RUTHFULLY YOURS

The notion of an Islamic economy or of “Islamic economics,” is rife with fallacies. An Islamic economy is a contradiction in terms. Why?

As the term economy is understood to be a system of trade – a barter system, or laissez-faire, or a mixed economy with the freedom to trade and produce hampered, saddled and skewed by government controls and regulations – on the other hand, the notion of an Islamic economy or of “Islamic economics,” is rife with fallacies.

An Islamic economy is a contradiction in terms. Why?

Islam is a looter’s system of wealth seizure and expropriation. It produces nothing, it does not encourage the production of values to trade, and it is essentially anti-capitalist and anti-life. Overall, it is a system for the maintenance by force of a class of parasites. Islamic “economics” prescribes, as its essential and inherent goals, the sustained activity of wealth, social, and – need we remind anyone – sexual plunder. Its Economics in One Lesson is the Koran. Instead of a genuine economist such as Henry Hazlitt, Islam has as its primary “economist” the delusional, “voice-hearing” cave-dweller Mohammad.

Islam has been a looters’ system from the very beginning of the Islamic calendar, when Mohammad left Medina in 630 A.D. with his 10,000 converts/warriors and marched on Mecca, which he had fled eight years before because his “peaceful” proselytizing for his own moon-worshipping religion netted him few converts but many enemies. Or so the legend goes. Robert Spencer casts serious and well documented doubts on whether or not the Prophet of Plunder even existed in his excellent, eye-opening book, Did Muhammad Exist? An Inquiry into Islam’s Obscure Origins.

Campus groups press anti-Israel message with seemingly little money, but gain leverage with allies.

The arts district along Mamaroneck Avenue in downtown White Plains is something of a cultural hub in Westchester County. Special blue street signs — Arts Ave., they read — and colorful flags give the area the feel of a historic district, anchored by ArtsWestchester’s handsome brick headquarters.

There, on the fourth floor of 31 Mamaroneck Ave., is the office of a group that is far more interested in politics than arts. And controversial politics, at that.

Suite 403 houses the nonprofit group WESPAC Foundation, and its location in an arts-rich area belies its role as one of the key conduits in a mysterious network that helps to fuel the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement.

In recent days I suggested that things might have unfolded in a very different manner in Europe had the Jewish people been armed and better able to defend themselves.

Sometimes it is hard to find the right words to talk about the kind of evil that defies reason and destroys lives. We saw that evil on full display during the Holocaust perpetuated by the fanatical and tyrannical Nazi regime under Adolph Hitler. The lessons to be drawn from those darkest of days in world history are plentiful, and as relevant today as they were nearly 80 years ago.

In recent days I suggested that things might have unfolded in a very different manner in Europe had the Jewish people been armed and better able to defend themselves. What would have been the impact on Hitler’s war machine if his victims had had more access to guns? It is something that we will never know for sure.

What I do know however, beyond any shadow of a doubt, is that I never intended for my words to diminish the enormity of the tragedy or in any way to cause any pain for Holocaust survivors or their families.

Both those who perished and those who survived the Nazi camps deserve our deepest reverence, as do the partisan fighters who rose in armed opposition.

Reality-based demography
Top Israeli opposition figures — Isaac Herzog, Tzipi Livni and Yair Lapid — recently echoed the erroneous assumption, shared by the White House and State Department, that Arabs will eventually become a majority in the combined area of Judea and Samaria and pre-1967 Israel. Driven by demographic pessimism and fatalism — which has eroded Israel’s negotiation position — they urge a retreat from geography (the mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria) so as to secure demography.
They rely on Israel’s demographic establishment, which regurgitates the numbers of the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics without examination, ignores the dramatic transformation of Jewish and Arab demography, understates Jewish fertility, overstates Arab fertility, disregards the flawed practices of the PCBS, overlooks the burgeoning Arab net-emigration and Jewish net-immigration and discards the feasibility of significant waves of aliyah (Jewish immigration), which have occurred — in defiance of the demographic establishment — every two decades since the 1930s.

But this establishment has forgotten that it was built on providing guns to Jews.

Historical revisionism is what the left does best. American Jewish history in the last century is a revisionist history in which the heroes are the “establishment”. The truth lies buried in old papers and lost documents. And it’s a deeply compelling truth of how the left suppressed Jewish self-defense.

The Jewish Defense Association was the first time that uptown establishment German Jews and downtown Eastern Jewish immigrants came together. The JDA’s goal had little in common with the empty rubber chicken dinner agendas of what the establishment that grew out of it would become.

Instead the Jewish Defense Association’s mission was simple. Buy guns for Jews.

Its agenda, as reported by the New York Times was, “New massacres are preparing. Our people must be possessed of arms to defend themselves and their honor.”

The year was 1905. The slow bloody beginning of the Russian Revolution was underway. Much like the Syrian Civil War, brutal militias aligned with different factions from the left to the right would arise out of the violence. Like the Christians in Syria, the Jews were an isolated minority. Xenophobia allowed both Communists and Czarists to score populist points by massacring the Jews in violent pogroms.

The Jewish Defense Association responded with a call to arms. Its motto took a part of Hillel’s credo, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me.” Its membership encompassed the left and the right, Zionists and anti-Zionists, religious and secular Jews.

A march of 200,000 Jews to Union Square included 5,000 former Russian soldiers, the volunteer Zion Guards in blue uniforms carrying rifles and the young men of the Manhattan Rifles, begun in the Lower East Side’s Educational Alliance as the Alliance Cadets, which had been formed in imitation of the Jewish Lads Brigade, a group that had put thousands of Jewish boys in the UK through military training.

The final resolutions declared that, “Eternal vigilance is the price of the Jew’s life, and that we urge our people to take up arms against their assailants, and if need be to sell their lives most dearly.”

It concluded with the ringing challenge, “We call Jews everywhere toward the defense of the Jewish people.”

In the words of the New York Times, “A ripple went through the crowd like wind rising to a hurricane which roared “Aye!”

As Muslims are imported, they’re thrust upon cities and towns across America. No location is immune. Case in point: Idaho. As reported by World Net Daily (WND), Idaho is slated to receive 2,000 “refugees” who will be settled in Boise and Twin Falls. This would be on top of the refugees Idaho has already absorbed. It turns out Idaho’s quite a hot spot for refugee resettlement. And of late, that means a lot Muslims, as the current round of invaders will be from Syria, Iraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and possibly Somalia.

WND reports that community leaders found out about the plan to import them at a conference at Boise State University, where church groups, social services providers, and other stakeholders were in attendance. Unfortunately, American citizens were not, and are not, seen as stakeholders, even though the stakes are as high as they get in this suicidal fiasco.

So what’s going on in Idaho? WND reports:

While Idaho remains largely a rural farm state, it is not new to the refugee business. The Agency for New Americans, an arm of Episcopal Migration Ministries, operates from an office in Boise doing the organizational work on the ground needed to resettle refugees and get them “integrated” into the community. The International Rescue Committee, whose top executive is former British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, also resettles refugees in Idaho.

Global warming became climate change in response to the inconvenient truth that there has been no warming over the past 17 years. This is called a “pause,” with the expectation and anticipation that any day now temperatures will begin climbing again. And when temperatures do rise, it could be called a “pause” in global cooling – or, in other words, another turn in the endless cycle of the Earth warming and cooling.

Pope Francis and President Obama continue to preach the perils of global warming, not concerning themselves with any pause or faulty climate models. One of the world’s leading climate change experts disagrees about those perils noting some “mathematical anomalies which effectively ‘disprove’ global warming.”

Dr. David Evans was a climate modeler for the Australian government. He has six degrees in applied mathematics. In analyzing “complex mathematical assumptions widely used to predict climate change,” he predicts stable temperatures until 2017, after which the Earth will cool for the next decade, ushering in a mini-ice age by 2030.

Can an accurate analogy be drawn between American race relations and the Arab-Israeli conflict? UC Berkeley ethnic studies assistant professor Keith Feldman advocates this particular “special relationship” in his 2015 book, A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America, the subject of a recent lecture sponsored by the University’s Center for Race & Gender (CRG).

CRG is home to the notoriously politicized Islamophobia Research & Documentation Project (IRDP) whose 2012 annual conference featured a jargon-riddled talk from Feldman. He was in similar form for CRG’s September 24 Thursday Forum Series, which included “commentary” by Judith Butler, a UC Berkeley comparative literature professor best known for her virulent anti-Israel activism. Feldman, a fellow endorser of the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, stood at the podium, while Butler was seated at a front table. An audience of approximately sixty comprised mostly of students filled the large classroom in Dwinelle Hall.

Feldman, whose manner was humble and, at times, apologetic, began by thanking Butler for being his “interlocutor” and CRG for its “Islamophobia project,” which he described as “unique globally” and a “community” that he had “been able to engage . . . in the construction of this book.”

A news photograph from Hazem Bader, who chronicles newsworthy doings in Israel for Agence France Presse, inspired a good deal of guilty giggles on Tuesday: A Palestinian thug mishandled his Molotov cocktail and managed to set fire to his T-shirt and then to his keffiyeh, which had his compatriots scrambling to put out the flames dancing on his head. That was not the sort of halo that the holy warrior had in mind at all — martyrdom, yes, inshallah, but not right now. Like all decent people of good will, my first reaction was: Serves you right, ass. And then a smidgen of guilt: If you’ve ever seen a human being burned, you don’t wish it on anybody. Not even these Jew-hating jihadi bums.

I myself have been closer than you’d generally like to be to that sort of fire on a few occasions: the automobile accidents and house fires that are part of the daily newspaper fare; the fiery climax of the Branch Davidian siege at Waco; a terrorist bombing of a train near New Delhi. Burning, it seems, is a very bad way to go.

But, as everybody from the Joker to Heraclitus to Father Gerard Manley Hopkins has observed: Everything burns.

I cannot help but seeing in the image of that hapless would-be Palestinian murderer a metaphor for the entirety of the Palestinian experience, and for the broader jihadist worldview.

Israel is on the brink of a third intifada. In the last several days, Palestinians have shot, stabbed, and rammed Israeli civilians to death, prompting fears that suicide bombings are next. But even without explosives, the attacks have been gruesome enough. In the the last 24 hours, two terrorists boarded a bus, locked the doors, and started shooting and stabbing passengers until one terrorist was shot to death and the other wounded. That same day, a Palestinian man rammed his car into a crowded bus stop, emerged from his vehicle “swinging an axe,” and killed a rabbi before he was stopped. In two other incidents, Palestinians seriously wounded Israelis in stabbing attacks.

What’s prompting the violence? The typical, tired media explanation for Palestinian attacks is “frustration with the lack of progress towards peace” (as if “peace” were ever the terrorists’ goal). But this time the consensus is that the immediate reason for violence is Palestinian rage over rumored policy changes at Jerusalem’s most holy sites. The New Yorker’s Ruth Margalit explains:

The stated cause of the recent surge in attacks is Palestinians’ belief that the Israeli government is trying to change the status quo at the holy compound in Jerusalem, a place revered by Jews as the Temple Mount and by Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif, or the Noble Sanctuary. According to security arrangements dating back to 1967, the site, while open to Jewish visitors at specific times, is sealed off to non-Muslim prayer.