RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3425/islam-extremism

William DiPuccio holds a Ph.D. in religious studies and has authored numerous articles and essays on both religion and science. He has also worked and taught in both fields. You can find his blog, Science Et Cetera, at http://scienceetcetera.blogspot.com/

Islamists seem to be driven not only to establish the hegemony of Islam by supplanting secular governments and legal systems, but also by enforcing religious purity according to their own standards. Muslims in America – most of whom were undoubtedly fleeing abuse, not trying to bring it with them – should of course be treated with the same respect and deference extended to people of other religions But our civility should not blind us to the potential for extremism – a concern shared by 60% of Muslim Americans – or to the religious connections between Islam and terrorism.

An excursion into the blogosphere reveals the polarization which attends Islamic issues. Comment areas are populated with readers who seem to think that Islam is a monolithic belief system. This myth, maintained by both “Islamophiles” and “Islamophobes,” has overshadowed any nuanced discussion of Islam.

Islam is a diverse religion. Many Muslims who have immigrated to America and Europe have adopted Western ideals of free speech and religious toleration. Those in the United States have done particularly well in assimilating these values.[1] In a democracy, in which the individual is regarded as the basic unit of society, a person is judged not by his ethnic or religious associations, but by his ideas and behavior.

Although nearly half (42%) of the American public, as well as the U.S. government, believe that Islam is no more likely to encourage violence than any other religion,[2] the radical tendencies which exist in Islam are unambiguously present and they continue to fuel terrorism and supremacist ideologies, such as Islamism, on a scale not seen in other modern religions. This fact, though politically incorrect, has not escaped the notice of Muslims here in the U.S. According to a 2011 Pew survey, 60% of Muslim Americans are concerned about the rise of Islamic extremism in the U.S., and 21% feel that there is significant support for extremism in the Muslim community.[3]

Americans and government officials who deny that there is a religious link between Islam and terrorism face a disconnect between their idealism, which seeks the good in all things, and the hard edge of historical reality. Western liberal optimism places its faith in reason and the essential goodness of mankind. According to this worldview, Islam is a religion of peace, and, given favorable political and economic opportunities, even terrorists can be persuaded to live in harmony with the rest of the world.

In February of 2008, then-Senator Barack Obama spoke to a campaign rally crowd in Wisconsin and declared that “words matter.” In shaping the image that was the centerpiece of the “idea of Obama,” he ginned-up an air of intellectualism using the tactic of manipulating through emotion, a potent tool in the Progressive war chest. “Don’t tell me words don’t matter,” he said. “I have a dream. Just words. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. Just words. We have nothing to fear but fear itself. Just words…just speeches.” Indeed, Mr. Obama is absolutely correct, a rare point where I agree with him. The problem is this. If we hold him to his own words, then the statements of his closest ally, Attorney General Eric Holder, must be taken literally. This is where I find myself very concerned.

The events in Ferguson, Missouri, are serious on many levels. We have the death of a young man. We have the brutal beating of a police officer at the hand of this dead young man. We have a community that exists on the head of a racial powder keg, begging for a spark to light the fuse. And we have perhaps the most politically motivated – and many would say, and rightfully so, divisive – United States Attorney’s General in the history of our nation in Eric Holder, injecting himself into this delicate situation; usurping the authority of local, county and state law enforcement and making some statements where words certainly do matter.

In an op-ed in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Mr. Holder attempted to present a balanced approach, calling for calm and temperance on both sides of the issue. But hidden in his words – and let’s remember, this administration insists that “words matter” – was a declaration that literally reserved the final opinion on the matter to the Department of Justice and, in fact, the Attorney’s General himself:

“This is my pledge to the people of Ferguson: Our investigation into this matter will be full, it will be fair, and it will be independent. And beyond the investigation itself, we will work with the police, civil rights leaders, and members of the public to ensure that this tragedy can give rise to new understanding — and robust action — aimed at bridging persistent gaps between law enforcement officials and the communities we serve. Long after the events of Aug. 9 have receded from the headlines, the Justice Department will continue to stand with this community.” (Emphasis mine)

If someone makes a pledge to someone, or to a group, it is – usually – a declaration of intention: “I pledge to be there,” “I pledge not to let you down,” “I pledge to adhere to the law,” “I pledge to do my best.” In Mr. Holder’s crafted statement he declares that the investigation into the events in Ferguson, Missouri “will be,” as if to say “it will be what we determine it to be.” Wouldn’t a more appropriately crafted statement be worded to say, “This is my pledge to the people of Ferguson: I will do everything in my power to make sure that the investigation into this matter is done to the fullest extent and I will insist, at every turn, that it be done in a fair and just manner for everyone involved…”

“I am Attorney General…but also a black man,” proclaimed Eric Holder upon arriving in Ferguson, Missouri to meet with the gentle-giant’s (Rush’s term) family to dispense blind justice over grape sodas. Then we have Gov. Nixon appointing Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson, a black man from Ferguson with no prior authority to focus on local matters, to head up law enforcement’s efforts dealing with rioting. I believe these events let’s all of us profilers out of the closet.

I am an Eagle Lake resident, a white man and I can now proclaim, a proud profiler. Some back story. In the 1970s I was an Eli Lilly sales representative, spending my final two years at a teaching / research hospital. Among the staff were a good number of Indian-American physicians that were particularly pleasant, collegial and unfailingly polite. For the past twenty-five years I have enjoyed a national reputation in my narrow area of expertise that has given me the rare experience of being solicited for advice by clients throughout the US. Other than intellectual content within national journals for which I write, and rather frequent interviews, I don’t do any marketing or make efforts to attract clients. In other words, my clients all self-select themselves to use my services that benefit and protect their families (e.g., educational funding, estate planning, etc.).

Though I can’t be absolutely certain because I deal with clients via phone and various written conveyances, not in person, I believe the only non-white clients that have solicited me are Indian-Americans, and in high numbers, and my experiences from the 1970s continue.

As a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas is hammered out, much talk is heard about aid packages for Gaza, as though none previously existed. The refrain is heard that Gazans are living in a teeming, open-air prison. Repeated endlessly by those under obligation to know the facts, the myth has it that Gaza is, according to:

Robert Fisk, veteran Middle East correspondent: “the most overpopulated few square miles in the whole world.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-why-bombing-ashkelon-is-the-most-tragic-irony-1216228.html

Christopher Gunness, spokesman for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency: “one of the most densely populated parts of this planet.”

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98778093

Amjad Attlah and Daniel Levy of the New American Foundation: “the world’s most densely populated territory.”

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98778093

James Zogby, founder and president of the Arab American Institute: “one of the most densely populated places on earth.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjP9jqA3nes

Untrue.

The dissolution of the colonial creation named “Iraq” is now almost complete. Perhaps what comes next is a return to the past; not a brutal Islamic “caliphate,” but something more basic.

Today, Mesopotamia is reappearing. The term is a Greek word meaning “the land between the two rivers.” The Tigris and Euphrates Rivers are the defining features, each arising in mountains far to the north of Baghdad. The rivers and their annual floods defined the landscape, the cycle of life and the worldview of civilizations. The deserts to the west and the mountains to the east and far north provided rough boundaries and were liminal spaces related to the center, but yet separate and apart, sunbaked and dangerous. Inside Mesopotamia was a cauldron.

From the Sumerians of the third millennium BCE through the Assyrian and Babylonian civilizations of the second and first millennia BCE, to the Abbasids of the eighth century CE and until the arrival of the British in the early twentieth century, the space called Mesopotamia was the container for civilizations that rose and collapsed. Cultures invented writing and built the first cities, growing and shrinking in response to changing river courses and global climate. They conquered and were conquered, traded with surrounding regions, and formed a baggy but recognizable whole—what we call Mesopotamian civilization.

Internal distinctions were paramount. Babylonia in the south was dominated by the rivers and the annual flood, irrigation agriculture and seemingly unrelenting heat and mud. Assyria in the northern, rain-fed zone sat amidst undulating plains and foothills. Culturally, Babylonia was older and more developed, the “heartland of cities” going back to 4000 BCE, a primacy that Assyria acknowledged even in periods when they dominated the south. By and large, both shared the same deities and myths, the same aggressive tendencies, and the same fear and loathing of surrounding regions. But competition, warfare and repression were constant.

For inhabitants, that is to say the kings and priests whose thoughts we read on clay tablets many millennia later, Mesopotamia the whole, a unity of north and south, was an ideal—the supreme prize, something overseen by the gods—to be aspired to and claimed by quotidian rulers. But, much like the idea of “Iraq,” it was conceptual, rather than practical. The south often dominated the north and vice versa, but never for very long.

It is the now familiar nightmare image. A kneeling prisoner, and behind him a black-hooded man speaking to camera. The standing man denounces the West and claims that his form of Islam is under attack. He then saws off the head of the hostage. Why did Wednesday morning’s video stand out? Because this time the captive was an American journalist —James Foley— and his murderer is speaking in an unmistakable London accent.
The revulsion with which this latest Islamist atrocity has been greeted is of course understandable. But it is also surprising. This is no one-off, certainly no anomaly. Rather it is the continuation of an entirely foreseeable trend. Britain has long been a global hub of terror export, so much so that senior US government officials have suggested the next attack on US soil is likely to come from UK citizens. All countries — from Australia to Scandinavia — now have a problem with Islamic extremists. But the world could be forgiven for suspecting that Britain has become the weak link in the international fight against jihadism. And they would be right. This is not even the first beheading of an American journalist to have been arranged by a British man from London.

In 2002, 27-year-old Omar Sheikh was in Pakistan. A north London-born graduate of a private school and the London School of Economics, he had gone to fight in the Balkans and Kashmir in the 1990s. In 1994 he was arrested and jailed for his involvement in the kidnapping of three Britons and an American in India. Released in 1999 in exchange for the passengers and crew of the hijacked Air India flight IC-814, he was subsequently connected to the bombing of an American cultural centre in Calcutta in January 2002 and that same month organised the kidnapping and beheading of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

Back then it was possible to dismiss Omar Sheikh as a one-off — a macabre fluke. His alma mater shrugged off concerns about the number of London-based students who had got involved in Islamic extremism or the radical preachers touring the country. The shrug became a little harder to maintain — though maintained it was — the next year when two British men — Asif Hanif, 21, from Hounslow in west London and Omar Khan Sharif, 27 — carried out a suicide bombing in a bar on the waterfront in Tel Aviv. Omar Sharif had been a student of King’s College London, just across the road from LSE. That time the glory of killing three Israelis and wounding over 50 was claimed by the terrorist group Hamas.

As the list of British-born jihadists grew, their activities also got closer to home. On 7 July 2005, British-born Muslims carried out the first suicide bombings on British soil, with four more attempted a fortnight later. On Christmas Day 2009, the former head of the Islamic Society at University College London attempted to explode a bomb on a plane as it landed in Detroit. Last year, two converts decapitated Drummer Lee Rigby in broad daylight in south London. It is important to keep in mind that these are just the most high-profile cases. But the list of cases which were thwarted by good security work or sheer luck is astonishing. As well as the constant stream of convictions, at least one large-scale mass atrocity attempt on the lives of the British public was thwarted each year. As were smaller attempts. Everybody still remembers the killing of Lee Rigby, but how many people recall the case of Parviz Khan’s Birmingham terrorist cell? Khan was convicted in 2008 for a plot the previous year to kidnap and behead a British Muslim soldier on video.

Why James Risen may be headed for jail.

After nearly four years of procedural delay, the trial of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling is set to open shortly. Sterling was indicted at the end of 2010 for leaking information about a top-secret CIA operation to James Risen of the New York Times in violation of the espionage statutes. It is difficult to regard Sterling as in any sense a whistleblower, though, predictably, he calls himself such. He appears to have given Risen CIA secrets as a way to settle scores with the agency in a dispute over the presence of classified information in memoirs he sought to publish and also for being the victim of what, following a poor performance review, he claimed was racial bias.

The trouble all began in August 2000, when Sterling, who is African-American, filed a racial-discrimination complaint against the CIA that the spy agency’s equal-employment office found had no foundation. A year later, Sterling filed a suit against the CIA based on the same complaint. In the weeks after 9/11, Sterling demanded a cash settlement, which the CIA declined to provide. Over the course of the next two years, Sterling put forward additional settlement demands, with the final one totaling $200,000 to be accompanied by a favorable employment recommendation. When that too was refused, Sterling filed a second lawsuit regarding CIA restrictions on his unpublished memoir. He also allegedly began funneling top-secret information to James Risen. Both of Sterling’s lawsuits were eventually dismissed by the courts.

The leaked information in question concerns Operation Merlin, a plan to pass along faulty blueprints of the trigger of a nuclear bomb to Iranian nuclear scientists. If Risen’s reporting is to be credited​—​and there is reason not to credit some of its most important details, as I noted in “Not Every Leak Is Fit to Print” (in the February 18, 2008, issue of this magazine)​—​subtle errors in the drawings were intended to derail the progress of Iran’s bomb-making effort. CIA director George Tenet and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice warned Times higher-ups that information in Risen’s proposed story would not only compromise the U.S. ability to collect intelligence about Iran, but might also lead to violent reprisal against and even the death of an individual that the CIA has identified only as “human asset No. 1.”
Editors at the Times listened to the CIA’s caution and weighed it against the news value of the story. This became one of the exceptional occasions in which the editors of the paper heeded the government’s warning. The Times spiked Risen’s story. But that was not the end of it. Risen turned around, did some additional reporting, and then published the secrets of Operation Merlin on his own as a chapter in his 2006 book, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration.

One thing an old Ivy League revolutionary can’t stand is people noticing that he represents the Establishment, that he embodies the System to a point where he can make it stop and make it go. He will go to great lengths to convince himself, if not others, this is not so.

Take Eric H. Holder Jr., Columbia College Class of 1973, Columbia Law School Class of 1976, now into his sixth year as U.S. attorney general of the Obama Imperium. The man really wants us to think he is not also “the man.”

Yes, he is “the attorney general of the United States,” as Holder told a group of St. Louis Community College students in Ferguson, Missouri, this week. “But I am also a black man.”

Holder took himself to Ferguson to spur the federal civil rights probe by more than 40 FBI agents into the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown, who was black, by 28-year-old police officer Darren Wilson, who is white. As the justice chief declared at local FBI headquarters: “We’re looking for possible violations of federal civil rights statutes.” Obviously, Holder left those scales of impartiality at home. Not that he would need them in Missouri, where Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon announced “a vigorous prosecution must now be pursued,” presumably of police officer Wilson.

Even the dark suits and American flags fail to obscure the 21st-century lynch mob at work. According to the snap judgment of federal and state authorities, Wilson shot the 6-foot-4, 292-pound man multiple times for “racist” reasons. The other story out there gathering reportorial mass is that Wilson fired as Brown charged him after having beaten Wilson to the point of fracturing his orbital socket and rendering the six-year veteran cop nearly unconscious – but, heavens, don’t let what’s quaintly known as the judicial process function unimpeded to ascertain the facts. Keep that media circus going because the nation’s top cop is ringmaster.

In his “closed-door meeting” – no media – at the community college, Holder wanted students to know he understood their “mistrust” of police. In fact, he wanted the whole country to know it because the Justice Department later released excerpts of his remarks. “I can remember being stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike on two occasions and accused of speeding,” the handout says. “Pulled over … ‘Let me search your car’ … Go through the trunk of my car, look under the seats and all this kind of stuff. I remember how humiliating that was and how angry I was and the impact it had on me.”

Hang on a sec. As a young man, my husband was pulled over on the New Jersey Turnpike. The state trooper ordered him to take his suitcase out of his car and dump his belongings on the ground. The officer looked at everything, through the trunk, under the backseat, turning up a pebble the officer tentatively identified as a “marijuana seed.” Then he noticed an unusual object in the mess. “What’s that?” he demanded. “Avon aftershave,” my future husband replied, unscrewing the cap of the Snoopy-shaped bottle.

1. The Gaza War has demonstrated the impressive performance of the Iron Dome short-range missile defense system, the Trophy active defense system for tanks and armed personnel carriers, and additional Israeli-developed military systems. This is enhancing respect for Israel’s defense and commercial high tech sector, and increasing interest in buying Israeli technology products and acquiring – and investing in – Israeli high tech companies.

2. Israel is India’s 4th largest supplier of military systems, following the US, Russia and France. India is the world’s largest importer of military systems (Globes, August 14).

2. According to the OECD annual report, Israel is the 4th most attractive country for foreign direct investment (FDI) per Growth Domestic Product (GDP) – 4% of GDP, compared to 1.4% of foreign direct investment per GDP in developed countries and 1.6% in the top 16 economies. Luxembourg, Ireland and Chile are ahead of Israel. The scope of foreign direct investment demonstrates the level of confidence in the long term viability of economic growth (Globes Business Daily, August 20, 2014).

3. Israel’s MobilEye raised $1.02bn on Wall Street (reflecting a $5.3bn market value), the highest ever Israeli public offering there: Cellcom – $400mn in 2007, Delek Logistics – $193mn in 2012, Alon USA – $188mn in 2005, Delek USA – $184mn in 2006, Alon USA Partners – $184mn in 2012, Ness Technologies – $161mn in 2004, BigBand – $160mn in 2007, Kite Pharma – $147mn in 2014 and Saifan – $135mn in 2005 (Globes, August 4).

Israel’s BioBlast, MacroCure and VBL raised 435mn, $53mn and $65mn respectively on NASDAQ (Globes, August 1).

4. The Swiss pharmaceutical giant, Novartis, has agreed to take a 15% stake in Israel’s Gamida Cell (stem cell therapies) in a deal that could reach over $600mn. Novartis will invest $35mn immediately, with a buyout option, pending a series of milestones in 2015 (Reuters, August 19).

America’s 3D Systems acquired Israel’s Simbionix for $120mn (Globes, August 1).

Sweden’s Vostok Nafta, London’s Access Industries (Len Balvatnik) and other investors participated in a $150mn round by Israel’s Get Taxi (Globes, August 14).

The video of the beheading of American journalist James Foley went viral this week, in ‎spite of Twitter and YouTube efforts to remove it from their sites for its graphic content.‎

This is understandable, as there is an element of voyeurism involved in watching the gory ‎clip. And its mass circulation has the unintentional effect of cheapening the horror of ‎Foley’s death in an almost pornographic way.‎

However, it is precisely the chilling depiction of the slaughter that provides the world ‎with a glimpse into the nature of the Islamic State group (ISIS), the Sunni terrorist organization that is trying to ‎take over Syria and Iraq, before turning the entire region (and then the world) into an ‎Islamic caliphate.‎

Not that the group has been hiding its blood lust. On the contrary, it is proud of its ‎brutality and pedophilia. And tales of its raping, maiming and killing of Christians are ‎being told, albeit with far less gusto than the media reserves for Israeli air strikes in Gaza.‎

Nor was it unknown in Washington that Foley and other Americans were being held by ‎ISIS.‎

But it wasn’t until President Barack Obama watched the footage of Foley’s murder, in ‎the video titled “Message to America,” that the ostensible leader of the Free World was ‎forced to face what the West is up against. And though his response was to say that ISIS ‎‎”speaks for no religion,” even he could not escape the horrors going on in the Middle East ‎‎ — and in this case cultivated in Britain — perpetrated by Islamists. ‎

Indeed, it is one thing to spend years theorizing, strategizing and looking the other way ‎when mass murder is taking place; it is quite another to see an individual U.S. citizen being ‎executed on camera. ‎

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the opportunity of the shock value of the ‎video to tell the world, particularly the Obama administration, that “Hamas is ISIS. ISIS ‎is Hamas. They’re the enemies of peace, they’re the enemies of Israel, they’re the enemies ‎of all civilized countries.”‎