Alan M. Dershowitz: Terror Tunnels: The Case for Israel's Just War Against Hamas - Chapter 1

by Alan M. Dershowitz

President George W. Bush's announcement in 2001 to support the creation of a Palestinian state offered a unique opportunity to Palestinians to end the violence and begin building a new future. Hamas's response came a few weeks later, when it fired the first Qassam rocket into the Israeli town of Sderot, population approximately 20,000.
It was only after Hamas's coup in June 2007, and the heavy rocket attacks that followed, that Israel imposed more extensive sanctions on Gaza. Palestinian rocket attacks against Israeli civilians were not a response to Gaza's increasing isolation, but the cause.
The sanctions imposed on Gaza -- not only by Israel, but the world -- were the direct result of Hamas's refusal to meet the international community's basic, reasonable demands: stop terror, recognize Israel, and respect previous agreements. Hamas and its fellow terrorist organizations deny the right to live in peace.
The Goldstone Report not only falsified the past; it had a negative influence by encouraging Hamas to repeat its own double war crimes: firing rockets at Israeli civilians from behind Palestinian human shields -- and killing and kidnapping Israeli civilians and soldiers through its terrorist tunnels.

Operation Protective Edge—The Historical Context

"Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." This truism, by philosopher George Santayana, well describes the current situation in the Middle East in general and Gaza in particular. Israelis and Palestinians have been condemned to repeat the tragedies of the past because history is neglected or misunderstood. That is why it is necessary to place the recent events in Gaza into a brief historical context.
 On October 2, 2001, only three weeks after the terror attacks of September 11, President George W. Bush announced that the United States supported the creation of a Palestinian state. It was a major milestone for the Palestinian cause, since no previous American administration had officially acknowledged a Palestinian state as an explicit goal of US foreign policy. The announcement was all the more remarkable given that the US was still reeling in the wake of 9/11, and that Palestinian extremists were still using terror against Israelis to achieve their goals. The American announcement came just months after Yasser Arafat had rejected an offer of statehood by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Bush's predecessor, Bill Clinton.[1]

Bush's announcement offered a unique opportunity to Palestinians to end the violence and begin building a new future. Hamas's response came a few weeks later, when it fired the first Qassam rocket at the Israeli town of Sderot, a city with a population of approximately 20,000, of which some two dozen were killed, hundreds wounded, and thousands traumatized. The Hamas website proudly proclaimed: "The Zionist army is afraid that the Palestinians will increase the range of the new rockets, placing the towns and villages in the [Zionist] entity in danger."[2] It was only the first of thousands of rockets that Hamas and other Palestinian terror organizations would fire in their relentless effort to kill Jews and destroy the peace process.

Rocket and mortar fire from the Gaza Strip peaked in late 2004 and early 2005. There was a brief halt in March 2005, in the aftermath of Mahmoud Abbas's victory in the Palestinian presidential elections, and an agreement signed by the various Palestinian factions in Cairo to halt violence. Hamas and other organizations merely used the lull to rearm, however. In August of that year, Israel carried out its disengagement from Gaza, voluntarily withdrawing thousands of settlers and soldiers, leaving twenty-one communities behind and completely ending the Israeli presence there. The hope was that Palestinians would use the end of Israeli occupation to build Gaza's economy and prepare it for political independence, along with the West Bank, as part of a Palestinian state. Private donors stepped in to buy the Israeli greenhouses that had been left behind and hand them over to the Palestinian Authority. James Wolfenson, the former head of the World Bank, contributed $500,000 of his own money to the purchase. But almost immediately after the disengagement, Hamas and other terror organizations destroyed the greenhouses and renewed their rocket fire, launching a barrage of rockets at the Israeli towns of Sderot and Ashkelon. The immediate trigger was an accident during a Hamas victory rally, in which a truck filled with weapons exploded in a Gaza refugee camp, killing nineteen Palestinians. There was little media focus on, and no demonstrations against these largely civilian deaths.

Rocket fire continued throughout the months that followed, though Israel was no longer occupying Gaza. In November 2005, Israel signed an agreement with the Palestinian Authority to open the Rafah Crossing on the Egypt-Gaza border. The agreement was part of an effort to encourage trade and economic development in Gaza, and to increase the responsibilities of the Palestinian government for the welfare of the Palestinian people. And, indeed, the Rafah Crossing remained open throughout the first half of 2006. The border remained open despite Hamas's victory in the Palestinian legislative elections in January 2006, which caused deep worry in Israel and throughout the international community. The Middle East Quartet—comprised of the European Union, United Nations, United States, and Russia— warned the new Palestinian government that further aid would be conditional on its "commitment to the principles of non-violence, recognition of Israel, and acceptance of previous agreements and obligations." Hamas considered and rejected each of these conditions. That decision, in turn, prompted the Quartet, and Israel, to cut off financial assistance to the Palestinian Authority, though Israel continued to supply electricity and water to Gaza.

Hamas quickly resumed its attacks. In February alone, forty-seven rockets were fired. By June, Hamas and other groups had launched hundreds of Qassams, as well as an Iranian-made Grad rocket. On June 25, Hamas launched an attack inside Israel, having tunneled under the border near the Kerem Shalom (Vineyard of Peace) border crossing. In the ensuing battle, Hamas kidnapped an Israeli soldier named Gilad Shalit, killing two Israeli soldiers in the process and injuring others. Following the tunnel attack and kidnapping, Israel attacked terrorist targets in Gaza and closed the Rafah Crossing. The closure was not an attempt to punish Palestinians for the elections result five months before, but was the direct consequence of Hamas's attack on Israel.

Even after Hamas abducted Shalit, the Gaza borders were not completely closed. The Rafah Crossing was open for twenty-four days over the next six months, and some movement of people and goods—albeit restricted—was allowed. Throughout this time, rocket fire from the Gaza Strip continued to terrorize Israeli civilians. Still, the international community gave the Palestinian leaders another chance to meet the basic demands it had issued in January 2006. But the two main Palestinian factions—Fatah, which controlled the executive, and Hamas, which controlled the legislature—began fighting openly with each other. After extensive negotiations, the two parties agreed to form a unity government, which was formed in March 2007. But the rockets continued to rain down—reaching a record high of 257 in May 2007—and in June 2007, Hamas launched a military coup against the Fatah executive, driving its leaders out of Gaza and killing over one hundred of their fellow Palestinians, including many civilians. Again, the events garnered little media focus and no protest marches. With the entire territory of Gaza under its iron-fisted control, Hamas increased rocket attacks against Israel, with other Palestinian terror organizations joining in. These attacks accelerated dramatically after Israel and the exiled Palestinian Authority leaders—still legally governed by Fatah, in the eyes of the international community—signed an agreement in Annapolis, Maryland, in November 2007, pledging to work toward a two-state solution.

It was only after Hamas's coup, and the heavy rocket attacks that followed, that Israel imposed more extensive sanctions on Gaza. In January 2008—two years after Hamas took power, and after thousands of rockets and mortars had fallen on Israel's southern towns—Israel began restricting fuel and electricity to Gaza, in accordance with a nuanced ruling by Israel's High Court of Justice. Still, it continued to allow fuel and humanitarian aid to enter, and allowed Palestinians to come in to Israel to receive medical treatment in Israeli hospitals. Israel did not want ordinary Palestinians to suffer and did all that it could to alleviate their living conditions while reducing Hamas's ability to function as a terrorist regime. And yet Hamas continued to smuggle weapons into Gaza via underground tunnels on the Egyptian border. More than two thousand rockets and mortars were launched from Gaza into Israel in the first six months of 2008. In June of 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama visited Sderot, and after viewing the rocket residues and meeting with residents, this is what he said:

I don't think any country would find it acceptable to have missiles raining down on the heads of their citizens.
The first job of any nation state is to protect its citizens. And so I can assure you that if—I don't even care if I was a politician. If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Israelis to do the same.

In December 2008, Hamas unilaterally declared that it would resume its attacks with full force—and it promptly did so, forcing Israel to respond with Operation Cast Lead in late December of 2008.

When these facts are examined, it is clear that Palestinian rocket attacks against Israeli civilians were not a response to Gaza's increasing isolation, but the cause. The first rocket attacks began in October 2001, precisely when the world was most eager to create a viable Palestinian state. They continued even after Israel pulled its army and its settlements out of Gaza in 2005. They accelerated after Hamas took power in 2006, increasing dramatically in 2007 when Israel and the Palestinian Authority resolved to renew negotiations toward a two-state solution. And the attacks were renewed in December 2008 when Hamas unilaterally declared that it would refuse to extend a period of calm that had been accepted by both sides.

The sanctions that were imposed on Gaza—not only by Israel, but the world—were the direct result of Hamas's refusal to meet the international community's basic, reasonable demands: stop terror, recognize Israel, and respect previous agreements. Even after Hamas took power in the 2006 elections, the Gaza borders remained relatively open, until Hamas escalated the conflict by abducting Gilad Shalit in June 2006, overthrowing the legitimate Palestinian executive in a violent coup in June 2007, and launching more and more rockets and mortars at Israeli civilians. Hamas brought about the isolation of Gaza because it is neither interested in peace nor in the welfare of the Palestinian people. Instead, it is fanatically committed to the destruction of Israel itself, a goal it pursues using weapons and funding it receives from the Islamic Republic of Iran, for which Hamas acts as a proxy and whose ambitions of regional domination it serves. More recently, Hamas has also been supported by Qatar and Turkey.

Israelis and Palestinians have the same right to live in peace. Hamas and its fellow terror organizations deny that right, and disrupt every attempt to move the peace process forward. That is why Operation Cast Lead, which ended on January 21, 2009, was necessary.

It was against this backdrop that I began to write a series of op-eds during Operation Cast Lead. These op-eds comprised the bulk of my short book, The Case For Moral Clarity: Israel, Hamas and Gaza. Following the publication of that book, the Goldstone Report was issued under the auspices of a UN fact-finding mission. It accused Israel of war crimes during Operation Cast Lead and exculpated Hamas from the charge that it used civilians as human shields. It turned a military defeat suffered by Hamas into a legal and public relations victory. Because of its importance, I begin this book with my response to that mendacious screed. The Goldstone Report not only falsified the past; it had a negative influence on the future by encouraging Hamas to repeat its own double war crimes: firing rockets at Israeli civilians from behind Palestinian human shields—and killing and kidnapping Israeli civilians and soldiers through its terrorist tunnels.

* * *

[1] This was neither the first nor last such offer. The Peel Commission in 1937, the UN in 1947, and Israel in 1967 made similar proposals, all of which were rejected by three noes: "no peace, no negotiation, no recognition." And in 2008, then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered the Palestinians the most generous proposal, which they did not accept.
[2] "Rocket Threat from the Gaza Strip, 2000–2007," Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Israel Intelligence Heritage & Commemoration Center, citing the Hamas website following the first rocket fired at Sderot at the end of October 2001: 33–34.

Excerpted from Alan Dershowitz's new eBook "Terror Tunnels: The Case for Israel's Just War Against Hamas", published by Gatestone Institute, which is currently available from Amazon.com and will be available Sept. 15 for the Barnes & Noble Nook and Kobo.

Alan M. Dershowitz

Source: http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4696/hamas-terror-tunnels-chapter-1

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

Caroline Glick: Of Politicians and Moral Courage

by Caroline Glick


Originally published by the Jerusalem Post. 
 
Leaders are not elected. Politicians are elected. Their election in turn provides politicians with the opportunity to become leaders.

You don’t become a leader by telling people what they want to hear, although doing so certainly helps to you get elected. A politician becomes a leader by telling people what they don’t want to hear.

If they are lucky, politicians will never have to become leaders. They will serve in times of peace and plenty, when it’s possible to pretend away the hard facts of the human condition. And they can leave office beloved for letting people believe that the world is the Elysian Fields.

Certainly this has been the case for many American politicians since the end of World War II.

This is not the case today. In our times, evil rears its ugly head with greater power and frequency than it has in at least a generation. As Americans learned 13 years ago this week, evil ignored is evil empowered.

Yet fighting evil and protecting the good is not a simple matter. Evil has many handmaidens.
Those who hide it away enable it. Those who justify it enable it. Those who ignore it enable it.

To fight evil effectively, a leader must possess the moral wisdom to recognize that evil can only be rooted out when the environment that cultivates it is discredited and so transformed. To discredit and transform that environment, a leader must have the moral courage to stand not only against evildoers, but against their far less controversial facilitators.

In other words, the foundations of true leadership are moral clarity and courage.

On Wednesday two American elected leaders gave speeches. In one, a leader emerged. In the other, a politician gave a speech.

The first speech was given by Texas Senator Ted Cruz.

On Wednesday evening, Cruz gave the keynote address at the inaugural dinner of an organization that calls itself In Defense of Christians.

The purpose of the new organization is supposed to be advocacy on behalf of oppressed Christian communities in the Middle East.

Ahead of the dinner, The Washington Free Beacon website questioned Cruz’s decision to address the group. Several Christian leaders from Lebanon and Syria also scheduled to address the forum had records of public support for Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, and Hezbollah, and had made egregiously anti-Semitic statements.

For instance, Church of Antioch Patriarch Gregory III Laham blamed jihadist attacks on Iraqi Christians on a “Zionist conspiracy against Islam” aimed at making Muslims look bad.

Probably the organization’s leaders assumed that Cruz would give their group bipartisan credibility and never considered he might challenge their anti-Jewish prejudices. No American politician in recent memory has made an issue of the rampant Jew-hatred among Middle Eastern Christians. Probably they figured that he’d make an impassioned speech about the plight of Christians under the jackboot of Islamic State, enjoy warm applause, leave the hall and clear the path for other speakers to blame the Jews.

Cruz did not follow the script. Instead he used the opportunity to tell his audience hard truths.

In a statement released by his office, Cruz summarized the events of the evening.

“I told the attendees that those who hate Israel also hate America… that those who hate Jews also hate Christians. And that anyone who hates Israel and the Jewish people is not following the teachings of Christ.
“I went on to tell the crowd that Christians in the Middle East have no better friend than Israel. That Christians can practice their faith free of persecution in Israel. And that ISIS [Islamic State], al-Qaida, Hamas and Hezbollah, along with their state sponsors in Syria and Iran, are all part of the same cancer, murdering Christians and Jews alike. Hate is hate, and murder is murder.”

For his decision not to take the low road, Cruz was subjected to angry boos and heckling from the audience, whose members angrily rejected his remarks.

“After just a few minutes, I had no choice,” Cruz said. “I told them that if you will not stand with Israel, if you will not stand with the Jews, then I will not stand with you. And then I walked off the stage.”

Cruz’s action was an act of moral leadership.

He stood before his audience of fellow Christians and told his co-religionists that their hatred of Jews and Israel is un-Christian. He told them as well that their bigotry blinds them to their own plight and makes them reject their greatest ally in securing their future in the Middle East.

Cruz’s strategy for fighting Islamic oppression of Christians involves uniting all those oppressed and attacked by jihadists. In all honesty, it is the only policy that has a chance in the long term of securing the future of the Christians of the Middle East.

For Cruz to reach this conclusion, he first had to possess the moral clarity to recognize that Christian Jew-hatred is a major obstacle to securing the future of the Middle East’s Christians.

In other words his strategic vision is anchored in moral courage.

The same evening that Cruz was booed off the stage by an audience of anti-Semitic Christians, US President Obama gave a speech to the general audience where he set out his rationale for fighting Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and his strategy for doing so.

In some ways, it is unfair to compare Obama’s speech to Cruz’s. Cruz addressed a narrow constituency and Obama gave his speech to all Americans, and indeed to the entire world.

A more apt comparison would be between Cruz’s speech to the pro-terror Christians and Obama’s speech to an audience that included Muslim Brotherhood leaders in Cairo in 2009.

Indeed, the chief reason that Cruz’s speech was an act of leadership, and Obama’s was the address of a politician, is that Obama’s speech reflected his remarks in Cairo and his subsequent speeches to Muslim audiences and about Islam throughout the intervening years.

Neither during his speech in Cairo nor in subsequent remarks has Obama ever called out the world’s Muslims for their bigotry against Jews, Christians and others. Neither during his speech in Cairo nor in subsequent addresses has Obama spoken out against Islamic terrorism or the jihadist world view that stands at the foundation of Islamic terrorism.

Rather, throughout his presidency Obama has denied the existence of the jihad, its ideology and the fact that it is a force shaping events throughout the world.

Wednesday’s speech was no exception.

At the outset of his remarks, Obama insisted that Islamic State, or (ISIL has he calls it), “is not ‘Islamic.’” Obama may be right, and he may be wrong.

That’s for Muslims to determine. But whatever the truth is about Islam and jihad, the fact is that hundreds of millions of Muslims believe that Islamic State and other jihadist groups and regimes, of both the Shi’ite and Sunni variety, are accurate expressions of Islam. This is why thousands of Muslims from Europe and the US are flocking to Iraq and Syria to join Islamic State.

Obama’s policies for contending with Islamic jihadists are a natural extension of his refusal to speak hard truths to Muslims or speak truthfully about Islamic terrorism and jihadism. His whitewashing of jihadist Islam on Wednesday night similarly was reflected in the strategy he set out for fighting Islamic State.

As Fred and Kim Kagan noted in The Weekly Standard, Obama’s decision to use counterterror strategies for fighting Islamic State is a recipe for failure. What Obama referred to as “a terrorist organization,” is actually an insurgency that fights battles against standing armies and wins.

Counterterror operations cannot work against such a force.

So, too, Obama’s asserted that his strategy for fighting Islamic State has been tried and succeeded in Somalia and Yemen. Yet by all accounts, jihadist forces in both countries are not only undefeated, they are becoming stronger.

Obama’s strategy involves joining US air power with anti-Islamic State forces on the ground in Iraq and Syria. Yet aside from the Kurds, all the forces on the ground in both countries are deeply problematic.

Just hours before Obama’s speech, the leadership of Syria’s “moderate” rebel forces was decapitated in an explosion. And for all their moderation, the leaders were part of an anti-Assad coalition that included Islamic State.

Although he is an Alawite, Bashar Assad and his forces are members of the Shi’ite jihadist coalition led by Iran that includes Hezbollah.

These forces are more dangerous than Islamic State. Yet US air strikes against Islamic State will redound to their direct benefit.

Obama’s refusal to acknowledge the existence of jihad – of both the Sunni and Shi’ite variety – makes it impossible for him to devise a realistic strategy for defeating jihadists. He rightly defines Islamic State as an enemy of the US, but because he denies the existence of jihad, he is incapable of putting Islamic State in its proper strategic context. Among the many forces fighting on the ground in Iraq and Syria today, you have two jihadist forces – one Shi’ite and one Sunni – that are fighting each other. Both are enemies of America and its allies.

To be sure, Islamic State must be confronted and defeated – just as Iran, Hezbollah, al-Qaida, Hamas and Boko Haram need to be defeated.

Defeating only one group empowers others, and so you keep ending up where you started.

Yet rather than understand that while jihadist forces may oppose one another, the threat they pose to the free world is indivisible, as Obama focuses on Islamic State, he is enabling Iran to expand its power in Iraq and Syria, and to complete its nuclear weapons program.

Last week the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Iran continues to hide key information about its nuclear program from the UN nuclear watchdog, despite its agreement to provide the IAEA with full transparency last November.

The Iranians continue to bar IAEA inspectors from the suspected military nuclear installation at Parchin. Negotiations on a nuclear accord between the US and its partners and Iran are going nowhere. According to Western diplomatic sources, the failure to reach an accord owes entirely to Iran’s refusal to compromise on any substantive nuclear issues.

While Iran refuses to provide transparency to the IAEA, its guiding strategy is clear to the naked eye. It is prolonging negotiations to buy time to complete its nuclear program.

However, Obama, who insists that Islamic State “terrorists are unique in their brutality,” refuses to see the true picture.

The truth revealed on Wednesday night is that Obama cannot lead a successful war against the forces of Islamic jihad that threaten humanity. He cannot do so because he rejects the moral clarity required to confront the danger.

He cannot successfully lead the war because, as we saw once again on Wednesday night, he is not a leader. He is a politician.


Caroline Glick is the Director of the David Horowitz Freedom Center's Israel Security Project and the Senior Contributing Editor of The Jerusalem Post. For more information on Ms. Glick's work, visit carolineglick.com.

Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/of-politicians-and-moral-courage/

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

James Lewis: The Utter Failure of our Political Class to Respond to Mortal Danger

by James Lewis

Nations are much like living organisms.  One fundamental function of life is to tell the difference between friends and foes.  When a nation fails to do that it will soon die.

For more than two centuries the United States has known how to tell friend from foe, because we’ve had a robust sense of identity -- we understood how “a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” would be tested over and over again, by enemies foreign and domestic, to see “whether any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.”

The West today is infected with a psychic parasite, the parasite of the radical Left that rose to power starting in the 1960s.  Simultaneously, media ownership in the US has become concentrated in a handful of Big Corporations with no visible love or loyalty to the United States. 

After politically primitive Persian Gulf nations became obscenely rich starting in the 1970s with the OPEC oil monopoly, the parasite of Islamic reactionary indoctrination combined with radical leftism into a new “Red Black” alliance, so that Europe imported what are now 44 million Muslims from backward political cultures to serve as welfare-dependency votes for the Left. 

Recent media exposures show that Pakistani Muslims in the UK also imported criminal habits like massive child sexual abuse, “honor killings,” and ethnic hatreds that the West has not seen since the Nazis.  For years the most prestigious “news organ” in the world, the BBC, was literally run by a politically powerful child-abuse ring, led by children’s program presenter Jimmy Savile -- but by no means only him.  Estimates of the number of sexually abused children at the BBC range above a thousand.  That is only possible in a closed culture that operates by secrecy and blackmail to maintain its power.  For years, Hollywood was run by a similar pedophile-and-blackmail network. 

New exposures in the English town of Rotherham show another Pakistani child abuse ring with 1,400 young victims.  The London Parliament has not been immune to this Black Plague either.  Other European countries have had similar invasion of Muslim badlands culture into the West.  Massive pedophile rings can easily be used for blackmail by enemy intelligence agencies, the way the KGB recruited homosexual rings in Cambridge in the 1930s. 

The “Cambridge Spies” essentially exposed all British secrets to Moscow starting in the 1930s.  Because pedophilia has been commonly practiced in Muslim history, importing reactionary Muslim jihadist cults from Arabia and Pakistan necessarily means the import of all their “cultural habits.” Because the West throws such criminals in jail, pedophile gangs give natural fodder for political blackmail. 

That may be why Britain is one leading example of Western political paralysis in the face of clear and present danger.  The UK has witnessed an astonishing rise in Islamic political power in a very short period of time -- a male-dominated political culture that utterly rejects British and American tradition. 

The United States shows a similar rapid rise in Muslim power grabs, both domestically and especially in foreign affairs.  Domestically, “multiculturalism” imposed a massive taboo on the American people, who were no longer allowed to be critical of media-boosted “victim” groups.  Muslim power seekers were the beneficiaries of a phony campaign against “Islamophobia” that never existed.  It is clear that the radical left (like David Axelrod) and the Muslim Brotherhood (among other wealthy and insidious forces) combined to exercise vast power in American life, far out of proportion to their actual numbers.  In the African American community the rise of the Black Muslims, Malcolm X, and Louis Farrakhan extended the left-Muslim alliance into the black community.

All these African-American string puppets covered up the basic truth that African slaves were kidnapped by native chiefs and sold to (white) Arab slave traders in the thousands, to be shipped across the Atlantic.  Black slavery in Africa has always been run by Muslim raiders and traders, just as the Islamist gang Boko Haram in Nigeria today specializes in kidnapping hundreds of children from their homes to sell into sexual slavery.  African Americans can see on their television screens precisely what happened to their ancestors -- and nobody seems to say a word about it. 

Around the time of the collapse of the Soviet Empire and Communist China, Gulf oil regimes amassed immense power, both in wealth and in price-setting power on the international oil market.  If Jimmy Carter wanted to be re-elected in 1980, for example, he had to ensure that the OPEC oil price did not suddenly rise in the weeks before the election. 

Islam has always been an imperialistic faith, from the first canonical version of the Koran, written down a few centuries after Mohammed.  Conquest by the sword, or by the threat of the sword, has been its most effective missionary tool.  What we see on the web today from ISIS and its criminal ilk has been a Muslim tradition for 1,400 years.  It is the Saudis who have spread Wahhabi war theology all around the world, not ISIS, not even the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.  The Saudis made it happen, and you can see their billion dollar hate campaigns on the outstanding MEMRI.org website even today.  Today King Abdullah disclaims responsibility for ISIS, but he and his family started it all, along with the mullahs across the Gulf. 

Muslim nations have always waged aggressive jihad at several levels.  When they could not coerce a neighboring tribe or nation into converting to Islam, they used all the methods that are so familiar from the history of conquest since ancient days: threats, bluff, propaganda, infiltration, blackmail, influence buying, mass migration, sabotage, and the like.  Yes, there were genuine high points of Muslim culture in history, influenced by the Persian and Byzantine Empires, for example, but these were destroyed after a few generations when the harsh and totalitarian priesthood took over again.  We saw the identical process happening in 1979 when Jimmy Carter allowed the primitive war cult of Ayatollah Khomeini to take over Iran, quickly destroying the flourishing and modern-minded era of the Shah of Iran.  Jimmy Carter and his national security Machiavelli colluded in turning over a flourishing Iran over to a primitive suicide cult.  Obama has just colluded in allowing them to develop nuclear weapons. 

There is no serious question that the Democrats -- after the Boomer Left took over -- colluded en masse with the primitive political culture of radical Islam.  If we survive this period historians will pin the tail on the Democratic donkey: Carter, the Clintons and Obama were in tacit collusion with radical Islam, notably Khomeini in Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan) in Egypt, Jordan and elsewhere.  It was the Ikhwan that assassinated President Anwar Sadat, an extraordinary patriot and the greatest peacemaker in history between Arabs and Israel.  Sadat’s successor President Hosni Mubarak was finally brought low by the Ikhwan, with the active and pernicious assistance of the Obama administration.  Only an extraordinary revolt of Egypt’s modernist elites was able to reverse the near-lethal damage Obama inflicted upon the peaceful trend in Egyptian politics.

The United States is therefore saddled with a double near-lethal political infection: The America-hating left, and their Islamofascist allies.  These forces are so strong that they hardly bother to lie about their intentions any more. 

I can’t read Barack Obama’s mind, but there is no serious doubt that in his consistent actions he has served as an agent for the Left-Islamist subversive alliance in America.  In that respect he echoes European socialism, which has followed exactly the same set of priorities and policies. 

In 1944 the United States came avoided a Communist-inspired near coup d’etat, when Henry Wallace was dropped from the Vice Presidential nomination at the Democratic Convention in favor of Harry Truman, who soon inherited the presidency from ailing Franklin D. Roosevelt.  The American Labor movement split between pro-American and anti-American unions as part of that rending of the Left.  The AFL-CIO became a strong force for national unity, while others, like the International Longshoreman’s Union, stayed under Stalinist control.  At the same time Stalin exploded the first Soviet nuclear bomb, with plans openly stolen from the Manhattan Project. 

Americans were scared.  The GI’s were just beginning to come home from Europe and Japan, and were in no mood to go to war again.  Stalin’s Bomb shook Americans awake, with a resulting furor against Communist-led unions, schools, universities, newspapers, and politicians.  The hard left was purged, and the country was saved.  The Left, which controls history teaching in American schools, calls this the McCarthyite period, with blacklists in Hollywood and Congressional hearings that lost people their jobs.  These days, under the taboos of PC we routinely fire, trash, scapegoat, and bankrupt people and corporations that do not, for example, agree to drop the name “Redskin” for a football team.  When it comes to the black arts of mob scapegoating McCarthy had nothing on the commissars of PC today. 

Purges and scapegoating are bad.  But they are not as fatal to the life of a nation as the failure to recognize and mobilize against a clear and present danger to our national existence. 

The next few elections will decide whether we are to survive as “a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Constitutional government in the world is only two centuries old, and the US Constitution is the longest-lasting and most benevolent one in existence.  Lincoln truly did not know “whether any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.” In 1860 the Constitution was only seven decades old.  But today, under the combined assault of enemies domestic and foreign, we still cannot guarantee whether constitutional government will survive.  It has many, many enemies. 

Ronald Reagan said that each generation must decide again to choose freedom or tyranny.  We are ultimately responsible for failing to teach our political history to our children, who are abysmally ignorant and misled.  The future of liberty, electoral legitimacy, political balance of powers and rationality is by no means assured.  Unlike the Founding generation, the generation of Lincoln, and the Greatest Generation of World War 2 our people today are steeped in folly and self-indulgence. 

We can win against the Left-Islamist alliance just as we won the Cold War.  But so far we have done little but retreat in confusion, for lack of clear leadership and unity. 

Today our future is as unsure as it was in 1944 when Harry Truman won the Democratic nomination for Vice President.  The Cold War ended two decades ago.  Today we must mobilize our resources for another life-and-death struggle or give in to the forces of barbarism. 

The next elections will decide our fate. 

James Lewis

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/09/the_utter_failure_of_our_political_class_to_respond_to_mortal_danger.html

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

Burak Bekdil: Turkey's Frankenstein Monster

by Burak Bekdil

Last June, Turkey's own Frankenstein, who went by the name of ISIS, attacked the Turkish consulate compound in Mosul, and took 49 Turks, including the consul general, hostage.
The hostages are still in captivity. So is Turkey.
For each [Islamic] sect, the other is "not even Muslim."

It all began when Turkey's leaders thought they could build a Sunni belt under Turkish hegemony, and resting geographically under the Crescent and Star. For that to actually happen, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq had to be ruled by Sunni -- preferably Muslim Brotherhood-type -- leaderships subservient to Ankara.

This Turkish gambit came at a time when the turbulent Middle East was even more turbulent than it always is: the Arab Spring had unmasked a 14-century-long hatred between Islam's two main sects, a schism started by rival clans in the Prophet Muhammad's tribe, the Quraysh. This is a feud that would survive beyond even their imagination.

Syria, with which Turkey shares a 500-mile border, was sadly being ruled by a Nusayri (Syrian Alawite), an offshoot of the Shia faith. Bashar al-Assad soon became, as the Sicilians say, "a stone in (then Prime Minister, now President) Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's shoe."

In the background, the Sunni-Shia feud was heating up. The Turks failed to get the message. In 2013, Iraq's acting defense minister, Saadoun al-Dulaimi, accused Turkey of controlling Sunni anti-government protests in (Shia majority) Iraq.

For some time the United States even toyed with the idea of creating a "moderate crescent" of Sunni nations in order to contain Shia Iran, Shia-controlled Iraq and Lebanon's Hizbullah.

The sectarian blindness explained a lot of complexities: Why, for instance, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia fiercely supported the Syrian opposition, or sent troops across the border into neighboring Bahrain to help stamp out a Shia uprising there; why al-Qaeda's leaders called on jihadists to join the fighting in Syria; or why, for Erdoğan, al-Assad was the "butcher of Damascus," while Sudan's Sunni leader Omar al-Bashir, with an international arrest warrant for crimes against humanity and the killing of hundreds of thousands, was "just an innocent friend." The hatred explains, even to this date, why the Shia and Sunnis in Iraq kill each other by the thousands every month and bomb each other's mosques.

The Wahhabis are virulently anti-Shia, and vice versa. They view the Shia as satanic "rejectionists." And, for their part, the Shia view the Wahhabis as simply perverted. For each sect the other is "not even Muslim." Saudi schools teach pupils that Shi'ism is simply a Jewish heresy.

In 2006, senior Wahhabi cleric Abdul Rahman al-Barrak released a fatwa which stated that the Shia are "infidels, apostates and hypocrites ... [and] they are more dangerous than Jews or Christians." Al-Qaeda's younger twin, al-Nusrah, declared in 2012: "The blessed operations will continue until the land of Syria is purified from the filth of the Nusayris and the Sunnis are relieved from their oppression."

The wreckage of the Shrine of Jonah, in Mosul, Iraq, which was destroyed by insurgents of the Islamic State in July 2014.

The Sunni supremacist Erdoğan would therefore even shake hands with Satan for the downfall of the Nusayri al-Assad. And he did. Turkey quickly became the mentor of all Syrian opposition groups which, ideally, would first defeat al-Assad, then form an Islamist government and volunteer to become a de facto colony of the emerging Turkish Empire.

At the outset, Turkey's support was about policy and planning: conference after conference, meeting after meeting, declaration after declaration. The innocent Turks were merely expending diplomatic efforts to end the bloody civil war in a neighboring country.

In reality, Ankara slowly made Turkey's southeast a hub for every color of radical Islamist militant arriving from dozens of different countries, including thousands from Europe. The militants would cross the border into Syria, fight al-Assad's forces, go back to Turkey, get medical treatment there if necessary, replenish their weapons and ammunition and go back to fight again. In an audio recording leaked on the internet in March, Turkey's top intelligence officer admits that, "Turkey has so far sent 2,000 trucks full of weapons and ammunition into Syria."

Last June, Turkey's own Frankenstein monster, who went by the name of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria [ISIS] -- later reflagged as "The Islamic State" [IS] -- appeared at its old master's doors. IS attacked the Turkish consulate compound in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, after having captured large swathes of Syrian and Iraqi territory. It also took 49 Turks, including the consul general, hostage.

Ironically, only a day before the attack on the Turkish consulate, an opposition parliamentarian, speaking in parliament, warned that the consulate was exposed to the risk of an attack from ISIS -- to which the government benches replied loudly: "Stop telling lies!" And only 20 hours before the Turkish consulate was attacked, Turkey's then-Foreign Minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, tweeted that "We have taken all precautions at the Mosul consulate general."

The hostages are still in captivity. So is Turkey, strategically and militarily. When U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel arrived in Ankara on Sept. 8 to discuss a joint methodology to fight IS, and asked the Turks what services they could offer, the most important Turks in Ankara, including Erdoğan, shyly looked in the air and explained why they could not actively or publicly engage IS. And so 49 unfortunate Turks are still in the hands of the Turkish Frankenstein.

More than two years ago Davutoglu prophesized that al-Assad's days in power were numbered. In a span of weeks, he predicted, the "butcher of Damascus would go." But there is another man who can compete with Davutoglu in any "Realistic Guesses on the Future of the Middle East" competition. At the end of 2011 when the last US troops left Iraq, President Barack Obama described Iraq as "sovereign, stable and self-reliant."


Burak Bekdil

Source: http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4698/turkey-frankenstein-monster

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

Emily Amrousi: Fertile ground for manipulation

by Emily Amrousi

Just like in the darker corners of Tel Aviv, you never know where it is going to get you. You can hear footsteps on the pavement of the alleyway. They are watching you, and they are out to get you. They come at you one by one, in perfect order. Attempts to stab the legitimacy of the settlement enterprise. Attempts to destroy it. 

In one day, they managed to poison the whole world against Israel with reports of "appropriation" of land in Gush Etzion. The next day, the Molad Center for the Renewal of Israeli Democracy, which was established to tell the story that people in Europe love so much (Jews controlling tax funds), reported that settlers were sucking public funds at the expense of investment in the people of Israel's southern towns. The day after that, the Adva Center reported that settlers were benefiting from funds that should rightfully go to the poorer towns. Orchestrated campaigns are dominating the newspaper headlines here, while a minute away from here journalists are being beheaded. And all of it is one big lie. 

For the past four decades, the Left has stuck to a single goal: to cleanse Israel's heartland of Jews and hand the territory over to the Palestinians. They work toward this goal by scattering promises of fairies and doves of peace on the one hand while smearing the communities' inhabitants on the other. 

But the reality -- oh, the reality. The vision of a Palestinian state is being buried even as Islamic State terror cells situated within bicycling distance from our homes promise to drink our blood. The idea of the Palestinian nation and its aspiration for an independent state is weakened as the "Greater Islamic State," with its pretensions of covering half the globe, has no nations or peoples -- only jihad. 

Operation Protective Edge also made it clear why shrinking Israel around the edges was not a good idea: Nobody wants Shujaiyyah five minutes away from the center of Israel. Israelis want their borders wide and safe. The rationale behind withdrawal has vanished. But the Left keeps on firing. Its hatred of the settlers has gone from a means to the goal. It has become second nature.

Let us begin with Gush Etzion. I visited the area this week. Slopes of green forest between the ultra-Orthodox city of Beitar Illit and Beit Shemesh. In this broad space overlooking the coastal plain (Gedera, Kiryat Gat, Rehovot, Ben-Gurion Airport) are two communities. One is Kashuela Farm, where two families live (with the blessing of the authorities), protecting the Lamed-Heh Forest from vandals who cut down the trees. The other is Gvaot, an IDF Nahal outpost established in the 1970s by the left-wing government of the time as a Zionist version of the ultra-Orthodox Beitar Illit. 

Currently, Gvaot is home to Sadnat Shiluv, an integration project for special-needs children. There is not a single Arab home in the area.

This is not a case of expropriation, dispossession or theft. The declaration of the area as state-owned land is a legal procedure meant to ensure that the land is not privately owned. It is the opposite of expropriation. The goal is to make sure that no Palestinian's ownership rights will be affected. 

There was no appropriation either, since Israeli law still does not apply in Judea and Samaria (or in Gush Etzion, where settlement began in 1923). Every time a Jew wishes to build in Samaria, the land is declared to be state-owned, and this has been the case since the High Court of Justice case involving Elon Moreh in the 1970s. But now, all of a sudden, it has become a dramatic political act.

Let's be frank: The aim is to settle. Settlements provide housing solutions for tens of thousands of young people, they ensure territorial contiguity, they provide land reserves. Those who seek to take this land are not fond of the prospect. 

But on the moral side, the procedures of surveying and declaration are pro-Palestinian. The purpose of surveying the land, which includes analyzing aerial photographs from the 1940s to the present, is to clarify whether privately owned land is involved. If historical signs of cultivation, such as possible ploughed furrow even from many years ago, are detected, that section is excluded from the declaration. Signs in Hebrew and Arabic can be seen in the area, inviting anyone with a claim of ownership to come and state his case. If the claim is proved, that land is excluded from the declared area. The invitation also appears in the Arab press in the area. Incidentally, the Palestinian side takes control over land without surveys, declarations or any legal procedure.

When such a procedure is done, the best legal minds make certain that everything is done in accordance with international law to prevent protests from the enlightened world. 

Actually, the hue and cry over the nationalization of the land did not come from the European Union. It came from here. The Zionist left wing goaded the United States and Europe until it got the condemnation it wanted. It was only after the Israeli Left leveled its harsh criticisms at the government that the world jumped on the bandwagon. So who is really trying to scorch the earth -- the defense minister or Peace Now?

Now for the Molad Center. Ever since the social-justice protests of the summer of 2011, Israeli activists have realized that the natural human inclination to seek material goods and assets can serve as a convenient way to make trouble for the settlers. The Molad Center is not an objective think tank. 

Avner Inbar, its co-founder and director, served time in jail for refusing to serve in the Israeli army. Academic director and research fellow Dr. Assaf Sharon, who signed a letter endorsing a campaign of disobedience, was arrested during a violent protest for attacking security troops. The same people who exhaust Israeli authorities with their frequent violent demonstrations in east Jerusalem are the one who broke the news about the "settlers' secret treasury" last Saturday.

Their new idea is to incite the inhabitants of Israel's southern towns against the people who live in the settlements. How do they do that? They take the statistical tables, remove one thing, move another, manipulate some part of it, conceal data that does not fit -- and presto, there is the proof. Here is one example of their sleight of hand: "Enormous budgets that swell from year to year are given to the settlers via the World Zionist Organization's Settlement Division." 

The reason for the "budget inflation" that particular year was the evacuation of Beit El's Ulpana neighborhood -- an move initiated and encouraged by the Left (arguing that Ulpana was built on private Palestinian land and urging the courts to force its inhabitants to evacuate the land). 

The texts Molad published a week after the government decided to allocate 1.25 billion shekels ($340 million) to the communities situated around the Gaza border are meant solely to arouse dispute. The Settlement Division was established by Levi Eshkol to assist the communities in Sinai, on the Golan Heights, the Gaza District, Judea, Samaria and the Jordan Valley. Those were the specific places named in the decision to establish it. If the Settlement Division funds the paving of a security road in a Jordan Valley community, it is not transferring secret funds to settlers. It is doing its job.

However, over the past decade the Settlement Division has also been working in the peripheral areas in the north and the south, and its budget is divided in equal thirds between the Negev, the Galilee, and Judea and Samaria. What is more, the Negev and the Galilee receive assistance not only from the Settlement Division but also from the Regional Development Ministry, which is specifically in charge of the development of the Negev and the Galilee with a budget of 136 million shekels ($37 million) per year. The Regional Development Ministry allocates no funds to Judea and Samaria. Would we ever say that the residents of the Galilee were stealing money from the settlers? Heaven forbid.

Even as this lie was being disseminated, along came the Adva Center and published a new report telling the exact same lie -- only this time, it was the settlements versus the poorer towns in the south or on the periphery, known in Hebrew as "development towns." 

By this account, the greedy Jew stole money from the disadvantaged Sderot resident. Making a comparison between a regional council (in Judea and Samaria) and a local council (in the Negev and the Galilee) is like comparing apples and oranges. A regional council, which has a large number of small, geographically scattered communities, costs the state more than a concentrated urban community does. That is equally true of Texas and of the Golan Heights, and it applies all the more to quite a few areas under threat. A social worker in Netivot can visit her clients by bus. A social worker in Har Hanegev needs a car to travel from one community to another. So Adva pulled a fast one by making a comparison between a regional council and a local council, with the regional councils costing more because they are, well, regional.

If, instead of comparing an apple and an orange, we compare two apples -- one regional council to another -- we will find that the settler receives much less government funding. To cite one example, the expenditure for an inhabitant of the Samaria Regional Council is 10,000 shekels per year and 8,300 shekels per year in the Binyamin Regional Council, but 14,600 per year in Sdot Negev. The expenditure per inhabitant of the Har Hebron Regional Council is 18,100 shekels, while for an inhabitant of the Har Negev Regional Council it is 22,800. The difference stems from the driving distance of the pupils from school, security costs and the socio-economic cluster. In what is known as extraordinary budgets, the government invests 960 shekels per resident of the Binyamin Regional Council, 1,600 per resident of the Samaria Regional Council, 2,200 per resident of the Hof Ashkelon Regional Council and 4,700 per resident of the Eshkol Regional Council.

When we also compare between local authorities, we begin to realize that the settler is actually the one being deprived. Expenditure per inhabitant in Mitzpe Ramon is 13,000 shekels per year. In Shlomi it is 9,200 shekels. Compare this with 7,200 shekels per resident in Alfei Menashe or 6,700 shekels in Elkana. And now let us move on to cities. Sderot: 9,800 shekels per inhabitant per year. Yeruham: 8,900 shekels. Kiryat Shemonah: 7,600 shekels. Compare this with 6,600 shekels per resident per year in Ariel, and 4,700 shekels each in Modiin Illit and Beitar Illit.

What other tricks were played with the data? They left the ultra-Orthodox communities (where the expenditure amount is much lower) out of the calculation, but included the ultra-Orthodox residents in the calculation of allocations within the Green Line. 

And here is another fast one they pulled: They mention the high investment in education, not per resident but per council. Well, of course they would do that: There are more children in the regional councils where the settlers live. In the Binyamin Regional Council, 53 percent of the population is aged under 19. In the Samaria Regional Council that figure is 48 percent, and in the Har Hebron Regional Council it is 54 percent. In the regional councils of Hof Ashkelon, Har Hanegev and Eshkol, children comprise only one-third of the population. More children mean more classrooms. Do the people at Adva think that children living in Talmon and Shiloh do not deserve to have a school?

A digression. When I bought a bed for my daughter this week, I was asked to pay an additional 140 shekels for delivery -- a punitive tax for having chosen to live near the border. If a family living in a community near the Gaza border orders a bed for a child and must pay a risk fee in addition to the delivery fee, they will refuse, and rightly so. But the settlers are accustomed to the red lines that have been created by the Green Line. The moving companies' charts do not lie. The settlers are still living in a parallel state.

Another trick is smearing the people themselves. Stereotypes and scholarly studies show how violent the settlers are. This is also what Dr. Anat Roth, a researcher of the Israel Democracy Institute and an activist in Peace Now, found when she began studying the secret of the Yesha settler council's strength.

"I saw things that I could not understand," she said, recalling the fight against the disengagement. "I saw a stricken and humiliated population behaving with restraint, and instead of getting into conflict with the police officers who had been sent to harm all it held dear, it called them 'my brothers.' There was a 180-degree gap between the theories in the research literature produced since Rabin's assassination and the reality. All the theories collapsed during the disengagement. No violence broke out." The result was her book "Not At Any Price" (Hebrew; Yedioth Ahronoth Books) -- a work that is fascinating, enriching and chilling.

The lies about Israel are even more annoying than the lies about the settlers. There is a small group of Israelis whose hobby is to say how bad things are here. A country ranking 16th on the global Human Development Index is suffering from an autoimmune whining disease. In the video clip by the Israeli expatriates, I saw a smiling face, a dancing body -- and hollow sadness. By the waters of Berlin we hopped and danced as we remembered Zion. How disconnected must a person be to rejoice as he leaves his homeland, language, culture and family behind?

In the classic form of salon debates, members of the Right always pull out claims from the past: the deadly 1929 riot in Hebron, the Balfour Declaration and King David. The left-winger always uses the future: The world will ostracize us, Europe will boycott us, the Americans will stop talking to us. The future that the Left sketches out is bleak and dim. And they call me the messianic one.

If I had a shekel for every time somebody called me messianic (as an insult), I could fund the additional delivery fee for the bed. What does being "messianic" mean? It means being optimistic. It means being a person who knows that all this is leading to something good. 

On the fifth of Iyar 5708 by the Hebrew calendar -- May 14, 1948 by the Gregorian -- the ladder was placed on the ground, and we have been trying to climb upward ever since. We have not reached the top, and not everything is good, but it will be. We do not have to wait for the final redemption or for utopia. A proper society and an excellent country are not a distant or lost challenge, as the pessimistic emigres think.

My friend Michal Bergman made an excellent point when she wrote, "Every self-respecting intellectual needs a small, carefully-packed suitcase so that if he/she is compelled to make good on the threat to move to Berlin, it will be smooth, quick and elegant. Who knows when someone might knock on her door and give her just five minutes to get ready? We must learn from history and prepare in advance."

The post office workers' union's choice to strike the rural postal service is one of malice. A resident of one of the large cities who needs a package or a document urgently can use one of the private delivery services. The 750,000 Israelis who live in rural areas can go fly a kite. They have no alternative but the striking Israel Postal Service.

The symbol of the Israel Postal Service is not a gazelle, as everyone thinks, but a deer. Deer can reach speeds of up to 50 kilometers per hour -- but the postal service does not even go that quickly. 

Now the strike is a total one. If Avda and Molad wanted to drive a wedge between the inhabitants of Judea and Samaria and those of the Negev and the Galilee, the rural postal service strike has united these peripheral regions. For two weeks the post office boxes in every sector of rural settlement areas -- be they on mountains, in valleys or in deserts -- have been empty. Nobody is receiving checks, notices for driver's license renewals, registration forms for the first grade, new credit cards, IDF call-up orders or invitations to military tryouts, forms from university or debt notices (which involve fines if they are not paid on time). No mail is going out or coming in. 

I heard first-hand about a wedding where half of the guests didn't come because they did not receive an invitation. And this is without even mentioning threatening letters that do not reach their destinations.

It is hard to feel empathy for the postal workers when the periphery is the one paying the price. If the postal service officials wanted the government to take notice of their suffering, I would have suggested that they separate the citizens' mail from the government's. Mail to and from government offices will wait until after the Jewish holiday season has ended.

Emily Amrousi

Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=9949

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

IDF Blog: Hamas Reveals Jihadi Character on Arabic Twitter Account

by IDF Blog

Though Hamas denies being linked to Islamic fundamentalism when it is speaks to a western audience, it uses different language on its official Twitter account in Arabic. The Twitter account shows how Hamas draws its and ideology from the same sources as ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

The difference in speech from English to Arabic

On its English twitter account, Hamas’ Islamist character is played down. The terrorist organization publishes more reserved statements such as, “The Palestinian people are committed to their right to their land, to defend themselves and to lift the siege imposed on Gaza,” (although there are some notable exceptions to this “moderation.”)

However, on its Arabic twitter account, Hamas reveals its Jihadist nature by issuing far more virulent statements, such as:

“We will not rest until Palestine is free … We are not tired nor weary, and we’ll continue on the path of Jihad with the help of God. “

These fundamentalist Jihadist statements are the bread and butter of Hamas. This has been the terrorist group’s position since its founding in 1987– as seen in its charter affirmed in 1988 – and it continues to be so.

Hamas’ Hymns: calls for hatred and Jihad

Lately, Hamas has been posting the words of Jihadist nasheeds (Islamist religious poems), or hymns, on its twitter account.  On August 25, Hamas posted a popular Jihadi hymn called ”Na’am Qatel” (“Yes Attack”). Na’am Qatil is a Jihad hymn very popular among the supporters of ISIS, as seen here.

Here are the lyrics for Na’am Qatel:

“Yes Resist, for you are our dawn, and rain down [rockets] on the Zionist offspring/ Yes Attack, for you are our victory, attack the call of the infidels in all of the fortresses.”

“We are the people who yearn for death”

In the past, Hamas leaders have made numerous statements in which they asserted that Hamas members love death as much as Israelis love life. This doctrine was recently advocated in a speech from the commander of Hamas’ military wing, Muhammad Dief, and previously by Hamas’  leader Ismail Haniyeh.

Moreover, a few days ago Hamas published on its Arabic Twitter account the words of another nasheed, seen here being sung by ISIS members on one of its propaganda videos.

Here is an excerpt of the hymn’s words:

“As I go, I know my path and I know my goal, and death dances around every corner.”

“Jihad as long as we live”

Finally, one more nasheed from Hamas’ Arabic twitter account that summarizes the ideology of the organization:

“We, the ones who have pledged allegiance to Muhammad / Will engage in jihad as long as we live.”

 

These nasheeds are not only adopted by Hamas, but also by jihadi groups around the world, revealing the similarities between Hamas and other terrorist organizations. The nasheeds published by Hamas on its Twitter account are not just songs but the hallmark of jihadists and their recruitment around the world.

 Hamas and other Jihadi Groups

In article twenty-three of its charter, Hamas makes clear its position vis-a-vis other Islamic movements.

“All the fighters of Jihad have their reward.  Hamas regards those movements as its stock holders and asks Allah for guidance and integrity of conduct for all.”

Hamas should be viewed like all other jihadi groups that have earned the scorn of the world for their fundamentalism and brutality.

IDF Blog

Source: http://www.idfblog.com/blog/2014/09/12/hamas-reveals-jihadi-character-arabic-twitter-account/

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