RUTHFULLY YOURS

The UNESCO vote seems clearly a response to the expansionist, jihadist aspirations of members of the OIC who sponsored it: Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar and Sudan.

Some analysts consider a vote to abstain to be a victory for Israel, but for Spain, Greece, France, Sweden, Slovenia, and Italy it was blatant appeasement and fear of their own often-violent Muslim minorities: “Please, please, don’t blow up our capital cities. We will reject Jewish and Christian history and pretend Jesus chased the money changers from the steps of Montmartre.”

UNESCO’s Director General Irina Bokova had already announced her opposition to the resolution, a position for which she received death threats.

Having demonstrable historical fact, such as Jewish patrimony on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, subject to the whims of the UN, in which, as the late Abba Eban said, Arabs could muster a majority to decide the sun rises in the West, is not a positive proposition.

The question remains how to convince nations in the West to stand for themselves in the face of Islamists committed to replacing them.

Last week, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) voted Christian and Jewish heritage off of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem; Tuesday they ratified their perfidy. The vote seems clearly a response to the expansionist, jihadist aspirations of members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) that sponsored it: Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar and Sudan. The vote, and the behind the scenes machinations, deserve evaluation.

Upfront:

Group 1: The “in favor” voters are a nasty collection of corrupt, dictatorial, largely Islamist (traditional Islamic theology gives Jews their place on the Temple Mount; these Islamists appear intent on removing all traces of Christian and Jewish presence from the Middle East) or Marxist, and unanimously frightening places. They are, in the immortal words French diplomat Daniel Bernard applied to Israel, “shitty little countries.” Even the big ones. But see below for a caveat.

Group 2: The US, UK, the Netherlands, Estonia Germany and Lithuania had nothing to be ashamed of in the first round; they voted “against.” But see below for a caveat.

Group 3: Some analysts consider a vote to abstain to be a victory for Israel, but for Spain, Greece, France, Sweden, Slovenia and Italy it was blatant appeasement of Group 1 and fear of their own often-violent Muslim minorities: “Please, please, don’t blow up our capital cities. We will reject Jewish and Christian history and pretend Jesus chased the money changers from the steps of Montmartre.”

If the West had stood for its own history, it would have mattered. Democratic Japan and South Korea should have voted “against” as well. There might be a narrow exception for India, which had never before failed to vote in favor of an Arab-led anti-Israel resolution.

Erdogan looks determined to fight any war in the hope that all will end with Turkish-Sunni dominance in the region. He is wrong.

Turkey’s “National Contract,” Misak-i Milli, also claimed the former Ottoman province of Mosul as a Turkish province. There is one complication, though. Mosul is not Turkish territory, as envisaged in Misak-i Milli, but Iraqi territory. And the Shiite-controlled Iraqi government does not want Turkish or Turkey-backed Sunni boots on the ground.

“Certain historians believe that the borders set by the National Contract include Cyprus, Aleppo, Mosul, Erbil, Kirkuk, Batumi, Thessaloniki, Kardzhali, Varna and the [Greek] islands of the Aegean.” — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Erdogan hopes to build a pro-Ottoman, Sunni region against Iranian dominance.

A few hundred Turkish soldiers in Iraq have been training Sunni militias to help retake Mosul from ISIS. Baghdad wants the Turkish troops out, but Turkey refuses to go.

Each time in recent history that Turkey’s pro-Sunni neo-Ottomans opted for assertive foreign policy in this turbulent part of the world, there were more casualties and no happy ending for any state- or non-state actor, including President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey. As multiple asymmetrical wars in the triangle of Turkey, Syria and Iraq turn more violent and complex, with the U.S.-led international campaign fighting jihadists — while Iran and Russia try to win proxy wars — Turkey keeps raising the stakes with the risky nonsensical wish to revive its imperial past. Erdogan looks determined to fight any war in the hope that all will end with Turkish-Sunni dominance in the region. He is wrong.

In his recent speeches Erdogan often revisited a long-forgotten Arabic phrase that is so dear to every Turk’s heart and mind: Misak-i Milli (“National Contract”).

On February 12, 1920, the last Ottoman parliament proclaimed a set of decisions which Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of modern Turkey, adopted as “the main principle of our independence.” Misak-i Milli, among other principles, set modern Turkey’s borders; it was a guideline to determine where the borders of the Turkish Republic would start and end. It would be used as the basis for the new Turkish Republic’s claims in the Treaty of Lausanne.

According to Misak-i Milli, “the future of the territories inhabited by an Arab majority at the time of the signing of the Armistice of Mudros shall be determined by a referendum.” On the other hand, the territories which were not occupied at that time and inhabited by a Turkish majority are the homeland of the Turkish nation. The status of Kars, Ardahan (Turkish provinces since then) and Batumi (a province in the Republic of Georgia) may be determined by a referendum. The status of Western Thrace (in Greece) will be determined by the votes of its inhabitants. Misak-i Milli also claimed that the former Ottoman province of Mosul should be a Turkish province. Instead, Mosul was first left to British control, then became an Iraqi province. Mosul is now Iraq’s second largest city, but tenuously under the control of the Islamic State (ISIS).

At a cabinet meeting this month, Erdogan reportedly told his ministers:

“Turkey can no longer stay the same at this point. The status quo will change somehow. We will either leap with moves forward or we will be bound to shrink. I am determined to make forward moves.”

In another speech, Erdogan said:

“Turkey is not just Turkey. Apart from its 79 million citizens, it is also responsible to the hundreds of millions of our brothers in the geographical area to which we are connected by historical and cultural ties … Certain historians believe that the borders set by the National Contract include Cyprus, Aleppo, Mosul, Erbil, Kirkuk, Batumi, Thessaloniki, Kardzhali, Varna and the [Greek] islands of the Aegean.”

Currently, the West is being confronted with foreboding challenges by Islamic States and Islamist groups of one kind or another, all of which view Western democracy and the Western way of life with abhorrence. Perversely, no matter how provocative and despicable the behavior and pronouncements of such entities, the general response of the prevailing Western intelligentsia and some of their governments ranges from sheer indifference and/or disbelief to a search for offenses committed by their own countries in “provoking” an anti-Western animus and, finally, to the actual proffering of assistance to the Jihadists.

While the majority of individual Muslims in the West are decent, law-abiding citizens, the nature of their communal structures and leadership gives rise to concerns that are briskly swept under the carpet. Many, if not most, mosques are officiated by imams trained abroad in madrasas that inculcate a belligerent attitude to Western values and lifestyles, which, in turn, gives rise to Islamic extremism. To the Muslim communities’ credit, Islamist groups have usually been small in size, drawing on only a limited number of active adherents. The Islamists do, however, pose serious security threats and are potentially capable of inflicting appreciable harm.

What compounds the problem is the fact that too few Muslim community leaders are genuinely utterly and unequivocally appalled by any manifestation of Islamic terrorism, no matter who the slain and injured happen to be. In the wake of the slaying on October 2, 2015, of a NSW police department employee by a young Muslim gunman, the Grand Mufti of Australia rationalized the incident as being due to “racism, Islamophobia, curtailing freedoms through securitization, duplicitous foreign policies and military intervention.”[1] Needless to say, the Grand Mufti made no reference to any features within his own Muslim community that could possible engender terrorism.

Such an analysis chimes in with the prevailing views of left-inclined intellectuals who assume that, in the West, Muslims are invariably victims of racism and Islamophobia. What deeply troubles the intellectual elite is that even the slightest disapprobation of any feature of Muslim society is taken as a breach of the spirit of multiculturalism, calling into question the notion that all cultures and societies are equally valid and are entitled to respect. Of all communities, the intellectual elite are particularly protective of and sensitive to the needs of the Muslim one, which they perceive to be especially exposed to wanton discrimination and harassment. One might add, that in virtually all advanced countries, the Muslim community is a strong supporter of left-wing parties and is ardently wooed by them.

The intellectuals’ fantasy of practically all Muslims in the West being hounded by hostile bigots is one that is widely shared but not well substantiated. In the United States the FBI disclosed that of the 1,149 anti-religious hate crimes committed in 2014, only 16.1% were directed against Muslims. By contrast, 56.8% of such offenses were inflicted on Jews without causing any disquiet whatsoever in left-wing or liberal circles.[2] In France all religious-based murders of Jews have been carried out by Muslims and in the wider Western community members of the general public have lost their lives in indiscriminate Islamist outrages perpetrated in New York, San Bernardino, London, Madrid, Paris, Brussels Orlando and Nice. If truth be told, within the West, it is mainly non-Muslims rather than Muslims, who have been encountering loss of life and limb as a result of hate crimes instigated by Islamist fanatics. However, whenever an act of Islamic terrorism occurs, Western political leaders regularly deny that such deeds are in anyway linked to Islam.

ARLINGTON, Va. — The commander of U.S. ground operations against ISIS in Iraq and Syria warned today that the offensive to take back Mosul could spark a large attack by the terror group elsewhere in reaction to their land losses.

There’s precedent in the global attacks — including on home soil — launched during the battle in which ISIS lost another key Iraqi city.

Maj. Gen. Gary Volesky, commander of Combined Joint Forces’ Land Component Command for Operation Inherent Resolve and commander of the 101st Airborne, told reporters via video from Baghdad on Wednesday that he couldn’t give a timeframe for when forces would be in Mosul as he’d rather “under-promise and over-deliver.”

“I would just say tomorrow we’ll be a lot closer to Mosul than we are today,” Volesky said. “My concern is making sure that they’ve got the combat power, they sustain that combat power, and don’t go so fast that they start to, you know, give opportunity to the enemy.”

Peshmerga Command tweeted that the Kurdish forces today began “a major advance from three fronts in North and North East of Mosul.”

“The objectives are to clear a number of nearby villages and secure strategic areas to restrict ISIL’s movements,” the Pesh continued. “This operation follows recent gains by Peshmerga forces in East Mosul and advances by ISF in South Mosul.”

Iraqi and Peshmerga forces are being advised to advance in a way so that they don’t “have to turn around and go back and fight an enemy that has gone to ground and stayed behind,” the general said.

“Because that’s what we expect the enemy is going to do. I mean, we’re seeing it already in the Euphrates River valley. The enemy knows they’re losing. I mean, Baghdadi has said as much, you know, ‘We’ll go back out to the desert where we’ve traditionally been and wait.’ Well, he’ll get the opportunity to do that here in the next period of time,” Volesky continued.

“But I expect that they’re going to go into an insurgency mode and they’ll try to do these high-profile, spectacular attacks to draw attention away from the losses that they’re suffering. I mean, we’ve seen them do that before. When they lose terrain in Iraq, there’s — they try to do a spectacular attack to tell everybody, you know, they’re still a relevant organization.”

During the battle to retake Ramadi from ISIS, which the Islamic State lost in February, terrorist attacks attributed to ISIS included the October 2015 downing of a Metrojet flying from Sharm El Sheikh to St. Petersburg, the November terror spree by an ISIS cell in Paris, the December attack in San Bernardino, and the January attacks on a Starbucks and police station in Jakarta.

Volesky said the coalition is “not doing any detainee operations” for any ISIS fighters taken into custody during the battle for Mosul, but instructions are understood to “treat people with dignity and respect or the fight becomes much, much harder.”

Iraq will be responsible for keeping any captured ISIS terrorists. CONTINUE AT SITE

Drawing its sustenance on the public purse, the website has become quite an empire, with international outposts and an ever-expanding staff nominally pledged to present the latest in academic research. What visitors get is an overload of green-left waffle and censorship if they dare to disagree.
In November, 2015, Islamist gunmen massacred 130 young Parisians. Academic authors at the taxpayer-supported The Conversation were quick off the mark with the site’s trademark ‘Academic rigor, journalistic flair’.Here’s a sample, from Folker Hanusch at Queensland University of Technology. It was headed: “Disproportionate coverage of Paris attacks is not just the media’s fault”.

He mounted a case straight from cloud-cuckoo land that the media ought to give equal treatment to death-dealing catastrophes no matter where they occur, e.g. in the African interior or Syria. He concluded that “journalists are not the only ones to blame for the disproportionate coverage” in Paris – audiences must “share the blame”. He suggested that if only the punters’ mindsets and empathies could be brought closer to the refined sensibilities of academics, “disproportionate” coverage of the Paris massacres could be corrected.

This patronizing PC bilge suggests why sensible people give academia a wide berth and news organisations staffed with journalism graduates are going down the gurgler. It also doesn’t say much for the nous of The Conversation’s editors. These are the same people who this month put ludicrous captions on stock pics of military mayhem:

Aftermath of a bomb attack in 2014 in Jos, Nigeria by the militant group Boko Haram. Analysts have linked Boko Haram’s rise to climatic shifts and resource shortages.

Destroyed tanks in front of a mosque in Azaz, Syria, 2012. Climate scientists have identified the 2006-2010 drought in Syria as a factor in the civil uprising that began in 2011.

Andrew Jaspan, 64, co-founder and executive director of The Conversation, was sent on forced leave last month, according to the Guardian, but not because of his site’s bizarre news treatments.

Two other factors were involved:

Letters of complaint to the board from some of Jaspan’s Australian and overseas editors about Jaspan’his style and strategy – a reprise of the Age staff revolt against Jaspan in early 2008
Top-level concern about Jaspan’s hell-for-leather expansion overseas, despite The Conversation’s shoe-string finances and dependence on taxpayers’ largesse.

As Jaspan put it with aplomb in his 2014 annual review, “Each year takes us by surprise. There’s no road map, and we are making our future as we go along.”

A few months later, the Abbott government declined to extend the Gillard government’s $1m a year grants (PM Gillard also provided a $1.5m startup grant). Abbott’s education minister, Christopher Pyne, said the previous funding was conditional on the site achieving viability by mid-2015. “It had a shelf-life of three years, at which time The Conversation is meant to be self-sustaining…They were given $3.5 million — in that time they’ve expanded to Africa, the United States and the UK, and I expect that they are in a position where they will be self-sustaining, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to expand overseas in the way they have.”

Jaspan claimed that the target date “was never achievable and The Conversation told the government that last year.” He put viability forward to at least 2017. He professed to be baffled why the conservative government was declining to fund green/left academics to undermine the conservative government on issues ranging from asylum-seeker policy to Muslim terror and continuance of coal mining.

She was born into poverty and an abusive family. As a young child she was forced by her family to marry an older man. According to the Islamic and Sharia law of Iran, this was a perfectly legal and moral arrangement. Islam encourages young girls to become child brides. Iranian authorities point out that the Prophet Muhammad’s life also demonstrates a similar model for his followers.

After being forced to marry, Zeinab Sekaanvand Lokran was repeatedly raped. But in Iran’s Islamist law, even if a husband beats and forces his wife into having sex with him, it is not considered rape or abuse of any kind, since they are married. According to the clerics, a wife’s duty is to please the man. The Quran in Sura (Chapter) 2:223 says: Your women are your fields, so go into your fields whichever way you like.

Zeinab was also repeatedly beaten after her wedding day. Despite the risk she knew she faced, she attempted to leave her husband multiple times, but with no success. She begged the police to help her, but they ignored her complaints, and reprimanded her for leaving her tormentor. The Islamist law of the land does not provide any protection for girls like her. In addition, neither her family nor friends would accept her if she left her husband.

More tragedies were to unfold for Zeinab. Her husband’s brother began also repeatedly raping her.

She begged for a divorce, but her husband would not accept her request for one. She did not have any legal base according to Iran’s Islamist codes to get a divorce. Everything was against this brave, unyielding girl. Yet, the worst was still to come.

At the age of 17, her husband was found stabbed to death. Because Zeinab had tried to escape him so many times, her community accused her of perpetrating her husband’s death. She was arrested and tortured for the next few months. After endless abuse and torment, she was forced to confess that she was a murderer.

It did not take long for the judge to issue a death sentence for Zeinab. She was not allowed to have access to a lawyer at any point of her trial. Once more, men made the decisions about her life and her death.

“Sharia councils are thriving because there is no other authentic and credible mechanism for Muslim women to obtain an Islamic divorce. If the government offered an alternative, 90% of the work of sharia councils would end.” — Moulana Raza, Director of the Muslim Law Council UK.

Peter Sutcliffe, who was convicted in 1981 of murdering 13 women and attempting to kill seven more, has faced daily death threats since arriving at Frankland Prison. Muslim gang members have offered to protect him, but only if he converts to Islam. They told Sutcliffe that changing faith will also allow him access to a special diet, more time out of his cell and the right to refuse certain types of prison work.

Kamran Ahmed, 27, was sentenced to ten years in prison for raping a 12-year-old girl. Ahmed, a Pakistani man who moved to the UK to wed a British-born woman in an arranged marriage, had been in the country less than six months when he raped the girl after trying to groom her for sex.

“Take off your tight jeans or you’re going to burn in hell, kafir [unbeliever]. I’m going to follow you home and blow up your house.” — Krissoni Henderson, a 31-year-old Muslim bodyguard.

“If they arrest me and put me in prison, I will carry on in prison. I will radicalize everyone in prison.” — Anjem Choudary, sentenced to five years, six months in prison for activities supporting Islamic State.

“There is only one punishment for insulters: cut off their heads, cut off their heads, cut off their heads.” — Tanveer Ahmed, 32, who murdered a Glasgow shopkeeper for “disrespecting Islam,” calling on supporters to behead other “insulters.”

Home Office statistics released to the Daily Express under Freedom of Information laws revealed that 12,000 migrants seeking asylum in the UK are missing.

September 1. A team of University of Oxford sociologists published a paper about why young, highly educated Muslim women who live in modern urban environments are choosing to wear Islamic veils. The report says that in social situations in which Muslim women mix with non-Muslim friends, work outside the home or interact with strangers, they may wear the veil as “a signal to others in their community to show that mixing with others does not compromise their religious piety.” Veils may also be used “to strengthen their own sense of commitment to their faith and its values in a secular world.” The report says that efforts by Western governments to ban the veil in public might be counterproductive because it would “deprive Muslim women from integrating.” It suggests that if they cannot signal their piety through wearing the veil, they might be forced to stay at home.

A big question surrounding missile attacks against two U.S. ships ( the USS Mason and USS Ponce) is whether it was the Yemeni rebel Houthis (also known as Ansar Allah) who did it? Or, instead, did Iran carry out the attacks? A related question is what were these U.S. ships doing near the Bab el-Mandab straits in the Red Sea? The Ponce is, admittedly, an at-sea forward staging base.

Iran has been harassing U.S. ships in the Persian Gulf for some time, and on each occasion the Iranians appear to have been bolder in what looks like a naval game of chicken. So much so that most recently Iranian fast boats equipped with missiles and torpedoes literally parked in front of the U.S. destroyer Nitze, forcing it to alter course to avoid a collision. But that is not nearly as serious the as events that unfolded starting on October 1st. Early in the morning the Houthis fired a C-802 missile that hit the HSV-2 Swift, a very fast and relatively large catamaran ship originally built by Incat in Australia. Acquired by the U.S. Navy in 2003, the Navy’s Sealift Command operated the vessel for ten years. Then it went out of service in 2013, replaced by another Incat-built catamaran. In an unusual move, in fact a strange one, the Sealift Command leased the Swift to a UAE organization called the National Marine Dredging Company. According to various news reports, the Swift was shuttling supplies and passengers between the UAE and Eritrea on the one hand and Aden on the other. So-called independent experts speaking on Iranian TV say that the Swift was moving troops from a training base in Eritrea to Aden, controlled by the Hadi government (Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi) backed by Saudi Arabia and its allies. According to Aden, the ship was evacuating wounded persons and bringing in humanitarian supplies.

The problem is that the Swift was nowhere near Aden. It was just off the coast of Houthi-controlled areas north of the Ban el-Mandab close to the Port of Mocha.

As acknowledged by the Houthis, they fired on the Swift and caused almost catastrophic damage. There is a video of the attack that appears to have been made from a small skiff. The video shows the missile launch and the missile hitting the target. The Swift is very close by. What follows is a terrific explosion and fire. The Swift did not sink, but it did burn. According to reports from some of the crew who survived the attack, another small boat fired at the survivors with a machine gun as they fled the Swift. The Houthis declared they used a C-802 missile to hit the Swift.