RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Air-Raid Shelters on the Road to Masada
The road to Masada, my road at any rate, began not in Jerusalem but three weeks earlier in Northcote, that quiet, secure and exquisitely fashionable suburb on the outer edge of inner-city Melbourne, where a dinner invitation saw the table talk soon turn to Israel. The television news that night had led with reports from Gaza—images of rockets heading north interspersed with grim-faced Israelis asserting that enough was enough. “You can’t support Israel, surely not?” marvelled a fellow guest, a chap with some sort of academic sinecure who had begun airing his impeccably righteous views well before the crudités were whisked away.

Abbott, the Catholic reactionary … asylum seekers tormented … “concentration camps” … Rupert Murdoch … the “tragedy” and “shame” of the carbon tax’s imminent repeal …

If you watch ABC television, listen to Radio National or once read Mike Carlton in the Sydney Morning Herald, there will be no need to cite another word or talking point, for it was all there in my fellow guest’s laundry list of the lockstep Left’s latest crusades and grievances. Had it not been for the irregular sprays of spittle that marked his more animated complaints, he might have been a life-size example of those talking dolls with the programmed catchphrases small children expect and enjoy. Just pull the string and out the clichés tumble to their immediate delight.

“Seriously,” he continued, “I’ve got nothing against Jews, except when they act like Nazis.” This observation passed for wit, and the table was ringed with wry smiles at Zionism’s evil being so pithily laid bare. Our hostess was a lovely woman, someone whose passions run hotter for hemlines and health fads, and this being Melbourne, her favourite football team, than international affairs. She had laboured long and hard to prepare the evening’s fare, so rather than ruin her night, to my shame I let the comment pass with nothing more muscular than a meek and muttered, “That’s not really fair.” If there is a book of postmodern etiquette it must surely advise that taking up such a gauntlet is best done over dessert, when harsh words can no longer ruin a fine main course of well-cooked organic beef.

On the way home, modern Melbourne was John Batman’s sleepy village: light traffic, no perils but for unilluminated cyclists and those low-rise roundabouts which town planners have insisted on placing at nearly every intersection. If there was a moment of anxiety it came at the roadblock near the zoo in Royal Park, but it was only a sobriety checkpoint manned by Victoria Police with their blow-in-this demands. It is an ostentatiously safe place, this city on the Yarra, protected from unpleasantness and peril at every round-the-roundabout turn of life’s daily journeys. Safe to live and raise a family, to pursue love if that joy is not already yours. And safe, too, to mount abstraction’s pulpit and sermonise from the great heights of moral clarity, as the blowhard from the ivory tower earlier demonstrated, about the murderous shortcomings of others in a distant and far, far more perilous land.

How very different are the checkpoints on the highway from Jerusalem to Masada. They are overseen not by courteous constables but, for the most part, kids in olive-drab fatigues who wear Galil assault rifles on their shoulders and the expressions of much older, harder-bitten men. Their gaze as they check the passing cars for bombs eliminates all doubt that this is any sort of country for theorists and dinner-party polemics. Off to the distant left on the outward leg of the journey you could see Jericho, where the walls came tumbling down. Now there are fresh walls of one sort or another defining all of Israel’s borders and landscape—long, high walls to keep out the human bombs who, a few years back, were taking such a dreadful toll in pizza shops and coffee bars, on buses and at a teenage girl’s bat mitzvah. No exploding Palestinian has done much damage for quite a while, and the walls—whether of cement or razor wire, arrays of high-tech motion sensors or cordons sanitaires of guns and living flesh—are a big part of the reason. You’re definitely not in Melbourne any more, you are reminded, as the urban oasis of water-blessed Jericho shrinks in the rear window, its receding skyline a bar chart of minarets clumped in spikes and thickets beneath a low pillow of brown air. It is empty desert in every other direction, and you wonder why anyone would fight for it. On rocky, bleached hillsides the few scrawny sprigs that pass for bushes must have perversity encoded in their DNA. You couldn’t run a single sheep on twenty acres of this real estate, yet it is soaked with blood and desire in equal measure.

Down to the Dead Sea and along its eastern shore the road runs, the only signs of human life an odd cluster here or there of Bedouin humpies. A small boy leading a goat on a rope is the only human to put in an appearance since the last checkpoint, way back on Jerusalem’s outskirts. And then, finally, Masada, a rearing butte just down the road from the cave where they found the Dead Sea Scrolls. Delivered to the summit by cable car, you look down on a crazy pavement of wadis, of earth scored and fractured into a thousand fissures by the fierce but irregular downpours that dump their moisture further to the west and long ago washed away the last semblance of fertility.

There are curious rectangles, too, each defined by low walls of piled stones. The guide explains them as vestiges of the Roman camps with which the general Titus ringed the entire massif in a ruthlessly methodical tightening of the noose that doomed the last holdouts of a hopeless revolt against imperial rule. Titus’s ramp to the summit is there as well—most of it, anyway—to boggle the mind that such a massive undertaking could have been built at all, let alone with baskets of dirt and rocks hauled by hand beneath a slave-driver’s whip. It did the trick, this improbable construction, and the wall was breached by siege engines block-and-tackled to the top, where the conquerors found only the bodies of the defenders, all dead by their own hands.

Masada is modern Israel’s mythology and shrine, a place as sacred in imagination as in stone, where Israelis take vows that Jews will never be driven from their homeland. “Masada will not fall again,” they pledge. Down south, the armoured columns were pushing deeper into Gaza. You could hear only the wind and the crows in the ruins of the fortress Herod built and see no further than Jordan’s hills beyond the Dead Sea’s shimmer, but it was the sound and spectre of tanks and gunships down south that clattered in the imagination.

At Masada’s foot there is a resort where you can get a decent meal—no cheese with your meat, though—and take a dip in the Dead Sea, the lowest and by far the saltiest body of water on the planet. The water is hot and thick, verging on the viscous, and the first splash makes you think of what it might be like to dive head-first into a full spittoon, the novelty of floating chest-high above the surface doing little to minimise the unpleasantness of the experience.

More off-putting, however, are the small placards riveted to what seems every second Israeli wall. All display a stick figure bolting towards a flight of downward stairs, and each points to the closest air-raid shelter. Over the past few weeks, as the rockets rose from Gaza, it has been wise to make a mental note of the nearest bolt hole. The warning sirens are unsettling as well, especially for a visitor unaccustomed to the notion of death dropping suddenly from a sky of unrelenting blue, and they erupt whenever Israel’s homegrown Iron Dome defence system detects an incoming threat. In the towns and kibbutzim closest to Gaza, the ones that have copped the recent worst of it, there might be thirty seconds’ warning, on a good day perhaps as much as a minute, in which to fling yourself into a cellar or a hole.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk realised some time ago that Muslims belong to a creed that cripples intelligent inquiry and progress, fosters backwardness, poverty, the oppression of women, and bigotry. Apologists can turn a blind eye to those deficiencies, but Islam is as Islam does.

ICM Research – which so far as I can tell is a reputable organisation – recently undertook a poll for Putin’s Russian news agency Rossiya Segodnya. The poll assessed how ISIS is viewed across Britain, Germany and France. Amazingly, if the results are to be believed, 16% of those polled in France had a favourable view of ISIS.

Equally amazingly to me, only 31% of respondents apparently placed ISIS in the ‘very unfavourable’ box, as distinct from an equal number who chose the option of “somewhat unfavourable’. I wonder how many heads ISIS has to cut off before your average French man and woman takes particular umbrage? The French result of 16% compares with 7% in Britain and just 2% in Germany. Let’s concentrate on France.

The Muslim population of France is supposed to be about 7%. I have read comments to the effect that this doesn’t square with the percentage of those viewing ISIS favourably and that perhaps the official figures understate the Muslim population. How queer this all is. Surely, even if Muslims accounted for a much greater proportion of the population, the vast majority would be peaceful and moderate and would therefore reject the savagery of ISIS? Aren’t the vast majority on the side of Team France? Maybe not, mon Dieu!

Isn’t it about time that we who carry the torch for Western civilisation — there is no one else here by the way, Winston Churchill is dead — started to face facts before facts bury us and our descendents? There is no such thing as a moderate and peaceful Muslim. There are moderate and peaceful people who happen to be Muslims. But that is not the same thing. Muslims belong to a traditional creed that cripples intelligent inquiry and progress, creating backwardness and poverty, the subjection of women, stultifying oppression and bigotry wherever it predominates.

Give Mustafa Kemal Ataturk some credit for knowing what he was doing in changing Turkey into a secular state in the 1920s to bring about modernity and economic progress. Islam and the modern world don’t go together. They will clash. And one will prevail. He knew that. Why is it so hard for the political class in the West to grasp what he grasped almost a century ago?

Islam, whose reputation for moderation and peacefulness ironically soared among the West’s political class, George Bush included, after the devastation of 9/11, is demonstrating in North Africa and in the Middle East that it is far removed from a religion of peace. It is a religion which is patently adept at lending itself to violence in its name.

Refugees fleeing the advancing Islamic State forces in western Iraq tell tales of savagery. The accounts have a number of common factors. A new report just issued by Amnesty International notes that the Islamic State has begun “a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing” [1] in northern Iraq. The report focuses on the actions taken by Islamic State forces against Yezidis living in the Sinjar mountain area of Iraq, close to the border with Syria. This area fell to IS in early August.

The Amnesty report lays bare a reality in which the Islamic State appears to be seeking to terminate the existence of non-Muslim religions on its soil. It describes, for example, two incidents that took place in the Yezidi villages of Qiniyeh and Kocho in mid-August. In both cases, the males of the villages — men and boys — were rounded up, forced into vehicles and then taken out of the villages and shot. Women, meanwhile, were abducted by the jihadis.

IS have established a slave market in Mosul, where women are sold for prices ranging from $5-25.

Christian and Yezidi places of worship and Shia mosques have been systematically vandalized or destroyed by the advancing Islamic State forces.

That the Islamic State is committing crimes against humanity is clear. What is less clear is the nature of the western policy toward the emergent jihadi state.

The U.S. response in Iraq, it should be said, has been firm. Very plainly, the administration drew a red line in front of Baghdad and the Kurdish capital of Erbil and made clear that the Islamic State would not be permitted to enter these areas. As a result, the IS advance on Erbil stopped 45 km from the city and remains stopped. The jihadis understood after the first U.S. airstrikes that if they attempted a rush for the city they would be wiped out from the air.

With the help of U.S. air power and special forces, the Kurds and the Iraqi army are now pushing the jihadis back from the easternmost of their conquests in Iraq. The Mosul Dam has been won back. The siege of Amerli has been lifted.

But its not quite clear what happens next. And there is a danger of goals being set which the west will not then seriously attempt to achieve. President Obama recently defined the goal of U.S. policy as to “degrade and destroy” IS. The Islamic State currently stretches from Mosul in Iraq all the way to Syria’s border with Turkey. It is hard to see how it could be destroyed by air power alone. It is also hard to identify a ground force among the myriad forces operating today in Iraq and Syria which could make a serious bid to destroy it on the ground.

When Steven Sotloff was abducted last summer while crossing the border between Turkey and Syria, serious efforts were made on the part of colleagues, friends and family members to keep secret the fact that the American journalist was not only Jewish, but was also an Israeli citizen.

The belief guiding the people involved in this campaign to prevent Sotloff’s Islamist kidnappers from learning of his roots was that the young man’s life would be in even graver danger if the truth about him emerged. In retrospect, we now know that his days were numbered anyway. Being an American, it turns out, was sufficient cause for Sotloff, like the photojournalist James Foley before him, to be decapitated on camera by the Islamic State operative known by his comrades-in-arms as Jihadi John.

It did not matter to the Islamic State group that Sotloff had undergone a voluntary — albeit “quickie” — conversion to Islam while in Egypt, reporting from Tahrir Square on the revolution that replaced ousted President Hosni Mubarak with the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi.

As a liberal, Sotloff likely harbored a degree of sympathy for the region’s anti-Israel and anti-Western forces. And one imagines he would have shared such views with his captors over the course of the year he spent with them, if for no other reason than self-preservation. But this was of no interest to the British national who ended up beheading him.

Regardless of any personal relationship that might have developed between Sotloff and the hooded butchers whose company he was forced to endure for 13 months, their sociopathic religious ideology sealed his sad fate. To them, he was merely a means to an end. In their eyes, he — like Foley and the British hostage currently on their literal and figurative chopping block — was simply a slab of flesh to be used as a bargaining chip and then slaughtered as a “message to America.”

And though most Americans actually have been getting the message that the Islamic State group and an increasing number of other radical Muslim groups possess a blood-lust that is part and parcel of their mission to murder all “infidels,” President Barack Obama continues to deny it.

The government is not the only prey on our freedoms. Islam is its major partner in that crime.

The ongoing abrogation of the Constitution and the freedoms it was established to protect and guarantee is complemented by the Islamic campaign to abrogate them, as well. What makes it possible are multiculturalism (no culture is superior to others), political correctness (many things are unmentionable, or mentionable only in euphemistic terms), diversity (a Brunswick Stew of cultural traditions, social relationships, and even political systems can enrich American culture and society), and subjectivism (all systems of values, moral, political and even esthetic, are mere prejudices, with no basis in reality).

Abrogation of the “peaceful” Koranic verses by the violent ones, and the abrogation of the U.S. Constitution by Islamic Sharia law (not that Muslims need any help from Congress and Obama to accomplish that) is an established goal by all the Islamic organizations in the U.S. But, first, let’s define the term. Merriam-Webster online:

: to abolish by authoritative action : annul

: to treat as nonexistent

As virtually every Islamic scholar, past and present, has preached, the later violent verses and dictats in the Koran abolish the earlier “peaceful” ones. They may as well have never existed, because the Koran especially was purported dictated in its entirety into Mohammad’s ear, and Mohammad, an illiterate bandit and killer, in turned supposedly dictated it to unknown scribes. (See Robert Spencer’s book, Did Muhammad Exist? An Inquiry Into Islam’s Obscure Origins). The Koran really didn’t begin to be assembled, collated, edited, expunged of “unauthentic” attributions, and disseminated by Islamic scholars until centuries after Mohammad’s death.

Before examining how Islam would abrogate our freedoms, we should examine some alternating examples of how the Koran abrogates its “peaceful” (Mansūkh) verses with the abrogating ones (Nāsikh).

On imposing jizya, or a poll or protection tax on “infidels.”

My first special article for nearly two months highlights that Israeli technology is fundamental to everything we use or consume. Modern life would be impossible without Israel.
There is some really bad news for the lunatic anti-Israel BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) brigade. Virtually every electronic device in the world is now produced using Israeli technology. The systems manufactured by Yavne-based Orbotech are used globally to produce almost every printed circuit board on the planet. So when you tell the BDS crazies to dispose of all their electronic equipment, here are some recent news reports relating to other everyday items that they also need to steer well clear of.

1. Doctors and medicine

BDS advocates must never approach hospitals or GP surgeries because Israeli discoveries, treatments and life-saving devices dominate the medical arena. Latest advances include treatments for pancreatic cancer and bladder cancer; a vaccine against avian flu; improved methods for diagnosing ADHD and blood clots; a new durable material for hip replacements; an app for diabetics; a watch that prevents heart attacks and safer cancer radiation therapy.

2. Water, food and drink

There is seldom a day without an announcement from one of Israel’s prolific water treatment companies. It may be Miya, saving billions of gallons of water in the Americas, South East Asia, South Africa and Australia; or RWL water, supplying water treatment systems to America’s nuclear energy industry. And the BDS mob will soon need to avoid most well-known food and drink products as the top companies in the US food and beverage industry are adopting Israeli water solutions in their manufacturing processes.

3. Agricultural produce

Israeli companies, products and innovative methods have revolutionized the agricultural industry in many countries. Israel has established twenty “centers of excellence” in India, providing technological solutions to agricultural issues. Netafim started propagating Israeli technology in 1965 with its drip irrigation system – now popular even in Arab countries. Netafim has just completed a successful international pilot project of its uManage platform, which helps farmers to monitor irrigation/fertilizer performance and yields. Meanwhile, even apparently small-scale Israeli innovations can help feed billions of needy people. Israelis Moti Cohen and Mendi Pollak won the $20,000 top prize in the Pears Challenge. Their Livingbox “mini-farm” can grow vegetables anywhere, with a self-sustaining “closed loop” of energy and nutrition.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEpPknWiCa0

American and European leaders are “shocked” that the Islamic State (IS) barbarians beheaded two American reporters, Steven J. Sotloff and James Foley. Their “shock” is disingenuous and troubling. They react as though such barbarism is something new among Islamists. It is anything but. And if not earlier, then certainly in the aftermath of al Qaeda’s attacks on the U.S. on September 11, 2001, a spike in Islamic groups’ and individuals’ barbaric crimes has been reported worldwide.

Islamist beheading is nothing new. Open a Quran in any translation to find the instructions that the IS and other jihadists groups are following, in the name ‘the Beneficent, the Merciful Allah.’ Bloody fighting as prescribed in the Quran serve as the foundation of their religion of War.

Here are a few examples: The Book of Muhammad, verse 4 (47:4) – “Therefore, when ye meet the Unbelievers (in fight), strike off their heads; at length; then when you have made wide Slaughter among them, carefully tie up the remaining captives: thereafter (is the time for) either generosity or ransom: Until the war lays down its burdens.”

According to the Book of Al-Maeda, verse 33 (5:33) -“The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger, and strive with might and main for mischief through the land is: execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land: that is their disgrace in this world, and a heavy punishment is theirs in the Hereafter.”

And the Book of Al-Anfal, verse 12 ( 8:12) – “I (Allah) will instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers: smite ye above their necks and smite all their finger-tips off.”

The IS and other jihadists are doing their best to follow the Quran’s barbaric instructions, using machetes, the popular modern version of the Prophet’s 7th-century sword. Indeed, a sword features in the national flags of Iran–the center of Shia radicalism, and Saudi Arabia–the center of Sunni/Wahhabi radicalism. The sword is not merely a symbol. The sword represents WAR. the most important value for this radical regimes.

The Saudi kingdom carries out barbaric physical punishments today as they have done since Ibn Saud founded it in 1932. Cutting off hands of thieves, stoning to death, beheading and crucifying those who violated the sharia, are carried out regularly.

Russians are stupid. They should send Hamas fighters into the Ukraine: they’re undetectable.

Media attention has shifted from Gaza to the Ukraine where more than 2000 people have been killed since April. How many civilians, soldiers, children? No breakdown is deemed necessary. But the situation is troubling, Russia is accused of invading, economic sanctions are traded like gunfire, the image of pan-European peace is tarnished.

And then there is DAESH. The mother of kidnapped journalist Steven Sotloff appealed by video to the Caliph, begging for mercy, pleading with the Caliph not to punish her son for acts of a government over which he has no control. Declaring that she has learned much about Islam, she asks the Caliph to follow the example of the prophet Mohamed who protected the People of the Book. Similar appeals have been made in the past, many kept private, others made public. Is there a single example of one that was successful? Allow me to express my doubts. [September 2–Steven Sotloff was beheaded, as promised] What works is money, prisoner release, arms, safe passage. Not appeals for mercy, not misconceptions about Islam.

The Daily Mail reports that a guard from one of the prisons where James Foley had been held was executed the day after Foley was beheaded. Was Abu Ubaida Almaghribi really guilty of giving information to British intelligence or was John-the-knife pissed off because the Brits identified him so quickly?

Meanwhile, some journalists were still foaming at the mouth in Gaza. A recent issue of Libération fell into my hands the other day. After reading a human interest story from the ruins of Shujaiyeh, I had a fleeting thought of inviting the author, Luc Mathieu, to face me in an honest public debate. That’s probably as hopeless as the heartfelt plea from Sotloff’s mother. Mathieu’s double-page spread of bitter complaints against a background of rubble is a variation on the theme of “Why did they destroy my house? I’m not Hamas…” No one is Hamas, no Hamas fighters were anywhere in reach, no rocket launch pads were on the rooftop and no tunnel entrances at ground level. Well, ok, maybe a little tunnel entrance, but it’s no reason to bomb us to smithereens. The stink of putrefaction and the smell of raw hatred rise in crescendo, accusations mount skyward against the unfair air raids and land with disgusting details of desecration by Israeli soldiers bivouacked in the al Mghani home during the operation. They made a hole in the wall for their sniper, smashed up everything in the kitchen, left their excrements in the room with the birdcages… the cages are empty now. There is no attempt at verification, no other side of the story, no hard facts… it’s not journalism. It’s take my word for it because the victims are howling in pain. So what is it doing in a newspaper and what is its purpose? To fuel hatred of Israelis. And, since there aren’t so many of them here in France, Jews will do. The article ends with an implicit justification for future attacks. “Saïd” (who requested his real name not be used) says he tried to enlist in Hamas but was rejected because he doesn’t know how to shoot. The journalist asks Saïd’s 17 year-old son if he’d join up. “I have just one thing to say: look around, look at our houses bombed to rubble. You’ll understand what I’m going to do.”

Anti-Israel propaganda has been driven from the start by lies distortions and a massive rewriting of history. Blame for everything is piled on the Jews, while the crimes of the Arabs, including the Palestinians, are exonerated.

The American Vice-Consul, along with British officers and the British High Commissioner, Sir Alan Cunningham, stated at the time that the Arabs were encouraging flight while the Jews were doing all in their power to prevent it.

The Hagana’s behavior was the exact opposite of “ethnic cleansing.” Once order was restored, Arabs were appointed to key posts and part of the supplies originally earmarked for the Jewish inhabitants were given freely to the Arabs.

Just now I’m feeling a bit ashamed of being Irish. Although our music, dance, and Nobel-prize winning literature have helped us punch above our weight in the ring of international culture, our politics has never been a model for anyone — and it is getting worse.

Back in 2011, for instance, Israel’s Foreign Ministry stated that Ireland had undoubtedly become the most hostile country to Israel in the European Union, “pushing all of Europe’s countries to a radical and uncompromising approach.”

Oddly enough, Ireland also has a reputation as a country relatively free from anti-Semitism. According to John Gallen, anti-Jewish incidents are thirty-two times more likely in the U.S. than in the Poblacht na hÉireann. One of the reasons there are almost no anti-Semitic incidents in Ireland is that there are very few Jews in the Irish Republic in the first place: under 2000 (0.04% of the population).

This information is based on data from the European Jewish Congress and the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism, Tel-Aviv University; but I remain sceptical.

If you are a Jew in Turkey not even a funeral is peaceful.

Just imagine a Turkish Jew having a legal dispute with a Muslim Turk and facing this judge in the courtroom…

As usual, apparently Muslims are allowed to kill Muslims as they like, only Jews are not.

Nearly three years ago, the Israeli news site Ynetnews.com published an opinion piece written by a Turkish-Jewish girl. She wrote: “…I have never had the need to discuss my Jewish identity, let alone my Israeli identity… We are a Jewish family with a connection to Israel, and as fit for a Turkish family we enjoy… freedom of religious rituals and worship. Holidays and vacations, Jewish schools, synagogues, and Jewish after-school clubs, all out in the open, and with no reason to fear… (Nov. 17, 2011)”

Just when I suspected that the author must be describing a Turkey other than the one I lived in, her final line confirmed that it was the same Turkey: “Despite my love for Turkey, I have chosen to remain anonymous, in case, well, you know…” Well, I knew…

Last month, Georgia and Jak Karako, a prominent, affluent Jewish couple, were found stabbed to death in their apartment in Istanbul’s upscale Ortakoy neighbourhood, amid President-elect Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s thundering speeches that, “Israel was worse than Hitler,” and regular attacks on Israel’s diplomatic missions in Ankara and Istanbul, including rocks thrown at — and hundreds of angry Turks trying to break into — the diplomatic compounds. The mayor of Ankara, Melih Gokcek, was quoted as saying: “We will conquer the consulate of the despicable murderers.”

Unfortunately, the Jewish couple had already been slain. But fortunately, this was not a crime motivated by anti-Semitism. The police quickly caught the suspects, an Uzbek couple who worked for the Karakos. They confessed to the killing. It was a simple criminal act like hundreds of others committed in Turkey everyday.