(Bibi beating a dead horse once again…or as the old saying goes, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.-LS)
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu addressed the UN general assembly on Monday in New York and warned the crowd of the threat of radical militant Islam.
He said that the Arab world, for the first time, was beginning to recognize the benefit in aligning themselves with Israel and seeing they have a common enemy.
He also said that he is willing to make a “historic compromise” with the Palestinians.
The prime minister spoke in his speech of the correlation between Hamas and ISIS, saying the two are “branches from the same poisonous tree.”
He warned that the escalation of the radical groups is similar to that of the Nazi’s and continued to warn about Iran, saying that Iran is not actually willing to give up nuclear weapons, rather just wants to get rid of the sanctions against them.
Netanyahu then spoke about Operation Protective Edge, saying that the IDF is the most moral army in the world.
Netanyahu said that Israel “faced a propaganda war because in an attempt to gain sympathy, Hamas used human shields, homes and hospitals to fire rockets at Israel while Israel surgically struck military targets.”
He said that Israel took steps to minimize civilian casualties and that “Palestinians were tragically and unintentionally killed. Israel was not targeting citizens.”
Prior to leaving for the US on Sunday, Netanyahu said that his speech would “deflect all the lies about us, and tell the truth about the heroic soldiers of the IDF, the most moral army in the world.”
Netanyahu’s comments followed Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s speech at the UN on Friday, in which he accused Israel of “committing genocide in Gaza.”
In what appears to be a new phase in the Palestinian diplomatic drive for unilateral recognition of statehood, Abbas said that he would seek the approval of the Security Council for a draft resolution that establishes a timetable for independence.
“During the past two weeks, Palestine and the Arab Group undertook intensive contacts with the various regional groups in the United Nations to prepare for the introduction of a draft resolution to be adopted by the United Nations Security Council on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to push forward the efforts to achieve peace,” he said.
Netanyahu was scheduled to discuss Palestinian unilateralism and Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapon in his meeting with US President Barack Obama on Wednesday.
On 60 Minutes, the president faulted his spies for failing to predict the rise of ISIS. There’s one problem with that statement: The intelligence analysts did warn about the group.
Nearly eight months ago, some of President Obama’s senior intelligence officials were already warning that ISIS was on the move. In the beginning of 2014, ISIS fighters had defeated Iraqi forces in Fallujah, leading much of the U.S. intelligence community to assess they would try to take more of Iraq.<
But in an interview that aired Sunday evening, the president told 60 Minutes that the rise of the group now proclaiming itself a caliphate in territory between Syria and Iraq caught the U.S. intelligence community off guard. Obama specifically blamed James Clapper, the current director of national intelligence: “Our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that, I think, they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,” he said.
Reached by The Daily Beast after Obama’s interview aired, one former senior Pentagon official who worked closely on the threat posed by Sunni jihadists in Syria and Iraq was flabbergasted. “Either the president doesn’t read the intelligence he’s getting or he’s bullshitting,” the former official said.
Clapper did tell The Washington Post’s David Ignatius this month that he underestimated the will of the ISIS fighters in Iraq and overestimated the ability of Iraq’s security forces in northern Iraq to counter ISIS. (He also said his analysts warned about the “prowess and capability” of the group.)
Still, other senior intelligence officials have been warning about ISIS for months. In prepared testimony before the annual House and Senate intelligence committees’ threat hearings in January and February, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the recently departed director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said the group would likely make a grab for land before the end of the year. ISIS “probably will attempt to take territory in Iraq and Syria to exhibit its strength in 2014.” Of course, the prediction wasn’t exactly hard to make. By then, Flynn noted, ISIS had taken the cities of Ramadi and Fallujah, and the demonstrated an “ability to concurrently maintain multiple safe havens in Syria.”
The ability of ISIS to hold that territory will depend on its “resources, local support, as well as the responses of [Iraqi security forces] and other opposition groups in Syria,” Flynn added. He noted that while many Sunnis likely opposed ISIS, “some Sunni tribes and insurgent groups appear willing to work tactically with [ISIS] as they share common anti-government goals.”
Flynn was not alone. Clapper himself in that hearing warned that the three most effective jihadist groups in Syria—one of which he said was ISIS—presented a threat as a magnet for attracting foreign fighters. John Brennan, Obama’s CIA director, said he thought both ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, al Qaeda’s formal franchise in Syria, presented a threat to launch external operations against the West.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said February 4 that because of areas of Syria that are “beyond the regime’s control or that of the moderate opposition,” a “major concern” was “the establishment of a safe haven, and the real prospect that Syria could become a launching point or way station for terrorists seeking to attack the United States or other nations.”
(The author makes a convincing case. No exemption, no protection under religious rights.-LS)
(Please note that in the body of my piece I deliberately do NOT capitalize islam, muslims, mohammad, or the qur’an in this paper as I believe to capitalize those words gives credence to them, and I give NO credence to islam, muslims, mohammad, or the qur’an.)
Our Constitution allows for freedom of religion. Along with that come all the modern perks including tax exemption and other special privileges. If it can be proven that islam does NOT qualify as a religion according to our laws, then islam will lose its religious designation, it’s very wanted but misguided protection under the guise of our First Amendment along with its tax exempt status, and thus its foothold in America. With that said, what I will try to do here is present a feasible argument that the special rights and privileges afforded islam were given in error and hopefully will be reversed, thus helping to save our Judeo-Christian nation from the islamization being forced on us by the Obama administration.First, it must be stated how religion, in a theological sense, is defined in America. Simply, it is a belief in, and reverence for, a singular, supernatural power (or being) who is both creator and ruler of the universe and one who controls man’s destiny; what we commonly refer to as God. (Deuteronomy 6:4: ‘…Hear Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.). Religion in America is based upon a set of beliefs, values, morals, ideals, and practices following the teachings of God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Abrahamic God of the Jews; in other words a living, loving God (1 John chapter 4 verse 8 ‘He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love’) put forth as God’s word in The Holy Bible.(2 Timothy 3:16: ‘All scripture is given by inspiration of God’.) America was founded upon the holiness and supremacy of this God, thus at its inception America became a Judeo-Christian society; as in ‘One nation under God’, because of these very beliefs, values, morals, and ideals.Legal definitions of religion usually appear in the complicated contexts of either protecting freedom of religion, or prohibiting discrimination or persecution of religion. Legal definitions do not describe the nature of religion, they establish rules for regulating social and legal relations among people who themselves may have sharply different attitudes about what religion is, and what parts of it are entitled to protection. Legal definitions, therefore, may contain serious inefficiencies when they include particular social and cultural attitudes towards ‘accepted’ religions, or when they fail to account for social and cultural attitudes against ‘not accepted’ religions.
However, legally, The Supreme Court has interpreted religion to mean a sincere and meaningful belief that occupies in the life of its possessor a place parallel to the place held by God in the lives of other persons. The religion or religious concept need not include a belief in the existence of God or a supreme being to be within the scope of the First Amendment. The Supreme Court has deliberately avoided establishing an exact definition of religion because freedom of religion is a guarantee that was written in such a manner as to ensure adaptability as the United States grew. As a result, religion is not limited to traditional denominations, and this is where islam falls for it is anything but traditional.
The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution provides that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The first part of this provision is known as the Establishment Clause, and the second part is known as the Free Exercise Clause. Although the First Amendment only refers to Congress NOT to individuals or groups, The U.S. Supreme Court has held that the Fourteenth Amendment (this amendment was first introduced to secure the rights of former slaves but has since been expanded to include other groups such as senior citizens, women, children, and people with disabilities and is the center of Equality in America) makes the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses also binding on states (Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U.S. 296, 60 S. Ct. 900, 84 L. Ed. 1213 [1940], and Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1, 67 S. Ct. 504, 91 L. Ed. 711 [1947], respectively). This is extremely important because each state issues tax exemptions also.
However and here is where the problem lies, some define religion as an individual or group conviction, a belief tied in with societal and cultural traditions, along with man’s impact on them. But this definition of religion is wrong, for this in actuality is the definition of a ‘cult.’ A cult’s followers and members swear an allegiance to and/or worship in total submission to an unknown deity, or to a made-up god-like figure invented to further someone’s personal ambitions (as was the case with mohammad), and add the fact that the word ‘cult’ often suggests extreme beliefs and bizarre behavior, and you have just described islam to a tee. It’s extremely important to note that one of the main things separating a true religion from a cult is that NO true religion instructs its followers to kill in God’s name, but many a cult instructs its followers to kill in the name of their leader. Such is the case with the cult known as islam.
When a muslim declares that islam is a religion of peace, he is either ignorant of the qur’an or is deceitfully (taqiyya) thinking of this ‘peace’ as it applies only to those within the muslim community. (According to the qur’an Surah 48:29: “Muhammad is the Apostle of Allah. Those who follow him are merciful to one another, but ruthless to unbelievers.” Surah 9:5: “Kill the Mushrikun (unbelievers) wherever you find them, and capture them and besiege them, and lie in wait for them in each and every ambush…” Also see Surah 9:29: PICKTHAL: “Fight against such of those who have been given the Scripture (Christians & Jews) as believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, and forbid not that which Allah hath forbidden by His messenger, and follow not the Religion of Truth, until they pay the tribute readily, being brought low.”) Remember, there is NOT a single verse in the Old or New Testaments that contains this command to kill unbelievers.
It must also be noted that religion does NOT suppress or stop free speech and dissent, but cults do. Again, such is the case with islam. If islam really holds the ‘Ultimate Truth’(Koran 4:82: Do they not consider the Qur’an (with care)? Had it been from other than Allah, they would surely have found therein much discrepancy.) and ‘Final Revelation’ as it claims (islam teaches that the qur’an is the final revelation from God), then islam should not fear challenge, questioning, or free speech. islam’s leaders should be able to defend islam with only words, because its appeal should be evident to everyone.
Therefore, people should want to come to islam willingly and without fear of violence. If some choose to leave this so-called faith, then they should be allowed to leave without persecution or worse…..death. But that is not the case. (Hadith Al Buhkari vol. 9:57: ’Whoever changes his Islamic religion, kill him.’) This command from the Hadith is practiced in almost all Islamic countries today, and just reeks of being a cult NOT a religion.
It must always be remembered that islam came into existence thousands of years after the birth of Judaism, and 600 hundred years after the birth of Christianity. Was islam the answer to those who doubted the living, loving God as set down in the Old and New Testaments? Was islam the antidote to the harsh instructions and rules that both Judaism and Christianity demanded of its followers? Or was islam nothing more than the mad rantings of a Bedouin sheepherder who had visions of grandeur and immortality and thus NOT a religion at all? I believe it is the later, and I will explain why.
islam literally means submission. And herein lays a very crucial deviation from what religion is supposed to commutate. True religion worships a living, loving God and allows for the free will of man, (Deuteronomy 30:19: ‘I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.’), (Joshua 24:15: ‘And if it seem evil unto you to serve the LORD, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.’), (Proverbs 3:3: ‘Envy thou not the oppressor, and choose none of his ways.’) however, islam by its very name does not. Tawhid, the oneness of allah, is an essential belief for all muslims. Without the free will to either follow Tawhid or leave the so-called religion of islam, islam becomes nothing more than a cult where one must follow blindly or pay severe consequences. (Qur’an 8:12: ‘I shall terrorize the infidels. So wound their bodies and incapacitate them because they oppose Allah and his Apostle’).
Remember, anyone can join islam, but the only way one can ever really leave islam is by death NOT by one’s free will to do so. (Sura 5:33, commands mutilation and crucifixion for striving against Allah and Muhammad)
muslims erroneously claim their religion to be the oldest and the only truth, and that all human beings are born muslim, but practice religion according to their upbringing.(Sahih Muslim, Book 033, Number 6426: mohammad said “No baby is born but upon Fitra (as a Muslim). It is his parents who make him a Jew or a Christian or a Polytheist.”) Because islam means complete submission to the one and only ‘true god’ allah, muslims believe that anyone who is truly submitting himself to god (allah), according to what has been revealed from god (allah) and not simply according to his own whims, is a muslim. muslims believe that islam is the religion of all Prophets, Adam to muhammad, and that children are not born out of any sin, original, inherited or derived, so therefore, they are born of the religion of their nature…islam. muslims claim all people eventually revert back to islam and, therefore, are not converted to it, so if one does not follow islam and abide by its rules during their lifetime, then they must be killed. A simple premise yes, but one upon which muslims use to justify jihad upon non-believers (Qur’an 8:39: ‘Fight them until all opposition ends and all submit to Allah’), and lends more credence to the fact that islam is a cult NOT a religion of peace, as all religions are supposed to be.
The qur’an asserts that the god of islam is the God of Christians and Jews. (Sura 29:46: “Do not argue with the people of the scripture (Jews, Christians, & Muslims) except in the nicest possible manner—unless they transgress— and say, “We believe in what was revealed to us and in what was revealed to you, and our god and your god is one and the same; to Him we are submitters.”) Nothing could be farther from the truth. About 578 years before islam began, Christians were warned against islam by both Jesus and the Apostle Paul. In Matthew 16:11-12 Jesus warned about many false prophets who would follow Him.
Paul also warned of this when he wrote in Galatians 1:8: “But even if we (or an angel from heaven) should preach a Gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be condemned to hell!” muslims claim, without providing proof positive, that Christians and Jews have corrupted the Scriptures, and teach that everyone must instead accept the teachings of the qur’an. However, the Christian Bible predates muhammad and islam by more than 575 years and the Jewish Torah predates muhammad and islam by 1,000 – 3,000 years. muhammad said for muslims to read the Bible for ‘Guidance and Light’ (Surah 29:46 Muslims are told by Allah, not to question the authority of the scriptures of the Christians, saying, “And dispute ye not with the People of the Book, but say, “We believe in the revelation which has come down to us and in that which came down to you; Our Allah and your Allah is one”), so for islam to say that the Bible is corrupted, is to call muhammad a liar for recommending it, therefore taqiyya is being practiced here also.
In addition, islam teaches that only muslims will be admitted to Paradise or what we refer to as Heaven (Sura 5:72: Unbelievers are those that say: “God is the Messiah, the son of Mary.” For the Messiah himself said: “Children of Israel, serve God, my Lord and your Lord. “He that worships other gods besides God, God will deny him Paradise, and the fire shall be his home. None shall help the evil-doers.), even though Jews and Christians are considered ‘People of the Book’ (5:68 AYA).
And when compared with the Jewish and Christian scriptures, islam teaches that ‘Unbelievers’ are those that say that allah is not the true and only god (Sura, 14:9: Has not the news reached you, of those before you, the people of Nuh (Noah), and ‘Ad, and Thamud? And those after them? None knows them but Allah. To them came their Messengers with clear proofs, but they put their hands in their mouths (biting them from anger) and said: “Verily, we disbelieve in that with which you have been sent, and we are really in grave doubt as to that to which you invite us.” [islamic monotheism]), thus proving that allah is NOT the same god worshiped by Jews and Christians because allah is strictly a vengeful god, while the God of the Bible is a living, loving, and forgiving God (2 Corinthians 6:16: As God has said: “I will live with them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they will be my people.”) The bears out the premise that the true God strives to be one with man, while the false god allah wants all men enslaved to him. NOT the premise of a religion…most definitely the premise of a cult.
muslims claim the qur’an is the verbatim word of God, and that muhammad is the last prophet of God (Quran, 33:40: ‘Muhammad is not the father of any of your men, but (he is) the Apostle of God, and the Seal of the Prophets: and God has full knowledge of all things’ and is also stated in the first of the Five Pillars of islam: I bear witness that there is no god but Allah and that Mohammed is His messenger’), and according to mohammad himself the first muslim, (Al-An’am, 6:162,163: “Say (O Muhammad): ‘Verily, my prayer, my sacrifice, my living, and my dying are for Allâh alone, the Lord of all that exists. He has no partner. And of this I have been commanded, and I am the first of the Muslims.’”) They also believe in the authority of the sunnah—the examples and teachings of mohammad (Yusuf 12:108 : “Say (O Muhammad) : ‘This my way; I invite unto Allâh …”). Add to that their belief in the hadith, the record of the prophet’s actions and statements relating to life, personal conduct, morals and manners, and you have one vile contradiction to the definition of a religion. muslims believe their sole purpose in life is to worship allah that nothing else matters (qur’an 51:56: “I have only created jinns and men, that they may serve Me.”), while Jews and Christians believe in the sanctity and purpose of life while at the same time serving the living God’s will (Job 19:25: ‘I know that my Redeemer lives’).
Again, the free will to serve or not serve is laid upon the believer in a true religion but is demanded of people in the cult known as islam (qur’an 2:155-156e: “Be sure we shall test you with something of fear and hunger, some loss in goods or lives or the fruits, but give glad tidings to those who patiently persevere—who say when afflicted with calamity: ‘To ALLAH we belong, and to Him is our return.’ “). And remember, the living, loving God wants man to be happy in this life (Ps37:4: Delight yourself in the Lord; 1Thesilonians 5:16 Rejoice always; Jm1:3: Consider it all joy my brethren when you encounter various trials…), NOT to be a blind following, unquestioning servant.
And here is another premise allowed for in a religion but NOT in a cult, that is the right to question. True religions allow for questions, a cult does not. The punishment for questioning in the cult of islam is death, there is NO punishment for questions in the religions of Judaism or Christianity, in fact, questioning is encouraged for through questions comes understanding and acceptance, something NO cult, especially the cult of islam, accepts or allows.
muslims also mistakenly believe that islam is the only true version of faith (Qur’an,112: ‘In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate. Say (O Muhammad) He is God the One God, the Everlasting Refuge, who has not begotten, nor has been begotten, and equal to Him is not anyone’.), and that it was revealed many times before there was an actual islam, including to Abraham, Moses and Jesus (whom muslims do consider prophets, however, Jesus is NOT recognized as the Son of God nor is the Trilogy given any credence), but was not heeded by those men (qur’an 4:171: O people of the scripture, do not transgress the limits of your religion, and do not say about GOD except the truth. The Messiah, Jesus, the son of Mary, was a messenger of GOD, and His word that He had sent to Mary, and a revelation from Him. Therefore, you shall believe in GOD and His messengers. You shall not say, “Trinity.” You shall refrain from this for your own good. GOD is only one god. Be He glorified; He is much too glorious to have a son. To Him belongs everything in the heavens and everything on earth. GOD suffices as Lord and Master.).
muslims say that past revelations, as for example those in the Holy Bible, have been changed, corrupted, or compromised, thus their belief that the qur’an is the unaltered, untouched, and final revelation of God, (allah promises in the qur’an, in Surah Al Hijr, chapter 15 verse 9: “We have, without doubt, sent down the Message; and We will assuredly guard it (from corruption) something we know not to be the case. To them The Holy Bible is nothing more than a fairy tale.
The qur’an teaches that islam is the continued faithful religion in the same line as the Prophets who were before muhammad (42:13 AYA: the same religion has He established for you as that which He enjoined on Noah … and that which We enjoined on Abraham, Moses, and Jesus). The result of this view is that the scriptures given by these prophets are considered to be genuine scriptures from God (29:46 AYA: ‘We (Muslims) believe in the Revelation which has come down to us and in that which came down to you (Jews & Christians); our Allah and your Allah is One’.), and that allah and our Lord are the same but we know this to not be the case, because muslims believe the qur’an is the word of their god allah, when in reality The Holy Bible is the word of God.
While the hadith acts as a supplement to the qur’an, it still demands that sharia be followed. Sharia literally means ‘way’ or ‘path’ and is the code of conduct and religious law of islam. Most muslims believe sharia is derived from two primary sources of islamic law: the precepts set forth in the Quran, and the example set by the Islamic prophet muhammad in the sunnah. Sharia deals with many topics addressed by secular law, including crime, politics, and economics, as well as personal matters such as sexual intercourse, hygiene, diet, prayer, and fasting. Sharia is applied by Islamic judges, or qadis. The imam has varying responsibilities depending on the interpretation of sharia. While the term is commonly used to refer to the leader of communal prayers, the imam may also be a scholar, religious leader, or political leader. And herein is the sticking point. Because the imam is both a spiritual and political leader, and because sharia is applied by islamic judges, sharia itself becomes a political system instituted as the definitive way of existence touching upon virtually every aspect of daily life and society.Since sharia is indeed a political system then islam, what sharia is part of, therefore becomes a political system, as well as being a cult.
While sharia may have been inspired by the qur’an, it has developed and evolved through the efforts of mortal men. Sharia wraps its tentacles around every fiber of its followers being until life’s choices we take for granted are forbidden to islam’s followers. This is something a true religion does not do. While the ‘Golden Rule’ (Matthew 7:12: ‘Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them’.), or some derivative of said Rule, might be the hoped for basis for daily living, it is NOT demanded of a true religion’s followers, because of free will to either follow or not follow its tenets. Yet, islam demands sharia law be followed with NO exceptions. Sharia law denies the right of muslims to leave and thusly, is in contravention of one of the most fundamental principles of human rights (free will to leave a group of one’s own volition). But on the other hand, one of the reasons for the growth of islam has been that becoming a muslim is a one-way street. Whether by birth or conversion (likely to have been a forced conversion) once you are a muslim the only way out, under sharia law, is death.
Another example of sharia is shown in how muslim men are instructed to practice the total subjugation of women, who are viewed as property and in reality as slaves, to be disposed of at will at the whim of their husbands. They are, for all intents and purposes, actually lord and master over both their wives and their children, with the authority to actually take their lives if they feel the need to do so under the guise of ‘honor killings,’ something a true religion would never allow nor condone.
Also used by the followers of islam is the practice known as taqiyya, which is basically the obligation to lie and cheat if it promotes the spread of islam. The word ‘taqiyya’ means to protect against or conceal. Taqiyya is the islamic justification for lying and deceiving. (qur’an 66:2: “Allah has already ordained for you, (O men), the dissolution of your oaths”) Taqiyya is drawn explicitly from the words of muhammad, and from the examples he and his successors set. muslims are actually instructed and encouraged to lie, and told to lie to all non-believers just to spread islam. (qur’an 16:106 – establishes that there are circumstances that can “compel” a muslim to tell a lie.) Due to this fact alone, islam removes all integrity from its followers. Once again, this is a tactic used by a cult to obtain blind, unquestioning followers NOT by a religion trying to secure followers to the way of the living, loving God.
In addition to taqiyyqa, ‘kitman,’ known as lying by omission, is also allowed and encouraged. An example would be when muslims quote only a fragment of a verse (qur’an 5:32: that if anyone kills “it shall be as if he had killed all mankind”) while neglecting to mention that the rest of the verse, (and whoso saveth the life of one, it shall be as if he had saved the life of all mankind. Our messengers came unto them of old with clear proofs (of Allah’s sovereignty), but afterwards lo! Many of them become prodigals of the earth.”) and those that come after (qur’an 5:36: “As for those who disbelieve, lo! If all that is in the earth were theirs, and as much again therewith, to ransom them from the doom on the Day of the Resurrection, it would not be accepted from them. Theirs will be a painful doom.”) mandate murder in undefined cases of ‘corruption’ and ‘mischief.’ Again, lying by omission is another tactic used by cults to gain followers by concealing the whole truth of what they are or do.
To understand the true nature of the cult of islam you have to understand the beginnings of islam and hopefully this will show why islam is NOT a religion. muslims believe that in the beginning their god (or allah as muslims call him, which comes from the Arabic word ‘elah’ meaning ‘a god’ or something that is worshipped) sent prophets to all nations to tell the people to worship Him and Him alone. Abraham called upon his people to reject the worship of idols. muslims claim their god called Abraham and his people to islam, but the people rejected islam, becoming the Children of Israel (Jews) instead. God put Abraham through many tests, and he passed all of them. For his many sacrifices, God proclaimed that he would raise from amongst his progeny a great nation. Whenever people from his progeny started to stray away from the Truth, which was to worship none but their god alone and to obey His commandments, their god sent them another prophet steering them back to his will.
Many prophets were sent amongst the progeny of Abraham, for example his two sons Isaac and Ishmael, along with Jacob, Joseph, David, Solomon, Moses, and of course, Jesus. Each prophet was sent to the Children of Israel (the Jews) when they went astray from the true religion of the god (allah), and it became obligatory for them to follow the messenger who was sent to them and to obey their commandments. All of the messengers came with the same message, to reject worship of all other beings except the god (allah) Alone and to obey His commandments. Some disbelieved the prophets, while others believed. Those that believed the prophets became followers of islam and allah, henceforth to be known as muslims. This goes against everything Jews and Christians believe in.
The made-up concept of allah is really just a bastardized version of the pagan moon god, Hubal, and as such the word ‘allah’ is simply a title. It means ‘the god’. It can be any god, and since muslims claim allah is the same as Yahweh (one of the Hebrew names for God), why is there no mention of allah in the Old or the New Testaments? It is ridiculous to believe that the biblical prophets were muslims and believed in allah, yet that is what muslims believe. When the Arabic Bible mentions allah it is referring to al lah Yahweh but when the qur’an talks about allah, it is referring to al lah Hubal. While Christians and Jews are mentioned in the qur’an as the custodians of scripture, they are believed by muslims to be the custodians of the qur’an’s scripture NOT the scripture of The Holy Bible, because muslims do NOT believe The Holy Bible to be the word of God(5:47 AYA/44 MP: ‘For to them was entrusted the protection of Allah’s Book). islam teaches that their god (allah) gave the scripture to the Jews and Christians so that they could make known to the whole world the true knowledge of their god, being allah, not the living, loving God the Jews and Christians believed in. And remember allah took a Covenant from the ‘People of the Book’ (an islamic reference to Jews and Christians), to make the qur’an known and clear to mankind, and not to hide it (3:187 AYA). muslims also believe the unbelieving behavior of so-called unfaithful is to conceal the truth of the qur’an’s scripture (2:140 AYA: ‘Who is more unjust than those who conceal the testimony they have from Allah?’).
Simply, the Bible (from the Greek: Biblos meaning ‘books’) was given by God to man. The Bible writers were inspired by God in their writings. Thus Christians refer to the Bible as the ‘Word of God’. (2 Timothy 3:16) The Jewish and Christian religions are based on legitimate, proven historical events of divine intervention and revelations from God. Jews and Christian’s believe The Holy Bible is the word of the living, loving God,(Exodus 34:6: the real God revealed Himself as “merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth”. He is the Creator of the Universe, the God of Love, and Lord of Life. The God of Israel is this true God. He insists “Thou shall not kill the innocent and just”.) while muslims believe the qur’an (Arabic meaning ‘recitation’), revealed to mohammed over a period of about 20 years, to be the final revelation given by allah to mankind.
In reality, the qur’an is the rantings and writings of a mortal, mad man (mohammed), nothing more, nothing less. The Jewish and Christian religions teach us to peacefully spread God’s word. muhammad taught his followers to murder people who refused to follow him, a characteristic of a cult NOT of a peaceful religion. (Qur’an 9:5 – ‘Fight and kill non-muslims wherever you find them, take them captive, harass them, lie in wait and ambush them using every strategem of war.’). Also, only a cult would instruct people to hide the truth about themselves and not spread that truth, because the foundation of a true religion IS to spread the ‘Good News’ to everyone.
And lastly, The Holy Bible speaks of, ‘A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.’Jesus Christ, (John 13:34-3). This is truly what the definition of religion is, and that is love (Romans 5:5: Now hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us.) NOT hate, NOT subjugation, NOT blind allegiance, NOT fear of leaving, NOT torture, NOT perversion, NOT murder…for those are the makings of a cult, and those describe islam to a tee.
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Based on the premise that the so-called religion of islam is nothing but a totalitarian political cult, along with being an economic, social, and legal system hiding behind religious garb, it should then NOT be allowed tax exempt status under our laws. Many states, in addition to the federal government, give exemption from taxes for certain recognized organizations, like ‘churches’ (under which falls synagogues and mosques) and charities, but all applying for exemption must serve public purposes, and what purpose can a cult, as I’ve shown islam to be, possibly serve…the answer is NONE!
To show why mosques, and hence islam, do NOT meet the criteria for tax exemption we must start at the legal beginning, and that is with the fact that many people make the interpretative mistake that the First Amendment grants us individual or group rights. As written, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” the First Amendment doesn’t grant any rights to anybody. All the amendment does is prohibit Congress from making laws about religion, speech, the press, or assembly. Therefore, muslims do NOT have a First Amendment ‘right’ to build mosques, proselytize, or implement sharia anywhere in our country; therefore, islam is NOT protected under the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America.
This leads into the actual rules that a religious entity has to obey in order to become a tax exempt entity under our laws, thus gaining a 501-C-3 status. To qualify, the church, synagogue, or mosque, must be in operation for a specific purpose (see below). This is where the problems with mosques come into play, because as of this date our government still deems islam a legitimate religion, which I have proven it is not.
So, as of now, to qualify for tax-exempt status a mosque must meet the following requirements:
1. a mosque must be organized and operated exclusively for religious, educational, scientific, or other charitable purposes
2. net earnings may not inure to the benefit of any private individual or shareholder
3. no substantial part of the mosque’s activity may be attempting to influence legislation
4. a mosque may not intervene in political campaigns
5. a mosque’s purposes and activities may not be illegal or violate fundamental public policy.
All mosques are in violation of our tax laws, and actually violate the public policy of our country that assures Americans that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Let me go over this point by point. 1. a mosque must be organized and operated exclusively for religious, educational, scientific, or other charitable purposes. muslims, while inside mosques, engage in recruiting terrorists and jihad training within their confines, and none of this is for religious purposes or for charity but is for the singular purpose of killing or hurting those they consider infidels. 2. net earnings may not inure to the benefit of any private individual or shareholder. muslims, while inside mosques, raise monies to bail terrorists out of jail, and to send monies overseas to support recognized terrorist organizations like The Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. 3. no substantial part of the mosque’s activity may be attempting to influence legislation. muslims, while inside mosques, hold meetings to organize, push for, and write papers and such to prepare their case for sharia law to be implemented in this country. 4. a mosque may not intervene in political campaigns. muslims, while inside mosques, actively work for, and campaign for, muslim or pro-muslim leaning candidates so they win their elections and thus can infiltrate our government and influence legislation in their favor, and 5. a mosque’s purposes and activities may not be illegal or violate fundamental public policy. And here in number 5 is the hoped for sticking point, for a mosque to openly speak out, or organize in opposition to anything that our government declares ‘legal,’ that mosque has jeopardized its tax exempt status.
Once again, American mosques are actively preaching jihad in violation of their tax-exempt status and, a direct violation of public policy guaranteeing our right to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ in our daily lives.
Here’s an interesting fact that some might not know, there are over 3000 mosques, each granted tax exemption, in American today, and to me there is something inherently wrong with that. Since islam is NOT a religion (it is a cult) how is this being allowed to happen and what are our rights as Americans that the intrusion of islam into our society is not allowing us to have? Our rights come from the living, loving God of The Holy Bible, the book our nation was founded upon, NOT upon the false god allah, and NOT upon the vile book known as the qur’an. And our rights, spelled out in our Declaration of Independence, are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, the very things islam goes against. islam is a cult of oppression and death, instead of a religion of life, as noted in its oppression of women, its condoning of murder and its honor killings for even the most mild of transgressions. The qur’an actually instructs muslims to torture (Sura 4:56: Surely, those who disbelieve in our revelations, we will condemn them to the hellfire. Whenever their skins are burnt, we will give them new skins. Thus, they will suffer continuously. GOD is Almighty, Most Wise.), and kill non-believers. islam allows NO liberty for its followers for it is a cult of slavery and submission.
Women are forced to cover their faces and bodies (qur’an: 24:31: And tell the believing women to subdue their eyes, and maintain their chastity. They shall not reveal any parts of their bodies, except that which is necessary. They shall cover their chests with their ‘khimar’, and shall not relax this code in the presence of other than their husbands, their fathers, the fathers of their husbands, their sons, the sons of their husbands, their brothers, the sons of their brothers, the sons of their sisters, other women, the male servants or employees whose sexual drive has been nullified, or the children who have not reached puberty. They shall not strike their feet when they walk in order to shake and reveal certain details of their bodies. All of you shall repent to God, O you believers, that you may succeed.), and are at the total command and will of their husbands.
Children are often raped and molested, homosexuality is not frowned upon, especially with young boys (Sura LII:24 “And there shall wait on them [the Muslim men] young boys of their own, as fair as virgin pearls.” – Sura LXXVI:19: “They shall be attended by boys graced with eternal youth, who will seem like scattered pearls to the beholders.”), and conversion to another religion, if caught, ends in death. Islam allows no happiness because it is an all-consuming way of life that does NOT allow for any individuality or free will at all. You either follow its tenets to the letter, you NEVER question or speak out against islam or you will die. So how can anyone be happy under islam…they can’t.
So, if islam goes against our inalienable right to ‘Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happines,’ guaranteed to us under our Constitution and Declaration of Independence, if islam goes against what God the Creator has set down for us, how can islam be what our Founding Fathers meant by religion…it can’t be. And if it’s NOT a religion as set down by the writings of our Founders, no matter what The Supreme Court says (remember they must uphold the Constitution), how can it be given religious tax exemption status…it can’t! It really is that simple.
You might as well argue that Islam has nothing to do with Islam.
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Stop me if you’ve heard this story before.
A Muslim convert who recently became very religious beheads a woman while reportedly shouting Islamic phrases. The authorities rush to convince everyone in sight that it has nothing to do with Islam.
I’m not talking about Alton Nolen in Oklahoma at the end of September, but Nicholas Salvador in the UK at the beginning of September. Salvador, a Nigerian Muslim convert, beheaded an 82-year-old European woman with a foot-long blade. Nolen killed a 54-year-old American woman with a 10-inch blade.
The bios of both men are fairly similar to the beheaders of British soldier Lee Rigby. The perpetrators were Nigerian converts to Islam. Alton Nolen was a black convert to Islam. They had a history of criminal behavior followed by a conversion to Islam and the inevitable bloody ending.
On his Facebook page, Nolen posted, “Sharia law is coming!!!” The killers of Lee Rigby had chanted for Sharia law in the streets of London. That is the same Sharia law of stonings and beheadings.
It is the law of the Koran which states, “When you meet the unbelievers in Jihad smite at their necks until you have slaughtered many of them.” (Koran 47:4)
Or as Nolen quoted after posting a gory beheading photo on his Facebook page, “Thus do we find the clear precedent that explains the peculiar penchant of Islamic terrorists to behead their victims: it is merely another precedent bestowed by their Prophet.”
The quote underneath the beheading photo backed that up, “I will instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers: smite ye above their necks and smite all their finger-tips off of them.”(Quran 8:9-13)
An unbeliever is anyone who isn’t a Muslim.
This latest “Nothing to do with Islam” atrocity follows the Islamic State’s beheading of two Americans. These acts were admired by an Oklahoma City nursing home worker who was arrested for threatening a female co-worker with an ISIS style beheading on account of her being a Christian.
Again, nothing to do with Islam. Much like the Islamic State beheadings which we have been told also have nothing to do with Islam.
This sort of “Nothing to do with Islam” beheading pops up now and again.
A decade ago Ariel Selloul was nearly decapitated in Texas by Mohammed Ali Alayed. Mo had recently gotten religion and become a devout Muslim. His victim was Jewish. Before Mohammed got serious about Islam, the two men had been friends.
Around the same time a Jewish disc jockey was murdered in Paris by a Muslim friend who announced, “I killed a Jew, I will go to paradise. Allah made me do it.”
The Muslim killer, Adel Amastaibou, had threatened a Rabbi and a pregnant Jewish woman before. Instead the authorities decided that he was mentally ill.
Nothing to do with Islam. Not a thing.
And so we have a rash of mysterious beheadings and vicious stabbings that we know nothing about except that they have nothing to do with Islam. The more they obviously seem to have something to do with Islam, the more it has to be denied that they had anything to do with Islam.
Alton and Adel, Mohammed, Mujahid and Ismail, the latter two being the Muslim names of the Lee Rigby killers, have nothing to do with Islam. Even the Islamic State has nothing to do with Islam.
And yet Alton Nolen decided that beheading had quite a lot to do with Islam. All he had to do to figure that out was open a Koran. Expecting to convince Muslims to believe that the Koran has nothing to do with Islam will be even harder than convincing them that beheadings and the Islamic State have nothing to do with Islam.
You might as well argue that Islam has nothing to do with Islam.
The CVE programs under Barack Obama keep promising to counter the Islamic narrative on Twitter, but instead Twitter is full of ISIS Jihadists displaying severed heads as trophies and quoting the appropriate verses from the Koran.
Obama denounces ISIS as un-Islamic for beheading people while leading a coalition against them which includes Muslim countries that use beheading as an Islamic punishment. The Saudis recently beheaded a man accused of sorcery. What’s the difference between the Islamic State and the Saudis? They both have lots of oil, terrorists and a penchant for beheading people, but the Saudis have better public relations.
Maybe when the Islamic State starts funding chairs at Georgetown and UCLA, and donating to the Clinton Global Initiative, it’ll start getting better press.
The Saudis can’t possibly be un-Islamic because the establishment’s official definition of Islam comes from them. Even the idea of denying that the Islamic State is Islamic is a Saudi strategy. But if Alton Nolen is un-Islamic then ISIS is un-Islamic and if ISIS is un-Islamic then Saudi Arabia is un-Islamic. And then Islam, whose holy book contains numerous verses calling for the brutal murder of non-Muslims, must also be un-Islamic.
Perhaps then there really isn’t an Islam. Or rather there are two Islams.
One is the oriental Unitarianism of the Western imagination whose practitioners are liberals with prayer rugs. The other is a grim relentless Jihad of murderous men who chant the Koran while severing heads. This is the Islam of the Arabian imagination. It is not always what it is, but to them it is the purity of what it should be.
The convert to Islam rarely becomes a liberal with a prayer rug. To become devout is to become more certain, not less certain. And that certainty ends in Jihad. It ends in a murder commanded by Allah.
The real Islam’s symbols carry powerful meanings. The beheading is the final and ultimate meaning. By killing non-Muslims in the name of Allah, its followers become Allah, they gain the power of life and death, to kill and enslave, to rob and rape; they become the murderous masters of creation.
When they say that “Allah made me do it” what they really mean is that the part of them that wants to kill, to rob and rape, to burn and kidnap, made them do it. By submitting to Allah, the Muslim becomes Allah. When he kills, it is Allah killing. His religion is reducible to his will to kill. This is ISIS. This is Islam.
It has nothing to do with the imaginary Islam of the liberal. It has everything to do with the real Islam.
(The Islamic Republic of Iran, like the Islamic State, has nothing to do with Islam. Right? — DM)
Reyhaneh Jabbari has been transferred to Rajai-Shahr Prison to be hanged — while the world parties at the UN and gets ready to permit Iran nuclear capability.
Reyhaneh Jabbari has been transferred to Rajai-Shahr Prison to be hanged — while the world parties at the UN and gets ready to permit Iran nuclear capability.
While the West is focused on an Iran nuclear deal and defeating ISIS terrorists, the executioner-regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran continues violating human rights.
The regime has just transferred Reyhaneh Jabbari to Rajai-Shahr Prison in Tehran and, as she is transferred to be executed, told her to say goodbye to her mother and family.
Reyhaneh Jabbari’s execution may carried out by tomorrow.
Reyhaneh Jabbari in court during her trial.
(Here is an excerpt from an earlier article about Reyhaneh Jabbari from the Gatestone Institute.– DM
Jabbari has written from prison about the day of the attack, her interrogations, torture and the fate of other female prisoners:
As soon as I arrived at the Police Headquarters three large men were waiting for me in a small room. As soon as I entered, they handcuffed me to a chair and made me sit on the floor… They took turns screaming, “You think you are smart? People more important than you have been broken here. You insect, who do you think you are? Answer every question loudly…
I could feel something on my back and my skin swelling getting ripped. I felt a burning sensation and screamed until my ears hurt from the sound of my own screams. I did not hear the lash of the whip. I do not know if they were beating me with a whip, a rope or a piece of wood. I never learned what those three monsters were burning me with. I could only hear myself screaming. With my hands tied higher than my body to the chair, the pain and burning made my arms numb…
Winter was cold this year; it coincided with the prison’s heating system breaking down. In our ward, all you could hear was chattering teeth, coughing, sneezing…. The chattering teeth reminded me of 2007, when I was 19, in solitary confinement, with wounds all over my body, and shaking from anxiety and fear … I was questioned mostly by two men whose names I never found out. They would dictate [my confession] and I would write. Once they took me somewhere for interrogation where I saw a 14 or 15 year old girl hanging from the ceiling from her wrists. The girl was pale, her lips were cracked. She was whimpering.
[In another room,] the interrogator sat across from me and said that today or tomorrow they would go get my little sister… He referred to her by name: Badook. “It is her turn,” he said. “She is frail, thin … How long do you think she will last hanging like that one?” He began telling me in detail what he was going to do in front of me to my little sister … I started crying and begged him not to do such a thing. He said he had no alternative. I asked him what I could do to stop him from hurting my sister. He said: “It is very simple. Just confess that you bought the knife before the murder”. … So I wrote that I had bought the knife beforehand, signed the paper and breathed a sigh of relief.
Jabbari has said that Sarbandi had lured her to an apartment in July 2007, when she was 19, with the promise of an interior design job. When they arrived, according to her, Sarbandi locked the door and attempted to rape her. After a struggle, she saw a knife in the kitchen and stabbed him once in the shoulder. He later died in the hospital.
As Islamic courts do not recognize self-defense, especially from a woman, Reyhaneh was charged with first degree murder. The files from the court case are said to have gone missing.
On April 14, 2014, Ahmad Shaheed, a UN Special Rapporteur, asked for a stay of her execution — one day before her scheduled hanging. Shaheed also asked Iranian authorities for a review of the case, including a retrial and a request that the courts adhere to International standards for a fair trial.
Perhaps fearing further exposure of a corrupt and illegal judicial system — which includes sham trials and the systematic use of torture, the Islamic Republic postponed Reyhaneh’s execution and announced a review of her case.
By Mark Finkelstein | September 29, 2014 | 8:36 AM EDT
Score one for Joe Scarborough. The Morning Joe host today unleashed a tirade against the FBI for treating as a case of “workplace violence” the beheading by a fanatical Muslim convert of a fellow worker in Oklahoma. Scarborough lashed out at the FBI’s political correctness in claiming that there was “no indication” that the suspect, Alton Nolen, was copying the recent ISIS beheadings.
Said Scarborough: “how stupid does the FBI really think we are? Who exactly are they afraid of offending?” Political correctness, in its more innocuous manifestations, can be good fodder for humor. But when our government becomes so hobbled by PC that it cannot call Islamic fanaticism by its name, then political correctness becomes a grave threat to our national security.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: A 54-year-old wife and mother and grandmother, Colleen Hufford, was attacked and actually beheaded by a former co-worker who spent the last few weeks trying to convert the other fellow employees to Islam. Local news outlets reported that he was shouting Muslim phrases during the attack. So the feds were called in to investigate. Their response according to the Washington Post: that there was no indication, quote, no indication that Alton Nolen was copying the beheadings of journalists in Syria by the Islamic State. Adding that they were treating this as quote workplace violence. Workplace violence. Really? Despite the fact the attacker’s Facebook page had pictures of Osama bin laden, the Taliban, gruesome beheadings by ISIS, pictures celebrating the destruction of the Twin Towers and his promise that America would go up in flames and also his declaration that, quote, Islamic terrorists behead their victims because the president was bestowed by their prophet. Can you believe this?
The FBI says there was no indication that Nolen was copying ISIS? I’m not saying like ISIS has infiltrated us and this is going to happen. Seriously? FBI — how stupid does the FBI really think we are? Who exactly are they afraid of offending? ISIS? Moderate Muslims? Because moderate Muslims are just as scared as moderate Methodists. And as political correctness now so pervasive through our government that the FBI can’t tell Americans the truth of the beheading of a grandmother in the middle of America out of fear of offending Muslims? No, no: trust me. Muslims are offended by this creep’s actions. But if the FBI now is so weakly resorting to political correctness after the beheading on U.S. soil can they really confront the evil that America faces and the threat of copycat killers?
I mean, come on…
JOE SCARBOROUGH: A 54-year-old wife and mother and grandmother, Colleen Hufford, was attacked and actually beheaded by a former co-worker who spent the last few weeks trying to convert the other fellow employees to Islam. Local news outlets reported that he was shouting Muslim phrases during the attack. So the feds were called in to investigate. Their response according to the Washington Post: that there was no indication, quote, no indication that Alton Nolen was copying the beheadings of journalists in Syria by the Islamic State. Adding that they were treating this as quote workplace violence. Workplace violence. Really? Despite the fact the attacker’s Facebook page had pictures of Osama bin laden, the Taliban, gruesome beheadings by ISIS, pictures celebrating the destruction of the Twin Towers and his promise that America would go up in flames and also his declaration that, quote, Islamic terrorists behead their victims because the president was bestowed by their prophet. Can you believe this?
The FBI says there was no indication that Nolen was copying ISIS? I’m not saying like ISIS has infiltrated us and this is going to happen. Seriously? FBI — how stupid does the FBI really think we are? Who exactly are they afraid of offending? ISIS? Moderate Muslims? Because moderate Muslims are just as scared as moderate Methodists. And as political correctness now so pervasive through our government that the FBI can’t tell Americans the truth of the beheading of a grandmother in the middle of America out of fear of offending Muslims? No, no: trust me. Muslims are offended by this creep’s actions. But if the FBI now is so weakly resorting to political correctness after the beheading on U.S. soil can they really confront the evil that America faces and the threat of copycat killers? I mean, come on.
Score one for Joe Scarborough. The Morning Joe host today unleashed a tirade against the FBI for treating as a case of “workplace violence” the beheading by a fanatical Muslim convert of a fellow worker in Oklahoma. Scarborough lashed out at the FBI’s political correctness in claiming that there was “no indication” that the suspect, Alton Nolen, was copying the recent ISIS beheadings.
Said Scarborough: “how stupid does the FBI really think we are? Who exactly are they afraid of offending?” Political correctness, in its more innocuous manifestations, can be good fodder for humor. But when our government becomes so hobbled by PC that it cannot call Islamic fanaticism by its name, then political correctness becomes a grave threat to our national security.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: A 54-year-old wife and mother and grandmother, Colleen Hufford, was attacked and actually beheaded by a former co-worker who spent the last few weeks trying to convert the other fellow employees to Islam. Local news outlets reported that he was shouting Muslim phrases during the attack. So the feds were called in to investigate. Their response according to the Washington Post: that there was no indication, quote, no indication that Alton Nolen was copying the beheadings of journalists in Syria by the Islamic State. Adding that they were treating this as quote workplace violence. Workplace violence. Really? Despite the fact the attacker’s Facebook page had pictures of Osama bin laden, the Taliban, gruesome beheadings by ISIS, pictures celebrating the destruction of the Twin Towers and his promise that America would go up in flames and also his declaration that, quote, Islamic terrorists behead their victims because the president was bestowed by their prophet. Can you believe this?
The FBI says there was no indication that Nolen was copying ISIS? I’m not saying like ISIS has infiltrated us and this is going to happen. Seriously? FBI — how stupid does the FBI really think we are? Who exactly are they afraid of offending? ISIS? Moderate Muslims? Because moderate Muslims are just as scared as moderate Methodists. And as political correctness now so pervasive through our government that the FBI can’t tell Americans the truth of the beheading of a grandmother in the middle of America out of fear of offending Muslims? No, no: trust me. Muslims are offended by this creep’s actions. But if the FBI now is so weakly resorting to political correctness after the beheading on U.S. soil can they really confront the evil that America faces and the threat of copycat killers? I mean, come on.
Score one for Joe Scarborough. The Morning Joe host today unleashed a tirade against the FBI for treating as a case of “workplace violence” the beheading by a fanatical Muslim convert of a fellow worker in Oklahoma. Scarborough lashed out at the FBI’s political correctness in claiming that there was “no indication” that the suspect, Alton Nolen, was copying the recent ISIS beheadings.
Said Scarborough: “how stupid does the FBI really think we are? Who exactly are they afraid of offending?” Political correctness, in its more innocuous manifestations, can be good fodder for humor. But when our government becomes so hobbled by PC that it cannot call Islamic fanaticism by its name, then political correctness becomes a grave threat to our national security.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: A 54-year-old wife and mother and grandmother, Colleen Hufford, was attacked and actually beheaded by a former co-worker who spent the last few weeks trying to convert the other fellow employees to Islam. Local news outlets reported that he was shouting Muslim phrases during the attack. So the feds were called in to investigate. Their response according to the Washington Post: that there was no indication, quote, no indication that Alton Nolen was copying the beheadings of journalists in Syria by the Islamic State. Adding that they were treating this as quote workplace violence. Workplace violence. Really? Despite the fact the attacker’s Facebook page had pictures of Osama bin laden, the Taliban, gruesome beheadings by ISIS, pictures celebrating the destruction of the Twin Towers and his promise that America would go up in flames and also his declaration that, quote, Islamic terrorists behead their victims because the president was bestowed by their prophet. Can you believe this?
The FBI says there was no indication that Nolen was copying ISIS? I’m not saying like ISIS has infiltrated us and this is going to happen. Seriously? FBI — how stupid does the FBI really think we are? Who exactly are they afraid of offending? ISIS? Moderate Muslims? Because moderate Muslims are just as scared as moderate Methodists. And as political correctness now so pervasive through our government that the FBI can’t tell Americans the truth of the beheading of a grandmother in the middle of America out of fear of offending Muslims? No, no: trust me. Muslims are offended by this creep’s actions. But if the FBI now is so weakly resorting to political correctness after the beheading on U.S. soil can they really confront the evil that America faces and the threat of copycat killers? I mean, come on.
Score one for Joe Scarborough. The Morning Joe host today unleashed a tirade against the FBI for treating as a case of “workplace violence” the beheading by a fanatical Muslim convert of a fellow worker in Oklahoma. Scarborough lashed out at the FBI’s political correctness in claiming that there was “no indication” that the suspect, Alton Nolen, was copying the recent ISIS beheadings.
Said Scarborough: “how stupid does the FBI really think we are? Who exactly are they afraid of offending?” Political correctness, in its more innocuous manifestations, can be good fodder for humor. But when our government becomes so hobbled by PC that it cannot call Islamic fanaticism by its name, then political correctness becomes a grave threat to our national security.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: A 54-year-old wife and mother and grandmother, Colleen Hufford, was attacked and actually beheaded by a former co-worker who spent the last few weeks trying to convert the other fellow employees to Islam. Local news outlets reported that he was shouting Muslim phrases during the attack. So the feds were called in to investigate. Their response according to the Washington Post: that there was no indication, quote, no indication that Alton Nolen was copying the beheadings of journalists in Syria by the Islamic State. Adding that they were treating this as quote workplace violence. Workplace violence. Really? Despite the fact the attacker’s Facebook page had pictures of Osama bin laden, the Taliban, gruesome beheadings by ISIS, pictures celebrating the destruction of the Twin Towers and his promise that America would go up in flames and also his declaration that, quote, Islamic terrorists behead their victims because the president was bestowed by their prophet. Can you believe this?
The FBI says there was no indication that Nolen was copying ISIS? I’m not saying like ISIS has infiltrated us and this is going to happen. Seriously? FBI — how stupid does the FBI really think we are? Who exactly are they afraid of offending? ISIS? Moderate Muslims? Because moderate Muslims are just as scared as moderate Methodists. And as political correctness now so pervasive through our government that the FBI can’t tell Americans the truth of the beheading of a grandmother in the middle of America out of fear of offending Muslims? No, no: trust me. Muslims are offended by this creep’s actions. But if the FBI now is so weakly resorting to political correctness after the beheading on U.S. soil can they really confront the evil that America faces and the threat of copycat killers? I mean, come on.
Two new issues have emerged regarding the Obama administration’s policy towards ISIS, which was announced last week in President Obama’s speech to the nation. Both are connected to Iran: (a) the positions the administration will take regarding cooperation with it in fighting ISIS and (b) in negotiations regarding Iran’s nuclear centrifuges.
Should the United States accept Iran as a partner in its fight to “degrade and destroy” ISIS? Already, many self-proclaimed “realists” have argued for its necessity.
If President Obama truly wants to degrade and destroy the Islamic State, he must find a way to collaborate with Iran — the one great power in the Middle East with which the United States is still at odds. Engagement with Iran – while hard and complicated — would be a strategic game-changer, with benefits spreading from Iraq to Syria to Afghanistan.
To defeat ISIS, he argues, one must influence the Sunnis, something the Shia-dominated Iraq government has not been able to accomplish. Since that regime has been funded by Iran for many years, Iran alone has the power to force them to be more inclusive, and to commit to seriously forging a fighting force against ISIS. Iran’s help, he says, is “invaluable, perhaps vital.” Zakaria also thinks a power-sharing government be built in Syria, in which Assad will stay in power. Iran too, he notes, can help with this.
What he argues for is nothing less than the imperative of aligning with tyrants that have waged terrorism abroad as well as against their own people, all for the goal of defeating ISIS — which both Iran and the United States favor for different reasons. He ignores that Iran poses a very real threat to world stability, especially in the Middle East. As they have shown in the ongoing nuclear talks, Iran has shrewdly used such claims to stand firm in its goal of building a nuclear weapon, confident that its ability to play the United States will continue.
Others have claimed aligning with Iran is no different than aligning with the Soviet Union to defeat Hitler during World War II. As Gary Schmitt and David Adesnik point out at Fox News: “Our partnership with Stalin during World War II was one that arose from desperation.” Moreover, Stalin’s troops suffered the most and did most of the worst fighting, and Soviet armed forces died in the thousands, saving the lives of American GIs who otherwise would have had the job done by the Russians. As Churchill well put it, he would sign a pact with the Devil if it guaranteed the defeat of the Nazis.
In today’s world, to ennoble one terrorist regime to help gain its goals in order to defeat a non-state terrorist group simply makes no sense whatsoever. The West might eventually have to use combat forces in some areas to make air strikes work. But to depend on Iran to do that, which it may very well be willing to do, will further destabilize the region and enhance its power throughout the Middle East.
The desire of many, including some in the Obama administration, to align with Iran leads one to suspect that a deal might be accepted that allows Iran to keep its centrifuges at a level close to completion. Would the U.S. sign such a deal and claim that it is a path to real disarmament? Many factors indicate that is the case.
The Times of Israelreports that the United States is considering “softening present demands that Iran gut its uranium enrichment program in favor of a new proposal that would allow Tehran to keep nearly half of the project intact while placing other constraints on its possible use as a path to nuclear weapons.” If true, it indicates that giving in to Iran is something the United States might do in exchange for Iran remaining cooperative in fighting ISIS.
Diplomats tell the paper that it envisages letting Iran keep 4500 centrifuges while reducing its stock of uranium gas so that it would take Iran only one year, not weeks or months, to create material to build a nuclear bomb. Negotiators believe Iran can claim they have not given in nor ended their enrichment capabilities, while the U.S. could argue it succeeded in forcing them to downgrade their original aims for a year.
Israel, according to its intelligence minister, “strongly opposes leaving thousands of centrifuges active in Iran,” an act which he said is “reminiscent of the failed deal reached in 2007 with North Korea, which now possesses ten nuclear warheads.”
That the United States might be considering such a step seems connected to the announcement that Joe Biden’s new national security advisor will be a man named Colin Kahl. Kahl is presently at the Middle East Security Program at the Center for New American Security, and is a professor at Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program. Part of Obama’s 2008 campaign, Kahl was deputy asst. secretary of defense for the Middle East between 2009 and 2011.
The relatively under-the-radar Kahl has been a consistent apologist for Iran and its push to go nuclear. He has worked with pro-Iranian regime groups, including the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), whose main agenda is promoting engagement and negotiations with the Iranian government. At a 2013 NIAC leadership conference, Kahl called the Iranian negotiating team “both talented … [and] also committed to try and find some way to reach an accommodation on the nuclear file.”
“The Iranians have now sent two signals that they are serious,” Colin Kahl, a former deputy assistant secretary of Defense dealing with Iran, told Al-Monitor. The first signal was the way in which the Iranians have re-engaged in talks with the P5+1 since the election of President Hassan Rouhani, Kahl said. The second is that “they are slowing down their nuclear program so as not to do anything overly provocative.”
Kahl seems to be the point man for regularly explaining Iran’s positions and for putting them in the most positive light possible. He also seems to favor a strategy of “containment” for Iran that would allow them to get a bomb. He was co-author of a paper on how a containment strategy would work should Iran actually have a bomb. In a tweet, Kahl wrote: “We certainly can’t use military force, even though it would be more effective than negotiations.”
The argument makes little sense. In an article, Kahl writes that a U.S. or Israeli attack on “Iran’s nuclear program would knock it back, at most, a few years.” Yet he favors an unsatisfactory deal that would in effect set Iran back only a few months. That is the nature of the containment he favors.
In scores of reports and articles, Colin Kahl has argued that the regime’s leaders are rational. He praised Ayatollah Khamenei for “heroic flexibility,” argued that Obamas is “great for Israel,” and has had a series of appearances with NIAC. And he has been one of those praising the leadership of Iran’s President Rouhani, who he said needs time to “convince regime hard-liners to give him a chance.”
Joe Biden could pick scores of individuals to be his chief advisor on national security issues. That he picked Colin Kahl suggests the possibility that the administration needs people with that perspective if they intend to sell the public on the necessity of kowtowing to Iran because of the need to destroy ISIS. It also suggests they wish to prepare Americans for the possibility that Iran will get a nuclear bomb, and to convince us that containment will work to keep it from flexing its muscles.
(But we have been told authoritatively that the Islamic State is not Islamic. How, then, could strikes against it possibly be a “war on Islam?” — DM)
Jabhat al-Nusra denounces US-led attacks as ‘war on Islam’, and leaders of group holding meetings with Islamic State.
A still from a video from a plane camera shows smoke rising after an air strike near Kobani. Photograph: Reuters
Barack Obama said the intelligence community did not appreciate the scale of the threat or comprehend the weakness of the Iraqi army. In an interview on CBS 60 Minutes, he said: “Over the past couple of years, during the chaos of the Syrian civil war, where essentially you have huge swaths of the country that are completely ungoverned, they were able to reconstitute themselves and take advantage of … chaos. And so this became ground zero for jihadists around the world.”
*********************
Air strikes continued to target Islamic State (Isis) positions near the Kurdish town of Kobani and hubs across north-east Syria on Sunday, as the terror group moved towards a new alliance with Syria’s largest al-Qaida group that could help offset the threat from the air.
Jabhat al-Nusra, which has been at odds with Isis for much of the past year, vowed retaliation for the US-led strikes, the first wave of which a week ago killed scores of its members. Many Nusra units in northern Syria appeared to have reconciled with the group, with which it had fought bitterly early this year.
A senior source confirmed that al-Nusra and Isis leaders were now holding war-planning meetings. While not yet formalised, the addition of at least some al-Nusra numbers to Isis would strengthen the group’s ranks and further its reach at a time when air strikes are crippling its funding sources and slowing its advances in both Syria and Iraq.
Al-Nusra, which has direct ties to al-Qaida’s leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, denounced the attacks as a “war on Islam”, in an audio statement posted over the weekend. A senior al-Nusra figure told the Guardian that 73 members had defected to Isis last Friday alone and that scores more were planning to swear allegiance in coming days.
“We are in a long war,” the group’s spokesman, Abu Firas al-Suri, said on social media platforms. “This war will not end in months nor years, this war could last for decades.”
In the rebel-held north there is growing resentment among Islamist units of the Syrian opposition that the strikes have done nothing to weaken the Syrian regime. “We have been calling for these sorts of attacks for three years and when they finally come they don’t help us,” said a leader from the Qatari-backed Islamic Front, which groups together Islamic brigades. “People have lost faith. And they’re angry.”
British jets flew sorties over Isis positions in Iraq after being ordered into action against the group following a parliamentary vote on Friday.
David Cameron has suggested he might review his decision to confine Britain’s involvement to Iraq alone, but for now the strikes in support of Kurdish civilians and militants in Kobani were being carried out by Arab air forces from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the UAE and Bahrain.
The US was reported to have carried out at least six strikes near the centre of Kobani, where the YPG Kurdish militia is fighting a dogged rearguard campaign against Isis, which is mostly holding its ground despite the jet attacks.
Kobani is the third-largest Kurdish enclave in Syria, and victory for Isis there is essential to its plans to oust the Kurds from lands they have lived in for several thousand years. Control of the area would give the group a strategic foothold in north-east Syria, which would give it easy access to north-west Iraq.
Isis continued to make forays along the western edge of Baghdad, where its members have been active for nine months. The Iraqi capital is being heavily defended by Shia militias, who in many cases have primacy over the Iraqi army, which surrendered the north of the country.
That rout – one of the most spectacular anywhere in modern military history – gave Isis a surge of momentum and it has since seized the border with Syria, menaced Irbil, ousted minorities from the Ninevah plains and threatened the Iraqi government’s hold on the country.
Barack Obama said the intelligence community did not appreciate the scale of the threat or comprehend the weakness of the Iraqi army. In an interview on CBS 60 Minutes, he said: “Over the past couple of years, during the chaos of the Syrian civil war, where essentially you have huge swaths of the country that are completely ungoverned, they were able to reconstitute themselves and take advantage of … chaos. And so this became ground zero for jihadists around the world.”
52 European lawmakers propose Alaa Abdel Fattah, who also called for the assassination of Egyptians, for the Sakharov Prize.
Egyptian activist Alaa Abdel Fattah upon his release from Tora prison in Cairo, September 15, 2014 (photo credit: AP/Amr Nabil)
Debating the Palestinian issue, Abdel Fattah wrote on November 15, 2012, that “there is a critical number of Israelis that we need to kill and then the problem is solved.”
The following day, he wrote: “there should be no equal relations with Israel or any other relations. Israel must come to an end.”
***********************
A group of over 50 European parliament members has nominated a controversial Egyptian activist for the prestigious Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, despite his having advocated the assassination of Israelis and political leaders in Egypt and calling for an end to the State of Israel.
Alaa Abdel Fattah, 32, an Egyptian blogger and political activist, was arrested numerous times by Egyptian authorities since the eruption of a popular revolution in the country in early 2011. Abdel Fattah, who boasts 626,000 followers on Twitter and 156,000 on Facebook, was released on bail September 15 after being charged with organizing an illegal protest in Cairo and sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Abdel Fattah was nominated for the Sakharov Prize on September 23 along with rappers Mouad Belghouate (Morocco) and Ala Yaacoubi (Tunisia) by the European United Left/Nordic Green Left (GUE/NGL) Parliamentary Group, a left-wing group of 52 European parliament members representing 14 EU countries. The winner of the prize will be announced on October 16.
Named after Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, the €50,000 ($63,000) prize is awarded to “exceptional individuals who combat intolerance, fanaticism and oppression.” Previous laureates included South African president Nelson Mandela, UN secretary general Kofi Annan, and teenage Pakistani campaigner Malala Yousafzai.
While Abdel Fattah’s credentials as a political dissident are unimpeachable, a number of past comments published by him on Twitter raise doubts about his suitability for a prize rewarding “respect for international law, development of democracy and implementation of the rule of law.”
“Will no one form an armed organization and randomly assassinate Interior Ministry officers and be rid of them?” he tweeted on July 6, 2011, as the country seethed in violent protests against Egypt’s military rulers. “We all know that they’re all criminals.”
On September 6, 2012, Abdel Fattah wrote that the 1981 assassination of then-Egyptian president Anwar Sadat was “a service to the nation,” since Sadat was a traitor to his people.
“A president isn’t just anyone. It is our right to kill the president if there is no other way to get rid of him. Was the killing of [former Libyan leader Muammar] Gaddafi a crime?” he wrote. Abdel Fattah added that he would consider the killing of former Egyptian general Mohammed Hussein Tantawi, who served as de facto ruler of Egypt in 2012 as chairman of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), “a patriotic act.”
“We could limit killing to presidents of the republic only,” he tweeted.
During an exchange on generalizations in the Egyptian political context, Abdel Fattah wrote: “All Zionists are criminals, all racists are stupid, all humans have rights. These are examples of acceptable generalizations.”
Debating the Palestinian issue, Abdel Fattah wrote on November 15, 2012, that “there is a critical number of Israelis that we need to kill and then the problem is solved.”
The following day, he wrote: “there should be no equal relations with Israel or any other relations. Israel must come to an end.”
“While Egypt should be leading a comprehensive boycott movement against the [Zionist] entity and anyone who cooperates with it, we have the QIZ [Qualifying Industrial Zone; a free trade area uniting Israel and Egypt], normalization, an [Israeli] embassy and tourism,” he added.
Neither Abdel Fattah nor the European parliamentary group GUE/NGL responded to a Times of Israel request for clarification.
If Israel did not exist it would have to be invented.– DM)
Many Europeans who would laugh at the idea of negotiating with ISIS or al-Qaeda say that Israel should negotiate with Hamas.
Almost nobody sees that the invention of the “Palestinian people” has transformed millions of Arabs into a genocidal weapon to be used against the Israelis, and even, as in Europe recently, the Jews. Transforming people into a genocidal weapon is a barbaric act.
Israel was urged to find ways to coexist peacefully with people who did not want to co-exist with it. Terrorism against Israel fast became acceptable: a “good” terrorism.
Hamas’s stated aim is the destruction of Israel. Its stated way to achieve this aim is terror attacks, called “armed struggle” by Hamas leaders. To this day the Palestinian Authority has not ceased praising and promoting terrorism.
If hatred of Israel is increasing in the U.S., it is largely confined to academics and other extreme radical circles, many of which are funding or receiving funding from Soviet-style agitprop organizations. Journalists are recruited to disseminate descriptions of “facts” as if they were real facts. Pseudo-historians rewrote the history of the Middle East. The falsified version of history replaced history.
Understanding radical Islam requires going back to its roots.
The Christian idea of rendering “unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s” never existed in Islam. Its absence has had consequences, including, possibly, the decline of the Muslim civilization and the feeling of humiliation that resulted.
During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when Muslim clerics observed that that the Islamic world was not keeping pace with the West and was on the verge of collapse, they may have decided they needed answers.
Some of these clerics turned to the West, where they chose to study Western political ideas. They spoke of necessary reforms, and created secret societies and nationalist organizations.
Other clerics chose dogmatic, strict readings of the Quran. They found inspiration in the writings of Muhammad ibn Abd-al-Wahhab and in the established fundamentalist movements.
Several secret societies gained strength and came to power: the Young Ottomans staged a coup d’état in 1876; the Young Turks ruled the Ottoman Empire from 1908 to 1918.[1]
Nationalist revolts took place: Colonel Ahmed Urabi led a mutiny in Egypt in 1879. A secret society, calling Arabs to recover their “lost vitality,” was created in Beirut by Ibrahim al-Yaziji in the late 1870s.[2]
The House of Saud, led by Wahhabis, mounted military campaigns against other tribal rulers and the Ottomans in order to seize the Arabian Peninsula. From 1855-56 until his death in 1897, Sayyid Jamāl ad-Dīn al-Afghānī traveled throughout the Muslim world to call desperately for a return to the “original principles” of Islam.
But the decline did not stop and the collapse occurred. The First World War led to the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire, the emergence of modern Turkey, and the creation of kingdoms and Mandates in the Arab World.
In 1923, the Ankara-based Turkish regime, founded by Mustafa Kemal Pasha [Atatürk], became the officially secular Republic of Turkey. Arab nationalists, whom Britain had used as a weapon against the Ottoman Empire, felt betrayed when Britain and France settled on the division of Arab territories and did not satisfy Arab demands. The leader of the Arab revolt, Emir Faisal ibn Hussein, for example, asked during the 1919 Paris Peace Conference in Versailles that, “the Arabic-speaking peoples of Asia” be recognized as “independent sovereign peoples,” and that “no steps be taken inconsistent with the prospect of an eventual union” of Arab “areas under one sovereign government.”
As Arab nationalists grew bitter, pan-Arab nationalism emerged throughout the Arab world.
The House of Saud united the kingdoms of the Hejaz and Nejd, and created the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932.
Around the same time, radical Islam arose. The Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwān al-Muslimūn), established in 1928, quickly became the main radical movement.[3]
Radical Islam soon took on a different color. Although it is sometimes described as a by-product of fundamentalism, it is really fundamentalism influenced by Western totalitarian dogmas: Marxism, Leninism, fascism, National-Socialism.
The borders between radical Islam, Islamic fundamentalism, and Arab Nationalism have always been porous. Fundamentalist Islam “must have power in this world. It is the true religion—the religion of God—and its truth is manifest in its power…. [I]f Muslims now return to the original Islam, they can preserve and even restore their power.”[4]
In the late 1950s, the political landscape of the Muslim world was relatively easy to describe. Saudi Arabia was fundamentalist. Some moderate kingdoms existed: Jordan, Morocco, Iran. Turkey was a secular republic. Lebanon was a “unitary confessionalist” Republic: a Republic resting on a power-sharing mechanism based on religious communities.[5] Arab nationalists had taken power in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Tunisia, and were about to take power in Algeria.
The major Muslim countries in Asia — Pakistan and Indonesia — were not especially present in the news. Pakistan declared Islam as its state religion in 1949: most Pakistani Muslims belonged at the time to the Barelvi movement, much influenced by Sufism.[6] The Deobandi movement, inspired by Wahhabism, was not politically influential. And in Indonesia, the main Muslim groups — Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah — advocated religious moderation.[7]
Meanwhile, radical Islam was growing in the shadows.
In the 1960s, Arab nationalism was still gaining ground: Libya and Algeria were added to the list of countries ruled by people calling themselves Nationalists.
In the 1970s, a civil war erupted in Lebanon. Palestinian militias were expelled from Jordan. They settled in South Lebanon and began fighting Christian militias. As central government authority quickly disintegrated, Shi’a militias that were beginning to form joined in the fighting.[8]
The great change occurred on April 1st 1979: Iran, with its version of radical Shi’a Islam, became an Islamic Republic.[9] From then on, radical Islam spread rapidly. In 1985, various violent Lebanese Shi’a extremist groups founded Hezbollah, apparently in the hope of establishing an Islamic State in Lebanon. Two years later, in 1987, Hamas, an offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, was founded in Gaza City. Al-Qaeda, a radical Wahhabi movement calling for global jihad, was created in 1988-1989 by Osama bin Laden and Abdullah Yusuf Azzam. In Algeria, the Islamic Salvation Front started its bloody activities in 1989. Afghanistan became an Islamic State in 1992. The Taliban established the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan in 1996. Countless more violent and deadly developments have taken place since.
Radical Islam is now present on every continent. It has many names, various appearances, and is now a global threat.
***
In the meantime, as nationalism was on the rise all over the world and the idea of national liberation filled the atmosphere, Zionism emerged as the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, urging Jews scattered all over the earth to come back to “the Land of Israel.”
The movement began during the collapse of the Muslim world. The First Aliyah [lit. “going up”] to Israel took place in 1881; the First Congress of the World Zionist organization took place in Basel, in 1897, and the Second Aliyah began in 1904.[10]
In the 1920s, as the Ottoman Empire was dismantled, and the secret societies, nationalist organizations and fundamentalist movements rose in the Muslim world, Zionism also gained strength.
In 1917, the Jewish Legion, a group of Zionist volunteers, assisted the British Army in Palestine (the name given to the land by Roman Emperor Hadrian in 135 A.D., to try to rid it of its Jewish roots). The same year, the Balfour Declaration confirmed support from the British government for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” In 1922, the League of Nations granted Britain a mandate over Palestine to establish the “national home for the Jewish people.” The official document explicitly states that “a recognition has been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine.”[11]
Zionism was compatible. It could coexist with moderate kingdoms, such as Morocco, with secular republics such as modern Turkey, and with republics such as Lebanon before its civil war.
Islamic fundamentalism and Arab Nationalism, however, are not compatible with Zionism. In the eyes of Islamic fundamentalists, Jews are ahl al-ḏimmah, people of the dimmah: inferiors who are allowed to survive in an Islamic-conquered land only if they accept being subjugated and deprived of any legal or human rights.
Further, in fundamentalist Islam, the entire world is divided into either the Dar al-Islam [The House of Islam] or the Dar al-Harb [The House of War], where Islam does not yet dominate. In the eyes of Islamic fundamentalists, therefore, every territory — whether Israel or Spain’s al-Andalus — that has ever been under the rule of Islam must remain irreversibly under the rule of Islam — a waqf, or religious endowment, held in trust for Allah as part of his dar al-Islam [the House of Islam].
Originally, Arab nationalists wanted to end the Ottoman domination of Arab lands; then, after the Ottoman Empire was dissolved in 1918, they wanted the end of all Western presence in the Arab world.
The Zionist project was first viewed as a continuation of this Western presence. Then the influence of Marxism and Leninism, fascism and National-Socialism led them to start describing Zionism as “imperialist” and “colonialist,” or as part of some alleged “world Jewish conspiracy” — still how they see it today.
Radical Islam is also not compatible with Zionism. Radical Muslims are outspoken about wanting to destroy all that is not radical Islam and kill all those who do not submit to it, as can be seen now in the “Islamic State” in Iraq and Syria, in the Hamas Charter and in groups such as Boko Haram.
In such conditions, Zionism would seem to have no chance of succeeding.
But succeed it did — despite unbelievable adversity and despite the cowardice and the opportunism of Western leaders. Although Britain was granted a Mandate over Palestine in 1922 with the clear objective of supporting the Jews, the British never respected the spirit and the letter of the Mandate. They gradually closed the doors to Jewish immigrants who were trying to flee Hitler’s Europe before, during and after World War II. The British government did not even try to save Jews at the time when the extermination was taking place in Auschwitz; and no member of the League of Nations issued any objection to the British behavior.[12]
In parallel, the British kept the doors wide open to Arab immigration. In 1939, the British government issued a policy paper (“White Paper of 1939“) providing for the creation of an “independent Palestine” to be governed by “Palestinian Arabs and Jews” in “proportion to their numbers in the population.” The result of the British immigration policy was that Jews were made a minority, and “Palestine” would be an Arab Muslim State.
Despite British complicity with Amin al Husseini, an Islamic nationalist, violent anti-Semite and friend of Adolf Hitler, Zionism succeeded. Husseini, thanks to the approval of the British authorities, was appointed Mufti of Jerusalem in 1921. But in order to be able to appoint him, the British High Commissioner, Sir Herbert Samuel, first had to pardon Husseini for having incited riots. The British also chose Husseini despite his having received, in the election for Mufti, the least number of votes.[13]
British authorities received the results that could be expected: Arab riots and a pogrom in Hebron in 1929; the 1936-1939 Arab revolt; hundreds of Jews killed, and a widespread atmosphere of anti-Semitic hatred in the Arab population. Ironically, in 1921 Herbert Samuel was regarded as a British Zionist leader.
Then came the abandonment of the European Jews by every Western country at the Evian conference in July 1938. Before the conference, Hitler had said that if other countries would agree to take the Jews, he would help them leave. But when the United States and Britain refused to accept Jewish refugees, other countries at the conference followed suit, and any mention of the British Mandate of “Palestine” as a possible destination for Jewish refugees was excluded from the agenda. The decision-making process which led to the “final solution to the Jewish problem” began immediately after the conference and was a direct result of it.
Despite the Holocaust, the murder of six million Jews trapped in Europe, and the complicity of Western powers with the enemies of Israel to destroy Israel the day it was established, November 29, 1947 — just a few months after the adoption of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine — Zionism succeeded. Although most Western countries had voted in favor of the Partition Plan, no Western country helped the newborn state. Only one country, and not a powerful one, provided weapons: Czechoslovakia.
The Arab armies that attacked Israel on the day of its birth were equipped and supplied by the British and the French. Most Western leaders did not think Israel would last long. All of them were sure that Arab armies would win and wipe out both Israel and its population.
In the 1950s, Israel had almost no allies. The British and the French temporarily signed alliances and cooperation agreements with Israel — for opportunistic reasons: as nationalists in the Arab world were choosing the side of the Soviet Union, the British and the French could only choose the other side: the United States. But the United States, apparently wanting to have good relations with Turkey and fundamentalist Saudi Arabia, were prone to appeasement. Eisenhower did not support the action of France, Britain and Israel against the nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956; instead, he granted victory to Egypt’s President, Gamal Abdel Nasser.[14]
During the 1960s, the French — after the Algerian War of Independence from French colonization, which ended in March 1962 — switched sides again. That period was the beginning of the so called “Arab policy of France,” which later became the Arab and Muslim policy of Europe.
The British also switched sides again, strengthening their ties with Jordan and the Gulf countries. “Eurabia,” as the Egyptian writer, Bat Ye’or, has called it, took shape: “a geo-political reality envisaged in 1973 through a system of informal alliances between, on the one hand, the nine countries of the European Community (EC) which, enlarged, became the European Union (EU) in 1992, and on the other hand, the Mediterranean Arab countries.”[15]
All members of the European Community started to distance themselves from Israel and instead to align their interests with those of the Arab world.
At the same time, the United States saw that Israel could be a strategic asset in the Middle East. America started to help Israel seriously in 1967, and during the next decades, its help increased.
The alliance between Israel and the United States, however, often fluctuated; frequently Israel found itself under American pressure too heavy to resist.
When Egypt’s President, Anwar al-Sadat, for instance, decided to cut Egypt’s ties with the Soviet Union and align his country with the United States, the Carter Administration encouraged Israel in the direction of a peace treaty that could be acceptable to Sadat. In 1978, therefore, Israel’s Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, signed a text acknowledging the “legitimate rights of the Palestinian people.” Peace with Egypt is a strategic asset for Israel, but the recognition by Israel of the “legitimate rights of the Palestinian people” has had complicated consequences.
When George H.W. Bush (“Bush 41”) thought that he could establish a “new world order,” he tried to force the Israeli government to sign a peace agreement allowing the fulfillment of “Palestinian rights.” The result was the Madrid conference of 1991 from which, two years later, the Oslo Accords followed, under the presidency of William Jefferson Clinton.
The Oslo Accords, supposed to bring peace, brought anything but peace. Instead, they led to countless attacks on Israelis by Palestinians, and hundreds of injuries and deaths.
A separate peace treaty was signed with Jordan in 1994, but the price Israel had to pay was the de facto recognition of the PLO’s demand to create and take administrative control over an independent “Palestinian state” in Judea and Samaria, on the “West Bank” of the Jordan River. The Palestinian Authority [PA] was formed the same year, 1994 — the PLO acquired a “self-governing body” — but, in total contravention of the Oslo Accords, it did not renounce violence. Terrorist attacks from territories ruled by the PA stopped only a decade later when the Israelis finally built a security barrier to make it more difficult to blow up buses, hotels, cafés, and discotheques. To this day, the PA has not ceased praising and promoting terrorism.
President Clinton, although a friend of Israel, witnessed more Israelis killed by terrorist attacks under his watch than all U.S. presidents from Harry Truman to George H.W. Bush combined.
Ronald Reagan, also a friend of Israel, had as his main concern the danger posed by the Soviet Union. Even though he treated Israel as a reliable ally and fought to free Jews from the Soviet Union, in 1981 he decided temporarily to suspend the delivery of F-16 jet fighters to Israel, after an Israeli raid on a nuclear reactor in Osirak, Iraq, purchased from France by Saddam Hussein.
In 1982, Reagan announced a two-stage plan: to pull Israeli troops out of Lebanon, and to force Israel into withdrawing from the West Bank and Gaza. Israel eventually completed a full withdrawal from south Lebanon in 2000, but the second stage of the plan was killed by resistance from the Israeli government.
Under the presidency of George W. Bush (“Bush 43”), also a friend of Israel, the “peace process” that was to have emerged from the Oslo Accords had ground to a total halt.
After the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001, Bush understood that radical Islam was a global threat, that the mix of ideas roaming the Muslim world was dangerous, and that Arab nationalism, as well as Islamic fundamentalism and radical Islam, did not seem to be producing world peace. He tried to reshape the Middle East to prepare it for democracy and to break the backbone of radical Islam, but he was not successful.
Under his presidency, a majority of European leaders acted according to the unwritten rules of Eurabia. They placed themselves on the side of the most extreme form of Arab nationalism, such as the hellish dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, and did all they could to appease radical Islam. When they could see that Arab nationalism and Israel were not compatible, they chose Arab nationalism. When they could also see that radical Islam and Israel were not compatible, they chose radical Islam. When they could see the aims of George W. Bush, they chose to defeat him.
President Barack Obama, from the beginning of his term, adopted policies toward Israel and Islam that most Europeans were ready to love. As he seems to be basically “anti-imperialist,” he shares the fundamentals of Arab nationalism. As, according to his two books, he identifies with the history of “African Americans,” he seems to think he understands radical Islam’s vision of the world as an expression of a Muslim rage coming from the abuses committed by “American imperialism.”[16]
Obama appears to think that if the alleged abuses were corrected, and if radical Islam gained power, the world would be a more fair and friendly place. He may not have approved of Osama Bin Laden, but he very much approved of the Muslim Brotherhood in both Turkey and Egypt, and as it has infiltrated the U.S., according to U.S. “official sources.”
Obama apparently held up, as a “role model” of Muslim leadership, Turkey’s Islamist Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who said, “Democracy is like a streetcar. You ride it until you arrive at your destination and then you step off,” and, quoting a poem, “Mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets, the faithful our soldiers.”
In 2010, Obama issued a “Presidential Study Directive 11,” ordering an assessment of the Muslim Brotherhood and other “political Islamist” organizations; he concluded that the U.S. should shift from its policy of supporting stability in the Middle East to a policy of backing Islamic political movements. He encouraged the overthrow of Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak in 2011 and, despite massive protests, supported President Mohamed Morsi and his government until the last moment. Obama also did his best to not support Morsi’s successor, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.
Obama also seems to think he understands the grievances of the Islamist regime in Tehran. If he regards Israel as an ally of “American imperialism”, he possibly considers it yet another reason for America to be embarrassed.
On June 4, 2009, in the address to the Muslim world Obama delivered in Cairo, he analogized Palestinian “daily humiliations that come with occupation” to the “humiliation of segregation” of black people in America. He has said several times that he supports a “solution” based on the Arab Peace Initiative promulgated at the 2002 Beirut Summit of the Arab League, and has called many times for Israel’s return to indefensible pre-1967 borders. He seems not to be a friend of Israel.
Meanwhile, despite the supine pro-Arab and Muslim policy of Europe; despite fluctuations in the alliance between Israel and the United States, despite Israel’s sometimes making costly concessions to yield to pressure, despite the circumstance that some American presidents were not friends of Israel, and despite the present U.S. president’s not being a friend of Israel, Zionism has continued to succeed.
It has persisted despite the pretext that Europeans have used to justify their anti-Israeli policies, and despite the so-called “Palestinian cause” which stands behind the pressure exerted by several U.S. administrations, the 1979 Camp David Accords, the Madrid Conference in 1991, the Oslo Accords in 1992, and all that followed the Oslo Accords until today.
In 1948-49, in 1967, and in 1973, the Arabs states used conventional armies to try to destroy Israel. They attacked Israel, mostly in the name of Arab nationalism, partly in the name of Islamic fundamentalism. In 1948-49, they had the implicit support of Western powers. In 1967 and in 1973, the U.S. was on the side of Israel. European powers were not, but could not come right out and say they supported the eventual destruction of Israel. In 1948-49, the “Palestinian cause” did not exist; and in 1967 and 1973, it was embryonic.
The Fatah movement, founded in 1959, remained marginal and unimportant until the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization [PLO] in 1964 by a decision of Arab nationalist leaders in Egypt and Syria, in coordination with the Soviet Union. Its aim was to create a “national liberation struggle” and a “people” fighting for its liberation. It was only then that the “Palestinian people” and the “Palestinian cause” started their existence, but it took time for them to reach center stage.
The PLO, structured according to the codes of Arab nationalism, used the vocabulary of Arab nationalism with touches of the Soviet propaganda apparatus. Israel began to be described as a by-product of “colonialism,” and as a bridgehead of “American imperialism” in the region. A Middle Eastern, romanticized Che Guevara-type of terrorist was created: the leader of the Fatah movement, Yasser Arafat. The aim was apparently to seduce as many people as possible in the West, and many in the West were seduced.
Suddenly forgotten was that Israel had been born from a genuine national liberation movement of the Jewish people. It was now buried under the new “national liberation struggle,” presented as “more authentic”, emanating as it did from Arab Muslims, the ultimate victims of European “imperialism” and “colonialism.”
Little by little, Israel was no longer perceived as a small country threatened by 22 powerful and bloodthirsty armies, but as a “strong” power trying to “cruelly crush” a “small people” who “only” aspired to be free. European leaders found in this tale a good excuse to distance themselves from Israel and to accuse Israel of all types of crimes, whether it was guilty of them or not, such as in the non-stop accusations against Israel in the United Nations, as opposed to nations who are daily committing real violations of human rights.
Israel was pushed to sign peace treaties with leaders who were molded to make war, not to sign peace.
Israel was urged to find ways to coexist peacefully with people who did not want to coexist with it. The people Israel was asked to coexist with had been invented, literally, in order to be a weapon of war against Israel. Their entire reason for being was as a weapon of war against Israel.
Terrorism against Israel fast became acceptable: a “good” terrorism, a “resistance,” a sign of “despair.” Even attacks against children in a toy store or a restaurant were considered “comprehensible”. Every time Israel accepted a compromise and the “Palestinian leaders” said it was not enough, Israel was treated as the guilty party. The huge number of Israelis killed under Clinton’s presidency was treated as a detail.
When fewer Israelis were killed under the presidency of George W. Bush than in earlier years, he was accused of being “indifferent” to the “suffering” of the “Palestinians”.
The global rise of radical Islam in the 1980s saw the creation of Hamas. Hamas is not a nationalist Arab movement: it is an integral part of radical Islam.[17]
Hamas’s stated aim is the genocidal destruction of Israel. Its stated way to achieve this aim is terror attacks, called “armed struggle” by Hamas leaders.
For many years, European countries did not define Hamas as a terrorist organization. As Hamas was fighting for the “Palestinians,” it was considered by European leaders a “resistance movement.” Hamas only started to beconsidered a terrorist organization by the European Union in 2005. Many European leaders who would laugh at the idea of negotiating with ISIS or al-Qaeda, say that Israel should negotiate with Hamas. In other words, they are saying that Israel should negotiate with an organization dedicated to its genocidal destruction.
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Although Zionism succeeded despite the “Palestinian cause” and its consequences, it did not lead to peaceful coexistence between Israel and the rest of the Middle East, or even the Western world. Each time Israel was attacked by Arab conventional armies, Western media generally spoke of the wars in a neutral tone. Some commentators had sympathy for Israel, but not many.
In 1948-49 and in 1967, those who had no sympathy for Israel did not explicitly say what they thought.
In 1973, those who did not like Israel and the Jews hoped that Israel would be defeated; when Israel won, most of them did not openly express their disappointment.
Then, Israel was seen as the underdog, a tiny state set upon by 22 Arab and Muslim countries trying to obliterate it. But in 1973, that perception began to change — the start of a process that has not stopped.
The first “Palestinian” terrorist attacks[18] against Israel occurred in 1968, four years after the creation of the PLO, and one year after the unexpected victory of Israel in the Six Day War.
Even though the Western media talked of “Palestinian terrorism,” the phrase did not last. From the moment that “Palestinian” terrorism was associated with the “Palestinian cause,” Palestinian terrorist acts were described as noble and brave. Terrorists were portrayed as “militants” or “activists.” Killing Israeli Jews came to be considered by more and more journalists as logical, making sense.
Terror attacks went hand in hand with diplomatic attacks and attacks of disinformation. Arab diplomats worked closely with “Palestinian” organizations. European diplomats who wished to establish economic strategic links with the Arab world worked with Arab diplomats, and warmly received leaders of “Palestinian” organizations. They adopted the Arab vision of the Middle East and the “Palestinian” vision of Israel. Most American diplomats followed suit.
Since the early 1970s, some U.S. administrations have been supportive of Israel, others not as much. All of them have said they support the rights of the “Palestinian people”.
The Soviet propaganda apparatus produced all the elements of disinformation necessary[19]: “Pro-Palestinian” movements were created, existing “pacifist” movements were mobilized and protests were organized. Journalists were recruited to disseminate elements of language and descriptions of “facts” that other journalists used as if they were real facts. Pseudo-historians rewrote the history of the Middle East. The falsified version of history replaced history.
After a few years, all Western media were using the elements of language and the descriptions of “facts” that had been disseminated, and no Western media outlet was free of bias.
Not all of them became fully hostile to Israel. But most did.
As a result, Western opinion on Israel, especially in Europe, evolved in a negative direction.
The Soviet propaganda apparatus disappeared when the Soviet Union collapsed, but what had been sown remains, and continues its momentum.
Today, Israel is wrongly described almost everywhere in the West as an “aggressor,” an “occupier,” a “colonizer” or as a country that treats its minorities badly. Few bother to compare how Israel treats Palestinians to how their own “brothers” in Arab and Muslim countries treat them. The “Palestinian people,” who officially organized in 1964, are presented as a people as old as the Jewish people, as if a country called “Palestine” had ever existed in the past and as if “Palestine” had been illegitimately and arbitrarily displaced by Israel seven decades ago. The Gaza Strip, Judea and Samaria are defined as “occupied Palestinian territories”, even though much of Judea and Samaria are ruled by the Palestinian Authority and Fatah, and every Jew was forcibly removed from the Gaza Strip by the Israelis themselves in 2005. The very existence of a Jewish people is questioned by bestselling authors[20] and the ties of the Jewish people to their historic homeland are challenged.
“Palestinian” terrorism is still almost never described as terrorism. Violence against Israel is almost never condemned. Israel’s responses in self-defense are almost always defined as “disproportionate,” “barbaric,” “criminal.”
“Zionism” has become a dirty word. Being an “anti-Zionist” and fighting to erase Israel off the map — and the Israeli Jews off the earth — has become a widely-accepted attitude. “Anti-Zionists” again spread old anti-Semitic stereotypes, in new clothes.
In every Western country today, except the United States, a majority of the people regards Israel as one of the most despicable countries in the world and has a positive view of the “Palestinians”.
In every Western country, even in the United States, almost nobody sees that the raw invention of the “Palestinian people” transformed millions of Arabs into a genocidal weapon to be used against Israelis and even, in Europe this year, the Jews. Almost nobody sees that transforming people into a genocidal weapon is essentially a barbaric act.
Terror attacks have not stopped and will not stop so long as Arab nationalism and radical Islam exist. Israel will continue to exist at the price of eternal and strict vigilance.
Diplomatic attacks have not stopped and will not stop so long as Western countries do not break with the Arab vision of the Middle East and the “Palestinian” vision of Israel.
Disinformation attacks also have not stopped and will almost certainly increase. They could stop if, and only if, Western media admitted they had lied or been lied to — not a high probability.
There is no sign that European countries will change course. No sign indicates that European media will change discourse. The Arab and Muslim policies of Europe exist.
Multiple economic ties connect European countries to Arab Muslim countries and to the Muslim world in general. The Islamic influence on Europe is growing, despite the horrors of Syria, Libya and especially the “Islamic State.” Hostility toward Jews has never really disappeared in Europe; it just adapted to new circumstances. The Jewish State now plays the role of the “collective Jew,” with European Jews treated as its “henchmen.”
There is no sign even that most American leaders, diplomats and journalists will change course and stop talking about the rights of the “Palestinian people”.
Some American leaders and journalists speak the truth: a majority of the American people do not see Israel as a despicable country, and have a deeply skeptical view of the “Palestinian cause”.
One hopes that the United States will remain an exception. Although the Soviet propaganda machine has infiltrated academia and is increasingly inciting Americans to become “anti-Zionist”, most Americans are still impressed by what Israel has accomplished despite the diplomatic, political and economic pressures on it, despite the Soviet-style propaganda cooked up against it and despite the wars inflicted on it.
The Obama Administration is the most hostile administration to Israel in history — the dismaying result of the old Soviet-style propaganda to demonize America and the values of economic freedom, decentralized government and the individual liberties it promotes.
The decline of the Muslim world started at least one century before Zionism emerged. Fundamentalism, Arab nationalism, and radical Islam were born decades before the birth of Israel. Historical and cultural trends show that a Middle East without Zionism and Israel would not have evolved very differently.
The Arab world has used — and is still using — Israel as a decoy to hide its multiple failures and to channel the frustration of Muslim populations. But these failures and frustrations are not the result of the existence of Israel. The success of Israel so nearby only highlighted the sense of failure and frustrations of authoritarian governance in the Middle East. It did not create those failures or the authoritarian governance.
Israel has no responsibility for what happened to the Muslim world or for what the Muslims have done to their own societies. Israel could not have done more to be tolerated and accepted by the Muslim world, apart from ceasing to exist altogether. Israel could not bring democracy and liberty to countries with no experience of, or appetite for, either. Israel could have created links and partnerships that allow for evolution in the Muslim world towards more democracy and liberty only if the Muslim world were not what it is. But the Muslim world is what it is.
Israel also has no responsibility for the choices that led to the policies of Europe toward Arabs and Muslim. The choices made in Europe are the result of the cynical and short-sighted political calculations of European leaders.
Israel had no oil to offer to Europe in the 1970s. Israel did not threaten to plant bombs in European cities. And as Jews are a tiny minority in every European country, their votes do not matter.
Israel also has no responsibility for the choices made by the administrations in the United States. America is a superpower and can dictate terms to smaller countries. The ability of small countries to resist has limits.
The Camp David Accords brought a peace with Egypt that is now strengthening. The Madrid Conference and the Oslo Accords were disasters that have led to many deaths, and are causing painful consequences to this day. Many Israeli politicians were naïve and enthusiastic when the agreements were signed. Others, who could see what a “Trojan Horse” Oslo was, were shouted down.
Israel has no responsibility for the emergence and the global spread of the “Palestinian cause;” the disinformation campaigns either against Israel or in support of the “Palestinians;” the demonization of Israel, or the return of anti-Semitism in Europe.
Maybe Israel could have done more to counter the disinformation campaigns or have found better ways to sound the alarm about the return of anti-Semitism in Europe. But there are limits to what a small country, beset by terrorism, constant rocketing and wars every few years can do against propaganda, especially when it is financed by petrodollars.
The main achievement is that Israel not only exists but is flourishing, open, free and independent — despite setbacks that might have crushed any of the comfortable nations now criticizing and pecking at it. Despite all the dangers, attacks, hatred, enemies and threats, Israel and the Jewish people are better than ever.
It is better than in 1921, when the Jewish Agency for Palestine was created. It is better than in 1948 when the Arab armies attacked the tiny, newborn State of Israel.
It is better than in 1956, 1967 or 1973, when Arab armies attacked Israel, and better than in the time of endless waves of suicide bombings, before the security barrier was built.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad have been trying create a small terrorist state in Gaza and use it as a base for launching missiles into Israeli territory, but Israel’s military can defend it without asking anyone from abroad to risk his life for it.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Muslim world feared collapse. Muslim clerics and scholars looked for answers. But the collapse occurred almost a century ago; we are still in the aftershocks.
Fundamentalism survives in Saudi Arabia, in Yemen, in the Gulf Emirates. Fundamentalists with their petrodollars try to buy themselves a future with investments in the West. Many of the fundamentalists help radical Islamists. But that still does not create development or growth.
Arab nationalism is dying; it survives only in countries where economies are crumbling. It has no future. Leaders such Egypt’s President al-Sisi seem to understand the immense scale of the problem.
Lebanon sits unofficially under the dictatorship of Hezbollah. The secular Republic of Turkey under Erdogan has been increasingly sliding toward radical Islamism. Moderate monarchies survive in Jordan and Morocco, but Jordan and Morocco are — and will remain — underdeveloped for years to come.
Radical Islam destroys and threatens. It is the most destructive force of the twenty first century. It brings only chaos and sterility; it is dangerous and has no future.
The only country in the Middle East that has a future is Israel. Militarily, economically, legally and technologically, Israel is strong. Even as birth-rates throughout the Muslim world, including the so called “Palestinian territories,” are going down, in Israel, they are going up.
If hatred of Israel is growing in Europe, then Israel never had any real friends in Europe to begin with. Ties connecting European countries to Arab and Muslim countries, and to the Muslim world in general, are ties connecting European countries to losing countries. Islam’s growing influence in Europe is not exactly improving the continent. Europe continues to deteriorate.
As more and more Jews leave Europe, they take with them their cultural and intellectual capital. Israeli technological innovations have been essential to the economic survival of Europe. European countries cannot cut their ties with Israel without committing suicide, but it is not sure if they will or not, either out of short-term political comfort, or even out of spite.
If hatred of Israel is increasing in the United States, it is largely confined to academics and other extreme radical circles, many of which are funding, or receiving funds from, agitprop organizations trying to increase this hatred. Israel still has many friends among Americans. Ties to Arab and Muslim countries exist but have much less of an influence on America’s economy, politics and culture than they have in Europe.
If Jews leave the United States, it is because they choose to, not because they are tormented there.
Many American companies work together with Israeli companies and have branches in Israel. Many Israeli start-ups are bought or financed by American companies. Virtually all American leaders know that Israeli technology is essential to the U.S. economy. Even in the Obama Administration, there are limits to what he can do: Congress will never pass any law that could threaten the economic and strategic ties between the U.S. and Israel. A new president will be elected in November 2016 and a new administration will be formed. It almost certainly will not choose to harm U.S.-Israel relations.
Although U.S. President Barack Obama is not one of them, Israel still has many friends among Americans. Virtually all American leaders know that Israeli technology is essential to the U.S. economy. (Image source: The White House)
Other leaders of major countries in the world — Russia, China, Brazil, India, Japan — see the economic, technological and military importance of Israel, and respect what it has brought to the world.
To too many countries, the rarity that is Israel — a democracy that constantly brings fruitful inventions to the world — is not recognized. Perhaps they are envious.
Millions of people dream of destroying Israel and killing the Jews. What Jews brought to the world — one of the earliest codes of humanitarian law, social justice and respect for education — is not acknowledged. Yet Israel is respected by most leaders of the world and feared by its enemies. Even leaders who despise Israel respect it.
As long as these views hold, and as long as Jews who are persecuted elsewhere can find refuge and be able to build full lives in Israel, those who created Israel will have achieved its goal.
[1] M. Sükrü Hanioglu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire, Princeton University Press, 2010.
[2] Kamal Salibi, A House of Many Mansions: The History of Lebanon Reconsidered, University of California Press, 1990.
[3] Cf. Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, The Muslim Brotherhood, Evolution of an Islamist Movement, Princeton University Press, 2013.
[4] Martin Kramer, “Fundamentalist Islam at Large: The Drive for Power”, Middle East Quarterly, June 1996. Also, on radical Islam, cf. Daniel Pipes, “The Western Mind of Radical Islam“, First Things, December 1995.
[6] Gregory C. Kozlowski, “Devotional Islam and Politics in British India: Ahmad Raza Khan Barelwi and His Movement”, Journal of the American Oriental Society, Oct-Dec 1999.
[7] Cf. M. C. Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia, Indiana University Press, 1981.
[8] Itamar Rabinovitch, The War for Lebanon, 1970-1985, Cornell University Press, 1985.
[9] Amir Taheri, The Spirit of Allah: Khomeini and the Islamic Revolution, Adler & Adler, 1986.
[10] Cf. Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism: From the French Revolution to the Establishment of the State of Israel, Fine Communications, 1997.
[11] Isaiah Friedman, The Question of Palestine: British-Jewish-Arab Relations 1914-1918, Transaction Publishers, 1991.
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