RUTHFULLY YOURS

Palestinian political analysts said that the Hamas victory is an indication of what would happen if general elections were held these days in the West Bank.

The 3,481 students who voted in favor of the Hamas-affiliated list want to see the destruction of Israel.

Both Hamas and the PFLP are strongly opposed to any peace process with Israel. They continue to call for terror attacks against Israelis. The results of the election mean that most of the students at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank, not Gaza, support groups that have chosen terrorism over peace.

The Hamas victory at Bir Zeit University also shows that it does not matter how much money you pour on Fatah’s campus supporter; a majority of students would still prefer to vote for terror groups that do not believe in Israel’s right to exist.

The main charge against Fatah is that it has failed to reform and pave the way for the emergence of new and younger leaders.

“Fatah needs an internal shake-up before it faces more defeats.” –Sufyan Abu Zayda, a senior Fatah official from the Gaza Strip.

Hamas leaders also called for holding long overdue presidential and parliamentary elections in the Palestinian territories. They said they had no doubt that their movement would easily defeat Fatah.

Under such circumstances, it is not a good idea to promote the idea of free and democratic elections in the Palestinian territories. Worse, the talk about a renewed peace process and a two-state solution has become a tasteless joke.

The threat from terrorism is worse than at any time since 9/11, even as the West has limited its capacity for self-defense. One example of the latter is the way the Obama Administration has abandoned former CIA agent Sabrina De Sousa.

Ms. De Sousa was one of 26 U.S. officials convicted by Italy in 2009 for their role in the rendition of a radical Egyptian cleric. A Portuguese-American dual national who currently resides in Portugal, she received a seven-year sentence from an Italian court (later reduced to four years). Last week Portugal’s highest court cleared the way for her extradition to Italy under a European arrest warrant.

CIA agents working with their Italian counterparts in 2003 captured the cleric, known as Abu Omar, who was suspected of recruiting fighters for Islamists in Iraq, among other things, and transferred him from Milan to Egypt, where he says he was tortured. Egyptian authorities eventually released Abu Omar without charge, though Italy later convicted him in absentia on terror charges.

Among the anti-antiterror left, his case became emblematic of the evils of rendition. Italian prosecutors in 2004 launched an investigation and Italian courts eventually convicted, in absentia, the CIA agents, including Ms. De Sousa, and a U.S. Air Force colonel for their alleged participation in the affair. All of the convicted Americans had left Italy by the time the court case was under way.

Ms. De Sousa was acting in her official capacity and following U.S. policy during the 2003 rendition. Yet the U.S. government never asserted diplomatic immunity in her case, although it asserted a similar immunity on behalf of at least one other American involved in the affair.

When Ms. De Sousa sued the CIA, State and the Justice Department for failing to invoke immunity on her behalf, Justice argued that immunity is asserted for the benefit of the government, not of an individual employee. That’s a sound principle and is exactly why the government should act to protect Ms. De Sousa. Failing to do so sends a terrible signal to other U.S. operatives in the field. CONTINUE AT SITE

Alas, he stands firmly on weak knees…he should scuttle all negotiations….rsk
TEL AVIV—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday poured cold water on a French initiative to restart peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians, saying the two sides should be speaking directly rather than through a third party.

“Israel adheres to its position that the best way to resolve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is direct, bilateral negotiations,” said a statement from Mr. Netanyahu’s office. “Any other diplomatic initiative distances the Palestinians from direct negotiations.”

French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault last week said he would invite ministers from the U.S., Europe, Middle East and Asia to Paris on May 30 to discuss a framework for a new round of peace talks, aiming to host an international conference later this year that would include Israeli and Palestinian leaders.

France first suggested the international conference in January, the Israeli leader expressed similar concerns at that time too.

A spokesman for Israel’s foreign ministry said the prime minister’s statement didn’t completely rule out Israeli officials attending a conference as no invitations to the two sides had been sent out yet.

After welcoming the French initiative last week, Palestinian negotiators slammed Israel’s pessimism over the plan.

“The Israeli government’s call for bilateral negotiations is not a call for the achievement of the two-state solution, but an attempt at legitimizing its settlement enterprise and the imposition of an apartheid regime,” said Saeb Erekat, the secretary-general of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which represents Palestinian political factions in peace negotiations. “We call upon the French Government and the rest of the international community to take immediate steps in order to give peace a chance.”

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has sought support from the international community in recent years at forums such as the United Nations and International Criminal Court in a bid to create a Palestinian state. CONTINUE AT SITE

While in London last week, President Obama waded into the upcoming British referendum about whether the United Kingdom should stay in the European Union.

Controversy followed his lecture about the future of the Anglo-American relationship should Britain depart the EU. Obama also implied that without an EU, the United States might again be dragged into European squabbling, as it had been in the prior world wars.

Americans might take this occasion to reflect on Britain’s role in World War II.

Before the war, the League of Nations had done nothing to deter the future Axis powers from invading or annexing Albania, Austria, China, Czechoslovakia, and Ethiopia.

Britain’s alliance with France might have deterred Nazi Germany had Winston Churchill, not Neville Chamberlain, been prime minister in 1939. Or an isolationist United States might have helped had it been willing to conclude a defense pact with the Western European democracies.

What ensured a war were the appeasement of Nazi Germany by Britain and France, the isolation of the United States from global responsibilities, and the collaboration of the Soviet Union with Adolf Hitler. All three developments combined to convince Hitler that he could bully or invade his neighbors without consequences.

America entered the war on Britain’s side in late 1941, after more than two years of war that saw Hitler consolidate a continental empire larger than the present European Union. The United States declared war on Nazi Germany and fascist Italy on December 11, 1941 — but only after the two Axis powers declared war on us first. Had Hitler and Italy’s Benito Mussolini not declared war after Japan’s December 7, 1941 surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, America may well have concentrated on defeating Imperial Japan and stayed neutral in the European theater.

Great Britain was the only major power to fight for the entire duration of World War II, from its beginning after the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 until the surrender of the Japanese in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945.

In late June of 1940, after the fall of Western Europe, Britain was the only major power in the world still resisting Nazi Germany. Otherwise, all of Europe was either occupied by Hitler, neutral, or supposedly neutral but surreptitiously aiding the Third Reich with shipments of supplies.

It’s been a terrific week for integration Britain. First the National Union of Students (NUS) elected what the BBC joyously headlinedas its ‘First black Muslim woman president.’ Wahey! Another victory for diverse Britain. But amid the preliminary bunting some people still remembered that Malia Bouattia is principally known for two things: a reportedly extreme opposition to some things Jewish, and an equal opposition to measures which protect the country which gave her and her family sanctuary when they fled from Algeria. Ms Bouattia denies being an anti-Semite and insists she is, instead, simply anti-Zionist.

Of course expecting people to receive asylum in our country and then feel even slightly grateful for the fact must seem so patriarchal and twentieth century. The new deal seems to be that people flee some terrorist-destroyed hell-hole, arrive in the UK and then campaign against efforts to protect ourselves from terrorism. And people wonder why people’s hearts might be hardening towards not just migrants but to genuine refugees?

Ms Bouattia made her name in student politics with a ‘Why is my curriculum white?’ campaign. And it seems nobody ever gave her the simplest answer, which is, ‘I dunno. Maybe for the same reason that if you went to Algeria you might find it somewhat ‘black’.’ Of course it would probably be considered not just rude but racist for someone who found themselves in the unlikely situation of fleeing the UK to go and live in Algeria to start a campaign called ‘Why is my curriculum black?’ But maybe that’s because of the Crusades, or the British Empire or some other tired excuse of the new demagogues.

Anyhow, we have our ‘first black Muslim woman president’ of the NUS and now a grateful nation only has to make its way through the first non-binary President of the NUS, the first non-binary President of Muslim background of the NUS and so on. At any rate, perhaps somewhere around the end of the next century the NUS could get round to electing a vaguely conservative student? Or perhaps that’s the realm of science-fiction.

In any case, yesterday brought another great success story. Naz Shah got a fair amount of sympathy at the last election, primarily because of her story of a forced marriage to a cousin in Pakistan, but also for being insulted on the campaign trail by George Galloway. Now it turns out that the new Member of Parliament for Bradford West is a bit like the old one. Except this one seems even more virulent.

I noticed earlier this year from her appearance on an edition of the BBC’s The Big Questions that although she had suffered some of the harsher corners of Pakistani culture, Ms Shah was no moderate. And then yesterday morning the wholly unsurprising news emerged that she has spent recent years railing against the Jews and the State of Israel on social media. Specifically she seems to approve of a plan toremove all the Jews of the Middle East from Israel. If there is any irony to a Bradford Muslim telling the Jews of the Middle East to ‘go back to where they came from’ then it is clearly lost on Ms Shah.

Of course this is the same Ms Shah who sits on a Parliamentary Group investigating anti-Semitism. She has already issued the pro-forma statement stressing that in the wake of this unfortunate outing of her views she will be ‘seeking to expand my existing engagement and dialogue with Jewish community organisations, and will be stepping up my efforts to combat all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism’. Yes – that’s it! All that’s needed is for Shah to ‘fight’ racism just that little bit harder. Hitherto she just hadn’t been doing it quite enough. All she needs to do now is promise to crush ‘all extremists’ a little bit more and the sunlit uplands will be reached for all of us.

But she hails from a culture and a religion where anti-Semitism is rife. Why would you expect her not to hold some of the rancid views of that culture as well as some of the nicer bits? In any case, her attitudes have now proved so extreme that she has had to resign as John McDonnell’s PPS. Imagine how extreme you have to be to be too extreme for John McDonnell.

I say all this is a success for integration Britain, because every week brings up cases like this and nobody seems remotely willing to reflect on them. While people in senior jobs in public life turn out to be open and essentially unapologetic racists, we pretend that all that’s needed for our country’s future to be secure is to tweak the racism awareness lessons a bit more or make one more big push to ‘smash’ the fascists.

The mistake is far more basic. For decades, successive governments in Britain pretended that if you brought millions of people from other cultures into this country and gave them enough time plus all the provisions of the British state then before long they would be down the pub and failing to attend church like everyone else. For some time now it should have been clear that a great many people who come into our country have no such desire. They – and very often their children – have another set of ideas, a different attitude towards the purpose of life and an alternative view of what constitutes respected ‘authority’.

“All imams need to be trained in Germany and share our core values. … It cannot be that we are importing different, partly extreme values from other countries. German must be the language of the mosques. Enlightened Europe must cultivate its own Islam.” – Andreas Scheuer, the General Secretary of the Christian Social Union party (CSU).
The Turkish government has sent 970 clerics — most of whom do not speak German — to lead 900 mosques in Germany that are controlled by a branch of the Turkish government’s Directorate for Religious Affairs. Turkish clerics in Germany are effectively Turkish civil servants who do the bidding of the Turkish government.
Erdogan has repeatedly warned Turkish immigrants not to assimilate into German society. During a trip to Berlin in November 2011, Erdogan declared: “Assimilation is a violation of human rights.”

A senior German politician has called for an “Islam law” that would limit the influence of foreign imams and prohibit the foreign financing of mosques in Germany.

The proposal — modelled on the Islam Law promulgated in Austria in February 2015 — is aimed at staving off extremism and promoting Muslim integration by developing a moderate “European Islam.”

The move comes amid revelations that the Turkish government is paying the salaries of nearly 1,000 conservative imams in Germany who are leading mosques across the country. In addition, Saudi Arabia recently pledged to finance the construction of 200 mosques in Germany to serve migrants there.

And Turkey is the country its Western allies believe will help them fight jihadists? Lots of luck!

In theory, Turkey is part of the international coalition that fights the Islamic State (IS). Since it joined the fight last year, it has arrested scores of IS militants, made some efforts to seal its porous border with Syria and tagged IS as a terrorist orga

Last year, a Turkish pollster found that one in every five Turks thought that the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris was the natural response to men who insulted Prophet Mohammed.

nization. Turkish police have raided homes of suspected IS operatives. More recently, Turkey’s Interior Ministry updated its list of “wanted terrorists” to include 23 IS militants, and offered rewards of more than 42 million Turkish

“Infidels who were enemies of Islam thought they buried I
At a March meeting with top U.S. officials, King Abdullah of Jordan accused Turkey of exporting terrorists to Europe. He said: “The fact that terrorists are going to Europe is part of Turkish policy and Turkey keeps on getting a slap on the hand, but they are let off the hook.”
slam in the depths of history when they abolished the caliphate on March 3, 1924 … Some 92 years after … we are shouting out that we will re-establish the caliphate, here, right next to the parliament.” — Mahmut Kar, media bureau chief for Hizb ut-Tahrir Turkey.

liras (more than $14 million) for any information leading to the suspects’ capture. But this is only part of the story.

On March 24, a Turkish court released seven members of IS, including the commander of the jihadists’ operations on Turkish soil. A total of 96 suspects are on trial, including the seven men who were detained but released. All are free now, although the indictment against them claims that they

“engaged in the activities of the terrorist organization called DAESH [Arabic acronym of IS]. The suspects had sent persons to the conflict zones; they applied pressure, force, violence and threats by using the name of the terrorist organization, and they had provided members and logistic support for the group.”

The release of terror suspects came in sharp contrast with another court decision that ruled for a trial, but while under detention, for four academics who had signed a petition calling for peace in Turkey’s Kurdish dispute. Unlike the IS militants, the academics remain behind bars.

I spent most of my life in the Islamic Republic of Iran and Syria until a few years ago. Now, living in the West, I am stunned with all misconceptions and misleading information about Islam. It seems to me that this stems from a large propaganda campaign coming from various platforms ranging from the dominant liberal media to Western Muslim scholars who have never lived in an Islamic country, but only read books published in the West. Liberals are brainwashed to view the West as the victimizers and the Muslims as the victims.

While covering all the misconceptions would require hundreds of books, I am going to only address the truth about the hijab in this article and the fallacies that are taught to ordinary people in the West about veiling, Muslim women, and the idea of victimhood.

(I have covered other truths and aspects of Islam in my memoir, Allah: A God Who Hates Women.)

Two of my own sisters have gone through the phases of wearing the hijab. I believe that the repression and domination of women in the Muslim world begins with the dress code — wearing a scarf, or hijab; wearing wide garments, chador; and hiding the body. In other words, the religion of Islam provides the language for men to dominate women by Sharia law, which takes possession of a women’s body from the moment a girl is born.

On the surface, a wide garment, scarf, or hijab looks like a piece of cloth. But, in fact, the dominating power of this piece of cloth is extraordinary. The idea is that once I can control your body, and once I can confine your body, I basically own you.

I believe and personally witnessed that wearing a scarf and wearing a wide garment, do not have anything to do with divine religious rules, as some ignorant imams or Muslims attempt to promote. Hijab is the first crucial step to possess a woman and make her follower of Islam.

I argue that the process of enforcing the hijab on women and making it feel natural to them is carried out through several institutional and psychological steps.

The First Phase: Indoctrination

The first phase is indoctrinating the idea of hiding one’s hair and body in the mind of a woman. The process of indoctrination begins from the moment a baby girl is born.

One concrete example is my sisters. They were forced to wear the hijab at the age of 8 in the schools of the Islamic Republic of Iran and Syria. So even before girls reach the age that they can make decisions, before they know right from wrong, they are indoctrinated to hide their body. From age 3 or 4, they are repeatedly told about the “nice” things that will happen to them when they wear their hijab, and how they will be a good girl and be treated as a mature girl when they hide their body.

The Second Phase: The Superficial Pleasure

“This is not about freedom of speech, this is about insulting people’s faith. I cannot see anything that has to do with freedom of speech here.” — Mehmet Kaplan, on the Mohammed cartoon controversy, 2005.

Mehmet Kaplan told Turkish media that the reason young Muslims join ISIS is “the rampaging Islamophobia in Europe.” As a solution to the problem, he suggested that the Swedish government support mosques financially, ostensibly to counteract ISIS’s recruitment.

In 2014, three Muslims became ministers in the Swedish government. Clearly the most fervent and committed believer was Mehmet Kaplan, 44, who took on the role of Minister for Housing and Urban Development.

Kaplan came to Sweden from Turkey, at the age of one. Despite many claims that he is in fact an Islamist, until now Kaplan has been untouchable. That is, until it emerged that he said that Israel treats the Palestinians the same way the Nazis treated the Jews in Germany. At a hastily summoned press conference on April 18, Prime Minister Stefan Löfven announced that he had accepted Kaplan’s resignation.

Mehmet Kaplan was a minister in Sweden’s government until last week, when he was forced to resign after revelations that he compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to that of the German Nazis’ treatment of Jews. (Image source: Wikimedia Commons/Jan Ainali)

Kaplan, a member of the Green Party, has a history of being affiliated with various Muslim organizations connected to the Muslim Brotherhood. In 2005, he denounced the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, for publishing cartoons depicting the Muslim prophet Mohammed. In an interview with the Christian magazine Dagen, he said, “This is not about freedom of speech, this is about insulting people’s faith. I cannot see anything that has to do with freedom of speech here. This is an insupportable provocation.”

In 2010, Kaplan was aboard one of the ships of the flotilla sailing to the Gaza Strip, with the aim of breaking Israel’s naval blockade. He, along with several others, was arrested after the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) boarded the vessel. Once safe and sound back in Sweden, he complained that the IDF “acted like pirates.”

“The establishment of such a [Palestinian] state means the inflow of combat-ready Palestinian forces into Judea and Samaria … In time of war, the frontiers of the Palestinian state will constitute an excellent staging point for mobile forces to mount attacks on infrastructure installations vital for Israel’s existence…” — Shimon Peres, Nobel Laureate and Former Prime Minister of Israel, in 1978.

The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was formed in 1964; three years before there were any “occupied territories.” Exactly what, then was the PLO planning to “liberate”?

Both Fatah and Hamas have always considered, and still consider, Israel as simply part of “Palestine.” On their current official maps, all of Israel is identified as “Occupied Palestine.”

“You understand that we plan to eliminate the State of Israel, and establish a purely Palestinian state. … I have no use for Jews; they are and remain, Jews.” — PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, January 30, 1996 (2.5 years after signing the Oslo Peace Accords).

In view of these repeatedly intolerant Arab views on Israel’s existence, international law should not expect Palestinian compliance with any agreements, including those concerning use of armed force — even if these agreements were to include explicit U.S. security guarantees to Israel.

There is no lack of irony in the endless discussions of Israel and a Palestinian state.

One oddly neglected example is the complete turnaround of former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres. Recognized today as perhaps the proudest Israeli champion of a “Two State Solution” — sometimes also referred to as a “Road Map to Peace in the Middle East” — Peres had originally considered Palestinian sovereignty to be an intolerable existential threat to Israel. More precisely, in his book, Tomorrow is Now (1978), Mr. Peres unambiguously warned:

“The establishment of such a (Palestinian) state means the inflow of combat-ready Palestinian forces into Judea and Samaria this force, together with the local youth, will double itself in a short time. It will not be short of weapons or other military equipment, and in a short space of time, an infrastructure for waging war will be set up in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip. … In time of war, the frontiers of the Palestinian state will constitute an excellent staging point for mobile forces to mount attacks on infrastructure installations vital for Israel’s existence…”

Now, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in apparent agreement with this original position of Peres on Palestine, is nonetheless willing to go along with some form or another of a Palestinian state, but only so long as its prospective leaders should first agree to “demilitarization.” Netanyahu, the “hawk,” is now in agreement with the early, original warning of Peres, the “dove.” Peres’s assessment has been Netanyahu’s firm quid pro quo.