RUTHFULLY YOURS

Anti-Zionism delays having to face the threats to world peace and human rights presented by Muslim supremacism.

“One girl had boiling water held over her throat: another had her tongue nailed to a table.” — Peter McGloughlin, Easy Meat: Inside Britain’s Grooming Gang Scandal.

Muslims who spoke in opposition to the grooming behavior learned that no one outside their community had their back. Clearly, some form of displacement is going on. Jews are safe to criticize; jihadists are not.

One of the most troubling aspects about “peace and justice” activism in the current era is that the very same institutions that condemn Israel so vociferously have had a difficult, if not impossible time confronting the terrible misdeeds of the Assad regime in Syria, ISIS in Iraq and Boko Haram in Nigeria with the same force with which they assail the Jewish state.

Yes, they issue condemnations, but their statements are lamentations that really do not approach in ferocity of the ugly denunciations these institutions target at Israel. In the United States, the problem is most pronounced in liberal Protestant mainline churches such as the United Church of Christ, the Presbyterian Church USA and the United Methodist Church, denominations that have to varying degrees of intensity support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement that singles Israel out for condemnation — in a transparent effort to eradicate the country by economic means — while remaining shamefully silent about the genocide of Christians in the Middle East.

We also see a tendency in institutions such as the World Council of Churches, the National Council of Churches and to my dismay as a Catholic, the Vatican and other parts of the Roman Catholic Church, to assail Israel while remaining silent about the problem of jihad.

The Catholic Church, which has condemned anti-Semitism in a document called Nostra Aetate in 1965, also has a difficult time dealing with the problem of Muslim anti-Semitism and anti-Christian hostility in Muslim communities and the religious sources they hold dear.

One source of the problem is that it is simply a lot easier and safer to speak out about the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians than it is to confront the violence against Christians in the rest of the Middle East.

If you fly to Israel, you can participate in a protest against the IDF at the security barrier in the morning and be eating in a nice restaurant in Tel Aviv that afternoon without having to worry about getting shot. Protesting against ISIS or the misdeeds of the Iranian government, which puts Westerners in jail, is another, rather more courageous, thing altogether.

The Arab-Israeli conflict has a theme park for many peace activists: Israel. American clergy go on a tour organized by an anti-Israel group like Sabeel then go back home and give PowerPoint presentations about how they protested the security barrier.

Another factor is fear — fear of Islam. The threat of violence that comes with confronting the impact of Sharia law and jihadism on human rights and national security has been significant, but it has remained doggedly unstated in the witness of churches in the United States. Condemn Israel unfairly or engage in Jew-baiting and you get a letter from CAMERA, the ADL or the local Board of Rabbis. Offend the sensibilities of jihadists and you might get killed.

On this score, it is important to note that anti-Zionism really started to manifest itself in the Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA) — the church where the anti-Israel divestment movement got its start in the U.S. — with the election of a former missionary by the name of Benjamin Weir as moderator of the denomination’s General Assembly in 1986.

Prior to his election as moderator, Weir, kidnapped while working as a missionary, spent a year as a hostage held in Lebanon by Hezbollah.

If the United States in 2015 had received the same proportion of asylum seekers as Sweden, in relation to its population, the US would have taken in 5.2 million of them.

The survey covered the period 2011 to 2016 and concerned more than 10,000 reported crimes relating to sexual offenses.

That traditional Swedish bathhouses in Sweden today are associated with rape and sexual abuse was something unthinkable before the migration crisis in 2015. Both the Boston Globe and alternative media should please stick to statistics and facts.

Recently, The Boston Globe’s Astead W. Herndon wrote an article criticizing U.S. President Donald Trump’s ways of gathering support for his statements and proposals. While it is basically true that politicians should not only rely only on the media, Herndon’s understatement Sweden’s problems is dishonest at best.

If one mentions problems in Sweden relating to migration, it is important to describe what is really happening. Sadly, Sweden’s refugee policy has made Sweden less secure. In 2015, Sweden received 163,000 asylum seekers. The same year, the United States received about 70,000 asylum seekers. Sweden, however, has a population of ten million, while the United States has approximately 323 million. If the United States in 2015 had received the same proportion of asylum seekers as Sweden, in relation to its population, the US would have taken in 5.2 million. Would it have threatened U.S. security to host 5.2 million new asylum seekers in one year? Probably. That is what happened in Sweden.

The US already has a rigorous vetting process, but Sweden has a weak one — only slowly improving. In addition, because many “unaccompanied refugee children” lie about their age when they reach Sweden, the National Board of Forensic Medicine (“Rättsmedicinalverket”) has been instructed by the government to do medical age-assessments. These are made at the request of the Swedish Migration Agency (“Migrationsverket”), this, after the asylum seekers’ consent. The National Board of Forensic Medicine began performing these age-assessments in March; reporting on their activities on September 4, they found that in 83% of cases, the investigated person was not a minor, but 18 or older.

The problem of asylum seekers lying about their age is that these adults of unknown backgrounds have been sent to primary schools and high schools with children and placed in different homes with them. Sweden’s liberal migration policy has jeopardized the safety of Swedish children.

As a result of the migration crisis, since 2015 Sweden has been forced to introduce border controls. This activity, along with deporting illegal migrants and violent disputes in asylum accommodations, has claimed a large part of the resources of the police. In June 2016, the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency, surveying fires at asylum accommodations, found that only 11% of the fires were started from outside the asylum home. The resource-crisis of the Swedish police has resulted in more municipalities forced to hire private security companies. In spring 2017, Radio Sweden sent a survey to Sweden’s 290 municipalities. 200 responded, and of these, 140 stated that their security costs had increased, and of these, 35 responded that their costs had increased directly because of the lack of police officers.

In 2005, Sweden enacted a new law concerning sexual offenses, that broadened, under Swedish law, what was considered rape. In 2013, this law was extended even further to include even a passive response as a rape.

While the increase in the number of reported rapes should not be interpreted as Sweden having a “rape epidemic,” in June 2017, for example, Sweden’s public broadcasting television reported that in just a little over a year, 15 unaccompanied migrant boys from Afghanistan were convicted of gang-rapes of other boys in Sweden. In a police report published in 2016, dealing with sexual assaults, the police stated that:

“In cases where the crimes were committed by perpetrators in a larger group in public places and in swimming pools, the perpetrators were mainly young people seeking, or recently receiving, asylum in Sweden”.

In the same report one can also read that:

“All investigations in Stockholm and Kalmar from 2014 and 2015 have been closed down due to difficulties with identification or lack of evidence.”

Israel has conducted approximately 100 strikes inside Syria in the six years of civil war, not to change the course of battle or support one side over the other, but to eliminate weapons and facilities deemed unacceptable threats to Israel — including missile factories, a nuclear reactor and now a chemical weapons factory.

Guterres, Kushner and Greenblatt focused on the narrowest threat in the Middle East — the possibility that the Palestinians will continue to make low-level warfare against Israel. They ignored the role of Iran and its proxies. In effect, they performed the role of Nero with his fiddle.

If you have not been paying attention, the last thing you heard was that Syria had used sarin gas attack on civilians in 2013. President Obama’s “red line” was washed pink in an agreement with Russia to remove the weapons and destroy them at sea. The U.N. Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) special coordinator Sigrid Kaang, in a remarkably precise statement, said 96% percent of Syria’s declared chemical weapons were destroyed. Not 95% or 87% or 43.5%, but 96% on the nose. Secretary of State Kerry said: “In record time, even amid a civil war, we removed and have now destroyed the most dangerous chemicals in the regime’s declared stockpiles.”

It was good PR, but as a solution to a deadly violation of international law, it was a huge, gaping failure. The word “declared” is the giveaway — Syria was allowed to tell inspectors what it had and where, and the inspectors were allowed only to touch those sites. It you think they cheated, you are right.

This week, the Israel Air Force destroyed a “research center” in Syria, one that “researched” chemical weapons. The attack came the morning after U.N. investigators said the Syrian government was responsible for a sarin gas attack in April 2017. Israel has conducted approximately 100 strikes inside Syria in the six years of civil war, not to change the course of battle or support one side over the other, but to eliminate weapons and facilities deemed unacceptable threats to Israel — including missile factories, a nuclear reactor and now a chemical weapons factory.

Here is the lesson. Focus on the real regional threats and push off peripheral issues.

Iran and its proxies Hezbollah and Hamas — oddly enough, Shiite Iran is Sunni Hamas’s biggest backer both militarily and financially. There are more than 100,000 rockets and missiles in southern Lebanon, controlled by Hezbollah and aimed at Israel.

Iran and its occupation of Syria, as the Russians seek to nail down their bases but prefer to exercise influence from Moscow without a large military presence in the country. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said last week that Israel’s interests in Syria “would be taken into account,” but with Russia hoping to leave and Iran planning to stay, Russia’s leverage is questionable.

Iran and its unconventional weapons – it was Iran that facilitated the Syrian chemical weapons program, and Iran and North Korea that built the nuclear facility in Syria that Israel destroyed in 2007.

Iran’s physical presence in the Sunni areas of Iraq in pursuit of a land-bridge from Iran to the Mediterranean Sea. Iran’s harassment of U.S. and other ships in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, encircling Saudi Arabia in the south and potentially cutting off Israel and Jordan’s access through the Bab el-Mandeb Straits to the Indian Ocean. The “Shiite Crescent” is a “Shiite Encirclement.”

See a pattern?

A debate rages among American Jews as to whether right-wing or left-wing anti-Semitism poses the greater danger. Germany has come up with a novel solution to this dilemma that will undoubtedly delight denialists of the left-wing version: Simply redefine Jew-hatred as a “politically motivated right-wing extremist crime,” and by definition, you’ve eliminated all other kinds of anti-Semitism. https://www.commentarymagazine.com/anti-semitism/germany-redefines-anti-semitism-existence/

Last week, the German Interior Ministry released a report on anti-Semitism which stated that during the first eight months of this year, a whopping 92 percent of anti-Semitic incidents were committed by right-wing extremists. That sounded suspicious for two reasons, which I’ll get to later, but since I don’t speak German, I couldn’t scrutinize the report for myself. Fortunately, the German dailyDie Welt found the results equally suspicious, and this week, Benjamin Weinthal of the Jerusalem Post reported on some of the problems it flagged.

Weinthal explained that in a federal report on anti-Semitism issued by the German government earlier this year, “the crime of ‘Jew-hatred’ is classified in the category of ‘politically motivated right-wing extremist crime.’” But once Jew-hatred has been declared a right-wing crime by definition, most of its perpetrators will inevitably be classified as far-right extremists, even if they shouldn’t be.

Die Welt cited one particularly blatant example from summer 2014 when Israel was at war with Hamas in Gaza. The war sparked numerous anti-Israel protests, and during one, 20 Hezbollah supporters shouted the Nazi slogan “Sieg Heil” at pro-Israel demonstrators in Berlin. Hezbollah supporters are Islamic extremists, not neo-Nazis, even if they chose to taunt German Jews by hurling Nazi slogans at them. Nevertheless, the incident was classified as a far-right extremist crime, thereby neatly removing a case of Islamic anti-Semitism from the statistics.

There are two good reasons for thinking the linguistic acrobatics, in this case, represents the rule rather than the exception. First, a 2014 study of 14,000 pieces of hate mail sent over a 10-year period to the Central Council of Jews in Germany and the Israeli embassy in Berlin found that only three percent came from far-right extremists. Over 60 percent came from the educated mainstream–professors, PhDs, lawyers, priests, university and high-school students. And these letters were definitely anti-Semitic rather than merely anti-Israel; they included comments such as “It is possible that the murder of innocent children suits your long tradition?” and “For the last 2,000 years, you’ve been stealing land and committing genocide.”

Sending hate mail is an anti-Semitic incident in its own right, even if it’s not reported to the police (as most of these letters undoubtedly weren’t). Thus unless you want to make the dubious claim that Germany’s educated mainstream–unlike that of other Western countries–consists largely of far-right extremists, it’s clear that far-right extremists aren’t the only people actively committing anti-Semitic acts.

Sixteen years ago, nineteen members of al Qaeda, an Islamic terrorist group, boarded four planes in three cities. Within minutes, three thousand people were dead. It was the first act of war by a foreign group on continental U.S. since the burning of Washington, D.C. in August 1814. More people died that bright sunny morning than American servicemen at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, or American soldiers on June 6, 1944.

The war against Islamic militants continues to this day. For anyone who does not believe they pose a threat to western civilization, your naivete is only exceeded by your ignorance. Since 9/11, tens of thousands lie dead in dozens of countries, on every continent except Antarctica, victims of the murderous rampage of Islamic extremists from numerous groups, like ISIS and Boko Haram. Make no mistake; it is religion that drives them. They believe they are serving God. Osama bin Laden is dead, thank goodness, but al Qaeda has quietly rebuilt. It is estimated that they have 20,000 fighters in Syria, 7,000 in Somalia and 4,000 in Yemen.

The end can only come when millions of moderate Muslims rise-up, against those who have hi-jacked their religion.

But this day is also one my family celebrates, for it was on this day 51 years ago that our first child was born – a son and now husband to a beautiful and talented wife and father to four wonderful grandchildren.

These two events are reminders that in death there is birth, that life moves on. They are reminders that, while the past is all of ours, the future belongs to the young. And the greatest legacy we can leave is a knowledge of history, the willingness to face facts unafraid, and to love all those we hold dear.

Who are the Rohingya?

The Rohingya are a minority living in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, where they are not recognized by the government as an official group and are denied citizenship. An estimated 1 million Rohingya are stateless Muslims in an overwhelmingly Buddhist country that has long been hostile to their presence.
Why did the Rohingya exodus from Myanmar begin?

The mass evacuation from Myanmar’s northern Rakhine state began Aug. 25 after a group of Rohingya militants attacked police outposts and a military base, killing a dozen officers. The military responded with what it deemed “clearance operations” to root out fighters it said might be hiding in villages. As a result, hundreds of thousands of Rohingya have escaped the military crackdown and vigilante attacks that have burned villages and killed hundreds.
What is the U.S. saying?

The United States said it is “deeply troubled” by the Myanmar crisis. White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the Trump administration continues to condemn the violence between Rohingya Muslims and Myanmar security forces.
What is Iran saying?

Iran’s Supreme Leader strongly denounced the killing of Muslims in Myanmar. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said the deaths of Rohingya Muslims is a political disaster for Myanmar because it is being carried out by a government led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. He called her a “brutal woman.”