RUTHFULLY YOURS

There is no meaningful equivalence to be found between prevailing Islamic and Christian belief systems, no matter how fervently our Prime Minister might wish it otherwise. Muddled or wishful thinking in appraising the Islamist threat makes the jihadis’ task that much easier.

How do we put the current threat to Western civilisation from Islam into an undistorted perspective? The Koran has numbers of violent passages directed at unbelievers and ‘sinners’, and literally many thousands of Muslims believe in acting them out. But people whose views I otherwise respect tell me — I believe to ease their minds and mine — that the Bible has many violent passages and that it is only a relatively short time in the history of mankind since Christians, along with those of other faiths, exhibited marked intolerance to those not toeing the received theological line.

These people are factually right. Look at Deuteronomy Chapter 22 for example. Stoning and death is instructed to be meted out to ‘damsels’ who prove not to be virgins on their wedding nights and also to adulterers, both men and women. And as Geoffrey Blainey (A Short History of Christianity) points out: “A high level of religious tolerance is almost a modern invention. A few centuries ago it was almost unthinkable.”

OK, so do violent biblical passages and evidence of historical intolerance among Christians ease my mind or, and more to the point, should they? Well they don’t and I don’t think they should, although they seem to have an anaesthetic effect on many people who are otherwise level-headed. So far as I can tell, their thinking is that Islam is going through a phase with its version of the Enlightenment over the horizon. Its adherents will then become just like us, with God put in His proper place.

To combat the threat of homegrown Islamic terror, the first step must be the wholesale rejection of multiculturalism’s core principles of indiscriminate tolerance and cultural relativism. With Labor selling its soul for votes in heavily Muslim seats, that won’t be easy

Last August, after Tony Abbott appealed to a cross-section of Australian Muslims to meet him to discuss a range of counter-terrorism proposals — mainly changes to passport and welfare regulations that would inhibit Australians from joining Middle Eastern jihadi — a number declined the invitation, including the Islamic Council of Victoria, representing 150,000 Muslims.

Instead, a petition was sent to the media from Muslim organisations and individuals deriding the Prime Minister’s overture and his patriotic appeal to join “Team Australia” in this conflict. The petitioners argued that, rather than being on their side, Australia was part of their problem: “We are not fooled by those who speak against violence and terrorism but are its proponents at an institutional level through military and foreign policies.”

The petition’s signatories included Muslim community, welfare and legal organisations but the biggest single grouping was that of university student associations, which comprised eleven of the fifty-one names on the list. They included the University of Sydney Muslim Students Association, University of Melbourne Islamic Society, Monash University Islamic Society, La Trobe University Islamic Society, Swinburne University Islamic Society, RMIT University Islamic Society, University of Technology Sydney Muslim Students, and the University of Western Sydney Muslim Students Association. Signatures also came from postgraduate students at the University of Western Sydney, University of South Australia and University of Melbourne.

It should be no surprise to find the latest manifestation of radical politics, militant Islam, well represented within Australian universities. Their campuses have long proven fertile recruiting grounds for political movements, mostly of the Left persuasion. Universities also employ many academic staff who see their vocation not as the preservation and advancement of traditional scholarship, but the propagation of theories that provide aid and comfort to radical politics.

Since June, when Islamic State troops captured the cities of Mosul and Tikrit and IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared the restoration of the Islamic caliphate, the appeal of radical Islam to young Muslims living in the West has been transformed. Political violence is no longer confined to random acts against the decadent West, like the Boston Marathon bombing. Instead, they can join a revolution in the Middle East that could make history and change the world. The excitement must be akin to that generated among communists when Lenin stormed the Winter Palace in October 1917. Like the communists, some Muslims now believe their time has come to take over the world.

Until now, the major issue in this conflict for Australian authorities has been about young Muslims going abroad and receiving training in arms and explosives, which on their return they could use to commit acts of terror. While that still remains likely, the bigger problem now is that Australians will probably help swell the sizeable number of jihadists from Western countries already fighting in the Middle East.

The Commander in Chief of the USA has been dithering and having endless fun on the golf course while a Sunni horde of jihadists and savages in the Middle East has been allowed to swell its numbers to 35,000.

At the same time, and in direct consequence to the deeply suspicious procrastination of President Obama, the Muslim head choppers who comprise the so-called Islamic State (IS) have seized a massive 144,000 square kilometers of Middle Eastern land from Raqqa in the north of Syria as far as north west of Baghdad in Iraq.

Who, then, is leading the world into the greatest danger it has faced since the German Nazi juggernaut brought death and destruction upon it some 70 plus years ago because small men in high places did not stop the genocidal and territorial ambitions of Adolf Hitler?

Is it Abu Bakr al-Baghadi, the self-declared leader of Islamic State? Or might it well be the man in charge of the still most powerful nation in the world, Barak Hussein Obama?

Because President Obama delayed and delayed any necessary and forceful action against the horrors IS were perpetrating, the Islamo-Nazis were able to capture all the U.S. supplied military hardware and weapons the fleeing Iraqi army left behind. Now it has become a formidable force, slaughtering everyone and anyone who stands in its path.

A global Islamic Caliphate is its declared intention and the USA and the West are clearly in its sights as has been demonstrated by the public beheadings of American journalists ‎James Foley, Steven Sotloff and British aid worker David Haines along with the slaughter of thousands of Christians, Yazidis, and fellow Muslims.

But let us not forget the earlier beheadings by Muslim fanatics of Americans, Nick Berg and Daniel Pearl, which should have been a wake up call.

“If Hamas does not like you for any reason all they have to do now is say you are a Mossad agent and kill you.” — A., a Fatah member in Gaza.

“Hamas wanted us butchered so it could win the media war against Israel showing our dead children on TV and then get money from Qatar.” — T., former Hamas Ministry officer.

“They would fire rockets and then run away quickly, leaving us to face Israeli bombs for what they did.” — D., Gazan journalist.

“Hamas imposed a curfew: anyone walking out in the street was shot. That way people had to stay in their homes, even if they were about to get bombed. Hamas held the whole Gazan population as a human shield.” — K., graduate student

“The Israeli army allows supplies to come in and Hamas steals them. It seems even the Israelis care for us more than Hamas.” — E., first-aid volunteer.

“We are under Hamas occupation, and if you ask most of us, we would rather be under Israeli occupation… We miss the days when we were able to work inside Israel and make good money. We miss the security and calm Israel provided when it was here.” — S., graduate of an American university, former Hamas sympathizer.

While the world’s media has been blaming Israel for the death of Gazan civilians during Operation Protective Edge, this correspondent decided to speak with Gazans themselves to hear what they had to say.

They spoke of Hamas atrocities and war crimes implicating Hamas in the civilian deaths of its own people.

Although Gazans, fearful of Hamas’s revenge against them, were afraid to speak to the media, friends in the West Bank offered introductions to relatives in Gaza. One, a renowned Gazan academic, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that as soon as someone talked to a Western journalist, he was immediately questioned by Hamas and accused of “communicating with the Mossad”. “Hamas makes sure that the average Gazan will not talk to Western journalists — or actually any journalists at all,” he said, continuing:

“Hamas does not want the truth about Gaza to come out. Hamas terrorizes and kills us just like Daesh [ISIS] terrorizes kills Iraqis. Hamas is a dictatorship that kills us. The Gazans you see praising Hamas on TV are either Hamas members or too afraid to speak against Hamas. Few foreign [Western] journalists were probably able to report what Gazans think of Hamas.”

Daniel Finkelstein, associate editor at Times of London, provided an extremely lucid, measured, yet penetrating look into antisemitism in the UK, in a column published in August. It’s behind a pay wall, and
we thought it was valuable enough to provide excerpts.

He begins by providing some important context, stressing the fact that”in the long history of the Jews, there are very few better places ortimes to live than right here, right now”.

So there we were, a handful of Jews, sitting on either side of theHouse of Lords in our ermine, waiting for the Queen to get robed up and open parliament. And across the chamber, one of my co-religionists
calls out the question that Jews have asked each other since the most ancient of days: “Where shall we go for lunch?” I wanted to tell you that story before I got going with this piece so that you understand,
before you read the rest of it, that I know what this country is.

Finkelstein then sets up the larger narrative.

Last weekend, the guy in charge of chopped fish in Sainsbury’s in Holborn, central London, panicked. He moved the gefilte fish balls andthe rollmop herring to a different refrigerator in a well-meaning, if
misconceived, attempt to keep the New Green cucumbers from being entangled in a political row with some demonstrators. It was a bad moment and one I will come back to.

He then writes evocatively about his family’s history, and his love for his country.

When I took the oath to the Queen in the House of Lords, my mother, a refugee from the Nazi death camps, was sitting just a few feet from me.

Every Jew I know comes from a family that at some point, not all that long ago, was driven out from somewhere else. Almost all have a story of a family member who was killed, a large portion of them within
living memory. To be able to become an actuary and settle in Radlett, occasionally striking out on an intrepid adventure to eat at the Delisserie in Stanmore, marks a high point in Jewish civilisation, in
my opinion.

http://www.cfact.org/about/?utm_source=CFACT+Updates&utm_campaign=3ba0afdcc1-Report_Climate_change_exposed9_18_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_a28eaedb56-3ba0afdcc1-269736665

President Obama is headed to New York for the UN climate summit.

CFACT will be there.

For the next week the global warming campaign will focus all of its propaganda might on New York City, starting with what has been dubbed “the people’s climate march” this weekend.The hype will be thick. CFACT will not let it stand unchallenged.We are kicking off our campaign with the release of a new report by CFACT Senior Policy Advisor Paul Driessen and Marc Morano, founder and editor of CFACT’s award winning Climate Depot news and information service. This report exposes the global warming campaign’s junk science, wasteful policies and the threat to freedom and prosperity it represents.

I’d like to invite you to read the entire report for yourself. Please share it with your friends.President Obama has made it clear that he intends to bring the United States fully into the UN climate regime for the first time — without submitting a treaty to the Senate for ratification.The facts must be heard and the global warming hype exposed.

Keep an eye on CFACT.org and ClimateDepot.com over the next week.

We’ll keep you fully posted.

I’m trying to look on the bright side of what passed for debate over another doomed effort to secure U.S. interests by embarking on the fruitless pursuit, cultivation and empowerment of Islamic “moderates,” this time in Syria. We would get better results sending an expeditionary force after the Loch Ness sea monster. No matter. In deliberations resembling a stampede, we heard: The ISIL is coming, the ISIL is coming! Quick, leave our own borders undefended and save Saudi Arabia!

That seemed be the subtext, anyhow, to much talk of Syria. There were odd glimmers of light as when House Appropriations Committee chairman Harold Rogers erupted in candor to say, “They use the term ‘moderates.’ I don’t know a moderate person in Syria.” Rogers also gave voice to the ever elusive obvious in noting that “arms that we supplied in Iraq and Afghanistan, American arms” are now in enemy hands. He could have added Libya to the list and established the unmistakable trend. The U.S. is a total failure at rewiring the Islamic world, the impossible dream of disastrous wars and other interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Egypt, “the Middle East peace process” and elsewhere. Now, with predictably tragic consequences, we’re about to do it again.

And still our own nation’s borders remain undefended. I know I just said that, but this epic failure to protect these United States at our first and last line of defense — the ultimate betrayal — cannot be underscored enough. Killers — terrorists and disease — have easy access to our towns and neighborhoods, and our leaders’ priorities are elsewhere.

One look at the world map, however, shows that the most dire threat the ISIL-proclaimed “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria poses is to the seat of the “shadow-caliphate” next door in Saudi Arabia, as the headquarters of the international Islamic organization, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, is sometimes called.

One of the joys of this blog has been to introduce so many people to one man I hold above all in the war on terror Islamofascism radical extremism extremist radicalism IslamoNazism overseas contingency man-caused disasters Islamist terrorism Islamism radical Islamistism.

That man, of course, is the inimitable Abu Qatada.

It all started back in 2003 when Abu Qatada reacted to hearing President George W. Bush declare that Islam was a religion of peace that did not justify violence in any way.

Quoth Qatada:

“I am astonished by President Bush when he claims there is nothing in the Koran that justifies jihad or violence in the name of Islam. Is he some kind of Islamic scholar? Has he ever actually read the Koran?”

Classic.

I’ve invoked Qatada’s words from time to time since. They came back to me lately on hearing the same dreary GWB-style non-sense from Barack Obama (“ISIS is not Islamic”) and David Cameron (“Islam is a religion of peace”). Then, testifying before the Senate, John Kerry said: “We must repudiate the gross distortion of Islam that ISIS is spreading.”

Setting aside the question of who’s “we,” Kerry’s line rang a bell, too. Who was it that said something very similar in our recent past about some other group of rampaging Muslims on the jihad?

I found the answer in the vault dating back to September 2009. It was Gen. Stanley McChrystal in his famously leaked Afghanistan assesment writing not about ISIS, of course — still just a bomb fragment in Mohammed’s eye — but about the Taliban and other jihad networks in Afghanistan.

McChrystal wrote:

A more forceful and offensive StratCom approach must be devised whereby INS [insurgents] are exposed continually for their cultural and religious violations, anti-Islamic and indiscriminate use of violence and terror, and by concentrating on their vulnerabilities.

The New York Times recently published a long investigative report by Eric Lipton, Brooke Williams, and Nicholas Confessore on how foreign countries buy political influence through Washington think tanks. Judging from Twitter and other leading journalistic indicators, the paper’s original reporting appears to have gone almost entirely unread by human beings anywhere on the planet. In part, that’s because the Times’ editors decided to gift their big investigative scoop with the dry-as-dust title “Foreign Powers Buy Influence at Think Tanks,” which sounds like the headline for an article in a D.C. version of The Onion. There is also the fact that the first 10 paragraphs of the Times piece are devoted to that highly controversial global actor, Norway, and its attempts to purchase the favors of The Center for Global Development, which I confess I’d never heard of before, although I live in Washington and attend think-tank events once or twice a week.

Except, buried deep in the Times’ epic snoozer was a world-class scoop related to one of the world’s biggest and most controversial stories—something so startling, and frankly so grotesque, that I have to bring it up again here: Martin Indyk, the man who ran John Kerry’s Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, whose failure in turn set off this summer’s bloody Gaza War, cashed a $14.8 million check from Qatar. Yes, you heard that right: In his capacity as vice president and director of the Foreign Policy Program at the prestigious Brookings Institution, Martin Indyk took an enormous sum of money from a foreign government that, in addition to its well-documented role as a funder of Sunni terror outfits throughout the Middle East, is the main patron of Hamas—which happens to be the mortal enemy of both the State of Israel and Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party.

But far from trumpeting its big scoop, the Times seems to have missed it entirely, even allowing Indyk to opine that the best way for foreign governments to shape policy is “scholarly, independent research, based on objective criteria.” Really? It is pretty hard to imagine what the words “independent” and “objective” mean coming from a man who while going from Brookings to public service and back to Brookings again pocketed $14.8 million in Qatari cash. At least the Times might have asked Indyk a few follow-up questions, like: Did he cash the check from Qatar before signing on to lead the peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians? Did the check clear while he was in Jerusalem, or Ramallah? Or did the Qatari money land in the Brookings account only after Indyk gave interviews and speeches blaming the Israelis for his failure? We’ll never know now. But whichever way it happened looks pretty awful.

Now, with the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate having captured key oil wells in the Middle East this year, foreign oil has become an even more lethal financial weapon-of-choice for those seeking to destroy democracy and further escalate the War on Terror.

That President Barack Obama failed even to mention oil as a critical factor in the war against IS during his speech to the nation on September 10, is an omission both revealing and dangerous in terms of how his administration wants to depict the stakes involved in this latest confrontation with the jihadis.

America’s failure to achieve energy independence over the last 30 years has resulted in exponential oil price increases that have hurt our nation. Trillions of dollars have left, and billions more continue to leave our economy to purchase oil from countries that seek our destruction, and to support madrassas [Islamic religious schools] that teach new Muslim generations how to hate — and worse.

Now, with the self-proclaimed caliphate of the Islamic State [IS] having captured key oil wells in the Middle East this year, foreign oil has become an even more lethal financial weapon-of-choice for those seeking to destroy democracy and further escalate the War on Terror.

Recent reported developments: The Islamic State accelerated its rampage through northern Iraq at the beginning of the summer. Its terrorists quickly captured seven oil fields in the region with the capacity to produce 80,000 barrels of oil per day – assets worth, at international market prices, around $240 million per month.

The IS met virtually no armed resistance as it seized these fields. Indeed, two of them, Najma and Qayara, had already been abandoned as far back as February, when Sonangol, an Angolan company with a 75% stake in the fields, announced that its operations were no longer feasible because of the prevailing climate of insecurity.