Is the Occupy Wall Street Movement Occupied?

by IPT News

Anti-Israel and Muslim-American advocacy groups in the United States are capitalizing on the Occupy Wall Street Movement (OWS) to promote their own agendas.

The Occupy movement started in New York's Zuccotti Park Sept. 17, and spread to more than 100 cities, according to the movement's "unofficial" website. "The movement is inspired by popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, and aims to expose how the richest 1 percent of people are writing the rules of an unfair global economy that is foreclosing on our future."

There has been an ongoing debate about the depth of anti-Semitism within the OWS movement, with some finding it rampant and others casting it as a fringe element. Those concerns were heightened Nov. 5 when more than 20 people from the Occupy Boston camp marched into the lobby of that city's Israeli consulate for a sit-in. The group engaged in a series of anti-Israel chants including "Viva Palestina," and "Hey hey, ho ho, Israeli apartheid has got to go!"

What is clear is that groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) have insinuated themselves on the movement to tackle issues other than economic policies.

The latest example came Nov. 18, when CAIR's New York chapter held a rally, prayers and a march from Occupy Wall Street to make demands including:

· "An immediate end to all racial, ethnic and religious profiling;"

· "The dismantlement and disclosure of all surveillance operations;"

· An "independent commission to investigate all NYPD and CIA operations against the Muslim community." The event was sponsored and endorsed by dozens of organizations, including the New York chapters of the Muslim American Society, the Islamic Council of North AmericaAl-Awda and the Majlis Ash-Shura of Metropolitan New York.

The demonstration attracted hundreds of Muslims and approximately 50 OWS protesters, carrying signs reading, "NYPD Watches Us. Who Watches NYPD?"

"Many many other people at Occupy Wall Street stand in solidarity with Muslim communities, and all targets of NYPD, CIA, FBI and government repression," Jen Waller, a representative of the OWS movement and a member of the New York Committee to Stop FBI Repression, said during the rally. She added that we are watching "more and more innocent Muslim men and women [that] are targeted and attract into government orchestrated terrorism schemes."

Previously, Islamist groups joined OWS events. CAIR-NY and the Islamic Leadership Council held a prayer service in Zuccotti Park on Oct. 21 following outreach to the group by the Wall Street protesters.

The crowd of approximately 60 chanted in response to a speaker: "American Muslims have to stand with Occupy Wall Street. For a long time, American Muslims have been scared into silence. Those days are over. We are here in numbers. We are here to pray. We are here to protest. And most of all we are here to raise our voice."

Imam Ayub Abdul Baki of the Islamic Leadership Council of New York delivered a speech saying, "We are also suffering, suffering racism and discrimination. Islamic bashing is on the increase." Baki held up a plaque with the "last sermon of the Prophet Mohammed," calling it "the eternal message of Islam to the world." Baki then discussed the sermon saying "all Muslims as well as non-Muslims should be familiar with this."

Baki's Leadership Council (Majlis Ash-Shura of Metropolitan New York) is an umbrella organization of mosques and Islamic organizations that claims to serve 850,000 Muslim New Yorkers and is "dedicated to bring Muslims on one platform." Among its members are the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA)-NY and the Muslim American Society (MAS) Youth Center.

MAS was founded as the American chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood, while ICNA has a track record of radicalism and teaching its members violence and the evils of Jews and America. ICNA issued a press release earlier this month expressing support and sympathy for the OWS protestors.

The youth branch of the Muslim American Society (MAS) held an OWS gathering in Zuccotti Park in late October. "We, the members of Muslim American Society New York and Muslim New Yorkers stand in solidarity with the protesters of Occupy Wall Street on grounds of free speech, right to assemble and justice for all," the advertisement for the event said.

Hatem Bazian, the chairman of the anti-Israel organization American Muslims for Palestine, led a prayer service and delivered a speech late last month as part of Occupy Oakland. Bazian spoke about the amount of money the United States spends on the military, calling the United States "a deaf economy," and stating "We are the number one producers of weapons of mass destruction."

"Allah and his messenger are at war with those who exploit people through usury," CAIR-Michigan Executive Director Dawud Walid said Oct. 21 during a "Sermon about Occupy Wall St Movement & the death of Qadhafi" at a Michigan mosque. "And the world is hungry for this message. The financial and the housing crisis would not be what it is in America I believe, and even some non-Muslim economist wrote if the American financial system was working according to the Islamic banking system. This is a fact," he added.

Walid drew help from the Occupy Detroit movement to hold "Crusades Against Hate" on Nov. 11, which was intended to counter a prayer event being held that same day by an organization that CAIR regards as anti-Muslim.

Other groups have capitalized on the OWS movement to promote anti-Israel messages.

In addition to the Boston sit-in, protesters in Chicago repeated anti-Israel statements made on a megaphone by an Occupy Chicago leader: "The city of Chicago is guilty of supporting the Israelis." The speaker also announced two upcoming demonstrations to protest the "Israeli occupation of the Palestinian land."

Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), an anti-Israel organization on college campuses across the country, joined an OWS protest last month during its 2011 conference, "Students Confronting Apartheid," at Columbia University.

Approximately 30 SJP students participating in the conference joined protesters at Wall Street, chanting "Occupy Wall Street, Palestine Must Be Free," while carrying Palestinian flags.

Since its inception, SJP chapters have campaigned for divestment from companies that work with Israel, which SJP categorizes as an apartheid state, and accuses of ethnic cleansing.

This month, activists from Adalah-NY, a radical group that organizes protests against Israeli artists and products, went to Zuccotti Park to read a statement advocating boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel.

"Our aspirations overlap; our struggles converge," the statement said. "Our oppressors, whether greedy corporations or military occupations, are united in profiting from wars, pillage, environmental destruction, repression and impoverishment … Palestinians, too, are part of the 99% around the world that suffer at the hands of the 1% whose greed and ruthless quest for hegemony have led to unspeakable suffering and endless war."

OWS protests also have served as a platform for individuals to make anti-Semitic statements.

"I think that the Zionist Jews, who are running these big banks and our Federal Reserve, which is not run by the federal government... they need to be run out of this country," an OWS protester in Los Angeles said.

The Emergency Committee for Israel released a video featuring anti-Semitic speech and signs at OWS protests. Signs include statements such as "Hitler's Bankers – Wall St.," and "Google: 1) Wall St. Jews 2) Jewish Billionaires 3) Jews & Fed Rsrv Bank." The video also calls on viewers to contact elected officials to take action against the hate speech.

The anti-Israel agenda associated with the OWS movement led "many Jewish supporters of OWS who do not identify as anti-Zionist" to believe "that they could no longer be associated with the movement," Daniel Sieradski, a Jewish OWS supporter said in an interview earlier this month. "Worse yet, there have been attempts to push Zionists out of the movement by claiming their support for Israel's mere existence is fundamentally racist and as such, they should not be part of any serious social justice movement."

One OWS protest organized by Existence is Resistance worsened the movement's "external impression of being pro-terror," Sieradski said. Existence is Resistance (E.I.R.) is a grassroots organization that promotes "non-violent resistance through cultural arts." E.I.R. hosted a "Kuffeya Day" at New York's Liberty Plaza late last month "in support of Palestinian prisoners, most significantly Majd Ziada." The photo featured alongside the event announcement is a picture of Leila Khaled, a member of the U.S. designated terrorist group the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. During the event a man claiming to be from Afghanistan gave an anti-Semitic tirade, saying that "Yehudi" means "hateful thing." (Yehudi means "Jew" in Arabic).

It's a "Jewish idea to kill Muslims," he added, and that America and Israel are trying to kill Muslims.

Demonstrations like the above have nothing to do with OWS's frustrations with U.S. economic policies. But they show how Islamist groups are using the economic-driven movement to engender hostility toward Israel, and in some cases, toward Jews in general.

IPT News (The Investigative Project on Terrorism)

Source: http://www.investigativeproject.org/3312/is-the-occupy-wall-street-movement-occupied

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

Hamas is No Peace Partner for Israel

by Neil Snyder

In an article for Hudson New York titled "Hamas and Fatah: The Unity Government That Isn't - and Won't Be," Khaled Abu Toameh explained that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad are in the enviable position of living in the West Bank out of harm's way as it were from Gaza where Hamas is in control.

Under Hamas' despotic rule, Gaza has become a powder keg that is waiting to explode. Hamas' government is corrupt; the people of Gaza suffer daily under Hamas' brutal tactics that are reminiscent of the Dark Ages; and Hamas continues to lob missiles into Israel while its leaders try to regain complete control of the Palestinian government in the West Bank and Gaza.

As recent talks leading up to the hoped for unity government between Hamas and Fatah collapsed, Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal told AFT that "Hamas is looking to focus its energies on popular resistance without giving up its right to wage armed struggle against Israel." That says it all. Hamas was, is, and hopes to remain Israel's avowed enemy. Hamas and its sponsors in the Muslim Brotherhood are totally committed to Israel's annihilation. That should surprise no one since the Hamas Charter calls for armed struggle against Israel and for Israel's elimination.

While the Hamas-Fatah unity government talks evaporate into thin air, Egypt is in the throes of a so called "democratic election" that the Muslim Brothers are expected to win handily. Ordinary Gazans anxiously await Egypt's election results fearing that under even stricter Islamist rule living conditions in Gaza will become unbearable as Hamas and its Egyptian Muslim Brothers join hands in their quest to rid the Middle East of all vestiges of Israel's presence. They believe that they will end up being the big losers and that the winners will be the corrupt warlords in Hamas who dominate their lives.

Since Israel's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, weapons of all sorts have been pouring into Gaza through tunnels under the border crossing with Egypt. Following the collapse of Muammar Kaddafi's regime in Libya, high-tech weapons including "advanced Russian surface-to-air missiles plundered from Libyan arsenals" have made their way into Hamas' hands thus forcing Israel to speed up implementation of an airliner anti-missile defense system that's designed to protect planes flying into an out of nearby Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv. When Egypt's Muslim Brothers and Hamas unite, the world will finally realize what the Arab Spring has become. It may have started out as a popular uprising in Tunisia, but radical Islamists understood the movement correctly and quickly seized control of it in every Arab Muslim country where brutalized citizens dared to raise their heads.

Ironically, as Khaled Abu Toameh points out in his article, the West Bank is the safest place for Palestinians to be as Islamists take control of countries bordering Israel. They are safe there because the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) patrols the region, and they "know that the day Israel withdraws from the West Bank, Hamas will become so strong that it will seize control of the area in a matter of days or weeks." That's the story that the mainstream media refuses to tell, and it's the story that useful idiots around the world refuse to recognize as they pour resources into Gaza -- resources that are used primarily to acquire weapons and line the pockets of Hamas strongmen.

Neil Snyder is a chaired professor emeritus at the University of Virginia. His blog, SnyderTalk.com, is posted daily. His latest book is titled If You Voted for Obama in 2008 to Prove You're Not a Racist, You Need to Vote for Someone Else in 2012 to Prove You're Not an Idiot.

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2011/11/hamas_is_no_peace_partner_for_israel.html

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

Syrian Human Rights Violations in Black and White

by Rick Moran

A new UN report details thousands of human rights violations by the Syrian army and government.

CNN:

The U.N. independent international commission on Syria's assessment was based on interviews with 223 victims and witnesses, but observers were not allowed access to the country, the report said.

According to the report, evidence "documents patterns of summary execution, arbitrary arrest, enforced disappearance, torture, including sexual violence, as well as violations of children's rights."

Military deserters told the commission that they had been ordered to shoot at unarmed protesters without warning, the report said.

"The commission reiterates its call for immediate and unhindered access to the Syrian Arab Republic," the report said.

Earlier this month, the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights estimated that government forces had killed at least 3,500 civilians.

The report notes that up to 256 children have been tortured and killed by Syrian forces.

Meanwhile, Turkey is edging toward some kind of move that might involve its military. Under serious consideration is a "buffer zone" on its border in case of a mass exodus from Syria, as well as other military options including the establishment of a humanitarian corridor where food, medicine, and protection from Assad's forces could be given to civilians. The last two options won't happen without regional and international support. But if things continue the way they are, that may be forthcoming.

Rick Moran

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2011/11/syrian_human_rights_violations_in_black_and_white.html

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

Egypt’s Defining Period Begins

by Ryan Mauro

On November 28, the opportunity that the Muslim Brotherhood​ has waited for since 1928 came. The first round of elections in Egypt took place, and although the results are not yet in, the Brotherhood’s mammoth political operation blew away its competitors. A Brotherhood spokesman was honest about what the group seeks: “The Sharia, the Muslim legal framework, must be the foundation for everything.”

The vote for the lower house of parliament took place in nine provinces. In districts where a candidate does not take a majority, there will be a run-off election on December 5-6. Two other rounds of voting will take place for a lower house among the remaining provinces, and then there will be three rounds to decide the upper house. The entire process will finish on March 11, ushering in an interim government that will draft the next constitution.

The turnout was so high that an extra two hours was given for people to vote. There were no notable clashes and by all accounts, a sense of happiness filled the air. The Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists, who were accused of buying votes by selling cheap goods to poor voters in the run-up to the election, are being accused by some rivals of cheating. Farid Zahran of the Egyptian Social Democratic Party claims that some veiled women refused to expose their face for identification or to dip their fingers in ink, allowing them to vote multiple times. The Muslim Brotherhood, he says, stuffed ballot boxes in Luxor, Aswan and Faroun, and Coptic Christians were prevented from entering some polling stations.

According to Zahran, thousands of the Brotherhood’s “youth volunteers” were at the polling stations to help illiterate people to vote and guided them to choose their party. The Wasat Party is complaining that the Brotherhood stole ballot papers in Damietta. The National Human Rights Council confirms that there were 391 complaints filed, most of which were related to the illegal campaigning on election day that many parties were involved in. One Free Egyptians candidate told an army officer that the Brotherhood was handing out flyers at a polling station and he did nothing. The law preventing campaigning during the 48 hours before a vote was largely ignored and unenforced.

The White House has tough language for the ruling military council but when asked about the Muslim Brotherhood’s likely victory, White House spokesman Jay Carney​ replied that it is “unfair to assume that any party that has a religious affiliation cannot adhere to democratic principles.” That doesn’t exactly jive with the Muslim Brotherhood spokesman’s statement that the “Sharia, the Muslim legal framework, must be the foundation for everything.”

The spokesman said that the Muslim Brotherhood’s form of governance will be different than that of Turkey. “In Turkey, women may go to university without a headscarf. They have adultery and homosexuality. We will not allow that in Egypt,” he said. A spokesman for Hamas admitted that the group wants the Brotherhood to win, saying, “We have the same ethics as the Muslim Brothers, the principles are the same.”

The Muslim Brotherhood has been building a political operation for decades through mosques and social services and its advantages showed. It’s been reported that each Brotherhood operative was asked to deliver 100 votes. The Brotherhood registered a huge amount of voters and by some accounts, had 30,000 volunteers working in Alexandria alone. Six operatives were at each polling station.

In Tunisia, the Islamist Ennahda Party exceeded expectations and took 41% of the vote. Middle East expert Barry Rubin subsequently adjusted his projection for Egypt. He now believes the Islamists will take around half of the seats in parliament. Samuel Tadros is even more pessimistic and talks of the Islamists possibly winning a two-thirds majority. “It is quite apparent to anyone that has been paying attention that their victory will be nothing short of a tsunami,” he wrote.

Tadros predicts that the results of the election will dispel numerous comforting myths in the West. His opinion is that the weaknesses of the secularists will be exposed. The main competing forces, he says, will be the Brotherhood and the Salafists and not the secularists and the Islamists. The Sufis and Brotherhood splinters will not perform well and the secular Wafd Party will not come in second place, as some polls showed. Tadros believes that the largest non-Islamist force will be the Egyptian Bloc of three parties, led by the Free Egyptian Party, which almost all Christians will vote for.

One of the Islamists’ main advantages is that the secularists are extremely divided. In Tunisia, almost all of the 59% that did not vote for Ennahda chose liberal parties. Over the weekend in Morocco, the Islamist PJD had the highest vote total and won 107 of the 395 seats, but most of the rest went to non-Islamists. If the Islamists dominate the first round of voting, it might encourage these non-Islamist forces to rally behind one candidate in the run-off and to coordinate their campaigns in future votes.

It is also possible that the Muslim Brotherhood will face a backlash for cutting a deal with the military council and pulling out of protests against it. Secular activist Mohamed Ghoneim said that the protesters were “very, very disappointed” in the Brotherhood. Wael Nawara of the Democratic Front Party didn’t mince words and said, “The Muslim Brothers really screwed this revolution. They’ve done everything possible to monopolize and hijack the revolution.”

The future of Egypt, and perhaps the region, will be decided over the next few months. This initial vote will tell us where the Middle East is headed, and so far, it doesn’t look good.

Ryan Mauro

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/11/29/egypt%E2%80%99s-defining-period-begins/

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

The UN’s International Day of Solidarity Against the Jews

by Joseph Klein

There is no single issue on which the United Nations expends more time and energy than its advocacy of the Palestinian cause. It dominates the agendas of various UN bodies, supported by American taxpayer dollars, including the UN Human Rights Council, the Division for Palestinian Rights, the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Human Rights Practices Affecting the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories, the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees.

The UN’s obsession over Palestine has led to the world body’s repudiation of its own original two-state solution, spurned by all of the Arab countries and the Palestinians themselves back in 1947.

Beginning in 1977, the United Nations has sponsored the “International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People” on November 29^th, the date in 1947 when the UN General Assembly approved its Palestine partition resolution. Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan called November 29^th a “day of mourning and a day of grief.” The event takes place every year at UN headquarters in New York and at the UN Offices at Geneva and Vienna and elsewhere.

In other words, every November 29^th, the United Nations publicly mourns the passage of its own peaceful solution to the Arab-Jewish dispute, which had called for the establishment of an independent Arab state and independent Jewish state. Every year the UN commiserates over the adoption by the General Assembly of the 1947 partition resolution under which the Palestinians could have been living in their own independent state for the last sixty-four years if the Arabs had only accepted it. Even Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has conceded that the Arabs’ rejection of the partition resolution was a big mistake, but the day of mourning and grief over the Palestinians’ self-inflicted wounds go on anyway at the United Nations.

This year is no exception. In addition to a series of pro-Palestinian speeches denouncing Israel, the meeting is featuring an encore showing of the film titled La Terre Parle Arabe (The Land Speaks Arabic). The film purports to equate Zionism with Nazism. It depict the alleged “expulsion of the indigenous Arab population” and the alleged “ethnic cleansing of Palestine by the Zionist movement.”

The following is an excerpt from the film’s script:

Christians and Muslims alike…unite in their hatred of Zionism…I preferred to die as a martyr rather than be governed by the Jews …The children cried …The Hagana had no mercy, no pity. Zionists! They were Zionists!…

The Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, which hosts this hatefest, was established by the General Assembly in November 1975. Its current two year budget, including support from the Division for Palestinian Rights of the UN Secretariat, is approximately $5 million, of which American taxpayers are on the hook for more than $1 million.

What does this $5 million pay for? A Palestinian propaganda arm. The Land Speaks Arabic, shown so proudly by the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, is today’s version of the infamous Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda film Jud Süss.

In its own words, the committee “advocates” for the “inalienable rights of the Palestinian people.” As part of its advocacy, the committee issues annual reports, convenes international meetings and conferences in various regions of the world, and hosts the annual November 29th Palestinian solidarity meetings.

The committee’s most recent annual report lays the blame for the stalemated negotiations entirely on Israel. Whether it is the settlements, the security fence or blockading the Gaza coast to prevent arms smuggling to Hamas, everything Israel does to protect its own citizens is suspect.

The committee calls upon the Security Council and the General Assembly to favorably consider Palestine’s application for United Nations membership. And it advocates the Palestinian definition of what the Palestinian state should look like – “a Palestinian State on the basis of the pre-1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital, and a just and agreed solution to the Palestine refugees issue.” The committee’s idea of a “just” solution to the Palestine refugees issue would entail their return to “their homes and property from which they had been displaced.” This is the essence of the so-called right of return to pre-1967 Israel demanded by the Palestinians.

The United Nations’ obsession with promoting the Palestinian cause – to delegitimize the Jewish state and enable its destruction – knows no bounds.

Joseph Klein

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/11/29/the-uns-international-day-of-solidarity-against-the-jews/

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

Libya: New Threat in the Middle East

by Joe Kaufman

Less than a year after the invasion of Iraq took place in December 2003, Libya's then-ruler, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, gave up his Weapons of Mass Destruction program, apparently out of fear that war could come to him and his nation, as it just had to Saddam Hussein and Iraq. His renunciation of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction was counted as one of the major achievements of the Bush Administration.

Gaddafi had previously been involved in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, a terrorist attack which took the lives of 270 people, 189 of which were Americans. However, since Gaddafi agreed to the dismantling of his weapons, Libya was no longer seen as a threat to either the United States or to its allies in the free world.

Recent events may dramatically change the situation.

President Barack Obama has been vocal in his support for the revolutions that have taken place around the Middle East: the so-called Arab Spring – a mechanism to remove dictators from power and replace them with possibly other, religiously obsessed, dictators. To some, these revolutions represent a move towards democracy for the troubled region. But to others, these events represent new dangers for the area.

With Libya, while President Obama, "leading from behind" NATO, was ordering the firing of missiles on the Gaddafi regime, he was, as with his abandonment of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, propping up Islamist elements that could be even more tyrannical and globally corrosive than Gaddafi ever was.

One of the groups represented in the anti-Gaddafi coalition is the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, or LIFG. Leaders of the LIFG fought alongside Osama bin Laden against the Soviets during the War in Afghanistan in the1980s. The LIFG's association with al-Qaeda is the reason why the group is found on the U.S. State Department's list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations.

How ironic, then, that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would travel to Libya, as she did this past October, to announce a U.S. foreign aid package to the country. When she arrived, she was greeted by "revolutionaries" in Tripoli, the capital of Libya, where the head of the LIFG and ex-Guantanamo Bay inmate, Abdul Hakim Belhadj, is presently the commander of the Tripoli Military Council, and another Islamist, Osama al-Juwaili, is the head of the Libyan Defense Ministry. Essentially, the entire military apparatus for Libya is, today, controlled by Islamists.

This does not look promising for people in the region, who may not wish to be threatened by yet another militantly Islamist regime; for people who might not wish to be ruled by yet another regime that requires total submission to Sharia Law -- which strictly follows the Koran in its unequal justice under law for women and people of religions other than political Islam; where charges of rape require four male witnesses as "proof;" where limbs may legally be amputated for alleged theft; where alleged adulterers may be stoned to death; where homosexuals should be receive the death sentence, and where leaving Islam also mandates the death sentence -- or for the people of the United States, who learned on 9/11 that the turmoil of the Middle East is not as far away as one might once have thought.

Prior to declaring war on Libya, President Obama never approached the Congress on the matter and never described how Libya, under the leadership of Muammar Gaddafi, posed a threat to America's national security. He merely said that the unrest in the country and Gaddafi's treatment of his people represented "an unusual and extraordinary threat."

Today, Libya may very well pose an even more unusual and extraordinary threat -- to both the free world and America's national security.

Joe Kaufman is an expert on issues of counter-terrorism and Middle Eastern and South Asian affairs. Currently, he is a candidate for United States Congress in Florida's District 20, a seat currently held by DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Source: http://www.hudson-ny.org/2612/libya-new-threat

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

UN Resolution 181 - The Partition Plan

by Eli E. Hertz

In 1947 the British put the future of western Palestine into the hands of the United Nations, the successor organization to the League of Nations which had established the Mandate for Palestine. A UN Commission recommended partitioning what was left of the original Mandate - western Palestine - into two new states, one Jewish and one Arab [Not a Palestinian state]. Jerusalem and its surrounding villages were to be temporarily classified as an international zone belonging to neither polity.

What resulted was Resolution 181 [known as the 1947 Partition Plan], a non-binding recommendation to partition Palestine, whose implementation hinged on acceptance by both parties - Arabs and Jews. The resolution was adopted on November 29, 1947 in the General Assembly by a vote of 33-12, with 10 abstentions. Among the supporters were the United States and the Soviet Union, as well as other nations including France and Australia. The Arab nations, including Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia denounced the plan on the General Assembly floor and voted as a bloc against Resolution 181 promising to defy its implementation by force.

The resolution recognized the need for immediate Jewish statehood (and a parallel Arab state), but the 'blueprint' for peace became a moot issue when the Arabs refused to accept it.Subsequently, de facto [In Latin: realities] on the ground in the wake of Arab aggression (and Israel's survival) became the basis for UN efforts to bring peace. Resolution 181 then lost its validity and relevance.

Aware of Arabs' past aggression, Resolution 181, in paragraph C, calls on the Security Council to:

"Determine as a threat to the peace, breach of the peace or act of aggression, in accordance with Article 39 of the Charter, any attempt to alter by force the settlement envisaged by this resolution." [italics by author]

The ones who sought to alter by force the settlement envisioned in Resolution 181 were the Arabs who threatened bloodshed if the United Nations was to adopt the Resolution:

"The [British] Government of Palestine fear that strife in Palestine will be greatly intensified when the Mandate is terminated, and that the international status of the United Nations Commission will mean little or nothing to the Arabs in Palestine, to whom the killing of Jews now transcends all other considerations. Thus, the Commission will be faced with the problem of how to avert certain bloodshed on a very much wider scale than prevails at present. ... The Arabs have made it quite clear and have told the Palestine government that they do not propose to co-operate or to assist the Commission, and that, far from it, they propose to attack and impede its work in every possible way. We have no reason to suppose that they do not mean what they say." [italics by author]

Arabs' intentions and deeds did not fare better after Resolution 181 was adopted:

"Taking into consideration that the Provisional Government of Israel has indicated its acceptance in principle of a prolongation of the truce in Palestine; that the States members of the Arab League have rejected successive appeals of the United Nations Mediator, and of the Security Council in its resolution 53 (1948) of 7 July 1948, for the prolongation of the truce in Palestine; and that there has consequently developed a renewal of hostilities in Palestine."

The conclusion:

"Having constituted a Special Committee and instructed it to investigate all questions and issues relevant to the problem of Palestine, and to prepare proposals for the solution of the problem, and

Having received and examined the report of the Special Committee (document A/364). ... Recommends to the United Kingdom, as the mandatory Power for Palestine, and to all other Members of the United Nations the adoption and implementation, with regard to the future Government of Palestine, of the Plan of Partition with Economic Union set out below; ..." [italics by author].

In the late 1990s, more than 50 years after Resolution 181 was rejected by the Arab world, Arab leaders suddenly recommended to the General Assembly that UN Resolution 181 be resurrected as the basis for a peace agreement.There is no foundation for such a notion.

Resolution 181 was the last of a series of recommendations that had been drawn up over the years by the Mandator and by international commissions, plans designed to reach an historic compromise between Arabs and Jews in western Palestine. The first was in 1922 when Great Britain unilaterally partitioned Palestine.

This did not satisfy the Arabs who wanted the entire country to be Arab. Resolution 181 followed such proposals as the Peel Commission (1937); the Woodhead Commission (1938); two 1946 proposals that championed a bi-national state; one proposed by the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry in April 1946 based on a single state with equal powers for Jews and Arabs; the Morrison-Grady Plan raised in July 1946 which recommended a federal state with two provinces - one Jewish, one Arab. Every scheme since 1922 was rejected by the Arab side, including decidedly pro-Arab ones because these plans recognized Jews as a nation and gave Jewish citizens of Mandate Palestine political representation.

Arabs Rejected the "Unbalanced" Partition Plan

The UN International Court of Justice (ICJ) uses the term "unbalanced" in describing the reason for Arab rejectionism of Resolution 181. This description hardly fits reality. Seventy-seven percent of the landmass of the original Mandate for the Jews was excised in 1922 to create a fourth Arab state - Trans-Jordan (today Jordan).

In a statement by Dr. Abba Hillel Silver, the representative of the Jewish Agency for Palestine to the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), he had that to say about fairness, balance, and justice:

"According to David Lloyd George, then British Prime Minister, the Balfour Declaration implied that the whole of Palestine, including Transjordan, should ultimately become a Jewish state. Transjordan had, nevertheless, been severed from Palestine in 1922 and had subsequently been set up as an Arab kingdom. Now a second Arab state was to be carved out of the remainder of Palestine, with the result that the Jewish National Home would represent less than one eighth of the territory originally set aside for it. Such a sacrifice should not be asked of the Jewish people."

Referring to the Arab States established as independent countries since the First World War, he said:

"17,000,000 Arabs now occupied an area of 1,290,000 square miles, including all the principal Arab and Moslem centres, while Palestine, after the loss of Transjordan, was only 10,000 square miles; yet the majority plan proposed to reduce it by one half. UNSCOP proposed to eliminate Western Galilee from the Jewish State; that was an injustice and a grievous handicap to the development of the Jewish State." [italics by author].

Arab Aggression Before and After the Adoption of Resolution 181

Following passage of Resolution 181 by the General Assembly, Arab countries took the dais to reiterate their absolute rejection of the recommendation and intention to render implementation of Resolution 181 a moot question by the use of force. These examples from the transcript of the General Assembly plenary meeting on November 29, 1947 speak for themselves:

"Mr. JAMALI (Iraq): ... We believe that the decision which we have now taken ... undermines peace, justice and democracy. In the name of my Government, I wish to state that it feels that this decision is antidemocratic, illegal, impractical and contrary to the Charter ... Therefore, in the name of my Government, I wish to put on record that Iraq does not recognize the validity of this decision, will reserve freedom of action towards its implementation, and holds those who were influential in passing it against the free conscience of mankind responsible for the consequences."

"Amir. ARSLAN (Syria): ... Gentlemen, the Charter is dead. But it did not die a natural death; it was murdered, and you all know who is guilty. My country will never recognize such a decision [Partition]. It will never agree to be responsible for it. Let the consequences be on the heads of others, not on ours."

"H. R. H. Prince Seif El ISLAM ABDULLAH (Yemen): The Yemen delegation has stated previously that the partition plan is contrary to justice and to the Charter of the United Nations. Therefore, the Government of Yemen does not consider itself bound by such a decision ... and will reserve its freedom of action towards the implementation of this decision."

The Partition Plan was met not only by verbal rejection on the Arab side but also by concrete, bellicose steps to block its implementation and destroy the Jewish polity by force of arms, a goal the Arabs publicly declared even before Resolution 181 was brought to a vote.

Arabs not only rejected the compromise and took action to prevent establishment of a Jewish state but also blocked establishment of an Arab state under the partition plan not just before the Israel War of Independence, but also after the war when they themselves controlled the West Bank (1948-1967), rendering the recommendation 'a still birth.'

The UN itself recognized that Resolution 181 had not been accepted by the Arab side, rendering it a dead issue: On January 29, 1948, the First Monthly Progress Report of the UN-appointed Palestine Commission charged with helping put Resolution 181 into effect was submitted to the Security Council (A/AC.21/7). Implementation of Resolution 181 hinged not only on the five member states appointed to represent the UN (Bolivia, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Panama, Philippines) and Great Britain, but first and foremost on the participation of the two sides who were invited to appoint representatives. The Commission then reported:

"The invitation extended by the [181] resolution was promptly accepted by the Government of the United Kingdom and by the Jewish Agency for Palestine, both of which designated representatives to assist the commission. ... As regards the Arab Higher Committee, the following telegraphic response was received by the Secretary-General on 19 January:

ARAB HIGHER COMMITTEE IS DETERMINED PRESIST [PERSIST] IN REJECTION PARTITION AND IN REFUSAL RECOGNIZE UN[O] RESOLUTION THIS RESPECT AND ANYTHING DERIVING THEREFROM [THERE FROM]. FOR THESE REASONS IT IS UNABLE [TO] ACCEPT [THE] INVITATION."

The UN Palestine Commission's February 16, 1948 report (A/AC.21/9) to the Security Council noted that Arab-led hostilities were an effort

"To prevent the implementation of the [General] Assembly's plan of partition, and to thwart its objectives by threats and acts of violence, including armed incursions into Palestinian territory."

On May 17, 1948 - after the invasion began, the Palestine Commission designed to implement 181 adjourned sine die [Latin: without determining a date] after the General Assembly appointed a United Nations Mediator in Palestine, which relieves the United Nations Palestine Commission from the further exercise of its responsibilities.

Some thought the Partition Plan could be revived, but by the end of the war, Resolution 181 had become a moot issue as realities on the ground made the establishment of an armistice-line (the "Green Line") - a temporary ceasefire line expected to be followed by peace treaties - the most constructive path to solving the conflict.

A July 30, 1949 working paper of the UN Secretariat entitled The Future of Arab Palestine and the Question of Partition noted further that:

"The Arabs rejected the United Nations Partition Plan so that any comment of theirs did not specifically concern the status of the Arab section of Palestine under partition but rather rejected the scheme in its entirety."

By the time armistice agreements were reached in 1949 between Israel and its immediate Arab neighbors (Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Trans-Jordan) with the assistance of UN Mediator Dr. Ralph Bunche, Resolution 181 had become irrelevant, and the armistice agreements addressed new realities created by the war. Over subsequent years, the UN simply abandoned the recommendations of Resolution 181, as its ideas were drained of all relevance by events. Moreover, the Arabs continued to reject 181 after the war when they themselves controlled the West Bank (1948-1967) which Jordan invaded in the course of the war and annexed illegally.

Attempts by Palestinians to 'roll back the clock' and resuscitate Resolution 181 more than six decades after they rejected it 'as if nothing had happened' are a baseless ploy designed to use Resolution 181 as leverage to bring about a greater Israeli withdrawal from parts of western Palestine and to gain a broader base from which to continue to attack an Israel with even less defendable borders. Both Palestinians and their Arab brethren in neighboring countries rendered the plan null and void by their own subsequent aggressive actions.

Professor Stone wrote about this 'novelty of resurrection' in 1981 when he analyzed a similar attempt by pro-Palestinian 'experts' at the UN to rewrite the history of the conflict (their writings were termed "Studies"). Stone called it "revival of the dead"

"To attempt to show ... that Resolution 181(II) 'remains' in force in 1981 is thus an undertaking even more miraculous than would be the revival of the dead. It is an attempt to give life to an entity that the Arab states had themselves aborted before it came to maturity and birth. To propose that Resolution 181(II) can be treated as if it has binding force in 1981, [E.H., the year the book was written] for the benefit of the same Arab states, who by their aggression destroyed it ab initio, [In Latin: From the beginning] also violates 'general principles of law,' such as those requiring claimants to equity to come 'with clean hands,' and forbidding a party who has unlawfully repudiated a transaction from holding the other party to terms that suit the later expediencies of the repudiating party. [italics by author].

Resolution 181 had been tossed into the waste bin of history, along with the Partition Plans that preceded it.

Israel's Independence is not a Result of a Partial Implementation of the Partition Plan

Resolution 181 has no legal ramifications - that is, Resolution 181 recognized the Jewish right to statehood, but its validity as a potentially legal and binding document was never consummated. Like the proposals that preceded it, Resolution 181's validity hinged on acceptance by both parties of the General Assembly's recommendation.

Cambridge Professor Sir Elihu Lauterpacht, Judge ad hoc of the International Court of Justice, a renowned expert on international law, clarified that from a legal standpoint, the 1947 UN Partition Resolution had no legislative character to vest territorial rights in either Jews or Arabs. In a monograph relating to one of the most complex aspects of the territorial issue, the status of Jerusalem, Judge, Sir Lauterpacht wrote that any binding force the Partition Plan would have had to arise from the principle pacta sunt servanda, [In Latin: treaties must be honored - the first principle of international law] that is, from agreement of the parties at variance to the proposed plan. In the case of Israel, Judge, Sir Lauterpacht explains:

"The coming into existence of Israel does not depend legally upon the Resolution. The right of a State to exist flows from its factual existence-especially when that existence is pro­longed shows every sign of continuance and is recognised by the generality of nations."

Reviewing Lauterpacht's arguments, Professor Stone, a distinguished authority on the Law of Nations, added that Israel's "legitimacy" or the "legal foundation" for its birth does not reside with the United Nations' Partition Plan, which as a consequence of Arab actions became a dead issue. Professor Stone concluded:

"The State of Israel is thus not legally derived from the partition plan, but rests (as do most other states in the world) on assertion of independence by its people and government, on the vindication of that independence by arms against assault by other states, and on the establishment of orderly government within territory under its stable control."

Eli E. Hertz

Source: http://www.mythsandfacts.org/Conflict/10/Resolution-181.pdf

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

Romney vs. Gingrich on Jihad and Sharia

by Andrew Bostom

Early and volatile, the Republican Presidential nomination race—at least for now—appears to be settling into a contest between consistent front runner Mitt Romney, and the latest surging, "non-Romney alternative", former House Speaker, Newt Gingrich.

Unfortunately the CNN/Heritage Foundation/American Enterprise televised debate of 11/22/11 did not highlight the yawning gap between these front running contenders' views on the existential threat doctrine of our Islamic enemies: jihad and its motivational, sacralized religio-political "law", Sharia.

During an interview with US News reporter Dan Gligoff published June 3, 2009, Mitt Romney offered the following bizarre observation about the living Islamic institution of jihad, ostensibly to "clarify" remarks made during an earlier speech at the Heritage Foundation:

I spoke about three major threats America faces on a long term basis. Jihadism is one of them, and that is not Islam.

Romney—notwithstanding this ridiculous pronouncement—remains, for now, the front running contender for the Republican Presidential nomination.

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, in stark contrast to the muddled and craven nonsense uttered by Romney on jihad during his US News interview, delivered an astute and courageous address at The American Enterprise Institute, July 29, 2010, which provided an irrefragably accurate, if blunt characterization of the existential threat posed by Islam's living, self-professed mission: to impose Sharia, its totalitarian religio-political "law," globally.

With vanishingly rare intellectual honesty and resolve, Gingrich described how normative Sharia—antithetical to bedrock Western legal principles—by "divine," immutable diktat, rejects freedom of conscience, while sanctioning violent jihadism, absurd, misogynistic "rules of evidence" (four male witnesses for rape), barbarous punishments (stoning for adultery), and polygamy:

Sharia in its natural form has principles and punishments totally abhorrent to the Western world, and the underlying basic belief which is that law comes directly from God and is therefore imposed upon humans and no human can change the law without it being an act of apostasy is a fundamental violation of a tradition in the Western system which goes back to Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem and which has evolved in giving us freedom across the planet on a scale we can hardly imagine and which is now directly threatened by those who would impose it.

Moreover, Gingrich warned about efforts—deliberate, or unwitting–to represent Sharia as a benign system:

So let me also be quite clear that the rules are radical and horrific. I think again it's fascinating that even when people go out and do polling and they say to, for example, Muslims in general, do you believe in Sharia, they don't then explain what Sharia is. Sharia becomes like would you like to be a Rotarian and it sounds okay.

Gingrich's unflinching portrayal of the existential threat Sharia represents—whether or not this totalitarian system is imposed by violent, or non-violent means—was accompanied by a clarion call for concrete measures to oppose any Sharia encroachment on the U.S. legal code:

Stealth jihadis use political, cultural, societal, religious, intellectual tools; violent jihadis use violence. But in fact they're both engaged in jihad and they're both seeking to impose the same end state which is to replace Western civilization with a [radical] imposition of Sharia.

The fight against Sharia and the madrassas in mosques which teach hatred and fanaticism is the heart of the enemy movement from which the terrorists spring forth. It's time we had a national debate on this. One of the things I'm going to suggest today is a federal law which says no court anywhere in the United States under any circumstance is allowed to consider Sharia as a replacement for American law.

Subsequently, J. Mark Campbell of The United West, obtained a video recorded commitment from Newt Gingrich, to pursue and prosecute the major Muslim Brotherhood front groups currently operating unencumbered in the US, and being courted for "Muslim outreach" by feckless politicians, policymakers, and even law enforcement officials.

The Holy Land Foundation trial made unmistakably clear the agenda of this spiders web of Muslim Brotherhood organizations—which includes unindicted co-conspirators CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations), ISNA (Islamic Society of North America), and NAIT (North American Islamic Trust)—as stated explicitly by Yusuf al-Qaradawi acolyte Mohamed Akram, in his "An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Brotherhood in North America", May 22, 1991 (translated here, on "Page 7 of 18," bottom center pagination):

The process of settlement is a "Civilization-Jihadist Process" with all the word means. The Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and "sabotaging" its miserable house by their hands and by the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions.

"Front runner" Mitt Romney needs to provide the same unequivocal commitment, immediately, to this critically important national security goal in the struggle against jihadism

Newt Gingrich has set the standard for honest and informed discussion of Islamic totalitarianism which should be expected of all contenders—a standard Mitt Romney, thus far, fails, miserably.

Andrew Bostom

Source: http://www.hudson-ny.org/2616/romney-gingrich-jihad-sharia

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

Moroccan Crime in the Netherlands & the Myths of Multiculturalism

by Soeren Kern

Forty percent of Moroccan immigrants in the Netherlands between the ages of 12 and 24 have been arrested, fined, charged or otherwise accused of committing a crime during the past five years, according to a new report commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of Interior.

In Dutch neighborhoods where the majority of residents are Moroccan immigrants, the youth crime rate reaches 50%. Moreover, juvenile delinquency among Moroccans is not limited to males; girls and young women are increasingly involved in criminal activities.

The "Dutch-Moroccan Monitor 2011" also reveals that most of the Moroccan youth involved in criminal activities were born in Holland. This implies that the children of Moroccan immigrants are not integrating into Dutch society, and confirms that the Netherlands is paying dearly for its failed multicultural approach to immigration.

The report, which was produced by the Rotterdam Institute for Social Policy Research (Risbo) at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, examines the extent and nature of crime among the Dutch-Moroccan population in 22 municipalities in the Netherlands. The data were taken from the Herkenningsdienstsysteem (HKS), a nationwide database where the Dutch police register criminal suspects.

So who is to blame for the failure of Moroccans to integrate into Dutch society and the attendant epidemic of Moroccan youth criminality?

According to Dutch journalist Fleur Jurgens in her book, "The Moroccan Drama" (Het Marokkanendrama), the blame lies with two groups: the Moroccans, who say the Dutch are responsible for their circumstances, and leftwing multiculturalists, who have portrayed Moroccans as the defenseless victims of an unfair society.

Jurgens convincingly demolishes four multicultural myths that have been built up over the years, and which have prevented the implementation of lasting solutions.

The first myth is that there is no Moroccan problem. Jurgens answers this myth with the following statistics: over 60% of Moroccan youths between 17 and 23 drop out of school without even a basic qualification; Moroccan youth unemployment in the Netherlands is around 40%; more than 60% of Moroccan males between ages 40 and 64 live on Dutch social welfare benefits.

The second myth is that Moroccans turn to crime because the Dutch labor market discriminates against them. Jurgens refutes this by pointing out that immigrants from many countries are working in the Netherlands.

The third myth is that Moroccan parents cannot control the conduct of their sons because it is not part of their culture. Jurgens disproves this claim by showing that many Moroccan girls complain about the intense social control they face from their parents.

The fourth myth is that the Netherlands has a moral debt to the Moroccan immigrants because they were recruited as "guest workers" by the Dutch in Morocco. Jurgens refutes this argument by showing that not only was such recruitment stopped in 1973, but that at least half of the Moroccans who were recruited as guest workers eventually returned to Morocco. The present population is almost entirely made up of Moroccans who immigrated to the Netherlands on their own initiative for economic reasons.

In January 2009, the Dutch central government signed an agreement with 22 so-called "Moroccan municipalities," home to the highest numbers of Moroccan juvenile delinquents. Over the past four years, these 22 municipalities received €32 million ($43 million) through a government program called "Moroccan Youth at Risk." Far from reducing delinquency, however, the crime rates in many of these municipalities have increased.

In most cases, the municipalities failed to implement plans for tackling youth criminality in their areas because local politicians feared reprisals from Moroccans.

The government also hired so-called "family coaches" whose job it was to interact with families with delinquent children, as well as "street coaches" who were to counsel youth on the street.

As it turned out, these trainers were more committed to preserving multiculturalism than preventing crime; many of the coaches dedicated their time to helping Moroccan youth find ways to avoid paying the fines and penalties incurred by their criminal behavior.

Jurgens concludes that Moroccan parents are to blame for the antisocial behavior of their children by teaching them at a young age to hate the Dutch and abhor their society.

Dutch politician Geert Wilders has taken Jurgens' analysis one step further by arguing that Moroccans are not integrating because they do not want to. He has told Parliament that Moroccans are in the Netherlands not to integrate but rather to "subjugate the Dutch and to rule over them." He said: "They happily accept our dole, houses and doctors, but not our rules and values."

The Dutch government now says it will abandon the long-standing model of multiculturalism that has encouraged Moroccans and other Muslim immigrants to create a parallel society within the Netherlands.

The Netherlands is home to around 350,000 so-called Dutch-Moroccans (Moroccan immigrants to Holland and their descendants), or around 2% of the total Dutch population of 16.4 million. More than half of Dutch-Moroccans are second-generation.

The Dutch municipality with the highest incidence of Moroccan juvenile delinquency is the southern city of Den Bosch, where Moroccans make up approximately 10% of the total population, and where 47.7% Moroccan males under the age of 24 have had a run-in with the law during the past five years.

Den Bosch is followed by the city of Zeist in central Netherlands (47.3%), Gouda (46.3%), Veenendaal (44.9%) and Amersfoort (44.6%). The numbers for the municipalities of Den Haag, Ede, Leiden, Maassluis, Nijmegen, Oosterhout, Schiedam and Utrecht are also over 40%.

The study also reveals that Moroccan youth are substantially overrepresented (compared to other immigrant groups, such as Antilleans or Turks, or native Dutch) in every stage of the Dutch criminal justice system. In the Netherlands as a whole, Moroccan youth are overrepresented by 196%. In Den Hague, the overrepresentation rate is 150%; in Amsterdam it is 142% and in Rotterdam it is 135%.

In nine of the 22 municipalities, however, the overrepresentation is greater than 300%. In Ede, a town in the center of the Netherlands, the overrepresentation is 481%; in Den Bosch it is 372%, in Veenendaal it is 368% and in Zeist it is 356%.

This data complements the conclusions of a classified report, "Analysis of Moroccan Criminal Populations of Municipalities in the Netherlands," conducted by the Dutch national police (KLPD) in 2009, and leaked to the media in March 2010. The report examines 14,462 Moroccan criminals in 181 Dutch municipalities.

It reveals that in absolute numbers, Amsterdam has the most Moroccan criminals (2,497), followed by Rotterdam (1,798) and Den Haag (1,271). When taking into account recidivism, the western Dutch city of Gouda has the biggest Moroccan crime problem, followed by Utrecht and Den Haag.

The report also shows the percentage of Moroccans among the total number of arrested criminals: Gouda leads with 31%, followed by Utrecht (23.7%) and Culemborg (22.6%).

A separate study makes a direct link between criminality in the Netherlands and Muslim immigration. Entitled "Criminality, Migration and Ethnicity," it was published in June 2010 by the Amsterdam-based Journal of Criminology.

The authors of the study identified everyone who was born in the Netherlands since 1984, and tracked their criminal records until age 22. They found that in the Netherlands as a whole, 50% of Moroccan males committed a crime before they turned 22, and that one in three are repeat offenders with more than five incidents on their police records; this compares to 23% for the native Dutch. The authors also found that Moroccan girls commit three times as many crimes as native Dutch girls.

Taken together, all of this data shows that efforts by the Dutch government to tackle Moroccan youth criminality have failed.

A new integration bill (covering letter and 15-page action plan), which Dutch Interior Minister Piet Hein Donner presented to parliament in June, reads: "The government shares the social dissatisfaction over the multicultural society model and plans to shift priority to the values of the Dutch people. In the new integration system, the values of the Dutch society play a central role. With this change, the government steps away from the model of a multicultural society."

The new integration policy will place more demands on immigrants, who will be required to learn Dutch. The government has also promised to take a tougher approach toward immigrants who ignore Dutch values or disobey Dutch law.

Is it all too little too late? Many native Dutch seem to think so.

Since 2004, when the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was assassinated by a 26-year-old Dutch-Moroccan, tens of thousands of native Dutch have moved to other countries in search of a better life. During the first six months of 2011 alone, 58,000 people have left the Netherlands. According to Statistics Netherlands, the increase in emigrants is largely due to native Dutch leaving the country to settle elsewhere.

The trend is picking up steam.

Soeren Kern is Senior Fellow for Transatlantic Relations at the Madrid-based Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group.

Source: http://www.hudson-ny.org/2624/moroccan-crime-netherlands

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

Egyptians Go to the Polls

by Rick Moran

Egyptians will go to the polls on Monday to take the first of several steps in voting for a new parliament. Up to 30 million of the nation’s 50 million eligible voters may take part in what one Western observer is calling a needlessly “complicated, contradictory and non-transparent” process. And with the threat of violence hanging over the election, it is believed by most observers that any reduction in turnout will almost certainly help the Muslim Brotherhood​’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP).

The bewildering array of dozens of political parties will field up to 7,000 candidates for the 498-member “People’s Assembly,” or lower house of the new parliament. Further elections in January will fill out the upper house, or Shura Council, with the voting for a new president sometime after that.

With thousands of young Egyptians occupying Tahrir Square, there is fear that violence may break out once again. Thousands of protestors were injured last week while 42 died in street clashes with the military. Although relative peace reigned in the square over the weekend, there is no guarantee that the youthful demonstrators won’t take out their frustration at what they see as a corrupt process by trying to stop the election from going forward. Their demands are simple; no elections until there is an end to military rule and the transfer of power to a civilian council to guide the country through the transition to democracy. There is no chance of that happening — not with the Muslim Brotherhood cautiously backing the military’s plan for parliamentary elections.

Indeed, after initially backing the protestors, the Brotherhood then pulled out of Tahrir Square and left it to the youthful demonstrators who organized the protests that overthrew Hosni Mubarak​ early this year. The young activists are calling for elections to be delayed until January, but the FJP is supporting the military’s position that the vote should go forward as planned. This has engendered some bitterness among activists who see the Brotherhood’s support of the military as a cynical move to assure that the largest percentage of the vote will fall to the Islamist group.

“Even without Tahrir, there are a million ways this could be a disaster,” said one Western observer. He is hardly exaggerating. The vote will be held for two days — a twist only announced on the election commission’s Facebook page last Friday. The first round of voting will be for certain sections of the country only. The rest of the nation will vote on two days in December. There will also be runoff elections for those seats where no candidate receives a majority.

The ballot process itself is excruciatingly complex. As Joshua Hersh notes, “Once in the booth, voters will have to select a party list, as well as two independent candidates. If they do not choose two independents, their entire vote will be invalidated, a technicality that few voters seem to be aware of.”

The “party lists” are incredibly confusing:

Two-thirds of the assembly are elected using a complex, closed proportional list system via 46 multiseat districts, while the remaining third, or 166, of the members are elected via 83 two-seat constituencies. In both cases, half of the elected members must be classified as “workers and farmers” (see Eligibility, below).

Voters cast two ballots, the first for one candidate list of their choice, and the second for the two-seat constituency where they choose two candidates.

Needless to say, experienced international election observers are appalled. “If we had to do it over again, I think it would be better if the rules weren’t changing every day — even up to today,” said Les Campbell, an observer with the National Democratic Institute. Said another observer, “The larger problem is that many procedures for the actual conduct of the voting remain undefined and could be interpreted and implemented differently in every polling center.”

But most of the international observers are taking a hands-off approach. “I’ll let the Egyptians define what is legitimate or not. What we can do is amplify whatever that decision is. If the politicians are willing to compete, we should be willing to observe. But we will not pull punches on what we see,” said Campbell.

Consider also that voters are electing a parliament with no defined constitutional duties. Once parliament is seated sometime next January, members will select a committee to write a new constitution. No doubt the military will have a lot to say about the drafting of the document, as Chief of Staff Mohamed Hussein Tantawi has said that there will be “no change” in the role of the military in the new constitution. If Tantawi gets his way, it would mean that the Egyptian military would still have virtual immunity from scrutiny, as well as continued domination of the economy.

Significantly, the Muslim Brotherhood​ appears to have come down on the side of the military in trying to dismiss the Tahrir Square demonstrators. Tantawi upbraided the protestors, hinting that they were being manipulated by foreign powers. “None of this would have happened if there were no foreign hands. We will not allow a small minority of people, who don’t understand, to harm Egypt’s stability,” he said. The leader of the Brotherhood, Mohammed Badie, echoed the junta’s line, saying, “There are powers inside and outside Egypt that don’t want stability for Egypt or development, and this is something that is being pushed and paid for,” he said.

How this cozying up to the military will affect the Brotherhood’s vote is unknown. If the turnout tops 50%, it is estimated by some that the FJP could receive as much as 35%-50% of the vote. But there is no track record to go on except for the vote in 2005 when the Brotherhood’s candidates ran as independents. At that point, it received 20% of the vote — a total it is sure to exceed this year.

Protecting the military’s economic interests, particularly in the Western-oriented tourist industry in which one in eight Egyptians work, means no radical changes will immediately take place, despite the fact that the Brotherhood has been promoting the idea of change during the campaign. It is a delicate balance and could mean that the FJP follows the example of Turkey’s Justice and Development Party in slowly adapting its Islamist agenda over a longer period of time.

As for other parties, the more secular and liberal parties are poorly organized and have little name recognition. Surprisingly, the prospects of Mubarak-era politicians in the countryside are better than one would expect. The Wall Street Journal quotes a candidate from one of the provinces saying, “Tribe, family, and religion-this is how people vote here.” The people have been voting for the Mubarak-era politicians for decades and will vote for them again because, like feudal lords, they dispense patronage and favors over their districts.

Whatever promise the future held in those giddy days following the departure of Hosni Mubarak​ has been strangled by the harsh reality of military rule and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood. Even if the country makes it through this torturous electoral process, the government that emerges from the confusion will be nothing like the activists and idealists who put their bodies on the line to oust a dictator imagined.

Rick Moran

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/11/28/egyptians-go-to-the-polls/

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