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Blasphemy Convictions Intensify in Sisi’s Egypt

April 7, 2016

Blasphemy Convictions Intensify in Sisi’s Egypt, Front Page Magazine, Raymond Ibrahim, April 7, 2017

(The author demands that President Sisi “do something,” but does not specify what he, as the president, is in a position to do legally. He does not control Al-Azhar University, nor can he require the courts to interpret or enforce the law as he wishes. He became Egypt’s president because millions of Egyptians were tired of his dictatorial predecessor. Would the author like to see Sisi emulate Morsi?

Egypt is an Islamic nation; Sisi can’t change that. At best, he can try to precipitate a gradual Islamic reformation.– DM)

al-sisi-660x330

Despite Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s many pluralistic words and gestures—which have won him much praise from the nation’s Christians and moderates—he appeases the Islamist agenda in one very clear way: by allowing the controversial defamation of religions law, colloquially known as the “blasphemy law,” to target Christians and moderates in ways arguably worse than under the Muslim Brotherhood and Morsi.

Late last February, three Christian teenagers were jailed for five years for breaking the defamation of religions law. A fourth defendant, 15, was handed a juvenile detention for an indefinite period. Earlier they were detained for 45 days and subjected to “ill-treatment” said a human rights group.

Their crime is to have made a 20-second video on a mobile phone mocking the Islamic State—which has been interpreted as mocking Islam. In the video, the boys appear laughing and joking, as they pretend to be ISIS members praying and slitting throats. The Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms, an independent rights group, confirmed that the four teenagers were performing scenes “imitating slaughter carried out by terrorist groups.” Even so, according to their defense lawyer, Maher Naguib, the Christian youth “have been sentenced for contempt of Islam and inciting sectarian strife…. The judge didn’t show any mercy. He handed down the maximum punishment.”

Considering that even Al Azhar—the Islamic world’s most prestigious university located in Egypt—refuses to denounce the Islamic State as being un-Islamic, it is unsurprising that mockery of ISIS is being conflated with mockery of Islam.

The Christian youth made the brief video back in January 2015, when three of them were aged 17 and one 15. It is believed that the court kept delaying their case till the three 17-year-olds became 18, so they could receive the full penalty. Their teacher who also appeared in the video had earlier been sentenced to three years in jail.

Several other Christians have been prosecuted for insulting Islam and Muslims under Sisi’s tenure. One young Christian man was sentenced to six years for “liking” an Arabic-language Facebook page administered by Muslim converts to Christianity. A female Christian teacher was imprisoned for six months after Muslim parents accused her of insulting Islam and evangelizing. Bishoy Armia Boulous, a Muslim convert to Christianity, remains behind bars on, according to his lawyer, trumped up charges of blasphemy.

While Christian minorities are the most prone to being targeted by the blasphemy law, secular Muslim thinkers and writers are also on the hit list. Late last January, female Muslim writer Fatima Naoot was sentenced to three years in prison after she criticized the sadistic slaughter of animals that takes place during the Islamic festival, Eid al-Adha. The month before that, in December, television host Islam al-Behairy was sentenced to one year in prison for questioning the validity of some of the sayings (hadiths) attributed to Muslim prophet Muhammad.

Although Egypt’s constitution outlaws the “defamation of religions,” the plural indicates that, along with Islam, Judaism and Christianity are protected. In reality, however, the law is almost exclusively used to prosecute Christian minorities and secular Muslims. Despite the fact that there are many more Muslims than Christians in Egypt, rarely are Islamists arrested and prosecuted for defaming Christianity.

In this, Egypt is becoming more like Pakistan. Although that nation also prohibits the defamation of religions—which technically includes Christianity—only Christians and moderates are targeted and imprisoned; some, like Asia Bibi, a wife and mother, are on death row. Conversely, Muslims who openly defame Christianity—and they are many—are regularly let off one way or the other. A few weeks ago a Muslim broke into a church and proceeded to burn its Bibles. Although several Christians caught and handed him over to police, the latter claimed he was mentally unstable and could not stand trial. Earlier, a Muslim shopkeeper started selling shoes which depict the Christian cross on their soles. Christians demonstrated but police did nothing.

On January 26, soon after the sentencing of the writer Fatima Naoot, another moderate Muslim and television host in Egypt, Ibrahim Eissa, scathingly criticized the Sisi government, including by saying that “there have been more blasphemy cases and convictions during the Sisi era than during the Morsi era.” He continued:

There is no greater contradiction between what the [Egyptian] state says and claims about itself and the reality on the ground… The Egyptian state is schizophrenic because it says what it does not do…. It’s amazing and baffling to see a state who’s president regularly preaches about the need for religious discourse and renewal—and yet, during Sisi’s 18-19 month tenure, the nation has witnessed more reports, cases and convictions, and the imprisonment of writers, in the name of defamation religions than during the one year tenure of the Muslim Brotherhood president…. The [Sisi] revolution dropped the Brotherhood but kept the ideology unchanged.

Categories: Blasphemy, Christians, Egypt, Human rights, Muslims, Sisi
Tags: Blasphemy, Christians, Egypt, human rights, Muslims, Sisi

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The Bipartisan Enemy of the Good

April 5, 2016

The Bipartisan Enemy of the Good, Front Page Magazine, Caroline Glick, April 5, 2016

secretary_kerry_with_president_al-sisi_july_2014

Originally published by the Jerusalem Post.

On March 25, The New York Times published an editorial effectively calling for US President Barack Obama to abandon the US alliance with Egypt.

The Obama White House’s house paper urged the president to “reassess whether an alliance that has long been considered a cornerstone of American national security policy is doing more harm than good.” The editorial concluded that Obama must “start planning for the possibility of a break in the alliance with Egypt.”

The Times’ call was based on an open letter to Obama authored by a bipartisan group of foreign policy experts that call themselves the “Working Group on Egypt.” Citing human rights violations on the part of the government of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the Working Group urged Obama to tie US financial and military assistance to Egypt to the protection of NGOs operating in Egypt.

The self-proclaimed bipartisan band of experts is co-chaired by Robert Kagan from the Brookings Institution and Michele Dunne from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Among its prominent members are Elliott Abrams, Ellen Bork, Reuel Gerecht, Brian Katulis, Neil Hicks and Sarah Margon.

The Working Group has a history.

In January 2011, it called for Obama to force then Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak to resign from office. In so doing, it provided bipartisan cover for Obama’s decision to abandon the US’s most critical and dependable ally in the Arab world. Then, as now, the group’s esteemed experts argued that due to the regime’s infringement of human rights, the US could not in good conscience support it. Back in 2011, Israelis found a rare wall-to-wall unanimity of purpose in vocally and forcefully defending Mubarak from his American detractors. From the far Left to the far Right, from the IDF General Staff to the street, Israelis warned anyone who would listen that if Mubarak were forced out of power, the Muslim Brotherhood would take over and transform Egypt into a jihadist state.

Due in large part to the presence of senior Republican foreign policy hands on the Working Group, by and large Israel’s warnings were ignored in Washington. Facing the unusual Israeli consensus backing Mubarak was an American consensus insisting that “democracy” would ensure that a new liberal democratic Egypt would emerge out the ashes of the Mubarak regime.

The Americans chided us for repeating over and over again that the Muslim Brotherhood, the progenitor of al-Qaida, Hamas, Egyptian Islamic Jihad and every other major Sunni jihadist terrorist group around at the time, was a terrorist group.

We were attacked as “anti-democratic,” for insisting that the Facebook posters and twitterers on Twitter were in no position to replace Mubarak.

Who were we, the Americans scoffed, to point out that the “Facebook revolutionaries” were but a flimsy veneer which barely hid the Islamists from willfully blind Western officials and reporters who refused to admit that liberal values are not universal values – to put it mildly.

In the ensuing five years, every single warning that Israel expressed was borne out in spades.

Just as we said, right after Mubarak was forced from power, the Islamists unceremoniously dispatched with the Facebook crowd. The two million Islamists who converged on Tahrir Square to hear Sheikh Yussuf Qaradawi call for jihad and the Islamic conquest of Israel weren’t interested in democracy.

The women and Christians of Egypt soon realized, Mubarak’s overthrow, which paved the way for the Muslim Brotherhood electoral victories in 2012, did not expand their rights, it endangered their lives. As for the hapless Americans, immediately after Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammed Morsi was inaugurated to serve as president of Egypt, the government began demanding that the US release from prison Omar Abdel Rahman, the so-called Blind Sheikh who masterminded the 1993 World Trade Center bombings. The US embassy in Cairo was the target of jihadist riots on September 11, 2012.

Then, since Morsi was elected democratically, none of this was any sweat off the back of Washington’s Egypt experts. They supported sending F-16s to his air force even after he hosted then Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Cairo, let Iranian warships traverse the Suez Canal and became a strategic ally of Hamas. They also supported his government, even though he enabled Libyan arms to flow through Egypt to Syria, transforming the war in Syria from a local dispute into the incubator for Islamic State – the precursor of which Morsi also gave a free hand to operate in the Sinai, in conjunction with Hamas.

The Americans didn’t reconsider their belief that Morsi was the guy for them, even after he allowed his Muslim Brothers to torch Coptic churches and massacre Christians. They didn’t revisit their support for the Muslim Brotherhood government even after Morsi arrogated to himself dictatorial powers that even Mubarak never dreamed of.

Perhaps if Morsi had been a responsible economic leader, and maintained the liberalization policies Mubarak enacted during his last five years in power, then defense minister Abdel Fatah Sisi wouldn’t have felt the need to remove him from power. After all, Morsi appointed Sisi to his position.

But in addition to ending even lip service to human rights, Morsi gutted the economy. By the time the military overthrew Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood in the summer of 2013, Egypt had a mere $5 billion in reserves, and according to the World Health Organization, a quarter of Egyptians were starving.

So had the Muslim Brotherhood remained in power, Egypt would not have remained a democracy.

It would have become a jihadist state as dangerous as Iran, with the economic prospects of North Korea.

In other words, five years ago, there was no chance that a post-Mubarak Egypt would become a liberal democracy. There were only two options – a US-allied tyranny that fought jihad and maintained the peace with Israel, or a jihad state, aligned with Iran, that posed an existential threat to Israel, Jordan, the US and the international economy.

Those are still the choices today, but the stakes are even higher. Due to the Muslim Brotherhood’s year in power, the jihadist elements that gathered force in the Sinai over the past 20 years were able to organize as a more or less unified force, under the rule of Islamic State (ISIS), and in strategic alliance with Hamas. Like ISIS in Syria, ISIS in Egypt is an aggressive, dangerous group that stops at nothing to achieve its aims of expanding the ISIS empire.

The war it now fights against the Egyptian state is a total war.

To his credit, Sisi recognizes the nature of the threat and has taken steps to counter jihad that Mubarak never contemplated. The Egyptian leader recognizes that to defeat ISIS nothing less than a reformation of Islam is required. And so, in addition to fighting ISIS with everything he has, he is risking everything by taking on the jihadist belief system.

Sisi has mobilized the clerics at Al-Azhar seminary to develop an Islamic narrative that rejects jihad.

Sisi risks everything because everything is already at risk. If ISIS wins, Egypt is finished.

To win this war, he has publicly embraced Israel as an ally. He has openly sided with Israel against Hamas. Unlike Mubarak, Sisi has been fully willing to acknowledge that just because Hamas’s primary victims are Jews doesn’t mean that it isn’t a terrorist group that has to be destroyed.

Without putting too fine a point on in, for his fearless fight to the death with the forces of jihad – both in the mosque and on the battlefield – Sisi has already entered the pantheon, alongside Winston Churchill, of word historical figures. And yet, rather than embrace him and support him in his fight for Egypt and humanity, the same “experts” who called for Mubarak to be overthrown now urge Obama to abandon Sisi.

It is depressing that there is no magic bullet – like democracy – for the pathologies that afflict the Islamic world. But there is no magic bullet. And there are no easy choices for people who refuse to recognize that the natural state of man is neither liberal nor democratic.

But it is hard to accept the credibility of those who refuse to learn from their mistakes. It is harder still as well to listen to the “moral calls” of those who refuse to accept that because their past advice was heeded, thousands have died, and if their current calls are heeded, millions of lives will be imperiled.

Categories: Egypt, Foreign policy, Human rights, Islam and human rights, Islamic reformation, Islamic terrorism, Israel, Leftists, Morsi, Mubarak, Muslim Brotherhood, Obama and Egypt, Obama and Islam, Obama and Muslim Brotherhood, Republicans, Sisi, U.S. Congress
Tags: Egypt, Foreign Policy, human rights, Islam and human rights, Islamic reformation, Islamic terrorism, Israel, Leftists, Morsi, Mubarak, Muslim Brotherhood, Obama and Egypt, Obama and Islam, Obama and Muslim Brotherhood, Republicans, Sisi, U.S. Congress

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Two Clashes of Civilizations

April 4, 2016

Two Clashes of Civilizations, Dan Miller’s Blog, April 3, 2016

(The views expressed in this article are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)

One clash involves those who would make America more corrupt, more violent, more drug addicted and poorer. The other involves those who would make Islam dominant, bringing us Sharia law along with the violence and social unrest now seen in Europe.

Illegal immigration from South of the Border

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHti8_guyMM

Is she right or wrong?

Corruption in the United States mainly (but not exclusively) enriches the political class. In the Latin Amerian countries my wife and I explored during our seven years of sailing in the Caribbean, we saw corruption in most countries. However, rather than being mainly at the top, it was accepted and relied upon by all levels of society. Venezuela under Chavez was the worst. The more illegal immigrants from Latin America who enter America, the more corruption we will have at all levels.

Our southern border is not a sieve; it is wide open to all who can get to it, with no significant efforts to restrict entry or to deport the many who get across illegally.

Perhaps that’s among the reasons why the U.S. Border Patrol agents’ union broke with its policy of endorsing no presidential candidate to support Donald Trump.

“We need a person in the White House who doesn’t fear the media, who doesn’t embrace political correctness, who doesn’t need the money, who is familiar with success, who won’t bow to foreign dictators, who is pro-military and values law enforcement, and who is angry for America and NOT subservient to the interests of other nations. Donald Trump is such a man,” the union said.

Trump had scheduled a tour of the border with agents from a local chapter of the union, but that tour was canceled due to pressure from the group’s national headquarters. Yet the endorsement, which Trump’s campaign touted Wednesday, came from the national union.

The results of our open border are felt well beyond border states. In St. Louis, Missouri for example, a substantial spike in violent crime has been traced to cheap heroin and Mexican cartels. Ditto Chicago, Baltimore, Milwaukee and Philadelphia.

“The gangs have to have a lot of customers because the heroin is so cheap,” said Gary Tuggle, the Drug Enforcement Administration’s chief in Philadelphia, who observed the same phenomenon while overseeing the agency’s Baltimore office. ”What we are seeing is these crews becoming more violent as they look to expand their turf.”

To attract customers, the cartels — usually through a local surrogate — instruct gangs to sell the drug at prices as low as $5 for each button (about one-tenth of a gram of powdered heroin, which could last a novice user an entire day). At times, the gangs distribute free samples, according to agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Drugs are one part of the illegal immigration problem, but far from the only part. On March 16th, an article by Victor Davis Hanson was posted at PJ Media. It was titled The Weirdness of Illegal Immigration. Hanson’s basic thesis is that illegal immigration begets disregard for the law and hence additional lawlessness.

[C]ontemplate what happens in a social, cultural, and economic context when several million immigrants arrive from one of the poorest areas in the world (e.g., Oaxaca) to one of the most affluent (e.g., California). For guidance, think not of Jorge Ramos, but of the premodern/postmodern collision that is occurring in Germany, Austria, and Denmark.

The first casualty is the law. I am not referring to the collapse of federal immigration enforcement, but rather the ripples that must follow from it. When someone ignores a federal statute, then it is naturally easy to flout more. In Los Angeles, half the traffic accidents are hit-and-run collisions. I can attest first-hand that running from an accident or abandoning a wrecked vehicle is certainly a common occurrence in rural California. Last night on a rural road, a driver behind me (intoxicated? Malicious? Crazy?) apparently tried to rear-end me, then turned off his lights, sped up, and at the next stop sign pulled over swearing out the window in Spanish. In this age and in these environs, why would one call a sheriff for a minor everyday occurrence like that? The point is simply that when there is no federal law, no one has any idea how several million arrive in the U.S., much less what exactly they were doing before their illegal arrival. [Emphasis added.]

. . . .

Out here almost all laws concerning the licensing and vaccination of dogs seem to have simply disappeared. No one can walk or ride a bicycle along these rural roads without being attacked by hounds that are unlicensed and not vaccinated—and that have no ID or indeed owners that step forward to claim ownership once the victim is bleeding. The Bloomberg Rule reigns (i.e., if you can’t keep snow off the street, deplore global warming or cosmic war): we talk of dreamers because we have not a clue how to ensure that hundreds of thousands of pets are registered and given rabies shots. No one suggests that once one breaks the law of his adopted home, and continues to do so through false affidavits, aliases, and fraudulent documents, then the law itself become an abstraction, useful as a shelter, expendable if an inconvenience. Again, one assumes that if a citizen were to do that, he would face a felony indictment.

. . . .

An indigent Oaxacan immigrant is reminded more often by his host that his poverty is not the result of his own wild gamble to leave his home and enter illegally an entirely foreign universe, but due to the racism, nativism, and xenophobia of his clueless host—pathologies that can be ameliorated by plenty of advocates whose own careers are predicated on open borders and slow if any assimilation.

Yesterday, I saw this story of a walkout from a local high school, five miles away: Among the many racialized complaints was a strange one that that were not enough Latino school board members (that might apparently ensure interpreters at board meeting). “We feel oppressed and underrepresented. When we try to speak up, they don’t listen,” said student Monica Velazquez. “When the majority of the school board is white and male, I don’t see us being represented. And [Laton High School] is just a small piece of that problem.” In our world of victimology, being oppressed and underrepresented are quirky assertions (e.g., ethnic chauvinism mean that coveted spots must reflect ethnic percentages of the population, while ethnic disproportion in unmentionable activities is left unsaid).

Where does all this lead? I suggest we open our eyes and watch it in progress. Mass flight either out of state, or to coastal enclaves, where liberalism and abstract progressive utopianism can be indulged safety without worries over the concrete ramifications that follow from one’s own idealism. If deeds trump words, then the real racists or exclusionists are those in the mostly affluent coastal enclaves who suddenly want no part of the California that they have helped to create.

The final tragedy? If the border were to be closed, if immigration laws were enforced, if there were some reduction in legal immigration, if entry were to be meritocratic, if we reverted to the melting-pot ideal of assimilation, if we cut –studies courses and jettisoned therapy and ideology for hard science, math, and English language, in just two decades one’s particular ancestry would become irrelevant — the image of Oaxaca would be analogous to having a grandfather from Palermo or cousin from the Azores. In other words, things would work out fine.

Please read the entire article. It’s one of VDH’s best.

Sanctuary cities? An article titled Terrorism, Enclaves and Sanctuary Cities compares sanctuary cities to “no-go zones”in Europe.

While there are no actual “No Go Zones” in the United States, there are neighborhoods scattered around the United States, where the concentration of ethnic immigrant minorities is so great that police find themselves unable to make the sort of inroads that they should be able to make in order to effectively police these communities. Adding to the high density of these aliens in these communities is the issue of foreign languages often being the prevalent language in such “ghettos.” This gives new meaning to the term “Language Barrier.”

. . . .

Not unlike the “No Go Zones” of European countries, these communities in the Unites States also tend to shield foreign nationals who may be fugitives from justice both inside the United States and in other countries. Terrorists and their supporters are able to go about their daily lives- undetected by law enforcement agencies.

Implementation of sanctuary policies in such cities greatly exacerbates the threats posed to national security and public safety- turning those cities into magnets that attract still more radicals and fugitives and terrorists who need to “fly under the radar.”

Any community that provides safe haven for illegal aliens willfully endangers the lives of it residents.

Even as concerns about increased threats of terror attacks are the topic of a succession of Congressional hearings, so-called “Sanctuary Cities” continue to flourish- with the tacit approval of the administration even though they are clearly operating in violation of federal law.

Islamic immigration, legal and illegal

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeJ-iv3MOTo

Europe

Much of Europe has been overrun with Islamic “immigrants” and “refugees.” In consequence, Sweden, Germany and other nations are faring poorly. It is virtually impossible to determine who they are (use of forged passports and other identity documents is rampant), where they come from or whether they are seeking refuge from violence in their home countries or ways to bring it to Europe on behalf of Allah “the all merciful.” Perhaps national suicide is a “merciful” way to go. Unfortunately, few in Europe’s political class acknowledge the nature of the predicament their constituents face.

Despite the series of horrific attacks perpetrated by Muslim terrorists in the name of their religion, Europe is not taking the appropriate steps to suppress the phenomenon. Very few mosques in which clerics preach for war against the infidels have been closed down; public order has not been restored to the lawless suburbs in large cities; there is no real oversight of textbooks used in Muslim schools and mosques; very few radical imams have been deported; no significant countermeasures have been taken against Muslims expressing extremist views; and the burka ban has not been implemented.

These are just several of the signs pointing to Europe’s lack of comprehension that some of the Muslims living among them want the continent to fall under Muslim sovereignty, whether by way of the Islamic State approach of violent jihad or by the Muslim Brotherhood approach of population growth and Islamic preaching.

There are many excuses: Misconceptions that violent Muslims are that way simply because they are poor and unloved, a misperceived need to expand the workforce by importing those unwilling and/or unable to participate in that workforce are parts of the problem. So is Europe’s “original sin” of colonialism, for which all of Europe must atone. Another is a fear that if they are not appeased Muslims will become more violent.

Rooting out militant Islam will require taking police action in Muslim-controlled areas. We have already seen the humiliating footage of police officers fleeing under a hail of rocks and Molotov cocktails, hurled at them by crowds of incensed Muslims. Another contributing factor is the dependency of political leaders, primarily from the Left, on the Muslim vote (French President Francois Hollande owes his election victory to the Muslims).

Turkish Muslims living in Germany are on the move. Are they “refugees” (from where) or economic “immigrants” just seeking a better life?

Turkish Muslims living in Germany threaten Germany Shouting “With Allah’s (and Merkel’s?) help, we shall conquer you,” Turkish Muslims take to the streets of Germany, carrying Turkish flags and using the ‘Grey Wolves’ salute, the Turkish equivalent of a National Socialist (NAZI) salute. Just think, Angela Merkel has just signed an agreement to allow Turkish Muslims into Germany without having to get a visa.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YqcIFIzOPA

Don’t they seem grateful for their new opportunities to prosper? Oh well. Swedish women and girls gotta “love” them, like it or not.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uws9BlnJmjI

Some “ordinary” Europeans are getting fed with up mass immigration and support anti-immigrant politicians. The left objects.

“You are not the people, you are the past,” was the message to German critics of mass immigration on Germany’s public broadcaster ZDF’s NEO MAGAZIN ROYALE television programme.

The message was delivered in a video featuring a multi-ethnic crowd of disabled, gay and transgender people, as well as a Muslim woman wearing a face veil and a man wearing traditional Saudi headgear, all telling a crowd of Germans that they are “not Germany”.

The video opens with a crowd of angry-looking white Germans hitting against the windows of a bus to intimidate a frightened Arab child and his father, a policeman dragging the child out and hurling him to the ground. Led by the German comedian and television presenter’Jan Böhmermann, brightly dressed people rise from graves, forming a crowd to combat the beige-clad Germans who are wielding Donald Trump placards and signs reading “Refugees not welcome.”

Condemning the German crowd as “authoritarian nationalist dorks” and telling them “you are not the people, you are the past,” Böhmermann cautions that “true Germans are coming for you, you’d better run fast.”

Warning the beige-clad Germans that “10 million bicycle helmets are in sight” Böhmermann describes the lifestyle of “true Germans” to be one of cycling, recycling and eating kebab and muesli. In what is perhaps a jab at protests from senior members of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union against pork being “quietly removed from menus” of public canteens, Böhmermann also declares that the “true Germans” eat vegan sausages.

Obama’s America

A relatively small, but significant, number of Muslims now live in America.

In 2005, more people from Islamic countries became legal permanent United States residents—nearly 96,000—than there had been in any other year in the previous two decades.^[13]^[14] In 2009, more than 115,000 Muslims became legal residents of the United States.^[15]

That’s just those who are legally present. Those present illegally? The powers-that-be haven’t a clue as to who they are, where they are, how they got here, where they came from or what they want. We experienced the gifts bestowed upon us by some legally present in Obama’s America during the Boston marathon as well as in Fort Hood, San Bernardino and elsewhere.

Obama has already brought in more than 76,000 “Syrian refugees.” More seem to be on the way.

President Barack Obama has been quietly pushing new plans to bring thousands of additional Syrian refugees into the country, despite the concerns of state and county officials and the outrages committed by welfare-dependent migrants in Europe.

Obama’s special assistant to the president for immigration policy, Felicia Escobar, recently announced plans to increase America’s intake of migrants, according to the Washington Examiner.

“We want to make sure that we can increase our numbers of refugees that are able to settle here,” Escobar said. “The need globally is so, so, so massive right now, given all the displacement and conflict around the world, but we also know that we have to do it in a way that’s smart.”

Federal law already allows the administration to bring in 10,000 Syrian refugees a year, but many states and local county administrations have complained that once the Obama administration places refugees among them, few resources are available to deal with them.

The influx is very unpopular, according to polls. Also, nearly all immigrants from the Middle East are dependent on welfare. Some migrant and some second-generation Muslim Americans also embrace jihad.

During his March 2016 visit to a mosque, Obama praised Muslims living in America.

In rebuke to politicians like Donald Trump, Obama presented Islam as an essential part of the nation’s heritage, going back to Muslim slaves brought to the British colonies and running through Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom up to Fazlur Rahman Khan, who designed two of Chicago’s tallest skyscrapers. And he spoke emotionally about mail he received from Muslim American children and parents who felt persecuted and unsafe.

“We’re one American family. And when any part of our family starts to feel separate or second-class or targeted, it tears at the very fabric of our nation,” he said.

. . . .

On Wednesday he responded to critics—especially Republican contenders to replace him in the White House—who complain that he won’t label Islamic terrorism as such, saying demands to label by religion only play into extremist propaganda.

“I often hear it said that we need moral clarity in this fight. And the suggestion is somehow that if I would simply say, ‘These are all Islamic terrorists,’ then we would actually have solved the problem by now, apparently,” he said. “Let’s have some moral clarity: Groups like ISIS are desperate for legitimacy…. We must never give them that legitimacy. They’re not defending Islam. They’re not defending Muslims.”

Implicitly responding to tiresome calls for the “moderate Muslims” to speak out against terrorism, Obama said that they are speaking—but not enough people are listening. He vowed to work to amplify their voices. [Emphasis added.|

There are, in fact, Muslims who want to reform Islam; Obama pays them scant attention. Instead, He consorts with CAIR and it’s co-conspirators to keep Islam just the way it is. Here’s a video of some reform-minded Muslims. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Muslim, produced and directed it as well as others in the Honor Diaries series.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbTATkLntBU

And here’s a video of some who think Islam is just fine the way it is.

As I noted here,

Along with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Azeezah Kanji — the featured speaker in the above video — has been very active in disparaging Honor Diaries. Like CAIR, she has ties to the Obama White House and was named a “Champion of Change” by the White House in 2011. What changes in Islam does Ms. Kanji champion? None, apparently, of those intrinsic to it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEpMfYDUahA

In Heretic, Hirsi Ali argued,

There is probably no realistic chance that Muslims in countries such as Pakistan will agree to dispense with sharia. However, we in the West must insist that Muslims living in our societies abide by our rule of law. We must demand that Muslim citizens abjure sharia practices and punishments that conflict with fundamental human rights and Western legal codes. Moreover, under no circumstances should Western countries allow Muslims to form self-governing enclaves in which women and other supposedly second-class citizens can be treated in ways that belong in the seventh century. [Emphasis added.]

Yet there are Islamic enclaves in America where Sharia is practiced. According to The Clarion Project, there are at least twenty-two.

Jamaat ul-Fuqra, a Pakistani militant group that has rebranded itself as Muslims of the Americas, says it has 22 “Islamic villages” in the U.S. Its “Islamberg” headquarters in New York is the most well-known.

The Clarion Project identified one village in Texas in 2014 and the group mentioned others, including one in Alaska during a frivolous lawsuit it filed against a prominent critic.

Fuqra’s 1994 book, Target Islam: Exposing the Malicious Conspiracy of the Zionists Against the World of Islam and Prominent Muslim Leaders,explains that its establishment of “villages” in the U.S. since 1980 is part of a jihad against a Satanic-Jewish-Communist conspiracy that puppeteers the U.S. government.

They have a cultish devotion to their extremist leader in Pakistan, Sheikh Gilani, who they believe is in constant contact with Allah and the Prophet Mohammed and a miracle worker chosen by Allah to lead Islam to victory.

. . . .

“The Jammatul Fuqra has been able to establish justice according to Islamic Law, not only in the United States, but wherever Muslims are living under un-Islamic laws. According to the Holy Q’uran, a Muslim is not allowed to follow laws other than the law of the Holy Qu’ran…This so-called ‘freedom’ is actually enslavement by the kufaar [non-Muslims] and Shaitan [Satan]…”

It continues:

“On these sites where Islamic Law is enforced as much as possible, anyone who commits a crime against the Law of Allah is punished according to Ta’azerat….Here you see one person receiving twenty lashes in one [Sharia] court in South America. He was found guilty of violating the honor of a Muslim lady, a crime for which he received a hard punishment with patience and faith.”

The article says that the hudud punishments, such as execution and severing of hands and feet, cannot be enforced in kuffar (infidel) lands like the U.S. Notice that this isn’t a stand against sharia‘s brutal hudud punishments; just that they aren’t implementable at this time.

With freedoms of speech and religion lacking in Islamic countries, America could become the birthplace of Islamic reform. With Obama in office? Not a chance.

Conclusions

People from some foreign cultures have integrated and become productive American citizens. Many who have come illegally have not and live on welfare payments and other government subsidies. Since the current administration welcomes them and seeks more, we get (some) cheap labor, plentiful cheap heroin and substantial welfare costs. We also get drug gang-related violence, lawlessness metastasizing into areas beyond immigration itself and corruption.

Our Islamic “refugees” and “immigrants” bring us some similar and some different bounties, just a bit less thus far. They bring us the gift of jihad and Sharia law while enjoying welfare-based lives and complaining that anyone who complains is racist and “Islamophobic.”

There is little that any of us, individually, can do to halt or even slow the Haspanification and Islamification of America. We need to vote for leaders who will undertake — seriously and not merely with pleasing slogans — the legislative and legitimate executive steps needed for that purpose.

Categories: 2016 elections, Corruption, Donald Trump, Europe, Freedom of speech, Human rights, Illegal immigration, Islam and honor, Islam in America, Islamic immigration, Islamic integration, Islamic invasion, Islamic jihad, Islamic reformation, Islamisation, Multiculturalism, Obama and Islam, Obama's America
Tags: Corruption, Donald Trump, Europe, freedom of speech, human rights, Illegal immigration, Islam and honor, Islam in America, Islamic immigration, Islamic integration, Islamic invasion, Islamic Jihad, Islamic reformation, Islamisation, Multiculturalism, Obama and Islam, Obama's America

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Turkey to Host UN’S First Global Humanitarian Summit

March 30, 2016

Turkey to Host UN’S First Global Humanitarian Summit, Front Page Magazine, Joseph Klein, March 30, 2016

(Please see also, Turkish Gov’t Children’s Magazine Promotes Martyrdom. — DM)

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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 – 130^th 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.

Categories: Human rights, Turkey, United Nations
Tags: human rights, Turkey, United Nations

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Patrol Muslim Neighborhoods or Jewish ones

March 29, 2016

Patrol Muslim Neighborhoods or Jewish ones, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, March 29, 2016

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When I go to the synagogue on Passover, there will be a police officer at the door. There will be an NYPD officer in front of every synagogue. Police brass will make the rounds of each synagogue to check security and alertness. Local precincts will be on alert anticipating a Muslim terrorist attack.

As they are on every Jewish holiday.

In France, there are heavily armed soldiers outside synagogues. In Israel, the soldiers are more likely to be found inside the synagogues. That is what Jewish life is like under the shadow of Muslim terrorism.

The ADL, which was not outraged when Bernie Sanders posed with members of anti-Semitic hate groups such as SJP and CAIR, put out a press release denouncing Ted Cruz for calling for heightened police scrutiny of Muslim neighborhoods. But the alternative to a police presence in Muslim areas is a police presence in Jewish areas. If you can’t stop Muslim terrorism at the source, then you have to try and secure all the potential targets. That means police officers in front of synagogues and TSA agents checking your shoes. It means police forces that look like armies and soldiers in the streets.

The ADL denounced Cruz for calling for a return to the NYPD’s old tactics for breaking up Muslim terror plots. One of those “controversial” methods led to the breakup of a Muslim terror plot to blow up a synagogue in Manhattan. Ahmed Ferhani had been interfaith enough to also consider blowing up a church, but he settled on plotting to plant a bomb and then open fire inside a synagogue.

The same left that is now outraged by Cruz’s statement fought for Ferhani. They fought for a Muslim terrorist who boasted at his sentencing, “I intended to create chaos and send a message of intimidation and coercion to the Jewish population of New York City.” In the zero sum game of civil rights, the left fights for the civil rights of Muslim terrorists and against the civil rights of their Jewish victims.

Muslim civil rights is not a matter between the government and Muslims. It is a zero sum game in which protecting the “rights” of Muslims to plan terror attacks takes away the right of their victims to live. It’s a choice between having police informants in a mosque or police officers in front of synagogues. Both send a chilling message. But the former sends a chilling message to terrorists. The latter to their targets.

Liberal groups protesting the idea of Muslim surveillance are offering a false and dishonest choice.

The choice is not whether there will be government surveillance and a police presence. The choice is where will it be? Will it be at a mosque run by the Muslim Brotherhood that terror preachers visit to spread their hate? Or will it be at every church and synagogue that Muslim terrorists might target.

None of the above is not an option. It stops being an option after the first, second and third terror attacks. France tried to ignore Muslim violence against Jews for as long as it could. But even a left-wing government was forced to station armed soldiers in front of Jewish schools and synagogues.

Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL’s new boss, whines that “special patrols of Muslim neighborhoods” will make Muslims “more vulnerable, more frightened”. What exactly does he think that police patrols of Jewish neighborhoods do? What message does it send to Jewish children going to synagogue that there is a cop at the door because a Muslim terrorist might try to kill them?

Why isn’t Greenblatt more concerned about how those children feel than how their killers do?

Muslim terrorism is not a matter between Muslims and an abstract state. The victims of Muslim terror are not abstractions. They are real people who suffer and bleed. After every Muslim terror attack, the media rushes the victims off the stage to make way for Muslims whining about an imaginary backlash after someone gave them a dirty look on the bus, because it wants us to forget who the real victims are.

The real victims are not in the mosque. They are in the church, the synagogue and the Hindu temple. They are in a New York office building shuffling their papers at 8:45 AM on a Tuesday morning. They are at a Christmas party in California. They are near the finish line in Boston watching the runners pass.

Muslim civil rights violate their civil rights. Muslim civil rights violate their bodies. Muslim civil rights drive nails and ball bearings into their arms and legs. Muslim civil rights lead them to stagger through the smoke and then plummet one hundred stories headfirst into the New York cement. Muslim civil rights force non-Muslims to walk in fear to their own houses of worship waiting for the next attack.

Muslim terrorism forces us to choose between the civil rights of Muslims and those of everyone else.

How we handle Muslim terrorism will define who we are as a people. Will we side with the victims or the perpetrators? Anyone who speaks of the civil rights of the perpetrators instead of those of the victims has chosen the side of the perpetrators. The ADL, like Obama and the media, stands with the perpetrators. It would rather see police in front of synagogues than in front of mosques.

That is a choice. And it is a choice that says a great deal about what the ADL’s real values are.

Liberals used to pride themselves on standing with the oppressed, not with the oppressors. Today, they stand unambiguously with the oppressors. They stand with hate groups and synagogue bombers.

Dutch journalist Elma Drayer complained about Muslims throwing stones at Jews leaving the synagogue after September 11. The police told her not to talk about it because the Muslims were “already being stigmatized”. It wasn’t the stigmatism of the Jewish victims being stoned that the police were concerned with, but the stigmatism of the Muslims who were throwing the stones at them.

This is Muslim civil rights.

We can be concerned about the “stigmatism” of the Muslims whose mosques are being used to plot attacks. Or the stigmatism of their victims. We can worry about how “vulnerable” and “frightened” Muslims feel at the extra police scrutiny or how vulnerable and frightened non-Muslims are because instead of proactively fighting terrorism, they have to reactively hope to stop the next terrorist attack.

The NYPD brass that attacked Ted Cruz’s proposal is reactively deploying police officers to potential targets because it has been prevented from fighting Islamic terrorism proactively by investigating mosques and other Jihadist coordinating hubs. And so there are police officers in front of synagogues and heavily armed ESU tactical teams hanging around high traffic areas hoping that will be enough.

Under Bill de Blasio, New York made a choice between proactively targeting Muslim neighborhoods and reactively deploying everywhere that Muslim terrorists might strike. It was the wrong choice.

In Europe, those same choices were also made. Synagogues were turned into fortresses with bulletproof windows and armored doors. Jews were told not to wear religious clothing outside. Worshipers travel in fear to prayer, passing armed soldiers outside, entering one at a time to avoid becoming bigger targets.

While politicians wrung their hands over Muslim feelings, their victims were left frightened, vulnerable and stigmatized. And now the same pattern is repeating itself in the United States all over again.

The fundamental moral question of every crime, every atrocity and every act of violence against the innocent is do we concern ourselves with the pain of the victims or do we make excuses for the killers. The answer to that question defines who we are, individually and as a people. It also determines whether we will defend ourselves or go on making excuses for the killers even as they are killing us.

When we choose the killers over their victims, we not only betray them, but we betray ourselves.

Categories: ADL, CAIR, Human rights, Islam and Christianity, Islam and human rights, Islam and Jews, Islamic immigration, Islamic jihad, Islamisation, Islamophobia, Multiculturalism, SJP
Tags: CAIR, human rights, Islam and Christianity, Islam and human rights, Islam and Jews, Islamic immigration, Islamic Jihad, Islamisation, Islamophobia, Multiculturalism, SJP

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Obama: US can Learn About Human Rights from Cuba

March 22, 2016

Obama: US can Learn About Human Rights from Cuba, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, March 21, 2016

Obama Cuba

Does Cuba have something to teach us about human rights? Considering Obama and Castro’s attitude toward the rights protected by our Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion, Freedom of the Press and the Right to Bear Arms, not to mention the Right to Compulsory Insurance, you can see why Obama would find the Communist dictatorship inspiring.

“President Castro, I think, has pointed out that it, in his view making sure that everybody is getting a decent education or health care, has basic security in old age, that those things are human rights as well.”

“The goal of the human rights dialogue is not for the United States to dictate to Cuba how to govern themselves,” Obama continued. “Hopefully, we can learn from each other.”

Cuban health care is quite impressive. And by “impressive”, I mean that it’s a good way to die. It also depends on a population of plantation doctors who are leased as slave labor to other countries.

Then there is the real Cuban system, the one that ordinary people must use — and it is wretched. Testimony and documentation on the subject are vast. Hospitals and clinics are crumbling. Conditions are so unsanitary, patients may be better off at home, whatever home is. If they do have to go to the hospital, they must bring their own bedsheets, soap, towels, food, light bulbs — even toilet paper. And basic medications are scarce. In Sicko, even sophisticated medications are plentiful and cheap. In the real Cuba, finding an aspirin can be a chore. And an antibiotic will fetch a fortune on the black market.

A nurse spoke to Isabel Vincent of Canada’s National Post. “We have nothing,” said the nurse. “I haven’t seen aspirin in a Cuban store here for more than a year. If you have any pills in your purse, I’ll take them. Even if they have passed their expiry date.”

The equipment that doctors have to work with is either antiquated or nonexistent. Doctors have been known to reuse latex gloves — there is no choice. When they travel to the island, on errands of mercy, American doctors make sure to take as much equipment and as many supplies as they can carry.

And doctors are not necessarily privileged citizens in Cuba. A doctor in exile told the Miami Herald that, in 2003, he earned what most doctors did: 575 pesos a month, or about 25 dollars. He had to sell pork out of his home to get by. And the chief of medical services for the whole of the Cuban military had to rent out his car as a taxi on weekends. “Everyone tries to survive,” he explained.

If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. As long as he’s willing to sell pork out of his home to make ends meet.

And of course there are Castro’s progressive education policies.

“I say it is one of the achievements of the revolution that even our prostitutes are university educated,” Fidel Castro said.

And that’s true. Their university education however is worthless.

With food rations being cut to malnutrition levels, the average family can live only if it somehow obtains dollars. This makes prostitution all the more appealing for women who are trying to support themselves or their families. Though prostitution does not appear to be an option for men, they are also abandoning their professional positions and choosing to work in the tourism industry as bar tenders, parking valets, bellhops and waiters in hopes of making dollars. Dollars are the means of survival in Cuba, where one in eleven people holds a university degree and there are more doctors and teachers per capita than almost any where else in the world.

We’re headed this way too with the education bubble. Some are already there.

But Obama is pushing the leftist FDR line of positive entitlements as rights over negative rights that are freedoms. Give up your freedom, get free stuff. Look how well it worked out in Cuba.

Categories: Cuba, Human rights, Obama
Tags: Cuba, human rights, Obama

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Israel’s Christian Minority

March 20, 2016

Israel’s Christian Minority, Gatestone Institute, Shadi Khalloul, March 20, 2016

♦ Christians in Israel, as well as all other minorities, understand today that serving in the Israeli military is essential. Many Christians and other minorities in Israel share the same fears: they understand that in this region, Israel is the only island of safety that allows them freedom and democratic rights.

♦ Christians and other minorities in Israel prosper and grow, while in other countries in the Middle East, including the Palestinian Authority, they suffer heavily from the Islamic movement and persecution — until forced to disappear.

♦ Contrary to propaganda, there is no “Apartheid” of any kind in Israel, and no roads on which only Jews may travel.

♦ In Israel, members of the Christian and Muslim minorities fill all types of high positions — just as any Jewish Israeli who wishes to have a successful career. There is the Maronite Christian Supreme Court Judge, Salim Jubran.

♦ Widely discussed in the region is how the Europeans secretly want Israel wiped out, too, and are hoping that their new laws, combined with old Arab violence, will do the trick.

Last year, Israel recognized the existence of a group of Christians — “Arameans” — within its borders; an act that no Arab or Muslim nation from the Middle East has ever done or would ever do. Israel recognized a distinct religious and ethnic group: the indigenous people of the ancient Fertile Crescent.

Their language, Aramaic, was the language spoken by Jesus centuries before Islam came to the region.

Israel not only supports and gives Christians and other minorities — Druze, Muslims, Baha’i, everyone — full civil rights, freedom and legal rights to exist peacefully and practice their faith as they wish, but also to develop themselves as a minority with all the implications of differences in culture. Arabs, for instance, are welcomed into the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), but are not, as opposed to Jews, required to serve. Israel’s founding Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, humanely did not want Arabs to feel as if they were obliged fight their “brothers.”

In Israel, members of the Christian and Muslim minorities fill all types of high positions — just as any Jewish Israeli who wishes to have a successful career. There is the Maronite Christian Supreme Court Judge, Salim Jubran.

Contrary to propaganda, there is no “Apartheid” of any kind, and no roads on which only Jews may travel. Those roads are in Saudi Arabia, which has real Apartheid roads, since only Muslims may travel to Mecca.

Israel does this, moreover, in a neighborhood where most of its neighbors — often the most brutal enemies of humanity — wish Israel were wiped out and often do their utmost to make this wish come true. Sadly, many Europeans join in. Everyone has seen the recent vicious attempts by the European Union to snuff out Israel economically by labeling goods made in disputed territories. This requirement, made of no other country with a disputed border actually hinders any prospects for peace that working together is meant to bring about.

These Europeans are not fooling anyone. Their slyly sadistic, self-righteous “punishments” meant for Israel will only throw thousands of Palestinians out of well-paying, badly-needed work; these diktats also drive many newly out-of-work Palestinians to the employment bureau of last resort: Islamic extremism and terrorism. Ironically, these Europeans, to satisfy their wish to hurt Jews by pretending to help Palestinians, are actually seeding a new crop of terrorists who will later come to Europe and show them what they think of such hypocrites.

Widely discussed in the region is how the Europeans secretly want Israel wiped out, too, and are hoping that their new laws, combined with old Arab violence, will do the trick. That way, the Europeans can pretend to themselves that they had “nothing to do with it.” These Europeans need to know they are not fooling anyone.

Israel, meanwhile, despite having to deal with the European and American fronts as well as often genocidal Muslim threats, continues actively to strengthen its minority communities through a variety of state-sponsored programs. Among them is a five-year plan to develop Israeli Arab and other minority communities adopted by the government on December 30, 2015, at cost of 15 billion shekels [roughly $4 billion]. Social Equality Minister Gila Gamliel, of the Likud Party is in charge of implementing the plan. Prime Minister Netanyahu, who is unjustly demonized, has for the last several years operated the “Authority for the Economic Development of the Arab, Druze and Circassian Sectors.” It is headed by an Arab Muslim, Aiman Saif, who controls a sizeable budget of 7 billion shekels [roughly $1.8 billion], which has mostly gone to different Arab cities and villages to develop modern infrastructure, industrial zones, employment opportunities, education and other elements. The rest was allocated to helping Christian villages in the Galilee.

Arabs have their own section in the Ministry of Education, headed by an Arab Muslim, Abdalla Khateeb, who is also in charge of a sizeable budget of 900 million shekels [$230 million].

Christians, as well as all other minorities, understand today that serving in the Israeli military is essential for their integration in Israel. Many Christians and other minorities in Israel share the same fears: they increasingly understand that in this region, Israel is the only island of safety that allows them freedom and democratic rights. The Muslim Arab community in Israel, as well as the Christian and other Arabic-speaking communities, see the tragic destiny of their brothers in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and other Arab countries. Muslims killing Muslims; fanatical Muslim groups killing Christians, uprooting them, slitting their throats, burning them alive, drowning them in cages and of course crucifying them, even little children. Israel’s minorities are very aware of this. They also cannot understand why no one is demonizing those villains. They fear that this devastation will spread, first to the holy land of Israel, and then to Europe.

This fear is one of the reasons there have been increasing numbers of Christians applying to serve in the IDF: 30% recruitment on a voluntary basis; while in general Jewish society, the number stands for 57% on an obligatory basis. Today there are even more than 1000 Muslim Arabs serving in the IDF.

We all know the danger of these fanatic Islamic jihadist groups such as Hamas groups, and feel ever more committed to protect this lone pluralistic state.

The community to which this author belongs, Aramean Christians, is of Aramean-Phoenician ethnic roots and language, and was originally based in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. Over the 1400 years following the Islamic conquest, Aramean Christians were forced to switch to speaking Arabic, and more recently to flee their homes in Syria and Iraq. They have no status in Arab and Islamic states, most ruled according to Islamic sharia law. Aramean Christians also have no status in the Palestinian Authority, which now rules Judea and Samaria.

We are aware of some Christian groups, such as Sabeel, Kairos Palestine and others under the thumb of the Palestinian Authority, who still feel the need to pay lip-service to the Muslim Arabian lords who have conquered them.

Jerusalem is open to everyone. But it has not always been, especially under the jurisdiction of Jordan, until 1967. Not only were Jews not allowed in, but 38,000 Jewish gravestones were taken from the Mount of Olives cemetery and used as building materials and flooring for Jordan’s latrines.

Muslim Arab members of Israel’s Knesset [parliament] reject the right of Christians to preserve their unique heritage. On February 5, 2014, Knesset member Haneen Zoabi of the United Arab List party threatened the Israeli Christian representatives who lobbied in the Knesset Employment Committee in favor of a law that would add Christian representatives to a committee on employment equality in the Economy Ministry. Zoabi rejected their declaration that they were a separate Aramean Christian ethnicity. She insisted on forcing upon them an Arab and Palestinian identity. This identification was of course, as false as if we Christians had insisted that Muslim Arabs call themselves Native Americans. The law passed despite the efforts of Zoabi and her colleagues, due to a coalition of Knesset members — with vast majority of Jewish MKs voting in favor of it.

This incident illustrates how some of Israel’s Muslim Arabs, while asking their Jewish neighbors for help in preserve their own Muslim-Arab heritage, prohibit other ethnic minorities these same rights.

Instead, they try to impose Arabization and Palestinization by threats and by force. In September 2014, for instance, an Aramean Christian woman, IDF Captain Areen Shaabi, was stalked by Arab Muslim activists in Nazareth. She was threatened with shouts of “Allahu Akbar” [“Allah is Greater!”], and at night her car tires were slashed.

IDF Major Ehab Shlayan, an Aramean Christian in Nazareth and the founder of the Christian Recruitment Forum, awoke on the morning of August 2015 to find that a Palestinian flag had been put in front of his door during the night. On Christmas Eve, December 24, 2014, thirty Muslims throwing stones and glass bottles attacked a Christian soldier, 19-year-old Majd Rawashdi, and his home.

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IDF Major Ehab Shlayan (far left), is an Aramean Christian from Nazareth and founder of the Christian Recruitment Forum, which encourages Israeli Aramean Christians to serve in the military. Muslim Arab Knesset member Haneen Zoabi (right) recently threatened Israeli Christian representatives, rejecting their declaration that they were a separate Aramean Christian ethnicity and insisting on forcing upon them an Arab and Palestinian identity.

All this is hypocrisy at the highest levels, mixed with racism.

In an official Christmas greeting to Israel’s Christians on December 24, 2012, Prime Minister Netanyahu said:

“Israel’s minorities, including over one million citizens who are Arabs, always have full civil rights. Israel’s government will never tolerate discrimination against women. Israel’s Christian population will always be free to practice their faith. This is the only place in the Middle East where Christians are fully free to practice their faith. They don’t have to fear; they don’t have to flee. At a time when Christians are under siege in so many places, in so many lands in the Middle East, I am proud that in Israel Christians are free to practice their faith, and that there is a thriving Christian community in Israel.”

Christians and other minorities in Israel prosper and grow, while in other countries in the Middle East, including the Palestinian Authority, they suffer heavily from the Islamic movement and persecution — until forced to disappear.

Categories: Christians, Foreign policy, Freedom, Human rights, IDF, Israel, Israeli Arabs, Middle East, Palestinian Authority, Palestinians
Tags: Christians, Foreign Policy, Freedom, human rights, IDF, Israel, Israeli Arabs, Middle East, Palestinian Authority, Palestinians

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The Israel-Bashing Industry’s “Intellectuals”

March 16, 2016

The Israel-Bashing Industry’s “Intellectuals” Gatestone Institute, Giulio Meotti, March 16, 2016

♦ These novelists hold a deep, uninformed, irrational hatred. Instead of backing the only country that gives full rights to all its citizens, they are instrumental in attacking not only Israel but the Jewish people.

♦ What is notable is that every single time, these most illustrious writers “forget” to say why Israel built those fences, checkpoints and roadblocks in the first place.

♦ Saramago, while he was visiting Ramallah, chose not to see and talk about the Israeli restaurants, malls and hotels turned into carpets of human bodies. The wholesale slaughter of Jews was the only reason Israel had to send tanks and soldiers back into the Palestinian cities after the Oslo Accords. Saramago did not mention the context; he preferred to give credence to a distorted, demonizing vision.

What is the only country about which can be said that its very existence is disputed? Clue: Not Zimbabwe, not Tuvalu, not even overrun Tibet. Which country’s boundaries, bought with blood in wars initiated by others, are challenged by all nations, who now seem determined to destroy it through boycotts, unjust defamation and purported “laws” that are applied to no other nation?

Which country fully respects the rights of women and every kind of ethnic, religious and sexual minorities, notwithstanding that it is condemned at the United Nations for being “the worst violator of women’s rights” — worse than Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan, China, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Sudan?

Which country provides its own enemy with water, electricity, food and medical treatment? Its military, to avoid enemy civilian casualties, warns its enemy to evacuate buildings before attacking them, and — instead of simply carpet bombing the enemy as all other nations do, including most democracies — sends its own soldiers possibly to die in ground operations?

The country is Israel — the only country that even famous writers, intellectuals and Nobel laureates target, demonize and criminalize.

There was a time when Nobel laureates for Literature, such as the German Heinrich Böll, the French Jean-Paul Sartre and the Italian Eugenio Montale, rushed to denounce injustice. Earlier, in the name of best Europe’s values — justice, freedom and solidarity — they condemned the threats to the State of Israel’s existence.

But today, these novelists hold a deep, uninformed, irrational hatred towards the same place. Instead of backing the only country that gives full rights to all its citizens, they are instrumental in attacking not only Israel but the Jewish people. In Germany, Hitler’s Mein Kampf is the new best-seller. In Europe today, you can even find a great number of books that wipe Israel off the map. And a provincial council near Glasgow, West Dunbartonshire, banned Israeli books from local libraries.

In the chorus of those who speak from journals, poems and novels, there have been a few noble exceptions. The Albanian writer Ismail Kadaré, a Muslim candidate positioned every year to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, turned down a request to boycott the tiny Jewish State. Israel, he says, faces “the threat of disappearance,” and he compared Israel to Albania under Nazi occupation. Also the author of the Harry Potter books, JK Rowling, refused to add her name to the list of Israel’s boycotters.

Their brave, solitary gestures highlight the sluggish, uninquiring conformity of the “intelligentsia’s” campaign to pile unmerited calumnies on Israel.

Worse, supposed “intellectuals” often spout raw anti-Semitism while giving a pass to the truly barbarous people among us. If the Nobel Committee had any decency, it would revoke the prizes it awarded for “Peace” to such “humanitarians” as Fidel Castro and Yasser Arafat. It is painful to watch the Nobel Committee make a fool of itself year after year, and it is painful to watch these so-called intellectuals be so unaware and filled with prejudice against the people who least deserve it.

An Italian writer, Dario Fo, a laureate of the Nobel Prize for Literature, just gave an interview to the newspaper, La Repubblica. Fo, talking about the Jewish patriarch, Moses, said: “Moses was killing women and children because they worshiped idols.” Mr. Fo went on blaming “the Jews’ brutality against those who follow other religions, as it happens today.” Excuse me? Is it the Jews who are burning people alive, drowning them in cages, slitting throats or crucifying anyone for following a different religion?

Mr. Fo’s comparison is as wrong as it is ghastly. It is not the Jews who suicide-bomb Palestinian buses, cafes, wedding halls and discotheques. It is not the Jews who now try to mow down Palestinians with cars or stab them in the street. It is the reverse — and has been for years.

The daily newspaper La Stampa charged Dario Fo with “recycling anti-Semitic stereotypes.” Fo is not new at this. In the 1970s, in one of his theatrical operas, “Resistance: Italian and Palestinian people speak,” the future Nobel Prize laureate compared Nazism to Zionism and the Palestinian fedayeen terrorists to the anti-Fascist partisans.

A few days after the 9/11 attacks, Fo also said that,

“the great speculators wallow in an economy that every year kills tens of millions of people with poverty — so what is 20,000 dead in New York? Regardless of who carried out the massacre, this violence is the legitimate daughter of the culture of violence, hunger and inhumane exploitation.”

Who gave this famous writer the right to defame, earlier, not only Israel’s name but also 9/11’s victims?

Another Nobel prize-winning novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa, as well as the Pulitzer Prize winner Dave Eggers, are among a group of international novelists who will contribute to a book of essays next year about “50 years of Israeli occupation” that will be published by Harper Collins, one of the publishers that wiped Israel off the map.

The book is part of an initiative by Breaking the Silence, a non-governmental organization (NGO) which makes sweeping charges against the Israeli army “based on anonymous and unverifiable hearsay ‘testimonies.'” while refusing to disclose the names of the Israeli soldiers who “testified.” Worse, it is being funded specifically “to incriminate the IDF” (Israel Defense Forces) and, was explicitly directed by European charities to prove that Israel acted improperly. In an article entitled, “Europe to Breaking the Silence: Bring Us As Many Incriminating Testimonies As Possible,” the watchdog group NGO Monitor disclosed that:

Contrary to BtS’ claim that “the contents and opinions in this booklet do not express the position of the funders,” NGO Monitor research reveals that a number of funders made their grants conditional on the NGO obtaining a minimum number of negative “testimonies.” This contradicts BtS’ declarations and thus turns it into an organization that represents its foreign donors’ interest, severely damaging the NGO’s reliability and its ability to analyze complicated combat situations.

Are these “prestigious” writers aware of the organization’s predetermined bias which is going to fund their new book?

There is also, of course, the problem of double standards and hypocrisy. These writers did not decide to put their pen at the service of the Syria’s civil war victims or the Christians and Yazidi who are suffering a genocide in Iraq. No, these writers targeted Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, and its supposed “occupation” — which they fail to disclose was backed by the Palestinians themselves in the Oslo II Accord of 1995, Chapter 3, Article XVII Jurisdiction [1], which in fact turned the Palestinian people into the most protected Arab population in the entire Middle East. Go to Ramallah and Jenin and you will see the difference between how they live compared to the people living in Aleppo, Sana’a and Mosul.

The most prolific novelists in the Israel-Bashing Industry are, sadly, the British. “Sadly,” especially as Iran has within the last month raised the bounty offered on the head of a British citizen, Salman Rushdie, by another $600,000, in addition to the $3 million issued by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989. That brings the incentive for murdering a novelist to roughly $4 million. About that, the British government has been shamefully silent. The only condemnation so far seems to have come from the Iranian journalist, Amir Taheri, the British journalist, Douglas Murray and from PEN.

Another “intellectual,” John Berger, a Booker Prize winner, called for artists to decline being published by Israeli publishers and to undertake a boycott of the Jewish State. Harold Pinter, the late Nobel Laureate playwright, has gone so far as to declare Israel “the central factor in world unrest,” presumably forgetting about Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, and Sudan. Showing how thin is the line separating criticism and anti-Semitism, Tom Paulin, poet, essayist and academic at Oxford, said Jewish “settlers” in Israel “should be shot dead.” A Scottish National Poet, Liz Lochhead, also joined a group calling for the boycott of Israel.

Dozens of the world’s literary stars, including Nobel laureates in literature such as J. M. Coetzee, Herta Mueller, Orhan Pamuk and the late Irish poet Seamus Heaney, added their names to a petition against Israel’s “occupation’s giant, cruel hand.” What is notable is that every single time, these most illustrious writers “forget” to say why Israel built those fences, checkpoints and roadblocks in the first place.

Donald Trump wants to build a wall with Mexico, the Arab sheikhdoms are closing the border with Oman, Spain built fences to keep out Moroccans, India is walling off Bangladesh, South and North Korea share a fortified border, Cyprus is divided by walls and Belfast is a fenced city of barriers.

But only Israel’s fence — built for defensive, humanitarian reasons, merely not to get blown up — is condemned by the International Court of Justice and receives round-the-clock coverage on CNN and front page stories in the New York Times. Why? Because the security barrier that saves lives was perverted by unjust people into an unjust barrier, with no mention of what happened to Israelis before that fence was put up. To paraphrase attorney Alan Dershowitz: If you made a fair and objective list of all the countries in the world that comply with human rights, from best to worst, Israel would have to be near the top, among the best.

One of the most chilling accusations against Israel has come from a northern European writer, Jostein Gaarder, an ostensible humanitarian, whose book, “Sophie’s World,” was translated into 53 languages, and with 26 million copies sold. Penning an article in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten, Gaarder wrote:

“If the entire Israeli nation should fall … and part of the population must flee to another Diaspora, then we say: may their surroundings stay calm and show them mercy. Shoot not at the fugitives! Take not aim at them! They are vulnerable now — like snails without shells! … Give the Israeli refugees shelter; give them milk and honey!”

Gaarder envisages the expulsion of the entire Jewish people from their land, and again dependent on European charity — in recent years not exactly a commodity in great supply.

Israel has been humiliated also by a German writer and Nobel Prize for Literature, Günter Grass, who published a poem in several European newspapers, in which he treated Israel as the purveyor of all ills and the instigator of every type of disorder. According to Mr. Grass, it is Israel that threatens Iran with a nuclear genocide, not the reverse.

This sanctimony should not have come from that writer: Grass, in fact, served in Nazi Germany’s armed SS force and defined East Germany’s Communism “a comfortable dictatorship.”

After a visit in the Palestinian Authority’s de facto capital, Ramallah, during the Second Intifada, after there were about 1,500 Jewish dead from terrorism, another winner of Nobel Prize for Literature, José Saramago, stated that the Israeli blockade of Ramallah was “in the spirit of Auschwitz” and “this place is being turned into a concentration camp.” A year later, Saramago commented that the Jewish people no longer deserve “the sympathy for the suffering they went through during the Holocaust.”

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Nobel laureates who demonized: German novelist Günter Grass (left), who served in Nazi Germany’s armed SS force, claimed that Israel threatens Iran with a nuclear genocide. Portuguese novelist José Saramago (right), gave credence to a distorted, demonizing vision that culminated in the perverse comparison between Hitler and Israel.

Mr. Saramago, while he was visiting Ramallah, chose not to see and talk about the Israeli restaurants, shopping malls and hotels turned into carpets of human bodies. The wholesale slaughter of Jews was the only reason Israel had to send tanks and soldiers back into the Palestinian cities after the Oslo Accords. Saramago did not mention the context; he preferred to give credence to a distorted, demonizing vision that culminated in the perverse comparison between Hitler and Israel, and the transformation of the Jewish State — the historical home of the Jews for nearly 4000 years, and lately the only sanctuary not to turn away Jews being persecuted or rounded up for death — into an “imperialist base.”

It is by repeating lies that Europe even accepted the big Mohammed al-Dura lie: a boy supposedly riddled to death with Israeli bullets, but there was not one drop of blood! Not only that, but after he was dead, he moved his hand to look out. Quite a feat. For a time, the lie even became the favorite table conversation for Europe’s upper classes.

This is how millions of Europeans have been persuaded to see Israel as the aggressor and the Palestinian terrorists as the victims. They read the inverted, Orwellian revision of history every day on the front pages. Look at what is happening now during this “Third Intifada”: it is filled with knives, stabbings of Jews, even charts on the internet showing where to stab a Jew to do the most damage. The many dead Israeli civilians and soldiers have totally disappeared from the television screen, but when Israeli soldiers shoot a Palestinian in the process of stabbing a Jew, they are labelled by a corrupt and racist media as “illegal executioners.”

What would these supposed intellectuals do if citizens were being stabbed in London, Rome or Berlin? The “intellectuals” and the media seem to be trying to make the Jews unable to defend themselves. The “intellectuals” and the media are preaching for Israel’s destruction.

_____________________

[1] From the Oslo II Accord — Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, September 28, 1995, CHAPTER 3 – LEGAL AFFAIRS, ARTICLE XVII  — Jurisdiction:

4. a. Israel, through its military government, has the authority over areas that are not under the territorial jurisdiction of the Council, powers and responsibilities not transferred to the Council and Israelis.

b. To this end, the Israeli military government shall retain the necessary legislative, judicial and executive powers and responsibilities, in accordance with international law. This provision shall not derogate from Israel’s applicable legislation over Israelis in personam.

Categories: Death to Israel, Defense of Israel, Europe, Foreign policy, Human rights, Islam and Jews, Israel, Leftists, Media, Middle East, Palestinian Authority, Palestinian incitement, Palestinian terrorists, Palestinians and Jews, Palestinians and media
Tags: Death to Israel, Defense of Israel, Europe, Foreign Policy, human rights, Islam and Jews, Israel, Leftists, Middle East, Palestinian Authority, Palestinian incitement, Palestinian terrorists, Palestinians and Jews, Palestinians and media

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Trump and the Left’s Accusations of Fascism

March 16, 2016

Trump and the Left’s Accusations of Fascism, Front Page Magazine, Bruce Thornton, March 16, 2016

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Donald Trump’s success in the primaries and his rhetoric have sparked troubled meditations about an awakening of fascist impulses among his supporters. Bret Stephens has drawn an analogy with the Thirties, “the last dark age of Western politics,” and compared Trump to Benito Mussolini. On the left, Dana Milbank, in a column titled “Trump Flirts with Fascism,” wrote about a campaign rally at which Trump was “leading supporters in what looked very much like a fascist salute,” a scene New York Times house-conservative David Brooks linked to the Nuremberg party rallies.

Much of the rhetoric that links Trump to fascism or Nazism is merely the stale ad Hitlerum fallacy used by progressives to demonize the candidate. They did the same thing when they called George W. Bush “Bushitler.” This slur reflects the hoary leftist dogma that conservatives at heart are repressed xenophobes and knuckle-dragging racists lusting for a messianic leader to restore their lost “white privilege” and punish their minority, immigrant, and feminist enemies. As such, the attack on Trump is nothing new or unexpected from a progressive ideology whose totalitarian inclinations have always had much more in common with fascism than conservatism does.

What Auden called the “low dishonest decade” of the Thirties, however, is indeed instructive for our predicament today, but not because of any danger of a fascist party taking root in modern America. Communism was (and in some ways still is) vastly more successful at infiltrating and shaping American political, cultural, and educational institutions than fascism ever was. But the same cultural pathologies that enabled both fascist and Nazi aggression still afflict us today. These pathologies and their malign effects are more important than the reasons for Trump’s popularity–– anger at elites, economic stagnation, and anti-immigrant passions–– that supposedly echo the “waves of fear and anger” of Auden’s Thirties.

The most important delusion of the Thirties still active today is the idealistic internationalism that had developed over the previous century. A world shrunk by new communication and transportation technologies and linked by global trade, internationalists argued, meant nations and peoples were becoming more alike. Thus they desired the same prosperity, political freedom, human rights, and peace that the West enjoyed. Interstate relations now should be based on this “harmony of interests,” and managed by non-lethal transnational organizations rather than by force. Covenants and treaties like the Hague and Geneva Conventions, and institutions like the League of Nations and the International Court of Arbitration, could peacefully resolve conflicts among nations through diplomatic engagement, negotiation, and appeasement.

The Preamble to the First Hague Convention (1899) captures the idealism that would compromise foreign policy in the Thirties. The Convention’s aims were “the maintenance of the general peace” and “the friendly settlement of international disputes.” This goal was based on the “solidarity which unites the member of the society of civilized nations” and their shared desire for “extending the empire of law and of strengthening the appreciation of international justice.” Two decades later, the monstrous death and destruction of World War I should have shattered the delusion of such “solidarity” existing even among the “civilized nations.” Despite that gruesome lesson, Europe doubled down and created the League of Nations, which failed to stop the serial aggression that culminated in World War II.

But the League wasn’t the only manifestation of naïve internationalism. The Locarno Treaty of 1925 welcomed Germany back into the community of nations with a seat on the League of Nations council. Nobel Peace prizes, and wish-fulfilling headlines like the New York Times’ “France and Germany Bar War Forever,” were all that resulted. The Kellogg-Briand pact of 1928 “condemn[ed] recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce[d] it as an instrument of national policy” in interstate relations. The signing powers asserted that “the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts . . . shall never be sought except by pacific means.”

All the future Axis Powers signed the treaty, and they all soon shredded these “parchment barriers.” In the next few years, Japan invaded Manchuria, Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland in gross violation of the Versailles Treaty, and Italy invaded Ethiopia. By the time Germany annexed Austria, and Neville Chamberlain’s faith in negotiation and appeasement handed Czechoslovakia to Hitler, all these treaties and conventions and conferences were dead letters, and the League of Nations was exposed as a “cockpit in the tower of Babel,” as Churchill suggested after the First World War.

However, such graphic and costly evidence showing the folly of “covenants without the sword,” as Hobbes put it, did not discredit this dangerous idealism over the following decades. Indeed, it lies behind the disasters of Obama’s foreign policy. Just consider his “outreach” to our enemies, his acknowledgement of our own “imperfections,” his reliance on toothless U.N. Security Council Resolutions, his preference for non-lethal economic sanctions to pressure adversaries, and his belief that negotiated settlements and agreements can achieve peace and good relations even with our fiercest enemies. All reflect the same failure to recognize that our adversaries in fact do not sincerely want to reach an agreement, for the simple reason they are not in fact “just like us,” and so they do not want peace and prosperity and good relations with their neighbors and the “world community.”

The catalogue of Obama’s failures is long and depressing. The “reset” with Russia and promise of “flexibility,” the empty “red line” threats against Bashar al Assad, the arrogant dismissal of a metastasizing ISIS as a “jayvee” outfit, the alienation of allies like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, the cultivation of the jihadist Muslim Brotherhood, the ill-conceived overthrow of Muammar Ghaddafi, and the rhetoric of guilt and self-abasement are just the most noteworthy failures. The nuclear deal with Iran, of course, is the premier monument to this folly. Yet despite the increasing evidence of its futility––Iran’s saber-rattling in the Gulf, capture of U.S. military personnel, genocidal rhetoric, and testing of missiles in blatant violation of a U.N. Security Council resolution–– Obama still clings to this internationalist delusion.

A recent article in The Atlantic on Obama’s foreign policy shows, despite his protestations of hardheaded “realism,” that he has not learned from his failures. Thus he still thinks that the vigorous use of force is usually an unnecessary and dangerous mistake, and that verbal persuasion and diplomatic engagement are more effective. He also still believes that “multilateralism regulates [U.S.] hubris” of the sort that George W. Bush showed when he recklessly invaded Iraq, and that American foreign policy has frequently displayed.

Obama’s delusional faith in rhetoric, especially his own, comes through in his rationale for the infamous 2009 Cairo speech: “I was hoping that my speech could trigger a discussion, could create space for Muslims to address the real problems they are confronting—problems of governance, and the fact that some currents of Islam have not gone through a reformation that would help people adapt their religious doctrines to modernity.” The idea that Obama’s mere words could start a “discussion” that would transform 14-century-old religious doctrines fundamentally inimical to liberal democracy, human rights, and all the other Western goods we live by, is a fantasy. Obama’s self-regard recalls Neville Chamberlain’s boast after his meeting with Hitler at Bad Godesberg that he “had established some degree of personal influence with Herr Hitler.”

Or consider Obama’s take on Vladimir Putin:

He understands that Russia’s overall position in the world is significantly diminished. And the fact that he invades Crimea or is trying to prop up Assad doesn’t suddenly make him a player. You don’t see him in any of these meetings out here helping to shape the agenda. For that matter, there’s not a G20 meeting where the Russians set the agenda around any of the issues that are important.

A “player,” in Obama’s foreign policy universe, is a leader who uses “smart power” like diplomacy and negotiated deals, and recognizes that the use of force will backfire and lead to costly “quagmires.” As Secretary of State John Kerry suggested, Putin is using outdated “19th century” instruments of foreign policy like military force in a world that presumably has evolved beyond it.

In contrast, a genuine “player,” as Obama fancies himself, attends summits and conferences, such as the useless climate change conference in Paris, and “sets the agenda.” And like his rationale for the Cairo speech, as the leader of the world’s greatest power, his rhetoric alone can be a force for change. Thus just saying that Syria’s “Assad must go,” while doing nothing to achieve that end, is still useful, and refusing to honestly identify the traditional Islamic foundations of modern jihadism will build good will among Muslims and turn them against the “extremists.”

Meanwhile, Putin and Iran fight and bomb and kill in Syria and Iraq, and now they are the big “players” in a region that the U.S. once dominated, but that now serves the interests of Russia and Iran. I’m reminded of Demosthenes’ scolding of the Athenians for refusing to confront Phillip II of Macedon: “Where either side devotes its time and energy, there it succeeds the better––Phillip in action, but you in argument.”

In other words, for Obama as for Chamberlain, appeasing words rather than forceful deeds are the key to foreign policy––precisely the belief that led England to disastrously underestimate Hitler until it was too late. And that same belief has turned the Middle East into a Darwinian jungle of clashing tribes, sects, and nations.

Obama wraps his foreign policy of retreat in claims to “realist” calculations of America’s security and genuine interests, and buttresses his claim by citing his strategically inconsequential drone killings. But such rhetoric hides an unwillingness to risk consequential action and pay its political costs. And it reflects a commitment to the internationalist idealism that gives diplomatic verbal processes an almost magical power to transform inveterate enemies into helpful partners. Europe tried that in the Thirties, and it led to disaster. That’s a much more important lesson from that sorry decade’s history than the lurid fantasies about fascism coming to America on the wings of Trump’s rhetoric.

Categories: Donald Trump, Europe, Fascism, Foreign policy, Germany, Human rights, Iran scam, Leftists, Middle East, Moral equivalence, national security, Nazis, Obama, Obama's America, Take America back, Western media
Tags: Donald Trump, Europe, Fascism, Foreign Policy, Germany, human rights, Iran Scam, Leftists, Middle East, Moral equivalence, national security, Obama, Obama's America, Take America back, Western media

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Trump and Jihad

March 13, 2016

Trump and Jihad, American Thinker, James Lewis, March 13, 2016

Donald Trump just broke another PC taboo by telling the truth, and he put it in just a few words: “I think Islam hate us.”

By now American Thinker readers are familiar with the overwhelming evidence on that point, while the American victims of the One Party Media still have their heads buried under camel droppings.

(“But what about the children? What about the children? What about the children?” said Cokie Roberts three times, talking with Trump about waves and waves of illegal and hostile Obamaesque immigrants, including Sinaloa gang killers who recently took 30,000 lives in Northern Mexico, using long guns and ammo from Obama’s Federales.

My respect for Roberts instantly dropped way below the Rio Grande, heading south. What about our children, Cokie? The real goal of bringing in vast numbers of illegals is to manufacture more lifelong Leftists, guided by La Raza, in collusion with MS-13 and Sinaloa (the biggest drug gang in Chicago). But Cokie only “cares” about the children… While in fact ensuring horrors for those very same children.

Well, do you really think those teenage thugs massing at the border, along their much younger would-be victims, are heading for a better life? They are being used and abused by the Obama Left, in collusion with radical Islam and Mexican gangs. Maybe some will be better off. But many are in immediate danger of becoming victims of abuse in our inner cities.

Nobody seems to know where the incoming flood have ended up going. In the world of the Charlie Chaplin’s Great Dictator we understand why the media are not interested in telling us. Or do you really think that most of those children will be adopted by nice, wealthy moms in DC, like Cokie Roberts? Have you ever heard of child slavery in the Third World, which we are importing en masse at this very moment?

Which brings me to Trump and Islam.

I don’t know how many individual Muslims hate us, but we know that from day one, 14 centuries ago, Islam has preached Holy War (Jihad) against those who don’t bow to its primitive dictates. From ISIS’ point of view, they are agents of Allah’s compassion. They will cheerfully kill, abuse, exploit, enslave, torture, threaten, beat and terrorize children, women and men with real pride in a job well done. You can see it on ISIS snuff videos on YouTube. Which Cokie has apparently never watched.

ISIS follows Saudi (Wahhabi) orthodox war doctrine. The Wahhabi priesthood has acknowledged the Qur’anic correctness of ISIS sadism, a perverted example of the very worst that humans can do to each other — not in self-defense but as a deliberate act of unprovoked aggression. And yes, they are constantly promising to do the same thing to us.

On the Shi’ite side of the Gulf, the mullahs follow exactly the same war theology. They don’t mind killing the wrong person, because in Heaven or Hell Allah will know his own. It doesn’t really matter whom you kill.

This is elementary information about Jihad, the kind of thing Western children used to learn in their history lessons. Cokie Roberts, propaganda peddler for the Left, has never bothered to learn the truth.

So Trump was right that Islamic doctrine is all about killing us, and by telling the truth Trump freaks out all the good liberals who are actually colluding with a genocidal war theology. The Cokies are no different from Nazi or Stalinist collaborators. Literally. They may be useful self-deluded idiots, but at some point, willful idiocy becomes a moral choice. Or do you think Nazi and North Korean collaborators bear no responsibility for crimes against humanity?

Jihad theology preaches the destruction of high, creative, and tolerant civilizations; it has always done so, and the Jihadist destruction of Persian, Egyptian, Byzantine, Indian, and other admirable pre-Muslim civilizations is well-known, even in Muslim countries.

The Taliban’s theological decision to blow up world-renowned Buddha statues in Afghanistan is the norm in Jihad warfare, not the exception. The Saudis have also blown up precious archeological artifacts from pre-Muslim times in Arabia, because, like the Soviets, they must erase history at all costs.

ISIS is a deliberate throwback to the very worst behavior in human history. Its parallel with Stalinism is amazing. Muslim crimes against humanity are rationalized by the ultimate goal of Paradise on Earth under Allah’s mercy.

Utopian ideologies are a dime a dozen in history. The Nazis were utopians, promising peace and love after all the inferior peoples were dead.

Jihad has always been single-minded, war-mongering, rape celebrating and fanatical, starting in the Arabian desert more than a thousand years ago. Jihad is not some weird historical anomaly. It is a calculated doctrinal strategy, representing a consensus in the radical ‘ulema, the priestly hierarchy. Nothing about Jihad is happenstance.

And yet — much of the nominally Muslim world today is deeply torn between its non-Muslim history versus centuries of Shari’ah dominance. Because orthodox Islam threatens all Muslims with death for apostasy, many have learned to live double lives, one for the local imam and his enforcers, and one for their private truths. That is important, because it means that every Muslim country also has a Fifth Column — all those who secretly reject the warmongering priesthood.

Iranians take justified pride in the high civilization of the Persian Empire, before Jihad stomped out the intellectual diversity that fuels innovation. Fanatical ideologies kill off the freedom to think. We can watch it in North Korea under its atheist dynasty, just as we can see it in Saudi Arabia in the grip of Wahhabi fanatics. They are all brain-locked war cults. Only the hats and banners change, but all war cults stir up mass murder as part of their divine mission.

In Northern India, where Buddhism first emerged, the monasteries and their peaceful monks were murdered en masse in 1200 by the Ghurid Jihadis. The Buddhist genocide was much celebrated by Muslim historians. After Jihad conquered the Byzantine Empire — the Christian Roman Empire of North Africa and Anatolia — another civilization was frozen into silence.

Much of the nominally Muslim world lives a double life. That is a basic strategic fact in the Jihad War. It means that millions of people secretly yearn for better lives.

Just as in the USSR, ordinary people learn to mouth the Party Line, until the day when the whole fabric of lies falls apart.

One key to victory against Jihad is very fast-spreading shale oil technology. The OPEC monopoly is losing its most powerful weapon against the West. There are serious predictions that the Saudis and Iranian mullahs will not survive another crash in the international price of energy.

In Lebanon, ordinary people remember better days, before Hizb’allah took over on behalf of its Iranian masters. Pakistanis celebrate Urdu love poetry, with its ancient pre-Muslim roots. Iraqis take pride in centuries of high Mesopotamian civilizations. Egyptians remember three thousand years of pharaonic Egypt, long before Jihad made free thinking punishable by death. In Turkey, people in the cities remember half a century of modernist politics, before Obama’s good friend Recip Erdogan brought back Ottoman corruption and misrule.

It is only sane for the civilized world to defeat aggressive Jihad, the deadliest threat in the world today. Trump may not be your cup of tea, but he has just broken decades of PC taboo against telling the truth about Jihad. I believe that every GOP candidate must finally talk openly about what every sane person already knows in the privacy of their minds.

In a time of war, you may have to pick Ulysses S. Grant for president, even if he is a drunkard. Sometimes, in the face of worse, you have to make tough choices.

That is where we are today. This election could be a turning point for the better, but only if millions of Americans follow their honest convictions. PC is a Leftist intimidation game, and we have to have the courage of our convictions. The media constantly play mind tricks on us, like the Wizard of Oz. This PC intimidation campaign will go up in a puff of toxic smoke, if we stand up to it.

Donald Trump keeps challenging the fear of PC. He is therapeutic for millions of Americans who have been silenced for decades; he has beaten the mind games of the One Party media. So far, he has the cult of the Islamo-Left on the run, which is a very good thing. But they see politics as war, and it ain’t over ‘till it’s over. Expect a vicious election season, and if we win this one, expect more years of Islamo-Lefto-fascist struggle. They are an absolutist cult, and any means are acceptable for their goals

The Clintons and Obamas refuse to even name Islamofascist aggression, because they have forged a close alliance with oil-rich Gulf regimes, who constantly push fundamentalist invasions of the West. The Saudis just promised to double the number of mosques in Europe, with the obvious goal of controlling millions of Muslim “refugees” wherever they may end up living. This is all standard Jihadist tactics. Mass infiltration by “peaceful” Jihad is called Hejira, after Mohammed’s journey to Mecca with the secret intention of committing genocide against the infidels.

None of that war strategy could happen in the West without the active collusion of the Left. We see the same corrupt bargain in Europe and over here.

Oil money and power are the reasons why Obama and Hillary will never call Jihad the enemy. Obama has consistently misused American power and resources to curry favor with Jihad-preaching regimes — maybe because he’s buying UN votes from the “57 Muslim states” that might elect him as Secretary General. If Hillary or Sanders win, they could nominate Obama for the position. The Party Media would never oppose it. With 57 Muslim votes in the General Assembly, Obama’s has already planted the seeds.

Obama’s ego is ungovernable, and in his mind there’s only one future to fill that everlasting hole in his soul. The news now tells us that the Obamas will stay in Washington DC, “to keep their children in the schools.” Funny thing is that it also keeps them in personal contact with the levers of power they’ve planted in the U.S. government. If Americans ever bothered to study history they would see how the same kinds of people have done the same thing before.

Needless to say, Obama as President of the UN Socialist World would enormously empower Jihad and the hard Left. Imagine Obama and Hillary in charge of both the UN and the U.S. It’s their lifelong wet dream.

As for Hillary, we now know she was behind the invasion of Libya, which brought down a stable Muslim regime, leading to another endless, bloody civil war that is still going on. I would hate to have that cruel blunder on my conscience. Invading Libya was unprovoked aggression — a genuine crime against humanity. Hillary’s idiotic slogan for that war was “We came, we saw, he died.” (Meaning Gadaffi, who was killed by anal impalement.) This is unmitigated evil, and a GOP challenger should use Hillary’s sadistic quote to expose her inner killer. Gadaffi posed no threat; in his later decades he was a source of stability. But at least Hillary’s War revealed her inner self to the world.

Apparently, in the Reign of the One, American foreign policy has lost any moral basis whatsoever. This is inexcusable.

Some reports suggest that Hillary stoked up the Libyan intervention to give herself a “foreign policy accomplishment” in time for the 2016 election. If that is true, Hillary and Obama have knowingly blundered into Nuremberg Trial territory. It certainly seems that she has no conscience, and Bernie’s unrepentant Stalinist past shows he has none either. If Bernie had a Nazi past, he would never have been elected, even in New Hampshire.

Like it or not, those are the choices we face today.

Jihad is a strategic threat, and it demands a strategic response. A GOP president could lead that response. The Democrats are far too corrupt and brainwashed to do it.

The United States led the Cold War against Soviet imperialism because Europe was utterly incapable of self-defense, as we can see again today. Angela Merkel may be hunkering down after the rapefugee betrayal of Europe, hoping the Amis will come to the rescue again. But she is a Eurosocialist above all, and her goals are the same as the official EU Machine.

For sixty years Pax Americana protected the world without the suicidal danger of nuclear war. In their heart of hearts, millions of Europeans are looking again to the United States to pull their cookies out of the fire. The EU ruling class has simply brought one “yuge” disaster after another, but the unelected rulers are never blamed. Even the controlled Euromedia are starting to get it, but they still obey orders from the top. Merkel ordered the German media not to criticize her mad decision to bring in the rapefugees, and they followed orders: Jawohl, Frau Commandant!

Like Obama, Merkel represents the smiling face of a ruthless cult.

Today there is not a single leader of moral stature in Europe, because all decisions are made via group-think in EU committees. The EU is a political hierarchy, like the Soviet nomenklatura. Bureaucrats are taught to obey orders. EU governing committees are another version of the old Soviets (councils), which ultimately brought down the Soviet Empire.

Since the return of Jihad with OPEC, Jimmy Carter and Obama have dismantled the defensive alliances that contained global aggression in the Cold War. There certainly were painful proxy wars in Korea and Vietnam in the Cold War, but strategically we learned how to contain aggression without appeasement. The Democrats are not as ignorant as they pretend to be. They have knowingly sabotaged our successful Cold War strategy, constantly evading the obvious parallels between Soviet imperialism and Jihad.

Oddly enough, under Putin the Russians have switched sides, because of the greater threat posed by Jihad. Vladimir Putin is not our friend, but he thinks rationally.

Around the world our rejected allies must be thinking about a renewed alliance, to push a chaotic world back from the brink. Putin has suggested making common cause against Jihad, on the model of Soviet-American resistance to the Nazis. With real leadership, the civilized world could come together and beat oil-fed Jihad. In the Muslim Middle East, Egypt’s President El-Sisi would be a powerful ally, with major credibility among other Muslim nations, including Saudi Arabia. El-Sisi rescued Egypt from a Muslim Brotherhood (Jihadist) takeover, and he is now fighting a hot domestic war against the Nazi-era Broederbund.

Jihad is a global threat, and a worldwide defensive alliance has worked well since World War II. India, Japan, the UK, Australia, the saner half of Europe, and many others share our strategic interests.

We know it can be done. What’s missing is leadership.

An entente cordiale with Russia can work, because Putin rose to power in response to Jihadist terror attacks in Moscow and Beslan. Like it or not, Putin wiped out the Chechnyan Jihadist rebellion in his usual ruthless way. Russia has a long, long history of coping with Jihad. But now Russia is the only major nation that is prepared to fight for strategic goals. Fantasy pacifism has gripped Europe, which is why Angela Merkel surrendered to the rape Jihad that is still victimizing women and children in Europe.

What we need today is an administration with a strategic vision, instead of a gaggle of delusional radicals and their Jihadist collaborators.

This is not hard. It takes common sense, something Americans have always been blessed with.

At least until now.

The election will show if we still have what it takes.

Categories: Democrats, Donald Trump, Europe, Islam - submission, Islam - the religion of war, Islam and human rights, Islamic invasion, Islamic jihad, Islamic State, Islamisation, Obama and Islam, Republicans
Tags: Democrats, Donald Trump, Europe, human rights, Islam - submission, Islam - the religion of war, Islam and human rights, Islamic invasion, Islamic Jihad, Islamisation, Obama and Islam, Republicans

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