Saturday, July 20, 2013

Choosing Evil - Obama's Systematic Surrender to Jihad



by James Lewis


Clare M. Lopez is that vanishing rarity in Washington, a professional intelligence analyst who tells the truth. This week she writes about Obama's systematic surrender in the Jihad War, the aggressive war on America that our political class has denied since September 11, 2001. 


Lopez confirms in detail what many of us suspected: under Obama the US has flipped to the side of Islamic aggression.

She writes,

"... the United States of America has apparently abandoned the core principles of its Founding Fathers and capitulated to the forces of jihad and shariah.... "
Amazingly, the administration seems to follow the Muslim Brotherhood's ideological imam, Yousef al-Qaradawi.        It sure looks like we are now Qaradawi's string puppet:
"When al-Qaradawi said that Mubarak had to go, the U.S. waited a whole three days before throwing America's key ally in the Middle East for over three decades under the bus. When al-Qaradawi called for Libyan rebels to kill Muammar Qaddafi ... the U.S. led the Western military campaign that brought al-Qa'eda, the MB, and chaos to Libya. And when al-Qaradawi issued a call for jihad in Syria ...  It took the U.S. less than one week ... to announce authorization of stepped-up military aid to the al-Qa'eda-and-Brotherhood-dominated Syrian rebels."

The Muslim Bros only have to pull a fatwah out of the hat and the United States of American jumps to do its bidding.


Rub your eyes and pinch yourself --- this is not a horrifying dream. It's all too real.

But surely Hillary can't be infected by the same disease?

Oh yeah?
"Since 2011, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had been working closely with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation [OIC] to implement UN Human Rights Council Resolution 16/18, one of the key vehicles aimed at legislating restrictions on Americans' .... right to free speech

Anything that causes offense to Muslims will be forbidden. Remember the "Islamophobia" scare campaign? We are already on the way there, or have you tried to say a critical word about Muslims to a liberal lately.


The world knows about Ms. Huma Abedan as Hillary's personal Muslim Brotherhood assistant. Huma no doubt helped to advise our Secretary of State about that war they keep making on us.


Huma's husband is of course Anthony Weiner, the infamous crotch photo sexter, who has now jumped to the head of the pack for the Mayor of New York City.


That would be the American city that saw 3,000 civilian war dead on September 11, 2001. 

The word "Islam" means surrender. Not peace. The peace only comes after you surrender.
It could be that Obama is our Manchurian president, who learned as a child to surrender to Islam in that Indonesian madrassah. Could be.

Or it could be that this administration is merely perverse, turning upside-down and backwards every single moral position the United States has taken since George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. 

Whatever the smelly details may be, it looks like we are now on the side of savage oppression of women, Jews, Christians, secularists, and every other heretic throughout the Muslim world. 

Of course, it could all be just a coincidence. 

But notice one more fact. 

Thursday, Janet "Big Sis" Napolitano officially moved from Secretary of Homeland Security to the President of the University of California system.



In the same 24 hour period the UC Board of Regents named "student Muslim activist Sadia Saifuddin," age 21, to be its next student member.



Don't shut your eyes, don't turn away from the obvious.


In the Middle East people are already dying in the tens of thousands, after our turn to the dark side.


Funny thing is, that happens whenever the radical left comes to power in the world.

Ever notice that?


James Lewis

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/07/choosing_evil.html

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

Dore Gold: The US and the Muslim Brotherhood



by Dore Gold


One of the striking features of last month's overthrow of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi was the rage that came out in the street demonstrations against the Obama administration for its alleged backing of the Muslim Brotherhood. 

A CNN report on June 30 showed the crowds in Tahrir Square carrying anti-American signs saying: "Obama, stop supporting the Muslim Brotherhood fascist regime." Some signs were aimed not only against President Barack Obama, but also against U.S. Ambassador to Egypt Anne Patterson. 

Where did the crowd get this idea? Patterson detected before Morsi fell from power on July 7 that a significant number of Egyptians believed that the U.S. was working with the Muslim Brotherhood. She actually gave a speech on June 18 at the Ibn Khaldun Center "to set the record straight" on this subject. She suggested that some might be asking if the contacts between the U.S. Embassy and the Muslim Brotherhood over the years was being interpreted was "evidence of a long-term conspiracy to support the Muslim Brotherhood to replace the government of former President Hosni Mubarak." She explained to her audience that all countries "maintain contacts with those out of power." Her logic was simple: "Today's political outcasts may be tomorrow's leaders."

However, at the end of her speech she appeared to be taking a position against the planned anti-Morsi demonstration: "Some say that street action will produce better results than elections. To be honest, my government and I are deeply skeptical." For Egyptian critics of the Muslim Brotherhood, Patterson's words amounted to direct intervention into Egyptian domestic politics. The respected Lebanese daily An-Nahar added that Egyptian liberals felt that the U.S. had failed to criticize Morsi's authoritarian practices since he came to power, leading them to conclude that "Washington was 'in bed' with the Brotherhood." 

What enraged these Egyptians even further was Patterson's visit the same week of her speech with Khairat el-Shater, the deputy head of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, who is widely regarded as the strongest figure in the organization. Secular Egyptians can understand when the U.S. ambassador meets with Egyptian officials who also happen to be members of the Muslim Brotherhood. But if she met with the leadership of the organization, outside of the framework of the Egyptian government, then that is interpreted by Morsi's opponents as an effort to legitimize the Muslim Brotherhood, even if it was not the intent of the U.S. ambassador.

In order to halt the spread of the rumors about the links between Washington and the Muslim Brotherhood, Secretary of State John Kerry was forced to add his voice, last week: "We firmly reject the unfounded and false claims by some in Egypt that the United States supports the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood or any specific Egyptian political party or movement." 

Yet this claim had become the conventional wisdom across the Middle East. The Wall Street Journal reported that when then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Cairo just before Morsi issued a declaration giving himself powers over the judiciary, there were suspicions that he had U.S. support, since Washington did not condemn him for what he had done.

Many in the Middle East have been surprised at U.S. policy toward the Muslim Brotherhood. Having provided political asylum for Muslim Brotherhood members fleeing Nasserist Egypt, after 9/11, Saudi Arabia completely revised its policy. Its late crown prince, Nayef bin Abdulaziz, called the Muslim Brotherhood "the source of all problems in the Islamic world." 

A former Kuwaiti minister of education wrote in Asharq Al-Awsat in 2005 that "all those who worked with bin Laden and al-Qaida went out under the mantle of the Muslim Brotherhood." The main architect of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, came out of the Kuwaiti Muslim Brotherhood, while the roots of al-Qaida's current leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, can be traced to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.

In recent years, America's Arab allies have expressed their serious reservations about the Muslim Brotherhood. In December 2012, the United Arab Emirates arrested a number of Muslim Brothers from Egypt who were accused of trying to plot the overthrow of the ruling family. In an April 2013 interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, published in the Atlantic, Jordan's King Abdullah described the Muslim Brotherhood as "wolves in sheep's clothing." He described Jordan's "major fight" -- to prevent the Muslim Brotherhood from conniving its way into power across the region. King Abdullah claimed his Western allies were naive about the Muslim Brotherhood's intentions.

But it would be incorrect to argue that the U.S. connection with the Muslim Brotherhood came out of the Obama administration, alone. The problem is deeper. Already in 2007, Foreign Affairs, a quarterly which might be seen as a weather vane of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, decided to publish a controversial article titled "The Moderate Muslim Brotherhood." The article was largely based on the conversations of its authors with senior members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo. They wrote that the Muslim Brotherhood was discouraging jihad. 

Yet on the website of the Muslim Brotherhood, the very opposite was written. The Muslim Brotherhood explained there in 2003 that it sought to recover "the lands robbed from Islam." This was consistent with the writings of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose newspaper wrote that Muslims should take back Spain, southern Italy and the Balkans. The web article concluded: "The problems of conquering the world will only end when the flag of Islam waves and jihad has been proclaimed." In 2005, the supreme guide of the Muslim Brotherhood boasted that his organization was active in 70 countries. 

The main motivation of those in the West who support working with the Muslim Brotherhood is that it can serve as an alternative for young Egyptians to al-Qaida and other jihadist groups. But that is not what happened in the past. When the Muslim Brotherhood came to power in Sudan, it hosted jihadist leaders from Osama bin Laden to the heads of Hamas. It even allowed them to set up training camps during the 1990s. 

Morsi's regime did not go that far, but it pardoned jihadist leaders who were in Egyptian prisons, like Mustafa Hamza, the leader of al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya (the Islamic Group) who was involved in the attempted assassination of President Mubarak and the 1997 Luxor massacre that left 62 dead. Morsi also promised to work for the release of Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, the mastermind of the first World Trade Center attack in 1993. More recently, in March, Morsi was pressing the Egyptian military academy to accept members of the Muslim Brotherhood as well as other hard-line jihadists. The Muslim Brotherhood was working closely with Hamas. An Egyptian general admitted on March 11 to Dubai's Al-Bayan newspaper that the Muslim Brotherhood was pressuring Defense Minister Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi to ignore the tunnels from Sinai to the Gaza Strip.

The perception in the Middle East that the U.S. had been sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood may be overstated, but it is not entirely without foundation. A school of thought in Washington exists that truly believes that the Muslim Brotherhood has evolved into a moderate organization, with which the West can do business. It has been influencing policymaking since the second term of the Bush administration. But it is too early to establish whether the overthrow of Morsi will lead to the demise of this dangerously naive political theory or whether it will resurface in one of the other Arab states facing internal revolts as part of the Arab Spring.


Dore Gold

Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=5051

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

An Island in Revolt: A Window into Europe’s Future



by Enza Ferreri




People fleeing unrest in Tunisia are escorted by Guardia di Finanza police officers as they arrive at the southern Italian island of Lampedusa 

One could be justified for being perplexed about Pope Francis’s choice of Lampedusa, a tiny island off the coast of Sicily and Italy’s — indeed Europe’s — southernmost tip, as the destination of his very first official visit, which took place on July 8. Not a world capital, not a place in some important geopolitical region of the globe.

What is significant, even symbolic, about Lampedusa is its geography: The small island, with a population of 5,000, is positioned in the middle of the Mediterranean, making it close to the Muslim world, even closer to Tunisia than Sicily.

These two conditions explain what’s been happening to Lampedusa for over a decade, and how it could be a miniature model of the whole of Europe in the not-too-distant future.

Since at least 2001, Lampedusa has been a primary entry point into Europe for immigrants, mostly illegal from Africa. Tens of thousands have been landing here over the years, peaking during the “Arab Spring.” In 2011, according to a report of the United Nation’s Human Rights Council, “[a]pproximately 60,000 irregular migrants arrived [in Italy] as part of the 2011 influx from North Africa,” mainly from Tunisia and Libya. Around 50,000 of these came to Lampedusa.

Over 10,000 received residence permits on humanitarian grounds, because the Italian government declared a state of humanitarian emergency in February 2011, subsequently extended until December 2012.

In Lampedusa, the temporary immigrant reception center where outsiders were accommodated and sent to other facilities where they could request asylum, became so overcrowded that thousands of people had to sleep outdoors and in shelters provided by the local parish and ordinary Lampedusans.

The immigrants, among whom were suspected escaped prisoners, were given temporary visas and then gradually transferred to mainland Italy and other EU countries, but there were many times when the number of newcomers was higher than that of the locals.

On those occasions, when natives were outnumbered, there were tales of local women having to be accompanied everywhere to protect them from immigrants’ unwanted attention, sacked shops, apartment doors forced open, people returning home to find Tunisians sitting at the dining table eating and, after the intruders’ departure, some householders even discovering faeces inside saucepans.

The island became what one newspaper called “a huge immigrant camp.”

Maybe expecting to find a hotel reception and with scarcely a thought about the crisis they were creating on the small island, the illegal immigrants were complaining, as in the video below, describing what they found in Lampedusa as “shameful” and pontificating “the reception is zero” as if they were giving a hotel review on TripAdvisor:



This video confirms what Lampedusa Mayor Bernardino De Rubeis said: “We have here young Tunisians who arrogantly want everything immediately, just like criminals, ready to endanger our lives and theirs.” He later added: “We’re in a war, and the people will react. There are people here who want to go out into the streets armed with clubs.”

The reception center was burnt down twice by the migrants, during inmate riots in February 2009 and in September 2011. The media blamed everyone for the arson: the Italian government, the provisional Tunisian government, the EU; all except the actual perpetrators. In April 2011 the illegals set fire to a guest house where they were staying at the expense of a charity organization, and threw rocks at the police.

Without the reception center, they had to be accommodated in hotels and tourist villages, which are virtually the place’s only economic resources.

Aliens overwhelmed the 5,000-inhabitants island and took advantage of their hospitality, subjecting the place to unusually high levels of violence and crime. Lampedusa is a micro-representation of what will happen to Europe if both current Muslim immigration and European demographic trends continue, when the proportion of natives and migrants will be the same in Europe as it’s been in Lampedusa. The islanders’ reaction, a small civil war, could also represent a prediction of future continent-wide events.

At the height of the immigration flux, confronted with an unprecedented crisis and left to their own devices to deal with it, the people of Lampedusa used “direct action” methods.

They stopped the Italian Coast Guard patrol boat, loaded with still more “rescued” North Africans. Women occupied the harbour and docks, chained themselves, overturned wheelie bins and blocked the road. Fishermen pulled boats to the entrance to the harbour. “Nobody enters here any more,” the women shouted from the quay where patriotic flags were flying. To chants of “freedom!” they raised a banner: “We are full.”

The island descended into chaos. An urban riot occurred, with violent clashes between hundreds of Tunisians, police and locals. Many were injured. Three Lampedusans tried to assault their mayor, who barricaded himself in his office with a baseball bat for self-defence, while outside dozens were protesting against him and the immigrants, who wandered around the streets after having burnt down the reception center.

Islanders attacked journalists and TV crews. Tunisians and Lampedusans threw rocks at each other after illegals had threatened to explode gas cylinders near a petrol pump.

The reality is that this was a pseudo-humanitarian crisis: the illegals overwhelmingly were not refugees but economic migrants. What’s for years been called an “emergency” continues. Every day there are new arrivals.

The number of immigrants to Italy from the Mediterranean is growing. In the first 6 months of 2013, 7,800  of them arrived on Italy’s southern coasts, compared to 3,500 in the first 6 months of 2012. About three quarters landed on Lampedusa from Africa, the rest disembarked on Italy’s south-eastern coast in Apulia from Greece and Turkey.

The Pope, unfortunately, seems to have gone to Lampedusa in order to make everybody feel guilty for the immigrants, those lost at sea and the survivors. He condemned the “globalisation of indifference”; he talked about “the frontier of the desperate” and tragedies of people crossing the sea to seek a better life.

His sermon’s been received with mixed reactions. While Italy’s Prime Minister Enrico Letta has promised to put into practice the Holy Father’s appeal through more European co-operation (nothing new here, Italy has unsuccessfully tried for years to pass the buck to Europe), the political Right hasn’t been so keen.

Fabrizio Cicchitto, of Silvio Berlusconi’s party, PDL, pointed out that religious preaching is one thing, but a country’s management of such a complex and even intractable problem as illegal immigration — further aggravated by the presence of criminal groups — is another.

Erminio Boso of the secessionist, “far-Right” Northern League has been more outspoken: “I don’t care about what the Pope did. Indeed, I’m asking him to give land and money for the extra-comunitari [immigrants from outside the European Union]. I’m defending my own land.”

The Italian blog Diavoli Neri has made the interesting observation that the Vatican City State’s law declares that those found in its territory without authorization may be expelled, subject to fine or imprisonment. Further evidence, it concludes, that the Papal sermon, as so often, was beautiful and touching, but government laws are another matter.

A Northern Italian radio phone-in program aired irate messages from its audience: “I would have expected a few words [from the Pope] for those who are killed and raped by them [the immigrants]“; “As a Catholic I’m outraged. I’ve never heard this or another pope worry for the massacres that they commit”; “We have to prevent them from coming here. Let’s shut everything up and start thinking as a macro-region.”

Much of the immigration debate in Italy centers on whether to give citizenship to Italian-born children of immigrants, a worrying prospect considering that one third of the so-called “new Italians” are Muslim.

Particularly vociferous in support of the proposal is the Minister for Integration, Congolese Cecile Kyenge, who claims that this would “acknowledge a path to integration of the parents.”

Italians should look more closely at the experience of countries with a longer history of Third-World immigration, like Britain, where Muslim immigrants of second and third generation are more devout, orthodox and radicalized than their parents and grandparents. Something similar happens in Germany. Rather than a “path to integration” we witness a “path to Islamization.”

Either Kyenge doesn’t know what’s going on in the rest of Europe – where the policies she recommends are bringing to ruin entire countries – or she knows it very well, in which case she is a dangerous woman.

It’s already taking place in Italy too: among the hundreds of second- and third-generation immigrants leaving Europe to fight alongside the jihadist rebels in Syria there are 45-50 who lived in Italy.

In conclusion, the lesson from the Lampedusa experience is that there’s a limit to what indigenous populations can take. While it’s true that the most common reaction of native Europeans to Third-World non-military invasion so far has been leaving the city or country where this colonization occurs, it may not stay like this forever. There could sooner or later be a breaking point.


Enza Ferreri

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2013/enza-ferreri/an-island-in-revolt-a-window-into-europes-future/

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

The Resurgence of the Regimes in the Arab World



by Jonathan Spyer


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The toppling of the Muslim Brotherhood power in Egypt by the army is an event of historic importance. It is important chiefly because it represents an enormous setback in a process which only a few months ago looked inexorable and unstoppable. That process was the replacement of the military-republic regimes in the Arab world by new regimes based on Sunni Islamism, with franchises of the Muslim Brotherhood most prominent among them.

The setback suffered by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was preceded by an earlier rallying of one of their chief enemies. In the course of this year, the Assad regime in Syria succeeded in reversing rebel gains and ending the threat to Damascus.

Since then, Assad’s forces, assisted by Hizballah and advised by Iran, have been turning the Sunni Islamist rebels back in the west of the country. They have consolidated the area of regime control in the west, the capital, and the communication links between them. The regime is now in the process of brutally crushing remaining rebel-held areas in the city of Homs.

The regimes that have fallen as a result of the “Arab Spring” agitation have so far been of a single type: namely, the nationalist-military regime type patented by Colonel Gamal Abd el-Nasir and his friends in Egypt in 1952. In Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and Libya, regimes of this type fell in the course of 2011-12. The Syrian version held on because of its alliance with Iran (in contrast to all others on the list, who were either aligned with the U.S. or isolated and friendless).

Syria’s membership in a regional bloc which understands the importance of standing by friends and clients was the key factor in enabling Assad to escape the fate of his fellow nationalist dictators. Two other superannuated representatives of Arab nationalism also managed to stay in business: Algeria and the West Bank Palestinian Authority. There were clear reasons in each case. Algeria had dealt with an early version of the Arab Spring, when the military intervened to crush the Islamist FIS movement in 1991, after the latter achieved victory in elections.

In the case of the nationalist Fatah-controlled PA, survival was assured because of the presence of a military force capable of crushing any Islamist attempt to seize power. That military force, with the irony that history favors, is the armed force of the state which Fatah came into being to destroy. It is the Israel Defense Forces.

But despite these exceptions, the general direction of events looked clear — namely, the onward march of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Not any more. In Egypt, faced with impending anarchy, the old regime acted. The Muslim Brothers were removed. Notably, among the first to congratulate General Abd al-Fatah al-Sisi were President Bashar Assad of Syria and PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas. Both understood very well the significance of the Brotherhood’s eclipse in Egypt for their own battles with its local representatives.

So is the return of military domination in Egypt a return to “secular” nationalist Arab governance?

Not so fast.

First of all, the latest developments suggest the Muslim Brotherhood has chosen not to accept the verdict of the generals. Instead, the movement now appears to be trying to incite rebellion. Its Freedom and Justice party has called for “an uprising by the great people of Egypt against those trying to steal their revolution with tanks.”

Dozens people have already been killed.

So the stage seems set for an ongoing, bloody showdown between the ancien regime and the Brotherhood — as in Syria, but with the difference that in the Egyptian case, neither of the sides is aligned with Iran. This is an intra-Sunni conflict.

Secondly, the Egyptian resurgent regime side is itself not “secular” in any western sense. General al-Sisi is a devoutly observant Muslim. Among his main supporters is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which regards its own monarchical absolutism as the correct form of Islamic governance, and hates and fears the Muslim Brothers. The Saudis were also among the first to congratulate the putschist Egyptian officers, as was the United Arab Emirates.

The Saudis have emerged as the key opponents of the Brotherhood in the region. In this, their approach is in direct contrast to that adopted by neighboring Qatar, which is the main backer of the MB. The Egyptian generals will be relying on Saudi largesse to stave off economic catastrophe in the months ahead. Qatari generosity will be a casualty of the coup.

So the generals’ coup in Egypt has proven conclusively that the old, nationalist regimes are not finished yet. The Muslim Brotherhood, in Syria and now in Egypt, has been faced down. The fight is not over in either country.

But the fight is over power, not over ideology or methods of governance. The Muslim Brotherhood, General al-Sisi, the Syrian rebels, Bashar Assad, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Qatar may be at loggerheads but they have the following in common: none of them are democrats and none of them are interested in democracy.

The issue for the west, therefore, should be which of these forces are interested in pragmatic alignment with the west, and which wish to oppose it. On this basis, the west should determine its attitude toward the various players in the roiling Middle East.


Jonathan Spyer

Source: http://www.gloria-center.org/2013/07/the-resurgence-of-the-regimes-in-the-arab-world/

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

The Letter Netanyahu Should Send to the EU



by Steven Plaut


[FrontPage Editor’s note: The letter below was formulated on behalf of the Israeli Prime Minister by Steven Plaut:]
 
Dear Leaders and Commissioners of the European Union:

As Prime Minister of Israel I would like to thank you for sharing your thoughts with the world about how Israel should solve the Middle East conflict, namely by agreeing to “return” the “occupied Palestinian” lands to the “Palestinians.”

Always willing to be of public service, I have composed a small list of minor preconditions that must be met in order for Israel to agree to return to the “Palestinians” of the “occupied territories” that are “theirs.” These are really just minor corrections in your own plan. After all, why should Israel be the first and the only country to “return” lands to the original inhabitants from which they “seized” these lands in “occupation”?

So here goes:

It goes without saying that the Americans and Canadians must lead the way and show Israel the light by returning all lands that they seized from the Indians and the Mexicans to their original owners.  The Anglo-Saxons, meaning the English, will be invited to return the British isles to their rightful original Celtic and Druid owners, while they return to their own ancestral Saxon homeland in northern Germany and Denmark.  The Danes of course will be asked to move aside. In fact, they will be asked to move back to their Norwegian and Swedish homeland, to make room for the returning Anglo-Saxons.

But that is just a beginning.  The Spanish will be called upon to leave the Iberian peninsula that they wrongfully occupy and return it to the indigenous Celtiberians.  Similarly, the Portuguese occupiers will leave their lands and return them to the Lusitanians.  The Magyars will go back where they came from and leave Hungary to its true owners. The Australians and New Zealanders obviously will have to end their occupations of lands that do not belong to them.  The Thais will leave Thailand.  The Bulgarians will return to their Volga homeland and abandon occupied Bulgaria.  Anyone speaking Spanish will be expected to end his or her forced occupation of Latin America.  It goes without saying that the French will surrender all their lands, starting with Corsica, to their rightful owners. The Turks will go back to Mongolia and leave Anatolia altogether.  The Germans will go back to Gotland.  The Italians will return the boot to the Etruscans and Greeks.

That leaves the Arabs and Iranians.  First, all of northern Africa, from Mauritania to Egypt and Sudan, will have to be immediately abandoned by the illegal Arab occupiers and squatters and returned to their lawful original Berber, Punic, Greek, and Vandal owners.  Occupied Syria and Lebanon must be released at once from the cruel occupation of the Arab imperialist aggressors.  Iraq must be returned to the Assyrians and Chaldeans.  Southern Arabia must be returned to the Abyssinians.  The Arabs may retain control of the central portion of the Arabian peninsula as their homeland. But not the oil fields.

Oh, and the Palestinian infiltrators, usurpers and squatters will of course have to return the lands they are illegally and wrongfully occupying to their legal and rightful owners – the Jews.

While we are fixing world problems, let us also return all of Iran to its rightful owners.  I of course mean the Mongolians.

True, Iran was conquered or liberated from the Persians by the Mongols militarily starting in 1219. Iran then became a legitimate part of the Mongol homeland. Tamerlane, who was part Mongol, also ran the place.  All in all, the Mongol liberation of Persia lasted for two and a half centuries, not much different from the length of the period of Arab rule of “Palestine,” after which Iran was “lost” to Turkic tribes.  I guess that means the Turks also have a legitimate claim to a homeland there.

Now if the fact that some Arab armies once conquered the Land of Israel is thought to confer upon them rights of sovereignty and even statehood, why should not the Mongol conquest of Iran do the same? After all, Iran was once a Mongol state, as recently as 550 years ago, whereas the last time the Land of Israel was an Arab Palestinian state was, well, never.

Not only should Mongol rule be restored to Iran as the only legitimate rulers of the place, but these days the Mongols make far better neighbors than do the ayatollahs. The Mongols have no nuclear plans and have never met with the anti-Semitic pagans from the Neturei Karta.  The Mongols would surely put the Persian Gulf petroleum to better use than do the Holocaust Deniers in Iran these days, like developing yak milk production capacities.

So, I say, end these illegal occupations once and for all and return these lands to their rightful owners!

And right after all this, Israel will be happy to implement your proposals in full.

Thanks you for hearing me out.

Sincerely yours,

Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel


Steven Plaut

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2013/steven-plaut/the-letter-netanyahu-should-send-to-the-eu/

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

Dutch Islamic School's Lies and Threats Offer Broader Lessons



by Abigail R. Esman


Students threatening teachers. Teachers threatening students. Corruption in the classrooms, the hallways, and, eventually, becoming a national scandal – all part of daily life at an Islamic high school in Rotterdam. There, according to a recent article in Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad, non-Muslim teachers are pressured to pass failing Muslim students, while Muslim teachers hold secretive classes instructing their pupils on the evils of European culture.

And that's only part of the story.

The Ibn Ghaldoun school has a long history of controversy, but returned recently to the spotlight after it was discovered that a group of its students had stolen copies of the national final exam, administered to all Dutch students, and were selling it over the Internet. Dozens were found to have cheated, including at least one young woman who, having researched the answers, spoke them into her smartphone and played the recording during test-taking, hiding the headphones under her hijab. The result: the tests had to be repeated, even by those who had not seen them in advance – and so students around the country whose families had planned to take their summer holidays were, in many cases, forced to forfeit flights and other travel arrangements (often at substantial cost).

Investigations into the theft have revealed deep-rooted corruption and revisited previous dirty dealings at the Islamic school, the only Islamic secondary school in the country. In 2007, for instance, Ibn Ghaldoun's directors were found to have used over €200,000 in government subsidies earmarked for books and local educational school outings to take 200 students and their families not, say, to the Rijksmuseum or Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, but to Mecca. To make matters worse, school administrators then created false receipts and invoices to cover up the misallocation of funds.

Other money also appears to have been paid that same year to local imams not officially affiliated with the school, including the radical Khalil El Moumni, known, among other things, for regularly characterizing homosexuals as being "worse than pigs."

In this latest scandal, the school has come under its most intense scrutiny yet. And the findings suggest that problems with Holland's Muslim population are far more complex – and potentially serious – than has been recognized to date.

It isn't only that several hundred of Rotterdam's Muslim youth attend a school where lying and stealing is evidently the norm for the administration, creating an environment in which the basic values and principles of Western law and social values are dismissed and disregarded; and it isn't only that the role model this establishes for these children is one that not only ignores Dutch law, but defies it. What is worse is that such lessons, according to the NRC Handelsblad, are actually taught directly: in a discussion with seven non-Muslim teachers from the school (all of whom claim to have taken jobs there in the hope of improving chances for underprivileged Muslim youth), reporter Andreas Kouwenhoven discovered that after-school "study groups" prove not to be study groups at all. Rather, one Ibn Ghaldoun teacher told him, "they were classes aimed at indoctrinating the children. The lessons were directed against Dutch culture: Girls should never marry a Dutch boy or a non-believer [non-Muslim]."

Others told the NRC that parents frequently participated in the culture of lies prevalent at the school, regularly pressuring them to raise a child's grade or even to pass a failing student. Equally distressing, however, is the fact that some teachers actually capitulated. Some cited threats (one claimed his car was vandalized when he refused to raise one student's grade). Others who admitted inflating grades and secretly giving pupils second- and third chances felt that Dutch-Muslim children experience particular difficulty navigating Dutch society and so, deserve some latitude – this even when many Ibn Ghaldoun's students were born and raised in the Netherlands. Not only have students who should have failed been allowed to pass, but even those who rightfully should have flunked out completely have received diplomas. (Ibn Ghaldoum's director, Ayhan Tonca, did not respond to requests for comment for this column.)

The consequences of all this are significant. The unemployment rate among the Dutch Muslim population, particularly among Moroccans, is 15 percent, versus 8 percent of non-Muslims. Far more live in poverty. These facts are frequently cited as reasons for the high rate of criminality in the Muslim (and especially Moroccan) community, and as proof that Muslims are discriminated against by non-Muslim employers. But the situation at the school suggests that the problems lie deeper, in a systemic, cultural approach to maneuvering through life and handling an adverse situation: the lying, the cheating, the threats.

(As for allegations of discrimination in the job market, one can't help but wonder: the fact that two kids graduate with a certain grade point average may make them appear equal as job candidates; but if one of them received that diploma despite the fact that he cannot write a coherent job solicitation letter, then there's likely more than just ethnicity involved.)

What's more, failure to assimilate appears to come, then, not from discrimination or difficulties in adapting per se, but as a deliberate strategy promoted not just be radical imams in the mosques, but by the schools.

Granted, Ibn Ghaldoun is but one of many Islamic schools in the country (though it is, significantly, the only Islamic high school). But it is by far not the only one that expressly teaches students to oppose Dutch norms or resist Westernization; in fact, a 2008 report showed that a full 86 percent had defrauded the government of a total of over €2 million, while more recent government reports have shown that 30 percent of Islamic schools in the Netherlands have ties to Hamas and/or the Muslim Brotherhood.

That may explain the rise in extremism in the country in recent years, and the growing flow of Dutch Muslims to join the jihad in Syria – trends that have caused Dutch officials to raise the terror alert to its next-to-highest level.

This is not to argue against the existence of Muslim schools in principle, any more than against the presence of, say, Yeshivas. But if this is the kind of Islam Ibn Ghaldoun and similar such schools are teaching, then not only Holland, but all of Europe – and the West would be far better off without them. The time, in any case, has come to stop mollycoddling these children, and to stop making excuses for their behavior. The West must at last demand that its Muslim children be part of our cultural and moral fabric – starting in the classroom.

Abigail R. Esman, the author, most recently, of Radical State: How Jihad Is Winning Over Democracy in the West (Praeger, 2010), is a freelance writer based in New York and the Netherlands.


Abigail R. Esman

Source: http://www.investigativeproject.org/4092/guest-column-dutch-islamic-school-lies

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

Attention, Western media: there were NO 1967 'borders'



by Leo Rennert


In their July 20 Washington Post article about an apparent deal to get Israel and the Palestinians to return to the negotiating table, correspondents Anne Gearan and William Booth write the following:

Palestinian leaders have balked at returning to the bargaining table without a promise that negotiations over a future Palestinian state would be based in principle on the pre-1967 borders.

One problem with this sentence, but it's a huge one: there never were any pre-1967 "borders" between Israel and its neighbors -- only a 1949 armistice line that Arab leaders twice sought to erase when they waged existential wars to annihilate Israel in 1967 and again in 1973.  The Arab aggressors obviously didn't succeed.  Israel's victories resulted in the capture of Sinai, Gaza, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and East Jerusalem.


Now, the Palestinians essentially want a complete Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and East Jerusalem so as to convert the 1949 armistice line into the western border of a Palestinian state. 


But any way you want to slice it, a "border" still awaits a formal peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians.  In the meantime, there is only a 1949 armistice line.


As to whether there is any validity to returning to the pre-1967 line, as the Post erroneously suggests, the international community in the form of the U.N. Security Council has ruled exactly in the negative.


After the 1967 war, the Security Council debated whether to demand a complete Israeli pullback to the 1949 line, as demanded by the Soviet Union and Arab countries.  Their position, however, went nowhere.  The Council, both after the 1967 war and again after the 1973 war, adopted resolutions calling on Israel to withdraw from some, but not all, territories captured in these two wars.  The Council thus made it crystal-clear that the 1949 armistice line need never become a permanent "border."  A "border" between Israel and a Palestinian state remains to be determined as part of a future peace agreement.  We ain't there yet.  The Post shouldn't jump the gun.


When the Post insists on still using "border" as synonymous with "armistice line," it makes mincemeat of both history and international legality.


Golda Meir said it best in her autobiography: "When Arab statesmen insist that Israel withdraw to the pre-June, 1967, lines, one can only ask:  If these lines are so sacred to the Arabs, why was the Six-Day War launched to destroy them[?]"


Where Meir mentions Arab statesmen, substitute today the Washington Post.  Her question remains pertinent and valid today.  The Post should own up to its mistake.  There never was and still is no "border" there.



Leo Rennert is a former White House correspondent and Washington bureau chief of McClatchy Newspapers.

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/07/attention_western_media_there_were_no_1967_borders.html

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

Barry Rubin: Kerry Runs Around in Rings



by Barry Rubin


kerry
 
Once again a lot of people think that Secretary of State John Kerry is on the verge of making a breakthrough toward peace. The problem is that these people believe that the contenders were born yesterday, that they have no constraints whatsoever.
 
The Palestinian Authority (PA) has no intention of making peace. It only wants to get concessions and blame Israel for an absence of peace. It knows that the Obama Administration will never punish it if it balks but probably will only offer it more.
 
The PA doesn’t want to make peace since any actual concessions will make it appear to be a traitor and will bring a counter-offensive from Hamas. Since it doesn’t even represent the territory it claims—it has no power over the Gaza Strip and has no prospect of getting any—the PA cannot make any binding commitment at all. And it is watching as the battle for Syria is going on next door. That would give it a radical neighbor—the United States is supporting it—which will deem a peace agreement as null and void.
 
Every PA negotiator knows well that he isn’t supposed to succeed. It is only Kerry who doesn’t know this.
 
As for Israel, the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu knows that it cannot depend on the United States. For example, the key issue is supposedly the precondition of what the borders will be. Now think this one through:
 
The PA demands and must demand that the 1967 lines would be the state borders. BUT the United States on two occasions, in the George Bush administration and in later 2010—told Israel that it could keep “settlement blocs,” that is large settlements along the borders. It is thus impossible that Netanyahu would agree to accept the loss of that U.S. commitment.
 
Why should he not get something for nothing, show that the president’s past commitment was worthless, and simultaneously know that any time the PA wants more that Obama will give it to them?
 
And of course his coalition—even his own party—won’t agree. Does Israel so desperately need “peace” that it must be purchased at its reduced security?
Meanwhile what is the United States doing for Israel on Egypt (still refusing recognizing the military regime in Egypt), Lebanon (not keeping the 2006 commitment to combat Hizballah); Syria (pushing weapons on Islamists which Israel will have to confront in future); the Gaza Strip (having no policy to bring down Hamas); Iran (no serious plan for denying nuclear weapons), and Turkey (letting Ankara ignore the supposed détente even though it was promised by Obama himself)?
And that’s not even mentioning the demand for millions of Palestinian Arabs to “return” to Israel or Jerusalem?
There is nothing for Israel in this except the promise of peace, which will evaporate as ever single Obama promise has also done.
So the point is this:
The PA will keep doing stalling tactics and come up with new preconditions that it hopes Israel will not meet.
Israel will keep giving minor concessions and engaging in stalling tactics to hope that Kerry finds something useful to do.
Kerry will keep rotating between shuttle diplomacy and his yacht until the media has tired of this game. The Ring of Kerry in Ireland is one of the most beautiful places in the world. Now the Middle East has its own.
All leaks, spins, false claims, and ploys will go nowhere.
Advice: Don’t read about the latest double-talk and impending supposed breakthroughs in the media. Look at underlying interests; not imaginative headlines.

Posted originally via RubinReports 

Barry Rubin

Source: http://www.gloria-center.org/2013/07/kerry-runs-around-in-rings/

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

Hamas: The Resistance Is Entitled To Attack Israel's and its Allies' Embassies, Interests, And Officials Worldwide



by MEMRI


In an article published July 16, 2013 on Felesteen.ps, a website affiliated with Hamas, Hamas Refugee Affairs Department head Dr 'Issam 'Adwan argued that Hamas had the right to attack Israeli embassies and interests as well as senior Israeli officials anywhere in the world. He added that the resistance is also entitled to harm the interests of Israel's allies, headed by the U.S.

5371.jpg
Dr. 'Issam 'Adwan[1]


In his article, 'Adwan called for opening Hamas liaison offices in the Arab and Islamic countries "in order to recruit support, material and moral assistance, and even manpower assistance." Hinting at the Palestinian Authority, he stated that the resistance "has the right to smite with an iron fist any hand that seeks to rip apart the [Palestinian] people's unity and [cause it to] abandon its rights."

It should be noted that this article is unusual in that to date, senior Hamas officials have adhered to the movement's position that there should be no attacks outside the borders of Palestine. 

The following is a translation of the main points of the article:[2]

"The Palestinian resistance is entitled to expand and diversify its means and tools of resistance; this is a legitimate resistance that defends a defenseless people that has fallen under an oppressive occupation which is supported by the global forces of evil. No one has the right to condemn the resistance for any of the methods that it adopts, because it knows better than everyone else what is good for it and for its noble objectives.

"The Palestinian resistance requires the Palestinian people to remain united under the resistance banner, and it [the resistance] has the right to smite with an iron fist any hand that seeks to rip apart the people's unity and [cause it to] abandon its rights. It must also pursue the agents of the occupation wherever they may be, even outside Palestine, because leaving them in peace damages the Palestinian cause and places the Palestinian people, its leadership, and its resistance in grave danger.

"The resistance may find itself forced to attack the enemy's interests and senior officials outside the occupied territory. It is incumbent upon the honorable countries to stand alongside the occupied Palestinian people and assist it in removing the obstacles that stand in its way. By doing so, they [will be acting] in accordance with the principle of the right of peoples to self-determination, and in accordance with international decisions condemning the occupation and encouraging resistance to it by all means.

"It is the right of the Palestinian resistance [to request that] the friendly Arab and Islamic peoples and governments open liaison offices in these arenas in order to recruit support, material and moral assistance, and even manpower assistance. Anyone claiming that he supports the Palestinian people while at the same time denying the resistance this right is making a specious argument.

"The Palestinian resistance may find at a certain stage that the path of martyrdom operations is more effective, and it must not rule out the use of any method that can inflict pain on the enemy and deter it. Friendly nations and countries must support the action of the resistance and must condemn the occupation. The resistance may find itself at a certain stage forced to damage the interests of the [Israeli] occupation's allies, and the parties that provide it with funds, arms, and media support. It is the resistance that will decide when to adopt this path, and how, when, and where. 

"It is the Palestinian resistance's right to transfer the battle against the occupation to any area where the occupation is located, for the [effective] principle is that the countries of the world do not have reciprocal relations with the occupation and do not grant it legitimacy, and therefore the enemy's embassies worldwide are a target. The principle is that these countries should not allow the occupation to maintain embassies [in them], particularly when the resistance [itself] has no embassies there. This distortion must be rectified.
"It is the resistance's right to obtain weapons and money everywhere in Arab or foreign territory. If UN decisions allow the occupied Palestinian people [to wage] an armed struggle, how can this struggle be armed if the countries of the world, and particularly the Arab ones, do not comply with these decisions and refuse to allow the transfer of weapons and money to the Palestinian resistance?

"What we call resistance, our occupier enemy and its allies call terrorism. Will the resistance continue to stand with its arms folded when it is falsely accused of terrorism? The UN has still not released an international definition of terrorism, while it has released a number of decisions that allow various kinds of resistance, including armed resistance. In any case, the occupation's allies, headed by the U.S., have placed the Palestinian resistance movements, headed by Hamas, on the list of terror organizations – though they have used none of the abovementioned legitimate means of resistance. As the saying goes, 'if I am drowning, I don't fear getting wet.'"



[1] Photo source: Alresalah.ps.
[2] Felesteen (Palestine), July 16, 2013.

MEMRI

Source:http://www.memri.org

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