RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Daily Iowan Editorial Board appears to have fallen prey to some very dangerous rhetoric – as though influenced by an un-American entity. Rather than provide an overview or opinion, their editorial presents a plethora of deceitful statements in defense of Islamic sharia law – preaching that it is compatible with religious liberty.

The Board began with an objection to a statement by Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal (R), which was, “America did not create religious liberty, religious liberty created America.” Iowans, it is because of our Founding Fathers’ understanding about our sacrosanct, inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that they left their oppressive homeland and established a republic, America, in which to enjoy those rights – so it is their religious liberty that created America.

Their second brainstorm suggested that sharia be included with international law! International law is legal rules, regulations, and guidelines by which countries will interact with each other to solve international disputes. It does NOT mean that every country should cede its individuality and its citizens’ rights to a body – the United Nations, no less – that will impose its decisions and edicts over the entire world.

The UN is most often a biased, tyrannical assemblage whose Islamic voting block frequently overlooks the truths in the Middle East. The Organization of Islamic Conference of the UN pressures the rest of the countries to impose worldwide limits on free speech, limits demanded by sharia. Islamic countries are home to harshly dominated, long suffering citizens who live with poverty, illiteracy, severe restrictions, enslavement, and the most sadistically brutal, barbaric behavior of any classification of creatures. Their sharia must never be imposed on others.

The Board submitted that opposition to sharia law is opposition to religious freedom; this is blatant propaganda. Under sharia, there is no freedom of religion, speech, thought, artistic expression, press, equality of people or equal justice for different classes. Sharia is the antithesis of democracy and its purpose is to ban laws that conflict with dictatorial Islam. Sharia would destroy our American Constitution.

Because of Islamic sharia, traditional invocations at Friday night high school football games were banned in Santa Fe, Texas; a science teacher in Ohio was fired for having a classroom Bible; a New Jersey high school coach was banned from praying before a football game; prayer around a school flagpole was banned in Clay County, Florida; the Ten Commandments were removed from schools in Muldrow, Oklahoma; some Texans were told that flying their American flags was offensive – in America! Some schools are yielding to removing lunchroom foods that Muslims find offensive.

Sharia succeeds when Americans do not speak out. Islamized textbooks are used to indoctrinate students; jihad is being taught in California; schoolgirls were forced to wear full burqas in some states; some students were required to “become Muslims for two weeks and learn prayers; and Ohio students were taken, sans parental permission, on a field trip to pray in a mosque.

While there are people who mass-murder, one factor especially matters: whether around them are individuals, or a circle of individuals, who encourage them to mass murder.

The young men leaving Britain to go fight in Syria are not going in spite of the teachings of certain religious leaders, but because of them.

When Christians, Jews or even other Muslims and others are targeted around the world by Islamists, we even hope that this urge has nothing to do with any of the texts or books or preachings or encouragements in the milieu from which the perpetrators come.

Today in America, Britain and most other Western countries we are still governed by politicians and bureaucrats who refuse to identify the principal form of fanaticism that threatens us. We are governed by elites who hesitate to say — if they ever say — what distinguishes the current threat of our time, radical Islam, as the latest group of jihadists, ISIS, establishes beachheads in Syria and Iraq and plants its flag at the border of Jordan and Turkey. In the blancmange of political correctness, which this refusal entails, we hear of the threat of “extremism” and “radicalism” in general. This season there is even talk of “violent extremism” in particular, as though violent extremism is an event like the weather, which could affect almost any sufferer at any time.

Of course in some ways it is understandable that this pretence should have come about. Rightly, nobody should claim to be targeting all Muslims; so there is a nervousness about singling out what is different — namely, violence — in one especially prominent ideology at the moment. Sometimes this nervousness, and the resultant spreading of blame, appear to be a justification. It did a few years ago when Anders Breivik in Norway appeared to some to have just demonstrated that anybody might be persuaded to plant car bombs in a city center or gun down innocent people in a youth camp. This horror, perhaps more than any other recent event, is wheeled out to assist those who wish to avoid the main issue. Our countries at the time were filled with claims that anybody who had ever been critical of radical Islam had in some way contributed to Breivik’s non-Islamic atrocity. These claims often came from the same people who refuse to blame any wider circle of influence for the outrages of the jihadists. What was, and is, strangest here is that it fails to notice the two most important differences between mass-murderers, such as Breivik or Timothy McVeigh, and the rest of us — and the difference between them and the sort of Islamists who have just killed three Israeli teenagers and threaten countries around the globe.

A delegation of American Jews was expelled last week from the African Union Summit, to which it had been invited. This happened because the delegates from Egypt, Iran and South Africa could not stand seeing the American Jews wearing the traditional Jewish skullcap. Did any of our leaders, including the president of the Spanish government, make the slightest venture of disgust or disapproval? No.

Never has any country had to fight its enemies simultaneously on so many fronts. The Jewish people have the right to live in peace everywhere and Israel has the right to self-defense to achieve peace.

First, sincerest condolences to the families of the three Israeli teenagers brutally kidnapped and killed by Palestinian terrorists in the West Bank on June 12, and whose lifeless bodies were found Monday near Hebron. Naftali Frankel, Gilad Shaar and Eyal Yifrach were killed for being three Jewish boys in a land where the enemies of Israel only aspire to generate terror, where they only dream of destroying the Jewish state by force. In the enemies’ twisted minds, killing Jews is a way to finish, if only a little, the State of Israel.

Israel knows all too well what suffering is all about. The anti-Jewish pogroms began almost a hundred years ago, well before the State of Israel was established, and before settlements, so hotly debated today, had begun to develop. If Jewish communities in Haifa or Hebron were under the threat of extinction in 1929, or in 1936 through 1939, it was because the Arabs have never accepted what the Bible and history teaches us: The Jewish people have roots in Palestine since time immemorial — thousands of years before Yasser Arafat invented the term “Palestinian people” in 1967. It is the same reason that the Arabs would not accept the 1947 UN partition plan to have two states, one for Arabs and the other for the Jewish people – precisely because one of them was for the Jewish people. And it is the same reason that they have suffered so many wars, intifadas, terror attacks, immoral delegitimization campaigns against Israel’s right to exist and repeated Iranian threats to “wipe Israel off the map.”

Unfortunately these three new murders have taken place in an increasingly problematic context for Israel and many Jewish communities in the world. Israel is an island of freedom and prosperity in an increasingly menacing and turbulent region. ISIS black flags are present at Gaza funerals; the Syrian war is destabilizing Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq; Fatah and Hamas have formed a new Palestinian coalition government, and there is no firm or coherent world reaction against a Palestinian Authority that has allied with terrorism. Further, the agreement with Iran that President Obama is cooking up does not guarantee that Tehran will renounce its current capability to make a nuclear bomb.