RUTHFULLY YOURS

United States of Jihad: Investigating America’s Homegrown Terrorists, by Peter Bergen (Crown, 400 pp., $28)

Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror, by Michael V. Hayden (Penguin, 464 pp., $30)

In mid-April, President Barack Obama boasted that America and its allies were winning the fight against the Islamic State. In a rare visit to Central Intelligence Agency headquarters, Obama noted that though ISIS could still inflict “horrific violence,” America’s 11,500 air strikes had put the group on its heels. “We have momentum,” the president said, “and we intend to keep that.” Only days before, however, senior administration officials sounded gloomier about the state of the war. While American air strikes and other operations had killed 25,000 ISIS fighters in Iraq and Syria, incinerated hundreds of millions of dollars that ISIS had stolen from banks and seized from kidnappings and extortion, forced it to cut salaries by a third, and taken back some territory it had seized in Iraq and Syria, the terror group now had roots in 15 countries and continued to expand its reach in Europe, North Africa, and Afghanistan. Deputy Secretary of State Anthony Blinken told senators that despite the progress, America and its allies had failed to stop “the recruitment, radicalization, and mobilization of people, especially young people, to engage in terrorist activities.” In February, James Clapper, President Obama’s director of national intelligence, testified that ISIS remained not only the nation’s “preeminent terrorist threat,” but that al-Qaida and its affiliates were “positioned to make gains in 2016.” ISIS, he said later, was a “phenomenon.”

Is the threat of ISIS to Americans at home and abroad growing or waning? What has prompted its rise and that of like-minded militant Islamists? And most crucially, how can America and its allies defeat them and their seductive extremist ideology?

No shortage of books has appeared on the issue of Islamic terrorism since al-Qaida’s attacks on New York and Washington on September 11. The rise of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaida in Iraq, which evolved into the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, is compellingly described in Black Flags, Joby Warrick’s riveting account of how ISIS, aided partly by the strategic errors of Presidents Bush and Obama, managed to seize and impose its barbaric, authoritarian rule on a territory the size of Great Britain. Published last year, the book won a Pulitzer Prize. It was a worthy successor to The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright’s majestic 2006 account of the rise of al-Qaida. Now, new books by Peter Bergen, a CNN national security analyst and professor at Arizona State University who was the first reporter to interview bin Laden for an American broadcast network, and Michael V. Hayden, a former director of the National Security Administration and the Central Intelligence Agency, enhance our understanding of the spread of ISIS and like-minded jihadi groups; the appeal of the extremism underlying them; how law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and American Muslims have responded to the threat of Islamist terror; and how that appeal might be reduced.

Huh? “They appear to be terrorists and they are from the “occupied West Bank”….is the WSJ taking its narrative from the New York Times?….this is the latest of more than 300 attacks by PalArabs targeting Israelis over the past nine months…rsk

TEL AVIV—Two Palestinian gunmen opened fire Wednesday at a popular food market in central Tel Aviv, killing four people and wounding five others in what Israeli police said appeared to be a terror attack.

The attackers were family members in their 20s from the Hebron region of the occupied West Bank, police said. One was arrested and the other was rushed to the hospital after being shot and​subdued by police.

One attacker sat in a cafe at the high-end Sarona Market before standing up and shooting at other customers, according to witnesses. The assault came on a warm summer night at about 9 p.m.

“He got up, he had a rifle in his hand and he was just shooting point-blank at people [who were] sitting down,” said one witness, Avraham Liber, according to a video distributed by nonprofit group the Israel Project.

Meital Gonen, who manages a clothing shop at the market, said more than 10 people took cover in the store after shots began ringing out.

“People were running and screaming ‘blood’ and ‘terrorists,’ and one woman fainted,” she said. Security forces kept the store on lockdown while searches for the gunmen were under way, she said.

Apparently, Amb. Stephen D. Mull has been living under a rock for the past decade.

Mull is man the Obama administration appointed to implement its nuclear deal with Iran. Iran is a country that has consistently vowed to wipe America’s ally Israel off the map. In fact, Iran is considered, by many, to be the greatest existential threat to the State of Israel.

For decades, Iran has threatened to destroy Israel. Just recently, Iran test-fired two ballistic missiles that were marked with the statement “Israel must be wiped off the Earth.”

Mull showed a stunning level of ignorance towards a threat to the State of Israel last month when, at a recent hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. While being questioned by Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) about letters from the State Department requesting that States revisit and lift laws that divest state funds from Iran, Mull was asked if the State Department would do the same for Israel and send a letter urging States against BDS. Mull then claimed that he was “not sure what that [BDS] is.”

How does he not know what BDS is?

The BDS. Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement against Israel is a discriminatory movement against the State of Israel that’s over a decade old and has been working to isolate the State of Israel both financially and diplomatically. Some consider BDS as much of a threat to Israel as Iran.

It’s not necessarily the duty of the State Department to urge U.S. states against BDS. However, as a top diplomat assigned to implementing a deal with a country calling for the destruction of both the U.S. and its ally Israel, Mull should have a general understanding of the threats these countries face.

This special edition of The Glazov Gang presents The Louis Lionheart Moment with Louis Lionheart, a scholar of Islam and Christian preacher who is the Founder of TruthDefenders.com.

Louis discussed Lucifer, Lies and Lust: The Dark Reality of Muslim Paradise, unveiling what Jihadists are killing and dying for.

Don’t miss it!

And make sure to watch Louis discuss Muslim Woman Attacks Christian Preacher, in which he shares the incident that occurred with him when he dared to tell the truth about Mohammed and Aisha. (Video clip of the assault is played in the program):

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Journalist and Philos Project contributor Ralph Dexter Van Zile takes to task Christians worldwide who “practice Christianity as if it were a submissive, anti-Semitic slave religion.” This assessment comes in his new book Submitted under Protest: Essays Written in Defense of Freedom, an insightful anthology documenting one Christian’s intellectual defense of religious freedom against jihad.

Van Zile examines how old discredited anti-Semitic sentiments have gained new vibrancy among Christians as the global “human rights community has promoted a pornographic obsession with the Arab-Israeli conflict.” Amongst America’s historically socially predominant Protestant denominations like the United Church of Christ in which the Catholic Van Zile grew up, “progressive mainline churches have become a storehouse of anti-Jewish invective.” Internationally, the “World Council of Churches [WCC] speaks about the modern state of Israel in a manner similar to the way Christians spoke about Jews in Medieval Europe—as a uniquely sinful nation.”

WCC materials, writes Van Zile, “portray Israel’s creation as a mistake or irredeemable injustice against the Palestinians.” In America, the “implicit message offered by mainline peace and justice activists” is that “maybe the world would be better off if the Jewish nation were banished from community of nations and ultimately dismantled.” Often this “anti-Zionism expressed by mainline churches is a consequence of disappointed millennial hopes” as Judaism’s historic encounters with a fallen, murderous world negate what he calls “messianic pacifism.”

Van Zile also analyzes surprising parallel developments among anti-Zionist Jewish groups like Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). “If they were alive in the 1930s, JVP’s supporters and allies would argue that if only Herschel Grynszpan hadn’t killed that German diplomat on November 6, 1938, Kristallnacht would never have happened.” Van Zile disbelievingly writes that “maybe the Holocaust could have been averted through rational discussion.”

Such distorted biases result in “portraying Israel as if it has the human rights record of China and the security concerns of Canada,” writes Van Zile. Yet Israeli democracy “sets the gold standard for human rights in the Middle East,” while the region’s dictatorships and terrorist movements commit often ignored atrocities against which Israeli sins pale. Demands that Israel achieve peace with its Arab neighbors similarly ignores that “Israel has been attacked from every inch of territory from which it has withdrawn in the past two decades.” This reflects the security reality that “Israel was created in response to a mass killing of Jews in Europe in the twentieth century that part of Arab and Muslim world seem intent on repeating in the twenty-first century.”

Yale English majors are demanding a safe space from Chaucer.

In a petition to the English department, Yale undergraduates declare that a required two-semester seminar on Major English Poets is a danger to their well-being. Never mind that the offending poets – Shakespeare, Chaucer, Donne, Milton, Wordsworth, et al. – are the foundational writers in the English language. It’s as if chemistry students objected to learning the periodic table or math students rose up against the teaching of differential calculus.

The root of the plaint against the seminar is, of course, the usual PC bean-counting, where prodigious talents who have stood the test of time and explore the deepest questions about what it means to be human are found wanting because they wouldn’t be suitable models for a United Colors of Benetton ad.

The petition whines that “a year spent around a seminar table where the literary contributions of women, people of color, and queer folk are absent actively harms all students, regardless of their identity.”

This is a variation on the widespread belief on campus that unwelcome speech is tantamount to a physical threat. In this case, the speech happens to be some of the most eloquent words written in the English language. One can only pity the exceedingly fragile sensibility it takes to feel assaulted by, say, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey.”

The petition’s implicit contention is that the major poets are too circumscribed by their race and gender to speak to today’s socially aware students, when, in point of fact, it is the students who are too blinkered by race and gender to marvel at great works of art.

It takes a deeply impoverished imagination to read Shakespeare and regard him simply as an agent of the patriarchy. It is safe to say that the bard is better at expressing what it is like to be a teenage girl in love, or a woman disguised as a man who falls for a man, or a bloody tyrant than almost every actual teenage girl in love, woman disguised as a man, or bloody tyrant.

The poet Maya Angelou said in a lecture once that as a child she thought, “Shakespeare must be a black girl.” It was because, growing up in the Jim Crow South, a victim of unspeakable abuse, Sonnet 29 spoke so powerfully to her. (“When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, / I all alone beweep my outcast state, / And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, / And look upon myself and curse my fate.”)

Islamic violence is nearly impossible to deny. But why is Islam violent? The usual answer is to point to Koranic verses calling for the conquest and subjugation of non-Muslims. That certainly covers the theological basis for Islamic violence. But it fails to explain why Muslims continue to practice it. Even against each other. Violence has become the defining form of Islamic exceptionalism.

Optimists speak of reforming Islam. But such reforms had over a thousand years in which to take place.

Islam is an ideology. Its violence is a strategy. That strategy fit the needs of Mohammed. Mohammed chose to use force to spread his ideology. He needed to recruit fighters so he preached the inferiority of non-Muslims, the obligation for Muslims to conquer non-Muslims and the right of his fighters to seize the property and wives of non-Muslims as incentive for them to join his fight. Furthermore he even promised them that if they should fall in battle, they would receive loot and women in paradise.

The strategy was barbarous, but quite effective. Mohammed had created a new super-tribe in a tribal society. The tribe of Islam united different groups in a mission of conquest. The Islamic religion allowed the varying clans to be more effective and ambitious than their victims. Within a surprisingly short amount of time the chain of conquests made Islam into a world religion. The most effective Islamic conquerors could not only claim vast territories, carving up civilization into fiefdoms, but they could prepare their sons and grandsons to continue the chain of conquests.

Islam made the standard tactics of tribal warfare far more effective. Its alliance was harder to fragment and its fighters were not afraid of death. But at the same time Islam remained fundamentally tribal. It made tribal banditry more effective, but didn’t change the civilization. It codified the tribal suspicion of outsiders and women into a religious doctrine. That still drives Islamic violence against non-Muslims and women today.

And yet Islam could have reformed. All it had to do was choose a different civilizational strategy.

This academic year will be remembered for its psychological crack-ups over Halloween costumes (Yale), faculty intimidation of student journalists covering protesters (the University of Missouri) and purges of single-sex social clubs (Harvard). But the dishonor roll isn’t complete without documenting how the Obama Administration is further eroding due process on campus.

The Education and Justice Departments have already gone far to subvert the norm that students accused of sexual assault retain individual rights. Now they are targeting the few rights that are left. Under new standards promulgated this spring, students can be punished before any disciplinary hearing has been held, and sometimes after anonymous allegations.

Starting with a 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter, the Education Department has reinterpreted the Title IX law that prohibits sex discrimination at educational institutions, creating legal obligations that do not exist in federal statutes. Schools can now lose taxpayer funds if they use a “clear and convincing” evidentiary standard for adjudicating assaults instead of the less rigorous “preponderance of the evidence.”

A new round of federal letters appeared starting in April. The one that expanded the definition of sexual harassment the most—and how schools must respond—was the finding of a Justice Department investigation into the University of New Mexico’s grievance protocol.

Justice said UNM violated Title IX in part because of a “failure to provide effective interim safety measures.” Interim measures are imposed on an accused student before any official ruling on guilt. They can include provisional suspensions for the accused; no-contact instructions akin to a restraining order; restrictions on when students can use libraries, dining halls and athletic facilities; evictions from dorms; and bans on extracurricular activities. CONTINUE AT SITE

“The subject is gloomy, but the food will be good—and the music spectacular.”http://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2016/06/is-anti-zionism-on-campus-a-passing-nuisance-or-a-fundamental-threat/

Thus, in late January, spoke Alvin Rosenfeld, a professor at Indiana University and director of its Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism. He was describing a four-day international scholars’ conference scheduled for late spring on the university’s Bloomington campus. In the event, the conference did not disappoint in its food, its music—or its gloom, which rose like a miasma from the days-long rehearsals of the varied and abundant forms of anti-Semitism, particularly in the form of anti-Zionism, in today’s world.

As if to reinforce the gravity of the occasion, the conference took place in the interval between the November 2015 terrorist massacres in Paris and the disclosure in April of the social-media posts by Naz Shah, a Labor member of the British parliament, advocating the forcible “relocation” of all Israeli Jews to America and the even greater uproar a month later over anti-Semitism among senior party leaders. Although the focus of the conference was mainly on Europe, both the academic setting and the topic, “Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism, and the Dynamics of Delegitimization,” inevitably launched attendees into the middle of an issue that many American Jews have strenuously tried to avoid: namely, the anti-Israel activity now rampaging through U.S. universities. Is this a fundamental threat, or a nasty but passing nuisance?

The answer suggested by the conference deliberations—“both of the above”—may sound like another evasion, but reflects an understanding of the still-relevant distinction between the seemingly ineradicable persistence of European anti-Semitism and the contrasting benignity of American social and political institutions. It also suggested the need to exploit that distinction before it becomes too late.

I. The European Scene

That today’s anti-Semitism is intimately connected with anti-Zionism is a virtually axiomatic proposition. Still, there are variations, and Europe specializes in them. The scholars at the conference—mostly from outside the United States—did a thorough job of filling in the European background, anatomizing the beast’s profile in individual countries, and connecting it in each case with the details of local politics. Without pretending to do justice to the richness of these presentations, it’s possible to sketch a few main themes before returning to the American scene.

That Old-Time Religion

There are places in Europe—and especially in Eastern Europe—where anti-Semitism is still so unreconstructed, and the sanctions against its open expression so few, that it doesn’t bother to cloak itself in “mere” anti-Zionism. One of these places appears to be the Czech Republic.

Thus, according to Zbyněk Tarant, an expert in cyber-hate at the University of West Bohemia, anti-Semitism on the Czech Internet, once chiefly a staple of neo-Nazi websites but now also part of the arsenal of more general conspiracy theorists, has recently specialized in resuscitating more ancient tropes in order to “explain” current events.

Two Israeli celebrations in recent days underscore the uniqueness and heroism of the Jewish state, while highlighting the concerted effort on the part of its enemies to undermine and delegitimize it.

The first was Gay Pride Week, which culminated in a massive parade in Tel Aviv. The second was the anniversary of the liberation of Jerusalem, capped off by a flag march through the streets of the Old City.

Though unrelated in content and focus, what these annual events have in common is their misrepresentation by ill-wishers.

Let’s begin with what Israel’s detractors concocted to counter the consensus, revealed in numerous tourist and other surveys, that Tel Aviv is among the most LGBT-friendly cities in the world. Coming up with the clever catch-phrase “pinkwashing,” left-wing activists accuse Israel of flaunting its gay-rights record so as to obfuscate its abuse of the Palestinians, including those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. Never mind that such Palestinians sneak into Israel, where they can be free to be who they are without fear of rejection or slaughter for their sexual preferences. All one has to do to cast aspersion on the Jewish state is spread lies. It’s an effective propaganda tool, which works like a charm — though in this case, the fun that is had by all during Pride Week appears to trump the mud-slinging.

When it comes to marking the reunification of Israel’s capital 49 years ago, the lies are even more pronounced, as they have had many more years to take hold in the hearts and minds of people who don’t know any better, not to mention many whose motives are impure.