RUTHFULLY YOURS

“These boys were groomed [at the Al Manar Centre] … so that they are satisfied that what they go to do is right … once they’re groomed, all it takes is someone to say come and I’ll take you.” — Source close to the Yemeni Community, Cardiff, U.K., as reported in The Telegraph.

All these preachers share one thing in common: they are favorites of the two leading government-subsidized Salafi charities in Britain.

The British government, on June 26, banned Sheikh Mohammad Al Arifi from entering the United Kingdom, after reports in the British media linked the Saudi preacher to the radicalization of British youth now fighting for ISIS in Syria.

Arifi’s sermons at the Al Manar Centre in Cardiff in particular, have been linked to the radicalization of three young British Muslims: brothers Nasser and Aseel Muthana and their friend, Reyaad Khan.

Saudi Islamist preacher Muhammad al-Arifi (right) at an iERA stall in London

This ban demonstrates the British government’s growing acceptance that Islamist preachers actually do play an important role in driving Muslim youth toward terrorism.

In an interview with Channel 4 News, Mohammad Al Arifi denied the charges and voiced condemnation for those who incite Muslims to fight in Syria. His denial, however, was clearly at odds with his earlier declarations. In 2010, Arifi stated in a television broadcast that:

“There is no doubt that a person whom Allah enables to sacrifice his soul, and to fight for the sake of Allah, has been graced with a great honor.

They carried banners saying, “Stop Israeli State Terror,” but some went off-message, deciding, apparently, that it did not matter if their targets were Israelis or not.

In the Netherlands, fresh from a pro-ISIS rally in Amsterdam, the home of the Chief Rabbi — not Israeli, just Jewish — was attacked twice in one week.

We live in a rightful disgust for racism of any kind. And yet here we see — and nowhere more clearly than in Germany — the new racist nightmare for Europe.

The backlash in Europe against Israel has been underway since the beginning of Operation Protective Edge. In each country the protests have similarities. And in each they are spear-headed by the same motives and often by the same people.

In London the protests have been dominated young Muslims with the usual smattering of far-left fellow-travellers. They have carried Socialist Worker Party banners saying “Stop Israeli State Terror.” But some went off-message, apparently deciding it did not matter if their targets were Israeli or “just” Jews. There have also been the predictable banners comparing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with Adolf Hitler. Others have a more confused relationship with this sinister conflation. One young protestor was photographed at a demonstration outside the Israeli Embassy in London with a poster saying, “Hitler you were right!” Elsewhere the protests have spilled over into occasional outbursts of violence.

The bear is loose

No, not the self-designated ursus in the White House, but the Kremlin’s ruler.

Having launched a program attempting to reinstate Moscow’s hegemony over the former Tsarist/Soviet Empire, Vladimir Putin now has been hoisted on his own petard.

When his naked aggression in Georgia in 2008 elicited no significant American-EU response, he followed it with his 2014 annexation of Crimea. When that produced little more than Western denunciation, he mobilized for further aggression, attempting to use the Russian-speaking minority in eastern Ukraine.

But he has now become a prisoner of his own rhetoric and aggression.

True, like the European dictators of right and left of the 1930s, he has gained wide popular support at home. But the chauvinistic reaction of the Russian public is a false flag. Shamed and humiliated by the implosion of the Soviet Union [“the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century”, Putin has said], a catastrophic declining population, a start-and-stop economy, and an enormous flight of capital, Putin has used aggressive nationalism to try to reinvigorate a failed regime with all too well remembered demagoguery.

But he is now riding a tiger. Earlier he seemed to have won in Ukraine with an administration succumbing to pressure to back away from the overwhelmingly popular demand to move closer to European Union’s prosperity. [Even relative objective polling of Russian-speakers in Ukraine show their choice is to move into the EU orbit rather than to tie their destinies to a failing Russia.] Then when a popular movement overthrew that Kyiv administration and installed a new pro-European Union executive by a democratically elected parliament, reinforced now with new elections, Putin grabbed Crimea and began to try to manipulate the Russian-speaking minority in eastern Ukraine for his program to reestablish empire.

Good morning, Don Imus. Caught you this morning on the Fox Business Network and as usual you were right about everything. Except Israel.

If the Jewish State can’t count on America, what’s left?
Dig it, as our guy Lenny used to say, I am touchy on the subject for a thousand different reasons so I won’t even name one. But for the topic at hand, the Arabs versus Israel, you are hugely important. On radio, TV, you’re fast, you’re smart and millions pay attention even when you’re cranky. You’re the last hipster. You grew out of Lenny Bruce.

You’ve got the “undecided” in the palm of your hands. One word from you can tip the scales.

If America equivocates between right and wrong, between Israel and the savages, I fear not only for Israel. I fear for America as well. We are in the same boat.

So on the Gaza crisis, when it came up, I was hoping you would take sides. Staying neutral is the same as taking sides, in this case the wrong side.

Around the world the asylums have emptied out. If the Jewish State can’t count on America, what’s left?

This is a conflict between good and evil. This should not be difficult to separate. On 9/11, when Muslims murdered 3,000 of our people a few blocks from where you were broadcasting in Manhattan, those Hamas Muslims and Fatah Muslims cheered. We wept. They danced and they laughed.

That’s the same crowd that’s been shooting rockets at Israel. That’s the war Israel is fighting and when it comes to evil there is no choice but to crush it entirely.

Diana West, author of American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character, delivers a one-two punch in her July 25th syndicated article, “Israel and the U.S.: Whose Survival Instinct is Stronger?”

The subject is the use of children by terrorists in Gaza as “human shields,” and the use by President Barack Obama of children as “invasion shields” at the U.S. and Mexican border.

Terrorists and Obama lie; children die.

Children have been used as a Trojan Horse for all sorts of statist and collectivist initiatives: to ban smoking, to ban guns, to ban obesity, to ban Barbie Dolls and other “dangerous” toys, and so on. But West discusses the nearly unprecedented use of children as weapons of war in the Middle East and in the U.S. As she describes the phenomena:

There’s something darkly coincidental in the fact that the latest weapon to be deployed against the survival instinct of both Israel and the United States is an alleged “heartlessness” when it comes to children.

Most stories appearing in the MSM in the U.S. and overseas are nearly maniacal in their focus on the “civilian casualties” of “Palestinians” in Gaza as a result of Israel’s campaign against Hamas, with “personal” stories accompanied by photographs of devastated streets and homes, sorrowful pictures of Gazan children sitting in the rubble, and even faked photographs of supposedly dead children, or second-hand, recycled faked photographs used in Syria.

Is Hamas’s use of children as “human shields” unprecedented? No. Hitler, when he began to run out of adults to fight the Allies, filled his shrinking armies with adolescents and boys. Japan counted on women and children to fight the expected invasion by Americans, with guns, if available, with bamboo sticks, if necessary. Mao employed uncounted children to enforce, by violence and force, his “cultural revolution.” Islamic jihadists have employed children to don suicide vests and blow themselves up among Jews and American soldiers. So, the “human shield” tactic isn’t new.

But all that is conveniently forgotten by the MSM. It’s easy to decide whether that forgetfulness is a symptom of a short-term memory or deliberate repression. It’s deliberate repression.

Discussing an article in the London Telegraph about Israel’s alleged war crimes, West writes that the Telegraph headline is not untypical: “Israel’s offensive in Gaza has ‘killed more children than fighters,’ say human rights groups. Israel has been accused of waging ‘war on the children’ of Gaza …”

Dr. Anna Geifman on “Life in Israel Under Siege” — on The Glazov Gang
The author of “Death Orders” shares life in Jerusalem during a state of war — and what it means to confront a death cult.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/dr-anna-geifman-on-life-in-israel-under-siege-on-the-glazov-gang/

Defaming Israel: Bigotry or electoral strategy?

Former UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has a lot of nerve slamming Israel over civilian deaths. How many civilians died in Britain’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Perhaps it’s bigotry, perhaps it’s pandering to the rising Muslim electorate

This is Jack Straw, UK foreign secretary at the launch of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, speaking in parliament last week:

“For all the vacuous words of the Israeli government and the IDF spokesman, they have no regard for international humanitarian law; they place a completely different and much lower value on Palestinian life compared to Israeli life” and “the actions that they are taking are completely outwith the United Nations Charter and any idea of how a civilised nation ought to behave.”

Are these appallingly defamatory comments a result of being a) an extreme bigot or b) electoral considerations?

Given that he has announced he is standing down as an MP for Blackburn at the next election, I would strongly favour the former (though old habits may die hard in his constituency which has a significant Muslim presence).

He has form, of course.

In 2013, at the Round Table Global Diplomatic Forum at the House of Commons, Israeli politician Einat Wilf, one of the panelists at the forum, quoted Straw as having said that among the main obstacles to peace were the “unlimited” funds available to pro-Israel Jewish organizations in the US – funds “used to control and divert American foreign policy in the region” – and also Germany’s “obsession” with defending Israel.

Wilf stated: “It was appalling to listen to Britain’s former foreign secretary. His remarks reflect prejudice of the worst kind… I thought British diplomats, including former ones, were still capable of a measure of rational thought.”

Meanwhile, current Prime Minister David Cameron has been markedly less critical of Israel than in his earlier days in Downing Street when he referred to Gaza as a prison camp and to the Israeli attack on a Turkish ship attempting to break the life-saving blockade of Gaza as “completely unacceptable”.

Pressure is mounting across Europe against Sharia-inspired practices such as the wearing of the burqa. The latest move in Spain is another significant development

“While other towns in Spain have banned the veil in publicly-owned buildings, Reus is the first of the ban garments like the niqab and the burqa on the streets.

“The ban has been introduced for reasons of “security” and “coexistence”, according to El País newspaper.”

Other European countries such as Belgium and France have introduced similar, nationwide bans which were upheld as legal by a recent ruling from the EU.

The Local added:

“Spain’s Supreme Court in March 2013 annulled previous burqa bans introduced by a number of Spanish municipalities on the grounds that local authorities do not have the jurisdiction to regulate fundamental rights.”

It remains to be seen how the Supreme Court will now respond.

DAVID SINGER IS A LAWYER AND INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS ANALYST IN AUSTRALIA

The failure of many Gazans to leave their homes and seek safer shelter after ignoring Israeli leaflet drops, mobile phone calls and even the firing of harmless warning shots as a last resort has been a major contributor to the increasing number of civilian deaths and casualties in Gaza.

This phenomenon has presented a perplexing problem for Israel as it continues its determined drive to destroy the Hamas arsenal of rockets, rocket launchers, weapons caches and extensive network of tunnels located in, under or in the vicinity of densely populated housing areas of Gaza.

Former US President Bill Clinton hit the nail squarely on the head with this prescient statement on 17 July:

“Hamas was perfectly well aware what would happen if they started raining rockets on Israel. They fired a thousand of them, and they have a strategy designed to force Israel to kill their own civilians so that the rest of the world will condemn them…

… In the short to medium term, Hamas can inflict terrible public relations damage on Israel by forcing it to kill Palestinian civilians to counter Hamas.”

The strategy was given expression by Hamas MP Fathi Hammad in 2008:

“[The enemies of Allah] do not know that the Palestinian people has developed its [methods] of death and death-seeking. For the Palestinian people, death has become an industry, at which women excel, and so do all the people living on this land. The elderly excel at this, and so do the mujahideen and the children. This is why they have formed human shields of the women, the children, the elderly, and the mujahideen, in order to challenge the Zionist bombing machine. It is as if they were saying to the Zionist enemy: “We desire death like you desire life.”

U.S. Evacuates Tripoli Embassy Personnel by Land to Tunisia Posted By Bridget Johnson

The Defense Department was called in to evacuate all staff from the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli in what the State Department called a “temporary staff relocation” to Tunis.

Pentagon press secretary Rear Adm. John Kirby said “at the request of the Department of State, the U.S. military assisted in the relocation of personnel from the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli” today. There were reportedly 150 staff there including 80 Marines.

“All embassy personnel were relocated, including the Marine security guards who were providing security at the embassy and during the movement,” Kirby said. “The embassy staff was driven in vehicles to Tunisia.”

“During movement, F-16′s, ISR assets and an Airborne Response Force with MV-22 Ospreys provided security. The mission was conducted without incident, and the entire operation lasted approximately five hours.”

State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said the U.S. is “grateful to the Government of Tunisia for its cooperation and support” and that the staff would travel “onward” from there.

“Due to the ongoing violence resulting from clashes between Libyan militias in the immediate vicinity of the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli, we have temporarily relocated all of our personnel out of Libya,” Harf said in a statement this morning. “We are committed to supporting the Libyan people during this challenging time, and are currently exploring options for a permanent return to Tripoli as soon as the security situation on the ground improves. In the interim, staff will operate from Washington and other posts in the region.”

“Securing our facilities and ensuring the safety of our personnel are top Department priorities, and we did not make this decision lightly. Security has to come first. Regrettably, we had to take this step because the location of our embassy is in very close proximity to intense fighting and ongoing violence between armed Libyan factions,” she continued.

“We will continue to engage all Libyans and the international community to seek a peaceful resolution to the current conflict and to advance Libya’s democratic transition. We reiterate that Libyans must immediately cease hostilities and begin negotiations to resolve their grievances. We join the international community in calling on all Libyans to respect the will of the people, including the authority of the recently-elected Council of Representatives, and to reject the use of violence to affect political processes. Many brave Libyans sacrificed to advance their country toward a more secure and prosperous future. We continue to stand solidly by the Libyan people as they endeavor to do so.”