Iranian Women Fight for Freedom - Uzay Bulut

​
by Uzay Bulut

Three Iranian women held in Tehran's notorious Qarchak prison were sentenced recently to what could amount to more than 10 years in prison. Their "crime"? Failing to wear headscarves

Translations of this item:

French

• "The Islamic Republic authorities say 'compulsory hijab' is the law and must be obeyed. However, bad laws must be challenged and changed." — Masih Alinejad, Iranian-American journalist and award-winning activist.
• "The basis of this tyranny is the religious law that the government has been enforcing since the 1979 revolution. Women are second-class citizens, and essentially slaves in Iran. The international community needs to have the courage to delegitimize religious law and call it out for its tyrannical nature. Just as the free world delegitimized communism during the Cold War, it should do the same to religious law." — Nasrin Mohammadi, author of Ideas and Lashes: The Prison Diary of Akbar Mohammadi, about the torture and death in prison of her late brother; to Gatestone Institute.
• "The international community should also focus on Iran, struggle to end that regime and other similar governments across the world. With Iran, it should also point out the corruption, where religion is used as an excuse to steal money and power from the people." — Nasrin Mohammadi.
• "But we need support of the international community to raise this issue with Iranian authorities and take action." — Masih Alinejad.

Three Iranian women held in Tehran's notorious Qarchak prison were sentenced recently to what could amount to more than 10 years in prison. Their "crime"? Failing to wear headscarves, thereby defying the country's dress code. Pictured: An Iranian policewoman (left) warns a woman about her clothing and hair during a crackdown to enforce the regime's dress code, on April 22, 2007 in Tehran, Iran. (Photo by Majid Saeedi/Getty Images)

Three Iranian women held in Tehran's notorious Qarchak prison were sentenced recently to what could amount to more than 10 years in prison. Their "crime"? Failing to wear headscarves, thereby defying the country's Islamic dress code.

The women were apprehended after a video they posted online during International Women's Day went viral. In the clip, they are seen walking bear-headed on a Tehran metro and distributing flowers to female passengers.

"The day will come when women are not forced to struggle," one of them is heard saying, while another expresses hope that one day women in hijabs will be able to walk side-by-side with women who choose not to wear them.

The battle on behalf of a woman's right not to cover her head spurred Iranian-American journalist and award-winning activist Masih Alinejad – author, most recently, of The Wind in My Hair: My Fight for Freedom in Modern Iran -- to found a social-media movement called "My Stealthy Freedom."

The movement, as part of its efforts, created the hashtag #WhiteWednesdays, where Iranian women can share photos and videos of themselves appearing in public places without headscarves -- or pictures of themselves wearing symbolic white head coverings and other articles of clothing -- and discuss their views on women's rights.

During the five years since its establishment, My Stealthy Freedom has received thousands of photos and videos and has attracted more than a million followers.

In a recent interview with Gatestone, Alinejad, who lives in "self-exile" in New York, said:

"For 40 years, the Islamic Republic authorities have used coercion, public shaming and violence to crack down on women. What is different now is that the women are pushing back and demanding their rights. I started My Stealthy Freedom campaign against the 'compulsory hijab' in 2014, and since then, it has grown massively, with initiatives such as White Wednesdays giving the regime constant headaches, because women have become braver about challenging the authorities for their civil rights.
"The Islamic Republic authorities say 'compulsory hijab' is the law and must be obeyed. However, bad laws must be challenged and changed. Today, the women fighting against the backward compulsory hijab law are the biggest challenge to the clerical regime in Iran and, like a river that will eventually overcome any obstacle, these women cannot be stopped.
"But we need support of the international community to raise this issue with Iranian authorities and take action."

Alinejad's writings and political advocacy have come at a great cost, however. As she wrote in the New York Times in 2018, she has not been able to visit Iran since 2009 for fear of arrest. Also, her family, who "still lives in the poor village where [she] was raised in northern Iran," has been intimidated by the regime – so much so that her sister publicly disowned her on prime-time Iranian television.

Referring to the two-hour interrogation to which Alinejad's elderly mother was subjected recently, Amnesty International expressed concern "that the authorities may feature statements she gave under duress in future propaganda videos, given their long-standing record of engaging in such abusive practices."

Non-violent human rights activists are often violently targeted by the Iranian regime. Akbar Mohammadi, the brother of the US-based Iranian women's rights activist, Nasrin Mohammadi, for instance, was arrested during the student uprising in 1999. Akbar was tortured and eventually killed after seven years in prison. Nasrin published the book Ideas and Lashes: The Prison Diary of Akbar Mohammadi in 2012, about the torture of her late brother.

"Iran's violent crackdown of women is just another example of oppression that the Iranian people go through every day," Nasrin Mohammadi told Gatestone.

"The basis of this tyranny is the religious law that the government has been enforcing since the 1979 revolution. Women are second-class citizens, and essentially slaves in Iran. The international community needs to have the courage to delegitimize religious law and call it out for its tyrannical nature. Just as the free world delegitimized communism during the Cold War, it should do the same to religious law.
"The international community should also focus on Iran, struggle to end that regime and other similar governments across the world. With Iran, it should also point out the corruption, where religion is used as an excuse to steal money and power from the people."

Another U.S.-based Iranian activist Nasim Basiri -- a teacher's assistant at Oregon State University's Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies department -- told Gatestone that, in spite of the risks involved, the feminist movement is growing in Iran.

Basiri said she believes that "foreign feminists can be allies and serve as a voice for Iranian women and women's rights activists."

She continued:

"Many Iranian feminists believe that Western policies have favored the dictatorship in Iran that resulted in increased cultural and political violence against women. They do not want to experience what Afghan and Iraqi women have experienced because of wars. That does not lead to liberation and gives excuses to authoritarian regimes to silence women in the name of protecting the nation and fighting against 'imperialism.'"

Faranak Rostami, an Iranian refugee in Qatar, told Gatestone:

"Iranian women really want to exchange this regime for a liberal government. We need liberty and gender equality in all sectors. If we don't have that, we should be provided with refugee status abroad."

Uzay Bulut, a Turkish journalist, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute.

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14773/iranian-women-freedom

Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter

Mandatory Teacher Training Denigrates Christianity, Exalts Islam - Sara Dogan

​
by Sara Dogan

Christian scriptures described as “corrupted” while the Koran contains the “pure” word of God.

A Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan revealed deeply concerning information on a mandatory two-day teacher training session on Islam conducted for public school teachers in the state which denigrated Christianity while presenting Islam in an exclusively positive light.
“We found that the teachers were subjected to two days of Islamic propaganda, where Islam was glorified, Christianity disparaged, and America bashed—all funded by Novi taxpayers,” explained Richard Thompson, president and chief counsel at the Thomas More Law Center. He noted that the school district had not sponsored teacher trainings on Christianity, Judaism, or other religions over the past five years, but solely on Islam.
The “cultural competency” expert hired by the Novi Community Schools District in Michigan is Huda Essa of Culture Links LLC, a hijab-wearing woman of Arab descent. After examining numerous documents relating to Essa’s presentation including audio transcripts from her talk, the Thomas More Law Center (TMLC) found that “information on Islam she provided to Novi teachers was riddled with falsehoods and errors of omission that were clearly meant to deceive.”
During the two-day training session, Essa “spent a great deal of time in her Novi presentation talking about Muslim women, whom she described as victims of Islamophobia on the part of bigoted Americans,” explains a press release from the TMLC. She described cases where hijab-wearing Muslim women have been attacked or killed for their religious dress but provided no details on when or where these attacks occurred. As the Thomas More Law Center pointed out in its release, “anti-Muslim attacks are relatively rare in America and actually fell by 17 percent in 2017” while “Anti-Jewish hate crimes that year out-numbered anti-Muslim offenses by nearly four to one.”
Essa also claimed that mistreatment of women in Islamic countries is due only to “cultural” differences, and not to the Islamic religion itself, which in fact dictates radically different rules for men and women.
Her presentation repeatedly portrayed Christianity in a negative light, claiming that the Christian scriptures were “corrupted” over time whereas the Koran contains the true and “pure” word of God. Claiming that Christianity and Islam are “mostly similar,” she also asserted that Islam is in fact the world’s “only purely monotheistic religion.”

Teachers attending the training session were taught to believe in a whitewashed version of Islam. Essa told those in attendance that the word “Islam” is a variation on the Arabic word “salaam” which means peace. As the TMLC points out, Islam is more accurately translated as “submission,” since Muslims must submit to Allah and Sharia law before all other authorities. She also described the phrase “Allahu Abkar” as a refrain used to convey strong emotions; she did not mention that this same phrase is used as a battle-cry by Islamic terrorists conducting attacks.

The problematic presentation on Islam was not limited to one Michigan school district. Essa’s website lists nine separate school districts in Michigan as clients and also public schools, colleges and professional organizations in numerous other states including California, Texas, Georgia, and Florida. For the two-day presentation for the Novi Community Schools District, Essa’s organization was paid $5,000. The Freedom of Information Act requests filed by the TMLC further revealed that the district did not fully vet Essa before allowing her to conduct the mandatory training, nor did they conduct a factual analysis of her claims. In spite of the school district’s limited screening process, Essa was given access to data from student and faculty surveys.
“This type of infiltration amounts to an Islamic Trojan horse within our public-school systems,” Thompson of the Thomas More Law Center said. “No other religion gets this kind of special treatment in our schools.”
  To learn more about the Freedom Center's campaign to halt indoctrination in K-12 schools, please visit  www.stopk12indoctrination.org.  To read the K-12 Code of Ethics CLICK HERE. To order the Freedom Center’s new pamphlet, “Leftist Indoctrination in Our K-12 Public Schools,” CLICK HERE. To donate to the Stop K-12 Indoctrination campaign, CLICK HERE.


Sara Dogan

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274787/mandatory-teacher-training-denigrates-christianity-sara-dogan

Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter

Daring to Suggest that All Cultures Aren't Equal - Jason D. Hill

​
by Jason D. Hill

The Acting Provost of DePaul University issues a formal censure against me.

It is a common canard among the educated cognoscenti that all cultures are equal. Indeed, a few weeks after writing an article in which I declared that not all cultures were equal, the Acting Provost of DePaul University—where I am a full tenured professor of philosophy—issued what I and many others considered to be a formal censure against me. She declared that at her university it is considered an accepted truism that all individuals are valued equally, and that she was truly disheartened that a member of the academic community would assert that “not all cultures are indeed equal.”

I had stated that some cultures are abysmally inferior and regressive based on their comprehensive philosophy and fundamental principles, or, lack thereof—that guide or fail to protect the inalienable rights of their citizens.

Therein lay the category mistake that an educated academic along with countless others commit conflating the individual with the cultural. A culture may be described as a multiplicity of complex systems that include the arts, laws, customs, practices, norms, mores, beliefs, knowledge, and human capabilities acquired by human-beings in society. Culture also includes language, ethical systems, and religious institutions. One can indeed say that all persons are endowed with equal and intrinsic moral worth as human beings which they may corrupt by committing morally egregious acts; but as human beings, they are possessed of inviolable moral worth and dignity.

It is, however, a category mistake to transfer this innate respect and reverence for the individual on to the landscape of culture which is not an indivisible whole, and which possesses none of the requisite attributes of individuals that make them deserving of such unassailable respect. Persons' identities are not reducible to the practices of their cultures. Some cultural practices are downright horrific and evil; some are better than others. Persons in their respective cultures are free to identify themselves with those cultural practices that align themselves with their moral identities, and distances themselves from those they find repulsive.

The Unites States of America is not a perfect civilization; however, as a rights bearing culture in which the inalienability of rights are observed, a country in which civil liberties such as freedom of speech ( for now) is still upheld, freedom of conscience, and freedom of religious association or lack thereof respected, it is vastly superior to barbaric and primitive cultures that have yet to discover the individual and his or her inviolate dignity. The United States is a republic devoted to the inalienability of those rights that are conducive to human survival and flourishing. The United States, through its Constitution and Bill of Rights, is the first political system to discover the direct correlation between the rational nature of man qua man, and the exact political milieu in which that nature has to properly live and function if it is to live rather than perish.

Sudan, Nigeria, Mauritania, Libya and Algeria —all countries which still practice and/or tolerate chattel slavery by Arab and black Muslims against other Muslims and Christians—are not the moral, political or cultural equals of the United States, Israel, Great Britain and, say, France. Those countries are vastly superior to Saudi Arabia or Iran, or North Korea and Gaza, which do not permit religious reciprocity. Its political leaders permit the beheading of homosexuals in the streets, legalize torture, and have some of the most egregious records of gender inequality in the world. In the cases of Iran, Qatar and Saud Arabia, we witness them as sponsors of world-wide terrorism, and of placing restrictions on civil liberties and a free press.

Cannibalistic Aztec culture could never and will never be the cultural equal of any civilized and free culture existing anywhere in the world today. Cultures that permit freedom of association, respect equality for all citizens and legal residents before the law, that uphold gender equality as an unsalable moral axiom, that allow  individuals to cultivate their unique life plans—generally speaking—cultures that have discovered the fact that that an environment in which freedom and liberty are the milieu in which the individual needs to cultivate his or her rational nature qua human being and live an optimal existence, are undoubtedly, superior cultures, morally, spiritually and politically speaking.

It is a mark of sheer cognitive malarkey to claim that all cultures are equal. Just as some cultures are technologically more advanced than others, so some are politically more distinguished in their record on individual rights and the protection of private property and personal liberties than others. Rape cultures, that is, cultures in which rape is sanctioned by law such as in several parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan, are not moral equivalents of any western democratic countries in which rape, though committed by moral deviants, is illegal and punishable by objective law.

Brunei practices a Sharia penal code under Islamic law that allows death or stoning for adultery, homosexuality and even apostasy. Hamas continues to pose an existential threat to Israel by pounding the latter, (unprovoked), with a barrage of deadly rockets so often that one can barely keep track of the war attacks. Hamas routinely arrests and tortures peaceful critics of its totalitarian government with impunity. It is a blatant advocate and practitioner of Jihadism. There is no culture, so to speak, inside Gaza. It is defined, incidentally, by its absence of any significant life and culture. Nevertheless, even countries that lack a significant culture can wreak havoc on the lives of others.  A rich culture is potent because it creates life. One that is an ecological sociopolitical   ballast, or worse, evil, can destroy life. 

The question remains, too, of not only how to think about cultures that are unequal to others but: what to do about those that are evil; cultures that exist as moral rogue states that betray the civilizational maturity expected by an international order that protects the well-being of the global commons? We are talking here of morally inverted states that pose a serious threat to the international order; evil cultures that are political sinkholes that lie outside the process of history, and that are reverting to pre-modern ages. The goals of such cultures —among other things—are to eradicate the individual, and practices of freedom and liberty from the earth.

Evil cultures are drainage systems that tax the existential, spiritual and psychological resources of their citizens who must expend a disproportionate amount of energy just to stay alive—let alone flourish.

So, what is the antidote? In a forthcoming article on moral rogue states that pose existential  threats to the global commons, countries that violate the conditions of their own sovereignty which is secured by objective constraints of justice, I will outline and philosophically defend a process of what I call: global incarceration. This involves an ethical defense of placing intolerable, incorrigible and politically inverted countries into a state of political receivership by any free and civilized country willing and able to do so based on criteria of political expediency, and military and technological capability.

Until such time, let us rid ourselves of the simplistic egalitarian idea that all cultures are equal. That some are moral and political sinkholes from which millions seek to flee is obvious. That such escapees or freedom seekers aspire to self-actualize in other cultures that, in their judgments, are better suited to their aspirations, hopes and dreams constitutes enough proof that some cultures are inimical to human well-being, and others better suited for the development and practice of human agency.


Jason D. Hill is professor of philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago, and a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. His areas of specialization include ethics, social and political philosophy, American foreign policy and American politics. He is the author of several books, including “We Have Overcome: An Immigrant’s Letter to the American People” (Bombardier Books/Post Hill Press). Follow him on Twitter @JasonDhill6.

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274741/daring-suggest-all-cultures-arent-equal-jason-d-hill

Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter

IDF increases readiness in the north - Arutz Sheva Staff

​
by Arutz Sheva Staff

IDF cancels major exercise as forces improve preparedness for possible scenarios in northern Israel.

Over the past week, the IDF's ground forces, intelligence, Air Force, and Navy improved their preparedness for various scenarios in the Northern Command area and in the 91st Division.

In addition, in accordance with the assessment of the situation, it has been decided to postpone the IDF exercise which was planned for the second half of next week.

The exercise was designed to enhance IDF readiness and was planned as part of the 2019 training program.

Moreover, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi decided to postpone the end of IDF Spokesperson, Brigadier General Ronen Manelis' term, which was slated for this Tuesday. Manelis will remain in his position and the date of the handover to Brigadier General Hidai Zilberman will be decided upon in the future.

Reserve soldiers have received a message regarding the relevant time they need to deploy.


Arutz Sheva Staff

Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/268184

Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter

The Dangerous Stalinism of the "Woke" Hard-Left - Alan M. Dershowitz

​
by Alan M. Dershowitz

Feeling unsafe is the new trigger word for demanding censorship.

• People on the "woke" hard-left seem so self-righteous about their monopoly over Truth (with a capital T) that many of them apparently see no reason to allow dissenting, politically incorrect, views to be expressed. Such incorrect views, they claim, make them feel "unsafe." They can feel safe only if views they share are allowed to be expressed. Feeling unsafe is the new trigger word for demanding censorship.
• The other dangerous similarity between the Stalinists and the "wokers" is that both disdain due process for those they deem guilty of political incorrectness or other crimes and sins. They reject any presumption of innocence or requirement that the accuser bear the burden of proof.
• For Stalinist and "wokers," there is no uncertainty or fallibility. If they believe someone is guilty, he must be. Why do we need a cumbersome process for determining guilt? The identities of the accuser and accused are enough. Privileged white men are guilty perpetrators. Intersectional minorities are innocent victims. Who needs to know more? Any process, regardless of its fairness, favors the privileged over the unprivileged.
• That is why I make the controversial claim that today, the "woke" hard-left is more dangerous to civil liberties than the right. To be sure there are hard right extremists who would use — and have used — violence to silence those with whom they disagree. They are indeed dangerous. But they have far less influence on our future leaders than their counterparts on the hard-left. They are not teaching our college age children and grandchildren. They are marginalized academically, politically and in the media. The opposite is true of hard-left Stalinists. Many have no idea who Stalin even was, but they are emulating his disdain for free speech and due process in the interests of achieving the unrealizable utopia they both sought. They also have in common the attitude that noble ends justify ignoble means.
• We must always remember that it is not only the road to hell that is paved with good intentions. It is also the road to tyranny.

Civil liberties are in greater danger today from the intolerant hard-left than from the bigoted hard-right. This may seem counterintuitive: There has been far more violence — mass shootings in malls, synagogues and other soft targets — from extremists who identify more with the hard-right than with the hard-left. But the influence of the hard-left on our future leaders is far more pervasive, insidious and dangerous than the influence of the hard-right.

People on the "woke" hard-left seem so self-righteous about their monopoly over Truth (with a capital T) that many of them see no reason to allow dissenting, politically incorrect, views to be expressed. Such incorrect views, they claim, make them feel "unsafe." They can feel safe only if views they share are allowed to be expressed. Feeling unsafe is the new trigger word for demanding censorship.

A "woke" rally in Washington. We must always remember that it is not only the road to hell that is paved with good intentions. It is also the road to tyranny. Photo: Wikipedia.

No university student has the right to be safe from uncomfortable ideas, only from physical threats, and any student who claims to be in physical fear of politically incorrect ideas does not belong at a university. The most extreme example of this distortion of the role of higher education took place at my own university when a distinguished dean of a Harvard residential college was fired from his deanship because some "woke" students claimed to feel unsafe in his presence because he was representing, as a defense lawyer, a man accused of rape.

We often forget that the concept of "political correctness" originated in the Stalinist Soviet Union, where Truth — political, artistic, religious — was determined by the central committee of the Communist Party and any deviation was regarded as unacceptable. To be sure, there is a vast difference between how Stalin treated political incorrectness and how the "woke" generation treats it. Stalin murdered those who deviated from his Truth, while "wokers" generally shun and discredit, though there has been occasional violence from elements of the hard-left toward those who deviate from their Truth. But both produce a similar result: less dissent, less reliance on the marketplace of ideas and more self-censorship.

For many "wokers," freedom of speech is nothing more than a weapon of the privileged used to subjugate the unprivileged. It a bourgeois concept that emanates from an anachronistic white, male constitution that is irrelevant to the contemporary world. Free speech for me — the underprivileged — but not for thee — the privileged. That is what the "wokers" want. Affirmative action for speech!

The other dangerous similarity between the Stalinists and the "wokers" is that both disdain due process for those they deem guilty of political incorrectness or other crimes and sins. They reject any presumption of innocence or requirement that the accuser bear the burden of proof. These bourgeois concepts are based on the recognition of human fallibility and uncertainty. For Stalinist and "wokers," there is no uncertainty or fallibility. If they believe someone is guilty, he must be. Why do we need a cumbersome process for determining guilt? The identities of the accuser and accused are enough. Privileged white men are guilty perpetrators. Intersectional minorities are innocent victims. Who needs to know more? Any process, regardless of its fairness, favors the privileged over the unprivileged.

When I was in college in the 1950s, it was the McCarthyite right that was censoring and denying due process. It was the liberal left that was defending free speech, dissent and due process. But for some on the left, this stance was self-serving, because it was people on the extreme left who were being denied these protections. Now that it is conservatives who are being censored and denied due process on campuses around the country, many on the left have remained silent. Civil liberties for me, but not for thee.

That is why I make the controversial claim that today the "woke" hard-left is more dangerous to civil liberties than the right. To be sure there are hard right extremists who would use — and have used — violence to silence those with whom they disagree. They are indeed dangerous. But they have far less influence on our future leaders than their counterparts on the hard-left. They are not teaching our college age children and grandchildren. They are marginalized academically, politically and in the media. The opposite is true of hard-left Stalinists. Many have no idea who Stalin even was, but they are emulating his disdain for free speech and due process in the interests of achieving the unrealizable utopia they both sought. They also have in common the attitude that noble ends justify ignoble means.

It is precisely because the ends sought by the "wokers" are often noble — racial and gender equality, a fairer distribution of wealth, protection of the environment, a women's right to choose, gay marriage — that liberals find it harder to condemn them for their intolerance toward civil liberties. But we must always remember that it is not only the road to hell that is paved with good intentions. It is also the road to tyranny.

• Follow Alan M. Dershowitz on Twitter and Facebook

Alan M. Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law Emeritus at Harvard Law School and author of The Case Against the Democrats Impeaching Trump, Skyhorse Publishing, 2019. He is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Gatestone Institute.

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14794/the-dangerous-stalinism-of-the-woke-hard-left

Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter

To European Leaders, Jewish Flesh Is Cheap - Guy Millière

​
by Guy Millière

As PLO Executive Council member Zuheir Mohsen said in 1977: "The Palestinian people does not exist... Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people..."

• The Oslo Accords were based on the illusion that the PLO could totally change and suddenly become a "partner for peace"... It soon became clear that the Palestinian Authority was still the PLO: terrorist attacks quickly multiplied. The money received by the Palestinian Authority was used to continue incitement to murder and payments to incentivize it.
• In 1967, a change of strategy took place. No one, the PLO decided, would speak of a "war for the destruction of Israel". Instead, they would call it a "war of national liberation". From then on, the PLO was presented as a "liberation movement".
• Arabs who had left Israel in 1948-49, many of whom remained in refugee camps, were defined as the "Palestinian people"; in this way were the Palestinian people invented. As PLO Executive Council member Zuheir Mohsen said in 1977: "The Palestinian people does not exist... Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people..."
• The leaders of the Palestinian Authority have, in fact, never stopped resorting to "armed struggle", the name they give to terrorism and murdering Jews. To "frustrate all the schemes of Zionism", they invented the Palestinian people; their "struggle for national liberation" gave them international recognition. By renaming terrorism and murdering Jews "armed struggle", they made their use of terrorism and murder acceptable. By signing the Oslo Accords, they could appear interested in peace without having to renounce terrorism. They could even demonize Israel and give it the image of a barbaric and cruel country while continuing to murder Jews.
• "If you look at history... what ends conflicts is one side giving up.... and then it's over.... in World War II, [the Germans] were forced to give up... and note how much they benefited by giving up." -- Daniel Pipes, historian, November 19, 2017.
• No U.S. president had ever told Palestinian leaders that they were lying, or had required them to stop inciting murder and financing terrorism, and no U.S. president had ever decided to cut funding for the Palestinian Authority as long as it continued to incentivize terrorism. President Donald J. Trump did.
• French President Emmanuel Macron accepted using taxpayer money to reward murdering Jews. Macron also still accepts the United Nations' (UNRWA's) unique definition of Palestinian "refugees": that they must include endless generations of descendants.

The Oslo Accords were based on the illusion that the PLO could totally change and suddenly become a "partner for peace"... It soon became clear that the Palestinian Authority was still the PLO: terrorist attacks quickly multiplied. The money received by the Palestinian Authority was used to continue incitement to murder and payments to incentivize it. Pictured: From left to right, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, U.S. President Bill Clinton, and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat at the signing of the Oslo I Accord at the White House in Washington, DC, on September 13, 1993. (Vince Musi/The White House/Wikimedia Commons)

August 7th. Israel. When Dvir Sorek, an 18-year-old student returned from Jerusalem to his school after having bought some books for his rabbis as an end-of-year gift, he was stabbed to death by two Arab terrorists.

As his funeral took place, while his father was delivering the eulogy, the inhabitants of the Arab village of Silwad, two miles North, to celebrate the murder, were setting off fireworks.

Sorek was apparently a peaceful teenager who had never hurt anyone. Among the books he brought was one by an Israeli left-wing writer, David Grossman, supporting the need to create a Palestinian state.

Sorek's "fault" was to be a Jew.

His name extends the long list of Jews killed or wounded by Arab terrorists. Some murders are even more cruel. The man who raped and murdered Ori Ansbacher in February in Jerusalem said, "I wanted to kill a Jew and be a martyr." In 2011, five members of the Fogel family, including three young children, were slaughtered. In 2014, two murderers with axes, knives and a gun entered a synagogue in Jerusalem during morning prayers and massacred five worshipers and a policeman who tried to stop the attackers. On December 13, 2018, at a bus stop near Ofra, two young Jews were shot dead by terrorists. Four days before that, another gun attack injured seven Jews. A wounded young woman survived, but despite the efforts of doctors, the baby she was carrying died. Last week, in a terrorist bombing on a hiking trail near Dolev, north of Jerusalem, a teenage Jewish girl was murdered. Her father and brother were seriously wounded.

After each murder, celebrations like those in Silwad take place. Candies and sweets are passed out in the street. If the murderers are shot by the Israeli soldiers or the police, they are proclaimed martyrs, and are celebrated. Their portraits are displayed in Palestinian towns. Whether the terrorist murders are killed or whether they are arrested, tried and imprisoned in Israel, they or their families are awarded a generous monthly stipend from the Palestinian Authority -- an amount higher than the average Palestinian wage. Sometimes, the mothers of the murderers say how proud they are of the act their sons committed.

The depravity built-in to murdering civilians, the celebrations that follow, the prestige granted to racist murderers, the alluring payments granted as a reward, and the pride of the mothers all stem from an incitement to hate Jews that is injected into the minds of the Palestinian Arabs by the people and institutions that lead them.

Textbooks used in Palestinian schools are filled with calls to murder Jews, even if the topic is math. Newspapers of the Palestinian Authority regularly publish anti-Semitic cartoons worthy of those published by Nazi Germany's Der Stürmer. The UN's Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination devoted an entire day, August 13, 2019, to studying the anti-Semitic propaganda broadcast by the Palestinian Authority's media. The data gathered was overwhelming. The legal adviser of UN Watch, Dina Rovner, showed the committee how the Palestinian Authority's media "perpetuates antisemitic stereotypes such as that Jews are greedy, that they are part of a conspiracy to control the world, that they are baby killers, and that they poison Palestinians and steal their organs".

Unfortunately, the Palestinian Authority is still fundamentally a terrorist organization dedicated to destroying Israel and Israeli Jews by all means.

Until they issued the Venice Declaration in 1980, the nine member states of the European Community saw the PLO as a terrorist group, and for good reasons: in December 1973, a Palestinian attack at Rome's Leonardo da Vinci Airport resulted in the deaths of 34 people, and two Palestinian attacks also took place at Orly Airport in Paris, one in January 1975, another in May 1978. The US and Israel, until 1991, defined the PLO as a criminal terrorist organization, and contacts between Israelis and PLO leaders were prohibited by Israeli law.

The Oslo Accords were based on the illusion that the PLO could totally change and suddenly become a "partner for peace". The Palestinian Authority was created a few months later and became the new name of the PLO.

It soon became clear that the Palestinian Authority was still the PLO: terrorist attacks quickly multiplied. The money received by the Palestinian Authority was used to continue incitement to murder and payments to incentivize it.

The leaders of the Western world pretended that it did not matter, and looked the other way. They insisted that the Israeli leaders negotiate, as if there were no terrorism and as if incitement to murder did not exist.

So, Israeli leaders negotiated. The negotiations failed.


Since 2008, the Palestinian Authority has stopped negotiating with Israel, thereby nullifying its commitments in the Oslo Accords. Instead, the Palestinian Authority is conducting an international diplomatic offensive. According to the Palestinian Authority, the non-existent "State of Palestine" is now recognized by 139 countries, including several member states of the European Union and the Holy See. The State of Palestine was granted non-member state observer status at the United Nations in 2012 and the opportunity to join various UN agencies. In 2018, the Group of 77, the largest intergovernmental organization of developing countries in the UN, chose as its leader the "State of Palestine".

As leaders of the Palestinian Authority see that the fantasy among most of the leaders of the Western world is still strong, they no longer even hide their refusal to renounce terrorism. PA President Mahmoud Abbas, now approaching the 14^th year of his four-year term, proudly announced that he will continue to reward the murderers of Jews and the murderers' families. Qadura Fares, head of the Palestinian Prisoners Club, recently said:

"Palestinian society holds a completely different attitude toward those whom Israel calls 'terrorists.' These militants are, instead, regarded by us as people who sacrifice themselves for the liberation of the Palestinian people".

Palestinian leaders, without anyone ever blaming them, also deny Israel's right to exist. On August 14, Ibrahim Khraishi, the Palestinian Authority's Ambassador to the UN, said. "What we face is the Zionist movement, I would like to remind you that in 1975, the General Assembly adopted Resolution 3379, indicating that Zionism is a form of racism". He left out that the resolution had been revoked in 1991 and that the Zionist movement reached its goal: Israel does exist. Khraishi spoke as if the state of Israel still did not. His defamation and attempted erasure of Israel were not even mentioned in the Western media.

Hamas, a more violent and radical organization than the Palestinian Authority, is often used as an example to try to float the idea that the Palestinian Authority is, by contrast, "moderate". Middle East expert Raymond Ibrahim said in 2014 that Hamas has "chosen fast jihad". However, just because the Palestinian Authority proceeds more slowly, does not make it fundamentally different.

The Muslim world in general has never accepted the existence of Israel. On the day the birth of Israel was proclaimed, May 14, 1948, the armies of five Arab countries invaded Israel to destroy the newborn State. Israel survived. Another war to destroy Israel took place in June 1967, then another in 1973. Each time, Israel won.

In 1967, a change of strategy took place. No one, the PLO decided, would speak of a "war for the destruction of Israel". Instead, they would call it a "war of national liberation". From then on, the PLO was presented as a "liberation movement". Arabs who had left Israel in 1948-49 and remained in refugee camps were defined as the "Palestinian people", and so the Palestinian people were invented. As PLO Executive Council member Zuheir Mohsen said in 1977:

"The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality, today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct Palestinian people to oppose Zionism."

A political program, adopted in Cairo, Egypt, at the Palestinian National Council on June 9, 1974, spoke of the need to create a "Palestinian national authority". The program defined this creation as a "first step", a basis for moving towards "the liberation of all Palestinian territory". Twenty years later, the Palestinian Authority was created. The goal nevertheless remains the "liberation of the entire Palestinian territory", meaning all of Israel.

The program also mentioned the need to "resort to all means necessary" and insisted on the importance of "armed struggle". It talked about a strategy of "frustration of all the schemes of Zionism". The leaders of the Palestinian Authority have, in fact, never stopped resorting to "armed struggle", the name they give to terrorism and murdering Jews. To "frustrate all the schemes of Zionism", they invented the Palestinian people; their "struggle for national liberation" gave them international recognition. By renaming terrorism and murdering Jews as "armed struggle", they made their use of terrorism and murder acceptable. By signing the Oslo Accords, they could appear interested in peace without having to renounce terrorism. They could even demonize Israel and give it the image of a barbaric and cruel country while continuing to murder Jews.

The journalist Amotz Asa-El and the historian Moshe Dann recently wrote about the multifaceted war led by the Palestinians in the context of a "war of attrition".

"Wars of attrition," Asa-El notes, "are not decided by their parties' balance of troops, arms or resources, but by their balance of spirit. The winner will not be the one left with more land, population or treasure, but the one whose spirit will last longer".

Dann writes:

"From a Palestinian perspective, their war of attrition has been successful. Despite engaging in incitement and terrorism, they are recognized and supported by the international community, including their demand for statehood... it encourages the belief that they can win if they are committed and determined."

The possibility for Israel of turning the tide and prevailing has been defined by Daniel Pipes:

"If you look at history (and I'm a historian), what ends conflicts is one side giving up. Now, think about it; if you and I are in a struggle, it's only going to end when one of us gives up, and then it's over. Until one of us gives up, the conflict can resume. The Koreas could be at war today, for all we know, because neither side has given up. World War I, the Germans lost, but didn't give up, so they gave it another try, and in World War II, they were forced to give up, and they did; and note how much they benefited by giving up." [Emphasis added.]

In other words, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict will end only when Palestinians realize they cannot achieve their goal of eliminating the Jewish state of Israel.

For now, Palestinians, with the help of the Iranians and the Europeans, continue to think that they will be able to eliminate Israel.

U.S. President Donald J. Trump is the first world leader to see that Palestinians must understand that they will not win and eliminate Israel.

No U.S. president had ever told Palestinian leaders that they were lying, or had required them to stop inciting murder and financing terrorism, and no U.S. president had ever decided to cut funding for the Palestinian Authority as long as it continued to incentivize terrorism. President Trump did.

No world leader had ever before questioned the unique definition of Palestinian "refugees" given by the United Nations (UNRWA): that they must include endless generations of descendants. No world leader had dared to say that there are not five or six million refugees, but only a few tens of thousands, and that the flooding of Israel by people incited to murder Jews would not take place. No world leader had officially recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, or relocated an embassy in Jerusalem. President Trump did.

President Trump is also the first U.S. president since the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993 never to have affirmed the need for a "Palestinian state".

Alas, the attitude of other Western political leaders, particularly in Europe, is quite different.
French President Emmanuel Macron promised to give the Palestinian Authority the funding that the United States no longer granted him, and that he would not renounce rewarding Jew-killers and their families. Macron accepted using the money of French taxpayers to reward murdering Jews. Macron also still accepts UNRWA's definition -- just for Palestinians -- of being refugees in perpetuity, through the generations. He called President Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel a "serious mistake", and stressed several times the urgent "need for a Palestinian State".

German Chancellor Angela Merkel adopted the same positions. Federica Mogherini, the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, said in April:

"... the European Union voice, and I can probably say the European voice, has been very loud, clear and consistent all over these years on our constant work for the implementation of the Oslo agreements, and the creation of a Palestinian state... the European Union is and will remain the biggest and the most reliable donor to the Palestinians..."

She did not utter a word of condemnation regarding the Palestinian Arabs' use of terrorism or murdering Jews.

In 2016, Mahmoud Abbas delivered a speech in the European Parliament in which he falsely claimed that "Certain rabbis in Israel have said very clearly to their government that our water should be poisoned in order to have Palestinians killed." He received a standing ovation. No European leader took him to task for him for his lies.

Macron, Merkel and the European Union show Palestinian leaders that as long as the Western world is divided, they can continue to incite and murder.

In the European media, the murders of Jews, such as that of Dvir Sorek, are hardly ever mentioned. When murderers, such as those who killed Sorek, are eliminated by the Israeli army or the police, it is the Israelis who are depicted as having "killed a Palestinian" and as the real murderers.

As a character said in the movie Exodus, "Jewish flesh is cheap". Jewish flesh was already cheap in Europe 90 years ago. In the eyes of Macron, Merkel, Mogherini and many European journalists, it still is.

The European Union is considering a regulation -- it does not yet exist -- requiring labels to be placed on products made by Jews in Judea and Samaria, to caution buyers that the product was made in a "settlement colony." The shape of the labels that would be used has not yet been defined. Maybe a European will suggest a yellow star?

Dr. Guy Millière, a professor at the University of Paris, is the author of 27 books on France and Europe.

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14786/europe-jewish-flesh-is-cheap

Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter

Can China Be Unified? - Michael Ledeen

​
by Michael Ledeen

Xi faces three rebellions.

For several years, I was vice president of the US-China Strategic Review Commission, and we spent a lot of time with the top experts. We all generally agreed that China would grow larger and more powerful, but the central question was whether this would be a peaceful transformation or a violent one. Very few of these people (almost all men) thought China could get through the transition without some sort of violent convulsion, as we see today.

Chinese unification has long been a challenge to the chiefs of their dynasties, and today there are three big areas that seek various degrees of independence from Beijing: Tibet, Hong Kong, and the Uighur territories. 

Each territory has made its own arrangements with the capital, giving formal control to Beijing while retaining varying degrees of independence for themselves. The Dalai Lama has sworn he will stay away from his Tibetan homeland, but the nature of contemporary communications is such that he maintains a constant channel to his people. The violence in Hong Kong we see daily. And the Uigurs, who for some time received support—including military training—from Iran, are now prime targets of Chairman Xi.

So the Chinese are facing three convulsions, shortly after making Xi president for life, and they are dealing with a nationwide economic challenge that is testing the abilities of Xi and his colleagues to manage the highly ambitious global expansion they have set for themselves. The Belt and Road Initiative, flush with cash just a year ago, is cutting back on investment in places like sub-Saharan Africa. And if you remember all those artificial islands in the South China Sea that the Chinese dredged up in apparent preparation for offensive action in the Pacific, you’ll be surprised to learn that Beijing isn’t pressing ahead to arm them. As Stephen Green writes in Pj Media:

But as conspicuous as the bases’ capacity to project China’s offensive power is how little of that might Beijing has actually deployed there. The Pentagon’s latest report on China’s military notes that no new militarization has been observed since China placed air defense and anti-ship missiles in the Spratlys last year.

The decision to withhold offensive power likely goes hand-in-hand with Xi’s long-term thinking, hoping that Trump is replaced a year from November with a more "moderate" president. 

Meanwhile, Xi has his hands full with the monster demonstrations in Hong Kong, provoked at least in part by the dictator’s decision to crack down on the protests. If he cannot reassert control there, he may face similar demands for greater freedom around the country. In fact, there has been considerable disruption already, as demonstrated in the Uighur territories.

The US-China Strategic Review Commission found that internal Chinese reporting on the real state of economic affairs was often “a hoax,” suggesting that official growth rates were simply made up  We don’t know how much contemporary data has been falsified, but we do know—on the basis of our own intelligence—that the tempo of militarization of the islands has diminished. It may be that the reduction of the tempo is the result of a shortage in available funding, or that it is the result of a desire by Xi and his men to at least temporarily avoid direct military conflict with the United States, or for some other reason.

I keep thinking back to all those experts who confidently predicted that China would have to overcome a period of crises before—or if—the country could find its way to a stable unity. Ever since Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon saw a chance to bring Beijing into the “community of nations” by offering American largesse, Western diplomats have pursued this goal with the confidence that a wealthy China would inevitably seek warm relations with those who had made it possible for China to become a rich nation. Current events suggest that culture, tradition and politics play a role at least as important.

China has a long history of rebellion against would-be tyrants, and the three large pieces of territory in more or less open revolt show that the tradition is still vibrant. Xi has the support of the Beijing bureaucracy, but the rest of the country remains at odds with him. At the moment, Hong Kong presents his greatest challenge. How will he deal with it? Will he eventually send in the armed forces? Will he step back and leave Hong Kong to its own devices, transferring the city’s wealth and experience in the international marketplace to another place? Nobody knows if either expedient can or will succeed.

We only know that, as in eras past, China is trying to find some way to survive its crisis.

Michael Ledeen

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274747/can-china-be-unified-michael-ledeen

Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter

Boris Johnson shows the steel and U.K.'s Tories soar in the polls - Monica Showalter

​
by Monica Showalter

Johnson's stellar capacity to use power has unified Britain, and at just the right time for it.

Not too long ago, Britain's Tories were in the loo, poll-wise.

In a July 21 story headlined, "As Brexit looms, the U.K. Tories fight for survival," NBC News reported:

After almost 10 years in power and 185 years in existence, its voters and members are leaving in droves to support the upstart Brexit Party. A fractious leadership battle has been defined by who can talk the toughest on Europe — a union Britain has been part of for half a century.

And don't think this wasn't the conventional wisdom on all sides - as these stories here and here signal. As wildly opposed as those organs' political lines are, the stories they all put out could have been written by the same person. The Economist put it, quite Britishily, this way, last June 13: "The question is not who will lead the Conservative Party, but whether it will survive." 

Welp. Not anymore. Here's The Sun scarfing up the real story:

BORIS Johnson's gamble to shutdown Parliament has paid off as the Tory's lead over Labour has almost doubled in just three weeks, latest polls have revealed.
The boost comes after the Prime Minister announced his decision to prorogue Parliament for nearly five weeks next month in order to deliver Brexit.
The shock move was approved by the Queen, leaving just days for a possible vote of no confidence in Boris, or for rebel MPs to pass a law to push back the Brexit date.
And latest polls has seen the Tory's lead over Labour almost double in three weeks since the decision.

Suck it up, doomsayers. Rule, Britannia! What's fair to say here is that something has changed, and that change is the one change that really matters, that of the new personality influencing events. 

Britain has a new leader, Boris Johnson, its last-ditch gamble on the man with the slightly wild and unexpected personality who seems to have understood the stakes and recognized the kind of power that was needed to correct it. He's acted ruthlessly on Britain's far-left oppostionists and obstructionists and the British voters are throwing their support to him in droves. Turns out that's exactly what Britain -- and its old Tory party -- really needed.

According to the Sun:

More than half said they were happy with the PM's decision to prorogue Parliament for nearly five weeks next month - and four in ten were "extremely happy".

A poll of Sun readers described the decision as brave, decisive, excellent and fantastic. Others said they were ecstatic and delighted to hear the news.

Nearly three quarters of the 630 respondents said they thought it was more likely now that Boris would finally be able to get us out of the EU by October 31.

What it shows us here is that Johnson is a power player - and a risk taker, and a man with a general-like use of strategy. Johnson's stellar beginning came of his step to first neutralize the leftist clown show at home, taking quite a risk to get the Queen to shut down parliament, and now he's amassing the national unity needed to slay the dragons Britain faces abroad as it tries to extricate itself from the European Union morass. This is one hell of a good beginning.

Conrad Black, who follows British affairs closely, has written a superb explainer of how Britain's power structure works and how Johnson has showed significant genius in using it to bend the 'arc of progress' (as Obama likes to say) toward the will of the British voters. Not surprisingly, his party is now soaring in the polls. Black begins deliciously, and his piece just get better and better:

No one in this country should underestimate the significance, for Canada and the world, of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s ingenious measure for assuring the end of the crisis of immobilized government that has possessed the United Kingdom in the past three years. In 2016, 52 per cent of a heavy turnout of British voters chose to leave the European Union. The minority voted to remain — there was no option on the ballot for a compromise. The stark choice was selected by former prime minister David Cameron, because he was convinced that there was no chance that Britain, whatever its level of grumbling, would choose to “crash out” of the association with Europe in which the political elites were comfortable.

The British are the wrong electorate to bluff with such an artificially polar choice. The European Union has had the habit of simply ignoring negative votes in member countries and of waiting for the national governments to frighten their populations into reconsidering their rash decisions. This was what happened with the French, the Danes, and the Irish, and on the second try, the Unionists won. But those votes were not on such fundamental issues, and the negative votes were against the wishes of the incumbent governing parties, and no other European country has such an extensive history in worldwide activities or is as geographically insular as Britain.

This is amazing. The Tories are back. The British really are going to get what they voted for when the voted to leave. And now they have a leader who knows what he's doing. Small wonder he and his party are now soaring. Good job, Boris!

Image credit: Photo illustration by Monica Showalter with use of detail from an image by International Atomic Energy Agency Director General // CC BY-SA 2.0

Monica Showalter

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/08/boris_johnson_shows_the_steel_and_uks_tories_soar_in_the_polls.html

Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter