RUTHFULLY YOURS

Babette Francis is the National & Overseas Co-ordinator of Endeavour Forum Inc., a women’s NGO having special consultative status with the Economic & Social Council (ECOSOC) of the United Nations

If our Foreign Minister had a mind to do something of genuine value for her oppressed sisters, she might consider re-visiting Tehran on a bicycle while wearing leggings and a coat with writing on the back — ‘offences’ that could see an Iranian woman punished, even executed.
In April, 2015, our Minister for Foreign Affairs, the Hon. Julie Bishop, was criticized online by Iranian and other women for wearing a headscarf, and on occasion a hat, during her official visit to Iran; they deplored her decision to not take a stronger stance on the issue of headscarves — voluntary for her but compulsory for women in Iran. Iranian political journalist Masih Alinejad who now lives in the US, is founder of My Stealthy Freedom page and lobbies for freedom for women from wearing the hijab in public. She says that freedom to dress as you choose is also a free speech issue.

Julie Bishop always looks very fetching in photographs, and she looked even more so in her glamourous headscarf which revealed most of her hair, whereas Iranian women are punished if their headscarf does not completely cover their hair. I should mention that women who are privileged to have a personal audience with a Pope in the Vatican, traditionally wear a hat or mantilla, but it is not compulsory, does not conceal their hair, and is a mark of respect to a religious leader, whereas Julie Bishop was meeting with her political counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif, the Iranian Minister for Foreign Affairs, and not a leading cleric.

So I have much sympathy for Masih Alienjad who wrote an open letter on line to Julie Bishop saying, “You were not brave enough to challenge the compulsory hijab rules yet. We hope you will soon. You may say you were respecting Iran’s culture but compulsory hijab is not part of our culture”. Alinejad had previously challenged Ms Bishop to eschew wearing the headscarf in the country, calling it an insult to “human dignity”.

News Corp journalist Victoria Craw further reports that “other women joined in the criticism, with Australian-Iranian woman Moji Joon saying she was ‘quite disappointed Ms Bishop did not use her political position to take a stance for her fellow females.’ Another woman, Jeanie Mac, wrote: ‘The moral support this would have given the women in Iran who are protesting the wearing of compulsory hijab could have been huge. Instead it leaves a bitter taste in the mouth that she cares so little for women’s liberation and human rights.’ Others commented that they were ‘disappointed’ or ‘disgusted’, with some adding they were ashamed the foreign minister did not have the courage to challenge the rule.

Bishop’s visit marked the first official talks between Australia and Iran in 12 years and covered asylum seekers, intelligence and ISIS. She achieved some kind of deal on intelligence-0sharing to help track ISIS fighters, but Iran rejected her request to accept its nationals who have been deported from Australia. Iranians make up about a quarter of the people held in immigration detention centres.

President Obama appears to have been told that if all these secular dictators could be brought down, a magnificent Arab Spring would blossom. This was, it seems, precisely the goal of the Muslim Brotherhood: to get America’s help to topple the dictatorships — then mostly military and secular — but then to replace them with themselves, Islamists.

After Egypt took down the Muslim Brotherhood, the goal of establishing the Islamic Caliphate in Egypt simply moved to Syria, the only Arab nation where a secular Muslim leader had survived the Arab Spring.

Promoting Islam also seems to have been a major factor in Obama’s equation for America. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton followed suit, hosting several closed-door conferences on “Defamation of Religion,” to suppress free speech and internationally criminalize any criticism of Islam with fines and prison. She would rather blame terrorism on free speech than on the violent tenets of Islam.

This escalating subversion should be reason enough for all Western democratic countries permanently to part company with the United Nations. Its history of corruption is neither new nor surprising, or that it is run anti-democratic “club of dictators” whose interests are opposite to ours.

The goals of U.S. President Barack Obama in the Middle East ended the rule of most of the “secular” Arab leaders in the area. His views may have come, partly at least, from propaganda on why Muslim people supposedly lacked freedom there. Obama appears to have been told that if all these secular dictators could be brought down, a magnificent Arab Spring would blossom.

This was, it seems, precisely the goal of the Muslim Brotherhood: to get America’s help to topple the dictatorships — then mostly military and secular — but then to replace them with themselves, Islamists.

One of the enduring myths against the Jews is that they played a key role in the slave trade. The British newspaper Independent recently reported that Jackie Walker, the vice-chair of the left-wing Labor Party–linked movement, wrote on her Facebook page: “I’m sure you know, millions more Africans were killed in the African Holocaust and their oppression continues today on a global scale in a way it doesn’t for Jews…and many Jews (my ancestors too) were the chief financiers of the sugar and slave trade which is of course why there were so many early synagogues in the Caribbean.”

Her attack now appears on the website of Jews For Justice For Palestinians whose demands include “ending Israel’s illegal occupation and settlement of Palestinian land, including its illegal blockade of Gaza; and [demanding Israel] acknowledge its responsibility in the creation of the Palestinian refugees, and its obligation to negotiate a just, fair and practical resolution of the issue.”

In addition to being accused of having been part of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and of owning slaves, Jews are also charged with being involved in creating the Jim Crow laws that mandated racial segregation, sharecropping, the labor movement, unions and general mistreatment of black people in the U.S.

If we are to respond to this fabrication, we need to know the facts. This canard of Jewish involvement in the slave trade has been debunked by a number of historians as well as the Council of the American Historical Association (AHA). Historian Seymour Drescher, a noted expert on slavery and antislavery movements, found, “It is unlikely that more than a fraction of 1 percent of the twelve million enslaved and relayed Africans were purchased or sold by Jewish merchants even once… At no point along the continuum of the slave trade were Jews numerous enough, rich enough, and powerful enough to affect significantly the structure and flow of the slave trade or to diminish the suffering of its African victims.”

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is losing his nerve. After a year of silence, the self-proclaimed caliph of Islamic State released an audio recording Wednesday in which he urged his fighters to stand firm in Mosul as the U.S.-backed coalition closed in. “The value of staying on your land with honor is a thousand times better than the price of retreating with shame,” he thundered.

Next door, Jordanians watch the Mosul operation with enthusiasm and unease. As Information Minister Mohammad al-Momani puts it in an interview in Amman this week, “To us the Mosul operation is a cornerstone in the whole fight against terrorism.” Mosul also raises discomfiting questions about what form jihadism will take after Islamic State is defeated, and how that might threaten Jordan, America’s most reliable Arab ally.

Roiling Amman now are reports that many Islamic State fighters are “shaving their beards” to blend in as coalition forces draw near. An estimated 2,500 Jordanians have joined Islamic State, and alarms rang last week after the jihadist army overran half of Rutba, a city about 70 miles from the Jordanian border in western Iraq. “These groups are rooted now in Syria and Iraq, and Jordan will be a target once the space in Syria and Iraq closes,” says counterterror analyst Amer al-Sabaileh.

This is why border security is foremost among Amman’s priorities. Some 1.5 million refugees from the wars in Syria and Iraq have already flooded Jordan, straining resources and patience in a small nation that unlike many of its neighbors isn’t blessed with oil wealth. Jordanians recognize the magnitude of the risk if even a minuscule fraction of the newcomers is linked to Islamic State. They aren’t keen to accept more.

The upside is that officials here have a good sense of what goes on beyond their frontiers. The Obama administration has been a relatively decent steward of the Amman-Washington alliance, and thanks in part to U.S. assistance, the Jordanian security apparatus is battle-ready for any territorial attempts. “We’ve been at war with Daesh in our northern and eastern borders for four years,” says Mr. Momani, using the Arabic acronym for Islamic State. “So we are in a strong position to defend our borders.”

Jordan also faces an internal threat underscored by two Islamic State assaults in June against military and intelligence targets that killed 11 soldiers and officers in total. In coming years Jordan will likely face an uptick in such attacks, the product of the “collapse of ISIS and the rise of ISIS 2.0,” says Mr. Sabaileh, the terrorism analyst. Both the remnants of the old Islamic State and its successor group, he says, will have an incentive to stage brutal, sophisticated attacks—the former to demonstrate it is still in the game, the latter to prove its jihadist chops. CONTINUE AT SITE

“Let us see how your Islamist friend [Erdogan] behaves after crushing the secular establishment.” — The author to a friend, 2004.

To insist on the borders Turkey accepted in the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne “is the greatest injustice to be done to the country and to the nation.” — Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, October 19, 2016.

Erdogan’s newfound claims seem to refer not only to wish to regain hegemony to the west (Greece) but also about the south (Syria) and the southeast (Iraq). Turkey evidently wishes to be part of an Iraqi- and Kurdish-led offensive against Mosul, controlled since 2014 by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Sipping his ouzo at a café in Athens on a warm afternoon in 2004, a Greek diplomat friend smiled and said:

“You are wrong about Erdogan. He will reform Turkey’s democratic culture, align it with the European Union, strengthen its ties with NATO and pursue a pro-peace policy in this part of the world. Meanwhile he will crush the secular army establishment and Turkey will no longer be a threat to any of its neighbors.”

I said: “Let us see how your Islamist friend [Erdogan] behaves after crushing the secular establishment.”

Twelve years later, I still enjoy our peaceful ouzo sessions with the same Greek friend. But things do not look equally peaceful between Turkey and its neighbors, including Greece.

Speaking at a public rally on October 22, President Erdogan said that “We did not accept our borders voluntarily.” He went on to say, “At the time [when the current borders were drawn] we may have agreed to it but the real mistake is to surrender to that sacrifice.” What does all that mean?

The Atlantic Council, founded in 1961 to encourage civic engagement in transatlantic security, is now blaming the West for “Islamophobia,” along with notorious Islam apologists like Karen Armstrong.

“What we want to do today is debunk myths,” stated Atlantic Council President Frederick Kempeat the Washington, DC, organization’s October 20 event “Islamophobia: Overcoming Myths and Engaging in a Better Conversation.” Yet the panelists merely offered hackneyed arguments diverting attention from current Islamist threats, casting disrepute on an Atlantic Council once founded to stimulate civic engagement in transatlantic security.

Vuslat Doðan Sabancý, publisher of the leading Turkish newspaper Hürriyet, dismissed any legitimate concerns about Islamic doctrine by stating that “Islamophobia…stems from phobia, which is a fear of the unknown.” British religion writer and notorious Islam apologist Karen Armstrong similarly spoke of a “phobia, an irrational fear, it is not based on reason, it is based on a gut feeling.” Blurring distinctions between critiquing a belief system like Islam and ethnic prejudice, Kempe discussed the “line between security concerns and racism.”

For Sabancý, the “answer is very simple. Let’s get rid of the phobia…let’s get to know each other,” yet her appeal for intercultural dialogue contained limits evoking “Islamophobia’s” totalitarian nature. “Freedom of speech is the backbone of democracy, but it should not be exercised at the cost of attacking one’s dignity, it should not be exercised at the cost of attacking one’s faith either, because dignity is also a human right,” she stated. This rather unusual position for a publisher paralleled Dr. Mehmet Aydin, former head of Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet). He warned that when “saying nasty things about the prophet” Muhammad of Islam, “you have to be very careful…we have to respect the values of other cultures.”

The panelists exhibited no such concern for European security measures amidst millions of Muslim refugees overwhelming Europe with various economic and terrorism worries. “This is going to take its place in history as the most disgraceful human act,” Sabancý stated with reference to Europe’s new zeal for border barriers. “It doesn’t seem long ago, does it, when we were cheering because the Berlin wall was being torn down,” Armstrong contrasted.

Armstrong evoked ominous historical analogies of epochs in which “there have been these explosions of hatred of certain groups, just think of the Crusades,” where Crusaders “slaughtered Muslims with great joy.” This common slander (see President Barack Obama) of Crusaders as mere bloodthirsty aggressors preceded her trite Nazism invocation while discussing the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa calling for British writer Salman Rushdie’s death. At the time, she was “appalled by the way British intellectuals, the great and the good, segued away from a denunciation of the fatwa to an out and out denunciation of Islam itself. I said to myself we have learned nothing in Europe since the 1930s.”

Armstrong’s imagination somehow juxtaposed justifiable outrage in the United Kingdom and elsewhere at lethal Islamic blasphemy doctrine with the subsequent 1990s eruption of the Balkans bloodbath. “There were concentration camps again on the outskirts of Europe, this time with Muslims in them,” she stated. Apparently unaware of any Balkan wars, including the Ottoman Empire’s jihad conquests, she superficially described the prior history of a region “where Muslims, Jews, and Christians had coexisted amicably for centuries.”