(The views expressed in this article are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)
Although claiming repeatedly that Islam is the religion of peace, tolerance, otherwise good and therefore welcome in America, the media are horrified that Donald Trump failed to “correct” the “highly offensive” claim by a member of the audience at a New Hampshire rally that Obama is a Muslim.
The media and others also seem to be offended by the parallel claim that Obama is not a Christian. However, Islam and Christianity have very different theological foundations and share very few beliefs. Hence, if Obama is a Muslim, He cannot also be a Christian.
True, Obama has occasionally claimed to be a Christian; if He is instead a Muslim He has lied about being a Christian. He has also lied about many other things, including Obamacare and, more recently, the nuke “deal” with Iran.
The claim that Obama is a Muslim seems to have produced significantly more media outrage than claims that He lied about Obamacare, the nuke “deal” and other topics. Perhaps in Obama’s America presidents are expected to lie as a matter of routine. Had Trump’s questioner merely claimed that Obama is not a Christian, without also claiming that He is a Muslim, would the outrage have been less? It seems to me that the major problem is that Trump’s questioner claimed that Obama is a Muslim.
If what we read in the press and hear on television is true (and I don’t think it is), being a Muslim is per se good. According to Obama, Islam helps to make His America great. Is it among the very few aspects of American exceptionalism of which He is proud?
Muslims don’t generally live in flyover regions (except in some jihad training compounds), clinging to their guns and bibles. Would Obama think better of Christians in flyover regions if they were to cling instead to their beheading implements and Qurans? What if they dealt with homosexuals (and political dissidents of all types) as do Iran (the peace partner featured in Obama’s nuke “deal”) and other Islamic countries?
Clerks of court in Iran don’t refuse to issue marriage licenses to homosexuals; torturing and hanging them (along with other regime opponents) must be politically correct and, therefore, acceptable.
Islamic reality, on which Obama and the media are generally silent aside, why should Trump be disparaged for failing to come to Obama’s defense by denying that He is a Muslim? What sort of defense would that be? Hasn’t Obama told us that Christians (unlike Muslims) are warlike and bad (please see the next to last video at the end of this post.)
Is being called a Muslim worse than being called a sexual predator?
Sometimes, presidents are accused of doing very bad things. President Clinton was accused of being a sexual predator. In western countries, sexual predation of any sort is often considered undesirable — although less so when the predators are Muslims who believe that Mohamed had the right ideas about sex.
Please see also Ayan Hirsi Ali’s autobiography, Infidel. Much of it is about sex in the Muslim world where women are born to be submissive to men, who own them.
Hillary immediately came to her husband’s defense and blamed the accusations of sexual predation on a vast right wing conspiracy.
For some, former President Clinton remains a highly respected Democrat.
Are claims that Obama is a Muslim also part of a vast right-wing conspiracy, which all right-thinking people, Republicans as well as Democrats, should publicly reject, admonish and silence? Jeb Bush and several other RINOs seem to think so.
Is Obama a Muslim?
I don’t know whether Obama is a Muslim. I do understand that He appears to have substantially more affinity for that religion than for any other and is far more likely to defend Islam than to defend Christianity, Judaism or any other religion.
Is many Islamic countries, Christians, Muslims and the few remaining Jews are being persecuted in the most vicious ways conceivable by Muslims. Why are the asylum and immigration policies of Obama’s America so different for Christians, Jews and Muslims?
Might the differences be on account of Obama’s destructively great affinity for Islam? Does He agree with this preacher that Muslim males who migrate to previously non-Islamic countries should help to make them Islamic by breeding with local women to produce Muslim children? Wouldn’t that make Obama even more proud of His America?
I guess we can’t permit Obama to be insulted. Right? Wrong!
Hamas is continuing to use its media to educate young children to carry out “jihad” against Jews.
The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) has exposed a clip from a children’s show on the Hamas-owned Al-Aqsa TV channel which shows young children, dressed in military fatigues, asked what they want to be when they grow up.
One of the children said that he wanted to be an engineer, “so that I can blow up the Jews.” Another recited a poem, “I shall liberate [Jerusalem] from the Jews by means of the Al-Qassam Brigades.”
A clip released by MEMRI earlier this year showed footage from a youth camp organized by Hamas’s so-called “military wing”, in which young cadets learn how to use weapons and simulate the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier.
A previous clip shows a televised graduation ceremony for a similar Hamas youth camp in Gaza. At the ceremony, suicide terror attacks against the “Zionist enemy” were glorified by Hamas officials.
This has been a bad month for democracy, for serious debate and for the treatment of all Americans as equally capable of deciding important issue on their merits and demerits. Whether it also turns out to have been a bad month for peace and nuclear non-proliferation remains to be seen. But even those who support the deal should be ashamed of some of the undemocratic tactics and bigoted arguments employed to avoid a real debate and a majority vote.
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When I was growing up, “filibuster” was a dirty word. It was a tactic used by bigoted southern Senators to prevent the enactment of any civil rights legislation. I recall Senator Strom Thurman babbling on for 24 hours in an effort to keep the south racially segregated. We regarded the filibuster as the enemy of democracy and the weapon of choice against civil rights.
Yet, President Obama and his followers in the senate deployed this undemocratic weapon in order to stifle real debate about the nuclear deal with Iran and to prevent the up or down vote promised by the Corker bill. A President, who was more confident of the deal, would have welcomed the Lincoln-Douglas type debates that I and others had called for regarding the most important foreign policy decision of the 21st century. But instead of arguments on the merits and demerits of the deal, what we mostly got was ad hominems. Proponents of the deal trotted out famous names of those who supported the deal, without detailed arguments about why they took that position. No wonder so few Americans support the deal. According to a recent Pew poll approximately one in five Americans think the deal is a good one. The President had an obligation to use his bully pulpit to try to obtain majority support among voters. Not only did he fail to do that, he also failed to persuade a majority of senator and house members. So this minority deal will go into operation over the objection of majority of our legislators and voters.
One of the low points of this debate was a variation on the ad hominem fallacy. It was the argument by religious or ethnic identity. Supporters of the deal tried to get as many prominent Jews as they could to sign ads and petitions in favor of the deal. The implicit argument was, “See, even Jews support this deal, so it must be good for Israel,” despite the reality that the vast majority of Israelis and almost all of its political leaders believe the deal is bad for Israel.
The absolute low point in the non-debate was a New York Times chart, identifying opponents of the deal by whether they were Jewish or Gentile. The implication was that Jews who opposed the deal must be more loyal to their Jewish constituents or to Israel than Americans who supported the deal. But the chart itself made little sense. It turns out that the vast majority of democratic Congressmen who voted against the deal were not Jewish, and several of them represented districts in which less than 1% of the voters were Jewish. It is true that two out of the four democratic senators who voted against the deal were identified as Jews, but one of the non-Jewish Senators represents West Virginia where Jewish voters constituted less than one tenth of one percent of the voting population. Moreover, opposition to this deal is considerably greater among evangelical Christians than among Jews.
Identifying by their religion members of congress who voted against a deal that the Times strongly supported is, as the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting (Camera) aptly put it, more than a dog whistle; it is a bull horn. It plays squarely into anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jews having dual loyalty. Will the Times next identify bankers, media moguls, journalists and professors by their religious identity? Would the Times have done that for other ethnic, religious or gender groups?
This has been a bad month for democracy, for serious debate and for the treatment of all Americans as equally capable of deciding important issue on their merits and demerits. Whether it also turns out to have been a bad month for peace and nuclear non-proliferation remains to be seen. But even those who support the deal should be ashamed of some of the undemocratic tactics and bigoted arguments employed to avoid a real debate and a majority vote.
(The views expressed in this article are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)
We have met the enemy and it is us: we have become too tired to be effective and hence are becoming indifferent. The charade on Capitol Hill continues, and not only about the nuke “deal” with Iran. Will the carnival end before it’s too late, or will Obama continue to win?
The House speaker is elected by all House members, not just those of the majority party. He need not be a member of the House. Boehner having resigned because a serious medical condition often reduces him to tears, one group of Democrats nominated Debbie Wasserman-Schultz to replace him. However, due to her support for Hillary Clinton, she fell out of favor with the White House so another group of Democrats nominated Kim Jong-un at Obama’s request. To avoid the appearance of confrontation, Republicans offered no candidates. Kim won by seventeen votes, becoming the first non-US citizen to hold the office thus far this month.
REPORTING FOR DUTY!
The current upset was precipitated by Republican members’ disagreements with Boehner and other party leaders about how best to deal with the catastrophic Iran nuke “deal” without unnecessarily offending the President. Kim Jong-un is expected to substitute his own brand of leadership for Boehner’s leadership through ambivalence.
A majority also deemed Kim the best qualified to negotiate with Dear Leader Obama on behalf of the House because, as the undisputed leader of a rogue nuclear nation himself, he should be able to pull not only Obama’s strings but also those of the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Rogue Republic of Iran.
White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest declined comment on the situation beyond refusing to comment on whether Obama met privately with Kim to congratulate him. However, Obama is generally thought to have confirmed that He fully supports Kim’s way of governing his own Democratic Peoples’ Republic and — subject to the few pesky restraints still imposed by an antiquated Constitution that He has not yet found ways to sneak around — He does His best to emulate him. In that connection, Obama asked Kim for recommendations on antiaircraft guns to deal humanely with Jews and other traitors who oppose Him (Please see also, New York Times Launches Congress ‘Jew Tracker’ – Washington Free Beacon.)
Desiring to gain Obama’s total good will, Kim promised to have derogatory cartoons of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton painted on all future North Korean nukes and missiles just before they explode. In return, Obama promised to issue executive orders granting North Korea the permanent right to declassify any and all U.S. documents it sees fit pertaining to the security of the United States and to obtain copies, gratis, from the Government Printing Office.
House Speaker Kim Jong-un will next meet with Supreme Leader Khamenei in Tehran to make two common sense proposals, with which Khamenei is certain to agree:
First, Kim will propose that a group of highly regarded North Korean nuclear experts — under his personal guidance and supervision — conduct all nuke inspections in Iran and draw all conclusions concerning any past or present Iranian nuclear program based on them exclusively. Those conclusions will be drawn on behalf of, and in lieu of any conclusions drawn by, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The head of the IAEA, Yukiya Amano, immediately endorsed this plan as “splendid and totally consistent with any and all IAEA – Iran “secret deals.”
Second, Kim will propose that Khamenei promise not to nuke anyone until all sanctions have been permanently eliminated, unless he really wants to.
Obama is thought to have agreed with every aspect of the Kim plan and to have directed Secretary Kerry to tell Khamenei that if he agrees all sanctions will be eliminated permanently, via executive decree, and hence even more expeditiously than previously expected. Due to a successful Senate filibuster yesterday, Obama can issue the executive decree very soon; Today — Friday, September 11th — is being considered seriously due to the obvious symbolism of the date.
The inevitable success of Kim’s mission will result in a win-win situation for nearly everyone, particularly the financially strapped IAEA, and the true Peace of Obama will prevail throughout all parts of the world that He considers worth saving. Remember — it’s all for the Children!
Addendum
하원 의장 김정은 의 문 사랑하는 북미 친구 , 그것은 오바마 대통령 아래에서 당신의 인생 이 곧 Amerika 민주주의 인민 공화국 이 될 것입니다 무엇 에 미래의 삶을 위해 잘 준비 것을 진심으로 희망 합니다. 배리 와 나는 제출 된 것을 기쁘게 사람들을 위해 가능한 한 오랫동안 지배 구조 의 우리의 양식 에 서서히 적응 을 하기 때문에 전환이 원활 하게 하기 위해 함께 열심히하고 고통 일했다 .
Translation:
Statement of House Speaker Kim Jong-un
My dear North American friends, it is my sincere hope that your life under President Obama has prepared you well for your future life in what will soon become the Democratic People’s Republic of Amerika. Barry [a.k.a. Barack] and I have worked long and hard together to acclimate you gradually to our transformed and transformational form of governance and hence to make the transition as smooth and painless as possible for those pleased to submit. Now, we will accelerate the progress.
We don’t have to give in to despair. If we do, we are lost. Lost the way that the left is lost. Lost the way that the Muslim world is lost.
We are not savages and feral children. We are the inheritors of a great civilization. It is still ours to lose. It is ours to keep if we understand its truths. [Emphasis added.]
We are not alone. A sense of isolation has been imposed on us as part of a culture war. The task of reconstructing our civilization and ending that isolation begins with our communication. We are the successors of revolutions of ideas. We need to do more than keep them alive. We must refresh them and renew them. And, most importantly, we must practice them.
We are not this culture. We are not our media. We are not our politicians. We are better than that.
We must win, but we must also remember what it is we hope to win. If we forget that, we lose. If we forget that, we will embrace dead end policies that cannot restore hope or bring victory.
What we have now is not a movement because we have not defined what it is we hope to win. We have built reactive movements to stave off despair. We must do better than that. We must not settle for striving to restore some idealized lost world. Instead we must dream big. We must think of the nation we want and of the civilization we want to live in and what it will take to build it.
Our enemies have set out big goals. We must set out bigger ones. We must become more than conservatives. If we remain conservatives, then all we will have is the America we live in now. And even if our children and grandchildren become conservatives, that is the culture and nation they will fight to conserve. We must become revolutionaries.
We must think in terms of the world we want. Not the world we have lost.
This is the America we live in now. But it doesn’t have to be.
It can be up to us, not to those who hate America and all for which she once stood.
Israel is not like the Czechoslovakia of 1938 and never will be. Israel is an independent military and nuclear power that intends to use its right of self-defense against Iran and its terrorist proxies whether “Emperor” Obama likes it or not, or tries to stop it.
Obama and his army of Democratic followers in the Congress, progressive groups, and the media repeatedly state their main argument in favor of the agreement, which is that Israel is the only country in the world opposing the Iran nuclear deal. First, It seems that President Obama and his supporters have not paid attention to a recent CNN poll taken on August 20 that found that 60 percent of Americans disapprove of how Obama is handling the Iran deal, and 56 percent believe that Congress should reject it.
Secondly, like any other self-respecting sovereign country, Israel is against any deal that threatens her own survival by an evil Jihadist Islamic state clearly intent on its annihilation, which is being imposed on her by world powers as a fait accompli.
It seems that Obama and his supporters are delusional, expecting that Israel will allow itself to become a second Czechoslovakia. They are outraged and shocked that Israel has not only refused to quietly accept this very bad deal but dares to fight the deal publicly, loudly, and proudly.
Like Czechoslovakia in 1938, Israel is a small democracy surrounded by hostile nations, and like Czechoslovakia, it was excluded from negotiations that led to a diplomatic deal that shapes its fate and threatens its survival. In 1938, the enlightened democracies in Europe decided to sacrifice Czechoslovakia for a comfortable, temporary solution. The Munich agreement was signed, when Britain and France believed that handing Czechoslovakia to Hitler was the only way to save the world from another war. It is regarded as the shameful culmination of the Allies refusal to confront Nazi aggression and gave Hitler what he wanted in exchange for his verbal promise of “peace in our time” as Neville Chamberlain called it.
In his biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Champion of Freedom, Conrad Black recalls the scene when the poor Czechoslovakian delegates were brought into the room to be informed of their nation’s fate as set out in the Munich Agreement. “No Czech answer was requested. They were handed a fait accompli. The Czechs wept, and Hubert Masarik (Czech diplomat attending the Munich conference) said, prophetically and justly: ‘They don’t know what they are doing to us or to themselves.… These poor, good men were the final players in a macabre and shameful Gothic tragedy.”
The Jewish state has for 67 years been mourning its beloved soldiers who have courageously died defending it from the evil regimes that surround her. However, it will never weep over a deal imposed on it by a morally bankrupt world. Those days of passivity were over when the enormity of the Holocaust was revealed. The Jewish state has been fighting for itself on its own since its independence.
Obama’s threats of a military attack on Iran when violations of the deal occur are not taken seriously by anyone and are a source of laughter for the Iranian regime. Israel does not need the U.S. or any another party to save her but it does need for Obama and the world powers to move away from Israel’s path and let it do everything in its means to minimize the nuclear threat, and the more menacing conventional threat resulting from the hundreds of billions of dollars Iran and its terrorist proxies will get from the deal.
For the last two years, Obama has been trying to tie Israeli hands and prevent it from practicing its right to self-defense against Iran. Dan Raviv from CBS News reported in March 2014, that the Obama’s administration has asked Israel to stop killing key scientists in the Iranian nuclear program while Obama has been negotiating. In an August interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon implicitly warned that the assassinations could be renewed by saying;” I am not responsible for the lives of Iranian scientists.’
But much worse, in Article 10 of the deal, Obama and world powers have agreed that they will assist Iran in thwarting attempts to undermine its nuclear program. The agreement stipulates that they, with the Iranians, will foster “cooperation through training and workshops to strengthen Iran’s ability to protect against and respond to, nuclear security threats, including sabotage, as well as to enable effective and sustainable nuclear security and physical protection systems.”
Recent years have seen various mishaps befall the Iranian nuclear program, from powerful computer viruses to the death of the nuclear scientists, which world media outlets have often attributed to the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad. According to an audio recording with former Defense Minister Ehud Barak leaked to an Israeli television channel on August 22, Israeli leaders planned to attack military targets in Iran in 2010, 2011, and 2012 but were held back due to the opinions of other government and military leaders.
It is quite disturbing that the U.S. as well as the U.K., Russia, China, France, and Germany will actively try to prevent covert actions against the Iranian nuclear program, as well as any potential military operation against Iran, making such options far more complicated and dangerous for a country like Israel. Congress should ask Obama whether he will order U.S. jets to shoot down Israeli jets intent on destroying an Iranian nuclear weapon facility.
The Congressional Democrats must not repeat the mistakes of the past and sacrifice the future for the present; The Democrats must not ignore Iranian aggression in the hopes of gaining an illusory peace. A vote for the deal is a vote for the beginning of the next war between Israel and Iran and its proxies. The Jewish people can never again remain passive in the face of genocidal enemies.
Critics of Islam are often accused of bigotry. The accusers tend to overlook the kind of crazy racism that Islam teaches. And we are talking really, really crazy racism. (via Religion of Peace)
Al-Mosharraf, whose Elaph blog posts often contain anti-Semitic overtones, argues that some monkeys are Jews whom Allah punished for desecrating the Sabbath, as is told in the Quran. He included numerous photos of macaque monkeys in his post, and pointed out the similarities between their behavior and Jewish behavior.
Sure. Who can forget the time that six Muslim armies were defeated by an army of monkeys.
The term “offspring of apes and pigs” originates from the Quran: 2:65, 5:60, and 7:163-169 tell the story of the “Sabbath people’s” — i.e., the Jews’ — violation of Allah’s instructions and Allah’s punishment of them by turning them into apes and pigs.
Apes and pigs is one of the favorite racist taunts aimed at Jews. That and the usual Khaybar, Khaybar Ya Yahud call for genocide which you encounter at finer universities these days. And the claim that Jews are planting Gharkad trees in the hopes of escaping the coming Muslim genocide.
Because Islam is a religion of peace. And to have peace, you first have to kill everyone else. Because they’re really monkeys.
The [Jews who had become monkeys] continued to multiply, and were finally forced to disperse throughout the world. It seems that they chose to settle in the countries of Southeast Asia and the Far East, as can be seen today. “What is interesting is that there are two species of macaque — black and silver. This corresponds to the two types of Jews, of two [skin] colors: the Ashkenazim of European origin and the Sephardim of Asian origin.
Islam is racist? Who knew.
“It is noteworthy that [Charles] Darwin ([who was] of Jewish descent) kept the world preoccupied for a long time with his theory that man is descended from apes. Apparently, he arrived at this assumption from his study [of] the history of some of his forefathers amongst the Jewish monkeys.”
This is Islamic racism. This is Islamic racism ‘evolved’.
“It is indisputable that there are monkeys of Jewish origin; none deny this but those who do not believe in the Quran that Allah brought down to Muhammad. Allah said of these monkeys of Jewish descent: ‘And you had already known about those who transgressed among you concerning the Sabbath, and we said to them be apes, despised. And we made it a deterrent punishment for those who were present and those who succeeded [them] and a lesson for those who fear Allah’ (Quran 2:65-66).
Indisputable. I don’t think that word means what you think it does.
But I think we can conclusively prove that Jews aren’t monkeys even to Al-Mosharaff’s satisfaction. If these monkeys really were Jews, Muslims around the world would be trying to kill them.
US Secretary of State John Kerry speaks in Singapore. (photo credit:STATE DEPARTMENT)
The secretary rejected Israel’s criticism of the nuclear agreement, saying that the deal “is as pro-Israel” as it gets.
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U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told The Atlantic on Wednesday that if Congress were to shoot down the Iran nuclear agreement, it would be “the ultimate screwing” of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The secretary rejected Israel’s criticism of the nuclear agreement, saying that the deal “is as pro-Israel” as it gets.
Reneging on the nuclear agreement, which has the support of the major world powers, would constitute a setback for Washington and justify anti-American animus in Iran.
“The ayatollah constantly believed that we are untrustworthy, that you can’t negotiate with us, that we will screw them,” Kerry said. “[Having Congress vote down the nuclear pact] will be the ultimate screwing.”
“The United States Congress will prove the ayatollah’s suspicion, and there’s no way he’s ever coming back. He will not come back to negotiate. Out of dignity, out of a suspicion that you can’t trust America. America is not going to negotiate in good faith. It didn’t negotiate in good faith now, would be his point.”
Kerry also commented on the vociferous opposition to the deal expressed by Israel, which the secretary referred to as “visceral” and “emotional.” He was adamant that the agreement was positive for Israel’s geopolitical standing.
“I’ve gone through this backwards and forwards a hundred times and I’m telling you, this deal is as pro-Israel, as pro-Israel’s security, as it gets,” Kerry said. “And I believe that just saying no to this is, in fact, reckless.”
Kerry said that he was “sensitive” to Israeli concerns over Iran’s long-term aims, but he rejected arguments made by Jerusalem that the Islamic Republic was planning its annihilation.
“I haven’t seen anything that says to me [that Iran will implement its vow of wiping Israel off the map],” the secretary said. “They’ve got 80,000 rockets in Hezbollah pointed at Israel, and any number of choices could have been made. They didn’t make the bomb when they had enough material for 10 to 12. They’ve signed on to an agreement where they say they’ll never try and make one and we have a mechanism in place where we can prove that. So I don’t want to get locked into that debate. I think it’s a waste of time here.”
“I operate on the presumption that Iran is a fundamental danger, that they are engaged in negative activities throughout the region, that they’re destabilizing places, and that they consider Israel a fundamental enemy at this moment in time,” Kerry said. “Everything we have done here [with the nuclear agreement] is not to overlook anything or to diminish any of that; it is to build a bulwark, build an antidote.”
The secretary said that the nuclear deal is even more imperative if Israel’s fears that Iran is plotting its destruction are true, since the agreement neutralizes Tehran’s nuclear program.
(Another interesting question would be, does Obama agree with any of Khamenei’s statements and, if so, which? — DM)
The Khamenei Palestine book is important not in and of itself but because the regime’s obsession with Israel is a key to its foreign policy. . . . But as much as Iran is focused on regional hegemony in which Sunni states would be brought to heel, as Khamenei’s Palestine illustrates, it is the fixation on Israel and Zionism that really animates their expansionism and aid for terror groups.
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It turns out President Obama isn’t the only world leader who writes books. His counterpart in Iran – Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — has also just published a new book. But while it may not be as introspective as Obama’s Dreams From My Father, it does tell us at least as much about the vision of the person in charge in Tehran (as opposed to Hassan Rouhani, the faux moderate who serves as its president) as the president’s best-selling memoir. As Amir Taheri reports in the New York Post,Palestine is a 416-page diatribe against the existence of the state of Israel and a call to arms for it to be destroyed. Supporters of the nuclear deal the president has struck with Khamenei’s regime may dismiss this book as merely one more example of the Supreme Leader’s unfortunate ideology that must be overlooked. But as the New York Times noted last week, the administration’s real goal here isn’t so much in delaying Iran’s march to a nuclear weapon (which is the most that can be claimed for the agreement) as it is fostering détente with it. Seen in that light, the latest evidence of the malevolence of the Islamist regime should be regarded as yet another inarguable reason for Congress to vote the deal down.
In his interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg on May 21, President Obama was asked directly about the significance of Iran’s anti-Semitism and its commitment to destroying Israel. The president said the anti-Semitism of the Iranian leadership did not mean they weren’t also “interested in survival” or being “rational.” As far as he was concerned, the ideology of the regime was not something that would influence its decisions.
But everything Khamenei says and, even more importantly, everything the regime does, by funding terrorist groups at war with Israel such as Hamas and Hezbollah or by embarking on a ruinously expensive nuclear project that placed it in conflict with the West, speaks to its commitment to policies that Obama may think are irrational but which are completely in synch with what he called its “organizing principle.” Why would a nation so rich in oil need to risk international isolation or war seek nuclear power if not to help Khamenei fulfill his pledge to “liberate” what is now Israel for Muslims?
The president told Goldberg that the American military option would be a sufficient deterrent to ensure that Iran didn’t violate the nuclear pact or behave in an irrational manner. But since the president has ruled out the use of force in a categorical manner, it’s hard to see why the Iranians would fear it once the U.S. and Europe are doing business with them. Even if it was a matter of snapping back sanctions, assuming that such a concept is even possible? Once the restrictions are unraveled, it’s fair to ask why would they work then when the president repeatedly tells us additional sanctions won’t work now and require us to accept the current deal that doesn’t achieve the objectives that the administration set for the negotiations when they began.
The Khamenei Palestine book is important not in and of itself but because the regime’s obsession with Israel is a key to its foreign policy. Iran constitutes a grave threat to Neighboring Arab countries that are at least as angry about the president’s embrace of Tehran as the Israelis since their nuclear status would undermine their security. But as much as Iran is focused on regional hegemony in which Sunni states would be brought to heel, as Khamenei’s Palestine illustrates, it is the fixation on Israel and Zionism that really animates their expansionism and aid for terror groups.
As Taheri notes in his article on the book, Khamenei distinguishes his idée fixe about destroying Israel from European anti-Semitism. Rather, he insists, that his policy derives from “well established Islamic principles.” Chief among them is the idea that any land that was once ruled by Muslims cannot be conceded to non-believers no matter who lives there now. While the Muslim world seems to understand that they’re not getting Spain back, the territory that constitutes the state of Israel is something else. Its central location in the middle of the Muslim and Arab worlds and the fact that Jews, a despised minority people, now rule it makes its existence particularly objectionable to Islamists like Khamenei.
Khamenei’s book shows that not only is he serious about wanting to destroy Israel and uproot its Jewish population, he regards this project as a practical rather than a theoretical idea. The administration ignores this because it wants to believe that Iran is a nation that wants to, as the president put it, “get right with the world.” But what it wants is to do business with the world while pursuing its ideological goals. The nuclear deal is a means to an end for the regime and that end does not involve good relations with the West or cooperation with other states in the region, let alone coexisting peacefully with Israel.
What is curious is that this is the same administration that regarded the announcement of a housing project in Jerusalem by low-level Israeli officials as an “insult” to Vice President Biden. But it chooses to regard the “death to America” chants led by regime functionaries in Iran as well as a book by the country’s leader indicating that Obama’s ideas about its character are fallacious as non-events. The only explanation for this remarkable lack of interest in Iranian behavior is an ideological fixation on détente with Tehran that is every bit as hardcore as any utterances that emanate from the mouth or the pen of the Supreme Leader.
Taken out of the context of a vision of friendship with the Iranian regime, the nuclear deal makes no sense. Yet squaring that vision with Khamenei’s literary effort is impossible. Members of the House and Senate must take note of this conundrum and vote accordingly.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chairs the weekly cabinet meeting at his Jerusalem office on August 2, 2015 AFP PHOTO / POOL / GALI TIBBON)
PM says Israel ‘condemns’ such violence, while the PA ‘names public squares after the murderers of children’
Speaking in the wake of a firebombing attack in the West Bank that left a Palestinian toddler dead, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday lashed out at Mahmoud Abbas, accusing the Palestinian Authority president of failing to condemn acts of Palestinian terrorism.
“We deplore and condemn these murderers. We will pursue them to the end,” he said. “They name public squares after the murderers of children. This distinction cannot be blurred or covered up,” he said.
“It is important to say this even as we utter our condemnations and unite against the criminals among our people,” Netanyahu said.
The prime minister also said that there would be a “zero tolerance” policy toward such crimes in Israel, and vowed to punish the perpetrators to the full extent of the law.
Participants in the gay pride parade in Jerusalem flee stabber Yishai Schlissel, July 30, 2015. (screen capture: Channel 2)
“We recently witnessed two abhorrent crimes. Our policy toward these crimes is zero tolerance,” he said, referring both to the killing of the Palestinian child and a stabbing attack at the Jerusalem Gay Pride Parade on Thursday.
Netanyahu recalled visiting the home of the historian Joseph Klausner as a child. Over the arched entrance to Klausner’s home, said the prime minister, the words “Judaism” and “humanity” were engraved in Hebrew.
The perpetrators of last week’s crimes did not represent Judaism, he said.
The prime minister said he had instructed security and law enforcement officials to use all legal tools at their disposal to apprehend the perpetrators of the arson attack and prosecute the perpetrator of the stabbing attack.
“We are determined to vigorously fight manifestations of hate, fanaticism and terrorism from whatever side. The fight against these phenomena unites us all.
“This is not a struggle by this or that faction. This is a matter of basic humanity and is at the foundation of our enlightened Jewish values,” he said.
The assailant in Thursday’s anti-gay attack was an ultra-Orthodox Jew, Yishai Schlissel, who had just been released after serving 10 years in jail for carrying out a similar attack at the 2005 Pride Parade. On Sunday, doctors said that one of the six victims, who suffered multiple stab wounds to her chest and abdomen, remained in critical condition.
A Palestinian man mourns alongside the body of a one-and-a-half year old boy, Ali Dawabsha, during his funeral in Duma village near the West Bank city of Nablus, Friday, July 31, 2015. (Majdi Mohammed/AP)
On Friday, unknown assailants suspected to be Jewish settlers firebombed the home of a Palestinian family in the northern West Bank village of Duma, killing a toddler. The parents and brother of 18-month-old Ali Saad Dawabsha were hospitalized and are still fighting for their lives.
The family’s small brick and cement home was gutted by fire, and a Star of David spray-painted on a wall along with the words “revenge” and “long live the Messiah.”
The phrases were indicative of so-called “price tag” violence — a euphemism for nationalist-motivated hate crimes by Jewish extremists.
Ayatollah Ali Khameni has published his version of Mein Kampf, a 416 page book outlining his strategy to eliminate Israel, which he describes as “a cancerous tumor.” Although it is currently available only in Iran, an Arabic translation is underway, and sooner or later it will achieve wide readership in the Muslim world. The Obama administration is no doubt hoping it will achieve no notice in the United States until after the Iran deal is voted upon, because the plan advocated will be immensely aided by its implementation.
Amir Taheri of the New York Post obtained a copy from Iran:
Khamenei makes his position clear from the start: Israel has no right to exist as a state.
He uses three words. One is “nabudi” which means “annihilation.” The other is “imha” which means “fading out,” and, finally, there is “zaval” meaning “effacement.”
Khameni does not call for wiping out Israel with a nuclear bomb. He states that one of his fondest desires is to pray in Jerusalem. Instead, his plan is one of terrorism and pressure, keeping Israel from fighting back against Iran, the sponsor of terror, with the implicit threat of nuclear retaliation.
What he recommends is a long period of low-intensity warfare designed to make life unpleasant if not impossible for a majority of Israeli Jews so that they leave the country.
His calculation is based on the assumption that large numbers of Israelis have double-nationality and would prefer emigration to the United States and Europe to daily threats of death.
Iran has many allies in this effort, including the BDS movement in the United States. Cripple Israel economically, and her economically productive people will leave. Make the political cost of supporting Israel high. That will pave the way for an internationally-sponsored plebiscite engineered to produce a Muslim state:
Under Khamenei’s scheme, Israel, plus the West Bank and Gaza, would revert to a United Nations mandate for a brief period during which a referendum is held to create the new state of Palestine.
All Palestinians and their descendants, wherever they are, would be able to vote, while Jews “who have come from other places” would be excluded.
Double standards are inherent in Islamic thinking. Any land that once fell under Muslim control belongs to Muslims by right. So Israelis who only boast a few generations in Israel are excluded, while Arabs whose families once lived in Israel generations ago are automatically qualified.
Khamenei does not mention any figures for possible voters in his dream referendum. But studies by the Islamic Foreign Ministry in Tehran suggest that at least eight million Palestinians across the globe would be able to vote against 2.2 million Jews “acceptable” as future second-class citizens of new Palestine. Thus, the “Supreme Guide” is certain of the results of his proposed referendum.
With a $150 billion war chest, thanks to the Obama deal, and the prospect of oil exploration and other business expansion in Iran, there will be plenty of money available to subsidize Hezb’allah, Hamas, and other terror attacks against Israelis and Jews (such as the attack on the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires).
Khamenei boasts about the success of his plans to make life impossible for Israelis through terror attacks from Lebanon and Gaza. His latest scheme is to recruit “fighters” in the West Bank to set up Hezbollah-style units.
“We have intervened in anti-Israel matters, and it brought victory in the 33-day war by Hezbollah against Israel in 2006 and in the 22-day war between Hamas and Israel in the Gaza Strip,” he boasts.
Far from a spittle-flecked madman, Khameni is coldly calculating, and explains a plan that is already underway with considerable success. And he has many allies in this country, some of them in high places.
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