Displaying posts published in

2016

Palestinians: Bad News for Israel-Haters by Khaled Abu Toameh

Sheikh Abdullah Tamimi and his colleagues do not believe in boycotts and divestment. They are convinced that real peace can be achieved through dialogue between Palestinians and all Israelis — not just those who are affiliated with the left-wing. The Israeli left-wing, they contend, does not have a monopoly over peace-making.

For Tamimi, real peace begins between the people and through economic cooperation and improving the living conditions of the Palestinians. This, he explains, is more important than the talk about the establishment of a Palestinian state, which he believes, under the current circumstances, is not a realistic option. This notion goes against the ideas of the advocates of “anti-normalization” and others in the West obviously acting against the true interests of the Palestinians by promoting boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel.

Venal leadership has always been the main tragedy of the Palestinians. But it has created a vacuum that provides an opportunity for Palestinians such as Tamimi to search for other alternatives. This, of course, comes as bad news for those who hate Israel and keep hoping to destroy it. Now the question is, who will triumph: Palestinians and their Jewish neighbors in the West Bank who wish to live in peace, or the anti-Palestinian, anti-Israel, “anti-normalization” activists who seek to derail a true peace at any cost?

By all accounts, Sheikh Abdullah Tamimi, who hails from an influential clan in Hebron, is an extraordinarily courageous and unique Palestinian. His bravery lies not in rescuing a child from a burning house, and his singularity lies not in donating his salary to an orphanage.

Tamimi’s courage and exceptionality showed up in a different sphere: he recently spoke at a seminar organized by Jewish residents of the settlement of Efrat, in Gush Etzion (south of Jerusalem). The seminar was held under the title, “Relations between Jews and Arabs in Gush Etzion.” The event was attended by another courageous Palestinian, Khaled Abu Awwad, General Manager of the Israeli-Palestinian Bereaved Families Forum, a grassroots organization that promotes reconciliation as an alternative to hatred and revenge.

There Goes Turkish Secularism by Robert Jones

“They hold such events to establish hegemony over society, to scare and terrorize people — mainly Alevis, secularists, Christians, and even Muslims who do not agree with their policies. They aim to silence, repress, and standardize the people.” — Kemal Bulbul, Alevi author and community leader.

“Laïcité [secularism] should not be in the new constitution in Turkey.” — Ismail Kahraman, the speaker of Turkey’s parliament, and an MP of the ruling AKP.

Countless churches in Anatolia have been destroyed, left to decay or, used for sacrilegious purposes, such as stables and storehouses.

Islamic supremacists do not aim to establish a system where different communities can meaningfully and peacefully coexist. Instead, they aim for political and social domination in which non-Muslims will be second class citizens — or dhimmis — who will always remain under threat.

At least a thousand Muslims worshipped in the mosque of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s presidential palace in Ankara on August 6. They performed a ceremony known as dhikr (“remembrance” in Arabic).

This event was heavily criticized by the country’s many secularists on the social media.

OUR 15-YEAR-TRAUMA AFTER 9/11 — A NONIE DARWISH MOMENT

This special edition of The Glazov Gang presents The Nonie Darwish Moment with Nonie Darwish, the author of The Devil We Don’t Know.

Nonie discusses Our 15-Year-Trauma After 9/11, unveiling why we are more divided than ever over the Islamic threat.http://jamieglazov.com/2016/09/11/our-15-year-trauma-after-911-a-nonie-darwish-moment/

Don’t miss it!

And make sure to watch former Senior INS Special Agent Michael Cutler discuss 15 Years After 9/11: Lessons Not Learned, revealing how and why we must immediately change direction:

DIANA WEST: HILLARY’S CHAPPAQUADICK

I could not have prepared better for Lou Dobb’s question last night regarding Trump’s weaker polling with the weaker sex than having watched this video — “I Thought You Should Know.”

The video introduces a brutal rape of a 12-year-old girl that took place in 1975 in Arkansas. A 41-year-old man named Thomas Alfred Taylor stood trial. His defense counsel was a freshly minted lawyer named Hillary Rodham. She got him off.

Once you start reading more deeply into this case, thanks to the crack research of Alana Goodman for the Washington Free Beacon, which broke the story open in 2014, it becomes clear: This case is Hillary Clinton’s Chappaquiddick — the original moral stain, which, as with Ted Kennedy, once exposed, becomes her ultimate undoing.

Clinton’s involvement in this Arkansas child-rape trial was not a matter of providing counsel to a defendant, as our system requires. It was jumping through legal hoops to win a dirty victory — a dirty victory for a child-rapist by the woman who presents herself as lifelong champion of women and children.

Some key points.

Clinton demanded that this grievously injured 12-year-old undergo a psychiatric exam, later depicting her to the court as “seeking out older men.” This is already monstrous; however, listening to the audio unearthed by Goodman at the University of Arkansas library intensifies the horrors. “I had him take a polygraph, which he passed, which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs,” we hear Hillary Rodham Clinton herself say, laughing. It is chilling. It is also sickening.

MY SAY: REFLECTIONS FIFTEEN YEARS LATER

In the aftermath of 9/11, on September 20th, President Bush delivered the most inspiring speech of his entire career. My anger and grief gave way to some hope.

I was confident in our determination to defeat global jihad. I was certain that all victim nations would unite in a common front, setting politics and grudges aside. I predicted that all “root cause” cant would be dismissed. I was virtually certain that Israel, located in the belly of the Jihadist beast would gain understanding in its responses to brutal attacks.

And yet, only six months later in April 2002, President Bush- he of the inspiring address of September 20- invited the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia – the locus of seventeen 9/11 terrorists to a down home barbecue at his ranch in Crawford and the robed tyrant put forth his “initiative” for Mideast peace.” The President gushed to the assemble press:” Good afternoon. I was honored to welcome Crown Prince Abdallah to my ranch, a place that is very special for me, and a place where I welcome special guests to our country.” Special indeed.

For the rest of his term the President did not use terms other than “the religion of peace” which was “hijacked” by meanies who are the “enemies of peace.”

His generals applied rules of engagement that respected the mores of barbarians above the security needs of our troops.

That was the beginning of the appeasement of Radical Islam and Jihad that was followed by more threats and brutal attacks throughout the West and within our borders. And Israel, the only nation that has battled and confronted terrorist carnage with war and deterrence is routinely castigated for “disproportionate” responses.

Now President Obama has elevated that appeasement to an art form.

So, fifteen years later, have things really changed? Are we more cautious or far more concerned with political correctness and concerns for the sensibilities of potential enemies rather than our security? I fear it is the latter.

The Unmentionable Origins of Terrorism To counter ‘violent extremism,’ you have to be honest about its roots. By Robin Simcox — June 9, 2016

For some years now, the Obama administration has worked on developing a “Countering Violent Extremism” (CVE) strategy. Its goals: to be proactive in stopping terrorists from radicalizing and recruiting followers, and to address the factors that allow such actions to occur in the first place. Last week the result of some of these deliberations — a twelve-page strategy fronted by the State Department and USAID — was published.

In its foreword, Secretary of State John Kerry lists some of those countries affected by “violent extremism” (“from Afghanistan to Nigeria”) as well as the identity of violent extremist groups (“Da’esh . . . al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula, al-Shabaab, and Boko Haram”). The focus then, seems clear: countries with a significant Muslim population and Islamist terrorist groups. Yet here is where the strategy takes a turn for the surreal, because from the content of the actual strategy, you would not realize any such thing — the document is just that opaque, obfuscatory, and, ultimately, unhelpful.

Regarding why violent extremism takes root, the reader is treated to a variety of possibilities. They include “individual psychological factors . . . community and sectarian divisions and conflicts.” Other explanations are corruption, insufficiently robust courts, and a lack of tolerance among different ethnicities.

Apparently not even worthy of discussion is Islam or Islamism, words that are not mentioned once. This is no accident. There has been a concerted attempt to scrub any religious aspect from the actions of ISIS and al-Qaeda: That is why phrases like “violent extremism” even exist. (First mainstreamed by the British government, “violent extremism” was dreamed up as a way to avoid saying “Islamic” or “Islamist” extremism in the months after the July 2005 suicide bombings in London. The phrase swiftly traveled across the Atlantic and into the U.S. government’s vocabulary.)

The strategy states that “to be effective, CVE efforts must be guided by ongoing research and analysis of the context, drivers, and most effective interventions against violent extremism.” One can only wonder what would happen if this ongoing research and analysis concluded that the biggest context and driver to violent extremism was an ideologically driven reading of religion.

This is a dishonest approach in multiple ways. Consider a White House Fact Sheet on CVE from February 2015, which states that “CVE efforts address the root causes of extremism through community engagement” and that “violent extremist threats can come from a range of groups and individuals, including domestic terrorists and homegrown violent extremists in the United States.”

Fifteen Years After 9/11, Blindness to the Islamist Threat Is Official Policy Prohibiting mention of Islam in connection with jihadist violence won’t prevent future atrocities. By Andrew C. McCarthy

If there is a theme to this 15th annual observance — the word “anniversary” just seems so wrong — of the most lethal enemy attack ever carried out on American soil, it is erasure.

At least that’s what they’re being told in Owego, N.Y. There, a Muslim activist group is demanding that the town’s 9/11 memorial be erased. Not all of it; just the word “Islamic.”

Carved into the memorial — the point of which is to signify that which we must never forget — is the factual assertion that, on September 11, 2001, “nineteen Islamic terrorists” carried out coordinated suicide-hijacking attacks against the United States.

The Islamic Organization of the Southern Tier has decided that the monument is dangerous because it “could encourage hatred toward Muslims.” Fifteen years on, we are supposed to believe that the danger we face is not an enduring global threat fueled by an ideology drawn directly from Islamic scripture; the danger lies in speaking honestly about the threat.

It has taken less than two years to go from Je suis Charlie — the fleeting show of solidarity in support of Western free-speech principles after Islamic terrorists mass-murdered cartoonists at the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo — to Je suis Kerry. That’s a show of solidarity in support of our ineffable secretary of state who, when not steering aid, comfort, and goo-gobs of cash to the jihadist regime in Tehran, is telling the international media that maybe terrorism would go away if they’d just stop talking about it.

Erasure: It is Willful Blindness 2.0, specially fit for the age of Obama.

When I wrote my “Memoir of the Jihad,” willful blindness was an ingrained conscious avoidance of the abundant evidence of the threat posed by Islamic supremacism — the ideological commitment to coerce acceptance of sharia law, by force if necessary. It was a head-in-the-sand approach to easily accessible proof that the threat is rooted in Muslim scripture and a mainstream interpretation of Islam that stretches back over a millennium.

We’re way beyond that. Now, it is compelled blindness, a tireless campaign to erase the abundant evidence, to make it inaccessible. Alas, apologists of the See No Islam school cannot seem to make the jihadist carnage go away. But they work feverishly to make sure you can’t see what causes it. Or, if you do get a glimpse — because the carnage and its animating ideology are inextricably linked, and because jihadists are actually quite anxious to tell us why they do what they do — the apologists warn that you’ll keep your mouth shut if you know what’s good for you.

Or, as then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put it while working to create an unconstitutional legal restriction against criticism of Islam, she and her Islamist government partners will “use some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don’t feel they have the support to do what we abhor.”

She wasn’t kidding. Mentions of “Islam” in connection with terrorism? Erased — in favor of “workplace violence,” “man-caused disasters,” and “overseas contingencies.”

Investigations of prominent Islamist organizations proved in a terrorism-financing prosecution to affiliate with the Muslim Brotherhood and its Palestinian jihadist branch, Hamas? Erased.

David Singer: United Nations Must End Hamas and PLO Stranglehold On Power

The United Nations’ effort to create a second Arab State in former Palestine – in addition to Jordan – has suffered another death blow following the Palestinian Supreme Court ordering the suspension of local elections in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) and the Gaza Strip scheduled for October 8.

No parliamentary elections have been held since the 2006 – which Hamas won – but which the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) refused to accept.

A bitter internecine struggle saw Hamas end up governing the Gaza Strip and the PLO controlling areas “A” and “B” in Judea and Samaria.

No Palestinian presidential election has been held since PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas was elected in 2005.

Hamas boycotted the last Palestinian municipal elections in 2012 – but was due to participate this year.

In the absence of a popularly elected Government exercising complete authoritative and legislative control over the Gazan and West Bank Arab populations – any prospects of reaching a binding agreement with Israel in relation to Gaza and Judea and Samaria remains an impossible pipedream.

Both the PLO and Hamas have used the slogan “End the Occupation” to demand that Israel totally withdraw from Area “C” in Judea and Samaria over which Israel exercises complete administrative and security control under the Oslo Accords.

Peter O’Brien The Creed of the Climate Scientist *****

Taxpayer-funded warmists have no need for sacramental confession to expiate the sins of their wild inaccuracies and habitually incorrect prophecies. As a recent spate of amended theories demonstrates, they just make up new ‘facts’ and keep those grants rolling in
Catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) is the gift that keeps on giving, mainly to its adherents but, yes, also to sceptics for whom it provides an endless source of material upon which we can keep exercising our ‘little grey cells’. For example, I often wonder at what point the CAGW scam will finally expire. There have been two events which, by rights, should have at least given our governments pause in their rush to bankrupt us. The first was Climategate and the second is the warming stasis (better but more unscientifically known as “the pause”). But no, not a bit of it.

CAGW will end either because of a gradual and growing acceptance that the empirical data do not support the proposition of catastrophic warming (i.e. the science, the genuine science, at last triumphs) or, alternatively, there may be some, as yet unpredictable, watershed event (a Berlin Wall if you like) that causes the edifice to come tumbling down.

Regrettably, all the portents (and Graham Woods article Open Letter to an Alarmist Shill only reinforces my fear) are that we will have to rely on the latter. What prompted these thoughts was a series of recent Graham Lloyd reports in the The Australian. Let me say, at the outset, that any observation I make here is no reflection on, or criticism of, Lloyd. He is merely presenting the argument of the ‘climate establishment’.

The first of these articles, published on July 21, reported an interesting find:

The Antarctic Peninsula, regarded as a “global warming hot spot”, has been cooling for almost 20 years.

Natural variability was responsible both for the decades-long warming since the 1950s and more recent cooling, according to research published today in Nature.

Good news for sceptics, right? It seems to support the sceptic view that observed 20th century warming was nothing out of the ordinary.

But wait, as is always the case when observed evidence does not mesh with approved climate narrative, a warmist was quick to dismiss those inconvenient thermometer readings:

The research, led by John Turner from the British Antarctic Survey, said while the start of Antarctic Peninsula cooling in 1998 had coincided with the so-called “global warming hiatus”, the two were not connected.

So in this case ‘correlation’ has no significance. The prevarications and provisos foreshadowed by the above quote commence immediately in the following paragraph and dominate the remainder of Lloyd’s article. Just one example:

Deepak Lal :Wisdom on the Greater Middle East

Deepak Lal is James S. Coleman Professor Emeritus of International Development Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, and Professor Emeritus of Political Economy, University College London. His most recent book is Poverty and Progress: Realities and Myths about Global Poverty.

Unlike other Eurasian civilisations where the growth of a Western-educated elite which had imbibed some of the messages of the Enlightenment allowed modernity and tradition to be reconciled, the prevailing Islamic reaction was that of the oyster: a resolute determination to close and seal.
I came across J. B. Kelly’s magnificent book Arabia, the Gulf and the West (1980), when I was researching my book In Praise of Empires (2004). The essays and reviews collected in these three volumes by his son provide a compendium of his views on the failures of the imperial Western powers—first the British and then the Americans—to understand the Arabs and Islam, and their consequent failure in maintaining order in the Middle East. Today with the region in flames and millions fleeing the disorder in their dysfunctional homelands to the order and safety of Europe, the states system created after the fall of the Ottoman empire at the end of the First World War has more than fulfilled Field Marshal Earl Wavell’s prediction: “After ‘the war to end war’ they seem to have been pretty successful in Paris at making a ‘Peace to end Peace’.”[1]

These essays emphasise the influence of Arabophiles like T.E. Lawrence and Philby pere in presenting a romanticised view of the character of the Arab tribes. This created a climate of opinion in England where officials in charge of imperial policy chose to appease rather than deal robustly with the various machinations of Middle Eastern tribal rulers against British interests. The officials of the India Office with a more realistic view of these rulers and Islam were sidelined. After Indian independence they were replaced by Foreign Office officials intent on appeasing the Arabs, and increasingly reluctant to use military force to challenge the depredations of their rulers.

The misunderstanding of the Arabs and Islam began when Lord Kitchener of Khartoum (who became Secretary of War in Asquith’s government at the start of the First World War) changed Britain’s traditional aim in the Middle East of ensuring that their regional rivals, the French and the Russians, did not change the balance of power in the region, apart from a few territorial adjustments. Kitchener, by contrast, sought to seize the Arabic-speaking part of the Ottoman empire for the British, thereby creating a Middle Eastern empire to link and rival the one in India.

Recognising the importance but misunderstanding the nature of Islam, he sought to use it as a bulwark for the new Arabic empire by offering the religious leadership of the caliphate to the Hashemite Sheriff of Mecca. But, misunderstanding that in Islam the spiritual and temporal authority could not be split, this meant he was offering the kingdom of the Arabs to the Hashemite. This led Ibn Saud, the leader of the fierce, puritanical Wahhabi sect, to conquer the Hejaz with its holy cities of Mecca and Medina in 1924, driving Hussein ibn Ali into exile. As a consolation prize the British put Hussein’s sons Feisal and Abdullah on the thrones of the newly created states of Iraq and Trans-Jordan.[2] This whole edifice, including the French dependencies in Syria and Lebanon created by the Sykes–Picot agreement, is now in flames.

In reviewing Kelly’s voluminous output of essays and reviews in this article, I will concentrate on three themes of contemporary relevance, instead of the chronological sequence in which they are arranged in three volumes by the editor. These are: The British Empire and tribal societies; the US engagement with the Greater Middle East (including Afghanistan and Pakistan); and Islam as a threat to global order.

Britain and tribal societies

Kelly’s essays on the British retreat from Aden are a particularly damning indictment of Britain’s pusillanimity in fulfilling its treaty obligations to the Gulf sheikdoms. This led to the Marxist takeover of Yemen, and the regional turmoil which continues. Yemen is particularly important, as the tribes inhabiting the bleak, inaccessible mountainous areas in the region are at the centre of the insurgencies currently tormenting the Middle East.