RUTHFULLY YOURS

On a trip to the U.S, the Rev. Dr. Kenneth Meshoe, a member of the South African Parliament, president of the African Christian Democratic Party and chairman of the South African Israel Allies Caucus, expressed his profound concern about the ad campaign on San Francisco’s Muni transportation system, urging for an end to U.S. support for Israel. A group of Christian, Jewish and Muslims has funded the ad campaign since 2010. [1]
Having lived as a black South African under apartheid and having visited Israel numerous times, he said there is no basis for those accusing Israel of being an apartheid state. Apartheid is a legal system of segregation based on color, with a white majority in control of the government. Under apartheid, people of color could not vote, hold office or travel freely in their own country.
Only segregated schools and sports arenas were available to them and they had to use segregated public restrooms and public transportation. Whites and blacks were prohibited to marry or have sexual relations. Different residential areas were built to ensure a forced physical separation between the races. Their hospitals, medical care and education were always inferior to those of the whites. Any white physicians willing to treat a black patient had to conduct the examination in private. [2]
Richard J. Goldstone, a former justice of the South African Constitutional Court, who led the United Nations fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict of 2008-2009, added that attacking Israel “is an unfair and inaccurate slander … calculated to retard rather than advance peace negotiations…. In Israel, there is no apartheid. Nothing there comes close to the definition of apartheid under the 1998 Rome Statute.” [3]
He remembered “all too well the cruelty of South Africa’s abhorrent apartheid system …where blacks critically injured in car accidents were left to bleed to death if there was no black’ ambulance to rush them to a black hospital. ‘White’ hospitals were prohibited from saving their lives.”[4]

If we are speaking of Muslims, I would say no. Muslims would need to repudiate Islam or leave it as apostates. Because Islam is a totalitarian ideology melded to the “religion” of Islam, such an action would require intellectual honesty, a fealty to reality, and a dollop of courage in the face of death threats prescribed in the Koran or leave it as apostates. Because Islam is a totalitarian ideology melded to the “religion” of Islam, such an action would require intellectual honesty, a fealty to reality, and a dollop of courage in the face of death threats prescribed in the Koran for leavers of the “faith.” I also base my conclusion on the record of crimes by jihadists who are first- or second-generation Muslims, a record compiled and documented by Clarion and numerous other sites that report on the rapes, murders, knifings, and suicide-bombings committed by Muslims who have resided in the West for any measurable time. The more barbarous the origins of these Muslims (Somalia comes to mind, and there is also a racist element in Somalian crimes against Westerners), repeatedly commit the most heinous crimes and plead ignorance of Western mores and standards of behavior. The authorities and the MSM jump on a “mental illness” explanation before a victim is taken away in an ambulance.

Islam does not prepare average Muslims for any degree of intellectual enquiry on any subject, especially when it comes to the multitude of contradictions and fallacies inherent in the “faith” which would leave Socrates or Aristotle massaging their heads. Islam is anti-mind to the core, and does not much tolerate Muslims who “want to know.” Islam is a mortal enemy of free minds. This will help to explain why Muslim populations in Western countries represent a “silent majority” reluctant to or will not condemn jihadist outrages, and this silence is to my mind tacit approval of the crimes, even when Muslims are collateral victims of terrorist attacks (as there were on 9/11, e.g.). This tacit sanctioning may be based on fear of reprisals or on an inbred indifference to the death and suffering caused by terrorism. Islam is, among other charges one may level against it, profoundly anti-life and anti-individual, and so I shall always remain “Islamophobic.”

‘The Angel: The Egyptian Spy Who Saved Israel’ by Uri Bar-Joseph is a book that should be required reading—as a terrible warning—for everyone involved in intelligence. It is the tale of how an intelligence agency, despite having the best information imaginable, can still get it wrong. Bar-Joseph recounts how, prior to the Yom Kippur War of 1973 when Israel suffered a near-fatal blow, Israel had been given detailed knowledge of Egypt’s plans thanks “to an exceptionally rare situation in the history of espionage: the direct assistant to the leader of a country preparing to launch an attack on its enemy was a secret agent on behalf of that enemy.”

That secret agent was Ashraf Marwan, the son-in-law of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and a trusted confidante of his successor, Anwar Sadat. Bar-Joseph, a professor of political science at the University of Haifa, himself a veteran of the war, has the ideal background to write this book. His earlier effort, The Watchman Fell Asleep, took a broad view of the intelligence failures leading up to the Yom Kippur War; it is considered the most important study on the subject and won the Israeli Political Science Association Best Book Award in 2002. In The Angel, ably translated by David Hazony, Bar-Joseph focuses exclusively on the story of the spy central to the drama and the ossified thinking that prevented Israel from taking advantage of the secrets he provided.

In the summer of 1970, Marwan simply consulted the phone book and called the Israeli Embassy from a London telephone booth to offer his services. It took a second phone call five months later for Mossad agents to wake up to the fact that they were being offered what a former Mossad chief would call “the greatest source we have ever had.”

What was Marwan’s motivation? Bar-Joseph hazards some conjectures. Nasser, unusually for an Arab leader, was immune to financial corruption and had no intention of allowing his ambitious son-in-law to use his new family connections to enrich himself. He disliked Marwan and, when his daughter refused his order to divorce him, put him in a job with little pay or scope. But while the desire to get back at Nasser and improve his finances might explain his initial decision, as Bar-Joseph notes, it does not explain why Marwan spied for Israel after Nasser’s death. Marwan’s situation radically improved after he backed Sadat in the face of an attempted palace coup d’état; from then on he enjoyed a key role in Sadat’s inner circle. Bar-Joseph suggests instead that Marwan had a need to live dangerously and seek out risk, almost like an adrenaline junkie. Whatever his motives, writes Bar-Joseph, the cornucopia of information that poured forth from him, the most important concerning the Egyptian military, “went far beyond anything [the Israelis] had known. It was unprecedented in its quality.”