H/t Freedom is just another word
Posted tagged ‘Middle East’
Cartoon of the day
June 23, 2015The Iran scam worsens — Part III, Human rights and support for terrorism
June 22, 2015The Iran scam worsens — Part III, Human rights and support for terrorism, Dan Miller’s Blog, June 22, 2015
(The views expressed in this post are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)
It is likely that the P5+1 nuke “deal” with Iran will be approved soon. Military and other nuke sites which Iran has not “disclosed” will not be inspected. Nor will Iran’s nuke ties with North Korea — which P5+1 member China seems to be helping, Iran’s massive support for terrorism and abysmal human rights record be considered because they are also deemed unnecessary for “deal” approval. Sanctions against Iran are moribund and will not be revived regardless of whether there is a “deal.” However, a bronze bust of Obama may soon be displayed prominently in Supreme Leader Khamenei’s office and one of Khamenei may soon be displayed proudly in Dear Leader Obama’s office.
Iranian support for terrorism
According to the U.S. State Department, The Islamic Republic of Iran continued its sponsorship of terrorism during 2014. The linked article observes,
Iran has increased its efforts to finance and carry out terrorist activities across the world and remains a top nuclear proliferation threat, according to a new State Department assessment. [Emphasis added.]
Iran is funding and arming leading terrorist groups in the Middle East and elsewhere, according to the State Department’s 2014 Country Reports on Terrorism, which thoroughly documents how Tehran continues to act as a leading sponsor terror groups that pose a direct threat to the United States.
The report comes as Western powers work to finalize a nuclear deal with Iran ahead of a self-imposed June 30 deadline, though it is unclear whether the new findings will come up in negotiations.
It seems clear that the new findings will not be considered.
Among many other terrorist organizations, Iran supports the Taliban.
Afghan and Western officials say Tehran has quietly increased its supply of weapons, ammunition and funding to the Taliban, and is now recruiting and training their fighters, posing a new threat to Afghanistan’s fragile security.
Iran’s strategy in backing the Taliban is twofold, these officials say: countering U.S. influence in the region and providing a counterweight to Islamic State’s move into the Taliban’s territory in Afghanistan. [Emphasis added.]
According to James Clapper, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, the intelligence community considers Iran to be the “foremost state sponsor of terrorism.”
The assessment came after criticism from the Senate that the information was omitted in a global threat assessment submitted to Congress [in February of this year.] Initially, Iran and Hezbollah were not included as terror threats in the intelligence community’s report to the Senate in February. [Emphasis added.]
Might the Obama administration have been trying to ignore Iran’s continuing support for terrorist activities because of its fixation on getting a “deal” with Iran in the ongoing P5+1 “negotiations?” Probably, but that was then. Now, it is apparently not a problem to report on Iran’s terrorist activities because they are deemed unworthy of consideration by the P5+1 negotiators. It’s terrible, but so what?
Iran is the world’s biggest sponsor of terrorism. Its tentacles have a hold on Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and the Gaza Strip. Its terrorist operations know no border and its proxies partake in mass killings and war crimes. But as it has been demonstrated time and time again, the West appears unperturbed by all that. It views Iran as a potentially constructive state actor, which, as long as it gets its way, could serve to stabilize the region. [Emphasis added.]
Iran could, of course, “stabilize” the region with its own military and its terror proxies in much the same way that Hitler tried to “stabilize” Europe — by gaining military control and forcing his ideology on subjugated residents. At first, there was some resistance but that was shown to be useless as Britain under Chamberlain gave Hitler Czechoslovakia. Eventually, Britain and later her ally, the United States, became sufficiently upset to intervene militarily.
As noted in an article at Asia Times on Line, the “free world” is unwilling to confront Iranian hegemony:
For differing reasons, the powers of the world have elected to legitimize Iran’s dominant position, hoping to delay but not deter its eventual acquisition of nuclear weapons. Except for Israel and the Sunni Arab states, the world has no desire to confront Iran. Short of an American military strike, which is unthinkable for this administration, there may be little that Washington can do to influence the course of events. Its influence has fallen catastrophically in consequence of a chain of policy.
. . . .
President Obama is not British prime minister Neville Chamberlain selling out to Hitler at Munich in 1938: rather, he is Lord Halifax, that is, Halifax if he had been prime minister in 1938. Unlike the unfortunate Chamberlain, who hoped to buy time for Britain to build warplanes, Halifax liked Hitler, as Obama and his camarilla admire Iran. [Emphasis added.]
The bountiful windfall soon to be given to Iran if the P5+1 “deal” is approved, via a “signing bonus” and other Sanctions relief, will help Iran’s terror sponsorship.
[S]hould the “treaty” with Iran be consummated, this sponsor of global terrorism will receive at least $100 billion in sanctions relief. Not only will this money be used for Assad, but it will bankroll Hezbollah and Hamas with a new generation of rockets and weapons.
For Tehran, money buys weapons, and weapons buy power and influence. President Obama is counting on an accommodative Iran that receives foreign assistance. But is there any reason to embrace this hypothesis? And even if someone does, at what point can the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), or any other relevant body, determine the turnabout in Iran’s nuclear program? How do we know when a genuine peace has arrived? [Emphasis added.]
Iranian leaders have made it clear that dreams of a Persian kingdom dance like sugar plums in their imagination. For that to happen, the money pump cannot run dry. There is a need to support their Houthi surrogates in Yemen; resupply Hamas rockets that were destroyed in the last war with Israel; continue to add to the Hezbollah war machine that is poised to attack Israel; and keep Assad afloat, the mechanism by which control of Lebanon is retained. [Emphasis added.]
Iran’s abysmal human rights record is getting worse
According to Iranian Human Rights,
[T]he Iranian regime has executed a prisoner every two hours this month.
“So far in 2015, more than 560 have been executed, and we are just in the first half of the year… What we are witnessing today is not so much different from what ISIS is doing. The difference is that the Iranian authorities do it in a more controlled manner, and represent a country which is a full member of the international community with good diplomatic relations with the West.” — Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, spokesman for Iran Human Rights. [Emphasis added.]
Now the West, with the possibility of a nuclear deal, stands to increase Iran’s diplomatic standing.
According to officials of the Islamic Republic of Iran,
Iran has “the best human rights record” in the Muslim world;[11] that it is not obliged to follow “the West’s interpretation” of human rights;[12] and that the Islamic Republic is a victim of “biased propaganda of enemies” which is “part of a greater plan against the world of Islam“.[13] According to Iranian officials, those who human rights activists say are peaceful political activists being denied due process rights are actually guilty of offenses against the national security of the country,[14] and those protesters claiming Ahmadinejad stole the 2009 election are actually part of a foreign-backed plot to topple Iran’s leaders.[15] [Emphasis added.]
Conclusions
Iran’s abysmal and already worsening records of human rights violations and support for terrorism will likely get even worse as it gets (or gets to keep) the bomb, along with a reward of massive further sanctions relief. None of that is deemed worthy of consideration by the P5+1 “negotiators,” lest Iran decline to sign a deal or lest its feelings be hurt — as they would be were IAEA inspections of “undisclosed” sites be demanded or if any Iranian demands were not met.
Iran and North Korea share not only nuclear weaponization technology; they also share a common contempt for human rights. Yet the North Korea – Iran nuclear nexus (denied by Iran) appears to be of no concern to the P5+1 “negotiators.”
Obama long ago “opened his heart” to the Muslim world.
“To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward based on mutual interest and mutual respect,” Obama declared in his first inaugural address. The underlying assumption was that America’s previous relations with Muslims were characterized by dissention and contempt. More significant, though, was the president’s use of the term “Muslim world,” a rough translation of the Arabic ummah. A concept developed by classical Islam, ummah refers to a community of believers that transcends borders, cultures, and nationalities. Obama not only believed that such a community existed but that he could address and accommodate it.
The novelty of this approach was surpassed only by Obama’s claim that he, personally, represented the bridge between this Muslim world and the West.
ALL of My policies are the best ever
Obama does deserve some credit: His foreign policies are the most foreign in U.S. history to the security of the United States and of what’s left of the free world. Much the same is true of His domestic policies.
Islamic Hate for the Christian Cross
June 22, 2015Islamic Hate for the Christian Cross, Front Page Magazine, Raymond Ibrahim, June 22, 2015 (Originally published by PJ Media.)
(Apparently Obama, who appears to favor Islam over all other religions, hopes that when The Islamic Republic of Iran gets or gets to keep the bomb and enjoys lots of sanctions relief its behavior toward non-Muslims will improve. — DM
Islamic hostility to the cross is an unwavering fact of life—one that crosses continents and centuries; one that is very much indicative of Islam’s innate hostility to Christianity.
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Last May in Italy, a Muslim boy of African origin beat a 12-year-old girl during school because she was wearing a crucifix around her neck. The African schoolboy, who had only started to attend the school approximately three weeks earlier, began to bully the Christian girl—“insulting her and picking on her in other ways all because she was wearing the crucifix”—before he finally “punched the girl violently in the back.”
What is it about the Christian cross that makes some Muslims react this way?
The fact is, Islamic hostility to the cross is an unwavering fact of life—one that crosses continents and centuries; one that is very much indicative of Islam’s innate hostility to Christianity.
Doctrine and History
Because the Christian cross is the quintessential symbol of Christianity—for all denominations, including most forms of otherwise iconoclastic Protestantism—it has been a despised symbol in Islam.
According to the Conditions of Omar—a Medieval text which lays out the many humiliating stipulations conquered Christians must embrace to preserve their lives and which Islamic history attributes to the second “righteous caliph,” Omar al-Khattab—Christians are “Not to display a cross [on churches]… and “Not to produce a cross or [Christian] book in the markets of the Muslims.”
The reason for this animosity is that the cross symbolizes the fundamental disagreement between Christians and Muslims. According to Dr. Sidney Griffith, author of The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque, “The cross and the icons publicly declared those very points of Christian faith which the Koran, in the Muslim view, explicitly denied: that Christ was the Son of God and that he died on the cross.” Thus “the Christian practice of venerating the cross and the icons of Christ and the saints often aroused the disdain of Muslims,” so that there was an ongoing “campaign to erase the public symbols of Christianity, especially the previously ubiquitous sign of the cross.”
Islam’s hostility to the cross, like all of Islam’s hostilities, begins with the Muslim prophet Muhammad. He reportedly “had such a repugnance to the form of the cross that he broke everything brought into his house with its figure upon it.” He once ordered someone wearing a cross to “take off that piece of idolatry” and claimed that at the end times Jesus himself would make it a point to “break the cross”—an assertion the Islamic State regularly makes.
Islamic history following Muhammad is riddled with anecdotes of Muslims cursing and breaking crosses. Prior to the Battle of Yarmuk in 636, which pitted the earliest invading Muslim armies against the Byzantine Empire, Khalid bin al-Walid, the savage “Sword of Allah,” told the Christians that if they wanted peace they must “break the cross” and embrace Islam, or pay jizya and live in subjugation—just as his Islamic State successors are doing today in direct emulation. The Byzantines opted for war.
In Egypt, Saladin (d. 1193)—regularly touted in the West for his “magnanimity”—ordered “the removal of every cross from atop the dome of every church in the provinces of Egypt,” in the words of The History of the Patriarchate of the Egyptian Church.
Europe: Growing Violence against the Cross
Centuries later, not much has changed concerning Islam’s position towards the cross, though much has changed in Western perceptions. In other words, an African boy punching a Christian girl in Italy for her crucifix is part of a long continuum of Islamic hostility for the cross. Perhaps he learned this hatred in mosque—the same European mosques where Islamic State representatives call Muslims to jihad?
After all, earlier this year in Italy, another crucifix was destroyed in close proximity to a populated mosque. The municipality’s Councilor, Giuseppe Berlin, did not mince words concerning the identity of the culprit(s):
Before we put a show of unity with Muslims, let’s have them begin by respecting our civilization and our culture. We shouldn’t minimize the importance of certain signals; we must wake up now or our children will suffer the consequences of this dangerous and uncontrolled Islamic invasion.
Nor is Italy the only European nation experiencing this phenomenon. In neighboring France, a “young Muslim” committed major acts of vandalism at two churches. Along with twisting a massive bronze cross, he overturned and broke two altars, the candelabras and lecterns, destroyed statues, tore down a tabernacle, smashed in a sacristy door and even broke some stained-glass windows. (Click for images.)
And in Germany, a Turkish man who checked himself into a hospital for treatment went into a sudden frenzy because there were “too many crosses on the wall.” He called the nurse a “bitch” and “fascist” and became physically aggressive.
Of course, other times Europeans willingly capitulate to Islamic hostility for the cross. Real Madrid, a professional football (soccer) team in Spain reportedly stripped the traditional Christian cross from its club crest as part of a deal with the National Bank of Abu Dhabi—“so as not to offend Muslim sensibilities in the United Arab Emirates.” And in the United Kingdom, offensive crucifixes are being removed from prisons in order not to offend Muslim inmates (who are further provided with food baths for Islamic rituals).
Muslim World: Christians Killed for the Cross
If this is how some Muslims react to the Christian cross in Europe—where Muslims are aware of their outnumbered, minority status—how do other Muslims react to the cross in the Islamic world, where vastly outnumbered and ostracized Christian “infidels” are easy prey?
The answer is murderous—literally, Christians are being murdered by Muslims provoked at the sight of the cross:
Last year in Egypt, a young Coptic Christian woman named Mary was mauled to death—simply because her cross identified her as a Christian to Muslim Brotherhood rioters. According to an eyewitness who discussed the episode, Mary Sameh George was parking her car by the church to deliver medicine to an elderly woman:
Once they [Brotherhood rioters] saw that she was a Christian [because of the cross hanging on her rearview mirror], they jumped on top of the car, to the point that the vehicle was no longer visible. The roof of the car collapsed in. When they realized that she was starting to die, they pulled her out of the car and started pounding on her and pulling her hair—to the point that portions of her hair and scalp came off. They kept beating her, kicking her, stabbing her with any object or weapon they could find…. Throughout [her ordeal] she tried to protect her face, giving her back to the attackers, till one of them came and stabbed her right in the back, near the heart, finishing her off. Then another came and grabbed her by the hair, shaking her head, and with the other hand slit her throat. Another pulled her pants off, to the point that she was totally naked.
In response, the Coptic Christian Church issued the following statement: “Oh how lucky you are, Mary, you who are beloved of Christ. They tore your body because of the Cross. Yet they offered you the greatest service and gave you a name of honor as one who attained the crown of martyrdom.” The statement also quoted Christ’s warning to believers: “Yes, the time is coming that whoever kills you will think that he offers God service” (John 16:2).
In October 2011, seventeen-year-old Ayman Nabil Labib, a Coptic student, was strangled and beaten to death by his Muslim teacher and some fellow students—simply for refusing to obey the teacher’s orders to remove his cross. Student eyewitnesses present during the assault said that while Ayman was in the classroom he was told to cover up his tattooed wrist cross, which many Copts wear. Not only did he refuse, but he defiantly produced the pectoral cross he wore under his shirt, which prompted the enraged Muslim teacher and students to beat the Christian youth to death.
Before that, an off-duty Muslim police officer on a train from Asyut to Cairo shouted “Allahu Akbar!” and opened fire on six Christians, killing a seventy-one-year-old man and critically wounding the rest. Before opening fire he had checked for passengers with the traditional Coptic cross tattooed on their wrists. (Days ago, another Coptic woman was “shot dead by an Egyptian police officer. Although officially an “accident,” the Muslim officer is notorious for hating Christians.)
In Pakistan, when a Muslim man saw Julie Aftab, a Christian woman, wearing a cross around her neck,
The man became abusive, shouting at her that she was living in the gutter and would go to hell for shunning Islam. He left and returned half an hour later, clutching a bottle of battery acid which he savagely chucked over her head. As she ran screaming for the door a second man grabbed her by the hair and forced more of the liquid down her throat, searing her esophagus. Teeth fell from her mouth as she desperately called for help, stumbling down the street. A woman heard her cries and took her to her home, pouring water over her head and taking her to hospital. At first the doctors refused to treat her, because she was a Christian. ‘They all turned against me . . . even the people who took me to the hospital. They told the doctor they were going to set the hospital on fire if they treated me’. . . . 67 percent of her esophagus was burned and she was missing an eye and both eyelids. What remained of her teeth could be seen through a gaping hole where her cheek had been. The doctors predicted she would die any day. Despite the odds she pulled through.
All this because she was wearing a cross.
Even in Muslim nations deemed “moderate,” violence provoked by the cross is not uncommon. In 2012, a 12-year-old boy in Turkey who converted to Christianity and decided to profess his new faith by wearing a silver cross necklace in class was spit on and beat regularly by Muslim classmates and teachers.
In the Maldives, October 2010, authorities had to rescue Geethamma George, a Christian teacher from India, after Muslim “parents threatened to tie and drag her off of the island” for “preaching Christianity.” Her crime was simply to draw a compass in class as part of a geography lesson. The compass was mistaken for the Christian cross.
Christians ‘Killed’ Again for the Cross
If some Muslims kill the wearers of the cross, so do they disturb the slumber of those already dead for having the cross on their tombstones. A few of the many examples follow:
- Libya, March 2012: A video of a Muslim mob attacking a commonwealth cemetery near Benghazi appeared on the internet. As the Muslims kicked down and destroyed headstones with crosses on them, the man videotaping them urged them to “Break the cross of the dogs!” while he and others cried “Allahu Akbar!” Towards the end of the video, the mob congregated around the huge Cross of Sacrifice, the cemetery’s cenotaph monument, and started to hammer at it, to more cries of “Allahu Akbar.”Other Christian cemeteries in post-“Arab Spring” Libya have suffered similarly.
- France, April 2015: Christian crosses and gravestones in a cemetery weredamaged and desecrated by a Muslim. After being apprehended, he was described as follows: “The man repeats Muslim prayers over and over, he drools and cannot be communicated with: his condition has been declared incompatible with preliminary detention.” He was hospitalized as “mentally unbalanced.” (See his handiwork.)
- Malaysia, February 2014: AChristian cemetery was attacked and desecrated in the middle of the night by unknown persons in the Muslim majority nation. Several crosses were destroyed, including by the use of “a heavy tool to do the damage.”
- Germany, June 2014: After Muslims were granted their own section at a cemetery in Seligenstadt, and after being allowed to conduct distinctly Islamic ceremonies, these same Muslims begandemanding that Christian symbols and crosses in the cemetery be removed or covered up during Islamic funerals.
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One can go on and on with more recent examples of Islam’s hostility to the cross. Last April in “moderate” Malaysia, a Muslim mob rioted against a small Protestant church due to the visible cross atop the building of worship. It was quickly removed.
And in Pakistan, a nation where the mere accusation of offending Islam get Christians burned alive—a Muslim shopkeeper is allowed to sell shoes which depict the Christian cross on their sole: “In Pakistani culture, showing the sole of one’s shoe or foot is offensive because placing anything on the ground is considered to be an insult to the object. Therefore, something on the sole of a shoe is going to be constantly insulted as the person walks.”
From an African School Boy in Italy to ‘ISIS’
In light of the above, it should come as no surprise that the Islamic State—“ISIS”—also exhibits violence to the Christian cross. In its communiques to the West, hostile reference to the cross is often made: “We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women, by the permission of Allah…. [We will cast] fear into the hearts of the cross worshippers….”
After carving the heads of Coptic Christians off in Libya, the lead executioner waved his dagger at the camera and said, “Oh people, recently you have seen us on the hills of as-Sham and Dabiq’s plain [Syrian regions], chopping off the heads that have been carrying the cross for a long time. And today, we are on the south of Rome, on the land of Islam, Libya, sending another message.” He concluded by declaring: “We will fight you [Christians/Westerners] until Christ descends, breaks the cross and kills the pig” (all eschatological actions ascribed to the Muslim “Christ,” Isa).
Moreover, the Islamic State has committed countless atrocities against and because of the cross: it made and disseminated a video showing its members smashing crosses in and atop churches in territories under its sway; it beheaded and stabbed a man with his own crucifix after it exposed him as a Christian; and it published pictures of its members destroying Christian crosses and tombstones in cemeteries under its jurisdiction — and quoted Islamic scriptures justifying its actions.
Careful readers will note the similar parallels here: destroying crosses in churches and cemeteries and even killing Christian “infidels” for wearing them, as documented above, is not limited to “ISIS” but is happening all around the Muslim world, and even in Europe.
In short, Islam’s age-old hatred for the Christian cross—and what it represents—is not a product of the Islamic State, but of Islam.
The Palestinians’ Real Strategy
June 22, 2015The Palestinians’ Real Strategy, The Gatestone Institute, Khaled Abu Toameh, June 22, 2015
- Marzouk’s remarks refute claims by some in the Arab and Western media that Hamas is moving toward pragmatism and moderation, and that it is now willing, for the first time, to recognize Israel’s right to exist. Many in the West often fail to understand Hamas’s true position because they do not follow what Hamas says in Arabic — to its own people. In Arabic, Hamas makes no secret of its call for the destruction of Israel.
- The current strategy of the Palestinian Authority (PA) is to negotiate with the international community, and not with Israel, about achieving peace in the Middle East. The ultimate goal of the PA is to force Israel to its knees. For the PA, rallying the international community and Europe is about punishing and weakening Israel, not making peace with it.
- Their strategy is no longer about a two-state solution so much as it is about inflicting pain and suffering on Israel. It is more about seeking revenge on Israel than living in a state next to it.
- Hamas’s terrorism also helps the PA’s anti-Israel campaign in the international community. Each terrorist attack provides the PA with an opportunity to point out the “urgent” need to force Israel to submit to Palestinian demands as a way of “containing the radicals.”
All signs indicate that the Palestinians are planning to step up their efforts to force Israel to comply with their demands. But as the Palestinians are not united, they are working on two fronts to achieve their goal.
One party, headed by the Palestinian Authority (PA), believes that, with the help of the international community, Israel will be forced to fully withdraw to the pre-1967 lines, including east Jerusalem, and accept the “right of return” for millions of refugees and their descendants to their former homes inside Israel.
The second party, represented by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and several other terror groups, continues to reject any form of compromise, and insists that the only solution lies in the elimination of Israel. Unlike the first party, this one believes that direct or indirect negotiations with the “Zionist enemy” are a waste of time and that terrorism is the only means for the Palestinians to achieve their goal.
The two Palestinian parties, the PA and Hamas, have been at war with each other since 2007, when Hamas seized full control over the Gaza Strip and forced the Palestinian Authority to flee to the West Bank.
But while the two rival parties are fighting each other, they are also working separately to overpower Israel.
On June 19, a Hamas-affiliated group claimed responsibility for the shooting attack that killed Danny Gonen, a 25-year-old man who was visiting the West Bank.
Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other Palestinian groups rushed to “welcome” the killing of the young Israeli man who, by the way, was not a “settler,” but a resident of the Israeli city of Lod, near Ben Gurion Airport.
In separate statements, these terror groups explained that the attack came in the context of Palestinian efforts to “preserve the resistance” against Israel in the West Bank. They said that such attacks were “legitimate means” to achieve Palestinian rights and aspirations.
These groups made it unavoidably clear that their real objective is not to “liberate” the West Bank, but to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. As one of them said, “We will continue to support any resistance action on the land of Palestine until it is liberated, from the (Mediterranean) sea to the (Jordan) river, and cleansed from all Zionist usurpers.”
Hours after the West Bank attack, a senior Hamas leader, Musa Abu Marzouk, repeated that his movement was seeking to replace Israel with an Islamist state: “Hamas wants a state not only in the Gaza Strip, but in all of Palestine; we won’t give up our weapons and will continue to fight in order to liberate our land.”
Marzouk’s remarks refute claims by some Arab and Western media that Hamas has been moving toward pragmatism and moderation, and that it is now willing, for the first time, to recognize Israel’s right to exist. Many in the West often fail to understand Hamas’s true position because they do not follow what Hamas says in Arabic — to its own people. In Arabic, Hamas makes no secret of its call for the destruction of Israel. To Hamas’s credit, this message is often repeated in English and other languages.
While Hamas and its allies work toward destroying Israel through terrorism, the Palestinian Authority seems more determined than ever to step up its worldwide campaign to delegitimize and isolate Israel with the help of various international parties, such as the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
Some senior Palestinian officials like to describe this campaign as a “diplomatic war” against Israel. They argue that this war has thus far proven to be much more “effective” than rockets and suicide bombings. “When we launch rockets at Israel, we don’t get any sympathy,” explained one official. “But everyone in the international community is now supporting our diplomatic efforts. That’s why we believe that what Hamas is doing right now is harmful to Palestinian interests.”
Shortly before the Israeli man was fatally shot in the West Bank, the chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, revealed his plan to rally the world against Israel so that it would be forced to submit to the Palestinian Authority’s demands, above all a complete withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines.
Erekat’s plan calls for working very closely with EU countries and members of the UN Security Council, to increase pressure on Israel to comply with the Palestinian demands. It also calls for recruiting international support for recognition of a Palestinian state and paving the way for it to join various international organizations and conventions.
In his plan, Erekat warns against endorsing any UN Security Council resolution that would include recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, or offer concessions on the “right of return” for refugees. He also repeats the Palestinian Authority’s rejection of the idea of land swaps between the future Palestinian state and Israel. In addition, Erekat emphasizes his opposition to the idea of creating a demilitarized Palestinian state or giving up any part of Jerusalem.
The Palestinian Authority’s current strategy is to negotiate with the international community, and not with Israel, about achieving peace in the Middle East. The PA knows that it is not going to get from Israel all that it is asking for. That is why the Palestinian leaders have chosen to negotiate with France, Britain, Sweden and the US. The Palestinians are hoping that these countries will give them what Israel cannot and is not prepared to offer at the negotiating table.
Even if Israel wanted to give one hundred percent of what it gained in 1967, the reality on he ground does not allow it. Since 1967, both Jews and Arabs have created irreversible “facts in the ground,” such as the construction of tens of thousands of houses for both Arabs and Jews. A full withdrawal would mean that tens of thousands of Jews and Arabs would lose their homes both in the West Bank and in Jerusalem.
The ultimate goal of the Palestinian Authority is, with the help of the international community, to force Israel to its knees. For the PA, rallying the international community and Europe is about punishing and weakening Israel, not making peace with it. The PA wants to see Israel degraded, isolated and turned into a rogue state. It wants to see Israelis brought before the International Criminal Court and expelled from as many international organizations as possible.
From talking to senior Palestinian Authority officials, one is left with the impression that their true goal is to see Israel in a state of surrender and defeat. Their strategy is no longer about a two-state solution so much as it is about inflicting pain and suffering on Israel. It is more about seeking revenge on Israel than living in a state next to it.
In many ways, the PA’s “diplomatic war” on Israel also helps Hamas. By constantly accusing Israel of “war crimes” and “atrocities,” the PA is helping Hamas justify its terror attacks against Israelis. The PA’s anti-Israel campaign also helps in creating sympathy and understanding for Hamas’s terror attacks.
Meanwhile, Hamas’s terrorism also helps the Palestinian Authority’s anti-Israel campaign in the international community. Each terrorist attack provides the PA with an opportunity to point out the “urgent” need to force Israel to submit to Palestinian demands as a way of “containing the radicals.”
This is how Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, although remaining sworn enemies, complement each other’s role against Israel.
And many in the international community seem to be helping these two Palestinian camps in their effort to undermine and destroy Israel.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (r) meets with the Hamas political bureau chief Khaled Mashaal in Qatar, July 20, 2014. (Image source: Handout from the PA President’s Office/Thaer Ghanem)
Terror will not be defeated with reports
June 22, 2015Terror will not be defeated with reports, Israel Hayom, Dr. Gabi Avital, June 22, 2015
(Please see also, US: Iran’s Support for Terror Undiminished. — DM)
Iran is led by rational and calculated religious clerics, whose goals are openly declared and well-defined. The rationality one should expect to find in the State Department has dissipated in a haze of illusions, which are exacting a heavy toll. Meanwhile, only the Islamic State stands to outflank Iran, and that is only under the assumption that these two terrorist entities are on completely divergent paths. To be sure, that is quite the baseless assumption.
Yet those who with one hand sound the alarm over an increase in terror, while with the other help the perpetrators of said terror rule the roost by giving it nuclear weapons, must provide convincing explanations. The United States, with its utter foreign policy failures — from Iraq to Yemen to Syria to Egypt and Iran — is not forthcoming with such explanations.
Where is Michael Moore when you need him? The State Department can see what is happening, but Kerry is on his way to a nuclear deal with the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism. Not much could be worse.
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Understanding history is a tricky proposition. Its lessons are sometimes hidden to us for long periods; often only subsequent generations can achieve the proper historical perspective, after a series of fateful events has unfolded. Even so, within less than 40 years we have witnessed global events that many political scientists correctly predicted.
The time is the late 1970s. All signs point to an oncoming revolution in Iran. However, U.S. President Jimmy Carter (whom some call the worst president ever), is instead consumed with the wording for a peace deal that undermines pre-existing agreements and international accords. Egypt wins the entire pot in a peace deal with Israel. Iran rises in prominence; the Soviet Union bolsters its standing across the globe, until the arrival of Ronald Reagan, who in an effort to defeat the Soviet Union in the ongoing Cold War, announces his Star Wars program.
We know the ending. Almost every single international relations expert points to that declaration as the beginning of the fall of the Soviet Union. In 1989, Reagan concludes two terms in office, and the Soviet Union falls apart.
Terrorism spreads across the globe. The leading sponsors are Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran. An extensive report, examining the dangers of mass terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, is being compiled. The conservative-democratic pendulum in the U.S. swings toward the Democratic candidate, Bill Clinton. The egregious disregard of the report, now collecting dust, brings terrorism to its horrific pinnacle on Sept. 11, 2001. All fingerprints lead back to Saudi Arabia. Everything had already been laid out in the dust-covered Pentagon report. What the democratic Pentagon and State Department cooked up, the Republican George W. Bush was forced to eat.
The State Department has now published its annual report on terrorism. The seeds of this report were planted in the Carter era, when peace at all costs was championed without any understanding of the world in general and the Middle East in particular. Iran is led by rational and calculated religious clerics, whose goals are openly declared and well-defined. The rationality one should expect to find in the State Department has dissipated in a haze of illusions, which are exacting a heavy toll. Meanwhile, only the Islamic State stands to outflank Iran, and that is only under the assumption that these two terrorist entities are on completely divergent paths. To be sure, that is quite the baseless assumption.
So what does the report say? There will be a dramatic 35% rise in global terrorist acts. Iran supports terrorist organizations all over the world and in the Middle East especially; it backs the Shiite fighters in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon and in Syria, with arms, training, money and intelligence. And we haven’t even mentioned Syria yet, or Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Yet those who with one hand sound the alarm over an increase in terror, while with the other help the perpetrators of said terror rule the roost by giving it nuclear weapons, must provide convincing explanations. The United States, with its utter foreign policy failures — from Iraq to Yemen to Syria to Egypt and Iran — is not forthcoming with such explanations. Russia is back on the Cold War track; the Islamic State group is emboldened by the conduct of the U.S. president and his team at the State Department; Iran is envisioning a nuclear bomb in its arsenal; and Saudi Arabia is looking on nervously as the carpet of reciprocity is being pulled out from under it and its oil fields.
Only a week before Secretary of State John Kerry, one of the pillars of this dangerous U.S. foreign policy, takes off to pursue the deal with Iran, Tina Kaidanow, the State Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism, tells us: “We continue to be very, very concerned about [the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] activity as well as proxies that act on behalf of Iran.”
What then, is Kerry really unaware of the findings in the 388-page report? And does he not understand that the deal with Iran, the seeds for which were planted in the Carter era and now being cultivated by Obama, is terrorism itself, and that there is no need for any report to merely sit and collect dust again in the State Department cellar?
Where is Michael Moore when you need him? The State Department can see what is happening, but Kerry is on his way to a nuclear deal with the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism. Not much could be worse.
US: Iran’s Support for Terror Undiminished
June 22, 2015US: Iran’s Support for Terror Undiminished, The Clarion Project, June 21, 2015
The Iranian volunteer Basij militia (Photo: © Reuters)
In an interview with The Atlantic, U.S. President Barack Obamas admitted that some of the money freed up the deal’s proposed sanction relief may up going towards terrorism, although he argued that Iranian government would have to make good on their commitments to improve the country’s economy.
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Despite the fact that Iran’s global terror activities were “undiminished” between 2013 and 2014, the U.S. State Department is still entirely committed to pursuing a nuclear deal with Iran.
“We think it’s essential that we pursue those negotiations,” said Tina Kaidanow, the State Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism, as quoted in The Wall Street Journal. “None of that implies that we would be, again, in any way taking our eye off the ball with respect to what Iran is doing as a supporter of terrorism.”
Iran’s support for terror was documented in the State Dept.’s annual report on global terrorism, which was released Friday. The report says “Iran’s state sponsorship of terrorism worldwide remained undiminished,” which makes the State Dept. “very, very concerned,” according to Kaidanow.
While the June 30 deadline for the deal is now fewer than 10 days away, the release of the report shows, “Iran continued to sponsor terrorist groups around the world,” according to Kaidanow.
The report specifically mentions Iran’s continued support for the Shiite terror organization Hezbollah in Lebanon as well as those fighting with embattled Syrian President Bashaar al-Assad.
The Clarion Project reported last week that Iran is supporting more than 100 terrorist organizations in Syria and Iraq alone.
In an interview with The Atlantic, U.S. President Barack Obamas admitted that some of the money freed up the deal’s proposed sanction relief may up going towards terrorism, although he argued that Iranian government would have to make good on their commitments to improve the country’s economy.
“I don’t think …anybody in this administration said that no money will go to the military as a consequence of sanctions relief,” Obama said. “The question is, if Iran has $150 billion parked outside the country, does the IRGC automatically get $150 billion? Does that $150 billion then translate by orders of magnitude into their capacity to project power throughout the region? And that is what we contest …”
The report also showed that between 2013 and 2014, there was a significant rise in global terror attacks, causing an increase in over 80 percent of violent deaths from the previous year (which itself had seen a 43 percent increase from the year before). In addition, the report showed:
- There was an average of 1,122 attacks per month
- Kidnappings increased by one-third, with more than with 9,400 people taken hostage
- The number of global attacks rose by 35 percent
- 32,727 people were killed worldwide (versus 17,800 in 2013)
- 34,700 people were injured in attacks in close to 95 countries
- In Iraq alone, 10,000 people died in 3,360 attacks representing close to a third of all people killed in terror attacks worldwide.
The Myth of Muslim Radicalization
June 18, 2015The Myth of Muslim Radicalization, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, June 18, 2015
Usaama Rahim
Mainstreaming extremism is . . . Obama’s policy. It’s the logic behind nearly every Western diplomatic move in the Middle East from the Israel-PLO peace process to the Brotherhood’s Arab Spring. And these disasters only created more Islamic terrorism.
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After some of its quarter of a million Muslims headed to join ISIS, Quebec decided the answer was a $2 million anti-radicalization center headed by a specialist in cultural sensitivity. But if you’re about to be beheaded by a masked ISIS Jihadist, a specialist in cultural sensitivity isn’t going to help you much.
Western governments nevertheless keep rolling out their culturally sensitive approaches to fighting ISIS.
The key element in Obama’s strategy for fighting ISIS isn’t the F-15E Strike Eagle, it’s a Twitter account run by a Muslim Brotherhood sympathizer which claims to “Counter Violent Extremism” by presenting moderate Islamists like Al Qaeda as positive role models for the Islamic State’s social media supporters.
So far 75% of planes flown on combat missions against ISIS return without engaging the enemy, but the culturally sensitive State Department Twitter account has racked up over 5,000 tweets and zero kills.
Cultural sensitivity hasn’t exactly set Iraq on fire in fighting ISIS and deradicalization programs here start from the false premise that there is a wide gap between a moderate and extremist Islam. Smiling news anchors daily recite new stories about a teenager from Kentucky, Boston or Manchester getting “radicalized” and joining ISIS to the bafflement of his parents, mosque and community.
And who is to blame for all this mysterious radicalization? It’s not the parents. It certainly can’t be the moderate local mosque with its stock of Jihadist CDs and DVDs being dispensed from under the table.
The attorney for the family of Usaama Rahim, the Muslim terrorist who plotted to behead Pamela Geller, claims that his radicalization came as a “complete shock” to them.
It must have come as a truly great shock to his brother Imam Ibrahim Rahim who claimed that his brother was shot in the back and that the Garland cartoon attack had been staged by the government.
It must have come as an even bigger shock to Imam Abdullah Faaruuq, the Imam linked to Usaama Rahim and his fellow terrorist conspirators, as well as the Tsarnaev brothers, who had urged Muslims to “grab onto the gun and the sword.”
The culturally insensitive truth about Islamic ‘radicalization’ is that it is incremental.
There is no peaceful Islam. Instead of two sharply divided groups, peaceful Islam and extremist Islam, there is a spectrum of acceptable terrorism.
Muslim institutions have different places on that spectrum depending on their allegiances and tactics, but the process of radicalization is rarely a sharp break from the past for any except converts to Islam.
The latest tragic victim of radicalization is Munther Omar Saleh; a Muslim man living in New York City who allegedly plotted to use a Tsarnaev-style pressure cooker bomb in a major landmark such as the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building. Saleh claimed to be following orders from ISIS.
Media coverage of the Saleh arrest drags out the old clichés about how unexpected this sudden radicalization was, but what appears to be his father’s social media account shows support for Hamas.
Likewise one of Usaama Rahim’s fellow mosque attendees said that Rahim and another conspirator had initially followed the “teachings of the Muslim Brotherhood” but that he had been forced to cut ties with them when they moved past the Brotherhood and became “extreme”.
Despite the media’s insistence on describing the Muslim Brotherhood as a moderate organization, it has multiple terrorist arms, including Hamas, and its views on non-Muslims run the gamut from the violent to the genocidal.
A year after Obama’s Cairo speech and his outreach to the Muslim Brotherhood, its Supreme Guide announced that the United States will soon be destroyed, urged violent terrorist attacks against the United States and “raising a jihadi generation that pursues death just as the enemies pursue life.”
Despite this, Obama continued backing the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power across the region.
There are distinctions between the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda, but the latter is a splinter group of the former. Al Qaeda’s current leader came out of the Muslim Brotherhood. A move from one to the other is a minor transition between two groups that have far more in common than their differences.
And since the Brotherhood controls much of the Islamic infrastructure in the United States, the idea that Munther Omar Saleh or Usaama Rahim became radicalized because they went from a Jihadist group that takes the long view in the struggle against the infidel, putting political structures into place to make a violent struggle tactically feasible, to a Jihadist group that focuses more on short term violence, is silly.
Radicalization isn’t transformational; it’s incremental.
It’s the Pakistani kid down the block deciding that instead of joining the Muslim Students Association and then CAIR to build Islamist political structures in America, he should just cut to the chase and kill a few cops to begin taking over America now.
Radicalization is the moderate Imam who stops putting on an act for PBS and the local politicians and moves to Yemen where he openly recruits terrorists to attack America instead of doing it covertly at his mosque in Virginia.
Radicalization is the teenage Muslim girl who forgets about marrying her Egyptian third cousin and bringing him and his fifty relatives to America and goes to join ISIS as a Caliphate brood mare instead.
It’s not pacifism giving way to violence. Instead it’s an impatient shift from tactical actions meant to eventually make Islam supreme in America over many generations to immediate bloody gratification. ISIS is promising the apocalypse now. No more waiting. No more lying. You can have it tomorrow.
Radicalization does not go from zero to sixty. It speeds up from sixty to seventy-five.
It builds on elements that are already there in the mosque and the household. The term “extremism” implicitly admits that what we are talking about is not a complete transformation, but the logical extension of existing Islamic beliefs.
Omar Saleh seemed cheerful enough about Hamas dropping Kassam rockets on Israeli towns and cities. Would he have supported his son setting off a bomb in the Statue of Liberty? Who knows, but his son was already starting from a family position that Muslim terrorism against non-Muslims was acceptable.
Everything else is the fine print.
When Usaama Rahim followed the way of the Muslim Brotherhood, he was with a moderate group whose spiritual guide, the genocidal Qaradawi was the godfather of cartoon outrage and had endorsed the murderous Iranian fatwa against Salman Rushdie.
The slope that leads from Qaradawi’s cartoon rage to trying to behead Pamela Geller isn’t a slippery one; it’s a vertical waterfall. And this is what radicalization really looks like. It doesn’t mean moderates turning extreme. It means extremists becoming more extreme. And there’s always room for extremists to become more extreme which turns old extremists into moderates while mainstreaming their beliefs.
In the UK, Baroness Warsi, Cameron’s biggest mistake, blamed Muslim radicalization on the government’s refusal to engage with… radicals. Or as she put it, “It is incredibly odd and incredibly worrying that over time more and more individuals, more and more organisations are considered by the government to be beyond the pale and therefore not to be engaged with.”
The reason why the government is refusing to “engage” with these organizations is that they support terrorism in one form or another. Warsi is proposing that the UK fight radicalization by mainstreaming it.
Mainstreaming extremism is also Obama’s policy. It’s the logic behind nearly every Western diplomatic move in the Middle East from the Israel-PLO peace process to the Brotherhood’s Arab Spring. And these disasters only created more Islamic terrorism.
The Muslim teenagers headed to join ISIS did not come out of a vacuum. They came from mosques and families that normalized some degree of Islamic Supremacism and viewed some Muslim terrorists as heroes and role models. It’s time for Western governments to admit that the ISIS Jihadist is more the product of his parents and his teachers than of social media Jihadis on YouTube and Twitter.
Radicalization doesn’t begin with a sheikh on social media. It begins at home. It begins in the mosque. It just ends with ISIS.
The Postcolonial Rot Spreads Beyond Middle East Studies
June 15, 2015The Postcolonial Rot Spreads Beyond Middle East Studies, Front Page Magazine,
Middle East Studies programs, Kramer writes, “came under a take-no-prisoners assault, which rejected the idea of objective standards, disguised the vice of politicization as the virtue of commitment, and replaced proficiency with ideology.” The ideology, of course, comprised the old Marxist narrative of Western colonial and imperial crimes, a Third Worldism that idealizes the dark-skinned, innocent “other” victimized by Western depredations, and the juvenile romance of revolutionary violence.
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In theory, Middle East Studies programs are a good idea. One of the biggest impediments to countering modern jihadism has been the lack of historical knowledge about the region and Islam. But even the attention and urgency that followed the terrorist attacks on 9/11 have not led to such knowledge. The result has been policies pursued both by Republicans and Democrats that are doomed to fail, as the current chaos in the region attests.
Rather than enlightening citizens and policy-makers, Middle Eastern Studies programs have darkened our understanding. As Martin Kramer documented in his important 2002 study Ivory Towers on Sand, most programs have become purveyors not of knowledge but of ideology. Under the influence of literary critic Edward Said’s historically challenged book Orientalism––“a work,” historian Robert Irwin has written, “of malignant charlatanry, in which it is hard to distinguish honest mistakes from willful misrepresentations”––Middle East Studies programs, Kramer writes, “came under a take-no-prisoners assault, which rejected the idea of objective standards, disguised the vice of politicization as the virtue of commitment, and replaced proficiency with ideology.” The ideology, of course, comprised the old Marxist narrative of Western colonial and imperial crimes, a Third Worldism that idealizes the dark-skinned, innocent “other” victimized by Western depredations, and the juvenile romance of revolutionary violence.
Yet Said’s baleful influence has not been limited to Middle East Studies programs, one of which has been created at my campus of the California State University, replete with the problems Kramer catalogues. It has insidiously corrupted much of the humanities and social sciences, operating under the innocuous rubric of “postcolonial” studies, which to the unwary suggests a historical rather than an ideological category. Through General Education courses that serve students across the university, and in departments like English that train primary and secondary school teachers, Saidian postcolonial ideology has been shaping the attitudes and presumed knowledge of Islam and the Middle East far beyond the reach of Middle East Studies programs.
Said’s dubious argument in Orientalism is that the work of Western scholars on the Middle East embodied “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient,” thus creating the intellectual infrastructure for justifying colonialism and imperialism. As such, every European scholar perforce was “a racist, an imperialist, and totally ethnocentric.” For social science and humanities departments committed totally to the multiculturalist melodrama of white racism and oppression of the dark-skinned “other,” Said’s work seemingly provides scholarly bona fides to ideas that are in fact expressive of illiberal grievance politics.
English departments have been particularly vulnerable to Said’s work, for he overlaid his bad history with watered down Foucauldian ideas about the relationship of power to discourse. Thus English professors seduced by the poststructuralist theory ascendant in 1978 when Orientalism was published found in that book a seemingly sophisticated theoretical paradigm that shared both poststructuralism’s disdain for objectivity and truth, and its “hermeneutics of suspicion,” the notion that the apparent meaning of a discourse is a mask for the sinister machinations of power at the expense of the excluded “other.”
More important, postcolonialism is a politically activist theory, bound up as it is in the politics of the Middle East, especially the Arab-Israeli conflict. Now English professors could avoid the legitimate charge that poststructuralism, despite its patina of leftist ideology, was in fact an evasion of politics, a “symbolic politics,” as historian Russell Jacoby put it, “a replacement for, and a diversion from, the gritty politics of the community and the street.” On the contrary, the purveyors of postcolonialism were on the barricades, struggling to liberate Palestinians and other Muslims oppressed by a neo-imperialist America and its puppet Israel. Rather than pampered elitists guaranteed jobs for life, now the professors could fancy themselves freedom fighters and champions of the ex-colonial brown peoples still exploited and oppressed by the capitalist, racist West.
Finally, the dogma of multicultural “diversity” now firmly enshrined in American universities likewise has found Saidian postcolonialism a useful tool for interpreting and teaching literature, one that exposes the Western literary canon’s hidden racism and oppression. Moreover, in a university like Fresno State, half of whose students are minorities, a postcolonial perspective can establish a rapport with minority students who are encouraged to interpret their own experiences through the same lens of unjust exclusion and hurtful distortions of their culture and identity. At the same time white students are schooled in their privilege and guilt, minorities can be comforted by a narrative that privileges them as victims of historical oppression, one masked by the unearned prestige of the classics written by “dead white males.” Now minority students learn that Shakespeare’s Caliban is the true hero the Tempest with whom they should identify, the displaced victim of rapacious colonialists and slavers like Prospero who unjustly define the indigenous peoples as savages and cannibals in order to justify the brutal appropriation of their lands and labor.
Over the thirty years I have taught in the California State University, I have seen this transformation of the English department. Reading lists dominated by contemporary ethnic writers are increasingly displacing the classics of English literature, and even when traditional works are on the list, the books are often taught from the postcolonial perspective. New hires more and more comprise those Ph.D.’s whose specialties lie in ethnic or “world” literature, replacing the Shakespeare scholars and others trained to teach the traditional English and American literary canon. The traditional content of a liberal education––“the best which has been thought and said in the world,” as Matthew Arnold wrote––is disappearing, replaced by multicultural melodramas of Western crime and guilt.
More important for the culture at large, many of these students will go on to earn teaching credentials and staff public schools. They will carry the postcolonial ideology into their own classrooms, influencing yet another generation and reinforcing a received wisdom that will shape their students’ understanding of the important threats to our national security and interests emanating from the Middle East, especially jihadism. And it will encourage ordinary citizens to assent to the demonization of our most valuable regional ally, Israel, currently battling the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement that can more easily gain traction among those who from grade school to university have been exposed to the postcolonial ideology.
The damage done to our foreign policy by Middle East Studies is obvious. The influence of the godfather of such programs, Edward Said, on the social sciences and humanities departments like English is more insidious and subtle. But it is no less dangerous.
Islamic State at Israel’s Gate
June 12, 2015Islamic State at Israel’s Gate, Front Page Magazine,
(According to Israel National News,
Late on Thursday night “color red” rocket sirens were sounded in the southern coastal city of Ashkelon, as well as throughout the Ashkelon Coast regional council.
At least one rocket was identified as having been fired from Gaza, but IDF officials said it is believed the rocket exploded inside Gaza. No rockets were found in Israeli territory.
— DM)
All this is happening while the Obama administration, by the president’s own admission, has no clear strategy to defeat ISIS. At the same time, President Obama’s “strategy” to deal with Iran is to make concession after concession in order to secure any nuclear deal he can, including the possibility of providing Iran with relief from sanctions that were imposed for non-nuclear related reasons such as Iran’s support for terrorist activities
In short, Israel is facing Iran-backed Hamas from the south, Iran-backed Hezbollah from the north, and an expanding Islamic State presence north and south of Israel and within Israel itself. And that is before Iran gets its hands on a nuclear bomb and the Islamic State has enough radioactive material to build its own weapons of mass destruction.
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Jihadists affiliated with the Islamic State (also known as ISIS or ISIL) are carrying on the rocket war against Israeli civilians from where Hamas left off. Following several rocket attacks in the last several weeks for which the Islamic State has taken credit, rockets launched from Gaza Thursday night exploded in the Ashkelon area.
Israel is still holding Hamas responsible for the attacks as the governing authority in Gaza.
“The IDF understands that Hamas wants quiet and is making an effort to prevent the shooting, but the State of Israel still sees Hamas as responsible for what happens in Gaza,” said Sami Turgeman, head of IDF’s Southern Command.
The Israeli military responded with measured attacks on Hamas facilities, while at the same time trying to avoid setting off a wider war at this time. But Israel’s hand is being forced by the Islamic State, which is evidently working assiduously to supplant Hamas as the authoritative Islamic power in Gaza. The Gaza branch calls itself the Sheikh Omar Hadid Brigade. It is cooperating with another ISIS-affiliated group operating in the Sinai Peninsula, which calls itself Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis.
According to a June 8th report by Debkafile, “Islamic State operatives in the Gaza Strip have been helping themselves to Hamas rockets in recent weeks after furtively penetrating the factory teams operating the group’s production and assembly lines… The jihadis then secretly passed the stolen rockets to their squads for launching against Israel.”
On June 7th Debkafile noted in more general terms Hamas’s loss of control in Gaza in the face of Islamic State infiltration: “The terror infrastructure Hamas built over many years in Sinai has been taken over by ISIS, and its control of the Gaza Strip is slipping, as yet more radical and violent organizations eat away at its authority and seize control of the rocket offensive against Israel.”
Thus, even as Hamas remains committed to the destruction of Israel and is trying to re-build its arms stockpiles with Iran’s help, it is engaged simultaneously in its own battles with the Islamic State. Hamas has arrested some ISIS supporters and bulldozed a Sunni mosque believed to have been used by ISIS affiliated jihadists, while Hamas’s own facilities have come under attack by ISIS affiliated jihadists. Hamas also claimed in a message to Israeli authorities, routed through an Egyptian intermediary, that jihadists affiliated with the Islamic State were deliberately trying to spark a renewed war between Israel and Hamas.
The Islamic State is also trying to position itself to challenge Israel from the north. Israeli TV Channel 2 reported last week that the Islamic State is moving forces in the direction of the Golan Heights and the Israeli border.
Moreover, ISIS is developing an increasing presence within Israel itself. Recruits, influenced by ISIS’s slick social media promotions, are attracted to ISIS’s self-declared purer Islamic ideology. Hamas is apparently too “moderate” for these jihadists’ tastes.
“Dozens of Israeli Arabs and Palestinians have travelled to Syria and Iraq to join insurgent groups.” Israel’s Shin Bet domestic intelligence agency said in a statement released last January 4th. Israel had announced that it managed to crack one Islamic State cell on its soil and arrested its alleged members. An Israeli security official described the cell as “just the tip of the iceberg.”
Last July, the Islamic State previewed its intentions in a statement that it issued regarding jihad against Israel:
As for the massacres taking place in Gaza against the Muslim men, women and children, then the Islamic State will do everything within its means to continue striking down every apostate who stands as an obstacle on its paths towards Palestine. It is only [a] matter of time and patience before it (Islamic State) reaches Palestine to fight the barbaric Jews and kill those of them hiding behind the gharqad trees – the trees of the Jews.
Arutz Sheva reported that a spokesperson for the Islamic State, Nidal Nuseiri, urged patience as the Islamic State wanted first to consolidate its control over Arab Muslim lands, but “reaffirmed that conquering ‘Bayt el-Maqdis’ (Jerusalem) and destroying the State of Israel is central to the group’s jihad.” Thanks to President Obama’s dithering, the Islamic State is well on its way to achieving such consolidation in Iraq and Syria, while spreading to Libya.
At least three questions arise from the emergence of ISIS as a direct threat to Israel. Will Israeli military and security forces, either on their own or in concert with Jordan and Egypt, take on ISIS directly, including going after ISIS’s command and control centers with far more firepower than the Obama administration has used thus far?
To what extent will Israel be willing to outsource military operations against ISIS affiliates in Gaza to Hamas, much as it has outsourced some security operations to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank? Major-General Turgeman tried to cast Hamas as the lesser of two evils, since, he claimed, “Israel and Hamas have shared interests, including in the current situation, which is quiet and calm and growth and prosperity.” Hamas “does not want global jihad,” he added. This is a truly incredible assertion coming from an Israeli military leader about a group willing to put its own citizens and their homes in harm’s way in order to launch their own thousands of rockets against Israel. What happened to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s concise description of Hamas and the Islamic State as “branches of the same poisonous tree?” This just further demonstrates how completely insane the Middle East has become.
Finally, how successful will Iran be in exploiting the chaotic situation in Gaza, positioning itself as it has in Iraq as an enemy of ISIS, while further bolstering Hamas to Israel’s detriment?
All this is happening while the Obama administration, by the president’s own admission, has no clear strategy to defeat ISIS. At the same time, President Obama’s “strategy” to deal with Iran is to make concession after concession in order to secure any nuclear deal he can, including the possibility of providing Iran with relief from sanctions that were imposed for non-nuclear related reasons such as Iran’s support for terrorist activities.
In short, Israel is facing Iran-backed Hamas from the south, Iran-backed Hezbollah from the north, and an expanding Islamic State presence north and south of Israel and within Israel itself. And that is before Iran gets its hands on a nuclear bomb and the Islamic State has enough radioactive material to build its own weapons of mass destruction.
General Michael Flynn and Ambassador Robert Joseph on Iran’s Missile Program and a Nuclear Deal
June 11, 2015General Michael Flynn and Ambassador Robert Joseph on Iran’s Missile Program and a Nuclear Deal, Secure Freedom.Org. via You Tube, June 11, 2015
Former DIA Director Lt. General Michael Flynn and Ambassador Robert Joseph discuss their concerns about the exclusion of Iran’s ballistic missile program from the nuclear agreement currently being negotiated with Tehran and their belief that this deal will not stop or slow Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.
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