RUTHFULLY YOURS

This was supposed to be the Era of No Fences. No walls between blocs. No borders between countries. No barriers to trade. Visa-free tourism. The single market. A global Internet. Frictionless transactions and seamless exchanges.

In short, a flat world. Whatever happened to that?

In the early 1990s, Israel’s then-Foreign Minister Shimon Peres published a book called “The New Middle East,” in which he predicted what was soon to be in store for his neighborhood. “Regional common markets reflect the new Zeitgeist,” he gushed. It was only a matter of time before it would become true in his part of the world, too.

I read the book in college, and while it struck me as far-fetched it didn’t seem altogether crazy. The decade from 1989 to 1999 was an age of political, economic, social and technological miracles. The Berlin Wall fell. The Soviet Union dissolved. Apartheid ended. The euro and Nafta were born. The first Internet browser was introduced. Oil dropped below $10 a barrel, the Dow topped 10,000, Times Square became safe again. America won a war in Kosovo without losing a single man in combat.

It is hard to understand why some Westerners believe that Abbas’s departure could boost the prospects of peace between Israel and the Palestinians. To many Palestinians, it is clear that the PLO or Fatah official who replaces Abbas will not be able to make any concessions to Israel. Any Palestinian leader who dares to make the slightest concession to Israel will be denounced as a traitor and will be lucky if he stays in power or stays alive.

The West needs to understand that no Palestinian leader is authorized to make concessions to Israel for the sake of peace. Neither the PLO nor the Fatah leaderships would ever approve of such concessions. And, of course, Hamas also will never accept any peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, except one that leads to the destruction of Israel and the establishment of an Islamic empire in the region.

Saeb Erekat has been negotiating with Israel for the past two decades and his position has never changed. Like Arafat and Abbas, he too will never sign a peace agreement with Israel that does not include 100% of the territories captured by Israel in 1967. Erekat is not authorized to make any concessions on Jerusalem or the “right of return” for Palestinians to their former homes inside Israel.

Abbas’s successor will undoubtedly declare that he intends to follow in the footsteps of Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas may go, but his legacy, like that of Arafat, will not.

The recent talk about Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas’s intention to quit political life has left many wondering whether his departure would bring about real changes for the Palestinians and the “peace process” with Israel.

The latest example of absurdity masquerading as principle is the election of Amna Farooqi as the leader of J Street U, the campus adjunct to the supposedly liberal “pro-Israel” organization, founded and run by radical leftists of Jewish origin.

Farooqi is a Muslim, pro-Palestinian, Hamas-supporting woman of Pakistani descent, whose claim to Jewish identity is growing up in Potomac , Maryland, home to many wealthy and successful Jewish business people and professionals. In this article, the World Zionist Organization details how Farooqi can in no way be considered pro-Israel, supporting Palestinian “resistance” to Israeli “occupation,” calling for boycott and divestment of Israel, labeling Israel a racist state, and defaming Israeli leaders.

But one has to ask: why even detail such an argument against someone who is admittedly a devout Muslim and Palestinian sympathizer – and who ran for her J Street office not hiding these things, but celebrating them? Incredibly, J Street’s Jews voted her in because of her positions and background, not in spite of them.

Watch this bizarre video, in which Farooqi describes her journey from being a Pakistani pro-Palestinian Muslim to a “Zionist,” including a visit to Israel. What she learned there is that her pre-existing ideas about Israeli “occupation” and discrimination against the Palestinian Arabs were absolutely true. She announces this to the cheers of her (presumably mostly Jewish) leftist audience.

Kids Get School Supplies from Groups Associated with Terrorism Broward School Board Member Ann Murray helps expose children to Islamist outreach.

It’s back to school time for kids. New teacher, new friends and new costs for school supplies – something parents know can be fairly expensive! To exploit this financial concern, this past July, Islamist groups, including ICNA, CAIR and Emerge USA, along with Broward County School Board Member Ann Murray, participated in a program at Miramar Elementary Public School to give away school supplies to children in need. While the children weren’t old enough to understand who they were accepting gifts from, parents should be alarmed to discover the tainted favors came from groups associated with terror and bigotry.

The flyer for the event reads, “A Project of ICNA Relief. BACK2SCHOOL GIVEAWAY. HELP US HELP THE CHILDREN IN NEED.” The sponsors listed on the flyer include: the Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), and the Florida Islamic Association (FIA).

ICNA Relief is the main charity of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), the American affiliate of South Asian Islamist group Jamaat-e-Islami. Jamaat-e-Islami’s militant wing, Hizbul Mujahideen, owned the Pakistani compound where Osama bin Laden was killed in. ICNA has been linked to terrorist financing and has used the web to promote a number of terrorist groups, including Hamas, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah and the Taliban. ICNA conducts annual functions along with the Muslim American Society (MAS), a group that was recently named to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) government list of international terrorist organizations.

Raymond Stock, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, is a Middle East political analyst and scholar. A resident of Cairo for two decades, he has written extensively about Egypt and the Middle East in the Middle East Quarterly, The Financial Times, and International Herald Tribune, among many other venues. Dr. Stock briefed the Middle East Forum in a conference call August 27, 2015.

The Islamists have enabled Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah Sisi to consolidate his domestic standing and gain widespread international legitimacy.

Though no more tolerant of political dissent than his predecessors, Sisi is a liberal in the sense that he wants a more open, tolerant, and religiously equal Egypt as evidenced by his uncompromising fight against Muslim Brotherhood violence. The only Egyptian president to demand that Al-Azhar clerics end their militant interpretation of Islam and societal discrimination of non-Muslims, Sisi made overtures to the Coptic Christians and toned down religious extremism in the education curriculum.

Pro-Sisi demonstrators celebrate the third anniversary of Mubarak’s overthrow, January 2014.

The president’s success in restoring order has been eroded by the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the resurgence of Muslim Brotherhood violence, and spreading lawlessness in Sinai. The recent opening of the new Suez Canal and encouragement of foreign investment are attempts to revive Egypt’s economy and boost its international standing.

It has been said, “Nature abhors a vacuum.” The vacuum created by the administration where the effective enforcement of our nation’s immigration laws were concerned motivated Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and her state’s legislature to enact an immigration law, SB 1070, that largely paralleled sections of the current federal immigration laws.

On April 23, 2010 Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed Arizona’s immigration into law SB 1070.

You might think that the law and the controversy that surrounded it are hardly newsworthy today, more than 5 years after SB 1070 was enacted. However, today that law is back in the news. On September 6, 2015 the Los Angeles Times reported, “U.S. judge dismisses challenge of Arizona’s SB 1070 immigration law.”

It is that headline and the report on the decision rendered by U.S. District Court Judge Susan Bolton on September 5, 2015 that makes this issue worthy of consideration today. Furthermore, on a personal note, the court’s decision is one I find personally satisfying. I assisted the law firm that defended Arizona and SB 1070 by providing a declaration in support of that important law.

The “Arab Spring”—a wave of mayhem—began late in 2010 and soon included, by the spring of 2011, the civil war in Syria. By now that war has cost over 200,000 lives, seen Syria’s disintegration into zones controlled by various, mostly radical factions, and sparked a refugee crisis that is now affecting not only surrounding countries like Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey but Europe as well.

Just two years before Syria’s version of the “Spring” broke out, in 2009, then-Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert was still engaged in indirect talks with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad aimed at returning all of the Golan Heights to Syria. The payback was supposed to be a Syrian commitment to peace and to exiting its alliance with Iran and Hizballah.

By now, no one in Israel—right, left, center, even far left—is heard lamenting that those talks did not lead to such a deal. In 2012, prominent left-of-center columnist and author Ari Shavit wrote:

I couldn’t help but think what would be happening today if the ideological position I had long held—peace in return for the Golan—had been accepted…. I have to admit that if the worldview I had championed had been applied, battalions of global jihadis would be camping near Ein Gev [beside the Sea of Galilee] and there would be Al-Qaida bases on the shores of [the lake]. Northern Israel and the country’s water sources would be bordering…on an armed, extremist Islamic entity that could not be controlled.

On September 6-7, 1955, Istanbul’s Greek Christians underwent the “most destructive pogrom…in Europe since the infamous Kristallnacht” of 1938 Nazi Germany, eminent Greek-American historian Speros Vryonis, Jr. has written. As he wrote in the extensively documented 2005 book The Mechanism of Catastrophe: The Turkish Pogrom of September 6-7, 1955, and the Destruction of the Greek Community of Istanbul, these important events remain “virtually unknown” even today.

As the Greek Consul General of Constantinople (Istanbul) wrote in September 1955, Istanbul’s Greek community that dated from the city’s founding in 668 B.C. “suffered a complete and destructive catastrophe in only seven hours.” Turkey’s ruling Demokrat Parti (DP) and allied groups as well as Turkish Special Forces had recruited Turkish rioters in Istanbul. Other rioters arrived by train, truck, and some 4,000 taxis from Turkey’s provinces, some 100,000 in all. A faked bomb attack against the Turkish consulate in Thessalonica, Greece, whose grounds contain the birth house of Turkish republic founder Kemal Mustafa Atatürk, would trigger a feigned popular outburst.

Like a snake oil salesman trying to move a gallon of lies by promising that it’s either buy the bottle or die, Obama sold the Iran deal as the only alternative to war. In fact the deal is a certain road to war.

Or as Churchill said, “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor, and you will have war.” Before long, the British and French were facing Czech tanks redesignated as Panzers that had been seized as part of the Nazi spoils of appeasement.

When Obama claimed that the Iran nuclear deal was the only alternative to war, he was lying in more ways than one. The United States has already been dragged into Iran’s war for control of Iraq. That war was one of the levers that Iran exploited to get its way on its nuclear program. Iran also came close to dragging us into its war in Syria and we are hovering on the edge of being dragged into Yemen.

Iran and ISIS have done a thorough job of carving up entire countries into Shiite and Sunni blocs. And there’s no sign that this Islamic realignment of the Sykes Picot borders is going to stop. If the process continues, the scale and scope of the war will expand and transform the region away from nation states.

A gnomish little man from the 18th century is the author of so many bad things, including Europe’s current invasion of “immigrants,” who claim a right to infest the countries they settle in. But, who’s fault is it, really? The gnome’s, or those who believe what he said?

“Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.” Immanuel Kant, in Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, 1785

Or, to put Kant’s categorical imperative in contemporary language: “Do the right thing!”

Just do it! Don’t think, don’t hesitate, don’t wonder whether or not you will benefit from doing “the right thing,” because if you think or wonder, then your action will be impure – nay, immoral! – and won’t make you a moral person. It might be praiseworthy by others, but the esteem you might be held in by them should not be a primary consideration. The thought should never enter your mind.

If you hesitate, that means you were thinking. Thinking is not allowed.

In fact, your wanting to be a moral person by doing “the right thing” will also disqualify you from being a moral person. To be a moral person, your doing “the right thing” must be scoured of all personal interest, it must be eminently and literally disinterested, expecting no kudos, no laurels, and not even personal satisfaction for having “done good.” When and if you see the “right thing” to do, you must know it somehow beforehand –– that it is a priori the “right thing to do” – and take action and just do it.

If “doing the right thing” means leaping trance-like off a bridge without a Bungee, so be it. Others will mourn your passing, and reflect on how moral a person you were. You did your duty.