Sunday, February 22, 2015

Let the Man Speak on Behalf of his People, Mr. President - Karin McQuillan



by Karin McQuillan


So why are our Democrat friends and neighbors silent and loyal as Obama turns them 180 degrees from the direction they always faced before, standing up to Iran and showing support and respect for our ally, Israel?  Why are they willing to follow him wherever he goes, even to a nuclear Iran, even to orchestrating a partisan onslaught against Israel’s Prime Minister?

Have you ever asked yourself, ‘would I have helped a Jewish friend or neighbor in Nazi Europe?’  Would I have tried to rouse my fellow citizens in America, when isolationism was the rage?  Would I have even noticed there was a call of conscience?  Would I have told myself to ignore what was happening around me, until my world was in ruins?

I have no illusions of possessing extraordinary courage.   Luckily, as Americans, we do not live under a terror regime.  We can inform ourselves easily on the advance of radical Islam.  We can speak out.  We can exercise our individual conscience.   We can listen to the still, small voice that determines our own moral worth. 

We are living at what Churchill called “a hinge of fate.”  Iran is poised to develop nuclear weapons.   The Iranians speak of genocide against the Jews and worldwide conquest as fondly as Hitler did.  In America, we are all players in this drama.  

The entire lesson from the 20th century is to prevent calamitous developments before it is too late.   We have had national unanimity on this point.  For thirty-five years there has been bi-partisan recognition that Iran is a terror state, dangerous to Israel, the Saudis, Europe, America.   Iran has become more dangerous, not less.  Iran has also become weaker economically.  The Saudi oil price war gives us a real chance that economic sanctions could bring the mullahs down. Except that Obama lifted the sanctions and no longer wants the regime brought down. 

None of us has a part so small it cannot be turned into a speaking part.  There is no price if we confront our own President and his party.  No one will turn us in if we dare speak our consciences.  So why are our Democrat friends and neighbors silent and loyal as Obama turns them 180 degrees from the direction they always faced before, standing up to Iran and showing support and respect for our ally, Israel?  Why are they willing to follow him wherever he goes, even to a nuclear Iran, even to orchestrating a partisan onslaught against Israel’s Prime Minister? 

John Kraushaar writes:
As a presidential candidate, President Obama expressed his desire to "change the trajectory of America"… rebuking the legacy of Bill Clinton's pragmatic presidency in the process. Now that his own presidency is winding down, Obama is finding that his main legacy is only half-achieved. He has indeed transformed the Democratic party to his liking, but failed to get anyone else to follow suit.  At the same time, there's no doubt he's successfully pushed Democrats to adopt his favored policies with minimal dissent…Obama knows that.
. … Challenging Israel was one of the president's top second term priorities, according to Axelrod. The worsening relationship between this administration and Israel was as much the president's preconceived plan as the result of a protocol breach.
This is the moment of critical importance to prevent Iran from going nuclear.  Democrat and Republican, liberal and conservative, for decades Americans have been united on this common sense, prudent course of action.  Until now. 

President Obama never went before the American people and honestly explained to us that he has a different idea.  Still, it doesn’t take much time on the internet to look up the details of Obama’s new approach to Iran.  What is important is the bottom line:  the final deal he is working on does not include Iran destroying their nuclear weapons capability. 

During the 1930’s, the Jews had no voice.  They had no country and no leader who could speak out on the danger of rising Nazism.  They had no one to take up arms and defend them.  Six million were tortured and died with no one to speak on their behalf.

The Prime Minister of Israel, Bibi Netanyahu has been invited by Congress to come and speak to them, to America and to the world about the danger of letting Iran keep their nuclear weapons program.  Congress has invited the Prime Minister before, in the same way, informing but not waiting for permission from the White House, as none is required. 

Bibi is eager to make Israel’s case, and most of us are eager to hear him.  He will come.  He will argue for his people far better than any American can, and we need to hear what he has to say.

Obama wants to shut the Israeli Prime Minister up.  And so Obama orchestrated an insult out of thin air, pretending there was disrespect to the White House in the way the invitation was issued and accepted.  His ploy worked because the liberal media as usual repeated the White House talking points and his party fell in line. 

Stunningly, over a dozen Democratic Congressmen and our Vice President will be boycotting the Israeli Prime Minister when he talks to Congress.  Obama has produced a real insult, never before instigated against any visiting head of state.

It goes deeper than that.  Obama has a coherent strategy.  He is working on a new role for America in the Middle East.  He wants us to be more distant from Israel and in a working alliance with Iran.  He believes he can work pragmatically with even a nuclear Iran, if that is the price for their (imagined) cooperation.

For his vision of a new Middle East to work, the President needs to turn Democrats against Israel.  Before the last election, Obama talked openly to his staff about his intentions to go after Israel.  He intended to enjoy it as a Bulworth moment, according to his top advisor David Axelrod.   

As the leader of his party, the President is succeeding beyond his own wildest dreams.  It seems inconceivable that ordinary Democrats would silently go along with facilitating a nuclear Iran, but they are.  They will not question this President.

Democrats are being weighed in the balance and found wanting.   

Congress is the only institution capable of stopping a nuclear Iran.  It is a good sign they have invited Bibi to address them.  They know Bibi will talk about long range missiles and dirty bombs.    He will talk about standing up to evil.  He will talk about dangerous delusions that there easier paths – the ones that lead to world wars in the end.  He will talk about the folly of thinking Islamic terrorism will be satisfied with attacking Middle East targets.  He will appeal to our better selves, our smarter selves, our braver selves.

Have the decency to let him appeal to your conscience, even if you have no intention of listening, Mr. President.

Let the man make his case. 


Karin McQuillan

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/02/let_the_man_speak_on_behalf_of_his_people_mr_president.html

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

Aiding Islamic Terrorists Is Our Foreign Policy - Daniel Greenfield



by Daniel Greenfield


The United States now has a strange two-tier relationship with the Middle East. On paper we retain a number of traditional alliances with old allies such as Egypt, Israel and Saudi Arabia, complete with arms sales, foreign aid and florid speeches. But when it comes to policy, our new friends are the terrorists.

s3tttf7n-1413804008Obama says that we are not fighting a war on Islam. What he leaves out is that under his administration the United States is fighting in a civil war that is taking place within Islam.

It’s not a conflict between the proverbial moderate Muslim and the raging fanatic. That was an outdated Bush era notion. Instead Obama has brought us into a fight between Muslim governments and Muslim terrorists, not on the side of the governments we were allied with, but on the side of the terrorists.

It’s why Egypt is shopping for French planes and Russian nukes. Yemen’s government was run out of town by Obama’s new Iranian friends in a proxy war with Saudi Arabia. And the Saudis are dumping oil.

Iran and Qatar are the regional powers Obama is closest to. What these two countries have in common, is that despite their mutual hostility, they are both international state sponsors of Islamic terrorism.

Obama’s diplomats will be negotiating with the Taliban in Qatar. Among the Taliban delegation will be the terrorist leaders that Obama freed from Gitmo. And Iran gets anything it wants, from Yemen to the bomb, by using the threat of walking away in a huff from the hoax nuclear negotiations as leverage.

In Syria and Iraq, Obama is fighting ISIS alongside Islamic terrorists linked to Al Qaeda and Iran. In Libya, he overthrew a government in support of Islamic terrorists. His administration has spoken out against Egyptian air strikes against the Islamic State Jihadists in Libya who had beheaded Coptic Christians.

At the prayer breakfast where he denounced Christianity for the Crusades was the foreign minister of the Muslim Brotherhood government of Sudan that has massacred Christians. Unlike Libya, where Obama used a false claim of genocide to justify an illegal war, Sudan actually has committed genocide. And yet Obama ruled out using force against Sudan’s genocide even while he was running for office.

The United States now has a strange two-tier relationship with the Middle East. On paper we retain a number of traditional alliances with old allies such as Egypt, Israel and Saudi Arabia, complete with arms sales, foreign aid and florid speeches. But when it comes to policy, our new friends are the terrorists.

American foreign policy is no longer guided by national interests. Our allies have no input in it. It is shaped around the whims of Qatar and Iran; it’s guided by the Muslim Brotherhood and defined by the interests of state sponsors of terror. Our foreign policy is a policy of aiding Islamic terrorists.

It’s only a question of which terrorists.

Obama’s familiar argument is that ISIS and Al Qaeda fighters shouldn’t be called Islamic terrorists. Not even the politically correct sop of “Radical Islam” is acceptable. The terrorists are perverting Islam, he claims. The claim was banal even before September 11, but it bears an entirely new significance from an administration that has put Muslim Brotherhood operatives into key positions.

The administration is asserting the power to decide who is a Muslim. It’s a theological position that means it is taking sides in a Muslim civil war between Islamists.

This position is passed off as a strategy for undermining the terrorists. Refusing to call the Islamic State by its name, using the more derogatory “Daesh,” denying that the Islamic terrorists are acting in the name of Islam, is supposed to inhibit recruitment. This claim is made despite the flood of Muslims leaving the West to join ISIS. If any group should be vulnerable to our propaganda, it should be them.

But that’s not what this is really about.

According recognition to a state is a powerful diplomatic tool for shaping world politics. We refuse to recognize ISIS, as we initially refused to recognize the USSR. Obama resumed diplomatic ties with Cuba. His people negotiate and appease the Taliban even though it was in its own time just as brutal as ISIS.

Obama is not willing to recognize ISIS as Islamic, but he does recognize the Muslim Brotherhood as Islamic. Both are violent and murderous Islamists. But only one of them is “legitimate” in his eyes.

Those choices are not about terrorist recruitment, but about building a particular map of the region. Obama refuses to concede that ISIS is Islamic, not because he worries that it will bring them more followers, this is a tertiary long shot at best, but because he is supporting some of their rivals.

The White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism has brought a covert strategy out into the spotlight. Despite its name, it’s not countering violence or extremism.

The new director of the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, the axis of Obama’s CVE strategy, is Rashad Hussain who appeared at Muslim Brotherhood front group events and defended the head of Islamic Jihad. In attendance was Salam Al-Marayati of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, yet another Muslim Brotherhood linked group, who had urged Muslims not to cooperate with the FBI and defended Hamas and Hezbollah.

In Syria, the United States is coordinating with Assad and backing the Syrian rebels, who have their own extensive ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and even Al Qaeda. This could be viewed as an “enemy of my enemy” alliance, but this administration backed the Brotherhood before it viewed ISIS as a threat. Top Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi and John Kerry, had focused on outreach to Assad under Bush.

They’re not allying with Assad and the Brotherhood to beat ISIS. They’re fighting ISIS to protect the Brotherhood and their deal with Iran.

In the White House, Obama has tried to shape an Islamist future for the Middle East, favoring Islamist governments in Turkey and Islamist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood. He saw his role as paving the way for the next generation of regional regimes that would be explicitly Islamist.

The Arab Spring was a deceptive code name for a clean sweep that would push out the old leaders like Mubarak and replace them with the Muslim Brotherhood and other likeminded Islamists. Islamic terrorism, at least against the United States, would end because their mission had been accomplished.

Stabilizing unrest by putting the destabilizers in charge wasn’t a new idea. Carter helped make it happen in Iran. And the more violent an Islamic terrorist group is, the more important it is to find a way to stop the violence by putting them in charge. The only two criteria that matter are violence and dialogue.

So why isn’t Obama talking to ISIS? Because ISIS won’t talk back. It’s impossible to support a terrorist group that won’t engage in dialogue. If ISIS were to indicate any willingness to negotiate, diplomats would be sitting around a table with headchoppers in less time than it takes a Jordanian pilot to burn.

And that still might happen.

Obama isn’t trying to finish off ISIS. He’s keeping them on the ropes the way that he did the Taliban. Over 2,000 Americans died on the off chance that the Taliban would agree to the negotiations in Qatar. Compared to that price in blood, the Bergdahl deal was small potatoes. And if Obama is negotiating with the Taliban after all that, is there any doubt that he would negotiate to integrate ISIS into Iraq and Syria?

Obama’s foreign policy in the region has been an elaborate exercise in trying to draw up new maps for a caliphate. The inclusion of terrorist groups in this program isn’t a mistake. It’s not naiveté or blindness. It’s the whole point of the exercise which was to transform terrorist groups into governments.

Stabilizing the region by turning terrorists into governments may sound like pouring oil on a fire, but to progressives who believe in root causes, rather than winning wars, violence is a symptom of discontent. The problem isn’t the suicide bomber. It’s our power structure. Tear that down, as Obama tried to do in Cairo, and the terrorists no longer have anything to fight against because we aren’t in their way.

Bush tried to build up civil society to choke off terrorism. Obama builds civil society around terrorists.

Obama does not believe that the terrorists are the problem. He believes that we are the problem. His foreign policy is not about fighting Islamic terrorists. It is about destroying our power to stop them.

He isn’t fighting terrorists. He’s fighting us.


Daniel Greenfield

Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/dgreenfield/aiding-islamic-terrorists-is-our-foreign-policy/

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

'Netanyahu's Congress speech is absolutely essential' - Boaz Bismuth



by Boaz Bismuth

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani: PM Benjamin Netanyahu is doing exactly what he needs to do -- to come and speak out against a bad agreement with Iran, even if the Obama administration doesn't like it. Most Americans agree with Netanyahu.



Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani
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Photo credit: AP

Boaz Bismuth

Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=23673

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

ISIS Trafficking Human Organs? - Arnold Ahlert



by Arnold Ahlert


a Dec. 5 report by Middle East news organization Al-Monitor explains that ISIS relies on four sources of funding that include oil sales, taxes imposed on residents in ISIS-controlled territories, drug trafficking—and the sale of human organs. The organ trafficking was exposed by otolaryngologist Siruwan al-Mosuli who noticed “unusual movement” at medical facilities in Mosul.

598c275eab173fdad96026168b8bc1b1If reports coming out of Iraq are accurate, the depraved savagery of ISIS has reached yet another new low. According to Iraqi Ambassador to the United Nations Mohamed Alhakim, ISIS is harvesting human organs to finance its war operations—and has executed a dozen doctors for failing to go along with the program.

Alhakim bases his claim on the discovery of dozens of bodies left in shallow mass graves near the city of Mosul, currently an ISIS stronghold. Surgical incisions, along with missing kidneys and other body parts lead to an inescapable conclusion. “We have bodies. Come and examine them. It is clear they are missing certain parts,” Alhakim revealed. He further described the carnage:

“When we discover mass graves, we look at the bodies. Some of those bodies are killed by bullets, some of them by knives. But when you find pieces of the back is [sic] missing and the kidneys is [sic] missing, you will wonder what it is.”

The Ambassador aired his revelations on Tuesday, a day ahead of an emergency U.N. Security Council meeting convened in response to the decapitation of 21 Egyptian Christians in Libya. He accused the Islamist thugs of committing genocide against Muslims, Christians and other religious groups. “These terrorist groups have desecrated all human values” he declared. “They have committed the most heinous criminal terrorist acts against the Iraqi people whether Shi’ite, Sunni, Christians, Turkmen, Shabak or Yazidis. These are in fact crimes of genocide committed against humanity that must be held accountable before international justice,” he told the U.N. Security Council.

Nikolay Mladenov, outgoing UN envoy to Iraq, also alerted the Council to the reality that in the last month alone, 790 people were killed by terrorism and armed conflict in his nation. “Almost daily terrorist attacks continue to deliberately target all Iraqis, most notably the Shi’ite community, as well as ethnic and religious minorities, across the country,” he said. “Equally worrying is the increasing number of reports of revenge attacks committed particularly against members of the Sunni community in areas liberated from (ISIS) control.”

ISIS currently controls territory that includes the airports in Mosul in Iraq and Aleppo in Syria. This control gives it the ability to ship the illicit black market organs to traffickers and middlemen around the world.

Just as shocking, if not more so, is the reality that allegations of organ trafficking by ISIS are not news. According to Mladenov, such reports have circulated for months. Moreover, a Dec. 5 report by Middle East news organization Al-Monitor explains that ISIS relies on four sources of funding that include oil sales, taxes imposed on residents in ISIS-controlled territories, drug trafficking—and the sale of human organs. The organ trafficking was exposed by otolaryngologist Siruwan al-Mosuli who noticed “unusual movement” at medical facilities in Mosul. This included the hiring of Arab and foreign surgeons who were prohibited from mixing with local doctors. Nonetheless, information about organ selling began to be leaked, with Mosuli revealing the organs come from fallen fighters rushed to the hospital, injured people who have been abandoned, or victims of kidnapping.

Mosuli further noted that selling the harvested organs yields large profits, and that the effort is undertaken by a “specialized mafia” working in coordination with foreign medical institutions. He further contends that without such cooperation the trafficking could not be sustained.

It might also be unsustainable if Western leaders had orchestrated international outrage when the gruesome activity first came to light. Jewish Press columnist Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu levels a devastating accusation in that regard, insisting that the “Western world, not least of all the Obama administration, chose not to disseminate the information in hopes of postponing the inevitable – a declaration of war on the ISIS. Valuable time has been lost by imagining that the Islamic State is the problem of Iraq and Syria and not of the entire world,” he adds.

Perhaps nothing epitomizes that waste of time better than President Obama’s summit on “violent extremism,” epitomizing the semantical [sic] bankruptcy embraced by the president, who remains grimly determined to deny the link between ISIS and Islam. Incredibly, Obama insists that such linkage legitimizes ISIS’s contention that they are prosecuting a holy war against the West. “We must never accept the premise that they put forward, because it is a lie,” Obama declared. “Nor should we grant these terrorists the religious legitimacy that they seek. They are not religious leaders; they’re terrorists. We are not at war with Islam.”

The president also chided Muslim community leaders for losing the propaganda war against ISIS because they are too “boring” to win it. “By the way, the older people here – as wise and respected as you may be – your stuff is often boring compared to what they’re doing,” he said, addressing the conference’s Muslim attendees. “You’re not connected. And as a consequence, you are not connecting. That’s the truth. The high-quality videos, the online magazines, the use of social media, terrorists Twitter accounts – it’s all designed to target today’s young people online in cyberspace.”

Apparently it escapes our self-deluded Commander-in-Chief that the military impotency currently embraced by him and other Western leaders—which has allowed ISIS to flourish and expand—constitutes the most effective propaganda campaign one could ever hope for. It is further aided and abetted by Obama’s community organizer approach to terror, where the president emphasized the solution to ISIS’s reign of depravity can be combatted by a combination of improving political systems and boosting economies that will ostensibly make people less inclined to join the terrorist organization. State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf was dispatched earlier this week to promote the equally preposterous notion that creating jobs is an effective tool for fighting terror—after which she dug a deeper hole for herself, chiding Americans for being unable to comprehend such a “nuanced” approach.

A RAND report commissioned by the Defense Secretary and published in 2009 puts the lie to those assessments. “Terrorists are not particularly impoverished, uneducated, or afflicted by mental disease,” it states. “Terrorist leaders actually tend to come from relatively privileged backgrounds.”

Harf defended herself, tweeting that President George W. Bush, former Secretary of State Colin Powell and “countless others” had also linked terrorism and poverty, which is true. However Harf conveniently failed to mention the American left and their media enablers have routinely excoriated the previous administration’s “nation-building” agenda. That failure was buttressed by an equally egregious attempt by the Obama administration to further a strategy of “winning hearts and minds,” that bottomed out 2012. That’s when the military brass reversed a standing order that required our troops to remove their magazines from their weapons when quartered inside bases with their “trusted”—and armed—”Afghan partners.” Unfortunately, 100 American and NATO troops were killed in green-on-blue murders before that PC-inspired insanity was abandoned.

In other words, there is an ample track record showing the administration’s current stance is a fatally flawed amalgam of wishful thinking and denialism. Retired Adm. James “Ace” Lyons spoke of the “multiple failures” of successive Republican and Democratic administrations to confront Islamic terror, going all the way back to Carter and his failure to strike back at Iran during the 1979 hostage crisis. But he leveled his harshest criticism at the current administration. “The Obama administration has a strategy,” he said at a conference hosted by the conservative Center for Security Policy. “It is very simple. Any thinking American should be able to grasp it. It’s anti-American, anti-Western, it’s pro-Islamic, pro-Iranian, and pro-Muslim Brotherhood.”

That last assertion goes a long way towards explaining why the Pentagon has refused to back Egyptian attacks against ISIS following the decapitation of 21 Egyptian Christians in Libya. Christians who were seeking jobs, Ms. Harf. While outgoing Pentagon press secretary Rear Adm. John Kirby characterized Egypt as an “important strategic partner in the region,” he refused to endorse those strikes. “We didn’t participate or support them in any way, and we’re not taking a position on it,” he told reporters.

Tensions between the two nations have remained high since the Muslim Brotherhood was deposed from power, a development that led to the suspension of weapons sales to the new government headed by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. This despite the reality that el-Sisi is one of a handful of Muslim leaders courageous enough to call for a “religious revolution,” and to ask religious leaders to help lead the fight against Islamist terror. Aside from the administration’s unseemly affinity for the Brotherhood, despite the reality that it spawned most of the major terrorist organizations that currently plague the world—including ISIS itself—it is likely Obama’s disdain for el-Sisi stems from the fact that the Muslim president has admitted that Islam is an integral part of the terror equation. Such honesty undoubtedly rankles our reality-challenged Commander-in-Chief. 

Moreover as our president’s long track record of narcissistic-driven pettiness suggests, maintaining an animus towards el-Sisi may be a preferable alternative to alliance with someone who doesn’t share Obama’s “superior” worldview.

As of now the U.N. will neither confirm nor deny Alhakim’s horrific allegations of ISIS organ harvesting. “At this point we’re not in a position to corroborate what he says, but obviously any source of illegal financing of groups such as ISIS or other extremist groups is extremely worrisome,” U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric told CNN. The State Department took a similar stance, noting it was aware of the “deeply disturbing comments,” but unable to confirm them. “We also have no reason to doubt them given other similar atrocities that have been documented and other heinous crimes for which ISIL (ISIS) has proudly taken credit,” the Department added.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes, director of Organs Watch, a University of California, Berkeley-based documentation and research project, offers a disturbing perspective to the mix. “Dead bodies, once they are disarticulated, pulverized, processed, freeze-dried, etc., are so far removed from the ‘human’ person that they are simply commodities,” she said. “The demand for fresh organs and tissues … is insatiable.” She further acknowledged that fresh kidneys from “the brain dead or from those executed with the assistance of trained organ harvesters are the blood diamonds of illicit and criminal trafficking.”

And these are the kind of people the Obama administration believes can be brought to bear with a so-far flaccid military campaign, buttressed by Muslim “outreach” programs? Mind-boggling.


Arnold Ahlert

Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/arnold-ahlert/isis-trafficking-human-organs-1-1/

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

The Muslim Takeover of West Bengal - Janet Levy



by Janet Levy



While the situation for Hindus in Bangladesh is certainly dire, life has become increasingly difficult for Hindus in West Bengal, home to a Muslim-appeasing government and a breeding ground and safe haven for terrorists. For several years, West Bengal has suffered under apparent Muslim-planned riots designed to implement shariah, extract government concessions and grab more territory. 


Riots, restrictions on speech and religion, and the takeover of politics and law enforcement are just a few of the unwelcome changes that can be expected in non-Muslim societies as Muslim immigrants increase in number, according to Dr. Peter Hammond.  A Christian missionary based in South Africa and author of 40 books, Hammond delineates how Muslims change societies in his book, Slavery, Terrorism and Islam.  Citing examples of countries worldwide, Hammond outlines typical activities that occur as the Muslim percentage of the total population increases.  It is a warning bell about the gradual, step-by-step changes that can be expected in other countries still undergoing significant Muslim immigration.

These societal changes occur because devout Muslims are bound by a 1,400-year-old doctrine of immigration originating in Islamic scriptures and based on Mohammed's migration from Mecca to Medina. Under the religious edict or Hijra, Islamic expansionism and submission of all non-Muslims to shariah or Islamic doctrine must occur.  Islamic expansionism and its counterpart, jihad, are first expressed as Muslim demands for special status and privileges within the host country.  A higher percentage of Muslims in the host country can soon translate into Muslim control of political processes, law enforcement, media, and the economy, as well as restrictions on freedom of movement, speech and religious practices. The appropriation of goods and property, as well as violence with impunity, can also occur.    

The situation in at West Bengal in Hindu-majority India, bordering Muslim-majority Bangladesh, illustrates the inherent problems to non-Muslim societies of a growing Muslim population.

West Bengal 

Bengal, an ethno-cultural region, was politically divided in 1947 during the partitioning of British India into independent India and Pakistan.  Under this arrangement, the Bengal province was carved in two: the predominately-Hindu West Bengal, a state of India, and the predominately-Muslim East Bengal, which became a province of Pakistan and, in 1971, the Muslim-majority country of Bangladesh. 

At partitioning, the Muslim population of West Bengal stood at 12% and the Hindu population of East Bengal 30%.  Today, with massive Muslim immigration, Hindu persecution and forced conversions, West Bengal’s Muslim population has increased to 27% (up to 63% in some districts), as per the 2011 census and Bangladesh’s Hindu population has decreased to 8%.  While the situation for Hindus in Bangladesh is certainly dire, life has become increasingly difficult for Hindus in West Bengal, home to a Muslim-appeasing government and a breeding ground and safe haven for terrorists. For several years, West Bengal has suffered under apparent Muslim-planned riots designed to implement shariah, extract government concessions and grab more territory. 

Kolkata Riots

In 2007, a violent protest broke out in Kolkata (formerly known as Calcutta) against Bangladeshi feminist author, physician and human rights activist, Taslima Nasreen. The demonstrations against Nasreen were a thinly veiled attempt to institute Islamic blasphemy laws and curtail freedom of speech. 

Nasreen, who was born a Bangladeshi Muslim but chose atheism, had witnessed the horrific treatment of Islamic women in her medical practice, and advocated for freedom of expression, women’s rights, non-Muslim rights and abolition of shariah law.  In 1993, she published a novel, Lajja (Shame) about a Hindu family persecuted by Muslims.  The novel ignited a furor in the Muslim community, which called for a ban on the book and offered a bounty for her death.  The novel was subsequently banned by Indian authorities.  Nasreen was physically attacked, went into hiding and escaped from Bangladesh to Europe.  After 10 years’ exile, she returned to the east and settled in Kolkata.  Her Bangladeshi passport had been revoked and she waited several years for a visa to be able to visit India.  While in Kolkata, she continued to write articles critical of Islam despite renewed threats and calls for her beheading.

In November 2007, a protest organized by militant Muslims against Nasreen led to riots as Muslims blocked traffic, pelted police and journalists, torched cars and damaged buses.  Similar to the justification for the Charlie Hebdo murders in Paris, West Bengali Muslims protested the violation of shariah blasphemy law, which mandates death for anyone who dares to criticize Islam.  The army was forced to intervene, Nasreen was placed under house arrest and later forced to leave the area.  The banned Student Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) and the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) were believed to have fostered the mayhem.

Canning District Riots

In 2013, Muslims in West Bengal were actively lobbying for a second partition of India to create an Islamic super state – Mughalistan – that would incorporate Pakistan, Bangladesh and parts of India.  Meanwhile, ethnic divisions were also stirred up by an upcoming local election.  Into this charged situation, the murder of a Muslim cleric by unidentified assailants sparked outrage among Muslims, as thousands mobilized for rioting in the Canning District.  An article in a popular weekly publication, Organiser, called the attack “a well organized and meticulously planned attack on Hindus.”  Over 200 Hindu homes were looted and firebombed, hundreds of temples and idols destroyed, and vehicles set on fire amid shouts of “Allah-hu Akbar!”  Repeated calls for help by Hindus went unanswered by the police.  Local residents claimed authorities were complicit with the Muslim mobs.   

Violence in Usti

This January 29th, in a market in the Kolkata suburb of Usti, more than 50 Hindu shops were ransacked, looted and gutted by rampaging jihadists.  Police mostly watched as bombs were hurled at Hindus indiscriminately.  They fired a few random shots into the air and detained victimized Hindu shop owners while their attackers roamed free. A legislative assembly member and the state minister for minority affairs reportedly demanded that local police release the few rioters held in custody. There was limited reporting by the mainstream media that didn’t specify the Muslim identity of the perpetrators and West Bengal’s Chief Minister, Mamata Banerjee, issued no statement about the violence.  Independent sites, Indiafacts and Hindu Samhati, reported the incident with numerous photographs.

Political Implications

With a 27% Muslim population, enough pressure exists to tip the scales for elected officials precariously toward advancement of an Islamist agenda and make Muslims the most privileged class in West Bengal.  In some areas, such as the border district of Murshidabad, which is over 63% Muslim, de facto shariah is imposed on all residents.  The vast majority of political candidates, elected officials and law enforcement leadership are Muslim and the economic prospects for Hindus dim as Muslims refuse to patronize non-Muslim businesses.

Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, who has received official visits from Hillary Clinton and several U.S. ambassadors, offers a prime example of a political leader who expediently favors Muslim constituents, capitulates to their many demands and entices them with special benefits and privileges.  The reality of Muslim vote bank politics, whereby an entire Muslim community votes along lines dictated by the local imam or religious leader, adds to the problem and furthers Muslim control of the state.  Banerjee has gone so far in her Muslim sympathies as to publicly recite the Kalima Shahadat, the Islamic conversion prayer, in front of an audience of imams.  

Because West Bengal’s Muslims were largely responsible for her election as chief minister, Banerjee has made substantial payback.  She approved and validated the academic degrees of 10,000 previously unrecognized Saudi-funded and controlled madrasas (Islamic colleges) four minarets (Muslim towers), honorariums for imams and an exclusively Islamic township. Banerjee called for the establishment of Muslim medical, technical and nursing schools with special subsidies for Muslim students, as well as Muslim-only hospitals.  She has favored Muslims to the extent of distributing free bicycles and rail passes to female Muslim students and laptops to Muslim boys.  

Banerjee’s political party, the All India Trinamool Congress (TMC), will most likely send more Islamists to serve in parliament in the future.  Reportedly, jihadist sleeper cells inhabit the area under her protection.  Meanwhile, the needs of Hindu refugees from Bangladesh are ignored, even as they continue being victimized in West Bengal. 

In June of 2014, Mamata Banerjee made a highly questionable appointment, Rajya Sabha, to the upper house of the Indian Parliament.  Despite multiple warnings from the District Intelligence Bureau that had red-flagged him for instigating violence against Hindus, including alleged participation in the Kolkata and Canning riots and sheltering known terrorists, she selected Pakistani Hassan Imran to serve as MP. Imran is a founder and self-admitted member of the radical student group, the Student Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), a recognized terrorist organization banned by the Indian government.  He founded and edited a radical weekly magazine, Kalam, which he later turned into a daily newspaper, Dainik Kalam, and sold to the Saradha Group, a financial conglomerate with ties to West Bengal government officials. The publication has advocated for the establishment of Muslim-controlled areas in the state under shariah.  Hassan has close ties to local Islamist leaders and has worked with Jamat-e-Islami (JI), a pro-Saudi jihadist group supported by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).  He also has ties to a chief official of the Islamic Development Bank, a Saudi entity that has financed Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood affiliate, the Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR), an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism funding trial in the United States.  JI and the ISI have been linked to efforts to take over the Indian state of Assam and separate it from India. 

The Saudi-funded terrorist group Jamaat-ul-Mujahadeen, also linked to MP Hassan Imran, has a major base in West Bengal, including bomb-manufacturing units, and has used Wahhabi money to build mosques throughout the state.  The Muslim call to prayer is blasted by loudspeaker from early in the morning to late at night and some thoroughfares in the Muslim districts of Kolkata are closed to all traffic for Friday prayers.

Recently, Hassan and other associates of Mamata Banerjee were implicated in a financial scandal – a Ponzi scheme with the Saradha Group – and things are starting to unravel for the chief minister.  A major investigation of a consortium of 200 private companies that collected between $4 – 6 billion from over 1.7 million depositors before it collapsed, may bring down her reign in West Bengal.  Her MP appointee, Hassan, is believed to have acted as a liaison between Jamaat-e-Islami and the money launderers.

Bangladesh

Hindus of West Bengal need only look across the border to Bangladesh to see their future if Muslim immigration continues and the Muslim population exceeds the current 27%. In Bangladesh, with an 89% Muslim population, ethnic cleansing persists unabated, Hindu land is forcibly captured and Hindu homes and businesses looted.  People are commonly beaten with no police intervention.  Hindus have been tortured and forced to pay the jizya, a tax that non-Muslims are required to pay for protection against Muslim terrorism.  Hindu girls, even married women, have been raped, mutilated, kidnapped, enslaved and forced to marry Muslim men.  Law enforcement authorities are often complicit in the activities and provide no protection or recourse.  Victims are typically threatened if they report incidents to the police. Often, in the case of abduction, police refuse to register complaints and make claims that consensual intercourse has taken place even if the girl is 9 or 10 years old, a non-minor under Islamic standards.  

Kidnapped Hindu girls who manage to escape report that they were taken to Muslim families in which relatives and friends were invited to rape them over several days while Muslim women facilitated the encounters. 

This dire future could possibly be avoided in West Bengal, where some speculate that the Saradha financial scandal could go far in exposing Mamata Banerjee’s dangerous ties to Islamists who seek to wrest control of West Bengal from Hindus.  If her government falls as a result, it could be the wake-up call needed to turn the current situation around.  It could also serve as an example to other countries facing increasing Muslim immigration and increasing imposition of Muslim values on non-Muslims.


Janet Levy

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/02/the_muslim_takeover_of_west_bengal.html

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

The US has been Committed to Land for Peace since 1948 - Ted Belman



by Ted Belman

The USA has been trying to force territorial concessions since the War of Independence.

1948 Declaration of Independence

In the lead up to Israel's Declaration of Independence, the State Department put enormous pressure on Ben-Gurion to postpone the declaration and warned him that the Arabs would attack and that Israel would be destroyed in three months and that the United States would not come to his aid.

In fact the State Department threatened to stoke anti-Semitism by publishing documents that would “do great harm to the Jews” as retribution for the establishment of an independent State of Israel, according to newly unearthed diplomatic cables.

The State Department argued “There are 30 million Arabs on the one side and about 600,000 Jews on the other side. .. Why don’t you face up to reality?”

Truman ignored them (the reasons are history) and recognized Israel as soon as it was declared.

As a result of the war, 550,000 Arabs fled the land between the river and the sea. The US and the Arabs were determined to reverse this exodus.

GA Res 194 was passed in Dec ’48. It is today quoted as the basis for the “right of return”.

Israel has usually contested this reading, pointing out that the text merely states that the refugees “should be permitted” to return to their homes at the “earliest practicable date” and this recommendation applies only to those “wishing to… live at peace with their neighbors”. Besides it was a General Assembly resolution and they aren’t binding.

The Arab League has instructed its members to deny citizenship to Palestinian Arab refugees (or their descendants) “to avoid dissolution of their identity and protect their right to return to their homeland.”

The Arab League forbade any Arab country from accepting these refugees or settling them in normal housing, preferring to leave them in squalid camps.

Even after the Oslo Accords, in the 'West Bank' and Gaza under full jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority, the refugees continued to be confined to camps — despite the millions of UNWRA and international relief dollars which poured into PA coffers specifically for this purpose.

Two years after UNGA Res. 194, the GA passed Resolution 393 (Dec. 1950). Article 4 states that “the reintegration of the refugees into the economic life of the Near east, either by repatriation or resettlement, is essential in preparation for the time when international assistance is no longer available, and for the realization of conditions of peace and stability in the region.” It also called for the creation of a “reintegration fund” in Article 5.

But this resolution would undermine the “right of return” so no one talks about it.

Ceasefire Agreement in the making.

In May 29, 1949, toward the end of Israel’s War of Independence, which consumed 6,000 Israeli lives (1% of the population!), the US Ambassador to Israel, James McDonald, delivered a scolding message from President Truman to Prime Minister Ben Gurion.

According to McDonald, (James McDonald, the US Ambassador to Israel at the time, “My Mission in Israel 1948-1951”,  Simon and Schuster, 1951, p 181)  Truman “interpreted Israel’s attitude [rejecting the land-for-peace principle; annexing West Jerusalem; refusing to absorb Arab refugees; pro-actively soliciting a massive Jewish ingathering] as dangerous to peace and as indicating disregard of the UN General Assembly resolutions of November 29, 1947 [the partition plan] and December 11, 1948 [refugees and internationalization of Jerusalem], reaffirming insistence that territorial compensation should be made [by Israel] for territory taken in excess of November 29 [40% beyond the partition plan!], and that tangible refugee concessions should be made [by Israel] now as essential, preliminary to any prospect for general settlement.  The operative part of the note was the implied threat that the US would reconsider its attitude toward Israel.”

Ben Gurion adamantly refused to retreat. The newly acquired land automatically became part of Israel pursuant to Ben Gurion’s Law.

The Armistice Agreement of ’49 provided at Jordan’s insistence that agreeing to them, would in no way prejudice future territorial settlements or boundary lines or to claims of either Party relating thereto. In other words they were temporary in nature.


To achieve this goal the US has maintained the special refugee status of the Arab refugees and UNRWA, ignored Res 393 and inserted this clause in Res 242, “Emphasizing the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in which every State in the area can live in security,”

This was in fact not in accordance with international law that permitted the acquisition of territory in a defensive war.

Nothing has changed. The US has always been determined to force Israel to surrender to her demands as a penalty for defying the US in the first place. 


Ted Belman

Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/16516#.VOo0DC6zchQ

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

Muslim Dutch Mayor to Muslims: Accept Western Values or Leave - Elad Benari



by Elad Benari


Muslim mayor of Rotterdam says Europe has no place for extremists who are not willing to live within the bounds of its norms.

The Muslim mayor of Rotterdam, the Netherlands, said this week that Europe has no place for extremists who are not willing to live within the bounds of its norms.

Speaking to CNN's Michael Holmes on Wednesday, the mayor, Moroccan-born Ahmed Aboutaleb suggested that those Muslims who don’t embrace those values should leave Europe.

"You are not forced to be with us, it's a choice," he said. "Work with us together to construct a 'we society.'"

"But if you want to stand out of the 'we community,' you threaten us, you go to Yemen to learn how to use a Kalashnikov and to come back to threaten the society, well you are not part of my 'we society,' you had better leave," added Aboutaleb.

Aboutaleb drew headlines around the world in the wake of last month's attack on the editorial staff of the Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris, when he said, "if you don't like it here because you don't like that humorists make a newspaper -- yeah, if I can say it like this, get lost!"

Aboutaleb, who moved to the Netherlands when he was 15, eventually working as a television journalist and then working his way up through the Dutch Labor Party, said he has the authority to speak on the subject. He rejected the notion that poverty leads to terrorism.

"I am one of the people who knows how it is to live in poverty. I spent fifteen years in Morocco of my life on one meal a day, walking without shoes, going to the Netherlands without a coat to protect myself," he told CNN.

"I cannot accept that poverty leads to terrorism," he added, saying that poverty must lead to knowledge and to better oneself.

"It's about investing in yourself, first of all. And by doing that you invest in society. And that's the message I try to give to these people."

"Yes, indeed, I am not only a mayor of a city, but I am also Muslim. And that gives me maybe the additional authority to say these things that maybe other colleagues of mine in Europe and maybe in the U.S. are maybe not authorized to say," noted Aboutaleb.

"The Dutch constitution, but also the Dutch society, is constructed on a very, very intrinsic basic value, and that is tolerance and acceptance," he continued. "So the moment you come to the Netherlands...and you get citizenship then you have to at least underline and embrace the constitution and the values of the country."

When he speaks to new citizens, he told Holmes, he emphasizes the symbolism of the passport they will soon receive.

"That is not only a travel document, that is an identity. Then we request, and there is also a duty, that you accept society as a whole," he said.

In Rotterdam, he added, "there are mosques and synagogues and churches from all denominations."

"It's even okay if you have radical opinions as long as you act within the borders of the law."



The Netherlands is one European country in which anti-Semitism is still prevalent and reared its ugly head during Israel’s Operation Protective Edge in Gaza last summer.

Thousands of people protested in Aboutaleb’s city of Rotterdam against what some labelled Israel's “genocide in Gaza”. As many as 10,000 people took part in the demonstration against Israel's defensive operation in Gaza, with marchers waving posters reading: "Free Palestine" and "No Dutch support for Palestinian genocide".

Similar demonstrations in other countries saw hundreds of Muslim extremists attacking a major synagogue in Paris, provoking clashes with Jewish youths who rushed to defend the site and worshippers trapped inside.

There have also been anti-Israel protests in Berlin. Footage of one of these protests showed hundreds of demonstrators chanting in German, “Jew, Jew, cowardly pig, come on out and fight on your own”.

At the same time, Dutch politician Geert Wilders has been a staunch critic of Islam and a supporter of Israel.

Wilders, who is often reviled in Dutch immigrant communities for his fiery anti-Islam rhetoric, has in the past compared the Koran to Hitler's "Mein Kampf" and has called Islam a fascist religion.


Elad Benari

Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/191620#.VOn_GC6zchR

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

Steven Salaita Imagines a Palestinian Garden of Eden - Andrew Harrod



by Andrew Harrod


Salaita admitted to being at times a "terrible classroom student"—a fact no one subjected to his intellectually vacuous, poorly delivered lecture could doubt. Nonetheless, his tired, cliché-ridden theme of evil Westerners exploiting indigenous peoples and environments—narratives now applied to Jews and Arabs in the Holy Land—are common in academia and beyond.

Palestine "will never be decolonized unless it is first demythologized," stated Steven Salaita, a controversial academic whose job offer from the University of Illinois was rescinded last summer after a series of anti-Semitic tweets came to light. Speaking on "Natural History Under Siege" before an audience of about twenty-five persons at Washington, DC's anti-Israeli Jerusalem Fund think tank on February 13, Salaita employed pseudo-intellectual rhetoric to apply his own mythology of hackneyed postcolonial themes to his ancestral Palestinians.

For those who have come to expect puerile packaging of anti-Israel screeds with fact-free, high-flown, often incoherent verbiage on the basis of his past writings, Salaita did not disappoint. In his introduction, he described the geography of a "Palestine" (including apparently Israel) as a "cacophony, but also an ensemble," even though "not everybody can see it." This geography "is a simulation of ideology," a "diversion into mythic cultural adventure," and "for the crooked and pious alike it is always in some way holy." Despite "continuous reinvention . . . we can still speak of Palestine as an actual place" whose soil once "was rendered tactile and knowable" to him when he got dirt under his fingernails during a visit as a graduate student. Sometimes it's the little things.

Yet "colonization and conflict" from Israel, Salaita lamented, created a situation in which "human habitation partners with military occupation to destroy the . . . tenuous existence of flora and fauna . . . Palestine's natural history." "Palestine is forever shrinking" under Israeli settlement and security installation building, but Palestinians have a supposedly "luminous, living history" that "no bulldozer can destroy." His father-in-law would speak of a "West Bank devoid of Jewish settlement" (Judenrein?) in a "narrative . . . filled with flora and fauna." In this imagined pristine Palestinian Eden, "children . . . could explore the surrounding environment for miles," while today "there is no area of the West Bank wild enough for children to explore unfettered."

Salaita focused on olive trees, a staple of the Palestinian economy and an iconic cultural symbol, to argue that "Israelis are fundamentally outsiders to the land." "Palestine endures in the way" diaspora Palestinians "select olives from the grocery store," while Palestinians often possess olive wood icons. He condemned the alleged Israeli destruction of 800,000 olive trees since 1967 in territories won by Israel in that year's Six Day War, although 2010 estimates count some ten million olive trees under Palestinian cultivation. He only briefly mentioned security concerns as one Israeli motive for their destruction, even though Palestinian ambushes of Israelis from olive groves have prompted their occasional clearcutting.

His claim that a "Palestinian would never destroy a healthy olive tree" ostensibly answered questions such as "who is indigenous, Jews or Palestinians . . . who is the aggressor . . . who wrecks the environment?" Yet Salaita neglects the fact that Palestinians and their leftist allies have destroyed olive trees in order to falsely blame Israelis in the disputed territories. Simultaneously, Israeli olive oil production in recent years has equaled Palestinian output with a fruit that has great significance for Judaism and whose trees enjoy Israeli legal protection.

Refuting Salaita's illusion of Palestinians living harmoniously in a beloved environment, population growth, overgrazing, and poor sewage treatment have had deleterious effects such as deforestation in Palestinian territories. Tree cutting for firewood, particularly by the Ottoman Empire in the years before and during World War I, has also caused significant damage to the region. By contrast, Jewish National Fund (JNF) planting of 240 million trees (sometimes targeted by terrorist organizations like Hezbollah) since 1901 has made Israel one of only two countries worldwide with more trees today than a century ago.

Salaita's fictions support his slanderous depiction of an Israeli Jewish state fundamentally foreign to its region. Absurdly, this supposed nature lover criticized the JNF in Israel because it "facilitates development" and "plants trees" to create "geostrategic gentrification" in an "Orientalized theme park" for "those of a certain ethnic background." In incomprehensible jargon he asserted that "incongruities of biological determinism" created modern Israel, whose Jewish people supposedly revived the Hebrew language to sound artificially like Arabic. "Zionists play Arab to inscribe themselves as indigenous to a foreign geography," he ranted, while condemning a Virginia Tech Hillel presentation on Israel for using a camel as Middle Eastern "orientalist imagery." Yet Camels, brought to the region by ancient Egypt, are not at all foreign to Judaism's biblical scriptures.

Equally hostile to the United States, Salaita compared Israel to an "American landscape . . . still undergoing a process of colonization." Therefore, a "squandering," capitalistic "commodification of natural resources" is a "central feature" of colonialism everywhere. He ignored considerable evidence for the benefits of efficient market societies on the environment, as exhibited in Israel's environmental ratings, which are superior to its Arab neighbors'. Israeli know-how, for example, has improved the region's water economy and benefitted Palestinians, which contradicts Salaita's repetition of the canard that Israel deprives them of water.

Despite his politicized, counterfactual assertions, Salaita maintains credibility and influence within great swaths of academe. One audience member bemoaned how Salaita was "really discriminated against for his views" when rejected by the University of Illinois. Reflecting upon the lecture, the audience member quipped that "nobody's perfect" when discussing whether Palestinian groups like Hamas or Israel better represent "American values" like democracy. In a shocking display of moral equivalence, he criticized the "power imbalance" between Hamas terrorists and Israeli democracy.

Salaita admitted to being at times a "terrible classroom student"—a fact no one subjected to his intellectually vacuous, poorly delivered lecture could doubt. Nonetheless, his tired, cliché-ridden theme of evil Westerners exploiting indigenous peoples and environments—narratives now applied to Jews and Arabs in the Holy Land—are common in academia and beyond. The depressing, undeserved respect enjoyed by Salaita and his ilk in academe deserves exposure to a wider audience.


Andrew E. Harrod is a freelance researcher and writer who holds a PhD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a JD from George Washington University Law School. He is a fellow with the Lawfare Project; follow him on twitter at @AEHarrod. He wrote this essay for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.

Source: http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/14565

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