RUTHFULLY YOURS

‘Uneaten birthday cakes next to pools of blood’

An Israeli parliamentarian who arrived on the scene of Wednesday night’s Palestinian terrorist attack in Tel Aviv summed up in a phrase what terrorism is all about.

“Uneaten birthday cakes next to pools of blood,” is how Likud MK Amir Ohana described what he encountered in the immediate aftermath of the shooting spree at the Max Brenner chocolate shop and cafe in the Sarona shopping complex.

No matter how precisely witnesses describe the attacks Israelis experience on a regular basis — the fear, the screams, and the killings — it is rare for words to capture carnage so well.

Yes, “uneaten birthday cakes next to pools of blood” tells us everything we need to know about the setting and its significance in the twisted, brainwashed minds of young people in the Palestinian Authority. It is precisely what the two young men, relatives from the village of Yatta near Hebron who brought makeshift assault rifles with them to an eatery on a summer’s eve, had envisioned. It was exactly their goal to slaughter Jews, some of them in casual dress and flip-flops, enjoying a respite from the oppressive heat of the day, others dressed to the nines, celebrating personal milestones.

Indeed, “uneaten birthday cakes next to pools of blood” says it all. It is a reminder of the funerals that will soon take place and the devastation entire families will feel for the rest of their lives; the months of physical rehabilitation and trauma awaiting those who were injured; and the tears of mothers, fathers, sons and daughters praying at bedsides.

“You never get used to it,” said a surgeon from the Sourasky Medical Center, where the wounded — among them one of the two terrorists — are being treated.

The rest of us in Israel, meanwhile, will be treated by the international community to reprimands about the need for peace, just as we are already being bombarded on local talk shows with the urgency for “an agreement with the Palestinians.” Like the terrorist attacks themselves, these pronouncements are repeated virtually without let-up.

The difference this time is the addition of the discussion about how Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s new defense minister, who assumed his role only last week, is going to meet the challenge, particularly as a proponent of the death penalty for terrorists, which the Jewish state does not have. Natch.

This is something the Arabs in Judea and Samaria, east Jerusalem and Gaza are keenly aware of, along with the knowledge that if they engage in particularly gruesome violence, they will be hailed as heroes by their society and leaders. Those who are killed while murdering Jews can look forward not only to paradise in the afterlife, but being martyrs after whom sports arenas, cultural events and streets are named.

Thankfully, Lieberman — whose alleged first order of business over the weekend was to strike terrorist bases in Syria — did not talk politics. Instead, he gave a brief press conference at the scene of the attack with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu had just landed in Tel Aviv from a two-and-a-half-day trip to Russia, ostensibly to mark the 25th anniversary of the establishment of full diplomatic relations with Moscow, but really to cement growing ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin. This is the sad but necessary upshot of the Obama administration’s attitude toward Israel in particular and the Middle East in general.

For some years now, the Obama administration has worked on developing a “Countering Violent Extremism” (CVE) strategy. Its goals: to be proactive in stopping terrorists from radicalizing and recruiting followers, and to address the factors that allow such actions to occur in the first place. Last week the result of some of these deliberations — a twelve-page strategy fronted by the State Department and USAID — was published.

In its foreword, Secretary of State John Kerry lists some of those countries affected by “violent extremism” (“from Afghanistan to Nigeria”) as well as the identity of violent extremist groups (“Da’esh . . . al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula, al-Shabaab, and Boko Haram”). The focus then, seems clear: countries with a significant Muslim population and Islamist terrorist groups. Yet here is where the strategy takes a turn for the surreal, because from the content of the actual strategy, you would not realize any such thing — the document is just that opaque, obfuscatory, and, ultimately, unhelpful.

Regarding why violent extremism takes root, the reader is treated to a variety of possibilities. They include “individual psychological factors . . . community and sectarian divisions and conflicts.” Other explanations are corruption, insufficiently robust courts, and a lack of tolerance among different ethnicities.

Apparently not even worthy of discussion is Islam or Islamism, words that are not mentioned once. This is no accident. There has been a concerted attempt to scrub any religious aspect from the actions of ISIS and al-Qaeda: That is why phrases like “violent extremism” even exist. (First mainstreamed by the British government, “violent extremism” was dreamed up as a way to avoid saying “Islamic” or “Islamist” extremism in the months after the July 2005 suicide bombings in London. The phrase swiftly traveled across the Atlantic and into the U.S. government’s vocabulary.)

The Israeli Left has a serious flag problem. Well, a problem with the Israeli flag to be precise. The one with the six-pointed blue star. Not the ISIS flag.

The Left intensely dislikes people who wave Israeli flags, although I think it would be okay with those radical anti-Trump protesters waving Mexican and Iranian flags. At the Israeli Left’s own rallies, like one widely reported recently, one sees oodles of Stalinist red flags, lots of PLO flags, and sometimes one may see Hamas flags, but no Israeli flags.

In a few famous cases, the Left’s contempt for the flag goes well beyond that. A few months ago, the ultra-leftist Israeli “artist” and “activist” Ariel Bronz appeared at an assembly sponsored by the anti-Israel Haaretz newspaper and pranced about the stage with an Israeli flag inserted in his rear end. Haaretz approved and hailed the behavior as the epitome of democracy and patriotism. In an earlier incident one Natali Cohen Vaxberg, also a leftist activist and actress, posted on the web videos of her relieving herself (number two, to be precise) on the Israeli flag. More courageous defense of freedom of speech, squealed Haaretz and its leftist amen choir in delight.

The latest twist in the Left’s jihad against the flag has to do with plans by participants in the upcoming Jerusalem Reunification Day festivities to wave it. This has triggered horrific anger among the enlightened Left. They are particularly irate because celebrants plan to march all over Jerusalem waving flags, including in all parts of the Old City.

That is simply fascism, scream the Leftists, especially because the celebrants will walk through the “Moslem Quarter” of the Old City. Flying flags under the noses of these “occupied” Arabs is intolerable oppression, even though these Arabs have Israeli citizenship and are welcome to join the celebrations and wave flags with the others if they wish.

So now a group of about 100 radical leftists has placed an ad in the press this week, paid for by you-know-who, denouncing plans to wave Israeli flags in Jerusalem on Jerusalem Day. The ad says that as peace seekers the signatories demand that the government and police prohibit the waving of flags in the “Muslim Quarter” of the Old City, which – they add – is near the Temple Mount and the day will be close to Ramadan. It should be noted that the signers do not express any opposition to PLO, Hamas, or ISIS flags flying on the PLO-controlled Temple Mount itself, nor in any leftist street rallies anywhere else in the country.

“After the attack, dozens of Palestinians in Hebron began to celebrate the attack and fire weapons into the air, media outlets said. Also, at East Jerusalem’s emblematic Damascus Gate people celebrated the attack, which comes on the third day of Ramadan.”

At least four people died and 13 were wounded in an attack carried out Wednesday evening by two Palestinians in a popular open-air market in Tel Aviv located in front of the Defense Ministry and the Army Central Command.

Both suspects, one of them wounded by security personnel, were arrested.

The incident occurred about 9:30 p.m. at the Sarona Market, an crowded shopping center with dozens of restaurants and stores located right in front of Israel’s main military base.

According to the preliminary police investigation, the two attackers, who were said to be cousins from the West Bank city of Hebron, arrived at the shopping center, had something to drink and then produced automatic weapons, tried to enter the shopping center and opened fire on the crowd.

Seeing themselves blocked by the market’s Israeli guards, they continued shooting until they ran out of ammunition, then mixed in with the fleeing crowd and disappeared.

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.”)