RUTHFULLY YOURS

Raymond Stock, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, is a Middle East political analyst and scholar. A resident of Cairo for two decades, he has written extensively about Egypt and the Middle East in the Middle East Quarterly, The Financial Times, and International Herald Tribune, among many other venues. Dr. Stock briefed the Middle East Forum in a conference call August 27, 2015.

The Islamists have enabled Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah Sisi to consolidate his domestic standing and gain widespread international legitimacy.

Though no more tolerant of political dissent than his predecessors, Sisi is a liberal in the sense that he wants a more open, tolerant, and religiously equal Egypt as evidenced by his uncompromising fight against Muslim Brotherhood violence. The only Egyptian president to demand that Al-Azhar clerics end their militant interpretation of Islam and societal discrimination of non-Muslims, Sisi made overtures to the Coptic Christians and toned down religious extremism in the education curriculum.

Pro-Sisi demonstrators celebrate the third anniversary of Mubarak’s overthrow, January 2014.

The president’s success in restoring order has been eroded by the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the resurgence of Muslim Brotherhood violence, and spreading lawlessness in Sinai. The recent opening of the new Suez Canal and encouragement of foreign investment are attempts to revive Egypt’s economy and boost its international standing.

It has been said, “Nature abhors a vacuum.” The vacuum created by the administration where the effective enforcement of our nation’s immigration laws were concerned motivated Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and her state’s legislature to enact an immigration law, SB 1070, that largely paralleled sections of the current federal immigration laws.

On April 23, 2010 Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed Arizona’s immigration into law SB 1070.

You might think that the law and the controversy that surrounded it are hardly newsworthy today, more than 5 years after SB 1070 was enacted. However, today that law is back in the news. On September 6, 2015 the Los Angeles Times reported, “U.S. judge dismisses challenge of Arizona’s SB 1070 immigration law.”

It is that headline and the report on the decision rendered by U.S. District Court Judge Susan Bolton on September 5, 2015 that makes this issue worthy of consideration today. Furthermore, on a personal note, the court’s decision is one I find personally satisfying. I assisted the law firm that defended Arizona and SB 1070 by providing a declaration in support of that important law.

The “Arab Spring”—a wave of mayhem—began late in 2010 and soon included, by the spring of 2011, the civil war in Syria. By now that war has cost over 200,000 lives, seen Syria’s disintegration into zones controlled by various, mostly radical factions, and sparked a refugee crisis that is now affecting not only surrounding countries like Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey but Europe as well.

Just two years before Syria’s version of the “Spring” broke out, in 2009, then-Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert was still engaged in indirect talks with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad aimed at returning all of the Golan Heights to Syria. The payback was supposed to be a Syrian commitment to peace and to exiting its alliance with Iran and Hizballah.

By now, no one in Israel—right, left, center, even far left—is heard lamenting that those talks did not lead to such a deal. In 2012, prominent left-of-center columnist and author Ari Shavit wrote:

I couldn’t help but think what would be happening today if the ideological position I had long held—peace in return for the Golan—had been accepted…. I have to admit that if the worldview I had championed had been applied, battalions of global jihadis would be camping near Ein Gev [beside the Sea of Galilee] and there would be Al-Qaida bases on the shores of [the lake]. Northern Israel and the country’s water sources would be bordering…on an armed, extremist Islamic entity that could not be controlled.

On September 6-7, 1955, Istanbul’s Greek Christians underwent the “most destructive pogrom…in Europe since the infamous Kristallnacht” of 1938 Nazi Germany, eminent Greek-American historian Speros Vryonis, Jr. has written. As he wrote in the extensively documented 2005 book The Mechanism of Catastrophe: The Turkish Pogrom of September 6-7, 1955, and the Destruction of the Greek Community of Istanbul, these important events remain “virtually unknown” even today.

As the Greek Consul General of Constantinople (Istanbul) wrote in September 1955, Istanbul’s Greek community that dated from the city’s founding in 668 B.C. “suffered a complete and destructive catastrophe in only seven hours.” Turkey’s ruling Demokrat Parti (DP) and allied groups as well as Turkish Special Forces had recruited Turkish rioters in Istanbul. Other rioters arrived by train, truck, and some 4,000 taxis from Turkey’s provinces, some 100,000 in all. A faked bomb attack against the Turkish consulate in Thessalonica, Greece, whose grounds contain the birth house of Turkish republic founder Kemal Mustafa Atatürk, would trigger a feigned popular outburst.

Like a snake oil salesman trying to move a gallon of lies by promising that it’s either buy the bottle or die, Obama sold the Iran deal as the only alternative to war. In fact the deal is a certain road to war.

Or as Churchill said, “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor, and you will have war.” Before long, the British and French were facing Czech tanks redesignated as Panzers that had been seized as part of the Nazi spoils of appeasement.

When Obama claimed that the Iran nuclear deal was the only alternative to war, he was lying in more ways than one. The United States has already been dragged into Iran’s war for control of Iraq. That war was one of the levers that Iran exploited to get its way on its nuclear program. Iran also came close to dragging us into its war in Syria and we are hovering on the edge of being dragged into Yemen.

Iran and ISIS have done a thorough job of carving up entire countries into Shiite and Sunni blocs. And there’s no sign that this Islamic realignment of the Sykes Picot borders is going to stop. If the process continues, the scale and scope of the war will expand and transform the region away from nation states.

A gnomish little man from the 18th century is the author of so many bad things, including Europe’s current invasion of “immigrants,” who claim a right to infest the countries they settle in. But, who’s fault is it, really? The gnome’s, or those who believe what he said?

“Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.” Immanuel Kant, in Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, 1785

Or, to put Kant’s categorical imperative in contemporary language: “Do the right thing!”

Just do it! Don’t think, don’t hesitate, don’t wonder whether or not you will benefit from doing “the right thing,” because if you think or wonder, then your action will be impure – nay, immoral! – and won’t make you a moral person. It might be praiseworthy by others, but the esteem you might be held in by them should not be a primary consideration. The thought should never enter your mind.

If you hesitate, that means you were thinking. Thinking is not allowed.

In fact, your wanting to be a moral person by doing “the right thing” will also disqualify you from being a moral person. To be a moral person, your doing “the right thing” must be scoured of all personal interest, it must be eminently and literally disinterested, expecting no kudos, no laurels, and not even personal satisfaction for having “done good.” When and if you see the “right thing” to do, you must know it somehow beforehand –– that it is a priori the “right thing to do” – and take action and just do it.

If “doing the right thing” means leaping trance-like off a bridge without a Bungee, so be it. Others will mourn your passing, and reflect on how moral a person you were. You did your duty.

A few months after the Ottoman Empire joined Germany in World War 1 in 1914 by attacking Russian ships, Herbert Samuel, a British Zionist, later appointed as the first Commissioner of the British Mandate in Palestine, recognized this was likely an opportunity to obtain a Jewish Palestine. But he decided that there were too few Jews in the population in Palestine at that time for immediate statehood to be practical. Although in the Jerusalem area the Jews were two thirds the total population, in the Palestine territory as a whole they only numbered about 100,000 or about one sixth the total of perhaps 600,000 Arab Muslims and Christians.

Herbert Samuel, a British Jew who had risen high in the British Labor Government, wrote in a memo to the British War Cabinet entitled “The Future of Palestine”: If Palestine were to be open to unrestricted Jewish immigration, it might become a Jewish majority state. How could they become a Jewish majority state? It would need a majority to be able to command obedience from the Arab ethnic population; also a larger population to protect the state against Arabs or other enemies external to the state. A failed Jewish state might set back Zionism for 100 years. After looking at what he conceived were the only alternatives, Samuel decided the way to go was to have Britain annex Palestine. The only alternatives to British annexation he thought of were: 1. Annexation by France, 2. Internationalization, 3. Annexation to Egypt, and 4. continued Turkish rule with guarantees permitting Jewish settlement.

A weekly column in the Sunday Times Magazine concerns questions of ethics which are addressed by three experts at least partially selected for the diversity they’re meant to represent. With first names like Kwame, Kenji and Amy, we can see immediately that this troika come from different races and ethnicities. In a rare example of e pluribus unum, all three moral mavens responded in unanimity to this week’s question which concerned the following dilemma.

A homosexual college student wonders whether it’s ethical for him to lie to his father who has expressed his unwillingness to pay his tuition and support if the son is engaged in a homosexual lifestyle. The father had previously found love letters between his son and another student which the son vigorously denied. With slight variations in emphasis, all the ethicists found that it is permissible to lie to a homophobic parent and to forgive oneself for doing so. They further asserted that a father with means has an obligation to provide such funds for college; lying is therefor a way of ensuring that the father will be saved from the sin of failing to do his duty.

http://jamieglazov.com/2015/09/07/the-ugly-truth-about-historical-voluntary-islamic-conversion-on-the-glazov-gang/

This special edition of The Glazov Gang was hosted by Ari David, the host of the Ari David Show Podcast, and joined by Raymond Ibrahim, Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

Raymond came on the show to discuss The Ugly Truth about Historical “Voluntary” Islamic Conversion, unveiling how most of the non-Muslim ancestors of today’s Muslims were converted to Islam.

Don’t miss it!

By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

WASHINGTON — A special intelligence review of two emails that Hillary Rodham Clinton received as secretary of state on her personal account — including one about North Korea’s nuclear weapons program — has endorsed a finding by the inspector general for the intelligence agencies that the emails contained highly classified information when Mrs. Clinton received them, senior intelligence officials said.

Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign and the State Department disputed the inspector general’s finding last month and questioned whether the emails had been overclassified by an arbitrary process. But the special review — by the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency — concluded that the emails were “Top Secret,” the highest classification of government intelligence, when they were sent to Mrs. Clinton in 2009 and 2011.

On Monday, the Clinton campaign disagreed with the conclusion of the intelligence review and noted that agencies within the government often have different views of what should be considered classified.