Russia's Achilles Heels (Plural)

by Kim Zigfeld

Whenever the horrifyingly precarious fundamentals of the Russian economy are pointed out to its apologists, the response is always the same.  “Russia has low debt and high reserves, so it can weather any storm,” they chant, and the melody of the anthem of the USSR can be heard in the background.

This is the opposite of the truth.  Far from being a strength, debt and reserves are Russia’s main Achilles heels.  In Ukraine, they may prove Russia’s undoing.

Russia came under withering economic fire last week as it geared up for a broader war of aggression in Ukraine.  Its stock market lost over 5% of its value, crashing through the 1300 barrier on the MICEX exchange, and the U.S. treasury secretary boldly stated that the U.S. would target Vladimir Putin’s personal assets if he launched an attack.  S&P downgraded Russia’s credit rating due to massive capital flight, and every day that passed brought new revelations about measures at U.S. disposal to wreck havoc in the Russian banking sector. 

World leaders piled on Putin with genuine zeal.  The secretary-general of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Co-operation called Putin a “ridiculous hypocrite,” and the U.S. secretary of state called Putin a liar and a cheat who had “refused to take a single step” to de-escalate the Ukraine crisis.  Russia found itself in the world’s financial cross hairs, with few defensive measures available in response.  The Russian Central Bank panicked at the prospect of runaway inflation and clamped down hard, risking putting the economy into a death spiral as loans dry up and growth peters out.

As the Russia economics guru Anders Aslund points out, it’s simply mythology to imagine that Russia’s currency reserves are squirreled away in some impregnable fortress deep within the bowels of the Kremlin, to be trundled out whenever the cold winds of recession blow.  They’re not even in Russia.  These funds, arising from international fossil fuel transactions, are mostly abroad in foreign banks, and they are subject to being frozen via economic sanctions.

Aslund writes:

In its March report on the Russian economy, the World Bank showed that the country's total foreign debt at the end of January was $732 billion. The distribution between public and private debt is only available from October last year. Then, state banks had $128 billion and nonfinancial state corporations $164 billion of foreign debt. Adding $80 billion of government foreign debt, Russia's total public foreign debt was $372 billion, while its international currency reserves are $477 billion, but much of those can be frozen as well.

Russia, in other words, is rapidly approaching the time when foreign debt will exceed reserves, even assuming it can access 100% of the reserves – which soon may not be the case.

Even if sanctions don’t target the reserves directly, they can still wipe them out.  Determined sanctions can radically reduce Russia’s national income, forcing it to incur more debt, and, by placing the Russian economy under pressure, can force the Kremlin to spend billions defending the value of Russian equities and the ruble.

And Western nations can also cut off Russia’s access to credit, meaning that it simply won’t be able to solve its problems by incurring more.  That would create a fierce financial crisis similar to what Russia saw when the USSR collapsed.

What’s more, regardless of sanctions, we have already seen the bloodletting that can occur in the Russian economy when the price of oil drops precipitously, as it did in 2008-2009.  The bottom fell out of the Russian currency and stock market when that happened.  Had it not been for its reserves, Russia as a nation would have flatlined.

In fact, at present, the only thing keeping Russia from being cast into this abyss is the West’s fear of the chaos that might result if Russia did collapse.  Aslund writes: “One month ago, the Western discussion on possible sanctions against Russia focused on whether they could be effective. During the spring meeting of the International Monetary Fund in Washington April 12 to 13, the question was turned around: Do we really want to destroy Russia that fast?”

Russia is choosing to face off against a NATO alliance whose combined GDP is ten times greater than Russia’s, and which spends ten times more on military capabilities.  It is choosing to do so at a time when, prior to any sanctions, its economy was already on the brink of a breathtaking recession.  These are the same sorts of missteps taken by the USSR – steps that led to national collapse.

And indeed, Aslund points out that the Russian security counsel, the only source of consultation Putin has turned to in regard to his aggression against Ukraine, consists almost entirely of former KGB agents like Putin and does not have a single member qualified to assess the economic ramifications of military actions.  As in Soviet times, Putin does not engage in real deliberations, but rather utilizes rubber-stamp façades to cover up what are really dictatorial edicts.

Thus, while Putin claimed that opinion polls in Russia strongly favored seizing Ukraine, those polls don’t reflect the views of a public that has been properly informed about the likely economic consequences of an invasion.

Even the Russians are starting to ask inconvenient questions.

Writing in leading Russian newspaper Vedemosti,  economist Yevsey Gurevich points out that in its desperate bid to vie with the West, Russia is spending nearly five times more on its military as a share of GPD than does the average NATO member, and is planning even more dramatic increases.  What this means is that just as in Soviet times, Russians are shouldering a far greater burden in the guns-or-butter tradeoff than those nations they are competing against.  Gurevich warns: “[O]nly a highly developed country can act as a super power without harm to itself.”  Russia isn’t a highly developed country, but rather one that relies on exports of raw materials to such countries in order to sustain itself.

Gurevich is worried because his country is already feeling the heat.  Both Ford and Renault have announced major rollbacks on the their business operations in Russia, and McDonald's has totally shut down in Crimea.  In the first quarter of this year, Russia has lost between $50 and $75 billion in capital flight, as nervous investors have sought the exits after seeing the neo-Soviet Putin regime unsheathe its claws.

And some Russians have already had enough.  Russia’s Mark Zuckerburg, founder of the Russian version of Facebook called Vkontakte, has fled the country, never to return, becoming the poster boy for Russia’s neo-Soviet brain drain.  And Putin has responded by imposing  (Russian-language links) Soviet-style restrictions on government officials traveling abroad, in what may be the first step on a wider ban designed to staunch the flow of talent.  Indeed, a group of Russian physicists just resigned from a major academic council to protest the firing of a colleague who dared to travel abroad without state approval.

Where just months ago commentators were hoping to see Russia do more to develop the rule of law, now they just want to see bare rationality, something that’s been in short supply of late.  Russian military analyst Alexander Golts says that Russia simply doesn’t have the type of military force that would be necessary to occupy, administer, and hold Eastern Ukraine, but he doesn’t believe that this fact will necessarily stop Putin from trying.  Needless to say, even if Russia did have such a force, it certainly does not have the economic power to support it indefinitely.

The signs of warlike intention are clear.  Russia has been sputtering with warlike rhetoric and backing it up with repeated threats to NATO airspace with military attack aircraft.  The rashness of these actions, which could spark a global war by accident, clearly recalls the worst of Soviet misconduct, such as the Cuban missile crisis.

Russia sent nuclear missiles to Cuba because a new, young, untried president had been installed, and Russia believed that his weakness offered an opportunity.  America’s current steward presents an equally sophomoric image to the world, and has no doubt encouraged Russian aggression in the same manner.  Then, ultimately, Russian missiles were blocked from our hemisphere.  What will historians say happened on Obama’s watch in Eastern Europe?


Follow Kim Zigfeld on Twitter @larussophobe.

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/04/russias_achilles_heels_plural.html

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

The Holocaust's Foremost Unsung Hero

by Emily Amrousi

Moshe Kraus was behind one of the largest rescue operations of the Holocaust • Using his wits, initiative and unparalleled courage, Kraus saved between 40,000 and 100,000 of Budapest's Jews • So why has no one ever heard of him?

     
          

Moshe Kraus Photo credit: Beit Haedut Museum

                                                               

In 1986, a 78-year-old man named Moshe Kraus died in Jerusalem. You probably don't recognize the name. He was never commemorated in any way. He is not mentioned in any Holocaust encyclopedias. But Moshe Kraus is responsible for the largest rescue operation during the Holocaust, on a huge scale. German industrialist Oskar Schindler, with his resourcefulness and courage, managed to save 1,200 Jews; Kraus saved tens of thousands.

 

Historians are divided on the exact number, but the most conservative estimate talks about at least 40,000 people, and some estimates are even as high as 100,000 Jews who escaped the Nazis in Hungary thanks to this daring man.

The year is 1944. The Nazis are stepping up the pace and sending more and more Jews to their deaths in efforts to quickly complete the extermination of Hungary's Jewry. A spacious glass factory located at 29 Vadasz Street in Budapest is granted extraterritorial status under the auspices of Switzerland. Some 3,000 Jews barricade themselves inside this building, dubbed the Glass House, for three months.

More and more homes in Budapest are turned into Swiss "safe houses," barring entry to Germans and the local complicit Hungarian authorities, and housing thousands of Jews. The Swiss embassy grants 40,000 Jews certificates making them foreign Swiss nationals. Tens of thousands of additional documents are forged while the Swiss turn a blind eye. Young, brave Jews disguised as Nazi officers roam the streets handing out these documents to Jews, and all of this is orchestrated by Kraus.

Among the Glass House survivors are many prominent Jews, including Moshe Shkedi, the father of former commander of the Israeli Air Force Maj. Gen. Eliezer Shkedi. "My father lived because of the Glass House," Shkedi says. "His parents and all his brothers were murdered. The important message is that not only Christians saved Jews during the Holocaust. Jews also managed to save thousands."

The story of the Glass House is one of the most fascinating historical events of that era. Much like the man behind the operation, Kraus, this event has somehow evaded public attention and never received the recognition it deserved. The Beit Haedut museum in Nir Galim has recently built a replica of the Glass House, in efforts to right this historical wrong. The forgotten story is now beginning to shed its anonymity thanks to the initiative of Ariel Bariach, the head of the museum. Bariach is not a European Jew, in fact his parents hail from Tunis. "Some people at other Holocaust remembrance facilities didn't like it that someone of Mizrahi descent was running a Holocaust museum, but the Holocaust happened to Jews, and I'm a Jew."

A mathematical trick

For Hungary's Jews, the Holocaust started long after Europe's skies became saturated with smoke from crematoriums. Some 20,000 Jews who fled the Nazis in occupied countries sought refuge in Budapest, which was considered safe. But in March 1944, after the German invasion of Hungary, the Nazis began sending Jews from outlying Hungarian towns to extermination camps in Poland. Within the span of eight weeks, about half a million Jews from the Hungarian periphery were sent to their deaths, at a pace of about 12,000 per day. Entire communities were wiped out, one after another.

 In April 1944, two Slovakian Jewish prisoners managed to escape from Auschwitz. Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler met with the head of the Slovak Jewish Council, Oscar Krasniansky, and gave him a detailed account of what was happening at the death camp. Krasniansky translated their account and compiled a 32-page report (the Auschwitz Protocols) providing, for the first time, accurate and detailed information on the methods and dimensions of the Nazi extermination efforts. Vrba and Wetzler said that at that point 1.75 million people had been killed at Auschwitz, and that the camp was preparing for the arrival of 800,000 Hungarian Jews, slated to be killed.

 

By the end of May that year, Moshe (Miklush) Kraus had gotten his hands on the Vrba and Wetzler's report. Kraus was one of the heads of the Zionist movement in Hungary and he directed the Palestine Office in Budapest. He added his own report to the Auschwitz Protocols detailing the transport and extermination of the Jews in the outlying Hungarian towns. The report named every individual from every city and district. He then did everything in his power to disseminate the two reports.

These documents made their way to the regent of the Kingdom of Hungary, Miklos Horthy, and to all the important political figures in Hungary. An international news agency picked up the story and distributed it, and the reports created quite a stir in Switzerland. Swiss public opinion applied enormous pressure on Horthy. The pope, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Swedish King Gustaf the fifth all sent letters of protest to Budapest. Roosevelt's letter to Horthy included a military threat. As a result, Horthy put a stop to the deportation of Jews.

Between July and October of that year, before Horthy was deposed and the Arrow Cross Party rose to power, Kraus gave his all to try to include as many Jews as possible in the mathematical trick he had devised with the help of the Swiss. How did so many thousands of Jews manage to evade the Nazis' awareness? At the core, it was a feat of bureaucratic sleight of hand on a massive scale.

At the time, a British-issued immigration certificate, simply referred to as a "certificate," granting entry to Palestine, was viewed as a protective shield. Anyone in possession of such a certificate was considered a British citizen protected by the Swiss legation in Hungary, because Switzerland represented Britain's diplomatic interests in Hungary at the time. At the end of 1943, the Hungarian government recognized the rights of 1,500 holders of such certificates.

Kraus, together with other Palestine Office workers, approached Swiss diplomat Carl Lutz, who was stationed in Budapest as vice-consul and headed the office that represented British interests. Lutz was sympathetic to the Jews, having served in the Swiss consulate in Jaffa. He and Kraus had the idea to turn the 1,500 individual certificates into family certificates, including the families of 1,500 Jews in these protective documents -- 7,800 people in all.

A month and a half after the Nazi occupation, when ghettos were at their peak in the outlying towns, Kraus and Lutz, with the help of anti-Nazi Hungarian foreign office workers, thought up yet another manipulation: They turned the 7,800 certificates back into individual documents, applying them to families as well, allowing them to save about 40,000 people, all of whom now possessed immigration documents issued by Switzerland. The International Red Cross, Britain and Switzerland recognized the 40,000 documents. The Nazis officially recognized only 7,800, but Kraus continued his efforts to get Nazi recognition for the full 40,000.

"The wait (for a reply) was long, and we didn't know the reason," Kraus wrote in an article, "until we found out something very strange: Someone had informed the German legation that the 7,800 documents applied to individuals, not families. That someone was one of us -- Dr. Kastner."

Lutz gave the certificate holders protective passports or "Schutz-Passes" -- which identified the bearers as Swedish subjects awaiting repatriation and thus prevented their deportation. The documents issued by the Swiss consulate in Budapest stated that the Swiss embassy's department of foreign interests confirms that so and so appears in a collective Swiss passport, and should be treated as having a valid passport. The collective passport included tens of thousands of names. In order to disguise the fraud, Lutz numbered the individuals in question between 1 and 7,800 -- the number that had already been approved by the local authorities.

Five hundred Glass House employees who handled these documents were made into Swiss embassy employees, enjoying all the consular benefits: they were exempt from wearing the yellow star, and some of them were allowed to use the embassy vehicles and the consular telephone as part of their "consular" work. Kraus himself traveled in a car bearing the Swiss flag, driven by a Swiss driver.

The Swiss consulate in Budapest was too small to take on such an enormous operation. Arthur Weiss, the Jewish owner of the Glass House, gave Kraus the keys to his enormous factory, and Lutz issued Swiss diplomatic immunity to the building. A Swiss flag was hung at the entrance. "I chose the Glass House because I feared that there would be a lot more trouble and I knew that this building could hold a lot of Jews in a time of need," Kraus wrote years later.

Stepping up the rescue efforts

In October 1944, Horthy is deposed and the Pro-Nazi Arrow Cross Party takes power. A ghetto is established in Budapest and all the city's Jews between the ages of 16 and 40, excluding foreign nationals, are told to report to work camps. Hungary's national radio station announces three times a day that individuals holding Swiss documents are exempt from reporting for duty and can move freely during all hours of the day (Jews were forbidden from exiting their houses for more than two hours each day).

Thousands of Hungarian Jews clamor to the Glass House in search of Swiss papers, including Jews already slated to cross the border into Germany. A photo taken by an unknown photographer during that time depicts masses of people crowding the building's doors holding out their arms.

Lutz and Kraus step up their rescue efforts. Beyond the 40,000 certificates, now tens of thousands are issued forged documents, printed both inside the Glass House and elsewhere on paper stolen from the same printing house that printed the valid documents for the Swiss. The documents provide a sense of security, but in some cases they are recognized as forgeries by the authorities and their holders are sent to the extermination camps.

 When Eichmann and the S.S. seek to bring all the Jews in the Budapest ghetto to prepare them for transportation to extermination camps, Kraus approaches Lutz and asks him to grant additional houses extraterritorial status. Lutz purchases 76 houses in Budapest and gives them Swiss immunity. Thousands of Jews possessing Swiss documents are given refuge in these safe houses. These houses are seen as Swiss territory in every respect, and their inhabitants are protected from being deported or taken to work camps. The Red Cross provides them with food and basic supplies.

Lutz's daring plan is adopted by other diplomats hailing from neutral countries. Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg turns 28 houses in Budapest into Swedish territory, housing 4,500 Jews. The Spanish, Portuguese and Vatican legations arrive at a similar agreement with the Hungarian authorities: Spain is allowed to hand out 1,500 certificates, Portugal 700 and the Vatican 3,000. Signs are posted on the safe houses declaring that they are under the protection of the legation and that foreigners are not allowed to enter. All the houses protected by foreign legations are dubbed an "international ghetto".

Kraus purchases another factory, a textile mill, and rents the football association headquarters that shares a wall with the Glass House in order to house the thousands of Jews he aims to save. Some 3,000 people crowd into the Glass House alone, sleeping side by side, head to toes, not daring leave the building for any reason. They sleep in every available space, in cellars, hallways, on tables, in attics. On Shabbat they all hold a collective Kiddush.

Youngsters belonging to the Zionist youth movement become Kraus' assistants. Pinhas Rosenbaum, a young Hungarian Jew at the Glass House, gets his hands on an Arrow Cross uniform and goes out in disguise every day to hand out dozens of Schutz-Passes to Jews. Tova Singer, a 12-year-old girl, takes a forged document stating that she is Christian, and helps transport orphan children from the ghetto to Red Cross orphanages.

Meir Friedman, a Glass House survivor recalls how the document disseminators became bolder and bolder as time went by. "Dr. Shendor Unger, one of the Zionist bureaucrats, took a consulate vehicle and drove alongside the death march from Budapest to Vienna. Those who were able to say their names were provided with documents on the spot, in the car. They filled out a form and handed it to them. In 90 percent of the cases, the Hungarians had no choice but to honor these papers. Another car that followed the march took those people back to Budapest."

In November 1944, the systematic extermination of Jews left outside the safe houses begins. Death marches to the Austrian border take 2,000 Jews to their deaths each day, in the blistering cold. Kraus and Lutz debate whether or not to continue issuing Schutz-Passes, because if they were to issue more papers than they were allotted the trick would likely be discovered, jeopardizing the entire operation. In the end they decide to keep going.

 Clerks and youth movement members work entire nights signing certificates. Kraus' people and members of the Swedish and Swiss legations go out into the streets, handing out life-saving papers with the ink still wet. They go to the death marches and hand out Schutz-Passes. The Hungarians are forced to release another group of people every time.

Holocaust researcher Dr. Ayala Nadivi explains that "it made no difference who received [the documents]. Young, old, men, women, they gave them to whomever they could."

According to Kraus' own account, up to 60 or 70 thousand people were in the safe houses. "It emerged that only 32,000 Jews were in the ghetto, while there were some 150,000 Jews in Budapest at the time," Kraus wrote after the war. "That is when the authorities decided to start looking for the missing Jews."

The attacks against the remaining Jews become worse. The Nazis start taking Jews to the banks of the Danube River, stripping them of their clothes and shooting them to death. Their bodies are then thrown into the river.

"We slept on the tables"

 

The Arrow Cross try to enter the Glass House and the other safe houses several times, under the pretext that they are looking for forged documents, but they retreat after Lutz steps in, asserting the buildings' diplomatic immunity.

Meir Friedman was 18 years old when he entered the Glass House. In the spring of 1944 he and his family fled from northern Hungary and headed to Budapest. "Lutz was a true righteous gentile. After all, he would have had to be blind not to see through the maneuver that Kraus and the Zionist youth movement had undertaken. Lutz pretended not to know," Friedman recalls.

"It was a miracle from above that 3,000 people were able to fit inside that building. The conditions were not good, but it was Holocaust deluxe compared to what the people on the outside were going through. I lived in a niche between the office and the top floor, together with several other people. Everyone tried to keep themselves occupied, so they wouldn't go completely crazy," he says.

 

"There was a cellar for Orthodox Jews. They studied Torah in there without stopping. There was an attic for the Hapoel Hamizrachi party. There was a cellar for Hashomer Hatzair with counselors for children and lectures for adults. There was no shortage of lecturers, professors and doctors among us. I remember someone handing out fliers about choir rehearsals."

Friedman helped affix photos to printed certificates. "The documents didn't provide absolute protection, but most of the Nazis honored them. There were instances, however, when they tore the paper into pieces and took the Jew."

Didn't the Nazis notice that tens of thousands of Jews became Swiss nationals right under their nose?

"Maybe they did notice, but they couldn't change extraterritorial laws. They wanted to show the world that they respected international law."

"On December 31 members of the Arrow Cross entered the Glass House compound in order to take us to the Danube. I will never forget it, because of the bitter cold. We were outside for two hours, until the Swiss embassy intervened and they were forced to let us go back in. Apparently the ruling rabble wanted to be seen as a legitimate government so they respected the Swiss."

Friedman's wife, Vera (Zipora) arrived in Budapest from Vienna at the age of 5, shortly after Kristallnacht. Her father was taken to a work camp and she and her mother hid with relatives in the city. When she was 11, the Arrow Cross rose to power.

"One day, Pinhas Rosenbaum came to us dressed as a Nazi officer. We were startled. We didn't know who he was. After the guard left the building, he immediately started speaking Yiddish so that we wouldn't be scared. He took my mother and me to the Glass House," she recounts.

"The front of the building was impressive and unusual. It was made entirely of glass. Inside were offices, a yard and warehouses. People slept on huge tables, and beneath them. Twenty people on the table and another ten below. There were families in every corner. We lived on the ground floor."

"On Shabbat we would hold a collective Kiddush and everyone sang. During Hanukkah we lit candles. We weren't sad together, but each one of us was sad by himself. Everyone had one suitcase that served as a closet as well as a partition from the person sleeping on the other side."

 

"The youngsters who were out dressed as Nazis also made sure there was food, and we got food from the Red Cross. Peas, mushrooms, cans. The sanitary conditions were rough -- there were only four or five bathrooms for 3,000 people. People stood in line for the bathroom for hours. We bathed once a week. Men bathed in the yard in subzero temperatures, and the women used one pail filled with ice water in a corner. Once a week it was obscured with a curtain."

"Every day in the afternoon we had a Bnei Akiva meeting. We sang and talked about Eretz Israel. We heard that all the Jews in Europe had been murdered. All my relatives in Poland and Vienna. My mother's eight siblings. We never knew if we would survive. Every day was a surprise. We asked ourselves questions. We knew that we had a job -- to keep the fire burning and go to Israel to build a Jewish life."

Meir Friedman met his wife after the war, at a Bnei Akiva chapter in Hungary. Together they moved to Israel as part of the youth movement, and later married and had three children and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

In February 1945, with the liberation of Budapest, it became clear that more than 100,000 Jews in the city had survived. Several days before the liberation, the owner of the Glass House, Arthur Weiss, was caught and murdered by the Nazis. His wife and son survived, and moved to the U.S. after the war.

Carl Lutz was one of the first to be awarded the title "righteous gentile" by Yad Vashem. In 1965, Israel issued a medal in his honor, and a street in Haifa was named after him.

Moshe Kraus moved to Israel and ran an institution for young boys. He married a Holocaust survivor from Budapest. The two had no children.

The Swiss government honored Kraus for saving 30,000 Hungarian Jews. But when Dr. Nadivi began her doctoral research on the Palestine Office in Budapest, she could find no information about Kraus in the Yad Vashem archives.

"It's sad. He was an enormous rescuer. There was no one like him. There was no other rescue operation during the Holocaust that saved so many Jews thanks to the initiative of one person. Thousands followed in the path that he paved -- members of youth movements, who also saved others," Nadivi says.

At the end of the war, when the Jewish Agency told Lutz that he would be inducted into the Jewish National Fund's "Golden Book" of honor and that a ceremony would be held to honor him, he thanked them, but informed them that it was Kraus who should receive the honor, because without him, the operation would have never succeeded. As the ceremony neared, Lutz wrote the JNF again asking them to recognize Kraus' contribution. But then, at the lavish ceremony, no one mentioned Kraus. Only Lutz praised him again and again.

Emily Amrousi

Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=17111

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

Obama’s Muslim Easter and Willful Ignorance

by Robert Spencer

I

In his Easter message last Saturday, Barack Obama asserted that the “common thread of humanity that connects us all – not just Christians and Jews, but Muslims and Hindus and Sikhs – is our shared commitment to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.”

Even though he was registered as a Muslim in primary school in Indonesia and recounts in his first autobiography that he got in trouble there for making faces in Qur’an class, Obama apparently recalls little of the contents of the Qur’an. For if he did, he would know that it tells Muslims “take not the Jews and the Christians for your friends and protectors” (5:51), calls them “the most vile of created beings” (98:6), and calls the patriarch Abraham an “excellent example” for telling his unbelieving relatives: “There has arisen between us and you enmity and hatred forever unless you believe in Allah and Him alone” (60:4). It also says: “Muhammad is the apostle of Allah. Those who follow him are merciful to one another, and harsh to the unbelievers” (48:29).

Enjoining mercy to those who share one’s religious beliefs and harshness to those who do not is hardly tantamount to loving one’s neighbor as oneself, and this sharp dichotomy between believers and unbelievers is not just found in some random Qur’an passages to which no one pays attention. It runs all through Islamic scripture, doctrine and law. It is even an accepted principle in Islam that the life of a non-Muslim is worth less than that of a Muslim: a manual of Islamic law certified by Cairo’s prestigious al-Azhar university (from which Obama addressed the Islamic world in June 2009) as “conforming to the practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni community” declares: “The indemnity for the death or injury of a woman is one-half the indemnity paid for a man. The indemnity paid for a Jew or Christian is one-third the indemnity paid for a Muslim. The indemnity paid for a Zoroastrian is one-fifteenth that of a Muslim.” (‘Umdat al-Salik, o4.9)

The Iranian Sheikh Sultanhussein Tabandeh echoed and amplified that point in his Muslim Commentary on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Since Islam regards non-Muslims as on a lower level of belief and conviction, if a Muslim kills a non-Muslim — then his punishment must not be the retaliatory death, since the faith and conviction he possesses is loftier than that of the man slain…Islam and its peoples must be above the infidels, and never permit non-Muslims to acquire lordship over them.”  

While this devaluing of the non-Muslim’s life is based on teachings of the Qur’an and Sunnah, there is nothing in Islam that teaches that non-Muslims should be accorded the same rights and dignity as Muslims in an Islamic state.

There is no indication that Obama knows about such Islamic teachings, but even if he did, it is unlikely that he would say anything, since, after all, he has said that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam” – and in Islamic law, “slander” is not telling a falsehood about someone, but telling a truth about someone that he does not want known. And after over five years of Obama’s presidency, it is abundantly clear that one thing he does not want Americans to know is that there are texts and teachings of Islam that Islamic jihadists use to justify violence and supremacism, and that jihadis are still trying to murder Americans in accord with those teachings.

As I detail in my book Arab Winter Comes to America: The Truth About the War We’re In, this willful ignorance at the highest levels has endangered Americans more than once, making for murderous attacks that could have and should have been prevented. The most notorious of these are the Boston Marathon bombing and the Fort Hood massacre. 

Two years before the Boston bombing, Russian intelligence agents told the FBI that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a “follower of radical Islam” who had tried to join “underground groups” in Dagestan. That is tantamount to saying that Tsarnaev was an Islamic jihadist, which should have been enough for the FBI to keep him under constant or at least regular surveillance. It did not – and not coincidentally, right around the time the Russians gave the feds this information, the Obama administration (under pressure from Muslim groups with links to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood) mandated the scrubbing of counter-terror training materials of all mention of Islam and jihad (and the dismissal of FBI trainers who spoke about the motives and goals of jihad terrorists, including me). Agents who still knew how to evaluate the Russian intel were probably afraid that to do so, in the prevailing politically correct climate, would have been career suicide.

In the same way, Fort Hood jihad murderer Nidal Malik Hasan rose through Army ranks even as he justified suicide bombing and spouted hatred for America, and he did so with extraordinarily positive recommendations. In an evaluation dated March 13, 2009, just short of eight months before his jihad attack, Hasan’s superiors said that he should be put into a position “that allows others to learn from his perspectives” and declared that his “unique insights into the dimensions of Islam” and his “moral reasoning” could be of “great potential interest and strategic importance to the U.S. Army.”

And indeed, Hasan’s insights into Islam are of great strategic importance to the U.S. Army, but not in a way that Army brass is inclined to accept or admit. To do so would harm “diversity” in the military. And that, apparently, is more important than making sure that there isn’t another jihad massacre.

A large-scale change in the political and media culture is vitally necessary for the U.S. to deal realistically with the jihad threat. But it is not on the horizon. Instead, the willful ignorance and wishful thinking that Obama manifested yet again in his Easter message rule the day. And that means only that there will be more jihad massacres.

Robert Spencer

Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/robert-spencer/obamas-muslim-easter-and-willful-ignorance/

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

Churchill Quotation on Evils of Islam Gets UK Man Arrested

by Daniel Greenfield

 

Open question: would Winston Churchill be arrested if he said it today? Or only repeatedly denounced by The Independent and then assaulted by anti-fascist demonstrators?

Today Paul Weston, chairman of the party Liberty GB and candidate in the 22 May European Elections in the South East, has been arrested in Winchester.
At around 2pm Mr Weston was standing on the steps of Winchester Guildhall, addressing the passers-by in the street with a megaphone. He quoted the following excerpt about Islam from the book The River War by Winston Churchill:
“How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property – either as a child, a wife, or a concubine – must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the faith: all know how to die but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith.”
Reportedly a woman came out of the Guildhall and asked Mr Weston if he had the authorisation to make this speech. When he answered that he didn’t, she told him “It’s disgusting!” and then called the police.
Six or seven officers arrived. They talked with the people standing nearby, asking questions about what had happened. The police had a long discussion with Mr Weston, lasting about 40 minutes.
At about 3pm he was arrested. They searched him, put him in a police van and took him away.

That certainly was a long discussion. There are no further updates on the Liberty site with more details as of now.

Daniel Greenfield

Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/churchill-quotation-on-evils-of-islam-gets-uk-man-arrested/

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

Melanie Phillips: What Blair should have said

by Melanie Phillips

Blair has understood that, with the world facing a lethal threat, there is an even more dangerous reluctance in the West to engage with it.

Day 2 of the Presidential Conference,

June 19, 2013. Photo: חן גלילי, ShiloPro

Tony Blair, Britain’s former prime minister, took a scalpel to a neuralgic issue last week. In a major speech on Wednesday, he declared that the West needed to swallow its differences with Russia and China and make common cause with them to counter the threat of radical Islam, the biggest threat to global security today.

Blair has understood that, with the world facing this lethal threat, there is an even more dangerous reluctance in the West to engage with it – even to the point of understanding exactly what it is.

His remarks provoked scorn and fury in equal measure. He was accused of being “the tyrants’ friend,” “embarrassingly simple-minded” and posing a “threat to world peace.”

Blair, the Middle East envoy for the Quartet of the UN, the EU, the United States and Russia, has long been a lightning-rod for widespread fury in the UK over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Critics claimed that, as prime minister, he was in the pocket of Israel and US president George W Bush.

Excoriated by both Left and Right as a Neo-con warmonger who took the UK to war in Iraq “on a lie” about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, he is hounded by demonstrators calling him a “war criminal” and “Bliar” whenever he appears in public.

In his London speech, Blair poked directly at these wounds – even though, in a number of respects, he himself flinched from the full implications of a situation he rightly criticizes the West for refusing to acknowledge.

He suggested that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan failed merely because of sectarian fighting in those countries. That provoked unbridled rage amongst those who believe that the carnage in Iraq, in particular, was the result of an “illegal” war that was his fault and pointless from the start.

The second issue on which Blair provoked fury was Israel. Despite his pro-Israel views – for which he paid a heavy price in British politics – he used to maintain that solving Israel/Palestine would solve the region’s problems. Now he understands, correctly, that solving the region’s problems is critical to solving Israel/Palestine.

This is incomprehensible to those for whom Palestinian “victimization” by Israel is the defining issue of the times. But Mr. Blair wants people to understand that the real issue is the global threat from radical Islam.

As he said, “There is not a region of the world not adversely affected by Islamism” – including Europe, where the Muslim Brotherhood’s agenda of Islamizing the West has been allowed to proceed unchecked. Yet the West goes to extraordinary lengths to deny this common factor. For saying we need to take sides, to “engage” and “intervene” against radical Islam, Blair stands accused of supporting tyrants. But in strategically crucial Egypt, it is only rational that Blair should say of General Sisi, the autocrat who stands against rule by the Muslim Brotherhood, that “it is massively in our interests that he succeeds.”

Nevertheless, aspects of this speech suggested Blair remains in a bit of a muddle. The turmoil in the Middle East, he said, was fundamentally due to the “titanic struggle” between Muslim reformers and Islamic radicals within both the Sunni and Shia worlds. That undoubted struggle, however, is by no means the whole story.

The unpalatable truth which he failed to acknowledge is that, invariably, the choice in the Middle East is not between a nasty strong man and nice reformers, but between a nasty strong man and Islamic radicals who threaten the West.

That, of course, is precisely the complaint thrown at him for deposing Saddam Hussein. But it was necessary to get rid of Saddam because he was too dangerous to the West to continue in office. It was similarly necessary to go to war against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

But it was disingenuous of Mr. Blair to blame the subsequent chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan on the “distorting feature” of religious extremism. The murderous battles there took place only because the strategic failures of both the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns had removed the restraints which had previously kept those sectarian divisions under control but then signally failed to help install new restraints in their place.

His deepest mistake, however, was to say that the “radicalized and politicized” view of Islam was “an ideology that distorts and warps Islam’s true message.”

This is the argument that Islam is really a religion of peace and so the extremists don’t represent “true” Islam. But this is not correct. While millions of Muslims around the world do shun the violent or extreme tenets of the religion, these are endorsed by all the Islamic authorities who matter.

It is more correct to say Islamic radicalism is a valid interpretation of Islam, no less “true” just because it is not universally endorsed. Yet Blair elides “interpretation” with “perversion” – thus undermining his own message that the West doesn’t understand the nature and severity of the threat from the Islamic world.

He also omitted to mention the most devastating blow of all to the security of the West: that President Obama’s America has stopped defending its allies and is instead empowering its enemies. The Arab and Muslim world perceives the US throwing in the towel in Afghanistan, breaking its own red lines over Syria and displaying impotence over Ukraine.

Above all, it recognizes from the farcical negotiations in Geneva that the US will not stop Iran from getting the bomb, and that it has actually strengthened Iran’s stranglehold on the region.

Arab rulers will always align themselves with whatever “strong horse” they perceive to be dominating the pack. Accordingly, Arab states previously helpful or essential to the West such as Egypt are cozying up instead to Russia, China or even Iran itself.

The one beacon of stability and freedom in the entire region is the nation that is directly threatened with annihilation: Israel. America and Europe should therefore stop beating it up and rewarding or appeasing those who want it destroyed, from the Palestinian Authority to Iran. They should instead start defending their one true ally against the enemies who threaten them all. Western interests, commercial as well as security and political, lie in supporting Israel. Only when the West finally understands that will it have any hope of defeating the radical Islamist enemy. That’s what Blair should have said.

Melanie Phillips

Source: http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-Ed-Contributors/What-Blair-should-have-said-350511

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

Netanyahu at Yad Vashem to world leaders: Don’t repeat with Iran the mistake of the 1930s

by Herb Keinon

The premier urges the world to learn the lessons of the 1930s and "see reality as it is, not how they would like it to be," in reference to the Iranian nuclear program.

           

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu speaking at Yad Vashem,

April 27, 2014. 

Photo: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu left the Fatah- Hamas pact aside, and in a somber speech marking the beginning of Holocaust Remembrance Day on Sunday evening urged world leaders to learn the lessons of the 1930s and – when facing Iran – see reality as it is, not as how they would like it to be.

While Netanyahu has in the past frequently drawn comparisons between Hitler’s Germany and the Ayatollahs’ Iran, he focused in his speech at Yad Vashem on retelling how the West was paralyzed against acting in time against Nazi Germany, because – coming out of the horrors of World War I – it wanted to avoid conflict at all cost. 

 

“We need to identify existential threats on time, and to act against them on time,” he said. “I ask, why in the years preceding the Holocaust did the vast majority of the world’s leaders, and the vast majority of the leaders of our people, not see the threats beforehand?” In retrospect, Netanyahu said, all the signs were apparent: the arming of the Nazi regime from year to year, the anti-Semitic propaganda that got worse month by month, and the attacks on the Jews.

Netanyahu said that a few world leaders, like Winston Churchill, saw the nature of the threat Nazism posed, and a few Jewish leaders – like Ze’ev Jabotinsky – warned against the oncoming destruction.

Then, in what seemed like a direct response to critics who accuse him of exaggerating the Iranian threat, Netanyahu said those who warned about the Nazis were roundly criticized by people who dismissed them as “prophets of doom” and “warmongers.”

“I ask how it could be that so many did not understand the reality?” he questioned.

“The bitter, tragic truth is that it is not as though they did not see; they did not want to see. And the reason they chose not to see the truth is that they did not want to deal with the ramifications of that truth.”

In an effort to avoid a repeat of the horrors of World War I, the West’s leaders wanted to avoid a confrontation at any price. “And by doing so, they prepared the ground for the worst war in the history of humanity.”

Netanyahu stressed, again in an obvious parallel to today, that this desire to prevent confrontation at all costs was not only the will of the leaders but also of their people, especially the intellectuals.

Even as more information about the true intent and capabilities of the Nazis reached London, Paris, and Washington, “They had eyes that did not see, and ears that did not hear,” Netanyahu said. “When you don’t want to accept reality as it is, it is possible to deny, and that is exactly what the Western leaders did.”

Netanyahu said the West dismissed the murderous rhetoric of the Nazis as meant for internal German consumption, and they understated the rearmament of the Nazis, saying that it flowed from the desire of a proud people to rebuild.

“The reality was clear, but it was wrapped in a bubble of delusions,” he said. “The price of the delusions, of the vain hopes, was very heavy. When the Western leaders finally acted, their people paid a horrible price.”

While World War I cost 16 million casualties, World War II left 60 million people dead.
Turning to Iran, Netanyahu asked if the world has learned the lessons of the past.

“Today we are again standing before clear facts and real dangers,” he warned.

Iran, he said, is calling for Israel’s destruction, and developing nuclear weapons, which is why it is building underground bunkers to enrich uranium, and building heavy-water plants to extract plutonium, and also why it is developing intercontinental ballistic missiles that can carry a nuclear payload.

“Like then, also today, there are those who dismiss Iran’s extreme rhetoric as stemming form internal needs. Like then, also today, there are those who dismiss their nuclear desires as the natural will of a proud people that we need to reconcile with. And like then, also today, those who say these things are deluding themselves, and making an historic mistake.”

Netanyahu said that Iran wants an agreement with the West that will relieve the crippling sanctions against it but enable it to be a nuclear threshold state, with the ability to manufacture a nuclear weapon in a couple of months. This type of agreement, he said, “would bring the world to the edge of the abyss.”

“I hope the lessons of the past were learned. I hope we will not meet again a desire to prevent conflict at all costs, something that will lead to an accord that will lead to a much higher price in the future.”

Netanyahu called on the world’s leaders to ensure that Iran completely dismantle itself of the capability to manufacture nuclear weapons, and to not give up until this goal is achieved.

“In any event, the people of Israel will stand strong. Against existential threats our situation is completely different than what it was in the Holocaust,” he said.

“Today we have a sovereign Jewish state. As Israel’s prime minister, I am not afraid to tell the world the truth, even to those whose eyes are blind, and ears are deaf. That is not only my right, but my obligation.”

Herb Keinon

Source: http://www.jpost.com/Jewish-World/Jewish-News/At-Yad-Vashem-Netanyahu-links-Wests-indifference-to-Holocaust-with-Iran-nuclear-program-350579

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