RUTHFULLY YOURS

The brouhaha surrounding the wedding reception of a Jaffa couple on Sunday evening is yet another example of ideology gone haywire. In this case, it was right-wing extremism on display, though turning private matters into political causes is something at which the radical Left excels as well.

When word got out about the upcoming nuptials of Mahmoud Mansour (an Israeli Arab) and Morel Malka (an Israeli Jew who converted to Islam), the Organization for the Prevention of Assimilation in the Holy Land, Lehava, went into action. Posting the couple’s wedding invitation on its Facebook page, the group called on the public to demonstrate outside the banquet hall in Rishon Lezion where the festivities were to be held, “wielding banners and bullhorns.”

Both threats against the groom and messages of congratulations ensued.

Fearing that violence would erupt during the festivities — particularly at this time of tension due to the war in Gaza — the groom petitioned the Rishon Lezion Magistrates’ Court to prevent the protest.

Judge Iryah Heuman Mordechai ruled that the protest could take place, but only at a distance of at least 200 meters away from the hall. She also ruled that the sides in the dispute could not contact each other, including via Facebook, for 90 days.

A few hundred people turned up at the event to condemn or support the couple, who hired 14 bodyguards for a high fee. Dozens of local police officers were also there to keep the peace. In the end, members of the “banners and bullhorns” crowd who tried to approach the hall were stopped; six were detained. Supporters waved balloons and posters wishing the couple well.

On Monday, politicians across the political spectrum weighed in on the wedding.

President Reuven Rivlin posted a congratulatory message on his Facebook page, wishing the couple “health, peace and joy.”

Health Minister Yael German sent a personal telegram stating: “On this, your day of rejoicing, I want to congratulate you and give you support. May you have many years together of happiness, love and tolerance.”

Finance Minister Yair Lapid admitted he would not want his son to marry a non-Jew.

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Primary: August 7, 2014

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U.S. Senate

Bob Corker (R) Next Election in 2018.
Lamar Alexander (R) Incumbent

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Albeit belated, and ever grudgingly, the non-Muslim world has been compelled to acknowledge ISIL’s ghastly, murderous jihad rampages against both the Christian and Yazidi religious minorities of northern Iraq.

Even now, however, no U.S. television network has been willing to air the explicit testimonies of both Yazidi and Christian refugees from these jihad depredations about the following salient issue: how local Sunni Muslims, their erstwhile “neighbors,” not only aided and abetted ISIL, but were more responsible for killings, other atrocities, and expulsions than the “foreign” invading jihadists. For example, Sabah Hajji Hassan, a 68-year-old Yazidi, lamented,

The (non-Iraqi) jihadists were Afghans, Bosnians, Arabs and even Americans and British fighters. But the worst killings came from the people living among us, our (Sunni) Muslim neighbors. The Metwet, Khawata and Kejala tribes-they were all our neighbors. But they joined the IS [Islamic State; ISIL], took heavy weapons from them, and informed on who was Yazidi and who was not. Our neighbors made the IS takeover possible.

The Yazidi Hassan’s observations independently validated this prior, concordant assessment (video here) by an Christian refugee from Mosul:

[Unnamed Christian refugee]: We left Mosul because ISIL came to the city. The [Sunni] people of Mosul embraced ISIS and drove the Christians out of the city. When ISIS entered Mosul, the people hailed them and drove out the Christians. Why did they expel just the Christians from Mosul? There are many sects in Mosul. Why just the Christians? This is nothing new. Even before, the Christians could not go anywhere. The Christians have faced threats of murder, kidnapping, jizya [deliberately humiliating “poll-tax,” per Koran 9:29, imposed upon non-Muslim Jews/Christians/Zoroastrians, vanquished by jihad, along with a slew of other “sacralized” debasing regulations] This is nothing new. […] I was told to leave Mosul. They said that this was a Muslim country, not a Christian one. I am being very honest. They said that this land belongs to Islam and that Christians should not live there.

[Interviewer]: Who told you that?

[Christian refugee]: The people who embraced ISIS, the people who lived there with us…

Writing about Israel is a booming field. No news agency, be it ever so humble, can avoid embedding a few correspondents and a dog’s tail of stringers into Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, to sit in cafes clicking away on their laptops, meeting up with leftist NGO’s and the oppressed Muslim of the week.
At a time when international desks are being cut to the bone, this is the one bone that the newshounds won’t give up. Wars can be covered from thousands of miles away, genocide can go to the back page, but, when a rock flies in the West Bank, there had better be a correspondent with a fake continental accent and a khaki shirt to cover it.

Writing about Israel isn’t hard. Anyone who has consumed a steady diet of media over the years already knows all the bullet points. The trick is arranging them artistically, like so many wilted flowers, in the story of this week’s outrage.

Israel is hot, even in the winter, with the suggestion of violence brimming under the surface. It should be described as a “troubled land.” Throw in occasional ironic biblical references and end every article or broadcast by emphasizing that peace is still far away.

It has two types of people; the Israelis who live in posh houses stocked with all the latest appliances and the Arabs who live in crumbling shacks that are always in danger of being bulldozed. The Israelis are fanatical, the Arabs are passionate. The Israelis are hate-filled, while the Arabs are embittered. The Israelis have everything while the Arabs have nothing.

Avoid mentioning all the mansions that you pass on the way to interviewing some Palestinian Authority or Hamas bigwig. When visiting a terrorist prisoner in an Israeli jail, be sure to call him a militant, somewhere in the fifth paragraph, but do not mention the sheer amount of food in the prison, especially if he is on a hunger strike. If you happen to notice that the prisoners live better than most Israelis, that is something you will not refer to. Instead describe them as passionate and embittered. Never ask them how many children they killed or how much they make a month. Ask them what they think the prospects for peace are. Nod knowingly when they say that it’s up to Israel.

The Islamic State is turning into a huge public relations problem for groups like the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and its allies. For years they have insisted that Islam is a religion of peace that has nothing whatsoever to do with the terrorism committed with alarming regularity in its name, and that the people responsible for linking Islam with terrorism were not Islamic jihad terrorists, but “Islamophobic” opponents of jihad terror. But then comes along a group calling itself The Islamic State, committing unimaginable atrocities and presenting each one as an authentic embodiment of Islamic texts and teachings, and the deception campaign at which CAIR officials have labored so assiduously for so many years, and with such great success, is in danger of crashing around their uneasy necks.

Take, for example, the recent revelation that, according to the UN News Centre, “some 1,500 Yazidi and Christian persons may have been forced into sexual slavery.” A similar kidnapping by Islamic jihadists in Nigeria recently horrified the world, but much overlooked was the fact that such behavior is sanctioned by the Qur’an. According to Islamic law, Muslim men can take “captives of the right hand” (Qur’an 4:3, 4:24, 33:50). The Qur’an says: “O Prophet! Lo! We have made lawful unto thee thy wives unto whom thou hast paid their dowries, and those whom thy right hand possesseth of those whom Allah hath given thee as spoils of war” (33:50). 4:3 and 4:24 extend this privilege to Muslim men in general, as does this passage. “Certainly will the believers have succeeded: They who are during their prayer humbly submissive, and they who turn away from ill speech, and they who are observant of zakah, and they who guard their private parts except from their wives or those their right hands possess, for indeed, they will not be blamed” (Qur’an 23:1-6).

These passages have not gone unnoticed. The Egyptian Sheikh Abu-Ishaq al-Huwayni declared in May 2011 that “we are in the era of jihad,” and that meant Muslims would take slaves. In a subsequent interview he elaborated:

Jihad is only between Muslims and infidels. Spoils, slaves, and prisoners are only to be taken in war between Muslims and infidels. Muslims in the past conquered, invaded, and took over countries. This is agreed to by all scholars—there is no disagreement on this from any of them, from the smallest to the largest, on the issue of taking spoils and prisoners. The prisoners and spoils are distributed among the fighters, which includes men, women, children, wealth, and so on.

The interior of the Ferguson Market and Liquor Store is littered with broken bottles and scattered snacks. Despite the plywood boards covering the windows and doors, looters with their faces covered in bandanas helped themselves to anything they could find as those who came to memorialize Michael Brown carried on his work.

The violence in Ferguson didn’t begin when a police officer shot Michael Brown. It began when a 300 lb thug robbed the Ferguson Market and abused a clerk. The release of the video showing the obese criminal assaulting the clerk led to a terrified statement from the store manager that he had not called the police and had nothing to do with the release of the video.

“They kill us if they think we are responsible,” he said.

That is what this conflict is about. The police exist so that Ferguson Market and a hundred other stores can do business without being robbed or murdered. Darren Wilson, the officer who shot Michael Brown, was holding down the thin line that makes it possible for stores to stay open.

When the police pulled back, the rioting and looting began in earnest. Governor Nixon, a critic of the police was forced to turn to the National Guard. The police were never the problem. The looters and rioters were.

The photos of protesters with their hands in the air confronting police in riot gear told a very misleading story. But the real story was sitting in a video held by the Ferguson police and the Justice Department. It was the video of Michael Brown assaulting a clerk at Ferguson Market.

The Justice Department and Governor Nixon did not want the video released because it put the emphasis back where it should have been all along. This was not a conflict between Michael Brown and the police. It was a conflict between Michael Brown and a Ferguson Market worker.

We are all that worker.

Dead-Bird ‘Streamers’ at a California Solar Plant
Reaching temps of 1,000ºF, this Obama-favored plant incinerates up to 28,000 birds annually.

California’s massive Ivanpah solar power plant can produce enough electricity for 140,000 households — but the environmental cost is nothing less than an avian slaughter.

The plant’s 350,000 mirrors bounce sizzling sunlight to the tops of three 40-story boiler towers, heating steam for turbine electricity generators. Temperatures near the towers can reach up to 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, heat certainly sufficient to fry a fowl.

“Workers at the state-of-the-art solar plant in the Mojave Desert have a name for birds that fly through the plant’s concentrated sun rays — ‘steamers,’ for the smoke plume that comes from birds that ignite in midair,” the Associated Press reports this week.

That’s a common occurrence, the AP continues; federal investigators saw a bird burn roughly every two minutes. Ivanpah owner BrightSource estimates that “about a thousand” die each year, and one environmental group says the plant kills up to 28,000 birds each year.

We must do much more to end the persecution of Christians and other religious minorities.

All over the world, millions of innocent people are facing persecution, imprisonment, and even death because of their religious beliefs.

In 2013, the world witnessed the largest displacement of religious communities in recent memory, according to the State Department’s Annual Report on International Religious Freedom. And the trend in 2014 is only getting worse.

But perhaps nowhere has intolerance, ruthlessness, and evil combined to destroy people of faith more than it has in Iraq, where the Islamic State is engaged in a systemic effort to wipe out the Christian presence there, along with all other religious minorities.

The Islamic State, an extreme Sunni militant group that emerged from al-Qaeda, has rampaged across Iraq, ridding towns of Christians and other religious minorities, just as it did in parts of Syria over the last year, persecuting that country’s Christians. It has used brutal tactics such as beheadings, rapes, forced conversions, and forced marriages of any non-Sunnis in its path.

The United States intervened militarily to assist 40,000 Iraqi Yazidis — a religion that fuses Christianity, Islam, and ancient Zoroastrianism — who were literally stuck on a mountaintop. Until U.S. and Kurdish military operations helped clear a path to safety, their options were to stay and die of thirst, or relocate and be massacred by the Islamic State militants waiting at the base of the mountain.

OSWIECIM, Poland

Walking among the starvation cells and gas chambers where more than a million souls perished, it is hard to explain to my 12-year-old son how the free world allowed this happen. Why did the world’s democracies not stop the Nazi movement in its infancy — before it indoctrinated millions with its hateful ideology, took control of a great power, built its military might, invaded foreign lands and constructed death camps like the one here at Auschwitz?

The depressing answer is: for the same reason that the world’s democracies have done almost nothing to stop the rise of the Islamic State.

It is difficult to describe the feeling of spending a day at Auschwitz and then watching the images emanating from the Middle East, where the Islamic State is carrying out acts of unspeakable barbarism — beheading unbelievers; sticking decapitated heads on posts; burying women and children alive; randomly shooting pedestrians and motorists; even crucifying — yes, crucifying — its opponents.

So proud are the Islamic State’s leaders of these crimes against humanity that they broadcast them for the world to see on Twitter and YouTube. In one propaganda video, they show hundreds of victims being trucked to an execution site, where they are filmed pleading for their lives before being marched toward open pits and shot one by one. Islamic State militants recently tweeted a photo of a decapitated head with this message: “This is our ball. It is made of skin #WorldCup.”

When it takes over Christian neighborhoods, the Islamic State paints the letter “N” on the homes and businesses of Christians (marking them as followers of the Nazarene, a pejorative reference to Christians in Arabic) before confiscating them and giving them to Muslims. It runs camps where it indoctrinates children to believe that all non-Muslims are sub-human, “apostates” and “infidels” who should be exterminated. Vice News recently interviewed children undergoing such indoctrination by the Islamic State. One young boy looks into the camera and says “In the name of God my name is Daoud and I am 14 years old. I’d like to join the Islamic State and to kill with them, because they fight infidels and apostates.” Another declares: “We promise you car bombs and explosives. . . . I swear to God, we will divide America in two.”

The ZimPiraeus traversed the Panama Canal two weeks ago, then turned its 964-foot deck north, toward California, where it was scheduled to offload tens of thousands of tons of cargo at the Port of Oakland this weekend — just like 1,897 other container ships last year. But the ZimPiraeus, which arrived in San Francisco Bay on Sunday afternoon, is not unloading — and might not anytime soon.

The problem with the Piraeus is that Israel Corporation, Israel’s largest holding company, founded by the Jewish state’s government in 1968, owns 32 percent of the Piraeus’s operator, Zim Integrated Shipping Services. For the protesters who have formed picket lines at Oakland’s docks, the container ship moored in the bay is a symbol of “apartheid,” “Zionism,” and “imperialism.”

Last week posters appeared advertising a planned protest against the incoming ship: “Block the Boat, End Israeli Apartheid.” The sponsors — a Bay Area coalition of 70 organizations that includes such varied partners as the Arab Resource and Organizing Center and Critical Resistance, which opposes the “prison-industrial complex” – wrote: “Every week, the Israeli-owned Zim shipping line docks and unloads its cargo at the Port of Long Beach. Let’s boycott Israeli Apartheid and stop the ship from ever unloading in our town. From Seattle to Oakland to Los Angeles: Turn the Israeli ship around!”

Waving Palestinian flags and posters calling for the end of “Israeli apartheid” and for a “Free Gaza,” protesters first gathered on Saturday to find that the Piraeus’s arrival was delayed — a postponement protesters claimed as a victory. The Guardian reported that between 2,000 and 3,000 protesters participated in the demonstration; local media claimed it was about 500. The ship finally arrived on Sunday afternoon, but dockworkers from the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10 were unable to pass picket lines.

Zim is no stranger to this activity in Oakland. In 2010, pro-Gaza activists who were protesting Israel’s raid on a Turkish flotilla attempting to break the blockade of the Gaza Strip managed to turn away a Zim ship. The victory was short-lived: As even organizers acknowledge, a Zim ship unloads in the Port of Oakland about once a week. But they hope this latest demonstration will have a longer-term impact: “Our intention is to really build a movement here,” one organizer told The Guardian. “Our goal in the long run is for the workers themselves to refuse to unload that ship, stand with us, and take a position against Israeli apartheid.”