RUTHFULLY YOURS

At least since the early part of the 20th century, aside from oil, the Arab world has produced and exported two products.

It has produced essentially no technology, medicine or anything else in the world of science. It has almost no contributions to world literature, art or to intellectual development.

According to the most recent United Nations Arab Human Development Reports (2003-2005), written by Arab intellectuals, Greece, with a population of 11 million, annually translates five times more books from English than the entire Arab world, population 370 million. Nor is this a new development. The total number of books translated into Arabic during the last 1,000 years is less than Spain translates into Spanish in one year.

ArabianBusiness.com reports that about 100 million people in the Arab world are illiterate; and three quarters of them are between the ages of 15 and 45.

As for Arab women, the situation is even worse. Nearly half of the Arab world’s women are illiterate, and sexual attacks on women have actually increased since the Arab Spring, as have forced marriages and trafficking. And the exact number of women murdered by family members in “honor killings” is not knowable. It is only known to be large.

In Egypt, the largest Arab country, 91 percent of women and girls are subjected to female genital mutilation, according to UNICEF. Not to mention the number of women in the Arab world who must wear veils or even full-face and full-body coverings known as burkas. And, of course, Saudi Arabia is infamous for not allowing women to drive a car.

Another unhappy feature of the Arab world is the prevalence of lies. To this day, Egypt denies that it was the Egyptian pilot, Ahmed El-Habashi, who allegedly crashed an EgyptAir jet into the ocean deliberately. Vast numbers of Arabs believe that Jews knew of the 9-11 plot and avoided going to work at the World Trade Center that day.

So, then, is there anything at which the Arab world has excelled for the past two generations? Has there been a major Arab export?

As it happens, there are two.

Hatred and violence.

Kobane — a town in northern Syria, not the dead rocker — is one of the focuses of President Obama’s war against ISIS. The fighting is confused by the fact that there aren’t just two sides, but at least six or seven. Obama told the UN last week that “the terrorist group known as ISIL must be degraded, and ultimately destroyed.” Our effort to do so, aided by a coalition of sorts, is going at a glacial pace that will not foreseeably grow faster.

First things first. I’d guesstimate that we’re applying about 2-5 percent of the combined airpower of the U.S. Air Force and Navy to the president’s effort to destroy the Axis of Evil 3.0. That may be because we lack the actionable intelligence to do it faster. And it may be that neither we, nor our coalition members, are willing to do more.

Second, it’s always been clear — as we can see in areas of fighting from Kobane to Iraq’s Kurdish region — that ground forces are needed to drive ISIS from the ground it has taken by force and remains in control of. Either we or our allies will have to provide those troops if Obama’s plan is to succeed. Our allies aren’t willing to do that, and President Obama’s plan to train Syrian “moderates” cannot succeed because that plan is to train too few soldiers and it will take too long.

As Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. John Kirby said last week, the plan is to train only about 5,000 Syrians, and it will first take about five months to vet the possible trainees and another six months or more to train and deploy them. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey said recently that at least 12-15,000 such troops would be necessary to force ISIS out of Syria even with the help of American airpower. The creation of such a force — whether it’s 5,000 or 15,000 men, making it effective and integrating it with American airpower — would take decades if it were even possible, which history tells us it’s not.

British General Lord Richards, who until last year was Dempsey’s equivalent as head of the British general staff, said that the only way to defeat ISIS is to take back the land it’s now ruling, which would require a campaign by ground troops, and that air power cannot do the job. According to the Sunday London Times, Richards said that meant Western armies have to do it.

If ISIS and other such groups are an immediate threat to American security, shouldn’t we be applying more U.S. airpower and demanding the Arab nations who are members of the Obama coalition supply the troops now, rather than rely on a training program that will only produce too few troops a year from now?

Our deployment of air forces — even if American troops join them — in the fight against ISIS will have to have to be repeated again and again. Even if ISIS is degraded by air power it and its successors cannot be destroyed because other groups just like it will continually arise and achieve the same strength while espousing the same ideology and goals. And it’s not only new groups, but the usual terrorist groups appearing under new names.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4743/reyhaneh-jabbari-execution

by Mina Ahadi, Nazanin AfshinJam, Shabnam Assadollahi and Shadi Paveh

Reyhaneh Jabbari has been transferred to Rajai-Shahr Prison to be hanged — while the world parties at the UN and gets ready to permit Iran nuclear capability.

Reyhaneh Jabbari has been transferred to Rajai-Shahr Prison to be hanged — while the world parties at the UN and gets ready to permit Iran nuclear capability.

While the West is focused on an Iran nuclear deal and defeating ISIS terrorists, the executioner-regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran continues violating human rights.

The regime has just transferred Reyhaneh Jabbari to Rajai-Shahr Prison in Tehran and, as she is transferred to be executed, told her to say goodbye to her mother and family.

The Petition to Save Reyhaneh Jabbari from being hanged has been signed by over 188,000 people, but as usual has been ignored by the Iranian regime.

Reyhaneh Jabbari’s execution may carried out by tomorrow.

A post-scientific look behind the news: We humans, as observers, can’t ever meaningfully experience the full impact of terrorism on victims. We must also acknowledge the real motives of the perpetrators. (Special to israelnationalnews)

“So says science, and I believe in science. But up to now, has science ever troubled to look at the world other than from without?” (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man).

Recent videos of ISIS/IS-inflicted beheadings revealed, in conspicuously graphic terms, what has generally remained hidden – that is, the deeply human suffering side of Jihadist terrorism.

Still, unavoidably, even these intensely grotesque images must fail to let us fully understand the victim anguish in such barbarous circumstances, here, the unimaginable terror that screams desperately, but also silently, “from within.” This absence of a genuinely interior perspective on terrorism – a partially irremediable absence, as we shall soon see – must always leave observers with only a limited understanding of terrorist-inflicted harms.

It’s no one’s fault. We are not to blame for this serious absence. After all, we haven’t somehow created or “allowed” such regrettably limited kinds of understanding.

Jihadist terrorists are actually much worse, and much more insidious, than they might appear.
Even today, the best available science is able to illuminate only selectively partial truths. Accordingly, Pierre Teilhard De Chardin, in his deservedly modern classic, The Phenomenon of Man, queries insightfully: “I believe in science, but up to now, has science ever troubled to look at the world other than from without?”

Sigmund Freud himself, much more familiar to modern readers than Teilhard, a Jesuit Father and paleontologist, had already understood this “phenomenological” point of view, and, quite naturally, also in much more distinctly therapeutic contexts. He had early recognized, in what was both an utterly primal and spontaneously visceral observation, that useful psychological examination must never neglect intimately private feelings. More precisely, whatever the intrusive limitations of any subjective investigation or healing enterprise, Freud had wisely cautioned, the capable therapist must pay close attention to the human psyche, or “soul.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned the United Nations General Assembly today about “militant Islam” and chided those who don’t see the connections between ISIS and Hamas or Iran.

“Last week, many of the countries represented here rightly applauded President Obama for leading the effort to confront ISIS. And yet weeks before, some of these same countries, same countries that now support confronting ISIS opposed Israel for confronting Hamas,” Netanyahu said.

“They evidently don’t understand that ISIS and Hamas are branches of the same poisonous tree. ISIS and Hamas share a fanatical creed, which they both seek to impose well beyond the territory under their control. Listen to ISIS self-declared caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi,” he continued. “This is what he said two months ago. ‘A day will soon come when the Muslim will walk everywhere as a master. The Muslims who caused the world to hear and understand the meaning of terrorism and destroy the idol of democracy.’”

“Now listen to Khaled Mashal, the leader of Hamas. He proclaims a similar vision of the future. ‘We say this to the west: by Allah, you will be defeated. Tomorrow our nation will sit on the throne of the world.’”

Netanyahu stressed that even if these groups operate in different lands, “they all seek to create ever-expanding enclaves of militant Islam where there is no freedom and no tolerance; where women are treated as cattle; Christians are decimated; and minorities are subjugated, sometimes given the stark choice: convert or die.”

“The Nazis believed in a master race. The militant Islamists believe in a master faith,” he said. “They just disagree who among them will be the master of the master faith.”

The prime minister said “the Islamic State of Iran” is where militant Islam could soon “have the power to realize its unbridled ambitions.”

“Iran’s president, Rouhani, stood here last week and shed crocodile tears over what he called the globalization of terrorism. Maybe he should spare us those phony tears and have a word instead with the commanders of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. He could ask them to call off Iran’s global terror campaign, which has included attacks in two dozen countries, on five continents since 2011 alone,” Netanyahu said.

It’s Immigration Uber Alles at the Wall Street Journal

Immigration is the “climate change” of non-scientific political issues.

Proponents consider climate disruption — which I have for years preferred to call ”globaloney [1]“ — to be “settled science.” No contrary evidence, such as the inconvenient fact that the planet hasn’t warmed and has perhaps even cooled for 19 years [2], can intrude on their computer model-driven fantasies. Some proponents, if they were to achieve the positions of power they covet, would jail so-called climate deniers [3] faster than you can [4] say “Climategate [5].”

The press shields ordinary people who have been slowly brainwashed into becoming globaloney sympathizers by decades of journalistic malfeasance from the movement’s virtual dominance by socialists [6] and de facto Communists [7]. Most of those in the polling pluralities who believe globaloney’s garbage are among those who would suffer the most economically if these wannabe tyrants ever get what they want.

Similarly, immigration advocates are utterly convinced that the overall benefit of granting amnesty to all who have come to this country illegally — committing what is still quaintly known as a crime the minute they cross the border — is a matter of settled political science. Mountains of evidence of the irrevocable harm such a move would cause fail to dent their illogic.

Most of those advocating amnesty also believe that whoever wants to come here for jobs related to science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) should be allowed to do so. That many STEM trainees going through federal jobs programs are hitting brick walls [8] when trying to find employment, and that some currently employed Americans about to be laid off have been forced to train [9] their shadily placed outsourced [10] H-1B visa-holding replacements, is irrelevant.

No institution has been more persistently stubborn and utterly impervious to reality in its unfettered immigration advocacy, accurately characterized as immigration uber alles, than the Wall Street Journal.

In July 1984, the Journal advocated a new Constitutional amendment. It would simply read [11]: “There shall be open borders.” It repeated its plea for such an amendment four additional times [12] during the rest of the decade. Even though events during the 30 years since the first such editorial appeared have moved the Journal’s position from barely defensible to astonishly stupid, the paper has never officially backed away from it.

At last, moderate Islam! The Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Fiqh Council of North America held a press conference in Washington on Wednesday at which they announced with great fanfare that they had refuted the religious ideology of the Islamic State. They issued this lengthy “open letter” (not, interestingly enough, a fatwa) addressed to the Islamic State’s caliph Ibrahim, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, explaining how he was misunderstanding Islam. The international media is, predictably, thrilled [2], but unfortunately, and not surprisingly, there is less to it than meets the eye [3]. In fact, the “moderates” who signed on to this open letter have ended up endorsing elements of Islam that most non-Muslim Westerners consider to be “extremist.”

The fact that this is not an Islamic case against the Islamic State’s jihad terror that will move Islamic State fighters to lay down their arms, but rather a deceptive piece designed to fool gullible non-Muslim Westerners into thinking that the case for “moderate Islam” has been made, but which will not change a single jihadi’s mind, is clear from the outset from the involvement not only of Hamas-linked CAIR, but also from some of the 126 signers.

These include Professor Mustafa Abu Sway, the integral professorial chair for the Study of Imam Ghazali’s Work, Jerusalem — and a Hamas activist [4]; Dr. Jamal Badawi, an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation Hamas terror funding case; Mustafa Ceric, former grand mufti of Bosnia and Herzegovina, who has called for Sharia in Bosnia [5]; Professor Caner Dagli, a venomously hateful Islamic apologist at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, who traffics in Nazi imagery about “unclean” unbelievers [6]; Ali Gomaa, former grand mufti of Egypt, who endorses wife-beating, Hizballah, and the punishment of apostates from Islam [7]; Hamza Yusuf Hanson, founder and director of Zaytuna College, USA, who blamed the West for Muslim riots over a teddy bear named Muhammad [8]; Ed Husain, senior fellow in Middle Eastern Studies for the Council on Foreign Relations, who recently claimed [9] that seizing British jihadis’ passports so that they couldn’t return to the UK from the Islamic State would only create more jihadis; Muhammad Tahir Al-Qadri, founder of Minhaj-ul-Qur’an International, Pakistan, who drafted Pakistan’s notorious blasphemy law and issued his own disingenuous and hypocritical Fatwa Against Terrorism [10]; and Muzammil Siddiqi, chairman of the Fiqh Council and former head of the Hamas-linked Islamic Society of North America (ISNA).

Hardly a group that inspires confidence in their “moderation.”

Republican chances to win control of the Senate in the 2014 midterms, requiring a pickup of six seats, have taken a blow. Kansas, a state no one considered anything other than a safe hold for the party a few months ago, now appears to be slipping away.

After a contentious primary resulting in a victory for the 78-year incumbent Pat Roberts over tea party challenger Milton Wolf, things have gone steadily south for Roberts. Wolf refused to close ranks and endorse Roberts. A self-funded independent, 45-year-old Greg Orman, has now opened up a solid lead over Roberts after Chad Taylor, the Democrat, withdrew from the race, trailing badly in third place. As expected, polls that had shown [1] Roberts narrowly ahead in a three-man race, transformed into a 5-10-point Orman lead with Taylor no longer part of the polling survey .

The Kansas secretary of State attempted to prevent Taylor’s name from being removed from the ballot, since the law allows for this only when the candidate dies or has a physical disability preventing him from running, and Taylor fits neither profile. But this maneuver was challenged by Democrats and lost in court. Republicans are now trying to force Democrats to replace Taylor on the ballot, but that gesture will probably also prove unsuccessful, and worse, smacks of a near complete lack of confidence in Roberts’ chances to win straight up.

Roberts has come under attack for many of the same things as Mary Landrieu in Louisiana — for effectively becoming a Washington, D. C., senator, and not a senator of the state. There have been questions about Roberts’ legal residence and time spent in the state, just as with Landrieu. These issues, plus his age and long tenure in Congress (16 years in the House, and now 18 in the Senate), as well as accusations of being a big spending, go-along senator, were primary reasons why Roberts faced his first serious primary challenge in years.

Now the plot has thickened. Orman, who has largely escaped serious scrutiny so far, is feeling the first pushback from national Republicans, desperate to preserve the seat in the GOP column. His business relationship with a jailed Goldman Sachs banker and former board member, Rajat Gupta, is the first hit [2]. Roberts went on offense in similar fashion against Wolf in the primary fight, accusing his radiologist opponent of being dishonest and unethical.

The bitterness of the primary contest, combined with Roberts’ declining approval in the state, is the reason why many Republicans have so far not come back into the fold and appear to prefer the independent Orman. Mississippi had a similarly bitter Republican Senate primary this year, but the race there remains Republican versus Democrat,without a significant independent in the November field. In Mississippi, whites tend to vote Republican, and the state’s sizable black population always votes Democratic in even greater percentage numbers. With the current white/black split in the state, Republicans win.

In August, the world collectively held its breath as thousands of Yazidi Kurds — a minority most people had never even heard of — clung on for dear life atop the Sinjar mountains in northern Iraq.

Beneath them, violent Islamic State factions encircled the mountain, determined to starve out the people they considered infidels. Those who did not make it into the mountains in time were tortured, raped or beheaded.

In Israel, itself in the closing stages of a 50-day war with Hamas in Gaza, articles began appearing in newspapers urging the Israeli government to offer the Yazidis asylum. A 17-month-old Yazidi boy was recovering in a Tel Aviv hospital, his father at his bedside, after life-saving heart surgery, facilitated by an NGO. As he had left Iraq just before the massacre began, the father’s thoughts were with his wife and five other children, who had to fend for themselves. “They fled to the mountain with just the clothes on their backs,” he told me. He described how his four-year-old daughter had to climb the mountain on her own, because her mother was holding her three-month-old twins. The father’s relatives saw their neighbours slain and heard stories of local girls captured by IS make furtive calls to their parents, asking to be brought poison as they would rather commit suicide than be held by their notoriously brutal captors. “IS treats them like trash. The people are running away from death. IS treats [Yazidis] like Jews, so they want to come here,” he said. “Maybe Israeli soldiers will protect them and not leave them in IS’s hands.”

Casting Israeli soldiers in the role of protectors may have seemed strange to many in the West, particularly when Israel has been embroiled in a bitter war with Hamas in Gaza that has killed nearly 2,200 Palestinians and 68 Israelis.

Yet while Israel’s relations with its neighbours remain deeply problematic, its ties with the Kurds have for years helped nurture a military force that has proved itself more resilient than the US-funded Iraqi army. For years Israel’s relationship with the Kurds was kept secret, but gradually the issue has cropped up more and more in interviews in Israeli media and in academic reports.

The Kurds constitute the world’s largest stateless people. There are 30 million Kurds, mostly spread across Iraq, Syria, Iran and Turkey. They have been seeking a state of their own for centuries.

Although the links between Jews and Kurds go back centuries, the substantive roots of the relationship go back to the 1930s, when a Jewish journalist stationed in the Kurdish part of Iraq and writing for the Palestine Bulletin began making contacts with local activists.

For centuries, Western classical music propelled listeners toward Christian salvation. Then Jewish music changed everything.

In his 1944 essay The Halakhic Mind, Rabbi Joseph Dov Soloveitchik makes a striking assertion about the directionality of time:

The reversibility of time and of the causal order is fundamental in religion, for otherwise the principle of conversion would be sheer nonsense. The act of reconstructing past psychical life, of changing the arrow of time from a forward to a retrospective direction, is the main premise of penitence. One must admit with Kierkegaard that repetition is a basic religious category. The homo religiosus, oscillating between sin and remorse, flight from and return to God, frequently explores not only the traces of a bygone past retained in memory, but a living “past” which is consummated in his emergent time-consciousness. It is irrelevant whether reversibility is a transcendental act bordering on the miraculous, as Kierkegaard wants us to believe, or a natural phenomenon that has its roots in the unique structure of the religious act. The paradox of a directed yet reversible time concept remains.

R. Soloveitchik leaves open the issue of whether the reversibility of time is a “natural phenomenon” or not. The question is not as far-fetched as it sounds: Five years after R. Soloveitchik finished this essay, the great mathematician Kurt Gödel showed (in a contribution to Albert Einstein’s Festschrift) that General Relativity implies the reversibility of physical time under special conditions. In any case, physicists have not yet succeeded in making time run backwards.

Eastern European chazanim found means to reverse musical time, in the service of the religious requirement that R. Soloveitchik identified. This was not a “transcendental act bordering on the miraculous,” to be sure, but the next best thing. Chazanut in this view was one of the great Jewish religious innovations of the early modern period. It is not merely symbolic but evocative, turning an abstract point of theology into an artistic event.

The high musical culture of Eastern European chazanut is a uniquely Jewish art form, but it is not sealed off hermetically from the ambient Western musical culture. Nonetheless it is uniquely Jewish both in form and—decisively—in function. I shall argue that althoughchazanut draws on elements of Western musical culture, it employs them in an entirely original fashion for a uniquely Jewish religious purpose. Eastern European synagogue chant evokes the reversibility of time in its most characteristic gesture, namely the “Phrygian” or Freygisch descent from the flattened 2nd of the scale to the 1st degree, or tonic note. To hear this move in the Freygisch (Ahavah raba) mode as transformation of the directionality of time, we must hear it in the context of the tonality of Western music, with its clear sense of time’s forward motion. The Freygish flattened half-step, I will argue, functions as an ironic reversal of the most characteristic gesture in Western tonal music: the ascent of the sharpened 7th degree of the ordinary Western scale, or leading tone, to the tonic. This is the most characteristic pointer to the forward motion of time in Western music.