RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-trump-and-muslims-1480378571

Abdulrahman al-Rashed, writing in a Nov. 10 op-ed titled “Don’t Fear Trump,” which appeared on the website of the Al Arabiya News Channel and in the London-based Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat:

When Barack Obama won the presidential elections eight years ago, it was met by a torrent of cheerful statements and writings. Back then, I wrote saying do not be over-optimistic. And now, it’s only been one day since Donald Trump won the elections and many rushed into making pessimistic judgments. To those I say, do not be over-pessimistic. . . .

Those who have been persuaded by what’s written and said during the electoral campaigns, and who concluded that Trump is against Muslims must take two important points into consideration: Trump’s personal history and the system of the American state, its constitution and judicial institutions. The president-elect has a long personal record of dealing with Muslim people and there isn’t any racial stance documented against him. He’s never been engaged in political or media campaigns against Muslims, whether American Muslims or Muslims outside the U.S., even following the phobia which spread after the September 11 terrorist attacks although Trump is a resident of the traumatized city of New York.

Meanwhile, the stance against Muslims who are affiliated with terrorism and extremism must not be viewed as a racial stance. As Muslims, this is our position too. Those who want to confuse enmity towards extremism with enmity against Islam are ideological groups that sponsor terrorist ideology and they aim to lobby to serve their political purposes.

Arab governments have plenty to do to communicate with the new administration in Washington after it’s formed. . . . At the same time, we must not blame Washington and fail to see that most of our problems and issues are the product of our decisions and acts and that most solutions to them are in our hands.

If we do not demand equal cultural access, such a cultural imbalance will result in one side absorbing the values of the other, while keeping the Islamic nation “pure” and free of any outside influence. This one-sided cultural tyranny is forcing us, the American citizen, into tolerating intolerance while never expecting anything more aligned to Western values from the Muslim world.

As soon as Muslims form a small community inside a Western nation, they immediately deny access to any kind of Biblical preaching or education inside their community, but at the same time apparently feel entitled to demand access to preach the Koran in American prisons and spread Islamic culture and values in American schools.

If Muslims finance Islamic Studies departments on American campuses and teach Islam in our public schools, the same rights must be awarded to Americans. It is true there are a few American schools in the Middle East, such as the American University in Cairo, but these schools are forbidden from having departments of Biblical Studies.

If Muslim governments and citizens have full access to build mosques in America, America must insist on having the same access in their countries. That is not the fault of Muslim countries, so much as it is the fault of Western “multiculturalism,” which expects nothing and is adhered to only by Western nations.

If such one-sided access of Islam into the West continues, while other religions in Muslim communities and countries are considered by them illegal “hate crimes,” Western culture and the values of free will and religious freedom will atrophy and die. Islamists are counting on Western inertia to win.

Similar to the often-mentioned trade imbalance, there is a large imbalance Western nations and Muslim nations that is hardly ever mentioned: the cultural imbalance.

November 9th, 2016 I was celebrating the election of Donald Trump…and the rejection of Hillary Clinton. While wading through the flood of jubilant national news I overlooked the anniversary of Kristallnacht 1938. As Arab arson ignites in Israel terrorizing civilians and wreaking despair, I think now of Kristallnacht which was the tinder that ignited a war against the Jewish people in which one of every three Jews in the world was killed……rsk
Here is a column from November 9, 2015 published in the Wall Street Journal.
http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2015/11/09/from-kristallnacht-to-the-kindertransport-to-finally-america-a-group-of-berliners-said-a-stain-on-the-street-was-a-jews-blood-even-now-i-can-hear-their-laughter-by-john-h-lang/

From Kristallnacht to the Kindertransport to, Finally, America A group of Berliners said a stain on the street was a Jew’s blood. Even now I can hear their laughter.By John H. Lang

http://www.wsj.com/articles/from-kristallnacht-to-the-kindertransport-to-finally-america-1447019141

Monday, Nov. 9, marks the anniversary of Kristallnacht in 1938, when Nazi hordes ran wild throughout Berlin, as well as in other German cities. Jewish houses of worship were desecrated and then set afire. Thousands of Jews were rounded up, some beaten to death, others sent to concentration camps. Jewish-owned businesses and homes were looted.

I will never forget seeing the unimaginable horror of the night and the following day 77 years ago. By luck, my parents were not in Berlin. I was at my grandmother’s. Through the window I could see my beautiful synagogue engulfed in flames as desperate screams rose from the street below. Each knock on our apartment door brought terror, followed by incredible relief. By some miracle, two of my uncles made it to my grandmother’s seeking safety from the savagery of this night.

The next morning as I wandered through my neighborhood, I saw shards of plate glass everywhere, as every Jewish-owned shop had been looted and painted with vile Jew-hating slogans. Uniformed Nazis and their sympathizers were having fun as they surveyed their brutality. One group looked at a large stain on the street that was said to be the blood of a Jew. Even now I can hear their laughter.

At that moment, I was an 8-year-old who had suddenly turned 18. My every thought turned to survival. When my parents returned, I told my father that I would never live to see my ninth birthday. He took my hand and told me that he would always protect me and that nothing would happen to our family—because he had been a decorated front-line soldier during the 1914-18 World War.

Though reports of Kristallnacht—called the night of broken glass—were circulated world-wide, there was no forceful reaction by the world powers, although the U.S. ambassador to Berlin was recalled to Washington for consultations. In retrospect this became a rehearsal for the Holocaust to come. Although my parents already had applied to immigrate to the United States, they were informed by the U.S. Embassy in Berlin that our quota number would not be reached for several years. There was no escape.

To paraphrase the old VE jump-rope rhyme, “A-tisket, a-tasket, Castro’s in his casket.” The last of the Cold War Soviet stooges has gone the way of his communist masters.

Encomia from the usual useful idiots are lighting up the internet, but don’t mind them. Like tantrum-throwing college students and George Soros rent-a-protestors, they are a machine for producing Republican voters. The Dem-wits, on the other hand, should pay attention to the Cuban immigrants and expatriates celebrating in Miami. They might find there a clue to how they lost Florida and the whole government. Opening up trade, as their messiah Obama did, with a regime that pockets all the profits while it jails protestors, that gives workers eight cents of every starry-eyed tourist’s dollar, makes for bad optics. Canoodling with a brutal dictator who crushes dissent, persecutes homosexuals, excludes blacks from the government, abuses the church, monopolizes wealth, and tortures dissidents in his gulag is not the way to win American votes.

And discount the extravagant praise for Castro’s political genius. For all his Marxist-Leninist rhetoric and international fan-boys, Castro was a typical, but savvier, Latin American dictator––a cacique, caudillo, jefe, El Señor Presidente, El Gran Chingon, a glorified version of the General Mapache from The Wild Bunch. If not for the Cold War, he would long ago have met the same gruesome fate as those other strutting, bombastic oppressors. Only with billions of dollars in Soviet support and cash for overpriced sugar––and John Kennedy’s foreign policy bungling–– was he able to leverage being 90 miles from the U.S into a geopolitical significance far beyond his deserts, along the way almost igniting a nuclear war. He paid the Soviets back by letting them use his soldiers as imperialist mercenaries in Angola, Ethiopia, and Mozambique. After the USSR vanished like Trotsky from a May Day photo, oil and $18 billion in loans and grants from his fellow dictator Húgo Chavez, along with foreign investment from running-dog capitalists, kept Cuba from collapse. Castro repaid Húgo by skimming thousands of his doctors and other skilled professionals needed at home, and sending them to Venezuela.

More importantly, Castro, like many other Third-World communists or the PLO jihadists, was a genius at exploiting the romance of revolutionary violence and the radical chic endemic among Western bourgeois parlor pinks and caviar communists. For Europeans, Canadians, and a small number of Americans before Obama’s recent softening of travel restrictions, carefully orchestrated and surveilled tours of Cuba were like the hajj to Mecca for Western lefties. Like their political ancestors in the twenties and thirties gaping at the Soviet’s Potemkin economy, these rich, well-fed, politically free beneficiaries of liberal democracy and free-market capitalism ignored or rationalized away the poor, hungry, repressed Cubanos hidden behind the pastel-colored belle époque hotels and the restored ’57 Chevies.

http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/index.html

HALF A MILLION CHILDREN ARE TRAPPED IN SYRIA, THE UN SAYS

The United Nations said on Saturday that the number of children trapped in besieged areas in Syria had doubled in less than a year to half a million.

The United Nations Children’s Fund, Unicef, said the children were among hundreds of thousands of civilians in 16 areas under siege (manly by the Assad regime and the Iranian-directed Hizbullah militia) across the country that had been “almost completely cut off from sustained humanitarian aid and basic services.”

The Obama administration and other democratic governments continue to do almost nothing to help them, not even to make aerial food and medicine drops.

ABBAS ORDERS PALESTINIAN FLAGS BE FLOWN AT HALF-MAST FOR FIDEL CASTRO

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas ordered all Palestinian flags be flown at half-mast for Fidel Castro, WAFA, the official news agency of the Palestinian Authority, reported.

http://english.wafa.ps/page.aspx?id=c0Le0Ta51734437821ac0Le0T

The Cuban revolutionary leader, Fidel Castro, died on Friday at the age of 90.

Castro enjoyed a close relationship with late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, and was an early supporter of “armed resistance” (i.e. terrorist attacks) against Israeli civilians.

“THE BBC REPORTS CASTRO’S DEATH MORE FAVORABLY THAN THATCHER’S”

See also:

Trudeau attacked worldwide for Castro statement: Politicians, journalists from America, Britain and elsewhere take to Twitter to decry Canadian prime minister’s glowing tribute to Cuban dictator.

Farewell to Cuba’s brutal Big Brother (Washington Post)

The UK’s Guido Fawkes blog also notes:

“The BBC are reporting Castro death more favorably than Thatcher’s. No use of the word ‘controversial’. No mention of the thousands summarily executed after the revolution. No mention that he demanded the USSR nuke the USA. No mention of the decades of impoverishment and human rights abuse. No mention of his secret police rounding up homosexuals and putting them in concentration camps. Castro gets a free pass on democratic norms – ‘his critics accused him of being a dictator’. Does the BBC think that is only an allegation? Particular congratulations to the BBC News Channel, who interviewed ‘Cuba expert’ Richard Gott, without mentioning he was a KGB agent of influence.”

(Tom Gross adds: The BBC have toned down their praise for Castro following widespread criticism.)

ISRAEL KILLS 4 ISIS-LINKED JIHADISTS IN FIRST CLASH WITH GROUP

The IDF killed four gunmen linked to the Islamic State on Sunday after they attacked Israeli forces in the Golan Heights.

The confrontation was the first of its kind between Israel and Islamic State-affiliated forces based in Syria.

The jihadists were riding in a vehicle with a machine gun mounted on its roof, when they attacked an Israeli patrol across the border. Many mortar shells have fallen inside Israel during the Syrian war, some of which may have been fired by these terrorist groups, but it is thought yesterday’s was the first deliberate attack on Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the IDF had “successfully repelled an attempted attack on the triangle of borders,” referring to the point where the borders of Israel, Syria and Jordan meet.

Israel has done its best to keep out of the five-year-old Syrian war, though Israeli doctors have treated over 1000 badly injured Syrians, including many children, who manage to reach the country’s borders and asked for help.

The Israeli government and Jewish charities have paid for the life-saving operations for Syrians in hospitals across northern Israel. Israeli authorities have also sent medical and other humanitarian aid across the border into Syria.

Israeli security experts said it was too early to say whether yesterday’s clash represented a change in strategy by Islamic State-affiliated forces, and that it may have been prompted by the need for a “propaganda victory” among their supporters in the Arab world at a time when Islamic State strongholds in Iraq and Syria were under attack.

DEATH TOLL IN NORTH SINAI ATTACK RISES TO 11

IS affiliate groups continue to be active across Israel’s southern border too, battling Egypt’s Sisi government for its rule over northern Sinai.

The Egypt Independent newspaper reports:

Death toll in North Sinai attack rises to 11
By Aswat Masriya
Egypt Independent
November 26, 2016

http://www.egyptindependent.com//news/death-toll-north-sinai-attack-rises-11

The death toll from an attack on a military checkpoint in North Sinai increased to 11 on Friday, Reuters reported, citing anonymous medical sources.

Three more bodies were found on Friday, bringing the death toll to 11 soldiers out of the checkpoint’s 31-strong force. Twelve soldiers were injured, six unarmed and the rest were missing.

Following the attack, eyewitnesses told Reuters that security forces set up several additional moving and static checkpoints in and around Arish city, where the attack took place, in search for the culprits.

FIRES BROUGHT UNDER CONTROL, BUT ENORMOUS DAMAGE REMAINS

After a five-day campaign in which thousands of Israeli troops aided the country’s firefighters, the wildfires raging across northern and central Israel have finally been brought under control.

While unusually hot, dry conditions and strong winds helped fan the flames, almost half of the fires are suspected of being arson.

Israeli police have so far arrested 18 Israeli Arabs and 6 West Bank Palestinian suspects, and also others who used social media to “incite arson.”

Some arsonists were spotted on security cameras lighting fires. The police say there is no sign of direct coordination between arsonists but they appear to have been inspired by a desire to cause harm to Jews.

However, many Israeli Arabs as well as Israeli Jews have been victims of the fires, seeing their homes and businesses, such as restaurants, burn down.

The Palestinian Authority (along with Jordan and Egypt) also sent firefighters to assist Israel.

Hundreds of Israelis were injured but no deaths were reported.

As I noted in 2012, a new Al Qaeda magazine described in detail how to start huge forest fires across America and other countries.

NETANYAHU THANKS ABBAS FOR SENDING FIREFIGHTERS

This is a press release:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this evening (Saturday, 26 November 2016), contacted Palestinian Authority Chairman Abu Mazen and thanked him for sending firefighters to assist in extinguishing the fires. The Prime Minister also appreciates the fact that Jews and Arabs alike opened their homes to those affected by the fires.

THE FIRES IN ISRAEL – IN PICTURES (THE GUARDIAN)

The Guardian, a newspaper which has been unsympathetic to Israel over many years, and its opposition to Zionism has occasionally spilled over into outright anti-Semitism (its former comment editor is now a chief advisor to the far-left British Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn), has been less hostile to Israel recently, as I noted in previous dispatches.

It published this photo-compilation of the fires Israel has been experiencing, which shows how deadly they have been.

U.S. FIREFIGHTERS FLY TO ISRAEL TO BATTLE BLAZES

Several readers wrote in response to my dispatch last Thursday morning (“Israel on fire: Russia, Greece and Turkey rush firefighting planes to help, as some Arabs celebrate”), to ask if the U.S. government had also offered to help douse Israel’s out-of-control fires.

Since I wrote that dispatch, Britain, France, Spain, Italy and Canada have also sent fire-fighting equipment. The Americans have done so privately after Israel made a commercial order for equipment. And individual American firefighters were quick to help.

Some 40 veteran U.S. firefighters boarded planes from as far away as Los Angeles and Dallas to travel to Israel to help.

The men, ranging in age from 30 to 60, are part of the “Emergency Volunteer Project,” a non-profit organization launched by Israel, the U.S. and others in 2009 to train and work with firefighters and other emergency personnel during extreme circumstances.

A senior American government official who subscribes to this list says he forwarded my previous dispatch (“Israel on fire: Russia, Greece and Turkey rush firefighting planes to help, as some Arabs celebrate”) to some Emirati government officials.

They replied that Dhahi Khalfan Tamim, who had tweeted “Israel banned the muezzin and caught on fire, Blessed be Allah,” is no longer Dubai’s security chief.

CNN APOLOGIZES FOR BANNER READING “IF JEWS ARE PEOPLE”

CNN has apologized following criticism after it ran an on-screen accompanying caption last week which read “If Jews are people.”

The offending phrase appeared during a discussion about America’s alt-right movement on CNN’s “The Lead” show.

CNN said the caption had been clumsily written by a production assistant and was meant to paraphrase the words of American white nationalist leader Richard Spencer who had said of Jews: “One wonders if these people are people at all, or instead soulless golem”.

The regular host of The Lead, Jake Tapper, who was on vacation on the day the caption appeared, also apologized, saying he was “horrified” and “furious” at the caption.

In his apology, the stand-in host of The Lead Jim Sciutto called Spencer’s remarks “hate-filled garbage.”

The former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who bridged the Bush and Obama administrations warned that the most potentially explosive security issue the incoming administration will have to deal with is North Korea and nuclear weapons.

Retired Adm. Mike Mullen, who served as chairman from 2007 to 2011 and is now a professor at Princeton University, said the presidential transition entails “leaving campaign rhetoric behind and the reality of governing, which just hits you square in the face.”

“And so focusing on, finding out and focusing on the real issues that are facing the current administration and then developing policies and strategies, if you will, to meet those challenges,” he told ABC this morning.

Mullen said he’s “encouraged, actually” by the fact that Donald Trump “is turning to people” who have adequate foreign policy experience.

“And that will really make a difference. The world is very unforgiving. And he has said, rightfully so, that he wants to focus here in the United States,” he said. “But I’ve always found, certainly in my time, that challenges that exist internationally, whether it’s North Korea or China or Russia or the Middle East, will certainly be on his desk on day one.”

Mullen singled out the Korean peninsula as “more likely than anyplace else in the world to potentially create an explosive outcome, particularly tied to the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.”

“Realize that he has nuclear weapons and the inability so far to contain him in that regard. And that’s a place where four of the five top economies in the world are centered. Stability there is critical, and at least North Korea historically has generated a surprise, if you will, for new leaders in this country,” the admiral continued, acknowledging that neither the Bush policy nor the Obama policy succeeded at reining in the regime. CONTINUE AT SITE

In a country like Italy, which has seen 63 governments since 1948, political stability is more than a campaign slogan. But it appears a real possibility that Grillo’s Five Star Party and their allies in Lega Nord may be on the cusp of once again overturning the establishment and making history.

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi is staking his political future on a referendum to be held next Sunday that would change the Italian constitution by weakening the upper house of parliament and strengthening the central government.

Foolishly, Renzi said he would resign if he lost the vote. This galvanized opposition parties to make the referendum a vote on Renzi’s tenure as prime minister.

Now it appears that the anti-establishment forces who successfully pushed through a British exit from the EU and elected Donald Trump president of the U.S. are ready to deal a crippling blow to Renzi’s center-left coalition by defeating the constitutional changes.

And waiting in the wings if Renzi follows through with his promise are two anti-establishment newcomers who are both committed to blowing up the EU.

Newsweek:

A defeat for Renzi will be read as a victory for Italy’s two major populist parties: the Lega Nord and the larger Five Star Movement, led by the comedian Beppe Grillo. The two parties are not allied, but both are nurtured by anti-establishment sentiment and favor “national solutions” to Italy’s problems – beginning with a return to the Italian lira.

If Renzi is defeated, Lega Nord and the Five Star Movement could join forces to support a new government and hold a new referendum – this time on the euro. If Italy – one of the world’s largest public debtors – decided to go it alone, the entire European project could be dealt a mortal blow. In the age of Donald Trump and Brexit, that outcome is far from unthinkable.

The issue at stake in the referendum is not inconsequential, but it should not decide the fate of Europe. Italians will vote on whether to strip the Senate (the parliament’s upper house) of two-thirds of its members and much of its legislative authority, making it merely a talking shop akin to the second chamber of Germany’s Bundesrat, and return some of the regions’ powers to the central government.

Changes like these have been discussed for 30 years. The lack of movement could benefit Renzi, if voters conclude that they should not waste such a rare opportunity to do something to reform their sclerotic system. President Sergio Mattarella is impartial, but he would prefer that the reforms go forward. His predecessor, Giorgio Napolitano, is also strongly in favor of the reforms, which he sayswould be “great news for Italy.”

MILAN – In the last 68 years, Italy has held 17 general elections and a few referenda. But only three times has an Italian vote claimed center stage internationally: in 1948, when the choice was between the West and communism; in 1976, when voters faced a similar choice, between the Christian Democrats and Enrico Berlinguer’s “Eurocommunism”; and now, with the upcoming referendum on constitutional reforms.

The implications of the upcoming vote are enormous. Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has staked his political future on the vote, pledging to step down (though not immediately) if the reforms are rejected. Such an outcome that would irreparably weaken the center-left government coalition as well: Renzi’s Democratic Party (PD) is already roiled by infighting over the reforms. In fact, the PD may not be able to avoid a split even if the vote goes the prime minister’s way.

A defeat for Renzi will be read as a victory for Italy’s two major populist parties: the Lega Nord and the larger Five Star Movement, led by the comedian Beppe Grillo. The two parties are not allied, but both are nurtured by anti-establishment sentiment and favor “national solutions” to Italy’s problems – beginning with a return to the Italian lira.

If Renzi is defeated, Lega Nord and the Five Star Movement could join forces to support a new government and hold a new referendum – this time on the euro. If Italy – one of the world’s largest public debtors – decided to go it alone, the entire European project could be dealt a mortal blow. In the age of Donald Trump and Brexit, that outcome is far from unthinkable.

The issue at stake in the referendum is not inconsequential, but it should not decide the fate of Europe. Italians will vote on whether to strip the Senate (the parliament’s upper house) of two-thirds of its members and much of its legislative authority, making it merely a talking shop akin to the second chamber of Germany’s Bundesrat, and return some of the regions’ powers to the central government.