WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Turkey: Container Cities, Uprooting Alevis, Fear of Infiltrating Jihadis by Uzay Bulut

Posted By on April 26th, 2016

“This is a policy of forcing Alevis to immigration and dissolving the Alevi population,” said Gani Kaplan, the head of the Pir Sultan Abdal Alevi Cultural Association. “We are not against immigrants but it is impossible for us to live alongside jihadists in the same village.”

The province of Sivas is also a terrible choice by the government to build another container city for “refugees”: Alevis in Sivas have already been exposed to a deadly attack there at the hands of Islamists.

“After the attempt to build a refugee camp in the middle of the Alevi villages… where the [1978] massacre happened — is it a coincidence that you are building yet another refugee camp in the predominantly Alevi town of Divrigi in Sivas — where the [1993] massacre… took place? What is the objective of all of that?” — Zeynep Altiok, an MP from the Republican People’s Party (CHP).

The denial of the Alevi faith seems to be an effective way of assimilating Alevis into the Islamic culture or making them “invisible.” There are also other methods — such as trying to change the demographic character of the predominantly Alevi places by building “mysterious” container cities in the middle of Alevi villages.

Since late February, locals from the predominantly-Alevi populated villages in the province of Kahramanmaras, or Maras, have been protesting government plans to build a “container city” (housing made from used shipping containers) in their villages supposedly for the Syrian “refugees.”

There are 16 Alevi villages in the region where the container city for “27 thousand refugees” is being built by the Prime Ministry’s Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD).

The villagers are deeply concerned that militants might infiltrate, and that the container city “could be turned into a human resources department of jihadists such as ISIS and al-Nusra.”

The Alevis in Turkey are a persecuted religious minority who have been exposed to several massacres and deadly attacks – both in the Ottoman Empire and republican Turkey.

The Alevis in Maras say that they are afraid of being exposed to yet another massacre or forced displacement – this time at the hands of foreign jihadists.

When the plans for building a container city for Syrians first came up, the Alevis sought help from the governor.

When their complaints were mostly met with silence or indifference, the villagers started peaceful protests in which they set up tents and read statements to the press to express their opposition to the camp being built.

On April 3, however, the gendarmerie forces attacked the villagers with pressurized water and gas cartridges, and detained six.

Affected by the police’s tear gas, Mor Ali Kabayel, 82, was taken to hospital where he lost his life.

According to the journalist Gulsen Iseri, the villagers are “scared of being exposed to a new 1915 [genocide] in which Armenians were deported.”

Hasan Huseyin Degirmenci, an Alevi from Maras, said:

“The real project here is to carry out another 1915. Just like Armenians were deported from here, they want to deport us in the same way. I lived through 1978 Maras [massacre]. I was 24 years old back then. I had to go abroad afterwards.”

BOOKS Comments turned off

Obama’s Double Standard Toward Netanyahu by Alan M. Dershowitz

Posted By on April 26th, 2016

As President Obama winds up his farewell tour of Europe, it is appropriate to consider the broader implications of the brouhaha he created in Great Britain. At a joint press conference with Britain Prime Minister, David Cameron, President Obama defended his intrusion into British politics in taking sides on the controversial and divisive Brexit debate. In an op-ed, Obama came down squarely on the side of Britain remaining in the European Union — a decision I tend to agree with on its merits. But he was much criticized by the British media and British politicians for intruding into a debate about the future of Europe and Britain’s role in it.

Obama defended his actions by suggesting that in a democracy, friends should be able to speak their minds, even when they are visiting another country:

“If one of our best friends is in an organization that enhances their influence and enhances their power and enhances their economy, then I want them to stay in. Or at least I want to be able to tell them ‘I think this makes you guys bigger players.'”

Nor did he stop at merely giving the British voters unsolicited advice, he also issued a not so veiled threat. He said that “the UK is going to be in the back of the queue” on trade agreements if they exit the EU.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Free Trade, or Protectionism? Sydney Williams

Posted By on April 26th, 2016

It’s a hostile world. Global economies are in a funk. Central bankers offer “free” money, yet economies stagnate. The benefits of capitalism and globalization, which have done so much to eradicate poverty and enhance living standards, are debunked. Cyber threats menace our defense systems, electric grid, as well as our aviation and banking industries. Drones, which can be used to carry explosives, threaten commercial airlines. Failed policies in the Middle East have created a refugee crisis in Europe. The Middle East has devolved into two apparently irreconcilable camps – Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia. From the Baltic to the South China Sea, Russia and China are testing the United States. Islamic terrorism poses threats on four continents, bringing with it (not unnaturally) xenophobic fears of Muslims. Anti-Semitism is resurgent in Europe. Amidst this fusillade, leading candidates for President of the United States are turning toward protectionism and away from globalization.

Protectionism refers not only to international trade. It was the reason behind Teddy Roosevelt’s dismemberment of “Trusts.” It is manifested in Washington, where cronyism places the interests of politicians (and their business and union counterparts) above that of the people. Protectionism, the antithesis of free trade, inhibits growth, keeps prices high and produces stagnation. Wherever it appears, it fails the long-term economic well-being of the nation. The ghost of Smoot-Hawley should frighten us all, as its signing in 1930 preceded a downward spiral into a world-wide depression. Former Presidential candidate Jon Huntsman once noted: “When America closes its doors, so does everybody else. We are the primary engine of growth in the world; we are the only beacon of free trade and open markets.” Amen!

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

JED BABBIN: A NEW WINDOW INTO RUSSIA

Posted By on April 26th, 2016

Wait till Putin gets going on the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution.

Since one tribe of cavemen began to observe another, it’s been the norm for one tribe or nation to covertly gather information on another. We live in the age of spy satellites and the interception of telephone, email and social media conversations. But these are (unless Hillary Clinton has access to them) kept secret both from our adversaries and the public.

It’s very rare for a new window on our adversaries to open to the public. For years, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) has been giving us a view into the otherwise unavailable, untranslated media of the Arab world and Iran. Its translations of newspaper articles, speeches by nations’ leaders — and in the case of many Islamic nations, their terrorist proxies — has been an enormous gift to journalists who take the trouble to avail themselves of them.

Thanks to MEMRI, we have been able to read and research materials that told us, for example, that while Yassir Arafat was preaching peace to the United Nations, he was also, at home, shouting in Arabic that Arabs would go to Jerusalem as “martyrs by the millions.” We knew that Iran’s ayatollahs demanding that crowds chant “death to America” wasn’t like Americans singing “take me out to the ballgame,” it was a religious statement demanded of their people. The vast majority of the source material of my book In the Words of Our Enemiescame from MEMRI.

Now, our friends at MEMRI have opened another window, this time on Vladimir Putin’s Russia through MEMRI’s “Russian Media Studies Project.” Like MEMRI’s studies of Middle Eastern media, MEMRI-Russia provides a lot more than propaganda published at home to the Russian people. It gives considerable insight into what Russian leaders are arguing to each other and to the Russian oligarchy.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Void By Herbert London

Posted By on April 26th, 2016

Deployments of U.S. forces continues despite the claims of drawdown and withdrawal. The numbers may be on the decline and the use of Special Forces may be on the rise, but the issue that is emerging is why are our military forces in harms way at all. From Rand Paul to Barack Obama, from Donald Trump to Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public, many are asking a fundamental question: What is the benefit to the United States of overseas deployments? It was once a question easily addressed within the context of the Cold War. But at a time when there is a quagmire in the Middle East and modest European expenditures for self-defense, the question emerging directly, and often inadvertently, is why the U.S. is burdened with defending the civilization. Why is President Obama now sending an additional 250 troops into Syria?

Isolationists from Robert Taft to Charles Lindbergh have asked the question and their answer came in Nazi jack booted invasions across Europe and the attack on Pearl Harbor. Today the threat is more complicated and subtle. It does not necessarily rely on nation states. There is also a backdrop of weapons of mass destruction. And much of the enemy’s imperial drive is promoted through religious prescriptions. Hence conventional war may have its place, but it is not likely to be dispositive.

Moreover, the internationalists are also in an odd position. Former Vice President Cheney said we should clean out the “swamp” to prevent attacks here in the United States. The problem, of course, is that attacks have already occurred, “sleepers” are probably in our midst and whatever we do in the Middle East may not forestall future violence at home. The threat has metastasized making it far more difficult to confront. It is also a threat that manifests itself on and off the battlefield. Radicalization of individuals is often as notable a challenge as those firing AK47s.

What has emerged is a void, a giant whole in the foreign policy apparatus. Military officials deploy their troops efficiently and effectively, but they are not engaged in the making of policy. Policy is in the realm of an uninvited guest at a dinner party.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

State Department Still Covering for Clinton and Obama’s Benghazi Lies by Andrew McCarthy

Posted By on April 26th, 2016

In March, the State Department quietly released records relevant to the Obama administration’s response to the September 11, 2012, Benghazi terrorist attack. Included are transcripts of the telephone call then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had on September 12, only hours after the attack ended, with then-Egyptian Prime Minister Hisham Kandil. As explained by Judicial Watch, whose Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the “most transparent administration in history” forced the belated disclosure, Mrs. Clinton flatly told Mr. Kandil, “We know the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack – not a protest.”

Kandil responded, “You’re not kidding. Based on the information we saw today, we believe the group that claimed responsibility for this is affiliated with al-Qaeda.”

Of course, “the film” Clinton was referring to was “Innocence of Muslims,” an obscure anti-Islamic video trailer that she, President Obama, and the administration tirelessly blamed for the attacks despite – let’s quote Clinton again – “know[ing] the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film.”

The al-Qaeda affiliated group to which the Egyptian prime minister referred as having claimed responsibility was Ansar al-Sharia. (On ties between Ansar al-Sharia and al-Qaeda, and between al Qaeda affiliates and Ahmed Abu Khatallah, the only suspect charged in the Benghazi attack, see Tom Joscelyn’s Long War Journal reports, here and here.) The fact that a jihadist organization tied to al-Qaeda had carried out the attack, in which jihadists killed U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans working at U.S. government facilities (the purpose of which has still not been adequately explained), was also well known to Clinton from the earliest hours of the siege – while she and the Obama administration were publicly blaming the video.

BOOKS Comments turned off

The Anti-Israel Money Trail By Bret Stephens

Posted By on April 26th, 2016

Earlier this month, Harvard law student Husam El-Quolaq posed a question at a public conference to Tzipi Livni, the former Israeli foreign minister. “How is it that you are so smelly?” Mr. El-Quolaq wanted to know. “It’s regarding your odor—about the odor of Tzipi Livni, very smelly.”

Harvard went out of its way to try to keep the questioner’s identity a secret, including by deleting the comment from its video of the event—a privilege, one suspects, the school would not have afforded a student asking a similar question of a black speaker. And Mr. El-Quolaq, who is active in a Harvard affiliate of Students for Justice in Palestine, or SJP, later offered an anonymous apology “to anyone who felt offended.”

Yet the exchange is another reminder of the anti-Israel, and increasingly anti-Semitic, environment students now experience on American campuses. That’s the doing of several groups, including some nominally Jewish ones. But none is so prominent as SJP, which has more than 100 chapters nationwide and has been canny in pairing itself with left-wing or minority student organizations to sponsor anti-Israel events, heckle pro-Israel speakers, and agitate for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) resolutions on campus.

SJP’s self-declared goal is to end Israel’s “occupation and colonization of all Arab lands” while “promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes.” That’s another way of saying destroying the Jewish state. CONTINUE AT SITE

Yet as prominent as SJP and the wider BDS movement have become, less is known about the sources of their funding. That changed last week after testimony to the House Foreign Affairs Committee by Jonathan Schanzer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Mr. Schanzer, a former Treasury Department official and terrorism-finance expert, notes in his testimony that a prominent backer of SJP and like-minded groups is an organization called American Muslims for Palestine, based in Palos Hills, Ill., and led by UC Berkeley lecturer Hatem Bazian, who also happens to be one of SJP’s founders. AMP claimed to have spent $100,000 on anti-Israel campus activities in 2014, including to SJP. An AMP conference that year at a Chicago Hyatt invited participants to “come and navigate the fine line between legal activism and material support for terrorism.”

FDD discovered that many of AMP’s leading members were previously active in some dubious former charities. The most prominent, the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation For Relief and Development, was shut down in 2001 by the federal government for providing millions in funds to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas; five Holy Land officials eventually were convicted to prison terms and two others fled the country.

Today, AMP’s leaders include at least three Holy Land alumni. One of them is Milwaukee furniture salesman Salah Sarsour, who last year told Al Jazeera that an AMP conference he chaired “aims to keep up with and support the Palestinian people’s continuous intifada.” CONTINUE AT SITE

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Robert Kaplan: ‘Europe Was Defined By Islam. And Islam Is Redefining It Now.’ Is it really Europeans who need to compromise? Hugh Fitzgerald

Posted By on April 25th, 2016

Robert Kaplan, a contributing editor to The Atlantic, has just published a piece on Islam and the future of Europe. He claims, startlingly, that Europe “was essentially defined by Islam,” by which he means that before Islam swept across North Africa, Europe consisted of a single civilization, on both banks of the Mediterranean — that of the Roman Empire — and that Islam’s arrival severed “the Mediterranean region into two civilizational halves.” It is true that Muslim conquerors swept across North Africa in the seventh and eighth centuries, but not quite true, pace Kaplan, that they “extinguished Christianity there.” Millions of Coptic Christians remained a majority in Egypt until the 14th century (that is, for at least 700 years after the time that Kaplan claims Muslim armies “virtually extinguished Christianity” in North Africa). And while it is true that the Roman Empire was sundered, it was not only by the forces of Islam, as Kaplan appears to believe: before the Arab armies arrived, others had been seizing territory from Roman control, including the Visigoths in Spain and the Vandals, who conquered the Roman province of Africa in 433 and held it till 539.

Kaplan quotes with evident approval Jose Ortega y Gasset that “all European history has been a great migration toward the North.” Is that true? The Roman Empire fell because of a great migration of the Germanic tribes from the north and northeast to the South; it was they, the Barbarians, who beat down the steady Roman legions and seized Rome in 476 A.D., with the Germanic warrior Odoacer placed on the throne. And even before the Fall of Rome, the Roman Empire had divided into Eastern and Western Empires, one ruled from Rome, the other from Constantinople. Surely that split was just as significant, for the future of European civilization, with the Western empire embracing Latin Catholicism, and the Eastern empire Orthodox Christianity, as the loss of North Africa to Islam.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Back to the Ethic How do we restore the vigor and greatness of Western civilization? Mark Tapson

Posted By on April 25th, 2016

The collapse of the West is accelerating. The secular, leftist, multiculturalist elites have subverted Europe so successfully that the clash of civilizations is ending not with a bang, but with a whimper. The continent’s leaders have imported a violent, virulently anti-Western horde in the form of mass male Muslim migration; a rape culture and terrorist mayhem are becoming the new normal; and the best self-defense the Europeans can muster is ragtag bands of vigilantes. Here in America the cultural decay is less dramatic but gathering momentum as the radical left’s half-century war on American exceptionalism takes its toll.

As the West commits slow-motion suicide, and fundamentalist Islam advances, the questions arise: what can we do to recover our cultural self-confidence? How can we restore the vigor and greatness of Western civilization? How do we revive the unique values of our culture and push back against the barbarians at (and within) the gate?

A new book from Canadian publisher Mantua Books addresses these urgent concerns: Back to the Ethic: Reclaiming Western Values, by Diane Weber Bederman. Bederman is a multi-faith endorsed, hospital-trained chaplain who contributes regularly to CanadaFreePress and the Times of Israel, as well as maintaining her own blog.

Back to the Ethic is both a personal memoir and a broader cultural prescription. From the author’s own death-defying struggle with illness and depression to her meditations on a secularized culture that itself is mortally ill, the book stresses our need to return to the Judeo-Christian ethical monotheism that is at the root of Western civilization’s success.

Bederman begins by simply stating what I noted at the outset of this review – that “our belief systems are under attack.” Those belief systems, she writes, derive from our “foundational story,” the Bible. “The Hebrew Bible, filled with these teachings, the Gospels, and the New Testament make up the backbone of the Judeo-Christian ethic as practiced today in the Western world.”

Ethical monotheism, the 3500-year-old value system that began with Moses and the Israelites wandering in the desert, spread outward from that humble beginning to transform the earth. “And the world’s greatest transformation,” claims Bederman, “has been the knowledge that we humans are individually accountable for our actions.” It taught us that “we each have intrinsic value – we matter because we exist.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Attack of the 90 Foot Islamic Virgins Creating an Islamic heaven on earth. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on April 25th, 2016

Ibrahim Barda’aya had turned 54 and he was still single so he decided to go out and kill some Jews. But Ibrahim wasn’t just a violent anti-Semitic racist. He was also lonely. According to his Imam, he wanted to die and get his 72 virgins in the afterlife. And he had stayed single to avoid the temptations of earthly women so that he could enjoy the 72 virgins who are 90 feet tall and so “white” that you can see the “marrow of their bones,” who never urinate or menstruate, get pregnant or complain.

In Pakistan, an arrested suicide bomber last year when asked if he wanted to marry, retorted that he wanted to die. “72 virgins are waiting for me in paradise, so why I should prefer only one here?”

Muslim men are encouraged to view their marriages to Muslim women as temporary. A Hadith has the Houri virgin admonishing the Muslim wife, “Do not annoy him, may Allah ruin you. He is with you as a passing guest. Very soon, he will part with you and come to us.” That is what Muslim terrorists strive for.

According to Saudi cleric Muhammad Al-Munajid, the 90-foot-tall Islamic virgins are vastly preferable to actual Muslim women. “Whereas the women of this world may suffer, for days and nights, from menstruation, from blood for 40 days after childbirth, from vaginal bleeding and from diseases – the women of Paradise are pure, unblemished, menstruation-free, free of feces, urine, phlegm, children.”

Also they are “restricted to tents” and “locked up” so, like the ideal Saudi woman, they never leave the house. They are “hairless” and never get older than their “tender age.” Their skin is so “bright that it causes confusion” and actually doubles as a mirror so that “one can see one’s image in her cheek.”

Unsurprisingly for a death cult, Islamic scholars appear to be obsessed with the bones of these giant women and assure Jihadists that “the marrow of the bones of their legs” of their promised virgin brides “will be seen through the bones and the flesh.”