RUTHFULLY YOURS

There is hardly any Islamist group out there which does not expressly strive for the restoration of the caliphate. Here’s why.

What do Islamist groups want and what are their aims? Most Westerners know that groups like ISIS are in some way, shape, or form related to Islam. Thanks to the media, they also associate, correctly, Islamist groups like ISIS and al-Qā’ida with violence. Although average Americans may be told by the media how these groups are fundamentally motivated by political and economic grievances, no more than a superficial spotlight is usually cast on their religious ideology and goals.

However, one thing that your average American probably knows is that groups like ISIS are working to establish an Islamic “caliphate.” Images of Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed caliph of the Islamic State, speaking at the Grand Mosque of Al-Nurī in Mosul are likely to be conjured up.

But what exactly is a caliphate? And why do militant Islamist groups like ISIS, al-Qā’ida, Boko Harām, Jabhat al-Nusra, and even less overtly militant Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, want to establish a caliphate? And how important is the caliphate in the overall thought of Islamists? Is it perceived to be a necessary tenet of Islam? Let’s take a look.
What is a Caliphate? Who is a Caliph?

Etymologically, the English word “caliphate” is a loanword of the Arabic term khilāfa. The word khilāfa is derived from the triliteral root kh-l-f (خلف), meaning “to succeed” or to “come after.”[1] Khilāfa (خلافة) denotes a caliphate, and is obviously a noun derived from the verbal root kh-l-f; furthermore, the (slightly different) word ‘khalīfa‘(خليفة) denotes a caliph and is an active participle meaning one who succeeds or comes after another.

The term khalīfa (خَلِيفَةً) occurs in the Qur’ān nine times and is always used by the Qur’ān to denote a successor or viceregent (e.g., “Oh David, we have made you a khalīfa upon the Earth”; Q 38:26). However, there is nothing in the Qur’ān about a khalīfa being a present ruler ruling over the believers or the Islamic umma(community). This specific application of the khalīfa-concept was clearly one that developed after the death of Muḥammad in 632 A.D.

A caliphate is essentially a state where an Islamic ruler or Caliph rules the Muslim umma. That is, a caliphate is an essentially theocratic and Islamic conception of government. It is important to emphasize that the idea of a caliphate is an exclusively Islamic notion. There is no such thing as a Christian, Buddhist, or atheist caliphate. Every caliphate is by definition an Islamic one, and every caliph is or should be a Muslim, as we will see later on.

On September 11, 2016, Raphael Medoff of JNS.org penned a piece, “Denis Ross: If Elected Again, Clinton Should Seek More Israeli Concessions.” One is forced to wonder if a background study of Dennis Ross might help in comprehending how he arrives at this thought.

Dennis Ross is known as one who calculates that public pressure would move the parties, Palestinians and Israelis . He figures that in the Middle East, private negotiations work better. He has thrived under presidents from Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan Bill Clinton, both Bushes and Barak Obama. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Ross worked for Jim Baker, the same individual who is credited with saying, F—– the Jews, they didn’t vote for us anyway.”

In 1989, Ross and Miller——along with an Orthodox Jewish Foreign Service officer, Daniel Kurtzer of PLO recognition fame and later to become US Ambassador to Egypt and subsequently US Ambassador to Israel—–were accused of being “self-hating Jews. They had drafted a Baker speech which rocked the American Jewish community. requesting Israel’s leaders to renounce “the unrealistic vision of a greater Israel.” Apparently, an aide to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir referred to them as “Baker’s Jew boys.”

Now, it is known that Ross was absolutely dedicated to the peace process more so than anything else and obviously still is. Interesting, what in former times was entitled “Land for Peace” became “The Two State Solution”. Yet another questionable euphemism!

At the Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Survive conference which gave rise to Medoff’s article, Ross asserted that “even though negotiations with the Palestinian Authority won’t work now”, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should take steps of his own. “He should at a minimum announce an official policy that there will be no further Israeli construction east of the security barrier.”

When one engages the historical record from the 1979 Camp David Accords to the present day, one can only find many concessions presented by Israel accompanied by dismissal of commitments made by the Palestinians. More than that, in every case the Palestinian reaction has been inhuman and cruel violence. What Israel has been able to achieve with Egypt and Jordan, has not been possible with the Palestinians. Ross surely knows this since his involvement in the overall process dates back to the 1st George Bush.

Professor Gerald Steinberg is of the opinion that Ross and his colleagues “in the excitement of the diplomatic activity closed their eyes to the disconnect between myth and reality,” He observes that while Ross finally recognized Arab rejectionisim of Israel’s existence had not changed, the diplomat in him would not let go. Writing in 2004, Steinberg insightfully notes that process without substance is untenable and another round of good intentions will end again in the hell of suicide bombings. Today, while in fact, suicide bombings have been replaced by knifing and weaponry, the principle remains unaltered.

A full iteration on Israeli concessions is necessary to answer the charge of Dennis Ross. Any discussion on [Israeli] concessions has to consider, as a minimum, The 1979 Camp David Accords, The 1991 Madrid Conference, The 1993 Oslo Accords, The 1994 Jordanian-Israeli Peace Treaty, The Taba Agreement [Oslo11], The 1997 Hebron Agreement, 1998 Wye River Memorandum, 1999 Sharm el-Sheikh Memorandum, August 2000 Camp David ‘Final Status’ Summit, 20o1 Taba Conference and 2005 Gaza Disengagement.

What distinguished the Camp David Accords and the Jordanian -Israeli Peace treaty from the rest was that Israel was negotiating with nation states viz., Egypt and Jordan. In the case of the former, Israel returned 90% of the conquered territory and made provision for an autonomous entity for the Palestinians. In the case of Jordan, it regained its entire sovereignty. Gaza and Judea and Samaria, previously illegally occupied by Egypt and Jordan respectively were retained by Israel. Obviously, Ross does not consider land returned in a defensive war a concession.

During the month and a half after July 15, the Turkish government aggressively purged more than 100,000 civil servants and arrested tens of thousands.

Anyone can be the target: journalists, academics, teachers, pilots, doctors, businessmen — even the owner of the small grocery store on the corner, if its owner kept his savings at a bank that the government claims financed Gulen’s illegal activities.

Prominent journalist Ahmet Altan and his brother, academic and columnist Professor Mehmet Altan, were detained for questioning. A prosecutor claims that during a recent TV debate, the suspects had given “subliminal messages suggesting a military coup.”

“A total witch hunt has been launched…” — Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of the main opposition Social Democrat Party.

In the twelve days ending on July 2, 1934 Germany saw the “Röhm Putsch,” a purge in which the Nazi regime carried out political executions in order to consolidate Hitler’s absolute hold on power. Hitler moved against the Sturmabteilung (SA), the Nazis’ own paramilitary group; hundreds were killed. The regime did not limit itself to a purge of the SA.

Having already imprisoned social democrats and communists, Hitler used the “Röhm Putsch” to move against conservatives. More killings followed, including Kurt von Schleicher, Hitler’s predecessor as Chancellor, and von Schleicher’s wife. The Gestapo also murdered several leaders of the disbanded Catholic Center Party.

Just a few years later, the Soviets’ own purge would be called Yezhovshchina (“Times of Yezhov”), after Nikolai Yezhov, head of the Soviet secret police. From 1936 until 1953, Yezhovshchina not only meant being expelled from the party; it came to mean almost certain arrest, imprisonment, and often execution.

The purge, in general, was Stalin’s effort to eliminate past and potential opposition groups. Hundreds of thousands of victims faced charges of political crimes such as espionage, sabotage, anti-Soviet agitation, and conspiracies to prepare uprisings and coups. Most victims were quickly executed by gunfire or sent to the Gulag labor camps, where many died of starvation, disease, exposure and overwork.

The animosity of Lebanon towards Israel continues today only because it provides a convenient excuse for Hizballah to maintain a formidable arsenal that it uses to control Lebanon and to help its allies in Syria.

If Lebanon had prevented terrorist attacks from its territory against Israel, not one bullet would have been exchanged between the two countries. Today, Lebanon would be enjoying diplomatic relations with Israel, and the benefits of successful trade.

Lebanon has many problems, including sectarian divisions, Iranian influence, spillover from the Syrian civil war, the weakness of its army, the ineffectiveness of its politicians, and the very existence of Hizballah, but Israel’s existence next door is not one of them.

The animosity of Lebanon towards Israel continues today only because it provides a convenient excuse for Hizballah to maintain a formidable arsenal that it uses to control Lebanon and to help its allies in Syria.

Lebanon has a law forbidding its citizens from interacting with Israeli citizens. As Michael J. Totten wrote:

“Lebanese citizens aren’t allowed to have any communication of any kind with Israelis anywhere in the world. If citizens of the two countries meet, say, on a beach in Cyprus or in a bar in New York, the Lebanese risks prison just for saying hello.”

The Lebanese online news source NOW explains that law in detail. Even a dual citizen (of Lebanon and Canada for example) could be jailed for interacting in the most innocuous way with an Israeli.

The Lebanese delegation, for example, recently refused to share a bus with the Israeli delegation at this year’s Olympic Games in Rio, prompting the Israeli minister of culture and sports to describe the incident as, “anti-Semitism, pure and simple, and the worst kind of racism.” The incident was, however, hardly surprising, considering the history of Lebanese animosity towards Israel.
Only one of many incidents of pettiness and bigotry

The Olympics incident is unfortunately not unique.

Incidents in the entertainment industry have been just as visible. In Lebanon’s only attempt to enter the Eurovision song contest, its contestant Aline Lahoud was forced to withdraw in 2005 after Lebanon would not allow the program to be broadcast because it included a performance by an Israeli. Despite his huge popularity in Lebanon, the Jewish Moroccan-French comedian, Gad Elmaleh, was forced to cancel his performances at a 2009 Lebanese festival due to what Reina Sarkis, a Lebanese psychoanalyst living in France, described as Hizballah’s “intellectual terrorism”. In June 2010, a boycott targeted the British Rock band Placebo, performing in Lebanon, resulting in a lawsuit by the Lebanese concert promoter against the groups that organized the boycott. Popular Belgian-Italian singer Lara Fabian cancelled a concert in Lebanon in 2012, after she was the target of threats for supporting Israel.

Such incidents have occurred in academia as well. In March 2010, Palestinian scholar Sari Hanafi, a professor at the American University of Beirut, was verbally assaulted at the university by a crowd of nearly 300 for having worked with two Israeli scholars on a book, even though the book was critical of Israel.

Even Miss Lebanon 2014, Saly Greige, was implicated in this type of incident in 2015, when a photo of her was taken with Miss Israel, Miss Japan, and Miss Slovenia. Lebanese Tourism Minister Michel Pharaon launched a probe into what was considered an incident of national significance. Greige was allowed to keep her crown only after she made the implausible claim that the picture was taken against her will.

Instead of worrying about Islamist terrorism and Molenbeek, Brussels’ nest of jihadists, there are racists in Europe who want to crush Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East.

They all falsely claim to be a “peaceful”, using “economic means” to correct “wrongs” in the Palestinian territories. However, they never seem to try to correct any of the wrongs of the corrupt, repressive governments of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas in Gaza, or even to advocate there for a free press, for the rule of law or for building a stable economy. Their true, racist motives are unmasked.

The pre- or post-1967 lines are only an alibi for these new Nazis. Many consider Israel in its entirety illegal, immoral, or both — even though Jews have lived on that land for 3,000 years — part of it is even called Judea. Their appetite for accusing Jews of having the audacity to “occupy” their own historical, Biblical land only reveals their collusion the darkest lies of Islamic extremists, who are trying to destroy the indigenous Christian Copts in their native land of Egypt, and the indigenous Assyrian Christians whom we see being slaughtered throughout the Middle East. Should the French be accused of “occupying” Gaul? Just look at any map of “Palestine,” which blankets the entire state of Israel: to many Palestinians, all of Israel is a single giant settlement that has to be dismantled.

Meet the packs of new Nazis, posing as Righteousness and Virtue, pursuing new exterminationist policies against Israel and, right after that, the Jews.

“In Nazi Germany,” noted Brendan O’Neill in the Wall Street Journal, “it was all the rage to make one’s town Judenfrei.”

“Now a new fashion is sweeping Europe: to make one’s town or city what we might call ‘Zionistfrei’ — free of the products and culture of the Jewish state. Across the Continent, cities and towns are declaring themselves ‘Israel-free zones,’ insulating their citizens from Israeli produce and culture. It has ugly echoes of what happened 70 years ago.”

The Nazis said “kauft nicht bei Juden”: do not buy from Jews. The slogan of these new racists is “kauft nicht beim Judenstaat”: do not buy from the Jewish State. The Nazis repeated “Geh nach Palästina, du Jud”: Go to Palestine, you Jew. Racists in Europe shout “Jews out of Palestine!”

Let us take a look at who they are. The city council of Leicester, for one, recently approved banning products “made in Israel.” Think of that: a city without Israeli products. This is not Nazi Germany in 1933; this is a British city under Labour leadership in 2016. Two Welsh councils, Swansea and Gwynedd, blocked commercial partnerships with Israeli companies. In Dublin, a well-known restaurant, Exchequer, decided not to use the Israeli products. The Irish town of Kinvara became “Israel-free”. In Spain, the town of Villanueva de Duero no longer distributes Israeli water in its public buildings. The French city of Lille froze an agreement with the Israeli town of Safed.

TEL AVIV—A knife-wielding Palestinian assailant stabbed an Israeli soldier before being shot dead by security forces in the West Bank city of Hebron on Saturday, the military said, the fourth attack against Israelis in less than 24 hours.

The soldier was taken to the hospital.

Two Palestinians and a Jordanian were also killed on Friday by Israeli forces after launching separate knife and car-ramming attacks against Israeli civilians and soldiers, the country’s police and army said.
The bevy of attacks revived a wave of Israeli-Palestinian bloodshed that began last September but had tapered off in recent months as Israel heightened security and Palestinian leaders called for their youth to shun violence.

A Palestinian assailant stabbed an Israeli soldier on Friday afternoon at a checkpoint in the West Bank city of Hebron before being killed, Israel’s military said. The soldier was evacuated to the hospital, it added.

Hours earlier in the nearby Israeli settlement of Kiryat Arba, two Palestinians rammed their car into a bus stop full of Israeli settlers, injuring three people, the army said.

Israeli soldiers then fired on the car, killing one assailant and wounding the other, it said.

A knife-wielding Jordanian citizen also on Friday attacked Israeli police near the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem’s Old City before being killed, a police spokeswoman said. It wasn’t clear why the man was in Israel and an investigation had been launched, police said.

Over the past year, Palestinians have launched more than 300 attacks against Israelis, killing 40 people and wounding more than 500, according to Israeli officials.

Some 200 Palestinians have also been killed by Israeli forces, most after attacks against Israelis, according to Palestinian officials.

The violence had slowed since July, when Israel imposed military and financial restrictions on the Palestinian West Bank after a series of bloody attacks on Jewish settlers in the territory.

BRITISH AMBASSADOR TO SAUDI ARABIA COMPLETES HAJJ PILGRIMAGE AFTER CONVERTING TO ISLAM

British ambassador to Saudi Arabia completes Hajj pilgrimage after converting to Islam
By Raf Sanchez
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/09/15/british-ambassador-to-saudi-arabia-completes-hajj-pilgrimage-aft/

Britain’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia has been inundated with congratulations from across the Islamic world after it emerged that he converted to Islam and carried out the first Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca ever performed by a senior UK diplomat.

The conversion of Simon Collis, the UK envoy to Riyadh, became public after pictures posted on Twitter showed him and his wife Huda wearing the traditional white garments of Muslim pilgrims in front of the British consulate in Mecca.

The 60-year-old diplomat, who speaks fluent Arabic, confirmed the news in response to messages on Twitter.

“God bless you. In brief: I converted to Islam after 30 years of living in Muslim societies and before marrying Huda,” he wrote.

The news led to a wave of online congratulations from Saudi Arabia and across the Islamic world, with many Muslims saluting Mr Collis as “Haji Simon” using the title reserved for those who make the pilgrimage to Mecca.

Mr Collis converted in 2011 shortly before marrying his wife, who is Syrian. While his conversion was known to some fellow diplomats it was not public knowledge in Riyadh.

The Foreign Office declined to comment, saying Mr Collis’s religion was a personal matter.

While Mr Collis acknowledged many of the congratulatory messages coming in on Twitter, he declined interviews about his faith.

The UK is building a wall to keep the denizens of the Calais “Jungle” migrant camp from invading cars and trucks after some 22,000 breaches of the port road. The “Jungle” is a nightmare for the local population which has been terrorized by the mob of migrants aspiring to invade the UK.

The French have blamed the British and the British have blamed the French. But the migrant invasion is not the fault of either alone. In a sense it is the fault of everyone in the European Union.

Merkel’s open invitation to a migrant invasion occasioned the same round of finger-pointing, often, as with the Calais crisis, not at those countries that let the migrants in, but those who did not wish to take them in. Eastern European countries were most frequently blamed for not doing their “share” to maintain the wonderful open borders which required accepting anyone wandering through them.

Instead of bringing countries together, open borders create conflicts.

The Schengen Area didn’t unite Europe. Even before the mob of Muslim migrants arrived, the ability of foreign workers to just show up in the UK was generating some of the tensions that led to Brexit.

The biggest source of tension between America and Mexico remains the open border. Not only is the open border bad for America, but it’s bad for Mexico. As profitable as the remittances might be, the cost of the cartels and migrants drawn to that border end up offsetting it.

What globalists fail to understand is that good walls really do make for better neighbors. Countries with walls may occasionally invade each other, but a lack of walls means that the invasion never stops. Walls are torn down in the name of peace, but the lack of walls is what makes peace impossible.

In war, a bunch of foreigners show up to take your entire way of life. The citizens of countless countries are asking whether this is really any different than the peace offered by the borderless world.

When countries control their own borders, they can negotiate an end to conflicts. But when they don’t, all they can do is assign blame. In the absence of the state, borders and nations are recreated by mass migration. The millions of Muslims invading Europe are but one example. There has been a similar mass movement out of Africa along the Middle East for some time. The end result isn’t integration, but tribalism. The borderless world was meant to banish tribalism, but instead it’s stronger than ever.

Tribalism does not go away when you eliminate borders. The ability to limit tribal conflicts does.

After raiding refugee shelters in three towns in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein this week, German authorities detained three suspected Islamic State (ISIS) members linked to the same group that carried out the November 2015 Paris attacks.

Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere confirmed that three Syrian nationals were arrested on Tuesday, and that one was found to have joined ISIS a year ago.

The young men were said to have entered Germany in November with the intention of “carrying out a previously determined order [from ISIS] or to await further instructions.”

They are thought to have traveled through Turkey and Greece, using fake passports issued by ISIS along with U.S. cash and mobile phones loaded with a communications app.

De Maiziere linked the individuals to the Paris attacks.

“There is every reason to believe that the same trafficking group used by the Paris attackers also brought the three men who were arrested to Germany,” he said [1], adding that their forged passports had also come from the “same workshop.”

More than 200 officers from the German Federal Police and agents from the GSG9 special operations unit took part in the coordinated raids.

Germany has remained on edge following several violent attacks [2] in July, including a suicide bombing attempt near a music festival, and an ax-and-knife attack on a commuter train, both later linked to ISIS.

German police have ramped up security efforts since the attacks. In raids on refugee facilities in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia last month, two men were arrested on suspicion of connection to jihadist movements. One is suspected of planning an attack at a soccer game.

After those arrests, Rainer Wendt, a police officer and head of the German Police Trade Union, called for increased monitoring of asylum seekers.

“What happened here in North Rhine-Westphalia showed that it’s right to observe these people and, at the right time, to take them into custody,” he said.

Last weekend De Maiziere warned in an interview [3] with the Bild daily that there were 520 “potential” Islamist attackers in the country, as well as a further 360 “relevant persons” under surveillance, closely affiliated with potential attackers.

Jibril Rajoub, chairman of the Palestinian Football Association and a top official of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank, made the offensive remarks during a recent interview with an Egyptian television station.

Many Palestinian Christians said that Rajoub’s derogatory remarks would further heighten tensions between them and Muslims. They pointed out that the top PA official was excluding them from being an integral part of the Palestinian people.

Christians see Rajoub’s derogatory remarks as part of the widespread persecution of Christians in Arab and Islamic countries, which has claimed the lives of thousands of Christians over the past few years and prompted many of them to flee to the US, Canada, Australia and Europe.

In an open letter to Rajoub, who previously commanded the PA’s notorious Preventive Security Force, and served 17 years in Israeli prison for terror-related charges, Bethlehem Pastor Danny Awad wrote: “We have been here for more than 2000 years… We are not strangers or guests or aliens who speak a foreign tongue.”

Rajoub’s disparagement of Palestinian Christians is indeed likely to encourage Christians to leave the Western-funded PA areas. Such comments are particularly unwelcome at a time when Christians in Syria, Iraq and Egypt face a campaign of terrorism and intimidation by Muslim extremists.

A senior Palestinian official has enraged Palestinian Christians by referring to them as the “Merry Christmas Group” and accusing them of supporting the Islamist movement, Hamas. Jibril Rajoub, chairman of the Palestinian Football Association and a top Fatah official who previously served as commander of the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) notorious Preventive Security Force in the West Bank, made the offensive remarks during a recent interview with an Egyptian television station.

Referring to the Palestinian local elections, which were supposed to be held on October 8 but were suspended due to the continued power struggle between Fatah and Hamas, Rajoub said in the interview:

“Even some of our brothers, the ‘Merry Christmas Group,’ voted for Hamas [in the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary election]. Today, no one will vote for Hamas. What has Hamas given them? Hamas has brought nothing but destruction.”