RUTHFULLY YOURS

To defeat the extremists for good, Muslims must reject those aspects of their tradition that prompt some believers to resort to oppression and holy war

“Islam’s borders are bloody,” wrote the late political scientist Samuel Huntington in 1996, “and so are its innards.” Nearly 20 years later, Huntington looks more right than ever before. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, at least 70% of all the fatalities in armed conflicts around the world last year were in wars involving Muslims. In 2013, there were nearly 12,000 terrorist attacks world-wide. The lion’s share were in Muslim-majority countries, and many of the others were carried out by Muslims. By far the most numerous victims of Muslim violence—including executions and lynchings not captured in these statistics—are Muslims themselves.

Not all of this violence is explicitly motivated by religion, but a great deal of it is. I believe that it is foolish to insist, as Western leaders habitually do, that the violent acts committed in the name of Islam can somehow be divorced from the religion itself. For more than a decade, my message has been simple: Islam is not a religion of peace.

Evidently, Sweden’s Foreign Minister was unaware that that by criticizing Islamic sharia customs, such as flogging a blogger a thousand times and the ill-treatment of women, she was, in fact, seen as turning against Islam itself.

There appears to be a genuine but concerning lack of knowledge in the Swedish government about Islam and Islamic affairs.

“It makes no difference what she says. In Islam, it is for Muslims to determine whether or not one has criticized their religion.” — Johannes J.G. Jansen, author and historian of Islam.

From a Muslim perspective, any criticism or infringement of sharia law and Muslims’ obligation to wage jihad [war in the service of Islam] is a violation of their freedom of religion.

In other words, it is incumbent on Muslims to “terrify” non-Muslims (referring to the Koran 8:60). But when they succeed, Muslim spokesmen accuse their frightened victims of suffering from “Islamophobia,” and demand that Western authorities denounce and persecute people beset by the psychiatric malady.

Israel’s March 17, 2015 general election shed light on the increasingly local – rather than national/regional – order of priorities of the 1.7 million Israeli Arabs; the intensifying Israelization/localization of their self-determination; the widening cultural/ideological gap between Israeli Arabs and the Arabs of Judea, Samaria and Gaza; the deep fragmentation within Israeli Arabs (despite the current Joint Arab Slate); their growing appreciation of Israel’s civil liberties and expanded trust in Israel’s political system; and the gap between the worldview of a growing number of Israeli Arabs on the one hand and most Arab Knesset Members on the other hand.

According to a February, 17, 2015 public opinion survey, conducted by Tel Aviv University’s researcher Arik Rudnitzky, a project manager at the Konrad Adenauer Program for Jewish-Arab Cooperation, the top priorities of Israeli Arabs are employment, education, healthcare, neighborhood crime and women’s rights (43%), ahead of enhancing the status of the Arab community in Israel (28.1%) and the Israel-Palestinian conflict/negotiation (19%).

Oily Mr. Baker is a hard core antagonist of Israel…. In his 1952 senior thesis at Princeton University Baker defended the 1940’s anti-Zionist policies of British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin and lambasted “the irrational and extreme behavior of American Zionists [in the 1940’s]” and dismissed U.S. support for Jewish statehood in 1947 as nothing more than a case of “the vote-conscious American Government back[ing] its Zionists.”In more recent years, Baker reportedly referred to pro-Israel members of Congress as “the little Knesset,” according to the Los Angeles Times…..rsk

Former Secretary of State James A. Baker III is to deliver the keynote at this weekend’s J Street conference, a gathering of left-wing activists opposed to the Israeli government and to recently re-elected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Baker, who served under President George H.W. Bush, is also advising Gov. Jeb Bush on foreign policy in his presidential effort–at Bush’s invitation. Baker is considered hostile to Israel and is controversial among Jewish voters.As the Algemeiner notes:

Baker is of course infamous for reportedly saying in private conversation, while George HW Bush’s secretary of state, “F**k the Jews, they didn’t vote for us anyway.”

On Thursday, the press announced that the Obama administration would fully consider abandoning Israel in international bodies like the United Nations.

According to reports, President Obama finally called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to congratulate him – but the “congratulations” was actually a lecture directed at forcing Netanyahu to surrender to the terrorist Palestinian regime.

For some odd reason, many in the media and Congress reacted with surprise to Obama’s supposedly sudden turn on Israel. The media, in an attempt to defend Obama’s radicalism, pretend that Netanyahu’s comments in the late stages of his campaign prompted Obama’s anti-Israel action.

But, in truth, this is the culmination of a longtime Obama policy of destroying the US-Israel relationship; Obama has spent his entire life surrounded by haters of Israel, from former Palestine Liberation Organization spokesman Rashid Khalidi to former Jimmy Carter National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, pro-Hamas negotiator Robert Malley to UN Ambassador Samantha Power (who once suggested using American troops to guard Palestinians from Israelis), Jeremiah Wright (who said “Them Jews ain’t going to let him talk to me”) to Professor Derrick Bell (“Jewish neoconservative racists…are undermining blacks in every way they can”). Here is a concise timeline, with credit to Dan Senor and the editors of Commentary:

http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4531910/senators-marco-rubio-tom-cotton-us-israel-relations

They said he couldn’t do it.

“They” being the mainstream media mouthpieces in the United States, Europe and Israel. According to our enlightened scribes and talking heads, Benjamin Netanyahu was a goner and Israel was about to welcome in a new left-wing government that would be more pliable to the Obama administration’s relentless demands on the Jewish State.

Only things didn’t work according to the global Left’s script–in fact, it was quite the opposite. Netanyahu’s Likud party won a resounding victory over Isaac Herzog’s Zionist Union that left no doubt that Bibi would be the man to lead Israel through the very rough waters ahead: from ISIS to Hamas to Hezbollah to the global “BDS” movement to a rise in anti-Semitism worldwide to a hostile “international community”–led by the Obama administration–demanding the quick establishment of a Palestinian state, to of course, Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

That’s a tall order, to say the least–yet Netanyahu is the right man for this particularly perilous period in Israel’s history.

It’s got nothing to do with American principles and everything to do with partisanship

David Harsanyi is a Senior Editor at The Federalist
Israel is a liberal nation—in the best sense of the word—but it’s not a leftist one. And for increasing numbers of Democrats, the center-right consensus of Israeli politics is unacceptable, immoral and bigoted— incompatible with their conception of American values. Or so they say.

This is bad news, because Likud looks like it’s going to win around 30 seats. If the numbers hold, Benjamin Netanyahu, despite the best efforts of the president and his allies, will likely remain prime minister. Bougie Herzog will, no doubt, have a bright future in the opposition.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. Paul Krugman had already declared Likud’s impeding fall was all about inequality. (What isn’t, right?) Slate proposed that Likud’s looming death would be about housing, or maybe it was racism. Mostly, though, Netanyahu was going to lose because he has a nasty habit of challenging the progressive worldview of Barack Obama, which offends many people, according to the New York Times. And really, is there any bigger sin?

The Obama White House is enlisting all its allies to make its case for the bad nuclear deal with Iran that, say administration allies, is better than no deal. The alternative, they claim, is war. And to what purpose? Many nuclear experts, Middle East analysts, and journalists argue, after all, that an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would set the program back only two to three years. Indeed, Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, asserted last week that setting Iran back “only a couple of years” is “the best-case scenario.”

However, it’s not entirely clear where that assessment—a couple years, or a few years, or two to three years—comes from. “When U.S. government officials have given specific estimates, like two to three years, these are for an Israeli attack on Iranian facilities,” says Matthew Kroenig, a former Pentagon official. “They’re not talking about a U.S. attack, which would obviously be more than what an Israeli strike could accomplish.”

Even then, says Kroenig, author of A Time to Attack: The Looming Iranian Nuclear Threat, these estimates regarding American strikes are based on worst-case scenarios. “That is, if after a strike Iran decides to rebuild immediately, encounters no significant difficulties, and is able to get whatever it needs in the international marketplace. But that’s hard to imagine.”

Iran is an opportunity, not a threat; it’s a potential partner, not an enemy.

For more than six years, this view of the Islamic Republic has guided the decisions made by Barack Obama. The president has repeatedly declared his eagerness to welcome Iran into the community of civilized nations. His words sometimes suggest that Iran has a choice to make, that their acceptance into this mythical community depends in some way on their behavior. But there’s little over those six years to indicate that he means it. Instead, Obama has made clear that in his eagerness to salvage anything from his tattered foreign policy legacy he is willing to gamble the security of the United States on a blind and irrational hope that Iran will someday change for the better.

To this end, he has abandoned more than three decades of bipartisan U.S. policy towards Iran—on its nuclear weapons program, on its regional ambitions, and on its support for terrorism.

These are radical departures. The Obama administration’s goal in nuclear talks is no longer preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons at all costs, but managing the process by which Iran becomes a nuclear state. The Obama administration no longer seeks to thwart Iran’s expansionist aims in the region and in many respects is now facilitating its aggression. On terrorism, the Obama administration has cast aside inconvenient realities about Iran’s support for jihadists of all kinds and has chosen instead to pretend that to the extent there any longer exists a war on terror, Washington and Tehran are on the same side.