Tragically, and in his own words, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan thinks (or pretends to think) that “the primary reason behind terror in Turkey is to prevent Turkey from getting into the world’s top 10 economies.”
In fact that diagnosis explains why Turkey must still fight the war it has been fighting since 1984 – wrong diagnosis. But it does not explain if Turkey, three decades ago, was also heading for the top 10 list but was barred by a global network of conspirators who all of a sudden sparked terrorism on Turkish soil. So it was all because the world’s top 10 economies did not want Turkey on the list; they held secret meetings and decided that the best way to stop Turkey’s rise was to plot terror in a land that was best known for its peaceful past?
But then, ironically, Mr. Erdoğan also thinks that Turkey (or a Muslim) country should be sharing the same seat and powers as the same countries that are most probably the culprits of the global plot against Turkey: The United Nations Security Council (or the five permanent members of the UNSC).
In a recent speech, Mr. Erdoğan renewed his famous “the-world-is-greater-than-five” dictum. “There is no Muslim country among the five – all of them are Christian, non-Muslim. What is that approach? Is it fair? It’s not!” he roared, reminding everyone that he wants a Muslim member state at the UNSC “only to make the world fair” (not to be confused with the fact that Mr. Erdogan is Muslim).
Just smile and forget the fact that Mr. Erdoğan thinks that permanent member China is a Christian country.
There may be a boom in the number of house churches in the country but I have not read about the Communist Party declaring the country’s official religion to be Christianity.
If not five, what does the world equal, then, in Mr. Erdogan’s thinking? All 193 U.N. member nations as permanent members of the Security Council, all with veto powers? That would not be practical. Then, one country representing each monotheistic faith? Is Mr. Erdoğan implying that he wants Israel as a permanent member?
Should China and North Korea spell each other off and represent the atheist seat? Then the new UNSC should have India as a permanent member representing Hinduism and Japan representing Shintoism.
But the Muslim representation in UNSC could be more problematic than Mr. Erdoğan envisages. To begin with, which Islamic sect should win a seat at UNSC? Sunni or Shiite, or both? If it would be Sunni only, would that not go against Mr. Erdoğan’s preaching that all faiths must be represented? So, it will be Iran and a Sunni permanent member. But which Sunni country? It is not too hard to guess Mr. Erdoğan’s idea on the ideal candidate. But what would be the fair criteria? The world’s “most Muslim Sunni country?” Sadly science has not yet invented a Muslim-meter.
One natural candidate could be Saudi Arabia, the custodian of Islam’s holy place. It would also be fun to have both Saudi Arabia and Iran sitting on the UNSC together and in peace – and with Israel, too.
Another criterion could be to nominate the most populous Muslim country in the world. That would point to Indonesia and even Pakistan and Egypt would come before Turkey. Not just that: India where, according to the 2011 population census, the Muslim population is twice as big as Turkey, would be a far better candidate than the Crescent and Star.
Mr. Erdoğan complains that all five permanent members are Christian but since in the new “faith-based setting” there will be Sunni and Shiite members, what if the Christians want representation on the grounds of Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant (and other) faiths? What about the animists in Africa? Or Zoroastrians – for whom Mr. Erdoğan has never hidden his deep disdain?
And, by the way, are we talking about a security council or a world congress of the faithful including those with faith in no faith?
PA wants the international community to ‘recognize the legitimacy’ of their murders by awarding a terrorist the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) is seeking to have the international forum recognize their “right under international law” to murder Israeli civilians in all places and at all times, which they claim is established by a UN resolution.
Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) reports that the PA are requesting that Palestinian “heroes and role models” who murdered Israeli civilians should receive an internationally protected right to murder Israeli civilians, that will also be recognized as a positive act that should be awarded.
As a means to attain this recognition, the PA is asking the international community to award an imprisoned Palestinian terrorist with the Nobel Peace Prize. As the leader of the Tanzim, Fatah’s terror wing, Marwan Barghouti orchestrated many terror attacks in which Israelis were murdered. He was convicted in an Israeli court and is serving five life sentences for murder.
“The candidacy (of Barghouti) is essentially a call to recognize the legitimacy of the prisoners’ struggle… and also a response to the claims and Israeli terms that do not recognize the legitimacy of their struggle, and treat them as ‘terrorists and criminals,’” said the head of the PLO Commission of Prisoners’ Affairs Issa Karake.
Barghouti was convicted of five murders – Yoela Hen (45), Eli Dahan (53), Yosef Habi (52), Police officer Sergeant-Major Salim Barakat (33) and Greek monk Tsibouktsakis Germanus.
Additionally, dozens of other Israeli civilians were murdered by Tanzim terrorists under Barghouti’s reign, although he was not tried for those murders.
The PA claims it has the right to murder Israeli civilians according to UN resolution 3236 of 1974, which “recognizes the right of the Palestinian people to regain its rights by all means.”
The PA interprets “all means” to include violence and killing of civilians, while ignoring the continuation of the resolution which states that the use of “all means” should be “in accordance with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations.” The UN Charter prohibits targeting civilians, even in war, and that “international disputes” should be resolved “by peaceful means.”
(The views expressed in this article are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)
CAIR, the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist organizations are winning. Islamic terror in America, Europe and Israel has killed a thousand or so people. That’s a lot, but Islamization kills entire civilizations; with the death of our civilization, more deaths than Islamic terrorism has brought can be expected.
Should we give up and voluntarily commit civilizational suicide? Much of Europe has already done so and that’s what Obama and His minions are seeking for America. The forces pushing for it are strong and we can react with greater strength only if we have the will. Do we?
Part I – America
a. Muslims already in Obam’s America
The video embedded above promotes a new book titled See No Sharia, which deals with the Muslim Brotherhood and related Islamist organizations. The Muslim Brotherhood’s vision for America is laid out in a document put in evidence at the Holy Land Foundation criminal trial of several Islamist Muslim Brotherhood conspirators for funding Hamas, a terrorist organization, in violation of U.S. law.
[w]ritten in 1991 by a top Muslim Brotherhood operative, Mohamed Akram, and entitled “The Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal of the Group in North America,” this internal correspondence was meant for the eyes only of the organization’s leadership in Egypt. So, the document is direct and to the point: It explicitly states that the mission of the Muslim Brotherhood in North America is “destroying Western civilization from within … by [the infidels’] hands and the hands of the believers so that Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.” [Emphasis added.]
Following guilty verdicts against indicted conspirators, the Obama administration could (and should) have sought indictments against their multiple unindicted co-conspirators. It chose not to do so, most likely because pursuing the matter further would have been inconsistent with Obama’s world view — which seems to be consistent with that of the Muslim Brotherhood, et al.
See No Sharia, and to some extent the related video, illuminate ways in which Obama’s America has been seduced by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and other Muslim Brotherhood-related Islamist groups into requiring our law enforcement agencies to reject the notion of Islamist Terrorism and to accept instead that of non-denominational “Violent Extremism.” We are repeatedly told that Violent Extremism has nothing to do with Islam.
It was the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Cairo in 1928, that established Islamic Jihad as a mass movement. The significance of the Muslim Brotherhood to Islamic Fascism is comparable to the significance of the Bolshevik Party to Communism: it was, and it remains to this day, the ideological reference point and the organizational core for all later Islamist groups, including Al Queda and Hamas. [Emphasis added.]
While British colonial policy contributed to the rise of Islamic radicalism, the Brotherhood’s jihad was not directed against the British, but focused almost exclusively on Zionism and the Jews.
Membership in the Brotherhood rose from 800 members in 1936 to over 200,000 in 1938. In those two years the Brotherhood conducted a major campaign in Egypt, and it was against the Jews, not against the British occupiers. This campaign against the Jews, in the late 1930s, which established the Brotherhood as a mass movement of Islamic Jihadists, was set off by a rebellion in Palestine directed against Jewish immigration from Europe and Russia. That campaign was initiated by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Muhammed Amin al-Husseini. [Emphasis added.]
Al-Husseini was extremely impressed with Adolf Hitler and his anti-Jewish rhetoric. In 1941 he visited Hitler in Berlin. He was so enthralled with Hitler and the Nazis, and their plans to exterminate the Jews that he decided to remain in Berlin. He lived there from 1941 to 1945, recruiting Muslims in Europe for the Waffen-SS. He was very close to Hitler. Husseini’s best friends were Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Eichmann.
He convinced Hitler that he would be able to persuade his Muslim brothers in the Arab world to carry out the extermination of Jews in the Middle East, just as the Nazis were doing in Europe.
Back then, Hitler was largely focused on the elimination of Jews. That remains the focus of Hamas, of which the Muslim Brotherhood remains a principal supporter. Might it be due to long-standing Muslim Brotherhood ideas that many blame all of the conflicts in the Middle East on the Jewish “occupation” of Israel? That view is held by Obama and members of His administration. Hence, their persistent efforts to turn parts of Israel over to the “Palestinians,” culminating in a two state solution giving Hamas and the Palestinian Authority enhanced leverage in driving Jews from Israel.
Under pressure from the Obama administration, our law enforcement agencies cooperate with Islamist organizations to implement Sharia principles to fight “Islamophobia” rather than to locate, arrest and prosecute Islamist terrorists and wannabe Islamist terrorists. One possible rationale is that if we are nice, they may reduce their efforts to “radicalize” Muslims and, perhaps, stop some Islamic attacks. Another more likely rationale is that our dear leaders actually believe that Islamophobia (along with the Jewish “occupation” of Israel) is the principal cause of Islamic terrorism and that Sharia compliance (along with the “two state solution” and death of Israel) will solve the problems.
America has no blasphemy laws and should want none. They would violate our First Amendment right to freedom of speech. The Organization for Islamic Cooperation, consisting of fifty-seven Islamic nations, has been pushing the United Nations to impose Sharia law-style laws prohibiting blasphemy. They do not seek such laws for their own nations because they already have them to protect Islam. They seek them for America and the rest of what’s left of Western civilization, but seem to have little or no interest in prohibiting “blasphemy” against Judaism or Christianity.
The cartoon is blasphemous under Sharia law because it depicts Muhammed; some Muslims seek to kill those who produce such material. An “art exhibit” featuring an image of the Virgin Mary in a glass of urine is considered sacrilegious; some Christians seek to have government funding removed. I am reminded of this rather old Andrew Klavan video:
The issue of the admission of Syrian refugees into the United States has understandably ignited a firestorm of protest by Americans concerned about their safety and the safety of their families. These Americans are not exhibiting “xenophobia,” the usual claim made by the open borders immigration anarchists. They have simply been paying attention to what James Comey, the Director of the FBI, and Michael Steinbach, the FBI’s Assistant Director of the Counterterrorism Division, have stated when they testified before congressional hearings about the Syrian refugee crisis. They made it clear that these refugees cannot be vetted. There are no reliable databases to check and no capacity to conduct field investigations inside Syria to verify the backgrounds of these aliens. [Emphasis added.]
. . . .
I focused on these issues in my October 7, 2015 article for FrontPage Magazine, “Syrian ‘Refugees’ and Immigration Roulette: How the government is recklessly playing with American lives.”
Further reports have provided disturbing information that ISIS operatives have seized blank Syrian passports and other identity documents, along with the printing devices used to prepare passports and other ID, and have sold these documents to reporters in false names. These identity documents are indistinguishable from bona fide documents because they are bona fide documents — except that the photos and biometrics do not relate to the original person but create credible false aliases for anyone willing to pay for them.
Even if we had the documentation referred to above, it would be of little help because due to pressure from Muslim Brotherhood-related groups, we are not allowed to “profile” Muslims. As noted here,
obeisance to politically correct proscriptions against “profiling” is just one of the myriad ways in which we tell the jihadist enemy we really aren’t serious about the latest battle in the 14-century-long war of Islam against the infidel West.
. . . .
This lack of seriousness is endemic in this administration. Refusing to call ISIS “Islamic,” even going so far as to censor comments by French president François Hollande that used the word, bespeaks a dangerous frivolity. . . .
Our problem, however, goes beyond the politicians. Too many of us have failed to understand that this war did not begin on 9/11. It did not begin when al Qaeda declared war on us in the 90s and attacked our embassies and naval vessels. It did not begin in 1979, when our alleged neo-colonialist depredations supposedly sparked the Iranian revolution and created today’s Islamic (N.B., Mr. President) Republic of Iran, the world’s premier state sponsor of terrorism. It did not begin in 1948, when five Arab nations, all but one members of the U.N., violated Resolution 191 and attacked Israel. It did not begin when after World War I the victorious Entente powers exercised mandatory powers, granted by the League of Nations and codified in international treaties, over the territory of the Ottoman Empire that had sided with the Central Powers.
All these acts of aggression were merely the latest in a war begun in the 7th century when Islam attacked the eastern Roman Empire and began its serial dismemberment of the heart of Christendom, the old word for the West. For a thousand years the armies of Allah successfully invaded, conquered, occupied, enslaved, and raided the West, in accordance with its doctrine of jihad in the service of Muslim domination, and in homage to Mohammed’s injunction, “I was told to fight all men until they say there is no god but Allah.” This record of success began to end in the 17th century with the rise of the modern West and its technological, economic, and political advantages. [Emphasis added.]
But the war didn’t end with that Muslim retreat, even after what bin Laden called the “catastrophe” –– the demise of the Ottoman Caliphate, and the division of its territory into Western-style nation-states. The West won that battle, but it did not win the war. One reason is the Muslim nations of the Middle East never suffered the wages of their aggression. They sided with the Central Powers in World War I. They sat out World War II––apart from the many thousands who fought on the side of the Nazis––and received fugitive Nazis as guests after the war. Their serial aggression and terror against Israel has never been repaid with bombed-out capitals or punitive postwar reprisals. Their governments have never been punished for funding and proliferating mosques and madrassas teaching hatred of the infidel and terrorist violence in the service of jihad. [Emphasis added.]
Instead of paying the price of aggression, partly because of the Cold War, more recently because of Western failure of nerve and civilizational exhaustion, Muslims have been the beneficiaries of billions in Western aid, Western arms, Western defense against enemies, Western lax immigration policies, Western appeasement, and Western suicidal ideas like cultural and moral relativism. In short, Muslims have never accepted their defeats, and have never experienced the humiliating cost of their aggression, because the modern West has never forced them to pay for it. [Emphasis added.]
Thus they look at our unserious, godless culture of consumption and frivolity, of self-loathing and guilt, and these serious believers are confident that 350 years of defeat in battle have not led to defeat in the long war. And so the war goes on. The frivolous Western dogs bark, but Allah’s caravan moves on. [Emphasis added.]
Part II — Israel
Israel is constantly attacked by various UN organizations, most recently UNESCO, which has named the Western Wall after Muhammed’s flying horse, Barack Buraq.
There is a concerted effort among “Palestinians” and their supporters to erase all evidence of the historical connection of Jews to Israel. The UN, controlled by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, is a willing partner in these efforts. Besides being motivated by Islamic Jew-hatred, this endeavor is in line with the Islamic supremacist tendency to appropriate the holy places and sacred figures of other religions.
Buraq is claimed to have transported Muhammed from Mecca to Jerusalem, hence giving Palestinians valid claim to all of Israel. Here’s one depiction of Buraq. Obviously, there are no photographs of Muhammed actually riding him, because images of Muhammed are prohibited. Look closely at the picture. Where did the horse’s head come from?
Here’s an explanation of the Muslim nexus with the Western Wall:
Various scholars and writers, such as Ibn al-Faqih, Ibn Abd Rabbih, and Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi, have suggested places where Buraq was tethered, mostly locations near the southwest corner of the Haram.[7]However, for several centuries the preferred location has been the al-Buraq mosque, just inside the wall at the south end of the Western Wall plaza.[7] The mosque sits above an ancient passageway that once came out through the long-sealed Barclay’s Gate whose huge lintel remains visible below the Maghrebi gate.[7] Because of the proximity to the Western Wall, the area next to the wall has been associated with Buraq at least since the 19th century.[8]
A New York Times editorial published in October of last year purported to compare the Jewish and Muslim claims to the Temple Mount. An article by Daniel Greenfield at Front Page Magazine posed a few questions for the NUTNYT editorialists.
The Temple Mount is holy to Jews because of the Temples. So the New York Times chose to discuss whether the Temples really existed. It’s holy to Muslims because Mohammed supposedly flew there on a flying horse (with a woman’s head).
. . . .
Let’s interview some of the same scholars and archeologists as to whether the entire Muslim basis for laying claim to the area has any basis in reality. The New York Times discusses the need for “independent scientific verification” of the Temples. How about “independent scientific verification” of this?
1. Buraq was a flying horse with a woman’s head. Can we get any verification that such a creature ever existed.
2. Buraq flew from Mecca to Jerusalem and back in one night. “The distance between Mecca and Jerusalem is 755.1 miles. To complete this feat in one night would have meant that Buraq must have been jet propelled in the 7th Century.” Please provide independent scientific verification of the existence of a flying horse with a woman’s head that can travel faster than the speed of sound.
Oddly the New York Times doesn’t appear to be interested in independent scientific verification of Islamic Supremacist myths.
Evidently, UNESCO puts more stock in flying horses than in Jewish claims to the Temple Mount.
In view of the gravity of the Islam vs. Everybody Else situation, I decided to try to inject a bit of humor into only one of the many problems Israel faces with the UN, the OIC, Obama’s America, Europe, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, the Palestinian Authority and others. I had originally intended to write a more comprehensive piece on Islam vs. Israel, and will probably do so after I post Part III of this series dealing with the Islamisation of Europe.
A better and more detailed account of the UNESCO – Temple Mount absurdity is provided here.
Conclusions
Obama’s America has the will to “win,” but confuses winning with eradicating Islamophobia and slicing Israel into pieces to give to the “Palestinians” and perhaps Syria, hence bringing “peace” to the Middle East. Under that definition of “winning,” Israel, the only democratic nation and the only solid ally of the United States in the region, will cease to exist; the Islamists will have won.
We need a very different version of “winning,” one under which our constitutional freedoms and our democratic nature will be cherished and protected. Both are inconsistent with Sharia law and are not part of any definition with which Obama would agree.
We can win against Islamist encroachments on our government and in our society only if enough of us recognize the dangers they entail. Then, we will have not only the means to win but the will to do so. A first step will be to bid Obama good riddance and to welcome a successor who recognizes the dangers of Islamism and is prepared — and wants — to move quickly and effectively against it.
At an open debate on the Middle East at the United Nations Security Council in New York on Monday — as a bus was being blown up in Jerusalem — Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Danny Danon told his Palestinian counterpart, Riyad Mansour, that he ought to be ashamed for not denouncing terrorism and incitement.
Danon had brought Natan and Renana Meir to the session to personify the devastation that Palestinian Authority incitement to violence against Jews continues to wreak. Natan is the widower of Dafna Meir, a 38-year-old nurse who was murdered three months ago by a Palestinian teenager at the entrance to her home in Otniel, a settlement south of Hebron. Renana is Natan’s 17-year-old daughter, who not only witnessed her mother being stabbed to death, but tried to help fend off the assailant.
The 15-year-old terrorist later told Israeli interrogators that he had been inspired to commit his heinous act from broadcasts on PA television and social media.
Mansour did not condemn any of it, of course. Instead, he berated Israel for imprisoning and killing Palestinian children. No surprise there, which is why Danon — who should be lauded for standing alone in the hornets’ nest of hypocrisy and deceit that the Security Council occupies — was wasting his breath. As Natan Meir said later in a small press conference after the event, it hurt him to hear a diplomat referring to jailed Palestinian kids as victims, when one of those “kids” had slaughtered his wife in cold blood.
Danon already knows that the PA is a lost cause in every possible respect. So his finger-pointing at Mansour was a gesture aimed elsewhere — but hopefully not at the United States, which is just as deserving of a tongue-lashing as the PA that it morally equates with Israel.
Indeed, “disgraceful” doesn’t begin to describe the statement made by David Pressman, the U.S.’s “alternative representative to the U.N. for special political affairs,” at the session in question. Condemning terrorism and settlements in the same sentence, Pressman talked about America’s “steadfast” efforts to “advance dialogue and progress,” which, he said, “will be borne from hard choices made by both leaders to advance the cause of peace over parochial politics.”
Thus, he continued: “We remain very concerned by the wave of terrorism, violence and the utter lack of progress the parties have made toward a two-state solution. It is important that both sides demonstrate, with concrete policies and actions, a genuine commitment to achieving a two-state solution to reduce tensions and restore hope in the possibility of peace. What we have seen on the ground, and what families like the Meir family present here today have experienced first-hand, is absolutely unconscionable.”
Yes, said Pressman, “acts of terrorism have taken too many lives, including Americans. The victims have included soldiers and civilians, pregnant women and mothers, Israelis and Palestinians. … Terrorism is terrorism. It is wrong. It is bloody. And it must stop. Anyone that aspires to achieve a viable and independent Palestinian state must understand that engaging in incitement to violence only serves to undermine this goal. Only a political outcome, not violence, will allow this goal to be realized.”
And here came the clincher: “We remain deeply concerned about the shooting of a Palestinian assailant on March 24 in Hebron by a member of the Israeli security forces, and are following the legal proceedings against the accused perpetrator closely. We note that just today charges of manslaughter were brought against the soldier. … In cases where anyone from any side acts outside the law, they must be held accountable.”
In other words, while Israel always holds each and every soldier accountable for the slightest whiff of wrongdoing, and the PA encourages, glorifies and funds terrorists as a matter of course and principle, “both sides” share responsibility for the violence that is causing the deaths of Israelis and Palestinians alike.
But Pressman didn’t stop there. No, he completed his comparison by reprimanding Israel for “settlement activity” that the U.S. “strongly opposes.” Such actions as “land expropriations, settlement expansions, and legalizations of outposts,” he said, “are wrong and fundamentally undermine the prospects for a two-state solution.”
Shame on him and the entire Obama administration for not realizing that the only kind of construction the U.S. should be linking to the jihad that the Palestinians are waging against Israel is that of terror tunnels, rocket launchers and lies.
An IDF soldier stands atop a tank near Alonei Habashan on the Golan Heights, close to the ceasefire line between Israel and Syria. (photo credit:REUTERS)
In a first reaction to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s declaration that “Israel will never leave the Golan Heights,” Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal al-Miqdad said Sunday that Syria is prepared to use every possiblemeans to recapture the area, including military means.
“The Syrian Golan is an occupied Arab land according to the UN Security Council’s resolutions, and the presence of the United Nations Disengagement Observer Forces proves this,” Miqad said in an interview with the Lebanon-based TV channel al-Mayadeen.
“We have never renounced the resistance and we are ready to recapture the Golan in all possible ways, including military ways. Israel wants to provoke us, but we will never surrender,” Miqdad added.
Regarding Syria’s cooperation with Russia, he stated that “the daily communication between the Syrian leadership and the Russian leadership continues. We believe that the Russian policy leans on the international law and on UN Security Council resolutions.
“Neither Russian President Vladimir Putin nor any other president in the world would have accepted the indecent Israeli logic regarding the Golan,” Miqdad argued.
At the opening of a special cabinet meeting held for the first time ever on the Golan Heights on Sunday, PM Netanyahu declared: “The time has come after 40 years for the international community to finally recognize that the Golan Heights will remain forever under Israeli sovereignty.”
The United Nations is an evil body dominated by Islamic nations and tyrannies.
Just last week, on March 24 in Geneva, the U.N. Human Rights Council concluded its session by passing five resolutions condemning Israel. This followed a series of blood libels accusing the only democratic country, in a region surrounded by barbarism, of engaging in a policy of deliberate murder of Palestinian children.
Indeed the Human Rights Council has passed more resolutions condemning Israel over the past decade than all resolutions criticizing other governments combined. This, despite the fact that countries leading the charges against Israel are themselves engaged in horrific human rights violations. And despite the fact that in Syria, Israel’s neighbor, hundreds of thousands have been killed and millions are trying to flee the country as President Bashar Assad’s army and ISIS butcher entire communities.
The reality is that the United Nations, with its subsidiaries, has morphed into an evil body dominated by Islamic nations, tyrannies and rogue states whose policies it legitimizes.
Freedom House, the independent watchdog organization dedicated to the expansion of freedom and democracy, maintains that 80% of UNHRC members are “not free” or only “partly free.” In this degenerate body, Saudi Arabia was elected last year to chair a key human rights panel.
The UNHRC has consistently appointed fiercely biased anti-Israel rapporteurs and commissioned numerous reports to demonize Israel and accuse the Israel Defense Forces of engaging in war crimes.
Last month, it passed a resolution to boycott produce and compile a list of businesses over the Green Line — clearly a first step in the direction of sanctions and an extension of the global anti-Semitic BDS movement.
Similar outrageous bias is also prevalent in the U.N. General Assembly and Security Council where demonizing, delegitimizing and attributing all the woes of the world to the Jewish state is reminiscent of Nazi propaganda or the Middle Ages when Jews were held responsible for all the misfortunes of mankind.
The initiatives of these efforts to demonize Israel emanate from rogue states that dominate the U.N.
A few examples:
Representatives of Moammar Gadhafi’s Libya and Qatar served as presidents of the General Assembly;
A representative of Iran served as a vice president;
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, who heads the world’s most virulent terror state, used the General Assembly to “condemn terror” while interspersing his statements with anti-Semitic remarks;
Iran, which stones women for adultery, was appointed to the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women;
Assad’s Syria was elected to a UNESCO commission dealing with human rights and nuclear proliferation;
As recently as 2010, the UNHRC published a report praising the human rights record of Libya;
A representative of Sudan, whose president is wanted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, was elected vice president of the Economic and Social Council, which regulates human rights;
North Korea was elected to chair the Conference on Disarmament;
UNESCO continuously condemns Israel and only once condemned Syria, and yet elected Syria to one of its human rights committees.
In 2015 the World Health Organization had the gall to pass a resolution, introduced by Syria, by a majority of 104 with 4 opposed and 6 abstentions, absurdly claiming that Israel was “targeting the health of Syrians in the Golan … injecting them with pathogenic viruses.” The WHO has never carried a single resolution condemning any other country.
Further examples abound of the hypocritical, corrupt and evil machinations of the U.N.
After the defeat of Nazism, the founders of the United Nations endorsed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They never envisaged that the organization they created would subsequently be hijacked by dictatorships and tyrannies who would exploit it as a platform to promote evil, even including the endorsement of genocide.
Israel became the canary in the mine. Two decades after having endorsed the creation of the State of Israel, the U.N. initiated a concerted effort towards its delegitimization.
We have witnessed a dramatic downward spiral at the U.N. over the last 30 years. In the 1990s, the Security Council was disgraced by its failure to quash genocide in Rwanda, despite the fact that it had peacekeeping forces in the area. Likewise, the shocking blunder in Srebrenica, Bosnia, when a U.N. battalion — in a U.N.-declared “free zone” — handed 8,000 Muslim civilians to the Serb military, which promptly slaughtered them all. Nor was the U.N. able to deal with the genocide in Sudan or more recently the carnage in Syria.
Instead, it intensified its anti-Israel campaigns. What is morally despicable is that the Europeans, who initially displayed token resistance to some of the more outrageous attacks on Israel, have reverted to the role they played in the 1930s when they stood aside as the forces of darkness enveloped the Jewish people.
They seem to have entirely forsaken their moral compass and rarely vote against the most extreme anti-Israel resolutions, preferring to abstain so as not to antagonize those powers seeking to delegitimize and destroy the Jewish state. They also join the obscene calls on Israel to respond “more proportionately” to Palestinians engaged in murdering their civilians.
Now they have gone one step further. In a world rampant with human rights injustices, they preceded the UNHRC with an EU demand for “labeling” Israeli products emanating from over the Green Line.
This must be seen as an extension of the ongoing campaign to rescind U.N. Resolution 242, which calls for negotiations based on defensible borders and substituting it with a demand to return to the indefensible 1949 borders unless an agreement on swaps with the Palestinians (currently inconceivable) can be achieved. In this context, the settlement blocs, the Jewish neighborhoods of east Jerusalem and even the Jewish Quarter of the Old City are regarded as occupied territories.
Until now, the Security Council was prevented from passing such a resolution because the U.S. protected Israel by employing its veto. While U.S. President Barack Obama has been at the vanguard of those demanding that Israel accept the indefensible 1949 armistice lines as future borders, until now he was inhibited by Congress and his own party from endorsing a Security Council resolution to this effect.
But in recent months there have been numerous signals and outright threats that unless Israel makes further unilateral concessions, it should no longer rely on a U.S. veto to prevent a harsh Security Council resolution which could in turn pave the way for global sanctions against the Jewish state.
Obama is unlikely to act until after the presidential elections. But there are growing concerns that in the two-month hiatus between the elections and his retirement, he could well do so.
The U.N. is intensifying its campaign against Israel. The horrendous ISIS attacks in Europe have in no way impacted on EU policy toward Israel.
The months until the presidential elections present the optimal time to influence future U.S. policy toward the U.N. and to ensure that Israel is not abandoned to the wolves.
This year, due to a mandatory rotation, the U.S. is not a member of the UNHRC. Presidential candidates should be canvassed to express their commitment to refuse to participate in the UNHRC unless it halts its obsessional anti-Israel crusades. They should also be urged to commit themselves to refute any effort to impose a solution on Israel or rescind U.N. Resolution 242.
Donald Trump has already completely written off the U.N. But the real challenge is to persuade the likely winner — Hillary Clinton — to translate the speech she made at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference expressing her love for Israel into a clear cut commitment that, if elected, she will ensure that the U.S. either enforces a modicum of morality at the U.N. — including confronting the vile hatred that portrays Israel as evil incarnate — or take appropriate action.
The U.N. today incubates evil and provides legitimacy to tyrannies. If this will not change, the U.S. and other democratic countries have an obligation to condemn these pathological actions and, if necessary, establish a global association of democracies to promote human rights and combat terrorism.
Democratic leaders would do well to recall the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian executed by the Nazis, who stated that “silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”
The first-ever United Nations-sponsored World Humanitarian Summit is scheduled to take place May 23-24, 2016 in Istanbul, Turkey. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon praised Turkey’s “compassionate leadership” in hosting the summit and its “admirable commitment to humanitarian action.”
Turkey’s hosting of the UN humanitarian summit is a travesty. Ban Ki-moon’s praise of Turkey’s “compassionate leadership” and “admirable commitment to humanitarian action” is a disgrace. Did perhaps the Secretary General have in mind the so-called Turkish “charity” known as the Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief (IHH)? Despite its name and some programs that have delivered aid to areas in genuine need, IHH has an overtly political Islamist agenda. It has had a particular interest in directing assistance to terrorist organizations such as Hamas, and has had ties with al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. It is looking forward, in its words, to when “Muslims may show up in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem one day unannounced and we will erect the flag of Islam everywhere.”
The IHH is best known for sponsoring the 2010 Gaza flotilla, which had been sent to break Israel’s legal naval blockade of Gaza against the shipment of weaponry to Hamas. Nine armed Turkish Hamas supporters on one of the ships were killed by Israel Defense Force personnel, whom had acted in self-defense after they had boarded the ship to prevent it from reaching Gaza. Never mind that a UN investigatory committee subsequently concluded that Israel had legally boarded the IHH ship in the first place. Turkey’s leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan sided with the IHH and Hamas, and accused Israel of engaging in “state terrorism.” Erdogan’s government has coordinated with the IHH and has given it cover as a so-called “humanitarian” charity so that it could carry on its support of Hamas against Israel. Erdogan’s loyalists even went so far as to fire a senior police official who thought he was simply doing his job by conducting a police raid of IHH offices. The raid which so displeased Erdogan had led to the detention of at least 23 people with alleged ties to Al Qaeda.
Apart from its ties to the misnamed Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief, Erdogan’s government has made a mockery of the “core responsibilities” outlined in the Agenda for Humanity, which will be the focus of discussion at the Istanbul UN World Humanitarian Summit in May.
For example, one of these core responsibilities is “a commitment to address forced displacement.” Turkey has a huge internal displacement problem, primarily involving the forced displacement of members of its minority Kurdish population. Between 954,000 and 1.2 million people were forced to flee their homes between 1986 and 2005. Turkey’s attempts to address this situation, with such measures as compensation for the victims, have been fitful at best. Most internally displaced persons (IDPs) have been left to fend for themselves, living in poverty. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, “Poverty has forced IDPs’ children to work rather than going to school, and some women have resorted to negative coping mechanisms including prostitution to get by.”
In Cyprus, Greek Cypriots were forcibly expelled from their homes after Turkey invaded the northern area of the Republic of Cyprus and placed it under military occupation in 1974. Turkey’s illegal occupation of the northern third of the island continues to this day. The European Court of Human Rights concluded in a judgment against Turkey for damages that “Greek-Cypriot owners of property in northern Cyprus are being denied access to and control, use and enjoyment of their property as well as any compensation for the interference with their property rights.” The Court noted “the protracted feelings of helplessness, distress and anxiety” suffered by the victims of Turkey’s actions. Turkey’s Foreign Minister angrily rejected the Court’s verdict.
Another “core responsibility” outlined in the Humanitarian Summit’s Agenda for Humanity is “catalyzing action to achieve gender equality.” Turkey’s President Erdogan declared in November 2014 that “men and women are not equal; it is against nature.” In the 2015 Global Gender Gap country rankings, Turkey is near the bottom of the list – 130th out of 145 countries surveyed. It placed only four countries above Saudi Arabia.
According to an article written in 2015 by Meltem Müftüler-Baç, a Professor of International Relations and Jean Monnet chair at Sabanci University, Istanbul, “when it comes to protecting Turkish women against violence, ensuring their rights of education and employment, and even their right to choose their own spouse, women face layers of discrimination. Child marriages and domestic violence are the most visible forms, with around 30-35% of all marriages in Turkey involving under-age girls, rising in rural southeastern Turkey to up to 75%.”
Two other “core responsibilities” outlined in the Humanitarian Summit’s Agenda for Humanity are “leadership to prevent and end conflicts” and “upholding the norms that safeguard humanity.” Turkey has engaged in policies that have heightened conflicts and caused human suffering.
In September 2015, for example, the Turkish Armed Forces besieged the Kurdish town of Cizre in southeastern Turkey. Civilian residents have been cut off from receiving food, medical supplies, water and electricity for days on end. In one incident, people were trapped inside a burning, multi-story building, surrounded by Turkish troops who reportedly would not let them out. Unconfirmed reports have estimated the number of people killed in the fire as at least 150, and perhaps several hundred more.
“This was a residential building where women and children lived. Erdogan killed them all with heavy artillery. He destroyed this building. They say they’re fighting terrorists. But where are the terrorists? All victims were local civilians,” a local resident told journalists. “They were old men, women, and children. They even killed pregnant women.”
Turkey’s claim to humanitarian action is its hosting of 2.5 million refugees from Syria, more than any other country worldwide. However, while Turkey can spin the sheer number of refugees it has admitted and the billions of dollars it has spent to host them on its soil, Turkey has also contributed to creating the problem in the first place. It has served for years as a passage way for foreign jihadists to reach Syria and exacerbate the conflict. Moreover, many of the refugees living in Turkey are treated poorly. They “still live in terrible conditions, some have been deported back to Syria and security forces have even shot at Syrians trying to cross the border,” said Gauri van Gulik, Amnesty International’s Deputy Director for Europe and Central Asia.
Until very recently, Turkish authorities have looked the other way as smugglers transported self-proclaimed “asylum-seekers” and economic migrants – mostly young adult males – from Turkey’s shores to Greece. From Greece, they began their trek through European Union member states to reach Germany or other desirable destinations. These include ISIS fighters embedded in the masses of refugees reaching Europe from Turkey, as well as garden variety criminals whom have responded to the welcome they received in Germany, Sweden and other EU member states with gang rapes, armed robberies and murder.
Erdogan used the prospect of a continued flow of refugees from Turkey to Europe as a bargaining chip to win key concessions from his European counterparts. Most importantly, he extracted a pledge of €6 billion from Europe (approximately US$6.7 billion based on the current currency conversion rate) to be paid by 2018. For its part, Turkey agreed to take back new refugees seeking to enter Europe and to implement other measures to stem any future refugee flow. The amount Europe will be paying Erdogan’s regime is the equivalent of over 3 years of Turkey’s expenditures on Syrian refugees, based on its own report of US$1.8 billion for all of its humanitarian related expenditures in 2014. No doubt, Turkey will have its hand out for more money from the European Union well before the end of 2018.
Erdogan is an autocrat. His government tramples on basic human rights such as freedom of expression. It has committed what could be considered crimes against humanity in its treatment of its Kurdish population. It scoffed at a judgment by the European Court of Human Rights, which sought to hold Turkey accountable for its illegal occupation in Cyprus and the human suffering it caused. Erdogan’s government has an abysmal record on women’s rights. It is extracting a large sum of money and other concessions from the European Union in order to stem the flow of Syrian refugees from Turkey to Europe that it helped to worsen in the first place. And it supports terrorist organizations such as Hamas.
In short, Turkey is one of the last places on earth that should be hosting a global summit devoted to addressing genuine humanitarian concerns.
FILE — A woman walks past the Human Rights Council at the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland.
According to the United Nations, the most evil country in the world today is Israel.
On March 24, 2016, the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) wrapped up its annual meeting in New York by condemning only one country for violating women’s rights anywhere on the planet – Israel, for violating the rights of Palestinian women.
On the same day, the U.N. Human Rights Council concluded its month-long session in Geneva by condemning Israel five times more than any other of the 192 UN member states.
There were five Council resolutions on Israel. One each on the likes of hellish countries like Syria, North Korea and Iran. Libya got an offer of “technical assistance.” And countries like Russia, Saudi Arabia and China were among the 95 percent of states that were never mentioned.
No slander is deemed too vile for the U.N. human rights bodies that routinely listen to highly orchestrated Palestinian versions of the ancient blood libel against the Jews.
In Geneva, Palestinian representative Ibrahim Khraishi told the Council on March 24, 2016: “Israeli soldiers and settlers kill Palestinian children. They shoot them dead. They will leave them to bleed to death.” And in New York, Palestinian representative Haifa Al-Agha told CSW on March 16, 2016: “Israel…is directing its military machinery against women and girls. They are killing them, injuring them, and leaving them bleeding to death.”
Operating hand-in-glove with governments and the U.N. secretariat are the unelected, sanctimonious NGOs, to which the UN offers free facilities and daily advertisement of “side-events.” In theory “materials containing abusive or offensive language or images are not permitted on United Nations premises.”
In practice, in Geneva the UN permitted handouts that claimed Israel “saw ethnic cleansing as a necessary precondition for its existence.” A film accused Israel of sexual violence against children and “trying to exterminate an entire Palestinian generation.” Speeches focused on the 1948 “catastrophe” in which a “settler colonial state” was established on Palestinian land.
The New York CSW-NGO scene included a film set in in the context of Israeli “oppression” and the “tear gas of my childhood,” and statements analogizing the experiences of Palestinians to today’s Syrian refugees.
Picture these real-life scenes:
In Geneva’s grand U.N. “Human Rights” Council chamber, 750 people assembled, pounced on the Jewish state, broadcast the spectacle online, and produced hundreds of articles and interviews in dozens of languages championing the results.
On the ground, Israelis are being hacked to death on the streets, stabbed in buses, slaughtered in synagogues, mowed down with automobiles, and shot in front of their children.
At the New York’s UN headquarters, 8,100 NGO representatives gathered from all corners of the globe, in addition to government delegates, and watched the weight of the entire world of women’s rights descended on only one country.
On the ground, Palestinian women are murdered and subjugated for the sake of male honor, Saudi women can’t drive, Iranian women are stoned to death for so-called “adultery,” Egyptian women have their genitals mutilated and Sudanese women give birth in prison with their legs shackled for being Christian.
Isn’t it about time that people stopped calling the U.N. a harmless international salon or a bad joke?
The poison isn’t simply rhetorical. One of the Council resolutions adopted last week launches a worldwide witch-hunt for companies that do business with Israel – as part of an effort to accomplish through economic strangulation what Israel’s enemies have not been able to accomplish on the battlefield. The resolution casts a wide net encompassing all companies engaged in whatever the U.N. thinks are business “practices that disadvantage Palestinian enterprises.”
And the toxicity is self-perpetuating. Acting at the beck and call of Islamic states and their conduit – French Ambassador Elizabeth Laurin and Council President Choi Kyonglim selected Canadian law professor Michael Lynk as the newest U.N. “independent” human rights investigator on Israel.
Lynk’s qualifications? He has likened Israelis to Nazis, and challenged the legitimacy of the state of Israel starting in 1948 as rooted in “ethnic cleansing.”
All of this played out in the same week that Europe was reeling from the Belgian terror attacks. Petrified or already vanquished, no European state voted against this onslaught of U.N. resolutions against Israel. Germany and the United Kingdom occasionally abstained, while France voted with Arab and Islamic states on all but one Council resolution.
Here we are just 70 years after World War II and Europeans believe that they can license this vitriol against the Jewish state – the only democracy on the front lines of an Islamist war against human decency – and the consequences can be contained to the Jews.
Even as the converse stares them in the face. Two days after the Brussels attacks, Islamic states rammed through a Council resolution slyly labeled “Effects of terrorism on the enjoyment of all human rights” that was actually so anti-human rights even Belgium was forced to vote against it.
As for the United States, the Obama administration has been the Human Rights Council’s most important supporter. Though the U.S. is currently in a mandatory one-year hiatus — after serving two consecutive terms — President Obama plans to bind his successor by running again in the fall for another three-year term that starts January 1, 2017.
Memo to Americans who are mad as hell: It’s time to elicit a promise from our would-be leaders to refuse to sit on the U.N. Human Rights Council or to legitimize the United Nations.
Professor of Law at Queen Mary University of London, Penny Green, is the first candidate for the role of the UN envoy to Israel and the Palestinian territories, a position that the Human Rights Council in Geneva will soon fill.
Ms. Green would be a truly “impartial” choice. She accuses Israel of being a “criminal state”, of being guilty of “ethnic cleansing” and “apartheid” and she even compares Israel to the Islamic State. Green has also complained that the US and the UK have not yet begun to bomb Israel for its “massacres”. The other “impartial” candidate, Canadian Professor Michael Lynk, is a bit more decent as he only signed anti-Israel petitions.
Considering that without the US veto Israel would have already been blacklisted by the UN Security Council; considering that Israel is treated worse than North Korea and Nigeria at the Human Rights Council; considering that at UN schools in Gaza Hamas stocks missiles to be launched against Israel; considering that the UN court in The Hague treats Israeli officials as Nazi war criminals, why is it so outrageous naming as UN bureaucrats those who compare Caliph Al Baghdad to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu?
The UN envoy for Children and Armed Conflict, Leila Zerrougui, suggested including the Israeli army in the black list of countries and organizations that regularly cause harm to children along with Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, the Taliban, and countries such as the Congo and the Central African Republic, infamous for their armies of children.
The culture of human rights, created by Jewish jurists after the Holocaust, is now being used by anti-Semites to foment a war against the State of Israel. Mr. Alfred de Zayas, the United Nations’ Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order, blamed last year’s Paris attacks on the U.S., Western colonialism, capitalism, and “Israeli settlers”, implicitly justifying them as “a response to grave injustices and ongoing abuses perpetrated by the dominant, primarily developed countries, against populations of less developed countries”.
Instead of equating Hamas with ISIS and ISIS with Iran, the UN officials ponder whether to include the IDF on the same lepers’ list as Islamic State. Whether they succeed or not doesn’t matter: they very presence pollutes the political atmosphere and destroys the reputation of the Jewish State.
Israel’s biggest enemy today is not Jihadism, but the UN, which entrusted the defense of human rights to China, Cuba, Russia and Saudi Arabia, among other liberal bastions, and to paranoid “experts” whose anti-Semitism resembles that of Doktor Joseph Goebbels.
Days after the latest Iranian ballistic missile test,Russiaand Iran are telling the Obama administration that Iranian missile tests are not prohibited by the UN Security Council, as the administration argues.
Russia and Iran cited language about ballistic missiles that was changed during last summer’s nuclear negotiations in Vienna. UN Security Council Resolution 1929 had stated plainly: “Iran shall not undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles.” During the negotiations, Iran demanded the removal of this uncompromising language in favor of a new, softer formulation.
The Obama administration complied, resulting in the passage of a new UN Security Council Resolution after the Iran agreement was reached. The new resolution merely “calls upon Iran not to undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles.”
The change in language—from the “shall not” requirement of the original resolution to the “calls upon” suggestion of the new one—was the subject of intense questioning by Congress precisely due to the suspicion that the administration had provided a loophole Iran would use to justify missile development.
In one exchange, Sen. Robert Menendez (D., N.J.) pressed Secretary of State John Kerry to acknowledge that the change in language was substantive.
“The ban on Iranian ballistic missiles,” Menendez told Kerry, “has, in fact, been lifted. The new Security Council resolution is quite clear. Iran is not prohibited from carrying out ballistic missile work.” Kerry rejected Menendez: “That is not accurate … [Iran is] restrained from any sharing of missile technology, purchase of missile technology, exchange of missile technology, work on missiles.”
In response to the Obama administration’s announcement that it would pursue sanctions after Iran’s latest missile test, Russia’s UN Ambassador raised precisely the objection that Menendez and other critics of the deal did: Obama and Kerry removed the prohibition on Iranian ballistic missile work last summer, when they agreed to remove the “shall not” language from the relevant UNSC resolution.
WarSclerotic 
Recent Comments