Disgusting video encourages Arabs to murder Jews, elderofziyon2 via You Tube, October 6, 2015
This video was released apparently from Gaza telling Arabs to attack Jews.
Not Israelis – Jews.
Salman Rushdie invite to Frankfurt Book Fair against freedom of expression: official, Tehran Times (Iran), October 6, 2015
(To what extent do western “democracies” share variants of this view? To what extent are anti-immigrant and other “Islamophobic” comments becoming unlawful or prohibited de facto? — DM)
TEHRAN — Deputy Culture Minister for Cultural Affairs Seyyed Abbas Salehi has said that Frankfurt Book Fair’s plan to invite Salman Rushdie violates freedom of expression.
Earlier last week, the organizers of the book fair, which is the world’s largest event in the publishing industry, said, “On the significance of freedom of expression for authors and the book industry”, Rushdie will give the keynote address at the opening press conference of the fair on October 13.
Rushdie is the author of “The Satanic Verses”, a blasphemous novel about Islam, which was published in 1988.
The book sparked Muslims’ outrage, which culminated in a fatwa by Imam Khomeini, the founder of Islamic Republic, calling for Rushdie’s death.
“If we want freedom to turn into a sustainable issue and not an overture to violence, we should provide the necessary prerequisites,” Salehi told the Persian service of MNA on Monday.
“A basic prerequisite is respect for the sanctities of every religion,” he noted.
He warned the organizers of the Frankfurt Book Fair about the Rushdie invite and said, “The plan to invite Salman Rushdie would provoke feelings whose results would not be clear.”
Salehi said that Iran has sent a letter to Frankfurt Book Fair Director Juergen Boos, asking him to cancel their plans for Rushdie’s speech. However, there has been no response from him so far.
He said that Iran has also called upon other Muslim countries to protest against the Frankfurt Book Fair’s plans for Rushdie’s speech.
The Frankfurt Book Fair is slated to take place from October 14 to 18.
In addition, dozens of independent Iranian publishers are scheduled to showcase their latest offerings at the fair, which is the world’s largest event in the publishing industry.
A new global police to fight “Violent Extremism” in the U.S.? Front Page Magazine, Matthew Vadum, October 6, 2015
(Not long ago, I would have thought this a nutty conspiracy article. Now, not so much. With the UN and Obama involved, what could go wrong? — DM)
The Obama administration plans to create a global police force that counters “violent extremism” in the United States and elsewhere.
The problem is that in Obama-speak “violent extremism” refers not only to jihadists wishing to harm Americans but also to conservatives and Tea Party activists. Just ask all the law-abiding right-of-center nonprofit groups targeted by Lois Lerner’s IRS during the Obama presidency.
Ominously, President Obama and U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch unveiled the Strong Cities Network last week at the United Nations.
America’s chief executive, who speaks in hushed and reverent tones when discussing the Muslim faith, said the U.S. will use “all of our tools” to fight Islamic State terrorists.
“This is not an easy task,” Obama said. “This is not a conventional battle. This is a long-term campaign — not only against this particular network, but against its ideology.” The United States and a coalition of 60 other countries are “pursuing a comprehensive strategy” for dealing with Islamic State, he said.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Justice teased the Strong Cities Network in a press release:
Cities are vital partners in international efforts to build social cohesion and resilience to violent extremism. Local communities and authorities are the most credible and persuasive voices to challenge violent extremism in all of its forms and manifestations in their local contexts. While many cities and local authorities are developing innovative responses to address this challenge, no systematic efforts are in place to share experiences, pool resources and build a community of cities to inspire local action on a global scale.
“The Strong Cities Network will serve as a vital tool to strengthen capacity-building and improve collaboration,” Lynch was quoted saying. “As we continue to counter a range of domestic and global terror threats, this innovative platform will enable cities to learn from one another, to develop best practices and to build social cohesion and community resilience here at home and around the world.”
The media release continues:
The SCN will include an International Steering Committee of approximately 25 cities and other sub-national entities from different regions that will provide the SCN with its strategic direction. The SCN will also convene an International Advisory Board, which includes representatives from relevant city-focused networks, to help ensure SCN builds upon their work. It will be run by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a leading international “think-and-do” tank with a long-standing track record of working to prevent violent extremism …
Although the European scene is different from the American, the London-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue doesn’t come across at first glance as a neutral observer.
Its website, which is filled with left-wing buzzwords, warns
The tragic attacks in Norway on 22 July, 2011 drew Europe’s gaze to the dangers of the growing presence of far-right extremism across Europe and the increasing legitimisation of anti-immigration and anti-Islamic discourses within mainstream European politics. The blurred relationship between violence from the extreme right and broader trends of Islamophobia and anti-immigration sentiment poses several challenges for policy makers seeking to address the increasing risk of violent right-wing extremism.
And although American conservatives might not quibble with a new U.S.-based initiative aimed at “violent extremism” outside America’s borders, they have ample reason to be concerned about one that targets organizations within the United States.
Conservative champion Pamela Geller railed against the Strong Cities Network in a column at Breitbart News.
This plan “amounts to nothing less than the overriding of American laws, up to and including the United States Constitution, in favor of United Nations laws that would henceforth be implemented in the United States itself – without any consultation of Congress at all.”
Announcing the plan at the United Nations is curious she writes, because the UN “is a sharia-compliant world body, and Obama, speaking there just days ago, insisted that ‘violent extremism’ is not exclusive to Islam (which it is).”
It is unlikely the new body will be used as a “global police force” to crush counter-jihad forces, she wrote.
After all, with Obama knowingly aiding al-Qaeda forces in Syria, how likely is it that he will use his “global police force” against actual Islamic jihadists?
I suspect that instead, this global police force will be used to impose the blasphemy laws under the sharia (Islamic law), and to silence all criticism of Islam for the President who proclaimed that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”
Geller and other conservatives are painfully aware that in the parlance of the Left, “violent extremism” refers to conservatives and other patriotic Americans.
If you are opposed to enlarging the redistributive state and spreading the wealth around then by definition you’re a potential terrorist. If you’re a conservative or a libertarian, if you believe in gun rights or don’t support abortion rights or an immigration amnesty, if you don’t like high taxes or welfare programs or if you dare to believe that the Constitution actually limits the power of the government, you’re at risk of turning to terrorism.
In 2009, Janet Napolitano, then head of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security gave her blessing to a spurious DHS report titled, “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment.”
Drawing heavily from so-called research by the loony-left Southern Poverty Law Center, the report lumped Ku Klux Klansmen and violent militias together with good government types and members of the Federalist Society. This law enforcement guidance claimed that large swaths of the nation that did not vote Democratic in the last election were boiling over with hatred and intolerance.
Anticlimactically, the report noted that there is no actual evidence “that domestic rightwing terrorists are currently planning acts of violence.” Nonetheless the report speculated, using language that would later be embraced by the violent Occupy Wall Street movement, that “the economic downturn and the election of the first African American president” might help these “rightwing extremists” gain new recruits.
Guffaws from Republicans and some of her fellow Democrats forced Napolitano to disavow the report but in the intervening years Obama’s DHS has kept up the pressure on patriotic Americans in an attempt to stigmatize and marginalize conservative beliefs.
As recently as this past February, DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson released a report on what CNN called the grave “domestic terror threat from right-wing sovereign citizen extremists.”
“The government says these are extremists who believe that they can ignore laws and that their individual rights are under attack in routine daily instances such as a traffic stop or being required to obey a court order,” the news network reported.
To the Obama administration, zealous civil libertarians and ornery old guys in pickup trucks are a much greater threat to the homeland than Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, al Qaeda, and Islamic State combined.
CNN paraphrased Mark Potok, a senior fellow at — you guessed it, the Southern Poverty Law Center — hailing the report.
“Potok said that by some estimates, there are as many as 300,000 people involved in some way with sovereign citizen extremism. Perhaps 100,000 people form a core of the movement, he said.”
Around the same time counterinsurgency and counterterrorism expert Sebastian Gorka ridiculed the obviously politicized DHS report for going off the deep end.
Gorka, a professor who lectures on irregular warfare at the College of International Security Affairs at the National Defense University, said over the last two decades he could not remember right-wing extremists flying jumbo jets into buildings, bombing a marathon, or beheading Christian hostages.
“It really is the most egregious politicization of national security,” Gorka opined. “We’re going to be looking for right-wing extremists when ISIS prepares to attack us? It’s outrageous.”
“We have tens of thousands of people in the Middle East and elsewhere and here in America who have committed themselves to the destruction of this great nation. And we’re going to be focusing on the small cluster of right-wingers here in the United States?” he said. “This could endanger American lives.”
All of this brings to mind the jarringly strange thing then-Senator Obama said on the campaign trail in October 2008.
“We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set,” he said. “We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well funded.”
Is the Strong Cities Network the civilian national security force Obama mentioned just once and then never brought up again?
We’re about to find out.
Sexual Slavery: “Nothing to do with Islam”? Gatestone Institute, Uzay Bulut, October 5, 2015
The sexual abuse of non-Muslim children and women at the hands of Jihadist groups such as ISIS and Boko Haram is not only a widespread practice in the Muslim world, but, sadly, has a lot to do with Islamic teachings.
Sexual slavery is deeply embedded in Islamic law and tradition. The founder of Islam also practiced and approved of slavery, as was more common at the time. Caliphs had harems of hundreds or thousands of young girls and women brought from Christian, Hindu, Persian and African lands.
Islamic slavery also was, and is, race-based. Umar, Muhammad’s father-in-law and a caliph, declared that Arabs could not be taken as slaves; he even emancipated all Arab slaves. In Islam, only non-Muslims may be taken as slaves — a rule that is unfortunately only further evidence of a supremacist doctrine within Islam: that Islam is superior to other religions, and its adherents therefore entitled to privileges not afforded to members of other religions.
This supremacist doctrine of Islam has brought non-Muslims centuries of persecution and institutionalized discrimination. Some have been exposed to brute force and had to convert from their native religion; others have been given the status of “dhimmis“: third-class, “tolerated” citizens who have to pay a tax (the jizya) in exchange for “protection,” never allowed the same religious rights or freedoms as Muslims. If they cannot pay the tax, they are to be killed or have their children taken from them.
All those practices indicate what Islamic rule brings for non-Muslims: death or a state-approved position of inferiority and humiliation.[1] One of the most appalling practices of the Islamic supremacist mindset was the institution of Janissaries established by the Ottoman Empire. For hundreds of years, Ottoman Turks took away the sons of Christians in occupied Europe and forcibly converted them into Muslim warriors (Janissaries).
There are about dozens of verses in the Quran and the Hadith referring to Allah’s hatred for non-Muslims and the eternal damnation and punishment awaiting them in the afterlife.[2] Once Islam establishes political superiority, there is very little tolerance for people of other faiths or atheists.
As early Muslim armies used their swords to invade and Islamize non-Muslim lands, they enslaved non-Muslims, and even other black Muslims. Islamic scriptures approve of the rape of female prisoners who have very few civil or legal rights under Islamic law.
During 1,400 years of jihad and even today, the Muslim world is mostly apathetic and silent about sexual aggression. Many Muslims even try to justify it under Islamic rule. So now this practice is common not only in the Middle East, but also in Europe, including Britain.
Women are finally refusing to accept this situation. Toni Bugle, for example, a women’s rights activist, has established an organization called M.A.R.I.A.S (Mothers Against Radical Islam and Sharia), which tries to raise awareness about, and act against, sexual abuse, female genital mutilation, child grooming gangs, child marriage, domestic violence, forced marriages and honor killings.
In the midst of the complicit silence of many institutions, including the mainstream media in Britain, Bugle is trying to protect British children and women from rapists — many of whom apparently have been Muslims.
As a victim of sexual abuse for two years from the age of eight, Bugle was homeless for a time, and later exposed to physical violence. She witnessed her friends in the streets sexually abused and forced into prostitution.
“Not until years later did I realize I was reading patterns which were similar that are happening to girls all over the UK,” Bugle said to Gatestone Institute. “I have also spoken to Muslim women, abused because of sharia law. I took one into my home. Her family were trying to use her to traffic people from Somalia to the UK.”
A few months ago, a report found that between 1997 and 2013, at least 1,400 non-Muslim British children were gang-raped and brutalized by Muslims in Rotherham. Children as young as 11 were often gang-raped, abducted, trafficked to other cities in England, beaten and intimidated, according to the report. Authorities did nothing “for fear of being thought as racist.”
Another report in May, 2015, added that the Rotherham Council and police had wanted the authorities to ban protests against child rape. “They have appealed to the home secretary for emergency special powers under the Public Order Act 1986,” according to Breitbart.
A protest against child-grooming in Rotherham, on October 5, 2014, organized by the group “Britain First.” (Image source: Britain First)
Bugle remarked that not only does this political and religious ideology encourage Muslim men to rape non-Muslim children and women, but that Britain’s submission to Sharia-inspired brutality seems to have several causes:
“Muslims believe they are at war with the West; and when in a state of war (jihad), they have the right to ‘war booty:’ that which the right hand possesses, sex slaves. They are also taught that white non-Muslims are easy, cheap, dirty sluts and that it is their right [to take them]. On top of this, teaching people to hate anyone who is not a Muslim – as is done in many mosques – will, of course, lead to a lot of people hating anyone who is not a Muslim. So the way many Muslims perceive Western women fuels the increase in rape incidents. The problem, however, is also due to police, judges, lawyers, teachers, to name but a few, fearing the words ‘racist’ and ‘Islamophobe’ — and nothing is being done to stop that.”
The map on the organization’s website shows the areas hit by Muslim grooming gangs in Rotherham, Rochdale, Telsley, Stevenage, Peterborough, Birmingham, Oxford, and Bradford. “This,” says Bugle, “barely scratches the surface.[3]
“The UK media refuse to use the term Muslim,” Bugle adds. “But in London alone 27% of the inmates are Muslim, serving time for rape, drugs and violence. That is a massive percentage considering that Muslims are apparently only 4% of the overall population.”
“When girls are raped, they are referred to by the rapists as ‘white trash,’ ‘white whores’ and ‘white kuffir.’ It is said to the girls quite openly. And the girls tell the police. Yet the assaults are never recognized as ‘racially motivated’.”
“I get death threats, rape threats, and sodomy threats – but never from non-Muslims. Muslims follow me on Twitter and Facebook and have immediately sent messages, calling me ‘white bitch’ and ‘white whore,’ and threaten me with sexual assaults.”
Despite the enormity of the problem, Bugle notes that the media virtually ignore the Muslim rape epidemic in the West: “The media will rarely speak about it for more than one day. Rotherham was the only time they did, and they insisted on calling the perpetrators ‘Asian,’ not Muslim. And they never mention the link between these rape incidents and the Islamic teachings.”
One of the few scholars who do expose the link between the two, Raymond Ibrahim, wrote in a comprehensive article about Islamic rape: “The ongoing epidemic in the UK, Scandinavia and elsewhere—whereby Muslim men sexually target white women—is as old as Islam, has precedents with the prophet and his companions, and, till this day, is being recommended as a legitimate practice by some in the Muslim world.”
Despite the alarmingly widespread problem, many British girls, possibly partly from shame or concern that they might be thought complicit, stay silent. A stronger reason, according to Bugle, is that the perpetrators still threaten and intimidate them.
“This would be enough to silence most girls. In addition, the police ignore the pleas of these girls, so they do not trust the police. Also, apparently when parents were told that the girls were ‘known prostitutes,’ they were told that the girls ‘would grow out of it.’ These are just a few of the reasons they stay silent.”
Bugle says she has
“emailed several ‘feminist’ organizations inviting them to speak out against sharia law, but each time they have not even answered. If you search for feminists standing against sharia law or the rape of predominantly white girls, she says, they will always tell you it has nothing to do with Islam. No matter how you try to explain that we wish to stand against all forms of misogyny, they do not want to accept facts. They refuse even to address the problem. They say ‘you cannot blame an entire community.’ I do not blame an entire community and I do not think all Muslims are rapists or terrorists, but I do think the silence of the community means it acquiesces. To address an issue properly, however, one must first acknowledge and accept that there is a problem.”
One of the main arguments of the apologists of extremist Islam in the West has been to accuse people of having “white privilege,” an overtly racist term for advantages allegedly enjoyed by white people but that non-whites do not experience.
Bugle, a rape victim, opposes the term:
“I am sick of being told that I matter less because, I was born white, or that someone else matters less because he was born a different color. Such terms are themselves racist. People now seem to be using the race card to behave in the most appalling manner and because people fear being termed racist. I do not see skin color. Yet skin color is used to shut down debate and discussion. ‘White guilt’ is being manipulated to silence the masses. Whether you are black or brown or white, you should be proud of the skin you were born with; it was not a choice.”
Bugle says her organization aims eventually to give a voice to every woman abused by sharia law, and a place to girls who are targeted — first for being non-Muslim, and second for being white — a place to come to. There, they will be able to talk with people who will believe them and will not blame them.[4]
She says she would like the girls to feel free of guilt, and to take back the control that was taken from them. “Perhaps in the future we will be able to provide safe houses, phone help-lines and a sense of safety, and help them to not remain victims, but in time to become survivors. Not all will survive but those who do will one day help others.”
When the organization held its first conference on August 29, two of the speakers were Muslim women, one of whom had apparently been repeatedly raped by Muslim men. The organization intends to hold another conference, also with Muslim speakers, in Rochdale around mid-November.
Britain — with all of its institutions, says Bugle — should act to protect children and women from rapists. No matter who may feel hurt or offended, she says, nothing is more hurtful than innocent women and children being raped, pimped, tortured and trafficked. “But first,” she states, “we need a government with the moral fortitude to stop ignoring facts and constantly stating, ‘This has nothing to do with Islam.'”
Uzay Bulut, born and raised a Muslim, is a Turkish journalist based in Ankara.
[1] E.g: Koran 67:6-8; 21:98; 2:191-193; 9:111; 9:5; 9:29; 5:32; 5:33; 33:50; 8:41; 22:19-22; 2:178; 8:12
[2] E.g.: Koran 6:27; 3:91
[3] A blog at Channel 4 also reported that in many other cases in the UK, vulnerable teenage girls were sexually abused:
“We have evidence of such exploitation taking place in Keighley (2005 and 2013), Blackpool (2006), Oldham (2007 and 2008), Blackburn (2007, 2008 and 2009), Sheffield (2008), Manchester (2008 and 2013) Skipton (2009), Rochdale (two cases in 2010, one in 2012 and another in 2013), Nelson (2010), Preston (2010) Rotherham (2010) Derby (2010), Telford (2012), Bradford (2012), Ipswich (2013), Birmingham (2013), Oxford (2013), Barking (2013) and Peterborough (2013).”
The report also says that “Of the 306 offenders whose ethnicity was noted, 75 per cent were categorized as Asian.”
[4] On the website, there are blogs written by the girls in their own words.
Jews, Islamophobia and compassion for refugees, Israel Hayom, Isi Leibler, October 4, 2015
We should be under no illusions. Most emigrants from Muslim countries have been nurtured with hatred of Western values, contempt for democracy and vicious anti-Semitism. Ironically, Germany’s concern to demonstrate its severance from its evil Nazi past by hosting large numbers of these “refugees” will inevitably strengthen the growing Islamist anti-Semitism in Germany and throughout Europe.
We must rationally consider the long-term repercussions of our actions and, while displaying compassion and joining calls for Christians and Yazidis facing genocide in Syria to be accepted as refugees in Western countries, we must also avoid creating a situation in which we lay the foundations for jihadis to achieve their objectives by demographic means and devour the hand that feeds them.
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It would be inhumane not to react with compassion to the tragic and harrowing depictions of the suffering of refugees. For Jews, more than any others, these images revive horrific memories of their own collective past and the horrors endured by their families and kinsman when an indifferent world effectively collaborated with the Nazis by denying haven to Jews seeking escape from the gas chambers.
In this context, it is ironic that the most generous assistance to refugees emanates from the Germans, who — even setting aside the Nazi era — were hardly renowned as adherents of multiculturalism. Many attribute this to a guilt reflex and atonement for Germany’s iniquities during the Holocaust.
It is also not surprising that many Jewish communities in Europe, North America and Australia are currently at the vanguard of those calling on governments to be more liberal and accept greater numbers of refugees. We also hear passionate calls from rabbis and Jewish lay leaders citing religious and ethical teachings that oblige us as Jews to provide haven for refugees. Former British Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks even went to the absurd extreme of making an analogy between Syrian refugees and Jews in Europe during the Holocaust.
While reaching out and providing assistance to refugee families in distress is highly commendable, to make analogies between these refugees and Jews facing the Nazi genocidal policies is not merely misleading, but it also trivializes the Holocaust.
The Jews who found refuge from the Nazis integrated into their host societies and never sought to impose their Jewish values — in stark contrast to the tensions created in Europe over recent decades by Islamic migration of elements who seek to impose anti-democratic values, restrict freedom of expression and promote the equivalent of Shariah law. In fact, the Jews became the most committed advocates for strengthening democracy and made major contributions to the economic and cultural enrichment of the countries that gave them haven.
Nor can one point to a single example of a second-generation Jew transformed into a terrorist by extremist rabbis, while this has been the case with many Muslim migrants. Indeed, the idea of Jews engaging in terrorism in Western countries is simply inconceivable.
That European Union bureaucrats are pressuring European countries to absorb refugees indeed reflects commendable humanitarian intentions. But there is a need to act rationally and appreciate that a growing flood of Muslim migrants to Europe could lead to disaster and even ultimately undermine West European civilization.
That may sound hysterical and, in the current climate, such observations automatically provoke accusations of Islamophobia and lack of compassion.
But the reality is that the overwhelming majority of these “refugees” not only originate from Muslim countries other than Syria, but 70% are estimated to be men of military age. That is to say that the majority of this “refugee” population are not traditional families seeking sanctuary, but men seeking economic enhancement.
Furthermore, these large numbers will act as a magnet which could result in profound demographic changes with tens of millions of Muslims seeking to escape Arab countries for better lives in Europe. Taking account of their high fertility rates in a continent with declining birth rates, Islam could yet conquer Europe by demographic means, despite being vanquished militarily hundreds of years ago on the battlefields.
Most European countries already face major problems integrating existing Muslim communities, all of which include substantial extremist elements promoting objectives incompatible with Western values and creating major social upheavals and conflicts.
We should be under no illusions. Most emigrants from Muslim countries have been nurtured with hatred of Western values, contempt for democracy and vicious anti-Semitism. Ironically, Germany’s concern to demonstrate its severance from its evil Nazi past by hosting large numbers of these “refugees” will inevitably strengthen the growing Islamist anti-Semitism in Germany and throughout Europe.
It would be absurd to imagine that these migrants will somehow miraculously be integrated more effectively than their predecessors. We already have the specter of second-generation Muslims educated and nurtured in European countries becoming jihadis, voluntarily serving in terrorist militias in Syria and returning to Western countries to embark on terrorist activities.
In this environment, Europe’s current security problems will exponentially increase if large numbers of Islamic refugees descend upon the continent — especially as there are no means of identifying or excluding potential terrorists. The reality is that a significant proportion support the jihadi movement and will never be integrated into democratic societies.
These are indeed difficult problems and there is no easy solution. To allow compassion to determine policy without reference to long-term repercussions reflects a total lack of resolve to maintain democratic values and is almost comparable to lemmings heading to the slaughter — a true recipe for the demise of Western civilization.
The reality is that Western democratic values are under threat and that while multiculturalism is an idyllic concept, it can only apply in an environment where all parties accept an open democratic society. Alas, the reality is that the Muslim radicals are gaining strength and while distinctions between moderate and radical Muslims may apply in realpolitik on the international global arena, all evidence indicates the rapid expansion of powerful and surging anti-democratic and jihadi elements in every expatriate Muslim community.
This is further highlighted by the astonishing but adamant refusal of the wealthy Arab oil countries — Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, which import vast numbers of Asian workers — to absorb even a minimal number of their own kinsman. They justify their exclusion on the grounds that such people will create disorder and represent security risks.
It is also scandalous that the Arab League and the 57-state Organization of the Islamic Conference make pious comments but turn to the non-Muslim international community to resolve issues created by Islamist extremism from their own ranks. The wealthy Muslim states should be obliged to take the lead role in efforts to integrate their own people.
There must be an intensive effort to stabilize the Middle East region. In this context, it should be noted that the barbarism that today dominates the region is a direct outcome of U.S. President Barack Obama’s concern not to alienate the Iranians, and the repudiation of his commitment to act against the Syrians after Bashar Assad used chemical weapons against his own people.
There are no easy solutions but the Western world must seek to resolve these problems without paving the way for anti-democratic forces to destroy our way of life. As Jews, despite identifying with the harrowing images of suffering endured by those seeking to find a better life in Western countries, we must not let ourselves be ruled by emotions or intimidated by the threat that we will be accused of engaging in Islamophobia. We must rationally consider the long-term repercussions of our actions and, while displaying compassion and joining calls for Christians and Yazidis facing genocide in Syria to be accepted as refugees in Western countries, we must also avoid creating a situation in which we lay the foundations for jihadis to achieve their objectives by demographic means and devour the hand that feeds them.
Persia, Putin and the Pansy, Times of Israel, Irwin G. Blank, October 3, 2015
(Guess the name of the Pansy. But please see, The Moscow-Washington-Tehran Axis of Evil. — DM)
Putin, a product of the Soviet Communist system is well acquainted with the dictum of the father of the Bolshevik revolution that gave birth to the regime that he so faithfully served. V. I. Lenin’s famous quote-” Probe with a bayonet. If you meet steel, stop. If you meet mush, then push.”
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In ancient times there was no greater empire than that of Persia. This imperial power stretched from the mountains of Afghanistan all the way to the islands of Greece and the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East. Against the Greeks of Alexander the Great, it could field armies of millions of troops arrayed with the most modern weapons of war at the time. Until the rise of the Roman Empire, no power on Earth, made nations tremble as did the rulers of Persia.
Today the fanatic Ayatollahs in Teheran, with a megalomaniacal apocalyptic dream of Islamist imperialism and world conquest under their banner of jihad are hell bent on the recreation of their ancient empire and the destruction of all they see as infidels and unbelievers. Their conception of faith is a political and social fanaticism that goes even further than the hysterical rantings and horrendous nightmare that Nazi Germany once attempted to foist on mankind. Indeed, the very Nazi terminology for its origin, the word “Aryan” is associated with the nation whose name is a derivative of that racist term-Iran.
However, other than employing proxy allies in Lebanon, Syria and Yemen, the mad mullahs knew that their military, for all its goose stepping soldiers and bombast that they would require the tools necessary to fulfill their wicked aims. Firstly, it was able to build up a nuclear industry with the aim of developing the most lethal weapons of mass destruction. Through deception, deliberate obfuscation and diligent denial, it succeeded in the implantation of this atomic framework under the blindness of the international agency whose responsibility is to curtail the spread of nuclear weapons.
Furthermore, when its nefarious production methods and its open evidence of ballistic missile technology became apparent, Iran successfully parried the efforts to curtail its march toward nuclear weaponry by undertaking a Potemkin village of diplomacy whereby even the most seemingly astute diplomatically experienced national leaders, succumbed to the meanderings and sweetheart deal that Iranian negotiators engineered. The secrets of the Ayatollahs were swept under a Persian rug.
However, in the meantime, the Persian imperialist war mongers still were in great need of the assistance of a powerful ally in order to accomplish their more conventional aims in their desire to continue their conquest throughout the Middle East. What better place to seek this help than to another former empire builder than a nation which was chomping on the bit to return to an area of the globe from which it had been so unceremoniously evicted.
The former Soviet Union, now the Russian Federation, has had dreams of installing its imperial presence in the Mediterranean Sea since the days of the Czars. Until 1972 when the late Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, evicted ( for the most part as a political move, not a military one) most of the Soviet personnel from his country, the USSR had been ensconced throughout Egypt and the Arab world. Indeed, it was the humiliating defeat of the Egyptian and Syrian forces by the Israel Defense Forces during the Yom Kippur War that demonstrated at that time, the weakness of the Soviet response to American supported Israel which was demonstrating the vapidness of the Soviet promise to come to the aid of its Arab allies. The US response to Soviet threats to directly intervene on behalf of its Egyptian and Syrian clients, by moving the US Navy’s Sixth Fleet towards the Syrian coast and the declaration of a higher war footing by all US forces, made the Soviets back down.
The political and military supported victory of American arms and diplomacy demonstrated the resolve of that world power to face down the threat of Soviet dominance in such a strategic region of Western interests. Not only did the diplomacy of Henry Kissinger and the Nixon White House make a shambles of the massive Soviet involvement in the Arab world, but it brought about the first true demarche of Soviet (Russian) imperial chicanery since the Berlin blockade of 1948 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.
But the Russian Federation today is led by a president whose demonstration of the old Russian imperial nightmare is alive and well. Vladimir Putin, a former high official of the dreaded KGB,( Soviet Secret Service) has no qualms about restoring the dreams of the Czars and the re-entrenchment of his nation’s appearance in the Middle East. As a significant power player on the world scene and a massive supplier of sophisticated arms to anyone who opposes Western influence anywhere on the planet, the situation in the Levant and the hysterical anti-American paranoia in Teheran led the Ayatollahs to the road towards Moscow.
Iran was facing a significant threat to its allies in that disintegrating country and witnessing the probable demise of its Syrian puppet, Bashar al-Assad. The forces of ISIS (an Iranian rival for control of the Islamic world) were on the march and its debilitating of the Syrian military as well as its capture of large swaths of Alawite controlled territory would put an end to the mullah’s plans for conquest. The entire northern tier of the Middle East would collapse and the Persian dream of conquering all the Sunni dominated lands of the region would go up in smoke. Iran had invested heavily in its subterfuge of the regimes of Iraq, Yemen and its military adventures in those countries. It required a strong ally and it looked to its northern neighbor with which its shares a common enmity for the West, and Putin, licked his chops and dove onto the plate presented to him.
Not only have Russian military forces seized control of the vital Syrian port of Latakia on the Mediterranean, but it has constructed revetments for air forces and ground personnel unseen in this region since the 1970s. His air forces have conducted bombing raids, not on ISIS, which was a planned political prevarication, but on US backed components of the anti-Assad coalition. Of course, Putin has no conflict with conducting airstrikes on civilians. After all, the West has been all but silent on the massive slaughter of approximately 300,000 civilians by the butcher of Damascus. Even when presented with irrefutable evidence of the use of internationally banned chemical weapons on his own countrymen, the US and NATO have been reticent (cowardly) in confronting this evil practice. Why not? The current leader of Syria’s father dropped poison gas on his own people in Homs when they revolted against his tyrannical rule and the world stood silent.
When the president of the United States declared that the Assad administration’s use of chemical weapons would cross a “red line” and force his hand – well, the red line turned into a yellow streak. The insipid and relatively weak assistance that this erstwhile leader of the world’s greatest superpower has shown to be the denigration and degradation of a once trusted and worthy ally. America’s allies no longer trust her and her enemies no longer fear her. It is not the American people who have lost their courage, it is their incompetently dangerous president and his minions that are responsible.
Not only for the rise of Russian/Iranian imperialism, but for its effect as daily demonstrated by the thousands, if not future hundreds of thousands, of men, women and children, fleeing from the murderous genocide of the Assad aided and abetted by this new Axis of evil-Islamic radicalism and Russian imperialism.
Iran seeks to conquer the Middle East and destroy the Sunni dominated Arab states of the region. With Russian assistance it will expand its imperial power behind Russian bayonets and the threat of its own nuclear umbrella to come. It is biding its time while innocents are being slaughtered and the threats against Israel, Jordan and Lebanon are unrelenting through public declarations and political oratory.
Putin, a product of the Soviet Communist system is well acquainted with the dictum of the father of the Bolshevik revolution that gave birth to the regime that he so faithfully served. V. I. Lenin’s famous quote-” Probe with a bayonet. If you meet steel, stop. If you meet mush, then push.”
The American president, who through Constitutional authority commands the most expansive and well trained military in the history of the world, who purports to be the defender of international human rights, has proven himself to be, in the face of wanton aggression and slaughter, in the abrogation of his country’s duty to defend its most vital and established interests, in his tepid response to evil and his recalcitrance to even identify the greatest threat to Western civilization since the rise of Nazi Germany, has without a doubt, at least in this writer’s estimate, become akin to an ostrich-a bird that buries its head in the sand and presents its foes with an irresistible target.
The Dictionary of American Slang has a word for such a person-a weakling and a wimp-the word is “pansy.” The pansy of the United States will bring the most terrible war upon us all-including by beloved tiny Jewish country.
The Most Dangerous Man In the World, American Thinker, Andrew Logar, October 2, 2015
…is neither Russia’s Vladimir Putin nor China’s Xi Jinping, nor at this time, Ayatollah Khamenei – it’s none other than America’s Barack Hussein Obama. This is not because of any aggressive, risk-laden actions he has taken, far from it. It is because of those he has failed to take at critical times to credibly dissuade strategic competitors and potential aggressors, such as Russia and China, from actions that may suddenly compound into destabilizing confrontations, even war. When the Middle East cauldron spawned the barbaric ISIS, Obama’s indecisive, pusillanimous response allowed this Islamic malignancy to rapidly metastasize, compounding and accelerating an existing refugee problem that will involve America. Additionally, throughout his tenure, overt actions Obama has taken served to steadily and materially, degrade American military capabilities, while enemies grow stronger.
In retrospect, divining Obama’s foreign policy should have been relatively easy given his background – a world seen through the eyes of someone whose father was a Muslim, as was his step-father, whose early education was in a Muslim madrassa, followed by mentoring from the known communist Frank Marshall Davis, associations with Columbia University’s Palestinian activist Edward Said and later, Harvard’s leftist Brazilian socialist Roberto Unger, later close association with admitted communist and Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers, then followed by 20 years of anti-American and anti- Semitic sermons by Reverend Jeremiah Wright who, placing much of the world’s ills at America’s doorstep, culminated a post 9-11 sermon sententiously intoning, “…America’s chickens have come home to roost.”
Ironically, other chickens have indeed come home to roost. American liberalism’s pernicious obsession to eradicate the odium of slavery long gone and any vestiges of remaining discrimination in one fell swoop, blindly promoted the candidacy of the first black president, propelling a relatively unknown, unvetted and remarkably unqualified candidate to two electoral victories. That most unfortunate occurrence followed by resultant deleterious fallout at home and abroad, are liberalism’s chickens coming home to roost – in the White House – where they’ll cluck away until January 20, 2017.
After winning the 2008 election, Obama launched his now infamous “Apology Tour,” covering three continents in some 100 days, during which the Heritage Foundation identified 10 major apologies Obama made for America’s past behavior. Mitt Romney, in his book, “No Apology,” correctly criticized Obama’s gratuitous apologies. Indeed, unnecessary apologies by our president projected a weakness in resolve, confidence and appreciation of our nation’s accomplishments, our beliefs and values. While in Europe, when asked if he believed in American “exceptionalism,” he said yes – in the same way that, “ …the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks in Greek exceptionalism.”
This was an arresting, if not downright stupefying statement – coming from the head of state of the world’s most powerful nation, with a manifestly unrivaled history. This is a nation which in 239 years since the Declaration of Independence, grew from 13 colonies and 3 million people to 50 states and 320 million people, a nation victorious in its Revolutionary War, the War of 1812 and which fought its bloodiest of wars, the Civil War, to expunge slavery; this is a nation victorious in the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, WWI and WWII, that introduced the incontestably successful Marshall Plan critical in European post war recovery, that sent men to the moon and back, 6 times – and the nation that won the Cold War – a nation that has consistently led the world in Nobel prizes in medicine, science and technology. This is unequivocally a nation like none other, a nation of unparalleled achievements and sadly, one whose president does not consider particularly exceptional.
The historical record now shows global competitors and enemies have taken their measure of Obama: the Russians have acted with impunity in Crimea, Ukraine and Syria, the Chinese are establishing a stranglehold on the South China Sea while Russians, Chinese and Iranians are engaged in flagrant cyber-espionage against America, ISIS is growing, while Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan are all in play.
Barack Obama’s sophomoric efforts at geopolitics derived from his warped, kaleidoscopic misreading of 20th century history have now spiraled into a veritable tragicomedy of incompetence. Witness his administration’s $500 million program to train Syrian rebels to fight ISIS: not only didn’t that produce the projected 5,000 trained fighters, or even 500, but only, according to General Lloyd Austin, “…four or five.” This is grist for a Marx Brothers movie and attributable to abysmally poor leadership, planning and organization which can only be placed at the doorstep of the White House.
An objective review of the Obama administration’s policies reveals they have consistently posed a direct or indirect threat to national security:
– The unilateral cancellation of the Easter Europe ABM deployment without securing a tangible quid pro quo from Moscow and no counter to Russia’s recent decision to sell the potent S-300 anti-aircraft system to Iran.
– The ill-advised support for the overthrow of long-term ally of the West, Egypt’s Mubarak and the inexplicable enthusiastic White House support of the Muslim Brotherhood.
– The equally ill-advised and ill-planned toppling of Libya’s Gaddafi, resulting in a country without a functional government now overrun with Islamists, where at Benghazi four Americans died needlessly.
– The withholding of vital intelligence from the Senate that Russia had been flagrantly cheating on the existing INF treaty to advance ratification of New START in 2010. Seventy-one Senators voted for ratification without full background knowledge.
– The 2011 withdrawal of all American troops from Iraq by Obama while blaming the Bush administration for inadequacies of the 2008 Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA). This allowed Iraq to descend back into sectarian chaos, giving rise to ISIS and advantage to Iran. A war won at high cost in blood and treasure was thus lost.
– The military drawdown in Afghanistan – mindlessly pre-announced to the enemy – may lose that war as well if continued.
– The release of five dangerous Taliban in exchange for Sgt. Bergdahl is beyond rational justification and/or discussion.
– The manifest dereliction of duty in not taking strong measures to protect America from devastating EMP attack – which can be done at very affordable cost.
– The lack resolute policy has turned Syria into a graveyard of American credibility. Nothing substantive has been achieved to slow, let alone destroy, rapidly metastasizing ISIS, unconscionably leaving a compounding problem to future administrations.
– The opening of our southern border to a tsunami of illegal immigration, arguably to permanently bias future voter demographics toward a one-party (Democratic) state. That many of those gaining easy entry may wish us harm is apparently of no concern to Obama.
– The continuing undermining of America’s military superiority is increasing the likelihood of confrontation with adversaries. According to the Heritage Foundation Index of Military Strength, our Commander-In-Chief has allowed our military power to degrade to “Marginal,” leaving the US Army at its relatively weakest level since the end of WWII, while our antagonists pour money into their armed forces.
– Finally (but Obama is not through yet!) – during recent post-summit remarks, China’s Xi Jinping suggested tough U.S. response to Chinese hacking would bring retaliation; obligingly, Obama affirmed sanctions wouldn’t be directed against governments. Essentially, Xi stepped forward, Obama blinked and stepped back – signaling a major geopolitical sea change. Cyberespionage by Russia and Iran haven’t been addressed.
Before winning the 2008 election and still a senator, during the Bush administration’s then ongoing nuclear negotiations with Iran, Obama, in a brazen and historically unprecedented move, secretly sent a personal emissary to Iran, William G. Miller, a former Ambassador to Ukraine, essentially conveying this message: Obama will very likely to be elected president, after which time Iran will find negotiating with him far easier. The Bush negotiations reportedly then reached a stalemate. Fast-forward to 2015, through Obama’s and Kerry’s “hard” bargaining, we’ve reached an agreement with Iran whereby monitoring Iran’s programs will be left to the Iranians as they now have the right to self-inspect” and so as to take the sting away from such an onerous deal, we’ll give them $100 billion of frozen assets – with which to do as they please – while America agrees to protect Iran’s nuclear facilities from cyber warfare.
Though Red China, Russia and Iran increasingly challenge America, the Middle East bloodshed continues and ISIS grows stronger, President Obama has declared “…no challenge–poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change.” This extraordinarily vacuous statement is from either a hopelessly delusional ideologue, woefully untutored in world history, geopolitics and the unequaled greatness of America, or a brilliant Manchurian Candidate marching to his own drumbeat. In any case, Obama is a president like none other – and may we never see the likes of him again.
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