RUTHFULLY YOURS

Why is the U.S. downplaying or denying attacks against Christians?

“What about the churches which were desecrated? Is this not blasphemy? Where is justice?” — Fr. James Channan OP, Director of The Peace Center, Lahore, Pakistan.

Members of the Islamic group al-Shabaab publicly beheaded the mother of two girls, ages 8 and 15, and her cousin after discovering they were Christians. The girls “were witnesses to the slaughter.” — Somalia.

“Christian teaching is extremely harmful to the mental health of the people.” — Kazakhstan.

Five years’ imprisonment and up to $20,000 in fines for educators if they…speak to a Muslim child of religions other than Islam. — Brunei

Along with an especially jarring list of atrocities committed against Christian minorities throughout the Islamic world, March also saw some callous indifference or worse from the U.S. government.

President Barack Obama was criticized by human rights activists for not addressing the plight of Christians and other minorities during his talks with leaders in Saudi Arabia, where Christianity is actively banned.

According to the Washington-based International Christian Concern [ICC] advocacy group, Obama did not “publicly broach the subject of religious freedom” when he spoke on March 28 with Saudi King Abdullah, despite a letter from 70 members of Congress urging him to “address specific human rights reforms” both in public and in direct meetings with the king and other officials.

“This visit was an excellent opportunity for the president to speak up on an issue that affects millions of Saudi citizens and millions more foreign workers living in Saudi Arabia,” said Todd Daniels, ICC’s Middle East regional manager. He added that it was “remarkable that the president could stay completely silent about religious freedom,” despite pressure from Congress “to publicly address the issue, as well as other human rights concerns, with King Abdullah…”

U.S. officials reportedly responded by saying that “Obama had not had time to raise concerns about the kingdom’s human rights record.”

It’s not often that North Korean-flagged freighters turn up near America’s shores, but when they do, they deserve attention. North Korea has a prolific record of arms smuggling, narcotics dealing, counterfeiting, terrorist ties and missile and nuclear proliferation. So, let’s hope U.S. authorities are keeping a close eye on a North Korean cargo ship called the Mu Du Bong, which late last month called at Cuba, then vanished from the commercial shipping grid for more than a week. This past Thursday, July 10, the Mu Du Bong reappeared at Havana, then began steaming north of Cuba, and as of this writing is cruising the Gulf of Mexico, not all that far from the Mexican port of Tampico — or for that matter, the coast of Texas.

The Mu Du Bong’s mission could be entirely legitimate. But its behavior bears some disturbing similarities to last year’s voyage of another North Korean freighter, the Chong Chon Gang, which last summer sailed into the Caribbean, picked up an illicit load of weapons in Cuba, and got caught trying to smuggle its cargo through the Panama Canal.

Acting on a tip, Panamanian authorities searched the Chong Chon Gang. They discovered some 240 tons of arms and related materiel, including two disassembled MiG-21 jet fighters, additional MiG engines, surface-to-air missile system components, night vision goggles and ammunition — all hidden under more than 200,000 bags of Cuban sugar.

Documents found on board the Chong Chon Gang proved a trove of information for members of the United Nations Panel of Experts on North Korea sanctions, who summarized some of their findings in a UN report released this past March. The U.N. investigators were able to reconstruct an array of techniques with which the Chong Chon Gang tried to hide its illicit mission. They concluded that both the arms shipment and the related transaction between North Korea and Cuba had violated U.N. sanctions on North Korea.

Raymond Ibrahim on ISIS’s Islamic Inspirations — on The Glazov Gang
Shillman Journalism Fellow points to the Islamic roots of the Islamic killing fields.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/raymond-ibrahim-on-isiss-islamic-inspirations-on-the-glazov-gang/

The more things change, the more they get worse….

Palestinian Arabs and their cheerleaders have declared war on Israel, and what do you know, Israelis have struck back. The hand wringers are at it again urging restraint and urging Isrel not to take “disproportionate” measures.

This is an excerpt from a column I wrote in 2009: http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.2168/pub_detail.asp

First of all, what is the definition of proportion before we call something disproportionate? Well, the dictionary says it is comparative relation between things and magnitude as to size, quantity, number and extent. So what is disproportionate? Again, the dictionary: “out of proportion as in size and number.”
Second: Indulge me. The Jewish population of the world is now about 13,000,000 after losing one third of the world’s Jews in the Holocaust. Jews are truly disproportionate in their contribution to science, culture, the arts, theater, entertainment, technology, philanthropy, and social institutions. Don’t believe me? Just go to the operas, concerts, hospitals, museums and research institutions throughout the United States even in areas with a tiny Jewish population.

Third: The Jewish people, with the sole exception of India, have created the only post colonial democracy in the world in a sliver of land that is disproportionately small and resource poor in comparison to the Muslim Arab world surrounding them and panting for a Jihad against them. There are disproportionately more institutions in Israel and among Jews concerned with the rights of the Arabs then there are throughout the Arab/Muslim world. And, there are no – repeat, .no – institutions among Arab nations which support any Jewish or Christian grievances.

Fourth: The United Nations should change its name to the United Islamic and Dhimmi Nations, since it is disproportionately populated by Muslim Nations and their European acolytes whose anti-Israel resolutions are disproportionately numerous compared to any against Sudan or Rwanda or Somalia….the real perpetrators of atrocities.

Fifth: There are a disproportionate number of so called Palestinian refugees who still squat in Arab perpetrated squalor camps and receive a disproportionate amount of help from UNRWA and the disproportionate number of UN organizations dedicated to perpetuating their misery as a tool in the utterly disproportionate global bashing of Israel. Since the advent of those refugee camps, now five generations old, hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of refugees have been relocated throughout the world where they have learned new languages, new mores, new customs and forged new lives. But these so-called refugees get a disproportionate amount of international concern.

Sixth: Israel has been truly disproportionate in territorial concessions in its quest for peace. As a result of the Camp David Accords, 92% of the territories acquired in the war of 1967 were returned when Israel surrendered the Sinai Peninsula, the locus of a disproportionate number of terrorist acts against Israel before 1967. Egypt has obliged by permitting a disproportionate number of sermons, school books, and government controlled media cartoons and editorials libeling and threatening Israel and world Jewry.

Seventh: Do you remember the assassination of Theo Van Gogh in Holland in 2002 because he made a “controversial film depicting Islam?” Or what about the murderous rampages throughout the Muslim “street” elicited by 12 cartoons deemed to be offensive to the Prophet, published in a Danish newspaper? Reactions started with public demonstrations and escalated to violence throughout the world; fires set to American flags in the Arab “street;” fires set in Danish embassies in Syria, Lebanon and Iran: storming European buildings; marches in Pakistan and Indonesia and throughout the Moslem world which incidentally included many placards of crude threats to Israel and the United States; and from Gaza the Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar a call for death to the infidels. The violence resulted in hundreds injured and at least an equal number dead. Hmmm. That all sounds a tad disproportionate.

Eighth : In February 2005 Ariel Sharon offered the release of 900 Arab prisoners in exchange for some promises from Abbas. In June of 2006 Israel released 429 Arab prisoners in exchange for some more promises. In July of 2007, Israel released 255 prisoners for a few more promises which were withheld until that September when 90 more were sprung for more promises. In August of 2008 another 198 prisoners were released for some more promises and just a month ago 224 Arab prisoners were released in exchange for more promises. Okay, here is the tally: Prisoners released since 2005: roughly 1,500. Arab promises kept: 0. Hmmm. That too sounds a tad disproportionate since a disproportionate number of the prisoners released returned to terrorism. (That number is much higher since 2009)

Ninth: The prisoners released by Israel all looked fit and well fed. Not a hand chopped in the bunch. That’s an example of disproportionately mild punishment for murderers in a section of the world that abets “honor killings” and stoning for adultery and beheadings for “infidel’ behavior.

Tenth: The mainstream media is disproportionately biased and ignorant. This will come as no surprise to anyone who knows the history and facts of the ongoing Jihad against Israel. It will come as no surprise to those who are stunned by the disproportionate reluctance of the media to confront militant Islam and the disproportionate sensitivity of media apologists to anything that may smack of “Islamophobia.”

Eleventh: Check out the number of terrorist incidents, including those that have been thwarted in the world, in every continent, from Argentina, to the Philippines to India to London, to Paris to the United States. Are there not a disproportionate number of er…ah…Muslims among them? And, are there not a disproportionate number of silent imams and mosques and Islamic fraternal organizations that fail to condemn them?

Twelfth: Let’s get to Gaza now. In 2005, when the Israelis removed Jewish population from Gaza, Jewish philanthropists bought 3,000 homes and disproportionately productive farms and greenhouses for the Arabs. These greenhouses used highly advanced agricultural technology and insect control and harvesting systems and temperature and moisture regulation. They also supplied Israel with more than half of its daily produce. The Arab response was trashing, looting and destruction of every home, greenhouse and farm including hoses, irrigation systems, water pumps and plastic sheathing. Then, talk about disproportionate chutzpah, the Arabs demanded and got food from Israel.

Finally, here is one thing that I know. Americans are a people who are disproportionately fair. Outside of the fringes in the left and right, the largest proportion of Americans understand Israel’s dilemma and are rooting for Israel in its existential struggle against Jihad.

As Israeli airstrikes hit Hamas targets and Hamas rockets fall on Israeli towns, some wonder how did Gaza come to run by Hamas terrorists. The answer is that the world forced Israel to let them in.
In the early 90s, Nissim Toledano, a border police sergeant, was kidnapped by terrorists on the way to work. After an extended search, he was found dead in a roadside ditch.

In response to that attack and numerous other atrocities committed by Hamas, including a planned massive car bombing, Israel made the decision to deport 400 Hamas terrorists. Among them were the past and present day leaders of Hamas.

You might assume that the story ends there. And you would be wrong.

The United Nations issued a unanimous resolution condemning Israel’s deportation of “civilians” and demanding that Israel immediately bring them back, or face sanctions. The United States voted for that resolution, along with three others condemning Israel. Thomas R. Pickering, the American delegate warned that the deportations of Hamas terrorists “do not contribute to current efforts for peace.”

Lebanon refused to officially accept the terrorists. The Red Cross brought them tents and blankets and the media swarmed to take photos of them “shivering from the cold” while drinking coffee outside their tents. Newsweek accused Israel of “Deporting the Hope for Peace”. The LA Times ran a tearful interview with the wife of Mohammed Taamari, a future member of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, who was terribly lonely without her husband. Much as after the flotilla raid, the Israeli media condemned the clumsy mishandling of the deportations.

Finally after enough browbeating by James Baker and Warren Christopher, Rabin agreed to take the Hamas terrorists back. In a bizarre charade that would serve as a tragic foretelling of events to come, Rabin agreed to return 100 terrorists immediately, and to take the remainder back in a year.. Now the Hamas terrorists that Rabin took back control all of Gaza, and have been responsible for an untold number of murders.

The terrorists that Israel was forced to accept included current Hamas leader Ismael Haniyeh and Hamas’ religious figurehead, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.

Israel acting disproportionately? Think again

Once again, millions of Israelis are under assault from the threat of rockets from Gaza. And once again, truth, morality and international law are coming under vicious assault.

In a short piece in Wednesday’s Guardian, Owen Jones decried the BBC’s lack of balance. After condemning Palestinian rocket attacks, he objected to a headline which stated that Israel was ‘under renewed Hamas attack’.

In his words, it was ‘as perverse as Mike Tyson punching a toddler, followed by a headline claiming that the child spat at him’. This was because Israel, ‘a military superpower’, was being pitted against Gazans with ‘almost entirely ineffective missiles’.

Echoing these thoughts in Wednesday’s Independent, Robert Fisk, hardly one to resist an anti-Israeli calumny, made a similar point. ‘OK’, he declared, ‘so by this afternoon, the exchange rate of death in two days was 40-0 in favour of Israel’.

Then there was an outrageous cartoon in the same paper by Dave Brown, purporting to show Israeli jets pounding Gaza while evoking a Biblical verse from Leviticus. The suggestion was that Israel was exacting disproportionate and inhuman revenge for Palestinian wrongs.

At the UN, Ban Ki Moon has condemned rocket fire but added this warning to Israel: “The excessive use of force and endangering of civilian lives are also intolerable.”

According to these views, the divergence in the casualty count shows that Israel is automatically in the wrong. Worse, its ‘Mike Tyson’ tendencies make it a demented regional bully, one which responds to ‘primitive’ attacks with gargantuan force. This view is supported by BBC images of suffering Palestinian civilians, with a clear subtext that they are victims of Israeli wrongdoing.

While western leaders have been broadly sympathetic to Israel’s predicament, the mood music could easily change. In the past, world leaders have been quick to accuse Israel of using disproportionate or excessive force while the UN has echoed the more serious accusation that civilians have been targeted. Yet these charges are egregious falsehoods, the result of lazy thinking, bigotry and a failure to understand international law.

The U.S. government is generally expected to act in the interest of the people of the United States.

The influx of children across our southern border is troubling. First, because they are not all children — not by a sight — but images of children are useful for stirring emotions to muddy the policy waters. Second, because it is not all that unusual: As the Wall Street Journal reports, between 23,000 and 47,000 minors illegally entered the United States and were apprehended in each of the past five years; in 2013, we ordered only 3,525 deportations, suggesting that something on the order of nine in ten, or more, of minor illegal aliens — again, of the number apprehended — are allowed to stay. The number not apprehended is very large, the number of non-minors is very large, and that is how we find ourselves with not millions but tens of millions of illegal aliens resident in these United States.

Don’t tell my friend Mark Krikorian, who recently praised my views on immigration as “patriotic,” but I am something of a liberal on the question. I am generally in favor of relatively high levels of immigration, at least of certain kinds of immigrants. But whether you are a hawk like Krikorian or a squish like me, there are some things we can and should agree upon.

1. Borders are a fundamental aspect of national sovereignty. They are, in part, what defines a country — indeed, the word “define” means to put borders around something. In the United States, we have a federal system, in which the national government exists to do things that are impossible or impractical for the states to do severally. The federal government generally comes into play when the states have disputes with one another or when they interact with foreign powers and foreign peoples. National governments set the terms under which non-nationals may enter a country or immigrate to it. Even putative open-borders schemes realistically incorporate a role for the national government, inasmuch as they assume that it will do things such as screen for diseases or contraband, that it will distinguish between immigrants and foreign agents or militaries, etc.

2. Where the national government acts to establish rules and standards for immigration, it must first establish the controlling criterion, answering the question of what it intends to accomplish through its immigration policies. While some governments may be liberal in the sense that Robert Frost understood the term — too broadminded to take their own side in a fight — the government of the United States is generally expected to act in the interest of the people of the United States. Sometimes it engages in humanitarian efforts in service to a consistently ungrateful world, but its controlling principle is the national interest of the United States.

3. The United States, like any country, has many kinds of national interests: economic, military, cultural, etc. It is not chauvinistic, jingoistic, or yahooistic to recognize that fact and to expect that our national immigration policy, like our defense policy and our economic policy, is organized around those interests.

The ultimate test of this agreement will be a test of blood. If it becomes clear that [Palestinians] cannot overcome terror, this will be a temporary accord and… we will have no choice but to abrogate it. And if there is no choice, the IDF will return to the places it is about to leave in the upcoming months.

– Yossi Beilin on the Oslo Accords

Everything is reversible.

– Yitzhak Rabin on the Oslo Accords

Truth be told, I found it difficult to write my column this week. I spent hours staring at my laptop’s keyboard, unable to compose a single sentence, feeling waves of anger, frustration and disbelief wash over me as the news of the bombardment of the country came streaming through the television set beside me.

Depressing déjà vu

It was not that there was a dearth of topics to write about. There was a surplus of issues that could be subject matter for a column relating to the events of the last few days.

For example:

• The “original sin” of Oslo, that made the perverse – and previously scorned – notion of Palestinian statehood the center-piece of Israeli policy, which opened the flood gates of terror across the country, and eventually precipitated the current situation in Gaza;

• The continuous poor judgment by the Israeli leadership over the last two decades as to developments in Gaza and how they should be dealt with;

• The debilitating distortions and ridiculous restrictions imposed on the formulation and conduct of Israeli policy regarding Gaza by the diktats of political correctness;

As a liberal Zionist, certain statements are expected from me at times like this, so let’s get it out of the way:

1. The kidnap and murder of three Israeli teenagers was an abominable crime.

2. So was the kidnap and murder of a Palestinian teenager.

3. Palestinians have a right to a state of their own, secure in its own borders,

4. But so does Israel.

5. Hamas is a wholly malevolent organization who would be recognized as neo-Nazis if they happened to be white Christians.

6. The Israeli government, whatever my disagreements with it, is still a liberal democracy doing its best under highly adverse circumstances.

7. This doesn’t mean that every innocent Palestinian killed isn’t a tragedy, but…

8. War is war.

Are we done now? Can we not have this printed and bound in pamphlet form, to be distributed by the well-wrung hands of liberal writers each time events in the Holy Land take another apocalyptic turn? Because I’m a bit exhausted, to be honest. The kind of existential, moral exhaustion that might also be called despair.

This is how I feel, as a coddled third-hand observer a happy ocean or two away, so what Israelis and Palestinians feel must be beyond the power of words to describe. In 2017, Israel will have held the Palestinian territories for half a century, and the solution keeps on receding into the distance.

As my list above implies, I can’t pretend to be entirely neutral: I stand with Israel, as the hashtag has it. Even if I didn’t find the Zionist claim to a state in the historical Jewish homeland compelling, I’d still feel inclined towards Israel for reasons of solidarity.

What I mean by this was expressed beautifully by Howard Jacobson in 2009. So little has changed since then that, after I read it for the first time recently, I assumed it had been written this week. You should take the time to read the whole thing, but the nub is this: there is legitimate criticism of Israeli government policy, and then there is the international anti-Zionist movement, and the two bear scant relation to one another.

THIS WAS WRITTEN IN FEBRUARY 2009….JAN POLLER REMINDED ME…..RSK

Howard Jacobson: Let’s see the ‘criticism’ of Israel for what it really is Emotions have run high over recent events in Gaza. And in this impassioned and searching essay, our writer argues that just below the surface runs a vicious strain of ancient prejudice

I was once in Melbourne when bush fires were raging 20 or 30 miles north of the city. Even from that distance you could smell the burning. Fine fragments of ash, like slivers of charcoal confetti, covered the pavements. The very air was charred. It has been the same here these past couple of months with the fighting in Gaza. Only the air has been charred not with devastation but with hatred. And I don’t mean the hatred of the warring parties for each other. I mean the hatred of Israel expressed in our streets, on our campuses, in our newspapers, on our radios and televisions, and now in our theatres.
A discriminatory, over-and-above hatred, inexplicable in its hysteria and virulence whatever justification is adduced for it; an unreasoning, deranged and as far as I can see irreversible revulsion that is poisoning everything we are supposed to believe in here – the free exchange of opinions, the clear-headedness of thinkers and teachers, the fine tracery of social interdependence we call community relations, modernity of outlook, tolerance, truth. You can taste the toxins on your tongue.

But I am not allowed to ascribe any of this to anti-Semitism. It is, I am assured, “criticism” of Israel, pure and simple. In the matter of Israel and the Palestinians this country has been heading towards a dictatorship of the one-minded for a long time; we seem now to have attained it. Deviate a fraction of a moral millimetre from the prevailing othodoxy and you are either not listened to or you are jeered at and abused, your reading of history trashed, your humanity itself called into question. I don’t say that self-pityingly. As always with dictatorships of the mind, the worst harmed are not the ones not listened to, but the ones not listening. So leave them to it, has essentially been my philosophy. A life spent singing anti-Zionist carols in the company of Ken Livingstone and George Galloway is its own punishment.

But responses to the fighting in Gaza have been such as to drive even the most quiescent of English Jews – whether quiescent because we have learnt to expect nothing else, or because we are desperate to avoid trouble, or because we have our own frustrations with Israel to deal with – out of our usual stoical reserve. Some things cannot any longer go unchallenged.

My first challenge is implicit in the phrase “the fighting in Gaza”, which more justly describes the event than the words “Massacre” and “Slaughter” which anti-Israel demonstrators carry on their placards. This is not a linguistic ploy on my part to play down the horror of Gaza or to minimise the loss of life. In an article in this newspaper last week, Robert Fisk argued that “a Palestinian woman and her child are as worthy of life as a Jewish woman and her child on the back of a lorry in Auschwitz”. I am not sure who he was arguing with, but it certainly isn’t me.