RUTHFULLY YOURS

Middle East Turns Back Clock as Remnants of Old Regimes Rise Again
Egypt, Gulf Monarchies Increasingly Project Power

Four years after the Arab Spring began, the new Middle East looks more and more like the old one—but worse.

For decades, the bleak choice in the region was between dictators such as Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and the Islamist militancy that they always invoked when pressured by the West to liberalize.

The uprisings of 2011—often spurred by liberal and secular activists—produced fleeting hopes that the jihadists and autocrats would no longer be the only alternatives.
Middle East Crossroads

But today, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi oversees a regime that is seen as more repressive than Mr. Mubarak’s in many ways.

This new Egypt and its main financiers and allies—the absolute monarchies of Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates—increasingly project power and influence across the region.

On the other side of the equation, Islamic State has seized a Britain-size chunk of Syria and Iraq, and now is spawning affiliates in Libya and Egypt’s restive Sinai Peninsula. It is outmatching al Qaeda of old in wanton barbarity and military prowess.

Underscoring the growing terror threat to the West, al Qaeda’s offshoot in Yemen claimed responsibility for last week’s attack on a satirical magazine in Paris, while a French follower of Islamic State killed first a policewoman and then four hostages at a kosher grocery.

“We have turned the clock back,” said Maha Azzam, a political scientist who heads the Egyptian Revolutionary Council, an umbrella group of organizations opposed to Mr. Sisi’s rule. “The political space in the middle has not shrunk, it has disappeared. What you are left with in the younger generation is a choice between acquiescing to dictatorship or, for the more radical ones, resorting to violence.”

In his three decades in power, Mr. Mubarak often told visiting American dignitaries that the choice was between him and the Muslim Brotherhood, the country’s main Islamist organization with branches across the region. He did prove right: A year after his ouster, the country’s first democratic presidential elections put the Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi in power.

The Brotherhood under Mr. Morsi alienated many Egyptians by clamping down on dissent, excluding other political movements, and imposing its religious agenda.

Every Friday, Johanna Bettach, a pregnant mother of two, stocks up on weekend supplies at the Hyper Cacher supermarket. Last week, just before she was getting ready to shop, an Islamist militant gunned down four Jewish customers at the kosher store and took many others hostage.

The Hyper Cacher attack, one of the deadliest against France’s Jewish community since World War II, spurred outrage across the country. It was by no means isolated, coming against a backdrop of acts of violence and intimidation.

Just three months earlier, Ms. Bettach said, she found her mezuzah—a box containing a parchment of Torah verses that religious Jews attach to their doors—torn off and thrown out. “It is going from bad to worse in France, and we know that it is not going to stop,” said Ms. Bettach, 33 years old. “I can’t sleep at night anymore. All day when my kids are at school, I worry. I just don’t see any future for my children in this country.”

Three-quarters of France’s roughly half-million Jews are, like Ms. Bettach, of North African origin, Jewish community officials estimate. Their families moved to the safety of France mostly in the period between Israel’s creation in 1948 and Algeria’s independence in 1962, as persecution and discrimination emptied out the once-huge Jewish communities of former French possessions across the Mediterranean.

One out six people all over the world is a Muslim… trying to say anything in general about this huge community – 1.5 billion people – will be wrong… The vast majority of these populations are not involved with all what’s happening with violence and terror all over the world…. I don’t think there is anything essential that connects between this huge and historically important religion and all the terrorism that’s going on
– Sami Abu Shehadeh, secretary-general of Balad, Tel Aviv-Jaffa

With these words, Sami Abu Shehadeh, of the anti-Zionist Arab party Balad, commenced a debate with me on “The rise of anti-Muslim sentiment in the West,” which took place in the i24 News studios last month.

Clearly, the events in Paris on Wednesday, in which 12 people were brutally gunned down, gave the topic new and urgent relevance.

Islam is to terror as rainfall is to flooding

Of course, there is much truth in Abu Shehadeh claim that most Muslims are not actively involved in terrorism. While this claim is factually correct, substantively it is meaningless.

Demanding an end to “the epidemic of racist police murder,” protest organizers with Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER) Coalition plan to “Take the Movement onto the Trains” on Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday this Thursday by shutting down the New York City subways during the morning commute.

Promising to “flood the subways,” AnswerCoalition.org advised “every high school, college and community…to flood the subways with their message, their chants, and their signs…In the name of Mike Brown, Eric Garner and all the victims.”

Wherever you stand on policing issues, and whether or not you think disrupting the subways is an effective way to win support for reform, it’s worth knowing that the ANSWER agenda goes far beyond issues of “racist police murder.”

http://nypost.com/2015/01/13/ray-kelly-calls-for-an-apology-from-de-blasio/

Ray Kelly calls for an apology from de Blasio

Former NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly declared that Mayor Bill de Blasio should “apologize” for creating a tense environment between New York’s Finest and those in charge at City Hall.

Kelly appeared on Fox’s “Good Day New York,” where he called for the mea culpa for comments and policies by de Blasio that have disgusted cops.

“I think the mayor has to give something. He has to, you know, sort of make amends,” Kelly said.

“I think an apology is appropriate or perhaps a third party gets involved here too to bring them together.”

Kelly stressed the importance of the two sides coming together as the city faces immense challenges after the terror attack on a Paris newspaper last week.

Among the Affordable Care Act’s many economic and political disruptions, the law has unintentionally encouraged employers to convert full-time jobs into part-time jobs. ObamaCare mandates that employers offer health insurance to employees who work more than 30 hours a week, or pay a penalty up to $3,000 an employee. But employers have no such obligation for employees who work less than 30 hours a week, making part-time employment less costly.

It’s a simple fact: Make something more expensive and people will use less of it; make something less expensive and they will use more of it. So naturally employee hours have been reduced, particularly in the retail segment, which has lowered wages and reduced consumer spending.

On Thursday the House addressed this issue by passing by 252-172 the Save American Workers Act, a bipartisan bill that would restore the definition of “full-time employee” to the 40-hour workweek threshold. Now it will head to the Senate, where Republicans will need six Democratic votes to send the legislation to the White House, which has already threatened to veto it. This isn’t Republicans’ first try; in April 2014, the House passed a near-identical measure that, like so many other bills, died in Democrat Harry Reid ’s Senate.

Below is the most recent opinion piece by the Austrian writer Andreas Unterberger, as published last Friday at the author’s website. Many thanks to JLH for the translation:

The new book by the bestselling French author Michel Houellebecq is on everyone’s mind, because of the Paris attacks. It envisions a Muslim president of France in eight years, and the elimination of all “infidels” from the “Islamic University of the Sorbonne.” Actually, the demographic development makes that most likely a few years later. But, in fact, the triumph of Islam over what was once the West could take place in eight years. Indeed, the tendency of most leftist parties is to prefer voting for Muslim candidates than for those from anti-Islamic parties.

That is the logical result of their intensive efforts in recent years to label all Islam critics as neo-Nazis. It was ostensibly a strategy to retain power, but with no factual basis. This characterization has become an unquestioned axiom and, therefore, a self-made trap.

Something similar is happening in Germany, where there has been increasing support for Islam-critical demonstrations. Where, however, all the Bundestag parties (excepting only the CSU*) have made the mistake of denouncing as rightist-radical the rapidly growing concerns of that portion of the population that is still in the majority. Even as partisan tactics, that is stupid. It is to be expected that Muslim-qua-Muslim parties will be forming everywhere in Europe in coming years. And as that happens, the present membership of Muslims in red and green parties will be a thing of the past.

The SPD parliamentary leader Opperman had a particularly dramatic reaction after the Paris attacks. “These are killers, not Muslims,” he decreed, without explaining why these two terms should be mutually exclusive, And, as a reaction to this attack on freedom of expression, he actually demanded that PEGIDA stop its demonstrations. With no understanding of the fact that this is what the Islamists want — for any further peaceful exercise of freedom of expression to be made impossible. Some Europeans believe that prognoses about an Islamic majority are like predictions of economic cycles — just reading tea leaves. But that is wrong, because demography — even in reference to the future — is based on hard facts. The mothers of the next generations are already born. Or not born. And the tendency to be prolific is an amazingly firm constant. The more educated, the more cosmopolitan, the more non-Muslim women are, the fewer children they have. That has been true for decades now. And in every country in Europe. It is therefore almost inevitable that several European countries will have Muslim majorities sometime in this century.

Sweden: A Democratic Joke
by Alfred Fredriksson

The Swedish Domestic Minister Anders Ygeman said during Folk och försvar (Swedish defense conference) today that it is possible that there will be terror attacks in Sweden. At the same time he strongly criticized opponents of mass immigration and compared them to terrorists.

“Je Suis Ahmed”, he proclaimed.

The domestic minister briefly addressed the terror attacks in Paris followed by a long description of Muslims in Europe and Sweden as an oppressed group. He compared critics of mass immigration with terrorists who murder people.

“Je Suis Ahmed”, he proclaimed and continued, “Ahmed Merabet, the 42-year old Muslim police officer who gave his life to defend Charlie Hebdo’s right to joke about Muslims.”

He chose to focus on Merabet because he was a Muslim, but he did not mention the fifteen other people who died in the gruesome attacks. That is not to say Merabet doesn’t deserve our respect and his family our condolences, but not even mentioning all the other people who died is blatantly disrespectful. Afterwards Ygeman focused on the fire at the mosque in Eskilstuna — a fire which after media speculation and a comprehensive police investigation turned out to be the result of an accident, not hate crime against Muslims.

“Dark forces on both sides are trying to make the struggle against terrorism into a war between religions,” he claimed.

Before discussing the likelihood of Sweden’s suffering a terrorist attack he also claimed that the “brothers in Paris were no warriors,” referring to Said and Chérif Koachi who shortly before the terrorist attacks were in the Middle East waging war on behalf of the Islamic State.

“We have to dare to think that this could happen in Sweden and take necessary steps to protect ourselves,” he said and continued, “It is extremely difficult to protect against perpetrators who are prepared to die to harm others. We can’t protect ourselves against everything.”

During the questions after his speech Ygeman admitted that it is easy for immigrants to get Swedish passports — passports often used for smuggling of illegal immigrants and by terrorists who travel to Syria and Iraq to participate in gruesome acts of violence.

“It shouldn’t be possible to obtain ten to fifteen passports; we have to tighten regulations,” he said.

Your Excellency, many Palestinians nearly fell off their chairs upon seeing their president march at the front row of a rally in your capital to protest against terrorism and assaults on freedom of the media.

Undoubtedly, you are unaware of the fact that President Abbas is personally responsible for punishing Palestinian journalists who dare to criticize him or express their views in public. Every day we see that the Western media, including French newspapers and magazines, does not care about such violations unless they are committed by Israel.

Your Excellency, you are completely mistaken if you believe that Abbas and his Palestinian Authority are tolerant toward satire or any form of criticism. While he was attending the rally, a human rights group published a report accusing the Palestinian Authority of “waging war” against university students in the West Bank.

President Abbas has managed once again to deceive you and the rest of the international community. He now has managed to create the false impression that he cares about freedom of speech and independent journalism

Palestinians like me will now pay a heaver price because Abbas has been emboldened and will now step up his assaults. France will be helping to establish another corrupt and repressive Arab dictatorship — one that glorifies and rewards terrorists no different from those who carried out the Paris attacks.

I hope now your Excellency understands why I am too scared to reveal my identity.

The spread of Islam apparently trumps the First Amendment in the view of President Obama.

By now, most of America should realize that Barack Obama has a special mission in life to shield Islam from criticism.

But pressuring the media should be a step too far considering the President takes an oath to defend the Constitution and thus the most important of amendments: free speech.

But, according to the president’s press secretary, Barack Obama has no such desire when it comes to criticism of Islam.

Neil Munro of the Daily Caller writes:

President Barack Obama has a moral responsibility to push back on the nation’s journalism community when it is planning to publish anti-jihadi articles that might cause a jihadi attack against the nation’s defenses forces, the White House’s press secretary said Jan. 12.

“The president … will not now be shy about expressing a view or taking the steps that are necessary to try to advocate for the safety and security of our men and women in uniform” whenever journalists’ work may provoke jihadist attacks, spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters at the White House’s daily briefing.