Days after the latest Iranian ballistic missile test,Russiaand Iran are telling the Obama administration that Iranian missile tests are not prohibited by the UN Security Council, as the administration argues.
Russia and Iran cited language about ballistic missiles that was changed during last summer’s nuclear negotiations in Vienna. UN Security Council Resolution 1929 had stated plainly: “Iran shall not undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles.” During the negotiations, Iran demanded the removal of this uncompromising language in favor of a new, softer formulation.
The Obama administration complied, resulting in the passage of a new UN Security Council Resolution after the Iran agreement was reached. The new resolution merely “calls upon Iran not to undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles.”
The change in language—from the “shall not” requirement of the original resolution to the “calls upon” suggestion of the new one—was the subject of intense questioning by Congress precisely due to the suspicion that the administration had provided a loophole Iran would use to justify missile development.
In one exchange, Sen. Robert Menendez (D., N.J.) pressed Secretary of State John Kerry to acknowledge that the change in language was substantive.
“The ban on Iranian ballistic missiles,” Menendez told Kerry, “has, in fact, been lifted. The new Security Council resolution is quite clear. Iran is not prohibited from carrying out ballistic missile work.” Kerry rejected Menendez: “That is not accurate … [Iran is] restrained from any sharing of missile technology, purchase of missile technology, exchange of missile technology, work on missiles.”
In response to the Obama administration’s announcement that it would pursue sanctions after Iran’s latest missile test, Russia’s UN Ambassador raised precisely the objection that Menendez and other critics of the deal did: Obama and Kerry removed the prohibition on Iranian ballistic missile work last summer, when they agreed to remove the “shall not” language from the relevant UNSC resolution.
Protestors march in Chicago before a rally with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump / AP
Left-wing groups that have received money from the federal government and the MacArthur Foundation celebrated the disruption of Donald Trump’s rally in Chicago and are using the clashes to raise more money.
The progressive organizing group MoveOn.org, which boasts more than 8 million members nationwide, took partial credit for protests hours after a Trump rally was canceled in Chicago due to security concerns. Republicans who support Trump “should be on notice,” according to one MoveOn.org Political Action official.
“Mr. Trump and the Republican leaders who support him and his hate-filled rhetoric should be on notice after tonight’s events,” Ilya Sheyman, executive director of MoveOn.org Political Action, said in a statement hours after the clashes. “These protests are a direct result of the violence that has occurred at Trump rallies and that has been encouraged by Trump himself from the stage. Our country is better than the shameful, dangerous, and bigoted rhetoric that has been the hallmark of the Trump campaign.”
“To all of those who took to the streets of Chicago, we say thank you for standing up and saying enough is enough,” Sheyman said. “To Donald Trump, and the GOP, we say, welcome to the general election. Trump and those who peddle hate and incite violence have no place in our politics and most certainly do not belong in the White House.”
One day after this statement, Sheyman said it was “dishonest” to “scapegoat” progressive activists for the violence at the canceled Trump rally.
MoveOn.org, which was initially formed in 1998 to organize liberal opposition to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, receives financial support from liberal billionaire George Soros. Soros gave $1.46 million to MoveOn’s Voter Fund in 2004.
MoveOn has also taken money from a wide range of left-wing funds and foundations, including the Compton Foundation, the Shefa Fund, the Steven and Michelle Kirsch Foundation, and the Stern Family Fund.
The group raised nearly $20 million in 2012, $10 million in 2014, and has pulled in nearly $5 million for the 2016 elections to date, according to its most recent filings. MoveOn used the recent Trump protests in Chicago as another avenue of fundraising.
The group’s members voted overwhelmingly to back Bernie Sanders this election cycle. According to a release, 78.6 percent of MoveOn.org members voted to endorse Sanders, “shattering MoveOn records with most votes cast and largest margin of victory.”
The ANSWER (Act Now To Stop War and End Racism) Coalition, which has offices in 11 cities, including Chicago, also declared “victory” after the disruptions and called for protesters to “keep the fires going.”
“Large numbers of Latinos, Muslims, Black people, Asians, Arabs and whites stood together, out of necessity, to confront and defeat a great threat to the people. The threat is very real,” the group said in a press release following the events.
The group launched three days after September 11, 2001 with the intent of opposing military intervention following the terrorist attacks committed that day. It has since become involved in other political issues, including the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and has come under fire from numerous groups, including other anti-war groups, for its radical and anti-Zionist views.
ANSWER, which operates as a 501(c)3, has received funding from the Progress Unity Fund (PUF), a group founded in 2001 to “break down the barriers of divisiveness and discrimination that exist in the world, and replace them with a sense of solidarity.”
The Progress Unity Fund has provided hundreds of thousands in donations to ANSWER since its inception.
The Illinois Coalition of Immigrant and Refugee Rights is another organization involved in the Chicago protests. The group describes itself as “dedicated to promoting the rights of immigrants and refugees to full and equal participation in the civic, cultural, social, and political life of our diverse society.”
The group received a $450,000 grant from the Marguerite Casey Foundation in January 2016 for leadership development and network development, according to the foundation’s website.
The Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation, one of the nation’s largest independent foundations, giving hundreds of millions in donations to liberal organizations and causes every year, provided a $575,000 grant in 2014 to the organization to be used over the course of two years, according to its website.
The National Council of La Raza, the largest Latino activist organization in the United States, was also involved in the Trump protests.
La Raza gets two thirds of its funding from individuals and corporations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the American Express Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. La Raza also receives funds from the United States government.
Cecilia Muñoz, the director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, previously served as La Raza’s senior vice president for the office of research, advocacy, and legislation.
Muñoz, who sat on the board of directors at Soros’s Open Society Institute before joining the White House, is married to human rights attorney Amit Pandya, a former counselor to the Open Society Institute.
After Muñoz joined President Obama’s team, funding from the government to La Raza nearly tripled, rising from $4.1 million to $11 million.
None of the groups returned a request for comment by press time.
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran has retrieved thousands of pages of information from devices used by U.S. Navy sailors who were briefly detained in January, the country’s state television reported Tuesday.
The report quotes Gen. Ali Razmjou, a naval commander in the powerful Revolutionary Guard, as saying that information filling about 13,000 pages was retrieved from laptops, GPS devices and maps.
He said the move falls within Iran’s rights under international regulations, and that the information recovered could be used in “various fields.” Iranian authorities returned all the devices taken from the Americans even though it had the right to confiscate them, he said.
The Guard plans to publish a book on the incident based on international reactions and coverage of the event, Razmjou added.
The U.S. Navy’s Bahrain-based 5th Fleet, which is responsible for American naval forces in the Gulf, said it was aware of the report but had no immediate comment.
The sailors, nine men and one woman, were detained for less than a day in January after they drifted into Iranian waters off Farsi Island, an outpost in the middle of the Persian Gulf that has been used as a base for Revolutionary Guard speedboats since the 1980s.
First the Left unleashed anti-war rallies against President Bush in support of Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. Then it brought out Occupy Wall Street to push the radical Marxist agenda that Bernie Sanders is now riding like a red wave through the Democratic Party. Finally, it unleashed the racist hate mobs that looted and burned neighborhoods and cities, singled out white people for harassment over the color of their skin, terrorized campuses and incited the murder of police officers.
The common agenda of all these hateful campaigns was to radicalize, intimidate and terrorize Americans into submitting to the totalitarians of the Left. From the inner city neighborhood to the Ivy League campus, from a couple having brunch in the morning to a police officer on patrol being shot in the head, from a political rally to the Thanksgiving Day parade, these thugs of the Left are out to enforce their tyrannical Party Line through political terror.
While the media call these so-called protesters “non-violent,” they completely ignore the fact that suppressing someone else’s free speech is an act of intimidation. To prevent someone else from speaking is not a debate. It’s the refusal to have a debate. Protesters have the right to be heard, but silencing views you disagree with is not a protest. It is the exercise of totalitarian power. And the Left’s organized efforts to prevent opposing points of view from being heard have now migrated from the campus to the city. The media call these crybullies the victims. But they are not victims. They are thugs who are using brute force to suppress the free speech and political freedoms of others.
Donald Trump has as much right to hold a rally as Bernie Sanders. His supporters have as much right to come out to hear him speak. The Left’s refusal to accept this is a definitive rejection of freedom of speech and democracy.
For all his faults, Donald Trump is to be commended for standing up against all this, and for his cool under fire. When a leftist fascist attempted to attack him recently at a rally in Dayton, Ohio, and succeeded in grabbing his foot before he was subdued by Secret Service agents, Trump quipped: “I was ready for him but it’s much easier if the cops do it, don’t we agree?”
Trump’s opponents, both Republican and Democrat, and the Obama administration should realize what’s at stake – if, that is, they have any interest in preserving the American tradition of non-violent political disagreement. The unseemly haste of Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and John Kasich to blame Trump’s rhetoric for the violent shutdown of his Chicago rally is extraordinarily disappointing: they should realize that the same violence can and will be turned against them if they stray too far from the thugs’ idea of what constitutes acceptable political discourse.
There is only one answer to a movement that is determined to thuggishly shut down the speech of others. And that is prison. We can either have speech democracy or speech tyranny in which the biggest thugs and the nastiest bullies decide who gets to speak and who has to shut up. The leftist fascists who shut down Trump’s Chicago rally should be arrested and energetically prosecuted. Barack Obama, so quick to issue statements about black and Muslim victimhood, should (if he cared at all about the principles that allow for a republic) immediately issue a statement stressing the importance of civility and respect for political dissent, and decry the shutdown of the Trump rally.
Obama won’t issue any such statement, of course, and that’s a large part of the problem. Much, much more is at stake in the shutdown of Trump’s rally than most Americans realize. As it becomes increasingly perilous to dissent from the leftist line in America, we can only hope that a sufficient number of Americans will awaken to what is happening in time to hold today’s political and media elites to account for the damage they have done and are doing to the American public square.
The political thugs of the Left cannot be allowed to hijack freedom of speech for an entire nation. Either we arrest the thugs or we will all exist confined in a prison where a handful of thugs can tell us what to we may say and what we may think.
“Most of my friends were graduating that year,” writes Barack Obama in Dreams from My Father. “Hasan off to work with his family in London, Regina on her way to Andalusia to study Spanish Gypsies.”
Ah yes, “Andalusia!” That, of course, is left-speak for “Spain.” For anti-colonialists like Obama, Andalusia is more than an historical place. It is a metaphor for a progressive golden age, one in which wisdom ruled and peace reigned. “Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance,” affirmed Obama at Cairo in 2009. “We see it in the history of Andalusia.”
True, after the invading Moors brutally ripped the Iberian Peninsula from its indigenous Latinos, peace of a sort did reign. It came at a price, specifically the jizya, a tax non-Muslims had to pay to secure their dhimmi status, the Islamic equivalent of Jim Crow.
The Moors arrived in the year 711. The Christians started reconquering their homeland in 721. It would take them seven centuries to finish the job. In all of Obama’s musings about Andalusia, he has spared scarcely a word for the “Reconquista,” a Republican variation of which has hatched on his watch.
A few days ago, casually searching YouTube, I came across a short video I had not seen in five years called “The Media Reaction to Jack Cashill’s Deconstructing Obama.” In seven compact minutes producer Chris Kusnell sheds some unexpected light on the Republican Reconquista in embryo.
What makes the video particularly relevant is that it features on-screen appearances by some of the leading figures in this movement — Rush Limbaugh, the late Andrew Breitbart, and, most intriguingly, Donald Trump.
Kusnell’s piece begins with a video of candidate Barack Obama boasting to a crowd of Virginia schoolteachers in July 2008, “I’ve written two books. I actually wrote them myself.”
Obama was comfortable making this claim for one reason: the left dominates America’s culture as thoroughly as the Andalusian Muslims did the culture of Iberia. From experience, Obama knew that the nation’s cultural imams were willing to enable his fraud if it advanced a cause close to their hearts.
And a fraud it most certainly was. By September 2008, I was 100 percent certain Obama did not write Dreams from My Father or Audacity of Hope by himself, and I was 90 percent certain that terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers co-authored Dreams.
Knowing Obama’s media allies would have zero interest in my evidence, I tried to find an influential forum on the right. Yet when I knocked on insider doors to advance my thesis, they remained firmly shut. Human Events punted on my research. The National Review did too. The FOX producers downstairs showed interest, but the suits upstairs did not.
The managing editor of the Weekly Standard referred me to the magazine’s literary editor, whose response was myopic to a fault: “An interesting piece, but I’m rather oversubscribed at the moment, the length is considerable, and cutting would not do it justice.”
A Weekly Standard cover that read “Who Wrote Dreams from My Father?” might have changed the outcome of the election, but the editor, alas, was “oversubscribed.” Like the other high profile dhimmis, he had made his “peace” with the progressive establishment. Whether Obama won or lost, he still had his job and the grudging tolerance of his overlords. He was not about to risk either to advance an idea someone might call “racist.”
On October 9, 2008, the American Thinker gave me the space I needed to make my case. Rush Limbaugh amplified the American Thinker piece that same day. As the Kusnell video shows, he gave it a good airing.
To keep Limbaugh’s influence in check, the cultural imams fought back with the most potent weapon in their arsenal — shame. “This may not have been Limbaugh’s most racist insinuation of the campaign,” said New Yorker editor David Remnick, citing others he liked less. He concluded, though, that our collective “libel about Obama’s memoir — the denial of literacy, the denial of authorship — had a particularly ugly pedigree.”
During the next four weeks, despite Limbaugh’s overture and my best efforts, not a single “respectable” conservative, either in the media or in the McCain campaign, dared explore this issue. On the up side, no one called our respectable friends “racist.” On the down side, Obama was elected president.
When McCain lost, the dhimmis blamed “Internet zanies” like me for his defeat. The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto singled me out by name as among those who “engaged in irresponsible rumor-mongering and conspiracy-theorizing.” The National Review’s Jonah Goldberg sniffed, “I think trying to claim some sort of literary conspiracy is a bridge too far.”
In the fall of 2009, without ever talking to me, bestselling celebrity biographer Christopher Andersen confirmed my thesis in his book, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage. Although the apolitical Andersen spent six pages on Ayers’s involvement with Dreams, the mainstream media simply pretended he didn’t. And once again, the conservative media enabled the pretense.
In 2011, Simon & Schuster published my book, Deconstructing Obama. In it, I make a case for Ayers’s role as Obama’s muse so compelling that only a liberal or a dhimmi would deny it. As the Kusnell video shows, Andrew Breitbart was neither.
“Let’s get on to the racism of today,” Bill Maher asked Breitbart on his HBO show. “You do not believe Obama wrote his own book?” Breitbart was not surprised by this line of attack. Martin Bashir had already tried to shame him for defending me on his MSNBC show.
Breitbart, however, did not offer the expected apologies. A true culture warrior, he was taking conservatism one step beyond Limbaugh, out of the Dhimmi ghetto and right into the pinkest of parlors, fully impervious to their ritual defamation. His unexpected death in March 2012 stalled the Reconquista and his left his heirs fighting over his legacy.
The Kusnell video held one more surprise for me. In 2011, as the video shows, the only other major figure to support my thesis publicly was Donald Trump. Said Trump about Obama to a gathered crowd, “His whole aura was caused by the genius of the first book which was written by Bill Ayers.”
At the time, the media, Democrat and dhimmi, gleefully took Trump to task for questioning Obama’s birth certificate, but they dared not question him on the authorship issue. By 2011, even if the major media refused to admit it, most of them sensed Obama was a fraud. True to form, our dhimmi friends refused to raise the authorship issue in 2012 and once again helped elect Obama president.
What Limbaugh, Breitbart and Trump have in common is less a shared belief system than a refusal to accept their dhimmi status. They want to take the culture back. If Trump has attacked the dhimmi establishment from outside, Ted Cruz has attacked it from within. Calling the Senate majority leader a liar on the Senate floor is a sure way to get its attention.
Ordinary Americans are “mad as hell about political correctness and the havoc it has wreaked for 40 years — havoc made worse by the flat refusal of most serious Republicans to confront it,” writes David Gelertner in the Weekly Standard, a dhimmi publication hostile to Cruz and apoplectic about Trump. Yet Gelernter nails the issue.
In a June 10, 2015, column, I wrote, “The Republican nominee for president will be that candidate who best learns that there is no future in apologizing.” This was a week before Trump declared. I did not even know he was running.
Nine months later, Republican voters have rejected all the apologizers, all the collaborators, all the dhimmi candidates. Ready or not, they will be asked to join the first full scale battle in the Republican Reconquista behind either Donald Trump or Ted Cruz, and the dhimmis are atwitter.
Shame has not stopped either candidate. Violence won’t work either. The one force that will stop the Reconquista is division. There was much of that in Christian Iberia, so much of it, in fact, that it took seven centuries for the Christians to win their country back. Here is hoping the Republicans can do a little better.
( Keep this crap OUT of the US ! Vote TRUMP 2016 ! – JW )
Neighborhood in Belgian capital put on lockdown as Belgian and French police forces search for suspect who opened fire on them, lightly wounding three police officers.
BRUSSELS – Armed Belgian police locked down a section of russels on Tuesday as they hunted a fleeing gunman who lightly wounded three police officers during a raid linked to the investigation of November’s Islamist attacks in Paris, in which 130 people were killed.
A police official said the exact circumstances of the incident were still unclear, or whether the police officerswere struck by bullets or injured in another way.
“This operation is connected to the Paris attacks,” a spokesman for Belgium’s federal prosecutor told Reuters.
Police forces looking for suspects in Brussels (Photo: Reuters)
France’s Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said French police were also taking part in the raid. “It was in the context of a raid. A team made up of Belgian and French police officers intervened and came under fire – shots from heavy weapons,” Cazeneuve said at a news conference in Ivory Coast.
Police told residents in the Forest neighborhood of the Belgian capital to stay indoors and a primary school close to the scene of the shooting was in lockdown, residents said. The lockdown in the area continued more than an hour after the first shots were fired and is close to Molenbeek, home to several people involved in the Paris attacks.
Local media said there was possibly more than one fugitive.
Police forces looking for suspects in Brussels (Photo: Reuters)
Police sealed off a wide perimeter around the area where the shots were heard to keep the many bystanders at a safe distance. A helicopter was hovering overhead to patrol the area as police commandos were still looking for at least one suspect. Several hundred spectators were trying to get a closer look at the operation in the multicultural neighborhood, which is near the main north-south railway linking Paris and Amsterdam and has a big Audi car factory nearby.
Several hooded officers wearing body armor milled around the neighborhood and ambulances were on standby.
Wounded police officers being evacuated to hospital (Photo: Reuters)
Four months on, Belgian police and magistrates have been still piecing together the role Belgian nationals played in aiding the Paris attackers, as well as trying to track down missing suspects including international fugitive 26-year-old Frenchman Salah Abdeslam. He left Paris shortly after his brother Brahim blew himself up in the attacks.
The suspected ringleader of the attacks was a Brussels resident, Abdelhamid Abaaoud. Another attacker, Bilal Hadfi, was said to have lived for a time in the Forest neighborhood.
Belgian authorities are holding 10 people who have arrested in the months since the attacks.
Belgian authorities have stepped up their counterterror efforts since a lone gunman killed four people at the Brussels Jewish museum in May 2014. The small Western European country has also been prime recruiting ground for the Islamic State group, and officials freely acknowledge their concerns about what radicalized recruits might do after returning home from the battlefields of Syria or Iraq.
U.S. President Barack Obama makes a point at a National Security Council meeting in February 2016. (Photo: Pete Souza/White House)
For the first time, President Obama said that Islam needs a modernist reformation. This is what was missing from his speech at a Maryland mosque (see video below) on February 3, which presented a critical opportunity where Obama could have had his “tear down this wall” moment.
“I was hoping that my speech could trigger a discussion, could create space for Muslims to address the real problems they are confronting—problems of governance, and the fact that some currents of Islam have not gone through a reformation that would help people adapt their religious doctrines to modernity.”
Obama also said, “There is a need for Islam as a whole to challenge that interpretation of Islam, to isolate it, and to undergo a vigorous discussion within their community about how Islam works as part of a peaceful, modern society.”
The Cairo speech was written to chip away at two boulders standing in the way of such a reformation, he explained: The scapegoating of Israel, which serves to distract Muslims from self-reflection and concerns about wholesale negative impressions of Muslims.
“I do not persuade peaceful, tolerant Muslims to engage in that debate if I’m not sensitive to their concern that they are being tagged with a broad brush,” Obama argued.
Here, a word of caution is due: Not every “reformation” is equal. As Raymond Ibrahim explains, the hardline Islamic movements that President Obama wants swept away actually are a reformation movement. In fact, Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna and “Wahhabism” founder Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab styled their movements as “reformist.”
President Obama’s qualifier of a modernist reformation is helpful in guarding against these types of reformers. But again, another word of caution: Democratic elections are not necessarily the engines of this modernist reformation, since Islamist movements like the Muslim Brotherhood participate in them.
One interesting point in the interview is when Jeffrey Goldberg reflects on President Obama’s early closeness to the democratically-elected Islamist leader of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan (who was then prime minister and is now president of Turkey).
Goldberg writes that Obama now “considers him a failure and an authoritarian.” Obama’s mistaken hope in Erdogan and his deceitful “moderate Islamism” should be a hard-earned lesson.
An equally surprising part of the interview is when Goldberg explains how President Obama has noticed Indonesia “move from a relaxed, syncretistic Islam to a more fundamentalist, unforgiving interpretation” (Goldberg’s words). Obama saw the proliferation of the hijab in Indonesia as indicative of this trend he is concerned about and for which he largely blames Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states.
Obama’s statements about the need for an Islamic modernist reformation are certainly welcome, but the right goal can only be achieved with the right strategy.
Similarly, the right reformation can only be achieved with the right reformers. And we have no reason to believe that the current administration has picked them, much less come up with a strategy to empower them.
♦ In 35 nations Islamic extremism “has risen to a level akin to ethnic cleansing” of Christians.
♦ Something else stands behind this rise of genocidal “Islamic extremism”: U.S. foreign policy. In every Muslim nation where the U.S. has intervened in the name of “freedom and democracy,” Christian life has exponentially worsened.
♦ For years the Obama administration has refused to list Boko Haram as a terrorist organization, and has argued that its violence had nothing to do with Islam and was a result of poverty and grievances. Instead, the U.S. pressured the Nigerian government to make concessions.
♦ The primary achievement of U.S. foreign policies, apart from wasted American blood and treasure — is the unprecedented rise in Muslim nations of Islamic forces outspokenly bent on destroying America.
2015 was the “worst year in modern history for Christian persecution,” according to Open Doors, a human rights organization that has been documenting the persecution of Christians since 1955.
According to its latest data, more than 7,000 Christians were killed for their faith in 2015 — almost twice as many as in 2014. In addition, more than 2,400 churches were attacked, damaged or destroyed — again, more than double the number of the previous year.
In the words of Open Doors’ CEO, David Curry:
The 2016 World Watch List [which ranks the 50 nations where Christians are most persecuted] documents an unprecedented escalation of violence against Christians, making this past year the most violent and sustained attack on Christian faith in modern history. … This research has concluded that after the brutal persecution of Christians in 2014, 2015 proved to be even worse with the persecution continuing to increase, intensify and spread across the globe. … The level of exclusion, discrimination and violence against Christians is unprecedented, spreading and intensifying.
Who or what is behind these unprecedented levels of persecution? Some of it is related to the tendency of non-Western nations to associate Christianity with the “hated West.” Four are Communist nations — Vietnam (ranked #20), Laos (#29), China (#33), and North Korea (#1), where “Christianity is not only seen as ‘opium for the people,’ as is normal for all communist states, it is also seen as deeply Western and despicable,” notes the report. Three are reclaiming their religious heritage in contradistinction to what is portrayed as a depraved West — Hindu India (#17), Buddhist Bhutan (#38) and Myanmar (#23). And two — Mexico (#40) and Columbia (#46) — are fueled by organized crime and drug cartels.
“Islamic extremism” is cited as the source of persecution for the remaining 41 nations that make the list of 50 worst persecutors of Christians. North Korea aside, the rest of the eight nations where Christians experience the worst form of persecution (“extreme persecution”) are all Islamic. In 35 nations, Islamic extremism “has risen to a level akin to ethnic cleansing” of Christians.
A close examination of the report indicates that something else stands behind this rise of genocidal “Islamic extremism”: U.S. foreign policy. In every Muslim nation where the U.S. has intervened in the name of “freedom and democracy,” Christian life has exponentially worsened. Put differently, among those who most despise “freedom and democracy” — radical and jihadi Muslims — tend to be the ones most empowered by U.S. foreign policies.
Iraq today, according to the report, is the second worst nation in the world in which to be Christian. Afghanistan is fourth, Syria fifth, and Libya tenth. A decade ago, none of these countries even made the top 10 list. Syria and Libya — when they were ruled by secular autocrats who were eventually demonized by U.S. politicians and media, and then underwent U.S. intervention — did not even make the top 20.
In 2004, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was ranked 32 and scored only 35.5 (out of 100). After a decade’s worth of American lives and treasure were wasted, Iraq is now scores 90 and is the worst Muslim nation in which to be Christian. The situation is the same in those other Muslim nations that the U.S. government brought “freedom and democracy” to — and with Syria, which it continues trying to bring “freedom and democracy” to:
Syria: A decade ago it was ranked #47 and scored only 24.5. A nation must score at least 50 to count as containing “sparse persecution.” Today it is ranked #5 and scores 87 , or “extreme persecution.”
Libya: A decade ago it was ranked #22 and scored 41; today it ranks #10 and scores 79.
Afghanistan: A decade ago it ranked #11 and scored 53; today — a decade after the U.S. declared “victory” over al-Qaeda and the Taliban — it is ranked #4 and scores 88.
Even in nations where U.S. intervention is not obvious, Christian persecution has reached unprecedented levels. In Nigeria, Boko Haram — an Islamic group possibly more savage than ISIS — slaughtered more Christians in 2015 than any other terrorist group. Yet for years the Obama administration has refused to list Boko Haram as a terrorist organization, and has argued that its violence had nothing to do with Islam and was a result of poverty and grievances. Instead, the U.S. pressured the Nigerian government to make concessions, including by building more mosques — the very structures, as the Nigerian lawyer Emmanuel Ogebe said, where Muslims are radicalized and recruited for the jihad.
In May 2013, soon after Nigerian forces killed 30 Boko Haram members in a particularly strong offensive, Reuters reported that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry “issued a strongly worded statement” to the Nigerian president: “We are … deeply concerned by credible allegations that Nigerian security forces are committing gross human rights violations, which, in turn, only escalate the violence and fuel extremism” from Boko Haram.
Those many Americans indifferent to all this persecution “over there” would do well to connect the dots: Globally empowering forces hostile to Christians is synonymous with globally empowering forces hostile to America. Those Muslims who hate and persecute Christians alsohate, and seek to persecute, Americans for exactly the same reason: Westerners all are hated non-Muslim infidels.
In short, the primary achievement of U.S. foreign policies, apart from wasted American blood and treasure — is the unprecedented rise in Muslim nations of Islamic forces outspokenly bent on destroying America.
Global political figures have welcomed the Russian military pullout from Syria, and while many have called the Kremlin’s decision “unexpected,” it is seen as clearing the way for dialogue while a truce in the five-year-old war is negotiated in Geneva.
Acknowledging that five months of military campaigns have mostly succeeded in their primary objective of eliminating the immediate wider threat from Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL), President Vladimir Putin has ordered the partial withdrawal of Russian armed forces from Syria.
UN Mediator of the Syrian peace talks Staffan de Mistura said the Russian pullback would give impetus to the process. “The announcement by President Putin on the very day of the beginning of this round of Intra-Syrian Talks in Geneva is a significant development, which we hope will have a positive impact on the progress of the negotiations in Geneva aimed at achieving a political solution of the Syrian conflict and a peaceful political transition in the country,” he claimed in a statement Tuesday.
Russia has placed its strategic emphasis on establishing a diplomatic effort, with Putin instructing the Foreign Ministry to intensify Moscow’s participation in organizing the peace process to resolve the Syrian crisis, which is about to enter its sixth year.
After announcing partial Russian withdrawal, President Putin, explained to his American counterpart Barack Obama in a phone conversation that the decision will “certainly serve as a good signal to all conflicting sides and create conditions for the start of a true peace process,” the Kremlin said in a statement.
The timing of the Russian decision is crucial as vital negotiations to avert further bloodshed in Syria resumed on Monday in Geneva. The last round of negotiations collapsed in January because the opposition block refused to debate their differences as Russian air raids intensified near the northern Syrian city of Aleppo.
Obama welcomed the “much-needed reduction in violence” since the cease-fire took effect late last month, the White House said in a statement about Monday’s phone call. “The president underscored that a political transition is required to end the violence in Syria,” the White House added.
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier also welcomed Moscow’s announcement saying it will put additional pressure on parties in Geneva to negotiate a peaceful transition to end the Syrian turmoil.
“This will increase the pressure on the al-Assad regime to finally and seriously negotiate a peaceful political transition in Geneva,” Steinmeier said in a statement.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry was also positive about developments.
“The fact that a semi-ceasefire has been holding in Syria is welcome news, it’s something that we’ve been asking for at least two-and-a-half, three years,” Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said at a meeting with his Australian couterpart Julie Bishop in Canberra.
“The fact that Russia announced that it’s withdrawing part of its forces indicates that they don’t see an imminent need for resort to force in maintaining the ceasefire,” he added. “That in and of itself should be a positive sign. Now we have to wait and see.”
While Russia plans to maintain a military presence at its naval base in Tartous and the Khmeymim airbase, Moscow’s decision to reduce its military involvement in Syria has already been welcomed by the Syrian opposition currently negotiating in Geneva.
“If there is seriousness in implementing the withdrawal, it will give the talks a positive push,” said Salim al-Muslat, spokesman for the rebel High Negotiations Committee. “If this is a serious step it will form a major element of pressure on the regime, because the Russian support prolonged the regime. Matters will change significantly as a result of that.”
What is also important is that the move has been well received by all members of the UN Security Council, who have been working tirelessly on the diplomatic front to secure peace in Syria.
“We have also taken very good note of the decision by the Russians to start withdrawing part of these forces,” the Security Council’s rotating president, Angola’s Ambassador Ismael Abraao Gaspar Martins, told reporters. “When we see forces withdrawing, it means war is taking a different step. So that’s good.”
However, despite the careful timing of Putin’s announcement that is clearly aimed at cementing the fragile ceasefire in Syria, the Kremlin’s decision has been called “a surprise move,” by the New York Times, which hypothesizes that the Russian decision was conditioned by the rift between Moscow and Damascus.
“There have been growing signs of differences between Russia and the Syrian government over the Geneva talks, which Moscow has pressed hard for along with Washington,” NYT wrote.
In reality the Russian initiative to withdraw received full support from the Syrian government before the announcement was made.
“The president of Syria noted the professionalism, courage and heroism of the Russian service personnel who took part in the military operations, and expressed his profound gratitude to Russia for providing such substantial help in fighting terrorism and providing humanitarian assistance to the civilian population,” the Kremlin said commenting on the phone call between Putin and Assad.
The Wall Street Journal has dubbed Moscow’s withdrawal an “unexpected announcement.”
“US officials said any withdrawal of Russian forces from Syria would come as a complete surprise and that the US government hadn’t expected Moscow to announce such a move,” WSJ said.
Stratfor, a global intelligence think tank, has also used the term “unexpected withdrawal,” to describe Putin’s decision. At the same time, their report acknowledged that Moscow has achieved its stated agenda.
“With their actions in Syria thus far, the Russians have showcased their improved combat capabilities and some new, previously unused weapons… Russia has also largely achieved its goal of weakening Islamic State…” the Stratfor report reads. “All in all, Islamic State may not be entirely defeated, but its forces in Syria and Iraq are much weaker than they were five months ago.”
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