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John Kerry’s Dangerous Worldview

October 19, 2014

John Kerry’s Dangerous Worldview, Israellycool, Mirabelle, October 19, 2014

(Please watch the Kerry video at the bottom, or at least the part about Israel, “Palestine” and world peace beginning at 11:20. The world is probably not completely insane — yet: Kerry did not blame Israel or the Jews for the Holocaust and World War II. — DM)

Kerry’s scapegoating of Israel has become a dangerous pattern, one that is indicative of a worldview that underlies his behavior and his decisions with respect to the Jewish State.

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The operative question for the US State Department now appears to be, is there anything left that John Kerry won’t blame on the Jews?

Earlier this year, the Secretary of State famously sat before Congress and blamed Israel for the failure of the peace talks that he pushed so hard for, even though, as was subsequently revealed, it was Kerry’s own miscommunications that doomed the talks from the start. Prior to that, he had implied that if a third intifada started, it would be Israel’s doing. Now it seems that, at a State Department event for the festival of Eid al-Adha onThursday, Kerry has blamed Israel for the rise of ISIS.

Kerry’s pronouncement calls to mind this satire piece from PreOccupied Territory, titled “Free Will Is Only For White People,” and “attributed” to Kerry’s former right-hand man and Qatar-stooge Martin Indyk:

Since Arabs, as nonwhites, lack free will, the only ethical method of achieving change is to demand concessions from Israel. A society or individual with genuine volition and sense of right and wrong could be held accountable for translating political grievances into the bombings of cafes and buses, but that is not how we, or our European allies, view the Palestinians. They have no choice but to resort to brutality, since that is their nature.

Satire. Except, it’s not. Kerry’s various statements about the peace talks, Palestinian terrorism, or ISIS all remove the agency of the actors involved. The individuals who join ISIS — at least those who are adults and not teenagers — do so of their own accord. They have agency, and they alone are responsible for their own actions. Kerry would never excuse the actions of a rapist on the ground that he had been provoked or led on by his victim. He should never justify the actions of the most depraved terrorists on the ground that they have a political gripe.

Taking this mentality a step further and making the claim that Israel’s actions towards the Palestinians have anything to do with the rise of ISIS requires a logical leap into the absurd. Kerry claimed that “there wasn’t a leader I met with in the region who didn’t raise with me spontaneously the need to try to get peace between Israel and the Palestinians, because it was a cause of recruitment and of street anger and agitation.” Even setting aside the issue of holding individuals to account for their own actions, one still must wonder, why Kerry would take such assertions at face value. ISIS directs its jihad against Christians, Yazidis, Kurds, and other Muslims but, somewhat surprisingly, it has not attacked Israel. If Israel were the source of ISIS rage, wouldn’t ISIS have attacked Israel? ISIS’s gripe, however, is with all of western society, not with Israel. And it recruits from Europe and the US, as well as from the Mideast. The suggestion that Israel has caused ISIS makes about as much sense as the suggestion that Israel has caused global warming. There simply is no cause-and-effect relationship.

The State Department’s division of black-is-white-and-day-is-night, in the person of Deputy Spokesperson Marie Harf, has of course attempted to walk back Kerry’s comments, saying, Kerry “didn’t make a link between growth of ISIL and Israel, period.” But this is not a case of he said, she said, and it is not a case of misplaced context. Kerry’s entire speech is on theState Department website for anyone to see:

As I went around and met with people in the course of our discussions about the ISIL coalition, the truth is we – there wasn’t a leader I met with in the region who didn’t raise with me spontaneously the need to try to get peace between Israel and the Palestinians, because it was a cause of recruitment and of street anger and agitation that they felt – and I see a lot of heads nodding – they had to respond to. And people need to understand theconnection of that.

Doofus

That is to say, that in the context of discussions regarding ISIL/ISIS, other Arab leaders raised the issue of the Palestinians, and Kerry feels that people need to understand the connection. To say that this is not an attempt to link ISIS to the Palestinian issue is the most obfuscatory double-speak. For those who have the stomach for it, you can watch the video yourself, embedded below. The relevant comments start at about 11:20. Note the way that Kerry uses hand gestures for extra emphasis when he says “understand the connection.”

Kerry’s scapegoating of Israel has become a dangerous pattern, one that is indicative of a worldview that underlies his behavior and his decisions with respect to the Jewish State. Although Jeff Goldberg wrote persuasively in 2013 that “the past two years have proved the theory of linkage [i.e., the theory that the Mideast would be stable if the Israeli-Palestiniandispute were solved] to be comprehensively false,” Kerry appears unwilling to move on from it and to accept a more reality-based perspective. It is no wonder, then, that his actions in the Mideast have been, to put it kindly, ineffective.

In the same speech, Kerry also spoke about introspection on the Muslim and Jewish holidays. It seems that Kerry would benefit from some introspection of his own. In doing so, he might consider that, had he not been so obsessively focused on Israel and its real or perceived failings, he might have woken up to the ISIS threat sooner. He might also consider his own department’s definition of anti-semitism: “Accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group, the state of Israel, or even for acts committed by non-Jews.” Kerry’s scapegoating of Israel for his own failures and for those of others is one of the most traditional forms of anti-Semitism around.

 

Categories: Gaza, Hamas, Islamic State, Islamism, Israel, Palestinians, Jewish occupation of Israel, Kerry, Middle East, Obama, Syria, Terrorism
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Allah Made Me Do It

September 29, 2014

Allah Made Me Do It, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, September 29, 2014

nolen-facebook-two-450x337

You might as well argue that Islam has nothing to do with Islam.

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Stop me if you’ve heard this story before.

A Muslim convert who recently became very religious beheads a woman while reportedly shouting Islamic phrases. The authorities rush to convince everyone in sight that it has nothing to do with Islam.

I’m not talking about Alton Nolen in Oklahoma at the end of September, but Nicholas Salvador in the UK at the beginning of September. Salvador, a Nigerian Muslim convert, beheaded an 82-year-old European woman with a foot-long blade. Nolen killed a 54-year-old American woman with a 10-inch blade.

The bios of both men are fairly similar to the beheaders of British soldier Lee Rigby. The perpetrators were Nigerian converts to Islam. Alton Nolen was a black convert to Islam. They had a history of criminal behavior followed by a conversion to Islam and the inevitable bloody ending.

On his Facebook page, Nolen posted, “Sharia law is coming!!!” The killers of Lee Rigby had chanted for Sharia law in the streets of London. That is the same Sharia law of stonings and beheadings.

It is the law of the Koran which states, “When you meet the unbelievers in Jihad smite at their necks until you have slaughtered many of them.” (Koran 47:4)

Or as Nolen quoted after posting a gory beheading photo on his Facebook page, “Thus do we find the clear precedent that explains the peculiar penchant of Islamic terrorists to behead their victims: it is merely another precedent bestowed by their Prophet.”

The quote underneath the beheading photo backed that up, “I will instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers: smite ye above their necks and smite all their finger-tips off of them.”(Quran 8:9-13)

An unbeliever is anyone who isn’t a Muslim.

This latest “Nothing to do with Islam” atrocity follows the Islamic State’s beheading of two Americans. These acts were admired by an Oklahoma City nursing home worker who was arrested for threatening a female co-worker with an ISIS style beheading on account of her being a Christian.

Again, nothing to do with Islam. Much like the Islamic State beheadings which we have been told also have nothing to do with Islam.

This sort of “Nothing to do with Islam” beheading pops up now and again.

A decade ago Ariel Selloul was nearly decapitated in Texas by Mohammed Ali Alayed. Mo had recently gotten religion and become a devout Muslim. His victim was Jewish. Before Mohammed got serious about Islam, the two men had been friends.

Again, it had nothing to do with Islam. At least that’s what the authorities said.

Around the same time a Jewish disc jockey was murdered in Paris by a Muslim friend who announced, “I killed a Jew, I will go to paradise. Allah made me do it.”

The Muslim killer, Adel Amastaibou, had threatened a Rabbi and a pregnant Jewish woman before. Instead the authorities decided that he was mentally ill.

Nothing to do with Islam. Not a thing.

And so we have a rash of mysterious beheadings and vicious stabbings that we know nothing about except that they have nothing to do with Islam. The more they obviously seem to have something to do with Islam, the more it has to be denied that they had anything to do with Islam.

Alton and Adel, Mohammed, Mujahid and Ismail, the latter two being the Muslim names of the Lee Rigby killers, have nothing to do with Islam. Even the Islamic State has nothing to do with Islam.

And yet Alton Nolen decided that beheading had quite a lot to do with Islam. All he had to do to figure that out was open a Koran. Expecting to convince Muslims to believe that the Koran has nothing to do with Islam will be even harder than convincing them that beheadings and the Islamic State have nothing to do with Islam.

You might as well argue that Islam has nothing to do with Islam.

The CVE programs under Barack Obama keep promising to counter the Islamic narrative on Twitter, but instead Twitter is full of ISIS Jihadists displaying severed heads as trophies and quoting the appropriate verses from the Koran.

Obama denounces ISIS as un-Islamic  for beheading people while leading a coalition against them which includes Muslim countries that use beheading as an Islamic punishment. The Saudis recently beheaded a man accused of sorcery. What’s the difference between the Islamic State and the Saudis? They both have lots of oil, terrorists and a penchant for beheading people, but the Saudis have better public relations.

Maybe when the Islamic State starts funding chairs at Georgetown and UCLA, and donating to the Clinton Global Initiative, it’ll start getting better press.

The Saudis can’t possibly be un-Islamic because the establishment’s official definition of Islam comes from them. Even the idea of denying that the Islamic State is Islamic is a Saudi strategy. But if Alton Nolen is un-Islamic then ISIS is un-Islamic and if ISIS is un-Islamic then Saudi Arabia is un-Islamic. And then Islam, whose holy book contains numerous verses calling for the brutal murder of non-Muslims, must also be un-Islamic.

Perhaps then there really isn’t an Islam. Or rather there are two Islams.

One is the oriental Unitarianism of the Western imagination whose practitioners are liberals with prayer rugs. The other is a grim relentless Jihad of murderous men who chant the Koran while severing heads. This is the Islam of the Arabian imagination. It is not always what it is, but to them it is the purity of what it should be.

The convert to Islam rarely becomes a liberal with a prayer rug. To become devout is to become more certain, not less certain. And that certainty ends in Jihad. It ends in a murder commanded by Allah.

The real Islam’s symbols carry powerful meanings. The beheading is the final and ultimate meaning. By killing non-Muslims in the name of Allah, its followers become Allah, they gain the power of life and death, to kill and enslave, to rob and rape; they become the murderous masters of creation.

When they say that “Allah made me do it” what they really mean is that the part of them that wants to kill, to rob and rape, to burn and kidnap, made them do it. By submitting to Allah, the Muslim becomes Allah. When he kills, it is Allah killing. His religion is reducible to his will to kill. This is ISIS. This is Islam.

It has nothing to do with the imaginary Islam of the liberal. It has everything to do with the real Islam.

Categories: Islam, Jihad, Terrorism
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Winning Heads and Minds

September 27, 2014

Winning Heads and Minds, Steyn on Line, Mark Steyn, September 26, 2014

960French citizen Hervé Gourdel, a mountaineering guide from Nice, shortly before his beheading in Algeria last week

Colleen Hufford was born in 1960. Life is full of grim twists and cruel vicissitudes, but in mid-20th century America it would not have occurred to anyone that one needed to worry about going to work and being beheaded by a colleague. Yet that’s what happened to Ms Hufford on Thursday: She turned up for her job at at the Vaughan Foods food processing plant in Moore, and Alton Alexander Nolen decapitated her.

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Moore is a municipality that lies between Norman, where a dear friend of mine lives, and Oklahoma City, which I know reasonably well. I can’t claim to know Moore other than to drive through, but I do remember the water tower emblazoned with “Moore – Home of Toby Keith”. Can’t get more American than that, can you?

Colleen Hufford was born in 1960. Life is full of grim twists and cruel vicissitudes, but in mid-20th century America it would not have occurred to anyone that one needed to worry about going to work and being beheaded by a colleague. Yet that’s what happened to Ms Hufford on Thursday: She turned up for her job at at the Vaughan Foods food processing plant in Moore, and Alton Alexander Nolen decapitated her.

Why would he do that? Well, as the initial reports were at pains to assure us, it’s nothing to do with terrorism. That’s true, in the sense that Mr Nolen is not a card-carrying member of an officially credentialed state-recognized terrorism-provider such as ISIS or al-Qaeda. It’s true in the sense that he’s not on any official US Department of Homeland Security terror watch list, because, under the geniuses running American national security, that honor is reserved for my fellow Hillsdale cruiser Steve Hayes. And, of course, it’s also true in the sense that Mr Nolen is a recent convert to Islam and, as David Cameron and Barack Obama and many others are ever more eager to emphasize, terrorism is nothing to do with Islam. Mr Nolen had the Muslim greeting “As-salamu Alaikum” – “Peace be upon you” – tattooed upon his abdomen. And he’d tried, without success, to persuade his co-workers at Vaughan Foods to convert to Islam. So he wasn’t just mildly Islamic in the nothing-to-do-with-terrorism sense, he was super-Islamic in the really-totally-no-terrorism-to-see-here sense.

So Colleen Hufford’s death was, as Jim Hoft put it, just “a random workplace beheading“. Indeed, many commenters at KOCO-TV seem more outraged by the mentioning of Mr Nolen’s religion than by the beheading:

Truth is, Islam has nothing to do with it. And Christians are far from innocent.

What does his religion have to do with this tragedy???

What does his religious faith have to do with this story?

Why would you even through in anything about terrorism in this story? The writer of this story is a true DUMBASS!

I can cite plenty of instances where religion was used to justify the bombing of abortion clinics and the murder of abortion doctors.

I’ve read plenty of Christians calling for the indiscriminate murder of Muslims.

Here’s some other examples of Christian terrorists, since you can’t find it on Youtube.

The Centennial Olympic Park bombing, July 27, 1996 Planned Parenthood bombing, Brookline, Massachusetts, 1994 Suicide attack on IRS building in Austin, Texas, Feb. 18, 2010 Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing, April 19, 1995
Seems Christians prefer to bomb more then beheading, since that’s so archaic

Inquisition anyone?

Perhaps we wouldn’t have these issues if the United States and Great Britain hadn’t supported a coup in Iran in 1953 against a secular, democratically-elected leader who did not kiss our nation’s rear and then reinstalled the Shah,

If he was converting to Christianity would you say that??

It seems many western heads have too little up there to be worth chopping off. Whether or not Ms Hufford’s beheading is anything to do with Islam, the frantic insistence that Islam is no more prone to beheading than Buddhists or Episcopalians starts to sound like a psychosis. Asked “Who ya gonna believe – the multiculti pap or your lyin’ eyes?”, many Americans cheerily answer, “Mossadeq and Planned Parenthood.”

More from the voluminous nothing-to-do-with-Islam files courtesy of Mr Nolen’s Facebook page, where he appears to be known as Jah’Keem Yisrael.

~Colleen Hufford was not the first western woman beheaded this month. In Edmonton, north London, 82-year-old Palmira Silva, an Italian immigrant, was beheaded by Nicholas Salvadore, also a convert to Islam. Miss Silva’s executioner was reported to have been “inspired” by recent Isis beheadings of westerners. As we know from President Obama, that’s nothing to do with Islam, too. “Nothing to do with Islam” is not yet the leading cause of death in developed nations, but it’s making impressive strides.

~In a much mocked column, grizzled leftie Rick Salutin considers the fate of Mohamud Mohamed Mohamud, amusingly known as Mo3, a “Canadian” who died fighting for ISIS in Syria. You’ll be relieved to hear from Rick that Mo3 was just a typical Canuck going through adolescence:

He was 20. He’d been a bright kid, on student council, got involved in religion, then politics. Sounds familiar. Oh wait, that would be me in high school and the years after. These young people aren’t monsters and haven’t had their brains or bodies snatched. They’re going through adolescence. It’s dicey.

Or in the ISIS lads’ case it’s slice’n’dicey. As I say, Salutin’s column was met with near universal derision, but he’s stumbling around in the vicinity of a kind of point. As I wrote all those years ago in America Alone (personally autographed copies of which are exclusively available, etc, etc), Islam is “the ultimate global gang”. In Oklahoma, Mr Nolen had a rap sheet as long as his knife. In London, Mr Salvatore was a not dissimilar type. All that’s happened in the years since I first made that observation is that ISIS has supplanted al-Qaeda as the brand leader of the sharp end of Islam, and made the gang aesthetic even more explicit. As for Mo3’s comrades, if you’re a Canuck or Aussie or Frenchman or American having fun chopping heads off in Syria and Iraq, how much more fun it would be to go “home” and chop heads off in Toronto or Sydney,Toulouse or Minneapolis. Western leaders may insist that that’s nothing to do with Islam, but, as the “reversions” of Messrs Nolen and Salvadore suggest, not all potential Muslims are willing to defer to Obama and Cameron’s doubtless extensive Islamic scholarship. In the years to come, there will be more beheading, by more “reverts”.

~Judging from the various comments sections, many westerners are willing to live with a certain amount of decapitation rather than abandon the multiculti pieties. It is not a pleasant way to die, in part because it requires more expertise than you might think. A decade ago, a young lady in my employ emailed a backgrounder on the subject to me in my room at the Grand Hyatt in Amman the night before I set off on my motoring tour of Iraq. If you’re lucky, your killer will insert the knife from the side, the sharp edge pointing to your front. One skilled thrust forward will cut the jugular, the carotid artery, the esophagus – and it will all be over in seconds. On the evidence of their social media videos, the ISIS boys are not that good: They go in from the front, blade facing backward, sawing back and forth for minutes on end. As I said in America Alone:

Writing about the collapse of nations such as Somalia, The Atlantic Monthly’s Robert D Kaplan referred to the “citizens” of such “states” as “re-primitivized man”. When lifelong Torontonians are hot for decapitation, when Yorkshiremen born and bred and into fish’n’chips and cricket and lousy English pop music self-detonate on the London Tube, it would seem that the phenomenon of “re-primitivized man” is being successfully exported around the planet.

Categories: Islam, Jihad, Terrorism
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