RUTHFULLY YOURS

Once again, it’s taken tragedy and scores of thousands of dead, wounded, and displaced Kurds to awaken most of the rest of the world to the plight of these thirty-eight million truly stateless people in the Middle East. Decades ago, at least some folks learned that they were not just something that Little Miss Muffet ate while sitting on her tuffet. That occasion required thousands of Kurds (not curds) getting gassed to death by Arabs, and many more scores of thousands being slaughtered by them as well in Iraq’s Anfal Campaign and afterwards.

The Kurds’ plight, while a bit more severe than in most other cases, was not atypical of the response of Arabs and Arabism have historically had to any of the region’s other scores of millions of non-Arab peoples daring to assert rights in the region Arabs claim solely to be “purely Arab patrimony”… https://ekurd.net/arabism-zionism-journeys-2019-01-12 .

The reason for this new examination of an old problem has to do–this time–with not only (but still including) Arab, but also the Turks’ Kurdish “headaches” in the age of nationalism. Ankara’s current, ongoing invasion and slaughter in Syrian Kurdistan is just the latest manifestation of this.

With all of the above in mind, some serious background information–missing in most other accounts–is thus in order…

Now, I know…perhaps I’m really not supposed to talk about such things.

I mean, after all, didn’t a Turkish Sultan give refuge to Jews when Christendom was expelling, inquisitioning, ghettoizing, humiliating, demonizing, forcibly converting, massacring, blood libeling, etc. and so forth…them ?

Yes, there’s some truth here.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15004/bbc-thought-police

“The need for sensitivity in talking about religious, political or social issues has now been taken to absurd proportions… making it difficult to say anything worthwhile. The aim of Thought for the Day has changed from giving an ethical input to social and political issues to the recital of religious platitudes and the avoidance of controversy, with success measured by the absence of complaints. I believe Guru Nanak [the founder of Sikhism] and Jesus Christ, who boldly raised social concerns while stressing tolerance and respect, would not be allowed near Thought for the Day today.” – Lord Indarjit Singh, The Times, October 4, 2019.

So here is another thought for the day: Why should the BBC — or the rest of the mainstream media — rely on journalistic accuracy, when a sensationalist misquote will do?

Celebrated interfaith activist Lord Indarjit Singh has sensationally quit BBC Radio 4 after accusing it of behaving like the “thought police”. He alleges that the corporation tried to prevent him discussing a historical Sikh religious figure who stood up to Muslim oppression — in case it caused offence to Muslims, despite a lack of complaints.

The Sikh peer, who has been a contributor on Radio Four’s Thought For The Day programme for more than three decades, is also accusing Radio Four bosses of “prejudice and intolerance” and over-sensitivity in relation to its coverage of Islam, after he says he was “blocked” from discussing the forced conversion of Hindus to Islam, under the Mughal emperors in 17th century India.

The 87-year-old peer’s resignation comes as a blow to the show’s flagship segment, that has been a part of Radio Four’s Today programme since 1970, and has been described by Britain’s former chief rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks, as “one of the last remaining places in the public square where religious communities are given a voice in Britain.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/10/dead-caliph-and-eternal-jihad-raymond-ibrahim/

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head or “caliph” of the Islamic State, is finally dead.  This is certainly welcome news—if only because someone like al-Baghdadi deserves his fate. And President Trump deserves much credit for eliminating this evil leader of ISIS.

But while we can all celebrate this monster getting his just deserts, al-Baghdadi’s death will, unfortunately, likely have zero impact on the jihad.  This dismal prognostication is fortified by the fact that, for nearly 14 years now, every time an Islamic terror leader was killed, politicians and media exulted, portraying the death as a major blow to the jihad; and, for nearly 14 years now, I have responded by recycling an article that I first wrote in 2006, titled “The West’s Multi-Headed Monster.”

Although I changed the names of the jihadi leaders killed to suit the occasion—first Abu Mus‘ab al-Zarqawi, then Abu Hamza al-Masri, then Abu Laith al-Libi, then Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and Abu Ayub al-Misri, then Osama bin Laden, and now Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi—my conclusion has remained the same:

The West’s plight vis-à-vis radical Islam is therefore akin to Hercules’ epic encounter with the multi-headed Hydra-monster.  Every time the mythical strongman lopped off one of the monster’s heads, two new ones grew in its place.  To slay the beast once and for all, Hercules learned to cauterize the stumps with fire, thereby preventing any more heads from sprouting out.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/10/erdogan-lauds-koranic-harshness-toward-non-muslims-andrew-bostom/

Notwithstanding any limited “support” Turkey may (or may not) have provided the successful U.S. raid which liquidated ISIS’s al-Baghdadi, Turkish President Erdogan made some revealing, indeed pathognomonic remarks, during last Friday’s (10/25/19) prayers in Istanbul’s Great Camlica Mosque.

A Turkish writer in exile who is a very fluent, gifted Turkish to English translator, translated (below) the triumphal report by Yeni Akit, an outlet enamored of the Turkish President and his traditionalist Islamic political party, the AKP.

On October 25, Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan attended the Friday prayers at the Great Çamlıca Mosque in Istanbul. He was accompanied by Istanbul’s governor Ali Yerlikaya, mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, Istanbul’s chief of police Mustafa Çalışkan and the head of the Istanbul branch of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), Bayram Şenocak.   After the Friday prayers, hafiz İshak Danış recited from the Koran Sura Al-Fath (which means “victory, triumph, conquest” in English, Koran 48:29: “Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah ; and those with him are forceful against the disbelievers, merciful among themselves.” ). Then Erdogan took the microphone, reciting a part of the verse in Arabic and then in Turkish. He told the congregants: “My dear brothers. First of all, I congratulate your holy Friday. The Koranic verses that Danış just recited commands us to be violent towards the kuffar (infidels). Who are we? The ummah [nation] of Mohammed. So [the Koran] also commands us to be merciful to each other. So we will be merciful to each other. And we will be violent to the kuffar. Like in Syria.” Erdogan then went on to refer to another Koranic verse (61:13: “And [you will obtain] another [favor] that you love – victory from Allah and an imminent conquest; and give good tidings to the believers.”)  in Arabic: “Inshallah, God has promised us in Syria (in Turkish): ‘Nasrun minallahi ve fethun karib ve beşşiril mu’minin.’ [‘Victory from Allah and an imminent conquest; and give good tidings to the believers.’]. We see it is happening right now. With the permission of Allah, we will see it even more. I will meet some presidents of foreign countries at the Dolmabahce Palace today. I ask for your permission now to go there.”

Authoritative Koranic commentaries—classical and modern—as well as canonical hadith, traditions of Islam’s prophet Muhammad, support Erdogan’s hateful and predatory views toward non-Muslims.

The Egyptian polymath al-Suyuti (d. 1505) was recognized as a brilliant jurist, historian, and biographer, among whose many scholarly contributions are about twenty works of Koranic studies, including seminal Koranic commentaries. Suytui’s Tafsir al-Jalalayn (co-written with his mentor al-Mahalli), as the great contemporary Dutch Islamologist Johannes J.G. Jansen (d. 2015) noted in his treatise “The Interpretation of the Koran in Modern Egypt,”  remains one of the most popular as well as the most authoritative Koranic commentaries in Egypt. Maulana Muhammad Shafi (d.1976), was a former grand mufti of India (prior to the August, 1947 partition), and author of Maariful Quran, which remains the best-known Koranic commentary in Urdu, and a major, influential modern interpretation of the Koran. Shafi also wrote more than three hundred books, and in addition to these literary works, broadcasted tafsir of the Koran on Radio Pakistan for a number of years.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/10/what-baghdadis-death-tells-us-about-real-terror-daniel-greenfield/

What’s the best place to look for the terrorist leader of a defeated Islamic terrorist group? When his men are on the run, look for his hideout in or near the country that sponsors him.

We didn’t find Osama bin Laden hiding in a cave in Afghanistan, but in a compound in a Pakistani military city. And Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the former Caliph of ISIS, wasn’t hanging out in his home turf, but in an area controlled by Turkey and its allied Islamist militias right off the Turkish border.

Osama bin Laden’s death confirmed the reports of his ties to Pakistan, and Baghdadi’s death confirmed the rumors of the links between ISIS and Turkey. Those links may not as run as deep as those between Pakistan, the Taliban, and Al Qaeda, but when Baghdadi wanted someplace to hide out with his family, he didn’t huddle with his forces, but picked a location under the shadow of the Turkish military.

As Robert Spencer, an expert on the theology and geopolitics of Islamic terrorism, noted, “It strains credulity that Turkey, with its interests in northern Syria, did not know he was there. Al-Baghdadi was killed in Barisha in the Idlib province, a town of no more than 2,500 people right on the Turkish border.”

Where did we actually find the Caliph of ISIS? Allegedly, he’d been living in the home of Abu Mohammed Salama, a Hurras al-Din leader. The Islamic terror group, whose name means Guardians of Religion, had been listed as Al Qaeda in Syria in its Specially Designated Global Terrorist designation. Hurras al-Din had formerly been part of Tahrir al-Sham which has been cooperating closely with Turkey.

One of Tahrir’s four components was the Al-Nusra Front, which was formerly the official Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria. While the US bombs Tahrir al-Sham, Turkey, a NATO member, works with it.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/10/death_by_islamopho

James Thomson in his “Rule Britannica” poem of the mid-1700s wrote:

Thee haughty tyrants ne’er shall tame:
All their attempts to bend thee down,
Will but arouse thy generous flame;
But work their woe, and thy renown.
Rule, Britannia, rule the waves;
Britons never will be slaves.

And yet, today, the “manly hearts” appear to have simply withered as Great Britain and now most of Europe behave in classic dhimmi fashion, falling prey to the imaginary racism called Islamophobia.  In fact, as Salman Rushdie writes in Joseph Anton, “a new word has been created to help the blind remain blind: Islamophobia.  To criticize the militant stridency of this religion in its contemporary incarnation [is] to be a bigot.”

After the Iranian Revolution of 1980, the term “Islamophobia” “underwent a mutation that weaponized it.”  It continues to be more militant as it has “entered the global lexicon.”  Clearly, America and Canada are not immune, either.

Thus, the All Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims (APPG) recently released a report titled “Islamophobia Defined: The inquiry into a working definition of Islamophobia.”  A few quotations from the lengthy report should highlight the disingenuousness of a document that is essentially recommending a form of blasphemy law.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-dissident-outlives-soviet-communism-11572302952

Only death could silence Vladimir Bukovsky. His crusade against the Communist system in Russia and beyond, before and after the Berlin Wall’s fall, was unequaled. He died Sunday at age 76 at his home in Cambridge, England, where he’d lived since the Soviet Union expelled him in 1976.

He didn’t seem to know fear. He was kicked out of high school for creating a satirical magazine. He took night classes and managed to enter Moscow University, where he held unofficial poetry readings and disseminated underground literature. He was expelled from university after denouncing the Young Communist League as useless and later arrested for possessing anti-Soviet literature. In prison he met other dissidents, was “diagnosed” as schizophrenic, read Dickens in English and studied Soviet law. After his release, he protested and was detained again. Altogether he spent 12 years in psychiatric hospitals, prisons or labor camps.

He realized that to make a difference, he had to get his message out to the West. He succeeded, but at the price of additional torture, which he described in his best-selling autobiography, “To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter.” He staged hunger strikes aimed at improving medical treatment in prison and encouraged others to do the same. The authorities force-fed the prisoners through the nose.

The book was published in 1978. By then Bukovsky had been in the West for two years, studying biology at Cambridge University and continuing to defend freedom. In 1983 Bukovsky and Armando Valladares, a Cuban dissident, co-founded the anticommunist Resistance International. His influence grew as he informally advised Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15050/eu-freedom-control

” We are not ‘citizens of the world’… ; we are also not citizens of Europe. We are inhabitants of Europe, but citizens of our nation states…” — Václav Klaus; MCC Budapest Summit on Migration; Hungary; March 23, 2019.

“The European elites understood that to succeed in their ambition to get rid of the nation-states and to create a State of Europe… they have to dissolve the old existing nations by mixing them with migrants from all over the world. By means of this procedure they want to create a new, truly European man, a Homo bruxellarum. This is the main reason why they are – without paying attention to all kinds of negative and destructive side-effects – supporting and promoting mass migration.” — Václav Klaus, MCC Budapest Summit on Migration, Hungary; March 23, 2019.

“Multiculturalism is not a manifestation of Europe’s generosity, or some noble embodiment of love and truth. [It] is what remains after mass migration reveals itself as a threat, rather than a benefit, to the economies of European countries.” — Jan Keller, Czech sociologist, October 16, 2018.

“The [European] community must rely fully on the spiritual, intellectual, and political values that in recent decades have been maintained, cultivated, and practiced in the democratic countries of Western Europe. I mean values like political and economic plurality, parliamentary democracy, respect for civil rights and freedoms, the decentralization of local administration and municipal government, and all that these things imply…It does not mean adaptation to something alien…” — Vaclav Havel, “Summer Meditations”, 1991.

Europe is in the throes of an internal debate between those who continue to view it as a constellation of free nations and those who see it as an entity controlled by Brussels.

Although the Brexit controversy may highlight this split, the conflict — as the former Czech President (and former Prime Minister), Václav Klaus, pointed out 13 years ago — has been raging for decades:

In his 2006 book, What is Europeism, Or, What Should Not be the Future for Europe?, Klaus wrote:

“For half a century there has been an ongoing dispute in Europe between the advocates of the liberalization model of European integration – which was based primarily on intergovernmental cooperation of individual European countries (which kept significant majority of parameters of their political, social and economic systems in their own hands) and on the removal of all unnecessary barriers to human activities existing on the borders of states – and the advocates of the harmonization (or homogenization) integration model, which is based on unification from above, orchestrated by the EU-authorities, with the ambition to level-out all aspects of life for all Europeans …

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15090/sweden-gang-violence

In Sweden, crucial societal issues, such as who is behind the current crime epidemic, are a public taboo.

“With the exception of three people in the survey, all have been offered help since they were boys. Some of them were already registered with the police as ten-year-olds… They have undergone programs… far from the criminal environment in Malmö…. It has not worked. In many cases, social services use the same words: all resources have been exhausted. Put another way: what the social services have done so far does not help, and there are no more measures to try out”. — Sydsvenskan, September 21, 2019

The government therefore recently presented a new initiative, which seeks to tackle the gang violence. The government proposal, however, never specifically mentions who is mainly behind the gang violence and that its own migration policies have in large part created the situation in which Swedish society now finds itself.

These are facts that mainstream politicians have avoided discussing openly for years. The question is: How do you solve a critical societal problem… without talking about it openly?

It does not seem likely that any of these hardened criminals will be swayed much by “increased investments in schools and social services in ‘vulnerable areas'”, as one of the government proposals suggests.

“Since 2015, 32 people have been shot dead in 30 separate acts in Malmö’s latest murder wave. Our survey of the murders shows that more than 120 young men are linked to them in different ways”, according to a recent series of reports about gang violence in the Swedish mainstream newspaper, Sydsvenskan.

“There is much talk about ‘gang wars’ in Malmö,” the report relates.

“Nothing indicates that there are fixed groupings with hierarchical structures and regulated activities in Malmö’s crime world. Rather, on the contrary — everything can be seen as one single gang. And there is civil war [within the gang]. We have mapped 200 criminals in the city. Most of them know each other – they have grown up together, been schoolmates, shared housing and moved in the same circles. Of these, we have selected 20 men for closer examination. Either because they are suspected of having shot, planned or otherwise contributed to the murders. Or that they themselves have fallen victim. And for being identified… as central people in Malmö’s crime world in recent years. At least 18 of the murders have, according to our review, occurred within the relatively narrow circle of these 20 men”.

https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/insight/

President Trump made good on a campaign promise with the U.S. Special Operations raid on Barisha, Syria that sent Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi into a dead-end tunnel, where he blew himself and three of his children to bits. In May 2019, Mr. Trump had announced “the end of the caliphate” in the territorial sense, but the Americans have now eliminated its theological master and terrorist dictator. Bravo to the brave, intrepid, and patriotic men and women who proved once again, as President George W. Bush said, that “you can run, but you can’t hide.”

Let’s clear the quick and stupid stuff first: No, this is not the end of ISIS ideology or terrorism spawned by it; no, it doesn’t fix the problem of Syria; no, it doesn’t make things right with the Kurds; no it doesn’t slow Iran’s desire for a hegemonic land bridge to the Mediterranean. And, yes, The Washington Post is an idiot.

Now, the implications. Most important for the future of the region and elsewhere, the ISIS concept of a land-based “caliphate” has probably expired. A retired naval commander notes:

It’s not 2013 anymore, when the progress of ISIS as a territory-gobbling guerrilla-terrorist force became evident. Their progress was defined by the Euphrates River, which they were following from the general area of Raqqa, from one side, and a general area between Ramadi and Haditha on the other, to link up between the Syria-Iraq border and Deir-ez-Zor. The fact that they were trying to consolidate and control that area was an arresting indication of their intentions, and then in 2014 they stormed into Mosul in the north.

The ISIS plan was different from that of al-Qaeda, which hid in caves in Afghanistan, as remote from its targets as it could be — and thus believed itself safe from retaliation. ISIS planted itself and its flag in the middle of Syria and Iraq: The benefit being oil fields with their revenue, land for training and operations, the ability to levy taxes on the population, and to show how a “real” Islamic civilization would work. Not too many people were impressed.