RUTHFULLY YOURS

Washington: Saudi Arabia’s King Salman has awarded a prestigious prize to Zakir Naik, a televangelist and religious scholar from India, heralding him as “one of the most renowned non-Arabic-speaking promulgators of Islam”. Naik, a trained doctor, founded the Peace TV channel, which supposedly reaches an audience of 100 million English-speaking Muslims. His popular YouTube stream includes videos titled “Who is deceived by the Satan, Christians or Muslims?” and “Does eating non-vegetarian food have any effect on the mind?”

Naik’s creed is an expansive one. “Islam is the only religion that can bring peace to the whole of humanity,” he said in a video biography aired at the ceremony.

It’s a Tuesday night three weeks before election day, and Naftali Bennett, the head of one of Israel’s oldest religious parties, is speaking in English to 1,000 mostly young, secular Israelis. For Bennett, 42, an ambitious, talented, American-style politician seeking to catapult his Jewish Home faction to third place among Israel’s parties, this isn’t all that surprising.

The contest is widely seen here as a referendum on Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s second-longest-serving prime minister and a lightning rod for criticism across the political spectrum. The yard signs and billboards of the opposition declare “It’s us or him,” and an American-style PAC, reportedly funded, indirectly and in part, by the U.S. State Department, has launched ubiquitous anti-“Bibi” ads urging Israelis to “Just change.” Netanyahu’s highly controversial address to Congress about the Iranian nuclear threat only added fuel to the fire.

Her support seems a continent wide, a cracker deep, and just as prone to crumble. Like snowflakes on a frozen sidewalk, the latest damaging revelations about Hillary Clinton are starting to stick. More than that, Servergate raises the question: Why, precisely, should she be president anyway? This week brought news that then–secretary of state Clinton never had a State Department e-mail address. Instead, she exclusively used a private account to e-mail others in the Obama administration, including some of her staffers who communicated via their own private accounts. Clinton did not simply keep using an old account. She launched hdr22@clintonemail.com as her Senate confirmation hearings opened. Rather than have her e-mails automatically available on government computers for permanent scrutiny, Team Clinton gave State 55,000 pages of handpicked e-mails. What they may have withheld is anyone’s guess.

It is a seductively attractive notion, that Islam might reform itself and its more ardent, violent followers, as did Christianity in bowing to the separation of church and state. Alas, such optimism ignores the very nature of the religion and the bloody lessons of the West’s own history
Contemporary commentary on the crisis of Islam is bedevilled by several important misconceptions about religious history and the nature of Islam.

It is commonly claimed — for example, by the New York Times‘ Thomas Friedman – that the crisis of the Muslim world will only be resolved when Islam undergoes a Reformation similar to that experienced by the Christian West. Melanie Phillips, author of Londonistan, claimed on Radio National’s Between the Lines “there is a problem in the religion [Islam], it has not been reformed to enable it to coexist with Western notions of human rights.” According to Phillips, the medieval Christian Church carried out beheadings and burnt people alive before reforming itself at the beginning of the Modern Age: “It came to an accommodation in the Reformation with secular authority. It divided church and state. Islam has not had that kind of Reformation”. Phillip’s argument was cited by Janet Albrechtsen in The Australian beneath the headline “Battlefield of ideas is where fanatics will fall”.

Aaron David Miller, an American expert for the Middle East, six times adviser to US Treasury Secretaries Democrats and Republicans, 24 at the US State Department, State ex-advisor on Arab-Israeli negotiations and agreements between Israel, Jordan, Syria and the Palestinians, answering the question of whether the decision to Netanyahu speaking before the US Congress despite opposition from the US President will have negative consequences for the relationship between the two countries, said on Fox News:

“The relationship between Israel and the United States, unlike Lehman Brothers, are too big to fail (TBTF)”

He also noted the attitude that I call infant President Obama declares not to have listened to the President Netanyahu and gives a press conference a few minutes later by commenting in detail … the speech he does not listen. I have not failed to notice the hypocrisy of the US president who expressed concern that Netanyahu would reveal confidential aspects of the ongoing negotiations with Iran, then, instead of congratulating him on not disclosing anything, quipped that he “did not say anything new” can not both fear that Netanyahu may say too much, and blame him for not having said enough.

A historic speech

This week, a photo of a dress went viral on the Internet, with people from all corners of the globe expressing an opinion about it. The article of clothing in question is nothing special, though its fame has made it a hot commodity on the market. No, what is causing this particular “fashion” sensation is the fact that the garment’s colors are a matter of controversy. Indeed, viewers of its picture are sharply divided between those who see stripes of gold lace on white fabric, and those who see them as black and blue. I am among the former.

As it happens, the actual dress, according to its designer and subsequent photos taken in a different light, prove the latter to be correct. But, even after knowing this, neither I nor others in the gold-and-white camp are capable of seeing the item’s true colors for what they are.

Explanations for this, too, have been circulating since the onset of the color war. The discrepancy apparently has to do with a trick the brain plays on the optic nerve of part of the population, under certain conditions — or something to that effect.

Confronted with such a phenomenon, one cannot help but be reminded of the saying: “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a haunted man. He is haunted by the history of the Nazi Holocaust, by Iran’s threats to annihilate his tiny nation, and by the fact that Israel’s once-faithful American ally is about to ensure that Iran will possess the weapons with which it will be able to make good on that threat.

Another nation, in another time, faced an existential threat equal to that which Netanyahu and Israel face today. Echoes of that nation’s leader’s speeches – and personal courage – were heard more than once in Netanyahu’s speech. Netanyahu, a student of Winston Churchill, spoke as if the shade of Churchill were standing beside him.

When Churchill became Britain’s prime minister, war was already upon his nation. Britain had been abandoned by the isolationist United States and its European allies had been defeated. But Churchill – by virtue of his personal courage and powerful rhetoric – managed to maintain his nation’s resolve and resist demands to sue for peace.

As I See It: The bitter tears of Nancy Pelosi

The Democratic Party leader in America’s House of Representatives
stormed from the floor of the House before Netanyahu had finished
saying his goodbyes following his speech to Congress.

Why did Nancy Pelosi choke up? The Democratic Party leader in
America’s House of Representatives stormed from the floor of the House
before Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had finished saying
his goodbyes following his speech to Congress.

Pelosi was “near tears,” she said, over what she had heard.

In 2012, U.S. Ambassador to Kenya Scott Gration abruptly stepped down from his post. According to a Foreign Policy report by Josh Rogin (now a reporter for Bloomberg), Gration was the subject of a whithering evaluation from the State Department:

The impending release of a highly critical report by the State Department’s Inspector General’s office prompted the sudden resignation Friday of U.S. Ambassador to Kenya Scott Gration, according to administration and congressional sources.
The report was described to The Cable by multiple people briefed on its contents as one of the worst reviews of an ambassador’s performance written by the IG’s staff in several years.

While Gration was fired for a myriad of reasons, one passage of the damning report leaps out in light of recent events:

Very soon after the Ambassador’s arrival in May 2011, he broadcast his lack of confidence in the information management staff. Because the information management office could not change the Department’s policy for handling Sensitive But Unclassified material, he assumed charge of the mission’s information management operations. He ordered a commercial Internet connection installed in his embassy office bathroom so he could work there on a laptop not connected to the Department email system. He drafted and distributed a mission policy authorizing himself and other mission personnel to use commercial email for daily communication of official government business.

Last year, the Palestinian Authority made a promise to respect “the civil and political rights of individuals, including the right to life, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, electoral rights and rights to due process and a fair trial” by signing the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

The PA has also signed the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Arab Charter on Human Rights.

All of these documents guarantee freedom of religion in some way.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that religious minorities under the PA enjoy freedom. In fact, according to a new report from the Jerusalem Institute of Justice, these minorities face many “unreported, often censored, violations by Palestinian governing authorities against Palestinians.” The JIJ report is an effort to provide a voice for those marginalized Palestinians — mostly Christians — who cannot speak for themselves.