RUTHFULLY YOURS

Donald Trump is standing by his charge that President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are the “co-founders” of ISIS.

“In many respects, you know, they honor President Obama,” Trump said at a Florida rally on August 10th. “He’s the founder of ISIS. I would say the co-founder would be crooked Hillary Clinton.”

Commentators immediately ripped into Trump’s latest accusation against Obama as demonstrably false. They point out that ISIS’s predecessor organization was originally a part of al Qaeda in Iraq and was founded years before Obama became president. David A. Graham, a staff writer at The Atlantic, for example, wrote that the idea that Obama is “a founder of the group is plainly ridiculous.”

A conservative radio show host, Hugh Hewitt, tried during an interview with Trump to offer him some wiggle room. “You meant that he created the vacuum, he lost the peace,” Hewitt said, in attempting to clarify for the audience what Trump really meant. At first, Trump did not back down from his use of the term “founder” when describing Obama’s relationship to ISIS. He responded, “No, I meant he’s the founder of ISIS. I do. He was the most valuable player. I give him the most valuable player award. I give her, too, by the way, Hillary Clinton.” But then, Trump explained, “I mean, with his bad policies, that’s why ISIS came about. If he would have done things properly, you wouldn’t have had ISIS.” Hewitt agreed with Trump’s explanation, but said he would not have used the phrase “founder of ISIS” to communicate it.

A debate over the precise semantics should not be allowed to obscure the underlying truth of Trump’s observation. Obama’s policies, in which Hillary Clinton participated in their formulation and early implementation, created the conditions that allowed ISIS to rise and become the global threat that it represents today.

ISIS (or the Islamic State, as it likes to call itself) emerged from the remains of the al Qaeda organization in Iraq, which was founded by the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Zarqawi was killed during the second term of George W. Bush’s administration. The al Qaeda organization itself was defeated as a result of Bush’s “surge” policy, which Obama and Hillary Clinton, as U.S. senators, opposed. On October 22nd, 2007, Osama bin Laden admitted in an audio tape, entitled “Message to the people of Iraq,” that al Qaeda was losing the war in Iraq because it had made mistakes and no longer had the allegiance of Sunni insurgents who had switched sides. When Barack Obama became president on January 20, 2009, the war in Iraq against ISIS’s predecessor group was essentially won.

The status of Islam should be clarified if the debate on how to defeat terrorism is ever to bear fruit. Islam, I would argue, is not a religion in the common acceptation of the term as a community of believers dedicated to the loving worship of the Divine, the sanctity of life, and the institution of moral principles governing repentance for sins and crimes, making life on earth a stage toward a higher reincarnation, an ineffable peace, or a confirmatory prelude to eternity in the realm of a righteous and merciful God.

In fact, Islam is an unrepentant politico-expansionist movement clothed in the trappings of religion and bent on universal conquest by whatever means it can mobilize: deception (taqiyya), social and cultural infiltration, or bloody violence, as its millennial history and authoritative scriptures have proven. (See Koran 13:41, which is meant literally despite the attempt of apologists to launder its purport: “Do they not see that We are advancing in the land, diminishing it by its borders on all sides?”)

There are several ways in which Islam differs from all other major religions. For starters:

It sanctions militant proselytization, mandating forcible imposition on other peoples by coercion, threat and overt violence (Koran 8:39, 9:29, etc.), a practice unique among religions today.

It punishes apostasy with death (Koran 4:89; Hadith, Bukhari 9.84.57), also a practice unique among religions today.

It countenances no separation between church and state, that is, it cannot render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. The scope of its ambition is khilafil, that is, the establishment of a Caliphate requiring that a state—ultimately a universal state—be ruled by Islamic law. As Muslim scholar Jaafar Sheikh Idris explains, “Secularism cannot be a solution for countries with a Muslim majority or even a sizeable minority, for it requires people to replace their God-given beliefs with an entirely different set of man-made beliefs. Separation of religion and state is not an option for Muslims because it requires us to abandon Allah’s decree for that of man.”

The “religion” itself takes precedence over the transcendent values it should strive to attain: the flourishing of the individual soul, the love of God’s Creation, the grace and miracle of life, the conversation with the Divine, freedom of conscience and the inviolability of personal choice in determining one’s redemption. Instead, it elevates conformity to a set of stringent rules, down to the smallest detail, as a prerequisite to salvation, whose effect is primarily to perpetuate the faith itself at the expense of the individual votary. Admittedly, this is a literalist practice common to most restrictive and comparatively minor orthodoxies, but regarding the massive following enjoyed by Islam and its susceptibility to violence and the subjugation of other faiths and peoples to its hegemony, we are remarking a radically greater economy of scale and the havoc it can wreak.

The propensity to violence is not an aberration but an intrinsic element of the Islamic corpus. As Lee Cary has written, Islamic terrorists are “legacy, Koranic literalists” who use terror “to enforce a dogma that defines behavioral practices that comply with the Koran and [defines] the regulations of daily life.” The much-bruited notion that there is such a thing as “Islamism,” a form of extremism that has nothing to do with Islam proper, or is a perversion thereof, is a pure canard, another in a series of timorous progressivist memes bleaching the blood out of the Islamic ideological jalabiyya. Islam, not “Islamism,” promises paradise for martyrs and jihadis killed in battle (Koran 3: 157), thus palliating and even inciting feral attitudes and fanatical actions—a patently non-spiritual way of earning beatitude.

As Howard Kainz points out in an illuminating essay, “Islam and the Decalogue,” Islam reverses the Golden Rule, which is central to Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism (Koran 48:29, 2:191, 3:28, etc.). For this reason, Kainz concludes, “Islam may best be understood,” not as a religion, but “as a world-wide cult.”

On June 15, 2016, Israel’s Shin Bet security agency nabbed Muhammad Halabi at the Erez Crossing as he was trying to return to the Gaza Strip.

The Times of Israel reports that Halabi was Gaza manager of operations for World Vision. One of the largest Christian charities in the world, World Vision operates in about 100 countries and has a budget of $2.6 billion, much of it provided by Western governments and the UN.

Halabi has been indicted in an Israeli court for funneling 60% of the World Vision budget at his disposal—about $7.2 million a year—to Hamas, the terror organization that runs Gaza.

A member of Hamas from a young age, in 2005 Halabi was “handpicked to infiltrate” World Vision with the aim of diverting funds to the terror group. The money went for digging terror tunnels, buying weapons, and building military bases.

In addition, “about 40% of World Vision’s funds for civilian projects—$1.5 million a year—was also given to Hamas battalions in cash…along with approximately $4 million a year that was designated for helping the needy.”

Some of the fictive humanitarian projects

included the construction of greenhouses, rejuvenation of agricultural fields, mental and physical health projects, an initiative to assist fishermen, a center for treating the mentally and physically handicapped, and the creation of agricultural organizations.

“These were all used as a pipeline to transfer money to Hamas,” the Shin Bet said.

In a statement, the Shin Bet said its “meaningful and important investigation [had] showed—above all—the cynical and crude way in which Hamas takes advantage of funds and resources from international humanitarian aid organizations.”

World Vision, for its part, countered with: “Based on the information available to us at this time, we have no reason to believe that the allegations are true. We will carefully review any evidence presented to us and will take appropriate actions based on that evidence.”

On a trip to the U.S, the Rev. Dr. Kenneth Meshoe, a member of the South African Parliament, president of the African Christian Democratic Party and chairman of the South African Israel Allies Caucus, expressed his profound concern about the ad campaign on San Francisco’s Muni transportation system, urging for an end to U.S. support for Israel. A group of Christian, Jewish and Muslims has funded the ad campaign since 2010. [1]
Having lived as a black South African under apartheid and having visited Israel numerous times, he said there is no basis for those accusing Israel of being an apartheid state. Apartheid is a legal system of segregation based on color, with a white majority in control of the government. Under apartheid, people of color could not vote, hold office or travel freely in their own country.
Only segregated schools and sports arenas were available to them and they had to use segregated public restrooms and public transportation. Whites and blacks were prohibited to marry or have sexual relations. Different residential areas were built to ensure a forced physical separation between the races. Their hospitals, medical care and education were always inferior to those of the whites. Any white physicians willing to treat a black patient had to conduct the examination in private. [2]
Richard J. Goldstone, a former justice of the South African Constitutional Court, who led the United Nations fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict of 2008-2009, added that attacking Israel “is an unfair and inaccurate slander … calculated to retard rather than advance peace negotiations…. In Israel, there is no apartheid. Nothing there comes close to the definition of apartheid under the 1998 Rome Statute.” [3]
He remembered “all too well the cruelty of South Africa’s abhorrent apartheid system …where blacks critically injured in car accidents were left to bleed to death if there was no black’ ambulance to rush them to a black hospital. ‘White’ hospitals were prohibited from saving their lives.”[4]

If we are speaking of Muslims, I would say no. Muslims would need to repudiate Islam or leave it as apostates. Because Islam is a totalitarian ideology melded to the “religion” of Islam, such an action would require intellectual honesty, a fealty to reality, and a dollop of courage in the face of death threats prescribed in the Koran or leave it as apostates. Because Islam is a totalitarian ideology melded to the “religion” of Islam, such an action would require intellectual honesty, a fealty to reality, and a dollop of courage in the face of death threats prescribed in the Koran for leavers of the “faith.” I also base my conclusion on the record of crimes by jihadists who are first- or second-generation Muslims, a record compiled and documented by Clarion and numerous other sites that report on the rapes, murders, knifings, and suicide-bombings committed by Muslims who have resided in the West for any measurable time. The more barbarous the origins of these Muslims (Somalia comes to mind, and there is also a racist element in Somalian crimes against Westerners), repeatedly commit the most heinous crimes and plead ignorance of Western mores and standards of behavior. The authorities and the MSM jump on a “mental illness” explanation before a victim is taken away in an ambulance.

Islam does not prepare average Muslims for any degree of intellectual enquiry on any subject, especially when it comes to the multitude of contradictions and fallacies inherent in the “faith” which would leave Socrates or Aristotle massaging their heads. Islam is anti-mind to the core, and does not much tolerate Muslims who “want to know.” Islam is a mortal enemy of free minds. This will help to explain why Muslim populations in Western countries represent a “silent majority” reluctant to or will not condemn jihadist outrages, and this silence is to my mind tacit approval of the crimes, even when Muslims are collateral victims of terrorist attacks (as there were on 9/11, e.g.). This tacit sanctioning may be based on fear of reprisals or on an inbred indifference to the death and suffering caused by terrorism. Islam is, among other charges one may level against it, profoundly anti-life and anti-individual, and so I shall always remain “Islamophobic.”

‘The Angel: The Egyptian Spy Who Saved Israel’ by Uri Bar-Joseph is a book that should be required reading—as a terrible warning—for everyone involved in intelligence. It is the tale of how an intelligence agency, despite having the best information imaginable, can still get it wrong. Bar-Joseph recounts how, prior to the Yom Kippur War of 1973 when Israel suffered a near-fatal blow, Israel had been given detailed knowledge of Egypt’s plans thanks “to an exceptionally rare situation in the history of espionage: the direct assistant to the leader of a country preparing to launch an attack on its enemy was a secret agent on behalf of that enemy.”

That secret agent was Ashraf Marwan, the son-in-law of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and a trusted confidante of his successor, Anwar Sadat. Bar-Joseph, a professor of political science at the University of Haifa, himself a veteran of the war, has the ideal background to write this book. His earlier effort, The Watchman Fell Asleep, took a broad view of the intelligence failures leading up to the Yom Kippur War; it is considered the most important study on the subject and won the Israeli Political Science Association Best Book Award in 2002. In The Angel, ably translated by David Hazony, Bar-Joseph focuses exclusively on the story of the spy central to the drama and the ossified thinking that prevented Israel from taking advantage of the secrets he provided.

In the summer of 1970, Marwan simply consulted the phone book and called the Israeli Embassy from a London telephone booth to offer his services. It took a second phone call five months later for Mossad agents to wake up to the fact that they were being offered what a former Mossad chief would call “the greatest source we have ever had.”

What was Marwan’s motivation? Bar-Joseph hazards some conjectures. Nasser, unusually for an Arab leader, was immune to financial corruption and had no intention of allowing his ambitious son-in-law to use his new family connections to enrich himself. He disliked Marwan and, when his daughter refused his order to divorce him, put him in a job with little pay or scope. But while the desire to get back at Nasser and improve his finances might explain his initial decision, as Bar-Joseph notes, it does not explain why Marwan spied for Israel after Nasser’s death. Marwan’s situation radically improved after he backed Sadat in the face of an attempted palace coup d’état; from then on he enjoyed a key role in Sadat’s inner circle. Bar-Joseph suggests instead that Marwan had a need to live dangerously and seek out risk, almost like an adrenaline junkie. Whatever his motives, writes Bar-Joseph, the cornucopia of information that poured forth from him, the most important concerning the Egyptian military, “went far beyond anything [the Israelis] had known. It was unprecedented in its quality.”

With the collapse of several artificial nation-states created by the victors of the First World War, the entire region from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf has entered a prolonged period of instability. The Syrian and Libyan states have ceased to exist; the Iraqi State is near collapse; the Lebanese state is hostage to Iran; the Turkish state has just survived a military coup and is descending into authoritarian rule; and Saudi Arabia will not be able to buy domestic peace much longer if oil prices remain low. Egypt survived a revolution and counterrevolution to return to the status quo of military rule, but depends on subsidies from the Gulf States.

Non-state actors now occupy the political and military space left vacant by the collapse or decline of nation-states. That is emphatically true in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, and increasingly true in Turrkey. The most fanatical and determined of these actors play the decisive role—Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria and the Iran-backed Shi’ite militias in Iraq, and ISIS and al-Qaeda in Iraq and Syria. Ethnic and sectarian divisions that were contained by the region’s autocracies have turned into vehicles for existential war.

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.