The Pakistani dilemma.

 

by Caroline B. Glick

 

In the current era of ideological polarization, throughout the West, the Right and the Left diverge on almost every issue. One of the few convictions that still unifies national security strategists across the ideological spectrum is that it would be a global calamity of the first order if al Qaida gets its hands on nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, due to the rapid demise of nuclear-armed Pakistan as a coherent political unit, this nightmare scenario is looking more possible than ever. Indeed, if events continue to move in their current direction, it is more likely than not that in the near future, the Taliban and al Qaida will take possession of all or parts of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal.

This week has been yet another bad week in Pakistan. On Monday Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari officially surrendered the Swat Valley — an immense district in Northwest Pakistan that encompasses seven provinces — to the Taliban when he signed a regulation implementing Islamic Sharia law in the area. Following the government's capitulation in Swat, the Taliban now controls eighteen out of Pakistan's thirty provinces in its northwest and Federally Administered Tribal Areas that border Afghanistan. Only two provinces remain under full government control.

With its new territory, the Taliban now controls the lives of some 6.5 million Pakistanis. For their part, the civilians live in a state of constant terror. Since the Taliban took control of Swat in February, executions, public floggings, bombings of girls' schools, restaurants, video and music stores have become routine occurrences. As a merchant in Swat's main village of Mingora told the Wall Street Journal, "We are frightened by this brutality. No one can dare to challenge them."

And with just sixty miles now separating the Taliban from the capital city of Islamabad, the Taliban are well positioned to continue their march across the country. Indeed, the Taliban appear unstoppable.

The Pakistani government, for its part, seems both unwilling and incapable of taking concerted action to destroy Taliban forces. Again according to the Wall Street Journal, Taliban fighters are flooding the Swat Valley with thousands of veteran fighters from Afghanistan and Kashmir and setting up training camps throughout the areas. Moreover, they are recruiting — both through intimidation and persuasion — still more thousands of locals to join their lines.

A further sign of government capitulation came on Tuesday when Pakistan's Supreme Court released Maulana Abdul Aziz, the leader of the Lal Masjid or Red Mosque in Islamabad from house arrest. In 2007 Aziz used his al Qaida/Taliban affiliated madrassa to incite an Islamist takeover of the Pakistani capital. It took then president Pervez Musharraf three months to forcibly take over the Red Mosque. Arguably, Musharraf's actions against Aziz and his followers were the ultimate cause of his political downfall last year.

According to the online Long War Journal, over the past year, the government has signed capitulation agreements with all of Aziz's Taliban and al Qaida allies and returned control of the mosque/madrassa complex to the jihadists. At the time of Aziz's attempted overthrow of the Musharraf government and since, the Red Mosque became emblematic of the jihadist war to take over the nuclear-armed state. Aziz's release in turn symbolizes the current government's willingness to surrender.

For their part, US strategists appear despondent in their assessments of the situation in Pakistan, and its impact on NATO's capacity to stabilize the security situation in neighboring Afghanistan. US Army General David Petreaus, who is responsible for the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan has called the Taliban an "existential threat" to the Pakistani state. David Kilcullen, who advised Petreaus on his successful counter-insurgency campaign in Iraq and now advises the White House, warned last week that Pakistan could fall within six months. The growing consensus in Washington — particularly given the recent unification of command of Taliban forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan under the so-called Council of United Holy Warriors and their open collaboration with al Qaida — is that Pakistan is a far greater danger than Afghanistan.

The US's assessment of the threats emanating from Pakistan and Afghanistan has been largely the same under both the Bush and Obama administrations. In both cases, the US has identified Taliban/al Qaida acquisition of nuclear weapons as a primary threat to US security that must be prevented. Both have also asserted that the unimpeded operation of al Qaida training camps in Afghanistan/Pakistan is a grave threat to US and global security.

Then too, the US's strategy for contending with these challenges has been similarly focused for much of the past eight years. The US has sought to militarily and politically defeat the Taliban/al Qaida in Afghanistan by fighting them on the battlefield and cultivating democracy. In Pakistan, the US has sought to defeat the Taliban by strengthening the Pakistani government mainly through financial assistance to its civilian and military budgets.

In recent years, the US has also worked to decapitate Taliban/al Qaida leadership through targeted assassinations inside Pakistan carried out by unmanned aircraft. Under the Obama administration the US has declared its intention to maintain these strategies but expand them by increasing the number of soldiers in Afghanistan and by increasing its civilian assistance to the Pakistani government to $1.5 billion per year.

Unfortunately, the US's efforts in Pakistan to date have failed miserably and there is little cause to believe that expanding them will change the situation in any significant way. Both under Musharraf's military dictatorship and under Zardari's civilian government, the Pakistanis have failed to stem the Taliban's advance.

The Pakistani military and Inter-Service Intelligence agency (ISI) have refused to divert their resources away from fighting India and towards fighting the Taliban. They have refused to take any concerted action against terrorist groups, including al Qaida that openly operate on Pakistani soil.

Against the wishes of the US, they have continued to surrender territory to the Taliban in the framework of "peace accords." And still today, the Pakistani government and military openly oppose US military action on Pakistani territory, preferring to allow the Taliban to take over the country to permitting the US to help the Pakistani military defeat them.

What the situation in Pakistan clearly exemplifies is the fact that sometimes there are no good options for contending with international security threats. Once Pakistan became a nuclear power in 1998, the US lost much of its ability to pressure the Pakistani government and military. Washington understood that if it pushed too hard, the Pakistanis could opt to abandon the West and collaborate with the Taliban and al Qaida which by then were not only openly operating from Pakistani territory after having taken over Afghanistan with Pakistani support two years earlier. They were also attacking US targets — including the 1998 attacks against the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks demonstrated just how dangerous jihadists in Pakistan/Afghanistan are to global security, it has been clear that Pakistan's nuclear arsenal is a primary threat to global security. For eight years, the US's chosen methods for staving off the threats have effectively served as little more than holding actions because Pakistan's governments have been both unable and unwilling to wage successful military or political campaigns against the Taliban and al Qaida.

Musharraf believed that he could play a double game of at once helping the US in Afghanistan and sheltering al Qaida and the Taliban in Pakistan. The Zardari government, which exerts little control over the military and the ISI, has simply expanded and intensified Musharraf's policy of capitulating to the jihadists. Due to the Taliban's current control over the territories bordering Afghanistan, Pakistan is no longer in a position to support NATO operations in Afghanistan. And in the meantime, the advancing Taliban forces in Pakistan itself place Pakistan's nuclear weapons and materials in unprecedented jeopardy.

Given the failure of the US's political strategies of securing Pakistan's nuclear arsenal by supporting Pakistan's government, and fighting the Taliban and al Qaida in Afghanistan, it is becoming apparent that the only sure way to prevent the Taliban/al Qaida from taking control over Pakistan's nuclear weapons is to take those weapons out of commission.

The US has two basic options for accomplishing this goal. It can send in forces to take control of Pakistan's nuclear installations and remove its nuclear arsenal from the country. Or, it can destroy Pakistan's nuclear installations. Both of these options — which are really variations of the same option — are extremely unattractive. It is far from clear that the US military has the capacity to take over Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and it also unclear what the ultimate effect of a military strike against its nuclear arsenal would be in terms of lives lost and areas rendered uninhabitable due to nuclear fallout.

The only other option that is discussed by US strategists today is that India may serve as deux ex machina and destroy Pakistan's nuclear arsenal itself. Reasonably believing that India would be the first target for Pakistan's nuclear weapons — which Pakistan built in order to threaten India — US military strategists do not expect India to sit back and wait for the US to defend it against a Taliban/al Qaida-ruled nuclear-armed Pakistan.

For India however, the calculation is not as clear as one might assume. New Delhi knows it can expect for the US to support the imposition of various political and military sanctions against it if it were to attack Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. Consequently, it is possible that Washington's unwillingness to make a tough but necessary call may mean that no one is willing to make it.

The situation in Pakistan of course is similar to the situation in Iran. There, as Iran moves swiftly towards the nuclear club, the US on the one hand refuses — as it does with Pakistan — to make the hard but essential decision to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. And on the other hand, it warns Israel daily that it opposes any independent Israeli operation to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear-armed state. That is, the Obama administration is forcing Israel to weigh the specter of a nuclear-armed Iran against the threat of an abrogation of its strategic alliance with the US in the event that it prevents Iran from becoming a nuclear power on its own.

In both Pakistan and Iran, the clock is ticking. The US's reluctance to face up to the ugliness of the options at its disposal will not make them any prettier. Indeed, with each passing day the stark choice placed before America and its allies becomes ever more apparent. In both Pakistan and Iran, the choice is and will remain seeing the US and its allies taking swift and decisive action to neutralize nuclear programs that threaten global security, or seeing the world's worst actors successfully arm themselves with the world's most dangerous weapons.

 

Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post.

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

 

Proactive foreign policy: Israel meeting the Obama challenge.

 

by Ami Isseroff

 

Those who feel Israel is threatened by the difference noises out of Washington should view them as a challenge and an opportunity rather than a threat. It can be an opportunity if Israel uses the positive aspects of the Obama administration policy and shows that it is willing to work for those aspects.

President Obama and the US administration insist they are intent on peace between Israelis and Palestinians. From Israel's point of view, from the Zionist point of view, peace has always been viewed as a good thing. Until the 1990s, Israel had the "patent" on wanting peace in the Middle East. Even the government of Menachem Begin was solidly pro-peace and made great sacrifices in fact, to achieve peace with Egypt. We must never allow Israel to maneuver itself into the position of the Arab states in 1948 or the Arab states at the Khartoum conference, telling the entire world they are opposed to peace, and we must never allow the Arab states and the Palestinians to usurp the historically pro-peace position of Israel.

The first thing that must be done is to remove a fictive bogey man. Israel has been allowing itself to be cast as a "bad guy" that opposes a two solution. Strictly speaking, that is not true. Avigdor Lieberman's by now infamous speech did not rule out a two state solution, despite media reports. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also refused to rule out a two state solution. A report in Maariv indicates Israel will accept the two state solution, That being the case, it would be simple to make a statement saying that the Israeli government is not opposed in principle to a two state solution, a fact that was implied in any case by the reiterated support of the Road Map and the relevant UN Resolution in Lieberman's speech. The statement is not forthcoming, one surmises, because of opposition at home. So the statement will be delayed, and will be exacted as a "concession" by the Obama administration.

More important than the irrelevant non-issue of the "two state" principle, is the question of how to conduct public and private negotiations. The Palestinians rightly negotiated based on principles, while the Olmert administration, for the most part, fiddled with maps. The Palestinians were then able to make clear and simple statements about their "rights" which sound good to sympathetic ears. The Palestinians have also been adept at mobilizing press support for their positions, which are not examined very closely and against Israeli positions. The Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs isn't even in the game regarding media presence.

Those who wanted to believe that these statements of "right of return" "right to a capital in east Jerusalem" were not inimical to peace, could believe it. After all, the Palestinians did not say they would not recognize Israel. At least not officially. True, Mohamed Dahlan pointed out that the Fatah never recognized Israel. No major media will pay attention to this statement, whereas if a third assistant clerk in the Israeli foreign ministry says off the record that Israel doesn't want a two state solution, this "news" will appear on the front page of the New York Times. Saeb Erekat also quietly explained, once again, that the Palestinians are never going to accept any Jewish rights in the historic Jewish capital of "East" Jerusalem:

There will be no peace whatsoever unless East Jerusalem – with every single stone in it – becomes the capital of Palestine.

Since Israel doe not bother to publicize these remarks or to take issue with them, they become non-events. Reacting to outrageous statements, and ensuring that the world knows about them, should be a priority. In the best IDF tradition, carry the war to the enemy. Instead, the Israel government and Ministry of Foreign Affairs seem to be mired down in fending off attacks on its own position, and sometimes even in trying to figure out what its position is on matters of principle.

If the Israel Foreign Ministry and the Israel Foreign Minister were doing their jobs, Dahlan's statement would have provoked an immediate reaction. The

But the most important element of Israeli policy must be proactive. President Barack Obama handed Israel a huge foreign policy weapon, that has not been utilized to its full potential, because the Israel's Foreign Ministry is not set up to deal with that sort of thing properly. In Istanbul, Obama said:

“...I believe that peace in the Middle East is possible. I think it will be based on two states, side by side: a Palestinian state and a Jewish state”.

"Moderate" Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas has refused to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. From the beginning, that should have been the cornerstone of Israeli policy - Arabs, Palestinians included, must recognize the validity of the League of Nations British Mandate for Palestine and of UN General Assembly Resolution 181, both of which explicitly recognize the right of the Jewish people to self determination. After all, that is what the whole conflict is about. Once the Palestinians are will willing to accept international law, we can quibble about borders, refugees and other issues. President Obama's off-the-cuff remarks must be converted into a commitment by the United States to support the existence of Israel and its recognition by its Arab neighbors as the homeland of the Jewish people. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has already made a statement demanding that Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Too bad that demand was not part of Avigdor Lieberman's speech. It will be remembered, also, that Ehud Olmert made a similar effort and then mysteriously dropped it. This issue has to be a centerpiece of Israeli policy, raised at every opportunity. not just a sound bite to be used when the occasion seems to call for it.

Similarly, though it is not a prior condition for negotiations, everyone should be made to understand that Israel will assert the historic rights of the Jewish people in "East Jerusalem." The Palestinians have been allowed to establish a historical "fact on the ground" by dint of repetition: They have convinced at least themselves, and perhaps much of the world, that they have a "right" to a capital in East Jerusalem, even though Jerusalem was never the capital of any Arab state, and was not even included in the Palestinian area in the 1947 partition plan. Jerusalem was always known as the ancient capital of Jewish people, and the old city had a large Jewish community until it was ethnically cleansed in pogroms beginning in 1920 and culminating in the expulsion of the remaining Jews by force by the Jordanian Legion in 1948. Absurdly, a sizeable part of world opinion now believes that somehow "East Jerusalem" ought to be the capital of an Arab state and that Israel and the Jews have no rights there.

On these bases, when it is clear what is is being negotiated and what the end of the process will be for Israel, and it is clear that the agreements will be kept at least by the Fatah lead Palestinian Authority, it makes sense to continue negotiations. If they have any intellectual honesty, even the most enthusiastic proponents of "Annapolis" in the USA and in the EU would have a hard time explaining why Israel has to negotiate and what is to be negotiated with a partner that declares that its constituent groups - containing the same personnel who do the negotiating - are not bound by any agreements, and that the end goal of the negotiations is to destroy Israel as a Jewish state. But we can hardly expect others to agree with this point of view if the Israel Foreign Ministry itself has not advanced it at every opportunity.

Ami Isseroff

Original content is Copyright by the author 2009.

 

What I planned to say in the House Of Lords.

 

by Geert Wilders

 

 

 

Geert Wilders was invited to speak before the House of Lords and was then not allowed into England.

Background:

Excerpts From "Death To Free Speech In The Netherlands" by Brooke M. Goldstein and Aaron Meyer, American Spectator January 22, 2009; archived at >http://www.meforum.org/article/2053.

On Wednesday, freedom of speech in Europe took a new and devastating turn, as a Dutch appellate court ordered the prosecution of Geert Wilders, parliamentarian and filmmaker, charginghim with "inciting hatred and discrimination" against Muslims for his film exposing the threat of radical Islam.

[...]

After releasing a ten-minute self-produced film entitled "Fitna" , Wilders found himself wound up in a litany of "hate speech" litigation, one such suit filed by a radical Imam asking for 55,000 Euros in compensation for his hurt feelings.

Ironically, the film's narrative is primarily comprised of quotes from the Koran which incite violence and death to "infidels" as well as scenes of an Imam preaching death to the Jews. Akin to something out of the Twilight Zone, the Imams who routinely spout hate speech from the pulpit and who are instigating these suits are never themselves charged with incitement to immediate violence. Moreover if the film "Fitna," which merely quotes the Koran and depicts angry Imams, is "hate speech" then what is the Koran itself?

Suspiciously, the wording of the appellate court's ruling strongly echoes public criticism made by the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) when the earlier prosecution was dropped, where the OIC censured prosecutors for ignoring the "thin line separating freedom of speech and the instigation of hatred, animosity and discrimination."

Even more disturbing is that the State of Jordan, most likely acting as a stalking horse for the OIC, has issued a request for Wilders' extradition to stand trial in Jordan for blasphemy of Islam, a crime for which Shari'a law declares the penalty to be death. The Dutch parliament has taken the extradition request very seriously, and has shut out Wilders from all multi-lateral negotiations. As a precaution, Wilders no longer travels abroad unless he can obtain a diplomatic letter from the destination state promising he won't be extradited. For years now, Wilders has lived under looming death threats complemented by the threat that any day, Interpol might issue a warrant for his arrest at Jordan's behest.

[...]

The very notion that a judge could weigh a man's freedom of speech against what the court construed as "one-sided generalizations" is an absurd and dangerous misrepresentation of the very concept of free speech. However, that pales in comparison to the fact that a democratically elected and sitting member of government is going to be prosecuted for a thought crime for speaking to his constituents about matters of national security. In Iran dissdents are routinely arrested for holding opposing political views. Now we are seeing the same tactics being employed in Europe, but this time, enacted by Western governments at the behest of Islamist groups and against their own citizens.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

This is the text of the speech that Geert Wilders would have given in the House of Lords if he had not been banned from the United Kingdom:

London, Feb. 12, 2009

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much.

Thank you for inviting me. Thank you Lord Pearson and Lady Cox for showing Fitna, and for your gracious invitation. While others look away, you, seem to understand the true tradition of your country, and a flag that still stands for freedom.

This is no ordinary place. This is not just one of England's tourist attractions. This is a sacred place. This is the mother of all Parliaments, and I am deeply humbled to speak before you.

The Houses of Parliament is where Winston Churchill stood firm, and warned — all throughout the 1930's — for the dangers looming. Most of the time he stood alone.

In 1982 President Reagan came to the House of Commons, where he did a speech very few people liked. Reagan called upon the West to reject communism and defend freedom. He introduced a phrase: 'evil empire'. Reagan's speech stands out as a clarion call to preserve our liberties. I quote: If history teaches anything, it teaches self-delusion in the face of unpleasant facts is folly.

What Reagan meant is that you cannot run away from history, you cannot escape the dangers of ideologies that are out to destroy you. Denial is no option.

Communism was indeed left on the ash heap of history, just as Reagan predicted in his speech in the House of Commons. He lived to see the Berlin Wall coming down, just as Churchill witnessed the implosion of national-socialism.

Today, I come before you to warn of another great threat. It is called Islam. It poses as a religion, but its goals are very worldly: world domination, holy war, sharia law, the end of the separation of church and state, the end of democracy. It is not a religion, it is a political ideology. It demands you respect, but has no respect for you.

There might be moderate Muslims, but there is no moderate Islam. Islam will never change, because it is build on two rocks that are forever, two fundamental beliefs that will never change, and will never go away. First, there is Quran, Allah's personal word, uncreated, forever, with orders that need to be fulfilled regardless of place or time. And second, there is al-insal al-kamil, the perfect man, Muhammad the role model, whose deeds are to be imitated by all Muslims. And since Muhammad was a warlord and a conqueror we know what to expect.

Islam means submission, so there cannot be any mistake about its goal. That's a given. The question is whether the British people, with its glorious past, is longing for that submission.

We see Islam taking off in the West at an incredible speed. The United Kingdom has seen a rapid growth of the number of Muslims. Over the last ten years, the Muslim population has grown ten times as fast as the rest of society. This has put an enormous pressure on society. Thanks to British politicians who have forgotten about Winston Churchill, the English now have taken the path of least resistance. They give up. They give in.

Thank you very much for letting me into the country. I received a letter from the Secretary of State for the Home Department, kindly disinviting me. I would threaten community relations, and therefore public security in the UK, the letter stated.

For a moment I feared that I would be refused entrance. But I was confident the British government would never sacrifice free speech because of fear of Islam. Britannia rules the waves, and Islam will never rule Britain, so I was confident the Border Agency would let me through. And after all, you have invited stranger creatures than me. Two years ago the House of Commons welcomed Mahmoud Suliman Ahmed Abu Rideh, linked to Al Qaeda. He was invited to Westminster by Lord Ahmed, who met him at Regent's Park mosque three weeks before. Mr. Rideh, suspected of being a money man for terror groups, was given a SECURITY sticker for his Parliamentary visit.

Well, if you let in this man, than an elected politician from a fellow EU country surely is welcome here too. By letting me speak today you show that Mr Churchill's spirit is still very much alive. And you prove that the European Union truly is working; the free movement of persons is still one of the pillars of the European project.

But there is still much work to be done.

Britain seems to have become a country ruled by fear. A country where civil servants cancel Christmas celebrations to please Muslims. A country where Sharia Courts are part of the legal system. A country where Islamic organizations asked to stop the commemoration of the Holocaust. A country where a primary school cancels a Christmas nativity play because it interfered with an Islamic festival. A country where a school removes the words Christmas and Easter from their calendar so as not to offend Muslims. A country where a teacher punishes two students for refusing to pray to Allah as part of their religious education class. A country where elected members of a town council are told not to eat during daylight hours in town hall meetings during the Ramadan. A country that excels in its hatred of Israel, still the only democracy in the Middle-East. A country whose capitol is becoming 'Londonistan'.

I would not qualify myself as a free man. Four and a half years ago I lost my freedom. I am under guard permanently, courtesy to those who prefer violence to debate. But for the leftist fan club of Islam, that is not enough. They started a legal procedure against me. Three weeks ago the Amsterdam Court of Appeal ordered my criminal prosecution for making 'Fitna' and for my views on Islam. I committed what George Orwell called a 'thought crime'.

You might have seen my name on Fitna's credit role, but I am not really responsible for that movie. It was made for me. It was actually produced by Muslim extremists, the Quran and Islam itself. If Fitna is considered 'hate speech', then how would the Court qualify the Quran, with all its calls for violence, and hatred against women and Jews?[emphasis added]

Mr. Churchill himself compared the Quran to Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf. Well, I did exactly the same, and that is what they are prosecuting me for.

I wonder if the UK ever put Mr. Churchill on trial.

The Court's decision and the letter I received form the Secretary of State for the Home Department are two major victories for all those who detest freedom of speech. They are doing Islam's dirty work. Sharia by proxy. The differences between Saudi-Arabia and Jordan on one hand and Holland and Britain are blurring. Europe is now on the fast track of becoming Eurabia. That is apparently the price we have to pay for the project of mass immigration, and the multicultural project.

Ladies and gentlemen, the dearest of our many freedoms is under attack. In Europe, freedom of speech is no longer a given. What we once considered a natural component of our existence is now something we again have to fight for. That is what is at stake. Whether or not I end up in jail is not the most pressing issue. The question is: Will free speech be put behind bars?

We have to defend freedom of speech.

For the generation of my parents the word 'London' is synonymous with hope and freedom. When my country was occupied by the national-socialists the BBC offered a daily glimpse of hope, in the darkness of Nazi tyranny. Millions of my country men listened to it, illegally. The words 'This Is London' were a symbol for a better world coming soon. If only the British and Canadian and American soldiers were here.

What will be transmitted forty years from now? Will it still be 'This Is London'? Or will it be 'this is Londonistan'? Will it bring us hope, or will it signal the values of Mecca and Medina? Will Britain offer submission or perseverance? Freedom or slavery?

The choice is ours.

Ladies and gentlemen,

We will never apologize for being free. We will never give in. We will never surrender.

Freedom must prevail, and freedom will prevail.

Thank you very much.

Geert Wilders MP
Chairman, Party for Freedom (PVV)
The Netherlands
 

This was published February 13, 2009 by Baron Bodissey on the Gates of Vienna blog

 

Geert Wilders' Wake-Up Call

 

by Evelyn Markus

At the same time President Obama was greeting King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia in Europe last week, Dutch MP Geert Wilders was receiving standing ovations in California for expressing exactly the opposite message: do not bow down to Islam.

Wilders is on tour in various Western countries to raise the consciousness of politicians and the public on the  advancement of Islam in Western societies. During his lectures, he urgently calls for stopping this progress in order to preserve our human rights such as freedom of speech, the equality of women and gays and other precious liberties. He was invited by the David Horowitz Freedom Center to speak in California for the first time. 

Surrounded by an army of security comparable to that of his fellow countrywoman Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wilders gave the following message to his audiences: Islam is not a religion but a totalitarian ideology aiming for world domination and for the total submission of everyone who is non-Muslim. There is no freedom or egalitarianism or human rights in Islam. Islam is not peace, but violence. To illustrate this point, Wilders showed his film Fitna. In Fitna, Mr. Wilders compiles various verses of the Koran that call for Muslim domination, hatred and violence, as well as media footage showing death threats, terror attacks, executions and hate speech that are in line with these Koranic imperatives. It also demonstrates the small steps by which Sharia law is introduced in Western societies, such as Halal banking, Jihad lessons in elementary school, Muslims hindering doctors taking care of women, and certain imams legalizing violence against gays.

The statement Mr. Wilders makes in his film is that it is not poverty or Western oppression which is the main driver of Muslim intolerance, aggression and violence but Islam itself.  

As expected, these statements were not tolerated by most Muslim countries and an economic boycott of the Netherlands was organized for allowing production of this ‘insulting’ film. Furthermore, the Kingdom of Jordan is currently threatening to bring Mr. Wilders before it’s high court in an attempt to convict him there for ‘insulting Islam’. But even more alarming, the freedom to make such statements is threatened in Western countries as well. In the Netherlands, Mr. Wilders is currently being prosecuted for alleged ‘incitement of hatred’ and in France a French human rights group recently filed suit against him for “hate speak” against Muslims. Last month, the British border police rejected his entrance into the UK, where he was invited by a member of the House of Lords to show Fitna in Parliament. In the opening remarks of his lectures last weekend in California, Mr Wilders thanked the US border police ‘for allowing me to enter into the US and speak out freely’.  

Mr. Wilders is constantly demonized as a hater of Muslims, a racist and a fascist in the politically correct Dutch media. If he had criticized Christianity instead of Islam, he would not have been rejected with the same passion. Today, cultural relativism is the norm, with a one-sided embargo on criticizing non-Western cultures, such as Islam, out of feelings of ‘white guilt’.

Wilders doesn’t hate Muslims though as he welcomes all immigrants who want to integrate and adhere to Western values. However, he does advocate for a halt of the mass immigration from Muslim countries into Western societies. This is not because he doesn’t like the people or because he thinks all Muslims are terrorists, but because Muslim immigrants tend to bring Muslim values with them from their countries of origin which Wilders considers a threat to democracy and freedom. Values of Muslims in Europe are often pre-modern and resistant to change since the Islamic religious rules and the Muslim community do not allow such changes. There are no institutions in Islam that have the authority to alter these pre-modern values and rules.  

To label Wilders a racist, a xenophobe or a fascist is false. Instead, he should be seen as a democrat who seeks to protect modern democratic societies against the realistic threat of a stealth Islamic revolution, evolving from mass immigration, step by step introduction of Sharia law, and restriction of freedom of speech. He proposes a First Amendment for freedom of speech in Europe and discourages the US from joining the UN Human Rights Council which tries to ban freedom of speech for people critical of Islam. Mr. Wilders applauds legislation that would prevent the introduction of Sharia law. He calls cultural relativists the ‘useful idiots’ – a term coined by Lenin - who unknowingly facilitate this stealth revolution. 

Cultural relativists in the Netherlands usually belong to the highly educated socio-economic elite and tend to live in the best parts of town where hardly any immigrants live. It is in the lower income neighborhoods, with mostly less educated people, where cultures mingle and clash. It is primarily in these neighborhoods where anti-Muslim sentiments rapidly evolve. The problems that people of native Dutch backgrounds meet in their co-existence with Muslim immigrants are mostly ignored by the established political parties. This lack of understanding by the ruling political class makes the party Mr. Wilders leads -  the Freedom Party - into the biggest party in his country in the polls of today.  It is noteworthy to point out that many Dutch citizens who would vote for Mr. Wilders now could at some point be attracted by political movements more to the right if he were not part of the political spectrum.  

Therefore, instead of calling Mr. Wilders a fascist, it seems more appropriate to see him as a fervent democrat who is saving the Netherlands from two forms of fascism: Islamo-fascism and the ultra-right.

In June, his Freedom Party will participate in the elections for European Parliament and it will be interesting to see how his leadership will develop on a European scale. 

 

Evelyn Markus is a psychologist specialized in conflict, aggression and violence and works in the Netherlands and the United States. She publishes in Dutch newspapers on Islam in the West and anti-Semitism.

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

 

Geert Wilders and the fight for Europe.

 

by Bat Yeor

  

Does defending Western values constitute "inciting hatred"?

Britain has just witnessed the spectacle of a duly elected parliamentarian from another EU country, Geert Wilders of the Netherlands, being denied entry to the country because he constituted "a threat to public policy." Wilders, after being detained briefly at Heathrow, was sent back to Holland — where he has further legal troubles. Three weeks earlier, a Dutch appeals court had ordered prosecutors to begin criminal proceedings against Wilders for "inciting hatred and discrimination" and "insulting Muslim worshippers" through his public statements and his 2008 film, Fitna. The order to proceed with the criminal prosecution resulted from pressure put on European states and on the UN Human Rights Council by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). The OIC's aim is to punish and suppress any alleged Islamophobia, around the world but particularly in Europe, and it has been a leader in creating the conditions that made the U.K.'s Wilders ban possible.

The OIC is one of the largest intergovernmental organizations in the world. It encompasses 56 Muslim states plus the Palestinian Authority. Spread over four continents, it claims to speak in the name of the ummah (the universal Muslim community), which numbers about 1.3 billion. The OIC's mission is to unite all Muslims worldwide by rooting them in the Koran and the Sunnah — the core of traditional Islamic civilization and values. It aims at strengthening solidarity and cooperation among all its members, in order to protect the interests of Muslims everywhere and to galvanize the ummah into a unified body.

The OIC is a unique organization — one that has no equivalent in the world. It unites the religious, economic, military, and political strength of 56 states. By contrast, the European Union represents half as many states and is a secular body only, and the Vatican — which speaks for the world's 1.1 billion Catholics — is devoid of any political power. Many Muslims in the West resist the OIC's tutelage and oppose its efforts to supplant Western law with sharia. But the OIC's resources are formidable.

The organization has numerous subsidiary institutions collaborating at the highest levels with international organizations in order to implement its political objectives worldwide. Its main working bodies are the Islamic Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (ISESCO), which seeks to impose on the West the Islamic perception of history and civilization; the Observatory of Islamophobia, which puts pressure on Western governments and international bodies to adopt laws punishing "Islamophobia" and blasphemy; and the newly created Islamic International Court of Justice. As stated in its 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, the OIC is strictly tied to the principles of the Koran, the Sunnah, and the sharia. In a word, the OIC seeks to become the reincarnation of the Caliphate.

The OIC regularly reiterates its commitments to protecting the political, historical, religious, and human rights of Muslims in non-OIC states, especially Muslims who form the majority in specific regions of non-Muslim countries — such as the southern Philippines, southern Thailand, and western Thrace in Greece — as well as Muslims in places like the Balkans, the Caucasus, Myanmar, India, and China. The OIC supports Hamas and the Palestinians in their struggle to destroy Israel, as well as the Muslim fight for "legitimate self-determination" in "Indian-occupied Jammu and Kashmir." It has condemned the "continual Armenian aggression against Azerbaijan," and it expresses its full solidarity with "the just cause of the Muslim Turkish people of Cyprus" and with Sudanese President Omar Hassan Al-Bashir, whom many hold responsible for encouraging the massacres in Darfur. The seat of the OIC is in Jeddah, but the organization regards that location as temporary: Its headquarters will be transferred to al-Kods (Islamized Jerusalem) when that city has been "liberated" from Israeli control.

In its efforts to defend the "true image" of Islam and combat its defamation, the organization has requested the UN and the Western countries to punish "Islamophobia" and blasphemy. Among the manifestations of Islamophobia, in the OIC's view, are European opposition to illegal immigration, anti-terrorist measures, criticism of multiculturalism, and indeed any efforts to defend Western cultural and national identities. The OIC has massive funding from oil sources, which it lavishly spends on the Western media and academia and in countless "dialogues." It influences Western policy, laws, and even textbooks through pressures brought by Muslim immigrants and by the Western nations' own leftist parties. Hence, we have seen Kristallnacht-like incitements of hate and murder against European Jews and Israel conducted with impunity in the cities of Europe — where respect for human rights is supposed to be one of the highest values.

Geert Wilders is the latest victim of this enormous world machinery. His crime is maintaining that Europe's civilization is rooted in the values of Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and the Enlightenment — and not in Mecca, Baghdad, Andalusia, and al-Kods. He fights for Europe's independence from the Caliphate and for its endangered freedoms. He had received serious death threats even before Fitna was released.

Many Muslims in the West support him, but Geert Wilders's principal weapons are his courage and his willingness to resist even his own government, which is slowly submitting to the OIC's pressures. Wilders's enemies pretend that he is an insignificant personality who makes "provocative" statements only in search of fame. In fact, if his motivation were self-interest, he could do far better by courting the OIC's favors — as so many Europeans are doing, consciously or unconsciously — rather than risking his freedom and indeed his life.

Bat Yeor is the author of studies on the conditions of Jews and Christians in the context of the jihad ideology and the sharia law. Recent books include: Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide and Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, both from Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

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

 

The banality of Evil .

 

by Mark Silverberg

  
A resurgence of the oldest of ancient hatreds.

Anti-Semitism never really died after the Holocaust, it just became unfashionable. That is no longer the case. In the wake of the Gaza War and with the global economy in a tailspin, disturbing events have been occurring in Britain - events that do not bode well either for the future of British Jewry or for the future of British democracy.

The war in Gaza combined with the global economic downturn have revealed a dark side to British society as demonstrated by the extent to which he British media, intelligentsia and political class have buckled in the face of the Islamic jihad.

On average, according to the Observer, there are seven anti-Semitic attacks every single day in the UK — attacks that have come in the form of graffiti, vandalism, arson, violent assaults on Jews in the streets, and hate e-mails. Jewish schools have been granted extra protection, and the Community Security Trust, which monitors anti-Semitism in British society, continues to issue dire warnings. According to British police, Jews are four times more likely to be attacked because of their religion than are Muslims. As a result, every synagogue service and virtually every Jewish communal event now requires guards to be on the lookout for violence from both neo-Nazis and Muslim extremists. Orthodox Jews have become particular targets; some have begun wearing baseball caps instead of skullcaps and concealing their Star of David jewelry for fear of being attacked. Melanie Phillips, writing in the Wall Street Journal (Europe) expressed her concern in historical terms:

"Years of demonizing Israel and appeasing Islamist extremism within Britain have now coalesced as a result of the media misrepresentation of the Gaza War as an atrocity against civilians, in an unprecedented wave of hatred against Israel, and a sharp rise in attacks on British Jews"

 

— and the authorities have done little or nothing to quell such incitement. In one case, the police even told pro-Israel demonstrators to put away their Israel flags because they were 'inflammatory,' yet they allowed anti-Israel demonstrators to scream support for Hamas, and even to dress up as hook-nosed Jews "drinking" the blood of Palestinian babies. In another, students at Oxford University gleefully proclaimed that in five years, their campus "would be a Jew-free zone," and in another, the London-based Royal Court Theatre is staging a viciously anti-Israeli play by Caryl Churchill that Melanie Phillips described in The Spectator as reminiscent of anti-Semitic plays performed in the Middle Ages portraying Jews as demonic Christ-killers.

These events form part of a disturbing trend suggesting that Britain is slowly succumbing to Islamic d'himmitude motivated in large measure by Muslim intimidation — the latest expression of which saw Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders banned from Britain by the British Home Office as "a genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat" because his film Fitna graphically and honestly documented the brutality of radical Islamists and twinned their actions to specific verses in the Quran. As Bat Yeor wrote recently in National Review Online:

"His crime is maintaining that Europe's civilization is rooted in the values of Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and the Enlightenment — and not in Mecca, Baghdad, Andalusia, and al-Kuds. He fights for Europe's independence from the Caliphate, and for its endangered freedoms. He had received serious death threats even before Fitna was released."

In all this, it is becoming clearer with each passing day that Londonistan is no longer a safe place for Jews to practice their religion, nor are many places in Europe which is demographically morphing into Eurabia. In a recent comment in The Spectator, one reader opined:

"I for one resent the fact that I can no longer congregate outside my synagogue. I resent the fact that my children attend Jewish school protected by security fences, concrete blocks and guard posts. I resent the fact that my eldest daughter ...... should feel intimidated on campus and questioned in a hostile, finger pointing manner how she feels as a Jewess on the question of Gaza, and if she supports the Israeli actions."

And a Birmingham school is investigating reports that twenty children chased a 12-year-old girl (the only Jewish pupil in the school) chanting "Kill all Jews" and "Death to Jews".

Listening to the hatred reflected in the cries of "Death to the Jews", one could almost imagine that it must have been the Jews who were behind the 9/11 attacks, burned down the Danish embassies throughout Europe and the Middle East two years ago over the Mohammed cartoons, planned and executed the suicide bombing attacks on the London tube and Madrid railway stations, decapitated Daniel Pearl, Nick Berg and scores of other infidels, train their children to become "martyrs for Allah", use the web to incite hatred and jihad, strap twenty pounds of explosives to their bodies and self-detonate in restaurants, subways, pizza parlors, buses, shopping malls, coffee shops, marketplaces, hotels and tourist resorts in France, London, Bali, Yemen, Jordan, Kenya, Algeria, Istanbul, Dar es Salaam, Mumbai and Israel and are waging a vicious religiously-inspired holy war against "non-believers."

I suspect that if the British students who attended the seventeen sit-ins and demonstrations held at British universities to protest Israeli "massacres" in Gaza had chanted "Death to all Muslims" (just as they screamed "Death to all Jews" during the Gaza War), the British Left and civil rights organizations would have been all over them demanding staff resignations, boycotts of their schools and colleges, the arrest of the student organizers, and compensation to the British Muslim community. But it appears that only the Jews merit such revulsion.

These actions reflect more than an anti-Israel stance. They represent a sickness gaining prevalence within British society - a sickness reflected by the growing social acceptance of the most ancient of religious hatreds.

Neither the British media (that excels in the art of whitewashing Muslim extremism) nor British society generally seem to care much that radical Islamists like Hamas are involved in at least twenty-five conflicts going on around the globe including, but not limited to Afghanistan, Algeria, Bangladesh, Bosnia, Congo, Ivory Coast, Cyprus, East Timor, India, Indonesia (2 provinces), Kashmir, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kurdistan, Macedonia, the Middle East, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Somalia, Sudan, Russia-Chechnya, Tajikistan, Thailand, Uganda and Uzbekistan.

Nor are they especially concerned (as Phillips points out) that the government of Sri Lanka is attempting to eradicate terrorism by a military campaign in which, according to the UN, "many civilians are being killed", thousands made homeless, hundreds of thousands trapped, and to which, as food shortages grow, the government refuses to allow access to journalists. Despite all this, there are no sit-ins on British campuses against the Sri Lankans, no violent protests outside its High Commission, and no calls to boycott Sri Lankan products and academics. Nor do I recall any protests against Hamas for firing thousands of missiles at Israeli cities, towns and villages for years, not to mention terrorizing over 250,000 men, women and children who have spent the better part of the past three years running to bomb shelters several times a day.

Somehow, the deaths of 1,300 Gazans (two-thirds of whom were terrorists hiding behind Palestinian human shields) have evoked more outrage in Britain than the estimated two million dead in Congo, the tens of thousands of Iraqis slaughtered by Sunni and Shia terrorists in Iraq, or the massacres of civilians killed by their own governments in Zimbabwe, Uzbekistan, Burundi, Chad, Afghanistan, Columbia, Guatemala, Haiti, Guinea, Rwanda and West Bengal.

If anyone should be charged with war crimes in Gaza, it should be Hamas not Israel. But not according to British public opinion. The bottom line seems to be - if you are willing to excuse terrorist attacks against Jews in southern Israel where a tiny democracy is seeking to protect its people against terrorism, it's just as easy to turn a blind eye to Jews being attacked elsewhere, even in the streets of London or Birmingham.

In many ways, Jews are the barometers of the societies in which they live — the canary in the mineshaft of democratic societies - which accounts for why the U.S., Canada and Australia remain resilient, vibrant democracies where minorities continue to thrive. But these countries have become more the exception than the rule. The history of the 20th century suggests that as it has gone with the Jews, so it has gone with democracy. By that standard, the events surrounding the Gaza War combined with the global economic downturn foreshadow a difficult period ahead not just for British Jewry, but for British (and by extension European) democracy.

The results of a recent survey show that 31% of Europeans blame Jews for the global economic meltdown (including more than half of Hungarian, Polish and Spanish respondents) and 40% of Europeans consider Jews to have too much power.

There is little doubt that the Gaza campaign merely provided a pretext to unleash deep-seated anti-Semitism in Britain, across Europe and beyond. Under these circumstances, there can be no better justification for the existence of a Jewish State than the persecution of Jews outside of it.
 

Mark Silverberg is a former member of the Canadian Justice Department and a past Director of the Canadian Jewish Congress (Western Office). He served as a consultant to the Secretary General of the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem during the first Palestinian intifada. A foreign policy analyst with the Ariel Center for Policy Research (Israel) and the International Analyst Network (Australia), he is the author of "The Quartermasters of Terror: Saudi Arabia and the Global Islamic Jihad" (Wyndham Hall Press, 2005).

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