Obama's Immoral Embrace of Moral Equivalence - Jerold S. Auerbach

by Jerold S. Auerbach

In a recent appalling surge of innovative terrorist violence, Palestinians have driven cars into Jewish civilians whose only crime was walking or waiting near the light rail that runs through Jerusalem. In late October a Hamas fanatic murdered a three-month-old Israeli-American baby whose parents were returning from her first visit to the Western Wall. In a similar attack two weeks later, another Hamas zealot killed two pedestrians.

Palestinians were ecstatic. An animated cartoon showed three religious Jews with a Star of David on their hats frantically fleeing a pursuing car painted with the colors of the Palestinian flag. Another, labeled the “Run Over Organization,” called on followers to “hit the gas . . . for Al-Aqsa,” the Temple Mount mosque. Palestinians were urged to “Run over, friend, run over the foreign settler!”

Climaxing the current wave of Palestinian atrocities was the brutal slaughter earlier this week of four rabbis (three of whom were Americans) at prayer in their Jerusalem synagogue. Palestinian cousins armed with meat cleavers and a gun left ghastly images of murdered Jews wrapped in blood-smeared prayer shawls lying on the blood-splattered floor. These barbaric images will endure forever as testimony to the demented insanity of Palestinian terrorists.

Responses from Arab political leaders were predictable. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas complied with Secretary of State Kerry’s firm request that he condemn the attack, adding his universal denunciation of “the killing of civilians no matter who is doing it.” A senior Hamas official more precisely proclaimed his support for “any military action against the occupation anywhere it can be carried out.”

As political leaders worldwide condemned the brutal assault, President Barack Obama, the obtuse master craftsman of moral equivalency, chimed in. “We condemn in the strongest terms these attacks,” which he properly labeled “outrageous acts.” That would have been the perfect place to stop. But the preening universal moralist who resides in the White House could not resist the opportunity to generalize and equivocate, seizing upon the pitiless slaughter of innocent Jews to bracket Palestinian murderers and Israeli victims.

"Too many Israelis have died, too many Palestinians have died,” Obama continued, as though the synagogue slaughter was an equal-opportunity participatory event. He stressed the importance of collaboration between Israelis and Palestinians “to lower tensions and reject violence." In conclusion, the President offered his familiar trope, for which there is not a shred of supporting evidence: “We have to remind ourselves that the majority of Palestinians and Israelis overwhelmingly want peace.”

With this vapid -- indeed obtuse –  pronouncement, aptly labeled by Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens as a demonstration of “moral blindness,” the president retreated to more important matters of state. As Gary Bauer and Thomas Rose aptly noted on Breitbart.com, Obama’s “stunningly void remarks” reiterated his “morally bankrupt bromides about ‘cycle’s of violence,’ calls for ‘mutual restraint,’” and hollow conviction that “most Palestinians want peace.”

Indeed, the Palestinian “yearning for peace” was instantly demonstrated in the streets of Gaza, where Arabs celebrating the slaughter of Jews distributed sweets, waved hatchets and guns, and danced with joy. So much for Obama’s peace-lovers, who are indistinguishable from Taliban, al-Qaeda, and ISIS jihadis who spread their version of headless peace through neighboring Middle Eastern precincts.

If President Obama truly believes in equality between Israelis and Palestinians perhaps he would make a pitch for the right of Jews to pray at their holiest site, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, which the Muslim Waqf (supported by the Israeli government) prohibits. There King Solomon built the first Jewish Temple. Destroyed by the Babylonians, it was rebuilt after Jews returned from exile and razed by Roman conquerors in 70 CE, seven centuries before the Islamic conquest of Jerusalem.

But the Messiah is likely to arrive long before Barack Obama jettisons the pretense of moral equivalence that only thinly veils his hostility to the State of Israel.


Jerold S. Auerbach is the author of eleven  books and a frequent contributor to on-line news sites.

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

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

Pollard’s parole plastering - Gil Hoffman

by Gil Hoffman


Today, Israeli agent Jonathan Pollard enters the 30th year of his life sentence for the crime of passing classified information to an ally. As he does so, he is aware that yet another possible door to his long-awaited freedom has just slammed shut.

The first time such a door closed was November 21, 1985, when he was prevented from entering the Israeli Embassy in Washington and arrested outside. Today also marks another significant anniversary: 19 years since the day he became eligible for parole after 10 years in prison.

Since then, he has decided repeatedly not even to try and seek parole, because his release would be conditional, and his lawyers had told him that he had no chance in a parole hearing where the legal deck would be overwhelmingly stacked against him.

Many have questioned why Pollard never even tried the parole path and focused instead on seeking clemency – asking presidents of the United States to commute his life sentence to the time he had already served.

But after so many years of failure, that strategy was secretly reconsidered and replaced last year, according to documents and information revealed exclusively to The Jerusalem Post.

Pollard finally applied for parole in December 2013. The person who persuaded him to take that step was the man in whose hands his fate lies: US President Barack Obama.

Obama’s statements when he came to Israel in March 2013 left no doubt about what approach Pollard should take. The president ended hopes that he would announce clemency for Pollard during the visit as part of a so-called charm offensive.

But he hinted that if Pollard were to apply for parole, he would be treated like any other prisoner.

“I have no plans for releasing Jonathan Pollard immediately, but what I am going to be doing is make sure that he – like every other American who has been sentenced – is accorded the same kinds of review and same examination of the equities that any other individual would be provided,” Obama told Channel 2 anchorwoman Yonit Levi in an interview.

Obama said his obligation as president was to uphold his country’s laws and make sure they were applied consistently, “to make sure that every individual is treated fairly and equally.”

Here was the opportunity that Pollard had been waiting for. He felt he had been treated unfairly and unequally for so many years, and now the president was hinting – in his view, even promising the Israeli people on record on the highly rated nightly news – that he would fix that.

Pollard’s parole hearing was scheduled for April 1. But then a different opportunity came, the sort Pollard had always made a point of rejecting.

Obama was ready to commute Pollard’s sentence as a gesture to Israel for releasing Israeli Arab prisoners as part of an American-brokered diplomatic process with the Palestinians. That process nearly brought Pollard home in time for the Passover Seder, but it ultimately failed.

Pollard withdrew his parole application so it would not be connected to a trade for terrorists. Only when the trade talk died down did he reapply for a parole hearing, which was scheduled for July 1.

He and the team working for his release then had a limited time to make efforts to ensure the parole hearing would go well. To that end, they enlisted the man who is arguably the most respected Israeli in America – possibly the only Israeli who enjoys a close relationship with Obama: then-president Shimon Peres.

PERES’S ROLE in bringing about Pollard’s release was more than symbolic. He was the prime minister at the time of Pollard’s arrest.

At the time, he did not alert the embassy staff about Pollard to ensure he would be let in, and he gave the US documents with Pollard’s fingerprints that incriminated him.

Many Israelis saw Pollard’s continued incarceration as a lingering stain on Peres’s decades of public service that neither of the medals he recently received in Washington could remove.

The two presidents were due to meet in the US capital during Peres’s final tour in office on June 25, six days before the parole hearing. Peres vowed to the people of Israel to take action for Pollard, and the Israeli agent’s pro-bono lawyers prepared him meticulously.

Respected New York attorneys Eliot Lauer and Jacques Semmelman, who have represented Pollard for free for 15 years, met with Peres’s aides extensively to explain how the US parole process worked. Lauer reviewed the information with Peres himself at Washington’s Willard Hotel immediately before he met with Obama.

Peres’s message to Obama was to be the following: You don’t have to grant clemency. In fact, you can distance yourself from the matter completely. Just privately let the US Justice Department know that you don’t oppose paroling Pollard and letting him leave for Israel.

Obama would not need to get his hands dirty, just keep the commitment he had made to Israelis 15 months earlier to treat Pollard fairly, like any other prisoner, and let his parole be assessed naturally on the merits of his case.

Following the meeting, Peres’s diplomatic adviser Nadav Tamir reported back to the lawyers with good news: The message had indeed been delivered.

Peres’s office leaked to the press that Obama had personally referred the matter to his attorney-general and close confidant Eric Holder – the head of the American Justice Department and the chief law-enforcement officer of the US government.

“The entire nation is interested in releasing Pollard, and I am the emissary of the nation,” Peres told reporters after the meeting. “I don’t think of myself as Shimon. I am the representative of the State of Israel, and I speak in the name of its people.”

But he added a realistic yet disheartening caveat when he vowed to “continue to work for Pollard’s release after I finish my term.”

Pollard and his lawyers hoped against hope that his salvation was finally coming, that the Peres-pushing- parole strategy had worked.

The day after the Obama-Peres meeting, Lauer and Semmelman filed a supplemental submission to the US parole commission. The document stressed that Pollard was a model prisoner who had the best possible salient factor score – a measure the US Parole Commission uses to assess a federal prisoner’s likelihood of returning to crime after release, which is the main factor for parole.

The document revealed for the first time that an apartment had been rented for Pollard in the New York area and employment had been obtained for him as an analyst at an investment firm.

“Further incarceration would serve no purpose, as he has been severely punished,” the lawyers wrote. “The commission should set an effective date of parole so that Mr. Pollard can be released as promptly as possible.”

LAUER FLEW to Pollard’s prison in Butner, North Carolina, for the hearing. The deputy chief of the National Security Section of the United States Attorney’s Office Jay Bratt participated in the hearing from Washington by video conference.

Pollard entered the room skeptical but cautiously optimistic, ready to see what his first parole hearing would be like.

But all hopes that the hearing would be fair were dashed immediately. The government’s representatives spoke menacingly, treated Pollard with contempt, prevented Lauer from making his case, and made it clear that the Israeli agent would not see the Jewish state any time soon, if ever. Those present described the hearing as a “kangaroo court” and even “a lynching.”

The rejection letter that the parole commission sent Pollard in August, which the Post exclusively obtained, was also harsh in tone.

“The breadth and scope of the classified information that you sold to the Israelis was the greatest compromise of US security to that date,” the letter said.

“You passed thousands of Top Secret documents to Israeli agents, threatening US relations in the Middle East among the Arab countries.”

The parole commission complained that had it not been for Pollard, the US could have received intelligence from Israel in return for the information he had provided.

“Given all this information, paroling you at this time would depreciate the seriousness of the offense and promote disrespect for the law,” the letter concluded.

The commission wrote that ahead of the 30th anniversary of Pollard’s incarceration, it would conduct another review of the case in February 2015 and another parole hearing five months later.

But when asked whether the government would once again oppose Pollard’s parole next July, a commission official replied, “Absolutely, vigorously” – indicating that it would be no different than the hearing that had just concluded.

The letter indicated that barring parole next year, Pollard would have to continue serving his life sentence, which, due to the laws when he was sentenced, will conclude only in 2030 after 45 years in prison.

Pollard, 60, is suffering from multiple recurring health problems and has been hospitalized several times recently without word getting out to the media.

Chances are he would be unlikely to live that long.

His lawyers were very disturbed by how the hearing turned out. The team working for his release purposely hid the entire parole process from the press and the public until now.

“I was disappointed because I thought that as a result of the Peres-Obama meeting, the government would take a more judicious and fair approach to the hearing,” says Lauer in an interview at his office on Manhattan’s Park Avenue. “There is no basis for the government’s inflammatory statement about the level of harm caused to the US by Pollard.”

Lauer and Semmelman filed an appeal last month, and as of press time they have yet to receive a response.

But no one on Pollard’s team remains optimistic about the possibility of parole.

THE MAIN grounds for the appeal were that the commission had rejected parole on the basis of a 1987 classified memorandum written by then-US defense secretary Caspar Weinberger, which was false at the time and has proven grossly inaccurate in hindsight.

A federal grand jury indicted Weinberger in June 1992 on two counts of perjury and one count of obstruction of justice in the Iran-Contra Affair. But president George H.W. Bush pardoned him six months later, before the case went to trial.

His paternal great-grandparents left Judaism because of a dispute at a Czech synagogue, and Weinberger and his parents were devoted Christians. Lawrence Korb, who was deputy defense secretary under Weinberger, said his former boss was not anti-Semitic, but he had “almost a visceral dislike” of Israel’s impact on US policy.

The defense secretary and other top US officials at the time were angry at Israel for the June 1981 bombing of Saddam Hussein’s Osirak nuclear reactor. Boston University international relations professor emeritus Angelo Codevilla, who had access to intelligence information as a staff member of the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence, told the Post in a phone interview that the officials were upset because they were building up Hussein as an ally and a counterweight to Iran.

That was why the US was not giving Israel information it had agreed to give the Jewish state. Pollard supplied Israel with some of the most vital information to its security – which was being withheld – further angering the US.

Despite his many years in prison, Pollard never had an actual trial. At the request of both the US and Israeli governments, he entered into a plea bargain, which spared both governments a long, difficult, expensive and potentially embarrassing trial.

Pollard fulfilled his end of the bargain, cooperating with the prosecution. Nevertheless, he received a life sentence and a recommendation that he never receive parole – in complete violation of the plea agreement he had reached with the government.

He was never indicted for harming the United States or for compromising codes, agents or war plans. He was never charged with treason, a charge that applies to spying for an enemy state in wartime.

But two months prior to Pollard’s March 1987 sentencing, Weinberger delivered a 46-page classified memorandum to sentencing judge Aubrey Robinson.

Except for briefly at first, neither Pollard nor any of his cleared attorneys have ever been allowed to access the memorandum to challenge its false charges.

The day before sentencing, Weinberger delivered a four-page supplemental memorandum to Robinson in which he falsely accused Pollard of treason.

“It is difficult for me, even in the so-called ‘year of the spy,’ to conceive of a greater harm to national security than that caused by the defendant in the view of the breadth, the critical importance to the US, and the high sensitivity of the information he sold to Israel,” Weinberger wrote in the memo. “I respectfully submit that any US citizen, and in particular a trusted government official, who sells US secrets to any foreign nation should not be punished merely as a common criminal. Rather the punishment imposed should reflect the perfidy of the individual’s actions, the magnitude of the treason committed, and the needs of national security.”

Pollard was shown the supplemental Weinberger memorandum only once, just moments before sentencing.

Since then, his lawyers’ efforts to see the documents that were used to prosecute him have failed.

HIS LAWYERS renewed those efforts in court with Pollard’s parole application, knowing the government would refer to the Weinberger memo at the hearing. The court denied access, saying that the lawyers lacked a need to know and the court lacked jurisdiction to declassify it.

But Semmelman says what is known of the documents is that Weinberger wrote not about facts, but about predictions and projections of damage Pollard had caused that have proven wrong over time.

In a 2002 interview, journalist Edwin Black asked Weinberger why he had left the Pollard case out of his autobiography. He replied, “Because it was, in a sense, a very minor matter, but made very important.” Asked why, he said, “I don’t know why, it just was.”

Another possible reason for Pollard’s life sentence may have been that Robinson, who had requested the memo from Weinberger, was infuriated by an (incorrect) report that Pollard had provided Israel with information about US satellite monitoring of joint Israeli- South African missile tests.

Attorney Alan Dershowitz wrote in his 1991 book Chutzpah that former Supreme Court justice Arthur Goldberg had told him he’d heard from the African- American judge that he had taken Pollard’s alleged link to the Israel-South African connection into consideration in sentencing him.

“Robinson doesn’t like Israel very much, though he’s no anti-Semite, but this South Africa thing really got his dander up,” Goldberg told Dershowitz. Pollard denied ever having given such information to Israel, and the prosecution did not accuse him of such.

A form in Pollard’s parole file that the prosecution compiled in 1987 says it was the Weinberger memo that persuaded the judge to seek a life sentence. Pollard’s lawyers say that if a memo to which they cannot receive access is being used to deny their client parole, Pollard is not receiving fair or equitable treatment as Obama promised Israelis he would.

That was the premise of a letter to Obama this week from former senior US officials with firsthand knowledge of the classified files in the Pollard case. In the letter, they renewed their past calls for Obama to commute Pollard’s sentence, due to the parole process failing.

“We write to protest the unjust parole process,” they wrote. “Our review of the parole commission decision compels our strongest objections to the conclusions of the commission and our dismay with the deeply flawed process.”

The officials said the commission had written falsely that Pollard’s espionage “was the greatest compromise of US security to that date,” a charge they said was not supported by any evidence in the public record or the classified file.

“The unreliability of the 1987 Weinberger document was known to and ignored by the parole commission,” the officials wrote. “Worse, the parole commission ignored all other documentary evidence that mitigates in favor of Mr. Pollard’s immediate release.”

The officials wrote that Pollard had adequately expressed remorse and served a sentence far more severe than others in the US convicted of spying for an ally, a charge that normally bears a sentence of just two to four years.

“We are deeply troubled that his grossly disproportionate sentence is now continuing into a 30th year of incarceration with no end in sight,” they wrote. “Denying a man his freedom based on a claim of damage that is patently false while ignoring exculpatory documentary evidence and hiding behind a veil of secret evidence is neither fair nor just, and it simply is not the American way.”

Korb, who is one of the signatories to the letter, says in a phone interview that the parole commission should have taken into account not just Weinberger’s opinion, but also the views of former CIA and FBI heads and the former chairmen of congressional intelligence committees who do not oppose parole.

For instance, former FBI head William Webster, who headed the bureau at the time of Pollard’s arrest and later directed the CIA, told the Post in an exclusive interview last year that he no longer opposed Obama commuting his life sentence to time served.

“My reason is that there are circumstances where compassion is in order,” he said. “That can be tested against sentences that have been meted out to others with as serious offenses. All those are matters of judgment that can be made on their own individual facts, but there is nothing there that would lead me to oppose the exercise of commutation.”

Former CIA head James Woolsey even blamed Pollard’s continued incarceration on anti-Semitism, in an interview with the Post’s Caroline Glick.

“My view is that he should be treated like other intelligence assets of allies,” he said. “We spy on some allies, and they have spied on us. Because they’re allies, usually they have only been in prison for a few years. What I said is that people shouldn’t be hung up on him being Jewish or Israeli. Pretend he’s Greek and release him.”

Korb says it bothered him that Webster’s and Woolsey’s statements were ignored at the parole hearing.

“Woolsey saw Pollard’s whole file, and Jim’s a tough guy,” Korb says. “You’ve got to hope that the parole board so overreacted that it will persuade people to say this is really a miscarriage of justice. It already was before.

They broke their plea agreement, for heaven’s sake.”

Korb notes that while he has never seen any concrete damage Pollard caused the US, there were spies like John Walker, who gave the Soviets the information to help track American submarines, and Robert Hanssen, who gave the Soviets a complete list of American double agents and told them about an FBI tunnel beneath the Soviet embassy in Washington.

Over the years, Pollard was falsely accused of compromising American agents in Eastern Europe, when it was actually the head of the CIA’s Soviet/Eastern Europe Division, Aldrich Ames, who had committed the crime and then blamed Pollard. Information Ames gave the USSR is estimated to have led to compromising at least 100 US intelligence operations and to the execution of at least 10 American sources.

Codevilla says it should have been obvious that Pollard could not have relayed such information, because his access was limited.

“There were many secrets at the time, but Pollard didn’t have access to any of them,” he says.

THE TEAM working for Pollard’s release has questioned why Obama was willing to release him in April in a swap for Israeli Arab prisoners if the US parole commission really equates Pollard with the likes of Ames, Hanssen and Walker.

An extensive article published in The New Republic in July about how Israeli-Palestinian diplomatic talks broke down revealed that US Secretary of State John Kerry had first proposed to Obama that he use Pollard as a bargaining chip near the start of the nine-month peace process, and then again when the negotiations were breaking down.

“Obama wasn’t going to touch the option unless it facilitated a true breakthrough,” Ben Birnbaum and Amir Tibon wrote. “Kerry was becoming desperate, though. At the Ritz, he explained to Obama and [national security adviser Susan] Rice that, without Pollard, the talks were days away from collapse (in part because of his initial miscommunication with [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu). Obama wasn’t pleased. But late at night, after hours of talking, he gave Kerry the go-ahead. ‘I’m not doing this because I want to, John,’ Obama said. ‘I’m doing this for you.’” Israeli diplomatic sources have revealed since then that in exchange for Pollard, Netanyahu had been ready to carry out the fourth round of Palestinian prisoner releases that included Israeli Arabs, before Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas took steps that ended the talks. Bayit Yehudi leader Naftali Bennett threatened to quit the coalition if the Israeli Arabs were released, but Netanyahu was willing to accept that for Pollard.

Nonetheless, in an interview with Yediot Aharonot last month, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, who conducted the negotiations, appeared to blame Bennett and his allies for Pollard’s continued incarceration.

“We reached the point with the US that they were ready to free him,” Livni said. “Those who want him free should ask themselves why he wasn’t freed. The settler leaders who call on every stage for releasing Pollard immediately must ask themselves what their contribution was to him remaining in prison.”

The only other time Pollard’s release was so close also came as part of a diplomatic process. Netanyahu asked then-US president Bill Clinton to release him as part of the 1998 Wye River Accords, in which Israel agreed to withdraw from 13 percent of the West Bank’s Area C.

A source who was updated on Netanyahu’s talks with Clinton at the time said the deal had been so final that Pollard’s parents had been told to get ready for his release, and there had been media packets prepared about him.

But Clinton reneged when CIA director George Tenet reportedly threatened to resign. US negotiator Dennis Ross revealed in his 2005 book The Missing Peace that he had advised Clinton to keep Pollard in prison to use as a bargaining chip for final-status peace talks.

“Is it a big political issue in Israel and will it help Bibi [Netanyahu]?” Clinton asked Ross.

“Yes,” Ross replied, “because he is considered a soldier for Israel” and “there is an ethos in Israel that you never leave a soldier behind in the field. But if you want my advice, I would not release him now. It would be a huge payoff for Bibi; you don’t have many like this in your pocket. I would save it for permanent status.

You will need it later, don’t use it now.”

SUCH ATTITUDES have convinced many that the reason Pollard remains in jail is that the government wants to keep him for a future Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The April round of prisoner releases that included Pollard is technically still on the table, even though there are currently no talks in sight and Netanyahu and Abbas did not meet when they were both in Amman with Kerry last Thursday.

“Pollard is still in prison because he was transformed from an American who committed a crime and was sentenced unjustly, into a tradeable item,” Lauer says.

“Pollard became objectified because he served a purpose in the Arab-Israeli peace process. He’s an asset to be used and not given away.”

Besides behavior in prison, the other grounds for not granting parole are that a prisoner remains a security risk. Pollard’s lawyers say that cannot possibly apply to him anymore.

“The government knows exactly what Pollard knew at the time of his arrest, because he was debriefed by US government experts [while] hooked up to a polygraph machine,” Lauer says. “What could he know that still matters? Where Saddam’s troops were 30 years ago? Where [former Palestinian leader Yasser] Arafat’s base was in Tunisia?” “There is no basis whatsoever that if released he’d commit any wrongdoing whatsoever,” Semmelman adds. “It’s simply preposterous. He wants to enjoy the rest of his life in freedom, peace and quiet.”

With the parole option tried and failed, Pollard is shifting back to the only option left: clemency from the president of the US. To that end, US Jews will once again be asked to make their voices heard.

Malcolm Hoenlein, who has headed the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations since shortly after Pollard’s arrest, tells the Post in a phone interview that getting Pollard free means persuading not only Obama, but also five US government agencies. Yet he is up to the task.

“It is an outrageous situation, a tragedy that has got to end,” he says.

National Council of Young Israel president Farley Weiss, whose organization has done much to help Pollard, says the news about the failed parole hearing could inspire a new effort to lobby Obama from a Jewish community that wrongly thought Pollard would automatically be released when he completed 30 years in prison.

“This is no way to treat an ally,” Weiss says in a phone interview. “By not giving clemency or parole to Pollard, America is hurting relations with Israel, and it’s wrong. There has been an undercurrent in the Jewish community that he will just get out on parole in a year. This fierce and outrageous denial of parole now will enrage the Jewish community.”

However, Chicago Pollard activist Jack Berger, who was a close friend of Pollard’s parents, expresses doubt that American Jews will do enough to bring about his freedom.

“The American Jewish community leadership should be ashamed that they have totally abandoned Jonathan Pollard,” Berger says in an interview in Jerusalem. “If the Conference of Presidents had any real clout, they should have demanded that Pollard be treated like anyone else convicted of spying. AIPAC should have put pressure on its elected representatives and encouraged Jews to refuse to contribute to candidates until he was free.”

But an American Jewish leader who asks to not be named says over the phone that Pollard himself was at least partially responsible for his own continued incarceration and that the strategy to bring about his release was wrong all along.

“He didn’t apply for parole for 19 years, and instead tried to use political shenanigans and blackmail, so it can be expected that when he finally got a parole hearing, it wouldn’t go too well,” he says.

Yet Pollard’s lawyers remain convinced that although it has so far been unsuccessful, their strategy of seeking presidential commutation remains the only way to get him out of prison. To that end, they hope renewed pressure will begin soon, not only from US Jews, but also from movements for civil liberties.

“The US Jewish leadership and civil liberties movements have failed so far, and now they must take up the Pollard issue and challenge it the right way,” Lauer says. “They could be asking the US administration serious, probing questions to at least obtain substantive reasons to keep him in jail. They can do a lot more to bring about Pollard’s release.”


Gil Hoffman

Source: http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Pollards-parole-plastering-382301

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

Anti-Israel Bias Infiltrates the Classroom - Tammi Rossman-Benjamin and Leila Beckwith

by Tammi Rossman-Benjamin and Leila Beckwith

At the heart of the recent controversy over Professor Steven Salaita, whose job offer at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign was rescinded after dozens of his virulently anti-Zionist tweets came to light, is whether a professor’s speech outside of the university should impact his or her university employment.

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has argued that basing Salaita’s employment decision on his extramural tweets violates his right as a citizen of constitutionally protected freedom of speech. The assumption underlying the AAUP’s argument is that what a faculty member does or says outside the university is independent of what he does or says in carrying out his academic responsibilities inside the university. In other words, according to AAUP there is no good reason to believe that Salaita would bring the anti-Zionist sentiments expressed in his extramural tweets into the university.

But what if there is good reason to believe that Salaita will bring his anti-Zionist sentiments onto the campus, and even try to disseminate them among students and faculty?

Indeed, Salaita has done just that.  His expression of opposition to Zionism and the existence of a Jewish state goes well beyond his “extramural” tweets. Salaita has promoted for academic colleagues what he describes as “a primer for practicing BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israel)” on university campuses in a recent article titled “How to Practice BDS in Academe.” His suggestions include organizing pro-BDS university events, supporting student activists such as Students for Justice in Palestine, proposing a boycott resolution in the faculty senate, writing pro-BDS articles for the university publication, and opposing the university’s study abroad program to Israel.

Salaita is by no means the only professor to bring his campaigns to destroy the Jewish state onto campus and to use his academic position and his university’s resources to promote it.  Here are just a few examples of faculty across the country who have imported their virulent hatred of Israel onto their campuses and into their classrooms:

• In January, David Lloyd, a Professor of English at University of California Riverside and a founder of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI), organized on his campus a lecture by Omar Barghouti, the founder and most vocal advocate of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. The talk was funded and sponsored by the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences along with the Department of Ethnic Studies, a third of whose faculty have endorsed the academic boycott of Israel, including the department chair. Students in eight courses were required to attend and listen to Barghouti’s talk, which consisted of anti-Israel propaganda laced with classic antisemitic tropes used to promote the academic boycott of Israel.

• Lisa Duggan is a professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. She is also the President of the American Studies Association and was an organizer and vocal advocate of the ASA’s resolution to boycott Israeli universities and scholars.  A few months after the ASA’s membership approved the boycott resolution, Duggan helped to organize the annual conference of NYU’s American Studies Program, entitled “Circuits of Influence: U.S., Israel.” The conference, which was co-sponsored by three other NYU departments, included talks by 21 BDS-supporting academics and activists focusing on “using boycotts as a tactic and substantive challenge to systems of injustice” that include Israel’s “racialization, empire, and settler colonialism”. The conference also featured workshops on how to boycott Israel, run by representatives of virulently anti-Zionist organizations such as Adalah-NY, Students for Justice in Palestine, and Jewish Voice for Peace.

• David Klein is a mathematics Professor at California State University Northridge and a founder of USACBI.  For more than 4 years Klein has been using his university’s server to promote his web page entitled “Boycott Israel Resource Page,” calling for the economic, academic, and cultural boycott of Israel.  His web pages contain a litany of false and inflammatory statements and photographs intended to incite hatred and promote political activism against the Jewish state, particularly boycott.  He also organized a petition to boycott the Israel Abroad program on CSU campuses in solidarity with the academic boycott of Israel.

• Rabab Abdulhadi is a professor of ethnic studies at San Francisco State University and a founder of USACBI. Earlier this year she received $7,000 from her university to organize and lead a delegation of boycott activists to the Middle East, where the group met with PFLP terrorist Leila Khaled and other Hamas-affiliated activists to build solidarity for promoting the academic boycott of Israel. Abdulhadi is also the faculty advisor of the General Union of Palestine Students (GUPS) at SFSU. As a featured speaker at student-organized events often sponsored by her ethnic studies department, Abdulhadi has advocated overthrowing the “settler colonial” occupation of Palestine by any means, including by armed violence and BDS.  She has also posted messages on the GUPS Facebook page promoting BDS.  In her role as GUPS faculty advisor, Abdulhadi helped the GUPS students organize an event in November 2013 that featured an image of PFLP terrorist Leila Khaled holding a rifle with the caption “resistance is not terrorism,” and another with the words “My Heroes Have Always Killed Colonizers.” Abdulhadi was also the personal mentor of former GUPS president Mohammad G. Hammad, who was expelled from SFSU in January 2014 for numerous violent social media postings glorifying terrorism and threatening to kill Israelis and their supporters.

Our universities are out of control, and the impact on students is enormous. Professors who bring their one-sided anti-Israel perspectives onto the campus and into the classroom limit the access of students to vital information about complex topics of global importance and violate their fundamental right to be educated and not indoctrinated. Even more troubling, professors who use their university positions and university resources to promote campaigns to harm or dismantle the Jewish state, and who encourage students to do the same, contribute to the creation of a hostile and threatening environment for many Jewish students, who report feeling emotionally and intellectually harassed and intimidated by their professors and isolated from their peers.

Faculty who not only express their hatred of the Jewish state as private citizens, but bring their anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic expression onto the campus and into their classrooms, have stretched the public trust in our nation’s universities to the breaking point. University stakeholders -- students, parents, alumni, donors, and taxpayers -- should be outraged.


Rossman-Benjamin is a lecturer at University of California Santa Cruz and the co-founder of AMCHA Initiative, a non-profit organization that combats anti-Semitism on college campuses across the United States.
Beckwith is an emeritus professor at the University of California Los Angeles and the co-founder of AMCHA Initiative.

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

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

House Files Lawsuit Against Administration Over Obamacare - Daniel Newhauser

by Daniel Newhauser

GOP accuses White House of exceeding its authority in implementation of health law, does not include immigration order in suit.

House Speaker John Boehner says the House has to "stand up for the Constitution."(Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

November 21, 2014 House Republicans filed their long-anticipated lawsuit against the Obama administration on Friday, claiming the White House abused executive authority by acting independently of Congress on parts of the Affordable Care Act.

The complaint alleges the administration unlawfully delayed the implementation of a mandate that large employers provide health insurance to their employees and will illegally give $175 million over the next 10 years to insurance companies under a cost-sharing program.

"Time after time, the president has chosen to ignore the will of the American people and rewrite federal law on his own without a vote of Congress," Speaker John Boehner said in a statement. "If this president can get away with making his own laws, future presidents will have the ability to as well. The House has an obligation to stand up for the Constitution, and that is exactly why we are pursuing this course of action."

The suit, filed against the secretaries of Health and Human Services and the Treasury, alleges that Obama's decision to twice waive the employer mandate's start date and waive penalties on employers was not in accordance with the language of the law.

The suit also claims Congress never appropriated the money the administration is using to make direct payments to insurers to defray the expense of providing cost-sharing benefits to the insured. The law required insurers to provide reduced deductibles, copays and coinsurance to some qualified beneficiaries.

The House voted this summer to authorize the suit against Obama.

Notably, the lawsuit does not target the executive action Obama announced Thursday night that would grant legal status to more than 4 million undocumented immigrants. Boehner is considering suing Obama over that issue as well, but would need to hold a second vote to authorize it.

The House is being represented by George Washington University professor Jonathan Turley. He is the third lawyer to take on the case, after two previous attorneys dropped the suit.

The White House quickly criticized the suit Friday.

"Instead of passing legislation to help expand the middle class and grow the economy, Speaker Boehner and House Republicans are spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars pursuing a lawsuit that is without any sound legal basis," said White House spokeswoman Brandi Hoffine.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi lashed out at Republicans, saying they are "prioritizing the special interests and the howls of impeachment-hungry extremists" in pursuing the lawsuit.

"After scouring Washington for months, Republicans have finally found a TV lawyer to file their meritless lawsuit," Pelosi said in a statement. "While the American people want Congress to get serious about creating good-paying jobs and strengthening the middle class, House Republicans are paying $500-an-hour in taxpayer money to sue the President of the United States."

Daniel Newhauser

Source: http://www.nationaljournal.com/congress/house-files-lawsuit-against-administration-over-obamacare-20141121

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

Somali Terrorists Separate Muslims Before Slaughtering - Ari Yashar

by Ari Yashar

Al-Shabaab terrorists murder 28 in attack on bus in Kenya, pick out victims based on ability to read from the Koran.

 

 

Somali Al-Shabaab terrorists

Reuters

 

Somali terrorists of the Al-Qaeda linked Al-Shabaab organization murdered 28 people in an attack on a bus in Kenya's northeastern Mandera county on Saturday - before shooting their victims in the head they separated out the Muslims.

Around ten heavily-armed terrorists stopped the bus bound for Nairobi not far from the Somali border, forced passengers off, and then had them read from the Koran to pick out the non-Muslims and brutally shoot them, witnesses told BBC.

Ahmed Mahat, a passenger on the ill-fated bus, told the British news source there were over 60 passengers on board, and the driver tried to outpace the terrorists before getting stuck in mud.

"When we got down, passengers were separated according to Somali and non-Somalis," Mahat said. "The non-Somalis were ordered to read some verses of the holy Koran, and those who failed to read were ordered to lie down. One by one they were shot in the head at point blank range."

Mahat, a teacher from Mandera, said some Somalis who asked the terrorists not to shoot the non-Somali passengers were themselves shot.

Al-Shabaab released a statement saying the attack was "retaliation" for police raids on mosques in Mombasa earlier this week, in which security forces tried to crack down on weapons caches.

Mandera county where the attack occurred has a long border with Somalia, with guns passing freely over the border, and from southern Ethiopia where the Oromo Liberation Front operates.

Just over the border in Somalia, Al-Shabaab has a base called Gadondhawe which has been targeted by Kenyan airstrikes.


Ari Yashar

Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/187747#.VHD-Acl6h-g

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

Israel Can Prevail in its Struggle against Violence - Dr. Mordechai Kedar

by Dr. Mordechai Kedar

Israel can withstand and overcome the current wave of violence, which is just another chapter in the struggle against Arab and Islamist hatred. But to do so, there are concrete steps that Israel should take - now.

The problem:

During these difficult days of increasing terror, the most urgent question is: What can we do in order to cope optimally with the growing terrorist violence in Israel, knowing that behind the scenes there are several players who are expending intense efforts to bring about an explosion.

Leading the pack is Hamas, whose goal is to become the undisputed leader of the Palestinian Arabs at the expense of the Palestinian Authority – and, for good measure, giving Sisi something to remember.
Supporting Hamas is a coalition composed of Qatar and Turkey, with unlimited sources of funds.
The PLO, at the same time, is trying to hold on to first place and cannot allow itself to appear less extreme than Hamas, for fear it will be accused of cooperating with Israel. This is the origin of the two-faced behavior of the PA: on the one hand, it presents a cooperative face to Israel and on the other hand, it stabs Israel in the back, through incitement and education, on the street and in international forums.

Qatar bases its standing in the Arab world and the West by pouring oil on the fire, exactly as it does with Islamic State. Hypocritically, in the usual Qatari fashion, it funds Islamic state while, as part of the Western coalition, it expresses support for those who fight it.

Behind the scenes of the growing terror Israel faces stands Islamic State, the model for successful battles against the enemies of Islam: massacre the enemy, act with extreme violence and use fast vehicles that give the impression of Jihad's sweeping, advancing victory. The murderers who entered the Jerusalem Synagogue did not bring long butcher's cleavers for nothing.

The solution:

1. First of all, Israel must say emphatically: the Palestinian Authority established on the basis of the Oslo Accords is an enemy entity, an enemy whose goal is establishing an Arab state  in place of Israel, not alongside Israel, but on its ruins. That is the reason the Oslo Accords were violated so blatantly and thoroughly by the other side, resulting in them being declared null and void..

In addition, Israel must cease funding the PA on the basis of economic agreements derived from the Oslo Accords. There is no other country that funds an enemy entity, and there is no reason for Israel to be the only country that acts in such a delusional manner.

The government of Israel must condemn those among us who were instrumental in giving us the "New Middle East", even those who once held posts of high honor.

2. Israel must announce as clearly as possible that Jerusalem is not the subject for any negotiations with anyone. It was never the capital of any entity connected to the Arab or Islamic world and was never ruled by a king, sultan, emir or caliph, so that there is no historical or legal basis for demanding that it be the capital of any state other than Israel.

3. Israel must point out to the entire world that Jerusalem is the most ancient capital in the world, and was the People of Israel's capital thousands of years before Washington was the capital of the US, Paris was the capital of France and London was the capital of Britain. We Jews worshiped one G-d in Jerusalem in both of the Temples, while our neighbors were tribes wandering in the desert, drinking wine, burying their daughters alive and worshiping idols.

4. Israel has to remind the entire world that Judea, Samaria and Eastern Jerusalem were areas occupied by Jordan for 19 years, from May 1948 until June 1967. Had the Arab world felt it was just and necessary, it could have established a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital then, without anyone in the world disputing it.  The Arabs  refrained from doing that for the 7000 days in which Jordan had control of the area and therefore have no right to demand from Israel what they did not demand from themselves.

5. Israel must immediately shut down all the PA institutions in Jerusalem and any governmental entity that is not that of the state of Israel. Sovereignty cannot be shared or compromised on, because he who compromises with regard to his sovereignty loses it.

6.The police must issue a restraining order against all Islamic Movement activists, first and foremost to Sheikh Raad Salah and his deputy Sheikh Kamal el Khatib.  After that, the possibility of issuing an order forbidding them to leave Um El Fahem and Kafr Kana should be considered.

7. Israel must immediately shut down all the Hamas TV stations broadcasting in Judea and Samaria.

8. Israel must keep the bodies of all dead terrorists who committed terror attacks. To all events, Israel must forbid their burial in Jerusalem, especially not in the vicinity of the Temple Mount, because burial in that spot is an expression of pride in the shahid and  encourages more terror.

9. Israel must announce that it is building a new neighborhood, a new settlement or at least a new building in Jerusalem or Judea and Samaria in memory of every terror victim. Let the terrorists discover that terror makes the Jewish People's connection to its land stronger.

10. Israel must change the way it views Europe. This continent is gradually turning into an Islamist area, and European politicians are becoming more and more dependent on the Muslim voter.They have to take stands dictated to them by the voters in their electoral district, and these brought their visceral hatred of Jews and Israel with them from their countries of origin. I do not see this pattern changing, so that for Israel, relying on Europe is a waste of effort at best and under normal circumstances, like entering hostile territory.

11. Israelis have to internalize the fact that their neighbors do not want them in the Middle East, and that Tel Aviv and Ramat Hasharon as seen as "settlements" just as Eli, Shilo and Neve Daniel are.  The entire Peace industry is just froth topping the waves of the stormy waters of the Middle East. It succeeded in blinding us to the point where we did not accept the reality of the situation and it managed to neutralize the will of some of us to fight for our land and freedom, but it had no absolutely no effect on our neighbors.

12. Israel must develop a psychological mindset that prepares it for a multi-pronged struggle, because many of the countries in the world are against the existence of the state of Israel and will do anything to weaken its security, economic stability and legitimacy.

Israel must publicly condemn people, such as Martyn Indyk, who accept funding from countries like Qatar which uses its money to influence political stands vis a vis Israel.

13. Israel's justice system must internalize the fact that we are struggling for our survival. We cannot relate to enemies of the state as if they are deserving of mercy at the hands of our country's legal system. The legal system was not intended to make the state vulnerable but to base it on law and order so that it can continue to function during difficult times.

14. The people of Israel must trust in G-d and in themselves, they must be prepared to fight for their existence. This struggle is infinitely more important than what the Knesset and the media have been stressing - VAT on purchasing an apartment or any internal political struggle. Ministers and MK's must rise above narrow party considerations and begin to lead the Jewish people in its struggle to keep its land, state and liberty.


Dr. Mordechai Kedar is a senior lecturer in the Department of Arabic at Bar-Ilan University. He served in IDF Military Intelligence for 25 years, specializing in Arab political discourse, Arab mass media, Islamic groups and the Syrian domestic arena. Thoroughly familiar with Arab media in real time, he is frequently interviewed on the various news programs in Israel.

Source: http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4894/beautifying-islam

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

PA Will Stand Trial in New York for Terrorism - Ari Yashar

by Ari Yashar

Shurat Hadin wins major decision as court date set in $1 billion lawsuit against PA and PLO for committing and supporting terrorist attacks.

Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades terrorists

Ahmad Khateib/Flash 90

 

Shurat Hadin (Israel Law Center) on Thursday won a major decision in their landmark case against the Palestinian Authority (PA), achieving a court date in a $1 billion case exposing PA and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) culpability in numerous terror attacks.

The Israeli-based civil rights organization sued the PA on behalf of 11 families for involvement of PA and PLO members in seven terror attacks between 2001 and 2004 during the Second Intifada.

Now a trial will be held in New York in January, allowing the lawsuit originally brought in 2004 to be heard in court after the defendants' request to dismiss the trial was overruled.

"For years the PA provided funding and every measure of support for the murderous terrorist operations in Israel that devastated the country and left so many civilians dead," said Shurat Hadin director Attorney Nitsana Darshan-Leitner.

Darshan-Leitner added "the decision and trial will provide an unprecedented opportunity to present to a New York jury all that the evidence that has been amassed documenting the Palestinians use of terrorism as an official policy to advance their goals."

In setting the court date, the US District Court in New York found there was sufficient evidence to present to a jury that the PA and PLO had provided material support for seven attacks that killed American citizens, and that the PA could be tried for being "vicariously liable" on six of the seven attacks.

The decision found there was enough evidence to rule that PA employees conducted terrorist attacks against civilians in Israel, and that the PA and PLO provided weapons, money and other material support in violation of the Anti-Terror laws.

Additionally, the court found the jury could rule that the PA provided safe haven to the terrorists, and gave material support to the terrorist organizations Hamas and Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, the "military wing" of PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah faction.

Shurat Hadin has been actively pursuing the PA in international courts, recently filing a war crimes complaint in the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Abbas.

It is hoped that the hearings in January will allow further recourse against Arab terrorism, as was achieved in a recent ruling finding the Arab Bank guilty of funding Hamas attacks. Arab Bank has submitted for a retrial on the ruling.


Ari Yashar

Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/187704#.VG5QTcl6h-g

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

Beautifying Islam - Ahmed Vanya

by Ahmed Vanya

Many people are understandably asking: What is the true nature of Islam? Is it that although there are many peaceful Muslims, Islam itself is not peaceful?
Classical Islamic law, developed over the history of Islam, is definitely not peaceful or benign, and therefore not suitable for this age; neither are its violent and grotesque progeny, such as Islamism and jihadism.
If Islam is a religion that stands for justice and peaceful coexistence, then this policy of jihad cannot be justified as sanctioned by a just and merciful creator.
Religious traditions have changed and evolved over time, therefore it is the duty of us Muslims, using reason and common sense, to reinterpret the scriptures to bring about an Islam that affirms and promotes universally accepted human rights and values. It is our duty to cleanse the traditional, literalist, classical Islam and purify it to make it an Islam that is worthy to be called a beautiful religion.

Looking at a year of beheadings by ISIS, child grooming abuses in the UK, judicial misconduct by the hanging judges of Iran, slaughtering and enslaving of Christians in Egypt and Africa, and various murders justified in the name of Islam throughout the world, many people are understandably asking: What is the true nature of Islam? Is it that although there are many peaceful Muslims, Islam itself is not peaceful?

If, for us Muslims, Islam is a religion of peace, justice, and mercy, how come the militants, who claim to be staunch Muslims -- who are ready to die for Islam and who claim to have established a state in the name of Islam in Iraq and Syria by sacrificing blood and lives -- are beheading journalists and aid workers, and enslaving religious minorities, all by citing Islamic Sharia Law?

The Taliban (literally "students") in Afghanistan have persecuted religious minorities and inflicted human right abuses against women -- and men who disagreed with them or who have fallen afoul of their laws. Boko Haram has also carried out human rights abuses in the name of Islam and Islamic law. In Malaysia, where "moderate" Islam is practiced, Christians cannot call God "Allah." In Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam, and supposedly an ally of the U.S., the policies and practices carried out by the state, and the Wahhabi religious scholars in the name of Islam, are woefully anti-humanitarian. Many Muslims from around the world perform the religiously required pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina; a number of them are on the dole of the petrodollars provided by the Saudis, but do not show much concern for the human rights abuses carried out in the name of Islam by the Saudi establishment.

Many devout Muslims, like monks in monasteries, are busily trapped in performing rites and rituals, and ceding ever more ground to extremists, without adequately reflecting on the history of Islam, the nature of God and the nature of revelation from God.

We Muslims commonly believe that God sent prophets and messengers to every corner of the world since the beginning of creation to guide humanity, but that most, if not all, of the messages got corrupted and adulterated, one way or another, except the message of Islam. But it seems natural that most people, Muslims or not, also see their own religion as the only true religion. But there are religious traditions, both in Islam, such as many Sufi sects, and in other religions, that affirm the transcendental unity at the core of almost all religious traditions, and that are inclusive and universalistic in nature.

Also, Muslims learn from the Qur'an that hubris, or arrogance, is the greatest sin committed by the Satan, and that it was arrogance led him to disobey God. God asked him to bow to Adam, the first human, but Satan refused out of arrogance.

The current question seems to be: Did Muslims go astray very early on, when they conquered many lands and developed a massive doctrine and theology of intolerance (it took about 300 years to solidify Sharia after the passing of the Prophet Muhammad), due to pride and quest for power -- the very arrogance that is prohibited? Although many conversions to Islam did not occur by the sword, the first four caliphs (the so-called "Rightly Guided") and their successors did in fact send out armies to conquer the world. If Islam is a religion that stands for justice and peaceful coexistence, then this policy of jihad -- and the idea that peace and justice can be achieved only under Islamic sovereignty -- with Muslim rulers subjugating non-Muslims, cannot be justified as sanctioned by a just and merciful Creator.

The Islamic tradition is not monolithic; there are countless variants. Many of the Islamic Sufi traditions, for instance, that are often relentlessly condemned by the extremists, who likely see them as a threat to their own power -- are notable for their pluralistic and humanistic nature, even though, historically, some orders may have been more martial than spiritual.

There have been many individual Muslims throughout history who are truly freedom-loving and who respect the rights of all human beings. Also, historically, a number of Muslim kings, sultans and emperors in Andalusia, Spain -- and in the Ottoman Empire in Turkey, as well as in Mughal India -- who treated their non-Muslim subjects kindly, albeit not with full equality. The Ottoman Sultans established a system of "millet" whereby people of other religious communities were allowed to live in the Empire in peace, although as second-class "protected" citizens, had to pay a head tax called jizya, but were otherwise freely allowed to follow their own personal laws and religions (Canon law for Christians and halakha for the Jews), without attempting to convert them by compulsion.

Maimonides, the early medieval Jewish scholar, for example, makes it clear that even in the "golden age" of Islamic rule in Spain, it could be a bit nightmarish for the non-Muslims; but if the rulers were reasonably kind and tolerant, and if the intolerant religious leaders were not in control, non-Muslims could live restrained but reasonably comfortable lives, as dhimmis (protected people), under Islamic suzerainty.

When Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, died in the year 632 CE, the Qur'an had not been compiled as a book. The messages said to have been revealed from God, or Allah, to the Muhammad during a period of 23 years, during his prophetic career, were either orally passed down or written on animal bones, leather and scraps of parchment, without systematic collection or any adequate background or context.

The Prophet Muhammad himself did not provide any authoritative narration or explanation for the Qur'anic verses while he was alive. He also did not provide a method for selecting his successor, nor did he authorize his companions to record the Hadith (his actions and sayings) while he was alive. Later, therefore, subsequent generations would have to sift through mountains of dubious material, in an age of primitive record keeping -- and during a period of discord, partisanship and violence, even among those who were close to the Prophet.

In the Battle of Karbala in 680 CE (48 years after Muhammad's death), depicted in Abbas Al-Musavi's painting, Husayn, the son of 'Ali and grandson of Muhammad, was killed along with his family and all his followers by the armies of the Umayyad Caliphate. It was the most crucial moment in the split between Shi'a and Sunni Islam. (Image source: Brooklyn Museum)

The Qur'an and the six canonical Hadith collections primarily formed the twin pillars of the sources from which the scholars of Islam developed the principles of Sharia and the commandments of the Islamic laws. These try to give prescriptions and proscriptions for all human conducts imaginable.

But is it not possible that God wanted humans to use their brains and rational faculties, and that He did not provide step-by-step instructions for all the questions in life simply to be obeyed by humans without reflection or questioning? Although in Islam, there exists an important concept called ijtihad -- independent reasoning in legal matters -- the literalist, textual fundamentalist scholars declared this principle to be inoperable whenever there are clear-cut, decisive textual statements in the sacred texts on the issue in question. There is also a debate as to whether the gates of ijtihad were closed after the 10th century CE. While most traditional Islamic scholars and jurists still consider ijtihad to be the exclusive domain and prerogative of the preeminent religious scholars (mujtahid), and not for the general public, other scholars do not.

In the early days of Islam, right after the passing away of the Prophet Muhammad, Muslims splintered into many sects and factions. There were endless debates on the issues of religious doctrine, theology, and religious law, due to divergent interpretations of the Qur'an and the Hadiths. During that period, a group of theologians called the Mutazila, who based their theology on reason and rational thinking in conjunction with the sacred texts, waged an intellectual battle with the traditionalists, who gave absolute primacy to strict literal interpretations of the revealed texts: the Quran and the Hadith. Unfortunately for the future of the Islamic tradition, the literal traditionalists won the struggle, and went on to establish among the Sunni Muslims the four legal schools of Sharia, which became the dominant form of Islam from then onwards.

This mainstream, legalistic, text-bound, literalist Islam -- now the dominant strain and controlled by the traditional Muslim scholars -- is a mixture of both humanistic ethical values, combined with supremacist ethos, as it developed throughout the centuries. Due to its literalist tradition, it does not have the flexibility or the ability to overcome interpretations of the scriptures that are inimical to pluralistic and humanistic values.

Many equate this literalist, legalistic, text-bound Islam to be the "true" Islam. But just because it is the dominant form of Islam does not mean that it is the "true" Islam. A careful study of the history of Islam indicates that this view is utterly unwarranted. Religious traditions have changed and evolved over time, based on the understandings, interpretations, and practices of their adherents. Therefore, it is the duty of us Muslims, using reason and common sense, to reinterpret the scriptures to bring about an Islam that affirms and promotes universally accepted human rights and values.

Classical Islamic law is a synthesis and deduction of rulings from the Quran and Hadith by the medieval scholars from when Muslims were powerful. Beheadings and enslavement at that time were widespread among many societies, not unique to the practice of Islam. Muslims believe that in the Quran we have a document from God that provides ethical guidance and moral lessons from the Prophet and his followers in the language many at the time understood. They allude to the practices and conduct suitable for the time and place in which the Prophet lived and was trying to influence people.

There were many actions of the Prophet recorded in the "authentic" Hadith, such as holding slaves, carrying out beheadings and so on, which are not easy to accept according to the present day norms, to say the least. But for the textual literalists, there is no question that whatever the Prophet did, as recorded in the approved texts, must be accepted and emulated without any question or hesitation. And in order to strengthen their text-based legal methodology, the textual literalists elevated the status of the so called "authentic" Hadith to the status of the divine scripture, almost equivalent to the status of the Qur'an, believed by almost all Muslims to be the literal word of Allah relayed to the Prophet.

For the rest of us, however, first, we need to realize that the "approved" texts were recorded by early methods and at least after a century or two after the passing of the Prophet in an age of violent sectarian conflicts. Therefore, it might be wise to take with a big grain of salt, the accuracy of these so called "approved" texts. Second, if the actions of the Prophet were so important as exact examples, then, why didn't he or his God make sure that authoritative, unambiguous, contemporary recordings of the actions were written down for posterity to follow? Either the Prophet or his God, or both, did not have foresight, or more than likely, these actions were not meant to be exactly copied and emulated, especially in different times, different places, and under vastly different circumstances.

While it is true that there are eternal principles in the Qur'an and the Hadith, such as peace, justice, and mercy, which are universal values, and therefore, incumbent on everyone to believe and practice at all times and at all places, it is also true that it is a betrayal of the true spirit of Islam to assume that God wanted Muslims to follow the Prophet blindly, slavishly, without thinking and reflecting. Is it possible, therefore, that the close-minded, literalist and text-bound tradition is a betrayal of the true spirit of Islam?

The pitfalls of the literalist methodology can be illustrated by looking at any textual document. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, for example, affirms freedom of speech. But we know that, to "shout fire in a crowded theater" (when there is no fire), for example, endangering public safety, does not fall under the protection of the First Amendment. Any text by its very nature is finite and limited, and therefore cannot be comprehensive. Therefore, to be a strict literalist is to live in constant conflict with common sense and with practical reason. According to the literalist classical scholars of Islam, "justice" is achieved only by being obedient to God and reason by itself is not to be trusted to decide what is just and unjust.

For these literalist, text-bound scholars, there are no objective standards of right or wrong by using reason alone. In the mind of the literalists, the killing of innocents, for example, is wrong not because we learn from experience or reason, but because that is what God says in the Qur'an and the Hadith. According to them, God could just as well have said, for example, in the scripture that the killing of innocents is right, and therefore that makes it right.

The god of these scholars is not therefore a merciful and rational God but a god of power whose motto is: "Might is right!" In order to preserve the absolute omnipotence of God, these scholars sacrifice rationality as an essential attribute of God.

As Prof. Robert Reilly writes in the article, "The Formidable Philosophical Obstacles to Islamic Constitutionalism":

"There is a realm within which man is legitimately semi-autonomous and sovereign. Through his reason, he is called upon [to] figure out how to rule it and himself ... God [in the Judeo-Christian tradition] speaks to man with equal force through his reason, as He does through revelation. Reason, therefore, is morally legitimate as a source of law. What is reasonable is morally good."

If we Muslims want to stand up and challenge the literalism of the text-bound scholars and the militants who are beheading, enslaving and persecuting people around the world alike, we need to develop an interpretative methodology that balances revelation with reason as in other rational, religious traditions.

The militants are idealistic and impatient, and part of an ideology that has essentially become frozen in time, while the other Muslims are more careful, patient and circumspect, and dwell in a tolerant society without resorting to violence.

That is why many of these literalists believe that peace, justice and mercy (all interpreted according to the classical Sharia) can be achieved only under the sovereignty or hegemony of Islamic rule. And that is also why the OIC (Organization of Islamic Conference, since renamed the Organization of Islamic Cooperation), in 1990 came up with its own version of a human rights declaration, the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam -- based on Sharia law -- to supersede the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, approved by the UN in 1948.

So the vital question is: Can't we Muslims also learn from all of human history and all of nature -- the arts and the sciences -- which are also created and originated from God, as in "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God," as stated in the U.S. Declaration of Independence?

There are signs and hints in the natural world that provide guidance from the Creator on a continuing basis, even after all the textual revelations. Although God has stopped sending His messages (revelations) through human messengers, He is still providing messages, in the form of natural phenomena in the world He created, so that human beings can experiment and learn, and benefit -- using reason and reflection.

Slavery and beheadings may have been suitable at some time in human history. But just because it is in the scriptural texts, it does not mean that we need to follow them to the letter so literally, for eternity -- unless we happen to agree with the literalists, and reject using reason and thinking to learn from the natural sciences and the experiences of human history.

A religion that prescribes killing or criminalizing apostates; condones institutionalized slavery, stoning, beheading, flogging, and amputations; which restricts and criminalizes freedom of speech and freedom of religion; commands the stoning of adulterers; develops a theory of constant state of war with non-believers; discriminates and demeans women and people of other religions is not only "The Religion of the Bigots" but it is also the Religion of the Bullies.

Classical Islamic law, developed over the history of Islam, is definitely not peaceful or benign, and therefore not suitable for this age; neither are its violent and grotesque progeny such as Islamism and jihadism.

If we Muslims believe that "true" Islam, which is genuinely aligned with the will of the Creator, must be fundamentally peaceful, comprehensively merciful and objectively just, then it is our duty to cleanse the traditional, literalist, classical Islam and purify it to make an Islam that is worthy to be called a beautiful religion.


Ahmed Vanya , based in San Jose, California, is a fellow at the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD).

Source: http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4894/beautifying-islam

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