RUTHFULLY YOURS

“There are three major lessons for Israel in the ruins of Aleppo:

1. Ignore international promises
2. Strength is the best deterrent
3. Israel needs to trust only itself when it comes to its long-term security

And those who still follow the ‘new Middle East’ argument. Who suggest Israel should make large concessions because, well, it has worked so well for them before. Some parts of Israel are only 250 miles from Aleppo in Syria. In the comfort of London and New York, it is easy to tell others to take risks for peace.”

…….It is difficult not to be moved by events in Syria. Images from Aleppo, Syria are heart-breaking. It is also fair to say, most of us in the west, despite vocally shouting that ‘something needs to be done’, haven’t got much idea about exactly what. Syria is a tale of 1000 trenches with 2000 armies.

During the ‘Arab spring’ in 2011, I remember being engaged in debate over events in Libya. As ‘interventionists’ were encountering difficulty coordinating international support for anti-Gaddafi action, I was pointing towards Syria, worried international impotence was signaling to Assad he could act with impunity. Action in Libya was the ‘easy’ choice.

At the time, most commentary over the ‘Arab Spring’ was positive. Thousands of experts, mostly liberal elites listening to the sound of their own echo, applauding the ‘rising up’ of the Arab street. This policy brief from the European Policy Centre discusses how Europe should ‘open up’ to ‘democracies in the making’. Brian Whitaker in the Guardian suggested on 14/3/2011 that “the Arab spring is brighter than ever”.

My pessimism in conversations on the topic was unwelcome. Nobody wanted the input of the doomsayer. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in the Guardian led with a headline “Arabs are democracy’s new pioneers”. They asked “what these new experiments in freedom and democracy will teach the world over the next decade?” It is now 2016, we are half way into that ‘next decade’. This piece is in answer to that puzzle.
In the beginning

To do this I must start this story 20 years earlier. To be precise at 3.30am on 18th January 1991.

At that time, I was huddled inside a ‘sealed room’. In reality this was just a room specially decorated with masking tape and plastic sheeting, designed to increase my chance of surviving a chemical attack. I didn’t speak Hebrew, and the information given on the radio was linguistically out of my reach. One of my neighbours kept their dog leashed outside their house and I’d frequently sneak over to let it run free for a while. So when the sirens came, I first ran to free ‘Lady’, to share my protection against chemical attack. So, there we sat in the sealed room, two loners, taking our chances together.

The reason I mention Iraq is because Arab response to Saddam’s belligerency, coupled with Israel’s restraint, were taken as early signals of what Shimon Peres would begin to call the ‘New Middle East’. Regardless of how foolish such thought looks in 2016, the underlying pillars of these ‘believers’ have been the central drivers of the global strategy towards Israel for the last three decades.

Within three years of Iraq, and to loud international applause, Israel was importing terrorists from Tunis. Just months later, buses were exploding in Israel’s cities. As Yitzhak Rabin sought ways to act against the rise in terror, Israel was asked to act with restraint.
International applause

Israel often hears international applause when it lowers its guard and is swiftly criticised when it reacts to aggression from within the new reality. In early 1995, as bus bombs in Israel threatened to unseat Rabin and the Labour party, pressure was applied on Israel to deliver the concessions to make peace with Syria. The price – the Golan Heights. The UK Foreign Secretary in 1995 suggested ‘historic opportunities could be missed’, if the parties seeking peace were ‘over cautious’.

Have you noticed how elections that produce results counter to the Left’s wishes — Trump and Brexit, to name but two examples — are sneeringly dismissed as manifestations of the hoi polloi’s ignorance, stupidity and bigotry? Those progressives, they don’t like democracy.
No doubt many readers have recognise and deplore the debasement, over the past 40 or so years, of the English language under the influence of Left wing academics and special interest groups. The word ‘racist’ is the most obvious example. Others are ‘homophobia’, ‘xenophobia’, ‘hate speech’ and, well the list of words hijacked by the left and freighted with contempt for all who disagree goes on on on.

But there’s also another example, one that has come very much to the fore of late: “populist”. At the moment it is the slur du jour for the shell-shocked left, stunned that so many recent votes and plebiscites have gone against them.

Merriam-Webster defines a populist as “a member of a political party claiming to represent the common people; a believer in the rights, wisdom, or virtues of the common people.” Under the first definition, the ALP qualifies as ‘populist’. What politician in his right mind would abjure a description of himself as a believer in the rights, wisdom or virtues of the common people? Yet we routinely hear ‘populist’ used in the pejorative against any politician who so far forgets his status as a member of the establishment elite as to tap into the mood of those he has been elected to represent.

The supreme and most recent example, of course, is Donald Trump. You could not find a better example of this phenomenon than a piece headlined “Moderates Can Be a Force for Change in 2017”, originally published in The Times and reproduced in The Australian, by one Rachel Sylvester.

Sylvester’s Wikipedia entry tells us “she was named 2015′s Political Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards. Iain Martin has described her and Thomson’s work as ‘highly skilled interviewers [with] a gift for getting people to burble on until they say something highly revealing’.” Judging by the article in question it’s clear Rachel knows a thing or two about burbling. She begins thus:

In this, the year of the political strongman, Vladimir Putin has surely been the biggest winner. He has extended Russia’s sphere of influence to the Middle East, propping up his ally Bashar al-Assad in Syria by slaughtering civilians and bombing aid convoys, while launching cyber attacks and propaganda campaigns that destabilised the West.

She then goes on to mention Turkey’s President Erdogan and Philippines President Duterte as other examples of the rise of ‘hard men’ and, not to be thought of as jingoistic or biased, she takes a swipe closer to home:

British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s eulogy to Fidel Castro was a reminder that the Left has its own favourite oppressors.

Since she led off with Vladimir Putin one wonders why she needed to remind us, per the example of Corbyn, that the Left has its own dubious characters, albeit fairly tame ones, who confine themselves to simple expressions of admiration for dictators, rather than actually emulating them by executing or imprisoning their opponents. I wonder if Xi Jinping might be a bit miffed at not making the cut, given his sabre-rattling in the South China Sea.

“Let me be clear: there is wisdom and insight to be found in the writings, speeches and addresses of Pope Francis. He is at his best when he thinks and writes in continuity with the full weight of Christian wisdom and in continuity with the insights of his immediate predecessors. But when he departs from them, he tends to confuse humanitarian concerns with properly Christian ones. He often gives a one-sided “progressivist” reading of Catholic social teaching. Remarkably, he seems to have learned very little about the gravest evil of the twentieth century, totalitarianism, hence his troubling indulgence towards communist tyranny in Cuba. Pope Francis could benefit from paying more attention to the reflective experiences of John Paul II with totalitarian communism and Pope Benedict XVI with Nazi barbarism. No doubt, if he did so, his thought would resonate more clearly with the timelessness of the best of Catholic social and political thought. At the very least, he would be less apt in his writings and remarks to emphasise private judgments that too easily echo the progressive opinions and prejudices of his most vocal elite, Left-liberal fans.”

….Rather than indulging his inclination to echo the opinions and prejudices of the Left’s progressive choir, the Pontiff would benefit from the example of John Paul II and Benedict XVI in honouring the timelessness of the best Catholic social and political thought.
Pope Francis is widely acclaimed today, less for his Catholic wisdom than for the fact that he is perceived by secular (and some religious) opinion as some kind of “progressive”. Whether this will lead many to return to the Catholic Church or reconsider “the truth about man” that it proffers is highly doubtful. There is an element of the bien-pensant in Francis’s papacy, a tendency in his utterances and self-presentation to confirm widely held Left-liberal elite opinions about politics and the world.

The consensus around Pope Francis is selective and tends towards the ideological. His admirers, and the Pope himself sometimes, confuse Christian charity with secular humanitarianism. Francis’s ill-disciplined off-the-cuff remarks are treated with utmost seriousness, and the part of his thought that is in continuity with his great predecessors is largely ignored, if not explained away. Among conservative Catholics there is deep and, I would suggest, excessive suspicion of the Pope and a growing sense that he confuses his personal judgments, largely shaped by his Argentinian experience, with the full weight of Catholic wisdom.

How does one find one’s way in the midst of this confusion? What is needed is the deployment of a “hermeneutic of continuity”, one that forthrightly confronts Francis’s continuities and discontinuities with the great tradition of Catholic thought that preceded him. Out of justice, we owe the Pope both respect and the full exercise of the arts of intelligence.

Caring for our common home

Pope Francis’s May 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’ (Praise Be to You) is a perfect illustration of these continuities and discontinuities. There is much about it that is thoroughly orthodox and even traditionalist. Pope Francis repeats old Christian wisdom of a decidedly anti-modern cast when he laments the project of modern mastery which reduces human beings to “lords and masters” of nature. He affirms human uniqueness, “which transcends the spheres of physics and biology”, and emphasises our stewardship over the whole of creation. Nonetheless, Francis’s is noticeably more a theology of creation than a theology of redemption and is thus incomplete. Francis’s theological defence of biodiversity probably understates the fact that organisms and species come and go quite independently of the alleged rapaciousness of human beings. This brings us to a fundamental tension in his encyclical: a society that attempts to preserve pristine nature as it is, all in the name of not “sinning” against creation, cannot meet the goal of providing “sustained and integral development” for the poor, a goal that is also central to Francis’s pontificate.

When Pope Francis delivers his Christmas message this weekend, he will do so not just as the head of the Catholic Church but as the improbable standard-bearer for many progressives around the world.

With conservative and nationalist forces on the rise in many places and with figures such as U.S. President Barack Obama and French President François Hollande on their way out, many on the left—from socialists in Latin America to environmentalists in Europe—are looking to the 80-year-old pontiff for leadership.

“Pope Francis really inspires a lot of people to want to fight. I’m pretty sure if he weren’t the face of the Catholic Church, he’d be out in the street with us,” said Bleu Rainer, an activist in the “Fight for $15” minimum-wage movement in Tampa, Fla., who traveled to Rome last month for an international meeting of grass-roots activists addressed by the pope. “He reinforces our issues and makes them moral issues.”

Yet the pope’s support for some liberal causes, rooted in traditional Christian concern for the poor and defenseless, has meant joining forces with some partners who reject major Catholic moral teachings. Critics also say that the church’s leader shouldn’t take such strong stands on political questions about which Catholics are allowed to have a range of views.

Pope Francis has taken bold positions on a variety of issues, including migration, climate change, economic equality and the rights of indigenous peoples. His June 2015 environmental encyclical “Laudato Si’ ” called for a sharp reduction in the use of fossil fuels and described global warming as a major threat to life on Earth. The document was also an indictment of the global market economy, which he said has plundered the planet at the expense of the poor and of future generations. The Vatican now requires students for the priesthood to learn about environmental problems, including climate change, during their seminary studies.

The pontiff’s views on migration—he calls, in effect, for open borders for refugees and economic migrants—spilled over into criticism of Donald Trump earlier this year. The pope said that the Republican candidate was “not Christian” for calling for a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico. Just days before the American election, in a speech to grass-roots activists from around the world, Pope Francis warned against the “spread of xenophobia” and the “false security of physical and social walls”—remarks widely seen as a critique of Mr. Trump.

The pope has also been blunt about economic equality. He has said that “land, shelter and employment” are “sacred rights” and added that “if I speak of this, some people conclude that the pope is a communist.” In his 2015 address to the U.S. Congress, he praised the late Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, for “her social activism, her passion for justice and for the cause of the oppressed.”

Such statements have made him a hero to many politicians on the left. Sen. Bernie Sanders, who left the campaign trail for two days before the New York primary to attend a Vatican conference, called himself a “fan of the pope’s clarity, his humility, his vision and his courage.”

Cheerleading for killers and terror-mongering has become synonymous with the countries where religious extremists enjoy popular and official support.

This is exactly what is wrong with the Muslim world, where masses are kept ignorant by these radical mullahs from the real challenges such as poverty, illiteracy and disease.

Instead, at the behest of the powerful extremist regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, which throw unlimited money into poor countries to expand their radicalization, extremist religious parties feed the people with the false notion of the supremacy of their creed.

Some of the terrorists have entered Europe with the refugees. If this amount is just one percent, that number comes to 10,000 people.

However, the wrong political policies of governments in Europe are also to be blamed for the rise of Islamic extremism in the world: they allowed the existence and breeding of such organizations on their soil at the first place.

Time has come for those who are still confused about the acts of these terrorists — or those who serve as terrorist apologists to try to cover up their deeds after every incident — to be exposed. A large number of Muslims are already sick and tired of these extremists.

We Muslims also need to leave no stone unturned to return the humane gestures that our fellow citizens have shown when we Muslims faced trouble. In the same way they took to the streets for us, it is now our turn to show all our fellow citizens — non-Muslims as well as Muslims — that we also stand by them. Merry Christmas!!!

The world saw a massacre in Aleppo, the assassination of Russian ambassador in Turkey, a brazen terror attack in Berlin and a shooting incident in a Zurich mosque – all just last week. We also saw religious extremists across the Muslim world cheering for the killers of both the Russian envoy and the truck driver in Germany.

ISIS hailed the Berlin terror attack and the killing of the Russian ambassador while themselves facing imminent extinction due to massive Russian, European and US led strikes against their strongholds in Mosul, Raqqa, Aleppo and other cities.

Terrorists such as ISIS and their sympathizers seemed translating this chaos into another opportunity to pour the “victim narrative” into the minds of naïve Muslim youths apparently in the hope of recruiting more soldiers for their holy war.

One incident of the behavior witnessed in Pakistan where the biggest religious political party was seen cheerleading for the anti-Russia attack, hailing the extremist Muslim killer, Melvut Mert-Altintas, as a hero.

“The apostate’s life and organs do not have to be respected and may be taken with impunity.” — Islamic State document found during a raid in December by U.S. Special Forces in Syria.

“Former prisoner Abo Rida stated that surgeons for IS terror group removed kidneys and corneas from prisoners. He said that they were told that jihadists were more deserving of organs.” — Anne Speckhard, International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism.

Iraq’s Ambassador to the UN, Mohammed Alhakim, asked the world body last year to investigate the killing of a dozen Iraqi doctors who rejected IS demands to cut out people’s organs.

According to the World Health Organization, illegal organ trading generates between $600 million and $1.2 billion in profits each year.

Charges that Islamic State (IS) engages in organ trading — taking body parts from their victims in Iraq and Syria and selling them to traffickers in Turkey — have surfaced again.

The Iranian news network Alalam reported on October 6 that IS has set up a market in Turkey where it sells human organs stolen from innocent people. Alalam also posted a photograph of a person whose organ was taken.

The Iraqi News also reported that IS has kidnapped and sold many children in Syria to Turkish organ traffickers in order to finance its operations.

Turkey’s government-funded news service, Anadolu Agency, reported months ago that ISIS opened a “medical school” in Northern Syria.

Wayne Madsen, an American investigative reporter and a former intelligence analyst at the US National Security Agency (NSA), told Gatestone that IS has been, and is, involved in organ trading. “The Uyghur battalions of ISIS are heavily engaged in this. They are also known to be involved in organ harvesting in China.”

“We have no reason to doubt them given similar atrocities that have been documented and other heinous crimes for which ISIL has taken credit,” U.S. State Department said in response to charges of IS’s organ harvesting. In December, the U.S. government revealed that it had obtained an ISIS document during a raid by Special Forces in Syria. “The apostate’s life and organs do not have to be respected and may be taken with impunity,” the document said.

Anne Speckhard wrote that ISIS is involved in organ smuggling and earns profits from it. “Former prisoner Abo Rida stated that surgeons for IS terror group removed kidneys and corneas from prisoners. He said that they were told that jihadists were more deserving of organs,” she added.

Speckhard told Gatestone that given their mentality – that anyone who does not believe as they do can be killed – it is believable that IS is involved in organ trading: “Defectors we talked to said it is happening.”

According to press reports, there is high demand for organs such as kidneys and hearts. Based on the same reports, a kidney is sold in the Turkish market for $4,000 and a heart for $6,000.

From “The Guardian ” March 2011 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/mar/03/antisemitism-hatred-wont-go-away

What accounts, then, for the stubborn resilience of what has been called “the longest hatred”? Why does it continue to appear even among those educated, liberal elites who pride themselves on their opposition to racism?

We may want to believe it went away, but it never did. Not even in the late 1940s, immediately after the revelations of the Holocaust confirmed the murderous place where antisemitic discourse could lead. There were still English literary critics around in those years to refer to the Jews as “Shylocks”, still crime novels with the conniving Jew as the arch-villain. We may want to see the likes of Galliano ( “transgressive” designer dropped by fashion house Dior after delivering a drunken rant in a Paris bar to two women he took to be Jews: “I love Hitler,” he began. “People like you ought to be dead, your mothers, your forefathers would all be fucking gassed.”)as relics from another era or as mere eccentrics, but they are expressing a set of attitudes that remain deep in the soil and which have never been fully shaken off. They can appear in the most respected institutions, voiced by the most respectable people. Even when they seem to be dozing, they are never quite dead.