Palestinians Attempt to Co-Opt Jewish History - Ari Lieberman

by Ari Lieberman

Zahir Muhsein: The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity.

The Tel Dan Stele

In December 2011, former House Speaker and presidential candidate, Newt Gingrich made the following observation regarding the Palestinians;

Remember there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire. And I think that we’ve had an invented Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs, and were historically part of the Arab community…

That comment set off a firestorm of debate and criticism but is in actuality, grounded in historical fact. As noted historian Benny Morris pointed out in his acclaimed book, 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War, at the turn of the 20^th century, most Arabs residing in the Land of Israel or “Palestine” considered themselves to be subjects of the Ottoman Empire. There were some Palestinian Arabs with vague nationalistic tendencies but even this minority considered itself to be part of Greater Syria. There simply was no reference to an independent Palestine for a distinct group of people calling themselves “Palestinians.”

Morris also perceptively notes that the residents of Palestinian villages routinely failed to come to the assistance of nearby villages that were under attack by Jewish forces thus reinforcing the view that Arab villagers felt little loyalty to all but clan and village. The notion of a “Palestinian people” was an alien concept to the common Palestinian villager who was not bound by any sense of duty to assist a neighboring village.

Occasionally, Palestinians themselves will acknowledge this fact. In a revealing 1977 interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw, PLO executive committee member Zahir Muhsein stated,

The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism.
For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa. While as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.

It was a rare but astonishing moment of candor. A senior PLO member was openly acknowledging what few would readily admit. But his was not an isolated admission. In a March 2012 televised address, Hamas Minister of the Interior and of National Security Fathi Hammad essentially validated Gingrich’s assessment of the Palestinians. While pleading for Egyptian fuel, Hammad let loose with a series of embarrassing admissions that were certainly not intended for Western audiences.

“Every Palestinian…throughout Palestine can prove his Arab roots, whether from Saudi Arabia or Yemen or anywhere.” He went on to say that “personally, half my family is Egyptian, we are all like that.” And further buries himself deeper by stating, “Brothers, half the Palestinians are Egyptian and the other half are Saudis…Who are the Palestinians?” he asks rhetorically. “We have families called al-Masri whose roots are Egyptian, Egyptian! We are Egyptian! We are Arab! We are Muslim!” He concludes his rant with the obligatory Muslim battle cry, “Allahuakbar!” Curiously absent from his long diatribe is any recognition of an independent Palestinian identity and that’s precisely because there simply isn’t any.

Lacking their own independent history, culture and identity, Palestinians have adopted a strategy of denying Jewish history. Arafat, for example, flat out denied the fact that great Jewish Temples, built first by king Solomon and then by Herod, once stood where the Al-Aqsa Mosque currently stands. So ridiculous were his comments that they earned a swift rebuke from President Clinton. Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas taking cue from his boss also adopted this odious position. It should therefore come as no surprise that Abbas is also a confirmed Holocaust denier, despite his transparent efforts to rehabilitate his image for his gullible Western audience.

Palestinian Arabs have also attempted to recruit Western “experts” and academics to their cause. In his insightful book The Fight for Jerusalem: Radical Islam, the West, and the Future of the Holy City, veteran Israeli diplomat Dore Gold chronicles the length to which Arab-Muslims and their Western lackeys will go to deny the Jewish nexus to the Land of Israel. They argued that much of ancient Jewish history was nothing but mythology including the Kingdoms of David and Solomon.

From the Arab perspective, the tactic was a sound one. Sever the ancient historical Jewish nexus with Israel and you severely undermine claims of indigenousness. But archeology does not lie and those very Western academics (at least the intellectually honest ones) were forced to retract their findings and conclusions after the dramatic 1993 discovery of a 9^th century stele at Tel Dan in northern Israel that clearly referenced the “House of David.” Additional discoveries since then, including finds in Jerusalem, Tel Zayit and at the Fortress of Elah have further eroded claims by skeptics and naysayers.

Not content with denying Jewish history, Palestinian Arabs have actually attempted to co-opt it by absurdly claiming that Moses as well as King Saul were Palestinian Muslims who conquered and claimed “Palestine” for the benefit of Palestinians. These risible comments were spewed forth by “Dr.” Omar Ja’ara, a lecturer at Al-Najah University in Nablus and broadcast on Palestinian Authority TV. He notes further that the actions of Moses and Saul represented “the first Palestinian liberation through armed struggle to liberate Palestine… this is our logic and this is our culture.”

Incidentally, Al-Najah University boasts on its website that it is “the first Palestinian University to obtain the EFQM European Certificate of Excellence.” Something to bear in mind next time any parent contemplates sending their child off to Europe for higher education.

Of course it doesn’t matter that Saul lived approximately 1,700 years before Muhammad was zygote. Facts play absolutely no role in Palestinian academia. Empirical data and evidence is ignored. Precedence is given to upholding a false, pernicious and viscerally anti-Semitic narrative that either denies historical fact or co-opts it.

As PLO bigwig Zahir Muhsein candidly noted, the claim of a Palestinian identity is a myth whose aim is not designed to achieve liberation or advancement for any particular people but rather to subjugate and destroy another people. For those of you, who still remain unconvinced; consider the recent comments made by a prominent sheikh during a religious sermon at the Al-Aqsa Mosque. During his tirade, which included the usual dose of anti-Semitic vitriol, the sheikh never once uttered a desire or longing for Palestinian statehood. Instead he expresses the desire to join with ISIS in its quest for an Islamic caliphate and asks the large crowd of acolytes surrounding him to, “pledge allegiance to the Muslim Caliph,” and they in turn respond with chants of “amen!”

Few in the West have faced up to this malevolent reality. They continue to adhere to the harmful, dogmatic formula of a two-state solution. What they willfully fail to realize is that such a solution poses an existential threat to the Mideast’s only democracy and will most certainly have grave negative consequences for the region at large.

Ari Lieberman

Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ari-lieberman/palestinians-attempt-to-co-opt-jewish-history/

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

The Jihadist Connection to Epidemic Child Abuse - James Lewis

by James Lewis

In Europe today, the political and media power of Muslims and their Leftist allies is enormous, and given their indigenous practices of bribery, sexual and physical abuse of children and women, and imperialistic theology, Europe’s taboos on criticism of PC must reflect deep corruption.

The Cambridge Spies in Britain were the most destructive spy network of the Cold War. Soviet intelligence recruited lifelong moles among students at Cambridge University, who went on to careers in British intelligence and even Buckingham Palace. The Soviets used a simple recruiting strategy, aided by Communist professors who served as talent spotters, along with radical Leftists like Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

The Cambridge Five spies were young homosexuals at a time when active gay sex was illegal and often a source of great personal shame and social stigma. In one famous case, mathematician Alan Turing was arrested for homosexual acts, and given dangerous hormone treatments until he ultimately committed suicide.

Sexual abuse of children is still a deep violation of our morality, and it is actively prosecuted in Western countries. The lifelong trauma that early sexual abuse can inflict should be obvious to sane and reasonable adults. But our laws against pedophilia also give hostile regimes a chance to blackmail active pedophiles.

Many Muslim cultures celebrate adult male sex with underage children; homosexual aggression is quite acceptable, as long as it is practiced by powerful males on younger and weaker ones. For one historical example, Lawrence of Arabia made allies for Britain among Arab desert tribes against the Turks during World War I. But it is less well known that Lawrence was also anally raped by some of his Arab friends.

Just as raping women is acceptable in Shari’a for male aggressors but not for female victims, the same “logic” applies to dominant adult males and children.

Some of Europe’s 44 million Muslim immigrants brought their native practices with them. Add to that the corrupting power of Gulf oil money in Europe’s politics and the supremacist theology of Wahhabi and Khomeinist Islam, and you have all the makings of widespread European child abuse, aided and abetted by Jihadist infiltration into the police, the schools and government agencies, huge amounts of bribery, massive government-media coverups, and blackmail threats against any potential witnesses.

Western Europeans are not even allowed to talk about limiting Muslim immigration, witness the second prosecution of Member of Parliament Geert Wilders in the Netherlands today, merely for asking the question: “Do we want more Moroccan immigrants?”  In Europe today, the political and media power of Muslims and their Leftist allies is enormous, and given their indigenous practices of bribery, sexual and physical abuse of children and women, and imperialistic theology, Europe’s taboos on criticism of PC must reflect deep corruption. Nations do not commit suicide unless they are forced to. But Europe cannot seem to stop itself.

A recent report from the Gatestone Institute shows the same pattern of corruption and Muslim infiltration in Sweden:

Sweden's Minister of Interior, Ardalan Shekarabi, who is also responsible for Domestic Law and Order, is a former illegal immigrant from Iran who defied a Swedish deportation order in 1989 by going into hiding. Shekarabi is also known for embezzling state funds for an integration project to aid in his reelection as leader of the Social-Democratic Youth Party.
Sweden's Minister for Culture and Democracy, Alice Bah Kuhnke is a hard-line feminist known for threatening to cut off funds to organizations that oppose honor killings if any of those funds went to men working against honor killings. As a feminist, it seems as if she wants only women to receive these funds.”
These two facts show the close alliance between radical Leftists and Muslim political power. It’s not that they agree with each other -- Leftists are typically atheists, and Muslims are militant proslatyzers for a tyrannical faith. Yet the two sides have built a powerful, secret alliance of convenience in Europe (and some places in America) -- an amazing parallel to the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1938. Their alliance is based on a common enemy, and that would be us.

In Britain, these long-suppressed rivers of cultural rot are finally beginning to make headlines in the media, after decades of spreading under cover of media censorship. 
Pedophile rings have been publicly exposed at the very top of the BBC -- George Orwell’s infamous Ministry of Truth, which only broadcast lies. Recently a ring of 22 pedophiles was exposed in Parliament, with headline allegations of murders of some child victims. In cities like Rotherham, Pakistani gangs victimized thousands of children. Pakistanis criminals were invariably labeled “Asians” in the press during this time of witch hunts. But the word “Asian” never seemed to mean Chinese, Japanese, or Malay. It simply meant “Muslim.”
When parents tried to report BBC children’s show star Jimmy Savile to the police, nothing was done. Britain’s libel laws can destroy a newspaper, with the result that no newspaper dared to publish what must have been the worst-kept secret in Britain. The Jimmy Savile scandal -- which also involved other top BBC personnel -- only became public when Jimmy died.

It is vital to understand that such crimes at the top of politics, the BBC, and in local cities cannot be kept truly secret -- not to hostile intelligence agencies that know how to spy them out. For at least twenty years, therefore, the British political system has made itself vulnerable to massive blackmail by Jihadist forces, but also to Russian, Chinese, and perhaps industrial espionage outfits. The European Union, which is run by France and Germany, must also know about such high-level criminal networks, and the EU is not above a little blackmail itself.

The height of pedophile infiltration in Britain seems to overlap with the height of the multiculturalist witch-hunting campaign -- peddling the myth that all cultures are morally equivalent. It is easy to see how that campaign could be run by BBC bosses and “stars” like Jimmy Savile, to rationalize their sexual compulsions and to intimidate their enemies.

The Leftist Connection

In Britain, the Labour Party and its hard left core controls the BBC and newspapers like the Guardian and the Independent. The BBC also runs predictable hate campaigns against Israel, against the United States when a Republican is president, and against British conservatives. Margaret Thatcher was a target of over-the-top BBC rage until the day she died. No Muslim countries are subjected even to truthful reporting -- as in the case of Saddam Hussein’s sadistic reign of torture in Iraq. The intensity of rage and hatred expressed by the leftwing media in Britain, especially the BBC, almost certainly reflects the depth of corruption that prevailed (and perhaps still does) at the top of these organizations. To protect endemic corruption at the top, the controlled media had to run hate campaigns against people with traditional values.

British Organs of Propaganda were also running the international global warming fraud at this time.  Since radical Leftists like the Frankfurt School have often tried to make the case for pedophilia, there is reason to believe that several political disease vectors came together during the height of the multicultural witchhunt campaign -- when any critic was instantly labeled as racist, sexist, and absolutely evil.  A powerful pedophile network peddled the radical Leftist party line, and supported the Left-Islamist Axis we see at work around the world. 

European media propaganda took a decisive turn to pro-Muslim agitation during this same period of time. European pedophiles could be invited to Muslim countries where their tastes were catered to.  For centuries, novelists and travelers to Muslim lands have reported child brothels and slave markets.  Today’s depredations of Boko Haram in Nigeria are identical to the Muslim slave raiding, kidnapping, rape and violence that brought the ancestors of today’s American blacks across the Atlantic. And yet, Muslim influence in America’s inner cities is enormous. 

Obama’s Rev. Jerry Wright started his career as a Muslim, and of course, Obama himself adopted a Muslim name, and actively aids Islamist powers -- Iran, Turkey, Qatar, the Muslim Brotherhood, and even Al Qaeda-linked gangs in Libya and Syria.

Saudi billionaires have long bought houses in London, going there to drink prohibited booze and engage in all the activities that are taboo at home, such as homosexual house parties.  In return, Europeans and Americans discovered the lure of sex tourism, where pedophiles could visit Muslim countries (or South America) to find their victims. It is possible that British politicians visited the Gulf states to indulge in such practices, and it is certain that hate-propagating politicians like George Galloway converted to Islam during the same period.  At the same time HIV carriers were actively spreading their disease to Africa and the Caribbean, countries without the public health resources to keep those diseases under some control.

Starting in the 70s and 80s, hundreds of thousands of Pakistani Muslims were imported into London and other British cities to provide cheap welfare votes for the Labour Party.  The Saudis provided indoctrinated Wahhabi imams to run the mosques they bought in major cities. The BBC conducted public witchhunts against its much-hated enemies, like former PM Margaret Thatcher, and for that matter, against anybody who spoke out against the suicidal immigration flood.

The British media generated a hysterical persecution atmosphere, and it now appears that pedophile gangs took advantage of that atmosphere of fear to exploit vulnerable children, to engage in sexual slavery and abuse against women, and to conduct honor killings when Muslim girls went out with the wrong boys. There were even reports of African child sacrifices.

London’s Finsbury Mosque has been a known center of Jihadist recruitment for years, and yet, infamous hate preachers like Abu Hamza can never be expelled from Britain. One major reason why Western Europe has lost the ability to protect itself from poisonous hate preachers is the EU, which routinely prohibits simple self-defense among its member nations. The European Union itself reflects all the corruption and political pathologies of its subject nations. 

This is same time that the Parliament in London surrendered many of its legislative power to Brussels and Strasbourg, where the European Union runs a phony front parliament -- with elected representatives who have no powers whatsoever. That is still true today -- the EU has a nice building for its parliament, but the rump parliament is still utterly powerless.

Thus British voters were made helpless -- voting for the parliamentary parties in London did no good, because Parliament had ceded major powers to Brussels, and the Franco-German bureaucracy in Brussels was just as corrupt as the party bureaucrats who appointed them. Free speech came under constant assault from nationalized media like the BBC.

Europe’s political actions seem suicidal. The importation of 44 million Muslims is only one example. If only one percent of Europe’s Muslims are jihadists, the continent has to keep track of 440,000 violent enemies hidden in its more than 300 million people. Like the U.S., Europe spies on its own people on a massive scale. Britain was once the land of individual privacy, where a man’s home was his castle, where even the King’s men could not enter without due process of law.  That England is now dead or dying.

Europe’s media are under the thumb of politicians, who reflect the Left-Islamist alliance. Muslim immigrants form majorities in major cities, where Shari’a enclaves are springing up and the police dare not go. The Left-Muslim alliance works to attract increasing numbers of Muslims from impoverished countries by promising free welfare to entire families in return for reliable votes for the Left. The political system appears to be in a death spiral.

When we think about jihadism we imagine the videotaped horrors of ISIS and its ilk. But like Soviet Communism, jihad uses many varieties of aggression, from ideological propaganda to infiltration, bribery, sexual subornation, beatings of women and vulnerable “infidels,” sabotage of police and military, on and on. The radical Left developed a lot of expertise in these methods during the seventy years of Soviet power, and resurgent jihadism originating in the Muslim world has apparently learned those lessons.

If Obama and his kind of radicalism is allowed to succeed -- and the next candidate is clearly Liz Warren -- this toxic mix will also infect the United States and other free countries.

There are many signs that these social poisons are already at work.

The Cold War ended in the 1990s, at least in Russia, China, and Eastern Europe. But the Western Left clung to various strains of Marxist-Leninism, most visibly in Barack Obama’s ideology. After the Soviet breakdown, the Left found new allies in Islamist fascism -- starting with Iran in 1979 and spreading through Islamist networks like the Muslim Brotherhood. Marxism is dead in Russia and China, where the memories of its actual depredations are too painful. But it is very much alive in Western university campuses, where it was always an ideological fantasy and reality had no impact.

We are therefore still engaged in a Cold War with major hot spots. The enemy has shape-changed, but is not difficult to spot once you see his camouflage. The Left-Islamist alliance is the real axis of evil these days, and as long as we are not even allowed to name him, he will keep working to destroy Western civilization.

James Lewis

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/12/the_jihadist_connection_to_epidemic_child_abuse_.html

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

Is there a Solution to the "Palestinian" Problem? - Dror Eydar

by Dror Eydar

The Palestinians are the last thing that the Europeans care about, just as they care nothing about the atrocities being perpetrated in Syria, Iraq or Africa. The Europeans are recognizing the Palestinian state not because they have any desire to improve our neighbors' situation, but because they have a problem with the Jews. They always did.

1. The upcoming elections have plunged Israel into a wartime atmosphere, and a good deal of blame is being thrown about. Each side, instead of looking to its own misdeeds, is making accusations against the other. They are not saying, "We have sinned," but rather, "You have sinned." 

Here, too, the accusations are meant to generate shallow headlines rather than addressing deep issues. This is a big mistake. Despite the piles of mud and refuse that are customarily dumped onto the average Israeli, the average Israeli is generally well aware of what is going on. They understand ideology and vision.

On the political plane, one gets the impression that the discourse, at least on the Left, is still stuck in the 1980s, before the great experiments that the Oslo Accords brought upon us -- before Hamas, before Islamic State, before the Middle East fell to pieces. What can Tzipi Livni accomplish with the Palestinians that she hasn't done over the past two years, when she was in charge of the talks with them? Did she bring any sort of agreement to the government that it turned down? If so, let her tell us. 

But she knows that there is nobody to talk to on the other side. They never had the slightest desire to end the conflict with the Jews. I would be glad to hear any Arab leader name his final demands -- the ones for which, if they were fulfilled, he would sign on the dotted line that the conflict was over and state that he had no further claims. Are there any volunteers? 

We have not even mentioned Jerusalem or the refugees or recognition of Israel as a Jewish state. The demand that our neighbors recognize Israel as the national home of the Jewish people was not for us, but for them. That is the litmus test of the integrity of their intentions. Do they recognize the right of Jews to any part of the historical Land of Israel? We know that any Arab leader who grants such recognition can expect an uncomfortable death.

That is the reason for the effort to anchor the Jewish nature of the State of Israel in a Basic Law. It is because not even a utopian-style peace treaty will end the fight against Israel that is being waged by Europe and the global left wing (and here as well, to some degree). The dozens of organizations that have been established to take away the Jews' right to their own land (for some reason, these groups are known as "human-rights organizations"; after all, you know, we Jews have no human rights) will no longer show any interest in the cruel dictatorship that they helped set up next door. Instead, they will aim their heavy artillery against Israeli society, which they will accuse of racism for being an exclusive state for the Jewish ethnic group instead of a "state of all its citizens," which is actually code for "a state of all its nationalities."

2. As we look on, Europe is falling like a ripe fruit at the feet of the radical Islam sweeping over it. The more terrorism conquers the streets of Europe, the greater the Europeans' desire will be to pay the terrorists a ransom in exchange for being left in peace, unmolested. As history has taught us, the ransom will be the Jews. The ludicrous statements by the European parliaments about recognizing the Palestinian state show the blindness of a society in decline that lost its basic instincts long ago. The Europeans care nothing about the Palestinians, whom they have doomed to a life of misery and suffering under oppressive regimes that are among the worst in the world, where there is no such thing as basic human rights.

The Palestinians are the last thing that the Europeans care about, just as they care nothing about the atrocities being perpetrated in Syria, Iraq or Africa. The Europeans are recognizing the Palestinian state not because they have any desire to improve our neighbors' situation, but because they have a problem with the Jews. They always did. 

Ironically, the return to Zion made the Jewish problem worse because it gave the Jews an independent political living space -- which the Europeans find completely unacceptable. That is also the reason why there are dozens of European organizations in this region, and why they funnel hundreds of millions of euros supposedly to help the Palestinians, but actually in efforts to undermine the legitimacy of the Jewish state. The "peace process" is just one more tool in that mechanism.

3. The talk of a "diplomatic agreement" is also a media ransom, lip-service paid by politicians who seek the sponsorship of the media party. Avigdor Lieberman is quite familiar with this work. 

"We must reach a diplomatic agreement," he said in a "closed-door conference," and received flattering headlines right away. "What is going on today is that they are doing nothing; there is a status quo. The initiative must be a comprehensive regional agreement." 

Have we not heard those empty phrases a thousand times already? Have we not tried to reach a political agreement in all kinds of ways? Has Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not gotten into trouble with his own camp over it? Did he not freeze construction in Judea and Samaria for ten months? And, before him, did Ehud Olmert not offer our neighbors what even Lieberman (I hope) would never dare offer?

And what about the two Yisrael Beytenu princes, Uzi Landau and Yair Shamir? Where are they? Why are they not responding to their party chairman's heretical statements? After all, were they not the ones who gave Lieberman the stamp of approval to be a right-wing party? More evidence of Lieberman's desertion to the Left is his use of the well-known leftist scare tactic terminology: "a political tsunami." But what burst out this week was more of a police tsunami against the members of Yisrael Beytenu. Now that the leader has adopted the Orwellian language of peace and speaks the language of the media party, maybe they will cut him some slack.

4. In the end, the dispute between most of the Right and most of the Left boils down to one question: Do we believe the Palestinians or not? Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has declared many times that he will never recognize Israel as a Jewish state, and he specifically named 6 million, with all its symbolism, as the number of Palestinians who expect their demand for the right of return to be fulfilled. Abbas is currently being kept alive by the Israeli army, which is protecting him as they would a delicate flower from attacks by the street, which supports Hamas. This does not stop the Palestinians from going all over the world, accusing us of every possible atrocity. 

The purpose of their action is to gain the maximum amount of territory at the minimum price -- actually, for no price at all -- but not to establish a tiny statelet. The past hundred years have taught us that what unites Arab-Palestinians is not the desire to improve their own living conditions, but to destroy the Jews' lives. What more has to happen for us to believe what they say? In the meantime, they are sticking close to us so that we will protect them against Islamic State.

5. So what is the solution? First, whoever said that there was a solution? Second, if we tried and did not succeed, maybe we ought to leave something for future generations to accomplish. You do not really believe the well-known chorus of lamentation that things are bad here and that the country is "stuck." 

We have succeeded quite well, thank God, considering the fact that only one of our hands is engaged in construction, development and cultural work, since the other is busy with self-defense. Where were we just 70 years ago, in 1944 -- and where are we now? Let us put things in perspective.

Dror Eydar

Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=11041

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

The Cuban Archipelago - Jamie Glazov

by Jamie Glazov

Having seized power on January 1, 1959, Fidel Castro followed the tradition of Vladimir Lenin and immediately turned his country into a slave camp. Ever since, Cuba has distinguished itself as one of the most monstrous human-rights abusers in the world.

Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any enemy that falls in my hands! My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl.
—Che Guevara, Motorcycle Diaries

President Obama’s recent move to cozy up to Communist Cuba is a crucially  important moment not just diplomatically, but as a moral one in regards to human rights, dignity and justice. As we witness a Radical-in-Chief throwing an economic lifeline to a barbaric tyranny, it is our duty and obligation to shine a light on the dark tragedy of the Cuban Gulag — and to reflect on the unspeakable suffering that Cubans have endured under Castro’s fascistic regime.

Until July 26, 2008, Fidel Castro had ruled Cuba with an iron grip for nearly five decades. On that July date in 2008, he stood to the side because of health problems and made his brother, Raul, de facto ruler. Raul officially replaced his brother as dictator on February 24, 2008; the regime has remained just as totalitarian as before and can, for obvious reasons, continue to be regarded and labelled as “Fidel Castro’s” regime.

Having seized power on January 1, 1959, Fidel Castro followed the tradition of Vladimir Lenin and immediately turned his country into a slave camp. Ever since, Cuba has distinguished itself as one of the most monstrous human-rights abusers in the world.

Half a million human beings have passed through Cuba’s Gulag. Since Cuba’s total population is only around eleven million, that gives Castro’s despotism the highest political incarceration rate per capita on earth. There have been more than fifteen thousand executions by firing squad. Torture has been institutionalized; myriad human-rights organizations have documented the regime’s use of electric shock, dark coffin-sized isolation cells, and beatings to punish “anti-socialist elements.” The Castro regime’s barbarity is best epitomized by the Camilo Cienfuegos plan, the program of horrors followed in the forced-labor camp on the Isle of Pines. Forced to work almost naked, prisoners were made to cut grass with their teeth and to sit in latrine trenches for long periods of time. Torture is routine.[i]

The horrifying experience of Armando Valladares, a Cuban poet who endured twenty-two years of torture and imprisonment for merely raising the issue of freedom, is a testament to the regime’s barbarity. Valladares’s memoir, Against All Hope, serves as Cuba’s version of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. Valladares recounts how prisoners were beaten with bayonets, electric cables, and truncheons. He tells how he and other prisoners were forced to take “baths” in human feces and urine.[ii]

Typical of the horror in Castro’s Gulag was the experience of Roberto López Chávez, one of Valladares’s prison friends. When López went on a hunger strike to protest the abuses in the prison, the guards withheld water from him until he became delirious, twisting on the floor and begging for something to drink. The guards then urinated in his mouth. He died the next day.[iii]

Since Castro’s death cult, like other leftist ideologies, believes that human blood purifies the earth—and since manifestations of grief affirm the reality of the individual, and thus are anathema to the totality—mourning for the departed became taboo. Thus, just like Mao’s China and Pol Pot’s Cambodia,[iv] so too Castro’s Cuba warned family members of murdered dissidents not to cry at their funerals.[v]

The Castro regime also has a long, grotesque record of torturing and murdering Americans. During the Vietnam War, Castro sent some of his henchmen to run the “Cuban Program” at the Cu Loc POW camp in Hanoi, which became known as “the Zoo.” Its primary objective was to determine how much physical and psychological agony a human being could withstand. The Cubans selected American POWs as their guinea pigs. A Cuban nicknamed “Fidel,” the main torturer at the Zoo, initiated his own personal reign of terror.[vi]

The ordeal of Lt. Col. Earl Cobeil, an F-105 pilot, illustrates the Nazi-like nature of the experiment. Among Fidel’s torture techniques were beatings and whippings over every part of his victim’s body, without remission.[vii] Former POW John Hubbell describes the scene as Fidel forced Cobeil into the cell of fellow POW Col. Jack Bomar:

 The man [Cobeil] could barely walk; he shuffled slowly, painfully. His clothes were torn to shreds. He was bleeding everywhere, terribly swollen, and a dirty, yellowish black and purple from head to toe. The man’s head was down; he made no attempt to look at anyone. . . . He stood unmoving, his head down. Fidel smashed a fist into the man’s face, driving him against the wall. Then he was brought to the center of the room and made to get down onto his knees. Screaming in rage, Fidel took a length of black rubber hose from a guard and lashed it as hard as he could into the man’s face. The prisoner did not react; he did not cry out or even blink an eye. His failure to react seemed to fuel Fidel’s rage and again he whipped the rubber hose across the man’s face. . . . Again and again and again, a dozen times, Fidel smashed the man’s face with the hose. Not once did the fearsome abuse elicit the slightest response from the prisoner. . . . His body was ripped and torn everywhere; hell cuffs appeared almost to have severed the wrists, strap marks still wound around the arms all the way to the shoulders, slivers of bamboo were embedded in the bloodied shins and there were what appeared to be tread marks from the hose across the chest, back, and legs.[viii]

Earl Cobeil died as a result of Fidel’s torture.

Maj. James Kasler was another of Fidel’s victims, although he survived the treatment:

 He [Fidel] deprived Kasler of water, wired his thumbs together, and flogged him until his “buttocks, lower back, and legs hung in shreds.” During one barbaric stretch he turned Cedric [another torturer] loose for three days with a rubber whip. . . . the PW [POW] was in a semi-coma and bleeding profusely with a ruptured eardrum, fractured rib, his face swollen and teeth broken so that he could not open his mouth, and his leg re-injured from attackers repeatedly kicking it.[ix]

The reign of terror against American POWs in Vietnam was just a reflection of Castro’s treatment of his own people. In addition to physical hardships even for those who don’t wind up in prison or labor camp, Cuba’s police state has denied Cubans any freedom at all. Cubans do not have the right to travel out of their country. They do not have the right of free association or the right to form political parties, independent unions, or religious or cultural organizations. The regime has outlawed free expression; it has consistently censored publications, radio, television, and film. There is a Committee for the Defense of the Cuban Revolution (CDR) for every single city block and every agricultural production unit. The CDR’s purpose is to monitor the affairs of every family and to report anything suspicious. A Cuban’s entire life is spent under the surveillance of his CDR, which controls everything from his food rations to his employment to his use of free time. A vicious racism against blacks accompanies this repression. In pre-Castro Cuba, blacks enjoyed upward social mobility and served in many government positions. In Castro’s Cuba, the jail population is 80 percent black, while the government hierarchy is 100 percent white.[x]

Cuban Communism follows Lenin’s and Stalin’s idea of “equality,” wherein members of the nomenklatura live like millionaires while ordinary Cubans live in utter poverty. The shelves in the stores are empty, and food is tightly rationed for the average citizen. Teachers and doctors drive taxis or work as waiters to support their families. Under the system of tourist apartheid, ordinary Cubans are not allowed inside the hotels designated for tourists and party functionaries. There are, of course, police inside every such hotel to arrest any unauthorized Cuban citizen who dares to enter.

The $5-billion-a-year Soviet subsidy that just barely kept the Cuban economy afloat during the Cold War is long gone. And notwithstanding the $110 billion that the Soviets pumped in over the decades, Cuba has become one of the poorest nations in the world. Its sugar, tobacco, and cattle industries were all major sources of exports in the pre-Castro era. Castro destroyed them all.[xi] Because of his belief in “socialism or death,” Cuba is now a beggar nation. Even Haitian refugees avoid Cuba.

Denied the right to vote under Castro, Cubans have voted with their feet. Pre-Castro Cuba had the highest per-capita immigration rate in the Western hemisphere. Under Castro, approximately two million Cuban citizens (out of eleven million) have escaped their country. Many have done so by floating on rafts or inner tubes in shark-infested waters. An estimated fifty thousand to eighty-seven thousand have lost their lives.[xii]

Not content to trust the sharks, Castro has sent helicopters to drop sandbags onto the rafts of would-be escapees, or just to gun them all down. Epitomizing this barbarity was the Tugboat Massacre of July 13, 1994, in which Castro ordered Cuban patrol boats to kill forty-one unarmed Cuban civilians—ten of them children—who were using an old wooden tugboat in their attempt to flee Cuba.[xiii]

These are the heart-breaking stories, and only a few among many, of the Cuban people who have suffered excruciating pain and agony under an evil tyranny that now, as it stands on its last legs, is having its life extended by an American president.

It is food for thought.

Notes:
[i] For one of the best accounts of the brutality of the Castro regime, see Pascal Fontaine, “Cuba: Interminable Totalitarianism in the Tropics,” in Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism, pp. 647–665.
[ii] Armando Valladares, Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro’s Gulag, trans. Andrew Hurley (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2001), p. 137.
[iii] Ibid., p. 379.
[iv] For China’s case, see chapter 7 of my book, United in Hate: The Left’s Romance With Tyranny and Terror; for Cambodia’s, see John Perazzo, “Left-Wing Monster: Pol Pot,” FrontPageMag.com, August 8, 2005.
[v] Valladares, Against All Hope, p. 378.
[vi] Stuart I. Rochester and Frederick Kiley, chapter 19, “The Zoo, 1967–1969: The Cuban Program and Other Atrocities,” in Honor Bound: American Prisoners of War in Southeast Asia 1961–1973 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1999).
[vii] Humberto Fontova, Fidel: Hollywood’s Favorite Tyrant, (Regnery, 2005). pp. 141–142.
[viii] Rochester and Kiley, Honor Bound, p. 400.
[ix] Ibid., p. 404.
[x] Fontova, Fidel, p. 88.
[xi] Ibid., pp. 14–15 and 49.
[xii] Ibid., pp. 8 and 56–57.
[xiii] Ibid., pp. 157–163.

Jamie Glazov

Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jamie-glazov/the-cuban-archipelago/

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

The Destruction of the Middle East - Denis MacEoin

by Denis MacEoin

The heritage of centuries has been wiped out in little more than a year.
Eventually the need to wipe out all traces of unbelief becomes obsessive. At one time, for instance, Egyptian law demanded that any house found to contain a copy of The Apology of al-Kindi (a book containing a polemical dialogue between a Muslim and a Christian) would be demolished along with 40 houses around it.
Ethics were defined by what Allah said was good or evil in Sharia law. The Islamic State's behaviour is solidly rooted in Islamic ideology, law and practice. It is only when this fundamental fact is grasped that we will be able to address what confronts us.
There are many wise and sensible Muslims who favour a shift to a more updated way of thinking. It is their mosques and shrines that are being crushed; it is their heritage. Today, such Muslims use the freedoms bestowed on them in the West to write, network and debate their opposition to fundamentalist interpretation of Islam by the Islamic State and other supporters of murder and destruction.

We are living through ferocious times. Stories about the self-proclaimed Islamic State [ISIS/ISIL/Da'esh] abound in the media, in what has now become a daily round of beheadings, suicide bombings, and general mayhem from Nigeria to Malaysia. It seems that wherever there is a Muslim country, there is extreme violence. But one part of the Islamic State narrative has received less attention than the gruesome rounds of killings: the continuing onslaughts on cities such as Mosul, Aleppo, Raqqa and Kobani. The Islamic State and related movements have rampaged across parts of Iraq and Syria, destroying the entire heritage of ancient regions, demolishing historic churches, synagogues, mosques, Sufi and Shi'i shrines, and major archaeological sites. All this vandalism is driven by a relentless passion to enforce religious purity on the regions they now control.

Around the world, art historians, antiquities experts, and archaeologists scarcely dare open their e-mails every day, fearing loss of another irreplaceable site. Physical destruction in the Islamic realms has now reached proportions of the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century.

In Mosul, the Islamic State set out on an operation of "cultural and historical cleansing" across the city. The group deploys a unit called the Kata'ib Taswiyya, or settlement battalions, who are ordered to identify sites for culling. The unit razes to the ground any mosques, churches or, invariably, shrines that have been built over tombs; such places may attract devotees to pray in them, thereby creating polytheism -- in Islam one of the crimes most censured. In addition, the painting or sculpting of the human form is anathema; if man was created in God's image, to represent man is to presume to know God and therefore to diminish Him.

Graveyards are flattened, headstones are bulldozed, and statues of cultural significance to the people of Mosul are destroyed.

As we face the Islamic State and all the rapidly expanding jihadist movements in the Middle East and beyond, we are starting to recognize that airstrikes have only limited results. If we are to contain or defeat the adversaries in our midst, we have to understand their motivation, their psychology, and their sense of rootedness.

Politicians who proclaim that Islam is a religion of peace do us a disservice; Islam has never been at peace with the world around it. The Islamic State's behavior is solidly rooted in Islamic ideology, law and practice. Only when this fundamental fact is grasped will we be able to address what confronts us. It is time that not only active jihadists, but their ideological sponsors in Salafi, Wahhabi, Mawdudist, and other classical and modern interpretations of Islam, be discussed openly before they do more harm. They and we do not have the leisure to wait until the oil money runs out and leaves the Saudis or Qataris weak.

We must learn to speak the truth, especially in high places. In the tenth century, Islam abandoned reason and rational pursuits in favor of revelation and revealed law that could not be challenged. Ethics were defined by what Allah said was good or evil in Sharia law. Islam has remained frozen ever since. We cannot go on patronizing this, and nodding acceptance that Muslims know best. Very few grasp the quandary in which non-extremist Muslims, like their ancestors, are captured. Western rationalism, Western ethics, and Western standards of peace and justice need to remain, or the world we know could be trampled underfoot by men and women who prefer death to co-existence, and fundamentalism to tolerance.

There are many wise and sensible Muslims who favour a shift to a more updated way of thinking. Many cannot openly declare their thoughts for fear of reprisals and even execution; others are faithful Muslims who see a desperate need for a valid reinterpretation of their religion.

Today, such Muslims use the freedoms bestowed on them in the West to write, network, and debate their thoughts about the fundamentalist interpretation of Islam by the Islamic State, other Salafis, Wahhabis, Mawdudists, and all other clerics and extremist supporters of murder and destruction. It is their mosques and shrines and ancient monuments that are being crushed; it is their heritage -- as much as that of Jews, Christians, Yazidis and Baha'is -- that is being wiped from the pages of history.
Losses so far include:

• The statues of Mulla 'Uthman al-Mawsili (1845-1923), a famous musician and poet, of a woman carrying an urn, and of Abu Tammam (788-845), author of the celebrated Hamasa, one of the greatest literary compilations ever made in Arabic.
  
  
• The destruction of the greatly venerated tomb of 'Ali ibn al-Athir al-Jazari (1160-1233), a major landmark that had stood in the centre of Mosul for centuries. Ibn al-Athir is celebrated as the author of The Complete History, one of the most important histories of Islam ever written.
  
  
• The Islamic State's destruction of the Tomb of Yunus (Jonah) Mosque, which was blown to pieces along with all its contents. Even before the explosion, fighters took sledgehammers to ancient tombstones in the building. The mosque was of importance not just to the Muslims of the city, but as a place of pilgrimage for Jews and Christians. St. George's Monastery church, one of the oldest in the region, has also gone forever.
  
  
• In Kirkuk, the Islamic State has destroyed the tomb of the Prophet Daniel, and in Nineveh, the ancient ruins of which lie across the River Tigris from Mosul, sprawl damaged archaeological ruins.
  
  
• In Mosul, the 13th-century shrine of Imam Awn al-Din -- with a stunning vaulted ceiling, designed to resemble a honeycomb, inside a pyramid-shaped tower on the banks of the Tigris, and among the city's most precious sites -- was one of the very few structures to have survived the devastation of the 13th-century Mongol invasion On July 25, 2014, members of the Islamic State reduced it to rubble.
  
  
• In Tikrit, the city's most famous and most beautiful church of St. Ahoadamah, known as the Green Church, dating from the 7th century, has been erased from history.
  
  
• In Syria, the Jabhat al-Nusra's destruction of the Deir el-Zour Armenian Church, that stood as a memorial to the 1.5 million slaughtered in the Armenian genocide in Turkey, was blown up.
  
  
• In Mali, much of UNESCO's World Heritage Site of Timbuktu (Mali) was destroyed during the battles of Gao and Timbuktu, fought between the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad and the Islamist Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa between June 26 and 27, 2012. Afterwards, the Islamist group Ansar Dine went on a rampage identical to that of the Islamic State. An official for the group, Abou Dardar, boasted that "not a single mausoleum will remain in Timbuktu."
  
  
• Sufi shrines have been pulverized in Egypt, Libya, Mali, Pakistan, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Tunisia, Morocco, India, and the Balkans.
  
  
• In Bahrain, 43 Shi'i mosques and tens of other religious structures have been destroyed and damaged by the ruling Sunni government there.
  
  
• Across Syria and Iraq, ancient archaeological sites have been wrecked. They were not just the heritage of those countries, they were central to our understanding of the ancient world, where human civilization first developed in city-states. Apamea, with its famous colonnade and beautiful mosaic, capital of the Seleucid empire, was a major center of Roman rule in the Levant, a leading city in Byzantine Syria, and at one time among the best-preserved archaeological sites in the region. Today, it looks like the face of the moon. Its devastation, the work of demolition done by looters using heavy earth-moving machines, took a mere four or five months.
  
  
• In eastern Syria, one of the world's richest archaeological remains, Dura-Europos, the "Pompeii of the Syrian Desert," was obliterated. Remarkable finds had been brought to light: temples, wall decorations, inscriptions, military equipment, and tombs. It had been home to a third-century painted synagogue as well as to the oldest example in the world of a Christian house-church, which contained the earliest depictions of Jesus Christ ever found, dating back to 235 AD. The Islamic State looted the site and, as elsewhere, has apparently sold its treasure on the black market of the antiquities trade, presumably using the proceeds to inflate their already swollen coffers for the promotion of jihad.
  
  
• Both Shi'i and Sufi shrines and mosques have fallen afoul of the Islamic State's fanaticism. Jewish sites have been targeted so extensively that UNESCO has held a special session on threats posed to them. UNESCO's Director-General Irina Bokova has described the Islamic State's activities in this respect as "a form of cultural cleansing." Many other Jewish sites were also destroyed or under threat from Islamist entities in Libya, where an ancient Jewish heritage was all but wiped out under the regime of Mu'ammar Qadhafi, and where what is left is succumbing to fresh attacks.
  

Locals survey the hill of rubble that resulted from the destruction of the Tomb of Yunus (Jonah), in Mosul, Iraq. The Islamic State blew up the tomb and mosque on July 24, 2014.

The Islamic State, however, does not restrict its demolition to Christian, Jewish or pagan sites. Its members have also evidently culled what may be thought of as their own heritage. In Tikrit, they demolished the country's oldest Islamic site, the Arba'in (Forty) Shrine and mosque, where forty of the companions (Salaf) of the Prophet were buried.

In this, there is desperate irony, for the form of Islam followed by the Islamic State is Salafism, based on imitating the ways of Muhammad and his companions.

The heritage of centuries has been wiped out in little more than a year. There will be many who argue that this devastation is, at root, the fault of the West; that its colonization, imperial ambitions, and general interference have forced the people of the Middle East to rise up against Europe and America, and find their only solution in the creation of an Islamic state where Shari'a law will dominate and justice prevail. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Syria was never a French colony, but a mandate territory between 1922 and 1936 -- fourteen years. Lebanon was a mandate territory from 1922 to 1943 -- twenty-one years. Iraq was a British mandate from 1922 to 1932 -- ten years. All were colonies of the Muslim Ottoman empire for centuries: Iraq between 1543 and 1918, Syria from 1516 to 1918, and were, before that, colonies of earlier Islamic empires from the Umayyads to the Abbasids to the Mamluks -- and so on.

This alone exposes the reality, that the actions of groups such as the Islamic State have their true roots in Islam itself. The Prophet and his companions fought jihad wars and destroyed pagan idols as well as places they may have been concerned would become centers for cults. During the Arab conquests, many religious centers were destroyed, notably in India, where temples were looted and razed, and whole towns ruined by the Ghaznavids and Timurids.

Eventually the need to wipe out all traces of unbelief became more or less obsessive. At one time, for instance, Egyptian law demanded that any house found to contain a copy of The Apology of al-Kindi (a book containing a polemical dialogue between a Muslim and a Christian) would be demolished, along with forty houses around it.[1]

In more recent times, in 1802, during the first of the three Saudi states, Wahhabi armies attacked the major Shi'i religious town of Karbala in Ottoman Iraq, where they killed 5,000 inhabitants and destroyed the shrines of Muhammad's son-in-law 'Ali (the first Shi'i imam and the fourth Sunni caliph) and his son Husayn, the prophet's grandson. The following year, Wahhabi forces under the leadership of the first Saudi ruler, 'Abd al-'Aziz, entered Mecca, where they destroyed tombs and shrines, and in the process, removed much of the city's history -- as is being repeated today in Mecca and Medina.

Between 1913 and 1927, extremist Wahhabi forces, known as the Ikhwan, rampaged through the Arabian peninsula, much as members of the Islamic State do now, killing and destroying anyone and anything they deem contrary to the Puritanism of their creed, which extremists interpret as preaching the annihilation of all that is not Islam.

Today, the Mecca and Medina of the first and second centuries of the Islamic faith have been all but wrecked, not by the Islamic State or any other radical entity, but by the Wahhabi Saudi government. Over the past two decades, major historical sites in Mecca and Medina, all related to the lifetime of the Prophet and shortly after, have been destroyed or disfigured to the point where neither city is recognizable save for the Ka'ba and the Grand Mosque in Mecca, and the Prophet's Mosque in Medina.

Although much has been done to accommodate the increasing millions of pilgrims who go there for the hajj pilgrimage, most of the demolition appears to relate to a Wahhabi and Salafi fear that pilgrims may pray at the graves of Muhammad's companions, at the house where he was born, or at other buildings associated with the first era of Islam. There seems to be an insistence that anything that might compromise God's oneness must be eradicated, and this concern may have prompted the country's rulers to destroy them.

The vast Jannat al-Baqi cemetery, which holds so many remains of Muhammad's family, close companions and the earliest Muslim saints, has been levelled, and all domes and mausoleums turned to dust. That act followed earlier levelings by Wahhabis in 1206 and the Ikhwan in 1925. Those included the graves of the martyrs of the Battle of Uhud and that of Hamza, the prophet's uncle and most beloved supporter. So too the Mosque of Fatima (Muhammad's daughter), the Mosque of the Manaratayn (the twin minarets), and the cupola that marked the burial place of the prophet's incisor tooth.

In Medina as well, the home of Muhammad's Ethiopian wife, Maryam, where his son Ibrahim was born, has been paved over.

In Mecca, the house of his first wife, Khadija, the first person to whom he divulged his mission, has been turned into public toilets. In 1998, the grave of the prophet's mother, Amina bint Wahb, was bulldozed in Abwa, after which gasoline was poured on it. There is much more.[2]

Destruction of the sacred places of rival faiths or denominations is nothing new; it has happened throughout history. Henry VIII wrecked Catholic abbeys and monasteries; their ruins still pepper the English countryside. The destruction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya by Hindus in 1992 led to two thousand deaths. The Roman demolition of Judaism's Second Temple marks a watershed in world history and is central to the current conflict in the Holy Land. But the most consistent use of elimination through the centuries has been the Muslim war on non-Muslims. Despite much controversy, it has been claimed that over 2000 Hindu, Jain and Buddhist temples and holy places were destroyed by Muslim conquerors in India. Churches and synagogues have been demolished or converted into mosques in many places.

When Jordan controlled East Jerusalem between 1948 and 1967, all but one of the Old City's synagogues was reduced to rubble or converted into stables and chicken coops; the main Jewish cemetery was desecrated, and Jewish homes destroyed.

Today, in Iran, the Islamic regime has demolished all the holy sites and graveyards of an indigenous faith, the Baha'i religion.

If the depredations of the Islamic State are to have any meaning in the end, perhaps it will be because they will have shown how right the non-extremist Muslims are in calling for a deep change within Islam.

Dr. Denis MacEoin, based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, is a lecturer in Arabic and Islamic Studies and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute.

---

[1] Robert Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind, Wilmington, 2010, p. 36.
[2] Websites where readers can read of these destructions at length include: Irfan Ahmed, "The Destruction of the Holy Sites in Mecca and Medina," Islamica Magazine; Laith Abou-Ragheb, "Dr. Sami Angawi on Wahhabi Desecration of Mecca: Developers and Purists Erase Mecca's History," Center for Islamic Pluralism/Reuters, 12 July 2005; Ziauddin Sardar, " The Destruction of Mecca," The New York Times, 30 September 2014; Carla Power, "Saudi Arabia Bulldozes Over Its Heritage," Time, 14 November, 2014; Jerome Taylor, "Medina: Saudis take a bulldozer to Islam's history," The Independent, 26 October 2012; Jerome Taylor, "The photos Saudi Arabia doesn't want seen – and proof Islam's most holy relics are being demolished in Mecca," The Independent, 11 December 2014.


Denis MacEoin, based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, is a lecturer in Arabic and Islamic Studies and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute.

---

Source: http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4973/destruction-middle-east-antiquities

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

Justice Department Grants Linked to Cop-killing Rap Video - Alex Newman

by Alex Newman

The explosive link between the Justice Department-funded organization and the glorification of violence against police was first reported by the Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal news outlet on December 22.

Screengrab from video

As if the American people needed more evidence that the Obama administration’s Justice Department was out of control after six years of non-stop scandals, it was recently revealed that the DOJ was funding a “community” organization linked to a controversial rap music video glorifying the murder of New York City police officers. The group in question, Bronx Defenders, has received at least $1.5 million in U.S. taxpayer dollars from the Department of Justice, and played a prominent role in the pro-cop killing music video. The link between the widely condemned rap production and the DOJ made headlines this week after two New York City Police Department (NYPD) officers were murdered, execution style, under the guise of obtaining “revenge” for the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown. 
    
The explosive link between the Justice Department-funded organization and the glorification of violence against police was first reported by the Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal news outlet on December 22. It was not immediately clear whether the Bronx Defenders group, which is featured in the video, along with staff attorneys for the organization, played a role in financing the violent film. In addition to DOJ funding offered under a program ironically named after a murdered NYPD officer, the organization has also received upwards of $40 million from city taxpayers just in the last two years. So far, the Bronx Defenders has largely remained silent about the full extent of its involvement in the production, according to media reports.


  The lyrics and images, though, sparked a national outcry and left members of the law-enforcement community furious. “For Mike Brown and Sean Bell, a cop got to get killed,” go the words of the song, called “Hands Up (Eric Garner Tribute)” by rappers “Uncle Murda” and “Maino.” "Time to start killing these coppers." The music video also features numerous images of two black men dressed in thug costumes pointing handguns at a police officer’s head. The violent words of the rap song make numerous references to killing law enforcement officers to obtain “revenge” and “justice” over the alleged systemic racism and brutality of police officers across America.  

It was not clear whether the rap duo knew that the supervising officer at the scene of Garner’s fatal takedown was a black female, a fact most of the establishment media has carefully omitted from its reports aimed at stirring up racial strife. By contrast, in the Rodney King incident, the supervising officer, a white male, was hysterically demonized in the press for months on end. When a state jury refused to convict him, the federal government eventually came down on that officer, though nothing similar appears to be in the works against the supervising officer at the scene of Garner’s ultimately fatal arrest.     

The deeply controversial rap clip, posted on Youtube and viewed well over 150,000 times so far, shows the Bronx Defenders, too, on multiple occasions. In one scene, a grieving mother walks into the organization’s taxpayer-funded office. There, a Bronx Defenders lawyer, reportedly a managing director, comforts her over the apparent fictional loss of her son at the hands of police. At the end of the video, a banner advertisement for the Bronx Defenders is shown, along with the group’s website and Twitter account. Since 2007, the organization has received over $100 million in taxpayer funding from the city, in addition to at least $1.5 million in federal grants of U.S. taxpayer funds since 2009 by Obama’s DOJ under the “Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Grant Program.”    

The Bronx Defenders mostly refused to answer the Daily Signal’s questions and requests for comment about its role in potentially funding the video, or about its repeated appearances in the clip. The Justice Department also failed to respond to requests for comment, the media outlet reported. Despite the escalating scandal, as of December 26, neither the DOJ nor Bronx Defenders had also issued a formal statement on their websites about the rap song or the possible role of taxpayer funding in producing it. An earlier article about the taxpayer-funded non-profit group’s ties to the rap video, though, did say the organization had issued a statement saying it did not know the clip would feature images of thugs holding guns to a police officer’s head. While the statement did not mention the pro-cop-killing lyrics, Bronx Defenders reportedly said it had asked for the video to be taken down.

Aside from the images of guns pointed at a police officer’s head, the violent words of the song have also sparked a growing national uproar — especially in light of the links to taxpayer funding and the recent murders of two New York police officers. “For Mike Brown and Sean Bell, a cop got to get killed; ’cause I’m black, police think they got the right to shoot me; No jail time, their punishment is death’s duty; … By any means necessary let’s make them respect us,” the rappers say in the video, which also features real and fictional video of police officers in confrontations with citizens.  

It continues: “Killin’ unarmed black men, makin’ mothers holla; And this what the government payin’ with our tax dollars?; (Crazy!) All these unjustified shootin’s; Then they call us animals when we start lootin’; Those kids ain’t had no gun and the police knew it; [rapper] Jay need to talk to Obama or let me do it … My lil’ homie told me he ready to ride; Ferguson was on his mind, he ready to fire; Staring at a cop who got death in his eyes; He want to kill me, I can tell, so my head’s in the sky; I’m stressing so I’m grabbing my MAC-11 [pistol];  Told my mama I’m’a end up on Channel 11.”

Even before the December 20 execution-style murder of police officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos by rapper Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley in New York City, though, the links between the DOJ-funded Bronx Defenders and the cop-killing rap video had sparked alarm. “It’s reprehensible that the city and its taxpayers are essentially supporting a video that encourages the idea of shooting police officers,” a police source was quoted as telling the New York Post  in a December 12 article, which noted that the “vile online rap video … urges black people to kill NYPD cops.” The murder of the two officers by the gunman who wanted “revenge” for Garner and Michael Brown of Ferguson, unsurprisingly, sparked a fresh wave of outrage about the video.  

Another law-enforcement source quoted in the article, Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association President Patrick Lynch, went even further, suggesting that the deliberate promotion of cop-killing ought to be considered a crime. “This video goes well beyond the parameters for protected speech and constitutes a serious threat to the lives of police officers,” Lynch told the Post. In addition to concerns over the video, police officers in New York, as well as their union officials, have also engaged in a high-profile showdown with extreme far-left New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio, whom they held partially responsible, along with Attorney General Holder and race profiteer Al Sharpton, for the murders and the escalating anti-police sentiment.  

Local, state, and federal law enforcement officers have all grown increasingly weary of the Justice Department, too — especially under the reign of Obama’s disgraced attorney general, currently in criminal contempt of Congress for trying to cover up his role in arming Mexican drug cartels in Operation Fast and Furious. The guns trafficked to criminals as part of that plot have been found at the murder scenes of at least two federal agents so far, in addition to being used in the slayings of hundreds of Mexican citizens. Indeed, advocates for law enforcement say the Justice Department has increasingly been at “war” with local and state police.     

“As an expert and also essentially a watchdog on DOJ cases and management since the War on Law Enforcement began with targeted prosecution against law enforcement initially under the George W. Bush Administration, I can unequivocally state the Justice Department has been all about politics and certainly no longer interested in justice,” explained Andy Ramirez, president of the Law Enforcement Advocates Council. “Under Bush, it was the protection of illegal alien drug and human traffickers while providing law enforcement scalps upon foreign government request. Under Obama, it has been about expanding if not fomenting racial divisions. Look back to the Harvard incident where Obama and Holder, instead of investigating quietly under the ‘we cannot confirm, deny, or otherwise comment on any investigation that may or may not be ongoing...’, to openly issuing relative condemnations without so much as the facts.”

“That is the modus operandi and pattern of this administration,” Ramirez told The New American, adding that efforts to federalize the police were an overreach infringing on powers constitutionally left for the states. “Most LEOs have zero regard, let alone trust, for this administration, which has only worsened over time, especially after the Trayvon Martin case. This certainly was not helped by Ferguson or the endless banter joined in by fellow race-baiters Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. Active and retired law enforcement I have worked and spoken with have long believed and stated that this administration needs to go in the worst way.”

Speaking of the taxpayer funding for the non-profit group involved in the rap video, Ramirez said it “only furthers such feelings and increases the chasm between politicians and the electorate, for in all honesty, it's unconscionable given the contents.” He also said such grants and rewards only further increase distrust. “It's clearly pork legislation that must be ceased immediately,” he added, referring to federal taxpayer funding for Bronx Defenders and other such “community” organizations. It remains to be seen whether the DOJ or New York Mayor DeBlassio will issue apologies for spending the public’s tax money in such a manner.

Alex Newman is a correspondent for The New American, covering economics, education, politics, and more. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU. He can be reached at

anewman@thenewamerican.com

Source: http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/crime/item/19792-justice-department-grants-linked-to-cop-killing-rap-video

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