Saturday, November 21, 2015

The City of Light Goes Dark - Denis MacEoin



by Denis MacEoin

  • The targets in all the Paris attacks were not chosen "randomly." Charlie Hebdo stood for the Enlightenment value of free speech, for the right to challenge, even to make fun of figures who deem themselves above criticism: politicians, religious leaders, the rich and famous. It stood for the right to be secular: for refusing to fence off religion, or award believers greater respect than non-believers.
  • Like the attempts to shut down all criticism of Islam -- whether in novels such as Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, cartoons such as those of Muhammad drawn and published in Denmark, or debates between academics -- the Charlie Hebdo killings were intended to instill fear and silence all honest discussion of Islam and its values.
  • Through bold criticism in a secular manner, European states have been able to create a more pluralistic, tolerant, and humane culture. For devout Muslims (not just radicals), this is blasphemy of the worst sort: democracy, made by man and not by Allah, is evil, and tolerance for all beliefs is a path to hell.
  • This ongoing failure to admit that the law of jihad is explicitly cited by spokesmen for Islamic State is the root cause of our inability to fight this war. The ancestors of today's Europeans knew how to fight against Islamic encroachment, but today, hundreds of thousands of Muslim migrants, some of them devoted to waging jihad, are being given free access to enter Europe.

Who does not love Paris? Puritans do not love Paris. Puritans hate, music, song, dance, poetry, fun and love. Today, such people are represented above all by extremist Muslim doctrinaire fundamentalists. They seem to despise women without veils; call music Satanic; regard painted images as an insult to an angry God; consider football a sin, and a restaurant serving wine as the embodiment of evil. They do not respond to a life-affirming bustle and the ideals an open, tolerant, democratic, liberal, humanitarian, egalitarian West.

When Sir Karl Popper wrote, at the end of the Second World War in 1945, his two-volume classic, The Open Society and its Enemies, he laid bare the evils of totalitarian systems, both left and right -- Communism and Fascism. He would never have guessed that soon a Third World War would be taking place between radical Islam and the West.

Last week, the City of Light went dark. In January of this year, some Islamist gunmen had attacked the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, and another had gunned down shoppers in a kosher supermarket. U.S. President Barack Obama, in an interview with Matt Yglesias, commenting on the supermarket attack, glossed over the motives behind it: "It is entirely legitimate for the American people to be deeply concerned when you've got a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris." [Emphasis added]

Two days after last week's attacks, when reporters asked Obama if he would consider additional action against The Islamic State (IS), he declined to give a straight answer. The killings, he said, were "based on a twisted ideology." As so many times before, Obama would not define what ideology -- the belief system of radical Islam, based on violent passages from the Qur'an and Hadith, and modelled on the jihadist actions of generations of Muslims, beginning with Muhammad himself.

This ongoing failure to admit that the law of jihad is explicitly cited by spokesmen for Islamic State is the root cause of our inability to fight this war. The ancestors of today's Europeans knew how to fight against Islamic encroachment, but today, hundreds of thousands of Muslim migrants, some of them devoted to waging jihad, are being given free access to enter Europe. At least one of last Friday's killers in Paris appears to have travelled from Syria and entered Europe through Greece.

The targets in all the Paris attacks were not chosen "randomly." Charlie Hebdo stood for the Enlightenment value of free speech, for the right to challenge, even to make fun of figures who deem themselves above criticism: politicians, religious leaders, the rich and famous. It stood for the right to be secular: for refusing to fence off religion, or award believers greater respect than non-believers.

Through bold criticism in a secular manner, European states have been able to create a more pluralistic, tolerant, and humane culture. For devout Muslims (not just radicals), this is blasphemy of the worst sort: democracy, made by man and not by Allah, is evil, and tolerance for all beliefs is a path to hell.

Like the attempts to shut down all criticism of Islam -- whether in novels such as Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, cartoons such as those of Muhammad drawn and published in Denmark, or debates between academics -- the Charlie Hebdo killings were intended to instil fear and silence all honest discussion of Islam and its values.

The kosher supermarket attack was clearly anti-Semitic. Like the multitude of such attacks on Jewish schools, museums, synagogues, and individuals, it celebrated the rise of a new anti-Semitism in Europe, an anti-Semitism (often expressed through anti-Zionism) that has been carried out by the political left, hand-in-hand with Muslim radical groups.

Jews on European streets are the one people most intensely hated by many Muslims (again, not just radicals). The freedom French Jews have for a long time enjoyed (despite high levels of indigenous anti-Semitism) is an affront to Islam, in which Jews especially must be converted, rendered submissive, or killed. Unfortunately, many Europeans have gone out of their way to be helpful. Just the day before the Paris attacks, the EU had singled out Israel, as usual, to label goods to help anti-Semitic, racist Europeans hurt Palestinians and Israelis with an unjust, sanctimonious boycott.

A leader of a British Islamic educational institute writes that, "One should abstain from evil audacities such as listening to music." Another graduate speaks of the "evils of music;" calls London's Royal College of Music "satanic," and claims that music is the way in which Jews spread "the Satanic web" to corrupt young Muslims. Is it, then, surprising that a handful of fanatics gunned down more than 80 innocent young people who had gone to enjoy a rock concert in the Bataclan Theatre?

As sports (apart from archery and horseback riding) are also activities much disliked by fundamentalist imams, three jihadis, in an apparent rebuke to such games and frivolity, went to a football stadium in Paris last Friday night and, although they could not get in, they blew themselves up outside it.[1]

The Nazis hated jazz and modern art (even as they stole it), but not even they rejected all music and all art. Hitler luxuriated in the operas of Wagner and fancied himself no mean painter, even if the art world may not have agreed with him. But today's fascists care for nothing but their own increasingly expansionist beliefs.

As Hamas members have said more than once to Israelis, with whom the Europeans have more in common now than they would like to admit, the extremist Muslims will conquer in the end because "we love death more than you love life." Nothing could better sum up the bitter reality of the Paris attacks.

In a television interview on BBC News at Ten on Sunday night, a singer, Maude Hacheb, expressed her response to the killings: "If they want to break the country, they have to break young people. I think for them, music is no good, fun is no good, love is no good. So I guess it was really significant they go to the Bataclan."

Denis MacEoin, based in England, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Gatestone Institute.

[1] Cricket has been condemned by a Pakistani imam as a sacrilegious "waste of time," playing chess has been compared to dipping one's hands in the blood of pigs, and ultra-conservative Muslim clerics have condemned football as a Jewish and Christian tool to undermine Islamic culture. Saudi Sheikh Abdel Rahman al-Barrak has warned in a fatwa that football "played according to [accepted international rules] has caused Muslims to adopt some of the customs of the enemies of Islam, who are [preoccupied with] games and frivolity."


Denis MacEoin, based in England, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Gatestone Institute.


Source: http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/6924/paris-attacks-radical-islam

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

Who Is Being Delusional? - Caroline Glick



by Caroline Glick

Why the Palestinians are not interested in either peace or statehood.



Originally published by the Jerusalem Post

On Tuesday night, Channel 10 broadcast an interview with PLO chief and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in which Abbas admitted publicly for the first time that he rejected the peace plan then prime minister Ehud Olmert offered him in 2008.
Olmert’s plan called for Israel to withdraw from the entire Old City of Jerusalem, including the Western Wall, and from 93.7 percent of Judea and Samaria. Olmert also offered sovereign Israeli territory to the Palestinians to compensate for the areas Israel would retain in Judea and Samaria.

Abbas said his rejection was unequivocal. “I didn’t agree. I rejected it out of hand.”

For years, the story of Abbas’s rejection of Olmert’s 2008 offer has been underplayed. Many commentators have insisted Abbas didn’t really reject it, but just failed to respond.

But now the truth is clear. Abbas is not interested either in peace or in Palestinian statehood.

Abbas’s many apologists in the Israeli Left insist that he didn’t reject the plan on its merits. Rather, they argue, Abbas rejected Olmert’s offer because, by the time Olmert made it, he was involved in criminal investigations that forced him to resign from office eight months later.

Hogwash, says former AP reporter Mark Lavie.

Following the interview’s broadcast, Lavie countered that if Abbas were truly interested in establishing an independent Palestinian state, he wouldn’t have cared about the political fortunes of the Israeli prime minister. He would have taken the offer and run, knowing that, as Olmert said, the likelihood that he’d get a similar offer in the next 50 years was nonexistent.

The most notable reaction to Abbas’s admission was the reaction that never came. The Israeli Left had no reaction to his interview.

Abbas is the hero of the Left.

He is their partner. He is their moderate. He is their man of peace. Abbas is the Palestinian leader to whom every leftist politician worth his snuff, from opposition leader Yitzhak Herzog to the Meretz Knesset faction make regular pilgrimages to prove their devotion to peace.

Their man in Ramallah received the most radical offer ever to see the light of day. And rather than accept it, he rejected it out of hand and refused to meet with Olmert ever again, and he openly admits it.

The Left’s non-response is not surprising. Abbas’s decision to end all speculation about whether or not he is a man of peace is merely the latest blow reality has cast on their two-state formula.

The Left’s policy of land for peace failed more than 15 years ago when Abbas’s boss, Yasser Arafat, preferred war to peace and initiated the worst campaign of terrorism that Israel had ever experienced.

Yet for the last 15 years, the Israeli “peace camp” has never wavered in its view that, despite it all, Israel must rid itself of Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem.

Rather it members has grown angrier and angrier at their own people for abandoning them and less and less willing to agree that there is anything – including Israeli statehood itself – that is more important than giving up Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria.

The Left’s reactionary position was on full display last Thursday at the annual “peace conference” hosted by the far left Haaretz newspaper.

Last year, the conference’s audience attacked Bayit Yehudi Party leader Naftali Bennett both verbally and physically when he presented his plan to apply Israeli sovereignty over parts of Judea and Samaria. This year it was Tourism Minister Yariv Levin’s turn to be assaulted.

Levin was subjected to constant catcalls from the audience, whose members called him “Goebbels” for arguing that the two-state formula has no chance of bringing peace and that the time has come to consider other options.

But Levin’s claims were simply common sense.

This week the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion published its most recent survey. The results were no surprise. Indeed, they were more or less consistent with historical survey results.

According to the PCPO data, 63 percent of Palestinians oppose holding peace talks with Israel.

58 percent think Mahmoud Abbas, whose term of office ended in 2009, should resign. A majority of Palestinians support a new assault or “intifada” against Israel and 42 percent of Palestinians support the use of terrorism against Israel.

Also this week, ahead of the Jerusalem Post Diplomatic Conference on Wednesday The Jerusalem Post published a new poll of Israeli public opinion.

According to the data, 46 percent of Israelis support a policy of separating from the Palestinians through the establishment of a Palestinian state. 35 percent of Israelis support applying Israeli sovereignty to Judea and Samaria. For Israelis under 45, the numbers are reversed.

Today a majority of Likud Knesset members and all members of the Bayit Yehudi’s Knesset faction oppose Palestinian statehood and support applying Israeli law to all or parts of Judea and Samaria.

Rather than deal with the fact that neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis support their two-state model, the Left has decided to ignore both.

The Haaretz conference last week hosted a panel discussing whether the two state paradigm remains viable. In his remarks, Prof. Shlomo Ben-Ami, who served as foreign minister in 2000 during the failed Camp David peace summit, explained that given the Israeli and Palestinian publics’ rejection of the two-state formula, (but especially the Israeli rejection of it), the UN Security Council determine Israel’s final borders. In other words, from Ben-Ami’s perspective, withdrawing from Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria is more important than maintaining Israel’s independence and governing in accordance with the will of the people.

When the panel’s moderator expressed concern that the mass expulsion of Israelis from their communities in Judea and Samaria which the two-state formula requires would cause a civil war within Israeli society, Ben-Ami just shrugged his shoulders.

“I don’t delude myself. I never deluded myself that this would be a boy scout trip,” he said. “You can’t do this through consensus….Consensus is the great enemy of leadership.”

Ben-Ami continued, “War unites, peace divides…A leader who wants to make peace will always have a split nation behind him.”

MK Meirav Michaeli, who serves as the Zionist Union’s Knesset faction head, said for her part that the greatest obstacle to peace is Israel. Ever since Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, Israel hasn’t had a leader willing to do what it takes to make peace.

In Michaeli’s view, when the Left next forms a government, it will need to adopt – as is opening position in negotiations – the position that Israel shares responsibility for the fate of the so-called “Palestinian refugees.”

Michaeli explained, “Israel needs to be part of a coalition that will find a solution,” for the descendants of the Arabs that left Israel during the 1948- 1949 pan-Arab invasion of the nascent state of Israel.

Michaeli also insisted that Israel needs to stop demanding that the Palestinians recognize the Jewish state’s right to exist. Israel should suffice instead with a Palestinian acknowledgment that it does indeed exist.

It goes without saying that there has never been, and there never will be a majority of support in Israel either for Ben-Ami’s position or for Michaeli’s position. This is the reason that they prefer to ignore the Israeli people and wait for “the world” to save “the peace” for them.

This brings us to the 46 percent of Israelis who would like to separate from the Palestinians and let them have a state.

The only reason that a plurality of Israelis still supports a policy that has failed continuously for the past 15 years is because the Israeli Left has blocked all discussion of alternative policies.

Over the past 20 years, the Left has implemented three policy initiatives: the peace process with the PLO from 1993 to 2000, the unilateral withdrawal from south Lebanon in 2000 and the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. These policies never enjoyed the sustained support of the majority of the public.

To the extent they ever mobilized the temporary support of bare majorities of public, they did so only because the media campaigned continuously on behalf of these initiatives. Not only did key all the mass circulation newspapers and all major broadcast media outlets support these plans, they blocked all debate about them. Opponents were demonized as extremists.

And this brings us to the 35 percent of Israelis who support applying Israeli sovereignty to Judea and Samaria.

It is this virtual blackout on coverage of opposing views that makes the results of the Post’s opinion poll remarkable. In the absence of almost any public discussion of the possibility of applying Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria aside from the self-generated publicity of advocates of the position, more than a third of Israelis overall, and a plurality of young Israelis supports it.

Over the past week, Netanyahu has been asked his opinion of the prospects for unilateral Israeli actions toward the Palestinians three times, once in Washington and twice in Jerusalem. Netanyahu’s responses have been enigmatic. But collectively they lend the clear impression that the premier does not support unilateral Israeli withdrawals from Judea and Samaria and at least in principle, does not oppose the sovereignty model.

In his remarks at the Post’s conference Wednesday, Netanyahu said cagily, “There are all sorts of unilateral moves in all sorts of directions. Wait and see. And they are not necessarily in the direction you think.”

Speaking to the Likud’s Knesset faction on Monday Netanyahu clarified his remarks on the subject last week in Washington saying, “I didn’t say unilateral withdrawals. I said unilateral steps. You can imagine what I mean – states are disintegrating and we will protect our interests.”

Sitting next to Ben-Ami at the Haaretz conference was the lone non-leftist on the panel. Halachic expert Malka Puterkovsky said that, in her view, Israel should apply its sovereignty over all of Judea and Samaria. Doing so, she argued, will not risk Israel’s future as a Jewish state.

Both the audience and her fellow panelists reacted to her statements with a the same extreme hostility with which they responded to Bennet and Levin.

When Ben-Ami – the man who thinks it is more important for Israel to expel some 100,000 Israelis from their homes than avert a civil war, and prefers borders forced on Israel by the UN to Israeli democracy and independence – was asked his opinion of Puterovsky’s position, he called the notion of Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria “delusional.”

We need to take Netanyahu’s coy responses to questions about unilateralism as an invitation to begin a serious public discussion of the option.

The public wants this discussion and we need this discussion.

As for how the peace camp will respond, well, there are worse things than having reactionaries call you “delusional.”



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/fpm/260865/who-being-delusional-caroline-glick

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

More Palestinian and Western Mistakes - Bassam Tawil



by Bassam Tawil

  • The Palestinian "victims" -- victims of their own credulousness -- are known as shuhadaa, martyrs for the sake of Allah, victims of the misconception that Allah wants us to die for him. But Allah forbids us to murder. Muhammad forbids us to murder. The Qur'an forbids us to murder.
  • Europeans, in general, obviously want the Jews dead -- so long as the murder cannot be traced back to them. They seem to be hoping that their boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, combined with Arab and Iranian "hit men," will do the job for them.
  • Also tragically, it has taken Mahmoud Abbas too long to realize that the ultimate objective of Hamas, the local representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood, after killing Israelis, is to have this violence cost the Palestinian Authority its existence in the West Bank. There, they openly plan to set up another Islamic emirate, like the one in the Gaza Strip.
  • The knife-wielding Palestinian children -- and the other young people who commit murder -- are also not a spontaneous occurrence. They do not simply "spring" full-blown from "imperialism," "Syrian bombings" or an "endangered Al-Aqsa." They are the product of a careful, methodical, ongoing tactic of brainwashing about how glorious it is to become a shaheed [martyr] by murdering.
  • We do need to [be] liberated, but not from the people you think. We do not need help being liberated from Israel, which, even if it is harsh, has always been fair to us, but from the self-satisfied diplomats even now -- in our name -- swanning down the glossy halls of Europe.
The Palestinians have taken it upon themselves to sacrifice our younger generation -- on the altar of pointlessness -- again.

The Palestinians have been sending their children -- still in their teens, and intoxicated by hatred and lies as the assassins of old were intoxicated by hashish -- to the streets of Israel and the roads of the West Bank to murder Israelis again. And for what? Is Al-Aqsa mosque in danger? It is not. But the cynical, calculating Fatah, Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Hamas -- and the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement which has just been banned -- are desperate to bring the Palestinian issue back to the headlines. They hope it would displace the true catastrophe of the chaos in Syria and Iraq, which has led to the flood of refugees to Europe.

The Palestinian "victims" -- victims of their own credulousness -- are known as shuhadaa, martyrs for the sake of Allah, victims of the misconception that Allah wants us to die for him. But Allah forbids us to murder. Muhammad forbids us to murder. The Qur'an forbids us to murder.

The Palestinian terrorists that murder Israelis usually die in the process; the question is, does murder keep the Al-Aqsa mosque out of "danger" -- which it is not even in?

Do the senseless deaths on both sides advance the cause of a political solution and the establishment of a Palestinian state? No, only, apparently, to many Europeans -- anti-Semitic racists who love Muslims as much as they hate Jews. These Europeans probably love Muslims because they hate Jews.

Europeans, in general, obviously want the Jews dead -- so long as the murder cannot be traced back to them. They seem to be hoping that their boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, combined with Arab and Iranian "hit men," will do the job for them. Sadly, the Palestinians, instead of looking like people who want peace, look like the Muslim extremists to whom the European racists offer ever more help. It seems inconceivable to these Europeans that we may not want to live with these savages any more than they do.

We do need to liberated, but not from the people you think. We do not need help being liberated from Israel, which, even if it is harsh, has always been fair to us, but from the self-satisfied diplomats even now -- in our name -- swanning down the glossy halls of Europe.

The Palestinians are, not surprisingly, trying to avoid negotiating for peace. As any Palestinian leader will be killed, and go down in Palestinian history as a traitor unless he is able to come back with 100% of Palestinian demands, Mahmoud Abbas would only end up having to turn down any realistic offer -- in full view of the international community. The Palestinian leaders are clearly hoping, as anyone would, that these Jew-hating Europeans -- and others who breezily turn Jewish heritage sites into Muslim heritage sites -- will hand them the whole 100% on a plate, free of charge.

The knife-wielding Palestinian children -- and the other young people who commit murder -- are also not a spontaneous occurrence. They do not simply "spring" full-blown from "imperialism," "Syrian bombings" or an "endangered Al-Aqsa." They are the product of a careful, methodical, ongoing tactic of brainwashing about how glorious it is to become a shaheed [martyr] by murdering.

Do the dispatchers send their own children out to become suicide bombers? Do the dispatchers go themselves? No, the Palestinians and other terrorists prey on swayable, possibly depressed children -- looking for love or a "cause" in their lives to counteract the internal emptiness -- to commit murder.

These murders by our young -- and of our young -- are, tragically, the direct result of the inflammatory lies of Muslim extremists, both secular and religious. Here, these include the Palestinian Authority (PA), Fatah, Hamas, the Islamic Movement In Israel (banned last week), and ISIS.

Also tragically, it has taken Mahmoud Abbas too long to realize that the ultimate objective of Hamas, the local representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood, after killing Israelis, is to have this violence cost the Palestinian Authority its existence in the West Bank. There, they openly plan to set up another Islamic emirate, like the one in the Gaza Strip.

Abbas seems to have woken up, but only after the genie was out of the bottle. He then had no choice but to appeal to his only lifeline, Israel, for support -- while at the same time threatening to end security coordination with it. His hate-propaganda nevertheless machine continues to promote the murder Israelis while carefully ignoring Israeli deaths. Abbas instead still focuses on the "martyrdom" of the terrorists and their supposedly "cold-blood executions" at the hands of Israelis whose "crime" is stop them as they are in the act of trying to slit Jewish throats.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, speaking on PA television, September 16, 2015.

During the past six weeks, more than 70 Palestinians have been killed while trying to murder Israelis, and 12 Israelis have been murdered. Israel's population, contrary to Palestinian expectations, has not collapsed and is, as usual, successfully moving to protect itself.

The real damage has been done to the Palestinian Authority's credibility and to the belief, now held by fewer and fewer Israelis, that a political solution is possible.

The main questions still need to be directed to those who invented the slogan, "Al-Aqsa mosque is in danger":
  • Is al-Aqsa mosque now less in danger? Given that, throughout the Middle East, mosques are being blown up one after another, Al-Aqsa mosque is not only in no danger, it is, on the contrary, eminently secure.
  • Has the recent Palestinian violence and terrorism moved the Israelis one inch toward surrendering?
  • Are the Islamists, including the Israeli-Arab members of Knesset, really working to benefit the lives and careers of the Palestinian people? Or, to benefit their own careers, are these politicians keeping their public whipped up like manipulated fighting dogs, and forever poor, to make sure that we will be forever dependent on them? This is a way you treat infants or animals, not people.
Fortunately, the attempt made by Hamas and its subcontractor for collective suicide, Ra'ed Salah's Islamic Movement, to incite a religious war around the totally false slogan "Al-Aqsa mosque is in danger," in order to oust Mahmoud Abbas and his cronies from the West Bank, the way they did in the Gaza Strip, has not succeeded. To begin with, their timing was off. The Arab and Muslim world is too busy engaging in mutual slaughter to bother itself with the lies of a gang of Palestinians. The Arab and Muslim world cannot be bothered with Israel, and it certainly cannot be bothered with preventing the overthrow of Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority.

Even if the Israelis would like nothing better than to see Al-Aqsa mosque destroyed, a notion for which there is no evidence, they still protect it with the best of their police force, out of respect for others, as we all wish others would respect us. Protecting Al-Aqsa mosque guarantees Israel's security by respectfully honoring the religion of people different from them. It is also a reminder that all of us might actually benefit from respectfully honoring the religions of others different from us.

It is absurd and offensive that after the Palestinians initiated -- and then tried to justify the current wave of terrorism as "a legitimate non-violent peaceful protest against the occupation" -- that they now cry crocodile tears about the supposed "Israeli executions" of Palestinian youths who take their knives and go Jew-hunting, but who then get killed in the process. Dimitri Diliani, of the Fatah Revolutionary Council, even had the effrontery to claim, falsely, to Russia Today TV, that Israelis, to justify their crimes, tried to plant knives near the bodies of the purportedly innocent Palestinians to frame them.

Mahmoud Abbas denied the Jews any access to the Temple Mount on the fabricated pretext that the Jews were defiling Al-Aqsa mosque. The Temple Mount, however is as sacred to Jews and Christians as to Muslims. To Jews, the Temple Mount is the location of their two Temples (the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 C.E.); to Christians, it was at the Second Temple where Jesus expelled money-changers and those who sold doves (Matthew 21:12).

Ultimately, the American secretary of state, meeting with the King of Jordan and the Israeli prime minister, concluded that it was Israel that guarded Al-Aqsa and would continue to maintain the status quo. Thus the status quo was confirmed in Israeli's favor.

The Palestinian Authority, Hamas and the Islamic Movement were left with nothing to say.

The upshot was that Mahmoud Abbas's claim of defilement was rejected, and that Jews would still be allowed to visit. The Palestinians no longer serve as active participants; the Jordanians will continue to serve as religious administrators of Al-Aqsa Mosque, and the Israelis will continue as sovereign, and manage the security of the Temple Mount and Jerusalem.

Secretary Kerry's repeated reference to the "Temple Mount, that is Al-Aqsa mosque" (Alharam Alshareef) to define the holy site struck a blow to both Mahmoud Abbas and the Islamists trying to deny the rights of the Jews. The Palestinian Authority has also -- embarrassingly to many -- been claiming that Jesus was a "Palestinian," and trying to use the Temple Mount as an Islamic religious fulcrum for its baseless nationalist demands.

Secretary Kerry also put a stop to France's pathetic attempts to curry favor with the Muslims living in its ghettoes when it proposed an international commission of inquiry to examine events in Al-Aqsa mosque. As Israel preserves full freedom of access throughout Jerusalem, the French can enter Al-Aqsa mosque and argue among themselves, but their attempts to enter Jerusalem through the back door was rejected by the Palestinians as an attempt to internationalize Jerusalem into a "Crusader city."

When the Palestinians torched the Tomb of Joseph, it became clear that under Palestinian Authority control, Jewish and Christian holy sites in Jerusalem would be reduced to ashes, and that the Palestinians in the West Bank were no better than ISIS or the Taliban, which destroyed Palmyra and the ancient statues of the Buddha in Bamiyan.

The Jews, who dealt with two previous intifadas, are not particularly terrified by the thought of a third one. We have repeatedly seen that every violent Palestinian attempt has backfired and caused far more damage to us than to the Jews. The Palestinian Authority's approval of Hamas's incitement not only threatened its own downfall, but also looked as if it would precipitate the installation of an Islamic emirate in the West Bank -- an event that would effectively have killed any dream of a Palestinian state.

Yes, the recent wave of stabbings and shootings has, to a small and transitory extent, diverted the world's attention from the real tragedies of the Middle East. However, the millions of refugees in the Middle East (many knocking at the gates of Europe), will keep pushing to the sidelines the Palestinian cause; the slaughter; the mosques blown up; the churches burned down, and the genuine persecution of minorities, as opposed to the fairy tales invented by Mahmoud Abbas, Hamas and the seditious Israeli Arab members of Israel's Knesset.

The other real loser is the trust between Arabs and Jews. Trust -- with special thanks to Palestinian groups working fiercely against "normalization" rather than toward peace -- has been totally eroded. Again, the only people we have hurt are ourselves: the demand of Israeli Arabs for equality is rapidly slipping down the list of public priorities. As the old Arab proverb says, "Ask someone with experience, not the doctor."

At the end of the current violence that we began, will be left, as usual, with nothing to show for it, while the Israelis, who always rebound, will continue to thrive, prosper and move forward.

Clearly the time will soon come again for direct negotiations between the Palestinians and the Israelis -- but the use of force, instead of than wresting concessions from the Israelis, will, as always, do just the opposite.


Bassam Tawil is a scholar based in the Middle East.

Source: http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/6928/palestinian-western-mistakes

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

Your life comes first - Dror Eydar



by Dror Eydar

Hat tip: Jean-Charles Bensoussan

The West will not be able to defeat terrorism until we call the source of this insanity by name: jihadist Islam • Over the past 70 years, we seem to have forgotten that the majority has rights, too. Most importantly, the right to live.

Muslim women on London's Oxford Street
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Photo credit: Ami Shooman


Dror Eydar

Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=29839&hp=1

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

Fazliddin Kurbanov: Terrorist 'Refugee' - Arnold Ahlert



by Arnold Ahlert

A case study in Obama's refugee folly.


 
 
The fecklessness of the Obama administration’s despicable “refugee” agenda can be personified. Last August a federal jury convicted Uzbek refugee Fazliddin Kurbanov of three terror-related charges that included working to support a terrorist organization, and amassing explosive materials in his apartment in Boise, ID.
 
Kurbanov is a Russian-speaking truck driver originally from Uzbekistan who began his life as a Muslim. When his parents converted to Orthodox Christianity, the family was subjected to government persecution and they fled to nearby Kazakhstan. In 2009 his parents came to the Unites States, followed shortly thereafter by Kurbanov, his wife and his son in August 2009. 
 
According to court testimony, Kurbanov was a practicing Christian until he went to Denver in search of work in 2010. While there he met and took up residence with some fellow Uzbek men who were practicing Muslims. Kurbanov reconverted to Islam and returned to Boise. In 2011 he began making terror-related searches on the Internet. Two years later, federal agents searched his apartment where they found evidence that the former refugee was stockpiling explosive materials and communicating with the Taliban-linked Movement of Uzbekistan. According to the FBI, Kurbanov intend to launch a domestic bomb attack, with military bases and a park in Boise being cited as potential targets.
 
Kurbanov’s trial in Idaho lasted 20 days with a jury convicting him of three terror-related counts and acquitting him of two others. He faces 10 years in prison for the explosive device conviction and as much 15 years in jail for the other two. In addition, he faces another charge in Utah for distributing information related to explosives, destructive devices and weapons of mass destruction, arising from his efforts to teach another individual how to build an explosive device. "He taught another person in Utah to build a bomb with the intent to use the bomb,” explained U.S. Attorney for Utah John Huber. If he is convicted in that case, Kurbanov faces an additional 40 years in prison.
 
Writing for KTVB.com, anchor and reporter Kim Fields reminds Americans that Kurbanov "would have gone through the federal screening process,” and that court testimony indicates no red flags would have been raised "because there is no indication Kurbanov was involved in terrorism when he first arrived in the U.S.” 
 
That would be the same vetting process Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes was sent out to promote with regard to Syrian refugees. "There’s a very careful vetting process that includes our intelligence community, our National Counterterrorism Center, the Department of Homeland Security, he told “Meet the Press” moderator Chuck Todd.
“So we can make sure we’re carefully screening anybody who comes to the United States.”
 
Apparently, FBI Director James Comey didn't get the proverbial memo. “We can only query against that which we have collected,” explained the man whose agency is now conducting nearly 1,000 domestic investigations against ISIS. "And so if someone has never made a ripple in the pond in Syria in a way that would get their identity or their interest reflected in our database, we can query our database until the cows come home, but there will be nothing show up because we have no record of them.” U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services' (USCIS) associate director for the Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate Matthew Emrich was equally "ill-informed,” asserting the administration checked “everything that we are aware of” before falling back on the pathetic excuse that “in many countries of the world from which we have traditionally accepted refugees over the years the United States government did not have extensive data holdings.” The same goes for FBI Assistant Director Michael Steinbach who also admitted that in a "failed state" like Syria, “all of the data sets — the police, the intel services — that normally you would go to seek information don’t exist.”
 
This is hardly a new problem. In 2013, ABC News reported several dozen suspected terrorists were allowed to move to the United States after they claimed “refugee” status, including two Iraqi al-Qaeda terrorists living in Kentucky who had attacked American troops. The administration’s solution to that problem? The State Department suspended processing Iraqi refugees for all of six months.
 
Yet Kurbanov’s case speaks to other issues as well. Even an air-tight vetting process is completely useless when the filter of political correctness cherished by progressives is added to the mix. The FBI received multiple warnings from Russia about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, resulting in a single interview of the Boston Marathon bomber in 2011, after which they concluded he posed no threat. The same Obama administration ignored numerous red flags regarding the increasing radicalization of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan, and even after the atrocity referred to the incident as “workplace violence.” Another terrorist attack virtually swept under the media rug was perpetrated by Kuwati Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez who killed four Marines and wounded two other service members and a police officer during two separate attacks at Tennessee military facilities last July. The FBI told CBS News Abdulazeez was “not on their radar” and that it remained “unclear" whether he was a citizen. Follow up stories attributed his killing spree to depression as well as alcohol and drug abuse, according to his family--despite the fact he targeted military facilities.
 
Even more ominously, Kurbanov’s conviction speaks to the Obama administration’s disastrous foreign policy. Despite the president’s utterly absurd assertions both before and after the attack in Paris that ISIS is “contained,” there is no denying the terror group is a recruiting machine. A U.N. report released in April revealed the number of recruits leaving their more than 100 different countries to join ISIS had skyrocketed to more than 25,000. Moreover their latest propaganda video shows images of New York City spliced between clips of suicide bombers preparing for attacks. A message flashing across the screen warns Americans that what’s coming "will be far worse and more bitter” than the Paris atrocity.
 
In other words, ISIS remains an incredibly viable and attractive entity, not only to sleeper agents that would undoubtedly be some percentage of the people this administration wants to bring into America, but to the disaffected people who are already here. Disaffected people exactly like Fazliddin Kurbanov and countless others who view the administration’s flaccidly nonsensical approach to ISIS as proof that the terror group is the stronger horse. Add the progressive insanity that asserts anyone resisting Syrian immigration is a bigot, xenophobe or Islamophobe to the mix, and it becomes clear this administration and its adherents are willing to abide an "acceptable level” of domestic terror to preserve political correctness.
 
In short progressives are terrorism’s willing accomplices.
 
On Thursday, it was revealed that two U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials alleged to Breitbart News that eight Syrian illegals were arrested after they tried to enter Texas from Mexico. Another six Syrian men with stolen Greek passports were detained in Honduras. They too were on their way to the United States. President Obama has threatened to veto a GOP-sponsored bill that would suspend Syrian and Iraqi refugee emigration into the U.S. until key national security agencies can certify they pose no security risk. 
 
Former President George W. Bush once stated that "those who want to do harm only have to be right one time, and we have to be right 100 percent of the time.” Given the nation’s porous borders, coupled with the president’s stance on Syrian refugees and his obdurate refusal to confront ISIS in any meaningful way, it is time to ask the Obama administration why they are so willing to tip the odds even further in ISIS’s favor.


Arnold Ahlert

Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/260852/fazliddin-kurbanov-terrorist-refugee-arnold-ahlert

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

A city without lights - Boaz Bismuth



by Boaz Bismuth

Hat tip: Jean-Charles Bensoussan

Paris is still reeling from Friday's terrorist attacks, and already it is being asked to adapt to a new reality -- a state of war • Israel Hayom Foreign News Editor Boaz Bismuth spent a week in the devastated city, listening to residents' stories.


The site of one of the terrorist attacks in Paris


Boaz Bismuth

Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=29827&hp=1

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