RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Were it not for Jewish interest in what is legitimately their holiest site, Muslims would hardly notice the city, as was the case for centuries before and after the Crusades. That the mostly Christian West elevates this cynical game of power politics to the level of holy status, co-equal or superior to Jewish (and even Christian) concerns, is but another example of the growing tendency toward subservient dhimmi status regarding Islam in the West. Which is of course is largely what Umar had in mind when he set out to build the Dome of the Rock in the first place.”

Recent Palestinian Arab attacks on Jews in Jerusalem have focused attention on the status of Israel’s capital – and in particular the Old City, home to Judaism’s sacred Temple Mount – and the Islamic shrine and mosque that currently sit atop it (respectively the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa mosque). As reported by the mainstream press, “militant” Jews provoked Palestinian Arab violence by protesting the ban on prayer by Jews and Christians atop the Temple Mount. The Waqf (the Muslim authority that oversees the area at the sufferance of the Israeli government) is responsible for the ban.

The fact that this ban is even tolerated by the Israeli government is remarkable. That the ban it is either openly or tacitly supported by Western governments, the mainstream Western press, and Euro-American intelligentsia is due to historical ignorance, cowardice, and hypocrisy.

Typically, the Temple Mount is referred to as the “third holiest site” in Islam, behind the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Sometimes, that formulation is balanced by reference to the Mount’s status as Judaism’s holiest site (and also of immense importance to Christians), sometimes not at all, and sometimes with bogus formulations like CNN’s “one of the holiest sites in Judaism and Islam.”

But just how “holy” is the Temple Mount to Muslims historically? The answer is that its “third holiest” status is more a matter of political calculation and circumstance than an accurate statement of theology.

Today, in the highly charged contest between Arabs and Israelis over the land of Israel, it behooves the Arab/Islamic side to maximize the “historic status” of “Palestine” to the Islamic world. The usual basis asserted by Muslims for the claim of Jerusalem as the religion’s tertiary sacred city is the Quran’s account of Mohammed’s night journey, during which Allah allowed Islam’s prophet to visit heaven. Mohammed’s ascension, according to the Quran, occurred from Islam’s “furthest precinct.” Perhaps that was a location known to Mohammed’s followers nearly 1,500 years ago, but it has been lost to actual history. Today, Muslims claim the reference is to Jerusalem, and specifically to the site of the Dome of the Rock.

When history remembers the Obama administration, the flames of Ferguson will light up our memories. It wasn’t just an AutoZone and Jade Nails burning up in the fires of Ferguson, it was also the “Hope” of 2008 going up in smoke.

Instead of hope, the age of Obama has been characterized by racial division and discord.

Obama and Holder commanded the police to behave themselves. The police behaved, and look what happened.

Last week, members of the New Black Panther Party were arrested by state officials for plotting to use pipe bombs against the St. Louis Gateway Arch and for purchasing guns in a plot to kill as many policemen as possible.

Notice it was state officials who made the arrests. The Washington Times had a no-longer-surprising quote from an Obama administration official characterizing the plot to blow up the arch and kill (presumably) white police officers as “not a serious threat.”

Why do avoidable subplots involving the New Black Panthers keep shadowing this president? From the time he marched with them in Selma in 2007, to this past weekend, there has been a strange ambivalence toward their racially soaked radicalism.

Why would an administration official say anything to downplay a gun and bomb charge against New Black Panthers? Better yet, why didn’t the Justice Department bring their own domestic terrorism charges against these New Black Panthers?

Critics will say all these questions about the administration coddling the New Black Panther Party are getting old and tiresome, and I wholeheartedly agree.

Obama and Holder stoked division, strife and anger in Ferguson, culminating in last night’s violence.

Sure, President Obama called for calm in Ferguson. But that was after the damage was done. Calls for calm came after Attorney General Eric Holder tripped the time bomb during his visit to Ferguson by meeting with activists and agitators and assuring them the administration was on their side against the police.

That the photograph of Walter Duranty — the New York Times Moscow correspondent who deliberately whitewashed Stalin’s 1930s forced starvation of millions of Ukrainians and won the Pulitzer for it — still is on the newspaper’s wall of fame with their other prize winners is apparently no aberration. The New York Times has no moral center. In fact, it’s despicable. On November 24, they published the home address of Officer Darren Wilson [1].

By now most of America knows who Wilson is — the Ferguson, Missouri, police officer exonerated for the murder of Michael Brown, the supposed 6′ 6″, three-hundred-pound “gentle giant” who was reportedly on his way to college, but it turns out was holding up convenience stores and trying to grab Wilson’s gun and bashing him in the face all while the officer was sitting in his police car. We also all know the reaction of some of the angrier members of the Ferguson community and those omnipresent “outside agitator” dime-store anarchists to the grand jury announcement — cars torched, minority businesses burned down, looting, gunfire, freeways blocked, etc., etc. A lot of out-of-control mayhem from L.A. to NY with racial hatred fanned at every turn. The NYT apparently doesn’t give a shit (excuse the French, but it’s merited). In the midst of all this, they print Wilson’s address. It was to them “all the news that’s fit to print.” Who cares what might happen to the cop and his family? He’s just a cop, after all, and a white one at that. Definitely not a member of the elite — not bon type, bon genre. (Maybe someone should do a country song — “Two thousand miles from Zabar’s.”)

So much for that newspaper. They’re cancer.

Not quite cancer but pretty bad is Jay Nixon, the governor of Missouri. Not only did he attempt to prejudge the case, calling for Wilson’s head like some minor league Robespierre months before there was any evidence, but then, on the night of the grand jury announcement, after having brought in the National Guard, he goes completely AWOL and doesn’t use the Guards at all, leaving the poor store owners of Ferguson to fend for themselves, not to mention the police. Everyone got to watch the results on TV.

Peter Kinder, the vice governor of Missouri, wants to know what happened. Why no Guards, when they were all set to go? Did the word come down from the White House or the Department of Justice to keep the Guards out? Nixon didn’t answer, just accused Kinder of playing politics. (At least he didn’t play the race card, but that would be hard, white man to white man…. although it’s possible.) So we don’t know… yet

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/obamas-eulogy-for-abdul-rahman-kassig-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He writes the blog, “The Point,” on Frontpagemag.com.

Daniel came on the show to discuss Obama’s Sympathy for “Abdul Rahman Kassig,” analyzing how the president exploited the murder of an American in order to do public relations for Islam.

The discussion occurred within the context of Obama’s Fantasies about Un-Islamic Jihad, in which Daniel gauged the Radical-in-Chief’s responses to the Jerusalem synagogue massacre, the Islamic State’s beheading of Peter Kassig, and much, much more:

Don’t miss this week’s second episode with I.Q. Al-Rassooli, a scholar of Islam who was born in Iraq. He is the author of the trilogy, “Lifting the Veil: The True Faces of Muhammad and Islam.” The book is based on his YouTube series, “Idiot’s Guide to Islam.”

Kenneth Levin is a psychiatrist and historian and author of The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People under Siege.

Repeated claims in recent weeks by Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas that Israel was attacking or otherwise threatening the Al Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount, and Abbas’s calls for Palestinians and other Muslims to take action to defend Al Aqsa and “purify” the Temple Mount, have been a key factor in the latest spate of deadly Arab assaults on Israelis.

Other PA officials have echoed and elaborated on Abbas’s message, with some calling explicitly for murdering Jews in response to supposed provocations against Al Aqsa. Palestinian Authority media have conveyed the same message, punctuated by cartoons depicting Jews attacking Al Aqsa and Palestinians defending it.

A number of those involved in the assaults against Jews in Jerusalem and elsewhere have asserted that they were acting in response to the calls of their leaders to protect Al-Aqsa.

The false claims of Jewish threats against or damage to Al Aqsa have a long pedigree. They have been made by Abbas many times in the past and were a staple of Yasser Arafat’s screeds against Israel and against Jews more generally. Arafat labeled the terror war he launched in 2000 the “Al Aqsa Intifada.” He did so to cast the onslaught not as an aggressive campaign of mass murder of Israelis but as a struggle in defense of the Islamic holy site and to render the war not simply one of Palestinian pursuit of Israel’s destruction but as an Islamic fight against hostile, Al Aqsa-defiling non-believers.

But such anti-Jewish libels have a still older history, pre-dating Arafat, pre-dating Israel’s gaining control over the Old City of Jerusalem in 1967, even pre-dating Israel’s creation.

In 1929, during the British Mandate, the rabidly anti-Jewish, British appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini, claimed that Jews were threatening Al-Aqsa and sought to end Jewish prayer at the Western Wall (a Temple Mount retaining wall, which had become a place of Jewish prayer in the context of Jews being barred from ascending to the Temple Mount itself – the site of the First and Second Temples – for much of the preceding 2,000 years). According to the Mufti, the Western Wall was an Islamic holy place and Jewish prayer there was both an affront to Islam and a step towards Jewish attacks against Al-Aqsa. The Mufti is also reported to have distributed doctored photographs showing a damaged Al-Aqsa, with claims that the Jews were responsible.

And so the whirlwind, cultivated by Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Al Sharpton, the mainstream media and the army of thugs they enabled, is now being reaped. As the result of a St. Louis County grand jury refusing to indict officer Darren Wilson for the shooting death of Michael Brown, Ferguson, MO has become Ground Zero, in what irresponsible Missouri State Sen. Maria Chappelle-Nadali referred to on MSNBC as “St. Louis’s race war.”

One of the race war’s architects pleaded for calm shortly after the decision was announced. Yet even as Obama spoke about that “need for calm” and that there was “no excuse for violence,” he insisted, “We have to try to understand” the anger of those who demanded nothing less than a murder charge absent an ounce of evidence as an “understandable reaction” from people who believe “the law is being applied in a discriminatory fashion.”

Where did those people get that belief? Leave it to Obama to omit that critical information — the same President Obama who met with protest leaders and Sharpton on Nov. 5 at the White House. It was at that unscheduled meeting the president was ostensibly “concerned about Ferguson staying on course in terms of pursuing what it was that he knew we were advocating,” according to Sharpton. “He said he hopes that we’re doing all we can to keep peace.”

One is left to marvel at one of two realities. Either we have a president so utterly naive he believes a hoax-perpetrating, riot-inciting Al Sharpton, who denigrated the grand jury process, pre-organized protest rallies in 25 American cities, and uses his MSNBC platform to fire up racial unrest, is a man of peace. Or the president, who once urged his Latino followers to “punish our enemies,” remains as wedded to the same racial “us against them” mentality as America’s foremost racial arsonist. Is it really possible to believe the former?

Despite Obama’s superficial condemnations of violence, at least 25 businesses were set ablaze, many of which are total losses—and most of which were minority owned. Ten cars were burned at a dealership, and a “lot of gunfire,” as Ferguson Asst. Fire Chief Steve Fair put it, made maintaining control of the streets highly problematic, if not impossible. Reporters were assaulted, the store Michael Brown robbed prior to his confrontation with Wilson was looted, and at least 61 people have been arrested. “What I’ve seen tonight is probably much worse than the worst night we ever had in August, and that’s truly unfortunate,” said St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar Monday at a 1:30 a.m press conference. Belmar further noted that there was “nothing left” along West Florissant between Solway Avenue and Chambers Road, that he heard at least 150 gun shots, and that he was surprised he and Missouri Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson, who “got lit up,” as they drove through the area, weren’t hit by that gunfire.

The Senator admits the law has been disastrous for Democrats.

Now that 28—soon probably 29—of the 60 Senate Democrats who voted for ObamaCare are out of office, one of the surviving believers is confessing a crisis of faith. New York Senator Chuck Schumer’s striking remarks on Tuesday suggest that the church of ObamaCare is losing congregants even in the front pews.

Speaking at the National Press Club, the influential Senate leader identified the decline of middle-class incomes as the defining challenge of the age. Democrats can only win elections, Mr. Schumer said, as “the pro-government party”—and ObamaCare is undermining that larger political project.

The Senator called the law a distraction from the “middle-class-oriented programs” his party should have pursued after 2008: “Unfortunately, Democrats blew the opportunity the American people gave them. We took their mandate and put all of our focus on the wrong problem: health-care reform.”

Mr. Schumer said he still supported the entitlement’s goals, but “it wasn’t the change we were hired to make. Americans were crying out for the end to the recession, for better wages and more jobs.” We’re glad he’s finally taking our advice from 2009-2010.

This mea culpa is especially notable because it suggests the wall of implacable liberal opposition to reopening the health-care debate is starting to crack. Democrats have heretofore refused to acknowledge any failing in the law beyond the website rollout fiasco. Endangered Democratic incumbents tried to hold that line this year, and five of them will soon be unemployed.

The Netherlands, that country that so bravely pioneered movements such as gay marriage and the legalization of marijuana, seems on the brink of pioneering yet another: the official Islamization of Europe’s Parliaments.

That, anyway, would seem to be the wish of Tunahan Kuzu and Seleuk Ozturk, the founders of the country’s newest political party, which they established only a few days ago after splitting from the Partij van de Arbeid (PvdA), or Labor Party, in a dispute over Dutch Turkish organizations and the Dutch Turkish community at large. Although their party, Group Kuzu/Ozturk, has not yet been entirely defined, its creators describe it in sweeping terms as “the party the Netherlands longs for,” aimed at promoting “a society in which everyone is treated equally.”

Except that does not seem to be what they actually have in mind.

According to observations of former PvdA colleagues in local media reports , both Ozturk and Kuzu have shown clear antagonism towards women — ignoring even intimidating their female colleagues. More significantly, the two have also held tightly to their Turkish roots and Islamic faith, demanding, among other things, Islamic prayer spaces in the Parliament building – a clear violation of separation between church and state. (Those demands, it should be noted, were refused.)

And Ozturk, reported the national daily, Telegraaf, has regularly demonstrated a stronger allegiance to Turkey and to Islam than to the secular Dutch state he was elected to represent. On at least one occasion, for instance, he skipped a day of parliamentary voting, and explained his absence only the following day with the casual remark that, “Yesterday was a Muslim holiday.”

Ozturk, who defended the Turkish government’s violent backlash against protesters during the 2013 Gezi riots, has also demonstrated particularly strong support for Turkey’s Islamist president (and former prime minister) Recep Tayyip Erdogan – again indicating a greater solidarity with Turkey – and its current regime – than with The Netherlands.

This should probably come as no great surprise: the Dutch Parliamentarian also holds ties to the Diyanet, Turkey’s office of religious affairs, (which, the Telegraaf reports, also provides funding for most of The Netherlands’ Turkish mosques). In fact, it was PvdA Social Affairs minister Lodewijk Asscher’s proposal to investigate the Dutch Diyanet connection (along with the activities of other Turkish conservative religious organizations in the Netherlands) that precipitated Ozturk’s and Kuzu’s defection from the party.

The Supreme Court’s ruling is eerily similar to an international blasphemy law being promoted by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, a bloc of 57 Muslim countries dedicated to implementing a worldwide ban on “negative stereotyping of Islam.”

Firasat’s lawyers say that they have presented the court with irrefutable evidence that the charges against Firasat were fabricated by Indonesian authorities, but that this evidence has been ignored by a judiciary that is under political pressure from the Spanish government to get rid of Firasat once and for all.

“Even if Indonesians do not punish me for death, how will I be protected from Muslims who consider me a blasphemer and an apostate? Will I be able to get a fair trial when the judges, prosecution, fake witnesses and lawyers, everybody will be a Muslim?” — Imran Firasat

Firasat said it was never his intention to provoke the Spanish government, but that he felt it was his duty to “warn of the dangers of not understanding or stopping what is known as Jihad.”

A Spanish court is deliberating the fate of Imran Firasat, an ex-Muslim from Pakistan who faces imminent deportation because the Spanish government has deemed his criticism of Islam to be a threat to national security.

“If the Jews left Palestine to us, would we start loving them? Of course not. The Jews are infidels not because I say so but because Allah does… They aren’t our enemies because they occupy Palestine; they would be our enemies even if they had not occupied anything.” — Muhammad Hussein Ya’qub, Egyptian cleric.

Muslim extremists trust that time is in their side, in part because they are on the threshold of acquiring nuclear weapons. Once Iran and other Muslim countries have this capability, they will have the military means to blackmail their oil-rich neighbors, destroy Israel and threaten Europe.

What makes negotiations with Iran, ISIS, Hamas or any other Islamist group impossible is that their leaders believe they are acting according to the immutable word of God. America, Israel, other Muslims with whom they disagree, cannot do anything to satisfy them except “submit” (the Arabic word “Islam” means “submission”). As Egyptian cleric Muhammad Hussein Ya’qub said in a televised sermon in 2009, “If the Jews left Palestine to us, would we start loving them? Of course not. The Jews are infidels not because I say so but because Allah does… They aren’t our enemies because they occupy Palestine; they would be our enemies even if they had not occupied anything.”

Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and other terror groups do not conceal their intentions. The Hamas covenant explicitly calls for Israel’s destruction and does not distinguish between Israelis and Jews:

Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious… It strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine… It is one of the links in the chain of the struggle against the Zionist invaders…