RUTHFULLY YOURS

In 2007, in a highly controversial move, Keith Hakim Ellison, the first Muslim congressman, swore his oath of office on a copy of the Koran. In effect, Ellison rejected the values that unify Americans and instead pledged to follow a religious text that commands Muslims to wage war against secular legal systems.

Today, swearing the oath of office on the Koran and even simultaneously praising Allah have become almost commonplace. In 2016, Minneapolis Park Board member and Somalian refugee, A.K. Hassan took his oath on a massively oversized Koran and proclaimed his commitment to serve “in the name of Allah.” In 2015, another Somali refugee, Ilhan Omar, elected to the Minnesota House of Representative, swore on the Koran, as did Carolyn Walker-Diallo, the first Muslim woman judge elected to Brooklyn’s 7th Municipal District, and Abdullah Hammoud, a Michigan state representative.

In “Muslim Brotherhood Political Infiltration on Steroids,” I described how as early as 1987, FBI information revealed that the Muslim Brotherhood – a Middle East political organization considered a terrorist organization by five Arab countries and Russia – was seeking to “peacefully get inside the United States Government” and accomplish “the ultimate goal of overthrowing all non-Islamic governments.” Several M.B. front groups, including Project Mobilize; the United States Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO); and Jetpac, Inc., had been created to politically exploit America’s Muslim community to achieve supremacist goals set forth in the Muslim Brotherhood’s strategic plan, the Explanatory Memorandum.

As if taking a cue from the memorandum, the executive director of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), Nihad Awad, spoke in January 2016, at the 14th annual Muslim American Society-Islamic Circle of North America (MAS-ICNA) conference in Chicago. He urged Muslims to “[t]urn your centers, Islamic centers, mosques into registration centers for voters, into polling stations during election time.”

The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHCR) itself has become a prime motivator and enforcer of the rejection of human rights.

The other charters of human rights are to be found exclusively in the Muslim world. Anything that falls within Islamic shari’a law is a human right; anything that does not fall within shari’a is not a human right.

“For us the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is nothing but a collection of mumbo-jumbo by disciples of Satan”. — ‘Ali Khamene’i, Iran’s current Supreme Leader.

“The underlying thesis in all the Islamic human rights schemes is that the rights afforded in international law are too generous and only become acceptable when they are subjected to Islamic restrictions”. — Ann Elizabeth Mayer, Islam and Human Rights: Tradition and Politics.

The history of human rights, albeit fragmented, is a long and often honourable expression of religious and civic endeavour. The scriptures of most religions refer to the ways in which we should treat our fellow man, from the Bible in antiquity to the broadly liberal Baha’i scriptures written in Persian and Arabic in the late nineteenth century. Religious precepts have served to protect human beings from arbitrary mistreatment in Hinduism, Buddhism, and other faiths.

Modern human rights declarations and legislation developed in a secular context, above all as an expression of democratic values, and informed by Judaeo-Christian ethics. The earliest formulations of secular human rights legislation are to be found in the 1789 French Declaration on the Rights of Man and the Citizen and the 1791 US Constitution, the first 10 amendments of which form the Bill of Rights.

It was not until after the Second World War, however, that an even wider formulation of human rights came into being. Like the French and American declarations, these fresh formulas had much to do with the notion of individual rights: rights that were lodged in the political and legislative strategies of modern democratic states. Prior to that, rights tended to be located in communities, with individuals being subject to the laws and pressures of the tribe – as in the limitation of rights for Jews and Christians within Muslim societies, or for Jews in Europe, notably in ghettoes. This new construction of rights — through religious or ethnic identity — has, for some decades now, found expression in democratic states in “multiculturalism”.

Almost everything about the Turkish Republic is a lie or, at best, a half-truth, starting with its name. As the secular state is progressively dismantled the Islamic revivalism of the current regime is no mere nostalgia for the Ottoman heritage. It is something far more sinister.

The imminent demise of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s “caliphate” must be counted as a clear win in the Long War or the War of Freedom and yet, to borrow from Churchill, we are a long way from final victory: “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” Even that may be overly optimistic. Still incapable of identifying our mortal enemy, we remain stuck in 1938. This major peril confronting us is yet another incarnation of Islamic revivalism, one more manifestation of the hydra-like Global Jihad at war with Dar al-Garb (House of the West). The danger posed to the world by the burgeoning Islamic state of Turkey remains hidden in plain sight.

Almost everything about the Turkish Republic is a lie or, at the very best, a half-truth, starting with its name. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s secular Turkish Republic is being dismantled piecemeal by a modern-day demagogue, President Erdoğan. If the Tribune of Anatolia, who possesses the second-largest army in NATO, holds onto power until October 29, 2023—the centenary of the proclamation of the republic—his suzerainty is no doubt going to be reconstituted as the Islamic Republic of Turkey. This development will denote something more than modern-day Turks revisiting their Ottoman heritage. Ottoman-style Islam, as demanding and controlling as it was, might be counted as mild-mannered and easy-going compared with the fanatical millennialism of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

The rise and rise of Erdoğan, whose Freedom and Justice Party (AKP) won the 2002 parliamentary elections and has stayed in power ever since, did not occur in a vacuum. Erdoğan, as Soner Cagaptay points out in The New Sultan: Erdoğan and the Crisis of Modern Turkey (2017), was an acolyte of Necmettin Erbakan, a Turkish version of historic members of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb. The reason Erbakan’s vision of Islamic revivalism began to resonate in Turkey during the last twenty-five years of the twentieth century would probably require an investigation rooted in psychiatric anthropology. To make it brief, many Turks, especially in the Anatolian hinterland, were left feeling uncomfortable, dissatisfied and straight-out confused by Atatürk’s experiment in Western-style modernity.

Samuel P. Huntington, in The Clash of Civilisations?, encapsulated the problem as well as anyone. Turkey is a quintessential “torn country”, caught between the House of Freedom to its immediate north and Islamic rectitude to its south:

[Kemalists] allied Turkey with the West in NATO and in the Gulf War; they applied for membership in the European community. At the same time, however, elements in Turkish society have supported an Islamic revival and have argued that Turkey is basically a Middle Eastern society.

Dropping barrels of dynamite on houses and hospitals in a Palestinian refugee camp is apparently of no interest to those who pretend to champion Palestinians around the world. Nor does the issue seem to move the UN Security Council.

UNRWA said that of the estimated 438,000 Palestine refugees remaining inside Syria, more than 95% (418,000) are in critical need of sustained humanitarian assistance.

As for the leaders of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip? They are otherwise occupied. Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority and Hamas are too busy lunging at each other’s throats and trying to take down Israel to pay much attention to their people’s suffering in Syria.

While all eyes are set on the weekly demonstrations organized by Hamas and other Palestinian factions along the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel, as part of the so-called March of Return, a Palestinian refugee camp near Damascus is facing a wide-scale military offensive and ethnic cleansing by the Syrian army and its allies.

The war crimes committed against the Palestinians in Yarmouk camp have so far failed to prompt an ounce of outrage, much less the sort of outcry emerging from the international community over the events of the past four weeks along the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel.

The international community seems to differentiate between a Palestinian shot by an Israeli soldier and a Palestinian shot by a Syrian soldier.

In the first case, Hamas and several Palestinian groups have been encouraging Palestinians to march towards the border with Israel, with some even trying to destroy the security fence and hurling stones and petrol bombs at Israeli troops. The organizers of the Gaza demonstrations say their real goal is to “achieve the right of return and return to all of Palestine.”

Each time an anti-Semitic attack in Europe receives media attention, politicians rush to condemn it. But verbal condemnations alone change nothing. Anti-Semitism just gets bigger.

The European Union has adopted anti-Israel policies out of fear of upsetting Muslims, but this fear of upsetting Muslims has been fueling Muslim anti-Semitism.

When European governments refuse to accept Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and when they urge “restraint” instead of affirming that Israel has the right to defend itself, they are indulging in appeasement. On one side, they condemn anti-Semitism but on other, they are just whipping it up.

On April 18, 2018, two young men, both wearing Jewish skullcaps, were insulted by a group of Muslims and whipped with a belt in a clearly anti-Semitic attack in Prenzlauer Berg, one Berlin’s most fashionable neighborhoods. The violent assault, partly filmed by one of the victims, sparked national indignation in Germany. One of the attackers can be heard on the video clearly shouting “Yahudi” (Arabic for “Jew”).

“It is intolerable for young men to be attacked here just because they are wearing a kippah,” said Heiko Maas, the German Foreign Minister. “Jews must never again feel threatened here. It is our responsibility to protect Jewish life.”

Sweden’s National Board of Forensic Medicine reported that in 83% of the cases where it had stated an opinion about the age of the asylum applicant, the applicant had not been a minor. Many asylum seekers had lied about their age simply because there is greater probability of getting a residence permit — and more benefits — if you are a minor. It is also easier for minors to bring their relatives to Sweden through family immigration.

Afghan demonstrators were saying that Afghans who returned home would die. This second report showed that the problem for Afghans returning home was not security. The problem was the economy.

When members of the government presented their final version of the bill, the demand that unaccompanied youths should confirm their identity or present evidence that made their age probable, had been entirely removed.

In 2015, when approximately 35,369 “unaccompanied minors” came to Sweden, 66% of them were from Afghanistan. This was a staggering number. (In 2016 and 2017, only 3,533 unaccompanied minors came to Sweden.) In 2015, the high proportion of Afghans among the unaccompanied minors made the migrant group “unaccompanied minors” virtually synonymous with Afghani youth. During the last ten years, approximately 33,000 unaccompanied minors arrived in Sweden from Afghanistan.

In mid-August 2017, some young Afghan migrants, many of whose asylum applications had been rejected, started a series of demonstrations in central parts of Stockholm. The young migrants were demanding that the Swedish Migration Agency stop deporting them back to Afghanistan. Behind the demonstrations was a network calling itself “Young in Sweden”. It did not take long before the Swedish media hailed the spokesperson of these demonstrations, Fatemeh Khavari, as a heroine. Six weeks after the demonstrations began, Aftonbladet, Sweden’s largest newspaper, wrote:

Josef Schuster, the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, urged the nation’s Jews not to wear the Kippah publicly Tuesday, one week after two individuals wearing the traditional skullcaps were attacked in Berlin by a man spewing anti-Semitic vitriol in Arabic.

“Defiantly showing your colors would in principle be the right way to [tackle anti-Semitism],” Shuster said on Berlin Public Radio. “Nevertheless, I would advise individual people against openly wearing a kippah in big German cities.”

The warning comes ahead of the “Berlin Wears Kippah” solidarity march set to take place in the German capital Wednesday.

Angela Merkel addressed the trend of anti-Semitic attacks perpetrated by Arab refugees over the weekend, announcing that her government had appointed a commissioner to lead its efforts in combating anti-Semitism.

“We have a new phenomenon, as we have many refugees among whom there are, for example, people of Arab origin who bring another form of anti-Semitism into the country,” Merkel told the Channel 10. “The fact that no kindergarten, no school, no synagogue can be left without police protection dismays us.”

The 19-year-old perpetrator of last week’s attack in Berlin is a Syrian refugee living in a shelter for migrants outside the city. He turned himself into police Friday. A video of the incident shows him beating two Jewish men with a belt while yelling “Yahudi,” the Arabic word for “Jew.”

Anti-Semitic attacks have been on the rise in Germany in recent years; the number of individuals affected rose 55 percent in 2017, according to The Department for Research and Information on Anti-Semitism, a Berlin-based NGO.

Merkel’s detractors point to her liberal immigration policies, which led to roughly 1 million asylum seekers crossing the border in 2015, as the primary factor in the nationwide spike in anti-Semitic hate crimes.

A report commissioned by the German government found that newly-arrived asylum seekers were behind more than 90% percent of the increase in violent crimes in the state of Lower Saxony.

As of December 2017, an estimated 600,000 able-bodied asylum seekers in Germany were on the welfare dole, according to Die Welt. “More than half of the able-bodied unemployment benefit receivers at present are of foreign descent,” wrote Der Spiegel on April 10, 2018.

Meanwhile, poverty in Germany, especially among elderly pensioners, has reached a historic high.

While the number of Salafists in Germany reaches a record high and machete-wielding gangs riot on the country’s streets, the establishment media not only covers up the fallout from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open door migration policy, but continues to paint a false picture of the country’s current state.

“Cool Germany,” a cover story on Britain’s magazine, The Economist, claims that, “Germany is becoming more open and diverse” and “[m]any of the country’s defining traits” including “its ethnic and cultural homogeneity, conformist and conservative society” are “suddenly in flux.”

The Economist attributes this change to Chancellor Merkel’s migrant policy. “The biggest change comes from Mrs. Merkel’s “open door” policy towards refugees, which brought in 1.2 million new migrants in 2015-16. The magazine celebrates the sudden outburst of diversity as its transforms “once-homogeneous Germany” into a “melting-pot” and claims that the “patriarchal culture has become more gender-balanced.”

The Economist also advocates the urgent necessity of the open-door policy for refugees, and alleges that the “flow of newcomers to Germany” will “cushion the demographic crunch.”

Since the onset of the migrant crisis, which began in the autumn of 2015, much of the mainstream media has been peddling the idea of an influx of hundreds of thousands of migrants from Arab and Muslim countries as a silver bullet for Europe’s economic woes. Young and sturdy immigrants were going to bolster Europe’s shrinking labor force and usher in the next economic boom, a miracle comparable to Germany’s post-war Wirtschaftswunder (“economic miracle”).

Since the March 2004 attacks on Madrid’s trains, Spanish authorities have arrested more than 750 jihadis in 243 counter-terrorism operations, according to the Interior Ministry.

Jihadis remain undeterred. A recent Islamic State document included a list of grievances against Spain for wrongs allegedly done to Muslims since the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa on July 16, 1212.

“There is little doubt that the autonomous region of Catalonia has become a prime base of operations for terrorist activity. Spanish authorities tell us they fear the threat from these atomized immigrant communities prone to radicalism, but they have very little intelligence on or ability to penetrate these groups.” — US diplomatic cable, October 2, 2007.

Ten members of an Islamic State jihadi cell have been sentenced to combined prison terms of nearly 100 years for a plot to bomb landmarks and behead infidels in Barcelona.

The cell, composed of five Moroccans, four Spaniards and a Brazilian, was separate to and independent of the jihadi group that killed 16 people in Barcelona and nearby Cambrils in August 2017.

The case shows that Spain continues to be a prime target for jihadis, many of whom are striving to reconquer al-Andalus, the Arabic name given to those parts of Spain, Portugal and France occupied by Muslim conquerors (also known as the Moors) from 711 to 1492. Many jihadis believe that territories Muslims lost during the Christian Reconquest of Spain still belong to the realm of Islam, and that Sharia law requires them to re-establish Muslim rule there.

The president’s potential meeting with Kim Jong Un would come at a time when American foreign policy is rapidly changing.

The world has been stunned by North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un’s announcement last week that he was suspending his country’s nuclear tests in preparation for the impending meeting with President Trump. Even critics have had to concede that Trump’s bellicose rhetoric since last summer regarding the North Korean threat may have actually paid off — especially when his “speak loudly and wave a big stick” approach to foreign policy is backed by the real use of force, as demonstrated by the recent air strikes in Syria.

How sincere are Kim’s promises? Trump skeptics like to point out that Kim has announced suspensions of his nuclear program before. But Kim made one other concession last week that has gone largely unnoticed but is even more significant for the future: He withdrew his previous demand that U.S. troops leave the Korean peninsula before any discussion of denuclearization. That means any deal struck on shutting down North Korea’s nuclear program may well be separate from the status of U.S. forces in Korea — and America’s strategic role in the region.

Trump’s success points the way to a major realignment of the balance of power in East Asia. For that reason, it’s time to pause to consider how Trump’s approach to foreign-policy issues such as North Korea, and that of national-security adviser John Bolton, differs from the approach of his predecessors — and represents a revolution in America’s relations with the rest of the world.

The contrast with Trump’s two immediate predecessors, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, could not be sharper. Both Obama and Bush were animated by grand visions of the U.S. leading the world toward a new era of peace and stability, either (in Bush’s case) through an ever-widening process of coalition-building on the multilateral level and state-building on the bilateral level, or (in Obama’s) via “strategic patience” and “leading from behind,” phrases Obama’s foreign-policy team made famous — or rather notorious.