A Suicidal Collapse of Western Civilization? - S. Fred Singer

by S. Fred Singer

My background is basically European -- and more specifically, Western European.  I have lived and worked in many of those countries, and I know most of the major cities intimately -- from Stockholm in the north, Newcastle, London, Paris, The Hague, Munich, Vienna, to Rome and Erice, Sicily in the south.  I have also spent several months in Moscow and in Jerusalem as a guest of academic institutions.

Economic Suicide

The ongoing economic suicide of Europe is based on a faulty understanding of the climate issue by most Western politicians and on their extreme policy response, based on emotion rather than logic and science.  The major European economies have reacted irrationally to contrived, unjustified fear of imagined global-warming disasters.

Perhaps I should explain that the climate has not been warming for the past 18 years -- and even if it had been warming, it would be no disaster.  The EU wants to cut emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, a natural plant-fertilizer, by 40% within 15 years -- by 2030.  This insane drive to replace energy sources from fossil fuels that release plant-friendly CO2 into the atmosphere has led to greatly increased costs of energy.  As is well understood, such actions not only hurt economic growth, but they increase poverty levels and therefore threaten the social fabric of these nations. 

There are some exceptions. of course: France and Belgium rely heavily on nuclear energy; Austria and Norway rely heavily on hydro.  Poland has actively resisted the general trend to demonize CO2, but the UK and Germany, which has been the power-house of European economic growth, are severely threatened by their insistence on installing wind and solar energy.  The latter is especially inappropriate to the Continent and to Great Britain.

The pity of it all is that these economic sacrifices in Western Europe will hardly affect the level of atmospheric CO2 -- which is controlled globally by huge emissions from China -- and soon also from India.

Unfortunately, during the past few years, and even during the White House administration of George W. Bush, the United States has tended to move in the same direction -- and energy costs have gone up markedly.

The regulatory burdens created by the EPA’s “War on Coal,” by holding up permits for pipelines and for exploration-production of fuels on Federal lands, etc, are imposing real costs on US households, which are the equivalent of a large energy tax -- except that none of these increased costs flow into the US Treasury.

Cultural, plus even more dangerous Demographic Suicide,

But it is cultural suicide, which adds to economic suicide and spells doom for the future of Western Europe.  I have in mind here the heavy immigration from Islamic nations -- with most immigrants unwilling to adjust to the prevailing culture of the host country.

Examples are rampant.  In Great Britain, the dangerous immigration has come mostly from Pakistan and Bangladesh, Islamic successors to the British rule over India; Hindu immigrants present no special problem.  In Southern Europe, the Low Countries, and most of Scandinavia, much of the immigration has been from Somalia and North Africa.  France has experienced massive immigration from North Africa and other African French-speaking former colonies. 

In many of these nations now, these immigrant communities have formed enclaves that the native inhabitants can no longer enter safely; even the police have great difficulty controlling law and order in these enclaves.  Examples exist in cities like Birmingham, Amsterdam, Malmo (Sweden), Paris and Marseille.  Germany seems slightly better off, with immigrants from Turkey making some effort to become good Germans.  Of course, the aim of many in these enclaves is to take over the host country -- using available democratic means -- and institute Sharia (Islamic law). 

It is clear that these immigrants are taking advantage of the democratic nature of the host nations and their willingness to grant asylum status and lavish economic subsidies to any who declare themselves as refugees.  A prime example is Sweden, where multi-culturalism runs wild and is supported by the government-subsidized and beholden media.  So far, no real revolt yet -- except for some grumbling from the indigenous population (whom the compliant media denounce as “racists.”)

Least affected have been the Slavic nations, which were formerly under Soviet domination.  Perhaps because of their delayed economic development, they have not been as attractive a destination for immigrants.  Ironically, these East-Europeans may yet save Western civilization.

The United States faces a rather special situation.  There is much immigration, mostly illegal, from south of the border. But these Latino immigrants are not Islamic; they share similar cultural values with native-born Americans -- and most are making an effort to adapt to the prevailing culture.  The main danger is one of national security.  With porous borders, potential terrorists can easily slip into the United States and create mayhem. 

A peculiar problem exists in Israel, which has experienced illegal Islamic (!) immigration, mainly from Sudan and Eritrea.  We are told that some southern suburbs of Tel Aviv now resemble a Third-World nation.  Efforts are underway to deport these illegal immigrants; but standing in the way is Israel’s Supreme Court, a group of unelected liberal lawyers, who personally oppose the Parliament-passed law of deportation -- certainly an anomalous situation by US standards.

Russia has experienced problems of its own, mainly from Islamic provinces in the Caucasus.  The suppression of the Chechen revolt has caused a violent reaction, leading to major terror acts, even in Moscow.

Exacerbating the Islamic “conquest“ of Western Europe is the fact that the indigenous people -- from Swedes to Spaniards  -- are not reproducing themselves.  Whatever the cause may be, the number of children per family is well below the replacement level of 2.11; in some countries it is as low as 1.30.  The statistics are frightening -- as seen in records of births, welfare rolls, and school attendance.  By mid-century, parts of Europe will have a Moslem majority -- and even before then it will be too late to rectify the situation.

What of the future?  

With ongoing internal battles within Islamic groups, it is not easy to predict the future.  In Syria, some 200,000 have been killed and millions have been turned into refugees.  The rise of the “Islamic State” in the last few months promises a brutal suppression of any who hold even a slightly different Islamic view.  Their announced goal is to set up a theocratic Caliphate in any lands that have ever been under Islamic rule -- including most of the Balkans, Andalus-Spain, and of course Israel.

At the battle of Tours in 732, Charles Martell stopped the advance into France of Moslem armies from the Iberian peninsula.  In 1571, in the great naval battle of Lepanto, off Greece, a Spanish-Italian fleet defeated the Turks.  In their farthest advance into Central Europe, a Turkish army besieged Vienna in 1683.  Christian forces, under the command of King John Sobieski of Poland, defeated the invaders decisively and saved Western civilization.

Americans have twice saved Europe in the 20^th century and may soon be forced to defend Europe again against a new threat.  The first assault on Western European civilization came from Nazi Germany and its allies; it took a bloody World-War-II (1939-1945) to defeat them.  Certainly, without US intervention, Western Europe, and even Britain, might now be part of a German-ruled dictatorship, a sort of involuntary European Union.  It is doubtful also whether the Soviet Union could have withstood Hitler’s onslaught without the active material assistance of the United States. 

The second threat to Europe came from the post-1945 Soviet Union; it was dominated by the specter of ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons.  The “Warsaw Pact” encompassed even a large part of Germany.  This “Cold-War” threat was neutralized thanks to the steadfastness of the United States -- but also by the internal economic problems brought about by the planned economy of the Soviet empire. 

The new threat of course is Islamo-Fascism and its aim to introduce Sharia -- in at least those parts of Europe that had been Muslim lands in the past, but aiming really at all of Europe -- and eventually the rest of the world.  This new threat uses a method of warfare that is different from the past and more insidious.  Terrorism has come into its own, partly based on large Islamic populations in Western Europe. 

Coupled with this external threat is the internal one from Islamic fanatics, many of them born in Europe -- and even from converts.  We have seen this happen in Spain, and more recently in Britain.  Their methods have been crude and their weapons have been primitive; but with nuclear proliferation and with the possibility of chemical and biological warfare, these threats have to be taken very seriously. 

Fighting these threats takes resources for surveillance, intelligence, sundry military expenditures, and weapons, both offensive and defensive.  Resilience requires above all a strong economy.  And one cannot have a strong economy without adequate energy resources – which gets us back to the issue of climate fears. 

The problem now is that while the threat of terrorism is growing, so is the suicidal drive to limit the use of energy and thereby also economic growth.  This internal threat is particularly strong in Europe and has been called, quite properly, eco-Bolshevism.  It would have all the earmarks of the failed Soviet system, with government involvement in every facet of the economy and with energy restrictions reducing economic growth. 

There is no question that the policies being discussed now in Europe and in the United States would be extremely costly, would force industrial cutbacks and of course massive job losses.  All of these exacerbate social tension in nations that have a large number of immigrants, who traditionally have the highest unemployment levels. 

Will the US step up again and save Europe?  Doubtful

One may ask: Is there any way to stop this steamroller?  There’s probably little hope that such an initiative can come from Europe; it may have to come from the United States.  Somehow we would have to convince European leaders that their policies, based on global-warming fears, are mistaken.  That job may prove to be very difficult -- unless there is a drastic change in current US policy.  But it is something that has to be done if we want Europe to survive economically, as an ally against the threat of Islamo-Fascism. 

I don’t believe that the US is prepared to save Europe; just listen to our Secretary of State:  Speaking in Boston on Oct 9,  John Kerry pronounced that climate change, if left unaddressed, will result in the end of times: “Life as you know it on Earth ends,” Kerry said.  Last February, Kerry claimed that climate change was the world’s “most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.”  Not nuclear bombs in the hands of the terrorist-sponsoring regime of Iran -- or in the hands of ISIS or al Qaeda; not Ebola or some fearsome epidemic of a lethal disease.  According to Kerry, climate change is the real number-one national-security threat.

US media, academia, and other opinion-makers are chiming in.  In her latest work of science-fiction, Harvard’s Naomi Oreskes, co-author of the mendacious Merchants of Doubt, imagines a future world devastated by climate change.  She generously gives the West another 80 years -- well beyond her own life span, of course.  But she totally ignores the dangers of rising Islamo-Fascism and of demography.  Just listen:

The year is 2393, and the world is almost unrecognizable. Clear warnings of climate catastrophe went ignored for decades, leading to soaring temperatures, rising sea levels, widespread drought and -- finally -- the disaster now known as the Great Collapse of 2093, when the disintegration of the West Antarctica Ice Sheet led to mass migration and a complete reshuffling of the global order. Writing from the Second People's Republic of China on the 300th anniversary of the Great Collapse, a senior scholar presents a gripping and deeply disturbing account of how the children of the Enlightenment -- the political and economic elites of the so-called advanced industrial societies -- failed to act, and so brought about the collapse of Western civilization. 

So don’t look to the US to come to the rescue of a doomed Western Europe.  It is unlikely that our children or grandchildren will be fortunate enough to experience the charms of great cities like London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Rome – or what’s left of them.


S. Fred Singer is professor emeritus at the University of Virginia and director of the Science & Environmental Policy Project.  His specialty is atmospheric and space physics.  An expert in remote sensing and satellites, he served as the founding director of the US Weather Satellite Service and, more recently, as vice chair of the US National Advisory Committee on Oceans & Atmosphere.  He is a senior fellow of the Heartland Institute and the Independent Institute.  He co-authored the NY Times best-seller Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 years.  In 2007, he founded and has since chaired the NIPCC (Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change), which has released several scientific reports [See www.NIPCCreport.org].    For recent writings, see http://www.americanthinker.com/s_fred_singer/ and also Google Scholar

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/11/a_suicidal_collapse_of_western_civilization.html

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

The Return of the Malevolent Jew: the Academic Nazification of Israel - Richard L. Cravatts

by Richard L. Cravatts

“What if the Jews themselves were Nazis?,” mused French philosopher, Vladimir Jankélévitch in 1986. “That would be great. We would no longer have to feel sorry for them; they would have deserved what they got.”

The recasting of Israelis, and, by extension, Jews as Nazis has, in fact, taken place, just as Jankélévitch envisioned. This summer’s Israeli incursion, Operation Protective Edge, provided anti-Semites and loathers of the Jewish state with resurgent justifications for assigning the epithet of Nazi on the Jews yet another time, together with oft-heard accusations of “crimes against humanity, “massacres,” genocide,” and, according to recent comments by Turkey’s prime minister Tayyip Erdoğan, in their treatment of the Palestinians, Israel has demonstrated that “. . . their barbarism has surpassed even Hitler’s.”

The Nazification of Israelis -- and by extension, Jews -- is both breathtaking in its moral inversion and cruel in the way it makes the actual victims of the Third Reich’s horrors a modern-day reincarnation of that same barbarity. It is, in the words of Boston University’s Richard Landes, “moral sadism,” a salient example of Holocaust inversion that is at once ahistorical, disingenuous, and grotesque in its moral and factual inaccuracy.

In reflecting on the current trend, he perceived in the burgeoning of anti-Israelism around the world, Canadian Member of Parliament Irwin Cotler once observed that conventional strains of anti-Semitism had been masked, so that those who directed enmity towards Jews were now able to transfer that opprobrium to the Jew of nations, Israel. How had they effected that? According to Cotler, they did so by redefining Israel as the most glaring example of those human predations, what he called “the embodiment of all evil” of the Twentieth Century: apartheid and Nazism. He defined the process of grafting this opprobrium on Israel as “ideological anti-Semitism,” one which “involves the characterization of Israel not only as an apartheid state -- and one that must be dismantled as part of the struggle against racism -- but as a Nazi one.”

Most important for the anti-Israel cause, Cotler contended, once Israel had been tarred with the libels of racism and Nazism, the Jewish state had been made an international outlaw, a pariah, losing its moral right to even exist -- exactly, of course, what its foes have consistently sought. “These very labels of Zionism and Israel as ‘racist, apartheid and Nazi’ supply the criminal indictment,” said Cotler. “No further debate is required. The conviction that this triple racism warrants the dismantling of Israel as a moral obligation has been secured. For who would deny that a ‘racist, apartheid, Nazi’ state should not have any right to exist today?”

What is more troubling is that the characterization of the Israeli as Nazi is a trope now promulgated by Western elites and so-called intellectuals, including a broad contingent of academics who are complicit in, and in fact intellectual enablers of, the campaign to defame Israel by Nazifying its people and accusing Jews again as being the world’s moral and existential enemies as demonstrated by their oppression and brutality toward the long-suffering Palestinians. Thus, campus anti-Israel hate-fests sponsored by radical student groups have such repellant names as “Holocaust in the Holy Land,” “Israel: The Politics of Genocide,” or “Israel: The Fourth Reich,” creating a clear, though mendacious, linkage between Nazism and Zionism. 

One of the early academic voices to have assigned the Nazi epithet to Israel was heard in a November 2000 speech by Francis A. Boyle, a law professor at the University of Illinois and one of the principal promoters of the global Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. In that speech, Boyle made the exact linkage to which Cotler alluded, conflating Israel’s alleged racism with apartheid-like behavior and suggesting, even more ominously, that the ongoing “genocide” against the Palestinians had parallels with the Nazi’s own heinous offenses. “The paradigmatic example of a crime against humanity is what Hitler and the Nazis did to the Jewish People,” Boyle said. “This is where the concept of crime against humanity was formulated and came from. And this is what the U.N. Human Rights Commission is now saying that Israel is doing to the Palestinian People. A crime against humanity.”

That same trope is repeated and reinforced by other academics, such as Richard Falk, professor emeritus of International Law and Policy at Princeton University and the UN’s former, preposterously-titled “Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967,” who wondered aloud if it was “an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity?” on the part of Israel, and then quickly answered his own question by saying, “I think not.”

In the morally-defective pantheon of the academic defamers of Israel, perhaps no single individual has emerged as the paradigmatic libeler, the most vitriolic and widely-followed character in an inglorious retinue as Norman Finkelstein, late of DePaul University. Finkelstein has loudly and notoriously pronounced his extreme views on the Middle East, not to mention his loathing of what he has called the Holocaust “industry,” something he has called an “outright extortion racket;” in fact, he blames Jews themselves for anti-Semitism.

Hamas, designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department, has pure political intentions and passively yearns for truces and safe borders, according to Mr. Finkelstein, while the invidious state of Israel, fearing moderate Arab foes who will force it into peace, is obdurate, conniving, and bellicose. In fact, Finkelstein suggested, Israel is collectively going mad, while everyone else in the rational world yearns for Middle Eastern peace: “I think Israel, as a number of commentators pointed out, is becoming an insane state. . . In the first week of the massacres, there were reports in the Israeli press that Israel did not want to put all its ground forces in Gaza because it was preparing attacks on Iran. Then there were reports it was planning attacks on Lebanon. It is a lunatic state.”

If Finkelstein lives in an academic netherworld of political fantasies, conspiracies, and intellectually-imbecilic distortions of history and fact, his spiritual mentor, MIT’s professor emeritus of linguistics Noam Chomsky, has inhabited a similar ideological sphere, but has become an even more widely-known, eagerly-followed creature of the Israel-hating, America-hating Left.

While he is happy to, and regularly does, ignore the murder of Jews by Palestinians, Chomsky never hesitates to point to the perfidy of Israel, and its barbarous assault on their Arab neighbors who, in his socialist fantasies, wish for nothing more than to live in peace. He draws the perverse parallel between Israelis and Nazis so frequently in his writings that, to paraphrase the wry Professor Edward Alexander, he would be rendered nearly speechless if he was unable to use the epithet of Nazi against Israel in every sentence he utters. The rogue state of “Israel has tried killing, beating, gassing, mass arrests, deportation, destruction of houses, curfews and other forms of harsh collective punishment,” Chomsky wrote, and yet, even in the face of this hideous, Nazi-like behavior by Israel, “nothing has succeeded in enforcing obedience or eliciting a violent response.”

In January of 2009, a tenured sociology professor, William I. Robinson, of the University of California, Santa Barbara, sent an odious email to the 80 students in his “Sociology 130SG: The Sociology of Globalization” course with the explicit message that Israelis are the new Nazis.  Under the heading “Parallel images of Nazis and Israelis,” the email displayed a photo-collage of 42 side-by-side, grisly photographs meant to suggest an historical equivalence between Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in its occupation of Gaza and the Third Reich’s subjugation of the Warsaw Ghetto and its treatment of Jews during the Holocaust. Robinson sent the email without supplying any context for it, nor did it seemingly have any specific relevance to or connection with the course’s content.

At Columbia University’s department of Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Culture (MEALAC), an academic division with a long history of anti-Israel, anti-American bias and politicized scholarship, Joseph Massad, an associate professor of modern Arab politics, regularly espouses his loathing of Israel in fringe anti-Semitic publications like Counterpunch and The Electronic Intifada, or in the Arab press, and never misses an opportunity to denigrate the Jewish state as a racist, colonial enterprise, a moral stain on the world without any semblance of legitimacy. In his perfervid imagination, Israelis have become the new Nazis and the Palestinians the Jews. “As Palestinians are murdered and injured in the thousands,” he wrote after Operation Cast Lead in January of 2009 when Israel was defending itself against some 6000 rockets attacks from Gaza, “world powers are cheering on . . . and it even happened during World War II as the Nazi genocide was proceeding.” Perversely likening the barbaric aggression of Hamas from within Gaza to the efforts of Warsaw Jews to repel imminent extermination by the Nazis, Massad obscenely suggested that “The Gaza Ghetto Uprising will mark both the latest chapter in Palestinian resistance to colonialism and the latest Israeli colonial brutality in a region whose peoples will never accept the legitimacy of a racist European colonial settlement in their midst.”

It is Israel's actions alone -- that and the support of the United States -- that are the root cause of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and the Jewish state’s behavior is murderous, unethical, and brutal, according to University of Wisconsin-Madison's Jennifer Loewenstein, Associate Director of the Middle East Studies Program. Israel, she wrote, “speaks with a viper’s tongue over the multiple amputee of Palestine whose head shall soon be severed from its body in the name of justice, peace and security,” and “Israel has made its view known again and again in the strongest possible language, the language of military might, of threats, intimidation, harassment, defamation and degradation.”

This summer, while the Gaza incursion was raging, Dr. Julio Pino, associate professor of history at Kent State University, published a vitriolic open letter in which he chastised the “academic friends of Israel” who have “chosen to openly work for and brag about academic collaboration with a regime that is the spiritual heir to Nazism . . . I curse you more than the Israelis,” he told his academic colleagues, “for while The Chosen drain the blood of innocents without apologies you hide behind the mask of academic objectivity, nobility of research and the reward of teaching to foreign youth . . . Lest you think this is a personal attack I swear it applies equally to all who engage in collaboration with fascism, and we both know the fate of collaborators. In the same manner, only with more zeal, than you have sworn to the Jewish State I pledge to you, and every friend and stooge of Zionism.”

Occasionally, when an academic makes public his loathing of the Jewish state, and continues to demonize and libel Israel beyond the bounds of what would be considered acceptable scholarly discourse, there are consequences -- though rarely. This summer, for instance, Steven Salaita, author of Israel’s Dead Soul and perennial critic of Zionism, had an employment offer from the University of Illinois withdrawn once the school’s president was made aware of some of Salaita’s virulent Twitter posts about Israel. During the widely-criticized Gaza incursion, Salaita tweeted that “At this point, if Netanyahu appeared on TV with a necklace made from the teeth of Palestinian children, would anybody be surprised?” He also blamed anti-Semitism on Jews themselves, as many anti-Semites do, by asserting that Israel’s behavior causes the hatred of Jews, that “By eagerly conflating Jewishness and Israel, Zionists are partly responsible when people say antisemitic shit in response to Israeli terror.”  

As grotesque and distorted as these calumnies against Israel are, as perverse and inaccurate the comparisons drawn between Nazism and Zionism and between Nazis and Israelis are, and as wildly hateful these libels are to the point of being, as defined by the State Department’s own working definition, anti-Semitic in nature -- the branding of Israel as the Nazi of nations by these academics serves to reinforce, and give credibility to, similar hatreds and biases expressed outside the university walls.

This is a lethal narrative because when it is believed the world naturally asks itself, as Cotler warned: if Israel is a Nazi-like, apartheid regime, standing in opposition to everything for which the civilized community of nations stands, who cannot hold Israel accountable and judge it harshly for its transgressions? That against all historical evidence and the force of reason the calumny against Israel that it is a murderous, sadistic, and genocidal regime has been successfully promoted and continues to gain traction indicates that Israel’s academic defamers have been successful in inverting history as part of the modern-day incarnation of the world’s oldest hatred.


Richard L. Cravatts, Ph.D., is the president of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and the author of Genocidal Liberalism: The University’s Jihad Against Israel & Jews.

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/11/the_return_of_the_malevolent_jew_the_academic_nazification_of_israel.html

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

Safeguard the Druze's Integration - Dan Margalit

by Dan Margalit

The Muslim-Druze brawl in Abu Snan on Saturday was the worst in its history. In the 800 years since Sheikh Bazz founded the village, not once has this mixed town (which also has a handful of Christians) seen such a violent clash. The village name means "he with the teeth" -- because Bazz had a double-edge sword. But this name has always been just a name. Until Saturday. 

The religious strife in the village has been on the uptick in recent years, primarily because of shifting demographics. The Muslim population has grown steadily, threatening the delicate balance between the two predominant groups in the village. The troubled dynamics resulted in a contested municipal election. Nihad Mishleb, a Druze, ultimately prevailed as mayor, to the dismay of many Muslims. 

The last straw had a very emotional component to it, but not much else. Last week, Muslim students started wearing keffiyehs (traditional Muslim headdresses) in solidarity with the teen that was shot by police in Kafr Kanna‎. The Druze students protested, and demanded that the keffiyehs be taken off. 

Such tension would have been easily defused had it not been a microcosm of a much larger feud over the desired degree of integration in Israeli society. 

The Druze, who have justifiably taken the government to task over their share of unfulfilled promises, have taken an active role in Israel society and have risen to senior positions in its defense establishment. This includes Major General (ret.) Yusef Mishleb, who grew up in Abu Snan. 

Muslims want to sever the Druze-Israeli ties, to unravel the much-touted blood bond they view with scorn. 

Muslims have also harassed a Christian priest who has called on Arab Christians to enlist in the Israel Defense Forces and denounced Israel's decision to recognize Israeli-Aramean as a distinct ethnic group that dates back to the Bible and speaks its own unique language. 

The Israel Police must boost its presence in Abu Snan to make sure bloody sights on Saturday -- stabbings, hit-and-run attacks and grenade throwing -- do not recur. All Israeli citizens are entitled to a sense of security, regardless of their ethnicity, religious affiliation and gender. But Israel must make it clear that any group that seeks greater integration in Israeli society will be protected. 

We must address this situation lest things become much worse.

Dan Margalit

Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=10591

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"Sheikh Google's" Radical Islam - Irfan Al-Alawi

by Irfan Al-Alawi

"'Sheikh Google' is the real threat to young Muslims." — Hifsa Haroon-Iqbal, British Muslim mother, Daily Telegraph.
These mild legal outcomes indicate that U.S. officials do not appreciate how inflammatory the materials are.

As informed Muslims know, present-day radical Islamists have proven adept at using the internet – far more than have their moderate and Western opponents. "Internet savvy" jihadism appears as evidence of the youthful constituency of the extremists. They have grown up with the internet, video games, and other online diversions. When fanatical ideology takes hold of them, the internet is one of the obvious places for the process to begin.

In an important 2003 article in The Weekly Standard, entitled "The Islamic Terrorism Club," Stephen Schwartz, wrote about some of the more obnoxious pro-jihad Arabic-language websites then operating from Saudi Arabia and Iraq. The jihad-net expanded considerably in the decade that followed.

Even before September 11, 2001, however, many Muslims who opposed the fundamentalists were focusing on Islamist websites in English, as a means to anticipate threats from radicals.

With Britain targeted for recruitment to the self-proclaimed "Islamic State" [IS] and the IS's brutal campaign in Syria and Iraq, these sites, which remain operating, are still important and accessible to both the Muslim and non-Muslim public. They are exceptionally educational about the aims and methods of Islamist demagogues.

On September 25, the London Daily Telegraph reported on the pervasive influence of radical Islam on the internet. The article quoted Hifsa Haroon-Iqbal, a British Muslim mother, who said, "the internet is the real problem when it comes to young people being radicalised: 'The biggest issue right now is the internet – it's Sheikh Google.'" The Telegraph went with the quote in its headline: "Forget radicalisation in mosques – 'Sheikh Google' is the real threat to young Muslims."

(Image source: muslimvillage.com)

A standard source for monitoring jihadist agitation is Islamic Awakening. It has an extensive archive worth studying, and is eclectic in its postings, which are anti-radical as well as radical. On October 18, 2014, for instance, its headings under "Global Affairs" included: "America is One Sick Place," a thread begun in 2009, and "Kurdish Murtads [Apostates from Islam] Are Going on a Rampage in Turkey," posted a few days earlier. The latter is an explicit pro-ISIS comment that accuses Kurds of defending themselves against charges of apostasy, or leaving Islam, because their ranks include secularist "leftists."

Another well of Islamist venom is Sunni Forum. On October 18, 2014, its lead item under "Current Affairs," dating from July 23, 2006, was a protest in favor of Guantánamo detainees, entitled, "I Have Tried to Kill Myself Twice…" The second, first posted on July 21, 2006, is a petition defending Syed Talha Ahsan, a British-born jihadist author who was extradited from the UK to the U.S. Ahsan was tried by the American authorities and, with another defendant and UK citizen, Babar Ahmed, pled guilty to charges of promoting the Taliban when it protected Al-Qaida, and to assisting other violent groups, via the internet.

Sunni Forum appears not to have kept "current" on its "affairs" on the Ahsan-Ahmed case. In July 2014, based on plea bargains by the British pair, Ahsan's U.S. sentence was reduced to time already served. He was to be deported back to the UK. Ahmed's sentence of 12 years was almost over, including his imprisonment in Britain, before he was extradited to America in 2012. Ahmed was expected to be returned to Britain to serve out the brief remainder of his prison term. Further developments are undisclosed.

These mild legal outcomes indicate that U.S. judicial officials do not appreciate how inflammatory the materials produced by Ahsan and Ahmed are, but any Muslim who reads them would instantly recognize propaganda for Al-Qaida and its ultra-Wahhabi allies.

Other, similar, internet sites include: Yanabi.com, the title of which means, in Arabic, "O Prophet," referring to Muhammad. A review on October 18 showed threads, including "Why Does Allah Threaten to Punish the Unbelievers?" and the weird claim that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is ruled by a "Jewish government" because it has installed closed-circuit television in Mecca and Medina. Allowing photography would ostensibly nullify the sacred character of the hajj pilgrimages because of the alleged Islamic prohibition on depiction of humans. Such fantasies are old and absurd. Saudi Arabia has done much more damage to the hajj by heedless urban expansion in Mecca and Medina than by placing cameras; taking photographs is offensive only to the most primitive Wahhabi zealots.

Finally, no review of radical Islamist websites in English would be complete without consulting Salafi Talk, a site promoting Wahhabi doctrine. "Salafi," referring to the original three generations of Muslims living with, and immediately after, Muhammad, has been abused as a cover term for "Wahhabi." Wahhabis who call themselves "Salafi" do not follow the examples of the early Muslims, but claim the term "Salafi" as an indicator of rigidity against the passage of centuries, and because they know that admitting they are Wahhabis alienates many Muslims.

Viewed on October 18, SalafiTalk included materials glorifying the retrograde views of Abdullah Bin Baz, (1910-1999), the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia from 1993 to 1999. After the terrorist seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979 by the ultra-Wahhabi Juhayman Al-Otaibi, Bin Baz was known as Al-Otaibi's mentor, and, following the attack on the Grand Mosque, as the theological protector of radical ideology in the kingdom. Bin Baz endorsed the cultural devastation of Mecca and Medina, and forbade conservation of Islamic heritage – such as monuments associated with Muhammad and his family and companions – as a supposed temptation to polytheism (shirk). He additionally condemned traditional spiritual observances by hajj pilgrims. These include prayer at the cave of Hira, where Muhammad received his first revelations, as "polytheism," equating the prophet with Allah, purportedly, as an object of worship.

SalafiTalk included, when accessed recently, publicity for one of Bin Baz's most famous Wahhabi disciples, Sayyid Bin Ali Bin Wahf Al-Qahtani, author of Hisnul Muslim (Fortress of the Muslim), a Wahhabi prayer book translated into many languages, including English, and circulated widely.

Fortress of the Muslim is also sold as a printed volume in mosques. Thus, the poison of radical ideology circulates from the web portal back to the mosque. At present, however, extremist websites are a most significant and dangerous portal for the radicalization of young Muslims.



Irfan Al-Alawi

Source: http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4886/sheikh-google

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

The Jewish Voices on Campus - Aaron Goldenberg

by Aaron Goldenberg

It used to be that when an American complained about antisemitism, he might be accused of hypersensitivity. Today, in the land of the free, antisemitism is alive and kicking, especially on college campuses, where Muslim influence is sometimes very strong.

Aaron Goldenberg

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAyFlByb64M

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

"Zionist" Olive Trees in Turkey - Burak Bekdil

by Burak Bekdil

"Islamic state in Palestine in place of Israel and the Palestinian territories, and the obliteration or dissolution of Israel." — Hamas Charter.
Turkey's supreme court declared the olive grove to be "under state protection," after it was totally destroyed.
Some Turks are prepared to hate even olive trees because "they are Jewish."

Islamists often come in two flavors: Those who would decapitate an infidel, take out his heart and eat it in front of cameras, like the jihadists in Syria; and those who have the same sentiments and goals but pursue smarter means to Islamize the whole universe through "de jure" methods, including the ballot box.

Turkey's leaders fall into the second category, but some Turks these days feature a third flavor: Non-Violent Idiocy.

Hamas's infamous charter, proclaimed in 1988, is a must-read for self-declared Western intellectuals who tend to "angelize" the terrorist group in order, often, to reinforce their own intellectual identities. The charter (or the Covenant) calls for the eventual creation of an "Islamic state in Palestine in place of Israel and the Palestinian territories, and the obliteration or dissolution of Israel."

It goes on by outlining Hamas's mission as: "The only way to engage in this struggle between the truth and falsehood is through Islam and by means of Jihad until victory or martyrdom." Here, obviously, "victory is killing the last Jew on earth; and martyrdom is getting killed by Jews [or Muslims of rival sects]."

In one particularly tragicomic passage, the charter defines "our struggle against the Jews" as "very great and very serious" It goes on to say: "The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews [and kill them]; until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees which will cry: O Muslims! There is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him."

Apparently, some people take Hamas's prophecy literally. Last May, Muhammad al-Zoghbi, an Egyptian cleric, said in a television interview that "not a single Jew will remain on the face of this earth." When asked by his interviewer if the section about speaking trees and stones was an allegorical expression, al-Zoghbi replied: "Whoever says this is an allegory is wrong. The trees will actually talk. And the walls as well."

Apparently, some Turks have brought a totally unexpected dimension into the Islamic debate over the trees that will point to the last living Jews on earth. Despite a dubious source, a campaign ad circulating popularly in Turkish social media calls for a boycott against olive trees. Why? Read the campaign text:

"Shortly before the Day of Judgment, Muslims and Jews will fight a war. Eventually, Muslims will defeat the Jews. The Jews will hide behind the trees but the trees will betray them to the Muslims. But the olive trees will not. Because the olive tree is a Jewish tree. Today Israel encourages olive plantations in many countries. Because Jews know that olive trees will protect them. Israel has tried to prevent the uprooting of olive trees in Turkey. But our government, despite a court order that banned the uprooting, went ahead and foiled Israel's plans. In Turkey all olive trees should be uprooted within the next three years. That way we'll give a big blow to Israel. Our nation should join the campaign and do its part by not consuming olives."

That is the text. It invites everyone to join the campaign by visiting the hashtag "#zeytinalmiyoruz (We are not buying olives)." In conspiratorial thinking, the campaign may be the work of anti-Islamists who are trying to ridicule the Islamists. Regardless of whoever is behind the campaign, some pro-government Turks have already joined it, with tweets that demonize olives and olive trees.

Can countries go insane? If, in the Islamic thinking, Muslims will defeat Jews in the war before the Day of Judgment, why fight olive trees now? Why are olive trees Zionist trees and other trees are not? Will Muslims lose the war if olive trees do not betray the hiding Jews? If so, why is there a prophecy that says Muslims will win the war? Such questions of reason can be endlessly multiplied only to remain unanswered in a country where reason is being systematically defeated by Islamist bigotry.

That is what goes on in the virtual world. But in the real world, in the early hours of Nov. 7, six thousand olive trees that were 85 to 100 years old were cut down in Yırca, a village in western Turkey, despite 52 days of resistance by olive growers. The Turkish government had decided to expropriate the land and give it to a government-friendly business conglomerate, the Kolin Group, which would build an electricity-generation plant there. The villagers appealed to the Council of State for a reversal of the cabinet decree and had been waiting since then.

The uprooted olive trees of Yırca, Turkey, on November 7, 2014. (Image source: Greenpeace Turkey)

On Nov. 7, Kolin's army of private security guards did not wait for the court verdict. They violently dispersed the villagers guarding the fields, and opened the way for the bulldozers that uprooted the 6000 olive trees. Ten hours later, the supreme court ruled the expropriation and the construction of the power plant illegal. It also declared the olive grove to be "under state protection," after it was totally destroyed. On Nov. 11, Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc said: "[the Turkish soil] is full of olive trees. But Turkey needs energy too."

There are allegations that the court ruling had been leaked to the Kolin Group, prompting it to order an immediate uprooting of the trees before the verdict was announced. Security guards confessed that they were ordered to clear the grove of villagers in return for pay rises and other benefits. Apparently, Kolin did not destroy an otherwise fertile olive grove in agreement with the "olive-trees-are-Jewish" campaign. The company must have behaved from more corporate motives, no matter how unethical and illegal.

It just does not change the fact that some Turks are prepared to hate even olive trees because "they are Jewish."


Burak Bekdil

Source: http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4880/zionist-olive-trees-turkey

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

Iran: ‘The Great Satan’ Still Our ‘Number One Enemy’ - Majid Rafizadeh

by Majid Rafizadeh


The deadline for a final and comprehensive nuclear deal between the Iranian leaders and the six world powers (the P5+1: China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) is approaching in less than two weeks on November 24^th .

It seems that the White House is also investing in the notion that after a final nuclear deal is struck between Tehran and the P5+1, and after economic sanctions against the Islamic Republic are removed, Iranian leaders will alter their foreign policies and regional hegemonic ambitions. This argument is anchored in unrealistic and naïve expectations. If we closely analyze the Islamic Republic’s political and power structures, as well as its major sources of legitimacy, it becomes evident that a major and fundamental change in Iranian leaders’ political calculations is completely unlikely.

Domestically speaking, for over thirty years, by blaming and pointing fingers to the United States and Israel for almost every social and political challenge that the Islamic Republic encounters, the government has been capable of deflecting attention from the high unemployment rate among the youth, high inflation, corruption, nepotism, social injustice, lack of freedoms (speech, press, assembly, etc.), and lack of equal opportunity. The fundamental and underlying tenets of the Islamic Republic are anchored in opposing the United States and Israel and their foreign policies in the Middle East.

Secondly, from the Iranian leaders’ perspective, in order to be capable of legally oppressing and cracking down on domestic opposition, the regime must maintain an anti-American posture. 

Normally, any individual that criticizes the structure and legitimacy of the Iranian government, ruling clerics and the Supreme Leader, is characterized as a US agent, conspirator and traitor. These charges allow the government to use its judiciary system to oppress opposition and maintain its power.

Recently, in the midst of the international tensions and negotiations regarding Iran’s contentious nuclear program, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) released a statement to Iran’s semi-official Fars News Agency pointing out that the United States, “the Great Satan,” remains the Islamic Republic’s “number one enemy.” The IRGC’s statement read, “The U.S. is still the great Satan and the number one enemy of the (Islamic) revolution and the Islamic Republic and the Iranian nation.”

Also recently, thousands of pro-government Iranians gathered around the US embassy to mark the 35^th anniversary of the capture of the U.S. embassy and fifty-two Americans in Tehran by militant students. Demonstrators chanted  “Death to America,” “ Death to the Great Satan,” “Death to the United Kingdom” and “Death to Israel.”

Even if a comprehensive nuclear deal is reached between the Islamic Republic and the six world powers by November 24th, Iranian leaders’ position towards the United States, Western allies and Israel will not be altered for the following ideological reasons.

Having the largest Shiite population in the region, the Islamic Republic views itself as the major epicenter of Shiite revivalism across the region. Iran’s support for its proxies, Shiite militant political groups in the region (such Hezbollah in Lebanon, Liwa al-Imam al-Husayn in Syria, Asaib Ahl al-Haqq in Iraq, etc.), will remain to define Tehran’s foreign policy. Establishing itself as the front runner and leader of Shiism has been at the fundamental core of Iran’s foreign policy and regional hegemonic ambitions since 1979. This foreign policy objective will continue to define the Islamic Republic’s identity as long as the Ayatollahs are in power.

In addition, Iranian leaders have been investing in the Syrian regime, economically and politically, for over three decades. It is totally unrealistic to argue that if a final nuclear deal is sealed and if economic sanctions against the Islamic Republic are removed, Tehran will alter its unrelenting military, financial, advisory, and intelligence support to the Alawite-based government of al-Assad.

Without a doubt, some minor changes might occur if a final nuclear is struck. For example, Iran would be more incorporated in international organizations, particularly economically, and it would gradually open up its market to foreign and Western investors. It follows that the Islamic Republic will have to embed some international financial standards into its economic system. Nevertheless, the office of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and IRGC will remain the key economic generators with a monopoly over major industries and will be reluctant to allow equal opportunity and redistribution of wealth to the lower classes.

Furthermore, being incorporated more into world economic systems does not necessarily indicate that more political freedom, as well as civil liberties, will be granted to ordinary Iranian citizens. Historical evidence reveals that economic prosperity for some states can result in implementation of robust policies to tighten control over the population and further centralize power. In other words, similar to other authoritarian governments, economic liberalization will not go hand in hand with political liberalizations in the Islamic Republic.


Majid Rafizadeh, an Iranian-American political scientist and scholar, is president of the International American Council and serves on the board of the Harvard International Review at Harvard University. Rafizadeh is also a former senior fellow at the Nonviolence International Organization based in Washington, DC and is a member of the Gulf project at Columbia University. He can be reached at rafizadeh@fas.harvard.edu. Follow Rafizadeh at @majidrafizadeh.

Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/majid-rafizadeh/iran-the-great-satan-still-our-number-one-enemy/

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

Free Speech v. Political Correctness - Abraham H. Miller

by Abraham H. Miller

The Free Speech Movement seems to have evolved into its opposite, a censorship by others or of oneself, disguised as political correctness.
Bazian is in the forefront of the movement to prevent Bill Maher from speaking on campus. Bazian himself however, seems to like being unrestrained when he wants to speak.
Apparently to Bazian, Jewish money promotes undue influence, but Saudi money has no Wahhabi fundamentalist strings attached. Maybe Bazian should ask whether there is something in Islam that causes so many of its adherents to cast non-Muslims as "the other."
The organized Muslim groups have not exactly embraced Freedom of Speech or Assembly as primary values.

Each year, the University of California hosts a lecture in honor of Mario Savio. On December 2, 1964, Mario Savio stood on the steps of Berkeley's Sproul Hall and launched into an unrehearsed speech, often considered one of the best 100 of the century. The speech would make him the voice of what became known as the Free Speech Movement.

Throughout Berkeley, the Free Speech Movement [FSM] represented a strong part of Berkeley's historic and cultural identity.

The FSM, however, seems to have evolved into its opposite, a censorship by others or of oneself, disguised as political correctness. It is an ideology that makes sensitivity to the feelings of the "previously excluded" trump basic rights.

The tension between what the FSM was and what it became has now come to a head in the most recent of Berkeley's conflicts over the role of free speech. The conflict arose from the invitation to television personality Bill Maher to give the address for this December's graduation.

Maher is no stranger to political controversy. Ironically, it is Maher's controversial positions that undoubtedly led to his invitation; the December 20^th commencement will also commemorate the 50^th anniversary of the FSM.

In early October, on his show, Real Time, Maher said that liberals support the rights of gays, lesbians, and women, but refuse to stand up for those rights when supporting them also means criticizing aspects of Islam.

In a heated exchange with the actor Ben Affleck, Maher said that the reason we do not hear from moderate Muslims is because they are afraid to speak up, and that Islam is the only religion that acts like the Mafia. (He did not qualify his remark.) Maher went on to say that radical Muslims are not just a group of outliers, and that according to a Pew Poll, about 90% of Muslims in Egypt believe that death is an appropriate punishment for apostasy.

Maher's "free speech" was apparently too much for the organized Muslim student groups at Berkeley. They launched a petition to get Maher's invitation rescinded. Although Maher was attacked for tarring all Muslims with the same brush, anyone who bothered to view the roughly ten-minute segment of the show would note the obvious: Maher went to great lengths to say that he was condemning ideas and only those people who held these ideas, not all Muslims. 

Apparently, no one has come forward to refute Maher's citation of the Pew poll, or remind these students that apostates such as human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali need round-the-clock protection from radical Muslims.

If, for example, 90% of Brazilians believed that anyone leaving the Christian faith should be punished by death, surely this view would prompt legitimate criticism of the theology that implanted those ideas. After all, are we Americans not constantly asked to look inward at the consequences for others of our own beliefs and behavior?

This, ironically, is the theme of Berkeley senior lecturer Hatem Bazian's course on Islamophobia. The course focuses on how Americans indiscriminately cast Muslims as "the other."

Bazian is in the forefront of the movement to prevent Maher from speaking on campus. Bazian himself, however, seems to like being unrestrained when he wants to speak. At a 2004 anti-war rally in San Francisco, he called for an American Intifada (violent uprising). At that event, Bazian said, "...we're sitting here and watching the world pass by, people being bombed, and it's about time that we have an Intifada in this country that change[s] fundamentally the political dynamics in here." He went on to promise, "They're gonna say, 'some Palestinian being too radical' — well, you haven't seen radicalism yet!"

UC-Berkeley Professor Hatem Bazian demands that Bill Maher be disinvited from speaking at his university. Above, Bazian addresses an anti-Israel rally on July 20, 2014, appearing in front of a man carrying a sign saying "We captured Israeli soldiers in Gaza". (Image source: YouTube video screenshot)

Bazian is the founder of the Students for Justice in Palestine, a group the Anti-Defamation League calls anti-Semitic. He lectures about undue Jewish influence at Berkeley by rattling off the names of buildings built by San Francisco's Jewish philanthropists. Yet, as investigative journalist Lee Kaplan notes, Bazian received a degree from a program heavily endowed with Saudi Arabian money. Apparently, to Bazian, Jewish money promotes undue influence, but Saudi money has no Wahhabi fundamentalist influence strings attached. Maybe, Bazian should ask whether there is something in Islam that causes so many of its adherents to cast non-Muslims as "the other."

The organized Muslim groups have not exactly embraced Freedom of Speech or Assembly as primary values. For more than a decade, Muslim student groups have used verbal and physical assaults to prevent pro-Israel demonstrations and to disrupt speakers throughout California's system of higher education.

On February 2011, Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren was shouted down at the University of California, Irvine [UCI]. A year later, UCI's Muslim Student Union invited the popular Imam Malik Ali, who blamed the Jews for the financial collapse, while praising the MSU for disrupting Oren's speech. To Jews in the audience, he said, you all are the new Nazis.

The venue of a lecture by the historian Daniel Pipes at Berkeley had to be changed at the last minute for security reasons. To enter the auditorium, audience members had to go through metal detectors and have their personal belongings searched. Despite the presence of police who surrounded the interior of the auditorium, a designated safe room had to be created to which Pipes could withdraw in the event of an attack.

A group of about fifty Muslim students sat together in the center of the auditorium and took turns disrupting the lecture. Police, repeatedly, had to eject hecklers, and when Muslim women had to be ejected, the group announced that it was prohibited for the police to eject them because men were not allowed to touch women. When the question and answer period began and Pipes's remarks could be openly challenged in the free marketplace of ideas, the Muslims marched out in unison.

Once outside, they set up a gauntlet through which everyone exiting the auditorium had to pass. For some inexplicable reason, the university police only permitted one door to be used for an exit, so that everyone had to walk through the Muslim gauntlet. The departing audience was verbally accosted and in some cases spat upon just because they attended Pipes's lecture and because they either were Jews or perceived to be Jewish sympathizers.

Yet Imam Malik Ali was able to utter the most offensive vitriol at the Jews in his audience in a public forum without any need for a safe room or the presence of police. That, of course, is precisely as it should be.

The distortion in our system is not from extending the First Amendment to a Malik Ali or a Hatem Bazian. The distortion is from failing to educate young people to extend the same courtesy to those with whom one -- in this instance, some Muslim organizations -- might disagree. No one forced them to listen. They were free not to attend the lecture.

Although the Berkeley students were pressured into withdrawing the invitation to Bill Maher, the university administration made an adult intervention. Maher is still invited.

Ironically, fifty years ago, there was a strange union of the political left and the Students for Goldwater, both seeking to dismantle the barricades that prevented the Constitution from entering the campus gate: the university's regulations then prohibited any type of political organizing to occur on campus. The First Amendment, as it pertained to any external political activity, did not extend beyond the campus gate; the FSM was created to tear down that restriction. To invite Bill Maher to help celebrate the 50^th anniversary of the FSM is altogether fitting. The students at Berkeley should be free to hear a dissident voice. That, after all, is why Mario Savio stood on the Sproul steps on December 2, 1964.


Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science and a contributor to the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity. He is the author of Fourteenth Street, A Chicago Story, a work of political fiction.

Source: http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4862/berkeley-free-speech

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

41 Wounded in Druze-Muslim Clashes in the Galilee - Cynthia Blank

by Cynthia Blank

Violent clashes Friday night after Muslim youths show solidarity with slain terrorist, while Druze stand with Israel.

Over 41 people were injured in violent clashes that erupted between Druze and Muslims Friday night in the Arab village of Abu Snan in the Western Galilee. 

The clashes appeared to be a result of ongoing tensions in Israel between security forces and Arabs in the week since police shot Hir Alhamdan, who lunged with a knife at a police car last Saturday. 

The event sparked massive protests, leading the Muslim Arab population all over Israel to demonstrate and riot. 

The Druze, however, while also ethnic Arabs, serve in the army and are more integrated into Israeli society, making them reluctant to engage in the protests, thus straining tensions in many mixed Muslim and Druze Arab communities, such as Abu Snan. 

Abu Snan has a population of 13,000 residents, with a Muslim majority of 7,000. Some 4,000 locals are Druze and the rest are Christian Arabs.

Both sides threw rocks at one another with Muslim and Druze homes both targeted. Gunshots were also fired in the air, causing shrapnel injuries. 

A large number of police force remain in the area Sunday serving as a barricade between Muslim and Druze residents. A police helicopter and forces throughout the Galilee region are serving as backup. 

It took the police hours of overnight efforts to finally subdue Friday night's violence, using tear gas and stun grenades to disperse the rioters. Concern of another flare-up remains. 

Reports revealed Saturday night that the roots of the incident began earlier in the week, when two Muslim students entered the Abu Snan high school wearing kaffiyehs to honor Alhamdan.

They were confronted by two Druze students who asked them to remove the scarves. "You have no right to wear that here," they were told. The Druze students then pulled out Stars of David necklaces from under their shirts - worn in solidarity with Druze Border Patrol officer Jedan Assad, who was killed in a terror attack in Jerusalem. 

The students began to fight, and the school day was suspended, with both sets of students dismissed early. The tension then began to spread across the community. 

On Friday local residents traded curses against Druze and Muslim women on Secret, an anonymous messaging application. In the evening, a Muslim man entered a Druze cafe, claimed another man was slandering his sister on social networks, and stabbed him. 

A massive brawl broke out. A Muslim attempted to run over Druze residents with his car before being pulled out and beaten. Eyewitnesses claim that a Druze man threw a fragmentation grenade into the crowd, wounding dozens. 

20 people remain hospitalized at the Galilee Medical Center in Nahariya, several in critical condition with head injuries. 

Druze MK Hamad Amar (Yisrael Beiteinu), one of the participants in attempts to calm the community, has said of the efforts: "Our job is not to know who started it, rather to bring back the peaceful situation before. We are continuing to deal with the issues and make every effort that violence does not blaze again. I hope there will be no reprisals from either side, because it does not sever Druze or Muslims."


Cynthia Blank

Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/187492#.VGi7hcl6h-g

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

Democracy Alliance Invites Warren and Biden, Not Hillary Clinton - Daniel Greenfield

by Daniel Greenfield


Obama’s money boys who helped shape the current disastrous progressive takeover of the government are sending a message. It’s not quite a horse’s head in the bed, but they would like an alternative candidate who isn’t Hillary Clinton.

Vice President Joe Biden will join Sen. Elizabeth Warren and other leading progressives in addressing a closed-door gathering of elite liberal donors — a roster of speakers that notably doesn’t include Hillary Clinton.
Last year’s meeting was a lovefest for Warren, whose speech fired up the crowd. This year’s program, reviewed by POLITICO, includes sessions on numerous progressive causes — including fighting climate change, reducing the role of money in politics and more rigorously regulating Wall Street — on which Warren is seen as more liberal than Clinton.

There’s nothing like billionaires getting together to rig the election to “reduce the role of money in politics”. The Democracy Alliance is a gang of powerful and corrupt individuals abusing the system for their own power and profit.

But interestingly enough they are sending the message that they are not currently reading to get behind the Hillary express.

The issue isn’t ideology. Hillary Clinton is probably to the left of Elizabeth Warren in real life. Warren was still a liberal Republican while Hillary was trading air kisses with Alinsky. But the Clinton path to the presidency lay in miming fake centrism. And the Democracy Alliance is all about openly pushing a radical agenda.

That’s how we got Obama.

Clinton wasn’t invited to the conference, which has caused quiet grumbles from her supporters.
Many Clintonites left the Democracy Alliance in 2008 because of its perceived favoritism for President Barack Obama. And the group’s longtime executive director, Kelly Craighead, a Clinton loyalist, was replaced last year amid concerns that the group was too cozy with the Democratic Party. Gara LaMarche, the new director, is not as close to Clinton.

Warren will be introduced Thursday by the Massachusetts donor who served as the national finance chairman of her Senate race, Paul Egerman. He sits on the board of directors of the Democracy Alliance and is seen as her liaison to the tight-knit world of big liberal money and likely a key player if she changed her mind and entered the race.

Clearly the Democracy Alliance is panting for Warren. If it can’t have Warren, it seems willing to settle for Biden who is willing to say and be anything. But the more realistic endgame is to force Hillary Clinton to run to the left and protect their agenda.

This may cost them the White House, considering how tired Americans are of left-wing radicals running the government, but their larger agenda is to keep the Democratic Party tilted to the left. So they’re willing to lose an election to keep moving their party to the left.


Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. He is completing a book on the international challenges America faces in the 21st century.

Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/democracy-alliance-invites-warren-and-biden-not-hillary-clinton/

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