Jerusalem: Capital Cut-Up Kerry's Latest Joke

by Ken Blackwell and Bob Morrison

Twenty-five years ago, then-senator John Kerry cracked up a business audience in Los Angeles with a joke. 

Responding to the victory of president-elect George H.W. Bush and his much derided running mate, Kerry said "If anything happens to George Bush, the Secret Service has orders to shoot Dan Quayle." One has only to imagine the uproar today if a conservative had said the same thing about Barack Obama and Joe Biden. But those were more civil times and Kerry had to issue an apology. It was instantly accepted and everybody, as they say, moved on.

Well, that was the only joke ever attributed to the normally dour John Kerry. Until now. As President Obama's Secretary of State, John Kerry wants to preside over a final settlement of the thorny Arab-Israeli dispute. He wants to lead off with another capital cut-up. This time, however, the idea is to divide Jerusalem. 

He is working against a deadline. He wants to achieve this in his tenure as secretary. This would make a nice opening bid for a Nobel Peace Prize. And since the only Americans who seem to be eligible for Nobel Peace Prizes are those like Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, and Barack Obama -- Democratic Party nominees for president -- there's not a moment to lose.

Republicans, too, have succumbed on occasion to the Fix-it-Now delusion. In 2007, President George W. Bush sought a grand peace conference to kick-start negotiations for an end to the Mideast turmoil. President Bush invited representatives from many Arab states to join Israel in Annapolis, Md. The peace conference was held in Bancroft Hall at the U.S. Naval Academy. This is a very imposing building with shiny parquet floors and beautiful Bohemian crystal chandeliers. Set up for a peace conference, with green baize-covered tables, the scene was impressive, even august. 

There was only one problem: the Arab delegates declined to enter the building through the same portal as the Israeli delegates. And they conspicuously folded their arms when the Israeli delegates addressed the conference. 

It was not to be a harbinger of Mideast peace and harmony. Far from it. President Bush banked a lot on the idea of a "Roadmap for Peace." The only problem is: in order for a roadmap to be of any value, there has to be a road. How can there be a road to peace if the Palestinian Arabs are determined to eradicate the State of Israel?
Representatives of Fatah, the core group of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), was listed for decades as a terrorist group by the U.S. State Department. Those heirs of Yasser Arafat, may promise, in English, to stop inciting their people against Israel. But those promises are never kept. Schoolchildren in the PLO-dominated areas of the West Bank are routinely taught -- in Arabic -- to become "martyrs." They are encouraged to dress up as suicide bombers. What a hideous thought. What a horrible thing to teach children. It reminds us of the mournful statement of the late Israeli Prime Minister, Golda Meir: "We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for making us kill their children."

The State Department has never explained why the PLO was taken off the list of terrorist groups. Nor has the State Department informed us why, if we have been fighting terrorism around the world for a decade and more, it makes sense to create another "state," another voting member of the UN whose only political expression has been terrorism.

Will cutting up Jerusalem and awarding major portions of this Holy City to the heirs of Yasser Arafat, advance peace? We do not think so. 

Islamic militants have attacked all symbols of other religions. On the West Bank in 2000, Islamists attacked the Tomb of Joseph. Why? Because this burial place for the man who saved Egypt from famine reminded people of the Hebrew presence in the Holy Land for thousands of years. In Afghanistan, the Taliban in 2001 destroyed 2,000-year old statues of Buddha. They reduced them to rubble using artillery. In Iraq in 2006, Sunni jihadists bombed the Shiite Golden Mosque -- sacred site for this Muslim sect.

For Christians, there is this grim precedent: In 2002, jihadists seized the Church of the Nativity. They held it for weeks, fouling the birthplace of Jesus and holding Christian monks hostage. 

"O Little Town of Bethlehem/How Still We See Thee Lie." Not since the PLO came to town. Those who took over this Christian holy place used the pages of sacred scripture as toilet paper.

Mr. Secretary: Is this the kind of scene you want played out on Jerusalem's Via Dolorosa, where Jesus carried His Holy Cross? Is this what you want to happen to Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where Jesus' body lay? 

Why should Americans, especially American Christians, support John Kerry's dangerous plan to carve up Jerusalem? Why should we subsidize his vainglorious quest for his Nobel Prize? Why send yet another secular liberal on a taxpayer-financed Mideast ego trip? 


Ken Blackwell and Bob Morrison are Senior Fellows at the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C.

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/08/jerusalem_capital_cut-up_kerrys_latest_joke.html

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

9/11 Group Pushes Support for Terror Finance Legislation

by IPT News


A petition urging Congress to pass new terror financing legislation is being circulated by a group of 9/11 victims' families and survivors of the attacks.

Three New York lawmakers plan to introduce the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act when Congress returns after Labor Day. The bill would allow American victims to sue foreign people and entities for financing terrorist attacks. Courts have blocked such claims against Saudis alleged to have aided the 9/11 plot.

It has a bi-partisan group of co-sponsors, including Democrat Charles Schumer in the Senate, Republican House member Peter King and Democrat Jerrold Nadler, all from New York. While Americans widely support law enforcement actions to prevent terror attacks and curb terror financing, this is at least the third time the bill is being offered.

"No individual or country should be shielded from being held accountable for their role in the most heinous act of terrorism to ever occur in the United States," Schumer said in announcing a similar 2011 effort. "This bill will send a clear message to Saudi Arabia and other sponsors of terror: if you attack the United States, you will be held accountable. It will also allow the families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks to receive some justice for the losses they experienced on that fateful day."

The petition drive by 9/11 Families United for Justice Against Terrorism aims to show Congress a broad base of support for the bill.

"Never in our history has it been more important for us to end the flow of money to terrorists whose dangerous ideology led to the attacks of 9/11 and the murder of almost 3,000 innocent souls," the petition says. "We know al Qaeda and other terrorist networks are still active and receiving funding as demonstrated by the recent closing of U.S. Embassies across the Middle East in the wake of terror threats and reportedly 3 al Qaeda-assisted prison breaks in Iraq, Pakistan and Libya that freed over 1,500 dangerous prisoners. We need this bill and urgently need your help."

Click here to sign the petition.


IPT News

Source: http://www.investigativeproject.org/4132/9-11-group-pushes-support-for-terror-finance

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

Feminist ‘Hijab Solidarity’?

by Bruce Bawer

 

Europe is awash in dhimmitude, but Sweden is a case unto itself. There’s something desperate and demented about the levels of dhimmitude on display in Ikea-land. In no other European country, moreover, is there so little pushback in the media.

As I wrote just yesterday, Sweden has the highest percentage of rapes in the Western world. And the problem is getting steadily worse. Given the progressive Swedish establishment’s fondness for earnest rhetoric about women’s rights, you might think this rape crisis would be a subject of deep concern in the nation’s media. But no – it’s a non-topic. It’s unmentionable. And for one reason: because everyone understands that the ever-increasing incidence of Swedish rapes is directly related to the ever-increasing number of Swedish Muslims. And in Sweden, you can’t talk critically about Islam. You just can’t – not publicly, anyway. When the subject is Islam, nothing is permitted other than the usual mindless multicultural mantras.

I’m deeply aware of all this. Even so, I was taken aback by one of the big news stories out of Sweden this week.

It started when a pregnant Muslim woman (one report put her age at 20; another identified her as a mother of three) claimed that she’d been attacked late Friday night. She was alone in a parking structure in the Stockholm suburb of Farsta, she said, when a man walked over to her, ripped off her hijab, and banged her head into a parked car, making her dizzy. He also growled something to the effect that people like her “don’t belong here.”

Now, if this actually happened, it’s repugnant. But there’s no evidence that it did happen – no eyewitnesses, no surveillance video – and it’s been suggested (although not, of course, in the Swedish media) that the woman’s story could be entirely bogus. In any case, it’s a man-bites-dog tale if there ever was one: Sweden is overrun with Muslim men who rape infidel women, not with infidels who pull headscarves off Muslim women.

Yet when the woman went public with her account, Swedish derangement syndrome kicked in – big time. On Sunday, Aftonbladet ran an op-ed signed by five persons: Bilan Osman, identified as an “anti-racist commentator”; Fatima Doubakil of the Muslim Human Rights Committee; Foujan Rouzbeh,  an “asylum rights activist”; Nabila Abdul Fattah, “commentator”; and Nachla Libre, “poet.”

The five authors asserted that “the woman in Farsta isn’t the only one who has been attacked in this way.” Many Muslim women, they maintained, have been subjected to similar mistreatment by “white Swedish men…on buses, in stores, and at restaurants.” The authors painted a picture of a country filled with white people who “harass, degrade, intimidate, and abuse others in public places because of their religious attire.” And they argued that such offenses have become increasingly common because – and, yes, they actually wrote the following – “Islam and Muslims are described in the media and by political parties as a problem and a threat to Swedish democracy.”

Yes, Islam is a threat to Swedish democracy; but no, the Swedish media virtually never dare to admit this fact, or to say anything that might remotely hint at it. And the only political party that addresses this issue is the Swedish Democratic Party, whose members are not only routinely condemned in the media, in the harshest of terms, but have been repeatedly harassed, degraded, intimidated, and abused by the Swedish government itself.

The op-ed authors went on to demand – and that’s the word they used, “demand” – that Justice Minister Beatrice Ask “appoint a commission to investigate, map, and come up with specific action plans to combat the widespread hate crimes against Muslims.” They called on the government “to stop the march of fascism” (as represented, apparently, by that lone man in the parking structure who allegedly pulled off the woman’s headscarf). And they proclaimed what they called a “hijabupprop” – a hijab action. “We encourage all of our sisters in Sweden – religious and non-religious – to veil themselves on the morning of August 19 to show solidarity with all Muslim women who, all too often, suffer harassment and violence.”

The five authors tweeted their call to action on Twitter. The tweet was shared over 65,000 times. The idea was brilliant, providing politically correct Swedes with an excellent opportunity to posture. And it proved a magnificent success. In “solidarity” with the purported victim, countless Swedish women – including a number of well-known actors, writers, journalists, artists, and politicians – wore headscarves on Monday. And took pictures of themselves doing so. Their photos flooded Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

One of the women who proudly donned traditional Muslim headgear was Gudrun Schyman of the Feminist Initiative, a leading women’s rights group. Another was Social Democratic politician Veronica Palm, who announced on Facebook that she supported the hijab action “because nobody should feel threatened or harassed because of the way they choose to dress.” Sweden’s Humanist organization issued a statement in support of the campaign, declaring that all men and women have a right to dress as they wish.

Justice Minister Beatrice Ask, for her part, invited the hijab campaign’s organizers to meet with her on Tuesday. “I would love to hear what they have to say,” she told the media, “because I believe they have more to say than what they can write in an op-ed.” She underscored that the hijab-yanking incident “should be taken very seriously,” as should the views of the campaign organizers. As for the organizers, while they agreed to meet Ask, they didn’t hide the fact that they were sore at her for turning down a joint TV interview with them. “We’ll meet her, of course, but we won’t be satisfied with that,” one of them griped. “We want her to take action.”

The Swedish news media, notorious for the decorous silence it has long maintained about the country’s rape crisis, were all over this story. The newspapers were awash in stories about the hijab campaign and full of pictures of the famous Swedish women in Muslim headscarves. The hijab campaigners were interviewed repeatedly on TV and radio. One of them, Nabila Abdul Fattah, admitted that their goal was “to normalize the hijab.”

There were very few dissenting voices –  at least not in the public square. Muslim feminist Hanna Gadban was furious about the campaign, and tried to remind everyone that the hijab is a symbol of patriarchal oppression. But she was a voice crying in the wilderness. Like a chilled bottle of Dom Perignon to a dipsomaniac, the hijab action was just too irresistible to the Swedish mind.

Sitting at my computer and looking over all the pictures of Swedish women in headscarves, I pondered, more bemused than ever, the eternal question: what is it in the Swedish character that makes such foolishness possible? The zillions of photos of stupid, self-satisfied infidel women in veils symbolizing female subordination were ridiculous, deserving of mockery, of derisive laughter. But they were also scary. Seeing brainwashed people is always scary. “What’s wrong with these people?” I said aloud as I pored over the screwy selfies. “Whatever it is,” my partner said, “it should be in the DSM.”

Even as all this nonsense was underway, Sweden, which has the world’s second highest rape statistics – thanks to nothing more or less than the army of savage Muslim men within its borders who have no respect or mercy whatsoever for unveiled infidel women – was inexorably moving up toward the title of world’s #1 rape nation. And there was no sign of anyone doing anything whatsoever about it.


Bruce Bawer

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/feminist-hijab-solidarity/

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

Islam: Religion of Bigots

by Frontpagemag.com



 

Barack Obama has said repeatedly that Islam is “a religion of peace.”  His administration has accused those who do not agree with this proposition — or who dare mention Islamic violence against women and homicidal oppression of homosexuals — of “Islamophobia.”

These are fictions and the President has done the country a fundamental disservice by promulgating them.  The truth?  The true religious bigotry is the one that exists in the heart of Islamic orthodoxy.  In Saudi Arabia, the existence of Christian churches is prohibited, along with the Bible itself; no Christian or Jew can enter Mecca or Medina lest their mere footsteps desecrate Islam’s holiest sites.  In Pakistan and Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Muslim world, conversion from Islam to Christianity is punishable by death.  In Iraq, Syria, Nigeria and even the President’s beloved Indonesia, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and other “infidels” often face acts of religious genocide by fundamentalists who invoke core Islamic texts and teachings to justify their actions.

In short, as Robert Spencer shows in his alarming new pamphlet, Islam: Religion of Bigots, the creed of Muhammad, far from being a religion of peace, has revealed itself in the post-9/11 world to be a religion of bigotry.

To order the pamphlet, click here.

Islam: Religion of Bigots

by Robert Spencer

“Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance,” proclaimed President Barack Obama during his appeal to the Muslim world from Cairo on June 4, 2009. “We see it in the history of Andalusia and Cordoba during the Inquisition. I saw it firsthand as a child in Indonesia, where devout Christians worshiped freely in an overwhelmingly Muslim country.”1

Unfortunately, this is far from the truth. Even during what is generally considered to have been the Golden Age of Islamic “tolerance,” it is more accurate to say that non-Muslims were tolerated as second-class subjects rather than respected as equals under Islamic regimes. They were regarded as dhimmis, whose residence was conditioned on their submission to humiliating regulations that ensured their subjugation to the Muslim population. They had to pay an onerous special tax (jizya) mandated by the Qur’an (9:29), for example, and wear special marks identifying their second-class status.

Moreover, unlike Christendom, whose leaders have issued apologies for past mistreatment of Jews and condemned the scriptural justifications for that mistreatment, authorities in the Muslim world from Muhammad’s day to this have never thought twice about referring to Jews as “apes and pigs” (cf. Qur’an 2:63-65; 5:59-60; 7:166), or regarding them as destined by God’s will for destruction. These are some of the salient facts that Obama’s charitable view obscures at a time when prominent Muslim leaders including Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the world’s most prominent Muslim cleric, are calling on the faithful to finish the extermination of the Jews that Hitler began.²

In countries where Muslims are a small minority, such as the United States, there is a surface plausibility to Obama’s claim. Muslim groups have so far accommodated themselves to a democracy whose secular faith is one of diversity and tolerance. But in countries and communities where Muslims constitute a national majority, the face of Islam looks quite different. In Saudi Arabia, the existence of Christian churches is prohibited, along with the possession of Christian Bibles; no Christian or Jew is allowed to enter the cities of Mecca and Medina lest their footprints defile Islam’s sacred sites. As the Kingdom of the Two Holy Places, Saudi Arabia has a unique status in the Islamic world. One aspect of this status is that Mecca and Medina are realizations of Muhammad’s command to remove all but Muslims from the Arabian Peninsula.³ Mecca and Medina represent the aspirations of the Muslim world, the vision of a quintessential Islamic society: one in which there are no non-Muslims.

In Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere, conversion from Islam to Christianity is already punishable by death, in accord with Muhammad’s command. In Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Nigeria, and even Obama’s beloved Indonesia, religious minorities — Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and non-believers –face harassment and often violent religious persecution. These persecutions are carried out by jihadist Muslims who invoke core Islamic texts and teachings to justify their actions. In short, in the Muslim world itself, which since 9/11 has been increasingly swept up in the tide of Islamic supremacism, the creed of Muhammad reveals itself to be a religion of bigots rather than, as President Obama would have it, a religion of peace.

There is a theological foundation for Islamic bigotry. The Qur’an calls the Jews and Christians who reject Muhammad “the most vile of created beings” (98:6). It says that the “polytheists are unclean” (9:28), and since it claims that Jews consider Ezra the Son of God the way Christians consider Jesus the Son of God (9:30), and that “it is not befitting for Allah to take a son” (19:35), in Islamic theology, Jews and Christians are as much polytheists as are Hindus and hence just as unclean.

Religious Genocide

In March 2013, the Egyptian Islamic scholar Abdullah Badr demonstrated how such a belief can work out in practice when he explained that Christians disgusted him, saying that it was “not a matter of piety, but disgust. I get grossed out. Get that? Disgust, I get grossed out, man, I cannot stand their smell or … I don’t like them, it’s my choice. And they gross me out; their smell, their look, everything. I feel disgusted, disgusted.”⁴

That disgust has combined with imperatives derived from Qur’anic injunctions to “slay the polytheists wherever you find them” (9:5) and to subjugate the People of the Book (9:29) to play out in Islamic history in the cleansing of entire regions of their non-Muslim populations. Eliminating other religions, as per Qur’an 8:39 (“fight…until religion is all for Allah”) and making sure that any non-Muslims who remain are conquered and submissive, is the overarching goal of jihad. As an Iranian Bahai observed to V. S. Naipaul in the course of his travels through the world of Islam, “These Muslims are a strange people. They have an old mentality. Very old mentality. They are very bad to minorities.”⁵

The transformation of Constantinople following its conquest in 1453 illustrates the effects of Muslim bigotry. Before the Muslim conquest, Constantinople had been the center of Eastern Christianity and the second city of all Christendom, as well as the chief rival to the splendor and authority of Rome. Its Hagia Sophia cathedral, built by the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century, was the grandest and most celebrated church in the Christian world until the construction of St. Peter’s in the Vatican. As recently as 1914, Constantinople still boasted a population nearly fifty percent Christian. Today, as a result of the religious persecution of Christians, the city is now 99.99% Muslim.⁶

After the 1453 Muslim conquest, the Hagia Sophia Cathedral, like so many other Christian churches before and after, was transformed into a mosque. After Turkey’s secularization, the mosque was converted into a museum by the secularists, and is now about to be transformed into a mosque again. While secular Turkey did not enforce Islamic law, it saw a depoliticized Islam as essential to the Turkish identity at the expense of the Christian population. In Tur-Abdin in southwest Turkey in 1960, there were 150,000 Christians; today, there are just over two thousand.⁷ The rest have fled in the face of Muslim hostility and harassment.

Occasionally, Muslim authorities found it politically expedient to draw explicitly on the genocidal passions Muhammad had inspired, and used them to arouse the fury of the populace against the dhimmis, who were bringing Allah’s disfavor upon the larger community. In a harbinger of the Armenian catastrophe that would take place in Turkey twenty years later, the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid initiated a series of bloody strikes against the restive Christian Armenians in eastern Anatolia in 1895. The Armenians had made the mistake of embracing Western notions of human rights, and of beginning to question their dhimmi status. According to Lord Kinross, historian of the Ottoman Empire, “at the point of a bayonet,” the Armenians were offered “the choice between death and forcible conversion to Islam.”⁸ The genocide that the Muslim Turks subsequently conducted during World War I was a manifestation of the same jihadist strain in Islam, and led to the murder of a million and a half Armenians.

In Turkey itself, the Christian population has declined from 15% in 1920 to 1% today. In Syria, the Christian population has declined from 33% to 10% in the same span. Since the Turks occupied northern Cyprus in 1974, churches have been despoiled of their icons, which have flooded the market in Greece. The Turks have taken over many churches for secular uses, and even tried to convert the fourth century Christian monastery of San Makar into a hotel. Christian Cypriots are forbidden to come near the building, much less enter it.⁹

Likewise in Tunisia, “in the early 1950s, half of the inhabitants of Tunis were Catholics, but with the declaration of independence some 280,000 Tunisian Catholics were expelled. Today there are no more than a tenth of this number and most of the churches are closed or no longer in use.”¹⁰
Before the Gulf War, the number of Christians in Iraq approached a million people, according to some estimates.¹¹ But with Shi’ites and Sunnis vying for power in the war-torn country, over half, or roughly 500,000 Christians, have fled the country rather than risk the treatment in store for them from the majority Muslim population. This is not to suggest that the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein was particularly hospitable to Iraqi Christians. Even under his relatively secular regime, in which Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz was a Chaldean Catholic, the small Christian community faced random violence from the Muslim majority. Aside from outbreaks of actual persecution, including murder, Christians were routinely pressured to renounce their religion and to marry Muslims.¹² But since Saddam’s removal and the institution of Iraq’s Islamic constitution, the situation has grown exponentially worse.

Since the Muslim Brotherhood’s ascendancy in Egypt, enabled by the Obama administration, Islamic bigotry has been directed with increasing violence toward the nation’s indigenous Coptic Christian population. Recently, Muslim mobs, with the acquiescence of the Islamic supremacist regime, conducted an armed attack on St. Mark’s Cathedral, the seat of the Coptic pope. Now Copts are fleeing the country in droves. NBC News reported in June 2013: “The number of Egyptians receiving asylum in the U.S. has jumped more than five-fold in recent years.”¹³

In Bethlehem, the birthplace of Christ, the population was 85% Christian in 1948, but as of 2006, only 12% of those who hold to the faith of the town’s most celebrated native son remained, and even that minimal percentage is almost certainly smaller today.¹⁴

Islamic bigotry is driving Christians out of their ancient homelands all over the Middle East. “A century ago,” noted Simon Kent in the Toronto Sun, June 2013, “more than 20% of the region’s population was Christian and as recently as the 1980s, places like Lebanon had a Christian majority. Now, with Christian numbers fading, it’s split between brawling Hezbollah Shi’a and Sunni fanatics. Estimates put the Christian population in the Middle East at under 5% and sinking rapidly — and the figure only remains that high because of the Coptic Christians who have not yet left strife- torn Egypt.”¹⁵

The purging of Christians in the Middle East has taken place largely since Osama bin Laden launched the Islamic jihad in earnest. It represents the greatest population cleansing of modern times, dwarfing “ethnic” cleansings, and has taken place almost silently — while facile Western observers, including the occupant of the White House, rhapsodize about Muslim “tolerance.”

In a stark plaint that would sound paranoid if it were not so obviously true, Gregory III, the Patriarch of Antioch of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church, stated in 2006: “After September 11, there is a plot to eliminate all the Christian minorities from the Arabic world. Our simple existence ruins the equations whereby Arabs can’t be other than Moslems, and Christians but be westerners.”¹⁶

Nor is it just the Arab Middle East where the purge is taking place. Hindu activist Bharati Krishna declares: “When Pakistan came into existence in 1947, 24 per cent of the population were Hindus. And now look at the percentage of Hindus in Pakistan, just below 2 per cent. What happened to the rest? Majority of them have been mercilessly killed by the Islamic fanatics and the rest forcibly converted to Islam.” Krishna adds “the same happened in the case of Bangladeshi Hindus. The percentage of Hindu population in Bangladesh in 1947 (then East Pakistan) was numbered at 31. But with course of time it has been declined and stationed at nine per cent now. Massive religious conversion and ruthless murders of the Hindus were the reasons for this decline.”¹⁷

Traditional Islamic Submissions

Bigotry towards non-Muslim populations, along with religious cleansing, is as old as Islam itself. Islam originated in Arabia in the late seventh and early eighth centuries.¹⁸ Before its advent, Egypt, Libya, and all of North Africa were Christian, and had been so for hundreds of years. So were Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Asia Minor. The churches addressed in the letters of Paul, collected in the New Testament, are located in Asia Minor and modern Turkey as well as modern Greece. Antioch, Constantinople (“Istanbul” in modern Turkey) and Alexandria in Egypt were three of the most important Christian centers of the first millennium. But then came the Arab armies, and ultimately these lands became Muslim — not because the compelling aspects of Islam induced large numbers of people to convert to the religion of the conquerors, but because the non-Muslims were forced to accept a humiliating second-class status. This was a bigotry enforced by the sword. Conversion to Islam became the only way to live a decent life or, in many cases, to live at all, and in this way the Christian populations of these areas steadily diminished.

There was no tolerance for the “other,” as numerous misleading commentators claim. For the invading Muslim armies, it wasn’t enough to conquer their rivals; the native population had to be subdued, and its religion humiliated. Historian Bat Ye’or recounts that when the Arab invaders conquered Egypt in the seventh century, “Sophronius [Bishop of Jerusalem], in his sermon on the Day of Epiphany 636, bewailed the destruction of churches and monasteries, the sacked towns, the fields laid waste, the villages burned down by the nomads who were overrunning the country. In a letter the same year to Sergius, patriarch of Constantinople, he mentions the ravages wrought by the Muslim Arabs. Thousands of people perished in 639, victims of the famine and plague that resulted from these destructions.”¹⁹

Once the Muslims were entrenched in power, they began to levy the jizya, or tax on non-Muslims, which were not small charges. A medieval chronicler writes of one of the towns subjected to Muslim rule: “It is impossible to describe the lamentable position of the inhabitants of this town, who came to the point of offering their children in exchange for the enormous sums that they had to pay each month, finding no one to help them because God had abandoned them and had delivered the Christians into the hands of their enemies.”²⁰ In the fourteenth century, the pioneering sociologist Ibn Khaldun explained the options for Christians: “It is [for them to choose between] conversion to Islam, payment of the poll tax, or death.”²¹

As far as Islamic law was concerned, the Muslims who displayed such ruthless bigotry toward non-Muslims were not carrying their zeal too far, but were following the example of their Prophet, who expelled the three Jewish tribes of Medina: “It has been narrated on the authority of Ibn Umar that the Jews of Banu Nadir and Banu Quraiza fought against the Messenger of Allah, who expelled Banu Nadir, and allowed Quraiza to stay on, and granted favour to them until they too fought against him. Then he killed their men, and distributed their women, children and properties among the Muslims, except that some of them had joined the Messenger of Allah who granted them security. They embraced Islam. The Messenger of Allah turned out all the Jews of Medina, Banu Qainuqa… and the Jews of Banu Haritha and every other Jew who was in Medina.”²²

In light of the violence with which Muhammad spread Islam, there is a distinct menace in his famous invitation to the Byzantine emperor Heraclius: “Embrace Islam and you will be safe.”²³ Heraclius didn’t embrace Islam, and ultimately Byzantium fell to the jihadi sword.

These statements and actions of Islam’s prophet laid the foundations of a culture of bigotry and religious purges. The former realms of Christendom, now universally regarded as part of the Islamic world, only became so in the same way as these Arabian Jewish tribes became Muslim: by being bathed in blood and then subjugated by force.

The provisions governing the jizya and the subjection of non-Muslims in Islamic law have not been fully enforced since the mid-nineteenth century, but reinstituting them is a goal of today’s jihadists, who seek to restore the orthodoxy of the faith and are now in control of the two largest countries in the Middle East. In March 2007, Muslim gangs knocked on doors in Christian neighborhoods in Baghdad, demanding payment of the jizya.²⁴ In December 2011, Yassir Al-Burhami, a leader of the Salafists, an Egyptian movement of rigorist Muslims, reiterated some of the classic Islamic laws regarding the dhimmis: “Appointing infidels to positions of authority over Muslims is prohibited. Allah said: ‘Never will Allah grant the infidels a way [to triumph] over the Believers’” (Qur’an 4:141). He also declared that the Muslims of Egypt should begin again to collect the jizya from the Christians.

Al-Burhami also cited Muhammad’s precedents as a guide to Muslims living in countries in which they were still minorities: “The Muslims can implement any form of conduct used by the Prophet Muhammad. When the Prophet Muhammad was still in Mecca, he dealt with the infidels in a certain way, and when the Muslims are weak, they should deal with the infidels this way. ‘Refrain from action, pray, and pay the zakkat.’ In many infidel countries, such as occupied Palestine, we instruct Muslims to do just that. We are not telling the Muslims in Gaza to launch rockets every day, which would lead to the destruction of the entire country. We tell them to adhere to the truce. When the Prophet Muhammad first arrived in Al-Medina, he signed a treaty with the Jews without forcing them to pay the jizya poll tax. This was necessary at the time, but when they breached the treaty, he fought them, and eventually, he imposed the jizya upon the People of the Book…. The Christians [of Egypt] can be dealt with like the Jews of Al-Medina. This is possible.”²⁵

The idea that Christians must “feel themselves subdued” (Qur’an 9:29) in Islamic lands is also very much alive. When the first Catholic Church in Qatar opened in March 2008, it included no cross, no bell, no steeple, and no sign. “The idea,” explained the church’s pastor, Father Tom Veneracion, “is to be discreet because we don’t want to inflame any sensitivities.”²⁶ In the Philippines, the church in the nation’s one Islamic city, Marawi, has also done away with the cross. A Catholic priest, Father Teresito Soganub, explains: “To avoid arguments and to avoid further misunderstandings we just plant the cross deep in our hearts.” Soganub, according to Reuters, “doesn’t wear a crucifix or a clerical collar and sports a beard out of respect for his Muslim neighbors.” He celebrates few weddings, since roast pork is a staple of wedding receptions for Filipino Catholics.²⁷

It is easy to see the need for such discretion. Preaching in a mosque in Al-Damam, Saudi Arabia, the popular Saudi Sheikh Muhammad Saleh Al-Munajjid recommended hatred of Christians and Jews as a proper course: “Muslims must,” he declared, “educate their children to jihad. This is the greatest benefit of the situation: educating the children to jihad and to hatred of the Jews, the Christians, and the infidels; educating the children to jihad and to revival of the embers of jihad in their souls. This is what is needed now.”²⁸

The hatred of other religions, particularly of Christianity and Judaism, is manifest in the attitude towards religious conversion in countries with Islamic supremacist regimes. Converts from Islam to Christianity are often hunted in these countries, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia being the most prominent, while virtually all religious authorities in the Muslim world agree that such individuals deserve death. Muhammad himself commanded it: “Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him.”²⁹ This is still the position of all the schools of Islamic jurisprudence, although there is some disagreement over whether the law applies only to men, or to women also.

At Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, the most prestigious and influential institution in the Islamic world, an Islamic manual that the institution certifies as a reliable guide to Sunni Muslim orthodoxy states: “When a person who has reached puberty and is sane voluntarily apostatizes from Islam, he deserves to be killed.” Although the right to kill an apostate is reserved in Islamic law to the leader of the community and other Muslims can theoretically be punished for taking this duty upon themselves, in practice a Muslim who kills an apostate needs to pay no indemnity and perform no expiatory acts (as he must in other kinds of murder cases under classic Islamic law). This accommodation is made because killing an apostate “is killing someone who deserves to die.”³⁰

Islamic Bigotry and Islamophobia

Given Islam’s long and shameful record of bigotry, it is perverse in the extreme that Islamic spokesmen routinely charge those who point out the foregoing facts about Islam with … bigotry. According to these spokesmen and their gullible sympathizers on the left, any observation about the harsher realities of the Islamic world is evidence of “Islamophobia” — irrational hatred of all Muslims, and not just those who are carrying out terrorism in the name of Allah, or brutalizing women as a religious obligation. Several widely publicized reports, including one by the Democratic Party- aligned Center for American Progress, single out prominent conservative figures who have publicly criticized the misogyny, bigotry and terrorism promoted by many Islamic institutions, and stigmatized them as “Islamophobes.”³¹

The term Islamophobia is one of the favored weapons of the Muslim Brotherhood and allied jihadist organizations in the West. Muslim Brotherhood groups such as the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) employ it to manufacture a modern-day thought crime out of legitimate concerns about Islamic bigotry, misogyny and support for terrorist entities like Hezbollah and Hamas. Voltaire said, “To learn who rules over you [or in this case intends to rule over you], simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.”

The campaign to suppress all links of Islam to Islamic terrorism gained its greatest and most potentially damaging success in 2011, when Muslim Brotherhood groups and their left-wing allies prevailed on the Obama Administration to remove all mention of Islam and jihad from the counter-terror training materials used by the FBI and other agencies. This left agents in a state of woeful unpreparedness, rendering them incapable of evaluating intelligence regarding jihadist threats. This condition of purposeful ignorance bore bitter fruit in April 2013, when Islamic terrorists exploded a bomb at the Boston Marathon. The Russian and Saudi governments had warned the FBI in advance about the bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev. But the FBI discounted the warnings because they were blind to Tsarnaev’s connection to the global Islamic jihad and perceived him only as a Chechen “nationalist,” engaged in a cause that was a Russian problem and had nothing to do with the United States.

The goal of the “Islamophobia” campaign is disarm the West in the face of the Islamic threat, and beyond that to establish in free societies the blasphemy provisions of Islamic law forbidding criticism of Islam. This prohibition would preclude, for example, recognition of the Jew-hatred that permeates Islamic sacred texts, as well as the pronouncements of Islamic leaders.³² It would also render the First Amendment to the U.S. Bill of Rights null and void. Adoption of laws criminalizing “Islamophobia” would also foreclose criticism of Islam’s institutionalized mistreatment of women and gays.

If such a possibility seems farfetched, consider that the student councils at four elite universities in California, including UCLA and UC Berkeley, have passed (by unanimous votes) “anti-Islamophobia” resolutions mandating “zero tolerance” for just those expressions of opinion. One of the chief advocates of these resolutions, and leader of two campus Muslim Brotherhood fronts, Sadia Saifuddin, was recently nominated by the regents of the UC system to sit on their board as the representative of all UC students.³³

Blasphemy laws protecting Islam may not yet be adopted in the West, but Muslim mobs are ready to enforce them anyway. In the fall of 2005, violent Muslim riots resulting in over 100 deaths were triggered by the publication of cartoons in Denmark depicting Muhammad. In the wake of these Islam-inspired outrages, a group of writers issued a manifesto called, “Together Facing the New Totalitarianism.”³⁴ This genuine anti-bigotry manifesto declared: “After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new global totalitarian threat: Islamism…. We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all. We refuse to renounce our critical spirit out of fear of being accused of ‘Islamophobia,’ a wretched concept that confuses criticism of Islam as a religion and stigmatization of those who believe in it. We defend the universality of the freedom of expression, so that a critical spirit can exist in every continent, towards each and every maltreatment and dogma.”³⁵

Canaries in the Mine of the Islamic Jihad

The foremost targets of Muslim bigotry and the canaries in the mine for all non-Muslims in the path of the jihad are, unsurprisingly, Jews and the state of Israel. Islamic leaders have repeatedly affirmed their desire that the Jewish State cease to exist — a genocidal agenda in itself, and one that could only be accomplished by a Holocaust in the Middle East. Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, the former president of Iran, has called for such a Holocaust (without notable dissent from the Muslim world), saying that “the annihilation of the Zionist regime will come,” and that it was predicted by the Ayatollah Khomeini: “The Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time” — a declaration widely but not quite accurately translated in the West as “as the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map.”

On other occasions, Ahmadinejad has made the goal crystal clear: “The Islamic umma (community) will not allow its historic enemy [Israel] to live in its heartland,” and “the issue of Palestine is not one which we could compromise on …. This would mean the defeat of the Islamic world.” In Ahmadinejad’s mind, the destruction of Israel is near:

“There is no doubt that the new wave [of attacks] in Palestine will soon wipe this disgraceful blot [Israel] from the face of the Islamic world.” The Palestinians have made this genocidal goal equally clear. In the words of Mahmoud al-Zahar, a founder of Hamas: “There is no place for you Jews among us, and you have no future among the nations of the world. You are headed to annihilation.”³⁶
Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah (Party of Allah), has proclaimed the same goal:“[I]f they [the Jews] all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide,” while a 1992 Hezbollah statement declared “open war until the elimination of Israel and until the death of the last Jew on earth.”³⁷

This hatred of the Jews and their existence emanates directly from Muhammad’s call to all Muslims to “fight the Jews and kill them” to the very last one. Thus Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood that the Obama administration has chaperoned to power in Egypt, proclaimed: “Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them — even though they exaggerated this issue — he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers….”³⁸

For the jihadists, the Jews are only the first in line. In 1998, the World Islamic Front, led by Osama bin Laden, formally declared jihad against “the Jews and the Crusaders,” meaning the Christian nations (as the jihadis regarded them) of America and Europe. The fatwa declared: “The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and military — is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.”³⁹

At the “World Without Zionism” conference held in Tehran in October 2005, the assembled delegates chanted “death to Israel, death to America, death to England,” while the host, Ahmadinejad, predicted to the cheers of the assembled that, “with the help of the Almighty, we shall soon experience a world without America and Zionism, notwithstanding those who doubt.”⁴⁰

Like Ahmadinejad, Hasan Nasrallah also wants to see America destroyed: “Let the entire world hear me. Our hostility to the Great Satan [America] is absolute. … Regardless of how the world has changed after 11 September, ‘Death to America’ will remain our reverberating and powerful slogan: ‘Death to America.’”

This chilling command is the logical extension of Islamic bigotry, and its crowning manifestation.

Notes:
¹ “Text: Obama’s Speech in Cairo,” New York Times, June 4, 2009.
² “Sheik Yousuf Al-Qaradhawi: Allah Imposed Hitler upon the Jews to Punish Them ‘Allah Willing, the Next Time Will Be at the Hand of the Believers,’” MEMRITV.org, January 28-30, 2005.
³ “I will expel the Jews and Christians from the Arabian Peninsula and will not leave any but Muslim.” (Sahih Muslim 19.4366)
⁴ Raymond Ibrahim, “Video: ‘I Hate Christians and Am Disgusted by Them’ — Muslim Cleric,” RaymondIbrahim.com, April 1, 2013.
⁵ V. S. Naipaul, Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey, Vintage Books, 1982, p. 18.
⁶ Philip Mansel, Constantinople: City of the World’s Desire 1453- 1924, St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998, p. 437.
⁷ Aid to the Church in Need, “Religious Freedom in the Majority Islamic Countries 1998 Report: Turkey,” op. cit.
⁸ Lord Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries: The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire, Morrow Quill, 1979, p. 559-560.
⁹ Aid to the Church in Need, “Religious Freedom in the Majority Islamic Countries 1998 Report: Cyprus,” op. cit.
¹⁰ Ibid
¹¹ Luiza Oleszczuk, “Christians could disappear from Iraq and Afghanistan,” Christian Post, December 30, 2011.
¹²Aid to the Church in Need, “Religious Freedom in the Majority Islamic Countries 1998 Report: Iraq.” http://www.alleanzacat- tolica.org/ acs/acs_english/report_98/iraq.htm
¹³ Charlene Gubash, “Egypt’s Coptic Christians say they are ‘no longer safe,’” NBC News, June 20, 2013.
¹⁴ Stephen Farrell and Rana Sabbagh Gargour, “‘All my staff at the church have been killed – they disappeared,’” The Times, Decem- ber 23, 2006.
¹⁵ Simon Kent, “Christians face being driven from the Middle East,” Toronto Sun, June 9, 2013.
¹⁶ “We Are the Church of Islam: Interview with the patriarch of Antioch Grégoire III Laham,” 30 Days, Issue No. 10, 2005.
¹⁷ Bharati Krishna, “Pakistan Hindus, mercilessly killed, forcibly converted to Islam,” Haindava Keralam, April 29, 2012.
¹⁸ Toward the beginning of the seventh century, if one accepts the canonical account of Muhammad’s life.
¹⁹ Bat Ye’or, The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996, p. 44.
²⁰ Quoted in Bat Ye’or, pp. 271-272.
²¹ Bat Ye’or, p. 296.
²² Sahih Muslim, translated by Abdul Hamid Siddiqi, Kitab Bhavan, revised edition 2000, vol. 3, book 17, no. 4364.
²³ This incident is almost certainly apocryphal, but nonetheless considered authentic in Islamic tradition. Muhammed Ibn Ismaiel Al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari: The Translation of the Meanings, translated by Muhammad M. Khan, Darussalam, 1997, vol. 4, book 56, no. 2941.
²⁴ “Muslims Forcing Christian Assyrians in Baghdad Neighborhood to Pay ‘Protection Tax,’” Assyrian International News Agency, March 18, 2007.
²⁵ “Egyptian Salafi Leader Yassir Al-Burhami Compares the Christians of Egypt to the Jews of Al-Medina,” Middle East Media Research Institute, December 3, 2011.
²⁶ Sonia Verma, “First Catholic Church Opens in Qatar, Sparking Fear of Backlash Against Christians,” FoxNews, March 14, 2008.
²⁷ Carmel Crimmins, “Philippines’ Islamic city proud to be different,” Reuters, March 17, 2008.
²⁸ This sermon is undated. Like the others quoted here, it was posted at the Saudi website Al-Minbar (www.alminbar.net).
²⁹ Muhammed Ibn Ismaiel Al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari: The Translation of the Meanings, translated by Muhammad M. Khan, Darussalam, 1997, vol. 9, book 84, number 57.
³⁰ Reliance of the Traveller, o8.1, o8.4. 21
³¹ Wajahat Ali, Eli Clifton, Matthew Duss, Lee Fang, Scott Keyes, and Faiz Shakir, Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America, The Center for American Progress, August 2011, listed five leading “Islamophobes”: Frank Gaffney, David Yerushalmi, Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer, and Steven Emerson. These names appear in most “Islamophobia” reports, along with David Horowitz, Michael Savage, Pat Robertson, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Mark Steyn, Michelle Malkin, Glenn Beck, and Pamela Geller.
³² Epitomized in Muhammad’s notorious statement: “The last
hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them, until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: O Muslim, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him” (Sahih Muslim 6985).
³³ The other two are UC Santa Barbara and UC Davis. http:// frontpagemag.com/2013/robert-spencer/islamic-supremacist-nom- inated-as-uc-student-regent/. See also David Horowitz and Robert Spencer, Islamophobia: Thought Crime of the Totalitarian Future (pamphlet) September 8, 2011. http://frontpagemag.com/2012/ david-horowitz-and-robert-spencer/islamophobia-thought-crime- of-the-totalitarian-future-4/
³⁴ http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/4764730.stm
³⁵ Ibid.

³⁶ “Hamas Leader Mahmoud Al-Zahhar Justifies Persecution of Jews in History and Promises that Jews ‘Are Headed to Annihilation,’” MEMRI, November 12, 2010.
³⁷ “The Islamic Genocide Plan,” FrontPageMagazine.com, December 1, 2006. See also “Statements by Radical Muslims calling for the destruction of Israel (and its ally the United States),” Discover The Networks, January 2007, http://www.discoverthe- networks.org/Articles/genocidequotesjan.html. Quotations from contemporary jihadists are taken from these two sources unless otherwise noted.
³⁸ ‘To conclude my speech, I’d like to say that the only thing I hope for is that as my life approaches its end, Allah will give me an opportunity to go to the land of Jihad and resistance, even if in a wheelchair. I will shoot Allah’s enemies, the Jews, and they will throw a bomb at me, and thus, I will seal my life with martyrdom.” Sheik Yousuf Al-Qaradhawi: Allah Imposed Hitler upon the Jews to Punish Them — ‘Allah Willing, the Next Time Will Be at the Hand of the Believers,’” MEMRITV.org, January 28-30, 2005.

³⁹ World Islamic Front statement, “Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders,” February 23, 1998. http://www.fas.org/irp/world/para/ docs/980223-fatwa.htm
⁴⁰ Safa Haeri, “Iran on course for a showdown,” Asia Times, October 28, 2005.

Frontpagemag.com

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/religion-of-bigotry/

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

Barry Rubin: Lost: Obama Middle East Policy, 2013-2016, Why U.S. Policy Betrayed the Moderates

by Barry Rubin

Winston Churchill (Artist: William Timym)

In 1848, the new Communist movement issued a manifesto. It began with the opening line: 

“A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism.”

For our purposes today, this threat might be reworded as:

“A specter is haunting the Middle East—the specter of America.”

For example, about a year ago Dubai’s police chief addressed a major international Gulf Arab security conference. He said that there were about three dozen security threats to the Gulf Arab countries. But this well-respected security expert said the number-one threat was the United States.

Since that time, this American specter has become vivid. For instance, The New York Times had a recent editorial which stated that the only protection for Egypt’s democracy–meaning Muslim Brotherhood participation in the next Egyptian government–was the United States and Europe. The Egyptian regime, Israel, and Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Arab states were bad for wanting to protect their societies from Islamic ideology, revolution, and anti-Western Sharia states!

Might the  United States and its allies rather be expected to battle Turkey, Iran, Hamas, Hizballah, Tunisia, Bahrain, and Hamas or might it otherwise support Islamists while Saudi Arabia fought Europe’s and America’s response as too soft on Hizballah?

But what if a crazy notion seizes policymakers, blessed with the mush of ignorance about the Middle East, that they can take control of the troublemakers? Perhaps Germany (World War One and Two jihads), or the Soviet control of radical nationalist regimes in the 1950s and 1960, or the French rescue of the Palestinian leadership in the late 1940s, or Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Iran during the 1970s, or  America in the 1950s (Arab nationalism), or the 2010 Muslim Brotherhood would turn nominal extremists into friends?

Imagine, dunderheads in Washington, London, Paris, and so on thinking they are masterfully preserving stability, making peace, and harnessing Sharia in the cause of boosting democracy!

How smug would be the smiles when those who perpetrated September 11, 2001, were supposedly defeated by those mentored into power a decade later by the West in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, or in the Arab Spring or the Syrian revolution!

Look at it through the eyes of the Arabs, Iranians, Turks, Kurds, and Israelis who think they will try to impose a new order in the region.

Consider a famous speech by Winston Churchill at Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946. In contrast to the Communist Manifesto,100 years later, Churchill began, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain is descended across the continent.” It might be strange that to compare these two statements to the current situation in the Middle East. But such a comparison actually makes sense.

The intention of great powers seemed to impose one (European) system on the region. In the first case, it was Communism. In Churchill’s case, it was anti-Communism he advocated, which in parallel would be Anti-Islamism.

But today, what is the system that Arabs, Iranians, Turks, and Israelis think they will try to impose on the region? The answer for those who have been watching in recent years is revolutionary Islamism.

It might seem strange that this is the thinking, but it isn’t. The question is whether there is a system that Western Europeans want to impose on the Middle East to ensure  its hegemony; and the answer that the Arabs, Persians, and Turks usually give today–although this does not mean it has to be true–is Islamism. The Islamists themselves view Western policy, however, of as a sign of their own victory and of Western fear and weakness. 

Incidentally, Churchill’s title was “the Sinews of Strength,” and he favored a policy of leading a coalition of the Free World, which would be welcome today.

To summarize, in the 1930s, Churchill favored anti-fascism and advocated a united front against Nazi Germany. After World War Two, he supported an alliance of the Free World against the Iron Curtain.

Where is the Churchill of today?

Well, his bust was quickly chucked from the White House because he was the symbol for Obama of Western colonialism.

Who was the genuine symbol of anti-colonialism for Obama? The left wing anti-Western revolutionary ideological movement represented by the Muslim Brotherhood or Chavez, and other demagogues.

If you favor Islamism–a U.S.-sponsored movement except for the extremists of al-Qaida–you cannot be accused of Islamophobia. Not liberals or real pro-democrats or conservative traditionalists or nationalists or communal nationalists, but Islamists.

That also means that non-Islamists can also be the enemy in Western eyes. Moderates are actually less desirable friends to terrorists and extremists. The West seems to view its three main threats as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Israel; its three main friends as Turkey, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Syrian Islamist rebels.

Consider this: In Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Turkey, and other countries, Western powers and especially America were seen to be behind Islamist governments. And in the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, and even Iran, they were portrayed in this way with perhaps somewhat less justice. But here is the bottom line: The overwhelming majority of Arab governments and the Turkish-Iranian democratic opposition had many reasons to think that the Western countries, and especially the United States, were actually supporting their Islamist foes. In 2013, that view became even more accurate.

It should be understood in the current regional picture that the Western world, and especially the Obama Administration, have taken the Islamists’ side in the battle between these forces.

Barry Rubin

Source: http://www.gloria-center.org/2013/08/rubinreports-2013-08-21-080800/

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

Resetting US Foreign Policy

by Caroline Glick

Aside from the carnage in Benghazi, the most enduring image from Hillary Clinton's tenure as US secretary of state was the fake remote control she brought with her to Moscow in 2009 with the word "Reset" in misspelled Russian embossed on it.

Clinton's gimmick was meant to show that under President Barack Obama, American foreign policy would be fundamentally transformed. Since Obama and Clinton blamed much of the world's troubles on the misdeeds of their country, under their stewardship of US foreign policy, the US would reset everything.

Around the globe, all bets were off.

Five years later we realize that Clinton's embarrassing gesture was not a gimmick, but a dead serious pledge. Throughout the world, the Obama administration has radically altered America's policies.

And disaster has followed. Never since America's establishment has the US appeared so untrustworthy, destructive, irrelevant and impotent.

Consider Syria. Wednesday was the one-year anniversary of Obama's pledge that the US would seek the overthrow of Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime if Assad used chemical weapons against his opponents.

On Wednesday, Assad's forces used chemical weapons against civilians around Damascus. According to opposition forces, well over a thousand people were murdered.

Out of habit, the eyes of the world turned to Washington. But Obama has no policy to offer. Obama's America can do nothing.

America's powerlessness in Syria is largely Obama's fault. At the outset of the Syrian civil war two-and-a-half years ago, Obama outsourced the development of Syria's opposition forces to Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Erdogan. He had other options. A consortium of Syrian Kurds, moderate Sunnis, Christians and others came to Washington and begged for US assistance. But they were ignored.

Obama's decision to outsource the US's Syria policy owed to his twin goals of demonstrating that the US would no longer try to dictate international outcomes, and of allying the US with Islamic fundamentalists.

Both of these goals are transformative.

In the first instance, Obama believes that anti-Americanism stems from America's actions. By accepting the mantel of global leadership, Obama believes the US insulted other nations. To mitigate their anger, the US should abdicate leadership.

As for courting Islamic fundamentalists, from his earliest days in office Obama insisted that since radical Islam is the most popular movement in the Islamic world, radical Islam is good. Radical Muslims are America's friends.

Obama embraced Erdogan, an Islamic fascist who has won elections, as his closest ally and most trusted adviser in the Muslim world.

And so, with the full support of the US government, Erdogan stacked Syria's opposition forces with radical Muslims like himself. Within months the Muslim Brotherhood comprised the majority in Syria's US-sponsored opposition.

The Muslim Brotherhood has no problem collaborating with al-Qaida, because the latter was formed by Muslim Brothers.

It shares the Brotherhood's basic ideology.

Since al-Qaida has the most experienced fighters, its rise to leadership and domination of the Syrian opposition was a natural progression.

In other words, Obama's decision to have Turkey form the Syrian opposition led inevitably to the current situation in which the Iranian- and Russian-backed Syrian regime is fighting an opposition dominated by al-Qaida.

At this point, short of an Iraq-style US invasion of Syria and toppling of the regime, almost any move the US takes to overthrow the government will strengthen al-Qaida. So after a reported 1,300 people were killed by chemical weapons launched by the regime on Wednesday, the US has no constructive options for improving the situation.

A distressing aspect of Obama's embrace of Erdogan is that Erdogan has not tried to hide the fact that he seeks dictatorial powers and rejects the most basic norms of liberal democracy and civil rights.

Under the façade of democracy, Erdogan has transformed Turkey into one of the most repressive countries in the world. Leading businessmen, generals, journalists, parliamentarians and regular citizens have been systematically rounded up and accused of treason for their "crime" of opposing Turkey's transformation into an Islamic state. Young protesters demanding civil rights and an end to governmental corruption are beaten and arrested by police, and demonized by Erdogan. Following the overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt last month, Erdogan has openly admitted that he and his party are part and parcel of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Obama's approach to world affairs was doubtlessly shaped during his long sojourn in America's elite universities.

Using the same elitist sensibilities that cause him to blame American "arrogance" for the world's troubles, and embrace radical Islam as a positive force, Obama has applied conflict resolution techniques developed by professors in ivory towers to real world conflicts that cannot be resolved peacefully.

Obama believed he could use the US's close relationships with Israel and Turkey to bring about a rapprochement between the former allies. But he was wrong. The Turkish-Israeli alliance ended because Erdogan is a virulent Jew-hater who seeks Israel's destruction, not because of a misunderstanding.

Obama forced Israel to apologize for defending itself against Turkish aggression, believing that Erdogan would then reinstate full diplomatic relations with the Jewish state. Instead, Erdogan continued his assault on Israel, most recently accusing it of organizing the military coup in Egypt and the anti- Erdogan street protests in Turkey.

As for Egypt, as with Syria, Obama's foreign policy vision for the US has left Washington with no options for improving the situation on the ground or for securing its own strategic interests. To advance his goal of empowering the Muslim Brotherhood, Obama pushed the Egyptian military to overthrow the regime of US ally Hosni Mubarak and so paved the way for elections that brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power.

Today he opposes the military coup that ousted the Muslim Brotherhood government.

The US claims that it opposes the coup because the military has trampled democracy and human rights. But it is all but silent in the face of the Muslim Brotherhood's own trampling of the human rights of Egypt's Christian minority.

Obama ignores the fact that Mohamed Morsi governed as a tyrant far worse than Mubarak.

Ignoring the fact that neither side can share power with the other, the US insists the Brotherhood and the military negotiate an agreement to do just that. And so both sides hate and distrust the US.

Wresting an Israeli apology to Turkey was Obama's only accomplishment during his trip to Israel in March. Secretary of State John Kerry's one accomplishment since entering office was to restart negotiations between Israel and the PLO. Just as the consequence of Israel's apology to Turkey was an escalation of Turkey's anti- Israel and anti-Semitic rhetoric, so the consequence of Kerry's "accomplishment" will be the escalation of Palestinian terrorism and political warfare against Israel.

As Jonathan Tobin noted Wednesday in Commentary, to secure Palestinian agreement to reinstate negotiations, not only did Kerry force Israel to agree to release more than a thousand Palestinian terrorists from prison. He put the US on record supporting the Palestinians' territorial demands. In so doing, Kerry locked the US into a position of blaming Israel once the talks fail. When the Palestinians escalate their political and terrorist campaign against Israel, they will use Kerry's pledges as a means of justifying their actions.

The current round of talks will fail of course because like the Turks, the Syrians and the Egyptians, the Palestinians are not interested in resolving their conflict.

They are interested in winning it. They do not want a state. They want to supplant Israel.

Clinton's Reset button was played up as a gimmick. But it was a solemn oath. And it was fulfilled. And as a result, the world is a much more violent and dangerous place. The US and its allies are more threatened. The US's enemies from Moscow to Tehran to Venezuela are emboldened.

The time has come to develop the basis for a future US policy that would represent a reset of Obama's catastrophic actions and attitudes. Given the damage US power and prestige has already suffered, and given that Obama is unlikely to change course in his remaining three years in power, it is clear that reverting to George W. Bush's foreign policy of sometimes fighting a war on nebulous "terrorists" and sometimes appeasing them will not be sufficient to repair the damage.

The US must not exchange strategic insanity with strategic inconsistency.

Instead, a careful, limited policy based on no-risk and low-risk moves that send clear messages and secure clear interests is in order.

The most obvious no-risk move would be to embrace Israel as America's most vital and only trustworthy ally in the region. By fully supporting Israel not only would the US strengthen its own position by strengthening the position of the only state in the Middle East that shares its enemies, its interests and its values.

Washington would send a strong signal to states throughout the region and the world that the US can again be trusted.

This support would also secure clear US strategic interests by providing Israel with the political backing it requires to eliminate Iran's nuclear program. Moreover, it would bring coherence to the US's counter-terror strategy by ending US support for Palestinian statehood. Instead, the US would support the institution of the rule of law and liberal norms of government in Palestinian society by supporting the application of Israel's liberal legal code over Judea and Samaria.

Another no-risk move is to support former Soviet satellite states that are now members of NATO. Here, too, the US would be taking an action that is clear and involves no risk. Russia would have few options for opposing such a move. And the US could go a long way toward rebuilding its tattered reputation.

Low risk moves include supporting minorities that do not have a history of violent anti-Americanism and are, in general, opposed to Islamic fascism.

Such groups include the Kurds. In Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran, the Kurds represent a national group that has proven its ability to self-govern and to oppose tyranny. With certain, easily identified exceptions, the stronger the Kurds are, the weaker anti-American forces become.

Then there are the Christians. The plight of the Christians in the Islamic world is one of the most depressing chapters in the recent history of the region. In country after country, previously large and relatively peaceful, if discriminated against, Christian minorities are being slaughtered and forced to flee.

The US has done next to nothing to defend them.

Strong, forthright statements of support for Christian communities and condemnations of persecution, including rape, forced conversions, massacre, extortion and destruction of church and private Christian-owned property from Egypt to Indonesia to Pakistan to the Palestinian Authority would make a difference in the lives of millions of people.

It would also go some way toward rehabilitating the US's reputation as a champion of human rights, after Obama's embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Under Obama, America has made itself worse than irrelevant. In country after country, it has become dangerous to be a US ally. The world as a whole is a much more dangerous place as a consequence.

Nothing short of a fundamental transformation of US foreign policy will suffice to begin to repair the damage.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post. 

 

Caroline Glick

Source: http://www.carolineglick.com/e/2013/08/resetting-us-foreign-policy.php

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