Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.
Archive for September 5, 2015
Cartoon of the day
September 5, 2015Genocide, Islam and weaponized empathy
September 5, 2015Genocide, Islam and weaponized empathy, The Declination, The study of a civilization in decline
(A powerful narrative. — DM)
But back to the central point, why, then, if America sheltered my family, must the West turn back the refugees of Syria, of Somalia, of Libya?
Because they bring the source of infection with them. Armenians had managed, through some strength I sometimes find difficult to fully grasp, to hang on to their European culture and Christian religion through millenia of conflict with Islam. They had stubbornly resisted assimilation into Islam and its ideals. These refugees, for all that my heart yearns to give them sanctuary and a place to escape to, nonetheless carry Islam with them.
Leftists, take your Weaponized Empathy elsewhere. We understand that the world is full of terrible things, of children dying, of women enslaved. But we have to find our resolve and protect our own.
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As some of my readers know, I am part Armenian by ancestry. It used to be a thing that didn’t enter into my daily thought process, for I am also partially of English descent and am fully American, in culture, language and appearance. Armenians can generally tell that I am of Armenian ancestry, but few others can. But as militant Islam made its presence felt, increasingly in recent years, that identity has resurfaced because of the connection my own family has to the affair.
Then I saw this photo of a drowned Syrian boy:
Leftists would have you believe that us on the Right have no empathy. We wish to deny the endless migrations away from crisis areas in the Islamic world and that, they would tell us, is incompatible with human rights, dignity, empathy and so on.
My grandfather told me stories of Armenia (Armenians, then, lived throughout Anatolia), which he remembered only dimly. For he had been only a few years old when my family escaped, just ahead of the genocide in the dying Ottoman Empire. Mostly, he remembered it through the stories told in the Armenian exile community.
Entire villages were erased, all the inhabitants slaughtered, the buildings burnt to the ground, the movable wealth stolen and melted down. Nothing of them remained. In the days before the genocide, two dialects of the Armenian language existed, colloquially referred to as the Western, or Anatolian, dialect and the Eastern dialect. The Western dialect has mostly gone extinct, spoken only by a few elders in the diaspora. My grandfather could speak it, but my mother knew only a few words. Only the Eastern dialect survives. Half of Armenia ceased to exist.
These were hardy Christians who had survived on the edge of the Byzantine and Islamic worlds for centuries. They had fought alongside Greeks and Crusaders. They were among the earliest — perhaps the very first — nations to convert to Christianity. They spoke an ancient language, a variant of the Indo-European language set that appears distantly related to Greek, and unrelated to any other.
Islam nearly erased them.
Now that Christians in the Middle-East are approaching extinction, the new target is the insufficiently Muslim. The Yazidis with their syncretic half-Muslim religion, or the Kurds who elevate their own nationalism over their religion (a rarity in the Muslim world).
I feel for them. I really do. In fact, I cannot tell you how much it pains me to see these things. On my grandfather’s knee, I heard the stories of Armenian survivors. In particular, one woman stands out. She was a child when the Turks came for her family, but she was comely and pretty. Her parents and brothers were killed and she was sold as a slave for a wealthy Turk’s harem. Her story of survival and escape was terrifying to me as a child, and it instilled a sense of resolve where Islam was concerned that has not abated to this day.
Can you imagine this? Seeing your family slaughtered, and only surviving to be used as a sex slave by those who did the deed? Blacks in America lecture me about my White privilege, saying that their ancestors were slaves. Mine were slaves much more recently than theirs. Mine were slaughtered wholesale.
But back to the central point, why, then, if America sheltered my family, must the West turn back the refugees of Syria, of Somalia, of Libya?
Because they bring the source of infection with them. Armenians had managed, through some strength I sometimes find difficult to fully grasp, to hang on to their European culture and Christian religion through millenia of conflict with Islam. They had stubbornly resisted assimilation into Islam and its ideals. These refugees, for all that my heart yearns to give them sanctuary and a place to escape to, nonetheless carry Islam with them.
There are good Muslims in the world, and I want to make this clear. My own family lived only because an Ottoman official warned my great-grandfather that genocide was coming. This man, whose name I cannot remember — something that genuinely pains me, for my grandfather died when I was young and his stories are almost dream-like to me, now — paid for the ticket to America for my family, for English language lessons, and everything else needed to escape before it was too late.
I hope that I will meet this good and righteous man in the life to come. I hope God saw fit to accept him into His kingdom.
But Islam nonetheless is a contagion, even if some maintain a stubborn moral immunity to the infection. Where Islam goes, this violence will follow. You will never save all the little boys, you will never stop the slaughter. All you will do is bring it to your own shores.
And if there is something I know for certain, it is that my ancestors did not escape Islam only to see their descendants fight it again, once more in their own homes.
There were tears in my grandfather’s eyes, at times, as he recounted the things he knew. And I know what his reaction would be to this boy’s death. He would feel empathy and sadness, far more acutely than the moral busybodies of Progressive Leftism. But then he would turn off the TV and tell me the truth: that we could not help them without also dooming ourselves to the same.
So, Leftists, take your Weaponized Empathy elsewhere. We understand that the world is full of terrible things, of children dying, of women enslaved. But we have to find our resolve and protect our own.
For if we do not, it could be my son laying on that distant beach, and that I will not allow.
The Syrian Refugee Crisis is Not Our Problem
September 5, 2015The Syrian Refugee Crisis is Not Our Problem We didn’t cause it. We don’t have to solve it. September 4, 2015 Daniel Greenfield
Source: The Syrian Refugee Crisis is Not Our Problem | Frontpage Mag
The Syrian refugee crisis that the media bleats about is not a crisis. And the Syrian refugees it champions are often neither Syrians nor refugees. Fake Syrian passports are cheaper than an EU politician’s virtue and easier to come by. Just about anyone who speaks enough Arabic to pass the scrutiny of a European bureaucrat can come with his two wives in tow and take a turn on the carousel of their welfare state.
Or on our welfare state which pays Christian and Jewish groups to bring the Muslim terrorists of tomorrow to our towns and cities. And their gratitude will be as short-lived as our budgets.
The head of a UNHCR camp called Syrian refugees “The most difficult refugees I’ve ever seen. In Bulgaria, they complained that there were no jobs. In Sweden, they took off their clothes to protest that it was too cold.
In Italy, Muslim African “refugees” rejected pasta and demanded food from their own countries. But the cruel Europeans who “mistreat” migrants set up a kitchen in Calais with imported spices cooked by a Michelin chef determined to give them the stir-fried rabbit and lamb meatballs they’re used to. There are also mobile phone charging stations so the destitute refugees can check on their Facebook accounts.
It had to be done because the refugees in Italy were throwing rocks at police while demanding free wifi.
This is the tawdry sense of entitlement of the Syrian Muslim refugee that the media champions.
Hussein said: “We have the feeling that the aid workers are heartless.” (He) lives in a trailer that cost $3,000. The air-conditioner runs with electricity he is tapping from the Italian hospital. The water for his tea is from canisters provided by UNICEF. He hasn’t worked, paid or thanked anyone for any of it.”
And why would he? He’s entitled to it by virtue of his superiority as a Muslim and our inferiority as infidels. There is no sense of gratitude. Only constant demands as if the people who drove out their own Christians and Jews have some moral claim on the charity of the Christians and Jews of the West.
The media howls that the Syrian refugee crisis is our fault. That is a lie.
What is happening in Syria is a religious civil war fought over the same ideologies as the ones practiced by the vast majority of the refugees. This is an Islamic war fought to determine which branch of Islam will be supreme. It is not a war that started last week or last year, but 1,400 years ago.
We can’t make it go away by overthrowing Assad or supporting him, by giving out candy or taking in refugees. This conflict is in the cultural DNA of Islam. It is not going anywhere.
This war is not our fault. It is their fault.
There are Christian and non-Muslim minorities who are genuine refugees, but the two Muslim sects whose militias are murdering each other are not victims, they are perpetrators. Just because Sunnis are running from a Shiite militia or Shiites from a Sunni militia right now doesn’t make them victims.
The moment that their side’s militia wins and begins slaughtering the other side, the oppressed will become the oppressors. Such shifts have already taken place countless times in this conflict.
The refugees aren’t fleeing a dictator. They’re fleeing each other while carrying the hateful ideologies that caused this bloodshed with them.
We aren’t taking in people fleeing the civil war. We’re taking in their civil war and giving it a good home.
The Tsarnaevs left behind their old war with the Russian infidels to begin a new phase of it against the American infidels. The children of the Syrian Muslim refugees we’re taking in will be raised in a faith and a culture that will cause them to play out the same old patterns that led to the current tragedy.
There are already Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans fighting each other in Greece. Muslim migrants are murdering Christian refugees on the journey over. And this is only the beginning.
The ranks of the refugees include possible war criminals like Abu Hussein, the commander of a Free Syrian Army militia named the Falcons of the Tribe of the Prophet Mohammed, who controls portions of a UNHCR refugee camp and threatens to kill aid workers when they won’t give him what he wants.
The bleeding hearts of Europe and America want to take in the cute kiddies, but they’ll be getting the Husseins instead who will be running neighborhoods in London, Paris and Toronto. And then the kindly natives will notice that their daughters are coming home late and wonder what is happening to them.
Syria will happen to them. Just as Pakistan and Afghanistan happened to the British girls victimized by the Muslim sex grooming gangs in the UK. Just as Saudi Arabia happened to us on September 11.
A popular meme claims that the UK has taken in only enough refugees to fit on a subway train. My question to the meme spreaders is how would they like to be on that train, wedged between the terrorists, the sex groomers and the Sunnis and Shiites trying to reach across and throttle each other.
We are told that the Syrian refugees “stir the conscience” of the world; certainly not the Muslim world. The Saudis don’t want them. Jordan and Turkey have resentfully set up refugee camps without actually offering permanent legal status to them the way that Europe, Canada and America are expected to.
What do Muslim countries know about the Syrian Civil War that we don’t?
The Saudis, Jordanians and Turks have their own problems. They don’t want to import the Syrian Civil War into their own borders. Only Western countries are stupid enough to do that.
The Syrian refugee crisis is a voluntary crisis. It would go away in a snap with secure borders and rapid deportations. The fake Syrians would stay home if they knew that their fake passport wouldn’t earn them a train ride to Germany’s Hartz welfare state, but a memorable trip to the Syrian Civil War.
Even announcing such a policy would lead to a rapid wave of self-deportations by finicky refugees for whom Bulgarian jobs, Italian food and Swedish weather aren’t good enough.
Plenty of Syrian refugees returned on their own from the Zaatari camp in Jordan when they saw that there weren’t enough treats for them. They went back to Syria from Turkey and even Europe when they didn’t find life to their liking. If they were really facing death back home, they would have stayed. There were no Jews going back to Germany during the Holocaust because they couldn’t find jobs in New York. Nobody goes home to a genocide. They go home because they were economic migrants, not refugees.
The crisis here is caused by the magnet of Western welfare states. Get rid of the magnet and you get rid of the crisis. Stop letting migrants who show up stay and there will be no more photogenic rafts filled with “starving” and “desperate” people who pay thousands of dollars to get to Europe and then complain about the food and the weather. Put up border fences and the “hikers” will go back home.
Keeping the doors open intensifies the crisis. It’s the sympathy of the bleeding hearts that leads to dead children whose parents are willing to risk their lives for their own economic goals. The left creates the crisis and then indicts everyone else for refusing to accept its solution that would make it even worse.
The “humanitarian catastrophe” in which the migrants use their children as photogenic human shields would go away if the doors were closed to everyone except real refugees who were not part of this war. The only thing that taking in fake refugees does is attract more of them and that empowers the left which uses dead children for its power and profit at more places than just Planned Parenthood.
Slovakia has announced that it will only take in Christian refugees and that’s the right thing to do. Christians are the real victims of this Muslim conflict. The vast majority of the refugees, many of whom aren’t even Syrians, aren’t. The rest of Europe should use Slovakia’s refugee policy as a model.
Khamenei Publishes Book About The Annihilation Of Israel
September 5, 2015Khamenei Publishes Book About The Annihilation Of Israel
By Missing Peace
Source: Khamenei Publishes Book About The Annihilation Of Israel | Missing Peace | missingpeace.eu | EN
Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, just published a book in which he outlines a ‘slow and painful’ strategy to annihilate Israel.
The 416-page book, titled Palestine, was edited by Saeed Solh-Mirzai–but received full approval from Khamenei’s office and is thus Khamenei’s most authoritative document regarding his views on the issue, the Goldstone Institute think tank reported.
The book was published only weeks after six world powers, including the United States, reached a controversial agreement about Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
Khamenei’s plan for Israel will promote “the hegemony of Iran” while it will remove “the West’s hegemony” from the Middle East, the Ayatollah claims in the book. How this goal will be reached is described in detail by Khamenei.
“Israel has no right to exist” is the central theme of the book. Khamenei uses three words to describe the destruction of Israel. “One is “nabudi,” which means “annihilation.” The other is “imha,” which means “fading out.” And finally, there is “zaval,” meaning “effacement,” the Gatestone Institute reported.
The annihilation of Israel will not be achieved via conventional warfare, Khamenei argues, but via a never ending string of terror attacks and low-intensity conflict that will make life unbearable for the Israeli Jews.
In the end, they would pack their bags and leave the country for another country in the West–or return to their country of origin–because many Israelis have dual citizenship, the Iranian Supreme Leader thinks. This same way of thinking caused Yasser Arafat to launch the Second Intifada, but Israelis never even contemplated leaving the country during the five years of continuing terror.
Khamenei writes that his strategy for the annihilation of the Jewish State has nothing to do with anti-Semitism but with “well-established Islamic principles.”
The overriding principle is that Israel was established on territory that belongs to the Ummah (Islamic nation) and, therefore, is part of the Dar al-Islam (house of Islam). Such land can never be ceded to non-Muslims and must be brought under Muslim control again.
There are, however, three other reasons Khamenei gave for the mandatory destruction of Israel.
The first is that Israel, which he labels “adou” (enemy) and “doshman” (foe), is the ally of the “Great Satan” (United States) and is conspiring with the U.S. in an “evil scheme” to dominate the heartland of the Ummah.
The second reason is that Israel has become “Kaffir al-Harbi,” a hostile infidel because of the numerous wars it fought against Muslim armies.
The third reason Israel must be destroyed is that it “occupies” Jerusalem, the third holy city in Islam, according to Khamenei, who is honored with the title “The flagbearer of Jihad to liberate Jerusalem” on the cover of the book. He writes that one of his “most cherished wishes” is to pray in Jerusalem one day.
Khamenei is counting on increasing “Israel fatigue” in the international community that makes it more likely that the world will force his version of the one-state solution upon Israel, he thinks.
What is this solution?
The Supreme Leader wants to organize a referendum among at least 8 million Palestinian Arabs and their descendants and only 2.2 million Israeli Jews, those who did not immigrate to Israel.
The United Nations would run the affairs in the new country until the referendum takes place; and after that, Khamenei would be willing to let the Jews continue to live in the new “Palestine” as second-class citizens (Dhimmi’s).
Khamenei also boasts that Iran was behind the Second Lebanon War between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006 and the 22-day long war with Hamas in Gaza last year.
In his book, Khamenei denies the Holocaust and writes that he regards it as “a propaganda ploy” or a disputed claim. “If there was such a thing we don’t know why it happened and how,” he claimed.
Amir Taheri, the Iranian journalist who wrote the Gatestone article, added the following:
Khamenei has been in contact with professional Holocaust deniers since the 1990s. In 2000, he invited Swiss Holocaust-denier Jürgen Graf to Tehran and received him in private audiences. French Holocaust-denier Roger Garaudy, a Stalinist who converted to Islam, was also feted in Tehran as “Europe’s’ greatest living philosopher.”
It was with Khamenei’s support that former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad set up a “Holocaust-research center” led by Muhammad-Ali Ramin, an Iranian functionary with links to German neo-Nazis who also organized annual “End of Israel” seminars.
Despite efforts to disguise his hatred of Israel in Islamic terms, the book makes it clear that Khamenei is more influenced by Western-style anti-Semitism than by classical Islam’s checkered relations with Jews.
His argument about territories becoming “irrevocably Islamic” does not wash, if only because of its inconsistency. He has nothing to say about vast chunks of former Islamic territory, including some that belonged to Iran for millennia, now under Russian rule.
Nor is he ready to embark on Jihad to drive the Chinese out of Xinjiang, a Muslim khanate until the late 1940s.
Israel, which in terms of territory accounts for one per cent of Saudi Arabia, is a very small fry.
Khamenei’s book has been published in Farsi, the language of Iran. An Arab translation is expected soon.
Saudi Arabia: Iran deal will contribute to Middle East security and stability
September 5, 2015Saudi Arabia: Iran deal will contribute to Middle East security and stability
Saudi Arabia is satisfied with assurances from US President Barack Obama about the Iran nuclear deal and believes the agreement will contribute to security and stability in the Middle East, a senior Saudi official said on Friday.
Saudi King Salman met with Obama at the White House on Friday to seek more support in countering Iran, as the Obama administration aimed to use the visit to shore up relations after a period of tensions.
The visit is the king’s first to the United States since ascending to the throne in January 2015, and comes after the United States agreed to a nuclear deal with Iran in July.
The US-Saudi relationship has suffered strain because of what Riyadh sees as Obama’s withdrawal from the region, a lack of direct US action against President Bashar Assad in Syria, and a perceived US tilt towards Iran since the 2011 Arab uprisings.
But the countries share many strategic objectives and depend on each other on a number of core security, economic, and political issues.
Speaking after the meeting between Obama and Salman, Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir said Obama had assured the Saudi king that the agreement prevents Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, includes inspections of military and suspected sites, and has a provision for the snapback of sanctions if Iran violates the agreement.
Under those conditions, al-Jubeir said, Saudi Arabia supported the deal.
“Now we have one less problem for the time being to deal with, with regards to Iran,” al-Jubeir said. “We can now focus more intensely on the nefarious activities that Iran is engaged in in the region.”
Gulf Arab states had previously expressed their support for the Iran nuclear deal, but fear that the lifting of sanctions on Iran would enable it to pursue destabilizing policies in the Middle East.
Salman skipped a Gulf Arab summit at Camp David in May, a move widely seen as a diplomatic snub over Obama’s Iran strategy, though both governments denied that interpretation.
Critics say the nuclear deal will empower Iran economically to increase its support of militant groups in the region.
Saudi Arabia and Iran are opposed on a number of regional issues, especially the 4 1/2-year-long Syrian civil war and unrest in Yemen, where a coalition of Arab states led by Riyadh, assisted by the United States, are targeting Iran-allied Houthi forces.
Obama said on Friday that he and Salman share concerns about Yemen and the need to restore a functioning government and address the humanitarian situation there.
US Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes said ahead of Salman’s visit that the United States believed more care needs to be taken to avoid civilian casualties in the air strikes against Houthi forces in Yemen.
Al-Jubeir said on Friday that the humanitarian crisis in Yemen was being exacerbated by the Houthis and that supplies were at risk of being diverted from Yemenis who need them most, but that Saudi Arabia was working with international organizations to send supplies to Yemen.
A Saudi-led coalition has been conducting air strikes across Yemen against Iranian-allied Houthi forces since March, pushing back Houthi forces but drawing criticism from international aid and rights groups for a mounting civilian death toll.
Saudi Defense Minister Mohammed bin Salman also met on Friday with US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter and the two discussed Saudi Arabia’s underlying defense requirements, the Pentagon said.
The Obama administration is focused on providing the assistance that the president promised at the Camp David summit, including helping Gulf states integrate ballistic missile defense systems and beef up cyber and maritime security.
Saudi Arabia remains the world’s largest oil exporter, and its commitment to pumping oil freely despite a recent price decline has helped contribute to sustaining the US economic recovery. Obama and Salman will discuss the world economy and energy issues, Obama told reporters on Friday.
Saudi Arabia has also joined the United States and other Arab states in air strikes against the Islamic State jihadist movement in Syria, also called ISIS.
“We continue to cooperate extremely closely in countering terrorist activities in the region and around the world, including the battle against ISIS,” Obama said on Friday.
Obama and Salman discussed the potential fast-tracking of the release of American military technology and weapons systems to Saudi Arabia, al-Jubeir said, and discussed a “new strategic partnership” between the two countries, although he gave few details.
The Gulf state is in advanced discussions with the US government about buying two frigates based on a coastal warship that Lockheed Martin Corp is building for the US Navy, a deal valued at well over $1 billion.
The sale would be the cornerstone of a long-delayed multibillion-dollar modernization of the Royal Saudi Navy’s Gulf-patrolling eastern fleet of aging US warships and would include smaller patrol boats.
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