RUTHFULLY YOURS

A month ago I wrote an article entitled ‘The Failed State of the Two-State Solution.’ In it, I wrote that “by the ballot or by the ballot Hamas will head any Palestinian state as they did when Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005.”

So what has happened in the short time since I released that article?

In Nablus, on August 27, an estimated 120,000 protesters demonstrated against the Palestinian Authority after an Arab was beaten to death by PA security men. Many called for an international investigation into the murder as the Palestinian Authority threatened to arrest some of the leaders of the protest march. The town of Nablus has been described as being in “total anarchy.”

Sporadic violence has broken out in recent days against the Palestinian Authority, often by individuals but also by tribal groups or clans at odds with the increasingly unpopular rule by perceived corrupt leaders.

Universities are the crucibles that produce the next generation of opinion and influence makers. What has flown below the radar of the international community is that, at Birzeit University, the student body overwhelmingly elected students affiliated to Hamas with the Islamic List taking a majority 26 seats against Fatah’s 19. For the uninitiated, Birzeit is not a campus in the Gaza Strip. Birzeit University is located ten kilometers north of Ramallah, an easy march to Palestinian Authority headquarters.

Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah, propped up by the international community and, by default, the Israeli government, has failed this community by his stubborn refusal to negotiate with Israel, a refusal based on his adamant rejection of living alongside a Jewish state.

He has clearly also failed his own people who elected him back in 2005 and have been barred from expressing their democratic voice ever since.

Surveys show a sharp fall in Palestinian Arabs supporting a two-state solution. There has been a radical fall in support for an Abbas-led Palestinian rulership and a rise in support for Hamas.

The persistent fever for violence against Israel was highlighted in a study made in March 2016 by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Study which found that the majority of Palestinian Arabs yearn for violence. 60% of West Bank Arabs and three quarters of Gaza Strip Arabs favor violence against Jews.

If truth be told, Arabs living under Palestinian control are angrier at their leaders than they are against Israel.

The designs of Islamist forces have to be foiled in the region. Their agenda is to carve out a separate Islamic country in the Kashmir Valley.

The members of Hizbul Mujahideen, a group designated as a terrorist organisation by the EU and the US, have been at the forefront of killing, raping and pillaging Hindus since the nineties. Their campaign has led to the “ethnic cleansing” of the indigenous minority Pandits. An estimated 95% are said to have fled from the Valley to other parts of India.

Amnesty International’s approach is fallacious. It only takes into account alleged rights violations by security forces and not by Islamist forces in Kashmir. Amnesty also seems to gloss over the violations of the rights of non-Muslim minorities in the Valley.

India’s Home Minister Rajnath Singh has certainly tried to restore peace and normalcy to Kashmir. Since the July 8 killing of the Hizbul Mujahideen terrorist, Burhan Wani, in an encounter with India’s security forces, the region has been the scene of daily violence. The current turmoil in the Kashmir Valley is estimated to have resulted in the deaths of 66 civilians, with more than 4,600 security personnel injured.

During his second visit to the Valley on August 24-25, Singh reportedly welcomed talking with anyone in the Indian constitutional framework and emphasised the various governmental development projects and employment schemes in the Valley.

Regrettably, such efforts do not seem to be producing the desired atmosphere of peace. Militants, reportedly linked with the group Tehreek-ul-Mujahideen, based the in part of Kashmir occupied by Pakistan, apparently hid themselves among stone-throwing protesters and lobbed grenades. Some have been seen supporting the Islamic State.

Since Singh’s return from the Valley, violent protests have continued.

“The law and not religion should be the basis of justice for citizens. We are calling for an impartial judge-led inquiry that places human rights, not theology, at the heart of the investigation.” — Maryam Namazie, head of One Law For All

“This area is home to a large Muslim community. Please have respect for us and for our children and limit the presence of dogs in the public sphere. … those who live in the UK must learn to understand and respect the legacy and lifestyle of Muslims who live alongside them.” — Leaflets distributed by the Muslim group, “Public Purity.”

“It’s not gonna be long now before Islam will come to the shores of this country…and if they reject it we’ll fight them. We want to live under sharia not democracy.” — Muslim convert Gavin Rae, 36, a former British soldier who was sentenced to 18 years in prison for trying to buy weapons for the Islamic State.

Equality Now, a group that campaigns for women’s human rights, estimates that 137,000 women and girls living in England and Wales have been affected by female genital mutilation (FGM).

July 1. A Muslim taxi driver in Leicester refused to pick up a blind couple because they had a guide dog. Charles Bloch and Jessica Graham had booked a taxi with ADT Taxis for them and their guide dog, Carlo. But when the taxi arrived, the driver said, “Me, I not take the dog. For me, it’s about my religion.” Many Muslims believe dogs are impure and haram (strictly forbidden).

July 1. A judge in London ordered the deportation of Saliman Barci, a 41-year-old Albanian man who posed as a refugee from Kosovo and collected the full range of welfare payments in Britain for 14 years. Barci, it turned out, was a citizen of Albania who had murdered two men there in 1997. Shortly after carrying out the killings, Barci fled Albania and eventually reached Britain, where he claimed asylum as a refugee. In 2009, a court in Albania sentenced Barci in absentia to 25 years in prison for the double murder. British authorities only became aware of Barci’s real identity after an altercation at his London home, when the police arrived and took his fingerprints.

July 2. A Somali man was sentenced to ten years in prison for raping two women in Birmingham. Dahir Ibrahim, 31, had previously been sentenced to ten years in 2005 for raping a woman in Edgbaston. A judge had ordered his deportation after he had served his first sentence, but he appealed and was allowed to remain in Britain. Ibrahim’s attorney, Jabeen Akhtar, successfully argued that he had a lack of understanding of what is acceptable in the United Kingdom.

July 3. Azad Chaiwala, a Muslim entrepreneur in Manchester, launched a campaign to “remove the taboo” behind polygamy by starting two polygamy matchmaking sites: secondwife.com, exclusive to Muslims, and polygamy.com, open to “Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, agnostics — whoever you are.” Chaiwala said:

“I was 12 when I came out of the polygamy closet… Changing people’s perception of polygamy. If I can do that, and bring more family stability, happiness and a large support system infrastructure, I’ll be happy. And in the end, I’m a Muslim and I’m rewarded for doing good. So I hope that when I die, my creator will reward me with something better than what I had in this world in return. It’s almost like I get my religious kick out of it, I get my business kick out of it and I also get a lot of thank-you letters.”

Polygamy is illegal in Britain.

July 4. A Muslim man was ordered to bring his nine-year-old daughter back to Britain after taking her to Algeria and leaving her there with his relatives. The man said he did not approve of his estranged wife’s new Christian partner. In his ruling, Mr Justice Hayden said the woman had converted to Islam to marry the man, who was now unhappy about the lifestyle she was leading after their separation:

“The father has been extremely critical of the mother and of what he now regards as her un-Islamic lifestyle, which he has described as ‘debauched.’ He has been dismissive of her care of their daughter and of her choice of partner. He plainly does not consider it appropriate for their daughter to be brought up where her mother lives with a Christian man.”

July 5. ITV News reported that an alleged British member of the infamous Islamic State execution squad made a dating profile before he left Britain; he was advertising for a wife to join him in Syria. Alexander Kotey, a convert to Islam who also uses the name Abu Salih, was identified in February as one of the so-called “Beatles” who detained and killed a string of Western hostages. According to ITV, a profile he made for himself before leaving London for Syria, shows a “more sensitive side” to the killer:

“I am a practicing revert brother of mixed race origin. I enjoy outdoor activities and like getting away from the city. I hope to eventually leave (hijrah from) London and settle elsewhere. I am seeking a sister who is, or at least striving to be serious about her religion, sincere towards Allah (SWT), affectionate, caring and understanding, who understands the importance of always referring matters back to Allah and his messenger. And she should be willing and prepared to migrate to a Muslim land.”

After posting it, Kotey is believed to have used an aid convoy as cover to travel to the Middle East before slipping across the border into Syria. His whereabouts are unknown. According to ITV, it is believed he is still an Islamic State fighter.

July 5. The Labour Party reinstated Naz Shah, a Muslim MP from Bradford who was suspended over anti-Semitic Facebook posts that called on Israelis be deported to the United States. “Antisemitism is racism, full stop,” she said. “As an MP, I will do everything in my power to build relations between Muslims, Jews and people of different faiths and none.”

July 6. A Muslim man appeared at Chelmsford Magistrates’ Court on charges of forcing his wife to wear a headscarf outside of her bedroom, banning her from speaking to other men and beating her. Abdelhadi Ahmed, 39, denied one count of engaging in controlling or coercive behavior in an intimate relationship, one count of criminal damage and two counts of assault by beating.

The U.S. announced its plan to pass the oversight of the agency to a global governance model on October 1, 2016. The Obama Administration says that the transition will have no practical effects on the internet’s functioning or its users, and even considers the move necessary in order to maintain international support for the internet and to prevent a fracturing of its governance. Oh really?

The absence of the U.S. in overseeing the governance of the internet could spell the end of the current era of free speech on the internet, as well as free enterprise.

What guarantees are there that internet governance will not eventually end up in the hands of those very governments, seeing as they are all very eager to gain control of it? None. The Geneva Declaration of Principles makes clear that the UN, run by a majority of authoritarian governments, wants a decisive role for governments in internet governance.

Civil society groups and activists are calling on Congress to sue the Obama Administration — perhaps at least to postpone the date until more Americans are aware of the plan. It is not too late.

Very soon, on October 1, 2016, much of the internet’s governance will shift from the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) authority to a nonprofit multi-stakeholder entity, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, also known by its acronym ICANN.

Until now, NTIA has been responsible for key internet domain name functions, such as the coordination of the DNS (Domain Name System) root, IP addresses, and other internet protocol resources. But in March 2014, the U.S. announced its plan to let its contract with ICANN to operate key domain name functions expire in September 2015, passing the oversight of the agency to a global governance model. The expiration was subsequently delayed until October 1, 2016.

According to the NTIA’s press release at the time,

“NTIA’s responsibility includes the procedural role of administering changes to the authoritative root zone file – the database containing the lists of names and addresses of all top-level domains – as well as serving as the historic steward of the DNS. NTIA currently contracts with ICANN to carry out the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions and has a Cooperative Agreement with Verisign under which it performs related root zone management functions. Transitioning NTIA out of its role marks the final phase of the privatization of the DNS as outlined by the U.S. Government in 1997”.

According to the NTIA, from the inception of ICANN, the U.S. government and internet stakeholders envisioned that the U.S. role in the IANA functions would be temporary. The Commerce Department’s June 10, 1998 Statement of Policy stated that the U.S. government “is committed to a transition that will allow the private sector to take leadership for DNS management.” The official reason, therefore, is that

“ICANN as an organization has matured and taken steps in recent years to improve its accountability and transparency and its technical competence. At the same time, international support continues to grow for the multi-stakeholder model of Internet governance as evidenced by the continued success of the Internet Governance Forum and the resilient stewardship of the various Internet institutions”.

The Obama Administration says that the transition will have no practical effects on the internet’s functioning or its users, and even considers the move necessary in order to maintain international support for the internet and to prevent a fracturing of its governance.

Oh really?

The conservative Freedom Party’s (FPO) Norbert Hofer is likely to become Austria’s next president. According to the latest polls, Hofer is a few points ahead of independent candidate Alexander Van der Bellen.

A poll of 600 people published by the Oesterreich tabloid showed the average support for Hofer at 53 percent, one point higher than a poll in late July, versus 47 percent for former Greens head Alexander Van der Bellen.

Another poll, of 778 people with a margin of error of 3.6 percent, published by newspaper Kurier, found 38 percent thought Hofer would win while 34 percent expected Van der Bellen to.

Van der Bellen won the election earlier this year, but those results were canceled due to “to sloppiness in the count.” According to the official results, Van der Bellen won that election by a mere 31,000 votes.

From the looks of it, that’s set to change on October 2, when Austrians go to the voting booth for the second time this year.

Like many other conservative and populist parties (they’re often confused with each other, but they’re certainly not always the same thing: the PVV party of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands is, for instance, clearly populist, but it’s also in favor of big government and the welfare state), the FPO is benefiting from the migration crisis. Increasingly, more Austrians are dissatisfied with the traditional, more centrist parties that offer no solutions. Austrians see their country — and continent — being overrun by immigrants from the Middle East (people who do not share their values and beliefs, and who are making little to no effort to integrate).

In contrast to the old, traditional major parties, the FPO is clear about its views and policy proposals: the party wants to limit immigration and make sure that immigrants who do remain in Austria are fully integrated. CONTINUE AT SITE

In Monday’s Wall Street Journal, columnist Gordon Crovitz sounds an urgent warning about President Obama’s plans, during his final months in office, to fundamentally transform the internet. It’s an intricate tale, but the bottom line is that unless Congress acts fast, the World Wide Web looks likely to end up under control of the UN.

That would be the same UN that serves as a global clubhouse for despotic regimes that like to wield censorship as a basic tool of power. Russia and China occupy two of the five veto-wielding permanent seats on the UN Security Council. Iran since 2012 has presided over one of the largest voting blocs in the 193-member General Assembly, the 120-member Non-Aligned Movement. Among the current members of the Human Rights Council are Venezuela, Vietnam and Saudi Arabia — where blogger Raif Badawi was sentenced in 2014 to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes, for blog posts the Saudi government considered insulting to Islam.

We’re talking here about the same UN which for generations has proven incorrigibly corrupt, opaque and inept at managing almost anything except its own apparently endless expansion and self-serving overreach. This is the UN of the Oil-for-Food worldwide web of kickbacks; the UN of the evidently chronic problem of peacekeepers raping minors they are sent to protect; the UN that can’t manage to adequately audit its own books, and offers its top officials an “ethics” program of financial disclosure under which they are entitled to opt out of disclosing anything whatsoever to the public.

This is the UN where a recent president of the General Assembly, John Ashe, died this June in an accident that reportedly entailed a barbell falling on his neck, while he was awaiting trial on fraud charges in the Southern District of New York — accused by federal authorities of having turned his UN position into a “platform for profit.”

So, how might this entrancing organization, the UN, end up controlling the internet? Crovitz in his Journal column explains that Obama’s administration is about to give up the U.S. government’s longstanding contract with Icann, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which, as a monopoly, operates “the entire World Wide Web root zone.”

If that sounds like a good idea, think again. This is not a case of Obama having some 11th-hour 180-degree conversion to the virtues of minimalist government. It works out to the very opposite. Here’s a link, again, to Crovitz’s column on “An Internet Giveaway to the UN.” Crovtz explains that as a contractor under government control, Icann enjoys an exemption from antitrust rules. When the contract expires, the exemption goes away, unless Icann can hook up with another “governmental group” so as to “keep its antitrust exemption.” What “governmental group” might that be? Well, some of the worst elements of the UN have already reached out. Crovitz writes:

Authoritarian regimes have already proposed Icann become part of the U.N. to make it easier for them to censor the internet globally. So much for the Obama pledge that the U.S. would never be replaced by a “government-led or an inter-governmental organization solution.” CONTINUE AT SITE

This is a good column with a cogent “tour d’horizon” of foreign and national events. Too bad it ends with a “tour de hatred” of Trump. The question “who did this to us?”- our domestic and policy failures- could swiftly be answered by ” President Obama and the corrupt candidate Hillary Clinton that you endorsed.” rsk

Bernard Lewis once made the point that there are two basic ways in which people and nations respond to adversity and decline. The first, the great historian wrote in 2002, is to ask “Who did this to us?” The second is, “What did we do wrong?” One question leads to self-pity; the other to self-help. One disavows personal responsibility and moral agency; the other commands them. One is a recipe for economic failure and political squalor; the other for success.

Mr. Lewis, who recently turned 100, was writing about the Islamic world’s destructive habit of blaming its ills on imperialism, Jews and other assorted bogeymen. But his test also applies to other regimes and regions, not to mention political parties and movements, from Vladimir Putin to Black Lives Matter. So let’s take a tour of the world.

Begin with Turkey. The government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan is again at war with the Kurds, thanks to Ankara’s violent crackdown on Kurdish protesters in 2014. It has a terrorism problem courtesy of Mr. Erdogan’s previous willingness to turn his country into a jihadist entrepôt. And it recently had a coup attempt, the result of Mr. Erdogan’s suppression of his erstwhile fellow travelers in the Gulenist movement.

But don’t expect Mr. Erdogan to offer up any mea culpas. He’s conducting the greatest political purge of the 21st century, and has released 38,000 convicts from his prisons to make room for his political enemies. Ankara’s incursion into northern Syria—supposedly to fight ISIS—has become an opportunity to expand the war against the Kurds. The Turkish media is abuzz with “reports” that assorted American military men were behind the coup.

Mr. Erdogan is a “Who did this to us?” man, and it shows in Turkey’s fast descent from beacon of Muslim secularism and democracy to another paranoid Middle Eastern regime. It’s the same story in Iran and Russia, which was to be expected, but also increasingly in China, which wasn’t.

“THE ARABS DO NOT SEEM BENT ON STARTING HOSTILITIES”

[Note by Tom Gross]

(This dispatch may be of interest to historians on this list.)

I attach two articles, both by Amir Oren, defense correspondent for the Israeli paper Haaretz.

The first piece, published today, reports on newly released CIA documents that detail how the agency got their predictions about the Yom Kippur War spectacularly wrong.

The CIA wrote in a briefing for the president on October 6, 1973 (the day that Israel was attacked):

“Tension along Israel’s borders with Egypt and Syria has been heightened by a Soviet airlift that is in its second day… but neither side seems bent on starting hostilities… A military initiative at this time would make little sense for either Cairo or Damascus.”

Within hours (maybe minutes, considering the time gap between Washington and Jerusalem) of that report being delivered, the Egyptian and Syrian armies attacked Israel in a massive offensive from both north and south.

As Haaretz notes: “The CIA’s big secret was that it didn’t have a secret. It knew very little from covert sources. Many of the clauses that appeared in the PDB [President’s Daily Brief] were taken from ambassadors’ telegrams, leaders’ speeches and newspaper articles.”

(Tom Gross adds: The CIA has on many other occasion, both in the Middle East and elsewhere, made ill-judged predictions and assessments.)

The second piece below concerns a rare interview given in October 2013, on the fortieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, by Henry Kissinger for an Israeli television documentary called “The Avoidable War”.

Kissinger attempts to persuade Israelis that the U.S. helped save their country during the 1973 war, although many Israelis doubt this and indeed argue that Kissinger actually helped the Egyptian forces prepare for the war by, among other things, pressuring Israel not to destroy the anti-aircraft rocket launching pads which the Egyptians and Soviets set up in the Suez Canal a few days before the Egyptians invaded, and which were not supposed to be there according to the Rogers ceasefire.

By the time the war broke out, the rocket launching pads were armed and it was too late for Israel safely to do anything about it.

This author has argued that Europe’s Islamization — aided, abetted and enabled by the continent’s multiculturalist ideology — should serve as a warning and a lesson for America.

But when a European state does the right thing, we should take notice of that, too.

In the wake of the conviction of Britain-based Islamic supremacist preacher Anjem Choudary, an advocate for imposing Sharia law on Great Britain and supporter of global jihadism, British authorities are doing something that every Western nation ought to replicate.

Recognizing the problem of the spread of Islamic supremacism among prison populations, Secretary of State for Justice Liz Truss announced that the government would be establishing separate prison units for holding “a small number of very subversive individuals.”

Truss said prisons cannot continue to allow extremists to “peddle poisonous ideology across the mainstream prison population.” As the BBC notes, UK officials visited prisons in Netherlands for a close look at the program, as a similar “jail within a jail” program has been implemented by the Dutch.

Britain is right to acknowledge the spread of Islamist ideology in its criminal justice system and undertake a plan to remove the cancer.

Lawmakers in Germany are under increased pressure to tackle the country’s growing trend of child marriages, renewing the debate over whether to allow Islamic Sharia law to supersede the country’s legal system when applied to its refugee population.

With the wave of more than 1.2 million migrants, mostly of the Islamic faith, coming in from Iraq and Syria, German courts are being forced to consider the legality of Muslim marriages that include girls sometimes as young as 13, Britain’s Sunday Times reported.

According to estimates, the number of refugee child marriages is currently at 1,000, although activists believe the figure is much higher.

In one case, authorities ruled in favor of Fatima, a pregnant 15-year-old Syrian refugee, allowing her husband, a fellow Syrian refugee more than double her age, to be accommodated in the same town so they could be near each other. Fatima told reporters that after her family escaped Syria for Turkey, she pleaded with them to marry her off to “the next man who is willing” so she could escape to Europe.

In Bavaria, there are over 700 refugee brides under the age of 18, including 160 under 16. Typically, German law does not permit marriage under 18, although with parental consent, the court can recognize the marriage of a 16-year-old.

In addition, the U.N. estimates that 51 percent of brides in Syrian refugee camps are underage, compared with just 13 percent at the start of the civil war.

Chancellor Angela Merkel has come under a barrage of criticism from European leaders holding her open-door policy on refugees responsible for the recent wave of critical terror attacks in Germany and throughout the continent.

Last month, within one week, there were four terror attacks in Germany.

When a court in Bamberg, Bavaria ruled in June to accept the validity of a marriage between a 21-year-old Syrian man and his 14-year-old cousin, the issue of child marriage was again brought to focus, along with the debate over the extent of Islamic law and customs that will be allowed by Western countries.