THINK-ISRAEL features essays and commentaries that provide context for current events in Israel. The war Islam is waging against Israel and the West is top priority. We report on global anti-Semitism, Islamism and creeping Sharia. We aim to make sense of what's going on.
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We are told that there is a difference between extremist Islam and
peaceloving normal Islam.
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"The Palestinian people does not
exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for
continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab
unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians,
Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical
reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people,
since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a
distinct 'Palestinian people' to oppose Zionism.
"For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa. While as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan." (PLO executive committee member Zahir Muhsein, March 31, 1977, interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw.) The Palestinian leadership, including Ahmed Shukar and Yasser Arafat, has openly admitted Palestinian "peoplehood" is a fraud; See here. |
"It should be remembered that in 1918, with the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Britain and France were handed more than 5,000,000 square miles to divvy up and 99% was given to the Arabs to create countries that did not exist previously. Less than 1% was given as a Mandate for the re-establishment of a state for the Jews on both banks of the Jordan River. In 1921, to appease the Arabs once again, another three quarters of that less than 1% was given to a fictitious state called Trans-Jordan." (Jack Berger, May 31, 2004.) |
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The total for all the 22 Arab League
countries is 6,145,389 square miles (SM). By comparison, all 50 states of
the United States have a total of 3,787,318 SM. Israel has
8,463 SM, about one-sixth of that of the State of Michigan.
Iran, Turkey, Pakistan and Afghanistan are Muslim but not Arab and are
not included.
World Arab population: 300 million; World Jewish population: 13.6 million; Israel's Jewish population: 5.4 million. (Dr. Wilbert Simkovitz, http://dehai.org/archives/dehai_news_archive/apr04/0223.html) |
| "... during the late 1940s, more than 40 million refugees around the world were resettled, except for one people. They [Palestinian arabs] remain defined as refugees, wallowing 60 years later in 59 UNRWA refugee camps, financed by $400 million contributed annually by nations of the world to nurture the promise of the "right of return" to Arab neighborhoods and Arab villages from 1948 that no longer exist." (Noam Bedein, Jerusalem Post, January 6, 2009.) |
| Some 900,000 Jews left behind $300 billion in assets when they were forced to flee for their lives from the Arab countries in the 1940s. They hold deeds for five times Israel's size. (Independent Media Centre, Winnipeg) |
| Re Israel's irrevocable ownership of Israel, Samaria, Judea, the Golan and Gaza: "Nothing that Israel's legal system says can change the facts that: (1) the legal binding document is the Mandate of the League of Nations and (2) the obligations of the Mandate are valid in perpetuity." (Professor Julius Stone) |
| "By 1920 the Ottoman Empire had exercised undisputed sovereignty over Palestine for 400 years. In Article 95 of the treaty of Sevres, that sovereignty was transferred to England in trust for a national homeland for the Jews. The local Arabs had never exercised sovereignty over Palestine and so they lost nothing. Their rights were fully protected by a provisio in the grant: '...it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine...' The proviso has been fully observed by the Israelis. Since 1950 the Arabs have built some 261 new settlements in Judea and Samaria — more than twice as many as the Jews, but you never hear of them. They fill them with Arabs from Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan and by the grace of God they become Palestinians. Allahu Akbar! The Arabs call Judea "the West Bank' because they would look silly claiming that Jews are illegally living in Judea." (Comment by Wallace Brand on Martin Peretz "Narrative Dissonance" The New Republic, July 1, 2009) |
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"How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia [rabies] in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. "A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property — either as a child, a wife, or a concubine — must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. "Individual Moslims may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome." (Winston Churchill, The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan, Vol II, pages 248-250, 1899.) |
| Two Imperatives: "To ensure its long term survivability as the Jewish nation-state, Israel has to deal effectively with two imperatives: The Geographic and the Demographic. The first imperative calls for Israeli control (i.e. sovereignty) over all the territory east of the coastal plain up to the Jordan River—to prevent intolerable risks to its physical survival; the second imperative calls for significant reduction of the Arab presence in the territory under Jewish sovereignty to forestall the emergence of an intolerable demographic threat to its dominant Jewish character." (Martin Sherman; see here and here.) |
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What we are talking about in the January–December 2020 Issue
Editor's Note:Think-Israel tends to use salafist rather than extremist or Islamist or militant or fundamentalist or activist to describe generically a pious Muslim, one who sticks as closely as possible to the unfiltered words and actions of Mohammad and the first three generations of Muslims, including, especially, the Companions of the Prophet. In modeling himself as closely as he can on the preachings and practices of Mohammad, a salafist can in modern terms be precisely described as an uninhibited terrorist, a theological supersessionist, a political supremacist who believes Islam and sharia law must dominate and a social barbarian, who wages jihad with whatever tools are available. Thanks to the high quality of whitewash supplied by sympathetic propagandists, he seldom is so described.
We devote this issue to several entities that are swelling Jew-hatred by word and by deed. We focus on the Black Liberation Movement (BLM), a major source of Jew Hate. BLM may tout itself as an organization to improve the position of the blacks in our society, but it spends much more time and money lambasting Judaism and its proxy Israel. The International Criminal Court (ICC) is another institution with a noble-sounding name and activities that are less than reputable.
The other major area of discussion is the false notion that a non-people, the Palestinians, have owned Samaria and Judea and some of the eastern part of Jerusalem since ... well the story changes but it always a long time ago. Therefore, according to this lie, the Jews are occupying Arab land. Jews are certainly occupying these territories, just as you occupy your own home.
Starting after the mid 1880s, the Jews returned to their land in strength and restored the magnificence of a land that had fallen into ruin and squalor. But they have been living there from time immemorial one way or another. Jordan in 1948 invaded the new modern state of Israel and grabbed a part of the Jewish land, kicking out or killing each and every Jew who was living in Samaria and Judea and some of eastern Jerusalem and destroying the synagogues. It was not until 1967, when Jordan again invaded Israel, that Israel was able to take back this land and Jews again settled in Samaria, Judea and the eastern part of Jerusalem.
Aside from the Torah, history and the obvious eternal symbiosis of the Jew and his land, it is also the case that the land is legally Jewish and so said each and every member of the League of Nations in 1922, when they created an irrevocable trust for the Jews as owners of their historic land. The decree with its full power was passed on to the United Nations.
Rather than being satisfied that the Jews only have some tenth of one percent of the land area and the Arabs and other Muslims control all the rest of the Middle East that was lost by the Ottoman Empire in World War 1, too many Arabs spend their time thinking out better ways to slaughter Jews and destroy the Jewish state. Some of the articles discuss ways to stop the Arabs from distracting the Jews from making more major accomplishments by continuing to make the Jews miserable.
These articles also contribute information to a topic that is known but not widely circulated, namely, that while the Israeli administration allows little actual Jewish growth in the Territories and prattles on about changing from a military to a civil governance, the Arabs are busily engaged in stealing Jewish state land. That is why Bezalel Smotrich declared, in a statement that is hard for most of us to accept but is likely an accurate assessment, "It's either or. Either the settlements have a future, or the Palestinian state does — but not both." here.
Based on the assumption that slavery was mostly in the western hemisphere or on the arrogant assumption that slavery only counts in the western hemisphere, the ignorant Left spends time seeking retribution for the putative descendants of the slaves in the USA, a task almost impossible to do fairly, given the tangled genetics of the black community and the unreasonableness of inflicting a tax on whites whose ancestors were in Europe and Asia during the slave years, many living in worse conditions that the slaves in the USA.
The first articles below trace the history of slavery from about the time blacks were shipped from Africa to Europe and then America. Most of the emphasis is on the current organization, Black Lives Matter (BLM).
While chapters of the BLM network destroy both black and white communities, ruining property and committing vandalism across the country, universities and large companies are so intimidated, they declare admiration for its activities which are said to better the lives of blacks and pour tons of money into its treasury. The media blandly accept what BLM says its mission is, i.e., to protest brutality against blacks by society in general and police specifically, while ignoring how the organization actually operates. No matter how much damage is done, how many lives are lost, how many businesses are destroyed, the main stream media back up BLM claims. Commentators, their backs to burning buildings and rioters swinging bats, calmly say into the microphone, "This was mostly a peaceful demonstration." This is a lie but it is a sustained and repeated lie.
In addition to these articles, we urge you to read Ricki Hollander's monograph, "The BLM Movement and Antisemitism", which is to be found here. It is an excellent analysis of BLM's early embrace of anti-Israel Palestinian Arabs. It contains detailed portraits of some leading actors in the movement. It is a painfully accurate assessment of the Jewish organizations that ignore BLM's antipathy to Jews in their anxiety to protect that organization from criticism. They are so driven to defend BLM, they have exaggerated to the point of absurdity the supposed differences in attitude and rhetoric between the core and some of its partner organizations and chapters, ignoring BLM's slippery ways of ducking the issue of their bigotry. (Note that Joshua Washington deals with this point in an article below.) In sum, Hollander paints an accurate picture of BLM, stripped of the fluff often to be found in articles on BLM.
Ben Davis cites African historians who write of the major role Africans played in capturing other Africans and selling them into the slave trade. In fact, selling slaves was a major source of income for "African rulers, traders and military aristocracy." While the European slave traders stayed along the coastlines, it was Africans who trekked into the interior to capture Africans to feed the slave trade, it was Africans who often sold their own people into slavery.
See also a video on slavery routes - a short history of human
trafficking in the Common Era in 4 videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InQvC9c-3K8 - (1/4)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3ppAebUW54 - (2/4)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMB7CpjIS9s - (3/4)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKwXuRAseIc - (4/4)
From the typical article on black slavery, one would never suspect that Europeans were routinely taken into slavery as late as the nineteenth Century; the slavers were mostly Arabs. Black slavery was routinely handled by Africans and Arabs, long before the Europeans entered into the trade. Michael McManus writes on aspects of the slave trade that are ignored in the bubbling promotion of white guilt for black slavery.
Additional material on the early history of slavery in the West can be found in an article by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani entitled "When The Slave Traders Were Themselves African" in the The Wall Street Journal Sept. 20, 2019:
'This August marked 400 years since the first documented enslaved Africans arrived in the U.S. In 1619, a ship reached the Jamestown settlement in the colony of Virginia, carrying "some 20 and odd Negroes" who were kidnapped from their villages in present-day Angola.READ MORE
The government of Mauritania denies slavery exists in Mauritania. But it does. Slave-trading has been ongoing for some two thousand years and chattel slavery, where one person is the property of another, for some 800 years. In fact some 10-20% of the population is enslaved; they are enslaved generation after generation, as a class, with no way to buy out of slavery. Tom Kadie writes that "neither racial discrimination nor the historical model of chattel slavery defines slavery in Mauritania." Slaves there are usually dark-skinned and often from sub-Saharan Africa and the ruling Arab-Berbers are light-skinned, but slave owners range in color from dark to white and come from many races. And Arabs are allowed to own Arabs. It usually isn't necessary to compel slaves to work by using physical force, because generations of slaves have been conditioned to accept their condition. Moreover, given the high degree of unemployment in the country, they have little alternative choice. Those who do leave slavery do so mostly by physically escaping or by being freed by a group whose mission is to stop slavery.
See also the article, "Mauritania and Slavery: An Epidemic", by Zachary Crockett, February 25, 2014 at https://priceonomics.com/mauritania-and-slavery-an-epidemic/
See videos on Mauratanian slavery at https://www.youtube.com/embed/aCB7I-p26sU and https://youtu.be/5yQlOPD8mNo, both available at https://www.iabolish.org.
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The Mass Resistance organization has been tracking BLM's teaching that LGBT gender? genders? is just fine for a while. A later article on BLM (https://www.massresistance.org/docs/gen4/20d/BLM-and-lgbt-school-assault/index.html) October 23, 2020, discusses the new attack on math and English by BLM in the schools.
The present article is the second article on BLM in the schools. It examines how the same objectives are tailored to different age groups. "Like all good Marxists, they dress all this up in 'feel-good' sounding language on the surface. But that is just the starting point. Underneath the surface these 'principles' are heavily refined and used consistently and to push the clear Marxist agenda that they were intended for." We may think BLM's objectives are inane, or even insane, but when it comes to communicating their message, they are very good. This is a highly professional job.
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To hear BLM spokesmen tell it, they speak for the blacks, all blacks. There's no way to refute what they say. America is intrinsically racist; there hasn't been a time that blacks haven't been victimized. The reality is that black economists and civil rights leaders and leader across the black community do repudiate what BLM say. They advise shaping up, getting an education, working hard is the way to go. Their example indicates that every community can make its own way; they are not passive pawns that need a socialist leg-up to succeed.
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This article provides information about two subjects, related but independent. First, it is an excellent summation of the techniques for political revolution developed by Professors Richard Cloward and Francis Fox Piven. Second, Durden lays out how the Cloward-Pivan strategy is being used by such leftist groups as BLM to destroy America and replace it with a socialist state. This is an insightful article providing us with necessary information required to understand BLM's tactics.
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Phillip Carl Salzman explores the intersection of the BLM organization and Intersectionality, the currently popular social theory that 'explains' the oppression of selective categories of the down-trodden: gender, sexuality, race, nationality, religion, capability, etc. Underlying this notion of identity by group and feeding it justifications is radical Marxism. So it not surprising that a new emerging political group spouts the old ideas of anti-Semitism.
A reader said this about Dr. Salzman's articles: "Dr. Salzman's articles neatly captures the narrow framework characteristic of ideological worldviews, which are most vulnerable to historically informed contexts cleansed of emotionality and respectful of fact based objective analysis. Salzmans 3 most recent articles, bundled, exposes students educated within the stifling confines of academia with a broader perspective, complete with conceptual constructs (ex.intersectionality), to venture outside the fishbowl. Recommend required reading in social science curriculum."
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This article from Patriotic Viral News contrasts the impressive way BLM -- as do all socialist groups -- talks about distributing wealth equitably and how wealth is actually distributed. As Nebojsa Malic writes here: "Between July 2017 and June 2019, the Global Network had spent $4.5 million on consultants, travel and salaries while giving only $328,000 to local chapters." And that was before the enormous expansion of money being donated to BLM. He continues, "Not only did the BLM chapters not get that [money], they also bore the brunt of the backlash against rioting, arson, and property destruction inflicted by the riots on their own communities. It was a win-win for the self-styled leadership, lose-lose for the actual foot soldiers on the ground. What Black Lives Matter chapters don't understand is that the [socialist] system they've embraced is working exactly as intended."
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Joshua Washington write that BLM doesn't represent the black community. Most black Americans want a police presence, while BLM preaches defunding the police. Similarly, black Americans want school choice, while BLM want to end charter schools. BLM wants collective care of the young, while most blacks don't, preferring a nuclear family. And most blacks don't want Marxism, the ideology underlying BLM. He provides information that goes well beyond what is usually available; i.e., the degree to which, thanks to BLM, witchcraft has made its way into mainstream churches. He also references an article that points out that California's curriculum is now anti-Zionist and pro-Communist; both are BLM positions. In sum, "a movement for black Americans to be treated as equals turned into the destruction of black self-determination and joining us to an educational system that is now teaching the very Marxist principles many of us reject."
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Jonathan Tobin lays out his thesis at the start of this article: 'The specter of armed extremists facing off against violent mobs is a prescription for not just bloodshed, but chaos with unknowable consequences. Predictably, the Anti-Defamation League is chiming in about this to hype fears that the presence of militias in this combustible mix will add anti-Semitism to the mix. The question is, are they telling us something we need to know about the situation or, as appears to be the case, is the ADL just riding their favorite hobby horse in order to promote their preferred political agenda and distract us from the real threat to both Jews and the nation in this situation.' He expands on some of the consequences of American Jews downplaying the rising anti-Semitism on the Left.
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Paul Miller writes of the recent growth of anti-semitism. He says outright what many are too squeamish to say: "attacking Jews is acceptable in academia, the Democratic Party, and the press, as long as it comes from a left-wing source." Again, "... anti-Semitism has gone mainstream." He focuses on President Biden's "choices for top people in his administration. There is, as an example, the nomination of Kristen Clarke to head the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice." As far back as when she was head of Harvard's Black Students Association, she has welcomed unambiguous anti-Semites. Under Biden's administration, we can expect no abatement of Jew-hate spouted by Muslims, supposedly representing their states and districts.
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The authority of the ICC is often invoked as the last word, end of discussion. This section examines in depth whether such confidence in the decisions, arguments and opinions of the ICC is warranted.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) located in the Hague, Netherlands, is an intergovernmental organization and international tribunal. The brainchild of the United Nations, it was created to handle cases that sovereign countries who were members of the ICC could not themselves handle. As Prof. Gregory Rose and Maurice Hirsch comment in an article entitled 'Rule or Ruse of Law in the UN International Criminal Court?' here:
"The ICC was established in 2002 to prosecute the most heinous international crimes where there is no national court that can do so. With convictions in only four cases in 18 years, it is doubtful that potential offenders are deterred. Its convictions have all been for crimes in Africa where national courts were unable to prosecute. In actual practice, the ICC brand is tarnished: it is political in essence, defective in execution, and undermining the very tenets of law it was set up to protect. Most UN Security Council permanent members and the emerging global powers declined to sign the Rome Statute establishing the ICC. Israel also never joined the court." Its results may be meager and as Dr Manfred Greenfield notes in his 16January2020 BESA Center article 'How Israel Should Fend Off the ICC,': "It has few convictions, yet in the 17 years of its existence has spent more than $1.5 billion."
Being a development of the United Nations, it will surprise no one that it was corrupted and twisted into yet another weapon, a weapon using a legal system to wage lawfare.
Lawfare is a term coined by Major General Charles J. Dunlap, Jr., in a lecture at Harvard in 2001 to describe the hijacking and exploitation of the legal system "to the detriment of humanitarian values as well as the law itself." [See: Yale J. of Int’l Aff. 136, 146 (2008)]
Lawfare describes the actions of the ICC perfectly. So frequently has the ICC aggressively combated common sense and legal rules in acting against Israel, it is commonplace for anti-Israel debaters to declare ICC speaks for the world. They will assert "Israel acted against international law", meaning the ICC, to defend a blatantly false assertion about Israel. The ICC is the source of truth for the factually handicapped. Sad to say, the ICC has gone from being a respected entity that tried monstrous war criminals after World War II to a parody of itself.
The actions of the ICC have been rebutted from many points of view, from the diplomatic to the sneer. Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo said that the "ICC case against Israel is illegitimate prosecution" here. Some excerpts from his statement:
"The International Criminal Court is a political body, not a judicial institution. This unfortunate reality has been confirmed yet again by the ICC Prosecutor's attempt to assert jurisdiction over Israel, which, like the United States, is not a party to the Rome Statute that created the Court."
".... we do not believe the Palestinians qualify as a sovereign state, and they therefore are not qualified to obtain full membership, or participate as a state in international organizations, entities, or conferences, including the ICC."
"A court that attempts to exercise its power outside its jurisdiction is a political tool that makes a mockery of the law and due process. The United States reiterates its longstanding objection to any illegitimate ICC investigations. If the ICC continues down its current course, we will exact consequences."
On the other extreme, the ICC has been rebutted sarcastically, as in this appraisal of the ICC monomanical focus on Israel that appeared in the Objectivist, December 26, 2019:
"Heads up to the ICC. Keep ignoring actual war crimes and/or crimes against humanity that are being committed in any number of countries including but not limited to Syria, North Korea. This way the court will still have enough funds and time to prosecute Israel for rumped up reasons. As with most EU and UN bodies, the ICC is a cruel and fraudulent organization that does nothing to protect people against the crimes noted above. In fact, because the ICC focuses on bogus cases that concern Israel, which virtually assures its inaction elsewhere, it is aiding and abetting the commission of crimes against humanity and war crimes in general."
Below, we focus on several aspects of ICC's conduct and behavior. To cover important points, there is some overlap in articles. We spend most time on ICC's negative attitude and behavior toward Jews and Judaism, the converse of its strong connections with Palestinians, the European Union and UN NGOs, all of which are intrinsically unfriendly to Israel. The intimate relationship between ICC and the two Palestinian terror administrations in the Territories — the Arab Palestine Authority and Hamas, which controls Gaza — are also discussed.
The set includes an examination of the ICC's chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, and her fatuous pomposity in pursuit of her illegal objectives. Her guidance has played a large part in ICC's loss of respectability. With no legal right to do so, she had labored to bring Israeli soldiers and politicians to trial at the Hague, and has pontificated on the jurisdiction of Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem and Gaza. She claims Israel has violated international law, but brings no evidence to back her spurious claims, while ignoring strong evidence to the contrary. It would be comic, were it not outrageous and totally illegal, that the committee she has selected to work with her includes "six members of Hamas and a PFLP member with a senior Hamas official acting as spokesman." All in all, in Richard Kemp's words, here: "ICC has twisted itself into a political court rather than a serious legal body." It has weaponized aspects of the legal system, distorting or inventing rules to illegally attack Western democracies, particularly Israel.
All in all, this comment by Professor Gregory Rose and Maurice Hirsch here is a fair assessment:
"Fundamental to the rule of law is equal treatment and non-arbitrary, fair application of law. Instead, the International Criminal Court (ICC) exemplifies UN politicisation of international law principles and bureaucratic corruption of the rule of law, at extravagant cost."
In another article in the Jerusalem Post rebutting the ICC prosecutors accusations that Israel used disproportionate force during the 2014 Gaza War, Richard Kemp wrote:
I was present during these conflicts, witnessed, and was extensively briefed on IDF operations. I was a member of an investigation into the 2014 Gaza war by the High Level Military Group, an independent body of retired generals from Western armed forces and human rights experts. The group unanimously concluded that: "The IDF not only met its obligations under the Law of Armed Conflict, but often exceeded these on the battlefield."
In this article, he writes that "SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler, architect and director of the Holocaust, would be proud of the latest move by Fatou Bensouda, Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. Intent on the total elimination of the Jewish race, Himmler supported Amin al-Huseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, in his plans to eradicate the Jews in Palestine." It is ironic that the Nuremberg Tribunal, the progenitor of the ICC was created in the wake of World War II to give justice to the Jews by trying Nazis in a court of law. But, as Kemp writes, "[i]n a grotesque inversion, the ICC, heir to the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal, has become a propaganda weapon of anti-Semitic hate." The ICC "more closely resembles that of the Nazis' notorious People's Court, the Volksgerichthof, than the Nuremberg trials." Harsh words. But accurate.
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Lawrence Franklin brings us quickly up to date on the ICC — its reputation, its general attitude of the ICC towards Israel and the USA, its illegality in attempting to put Israel's IDF on trial when Israel is not a member of the ICC. He describes the ICC as "a straightforwardly politicized international body whose judgments continue to betray a mindset of politicization and bias." Perhaps only Eugene Kontorovich, director of International Law at the Jerusalem-based Kohelet Policy Forum and director of the Center for International Law in the Middle East at George Mason University in Washington, D.C., has put it more succinctly. Kontorovich told JNS that the ICC's chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda "has come to the absurd decision that a non-country can sue a non-member of the ICC for a non-crime that nobody has ever been prosecuted for, [and] which the ICC prosecutor herself has said does not exist when it comes to Russia and Crimea or Turkey and Cyprus." (cited here.)
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Both the USA and Israel see the ICC under Bensouda as a menace. In this article, Eytan Gilboa focuses primarily on Fatou Bensouda, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) at the Hague, As the Executive Summary has it, "[She has] decided to indict senior Israeli policymakers and military officers for committing war crimes in the West Bank and Gaza. Her decision is baseless, preposterous, and discriminatory, and it violates the ICC's own mission and rules." Bensouda's action takes its place within the wider context of the extensive Palestinian demonization campaign against Israel at the UN and elsewhere.
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One runs out of digits counting the ways the ICC has no business prosecuting Israel and gunning for the USA. Joseph Klein examines some of them in detail. He writes, "The prosecutor's appearance of even-handedness in claiming to look at the conduct of both sides is a sham. Her anti-Israel bias is evident." Aside from ignoring lack of jurisdiction, chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda has no problem ignoring that the major 'crime' the IDF committed "was taken in self-defense. Israel is only responding to Hamas's call for Israel's annihilation and its rocket launches from the Gaza territory that it controls against civilians in Israel."
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A major component of the Palestinian rejection of peace with Israel is to label Israel a criminal country. Implementing this has been primarily handled by Fatou Bensouda, the ICC's leading prosecutor. Maurice Hirsch provides us with the details. He concludes, "Accusing Israel of committing 'crimes against humanity' is simply ludicrous. A political decision of this nature should be met with a harsh political response. Removing from Israel the hostile U.N. agencies responsible for creating the fiction of 'Palestine' would be a good start."
Bensouda herself is corrupt: "news reports recently revealed that Bensouda advised Palestinian officials on how to obtain a decision from the Court to investigate and indict Israel, and that she collaborated with Palestinian organizations while preparing her brief for the pre-trial judges. All of this conduct violates ICC rules." (Emphasis added here and above) For details, see Professor Eytan Gilboa's May 25, 2020 article here.
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Alan Baker writes a succinct and sober article, which, in a nutshell says: the ICC is open to states only; there's no Palestinian state; so ICC can't deal with Palestinian Complaint. It would seem that a court would be among the first to respect a legal statute, but the ICC has gone to absurd lengths to ignore its own restrictions and to openly advocate for the Palestinian Arabs. As it is, in Baker's words, the UN and ICC "have permitted themselves to be abused and manipulated by an irresponsible Palestinian leadership, intent on hijacking international organizations for obvious and blatant political purposes." That the farce has been allowed to continue only reduces the credibility of the ICC further; and adds no respect for the UN.
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In an important paper, James Sinkinson [See here] indicated that what the ICC is attempting to do to Israel and also the US may make for headlines and dramatic political theatrics but these actions are not legal. "Since the court completely lacks legal jurisdiction in these matters, its only purpose can be to politically smear the two countries... "Thus, according to the ICC's own core mission, both prosecutions are extra-judicial and inappropriate — not only a misuse of time and money, but essentially unjust... But the travesty continues: In order to justify these politically-motivated prosecutions, the ICC has to ignore actual international law." In this article, Michel Calvo expertly provides us with the details and context for a full understanding of what's wrong with the case put forth by the ICC partnered with the Palestinian Arabs against Israel.
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Gerald M. Steinberg, an expert in politicized NGOs has written of the ICC [here] that "The ICC was created in the context of the negotiations that ended in 1998 with the Rome Statute, and already then it was clear that Israel was a primary target, particularly for the Arab states and for the anti-Israel groups that claim to promote international law and human rights. The facade may be legal, but in practice, this is a political institution." He talks about Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch; both of these NGOs claim neutrality but spit Jew Hate.
Adam Kredo in the present article focuses on ICC's affiliation with NGOs that are affiliated with Palestinian Arab terrorist groups, specifically, Haq, Al-Dameer, Al Mezan, and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR). Moreover, ICC chief prosecutor Bensouda herself has close ties with the international Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) that is close to the Palestinian NGOs that brought the complaint against Israel. READ MORE
Many take the view that self-styled Jewish organizations such as B'tselem and New Israel Fund and J Street are simply presenting a different view on events affecting Israel, as if this were a self-contained debate taking place in one place at one time with no extensions or consequences. The reality is that these groups play a huge role in aiding and abetting organizations that are extremely hostile to Israel. Akiva Bigman described how "The Israeli rights group B'Tselem, as well as other NGOs, receive grants — often from European governments — that are earmarked for activity intended to make Israel vulnerable to prosecution in the International Criminal Court."
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The European Union holds a VIP seat in De Hague's international court. It accuses Israel of "war crimes" while funding Palestinian NGO's. The French, British, German, Belgian, Swiss, Dutch, and Swedish all put significant funds in the pockets of Israel's mortal enemies. Mahmoud Abbas, the premier purveyor-employer of PA's pay-to-slay terror against Israeli citizens is the beneficiary of an annual $250,000,000 gift from the EU. This article by Valerie Sobel isn't about the Europeans and the ICC, but it paints a realistic picture of European actions towards Jews in general. Sobel puts these European contributions in context, noting how the same European politicians who shed a tear on Holocaust Remembrance day reinstate their ancestors' attacks on the Jews the rest of the time with their generous contributions to Israel's enemies.
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The previous article discusses the general attitude and actions of Europeans toward Jews. This article by Dan Schueftan focuses on Europe and ICC, with a somewhat different view. It discusses how the Europeans have joined the oppressive regimes, giving them legitimacy. As Schueftan writes, "Without this legitimacy, the international bodies would have been dismissed as nothing more than a circus that should be ignored because they are being controlled by outcast regimes. But the Europeans have systematically stood by those who distort the very values they have championed."
What does this lead to? Schueftan speculates:
READ MOREWhat's troubling is not just that the ICC is distorted. What's truly troubling is that civilized countries, especially in Europe, might one day allow their legal system to accept ICC warrants and that terrorist entities and their sympathizers around the world — from Hezbollah and Hamas to Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Jeremy Corbyn — will take great encouragement from humiliating those who challenge the court.
This section describes the history and consequences of the San Remo Conference of 1920 in which much of the land that had been the Middle Eastern territory of the Ottoman Empire was assigned to an independent Syria and Mesopotamia, and a small amount of land including TransJordan was assigned to the Jews, allowing them to take back land that was historically under their sovereignty. The latter document hashed out at the Conference was eventually signed by all the members of the League of Nations, a forerunner of the United Nations. The League of Nations was disbanded soon after World War 2 and was replaced by the current United Nations. All treaties, trusts and deeds held by the League were transferred to the United Nations, to be carried out as designed.
Briefly, the San Remo Conference assigned a tiny piece of the Ottoman Empire -- less than a tenth of 1% -- to Israel entirely. The rest was eventually cut up into Arab states. The original assignment to Israel included part of the Golan Heights, all of Gaza, and all of Judea and Samaria (aka the West Bank) eastward to the eastern border of what is now Jordan.
It ensured religious and civil rights to non-Jews as well as Jews, but the Jews had exclusive political (i.e., voting) rights. Unlike the rest of the Middle East area of the Ottoman Empire, which was divided among Arab states willy-nilly without regard to clan or kinship claims, this land specifically was given to Israel because the bond between the Jews and this particular territory went back in time thousands of years and has continued into the present. Significantly, it was signed by each and every one of the member of the then League of Nations. The USA was not a member so did not sign, but a joint Congressional resolution in 1922 was unanimous in supporting the creation of a Jewish homeland.
Britain, perhaps regretting its moment of decency, managed to cut out 78% of the land, the area now claimed by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, between the time of the Conference, May 2020, and the end of the signing on July 24, 1922. As Ted Belman has written:
"For those who do not know, the San Remo Resolution on the partition of the Ottoman Empire in 1920 gave binding international recognition to the right of the Jews to Palestine as it was then described. 78% of which lay east of the Jordan River.
"Before the Palestine Mandate was signed by the League of Nation in 1922, Winston Churchill deleted the east bank lands from the lands the Mandate would include as Israel's national home and it became known as Jordan. But he also declared that the Jewish right to the land was a matter of right and not of sufferance. The Jews were given the right to "reconstitute" what was, in recognition of their historic right to the land, save for the lands to the east. ... Nevertheless the San Remo Resolution stands as precedent for the right of the Jews to all of Jordan."
Using the low-keyed phrase "national home" instead of "state" has allowed many an enemy deciding that meant the Jewish state was to be within the Palestinian Mandate, but not over the entire area, small as it was. (Stein, Leonard: The Balfour Declaration, New York: Simon and Schuster. 1961, p. 470.) This argument became moot after Israel successful withstood several invasions from her neighboring Arab states, winning territory in the process.
The San Remo Resolution, this irrevocable document, was handed in trust to the United Nations when the League of Nations was dissolved. It is still in power and is still ignored.
Sad to say, the legal and historic rights of the Jews of Israel to the Land of Israel has received much less attention than it deserves. The January-June 2016 issue of Think-Israel is one such factual source. Part I of that issue is devoted to context: who are the Palestinians, claims to the Land of Israel, media propaganda and arguments derived from the 'Jews Stole Arab Land' assertions. Part II examines applicable legal concepts and pertinent legal documents. As the issue concludes, "the 19 years of Jordanian occupation [from 1948 to 1967] were the occasion for starting all sorts of creative theatrics. Arabs have hijacked Israel's history and have attempted to steal Israel's land. They have inverted history and claimed Israel is occupying Palestinian land. Given successive Israeli governments that don't even answer back, they have convinced most of the world they are in the right. Just think. Had Israel not lost control of some of her land for a few years, the Arabs would not be asserting rights they never had in the Land of Israel."
And these are some videos that are introductions to the essential issues involved on who has claim to the Land of Israel. "San Remo, April 25, 1920" here and "San Remo Conference celebrating 100 years" here are two videos on San Remo, both featuring Amb. Dore Gold.
Also see Im Tirtzu's video called "Israel's legal rights" here. It features Eugene Kontrovich, who speaks about nation-states and why Israel includes Samaria and Judea. The Jews are not illegally occupying Samaria and Judea. Kontrovich talks about the essential issues.
This articles tells us what San Remo was, when it was, what countries attended and a video hitting the high points. It also provides us with the core of the accomplishments, namely:
It was agreed —
READ MORE(a) To accept the terms of the Mandates Article as given below with reference to Palestine, on the understanding that there was inserted in the proces-verbal an undertaking by the Mandatory Power that this would not involve the surrender of the rights hitherto enjoyed by the non-Jewish communities in Palestine; this undertaking not to refer to the question of the religious protectorate of France, which had been settled earlier in the previous afternoon by the undertaking given by the French Government that they recognized this protectorate as being at an end.
(b) that the terms of the Mandates Article should be as follows:
The High Contracting Parties agree that Syria and Mesopotamia shall, in accordance with the fourth paragraph of Article 22, Part I (Covenant of the League of Nations), be provisionally recognized as independent States, subject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance by a mandatory until such time as they are able to stand alone. The boundaries of the said States will be determined, and the selection of the Mandatories made, by the Principal Allied Powers.
The High Contracting Parties agree to entrust, by application of the provisions of Article 22, the administration of Palestine, within such boundaries as may be determined by the Principal Allied Powers, to a Mandatory, to be selected by the said Powers. The Mandatory will be responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 8, 1917, by the British Government, and adopted by the other Allied Powers, in favour of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.
Julian Zuckerbrot provides an excellent and full-bodied description of the historic, political and social context of the San Remo Conference, where the victors of World War 1 "took what, for 400 years, had been the possessions of the Ottoman Empire and, in their place, laid the groundwork for the emergence of Iraq, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon — and of Israel. [...] It was at San Remo, one hundred years ago, where the world recognized the right of the Jews to build — to rebuild — their national home. The Jews of Palestine would be able to develop a state within the framework of a new concept, a mandate, established by the international community and under its authority. One day the mandate would end and a new Jewish state would replace it." And so it did. That state includes Judea and Samaria, so, as Zuckerbrot writes, "that is why, today, Israel cannot be accurately described as the illegal occupant of any of that territory."
After San Remo, all the Jews had to do to gain a state was to fight multiple invasions by their Arab neighbors, fight the politicians from Europe, the Arab countries and often the USA at the UN, and ignore the nastiness of a hateful media. And lo, within a relatively short time, it has become a vibrant creative state, which contributes mightily to the advancement of human knowledge, agriculture, medicine and instrumentation as well as being one of the first to provide emergency aid to a country suddenly stricken by an overwhelming disaster, be it earthquake, storm or terrorist attack.
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Dan Adler's emphasis in this article on the San Remo Conference is on how the winners of the first World War gave the Middle East territory of the Ottoman Empire -- the losers -- to the Jews and Arabs. With the Jews, the agreement reconstituted the Jewish right to their ancient land; The Jews already owned this piece of land and had since ancient times. Throughout the centuries, they had never lost contact with their land, sometime holding it collectively, sometimes individually, They were redeeming what was theirs. Early on, even Emil Feisal speaking for Hejaz supported the Jewish claim. Even so, Britain managed to cut out 78% of the land assigned to the Jews and placed it in the hands of the Arab Hashemites 'to administer'. Yet some people continue to argue the Jewish state itself is illegitimate. In contrast, the delegates accepted the Arab demands without argument and gave them 99.9% of the Ottoman Empire cut into states. It was a gift, a new gift. As Adler notes, "before the San Remo conference there did not exist a single Arab independent nation state. Not one." And no one objects that any of the Arab states are illegitimate.
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The San Remo Convention put into law that Israel included Samaria and Judea, aka the West Bank. David Wurmser points out the irony that "Israel [is] one of only a very few nations anchored in an inherited right (which can be revoked by no one), rather than a granted right (which the giver of the right can take back," yet the European Union proclaims "Israel is to be considered an occupying power of the territories." He cuts through the misinformation, insisting that "Fifty years of propagandistic debate over Israel in the international community must not be allowed to obscure facts, both historical and legal." It started with the Mandate for Palestine, which embodied the Balfour Declaration, and it is still irrevocably enforceable today. He lays out the specifics, some of the relevant history and the solemn obligation taken by all the members of the international community: "the international community's legal obligations to defend the rights of the Jewish people in their homeland, as defined and recognized by the international community nearly a century ago, enshrined in the UN Charter, and ratified by the member states of the United Nations, making it their own law."
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The underlying theme of Yishai Fleisher's article is how the media, politicians and hypocritical members of the UN promote plans they like over legally binding resolutions not in accordance with their wishes. Specifically, he asks, "why does the empty UN partition resolution get so much play compared to the real law of the San Remo Accords?" The San Remo Resolution of 1920 is firmly anchored in international law and affirmed by the members of the League of Nations; its laws and rulings became binding on its successor organization, the United Nations. In contrast, the UN plan of 1947 for partitioning 'Palestine' into Jewish and Arab states was a non-binding resolution of the UN's General Assembly. Nevertheless, "for those who wish to see a 'two-state solution' implemented, the idea that Israel was created through the UN partition vote is an indispensable narrative." The implication, of course, being, that what UN wrought, it could undo. The San Remo Resolution, in contrast, is irrevocable. It is time it became better known and not buried under the flurry of pseudo-legal demands to surrender Israeli land to the Palestinian Arabs.
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As Eugene Kontorovich writes:
"At San Remo, the Jews were promised a 'national home' in Palestine, and an explicit right to 'settle' throughout the territory, which included Judea and Samaria. The international community did nothing to implement this promise, or ensure its fulfillment in the face of reluctance by the Mandatory government and growing anti-immigrant xenophobia by local Arabs. It was left entirely up to the Jews to translate the international promises into facts on the ground, and in 1948 they partially did so, though with much of the territory, including the holy sites, falling to the Jordanians. After Israel retook these territories in 1967, much of the international community pretended its earlier guarantees did not exist.READ MORE"President Trump's recognition of a united Jerusalem, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's conclusion that Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria are not war crimes, represent a proper understanding of the legal significance of the League of Nations Mandate. More importantly, they are perhaps the first leaders who refuse to subordinate Israel's legal rights to political blackmail from Arab states."
Howard Grief disposes of some objections to Israel having sovereignty over all the land declared to be for the Jews. People have made the sounds-good argument that the Jews were to have a homeland IN the Palestine Mandate, but not OVER the Palestine Mandate. Grief writes: "The term 'Jewish National Home' was defined to mean a state by the British government at the Cabinet session which approved the Balfour Declaration on October 31, 1917. That was also the meaning originally given to this phrase by the program committee which drafted the Basel Program at the first Zionist Congress in August 1897 and by Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist Organization." The same sort of arguments were made that the future state was to be IN Palestine, not OVER Palestine. Grief points out: "Had 'Palestine' meant a partitioned country with certain areas of it set aside for Jews and others for Arabs, that intention would have been stated explicitly at the time the Balfour Declaration was drafted and approved and later adopted by the Principal Allied Powers. No such allusion was ever made in the prolonged discussions that took place in fashioning the Declaration and ensuring it international approval."
Similarly, to those who claimed Article 22 of the Covenant applied to the Arabs, Grief makes the case that Article 22 was applied "exclusively to the Jewish National Home, as set down in the Balfour Declaration, a fact everyone was aware of at the time, including the representatives of the Arab national movement, as evidenced by the agreement between Emir Feisal and Dr. Chaim Weizmann dated January 3, 1919 as well as an important letter sent by the Emir to future US Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter dated March 3, 1919."
But his main thesis is that under unassailable international law — every member of the League of Nations signed consent to the San Remo Resolution — Israel had and has legal sovereignty over the entire land then labeled the Palestine Mandate, including what is now known as the West Bank. In this essay, Howard Grief brilliantly fulfills his objective "to set down in a brief, yet clear and precise manner the legal rights and title of sovereignty of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel and Palestine under international law." This paper should be part of your armamentarium for the next time you are told that Resolution XXX of the U.N. guarantees the rights of the Palestinian Arabs to YYY.
READ MORE Samaria and Judea and the eastern part of Jerusalem were seized by Jordan in 1948, when it invaded the new state of Israel. This territory was reclaimed by Israel when she won back the land when Jordan invaded Israel again in 1967. What might have been a simple taking back of its land by declaration had it been done immediately became complex and problematic for several reasons. There was the Oslo Accords of 1993, where Israel agreed to allow the Palestinians to control parts of the West Bank in order to create a peace that never happened; the Arabs never even started to keep their promises. There was the unilateral giving up of Gaza by Israel in August 2005, throwing out every Jew, again to encourage the Arabs to become peaceful. That had the effect of increasing the space within which the Arabs could manufacture hand-made explosives and train snipers, but had no impact on developing a peaceful accord. There was the stupidity of putting the West Bank under a hodge-podge of military government mixed with some regional law and national law, when the Jews won it back in 1967. And so the hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens living in the West Bank are still forced to live under a misbegotten set of laws, all because the politicians didn't seem to know what to do with their land when they won it back.
The Europeans, in contrast, have been consistent. Not surprisingly, the Europeans, who have invested heavily in Palestinian infrastructure and who politically consistently support the Palestinian Arabs, are opposed even to Israel 'annexing' towns acknowledged by all as Jewish. As Raphael Ahren wrote in an article in TOI entitled "Over 1,000 MPs From Across Europe Call For 'Decisive Action' Against Annexation," here:
"We, parliamentarians from across Europe committed to a rules-based global order, share serious concerns about [US] President [Donald] Trump's plan for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the imminent prospect of Israeli annexation of West Bank territory. We are deeply worried about the precedent this would set for international relations at large."
What the Arabs might do in the event of annexation is the subject of Jonathan Ferziger's paper here. Backlash? Insurrection? Or will annexation happen with little drama and things continuing much as before. Ferziger cites Riad Al Khouri, an Amman-based economist and political risk consultant at GeoEconomica:
"Abbas is going to foam at the mouth, he's going to chew the carpet, he's going to spend a whole day screaming his head off about the Palestinian holocaust and how this is the end, because he has to, because his public posture demands it. ... Behind the scenes he's going to be looking for a quid pro quo."
We start with an article that lays out some of the major arguments for and against Israel annexing Judea and Samaria and the Jordan Valley. It discusses options and key possibilities. We continue with papers that more precisely define what might happen. Israel taking back the area lost in the 1948 Jordanian invasion is by no means 'annexation', A country can not 'annex' or 'occupy' its own territory. Samaria and Judea have indeed belonged to Israel for thousands of years historically and symbiotically. It has belonged solely to the Jews, legally, morally and irrevocably, since 1922, according to the world's community of nations. The remaining articles emphasize particular arguments for Israel redeeming its own land. Some of the arguments are reinforced in an interview with Eurgene Kontorovich entitled "Why Israeli Rule in the West Bank Is Legal under International Law." (See here.)
This is an extensively detailed even-handed article on applying Israeli sovereignty to Samaria and Judea, aka the West Bank. Mitchell Bard points out that although "the world refers to the West Bank as 'occupied,' the more accurate description is 'disputed' territory." (I would agree that it certainly is disputed, but the opposite of 'occupied', in the sense of an invasion, is 'not occupied'.) More importantly, he notes that "it is inaccurate to refer to Israel's plans — as critics do — as annexation. Erielle Davidson has explained, 'A nation cannot annex land over which it already has sovereign claims.'
Despite Israeli legal right to all of the land, proposed plans envision redeeming different amounts of land. Minimalist plans would incorporate some of the largest Jewish towns in Samaria and Judea. Most politicians understand that for security reasons, it must also retain control of the Jordan Valley. As usual, Israel has announced it is willing to compromise, and is then surprised that there are objections, no matter what it plans. Maximal plans would mean taking back the whole area, but in practice, plans rarely go beyond adding some of the existing Jewish towns.
All the various plans for applying sovereignty suffer, more or less, from Israel's fear of a global outcry particularly from the European Union and Arab protest. On the other hand, as Bard points out, major Arab states in the Middle East no longer view the Palestinians as a priority, even though they have voiced concern about 'annexation.' Possible action by terrorist groups such as Hezbollah is a consideration. But in truth, there is no real correlation between what Israel does or doesn't do and what any or some of the multitude of Arab terrorists do. They flare up and show what they can do in small ways all the time and in big ways some of the time. There are also genuine concerns about the impact of Israel recovering some of its land on the position of the Jordanian king. But his regime is unstable in so many ways, increased instability and regime failure is as likely from any one of Jordan's many problems.
Not surprising, some European leaders are vocal nay-sayers. More surprisingly, many of the Jews who continue to stay in the Democratic Party, despite the continuous Jew-hate spouted by Muslim congressmen, also oppose Israel acting unilaterally. On the other hand, Israelis, by and large support annexation of the settlements. They oppose a Palestinian Arab state. The Arabs would be getting real land, Jewish land, for promises they have never been known to keep. And there is the practical concern that giving up land means hundreds of thousands more homeless Jews. People remember "the wrenching experience of removing 9,000 from the Gaza Strip. Instead of peace, the end of the 'occupation' of Gaza has resulted in more than 15 years of violence which made Israelis doubt that territorial concessions in the West Bank will bring an end to the conflict." And on the other end of the spectrum from the nay-sayers, there is an increasing number of Israelis on the far right who advocate the return of all of Israeli land to Israel.
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Martin Sherman has written cogently in multiple articles on the fallacy of partial annexation of Samaria and Judea. Creating a single state with both Arabs and Jews in control will also not work. This article has its basis in Daniel Pipes' assertion here that annexing the West Bank would hurt Israel. Pipes says that annexation would rile both her friends and her enemies: the Trump administration, the Democrats, the EU, the Israeli Left, and the Arabs. He also is concerned that annexation would add a large number of additional Arabs. Martin Sherman recapitulates these arguments against annexation and rebuts them clearly and effectively. He acknowledges that the trend in Arab birthrate is in the direction of fewer births. Nevertheless he agrees with Pipes that "even a sizable minority will make Israel untenable as a Jewish nation state." But Sherman's solution is for a "large-scale initiative for the incentivized emigration (evacuation-compensation) of the Arab population of Judea-Samaria and Gaza." Sherman also points out that any major decision or change that Israel has made was accompanied by prophecies of ''imminent conflagrations that will set the Mid-East and beyond ablaze because of it. As a general rule, they have all proven unfounded."
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Daniel Greenfield writes about yet another group that is against Israel taking back her own land: liberal American Jews, It is, unfortunately, the case that 60%-70% of American Jews vote Democratic and oppose or at least do not speak out when the 'progressive' (aka 'socialist') leaders of the democratic party oppose Israel resuming sovereignty over land that is legally Jewish. He points out the House of Saud, "the oldest enemies of an independent free Jewish state, have at least temporarily abandoned their project to destroy it by replacing it with the Islamic terrorist colony of 'Palestine'." He asks pointedly, why can't liberal Jews do the same?
One has to agree with him when he write, "It's a sad day when Wahhabi Islam shows more aptitude for setting aside its fanaticism and adapting to reality than the alphabet soup organization leaders and non-profit newspapers that have been running the liberal Jewish community into the ground for over a hundred years without ever learning a thing." Liberal Jews seen to be making all the wrong choices. They have substituted waiting for Palestinian Arab peace partners in place of waiting for the messiah. That isn't going to happen. And they chose the Socialist Left over support for their own people, apparently ignorant of the fact that Jew-hate has always been a big part of Marxism.
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Victor Rosenthal continues the discussion on the uproar against Israel's annexation. But he also applies a corrective, pointing out exactly what it is that Israel is actually doing and why it is unquestionably legal. The main impact would be that Israel would substitute civil law for mainly military law, which, in itself would be a good thing. Caroline Glick put it this way, here: "Israeli sovereignty, not appeasement is the key to lasting peace. [...] "Israel's civilian legal code is far more liberal than the military laws that currently apply to the areas. The civil rights of area residents — Jews and Arabs alike—will be far better protected under Israeli law than they have been under Israeli military administrative law." The PA won't accept any peace plan that leaves Israel viable, so Israel might as well go ahead and do what she should do.
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Yechiel Leiter writes of the "cascade of dire warnings about the consequences should Israel's elected government follow through on Prime Minister Netanyahu's campaign promise to apply Israeli law in parts of Judea and Samaria." He points out that "[t]he Jewish people are the only people in fact who have a recognized legal right over Judea and Samaria. This was enshrined in the mandate drafted and approved by 51 members of the League of Nations guaranteeing the 'right of Jewish people to reconstitute their national home' in the Land of Israel (1922)." "Judea and Samaria have never been under the sovereignty of any other country than the State of Israel. Jordan's invasion of the territory in 1948 and its attempt to annex it in 1950 was widely opposed internationally."
Moreover, as Leiter writes, "... The prohibition against the forcible transfer of civilians to territory of an occupied state under the Fourth Geneva Convention has no relevance. It was never intended to relate to circumstances of voluntary Jewish settlement on legitimately acquired land which did not belong to a previous lawful sovereign and which was designated as part of the Jewish state under the League of Nations Mandate."
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The Jewish towns in Samaria and Judea, disparagingly referred to as 'settlements', are of course part and parcel of the land of Samaria and Judea, which is legally and morally and historically Jewish. Hence, by definition, these settlements are legal. Yet European politicians and the media has so muddied up the facts that international law is disregarded and these settlements are themselves considered illegal.
As Michel Calvo writes, "According to international law, the Jews are the indigenous people of the lands referred to as Judea, Samaria, Palestine, Israel and the Holy Land. Jewish rights of 'settlement' in the so-called 'West Bank' therefore exist; it cannot seriously be contended, as the EU, France, Britain, Russia, China and other states do, that Jewish communities in the West Bank are illegal and that annexation is contrary to international law.
"Indigenous peoples have the right to the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used or acquired (Art. 26.1) and that the exercise of these rights shall be free from discrimination of any kind (Art. 2). — UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), adopted by the UN General Assembly on September 13, 2007. "Among others, Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Israel and Luxembourg voted in favor of the Declaration. Since 2007, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, who voted against, formally endorsed the Declaration in 2010. In their relations with Israel, these states cannot claim that the Declaration does not apply to Israeli Jews, since such position would amount to blatant racial discrimination."
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Eugene Kontorovich says it's time Israel did what it should have done 53 years ago [in 1967] when it won back Judea, Samaria and the eastern part of Jerusalem, namely, apply Israeli law over the area, as it had been doing for decades before Jordan invaded Israel in 1948 and captured the area illegally. Jordan held the territory for 19 years until it again invaded Israel, and this time Israel was strong enough to win back its land.
As Kontorovich says, "All peace proposals —except Trump's— that have been put forward over the years since Israel liberated the West Bank from Jordanian occupation in the 1967 defensive war have been based on the erroneous idea that Jewish presence there is illegal and needs to be reversed." That is to say, while ethnic cleaning is abhorrent everywhere else, it is to be practiced on some 400,000 Jews in territory that belongs to Israel legally, morally, historically and by conquest.
"Kontorovich also takes issue with the term 'annexation,' explaining that in international law annexation is defined as one state taking land from another sovereign state. Since, in this case, the West Bank has no sovereign, the term 'annexation' is a misnomer." I suspect Israel could have avoided a lot of misdirected argument by just issuing a memo stating that military governance is being replaced by civil authority as of the first of next month.
Kontorovich's article in WSJ, which is posted in the Appendix, makes a good introduction to this article. It notes: "Over the past 53 years, Jews have returned to Judea and Samaria, territories from which they had been, to a man, ethnically cleansed by the Jordanians in 1949. Today, more than 400,000 Israelis live in West Bank settlements, still governed by an odd patchwork of military regulations. As a result, property is governed by obscure Ottoman land law. Permitting for infrastructure projects is difficult and burdensome. Most Israeli environmental regulations don't apply."
Note also that there is a must-read explanatory video featuring Kontorovich. It is a brilliant discourse on Israel's rights, international law, the meaning of "occupation," and more. It is called 'Jewish Settlements & International Law' and was issued. Feb 7, 2017. It is at https://youtu.be/V0ZTi-53t88. Click here.
Also see "International Law Issues in the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict", issued March 8, 2016 and featuring Eugene Kontorovich. It is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwB7LyPhzr0/. Click here.
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Nadia Matar argues against applying sovereignty only in parts of Judea and Samaria with the addition of a Palestinian state. She points out problems with the Trump plan that would give the Arabs a state and most of the territory. For the sake of stability, Israel must apply sovereignty to the whole area. She also writes about what is so often ignored: Mahmoud Abbas may continue to malign Israel and kill Arabs that sell land to Israel, but "[t]he majority of the Arabs here in Judea and Samaria say it very clearly when they are not on camera: We prefer being residents under Israeli control and sovereignty than be citizens under a Palestinian state." she states firmly what is a legal, moral and historic fact, "This land belongs to the Jewish people and only to the Jewish people."
This article is formatted as a transcript to an embedded video featuring Nadia Matar on the Sovereignty Movement. See here.
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Denis MacEoin focuses on Palestinian reactions to Israel restructuring the governing of its Territories from a military administration to a civil one. He points out that "Peace plans and treaties only work when both sides sincerely want to make them do so, and then can require one or more generations of young people who learn the benefits of an end to violence. Sadly, that is still a remote hope." The Palestinian Arabs have acquired land from Israel and much money from the global community -- at least their leaders have. They have signed treaties of peace but they have never forsaken what they consider their mission: to destroy Israel.
In Part I, he explains why "it is common today to find references to Palestine as a mainly Muslim Arab state that was supposedly 'stolen' by Jews, or promised but not given to those people who describe themselves as Palestinians. That is an immense misconception, albeit one that seems to influence political and legal thinking internationally, especially among people who would like to believe it." In Part II he suggests that "if Israel were to extend Israeli law to more land, the move could present a great opportunity to end the conflict. The decisive end by Israel to a Palestinian fantasy that should never have been humoured in the first place might finally enable Palestinian leaders finally to start their citizens on a constructive -- rather than a destructive -- path." He also brings up another reason why peace is difficult, if not impossible: the Islamic law of waqf. "In the present context, it refers to any territory once conquered by or converted to Islam and ruled by a Muslim monarch or government -- such as previously by the Ottoman Empire. No such territory should be allowed to pass into profane, secular, Christian (such as al Andalus, consisting of southern Spain) or, in this case, Jewish hands."
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As Gershon Hacohen writes in the Executive Summary: "Contrary to the alarming charge that the application of sovereignty over parts of the West Bank would transform Israel into a binational state, doing so would not affect 95% of the West Bankers who have been living under the rule of the Palestinian Authority since January 1996. They will continue to do so. The move does entail political risks, but they are smaller than the security hazards that would accompany Israel's inability to maintain a permanent security presence in the Jordan Valley."
Hacohen writes of the risks if Israel incorporates the land it regained. Dan Schueftan has written bluntly of the probabilities if it doesn't [here]: "'To ensure the Israeli response to the Palestinians and Jordan, it is best to strive for establishing permanent Israeli rule in the Jordan Valley.'" He recalls an American plan in 2014 that would place the Jordan Valley in Palestinian hands but would rely on high-tech sensors and unmanned aircraft plus foreign security forces to protect Israel's security in the face of Palestinian hostility. Schueftan sensibly points out that 'Peacekeepers and high-tech surveillance are no substitute for the IDF s on the ground. [...] What Israel needs is not information on threats and the hope that someone else will respond before it's too late. Rather, it needs deterrence that comes with a good chance of prevention and an Israeli force that will neutralize threats when needed.'"
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Judea and Samaria (AKA the West Bank) are home to a half million Jews and somewhere between 2-3 million Arabs.
As part of the Oslo Agreements, Israel put management of parts of Judea and Samaria in Arab hands. Area C was to be fully governed by Israel.
Elad Tzemach describes the 3-way split here:
- Area A (18%) which has full civil and security control by the Palestinian Authority. This is where most of the Palestinian population is, with no Israeli settlements around. Entry into this area is forbidden to all Israeli citizens.
- Area B (22%) which has Palestinian civil control and a joint Israeli-Palestinian security control. This area includes about 450 Palestinian villages and their surrounding lands, with no Israeli settlements.
- Area C (60%) which has full Israeli civil and security control, which is where all Israeli settlements are situated alongside many Palestinian villages. 400,000 Israelis and 300,000 Palestinians live in this area.
At the moment, Israel is making verbal motions to absorb some of Samaria, Judea and the eastern part of Jerusalem, which they were able to take back in 1967 from Jordan, which had captured them in an aggressive invasion in 1948. Unfortunately, in 1967, Israel did not immediately incorporate the area and return it to its pre-1948 status as just another part of the Mandated territory intended as a Jewish State.
The constant delay to action doesn't mean that nothing is happening. In the words of Regavim, many Jewish towns are now surrounded "by clusters of illegal Bedouin squatters’ camps, and [have] suffered for many years from crime, vandalism, burglary and agricultural theft." In the larger picture, while the Jews yatter and chatter, there a dynamics at work which ensure a disastrous outcome for Israel. Namely, while Jews hesitate, the Arabs preordain the ultimate result by taking over state land in Area C in the West Bank nibble by nibble, gulp by gulp.
The PA has enjoyed diplomatic and monetary support of European countries for decades. Although the European Union was an active participant in the formulation of the Oslo Accords and its representatives participated in the signing ceremony, in recent years the EU has actively funded many of the PA's illegal activities in Area C, contributing to the very projects that undermine those accords by taking unilateral steps to create a Palestinian state encompassing all of Judea and Samaria.
Matters have become even worse since the Regavim report on the Arab illegal land grab in Area C (here) came out in November 2018:
Since 2009, the Palestinian Authority has been making methodical progress toward the unilateral creation of a Palestinian state by means of large-scale land theft. Regavim's newly-released report provides details of this hostile takeover of territory, and reveals the primary tactic employed since 2013: Agricultural land-seizure. As opposed to illegal construction, agricultural use is a quick and convenient method of annexing very large tracts of land, under the guise of innocuous 'humanitarian aid.'
Under the system of law in force in Judea and Samaria, agricultural use of land affords rights akin to outright ownership — effectively enabling poached land to be transferred quickly and irrevocably to private Arab hands. This explains the intensive "agricultural" activity orchestrated by the Palestinian Authority in areas surrounding Jewish communities, adjacent to the security fence, and near other strategic assets: The seizure of land in these particular locations interrupts the contiguity of Jewish settlement and annexes a crucial band of territory to Palestinian Authority control.
The modus operandi for these agricultural land-seizures follows a fairly standardized protocol of operating procedures: Access to the area slated for seizure is established by creating new 'agricultural' roads; irrigation networks made up of kilometers of pipes, hundreds of cisterns and water collection devices, and hundreds water tanks are dispersed over massive tracts of open space. The next stage involves seizing control of tens of thousands of dunams of uncultivated land through agricultural take-overs: Mass-scale tree-planting campaigns, plowing and planting crops, constructing hothouses, building terracing and fences, and more — all on land that belongs to the State of Israel. From 2013 through 2017, hundreds of agricultural land-seizure sites have been created using these methods, accessed by more than 150 new roads covering hundreds of kilometers.
One way or another — land theft, constructing illegal buildings, doing agriculture, planting olive trees on land they don't own, encroaching on archaeological sites, raising structures on hills overlooking Jewish towns — the Arabs are gobbling up much of Area C. And no one is stopping them. One can visualize a point in the not so distant future that the discussions now taking place will be moot, because the Arabs, by doing rather than talking and with the help of the European Union and a government reluctant to actually end Arab encroachment, will have established themselves firmly on most of the land, and, for all practical purposes, it will be theirs.
This article provides additional details about what's in Regavim' report entitled "The Roots of Evil: The Palestinian Authority's Systematic Annexation of Tens of Thousands of Acres in Judea and Samaria." The report itself is available here.
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Moshe Dann emphasizes the role of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) in the siphoning off of Jewish land. It's a commonplace observation that the Arabs often falsely accuse Israel of doing what they themselves are actually doing. Hence the accusation that the Jews are stealing Arab land, when the opposite is true. It is also unfortunately true that too often the Arabs claim land although they "lack supporting evidence of ownership, such as deeds, transactions and actual possession, or usufruct. Nevertheless, COGAT recognizes the claims as valid, thus supporting charges that Israel steals private land."
As another example of in a related area, the Knesset tried to put through a law called the Settlements Law under which 4000 housing units built by Jews in good faith on vacant land with government approval would be retroactively legalized and the Arabs who later claimed they were the actual owners would be reimbursed. The Law was struck down by the Supreme Court, thus again favoring Arab land claims. More information is to be found in the next section, the "Israel's Judiciary' section. See also Martin Sherman's article entitled "Judicial Overreach & The Sovereignty Imperative" here.
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In this article, Arik Greenstein describes how the European Union is massively funding illegal Palestinian construction, openly, blatantly, and with no effective opposition. The embedded map makes clear how efficient the European project has been. Greenstein makes clear that the Israeli bureaucracy has backtracked on stopping the Europeans, while accepting lame excuses.
Aviel Schneider, writing in Israel Today [here] may have reached a core understanding why the Europeans are acting this way:
READ MOREA recent report from the Israeli non-governmental organization Regavim shows how broadly and profoundly the scheme by the Palestinian Authority is working. Barren hilltops, valleys, and other areas surrounding Jewish settlements in Area C are being taken over with the full knowledge of the Europeans. "The European governments don't just have a problem with Israel; first and foremost they have a problem with the Jewish people. Just look at the increasing antisemitism in Europe ... and the Palestinians are profiting from it."
Acting on the Fayyad Plan, the Arabs have been pursuing focused strategic illegal building in Area C of Samaria and Judea, which is supposed to be completely under Israel control. As Edwin Black writes, "European governments and the PA have completed the shredding of the already-weakened Oslo agreements." "In many instances, Arab residents from Areas A and B are bused in, encouraged by incentives to relocate or start a second home in the new settlements. ... In several cases, the illegal constructions are deliberately established on Israeli military reserves." Stopping them is difficult because of "Israel's complex legal system." And there's little indication that the politicians are making an effort.
European funding is not haphazard. Money for this takeover appears to be routed through the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC), which, itself, has had strong ties for decades to a terrorist group, the Popular Front for the Liberation Palestine (PFLP). They have shared resources and people. Senior PFLP leaders have served in high level positions in UAWC. "Despite, the growing body of public information about the UAWC and the PFLP, there is no indication that any of its donors intend to reduce the millions they are sending the UAWC for illegal development projects in Area C."
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Naomi Kahn writes specifically of one aspect of the Arab illegal construction in Area C of Samaria and Judea; namely, the connection of these illegal structures to the East Jerusalem Electric Company's (EJEC) grid. "Other than the Israel Electric Company, the East Jerusalem Electric Company is the only company in Israel licensed to distribute electricity throughout the country." Regavim attempted to determine how these unauthorized connections of EJEC to the structures erected by the Arabs came about? The Israeli Civil Administration stonewalled, so Regavim "petitioned the court to compel the Civil Administration to provide satisfactory answers about this absurd situation." "... on the one hand, the Israeli government has vowed to fight and win what it has called ‘the battle for Area C,’ on the other hand it is allowing this phenomenon to entrench and reward the illegal construction that is the primary tool for the hostile Palestinian takeover of Area C.” What is going on?
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Eliana Rudee writes that, while knives, car rammings, and bullets are often seen as the modern weapons of choice in Palestinian terrorism against Israel, according to agriculturalists and Israeli NGOs, trees could be the greatest threat to ensuring the future of Israel.
Yes, trees.
Usually olive trees. The Arabs are doing large-scale agriculture - on Jewish land. Well, the plantings may not be extensive, but the land grabbed for these plantings is.According to Regavim International Division Director Naomi Kahn, Israel is being blocked out of its own land in a "silent conquest." The Palestinian Authority has been illegally planting trees in Area C, land under full Israeli control, with millions of euros financial backing from the European Union (EU) and a Norwegian NGO, which has affiliations with The Popular Front for the liberation of Palestine (a terrorist organization as described by Israel, the United States Canada, Australia, and even the EU itself).
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As if it comes from a single source, the news media have overwhelmingly and often in the same words portrayed the Bedouins illegally building in Khan al-Ahmar as defenseless, long-term occupants; Israel of course is the evil giant stripping the Bedouin group "of its land, its culture and its way of life." None of this is factual, but Israel is again facing a dilemma. "Enforcing its own High Court ruling will portray Israel as a war criminal [the ICC again]. Overriding it will turn Israel into a laughing stock. So far, the Israeli government has chosen the latter." To put it bluntly, Israel prefers to reduce the security of its state and to lose more of its small amount of land than do what it needs to do. The Bedouins, while garnishing the sympathy of the world as helpless, are engaged in a cold-blooded detailed plan to take control of Israeli land, dunim by dunim, and set up, in its stead, a de facto Arab state.
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Yaakov Eliraz provides us with an accurate picture of how the Arabs have been extending their holding by illegal means. Eliraz writes: "The process is simple: First, they build illegal structures in an area in which they have a particular interest, challenging the Israeli enforcement authorities. This is followed by extensive use of legal means to prevent or delay demolition, as they employ the media and public opinion to portray the demolition efforts as a violation of human rights. Finally, the illegal construction is legitimized by means of civic planning processes." The game is simple, but deadly.
It is worth noting that in the words of Jacob Magid, January 9, 2020 (here):
READ MOREDefense Minister Naftali Bennett on Thursday announced the appointment of an external adviser who will be tasked with combating illegal Palestinian construction in the West Bank. Kobi Eliraz, who as Defense Ministry adviser on settlement affairs from 2016 to 2019 worked primarily on regulating illegal Israeli construction beyond the Green Line, will now "coordinate the fight against illegal Palestinian construction in Area C on behalf of the defense minister," Bennett's office said in a statement. "Citing Defense Ministry statistics, Kovi Eliraz said that compared to Israeli settlers who number roughly 450,000 but take up roughly 9% of Area C, the 240,000 Palestinians there have managed to gain control of 30% of the land, with much of it being used for agricultural and grazing purposes."
Last month, Bennett declared that combating illegal Palestinian construction in the roughly 60% of the West Bank that is under Israeli military and civil control based on the 1994 Oslo Accords would be a top priority for his office. "The future of the Land of Israel is at stake," Bennett said in a statement introducing the appointment of Eliraz. "Unfortunately, while the Palestinians have been taking over territory in a largely uninterrupted manner, the State of Israel simply has not risen to the occasion."
The Israeli judiciary has finally rejected 'embarrassing' bids to delay a Khan al-Ahmar evacuation hearing. It set a new date of November 1, 2020, by when the state must explain to the court why it had failed to evacuate the tents and huts and buildings that are home to some 180 members of the Jahalin tribe. But see the next article by Adam Berkowitz.
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It is discouraging that Adam Eliyahu Berkowitz, writing more recently than the other articles on Arab illegal building, tells the same story. The Arabs continue to build larger and stronger structures without permit on land that is not theirs. On September 9, 2020, despite the court's demanding it be told by November 1, 2020 why Khan al-Ahmar hasn't been evacuated, it was announced that Israel's decision to demolish Khan al Ahmar was postponed an additional six months. Here it is going into April 2021, and nothing much has changed, even though the media made much of the fact that Israel demolished two Khan al-Ahmar structures, sizes unknown, in January 2021.
Much of the illegal building is funded by the European Union (EU) that "provides money, people and planning, and legal knowledge." [The EU] "funds schools that intentionally place Palestinian children in danger in order to illegally grab Israeli land." And they have not been stopped from doing this by successive Israeli governments.
The article contains a novel way of confirming the facts. An Ad Kan narrator says:
"In the past year we have infiltrated agents in the Palestinian Authority under false identities and established contacts with EU officials — and what we have discovered is State of Israel, what we discovered was the European Union's 'Century Project'."
Aryeh Savir in "Exposed: PA Grand Plan to Occupy Area C, Israel is 'Losing Judea and Samaria'" here also has written on how Ad Kan obtained its information. He writes that Israel is losing the battle for the control of Judea and Samaria to the Palestinian Authority's (PA) grand plan to take it over illegally."
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It is true that the Palestinians are stealing Jewish Land with the help of the European Union. This isn't surprising. The EU has made no secret of its support of legal and illegals Palestinian Arab activities. What is surprising is the illegality is aided and abetted by what seems an unlikely source: Israel's Supreme Court. The next set of articles tells us about this.
There is an anecdote that sums up the sorry state of events. The Arabs set up tents on the hills in Area C and declare it their land. In any war in the area, the Arabs will have the advantage of location. The Israeli Judiciary does little or nothing to prevent this. So some Jews decided to do what the Arabs were doing. They set up tents on some vacant hills. They were told to take them down; Jews are subject to Ottoman Law in the Territories and it is not permitted. It is certainly factual, as Moshe Dann (see above) writes:
The status of land in Judea and Samaria was further confused by former High Court Chief Justice Dorit Beinisch, who, at the end of her term decided unilaterally that hazakah, the right to claim title to land by working it and paying taxes applied only to Arabs, not Jews.
We've seen that the judiciary often takes great pains to avoid having to stop illegal Arab building. This get little attention in the global press. Contrariwise, when the High Court struck down the 2017 Settlement Law, multiple articles appeared, almost all of which saw the end of the Law as a good thing, because it protected Arab interests. Jewish interests didn't matter. The article below by Yonah Jeremy Bob was as close to (left of) center as we could find. Note that the comments accompanying the article in the Jerusalem Post were in general much less kind to the Supreme Court than Bob is.
Bob writes that the 2017 Settlement Law "would have retroactively legalized over 4,000 unauthorized settler units in the West Bank." It should be noted that most of these are single outposts built next to a Jewish town. Marcy Oster, writing for the Arizona Jewish Post observed that "The Knesset passed the measure after Israel demolished homes or entire outposts built on lands that were later discovered to be privately owned by Palestinians." [Ed: Before assuming that Palestinian assertions of home ownership are necessarily accurate or even plausible, see Moshe Dann's article above.]
The Settlement Law was declared 'unconstitutional', which is curious in that Israel does not have a constitution. This is another instance of a high-handed left-wing extremist ruling by the High Court of Justice that capriciously negates a law passed by the Knesset. "Knesset Speaker Yariv Levin said the court 'trampled Israeli democracy and basic human rights' and warned that 'the Knesset will not accept the continued harm to its authority.'" Bob summarized the ruling this way: "the High Court said it was declaring the law unconstitutional since the law, 'retroactively legalizes illegal building by Jews in the area [West Bank],' while having 'deeply harmful consequences for the substantive rights of Palestinians.'"
As noted in Asian News: "The 2017 law would have legalised homes built on private land in the West Bank without government authorisation, provided that they had been established 'in good faith' or had government support, and that the Palestinian owners receive 125 per cent financial compensation for the land."
Dov Benovadia writing in hamodia.com explained: "The purpose of the law is to prevent demolitions of Israeli houses inadvertently built on land claimed by Arabs in Yehudah and Shomron. The law replaces the process which had been in place previously, in which Arab claims of ownership of land on which Israeli homes are built were adjudicated by the High Court. The bill instead institutes a special arbitration process that would, among other things, advocate land swaps that would replace the land claimed by Palestinians with state land of equal or greater value that is not in dispute."
There is also an excellent article by Martin Sherman entitled "Judicial Overreach & The Sovereignty Imperative," which takes the High Court to task for taking down the 2017 Settlement Law. It can be read here.
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Alex Dershowitz notes that while In the United States, the judiciary is the third branch of government and co-equal with the elected legislative and executive branches, in most parliamentary democracies, the judiciary is subordinate to the legislature (of which the executive is part), though they are generally somewhat independent.
Dershowitz writes further that, "Israel is a parliamentary democracy with an independent judiciary headed by a Supreme Court. It does not have a written Constitution, but it does have a series of basic laws that are quasi constitutional in nature. Unlike the United States Supreme Court which is constrained by the requirements that there be an actual case and controversy and that the case be brought by someone with standing, the Israel Supreme Court declined to accept such constraints on its power." Instead, it has become "increasingly involved in political and electoral issues," which often brings it into conflict with the Knesset.
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As this article indicates, groups and individuals have protested the High Court's actions by word and by deed. This article describes one such example:
READ MORE"A large convoy set out Sunday morning in protest over the High Court of Justice's decision to hear petitions against the Likud-Blue and White unity government deal. The convoy, comprised of more than 100 Israeli flag-carrying cars led by the Zionist watchdog Im Tirtzu, accused the High Court of abusing its power by unlawfully interfering in the Knesset's agenda." As Matan Peleg phrased it, "This blatant violation of the basic principles of democracy endangers the future of the State of Israel, and the time has come for the judges to end their judicial dictatorship and realize that this is a democracy, not Iran."
This article gives us a good view of a serious problem, namely, Israel's Supreme Court is arbitrarily and arrogantly overriding, overturning and ignoring Knesset rulings. Avi Abelow writes about Israel's Knesset Speaker resigning his position as Knesset Speaker. He felt he had no other choice, given that "[t]he HCJ decision is not based on the language of the law, but on a unilateral and extreme interpretation. The decision of the High Court destroys the work of the Knesset. The High Court decision constitutes a gross and arrogant intervention of the judiciary in the affairs of the elected legislature. The High Court decision infringes on the sovereignty and sovereignty of the Knesset."
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Martin Sherman has written a well-documented essay on how Israel's judiciary is subverting the democratic process. Because this is going on, the judiciary is losing its aura of infallibility, and is being perceived as just another political entity. He cites Ran Hirschl, who wrote:
"In Israel, the negative impact of the judicialization of politics on the Supreme Court's legitimacy is already beginning to show its mark. Over the past decade, the public image of the Supreme Court as an autonomous and impartial arbiter has been increasingly eroded... as political arrangements and public policies agreed upon in majoritarian decision-making arenas are likely to be reviewed by an often hostile Supreme Court. As a result, the court and its judges are increasingly viewed by a considerable portion of the Israeli public as pushing forward their own political agenda."
As Sherman puts it, [The Supreme Court is using] "the law as a political weapon." In doing so, it is losing the people's trust. But, as we've seen in the previous section, this hasn't yet stopped the Court from allowing the Arabs to take over large swatches of Area C in Judea and Samaria, while restricting Jews from expanding their holdings.
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While the Jews waffle, the secular Jews waiting for the Palestine to graciously decide to live peacefully, there is a dynamic at work which ensure a disastrous outcome for Israel. Namely, the Arabs, who allow no Jews in areas they control, are illegally taking over more and more land in Area C, which is supposed to be totally under Israeli jurisdiction. The military and living space consequences are dire.
This is why some courageous souls have suggested that Israel carry out the second stage of Population Exchange. The first transfer was at the time modern Israel became a state. Almost a million Jews were kicked out of the Arab countries, forced to leave behind land, property and personal possessions., The ancestors of many of these Jews had lived there hundreds, even thousands, of years before the Arabs invaded in the 7th Century CE.
The reason for transferring the 'Palestinian' Arabs from Israel and its territories was stated succinctly by Bezalel Yoel Smotrich, leader of the Religious Zionist Party, in an interview with the New York Times June 2, 2020, here.
It's either [Jewish]settlements or a Palestinian state. "It's either or," he stated. "Either the settlements have a future, or the Palestinian state does — but not both."
Transferring the local Arabs from the land set aside for a Jewish State in 1922 to some spacious viable area somewhere in the enormous, partially empty area the Arab States control would stop the bickering and hostilities and deaths we now see daily at the borders of Israel, within its cities and in the Territories, Judea, Samaria and Gaza. It would create a better life for the Jews and for the Palestinian Arabs, as well as for the those Arabs who have been living as 'refugees' on UN welfare without the rights of citizenship in Arab countries.
The global media has since 1967, when Israel reclaimed Samaria and Judea, pushed the fallacious idea that the Arabs own Samaria and Judea and eastern Jerusalem. It is a 'everybody knows' that blocks the truth from being acted upon. The truth? That Samaria and Judea and some of the eastern part of Jerusalem were ordinary parts of Israel and were grabbed by Jordan in 1948 when it invaded the newborn state of modern Israel. In 1967, Jordan again invaded Israel, and this time Israel regained this land, land that belonged to her. The Arabs retained 99.9% of the what had been the Ottoman Middle East. is that not enough?
This set of papers in this section discuss the second part of a population exchange, i.e., that the Arabs, for the most part, be moved out of Israel and the Territories of Judea and Samaria. It is the most sweeping of the ideas of how to obtain peace in the Middle East. But small measures aren't working. If anything, the Arabs are getting better at murder and destruction of Jews and their property. Eliminating the Jews remains the mission and focus of the leadership and most of the Arabs of Gaza and the Territories, To date they have had little time to waste on developing a normal government with normal focus on family and jobs and recreation.
Note that none of the papers suggest that the Arabs just be kicked out, in imitation of how the Arabs governments in the 1940-50s kept the Jewish homes and property when they forced the Jews to leave, literally with the clothes on their back and whatever personal articles they could carry.
Lewis Lipkin defines population exchange as "the legal and enforced exchange of populations so as to eliminate conflict by eliminating contact." He notes that "[p]opulation exchange is not a new idea. Sometimes a complete separation is the only way that two groups unable to live together can get on with their lives. It might be time to complete the separation of the Jews and the Arabs. The Jews were evacuated from Arab countries when Israel was born. Maybe it's time to do the second half of the transfer: move the Palestinian Arabs to Arab countries." If it is moral and not racist to contemplate the removal of hundreds of thousands of Jews, who have legitimate ownership, from Samaria and Judea, it is not racist to transfer Palestinian Arabs to one or more Arab states.
There are, moreover, practical reasons. First, were an Arab state to be established in Samaria and Judea, it would, like Gaza, become yet another area from which to launch attacks against Israel. Second, as Lipkin points out, "The neck between the 1967 border and Netanya on the Mediterranean coast is less than 10 miles. There is no depth to defend against external attack — against external attackers that are supported by 5th columns that can draw on some 2 million internal enemies. Neither the geographic situation or the demographics are acceptable." As we have seen, any Israeli concession encourages the diplomats of a hostile Europe and UN to pressure Israel to give up yet more land. And if the Palestinian Arab population is not resettled in Arab Land, the Peace Diplomats will pressure Israel to allow a sufficient number of alleged 1948 "refugees" to come live in Israel, where they can more easily work to destroy it.
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Martin Sherman's writes about an article by Newt Gingrich called "Palestinians Are An 'Invented' People," December 9, 2011. In it, Gingrich said, "I think that we've had an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs and who were historically part of the Arab community." Gingrich kicked up a storm. In response, the more the writer's ignorance, the more he was appalled. Many responded that of course they knew this all along and it was no big deal. They didn't think to tell us why they had never corrected the notion that the Palestinian Arabs were a people. And some admired his courage.
Invented is right on the mark. In 1920 at the San Remo conference, the League of Nations, as part of their cutting up what had been the Middle East section of the Ottoman Empire, declared the area called the Palestine Mandate was legally destined to become a Jewish state. There were already some local Arabs living there, but the majority of Arabs had started coming from the neighboring Arab countries after 1905 for the economic opportunities created by the Jews and the British. These Arabs became a people overnight by Yasir Arafat's decree in 1964. Well, most of them become Palestinian but the Arabs in the part of the Palestine Mandate called Samaria and Judea, (aka the West Bank) were not part of the new Palestinians people. The West Bank had been seized by Jordan in 1948 when it invaded Israel. Then Jordan attacked Israel again in 1967 and this time Israel regained Samaria and Judea. Arafat repalestined the local Arabs. The Arabs living in the territory reclaimed by the Jews in 1967 became Palestinians, joining the 'Palestinians' living in the rest of Israel. Many of these new Palestinians objected. If they were to be considered part of a collective, they were Syrian, and had been so from the time the Ottomans ruled the area they called Syria Palestina.
Sherman asks how this plays into Israel's major concern: survival as the "nation-state of the Jewish people." Clearly, both demographics and geography as well as factual history are the substrate upon which political decisions are to be made. If the notion of an authentic Palestinian people is fallacious, it follows that they are not the owners of "Palestine" and the thrust to deprive Israel of its rightfully-owned land becomes nonsensical, if not downright hostile. Nevertheless, there are the so-called Arab refugees, individuals from different clans and their descendants, who have been kept in a state of suspended animation for years. Sherman does a masterful job in laying out the outlines of a comprehensive plan to relocate these people to a suitable milieu in an Arab country or Arab countries, where they could live as citizens and be responsible for their own lives. The plan would also benefit the economy of the countries that would play host.Martin Sherman has written other papers on subsidized emigration. One is called 'Incentivized Emigration: An idea whose time has come?' available at Arutz-Sheva here.
READ MORE Ted Belman and others have written extensively of the advantages of moving them to Jordan, where the majority of the population is already Palestinian Arab. See for example this video. Moving to Sinai is a less familiar possibility. In another article entitled "Anti-Israel Travesty of Population Transfer from January 15, 2020 (here), Steven Shamrak reminds us that "[on] 29 November 1947, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 181, calling for the partition of what is left of the Mandate into Arab and Jewish states (into ridiculous six triangles). Interestingly, the resolution had a provision of population transfer. Arabs rejected this resolution and waged war against Jews! [...] Just two years earlier, 12 million people were transferred between India and Pakistan to stop the blood bath and resolve the conflict!
Because Israel won the war, when all international anti-Semites were hoping that Jews would lose, against seven well-armed Muslim states, the UN deliberately stopped the flood of Arab refugees from Israel! By doing so, the UN has created an unresolvable conflict and persistently has been maintaining it." In the present article, Shamrak writes why the local Arabs should be moved into the Sinai, which in point of fact never actually was part of Egypt.
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It would be suicidal for Israel to allow a Palestinian state to be carved out of Biblical Israel, particularly one that would control a major component of her water supply and is capable of shooting missiles everywhere in Israel. But there remains the festering problem of a growing Palestinian refugee population living on cradle-to-coffin debilitating welfare, taught to hate Israel and the West and used as pawns to make claim to Jewish land. The editors of Think-Israel propose that the Palestinian Arabs — those from the refugee camps and those residing in the Territories — be helped to establish a viable state within the land given to the Arabs by the League of Nations when the Ottoman Empire was dissolved. The state would be physically well-separated from Arab population centers and legally independent of the Arab country that previously owned the land. Within their state, the Palestinian Arabs would have complete control of their politics, education, culture and living style. Given recent political developments in the Middle East where Israel's military and technological strength is a major asset, the strengthening of Israel's appreciation of its own religious roots and a growing disbelief in the reliability of supposedly impartial external organizations, this is a propitious time to create such a state.
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It is a curious fact that Bedouins, living as nomads with no permanent housing for centuries now are claiming hundreds of thousands of dunams as their land. They have a romanticized tale that they are indigenous, despite the fact that most of the Bedouin tribes first came in the 18th and 19th centuries from Arabia, Egypt and Transjordan. They claim the Ottomans officially distributed tribal lands to them in the Negev. This, as have other dramatic claims to land ownership, has proven to be fact-free. [http://www.thetower.org/article/why-the-bedouins-claims-to-the-negev-are-outrageous/]. The media and the EU tend to lap up their claims and make no comment when they are shown to be totally without merit. When pressed, the Bedouins claim Israeli law doesn't apply to the Negev. But buffoonery pays. And their encroachments have become permanent.
In this essay, Mordechai Kedar dwells on some larger issues. He points out that "the truth of the matter is that the problem is not only an issue of the land and the Bedouins' illegal settlement on state lands." There is the deep problem that their lives are structured around tribal practices that have long been outmoded in the larger society. Though polygamy is illegal in Israel, the Bedouins practice large-scale polygamy. They tend to marry relatives, "and the result is that many children suffer from genetic diseases, some of which are severe and life-threatening," and taking much of the State's resources allocated to children. They indulge in honor killings and blood feuds. Israel, like other states in the Middle East where Bedouins live, hasn't been successful in coping with these practices, which are deeply rooted in their tribal culture. Kedar points out that these practices need to be changed, so that the Bedouins become normative citizens. Israel needs a holistic sustained approach. It is not acceptable that "the citizen in Tel Aviv is forbidden to build illegally on state land, while a citizen in the Negev is permitted." The Bedouins have taken advantage of their political and civil rights, which are equal to those of all Israel's citizens. Now they must be educated into accepting that they also have the same obligations as all other citizens.
See: http://abuyehuda.com/2021/02/the-bedouins-and-the-jewish-state/ - http://www.thetower.org/article/why-the-bedouins-claims-to-the-negev-are-outrageous/
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The majority of the Palestinian Arabs continue to see their mission as the destruction of Israel. Ben Shapiro writes that "[t]he time for half measures has passed. Bulldozing houses of homicide bombers is useless. Instituting ongoing curfews in Arab-populated cities is useless. Roadblocks, touch fences, midnight negotiations and cease-fires are useless." The solution? Shapiro writes, "If you believe that the Jewish state has a right to exist, then you must allow Israel to transfer the Palestinians and the Israeli-Arabs from Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Israel proper. It's an ugly solution, but it is the only solution. And it is far less ugly than the prospect of bloody conflict ad infinitum. When two populations are constantly enmeshed in conflict, it is insane to suggest that somehow deep-seated ideological change will miraculously occur, allowing the two sides to live together." He might have added that, as things are now, the Arabs can lose many of the hostilities they start with no consequence, but Israel would not survive even one defeat.
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This section has articles striding in time from the miracle of Hanukah, described by its author as the first battle against transnationalism, on to the Middle Ages when Christianity battled Islam to prevent it taking over Europe to some current concerns such as the activism of the modern fascist organization, Antifa, which claims to be fighting fascism.
These days, as throughout history, Jews are often caught in the crossfire and, just as frequently, are the first victims of a larger plan to take over a country or a kingdom. Today, some Jews devoted to the Democratic Party are beginning to reluctantly admit the party has been infiltrated by Socialists and Muslims, and both have an intrinsic hate of Judaism. As Lawrence Bush wrote in his article entititled "December 30, 1066: The Granada Massacre," https://jewishwebsite.com/featured/december-30-1066-the-granada-massacre/50392/.]
"A Muslim mob stormed the royal palace in Granada, Spain on this date [December 30] in 1066, crucified Joseph ibn Naghrela, the Jewish vizier to the Berber king, and massacred more than a thousand Jewish families." The violence, as usual, had been preceded by verbal hostility, including even a "maliciously anti-Semitic poem."
How familiar it all sounds.
Uzay Bulut writes on nine Christian churches, all named Hagia Sophia, that have been converted to mosques in Turkey. "These former churches no longer have local congregants because the Christians of these cities were massacred or deported about a hundred years ago." He traces the history of these churches, pointing out that "[t]he genocide against Greeks, Armenians and Assyrians committed by Ottoman Turkey from 1913 to 1923 has nearly marked the end of the indigenous Christian communities in the region. But it was not only hundreds of thousands of lives that perished in the genocide. The religious and cultural heritage of these peoples was also largely destroyed."
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From its inception, Islam was an invading army, conquering, slaughtering, vandalizing the Middle East, India, and invading Europe again and again after conquering Spain in the 8th Century. All of Christian Europe would likely be Islamic, were it not that the Islamic invaders were stopped at Vienna in 1683. And it turned the tide. Raymond Ibrahim tells us the tale, noting an important byproduct of Islam's continuous jihad over the centuries: Europe's subconscious fear of Islam. Could that be why Europeans handle the current Islamic 'refugees' so gingerly?
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Emil Avdaliani writes of the Khazars, a nomadic people from the Eurasian steppes, who managed to create a 'large powerful state' although hemmed in by the Islamic Empire. Remembered now mainly because they converted to Judaism, the Khazars achieved significant geopolitical power by taking advantage of the local geography. They situated themselves at the crossroads of two important trade routes and controlled the major rivers of the region, which allowed them to collect taxes from those entering and leaving these rivers. Similarly, they aimed at controlling key passes and cities on land. Moreover, they allied themselves with the Byzantines to neutralize the Muslim threat. And finally, urged by their Christian and Islamic neighbors to adopt their religions, they chose neither, but became Jews.
Nowadays, you might read a comment that modern Jews are not descended from the ancient Israelites but are descendants of the Khazars, a notion expanded in print by Arthur Koestler. Despite all the information tracing the DNA of modern-day Cohanim to ancient Cohanim, this false information on Jewish lineage continues to be cited in many an anti-Jew comment.
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Martin Sherman discusses the defects of the policy of 'land for peace', which found expression in the disastrous provisions of the 1993 Oslo Accords. Giving up land was never a way to reduce Arab animosity because the Arab states weren't angry over the amount of land Israel held. They were outraged that Israel existed at all. Yet Simon Peres, who understood that Arab hatred had nothing to do with Israel's land holdings, stupidly signed the Olso Accords, initiating the practice of giving up land for nothing, or even worse, expanding the area in which the Arabs could train to attack Israel without hindrance. While the Arabs gained the luxury of an enlarged platform for war, Israel lost "territorial barriers and strategic depth," which significantly reduced the security of its population. The story of not acting on one's knowledge and experience was repeated some years later when Ariel Sharon, who had written on the importance of retaining Gaza, gave it away unilaterally. Those are the facts. What remains a mystery is why Israeli leaders are so often dazzled by the talk of peace, they ignore the dangers to Israel of giving up its land, dangers which they had previously understood so well.
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In Part 1, Soeren Kern discribes Antifa's ideology and its structure as a global network that started in Europe in the 1920s and has no limits on its use of violence and destruction of property in its fight against "fascism.' Part 11 focuses on Antifa in the United States. Antifa pretends it is a loose connection of grass roots groups that have sprung up to fight fascism. Actually, as Kern notes, Antifa is "highly networked, well-funded and has a global presence." It rails against the police. It uses violence and destruction of public and private property to carry out its objectives and is often employed by the Left to do what the Left can not do openly, i.e., eliminate the capitalist system. This goal remains constant, while the triggers for Antifa's destructive behavior vary, depending on what they can use at a particular moment to be outraged by. In sum, it is a fascist organization claiming to fight fascism.
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As far back as the beginning of the United States of America and even before, piracy offshore Africa has been a scourge to boats transferring goods between countries. It is not far from the truth to say that thanks to the problems caused by the capture of American ships by the Barbary pirates, America reluctantly decided to utilize and expand its navy for warfare [Jefferson and the Barbary Pirates By Dave Benner on Jan 26, 2016. https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/review/jefferson-and-the-barbary-pirates/]. As recently as the 21st Century, between 2007 and 2012, more than 200 vessels were hijacked by Somali pirates. Peter Cook and Terry McKnight recount the story of the capture by Somali pirates of the Sirius Star, the largest ship ever pirated. They make clear that piracy was big business, done by young men with few other sources of income and 'owned' by organized criminals, 'warlords' undeterred by their non-functioning government. But, as Cook and McKnight write, "the entire maritime community came together to find a solution regarding Somalia. And succeeded. " The unabridged Horn of Africa counter-piracy operation has been a text book success for future international conflicts."
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In Israel, it's hard to drop a pin into the ground most everywhere, without dredging up some object from antiquity. David Israel writes about a discovery of gold coins In Yavneh around Chanukah time. They found "gold dinars issued by the Aghlabid dynasty that ruled in North Africa, in the region of modern Tunisia, on behalf of the Abbasid Caliphate centered in Baghdad." As one of the archaeologists said, these are real Chanuka gelt.
Older coins, Hasmonean coins, were also found at Chanukah time in Shilo.
These coins date back to the ruler Alexander Jannnaeus and his
successors, so they are some 2000 years old.
[https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/2000-year-old-Hasmonean-coins-unearthed-in-Shiloh-on-Hanukkah-612567
"2,000-year-old Hasmonean coins unearthed in Shiloh over Hanukkah"
By Ilanit Chernick, December 30, 2019]
A seal (bulla) excavated in the City of David in Jerusalem makes even the Hasmonean coins seem relatively new. It dates from after the destruction of the first Temple, making it more than 2500 years old.
[https://www.jns.org/excavations-in-jerusalem-dredge-up-a-seal-impression-from-after-first-temple/ Excavations In Jerusalem Dredge Up A Seal Impression From After First Temple JNS, June 30,2020]
What we are talking about in the January–December 2019 Issue
Editor's Note:Think-Israel tends to use salafist rather than extremist or Islamist or militant or fundamentalist or activist to describe generically a pious Muslim, one who sticks as closely as possible to the unfiltered words and actions of Mohammad and the first three generations of Muslims, including, especially, the Companions of the Prophet. In modeling himself as closely as he can on the preachings and practices of Mohammad, a salafist can in modern terms be precisely described as an uninhibited terrorist, a theological supersessionist, a political supremacist who believes Islam and sharia law must dominate and a social barbarian, who wages jihad with whatever tools are available. Thanks to the high quality of whitewash supplied by sympathetic propagandists, he seldom is so described.
This issue begins with suggesting why an organization such as the Muslim Brotherhood, with its wide range of ways to promote sharia from networking with politically, socially and theologically important groups in the West to starting the terrorists group Hamas in the Middle East, is still not labeled terrorist by the American government. It goes on to look at anti-Jewish activities that American Jews allow with no protest or participate in to some extent. It is most puzzling that just as Resurgent Islam, in league with Far-Left Democratic Party socialists, is again stirring a serious and strong brew of anti-Semitism, American Jews are largely unperturbed. American Jews who promote far-left-socialism, globalism and almost any group but their own, often work for the enlargement of socialist institutions, ignoring or castigating Judaism. Meantime, European Jews are already suffering severely from a large increase of anti-Semitism stemming from the large number of Muslim 'refugees' that have been coming to Europe the part few years.
We conclude with a History Section which begins with a description of some current excavations in Jerusalem, in the City of David and moves to other eras. One particularly startling bit of history is how the IDF had to be carefully conditioned to override their concern for all Jews so they could become capable of kicking out the innocent Jews living and working in Gaza, leaving it in the hands of Arab terrorists. It was supposed to bring peace. It brought increased hatred from the Arabs and havoc among the Jews.
Considering the villainy done by the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) world wide, not exempting the USA, why is there still argument about labeling the MB a terrorist organization? The answer may lie in their use of stealth jihad as a major technique in the early stages of infiltration of a host country, holding back their strong-arm methods until they judge they can go for full control. Their 'quiet subversion', as Raymond Ibrahim puts it, allows people that don't want to see the obvious to point to the MB's peaceful behavior as evidence that the MB means no harm. In Prez Obama's time, they were even welcome in the White House and capable of squashing anti-Muslim Government training material (see here). Even today, if you google queries involving them, many of the items focus on islamophobia and other noxious injuries to the MB, not coming from them.
This set of articles starts with information on Sharia law, the practical product of Sharia ideology, the rock to which the Islamic lifestyle is anchored, before discussing some MB techniques and gambits. The next articles look at CAIR, an MB front linked to Hamas, and Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, a prominent figure in the MB leadership. For insight into how CAIR argues, read James Simpson article, "CAIR's New 'Islamophobia' Report: The Larger Threat," here.
Finally, we extend the range of information about the MB to the Middle East, where MB groups and activities promoting its global mission have, in the last few years, been in conflict with such countries as Egypt and Saudi Arabia but are acceptable in Jordan, Qatar and others countries.
The most benevolent definition of sharia I've seen comes from the Ing website here. It starts this way: "With the focus in recent years on the issue of Sharia in the United States, many myths and half-truths have arisen around the topic. The following are a series of questions and answers about Sharia in the United States, including a look at what exactly Sharia means and encompasses, how much of a real threat Sharia really poses in this country, and who is behind this campaign." The author(s) use a great deal of whitewash, as they paint a well-sanitized portrait of a peaceful Islam. Take for example the answer to this question, "Isn't it un-American to follow Sharia in the United States?" After claiming an unwarranted affinity of Muslim sharia to Catholic magisterium and Jewish halakhah, they state that the "essential parts of Sharia are practices such as daily prayers, fasting during the month of Ramadan, marriage contracts, and rules for charity and investments." This blandly ignores stoning adulterers and honor killing girls who have been raped, two of sharia's many such quaint customs. In this article, Earl Taylor explains why, contrary to what Islamic propagandists claim, the US Constitution and Islamic sharia law are not compatible.
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Bill Warner writes on an important fact: Islam's ideology isn't just 'religious', it is also political, dwelling on how Islam is to dominate the entire world. This means that those who are skittish about discussing religion can examine Islam's concepts as they affect practical matters, such as a Muslim's attitude toward the kafir (a non-Muslim) versus how he behaves to another Muslim. If there is one flaw, it is that Warner notes that there are essentially two Korans without emphasizing the implications. The early verses written in Mecca and the later ones in Medina are contradictory. The early ones praise the Jew, the later ones revile him. In Islamic law, the later verses abrogate — cancel, nullify — the early one. Unfortunately the verses are arranged roughly by size from long to short and not by topic, event or chronological order. For a systematic analysis, see "Peace or Jihad? Abrogation in Islam' by David Bukay here and Stephen Coughlin's book Catastrophic Failure: Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad. Both provide a deeper understanding of how acceptance of the later verses laid the foundation for Islamic jihad and intolerance.
READ MORE Kelleigh Nelson details particulars of Creeping Sharia, features that make it a serious menace to the United States. She provides us with actual example of sharia as it operates in America — attacks, demands, lawsuits, threats, intimidation censorship — carried out by Muslims whose mission is to make Islam preeminent in the US. She points out, "The steady adoption of sharia's tenets is a strategy Muslims are using to transform America into an Islamic state." She concludes with the chilling observation that "Sharia is in every facet of American society, from politics to football, including Kaepernick's kneeling during the Anthem. Islam is being taught in government schools while Judaism and Christianity are banned."
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This video is from an article entitled, "Islamic clerics in Iraq arrange selling of 9 year olds for "pleasure marriages" by Avi Abelow. (here.) As Abelow writes, "Listen to this Islamic cleric in Iraq. Technically speaking, he is just promoting Sharia Law. The problem is that Sharia Law is appalling and sickening. What religion allows for 9 year old orphans to be sold for something called a 'pleasure marriage?' Being sold and forced to marry AT ALL is wrong. Even if someone is of marriageable age, they should not be sold into a marriage. But especially a 9 year old orphan? How can this be happening in our world?"
Tawfik Hamid urges that the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) be declared a terrorist group, if we are to retain our American civilization. Middle East countries such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UAE have already done so. They have seen MB in action and know MB is not moderate; it is regressive and works to put all countries around the world under Sharia dominance. Even Hamas, itself a violent terrorist branch of the MB tree, has announced it has broken away — but MB still supports it through cutouts. Qatar, with the help of MB, has used terror groups effectively against Middle East countries that can compete with Qatar in selling natural gas to Europe. Turkey was living in the modern era for many years, until Recep Erdoğan, a MB supporter, gained control and is moving Turkey back to the 7th century; he is capable of helping carry out the MB desire to flood Europe with Muslims. The MB is as hostile to Egypt and Saudi Arabia, who have been straying away from strict Koranic fundamentalism, as it is to European democracies. On the whole, MB may claims it is moderate and indeed has peaceful enterprises, but it underwrites and often commits violence, secure in the knowledge that it is obeying the Koran's command to "slay the idolaters [that's you and me] wherever you find them."
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ISIS and al-Qaeda leaders, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, all started out as members of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). They left to join more exciting, overt terrorist groups, but, as Raymond Ibrahim points out, "... when all is said and done, the Brotherhood's patient and incremental methodology has proven far more effective than the outright jihad of its terroristic offshoots." Almost thirty years ago, MB wrote out how they would wage jihad from within the USA (see here). They called what they would be doing as the 'Civilization-Jihadist Process.' They described their work in America as a kind of grand jihad to eliminate and destroy Western civilization from within, "'sabotaging' its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers..." They would use coalition, conversion, absorption and cooperation; they would unify and direct Muslim efforts. They would continue to create front organizations to infiltrate particular parts of society. Their single goal was to gently ease (their word was 'settle') Islam into American society. Islam would eventually become rooted. As they wrote, "That Islam is resident and not a passing thing; rooted "entrenched" in the soil of the spot where it moves and not a strange plant to it". They aren't in for a sudden kill. They work to spread their civilization deeply and broadly in the USA, without alarming the populace. They are confident that ultimately it will become ingrained and intrinsic to American culture. It is certainly true that they have had great success infiltrating our media and our educational, judicial, financial and political systems.
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Why ever would anyone think there's a hidden agenda in a friendly get together of Christians and Muslims? It is low-keyed; it takes place in a church, underscoring that it is a peaceful event, with no evil intent. Clearly, the Muslims wish only to reach out and familiarize the Christian audience with the peaceful nature of Islam. They want to make the church goers understand they all worship one God, the same God. How absurd to think this is part of a global effort to make Islam globally supreme. Why would Tabitha Korol write of this polite assembly as Muslim-controlled and part of Islamic policy to take control of the local population? Simple. Because behind the smiles, there is the reality that the Muslim leadership really is focused on taking over all countries, one way or another, one way and another. And another. And another.
READ MORE Recall, if you will, the agitation, violence and death threats emanating from Muslims everywhere because some cartoonists had drawn Mohammad in a contest sponsored by the Jyllands-Posten, a Danish newspaper. These protests were in no way spontaneous. Olivier Guitta writing soon after the rioting, pointed out that, the "cartoon jihad is tailor-made to advance the Muslim Brotherhood's long-term worldwide strategy for establishing Islamic supremacy in the West." They had been trying to get Europe to criminalize any criticism of Islam as blasphemy. They would make good use of the 'blasphemous' cartoons. A Muslim cleric, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a leader in MB, was one of those involved in rousing Muslims around the world to riot. Kyle Shideler writes more about him below.
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Ilya Feoktostov writes of the strange behavior of the Massachusetts Board of Rabbis (MBR), which joined forces with CAIR to picket a synagogue which "hosted speakers whom CAIR calls 'anti-Muslim hate group leaders.'" If the MBR was indeed concerned about hate groups, then why partner with CAIR? With strong though mistaken indignation, they and many other Jewish leaders denounced the synagogue, not the damage that Muslim CAIR has inflicted on Jews. The speakers brought important and valid information on security against radical Islam to the congregants. Unfortunately, the intimidation by CAIR and the picketing Rabbis worked and the synagogue has abandoned their speakers program, making the local Jews less able to cope with attack by Jew-haters.
READ MORE Individual democratic congressmen have associated themselves with CAIR. One such, Ilhan Omar, spoke at a CAIR fundraiser. To put it more bluntly, as Raymond Berger wrote here, "The purpose of Omar's speech was to raise funds for an unsavory organization. [...] Why is a powerful Congresswoman helping to raise funds for an organization connected to terrorist and Islamist groups devoted to destroying the US government?" Eileen Toplansky writes of a more general issue: the bond between the Democratic party and terrorist-affiliated CAIR. Virulent Jew-hating statements by Democratic presidential candidates and congressmen are not chastised. And the Democratic party has had a radical political transformation. She concludes we need "to vote out every Democrat who supports CAIR since Democrats and jihadists are actively engaged in dismantling America."
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Kyle Shideler writes about Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, one of the Muslim Brotherhood's (MB) outstanding leaders, who, like the MB itself, is yet to be designated as a terrorist by the USA. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries have banned the MB, but Qatar remains supportive, especially of Qaradawi, who has been a major figure in shaping Qatar's educational and banking systems and utilizing an umbrella fund for meting out charity intake to various terrorist groups. His work is not confined to Qatar. "Qaradawi provides Qatar access to an international network of committed Islamist activists throughout the West, who are willing to support Qatari policy goals." Thus Qatar has a position internationally much larger than its size would indicate. Shideler suggests that labeling Qaradawi a terrorist would put pressure on Qatar to reduce its terrorist-supporting activities.
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Using data from the Counter Extremism Project (CEP), Edwin Mora writes about the common goal toward which the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) and Islamic terrorist groups such as the Islamic State and al-Qaeda work: the establishment of a global Islamic caliphate under sharia law. The oldest, the MB, has the advantage of being well-organized, well-funded, far-reaching and possessing a large network of associated and derived groups. Its reach is global. It is actively present in some 18 Middle East and African countries, itself or by proxy. It is closest to reaching the goal of fundamentalist Islam primarily by seeking to change "existing governments and societies from within." It thinks of itself as offering a different culture, an alternative civilization to Western culture. In 4 of these countries (Turkey, Qatar, Sudan, Iraq) and in the Israeli's Territories where Palestinian Arabs reside, MB "maintains a terror-linked presence." MB works directly with the state (Qatar is a major sponsor) and/or provides groups who commit genocidal violence with money, weapons, intelligence and asylum. CEP considers Hamas, which operates out of the Gaza Strip, the most "lethal Brotherhood offshoot." Some Middle East countries have justifiably labeled MB a terrorist group. The CEP report is available here.
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Mudar Zahran describes the Muslim Brotherhood as "the world's wholesale terror producer...it has evil tentacles that stretch across the globe wherever democracy and free choice thrive." He provides us with a description of the relationship between the MB and King Abdullah in Jordan, where it openly "works hand-in-hand with the monarchy" and helps keep the population, which is 70% Palestinian Arab, in check. It is a major force preventing King Abdullah's overthrow, acting "as a sort of para-military squad." In turn, with Abdullah's connivance, it won seats in the Jordanian parliament. "The King and the MB are using their resources to promote antisemitism, hatred for America and stall the peace process, putting people's lives in jeopardy."
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The Boycott-Divest-Sanction (BDS) movement seeks to destroy Israel through economic sanctions and divesting investors of stock in countries that sell to Israel. We need to take BDS seriously, if only because it has reached deeply into the legal, academic and political infrastructure of countries around the world. This set of articles provides examples of BDS infiltration in these areas. One area that is often ignored is the incorporation of BDS ideology into what on the surface would appear an unlikely environment: professional societies, noted for having a high percentage of members capable of thinking logically and with detailed knowledge of their particular expertise. The technique for absorbing these societies into the BDS movement is actually simple. The 'humanistic' and/or 'social justice' committees of the professional society are taken over by members of the radical left. They then attempt to formulate attitudes for the entire organization. The American Library Association was an early example (see here). The tactic didn't succeed in September 2019 with the American Political Science Association (see here). But they keep pushing.
As Alex Joffe writes in his article "Social Geography of the BDS Movement and Antisemitism" here:
Like antisemitism, BDS is both an environment and an instrument; it exists as a free-floating cultural norm both of the far left and far right, and as a tool utilized against Israel and Jews. The presence or absence of Jews is secondary and the complex realities of Israel are irrelevant. But the creep of BDS and resulting antisemitism into the normative liberal political behavior of Western countries where Jews have been an active, welcome presence in post-war history is an ominous development.
Alan Dershowitz points out that critics of Israel criticize only Israel for "doing bad things to the Palestinians." They ignore the oppression suffered by "Tibetans, Georgians, Syrians, Armenians, Kurds or even Ukrainians." He asks, "Where are your BDS movements against the Chinese, the Russians, the Cubans, the Turks or the Assad Regime? Only the Palestinians, only Israel? Why ... the disproportionate hatred directed against the only nationstate of the Jewish people and the disproportionate silence regarding the far greater imperfections and deserved criticism of other nations and groups — including the Palestinians." The answer: the Nazis had many Western European sympathizers and collaborators in the countries they conquered. This anti-Semitism from both the right and the left has persisted generation after generation. Note that there is another large source of European Jew-hate: there is a strong correlation between spikes of Jew-hate and clusters of Jew-hating Muslims settling in Europe. These 'refugees' unabashedly sprout Jew-hate without hindrance, making it acceptable for others to chime in.
READ MORE Eugene Kontorovich, professor at George Mason University's School of Law and a director at the Kohelet Policy Forum in Jerusalem, wrote an important article on the ACLU's 180 degree flip on discrimination in its protection of BDS. (See here.) The article can't be read except by subscription. It was summarized by the editor of Just Desserts, Vivienne Grace Ziner, here:
In this article David Weisberg expands on Mr. Kontorovich's arguments. He concludes by asking, "So, is the ACLU woefully ignorant or intellectually dishonest? You decide."
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Lukas Mikelionis records Ilhan Omar's assertion that a boycott of Israel is as proper as boycotts of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Such language is shocking coming from a member of Congress, yet there was no thunderous rebuke. Democrats, however, are said to be "mulling a resolution condemning the boycott movement." How nice!
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Many commentators are skittish about writing about the choices American Jews make politically. It was bad enough when 70-80% of American Jews voted twice for Prez Obama, who worked hard at weakening Israel, even refusing to send ammunition in the 2014 Gaza War, while the Arabs were shelling Israel. Melanie Phillips writes of a choice closer to home: American Jews stay with the Democrats, who allow newly-elected Muslims to mouth ugly Jew-hatred. As she writes, "Downplaying or ignoring the Jew-baiting now tolerated by the Democratic Party, liberal Jews are so blinded by hatred of Trump that they actually attack him for supporting the Jewish people."
In truth, American Jews largely ignore that President Trump has acted decidedly against anti-Semitism on campus and in communities. He has also done a huge amount to benefit Israel. This includes moving the USA embassy to Jerusalem and confirming what has always been true, namely, that Israel has owned Samaria and Judea (AKA the West Bank) since the 1920 San Remo Conference. The Jews do occupy it, just as you occupy your own house.
READ MORE Despite his being prepared on how to react to anti-Jewish propaganda in college and despite accepting the kindnesses the Jews he knew bestowed upon him, Stacy Gittleman sad story describes a boy who almost immediately was caught up in the BDS movement when he entered college. He began mouthing the false and/or distorted BDS versions of the facts, and was impervious to correction. Unfortunately, this is not a unique or infrequent case.
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In Academia, staging hurtful theatrical events to highlight BDS is an accepted way to behave. It is mostly being triggered and maneuvered by Muslims. One such incident occurred at Columbus State Community College in Ohio and is described here by Rachel Wolf. On occasion, but not this time, Jewish students have participated, anxious to show they were on the right side of social justice for the Palestinians. A comment by GreenBasketball to Wolf's article stated the generality clearly: "Import Muslims, import hatred. And as more Muslims immigrate to the US, the more hatred that will come to the US. In Europe this has already reached violent levels of Jew hate. As the number of muslims increase there, it will reach middle eastern violence levels. It is merely math. The more of them, the greater the Jew hate. No, it does not mean all will hate and be terrorists, but as I say, it is just numbers. The more of them, the more Jew hate. It never fails. Never. Naturally Jews in the US are so insane they are in favor of this immigration."
READ MORE Teaching students to hate Israel and Jews isn't confined to colleges and universities. Jonathan Tobin describes a proposed high school course designed to do the same openly and blatantly. Aside from its message, note that it takes advantage of the division in American Jewry between those who recognize the BDS threat for what it is and the majority of American Jews, those on the left politically, who, in conformity with the Democratic Party, only recognize Jew-hate when it comes from the right, not from the left.
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Many churches are active supporters of BDS. Denis MacEoin writes of one of these, one of the liberal United Church of Christ (UCC), specifically ex-Prez Obama's 'spiritual home', Trinity UCC in Chicago, with its openly hostile attitude toward Israel, the bald and ugly anti-Semitic speeches by its pastors such as Jeremiah Wright Jr. and its close affiliation with Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam. MacEoin stresses that these views aren't confined to black Chicago radicals but, judging from the anti-Israel resolutions passed, permeate much of the UCC membership. They fawn on Muslims and encourage their practices; they ignore CAIR's links to international terrorists; they are silent on " the expanding exodus of Christians from the West Bank and Gaza ... precipitated by extremist Muslims and the Palestinian authorities"; and they don't allow facts to prevent them from writing earnestly but erroneously about Israel's supposed mistreatment of Palestinian children. Both their words and actions are "a contradiction of normative Christian ethics."
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Anti-Semitism is growing again in the USA. Not only is it growing, it is becoming normalized. Ben Shapiro (here) sums up the three sources of anti-semitism: "Right-wing white supremacist anti-Semites see the Jews as an eternal threat, a racially "mongrelizing" threat to white purity, a religious blot, a nefarious group of schemers threatening their race-based civilization. Radical Islamist anti-Semites see the Jews as the sons of pigs and monkeys, religious threats who must be exterminated. Left-wing anti-Semites see the Jews as defenders of brutal hierarchies, purveyors of exploitation."
We start off with an article on respect, and the lack of respect. Respect blocks nasty anti-Semitic theatrics. Instead, Jews have tried to deal with anti-Semitism by claiming victimhood. This works well for Muslims, but is annoying when it is a Jew complaining.
For the most part, this section deals with the typical response by very many, if not the majority, of American Jews to the growing anti-Semitism in America. It can be summed up this way: when not in denial, they identify the strongest sources of Jew-hate incorrectly.
Jews are known to be trendy, They are first to adopt a new point of view, a new generality, a new life style. Yet in one area, they retain a loyalty almost a century-old. Starting In the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then president of the United States, managed to convince Jews he was their friend while ensuring that his administration kept Jews out of America, when the Nazis were hounding Jews and later slaughtering them. After the second World War, American Jews continued to indulge in the dogma that the left as embodied in the Democratic Party was liberal and pro-Jewish, unlike the evil old Protestants who kept Jews out of so many areas. Besides, these stodgy Republicans had no sense of humor. If this ever held true, it is now some half century in the past, Nowadays, a member in good standing in the Democratic Party must subscribe to socialism and globalism, old ideas that have been brought back and to a new one, intersectionality, a gestalt of minority groups, all discriminated against. Jews are specifically excluded. Whites are excluded, unless they be of the new feminist persuasion.
For a while, Jews believed they could be loyal to Judaism and loyal to the Leftists, each separate in time and place. They are reluctantly learning they can subscribe to leftist tenets or they can follow Judaism. They can't be both, they can't do both, no matter how they distort Judaism to fake a commonality that doesn't exist.
Jews have applied none of their smarts to discovering effective ways to deal with the new rules governing one's identity and the old enemy, anti-Semitism.
Many American Jews are in uneasy denial. They still boast of their twinning with non-Jewish comrades of comparable wealth, education and status. Like others on the far-left, they are vexed at voiced 'islamophobia' but blithely trivialize ingrained Islamic Jew-hate. Yet somewhere, way in the back of their consciousness where it doesn't need to be examined, there's an untalked-about apprehension, a vague disquiet, that brings forth a voluminous denial when someone talks about the Democratic Party's growing anti-Semitism. They are solidly against racism, but shrug off indications that it has become a characteristic of the Democratic party. As a notable example, the new Muslim congress women spew forth Jew-hate much more virulent than that spoken by the current versions of the KKK. Do the Jews not hear it? Why are they not concerned that the DNC hasn't disavowed such speech?
The Republicans removed Stephen King from the Judiciary and Agriculture Committees because of what they said was a racist remark. King has a history of remarks that, these days, are considered to be racist and white supremacist. The remark that got him kicked off the committees was typical in tenor and content: "White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?" Querulous? Maybe. Mild? Certainly. Factual? Definitely. In tone, a sputtering candle compared to the fierce fire coming from the Muslim congress ladies. King's remarks over the years are as nothing compared to the shrill, blunt, angry and unending hate the congress women pour forth at each and every opportunity. They believe every word of what they say. They never sugar coat their arguments. Their hatred of the Jews is unmistakable. They nurse Jew hatred in others and encourage its growth. They unambiguously proclaim their prejudice at every opportunity. It is their core passion.
They have received no serious condemnation. Their positions on congressional committees are safe. They are of the far left. The far left, allied with resurgent Islam, is socialist in political theory, global in aim, and practitioner of 'you are what your group is' identification. More and more, the far left leads and makes the rules for the Democratic party.
The activities and the remarks by the Congress ladies are openly hostile to Jews, but au fond no different than ex-Prz Obama's attitude. He wasn't often confrontational but he worked hard to get the Iran deal accepted, even though the Iranians openly proclaimed they'd use the bomb on the Jews. He knew what they intended but ignored it in his speeches. Instead, he emphasized how he was slowing down Iran's nuclear activities, often implying he was changing Iranian direction. He wasn't changing Iranian plans and he knew it. He showed his real feelings again when he denied Israel ammunition just when it was needed — when the Jews finally invaded Gaza, after trying to stop 'lone-wolf' Arab terrorism for 8 years. But most of his activities were behind the scenes, and alerted few Jews.
Obama's attitude wasn't a minority opinion among Democrats, not even when he was first elected. American Jews seem to have forgotten that the Democratic National Committee (the DNC) barely was able to keep a popular anti-Israel plank off their platform. They succeeded because they feared losing Jewish money, not because such sentiments were abhorrent to them.
The current Jewish attitude — ignore Jew-hate but hate everyone who hates any of a particular set of minorities — was epitomized by Sacha Baron Cohen's award by the ADL. When first announced, it sounded like satire — a comedian being declared a leader by a deliberately ineffectual Jewish organization. But it was actually the case. The Jewish Chronicle reported that Sacha Baron Cohen, British and Jewish, actor, comedian and director, was to receive the International Leadership Award November 21, 2019 from the Anti-Defamation League for his use of comedy to expose racism, Islamophobia and, oh yes, anti-Semitism. When he gave his speech, yack after yack, he demonstrated that he didn't know there a jihad against the Jews going on. The audience laughed with him in gleeful agreement. Maybe he should have thrown in a comment that some dummies believe the world is round. The laughter would have been explosive.
About the speech itself: the media wrote almost exclusively about Cohen's major theme, his anger at Internet companies, whose major sin is, apparently, that they reinforce what Cohen calls conspiracy theories. Muslims, who are far-right in ideology are now considered by the Left as another endangered minority. The media were as oblivious to the damage being done by these Muslims as Cohen himself. Matt Wilson wrote here:
Baron Cohen turned to the rise of demagoguery, conspiracy theories and hate crimes around the world, and pointed to what he sees as the most logical explanation for this dangerous trend. "All this hate and violence is being facilitated by a handful of internet companies that amount to the greatest propaganda machine in history," he said.
And to him, no one bears more responsibility than the man who created Facebook. "It's like we're living in the Roman Empire, and Mark Zuckerberg is Caesar," he said at one point. "At least that would explain his haircut."
Baron Cohen spent the rest of his speech systematically dismantling a recent address given by Zuckerberg at Georgetown University in which he defended Facebook's limited attempts to combat its massive problems and explained away its inaction as a defense of "free expression."
Read Cohen's ADL speech and view the video below. It makes clear that the ADL, in selecting Cohen, selected someone who shares with many American Jews the belief that conservative Jews, nationalists and the right-wing hold absurd opinions. They ignore that the pertinent statements from these groups are not opinions but facts. They ignore that resurgent Islam, while playing the victim, has already created severe problems in the US and Europe for Jews and non-Jews alike. They are angry that some of the social media disseminate these distasteful facts. They want these distributors censored.
Victor Rosenthal deals with the new anti-Semitism and how to respond. He focuses on ways and means using actions by Israel as illustration. Forget "trying to teach Jew-hating bullies about the Holocaust, or about the importance of tolerance, or that someday they might be the ones being persecuted, or about how all humans are brothers (they aren't)." Go for respect, he advises. Like a barometer, respect increases when Israel aggressively wins a war or a sporting competition. It goes down when Israel is lenient to terrorists it's arrested. Batting "away missiles without killing the would-be murderers that are launching them is a very big minus." In the millenia of the disapora, "anti-Semitism thrived, in part because it was easy and safe to victimize them [Jews]." To fight anti-Semitism, Jews need better ways than writing letters and preaching peace. Gaining respect is one way to deter manifestations of Jew-hate.
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This is a video of Sacha Baron Cohen delivering his speech, when presented with the International Leadership Award by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) November 21, 2019. He received the award for using his talents to expose racism, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism.
Below is the transcript of the speech itself.
The Middle Eastern Arab states have had an excellent return on the millions and million of dollars they have spent proclaiming the rights of the Palestinians to Israel and stirring up hate against the Jews around the world, yet there was not a word about the Muslim war against the Jews by Cohen in his speech on fighting bigotry, racism and hate. Nor does Cohen seem to know that the Antifa is a terrorist organization. His implied argument seems to be: Antifa marched against the far right, so how can they be a terrorist organization? He finds it despicable that the social media will reinforce the (to him) fallacy that in Britain "white Christians are being deliberately replaced by Muslim immigrants." He believes it is a disgusting lie promulgated by the internet that the millions of illegals coming into the USA via its southern border (bringing crime and disease and disrupting communities near the border) is an invasion.
In giving his speech, Cohen was not acting in his typical mode as an exaggeration, a cartoonish character. In stating his own opinions, he was telling us what many American Jews also believe. What is worse is that Cohen voiced opinions are held by the ADL leadership. These opinions do not inspire the ADL to acknowledge who the enemies of the Jews are. Without incorporating this knowledge, how can the Anti-Defamation League do what it was set up to do?
READ MORE The large majority of Jews who run the large Jewish organizations are members of the Democratic Party. They have no problem fulminating against right-wing anti-Semitism but tend to ignore attacks against Jews by minorities favored by the Democrats. Unhappily for them, as Caroline Glick points out, the attacks against the Jews, say in large Jewish communities such as Brooklyn, are executed by blacks, a minority favored by the Democratic Party. How have these Jewish organizations responded? These large Jewish well-funded organizations designed to protect Jews from verbal abuse and physical attack have been most mousy quiet, speaking up mostly to suggest it is right-wing Jew-haters who are responsible, even though they know that isn't so. The foci of attacks have also expanded to academia, where Jewish students are harassed and physically attacked, and university administrators and professors encourage these acts by allowing antl-Semitic conferences on campus.
Glick points out that there is a larger issue: "many non-Orthodox Jewish communities now conflate progressive politics with Jewish identity [...] The problem with this strategy is that with anti-Semitism rapidly becoming a major component of progressive politics, the more strongly liberal Jews embrace progressivism, the less capable they become of defending their Judaism—much less defending their fellow Jews who aren't progressive."
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Of the congregations of Jew haters, there is right-wing anti-Semitism and there is left-wing anti-Semitism. In the right wing in 2016, all such groups — white supremacists, skinheads, the KKK and neo-Nazis — numbered almost 1000, 917 to be exact, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (here.) This sounds impressive, but there is only a relatively small number of members within this large number of groups. Many of these groups literally have only a handful of members. The KKK, which was once large and powerful, now totals well under 100 chapters and some 3000 members as of 2016, according to the Anti-Defamation League. I've read estimates of the total membership in all these groups as around 10,000 to 20,000. Few if any have political clout, funding or implementation strength. In contrast, the far left such as the Intifada have hundreds of thousands of members, and are well-supported to fight, to riot, to disrupt gatherings they don't control.
Matthew Hausman writes of the Jew-hating new Left, which now dominates the Democratic Party and Congress. Its controlling members are ideologues of socialism/Marxism, now labeled 'Progressivism, and Islam. They describe themselves as workers for social justice and equality. This is no burden for many Jewish Americans. As Caroline Glick notes, "Whereas the 2013 Pew survey of American Jews showed that a mere 19 percent of American Jews believe that observing Jewish law is an essential part of what it means to be Jewish, 56 percent said working for justice and equality is an essential part of Judaism."
What these Jews are trying to ignore, these Left-leaning Jews whose devotion to the Democratic Party has never faltered, is that they now need to subscribe to every tenet of the Democratic Party package, if they wish to continue as loyal members. And Progressivism is decidedly anti-Jewish. To conform, they need to embrace 'progressivism' and its intrinsic Jew-hate as the heart of Judaism.
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It appears American Jews are working to retain their loyalty to the old liberal Democratic party, despite the fact that the Democratic ideology has changed almost completely in content. It is no longer 'live and let live', it's more 'live as we tell you to live.' As part of this effort, they have joined the 'liberal' castigation of President Trump. They allege he is racist and bigoted toward minorities, anti-Semitic and authoritarian. True, he can hardly be described as weak and ineffective. But the Jewish frenzy at Trump's supposed anti-Semitism because he is targeting the Muslim freshmen congresswomen is bizarre. Apparently these Jews regard them as minorities, not hateful anti-Semites; ergo, Trump is persecuting minorities, which is a sign of underlying anti-Semitism. In actuality, it is the Congress women who are the Jew-haters. In defending them against Trump, Jews are defending Jew-haters against some one who speaks up against their Jew hate. As Jonathan Tobin points out, "claims that this administration is destroying democracy and liberty are partisan hogwash."
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Isi Leibler writes an excellent summary of Jews acting against Judaism and following progressivism. He notes that "[o]ver the past decade, the Jewish establishment leadership in America — with the exception of the Orthodox, the Zionist Organization of America, and other small groups — has failed to speak up in defense of Israel and imposed a curtain of silence." [...] "Many of these consider support for social radicalism to be a far higher priority than support for Israel." ... "They stand out as the most anti-Trump minority in the nation." Jewish organizations that should be neutral "openly display bias against Trump," who has been strongly pro-Jew, not just in word but in deed. This rejectionism has emboldened Democratic party radicals such as the new Muslim women congressmen and those seeking to be the Democratic Party's 2020 presidential candidate to promote BDS and criticize Israel at every opportunity. Ironically, this comes at a time when support of Israel by the American puble is at an all-time high.
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Allen Bergstein writes of some of the many ways that Jews, who "excel in the arts, science, medicine, law and finance" are just plain stupid when it comes to political intelligence. "Their support for Democratic candidates who are outright Jew haters is inexplicable. They show no common sense nor any desire to build up whatever portion of the brain functions as a road map to survival." True, sad but true. Too many American Jews prefer to ignore the facts and give their allegiance to the Democratic party, which is chock full of members filled with open and brazen hatred of the Jews.
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Jews sense the growing anti-semitism. It's hard to ignore that Jews are being beaten up, the synagogues sprayed, their cemeteries vandalized. But they accuse the wrong people. The new threat, the real threat. Caren Besner writes, "comes from an unholy red-green alliance — the Marxist left and Islam." Unfortunately, too many Jews continue to believe that their powerful enemies of old, the neo-Nazis and the KKK, are as powerful and effective as they once were. Just when American Jews need to understand where the new, dangerous, potentially deadly Jew-hate is coming from, the majority of the Jewish leadership is useless. It too ignores the Democratic party Muslims who spout anti-Semitism in the halls of Congress. It too continues to identify the current left with the liberal left our ancestors knew. Meantime, the Democrats effectively preach the doctrine of intersectionality, embracing the victimhood of particular minorities. More and more openly, they declare Jews are the source of the problems these minorities have.
READ MORE Manfred Gerstenfeld provides us with a wide range of ways anti-Semitism is currently whitewashed. They are used by politicians, the news media, members of the judiciary, even by writers who identify themselves as Jews. As Gerstemfeld notes with reference to Peter Beinart, "Jewish whitewashers of antisemitism are particularly in demand." Muslim foment Jew-hatred wherever they settle, and yet there is always a large group of politicians and media personalities ready to deflect awareness of the persistent Muslim incitement to harm Jews. Gerstenfeld mentions several ways but didn't include the oft-used technique, where violent and murderous Muslims declare themselves to be the victims. But as Gerstenfeld points out, he's written of "only a small selection of examples of antisemitism whitewashing that, with appropriate research, can be turned into a major collection."
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There are several overlapping Jewish groups that can rightfully be called traitors to Judaism.
First there are Jews who have superimposed and/or substituted tikkunism, human rights and social justice for Judaism and declare the ersatz product authentic.
Then there are individual Jews undermining Jews, Judaism and Israel, writers such as Peter Beinart and Norman Finkelstein and academics both in Israel and America who use their positions to preach against their own people or ignore their own and endorse groups who would destroy Israel.
Most of the damage comes from Jewish organizations. Organizations such as J Street, the New Israel Fund and Peace Now claim to be Jewish, and may indeed have many Jewish members. But they consistently reject measures that would support Israel or strengthen its security. Contrariwise, couched in lofty language and hollow generalities, their plans are designed to weaken or destroy Israel. In the name of 'democracy', the New Israel Fund uses Jewish money to generously fund Arab groups such as Adalah that openly work against Israel's existence. Discover The Networks has an accurate article about the New Israel Fund here. Discover the Networks also has a detailed article on J Street. The facts presented (see here.) lay to rest J Street's assertions that it wishes Israel well. The newer and very insidious organization, IfNotNow, is examined in this video that comes from the Elder of Ziyon.
There are Jewish organizations Jews have supported for many many years, without investigating whether these groups are doing the jobs they are richly paid to do. One, the ADL, protests Jew-hate speech from the right but ignores the vast amount and more effective hate speech and harassment coming from the left. Its recommendations are in general in keeping with far-left Democratic Party ideology, to which the ADL leadership subscribes. Another, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) has stopped helping Jews. European Jews could currently use their help in leaving Europe, where they have no protection against terrorist attacks that specifically target them. Instead, HIAS may take Jewish money but they are now busy bringing Jew-hating Muslim 'refugees' into America. Not only have they dropped Hebrew from their name, they are linked with organizations such as J Street and the New Israel Fund, organizations that claim to be Jewish but that are notoriously anti-Israel and supporters of BDS. HIAS (or is that now IAS?) also collaborates with CAIR, a subversive organization that actively seeks to replace the Constitution with Sharia law. CAIR was formed by Hamas members and, as guided by its co-founder Omar Ahmad, acts as a front group to carry out Muslim Brotherhood objectives.
Some organizations are bad for the Jews because they give us a false sense of security; they claim they are busy, busy, busy working to defend Jews but they accomplish little or nothing. This is particularly true in the universities. Around the beginning of the 21st century, the Muslims began a sustained attack against Jews in major universities. From the start, they had groups organized, large and nasty pre-printed posters and well-practiced techniques to harass and intimide Jewish students. They soon connected with far-Left Marxists and began a concerted and effective effort to prevent those who didn't agree with them from speaking or teaching on campus. Hillel and other groups have yet to act effectively while more and more Jewish students are intimidated, Judaism vilified and free speech undermined. Small groups such as Amcha Initiative, The Lawfare Project, Americans for Peace and Tolerance, ZOA and Im Tirtzu in Israel are effective within their limited resources, but we are yet to see the large organizations get significant results. Some supposedly Jewish groups on campus are undermining Jews by collaborating with the Jew-haters, J Street for sure, and ADL on occasion. We are also beginning to see the hostility toward Jewish students and the distorted and often fallacious information about Israel taught in the universities being transmitted to high school students and to even younger children.
This section examines some of these Jewish Jew haters and anti-Israel organizations.
In this essay, Victor Rosenthal has written about violently anti-Zionist Jews and Jewish organizations, who embrace the Arab's goal of destroying Israel. Ignoring both history and Israel's legal ownership, they claim Israel is occupying Palestinian Arab land. They subscribe to a detailed fantasy, which, contrary to reality, views Jews as racist, 'white' oppressors and "Arabs as the indigenous 'brown' inhabitants of the region who have been colonized by (primarily) 'white' European Jews, supported by the rest of the white, privileged, world." Rosenthal calls them misozionist Jews. Many base their activities on their idiosyncratic view of Tikuum Olam. Tikuum Olam (fixing/rectifying/improving the world) is actually an important Jewish activity. The Chabad Rabbi, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, maintained it was everybody's mission (here). Israel's quick response with doctors and medical equipment to disasters around the globe is an excellent example of how the concept has been incorporated into the Israeli way of behaving.
As used by latter-day social justice 'theologians', it came to be defined as repair of the world, in the sense of redoing it properly, a rather tall order, considering their ignorance of actual Judaism. But then again, rather that using Judaism as the base from which to develop ways and means to make the world a better place to live in, the adherents of Tikuum Olam substitute their socialist and human rights slogans and call that Judaism.
This article is one of a series of articles. In another article (here), Rosenthal points out that Tikkunism is "a radical departure from traditional Judaism. Reform Judaism de-emphasized the 'ritual' commandments like observance of kashrut and Shabbat, while emphasizing the 'social' commandments like concern for strangers, widows, and orphans, and the political vision of the Prophets. Tikkunism goes even farther and redefines the social commandments in terms of progressive politics. For example, the 'stranger' (ger) in the Torah, who in traditional Judaism is a convert to Judaism or a non-Jew living in the Land of Israel and obeying the Noachide commandments (ger toshav), becomes any outsider — even a Palestinian terrorist or an illegal immigrant. The injunctions of the Prophets are also interpreted in the most extreme left-wing way possible."
For a rounded picture of how Tikkunism relates to anti-Zionism, read also Rosenthal's article, "Tikkunism Begets Misoziony" (here). Using Carolyn Karcher's views on Tikkunism, he details how the anti-Zionists have replaced Jewish concepts with their idea of Tikkun Olam. For example, it would be a move to social justice "to participate in a demonstration to make it easier for people to vote, but it would not be tikkun olam to try to tighten safeguards against voter fraud." With the same reasoning, they assure us their allegiance to Arab causes is Jewish.
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Cinnamon Stillwell writes about supposedly reputable academics who distort objective reality in their desire to destroy Israel. One of her articles reviews a book by Sunaina Maira, with its "skewered perceptions" of the USA and Israel, all couched in "numbing leftist jargon" (see here). Another describes the anti-Israel antics of faculty members of departments of Jewish Studies at various California universities (see here). Yet another article turns Israel's being the only state in the Middle East to not discriminate against gays into a defect, asserting "pinkwashing" was invented by Israel "to downplay its alleged oppression of the Palestinians." (See here.)
When a group of Jewish studies professors wrote on 'word crimes', "the manipulation of academic language whereby Israel is demonized and its foes are cast as victims" (see here), academics such as Ian Lustick of the U. of Penn Middle East Studies Department were outraged. In the present article, Stillwell writes about Norman Finkelstein, a well-known anti-Israel Israeli. What is indicative of how wide-spread academic anti-Israel vitriol has spread, he spoke at a panel at Princeton University.
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In this article, Rabbi Aryeh Spero condemns the major Jewish secular establishment organizations (ADL, AJC, NYF, JCRC, Conference of Presidents, and Federations) for knowing full well that Jews are being attacked in Brooklyn and Manhattan by blacks, Hispanics and Muslims. Yet they do nothing. As Spero says, "You can be sure that if the attackers were white or Jewish and the victims Black, Muslim, or Hispanic, [they] would be the very first organizing protests against racism and pontificating about something rotten within American society." For many years, they have fought hard for minority rights, mostly excluding Jews, who, apparently are not considered by these Jewish organizations to be a minority. Spero suggests that denouncing their minorities for beating on Jews "would shatter all they believe in." "These Jewish organizations also call their support of Islamic immigration a 'Jewish value,' ignoring that a cardinal Jewish value is protecting Jewish life and safeguarding Jews." They may believe that protecting all minorities except the Jews is 'Jewish', but in effect they strip Jews of protection and put Jewish survival at risk.
Rabbi Spero also points out that in many universities, like many Jewish deans and professors, these organizations ignore the harassment Jewish students suffer on campus. The attitude of the secular Jewish organizations that repudiate the need to attend to their own particular people, is also mirrored in Congress, where Jewish politicians are silent while the squad of Muslim women congressmen loudly preach Jew-hate. Time and again, universalist Jews use their drive and energy to promote their Far Left-liberalism values; "the Jewish people and their needs are insignificant and must take a back seat."
READ MORE Daniel Greenfield writes about Jonathan Greenblatt, the director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Greenblatt was an odd choice for an organization intended to protect Jews. He had worked as a special assistant for Prez Obama, no lover of Jews, and for the Aspen Institute, which received many large grants from George Soros, the quintessential Jewish Jew-hater. Under his leadership, which began in July 2015, "the ADL had turned sharply to the left." This was made glaringly clear at the ADL's Never is Now 2018 conference. Greenblatt defended Soros, not Israel." Greenfield points out that the "list of speakers did not include a single official from a major pro-Israel organization. Not even AIPAC. However Jill Jacobs, the head of the militantly anti-Israel T'ruah, was a featured speaker. T'ruah had rallied efforts to force Jewish charities to stop helping Jews living in areas claimed by Islamic terrorists." The other speakers and invitees were no better. Greenfield's gloomy conclusion needs to be taken seriously: "Once upon a time, the ADL was a Jewish civil rights organization. Now it's just another generic lefty group that pretends to care about Jewish causes only long enough to fleece some of its donors. ... As the Left goes anti-Semitic, the ADL is becoming a threat to Jews."
READ MORE Ilya Feoktistov, executive director of APT, a Jewish organization that reports on anti-Semites and others that wish to create dissidence between ethnic groups, describes what happened when he himself was reported to the police as a dangerous anti-Semite by leaders of the ADL and JCRC, who disliked his accurate portrayal of them as using their organizations to engage in promulgating anti-Trump nastiness and Democratic Party ideology, not the defense of Judaism. That the New England regional director of ADL, Robert Trestan, and the executive director of Boston's Jewish Community Relations Council, Jeremy Burton, would behave in such a disgraceful manner is almost unbelievable, but Feoktistov's account is factual, even tending to be low-keyed.
Feoktisov has published additional thoughts on the larger significance of leaders of Jewish defense groups using their positions to maliciously and falsely accusing a "rival" of being an anti-Semite. (See here.) As he says:
READ MORE"In some ways like the doomed Athenians of Socrates's time, who destroyed their community while repressing internal enemies and ignoring threats from external ones, Burton, Trestan, and the other Jewish sophists play a dangerous game. By inflating its meaning to encompass their political enemies, including Jews on the right, they embezzle the gravest term of opprobrium that can be wielded by the Jewish people, and devalue it into their own worthless political plaything."
Steve Frank writes about J Street's tour of Israel for young Jewish adults, as a conscious alternative to Birthright Israel. J Street's tour is all about the suffering Palestinian Arabs, crushed under the ruthless feet of the Israeli occupiers. The participants in the J Street tour heard only from selected Palestinian Arabs and saw very little. The highlight of the tour was a visit to "the now-shuttered ... Shuhada Street ... a half-mile long road in Hebron which used to be the thriving market center of the city." The Arabs had a field day. There were no neutrals present to correct distortions. Nothing was said of the murderous Arab violence that led to Shuhada Street being closed. There was no hint that the Arabs now shopped in a close-by commercial district, which includes a luxurious mall. Shuhuda Street is a very dramatic visual in its ghost-town appearance,. Susceptible tourists were readily persuaded that the Palestinians are mistreated and Israel is evil. Frank spells out some of the facts the tourists didn't get to hear. They paint a very different picture.
READ MORE Strictly speaking, the US Green Party (GP) doesn't belong here. It has Jewish subscribers, but it is not a Jewish organization. However, as Ambassador Alan Baker points out, the environment is part of a bundle of GP's concerns, which include the promotion of non-violence, the distribution of wealth, the demolition of Israel. In other words, it differs little from the goals espoused by the US Democratic Party. This may be why many Jews support it, despite its attitude towards Israel.
As Amb. Baker writes:
"In a world that is plagued by environmental and ecological catastrophes and that faces continuing and ongoing moral and humanitarian crises such as willful bombing and wholesale killing of civilians, mass murders, mass expulsions, denial of basic social, cultural and religious rights and freedoms, assaults on immigrants and others, it is curious that the U.S. Green Party has chosen to concentrate most of its efforts on hounding Israel. This is even more astounding because Israel is one of the only states that excels in the very values treasured by the Green movement — innovative ways to protect the environment, reduce pollution, purify wastewater, desalinate seawater, reforest, and protect natural resources.
Israel has indeed developed important ways to protect the environment while the Palestinian Arabs have garbaged up their aquifer and show little concern for the environment. Yet GP wants to dissolve Israel and create a Palestinian state in its stead. Curious.
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Resurgent Islam continues to infiltrate America's educational system, popularizing its version of the history and geography of the Middle East, while falsifying information about Israel. It is in full swing in the universities, where anti-Israel attacks now include attacks on Jewish students. It has also more quietly but effectively infiltrated high schools and even grammar schools, where dedicated Marxists and teachers just following the curriculum teach the beauty of Islam. Their israelophobic and islamophilic efforts are often aided by the inaction of Jewish defense organizations, the acceptance of a corrupt curriculum by the school administration and the school board and by the support of the local population. Bernice Lipkin describes one such example in detail.
There is also a video available. Lipkin writes, "I didn't discover this video on Newton until recently, else I would have cited it. It describes the Newton scandal in an nicely formatted informative narrative. See it here."
READ MORE In this set we explore the increased strength of anti-Semitism and the constriction of free speech in Europe.
Traditionally, Jew hate came from the right, but now it is mostly coming from the left. Muslims infiltrating a host country bring in Jew hate as part of their core creed. They also are responsible for much of the actual violence against Jews.
Ambassador Ron Prosor put it this way here:
There comes a time in any decent person's life when they should face reality and say, "No more." We are at such a point — the radical has become mainstream, and anti-Semitism has moved from the edges of society to the heart of the political system in certain European countries."
It may be more sophisticated, yet it is just as violent as it always has been. Behind its new, civilized mask of political opposition to Israel's policies, anti-Semitism has the potential to be extremely dangerous, since it erodes the very basis on which the free world has stood since the end of World War II. This basis is a shared set of values that have become the consensus in politics and international relations. Among others, they include the sanctity of free speech until the point where it becomes incitement, the sovereignty of nation-states and absolute intolerance for racism.
[...] A survey published by the European Commission this month [July 2019] found that 44 percent of Jews between the ages of 18-34 have experienced some sort of anti-Semitic attack. Many of them now hide their Jewish identities for fear of harassment, attacks and violence. We usually only hear about the deadly attacks, such as the ones on a Jewish school in Toulouse or the Parisian kosher grocery store, but Jewish people deal with some sort of anti-Semitism regularly.
Different countries are at different points on the line connecting rejecting Jew-hate to coping with it — often inadequately — to actively furthering it. But while different European countries react differently, the European Union (EU), the collective representing the majority of the European countries, is strongly and consistently anti-Semitic, focusing its hostile activities primarily on Israel, which it sees as thwarting the EU's plans. Starting with the sensible goal of sharing a common currency and easing entry across neighboring states, the EU began overriding decisions made by elected officials in the member states. Long term, EU shares with the UN a desire that we all live in a one-world socialist society, administered, of course, by the UN. And Israel is strongly nationalist.
The inpour of Muslims who expect the host population to conform to their ways has not only terrorized the country's Jewish community, it has played havoc with the native population, disrupting the way they live, the values they have and how they express their cultural and religious identities.
Constricting free speech is how European politicians and legislators cope with the response of the native population to being overrun by the non-assimilating Muslim immigrants. Instead of dealing with the core Muslim values that fuel alien behavior, they hamper effective response by the natives and censor speech that might offend Muslims — which means that any criticism of Islam and Mohammad, not matter how accurate or how mild, is off-limits.
In turn, suppression of anti-Muslim criticism has helped populism grow. As William A. Galston writes: (here)
... populism draws strength from public opposition to mass immigration, cultural liberalization, and the perceived surrender of national sovereignty to distant and unresponsive international bodies. If economic arguments had determined the outcome of the Brexit vote, Britain would have remained in the EU. If economic growth had been decisive in Poland, which enjoyed the faster growth rate in Europe between 1989 and 2015, the populist Law and Justice Party would never have become the country's dominant political force.
Despite this political reaction, the betting money still appears to be on Europe being controlled by Islam within a few years. A video that assesses and projects from the current status features Douglas Murray in 'Death of Europe' (here).
Is there an inconsistency in predicting an Islamic future and at the same time a socialist one-world? Probably not. Muslim countries, Sunni and Shiite, often work together to put Islam in control, and then duke it out on which country does the actual management.
Rami Dabbas points out that "the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) has the most extensive network of completely legal organizations in the Old World, while they retain the closest of ties with the Salafis and jihadists, which makes them even more dangerous than the militant radicals." Asking whether the MB is a terrorist organization invites slippery answers, in that its protectors, who also protest plans to declare it an illegal organization in the US, can point to all its legal activities. An accurate answer is this: the MB will do anything and everything, legal and illegal, locally and globally, to advance Islam above all other religions and Muslims above all other people.
Among the many videos on MB, we suggest starting with Cynthia Farahat's 'What is the Muslim Brotherhood' (here). Ami Horowitz has many factual and interesting videos about the MB, including 'The Truth About The Muslim Brotherhood' (here).
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In a related article (here), Olivier Guitta observes that Europe's growing radicalization happens in jails, mosques and universities. In this article, he focuses on the growing number of mosques where Islamic imams preach Muslim doctrine and urge terrorism as acts of piety. Mosques and preachers are well-funded by groups and organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood that Westerners call extremist, but which religious Muslims see as conforming to Islam as practiced by Mohammad.
Two documents that deal with inculcating radicalism in the very young are: Kasim Hafeez's video 'Born to Hate Jews' (here) and Raheel Raza's article 'Radicalization of Kids: a Global Threat (here).
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European deradicalization projects have focused on how to reorient terrorists, to give them a "healthy identity." Olivier Guitta (see above) suggested that it was the propagandizing imams that needed to be deradicalized, if only because they were the nucleus that inculcated the desire to do acts of terrorism in large numbers of Muslims. Giulio Meotti would agree that attempting to rehabilitate jihadists doesn't work. He points out that until we tackle the core statements in the Islamic texts that provide religious justification for slaughtering people, deradicalization won't work.
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Swedish politicians for the most part still insist that Muslim immigration benefits the Swedish people but the reality, as Bruce Bawer writes, is very different. In fact, it may be "already far too late to forestall Sweden's transformation into a sharia state." As it is, services for the elderly have been severely cut to pay for welfare for immigrants without the language or level of education needed to find a job.
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This is an email describing problems confronting hospital personnel because of the attitudes and behavior of the influx of Muslim 'refugees'. It has been circulating on the internet for some five years. It came to Think-Israel as having been written by a nurse in Germany (here). The same letter has also been attributed to a Czech female physician in Munich Germany. Aside from the opening remark and trivial changes in some text ("Is this situation coming to your country?" vs "Is this 'situation' coming to America?') the letter is the same.
I am using the 'doctor letter' that appeared in the Sun Bay Paper because it is an early letter before much was known about how the Muslim refugees were reacting in Europe. Yet it is in keeping with what has been reported over time in bits and pieces in many articles and in comments appending articles. Moreover, Sun Bay Paper added remarks from Snopes.com. Snopes, always protective of Islam, disparaged these claims. But as the editor of the Sun Bay Paper points out (here)
Ed. Note: While we agree that unregulated influxes of economic migrants, asylum seekers and illegal immigrants are causing widespead problems for Western Societies, there is no way to verify this "letter" from the Czech Doctor, who, due to security risks from Islamic extremists, choose to remain anonymous. Snopes.com (an online service that vets material for authenticity) could neither deny nor affirm its veracity. However, since similar information is also available that mirrors much of what the missive states, we have chosen to print the information as a guest commentary/opinion with a following caveat from Scopes at the end of the article so readers can judge for themselves.
I had to admit I found so much of what Snopes said (here) risible. I especially liked Snopes subtly suggesting the letter was not authentic because the authority of a doctor bolstered the claims in a way that wouldn't happen if the claim came from a "barista or dog walker." It read as if Snopes was pleased it had scored a debating point. But would a barista or dog walker have the knowledge and hospital experience to write such a letter? Huh?
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Guy Milliere writes about France as a "a country adrift. Unrest and lawlessness continue to gain ground. Disorder has become part of daily life." Antifa members take to the streets. Separately, Arabs take to the streets. In another demonstration, African illegal immigrants take to the streets. Yellow Vests take to the streets at another time. Living areas are similarly partitioned with built-in no-go zones, and avoided by outsiders. Jews, targeted by Muslims, are leaving the country. President Macron chooses to focus on climate change. The government's response to the increasing disunity is to use new laws that allow the police to arrest "anyone, anywhere, even without cause" and punish anyone who uses ill-defined 'hate speech'.
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Soeren Kern writes of Ursula von der Leyen, slated to be the President of the European Commission, the powerful administrative arm of the European Union. Like any dedicated leftist, she urges large amounts of money be spent on reduction in carbon emissions, a guaranteed minimum wage, gender balance quotas, admission by all the member states of any migrant that requests asylum and inquiry into the "human and ethical implications of Artificial Intelligence." These expenses will of course come out of the pockets of the taxpayers and, of course, will have positive impact with no downside. But she also has larger, more global ambitions. Her policy proposals indicate she plans a large increase in the power of the EU, primacy of EU law over the current laws of the member states, the creation of a European army and the formation of a European superstate "at the expense of national sovereignty of the member states." Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage said of her plans, "She wants to build a centralized, undemocratic, updated form of Communism that will render [obsolete] nation state parliaments, where the state controls everything, where nation state parliaments will cease to have any relevance at all.."
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Imagine this scene. Several gangs are finally on trial for raping, grooming for prostitution and trafficking many, many children. These activities have been an open secret for decades but the media and the police have kept it quiet. Finally someone is convicted and sent to prison. It is a media person who has been writing about these horrible activities. As Linda Goudsmit writes, "Tommy Robinson was convicted for reporting the crime of Muslim rape gangs in England. The only law that Tommy Robinson broke was the Islamic supremacist sharia law forbidding criticism of Islam." This is, unfortunately, a true story.
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Judith Bergman informs us of the details of the Action Plan against Disinformation launched by the European Union (EU). The EU's concern is for Muslims. It wishes to avoid connections, informatively or disinformatively, between Islam and/or Muslims and extremism, a vague word for terrorism. it is quite serious about stomping out any activities it regards as disinformation. It advocate severe censorship on what the media write about Muslims.. The ways to 'detect and expose' and stop information are quite Orwelllian. The EU apparently believes it is better to stop information from reaching the public than refute it after the fact.
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This issue, as usual, explores a sequence of points in time of historic importance. What is unusual is those discussing the most recent events are first. These discuss the current archaeological digging in Jerusalem in the area called the City of David extending to the Arab village of Silwan. Obviously, it is of enormous historic and religious importance. Andrew Lawler, writing in the National Geographic, November 14, 2019, notes that the maze of tunnels reveals remains of ancient Jerusalem. "... A rocky spur of land jutting south from Jerusalem's Old City ... conceals a subterranean labyrinth of natural caves, Canaanite water channels, Judean tunnels, and Roman quarries." Unfortunately, as do most of the main-stream media, he spends a disproportionate amount of time recording the disgruntlement of above-ground Arabs complaining that the excavation is damaging their houses. Such articles ignore Arab distortions, exaggerations and just plain lies. Considering the harm these complaints do when used as a reason to close down a source that proves the Jewish attachment to its ancient homeland, more balanced articles such as the one below by Nadav Shragai need focus on refuting these complaints rather than the archaeological artifacts uncovered.. Victor Sharpe writes about some serious vandalism: the local Arabs have been deliberately destroying Jewish antiquities on the Temple Mount and environs. The local Arabs have not complained about Arab bulldozing affecting their homes; apparently Arab bulldozers don't crack Arab houses.
One of the artifacts found is a weight engraved with the word 'Beka' in ancient Hebrew; it dates from the First Temple period. As the Arutz-Sheva Staff writes here:
The Beka weight was used to weigh the half-shekel donation brought by the Jewish people for the maintenance of the Temple and the census, and it is mentioned in the Bible in Exodus 38, Verse 26:
"One beka per head; [that is,] half a shekel, according to the holy shekel, for each one who goes through the counting, from twenty years old and upward, for six hundred three thousand, five hundred and fifty [people]."
Another major find is a bulla (a seal), which bears the name Natan-Melech (Servant of the King) and has been accepted by even skeptical experts as likely having belonged to the Natan-Melech who was an official in King Josiah's court (Kings II 23:11). See here.
Nadav Shragai refutes the many inaccuracies in the usual write-up of the dig in the Old City of Jerusalem and provides the context the main stream media tend to ignore. He also tells us about some of the exciting findings recovered on the Pilgrimage Road to the Temple Mount.
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As Luke Moon points out, excavations in the village of Silwan are confirming the Biblical record. In fact, each new finding in the City of David and environs makes even more preposterous the Arab claim that Jews are johnnies-come-lately in their ancient land. In a recent article, the New York Times chose to ignore Silwan's history as a Yemini Jewish village. In an egregious lie — or maybe just out of plonkin' ignorance — it reasserted that "Israel captured East Jerusalem from Jordan in 1967 and then annexed it", implying it was Jordanian and the Jews were the aggressors. Even a 101 course in History would familiarize the NYT writers with the fact it was Jordan that invaded Israel in 1948 and captured Samaria, Judea and a piece in eastern Jerusalem. In 1967, when Jordan again attacked Israel, Israel didn't capture Jordanian land. Israel took back its own land, land that Jordan had seized in 1948, when it attacked the new-born state of Israel.
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Victor Sharpe writes that many Muslim 'authorities', including Yassir Arafat, have reassured us that the Jews built no Temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and they have no long-term association with the city. Retroactively, the Palestinian Arabs have been 'proving' this by using bulldozers to wantonly destroying archaeological evidence buried under the Temple Mount and environs. As expected, most of the media, which bemoaned ISIS destroying antiquities in Iraq and Syria, raised no objections. Archaeologists and volunteers have sifted the tons of dirt dumped by the Arabs. They have found thousands of artifacts. But As Sharpe points out, "... each precious find, ripped and torn from its age old location upon the Temple Mount by Palestinians, fatally compromises what archaeologists can tell us: a most grievous and barbarous sin against history and civilization."
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In 2005, the then Israeli government handed over Gaza completely to the Arabs by kicking out each and every Jew who was living there. There was an attempt to justify this action by asserting it markedly reduced terrorism. As Akiva Bigman notes here, this assertion only works if one starts counting from the 2000 Intifada, when Arafat deliberately caused a sharp increase in terror incidents. It is more accurate to assert, as most Jews have come to understand, that "the Gaza withdrawal of more than 8,500 Jews in August 2005 serves as a costly case study demonstrating the implications of evacuating lands and turning them over to Arab control." [See Avrohom Shmuel Lewin, here.] Instead of turning Gaza into a mini-state promoting industry and human rights, Gaza was soon taken over by Hamas with the endorsement of the Arab voters and became another place to train terrorists and develop ways to kill Jews. In his JNS article, Lewin cites Maj (res.) Gen. Gershon Hacohen, who points out the military assumptions asserted before withdrawal, i.e., "territorial separation between Israelis and Palestinians ... will delineate borders, reduce friction and create stability" proved "totally untrue." There was also the blithe reassurance to Israelis, repeating the nonsense reassurance at the time of the Oslo Accords, that if this proved untrue, the military would "embark on any necessary military operation;" That didn't happen. That couldn't happen.
One aspect of the Gaza withdrawal that has received little attention is the preparation it required to condition the Israel Defense Force (IDF) to be ready to carry out an attack on its own people. The article below describes the grotesque training required to make Jewish soldiers act against their own people and its impact on the fighting ability of the IDF. As noted by Professor Arieh Zaritsky In Eretz Israel Shelanu:
'The Mental Preparation' for the Disengagement and its Aftermath in the IDF, summarizes a fact-finding investigation of the notorious "mental preparation" the IDF (Israel Defense Force) had been undergoing for 18 months, prior to the "Disengagement" from Gush Katif. This "mental preparation" had been an outright brainwash that had been the big enabler of the deportation crime (dubbed disengagement).READ MORE
In Mosaic Magazine, Rick Richman quotes Ben Hecht on his early life:
I lived 40 years in my country without encountering anti-Semitism or concerning myself even remotely with its existence. This is perhaps a record for a Jew or, more likely, for a country. . . . I attended no synagogue, read no Jewish history or literature, never heard of the Spanish Inquisition, and listened to no discussion of Jewish problems.
It took the growing power of Hitler and the Nazis to instill in him his Jewish identity. Working with Hillel Kook (aka Peter Bergson), he took up his pen to boldly push people into action. As Colin Shindler writes, "Ben Hecht offended many during his campaign to open people's eyes to the Holocaust. He didn't care a jot."
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In this article, Alex Grobman and Susan Rosenbluth review Michael Dobbs book: "The Unwanted: America, Auschwitz, and a Village Caught in Between." Dobbs writes of the time Germany wanted to rid itself of its Jews; its mania to slaughter all Jews was still a few years in the future. Dobbs writes about a group of Jews trapped in Germany but with no place to go, unwanted in Germany, unwanted elsewhere. Grobman and Rosenbluth, summarizing Dobbs, convey the anxiety, the urgency, the panic, the despair endured by this particular group of German Jews, who were suddenly awoken to the fact that they were decidedly not wanted in the very place they had called home, some for generations, some for hundreds of years. Speeches filled with Jew-hate and restrictions on Jewish activities grew increasingly in the 1930s in Hitler's Socialist Germany. By Kristallnacht -- the night in November 1938 that windows in thousand of synagogues and shops were smashed -- it was clear even to those who had ignored earlier anti-Semitic actions, that they had to leave. They wanted to go to the USA, but the USA didn't want them. Dobbs details the twists and turns of their unhappy history.
READ MORE Jordan invaded the new state of Israel in 1948 and was able to grab Samaria, Judea and some of the eastern part of Jerusalem. She killed or kicked out all the Jews. When she again invaded Israel in 1967, Israel was stronger and took back her stolen land. Foolishly, Israel did not evict the Arab squatters who lived in Jewish homes at Jordan's invitation. So Jews have been forced to sue at great cost in money and time to regain their own homes. David Rosenberg writes of one such incident. NOTE: See also "The Muslim Quarter of the Old City was Jewish before the Mandate" by Dovid Mark here.
READ MORE Ruth Blum addresses the problem of how the treatment of Jews in the Middle East and North Africa by Muslims has been presented. Too many books and articles assert that Muslims and Jews happily coexisted, completely ignoring that Jews were treated as dhimmis are treated in Arab countries: badly. She points out that Exile in the Maghreb authored by Paul B. Fenton and David G. Littman "is a most important book, which sets the record straight about the true plight of the Jews after the conquests of the lands in which they had peacefully resided."
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In the 6th Century BCE, the Jews of Judea were conquered and exiled by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar 2, their Temple destroyed. When Cyrus the Great, ruler of Persia, (now called Iran), overcame the Babylonians in 539 BCE, he allowed the Jews to return to their homeland and rebuild their Temple. As Rivkah Fishman-Duker points out, it was his political policy to allow freedom of religion. This did not return the Jews to control of their homeland, as did, say, the San Remo Conference in 1920. The Washington Post hastened to refute claims that Trump is a modern-day Cyrus because he moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem. In doing so, the newspaper violated one of their policies. By talking about events involving Jews that happened more than 2500 years ago, they were implicitly and atypically refuting "the mendacious Palestinian narrative, which claims that the Jews are not the indigenous people and are usurpers who lack a historical claim to the land."
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Bruce Bawer reminds us how little the world understood the threat of Islamic Jihad just thirty years ago. Salman Rushdie had just published a novel, The Satanic Verses which featured the Koran and Muhammed. The Ayatollah Khomeini declared the novel blasphemous. He issued a fatwa condemning Rushdie to death and promising $6 million dollars to the one who killed him. The world was so unfamiliar with the concepts of fatwa, jihad and sharia law that many found it all "grotesque, absurd — a joke, even." Many agreed that Islam had been slandered. Few understood this was not an isolated incident of no lasting importance. Since 1989 we have become much more familiar with fatwas and jihad and acts of Islamic terrorism. We no longer think Khomeini's fatwa was a joke. But it can not be said that we yet understand that Resurgent Islam is waging a war to the death against the West and Israel in a variety of ways. It will not stop until we take the threat seriously enough to fight back effectively.
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Nurit Greenger writes of the return of sheep called Jacob sheep to Israel after thousands of years. The association to the Biblical Jacob is that like the sheep Jacob got to keep from his father-in-law's flock, these sheep are "piebald, of spotted and speckled patterns." Sheep were originally domesticated and bred in the Fertile Crescent, but deliberately-induced modifications in features may have occurred over the millennia. Nevertheless, 'closing the circle' is a charming notion.
READ MORE Michael Freund acquaints us with some astonishing facts about how many people in Central and South America are of Jewish descent. Genetic tests indicated that a quarter of a 6500-people statistical sample have Jewish genetic ancestry. Translated to the general population, that means the millions of this population have Jewish roots. Another study determined that some 20% of the 50 million combined population in Spain and Portugal were descendants of Jews forced to convert to Catholicism centuries ago. Currently some individuals and groups of these people, called Bnei Anusim (Children of the Coerced), have formally reverted to Judaism. Freund suggests that as others become aware of their ancestry, the Jewish community should embrace "the Bnei Anusim and other Jewish descendants." It should welcome "back those who wish to come home."
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What we are talking about in the July–December 2018 Issue
Editor's Note:Think-Israel tends to use salafist rather than extremist or Islamist or militant or fundamentalist or activist to describe generically a pious Muslim, one who sticks as closely as possible to the unfiltered words and actions of Mohammad and the first three generations of Muslims, including, especially, the Companions of the Prophet. In modeling himself as closely as he can on the preachings and practices of Mohammad, a salafist can in modern terms be precisely described as an uninhibited terrorist, a theological supersessionist, a political supremacist who believes Islam and sharia law must dominate and a social barbarian, who wages jihad with whatever tools are available. Thanks to the high quality of whitewash supplied by sympathetic propagandists, he seldom is so described.
This issue we tackle, in a small way, aspects of some large topics — Nationalism versus Globalism and Capitalism versus Socialism. We examine how avowed Marxists and pious Muslims have banded together to destroy our political system and our personal freedoms.
Part 1 examines the return of the notion of a single government planet-wide. To bring it about we would need to restructure our society and our values. Part 1 looks at the pressure to stop global warming (GW) and open all our borders. Doing so will move us closer to a one-world government.
Cleaning the atmosphere of carbon dioxide can not be done in bits and pieces, here and there. It needs to be done over the entire globe. The infra-structure in any one place needs to be connected to the network infrastructure. Once developed, a single network managed by some entity such as the United Nations is a global government in all but the name. In this way, dedicating ourselves to stopping GW would help bring about a single state.
If we start even in a small way to have open borders, we will be downgrading one essential characteristic of a sovereign state. Then too, if we rid ourselves of the idea that a sovereign nation has the right to decide which outsiders can reside within its borders, then we have no way to curtail the entry of people that don't have our values or want to abide by our laws.
Part 2 looks at socialism, defining it as best we can and exploring some of its practices. It also discusses the morphing of the Democratic party from liberalism to a political entity that is anti-Semitic, anti-family, anti-religion except perhaps Islam, and against our major values of personal freedom in speech and action. A few years ago, the Democrats promised to unite all groups by underplaying differences in skin color, religion, ethnic group and other features. Instead, we have morality by stratification. White people are told to go sit at the back of the bus and admit, despite their record of advancing civilization spectacularly, that they are worthless. We are being taught to value groups selectively, instead of assessing individuals according to what they have accomplished.
Part 3 looks at what's happening to Resurgent Islam's mission to make sharia law universal. What's happening in the States, in Europe, the Middle East and in the Far East.
The issue ends with Part 4 with sections on Public Relations and History.
In simple language, Rabbi Aryeh Spero describes nationalism as a good thing, contrasting it with globalism. He writes:
"... the preponderant meaning of nationalism is patriotism and love of country and the basic reading of America-First is exactly what President Trump has in mind: placing American job workers first; placing America's military and American lives first; putting America's security and the protections of its citizens first. And, that is how it should be! When asked to choose, we should always place our family and country first. The opposite of that is globalism or trans-nationalism. Those who purposely conjure up Nazi phraseology of "blood and soil" to describe American nationalism are propagandists. The Left, and neocons, should stop hijacking and re-defining the American language.
In contrast, Macron and Germany's Merkel are globalists, European socialists. They are strong advocates for a European Union that erases borders between European countries; so that when a jihadist enters one country he is blithely free to enter another country. The leaders of these countries willingly forfeit their economic autonomy to bureaucrats in Belgium who decide everything, from business regulations, weights, measures and slogans. This is a total loss of national sovereignty. It has resulted in a severe diminution of those cultural and traditional values and rituals that determine a country's identity and end up erasing its history."
Nationalism is easy for us to understand. Living in America, we constantly act out our constitutionally-granted freedoms. We incorporate the rights and responsibilities intrinsic to our nation's culture in what we do and how we do it on a daily basis. We use institutions that stem from the principles established when the USA was created. Kinship, community, patriotism are not meaningless terms. On the 4th of July, while eating hot dogs and ice cream, watching fireworks, joshing with friends and ignoring the harangues of the local politicians, kids are participating in the unique experiment that is America. Other nations, mostly Western, have some of the same life styles and culture. Some, such as the Islamic countries, are based on very different notions of what is worthwhile doing, what is good and what is bad. China in Asia had pretty much adopted our economics, while restricting the Chinese population in all aspects of their lives.
Globalism is harder for us to understand, if only because there are few things to point to that are the fruits of globalism. We know globalists believe in the efficiency of a single government uber alles. We know that in a globalist world there is no tension between the individual's self-interest and the good of the collective — the community won hands down when such an administration came into being. We know that globalists push for a single set of rules and regulations and behaviors around the world. They float the happy idea that this united world government would be flat in the sense that all would be equal. But details are hard to come by. Equal in what? Opportunity? Privileges? Obligations? Clout? Ask for specifics and that's when things get fuzzy. The hope-and-wish fairies take over. In a landscape that has few identifiable structures, speculation and fantasy are hawked about as reliable forecasts of the future. It is likely that that the system will be two-tiered, with the majority of the population on the bottom tier, and an upper tier where the managers, organizers and decision makers reside. We are reassured, however, that differences in life style, education, ideology and expectations won't matter. All will be equal.
Given the absence of real examples, hypothetically, how do you create a democratic globalist world? One possible model in the small is the United Nations, which was created in the hope that rational beings who differed in ideology, culture, life style and language could come together calmly in a civilized environment to work out their differences peacefully. Given the hopes at its birth and the prodigious resources it soon commanded, the UN was perhaps the likeliest to demonstrate that a flat-global world order, where all are equal and all are respected, was possible.
Less than a century later, we see the results of this globalist ideology put into practice. The UN has become a poisonous politicized plaything of one-worlders, with Islamic objectives a major component. A large factor in causing the UN's deterioration is that Muslims, after centuries of being backward and inconsequential in human development, became unbelievably rich. They used some of their oil wealth to try to make Islam mightier than all other religions and sharia law the law of all people everywhere. The Arab group of countries acting in a united fashion — not the usual way of interacting back home in the Middle East — distorted the hopes of the original plan for the UN. They demonized Israel, making hate the norm. They co-opted media people. With pocket change, they could sway the several hundred people that run the European Union.
When not engaged in excoriating Israel, the major administrators in the UN engaged in practices that made them an unsullied example of corruption. They made sure their children could live in 24-caret golden nests, while most of their co-religionists barely survive starvation and disease. I suspect that, whatever the real-life particular circumstances are — whenever and whatever — any democratic globalist world is doomed to inefficiency, strife and stagnation.
We have also witnessed some of the diverse efforts by globalists to bring their vision of a perfect world to fruition. As Ted Belman (IsraPundit, November 20, 2018) wrote:
"There is no question but that there is a movement afoot that seeks to create World Government. They do so by creating institutions such as the UN, the ICC, The Paris Agreement re controlling climate change, the UN Immigrant Compact, UN and EU blasphemy laws, political correctness. and so on and so forth."
Here are some explanatory videos.
"What Is A Globalist?" here.
"Elite Snakes FEAR Populism and Nationalism" here. It discusses how globalists pick and choose from the judicial systems of other countries, ignoring the will of their own people.
"UN To Make Criticism Of Mass Migration Illegal Hate Speech" here. Marcel de Graaff talks about the UN proposal to criminalize criticism of mass migration as hate speech. "No to Marrakesh! — The UN's Sinister Blueprint for Globalist Migration Hell" here has more detail.
The articles in Part 1 examine two areas that are the foot soldiers of the globalist ideology: global warming and open borders.
"Blaming mankind gives socialists an excuse to seize control of the energy industry, and wield complete control of every aspect of the global economy." — Daniel F. Melton (NC native, comment, here.)
Man-made global warming (GW), known also as Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) or Climate Change, is such a wonderful reason for restructuring the world. One doesn't even have to whisper this has anything to do with globalism. Just talk about the coming climate disaster if we don't act decisively. Obviously, ameliorating the climate can not be done in spurts and patches. It needs to be done globally. Once the infra-structure is in place, it will be no end useful — to clean up medical problems, provide welfare, educate children in a standard set of beliefs, prevent unsafe and unkind practices, and other useful endeavors. One won't have to speculate about what a global world would look like. A global economy will be in place, complete with a ruling class called 'management'.
Fortunately, more and more quality articles are appearing that question Global Warming assertions that for far too long have captured the headlines, if not the data. One such features Mark Levin interviewing Dr Patrick Michaels. It points out that almost every computer model predicts far too much global warming, so they need "adjustments." As the sarcastic article by Lewis Morris "UN: It's Climate Doomsday, and We Mean It This Time" (here) points out, because of the faulty models, doomsday warnings have also been way off, starting with the Doomsday article in Newsweek in April 1975 warning us about the coming Ice Age (here.)
Aside from questioning data, more attention is being paid to our energy options. At one end of the options spectrum, we continue to largely use fossil fuels; at the opposite end, we convert completely to plentiful replenishables: solar power, wind power and water power (SWW as a group). Using SWW would seem the way to go. Unfortunately, SWW are nowhere near ready to fuel our economy. Solar power will remain an adjunct source until there's a way to store the captured sun power to use when the sun isn't shining. So as Vijay Jayara's article "The Dawn of Climate Realism: Coal Surges Amid Climate Rhetoric" (here) points out, there's been a surge in using coal. The last election would indicate the American public isn't keen on paying out money to curb carbon dioxide emission; and this attitude is a trend, not a short-term spike (See James Taylor: "Election Slaughter for Climate Activism" here.) I note that the elephant in the room, nuclear energy, is scarcely mentioned.
Arguments against the idea that GW is due to greenhouse gases, particularly CO2, have been compiled in a video called "How A Theory About Climate Became A Political Ideology" here. Scientists speak out why they negate the theory. Of interest is the history of what started the conjecture that we were soon to suffer from Global Warming. Would you believe Margaret Thatcher was one of the people responsible?
Other informative videos are:
Tim Ball, "The Climate Change Hoax" here. Ball suggests that climate change data have been falsified to bolster the call for a Global World.
Nobel Laureate in Physics Iver Glaever warns that global warming is a pseudo science here.
"Prof. Don Easterbrook Crashes the Global Warming Party" here details NASA's and NOA's retroactive tampering with the data. How does he know? He examined the original data before it was 'adjusted.'
Nobel Laureate Dr Kary Mullis explains why "Climatology is a 'Joke'" here.
Mark Steyn talks about Michael Mann's fraudulent hockey stick here. Steyn was sued by Mann for daring to question his graph.
Steve Gorham cautioned here: "Contrary to what your political leader, professor, and newspaper tell you, global warming is dominated by natural factors. As a result, thousands of climate and energy laws across hundreds of nations, all summed together, are not going to have a measureable effect on Earth's temperatures."
In this video here, meteorologist John Coleman, who founded the Weather Channel, explains how climate change become a political and environment agenda item which uses science that is not valid. "A great scientist named Roger Revelle had Al Gore in his class at Harvard and the Global Warming campaign was born. Revelle tried to calm things down years later, but Gore said Revelle was Senile and refused to debate. ..."
The previous issue — as well as earlier issues — laid out facts contradicting AGW assertions. In the current issue, we focus on some of the activists urging that we must stop AGW now, before it's too late.
It is curious that we hear so much about the large number of people agreeing that there is Global Warming (GW) and we should do something about it; yet this attitude isn't reflected in how they vote. Last year, Canadian voters in Ontario voted in Doug Ford, who had emphasized that he would cancel the carbon tax imposed by Justin Trudeau. In Australia, Prime Minister Malcolm needed to walk back from his strong support of the Paris climate agreement. Rael Jean Isaac writes about President Emanuel Macron of France, perhaps the best-known politician who has agreed to increase the use of renewable sources of energy, in his case to 20% of France's total energy. This means France needs at great cost to reduce its current 75% dependency on nuclear power to 50%, even though nuclear power doesn't send carbon into the atmosphere. If the current unrest is an indicator, the French don't see it his way.
READ MORE This article by Paul Driessen is an excellent summation of how Global Warming Warners (GWW) are being ignored as we continue to obtain most of our energy from fossil fuels. Concurrently, some countries have swapped promises and plans — NOT actions — to reduce the use of fossil fuels for hard cash from GW believers. As Driessen cites some major locales where voters have rejected plans for reducing carbon-based fuels, we learn about some of the activists that are behind these proposals.
READ MORE We know that one-world ideologues are among those that broadcast the immediate dangers of what others consider the natural increase — followed by natural decrease — of global temperatures that has been going on for eons. We are familiar with the tightly-bonded inner circle of climate scientists that has promoted the dangers of man-made global warming in op-eds and in published papers with unscientific certainty. (Michael Mann, creator of the infamous hockey stick, has been so prominent a warming warner, I'm tempted to call it Mann-made global warming.) The group has had a large hand in the authoritative reports on Climate Change issued by the IPCC of the United Nations.
Patrick Michaels focuses on another group of major believers in the certainty that we are in the throes of a major global warming crisis, namely, scientific organizations such as the AAAS, or, more precisely, the officials and managers of theses societies, who speak in the name of the society. I have written how the administrators of the AAAS spend much of the organization's scientific and monetary capital on alarming politicians and the public about GW (see "Scientizing Politics" here). Michaels points out that using ethanol as fuel and being certain greenhouse gases are leading to severe global overheating are several areas where, despite the amount of contradictory evidence, the AAAS has added its weight to one side of the debate.
READ MORE This Washington Times editorial focuses on George Soros' money contributions to Al Gore's 'educating' the public on the dangers of global warming. It was a lot of money but it was only a part of Soros' various donations to persuade the public to make sacrifices to stop global warming. The article points out that Gore's climate predictions was often very wrong, which didn't stop him from broadcasting his next alarm.
Michael Bastasch of Technocracy News here described the Soros-Gore transaction this way:
Former Trilateral Commission member Al Gore secretly took millions from George Soros to push climate change. What's the game plan here? To propagandize the American public into accepting global warming propaganda that had nothing to do with real science and everything to do with a secret political and economic agenda. When the selling got tough, Gore then ridiculed 'deniers' by claiming that they should be punished for not agreeing with him. — TN Editor
Several articles add detailed information about George Soros. One, called "Forget The Us President, George Soros Is One Scary Man" and published by Australian Daily Mail says of him here:
"George Soros is a Hungarian-American businessman, investor, and philanthropist. He is multi billionaire who began his career looting the estates of Nazi Death Camp victims. George Soros is one of the most powerful men on Earth. ... since 1979 his foundation network has dispensed an estimated $5 billion, best known in the political arena for his funding and promotion of Radical Left wing causes within the US and abroad including Australia. He views himself as a Messiah of a New World Order."
See also, "George Soros Funding Reveals True Motivations of People's Climate March" by Tyler O'Neil here. This was touted as another of Soros's contributions to helping fight GW, but, as O'Neil writes, "The presence of many non-climate organizations leading the march suggests that the People's Climate March (like the March for Science and the Women's March before it) is more about opposing President Donald Trump than about supporting a single issue."
And don't miss the 1998 video here, when Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes interviewed Soros about his collaboration with the Nazis when he was 14 years old. Soros told Kroft that he has no regrets or sense of guilt. Since then, he and many of his hired hands have denied it ever happened, 'it' being his collaboration with the Nazis or the interview or maybe both.
"The Truth About George Soros' Radical Vision To Remake The Entire World" here provides quotes directly from Soros on his political and economic attitudes. He doesn't like capitalism, free markets and nationalism. He is working towards "A global system of political decision-making that will implement a new global economic system and govern global economics." I wonder who he sees as making the decisions?
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Riddle me this riddle. What is the Riddle of Climate Change?
The question: What climate does climate change change?
The answer: The political climate, of course.
As Linda Goudsmit points out, "Radical leftist political ideologues have taken control of legitimate environmental concerns and torqued them to promote their own agendas."
If we might add to Goudsmit's analysis with a specific example: officials of the UN, which is a powerful voice in promoting the dangers of GW, have articulated how GW is useful to the UN in a larger context.
Their thinking seems to be that the fear of GW helps make people more willing to accept changing from abundant carbon-based fuels to unreliable insufficient replaceable energy. Fighting GW in general and replacing carbon-based fuels specifically are significant steps leading to the UN's ultimate goal of a one-world government. Fighting GW, especially if they are to fight on several fronts, needs planet-wide organization and resources. And the UN has the multinational resources to handle creating the necessary infrastructure. Read for example António Guterres, UN Secretary-General (here) who said:
"The answer lies in the Total Transformation of our economies, and this is achievable." and "We have set out six issues for you to focus on: investment in clean technology; carbon pricing; The Energy Transition; risk mitigation; augmenting the contribution of sub-national actors and business; and mobilizing finance."(emphasis added)
Read also "U.N. Official Reveals Real Reason Behind Warming Scare," here:
READ MOREAt a news conference last week in Brussels, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.'s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy capitalism.
"This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution," she said.
The previous article speaks generally of political groups with political agendas that make use of GW as a persuasion tool. Dennis Avery's article focuses on an agency of the United Nations that is a powerful voice in promoting the dangers of GW. He addresses specifically the UN's IPCC. To quote www.ucsusa.org: "The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to assess climate change based on the latest science."
The article pokes holes in the notion that we have increased our information on what is causing globe warming, other than knowing that global temperatures change from hot to cold to hot in slow cycles. It explains the heightened alarms that recur every 25-30 year. Perhaps most importantly, it demonstrates the increase in warming that started to occur as rural temperature sensors became urbanized because the land surrounding the sensors was being built up. "The raw data for the rural sites showed only one-fifth as much warming as the urban sites." We'd expect that the results would be adjusted to negate the additional urban heat. Shockingly, "the officially 'adjusted' data shows both rural and urban instruments closely matching the urban record!"
Errors introduced by urbanization of the places where the temperature sensors were installed are also discussed here in a video of an interview with Anthony Watts, a meteorologist. Watts' paper, "A brief history of climate panic and crisis... both warming and cooling" is here. Watts tracks the fluctuating opinions regarding warming and cooling from 1895 to 2014. The accompanying graph indicates that GW advocates "take any change and claim it's going to go on forever and kill everyone, ..."
READ MORE John Dale Dunn and Joseph Bast write about two recent reports that deal with climate change: (1) the ICPP report published by and endorsed by the UN and (2) the NICPP report published by a non-governmental international panel of scientists. The two reports differ widely in their conclusions. The IPCC reports a dangerous amount of atmospheric heating. A global heat catastrophe is nigh upon us. We must ban fossil fuels immediately, the ban to be "enforced by the United Nations," if need be. In contrast, "the NIPCC report finds that while climate change is occurring and a human impact on climate is likely, there is no consensus on the size of that impact relative to natural variability, the net benefits or costs of the impacts of climate change, or whether future climate trends can be predicted with sufficient confidence to guide public policies today. Consequently, there is no scientific basis for the recommendation that the use of fossil fuels should be restricted."
As Dunn and Bast point out, "The NIPCC views the claim that human greenhouse gas emissions are causing climate change to be a hypothesis to be tested, not a preordained conclusion." The NIPCC members are scientists who are themselves qualified to judge the merits of the data in context; the IPCC members are politicians, who rely on a cadre of climate scientists who are certain that the existence of AGW has been settled.
The differences in approach and on reliance on authority instead of data are demonstrated in excruciating detail in an article in Climate Science and Policy Watch (CSPW) entitled "Heartland Institute and its NIPCC report fail the credibility test," here. The article claims that "The NIPCC does not employ the same rigorous standards and approval process used by the IPCC to ensure its assessment reports are accurate and inclusive," an assertion that is hard to track because the link to the source is broken. The responses to the article, both pro and con, are of extreme interest; they highlight major differences in approach and level of arrogance. They also clarify some major issues. As one of the comments says, "I don't think science is up for a vote. It's either provable through repeatable results or it is not." That's not the same as relying on the same manipulated models, time and again.
It is also amusing to watch Climate Science Watch make blanket assertions couched as thoughtful comparisons of IPCC versus NIPCC scrutiny of their respective reports.
Anyone willing to bet the UN will change its mind about banning coal and oil and gas soonest? Anyone worried that if the UN is willing to use force to ban carbon-based energy while they don't have that power, how would they behave were they in control of our lives?
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People are familiar with the fact that the growth in the immigrant Muslim population in Europe is rapidly overwhelming the native population. Fewer understand that the same process is developing momentum in the United States. The news media have tended to soft pedal the extent and consequences of illegal entry.
A comprehensive definition of open borders is to found here. For all practical purposes, when people talk about open borders, they are describing the influx of illegal immigrants at the southern borders of the United States. We are mostly confronted by immigrants from Central and South America, but, judging from the prayer mats and Korans found at the borders, these unvetted immigrants include an unknown number of Muslims.
The articles below attempt to characterize illegal immigrants. The difficulties are obvious. To determine how many people are in the United States, one can't just ask someone 'are you illegal' and expect an honest answer, although, bizarrely, that is how the census obtains its information. Other areas also suffer from the basic imprecision in identification, as when determining whether "anchor babies" are legal according to the Constitution. In other determinations, the "illegal" category may or may not include people who overstay their visas and other illegal ways that are different in character from crossing the border surreptitiously. Determining crime rate is a case in point.
This is an excellent framework video:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/sw8e7ee2fqc
Who is a citizen?
The XIV amendment, Section 1 states, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and SUBJECT TO THE JURISDICTION THEREOF, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.
Hans von Spakovsky explicates the second requirement of the 14th Amendment. He points out that "It is just plain wrong to claim that the children born of parents temporarily in the country as students or tourists are automatically U.S. citizens: They do not meet the 14th Amendment's jurisdictional allegiance obligations. They are, in fact, subject to the political jurisdiction (and allegiance) of the country of their parents. The same applies to the children of illegal aliens because children born in the United States to foreign citizens are citizens of their parents' home country."
So it is that 'anchor babies' are not legally citizens. Nor are the children of illegal aliens. In fact, as Spakovsky points out, "American Indians and their children did not become citizens until Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. There would have been no need to pass such legislation if the 14th Amendment extended citizenship to every person born in America, no matter what the circumstances of their birth, and no matter who their parents are."
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Since 2003, the number of illegal immigrants in the US is said to be between 8-12 million. It's not clear how this figure takes into account new births, deaths, overstays, departures and conversion to legal status. How was the figure obtained? The census asked people and the took the response as truth.
This article reports a new study at Yale by the authors. It estimates the number of illegals as some 22 million. The investigators used paper trails, with data from "deportations and visa overstays, and demographic data, including death rates and immigration rates." The actual study, "The number of undocumented immigrants [illegal aliens] in the United States: Estimates based on demographic modeling with data from 1990 to 2016," by Mohammad M. Fazel-Zarandi, Jonathan S. Feinstein, Edward H. Kaplan, PLOS, September 21, 2018, is available here.
The Center for Immigration Studies, which describes itself as "an independent, non-partisan, non-profit research organization" disputes the Yale findings. In an article entitled, "New Estimate of 22 Million Illegal Immigrants Is Not Plausible" here, using data on number of births reported and number of school admissions of illegals, the Center suggests the Yale group has overestimated the number of illegals in the USA. On the other hand, anecdotal evidence of school and emergency room overcrowding suggests even the 22 million estimate might be too conservative. This is backed up by information issued by the Colorado Alliance for Immigration Reform (see here.)
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Proponents of open borders make much of the putative fact that illegals do the work citizens won't do. Other groups suggests immigrants are skilled and educated and necessary to make up for our lack of professionals, an argument that is hard to sustain when referring to immigrants from e.g., Somalia, which devotes much more effort training terrorists than physicists. Relatively few people know how much of our welfare budget goes to support legal immigrants to the USA. This article reports that some 51% of the immigrants, many of whom are low-skilled and not able to speak English, are on some sort of welfare. The number increases to 76% counting immigrant-headed households with children. This is so, despite the fact that a legal requirement of immigration is that the immigant be self-supporting or have guaranteed support. These numbers are for legal immigrants only. The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) reports that "In 2017, the total cost of illegal immigration for the United States — at the federal, state, and local levels — was approximately $116 billion. FAIR arrived at this number by subtracting the tax revenue paid by illegal aliens — about $19 billion — from the total economic impact of illegal migration, $134.9 billion"
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The Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) in February 2018 published a monograph on the prison population of Arizona state prison. The investigators determined crime rates and types of crime committed by legal vs illegal residents in Arizona. They concluded that "Undocumented immigrants are at least 142% more likely to be convicted of a crime than other Arizonans. They also tend to commit more serious crimes and serve 10.5% longer sentences, more likely to be classified as dangerous, and 45% more likely to be gang members than U.S. citizens." Download the monograph at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3099992.
This study has been questioned for several reasons. Many in the media are certain that illegal aliens commit less crimes than the average American. This was answered in "CNN Repeats Myth That Illegals Commit Less Crime Than Citizens" here. Others, including the Cato Institute, raise concerns on how illegality was determined. Lott responded in an article called "Responding to Cato's and others' attacks on our research regarding crime by illegal immigrants" here.
I encourage readers to determine what's correct for yourselves, bearing in mind that number of crimes and rate are different measures. Similarly, there are subcategories in illegal alien, legal alien and citizen. Results will change, depending on which subgroups are counted together in a single major category.
READ MORE There is a good deal of contention surrounding the possibility that potential and already-trained terrorists are entering the States illegally via America's porous borders. We've known for years that prayer rugs and Korans have been found on the southern border, but for every article that asserts there are networks smuggling in terrorists, there are many more that deny it. Of course, one YES with facts against many NOs based on non-relevant assumptions is more compelling.
Articles on infiltration by terrorists via America's borders continue to be relatively sparse, particularly those backed by official data. The headline of Geoffrey Grider's August 2016 article was, "Sunni Muslim Extremists Are Infiltrating The United States With The Help Of Alien Smugglers In South America And Are Crossing U.S. Borders With Ease, According To A U.S. South Command Intelligence Report." He cited Army Col. Lisa A. Garcia, a Southcom spokeswoman. "'Networks that specialize in smuggling individuals from regions of terrorist concern, mainly from the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, the Middle East, and East Africa, are indeed a concern for Southcom and other interagency security partners who support our country's national security,' Garcia told the Washington Free Beacon."
Todd Bensman points out some highlights from the US State Department's annual "Country Reports on Terrorism" by the agency's Bureau of Counterterrorism. It focuses on how specific Latin American countries help or hinder the transit of terrorists.
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We do actually have a hint of what a socialist future will be like. The lynchpin of our society, its nuclear cluster, is no longer the family. Instead, as the voices for equality currently preach, congregation is stratified by race, by gender, by age, by transgender, by wealth. Values are frozen and must be certified as politically correct. Outlier opinions are discouraged. All white men are secret KKKers, no question. All women are chronically outraged, sharing a feminist view, the elements of which are defined by self-chosen leaders. Children are to be taught the facts of transgender life early so they grow up knowing they can change their identity at will. Criticism of Islam, however factual, is not allowed because it's religious hatred. On the other hand, anti-Zionism, which veers more and more to plain old-fashioned Jew-hate, is understandable and forgivable. Steven King, a Republican Congressman from Iowa was immediately rebuked for 'racist remarks' and lost his committee seat in the House. But people run out the clock, and then some, figuring out if an obviously hate-loaded remark by a Congress newbie is really anti-Semitic. The last two Democratic party platforms just missed having anti-Jewish planks many Democrats demanded.
We seem to be in a vindictive period of time. In today's version of the noble savage, non-white races and other select groups get a chance to clobber white males and their compliant females. The iconic image: a remorseful white man trailing meekly behind a fist-raised bitter non-white. If we conform to what the news media consider virtuous, a white man with the proper attitude no longer sees himself as burdened with the need to bring the backward races into modern times. No indeed. Nowadays, he feel guilty that his ancestors benefited from their labor.
In Part 1, Nationalism versus Globalism, we spoke of global warming (GW) having a striking ability to persuade otherwise rational people to adopt a single-administration across the globe because that would make the fight against global warming more efficient. But GW is not tethered to one-worldism or any other ideology. It is simply a trumpet blasting out a tune that engenders fear; and as such it can induce people to take a variety of ideologies seriously.
When interviewed about his book "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change here, Marc Morano said:
"Everything is done as a tactic of fear in order to get action. This started in the 1960s with the modern environmental movement.
" [...] [T]hey use this hysteria for the different environmental scares in the 1970s, whether it's resource scarcity, over-population, rain forest clearing, et cetera.
They will say, "We need a global solution; we need global governance; we need wealth redistribution; we need sovereignty threatening treaty, or some kind of economic activity limiting." No matter what environmental scare in the past that they tried to scare people with, it was the same solutions they're proposing now.
"In the book, I go back and show over and over that global warming is merely the latest scare they're using to get their agenda. I show Naomi Klein, who's an adviser to Pope Francis, who wrote 'Capitalism vs. the Climate.' I interviewed her for the book. She actually says that they would be seeking the same solutions even if there was no global warming and that essentially, capitalism is incompatible with a livable climate. She actually urges people, 'We need to jump on this because solving global warming will solve what we've been trying to achieve all along.'
"They're open about it. They use the climate scare tactics to achieve their ends. And in order to get those ends achieved, they have to hype and scare. It's been a very effective strategy because they've bullied Republican politicians, who should know better, into at least submissiveness and silence and/or activism, when you come to the case with John McCain and even Mitt Romney."
The papers in Part 2 deal with two areas: (1) the various definitions of socialism versus socialism as practiced. (2) The current shift to socialism — progressivism as it is called — and likely consequences.
When we talk about individual freedoms of speech and behavior, we don't usually define the specifics. It's more operational, mostly defining boundary conditions:'you can do what you want but you can't tread on my toes' and 'you can say what you want but you can't yell fire in an occupied building.'
Defining Socialism is different. Definitions are specific, unique, and seldom intersect with one of the other definitions of socialism. Thus given four people who define socialism differently, each can consider himself a socialist, but would insist the other three haven't got it right. Now mix in some of the components and defining socialism can get difficult.
These are dictionary definitions of capitalism (also called: free enterprise or private enterprise or private ownership):
"An economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned and development occurs through the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market."
"An economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, characterized by the freedom of capitalists to operate or manage their property for profit in competitive conditions."
These ignore state-imposed constricting regulations. Large-scale health and welfare programs that take from one group to give benefits to another contaminate a purist definition. But whether in actual practice or as a goal, there's a large separation between capitalism and socialism, which is defined as:
"An economic theory or system in which the means of production, distribution, and exchange are owned by the community collectively, usually through the state. It is characterized by production for use rather than profit, by equality of individual wealth, by the absence of competitive economic activity, and, usually, by government determination of investment, prices, and production levels."
"The stage following capitalism in the transition of a society to communism, characterized by the imperfect implementation of collectivist principles."
In actual practice, the individual has little or no control of a system which is said to be held in common by all the members of the collective. But it is an attractive notion, even if only available in the fairy tale land of perpetual sunshine and hot blintzes, that members of the community not be aggressively engaged in competition. Working for a communal objective seems oh so civilized. A socialist society does sound like a noble idea.
But where do we have an actual and viable example of a socialist society in which its members thrived and were fulfilled? For a short while, the Israeli socialist kibbutz seemed to serve. Driven by lofty ideas of equality and eager to redeem their ancient homeland, highly educated Jews from Europe learned how to dig out rocks and manipulate worn-out soil to support agriculture. Ultimately, human nature and economics did this experiment in. When Israel traded in Marxist equality for capitalist individualism, its economy blossomed, its people showed amazing creativity. What was most surprising was that when Israel adopted capitalism, which, according to socialist ideology, is selfish and dog-eat-dog, the outcome was surprisingly beneficial for mankind. Admittedly, pure economics was likely tempered by Jews taking obligation to the community seriously for millennia. But whatever the reason, the results were astonishing.
Contrariwise, wherever Marxist ideologues were in control, most of the people went hungry, with relatively few living lavishly and happily. Although socialism is usually defined as one-tiered, with all working to capacity for a common good, in practice, socialism is usually two-tiered, with the majority of the population on the bottom tier, equally miserable, and those in actual control on a small upper tier. The hoi polloi are encouraged to live vicariously through these elitists. It is the large-scale version of the Obamas flying from Washington to New York in a plane used exclusively by them to eat a lobster or two, while more and more of the ordinary people in the country were trying to decide whether they should cut down on food or health care.
I assume that the rich and famous and secure and tenured who advocate socialism take it for granted that they will be in the top tier, safe from the harshness of a socialist society.
Whether socialism is liked because it offers supposedly free goodies or whether the notion of all laboring for a collective good is inspiring, one rule of thumb holds up. As Lee Edwards points out, "Socialism is a rigid ideology that always ends in tyranny." (See here.)
Liz Wheeler's article "Three Reasons That Socialism Has Never Worked" is here and her article "Political Iatrogenics - Why Socialism Doesn't Work" is here. The ditty "Countries where Socialism Doesn't Work" is here.
The Hoover Institution, which initially published Richard A. Epstein's article, wrote that "Richard Epstein dissects the shallow theology behind the new strain of socialism that makes the unfounded claim that capitalism and private markets make us unfree..." It is indeed the case that Epstein carefully elucidates why socialism, whatever its guise, can not succeed. He provides the reasons why, as the recent report by the Council of Economic Advisors concluded, "socialism cannot succeed even in democratic societies." Some of the comments to the original article are attached. They describe specific cases where socialism didn't just fail but put the citizens of the country in danger. Other observations reinforce Epstein's analysis.
READ MORE Daniel Mitchell has written an easy-to-read primer on socialism vs a free market economy. It makes clear that socialism means different things to different people; and seldom do results come anywhere near early hopes and expectations. It touches on types of socialism, on wealth redistribution, interventionism, profits and property rights. Mitchell uses writings by Mark Perry to explain the importance of incentives, and market-determined price setting. But ultimately, he suggests, socialism fails for psychological reasons. As Mark Perry put it, "Socialism does not work because it is not consistent with fundamental principles of human behavior. ...it is a system that ignores incentives. ...A centrally planned economy without market prices or profits, where most of the property is owned or controlled by the state, is a system without an effective incentive mechanism to direct economic activity." Further, "Socialism fails because it kills and destroys the human spirit..." The article ends with an informative video featuring Dan Hannan speaking at Oxford U.
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Geoffrey Hunt writes a plain-speaking, mind-jolting article pointing out what the fuzzy socialist happy statements really mean in practice. Take, for example, "the promise of a pure economic democracy, where the means of production are owned and managed by 'the people.'" Hunt tracks it from theory to pracice: "How would 'the people' organize enterprises to produce industrial and consumer goods or deliver transportation and energy, let alone toilet paper, flour, and drinking water? They wouldn't. That's the whole point of the collapse of Venezuela, where socialism really means a corrupt collective run by a narrow military junta, where productive enterprises have been stolen by the state, and then extinguished. And nothing works, for anyone." Hunt traces how failures of socialism lead to totalitarianism, which is not the kind of kind society socialism envisions.
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John C. Goodman expresses the puzzlement many people feel: why is anyone a socialist? He tries out several possibilities, pointing out the discrepancy between theory and reality. He concludes that "what motivates the left in this country, ... isn't their love of the welfare state. It's their hatred of capitalism." Now all we need to do is figure out why people living in the comforts of capitalism hate it and long for the miseries of socialism.
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Bruce Thornton asks, "Can a generation marked by privilege and arrogance be reasoned with?" He's talking about those people in their twenties and thirties that are enthusiastic about socialism. They know it treats everyone as an equal, and power resides in the people. They don't know or discount that socialism has failed everywhere and taken a huge toll in human life and human suffering.
Thornton writes that "...Marxism and progressivism both assume that the knowledge useful for politically organizing a state or society is 'scientific,' comprising principles and techniques that are beyond ideology and universally true. [...] Hence the need for enlightened technocratic elites to control social institutions and use power in order to rationally arrange human existence more justly and efficiently." Thornton makes the point that "the flaw in this thinking was first identified by contemporaries of Plato, whose Republic imagined a utopia of elite Guardians educated to exercise totalitarian control over society." Marxist ideology, like earlier utopian versions, can't handle human nature, self-interest and factionalism; it can only suppress them. Thornton suspects that many of the millennials, functionally illiterate, undisciplined and living on a "high level of material existence, safety, and comfort" will have a bewildering time when the bill for our "unfunded liabilities, mountains of government debt, and unsustainable entitlement spending" comes due.
READ MORE In the USA, socialism has made major inroads in education. The Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) held the attractive promise of consistent and integrated teaching across the country, replacing the responsibility of the individual states to initiate and monitor k-12 education. It has also, unfortunately, promoted socialist values. Nancy Thorner and Bonnie O'Neil (here) observe that "[t]he original idea for Common Core originated as part of UN Agenda 21 (UNA21) ..."
UNA21 is often blandly described as detailing non-binding goals to benefit both the physical and human environment. These goals are to be implemented at all levels of government: local, national and international. At the other end of the spectrum, it is seen as a floor plan for building a one-world government run by the U.N. Statements from U.N. officials throughout the years have reinforced the notion that the U.N. believes its mission is to redistribute wealth, reconstruct national economies, and create a one-world administration.
Most writers on UNA21 deride critics and alarmists and historians such as Newt Gingrich for overstating the dangers of UNA21 and under understanding its goals. But there are others such as the Democrats Against U.N. Agenda 21 (here) who say:
"In a nutshell, the plan calls for governments to take control of all land use and not leave any of the decision making in the hands of private property owners. [...]"
"U.N. Agenda 21 cites the affluence of Americans as being a major problem which needs to be corrected. It calls for lowering the standard of living for Americans so that the people in poorer countries will have more, a redistribution of wealth. [...]"
"It's time that people educate themselves and read the document and related commentary. After that, get a copy of your city or county's General Plan and read it. You will find all sorts of policies that are nearly identical to those in U.N. Agenda 21. Unfortunately, their policies have advanced largely unnoticed and we are now in the end game."
A plank in the 2012 Republican National Committee's platform stated, "We strongly reject the U.N. Agenda 21 as erosive of American sovereignty.'
Agreement with the critics of UNA21 depends on how much the reader is willing to connect the dots of some specific happenings; as an example, Prez Obama using new unauthorized EPA regulations to take over vast swatches of Western land for the government, freezing coal leases on public land and stopping oil and gas drilling. Map this on UNA21 statements encouraging a government to take control of public land, and its emphasis on using 'clean' fuels rather than carbon-based energy. As Thorner and O'Neil write:
The United Nations Agenda 21 has quietly changed the makeup of our cities and rural areas through highly questionable tactics, clothed in lofty adjectives such as "smart growth" and "sustainability." [...]
Agenda 21 activists have quietly initiated laws that allowed the government to confiscate our land, water, private property, and wilderness areas. Their ultimate goal is to strip Americans of personal rights and freedoms, creating a socialist future and eventually a one-world government. [...]
A necessary path to obtain thse desired changes must include the indoctrination of children through education."[emphasis added]
The Universities, from ivy-league to state universities, assume the virtue of socialism and the virulence of capitalism. This conviction has been incorporated into the mentation of both faculty and students. They are unchallenged by their school's administrators, who, whether acting out of similar conviction or governed by sheer passivity, have done nothing to stop the harassment of anyone — student, visiting speaker or professor — who speaks for sovereignty, freedom of speech or capitalism. Along with the Marxist ideology and its conviction it is acting in a noble manner has come some of socialism's least noble practices, particularly anti-Semitism. The content of the courses offered in a socialist milieu has also been affected. Marion Ingeborg Andrews, who survived Hitler's reign of terror, is quoted in "Woman Born in Hitler's Germany Tells Liberals They Remind her of Nazis," here: "It saddens me that we are teaching garbage in the schools and in the college. We don't teach history anymore." Learning about the history of feminism may be interesting but it isn't a substitute for a course in history that integrates happenings and events with a country's culture and civilization and future.
In politics, from picking school boards to presidential elections, there are splits. Not really simple binary splits. Instead, it's as if the yes's to a whole set of seemingly unrelated statements are the elements in the 'democratic' cludge or the 'republican' cludge, not mixed between them. Each cluster containing a bunch of beliefs, which rarely intersect with the beliefs in the opposing cluster. Sometimes it's difficult to see how the elements of the cluster are themselves related. On the left, unfettered immigration is approved, but why is this linked to the enthusiastic approval for raising taxes hugely on the rich, as if removing their money is removing sin from an unrepentant? Providing illegal aliens with the same benefits citizens receive is an 'of course'; and there's a generous number of freebies. Scientific societies worry that the Trump government's exclusion of Muslims from countries that train terrorists will reduce the number of scientists, as if these immigrants had scientific training. There they are, all these objectives tucked in a single belief cluster.
Liberalism in the Democratic party, the once unsullied party of liberalism, has eroded. The Democratic party has been taken over by extremists who are very different from the typical liberal a half century ago, who sincerely believed in a live-and-let-live philosophy. No, I haven't forgotten that revamping nationalism started before the 1960s, but the typical democrat that I knew was a nice-guy liberal, who believed in free speech and self determination. Today's socialist theology may be a watered-down Marxism but its impact on its adherents is traditional. They hate Jews. And, as Marxists railed against the capitalist ruling class, so do the Democrats disrespect both white men and white women and expect whites to agree with them and not bolt the party, even though it might make middle-of-the-road democrats very uneasy. They want porous borders, that being the quickest way to introduce groups of people that in theory will vote democratic. There is the added benefit that many of them will be on welfare or in other ways be dependent on the government, which, with the help of the illegal invaders, they will control.
We have seen a surprising alliance between pious Muslims and the believers in socialism, who are mainly secular — two groups that aside from their Jew-hate have almost nothing in common. Indeed, they take exactly opposite views on equality for women in the workplace and in society in general, on multi-gender identities, on emphasizing race, gender and age strata versus control by tribe and clan. Rather than live-and-let-live, we see more and more intolerant behavior: demolishing public and out-of-favor historic statues; joining up with violence-prone Antifa to riot and demolish property; shaming and jeering at a disliked person in public places. We seem to be starting to repeat the fervor and chaos of the French revolution instead of following our legal and Constitution-based system of government. Wherever will it end?
The Trump administration is trying to reverse socialist notions that the State knows best and should control the behavior of individual Americans. The blatant offers of freebies for votes — can anyone forget the video featuring the gap-toothed black lady yelling, "Everybody in Cleveland got an Obama phone" here — are reduced, with people apparently preferring jobs to handouts. But the media still favor the creators of chaos.
Perhaps the most unexpected feature of the new Democrats is their increasingly vocal hatred of Jews, usually expressed as antipathy to Israel or to Zionism. Aside from overt anti-Semitism having become as rare as a case of measles, the political side of the enormous effort to create the modern state of Israel should have aroused socialist empathy. Much of the effective work in recreating a habitable homeland was done by Jews imbued by socialist ideas of equality: everyone was to work as hard as possible for their collective goal. It is true that rather than follow the Russian plan to spread Marxism globally, they chose to prove the worth of Marxism by bringing one state into being. But the fact remains that it was in part their ideology that helped them succeed.
It is likely that the Jew-hate we see in the far Left stems from their investment in cooperating with Muslims, whose hatred of Jews is endemic. But the more recent history of Israel may also have contributed. As is typical in socialist countries, the initial ground-breaking efforts were followed by the ascendancy of a socialist bureaucracy that was better at shifting blame than finishing jobs efficiently in a timely fashion. Certainly, trying the unknown and the unplanned was discouraged. There are still too many dictatorial bureaucrats but as Caroline B Glick writes here, "In the past 25 years, Israel's economy has changed from a socialist command economy to a free-market economy and today Israel's GDP per capita is higher than Japan's."
As an aside, we might mention that the second major motive for creating a homeland was religious. Religious Jews came to the Holy Land to redeem their ancient homeland, although many religious Jews favored living there but waiting for the Messiah to come before recreating a state. In truth, there was never a time there weren't some Jews living in the land of the Jews, usually under horribly adverse conditions. Other religious Jews figured they'd get a head start on the Messiah. They supplied the moral and spiritual glue for the Zionist enterprise operative in Israel. It has helped create a country where helping others and spontaneous kindness are important virtues. At the same time, it has helped lead to behavior that is impractical if not downright stupid; for example, in wartime, the IDF warns the Arab enemy their homes are soon to be bombed. Such weak retaliation has the effect of training the Arabs, improving their ability to attack Israel the next time.
This set of papers tracks the unchecked breakup of the Democratic Party into splintered forms of socialism. Classic communism saw a binary conflict: the exploited workers and the exploiter owners and managers. With the advent of identity politics, we now have many groups of victims, unified in their opposition to the current administration but wraggling for position among themselves. Whistleblower Editor David Kupelian has pointed out here that "Identity politics says what matters most isn't what you believe, but who you are. But this is a flagrant repudiation of the original notion of the American identity, wherein what we hold in common isn't our ethnicity or skin color or sexual hang-ups, but love of a shared history and reverence for certain transcendent values."
Splitting the university population as well as the general population into gender and race cohorts has had an impact on the courses taught and the type of personality that is developed. Tactics developed by Saul Alinsky to help communities that lacked power have morphed into street and dorm theater, teaching pampered students how to be victims needing comfort zones. Stuffing the separate groups of victims into one bag, where the official histories of oppression of the various certified strata bind together and reinforce each other, is based on the socialist theories of stratification and intersectionality.
In this video, Heather MacDonald speaks on the Diversity Delusion, one of the offshoots of intersectionality, on campuses. This delusion asserts that any disparity — for example, in number of males to females in a particular field or department — must be the result of discrimination, not individual choice or circumstances. There is much concern that there be diversity in skin color and gender, but almost no concern about admitting students that can't hack the course. The disappointing output, an inadequate professional, is attributed to discrimination, not ability. The emphasis on making sure each of the valued cohorts are tapped equally or by proportional representation rather than working to make the final product superior has corrupted even prestigious organizations such as the National Science Foundation, which is squandering its funds to study intersectionality in STEM instead of studying areas than would benefit science.
(Another MacDonald video is available here.)
As socialistic values eat up Democratic liberalism, unexpected likes and dislikes develop. There is marked sympathy in the main street media for Antifa terrorists and a growing lack of sympathy for Israel. We hear nasty Jew-hating statements from people in positions of authority, the likes of which were last heard before World War 2. Only now, it is members of Congress with foul mouths, not KKKers. What's worse, the rest of the Democratic congressmen don't kick the haters off their committee assignments. Instead, they sit around dissecting the quackings of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, trying to determine if these utterances were really and truly for sure anti-Semitic or just some statements made in ignorance.
Some of these consequences are examined in the papers below, in particular, the activities of Jews forced to reexamine their political connections and their subjective identities are emphasized.
Leon Puissegur provides excellent guidance in tracking the recent history of the Democratic Party as it descended into Socialism. He starts his detailed analysis in 1944 with Norman Thomas's much-cited remark that under the guise of liberalism, the "Democratic Party has adopted our platform." Please note that the quote has been challenged for authenticity by PolitiFact (not an impartial source of information, itself). On the other hand, Ronald Reagan used some of the quote and Thomas spoke often of what the two major parties had borrowed from the Socialist Party. Whatever the case, as Puissegur points out: "The Socialists in the United States did not achieve their full move towards making the Democratic Party more of a Socialist Party until they got a very good foothold in the 1960's," when they followed Saul Alinsky's advice "that to change a society, one had to first infiltrate the major institutions, the school, the media, the churches, the entertainment industries, the labor unions, and the three branches of government..."
Given the large number of ambiguous ways to hide the influence of the communist ideology on the Democratic Party, we'd suggest additional starter readings. The first is by Scott S. Powell, who wrote in 2015 in "Why the New Left Is Now the Democratic Party," here:
"The New Left counterculture did not end when the troops came home from Southeast Asia. It went mainstream, with many of the 60s radicals becoming professional revolutionaries who would go on to work in the knowledge industry: the universities, foundations, and the media and special interest activist group. [...]
By the 1980s a third of the Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives supported the budgetary priorities and the foreign policy advocated by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), the leading revolutionary Marxist think tank in the United States, located Washington, D.C. [...]
By 2008, the long march through the institutions resulted in the New Left being deeply entrenched in constituencies that provided a bedrock of support and policy positions for the Obama presidential campaign. And while Barack Obama had a very unconventional background punctuated by associations with Marxists and anti-American radicals throughout his life, and an extreme left-wing voting record, the major media, now enveloped with political correctness, made little effort to report on his background or examine his substantive qualifications.
See also "Time to Rebrand the Democratic Party as Socialists" by Alex Markovsky, here. He writes:
READ MOREWhether its policies are called liberal or progressive, or democratic, in terms of the issues and, especially in terms of tactics, the party became a plagiarizing scum of Lenin's faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP), or Bolsheviks, which coincidently also had "democratic" in its party name. A commonality of the ideological vocabulary of the Democratic Party leadership with Marxism; visceral hatred of capitalism and seductive promises of miraculous fulfilment of egalitarian dreams leaves little doubt about the Party becoming the source and spirit of a Marxist awakening.
The goal of changing America to a socialist country is not always openly announced; in fact, the opposite is more likely. A particular law or regulation can stress putative goals that are totally unobjectionable, in fact, highly desirable. They may seem to contribute to free enterprise or to a clean environment, but the under-the-cover intent is different. Tom DeWeese writes about a plan to change the bulk of housing to community complexes and high rise apartments. The policy is called Smart Growth for local community development. It has been endorsed by the National Association of Realtors (NAR). (Wouldn't you assume NAR would enthusiastically promote private house rather than compounds?) Tom DeWeese works through such a wolf-in-sheep's-clothing scenario.
On a personal note, I googled 'smart growth and urban planning.' I was on page 3 before I found the first negative article and was up to page 5 for the next few. One of them was a fascinating essay by James Shinn (see here) written in 2015. He had this to say: "High rise residential structures have exploded all over San Francisco, but the gridlock and prices just seem to be getting worse and worse." Apparently San Francisco was an early convert to urban smart growth. Come to think, more recently, it went big on being a sanctuary city for illegal immigrants (see here) and a home for the homeless (see here) and within an amazingly short time created a cesspool by the sea, where all sorts of diseases can be picked up with little effort.
My google search even dragged up a master's thesis entitled "The Link Between Smart Growth In Urban Development And Climate Change." It concludes
Dear me, here I thought we'd reached the ultimate in lunacy with the new congressman Cortez's plan to eliminate airplanes. This joker would even deprive us of cars. Will motorized wheelchairs be the next target? READ MORE"By using the concepts of smart growth and specifically focusing on pedestrian friendly [emphasis added] and other alternative transportation friendly development, those entities involved in policymaking decisions have the ability to manage the challenges facing urban areas. Reducing the impact of anthropogenic activities needs to make its way on to the environmental sustainability agenda."
Saul Alinsky, has been called a Machiavellian, meaning that he was cynical, cold-blooded and deceitful like Niccolo Machivelli, a 15th Century Italian diplomat, who wrote that any way to retain political power was acceptable. Personality characteristics aside, Alinsky, on the contrary, focused on how to gain power and change conditions. How do you change an unsafe workplace or political group or social organization if you don't have a lot of money or resources or expertise or an influential membership. Saul Alinsky's answer was: use what you have, go with what you know and understand. Alinsky's rules are neutral; anyone can apply them. In his time, he helped communities that have few ways to help themselves out of dismal and often dangerous conditions. He is best known today because of his street-theater approach, his ability to overload situations and organizations, using their own rules of operation against them. Building on his teachings, it is the Left that has made most use of his approach to civil warfare. Barak Obama, another community organizer, cited him as an influence in his book, Dreams from My Father. Hillary wrote her college thesis about him. Alinsky may have been tough and ruthless, but it is likely he would disapprove the violence the Left encourages.
Additional information about Alinsky is available in Theresa Riley's "Who is Saul Alinsky?" here. See also this video featuring Dinesh d'Souza, Ralph Benko of the Alinsky Center and David Alinsky, son of Saul Alinsky and Chairman of Alinsky Center talking about Saul Alinsky:
The Antifa is predominantly a Marxist anti-Fascist movement operating in the US and Europe. Discover the Networks writes mostly about Antifa in the US, where Antifa acts as "a revolutionary Marxist/anarchist militia movement that seeks to bring down the United States by means of violence and intimidation." In ideology it is the reverse of the nationalistic, white supremacist extreme-right. In practice, they are much alike, except that the neo-Nazis have declined in number since the heyday of the KKK, attracting only a few thousand members, while Antifa enjoys large-scale funding and hundreds of thousands of members, many of whom have served as mercenaries to provoke riots.
This is an exceptional article. It is exceptional in that it paints a well-documented detailed portrait of the Antifa Movement. It is exceptional because, unlike most articles about Antifa, it does not exhibit a sympathy for what is basically a thuggish terrorist organization. Unlike Antifa's media boosters, this article doesn't cut Antifa a lot of slack just because Antifa claims to fight 'fascism.' Or fights what it claims to be fascism.
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Daniel Greenfield tracks the early involvement of nascent socialism with anti-Semitism. Socialists didn't invent Jew-hate, but they've found it useful. Sometimes the anti-Semitic rhetoric has been hostile and overt, sometimes it is dressed in generalities and is academic sounding. Whatever the wrapping, the Jews have always been odd-man out, making, as Greenfield points out, highly acceptable "scapegoats for the failures of their [Socialist] economic programs." Recent denunciations of Judaism in Congress suggest excoriating Jews isn't going to go away. As Greenfield says, "Jews are a small and controversial minority. That makes them a good target for socialists, national and international, to make it seem as if their extremism only threatens the Jews." A good point, a subtle point, an important point. The Jew may be the first to be attacked, but not often does the attack stop there.
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The Far Right, the David Dukes of the world, have always been identified as Jew-haters. But, as Joshua Block point out, Jew-hate from the left is more intimidating. Block focuses on a major socialist tool: "intersectionality", which he defines as "the radical academic theory that holds that all forms of social oppression are inexorably linked." Academics, media people and leftist politicians have incorporated intersectionality into their thinking as a major revelation. Block writes, "intersectionality has forced artificial coalitions between causes that have nothing to do with each other — except a hatred for their fellow students who are 'privileged' because they are white, heterosexual, and especially Jewish.
This is an illuminating article from someone I would guess is a liberal Democrat. I must correct one statement Block assumes to be true, namely "President Trump's silence in the wake of Charlottesville". He wasn't. President Trump condemned both sides for the violence, "equating the white supremacists on one side with the 'alt-left' on the other side." (See here.)
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Ben Shapiro's article focuses on two topics. The first talks about the coming to Congress of three far-left Democrats: Cortez the fool; Omar who speaks bluntly and takes the brunt; and Tlaib who appears rational in comparison. This graphic from The Peoples Cube captures these three newbies perfectly:
The second topic is an explanation why, "[i]n areas where Jews are successful, then, anti-Semitism and intersectionality theory often merge." It's elegant. There's even a good chance it's right. The far Left does like its ideation simple. "Me Tarzan, you Jane." "Me exploited, You exploiter."
READ MORE Norman Berdichevsky wrote this article a decade ago asking why Jews voted overwhelmingly for ultra-liberal causes such as those sanctioned by the Democratic Party. Why did they ignore the hostility to Israel espoused by Leftist groups? Today, with Jew-hate heard without effective rebuke in Congress and remembering Prez Obama's open hostility to Israel throughout his years in office, the question is still valid, and the predilection of the Jews for far-left liberal organizations even more puzzling. Some Jews avoided the inconsistency of voting for Jew-hating Democrats by deciding they were for 'Social Justice" and Israel was not; this allowed them to feel virtuous in becoming strongly anti-Israel. Other Jews joined organizations such as J-Street, a cancer on the body Jewish. J-Street uses a lot of words to declare its love of Israel but its single unswerving effort is to create a state for the Arabs, no matter that this would likely destroy the Jewish state. This is a position wholly in keeping with the Democratic Party's strong support for the Arabs, one of their approved victim groups. As Berdichevsky writes:
"More than twenty years ago, Lucy Dawidowicz, one of the most respected and prominent historians of the twentieth century and author of the aptly named "What is the Use of Jewish History?" lamented the lopsided and continued illogical and self destructive political support of a large majority of American Jews for the Democratic Party."
More simply put, are American Jews meshuggah?
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Until a couple of decades ago, "American Jews' attachments to Israel and Judaism were synonymous and liberal political forces were Israel's strongest supporters..." However, as Isi Leibler puts it, "the far Left has become viciously anti-Israeli, even supporting terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah and depicting Israel as an imperialist occupier." How has this affected the leaders of Jewish organizations, many if not most of whom are liberals? Leibler notes that "[a]side from ZOA head Morton Klein, not a single mainstream Jewish leader had the courage to stand up and protest Obama's bias against Israel and constant bracketing of Israeli defensive actions as morally equivalent to the actions of terrorists." When Donald Trump was elected, his pro-Judaism versus the ever-growing Democratic Party anti-Semitism should have made the choice for these Jews obvious. Instead, they seemed to direct all their anger at Trump. J-Street, many Reform movement leaders and some supposed Jewish organizations such as the far Left Anti-Defamation League have weakly defended Israel if at all, while many of them have strongly spoken out defending the Arab terrorists that plague Israel. They certainly haven't countered the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic rants coming from the far Left, arguments that have persuaded many young Jews, who themselves have little knowledge of Israel.
"Twenty years ago, it would have been inconceivable to have any other than delusional Jewish fringe groups attacking Israel. Today, especially on campuses, it requires courage to even stand up against these perverted anti-Israeli Jews." Leibler's sober assessment is that "[u]ntil there are Jewish leaders who are fully committed to supporting Israel during these critical times rather than primarily concerned with displaying their tolerance toward those who seek our destruction, the disintegration of the non-Orthodox American Jewish community will proceed unimpeded."
This video cogently makes the point that many students on college campuses have been turned against Israel. Filmmaker Ami Horowitz sounds off about the clueless students, who have been taught that Hamas is OK, It was published on May 23, 2016 on Fox News. (Note: This is flaky. If it won't play, google using "Hannity Ami Horowitz Hamas" as keywords and it will.)
This video is called "Why Does The Left Hate Israel?" and features Dave Morrison.
There is a disparity in numbers of hate crimes between blue states and red states. Surprisingly, the numbers are higher, much higher, in the more liberal states. In an earlier version of this article, Karin MeQuillin wrote:
"Democrats rely on anti-Jewish voting blocks to win elections. Hispanic immigrants are 30-40 percent antisemitic, three or four times the national average. Blacks are twice the national average, 20-30 percent antisemitic. Our millions of new Muslim immigrants are doubly antisemitic, by religion and by the legacy of the Third Reich."
"The Democrat Party can't win with only the votes of decent people. They need the haters, so they're fine with the hate."
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Hoping for some sort of peace, Israeli governments have tended to be officially silent about the legitimate Jewish claim to the Land of the Jews. This has allowed the variegated Arabs and other ethnic groups who morphed into the Palestinian people half a century ago to promulgate the fantasy that some or all of the Land of Israel is theirs (see here).
The keystone of pro-Palestinian advocacy and activity is the belief that Israel is occupying Arab land. The boundaries of the land are vague, but it is unquestioned that the Israelis hold Samaria and Judea (the West Bank) captive. Any and all Arab attempts to regain its land, no matter how barbaric, are therefore understandable and excusable. There's only one small problem with this strongly-held belief: it is not a fact. Let me try it this way:
It is a fact that some Jews have always lived in the Land of Israel over the millennia, no matter who had control of the area. Before Israel became again a sovereign state, most recently the Ottomans — Muslim but not Arab — held the land for four hundred years until 1917, when they lost it in World War 1 to the Allied Forces, principally Britain, France, Italy and Japan.
It is a fact that Jews started migrating back to their ancestral home in ever larger numbers in the nineteenth century, when the land was still under Ottoman control. Most of the other 50 ethnic groups in the region spoke Arabic, but weren't Arab.
It is a fact that when the Jews revitalized the economy of this desolate and sparsely populated area, Arabs from neighboring part of the Ottoman Empire were attracted into the region (see here).
It is a fact that as part of the breakup of the Ottoman Empire the Jews, by an irrevocable trust created in 1920 in San Remo and signed by all the members of the League of Nations by 1923, were given title to what is now Israel, Samaria and Judea (AKA the West Bank), Gaza and part of the Golan (see e.g. here, here and here as starters). Altogether, this constituted less that 1/10 of 1% of the Ottoman's Middle East holdings. The remaining 99.9% was divided up into Arab states.
It is a fact that the British, under the aegis of the international community via the League of Nations, contracted to be mandatory (trustee) of the San Remo trust, to administer the area and help the Jews create the infra-structure for a state. Britain called the region destined to become the Jewish state Palestine.
It is a fact that it was the Jews that were considered to be the Palestinians — the Palestinian Post would become the Jerusalem Post, the Palestine Philharmonic Orchestra would become the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. The Arabs refused to be called Palestinian; they insisted they were Syrian, as in Ottoman times.
It is a fact that in 1948 the newly-declared State of Israel was attacked by its Arab neighbors: Transjordan, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria. Egypt gained Gaza; Transjordan was able to grab Samaria and Judea and a piece of Jerusalem.
It is a fact that the land Jordan seized in 1948 was Jew-free for 19 years, because Jordan kicked out or killed the Jewish inhabitants, while inviting in neighboring Arabs.
It is a fact that under Russian guidance Yasir Arafat created the 'Palestinian people' in 1964 (see here) under the leadership of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). The charter did not claim the people or the land then under Jordanian rule, i.e., Samaria and Judea and a piece of Jerusalem. It did not claim Gaza, then under Egyptian rule.
It is a fact that in 1967, 19 years after some of their land was stolen and occupied by Jordan, Israel was again attacked by the Arabs. The Jews were able to reclaim their land: Judea, Samaria, the Golan Heights and the Gaza Strip. Jerusalem was reunified. Israel also gained control of the Sinai Peninsula, which it later returned to Egypt.
It is a fact that the Palestinian Arabs did not rule the land during these 19 years from 1948 to 1967; Jordan did. During these 19 years, the Palestinian Arabs did not request that it be made into a state for them.
It is a fact that when Jordan lost the area in 1967, the Palestinian Charter was revised in 1968. It now claimed that Samaria, Judea and eastern Jerusalem were Palestine and the Arabs living there were Palestinians.
It is a fact that Jordan had eliminated a Jewish presence in Samaria and Judea in 1948, but the Jews still owned the land. It is a fact that Palestinian Arabs act as if there were never Jews in Samaria and Judea until 1967. It is a fact that the Palestinian Arabs insist the Jews didn't reclaim their own land in 1967 but came in to the West Bank as occupiers of Arab land. A very fragile claim.
It is a fact that when the Jews recovered Samaria, Judea and eastern Jerusalem in 1967, a factoid was fashioned that the brutal and unfeeling Jews had occupied Palestinian land. And there isn't an ignorant but tenderhearted friend of the Palestinians that doesn't believe it with complete certitude.
I would recommend YJ Draiman's "Jews Return To Their Homeland" here for a comprehensive presentation, with links for further reading. Also, the entire January-June 2016 issue of Think-Israel (see here.) is a set of articles on the biblical, the historic and the legal right of the Jews to the Land of Israel; and if that isn't sufficient, there is their right by conquest, after being invaded by their Arab neighbors.
NOTE: I have been asked how can it be that Arabs block out history before 1967 and, at same time, insist they have been on the Land since Canaanite times. In the same way, I suppose, that they can insist there was no holocaust, yet use pictures of dead Jews killed in a concentration camp but label them pictures of dead Arabs killed in 1948 in Al-Dawayima by you-know-who (see here).
Creeping jihad in the US hasn't stopped. In fact, it's enlarging its repertoire. There a take-over of the fast-food carts in NYC by the Halal crowd. They only sell halal-certified food. They have blocked out people selling ordinary fast-foods. They proselytize for Islam. And some of the money they make from selling halal food goes to their kind of charity; it goes to Muslim organizations that see to it that the money reaches terrorists. (See the full-length video Soft Jihad In USA here.)
There are more training centers in the USA, training the next generation of Muslim terrorists locally. We won't need to import them pretty soon. And the Muslim Brotherhood, which is yet to be declared a terrorist organization, continues, unhampered, to attempt to weaken, if not destroy, its enemies, i.e., the part of mankind that isn't Muslim. (See here.)
In this set, we also look at some of Santa's little helper, like the Arab Christians who act as shills for the Muslim Christians, helping them to convince Western evangelicals that the Arabs are the good guys, the Israelis are evil. But the biggest story is that some of the work traditionally done by Muslims to demonize Israel is being done by Jews — Jewish IfNotNow; Jewish history teachers and Jewish parents of pupils at Newton High School; Durham North Carolina's mayor, City Council and synagogue; J-Steet, Peace Now, Jewish Voice for Peace and New Israel Fund. All Jewish. All using their energy and brains and Jewish money to destroy Israel (and ultimately themselves) in the name of social justice and human rights. Did I mention the huge number of socialist Jewish academics promoting far-left, anti-Israel causes? These JINOS (Jews In Name Only) are only weakly rebuffed by the craven responses of many of the major Jewish organizations.
How did we get to this point?
Richard Turner has provided us with a relatively concise yet understandable description of both Sharia law and Taqiyya (to lie to protect Islam). They are fundamental to Islam and, for the most part, unacceptable to a country such as USA, which is governed by our own Constitutional Law. Contrary to American law, wife beating is allowed in Sharia Law and homosexuality is not. Turnquist points out a growing problem: Muslims are demanding the use of sharia law in our legal system, and American law courts are beginning to allow their decisions to be based on Muslim law. Turnquist provides us with examples where "some judges are rendering judgments based on Sharia law even when those judgments are in clear conflict with Constitutional protections."
Turnquist doesn't deal with the oft-made assertion that Muslims using sharia law in an American court is the same as Jews going to a Rabbi for a legal decision. It is emphatically not so. Resolving a dispute by Rabbinic law is, in effect, a contract between the two parties to abide by the Rabbi's decision. A Beth Din (a Rabbinic Court) is outside the American legal system, and, obviously, it can't be utilized in cases that ordinarily come to a criminal court.
READ MORE As a interesting experiment, google "new mexico compound", open the items listed one at a time and search for 'islam' 'muslim' and 'jihad.' There is likely to be one reference to 'muslim', zero for the other terms. This article by Margot Cleveland for The Federalist makes it obvious that terrorist training compounds are yet another way to carry out jihad in the US. What makes the New Mexico one unique is that it was training children to be snipers, and apparantly acclimating them to harsh conditions. It's unusual because most Muslim compounds in the USA train adults. Teaching very young children to kill is more typical of the Middle East, particularly in the areas controlled by Hamas and the Palestine Authority.
These are videos that amplify the information:
Children are trained to be terrorists. Siraj Wahhaj is the son of an imam with possible links to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Click here.
Secret Tunnel Discovered At New Mexico Compound Where 11 Kids Were Kidnapped. Click here.
22 Jihad Camps Inside the US? Ryan Mauro talks about the Disturbing Islamic Prophecy Behind Them. Click here.
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Dexter Van Zile describes his experience attending a "Christ at the Checkpoint Conference (CATC), a biennial event organized by Bethlehem Bible College, an outpost of Christian anti-Zionism located in Beit Jala." The sponsors and speakers assert that "Evangelical support for Israel hinders the ability of Christians in the Middle East to live in peace and share their faith in Muslim-majority countries in the region." These Christian Arabs also encourage the Western attendees to believe "Jews and their homeland as an obstacle to all that is good in the Muslim and Arab Middle East."
As an aside, have you noticed that when you force these humanitarians to document their wild statements, you learn that the major torture Israel inflicts is long waits at checkpoints. Maybe that's why the Arab advocacy to evangelicals group calls itself Christ at the Checkpoints.
For these Christian Arabs, demonizing Israel and whitewashing Muslim Arab tyrants and jihadists is how the game is played. Unfortunately, anti-Zionism has worked on a growing number of evangelicals. Their attitude has become that of the anti-Israel mainline Protestants, but it hasn't made life easier for the Christians living in Arab countries in the Middle East.
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Taking Westerns to be instructed by highly skilled Arab propagandists like the Tamimi family in Nabi Saleh is an important weapon in the effort to sway American evangelicals away from their strong support of Israel. Dan Rabb writes about one such tour, when Evangelical Protestants visited the town of Nabi Saleh in the West Bank. It is part of the larger effort by the Christ at the Checkpoint people to convince evangelicals that the Palestinians are the ones they should support. Dexter Van Zile has written an examination of Rabb's article. It is called "RNS Publishes Fictionalized Account Of Meeting In Nabi Saleh." It is available here.
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Deborah Gastfreund-Schuss writes about camp counselors imbued with the desire to heal the hurts suffered by the Palestinian Arabs at the hands of the Israelis. They belong to yet another Jewish I-hate-Israel group, IfNotNow, which allows them lots of latitude in developing ways to help the Arabs. Many planned to co-opt the young campers in their charge. Can't you just see the moppets returning home, shaking their tiny fists, demanding of their parents that Israel stop occupying the tewartowies, that Israel stop tortewing Arab children.
Some history: it was May 1948 and the sovereign state of Israel came into being. There was great joy and the bitter knowledge that had Jews a place to go to during the Nazi years, many many more Jews would have survived. Here it is three quarters of a century later and an uncounted but not insignificant number of Jews are willing to kill off Israel because they have bought into the Arab fantasy that Israel is occupying Arab land. Not only are they willing to have Israel destroyed, they are eager to inculcate other Jews, as ignorant as they are themselves, with their virtuous stand for social justice for the Palestinians. And there seems to be nothing to bar their way. Too many Jews in position of authority, even those with a strong grasp of the history and politics of the region, refuse to take a firm stand. It doesn't seem that the counselors eager to restructure young campers in their own image were sacked.
A comment to this article informs us that "Tamimi and Janna Iyyad, 2 Palestinian teens who live with daily pain and suffering. They are not terrorists. They are kids who want freedom." It's hard to think of another description that would be as far from the truth (see Van Zile's article above). Ahed Tamimi, the fearless maiden that kicked and mauled IDF soldiers while the cameras click, safe in the knowledge that her victims are forbidden to respond. I wonder if this spinelessness of Israeli politicians contributes to the demonization of Israel — after all, nowadays it's hard to find an unprotected group that you can hit and not be rebuked. Israel is truly a gift for frustrated haters.
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The previous article on IfNotNow laid out the general problem of using counselors for propaganda. In this article, Zvika Klein focuses on the details. What makes IfNotNow so evil is that, like pedophiles, it preys on children, using trusted camp counselors to do the indoctrination. As one of the comments points out, there's no official response to the false claim that Judea and Samaria are Arab. Why isn't there? Why doesn't the Israeli government speak out? Why doesn't it tell the world that in 1920 at the San Remo Conference this territory was put into an irrevocable trust for the Jewish People? In fact, territory on the East Bank of the Jordan also became Jewish. By the time the document was signed by the member states a couple of years later, Britain had put 80% of the land assigned to the Jews under "administrative control" of the Hashemites; it is now called the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. It is a fact that every single country belonging to the League of Nations signed the document. And that trust is still in power, transferred from the League to the United Nations.
Why don't they remind the world of some actual facts of history? Jews and Arabs and another 50 ethnic groups had been living in the land in poverty and squalor under the Ottomans. The Jews started coming in ever larger numbers in the 1800's to redeem their historic homeland. As Winston Churchill pointed out, 95% of the Arabs came after 1905, attracted by the economic opportunities. The Jews were the "Palestinians" when the Brits were given administrative control of the Palestine Mandate in World War 1, when the Ottoman Empire lost the Middle East. Jordan attacked the newborn State of Israel in 1948 and seized Judea, Samaria and the eastern part of Jerusalem. The Jews regained their land when the Arab States again attacked Israel in 1967. The Israeli paratroopers entered the Old City, June 7th, 1967. BTW, has anyone noticed that history only begins in 1967 according to the historians who claim that Israel conquered Arab Land and OCCUPIED it. They know it was Jewish land; why don't they let you know the Jews already owned it?
The land never belonged to the Palestinian Arabs. It belonged to the Ottomans for hundreds of years and then to the Jews. Yes, the Jews are occupying the land, just as you occupy your home.
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Newton Massachusetts is an affluent community, with educated parents and a large Jewish population, yet for years it has allowed its schools to teach Jew-hate and Islamophilia to its schoolchildren. The Outreach Center of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University distributed "The Arab World Studies Notebook", a blatantly non-factual pro-Palestinian distortion of the history, geography and events in the Middle East, to school teachers in local communities including Newton (see here). Ilya Feoktistov's organization, Americans and Peace and Tolerance, has written for years on the biased material emanating from Islam-promoting sources and, most surprising, how protective school administrators and teachers have been of this material, which can easily be determined to be egregiously incorrect. (See here.) In this article, Feoktistov writes of emails that confirm that "a group of public school history teachers in the posh Boston suburb of Newton pledged to reject the 'call for objectivity' in the classroom, bully conservative students for their beliefs, and serve as 'liberal propagandist[s]' for the cause of social justice." What makes this even more bizarre is that a number of the teachers involved, such as David Bedar, are themselves Jewish as are some of the community's parents who ignore the false information in the name of 'social justice.'
But that's not the end of it. As Jerry Gordon wrote in the New England Review, October 3, 2018,
"The non-profit teacher training group Primary Source is one of New England's major private providers of public school teacher training on Israel and the Middle East. As it turns out, Primary Source is funded by the government of Qatar through Qatar Foundation International. Qatar, which is also a major funder of the genocidal terror group Hamas and other terror organizations, has spent millions of dollars on influencing what is taught in American K-12 schools."
You can read more about Qatar's pernicious role in Feoktistov's article entitled, "How Foreign Terrorist Funders Get U.S. Public Schools To Teach Anti-Jew Propaganda" here.
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Muslim clerics have said that Europe will be conquered by the wombs of Muslim women. By means of hefty immigration, by immigrant Muslim women having many children, and Muslim men taking multiple wives, the Muslin population in Europe grows rapidly, while Europeans don't have children in replacement numbers. To make things worse, most politicians support Islamic demands and complaints, while ignoring the native Europeans. In fact, depending on circumstances, someone stating a fact not friendly to Islam can be sued for offending Muslims. The Muslims spend a good deal of effort marginalizing the natives; they hate Jews in particular, and show it both in hate speech and barbaric action. They are the major authors of hate crimes against their neighbors and then they are hurt that people don't understand it is the Muslim community that is the real victim of Muslim terrorism and everyone is just being islamophobic (see here.) The first paper of this set sees a way of stopping the flood of immigrants into Europe; it would also limit the number of jihadists that infiltrate the West.
We start with Dr Litsas's article which emphasizes that violence is intrinsic to Islam; it's not a barnacle that can be scraped away. Setting aside Greece's current 'vassal' status vis-a-vis the European Union, Litsas suggests a new strategy, one based on available resources. Both Greece and Israel "are both willing and able to safeguard western interests in the Eastern Mediterranean, a region with an upgraded geostrategic importance. In upgrading the conventional role of the 'frontier state,' Greece and Israel can maximize security for the region." This means they can help control the flow of refugees, which the jihadists use to shield the entry of their personnel into the Eastern Mediterranean region. This is important because "[J]ihadists make use of the continuous flow of refugees into Greece through the Aegean corridor in order to gain access to the West."
READ MORE Walter Russell Mead states quite clearly that Europe is declining as a force in world affairs. Economically it is barely growing; its birthrate is markedly declining; and politically it is badly divided. By increasing transnational cooperation, the European Union (EU) was supposed to strengthen Europe's ability to compete with the US and China, but this isn't happening. And, as anti-EU countries gain power, they weaken the European Union even more.
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In the article above, Walter Russell Mead doesn't address the influence of mass migration on Europe's decline. But Giulio Meotti cites another Mead's essay entitled "Why Italy Dares to Turn Away Refugees: Rome is reacting to a rising problem, but to EU elites such ideas remain unthinkable," (see here). The title says it all. In another essay, "Immigration Is Still Radioactive" (see here), Mead focused on unskilled immigrants, immigrants from Islamic backgrounds, and illegal immigrants. He commented that "no other issue, not even economic inequality, drives such a deep wedge between elite and mass opinion." Meotti's similar assessment is that "[t]he entire European political consensus is fracturing under the seismic impact of the migrant wave." Europe already has security challenges, with almost 1,000 people injured or killed since 2014 in terrorist attacks. Almost 10% of the Jews have been forced out of their houses primarily because of Muslim immigrant harassment. If Europe can't take control of its borders, it is likely to be overwhelmed by African migrants by mid 21-century. Yet Italy, Spain and Hungary have been condemned by the European Court of Human Rights for deporting migrants. If Europe isn't allowed to stop immigrants from coming in, "European democracies risk their own 'decomposition.'"
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Elizabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff gave a seminar where she rightly called Muhammad a pedophile — what else do you call a 56-year old man who 'marries' a 6-year old girl? She was sued by a Saudi lawyer and the Vienna Regional Criminal Court found her "guilty of 'disparaging religious doctrines." Eventually her case was heard by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). As Douglas Murray puts it, "The court ruled that the right of people to express themselves under Article 10 did not supersede the right of other people 'to have their religious feelings protected' (under Article 9)."
To muddle up the situation even more, ECHR asserted that the "effects of the impugned statements, to a certain degree, depended on the situation in the respective country where the statements were made, at the time and in the context they were made." To put it another way, "it means that, at least in cases of blasphemy, truth is not a defense." And the standards used to test acceptability are arbitrary and after-the-fact. Further, as one reader commented, "This ruling will apply to Muslims only, because you won't see offended Fundamentalist Christians rioting, assaulting, raping and destroying like you will offended Muslims. They are holding the peace of Europe for ransom." Another reader pointed out that if a Christian were to feel offended by someone denying Christ and took his case to court, "he would run the risk of being fined and sent to jail himself, because his very complaint would be found offensive by Muslims."
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A major threat to peace in Europe is Muslim agitation fueled by the anti-Semitic surahs of the Koran. When Mohammad was in Mecca, despite his efforts, he gained few converts. He praised Jews, but they refused to convert to Islam, his new religion. When he moved to Medina, he changed his message. The new writings spewed Jew-hate. Jews were descendants of "apes and pigs" and should be killed. Mohammad encouraged his followers to slaughter, loot and vandalize, an easy route to wealth that attracted many. Captives had only one of three choices: convert to Islam, pay jizya (a yearly tax) for the privilege of staying alive as second-class citizens, or be slaughtered or enslaved. This also increased the number of believers.
Y. Graff writes of a Manifesto composed in France, motivated by the notion that it would reduce Muslim incitement if the Koran verses calling for killing the Jews were eradicated from the Koran, or at least ignored. This sparked strong reaction from Islamic clerics. Some suggested the Koran was totally peaceful. Others said people were misreading it. They blamed attacks on the Jews on the Jews, because the Jews disrespected the sacred Koran. The consensus was that not a single surah, not a single verse, not a single letter of the Koran could be declared obsolete.
What is amusing about this indignation is that, as the imams already knew, the earlier surahs with their kind words about the Jews are already ignored. Mohammad declared them null and void when he moved to Medina; he swelled the ranks of believers in Islam by urging violence to spread the new religion. We call the process of retiring the early verses abrogation. Stephen Coughlin book called Catastrophic Failure: Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad explains this important process (see here.). The Koran can not be understood without it.
READ MORE The murder of Jamal Khashoggi was the big story of the region for a very long time, as the age of a news story is calculated. Khashoggi was said to be a journalist and a political moderate, whose life was taken by Saudi Arabia for internal political reasons. The outrage of the media was awesome. It was only after the initial verbal thunder bolts quieted down did a more factual and quite different, presentation become possible.
The villain in the piece was Saudi Arabia, believed to have authorized the killing. In the Middle East, there is a see-saw, with Saudi Arabia on one end, Iran on the other. If one is up, the other perforce is down. So even a murder that isn't remotely connected to Iran, becomes connected because anger directed against Saudi Arabia benefits Iran. The other articles are definitely connected to Iran.
Petra Marquardt-Bigman writes on Jamal Khashoggi's murder, pointing out: "There's no justification for his murder. But don't whitewash what he believed: his commitment to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, his hope that Israel would 'die by force', and the anti-Semitic Islamists with whom he spent his final days." Jamal Khashoggi was a sometime journalist, a longtime member of the Muslim Brotherhood, a full time jihadist propagandist, an every time defender of Hamas, a longstanding friend of Osama bin Laden and Azzam Tamimi, and, as a good Muslim, an unswerving hater of Jews. When he was killed in a Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, his murder was blamed on the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, who, ironically, is a major figure in the attempt to effect reforms to bring Saudi Arabia into modern times. The media went ape. They had not managed such extreme indignation for any of the 860 journalists arrested, jailed, tortured and in some cases executed in Iran by its theocratic government between 1979 and 2009 (see here). Nor did they react as strongly to the jailing of some 251 journalists around the world in 2018. Note however that, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), 70% of these journalists were charged with belonging or aiding terrorist organizations (see here), so comparison to those jailed in Iran is invalid. It is possible that what made this killing different from all others is that it was likely authorized by the Saudis, and the majority of the media are still in step with ex-Prez Obama's favoring Iran in the struggle between Saudi Arabia and Iran for control of the Middle East.
READ MORE Yemen was not exactly an enterprising country, but the Shiite Houthi rebels, Iran's proxy in Yemen, have in the last decade turned it into a disaster area, highlighted by starvation and a cholera epidemic. They have taken over Sana, Yemen's capital, and use it as a base from which to lob missiles coming from Iran into Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi. They have also attacked Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea. What is particularly deplorable is that the Houthis have recruited Yemen's children as soldiers as well as committing "atrocities against thousands of Yemeni civilians, including women and children, who have been victims of illegal executions and death under torture." Yet many a western politician and media person views Saudi Arabia as the villain and the Houthi terrorists as the good guys. The Washington Post, for example, gave the leader of the Houthis a platform. Nathalie Goulet writes that to make peace in Yemen, we need first to "to recognize the enemy for what it is: a regionally dominant but globally dangerous Iranian proxy acting as a terrorist army." Then "we must shut down its fundraising and supply lines from Iran and its proxies around the world. Failure to do so would be one of the biggest geopolitical — and humanitarian — failures of our time."
READ MORE Jonathan Spyer notes that Tehran's ballistic missiles appear to be its preferred weapon, but it is cautious in its choice of targets. He has come up with a fascinating observation, namely, Iran "prefers to strike directly at weak enemies, while acting against stronger ones through proxies." He provides us with recent events in Yemen and Syria that back up his thesis that Iran confronts weak enemies directly, but uses the Lebanese Hezbollah when facing Israel and the Houthis when targeting Saudi Arabia. Israel no longer subscribes to this fiction and "Israeli aircraft [has] began openly targeting Iranian facilities in Syria." With America's involvement in the area, "the US will need to decide whether retribution will be inflicted only on the proxies, or on those sending them." Spyer implies hitting at Iranian personnel directly would be a winning tactic.
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The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was sold to the American people by Prez Obama as a way to slow down Iran's developing a nuclear bomb. It did no such thing; Iran bragged that it was moving along on its plans both in building bombs and making missiles to drive the bombs to Iran's enemies. President Trump has followed in Iran's footsteps in ignoring the JCPOA's agreements and has also reinstalled sanctions. Many politicians, particularly in Europe, hold to the fantasy that pressuring Iran will cause her to become more hardline. Emily Landau disagrees. She recognizes that sanctions "are not a perfect tool, [and] ... have a mixed record." On the other hand, the number of strategies short of military action are limited, and economic pressure is the best of the lot. Looking ahead, she warns that "if the pressure does bring Iran to the table, a good result will critically hinge on effective negotiation strategy and tactics, internalizing important lessons from the failed negotiation that led to the JCPOA."
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In this section we attempt a broad brush treatment of jihad and salafism in the Far East. Al-Qaeda in the Indian subcontinent, AQIS, is thriving. The more it expands its influence, the narrower it constricts the practice of Islam by the locals to the extremely pious form of Islam known as Wahhabism. It is embedding itself gently among the locals and is carefully restructuring its organization with the aim of becoming a major player in global jihad.
Australia has relatively few Muslims, but there are early signs of their tradition procedures to take over a host country. In China, the Muslim Uyghurs of XinJiang are at loggerheads with the Chinese government. Just as the Chechen rebellion began as a movement to separate from Russia and later expanded its Islamic jihad connections — Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber, spent a half year with Chechen terrorists being trained by them — so have many Uyghurs transited from wanting independence to Islamic global terrorism. Japan presents the interesting case of having the reputation of having no problems with Muslims. That statement appears to be true; but the reasons are yet to be determined.
The Soufan Group provides strategic security intelligence services to governments and multinational organizations. In January 2019 they issued a report on Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent, AQIS as it is called. Its activities extend throughout South Asia, which includes Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. AQIS's activities in Myanmar are also included in the report. We in the West naturally tend to focus on terrorist activity in the West, and al-Qaeda has not called much attention to itself recently. But it is very active and effective in South Asia. And that is what the Soufan report is about.
We are posting the Executive Summary and the Key Findings of the Report. The Report notes: "The principal success of AQIS has been its ability to rewrite the global jihadist narrative from a regional perspective, what the authors refer to as the 'Glo-cal' jihad: a narrative that has local roots but global aspirations." With its "deliberate strategy of shunning coercion and its rejection of brutal Islamic State tactics, AQIS is attempting to reach out to local leaders and broader community members within the Muslim world. The emphasis on tolerant rules, like abstaining from attacking noncombatant Buddhists, Christians, and Hindus, is a strategic move to gain support from less radical jihadi outfits operating in South Asia and elsewhere. This al-Qaeda Central Command (AQC) strategy, of which AQIS is an integral part, is a calculated attempt to regain the leadership of global jihad and provide al-Qaeda with momentum as it seeks to capitalize upon the momentary demise of IS." This approach has brought AQIS both new recruits and support from local populations.
Disheartening, isn't it?
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Robert Spencer writes of an Australian Muslim who has disobeyed a court order to demolish an illegal compound on his property. He claims he only obeys sharia law.
This is this video of a Muslim rampage in Sidney Australla because of anger at an anti-Muslim film. It is similar to the one revved up by Yusuf al-Qaradawi, an important Islamic theologian, because some Danish cartoonists had drawn pictures of Muhammad. That wasn't spontaneous — it happened some weeks after the cartoons appeared. We don't know about this uprising.
This is a video of reactions to a politician in Parliament making a strong if somewhat inaccurate case that Australia should reduce Muslim immigration. The TV commentator and the speaker and his many critics in Parliament are polite. I point this out because, if courteous speech even about push-button topics is the rule, it isn't the media and politicians that are teaching the Muslim public to voice the angry tone of the Sydney riot.
Otherwise things seem quiet and, if there is some unease in the general population because of Muslim terrorism and sharia law, there is equally pleasant relations between Muslims and their neighbors.
What makes these stories of Muslim defiance and anger, unusual is that, generally speaking, Muslims don't start acting up until they are some 5-10% of the population. At the moment, Muslims are around 2.2% of the Australian population; they are some 600,000 out of a population of 24 million.
In an article in the January-June 2018 issue of Think-Israel, Hugh Fitzgerald cites Peter Hammond's observations in his book Slavery, Terrorism and Islam:
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- When the Muslim population remains under 2% in a country, they will be seen primarily as a peace-loving minority and not as a threat to other citizens.
- As the Muslim population reaches 2% to 5%, they begin to recruit from ethnic minorities and disaffected groups, within prisons and street gangs.
- From 5% on, they exercise an inordinate influence in proportion to their percentage of the population. For example, they will push for the introduction of halal (clean by Islamic standards) food and increase pressure on supermarket chains to feature such food on their shelves — along with threats for failure to comply.
- The violence increases when the Muslim population reaches 20%.
- After reaching 20%, nations can expect hair-trigger rioting, jihad militia formations, sporadic killings, and the burnings of Christian churches and Jewish synagogues.
- At 40%, nations experience widespread massacres, chronic terror attacks, and ongoing militia warfare.
Most Muslims in China get along with the Communist government and practice their religion mostly unhindered. But the Muslim Uyghurs of XinJiang have plagued the Chinese Administration with guerrilla fighting for separatism and independence that has expanded with the Uyghur formation of the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) to horrible deeds of Islamic terrorism in and outside the country, many of which are in behalf of al-Qaeda jihadist objectives (see for example, Colin P. Clarke and Paul Rexton Kan, here). As Clarke and Kan wrote, "If a more violent and lethal insurgency does indeed develop in Xinjiang, it could jeopardise China's prized 'Belt and Road Initiative,' the centerpiece of Xi Jinping's foreign and economic policy." China has responded harshly with mass arrests, sending hundreds of thousands to re-education camps and diluting the percent Uyghurs by importing Han people into Xinjiang.
With this as background, Joseph Hope writes, "While China has traditionally been threatened by a predominately domestic separatist movement, it appears that the war in Syria and the global influence and attention of the Islamic State has given China's domestic terror groups the opportunity to expand and network with other groups in China's regional neighbors. [...] China is becoming increasingly concerned with connections between its Uighur populations and radical groups in its Central Asian neighbors."
China's projected defense budget will be used to construct "military bases and logistics support hubs" and perhaps "to protect the growing number of Chinese citizens and professionals living and working in the Pacific region, particularly throughout East and Southeast Asia and around the South China Sea, as well as potentially in the Indian Ocean and South Asia." This suggests China is "aiming to become the predominant power in the Pacific, usurping the United States." This will put her in the eye of expat Uyghur Islamists as well as other terrorist groups. Hope points out that "as the U.S. and China focus on the Pacific, both nations may be facing essentially the same terror threat." Cooperation between the U.S. and China is a future possibility.
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It is apparently a well-known fact that Japan has no problems with its Muslim population. Solutions distributed on social media sites attribute this to Japan not giving Muslims citizenship or permanent residency, or allowing the Koran written in Arabic to be imported. Nor will it rent houses to Muslims. Snopes and PolitiFact, arbitrary arbiters, have debunked these claims, which are indeed false. In fact, as they point out, the application forms for citizenship and for permanent residency do not ask for one's religion. Nor does the government keep statistics on the number of Muslims in Japan. There are mosques in Japan and and Korans can be imported. As they point out, Japan's Constitution says, "All of the people are equal under the law and there shall be no discrimination in political, economic or social relations because of race, creed, sex, social status or family origin." Armed with this evidence, the fact checkers made the sweeping statement that Japan was not keeping Muslims at bay; in fact, they suggested, its immigration policies may have helped Muslim growth.
As usual, they ignored some other equally salient facts. Discrimination can be done by people as well as by governments; some people make an art form out of foot-dragging. The Japanese are a homogeneous people, with no ideological fondness for a melting pot of different ethnic groups. They don't welcome foreigners with open arms. And they won't pretend they should accept strangers because the West decrees multiculturalism is politically correct. Nu, so call them racist, call them islamophobic. Big deal. They want things they want to be done to be done pronto and to be done in the way they want them done. Even small things. So it rankles a foreigner that the cleaner wanted him to pick his clothes only on a particular day. So petty. So silly. So what. It is a fact that, perhaps due to cultural differences or more likely because many a Japanese is not keen on foreigners, many foreigners living in Japan have had problems, some large and prolonged, in service and in house rentals.
The fact checkers made the dubious assumption that if government forms didn't ask about religion, no particular group was of interest to the government. Jarni Blakkarly writes about an alternative way to keep an eye on people: blanket surveillance. There was a leak in 2010 which revealed the police were keeping tabs on some 72,000 Muslims out of the 100,000 or so Muslims living in Japan [Note: more recent estimates put the number at around 170,000]. Some Muslims challenged the legality of this broadband spying on the grounds that it violated their right to privacy. The courts awarded them compensation but didn't declare the spying illegal. The argument continues; security measures, which many deem excessive, continue. There haven't been terrorist incidents in Japan, but the Islamic State beheaded two Japanese hostages in 2015. That didn't encourage the public to ask for reduced surveillance. It should also be noted that Japan plans a data base on foreign residents working in Japan. It will integrate information now scattered among different agencies.
READ MORE The first article in this set points out how not to do advocacy. A couple deal with sources disseminating pro-Palestinian propaganda. The others have pointers to sources that are factual and useful. An additional source is the January-June 2016 issue of Think-Israel, which deals with Israel's biblical, historic, legal right to the Land of Israel (see here.) For a short summary, see here.
As part of the current nonsense the West sprouts — inferior cultures aren't inferior and superior cultures aren't superior — the West continues to echo Islam's lie that "Islam means peace." Bosch Fawstin points out that we do this "no matter what Muslims do, no matter what horrors we witness with our own eyes." Admittedly, believing Islam is benign is also encouraged by the enormous amount of entertainment propaganda produced that paints Islam pretty. Fawstin points out a curious fact: for all the fluff talk about Islam, Hollywood has never "had a Muslim play the lead in one of their blockbuster action films." "They can't get away with it. And they know it." So they draw the line at putting "their millions where their mouths are."
READ MORE A. J. Caschetta aptly describes Columbia University's Center for Palestine Studies (CPS), as "an Ivy League clearinghouse for PLO propaganda and the demonization of Israel. [...] The faculty members who comprise the center's experts are rivaled only by the faculty of Birzeit University] for their anti-Israel advocacy." CPS's 'academic' achievement has been: "spreading the three key elements of PLO propaganda: minimizing terrorism, delegitimizing Israel, and altering history. [...] Clearly, the CPS fosters an atmosphere that encourages anti-Semitism."
Caschetta might also have mentioned that when Columbia went looking for a head for its Israel and Jewish Studies Institute in 2004-5, Rhasid Khalidi served on the search committee. And when Columbia's President, Lee Bollinger, was forced to investigate Khalid's rabid hostility to Israel, 3 of the 5 members were known to be anti-Israel; Khalidi was exonerated.
READ MORE One would suppose that if there is one authority that wouldn't stoop to creating its own set of facts to support a point of view, it would be a high level official voice of the Government. Yet, as Melanie Phillips points out, Britain's Foreign and Commonwealth Office continues to voice false assertions about Israel's very legal settlements in Samaria and Judea. Then too, people often make some vague reference to international law and then sprout fanciful statements in its name. Melanie Phillips puts it this way: "One of the most startling aspects of the demonisation of Israel is the use of international law as a key weapon. ... it [Israel] is falsely painted as fundamentally illegitimate and guilty of repeated illegality and breaches of international norms."
A new book by two international lawyers, Matthijs de Blois and Andrew Tucker, called Israel on Trial: How International Law is being Misused to Delegitimise the State of Israel deals with this misuse. This is from the summary at Amazon:
READ MORESince the 1970's, the idea has developed that international law requires resolution of the Arab/Israeli conflict by creating a State of Palestine with East Jerusalem as its capital, and borders based on the "1967 lines" - the so-called "two-state solution". Israeli settlements are regarded by many as illegal and an impediment to this solution.
This book reviews international law regarding self-determination, statehood, territorial sovereignty, human rights and the right to self-defense. It argues that the two-state solution as defined by the UN is not required by international law. The authors examine how international law has been used and misused over the last century with regard to the Arab/Israeli conflict. They argue that the historical context of the creation of the State of Israel, especially the Mandate for Palestine, is too often ignored.
The Arab states, the Palestinian leadership and the European Union have all played a role in enabling the UN to become a platform for lawfare against Israel: policies and resolutions that use the language of international law but, in fact, undermine the existence of the Jewish State and have disputable basis in international law. Lawfare is problematic because it undermines the international legal order itself.
Rabbi Levi Welton interviewed a group of Israelis who are in the USA as part of an effort to counteract the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. What makes them different is that not one of them is Jewish. One is a Arab, one a Druze and two are Christians. They have volunteered to talk at college campuses, where, effectively, Jewish Israelis are blocked from speaking. Anti-Israel activists have highjacked the concept of Intersectionality which has it that the different grievances of victim groups — women, blacks, gays, and so forth — can be commingled and reinforce each other. Israeli Jews, and more and more, American Jews are not recognized as a legitimate victim group — talk about irony! They are effectively barred from making arguments for their position; they are automatically considered to be against social justice.
One of the Israelis, Yusef Haddad, is an Arab, who was slated to speak at Harvard right after the interview with Rabbi Welton. When he was in the army, he was in the Golani Brigade, serving as a commander over a unit of Jews. He wrote an essay called "It's Time I Break My Silence" that rebuts the claims by Breaking the Silence (BTS), an anti-Israel group of ex-Israeli soldiers. BTS asserts the IDF is immoral in how it behaves towards the Arabs in the Territories and they have vague, unsubstantiated stories to prove it. (An example of BTS's reliability can be found here.)
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Yisrael Medad describes historic and geographic points that should be emphasized. Right now, too many people believe falsely that (1) Britain gave Arab land to the Jews and that (2) the Jews seized Arab land in 1967. In the first case, after the Ottomans lost the Middle East by siding with the losing side, Germany, in World War 2, England and France, acting as agents of the winning side, divided up 99.9% of the land into Arab states. They left a tiny area for a future Jewish state. Before the legal document specifying this could be signed by all the members of the League of Nations, Britain cut away the land on the east side of the Jordan River — almost 80% of the land assigned to the Jews at San Remo in 1920. They gave it to the Hashemites to "administrate"; it is now called the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. In the second case, the Arabs invaded the new state of Israel in 1948, and were able to hold onto Judea, Samaria and a piece of Jerusalem. The Arabs invaded again in 1967 and this time, Israel was strong enough to take back land that was theirs.
Donald Rich described it this way: (Click here.)
READ MOREThe biggest myth is that Israel was created in 1948. What is now known as Israel was created as Palestine in Treaty of Sevres (1920) which formalized the San Remo conference agreements to create Syria, Mesopotamia (now known as Iraq) and Palestine (with a British mandate to govern Palestine until it could govern itself). Palestine was created as "a national home for the Jewish people". This treaty was confirmed by the new Turkish government after the Turkish War of Independence in the Treaty of Lausanne (1924).
Palestine gained its independence from British rule in 1948, renamed itself Israel and was invaded the next day by the surrounding Moslem countries. The resulting war is often called the Israeli War of Independence, but was actually a war between Israel, which had already gained its independence when the British ended their mandate, and its neighbors.
Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938 is usually taken as the start of the active phase of the Final Solution during the Nazi monomaniacal and unrelenting war against the Jews. There were nasty anti-Jewish attacks well before Kristallnacht, even in America. Back before the beginning of World War 1, Leo Frank, a Jew, was hanged in Atlanta, Georgia. He was arrested for raping and murdering a girl who worked in the factory he managed. The mob tore into the jail and hung him. It was later discovered the girl was raped by the factory's black janitor. It stands out because it was a singular happening. And yes, we did have hideous denunciations of Jews well before Kristallnacht. I remember Father Coughlin as almost as scary as Hitler. When I was a child, if I heard either one on the radio, I'd quickly change stations.
Because of the horrors of the Holocaust, Jew-hate in the West lessened after World War 2 (WW2). Certainly, blatant and overt anti-Semitic remarks were considered inappropriate. Practices such as quotas for Jews in universities were dropped or reformulated as widening access to the particular college by sex, pigmentation and geographical location. Because the number of seats can't be stretched, in effect, that reduced the number of those admitted solely on merit, so Jews were still impacted, although probably not as much. In Europe, Muslim 'refugees' from the Middle East brought Jew-hate with them. As they overwhelmed country after country, anti-Semitic speeches and 'incidents' increased.
In the USA to date, we have not had serious demonization of the Jews. By serious, I mean that eliminating Jews from German life and culture became eliminating Jews. Demonizing Jews by politicians and media led to this:
What we do have is politicians in Europe and Canada castigating Israel. Even in the US, there's been the 'sudden' emergence of anti-Semitic politicians everywhere from town councils to Congress. Their staying power is what is nervous-making. Only a whiff of racism was sufficient to dislodge Republican Steve King from his seat on a congressional committee. But the polite letters of protest at the blatant anti-semitism voiced by new congressmen who are far left and/or Muslim have been ignored.
What is different these days from the days of the Nazis is that while few if any Jews subscribed to the Nazi credo, nowadays too many Jews are willing to let Israel be destroyed for its supposed oppression of the Palestinians. Many of them are college students, groomed by generations of academics who favored one variant of Marxism and socialism or another. These youthful products of socialist ideology don't require factual information to become ardently anti-Israel; a few simple sentences that play on their pride in being virtuous humanitarians suffice. They march with Muslims and socialists who also claim to be humanitarians and civil righters but are more adroit at carrying out their actual agendas. They swell the ranks of Jew-hating organizations that claim to be Jewish such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for peace (JVP), IfNotNow, the New Israel Fund, Peace Now and J Street. Let us hope they don't need tomorrow the Jews they scorn today.
The articles in this set sample historical moments from Biblical times on up, some genocidal, some examples of ethnic cleansing.
Victor Sharpe asks: "What is the history of the Golan Heights and what is its overwhelming biblical significance to the reconstituted Jewish state?"
He starts at the beginning, with the biblical books of Joshua and Numbers, when the Golan Heights were part of biblical Bashan. The Golan Heights and Gilead, the northeastern part of today's Jordan, were taken from the Amorites and settled by the tribes of Manasseh, Gad and Reuben before the Children of Israel crossed the Jordan to defeat the Canaanites, whose land included Samaria and Judea.
The history of the Golan is one where the Jews were often driven from the land in blatant examples of ethnic cleansing and just as often returned and resettled there. The Golan is where King Ahab fought the army of Aram and won. The Golan was resettled after the Babylonian Exile, when the Jews returned to their homes. The Golan was resettled yet again at the end of of Hasmonean Period. And so it went through the ages. The Jews always returned to their homeland.
In our day, during the San Remo Conference of 1920 part of the Golan was deeded in trust to the Jewish People as part of the land projected for a Jewish state. By the time all the members of the League of Nations signed the Trust in 1923, England and France had illegally removed that part of the Golan from the Trust; they also cut away 80% of the land intended for the Jews — — and gave it to the Hashemites to govern The other 99.9% of the Middle East was cut into different Arab states. Israel regained the Golan in 1967, when it was attacked by its Arab neighbors. The Golan was officially annexed by Israel in 1980.
READ MORE Hebron is the second holiest place in Judaism. It is the site of the first Jewish community. It is where Abraham purchased a field for Sarah's burial. It is where the Cave of Machpelah is located. Except for Rachel, the fathers and mothers of the Jewish people — Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah — are buried in the Machpelah. David was anointed king in Hebron. The Jews lived there continuously since Biblical times except when they were expelled by invaders. They were expelled by the Crusaders in 1100 C.E. They returned in 1260. They fled the Ottoman pogrom in 1517 and returned in 1540, living there despite plagues, pogroms and poverty until 1929.
On the Sabbath, August 24, 1929, as Ben Bresky writes, "mobs of Arabs broke into Jewish homes, torturing, raping and murdering 67 people. Their bodies were mutilated and their homes looted." Some Arabs saved Jews; most attacked them. Arabs slaughtered their Jewish neighbors. Synagogues were vandalized. Torah scrolls in gold and silver casings were looted. The Jewish hospital, which treated the Arabs, was ransacked. A few Arabs were later tried in court. Jewish witnesses were able to identify "former Arab friends as those that participated in the massacre." Most of the accused Arabs received light sentences; and the British commuted the sentences of most of those found guilty. Exactly three rioters were executed. Not surprisingly, the Arabs had no shame about the riot. In fact, "there was a general strike the day of the executions;... Arab school children demonstrated." The British expelled the Jews — for their own safety, of course.
Ben Bresky writes, "Although tensions existed in the city between Jews and Arabs over generations, daily interaction was a fact of life." So why the riots? Different rumors that riled the Arabs have been mentioned. A reasonable supposition is that Haj Amin Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, used the riots as a way "to consolidate Arab factions by whipping them into a frenzy over a common enemy." Husseini later conspired with Hitler, concocting ways for the Germans and the Arabs to kill off the Jews in Europe and the Middle East.
READ MORE Britain failed monumentally to fulfill its contractual obligations to help the Jews create the infra structure of a state in Mandated Palestine. Instead they worked with the Arabs before and during World War 2 to limit the entry of Jews into their homeland, thus dooming "thousands of Jews who could have escaped the Holocaust to death." The way they treated the newly liberated survivors of the Holocaust is yet another heartbreaking example. Jeff Dunetz recounts the story of what happened to the thousands of refugees that sailed on the Exodus 1947 from Nazi Germany anxious to leave the places they had experienced the horrors of the Holocaust for a new life in their homeland. British destroyers intercepted the ship, ramming it and damaging it. The Jewish refugees fought back in what an unequal fight and were soon subdued. In Haifa, the Brits transferred the Jews to three "caged prison ships" that took them back to Europe, where they were forcibly taken ashore and "transferred to displaced persons camps in Germany." As Jeff Dunetz writes, "Seventy years ago, the British appeased the Arabs, denied Jews entry into the Holy land and sent them back to the Germany from which they had just escaped. Today the US, Britain and their European allies are still appeasing radical Islamists, their terrorism, their call for the destruction of Jewish State, and the anti-Semitic hatred they teach their children." But there is a difference. The Jews have Israel.
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Manfred Gerstenfeld interviewed Regina Gruner, formerly of the Netherlands Red Cross, (NRC) to determine what the NRC did for the Jews and political prisons during the Nazi occupation of Holland during World War 2. The answer is little or nothing. The NRC set up a committee to send food and medicine to transit camps but weren't, for the most part, able to get permission. "The general attitude of the NRC board was to accept the German measures against the Jews and the prohibitions against helping them." Some members in NRC branch offices helped Jews but "[t]he highest Dutch officials under the German authorities tended to accommodate themselves to the circumstances. [...] Moreover, the London Committee and the Dutch government-in-exile did not consider humanitarian relief for deported Jews and political prisoners a priority. Regina Gruner also pointed out: "The Information Bureau of the NRC had as task investigating what had happened to those who 'did not return.' It sent cold formal statements to surviving next of kin. The NRC office saw no need for special support for the surviving Jews. In this, it again failed in its humanitarian mission." After the war the Dutch government did little to help repatriated survivor, who had "nothing left — no housing, no work - and their social network had been destroyed." A sorry record.
READ MORE Douglas Feith was one of the American participants in the diplomatic negotiations between Israel and Yasir Arafat's Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) which produced the documents known as the Oslo Accords. These were signed at the Clinton White House in 1993. The public had been told that Yasir Arafat was sincerely ready to sign a peace treaty with Israel, whereby the Israelis gave up land and the Arabs gave them peace. The Israeli negotiators knew this mutuality was a fantasy but wanted to separate themselves from the unruly hate-filled Arabs occupying the Territories. Such a separation can done in many ways; the Israeli politicians chose the one most detrimental to Israel.
Feith writes:
"Perhaps the most important misperception about Oslo is that it is — or was — a peace process, a two-sided affair, a matter of give-and-take in which each side's promises depended on fulfillment of the other's promises. My view, as a witness to some of the relevant history, is that it was a kind of unilateral Israeli withdrawal."
The Israelis ended up with less land, more administrative headaches and greater responsibility for the welfare of the Palestinian Arabs. Arafat and his band of terrorist thugs acquired respectability, access to European money and good will, as well as unsupervised land where they could train terrorists and turn out hand-made explosives. Israel scrupulously kept its side of the bargain; the Arabs never began to keep theirs. Aside from Israel's withdrawing unilaterally from Gaza in 2005, the previous Oslo withdrawal in 1993 is Israel's most stupid mistake diplomatically and geographically. Its main result was more acts of terrorism and more Israeli dying at the hands of terrorists, while the Arabs gained confidence they would some day be successful at destroying their enemy.
What comes across in Feith's writing is that there were good men in Washington that tried to dissuade Israeli peace-seeking politicians from pursuing a disastrous course, but they could not. He has hopes that the Trump administration might elect to pursue new options.
"Kristallnacht" took place November 9-10, 1938.
Walter Bingham's memories of Kristallnacht serves as the Foreword to Rober Spencer's essay on the origin of "Khaybar Khayber" shouted to disrupt a a recent Kristallnacht vigil. Bingham wrote:
Kristallnacht was a long-before meticulously prepared so-called German popular and spontaneous uprising. Within hours, Kristallnacht, also known as the night of the broken glass, was launched. This name symbolized the final shattering of Jewish existence in Germany. During that night, all synagogues in Germany, Austria and the by-now Nazi occupied Sudetenland, western Czechoslovakia, were set alight, the sacred Torah scrolls damaged, valuables plundered, 7,500 Jewish shops and other property were destroyed and 30,000 Jewish men were taken to concentration camps. After Kristallnacht, the Nazi regime made Jewish survival in Germany impossible.
I saw it all on that fateful morning in November when I arrived at my school, which was situated on the synagogue premises. More people than usual were in the streets and smoke hung in the air. The fire department allowed the flames to consume the synagogue, and instead used their water to cool neighboring non-Jewish property to prevent it from damage. The onlookers seemed to enjoy the sight.
Eighty years later, when people gathered to remember Kristallnacht in London, they were shouted down by Muslims and their supporters chanting Khaybar, Khaybar. Robert Spencer explains the historic significance of this chant. It goes all the way back to Mohammad's time. As Spencer points out, "when modern-day Muslims invoke Khaybar, they are recalling an aggressive, surprise raid by Muhammad which resulted in the final eradication of the once considerable Jewish presence in Arabia. To the jihadists, Khaybar means the destruction of the Jews and the seizure of their property by the Muslims."
From Kaybar to Kristallnacht. From Muslims who killed Jews to Nazis who killed Jews. And now again to Muslims who want to kill all Jews, starting with those living in Israel. Oi.
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What we are talking about in the January–June 2018 Issue
Editor's Note:Think-Israel tends to use salafist rather than extremist or Islamist or militant or fundamentalist or activist to describe generically a pious Muslim, one who sticks as closely as possible to the unfiltered words and actions of Mohammad and the first three generations of Muslims, including, especially, the Companions of the Prophet. In modeling himself as closely as he can on the preachings and practices of Mohammad, a salafist can in modern terms be precisely described as an uninhibited terrorist, a theological supersessionist, a political supremacist who believes Islam and sharia law must dominate and a social barbarian, who wages jihad with whatever tools are available. Thanks to the high quality of whitewash supplied by sympathetic propagandists, he seldom is so described.
"In every country where Muslims are in the minority they are obsessed with 'the rule of law' and minority rights. In every country where Muslims are the majority there is no 'rule of law' [except sharia*] nor minority rights." — source uncertain
"When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles." — Frank Herbert, Children of Dune, page 164.
[*] bracketed phrase added for accuracy
Islamic stealth jihad may no longer have the active support of the White House but it continues to invade America's infrastructure, preaching and practicing hate against America, Israel and nationalism, often in league with other anti-American groups. In Congress, Congressman Keith Ellison, himself a Muslim with links to Hamas, supports Antifa attacks against Trump (see here). Among the universities, ivy-league Columbia University is an egregious example of universities becoming centers for pro-Palestinian political activism (see here). Anti-Israel, anti-Jewish, pro-Arab propaganda is disguised as scholarly lectures and credible research. In religious practice, across America, from coast to coast, imams, presumably properly vetted before they came to the States and not considered extremists, tell their congregants, many of whom are Americans, to kill Jews (see here). It is in fact difficult to find any part of the American infrastructure that has not been infiltrated.
This set of articles focuses on three areas where, increasingly, attempts are being made to resist Islamic jihad's penetration of America's infrastructure: the judiciary, the security agencies and our educational system. People can be brought to the white heat of indignation that an Arab child has lost its life because of the difficulties its parents encountered getting out of the Middle East war zone to Europe, but the response to Muslim infiltration of the American infra-structure is tepid. Part of this is due to a lack of publicity. Part is due to the Obama administration active support of infiltration and vigorous tamping down debate, discussion and eliminating information on Islamic terrorists from government databases. And part is due to well-written (but misleading and often dead wrong) claims about the innocence of such Islamic practices.
When discussing the use of sharia in American law courts, we need to make explicit what exactly is referenced. A Muslim may have willed distributing his money unfairly among his children because in Sharia women are second-class citizens. An American law court will treat this as it would his choosing to leave all his money to a hospital or to his cat. Nor are we talking about a religious court — a Catholic court, a Jewish court, a Lutheran court — outside of the American court system, where the opposing sides agree to argue their grievance and accept the decision of the religious court. What is at issue is whether an American judge in an American court can base his decision on Muslim law instead of the American Constitution. As one consequence of the use of Sharia law, when a Muslim wife sues for divorce, the wife automatically loses financially and often she would also lose her children.
For years little was written about the increasing number of USA law courts that were using sharia law in civil cases involving Muslims. But in the last few years, some states have responded by banning the use of sharia law in the courts. Benjamin Arie writes about Idaho's recent ban on the use of sharia law in Idaho's law courts. Some lawyers and politicians have objected to the law, noting that judges and politicians already swear to uphold the Constitution. Unfortunately, the oath of office too often was ignored during previous administrations.
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In 2008, Steve Coughlin, a counterintelligence expert in the Koranic basis of jihad and a government contractor, was fired. His job had been providing factual information on sharia to the military. Many other experts on Islamic terrorism were, in Steve Emerson's words, "banned from speaking to any U.S. government counterterrorism conferences." In 2009, on orders from the White House, data bases in our intelligence agencies were systematically gutted of information about terrorist connections with Islam. Intelligence agencies could collect emails and telephone calls from private citizens, but they were forbidden to snoop around mosques, a locale where like-minded terrorists often connect and develop their plots.
Years later, we learned from Pamela Geller (here) that "[n]ot only did the Obama administration scrub counter-terror programs of jihad and Islam, ... his administration scrubbed the records of Muslim terrorists. [...] An agent of the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, for 15 years, Philip Haney, reported (February 5, 2016) that after the Christmas Day underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, tried to blow up a crowded passenger jet over Detroit, 'President Obama threw the intelligence community under the bus for its failure to connect the dots. He said, 'This was not a failure to collect intelligence; it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had.' [...] His words infuriated many of us because we knew his administration had been engaged in a bureaucratic effort to destroy the raw material — the actual intelligence we had collected for years, and erase those dots. The dots constitute the intelligence needed to keep Americans safe, and the Obama administration was ordering they be wiped away."
John O. Brennan, Prez Obama's chief counterterrorism advisor and later his head of the CIA, successfully toned down assessments of the extent of Islamic jihad in American, making sure that the root cause of terror jihad was not systematically explored. In 2013, Rowan Scarborough wrote an important article on the consequences of not having information on potential terror attacks available:
"It is not just the case of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a radicalized jihadist whom the FBI questioned in 2011 and cleared of terrorism links. [Tsarnaev went on to kill and injure people at the Boston Marathon.] At least five Muslims have attempted mass destruction in the U.S. since 2009, undetected beforehand by law enforcement and the intelligence community." (see here.)
A reader of the Scarborough article, raymondvilla, commented, "Never in the history of the world, has a nation under threat, been ordered NOT TO NAME OR IDENTIFY THE ENEMY. Patriots for 50,000 years have cried out the name of the enemy they saw approaching. But laws, made by the enemy within, have forbade Americans from doing this. One of the most shocking evils in this century surely."
This underscores the importance of President Trump's recent order to return "jihad" to Intelligence. As Raymond Ibrahim writes below, "According to the new strategy document, 'The primary transnational threats Americans face are from jihadist terrorists and transnational criminal organizations'; the document also vows to 'pursue threats to their source, so that jihadist terrorists are stopped before they ever reach our borders.'"
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The July-October 2017 issue of Think-Israel featured an article by Rafael Medoff on the "Arab World Studies Notebook, a propaganda tract "depicting Israel as the aggressor in every Arab-Israeli war and praising Muslim conquerors throughout the ages for their 'gentle treatment of civilian populations.'" (See here.) Considering how much money Saudi Arabia has invested in Harvard, it is not surprising that the text is distributed by the Harvard Outreach Center of the Center for Middle East Studies. Receiving no satisfaction from school boards, parents who recognize the danger of this indoctrination have resorted to suing the local school administration. In Chatham, New Jersey, a mother is suing because "the teaching of Islam veered consistently away from a factual overview to flirt repeatedly with religious indoctrination." The children were also given videos to watch at home. These were "replete with biased, chastising statements encouraging the students to follow the Quran and become Muslim." (See here.) In this article, Tabitha Korol discusses some textbook and video sources used by schools teaching about Islam. As Korol notes, "This generation of children is being fed an egregiously biased version of an ideology that is incompatible with democracy and corrosive to our beliefs, morals, and ideals. Let us be clear: their ultimate purpose is the conversion of our children."
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The influx of illegal and pseudo-legal immigrants from South and Central America is well-documented. They cross the border illegally or they come as tourists and have 'anchor' babies in the States, creating a to-date unchallenged mechanism for chain-pulling-in the baby's very extended family. Others come to the border bringing their young children and depend on sympathy to get across. A high number of these adults are young men, not women, so it is not certain the children are theirs. All claim they are political refugees. They are not. They are here for economic reasons. With their entry, we've begun to see a high rise in middling to quite horrible crimes and a large increase in incarceration, welfare, medical and educational costs. There is also additional health costs to Americans, in that the immigrants bring communicable highly-contagious diseases we have just about eliminated in the States. There's been encouragement of local terrorism, and often forcible incorporation of local young people into MS-13 gangs.
The number of Korans and prayer rugs scattered around at our borders indicate that an unknown number of Muslims are coming in under cover of the larger group of Hispanics. Unlike the illegal Hispanics who 'hide' by living in large Hispanic communities, these Muslim infiltrators simply disappear. It is feared they make up the components of 'secret cells', waiting for orders to commit acts of terror. Other Muslims enter legally from the Middle East but come from countries known to be strongly salafist, with a history of promoting Islam by acts of terror. The media, which are generally for open borders, airbrushes reality by describing these infiltrating Muslim terrorists as 'innocent undocumented immigrants'. The administration is attempting to ban at least those from several countries such as Somalia that are known to be terrorist training centers.
Many Muslim immigrants comes in legally under the US Refugee Resettlement program, a government-funded program that is very quietly administered by the State Department, Health and Human Services, and Homeland Security. The program was started in 1980 by the then-president Jimmy Carter; it has been continued by every administration since then. Well over three million refugees have been brought in for permanent resettlement (see here). Of the 100,000 refugees resettled here in 2014, some 40% were Muslim (see here). The Office of Refugee Resettlement has issued a cheery detail-free overview (see here). The immigrants are said to have been securely vetted initially by UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency (see here) but in many cases, even their real names remain unknown. The program uses local Christian religious groups — and even a Jewish group, HIAS — as their "welcome wagon." To watch an eye-opening interview with an administrator involved on the state level, click here. The program is reported as costing more than $1 billion yearly, but considering the salaries paid to the large number of UN, federal and state employees involved, the real cost is likely to be much higher, even ignoring welfare and medical benefits paid in perpetuum.
Frankly, it is not clear whether there is a single central administration coordinating a number of resettlement programs or whether there are several independent programs. For example, the State Department has a resettlement program that deals just with Syrian refugees. Typically, UNHCR tries to repatriate the refugees or integrate them in the host country. Resettlement is done to a third country only if the other two ways are impossible. Nayla Rush writes, "The United States is welcoming Syrian refugees only from the 22,427 who made it through UNHCR referrals; it is not considering the remaining 4,368,012." (See here.) However, with regard to the amount of money involved, she also points out, "The United States has donated $4.5 billion to UNHCR since the beginning of the Syrian crisis in 2011."
According to the State Department these refugees coming to the States "have been subject to the highest level of security checks" by UNHCR but as Rush points out, "Americans are asked today to welcome Syrian refugees without hesitation and have total faith in the refugee resettlement program." Considering the amount of guess work and reliance on probabilities in the initial vetting as well as the known environmental instabilities in the Middle East, it is dangerous to take third-party reassurances at face value.
Supporters of open borders and unvetted immigration are in administrative control in many cities and states and on the federal level, so hard data are often hard to come by. This set of articles looks at the general problem of illegal immigration as best they can.
While countless articles wallow in the misery of the adults and children who come to the States illegally, Walter Williams raises larger issues that affect all who live in the US, legally and illegally. "Does everyone in the world have a right to live in the U.S.? Do Americans have a right to decide who and under what conditions a person may enter our country? Should we permit foreigners landing at our airports to ignore U.S. border control laws just as some ignore our laws at our southern border?" All countries have the right to decide on these questions. Even the US. And if we have the right to make decisions about who and when and why foreigners can come into our country, it follows that we can exclude those that don't meet our requirements. We can exclude them before, during and after they enter illegally. This isn't a game where you win by reaching the goalpost. Come to think of it, even in games, you need to play by the rules.
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Determining the fiscal costs of illegal immigration must, by the nature of the subject, rely on estimates. So, in any study, it's important to know what components were analyzed and whether the results are in line with what we can see for ourselves in communities hosting illegals. One group that is credible, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) (see here), publishes articles on illegal immigration, both statistical and informational. FAIR published a study September 27, 2017, written by Matt O'Brien and Spencer Raley, that estimates the annual cost of the some 12.5 million illegal immigrants and the 4.2 million citizen children of illegal immigrants to taxpayers at the federal, state and local levels at $116 billion (see here). A PDF copy is available here. There were complaints that pegging the number of illegals at 12.5 million was too high. Raley pointed out in an article in The Hill here that:
... this is based on the same criteria used by other credible research organizations like Pew Research. However, for ideological reasons, Pew leaves out illegal immigrants who are beneficiaries of programs like Temporary Protected Status and Deferred Action for Childhood of Arrivals. Failing to count these individuals falsely suggests there are fewer illegal immigrants in the country today than in the past and inappropriately lowers the costs associated with the illegal immigrant cohort.
Proponents of open or at least relaxed borders often point out that illegals work and pay taxes. True, but note that about a third of the illegals work off the book, paying no taxes. The money returned by those who do pay taxes falls far short of government expenses incurred on the state and federal levels. FAIR calculates that total governmental expenditures add up to $135 billion annually. But illegal immigrants only contribute about $19 billion in taxes, leaving a net deficit cost to taxpayers of $116 billion. Were we to factor in private charities and the monetary burden this additional population places on our private educational, welfare and medical groups, obviously the proportion the illegals pay in taxes would be an even smaller percent of the money it actually costs to take care of them.
Often in examining costs, what is overlooked is the disparity of the impact on the individual states relative to the cost burden to the federal government. Jordan Candler in an article called "Illegal Immigration Is an Economic Bludgeon", January 18, 2018, sums up the O'Brien and Raley data on the state-federal differential this way (see here):
The federal government absorbs $46 billion in outlays, while state and local governments dole out $89 billion. At the same time, $15.4 billion in taxes goes to the federal government, whereas just $3.5 billion goes to state and local governments. In other words, as the Washington Examiner's Paul Bedard put it, "State and local governments are getting ravaged by the costs," and "The federal government ... is getting off easy."
"In 2013," O'Brien and Raley add, "FAIR estimated the total cost to be approximately $113 billion. So, in under four years, the cost has risen nearly $3 billion. This is a disturbing and unsustainable trend." Indeed. Democrats rail against what it would cost to build a wall on our southern border. But the truth is that, even if we use the highest cost estimates, the wall would cost far less than what existing illegal immigrants already cost taxpayers every year. That will only continue to worsen if judicial activists and illegal immigration enablers continue to make mitigation elusive.
In this article the Staff of the Association of Mature American Citizens (AMAC) sums up some of the pertinent information in a user-friendly way. It is a good introduction to a complex problem.
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This article by Neal Asbury is a specific example of the general statements about the actual cost of harboring illegal aliens. It describes the medical costs of treating the illegal alien without health insurance back in 2013. As Asbury writes, "A 2007 report by the Journal of the American Medical Association found that in a four-year period, about 99 percent of those who used Emergency Medicaid were determined to be immigrants that entered this country illegally." It hasn't gotten better. The increase in the number of illegals has only added more pressure on an already dysfunctional system.
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People understand that the money it costs to care for illegal aliens is money coming out of their pockets. People feel the agony of the family that loses a child to the barbaric cruelty of some illegal. Their sympathy is immediate and genuine. But it's harder to feel compassion (or even interest) for the more prosaic interactions that over time erode the feeling of neighborliness and community that most of us take for granted. Beth Baumann describes her mother's car accident. No one died. No one was even badly hurt. Her mother's car was hit by a drunk driver. But this is where ordinary expectations went out the window. The man who hit her mother was an illegal driving drunk without a license and without real insurance.
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Much is being said about the reduced interest Americans Jews, especially young American Jews, have in Israel. Accurate or not, young American Jews, as do other college age Americans, display an ignorance of European history in general, not just Judaism and its recent history. The dumbing down of academic rigor as their professors promote globalism and socialism is turning out graduates chock full of humanitarianism and politically-correct mantras, with little actual integrated information or structured understanding. Some of what they are taught is indeed anti-Semitic, disguised as anti-Zionism. Israel is bad because Israel is gungho nationalist and many of our academics have shown a remarkable ability to ignore the horrors directly attributable to Marxism. They have reverted to a belief in the virtue of a global government, one world with no borders. Doubtless, such a world would be run by dedicated and gifted administrators such as those now running the U.N. or the E.U.
There is one area some academics, Jews in the West and Israeli Jews do see eye to eye. Ironically, these academics, who should be knowledgeable, instead are among the leaders of the minimization of the Holocaust. Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld cites Professor Israel Charney's observations, "These Holocaust distorting scholars have firmly decided not to see the victimization of the Jews in the Holocaust as a major event in human history. The agonized fates of the Jewish victims, because they are Jews, is nowhere to be experienced in these seemingly advanced intellectual analyses. Yet the Nazis themselves tell us over and over again explicitly that they hate Jews." Draining the Holocaust of emotion is quite a feat! But to what purpose?
Anti-semitism on campus has some curious components. It certainly exists. Hostility to campus Jews occurs sometimes subtly, but as time goes by it has become more openly aggressive. Perhaps because college administrators can't cope, they often deny there's a problem. They claim the campus is safe, except perhaps for justifiably repelling questionable ideologies. But that's the problem. Free and uninhibited expression of any and all points of view is no longer in fashion. The progressive bullies have proclaimed that Israel is evil and backtalk is not treated kindly. Rachel Hirshfeld writes of the repressive atmosphere Jews on campus encounter. She also discusses the defects of a Stanford University report that stacked the deck in selecting which type of student to study and so, unsurprisingly, minimizes the degree of antisemitism, presenting "a highly inaccurate and misleading account of antisemitism on campus."
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This article by Gil Troy writes about what happened at Princeton when Hillel canceled a speech by Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely after she voiced some home truths about American Jewry. An interview with Hotovely can be seen here.
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In the previous issue of Think-Israel, we examined the American Library Association and its pro-Palestinian proclivities. Cary Nelson wrote this report after observing two panels at a Middle East Studies Association (MESA) conference. We introduce it with some comments from an Editorial Note entitled "The Non-Political MESA Hijacked By Palestinian Agenda" from Israel Academia Monitor: (see here)
READ MOREMESA ... passed a resolution at the 2014 annual business meeting affirming "that calls for institutional boycott, divestment, and/or sanctions are protected free speech and legitimate forms of non-violent political action; it affirms the right of MESA members to engage in open and transparent discussion of the boycott of Israeli academic institutions in the context of the Annual Meeting and other forums." Simply put, the non-political association has bent over to help the Palestinians.
This should come in no surprise as over the years, MESA has shown a strong pro-Palestinian bias. For instance, the group became involved with Palestinian American Research Center (PARC) [see here] which was established in 1998 to promote Palestinian studies and exchange among scholars interested in Palestinian affairs. PARC boasted that in the latest MESA annual meeting it had 50 fellows and board members [see here] who participated 63 times throughout the conference. PARC also sponsored some of the MESA panels. [...]
In contrast, in 2005 MESA objected to an academic boycott of Israeli universities. Professor Ali Banuazizi, the then president of MESA wrote "The Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) is writing to express its profound disagreement with the recent decision of the Association of University Teachers (AUT) calling on its members to 'refrain from participation in any form of academic and cultural cooperation, or joint projects' with Haifa University and Bar Ilan University, in Israel. We strongly urge the Association to withdraw or rescind this resolution to boycott these universities and blacklist their faculty at the very earliest opportunity... We find thoroughly objectionable the call of the AUT to refrain from any and all scholarly interaction with the entire professional staff of two universities because of the policies of the state in which they are situated." All this changed in recent years. [...]
The pattern is clear. Professional associations are taken over by Palestinian activists and their sympathizers who maneuver the agenda toward attacking Israel while preventing any serious debate on the troubled Middle East.
David Hazony and Adam Scott Bellos write that "American Jews are re-litigating the twentieth century, while Israelis are living the twenty-first." American Jews raise conundrums, Israelis work out the problems in a project as they push it along. Hazony and Bellos write, "Israel has made its choices: security over messianic peace-seeking, capitalism over socialism, pragmatism over utopia. The country exists, and its foundations are now stronger than those of many other developed democracies. American deliberations about Israel's 'right to exist' suggest a surplus of spare time and an absence of imagination. Israelis do not struggle with the questions that grip American Jews because they have been resolved, by choice or by history, or left permanently unanswered, which is also an answer." Israelis are charging full steam ahead. This is an essay to think about.
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When President Trump declared that the US would finally follow through on the US decision to move its embassy from Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem, few believed him. After all, previous presidents had taken advantage of the loophole that kept the Embassy in Tel-Aviv for six months, then another six month, and then again. Friends of the Religion of Peace warned that the peaceful Islamites would become unpeaceful at such an insult. Did the US not understand the Arabs had owned Jerusalem since forever? When it became clear that Trump meant what he said, the State Department went into walk-slow-and-stall mode. They virtuously pointed out that it would take a while (at least until the Democrats returned from Capistrano) to find a site, to build, to relocate the people. Amazingly, when they finally grasped that Trump was serious, it took all of no time. What a little bit of push will do!
UNGA Item 5 draft resolution A/ES-10/L.22 submitted on December 19, 2017 expressed the anger of the UN members with changes in the status of Jerusalem. Jose Ciprut observes that the UN may object but, in analogy to Galileo's assertion that earth revolves around the sun no matter what the authorities declare, so it is true that Jerusalem is Israel's capital, no matter what the UN might wish. In a larger context, Ciprut points out that their methods may be updated but "...Islam is working to promote its own interests and priorities in the bosom of Western civilization, using atavistic mentalities and depleted worldviews to endogenize claims that are not only historically and geographically false but also rhetorically misleading."
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John Bolton testified in Congress on what moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem means and doesn't mean. First, proximity to the host government facilitates diplomatic relations. Moreover, we would be doing in Israel what we do in the other countries of the world, namely, we place our embassy in whatever city the country declares is its capital. Nor does it jeopardize negotiations on Jerusalem's final status, although time and reality have discarded several previous notions, such as the one that Jerusalem be internationalized. Putting it bluntly, Bolton said, "Moving the Embassy may produce new talking points for those who have never reconciled themselves to Israel's existence in the first place, but it will not 'cause' any change in the existing geopolitical state of play." Including the efforts called the 'peace process.'
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William Kilpatrick recalls how many doomsayers there were when the US announced it was moving its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. European politicians, Arab leaders, clerics from many a church. Even the Pope chimed in. They all warned of the dire consequences — we didn't want to rile up the Muslims, did we? But why would they expect the Arabs to go berserk? They have been reassuring us for years that Islam was a religion of peace. The moral of the story? As Kilpatrick says, "As Islam expands its global reach, it's becoming increasingly evident that the 'don't-do-anything-to-provoke-them' policy isn't working, and never will."
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The monstrous attacks of the Arabs on Israel are mirrored in the attacks of the Indian Muslims on the Hindus in India. In an early version of a two-state solution — it was supposed to create peace by separating Muslims and Hindus when India became independent in 1947 — a large piece of India was used to create the Islamic state of Pakistan. It made no difference. Muslim terrorism has continued unabated. Yet India stayed pro-Palestinian in the UN. As this set of articles point out, things are changing.
Despite the murderous harassment of Indian Hindus by Indian Muslims, India has been strongly pro-Palestinian, even though it gained them no advantage in the UN. Nor have the Indian Muslims become more tractable about their claim to Kashmir. But things have begun to change. The degree of shift is shown by the visit made by the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Israel, the first such visit by an Indian leader. Aside from both countries suffering from Islamist terrorism, Israel and India share similar values and goals, as well as an interest in utilizing advanced military and agricultural technology.
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This is the executive summary of S. Samuel C. Rajiv's article:
"India and Israel elevated their bilateral relationship to that of a 'strategic partnership' in July 2017. While agriculture and opportunities for cooperation in the innovation economy hogged the limelight during both the prime ministerial visits, the defense/security peg of the partnership continues to have the greatest traction. The two countries hope to take it forward with an ambitious agenda that includes joint manufacturing as well as joint research and development."
This isn't empty politician-speak. Rajiv's article supplies us with impressive details.
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Amanda Borschel-Dan describes a 70,000 people pro-Israel rally that took place in Calcutta, India. The occasion marked "the tenth anniversary of the founding of the far-right, anti-Muslim Hindu Samhati nationalist movement." They passed a voice resolution asking the Indian government to move its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. Hindu Samhati founder Tapan Ghosh spoke of similarities between Israel and India, both having struggled fiercely to obtain an independent homeland, both having been viciously attacked time and again by Muslims, both having been forced to fight against Islamic expansion. The photos accompanying the article are compelling.
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Hugh Fitzgerald responds to a Chinese writer, Ding Gang, who writes that the Muslims in India have not been radicalized as they have in the rest of the world, implying that Indian Muslims are different than their co-religionists elsewhere. Fitzgerald cites Peter Hammond's observations in his book Slavery, Terrorism and Islam:
- When the Muslim population remains under 2% in a country, they will be seen primarily as a peace-loving minority and not as a threat to other citizens.
- As the Muslim population reaches 2% to 5%, they begin to recruit from ethnic minorities and disaffected groups, within prisons and street gangs.
- From 5% on, they exercise an inordinate influence in proportion to their percentage of the population. For example, they will push for the introduction of halal (clean by Islamic standards) food" and increase pressure on supermarket chains to feature such food on their shelves — along with threats for failure to comply.
- The violence increases when the Muslim population reaches 20%.
- After reaching 20%, nations can expect hair-trigger rioting, jihad militia formations, sporadic killings, and the burnings of Christian churches and Jewish synagogues.
- At 40%, nations experience widespread massacres, chronic terror attacks, and ongoing militia warfare.
Fitzgerald points out that circumstances — such as the partition that reduced the number of Muslims in India — have made for superficial differences, but Indian Muslims have done more than their fair share of appalling acts of terror.
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"The Arab world will fight Israel to the last Palestinian. That's all they are walking munitions and objects of exploitation." —Dave man, Jun 25, 2010
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE RELATIONSHIP OF THE ARAB COUNTRIES AND PALESTINIAN ARABS
By the start of World War in 1914, the Ottomans (Muslim but not Arab) had dominated the Middle East, the south-west part of Europe and North Africa since the 13th and 14th centuries C.E. They sided with the Germans in the war and so lost most of their land holdings. At San Remo in 1920, the international community, as embodied in the League of Nations, fostered three mandates to spell out the redistribution of the Middle East. Two mandates became the start of carving Arab states from 99% of the land. They often disregarded family and clan affiliations when establishing borders between the new Arab states.
The third mandate, the Palestine Mandate, reserved the remaining 1% in an irrevocable trust for a Jewish homeland in recognition of the historic association of the Jewish people and the land. Before it was signed 2 years later, Great Britain split off 78% of the Mandate land, the territory on the east side of the Jordan, to be administered by the Hashemites; this is now the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan. See Myths and Facts here for an excellent writeup.
1920 - Original territory assigned to the Jewish National Home 
1922 - Final territory assigned to the Jewish National Home
Since 1922 by international agreement and as an irrevocable trust, the Jews legally (and biblically and historically and by right of conquest) own all of Samaria, Judea, Gaza, much of the Golan and what became the state of Israel in 1948.
Israel's neighbors invaded the new State of Israel in 1948. Israel managed to survive but she lost Gaza to Egypt. Jordan seized Samaria and Judea (AKA the West Bank) and the eastern part of Jerusalem, which had a large Jewish population. Jordan killed or kicked out all the Jewish inhabitants, razing their synagogues, and filling the Jewish homes with Arabs.
In 1964 by fiat, Yassir Arafat, with Russia's help, created an entity that had never existed: the Palestinian people, complete with an ancient history, which they would frequently alter. The Arabs living under Jordanian and Egyptian rule were specifically excluded from being considered Palestinians. It was only when the Arab countries invaded Israel again in 1967, and Israel regained Samaria, Judea and eastern Jerusalem, that Arafat redefined the Palestinian people to include the Arabs that lived under Jordanian and Egyptian rule since 1948. The Palestinian people eventually included Arafat and his band of thugs (the Palestine Liberation Organization), the terrorist organizations Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, the local Arabs who had become Israeli citizens, the local Arabs who lived in Samaria, Judea and Gaza and the 1948 Arab refugees scattered in various Western and Arab countries, Samaria, Judea and Gaza.
The Jews lost control of an intrinsic part of their land during the 19 years from 1948 to 1967 of Jordanian and Egyptian rule. Had that not happened, the Arabs would still hate Israel and keep trying to destroy it. But the "Palestinian people" and their fanciful history would not exist. The Jews would never have left, so they would not be returning as "occupiers." Arab propagandists would be deprived of an effective way to make counter-claim to Jewish land. They would have to make do with the Arab refugees of 1948, who lived well everywhere on charity while refusing to live anywhere but the Jewish state. But because of these 19 years where the Arabs had a toehold on land, the Arab could brew up countless geographic and historic fables that, with the help of a uncritical media, have won sympathy for these very special victims. In an inversion of reality, Israel has been branded as the occupier of land belonging to another people.
The "Palestinians" have been able to do what no Arab country has been able to do militarily: convince many who are gullible or willfully ignorant that they own the land of Israel, while killing Jews without arousing the full power of the IDF.
The major Arab countries are now engaged in a life-and-death struggle among themselves. They have withdrawn much of their support, moral and financial, from the Palestinian Arabs.
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REGARDING THE OFT-PROPOSED PALESTINIAN STATE, CONSIDER THESE FACTS:
So will there be one Palestinian State or two? Who exactly will be the citizens of the new state(s) of Palestine that would be entitled to the millions of dollars the world lavishes on the 'Palestinians'?
The Arab world hates Israelis because the Koran tells them to hate Jews. They hate Israel because Israel is a modern, free, vibrant and democratic country, adjectives that describe none of the Arab countries. And, to make matters worse, Israel is full of Jews. Paradoxically, the Arabs also hate Israel's arch enemy, the Palestinian Arabs, who migrated from these Arab countries to where the Jews lived. As refugees fleeing Israel, these Arabs gained the sympathy of the world. Mordechai Kedar points out that they live better than all other refugees, receiving free food, education and medical care for themselves and their descendants. And they don't pay municipal taxes. Many have enough surplus to sell some of their food intake and rent out their homes. Moreover, Arabs are wary because Palestinian Arabs have a propensity to try to take over host countries such as Lebanon and Jordan, where they were repelled at the cost of thousands of lives. And the part of the Arab world that see "Israel as the only hope in dealing with Iran is not happy at the expectation that it must mortgage its future and its very existence to the internal fighting between the PLO and Hamas." In sum, "the Arab world has realized that there is no solution that will satisfy those who have turned 'refugee-ism' into a profession, so that the 'Palestinian problem' has become an emotional and financial scam that only serves to enrich the corrupt leaders of Ramallah and Gaza."
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Guy Millière points out that the "Palestinians are the first people invented to serve as a weapon of mass destruction of another people." The European Union has become their main source of money; the UN has puffed up their illusion of being a country; and the global media and foreign politicians endorse their claim to be an actual people with geography and a history — a history they continually rewrite. They claim to own Samaria and Judea because Jordan conquered this part of Israeli in 1948 and held onto it for 19 years before Israel reclaimed it. They have never shown any sign of wanting to — or having the capability to — create the infrastructure of a viable state. They were created and continue to be supported to try to kill off Israel. But circumstances in the Middle East have changed. Sunni Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia under threat of Shiite Arab countries such as Iran need Israel alive. So there is no need for the Palestinian Arabs. It will be interesting to see if the "Palestinians" can continue to breathe on their own, when the life support provided by Arab countries directly and via the UN are withdrawn.
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The Palestinian Authority appears to be riding high. It got 128 nations to vote against the US recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. This included India, which has been creating significant ties with Israel. But support for the PA by India, as by other countries, has been eroding. As Caroline Glick writes, "The problem for the PLO/PA is that the world has changed fundamentally while they were busy embracing terrorists and getting away with it." Arab countries that cluster around Saudi Arabia fear the growing threat from Iran. They need help. It doesn't take much to realize that while "the Palestinians keep playing their old tricks, Israel is becoming a more and more significant regional and global power and the nations of the world aren't interested in weakening Israel when Israel is helping them survive and prosper."
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David Meir-Levi discusses some of the shocking revelations the Palestinian leadership made as far back as 2011 about the character of their projected state. While others may talk about a Palestinian state bringing peace, PA President Mahmoud Abbas sees the future state becoming a member of the UN as a way to pursue legal claims against Israel. In no way will it end their physical aggression against Israel. The most surprising information is that Palestinian refugees would not become citizens of the Palestinian state! "It would not only apply to refugees in countries such as Lebanon, Egypt, Syria and Jordan or the other 132 countries where Abdullah [the PA's Ambassador to Lebanon, Abdullah Abdullah] says Palestinians reside. Abdullah said that 'even Palestinian refugees who are living in [refugee camps] inside the [Palestinian] state, they are still refugees. They will not be considered citizens.'"
Think about it: Palestinian Arab refugees now living where the Palestinian state will be located will continue to be Palestinians but not citizens of the Palestinian State. Around half of the inhabitants of Samaria and Judea are refugees, and they will continue to remain stateless. The Arab refugees living in various Arab countries will remain stateless as will the Arab refugees living in the West as non-citizens. Kinda puts an end to the notion that what will solve the refugee problem is that Israel cut out a significant piece of its historical self to create a Palestinian state. And of course, UNRWA is expected to continue the support of the refugees.
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How Europeans are contributing to their own cultural demise:
Douglas Murray on the Strange Death of Europe
Muslims in Germany
One popular theory claims that if we surround Muslims with love, they will abandon their fiendish bloodthirsty religion and become civilized. Giulio Meotti discusses one example of how the theory operates in practice: "the jihadis' use of European cradle-to-grave entitlements to fund their 'holy war'". Known terrorists and their families have received "jobs, homes, public assistance, unemployment benefits, relief payments, child benefits, disability payments, cash support." This hasn't changed their mission to destroy Europe. In fact one Islamist "urged the faithful to seek unemployment benefits to devote full-time to war against the 'infidels'". As Meotti says, "The cycle of welfare and jihad needs to be stopped. Now."
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There is an anomaly that makes most people sneer or chuckle. Feminists who bridle at the slightest slighting of Western women have no problem with Muslim women being treated as chattel in the Middle East and even in Western countries. Bruce Bawer writes of Swedish bureaucrats that speak proudly of their scrupulous promotion of gender equality but accept Islam's sexual inequality. This attitude has consequences that go beyond downplaying feminist principles when they conflict with Muslim customs. It goes further than favoring the husband when a Muslim couple divorce. Bawer cites a case where a Muslim man raped a Swedish child. Because the authorities respected Muslim customs, he was given a suspended sentence; the welfare of the child was ignored. The real problem is that by allowing Muslim men in Sweden to act as they would in their home countries, Swedish law and customs get short shrift. Swedish citizens in Sweden are being judged by Sharia law, not Swedish laws and customs.
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These are three news items that appeared in Breitbart London about Muslim gangs preying on mainly white British children, grooming them for prostitution. The comments in the news items are also well worth reading; they add details and sharpen the image.
The scandal is that Muslim grooming gangs have been active for years across the country but the police have ignored the practice, even though the grooming involved child rape and human trafficking as well as addicting the children to drugs and alcohol. It is said the police feared being called racist or islamophobic were they to take action. Or they feared there'd be a backlash against the Muslim community. Even now, rather than using the word Muslim, the grooming gangs are often described as Asian. What is new is we are just now learning how many cities are involved. Initially, the practice appeared to be confined to the city of Rotherham, where some of the groomers were prosecuted almost a decade ago. It is also becoming clear that many thousands of children were raped over the years and the authorities — police and politicians — preferred ignoring complaints and silencing whistle-blowers to dealing with the problem, because it involved Muslims.
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Guy Millière provides us with examples of how pervasive attacks on Jews have become across France. French Jews have become so insecure that many are leaving the country. It is not just the physical attacks, which are often barbaric and are almost always committed by Muslims. It is the non-response of French politicians and journalists, who tamp down appropriate responses, rather than broadcast the outrages. To be fair, as Millière points out, "In France, telling the truth about Islamic anti-Semitism is dangerous. For a politician, it is suicidal. ... It is almost impossible to win an election without the Muslim vote." It is also a fact that instead of worrying that their country is being taken over by the Muslims and speaking out against Islam, many French mouth the same hatred of the Jews as do the Muslims.
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Steven Emerson and Pete Hoekstra pointed out in 2016 that terrorism was growing in lethality and geography (see here). Terrorism is increasing exponentially and is planet-wide.
This analysis was released in 2016. It is based upon extensive research, sources and multiple databases, including the University of Maryland Global Terrorism Database.
Whenever there's an act of terror, it is often explained in specifically personal terms or because of local events both by the perpetrator and by the news media. It is seldom attributed to a profound belief in fundamental Islamic principles.
Terrorists in Israel use weapons at hand, explosives and blazing kites, stones, cars and knives. The Palestinian Arabs are said to have no other ways to fight an occupying power. They focus on destroying the State of Israel and killing the Jews. But ultimately, it's a slice of the same cake. The goal is the same as it is anywhere else: to kill, convert or tax all infidels and make sharia law the law everywhere. Terrorism in Israel — as is terrorism elsewhere — is the product of the Islamic ambition to gain control of all non-Muslim countries.
Terrorists in the Western countries claim to kill because of bruised egos; supposedly they have been marginalized or ignored or singled out. The close connection between terror act and basic belief is probably most easily seen in the rationale for raping Western women because of their immodesty, an important precept anchored in Mohammad's teachings.
In the Far East, in India, Muslim terrorism is attributed to grievances over who owns the land. In medieval times, the Muslims conquered different parts of India. (From around 1000 C.E. to around 1500 C.E, they killed, according to Growth of Muslim population in India by Profesor Kishori Saran Lal, some 80 million Hindus in the process.) And salafists insist that once land is taken by Muslims, it is Muslim forever and ever. China has less of a problem, perhaps because China has been as brutal and indiscriminate as the terrorists, retaliating instantly and repeatedly. Japan has no acts of terror. They don't let many Muslims into the country; and Islamic proselytizers are deported. Street theatre, where hundreds of Muslims come and pray on the streets paralyzing traffic as they do in New York City, isn't allowed.
Acts of terror don't just happen. However the individual terrorist explains his murderous act, he has been trained or persuaded to do acts of terror because the salafist mission is to model the world according to Mohammad's precepts and actions.
| In Islam, as in other religions, there is a spectrum of belief from mainly secular to extremely devout. There is a truism that is often ignored when some new shocking act of terror occurs, namely, the more pious the Muslim, the more likely is he to commit or condone an act of terror. |
The salafist message hasn't changed: Mohammad was the perfect man and whatever he said after he came to Medina and whatever he did — his marrying a six-year old child, for instance — should be followed. Phrasing and implementation may have been somewhat 'modernized' but Islam is anchored in what was established in the 7th Century C.E. Denis MacEoin (January 5, 2018 here) explained the basic structure currently motivating Islam's mission this way:
" ... the Salafi style of fundamentalist Islam, based on a demand to return to the practices of the Islamic prophet Muhammad and the first three generations of his followers (salaf means "predecessors"), was already underway from the early years of the twentieth century, notably through the work of the Egyptian writer Rashid Rida. For Rida, and later for Salafis down to the Islamic State enterprise, reform meant turning away from the Western models that had inspired new legislation, and back to the earliest days of Islam as embodied in the Qur'an, the ahadith (sayings and acts of the prophet), and the biographies of Muhammad. In 1928, another Egyptian, the schoolteacher Hasan al-Banna, established the Muslim Brotherhood, the leading revivalist movement in Islam since the 1920s, which remains to this day a major international force for reviving fundamentalist Islam."
A major reason for the Palestinian lust for death and destruction is the PA educational structure, which is run by UNRWA. It is not geared toward peaceful coexistence. As Marcus Sheff wrote here:
The PA curriculum rejects negotiations with Israel to achieve Palestinian statehood. According to the textbooks, the only solution is victory via resistance and defeating Israel once and for all."
Sheff described how training for becoming killing machines starts early.
Young Palestinians are taught that martyrdom for boys and girls is a life goal, that dying is better than living, and that jihadis the pinnacle of ambition. Those who risk their lives by taking up arms are praised and those who choose the path of non-violence are denigrated as cowards. In science lessons, gravity is taught through the image of a boy with a slingshot targeting soldiers. Math exercises instruct students to calculate number of martyrs in Palestinian uprisings.
The new PA curriculum is packed with wording, imagery and ideology likely to create prejudices, misconceptions, stereotypes, misunderstandings, mistrust, racial and national hatred, and religious bigotry. As for gender equality, women are not equal in life, only in their value as martyrs in death.
A video entitled "Clip #5491
Terror Show At A Gaza Kindergarten Graduation Ceremony; Islamic
Jihad Leader To Israelis: We Are Not Terrorists, Don't Force Us
To Kill You" was posted May 30, 2016 by
Memri here.
This video posted by the Clarion Project April 2, 2018 is called
"Mommy sent me to die."
Even now, there are a few sparks of light in the huge murky pool where Muslims are inculcated with hate. Noor Dahri (a self-described Salafist) was raised to hate Israel and Jews. Now he believes there is no contradiction in being a practicing Muslim and Zionist. See here. But it it is more than likely it will take a massive effort reeducating Muslims and their groupies. This would need to include not allowing PA or UNRWA personnel or salafist mullahs teach the young.
This set of articles contains various ideas on cutting off oxygen to the ideational brain that directs the arm of terrorism.
Both Sunnis and Shiites preach adherence to the dictates of Mohammad and the Koran. In this article Ahmet Yayla focuses on Wahhabism, a 19th Century version of Islamic fundamentalism promoted by Sunni Saudi Arabia, which emphasizes affirming the primacy of Allah, following Islamic law precisely and promoting Islam by violent jihad. He describes the problem this way: "... it is essential we understand that if we cannot neutralize or counter the ideology behind these [terrorist] attacks, which is Salafist jihadism stemming from Wahhabism, there will always be new attacks regardless of the security precautions we take." Yayla points out that for many years Saudi Arabia took the lead in pouring huge amounts of money into building mosques around the world that are run by hate-spouting clerics, distributing textbooks biased towards salafism and recruiting foot soldiers for terror. He concludes "that regardless of the political costs and outcome, there is no true dealing of jihadi terrorism without countering the Salafist jihadist ideology."
The Saudis have recently started restraining their imams. We should do the same. Inciting for terror and training willing adherents to wage war on the West are not part of the freedom religions are guaranteed. Yayla proposes that imams be vetted and Islamic textbooks scrutinized for hate content. This is excellent advise but won't be easy, considering that much of the media and the public have been conditioned to deny that terror committed by Muslims stems from the fundamental ideology of the Religion of Peace. Nevertheless, attacking salafist ideology is a necessary component in the fight against Islamism.
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Generally speaking, this essay is about the support systems of respectable organizations that cosset Muslim terrorists and shield their acts of terror from effective punishment. Ben-Dror Yemini speaks specifically of the Palestinian Arab terrorists who have chosen their enemy wisely. They blame Israel for all their woes. This wins them "honor, money and prestige" from multiple Jew-hating groups, including academic organizations that deny factual history in favor of Arab fables; Western media that cooperate in creating fake videos that purport to show Israeli soldiers beating defenseless Arabs; feminist groups that rail against Israel making people go through security checkpoints while ignoring that Muslim women are treated like chattel throughout the Muslim world; humanitarian groups that expend all their pity on the Palestinians, leaving none for starving Africans or the girls brutalized by Boko Haram; and the NGOs that use their semi-official positions to berate Israel for expelling illegal 'jobs' immigrants while ignoring Islam's bestial treatment of homosexuals. These groups perpetuate Arab intransigence.
Yemini suggests ordinary rational people expose this overblown Palestinian discontent by comparing it to the horrors that do exist in the world. He also suggests withdrawing support for these who feed on the conflict — "from elite Palestinian leaders flying around the world in first class and elegant suits to academics paid to write a flood of studies on the feasibility of the right of return, to tunnel operators in Gaza, and families who depend on stipends for sons killed in terrorist attacks (shahids)." He might have added that destroying the twisted logic of the respectables that shield the Palestinian Arab terrorism industry would go a long way toward substituting sense for nonsense.
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This article by Vic Rosenthal sharpens our information on the resources the handlers of Islamic terrorists rely on for ideas, affirmation and whitewashing their activities. How to thwart this outpouring of resources for Palestinian terrorism? Alexi, a reader of this article said it well, "Fighting propaganda is HARD. It requires an all hands on deck, let no quarter be given hammering of the truth against the millions of falsehoods. There is no falsehood too small to go unchallenged and uncorrected."
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It is certainly true, as the articles by Ben-Dror Yemini and Vic Rosenthal above make clear, that Jew-haters pour much money into promoting the notion that the Palestinian Arabs are preyed upon by Israel. But this is a propaganda tool, aimed at making the victim of Arab terrorism — Israel — be viewed as the cause of terrorism. This inversion of predator and victim is very different than the supposition that one can eliminate Islamic terrorism by eliminating the putative cause, Israel. As Raymond Ibrahim so clearly explains, the source of Islamic terrorism is the salafic mission to have every infidel make one of three choices: "conversion, subjugation/jizya, or the sword." This is another way of saying there is nothing Islam's enemies (and that means every non-Muslim) can do in the way of pacification, appeasement or bribery to change resurgent Islam's goal. Eventually, when we can not think of any other useless remedy, we might recognize that to stop Islamic terror, we need to stop the spread of Islam. Firmly and effectively. Hopefully by reeducation but more likely by viewing Islam as a political enemy rather than a peaceful religion, and by suffocating the sources of its resources.
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The virtues of solar and wind power are so strongly asserted, many people are puzzled that the current administration supports the use of coal and fossil fuel. Sun and wind are everywhere, clean, free and they won't give out. All true. Unfortunately, the claim that renewable power is capable of providing the total energy we need to run our world is not true. There is still much to be done before energy from renewable sources can be stored so it is continuously available without random or cyclic interruptions (see here). So it is not surprising that in 2016, as an example, the total world energy used for electricity, heat and transportation came from 80% fossil fuels, 10% biofuels, 5% nuclear and 5% renewable — hydro, wind, solar and geothermal. (See here.) Moreover, environmentalists reject the use of nuclear power to fill the gap renewables can't handle. So, realistically, eliminating the use of fossil fuels, as the Obama administration tried to do, is premature.
Nevertheless, the blanket assertion that a global holocaust is imminent so we must stop using coal and rely only on clean fuel for our energy continues to be hyped by the media plus a large number of our information gatekeepers plus the UN plus many of our ideological environmental science experts. Many scientists expert in other fields — though not the 97% claimed — also urge that the use of fossil fuels be stopped. And what is perhaps most surprising: the consequences of global warming have been presented so alarmingly that many a civilian is willing to sacrifice his own comfort for the greater good and supports using huge sums of money for global action on the climate.
What is rarely asked in the debate on climate change is why the emphasis on global warming, where we can do so little to ameliorate the situation without going into pre-industrial stasis? Why is it prioritized ahead of pressing problems we currently have the ability to solve? Perhaps we should stop arguing versions of known facts and/or resting our case on random phenomena that are blamed on global warming. Perhaps we should instead look at the political consequences that would certainly occur should we change our life style and governmental administration.
We may not be able to change climate but we can do much to change global politics. And maybe this is what it is really about. Perhaps the salient factor is the large group of vocal and prestigious academicians and politicians in high places in the West that want to unite countries within some variant of socialist ideology as one world without borders. It goes without saying they have never lived in a non-democratic country. To further their actual agenda, they too hammer the claim that mankind is specifically and uniquely responsible for the rise of greenhouse gases.
Whatever else climate control would do or not do to cool the atmosphere, it is a lever to to get people to do what needs to be done to create a planet-wide infrastructure. The running of an interconnected set of agencies organized on a global level would be delegated to some planet-wide agency, a pseudo-government that would be given overwhelming financial resources, thus enhancing its political power. Blaming humans and their use of fossil energy as the predominant, if not the only significant, factor in global warming adds the element of guilt, always a good motivator for action.
The reasoning is simple enough. Climate control can't be done in patches and bits. It needs a central controlling agency, a planet-wide administrative structure with an integrated infrastructure to handle the problem. This agency would have the power to dictate what life-style practices need to be accentuated or eliminated — to stop pollution, of course. Once in place, such a planetary structure would be found useful for handling world-wide epidemics and other medical issues, for standardizing education and controlling proper behavior, enabling food distribution — you name it. And voila, we would have a de facto single global government.
Had Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election, large-scale planetary activities to fight climate change would have begun almost immediately. In fact, the 2016 Democratic Platform (DP) dated July 21, 2016, p45, reads: "We believe the United States must lead in forging a robust global solution to the climate crisis. We are committed to a national mobilization, and to leading a global effort to mobilize nations to address this threat on a scale not seen since World War II." From the beginning these would affect every community and every corporation (DP, p27-29). Such a political enterprise would be unable to do anything meaningful to solve climate change. But it would have the power to redistribute wealth and to control our lives.
What would likely evolve would be a two-tier political entity, where the elite occupy the top tier. The rest of us would be on the bottom tier, equally dependent on the government and equally miserable, equally deplorable. It would be rather like the functioning Marxist model in eastern Europe or perhaps even like the Muslim model with heredity clan and tribal leaders on top, with all others subjected to the leadership's interpretation of the Koran. For a real nightmare, imagine having the characters now running the U.N. or the E.U. in control of your life. It is the goal toward which the globalists have steadily been working.
In the April-June 2017 issue, Think-Israel had a set of articles on global warming here. They made the point that blaming global warming on humans and their industrial activities ignored important features of the oceans, the interior of the earth, the atmosphere and the sun. It is sensible to not waste money that would be better spent on doable projects that obviously benefit the environment. This current set follow up on some points made previously. Until we actually have a continuous source of renewable fuel, using fossil fuel to meet the energy needs of our modern world is more important than satisfying a globalist ideology. Even with such 'selfishness' we can do much to take care of tractable problems like upgrading electrical grids and transportation structures. Judith Curry (see here) talks about a pragmatic response to climate change. It includes accelerating energy innovation, building resilience to extreme weather [greenhouse gas atmospheric warming may already be reducing the severity of the projected start of another ice age] and 'no regrets' pollution reduction. She points out these have "near-term socioeconomic and environmental benefits" without committing to "costly policies with minimal impacts on climate, policies with adverse, unintended consequence."
It is asserted by the elite of climate science that global warming is due mainly if not exclusively to humans and their activities which load the atmosphere with CO2. Their models are based on this 'fact' and ignore the multitude of non-linear processes that are continuously in play. To bring their modeling results closer to reality, climate scientists have taken to including interactions of atmospheric CO2 and extra greenhouse gases. But this widens the gap between model results and measured temperature. John Christy makes a simple but important point when he presents actual data that indicate that in recent decades "the consensus of the [climate] models fails the test to match the real-world observations by a significant margin." If they have not been accurate predictors of "climate variation and change" when we can check results, why, he asks, should we base future policy decisions on them?
Christy is one of many qualified scientists who are uneasy about the heavy explanatory burden CO2 has been made to carry, while other plausible reasons for global warming are ignored either because they go against the notion that humans are responsible for global warming or because there is no good way of measuring them. These scientists have been locked out by establishment climate scientists from publishing in establishment trade journals and don't have access to a sympathetic media. The very people that lock them out of these information sources then say that because these scientists don't publish in establishment-approved journals, their results are spurious, or even worse, amateurish. Nevertheless, these scientists raise serious questions about man-made global warming and suggest other lines of investigation.
A good way to start learning about other potential factors influencing our climate is to read an article by Makia Freeman entitled "10 Prominent Scientists Refuting AGW (Manmade Global Warming) with Solid Research" available here. Freeman's article contains many links to excellent videos. In one video, David Evans probes the alarming overestimation of warming by climate models (see here). In another, Nobel Laureate physicist Ivar Giaever makes the case that global warming is pseudo science (see here). Professor Carl-Otto Weiss here calmly asserts the ultimate heresy: "Spectral analysis of Climate Data shows all Climate Change is due to natural Cycles." A favorite way for the tight bunch of climate scientists that determine climate change doctrine to ignore an alternative opinion is to accuse the scientist who holds that opinion of not being a practicing climate scientist. It's hard to dismiss Dr. Judith Curry as an outsider, she having been a prestigious professor of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and still very active in the field. She and Michael Mann, a member of the inner circle of establishment climate science and the creator of the notorious hockey stick shtick, offer their very different points of view in very different ways of expressing themselves (see here). Her talk was calmly factual, providing details and nuances. Mann ignored all but his certainties. He often used words like "irreversible" and "absolute" as in "absolute melting of the ice sheets." I wonder if he seriously believes his assertions that global warming is responsible for drought, wild fires, floods, homeless polar bears and terrorism.
READ MORE Sometimes manmade global warming is called Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) because the projected coming global holocaust is said to be due to people. They breathe out and they contaminate the atmosphere by using fossil fuels. Or it's fuzzed up and called Climate Change, where the only temperature change is from hot to hotter. In either case, many assertions have been made about the cause and the effects of global warming that have no factual support. This article by the Friends of Science Society presents ten such incorrect statements about manmade global warming.
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Susan Crockford writes of the relationship — actually, the non-relationship — of animal death and global warming. She decries the new fad of seeking out a sick or starving polar bear and attributing his condition to global warming this way:
READ MORE"We finally have this year's example of the new fad of claiming every polar bear that died of starvation (or on its way to starving to death) — and caught on film — is a victim of climate change.
"One starving bear is not scientific evidence that man-made global warming has already negatively affected polar bears but it is evidence that some activists will use any ploy to advance their agenda and increase donations."
"if sea ice loss due to man-made global warming had been the culprit, this bear would not have been the only one starving: the landscape would have been littered with carcasses."
This set starts with the discovery of ancient Jewish coins at the Temple Mount that might have been used for tithing. It then moves on to the 19th century practice in Tzarist Russia of forcibly inducting children into the army. The other essays are about more familiar topics, the non-neutrality of the International Committee of the Red Cross and the behavior of dedicated Muslims when they have the power. The final essay by Majid Rafizadeh is a must read. It documents the ongoing and intense brutalization, terrorization and humiliation of Iranians by their own clerical leaders to ensure that Sharia law is obeyed and Islam is practiced as dictated by Mohammad and stored in the post-Mecca suras of the Quran.
Itzchak Tessler writes about coins discovered around the Temple Mount that "are some of the first minted by Jews... [they] are dated to the end of the 4th century B.C." "The coins were inscribed with the letters 'YHD,' or Yehud, the Aramaic name for the First Persian Empire's province of Yehud—roughly equivalent to the older biblical kingdom of Judah." The area had been called Judea for thousands of years, until someone figured out it would be easier to claim Jews had no historic affiliation with the West Bank than persuade even the most ignorant of the ignorant that Jews didn't come from Judea. These coins were not found in situ where the surround would provide additional information about them. As explained in the Sun Sentinel here, "the Temple Mount Sifting Project, an archaeological initiative [was] started in order to sift thousands of tons of dirt illegally excavated and dumped in the Kidron Valley by the Islamic Waqf in 1999. The Waqf excavations compromised the archaeological integrity of the Temple Mount and sparked outrage in Israel, leading many to suggest that the Waqf was intentionally attempting to eradicate evidence of two Jewish Temples that stood on the Mount for more than 800 years." Tessler's article provides more information on the Waqf's lack of respect for Judaism's holiest site.
READ MORE This article by Cnaan Liphshiz was spotted by my cousin Ruth, who lives in Israel. Liphshiz describes the career of Herzl Tsam, who was kidnapped into the Russian army as a child and retired forty-one years later as a captain. In retirement, he participated in building a synagogue in Tomsk. The article resonated for us because the paternal grandfather of both our mothers (who were sisters) had been captured at age 7 and kept in the Russian army for 25 years.
The article set me to recalling what I remembered of my mother telling me of my great grandfather. Articles I've read lately say that when young children were forced into army service, they were educated until they were 18, old enough to be inducted into the regular army, to start serving their 25 years. From the information I have on my great grandfather, I'd suggest that in at least one case, the child was captured, started serving in the army in some capacity and was released 25 years later. I've reconstructed some dates in my great grandfather's life using information in the stories my mother told me and some old pictures to support my assertion. I am in the process of writing it up.
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Using material from "Humanitarians at War: The Red Cross in the Shadow of the Holocaust," a recent book written by Gerald Steinacher, Janet Levy writes, "The international Red Cross and the Vatican conspired to aid thousands of Nazi war criminals and collaborators, including German SS officers Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele. Its wartime record is even worse." The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) knew about the death camps as early as 1941, but did not voice its knowledge. "The Nuremberg trials exposed the depth to which the ICRC and the Swiss government turned a blind eye to German atrocities, making their 'humanitarian neutrality' a fiction. Unfathomably, ICRC officials viewed Germans as war victims and even criticized 'undue Jewish influence' manifested in what they viewed as the 'vengeance' of the Nuremberg trials." The ICRC is no longer so obvious in its sympathies, but no one would suggest it favors Israel against the Palestinians or is even close to neutral. As an example, Sever Plocker in an April 2017 article here wrote that "Jacques De Maio, who heads the International Committee of the Red Cross delegation to Israel and the PA, asserts: 'There is no IDF order to shoot suspects to kill,' while at the same time warns of the humanitarian damage caused by occupation." This statement echoes Palestinian propaganda, not actual facts.
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The title is something of a misnomer. In 1948 when the Jews declared the formation of the sovereign state of Israel, five of Israel's Arab neighbors invaded Israel. Jordan was able to seize and hold the eastern part of Jerusalem, which included the Jewish Quarter and the Temple Mount area, as well as Samaria and Judea (AKA the West Bank). When the Arabs again invaded Israel in 1967, Israel retook this land and Jerusalem was unified. Richard Pollock writes about how objects and installations sacred to Jews and Christians and cemeteries were treated by the Arabs during the 19 years Jordan occupied Jewish land.
READ MORE In this importantl essay, Majid Rafizadeh describes the changes that occurred in just a generation in Iran after the Shah was overthrown with the connivance of the then US president Jimmy Carter. Iran went from a free and modern society to a totalitarian state which subjected its citizens to extreme brutality in order to obtain complete submission to sharia law. Iranians continue to live in fear as the mullahs strive to return Iran to the grotesque piety of Mohammad's Islam. A reader, Linda Goudsmit, made an interesting observation: "Extremely powerful article - should be required reading for every liberal and every apologist for Islam and open borders. If Majid Rafizadeh had identified the Muslim Brotherhood, CAIR, Muslim Student Association etc as soldiers in today's jihad against the West he would have exposed how the same methods used against his father's generation are being used today against the trusting West to conquer them."
READ MORE This is where our readers get a chance to write opinions and editorials and share articles they find informative. The Blog-Eds page for the month is updated every few days.
There is a separate file that is the index for the articles on the Blog-Ed page. You can access an article immediately from this index by clicking on the item in the index.
To access the Index, click the "Blog-Eds List" box in the Blue Strip on the top of the Blog-Ed page.
Different Blog Ed pages will be down intermittently until the Archive structure is in place. We apologize for the inconvenience.
What we are talking about in the November–December 2017 Issue
Editor's Note:Think-Israel tends to use salafist rather than extremist or Islamist or militant or fundamentalist or activist to describe generically a pious Muslim, one who sticks as closely as possible to the unfiltered words and actions of Mohammad and the first three generations of Muslims, including, especially, the Companions of the Prophet. In modeling himself as closely as he can on the preachings and practices of Mohammad, a salafist can in modern terms be precisely described as an uninhibited terrorist, a theological supersessionist, a political supremacist who believes Islam and sharia law must dominate and a social barbarian, who wages jihad with whatever tools are available. Thanks to the high quality of whitewash supplied by sympathetic propagandists, he seldom is so described.
The Balfour Declaration was a significant benchmark in the formation of today's Israel. It was stated in a letter sent to Lord Walter Rothschild, a leader of the Jewish community in England, by the British Foreign Secretary, Alfred Balfour, during World War 1, while the land was still the Syrian Palaestina province of the Ottoman Empire. (See here.)
November 2, 1917
Dear Lord Rothschild,
I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty's Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet.
"His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."
I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.
Yours sincerely,
Arthur James Balfour
A video on the letter and the history and politics surrounding its transmission can be found here.
This section presents information on the Balfour Declaration. Further details of its lodgings historically and geographically and ideologically in the history of modern Israel can be read in the January 2016 issue of Think-Israel, beginning here.
The Children of Israel became a people when they left Egypt and settled on land ranging down from the Mediterranean and extending over to a large swatch of land on the east side of the Jordan river. The Romans eventually destroyed the Jewish Kingdom and various conquerors added the land to their domains over the centuries. But the territory was never again homeland to any people until modern times, when in the 1800s Jews returned in increasing numbers to their homeland. They, and the Jews who had always maintained a presence there, were able to redeem their Land, a land they yearned for during the two millennia of the Diaspora. The Balfour Declaration was a significant benchmark in the formation of today's Israel. It was an early confirmation that the effort to reestablish a Jewish homeland had the blessings of important members of the international community. Equally important, it encouraged the Jews that this time their efforts would succeed.
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The Balfour Declaration was an early formal statement by Britain of its commitment to what was already occurring, namely, Jews were returning to redeem their ancient homeland. The letter, sent with the prior approval of the Western allies, gave voice to Britain's commitment to the Jews reestablishing a national home in their ancient homeland. The language of the letter was incorporated into the text of the Palestine Mandate, which passed into international law in 1922. Dore Gold emphasizes three important points: "1) the significance of the Balfour Declaration and its standing as a commitment assured by international law; 2) The participation of the Yishuv [the local Jewish community] during the Second World War on the side of the Allied Powers; 3) Great Britain's dishonorable retreat from the obligations of the Balfour Declaration and its failure to reward its faithful ally."
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Daniel Mandel points out that "[t]he Balfour Declaration was the first step on the political road to reversing two millennia of Jewish statelessness and exile which had resulted in the Jews being the most dispersed and persecuted minority in history." Certainly, as Mandel points out, Israel "was not anyone's gift to the Jews. The Jews of Palestine sacrificed scarce blood and treasure to obtain and preserve their independence from five invading Arab armies and internal Palestinian Arab militias ..." Mandel also rebuts another argument: the Arabs and their proponents have complained that giving the Jews some land was unfair to the Arabs, or retroactively, the Palestinian Arabs. One must admit that it is true that the Arabs took possession of only the remaining 99.99% of the Middle East as a free gift for which they didn't have to fight — except among themselves.
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When Rashid Khalidi lived in Beirut, he was unofficial spokesman for the PLO. As professor at Columbia and the University of Chicago, his mission has been to promote Islam. In Chicago, when ex-Prez Obama was on Woods Fund board, he helped funnel money intended to help the disadvantaged to the Arab American Action Network (AAAN), which was run by Khalidi's wife; some of these funds were used to create propaganda to vilify Israel. Obama has written how Khalidi influenced his own views. In this article, Mara Schiffren writes of Khalidi, now a professor at Columbia, and his speech on 'The Balfour Declaration from the Perspective of its Victims.' The speech was unsurprising. Khalidi, like Abbas and other Arab revisionists, revamped the history of Palestine around the time of the Balfour Declaration to suit his argument that the British had declared war against the Palestinian people (who didn't then exist). He spoke of the Arabs as the indigenous population of then Palestine, although it was the Jewish inhabitants of the area that were usually the ones called Palestinian, because they were the ones that invented agricultural techniques, organized the Philharmonic Orchestra, started the Palestinian Post and served in the army as the Palestine Brigade. As Schiffren writes,
"The lecture epitomized the politicization of contemporary Middle East studies: by twisting a legitimate topic—the Balfour Declaration—into anti-Zionist, anti-Israel propaganda, Khalidi distorted the past in order to influence the present. His ahistorical claim that the Jewish people are not the indigenous population of Israel is a transparent effort to delegitimize Israel as a Jewish state. There should be no room in academe for such hucksterism masquerading as scholarship."READ MORE
It speaks to the creativity and imagination of politicians and media people that, with all the evidence available that the Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist organization, they are still able to quibble, misdirect and assert that the Muslim Brotherhood is not a terrorist group.
Bernice Lipkin rejects the argument made by ex-Prez Obama and lately by the CIA that we should not identify the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) as a terrorist organization. Nor does she find what is said to be the legal definition of a terrorist organization adequate, or even appropriate. She suggests using an operational definition of terrorism. What is the organization's ideology as translated into action? What has it accomplished? What does the organization plan to do? Who does it hang out with? What groups does it support, or is supported by? She suggests the criteria proposed in two recent reports are better at determining that organizations such as the MB are terrorist.
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Hany Ghoraba writes about an Egyptian, Ibrahim Munir, a little-known but very important member of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). Munir became a member of MB at an early age and has been hands-on in many of the MB organization's activities. He was imprisoned in the early 1950s for taking part in a foiled attempt to kill Egypt's then leader, Gamal Abd al-Nasser. After his release and his move to London in the early 1980s as a political refugee, he developed MB's global network, making London "its political and financial base," its global headquarters. In London, he "established a web of connections using his diplomatic skills and contacts in the British government." He has continued to foster a major but little-advertised MB connection with global consequences: he has maintained the strong ties Sunni MB has had with Shi'ite Iran since the early 1940s. More recently, using subtle threats that the Muslim community would become violent should MB be officially labeled a terrorist organization, he kept MB "from being banned in the United Kingdom in 2014 after then-Prime Minister David Cameron ordered an investigation into the Brotherhood's activities in Britain and Egypt." His skills in taqqiyya and double talk were evident when he defended Hamas's acts of terrorism while claiming Hamas didn't violate international law. Ghoraba writes that without Munir's diplomatic, financial and media skills, by now MB would have lost their money and media support and likely would have disbanded. I find it interesting that in America the MB is using governmental networking and specious arguments to prevent the US labeling MB a terrorist organization.
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Mark Hewitt tracks plans made by the Muslim Brotherhood and by ex-Prez Obama to increase Muslim participation in America. In 2004, while conducting a search at the Annandale Virginia house of Ismail Elbarasse, a fundraiser for Hamas, the FBI discovered boxes of Muslim Brotherhood (MB) material, including a plan whereby the MB would infiltrate North America. "Phase One [was the] Phase of discreet and secret establishment of leadership; and Phase Two [was the] Phase of gradual appearance on the public scene and exercising and utilizing various public activities. Establishing a shadow government (secret) within the Government." In the fall of 2008, Barack Obama, then Democratic candidate for the Presidency, issued a staffing order to hire "Arab Muslims over Arab Christians for the top jobs." Plans for a "Muslim Outreach" program were given to agency directors and department heads, including NASA, the CIA and Education. In November 2008, President Elect Obama's "administration officially extended a welcome to the Muslim Brotherhood." His Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, "stressed her belief that 'we must increase outreach not simply to American Muslims, but to Muslims around the world.'" As Hewitt writes, "When Mrs. Clinton stepped down from her position, Huma Abedin [Clinton's Deputy Chief-of-Staff and daughter of MB members] was allowed to take five boxes of 'physical files' out of the State Department that include records described as 'Muslim Engagement Documents.'" Hewitt makes the novel suggestion that Clinton's 33,000 deleted emails were her correspondence with MB. Whether that will prove to be the case or not, it is probable that Obama's Muslim policy — including his forbidding the FBI to surveil mosques — is yet to be intellectually absorbed by the public.
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Mudar Zahran attributes the current rift between Saudi Arabia (SA) and Qatar to a difference of opinion about the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). "Qatar is the main financier of the MB group not only in Jordan but the world." Qatar is also close to Jordan, which has been allied with the MB since the 1950s. In fact, in Jordan, MB is "registered as a charity, a political organization, and a private business. While the king bans secularists and liberals for a mere tweet, the MB owns its licensed satellite TV network and daily paper in which they consistently preach terrorism and death to America and the Jews." Recently, Jordan has appeared to be trying to appease SA, while continuing a defamation campaign against SA and President Trump. Zahran believes that Qatar "will have to give up the MB eventually. Once that happens, Jordan could face serious consequences..."
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Marxists/Socialists and Muslims and their allies continue to infiltrate US infrastructure. Muslim terror attacks have increased in number but the public's initial reactions of horror are quickly dampened by the media and politicians. Marxists continue to take over academic societies, although there has been some legal counterattacks. The bizarre cooperation of feminist groups and pious Muslim women who advocate sharia law, which regards woman as chattel, may be starting to come apart. The Ahmadi Muslim community are unquestioningly moderate and active proselytizers of their emphasis on peace. One essay explores the consequences of their not making it known that they are statistically insignificant and have little influence on mainstream Muslim behavior or ideology.
Antifa, a misnomer if ever there was one, stands for anti-fascist and was started in Europe to counter fascism. It now could serve as a prototype of how to stifle free speech and intimidate people. Its 'spontaneous' happenings have been funded by people like George Soros, which immediately tells us Antifa is not out to do America good. Leo Hohmann provides examples of how Antifa is using confrontation, riots, protest and intimidation to cancel events across U.S on free speech. As do so many extremist 'liberal' groups, this fascistic group works with organized Muslims to prevent opinions they do not share and facts they do not like from being transmitted. As Hohmann puts it, "The travesty is that the anti-free speech leftists and Muslims conduct their operations against the First Amendment under the faux argument that they want to promote dialogue."
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Sayfullo Saipov, a Muslim from Uzbek, now living in the Muslim community in Paterson, N.J., drove a truck through a crowd in New York City on Halloween, 2017. Matthew Hausman uses the response of the politically correct politicians and media as an example of how "secular westerners still do not seem to comprehend the implications of Islamic doctrine that divides the world into two halves — "dar al-Harb" (the house of war) and "dar al-Islam" (the house of submission)." There are no other categories. The only end point resurgent Islam envisions is "the submission or elimination of all whom they consider to be infidels." The response of the Main Stream Media of course was as usual to muddy the waters so that the meaning of the attack is blurred. They wrote as if their major worry was that Muslims would suffer a backlash, knowing that this doesn't happen. They also know this false concern is an effective technique to prevent people from giving serious consideration to how to respond to the salafists.
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Over the years, there have been a growing number of instances where a small group of Marxist and/or Muslim activists take over a professional society, then speak and act in its name. Early on, they joined committees where they could call for social justice — mostly on behalf of the Palestinian Arabs. In the process, they could flay Israel. More recently, they identify as strongly with the BDS movement against Israel, continue to be avowed pro-Palestinian but are better funded. They also aim at taking over higher positions in the society. A recent example has been the American Studies Association (ASA), where some of its members gained power and then used their position to use the prestige of the ASA on behalf of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. An article in The Tower (see here) describes these machinations this way:
"The evidence shows that members of the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel [USACBI], a movement which promotes BDS in the United States, have sought to take over the ASA and similar associations," Jerome Marcus, of Marcus & Auerbach LLC, the lead counsel for the plaintiffs, said. Among the defendants in the lawsuit are Sunaina Maira, Neferti Tadiar, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Jasbir Puar, and Steven Salaita, who are leaders of USACBI. [See http://chelm.freeyellow.com/confront.html for bios.]
"This case is about the illegal, hostile takeover of a non-profit, academic association by leaders of an anti-Israel group," explained Jennifer Gross of the Louis D. Brandeis Center, another attorney for the plaintiffs. "Through a series of misrepresentations and breaches of duty, USACBI activists obtained positions of trust in the ASA, and then abused those positions in order to capture and exploit the assets of the ASA to advance the agenda of the BDS movement.
[...] Because the membership of ASA is generally opposed to boycotts, the USACBI activists who ran for positions on the ASA board hid their support for BDS. The one activist who acknowledged his support for BDS lost his election.
[...] Once the BDS activists were in position they manipulated the association's rules in order to pass the anti-Israel boycott resolution.
"Lawsuit: BDS movement engineered takeover of American Studies Association" by William A. Jacobson is a detailed analysis of how academics used their positions to promote BDS against Israel specifically. (See here.)
Below the radar, such hostile take-overs have been going on for several decades. The main difference is that, finally, there has been some pushback instead of passive acquiescence. An early example was the corruption of the American Library Association. This was the introduction to N. Leonard Tolkan's article, when it was first published in 2003.
"Most people would say their public libraries are apolitical and desire only to educate the public by encouraging the purchase of books of varying points of view, providing they are not hate literature and providing they have their facts straight. So isn't it surprising to find that the American Library Association (ALA) — the oldest and largest and probably the most influential society of librarians in the world — apparently considers it has a duty to bash Israel and support the 'Palestinian' cause. N. Leonard Tolkan, the author of this article, is a veteran librarian who, for obvious reasons, chooses to remain anonymous."
Linda Sarsour has not been timid in demonizing Jews and declaring she supports sharia law and Islam's treatment of women. Yet the far-left feminist movement has continued to treat her as a strong supporter of women's rights. But recently, another Muslim, Asmi Fathelbab, has accused Sarsour of enabling a male co-worker to harass her sexually when she worked at the Arab American Association of New York (AAANY) in 2009. When Fathelbab complained "Sarsour threatened legal and professional damage if she went public with the sexual assault claims." After Fathelbab left AAANY, Sarsour would contact her employers. As Fathelbab puts it, "I haven't been able to obtain a steady job since 2009 ..."
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Bruce Bawer writes of the "Ahmadiyya, a small Islamic sect that actually preaches everything that Islam as a whole pretends to stand for: love, peace, forgiveness, and the brotherhood of all humankind. It rejects terrorism, violent jihad, and the concept of 'abrogation' whereby later, nastier passages of the Koran are considered to trump earlier, nicer bits." The largest group of Ahmadi live in Pakistan. Even there, they constitute a minuscule percent of the population. Altogether, the Ahmadi are about 1% of the Muslim world population, totaling 10-20 million worldwide. Writings about the sect usually emphasize how they suffer physically in some Muslim countries from attacks by main-stream Islam. Or their temperate views are praised. Bawer explores other aspects. He notes that they are activist proselytizers. Members of the Ahmadiyya Community are often the ones that run rallies declaring that terrorism is not part of Islam's teachings. When they do so, it is unfortunately a fact that this small group acts as if they speak for the majority of Muslims. They distribute a booklet called True Islam, where jihad is described as a non violent inner struggle, not the meaning jihad has for the 99 plus percent of Muslims that are not Ahmadi. When they say that Islam categorically rejects lying, they are not being truthful. When they persuade people that they are instructing them in authentic Islam, they are lying, which is against their own teachings. By presenting their own views as mainstream, they white-wash mainstream Islam and contribute to the growth of a religion that is, in the main, the opposite of what they preach.
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If the articles below are an indication, there's intensification but no major change in the relations between the members of the different religious groups. Non-assimilating Muslims continue to recreate the turbulence and disorganization of the countries from which their families fled, the Jews are leaving and the Christians practice dhimmitude or have lapsed into paralysis.
In as volatile a situation as the current "refugee" influx into Europe, we should expect some underestimate of the number of Muslims that are in Europe. But it is shocking to find how big Pew's underreporting of the actual numbers is. The Pew report compounds its misunderstanding of the situation by suggesting that even if the Muslim population triples in the next 30 years, there will still be more non-Muslims than Muslims in Europe. As Soeren Kern points out, "The Pew report entirely ignores the key issue of how Europe will integrate tens of millions of Muslim migrants whose values — including anti-Semitism, polygamy, female genital mutilation and honor violence — cannot be reconciled with those of Europe's Judeo-Christian and liberal-democratic heritage." Given that polygamy will increase the Muslim population a lot more than honor killings will reduce it, the Muslim population will continue to grow so rapidly that Europe will be even less able to cope with the aliens than it is now.
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Bruce Bawer critiques a recent report published by the Runnymede Trust on islamophobia. Although it is presented as a serious academic document, it is routine Muslim apologetics and has no depth in its analyses. It blames Western racism for all problems from Muslim criminal behavior to Muslim poverty. It ignores the connection between Islamic theology and "jihad, sharia, the caliphate, the systematic subjugation of women, the execution of adulterers and apostates and gays." It discusses anti-Semitism, but ignores that the recent sharp increase in Jew-hate is largely due to Muslim incitement. It sees honor killings and female genital mutilation (FGM) the moral equivalents of western domestic violence and child abuse. This ignores that while Islam allows, even requires, wife beating, the West condemns it. As Bawer concludes, the report "... would not merit any comment at all if the Runnymede Trust were not taken as seriously as it is in the corridors of British power."
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For centuries, Europe and Christianity were symbiotic. Now, Europe's churches practice a lukewarm Christianity and Europe's politicians have gone belly-up to appease the growing Muslim population. The ordinary European, if not brain-washed by the nobility of making his country multicultural, appears bemused, if not entirely paralyzed. Soeren Kern highlights how far this process of European dhimmitude has come by examples of the muting of Christmas in Europe out of deference to Muslim 'sensitivity.'
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Yves Mamou writes about two types of Muslim anti-Semitism. There's the hard-core Jew-hate that leads to acts of terrorism and there's soft Jew-hate that accuse Jews as being behind any accusation of Muslim wrongdoing. Not so long ago in France, associating Islam with anti-Semitism would land the speaker in court. Now, the problem is so extensive, it can't be hidden. "One out of every three racist crimes committed in France in 2016 was against Jews — who make up less than 1% of the population. ... [and] the overwhelming majority of the attackers are Muslim." Physical attacks, intimidation and fear-creation have corroded the Jewish neighborhoods. As a result, Jews have left the country or at least have moved out of once stable neighborhoods that now are populated by large numbers of uncivilized Muslims.
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The article above is about large-scale group dynamics that have impacted the lives of many Jewish communities in France. It differentiated the type of religous Jew-hate that underlies open acts of terror and the more seething type of Jew-hate that sees a Jewish conspiracy whenever a Muslim is blamed or accused of an immoral or criminal act. This article fills in details on a more personal level. Giulio Meotti writes of Jews leaving French suburban communities which used to have heavy concentrations of Jews, abandoning their neighborhoods to the Muslims who moved in and made life insecure and often impossibly awful for the Jews. Decades ago, some of these Jews were forced to flee French-speaking Middle East countries and, now, once again they need to pick up and leave. This time, many are returning to the Middle East, to Israel. The comments on the article are, for the most part, thoughtful and well-worth reading. Many make the point articulated by Yehoshua Friedman, one of the commentators, "Europeans did not want 6 million Jews. Now they will get 60 million Muslims."
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The Arabs in Israel? Arab woman may be treated as chattel at home, but as human shields, they and their children have become a major weapon of war and propaganda. At the same time, less use is being made of the earliest successful Arab propaganda weapon, the 1948 Arab refugees. They continue to thrive and multiply as wards of the UN. But, increasingly, people are asking for a realistic count of how many refugees there are and how the funds donated to them have been used. Israel is doing better at thwarting Palestinian incursion and take-over of Jewish land. And the Israeli public is less sanguine about the possibility of peace, given the profound Arab hatred of the Jewish state. Perhaps the comedy team, Latma, acting as Arabs, says it best, "We lie about the facts. The facts. The facts. Because it works. It works."
Eli Hertz describes how the Arabs in Gaza, Samaria and Judea sacrifice their children voluntarily and with pride by sending them out as suicide-murderers, where the children die while killing Jews. The desire to be a shahid is inculcated in the youngsters from the time they are toddlers. The Arab leadership sees this as a win-win. If the Israelis wound or kill an Arab child, the news media excoriates Israel. If the Israeli soldier flat out refuses to harm the child, he or those near him are likely to pay for this decision with their lives. As Hertz says of this monstrous practice, "A criminal Palestinian Arab leadership, along with cowardly and intimidated Palestinian parents on the West Bank and Gaza, exploit their children to engage in armed conflict — in opposition to values held by the rest of the civilized world and in flagrant violation of international law and common decency."
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Shoshana Bryen suggests this might be a good time "to review the number of Palestinian 'refugees' in the world and the world's obligation to them." Almost every refugee around the whole wide world is resettled well within a decade. Except the Palestinian Arab refugees. They are the only ones in the world that can 'inherit' their refugee status from their (great)(grand)parents. In fact, there are currently only around 30,000-50,000 who actually fled Israel in 1948, when the armies of the Arab states invaded. Yet some 5 million Arabs (6 million, if you believe the PA), most of whom have never been in Israel, have, as wards of UNRWA, access to free food, housing, education and medical care. And the numbers increase year by year. What is more bizarre, when an actual count was made in Lebanon, thousands of these refugees didn't seem to exist. In Lebanon, UNRWA, the agency that handles these refugees, receives money, on a per head basis, for 440,957 refugees. But only around 174,530 were there when they did a counting. 60% of the refugees had gone missing. How did these refugees disappear? Where has all the extra money gone? And why did UNRWA claim a budget shortfall? Millions more Palestinian Arab refugees live in Jordan, Syria, Gaza and the West Bank. We can expect missing refugees there also.
Far from being a mystery, the discrepancy may have a simple explanation. It has always been understood that the number of persons counted as refugees was inflated. (Read here.) Deaths are not reported. Local Arabs signed up as 'refugees' for the benefits; and their progeny continue to receive them. Moreover, after 1967 when Israel recovered Samaria and Judea, UNRWA added stateless persons to its refugee list. Besides the sloppy ways the list of refugees has been incremented, 'ghost-counting' was inflated because "Jerusalem Palestinians are double-counted — once as Palestinian Authority residents and once as Israeli Palestinians. And more than 100,000 babies born abroad are registered as West Bank residents." The count is further increased because Arabs who have become citizens of Arab countries or who live abroad are still counted as refugees. In other words, even the refugees available for counting are overestimated. And the higher figure that includes 'the missing' was never close to accurate. Again, where did the money go?
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It is an open secret that there are many Jewish girls, usually from lower-class or dysfunctional families, marrying Arab boys, who court them and treat them like royalty. Until they marry and the woman goes off to live with him in his all-Arab village. Suddenly, she's treated like a Muslim woman - as chattel, as an undervalued slave, who can be beaten whenever her husband chooses, good for nothing but to keep house and produce children. (see the video "Maya, Daughter of Hamas Sheikh" here.) Mordechai Sones writes of such a woman who asked a rescue organization, Yad L'Achim, for help after she almost died from abuse. The rescue mission was successful and, bringing the story into the present, her son just became Bar Mitzvah at the Western Wall. Another article by Sones is about a young man raised as Muslim in eastern Jerusalem who dreamt of becoming a 'shahid,' He discovered he was Jewish — his Jewish mother having married a Muslim. Slowly he began to exploring Judaism and completely changed his lifestyle. (see here.)
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David Weinberg writes of ways the Jerusalem municipality is protecting Israeli sovereignty in the eastern part of Jerusalem against Palestinian Authority incursion. Early this November, cleaning crews, protected by police, came into the area for a "sweep and clean" session. They hauled away "abandoned vehicles, piles of garbage, and rubble from ruined buildings. They took down dangerously placed signs and illegal sheds. They erased graffiti, fixed broken street lights, and painted road safety markings." They also checked that people under house arrest were actually at home. Clean-up should certainly improve the lives of ordinary residents but many people saw this as "part of a broader plan to ensure effective and equitable Israeli rule over a united Jerusalem." Edging out PA authority and asserting Israeli sovereignty is being done by "demarcating the area of activity of the municipal street cleaner, the youth counselor at the local community center, the building inspector, the road engineer, the policeman and the social worker, who provide services for the residents and are clearly identified with Israeli institutions." Whether local schools in the area will use Israeli or Palestinian curricula is another area of struggle. "Some [parents] support the introduction of the Israeli curriculum into schools so as to broaden their children's educational and professional horizons, while those affiliated with the PA wish to preserve the Palestinian curriculum due to its national characteristics." [What a polite way to describe incitement to terrorism!] In addition, tax collectors and building inspectors can play a role in encouraging quiet orderly neighborhoods not racked by constant riots. As Weinberg writes, "When multiple families in a clan are hit hard for back taxes and utility bills, as well as for social security fraud, the neighborhood suddenly goes quiet and the disturbances peter out."
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If you don't already understand that the Arabs nurse a profound and likely intractable hatred towards the Jewish state and will do whatever they can to destroy Israel, you can learn by inference from Amb. Alan Baker's list of conditions that must come into existence to have peace between Israel and the local Palestinian Arabs. He points out that peace is impossible in the current atmosphere, in which the Arab leadership disregards the promises made when signing the Oslo Accords, in which the Arab leadership incites the populace and encourages them to hate the Jews and in which they continue to deny Israel's right to exist. Their attempts to win a state by diplomatic means underscores that their professions of wanting a negotiated peace are insincere. Nor has the international community done anything to encourage Arabs to change. International organizations continue to accept Arab professions of peace while ignoring their hostile activities towards Israel. Baker cautions the US to understand that without a real change in Arab attitudes and behavior, the Israeli public will have no inclination to enter into negotiations. Bitter experience, he might have added, has made the Israeli public wise, if not their leadership.
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Two of this set of articles describe major information sources that we can no longer rely upon. The third, the article by Matti Friedman, describes how social media sources can scoop classic news and TV and thus control initial perceptions.
Distorting, lying, minimizing, trivializing, eliminating context, omitting important information, rewriting history and geography, attributing affect and beliefs diametrically opposite to the actual ones for both Arabs and Jews, and ignoring the devotion of the Jewish people to Jerusalem for thousands of years! In this gem of an essay, Evelyn Gordon describes how The New York Times and other prominent media sources have used all of these sleazy tactics to defend their silly assertion that Jerusalem hasn't been all that important to the Jews over the centuries. I wonder if these once-reputable information sources have taken as their model of reliability UNESCO, which simply one day decided to believe that the Temple Mount wasn't Jewish. Is it possible that institutions, like people, can manufacture false memories in their declining years? Is the New York Times suffering from Falzheimers?
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Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) that are "potent bad actors" are international organizations with lofty mission statements on public policy and human rights. They claim to be impartial "champions of human rights" but in fact, have an unacknowledged anti-Israel mission. Rael Jean Isaac writes about Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International (AI), NGOs that use their credentials to demonize Israel. They ignore facts and geographic/historic context. Israel does, after all, do an admirable job continuing to be democratic and humane, despite living in a dangerous neighborhood, surrounded by Muslim states that abide by the primitive 'religious' notions of their bloodthirsty founder. These NGOs have a simple formula: Israel can do no right, the Arab states and the Palestinian Arabs no wrong. Their message is constant, although they dress it in trendy contexts.
Isaac writes that these sort of NGOs are now also going after bigger game: propagandizing for and physically enabling Middle Eastern and African migrants to breach Europe's borders. In their zeal, they have ignored legal requirements and physical safety. "[H]uman rights NGOs operating in the Mediterranean [...] [are] in effect partnering with human smuggling rings." Isaac notes other ironies in this ill-considered gambit. "The NGOs draw upon Europe's feelings of guilt for its colonial past and above all for the Holocaust. ...Yet it is precisely the huge wave of Moslems, the vast majority of migrants, with their entrenched anti-Semitism, that will ensure that Jews are forced to flee a hostile Europe."
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Matti Friedman is a reporter and columnist who in recent years has begun to reflect on how the media have reported events involving Israel. Much more often than not, reporters have blatantly been biased against Israel, shaping the actual facts — emphasizing some, omitting much — into a weapon to injure Israel's reputation. In this article he reviews a book by David Patrikarakos with the intriguing title, War In 140 Characters. Patrikarokos writes of the early 1990s and on, when the digital landscape was beginning to become the important battleground. People's perceptions were what counted, not the events themselves. The story transmitted by the social media might be supported by (embellished) information from the actual physical battleground or the information necessary to win that particular information battle might be total fabrication. Friedman points out that the Middle East pious Muslims such as Hizbollah and those running the Islamic State have shown first-rate talent in gaining attention and convincing a global audience of the authenticity of their messages.
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In addition to examining some historical events, this sections speaks of some new discoveries of ancient artifacts and some recent uncovering of art and texts from the Holocaust.
During the Holocaust, the Nazis destroyed books and stole art produced and/or owned by the Jews. More than 170,000 pages of textual material was found in the Martynas Mazvydas National Library of Lithuania. The story is here. And some of the painting stolen by the Nazis have been discovered and a small fraction of these have been returned to the families of the Jewish owners. The section has an article on one such art collection.
James Rogers writes of the recent display of an ancient tomb door with a carving of a menorah that was found in Tiberias in 2010. The Umayyads used the door as a base for a pillar inside a mosque. The mosque was destroyed by an earthquake in 1068. In the Crusader era, the door was part of a complex where they produced sugar. The building collapsed at the beginning of the thirteenth century. Other recent discoveries include a 1500-year-old Christian mosaic in Ashdod (see article below) and the 3200-year old skeleton of a pregnant woman in the Timna Valley. A section of the Western Wall has been uncovered; it was hidden for 1,700 years. And some experts "believe they have found the lost Roman city of Julias, formerly the village of Bethsaida, which was the home of Jesus' apostles Peter, Andrew and Philip." Some new evidence supports dating Christ's tomb in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to the Roman era.
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Amanda Borschel-Dan writes about a mosaic excavated in Ashdod, at the ancient city of Ashdod-Yam. It provides archaeologists with several firsts. There is evidence in Jerusalem that Georgians were in Israel in the Byzantine period, but this is the first Georgian church or monastery discovered on the Israeli coast. It is the earliest known use of the Georgian calendar in the world, Georgia itself not excepted. The inscription on the mosaic is in Greek and states that the church's construction was started in 292 according to the Georgian calendar (the year 539 CE.) And it is the first solid evidence "for the tradition connecting Peter the Iberian to Ashdod-Yam." Peter was a bishop. The Bir el Qutt inscriptions discovered in 1953 and written in Georgian script are evidence that he founded the first Georgian monastery in Bethleham. This new mosaic supports the tradition that Peter was affiliated with Ashdod.
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The standard take on the Crusades is that they were attempts to colonize the peaceable Islamic states in the Middle East. Karen Armstrong, a well-known white-washer and apologist for Islam, explained, "Ever since the Crusades, people in the west have seen the prophet Muhammad as a sinister figure...The scholar monks of Europe stigmatised Muhammad as a cruel warlord who established the false religion of Islam by the sword." Raymond Ibrahim points out that this is historically incorrect. The West began to loath the prophet of the "Saracens" for his bloody ways starting at or very soon after Mohammad's conquests began. They were repulsed by his senseless brutality and his extravagant killing of villagers and monks, who took no part in his battles. As knowledge of Islamic theology became more detailed, the Arab paradise was describes as a "sexual brothel", "Allah was denounced as an impostor deity" and Mohammad as "a cruel warlord". By the time of the Crusades, these and similar depictions of Islam had a four-hundred year history.
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The occasion for this article was a recent exhibition of prime art works collected by a Nazi dealer and not shown until recently. Justin Huggler writes that many of these were simply looted from their Jewish owners by the Nazis and many were confiscated under the pretext that they were degenerate art. "While hundreds of the works in the collection are suspected of being stolen by the Nazis, only six have so far been identitied as looted, and only four returned to their rightful owners."
What Huggler writes about this specific collection is also true for the many paintings hanging in private collections and museums over the world: Many of them were looted from Jewish owners. Many people who currently own them thought the sale legitimate. Many knowingly bought and sold them directly or via laundering through several exchanges. The chaos created by the Nazis is still with us.
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Arnold Groiss uses two recently-published books with different viewpoints — one by Eliezer Tauber and one by Adel Manna — to provide context for the Deir Yassin massacre in the 1968 war. Israel's Arab neighbors invaded the newborn Jewish State expecting an easy victory and a wholesale slaughter of the Jews. The Arabs lost and labeled the reality Nakba, disaster. Most of the Arabs in Israel fled the country either through fear or from orders of the Arab leaders during the invasion. The inhabitants of Deir Yassin were unique because they stayed and fought from their houses until the end. According to Tauber, the Israelis resorted to house-to-house fighting, "storming in while shooting. This resulted in many casualties, including non-combatants." War is ugly but house-to-house fighting is SOP and not a massacre. Except for one incident, those that surrendered were unharmed (see here). Manna describes the scenes in Deir Yassir in detail but ignores that "the surviving inhabitants of [Jewish] Kfar Etzion, for example, were massacred after their surrender." The embroidered alleged massacre boomeranged in that the "mention of Deir Yassin brought about mass flight or hasty surrender of villagers elsewhere..."
Manna claims Israel had a premeditated policy of ethnic cleansing, which Groiss says is totally wrong. Israel's Arab policy for Arabs that did not flee was predicated on the explicit instructions of the Hagana's Commander-in-Chief Israel Galili: "Acknowledgment of the full rights, needs, and freedom of the Arabs in the Hebrew state without any discrimination, and a desire for coexistence on the basis of mutual freedom and dignity." And indeed, the Arabs that didn't flee became citizens of the new state, with voting rights and the same rights as any other citizen. In the same war, in stark contrast, the Arabs who conquered Judea and Samaria (relabeled the West Bank) and some of the eastern part of Jerusalem destroyed entire localities and expelled their populations to the last person. "Not a single Jew was left in Gezer, Revadim, Ein Tzurim, Masuot Yitzhak, Mishmar Hayarden, or Nitzanim after their surrenders [...] The Jewish presence in the areas occupied by the Arabs during the war was totally eradicated. All Jewish lands were taken over by the Arab authorities, leaving them completely 'Judenrein'."
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Return to Feature Index
What we are talking about in the July–October 2017 Issue
Editor's Note:Think-Israel tends to use salafist rather than extremist or Islamist or militant or fundamentalist or activist to describe generically a pious Muslim, one who sticks as closely as possible to the unfiltered words and actions of Mohammad and the first three generations of Muslims, including, especially, the Companions of the Prophet. In modeling himself as closely as he can on the preachings and practices of Mohammad, a salafist can in modern terms be precisely described as an uninhibited terrorist, a theological supersessionist, a political supremacist who believes Islam and sharia law must dominate and a social barbarian, who wages jihad with whatever tools are available. Thanks to the high quality of whitewash supplied by sympathetic propagandists, he seldom is so described.
Leaving one's religion, whether to atheism or to another
religion is never easy. For a Muslim, it is particularly
difficult, even if the ex-Muslim is not living in a Muslim country
that punishes apostasy with death. The general Muslim community
has no sympathy and his family is often blamed for this, which puts another
emotional burden on the apostate.
The ex-Muslim is leaving not just religious values, but an entire
configuration of attitudes toward his community and the outside
world. Tanveer Ahmed, a psychiatrist living in Australia, has
written, [It] "is one of the biggest barriers to the reform of
Islam, that Muslim identity is so tightly wrapped up in the
expression of self. We may see hijabs and beards as external
markers but they are fashion accessories to an inner outfit of
historical injustice, moral superiority and a barely disguised
middle finger to Anglo-Saxon, mainstream Australia."
(see
here.)
This set of articles deal with this issue, including two scholarly
articles on apostasy in Islam, one from the Muslim perspective,
one from the Christian perspective.
Return to What We Are Talking About
The more a Muslim country conforms to the precepts in the Koran, the harsher the punishment for leaving Islam. Moreover, there is strong grassroots support for the death penalty for apostasy. So it is unlikely that someone leaving Islam will find support from his family, friends or community. Hrishikesh Joshi writes about leaving Islam in the West. Even in the USA and Canada, many simply hide their atheism rather than confront family pressure or hostility towards his family. Hrishikesh Joshi writes of an support organization for ex-Muslims, which helps many. Considering the hostility of many on the Left to religion in general, we'd expect liberals to support Muslims leaving the mosque. Liberals certainly applaud a Christian becoming an atheist. But the attitude toward a Muslim leaving Islam is one of suspicion and anger. The Liberal is more likely to support the religious hierarchy and deny that practices such as female genital mutilation (FGM) exists.
In a related area, this is a video where students support religious freedom for Muslims, not Christians.
This is an authoritative paper on the laws of apostasy, particularly as applied to a convert of Islam. It was written by Sayyid Muhammad Rizvi, a Muslim scholar. It is important in that it counteracts the glib phrases Muslim proselytizers throw around such as 'There is no compulsion in the religion.' From Rizvi, we learn the 'if's' and 'but's' that change the conditions under which this actually applies. Rizvi deals with apostasy by Muslims that sign up voluntarily or by being born into a Muslim family and then decide to leave the 'only true religion.' If you follow him on his narrow path of reasoning, it sort of makes sense, sort of, that the only punishment that can possibly apply to the ex-Muslim is death. It helps if you believe as he does that "If a person is raised in a society which protects his soul from the impurities of atheism (kufr) and polytheism (shirk), or if a person is shown the Right Path and accepts it willingly — can such a person reject the Islamic faith?" As the Prophet Muhammad himself said, "Every child is born with the believing nature (al-fitra), it is his parents who make him into a Jew or a Christian."
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This is a sister article to the one by Ayyid Muhammad Rizvi above on Islamic law on apostasy, but written from a Christian rather than a Muslim perspective. A scholar who goes by the nom de plume of Silas writes on the consequences of leaving Islam. For 1400 years, the sentence for apostasy has been clear and unambiguous: death by execution for a man, life imprisonment for a woman. They have insulted Islam.
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Bill Muehlenberg writes that there are 12 countries — all of them Islamic — that punish apostasy with the death penalty and in another, Pakistan, blasphemy is punishable by death. Every other human on the planet — i.e. non-Muslims — has three choices: convert to Islam, become a dhimmi (a second-class citizen) or die. That is Islam's policy. When facts on the ground become propitious, Muslims will act on what their religion requires. Muehlenberg rejects current fallacious arguments that this doesn't represent "real" Islam by citing some pertinent Islamic books. This is a shorter but information-filled essay that nicely sums up what the articles above elaborate in detail.
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In what might well become a classic essay, Edward Cline writes about the impact of Islam on a believer, even one who later rejects it. Islam is weirdly different in its strong grip even on those who knew it only as children. His 'case study' is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a well-known Muslim apostate and women's rights activist. In recent years, she has modified her previous outright rejection of Islam because of its practices. In 2015, Ali wrote an article suggesting that "[t]o defeat the extremists for good, Muslims must reject those aspects of their tradition that prompt some believers to resort to oppression and holy war (here). Her current suggestions are how to bring Islam into the modern era and make it, truly, a religion of peace [emphasis added]. Whatever the dynamics that are going on in Ali's psyche, as Cline makes clear, Ali can't strip Islam of its intrinsic features and expect a gutted version with no theological-political legs to stand on to attract people looking for an all-encompassing super-power that at best tells them what to do and too often gives them permission to do the monstrous things they want to do.
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It is a fact that the majority of terrorist acts are committed by converts. Why this is true is speculation based on available data. The monograph at https://www.icct.nl/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/ICCT-Schuurman-Grol-Flower-Converts-June-2016.pdf discusses the literature on the overrepresentation of "converts to Islam in Islamist militancy and foreign fighting." It tentatively proposes several hypothesis:
(1) "Most converts, radicalised or not, are disillusioned to some degree with modern or Western life and have displayed some form of anti-social or stigmatised behaviour, such as alcohol or drug abuse, before converting. Such background factors therefore do not appear to be discriminating variables when it comes to accounting for how and why some converts to Islam embrace extremism and militancy."
(2) [They are] "targeted by extremist networks" and the influence of friends and partners with radical views."
(3) "Findings also emphasize the role that "inspirational preaching" can play."
The authors of the monograph don't feel there is yet sufficient data to come to firm conclusions.
The articles in this section examine aspects of the issue. One in particular, the essay by Jahangir Arasli, integrates data and context into a coherent summary. He doesn't disagree that the future terrorist has particular stresses, but the question is: what impels him to Islam? As Arasli writes, "The problems causing this crisis might be psychological, personal, social, or of a combined nature. But whatever the source of the problem, the individuals came to see conversion to Islam as a remedial solution to their troublesome life experiences." And does he see Islam as a benign religion that will calm him or as one authorizing rage and violence? The article makes an excellent starting point for more research into a subject that we must understand because it is vital to our security.
Abigail R. Esman writes about American and European converts to Islam. Surprisingly, native-born converts to Islam are "are four times more likely to become terrorists than those who are born Muslims." Most of these are women. Converts, particularly women, are actively recruited by terrorists organizations because they "operate freely in Europe, Asia, and North America without arousing the suspicion of security authorities." And they recruit others. This is making for new thinking in the counter-intelligence community on how to handle this new threat.
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Bruce Hoffman discusses the multiple possible and probable reasons why people become terrorists. He concludes, "At the start of the war on terrorism a dozen years ago the enemy was clear and plainly in sight. It was a large terrorist organization, situated mostly in one geographic location, and it was led by an identifiable leader. Today, when the borders between domestic and international terrorism have blurred, when our adversaries are not only identifiable organizations but enigmatic individuals, a complete re-thinking of our counterterrorism policies and architecture is needed."
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Jahangir E. Arasli provides us with an excellent historical overview, pointing out that the 9/11 attack "marked the beginning of a new stage of overt, broad confrontation of the Global Jihad Movement (GJM) against the Western world." The membership of the GJM is planet-wide. Arasli's descriptions of individuals who converted to Islam and became jihadists illustrate the "wide range of individuals, activities, and operational patterns" in the amalgamation of future converts, converts to Islam and Muslim immigrant communities in the GJM. There is sufficient evidence to start making some general statements of who is likely to convert, why he chooses Islam and how this leads to acts of terrorism.
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Julie Lenarz provides us with information on terrorists who were labeled 'long wolf' but were nothing of the sort. She sums up her article this way: "In an interconnected world, so-called 'lone wolf' jihadists are almost always part of a lethal pack. And they will continue prowling for prey, undeterred, until we recognize them as such." It might be hard to convince those who, despite all the evidence, cling to the belief that each act of terrorism is unique, unaffiliated, local and random.
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[This is a reposting of an article that first appeared on Think-Israel April 30, 2013. Part 5 includes a section on the economic reasons why Lone Wolf and Small Group Terrorism using locals would increase, as it has, compared to spectacular and expensive stunts like using a flotilla to gain entry to Gaza. This was the introduction:]
Bernice Lipkin examines the determined efforts of jihadists, aided and abetted by an Administration that is an adherent of the ideology of "progressivism." An unforeseen consequence has been the emergence of the Westernized Muslim terrorist, who is native to the West or who has lived here much of his life. The Lone Wolf and small group terrorists, provided they are imbued with passionate commitment, have advantages over the imported jihadist. They have local knowledge and already "fit" into the environment. The most compelling reason for large terror organizations to utilize them is that it is cost-effective. As Lipkin points out, "Supplies are cheap and terror enthusiasts are plentiful. With reduced need for a large cast, synchronous operations and complicated equipment, the 'script writer' can more easily mock up a plot to use at an oncoming event that will guarantee attention." "There is likely to be more opportunity for roughly scripted rather than rigidly choreographed direction. The field workers may be given the plot and left to work out the details. Or some tasks may be carefully timed and others left for improvisation depending on the circumstances." Until America changes its ways, Islam's activities on behalf of Islamic supersessionism will continue.
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[This is a reposting of an article that first appeared on Think-Israel, October 24, 2014. This was the introduction:]
Patrick Poole writes about other consequences of the fallacious belief that we need to Counter Violent Extremism (CVE) rather than fight devout Muslims willing to be extremely violent in the service of Islam, sustained by the certainty that Mohammad would approve of what they do. Poole makes the case that far from being untraceable nonentities, "terrorist actors are almost always part of a network who were involved in recruiting and tasking terrorist activity." As evidence, he writes of cases we've all heard of. As one example, Russian Intelligence had alerted the FBI that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the brothers who blasted people watching the Boston Marathon, was a radical Islamist. He was also readily tied to the near decapitation of three Jews, one of whom was said to be Tsarnaev's best friend, in what may have been a terrorist 'rite of passage'. But there was no follow-up. Major Hasan at Fort Hood is another example. I don't know what else Hasan could have done to alert people that he was fanatical about protecting his people, other Muslims. Yet the army authorities ignored all indications because he was a Muslim. Which raises another question: why would the Obama administration lay the blame for terrorist acts on everything but what the Koran decrees is acceptable behavior in the service of Islam?
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The term Lone Wolf suggests that with no pre-history of radicalism or dedication to Islam or urging by his family, friends or a jihadi group, some one wakes up one morning, suddenly suffering from — as Daniel Pipes calls it — Sudden Jihad Syndrome. The opposite is true. Linda Goudsmit points out, "Radicalization is an interactive social phenomenon. Radicalization happens socially in mosques. Radicalization happens socially in cultural centers. Radicalization happens socially in prisons. Radicalization happens socially in schools. Radicalization happens socially in homes. Radicalization happens socially on social media. Radicalization is not a monologue - it is a dialogue with Islam and there are no lone wolves." She points out that what characterizes the terrorist isn't being Muslim per se. It is being Muslim, following sharia law strictly and being imbued with the desire to make the whole world Islamic; in other words, Muslim terrorists are very pious Muslims.
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Daveed Gartenstein-Ross writes of the growing skepticism that a single terrorist or a small group of terrorists are unaffiliated with a larger group that bolsters their morale, acts as handlers, trains them directly or and/or provides training material and instructs them how to use the equipment they need to carry out terrorist attacks. Nevertheless, the rate of rejection of the 'Lone Wolf' myth is so slow, I fear it will be a long time before we really understand that lone wolves are the foot soldiers of groups of salafists, who may have tactical differences but who are all dedicated to total war on everyone in the world who has not yet recognized that Islam is the master religion and sharia the law that must be followed.
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Islam is of course a religion. It does, however, demands of its adherents that they strive to make Islam the supreme religion in the world. The consequences have been — even disregarding for a moment its encouragement of acts of terror and violence — that Islam has been intrusive, disrupting the lives of people of other religions or no religion to an extraordinary degree. This set of articles is about the political aspects of Islam and some of the ways the very people that should be guarding our cultural mores and our lifestyle are corrupted.
Pro-Palestinian propaganda described as "educational" is no longer confined to the lectures of Arab and far-left academics on college campuses. Rafael Medoff discusses anti-Israel bias in high-school text material, in particular the Arab World Studies Notebook, a 540-page volume of "unabashed propagandizing" and false information. The Notebook is ubiquitous. Some parents have complained at local schools and the Notebook has been withdrawn in several schools. But there has been no general withdrawal. In fact the book's author, Audrey Parks Shabbas, "has claimed the Notebook has been distributed to more than 10,000 teachers, and 'if each notebook teaches 250 students a year over 10 years, then you've reached 25 million students.'" The Editor's Addendum contains a 2003 letter pointing out problems with The Arab World Studies Notebook. They have yet to be corrected! And the Notebook continues to indoctrinate school age children.
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Many a University has been corrupted by Middle East 'donations' but Harvard, Columbia and Georgetown stand out for what they are willing to do for Arab money. President Bollinger of Columbia had the chutzpah to place Rashid Khalidi, one of Columbia's virulent Arab Jew-hating professors, on the search committee for the Chair of Modern Jewish Studies. The Harvard Kennedy School has been caught disseminating anti-Israel "work books" to high school teachers across New England. In this article, Andrew Harrod tells us of one of Georgetown University's attempts to whitewash the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), a major enabler of terrorism around the world. It was at an event called "Post-Arab Spring Middle East: Political Islam and Democracy," where speakers were willing to say that the MB "is traditionally a reformist, gradualist movement [which] is working on social change." Unbelievable, no? The moderator for the conference is the Director of the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU), Jonathan Brown, who at another occasion tried "justifying the practice of slavery within Islam." This may all sound like moronic comedy, but it isn't funny. It corrupts educational faculty and they in turn no longer know how to teach students to think rigorously and impartially and base conclusions on evidence.
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The Muslim Brotherhood (MB) has ambitious goals and the determination and resources to have a good shot at success. To make Islam supreme MB does whatever is necessary. It has talented operatives who can create working relationships with political leaders and it has assassins and terrorists, when it needs to pressure people to accept dhimmitude. In the USA, as Janet Levy writes, it "has focused on infiltrating all levels and branches of the U.S. government. More recently, the Muslim Brotherhood presence within the American political landscape has intensified, accelerated, and become more visible with the establishment of several nonprofit political action organizations." They are also running some of their people as candidates for Congress and state governments. This would increase their political clout, which they can supplement with well-placed donations to media, academics and politicians. They can hire people to turn out slick propaganda emphasizing their "multiculturalism and moderation. They work hard at achieving their goals and they don't waste time looking for "moderate Muslims". They leave that up to those who would like to deny that Islamic extremists have anything to do with Islam.
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Some people still hold the view that terrorism and rioting and havoc by Muslims has nothing to do with Islam. This article by Olivier Roy is very much in keeping with such main stream writing on Islamization; i.e., terrorism is due to marginalization, poverty, feelings of rejection, anything but the direct action dictated by the Koran. Roy's view of Political Islam, to date, has had the predictive power of zero.
According to Wikipedia.org:
Roy wrote widely on the 2005 civil unrest in France, rebutting the suggestion that the violence was religiously inspired. He argues that Islamism is merely the rubric under which troubled youth enact their violent inclinations. A view adamantly opposed by Roy's intellectual rival, Gilles Kepel.
According to Judith Miller, in the wake of the September 11 attacks Roy argued that militant Islamism of the type represented by Al Qaeda had peaked and was fading into insignificance.
His book Secularism Confronts Islam (Columbia, 2007) offers a perspective on the place of Islam in secular society and looks at the diverse experiences of Muslim immigrants in the West. Roy examines how Muslim intellectuals have made it possible for Muslims to live in a secularized world while maintaining the identity of a "true believer." But Roy's thesis is not based in reality. At best it describes some atypical Muslims. As we learn more about Muslim terrorists, their families, their life style and their absorption of the teachings of the Koran, it becomes more obvious that Roy's image of a religious Muslim living harmoniously in Western secular society is invalid.
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This is a review of a recent book written by Ibn Warraq, entitled 'The Islam in Islamic Terrorism: the Importance of Beliefs, Ideas, and Ideology'. The public has been conditioned to react as directed 'to the lethal narrative strategy of jihad conquest. They do not think rationally, they react Islamically to assaults of all varieties, on all levels, from hijab fashion that they glorify to atrocious murders that they cover with flowers, candles and denial. The intellectual ravages are concealed behind a curtain of consensus.' Poller writes that Ibn Warraq, himself an apostate, firmly states that the 'beliefs, ideas, and ideology' of the subtitle of The Islam in Islamic Terrorism, are enshrined in the Koran, extended in the hadith and sunna, clarified and confirmed by certified Islamic scholars, and translated into action from generation to generation, from the time of Islam's prophet to the present day." In sum, "Islamic ideology gives the jihadi the framework within which to exercise his brutalized will." And no stack of rosy portraits of Islam will change what has been the bitter truth since Islam came into being.
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Nonie Darwish writes about political Islam as practiced by such groups as the Muslim Brotherhood and ISIS from a point of view that is not often considered by Westerners, i.e., its impact on the stability and future of the Arab countries. Darwish also discusses how favorite "tactics of the Arab media — to accuse people of collusion in order to silence any opposition — have now moved into US mainstream media regarding Trump and Russia, which the US media would apparently like to regard as their new "enemies." These are the same media that defend sharia law and inaccurately insist that Muslim terrorists who shout "Allahu Akbar" have "nothing to do with Islam." What next!
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We all know this picture from 1967 when the Jews won back a piece of Jerusalem from the bad guys, the Jordanians, who had snatched it two decades before, just when the modern State of Israel was born, or, as some say, reincarnated. Do we also know that General Moshe Dayan, the Jewish guy with black cloth masking his lost eye, let the Arabs keep control of the Temple Mount, which is located in the piece of Jerusalem that the Jordanians had snatched? Big mistake. The conquered Arabs stopped being worried the Jews would do unto them as they would have done unto the Jews, had they won the Six-Day War. They started asserting their right to destroy Jewish archaeological finds at the Temple Mount and restrict Jews from coming there. So we had the ugly contrast of Arab children playing soccer on the Mount, while Jews stoop to all sorts of ruses to be able to pray at the holiest site in Judaism without being arrested. Now after only a half century, the Israeli Administration has forbidden soccer-playing. How long will it be before Jews can freely pray on the site of the Second Temple?
WATCH: Israeli police enforce 'no soccer playing' rule on Temple Mount, October 11, 2017.Manfred Gerstenfeld brings us up-to-date on the latest rioting on the Temple Mount: the Arabs stabbed two Israeli Druze policemen with weapons they had hidden in the al-Aqsa Mosque. Israel installed metal detectors to prevent Arabs from storing weapons in their mosques to have them on hand the next time they decide to stab someone. (Consider how many people in the Waqf had to know about the weapons and did nothing.) Palestinian preachers, angry at this restriction on their right to kill, stirred up their audience. The Arabs dutifully rioted. As it does too often, Israel foolishly backed down and removed the metal detectors. The riots continued.
Arab excuses change seasonally or because of some event, but the Palestinian Arab response is constant: rioting, nasty behavior, terrorism. If it didn't do so much damage, it would be a bore. Having the PA authorities start recurrent riots using some available excuse is such a recurrent pattern. Having the Arabs hide weapons in mosques, hospitals, UNRWA schools is a recurrent pattern. Having the foreign press blame the Jews is a recurrent pattern. Getting the Israelis to give the Arabs more concessions is getting to be less of a recurrent pattern. Who knows, maybe someday the Israelis will act like normal humans and stop the Arabs' obnoxious behavior. Now that might bring peace.
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Mark Silverberg considers some facts others ignore. Fact: the policemen that were stabbed were there to protect the site and the worshippers in the Mosque. Fact: it is a desecration to bring weapons to the Temple Mount. Fact: installing electronic security is done routinely in Mecca and Medina as it is in any important or populated place that would attract terrorists. Fact: many mosques have security installations. So why the uproar? Silverberg suggests that "[t]he essence of the struggle relates to a culture of hatred in Palestinian society that refuses to grant Jews in Jerusalem (specifically) and in Israel (in general) any status other than d'himmitude as non-Muslim subjects who must pay the jizya or head tax for protection in an Islamic-controlled Palestine that would stretch from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. This is consistent with Islamic doctrine that states that any land once under Muslim control is an endowment that must inevitably revert to Muslim rule." Abbas and the Palestinian Authority — the good terrorists — have continuously exacerbated this core Islamic belief. Even the Nazis tried to hide their massacring of Jews. The Arabs rejoice openly. Each murder of a Jew or even a non-Muslim is seen as an occasion to gleefully celebrate. Arab mothers celebrate the suicide-murders of their own children. Arab children grow up dreaming of becoming martyrs. Under these conditions, Israel's withdrawing the metal detectors can only be seen as an Arab victory, giving them the confidence to try more disgusting acts of terror in the future.
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Elder-of-Ziyon sees this latest manifestation of Arab irrationality as yet another example of the Muslin honor and shame culture at work. That Israel had the power to close the Temple Mount for a couple of days would be "a source of deep shame that has been buried for years by the fantasy of Waqf control." So what does a barbaric honor/shame culture do? Meditate? Review its lifestyle? See what it can reasonably salvage from the situation? Not when it can restore its sense of superiority by making Israel look like a loser. Elder-of-Ziyon points out, "The PA's reaction is completely bonkers by any normal yardstick. If the world wasn't so reflexively 'pro-Palestinian' it wouldn't coddle the crazy demands, but the Palestinians have made an art form of these kinds of crazy demands that end up sounding reasonable over the years of constant repetition." Maybe it's time for Israel to act the grown-up. It's time to stop feeding the fantasies of what one reader called "The People Who Never Were in a Country That Never Was".
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Richard Shulman points out that Jordan recently violated rules of diplomatic immunity by retaining a guard of the Israeli Ambassador. The guard had thwarted an terrorist attack, killing the terrorist. It was quietly straightened out eventually. The media made no buzz over what can still be a bad precedent internationally. Jordan incurred no bad press.
Shulman also has an interesting take on this puzzling fact: "The media keep falsely accusing Israel of violating international law. The Arabs keep violating international law, but the media mostly overlooks it." How do the media make this work? Shulman suggests that "the media often describes Palestinian Arabs as 'outraged.' It gives no explanation for that, leaving the incorrect impression that they might have justification and that maybe Israel mistreats them." The Arabs have learned the media are on their side, no matter what the facts are. This is certainly true in how the media reported the Temple Mount riots. It is certainly true in larger issues, where the media act as if the Palestinian Arabs own Samaria and Judea. Were they to check with their own fact-checking department, they would learn that Samaria and Judea belong to the Jews in an irrevocable trust by international law. I suppose we won't be seeing Israel reclaim its own land any time soon, if it was willing to jeopardize its security on the Temple Mount because the Arabs rioted.
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As Professor Hillel Frisch writes, "Regardless of its direct security merits, Israel's decision to place metal detectors at the entrances to the Temple Mount has been transformed by adversaries and Israel alike into an issue of sovereignty over the Temple Mount. Power-sharing there has always constituted a slippery slope to disaster. The murder of two Israeli policemen at the Temple Mount is an appropriate moment to rectify the situation by reasserting Israeli sovereignty over the holy site."
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It is frequently said that the Arab population in the Territories is helpless to stop the barbaric acts of the PA and Hamas leadership. It would be more accurate to say that they have the same attitude towards Israel as their leaders. They rejoice when Jews are murdered and often volunteer as suicide-murderers. They see nothing wrong in kidnapping Israeli soldiers; they build tunnels to get at the IDF. They lend themselves as human shields to protect missile sites. As this video shows, they corrupt their children and train them as assassins.
Jews and Arabs may live as neighbors but there is a big divide in their lifestyles and attitudes. This extends to large matters such as how much control someone should have over his own life and how much he can decide his own future. And it applies to what are considered 'weaknesses' in some societies: having compassion to one's enemies, showing kindness to strangers and helping those who need help. David Weinberg writes about the way some Arabs have paid back the medical treatment they received in Israel. Way back in 2005, people was shocked when an Arab girl who was having her face treated for massive burns was caught attempting to smuggle in explosives, so that she could blow up the people helping her. People were flabbergasted. It made no sense. To really twist the knife, she spoke enthusiastically about how many Jewish children she had hoped to kill. Nowadays, having women and even children attempt to smuggle in explosives and weaponry has become commonplace. David Weinberg worked at a medical center, where, at any time, Arab children from Gaza were a quarter of the patients. He tells the tale of a Arab who was the best match for his brother who needed a bone marrow transplant. Security was concerned because the older brother was a terrorist, but the medical staff overcame government and security objections and the Arab child got his transplant. News media don't let such incidents ruin their constant cry that Jews are evil.
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Danielle Ziri writes that schoolbooks in UNRWA schools have variations on three themes when talking about Jews: "delegitimization, demonization and indoctrination to violent struggle." Palestinian Arab children are taught that the Western Wall, Rachel's Tomb and even the Tomb of the Patriachs, where Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca and Leah are buried, are Muslim holy places. Israel as a name is seldom used. Children are prepared for future war against the Jews. Killing Jews is a worthy goal. Considering that half of UNRWA's large budget goes to education, that's a lot of money going into poisoning the minds of Palestinian Arab children. The final irony is that UNRWA is an agency of the United Nations, which was created so that governments could resolved disputes peacefully.
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The future of Christianity in the Middle East is not promising. Paul Merkley writes that Christians, many of whose ancestors were living in the Middle East (ME) centuries before Muhammad, have been forced by Muslim mobs to flee their homes. They are welcome only in Israel, the one ME country where their numbers are growing. In Iraq in 1947, there were 4.7 million Christians. Now there are 200,000. They are persecuted by ISIS and by anti-ISIS groups. The local Kurds are hoping to create their own homeland, and the Christians remember the Kurds' attempted genocide of the Assyrians in the 1930's. Nor are the Europeans interested in their plight. So even if parts of Iraq are reclaimed from ISIS, it isn't likely the Christians will be returning to their homes.
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Saeb Erakat is the chief negotiator for the Palestinian Arabs. Saeb Erakat claims Canaanite descent. It is not unusual for the local Arabs, most of whom migrated into what is now Israel and the Territories within living memory, to claim kinship with one ancient people or another. Not letting actual history deter them, many claim linkage to ancient people who have been extinct for centuries. "As the argument goes, the Palestinians, by virtue of their being descendants of the Canaanites, or the Philistines, or the Jebusites, are the real indigenous nation that sprung organically from this land." It would be amusing except that after a while, the local Arabs begin to believe their own lies and get very annoyed at anyone who prefers the truth.
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As Alex Joffe writes, "Evidence shows Palestinian Arabs descend primarily from three primary groups: Muslim invaders, Arab immigrants, and local converts to Islam." The Jews, on the other hand, "are the indigenous population of the Southern Levant; historical and now genetic documentation places Jews there over 2,000 years ago, and there is indisputable evidence of continual residence of Jews in the region." It would be accurate to say that it was the incoming Arabs that practiced colonialism, not the Jews.
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When the modern state of Israel was born in 1948, her neighbors invaded, intending to take over the country and rid themselves of the Jews, once and for all. Jordan was more successful than the others. She managed to take control of a big chunk of the eastern part of Jerusalem as well as Samaria and Judea. It was during this time that the newish United Nations began to show how well it would carry out the dream of creating a space where countries could work out differences without going to war. Its way of handling Jews versus Arabs set a pattern. Jordanian Muslims shooting at Jews were ignored. Muslims building illegally were ignored. Jews daring to add to their houses were chastised. Jordan destroying Jewish synagogues, using grave stones as steps to the latrines and kicking out or killing every Jew in the newly-conquered piece of Jerusalem and the Territories was as pure an example of ethnic cleaning as there is. Yet no one objected. Certainly not the U.N.
Daniel Greenfield explores how differently the Jews and Arabs were treated. Another way of saying it is: the politicians condoned the Islamization of Jerusalem and did what they could to make it happen. We've progressed to where Jewish settlements (that is, Jewish towns and cities in Samaria and Judea) are considered obstacles to peace. What they mean is the Jewish residents are obstacles to giving away Jewish land. When Jordan joined the other Arab countries and invaded Israel again in 1967, Israel begged Jordan to stay out. Like so many with his political make-up, Moshe Dayan really didn't want to liberate Jerusalem. But Jordan went to war, lost and the secular Jews were stuck with having to handle their own property. What is puzzling is why the Jewish politicians and administrators continue go along with the pattern of unfairness the representatives of the governments of the world have established. Why don't they grow up and enjoy the gift of land that belongs to them?
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The Arabs loot, murder Jews with knives, guns and cars, kidnap citizens, set fires destroy orchards and steal cars. Israel responds, sort of. She jails murderers, and then pays for them to study for college degrees. She releases thousands of murderers for a couple of Jews or Jewish bodies. But, little by little, she is becoming stronger and more sensible. She is beginning to reclaim houses the Jordanians took from the Jews and filled with Arab squatters from neighboring countries. She is even working on stronger legal punishments against acts of terror. Slowly, little by little, she is beginning to accept her sovereign claim to the Territories and is beginning to act as normal people do when they are under attack.
Yoram Ettinger examines the patterns of Israel's concessions to the Palestinian Arabs. Do these actions contribute to peace or increase acts of terror? The consequences of some of her actions were predictable. She released Palestinians from jail, many there for committing grotesque murders. As you would expect, the rate of recidivism was very high. She gave the Arabs control of an aquifer, an important asset in a water-short area. They promptly destroyed it. She kicked all the Jews out of Gaza in a pointless unilateral move. The Arabs destroyed the greenhouses and used the extra space to make home-made weapons of war. Hamas and other terrorist groups moved into the vacated space. Land for peace doesn't work. It's time to try something else, this time taking into account the safety of Jewish citizens.
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When two Israelis lost their way and drove to the Police Station in Ramallah, the Arab police turned them over to the gathering mob, which lynched and slaughtered the Israelis and ate their body parts. Israel has recently released the second of these monsters. Professor Louis Beres says it just right: this "is wrongly exculpatory, legally contrived, and nationally self-destructive." He points out, "A core element of longstanding international law is the rule Nullum crimen sine poena, or "No crime without punishment." He points out the consequences of releasing this criminal.
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Hezki Baruch writes a factual account of the reclaiming of a Jewish house occupied by Arab squatters. I wonder how many readers understand how rare such a story is. When Jordan invaded the new state of Israel in 1948, it gained control of the eastern section of Jerusalem, as well as Judea and Samaria (aka The West Bank). It killed and/or evicted every Jew from the area. It invited Arabs in from the neighboring areas to take over Jewish property. Israel regained the land when her Arab neighbors invaded again in 1967. But the Israeli authorities did not do what was right and just, namely, evict the Arab squatters and allow the Jews to reclaim their property. Instead, it has been a painfully slow and expensive process for Jews to reclaim their property, one house at a time. Either the Jews have had to buy out the Arab squatter or sue him in court; and the media, of course, portray the Arabs as the 'victims'. I had occasion to visit the area on an AFSI-conducted tour in 2002 and wrote about it in an article entitled "The Settlements Revisited" (see here.)
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Amb. Alan Baker points out, "The language of occupation law has been politicized, and partisan political expressions such as 'Occupied Palestinian Territories' have become common language by the UN and by such humanitarian organizations as the International Red Cross. This terminology has no legal basis and prejudges ongoing, agreed-upon, and internationally-endorsed negotiation issues between Israel and the Palestinians. Their use by humanitarian organizations such as the International Red Cross is incompatible with its own constitutional principles of neutrality and impartiality." Baker reviews other occupations and annexations, suggests that the "the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the main repository and arbiter of the [Geneva] conventions, have given themselves an overly wide and liberal margin in interpreting accepted factual definitions in the international instruments" and concludes that "the actual and unique factual, political, legal, and historic situation of the territory [Judea and Samaria] ... sets it apart from the simplistic international definitions."
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In the States, salafists are doing honor killing and FGM. But they are also paying attention to propaganda. They haven't abandonned their aim of having sharia rule the world, but they are painting an image of forward-thinking feminists and progressives who welcome diverse points of view in a multicultural society. Of course, once sharia is imposed, the feel-good imagery will be stripped away.
Linda Sarsour in her own person appears to be a blend of the rigidly pious Muslim and the extremely progressive Socialist. She is completely devoted to jihad and sharia law, while speaking in favor of identity politics, multiculturalism and a fuzzy sort of Marxism. She is a strong believer in Islam, which treats woman as second class citizens, yet, paradoxically, she is in the forefront of the liberated woman's-rights movement. As a good and pious Muslim, she hates Israel, as does the new Far Left. Barry Shaw observes that "Sarsour has been hiding her agenda behind the cloak of liberal progressivism but, occasionally, her real identity emerges." She told her Muslim audience in a recent speech that their priority was not to assimilate and please any other people or authority. "Our top priority is to please Allah and only Allah."
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In 2012, a report by the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention found that roughly 513,000 women and girls in the United States were at risk of undergoing FGM, which was more than twice an earlier estimate based on 1990 data. In 2016, Unicef estimated 200 million women in 30 countries had undergone the painful procedure. Spencer writes about a mosque that is said to have paid a Muslim docter to perform FGM on young Muslim girls.
Andrea Peyser presents some recent cases of honor killings that took place in the USA. Fathers killed their daughters because the girls didn't want to marry men chosen for them or because they wanted to be and dress like other girls in the West. It's estimated that there's a couple of dozen honor killings a year in the States, but they receive little publicity and are often mislabeled as ordinary domestic violence.
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Hugh Fitzgerald writes about Karen Armstrong, a well-known apologist for Islam. She goes in for interfaith harmony and preaches the doctrine of "let's all get along.' She talks about a Charter for Compassion but she has a sharp enough tongue for those who challenge her vapid statements and meaningless prattle. She also has stories that she claims are about real events in Islamic history. In her version, Christians carried on murderous crusades against innocent Muslims. She writes that Muslims stopped trying to conquer countries in Europe once they lost Granada, their last stronghold. In the time stream most of us live in, while the Muslims did lose Granada, they were busy taking over in Greece and Albania and Rumania and Hungary and pitting their strength against the gates of Vienna. She would have it, as do other Islam apologists, that the Christians of Spain gave both the Jews and the Muslims the choice of convert or leave or die around the same time. The Jews were indeed given those options in 1492. The Muslims were not. They stayed on, free to practice their religion, free to work and trade and more around freely. She spins her stories as if both the Jews and the Muslims were twinsies in suffering, as if both groups were expelled from Spain on the same date. But, as Fitzgerald informs us, "Karen Armstrong has sympathy for the Jews in Spain only insofar as that sympathy can be transferred to the real objects of her pity, the Muslims, and she will do nothing to help readers to recognize the difference in the two cases, that of the Jews being one of undeserved mistreatment, that of the Muslims a matter of geopolitical prudence."
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In Europe, Muslim salafists get a lot of help from Europe's politicians and leaders, who filter reality through their vision of multiculturalism and diversity being the keys to a well-run society. These leaders don't even try to do anything while Islam and Sharia law take over their countries. In England, lower class children were groomed for years for prostitution and the police ignored it for fear of being accused of islamophobia. It was an open secret, but the Mainline Press did not inform the public. Nowaday, people don't talk much about honor crimes of murder because the media tend not to label them as such. The politicians denied there were 'no-go' zones but people found out about them. Sweden has become the rape capital of the world since the Middle Eastern "refugees' started arriving. It's not hard to figure out that the more Muslims there are in a country, the higher is the crime rate. European natives who want to preserve their culture have to struggle not only against the activities of the Muslim migrants but their own politicians and their own media. There is no united front.
Andrew McCarthy reports that just as in the States, the media in England are the last to suspect that a Muslim running down a city street knifing people and yelling Allah Akbar is acting out of religious fervor, not poverty or rejection or a lack of self confidence. As in the States, they see the mosque as the equivalent of a church or synagogue, a place to pray. They don't seem to understand that a mosque in the West, as are mosques around the world, is "a center for sharia indoctrination, assimilation resistance, and anti-Western politics." Many Muslims in England have polygamous marriages and earlier marriages. They also have a high birth rate. The result is they are producing children at a much higher rate than the natives. In 2004 Bernard Lewis said Europe would be Islamic by the end of the century. Such population comparisons make his prediction likely.
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Soeren Kern lists a couple of dozen honor attacks that occurred in Germany in some five months in 2017. Men murdered their wives, girl friends and daughters for the Islamic crime of disobedience. This is likely the tip of the iceberg because, as Kern points out, police, politicians and the media don't want to inflame the public by letting people know the truth. He writes, "Increased censorship by the police and the media, aimed at stemming anti-immigration sentiments, makes it impossible to know the names and national origins of many victims or perpetrators, or the true circumstances surrounding many murders, which often appear to be honor killings but are downplayed as "domestic disputes." The fact that honor killings common in the Middle East are prevalent in Europe suggests that the Muslim immigrants have made little adjustment to their way of life to conform to the mores of European culture.
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In the USA, the media persistently write that right-wing groups such as the KKK, not the left-wing BLM and Anti-Fa, are the ones responsible for anti-Semitic hate crimes. In contrast, Paul Joseph Watson reports, "A major new study has found that left-wingers and Muslims are responsible for the overwhelming majority of anti-Semitic hate crime in several different European countries." It is more than likely that this is also true in the States but it doesn't get reported because it contradicts the prejudices of the press.
Muslims complain they
are the major target of hate-crimes. This notion is reinforced
by the media, which tend to report the number of crimes
committed as a percent increase over the previous year rather
than as percent of the total number committed in a particular
category of hate. Thus, if in one year there are 10 hate crimes
against a particular ethnic group, and the next year there are
twenty, then the media can 'truthfully' say there's a 100%
increase. The majority of the media reported a shocking increase
in anti-Arab crimes based on Race/Ethnicity or Ancestry. But
relative to the total number of hate crimes in this
category, 4216 victims in 2015, only 1.1% were victims of
anti-Arab bias. Note also we don't how many of these were crimes
against property, not person. In comparison, 53.2% of the total
number of crimes in the Bias Against Race category were because of
anti-black bias; 18.7% of the total number of crimes were
because of anti-white bias. Of the 1402 Anti-Religion hate
crimes committed, 21.9% were victims of anti-Muslim bias, but many more,
52.1%, were victims of anti-Jewish bias. These figures come from
https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2015/topic-pages/victims_final/.
It was not reported, but I'd be willing to bet many of the
anti-Jewish hate crimes were committed by Muslims.
Guy Millière wonders why so many politicians and media play 'blame the victim.' They blame Geert Wilders, the Dutch political leader, for violence when the violence is directed against Wilders. It doesn't come from Wilders. Like President Trump, he is the victim of unswerving hate. In his case, it is because he has been warning the Dutch that if they continue their generous immigration policy, they will lose their freedom and control of their country to Islam. It was so hard to find a reason to charge Wilders with a political crime, the prosecutors resorted to misinterpreting some words from a speech he once made. People don't want to hear the truh; it's too frightening. But ignoring what the Muslims are doing doesn't stop them from ethnically cleansing entire neighborhoods of the Dutch natives who once lived there.
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Bruce Bawer paints us a picture of Erna Solberg, head of the Conservative Party in Norway and current Prime Minister. As Bawer puts it, "When it comes to Islam, she's always been a first-class dhimmi." For her, "Muslims are always the victims and Norwegians the bad guys," no matter what the facts are. Despite the damage Muslims do in Norway, Erna chortles on about "Norway as a place where Muslims and non-Muslims live together in harmony, and warned about certain unnamed mischief-makers at both 'extremes' who seek to sow division." Bawer wonders if, by 'division', she means the body parts "strewn all over promenades in Nice, bridges in London, and concert arenas in Manchester," courtesy of Muslim terrorists.
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After "a series of radical Islamist attacks, rapes and assaults," apparently the Germans feel they need help in controlling their recent immigrants. As Jim Kouri writes, a "criminal court in Germany has given its blessing for a quasi-squad of Muslim refugees and immigrants to act as de facto Sharia police." As a result, a merry band of faith cops have harrasing Muslims and non-Muslims to make them conform to sharia law. "Germany's political leaders are tolerating what amounts to a parallel German universe; one that allows Muslim immigrants and refugees to take the law into their own hands, often with tragic consequences."
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Daniel Greenfield describes some things about George Soros's history that likely helped make him the loathsome Jew-hater he is today. "There's no denying that George Soros is a warped and twisted man. Especially when it comes to the Jews. But he's also the money man behind a great deal of leftist activism. Especially anti-Israel activism." And so such truth-seekers as the staff of the New York Times decry "'Israel's War Against George Soros'. That's right up there with Poland's war on Nazi Germany." "According to the New York Times, criticizing an anti-Semite whose Jewishness can only be found with a DNA analysis is anti-Semitic, but attacking millions of Jews defending themselves against genocide isn't." Greenfield points out that when not blaming Soros's victims, the Times is Jewashing Jew-haters. The New York Times may have been started by Jews but it is ending up as an instrument to destroy Judaism.
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Mort Klein writes about another Jew who has become a bitter enemy of the Jews and Israel. What makes this case so bizarre is that this Jew, David Myers, is head of "the prestigious Center for Jewish History (CJH), in New York." Mort Klein recounts many facts that would more than qualify Myers to be a hoodie, either a grand-pooh-bah of the KKK or the chief speaker at the start of yet another well-funded anti-Fa riot. As Klein writes, "The Center for Jewish History should be led by an honest, carefully accurate historian or other executive — not by hostile-to-Israel propagandist David N. Myers."
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Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) can be considered a predecessor of groups such as Anti-Fa, except SJP has an exclusive focus: how to destroy Israel. They are good at street theater and confrontation. They flunk on facts and honest information. As Richard Cravatts writes of them:
"SJP has a long history since its founding in 1993 of bringing vitriolic anti-Israel speakers to their respective campuses (now numbering over 200 with chapters), and for such collateral activities as sponsoring the pernicious Israeli Apartheid Weeks, building mock 'apartheid walls,' and sending mock eviction notices to Jewish students in their dorms to demonize Israel and create empathy for the Palestinian Arab cause."
SJP is not a model for how to hold rational civilized discussions on college campuses.
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For Israel, the expectations of the Kurds and the nay-saying by the neighboring Arab countries is a lesson Israel should take to heart. Because of the Iranian threat, the anti-Iran Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt have become much more friendly to Israel. In Israel this has been greeted by some as the start of a strong union if only Israel accepts Arab peace proposals and establishes a Palestinian State. Kedar suggests that once the Iranian threat dissipates, no matter how much Israel helped the anti-Iran coalition, the warmth of the Arab countries will also dissipate. Kedar concludes, "Israel must not jeopardize its existence, security and interests by placing them in bankrupt Arab insurance companies."
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Nadav Shragai writes, "Al-Aqsa mosque was destroyed in an earthquake in 1927. As it was being rebuilt, the British archaeologist Robert Hamilton documented the excavation of its foundations. He hid away the findings that the waqf found inconvenient. Today, thousands of findings, including a seal with the inscription "From Gibeon to the king" unearthed by Dr. Gabi Barkai and Zachi Dvira, shed light on the Temple Mount's Jewish period." This article and the next one discuss artefacts and structural details of the First and Second Temples.
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"Jews believe that the "foundation rock" beneath the Dome of the Rock is atop Mt. Moriah, the site of the binding of Isaac. King Solomon built his Temple upon the rock in the tenth century before the Common Era (BCE), but it was destroyed in 587 BCE by the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar. Seventy years later, the second Temple was built by Jews returning from Babylon with King Cyrus's blessing. Years later it was rededicated by the Maccabees in approximately 160 BCE after its defiling by the Seleucids." It too was destroyed, this time by the Romans. When the Muslims invaded and captured Jerusalem, they built a mosque — the al-asqa mosque — on the area of the Temple Mount, as a symbol of their dominance. In 1927, much of the mosque collapsed. Robert Hamilton and another English photographer took advantage of the reconstruction period to photograph under the mosque. Hamilton promised the Waqf that he would make 'no mention of any findings that the Muslims would have found inconvenient' such as findings from the time of the Jewish Temples. The photographers documented the mosaics, passageways, cisterns, and lumber that apparently were part of the Temples." The photos in this article are some of those photographs.
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Over the centuries, the area around the remains of the Second Temple was built up, blocking access to the Temple Mount walls. Meir Loewenberg tells us that what made the Kotel, the Western Wall, accessible was a massive earthquake in 1546, which destroyed many of the houses that had blocked access. The ruler at the time, Sultain Sulamein, had the ruins cleared and a small area was prepared where some hundred Jews could pray at a time. It was used in times of crisis. They started holding daily services there in the middle 1800s. When the Jews took possession of the Temple Mount, they reconstructed the area, making it accessible for thousands.
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As the Nazis started gaining momentum in Germany in 1933, a group of Nazis held their first meeting in Los Angeles. It was a time that many 'wannabe Nazi; groups were being formed, to rant about overthrowing the government and killing the Jews. Leon Lewis, a Jewish lawyer, decided to investigate these anti-Semitic groups. He recruited a small number of people, all but one of whom were Christian, to go undercover and join every Nazi and fascist group in the city. The initial plan was to find evidence for illegal activities and turn the evidence over to the police. Steven Ross tells us that soon after infiltrating the groups, they discovered a plot to take control of the armories in the vicinity. Lewis notified several of the Police, local FBI and Sheriffs. He was shocked to find they were all sympathetic to the nazi groups, seeing the radical lefties as the real threat. Between 1935 and 1945, they uncovered several plots. One was to kill a couple of dozen actors. Others were to kill Jews, steal munitions from the Armories and blow up military installations. Unable to make the authorities act, the citizen-spies were able to get some of these plans canceled by making the Nazi members worry about internal leaks and betrayals.
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Gili Izikovich writes about a German journalist, Sacha Battyany, who discovered one day many years after the War ended that his aunt made a lunch party and afterwards took her guests out to kill Jews. He began an investigation into his family that lasted years. He interviewed family members, traced his grandfather's history, read a diary his grandmother kept, even talked to someone that was at the lunch. He also explored "the connection between his grandmother, Marita, and an Argentinean woman named Agnes Mandel, a Jewish refugee from the village in which the two grew up, one as the daughter of the local nobleman and the other as the daughter of village Jews who were murdered." The result was a book. "The picture that emerges from the book is well-rounded, moving from the personal to the historic, as it emerges that the victim and the criminal are part of the same family."
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There is supposed to have been a massacre of Arab residents by Jews during the Arab invasion of the new-born State of Israel in 1948. Arab who lived in Deir Yassin have reported there was no massacre. It was a hoax perpetrated by Arab leaders to incite the local Arabs. It boomeranged in that it make many Arab residents so fearful that they fled out of the country. Like the Rachel Corey and Al-Dura hoaxes, which have also been exploded, the Deir Yassin "Massacre" lives on in Arab mythology. Shimon Cohen writes about Professor Eliezar Tauber's new book on Deir Yassin.
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Return to Feature Index
What we are talking about in the April–June 2017 Issue
1
Editor's Note:Think-Israel tends to use salafist rather than extremist or Islamist or militant or fundamentalist or activist to describe generically a pious Muslim, one who sticks as closely as possible to the unfiltered words and actions of Mohammad and the first three generations of Muslims, including, especially, the Companions of the Prophet. In modeling himself as closely as he can on the preachings and practices of Mohammad, a salafist can in modern terms be precisely described as an uninhibited terrorist, a theological supersessionist, a political supremacist who believes Islam and sharia law must dominate and a social barbarian, who wages jihad with whatever tools are available. Thanks to the high quality of whitewash supplied by sympathetic propagandists, he seldom is so described.
We live in an odd time. A divisive time. For some, Donald Trump's election was a win for American values. For others, it was an unbearable impediment in what had been a fairly smooth transition to a global society, a utopia where national difference and borders were no longer a threat to peace because there were no national borders that mattered. Had all gone as planned, administrative control would eventually shift to some international body, a larger version of the European Union perhaps. Or maybe the UN or some similar structure. Concern for the environment would be used to quiet any objections individual groups might raise while the core of global control was being firmed up. There would likely be an internal struggle to decide which pigmented group would actually be in charge. It has been a given for years that whites had to be cut down to size. In the last decade we went from reducing pride in American exceptionalism to degrading the white race, eradicating 'white privilege'. One would suppose that WASPS would not smilingly expose themselves to a future of being powerless, discriminated against in the society they created and having to fight for any sort of equal treatment. But many many whites in the western countries had been persuaded to see their demotion as a good thing. They agreed with ex-Prez Obama that putting the USA and its dominant culture down a peg or two was a top priority.
In an augmented EU or a herniated UN-type government, the odd-couple symbiosis of global socialists and religion-focused Muslims would likely continue, despite their very different value systems.
The Muslims might no longer be a solid block but even when divided, they have common goals they are furthering using their oil money. They would certainly continue their religious mission to install sharia law everywhere. Success would mean a de facto global Caliphate. Whether an Iranian or a Saudi Arabian would be the Caliph they would decide later. They also have a common interest in preventing the West from exploiting its own oil and gas resources or restricting the expansion of Muslim communities.
The globalists also want to unify the world, but with a socialist agenda in redistributing wealth. The dream of many an academician and politician in the West is to unite countries within a socialist unification. Protecting the environment and undoing global warming are the levers currently being used to pry open a massive global effort to fight climate change and eliminate human practices said to be polluting the atmosphere. The stated policy of the Democratic party in the USA (2016 Democratic Party Platform, July 21, 2016, p45) is to lead this global enterprise. Given the complexity of the task, an over-the-whole-world government would be needed to organize the project. Surprise, surprise — such a government would also have the infrastructure to control the global economy and handle welfare and healthcare. At the moment, the envisioned control mechanism seemed to be a global glob, a fuzzy sort of socialism where the majority of people are dependent on the government and the super rich are the milk cows providing renewable money. Not all the very rich. Not the politician and administrators who run the show, of course. What appears to be envisioned by the globalists is more a two-tiered socialism where a small elite class lives for us, takes vacations for us, flies in comfort in their own planes for us — an expanded version of the Obamas taking vacations that cost millions while access to jobs and health care and education for the middle class diminished.
Into what some had seen as a marvelous future, Brexit and then Trump were the proverbial wrench in the machinery. In the USA, under the Trump administration, it is a time of rage, crumblings, new mottoes and simultaneously a time of satisfaction, sharpenings and new adhesions. The re-seating of reporters in the White House news briefings was emblematic — dissing the wise elders of the New York Times and allowing unvetted scamps from nowhere with no lineage to warm the best seats! It brings up the image of the unwashed commoner being allowed into Andrew Jackson's White House. Shockingly uncouth. But Trump is succeeding in overturning many of the arbitrary and ill-advised decisions of the previous administration. Nevertheless, to assume that the government's oligarchical power structure is being dissolved may be premature. Already we've seen some of Trump's choices bringing into power those who happily served in the Obama administration.
The Trump administration may end up as a brief stop on the road to socialism but it is at least a pause. Individualism, nationalism and free choice might yet survive. It's too soon to do an analysis. And so this issue of Think-Israel is a jumble of comments on some chunks that are coalescing in the chaos.
We have become accustomed to some politicizing of science. Savvy scientists have adjusted by linking their research to one politically important cause or another, however shaky the connection. In climatology it's easier to get funding and have your papers appear in the proper trade journals if you conform to the views promulgated by a group of climatologists that are politically powerful and act as arbiters for the field. (For an interesting take on at least one of the arbiters, look at a video featuring Mark Steyn, who has been sued by the climatologist Michael Mann for defamation, here.) Now we are seeing the reverse. Not only is science being used to bolster and promote particular political goals, but many in the role of politician or evangalist or advocate is himself a scientist or science administrator. Believers in man-made global warming base their messages of environmental doom on scientific 'facts', but often these facts ignore contrary evidence, exceptions, areas of uncertainty and a multitude of possible environmental contributors to climate. The stated goal is to halt global warming. Whether the final solution is taxing western economies down to some degraded, barely-functional level or us installing a "one world government" to control climate, the end result will restructure our political system and limit our freedom of action. As Gary Stix wrote back in 2012, "Effective World Government Will Be Needed to Stave Off Climate Catastrophe," here. It is of little comfort that "Seven In 10 Brits Support 'World Government' To Protect Humanity From Global Catastrophes," (Ian Johnston 23May2017, here.)
For an excellent video on major topics in climate science and climate change, see here.
Alarmists sneer at contrary views by skeptical scientists, claiming they aren't really in the field. Listen to Dr. Judith Curry, a leading Earth and Atmospheric Sciences scientist and her sober talk on the current 'data versus dogma' polarization here.
Do 97% of Climate Scientists Really Agree? See here.
This video talks about Al Gore and how the global warming scare began. See here.
This is a very wise and a very sensible article by Jay Richards who suggests caution in accepting the premise that we are rapidly heading towards a global overheating of the earth. To avoid this, it is argued, we must overhaul our economy and politics and put ourselves in the hands of some global governmental institution such as the United Nations. Richards points out that a consensus that there is warming doesn't tell us about agreement or non-agreement on how much warming there is and what is causing this warming. He writes that "A consensus should be based on solid evidence. But a consensus is not itself the evidence. With well-established scientific theories, you never hear about consensus. No one talks about the consensus that the planets orbit the sun, that the hydrogen molecule is lighter than the oxygen molecule, ... The very fact that we hear so much about a consensus on climate change may be enough to justify suspicion."
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Bernice Lipkin writes of the infusion of supposedly rock-solid scientific information into political arguments by supporters of Anthropogenic [man made] Global Warming (AGW) and the growing investment of scientists in participating in social activism, not as individuals but as scientists. She contrasts the modes of behavior when the scientist is acting as advocate and when he is behaving as a scientist.
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In a most polite, politically acceptable way, Katie Burke lists some of the most commonly used ways to sell a product. Specifically, how can a scientist learn to persuade in ways that have been scientifically-determined to work? Stripped down, these tactics teach how to engage the audience, including emphasizing what you and the audience have in common. Be local in scale and approach. Talk about how AGW hurts them and their families. Let the audience know that the social groups important to them, the people they admire and trust, accept there's a problem with the climate changing. In fact, everyone except maybe a small number of foolish and ignorant deniers know there's a problem, and who wants to associate with them, anyway. Remember, the less intelligent the audience, the more (simple) pictures and slogans the better. And, for pity sakes, like any good politician, try out your speech on your own focus group before you go before a bunch of civilians.
There are some obvious tips that might be added to the list.
Don't waste your time explaining the difference between short-time weather and long-term climate. Any unusual weather patterns or odd events can be — and have been — blamed on man-made excessive warming. So let the audience tell you what they have or haven't seen in years. Don't reject these notions. You don't have to actually lie; just be suggestive.
Accentuate the positive; eliminate the negative. Push renewable energy sources, natural stuff like wind and sun. Don't talk about how these aren't close to ready to supply our energy needs.
Play up the horrors of excessive heat and how it's harmful to their family's health. Don't mention that the actual data don't support the idea that irreversible heating is just around the corner. They need to be roused. Tomorrow may be too late, if we don't stop our bad habits.
Coo in a dignified manner. Your body language and voice tones should say: You are doing the right thing joining us. You already share our values. Let's face it, guys. We humans are the reason why it's getting hot. And we have to do something about it. Together.
Share with them something related to AGW and supposedly not widely known that they can use next day in the office or while waiting for the kiddies to finish the game.
Content matters some. Delivery matters a lot.
This isn't education. This is salesmanship. Don't confuse the two. Your academic degrees are for show.
Choose your words carefully. Words have baggage. Labels count. Nuances are a sign of weakness. Keep it simple. (I wish there was a word like Mantrasize.)
It is interesting that Burke tells speakers not to follow the example of the Organizing for Action (OFA) group, that has been selling Climate Change by attacking conservative politicians directly. It has been, in Burke's opinion, a failure. I'd be interested on her take on why George Soros' OFA is interested in raising the alarm on Global Warming. I'd be hard-pressed finding anything Soros has done to strengthen America or protect it.
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If you google terms such as consensus 97% scientists global warming, almost all articles in the return list will report or cite reports that some 97% of climate scientists agree that there is global warming. Some articles go beyond the basic statement and add unsupported commentary and interpretation, often stressing the dangers of global warming. Few studies break down the summary numbers into distributed degree of support. Nor do the summaries tell us how many support the alarmists' certainty that a heat holocaust is around the corner. Neil L. Frank has posted one of the few papers that put the consensus mantra in context. He raises such issues as: how were the questions phrased, how reliable is it to infer attitude from an abstract, and what, exactly, were the scientists agreeing to. These are important considerations that the bald statement that '97% agree there's global warming' doesn't address. In fact, given how the data were obtained and the absence of "denier" articles in US journals, it is surprising the investigators didn't find 100% agreement.
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The set of articles below deal with some symptoms and indicators of the advancement of Islam's conquest of Western host countries. When the pious immigrant Muslims and their children born in Europe feel confident enough to exert their Allah-given rights of superiority, they start small by demanding hallel food in schools and hospitals and want any pig signs and drawings removed from books to piggy banks. As they progress, they demand substituting their political, cultural, educational and lifestyle values for what the native have or might want. They aren't blending in or giving into multicultural pressures, so anything that looks like assimilation is given publicity, sometimes prematurely. They encourage hate-the-Jews wherever they go. What's most ominous, they are working toward criminalizing criticism of Islam, which, in Muslim countries, is already treated as blasphemy. In another example not dealt with in these articles, Eileen Toplansky writes of artists and writers, so courageous in not visiting Israel to support BDS, who surrender up their freedom at home (American Thinker, 23apr17, here):
European writers, artists and museum directors admit that they are accepting their dhimmi status by:
- removing the art work "Persepolis" because it combines a Persian Islamic rug and a female head.
- veiling antique Roman statues in the Vatican to avoid offending Iran's visiting President Hassan Rouhani.
- censoring London's Mall Gallery exhibition titled "Passion for Freedom" because it shows a family of toy animals living in an enchanted valley while in the background another set of toy animals are dressed as ISIS, ready to invade the idyllic view. The installation entitled "ISIS Threatens Sylvania" was eliminated because of its alleged "inflammatory" content.
- withdrawing a portrait of the Prophet of Islam from the Victoria and Albert Museum of London because a group of Muslims protested.
- scrapping the dedication of a new section of the Louvre in Paris concerning the artistic heritage of Eastern Christians. Recall that Eastern Christians have been systematically decimated by the Islamic State but the Louvre caved to fear.
Assimilation of the Middle Eastern refugees in Germany has been often asserted, but actual examples are hard to come by. So when a hair salon in Herzberg, Germany, hired a refugee Syrian, this was hailed as an example of successful integration. Then he slit his boss's throat. Selwyn Duke points out that, as much as the Germans deny it, there isn't any integration. "In fact, the only successful integration going on is that of many Germans, who've been integrated into delusion." 'They are just like us,' just isn't so. The multiculturalists build sand castles of diversification and integration and the Muslim immigrants wash them away, time and again.
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Edward Cline chronicles some of the multitude of changes the Muslims are forcing on the British, who not too long ago were confident enforcers of their own views of what constitutes civilized society. No longer. While terrorist groups insist they are the ones responsible for the ever-increasing terror attacks committed by Muslims, British politician deny it is "Islamic terrorism." The list of cowardly caving-ins in every aspect of Western life grows daily.
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In the USA, successive administrations have been seeding the country with a steady influx of Muslims, distributing them everywhere (See here.) To date, given the size of the States, except for acts of terror, the impact hasn't been felt. But Britain and France are models of what happens when small colonies of Muslims grow to a size where they become confident enough to actively threaten the way of life of the natives. Dennis MacEoin writes about the city of Birmingham, which is said to be the most radicalized in England — some wards in the city are almost entirely Muslim and some public schools are controlled by Islamic religious leaders, who preach hate and intolerance. Terrorist attacks have increased sharply the past five years over all of Britain. Reports note there is a clear link "between highly-segregated Muslim areas and terrorism." France may be in worse shape. It has some 751 no-go zones, where French law is ignored. In general, the response to Islamist criminality is weak. To date, we in America haven't strayed from the path that doomed Europe — we continue to go along with the increasing demands of Muslims in school and the work place.
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Simon Kent writes about a new report that indicates Muslims are "major perpetrators of anti-Semitic violence in Western Europe." "Attitude surveys corroborate this picture in so far as anti-Semitic attitudes are far more widespread among Muslims than among the general population in Western Europe." While right-wingers may be severely anti-Semitic, the report indicates it is left-wingers who not only have strong anti-Semitic views but carry out hostile attacks.
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In this article, Clifford May discusses self-censorship, an accurate indicator of how much the media recognize that speaking out against salafists might be bad for their own well-being. He notes that Canada is considering criminalizing any criticism of Islam, true or false. It is a pursuit that radical Islam has pursued for years. As May writes, "Canada's Muslim reformers understand that what is being contemplated is not so different from a blasphemy law. And they know the impact such laws have had in other countries."
Recently, a 52-year old convert to Islam created terror havoc at the House of Parliament. Aside from his obvious motivation, he left no explanation why he did what he did when he did. Douglas Murray (see here) has speculated what working journalists would want to know and how criminalizing 'Islamaphobs' would hamper them.
READ MOREWould we be allowed to ask who ISIS are inspired by? The question must linger. It must be hovering over the mind of many a Canadian journalist as they ponder the terrorist attacks that have previously taken place in their country and wonder how they would go about reporting an attack such as that in Westminster last week.
Would they be allowed to say that the perpetrator was a Muslim? Would they be allowed to say that he was a convert? Would they be allowed to mention the Wahhabi point? Or would this tread into the realm of the "Islamophobia". Let us assume that they would be allowed to mention these things in print. Would they be allowed to go any farther? Would they be allowed to ponder in opinion columns or quote people in reportage who said that Masood and indeed ISIS had not got their ideas from nowhere? Would they be allowed to say that there is a tradition of violence within the Islamic religion, which has sadly permitted just such actions for a rather long time. Or would they have to lie?
People who do not side with settlement demonizers focus on proving that Israeli Jewish settlements aren't evil and that settlements won't thwart peace. Some even dare say — in the face of a high-pressure campaign against Jewish settlements and settlers that has co-opted the moral high ground — that settlements are legal and settlers are ordinary Israeli citizens, which they are. And so we present some well-written articles on the actual status of the Israeli settlement policy.
That's not where the focus should be. It should be on how to reunite Israel and the territory that Jordan took in 1948 when she invaded the new state of Israel, territory that Israel recovered in 1967, when Jordan again invaded Israel. Israel needs to absorb the Territories and carry out the second half of the Middle East's exchange of populations. The first half happened in the 1940s and 1950s when the Arab countries expelled their Jewish populations. The 800,000 Jewish refugees quickly became full-fledged citizens of the State of Israel.
Martin Sherman is courageous enough to point out that it's time to act on the obvious. Any half measure — a two-state solution or a single bi-national state — will lead to Israel's loss of its Jewish character and likely its sovereignty. In the end, depending on what Israel does, the Land of Israel will end up either Jewish OR Muslim. It can not be both. If this seems too drastic a conclusion, consider that in a two-state solution, the Arabs will not allows Jews to live in their state. But in Israel, with a Jewish population of 6.5 million and where the Arabs are citizens, the number of Israeli Arabs has already grown from the 200,000 counted in the 1949 census to 1.8 million today. (In fact, the most popular boy's name given to Israeli newborns, Jews and Arabs combined, continues to be Mohammad, Times of Israel.) A binational state would start today with the additional 4.5 million or so Arabs living in Samaria, Judea and Gaza plus an unknown number of the 6 to 7 million Palestinian Arabs living in Arab countries and elsewhere. To see what this would mean, consider what the relatively small proportion of Muslims coming into Europe has already done to erode native European culture and civilization.
These videos are but a few of the many available that explain what is legal, namely, the Jews legally and irrevocably own the Jewish land allocated to the Jews by the international community at San Remo in 1920. (See the January-June 2016 issue of Think-Israel below for details, here.) The fact that so much effort has been expending on demonizing the settlements by the members of Peace Now and other treasonous JINOs (Jews In Name Only) suggests that they, like many others, ignore the stipulations of the various agreements and would like to create conditions that would make it easier to illegally gift the Arabs with Samaria and Judea. Many of them dream that this is the first step in an Arabs take-over of all of Israel.
our legal rights
Professor Avi Bell of U San Diego
Edwin Black is author of "IBM and the Holocaust"
Prof Eugene Kontorovich, professor at Northwestern Law
Malcolm Lowe describes the current policy of the Israeli government on new construction in Jewish towns in Samaria and Judea. What is not new is that "All the settlements created by Israel before the Oslo accords are legitimate, including the new Israeli housing estates created in the extended boundaries of Jerusalem." New construction must be contained within the current construction lines; "the establishment of new wildcat outposts" is not permitted. The new stipulation is that new settlements are allowed but only when they are the legal substitutes for towns believed to be legal when they were built but subsequently shown to have private Arab ownership, so the Jews, who had bought their homes in good faith, had to abandon the sites. Lowe doesn't mention that the freeze on Jewish construction during the Oslo negotiations was for three months only. Yet Israel maintained a freeze on construction in the Territories, even in areas that, under the most idiotic giving away of land, would remain Israeli. The Arabs are yet to carry out any of their contractual promises, yet Israel has perpetuated a crippling restriction on itself. This noble self-sacrifice has not made the local Arabs any more willing to accept a Jewish state. Curiously, while any new Jewish building is greeted with 'international' outrage and is minutely monitored, the Arabs have no such restrictions in the areas they control. A deeper mystery is why Jewish officials remain silent about their legitimate claims to the land, affording the Arabs the opportunity to sprout all sorts of fantastic claims without hinderance.
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Israel is in a bind of its own making. By its foolish policy of curtailing building in areas of Samaria-Judea directly under its control, even by the Oslo Accords, it made itself vulnerable to foreign meddling. Every few years, when the diplomats can prop up some Arab 'leader' they can designate as 'peace partner', the world engages in a ritualistic 'peace process.' The Arabs are adamant that they won't give up a centimeter of 'their land', or they make some peaceful noises but everyone knows they won't keep any contractual obligation. Israel, on the other hand, makes generous, often self-destructive, concessions. Why would a diplomat waste breathe trying to persuade the Arabs, when the Jewish concessionists are so eager to screw themselves? It's a no-brainer that the 'peacemakers' will push only Israel for concessions. What has changed over the years is, as Alex Traiman writes, that pressure has built up for more housing in the Territories. As a spokesman for Hebron said, "We have hundreds of families on a waiting list. We haven't built anything new since 2005," Moreover, it's hard to convince Israelis that the Territories are under some evil Jewish occupation, when it's their friends and relatives who, except for the chronic terror attacks, vandalism and looting by the Arabs, are living ordinary lives in Samaria and Judea. In the words of an Israeli spokesman of a settlement, "Within Israel, most people understand that the 450,000 Israeli residents of Judea and Samaria are an irreversible fact."
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In response to the assertion of a New Zealand lawyer that the Jewish settlements are illegal, Orit ben Tzvi has encapsulated some of the main points for what by now should not need restating: the Jewish communities in Samaria and Judea (aka the West Bank) are legal. When the Allied forces defeated the Ottoman Empire in World War 1, in recognition of the historic connection of the Jews and their ancient homeland, a small portion of the Ottoman land was set aside at the San Remo conference of 1920 as a future Jewish state. Samaria and Judea, as well as Israel 'proper', Gaza and much of the Golan are in perpetual, irrevocable trust for the Jewish people. The 1922 Mandate for Palestine was based on the San Remo Resolution. As ben Tzvi points out, "The only binding resolution of international law, a resolution which has never been countermanded, is the 1922 Mandate for Palestine." The rest of Ottoman land, some 99.9% of the Middle East, was given to the Arabs. It is a sorry fact that before the international community in the person of the League of Nations voted on this law in 1922, Britain excluded the land on the East side of the Jordan river (75% of the land allocated for a Jewish state) from the Jewish domain, giving it to the Hashemites to administer. Over the years until she withdrew from "Palestine" and the Jews finally got their state in 1948, she violated her oath to help the Jews develop the infrastructure of a viable state. She sided with with the Arabs, even helping the Nazis exterminate Jews by not letting them come into "Palestine." ben Tzvi also discusses the other points raised by the initial rejection of Israel's ownership of the land. For further information, go to the January-June 2016 issue of Think-Israel (see below).
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Alan Baker has written a brilliant summation of the legal ways available to respond to terrorism, whether local or international. Failed ways of dealing with terrorism include appeasement and negotiation. As Baker writes, "The enhanced ideological element of today's terrorism, seeking in many instances to enhance the rule of Islam throughout the world, defies any logic of negotiation or specific legislative or social change. This "zero-sum" form of terror knows no means of conciliation or compromise. It cannot be negotiated. It needs to be addressed assertively."
Nations have begun more effective measures — attempting to dry out the terrorist's money supply and increasing punitive measures. Israel, relatively late in the day, has increased its counter-terror legislation. "It increases punishments for organizers of terrorism and enables courts to convict terror cell leaders more easily."
But in truth, even these measures have fatal defects:
(1) When the terrorist leaders and inciters of terror are the very same people that are in charge, such as is case with Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority (PA), the lower-level criminal may be more easily imprisoned but the organizers and resource-suppliers have no fear of punishment. Even though the PA leaders brag openly of paying the family of terrorists and educate the Arab children to practice terror, they remain in power.
(2) Enough persistent acts of terror — synchronized, sequenced or random — will, after a while, overload any legal system that relies on careful investigation and identification, followed by a fair trial and multiple appeals.
(3) An unintended consequence of using the state's "crime budget" mainly to stop acts of terrorism before they occur and deal with those that they don't catch ahead of time is that there is little left to deal with 'normal' low-level crimes: small-amount embezzlement, fraud, petty theft, graft, battery and abuse. In the long term, allowing small-time crime to grow undeterred may be as damaging to the State as acts of terror.
Baker makes a case for stronger measures for quelling incitement internationally, but this is a formidable job, unlikely to be successful in the short term. In the next article below, Martin Sherman considers the need for Israel to expel the local Arabs. Demographic reasons aside, these Arabs are from the same pool as the Arabs that commit acts of violence. Transferring these Arabs either to their own sequestered State in some portion of the vast land holding of the Arabs or giving them citizenship in the Arab countries where they now reside would seem to be a way, both benign and efficient, to empty the pool where terrorism festers. And it would better the lives of the Arab refugees, who have living temporary for some four generations.
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Martin Sherman speaks plainly on maintaining Israel as a sovereign nation, a Jewish state. He point out what's wrong with a partial or an entire absorption of the Arabs, limited autonomy, and other attempts at dealing with a recalcitrant group that doesn't wish to assimilate, while maintaining the character of the State as Jewish. If Israel is to survive, she must carry out two operations in synchrony. As Sherman writes, "She must satisfy two imperatives: the geographic and the demographic. The first of these imperatives calls for Israeli control (i.e. sovereignty) over all the territory east of the coastal plain up to the Jordan River—to prevent intolerable risks to its physical survival; the second imperative calls for significant reduction of the Arab presence in the territory under Jewish sovereignty to forestall an intolerable demographic threat to its dominant Jewish character.
In practice, this means: she must annex all of Samaria and Judea; they are, after all, hers legally. And she must carry out the second stage of a population transfer, which was begun when the Arab countries kicked out or killed their Jewish inhabitants in the 1940s. The Jews fled, forced to leave behind their property and valuables. The Arabs do not have to suffer by a transfer. Many implementations have been suggested, from 'buying' citizenship in one of the Arab countries to moving to Jordan or some other area in the vast space once owned by the Ottomans. (The suggestion by Lewis and Bernice Lipkin is to be found here.) In moving, he would be bettering his present condition.
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Our biggest, most dangerous concern is that rogue countries, Iran and North Korea, have or will soon have sophisticated, long-range nuclear weapons. The Trump administration has begun paying attention to North Korea. But the Mullahs of Iran are a wily bunch. They look exotic, not pudgy; they have the veneer of religion to clock their evil plans; they appear to be better at intimidating, persuading and bribing than North Korea; they have the sympathy of much of the media, having persuading news distributors that they should be able to do what they want to do.
Under consideration right now is the Joint Comprehensive Plan Of Action (JCPOA), that was said to solve our problems with Iran's nuclear ambitions. The JCPOA was to change the pace of Iran's progress toward acquiring nuclear bombs, and to make her more responsible when she eventually acquired such weaponry. The JCPOA is a curious document that is said to be binding on the United States, even though it is not a treaty. Congress didn't act on it. They did take a vote on whether to continue to debate it, which isn't the same thing at all. It is not even an executive agreement. It was passed internationally in a unique way. The representative of the involved countries (P5+1) and Iran did gather together in Vienna, Austria. But no one signed it. No one consented with raised hand. And the deed was done. (See here.)
The Iranian theocrats are a very large threat. At the least, they can use their technology to de facto control the Middle East. If they realize their dreams, they will possess nuclear missiles that can wipe out Israel in one blast and reach the USA to knock out much of America. For a thorough examination of the Iran Deal, see the July-October 2015 issue of Think-Israel.org here.
Now that the smoke has dissipated and the mirrors swept away, it is becoming even more obvious that the JCPOA is a danger to our national security. As Michael Rubin put it, "it is long past time for Congress to demand the testimony of John Kerry, his chief of staff and top aides, in order to understand just what risks they were willing to inflict on the United States of America for what appears increasingly to be a Potemkin agreement."
To put it bluntly, ex-Prez Obama could not have done more to aid Iran carry out its plans for world domination. He told bold lies to maintain the fiction that the JCPOA was working out. He dropped charges against people illegally procuring US microelectronics and other equipment for Iran. He avoided Congressional supervision. He misrepresented the deal, describing it as a way to control Iran's nuclear productivity, while Iran was clearly stating it would brook no involuntary inspection and it would not curtail its own nuclear plans. And, as Claudia Rosett has pointed out (here), he committed the USA to "facilitate exchanges and visits to nuclear power plants outside of Iran." Let's spell this out: Iranians can legally come and examine our work on nuclear fusion, from whence cometh hydrogen bombs. A reader of her paper, Really Mike, pointed out "there is a secret codicil to Annex III, Section D, item 8, pages 4-5. It says: 'to help the Iranians decide which nuclear plant to visit, the US will provide complete architectural and engineering drawings for each facility under consideration.'"
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Thanks to Shoshana Bryen discussion of recent Middle East history, we can cut through all the misleading information the Obama Administration fed us about how the West was restraining Iran's nuclear and political ambitions. An improbable patchwork coalition of Shiites, Iraqi and Iranian, with America help, has been fighting the Islamic State, battling for Mosul and helping Bashar Assad continue to reign in Syria. While the West focuses on what to do about Syria, Iran, with help of its ally Hezbollah, is quietly taking over the "Shiite Crescent", the northwest route from Iran to the Mediterranean Sea, pushing Sunni Syrians out as it progresses. In the southwest, Iran generously supports the Houthi rebels in Yemen. And, as Bryen writes, "Iranian weapons brought in through Sudan and Eritrea threaten the stability of Sunni Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, lining the Mediterranean Sea opposite NATO's Southern Command." Obama's "make nice" strategy has not made Iran less aggressive. The Iranian mullahs do not see themselves as pariahs. They see themselves as the protector of Shiite Islam, and however the West rationalizes its concessions to Iran, the mullahs have used the resources given them to solidify control of more and more of the Middle East.
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This article by Matthew JR Brodsky emphasizes Iran's strong reinforcement of Shiite Syria. It also underscores Bryen's point in her article above that Iran is working on many fronts, successfully so, to become the major power in the Middle East. Brodsky concludes that the USA's focus on ISIS and somewhat on Syria is too narrow. He writes, "Iran remains on the march and poses a greater long-term strategic threat to the United States and its allies than does ISIS.... for the United States, the war in Syria should be more about Iran than ISIS."
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Iran is steadily growing in power. But she has some serious problems. Shahriar Kia writes about the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) a highly visible group that opposes the current Iranian regime. They recently held a meeting, in which the NCRI president, Maryam Rajavi, said the Iranians are suffering from Mullah rule. As she put it, "The Iranian society is simmering." American conference speakers suggested that declaring the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to be a terrorist group would be a good move. Kia writes that "[f]ormer and current members of Congress from both sides of the aisle in the U.S., along with a very prominent Arab world figure, were among the many others also seeking regime change in Tehran." Many believe that the goal of ridding "the world of Tehran's criminal mullahs" would already be attained, had the West not "adopted a disastrous policy of appeasement vis-à-vis Iran."
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A major problem for Iran is environmental. Because of unregulated over-extraction of the available water supply, she is losing her water supply. In the 1980's, simple techniques in controlling water distribution were beginning to pay off, and farming became more reliable, But, as Nik Kowsar writes, "The Islamic Republic has literally killed a large number of aquifers and alluvial plains, and blocked the rivers that fed these aquifers through its compulsive dam-building." During Rafsanjani's presidency, suggestions by experts on how to recharge aquifers were ignored. Kowsar writes of his own experience attempting to change water management during Mohammad Khatami's administration. The main result of his efforts was that he had to flee the country. Land erosion and water loss continue.
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As the Far Left showed more and more of its core hatreds, Israel was demonized by politicians, the media and Jews whose real religion is Marxism and/or Globalism. Thanks to the new Trump administration, things are somewhat better at the US State Department and some pro-Israel information is reaching the public. But the tepid Jews and the JINOS, Jews in Name Only, either don't fight back or fight against Israel. Inverting reality, Jews are called the bad guys, and the terrorists are said to be the victims. This video makes the point.
Gregg Roman's article points up a notable fact: the US is no longer treating terrorist activity against Israel as if Israel were somehow at fault and should not respond to brutal attacks. Obama's leaving Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu alone in the middle of an official meeting to go off to have his supper was a calculated insult. His attitude was mirrored in how the American State Department behaved towards Israel directly and in the United Nations whenever Israel was attacked and responded. Considering that Israel is the USA's most reliable ally in the Middle East, the changing attitude towards Israel is obviously intelligent.
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Vijeta Uniyal writes about a documentary on anti-semitism in Europe — "Chosen and Ostracised — The hatred of Jews in Europe" — that a German network was reluctant to show. As Uniyal writes, "Anti-Israel campaign has some powerful political backers within the European ruling establishment. The documentary reveals that European governments contribute nearly €100 million each year to supposed charities and NGOs that run anti-Israel and anti-Semitic campaigns. The facts uncovered in the documentary will undoubtedly cause some embarrassment to leading German charities that turn a blind eye to antisemitic incitement peddled by their local partners operating in Israel and elsewhere." The pressure from the public was sufficient to make the Geman network run it. But, apparently, it is again 'unavailable.'
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Despite the genuine sense of shock and anguish people experience visiting Holocaust museums and other memorial buildings, the impact of these memorials on increasing the determination of Jews and non-Jews to defend Jews currently under attack from Resurgent Islam and its allies has been minimal. Instead, Jews have generally put their hopes in promoting tolerance, to the point of becoming a danger to themselves. As Tom Umland, a reader of the original publication, commented, "Tolerance of that which ... in reality is intolerable or leads to the intolerable reflects only the hope of Jews that they themselves will also be tolerated - for once... It's an error of an overly simplistic understanding of their reality. That excessive or unthinking 'tolerance' can act to actually promote intolerant perspectives in others seems surprising at first but unchallenged attitudes lead to complacency. Sadly there are almost too many complacent Jews who take thinking about the Holocaust to be sufficient response to its reality. Glad to see that there are others who perceive more deeply. Yes, it can 'happen again', it already has, but not against Jews, thanks to Israel."
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Matti Friedman writes about the silliness of some American writers who hopped over to Israel, spoke (not necessarily literally) to some Arabs, and heard yet again of the horrors of having to wait at checkpoints. The Westerners swallowed all they heard and, without wasting time to check out the facts, hurried home to write about the effect the awful Israeli occupation has on Palestinian Arabs. A reader, Mendel, said about this article: "Well meaning fools. The Arabs have been playing the left for suckers for years. Much as the Soviets did 60+ years ago." But why, I wonder, do so many of these useful idiots have to be Jews? During Israel's retaliation in Gaza in 2014, Israel was urged to be more proportionate; which in practice would mean either building the Gazan Arabs the bomb shelters their leaders had not bothered doing OR destroying Israeli bomb shelters so more Jews would be killed to even things up. Similarly, in comparing the relative large proportion of (Leftist) Jews who criticize Israel to the total number of Jews versus the relative small number of articulate critics coming from the huge number of people belonging to other religions, shouldn't some Jewish Jew-haters retire, just to even things up?
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The Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) is another anti-Israel organization that wears a Jewish name. Founded two decades ago, it is focused on destroying Israel but it often changes its arguments, dressing its message in the latest in trendy Jew-bashing. At a recent panel discussion, John Rossomando tells us, JVP made it clear than Israel can not be allowed to exist because "... the problem is with the ideological foundation of the state itself: Zionism. Zionism at its core is white supremacy." A panelist, an Ethiopian Jew, lamented Israel's racist policy regarding Ethiopian Jews. She saw no irony in the fact that Israel rescued thousands of Ethopian Jews, who were living in primitive conditions, insecure, constantly in fear of their hostile neighbors. In a relatively short time Israel taught them how to thrive in the modern world. This panelist should be lamenting that the unrestricted freedom Israel gave her unfortunately also gave her the freedom to join groups which don't encourage her to accomplish much of anything. As a proper Marxist organization, JVP encourages 'minority' groups to feel 'victimized' and act down-trodden.
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Starting with some historic betrayals, this issue's History Section transits via Alex Rose's article to the history of the fallacious Arab claims to Jewish land. An article on the history of the Muslim Brotherhood, a major source of global instability, follows. The Section ends with the use of new techniques to clear up ancient mysteries.
The Jewish Board of Deputies (BoD) is urging British leaders to establish a Palestinian state! This is not as surprising as one might think, given its history since its founding in the 1750s. Susie Dym reviews its less than admirable history of failure to support Jewish integrity and growth.
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Paul Bogdanor writes of Rezso Kasztner, who aided the Nazis by not informing the Hungarian Jewish community that they were being tricked into going quietly to a concentration camp. Kasztner is certainly not worthy of the whitewashing now going on, which describes him as an "unknown hero" of the Holocaust. His actions were not heroic, but a disorganized community in denial of activities that hinted at their coming doom certainly didn't help matters.
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From the end of World War 2 on, the level of specific proof was so high that relatively few Nazis have been punished for their crimes against the Jews and others. For a while, prosecutors believed things would change if they reduced the criminal charge to 'accessory to murder', which carried a lesser "penalty in Germany of five to fifteen years in prison." It hasn't worked because of a prolonged appeals system, where several convicted Nazis died before their appeals were exhausted. Because of its high cost and low yield, there is now pressure to abandon use of this accusation. Efraim Zuroff, however, suggests that the value of such prosecution to public education and historical documentation makes it worthwhile to retain the law.
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Alex Rose justifiably takes issue with Martin Kramer's article on the Balfour Declaration, which claimed that Great Britain had no authority to dispose of the land, i.e., the vast land area of the Middle East (ME), which had belonged to the Ottoman Empire until it fought on the losing side in World War 1 (WW1). Actually Arabs and pro-Arabs don't mind that the Arabs gained control of 99.9% of the ME. It's the paltry one tenth of one percent (Israel, including all of Jerusalem, Samaria, Judea, Gaza and much of the Golan) then known as Palestine and in trust for a Jewish State that bothers them. Rose demolishes the myths that Britain promised what was then called Palestine to the Arabs as well as to the Jews and that therefore the Arabs were cheated out of their land. The cheating Britain did was to renege on its contract to help the Jews build up Palestine, especially by not allowing Jews who managed to escape the Nazis to enter Palestine, legally set aside as the future State of Israel by the legal follow-ups of the Balfour Declaration: the San Remo Conference and the Palestine Mandate.
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Alex Grobman has written a detailed and historically-accurate article exploding the oft-asserted Arab fabrication that the Jews stole land belonging to the Arabs. If the listener is ignorant, the Arabs will claim they had owned areas of great wealth and productivity in Palestine. In actuality, those Jews who returned to their homeland in the late eighteen hundreds found a small number of people from some fifty ethnic groups living in unsanitary conditions on mosquito-infested land that had lost its topsoil and had turned into swamp or desert. Yet, when the Jews bought this land, paying top dollars to often absentee owners, and, against all odds and after many failures, developed a thriving agriculture, the Arabs claimed they were cheated. The returnees also found a moribund economy and frequent raiding of defenseless villages by the Bedouins. They took steps to correct the situation both for themselves and the local Arabs. These improvements were not important to the wealthy Arab leadership, who happily sold large amounts of land to the Jews, but condemned establishing a Jewish homeland on land they continued to regard as theirs.
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The Obama administration with a straight face and full knowledge of the Muslim Brotherhood's ideology and terror activities claimed the Brotherhood was not extremist. Without equivocation, Cynthia Farahat points out that "The Muslim Brotherhood has operated as a terrorist entity for almost a century." And it has given rise to both open terrorist organizations such as Hamas and the Islamic State and "respectable" front organizations such as CAIR. Farahat writes of its history from its inception almost a century ago. It uses whatever tool is necessary: it hobnobs with powerful politicians, it funds social causes, it assassinates enemy leaders and bombs civilians, it creates riots and havoc — it instigated riots globally because some cartoonists had drawn an image of Mohammad. It has adherents on campus, in the Government and in all strata of society. With its huge supply of money, excellent organization, infra-structure and its dedication to making Sharia law the law of every land, it is a threat to the Far West, the Far East and all countries in between.
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This article by Shira Faigenbaum-Golovin and associates is about a way to read the writing on ancient shards, where the writing is no longer visible in ordinary light. Consider the implications for reassessing ideas that were based on less evidence. As one sentence in this article says, "There are almost 20 words on the recto with a changed reading (half of the total!)" There have been many articles summarizing this new approach to examining ordinary shards uncovered at archaeological sites. Some explain the technique; some its implications, some link it to political points-of-view. The article presented here is the original one. Considering that so many politicized scientists are spending their time promoting their political ideas, we thought it would be interesting to read a scrupulously performed and well-written account of a scientific study with a significant result.
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The Bene Israel is a Jewish community that lived in India for several hundred years. Their history was unknown and when they came to Israel, their being Jews was questioned by the Israeli Rabbinate. Chabin writes how modern tools used in studying population genetics were used to delve into the Bene Israel's pre-Indian history. The techniques used can't tell who specifically is Jewish and it isn't certain when the community came to India. It may have been as early as two millennia ago, perhaps even earlier, in 175 BCE. By comparing members of the Bene Israel to samples from various Jewish groups as well as to non-Jewish groups in India and Pakistan, the researchers could conclude that "the Bene Israel have significant Jewish ancestry that likely originated from a group of Jews from the Middle East."
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What we are talking about in the January–March 2017 Issue
Editor's Note:Think-Israel tends to use salafist rather than extremist or Islamist or militant or fundamentalist or activist to describe generically a pious Muslim, one who sticks as closely as possible to the unfiltered words and actions of Mohammad and the first three generations of Muslims, including, especially, the Companions of the Prophet. In modeling himself as closely as he can on the preachings and practices of Mohammad, a salafist can in modern terms be precisely described as an uninhibited terrorist, a theological supersessionist, a political supremacist who believes Islam and sharia law must dominate and a social barbarian, who wages jihad with whatever tools are available. Thanks to the high quality of whitewash supplied by sympathetic propagandists, he seldom is so described.
This issue expands the section devoted to examining Propaganda and Public Relations. This issue we talk about lies — lies by omission, lies by puffery, lies by denying the obvious and observable, lies by trivialization, lies by turning oneself into a living lie. Lies by downplay, lies made out of whole cloth, lies by distortion, lies by willful misinterpretation and other such forms of fakery. They are seldom discrete. They overlap, they bump over each other, they change form, they compress becoming dense mantras, or expand into puffed-up lunacy. We can't cover every area, of course. That would take a 3-volume treatise. We start by trying to pin down what qualifies as fake news and some of its consequences.
Fake News is a new term for an old malady. It's new enough that its borders are still fuzzy. Is fake news just a superabundance of typos and minor accidental errors? The news media pounced on President Trump for saying there was an immigrant riot the night before he spoke about a riot (actually, Trump was referring to a video he saw about the riot), while ignoring that Sweden has a real problem with its Middle Eastern refugees, who refuse to assimilate.
Or is fake news the equivalent of a less than a full understanding of the significant facts? We saw this when citizens of some Muslim countries were suddenly restricted from using their visas to come to America. The news media labeled them immigrants and ignored that the targeted countries were notorious for breeding terrorists and that's what we wanted to keep out.
Or, sliding along the scale from innocent error to deliberate lying, is fake news a distortion of some of the facts and omission of others? In any investigation, the facts are not all equal in value. After all, what makes a doctor a good diagnostician is his ability to pull out the significant facts from a welter of data. Yet, from another perspective, the facts considered significant are unlikely to be the same in both right wing publications and leftist ones. Nationalist publications will likely give facts different weights than do globalist ones. An organization devoted to identity politics is unlikely to highlight the same information as an organization designed to unite all around American core values. One might ask: when does emphasis on particular facts while ignoring other significant facts become distortion?
Or does fake apply only to the far end of the graph, where 'facts' are invented and informational items are trimmed and pasted together to form a complete distortion of reality? A notorious recent example (examined below) was when a former British intelligence agent, Christopher Steele, who had either retired or been dismissed from MI-6, was paid, it is said by Jeb Bush and/or other GOPers, for an unsubstantiated and implausible account of Trump's purported relationship to Russian leaders, including his supposed activities in Moscow when he was there as judge of a beauty pageant. Some items were contradicted by documented facts and the activities didn't fit Trump's way of doing things, yet John McCain passed the report on to the FBI and several journalists. Despite admission by Democratic leaders that the Trump-Russia collusion is fake ("Democrats Admit Trump-Russia Collusion Is Fake Finally" here), it has become part of the Democratic credo, accepted as truth. These are the same people that were not outraged when Hillary Clinton, with Prez Obama's approval, helped make it possible for Russia to acquire control of one-fifth of all of the USA's uranium production capacity, (NY Times, 23April2015).
It might be a while to come to a consensus on what constitutes fake news. But it is obvious that with undisciplined social media and agenda-promoting press and TV people, the spread of false assertions has clearly become more extensive. It doesn't help that supposedly reputable news sources make a habit of running headlines and inlines that are opposites in content. Assessing information has often become a bewildering chore, damaging our ability to make intelligent assessments of situations.
This set of articles makes a try at defining fake news and then judges its different impacts in several situations. A nice low-keyed video worth viewing is "How to Spot Fake News" from FactCheck.org here,
Characterizing fake news is not easy, if at all doable. In this article, Ashe Schow presents a reasonable way of discriminating fake news. A story that is completely made up is obviously fake news, while satiric stories are assumed to be fake but hope to cleverly make a point. Ashe includes other categories that are less clear. One thing is certain: if one considers why a story was written in addition to its actual compilation of facts, analysis can get very complicated.
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Does fake news affect opinion? We start with this article by Michael Keefer on the impact of a recently published dossier on President Trump's supposed collusion with Russia to win the presidency. Keefer focuses on plausibility in assessing the truth-value of the dossier. Too many people think as did Andrei Soldatov, writing in The Guardian, "despite all these failings ["factual confusion, unverifiable details"], Steele's representation of Kremlin procedures and motivations "sounds about right...whatever the truth of Putin's connections with Trump, makes it all pretty scary." Keefer concludes, "I would describe this reasoning—according to which a document whose analytical method is problematic and whose evidential basis is variously confused, unverifiable, highly questionable, or wholly absent, can nonetheless be accepted as plausible—as mental debris. If any categorical distinction can be made between thinking of this order and the kind of arguments that sent accused witches to the stake in the 16th and 17th centuries, I should like to know what it might be." The dossier may be implausible and unverifiable, but some, even in the media, have accepted it because it says what they want to hear.
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Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow did a controlled study investigating the impact of false stories on the 2016 election. Their results indicate that false defamatory stories about Hillary Clinton did not cause her to lose the election. And exposure to pro-Trump fake stories had almost no effect. In sum, fake news had virtually no impact on the election results. The introductory Executive Summary by Charles Hartwell is an independent article summing up Allcott and Gentzkow's detailed analysis of their experimental design and results. The influence of fake news might, of course, differ in other circumstances. Clearly, a search for patterns determined by examining the impact of false and/or misleading information in particular events and conditions would be a useful investigation.
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David Kupelian considers the long term effects of fake news. He discusses how the Mainstream Media' (MSM) "has become the very enemy it condemns." "[C]oncern over 'fake news' [has become] a new weapon for attacking opposing viewpoints, 'conspiracy websites'" and [...] legitimate news." "Much, if not most, of what America's 'mainstream media' report today as news is either misleading or flat-out false." Thanks to a biased and corrupted media, too many believe a video caused the attack on the American compound in Benghazi and that anthropogenic global warming is a settled science and can not be questioned. Kupelian points out that "fake news, when codified over time, becomes fake history." What make this possible are the underlying assumptions that have conditioned our thinking; i.e., Islam is a religion of peace, America is a deeply racist nation, capitalism is inherently predatory, etc., etc. And this trend is increasing.
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Marches, rallies and 'spontaneous' gatherings that deteriorate into riots are the most visible signs of discontent. They seems so down-to-earth, accidental clumpings of people attracted to a particular place on a particular day. If the media agree with the purpose of the gathering, the entire congregation is praised as serious and discerning. However, with patience, one can find internet videos of interviews of ordinary folk that haven't a clue why they are marching, or, maybe, they went to the wrong rally. Many are there to promote identity agendas. For others, it's a Fourth of July happy type of celebration, whatever the date. Others vent and growl on cue, when the cameras shine on them. Most walk placidly, carrying posters that, surprise, surprise, just happen to be just like those carried by half a hundred of their neighbors.
Nidra Poller said this about the highly publicized Woman's March that took place January 21, 2017, "The self-appointed female nation, outraged by the words and deeds of the new president, took to the streets on the 21st of January, the day after the inauguration. Protesters marched in a compact mass estimated at 700,000 to a million in Washington DC, with another million tallied in national and international sister marches[...]The world's media gushed with enthusiasm over the movement's scope and message, which was clicked into contemporary history on its own terms, in the name of women's dignity." Using sharia-devout Linda Sarsour as anchor, Poller provides a sobering analysis of the tainted ideology behind this seemingly virtuous movement. ("Feminine Spring," February 16, 2017, see here.)
One worrisome phenomenon in the turbulent and emotional acting out of anger at Donald Trump being elected president is the set of people who are reacting like sophomoric seniors. It isn't just trust-fund babies and IQ 80s, it's supposedly rational beings that run respected scientific organizations. People considered worthy of being elected to the prestigious honor society, Sigma Xi, are planning to join the March for Science in April. At least some of them are. It's not clear what they are marching for. Or against. But march they will.
Marches, even riots, often look staged. As they should. Too many are carefully contrived and coached. In addition to the uniform rants and foul-mouth ravings against the new administration, they share fixed sources of money and organization. The Trump administration realistically acknowledged (Newsmax, March 22, 2017) "there are people working in the government who are likely part of what has been called the 'deep state' — an inner core of Obama loyalists seeking to stop the Trump presidency." This section records some reality about the actual leadership of the discontented.
See also: "Everything George Soros Doesn't Want You To Know" on Soros using religious organizations to corrupt their belief system.
Matthew Vadum writes of astroturfing where participants attempt to stack a public forum or townhall with their members to dominate the questions asked and appear to be the majority opinion. They are taught to denounce Trump's attempts to prevent terrorists from entering the US as unvetted refugees by following a slick script designed to elicit sympathy and ignore facts. Criminalize, islamophobia, xenophobia, pregnant mothers afraid to get prenatal care (aka illegal aliens), justice and love are important words in their vocabulary. As Vadum observes, "This language is reminiscent of communist revolutionary Ernesto 'Che' Guevara's famous statement that 'the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.'" The object is to convince Congressmen that they speak for the majority. The contacts listed in the script are members of organizations funded by George Soros. Another Soros-funded institute, The Center for Social Inclusion, teaches "Democratic congressmen how to smear their opponents as racist." The Center "practices the same pathological mixture of Marxism and identity politics that President Obama was raised on. The group was founded based on the assumption that America is an evil structurally racist country that systematically oppresses everyone who is not Caucasian." Repeated often enough, the belief that whites are racists becomes inculcated. As Vadum says, using the racist smear "to shut down open debate over government spending is a fascistic frontal assault on freedom of thought and expression that takes Alinskyite sliminess to new depths."
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DiscoverTheNetworks provides us with the history of Linda Sarsour, the quintessential islamophile. She labels people as islamophobic even if they have much reason to find Muslim terrorism loathsome. Like any pious Muslim, she will allow no criticism of Islam, warranted or not. A feminist in a hijab, she has won praise from the news media who either don't know her evil history or don't care. I always wonder about devout Muslim female believers in sharia law — say, someone like Huma Abedin's mother who works for a sharia takeover of the West — what would happen if sharia law were to win out? Will they go happily back to a sequestered harem, the chattel of their husbands or male relatives? Or do they envision a two-tiered Islam, with the commoners completely controlled by Mohammad's preachings, while the elites are allowed to run their lives as they see fit. It would be the Islamic equivalent of the two-tiered Socialism our political Marxist elite expected to come about, with Hillary elected as proxy for Obama's third term.
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All the fervor and energy and dedicated effort that people expected from Barack Obama during his presidency is finally being manifested, now that Obama is back to being a community organizer. With lots of money available to him and thousands of devoted globalists and socialists ready to be moles in the new administration or activists around the country, Obama and his live-in advisor/handler/motivator, Valerie Jarrett, are ready to run his new organization, variously described as deep state or shadow state, from his new home in Washington.
Robert Barnes writes of the Orwellian fashion in which the media attempt to restrict the meaning of "fake news" or "deep state" to to the needs of their own ideologies and agendas. Or they ignore the term; or deny, for example, that the deep state exists. Yet the notion of a power group setting up a structured organization running counter or in parallel with the official government has been studied for more than a half century. Working with intelligence sources, often government agencies, media implementers of the deep state's mission malign political people like Trump of Flynn, broadcasting innuendo loosely based on surveillance by these government agencies. Trump may have made the first cut into seriously looking into the deep government and its spying activities by suggesting that the "illegal intercepts and illicit leaks of those intercepts should be the scandal, not incredulous reports of collusion [e.g., with Russia] unsupported by the legally innocent conversations found on those intercepts." A major figure in the current deep state is ex-President Obama, who is putting to use his experience initiating spy operations on American citizens during his time in office.
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The anti-Trumpists scored a victory in getting rid of Michael Flynn, an ardent and savvy enemy of Salafist Islam. Two separate consequences have resulted.
First: Flynn was replaced by Gen. McMaster as National Security Advisor. Unfortunately, McMaster seems to be more concerned with downplaying Islamic terrorism than in dealing with it. He has distanced jihad terrorism from "true" Islam, ignoring that jihadists are pious Muslims acting in accordance with the Koran. They are enjoined to fight the infidel until the whole world embraces sharia law. As Robert Spencer has pointed out (here), "One cannot defeat an enemy that one does not understand, much less one that one refuses to understand. ... When one's duties include national security responsibilities, one has a professional duty to know the enemy or do due diligence to know the enemy. To fail to do so makes one professionally negligent in one's duties."
Second: when the news media revealed the surveillance conditions underlying the conclusion that Michael Flynn had unauthorized interactions with the Russian ambassador to the US, it popped open a large can of worms: members of the Obama administration appear to have been spying on the Trump election team for some time, as they have on journalists, congressmen and other American citizens. The story is that they were looking at foreign infiltration and just happened to listen to the Americans on the other end of the telephone or email. That doesn't explain, why, as they did with Flynn, they released the names of the Americans, a felonious act. Will these illegal activities be ignored as they were in the Obama administration?
When the Obama administration started, we were treated to a whole new vocabulary such as throw him under the bus, which described an activity the administration, unfortunately, would routinely indulge in. The Trump administration is barely in place and we need to learn a new vocabulary: the Deep State, political operative and shadow warriors, terms describing the malevolent activities ex-President Obama and his cronies have initiated. As Kenneth Timmermnan writes, "Want to know who broke the law by leaking information gleaned from a highly-classified U.S. intelligence program to monitor foreign diplomats about Michael Flynn? ... start by looking at former CIA director John Brennan, an Obama political operative." The president who spent quality time on the golf course during his presidency has suddenly become hard-working and politically involved. His first mate is the former CIA director, John Brennan, infamous for defining Islamic jihad as a spiritual journey and welcoming members of the Muslim Brotherhood into Federal agencies. Together, they have stuffed NSA with political operatives of their own choosing. To date, they have 'destroyed Michael Flynn before he could destroy them.' Clearly, President Trump needs to watch his back.
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Lawrence Sellin writes that Lt. Gen McMaster, who replaced Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn as National Security Advisor, has a weak strategy for defeating Resurgent Islam, which is working without let-up to replace Western democracy with sharia law. Unlike Flynn, McMaster views Islam's salafist ideology as a distortion of the true Islam. Actually, it is a valid expression of Mohammad's view of the world and his desire to put Islam above all other religions in the world. McMaster's solution is information warfare against what he sees as non-authentic Islam. However, as Sellin points out, "Pumping out more counter-propaganda, while leaving the sources of the ideology free to go about their dirty business" [is] "counter-productive."
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David Harsanyi writes of the growing evidence that President Trump, while he was a Presidential candidate and when he was President-elect, and his transition team were under surveillance by the Obama administration. Within the context of keeping tabs on foreigners, it is legitimate to record the conversations of Americans on the other end of the phone. What is not legitimate is uncovering the names of the Americans, when the conversations have no foreign intelligence value. What is appalling is disseminating the information. In a companion piece entitled "Here's Why Nunes' Obama Spying Revelations Are Such A Big Deal," Mollie Hemingway writes, (see here): "It matters not whether the Trump team were officially the targets, whether the targets were designed to obscure the real targets, or whether it truly was incidental collection." What is important is:
1) Information was collected on the Trump team by Obama administration agencies.
2) This information had no reason to be shared in intelligence reports to Obama officials.
3) Obama officials may have flouted legally required attempts to minimize and mask personal identifying information.
4) This had nothing to do with Russia.
To put it bluntly, as James Rosen wrote: ("Potential 'Smoking Gun' Showing Obama Administration Spied On Trump Team, Source Says," 24mar2017, here) "Republican congressional investigators expect a potential 'smoking gun' establishing that the Obama administration spied on the Trump transition team, and possibly the president-elect himself, will be produced to the House Intelligence Committee this week [...] The intelligence is said to leave no doubt the Obama administration, in its closing days, was using the cover of legitimate surveillance on foreign targets to spy on President-elect Trump ..."
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The media and such mags as The New Yorker have done a yeoman job minimizing the significance of Susan Rice's having intelligence-gathering agencies openly write out the names of Americans who had turned up in a report she got on Russian activities in this countries. In this article Andrew McCarthy makes the very important point that it is the intelligence agency — in this case it was the combined effort of three intelligence agencies — that writes the report that decides, with due regard to privacy issues, whether it is necessary to reveal the name when an American is mentioned. They rarely find it necessary. Susan Rice was not an investigator or collector of information, only a receiver, and, given the nature of the material, would know from context who the people were. So why would she ask for the names in clear, if not to make the leaking and utilization of the information more effective? And she did have Obama's backing. Herman Cain (here) in discussing McCarthy's article writes, "They could have told her no, of course, but she was the National Security Adviser and she worked directly for the president. Were they likely to tell someone with that kind of standing no?"
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Sweden has long seen seen itself as the best place to live, with personal freedom and government backup. Donald Trump pointed to Sweden's problems with its immigrant Muslims, incorrectly saying he'd seen a riot on TV, when what he'd seen was a TV discussion about Sweden. Surely, news editors and publishers know that Malmo is the rape capitol of the world, and that the Swedes are being terrorized by Muslim immigrants. Yet Trump's mistake became the high point of many articles flaying him and denying that anything was amiss in Sweden. When riots broke out shortly thereafter, the misplaced emphasis by the news media on Trump's mistake while denying Trump's important points — the high crime rate and lack of adaptability of the Muslim "refugees" in Sweden — became an excellent example of techniques that characterize some news now labeled 'fake news.' The sudden focus on Sweden brought to light that some Swedes, like other Westerns, were having belated buyer's remorse about their Muslim immigrants from the Middle East and Africa.
This essay by Bruce Bawer can be read just for pleasure. But it does have a moral. It tells the story how the news media and politicians yet again lambasted President Trump, this time for saying Sweden had problems with its Muslim immigrants. Those who insist that Sweden is a model of civic harmony got their comeuppance when soon afterwards there was yet another ugly eruption by the migratory adherents of the religion of peace. The politicians continue to pretend there's no problem, while civilized living in Sweden's cities disintegrates. Bawer points out that the newscasters could have gotten the real story if they'd interviewed truth tellers. Instead they provided us with a neat example of news that is fake because it denies observable truth.
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Fjordman paints a picture of a people who are under attack both by the foreign immigrants they have generously allowed into their once happy country and by their own native leaders who continue to deny the havoc the Muslims have caused. As he points out, "Swedes are ... attacked as an ethnic group [by the immigrants], but they are aggressively barred [by the native Swedes] from identifying and defending themselves as a group of people with a shared heritage and shared interests.." As a result, "[i]n just two generations, Sweden has become an increasingly dysfunctional and crime-ridden country. The main cause of this negative transformation is non-European mass immigration." Fjordman highlights the bizarre attitude, common not only in Sweden but in other Western countries including the USA, of condemning legitimate criticism of Muslim behavior while condoning nasty remarks about the native culture.
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It may be true that by careful selection, one can prove that Swedes still believe their country is still Utopia or, contrariwise, that they are living fearful lives, harassed by a foreign clump of Muslims that doesn't assimilate and doesn't live by Sweden's rules of civility. That doesn't make the two opinions equally valid. Crime statistics validate the argument that Sweden has serious problems. And as Scott Morefield points out, the growth of the Swedish Democratic Party — it is Anti-European Union and advocates a severe reduction in immigration — is another indication that many Swedes are repudiating Sweden's immigration policy. Swedes have been suffering from having tried to absorb a religious group that refuses to assimilate, or even to live their own way but without threatening Sweden's native population. The pattern of Islamic aggression — riots and rapes — may be different than in Israel, where Muslims knife, stone, crash vehicles and snipe at individuals and small groups, but the result is the same: the country's citizens are fearful, angry and resentful.
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The public has become more aware of the incoming Muslims in their neighborhoods because the newcomers have rapidly increased the crime rate and spread diseases not seen for years. The incomplete and mostly irrelevant response of left-leaning politicians and opinion-makers has been to push "compassion" and argue that "America is a country of immigrants." This may be true, but our immigrant ancestors that came through Ellis Island were sent back if they were diseased. Moreover, they needed someone to vouch they would not be a burden on the public treasury.
Articles in this set are concerned with how the government has been using religious organizations to 'welcome wagon' incoming refugees. It's been a win-win for the organizations that provide a veneer of godliness and for the Obama administration and its Islamic, Marxist, globalist and multidiversity adherents, eager to seed the USA with Muslims. The only losers have been ordinary American citizens, both in dollars and in security. Additional information is available in "Refugee Resettlement: The lucrative business of serving immigrants," written by James Simpson, published in July 2015 by Capital Research Center (CRC) and archived at https://capitalresearch.org/article/refugee-resettlement-the-lucrative-business-of-serving-immigrants/. A PDF version is available here. The impact on people neglected by or harmed by the religious groups who are busy caring for Muslim "refugees" is also examined.
Video Source: "https://needtoknow.news/2017/04/whistleblower-reveals-un-planned-invasion-refugees-us-already-underway/", March 22, 2017:
US: A Missouri woman is interviewed by radio-show host, Josh Tolley, and tells how she became involved in her state's refugee-immigration program and how the program is far more extensive and advanced than most people realize. She describes how the UN, under the heading of Agenda 2030, is planning immigration into the US similar to what is happening in Europe. The goal is to create chaos and lay the foundation for breaking the US into smaller political units with equal UN representation — and the end of America as a sovereign nation. -GEG
This video is an absolute must for understanding an insidious government program that brings in Muslims each year to all parts of the United States. In it, a Missouri official points out, the process to make the 'refugees' U.S. citizens starts immediately. They receive social security and free housing, free medical care, free food. They are not vetted. In fact, in many cases, their real names are not known. Many leave the area and there is no further information about them. The program was started by the Carter administration and was continued by every administration since then.
Babs Barron wrote this essay because of her unease viewing the collaboration of the Reform Synagogues Movement of which she is a member with Citizens UK, "a coalition of faith groups that include extremist Salafist and Muslim Brotherhood organizations." Together this inter-faith coalition brings Syrian refugees into the UK. It references a video that gives us a sense of what some participating Jews think this is all about. Filled with pride in what they are accomplishing, they ignore the elephant-sized problem that, thanks to the orientation of Citizens UK, too many of these "refugees" will, sooner or later, be a danger to the Jews and Christians who have so willingly come to their aid.
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Abraham Miller writes, "The Jewish roots of HIAS go back to rescuing Jews from the Russian pogroms of the 19th century. Its role as a lifeline for Jews who had nobody else to help them is prominently displayed in its fundraising pitched to Jews, but the word 'Hebrew' might 'offend' the Muslim refugees from the Middle East that HIAS is now busy resettling in America." Like the Christian organizations that participate in settling Muslims in the USA, they are well-paid by taxpayers' dollars. After three months, they can dump the "refugees" on governmental welfare, which again comes out of the taxpayers' pockets. Miller suggests it's time for HIAS to return to rescuing European Jews, victims of the co-religionists of the Muslims that HIAS is "rescuing."
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Michael Leahy provides us with statistics about the cost of bringing in "refugees." The USA spends hundreds of millions of dollars resettling refugees across the USA, and providing many of them with free food, shelter and education indefinitely. The initial resettlement of the entering refugees is often handled by voluntary agencies (VOLAGS), who are handsomely paid for their services. Five of the top nine VOLAGS are Christian. After 3-4 months, the VOLOG can turn the refugees over to the local welfare office. The monetary rewards are so great that often traditional charity efforts are neglected, while a VOLAG concentrates resettling refugees. Over time, "more than a million Muslims have been brought to the United States through this program." As the number of Muslim refugees increases, the danger that some of these migrants from the Middle East may be potential terrorists increases. As more Muslims invade the USA, the public is being forced to confront this problem because they commit obscene crimes — raping children as young as a five — and re-introducing diseases not seen in a long time.
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Sean Savage write of one example of the terrorism that Christians are subjected to in many Arab countries. He writes of the Egyptian Copts, who are being terrorized and often slaughtered, victims of the Islamic State (IS). They are also targeted by followers of the Muslim Brotherhood because of their minority status and because Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi has protected them. Many Christian churches in the West are committed to resettling Muslim Arabs from the Middle East. Or they side with the Palestinians Arabs, actively aiding BDS activities. Why do they take so little interest in the fate of their co-religionists in the Middle East?
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Quakers for peace is about as accurate as Islam is a religion of peace. Quakers may sound quaint and their thous and thees are charming but their best schtik is hate, with particularly hateful words directed towards Judaism. They have produced some highly virulent anti-Jewish propaganda. In this article, Asaf Romirowsky contrasts the Quaker reputation for promoting peace with their day-to-day advocacy for Banning, Divesting and Sanctioning (BDS) Israeli goods and products and otherwise isolating Israel from normal relations with other countries. YogiRUS said of this article: "The Quakers and their Washington lobby, the America Friends Service Committee, are one of the oldest, dishonest, and hypocritical anti-Israel operations in the nation's capital. They are involved in virtually every anti-Israel effort, always to remain anonymous, especially in recruiting other church groups to their cause. They are, beneath their pacifist camouflage, as anti-Semitic as they come. In effect, they are major supporters of the BDS movement and many Jews are unaware of this fact. By doing so, they underwrite terrorism. Kindly read [this article] carefully and forward it to many others. This is really important."
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I was reading in the Jerusalem Post about Csanád Szegedi, a far-right Hungarian politician, who, as is typical for European anti-Semites, trivialized the Holocaust, was certain Jews were evil foreigners, and blamed them for anything and everything that is wrong with the world. Then he discovered he was one of them, the Jewish people, a people he despised (see here). One fact, small in the scheme of things, and his world view changed completely. It made me wonder if the inverse also works. Is there some small but weighty conviction, some shard of ideology, working in the minds of Jews who hate Jews, Judaism and Zionism? Is there some idea stuck in the Jewish anti-Jew's mind that swamps awareness of the amazing civilizing and moral impact Jews have had on humanity? Is there some ideological notion that can make him ignore how small Jewish 'crimes' are relative to the deeds of so many other countries? Bernie Sanders, for example, who was born around the time of the Holocaust, was apparently brainwashed for life in his hippy days so that forever after he has been promoting the interests of Hamas and Islam and Marxism against Israel and Judaism and nationalism. This section has other examples of Jews who don't identify as Jews except when needing credentials to be critical of Jews.
Steven Plaut, who died January 17, 2017, was a Princeton-trained economist and professor of economics at University of Haifa. He was a most incisive critic of the stupidity of Israeli politicians and the fatuous fantasies of Jewish academics who filtered facts through their Marxist anti-Jewish ideology. His articles, both serious and humorous-sarcastic, were brilliant and on-the-mark. This article from 2011 is about Yoav Peled at Tel Aviv University. This article details Plaut's shrewd observation: "The worst enemy of radical Marxist pseudo-academics seems to be even more radical Marxist pseudo-academics."
I've no idea if they are related but I have just come across a video of an interview by Tavis Smiley with Miko Peled, a Jewish activist for the Arabs, who has recently written a biography of his father and himself. Pelo gifts Smiley with a nicely-voiced summary of the Arab fraudulent claim to Jewish land (see here). He seems to have no knowledge of modern Israel's history and the Jewish legal and moral right to the land of Israel, which includes Samaria and Judea (AKA the West Bank.) He certainly ignores facts that can, for example, be found in the January-June 2016 issue of Think-Israel, (here below). Or do historic and legal facts mean nothing when compared to whatever drives him to help the Arabs destroy Israel?
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In the USA, the Muslim Brotherhood has a single objective: to replace US law with Sharia law. To fulfill its mission, it does whatever will work, from generating Muslim-defense groups, making the lives of Jewish students on campus miserable to encouraging 'lone-wolf' acts of terror. One of their spin-offs is Hamas. Another is the notorious Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). It is well-known ISNA is a front for collecting money for Hamas. Yet, as Daniel Greenfield tells us, the American Jewish Congress (AJC) and ISNA have formed the Muslim-Jewish Advisory Council, which promotes the Islamic version of peace between Jews and Arabs: Israel gives up land, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas take and take — until there is no Israel.
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Isi Leibler writes of the "crass political exploitation of their Jewish identity by American leaders of purportedly 'nonpartisan' mainstream Jewish organizations" in behalf of a 'progressive' anti-Trump political agenda. As Leibler writes, "... liberal Jewish leaders have declared a hysterical war against the Trump administration. Led initially by the Anti-Defamation League but rapidly joined by the Reform and Conservative wings of the Jewish community, many Jewish community leaders have exploited their positions to endorse a vicious campaign in which Trump is portrayed as a satanic anti-Semite promoting fascism and racism, representing the antithesis of Jewish values. This, despite the reality that his presidency highlights an unprecedented acceptance of Jews at the highest levels of government. ... in promoting their personal political agenda and vulgarizing and demonizing Trump while posing as Jews motivated by religious principles, they are hypocritically exploiting their leadership positions and fueling anti-Semitism. ...This becomes even more stark in contrast to the eight years of Obama's administration, during which not a single condemnation was uttered against the outrageously biased statements in relation to Israel." It is bitter irony that "... today, the prime global anti-Semitic threat emanates not from neo-Nazis but from the witches' brew of far-left and Muslim anti-Jewish incitement, which has transformed many American university campuses into hotbeds of anti-Semitism." I wish I could say that Leibler exaggerates. It is more the case that, if anything, he has understated the childish antics of America's Jewish leadership.
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We're conditioned to discovering yet another intellectual Jew or academic Jew who can dish out Jew hate every bit as ugly as what comes from non-Jewish Marxists, globalists and Muslims. We are still in the head-shaking stage when we learn that yet another leader of a large Jewish organizations is working hard to bring in unvetted Muslims and/or is contributing to anti-Israel 'Jewish' organizations, while defending Muslim Brotherhood organizations. But what is unique among Jewish anti-Jews is the recent arrest of an 'ordinary' Jew who sent out a large number of bomb threats to Jewish schools and centers, disrupting the lives of Jews around the globe, engendering fear and paralyzing normal activities. The suspect, Michael Kaydar, a teenager, is a dual citizen of the US and Israel, and lives in Ashkelon, Israel. He used Google voice to sound like a woman, paid in Bitcoin, which isn't registered, and tapped into relays. In this article, Deborah Danan emphasizes the attention-getting aspects of making bomb threats. She cites articles by Brian of London that emphasize possible political agendas. Whether these are sufficient explanation, or even part of the explanation, we have yet to learn.
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Visualizing Jewish Jew-hate as a virus, to quote from a citation in the article, "[t]hose infected with the virus exaggerate Israeli sins real or imagined, while excusing or rationalizing Palestinian Arab anti-Semitism and outrages against Jews." But why? Alex Grobman examines several possibilities. Noting that "[i]dentification with the aggressor is the defense mechanism by which one adopts the perspective of one's abuser," hating Jewishness can, in many cases, be the ticket to inclusion. This may explain "why Jewish self-hatred is so pervasive within institutions to which belonging carries prestige. From campus groups with popular coeds to elite private colleges to social registries, to think tanks to insider punditry, to Israel's Europhiles..." Grobman suggests ways to counter anti-Israel bias by presenting accurate information to specific questions. He suggests we ignore the Jewish self-haters and work with "organizations fighting against the delegitimization, and prepare ourselves and our children with the knowledge to fight back."
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Chiune Sugihara was a Japanese diplomat assigned to the Japanese Consulate in Lithuania. Defying his government's restrictions on visas, he issued transit visas to Lithuanian Jews to escape to Japan. Dovid Greenberg meditates on Sugihara's bravery and goodness and the impact he had on future generations of the Jews he saved. Sugihara's home in Lithuania is now a museum, maintained as a tribute to a brave man who did what was right.
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The Warsaw Ghetto uprising took place in the spring of 1943 when the Polish Jews that had been forced into the Ghetto resisted the efforts by German soldiers to move them to Treblinka. Before this final act of resistance, many German photographers had come to the Ghetto and recorded the sheer misery suffered by the Jews who were starving, freezing and without medical care. Here are some of the pictures that have been preserved at Yad Vasham and other places.
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Matthew Shaer writes of a story told about the escape of some Jewish prisoners from Ponar, a Nazi concentration camp near the city of Vilnius in Lithuania in World War 2. They had been part of a group forced to disinter and cremate the skeletons of Jews previously killed by the Nazis. The Germans were losing the war and wanted to erase all signs of what they had done. But no one knew how the Jews had escaped, so the story was considered a fable. Richard Freund, an American archaeologist, and other scientists, studying aerial photos and contour maps, and using tomography, have uncovered the escape route: the prisoners had, slowly with small scoops, dug a 3-foot wide tunnel under the woods past the barbed-wire fence.
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Debra Rubin writes of one American Jew, who saved family members and their friends trying to escape from Europe during the Nazi period. America had a quota in effect. Moreover, as sponsor, he needed to demonstrate he had the financial means to support them, so they would not be a burden on the USA. The quota was not as restrictive in Cuba or Argentina, but the cost of a visa was very high.
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About the time that Steven Spielberg got started recording the reminiscences of Holocaust survivors, Aryeh Halivni founded Toldot Yisrael (Chronicles of Israel) to record personal histories of Jews who lived through the Mandate period and the early years of the State of Israel. Judy Lash Balint writes of some of these recountings of raw history.
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As written in Wikipedia, "Ammunition Hill (Hebrew: Giv'at HaTahmoshet) was a fortified Jordanian military post in the northern part of Jordanian-occupied East Jerusalem and the western slope of Mount Scopus." It was seized by the Jordanians, who invaded the new-born state of Israel in 1948, severing the connection between Western Israel and Mount Scopus. Steve Linde writes of some of the IDF heroes of the 1967 Sixth Day War who recaptured this part of Israel, when Jordan, together other Arab countries, again invaded Israel.
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What we are talking about in the July–December 2016 Issue
Editor's Note:Think-Israel tends to use salafist rather than extremist or Islamist or militant or fundamentalist or activist to describe generically a pious Muslim, one who sticks as closely as possible to the unfiltered words and actions of Mohammad and the first three generations of Muslims, including, especially, the Companions of the Prophet. In modeling himself as closely as he can on the preachings and practices of Mohammad, a salafist can in modern terms be precisely described as an uninhibited terrorist, a theological supersessionist, a political supremacist who believes Islam and sharia law must dominate and a social barbarian, who wages jihad with whatever tools are available. Thanks to the high quality of whitewash supplied by sympathetic propagandists, he seldom is so described.
Based on this observation, I was cautiously optimistic before the election: attendance at any Donald Trump get-together was huge and enthusiastic; Hillary Clinton could barely fill a gym and many of the photos taken there were photoshopped to show fill-in people. But Trump's incontestable win was a dream wish and a most welcome reality.
Ahead of the election, savvy watchers of election day illegalities were wary of illegals and others being trekked from voting site to voting site. Warnings were issued: look for a bunch of people that doesn't look like locals and who have come with a "handler". Viewers were encouraged to follow them to their next voting place; to report them immediately and to take pictures. (REF: Project Veritas). Moreover, there are already reports from early voters that they voted 'Trump-Pence', but when they checked the results, the vote now read 'Clinton-Kaine.' Unfortunately, electronic voting machines can be rigged. Some technical people in India have been circulating information about possible fraud in their elections for several years. In the US, we apparently have a similar problem. As one indication, the SmartMatic machine comes from a company owned by George Soras. We were cautioned that a way to thwart machine rigging was to demand a paper ballot. By law, a voter is entitled to receive one. Concern that a voter's wishes would be ignored by a variety of techniques was not a paranoid idea — in the 2012 election, for example, several counties in swing states had more votes registered than there were people living in these counties — it helped Obama win.
Before the election, Trump was excoriated for refusing to say he would unconditionally accept the election results; Hillary, in contrast, assured us she would not quibble with the count. After the election, things changed rapidly and rabidly, with Hillary indirectly and Prez Obama, both directly and indirectly, trying to foment a "grass roots" rebellion against the election results.
What's important is that America may have been stopped from its precipitous fall into economic and political ruin. The salafists and the globalists and the Marxists have weakened so much of the country's judicial, academic, political and media institutions, it is unlikely that one man can undo the damage in one, even two, terms. But the efforts to weaken America and destroy Israel will certainly slow down if not completely stop. And for that, we should be grateful.
Every few years we post an article on the correlation of the number of Muslims in a host country and their increasing demands for perks and power until they are strong enough to take over. These articles are general observations about the process of takeover — and what cultural features of Islam and the West contribute to Islam's success.
This article is one of the core articles on Liberty versus Sharia on the Civilus Defendus website. As they write:
READ MORESharia rejects freedom, embraces discrimination, condones misogyny, promotes subjugation and is eternally in conflict with infidels, with you and me. Muslims fare little better under this barbaric, dogmatic form of totalitarianism. No amount of political correctness, muticulturalism or moral equivalence will actually improve Sharia — it must be rejected outright.
Consider the 1400 year history islamification of Egypt, North Africa, Central and SE Asia and the current assault on nations across the globe including France, Kenya, the UK and US. Consider the murder of Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and both Muslims and non-Muslims by the followers of Islam as a dark and ominous glimpse into the future. We must take a stand to end the creeping annihilation of liberty and culture; to stop this islamic conquest. To not stand up is moral cowardice.
Ted Belman describes the invasion of Europe by hordes of Muslims as a Trojan-horse tactic: the followers of Islam appear harmless but when the opportunity arises, they wage civil war against the natives, who by then have been lulled into inactivity or are too weak to oppose the Muslims. He makes the important point that because Islam has always refused to accommodate any other religious group and have maintained superior power by ruthlessly destroying competing groups, over the centuries they have kept control over the countries they have conquered.
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Daniel Pipes writes of a major problem that impedes the West from intelligently fighting back against the salafists, namely,"[t]he establishment denies that Islamism—a form of Islam that seeks to make Muslims dominant through an extreme, totalistic, and rigid application of Islamic law, the Shari'a—represents the leading global cause of terrorism when it so clearly does." He substantiates his argument with examples of denial both in the USA and Europe. The more interesting question that Pipes tackles is: why the denial of the obvious?
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Free speech and freedom of expression appear to many of us as "there" as the air we breath. But the last few years have demonstrated, once again, that Thomas Jefferson was right when he urged the need for eternal vigil to safeguard freedom and independence. Denis MacEoin writes of the censorship of our freedom of speech by various sharia-promoting Muslim groups and Western groups that kowtow to Islam either out of conditioned conformity to political correctness or fear of reprisal, should they oppose Muslim teachings. MacEoin writes how "perceived irreverence towards Islam" is avenged and how anger toward the Muslim community that nurtures jihad is averted by Muslims claiming the Muslim community is the real victim. To date, it has too often been a winning combination.
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There is one generalization that holds up: wherever Muslims come, hatred of some group, likely a minority, spikes. Hate crimes increase, many of them committed by the Muslim immigrants, others by natives of the host country, who are predisposed negatively against the minority and/or who, like good dhimmis, accept Muslim attitudes as part of their acceptance of (selective) diversity. In this article, Bat Ye'or details a specific example: Europe's hatred of the Jews of Israel. And some consequences.
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Multiculturalism and diversity is a brilliant slogan. It sounds so civilized; so encouraging of harmony among people brought up in different environments, with different lifestyles and different values. In practice, it is a numbing phrase designed to subdue realistic "bad thoughts" about other groups, designed to encourage feelings of guilt in those that intuitively don't buy the hype. In practice, it is much used to persuade people to accept bad political gestures — to accept people who are unacceptable. As Walter Williams points out, it is oblivious to the fact that the different cultural values are not equally good. Multiculturalism is doomed to fail without mutual respect and tolerance. When the political system is working, the West encourages individual rights and freedom; while, for the most part, immigrant Muslims have no intention of conforming to the mores of the host country, or even meeting it half-way. Unfortunately, the virtue of believing in the equality of ideas stops people from reacting, and by the time they act — as Angela Merkel has finally seen the havoc wrought by yet another idea that thrives in academia, but is a menace in the real world — it's too late. In this case, the Muslims have taken over.
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Hijrah is Jihad by large-scale immigration of Muslims to another country. In the main they resist assimilation but appear to fit in while their numbers grow sufficiently so they can begin to implement a takeover of the host country. Hijrah has been practiced quietly for decades in Europe. Except when a Muslim is outed as outrageously manipulating welfare benefits or turning native children into prostitutes, this method of takeover is mostly ignored. More recently, infiltration has increased sharply as Europe has welcomed refugees from Syria and other Middle East war zones. This may satisfy the egos of European leaders that they are being virtuous but it has proven to be a bad decision in several ways. First, it has provided a means for actual terrorists to come into Europe, with a sharp increase in acts of terror. Second, the new "refugees" have mainly been adult, working-age males, who account for the major increase in crimes and rapes in the countries that welcomed them. This video called "Europe's Last Chance" by Pat Condell is an excellent summation of what the so-called Muslim "refugees" are doing to destroy the European lifestyle.
This is an excellent summary of Hijrah as presented on the Prepper Forum. Hijrah was practiced initially by Mohammad himself, who left Mecca and went to Medina, where he began violent jihad against infidels. Today it is used to describe an invasion of a country by Muslims purporting to be peacefully intentioned. It is a way of infiltrating a host country with more and more Muslims until there are enough Muslims to start activities to take over the country. The article also includes a video by Dr. Bill Warner on Hijrah.
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Lisa Daftari points out a specific danger in allowing unvetted refugees to enter a host country: it provides an easy route in for single terrorists and for a group of terrorists, who maintain contact and keep on schedule via cellphone and social media. Included are readers' comments that find these facts relevant to the Obama's administration's encouragement of unvetted Syrian and Somali "refugees" in the US.
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A recent report from the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) recommended that "the British media be barred from reporting the Muslim background of terrorists." Matt Dathan writes that the report is concerned that "when the media stress the Muslim background of perpetrators of terrorist acts, and devote significant coverage to it, the violent backlash against Muslims is likely to be greater than in cases where the perpetrators' motivation is downplayed or rejected in favour of alternative explanations." ECRI's concern for the Muslim community is certainly heartwarming, even if its comprehension of what's going on is limited.
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Giulio Meotti writes about several current-day European philosophers that have taken up the cause of Islamic jihad, or, at the very least, justify Muslim barbaric behavior. It is a given that capitalism and the West are bad, hence Jihad is praiseworthy in that it is a way of countering the power of the West, of leveling the field. One of these philosophers, Michel Onfray, has become popular not only with the at-home French but also with French jihadists fighting in Syria and Iraq, presumably when they have some quiet time to read and aren't busy butchering their enemies. Like Barack Obama, Onfray puts much of the blame for whatever event is under discussion on George W. Bush. Other philosophers, sounding much like sociologists, excuse jihad for reasons such as 'revenge for humiliation', rootlessness, and inequality. And like the sociologists, they feel no obligation to check their generalities against the facts.
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Joshua Buri summarizes a talk given by Guy Millière on the large increase in radical Islamic groups in France. Moreover, some of the major ones are no longer freelance but have ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Aside from the increase in network linkages, there are more no-go zones and a prison system that allows Islamic preachers to attract potential jihadists. In addition, more people are "returning from the Middle East with radical beliefs and training." As terrorists have become more organized, politicians appear less able and less willing to handle these new developments. Yet people are reluctant to complain, given that they will be labeled fascist and racist and can be fined for criticizing Islam.
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The 'sensitivity' of the Germans to the huge influx of Muslim immigrants is extraordinary — they tolerate the refusal of the Muslims to adapt to the German lifestyle, their destruction of property and high rate of crime, their refusal to work, their attacks on women. German politicians and police play down Muslim anti-social behavior, to the point of eliminating "'rape' from police reports." Some people assume that the Germans are being super-kind to make up for their fiendish cruelty to the Jews during World War 2. Using statistics on the current German attitudes toward Jews, Janet Levy points out that "a large percentages of Germans still harbor harsh, anti-Jewish sentiments" while adopting a "policy of acceptance and tolerance toward Muslims." Add to that the favoritism Germany extends to Muslim countries at the UN. Levy suggests that Germany's attitude toward the Muslims "may actually mask an underlying anti-Semitism that stubbornly remains despite the passage of time."
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The might of the Europe Union (EU) continues single-mindedly to be turned against Israel. It also exerts more control over the member states than originally intended. Michael Freund points out that the Brexit movement, where the Britain electorate voted to leave the Union, is the start of the dissolution of the EU. He argues that this is a good thing for Israel. Some of the member states of the EU are more friendly to Israel than the EU allows them to be. And second, it means "a return to the idea of the nation-state, which has served as the basis of modern Western civilization." This can only benefit Israel, which could serve as prototype of what a nation-state can accomplish.
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Fifteen years ago on a Tuesday, the eleventh of September, Resurgent Islam caught our attention long enough to announce dramatically that it was at war with us. Unlike the immediate impact Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor had in World War II and despite the growing number of terrorist attacks, it's not clear that the majority of Americans, even now, are aware we are at war. There are those who believe Muslims are just like anyone else and consider it islamophobic to single out the relatively few Muslims who exhibit extreme behavior. After all, out of the billions of Muslims on the planet, it is only some 10-15% estimated to be involved in acts of terror. They believe in the Moderate Muslim Majority as passionately as once they believed in the tooth fairy. They are incorrigible.
Another group, a very large group, many of whom are avid readers of the MSM such as the New York Times, recognize that Muslims who blow up malls or shoot their colleagues are indeed 'extremists'. This group is even willing to call terrorists 'terrorists' if they commit the act of terror locally. But they blame these acts of terror on outside factors. These poor souls are acting out their misery or their rage or their low self-esteem. They are poor. They are psychologically or socially or medically damaged. They are Muslims who are angry because society marginalized them or ignored them or because their marriages are dysfunction. Why call them terrorists? This attitude is fostered by a large group of bought media people and academicians.
Because so many opinion-makers have trivialized the problem, there has been no outcry that Muslims associated with Islamic terrorist front groups are welcomed into the White House and our security agencies. As I write this, it is finally coming out in the MSM that Huma Abedin helped Hillary Clinton, her boss, in using private servers for State Dept official business. What is less stressed is that she is the child of high-level members of the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization devoted to replacing Western values with Sharia law by any and all means, from infiltrating America's infrastructure to funding acts of terror. She herself worked for many years for a Muslim organization devoted to promoting sharia in the West. This information has been available for years. In fact in the July-August 2012 issue of Think-Israel, we had an article called "In The Matter Of Vetting People In High Places" that highlighted the fact that Huma, given her family connections, could not possibly have passed the vetting all government security positions receive. But apparently she passed or bypassed the vetting required by law. Another section in the 2012 issue, the Girls of the Brotherhood, contained more information on the entanglement of Huma and the Abedin family in terrorist groups.
In addition, there is a third group fighting on the side of the salafists and doing great damage to our country. These are the self-censors. It is epitomized by the NY Times which invokes freedom of speech to show contempt for religions other than Islam. Thus, the Times waxed poetic about Serrano's insulting Christ in Piss photograph. Th