RUTHFULLY YOURS

On Monday, the Israeli Counterterrorism Bureau issued strong travel warnings for ‎Israelis and Jews planning trips abroad, particularly to Western Europe, over the ‎upcoming holidays. Such advisories for Israelis are not new. Whenever there is a flare-up ‎of some kind involving terrorism against Jews, the government tells the public to be ‎especially cautious. But this week’s admonitions point to a specific, clear and present ‎danger.

Several factors are coming into play to make Israeli authorities sound the alert. The ‎recently paused war in Gaza is one. In spite of its defensive nature, Operation Protective ‎Edge was (and still is) portrayed by the international media as an act of Israeli aggression. ‎Demonstrations were held at Israeli embassies and consulates across the world, while ‎openly anti-Semitic incidents have been on a steady rise.

Meanwhile, the virulently anti-Israel Professor William Schabas was appointed by the U.N. ‎Human Rights Council to head the “inquiry” into “the widespread, systematic and gross ‎violations of international human rights and fundamental freedoms arising from the Israeli ‎military operations in the occupied Palestinian territory.”

The “Schabas Inquiry” — which Canadian MP Professor Irwin Cotler attacked last week in an ‎op-ed in The Jerusalem Post, for “not only presuppose[ing] Israeli criminality … but ‎mak[ing] no reference at all to Hamas’ spectrum of war crimes and crimes against ‎humanity” — is no small matter in this context, as it provides anti-Israel protesters all over ‎the world with a hefty stamp of approval.

It is therefore not surprising that Israel Prize laureate, actress Lea Koenig, in Holland ‎this week for the “Spot on Israeli Theater” festival, was verbally assaulted by Dutch ‎activists storming the premises and shouting anti-Israel epithets and pro-Gaza slogans. ‎Though the hecklers were removed and Koenig’s hosts profusely apologized, the ‎incident is indicative of the overall menacing atmosphere pervading Europe.‎

Another factor that has Israeli officials jumpy is the explosion on the scene of Islamic ‎State terrorists in Iraq and Syria. Due to their preferred method of annihilating “infidels” — televised decapitation — they have upstaged the rest of the Islamist barbarians in the ‎region, including Hamas. (It is thus that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a ‎point of declaring that “ISIS is Hamas and Hamas is ISIS.” He needed to explain to all ‎those Israel-bashers in the West, horrified by the beheadings of American journalists ‎James Foley and Steven Sotloff and British aid worker David Haines, that this is the kind ‎of threat Israel faces from Gaza and elsewhere along and within its borders.)‎

This administration turns to Abbott and Costello for guidance.

It’s only been five days since President Obama announced his strategy which depends on a coalition of NATO members and Arab states to join with us to degrade and maybe someday destroy the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. But, as I predicted on Thursday, that plan won’t succeed. It has already fallen apart.

The Arab nations are, as usual, singing “Onward Christian Soldiers” in the war against ISIS. Their resentment and distrust of Obama ensured that the most they’d do is permit us to use bases in their nations. Predictably, they won’t send one soldier to fight with us. Britain, Germany, and Canada have already told us that they’ll sit this one out. Turkey, once a cornerstone of NATO and now ruled by a radical Islamist, has not only refused to join us but has also indicated it will refuse us the use of what used to be our massive airbase at Incirlik.

Although one reported cease-fire between a “moderate” Syrian rebel group and ISIS seems to have been short-lived, Obama’s plan to arm the Syrian “moderates” is probably moot.

There seems to be a competition for the title of Obama’s shakiest ally. It’s not Congress, as one Washington Post columnist wrote on Saturday. The winners are the members of his own administration who should, by now, be famous for their imitation of Abbott and Costello’s immortal “Who’s on first?” routine.

So who’s on first? After Obama’s Wednesday night speech announced a war, first at bat to pull back from it was Secretary of State John Kerry. On Thursday, Kerry said, “I think war is the wrong terminology and analogy but the fact is that we are engaged in a very significant global effort to curb terrorist activity.”

What was on second? The White House and the Pentagon performances, stumbling over each other, to refute what Kerry said. White House press secretary Josh Earnest said (joshing earnestly?) we are at war with ISIS the same way that we’re at war with al-Qaeda. Pentagon spokesman RAdm. John Kirby made sure to point out that this isn’t the same Iraq war of a decade ago, but it’s a war nonetheless. Heaven forbid that someone might think this is connected in any way to the old nasty Bush war in Iraq.

In his view, the current debacle has nothing to do with his own errors and omissions.

How can we account for the apparent flip-flopping of the Obama administration about what we are doing, or might do further, to the Islamic State?

At times the secretary of defense seems at odds with the secretary of state. The administration seems not to be reacting to its own intelligence information about the Islamic State. Nor is it heeding the professional advice of the Joint Chiefs or top-ranking military officers in the field. Instead, in the run-up to the midterm elections, Obama appears to be guided largely by a stubborn adherence to his own past political truisms, and that explains the current inability to articulate a strategy or craft a coalition.

In anti-empirical fashion, the following axioms must be true — and thus the facts on the ground in Syria and Iraq must be massaged to reflect these beliefs.

1. The growth of the Islamic State has little if anything to do with the total withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq in 2011. Our departure did not prompt the Maliki government to backslide into religious oppression, free the skies for foreign powers, and open the countryside to resurgent Islamists.

2. The success of the Islamic State has nothing to do with the past failure to aid anti–Bashar Assad groups in Syria that once upon a time may have also opposed the Islamic State.

3. The current ascendancy of the Islamic State has nothing to do with a sense that the credibility of the United States in the region is diminished, or that enemies in the Middle East are emboldened by past non-enforcement of loudly announced red lines, step-over lines, or deadlines. Nor does it have to do with the situation on the ground after the bombing of Libya, or with the promise to vacate Afghanistan, or with the shunning of our old allies in the Gulf and Egypt.

4. The administration’s current Middle East plan of reaching out to the Islamic world — from the euphemisms about terrorism to the proclamations of underappreciated Islamic achievement to outreach to Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Iranians — has largely worked and therefore should be continued. Hence, the statement that the Islamic State has nothing to do with Islam.

In Search of the ‘Moderate Islamists’ The Muslim Brotherhood is the best Obama can do.

It is not out of ignorance that President Obama and Secretary Kerry are denying the Islamic roots of the Islamic State jihadists. As I argued in a column here last week, we should stop scoffing as if this were a blunder and understand the destructive strategy behind it. The Obama administration is quite intentionally promoting the progressive illusion that “moderate Islamists” are the solution to the woes of the Middle East, and thus that working cooperatively with “moderate Islamists” is the solution to America’s security challenges.

I wrote a book a few years ago called The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America that addressed this partnership between Islamists and progressives. The terms “grand jihad” and “sabotage” are lifted from an internal Muslim Brotherhood memorandum that lays bare the Brotherhood’s overarching plan to destroy the West from within by having their component organizations collude with credulous Western governments and opinion elites.

The plan is going well.

As long as the news media and even conservative commentators continue to let them get away with it, the term “moderate Islamist” will remain useful to transnational progressives. It enables them to avoid admitting that the Muslim Brotherhood is what they have in mind.

As my recent column explained, the term “moderate Islamist” is an oxymoron. An Islamist is a Muslim who wants repressive sharia imposed. There is nothing moderate about sharia even if the Muslim in question does not advocate imposing it by violence.

Most people do not know what the term “Islamist” means, so the contradiction is not apparent to them. If they think about it at all, they figure “moderate Islamist” must be just another way of saying “moderate Muslim,” and since everyone acknowledges that there are millions of moderate Muslims, it seems logical enough. Yet, all Muslims are not Islamists. In particular, all Muslims who support the Western principles of liberty and reason are not Islamists.

If you want to say that some Islamists are not violent, that is certainly true. But that does not make them moderate. There is, moreover, less to their nonviolence than meets the eye. Many Islamists who do not personally participate in jihadist aggression support violent jihadists financially and morally — often while feigning objection to their methods or playing semantic games (e.g., “I oppose terrorism but I support resistance,” or “I oppose the killing of innocent people . . . but don’t press me on who is an innocent”).

Understandably, the public is inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to people the government describes as “moderates” and portrays as our “allies.” If transnational progressives were grilled on these vaporous terms, though, and forced to concede, say, that the Muslim Brotherhood was the purportedly “moderate opposition” our government wants to support in Syria, the public would object. While not expert in the subject, many Americans are generally aware that the Brotherhood supports terrorism, that its ideology leads young Muslims to graduate to notorious terrorist organizations, and that it endorses oppressive Islamic law while opposing the West. Better for progressives to avoid all that by one of their dizzying, internally nonsensical word games — hence, “moderate Islamist.”

I rehearse all that because last week, right on cue, representatives of Brotherhood-tied Islamist organizations appeared with Obama-administration officials and other apologists for Islamic supremacism to ostentatiously “condemn” the Islamic State as “not Islamic.”

Klinghoffer: Pretending Art Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry
The Klinghoffer opera transforms the Palestinian Arabs’ false, lethal narrative into truth, while wresting away the truth of the Jewish connection to the land of Israel. A relationship which predates even the creation of Islam, let alone the Palestinian Arabs, by centuries.

The most important thing to know about the Metropolitan Opera’s staging of the provocation piece “The Death of Klinghoffer,” is that the first of what should be many protests against it will be on Monday, Sept 22, starting at 4:30 p.m., at the Metropolitan Opera, which is nestled in the Lincoln Center Complex, at Broadway and West 65th Street in New York City.

The opera itself is still set to run at the Met for eight performances, starting on Monday, Oct. 20, running through mid-November. But in a concession that should serve as an admission, the Met pulled “Death” from its line-up of operas it simulcasts to theaters around the world.

Why?

Because as Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager admitted in a statement issued in mid-June, the international Jewish community is genuinely concerned that “the live transmission of The Death of Klinghoffer would be inappropriate at this time of rising anti-Semitism, particularly in Europe.”

It beggars the imagination that Gelb and his board recognized and acted in deference to genuine concern about the effect the opera could have for Jews in Europe, but shuts his ears to the genuine concern and outrage over staging it in New York City, where there is one of the largest concentration of Jews in the world.

What is wrong with this opera, you ask? Spending hours listening to scenes from the opera only undergirds the enmity expressed towards the opera by concerned ranks of the Jewish community.

AMERICAN JEWS GETTING FAT WHEREVER POOR PEOPLE ARE SUFFERING

As the House Select Committee on Benghazi prepares for its first hearing this week, a former State Department diplomat is coming forward with a startling allegation: Hillary Clinton confidants were part of an operation to “separate” damaging documents before they were turned over to the Accountability Review Board investigating security lapses surrounding the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attacks on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya.

New Benghazi allegation puts spotlight on Hillary Clinton confidants, alleged after-hours document review.

UPDATE: Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff allegedly present at after-hours document review.

According to former Deputy Assistant Secretary Raymond Maxwell, the after-hours session took place over a weekend in a basement operations-type center at State Department headquarters in Washington, D.C. This is the first time Maxwell has publicly come forward with the story.

At the time, Maxwell was a leader in the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, which was charged with collecting emails and documents relevant to the Benghazi probe.

Raymond Maxwell, former State Department deputy assistant secretary (Photo: Sharyl Attkisson)
“I was not invited to that after-hours endeavor, but I heard about it and decided to check it out on a Sunday afternoon,” Maxwell says.

He didn’t know it then, but Maxwell would ultimately become one of four State Department officials singled out for discipline—he says scapegoated—then later cleared for devastating security lapses leading up to the attacks. Four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, were murdered during the Benghazi attacks.

‘Basement Operation’

The Bathsheba Deadline
An Original Novel
by Jack Engelhard
©2014

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The book they tried to ban…
reveals the truth behind the headlines…
now available in paperback and Kindle editions.
Bestselling novelist Jack Engelhard (Indecent Proposal) has produced a heroic work of literature. This is a superb, gutsy novel. The Bathsheba Deadline is a newsroom thriller ripped from the headlines. The present day action takes place in a Manhattan newsroom where three leading journalists find themselves caught in a sizzling three-way love triangle that may lead to murder in the Middle East (Israel). You will never forget Jay Garfield and you absolutely will never forget Lyla. Politics and sex mixed in with the war on terror provoke life-and-death rifts within the editorial staff. Journalists with the power to influence public opinion have lost their neutrality and have taken sides. Readers are taken behind the scenes and into the newsrooms where they are shown how headlines are made and often manipulated to favor one side over another. Media bias usually against Israel? Read all about it in Engelhard’s stirring pages. The war for survival in a New York City newsroom mirrors the clash of civilizations here, in the Middle East, and around the world.

“The fate of the Jews of France is like the canary in the coal mine: it announces a much larger conflagration”.

This is what a great French intellectual told me this week.He is the historian of the Sorbonne University, Georges Bensoussan, the director of the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris and of its Revue d’Histoire.

In the first eight months of 2014, France is leading the list of the world’s countries whose Jewish population is emigrating to Israel, with 5,000 Jews who chose to abandon the République to live in the Jewish State.

“It is a real novelty, a real turning point in the history of the aliyah of Jews from France since 1945”, says Bensoussan. “It is one per cent of the entire Jewish population of France. The French aliyah will be two and half times larger than the aliyah from the United States for a community ten times smaller”.

While French Jews are leaving for Israel, French Muslims are leaving for jihad in Iraq and Syria.

“France has the largest contingent of European volunteers for jihad in Syria. 900 French Muslims according to the police. This reflects the demographic upheaval and the non-integration and severe dissimulation of the Muslim population.

There is a surprising fact: the choice of name. The Arab immigration in France is the only one in the history of this country that continues to give children the names of the parent’s world of origin

This process of concealment is the result of historical factors such as colonization and decolonization in a background that everyone has forgotten, “‘History weighs on the minds of the living’ said Karl Marx”. The French model of integration is imploding.

“French multiculturalism is nonsense. France is a nation united around a language, literature, history. Communitarianism is antithetical to French history. Multiculturalism does not work anywhere”.

Several weeks ago a former Israeli ambassador spoke up to offer his prescription for “peace in the Middle East” and I was amazed all over again. They always amaze me, these dreamers. They never learn, so, as if the folly of abandoning Jewish Gaza weren’t enough, once again they’re back to a “two-state-solution.”

I won’t mention his name because we’re entering our High Holy Days and I prefer not to do lashon hara (slander, ed.). I’m being watched. For the same reason I won’t mention another Israeli “expert” who came along only yesterday to insist that for the sake of peace, Israel must dismantle itself immediately. Same deal, and the disease keeps spreading among our peaceniks.

King David, by the way, prayed for the utter annihilation of all his enemies – but that’s another column.

There was no “two-state-solution” and there were no “peace processes” when King David ran the show. That ought to be a hint.

So once Israel does this, shares the land, the Arabs will be astonished by these sweet gestures. They will start dancing with us at our Bar Mitzvahs.

Do you remember when it was the very religious among our people who were damned for being “messianic?”

So how about these “Liberals” from inside and outside the faith? Their dream is that the minute Israel and the rest of the West go groveling, capitulate and surrender, everything that ails Fevered Islam will be cured overnight. Islamists who’ve been drinking from intoxicating waters will sober up in a flash the instant we renounce ourselves and submit. So goes their messiah.

American oil companies used to sponsor a lot of cultural programming. As the Saudis nationalized and began to take control, that has shifted.

The Saudis are not big opera buffs, but their regime spreads anti-Semitism around the world. And the Metropolitan Opera’s current decision to mount The Death of Klinghoffer, a widely denounced anti-Semitic modern opera in a season packed with productions that are rarely less than a century old, is a curious aberration.

The Metropolitan Opera’s manager Peter Gelb is predicting bankruptcy in two years as the Met has blown through a fortune, for example spending $169,000 on a poppy field used as opera scenery.

The Met is incapable of budgeting and its needs money badly.

Saudi Petroleum International is a local arm of Saudi Aramco and a significant donor to the Metropolitan Opera. The Saudi Minister of Petroleum, Ibrahim Al-Naimi, has even been listed on occasion as a principal sponsor.

The Met has increasingly been making its money from digital broadcasts, rather than theater performances, making it more reliant on international audiences. Its “Live in HD” digital broadcasts go out to countries such as Lebanon, Morocco, as well as to Dubai.

The HD business has become the Met’s bread and butter and like a lot of the luxury trade, it’s looking for a cut of the gushing wells of oil money from nouveau riche sheiks and princes.

Catering to their bigotry is not the classiest way to get it, but it certainly has a history of working.