RUTHFULLY YOURS

Talking Points—Battle for Our Minds

Terrorism is about brains, not blood. Terrorists win when they capture our minds. Sadly, they have a lot of help: some of our best and brightest intellectuals.

“Battle for Our Minds” shows how analysts in our intelligence agencies, academics at our universities and journalists in our media have helped our enemies, knowingly and unknowingly.

It is a stinging, detailed indictment of The New York Times and CNN—leaders of print and broadcast journalism who turned trend-setters in awful journalism that caters to terrorists and tyrants. The book also flays politically correct but inaccurate dogmas that captured western universities, the CIA and the State Department.

Facing the Middle East and terrorism, we came to rely on “experts” without field experience in or scant knowledge of the Middle East: people who do not speak the languages, did not study the cultures and do not know the history. Even worse, some “experts” have been forgiving and even sympathetic to the terrorists and their aims.

Among the startling revelations in BATTLE FOR OUR MINDS: Western Elites and the Terror Threat

* · Edward Said, the professor who redefined Middle East studies for Western universities, used no Arabic sources in his work and knew almost no Arabic;
* · Said’s popular teachings promoted the careers of Said “wannabes” like John Esposito at Georgetown, Fred Halliday at the London School of Economics who spoke of the “myth” of Arab-Islamic terror before 9/11, while focusing, after 9/11, on the supposed persecution of Muslims rather than on growing Islamic terror;
* · Michael Scheuer, CIA’s “hunter” of Osama Bin-Laden, never served as a field agent, knew no Arabic, and misidentified Islamic holy sites.
* · Scheuer admired Bin-Laden, blamed the U.S. and Israel for vexing him, and called American Jews a dangerous minority that threatened America’s interests.
* · Paul Pillar, a top CIA mid-east analyst showed a colossal off-base percentage for his predictions over a decade: claiming before 9/11 the US was not threatened by terror, then, that Iran was not seeking an atom bomb, and that the US should reach out to Iran and Syria, despite their terror roles and their bloody repressive regimes.
* · Like Scheuer and Pillar, CIA director George Tenet never was a field agent, and he promoted their writings and their careers even as he censored talented field agents who said the CIA had become “too political” and was unprepared for terror.
* · CNN’s Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Peter Arnett, producer Robert Wiener and news director Eason Jordan played ball with Saddam Hussein’s government, ignoring some of his worst atrocities;
* · CNN’s Wiener removed all the Jewish mezuzahs from the doorways of CNN’s rented offices in Jerusalem.
* · Tom Friedman who got a Pulitzer Prize for directly blaming Israel and its ally, Saad Haddad, for the Sabra-Chatilla massacre of 1982, passed up countervailing evidence, including his own face-to-face interview with Sa’ad Haddad.
* · The book exposes Friedman’s limited knowledge of Arabic and Hebrew, his superficial analysis, and his effor

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

“It isn’t the dehumanization of people of color or women that the left is obsessed with. It is the dehumanization of all people at their hands. Their only interest in exploiting racism or sexism is as a means of destabilizing whatever power structure exists and unquestioningly replacing it with their own cadres. They have no sympathy for individual victims of persecution, only the collective solidarity of all peoples under the red flag. They can only see people who are useful in getting them closer to it. They can only see that final shining future that can never come to pass and feel pity only for those who help them up the ladder to Utopia.”

What we think the talking heads are talking about when they condemn racism, misogyny or some other form of bigotry is entirely detached from what they are actually talking about.

Obama’s Muslim Brotherhood Romance – on The Glazov Gang
by Frontpagemag.com
Mark Tapson, Susanne Reyto and Eric Allen Bell shed light on why the administration flirts with Islamists.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/03/07/obamas-muslim-brotherhood-romance-on-the-glazov-gang/

http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2012/03/07/two-videos-cbn-interview-on-iranian-jew-hatred-and-general-presentation-on-islamic-antisemitism/

Two Videos: CBN Interview on Iranian Jew-Hatred, and General Presentation on Islamic Antisemitism

Stakelbeck on Terror Show: Islam’s War on the Jews [1]

Watch this week’s episode of the Stakelbeck on Terror show below. CBN News examines the roots of the Islamic world’s animosity toward the Jewish people. Watch as author Andrew Bostom discusses the history of Muslim Antisemitism and shows how Islam’s core texts promote these beliefs, which have been made official state policy by the Iranian regime today.

http://blogs.cbn.com/stakelbeckonterror/archive/2012/03/06/stakelbeck-on-terror-show-islams-war-on-the-jews.aspx [1]

Dr. Andrew Bostom – Understanding the Islam in Muslim Jew-Hatred

Los Angeles, January 24, 2012

Video can be viewed by opening this link: http://vimeo.com/38060709 [2]

It’s early March, and that means that the Jewish holiday of Purim is fast approaching. Non-Jews may know it by way of the Hebrew Bible’s (“OldTestament”) Book of Esther, the story of how a young Jewess helped to save her people from those who would have destroyed them in ancient Iran some twenty-five centuries ago.

Unfortunately, besides Purim, there are additional holidays which also commemorate the Jews’ near misses or actual calamities at the hands of others as well. Tisha B’Av (the 9th of the month of Av–the date of the destruction of the two Temples), Chanukah, and Passover come to mind.

To be more specific, as I begin to write this, today is March 5, 2012, and Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu recently appeared on television along with President Obama discussing the Jews’ modern Iranian threat. Iran’s current, would-be nuclear rulers refer to Israel as being, among other things, a “one bomb” country. I don’t believe I have to explain that any further, do I ?

So, in some ways, some things change while others do not. Instead of an Iranian emperor’s wicked prime minister (Haman) plotting their demise some twenty-five centuries ago, Jews now face attack and extermination by Arabized Iranian Islamists.

http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/content/module/2012/3/7/main-feature/1/cyrus-ahmadinejad-and-the-politics-of-purim

At this week’s pre-Purim meeting in Washington between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu to discuss Iran’s nuclear threat to Israel, Netanyahu gave Obama a present: the book (or m’gilah, scroll) of Esther, which tells how the Jewish heroine foiled Haman’s plot to kill the Jews of ancient Persia. Ancient Persia was also in the news last Purim—because of the “Cyrus Cylinder,” a historic artifact whose loan to Iran by Great Britain was used by President Ahmadinejad as an occasion to recast the great Persian emperor Cyrus as a symbol of Islamist anti-Zionism. Alex Joffe’s explanation of last year’s drama helps us understand this year’s crisis. — The Editors
Anyone who deplores the politicization of the past should have been apoplectic in September 2010 at the sight of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad receiving the loan of the “Cyrus Cylinder” from officials of the British Museum. Often touted as the “world’s oldest human-rights charter,” this clay object, about nine inches long and shaped like a cork, contains in tiny cuneiform writing a royal inscription of the great Persian king. It dates to about 530 B.C.E.

The Iranian press had long demanded that the Cyrus Cylinder be returned “home” from London, and the Tehran regime had gone so far as to threaten to sever all cultural relations with Britain if a loan were not forthcoming. So the British officials who finally agreed to relinquish the object had ample reason to be nervous about the transaction, and Ahmadinejad’s behavior at the solemn handing-over ceremony in Tehran could only have added to their anxiety. There, making his own connection between past and present, the Iranian president ostentatiously draped a Palestinian keffiyeh on an actor dressed as Cyrus. By December, Iran was requesting that the loan be extended for three months.

http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/

With some 1,000 books currently in print on the subject, does the world desperately need another tome on anti-Semitism? What difference will it make, when anti-Israelism provides only the latest justification for Europe’s persistent prejudice against Jews and anti-Semitic views are shared by 15 percent of Americans and 90 percent of Muslims worldwide?

Phyllis Goldstein’s A Convenient Hatred: A Short History of Antisemitism, published by the liberal-minded “Facing History and Ourselves” foundation, is nevertheless timely, because she writes not primarily as a historian or polemicist but as a teacher of tolerance. Though Harold Evans’ foreword acknowledges that anti-Semitism is a “mental condition conducive to paranoia” and “impervious to truth,” the hope seems to be that this book can inoculate high-school and college students against incipient anti-Semitism. Assuming that human beings are capable of moral choice, there is every incentive to continue this battle, no matter the odds of victory.

http://www.nysun.com/foreign/nephew-of-yasser-arafat-surfaces-as-aide-to-kofi/87733/
Nephew of Yasser Arafat Surfaces as Aide to Kofi Annan on Road to Damascus

UNITED NATIONS — Yasser Arafat’s nephew, Nasser Al-Kidwa, will accompany former Secretary General Kofi Annan, who is scheduled to visit Bashar Al-Assad in Damascus this weekend. Mr. Al-Kidwa’s visit will renew a complex history of relationship between two infamous Middle Eastern families that have dominated the region’s politics for much of the last century.

The president of the Arab League, Nabil el-Arabi, today announced the appointment of Mr. Al-Kidwa as a deputy to Mr. Annan, who was recently named special envoy to Syria of both the United Nations and the Arab League.

Mr. Al-Kidwa served as ambassador in the Palestinian observer mission here before returning to Ramallah in 2005. After ending his high profile, 18-year Turtle Bay stint, the Arafat scion played a minor, mostly behind the scenes role in Palestinian Arab politics. He was said by several observers to be waiting for the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahoud Abbas, to vacate the top post before entering local politics in earnest.

Today’s announcement surprised some here at the United Nations, where two officials who spoke to the Sun last week said that Mr. Annan had initially rejected the candidacy of the Palestinian scion and was looking elsewhere for an Arabic-speaking deputy. But the former secretary-general’s spokesman, Ahmad Fawzi, said today that Mr. Al-Kidwa “has been appointed by the League of Arab States” AND denied that Mr. Annan had “rejected” the candidacy.

Mr. Annan represents Secretary General Ban and the Arab League, although Mr. Ban was said by several U.N. officials to have “swallowed” the appointment unhappily after conducting an icy relationship with his predecessor. Mr. Ban, according to western diplomats, agreed only after one or more major U.N. powers promoted Mr. Annan’s candidacy, pitched initially by Arab League officials.

It remains to be seen how the beleaguered Damascus strongman, who took power at Syria in 2000 after the death of his father, Hafez Al-Assad, will approach the renewal of a long history of rollercoaster relations between the Assads and the Arafats.

After Mr. Al-Kidwa’s uncle was chased out of Jordan in September 1970, Arafat arrived in Lebanon, which even then was under heavy Syrian influence. Assad’s troops started conducting raids into camps controlled by the Arafat-led Palestinian Liberation Organization, which was perceived as competition and threat to the Damascus Allawite clan. The raids culminated in a Syrian-backed massacre at the Palestinian camp of Tel al Zaater…..READ IT ALL AT THE SITE

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2051/Karzai-and-the-Mullahs-Flexing-Their-Sharia-Compliance.aspx

FROM THE FOUNDING MULLAHS…..RSK

“We the People of Islam, in Order to form a more perfect Caliphate, establish Sharia, insure domestic Obedience, provide for the common devotion to Allah, promote the general Dhimmitude of the Infidel, and secure the Blessings of the Prophet to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish the Qu’ran as absolute law.”

The articles of the Afghanistan constitution open as follows:

Article One
Ch. 1. Art. 1

Afghanistan is an Islamic Republic, independent, unitary and indivisible state.

Article Two
Ch. 1, Art. 2

The religion of the state of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is the sacred religion of Islam.

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE www.nationalreview.com
ELLIOTT ABRAMS, SHOSHANA BRYEN, JACK DAVID, CAROLINE GLICK, MONA CHAREN, CLIFFORD MAY,DANIEL PIPES, MICHAEL RUBIN, BENJAMIN WEINTHAL
With Washington, D.C., talking Israeli politics, National Review Online asked experts: “Going into a presidential-election year, what’s a sane, responsible Israel policy?”