RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/ RISKING RETRIBUTION AGAINST HERSELF AND HER FAMILY My brave friend Darya Safai again risked retribution from Rouhani’s Iranian regime after she held up a sign at the Rio Olympics Iranian volleyball match asking that women be permitted to attend matches in Iran. Darya has been forced to live in exile from what New York […]

Across the African continent, black children and teenagers are being kidnapped and raped in routine recruitment tactics for various Islamic terrorist groups. In Nigeria, Boko Haram has taken children as young as 5, forcing them to use weapons, to witness beheadings and to agree to kill even their parents if necessary. It’s estimated that Boko Haram has taken 10,000 boys as well as many hundreds of girls, subjecting them to starvation, torture, drugs, rape and pregnancy, jihadist videos and becoming suicide bombers themselves. In Yemen, Somali and Mali, Al Qaeda has done the same. Yet Black Lives Matter, the militant organization headed by people who call themselves African/American has said little to nothing about this continuing enslavement and murder of its own kin.

Instead, Black Lives Matter has focused on Israel , which it accuses of genocide of brown people – not black. It calls for ending U.S. military aid to Israel which is described as an “apartheid state.” It stands in solidarity with BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) and with Muslim people despite the daily deadly violence perpetrated by Muslims specifically against African blacks. No mention of ISIS or any other terrorist group which enslaves young blacks by the most barbaric tactics. Why bother to use African as part of your ethnic identification if you are determined to ignore the fate of your own people? How do other Black activists and leaders reconcile their own failure to rally against these horrific abuses at the UN, in front of the White House , in Union Square and the various other public forums they have used as venues for their protests. And how shameful that the very same organization that is seeking reparations for slavery two centuries ago has blinded itself to current mass slavery and its ravages.

Jews in the United States have a long history of standing in the forefront of civil rights activism and blacks perversely , have a long history of anti-semitic railing against the very people who have contributed so much to their liberation. Their embrace of Islam in the face of Islamic brutality in Africa is a sober reminder of how politics make strange bedfellows and how important causes can be dangerously subverted by the notion of inter-sectionality. The plight of young African blacks has nothing in common with Islamic Palestinians who are neither enslaved, tortured , kidnapped, starved or raped. What they do both share is being oppressed by Muslims; the former by radical terrorists and the latter by their own leadership which refuses to acknowledge Israel as a Jewish state, preferring to keep Palestinians in the faux state of “refugee” status indefinitely rather than make that concession to reality. Black Lives Matter loses both credibility and rationality by espousing the Palestinian cause instead of showing solidarity with the African/ black victims of radical Islam.

Mr Shah’s murderer was a Sunni Muslim, Tanveer Ahmed, who had travelled to Glasgow to kill Mr Shah because he believed Mr Shah had “disrespected the Prophet Mohammed.” At this point the comfortable narratives of modern Britain began to fray.

If Mr Shah’s murderer had been a non-Muslim, there would be a concerted effort by the entirety of the media and political class to find out what inspirations and associations the murderer had. Specifically, they would want to know if there was anybody — especially any figure of authority — who had ever called for the murder of Muslim shopkeepers. Yet when a British Muslim kills another British Muslim for alleged “apostasy” and local religious authorities are found to have praised or mourned the killers of people accused of “apostasy,” the same people cannot bother to stir themselves.

Earlier this year there was a murder that shocked Britain. Just before Easter, a 40-year old shopkeeper in Glasgow, Asad Shah, was repeatedly stabbed in his shop; he died in the road outside. The news immediately went out that this was a religiously-motivated attack. But the type of religiously motivated attack it was came as a surprise to most of Britain.

The early Cold War wisdom that “we must stop politics at the water’s edge” has never been entirely true. In endeavors as human as politics, no such altruistic aspiration ever will be. But Senator Arthur Vandenberg’s adage does reflect a principle critical to effective national security: The United States is imperiled when partisan politics distorts our understanding of the world and the threats it presents.

We’ve been imperiled for a long time now. The most salient reason for that has been the bipartisan, politically correct refusal to acknowledge and confront the Islamic roots of the threat to the West. It has prevented us from grasping not only why jihadists attack us but also that jihadists are merely the militant front line of the broader civilizational challenge posed by sharia supremacism.

Inevitably, when there is a profound threat and an overarching strategic failure to apprehend it, disasters abound; and rather than becoming occasions for reassessment of the flawed bipartisan strategy, those disasters become grist for partisan attacks. From 2004 through 2008, the specious claim was that President Bush’s ouster of Saddam Hussein created terrorism in Iraq. Now it is that President Obama is the “founder of ISIS,” as Donald Trump put it this week.

The point here is not to bash Trump. He is hardly the first to posit some variation of the storyline that Obama’s premature withdrawal of American forces from Iraq led to the “vacuum” in which, we are to believe, the Islamic State spontaneously generated. Indeed, this narrative is repeated on Fox News every ten minutes or so.

The point is to try to understand what we are actually dealing with, how we got to this place, and what the security implications are. There is no denying that American missteps have exacerbated a dangerous threat environment in the Middle East to some degree. It is spurious, though, to suggest that any of these errors, or all of them collectively, caused the catastrophe that has unfolded.

The problem for the United States in this region is Islam — specifically, the revolutionary sharia-supremacist version to which the major players adhere. There is no vacuum. There never has been a vacuum. What we have is a bubbling cauldron of aggressive political Islam with its always attendant jihadist legions.