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Charlie, Muhammad, and the Saudi 1000 Lashes of Raif Badawi

January 11, 2015

Charlie, Muhammad, and the Saudi 1000 Lashes of Raif Badawi, The Gatestone Institute, Denis MacEoin, January 11, 2014

(Is Saudi Arabia “not-Islamic,” like the Islamic State and its many cohorts? Nope, all are Islamic to the core and it’s high time for our “betters” to realize and acknowledge it. — DM)

“My commitment is… to reject any repression in the name of religion… a goal we will reach in a peaceful and law-abiding way.” — Raif Badawi.

If he ever leaves prison, his life will have been destroyed — by voyeurs as sexually twisted as those of ancient Rome.

“Our Prophet,” Malik said, “would have been crystal clear and unequivocal in condemning [the Charlie Hebdo massacre]. But his statement points out why there is a problem. Malik was — quite innocently, I am sure — completely wrong. Muhammad did the same thing – many, many times.

Today we all are Charlie, and we are all Raif.

His first 50 lashes were administered Friday. After the noon prayers, outside the mosque, Saudi writer and blogger Raif Badawi, 30, received a sentence perhaps worse than death. Accused of “insulting Islam,” he is to receive 1000 lashes: 50 per week for 20 weeks — nearly half a year. “The lashing order says Raif should ‘be lashed very severely,'” a twitter notice read. “If they lash him again next week we do not know if he is going to survive. He has no medical assistance,” another notice said.

After that, he is to spend ten years in prison and pay a fine of $266,000. If he ever leaves prison, his life will have been destroyed — by voyeurs as sexually twisted as those of ancient Rome.

His wife and three children have been given asylum in Canada. Her family has filed for divorce on the grounds of his supposed apostasy.

874Raif Badawi and his children

His crime is said to have been “insulting Islam.” Badawi had written, “My commitment is… to reject any repression in the name of religion… a goal that we will reach in a peaceful, law-abiding way.”

He is alleged to have criticized the Wahhabi clergy who run his country hand in hand with the royal family.[1] Muslims seem not to be able to handle questions, reasoned criticism or satire. Perhaps where many come from, there is only one opinion — the dominant majority one. If there are more, as there are, there seems a wish to stamp them out. Here in the West, a major role of government is to protect the minority from the majority.

The day before, January 8, 2015, just after the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, BBC News in London broadcast a report that contained short interviews with a number of moderate Muslims who decried the attack and feared repercussions on their own communities.[2]

One of the interviewees was Nadeem Malik, the UK Director of the Bahu Trust, a Sufi Muslim charity that “espouses the virtues of tolerance, peaceful co-existence and equality.” Malik said: “Our Prophet would have been absolutely crystal clear and unequivocal in condemning any such action. That’s not in the name of Islam at all, and Muslims are sick of having their faith hijacked in this manner.”

I do not doubt Mr. Malik’s sincerity, and I respect the Islamic tradition (Barelwi) from which he comes as one more in keeping with a non-violent interpretation. But his statement sharply points out why there is a problem. He was — quite innocently, I am sure — completely wrong.

There is an inspiration for attacks like those on writers, cartoonists, and film-makers: France’s Charlie Hebdo journalists; Amsterdam’s Theo van Gogh; Denmark’s Kurt Westergaard, Carsten Juste, and Flemming Rose, and Sweden’s Lars Vilks — as well as the assassination attempt on the Nobel Prize winning Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz and the fatwa for the murder of the British writer Salman Rushdie. The inspiration for this behavior is not that the Prophet Muhammad was lampooned or criticized or mocked. The inspiration for this behavior is that Muhammad himself would have ordered or approved such attacks as revenge for assaults on his honour.

How can one make such an outrageous suggestion? The answer is that Muhammad did exactly the same thing — many, many times. This may appear to be an Islamophobic calumny, perhaps something concocted by medieval churchmen in Europe (who did make up some fancy legends about Muhammad), but it is solidly recorded in the almost canonical biography of the Prophet by Ibn Hisham and in the canonical collections of prophetic traditions (hadith) by Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim.[3]

Shortly after his move from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE, for instance, when he became the effective ruler of the town, opponents emerged in the Jewish and wider communities. Poets wrote lampoons and disrespectful verses. Muhammad had them killed. Not just poets, but almost anyone who disagreed with him and his “revelations.”

In 624, for example, a Jewish poet named Ka’b ibn al-Ashraf wrote verses condemning the killing of notables from Mecca. He later became a one-man Charlie Hebdo, writing obscene and erotic verses about the Muslim women. Muhammad took offense and instructed one of his companions, Muhammad ibn Maslama, to assassinate Ka’b. When Ibn Maslama expressed doubts about having to lie to Ka’b in order to trick him into going with him, Muhammad told him lying was permissible for such purposes. Ibn Maslama and some other Muslims went out with Ka’b under false pretenses and murdered him.

Ka’b ibn al-Ahraf was not Muhammad’s only victim. The poets Asma’ bint Marwan (a woman), Abu Afak, and Al-Nadir ibn al-Harith, and Abu Rafi’ ibn Abi Al-Huqaiq were all assassinated in the same year for the same offence of mockery. In the next few years, several other poets were killed, such as Abdullah ibn Zib’ari, Al-Harith bin al-Talatil, Hubayra, Ka’b ibn Zuhayr ibn Abi Sulama, and Huwayrith ibn Nafidh. Abdullah bin Khatal and two of his slave girls were murdered for having recited poems insulting the Prophet. There is a list in WikiIslam of 43 people — as well as all the men from the Jewish tribe of the Banu Qurayza — who were killed on Muhammad’s orders or whose murders were sanctioned by him.

Today the lashes of Raif Badawi stand with the slaughter at Charlie Hebdo as further symbols of the determination of many extremists to reject the norms of reason, tolerance, pluralism, equality, the Universal Declaration human rights and the value that begins every chapter but one of the Qur’an: mercy.

Some people ask what inspires those who kill authors, cartoonists and journalists, while others insist that it has nothing to do with Islam. If we do not learn, if our leaders do not learn, what hope is there for us?

Today, we are all Charlie. And we are all Raif.

_______________

[1] The Al al-Shaykh are descendants of Wahhabi founder Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1792), who allied himself and his puritan belief system with the Al Sa’ud, an Arabian family with pretensions to grandeur.

[2] BBC News at Ten, 8 January 2010.

[3] For details, see Uri Rubin, “The Assassination of Kaʿb b. al-Ashraf”, Oriens, Vol. 32. (1990), pp. 65-71; the entries on Ka’b in both editions of the authoritative Encyclopedia of Islam; Sahih Bukhari 5:59:369, Sahih Muslim 19:4436

Categories: Blasphemy, Diversity, Europe, France, Freedom, Heresy, Human rights, International Community, Islam, Islamophobia, Koran, Moral equivalence, Saudi Arabia, Torture
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Christians Burned Alive

January 10, 2015

Christians Burned Alive, Gatestone Institute, Raymond Ibrahim, January 10, 2015

Muslim Persecution of Christians, November 2014

“They picked them up by their arms and legs and held them over the brick furnace until their clothes caught fire. And then they threw them [alive] inside the furnace.” — Javeed Maseeh, family spokesman, concerning a Christian couple in Pakistan murdered on rumors they had burned verses from the Qur’an.

“I would appeal to your honor to put pressure on the government of Pakistan to end misuse of blasphemy laws against Christians, Ahmadiyyia and other religious minorities and condition US Aid on human rights and repeal of blasphemy laws.” — From a letter to U.S. President Barack Obama by Dr. Nazir S. Bhutti, President of the Pakistan Christian Congress, expressing surprise that the U.S. did not even bother to condemn the burning of Christians alive.

East Jerusalem: Despite constant and ever bolder attacks on a church, police refuse to respond to pleas for help from the Christian congregation.

Denmark: Muslim refugees are persecuting Christian refugees. “Christian asylum seekers are repeatedly exposed to everything from harassment to threats and physical abuse….” — Niels Eriksen Nyman, 10news.dk

“Young Christian men are made scapegoats to show police performance, while the real culprits are carrying out their illegal activities right under the police’s nose.” — Brother-in-law of “Mithu,” 35, Christian father of five, who was arrested in Pakistan on false charges and tortured to death in prison.

The youngest [slave] being the most expensive. 20-30 years old: 100,000 dinars [$86]; 10-20 years old: 150,000 dinars [$129]; 9 years old: 200,000 dinars [$172]. — The Islamic State.

The Islamic State called on its followers to take the jihad to Egypt.

Qaiser Ayub, a 40 year old professor of computer science in Pakistan, of Christian background, was arrested and charged with insulting Islam’s prophet Muhammad.

Both in the Islamic world and the Western world, Muslims continued to attack and slaughter Christians.

In Pakistan, “A mob accused of burning alive a Christian couple in an industrial kiln in Pakistan allegedly wrapped a pregnant mother in cotton so she would catch fire more easily, according to family members who witnessed the attack,” reported NBC News:

Sajjad Maseeh, 27, and his wife Shama Bibi, 24, were set upon by at least 1,200 people after rumors circulated that they had burned verses from the Quran, family spokesman Javed Maseeh told NBC News via telephone late Thursday. Their legs were also broken so they couldn’t run away.

“They picked them up by their arms and legs and held them over the brick furnace until their clothes caught fire,” he said. “And then they threw them inside the furnace.”

Bibi, a mother of four who was four months pregnant, was wearing an outfit that initially didn’t burn, according to Javed Maseeh. The mob removed her from over the kiln and wrapped her up in cotton to make sure the garments would be set alight.

814Shama Bibi (left) and Sajjad Maseeh, a Christian couple and parents of four children, were burned to death by a Muslim lynch mob in Pakistan because of a false blasphemy accusation.

Discussing this latest atrocity against Pakistan’s Christian minorities, an AFP report states:

Blasphemy is a hugely sensitive issue in the majority Muslim country, with even unproven allegations often prompting mob violence.

Anyone convicted, or even just accused, of insulting Islam, risks a violent and bloody death at the hands of vigilantes.

A Christian woman [Asia Bibi] has been on death row since November 2010 after she was found guilty of making derogatory remarks about the Prophet Mohammed during an argument with a Muslim woman.

An elderly British man with severe mental illness, sentenced to death for blasphemy in Pakistan in January, was shot by a prison guard last month.

Two days after the Christian couple were burned alive, a policeman in Pakistan hacked a man to death for allegedly making blasphemous remarks against Islam.

About the Christian couple, Dr. Nazir S. Bhatti, President of the Pakistan Christian Congress, wrote a letter to U.S. President Obama expressing surprise that the U.S. did not even bother to condemn this crime:

It is surprising that neither US Administration under your honor nor US State Department even bothered to condemn this horrific crime of burning live of Christian couple by a mob living in country named Islamic Republic of Pakistan which is receiving billions of aid of US taxpayers.

I would appeal your honor to put pressure on government of Pakistan to end misuse of blasphemy laws against Christian, Ahamadiyyia and other religious minorities and condition US Aid to Pakistan on human rights and repeal of blasphemy laws.

Meanwhile, in America itself, in Oklahoma, Jimmy Stepney, a Muslim, stabbed Jerome Bullock, a Christian, after Stepney had said that Muslims need to “step up” beheadings. According to Koco5 News:

The [police] report went on to say Stepney had been making comments about beheading people.

“We were watching the news,” said Bullock. “He said he felt like more Muslims need to step up to the plate and do certain thing. He was talking about beheading people.”

The severity of the plight of Christians in the Middle East was further underscored by Dr. Alexander Yakovenko, Russian Ambassador to the United Kingdom, who wrote:

Russia is currently considering the possibility of initiating a draft decision of the UN Human Rights Council on the protection of Christians in the Middle East and North Africa. Russian experts are now working on this document.[…]

The scale of the problems demands the coordination of international efforts to protect Christians in the Middle East.

Further initiatives, new measures and relevant discussions aimed at finding durable solutions in this regard are strongly needed. Of course, we believe that Europe, including the UK, should make its contribution to these efforts, taking into account the Christian roots of the European civilization, which are now often forgotten for the sake of political correctness.[…]

The fate of the region’s religious minorities is of the greatest concern. The mass exodus of Christians, who have been an integral part of the Middle Eastern mosaic for centuries, is particularly troubling.

The rest of November’s roundup of Muslim persecution of Christians around the world includes (but is not limited to) the following accounts, listed by theme and country in alphabetical order, not necessarily according to severity:

Muslim Attacks on Christian Churches

Bangladesh: Two Christian pastors from the Faith Bible Church of God were arrested for preaching the Gospel to Muslims . They could face two years in prison if convicted for “hurting religious sentiments” and luring Muslims to convert by offering them money. The pastors deny both charges. Police arrested the pastors and 41 other people, including Muslims, after a throng of Muslims disrupted a house meeting. According to a witness: “More than 100 Muslims headed by local Jamaat-e-Islami party members and Muslim clerics gathered at the house and started barking questions at the pastors—why did they propagate Christianity in the locality and convert some of them,” and who gave them permission to preach to Muslims. “The pastors replied that it did not take any permission from any authority to propagate any religion and convert people to any religion. Suddenly the Muslims became apoplectic with rage, tried to pick a fight and started jabbing the pastors’ faces.”

Egypt: Father Timothy Shakar, priest of St. Mina Church in Port Said, confirmed that two homemade bombs were planted near the St. Mina Church but caused no injuries, or losses of life or property. Police searched other churches in the region for more bombs.

Germany: Nine men who had earlier broken into, vandalized, and robbed several Christian churches in the Cologne area—including by stealing money from the collection boxes and liturgical vessels—were caught during a massive raid. Apparently, all of the arrested are German by nationality, but Muslim by background and heritage. Some were also identified as “Salafis”—especially fundamentalist Muslims—connected to international terrorist organizations. Some had even raised hundreds of thousands of Euros from native Germans to support overseas “charities,” the proceeds of which actually went to terrorist groups such as ISIS.

Iraq: As cries of “Allahu Akbar” emanated from surrounding mosques, Islamic State militants blew up yet another Christian church — St. George’s Church and its associated nunnery in the city of Mosul — along with other non-Sunni sites. Separately, after breaking the cross from off the dome of the St. Ephrem Church dome (before and after pictures here) and selling its pews and other furnishings, the IS transformed the church into a mosque and council seat for the jihadis.

East Jerusalem: Despite constant and ever bolder attacks on a church, police refuse to respond to pleas for help from the Christian congregation. According to Morning Star News, “The attacks, driven by both intent to seize property and opposition to Christianity, have been mounted by young men with ties to Palestinian militants who for more than three months have been trying to force Living Bread Church from its rented building. Church pastor Karen Dunham and others have filed at least eight police reports about the assaults.” The most recent incident took place on November 5, when the gas tank of a car owned by a church volunteer was filled with sugar. On November 2, a car owned by one of the pastor’s relatives was stolen. And on October 16, three American Christians were injured while trying to repair a metal security door: A crowd of Palestinian men attacked them with box cutters, sticks, clubs and pepper spray. According to the church’s attorney, authorities “have their [the assailants’] pictures, they have their names, they even have their national ID numbers, and still they do nothing…. The level of brute force compared to the level of lack of response of the police force there is pretty shocking…. It almost seems like if someone is going to go in and murder her [Dunham], that no one is going to lift a finger.”

Malaysia: Approximately 70 local residents in Petaling Jaya protested the construction of a church. They claimed the growing number of Christian places of worship in the area is part of an attempt to evangelize and convert Muslims to Christianity. An NGO, the local branch of Pertubuhan Sahabat, supported the claims of the Muslims. They argued that there are three churches in the vicinity, although close to 70 percent of the residents in the area are Muslims. According to a spokesman, “Even before the church is built, flyers on Christianity have been distributed to our homes, and this could confuse our children and divert them from the path of Islam.” The vacant plot was previously occupied by squatters, a car park and several food stalls. Another local Muslim added “None of our neighbours are Christians, we can vouch for that… it is an insult to Muslims to allow a church to be built here, but none of our representatives seem to have the time to listen to us.” One demonstrator hurled large rocks at the temporary steel fence around the vacant plot.

Jihadi Slaughter of Christians

Kenya: Members of neighboring Somalia’s Islamic group Al Shabaab—”the Youth”—hijacked a bus carrying 60 passengers in the town of Mandera, near Kenya’s border with Somalia. They singled out and massacred 28 non-Muslims, the overwhelming majority of whom were Christian. According to an eyewitness, “When we got down, passengers were separated according to Somali and non-Somalis. The non-Somalis were ordered to read some verses of the holy Koran, and those who failed to read were ordered to lie down. One by one they were shot in the head at point blank range.”

Nigeria: On November 10, a suicide bomb attack on a Christian secondary school as students gathered for morning assembly killed at least 47 people. The Islamic group Boko Haram— meaning: “Western education is forbidden”—is believed to be behind the blast. In a separate incident, Christians from the predominantly Christian city of Mubi in Adamawa state were tortured and killed after Boko Haram took control of the town. Churches and homes were torched throughout the city, which was renamed Madinat al-Islam, or “the City of Islam.” In yet another separate incident, Boko Haram militants raided the mostly Christian town of Shani. According to a resident speaking to Reuters, “They rode on motorcycles and were more than 30 men. They started throwing bombs into houses… then the Boko Haram fired shots at people fleeing. They set ablaze the police station, houses and a telecom mast… I saw people fleeing, some bodies on the ground.” Reuters continues: “The Sunni jihadist movement is fighting to revive a medieval Islamic caliphate in Nigeria’s north.”

Pakistani Persecution

A few days after the Christian couple, mentioned earlier, was burned alive, a 35-year-old Christian father of five known as “Mithu” was arrested on false charges by police and tortured to death in prison. According to the deceased’s brother-in-law: “It was a fake allegation, because the raiding party failed to recover any contraband from Mithu’s person and his house… On the morning of Nov. 22, we were informed by Ilyas Gill, a local councilor, that Mithu had died in police custody because of heart failure…. Young Christian men are made scapegoats to show police performance while the real culprits are carrying out their illegal activities right under the police’s nose.” Morning Star News adds: “Area police routinely round up young, impoverished Christians on false charges of drug peddling and bootlegging, and then force their families to pay heavy bribes in return for their release… family elders had seen signs of torture on the body…”

Christian families in a Punjabi village were forced to flee after a Christian man married a Muslim woman—an act forbidden by Islamic law. According to the Pakistani report, “The Muslims in this village became enraged when this occurred and began threatening them…. When the news of the marriage was learned, the Muslims in Sahiwal attacked Shahab’s [the Christian husband’s] family as well as other Christian families in the village. The Muslims demanded that Ruksana [the Muslim wife] be returned immediately, according to Sharia which prohibits Muslim women from marrying a man from another religion…. the entire Muslim community was threatening to kill Shahab’s father and all of the village’s Christians…. The Christians’ pleas for help from the local police were all in vain.”

And Qaiser Ayub, a 40-year-old professor of Christian background, was arrested and charged with insulting Islam’s prophet Muhammad. The computer science professor had been a fugitive avoiding the police since 2011, when he was first accused of having written blasphemous comments on his blog.

Dhimmitude: Generic Contempt and Hostility

Denmark: In an apparent replication of the Islamic world’s modus operandi, Muslim refugees in the European nation are persecuting Christian refugees. According to 10news.dk, “Christian asylum seekers are repeatedly exposed to everything from harassment to threats and physical abuse by other refugees in the asylum centers, simply because they have converted from Islam to Christianity.” According to Niels Eriksen Nyman, who led the study, “There are certainly many more cases around the country than the ones we hear about in the church. I hate to say it, but I’m afraid that on some of the asylum centers there are some very unhealthy control mechanisms when the staff turns their back… I refuse to support Islamophobia, but we have a serious problem here.” Two recent examples: “An eight year old Christian at the Center Sandholm was bullied and beaten by the larger Arab boys on their way to school. Now the boy nolonger [sic] dares to go to school. On the island Bornholm, somebody had tampered with a Christian asylum seeker’s bike so that he crashed and broke both hands.”

Egypt: The Islamic State called on its followers to take the jihad to Egypt. Abu Mus’ab al-Maqdisi, a leader in the Islamic State, said in a statement titled “Advice to Egypt’s Mujahidin” that “It is necessary to take the battle to Cairo, until the Sinai is safeguarded from the apostates [reference to Egyptian government] and becomes a rear base [qaeda] from which to expand the jihad.” He also called on the jihadis in Egypt to “target the Copts,” the nation’s indigenous, Christian minority: “For targeting them, following them, and killing them is one of the main ways to serve the cause of our virtuous male and female hostages of the tyrants.”

Iraq: Christian homes in Tel Isqof were looted by Kurds who, after fighting the Islamic State, took control of the area on August 17. According to Agenzia Fides, “The city of Tel Isqof was occupied on August 7 by jihadist militias who already in June had conquered Mosul. Faced with the advancing of jihadists, the civilian population, mainly Christians, had fled to the autonomous Region of Iraqi Kurdistan, leaving the city deserted. Ten days later [on August 17], with a counter-offensive the Kurdish Peshmerga had regained control of the city. But it is precisely since then that [Christian] residents periodically return to the city to check the status of their homes, and acknowledge that the doors of a growing number of homes and businesses have been forced and property looted: money and jewelry, technical equipment and electronic instruments.” As in the Islamic State, most Kurds are Sunni Muslims.

Islamic State: IS issued a document breaking down the purchase prices of Christian and Yazidi women being sold as sex-slaves. Apparently these enslaved unfortunates are priced based on age— the youngest being the most expensive. The breakdown is as follows (with USD equivalency in brackets): 40-50 years old: 50,000 dinars [$43]; 30-40 years old: 75,000 dinars [$64]; 20-30 years old: 100,000 dinars [$86]; 10-20 years old: 150,000 dinars [$129]; 9 years old: 200,000 dinars [$172].

Spain: Real Madrid, a professional football (soccer) team, stripped the traditional Christian cross from its club crest as part of a deal with the National Bank of Abu Dhabi. “It is believed the European champions’ new crest, minus the Christian cross, was created so as not to offend Muslim sensibilities in the United Arab Emirates, where a marketing drive will take place,” wrote the Telegraph. Club president Florentino Perez said, “This agreement will help the club to keep conquering the hearts of followers in the United Arab Emirates.”

Syria: As of November, Raqqa, which once had approximately 1,500 Christian families, had only 23 Christian families remaining in it—the others were driven out or killed by the Islamic State. Those few remaining were unable to leave the city for lack of resources or for reasons of age and health. On November 16 they were told that they must pay $535, an exorbitant sum (human sex-slaves are being sold for as little as $43). “In all likelihood Christian families, impoverished by the war, will not be able to pay the tax and will have to leave their homes” or convert to Islam, as many elderly, debilitated Christians unable to flee have already done.

About this Series

While not all, or even most, Muslims are involved, persecution of Christians is expanding. “Muslim Persecution of Christians” was developed to collate some—by no means all—of the instances of persecution that surface each month.

It documents what the mainstream media often fails to report.

It posits that such persecution is not random but systematic, and takes place in all languages, ethnicities and locations.

Categories: Christians, Executions, Foreign policy, France, Freedom, Heresy, International Community, Islam, Islamic jihad, Islamic slaughter, Jerusalem, Koran, Kurds, Obama, Terrorism, Torture
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Can Charlie Hebdo’s Spirit Include Israel?

January 9, 2015

Can Charlie Hebdo’s Spirit Include Israel? Algemeiner, Noah Beck, January 9, 2015

parisians-300x167Grieving Parisians gathered to mourn the victims of the Charlie Hebdo shooting. Photo: Screenshot, Vice News.

[H]ad Palestinian gunmen similarly attacked Israel’s most important daily newspaper and then escaped, would the event inspire such constant coverage or international sympathy? Israel has suffered countless massacres followed by a suspenseful manhunt for the Islamist terrorists; in each of these incidents, the world hardly noticed until Israel forcefully responded and Palestinians died (prompting global condemnation of Israel).

The best response to the Charlie Hebdo attack is to redouble the free expression Islamists meant to stifle. Similarly, the best response to Islamist attacks on the only Mideast democracy, Israel, is to increase support for it.

****************

The Islamist massacre at Charlie Hebdo has understandably captured global attention because it was a barbaric attack on France and freedom of expression. In a moment of defiant moral clarity, “je suis Charlie” emerged as a popular phrase of solidarity with the victims. Hopefully such clarity persists and extends to those facing similar challenges every day in the Middle East.

Christians and other religious minorities have been beheaded by Islamists for years, but it wasn’t until US journalist James Foley was beheaded that the West cared. The Islamic State raped and slaughtered thousands of Yazidis — leaving the surviving refugees stranded on Mount Sinjar — before the West took notice. But one Islamist besieging a cafe in Sydney, killing two, dominated global coverage for the entire 16-hour incident.

Western leaders and media must realize that religious minorities in the Middle East are the canary in the coalmine for the West when it comes to Islamist threats. And Israel provides the clearest early warning of all, precisely because — despite Israel’s location in a region of Islamists and dictatorships — the Jewish state has free elections, freedom of speech, a vigorous political opposition and independent press, equal rights and protections for minorities and women (who are represented in all parts of civil, legal, political, artistic, and economic life), and a prosperous free market economy.

But had Palestinian gunmen similarly attacked Israel’s most important daily newspaper and then escaped, would the event inspire such constant coverage or international sympathy? Israel has suffered countless massacres followed by a suspenseful manhunt for the Islamist terrorists; in each of these incidents, the world hardly noticed until Israel forcefully responded and Palestinians died (prompting global condemnation of Israel).

However, when there is an attack in Europe, North America, or Australia, there is widespread grief, solidarity, and an acceptance of whatever policy reaction is chosen. But when Israel is targeted, there is almost always a call for “restraint,” as happened last November after fatal stabbings by Palestinian terrorists in Tel Aviv and the West Bank.

If two Palestinians entered a European or North American church and attacked worshipers with meat cleavers, killing five people, including priests, the outrage would be palpable in every politician and journalist’s voice. But when Israelis were victims of such an attack, Obama’s reaction was spineless and tone deaf. Did Obama condemn the Charlie Hebdo massacre by noting how many Muslims have died at the hands of French military forces operating in Africa and the Middle East? Of course not. Such moral equivocation would be unthinkable with any ally or Western country except Israel.

Similarly, would Secretary of State John Kerry ever suggest that the Islamic State is somehow motivated by French policies (whether banning Muslim headscarves at public schools or fighting Islamists in Mali)? Obviously not. Yet Kerry did just that sort of thing with Israel when he suggested that the Islamic State is driven by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

And the media’s anti-Israel bias is well known but became even more obvious when they couldn’t get a simple story about vehicular terrorism against Israelis correct. Compare how The Guardian writes accurate headlines when France or Canada suffers an Islamist car attack but not when Israel does.

Consider all of the justifiable news coverage and outrage over the 2013 Boston bombings, and imagine if one of those happened every week. Would anyone dare suggest that the US make peace with any Islamists demanding changes to US policy? And yet Israel had such bomb attacks almost every week of 2002 and was invariably asked to restrain itself and make concessions to the very people bombing them (as happened again last summer, when Hamas fired thousands of rockets at Israel).

As Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has ruefully observed, “There is a standard for dictatorships, there is a standard for democracies, and there is still a third standard for the democracy called Israel.”

Even when compared to Western democracies, what other country gives incredibly forgiving medical care to terrorists and agrees to treat the children of those working to destroy it? Israel is where a Hamas family member finds refuge when he is a gay convert to Christianity but this is yet another inconvenient fact for the mainstream media (as is the fact that some Israeli Arabs supported the IDF’s 2014 war against Hamas). Why report what contradicts the one-sided, anti-Israel narrative that the media and groups like Human Rights Watch have adopted? That narrative is only reinforced on college campuses (leftist college history professors openly supported Hamas last summer). Nevertheless, US funding of anti-Israel groups continues to aggravate the misinformation problem.

Israel is still the country that everyone loves to hate. So it’s the cheap way to please Muslim voters in Europe and oil producers in the Gulf. But what happens to Israel eventually comes to the West, because Israel is an extension of the West. And just as surrendering Czechoslovakia failed to appease the expansionist appetite and murderous rampage of Nazi totalitarianism, so too will feeding Israel to Islamist totalitarianism fail to appease that movement. In the end, there is no set of concessions — short of civilizational surrender — that the Islamists will accept.

Nevertheless, an EU court decided to remove Hamas from the European Union’s terror list, even though Hamas is responsible for scores of terrorist attacks that have murdered hundreds of Israelis, North Americans, and Europeans, and has a charter calling for the destruction of Israel. And Western European countries have voted for Palestinian statehood at the UN and in their parliaments, effectively rewarding Palestinian terrorism and intransigence. Europe supports the Palestinian Authority as if Hamas couldn’t overthrow it in the West Bank as easily as Hamas did in Gaza Strip in 2007. How can Europe not know that Hamas has designs on the West Bank and that any Israeli withdrawal from that territory will only facilitate such a takeover? And how can Europe believe that Israel could ever make peace with Hamas, which has launched three unprovoked wars on Israel in the last five years (in the decade since Israel withdrew from Gaza)?

Moreover, if lofty concerns about self-determination and human rights are the true motivation behind Europe’s vocal support for Palestinian independence (despite its undemocratic and violent record), why is Europe deafeningly quiet on Kurdish statehood? Given that six million Jews were annihilated by a genocide on European soil, Europe’s hypocrisy on Israel should embarrass the continent even more.

Worse still, Europe’s gestures of appeasement only encourage the Islamists. The best response to the Charlie Hebdo attack is to redouble the free expression Islamists meant to stifle. Similarly, the best response to Islamist attacks on the only Mideast democracy, Israel, is to increase support for it.

Categories: Charlie Hedbo, Europe, Foreign policy, Freedom, Gaza, Golan Heights, Hamas, International Community, Islam, Islamic jihad, Islamic slaughter, Israel, Jerusalem, Kerry, Kurds, Middle East, Moral equivalence, Obama, Terrorism, West Bank
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Robert Spencer on Hannity, January 8, 2015, on Sharia No-Go Zones and the Charlie Hebdo jihadis

January 9, 2015

Robert Spencer on Hannity, January 8, 2015, on Sharia No-Go Zones and the Charlie Hebdo jihadis, Jihad Watch Videos, January 9, 2015

 

Categories: Blasphemy, Diversity, Europe, Foreign policy, Freedom, Human rights, International Community, Islam, Islamophobia, Jihad, Moral equivalence, Multiculturalism
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Je Suis Jihad

January 9, 2015

Je Suis Jihad, Center for Security Policy, Frank Gaffney, Jr., January 9, 2015

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It was an act of violence prescribed by shariah to punish what that code deems to be a capital offence: giving offense to Muslims by caricaturing, or even just portraying pictorially, the founder of their faith, Mohammed. Unfortunately, acknowledging this reality is a practice that continues to be eschewed by governments on both sides of the Atlantic and by many in the media – even as they decry the attacks.

Therefore, it would be clarifying if, as those who profess solidarity with the fallen and their commitment to freedom of expression by declaring “Je suis Charlie” (I am Charlie) would also acknowledge the impetus behind the perpetrators: “Je suis jihad.”

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In the aftermath of the murderous attack on the staff of Charlie Hebdo, the iconically irreverent French satirical journal, there is a widespread – and welcome – appreciation that the Islamic supremacist perpetrators sought not only to silence cartoonists who had lampooned Mohammed. They wanted to ensure that no one else violates the prohibitions on “blasphemy” imposed by the shariah doctrine that animates them.

In other words, the liquidation of twelve of the magazine’s cartoonists and staff – and a police officer (a Muslim, as it turns out) assigned to protect them after an earlier 2011 firebombing of its offices – was an act of jihad. Not “workplace violence.” Not antisceptic “terrorism” or the even more opaque “violent extremism.”

It was an act of violence prescribed by shariah to punish what that code deems to be a capital offence: giving offense to Muslims by caricaturing, or even just portraying pictorially, the founder of their faith, Mohammed. Unfortunately, acknowledging this reality is a practice that continues to be eschewed by governments on both sides of the Atlantic and by many in the media – even as they decry the attacks.

Therefore, it would be clarifying if, as those who profess solidarity with the fallen and their commitment to freedom of expression by declaring “Je suis Charlie” (I am Charlie) would also acknowledge the impetus behind the perpetrators: “Je suis jihad.”

Such a step could begin a long-overdue correction in both official circles and the Fourth Estate. Both have actually encouraged the jihadists by past failures to acknowledge the reality of jihad and shariah, and by serial accommodations made to their practitioners.

One of the most high-profile and egregious examples of this phenomenon was President Obama’s infamous statement before the United Nations General Assembly in September 2012 – two weeks after he first, and fraudulently, blamed the attack on U.S. missions in Benghazi, Libya on a online video that had offended Muslims: “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”

This outrageous submission of the constitutional freedom of speech to shariah not only tracked with the sorts of statements one might have heard from global jihadists like al Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden, the Taliban’s Mullah Omar or the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood. It was of a piece with an agenda the Obama administration had been pursuing since its inception: finding ways to satisfy the demands of another, less well known, but exceedingly dangerous jihadist group – the supranational Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).

As documented in a superb film on the subject entitled Silent Conquest: The End of Freedom of Expression in the West (spoiler alert: I appear in this documentary, as do most of the preeminent international champions of freedom of expression), starting in March 2009, Team Obama began cooperating with the OIC in its efforts to use the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to impose what amounted to shariah blasphemy laws worldwide. This collaboration ultimately gave rise to UNHRC Resolution 16/18 entitled, “Combating Intolerance, Negative Stereotyping and Stigmatization of, and Discrimination, Incitement to violence, and Violence against Persons based on Religion or Belief,” which was adopted with U.S. support in March 2011. Despite its pretense of protecting persons of any religion or belief, the motivation behind and purpose of Res. 16/18 was to give Islamic supremacists a new, international legal basis for trying to impose restrictions on expression they would find offensive.

Resolution 16/18 is, in other words, a form of what the Muslim Brotherhood calls “civilization jihad” – a stealthy, subversive means of accomplishing the same goals as the violent jihadists worldwide: the West’s submission, and that of the rest of the world, to shariah and a caliph to rule according to it.

It fell to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to try to accommodate the Islamic supremacists’ demands. She launched something called the “Istanbul Process” which brought the United States, the European Union and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation together to find ways of giving force to Res. 16/18. On July 15, 2011, after paying lip service to the fact that, “for 235 years, freedom of expression has been a universal right at the core of our democracy,” Mrs. Clinton announced:

We are focused on promoting interfaith education and collaboration, enforcing anti-discrimination laws, protecting the rights of all people to worship as they choose, and to use some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don’t feel that they have the support to do what we abhor.

The Charlie Hebdo attack is a particularly vivid reminder of what comes of such appeasement and how it encourages jihadists – pursuant to their shariah ideology – to redouble their efforts, not just through stealth but through violence, to achieve our absolute submission. If are to have any hope of preventing more such incidents in the future, let alone far worse at the hands of shariah’s adherents, we must acknowledge the true nature of these enemies and adopt a comprehensive and effective counter-ideological strategy for defeating them.

Categories: Blasphemy, Diversity, Europe, Foreign policy, Hillary Clinton, Human rights, International Community, Islam, Islamic jihad, Islamic slaughter, Moral equivalence, Obama, Peace process, Terrorism, United Nations
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Meanwhile, Saudis Lash Blogger for “Insult” to Islam

January 9, 2015

Meanwhile, Saudis Lash Blogger for “Insult” to Islam, Investigative Project, January 9, 2015

(Will Saudi Arabia be declared “non-Islamic?” — DM)

The Paris jihadists acted on their own belief that Charlie Hebdo‘s cartoons were a crime against Islam warranting mass slaughter in response. Badawi was flogged at the demand of a national government, one which was invited to join the United Nations Security Council just two years ago and turned it down.

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For sheer brutality, it pales in comparison to the massacre of journalists and cartoonists Wednesday at the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo, but Saudi Arabia’s flogging of a liberal blogger Friday further shows how rooted the concept of violence is in response to any insult of Islam.

Raif Badawi was sentenced to 1,000 lashes – he received the first 50 in a public square in Jeddah Friday – along with 10 years in prison and a fine equal to $266,666, Reuters reports. His crime? Creating a website called “Free Saudi Liberals,” which advocated greater religious freedom. Saudi Arabia found this “insulting to Islam.”

In a statement, the International Humanist and Ethical Union called Badawi’s punishment “savage, and an absolute violation of human rights and dignity” intended to cow other potential free thinkers into silence.

“Only yesterday it was reported that Saudi Arabia condemned the Charlie Hebdo shootings, and yet the authorities choose this week to brutalize a young man because he had the audacity to stand up and say that his countrymen should have greater liberty,” Union spokesman Bob Churchill said. “The Saudi state’s condemnation of terror in Paris is hypocrisy of the highest order.”

Amnesty International also condemned Badawi’s treatment as “a vicious act of cruelty which is prohibited under international law” showing Saudi Arabia’s “abhorrent disregard for the most basic human rights principles.”

The Paris jihadists acted on their own belief that Charlie Hebdo‘s cartoons were a crime against Islam warranting mass slaughter in response. Badawi was flogged at the demand of a national government, one which was invited to join the United Nations Security Council just two years ago and turned it down.

This has been a horrible week for violence waged in defense of Islam. It’s not a great week for those who insist this violence is rooted in anything but theology.

Categories: Human rights, International Community, Islam, Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Torture
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How to Answer the Paris Terror Attack

January 8, 2015

How to Answer the Paris Terror Attack, Wall Street Journal, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, January 7, 2015

If there is a lesson to be drawn from such a grisly episode, it is that what we believe about Islam truly doesn’t matter. This type of violence, jihad, is what they, the Islamists, believe.

Those responsible for the slaughter in Paris, just like the man who killed the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004, are seeking to impose terror. And every time we give in to their vision of justified religious violence, we are giving them exactly what they want.

We appease the Muslim heads of government who lobby us to censor our press, our universities, our history books, our school curricula. They appeal and we oblige. We appease leaders of Muslim organizations in our societies. They ask us not to link acts of violence to the religion of Islam because they tell us that theirs is a religion of peace, and we oblige.

We have to acknowledge that today’s Islamists are driven by a political ideology, an ideology embedded in the foundational texts of Islam. We can no longer pretend that it is possible to divorce actions from the ideals that inspire them.

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After the horrific massacre Wednesday at the French weekly satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, perhaps the West will finally put away its legion of useless tropes trying to deny the relationship between violence and radical Islam.

This was not an attack by a mentally deranged, lone-wolf gunman. This was not an “un-Islamic” attack by a bunch of thugs—the perpetrators could be heard shouting that they were avenging the Prophet Muhammad. Nor was it spontaneous. It was planned to inflict maximum damage, during a staff meeting, with automatic weapons and a getaway plan. It was designed to sow terror, and in that it has worked.

The West is duly terrified. But it should not be surprised.

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If there is a lesson to be drawn from such a grisly episode, it is that what we believe about Islam truly doesn’t matter. This type of violence, jihad, is what they, the Islamists, believe.

There are numerous calls to violent jihad in the Quran. But the Quran is hardly alone. In too much of Islam, jihad is a thoroughly modern concept. The 20th-century jihad “bible,” and an animating work for many Islamist groups today, is “The Quranic Concept of War,” a book written in the mid-1970s by Pakistani Gen. S.K. Malik. He argues that because God, Allah, himself authored every word of the Quran, the rules of war contained in the Quran are of a higher caliber than the rules developed by mere mortals.

In Malik’s analysis of Quranic strategy, the human soul—and not any physical battlefield—is the center of conflict. The key to victory, taught by Allah through the military campaigns of the Prophet Muhammad, is to strike at the soul of your enemy. And the best way to strike at your enemy’s soul is through terror. Terror, Malik writes, is “the point where the means and the end meet.” Terror, he adds, “is not a means of imposing decision upon the enemy; it is the decision we wish to impose.”

Those responsible for the slaughter in Paris, just like the man who killed the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004, are seeking to impose terror. And every time we give in to their vision of justified religious violence, we are giving them exactly what they want.

In Islam, it is a grave sin to visually depict or in any way slander the Prophet Muhammad. Muslims are free to believe this, but why should such a prohibition be forced on nonbelievers? In the U.S., Mormons didn’t seek to impose the death penalty on those who wrote and produced “The Book of Mormon,” a satirical Broadway sendup of their faith. Islam, with 1,400 years of history and some 1.6 billion adherents, should be able to withstand a few cartoons by a French satirical magazine. But of course deadly responses to cartoons depicting Muhammad are nothing new in the age of jihad.

Moreover, despite what the Quran may teach, not all sins can be considered equal. The West must insist that Muslims, particularly members of the Muslim diaspora, answer this question: What is more offensive to a believer—the murder, torture, enslavement and acts of war and terrorism being committed today in the name of Muhammad, or the production of drawings and films and books designed to mock the extremists and their vision of what Muhammad represents?

To answer the late Gen. Malik, our soul in the West lies in our belief in freedom of conscience and freedom of expression. The freedom to express our concerns, the freedom to worship who we want, or not to worship at all—such freedoms are the soul of our civilization. And that is precisely where the Islamists have attacked us. Again.

How we respond to this attack is of great consequence. If we take the position that we are dealing with a handful of murderous thugs with no connection to what they so vocally claim, then we are not answering them. We have to acknowledge that today’s Islamists are driven by a political ideology, an ideology embedded in the foundational texts of Islam. We can no longer pretend that it is possible to divorce actions from the ideals that inspire them.

This would be a departure for the West, which too often has responded to jihadist violence with appeasement. We appease the Muslim heads of government who lobby us to censor our press, our universities, our history books, our school curricula. They appeal and we oblige. We appease leaders of Muslim organizations in our societies. They ask us not to link acts of violence to the religion of Islam because they tell us that theirs is a religion of peace, and we oblige.

What do we get in return? Kalashnikovs in the heart of Paris. The more we oblige, the more we self-censor, the more we appease, the bolder the enemy gets.

There can only be one answer to this hideous act of jihad against the staff of Charlie Hebdo. It is the obligation of the Western media and Western leaders, religious and lay, to protect the most basic rights of freedom of expression, whether in satire on any other form. The West must not appease, it must not be silenced. We must send a united message to the terrorists: Your violence cannot destroy our soul.

Categories: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Diversity, Europe, Foreign policy, Freedom, International Community, Islam, Islamic jihad, Islamic slaughter, Islamic State, Islamophobia, Moral equivalence, Multiculturalism, Political correctness, Terrorism
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Israel, the Obsession

December 22, 2014

Israel, the Obsession, American Thinker, Richard Baehr, December 22, 2014

[T]here is no clear path back to sanity, nor is there a clear path to the end of the obsession with Israel.

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It has been a pretty typical week on the hate Israel front.  A European Union Court has decided that Hamas is not a terrorist organization, and their previous designation as such had not been justified by real evidence that Europeans had developed, as opposed, say, to information supplied by the United States or Israel.  An international court in Geneva is hearing evidence of Israeli human rights violations.  The United Nations Security Council has been considering a resolution developed by the Palestinian Authority, as well as one by the French that would effectively lay out the terms for Israel’s capitulation over the next few years.  Israel’s peace camp has been working with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, encouraging a delay in consideration of the Security Council resolutions, since any action before the upcoming Israeli parliamentary elections could benefit the right-wing parties in Israel.  In other words, there is not even an attempt to hide anymore that the United States is putting its foot down for one particular side in the Israeli election.  Various European countries are endorsing Palestinian statehood on the terms demanded by the Palestinian Authority.  Academic groups, unions, and churches in Europe and the United States are endorsing the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement.  Certain European communities are now “Israeli-frei” – free of Israeli goods (or at least those they can identify and care to avoid).  The U.N. Human Rights Council and the General Assembly, as well as specific agencies whose only task is to bash Israel, are set to get back to work, creating more resolutions and condemnations of the Jewish state.

As Joshua Muravchik makes clear in his outstanding new book, Making David Into Goliath, this obsession with Israel by most nations of the world and the United Nations – or as they are collectively known, “the international community” – as well as by “the global left,” could not have been imagined a half-century back, prior to the Six-Day War.  At that time, Israel was championed by Socialist political parties, and viewed sympathetically as a beleaguered democracy fighting for its existence against a collection of larger anti-Western Arab tyrannies.  There was residual sympathy for Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, many of whom had moved to Israel.  There was no movement for Palestinian nationhood, though certainly violent actions by Arabs aimed at Israel and Jews in the region had been going on for decades.

Muravchik’s book attempts to explain what has happened during this period and why.  A lot changed after the 1967 war, when, instead of little Israel facing off with 21 Arab nations, the conflict was recast with Israel as the big dog, oppressing the Palestinians and occupying their land.  Since the left tends to root for the underdog, Israel no longer fit the bill.  The description of the conflict in the post-1967 telling is of course neither factual nor historical, since there had never been a unique nation of Palestinian Arabs, denied their nationhood – say, the way the Tibetans or the Kurds have been for sixty years, or forever.  The Palestinians became refugees because their leaders refused to accept half a loaf – a state on half of the mandate territory in 1947 – and instead chose to go to war to deny the Zionists their state.  The Arabs of Palestine, even with the support of armies from their Arab neighbor states, lost the war.

When you start a war and lose, there are consequences.

Since 1967, the Palestinians and their allies have been trying to reverse not just the war of 1967, but the 1948 war as well.  Refugees from the 1948 war (and there are not many of them left) are still in refugee camps, unlike any other refugees from any other conflicts then or in the years since, and the descendants of the original refugee population, now from three generations, demands a “right of return” to homes in Israel where they never lived and in fact to a country where they have never been.

The 1948 war produced a population exchange – a larger number of Jews were driven out of Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Yemen, Iraq, Libya, and other countries than Arabs who left their homes in what became Israel.  Most of the Jewish refugees moved to Israel, where in relatively short order they were out of any temporary refugee camps and absorbed as regular citizens of the state.  That the Arabs have sacrificed generations of their own people to maintain their inflexible hatred of Israel is all one needs to know about why there has been no resolution of the conflict despite serious efforts over the years to accomplish this.

Muravchik, who was once a leftist himself, spends a fair amount of time in the book documenting the impact of Edward Said , who with his disciples has mentored the current U.S. president, Barack Obama.  Said, despite his faked personal history, has had enormous impact introducing moral relativism to studies of the regions, declaring that the West cannot understand “the Orient” and has no right to judge the regimes, the religions, the people.  What the West calls a terrorist group is instead viewed as a resistance fighting for freedom.  The combination of mosque and state is what those in the region know and prefer, not Western parliamentary systems.  Israel is not a beacon with much to offer those in the region, but an imperialist creation and a predator.  Muravchik outlines how in Israel itself, a part of the population is at war with Zionism and is in fact in league with Israel’s external enemies, assisting viperish non-governmental organizations (often funded by European nations) and bigoted journalists.  An increasing number of left-wing Jews in the United States behave as if Israel is an embarrassment, claiming that Israel’s behavior is “not in its name” and calling for an end to the “racist, apartheid“ state.

At one time, the United Nations consisted primarily of democracies who had fought the Axis powers.  With the decolonization of Africa and Asia after the war, dozens of new nations, since dubbed “the Third World,” became the dominant block at the U.N., particularly in the General Assembly and other international organizations.  These new nations included many Arab and Islamic countries, and their power in numbers shifted these organizations into full-blown assault forces directed at Israel.  Three quarters of all U.N. General Assembly resolutions that are directed at a single country are rebukes of Israel.  It is fairly obvious that the international community considers Israel the worst country in the world (or at least the closest thing to a piñata for the purposes of diplomatic assault) and has ignored the human rights disasters at play in Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and dozens of other easy targets, since there is no real interest in fairness, and Israel is always held to a different standard.

The Palestinians and their allies have also scored with the terror weapon and the oil weapon.  One nation after another demonstrated that cowardice was the preferred policy for dealing with Palestinian terror groups, rather than risking confrontation with them, and many nations thought they could buy peace and security by becoming harsh critics of Israel and allies of the Palestinians.  In countries with large populations of Arab or Muslim immigrants, taking on Israel politically, and ignoring violence directed against Israel or threats against Jews, was seen as a safety valve to prevent terrorism and violence directed against such countries’ own citizens.  After the 1973 Yom Kippur War, OPEC, dominated by Arab oil producers, began a more systematic effort to use the threat of cutting off oil deliveries to force changes in policy by oil-importing nations, particularly in Europe.

Muravchik is an honest historian of the conflict, and he documents how Israel contributed to changing the narrative of the conflict.  Some of Israel’s leaders were poor spokespersons for the country.  The invasion of Lebanon in 1982, followed by the attacks carried out by Christian Phalangists in Sabra and Shatila to avenge the assassination of their leader by Palestinians, with Israeli forces seemingly looking the other way, were particularly damaging.  Many Israelis, not all on the hard left, have opposed the settlement enterprise in Judea and Samaria.  Muravchik makes clear, however, much as Caroline Glick has done in her book The Israel Solution, that to a large extent it is irrelevant what Israel has offered in any peace process to achieve a deal.  In essence, the country has entered a bidding war against itself.

Muravchik has laid out why Israel is now in the dock, facing more critics on more fronts all the time.  But what is most depressing is that there is no clear path back to sanity, nor is there a clear path to the end of the obsession with Israel.  In fact, the momentum is all with those ganging up on the Jewish state.  In the United States, Barack Obama is a president more comfortable with the thinking of the international community than any prior president since Israeli statehood in 1948, and he seems anxious to end America’s isolation on this issue (since it alone has stood in Israel’s corner for several decades) and move American policy so we are more in line with Sweden or Spain with regard to the conflict.

Muravchik calls for vigilance (Obama will be around only another two years and one month), but with America’s rapidly shifting demography, and the takeover of so many parts of the culture by the left – most of the media, the arts, the universities, Hollywood, many churches and synagogues – the struggle for those who stand with Israel will be uphill.

 

 

Categories: Europe, European Union, Gaza, Hamas, International Community, Islamic slaughter, Israel, Leftists, Middle East, Netanyahu, Palestinians, Peace process, Terrorism, Two state solution
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EU Gives Hamas Green Light to Attack Israel

December 22, 2014

EU Gives Hamas Green Light to Attack Israel, Gatestone Institute, Khaled Abu Toameh, December 22, 2014

Although the EU court has said that its controversial decision was “technical” and was not a reassessment of Hamas’s classification as a terrorist group, leaders of the Islamist movement believe that the move will eventually earn them legitimacy in the international arena.

The EU court’s decision represents a “severe blow to the Palestinian Authority and Egypt,” according to Palestinian political analyst Raed Abu Dayer.

Any victory for Hamas, albeit a small and symbolic one, is a victory for the Islamic State, Al-Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, the Muslim Brotherhood and other fundamentalist groups, and causes tremendous damage to those Muslims who are opposed to radical Islam.

Hours before the EU court’s decision was made public, Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar announced that his movement would never recognize Israel, and that Hamas seeks to overthrow the Palestinian Authority and seize control of the West Bank.

The EU court’s decision also coincided with a rapprochement between Hamas and Iran. Now, the Iranians and other countries, such as Turkey and Qatar, are likely to interpret the EU court’s decision as a green light to resume financial and military aid, including rockets and missiles, to Hamas — not only to Gaza but to the West Bank as well — to support those Palestinians whose aim it is to eliminate Israel.

Less than 48 hours after a top European Union court ruled that Hamas should be removed from the bloc’s list of terrorist groups, supporters of the Palestinian Islamist movement responded by firing a rocket at Israel. The attack, which did not cause any casualties or damage, did not come as a surprise.

Buoyed by the EU court’s ruling, Hamas leaders and spokesmen see it as a “political and legal achievement” and a “big victory” for the “armed struggle” against Israel.

Musa Abu Marzouk, a top Hamas leader, issued a statement thanking the EU court for its decision. He hailed the decision to remove his movement from the terrorist list as a “victory for all those who support the Palestinian right to resistance.”

When Hamas leaders talk about “resistance,” they are referring to terrorist attacks, such as the launching of rockets and suicide bombings against Israel. In other words, Hamas has interpreted the court’s decision as a green light to carry out fresh attacks as part of its ambition to destroy Israel.

The rocket that was fired from the Gaza Strip at Israel only days after the court decision is not likely to be the last.

Although the EU court has said that its controversial decision was “technical” and was not a reassessment of Hamas’s classification as a terrorist group, leaders of the Islamist movement believe that the move will eventually earn them legitimacy in the international arena.

Ironically, the EU court’s decision coincided with Hamas celebrations marking the 27thanniversary of its founding. Once again, Hamas used the celebrations to remind everyone that its real goal is to destroy Israel. And, of course, Hamas used the event to display its arsenal of weapons that include various types of rockets and missiles, as well as drones.

845 (1)Thousands of armed Hamas troops showed off their military hardware at a Dec. 14, 2014 parade in Gaza, marking the organization’s 27th anniversary. (Image source: PressTV video screenshot)

Hours before the EU court decision was made public, Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar announced that his movement would never recognize Israel. Zahar also made it clear that Hamas seeks to overthrow the Palestinian Authority [PA] regime and seize control over the West Bank.

The EU court’s decision also coincided with increased efforts to achieve rapprochement between Hamas and Iran. Recently, a senior Hamas leadership delegation visited Tehran as part of efforts to mend fences between the two sides. The main purpose of the visit was to persuade the Iranians to resume military and financial aid to Hamas. The visit, according to senior Hamas officials, appears to have been “successful.”

“There are many signs that our relations are back on the right track,” explained Hamas’s Musa Abu Marzouk. “Hamas and Iran have repaired their relations, which were strong before the Syrian crisis.” Relations between Hamas and Iran deteriorated due to the Islamist movement’s refusal to support the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Now the Iranians are likely to interpret the EU court decision to remove Hamas from the list of terrorist groups as a green light to resume financial and military aid to the movement.

Iran’s leaders recently announced that they intend to dispatch weapons not only to the Gaza Strip, but to the West Bank as well, as part of Tehran’s effort to support those Palestinians who are fighting to eliminate Israel.

Moreover, the EU court’s move will also embolden other countries that provide Hamas with political and financial aid, first and foremost Qatar and Turkey. Oil-rich Gulf countries such as Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Saudi Arabia will now face pressure from many Arabs and Muslims to join Qatar, Turkey and Iran in extending their support to Hamas.

The biggest losers, meanwhile, are Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Over the past few months, the two men have been doing their utmost to undermine Hamas and end its rule over the Gaza Strip.

Abbas has been fighting Hamas by blocking financial and humanitarian aid and arresting its supporters in the West Bank, while Sisi continues to tighten the blockade on the Gaza Strip and destroy dozens of smuggling tunnels along the border with Egypt.

The EU court’s decision represents a “severe blow to the Palestinian Authority and Egypt,” noted Palestinian political analyst Raed Abu Dayer. “As far is Abbas is concerned, the decision grants Hamas political legitimacy and challenges his claim to be the sole legitimate leader [of the Palestinians]. With regards to Egypt, the European court decision calls into question rulings by Egyptian courts that Hamas is a terrorist organization.”

Even if the EU court decision is reversed in the future, there’s no doubt that it has already caused tremendous damage, especially to those Muslims who are opposed to radical Islam.

Any victory for Hamas, albeit a small and symbolic one, is a victory for the Islamic State, Al-Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, the Muslim Brotherhood and other fundamentalist groups around the world.

The decision has left many Arabs and Muslims with the impression that Hamas, after all, is not a terrorist organization, especially if non-Muslims in Europe say so through one of their top courts. Even worse, the decision poses a real and immediate threat to Israel, as evident from the latest rocket attack.

If the Europeans have reached the conclusion that Hamas is not a terrorist organization, then why don’t their governments openly invite tens of thousands of Hamas members and supporters to move to London, Paris and Rome? And they should not forget to ask the Hamas members to bring along with them their arsenal of weapons.

Categories: Abbas, Egypt, European Union, Foreign policy, Gaza, Hamas, International Community, Iran, Islam, Islamic slaughter, Islamic State, Israel, Jerusalem, Middle East, Muslim Brotherhood, Palestinians, Peace process, Qatar, Sisi, Turkey, Two state solution, West Bank
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The Palestinians’ UN Charade Collapses

December 19, 2014

The Palestinians’ UN Charade Collapses, Commentary Magazine, , December 19, 2014

[T]he endless quarrels between Obama and Netanyahu over the peace process are so pointless. No matter how much Obama tilts the diplomatic playing field in the Palestinians’ direction or how often he and his supporters prattle on about time running out for Israel, Abbas has no intention of signing a peace agreement. The negotiations as well as their maneuverings at the UN and elsewhere are nothing but a charade for the PA and nothing Netanyahu could do, including offering dangerous concessions, would change that. The sooner Western leaders stop playing along with their game, the better it will be for the Palestinian people who continue to be exploited by their leaders.

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In the end, there wasn’t much suspense about the Obama administration’s decision whether to support a United Nations Security Council resolution endorsing a Palestinian state. After weeks of pointless negotiations over proposed texts, including a compromise endorsed by the French and other European nations, the wording of the proposal that the Palestinians persuaded Arab nations to put forward was so outrageous that even President Obama couldn’t even think about letting it pass because it would undermine his own policies. And the rest of the international community is just as unenthusiastic about it. In a very real sense this episode is the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict in a nutshell: the world wants to do something for the Palestinians but their leaders are more interested in pointless shows than in actually negotiating peace or doing something to improve the lives of their people.

The resolution that was presented to the Security Council was so extreme that Jordan, the sole Arab nation that is currently a member, didn’t want anything to do with it. But, after intense lobbying by the Palestinian Authority representative, the rest of the Arab nations prevailed upon Jordan and they put it forward where it will almost certainly languish indefinitely without a vote since its fate is preordained.

The terms it put forward were of Israeli surrender and nothing more. The Jewish state would be given one year to withdraw from all of the territory it won in a defensive war of survival in 1967 where a Palestinian state would be created. That state would not be demilitarized nor would there be any guarantees of security for Israel which would not be granted mutual recognition as the nation state of the Jewish people, a clear sign that the Palestinians are not ready to give up their century-long war against Zionism even inside the pre-1967 lines.

This is a diktat, not a peace proposal, since there would be nothing for Israel to negotiate about during the 12-month period of preparation. Of course, even if the Palestinians had accepted the slightly more reasonable terms proposed by the French, that would have also been true. But that measure would have at least given the appearance of a mutual cessation of hostilities and an acceptance of the principle of coexistence. But even those concessions, let alone a renunciation of the “right of return,” was not possible for a PA that is rightly fearful of being supplanted by Hamas. So long as Palestinian nationalism remains wedded to rejection of a Jewish state, no matter where its borders might be drawn, no one should expect the PA to end the conflict or actually make peace.

Though many of us have been understandably focused on the question of how far President Obama might go to vent his spleen at Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his government, that petty drama is, as it has always been, a sideshow distraction from the real problem at the core of the Middle East peace process: Palestinian rejectionism.

Though the administration has tirelessly praised PA leader Mahmoud Abbas as a champion of peace in order to encourage him to live up to that reputation, he had other priorities. Rather than negotiate in good faith with the Israelis, Abbas blew up the talks last year by signing a unity pact with Hamas that he never had any intention of keeping. The purpose of that stunt, like the current UN drama, isn’t to make a Palestinian state more likely or even to increase Abbas’s leverage in the talks. Rather, it is merely a delaying tactic, and a gimmick intended to waste time, avoid negotiations, and to deflect any pressure on the PA to either sign an agreement with Israel or to turn it down.

That’s not just because the Palestinians wrongly believe that time is on their side in the conflict, a dubious assumption that some on the Israeli left also believe. The reason for these tactics is that Abbas is as incapable of making peace as he is of making war.

This is not just another case of the Palestinians “never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity,” in Abba Eban’s immortal and quite accurate summary of their actions over the years. It’s that they are so wedded to unrealistic expectations about Israel’s decline that it would be inconceivable for them to take advantage of any opening to peace. That is why they turned down Israeli offers of statehood, including control of Gaza, almost all of the West Bank, and a share of Jerusalem, three times and refused to deal seriously with a fourth such negotiation with Netanyahu last year.

And it’s why the endless quarrels between Obama and Netanyahu over the peace process are so pointless. No matter how much Obama tilts the diplomatic playing field in the Palestinians’ direction or how often he and his supporters prattle on about time running out for Israel, Abbas has no intention of signing a peace agreement. The negotiations as well as their maneuverings at the UN and elsewhere are nothing but a charade for the PA and nothing Netanyahu could do, including offering dangerous concessions, would change that. The sooner Western leaders stop playing along with their game, the better it will be for the Palestinian people who continue to be exploited by their leaders.

Categories: Abbas, Fatah, Foreign policy, Hamas, International Community, Israel, Kerry, Netanyahu, Obama, Palestinians, Peace process, Settlements, Terrorism, Two state solution, United Nations, West Bank
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