Domestic Terror, Saudi Style

by Frank Crimi

The recent beheading of a foreign domestic servant in Saudi Arabia is just the latest in a horrifying litany of systematic abuse, torture and rape of female workers at the hands of their Saudi employers.

Ruyati binti Satubi, a 54 year-old Indonesian maid, was recently beheaded for killing her female Saudi employer with a meat cleaver. Claiming years of severe physical abuse, Satubi committed the murder when her employer had denied her permission to return home to Indonesia.

Although Satubi’s justification for her actions had no effect on the Saudi court’s decision, it certainly resonated among most of the over 2 million foreign women working as domestic servants in Saudi households.

Many of these women — most of whom hail from Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines — have routinely been subjected to emotional, sexual and physical abuse by their Saudi employers.

Sadly, these maids were all recruited by employment agencies in their home countries, but most had little idea where they were going or what would be expected of them, which probably makes sense given what awaited them on their arrival.

Of course, the Saudis have been notorious for the horrid treatment they have directed toward their seven million strong migrant workforce, most of whom have long been subjected to wretched working conditions, physical abuse and unjust imprisonment.

According to a 2008 US State Department report, many unskilled foreign workers in Saudi Arabia — especially domestic workers — had been subjected to “nonpayment of wages, debt bondage, confinement, confiscation of passports, contract switching, intimidation, and physical abuse.”

Not surprisingly, female workers were found to be particularly vulnerable victims. In fact, so widespread is the abuse of domestic servants that some countries — most notably India — no longer allow its citizens to work in Saudi Arabia as housemaids.

Unfortunately, the Saudi’s Islamic judicial system offers no assistance to this horrifying problem. While foreign professionals can seek redress for grievances in Saudi labor courts, unskilled workers –such as housemaids– are not protected by Saudi labor law and therefore have no legal recourse.

The result is that Saudi employers are more often than not given the role of meting out extra judicious punishments. These disciplinary measures have included an Indonesian maid being burned with an iron, beaten and her face and lips cut with scissors; a repatriated Sri Lankan maid having had 24 hot nails embedded into her hands, legs, and forehead; and a 36 year-old Indonesian maid having her neck slashed and her body dumped on a roadside by her employer.

So, in order to escape this living hell, thousands of domestic servants run away from their Saudi employers each year. In 2010 alone, at least 2,800 Sri Lankan housemaids reportedly ran away from their Saudi sponsors, claiming they had been overworked, sexually abused or physically mistreated by jealous wives.

Unfortunately, escape doesn’t guarantee a return trip home since all foreign workers need the consent of their employer or “sponsor” before they can leave the country. Therefore, the runaways are forced to rely on their embassies to resolve the problem.

To that end, shelters for runaway maids have been setup by both the Philippine and Indonesian diplomatic missions in Riyadh and Jeddah. According to one Indonesian official, there are currently close to 400 maids at one shelter alone. In fact, the Indonesian embassy is so overloaded with cases of abused workers that it recently hired a full-time Saudi lawyer to deal with all of the criminal cases.

Still, the Saudi government has attempted to address the situation. In January 2011 it tightened regulations regarding labor workers by increasing the requirements on possible employers, including the submittal of references proving an employers’ “good conduct.”

Unfortunately, this simple act of compliance has proven too much of a burden for most Saudi employers as job orders have dropped from an average of 1,000 each day to just five a day in the past five months.

For its part, the Indonesian government has responded to the situation by issuing a moratorium on the Saudi hiring of Indonesian women as well as a call for clemency for 23 of its nationals who currently face the Saudi death penalty.

The Philippine government has also issued a moratorium on the hiring of Filipino maids. That moratorium, however, was issued after the Philippine government had refused a Saudi proposal to cut the minimum wage for maids from $400 a month down to $200.

Ironically, both moratoriums have come at a time when the Saudi government is trying to wean itself off its heavy dependence on migrant-workers by pledging over $90 billion in programs aimed at boosting services and jobs for its own citizens.

Currently, over two-thirds of jobs in Saudi Arabia are held by foreigners, including almost 90 percent in the private sector. Moreover, unemployment in the Saudi kingdom stands at 10.5 percent with youth unemployment approaching nearly 30 percent. To that end, Saudi Arabia has imposed new quotas on companies in the kingdom to employ local staff, with cuts in permits for foreign workers if they fail to comply.

Still, it remains more than likely that the Indonesian and the Philippine governments will soon resolve their issues with the Saudi government. After all, migrant workers generate huge sums of cash, most of which is sent back home to their impoverished families. In 2010 Saudi Arabia was the source of $34 billion in such remittances. Moreover, it is estimated that the current Indonesian moratorium will cost it $1.6 billion.

In fact, so reluctant has Indonesia been in the past to lose that extra income that it rescinded a proposal in 2010 to raise the minimum age and salaries of maids after a coalition of employment agencies in the Gulf threatened to look elsewhere in Asia for maids and drivers.

Even Sri Lanka, which has 300,000 Sri Lankans guest workers in Saudi Arabia, more than twice as many as in any other country, is reluctant to impose any moratorium and risk the influx of money.

That rigid Sri Lankan stance, unfortunately, spells bad news for Rizana Nafeek, a Sri Lankan maid scheduled to be beheaded for allegedly murdering a four-month-old baby despite her plea that she had been trying to save the child from choking. Nafeek — who was seventeen at the time of the incident–had no legal representation before or during her trial.

Now, Nafeek will soon be marched into a packed town square where — blindfolded and shackled — she will be forced to kneel facing Mecca before her life will be brutally and abruptly ended with one sweep of a sharp-edged sword. Her frightfully cruel death chalked up as nothing more than a standard condition of Saudi Arabian employment.

Frank Crimi

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/07/01/domestic-terror-saudi-style/

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Germany’s Left Party Abandons Gaza Ship

by Stephen Brown

The Gaza flotilla has not even sailed yet and some rats have already abandoned ship.

Stung by accusations of anti-Semitism, Germany’s Left Party passed a resolution earlier this month forbidding any of its 76 elected representatives in Germany’s Bundestag (the national parliament) from taking part in this year’s anti-Israeli floating propaganda exercise, scheduled to sail next week. Two current Bundestag Left Party members and a former Left federal representative took part in the 2009 Gaza flotilla that ended in the deaths of nine activists after Israeli commandos raided the Turkish ship, the Mavi Marmara, and fought a running battle with radical Islamists armed with wooden staves and iron bars.

“We are very proud of your involvement,” Left Party President Gesine Loetzsch told the three upon their return to Germany.

The participation of Left Party representatives in the 2009 flotilla and their leader’s warm approval are just one in a string of incidents that led to accusations that the party nourishes anti-Semitism. Three years earlier in 2006, for example, the Left Party’s Bundestag representative for foreign policy accused Israel of conducting a “forbidden war of annihilation” in Lebanon in Israel’s armed clash with Hezbollah. In a ludicrous comparison with the Nazi era, he said the Israeli army’s actions reminded him of “the German Wehrmacht’s orders for taking revenge.”

Other incidents that evoked the anti-Semitic accusations involved the Left Party in Bremen supporting a call for a boycott of Israeli fruit in front of supermarkets. A more disturbing anti-Semitic occurrence concerned the Left Party association in Duisburg. It posted a two-page, anti-Semitic tract on the Internet that showed a swastika inside of a Star of David and began with the words “Never Again War For Israel!” The tract called on people to oppose “the moral blackmail of the so-called Holocaust.” Two Left delegates also disrespectfully remained in their seats when Israeli President Shimon Peres appeared in the Bundestag in January, 2010, to make a speech as part of a Holocaust memorial event.

“This was a sign for me that parts of their caucus not only tolerate an anti-Semitic undertone, but also cultivate it,” said Stefan Ruppert, a Bundestag representative from Germany’s liberal party who witnessed the disgraceful scene.

But its was a study by two university researchers, one an expert on anti-Semitism, that forced the Left Party’s leadership to take action and compose the resolution that prohibits its members’ participation in next week’s Gaza flotilla. Called “Anti-Semites as Coalition Partners,” the study stated that anti-Semitism is a “consensus position” among Left members and was “clearly gaining in influence in the party,” especially in West German Left associations.

“Anti-Semitism feeds itself there (in West Germany) on an anti-imperialist tradition, which has its origin in the communist groups of the 1970s,” the report states.

One German newspaper described the June resolution as having changed three of the Left Party’s positions regarding Israel. The first dealt with the fact the Party will “not make common cause with initiatives that demand a one-state solution for Palestine and Israel.”

This particular Left policy has been interpreted as concealing a hidden desire for Israel’s destruction. In April 2010, the Left did recognize Israel’s right to exist, but at the same time it demanded that Israel free its “political prisoners and dismantle all border security positions” as well as involve Hamas in all political negotiations. In the German newspaper Die Welt, German-Jewish writer Henryk Broder says this kind of argumentation has “tactical advantages.

“It enables the Left to be both for and against simultaneously. For Israel’s right to exist and for the recognition of Hamas, which has made clear again and again, that it will never come to terms with Israel’s existence,” Broder stated.

The Left Party’s second changed position contained in the June resolution stated the Party will no longer take part in calls for boycotts of Israeli products, while the third one saw the Party swearing off any involvement in this year’s Gaza flotilla. The resolution passed unanimously in a federal Left Party caucus vote, but only because 15 members opposed to the new measures left the meeting before the vote took place.

The Left Party is a descendant of the old East German communist Party, the Socialist Unity Party (SED), which renamed itself the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. One report states about 70 percent of current Left Party members belonged to the SED, which merged with the West German leftist Electoral Alternative for Labor and Social Justice Party (WAGS) in 2007. After unification, members called their new party simply ‘The Left’ (Die Linke). It is the fourth largest party in the 622-seat Bundestag, having received 11.9 percent of the vote in the last federal election in 2009.

Since 2007, the Left Party has been basically known for its staunch anti-American and anti-Israeli positions, which members brought to the party. Left members from East Germany were taught to dislike America and Israel as part of “state-directed policy.” But what probably transformed this dislike into hatred was that the East German state also taught its citizens, even as schoolchildren, to hate. But the hatred they absorbed was class hatred, which was then transferred after the failure of the workers’ state to Israel and America. The West German Left members, on the other hand, despise Israel as “an extension of the arm” of American imperialism. And it is this hatred of Israel and America, as has often been pointed out, which makes such leftists the Islamists natural allies.

In an essay in the German newspaper, Suddeutsche Zeitung, the president of Germany’s Central Council for Jews recently called the Left Party’s attempts to distance itself from its “anti-Semitic tendencies” through the June resolution as having “spectacularly failed.” President Dieter Graumann said the dislike of Israel among some Left Party federal representatives was “obsessive.” He accused some Left members, particularly from West Germany, of “living out their downright pathological, blinded by rage, Israel hatred.”

For its part, the Left Party denies there are any anti-Semites among its members and says racism does not exist in the party. There are just “different positions on the Middle East conflict,” the Left Party’s leader for the state of Sachsen-Anhalt said in an interview.

“We don’t have any pathological Israel haters,” he declared.

But the “Arab Spring” contradicts the Left leader’s assertion. The Arab uprisings are showing, once again, what heartless hypocrites the leftists supporting or involved in the Gaza flotilla truly are. The fact they are sailing with humanitarian aid to a relatively well-off Gaza rather than to a bleeding Libya, Syria or Yemen, where thousands of people have died and tens of thousands made homeless, bears this out. These leftists, it appears, are interested in suffering Arabs only in places where they can score anti-American or anti-Israeli propaganda points, their true goal, which confirms they don’t care about the welfare of Arabs at all – and never will.

Stephen Brown

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/07/01/germany%E2%80%99s-left-party-abandons-gaza-ship/

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Obama Reaches Out to the Muslim Brotherhood

by Robert Spencer

The Obama administration is set to begin formal contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood, a group dedicated in its own words to “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within, and sabotaging its miserable house.”

This news came in a Reuters report Wednesday, quoting a “senior U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.” Why this official felt it necessary to speak on condition of anonymity is a mystery, given the fact that Barack Obama has never made a secret of his solicitude for the Muslim Brotherhood. Even though the Brotherhood was still outlawed in Egypt at that time, he made a point of inviting leaders of the group to attend his speech to the Islamic world in Cairo on June 4, 2009.

Not only that. Obama included the leader of a Muslim Brotherhood-linked group that had been named an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case among the clerics giving a prayer during his inauguration ceremonies: Ingrid Mattson, then-president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), offered this prayer at the National Cathedral on Obama’s Inauguration Day – despite the fact that ISNA has admitted its ties to the Brotherhood. In fact, so overwhelming is the evidence of ISNA’s involvement with the Brotherhood and Hamas that the previous summer, federal prosecutors had rejected a request from ISNA to remove its unindicted co-conspirator status. Obama even sent his Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett to be the keynote speaker at ISNA’s national convention in 2009.

In light of all that, it is mystifying why the official opted to remain anonymous – surely he had no fear of incurring the wrath of anyone in the Obama high command by spilling these particular beans. Of course, he may have been mindful of how poorly this would play among those aware of the Brotherhood’s pro-Sharia, anti-Israel, anti-American agenda, and so he played up the pragmatic, realpolitik aspects of the decision: “The political landscape in Egypt has changed, and is changing,” he noted. “It is in our interests to engage with all of the parties that are competing for parliament or the presidency.”

The official added that the Obama administration would, in its talks with the Brotherhood, “continue to emphasize the importance of support for democratic principles and a commitment to nonviolence, and respect for minority and women’s rights in conversations with all groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Good luck with that. The Muslim Brotherhood, contrary to “intelligence” chief James Clapper’s ridiculous claim that it is “largely secular,” is dedicated to establishing an Islamic state in Egypt and implementing the Islamic law that has no room for democratic principles, uses violence against dissenters and miscreants, and tramples upon minority rights and women’s rights. Then there is the movement’s inveterate anti-Semitism: not only does the jihad terrorist group Hamas style itself as the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine, but recently the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Badie said: “Allah has warned us the tricks of the Jews, and their role in igniting the fire of wars… and they labor hard to spread corruption on earth: and Allah does not love the spreaders of corruption.”

The spiritual father of the Muslim Brotherhood, the 84-year-old Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, recently returned to Cairo to be greeted by huge and rapturous crowds after the end of his fifty-year exile from the country. In January 2009, during a Friday sermon broadcast on Al-Jazeera, he prayed that Allah would kill all the Jews: “Oh Allah, take this oppressive, Jewish, Zionist band of people. Oh Allah, do not spare a single one of them. Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them, down to the very last one.” He also declared: “Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by [Adolf] Hitler.”

More mindful of the many pitfalls involved in this new course of action was Elliott Abrams, a former deputy national security adviser for Middle East affairs in the Bush administration. “It’s critical,” said Abrams, “that we make it very, very clear to Egyptians, if we are going to do a meeting, that we are no less opposed to the ideas they represent.”

That’s unlikely in the extreme during the presidency of Barack Obama. Contradicting widespread claims and wishful thinking that the Brotherhood has moderated its hardline stances, Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center pointed out that “the political landscape in Egypt may have changed since the end of the Mubarak regime, but the Brotherhood’s hatred of Jews and Israel has not changed at all. This seems like a sell out to the European position and I hope it is not a signal that the United States will acquiesce to Europe and begin talking to Hamas as well.”

Rabbi Hier added:

We should not be talking to an organization that can lay claim to being the world’s leading purveyor of anti-Semitism and hatred of Jews. Legitimizing the Muslim Brotherhood sends the wrong message that you can hate Jews, and still sit and talk with world leaders.

Unfortunately, that seems to be a message that Obama administration is entirely willing to send. Combine his warm stance toward the Brotherhood with his thinly-veiled hostility toward Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel in general, and Barack Obama’s inclinations are clear. He gave approval for the killing of Osama bin Laden and has pursued al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, but in repeated statements he has made clear that he considers himself to be pursuing a war against al-Qaeda alone. In other words, Barack Obama is not fighting against the global jihad as pursued by groups other than al-Qaeda, and certainly not against the Islamic supremacist imperative to impose Sharia on majority-Muslim states as well as to bring elements of it westward.

The U.S. is the poorer for it. Israel is the more vulnerable for it. Obama’s stance puts all free people in danger. Obama’s stance puts Americans in increased danger from the Brotherhood’s subversive activities stateside. November 2012 cannot come fast enough.

Robert Spencer

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/07/04/obama-reaches-out-to-the-muslim-brotherhood/

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Patriots, Refugees and the Right of Return

by Steven Plaut

When the War of Independence began, it quickly assumed the nature of a civil war. Those opposing the declaration of statehood fought alongside the organized armies of their kinsmen, which invaded the territory of the infant state from all directions. The fighting was bloody, and the opponents of independence used terrorism against the population seeking statehood. The country was partitioned between the areas of the new state and the territories remaining under the rule of the foreign invaders.

As the fighting dragged on, the opponents of independence began a mass exodus. In most cases, they left because they feared the consequences of staying on as a political minority or because they simply opposed on principle the new political entity. In some cases, they refused to live as a religious minority under the rule of those practicing another religion. In some cases, they were expelled forcibly. They fled across the frontiers, moving their families to live in the areas controlled by the armies of their political kin. From there, some joined the invading forces and launched cross-border raids. When the fighting ceased, most of the refugees who had fled from the new state were refused permission to return.

The events described above did not transpire in 1947-49, but rather in 1775-1781. The refugees in question were not Arabs, but Tory “Loyalists” who supported the British against the American revolutionists seeking independence. During the American War of Independence, large numbers of Loyalist refugees fled the new country. Estimates of the numbers vary, but perhaps 100,000 refugees left or were expelled, a very significant number given the sparse population of the thirteen colonies.

While there are many differences, there are also many similarities between the plight of the Palestinians and that of the Tory refugees during the first years of American independence. The advocates of Palestinian rights are in fact clearly in the same political bed with King George`s allies who fought against American democracy and independence.

Like all wars of independence, both the Israeli and American wars were in fact civil wars. In both cases, religious sectarianism played an important role in defining the opposing forces, although for Americans, taxation was even more important. (Israelis suffered under abominable taxation only after independence.) Among the causes of the American Revolution was the attempt to establish the Anglican Church, or Church of England, as the official bishopric of the colonies. Anglicans were the largest ethnic group opposing independence in the 1770s, as were Palestinian Muslims in the 1940s, although in both cases, other religious/ethnic groups were also represented in the anti-independence movement.

Those fearing the possibility of being forced to live as minorities under the tyrannical religious supremacy of the Anglicans and Muslims, respectively, formed the forces fighting for independence. The Anglicans and Muslims hoped to establish themselves with the armed support of their co-religionists across the borders. New England was the center of patriotism to a large extent because of the mistrust of the Anglican church by the Puritan and Congregationalist majorities there. The later incorporation of the separation of church and state into the U.S. Constitution was largely motivated by the memory of would-be Anglican dominance.

Among the leaders of the Tory cause were many Anglican parsons, perhaps the most prominent being one Samuel Seabury, the Grand Mufti of the Loyalists.

In both the American and Israeli wars of independence, the anti-independence forces were a divided and heterogeneous population, and for this reason lost the war. In the American colonies, the Tories included not only Anglicans, but other groups — including Indians, Scots, Dutch, and Negroes — who feared for their future living under the rule of the local political majority. Tory sympathy was based on ethnic, commercial, and religious considerations. Where Loyalist sentiment was strong enough, namely in Canada, the war produced a partition, with territories remaining cut off from the newly independent state.

When independence was declared, the populations of the opposing forces were about even in both 18th century America and 20th century Palestine. The exact distribution of pro- and anti-independence forces in the American colonies is not known, but the estimate by John Adams is probably as good a guess as any — namely, one-third patriot, one-third Loyalist, and one-third neutral.

When fighting broke out, civilians were often the first victims in both wars. The Tories formed terrorist units and plundered and raided the territories under patriot control. The southwestern frontier areas of the colonies, like the southwestern border of Palestine, were scenes of particularly bloody terrorism. In South Carolina, the Tory leader Major William Cunningham, known as “Bloody Bill,” became the Ahmed Jibril of the struggle, conducting massacres of patriot civilians. Tory and anti-Tory mob violence became common. The historian Thomas Jones documents many cases of Tories burning patriot homes, but claims the patriots seldom did the same.

Terrorist raids were particularly common along the New England coast and up the Delaware River. General Sir Henry Clinton organized many guerilla raids upon patriot territory. Loyalists also launched assassination plots, including an attempt to murder George Washington in New York in 1776. Among the terrorists participating in that plot was the mayor of New York City.

There were Loyalist insurrections against the patriots in every colony. Tory military activity was particularly severe in the Chesapeake, on Long Island, in Delaware, in Maryland, and along the Virginia coast. As violence escalated and spread, the forces of the revolution took countermeasures. Tories were tarred and feathered. Indiscriminate expulsions sometimes took place. Tory areas were sometimes placed under martial rule, with all civil rights, such as habeas corpus and due process, suspended.

Queens County, New York, a Loyalist stronghold, was put under military administration by Continental troops, and the entire population was prohibited from travel without special documents. General Wooster engaged in wholesale incarceration and expulsion of New York Tories. The Continental Congress called for disarming all Loyalists and locking up the “dangerous ones” without trial. New York Loyalists were exiled to Connecticut and other places, and sometimes subject to forced labor.

Loyalists were sometimes kidnapped and held hostage. In some colonies, expressing opposition to the Revolution was grounds for imprisonment. In some colonies, Loyalists were excluded from practicing law and from some other professions. Tories were frequently stripped of all property rights, and had their lands confiscated. In colony after colony, “Acts of Banishment” forced masses of Loyalists to leave their homes and emigrate. The most common destination was the Canadian Maritimes, with others going to the British West Indies, to England, and to Australia.

In both the Israeli and American wars for independence, anti-independence refugees fled the country in order to live in areas under the control of their political allies. Many who opposed independence nevertheless stayed put. After the wars ended, these people generally found the devil was not as bad as they had feared, and were permitted to live as tolerated political minorities with civil rights. (This in spite of the fact that many refused to recognize the legitimacy of the new states, sometimes for decades.)

The colonies/states that had banished Loyalists refused to allow them to return, even after a peace treaty was signed. In most cases, property was never returned. There was fear that returning Tories could act as a sort of fifth column, particularly if the British took it into their heads to attempt another invasion. (Such an invasion took place in 1812.) The newly independent country, like Israel, initially resolved many of its strategic problems through an alliance with France.

The Tory refugees were regarded by all as the problem of Britain. The American patriots allowed small numbers to return. Others attempted to return illegally and were killed. But most languished across the partition lines in eastern British Canada, mainly in what would become Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. The refugees would never be granted the “right to return.” In most cases, they would never even be granted compensation for property; Benjamin Franklin was among the leading opponents of any such compensation.

At this point, the similarity between the Palestinian refugees and the Tory Loyalists breaks down. The British, unlike the Arabs, did a great deal to settle their refugees, rather than force them into festering camps, and allotted $20 million for their resettlement. The Tory refugees quickly became a non-problem, and never played any subsequent role in British-American relations.

Nevertheless, an interesting thought-experiment might be to imagine what would have occurred had the British done things the Arab way. Tory refugees would have been converted into terrorist cadres and trained by British commandos. They would have begun a ceaseless wave of incursions and invasions of the independent United States, mainly from bases along the Canadian frontier. The British, Hessians and their allies would have launched a global diplomatic campaign for self-determination for the Loyalist Americans. They would have set up an American Liberation Organization (ALO) to hijack whalers and merchant marines and assassinate U.S. diplomats.

Benedict Arnold would have been chosen ALO chairman and would have written the Tory National Charter under the nom de guerre of Abu Albion. The British would have organized underground terrorist cells among the Loyalist population that had not fled. Britain and her empire would have boycotted the new country commercially and pressured others to do the same, asserting that the national rights of the Loyalist people were inalienable and eternal, no matter how many years had passed since the refugees fled. International pressure would have been exerted on the U.S. to give up much of its territory and to internationalize Philadelphia.

For more than fifty years, the position of the American State Department has been that Israel should grant the Palestinian refugees the “right to return,” that Israel is liable for the suffering of the refugees and should be responsible for their resettlement. The State Department also thinks the refugees should be represented at Middle East peace talks. The State Department is sympathetic to calls for recognizing the rights of the refugees to self-determination and political expression.

The State Department, in other words, is exhibiting Loyalist Tory sympathies. A large portrait of Benedict Arnold should grace the office of every “Arabist” at Foggy Bottom.

Steven Plaut

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/07/04/patriots-refugees-and-the-right-of-return/

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

Whither Arab Solidarity?

by Amnon Rubinstein

For more than three months, the Libyan town of Misrata has been under siege, and its citizens are being bombarded by Muammar Gaddafi’s well-equipped army and air force. Nobody knows the number of civilian casualties, but over a month ago, the Guardian reported that there were over 1,000 dead and 3,000 wounded.

Misrata is only a short distance from the Tunisian border, where a popular revolution installed a non-tyrant government. And yet, Tunis does not extend any help to its beleaguered Arab brethren in Misrata, except for accepting the Libyan refugees fleeing the war.

The fate of Benghazi, located closer to the Egyptian border, could have been much worse: Were it not for a last-minute rescue by the NATO air-force, the people would have been slaughtered en masse when the armed columns of Gaddafi began their avenging march to the city. A few days before that intervention, the Guardian reported the frustration of a local engineer, who waved his clenched fist at the sky and shouted: “Where is [an] aerial counter-blow? Where is the West? They must stop Qaddafi before we all die.” He did not address his outcry to neighboring Egypt, which, with its huge army and air force, could have saved the people of Benghazi.

The only Arab states rendering any help to the Libyan people are Qatar, Jordan and the Emirates, and they confine themselves to aerial humanitarian assistance. Nothing is being done by any Arab organization to save the rebels from annihilation.

Now, let’s imagine a hypothetical scenario in which two Jewish communities face similar dangers, and right across the border, there exist two Jewish states. Can anyone even imagine a situation in which these Jewish states would turn a blind eye to their menaced brethren? Is it at all conceivable that these states would not mobilize their armies to save the lives of the besieged Jews?

Even without a state of their own, Jews in the Diaspora have always mobilized to help endangered Jewish communities. Indeed, Jewish solidarity – from the Joint to Col. Marcus’s volunteers in the War of Independence – has become legendary. But where is the Arab Col. Marcus? Where is the financial assistance from oil-rich governments that could help the people of Misrata?

If solidarity and loyalty are the hallmark of a people, then the Jews are certainly a people. And yet, anti-Israeli university professors in Israel, who thrive on Jewish donations, deny the existence of such a people. This is the edict of the latest academic fashion, and Prof. Shlomo Sand of Tel Aviv University is its main trendsetter. In his book The Invention of the Jewish People, Sand claims that the Jews were not expelled from ancient Palestine, that those who remained there were the ancestors of today’s Palestinians, that the Ashkenazi Jews are the descendents of the mass conversion of Khazars – a seminomadic Turkic people – to Judaism over 1,000 years ago and, needless to say, have no historical claim over Palestine.

Naturally the book drew worldwide attention, won an important French prize and was widely covered by the international media. Here was the ultimate attack on Israel: If there is no Jewish people, there should be no Jewish state, and strictly speaking, there should be no Jewish history (although Sand is ready, so it seems, to grant recognition to the Israeli-Jewish community).

IS THERE any scientific basis to Sand’s allegations? And if there is, what are its political ramifications? The answer is twofold: There is no evidence whatsoever for these statements, and even if they are true, they have no significance.

Let us take his claim that Ashkenazi Jews are descendents of Khazar converts. There is no evidence for this (although it is quite possible that a minority stems from such alleged conversions).

A wide range of reliable genetic tests have negated this tale, there are no Khazar words in Yiddish, and if we assume that the Ashkenazi community is of Khazar extraction, we must also assume that many of them decided, by acquiring names such as Cohen and Levy, to retroactively serve the Jewish God as holy men in a Jewish Temple destroyed almost 1,000 years before their conversion.

But let us assume that there was mass conversion and that most or all Ashkenazi Jews are of non-Jewish extraction. Since when are converts not considered Jewish? According to both Halacha and liberal principles, a convert to Judaism is a Jew for every purpose, including his yearning for Zion. According to the book’s argument, King David himself, whose grandmother was a convert, is not Jewish and has no claim to Zion.

The truth is that Sand’s compilation of rubbish serves an important purpose. It is a further erosion of the line between academic writing and its parody. Thus, Sand makes fun of all the genetic studies, undertaken by firstrate scientists, that prove two astounding conclusions: Ashkenazi Jews are genetically closer to oriental Jews and oriental non-Jews than to the non-Jewish European host societies, and Jews managed to keep their separate genetic identity throughout this long and eventful time.

Needless to say, no nation is, or should be, racially pure. Jews did intermarry, and conversions took place. Evelyn Waugh, in a letter to Nancy Mitford, notedices the diversity of ethnicities among Jews when he visited Palestine in the ’30s. Herzl was aware of this diversity and remarked that “no people are homogenous racially.” Meanwhile, all French children, including African-French, learn in school about “our ancestors, the Gauls”; are they different from the alleged descendants of a convert who prays, “Next year in Jerusalem?”

What Jews posses that is conspicuously absent among their Arab cousins is solidarity in time of need.

And it is this Jewish solidarity, among other things, that has enabled Israel and its universities to survive.

Amnon Rubinstein is a professor of law at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, a former minister of education and Knesset member, and the recipient of the 2006 Israel Prize in Law (www.amnonrubinstein.org).

Source: http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=227750

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TSA: A Portrait in Islamization

by Rabbi Aryeh Spero

On June 18^th in an airport in Florida, Transportation Security Administration agents required a 95-year-old woman with leukemia to remove her adult diaper if she wanted to pass their inspection and travel. The TSA says they would have been satisfied with merely feeling around the garment, but it was wet. Whatever version, this constitutes yet another debasing treatment of an absolutely non-threatening American citizen for the purpose of protecting Muslim honor. So as to be sensitive and not profile young Islamic men -- the demographic group most likely to be terrorists -- our policy is ending up dishonoring and humiliating American citizens, be they grammas or little girls, who in no way pose a threat.

This is not simply foolish, but evidence that our governmental agencies are already engaged in Islamization, for Islamization has taken root when a society abandons its decades of prevailing standards of dignity and common sense so as to accommodate Islam. In this case, American policy has set aside our historic respect for individual personhood as well as law enforcement's tried and tested method of profiling the most likely to commit a particular crime. Groping little girls, afflicting old women, and invasively searching middle-aged people with no indication of being a threat is not the American way and would not, in other circumstances, be tolerated by any civil rights organization except here due to our preoccupation of not offending Muslims.

When a society asks its citizens to accept their own debasement and forgo their right to modesty and propriety -- and all that constitutes first-class citizenship -- so as to accommodate Muslim demands, those citizens have now taken a backseat; they have become second-class. Second-class citizenship for non-Muslims so as not to offend Muslims is called dhimmitude, a core Islamic belief, the a priori subtext of the Islamization process. In effect, it elevates the Muslim over the non-Muslim and holds in higher regard how he is to be treated relative to how the Christian or Jew is to be treated. This is the ideal practiced throughout the Islamic world.

There are those that call this accommodation, but in reality it is Islamization for it, step-by-step, leads to an acceptance by society and ultimately society's new standard. The imams and Islamic organizations are well aware of Western society's desire to be accommodating and have seized upon it as a way to begin the process that goes from accommodation to a society submissive to its own dhimmi status, in its very own land.

This has happened in Great Britain where schools with a mixed student body will, out of deference to the Muslim students, no longer serve pork in the cafeteria. Jewish students never made such demands. Instead of live and let live -- the historic operating template of the West -- Britons are asked to forfeit their preferences and identity under the Islamic rubric of "It's our way, not your way." Similarly, British neighborhoods with sizeable, but not majority, Islamic populations are forgoing their centuries-old Christmas street displays so as not to offend Muslims. It is, effectually, the beginning of a society submitting to shariah, first by omission and eventually in actual commission.

Government bureaucrats call it sensitivity, but it is, of course, the ever-moving train of Islamization. Islam makes demands of a society that no other minority has ever made precisely because, unlike other groups, its goal is to reconfigure the society. Even today, many in the West think Islamic demands are simply of the age-old civil rights variety, as was the case with other minorities, when it is really about Islamization, the imposition of Islam over the prevailing culture and over its citizens.

This degradation of the American citizenry is not enough for many in the Islamic organizations, who all too often yell discrimination and "Islamaphobia" when a Muslim, like all other Americans, is subjected to TSA inspection. They cry the cry of civil rights, but the undertone bespeaks a feeling of Islamic entitlement, that Muslims are above the rest and should be spared the intrusions others must bear. It's a manifestation of the dhimmi notion found in the fifty-seven Islamic countries that shape the attitude of those, even here, who see them as model societies.

In the name of civil rights, many imams have warned our authorities not to subject Islamic women to what our own mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters routinely undergo in our policy of not implementing the commonsense profiling offensive to Muslims. But given that the civil rights of women is not at the forefront of Islamic theology, it seems that the real intent behind these warnings is not a concern for women's dignity but yet another opportunity to assert Islamic supremacy and hierarchy above the rest of us, the dhimmis.

A society is in a condition of dhimmitude when it neglects protecting its own people and overlooks what is done to its people so as not to offend Islam. It does so by discarding its previous values and begins accepting what it, deep down, knows is not true. In Norway and Sweden, for example, there are reports of young Islamic men raping local Scandinavian girls. Yet, fearful of Islamic cries of Islamophobia, authorities are not prosecuting these men and are buying into the imamic assertion that it's the scantily dressed girls who are, really, at fault by making men victims of their own youthful passions. When coming from a nation that for years denounced these very assertions as sexist, one has reached dhimmitude. What was previously the victim, the raped woman, is now the aggressor, and what was previously the aggressor, the man, is now the victim if a male Muslim. Dhimitude is not simply the demotion of one's own culture in relation to Islam but a categorization of inferiority as a people, and in body, to that of Islam. Many in the West are now voluntarily practicing racism against their own race.

Islamization is happening not simply because of the brazenness of Islam but because of the multiculturalism that has become our self-imposed test as to our worthiness. What began as an attempt in openness has metastasized to assigning other cultures superiority to our own. In fact, the more it differs from our own, the more we elevate it above our own.

Last year, a State Department spokesman announced that our procedures at the airport were necessary "so we can prove what we preach." Proving our tolerance has become more important than common sense. What impels a society to undergo mass humiliation so as to prove to Islam that we are not racist? Indeed, it would seem that Islam has a greater need to prove itself to us -- to prove that the atrocities perpetuated in its name around the world are, somehow, an aberration.

The more we obsess over their honor, the less we seem to care about our own honor. What makes us cherish their honor more than being concerned with the gross indignities of our own women and children? It is the self-hate and guilt generated by liberalism, an infectious disease spread across this country unrelentingly for over fifty years from the dens of New York's Upper West Side. It has brainwashed a great people into a confused and, often, pathetic submission. It has made us ripe for Islamization. Let's hope we gather our strength and pride before we, God forbid, become Sweden and Norway.

Rabbi Aryeh Spero

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/07/tsa_a_portrait_in_islamization.html

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

Quartet Statement on the Situation in Gaza

by IMRA

The following is the text of a statement released by the Middle East Quartet (United States, United Nations, European Union and Russia) in New York on July 2, 2011:

Begin Text:

The Quartet remains concerned about the unsustainable conditions facing the civilian population in Gaza but notes that efforts have improved conditions over the last year, including a marked increase in the range and scope of goods and materials moving into Gaza, an increase in international project activity, and the facilitation of some exports. In that regard, the Quartet commends the recent approval by Israel of materials for new homes and schools to be constructed by UNRWA, but notes that considerably more needs to be done to increase the flow of people and goods to and from Gaza, including a liberalization of the market in aggregate, steel bar and cement. Members of the Quartet continue to urge full implementation of Israel’s June 2010 policy decision and further meaningful steps to improve the situation in Gaza consistent with Security Council resolution 1860 (2009).

They will work, including through UN and Quartet Representative Tony Blair, with Israel, the Palestinian Authority, donors and the international community to ensure that the needs of the people of Gaza are being met.

The Quartet recognizes that Israel has legitimate security concerns that must continue to be safeguarded. Members of the Quartet are committed to working with Israel, Egypt and the international community to prevent the illicit trafficking of arms and ammunition into Gaza and believe efforts to maintain security while enabling movement and access for Palestinian people and goods are critical. In this context, the Quartet strongly urges all those wishing to deliver goods to the people of Gaza to do so through established channels so that their cargo can be inspected and transferred via established land crossings. The Quartet regrets the injury and deaths caused by the 2010 flotilla, urges restraint and calls on all Governments concerned to use their influence to discourage additional flotillas, which risk the safety of their participants and carry the potential for escalation.

The Quartet also calls for an end to the deplorable five-year detention of Gilad Shalit.

IMRA - Independent Media Review and Analysis

Source: http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2011/07/167525.htm

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

The 'Arab Spring' Explains Itself Further

by Andrew G. Bostom

Tunisia, the epicenter of the 'Arab Spring,' rejects 'any form of normalization with the Zionist state'

From ANSA Med:

Tunisia's commission of political reform announced that it adopted (by majority) a "republican pact'" that will be the basis of the future new Constitution, and in particular it states the rejection of any normalization with Israel. While announcing the pact the president of the commission, Yadh Ben Achour, did not offer any details, but the Arab speaking Tunisian press published its content, which defines Tunisia as a free and democratic country, whose official language is Arab and whose religion is Islam.

The pact, that will serve as the basis of the future Constitution, categorically rejects "any form of normalization with the Zionist State'", and supports the Palestinian cause.

Andrew G. Bostom

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2011/07/the_arab_spring_explains_itself_further.html

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

Beck Bids Adieu

by Arnold Ahlert

Yesterday was Glenn Beck’s last day on Fox. In his run there, which began in 2008 after Fox hired him away from rival network CNN, Mr. Beck was a lighting rod for relentless progressive vitriol. Perhaps only George W. Bush and Sarah Palin have been subjected to more criticism than the controversial TV and radio host. Yet despite the controversy, Beck leaves behind a solid legacy in two arenas: his attention to the far-left’s alliance with Islamic radicalism, and his exposure of the breathtaking degree of leftist radicalism that permeates the Democratic Party.

Beck has done yeoman’s work with regard to exposing radical Islam, as demonstrated by a a six-part series of videos (available here, here, here, here, here and here). In fact, Beck’s ongoing exposés of that radicalism remain unmatched by most in the mainstream media. Yet when Beck offered his rationale connecting Muslim radicals with the “hard-core socialist Left,” he was not only taken on by the Left, but conservatives as well. For instance, the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol accused Beck of “hysteria,” and National Review’s Rich Lowry called it a “well-deserved shot.”

The leftist/Islamist alliance is in fact quite ubiquitous and there are many disturbing examples of it that Beck took care to document. The radical leftist group Code Pink, which has forged ties with Hamas, did indeed spend time in early 2011 agitating in Cairo and at the Egyptian Rafah crossing, a border which many Egyptians believe Mubarak closed because he was a pawn of the Israelis. It was Code Pink founder Jodie Evans, along with leftist Weather Underground terrorists Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, who helped organize last year’s Free Gaza Movement which launched the “peace” flotilla attempting to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. This year’s 11-ship flotilla, with the same objective, includes a boat named the “Audacity of Hope” and carries American leftists, including author Alice Walker, who this week called Israel and America “terrorist states” (as the Iranians do). Beck also created a video montage of leftist organizations mingled with Islamic radicals, all promoting the same anti-Semitic message. Ironically, that video begins with Chris Matthews mocking Beck for making the connection.

Yesterday, on the same day Beck’s Fox career was coming to an end, he may have received one of the more satisfying vindications of his assertions: Commentary Magazine reported that the Obama administration is reversing a five-year ban on contact with the Muslim Brotherhood. That would be the same Muslim Brotherhood which spawned Hamas, whose charter is dedicated to the destruction of Israel and calls for the extermination of Jews. “We believe, given the changing political landscape in Egypt, that it is in the interests of the United States to engage with all parties that are peaceful, and committed to non-violence, that intend to compete for the parliament and the presidency,” said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Perhaps Beck is equally vindicated by another revelation which occurred recently. Left-wing Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), despite assertions that his statements had been “mischaracterized” by the Syrian media, was caught praising President Bashar Assad as a man “thinking about the different ways that would be the best way to address the needs of the people…And frankly, that’s a positive development.” How has Assad been addressing the needs of his people? By gunning them down in the streets for daring to stand against his thug regime. Over 1,400 men, women and children have been murdered so far.

Glenn Beck also made the Left hysterical when he took on one of its cherished icons, George Soros. Beck contended that Soros has a five-step plan to bring down America, a charge which was greeted with contempt. One of those steps, according to Beck, was to “control the airwaves.” Once again, Beck was vindicated when an in-depth Fox report revealed that Soros “has ties to more than 30 mainstream news outlets–including The New York Times, Washington Post, the Associated Press, NBC and ABC.” The breadth of Soros’ media connections are explained in great detail, but nothing sums up his influence better than this:

Readers unhappy with Soros’ media influence might be tempted to voice concerns to the Organization of News Ombudsmen–a professional group devoted to ‘monitoring accuracy, fairness and balance.’ Perhaps they might consider a direct complaint to one such as NPR’s Alicia Shepard or PBS’s Michael Getler, both directors of the organization. Unfortunately, that group is also funded by Soros.

The response to Beck’s efforts to expose Soros were characterized as anti-Semitic, with Daily Beast columnist Michelle Goldberg calling them an “updated Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” ADL leader Abraham Foxman piled on as well, calling Beck’s coverage of Soros’ actions as a boy during the Holocaust (when he aided Nazis in the confiscation of Jewish property) as “completely inappropriate, offensive and over the top.” Yet a 60 Minutes interview with Steve Kroft is where this information originated, and most of the controversy surrounding the interview has to do with Soros’ near-sociopathic lack of guilty for his conscription: “No feeling of guilt?” asked Kroft. “No,” said Soros. “There was no sense that I shouldn’t be there. If I wasn’t doing it, somebody else would be taking it away anyhow. Whether I was there or not. So I had no sense of guilt.”

Of course, Beck’s exposure of the control of the far-left over what’s left of the Democratic Party, facilitated immensely by Soros, was monumental. From Obama’s czars, such as dedicated Marxist Van Jones and the FCC’s chief diversity czar and Hugo Chavez sympathizer Mark Lloyd, to the president’s spiritual advisor and self-admitted Marxist Rev. Jim Wallis, Beck has sought to shine the light on the assortment of radical elements that form the basis of this administration and its defenders.

For that he has been routinely excoriated by the American Left, various elements of which have actively worked toward or endorsed the abridgment of Beck’s free speech. Even to the end, as yesterday’s piece in the Baltimore Sun indicated, there will be no letup. Writer David Zurawik stated that Glenn Beck ”will leave a TV legacy of reckless, divisive and ugly speech in his wake,” and that “he and Fox News should both feel some shame for the harm they have done to the national political discourse — how they have taken an hour of dinnertime each weeknight and used it to help polarize us with paranoid and angry words.”

Despite such obtusely hyperbolic detractors — who consistently and bizarrely level more vitriol and hysteria toward Beck than the very “hate” they purport to despise him for — Beck remains popular. Even with a forty percent drop-off from his ratings high-water mark, Beck’s remained the most popular show on cable news in his time slot, with almost two and a half times the number of viewers as his closest rivals, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. And contrary to published reports that he was fired, Beck is leaving Fox because his contract is up, and his business and creative teams at Mercury Radio Arts prefer to get out from under the grind of producing his 5 p.m. show amid the corporate bureaucracy “where most ideas must be generated, spelled out in pitches, run by producers, budgeted, then run by more producers, approved by senior executives, etc.”

His next venture, GBTV, will be a web-based TV network, with two hour shows broadcast on weekdays from 5-7 PM EST, beginning on Sept. 12th. The show will also be available on demand. Subscriptions will cost $4.95 per month for access just to the show, or $9.95 for premium member access to all of the site’s programming. Advertising will provide additional revenue. “Lots of people are talking about the digital content revolution, but few are willing to risk it all and place a huge bet on the future,” said Christopher Balfe, President & COO of Mercury Radio Arts in a statement. “With GBTV, Mercury is doing just that. Fortunately, our incredible team at Mercury, as well as our industry-leading business partners, makes me confident that we will once again build something extraordinary.”

On his last show, Beck explained the reasons for his success. “I contend that is the reason we are successful here…because it’s true,” he said last night. “It seems as though there’s no truth anywhere anymore. We’ve made a lot of enemies on this program. We’ve taken on every single person we’ve been told not to take on…because the truth has no agenda. It will lead us where it leads us. This show has not only survived; we have thrived.” He then explained where he was going. “I have given up on admiring the problem. I am focused solely on the solution…I’m running to something. I know exactly where I’m supposed to be.”

Will Beck remain a controversial figure? Undoubtedly. Yet despite his well-publicized foibles, Beck was more than willing to take on the sacred cows of political correctness and their defenders, often by the most devastating method possible:

Their own words.

Arnold Ahlert is a contributing columnist to the conservative website JewishWorldReview.com.

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/07/01/beck-bids-adieu/

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

Obama Admin Lists Israel as a Terror Sponsor

by Dick Morris

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) maintains a list of “specially designated countries” (SDCs) that “have shown a tendency to promote, produce or protect terrorist organizations or their members.” The folks from these nations get special scrutiny when they enter the U.S.

Here’s the list:

Afghanistan
West Bank
Algeria
Bahrain
Oman
Bangladesh
Pakistan
Philippines
Egypt
Qatar
Saudi Arabia
Indonesia
Somalia
Iran
Sudan
Iraq
Syria
Israel
And so forth.

Israel? Yes Israel is one of the thirty-six SDCs that “promote, produce, or protect” terrorists, according to the Obama Administration. With splendid equality, they manage to list the world’s biggest victim alongside the globe’s leading perpetrators of terrorism. Israelis coming into America get the same high level of scrutiny that Iranians do!

This information, which comes to us courtesy of the wonderful website www.ruthfullyyours.com, is as shocking as it is credible.

That Obama has tried to maintain that there is a moral equilibrium between Israel and the aggressive Arabs that surround it is well known. But to list Israel as a promoter, protector, or producer of terrorism is quite extraordinary.

Doubtless some politically correct soul at ICE or in the State Department felt that the U.S. needed to show impartiality in making up its list and include non-Muslim countries. What better rebuttal to those who would claim that the ICE is profiling Muslims than to say that Israel is also on the list?

But Israel’s inclusion on the list, to say nothing of the indignity inflicted on its citizens as they seek to enter the United States, is an insult and must be corrected at once!

Dick Morris

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/07/01/obama-admin-lists-israel-as-a-terror-sponsor/

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