Best Buy, CAIR and Boycotts

by Eileen F. Toplansky

With Father's Day just over a week away, it is important to publicize the ongoing situation with Best Buy and CAIR. Best Buy was founded by Richard Schulze in 1966 and the first store opened in St. Paul, Minnesota. Listed in 2008 as a Fortune 500 Company, Best Buy declares this to investors and employees.

Our formula is simple: we're a growth company focused on better solving the unmet needs of our customers-and we rely on our employees to solve those puzzles. Thanks for stopping.

Although it seems a bit truncated as a mission statement, clearly the focus is on problem solving.

Thus, it is confusing why Best Buy has doubled down and insists on continuing its support of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). In April of 2012, Islamist Watch publicized that Best Buy was a "Platinum Sponsor" for a fundraising banquet for the CAIR chapter. This alarming news led nearly 5,000 people to sign a pledge to boycott Best Buy until it rescinded its support for CAIR. As of the 3^rd of June 2012, the petition at the site PetitionBuzz.com had 11,547 signatures. Nonetheless, Best Buy maintains that its

...customers and employees around the world represent a variety of faiths and denominations. We respect that diversity, and choose to engage with our customers, employees and communities in ways that reflect their traditions and maintain good relationships for Best Buy.

Let's clarify. CAIR is a front for terror groups. As highlighted at Discover the Networks

CAIR promotes a radical Islamic vision, as evidenced by the fact that its co-founder Omar Ahmad told a Fremont, California audience in July 1998: 'Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran ... should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth.' In a similar spirit, co-founder Ibrahim Hooper told a reporter in 1993: 'I wouldn't want to create the impression that I wouldn't like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future.' In 2003 Hooper stated that if Muslims ever become a majority in the United States, they will likely seek to replace the U.S. Constitution with Islamic law, which they deem superior to man-made law. In the late 1980s, Ihsan Bagby, who would later become a CAIR Board member, stated that Muslims 'can never be full citizens of this country,' referring to the United States, because there is no way we can be fully committed to the institutions and ideologies of this country.'

Is this the diversity that Best Buy is promoting?

The United States government has identified CAIR "as an agent of the Muslim Brotherhood, sharing the common goal of dismantling American institutions and turning the U.S. into a Sharia-compliant Islamic state through incremental, stealth jihad."

So incensed was he at this news that a former Marine who served in Beirut in 1982-1983 and Iraq in 2003 posted this You Tube video stating that he and his family "will no longer conduct business at Best Buy" because of the company's endorsement of CAIR.

To those who would respond that this response is rooted in bigotry, one would be hard pressed to argue with a 2007 federal filing stating that "[f]rom its founding by Muslim Brotherhood leaders, CAIR conspired with other affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood to support terrorists[.]"

In this interview at Fox News, Dr. Jasser, founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy maintains that CAIR will not even condemn Hamas, long known for its terrorism. Jasser goes on to explain that CAIR actually obstructed the Somali Muslim community from assisting the federal government in weeding out terrorism. Jasser maintains that Best Buy is not promoting diversity at all but rather is "honoring the lowest hanging fruit" that does not promote freedom loving Muslim groups such as his.

In fact, according to Mona Charen, "[a] dishonest character assassination campaign has been launched against Jasser" by CAIR which has urged Muslims to protest Jasser's serving on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper told The Blaze that Jasser "has long been viewed by American Muslims and the colleagues in the civil liberties community as a mere sock puppet for Islam haters and an enabler of Islamophobia."

As a result of the Islamist Watch story, a number of other media have publicized the ongoing controversy. The Jewish Tribune of Canada features an interview with Islamist Watch Director Marc Fink. Powerline on April 19, 2012 by Scott Johnson highlighted the story as did Rachel Hirshfeld of Arutz Sheva-Israel National News

So even though the struggling retail giant is using profits from American consumers to fund the annual banquet of a group closely linked to Hamas, Best Buy has refused to rule out future support for CAIR. Moreover, Canadian readers of American Thinker should know that the Canadian retailer "Future Shop" is wholly-owned by Best Buy.

Sign the petition. Write the Best Buy Public Relations Department. If "you don't like the idea of your consumer electronics, software and appliance dollars going to fund groups pledged to turn America into a Sharia-compliant, Islamic state, and who align themselves with Hamas, write and/or call Best Buy and let them know. Best Buy Public Relations Department: 612-292-NEWS (6397) or NewsCenter@bestbuy.com. Mike Mikan, Interim CEO: Mike.Mikan@bestbuy.com; Susan Busch, Director of Public Relations: susan.busch@bestbuy.com; Lisa Hawks, Deputy Director of Public Relations: lisa.hawks@bestbuy.com.

Or better yet, forgo purchasing the next flat screen television from Best Buy. Dad will approve.

Eileen F. Toplansky

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/06/best_buy_cair_and_boycotts.html

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

Obama Stonewalling Gulf Oil Spill Disclosure

by Bruce Thompson

The Obama administration is desperately trying to avoid coming clean about its role in delaying capping the Gulf Oil Spill. Billions of dollars in fines are at stake, so BP is fighting in court to force release of correspondence related to handling the Gulf Oil Spill which might indicate that the federal government unnecessarily and substantially delayed the use of technology that was ultimately proven successful.

Rebecca Mowbray of the New Orleans Times-Picayune has the details of the battle underway in a New Orleans federal court:

In a letter filed in federal court Tuesday, the U.S. government charges that if BP is successful at forcing the release of 21 pieces of correspondence about responding to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, it will harm future disaster response efforts because public officials won't be able to confer frankly about the challenges before them. U.S. Department of Justice attorney Sarah Himmelhoch told Magistrate Judge Sally Shushan that the U.S. government has produced millions of documents in the litigation, and only wants to keep 119 documents confidential, but BP continues to try to force the government to disclose 21 of them. The documents involve communications between top Obama Administration officials in the White House, Department of Energy, Department of Interior and Department of Homeland Security.

We can reasonably infer that the authors of those 21 documents may include President Barack Obama, his then-chief of Staff Rahm "Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste" Emanuel, and Energy and Climate Change Czarina Carol "Midnight Moratorium" Browner from the White House, not to mention Energy Secretary Steven "Solyndra" Chu, Interior Secretary Ken "Boot on Their Neck" Salazar, and Admiral Thad "An Overabundance of Caution" Allen of Homeland Security's United States Coast Guard. All of them had a lot to say and or do publicly during the oil spill containment operations. Now it seems that BP wants to let the American public know about what its people were doing in private as they commanded BP's operations. BP knows what its employees did in private, as it was on the receiving end of those orders. They now want to share the details of those orders with the general public. The response of the Obama administration is positively Nixonian, revisiting the claims of executive privilege once espoused by Richard Nixon during the debate regarding the release of the Watergate tapes. Can it be that the people voted for "hope and change" and got the Ghost of Richard Nixon?

"To order the release of the 21 documents at this point sends the message that there is no protected space for government workers and decision makers in the midst of a national emergency," the letter reads.

And so the two sides presented their respective arguments in federal court.

BP says it may need the documents to defend itself against the government's lawsuit and potential fines. The documents in question include Department of Energy "issuance guidance and directives to BP," "the commencement or termination of specific response actions," and whether various efforts to shut down the well were "appropriate spill containment measures."

The government says that BP's argument misses the context of the litigation. The U.S. government is required to oversee the response to disasters, and needed to take a more active role because BP couldn't shut down the well. The government is also compelled to enforce environmental laws.

Could BP be trying to get documentation confirming the New York Times story that reported that Secretary Chu prematurely aborted the "top kill" operation that began on May 26, 2010? On that very day, President Obama was away giving a speech about green energy at a promising solar energy start-up in Fremont California named Solyndra. The NYT story states:

BP executives, however, wanted to proceed, the engineer said, in part to learn more about the condition of the well bore, and in part because they were eager to demonstrate that they could actually stop the flow of oil.

They "could actually stop the flow of oil"? In May 2010? How's that for "Hope" for the weary residents of the Gulf Coast? And what was Secretary Chu's grade-inflated analysis of this own performance?

Dr. Chu said he did not believe that he and his team had made any serious miscalculations in the nearly three months of trying to corral the renegade well, but like everyone involved in the catastrophe, they had been learning as they went along, under intense scrutiny and pressure.

"I don't want to dwell on 'coulda, shoulda, woulda,'" he said. "There's nothing I can really point to that we shouldn't have done based on what we knew at the time." [SNIP]

In an interview Thursday, Dr. Chu said that if he had understood geology and well technology better in the early days after the April 20 blowout, he might have urged a faster attempt at the top kill, which involved shooting mud and other gunk to clog up the damaged blowout preventer atop the gushing well. The delay, he said, might have allowed pressure to increase in the well, rendering the attempt fruitless when it was tried at the end of May.

Isn't "coulda, shoulda, woulda" also known as lessons learned? And isn't one of the most important lessons learned to not let the secretary of energy overrule the world's leading experts regarding the timing of an attempt to begin a subsea well intervention that could have stopped the flow of oil in May 2010?

One of the most exasperating facets of the efforts to control the spill is the fact that we were discussing beginning the top kill right here on The American Thinker on May 7, 2010.

Bruce Thompson was a volunteer to the effort to control the oil spill. You may read a bit more about him on his blog.

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/06/obama_stonewalling_gulf_oil_spill_disclosure.html

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

U.S. Inaction Allows Assad to Keep Killing

by Jonathan S. Tobin

After more than a year of violent repression of protests that have taken the lives of thousands of people, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad has figured out exactly how much he can get away with before his actions will provoke action from the West. Rather than being deterred by the prospect of an intervention to save the lives of his people, Assad now knows he can kill as many people as he likes. With reports of yet another massacre of dozens of women and children having been committed in the Homa region, the Syrian regime is demonstrating again that it will not be deterred by the condemnation of the international community from inflicting atrocities (let alone relinquish power). Indeed, rather than giving Assad pause, it may be that the latest statements of outrage issued by Secretary of State Clinton about events in Syria may just be confirming his impression that talk is all the United States and the West ever intend to do about the situation.

Clinton repeated earlier tough statements about Syria during a joint press conference with her Turkish counterpart. But as the U.S. has made it clear that no action will be taken without the consent of Syria’s Russian and Chinese allies, that is a virtual guarantee Assad has absolutely nothing to worry about. That the latest instance of mass slaughter — this time in the village of Qubeir where 78 persons are thought to have been killed, half of whom were women and children — happened while a United Nations peace plan was supposed to be implemented and U.N. personnel were in the country is just the latest evidence that Assad understands he can continue to act with impunity. If Assad is laughing at American suggestions he leave Syria, who can blame him for thinking U.S. policy is a joke?

U.N. observers were prevented from going to the site of the latest massacre by Syrian troops, but we expect the U.N. to be an impotent onlooker when mass slaughter is going on. The United States however, ought to be regarded differently. But with his trademark “lead from behind” style, President Obama seems to be emulating the behavior of the world organization he so admires.

The trouble here is not just the failure to act, though that is deeply troubling and a stain on America’s honor as well as that of the West. Rather, it is the combination of that lack of action with loud talk about Assad’s beastliness that is undermining the last shred of U.S. credibility as a force to be reckoned with in the region.

While silence about events in Syria would have been shocking, it might have made some sense if the president and the secretary of state had also made it clear the atrocities there were not America’s business. But to go on record as treating the crimes against humanity as an outrage that deeply offends Americans and then to do nothing about it is far worse. That is because the clear reluctance on the part of the administration to do something more than simply talk about Syria is not only being observed in Damascus. The real audience for this scandalous lack of backbone or a conscience on the part of the administration is in Moscow and Beijing.

More than just the people of that unhappy country will regret the consequences of America’s lack of guts and leadership on Syria. Though there are good reasons to worry about what would follow even a limited U.S. or Western intervention in Syria, the combination of talk and inaction will convince the Russians and Chinese they can dig in and back their awful Syrian client without fear of consequences. Even worse, it will convince them that President Obama is no more likely to go to the mat with Iran about its nuclear program than he is about Assad’s mass murders.

This is a real problem that is no less a matter of concern if the president sees these two cases differently, as some of his supporters insist he does. But after having demonstrated that he is a paper tiger on Syria, it is going to be very difficult to persuade the other members of the P5+1 talks with Iran that President Obama’s moral outrage is more than hot air. If Assad is allowed to go on killing people with no more than the prospect of a strongly worded statement from Hillary Clinton to deter him, the president may find out that once you lose your credibility, it takes more than a press conference to win it back.

Jonathan S. Tobin

Source: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/06/07/u-s-inaction-allows-bashar-assad-to-keep-killing/

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

Why Doesn’t the Media Get Israeli Politics?

by Seth Mandel

Lee Smith has an interesting take on one aspect of the administration’s calculated cyberleaks, produced obediently by the New York Times, detailing the cooperation between the U.S. and Israel in conducting cyberwarfare against the Iranian nuclear program. It’s true, Smith writes, that in one sense these articles are meant to make Obama seem tough, but they are also to pass the buck if and when things go wrong. Smith writes:

The nature of the story is given away in a quote from Vice President Joe Biden, exasperated after Stuxnet mistakenly appeared on the Web in the summer of 2010, exposing the code. Biden laid the blame at the feet of the administration’s ostensible partner. “It’s got to be the Israelis,” said Biden, according to an unnamed source. “They went too far.” In other words, the Obama White House wants it both ways—to claim credit for the successes of the cyberwarfare campaign and to shift blame on the Israelis in the event that things go wrong.

It’s telling that the administration thinks blaming Israel is a good election strategy, and Smith’s piece is worth reading in full. But a couple quotes from Israeli sources stood out to me. First Yossi Melman, the Israeli journalist, tells Smith: “Israeli officials know that it’s an election year… Israeli officials are not going to rock the boat and ruin the party.” Later in the story, an Israeli intelligence source tells Smith: “No Israeli government is going to be criticized for releasing a virus. We know we are at war, and America does not know it’s at war.”

I’m not so sure that’s the case, but it does reveal something else about the two countries: Israelis understand American politics well, and American officials and journalists don’t seem to understand Israeli politics at all.

The Israelis are at peace with Obama’s strategy, because they get it. It’s an election year. It’s just business. This knowledge gap partially explained Jodi Rudoren’s clumsy transition to the New York Times’s Jerusalem bureau. She made a number of missteps, and explained that she didn’t really know exactly what she was doing yet, and to give her some time to adjust. Fair enough I suppose, but it was telling.

And a perfect example comes from Vanity Fair, which dispatched David Margolick to write a long profile on Benjamin Netanyahu for the magazine’s July issue. It’s now online, and it is truly something to behold. Margolick writes that most of Netanyahu’s decisions can be attributed to the inordinate influence the following people have on his opinions: his wife, Sara; his late father, Benzion; his late brother, Yoni; Ehud Barak; and the last person Netanyahu has spoken to, regardless of who it was.

There may be more in the article, but I stopped reading two pages in when Margolick explicitly compared Bibi to a warmongering Soviet dictator with a split personality. Margolick wasn’t writing that all those people have some influence on Netanyahu; he was making the case that each one has unique control over him. In other words, the article constantly contradicts its own thesis. It is essentially a cry for help. But why? What makes Israeli politics so incomprehensible to the press?

I’m not sure what the answer is, but there are a few possibilities. One is that the left doesn’t understand coalition politics as well as the right, which has to deal with making peace among its various factions. Another is that the liberal media’s echo chamber keeps them in a pack mentality, following the biases of papers like the New York Times. There is of course the left’s anti-Russian-immigrant hysteria, which they direct at Avigdor Lieberman even though he agrees with many of their priorities. It’s also hard to miss the media’s noxious treatment of Orthodox Jews who, much to the left’s eternal chagrin, also participate in Israel’s democratic process.

Maybe it’s something as simple as the media’s deeply personal antipathy toward Netanyahu. Whatever it is, they should figure it out–and soon. These articles portraying Israel’s democratically elected, rational premier as a schizophrenic dictator are getting embarrassing.

Seth Mandel

Source: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/06/07/why-doesnt-the-media-get-israeli-politics-netanyahu/

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

Latest Viruses Could Mean ‘End of World as we Know it’

by David Shamah

Eugene Kaspersky: We’re at the mercy of cyberterrorists, armed with weapons more serious than any previous IT security threat

The Flame virus, whose existence was announced several weeks ago by Eugene Kaspersky, is not just any old virus. It’s so sophisticated that it represents a new level of cyber threat, one that could be “the beginning of the end of the [interconnected] world as we know it,” Kaspersky said at a press conference Wednesday. “I have nightmares about it.”

Professor Yitzhak Ben-Yisrael (L), with Eugene Kaspersky (R), at Wednesday's conference (Photo credit: Courtesy)

Information security expert Kaspersky, whose team of researchers uncovered Flame’s existence, was a featured speaker at Wednesday’s second annual cyber-security conference sponsored by the Tel Aviv University’s Yuval Ne’eman Workshop for Science, Technology and Security. The conference comes at a time when interest in cybersecurity is at a peak, as a result of speculation about who was behind the Flame attack and the earlier Stuxnet virus attack that is thought to have damaged, or at least delayed, progress by Iran on its nuclear program.

Also speaking at the conference were a host of top security and government officials, including Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Israel Space Agency chairman Yitzhak Ben-Yisrael, former Shin Bet director Yuval Diskin, and others.

While many companies — including Kaspersky’s — advertise sundry solutions for computer viruses and Trojans, they won’t help when it comes to Flame and other still undiscovered viruses of similar or even greater strength that are likely out there, he said. “Right now we have no way to defend against these global attacks.”

The term “cyber-war” is used by many to describe the situation, but that term — which implies that there are two equal, known enemies duking it out — is outmoded, he said. “With today’s attacks, you are clueless about who did it or when they will strike again. It’s not cyber-war, but cyberterrorism.”

Flame, which has stealthily stolen large chunks of data during the months or perhaps years it has been on the loose, is especially scary because of its many sophisticated tools, said Kaspersky. Besides being able to quickly replicate itself on networks and break up data into very small segments, making it almost impossible to trace as it is sent onwards, the virus has many unique features. “It can of course be spread very quickly via a disk-on-key, when one is plugged into a network,” but in addition, it can use bluetooth, wifi, and other communications protocols to propagate, he said.

The Russian-born Kaspersky, 46, whose company is the world’s largest privately held vendor of software security products, described the process by which his team discovered Flame, saying that he got interested in the matter when he heard that Iran had actually accused his company of designing the attack tool. “We thought that maybe our internal system was compromised, so we conducted a thorough investigation.”

It was this investigation, which entailed contacts with IT personnel in Iran itself, that yielded the data on Flame. “Dealing with what we discovered was too big a job for a company,” so Kaspersky took what he knew to the UN’s International Telecommunications Union, which was just as shocked as he was. “We worked out an arrangement where we would gather the data, and they would take care of the other issues.”

Data-gathering is a technical issue, not a political one, Kaspersky said, so he could not speculate on who invented Flame, or why. But anyone and everyone is a suspect. “There are many countries with hackers and experts who are sophisticated enough to pull something like this off.”

The US, Israel, China, and Russia are on that list, but so is Romania, “which has many talented hackers.”

But even countries without a staff of their own could kidnap the scientists they need or hire “hacktivists” to do their dirty work, and there is no shortage of willing and capable people, Kaspersky said.

Still, any country thinking of stockpiling cyber-weapons of these magnitudes should think twice, Kaspersky said, as they have a way of getting out of control.

“It’s like biological weapons; when you set one off in one place, it affects many others.” Cyber-weapons of the magnitude of Flame are just as destructive. “The world is just so interconnected today, and the viruses that attack one power plant puts them all at risk,” Kaspersky said.

Governments must work together to, for example, order a complete rewrite of software for essential systems to protect them against attacks — “there are still many systems out there using MS-DOS,” Kaspersky said — to agreeing to pool information and act jointly when an attack occurs.

The alternative, Kaspersky said, is a world in which cyberterrorists have a free hand – something like the world in the movie Die Hard 4 (also known as Live Free or Die Hard). That movie’s plot involves hackers causing blackouts, blowing up government buildings, and trying to shut down America’s computer system.

“We at Kaspersky Labs have been aware for a long time that such a scenario was possible, but until that movie came out in 2007, we forbade anyone inside the organization from using the term ‘cyber-terrorist.’ Now that the cat is out of the bag, we routinely use that word to describe what is going on.”

He, and other researchers like him, are hard at work coming up with the solutions as the problems arise. What’s at stake, he said, is nothing less “than life as we know it today. Let’s hope and pray we can keep the cyber world safe for our kids and grandkids.”

David Shamah

Source: http://www.timesofisrael.com/experts-we-lost-the-cyber-war-now-were-in-the-era-of-cyber-terror/

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

In Nuclear Talks, Iran Plays the Victim Card

by Emanuele Ottolenghi

With the third round of nuclear talks approaching, Iranian senior figures are taking turns to the airwaves to present a well-rehearsed, grievance-filled version of the issues at stake in their current nuclear standoff with the international community. This time, speaking out is former Iranian minister of foreign affairs, Ali Akbar Velayati – currently a diplomatic adviser to the Supreme Leader. Velayati, who is wanted in Argentina for the 1994 Iran-orchestrated terror attack against the AMIA Jewish Cultural Center in Buenos Aires, announced in an interview with the Iranian news agency IRNA that he hoped that “the P5+1 group recognizes Iran’s inalienable nuclear right within the framework of the [United Nations Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty] NPT and refrains from sitting on the sidelines.” He added, “By accepting Iran’s right to use peaceful nuclear energy, the forthcoming talks in Moscow should reach a favorable result.”

Iran has been spinning this tale for years now – and its propaganda is making considerable gains with Western leftists and among non-aligned movement members.

Iran is basically playing the victim card, darkly evoking an American-led and Zionist-orchestrated plot to deny Iran, alone among nations, the right to peacefully develop nuclear energy. The demand by the P5+1 to suspend all uranium enrichment and uranium reprocessing activities, Iran says, is an attempt to deny a right guaranteed under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to all its members. It is an unfair attempt, says Iran, because it is infused with a double standard where nuclear-weapons states and Israel are ganging up on Iran to preach to Tehran what they don’t practice. And it is a dangerous precedent, concludes Iran, because if legitimized, this mechanism can be adopted later to frustrate the legitimate nuclear ambitions of any other nation that is not a Western country and a friend of the United States.

So, as talks approach, it is useful to remind Western audiences of the basic facts around this matter.

First, Iran is a member of the NPT, and it is thus entitled to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes only as long as it meets its obligations under the NPT. But the International Atomic Energey Agency (IAEA) regards Iran as being in breach of its treaty obligations. This was stated explicitly and forcefully by the IAEA on September 24, 2005:

… Iran’s many failures and breaches of its obligations to comply with its NPT Safeguards Agreement … constitute non-compliance in the context of Article XII.C of the Agency’s Statute … [T]he history of concealment of Iran’s nuclear activities referred to in the Director General’s report, the nature of these activities, issues brought to light in the course of the Agency’s verification of declarations made by Iran since September 2002 and the resulting absence of confidence that Iran’s nuclear program is exclusively for peaceful purposes have given rise to questions that are within the competence of the Security Council, as the organ bearing the main responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security.

The Security Council has passed six UN Security Council resolutions under Chapter VII (1696, 1737, 1747, 1803, 1835, and 1929), which makes them mandatory and binding on all nations according to international law, commanding Iran to suspend uranium enrichment and uranium reprocessing activities.

The IAEA has reaffirmed this point in every report it published since Ambassador Yukiya Amano became its director general in early 2010.

And the June 2008 proposal to Iran, signed by the P5+1, further states that, provided Iran complies with its obligations under the NPT and with the aforementioned resolutions, “China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States and the European Union High Representative state their readiness: to recognize Iran’s right to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes in conformity with its NPT obligations; to treat Iran’s nuclear program in the same manner as that of any non-nuclear weapon state party to the NPT once international confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program is restored.”

This text is now an integral part of UNSCR 1929 – and the details it offers (including detailed aspects of technological assistance) should leave no doubt to the following simple facts:

Iran’s right to peaceful nuclear energy, including the right to enrich for peaceful purposes, was never denied in principle and has been affirmed ad nauseam by Iran’s interlocutors. All Iranian protestations and lamentations to the contrary are lies, smokes and mirrors.

Iran’s right is suspended because Iran has failed to comply with the obligations that make it possible for Iran, and indeed any other nation who wishes to have a nuclear program, to pursue nuclear energy within the NPT framework.

Iran’s behavior is illegal. Iran’s non-compliance demands concrete steps sanctioned by UN Chapter VII binding resolutions.

No concession should be made, therefore, on these matters, and no compromise should be offered on enrichment suspension.

This provision, far from being a punishment, is the only remaining guarantee against the collapse of an already shaky non-proliferation regime.

Emanuele Ottolenghi

Source: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/06/06/in-nuclear-talks-iran-plays-the-victim-card/

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

Obama's Syria Dilemma

by Jonathan F. Keiler

As the situation in Syria deteriorates, with the Assad regime acting with ever-increasing ruthlessness, the Obama administration's firm policy of inaction has come in for extended criticism from both the left and the right. That is not to say there are not legitimate reasons for caution. Syria presents a difficult and complex situation. Credible explanations for the administration's inaction cover a range of military and political factors. Taking down the Syrian regime through air strikes might prove more difficult than operations in Kosovo or Libya. There are potential problems with the Kurds, the Turks, and the Russians. There is uncertainty about the Syrian opposition. What to do about Syria's arsenal of poison gas and biological weaponry and its ballistic missiles? What about the doctrine of non-interference initiated with the Peace of Westphalia? And so on.

Yet these problems could prove manageable if President Obama were determined to act. But Obama's clear unwillingness to act militarily against the Assad regime almost certainly runs deeper than his famous preference for leading from behind. It is one thing for a dilettante like Obama to launch drone strikes against terrorist hovels, beat up on Moammar Gaddafi's pathetic army, or even agree to the hit on bin Laden. It's quite another to embark on an extended military campaign against a large and battle-tested army.

Nonetheless, even a reluctant warrior like Obama might be convinced to launch a limited air/sea campaign against the Assad regime, if there were a limited aim -- removing Assad -- and a reasonable chance of success with few if any losses. As Obama's political fortunes continue to fade, it's not hard to see the president hungering for yet another chance to brag about his fortitude and toughness. Helping Syria might help Obama politically -- a consideration, if believed, that usually trumps in his Oval Office.

And for all the potential difficulties bandied about, it's hard to believe that American air and naval forces could not take down the Assad regime with relative ease. True, Syria has a large and elaborate air defense system, built to oppose the Israelis, and considerably more formidable than Libya's. But in 1982 the Israelis dismantled a similar system in the Bekaa Valley without loss, and we dealt with Iraq's similar systems effectively in the Gulf War. Taking out Assad would likely require crippling his air defenses, ballistic missiles, WMD stores, and logistical bases, but not wiping out his army tank by tank. Without gas and ammunition, Assad's army would quickly grind to a halt.

Moreover, in the twenty years since the Gulf War, our military capabilities have expanded exponentially, while Syria is basically equipped with the same weapons that armed Saddam Hussein's army. Israel's successful 2007 strike against a Syrian nuclear facility suggests that American forces, five years on, with basing options, allies, and air and naval capabilities that the Israel Defense Force (for all its talents) simply lacks, could devastate the Syrian military structure that supports the Assad regime.

So why won't Obama act? Well, here's a reason I haven't yet seen bruited but which probably stays Obama's hand as much as anything listed in paragraph one. It's that an American-led assault on Syria, which broke Assad's military, would actually help one of America's key regional allies -- Israel -- and that is simply something that Obama, or Hillary Clinton's State Department, or the British and the French, for that matter, cannot abide.

While it's true that any American action against Syria might bring uncertainty and danger for the Jewish State, just imagine Israel's situation in the wake of a successful American attack. A key threat to its northern border, and even its survival -- one that has plagued the country since its founding -- would be eliminated. Syrian support for Hezb'allah would be diminished if not crippled. Iran's position would be weakened.

Israeli officials have been discreet regarding Syria, and for good reason. The Arab revolts have not been a boon for Israel's interests in general, and most particularly with respect to Egypt. There, regime change left the country's "reformers" (which includes the viciously anti-Semitic and anti-Israel Muslim Brotherhood) in possession of Egypt's powerful American-equipped military. Hardly a day passes without someone in Egypt calling to abrogate the peace treaty with Israel. The IDF has had to reposition forces to the south for the first time in a generation, and re-evaluate its strategic posture. A similar outcome in Syria -- regime change that left the Syrian military intact -- might be disastrous for Israel.

But if Syria's military capabilities were first devastated in an American-led attack, then whatever successor regime emerged in Syria would be of much less concern to the Israelis. Although Israeli officials have been circumspect, that is the kind of regime change Israelis could support. And such an outcome would clearly be in America's best interests as well -- that is, you'd think so, unless your name is Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, or you're one of their fellow travelers. It would not be the first time that Obama saw his first priority as checking Israel, rather than its enemies.

Here's how Obama and State would view such an outcome vis-à-vis Israel: disaster! Netanyahu, perhaps Obama's chief personal international nemesis, would win again. Then Obama must consider the poor Palestinians. How will the president ever get the Israelis to negotiate a "just and lasting peace" without the added pressure of war on the Golan, or on the Lebanese border, or in Gaza? All three would become less likely if Syria were defanged.

What of the Golan itself -- that supposedly sacred Arab territory that under Syrian control as nothing but an artillery platform? Israel annexed the Golan and turned it into a vital, beautiful, and productive part of the nation. But so what? It's Arab land -- so the Arabs claim, anyway -- that Israel must eventually return. How is that ever going to happen without the credible threat of a Syrian invasion?

See? If you're Obama, it's a nightmare. The British and French governments would see things the same way. Another "war for Israel" waged by American forces -- to use the calumny often bandied about regarding the Iraq war by extremists on the left and right. Another win for Israel!

Jonathan F. Keiler

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/06/obamas_syria_dilemma.html

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Europe’s Witch Hunt

by Giulio Meotti

Princeton University’s Bernard Lewis once told the German daily Die Welt that “Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century.” We are already living through the self-extinction of the European civilization that shaped the age we live in. The inquisition against Europe’s “racist” and “Islamophobic” writers and journalists sheds a unique light on this demographic and religious revolution. Cartoonists, novelists, intellectuals, reporters, these are “les nouveaux réactionnaires,, the new reactionaries as in the pamphlet of the leftist intellectual Daniel Lindenberg. Western intellectuals “guilty” of fighting the stereotypes of the Western elites: multiculturalism, the “droits de l’hommisme”(the human rights turned into a spoiled child), Islam and anti-Semitism. These new witches are demonized in the name of anti-racism, which the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut called “the communism of XXI century.”

The latest victim of the leftist bien-pensants allied with the Islamic fanatics is Eric Zemmour, Jewish journalist and author of the bestseller “Mélancolie Française.” A few days ago, Zemmour has been dismissed from his radio show for having criticized the new French Minister of Justice, Christiane Taubira, “gentle and compassionate as a mother with her children, the poor children of the suburbs who steal, peddle, torture, rape, and sometimes kill.”

The late Italian writer Oriana Fallaci went to trial (she was then acquitted) in France and Italy, where anti-racist leftist associations compared her to Osama bin Laden. The Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature, Wole Soyinka, known as the “Nigerian Joyce,” has been demonized as a “racist” for having called the UK “a cesspit” for Islamists. Finkielkraut himself has been tried, after he dared to comment on the French suburbs that “if the thugs were white everyone would have evoked fascism, when a school is burned down by an Arab then it’s ‘rebellion’.”.

If the writer Michel Houellebecq was on trial for his best-selling novel “Platform” and interviews where he called Islam “the most stupid of all religions”, VS Naipaul, another Nobel Prize Laureate, has been demonized as “racist” and “reactionary” by the liberal press.

In many cases, the journalists became refugees in their own countries. “My house is protected as a bunker with cameras,” told me Kurt Westergaard, the Danish artist who created the cartoon of the Prophet wearing a bomb in his turban for the Jyllands Posten newspaper. Visiting his paper’s office is like entering a US embassy in an Arab country. The journal had erected a 2.5-metre high, one-kilometer long barbed-wire barrier, complete with electronic surveillance, around its headquarters in Visby. Mail is scanned and newspaper staff members need ID cards to enter the buildings. When Flemming Rose, the cultural editor who took the initiative of publishing the cartoons, attended a conference in Oxford, the British police had to set up “the same protection as for Michael Jackson.”

In the Netherlands, where filmmaker Theo van Gogh was killed by a Muslim for his criticism of Islam and the biggest mosques of Europe frame the luxuriant, wooded, watery countryside, cartoonist Gregorious Nekshot uses even a pseudonym to protect his own identity. At the University of Leiden, Rembrandt’s city, the office of Law Professor Afshin Ellian, who escaped the Iranian religious dictatorship, is protected by bulletproof walls and policemen. “In Holland Rousseau, Locke, Sade and Spinoza were able to publish their books,” Ellian said during our meeting in Leiden. “Holland was the hope of Europe. But it’s no more. Now there is an atmosphere of fear.”

I recently spoke with Robert Redeker, the philosopher and columnist condemned to death for an article in Le Figaro newspaper. His piece, a response to the controversy over remarks about Islam made a week earlier by Pope Benedict XVI, was titled “What should the free world do in the face of Islamist intimidation?” Redeker was sentenced to death in a posting that, in order to facilitate a potential assassin’s task, provided his address, telephone and a photograph of his home. “I went to Austria for a conference and even there the bodyguards were always with me,” Redeker said. The police did not even allow him to announce his father’s death, because someone could have noted the surname. “I had to bury my father like a criminal,” he said. The marriage of his daughter was also attended by the police. Redeker had to sell his house and buy another one in a secret location. “I cannot go out to buy bread or newspapers or for a glass of wine. I cannot walk in the streets. I cannot take the train, bus or subway. I cannot answer the question of what I can expect from the future. This new situation has changed my perception of time…It’s as there is no future for me.”

A few days ago I received another email of threat, saying: “Dear feces eating insect, continue to scratch around the Zionist dung as it’s natural for you, the Israelis will give you thirty coins.” To quote from Walter Laqueur’s masterpiece, these really look like the last days of Europe.

Giulio Meotti

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/06/06/europe%E2%80%99s-witch-hunt/

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France Once Again a Hell for Jews

by P. David Hornik

Earlier this week, as reported in Algemeiner, three yarmulke-wearing young Jews in Villeurbanne, France were attacked with hammers and iron bars by a mob of over a dozen Muslim youths. The victims had to be hospitalized and then were released.

The Times of Israel reports that police are still looking for the perpetrators, and that they’re believed to be of North African extraction.

It was only in March, of course, that the French Muslim Mohammed Merah killed a teacher-rabbi and three young children in a French Jewish school in Toulouse. But from that incident to this latest, somewhat publicized incident, things have hardly been quiet for French Jews.

Not only did French Jewish leaders tell The Times of Israel that “There has been a series of acts like the one in Villeurbanne” and that “Not a week passes without anti-Semitic assaults in France.” Ariel Goldman, vice-president of the French Jewish communal organization CRIF, revealed that the Toulouse attack—however horrifying to many—acted as something of a tonic: “In the month following [it] we counted 140 such acts…. This amounts to a third of the violent incidents we had in 2011.”

And in a report on Tuesday, a Villeurbanne rabbi and school principal said that “We are regularly cursed and spat on” and that last month a motorcyclist in the town fired rubber bullets at a yarmulke-wearing Jew in a car, lightly wounding him.

A few things are worth pointing out here.

First is that most French Jews are themselves of North African origin, immigrants or descendants of immigrants from Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco who fled Arab persecution in those countries in the 1950s and 1960s as French rule declined. In fleeing to France, these North African Jews formed a minority as most of their compatriots made their way to Israel.

In France, seemingly, this population might at least have expected to be safe from further Arab, and particularly North African Arab, persecution. But it was not to be. French Arabs now outnumber French Jews by about 10 to 1, and a large majority of French Arabs are also of Algerian, Tunisian, and Moroccan origin. Hence, in France, North African Jews only succeeded to change the stage setting of their persecution by North African Arabs.

The above-linked Algemeiner report quotes French Jewish artist Ron Agam: “It is about time now for the French authorities to radically search for these Imams and put a stop to the brainwashing of tens of thousands of Muslim kids in France.” But such repeated entreaties to the French authorities have not helped much, and it’s now reported that large numbers of French Jews are considering moving to Israel after all; thousands already have, or have bought apartments there.

Israel too, of course, is hardly free from Arab/Muslim aggression, but it is an independent Jewish state that mostly takes attacks on Jews seriously and invests greatly in countering them.

Second, it was in France, specifically Paris, in the 1890s that Zionist visionary Theodor Herzl experienced a revelatory sense that European Jewry was in grave trouble when he witnessed anti-Semitic mobs incensed by the trial of Alfred Dreyfus—a French Jewish army officer who was accused of treason and later exonerated.

Herzl’s sense of an emergency is considered to have been vindicated, negatively, by the Holocaust, and positively by the rebirth of Israel in 1948. Yet, today, “enlightened,” democratic France is once more a dangerous hell for Jews. There are some things that even monumental events like the Holocaust and the rebirth of Israel do not seem to change.

And finally, it is not, of course, the case that the Arab and Muslim world alone is responsible for the current plight of French and other European Jewry. As Jonathan Tobin notes,

The flow of raw hate speech against Jews from Cairo and Tehran and other Arab and Muslim capitals is not to be underestimated, but the willingness of European intellectuals to lend their support to the demonization of the Jewish state has given these sentiments a patina of undeserved legitimacy.

Under a thin veneer of “anti-Zionism” or “anti-Israelism,” homegrown European anti-Semitism has returned in full force as the Jewish state is singled out for boycotts and obsessive vituperation.

Some of the effects were evident in a study finding that 40 percent of Europeans believe Israel is waging an extermination war against the Palestinians. Here, sheer disinformation plays a part as a viciously anti-Israeli “elite” media portrays the Jewish state as singularly evil. But such disinformation is also an excellent way to awaken latent anti-Semitism.

If there is any redeeming feature to this situation, it is the growing realization by French and other European Jews that Europe is perhaps a lost cause.As Muslim populations grow, along with their electoral clout, and homegrown European viciousness toward Israel and Jews shows no sign of abating, there is no reasonable prospect that European Jewry’s lot will get much better.

Hence, this population should not wait for another Herzl to clarify things for it. Even the actual Herzl was only able to do a limited amount of good.

P. David Hornik

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/06/06/france-once-again-a-hell-for-jews/

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

The State Department of Palestine

by Ben Shapiro

Jerusalem has, for the last several thousand years, been the holiest city in Jerusalem. Last week, Israelis celebrated Yom Yerushalayim, Jerusalem Day – the day in 1967 when the Israel Defense Forces liberated Jerusalem from Arab rule, reuniting the city and opening its holy places to all who wish to visit them.

For 45 years, Jerusalem has been the capital of Israel. And yet the position of the United States government remains that Tel Aviv is the capital of Israel. That position was clarified in March 2012 by a State Department official, Victoria Nuland, who refused to say that Jerusalem was a part of Israel at all:

QUESTION: Is it the State Department’s position that Jerusalem is not part of Israel?

NULAND: You know that our position on Jerusalem has not changed …. With regard to our Jerusalem policy, it’s a permanent-status issue. It’s got to be resolved through the negotiations between the parties.

QUESTION: Is it the view of the – of the United States that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, notwithstanding the question about the embassy – the location of the US embassy?

NULAND: We are not going to prejudge the outcome of those negotiations, including the final status of Jerusalem.

This is asinine for several reasons. First, it is an on-the-ground fact that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. Belfast may be a disputed city in Ireland, but nobody challenges the fact that it is the capital of Ireland. Denying that Jerusalem is a part of Israel is denying that Israel has any right to defend itself at all, or that even the portion of Jerusalem not liberated in 1967 is Jewish territory.

Second, the US position actually undercuts Israel’s ability to negotiate. Land-for-peace negotiations have been a dismal failure – the last twenty years have proved that the Oslo strategy of appeasement was destined for disaster from the start. But if land-for-peace were going to work, as Los Angeles Jewish Journal publisher David Suissa has pointed out, the Arabs would have to see Israel as making valuable concessions, not disowning territory to which they never had a right. Peace negotiations must be based on both sides giving up legitimate claims. If I steal your car, we don’t negotiate for its return – I owe you a car. But if I own a car and I trade it to you for cash, that’s a negotiation that may be successful. The same holds true with land.

Leaving aside the practicalities of why the United States should acknowledge that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel is the moral imperative here. Israel’s legitimacy did not spring from a UN resolution (rejected by the Arabs, accepted by the Jews); it did not come from the British Mandate (which allowed settlements throughout Israel, Judea and Samaria, and even Jordan). It came from the Jews’ eternal ties to the land of Israel. If Jerusalem is not a part of Israel, neither is Haifa or Tel Aviv.

And yet the State Department maintains that Jerusalem isn’t a part of Israel. Which means that, effectively speaking, Israel has no claim to any part of the land. If Israel is a creation of the UN, it can be uncreated; if Israel is a holdover of colonial British administration, the left’s hatred of colonialism demands Israel’s extermination.

President Obama seems to buy into this. That’s why in Cairo, he suggested that Israel had been created because of the Holocaust – a leftist and Arabist conceit that implies that Israel’s creation is artificial, a pity party for the Jews.

Jerusalem is central to the Jewish claim to Israel. Denying the legitimacy of that claim, as the State Department does, ignores history, reality, and morality. But that’s what the State Department does on a regular basis. Should we really be surprised?

Ben Shapiro

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/06/06/the-state-department-of-palestine/

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