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April 2017

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Testing China on North Korea Tougher sanctions would show if Beijing wants to restrain its client.

By on April 26th, 2017

President Trump called on the United Nations Security Council Monday to adopt new and stronger sanctions on North Korea. Diplomats are skeptical that such measures would change Pyongyang’s behavior because it is already economically isolated, doesn’t mind inflicting pain on its people, and will never negotiate away its nuclear weapons. A new sanctions push is nonetheless worth a try—not least as a test of Chinese willingness to confront the threat it has helped to nurture.

It’s a myth that Pyongyang already faces tough sanctions, since by several measures North Korea is well down the list of sanctions targets. There’s plenty of room to tighten financial and trade restrictions on the Kim Jong Un regime. The main obstacle has been China’s efforts to water down sanctions and veto tougher measures.

Beijing also has failed to enforce sanctions that it has agreed to. In recent years a U.N. Panel of Experts has documented how Chinese companies and banks violate U.N. sanctions against North Korea. Last year it determined that Bank of China ’s Singapore branch allowed 605 payments on behalf of North Korean entities. Beijing blocked the release of that report, though its contents leaked to the press.

Beijing has long viewed the collapse of the Kim regime as a worse threat to China’s interests than are the North’s nuclear missiles. And previous U.S. administrations chose to tiptoe around China’s resistance in the hope of making incremental diplomatic progress.

Mr. Trump has taken a different approach as the North continues to increase its nuclear stockpile and its missile-delivery systems, threatening unilateral action against North Korea while seeking China’s help. The Trump Administration is signaling in particular that it won’t tolerate a North that can target U.S. cities for destruction with long-range missiles that can carry a nuclear warhead. The U.S. has done this with multiple public statements, private talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping, and an invitation this week to the entire U.S. Senate for a briefing on the threat.

“This is a real threat to the world, whether we want to talk about it or not,” Mr. Trump said Monday at a White House meeting of Security Council envoys. “North Korea is a big world problem, and it’s a problem we have to finally solve. People have put blindfolds on for decades, and now it’s time to solve the problem.”

As we’ve recommended, the U.S. has the legal authority to increase pressure on the North by applying “secondary sanctions”—denying access to the U.S. financial system to companies and financial institutions in third countries that conduct illegal business with North Korea. Past administrations were reluctant to do so for fear of upsetting Beijing, since most of the targets of such sanctions would be Chinese. If Beijing refuses to act against the North, such sanctions would be a minimum test of Mr. Trump’s seriousness.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The ‘Hundred Days’ Humbug Blame FDR for this arbitrary standard, whose meaning has changed since 1933. By Charles Kesler

By on April 26th, 2017

President Trump is criticized for things he has done and for things he has left undone. What is unreasonable is the additional arbitrary standard to which he, like all modern presidents, is held liable: what he has accomplished, and failed to, in his first hundred days in office.

Why is the figure of 100 days so important? As though Franklin D. Roosevelt doesn’t have enough to answer for, here is another of his legacies.

FDR spoke of “the hundred days which had been devoted to the starting of the wheels of the New Deal” in his fireside chat of July 24, 1933—142 days after his March 4 inauguration. He was referring to “the historical special session of the Congress” he had convened, which opened March 9 and adjourned June 16. That is, the Hundred Days were legislative days, not executive days.

Today’s Congress commonly leaves Washington three days a week. If you wanted to apply Roosevelt’s implicit criterion of 100 congressional days, you’d be counting not to April 30, but into July or August—or even September or later, since Congress is in recess the whole month of August.

It’s true that in 1933 Roosevelt put the 73rd Congress through its paces. But the reason, or excuse, for the rush of legislation was an economic emergency, signaled by the steadily worsening bank panic. To get the closed banks open again was the aim of the first piece of legislation submitted, the Emergency Banking Act—introduced on March 9 at 12:37 p.m., and on its way to the president at 7:23.

Absent the bank panic, the Hundred Days would not have started with such a bang. Without a similar emergency, why should we expect a president’s (or Congress’s) first hundred days to have anything like the same urgency and focus?

Congress did enact leading elements of the New Deal during the Hundred Days. But within two years the Supreme Court had gutted the National Industrial Recovery Act. The administration never attempted to revive it. In 1936 the same fate befell the Agricultural Adjustment Act, though in less sweeping fashion. Haste makes waste. Perhaps the most famous piece of legislation associated with the New Deal, the Social Security Act of 1935, had nothing to do with the Hundred Days.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

MY SAY: REFLECTIONS ON HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY

By on April 25th, 2017

I lost an entire family in the Holocaust- grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins all perished among the one in every three Jews in the world that were exterminated. My brother and I were born in Bolivia where my parents presciently went before the war. I read the speeches and sermons and editorials this event evokes, but for me there is only one answer. and that is unstinting support for the security and future of Israel.

Only three years after the end of the Holocaust Israel was reborn in the ancient homeland where the unbroken chain of Jewish survival in spite of oppression, dislocation, murder and genocide, was started in Hebron. In Europe the words “Shma Israel”…Hear oh Israel were the last words uttered by the martyred.

Israel heard and offered succor and rescue.

Today, I cringe when supporters of BDS or J Street or other serial bashers of Israel grow solemn at the mention of the Holocaust but are complicit in criticism and libels of Israel which weaken the Jewish State and by extension encourage violent anti-Semitism throughout the world…even in this wonderful corner of the Diaspora.

Damn their caterwauling tears and hypocrisy. The only memorial and answer to the extermination of 6,000,000 Jews is a safe Israel within the boundaries of the ancient homeland where there has been a Jewish presence from time immemorial. The rest is just commentary. rsk

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Cowards of Academia A few — a very few — professors have written letters supporting free speech. Here’s why they’re worthless. By Dennis Prager

By on April 25th, 2017

Now that student mobs at universities around America (and elsewhere in the West) have silenced conservative speaker after conservative speaker, it has dawned on a small number of left-wing professors that the public is beginning to have contempt for the universities. As a result, a handful of academics at a handful of universities have signed statements in support of allowing “diverse” views to be heard at the university.

These statements are worthless.

While some of the professors who have signed these statements might sincerely believe that the university should honor the non-left value of free speech, one should keep in mind the following caveats.

First, the number of professors, deans, and administrators who have signed these statements is very small.

Second, while no one can know what animates anyone else, it’s a little hard to believe that many of those who did sign are sincere. If they were, why haven’t we heard from them for decades? Shutting out conservatives and conservative ideas is a not new phenomenon. Plus, it’s easy to sign a letter. You look righteous (“Of course, I support free speech”) and pay no price.

Third, these statements accomplish nothing of practical value. They are basically feel-good gestures.

If any of the rioting students read these statements — a highly unlikely occurrence — it is hard to imagine any of them thinking: Wow, I really have been acting like a fascist, rioting and shutting down non-leftist speakers, but now my eyes have been opened, and I’m going to stop. Even though my professors have taught me that every conservative is a sexist, racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic hate-monger, nevertheless, next time one of these despicable human beings comes to campus, I will silently wait for him to finish talking and then civilly ask challenging questions.

Thanks to left-wing indoctrination that begins in elementary school, most American students do not enter college as supporters of free speech. As reported in the New York Times on February 7, 2017, a Knight Foundation survey found that only “45 percent support that right [freedom of speech] when the speech in question is offensive to others and made in public.”

If any professors want to do something truly effective, they should form a circle around a hall in which a conservative is scheduled to speak, with each professor holding up a sign identifying themselves as a professor: “I am [name], professor of [department].”

Thanks to left-wing indoctrination that begins in elementary school, most American students do not enter college as supporters of free speech.

If just 1 percent of the professors on campus — that would mean just 43 faculty members at a place like UCLA — stood in front of the building in which a conservative was to speak, that might actually have an impact. If they were then attacked by left-wing thugs, other faculty members would then be forced to take a position.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Nukes + Nuttiness = Neanderthal Deterrence Acting crazy has worked for rogue regimes, but Western appeasement is not a long-term solution. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on April 25th, 2017

How can an otherwise failed dictatorship best suppress internal dissent while winning international attention, influence—and money?

Apparently, it must openly seek nuclear weapons.

Second, the nut state should sound so crazy and unpredictable that it might just use them, regardless of civilization’s deterrent forces arrayed against it.

Third, it must welcome being “reluctantly” pulled into nonproliferation talks to prolong the farce and allow its deep-pocket enemies to brag of their diplomatic “strategic patience” and sophistication.

The accepted logic of the rogue state is that the Westernized world is so affluent and leisured, and life is so good, that it will understandably grant almost any immediate geostrategic or monetary concession to avoid serious disruptions of the international order. The logic of appeasement is always more appeasement — especially in the one-bomb nuclear age.

North Korea sounds as if Pyongyang is an expendable hellhole, but not so Seoul, one of world’s great commercial and industrial powerhouses that exports Hyudais, Kias, Samsung, and LG appliances.

The logic is that of the proverbial crazy country neighbor, whose house and yard are a junkyard mess, whose kids are criminals, and who periodically threatens to “mess you up” unless you put up with his antics, give him attention, and overlook his serial criminality.

The renegade neighbor’s logic is that you have lots to lose by descending into his world of violence and insanity, while he has nothing to forfeit by basking in it, and that such asymmetry allows him to have something on you. And it makes him something other than just the ex-con, creep, and failure that he otherwise is.

Short-term appeasement of unhinged monsters is always felt to be a safer and less dangerous choice than solving the problem once and for all, which one might do by calling the bluff of a rabid entity believed capable of inflicting grave damage on the civilized order.

And so for nearly the last half century we have found new and creative ways of feeding our pre-civilized dragons in fear that otherwise they will immediately scorch civilization. The logic, in other words, has been “let the next administration handle this temporarily placated monster when he gets hungry again.”

For nearly the last half century, the logic has been ‘let the next administration handle this temporarily placated monster when he gets hungry again.’

For much of the 1980s and 1990s, Saddam Hussein sounded and acted murderously unhinged: He preemptively attacked Iran, issued threats against most of his neighbors, gassed thousands of Kurds at Halajba, bragged about his human flesh-chipper, ran a gestapo police state that murdered hundreds of thousands of its own, invaded Kuwait, sent missiles into Israel, violated U.N. resolutions, and all the while slyly suggesting that Iraq had a huge arsenal of WMD.

A crazy, dangerous Iraq was all over the front pages — in a way that Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and other oil-exporting Arab countries were not.

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Cinema Commandos of the Armenian Genocide Lessons from a courageous and long overdue film. April 25, 2017 Lloyd Billingsley

By on April 25th, 2017

The Promise, Survival Pictures, directed by Terry George, PG-13, 2 hr. 12 min.

In southern Turkey in 1914, Mikael Boghosian wants to attend medical school but doesn’t have the money, so he gets engaged to Maral, a young woman in his village, and uses her dowry to pay tuition. In Constantinople, he meets the dashing Ana Khesarian, who is consorting with American reporter Chris Meyers.

This love quadrangle plays out in fine style, with homage to Dr. Zhivago and Casablanca. The larger back story is probably unknown to many viewers, so The Promise takes pains to spell it out up front.

At the outset of World War I, the Ottoman Empire was coming apart and that was bad news for the non-Muslim minorities, particularly the Christian Armenians. The Ottoman Turks set out to exterminate the Armenians, the first attempt at genocide of the past century and the most well documented. So the filmmakers, who claim an “educational” purpose, had plenty of source material.

As in any Islamic state, the Christian Armenians are third-class citizens, derided as “dogs” and such. One prominent Turk says the Armenians are a “microbe,” and that was indeed the pronouncement of Turkish physician Mahmed Reshid. An Islamic state can’t tolerate an invasive infection, and when war breaks out Turkish mobs attack Armenians and loot their shops and homes. The film does not explain why the oppressors met with such little resistance.

The Turks took great pains to disarm the Armenians, and that left them essentially helpless against their highly mechanized oppressors. The Turks did indeed load Armenian captives into railroad freight cars, as the film shows. As Peter Balakian noted in The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response, a good companion volume for the film, the Turks packed 90 Armenian men, women and children into a car with a capacity of 36. That was hardly the only way they perished.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Pay for My Massage; “White Skin is Magic” Georgetown Professor Michael Eric Dyson prescribes a paralyzing pill to African-Americans. Danusha V. Goska

By on April 25th, 2017

Michael Eric Dyson is the University Professor of Sociology at Georgetown University. One website listed the average tenured professor’s 2012 salary at Georgetown at $167,000, three times the median US income. No doubt a professor occupying an elevated position such as Dyson’s, in 2017, earns more. Dyson received his PhD from Princeton, ranked by US News as the best American university, beating out Harvard. Dyson is the author of five bestselling books and the recipient of numerous awards. His three children have six degrees including from Ivy League schools. His son is an anesthesiologist.

Dyson’s 2017 book, Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America has received over-the-top praise from Stephen King, Toni Morrison, and Michael Medved. Reviews call the book “frank,” “searing,” “urgent,” “eloquent, righteous, and inspired … lyrical.” “Anguish and hurt throb in every word,” along with “brilliance and rectitude.”

Dyson’s main point is that America is a hellhole that dooms black people to failure, silencing, and death, while whites uniformly bask in unearned wealth and good fortune. “You know that white skin is magic.”

Blacks are analogous to captured birds. Whites will decide whether they want, finally, to open their hands and liberate blacks, or just, out of spite, strangle them to death. “It’s in your hands.”

As reparation, whites must hire blacks instead of whites. Whites must pay blacks more money than is appropriate. Whites must give blacks money for school tuition and zoo, museum, and movie admission, and pay for massages and textbooks. White people must also tell every white person they meet that he enjoys white privilege. Dyson provides the script: “Whites must understand that they benefit from white privilege in order to realize how white privilege creates the space for black oppression.”

Tears We Cannot Stop opens and closes with quotes from Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. The first quote, by Morrison, “We flesh. Flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh … they’d as soon pick out your eyes … break your mouth … What you scream from it they do not hear.” The closing quote from Alice Walker’s The Color Purple: “Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance and holler, just trying to be loved.”

One can’t debate with an enslaved fictional character; to do so would be unseemly and irrational. Dyson doesn’t open or close with statistics or peer-reviewed scholarship; he opens and closes with works of art that imprison African Americans in stereotypical images of helplessness and suffering, images created by college-educated, professional women who wrote in faux-Ebonics. Walker and Morrison have been embraced and feted by a majority-white academic and literary elite. Between them, they have won every possible prize, including two Pulitzers and a Nobel. In these opening and closing quotes, African Americans sound like the roadshow of Porgy and Bess.

Dyson does not include quotes by actual slaves. Such quotes often include an insistence on human dignity, no matter the circumstances, and an awareness of how complex life can be. Frederick Douglass wrote, “A smile or a tear has not nationality … they, above all the confusion of tongues, proclaim the brotherhood of man,” “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men,” “People might not get all they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all they get,” “We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and the future,” and “The soul that is within me no man can degrade.”

Booker T. Washington is a treasure-trove of quotes for Dyson to ponder. “Negroes inhabiting this country, who themselves or whose ancestors went through the school of American slavery, are in a stronger and more hopeful condition … than is true of an equal number of black people in any other portion of the globe … This I say, not to justify slavery … but to call attention to a fact.” Note that Douglass and Washington chose to make their points in Standard English.

Another of Dyson’s rhetorical ploys: he prostitutes religion to forfend rational thought. Dyson opens his “Invocation” with the words “Almighty, hear our prayer. Oh God how we suffer.” He closes the book, “Oh, Lord, black folk are everything … we are going nowhere.” In the same way that one can’t debate a fictional character, especially one who merely wants to dance and be loved, and whose eyes evil white people want to poke out, one can’t debate something as sacred as a prayer.

The Old Testament prophets were brazenly courageous. Jeremiah told his fellow Jews exactly where and how they were disobeying God and tempting catastrophe. Dyson cannot breathe a single word of criticism of his fellow African Americans. Dyson never so much as brushes against the New Testament’s love and forgiveness. “Father forgive them for they know not what they do,” “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,” and “Love does not keep account of injuries” are words that do not appear in Dyson’s Bible.

Dyson mentions having once lead a Bible study. “I hammered away at the parallels between sexism and racism” because sexism is bad for “black Christianity.” His emphasis on sexism and racism is truer to identity politics than to the Bible’s larger message. The very concept of “black Christianity” contradicts Galatians 3:28, “In Christ there is no Jew nor Greek … you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Whites’ only path to acceptance is to acknowledge how debased they are. “I’m a rich, white guy, and I’m sick to my stomach thinking about it,” reports basketball coach Gregg Popovich, as quoted by Dyson. Dyson mentions Christian publisher Jim Wallis who prescribed “repentance for white people as dying to whiteness.” No concordance would turn up any Biblical verses that support “dying to whiteness” as a form of repentance.

Dyson’s prostitution of religion as cover reaches its nadir in blasphemy. He equates the spit of a black girl on a white girl’s body with Christ’s presence in the Blessed Sacrament. The black girl’s spit “may as well have been holy water … Holy Communion … the biggest miracle since you turned water to wine.”

The book is so repetitious one gets a sense of its entire message from two pages of its “Invocation”: Blacks are not free; they are “ensnared.” Whites are “tormentors” and nothing blacks can do will “stop their evil.” Blacks cannot convince whites that “we are your children and don’t deserve this punishment.” Whites are “slaughtering us in the streets” because they want “to remove us from the face of the earth.” Whites “are lying through their teeth.” Whites “are invested in their own privilege” so “they cannot afford to see how much we suffer.” “White folk act like the devil is all in them.” Dyson watches helplessly as racism threatens to snuff the life out of his grandchildren.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Obama Vows To Continue Community-Organizing America The ex-president lays out part of his agenda in Chicago. April 25, 2017 Matthew Vadum

By on April 25th, 2017

Former President Obama suggested he will focus his post-presidency on redistributing wealth, emptying prisons, and sabotaging the economy with carbon-emission controls, during his televised return to the national stage yesterday.

Obama reiterated the politically tone-deaf radical policy priorities of his presidency in a speech at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago. (A transcript of Obama’s relatively brief oration is available here.)

In a statement preceding a roundtable discussion with students, Obama said:

The one thing that I’m absolutely convinced of is that yes, we confront a whole range of challenges from economic inequality and lack of opportunity to a criminal justice system that too often is skewed in ways that are unproductive to climate change to, you know, issues related to violence. All those problems are serious. They’re daunting. But they’re not insolvable.

“What is preventing us from tackling them and making more progress really has to do with our politics and our civic life,” Obama said. “It has to do with the fact that because of things like political gerrymandering our parties have moved further and further apart and it’s harder and harder to find common ground. Because of money and politics.”

Of course, in blaming “political gerrymandering” – an irrelevancy – he got to leave out the social polarization and ethno-cultural balkanization he encouraged while president, along with his crusade to inject more and more money into politics while pretending to do the opposite.

So what Obama failed to mention was just as interesting as what he did get around to saying.

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Hamas: The New Charter That Isn’t by Bassam Tawil

By on April 25th, 2017

It is worthwhile to note that, contrary to what is being published in many media outlets, Hamas is NOT changing its Charter, which explicitly calls for the elimination of Israel.

The document goes on to clarify that even if Hamas accepts a Palestinian state on the pre-1967 lines, “this would not mean recognition of the Zionist entity or giving up any of the Palestinian rights.”

Hamas and the PLO now have crucial common ground: sweet-talk the Western donors while laying stealthy plans to destroy Israel.

Yasser Arafat may have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, but his PLO officials and he really deserve the prize for the art of deception. For decades now, the PLO has spearheaded one of history’s biggest scams, and now it seems that Hamas, the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood movement, is about to join the bandwagon.

According to unconfirmed reports in the Arab media, Hamas is about to publish a “political document” in which it “accepts” the “two-state solution.” The purported document is already being hailed by some Western and Israeli analysts and Hamas apologists as a sign of the radical Islamic movement’s march toward moderation and pragmatism.

It is worthwhile to note that, contrary to what is being published in many media outlets, Hamas is NOT changing its Charter, which explicitly calls for the elimination of Israel. The new Hamas document is intended for outside consumption and is directed to the ears and eyes of Americans and Europeans only. The original Hamas Charter in Arabic will remain in effect even after the new document is made public and seemingly official. In fact, it does not have to do that. The New Charter, while mouthing all sorts of human rights bromides over which Westerners and the media can be counted upon to swoon, such as:

“Hamas believes that the message of Islam came with morals of justice, truth, dignity and freedom, and is against injustice in all its shapes, and criminalizes the criminals whatever their sex, color, religion or nationality,” and so on. (New Hamas Charter, Article 9).

It is, nevertheless, the same Old Hamas Charter as before. It does not even bother to renounce jihad as an acceptable means of “resistance.” This is Hamas talking in code; pursuing “resistance” against Israel means: We plan to continue launching terror attacks against Israel.

“Hamas confirms that no peace in Palestine should be agreed on, based on injustice to the Palestinians or their land. Any arrangements based on that will not lead to peace, and the resistance and Jihad will remain as a legal right, a project and an honor for all our nations’ people.” (New Hamas Charter, Article 21)

The PLO bluff began with the signing of the Oslo Accords with Israel in 1993, and reached its peak three years later, when PLO leaders managed to convince President Bill Clinton and the international community, including many Israelis, that they had changed the PLO Charter, which calls for the destruction of Israel. The truth, however, is a far cry from that.

Back in 1996, the PLO’s parliament-in-exile, the Palestine National Council (PNC), held a session in Gaza City where its members decided to “entrust a legal committee with re-formulating the Palestinian Charter.”

No one knows if the committee made any of the proposed changes. It is also unclear whether two-thirds of the PNC members (the required majority) actually voted in favor of changing the PLO Charter.

To this day, some Palestinians maintain that the charter was never officially amended or revoked — and it certainly was not ratified — and that the whole performance was a lie to mislead the international community and Israel into believing that the Palestinians had abandoned their dream of destroying Israel through “armed struggle.”

The PLO Charter question, like the PLO’s pledge to work towards a two-state solution, is murky. What is clear is that many in the international community swallowed the scam and began to believe that Arafat and his cohorts were finally leading their people toward real peace, beginning with recognition of Israel’s right to exist.

A glance at PLO actions over the past two decades will show that this tiger has certainly not changed its stripes. Since the signing of the Oslo Accords, the PLO and its leaders, first Arafat and now Mahmoud Abbas, have consistently and stubbornly rejected all Israeli peace offers, some of which were exorbitantly generous.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Open Letter to National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster ‘Radical Islamic Terrorism’ is Accurate and ‘Helpful’ by A. Z. Mohamed

By on April 25th, 2017

In other words, as al-Kalbani has confirmed — and contrary to what McMaster has been telling his staff and his commander-in-chief, President Trump — Muslim terrorists are Islamic, and the term “radical Islamic terrorism” is apt, accurate and extremely “helpful.”

During his first “all hands” staff meeting on February 23, President Donald Trump’s new national security adviser, U.S. Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, called terrorism “un-Islamic” and the term “radical Islamic terrorism” not helpful.

Prior to the meeting, retired U.S. Army Col. Peter Mansoor told Fox News that McMaster, with whom he served in Iraq during the 2007 surge of American troops, “absolutely does not view Islam as the enemy… and will present a degree of pushback against the theories being propounded in the White House that this is a clash of civilizations and needs to be treated as such.”

U.S. Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, President Trump’s National Security Adviser. (Image source: Center for Strategic and International Studies)

Let us put McMaster’s premise — which is antithetical not only to that of his predecessor, Michael Flynn, but to Trump himself and many of his senior advisers — to the test.

Less than three years ago, the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Abdulaziz bin Abdullah Al ash-Sheikh — a grandchild of Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, the 18th-century founder of the Saudi school of Islam called Wahhabism — said, in an August 19, 2014 statement, that Islamic State (ISIS), and al-Qaeda, are Islam’s “enemy number one.”

This would be a good sign, if not for the fact that four days earlier, Sheikh Adil al-Kalbani, a former imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca and a Salafi (a strict sect of Sunni Islam advocating a return to the early Islam of the Quran), tweeted: “ISIS is a true product of Salafism and we must deal with it with full transparency.”

Later that month, al-Kalbani published two pieces in the Saudi government-aligned daily Al Riyadh — on August 24 and 31 — criticizing elements “in the Salafi stream for appropriating the truth and Islam and for permitting the killing of their opponents, and… clerics and society that dared not come out against them.”

This was a bold assertion on the part of al-Kalbani: the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is based on Wahhabism, a form of Salafism embraced by the monarchy.

In January 2016, al-Kalbani gave an interview to the Saudi-owned, Dubai-based network, MBC, in which he acknowledged with regret, “We follow the same thought [as ISIS], but apply it in a refined way.” He added that ISIS “draws its ideas from what is written in our own books, from our own principles.” (Author’s emphasis)

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