RUTHFULLY YOURS

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas separately offered Christmas greetings to the world on Thursday. Because both leaders operate in the Middle East and neither is Christian, their respective messages are particularly worthy of note.

Netanyahu began his address by mentioning the festive nature of the holiday, calling it a “special opportunity to spend time with loved ones.”

He continued by expressing empathy for less fortunate Christians who are “experiencing violence, persecution and fear” in every part of the region except the Jewish state, where “religious freedom is a sacred principle” and “Christian citizens enjoy the full blessings of freedom and democracy, their equal rights enshrined in Israeli law.”

He ended by saying, “Let us remember the common heritage and values that unite us in the face of extremism and hatred, which we will never accept. From Jerusalem, the eternal capital of the Jewish people, the city of peace, I join Christians everywhere, and especially those in the Middle East, in a common prayer for a more peaceful and tolerant world.”

To understand ISIS, you have to understand the difference between terrorists and Islamic terrorists.

Ordinary terrorists have two goals; to compel the enemy to meet their political demands and to rally their supporters to consolidate their class, race or national identity group behind them.

Islamic terrorists are not interested in the “political demands” part. They will occasionally accept concessions and even offer Hudnas, temporary truces, but no permanent separate peace can be achieved with them. It’s why Israel’s peace process with terrorists has gone on failing for decades. It’s why the attempt by Gaddafi to achieve peace with the LIFG ended in a civil war and his death. It’s why Obama’s attempts to negotiate with the “moderate Taliban” failed miserably.

Al Qaeda and ISIS are not “negative” protest movements formed in response to our foreign policy. That’s a foolish self-centered idea held by foolish self-centered Westerners. Al Qaeda and ISIS are “positive” movements that seek to achieve larger religious goals entirely apart from us. Islamic terrorists are not responding to us. They are responding to the Koran and to over a thousand years of history.

Osama bin Laden did not carry out 9/11 to inflict harm on Americans. That was a secondary goal. His primary goal was to rally Muslims to build a Caliphate by encouraging them to attack America.

In his “Christmas Message”, like Arafat before him, PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas portrayed Palestinian terrorists as victims of Israeli oppression and urged, “international intervention is “desperately needed to protect the Palestinians.”

How do you square this with the daily growing number of Palestinians attacking Israelis by stabbing, car ramming shooting and stoning?

David Bukay, professor of Middle East Studies at the University of Haifa, explains what’s behind Abbas’ deception: “The Muslim leadership and the useful idiots portray Muslims as peaceful, tolerant human beings, and non-Muslims as aggressors, imperialist-colonialist occupiers. Thus, all Muslims, even those who are potential victims must fight to defend themselves and retaliate against the Kuffar (non-believer), who always instigates war.

“These clearly contradictory characteristics of Arab-Islamic political culture mean that Muslims can viciously attack at every possible opportunity while at the very same time crying out they are victims of oppression and aggression. They can perpetuate obscene inhuman acts of violence, terrorize and intimidate while accusing the infidels of colonialism, apartheid, racism, and Islamophobia.”

JERUSALEM–The Election of Israel is in the news again, with the report of a Vatican Commissionthat affirms the eternal validity of God’s covenant with the Jewish people. The Western elite long ago dismissed the subject as superstition. The vast majority of American Jews, think Election is a Jewish folk-belief like dybbuks or the Golem. (By contrast, 70% of Israeli Jews believe that the Jews are God’s chosen people).

The Western elite wants people to act rationally and considers all supernatural claims an affront to rationality. The trouble is that people aren’t rational (neither is the Western elite, but that’s another story). We want to live forever or we don’t want to live at all. When we lose faith, we stop reproducing. There might be a stray philosopher here and there so convinced of the immortality of the spirit as to despite death itself, as Socrates claimed to do (although I have my doubts even about him). We can’t live forever, to be sure, but we can take part in a culture that links our ancestors and descendants in an immortal chain.

Is every bizarre and/or savage anecdote committed by Muslims related to Islam? Consider the following story of a man who “decapitated” the penis of his wife’s alleged rapist before ordering her to prepare it for their dinner:

[T]he bizarre tale begins in September, on the wedding night of 30-year-old Rudi Efendi and his new bride, Nuriah, in the Indonesian province of Lampung. When Efendi discovered that Nuriah was not a virgin, he demanded an explanation—and was told that she had been sexually assaulted by a man she dated.

Efendi ordered his wife to contact the alleged rapist and set up a meeting. But when the ex arrived, he found only Efendi, who proceeded to stab him to death and set him on fire—first taking care to chop off and collect his man parts.

“I was so outraged,” Efendi told reporters last month, that the only way “to cure my heartache” was to eat the victim’s genitals—which he ordered his 20-year-old wife to cook for him. He also insisted that she sit down and eat along with him.

Although the man who did this is of Muslim background (as evinced by his name and Indonesia’s status as the world’s most populous Muslim nation), one would normally conclude that such behavior—if not the killing and burning, then surely the penis eating—has nothing to do with Islam.

The Obama administration calls its national security strategy “Countering Violent Extremism.” In the benighted times before January 20, 2009, we used to call it counter-terrorism.

Why does Obama insist on the more fuzzy “extremism”? Because “terror” has its roots in Islamic scripture. This fact ought to be undeniable, but Obama denies it — and in Washington, he’s far from alone in that.

It is not just that the word terror appears several times in the Koran; it is that the word appears in a particular context: The duty of Muslims to act as Allah’s instrument to terrorize non-Muslims is a recurring scriptural theme. In Sura 3:151, to take one of several examples, Muslims are admonished:

Soon shall We cast terror into the hearts of the unbelievers.

Those who oppose the national identity of the Jewish people in Eretz Yisrael, Jewish sovereignty, Zionism, oppose the “life equation” that defines Israel’s mission and its existence.The most famous mathematical equation is E=mc2 because it is associated with the production of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy. Put simply, Einstein described a law in physics: mass (m) is another form of energy (E); and, when mass is multiplied by the speed of light (c) times itself, the result will produce tremendous energy.

Einstein showed that the increased relativistic mass of a body comes from the energy of motion of the body – that is, its kinetic energy (E) – divided by the speed of light squared (c2).

In another context, however, the equation could be used as a symbolic metaphor to explain something about modern Jewish history: The energy of the Jewish people, expressed in its return en masse to its homeland, Eretz Yisrael, will illuminate the world with Jewish values and ideals.

BACK TO 1933?

How the Academic Boycott Began*

On April 6, 2002, 123 university academics and researchers (their number -would later rise to 250) from across Europe signed an open letter, published in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, calling for a moratorium on all cultural and research links with Israel until the Israeli government abided by (unspecified) UN resolutions and returned yet again to negotiations with Yasser Arafat to be conducted in accordance with the principles laid down in the latest Saudi peace plan. The petition was organized and published at the very time Israelis were being butchered on a daily basis, mainly by brainwashed teenage suicide bombers, Arab versions of the Hitler Youth. It declared, in high Pecksniffian style, that since the Israeli government was “impervious to moral appeals from world leaders” Israel’s cultural and research institutions should be denied further funding from the European Union and the European Science Foundation. It neglected to recommend that the European Union suspend its very generous financing of Yasser Arafat or that Chinese scholars be boycotted until China withdraws from Tibet. The petition was the brainchild of Steven Rose, director of the Brain and Behavior Research Group at Gresham College, London, and the great majority of its signatories were British. But it included academics from a host of European countries, a number sufficient to give it the appearance of a pan-European campaign against the Jews. It even had the obligatory display Israeli, one Eva Jablonka of Tel Aviv University. (Nine other Israeli leftists added their names as soon as they found out about this opportunity for international renown.)

In June, Mona Baker, director of the Center for Translation and Intercultural Studies at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) decided to practice what the all-European petitioners had preached: She dismissed from the boards of the two journals she owns and edits two Israelis, Miriam Shlesinger of Bar-Ilan University and Gideon Toury of Tel Aviv University. She also added that she would no longer accept articles from Israeli researchers, and it was later revealed that she would not “allow” books originating from her private publishing house (St. Jerome) to be purchased by Israeli institutions. One paradox of the firing, which would be repeated often in later stages of the boycott, was that Shlesinger was a member in good standing of the Israeli Left, former chairman of Amnesty International’s Israeli chapter, and ever at the ready with “criticism of Israeli policies in the West Bank…” Toury, for his part, opposed taking any retaliatory action against Baker — this had been proposed by an American teaching fellow at Leeds named Michael Weingrad — because “a boycott is a boycott is a boycott.” A small contingent of Toury’s (mostly British) friends in linguistics issued a statement objecting to his dismissal because: “We agree with Noam Chomsky’s view that one does not boycott people or their cultural institutions as an expression of political protest.”

Israeli Arab Christian diplomat George Deek made very interesting comments on Israel as the Middle East’s one hopeful island of diversity this past October.
Israeli diplomat George Deek has often described himself as an “orthodox Christian within the Arab minority in the Jewish State in the Muslim Middle East.” During an Oct. 29 Hudson Institute presentation, he explained that although such diversity in Israel may be complex, it offers one of the few hopes in the Middle East for mutually beneficial coexistence among vastly different groups.

Israel is a national home for a Jewish people truly indigenous to the Middle East, Deek said, pointing out that Israel’s Arab neighbors have repeatedly failed to destroy (through various military and political means) what they have wrongly viewed as a foreign colonial entity. The Palestinian intifadas of 1987 and 2000, particularly the latter, drew inspiration from the idea that “Jews have an alternative; they have a place to go. If we scare them enough, then they will just get up and leave.”

Hear no Islam! See no Islam! Speak no Islam!

A typical modern critic was as likely to grasp or report the substance of a book – good or bad, and whether or not he liked it or approved of it – as it was that a chimpanzee would appreciate a thermometer. He’d worry it, nibble on it, look through it, try to clean his ears with it, or use it to fish for maggots.
Private Detective Chess Hanrahan, in Honors Due (2011)

In October 2014, Mark Tapson published on FrontPage a review of an online document which qualifies as an enemy’s threat doctrine. It was reprinted on The Counter Jihad Report.

In the spring of 2004 a strategist who called himself Abu Bakr Naji published online The Management of Savagery: The Most Critical Stage Through Which the Ummah Will Pass (later translated from the Arabic by William McCants, a fellow at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center). The book – what the Washington Post calls the Mein Kampf of jihad – aimed to provide a strategy for al-Qaeda and other jihadists. “The ideal of this movement,” wrote Lawrence Wright in The New Yorker, “as its theorists saw it, was the establishment of a caliphate that would lead to the purification of the Muslim world.”