RUTHFULLY YOURS

DANIEL GREENFIELD

John Kerry tried to read the Idiot’s Guide to the Koran, then he switched to a tape of Islam for Dummies and then he finally gave up and just assumed that Muslims were like the Amish but with longer beards.

Kerry spoke to a largely-Islamic audience at the State Department Wednesday, which had assembled to recognize State’s new “special representative for Muslim communities,” Shaarik Zafar. But the planned event was overshadowed by the brutal beheading of Sotloff by ISIS fighters in Iraq, pushing the secretary to again publicly condemn the group.

“But here today, what is really important — and I want to take advantage of this podium and of this moment, to underscore as powerfully as I know how — that the face of Islam is not the butchers who killed Steven Sotloff,” he continued, to immediate applause. “That’s [ISIS].”

“The face of Islam is not the nihilists who know only how to destroy, not to build,” Kerry went on. “It’s not masked cowards whose actions are an ugly insult to the peaceful religion that they violate every single day with their barbarity, and whose fundamental principles they insult with their actions.”

“The real face of Islam is a peaceful religion based on the dignity of all human beings,” the secretary asserted. “It’s one where Muslim communities are leading the fight against poverty. It’s one where Muslim communities are providing basic health care and emergency assistance on the frontlines of some of our most devastating humanitarian crises.”

What better moment could there be to push a completely revisionist history of Islam than while commemorating a man murdered by the Islamic State.

But which Muslim country represents this peaceful religion that offers dignity to all human beings? Saudi Arabia? Qatar? Kuwait? Yemen? Iran? Turkey? Indonesia? ISIS?

Muslim countries are poor because of their feudal structure. Their best doctors become terrorists. The real face of Islam is ISIS, not an army of Muslim NGOs fighting poverty and then funneling the money to Al Qaeda.

Secretary of State John Kerry should have extended his Nantucket vacation. That would have spared him and the nation from his embarrassing remarks praising Islam as a “peaceful religion based on the dignity of all human beings,” which he delivered just a day after ISIS released a video showing American journalist Steven Sotloff being beheaded.

Kerry was speaking at a ceremony honoring the State Department’s new special representative to Muslim communities, Shaarik Zafar. Rather than call on Muslim leaders around the world to publicly condemn ISIS in the strongest possible terms and do everything possible to counter ISIS’s recruitment campaign, ideology and financing, Kerry coddled them.

“I want to take advantage of this podium and of this moment to underscore as powerfully as I know how, that the face of Islam is not the butchers who killed Steven Sotloff. That’s ISIL,” Kerry said. He added that the real face of Islam is “one where Muslim communities are advocating for universal human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the most basic freedom to practice one’s faith openly and freely.”

Where exactly in Muslim-majority countries today is a non-Muslim free to practice his or her faith “openly and freely”? Ten out of the sixteen countries deemed of particular concern regarding their abuses of religious freedom are Muslim nations, according to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom’s 2014 Annual Report. The governments of these countries engage in or tolerate particularly severe violations of religious freedom, the report states.

The Commission makes policy recommendations to the President, the Secretary of State, and Congress. Evidently, Kerry has not read the Commission report’s findings regarding the state of religious freedom in Muslim-majority countries or did not take them seriously. It also appears that Kerry has not read or understood the implications of the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights, based on Sharia law, which is diametrically opposed to the principles underlying the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The Universal Declaration’s organizing principle is that “[A]ll human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”

Another illegal settlement has arisen in the Judea-Samaria (West Bank) territories, the New York Times reports. Surely there will soon be an expression of “deep concern” from the Obama administration, a furious resolution from the United Nations Security Council, and a letter from twelve angry congressmen mobilized by J Street.

Oh, wait. It’s not a Jewish settlement — it’s an Arab settlement. Cancel the outrage!

A feature article in the New York Times on August 31 reports that the Palestinian Authority is building a new settlement called Rawabi. The first 600 apartments are already complete, out of a projected 6,000 units that will house an estimated 40,000 people.

While Jewish communities in the same area, with even larger populations, are called “settlements” by the Times and the rest of the world news media, Rawabi is for some reason characterized as a “town” and a “city.”

Why is one man’s community called a “settlement” and another’s a “town” ?

Because a “settlement” sounds like a foreign implant — something that has no business being there. A “town” sounds normal and natural. Supporters of the Palestinian cause — whether in the news media, the State Department, or misnamed “peace” groups — want to award Judea and Samaria to the Palestinian Arabs. They want everyone to recognize those territories to be “Palestinian.”

The problem they face is that there are three significant obstacles to calling the territories “Palestinian”: international law, history, and a text of religious history called the Bible.

According to international law, Jews have at least as much right as Arabs to build towns in Judea and Samaria. All of the documents related to the governing of those territories throughout the past century — the Balfour Declaration, the League of Nations Mandate, and so on–specifically endorse the right of Jews to build there. The territories have never been part of a “Palestinian” state which made them legally off-limits to Jews.

Every week brings new reports of Muslims in America flocking to join ISIS. Those who aren’t killed in battle will eventually return to New York, to Los Angeles and to Minneapolis–Saint Paul.

And they will stop being Iraq’s problem and become our problem.

ISIS is more than just another terrorist group. It is now an Islamic State. Its followers and allied militias pledge to obey the Caliph of ISIS and reject all allegiances to other states and entities. Western ISIS recruits burn their passports to show that they are no longer citizens of those countries.

Like most Salafists, ISIS members see our system of law and government as idolatry and heresy. Fort Hood Jihadist Nidal Hasan, who recently applied to join ISIS, had earlier written that he would “renounce any oaths of allegiances that require me to support/defend any man made constitution (like the Constitution of the United States) over the commandments mandated in Islam.”

“I therefore formally renounce my oath of office as well as any other implicit or explicit oaths I have made in the past … This includes my oath of U.S. citizenship,” Hasan declared.

By his own admission, Nidal Hasan is no longer a United States citizen. He should be promptly denaturalized. So should every ISIS member and anyone who supports the Islamic State.

The oath of citizenship that Hasan was retroactively rejecting states, “I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen.”

ISIS members have pledged their allegiance to a foreign prince and a foreign state. Denaturalizing them should be a mere formality.

Anwar Al-Awlaki, Hasan’s mentor, whose American citizenship became such an issue for the left when he was killed in a drone strike, was clear in his lectures that he was at war with America, that “Muslims in the West should see their stay there as temporary” before leaving to build an Islamic State in the Middle East and that Muslims shouldn’t even vote in America because they would be participating in “a disbelieving system, in a disbelieving country.”

Like Hasan, he did not consider himself an American in any way, shape or form.

Benghazi Security Team: Stand-Down Order Cost Amb. Stevens His Life

Three members of the special annex team who engaged with terrorists during the siege on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, in September 2012 tell Bret Baier, in the upcoming Fox News report 13 Hours at Benghazi: The Inside Story, that Ambassador Stevens and the three other Americans killed in the attack would be alive, had security forces not been ordered to stand down.

According to intelligence officials, no stand-down order was given. The three men — Kris (“Tanto”) Paronto, Mark (“Oz”) Geist, and John (“Tig”) Tiegen — report differently, saying a stand-down order from higher-ups that cost them 30 minutes trying to protect Americans at the compound. Baier asks them, “If I gave you that 30 minutes back, would Ambassador Stevens and [U.S. Foreign Service Information Management Officer] Sean Smith be alive today?”

“Yes,” responds Paronto immediately. “They would still alive. My gut is yes.” Tiegen concurs: “I strongly believe if we’d have left immediately, they’d still be alive today.”

13 Hours at Benghazi premieres Friday, September 5, at 10p.m. ET on Fox News Channel.

Many of the Westerners flocking to the Islamic State are middle-class misfits for whom jihad is a radical pose.

On the Internet, you’re never really alone. Name any fad, any cause, any hobby or passion — Shaker furniture? Dungeons and Dragons, Bolivian tree frogs? — and you’re only a few clicks away from someone who shares your obsession.

That’s great. It’s also horrible. Because while there’s no harm in tree-frog fans sharing pictures and stories that inspire others to fly to the Andes to take pictures of exotic creatures, the Internet also lets evil people share stories and pictures that inspire others to cut off the heads of various infidels and apostates.

Though I’m perfectly comfortable with YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and similar platforms doing what they can to undermine the PR campaigns of fanatical murderers, my point here isn’t necessarily that such things should be banned or censored (even if that were technologically feasible). I weary of reflexive responses to barbarism that involve curtailing the freedoms of Americans in order to avoid offending savages.

Rather, my point is that to a considerable extent, the Islamic State — and groups like it — is a modern Foreign Legion for losers. When discussing people who openly boast of rape, murder, and torture, “loser” is hardly too harsh. But invective is not my intent when I call them losers. These men — and a few women, too — are losers in a more significant sense. They are losers at Western civilization.

Recently the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) posted transcripts from Facebook and Twitter conversations among various French and British supporters of the Islamic State. They enthusiastically chatted about the exciting news that you can buy slave women in areas controlled by the Islamic State. The terrorist group reportedly captured an unknown number of women from the ethnic minority called Yazidis. They aren’t Muslims, so they can be used as chattel.

The men in the discussions asked all sorts of questions about the rules for sexually abusing (i.e., raping) the women. One British Muslim asked, “I have 3,500 dollars to spare, I am going to buy ten, who wants one?” A French man joked that 180 dollars must be the “price for the ugly ones.” There were plenty of “LOLs” in the thread. Because, you know, collecting the female survivors of mass murder and raping them is just so Laugh-Out-Loud funny to cretins who can bed women only at sword-point.

Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri announced the formation of a new chapter — the Al-Qaeda Jihad Organization in South Asia — intended to ”raise the flag of jihad” in India and beyond.

“This step is an effort for the ascendancy of Islam, re-establishment of Islamic government, and rule of Islamic sharia in the land of South Asia, which was once part of the world of Islam but infidels captured it and divided it into small pieces,” Zawahiri said, according to a MEMRI translation.

The terror leader said the formation of the new wing has been underway for “nearly two years” now. The expansion plans were being fomented at the same time as Zawahiri initiated another key cog in al-Qaeda expansion and rebranding — appointing young and ruthless al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula leader Nasir al-Wuhayshi as the organization’s general manager.

Zawahiri says that existing jihadi leaders in South Asia were brought into the al-Qaeda fold to form the new branch.

Taliban leader Mullah Omar will oversee the new unit. ”In the entire word at this time, the message of jihad under the flag of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has been spreading and expanding continuously,” Zawahiri said.

He said his confidence on Mullah Omar rests in part on the fact that U.S. troops are soon leaving Afghanistan, making the Taliban leader’s 2001 prediction of eventual victory correct.

“Therefore, O mujahid brothers, progress towards unity and fraternity! Hold tight Allah’s rope by leaving behind internal differences and discord, and stay away from groupism! This organization has been established so that, by uniting with our Muslim brothers in the entire world, to erase the borders which were drawn by the Britishers to divide the Muslims of South Asia,” he continued. “Therefore, the fundamental message of this organization for the inhabitants of South Asia is that they unite based on the Islamic monotheism and perform the duty of aiding Islam by walking on the path of dawah [invitation to Islam] and jihad adopted by prophets and pious persons of Allah.”

Zawahiri specifically noted Burma, Bangladesh, and India’s regions of Assam, Gujarat and Kashmir as regions where al-Qaeda cares and will offer “a cool breeze for the hapless and weak people.”

There’s a reason that the Islamic State’s magazine looks so slick and reads like it was written for a young American audience. There’s a reason that IS’ social media appear to be designed to get their message out to the west, effectively.

The man behind the message is believed to be an American. And contrary to the left’s notions that poverty causes terrorism, he is not poor. He is also not uneducated.

A college educated American citizen with a knack for computers is believed to be one of the men running the brutally effective ISIS social media operation, which is helping to attract hundreds of fighters from across the world – including the U.S., Britain and Canada.

Ahmad Abousamra, 32, was born in France and raised in the upscale Boston suburb of Stoughton. His father is a prominent endocrinologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. He attended the exclusive Xaverian Brothers Catholic high school and made the Dean’s List at Northeastern University.

He graduated with a degree in a technology field then took a job at a telecommunications company.

U.S. officials tell ABC News that he is now putting his skills to work for ISIS, the brutal terrorist organization that has been effectively using 21st century methods like Twitter memes, Facebook posts, selfies and YouTube videos to promote its radical 6th century Islamic ideals.

He originally left the U.S. to fight for al Qaeda in Iraq in 2004. He went into the media wing, returned to the U.S. in 2006, was questioned by the FBI, and then released again. Now he’s believed to be the man behind ISIS’ social media strategy.

Some 600 British citizens are waging jihad in Iraq and Syria with U.K. passports tucked in their pockets. The masked men appearing in Internet videos showing the murders of American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff spoke with London accents. So it’s not a moment too soon for Whitehall and other European governments to address the threat such terrorists pose.

David Cameron is calling for the government to restrict or rescind the passports of jihad-bound citizens before they leave the country, and Home Secretary Theresa May has threatened to deprive those Britons already fighting with the Islamic State of their citizenship. The Dutch and Australian governments, among others, are considering similar measures.

A debate also is raging in London over whether to reinstate or expand measures implemented after the 2005 London Underground bombings that allow for surveillance, arrest, detention and relocation of terror suspects. These so-called control orders and pre-charge detentions could be important tools in reducing the risk that returning jihadists will attempt attacks in the U.K.

This has triggered familiar protests by some civil libertarians that such moves are unlawful and put the West on a slippery slope to authoritarianism. But the government would be on firm legal ground because previous governments that wrote the laws have understood that a free society needs sufficient tools to counter terrorist threats.

Ms. May can invoke broad personal authority under the royal prerogative to restrict or rescind a British passport “where a person’s past or proposed activities are so demonstrably undesirable that the grant or continued enjoyment of passport facilities would be contrary to the public interest.” This reflects a longstanding view that a passport is a privilege, not a right. Governments routinely confiscate or restrict passports for less serious offenses than terrorism, such as white-collar crimes. Parliament should give British police the power to temporarily seize passports at the border. Currently, police can’t apply for the prerogative at the border.

The selective investigation of the political speech of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s allies goes to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals next week, and with any luck the judges will vindicate a district court’s preliminary injunction that has shut down the probe. They should do so before the November election because this unconstitutional exercise is being exploited by Mr. Walker’s enemies to defeat him.

The latest media misinformation concerns emails that show Mr. Walker raised money for the Wisconsin Club for Growth. But raising money for Super Pacs and 501(c) groups is routine political behavior, as President Obama and Harry Reid routinely demonstrate.

Prosecutors pursuing Mr. Walker have been pushing a theory of campaign-finance law that the state’s own campaign finance regulator, the Government Accountability Board, has admitted is unconstitutional under Supreme Court precedent. The theory has also been rejected by the Seventh Circuit and by two judges in the Walker probe.
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You’d never guess any of this from reading the anti-Walker press. Legal activity is made to look nefarious with loose references to terms like “coordination” that have precise definitions for what qualifies as political advocacy under the law.

The Washington Post said Mr. Walker solicited contributions from donors “to give large contributions to an allied tax-exempt group that backed him and other state GOP lawmakers.” Well, no, because the Club for Growth never ran campaign ads for Mr. Walker. The NYTIMES said one of Mr. Walker’s campaign aides “directed the political spending of the outside groups, most of them nonprofits, and in effect controlled some of them.” No again, because one person’s relationship with two groups does not equal control or coordination under the law.