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https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/pakistan-tightrope/

Pakistan risks falling off a tightrope as it attempts to balance its relations with rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Recent developments – including the Baloch nationalist attack on a luxury hotel in the strategic port city of Gwadar and a legal dispute over completion of a gas pipeline that took place against the backdrop of Saudi-Iranian-Qatari competition for the Pakistani gas market – suggest that Pakistan is in an increasingly tenuous position.

The South Asian nation’s seemingly unsustainable tightrope walk is likely to have consequences for the security of China’s massive US$45 billion investment in the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a crown jewel of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative. It could also affect the roughly US$10 billion the Saudis are planning to invest in a refinery and copper mine in the troubled Pakistani province of Balochistan. Pakistani hopes are dwindling that it will be able to contain political violence – a necessity if it is to attract more badly needed foreign investment and avoid sanctions for inadequate counterterrorism measures.

The assault on the highly secured Zaver Pearl Continental Hotel Gwadar (a part of Pakistan’s largest luxury hotel chain), in which at least five people were killed, was the second incident since Pakistani PM Imran Khan and Iranian president Hassan Rouhani agreed last month to step up security cooperation along their 959-kilometer-long border.

https://www.memri.org/reports/egyptian-german-scholar-hamed-abdel-samad-islamic-extremism-stems-core-islam-tens-thousands

Egyptian-German scholar Hamed Abdel-Samad said that Islamic extremism and terrorism stems from the “core of Islam” – from its texts, its history of conquests, its founder, and its ideology – and that the problem does not lie only with the returning ISIS members, but with the “multiple layers of radicalization,” with which the governmental and Islamic structures are not equipped to deal. “There are thousands, tens of thousands, of them living among us,” he warned, calling to try ISIS fighters in international tribunals and to impose harsher punishments. Abdel-Samad, who was participating on a talk show on the Austrian Servus TV channel on February 21, talked about the dangers to the child’s worldview posed by the victim’s mentality, by violence in the family, by mixed messages on sexuality, and by the clash of cultures. He discussed the violence and lack of freedom suffered by Muslim women, saying: “How often has this imaginary god ruined people!”

To view the clip of Egyptian-German scholar Hamed Abdel-Samad on MEMRI TV, click here or below.

“Many Muslims From Every Muslim Country Joined ISIS, The First Group Came From Saudi Arabia, I Don’t Think Islamophobia Exists There, The Second Group Came From The Middle Class Of Tunisia. There Is Not Much Islamophobia There Either”

Hamed Abdel-Samad: “Many Muslims from every Muslim country joined ISIS. The first group came from Saudi Arabia. I don’t think Islamophobia exists there. The second group came from the middle class of Tunisia. There is not much Islamophobia there either. There is not a single Islamic country that is devoid of terrorism and of increasing radicalization.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14221/turkey-celebrate-fire-notre-dame

The official Facebook page of Turkey’s pro-government daily, Sabah, for example, is filled with praise for the destruction of the cathedral.

Sadly, Islamic supremacism not only targets the churches of Western Christians. It targets Yazidi, Zoroastrian, Buddhist and Hindu temples too. These religious minorities in the Muslim world are completely vulnerable, defenseless and severely persecuted…. In many Muslim countries, Muslim-on-Muslim violence is also quite commonplace. The Islamic hatred of different religious groups is not about geography — the East or the West. It is about religious faith.

What is heartbreaking is that arson and other forms of desecration of churches have been going on in France and other countries on a regular basis, with barely a mention by the media or Western governments.

French authorities were quick to rule out arson as the cause of the devastating blaze at the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris on April 15. Whatever the final investigation reveals, many extremist Muslims in Turkey were equally swift in their celebration of the fire that has demolished large parts of the historic structure.

The official Facebook page of the pro-government daily, Sabah, for example, is filled with praise for the destruction of the cathedral.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-demise-of-hong-kong-11558134193

When a Hong Kong Legislative Council meeting ended in a brawl last Saturday with one lawmaker hospitalized, the Hong Kong government denounced the ”unprecedented” fight. But what did it expect? The weekend scuffle concerned a proposed extradition law that would allow the transfer of local residents from Hong Kong to Mainland China and eviscerate Hong Kong’s legal independence.

In the 1997 handover from British to Chinese rule, Beijing promised Hong Kong a high degree of autonomy under “one country, two systems” until 2047. But China has gradually increased its control over Hong Kong law and politics. It has pressed the city to remove pro-democracy lawmakers from office, outlaw the pro-independence Hong Kong National Party, refuse a visa to a foreign journalist who had moderated an event featuring the HKNP founder, and last month imprison leaders of the 2014 pro-democracy protests.

An extradition law could be the knockout blow. It would compromise Hong Kong’s independent legal system by allowing case-by-case extradition to Mainland China and elsewhere. Beijing could accuse anyone living in Hong Kong of one of 37 eligible crimes and demand he be sent to a Mainland court for trial, where the legal system is under control of the Communist Party. In 2018 China’s Jiangsu province acquitted 43 people while convicting 96,271.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/growing-international-movement-to-boycott-israel-is-condemned-by-germany-11558108099

BERLIN—The German parliament condemned as anti-Semitic a growing international movement that targets Israel and called on the government to withdraw funding for events or institutions affiliated with the initiative.

The Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions movement, which originated in Palestinian circles, calls for academic, cultural, economic and academic boycotts of Israel. Support for BDS is broad-based across the European center-left, but it also has backing among segments of the far-right and the far-left as well as in some Islamist groupings. It has also gained traction in the U.S.

On Friday, a broad majority of German legislators supported a resolution titled “Decisively Oppose the BDS Movement and Fight Anti-Semitism” that strongly condemned the initiative and compared its methods to Nazi-era campaigns targeting Jewish businesses in Germany.

The resolution will immediately stop funding and other forms of support for BDS-related events from the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, but it isn’t binding on the government. A spokesman for the German government didn’t immediately comment on whether it would follow parliament’s lead.

https://www.cjnews.com/

“Ali described “Islamist-driven anti-Semitism as the reigning anti-Semitism of the day,” and said that it’s distinct from the “classic” European variety, or today’s white supremacy movement.“Little attention is paid (to it) and that is a pity because it is the most zealous, most potent Jew hatred,” she said. “It both condemns Jews wholesale and seeks to destroy the State of Israel.”

Islamic anti-Semitism is of a “scale and scope” that most people in the West do not understand and is therefore all the more insidious, the controversial critic of the Muslim religion, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, told a capacity audience at the Jewish Public Library (JPL) in Montreal on May 13.

The Somali-born Ali, 49, grew up being told that Jews were evil and reflexively hated them, even though she had never met one. In her teens, she joined the Muslim Brotherhood, in which she was indoctrinated to believe that Jews were a sub-human enemy and that their state occupies Muslim lands and must be destroyed.

After fleeing to avoid a forced marriage, Ali found refuge in the Netherlands, where her views were transformed. She became an activist for Muslim women’s rights and was elected to the Dutch parliament.

She wrote the short, but incendiary, 2004 film Submission, a critique of Islam’s subjugation of women, whose director, Theo van Gogh, was murdered by a Muslim fundamentalist.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/23863

In the six countries we conducted the survey , approximately 45% of Muslims agreed with this claim. Among non-Muslims it was eight percent.

Manfred Gerstenfeld interviews Ruud Koopmans

“Antisemitism in the Netherlands has grown in the past 10-20 years like in other countries in Europe. It is difficult to prove the spread of verbal antisemitism which can hardly be quantified. The rise of social media has increased this type of abuse. It aims at many targets, including Jews, Zionists and Israel. I do not give much weight to it.

“A stronger and more severe form of antisemitism is threats and violence. We know that this violence has also grown in Europe. Sometimes it is even lethal.”

Dr. Ruud Koopmans was born in the Netherlands in 1961. In 1992 he received his Ph.D in sociology at the University of Amsterdam. He is professor of Sociology and Migration Research at the Humboldt University of Berlin and director of the research unit “Migration, Integration and Transnationalization” at the WZB Berlin Social Center.

Koopmans says: “I have done some research on antisemitism. In 2015, I studied religious fundamentalism in six European countries including the Netherlands. One question asked interviewees their opinion about the statement that Jews cannot be trusted. In the six countries concerned approximately 45% of Muslims agreed with this claim. Among non-Muslims it was eight percent.

‘Both in the Netherlands and in Germany there is good data about punishable antisemitic acts. Statistics are however rather vague about the perpetrators’ origins. The situation in Germany is even worse than in the Netherlands. It is impossible to obtain data about the share of migrants in various crimes.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14236/palestinians-oppose-economic-prosperity

To advance his goal, Ashraf Jabari recently announced the establishment of a new party that calls for focusing on economic prosperity for Palestinians. The Reform and Development Party seeks to solve the economic problems of the Palestinians, particularly high unemployment, he said. “We have an army of university graduates who are unemployed. We’ve reached a situation where a young [Palestinian] man holding a Master’s degree in law has to work as a street vendor because he can’t find work.”

Instead of giving Jabari a chance to carry out his initiative, Palestinians have waged a massive smear campaign against him, with many denouncing him as a “traitor” and “collaborator” with Israel and Jews. Some Palestinians have even gone as far as calling for his arrest or execution.

The upcoming peace plan, according to various reports, talks about giving the Palestinians billions of dollars and raising money for them from wealthy Arab countries. Yet, as Jabari’s case makes clear, the Palestinians are less invested in gaining economic stability than they are in hating Israel.

For Palestinians, the financial aid is a cynical attempt to lure them away from their struggle against Israel — and no Palestinian leader has the stomach to face the threats that Jabari is currently confronting. So, far from any “deal of the century,” the Palestinian leaders long ago struck a dirty deal of their own: they put their stock in Israel-hatred rather than in their own people.

In most normal societies, a businessman who seeks to improve the living conditions of his people by boosting the economy and creating job opportunities for the unemployed — including a host of jobless university graduates — is treated with respect. The Palestinians, however, do not seem to belong to those societies.Ashraf Jabari is a 45-year-old businessman from the West Bank city of Hebron. A member of a large Palestinian clan in the city, Jabari believes in economic cooperation and peaceful coexistence with his Jewish neighbors, including settlers living in the West Bank.

https://bit.ly/2LYX0p4

“The Middle East and North Africa have a well-deserved reputation for being a region plagued by war and conflict. Every decade since the end of WW2 has seen at least one interstate conflict; it has also witnessed 25 types of intrastate war, including insurgencies, civil wars and protracted terrorism. In the same timeframe, 2.3 million citizens have died as a result of political violence – 40% of the global total of battle-related deaths, although the region accounts for 5% of the world’s population…. 25 of these [intrastate] conflicts have claimed 1.5 million victims – 64% of the region’s total war deaths…. ” (Florence Gaub, Deputy Director, European Union Institute for Security Studies, October, 2017).

Middle East inter and intra-Arab/Muslim conflicts – some of them 1,400 year old – have been largely intractable, defying Western conventional wisdom, which has been dominated by the well-meaning pursuit of peaceful-coexistence, conflict-resolution, democracy and improved standard of living.

According to Dr. Daniel Pipes and Prof. Gunnar Heinsohn, some 11 million Muslims have been killed in wars from 1948-2007, only 35,000 of them in Arab-Israel wars – 0.3%!

According to Dr. Daniel Pipes and Prof. Gunnar Heinsohn, some 11 million Muslims have been killed in wars from 1948-2007, only 35,000 of them in Arab-Israel wars – 0.3%!Middle East inter and intra-Arab/Muslim conflicts – which preceded the 1948 establishment of Israel – have exposed the oversimplification of conventional Western wisdom, which has approached the Arab-Israeli conflict as if it were “the Middle East conflict.”