RUTHFULLY YOURS

Terrorist attacks, assassinations of police, and the presidential campaigns have sidelined the biggest, and perhaps most consequential news story of recent months: Iran’s serial subversion of the fatally flawed deal Obama made last October with the mullahs regarding their nuclear weapons program. German intelligence reports that Iran is carrying out “illegal proliferation-sensitive procurement activities” at a “quantitatively high level.” More recently, an AP reporter revealed yet another secret “side deal” to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPA), as Obama’s agreement is known. This one allows Iran to replace its 5060 uranium centrifuges with more advanced models, doubling the rate of enrichment. Along with Iran’s already documented cheating on the deal, these concessions bring ever closer the day when a fanatical, genocidal regime possesses nuclear weapons.

The urgency of this threat makes Robert Spencer’s The Complete Infidel’s Guide to Iran a must-read. Spencer is director of the Freedom Center’s Jihad Watch and author of fifteen books on Islam. His new book gives readers everything they need to understand the nature of the regime, its hatred of the West, especially the United States, and its religiously inspired aims of global conquest, which nuclear armaments would serve.

Spencer’s book begins, in a chapter appropriately called “The Ultimate Screwing,” with a summary of the JCPA and its dangerous appeasement of Iran. He explodes the mendacious claims of Obama such as “every pathway to a nuclear weapon” had been blocked and “we have stopped the spread of nuclear weapons in the region.” Nor does he let John Kerry off the hook for his equally preposterous claims that “we are watching their centrifuge production with live television, taping the whole deal 24-7 for 20 years.” Subsequent revelations about the deal and Iran’s violations of its terms have shown that the Ayatollah Khamenei’s jubilant boast–– that the U.S. has been “forced to accept and stand the spinning of thousands of centrifuges and the continuation of research and development in Iran” –– is more accurate.

We must look at Israel not as foreign presence, which it is not, but as a unique and remarkable component of the Middle East that enriches the region.

The creation of such a Palestinian state under today’s conditions is likely to result in a Hamas-dominated state that is violently hostile towards Israel. The Palestinian Authority must be transitioned into a peaceful and stable entity before it can be expected to run a state.

Binyamin Netanyahu recently suggested an approach to make the peace initiative work, but Arab League Secretary-General Nabil al-Arabi rejected it out of hand. This is not how harmonious relationships between nations are built.

“We must all rise above all forms of fanaticism, self-deception and obsolete theories of superiority.” — Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat, addressing Israel’s parliament on November 20, 1977.

This is part two of a two-part series. The first part examined the mistakes that we Arabs made in our interactions with Israel.

There is much that we can do to improve our relationship with Israel — if we want to — and there is good reason to think that it would be in both our short- and long-term interest if we did. The most critical change is in approach. Changing that would start to repair the foundation of the relationship and would provide a basis for mutual respect and trust, without which any solution would remain fragile.
Understand Israel

We must see the real Israel rather than the monstrosity that Arabs have been brainwashed to see. We are so afraid to call Israel by its real name that we refer to it as the “Zionist entity”. The name is “Israel”; as written in Haaretz, “Israel has been the name of an ethnic group in the Levant going back at least 3200 years”.

The standard Arab narrative about Israel is that it is the result of Western colonialism. This language has also been adopted by many, who claim that “settler colonialism that began with the Nakba … in 1948”, implying that all of Israel is a colony. This claim is not true, and no healthy relationship can be built while one side keeps repeating lies about the other.

Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people, a people with a long and complex history on that land. Attempts to kill them and exile them came from many sources over the centuries, including the Assyrians, Babylonians, Romans and the Crusaders. These are historical facts.

Israel’s then Prime Minister Golda Meir said in 1973, “We Jews have a secret weapon in our struggle with the Arabs — we have no place to go”. No matter how much pressure Arabs put on Jews to leave, they are not going anywhere; in fact, that pressure only hardens their resolve. Israel is their home.

We must look at Israel not as foreign presence, which it is not, but as a unique and remarkable component of the Middle East that enriches the region.
Not our enemy

We must stop calling Israel our enemy. We deliberately chose to make Israel our enemy when we attacked it, rather than accept the existence of a tiny Jewish state in our midst.

Israel (including the annexed Golan Heights and East Jerusalem) is only 19% of British Mandate Palestine (which included Jordan), on which Britain promised in 1924 to build a “Jewish National Home”. Israel is so small that it would have to be duplicated 595 times to cover the entire Arab world.

We made self-defeating decisions in our relationship with Israel, based on the belief that it is our enemy and that we can only deal with it though force — but the tiny state of Israel is not a threat to the Arab world.

Every year, Palestinians hold rallies, often violent ones, to commemorate the Nakba (“catastrophe”) , which is they give ton to the Arab loss in the war of 1948/49. They carry keys, symbolizing the keys to homes that their ancestors fled during that war. This commemoration, like much of the Arab rhetoric about Israel, is a one-sided view that demonizes Israel while it absolves Arabs of all responsibility for starting and continuing a conflict that resulted in decades of violence as well as displacements of both Arabs and Jews.

The State Department’s latest assault on Israel is further proof of the Obama administration’s deep conviction that “more distancing between itself and Jerusalem is a good thing for the United States,” a top adviser to former US President George W. Bush told The Algemeiner on Monday.

“Its obsession with housing construction by Israeli Jews is certainly not shared by any Arab government, but it is apparently held by everyone working in the Near East Bureau,” said Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the New York- and Washington, DC-based Council on Foreign Relations.

Abrams, who served as deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor in the “Bush 43” administration, was referring back to his own counter-offensive against what he called the State Department’s “remarkable assault on Israel” last week, which, “both in tone and content, marks a new hostility – and plenty of sheer ignorance.”

In his blog “Pressure Points” on Thursday, Abrams blasted the American administration, after State Department spokesman John Kirby released a statement accusing the Israeli government of “systematically undermining the prospects for a two-state solution,” by engaging in “settlement activity, which is corrosive to the cause of peace.”

As far as the timing of the statement is concerned, coinciding as it did with the Democratic National Convention, Abrams said he doesn’t believe it is linked to the presidential race. “What’s in it for the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Obama administration? For Hillary, nothing,” he said. “The Sanders people will presumably like the attack on Israel, but they will credit Obama for it and it won’t make them more likely to vote for her. For Obama, what is ever in it for him and his team, for bashing Israel? What do they ever gain from such actions? I don’t think they do it to help the Left in Israel, or for other narrowly political reasons. They do it out of conviction — the conviction that they have only a few more months to enlarge that famous ‘daylight’ between the US and Israel.”

Asked about the State Department’s having been so harsh on the eve of the visit of IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot, and a few days later, Israeli National Security Council head Yaakov Nagel, to the United States – reportedly to discuss defense cooperation between the two countries and the new US aid package to Israel – Abrams said, “It is suspicious, but not conclusive.”

Abrams was not alone in his criticism of the State Department’s recent reprimand of Israel.

On August 1, Professor Hasia Diner of NYU and Professor Marjorie Feld of Babson College in Massachusetts took to the pages of Ha’aretz to denounce the world’s only Jewish state for being racist, colonialist, reactionary, aggressive, and – this above all – Jewish. Vilification of Israel has long been de rigueur in that newspaper. “When it comes to defaming Jews,” says a character in Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock, “the Palestinians are pisherkes [small fry] next to Ha’aretz.”

On August 2, the same publication (perhaps as a result of some internal dissent) printed a powerful rebuttal by historian Jonathan Sarna of Brandeis. Jeffrey Goldberg of Atlantic Monthly declared that he was “getting ready to leave Ha’aretz behind.” Later he added: “when neo-Nazis are e-mailing me links to Ha’aretz op-eds declaring Israel to be evil, I’m going to take a break.”

Both Feld and Diner tell what might be called unconversion tales, from Zionism to Israelophobia, raw hatred of Israel, of its people, and, still more, of Diaspora Jews who recognize that securing Israel is the moral duty of this generation. Feld hints that she was awakened from her Zionist “delusions” by the outpourings of Noam Chomsky, a writer who would be rendered virtually speechless on the subject of Israel if he stopped equating the Jewish nation with Nazi Germany. His loathing of American Jewry was expressed as follows in 1988: “The Jewish community here is deeply totalitarian. They do not want democracy, they do not want freedom.” Beautiful and touching words! Are they also music to the ears of disillusioned history professors?

Diner, more than Feld, has ideas all her own, some of which may surpass Chomsky’s ravings. For example, she contends that “the death of vast numbers of Jewish communities as a result of Zionist activity has impoverished the Jewish people.” Was it “Zionist activity” and not the Third Reich and its collaborators that annihilated European Jewry? Was it “Zionist activity” and not Arab dictatorships that expelled one Jewish population after another from countries they had inhabited for over a thousand years? And was it “Zionist activity” and not the devastation left by communism that prompted more than a million Jews to leave Russia?

Diner complains that “the singular insistence on Israel as a Jewish and Zionist state” forced her to renounce her Zionist views. “Does Jewish constitute a race or ethnicity?,” she asks. “Does a Jewish state mean a racial state?” This from a teacher of Jewish history? Doesn’t she know that Jewish people are found in all races, and that anyone can become Jewish? Did none of Diner’s colleagues at NYU tell her that the “racial state” of Israel is the only country in history to have sought out and brought to its shores tens of thousands of Africans as free and equal citizens?

“The Law of Return,” Diner avers, “can no longer look to me as anything other than racism.” Yet other free countries have their own Laws of Return, occasioning no protest from the principled professor. The Armenian constitution, for instance, permits individuals “of Armenian origin” to acquire citizenship through “a simplified procedure.” The Lithuanian constitution proclaims: “Everyone who is ethnically Lithuanian has the right to settle in Lithuania.” The Polish and Ukrainian constitutions have identical provisions.

Non-Muslim Syrian refugees have been virtually locked out by the Obama administration, according to current data from the State Department.

According to the Refugee Processing Center, of the 6,877 Syrian refugees that have arrived in 2016 through July 31st, 6,834 of those are identified as Sunni, Shia, or generic Muslim. Only 43 (0.7 percent of total) refugees admitted have been non-Muslim.

That 0.7 percent of refugees arriving this year represents a statistically insignificant fraction of the more than 2.6 million Catholic, Syriac, Assyrian, and Greek Orthodox Christians, as well as Yazidis, other religions, and atheists living in Syria.

Yet all of these groups are being targeted by Islamic extremists — indeed, Secretary of State John Kerry himself has claimed these groups are facing a genocide.

Just yesterday, House Speaker Paul Ryan announced that he is opposed to any religious test for entering the United States:

Despite Ryan’s rejection, the State Department’s own numbers reveal active discrimination targeting non-Muslim Syrian refugees.

According to The Gulf/2000 Project at Columbia University, the religious breakdown of the Syrian population 2008-2009 shows that 15.98 million are Sunnis (73 percent of the population) while 3.29 million are Shiites (14.7 percent of the population). Christians account for 2.04 million people, or 9.3 percent of the population, while other religions account for 590,000 people, or 2.7 percent of the population.

This past March, Secretary of State John Kerry acknowledged at a State Department press conference that minority religious communities in Syria were being targeted for genocide:

My purpose here today is to assert in my judgment, (ISIS) is responsible for genocide against groups in areas under its control including Yazidis, Christians, and Shiite Muslims.

So why haven’t we heard Speaker Ryan’s outrage over active religious discrimination against non-Muslim minority Syrian refugees?

And why is Kerry overseeing the systematic religious discrimination of Syrian refugees in his own State Department?

I’ve witnessed this discrimination by the State Department against Mideast Christians first-hand. Two years ago, I was introduced to an Egyptian Coptic Christian man who had fled Egypt and made it to the U.S. after he was threatened by the Muslim Brotherhood following the July 2013 ouster of Mohamed Morsi. The introduction was made by my friend, Father Anthony Hanna of the St. Mary and St. Mina Coptic Church in Concord, California. In August 2013, he escorted me into Upper Egypt to survey the destruction of Egypt’s churches and monasteries carried out by the Muslim Brotherhood.

This man’s wife and children had been attacked in their village near Minya, where attacks against Christians continue to this day. They were in hiding with family members elsewhere in Egypt, and had hoped to visit their husband and father in the United States.

With the assistance of several members of Congress who had given the family members letters of support, the family applied to visas with the U.S. Embassy in Cairo.

And yet, the State Department denied their visa requests. CONTINUE AT SITE

August is festival month in Edinburgh. A massive celebration, delivered through a collective of independent arts and cultural festivals. Just one of these, the ‘Edinburgh Festival Fringe’, is the largest arts festival in the world.

At the ‘Fringe’ event this year, scheduled for August 17, is the ‘International Shalom Festival’. Described as a one-day celebration bringing together Jews, Arabs, Christians and other minorities, that all co-exist together peacefully in Israel. Yet once again, as Israeli artists perform inside Scotland, demonstrations are being arranged in protest.
Edinburgh protests

As far back as 1997, during the Oslo peace talks, antizionists attacked Israeli performers at the festival. In 2008 the Jerusalem Quartet concert was disrupted, in 2012 it was the turn of the Batsheva Dance Troupe. In 2014, anti-Israel activists called on the venue to cancel a show with Israeli performers, and local police forced the venue to incur additional security costs. In turn, the venue demanded additional funds from the performers.

So in 2015, Haaretz reported that for the first time in years, Israeli performances were not hosted at the festival at all. This silencing of the Israeli voice is celebrated as a victory by the anti-Israel activists. The voice that seeks dialogue and accommodation is being silenced.

The festival is not the only place in Scotland such opposition is seen, less than two years ago a worker at an Israeli cosmetics stall in Glasgow had a ‘burning liquid’ thrown at her. The university space is also rabid, with events being called off due to protests, and Jewish students at universities are “denying or hiding” their identity because of discrimination. These events, including the protests at Edinburgh, are all connected.

Yet here is a simple fact. Israel is by far the most diverse nation in the Middle East. Despite the accusations of the protesters, there is not a single nation in the region that is as free, as democratic, as liberal or as diverse as Israel. Not one. What else sets it apart from all of its neighbours though, is another simple fact. It is the only nation in the world that is Jewish.

According to the 2011 census, there are just under 6000 Jews currently living in Scotland and this year marks 200 years since the first Jewish congregation was founded, ironically in Edinburgh. But in reality, how welcome are the Jews in Scotland? When I use the word ‘welcome’, I don’t refer to the lack of a Hitlerite doctrine, or wish to gauge whether gangs of antisemites seek out symbols that adorn Jewish houses to begin targeting the inhabitants. I simply ask how free are Jewish people to celebrate their Jewish identity publicly?
Zionism

Which brings me back to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The protesters suggest that Israeli money is funding the Shalom Festival and then embark on a sickening exercise to follow ‘Jewish money’, from the organisers back to the embassy of the only democratic nation in the Middle East.

So what is this protest, anti-Israel or anti-Jewish? Well primarily, it is clear that the protest is anti-peace. The essence of the Shalom Festival is co-operation, the diverse and inclusive nature of Israel. And support for dialogue, the underpinnings of the international position over a two state solution. What the protesters are standing against isn’t a settlement or Israeli army action, but rather a core element of Jewish belief – Zionism. The very existence of Israel.

US Marine Corps fighters and Israeli commandos from the navy’s most elite unit conducted a joint exercise simulating a multi-pronged raid on enemy shores, the Hebrew news site Walla reported on Thursday.

According to the report, the point of the exercise – called CAYA Green (for “come as you are when you get the green light”) — was for the Israeli Shayetet 13 commandos to storm the beach clandestinely, under stormy weather conditions, and to secure it for a raid by Marines under fire.

The drill involved the transfer of fighters, jeeps and special equipment from ship to shore — from where the troops were to create maneuver room to move deep into the “enemy zone.”

The joint exercise made use of the amphibious American warship and troop carrier The San Antonio, as well as helicopters and armored vehicles.

A high-ranking Israeli naval officer told Walla that the fighters of Shayetet 13 who participated in the drill “were exposed to the many capabilities of the US {military}, among these, expertise in combat, raids, medical procedures (including surgery), the overtaking of a ship and logistics.”

He added that some of the equipment employed by the American {Marines} is familiar to the Israelis, but some “we’ve only seen in movies.”

In January 2015, I was one of the first to report on a massive massacre by Nigerian terror group Boko Haram in Borno State in northwest Nigeria, with reportedly thousands killed. Witnesses on the ground reported that bodies littered the landscape for miles as towns and villages had been burned to the ground, their populations murdered or fled.

By that time, Boko Haram had already become the most lethal terrorist organization in the world, now responsible for tens of thousands of deaths. Just yesterday, the United Nations accused Boko Haram of “almost unimaginable” levels of violence and brutality.
EXCLUSIVE: How Hillary Clinton Mainstreamed Al-Qaeda Fundraiser Abdurahman Alamoudi

And yet, as Boko Haram began to ramp up its terror campaign in 2011 and 2012, Hillary Clinton obstructed the official terror designation of the group over the objections of Congress, the FBI, the CIA and the Justice Department.

Boko Haram death toll

Why did Hillary Clinton’s State Department drag its feet on the terror designation in the face of near unanimous opposition from the rest of the U.S. government?

A recent series of reports exposes that a close Clinton family confidante — and Hillary campaign bundler — profited from Nigeria’s lucrative oil fields. He engaged in multiple illegal deals throughout Africa.

Also, other donors to the Clinton Global Initiative are deeply involved in Nigeria’s corrupt oil industry.

Were they the motivation behind Hillary’s inexplicable position on Boko Haram?

As PJ Media’s Bridget Johnson has previously asked, is Boko Haram Hillary Clinton’s biggest scandal? Hillary Clinton is set to accept the Democratic Party nomination for president of the United States. Why is no one in the media talking about Hillary and Boko Haram?

Say what? Don’t fight them there or they will go to Europe and America? They already have. Is he dense or was he too busy trying to exonerate Hillary to have read the news about Orlando or France or Germany? Federal Bureau of Ineptitude? rsk

Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey warned of a potential consequence of a future Islamic State defeat in the Middle East: a migration of the group’s fighters to Western Europe and the U.S.

In a speech at Fordham University on Wednesday, Mr. Comey said counterterrorism officials are focused on the prospect of hundreds of Islamic State fighters surviving the battlefield and flowing into Western Europe to commit attacks like the recent ones in Brussels and Paris. The ease of travel would also make the U.S. vulnerable to this threat, he said.

“This is an order of magnitude greater than any diaspora we’ve seen before,” Mr. Comey said. “A lot of terrorists fled out of Afghanistan in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This is 10 times that or more.”

Mr. Comey said violence inspired and directed by Islamic State is the greatest current threat to the physical safety of Americans. Trying to stop such attacks is even harder than finding a needle in a haystack, he said.

“We have to figure out which pieces of hay may become a needle because there are troubled people consuming that propaganda all over the world,” he said.

The current American election campaign is being touted as the most fraught in recent history. After arduous internal battles, the Republican and Democratic parties have finally nominated their candidates for the presidency of the United States — presenting the public with a choice between two unpopular and widely vilified candidates.

This turn of events is disheartening, as it is causing many voters to claim they will shun the ballot box in November. Far more disturbing, however, is the societal genie it has let out of the bottle — open expressions of Jew-hatred across the political spectrum. Thanks to social media, it is neither necessary nor possible to sugarcoat or qualify the nature of the comments on Facebook and Twitter. Nor can the words of angry mobs defending their candidate of choice by attacking their opponents be interpreted as political criticism.

The cat is out of the bag, and its name is anti-Semitism.

First came the white supremacists sending Donald Trump’s critics — whether Jewish or only perceived as such — to the gas chambers and bemoaning the fact that “Hitler didn’t finish off the job.” And now there are the Black Lives Matter and Students for Justice in Palestine gangs, banishing “Zionist pigs” from the Middle East and American universities. Oh, and burning the Israeli flag outside the Democratic National Convention — to protest Hillary Clinton’s victory over contender Bernie Sanders, a Jew. The irony would be sweet if it weren’t so tragic.

Meanwhile, as was revealed by the latest report released by the AMCHA Initiative — a watchdog organization that monitors anti-Semitism on U.S. campuses — Jewish students are the group most targeted for systematic attack. According to the report, which bases its findings on the State Department’s definition of anti-Semitism, this phenomenon has sharply increased since last year alone. And the top institutions of higher learning at which Jews feel least safe are Columbia, Vassar and the University of Chicago — illustrious schools filled with Jewish students, academics, alumni and donors.

As the late historian Robert Wistrich told me in an interview nearly a decade ago, “On the substantive issue of when criticism of Israel becomes anti-Semitic, I think that there are good criteria. Every rational person understands the difference between criticism and defamation. If you talk about an individual in a defamatory way, you’re going to the heart of his character, his essence. The same is true of countries.”