(The dear lad was Islamic, so how could he possibly have been involved in terrorism? Islam is the “religion of peace.” Or something.– DM)
The Obama administration insisted Monday that a Palestinian who was killed by the IDF while attempting to throw a Molotov cocktail at Israeli civilians is not a terrorist.
The Palestinian, a teenager with U.S. citizenship, was shot on Friday and buried this weekend wearing a green Hamas headband. The Obama administration said in a statement on Friday that it “expresses its deepest condolences to the family.”
At a State Department briefing today, Associated Press reporter Matt Lee asked spokesman Jen Psaki whether it is appropriate to offer deepest condolences to the family of someone killed while attempting to carry out an attack on civilians.
“There are reports … that [the Palestinian teenager] was throwing Molotov cocktails at cars on a highway, and I’m wondering, if that is the case, would you still have been so speedy in putting out a statement and offering your condolences to the family?” asked Lee. “The argument that is being made by some in Israel is that this kid was essentially a terrorist, and you don’t agree with that, I assume,” Lee continued.
“Correct, we don’t,” replied Psaki. Lee then asked whether the fact that the teenager was buried wearing a Hamas headband was “of concern at all.” Psaki replied, “I just don’t have any more on this particular case.”
Insanity, craziness or madness is a spectrum of behaviors characterized by certain abnormal mental or behavioral patterns.
Although the definition references “abnormal mental or behavioral patterns” [emphasis added], the behaviors here involved have become increasingly “normal.” Multicultural linguistics are part, but only part, of the problem.
Insane responses to Iran nukes, terrorism support and human rights
As the P5+1 negotiations continue under Obama’s guidance, Iran appears increasingly likely to get or keep nukes. Iran knows Obama.
The Iranian president’s senior advisor has called President Barack Obama “the weakest of U.S. presidents” and described the U.S. leader’s tenure in office as “humiliating,” according to a translation of the highly candid comments provided to the Free Beacon. [Emphasis added.]
. . . .
And with the deadline quickly approaching on talks between the U.S. and Iran over its contested nuclear program, Younesi’s denigrating views of Obama could be a sign that the regime in Tehran has no intent of conceding to America’s demands.
. . . .
“Americans witnessed their greatest defeats in Obama’s era: Terrorism expanded, [the] U.S. had huge defeats under Obama [and] that is why they want to compromise with Iran,” Younesi said.
. . . .
“We [the Islamic Republic] have to use this opportunity [of Democrats being in power in the U.S.], because if this opportunity is lost, in future we may not have such an opportunity again,” Younesi said. [Emphasis added.]
. . . .
The criticism of Obama echoes comments made recently by other world leaders and even former members of the president’s own staff, such as Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
Do enough of us, and of perhaps greater importance enough of our “leaders,” know Him as well as Iran does?
The P5+1 negotiations were a scam from the beginning and the scam continues, enhanced by perceived needs to work with the (Shiite) Islamic Republic of Iran to degrade the Sunni (but “non-Islamic”) Islamic State and otherwise to “degrade” terrorism.
The Iranian government is well known for its funding of terrorism. The U. S. Government has long been well aware of it.
The United States State Department describes Iran as an “active state sponsor of terrorism.”[2]US Secretary of StateCondoleezza Rice elaborated stating, “Iran has been the country that has been in many ways a kind of central banker for terrorism in important regions like Lebanon through Hezbollah in the Middle East, in the Palestinian Territories, and we have deep concerns about what Iran is doing in the south of Iraq.”[1]
So is the Obama Administration.
In July 2012, the United States State Department released a report on terrorism around the world in 2011. The report states that “Iran remained an active state sponsor of terrorism in 2011 and increased its terrorist-related activity” and that “Iran also continued to provide financial, material, and logistical support for terrorist and militant groups throughout the Middle East and Central Asia.” The report states that Iran has continued to provide “lethal support, including weapons, training, funding, and guidance, to Iraqi Shia militant groups targeting U.S. and Iraqi forces, as well as civilians,” despite pledging to support the stabilization of Iraq, and that the Qods Force provided training to the Taliban in Afghanistan on “small unit tactics, small arms, explosives, and indirect fire weapons, such as mortars, artillery, and rockets.” The report further states that Iran has provided weapons and training to the Assad regime in Syria which has launched a brutal crackdown on Syrian rebels, as well as providing weapons, training, and funding to Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, among others, and has assisted in rearming Hizballah. [Emphasis added.]
Iran is also remarkable for its failure to provide even minimal human rights. For example, it has been reported that Iran executed more than four hundred people during the first half of 2014. That’s more than two per day.
Despite Iran’s state anti-Semitism, the recent arrest of U.S. journalists, and the continued oppression of women, the Obama administration has been attempting a rapprochement with the Iranian regime. Fending off Iran hawks in Congress and the D.C. punditocracy, the administration has argued for a policy of constructive engagement, pursuing diplomacy over military action to halt Iran’s nuclear program. The execution of two gay men, while it may not be surprising, certainly doesn’t make that “engagement” any easier.
Iran’s cooperation also is seen as essential to managing the chaos in Iraq and the Islamic State. With U.S. airstrikes against the Sunni militants, on-off (now definitely off) support of Iraq’s Shiite (ex-) Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, and the possible disintegration of Iraq, this cooperation—or at least not overt opposition—is surely of more strategic importance than the latest human rights abuse. [Emphasis added.]
Iran’s support for terrorism, abysmal violation of even the most basic human rights — and what these Iranian characteristics suggest that Iran is likely to do with its nukes — appear to be deemed of no importance by the P5+1 negotiators.
Domestic terrorism
Terrorism is often labeled “workplace violence,” a “traffic accident“ or just about anything but Islamic. This is from Jihad Watch:
A traffic incident in Jerusalem. Another traffic incident in Canada just a few days ago. Odd coincidence: both drivers were devout Muslims who killed Infidels “in the name of Allah” (as the Canadian bad driver put it). Meanwhile, also in Canada, a mentally ill man shoots up the Parliament building and murders a soldier. And in New York City, a man wielding a hatchet injures several police officers. Another odd coincidence: both the Canadian mentally ill man and the New York hatchet-wielder were also devout Muslims. The father of the former waged jihad in Libya, and the latter called for armed revolt in the U.S. But you must put all of these odd coincidences out of your mind right now. We know that none of this can have anything to do with Islam, and that greasy Islamophobes are the only ones who think otherwise.
“Memo from US Consulate refers to Jerusalem terror attack as ‘traffic incident,’” by Itamar Eichner, Ynet News, October 24, 2014 (thanks to Hamish):
Hours after a Palestinian terrorist drove his car into a crowd waiting at a light rail station in Jerusalem, the US consulate in the city issued a memo referring to the attack as a “traffic incident”.
A three-month-old baby was killed and seven other people were wounded when Abdel Rahman a-Shaludi drove his car across incoming traffic to strike the people waiting at the station. The baby girl, Chaya Zissel Braun, had American citizenship.
The memo was sent to employees of the American consulate, which is based in East Jerusalem. It asks staff to report “any emergency.”
AnneinPT (Israel) provides an actual Associated Press news headline about the “traffic accident.” “Israeli police shoot man in east Jerusalem.”
Here’s how the AP, consistently with its customary reporting on things Israeli, might treat Palestinian rockets thwarted by Israel’s Iron Dome defense system: “Palestinian rockets damaged beyond repair by Israeli counter-measures.”
“Lone wolf” Islamic terrorists are exceedingly rare.
[N]umerous examples show that terrorist actors are almost always part of a network who were involved in recruiting and tasking terrorist activity. As Max Abrahms at Northeastern University has observed:
Since the advent of international terrorism in 1970, none of the 40 most lethal terrorist attacks has been committed by a person unaffiliated with some terrorist group, according to publicly available data from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, which is funded by the Department of Homeland Security and stored at the University of Maryland. In fact, lone wolves have carried out just two of the 1,900 most deadly terrorist incidents over the last four decades.
So why “lone wolf”? Simply, it was a mechanism promulgated by the CVE [countering violent extremism] industry, with willing cooperation from law enforcement and intelligence officials, to exonerate themselves when a terrorist attack happened. At its core is terror agnosticism: “There is possibly no way to predict who will turn to terrorism, so therefore we can’t be held responsible when it happens. Oh, and give us more money so we can better improve how we won’t be able to predict terror attacks.” [Insert added.]
It’s Islamic terrorism all the way down:
Yet there has been great reluctance to associate terrorist attacks with the “religion of peace.” Here are examples of media and official reactions to the recent terrorist attacks in Canada: “CBC’s Derek Stoffel tweeted: ‘Amid the speculation in the #OttawaShooting in #Canada, it’s important to remember #ISIS hasn’t shown interest in attacks abroad.’” However,
Stoffel should have known that in late September, the Islamic State’s spokesman, Abu Muhammad Al-Adnani, urged Muslims to murder non-Muslims in the West. “Rely upon Allah,” he thundered, “and kill him in any manner or way however it may be. Do not ask for anyone’s advice and do not seek anyone’s verdict.
“The hard-Left Vox reacted to the revelation that Zehaf-Bibeau was a Muslim by dismissing the fact as irrelevant.”
Not to be outdone in multicultural empathy,
In the wake of the shootings in Ottawa, the police chiefs of Toronto and Ottawa wrote to local Muslim leaders, assuring them of their good will and urging Muslims to contact them in case of a “backlash.” These politically correct cops appear to have learned their lesson well: after every jihad attack, Muslims are the victims, and need special reassurances.
Eventually, the Canadian terrorist attacks were labeled “terrorism.” Even the White House called them “despicable terrorist attacks,” without mentioning the words “Islam” or “Islamist.”
In 2008 we the people elected Obama as “our” President. We did it again in 2012. He was viewed by many as the one for whom they had been waiting.
He was seen as the “God of all things.”
Fortunately, some seem to be recovering from their dementia.
However, all too many are still infected with insanity and continue to be contagious. Here’s a video of James O’Keefe talking with college students about vote fraud:
Vote fraud is apparently good when done for a “good” purpose.
When Obama spoke about Democrats running for reelection appearing to desert but really supporting him, he said
“So this isn’t about my feelings being hurt. These are folks who are strong allies and supporters of me. And I tell them, I said, ‘You know what, you do what you need to win. I will be responsible for making sure that our voters turn out.'” [Emphasis added.]
He may not have intended to encourage voter fraud, but “you do what you need to win” may well have been taken seriously by Obamabots. It has, as a minimum, an unpleasant odor.
How many non-citizens participate in U.S. elections? More than 14 percent of non-citizens in both the 2008 and 2010 samples indicated that they were registered to vote. Furthermore, some of these non-citizens voted. Our best guess, based upon extrapolations from the portion of the sample with a verified vote, is that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of non-citizens voted in 2010. [Emphasis added.]
. . . .
Because non-citizens tended to favor Democrats (Obama won more than 80 percent of the votes of non-citizens in the 2008 CCES sample), we find that this participation was large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in a few close elections. Non-citizen votes could have given Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health-care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) won election in 2008 with a victory margin of 312 votes. Votes cast by just 0.65 percent of Minnesota non-citizens could account for this margin. It is also possible that non-citizen votes were responsible for Obama’s 2008 victory in North Carolina. Obama won the state by 14,177 votes, so a turnout by 5.1 percent of North Carolina’s adult non-citizens would have provided this victory margin.
. . . .
We also find that one of the favorite policies advocated by conservatives to prevent voter fraud appears strikingly ineffective. Nearly three quarters of the non-citizens who indicated they were asked to provide photo identification at the polls claimed to have subsequently voted. [Emphasis added.]
With early voting starting Thursday, North Carolina’s election board found 154 ineligible voters on its poll lists — and officials are examining thousands more questionable registrations.
The State Board of Elections said late Tuesday that more than 9,000 additional voters’ names are being checked for legal status. They do not expect to finish checking before early voting starts Thursday.
It’s necessary for Republicans to win outside the “margin of fraud,” and there have already been signs of voter fraud. In Arizona,
A Republican party official in the largest county in Arizona says surveillance tape shows a progressive Hispanic activist blatantly and openly engaging in vote fraud.
. . . .
Between 12:54 and 1:04, LaFaro said, he observed a man wearing a “Citizens for a Better Arizona” T-shirt loudly drop a box containing hundreds of early-voting ballots on a table.
Citizens for a Better Arizona is a progressive group.
The man then began “stuffing the ballot box,” LaFaro said. “I watched in amazement.”
In Chicago, Republican state representative candidate Jim Moynihan’s votes for Republican candidates, including for himself, were registered as having been cast for Democrats. He noticed the problem before pulling the ultimate lever and it was determined that the machine had been “improperly calibrated.” There is no indication in the linked article whether other machines were also “improperly calibrated” or whether any of them were examined to find out. Obviously, voters need to check for whom the machines say they have voted before pulling the lever. How many will bother to do so?
Since voter fraud may be insufficient, President Obama has diligently prevented voters from understanding what He intends to do about immigration soon after the election. Jonathan Turley, Esq., a “liberal” in the old fashioned sense rather than a leftist, wrote this about Obama’s refusal to disclose or even discuss His post-election plans for immigration “reform.”
[Y]esterday [October 23d] White House CBS reporter Major Garrett broke from the mainstream pack and pressed White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest on a report that the Administration has order material for a “surge” of immigration IDs of up to 9 million in one year. Ernest called the questions “crazy” and encouraged everyone not to speculate . . . before the election obviously. [Emphasis added.]
[T]his Administration is openly withholding any information in its plans for unilateral presidential action despite the President’s pledge to take action after the election and before the New Year — only a matter of weeks. It is a cynical decision to prevent voters from being fully informed of the plans in a major policy area. Regardless of how one feels about immigration policies, it should be condemned by people across the political spectrum. [Emphasis added.]
More importantly, the media has to show some independence from the White House in this and other stories. Garrett is one of the few such reporters to press the point. His extraordinary exchange however was not covered by the mainstream press and, once again, the stonewalling on the issue was again dropped. I expect given the record of the White House corp, such questioning from Garrett does seem “crazy.” After all, disclosure of such plans might harm the White House in the upcoming election and only a “crazy” reporter would pursue such a story. [Emphasis added.]
Get your excuses for not voting prepared if you like the status quo:
If you don’t like the status quo, vote and remind your friends to do so as well.
Conclusions
From the P5+1 negotiations with Iran and the failure of our “leaders” even to pause on their path to Iranian nukes due to Iran’s abysmal human rights record, its support for terrorism and the dangers Iran already poses for what’s left of the free and democratic world — and will pose in even greater measure with nukes — to rampant antisemitism to Islamic attacks on and persecution of Christians qua Christians, to domestic Islamic terrorism to voting fraud, far too many are either insane or extraordinarily devious. Those who appear to be insane either do not recognize the nature of our enemies or do not care. Some are perhaps complicit.
As this insidious form of insanity spreads we seem to have no antidote more powerful than reason and common sense, both increasingly rare. Will our enemies have to provide a more effective antidote in the form of an attack on the United States so severe, clear and obvious that insanity can no longer be ignored even by our lunatics?
(The Islamic problem cannot easily be resolved and to disparage the “religion of peace” would be wickedly un-multicultural. Yet there is a need to attack someone and/or something. Israel and the demon “climate change” are the easiest available targets. — DM)
Are we not passing through a very momentous period of history: with signs of the political decline and social decadence of Europe and the West, the clash between Israel and Islam, between Islam and Christianity, and with attendant results that could change the political — and religious — map of the world? The cutting edge of history is the crossroads we now face.
******************
There is a striking contrast today in world politics between the West’s submission to Islam and its assault upon Israel; this, ironically enough, occurs while we witness an Islamic assault upon Europe.
Unable to contend with Islam’s massive penetration of the continent, or to deal effectively and morally with its barbaric warfare against peoples in the Middle East, Europe has chosen to stalk Israel, embattled and attacked on many fronts.
The abandonment of the Jews in 1939-1945 in Europe and the murder of six million of them by the Germans represent a historical theme and modern chapter of the old hatred. Europe is not cleansed of this madness and fury; and it is incapable of seeing the justice and reasonableness in Israel’s existence and policies, bashing her over Jerusalem, settlements, human rights, and military operations. Nietzsche said that Europe would be a boring place without the intellectual ferment and cultural contributions of the Jews, but it would apparently be a happy place for some Europeans.
Now, with the blatant eruption of a reinvigorated anti-Semitism in Europe, the political campaign against Israel acquires its explicit racial underpinnings. The more vitriolic the attacks on Israel, running the spectrum from censure, defamation, to delegitimization, the more transparent the European culprit aflame with concentrated racist hatred of the Jews and their Jewish state.
The political backlash against Israel from the summer war in Gaza testifies to the moral bankruptcy of Europe and the loss of any equitable sense of justice. Now the Palestinian aggressor, undefeated and unrepentant, is to be rewarded with Gaza’s reconstruction. Mahmoud Abbas, unwilling to recognize the Jewish state of Israel, is to be rewarded with his own Palestinian state, according to sentiments in Sweden, Britain, and no doubt elsewhere.
The discourse of peace surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conundrum remains as divorced from morality and reality as could ever be imagined in this lopsided political universe. The laws of sociology and the lessons of history make the two-state solution a non-starter. After 47 years, the settlement map of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, their size and spread, preempt an Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 armistice lines. The idea of a Palestinian state over all of the territory is not in the demographic and geographic cards. Moreover, the embedded friction between the Jews and the Arabs, after so much bloodshed, enmity, and mistrust, is a visible obstacle to a mutually satisfactory agreement between them on all outstanding issues – borders and refugees, water and security, and Jerusalem. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is intractable and unsolvable according to the current modalities of proposed peace-making.
A frenzied Muslim fanaticism has galvanized the dormant emotional energies of an Islam bedeviled by old memories (like the Caliphate) and sectarian (Sunni-Shiite) divisions, always with a profound disdain for non-Muslims unworthy of life and dignity. The swirl of Islamic warfare began in Afghanistan and Pakistan, passed through Khomeini’s Iranian Islamic theocracy, penetrated northern Iraq and threatens Baghdad, took hold in eastern Syria, already with appeal and a foothold in Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel.
Meanwhile Europe lives in denial, paralyzed by multiculturalism and national self-immolation, hypnotized by the dogma of human rights, guilt-ridden by its colonial past, and hoping to mollify Muslims on their streets and neighborhoods by offering up the sacrifice of Christians and Jews in the Middle East to the Islamic god of wrath. But Islam seeks world conquest that includes the West as well.
What the Europeans ignore about the Arab-Israeli conflict and the long war is the precedent of 1948. When the Arabs attacked, and the West militarily embargoed Israel, the Zionists yet won a compelling victory in their ancient homeland; and a half a million Arabs became refugees, never to return. In 1967, the Arabs again declared their goal to be the annihilation of Israel; but Israel won, and another quarter of a million Arabs fled the country.
In 2014 the same scenario is unfolding. Pushed to the wall by Europeans who overlook and justify escalating domestic Arab violence and provocations, Israel will sooner or later need to unleash a severe response against the Muslims in the country who deny the right of Israel to exist, at all, and certainly as a Jewish and Zionist state. Newton’s political physics teach us that an action produces a reaction, and Hegel’s dialectics charted how a thesis leads to an antithesis, culminating in a new, rarely anticipated, synthesis. All this fondling of the Palestinians and coddling of Islam is putting in place a horrific threat to Israel, which may however evoke a welcome opportunity for deliverance and triumph.
Are we not passing through a very momentous period of history: with signs of the political decline and social decadence of Europe and the West, the clash between Israel and Islam, between Islam and Christianity, and with attendant results that could change the political — and religious — map of the world? The cutting edge of history is the crossroads we now face.
(Rather than chopping the tree down, we are watering and fertilizing it. — DM)
Arab protesters wave Islamic flags in front of the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv, Israel / AP
Six years into the Obama presidency, not only has the vocabulary of jihad been removed from official rhetoric and counterterrorism policy, but troops have been removed from Iraq, troops are withdrawing from Afghanistan, the administration has condemned Israeli settlement activity while coddling Hamas’ backers in Ankara and Doha, “torture” has been banned, the White House intends to close Guantanamo unilaterally, Hosni Mubarak was abandoned in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the president is desperate for a partnership with the Islamic theocracy of Iran.
We must recognize the global and unitary nature of the threat. We must recognize that there is only one way to deal with a poison tree: You chop it down.
***************
Last month, addressing the U.N. General Assembly, Benjamin Netanyahu made a connection between the Islamic State and Hamas. These terrorist entities, Netanyahu said, have a lot in common. Separated by geography, they nonetheless share ideology and tactics and goals: Islamism, terrorism, the destruction of Israel, and the establishment of a global caliphate.
And yet, Netanyahu observed, the very nations now campaigning against the Islamic State treated Hamas like a legitimate combatant during last summer’s Israel-Gaza war. “They evidently don’t understand,” he said, “that ISIS and Hamas are branches of the same poisonous tree.”
The State Department dismissed Netanyahu’s metaphor. “Obviously, we’ve designated both as terrorist organizations,” said spokesman Jen Psaki. “But ISIL poses a different threat to Western interests and to the United States.”
Psaki was wrong, of course. She’s always wrong. And, after the events of the last 48 hours, there ought not to be any doubt as to just how wrong she was. As news broke that a convert to Islam had murdered a soldier and stormed the Canadian parliament, one read of another attack in Jerusalem, where a Palestinian terrorist ran his car over passengers disembarking from light rail, injuring seven, and killing 3-month-old Chaya Zissel Braun, who held a U.S. passport.
Islamic State, al Qaeda, Hamas—these awful people are literally baby killers. And yet they produce a remarkable amount of dissension, confusion, willful ignorance, and moral equivalence on the part of the men and women who conduct U.S. foreign policy. “ISIL is not ‘Islamic,’” President Obama said of the terrorist army imposing sharia law across Syria and Iraq. “Obviously, we’re shaken by it,” President Obama said of the attack in Canada. “We urge all sides to maintain calm and avoid escalating tensions in the wake of this incident,” the State Department said of the murder of a Jewish child.
“Not Islamic,” despite the fact that the Caliphate grounds its barbarous activities in Islamic law. “Shaken,” not stirred to action. “All sides,” not the side that targets civilians again and again and again. The evasions continue. They create space for the poison tree to grow.
The persistent denial of the ideological unity of Islamic terrorism—the studied avoidance of politically incorrect facts that has characterized our response to the Ft. Hood shooting, the Benghazi attack, the Boston Marathon bombing, the march of the caliphate across Syria and Iraq, and the crimes of Hamas—is not random. Behind it is a set of ideas with a long history, and with great purchase among the holders of graduate degrees who staff the Department of Justice, the National Security Council, Foggy Bottom, and the diplomatic corps. These ideas are why, in the words of John McCain, the terrorists “are winning, and we’re not.”
A report by Katherine Gorka of the Council on Global Security, “The Bad Science Behind America’s Counter-Terrorism Strategy,” analyzes the soil from which the poison tree draws strength. Since the Iranian revolution of 1979, Gorka writes, U.S. policymakers have faced a dilemma: “how to talk about Islam in a way that is instructive in dealing with Muslims who are enemies but not destructive to those who are friends.” For decades, the preferred solution has been to declare America’s friendship with Islam, and to distinguish between jihadists and everyday Muslims.
One of Gorka’s earliest examples of this policy comes from former Assistant Secretary of State Edward Djerejian, who said in 1992, “The U.S. government does not view Islam as the next ‘ism’ confronting the West or threatening world peace.” Similar assurances were uttered by officials in the Clinton administration, by Clinton himself, and by President George W. Bush. The policy was meant to delegitimize terrorism by denying the terrorists’ claim that they are acting according to religious precepts. “Policymakers believed that by tempering their language with regard to Islam, they might forestall further radicalization of moderate Muslims and indeed even potentially win moderates into the American circle of friendship.”
George W. Bush, Gorka notes, combined his rhetorical appeals to moderate Muslims with denunciations of the immorality of terrorism and illiberalism. And yet, for the government at large, downplaying the religious and ideological component to terrorist activities became an end in itself.
The Global War on Terror was renamed the “global struggle against violent extremism.” In 2008 the Department of Homeland Security published a lexicon of terrorism that said, “Our terminology must be properly calibrated to diminish the recruitment efforts of extremists who argue that the West is at war with Islam.” State Department guidelines issued in 2008 said, “Never use the terms jihadist or mujahedeen to describe a terrorist.”
Then came Obama. As a candidate, he stressed his experiences in Indonesia and Pakistan. He told Nick Kristof of the New York Times that the call of the muezzin is “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.” In one of his first major addresses as president, he traveled to Cairo to inaugurate a new beginning with the Muslim world. His counterterrorism adviser, now director of the CIA, called jihad a “legitimate tenet of Islam,” and referred to Jerusalem as “Al Quds.”
The change in the manner in which the government treated Islamism was profound. “Whereas the 9/11 Commission report, published under the presidency of George W. Bush in July 2004 as a bipartisan product, had used the word Islam 322 times, Muslim 145 times, jihad 126 times, and jihadist 32 times,” Gorka writes, “the National Intelligence Strategy of the United States, issued by the Obama administration in August 2009, used the term Islam 0 times, Muslim 0 times, jihad 0 times.” The omission is stunning.
For Bush, terrorism consisted of immoral deeds committed by evil men animated by anti-Western ideology. Obama downplayed such judgmental language. He preferred an interpretation of terrorism as discrete acts of wrongdoing by extremists, driven by resentments and grievances such as the American failure to establish a Palestinian state, American support for secular Arab dictatorships, American forces in the Middle East, U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the terrorist prison at Guantanamo Bay, and, infamously, an anti-Islamic YouTube video. “The logic that follows,” Gorka writes, “is that once those grievances are addressed, the extremism will subside.”
Some logic. Six years into the Obama presidency, not only has the vocabulary of jihad been removed from official rhetoric and counterterrorism policy, but troops have been removed from Iraq, troops are withdrawing from Afghanistan, the administration has condemned Israeli settlement activity while coddling Hamas’ backers in Ankara and Doha, “torture” has been banned, the White House intends to close Guantanamo unilaterally, Hosni Mubarak was abandoned in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the president is desperate for a partnership with the Islamic theocracy of Iran.
The result? The Islamic State rules Mosul, threatens Baghdad, and has conquered half of Syria as Bashar Assad gasses the other half. Libya has collapsed into tribal warfare. Egypt has gone from military dictatorship to Islamic authoritarianism and back again. An Islamic strongman rules Turkey, Hamas murders with impunity, Al Jazeera broadcasts anti-American and anti-Semitic propaganda around the world, and the Taliban are biding time in Afghanistan. Not only is al Qaeda not on the run, it governs more territory than at any point since 2001. It is once again the “strong horse,” attracting jihadists to its crusade who inevitably turn their attention to the West.
“Without an ideological catalyst,” Gorka writes, “grievances remain merely grievances. They are dull and banal. They only transform into acts of transcendental violence when ignited by Sayyid Qutb or Osama bin Laden or Abu Bakr al Baghdadi. It is the narrative of Holy War that gives value to local grievances, not the other way around.” Before we can hope to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the Islamic State or the al Qaeda movement, we must recognize the poison tree of jihad for what it is. We must recognize the global and unitary nature of the threat. We must recognize that there is only one way to deal with a poison tree: You chop it down.
A three-month-old girl was killed Wednesday afternoon and eight others were injured when a car crashed into a crowd at a light rail station in Jerusalem in what officials said was a terrorist attack.
The suspect, identified by an Israeli official as a member of terror group Hamas, attempted to flee the scene on foot and was shot and badly hurt by police, a police spokesperson said.
“A private car which arrived from the direction of the French Hill junction hit a number of pedestrians who were on the pavement and injured nine of them,” police spokeswoman Luba Samri said in a statement.
“Initial indications suggest this is a hit-and-run terror attack,” Samri said.
The baby, Chaya Zissel Braun, died at the nearby Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus a few hours after the incident. A spokesperson for Israeli rescue service Magen David Adom said a 60-year-old woman and seven other people, including the baby’s parents, were also lightly and moderately wounded in the attack.
Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat said that both Chaya Zissel Braun and her parents were American citizens. US State Department Spokeswoman Marie Harf couldn’t immediately confirm whether the family was American, but condemned the attack.
The alleged attacker is Abdelrahman al-Shaludi, a former Palestinian prisoner from the flashpoint neighborhood of Silwan.
The Palestinian terrorist who ran over 8 people in Jerusalem this evening, injuring them and killing a baby, was a member of Hamas.
a baby stroller at the scene of a terror attack at a Jerusalem light rail station, by Ammunition Hill (Photo credit: Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
After the incident, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke with Internal Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch, Police Commissioner Yohanan Danino and Shin Bet chief Yoram Cohen to receive a briefing about what happened. Netanyahu ordered increased security in the capital.
“This is how [PA President Abbas’s] partners in government act, the same Abbas who just a few days ago incited attacks on Jews in Jerusalem,” Netanyahu said in a statement.
As if this terrible news were not bad enough, it takes an even more tragic turn, as Arutz Sheva reports:
The grandfather of the three-month-old girl murdered in this evening’s terrorist attack in Jerusalem has issued a heartbreaking statement in response.
The baby girl, named Chaya Ziso was among nine people wounded when an Arab terrorist mowed down pedestrians with his car at a light rail station in Jerusalem’s Ammunition Hill. She succumbed to her wounds shortly afterwards; another victim suffered serious wounds while the remainder were moderately or lightly injured.
“Her parents waited for a child for many years during which they did not merit to have children,” said grandfather Shimon Halperin. “Today they were coming back from praying at the Kotel (Western Wall) and a terrorist came and ran over their baby.”
He told of her parents’ joy after she was born, and described how he enjoyed playing with his granddaughter during her tragically short life. He and his wife had just arrived in Israel from the US to meet his grandchild, but only had a few short hours with her.
May Hashem avenge the blood of little Chaya Zissel Braun, and may He bring comfort to her grieving parents and family amongst the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem. May all those wounded have a speedy and full recovery.
But while we Jews await Hashem’s vengeance, the Palestinians have no such compunction. Instead of keeping a low profile, and maybe even apologizing for such a dastardly attack, what do our “peace partners” do? Why, they riot and throw firebombs of course!
A few hours after the suspected attack, dozens of masked Palestinian youths blocked roads in Silwan, set tires alight and fired off firecrackers. Clashes were reported with police forces in Silwan and Issawiya. One police officer was reported injured by a firebomb in Silwan.
A Hamas spokesperson said in response to the reports that if indeed it was a terrorist attack, then it was a natural response to Israel’s actions in Jerusalem, particularly Jewish incursions into the al-Aqsa Mosque, Israel Radio reported.
Just imagine if we Jews were to avenge ourselves on the Arabs for their desecration of our holiest site in a similar manner. There would be no Palestinians left! Trying to justify a terrorist attack against civilians is simply beyond the pale. Except for the Palestinians of course.
As for the Americans – since the baby and her parents are American citizens – what was their reaction? You can guess it I’m sure (from the previous link):
US State Department Spokeswoman Marie Harf couldn’t immediately confirm whether the family was American, but condemned the attack.
“The Israelis are currently looking into the incident. We are in touch with them and we’ll see what more information we can get, also urge all sides to exercise restraint and maintain calm,” Harf said.
They should have addressed that demand to the rioting Palestinians, not to the Israelis who show nothing BUT restraint.
In truth we must stop restraining ourselves. It has only brought more terror and devastation upon ourselves. It’s about time we stood up for ourselves and fought back with our full strength. It’s time Israel and our leaders stopped fearing the nations and took responsibility for our own safety.
In a particularly nasty piece of reporting which has now gone viral round the internet, AP reported the incident thus (via Israellycool):
How AP reported the terror attack in Jerusalem
Words fail me – and everyone else. As Brian of London remarks:
It’s hard to describe how evil this is. It immediately (and automatically) was pushed out by Yahoo! and hundreds of other sites that just run any AP story without modification.
It’s all over Google News and the Middle Eastern sites are loving it.
Many people are blaming Yahoo! That’s not entirely fair, the real evil was done by the headline writers at AP. It matters not that they’ve changed the headline now (many times). The damage is done.
The AP need to be kicked out of Israel. I’m too angry to even link to all the pieces I should.
A twitter response has been gaining steam with the ironic use of the hashtag #HowAPWouldReport:
Thus we have the following examples intended to embarrass AP:
All fun and snarkiness aside, this is no laughing matter. Seth Mandell at Commentary Magazine call this a case study in media bias:
If you want to understand the Arab-Israeli conflict, those two stories are a good introduction. The Israeli government built rail access to Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem to better integrate them into Israeli society. Arab Jerusalemites have made the very instruments of Israeli outreach and integration into targets of sporadic violence.
…
The Associated Press got plenty of attention for its initial headline of the story: “Israeli police shoot man in east Jerusalem.”
…
But the AP wasn’t alone. Scanning the BBC, I had noticed their initial headline (since changed as well): “Nine hurt as car hits pedestrians at Jerusalem station.” As the Jerusalem Post’s Seth Frantzman pointed out, the headline on the version he saw, and took a screenshot of, was “Car hits people at Jerusalem station.” Either the BBC was deliberately downplaying the story, or the editor in charge thought he was posting a story about an evil car magically becoming sentient only to lash out, like Black Sabbath’s Iron Man, at the humans around him.
Later in the day, after executives at the BBC located a shred of integrity hidden somewhere in the sofa cushions, that was changed as well. It now reads: “Jerusalem car ‘attack’ kills baby at rail station.” I say “a shred of integrity” because the BBC still saw fit to wrap “attack” in scare quotes. What are the options, here? Was it a car “love tap”? It was a terrorist attack, perpetrated by a member of a terrorist organization.
Addressing the Americans’ call for restraint, Mandell says:
I suppose if the driver of the car had said something mean about John Kerry, she’d really let him have it.
In any event, all sides are not exercising restraint and maintaining calm. Only the Israeli side is. The Palestinians are agitating for more, relying on an international press to obfuscate and deploy scare quotes as needed.
And that encapsulates the dangers of anti-Israel media bias. The Palestinians are always excused, the Israelis are always accused – and are demanded to show restraint. This what encourages the Palestinians in their maximalist demands and their rejection of anything resembling peace and normalization. And they are never required to pay the price for their rejectionism.
If ever there is a reason for the “cycle of violence” between Israel and the Middle East, Western encouragement is one of the major ones.
(Please watch the Kerry video at the bottom, or at least the part about Israel, “Palestine” and world peace beginning at 11:20. The world is probably not completely insane — yet: Kerry did not blame Israel or the Jews for the Holocaust and World War II. — DM)
Kerry’s scapegoating of Israel has become a dangerous pattern, one that is indicative of a worldview that underlies his behavior and his decisions with respect to the Jewish State.
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The operative question for the US State Department now appears to be, is there anything left that John Kerrywon’tblame on the Jews?
Earlier this year, the Secretary of State famously sat before Congress and blamed Israel for the failure of the peace talks that he pushed so hard for, even though, as was subsequently revealed, it was Kerry’s own miscommunications that doomed the talks from the start. Prior to that, he had implied that if a third intifada started, it would be Israel’s doing. Now it seems that, at a State Department event for the festival of Eid al-Adha onThursday, Kerry has blamed Israel for the rise of ISIS.
Kerry’s pronouncement calls to mind this satire piece from PreOccupied Territory, titled “Free Will Is Only For White People,” and “attributed” to Kerry’s former right-hand man and Qatar-stooge Martin Indyk:
Since Arabs, as nonwhites, lack free will, the only ethical method of achieving change is to demand concessions from Israel. A society or individual with genuine volition and sense of right and wrong could be held accountable for translating political grievances into the bombings of cafes and buses, but that is not how we, or our European allies, view the Palestinians. They have no choice but to resort to brutality, since that is their nature.
Satire. Except, it’s not. Kerry’s various statements about the peace talks, Palestinian terrorism, or ISIS all remove the agency of the actors involved. The individuals who join ISIS — at least those who are adults and not teenagers — do so of their own accord. They have agency, and they alone are responsible for their own actions. Kerry would never excuse the actions of a rapist on the ground that he had been provoked or led on by his victim. He should never justify the actions of the most depraved terrorists on the ground that they have a political gripe.
Taking this mentality a step further and making the claim that Israel’s actions towards the Palestinians have anything to do with the rise of ISIS requires a logical leap into the absurd. Kerry claimed that “there wasn’t a leader I met with in the region who didn’t raise with me spontaneously the need to try to get peace between Israel and the Palestinians, because it was a cause of recruitment and of street anger and agitation.” Even setting aside the issue of holding individuals to account for their own actions, one still must wonder, why Kerry would take such assertions at face value. ISIS directs its jihad against Christians, Yazidis, Kurds, and other Muslims but, somewhat surprisingly, it has not attacked Israel. If Israel were the source of ISIS rage, wouldn’t ISIS have attacked Israel? ISIS’s gripe, however, is with all of western society, not with Israel. And it recruits from Europe and the US, as well as from the Mideast. The suggestion that Israel has caused ISIS makes about as much sense as the suggestion that Israel has caused global warming. There simply is no cause-and-effect relationship.
The State Department’s division of black-is-white-and-day-is-night, in the person of Deputy Spokesperson Marie Harf, has of course attempted to walk back Kerry’s comments, saying, Kerry “didn’t make a link between growth of ISIL and Israel, period.” But this is not a case of he said, she said, and it is not a case of misplaced context. Kerry’s entire speech is on theState Department website for anyone to see:
As I went around and met with people in the course of our discussions about the ISIL coalition, the truth is we – there wasn’t a leader I met with in the region who didn’t raise with me spontaneously the need to try to get peace between Israel and the Palestinians, because it was a cause of recruitment and of street anger and agitation that they felt – and I see a lot of heads nodding – they had to respond to. And people need to understand theconnection of that.
That is to say, that in the context of discussions regarding ISIL/ISIS, other Arab leaders raised the issue of the Palestinians, and Kerry feels that people need to understand the connection. To say that this is not an attempt to link ISIS to the Palestinian issue is the most obfuscatory double-speak. For those who have the stomach for it, you can watch the video yourself, embedded below. The relevant comments start at about 11:20. Note the way that Kerry uses hand gestures for extra emphasis when he says “understand the connection.”
Kerry’s scapegoating of Israel has become a dangerous pattern, one that is indicative of a worldview that underlies his behavior and his decisions with respect to the Jewish State. Although Jeff Goldberg wrote persuasively in 2013 that “the past two years have proved the theory of linkage [i.e., the theory that the Mideast would be stable if the Israeli-Palestiniandispute were solved] to be comprehensively false,” Kerry appears unwilling to move on from it and to accept a more reality-based perspective. It is no wonder, then, that his actions in the Mideast have been, to put it kindly, ineffective.
In the same speech, Kerry also spoke about introspection on the Muslim and Jewish holidays. It seems that Kerry would benefit from some introspection of his own. In doing so, he might consider that, had he not been so obsessively focused on Israel and its real or perceived failings, he might have woken up to the ISIS threat sooner. He might also consider his own department’s definition of anti-semitism: “Accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group, the state of Israel, or even for acts committed by non-Jews.” Kerry’s scapegoating of Israel for his own failures and for those of others is one of the most traditional forms of anti-Semitism around.
Throughout its history, Hamas, like ISIS, has been committed to the concept of the global caliphate, which it plans to help construct by creating its own Islamic emirate on the ruins of the State of Israel.
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In a recent speech, Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Ron Prosor mentioned the central role of Qatar in supporting international terrorist organizations. Money flowing from Qatar to Hamas, for example, paid for the terrorist attack tunnels dug from the Gaza Strip under the security fence into Israeli territory, and for the thousands of rockets fired at Israeli civilian targets in both the distant and recent past. In response, State Department spokesperson Marie Harf rushed to Qatar’s defense, claiming it had an important, positive role in finding a solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Qatar’s funding for Islamist terrorist organizations all over the world is an open secret known to every global intelligence agency, including the CIA. It was exposed by Wikileaks, which clearly showed that funds from Qatar were transferred to al-Qaida. Qatar also funds the terrorist movements opposing the Assad regime in Syria, such as the Al-Nusra Front, encourages anti-Egyptian terrorism in the Sinai Peninsula and within Egypt itself, and is involved in Islamic terrorism in Africa and other locations. It accompanies its involvement in terrorism targeting Israel and Egypt (through the Muslim Brotherhood) with vicious and inflammatory propaganda on its Al-Jazeera TV channel.
Qatar also spends millions of dollars supporting the Islamic Movement in Israel, a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood headed by Sheikh Ra’ed Salah. The Islamic Movement is responsible for ongoing acts of provocation on the Temple Mount and in Judea and Samaria, and incites the entire Islamic world against Israel, claiming that the Jews are trying to destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque and replace it with the Jewish Temple. The incitement continued even as the Islamic Movement’s sister movement, Hamas, fired rockets at Jerusalem and endangered both the mosques on the Temple Mount and Jerusalem’s sites sacred to Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
As Qatar’s representative, the Islamic Movement, which has not yet been outlawed in Israel, contributed to Hamas what it could during Operation Protective Edge by instigating riots, blocking roads and seeking to foment a third intifada which, according to the plan, would be joined by Israeli Arabs to augment the deaths of thousands of Israelis killed by rockets and the mass murders through the attack tunnels planned for the eve of the Jewish New Year.
In his recent UN speech, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rebutted Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ accusations of Israeli “genocide” of the Palestinian people. He reminded his audience of Hamas’ use of Gazan civilians as human shields and of the rockets fired to attack specifically civilian Israeli targets. Unfortunately, he did not mention the Hamas charter, which calls for the murder of all the Jews. The fact that Abbas now heads a national consensus government in which Hamas is a full partner commits him to the slaughter of the Jewish people – a true genocide – and it is to the disgrace of the international community that such an individual was permitted to address the UN instead of being tried for war crimes.
In fact, the similarities between Hamas and ISIS are clearly stated in the Hamas charter, which defines Hamas as part of the Muslim Brotherhood’s global Islamic movement. One of its objectives is to fight “infidel Christian imperialism” and its Zionist emissaries in Israel in order to impose the Sharia, Islamic religious law, on the world. According to the charter’s paragraph 7, Hamas’ intention is to slaughter every Jew, as ordered by Muhammad and those who accept his legacy. That is the basis for the threat issued by ISIS “Caliph,” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, that under his leadership, Islam will “drown America in blood.”
Throughout its history, Hamas, like ISIS, has been committed to the concept of the global caliphate, which it plans to help construct by creating its own Islamic emirate on the ruins of the State of Israel. Since its founding, Hamas has attacked Israel and murdered thousands of its citizens exactly as ISIS has attacked and murdered “infidels.” They share the same slogans, with “There is no god but Allah” and “Allah, Prophet Muhammad” inscribed on their flags and headbands. Hamas terrorists have blown themselves up in Israel’s coffee shops, hotels, restaurants, buses, malls and markets, wherever there are large concentrations of civilians. The way Hamas executed suspected collaborators during the final days of Operation Protective Edge bore the hallmarks of the al-Qaida execution of Daniel Pearl and the ISIS beheading of James Foley and others.
In the decades during which Hamas has carried out a continual series of deadly terrorist attacks against Israel, wearing the same “Allah, Prophet, Muhammad” headbands as ISIS terrorists, the international community rarely voices its support for Israel, or takes into account that by defending itself Israel also defends the West, which has failed to understand that “political Islam” inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood was setting up shop in the free world’s backyard and that the ticking bomb was set to go off sooner than expected. The West has not clearly condemned Qatar for openly supporting Hamas and its terrorist activities against Israel or demanded that it stop.
While Israel responded to Hamas’ rocket attacks on civilian targets to keep thousands, if not tens of thousands, of Israeli civilians from being killed, the international community demanded “proportionality.” That requirement kept Israel from responding as it should have and encouraged Hamas to fire ever more rockets at “military targets” such as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. When Israel built its security fence to keep Hamas suicide bombers from infiltrating into Israeli territory to blow themselves up in crowds of civilians, the international community opposed it, rushed to embrace the Palestinians’ vocabulary of “racism” and “apartheid,” and willingly played into the hands of Hamas and Abbas. This reaction occurred although Israel is the only truly democratic country in the Middle East, where Jews and Arabs can live in peace without “apartheid.”
Today President Obama says he “underestimated” the threat posed by ISIS, while Israel has been warning the world of extremist military Islam for at least a decade, as Netanyahu warned the world of a nuclear Iran in his UN speech.
The international community has been curiously silent about the genuine apartheid in the Arab states neighboring Israel. There, descendants of the original 1948 Palestinian refugees, by now in their fourth generation, still live in refugee camps, do not have citizenship, and are excluded from jobs and social benefits. Israel, however, absorbed hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees, many of them destitute, who fled Europe and were expelled from the Arab countries when the state was founded, and were given citizenship and enjoy full rights, as do the Arabs who remained in Israel after the War of Independence.
Israel, which has nothing against the Palestinian people, would like to see the Gaza Strip rebuilt for both humanitarian reasons and to give Hamas something to lose. Radical Islamic elements around the globe, however, including Hamas, ISIS, al-Qaida, the Al-Nusra Front and Hizballah, all financed by Qatar, do not want to see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict resolved. They all have the same global agenda, based on fueling the conflict to unite Islam around it, under their leadership.
Therefore, Qatar continues to support global Islamic terrorism. On Sept. 13, Qatar paid the Al-Nusra Front a ransom of $20 million to free abducted UN soldiers from Fiji. The world praised Qatar for its philanthropy, but in effect, it was a brilliant act of manipulation and fraud, both filling the Al-Nusra Front’s coffers and representing itself as the Fijians’ savior. Qatar is using the same underhanded trick in the Gaza Strip. After sending Hamas millions of dollars to fund its anti-Israeli terrorist industry, itpledged $1 billion to help rebuild the Gaza Strip during last weekend’s conference in Cairo.
While the world hopes Operation Protective Edge was the last round of Palestinian-Israeli violence, senior Hamas figures reiterate their position of gearing up to fight Israel again. Not one Hamas leader is willing to agree to a full merger with the Palestinian Authority to establish a genuine unified Palestinian leadership. Hamas rejects even the idea of disarming or demilitarization as part of an agreement to rebuild the Gaza Strip and promote the peace process. Unfortunately, no one has suggested it as a pre- condition for any U.S. dollars that will be contributed to the reconstruction of Gaza.
All that is left now is to hope that the billions of dollars poured into the Gaza Strip for its rebuilding will be accompanied by the disarmament of Hamas and the establishment of an honest mechanism for overseeing the money and materials Egypt and Israel allow into the Gaza Strip. It is imperative that they not be diverted to rebuild Hamas’ terrorist infrastructure and tunnels, or to bribe UNRWA officials to look the other way, as has happened so often in the past. There is every indication that only Hamas and Qatar know whether there is anything to justify that hope.
Dr. Reuven Berko has a Ph.D. in Middle East studies, is a commentator on Israeli Arabic TV programs, writes for the Israeli daily newspaper Israel Hayom and is considered one of Israel’s top experts on Arab affairs.
It’s a two-step charade. First, since the UN has no definition of terrorism, state sponsors of terrorism happily denounce “terrorism” at the very same time as they promote it. Second, the terrorist funders and weapons suppliers redirect the world’s attention to the supposed “root causes” of terrorism.
On Oct. 7, at the legal committee meeting at UN headquarters, Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon listed “root causes that may lead to radicalism such as . . . poverty, social exclusion and marginalization” along with “Islamophobia.”
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani played the same card in an address to the General Assembly in September when he whined about “Iranophobia.
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While we are looking for terrorists sneaking across borders, lurking in mosques and holed up in caves, pro-terrorist ideology is spreading across America and around the globe — disseminated in plain sight from the United Nations, in the heart of New York City.
Over the past week, the UN’s top legal committee — a General Assembly body where all 193 states are represented — met to discuss terrorism. The webcasts are broadcast globally in multiple languages. The documents are translated and disseminated on a mammoth website free of charge.
It’s a two-step charade. First, since the UN has no definition of terrorism, state sponsors of terrorism happily denounce “terrorism” at the very same time as they promote it. Second, the terrorist funders and weapons suppliers redirect the world’s attention to the supposed “root causes” of terrorism.
Conveniently, the catalog of root causes of terrorism dreamed up in these circles never includes religiously driven bigotry doled out by anti-Semites and misogynist, homophobic sociopaths — whose need to torture, rape and kill requires no deep explanation.
A quick moral inversion, and the terrorist becomes the victim.
The UN was full of such dangerous canards last week.
On Oct. 7, at the legal committee meeting at UN headquarters, Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon listed “root causes that may lead to radicalism such as . . . poverty, social exclusion and marginalization” along with “Islamophobia.”
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani played the same card in an address to the General Assembly in September when he whined about “Iranophobia.”
Iran is the leading state sponsor of terrorism. And to the organization’s great shame, Iran is also the president of the so-called “Non-Aligned Movement” — a group of nations routinely aligned against the West. As such, Iran speaks for 120 UN member states — a majority of the 193 UN countries.
Here’s the Iranian speech to the UN legal beagles that was webcast Oct. 7: “Terrorism should not be equated with the legitimate struggle of peoples under colonial or alien domination and foreign occupation for self-determination and national liberation.”
Here’s state sponsor of terrorism North Korea on the same day: “Domination and interference, poverty and social inequality, and racial or religious discrimination constitute the root cause of terrorism. International efforts to put an end to terrorism should be preceded by removing the root cause of terrorism.”
All 56 member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation have signed on to the Islamic Convention on Combating International Terrorism, which gives a green light to killing Israelis, Americans and anybody else deemed fair game. The treaty says: “Peoples’ struggle, including armed struggle against foreign occupation, aggression, colonialism and hegemony, aimed at liberation and self-determination . . . shall not be considered a terrorist crime.”
Speaking on behalf of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation on Oct. 7, Egypt reiterated this pro-terror exemption clause. Over the course of Oct. 7 and 8, the UN trumpeted support for the Iranian and Organization of Islamic Cooperation call to arms from half of all the speakers.
Compounding the efficacy of this outrage, unfortunately, is the Obama administration. With great fanfare, on Sept. 24,, President Obama chaired a Security Council meeting that unanimously adopted a resolution on foreign terrorist fighters.
But the only reason everybody could agree that “terrorism constitutes one of the most serious threats to international peace and security” was because terrorism was left undefined.
Moreover, the Security Council didn’t just denounce terrorism. It demanded we “address the conditions conducive to the spread of terrorism.” Next it insisted we “counter the violent, extremist narrative that can incite terrorist acts.” And then it ordered us to “address the conditions conducive to the spread of violent extremism.”
In other words, Obama sold us an infinite regression. Because at the UN, the buck never stops with radical Islamists or the governments that support them.
(The UN’s “responsibility to protect” doctrine now applies principally to groups favored by the multicultural international community, such as the “Palestinians” from wicked Israel, disfavored by the international community. Those needing protection from Islamic terror must look elsewhere. But where? The U.S. of Obama?– DM)
Illustration on the illusion of “Responsibility to Protect” by Linas Garsys
[I]’s ludicrous to propose that the U.N. Security Council — whose permanent members include neo-Soviet Russia and anti-democratic China — should be vested with the authority to pass judgment on the legitimacy of such missions.
While the Islamic State is currently attracting the most attention, it is the Islamic Republic of Iran — which has been using proxies to kill Americans on and off for the past 35 years — that could soon have nuclear weapons as well as missiles to deliver them to targets anywhere in the world. Hezbollah and other terrorist groups offer an alternative means of delivery. Iran’s radical Shia rulers are more sophisticated than the Sunni jihadis displaying disembodied heads on pikes. However, their goals differ little from those of their rivals.
[T]he notion of an international community that can prevent or halt mass atrocities is a chimera.
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Remember R2P? Not to be confused with R2-D2 (a robotic character in the “Star Wars” movies), “Responsibility to Protect” was an international “norm” proposed by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan following the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and the mass murders in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica a year later. The idea was for the “international community” to assume an obligation to intervene, militarily if necessary, to prevent or halt mass atrocities.
Why has R2P not been invoked to stop the slaughters being carried out in Syria and Iraq? Why isn’t it mentioned in regard to the Syrian-Kurdish city of Kobani, which, as I write this, may soon be overrun by barbarians fighting for what they call the Islamic State?
Here’s the story: In 2009, Mr. Annan’s successor, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, issued a report on “implementing” R2P. The foreign-policy establishment cheered. For example, Louise Arbour, a former U.N. high commissioner for human tights, called R2P “the most important and imaginative doctrine to emerge on the international scene for decades.” Anne-Marie Slaughter, an academic who served under Hillary Clinton at the State Department, went further, hailing R2P as “the most important shift in our conception of sovereignty since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.”
In 2011, President Obama cited R2P as his primary justification for using military force to prevent Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi from attacking the opposition stronghold of Benghazi.
If that was the apogee of R2P, the nadir was not far off. The intervention in Libya has led to chaos and bloodshed with no end in sight. Meanwhile, in Syria, four years ago this spring, Bashar Assad brutally cracked down on peaceful protesters.
Mr. Obama made Mr. Assad’s removal American policy but overruled the recommendation of his national security advisers to assist Syrian nationalist opposition groups. Civil war erupted. Self-proclaimed jihadis from around the world flocked to Syria to fight on behalf of the Sunnis. The opposition was soon dominated by the al Nusra Front, an al Qaeda affiliate, and the Islamic State (also known as ISIS or ISIL), whose leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, broke with al Qaeda and, audaciously, declared himself caliph, or supreme leader.
As for Mr. Assad, he is supported by the Islamic Republic of Iran, deploying both its elite Quds Force (designated in 2007 by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization) and Hezbollah, a Lebanon-based militia loyal to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Russia also backs Mr. Assad, even supplying on-the-ground military intelligence specialists.
With no U.N.-approved R2P effort to rescue the innocent civilians of the region from these brutal forces, the death toll in Syria and Iraq has topped 200,000, and the number of refugees is in the millions.
Failed experiments, like crises, should not go to waste. Among the lessons to be learned from the R2P debacle: First, the notion of an international community that can prevent or halt mass atrocities is a chimera. If such work is going to get done, the United States has to do it, perhaps supported by a coalition of the willing and, with few exceptions, not particularly able. Second, it’s ludicrous to propose that the U.N. Security Council — whose permanent members include neo-Soviet Russia and anti-democratic China — should be vested with the authority to pass judgment on the legitimacy of such missions. Third, American power should be used primarily in pursuit of American interests. Sometimes that will include humanitarian interventions, but that’s a decision for Americans to make.
This, too, should be clear: While the Islamic State is currently attracting the most attention, it is the Islamic Republic of Iran — which has been using proxies to kill Americans on and off for the past 35 years — that could soon have nuclear weapons as well as missiles to deliver them to targets anywhere in the world. Hezbollah and other terrorist groups offer an alternative means of delivery. Iran’s radical Shia rulers are more sophisticated than the Sunni jihadis displaying disembodied heads on pikes. However, their goals differ little from those of their rivals.
In response to this dire and deteriorating situation, Mr. Obama should be instructing his advisers to present him with a range of strategic options. I’d recommend conceptualizing the global conflict not as disconnected “overseas contingency operations,” and not as akin to World War II, but more like the Cold War. That is to say, the United States should plan for a long, low-intensity struggle. In particular, we should support those willing to fight the jihadis who threaten them.
Economic weapons can be powerful if used correctly, which has not been the case in the past. For example, though sanctions brought Iran’s rulers to the negotiating table, premature relief from sanctions pressure has encouraged Iranian intransigence as the talks proceeded.
Also long overdue is a serious war of ideas — it’s insufficient to leave that to Bill Maher and Ben Affleck on HBO. Bottom line: We are not really engaged in a conflict against “violent extremism” or even “terrorism.” What we’re confronting are ideologies derived from fundamentalist readings of Islamic scripture. Proponents of those ideologies stress the supremacy of one religion — much as communists stressed the supremacy of one class, and Nazis of one race. There is no reason to suppose that saying this clearly, rather than obfuscating, will radicalize Muslims not already favorably inclined toward killing infidels.
Our aim should be, to borrow a phrase from Mr. Obama, to “degrade and eventually defeat” jihadism. Nothing is more imperative than preventing Iran’s rulers from taking the next, short steps toward a nuclear-weapons capability that they clearly intend to use to threaten not just their neighbors, but also Americans for decades to come. For an American president, this is where the R2P needs to begin.
The Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine (Arabic: حركة الجهاد الإسلامي في فلسطين,Harakat al-Jihād al-Islāmi fi Filastīn) known in the West as simply Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), is a PalestinianIslamist organization formed in 1981 whose objective is the destruction of the State of Israel and the establishment of a sovereign, Islamic Palestinian state.[2] PIJ has been labelled a terrorist organisation by the United States,[3] the European Union,[4] the United Kingdom,[5]Japan,[6]Canada,[7]Australia,[8]New Zealand[9][10] and Israel. Iranis a major financial supporter of the PIJ.[11][12][13][14] Following the Israeli and Egyptian squeeze on Hamas in early 2014, PIJ has seen its power steadily increase with the backing of funds from Iran.[15] Its financial backing is believed to also come from Syria.
Secretary-General of the Islamic Jihad Movement Ramazan Abdullah arrived in Iran on Tuesday to confer with senior officials of the country on the latest security developments in region.
Abdullah, who arrived in Tehran last night, is to hold separate meetings with Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) Ali Shamkhani, and Member of Iran’s Expediency Council Saeed Jalili later today.
He will also hold meetings with some other Iranian officials during his stay in the country.
Late in August 2012, Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei asked participants in the 16th Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit in Tehran to pay special attention to the Palestinian issue, and called on the American backers of the Israeli regime to accept Iran’s proposal for holding a referendum in Palestine.
The Leader reminded the Zionists’ bloody occupation of Palestine over 6 decades ago, and blamed the Zionist regime for waging various wars, massacre and state-sponsored terrorism in the last decades.
He blamed the western world for supporting and defending the Zionist regime of Israel against the oppressed Palestinian nation.
The leader further renewed Iran’s solution to the Palestinian issue, calling for a “comprehensive referendum to be attended by all the indigenous residents of Palestine, including those refugees who have been away from their motherland for decades to determine the country’s fate”.
The Iranian supreme leader cautioned the US against the continue support and defense for the Zionist regime of Israel, reminding that decade-long support for the Israeli regime has incurred many costs and losses on the American people.
The leader called on the White House leaders to revise their Middle-East policy and “show courage and opt for the referendum solution” presented by Iran to put an end to the astronomical spending that has been inflicted on the American nation for its support for the Zionist regime of Israel.
To conclude his remarks, he urged for collective management of global issues, asking the NAM member states “not to be afraid of the bullying powers and remain loyal to their own causes”.
He reminded failure of communism and capitalism, and said the world is pregnant to new events, saying the Islamic Awakening and the US and Israeli failures in North Africa and the Middle-East are indicative of the very same fact.
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