Nine Fronts in the Next War

by David Meir-Levi

The current unrest pursuant to the “Arab Spring” is a mixed blessing for Iran. On one hand, if young Bashir were to fall, Iran will lose its most important ally in the western part of the Arab world. A break with Syria would be a serious defeat for Iran, since it would no longer be able to supply Hezbollah directly, nor would it have direct contact and supervision over its proxy terror armies in Lebanon, the Sinai, and the Gaza Strip. It would also be very bad news for Hezbollah, whose terrorist leaders rely heavily on Iranian supplies, funds, and armaments, all channeled into Lebanon via Syria. Hamas too would suffer from a break in its link with its Iranian godfather.

But on the other hand, Iran is exploiting the great opportunity created by the chaos and upheaval of the “Arab Spring”. Iran does not want to see its foothold in the west undermined by this upheaval, so it has helped Bashir in his use of extreme force; and it has also begun to manipulate the “Arab Spring” violence and unrest to its advantage.

To gain maximum benefit from the situation in Egypt and to turn the world’s attention from Syria, Iran has activated two of its proxies, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, to renew attacks on Israel: blowing up the natural gas pipeline from the northern Sinai to Israel, firing scores of rockets into Israeli towns and villages near the Gaza Strip, most recently launching three brutal attacks on civilians near Eilat, and more in the offing. Igniting a new war between Israel and Egypt, or at least precipitating a crescendo in the incendiary calls for war from the Egyptian populous and neighboring Arab states, would be a marvelous win-win for Iran and for the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), the best organized and most popular of the political groups contending for power in post-Mubarak Egypt.

If Israel’s response to the attacks from the Gaza Strip and Sinai were to trigger a war with Egypt, Israel is likely to win; but the turmoil and upheaval in the wake of that war would weaken the Egyptian generals currently ruling Egypt with a temporary de facto mandate. Once shamed in defeat, they would lose credibility and popularity (there already have been protests against their continued rule and postponed elections). This scenario would create the perfect storm into which the MB could sail to political control. If, despite the attacks, Israel shows restraint, the MB can still shame the generals for not confronting Israel, and then either provoke a war or use the failure of the generals to confront Israel as a way to shame and weaken them and pave the way for the MB’s own rise to power.

Better yet, if Iran, through its proxies, could spark a war with Israel, and the other forces confronting Israel were to join in, Israel would be fighting on many fronts at once. In that case, the likelihood of Israel’s victory is in question.

El Qaeda is thoroughly ensconced in the Sinai. Currently Israel and Egypt are said to be in conversation about Egypt’s re-militarizing the Sinai, so perhaps the Egyptian army could be deployed against al-Qaeda and Hamas there. But if the MB succeeds in gaining a position of political strength in Egypt, it is not likely that the Egyptian military will be deployed in the Sinai to drive al-Qaeda out. Quite the opposite, the MB wants a military confrontation with Israel. So it is likely to see al-Qaeda in Sinai as an ally in such a war. And if the MB and al-Qaeda go to war against Israel, then Hamas in the Gaza Strip is sure to follow. Hamas cannot stand idly by while its Egyptian brethren initiate the great final jihad against Israel.

With Egypt, al-Qaeda and Hamas attacking Israel on its southern and western fronts, Iran will want Hezbollah to get in on the action and make use of the thousands of rockets and missiles that it has stockpiled just for this very moment, thus opening a northern front.

Syria may have difficulty deploying a large military force on the Golan front if it must use its military against its civilian demonstrators; but Iran will be in a position to aid Syria in suppressing unrest (probably in a manner similar to what Bashir’s father Hafez el-Assad did in 1982), and young Bashir will want a distraction on the Golan front to turn his citizenry’s attention, and the opprobrium of the world, from his slaughter of unarmed demonstrators. Even if Bashir falls, undesirable for Iran but an eventuality that the Mullahs may be anticipating, a Syrian government run by the MB or other Islamo-fascists of that ilk will be delighted to join Egypt and others in a pincer-movement assault on Israel. So a Syrian Golan front is very likely to open once Israel is at war with Egypt, Hamas, el-Qaeda and Hezbollah.

In the West Bank, Hamas is strong because its extreme Islamo-fascist ideology and commitment to Israel’s annihilation hold the sympathies of many. Fatah and the PLO, the main components of the PA, are condemned in some circles for their collaboration with Israel. The PA will not be able to maintain a position of power if it chooses to sit out a war against Israel; especially since the PA is in stiff competition with Hamas for the hearts and minds of the West Bank electorate, and it looks like entering a shooting war with Israel is a good way to win those hearts and minds. So it is very likely that another intifada could erupt once the southern, western and northern fronts are aflame, probably targeting the Israeli communities scattered throughout Judea and Samaria. Such a terror offensive could cause high numbers of casualties but is not likely to create an existential military threat. However, a West Bank terror war would be a serious distraction for Israel and would reduce Israel’s ability to concentrate its military on the fronts that are existential threats.

And then there are the Arab Israelis. No one knows for sure how many Arab Israelis are active supporters of Hamas et al, but however many there are, they could be mobilized for fifth column terrorism against Israeli military bases, infrastructure, and civilians: another distraction that would sap Israel’s ability to face the greater threats on its borders.

Egypt, al-Qaeda in Sinai, Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Syria in the Golan, Palestinian terrorist forces in the West Bank, and Arab Israelis in downtown Israel: Seven fronts.

But there’s more!

Jordan sits on a powder keg and the MB is itching to light the fuse. If the MB succeeds in supplanting the Hashemites, there can be little doubt that the newly Islamized Jordan will join the war against Israel, at very least by aiding and abetting the West Bank Arab terrorists, and perhaps by launching their own invasion from the east: front number eight.

Iran is moving ahead with alacrity to achieve WMD capabilities, despite some setbacks engineered by Israel over the past 5 years (Stuxnet being the most recent). Iran already has missiles capable of carrying nuclear payloads to Israel and beyond. West Bank or Israeli Muslims vaporized by Iran’s nuclear attack are not part of the Mullahs’ concerns. Muslim men will be martyrs, united with their celestial virgins (unclear what happens to the women and children), and besides, “Allah knows best who is wounded in His way.”[i] The Arabs of the West Bank and Israel are merely expendable pawns , collateral damage, just part of the price that the Arab world must pay for its final victory over Israel. Syria is a very important part of this equation, because Syria has substantial stockpiles of missiles and chemical warheads which can be deployed against all of Israel at very close range, to augment the internal terrorism from the West Bank and from Arab Israelis, and to mop up whatever of Israel may survive Iran’s nuclear attack.

So Iran is front number nine – and it will be a nuclear front.

In short, Israel is in greater danger now than it has ever been, even more so than during its 1948 war of survival.

Notes:

[i] A quote from Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood​, from his writings on Jihad, quoting a Hadith from Sahih Bukhari. See http://web.youngmuslims.ca/online_library/books/jihad/ and http://www.sunnipath.com/library/Hadith/H0002P0061.aspx for Qur’anic and extra-Qur’anic sources.

David Meir-Levi

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/09/07/nine-fronts-in-the-next-war/

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Palestine, Lies and Videotape

by Daniel Greenfield

Peace. We go to war in the name of peace. We maintain armies in the name of peace. And we turn a blind eye to murder and terrorism in the name of peace.

The promise of peace convinced Israelis and Americans to give Arafat a private army and control over an autonomous territory. And the fading promise of peace is why both governments still continue to appease the terrorists. All in the name of peace.

Over and over again, Israelis have sat at a table, shaken hands, drawn up maps, and walked away with bus bombings, attacks on malls and rocket fire at schools—and the cries of the left that they are to blame.

The left is in denial about what Palestine is; it is not a nationality, but a pretext for endless war. The “Palestinian” cause cannot be separated from the campaign for regional supremacy by Muslim states; it began as a way for Egypt and Syria to harass Israel, and it continues as a Saudi, Turkish and Iranian campaign to destroy Israel. The actors change, but the goal remains the same.

The UN can declare a Palestinian state, but it can’t reunify Gaza and the West Bank, or bring order to the feuding militia camps that pretend to be governments. The nations of the world can vote to recognize it, but they can’t make it self-supporting. Billions of dollars have already been wasted on the effort. And neither political support nor foreign aid will end the violence.

The justification for this is based around a myth that is at the heart of the left’s twisted version of history. The myth is that the Muslims never had a choice whether to engage in violence, terrorism or genocide. That they never initiate, only respond to what the Jews do. Whatever atrocities they commit, it is only because the Jews have done worse to them.

To sustain this myth, the left relies on two techniques. First, the regional context is stripped away and the Muslim-Israeli conflict is reduced to a conflict between Israel and West Bank and Gazan Arabs. Imagine a history of WW2 that only dealt with it as a conflict between Czechoslovakia and Sudeten Germans—that’s what the left has done by treating the pretexts for war as the causes of war.

Then once all the Muslim parties to the conflict have been hidden except for the militias in the West Bank and Gaza, the discrepancy in armaments is exaggerated to show that Israel has all the options, and the terrorists have none. To the left power is also agency, by focusing only on the differences in firepower and not the political options that both sides have, Israel is depicted as all-powerful, controlling not only Gaza and the West Bank—but even Washington D.C.

By ignoring Muslim colonialism and oppression of regional minorities—the left denies the context of the conflict and transforms the proxy armies of Sunni and Shiite regional majorities into the downtrodden and persecuted.

The left’s case for Palestine is built on these lies, funneled deceptively through networks of organizations that disguise them, dumb them down and present them as moral and ethical imperatives.

One example is Avaaz, a left-wing organization conducting a pressure campaign for Palestinian statehood. Avaaz’s video lays the blame for the violence on Israel, compares Israel’s Foreign Minister to Ahmadinejad and presents the unilateral Hamas-Fatah state as a way to bring peace to the region. Viewers are not told that few things are more certain to bring violence than unilateral actions by a fanatical terrorist group whose covenant celebrates the genocide of the Jewish people.

Like its video, Avaaz is not what it seems. Unlike most organizations, Avaaz does not list its staff openly; instead it claims to practice “servant leadership” with staffers letting members decide what to do. Only when the tax returns for Avaaz are examined, does a clearer picture emerge of who is really in charge.

Avaaz’s tax returns mention only one paid employee, its president, Ricken Patel, who pulls down a six figure salary—not bad for a ‘servant’. Patel was also a co-founder of Res Publica, the organization that co-founded Avaaz.

The Chairman of the Board, Eli Pariser, is the president of MoveOn.org which also co-founded Avaaz, and along with Avaaz’s Secretary, Tom Pravda, is also on the advisory board of Res Publica. Patel and Pariser serve on the advisory board of J-Street, a Soros organization founded to undermine Jewish support for Israel.

What’s the difference between Res Publica and Avaaz? Avaaz looks like an international activist group, which is convenient when you want to appear to be a global movement, instead of a disguised branch of the same old American left-wing organizations.

Res Publica gets the majority of its funding from the Open Society Institute, which makes Avaaz another disguised George Soros project, just like J Street. The Economic Times hails Ricken Patel as “The Man Who Gives You Your Voice”, but it’s not “your” voice, it’s Soros’ voice.

The organizations that promote the Palestinian narrative spend nearly as much time hiding behind front groups as the terrorists that they support. Their ideological deceptions are reflected in their structure, just like their clients, the PLO, a Syrian front group which denied any aspirations for statehood until it became politically convenient, and Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood whose ultimate goal is not a state… but a Caliphate.

They want statehood about as much as Soros wants to give you a voice. Their bid at the UN is only another way to fill their own pockets while undermining Israel on behalf of their bosses in Tehran and Riyadh. If the Muslim Brotherhood takes power in Egypt, it will absorb Gaza in all but name. And if Jordan falls, then the West Bank will end up joining whatever entity forms in its place.

The situation will revert to before the Six Day War, which the left claims deprived the Palestinians of a state. But there was no Palestinian state then because no one wanted it. The demand for it now is a matter of strategy, not national identity. Peace has become a more devastating weapon than war, and as long as princes and billionaires will pay to destroy Israel– there’s money to be made promoting peace. Just ask Ricken Patel or Yasser Arafat.

Daniel Greenfield

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/09/07/palestine-lies-and-videotape/

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

A Palestinian State, Arafat's Dream, But Then What?

by Dan Aridor

Having a state is not the end game of Palestinian leadership; it is just a major stepping stone. Former Palestinian Chairman Yassir Arafat and his successor, President Mahmoud Abbas, could already have had a Palestinian state a decade ago, thanks to generous offers of Prime Ministers Ehud Barak in 2000, and Ehud Olmert in 2008, to establish one and end the conflict Arafat's goal, however, was to have a state while continuing the conflict with Israel on four major issues: the refugees, the borders, Jerusalem and demilitarization.

The so called "right of return" for the refugees would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state, demographically flooded, as it would then be, by non-Jews.

The return to 1949 armistice lines would mean a return to indefensible borders, once again only serving as an invitations for surprise attacks, as happened until Israel finally repelled attacks by Jordan Syria and Egypt during the Six Day War in 1967, and took over control of Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem .

Jerusalem has been the central city for the Jewish people both spiritually and physically for 3,000 years, despite attempts throughout history to dislodge and disperse them. To the Jews, Jerusalem has not only been their historical sovereign capital city since 1000 B.C.; it has also since then, been their holy city, , as the Vatican is to the Roman Catholics, and as Mecca and Medina are to the Muslims. .

Palestinian objections to demilitarize their future state would mean that a surprise attack against Israel could always be an option, a situation unacceptable to the Israelis, as it would be to anyone else..

After achieving statehood, , aided by international pressure and de-legitimization campaigns from Europe and the Arab states, the Palestinian leadership, will most likely escalate the friction with Israel over these broad issues, as well as start to blame Israel for the lack of a final status agreement. The daily friction, as seen in daily terror and rocket attacks, will only lead to escalating military clashes.

This is not an extreme scenario; it is already happening., For over a decade, Israeli's southern towns have been – and still are -- under assault from thousands of rockets. A recent and painful reminder, which left eight Israelis dead, occurred only the other week ,when, after crossing the Sinai Desert from Egypt, Hamas terrorists attacked Israel, targeting civilians. When the Israelis responded by targeting the masterminds of the terror attack, the answer was a barrage of more than 100 rockets fired on Israeli cities and towns.

The Hamas was sending a clear message to Israel: Any retaliation against Hamas would be met by a bombardment against Israeli civilians.

Israel, not wanting to escalate matters further and risk a costly and prolonged military action, instead chose a cease-fire.

Understanding Israel's dilemma, various Hamas factions -- with or without Hamas's approval – nevertheless continued sporadic firing into Israeli civilian centers. As a result, missiles from Gaza still continue to be exploded in the towns of southern Israel.

One can only imagine what will happen when a Palestinian state, backed by Iran, will launch attacks directly or indirectly on, for example, Sderot and other urban centers inside Israel. The Palestinians leadership will claim that they are unable to stop all factions, or else that their attacks were in retaliation for some Israeli injustice. The Israel Defense Force will be limited – again – by international pressure from protecting Israeli citizens.

In the so-called peace process, there is constant pressure on Israel to give up historical lands, thereby releasing control of its security to terrorist organizations. These lands - Judea and Samaria - called "The Auschwitz Borders" by the late, left-wing foreign minister, Abba Eban, will be a launching platform for further attacks on Israel.

This situation is the fulfillment of Arafat's dream: the Phased Plan he laid out 1974: to destroy Israel step by step, taking whatever land the Palestinians could get, and using that as the platform from which to get the next-- with no end to the conflict, until all the land "from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] Sea," as the Palestinian Authority Minister for Jerusalem Affairs, Faisal Husseini, put it, would be under Palestinian control.

Now,, however, the stakes are higher: There might be the expectation in Israel, that Gaza's allies from Lebanon Judea and Samaria --not to mention Iran & Syria -- should also be taken into consideration.

A Palestinian state is not a remedy for peace; it is a base for war. No one should feign surprise when it happens.

Dan Aridor, a graduate of Columbia Business School, is a businessman based in Israel.

Source: http://www.hudson-ny.org/2402/palestinian-state-arafat-dream

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Muslim Persecution of Christians: August, 2011

by Raymond Ibrahim

This series, developed to collate some—by no means all—of the most extreme instances of Muslim persecution of Christians that surface each month, serves two purposes:

1) To document that which the mainstream media does not: habitual, if not chronic, Muslim persecution of Christians.

2) To show that such persecution is not "random," but systematic, interrelated, and ultimately rooted in a worldview inspired by Sharia Law.

As will become evident, whatever the of persecution that took place, it typically fits under a specific theme, including hatred for churches and other Christian symbols; sexual abuse of Christian women; forced conversions to Islam; apostasy and blasphemy laws; theft and plunder in lieu of jizya, the additional tax that can be imposed on by Muslims on non-Muslims in a Muslin state; overall expectations for Christians to behave like cowed dhimmis, or second-class "protected" citizens; and simple violence. Oftentimes it is a combination of the aforementioned.

Because these accounts of persecution span different ethnicities, languages, and locales –even in the West, wherever there are Muslims—it is clear that one thing alone binds them: Islam—whether the strict application of Sharia, or the supremacist culture borne by it.

Categorized by theme, August's batch of Muslim persecutions of Christians includes (but is not limited to) the following events, listed according to theme and in alphabetical order by country, not necessarily severity of the event:

Attacks on Christian Symbols: Churches and Bibles

Indonesia: Two churches were set aflame; officials downplayed these cases of arson by arguing that the buildings were "only made of board" and not real churches. A mayor also proclaimed that churches cannot be built on streets with Muslim names.

Iran: Officials launched a Bible burning campaign, confiscating and destroying some 7,000 Bibles; many were publicly burned. Likening their tiny Christian minority to the "Taliban and parasites," the regime also "cracked down" on Christians (who make up less than 1% of the entire population), arresting many; their whereabouts remain unknown.

Iraq: Two churches were bombed: the first attack damaged the church and wounded 23; the second damaged the church (a third church was targeted but the bomb was defused before detonating).

Nigeria: Two churches were bombed, including a Baptist church no longer in use due to previous Muslim attacks; when officials arrested Islamist leaders, a third Catholic church was torched.

Apostasy and Forced Conversions

Eritrea: At least eight Christians have died in prisons, most under severe conditions and torture, simply for refusing to recant Christianity.

India: A female who was formerly stripped and beaten by a Muslim mob for converting to Christianity, continues to receive severe threats to return to Islam or die; likewise, Muslims held three Christian women "threatening to beat and burn them alive if they continued worshipping Christ."

Iran: A Christian pastor in Iran remains behind bars, where he is being tortured; he is awaiting execution for refusing to recant Christianity.

Malaysia: religious police raided a church when it "found evidence of proselytisation towards Muslims" and "receiving information that there were Muslims who attended a breaking-of-fast event at the church"; a Facebook campaign created to support the raid and to "prevent apostasy" has already drawn support from 23,000 people.

Norway: A Muslim convert to Christianity was tortured with boiling water and told by fellow Muslim inmates "If you do not return to Islam, we will kill you"; if deported to Afghanistan, he risks death by stoning for leaving Islam.

Pakistan: Muslims openly abducted a 14-year-old Christian girl at gunpoint saying she had to convert to Islam. Another Christian woman who was abducted, drugged, and tortured for two years—all while being informed that she had converted to Islam—happily made her escape. In both cases, the police, as is usual, are siding with the Muslim abductors. Most recently, two Christians returning from church were attacked by Muslims and beaten with iron rods for refusing to convert to Islam or pay "protection" (jizya) money.

Sudan: A 16 year old Christian girl finally escaped from her Muslim kidnappers, who "beat, raped and tried to force her to convert from Christianity to Islam." Whenever she tried to pray, she was beaten again and called an "infidel"; when her mother went to the police, they told her to convert to Islam before they returned her child.

Uganda: In accordance with Islam's Hanafi School of law, a Muslim father locked his 14-year-old daughter in a room for several months without food or water simply because she embraced Christianity; when rescued, she weighed 44 pounds.

General Oppression, Violence, and Murder of Christians

Bangladesh: Church leaders, including an elderly pastor, were severely beaten in a police station for protesting that Muslims had illegally seized and occupied a Christian home. A previously tortured Christian activist is in hiding in Honk Kong, even as his wife and children face death threats from Muslims in the neighborhood.

Egypt: Soon after breaking their Ramadan fast, thousands of Muslims rampaged throughout a predominantly Christian village, firing automatic weapons, looting and throwing Molotov Cocktails at several homes. They beat a priest, then plundered and torched his home. Another Copt was murdered in his home, which was then ransacked. Separately, a Copt was savagely attacked by seven Muslims in front of a police station; he lost one eye and required 20 stitches to his head. Girls leaving church were sexually harassed by Muslims, who hurled stones at the church; they shattered five windows.

Nigeria: In what is being called a "silent killing," ten Christians were slain by Muslims seeking to expunge Christianity from northern Nigeria; eyewitnesses insist that the army is assisting and enabling the slayings.

Pakistan: A Christian family consisting of 26 people, including women and children, lived in slavery for over 30 years, forced to labor on a farm belonging to a wealthy Muslim landowner; they only recently managed to regain their freedom, through the aid of the Catholic Church. A Muslim mob attacked a group of Christians watching a movie about Jesus, and destroyed the projector. A Christian man was beaten unconscious for celebrating Independence Day. He was told by Muslims, "How can you celebrate when you are Christian? Convert to Islam if you want to join the celebration."

Somalia: Al-Shabab ("The Youth") is intentionally preventing food aid from reaching the nation's miniscule Christian minority: "Any Somali that the Islamists suspect to be a Christian, or even a friend of Christians, does not receive any food aid."

Sudan: A "humanitarian crisis is unfolding" in Sudan's border region where Christians and their churches are being targeted in a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing by North Sudan's Islamist regime.

United Kingdom: A Muslim family was terrorized and threatened with death because their daughter married a Christian -- an act considered a crime according to Sharia. Note: a man marrying a non-Muslim woman is permitted.

Uzbekistan: Authorities continue to pressure churches and Christians, fabricating evidence to punish or limit Christians' ability to practice their faith, and subjecting them to excessive fines, false accusations, as well as confiscating their Christian literature.

* * *

These are just some of the assaults to which Christians have been subjected under Islam that made it to the non-mainstream media last month.

Then there are the countless atrocities that never make it to any media—the stories of persistent, quiet misery that only the victims and local Christians know—such as the recent revelation that a 2-year-old girl was savagely raped in Pakistan because her Christian father refused to convert to Islam: it took five years for this story to surface. How many never surface?

Raymond Ibrahim, a widely published Islam-specialist, is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

Source: http://www.hudson-ny.org/2401/muslim-persecution-of-christians-august-2011

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

FADC Slams PM, Barak for Stopping Intel Testimony

by Lahav Harkov and Yaakov Katz

The Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee slammed Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak for preventing a Shin Bet representative and OC Military Intelligence Maj.-Gen. Aviv Kochavi from testifying on Sunday.

In an unusual move, Kochavi and the Shin Bet representative arrived at a meeting of the Subcommittee for Intelligence, Secret Services, Captives and Missing Soldiers with letters from the defense minister and the prime minister, respectively, saying that they may not answer the subcommittee’s inquiries as to what intelligence their agencies had before the terrorist attack on the Egyptian border last month.

“This is a deliberate attack on the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee’s capabilities as the parliamentary body that supervises defense matters,” committee chairman Shaul Mofaz (Kadima) said.

“There is no reason connected to security not to testify, and this decision was made from other considerations, which prevent the committee from fulfilling its duty to the public,” he added. “The Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee will not allow the developing trend to continue.”

“We did not want to interrogate them,” Mofaz explained. “All we wanted was to hear what information they had before the attack took place.”

Barak rejected Mofaz’s criticism and said that the officers would present their findings to the committee after the internal IDF investigations into the attacks were completed.

“It is unfortunate that Mofaz has decided again to turn the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee and its subcommittees into a political tool for his own personal use,” the Defense Ministry said in a statement. “Operational and intelligence inquiries are first held within the operational units, the intelligence agencies and are then presented to the chief of General Staff and the government. Then, they are presented to the Knesset’s subcommittees. That is how it has always been and that is how it will always be.”

Mofaz also called for Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin to call Netanyahu and Barak to the Knesset for a meeting on the matter.

“The Knesset and its committees are meant to supervise the executive branch of government – they cannot disrupt this order,” he said.

Rivlin agreed to hold a meeting “to solve the current crisis.”

“At a time when the committee chairman and the prime minister disagree on defense matters, the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee’s limits and the Knesset’s authority to supervise the Defense Ministry and its functions need to be defined,” Rivlin said.

MK Binyamin Ben- Eliezer (Labor) said that as a former defense minister and a veteran member of the committee, he does not remember defense officials ever being prevented from giving the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee information.

“This committee is appointed by the Knesset to handle sensitive and confidential information,” MK Avi Dichter (Kadima), a former Shin Bet chief, said. “This move is unprecedented. Censorship is intolerable and against the law.”

Kadima MK Yisrael Hasson said that “we cannot suspend our criticism” despite a lack of information.

“We cannot tell the public that we learned, reached conclusions, and are acting, so they can stay calm,” Hasson explained. “The prime minister and defense minister took that away from us.”

MK Arye Eldad said that the incident is “serious and very dangerous – but is not new. For two years the Defense Ministry has held back information.”

At the same time, he criticized Mofaz for his handling of a report on the possible ramifications of the Palestinian statehood bid.

“The report that we discussed last week was confidential, but you publicized its contents,” Eldad said. “This gave [Netanyahu and Barak] a great excuse. You lowered the committee’s stature, and allowed them to play this game.”

MK Nissim Ze’ev (Shas) said that the committee members should “practice self-examination in order to prevent a similar situation in the future.”

However, MK Uri Orbach (Habayit Hayehudi) said: “It isn’t the prime minister or defense minister’s privilege to prevent us from receiving information. This move was political, and not connected to the committee’s activities.”

Lahav Harkov and Yaakov Katz

Source: http://www.jpost.com/DiplomacyAndPolitics/Article.aspx?id=236622

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Expert: To Counter Erdogan, Offer Gaza

by Maayana Miskin

Middle East expert Dr. Guy Bechor revealed a surprising suggestion for handling Israel's crisis with Turkey in a Sunday interview with Arutz Sheva. Instead of just reacting to Turkey, Israel should take the lead, he said – by offering Turkey an active role in Gaza.

Turkey could take charge of bringing humanitarian goods to Gaza – a role Israel has filled for the past several years – under NATO guidance, he said.

The arrangement would be in Israel's favor for multiple reasons, Bechor explained. For one, Gaza would no longer be Israel's responsibility, but would remain under international supervision.

Secondly, he said, the arrangement would lead to tension between Turkey and Hamas.

“To this point they've been running the game, dealing the cards, and we've been responding,” he said of Israel-Turkey affairs. “Why shouldn't we deal the cards?”

If Israel wants to take a different path, he said, a second option would be ignoring Turkey while working with the United States and NATO to prevent any Turkish naval maneuvers.

'Erdoganistan' and the Kurdish Problem
Israel must realize that Turkey has become “Erdoganistan,” Bechor said; a territory under the total rule of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. As proof, he pointed to Erdogan's recent decision to bomb Kurdish regions in Turkey's north, simply because he personally had lost patience.

Erdogan's problems with his country's Kurdish population are going to make his estrangement from Israel particularly painful, Bechor predicted. Turkey previously enjoyed military ties with Israel which Erdogan had made use of to gain equipment that helped him thwart the Kurds' desire to declare independence and split Turkey in two.

But now, with ties with Israel frozen, Erdogan has few options left in his fight to keep his country united, Bechor said. The United States once assisted with information on Kurdish rebel activities, he added, but will soon be unable to do so, due to the pending withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

Erdogan's recent attacks in Kurdish regions have destabilized Iraq, Bechor noted, upsetting the Americans.

Erdogan cannot rely on the strong ties he has forged with Syria and Iran, as both countries are dealing with their own inner struggles, he explained. It is this lack of support that has led Erdogan to take such a tough public stance against Israel, Bechor opined. With Iran and Syria fading, he said, Erdogan hopes attacking Israel will bring him public support from new corners of the Arab and Muslim world.

Maayana Miskin

Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/147530#.TmPPrWrSmdc

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Erasing Jews from Jerusalem

by Janet Tassel

Our friends at the invaluable Palestinian Media Watch (PMW-Palwatch.org) have been diligently following the latest in the Palestinian policy of historical revisionism: erasing Jewish connection to the Temple Mount -- ginning up energy for the big day at the U.N.

To take but two examples of the "spurious" Jewish attachment to their "alleged" Temple, try this one from Al-Hayat Al-Jadida on August 9. August 9 is Tisha B'Av, the commemoration of the destruction of the First and Second Temples:

Since Monday morning, groups of extremist Jews have been roaming the courtyards of Al-Aqsa mosque one after the other, under heavy police protection, on the occasion of the so-called "destruction of the Temple"....This Sunday, the occupation's police handed the shop owners in the Market of the Cotton Merchants...which leads to the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque, an order forcing them to close their shops on Monday afternoon...in order to facilitate the arrival of the settlers to the Market, for the sake of holding special Talmudic rituals on the occasion of the destruction of the alleged Temple.

Or, from the same Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, on July 1, by its columnist on religious affairs:

The great and exalted Allah commanded the angel Gabriel to place Muhammad upon the riding beast Al-Buraq, which was a cross between horse and donkey. The night journey was both physical and spiritual....Once he reached the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the angel Gabriel removed Muhammad from upon Al-Buraq's back, and then he tied the beast to the Al-Buraq rock, which was called the 'Al-Buraq Wall.' The Jews changed its name to the 'Wailing Wall,' because the Jews are always trying to change Arabic names into Hebrew names....

As PMW notes, "the 'night journey' mentioned in the Qur'an is dated to 621 CE. The mosque was built on the Temple Mount by the son of Ummayed Caliph Abd Al-Malik 84 years later in 705 CE."

And as to the land of Israel:

The Zionists must acknowledge publicly, in front of the world, that the Jews have no connection to the Palestinian Arab land, upon whose ruins arose the colonialist settler Zionist plan that settles and expels, represented by the Israeli apartheid state. That which occurred two thousand years ago (i.e. the Jewish/Israeli presence in the land)...represents in the book of history nothing more than invention and falsification and a coarse and crude form of colonialism

There is much more at the website, including the claim that the Israelis stole "our clothing, our keffiyeh, our falafel, and our humus."

And furthermore, because the Palestinians are tired of looking out on "sin and filth (Jews' praying at Western Wall) ... we are drawing our new maps. When they [Israelis] disappear from the picture, like a forgotten chapter of our city's history, we will build it anew[.]"

The Arabs' meretricious propaganda is a relatively modern phenomenon. Returning to the Qur'an, neither Jerusalem nor Zion is mentioned even once. Major figures from the Hebrew Bible are co-opted and converted to Muslim prophets, though, and Jews are even instructed to enter the Holy Land "that God has decreed for you" in Sura 5, verse 21. Sura 17, verse 104 states: "And we [Muslims] said to the Children afterwards [after "we" drowned Pharaoh and his troops] 'Go live in this land. When the final prophecy comes to pass, we will summon you all in one group.'" And scholars have seen in Sura 2, verse 142 ff a repudiation of Jerusalem, though it is not mentioned by name, when Muslims are instructed to change the direction of prayer (qibla) from Syria to the Sacred Mosque in Mecca

So, as Daniel Pipes puts it:

Where does Jerusalem fit in Islam and Muslim history? It is not the place to which they pray, is not once mentioned by name in prayers, and it is connected to no mundane events in Muhammad's life. The city never served as capital of a sovereign Muslim state, and it never became a cultural or scholarly center. Little of political import was initiated there.

Indeed, as Pipes details in a comprehensive essay in Middle East Quarterly (September 2001), with some exceptions, Jerusalem had little or no importance for Islam. One exception was the Umayyad dynasty (661-750 CE), under whose rule was built "Islam's first grand structure, the Dome of the Rock, right on the spot of the Jewish Temple." Later, "the Umayyads did a most clever thing: they built a second mosque in Jerusalem, again on the Temple Mount, and called this one the Furthest Mosque," or Al-Aqsa. Thus, they retroactively turned Muhammad's "night journey" into a post hoc "reality."

Nevertheless, in the centuries of Ottoman rule in Israel and Jerusalem, even through its decline into a backwater, "the status quo concerning the Western Wall was preserved," according to Meir Ben-Dov, et al. in The Western Wall, "and the Wall was classified as the most sacred place in the Jewish religion...standing, as it did, close to the source of Jewish sanctity, the Temple." Under Suleiman the Magnificent, writes Ben-Dov, "the Jews were granted legal rights regarding the Wall and a firman was entered in the court archives of the Sultanate in Constantinople confirming the Jews' status in the area of the Western Wall."

The following is taken from a 1929 booklet, "A Brief Guide to Al-Haram Al-Sharif [the Noble Sanctuary], Jerusalem":

The Haram

The site is one of the oldest in the world. Its sanctity dates from the earliest (perhaps from pre-historic) times. Its identity with the site of Solomon's Temple is beyond dispute. This too is the spot, according to the universal belief, on which David built there an altar unto the Lord, and offered burned offerings and peace offerings.

The author? None other than Nazi collaborator and notorious anti-Semite, the Grand Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husayni.

Of course, the numerous archaeological finds dating to the First and Second Temples -- those that haven't been bulldozed and trucked away by the Waqf, the Muslim custodians of the Temple Mount -- are shrugged off. As the current Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Muhammad Ahmad Hussein, told Aaron Klein, "[t]here was no Jewish civilization in Jerusalem. Many people lived here throughout the ages and they left some artifacts, but so what? There is no proof of any Jews being here. Jews came to the [Temple area] in 1967 and not before."

Religious Jews have scratched their heads and asked since 1967: "Can somebody explain why the Temple Mount is in the custody of Muslims?" That is another, very large, story. Meanwhile, the lamentations continue.

Janet Tassel

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/09/erasing_jews_from_jerusalem.html

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Berkeley Takes On the Tea Party

by Arnold Ahlert

In 2009, the University of California at Berkeley established the Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements (CCSRWM) “to encourage and nurture comparative scholarship on right-wing movements in the United States, Europe, Asia, Latin America, and other regions of the world over the past hundred years.” They also initiated a Tea Party Working Group to study a movement “espousing fierce antipathy toward American liberalism in the name of ‘tradition American values’ while claiming as well dissatisfaction with the direction of the Republican Party.” In June of 2010, the progressive advocacy group, People for the American Way, donated its “vast and unique” collection of studies on the American Right to the center. A CCSRWM conference — more accurately described as a bash-fest — took place on October 22, 2010. Entitled “Fractures, Alliances, and Mobilizations: Emerging Analyses of the Tea Party Movement,” it included a cast of characters dedicated to one over-riding idea: the Tea Party movement is a seething cauldron of hatred, racism and paranoia, legitimizing the worst elements of right-wing excess.

CCSRWM founder Lawrence Rosenthal, author of “America’s Insurgent Right,” which compares American conservatism since the ’80s to radical right-wing movements in Europe (presumably Fascism and Nazism), opened the conference. He contended much of the Tea Party’s appeal stemmed from the idea that both the elections of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were ”deemed illegitimate by much of the right.” That’s a rather curious assertion, considering the only modern election which gained national prominence as being “illegitimate” was the left’s insistence (to this day) that George W. Bush “stole” the presidency in 2000.

Rosenthal also claimed the Tea Party movement did not spring up from the usual sources, i.e. churches, civil movements, or unions, but that it grew “in collaboration with a television network,” that is, Fox News​. (If Rosenthal is searching for collaboration between the media and a political movement, perhaps he should study the Journolist scandal, an effort by left-wing media members and political operatives to “coordinate” their talking points during the 2008 election.) Rosenthal concluded his remarks with a theme that was one of the evening’s recurring motifs: the Tea Party movement was energized by a “sense of dispossession–that something that belonged to them, call it America, is being taken away.”

Next up was Rick Perlstein. For Perlstein, the Tea Party arose as a “Yang” backlash to the “Yin” of the ’60s civil rights movement. He contended that the “tree of crazy” (read: conservatism), is “an ever-present aspect of America’s flora.” The Tea Party’s rise is largely attributable to ”media devolution” (read: Fox News and talk radio) which occurred as a result of “anxiety about appearing liberal and not understanding the heartland.” A heartland which remains susceptible to “rage, scapegoating, demagoguery and the idea that they are being dispossessed” due to “the psychoanalytic trauma that comes from being dependent on government when being dependent on government is shameful.”

That the same “angry” heartland less than two years earlier helped elect America’s first non-white president and a solid Democrat majority in Congress, is apparently lost on Mr. Perlstein. He seemingly believes that their subsequent rejection of progressivism is based on irrationality–as opposed to their first-hand experience with “hope and change.”

Moderator Jack Citrin then introduced the speakers and read their biographies. The rest of the conference was divided into three panels, followed by question and answer segments. (Q&A was omitted from this column, but can be accessed, along with every detail of the conference, using the hyperlink in the first paragraph.)

Panel One was entitled, “New Forms of Activism on the Right.”

Christopher Parker explained he was working on a theory about the Tea Party that is “not ready for prime time.” Most of Parker’s focus was on Tea Party polling data, which unsurprisingly revealed a movement centered around an “ideology, conformity, and Eurocentrism” that promotes racism, xenophobia, anger, fear and anxiety.

Apparently Mr. Parker’s Tea Party theory is still not ready for prime time. In June 2011, he once again contended that the “more racially resentful you are, the more likely you are to support the Tea Party.”

Ruth Rosen opined that women might be drawn to the Tea Party and its “incoherent” ideology due to the conservative Christian feminism publicized by Sarah Palin​, a prophet of the movement. Rosen went on to reiterate much of the evening’s prevailing themes through the lens of feminism, contending that without its grassroot female supporters “the Tea Party would have far less appeal to voters who are frightened by economic insecurity, threats to moral purity and the gradual disappearance of a national white Christian culture.”

Perhaps Ms. Rosen may not have noticed, but such threats have a substantial basis in fact. Economics aside, America now has a culture in which the out-of-wedlock birth rate is now 40 percent nationally and 72 percent among black Americans. And that’s when black babies are carried to term. In New York City, 60 percent of black pregnancies ended in abortion in 2009. The wholesale destruction of the nuclear family is a direct outgrowth of progressive ideology, not conservatism.

Clarence Lo, co-author of “Recent Developments in Marxist Theories of the Capitalist State” saw the Tea party as a ”program of economic conservatism that primarily benefits the wealthy, supported by a relatively broad section of the population.” Once again social conservatism equals “opposition to civil rights” and economic conservatism equals “supply side economics.” He views the movement through conflicting hypotheses: it is either “an artificial grassroots movement directly controlled, funded, etc. by elite, national groups,” (he cites the Koch brothers), or a “genuine social movement that is broadly based[.]”

Mr. Lo fails to mention that Democrats have also been well-funded by elite national groups, most notably Wall Street, who contributed more to Democrats than Republicans in 2010, the year this conference took place.

Debra Saunders provided the most enlightening moment of the conference when she opened with a question “How many people here are Tea Party members or supporters?” One or two people reportedly raised their hands. Saunders, ostensibly a conservative, contended that the Tea Party is “talked about in a condescending way.” Yet she also described Tea Partiers as “unsophisticated,” reiterating the tiresome elitist meme that many ordinary Americans are stupid.

Dave Weigel, contended the Tea Party has a “closed-loop silo of information about why things are the way they are,” much of which is “inchoate anger,” adding that they “haven’t quite figured out how government works, but they’re for whatever side is loudest.” He also blamed a lack of trust in the media for the success of conservatism in general. Ironically, Weigel was fired as the Washington Post​’s conservative blogger “after leaked online emails showed him disparaging some Republicans and commentators in highly personal terms.” So much for cultivating trust in the media.

Panel Two was entitled, “The Tea Party and the Right.”

Marty Cohen contended that the Tea Party is the third wave of conservatives to enter the Republican party since the ’70s, noting they resemble “first wave of the Religious Right” and are driven in part by the idea that “the country is going in the wrong direction morally” which “arises out of a reaction to threats to various forms of status.” He then cited the “racial status posed by an African American president, ethnic status posed by a majority-minority future, and economic status fueled by the current crisis.”

Alan Abramowitz noted that Republican activism substantially increased since the ’50s, and that the principal spark for the Tea Party and a Republican Party, which are both getting more and more conservative (and the Democratic Party isn’t becoming more leftists?), was “the election of Barack Obama​.” He concluded by saying the ”Tea Partiers will not fade as long as Obama is in the White House,” and that the “danger” they pose for a Republican presidential candidate in 2012 will making it ”more difficult for the eventual nominee to appeal to moderate swing voters.”

Once again, both Cohen and Abramowitz allow progressive ideology to taint their thinking. Neither man seems able to imagine that the Obama administration’s disastrous policies, coupled with its determination to carry them out absent congressional approval, gave rise to a political movement determined to rein the administration in.

Peter Montgomery sounded the alarm regarding the Christian Right and the Tea Party movement “overlap,” which viewed the election of Obama in “apocalyptic terms” (read: fundamentalism combined with racism). Tea Partiers believe in American exceptionalism “as defined by Glenn Beck​ and [historian] David Barton:” a divinely inspired Constitution made using the colonial preachers’ ideas of individual salvation, which were “cribbed” by the Founding Fathers. The beauty of this is that if you say Obama has this liberation theology inspired view of big government and collectivism, they will say big government is not only un-American, it is un-Christian.”

Leaving aside the reality of a Declaration of Independence in which our “unalienable rights” are “endowed by a Creator,” it is revealing that Mr. Montgomery can seemingly ignore the fact that the president spent twenty years attending the church of “liberation theologian” Jeremiah Wright, whose own un-American, un-Christian, as well as racist and anti-Semitic diatribes are well-documented.

Panel Three was entitled “Tapping into Fear, Anger and Resentment: The Tea Party and the Climate of Threat.”

Charles Postel who wrote a column claiming the “radical right has often had a soft spot for bigots,” noted that the “spectrum of political phenomena described as populist these days runs the gamut from social democratic to white nationalist,” and that the Tea Party “truly tests the limits of the term.” He further contended that Tea Partiers view the election of 2008 as “stolen” by ignorant and/or illegal black and immigrant voters and racialists, adding that they have launched a flurry of legislation “to constrain voting rights through the expansion of felony disqualification and the elimination of motor voter laws.”

Mr. Postel may wish to ignore instances of vote fraud convictions documented here and here, a Supreme Court ruling upholding photo ID voting requirements progressives consider a “disenfranchisement” of minorities voters, or a poll revealing that 75 percent of Americans support photo IDs. But they are realities nonetheless.

Lisa Disch reiterated the fear, anger, resentment and racist tropes that dominated the evening, adding that Tea Partiers are members of an American “precariat” which simultaneously disdains big government even as they “do not recognize” that they did not earn their own middle class status, but were lifted into the middle class, like my family, by [government] programs.” The Tea Party’s concerns must be viewed through the “analytic of whiteness” by which they identify with the “forgotten man scenario” of racist resentment.

One can only imagine what Disch thought of a Tea Party movement willing to go stake their political future on the refusal to go along with a “clean” debt ceiling increase, or their determination to get a Balanced Budget Amendment through Congress. Perhaps they are more concerned with the “forgotten children” of subsequent generations who may be denied middle class status due to the crushing fiscal burden of the very programs Disch champions.

Devin Burghart claimed the Tea Party ranks are increasingly permeated with people focused on race and nationalism,” and that “the notion that the first Black American president is not a real American is prominent throughout the movement…” He further contended that their relationship “with hard-core white nationalists has become a two way street.” He explained there are “three rings” and “six factions” of the Tea Party movement, which include “Glenn Beck listeners,” “birthers,” “Christian leaders,” “nativists” and those “who seek to repeal the 17th Amendment and the direct election of U.S. senators.” The movement also “disregards those it considers insufficiently American.” He went on to contend that “Islamophobia emerges as the new, cutting edge, wedge issue” for Tea Party supporters, and in conclusion contended that the “unstated racism in this movement is vocal and unmistakable.”

With all due respect to Mr. Burghart, a “phobia” is defined by an “exaggerated fear.” Nine days from now, America will be taking part in the 10th remembrance of a “phobia” that toppled the world Trade Center and killed nearly 3000 Americans.

The conference closed with a brief summary: ”First, the research presented today suggests that the Tea Party supporters are part of a very active, very conservative wing of the Republican Party, and, to the extent that they are able to frame their message in ways that appeal to a larger and more moderate segment of the American public, they are likely to wield significant influence within the Republican Party and move it further to the right. Second, to the extent that they succeed in mobilizing a significant segment of the American public and start winning elections, those on the left will need to take seriously the challenge that Tea Party activists pose to progressive politics and figure out how best to respond.”

What’s been the progressive response to the Tea Party since then? More of the same old same old. Within the last month, the vice president referred to them as terrorists and three members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) have referred to them as “the real enemy” (Frederica Wilson, D-FL), said they “can go straight to Hell” (Maxine Waters D-CA), and told an audience of CBC members “this tea party movement would love to see you and me…hanging on a tree” (Andre Carson​, D-IN).

Such reactions are totally unsurprising. If there is one thing that was illuminated by the Berkeley conference, it is all-encompassing myopia animated by a progressive political ideology so self-stifling that its practitioners failed to grasp a breathtaking irony: a symposium dedicated to understanding the Tea Party movement failed to present even a single member of the Tea Party at their meeting. That myopia, which now borders on angry paranoia in Democratic Party circles, has carried through to the present.

Such emotionalism engenders an equally large measure of hypocrisy. It is a hypocrisy evidenced by a conference in which America’s self-purported champions of tolerance and diversity managed to make sweeping generalizations about an entire political movement, virtually every one of which came down on the negative side of the ledger. In the real world, that’s called “prejudice.”

At the Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements, it’s apparently considered “scholarship.”

Arnold Ahlert

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/09/02/berkeley-takes-on-the-tea-party-2/

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Bringing Tahrir Square to Washington

by Matthew Vadum

A coalition of leftist groups is promising to occupy part of downtown Washington, D.C. “with the intention of making it our Tahrir Square, Cairo” next month.

This exercise in Marxist mobocracy is just one of many scheduled nationwide in coming months. It will take place nearly three weeks after the Left’s “Days of Rage” occupation of Wall Street scheduled for Sept. 17.

The Washington protest is modeled after the demonstrations that brought down the Egyptian government earlier this year. It is being organized by an umbrella group called the October 2011 Coalition, which is run by David Swanson, a former spokesman for ACORN and the International Labor Communications Association.

Swanson said the event was timed to overlap with “October 2011 when the next year’s budget kicks in, in the United States which includes cuts for just about everything useful but again a larger budget for the military.” Of course through the magic of the federal government’s baseline budgeting, there probably won’t be any actual reduction in federal spending, but the Left needs to pillory a villain in order to rally its troops.

The October 2011 Coalition is asking activists to pledge to show up at and remain in Washington’s Freedom Plaza “if any U.S. troops, contractors, or mercenaries remain in Afghanistan.” It is urging protesters to “resist the corporate machine” by occupying the plaza “to demand that America’s resources be invested in human needs and environmental protection instead of war and exploitation.”

In a promotional video for the group, wild-eyed playwright Karen Malpede seemed to suggest President Obama was Paul von Hindenburg and that Nazis were poised to take over America.

I will be in Washington on October 6 because it seems more and more a Weimar sort of moment where we have a nice, well-intentioned, weak, and mealy-mouthed president and lunatics on the right wing who would rather destroy the country than do anything productive. And we’re in how many wars, six now, and counting. We have the biggest military budget in the world combined. All other countries in the world do not spend as much as we spend on our military and it’s driving the country into bankruptcy and moral bankruptcy which is more important, I think, or as important. So it’s a time for citizens who value democracy and care about the country in which they live to step forward and say no.

Malpede, incidentally, seemed to be one of the more sane individuals appearing in videos promoting the October 6 event.

Swanson said Monday that his supporters will occupy Freedom Plaza, “the name of which is very similar of course to Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, and from there we are going to expand to shut down offices, buildings, streets, hallways, to nonviolently, strictly nonviolently resist what our government is doing.”

Swanson didn’t bother to address the glaring contradiction in his statement. The protesters at Tahrir Square to whom he alludes were anything but nonviolent. It is far from clear how the gargantuan government of the most powerful nation on Earth could be shut down without the use of violence.

The suggestion that nonviolent civil disobedience will be practiced that day seems to be merely an opening bid offered by the organizers, a public relations bait-and-switch calculated to appease the authorities and maximize attendance. In the world of radical activism the line between nonviolent protest and violent protest is often so thin that it might as well not exist. Unless all the demonstrators have the discipline of a Mohandas Gandhi, violence is virtually inevitable.

With few exceptions, the groups pledging to take part on October 6 aren’t exactly known for Weather Underground-caliber violence, but they’re also not known for reasonableness and restraint.

Velvet Revolution, a Tides Foundation-funded group co-founded by convicted terrorist bomber Brett Kimberlin and radical journalist Brad Friedman, is participating. So are the Communist-dominated anti-war coalition United for Peace and Justice, and other radical left-wing groups such as ANSWER (Action Now to Stop War and End Racism), Code Pink, and World Can’t Wait, an offshoot of the Revolutionary Communist Party.

In normal times a protest involving a group like World Can’t Wait, which used cheap political theatrics in a futile effort to drive President Bush out of the White House, might not matter. But in an age of massive unemployment, public unease, overheated rhetoric, and escalating political violence from the Left, the group could become a genuine threat. This is especially true if the group’s crazed adherents believe their long-awaited revolution is finally within their grasp.

As planning for October 6 continues, the Left is escalating its already-vituperative rhetoric.

A few days ago a member of the neo-communist Congressional Progressive Caucus said Tea Party supporters in Congress want the Jim Crow era to return and to see black Americans lynched. At a meeting of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) Rep. Andre Carson (D-IN) said some in Congress would “love to see us as second-class citizens” and “some of them in Congress right now of this Tea Party movement would love to see you and me … hanging on a tree.”

This was not an isolated incident for Carson, who is also a member of the CBC. The Al Sharpton wannabe, who is one of only two Muslims in Congress, also told reporters last year that he heard the N-word hurled at Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) outside the Capitol by anti-Obamacare protesters. But it never happened. Conservative Internet news entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart offered $100,000 to anyone who could provide recorded evidence that the racial slur was uttered at the event. No one has come forward.

Joanne Dowdell, a Democratic congressional candidate in New Hampshire, said she is seeking office because the 2012 election is about “class warfare.” Dowdell is not on the fringes of her party. She is a former DNC committeewoman and was a delegate at the 2008 party convention that nominated Obama for the presidency.

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) has called for runs on the banks and threatened “to tax them out of business” if they don’t forgive under-water homeowners’ mortgage principal. Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-FL) said “racism” is largely responsible for high black unemployment rates.

A demonstrator from the Red & Anarchist Action Network was captured on video at a protest earlier this week outside the Wisconsin state capitol. He was helping to hold up a banner that read “Class Warfare. No Justice. No Peace.”

He shouted to the cameraman, “It’s coming! Get ready! All you f—- tea-party-baggers. It’s coming. Get ready.”

There is a good chance he meant it.

Matthew Vadum

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/09/02/bringing-tahrir-square-to-washington/

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Africa’s Shameful Secret

by Stephen Brown

It is a story the left hates to see and loves to ignore. While leftists and other “humanitarians” in the United States and Europe are in a perpetual state of moral outrage concerning Israel’s alleged mistreatment of Palestinians, the savagery of modern-day Arab enslavement of black Africans elicits almost no reaction.

The most recent case highlighting this leftist hypocrisy concerns four anti-slavery activists in Mauritania, who were sentenced last week to six months in jail for protesting the enslavement of a ten-year-old girl earlier in August in Nouakchott, the country’s capital. According to a report by Amnesty International, the convicted men belong to the Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement in Mauritania (IRA), an anti-slavery NGO. Others who took part in the protest said they were beaten by police and imprisoned but let go after a few days.

“The draconian response to the work of these activists suggests that the Mauritanian authorities are still trying to cover up the fact that slavery takes place in the country,” said an Amnesty International official.

According to the Amnesty International account, the IRA discovered the child slave in Nouakchott, and reported the matter to police. Owning a slave was made a crime in Mauritania in 2007. It calls for a penalty of up to ten years in prison and fines ranging from US $2,000 to $4,000. A prison term of up to two years is also mandated for anyone who “facilitates” slavery.

“But the law does not allow representatives of civil society groups to attend the trial,” stated the United Nations (UN) news agency, IRIN.

In Mauritania, the anti-slavery group SOS Esclaves estimates there are about 500,000 black African slaves among the country’s population of 3.1 million. Their masters are Arab and Berber Mauritanians, who share only the same Islamic religion with their chattel. Unlike in Sudan, where the Arabs get their African slaves from old-fashioned, brutal slave raids, the Mauritanian slaves are the product of a system that has kept them in a state of bondage for generations, going back, in some cases, several hundred years.

Before the 2007 law criminalizing slave ownership, slavery had been banned several times in Mauritania. The first decree occurred under the French colonial government in 1901. In the third decree, issued in 1961, it was stated in the Mauritanian constitution, drawn up after the country’s independence from France in 1960, that everyone was equal “without distinction of race, religion or social condition.”

“Of course such an article was ridiculous to the Beydenes [Arab-Berbers],” wrote African-American writer Samuel Cotton in his book Silent Terror: A Journey Into Contemporary African Slavery, the result of his trip to Mauritania in the1990s to investigate reports of slavery there. “It was subsequently never enforced, and slavery continued to exist.”

These “woefully ineffective mandates,” as Cotton called the slavery bans, changed very little, if anything. The abolition decrees, observers say, were simply made for foreign consumption, while everything stayed the same inside the country. Therefore, it is no surprise that there have been no convictions in Mauritania under the 2007 law, although the practice of slavery is so widespread it encompasses several hundred thousand black Africans.

A good example is the ten-year-old slave girl’s mistress. She was arrested and charged but only has to report to the police once a week. The child, for whom the demonstrators braved the government’s “draconian response,” is reported as still missing. A problem in abolishing slavery in Mauritania, says one former slave, now an anti-slavery activist with SOS Esclaves, is that “the authorities themselves keep slaves.”

A larger problem is that the abomination of slavery in Mauritania and other Arab countries will be difficult to eradicate. Slavery is an ingrained, centuries-old institution in Islamic countries. It is also legal under Sharia law and, according to historian Bernard Lewis​, “elaborately regulated.” As a part of “God’s law,” it will be difficult to abolish, as one Egyptian Islamic theologian, Dr. Abu Zayd, discovered. When Zayd contended that “keeping slave girls and taxing non-Muslims” was contrary to Islam, he was declared an apostate, and an Egyptian court forcibly divorced him from his wife, since a Muslim woman cannot be married to a non-Muslim.

The institution of Islamic slavery has also created an Arab racism against black Africans. From the seventh century to the twentieth, it is estimated 14 million Africans were violently enslaved and transported under harsh conditions around the Islamic world. Black Africans became synonymous in Arab eyes with inferiority and with even something less than human. And since the Islamic world experienced no abolition movement, let alone a civil war like America’s that attempted to establish the black slave’s humanity, he continued to remain sub-human in the Arab worldview.

“The problem is that Mauritania’s Arabs sincerely believe that blacks are inferior and are born to be slaves,” wrote Cotton about this mindset. “They believe that a black man, woman or child’s place in life is to serve an Arab master, and it does not matter to them whether that black is a Christian, or a fellow Muslim.”

As one can imagine, this dehumanizing outlook has led to absolutely appalling and inhuman treatment of the black slaves. One former Mauritanian slave, who now works for SOS Esclaves, said he would “rather be shot than return to my owners.

“When I saw my mother and sister beaten by our owners, I just couldn’t take it,” he told IRIN. “I wanted out. But they beat me too…We were given nothing to eat except when our owners had leftovers. We would go into the desert to hunt small animals like lizards to cook and eat…slaves who tried to escape were often killed. We know of cases like that.”

Another problem is that the forces in the world that should be most concerned with African slavery’s abolishment look the other way. The African Union’s black African countries are a good example. They are well aware of Arab enslavement of their fellow Africans but say nothing. As one anti-slavery activist explained to Cotton “the Arabs give us money!”

“If an African nation or nations present a resolution on Palestine to the United Nations or at a conference, the Arabs promise a lot of aid in return,” said the activist, who was imprisoned and tortured for three years for his anti-slavery activities. “Mauritania is actually protected by those countries that meet with Africans in the Islamic conferences!”

Presumably, an African nation would receive nothing from the Arab world for opposing Arab slavery in Mauritania.

The UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) is just as useless. It contains despots and tyrants whose human rights records are just as bad as Mauritania’s as well as Islamic countries who bribe the African Union states. A UNHRC representative, after visiting Mauritania in 2009 and talking with NGOs and former slaves, concluded the country “needs a comprehensive and holistic national strategy, specifically addressing slavery … in order to effectively put an end to this phenomenon.” One can imagine Mauritania’s slave-owning authorities still laughing about that recommendation, as they “holistically” arrest anti-slavery activists two years later.

American and European leftists have always ignored modern-day Arab slavery as well. One reason is that they want to maintain the image they have carefully constructed that Israel and America are the only oppressors in the Middle East and Arabs the victims. Admitting and publicising that Arabs are enslaving black Africans would only undermine their propaganda campaign. The left also wants to keep the focus on the trans-Atlantic slave trade. It has always been a useful weapon to use against the United States.

The African-American community has also not launched a strong response to the continued enslavement of black Africans. Cotton encountered this in the 1990s upon his return to the United States. He believed that when he made the facts known about Mauritania, a large anti-slavery movement would develop. But he was to be disappointed. African-Americans, he wrote, lacked “a really firm or clear understanding of the contemporary African political, social, and cultural landscape” and thus could not connect the Mauritanian experience with their own.

“As I traveled around the country delivering lectures and screening the reels and reels of film…I met few African Americans who showed any real interest or concern for the topic,” Cotton stated.

President Obama was also a big disappointment. America’s first African-American president did not even mention the modern-day Islamic slave trade of black Africans when he visited Ghana in 2009. He focused on the trans-Atlantic slave trade and visited a former slave fort. He was obviously playing to his African-American constituency.

In the 1990s, Cotton called the “ignorance and apathy of America’s black leaders” shameful concerning the barbaric trade in black African flesh taking place in Arab countries like Sudan and Mauritania.

“Most do not see it as important enough to put on their agendas,” he wrote.

Tragically, more than a decade later, Obama proved that some, including non-blacks, still don’t.

Stephen Brown

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/09/02/africa%E2%80%99s-shameful-secret/

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