Archive for December 8, 2015

Wave of the eighth century

December 8, 2015

Wave of the eighth century, Power LineScott Johnson, December 8, 2015

President Obama fancies himself a progressive in the Progressive tradition. He wants not only to ride the wave of the future but to sense where it is going and give it a nudge. As with all good progressives, it is history by which Obama takes his bearings, not the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence. Thus in his Oval Office speech this past Sunday, he declared that “we are on the right side of history.” Steve Hayward deals with the thought underlying this claim here.

The argument from history is a weak argument to begin with, but Obama does no honor to it. Recall that Obama came out in favor of preserving the democratic “process” in Egypt in order to support Mohammed Morsi. Obama sought to preserve Mohammed Morsi as president of Egypt. The damage Morsi’s authoritarian governance had done to rule of law and the other fundamentals of a free society were left unspoken.

Morsi was the man from the Muslim Brotherhood and it had been the project of Obama’s “smart diplomacy,” as he views it, to place the United States on the crest of the rising wave of Islamism in the Middle East. Obama is fine with the Muslim Brotherhood. He wants to help us overcome our inordinate fear of Islamism. Thus we had the spectacle of his Director of National Intelligence promoting the self-refuting assertion that the Muslim Brotherhood is a “very heterogeneous group, largely secular.”

Obama has a tropism for leaders in the troglodyte mold. Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu is of course anathema to Obama, but Obama’s best friend in the Middle East is Turkey’s Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The contrast is striking and not in Erdogan’s favor.

Obama would love to find a way to get the United States aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood’s Hamas branch in Gaza and Iran’s Hezbollah subsidiary in Syria and Lebanon. They are the logical destination of his Middle Eastern fantasies. Coincidentally, Obama has just named a fan of Hamas as his Senior Advisor to the President for the Counter-ISIL Campaign in Iraq and Syria. In the Middle East, anyway, Obama is riding the wave of the eighth century.

In 1940 Anne Morrow Lindbergh sought to make Americans comfortable with what she saw as “the wave of the future” in Europe. Her book of the same name had become an overnight sensation. “Few books in the history of publishing have encountered a reception like the one accorded” it, Scott Berg writes in his biography of Charles Lindbergh.

To return to Obama for a moment, let us recall that he helped preserve the rule of the mullahs in Iran at a key moment of peril presented by the popular uprising against them in 2009. Now Obama has sought to align the United States with Iran under the JCPOA preserving Iran’s nuclear program. The regime has reciprocated with continuing expressions of contempt for Obama and the United States. Obama’s main mullah — Ayatollah Khameni — well, he’s the kind of guy who inspired Mrs. Lindbergh’s raptures in 1940.

Mrs. Lindbergh’s book elicited E.B. White’s devastating dissent in the pages of the New Yorker, collected in White’s One Man’s Meat. Mrs. Lindbergh’s book is of historical interest only, but White’s essay is still worth reading today.

Perhaps most notably, Mrs. Lindbergh’s book also prompted a response from President Roosevelt once he was safely reelected to his third term on a non-interventionist platform. In his inaugural address, Roosevelt invoked Mrs. Lindbergh’s book, “chiseling her metaphor into the public consciousness,” in Berg’s words. “There are men who believe that…tyranny and slavery have become the surging wave of the future — and that freedom is an ebbing tide,” Roosevelt asserted. “But we Americans know that this is not true.”

Obama can mouth the words, but he lacks conviction. Freedom just doesn’t ring his chimes. It’s not the wave of the future he envisions. Given his record and his proclivities, Obama’s muffled echo of the progressive faith in history sounds like an uncertain kazoo.

Calling Out Islam Terrorism Truthers

December 8, 2015

Calling Out Islam Terrorism Truthers Blame everything but Islam.

December 8, 2015

Daniel Greenfield

Source: Calling Out Islam Terrorism Truthers | Frontpage Mag

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.

Each and every act of Muslim terrorism is followed by a wave of denial.  The politicians who have done the most to cause the latest disaster are the eagerest to blame it on something, anything else.

The San Bernardino Muslim massacre was blamed on postpartum depression at CNN. Bill Nye blamed the latest Paris attacks on Global Warming. According to Hillary Clinton, Benghazi was a movie review with artillery. Islamic terrorism was blamed by the State Department on a lack of jobs, but Syed Farook had a good government job and his wife was the daughter of a wealthy family.

After rummaging through their big brass chest of excuses, Obama and his media allies have settled on gun control as their latest weapon of mass distraction.

California has the toughest gun laws in the nation. Unlike Ted Kennedy, the terrorists weren’t on the no-fly list that has become the latest desperate meme of mass distraction. And, despite Obama’s claim in Paris that mass shootings don’t happen in other countries because of gun control magic, they most certainly do. European gun control didn’t stop a Muslim mass shooting in Paris that killed 130 people.

Syed Farook and Tasheen Malik had built pipe bombs. The latest attack in the UK involved a knife. So did quite a few in Jerusalem. The Boston Marathon massacre used fireworks and a pressure cooker.

The Muslim mass murder of 3,000 people on 9/11 was carried out with box cutters.

If only we had some way to ban terrorists from buying pressure cookers, knives and box cutters.

Gun control is a distraction. A way to make something other than Islam into the problem that needs solving. If we banned guns, then the problem would be foreign policy. If we spent all our time working to aid Islamist political takeovers, then it would the weather. Obama has tried to aid Islamists and lower sea levels, so he has been reduced to blaming the inanimate objects of the latest terror attack.

Gun control, foreign policy and global warming are denialist gimmicks that reframe the problem.

Denialists will ignore the allegiances of terrorists like Nidal Hassan and Syed Farook to Jihadists to focus on individual pathologies. If that doesn’t work, they’ll pull back to a planetary focus and blame the weather patterns of the entire planet. They’ll zoom in with great detail on weapons purchases while ignoring the ideology that motivated the attacks. They’ll have a hundred different explanations for each attack that fail to account for the phenomenon of Islamic terrorism as a whole.

These aren’t reasonable arguments. Taken together they form a pattern of conspiracy theories.

The most basic aspect of the conspiracy theory is that it bypasses the obvious reasonable explanation and vanishes down a rabbit hole of complicated alternative explanations that make no real sense but allow the conspiracists to avoid dealing with the implications of the actual event that took place.

Leftists did not want to deal with the fact that JFK had been murdered by one of their own. So they invented a bunch of alternative conspiracies involving the CIA, Cubans and other “right-wing” villains. These conspiracies allowed them to avoid dealing with the violence at the heart of the left. But that violence continued to spill over anyway leading to riots and terror plots. In their alternate reality, none of it was their fault. The “Fall of Camelot” was caused by some “miasma of right-wing hatred” in Dallas.

Their response to 9/11 flirted with conspiracy theories.

A poll found that more than half of Democrats believed that George W. Bush had carried out the 9/11 attacks or knew about them beforehand. 1 in 4 Democrats believed that the World Trade Center attack was staged. 1 in 5 believed that the Pentagon attack was carried out by the United States government.

Democratic politicians, with some exceptions, usually knew better than to openly air blatant 9/11 conspiracy theories.  But they instead embraced a “soft” left-wing Trutherism that shifted the focus away from Islamic terrorism to alternative explanations that were meant to distract Americans from what really happened by finding sideways angles for blaming the attack on Bush and Republicans.

Bush may not have masterminded it, but Republican foreign policy caused it. Or worsened it.

It’s 2015 and the Terrorism Truthers have been reduced to frantically scrambling for any explanation from postpartum depression to the weather to explain the persistence of Islamic terrorism.

Trutherism works best when the Truthers aren’t in power. Muslim terrorism can’t be blamed on the government when both France and America are run by ridiculously notorious leftists. All that’s left is a “soft” Trutherism that seeks alternative explanations without being able to consistently answer the central question of why these attacks are taking place.

And this lack of a plausible central conspirator is the weak point of leftist Terrorism Denial.

Leftist Truthers like Obama are forced to constantly substitute new “right-wing” villains. Today it’s the NRA. Yesterday it was a Coptic Christian who made a YouTube video. But like the USSR’s efforts to blame its economic failures on a shifting gallery of villains, these explanations are unsatisfying. And they leave even leftists, never mind ordinary Americans, uneasy about a crisis they don’t understand.

There is something of Orwell’s “We have always been at war with Eastasia” to these deceits.

Today Muslim terrorists are attacking us because of the NRA. Yesterday it was because it was too hot. Before that, it was because of Israel. And before that, it was because of Bush.

But what if Muslim terrorists are attacking us because they’re Muslim terrorists?

What if we can’t beat them by banning guns, changing the weather, supporting Islamists or any of the other magical answers that completely fall apart at even the most casual examination?

The left’s response to Islamic terrorism has been built around a frantic effort to distract and divert us from exactly that question, blaming anything and everything but Islam, while sharply denouncing anyone who ignores the distractions and addresses that central question.

Attorney General Lynch responded to the San Bernardino terror attack by assuring Islamists that she intended to crack down on criticism of Islam. Criticism of Islam is dangerous, not because it leads to a mythical anti-Muslim backlash that we are constantly warned about as if it were more dangerous than Muslim terrorism itself yet never actually materializes, but because it destroys Terrorist Trutherism.

If Islamic terrorism is the problem, then the left and the Democrats who handed over their party to it are guilty of ignoring, minimizing and lying about a serious problem.

They have to go on lying, ignoring and minimizing, and even threatening to dump the First Amendment along with the Second, because they have long since become complicit in the crimes of their Islamist partner organizations.

Yesterday they blamed the weather. Today they’ll blame guns. Tomorrow, it’ll be something else.

We are always at war with Eastasia, unless it’s Eurasia. We are never however at war with Islam. The issue may be anything so long as it isn’t Muslim terrorism. Those are the words that no Democrat will utter. They will call it “man-caused disasters” or “violent extremism” or “hybrid workplace Jihad”.

It’s time to call this what it is, denialism, trutherism and conspiracism.

The famous epigram, “Treason doth never prosper, what’s the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason”, expressed the absurd hypocrisy of a government of traitors. But what happens when there is a government of conspiracy theorists? Then conspiracies exist to divert attention from the failures and crimes of those in charge. The conspiracy theory itself becomes the conspiracy.

It’s time to take away Obama’s weapons of mass distraction and expose his Trutherism for what it is.

Islamic terrorism isn’t caused by a thousand different problems, conditions, conspiracies and excuses. It’s caused by Islam. Every attempt to distract from that is Denialism and Trutherism.

And we owe it to the victims of the latest attack and all the attacks to end the denial and the lies.

The Palestinians’ Window of Opportunity Is Closing

December 8, 2015

The Palestinians’ Window of Opportunity Is Closing

by Bassam Tawil December 8, 2015 at 5:00 am

Source: The Palestinians’ Window of Opportunity Is Closing

  • Now the Israelis are trying to circumvent us by means of agreements with the Arab countries. They may not have much to offer the Arabs, except for advances in technology, agriculture and medicine, but now they all have a common enemy: Iran.
  • Our demands are the result of the greed of our leaders, who do not want a Palestinian state alongside Israel, they want a Palestinian state instead of Israel. Recently we openly exposed our desire to destroy the Jewish state. That is why we demand Jerusalem for ourselves, insist on the right of Palestinians refugees to “return” and threaten the Jews.
  • Like Hezbollah, we interpret Israel’s political left as a sign of weakness and dissention. We all sense their hypocrisy, arrogance, disdain, and how they patronize us as if we were stupid. That is why the Palestinians have always respected the Israeli right: they always tell us the truth.
  • The Europeans attempt to weaken Israel with territorial concessions that would make it possible for the Palestinians to fire rockets at Israel’s main cities and airport from the West Bank.
  • After seeing the results of their withdrawal from Gaza, the Israelis doubtless think one would have to be crazy ever to give up control of the border with Jordan.

Before Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s trip to the United States to meet President Barack Obama, administration officials there said they had given up hope of establishing a Palestinian state during the president’s term of office. One could only think that if as the Palestinian project failed during the current administration, which supports the Palestinian cause, and with a secretary of state as highly motivated as John Kerry, the probability of its ever succeeding was fading away.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu meets with U.S. President Barack Obama in Washington, on November 9, 2015. (Image source: White House video screenshot)

Just as boycotting and marking Israeli goods from the territories have led only to the mass layoff of thousands of Palestinian workers from dream jobs in the settlements, the fairy tales about a binational state will leave the Palestinians with nothing to show for our years of waiting.

Unfortunately, as time passes, Palestinian intransigence has led the Israelis to build a Zionist enterprise that cannot simply be dismissed.

In effect, regardless of what we say and think, apparently our agreement or disagreement is not a condition for the continued existence of the Jews on land they took from us. The danger is that at the rate Israel is growing, at some point there may not be that much territory left for a future Palestinian state.

The window of opportunity for change is rapidly closing. The sad truth is that the terrorist attacks carried out by Hamas and the other suicidal organizations, and by the Palestinians who stab Israeli civilians to death on the streets, are nothing more than the manifestations of our hopelessness and weakness. Worse, they serve the interests of the Israelis by fortifying their refusal to accomplish anything with us. We do not have one single individual in our leadership who has proposed a pragmatic plan that can be implemented to halt the process that is inexorably distancing us from any possible political solution with the Israelis.

As the growing wave of useless terrorism beats impotently on Israel’s increasing hesitance to accommodate us, it becomes increasingly clear that our leaders will eventually come to the painful realization that the Palestinian cause is going nowhere. It is a pity that when the scales fall from our eyes, our eventual, commonsensical acceptance of the existence of the State of Israel as the homeland of the Jews will come at the expense of so much needless death and suffering.

All we have been offering the Israelis are our mistakes and our unrealistic demands. One of them consists of putting the capital of Palestine in the heart of the capital of the State of Israel. Another is the ridiculous demand for the “return” of millions of Palestinian refugees to the territory of the State of Israel — which the Jews know would be demographic suicide for their country, and which would only be physically possible if all the Israelis suddenly vanished.

For our unrealizable demands, we look to the Europeans for support, while all they are interested in is gaining time and paying lip service to the local Islamists menacing them, while in effect, nothing is done for our cause.

Recently, out of an unjustified sense of self-confidence, we openly exposed our desire to destroy the Jewish state. That is why we demand Jerusalem for ourselves, insist on the right of the Palestinians refugees to “return” and threaten the Jews that if they do not accept our conditions we will demand the establishment of a binational state in all of Palestine.

Our demands are the result of the greed of our leaders, who do not want a Palestinian state alongside Israel, they want a Palestinian state instead of Israel. They delude themselves into thinking the West genuinely supports the Palestinian cause, hoping that by marking products made in the settlements, Israel will collapse like South Africa.

In reality, while the West does in fact hate Jews, it does not like Arabs much better. The West only supports the Palestinian cause out of the fear of another Islamist Arab Spring, carried out in their own backyards, instead of far away in the Middle East. We are betting that the West will support us against the Zionists, but even the radical Islamists know that Western support will mean a reentry of the Crusaders into our lands.

Our leaders have yet to identify the true source of Israel’s strengths, and in that they have made a fatal mistake. Like Hezbollah, we interpret Israel’s political left as a sign of weakness and dissention, we regard Israeli society as one long internal disagreement, and we consider Israel a paper tiger. What we do not understand is that arguing with one another and the lack of blind agreement are the foundations of Israeli democratic unity, and not signs that Israel is falling apart as we so earnestly desire.

What we have in fact identified is the sycophantic Israeli leftists, who think they can fool and cheat us with toned-down versions of the Zionist goals or seduce us with economic promises to make us suspect them less. We all sense their hypocrisy, arrogance, disdain, and how they patronize us as if we were stupid. That is why the Palestinians have always respected the Israeli right: they always tell the truth, even if it is unpleasant for us to hear.

Now the Israelis are trying to circumvent us by means of agreements with the Arab countries. They may not have much to offer the Arabs, except for advances in technology, agriculture and medicine, but now they all have a common enemy: Iran.

You can be sure that the Israelis do not delude themselves into thinking the Arabs will ever consider them as anything but a cancer in the heart of the Middle East. They rely only on their own strength and do not particularly care if we or the rest of the world agree. Paradoxically the more they strengthen and stop trying to negotiate with us, the more we shall expose our willingness to reach an agreement with them.

International oversight is out of the question. The Israelis are suspicious, and the Palestinians are greedy and respond only negatively.

Those who think Israel is immoral because it uses force do not understand that without the use of force Hamas, ISIS and Fatah would destroy it.

The European attempt to weaken Israel with territorial concessions that would make it possible for the Palestinians to fire rockets at Israel’s main cities and airport from the West Bank only increases the Palestinian appetite to eradicate Israel, and makes the Israelis more intransigent.

In view of the Palestinian determination not to reach a political solution, but rather bring about Israel’s demographic destruction as a binational apartheid state, it seems clear that the Israelis will continue with a reinforced reluctance to have anything to do with us. These actions on our part will simply lead Israel to make unilateral decisions, such as its withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank. After seeing the results of their withdrawal from Gaza, the Israelis doubtless think they would have to be crazy ever to give up control of the border with Jordan, for fear of the massive infiltration of weapons and terrorist operatives. They may simply draw new borders around their settlement blocks, and leave the rest to the Palestinians.

Or they may simply cede, for instance, the city of Um el-Fahm, which for years has openly identified itself as Palestinian. If that happens, it is almost certain that Hamas will take over the territory. Hamas will then kill the Palestinian Authority activists or throw them off roofs, as they did in Gaza, thereby proving to the world that Israel was right to act as it did.

The suggestion that the Israelis would agree to a multinational force along its border with Jordan to prevent weapons, ISIS or other terrorists from crossing the border is a fantasy. What do international forces do when the first bullet is fired? They flee! They were incapable of preventing slaughter in Syria, in Iraq, and regrettably cannot even maintain security in their own countries.

In the end, we shall see an Israel that is stronger and even more reluctant than before to trust Palestinians, and we shall have lost our dream of a Palestinian state forever.

State Department denies calling out Abbas on incitement

December 8, 2015

State Department denies calling out Abbas on incitement, Israel National News, Tova Dvorin, December 8, 2015

Kerry didn't say that

The US State Department pandered once again to the Palestinian Authority (PA), backtracking on remarks noting the PA’s incitement campaign against Israel and blasting Israel’s “illegitimate” presence in Judea and Samaria. 

During Monday’s press briefing, State Department spokesman John Kirby denied that US Secretary of State John Kerry had accused the PA of incitement.

During Sunday’s Saban Forum address, Kerry had said that “the Palestinian leadership should stop the incitement and condemn terror attacks.”

He also specifically noted PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s role in the incitement. “He made some very incendiary comments, which I called him on,” he said. “I was very direct with him about the al-Aqsa Mosque [Temple Mount – ed.]. And there was some very inciteful comments made.”

But Kirby denied this ever happened Monday.

“The Secretary did not say that the Palestinian leadership is engaged in incitement,” Kirby stated. “He stressed the importance of doing everything possible to combat it.”

“He also called on [PA] President [Mahmoud] Abbas to condemn Palestinian attacks against Israelis, which we’ve done repeatedly […] and he also made clear that President Abbas himself has long been committed to nonviolence.”

Kirby also addressed controversy over Kerry’s remarks vis-a-vis the PA, in which the latter said that “there are levels of some corruption and challenges within the PA that have to be taken on” before peace can be achieved.

“The Secretary did not intend to suggest that President Abbas or the PA was engaged in corruption or to make any new statement on that issue,” Kirby iterated. “He was reiterating a basic point that we have long made about the importance of transparency and accountability, which is a principle that President Abbas himself has embraced.”

“The United States remains committed to continuing to help the Palestinian Authority develop its institutions and continue to work closely with the Palestinian Authority to improve rule of law, enhance transparency, combat corruption, and strengthen protections for human rights, and acknowledge the progress that has been made to date on these and other institution-building efforts,” he added.

Kirby then attacked Israel, responding to questions about a Haaretz report earlier this week that private American donors had donated $220 million into Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria.

“This Administration, like every administration before it since 1967, views settlement activity as illegitimate and counterproductive to the cause of peace,” Kirby fired. “The United States Government does not support any activity that would indicate otherwise.”

Interfaith dialogue is more urgent today than any time: professor

December 8, 2015

Interfaith dialogue is more urgent today than any time: professor, Tehran Times, Javad Heirannia, December 8, 2015

(Did Nader Entessar  ghost write parts of Obama’s December 6th address to the nation? — DM)

TEHRAN – Regarding Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s second letter to the Western youth in which he called terrorism “our common enemy”, Professor Nader Entessar says it is necessary to counter “Islamophobia no matter where it emanates”.

In part of his letter issued on November 29, the Leader of Islamic Revolution said: Anyone who has benefited from affection and humanity is affected and disturbed by witnessing these [terrorist] scenes- whether it occurs in France or in Palestine or Iraq or Lebanon or Syria.

Entessar, professor and chair of political science at South Alabama University, tells the Tehran Times that “interfaith dialogue is more urgent today than any time in the past fifty or sixty years.”

Following is the text of the interview:

Q: Ayatollah Khamenei in his second letter to the Western youth has talked about terrorism and its roots. What is the importance of this issue?

A: Terrorism has been a major global scourge for some time now. Although the term “terrorism” is used extensively by journalists, pundits and politicians, there is no universal agreement on what terrorism is. There is certainly a need for a dispassionate treatment of this phenomenon and its root causes if one is serious about confronting the threat of terrorism in today’s world.

Q: Ayatollah Khamenei has emphasized in his message that Islam is the religion of friendship, however why do some try to equate Islam with violence?

A: In the West, Islam has become a political buzzword for politicians and political parties of differing ideological stripes to advance their personal agenda. In many ways, the term “Islam” has replaced communism as a rallying cry against which many politicians in the West can coalesce and advance their electoral agendas. For example, the Republican Party in the United States has incorporated Islamophobia as an essential part of its 2016 presidential campaign. In addition, the same trend can be witnessed at state and local elections as well where running against “Islam” has become a badge of honor for many U.S. politicians.

Q: Why do some try to associate Islam with terrorism whenever a terrorist act happens?

A: The emergence of such violent groups as al-Qaeda and Daesh in recent years and their terrorist campaigns under the guise of “Islam” has given a field day to the Islamophobes to advance their message. Unfortunately, the thrust of Islamophobia is not limited to extremist groups in the West. Several liberal groups and personalities have also jumped on the anti-Islam bandwagon in many Western countries. Again, as I previously indicated, it pays political dividends to adopt an anti-Islam posture in the West. Being an anti-Muslim bigot is relatively cost-free but may bring political advantages to a politician or would-be politician in several Western countries.

Q: What is the importance of Ayatollah Khamenei’s letter at this juncture of time?

A: It is very important to confront Islamophobia no matter where it emanates. Interfaith dialogue is more urgent today than any time in the past fifty or sixty years. Therefore, leaders of religious faith groups have a special responsibility to try to reach to other faith communities and highlight what unites the human race in order to promote the common good.

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[highlight]

“In the West, Islam has become a political buzzword for politicians and political parties of differing ideological stripes to advance their personal agenda,” Entessar says in an interview with the Tehran Times.