The Real Threat to Palestinian Christians: Radical Islam by Bassam Tawil

The Christians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are no different from their brothers in Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Libya, who face a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing at the hands Islamist groups. Yet Palestinian Authority (PA) leaders want the world to blame only Israel for the predicament of Christians.

The PA’s decision to cancel Christmas celebrations had nothing to do with Israel or the “intifada.” It came after threats by Muslim extremists to target Christians and their holy sites.

On Christmas Day, Muslim Palestinians hurled stones at the car taking the head of the Catholic Church in the Holy Land to Bethlehem. It would not surprise anyone if next year the PA decides to cancel Christmas celebrations for “security reasons.”

If, in the media and the international community, this strategy of turning a blind eye to the Muslim persecution of Christians continues, next year’s Christmas in Bethlehem is sure to be an even less happy one.

This was not a happy Christmas for our Palestinian brothers in the West Bank who happen to be Christian. The Palestinian Christians have now become a tiny minority in Bethlehem. This year, they were just lucky that Christmas passed without a major terrorist attack or serious outbreaks of violence.

On Christmas day, Muslim Palestinians hurled stones at the car taking the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Fouad Twal, to Bethlehem. Twal, head of the Catholic Church in the Holy Land, was fortunately not hurt in the attack. The stone-throwers, local residents said, were from a refugee camp near Bethlehem. They had apparently said they were opposed to holding any form of celebrations in Bethlehem — on the pretext that there is no reason to celebrate while Palestinians are being killed by Israelis — who, by the way, have merely been trying to stop Palestinians from killing them.

ISIS Slaughtering Christians “In Their Beds” Muslim Persecution of Christians, October 2015 by Raymond Ibrahim See note please

Butchering innocents is standard operating procedure for Arab/Moslem barbarians….remember this atrocity? ” …..an attack on a Jewish family in the Israeli settlement of Itamar in the West Bank took place on 11 March 2011, in which five members of the same family were murdered in their beds. The victims were the father Ehud (Udi) Fogel, the mother Ruth Fogel, and three of their six children—Yoav, 11, Elad, 4, and Hadas, the youngest, a three-month-old infant. The infant was decapitated. rsk

“People are even killed inside the camps, and the refugees are afraid to say if they saw somebody get killed. … they’re buying and selling ladies and even girls.”— Former ISIS operative.

“We will not stop hunting Christians and burning churches. Christians are Allah’s enemies!” — Extremist Islamic leaders, Indonesia.

“My family members and I have been marked for death, and everyone in the community denied ever knowing my family or me…” — A convert to Christianity, Nigeria.

“In Bangladesh, Christians are a weak minority and this is why Muslims are attacking us.” — Nirmal Rozario, general secretary of the Bangladesh Christian Association.

Teams of trained killers disguised as refugees were sent by the Islamic State (IS) into U.N. refugee camps to kill Christians, including “in their beds,” and to kidnap young girls to sell or use as slaves. This was revealed on October 24, according to a report, soon after an IS operative “got cold feet and renounced jihad after witnessing Christians helping out other refugees within the camp. He then revealed that he had been sent with an Islamist hit squad to eliminate Christians as part of the hate group’s ideological drive to wipe the religion off the map.” The report also quoted an aid worker saying:

They’re like a mafia. People are even killed inside the camps, and the refugees are afraid to say if they saw somebody get killed. If you ask them, they’ll say, “I don’t know, I was asleep.”… The camps are dangerous because they have IS, Iraqi militias and Syrian militias. It’s another place for gangs…. They’re killing inside the camps, and they’re buying and selling ladies and even girls.

Woman falsely accused of burning Koran ripped apart by Afghan mob By Ed Straker

A woman falsely accused of burning a Koran was ripped to pieces by a mob in Afghanistan. The woman, Farkhunda Malikzada, was falsely accused by a merchant who was selling Viagra and magical pregnancy amulets.

The tormented final hours of Farkhunda Malikzada, a 27-year-old aspiring student of Islam who was [falsely] accused of burning a Quran in a Muslim shrine, shocked Afghans across the country. That is because many of her killers filmed one another beating her and posted clips of her broken body on social media. Hundreds of other men watched, holding their phones aloft to try to get a glimpse of the violence, but never making a move to intervene. Those standing by included several police officers.

At first, the trial and convictions that followed seemed a victory in the long struggle to give Afghan women their due in a court of law. But a deeper look suggests otherwise. The fortuneteller who several investigators believe set the events in motion was found not guilty on appeal. The shrine’s custodian, who concocted the false charge of Quran burning and incited the mob, had his death sentence commuted. Police officers who failed to send help and others who stood by received slaps on the wrist, at most. Some attackers identifiable in the videos avoided capture altogether.

Farkhunda’s death and the legal system’s response call into question more than a decade of Western efforts in Afghanistan to instill a rule of law and improve the status of women. The United States alone has spent more than $1 billion to train lawyers and judges and to improve legal protections for women; European countries have provided tens of millions more.

Goodbye, Sweden By Thomas Lifson

SEE THIS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZtc2ma2GEQ

Pat Condell is the most outspoken and eloquent commentator in the English-speaking world. (Hello, Dr. Krauthammer: maybe it’s time to take a vacation from the Beltway and realize what’s really going on and why the elites of the world in their bubble are so out of touch.) Perhaps he is too outspoken for Fox News Channel, but that is their loss. The rest of us can watch him on our computers and handheld devices and avoid those endlessly rising costs of cable TV subscriptions.

I must confess: my heart breaks for Sweden. Like anyone born and raised in Minnesota, I feel a certain closeness to that country and feel a familiarity that transcends my visit to it long ago. Despite their embrace of political correctness, the Swedes are at heart very decent, humane people, their main faults being a desire to please others in their community (which leads to silencing dissent and conformity) and self-righteous hypocrisy. But these are minor blemishes considering the personal decency most people center their lives on.

Taking advantage of Sweden’s generosity, Muslim immigrants have been arriving in large numbers and, in recent months, catastrophically overwhelming the country’s budget and facilities to house and feed them.

The few minutes you spend watching Condell’s commentary will reward you:

America has jumped from the Middle East frying pan into the fire By Ted Belman

So far everything the Bush and Obama administrations have done has made it worse for the West. The US has not figured out who the enemy is nor how to deal with the threats
In the wake of 9/11, the Bush administration struggled to define the enemy and to decide how to defeat it. Even though 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis and the Saudis were involved in the planning and financing of the attack, President Bush allowed the Saudis to fly out of the country in the next 24 hours when all other air traffic had been shut down.

No doubt that Bush had decided to maintain good relations with the Arabs, and Saudi Arabia particularly, just as the US had done for half a century. This policy led Bush to say on Sept 17, 2011 to the Islamic world, “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war,” in a speech as sycophantic as any President Obama has ever delivered.

On a different policy tack, Bush said on the evening of 9/11, “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”

On Sept 20/11 Bush spoke to the Joint Houses Congress emphasizing both tacks:

The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends. It is not our many Arab friends. Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists and every government that supports them.

…any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.

And so began the bifurcation of Islam into the peaceful Muslims on the one hand and the radicals who hijacked the religion on the other.

Gareth Porter, national security policy analyst, wrote in 2008:

Three weeks after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, former US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld established an official military objective of not only removing the Saddam Hussein regime by force but overturning the regime in Iran, as well as in Syria and four other countries in the Middle East, according to a document quoted extensively in then-under secretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith’s recently published account of the Iraq war decisions.

Shakespeare a World Away Akira Kurosawa’s ‘Throne of Blood’ is the finest film rendering of any of Shakespeare’s plays By David Mermelstein

A new screen version of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard reminds us that cinematic refractions of the Bard’s most famous plays are never entirely out of fashion. Though Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh (two actor-directors especially associated with adapting Shakespeare to the big screen) never made movies of the “Scottish play,” other eminent filmmakers have. In 1948, Orson Welles gave us a brogue-heavy, noir-inflected version, with himself in the title role. And in 1971, Roman Polanski opted for a highly naturalistic, often graphically violent approach, emphasizing youthful ambition taken to extremes.

But the most nuanced and unsettling screen version of “Macbeth” strays far from Shakespeare’s text, though not its spirit. Directed by Akira Kurosawa— and performed in Japanese—“Throne of Blood” (1957) is frequently cited by cinéastes and scholars as the medium’s finest rendering of any Shakespeare play. Kurosawa has been described as the “least Japanese” of his country’s great film directors, and several of his movies draw on Western source material: Dostoevsky, Maxim Gorky, even the American crime writer Ed McBain—in addition to Shakespeare, to whom he would return late in life when adapting “King Lear” as “Ran” (1985).

The Myth of the Good Nazi Hitler’s closest companion, the architect of Germany’s wartime ‘armaments miracle,’ refashioned himself as a postmodern celebrity. By Adam Tooze

Just after midnight on Oct. 1, 1966, Albert Speer, the former armaments minister of the Third Reich, walked free from Spandau jail. Barely acknowledging Margarete, his long-suffering wife, the mother of his six children and the once-proud bearer of a Nazi award for fertility, Speer faced the flashbulbs and cameras of the world’s media from the back seat of a luxurious black Mercedes provided for the occasion by an old industrialist friend. Condemned by the Nuremberg Tribunal for war crimes and crimes against humanity, Speer was saved from the death penalty by an artful defense that separated him from the other Nazi ogres in the dock. He would spend the last 15 years of his life burnishing his image as “the good Nazi.” After three best-selling books and lucrative interviews with Der Spiegel and Playboy, among others, he died in London on Sept. 1, 1981, attended rather conspicuously by a beautiful young mistress, after a long morning of interviews with the BBC and dinner with the historian Norman Stone. Hitler’s closest companion, the architect of Germany’s wartime “armaments miracle,” had seized his time in the spotlight. He had refashioned himself as a postmodern celebrity.
Speer: Hitler’s Architect

By Martin Kitchen
Yale, 442 pages, $37.50

Already at Nuremberg, Speer had presented himself as a penitent prophet of a new age of technocracy. He used his closing statement in the dock to warn the world that the only forces that could “prevent unconfined engineering and science from completing the work of destroying human beings” were “individual freedom and self-confidence.” In the aftermath of Hiroshima and Auschwitz, the conjunction of technology and power had become an obsessive theme of cultural commentary, one that offered Speer two advantages. It put Allied strategic bombing alongside him in the dock while distracting attention from more specific questions about his personal responsibility for the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews from Berlin and the murderous exploitation of concentration-camp labor.

Abuse of the J-1 Visa Was a Sidelight of San Bernardino Attacks A Russian woman was in U.S. illegally when she married Enrique Marquez Jr., accused of buying rifles By Miriam Jordan

The San Bernardino attacks this month put the spotlight on a type of visa issued to a wide swath of foreigners, from camp counselors to physicians, and how easy it is for recipients to remain in the U.S. after the visa has expired.

A Russian woman who married Enrique Marquez Jr., the man accused of buying rifles used in the Dec. 2 attack, entered the U.S. six years ago on a three-month educational-exchange visa, known as a J-1 visa.

Once that visa expired, she remained for several years in the U.S. without legal status, according to law-enforcement officials.

In late 2014, Mariya Chernykh and Mr. Marquez were married, according to Riverside County, Calif., records. Last week, Mr. Marquez was charged with entering into a sham marriage to enable her to apply for permanent residency in the U.S. Mr. Marquez is also charged with conspiring to support terrorism.

Ms. Chernykh isn’t suspected of involvement in the attack, according to law-enforcement officials. But her case highlights the challenge to deter and identify visa overstays, those who enter the country legally and fail to leave by the stipulated date.

MARILYN PENN: A REVIEW OF THE MOVIE “45 YEARS”

There are strong parallels between “45 Years” and “Away From Her,” a movie starring Julie Christie, written and directed by Sarah Polley and based on a short story by Alice Munro (”The Bear Came Over the Mountain”). “45Years” stars two other well-known actors from the 60’s – Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay, was written and directed by Andrew Haigh and adapted from a short story by David Constantine (”In Another Country”). Furthering the link, viewers of a certain age will remember an exuberant Tom Courtenay and an exhilarating Julie Christie in a breakout performance in “Billy Liar.” Both “45 Years” and “Away From Her” deal with the dissolving threads of a long marriage; one triggered by the unexpected imposition of a tragic past love and one by the torments of dementia as it robs its victim of her very identity.

“45 Years” centers on the quiet intimacy between Kate and Geoff Mercer, a retired couple whose lives consist of walks with their dog, shared meals and time spent at home listening to music and reading. When a letter written in German arrives, we see the power of a withheld secret begin to erode the bond between husband and wife and eat away at each of them differently. All the action and revelations take place within one week that is scheduled to culminate in a party for their 45th wedding anniversary. These two are portrayed as very low-keyed, unpretentious people who don’t like to socialize much and who, at their own wedding, resented the notion of a special table for the bride and groom. One of the changes made in the screen adaption was framing a story about internal emotions around a too-large, too-festive party. These characters wouldn’t have wanted to even attend such an event, much less host it. It becomes difficult to reconcile the cranky personality of the scruffy husband with the tuxedo-clad bon vivant willing to make public proclamations about his feelings for his wife. Similarly one wonders who created the invitation list for this party – surely not the solitary, introverted Kate who eschewed the demands of raising children because her life consisted of a very tiny bond of two.

Producer of film Hillary Clinton blamed for Benghazi terror attack interviewed by CB editor Jim Kouri

Following the Islamist terror group’s attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya on Sept. 11, 2012, Conservative Base’s editor, Jim Kouri, interviewed one of the principles involved in producing the motion picture that Secretary Hillary Clinton blamed for the terrorist attack that killed four Americans including a U.S. ambassador. Kouri interviewed former U.S. Marine Major Steven Klein for NewswithViews.com in May 2013. Below is that interview:

As U.S. lawmakers continue to peel away layers of the Benghazi cover up, the partisan politics involved during the Congressional probes that have been twisted and maligned by members of the news media appear to be the only stories most news organizations are covering.

For example, little attention is being paid to the mysterious filmmaker who created the motion picture, “Innocence of Muslims,” which President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other administration minions blamed for the deaths of a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans in Benghazi, Libya, according to a former U.S. Marine, who worked on the now famous motion picture, in an exclusive interview with NewsWithViews.com.