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The Theological Compromise For Terror By Herbert London

Posted By on August 2nd, 2016

President, London Center for Policy Research

In a commonly told Israeli joke or aphorism, two taxi drivers come to an impasse on a single road. The first driver says move aside so I can pass; the second driver says the same. Emotions explode. After hurling insults, the first driver leaves his cab with fists flailing. He sees a Jew seated in the back of his rival’s taxi and proceeds to beat him up. The second driver upset by what he observed, gets out of his cab and heads for his rival’s taxi. Quite coincidentally, there is also a Jewish passenger in the back seat and he too is beaten up. What is the moral of this story?

Assume for a moment, the drivers are Sunni and Shia. In the story they are rivals, but most notably they are united in their hatred of Jews. The Middle East assumption that religious differences will lead to fragmentation and a stalemate between Sunni and Shia is a fiction since both sides have a common enemy and a common goal: Removing the U.S. and Israel from the Middle East.

Recently the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned members of al Qaeda who are based in Iran. What journalist Armin Rosen pointed out is that the Shia dominated regime doesn’t care about sectarian differences with Sunnis as long as al Qaeda bogs down the U.S. on every battle front in the Middle East.

Iran’s ties with al Qaeda have been well known and documented since 2011. According to the 9/11 Commission report, “Eight of the fourteen Saudi ‘muscle’ operatives (in the attacks) traveled into or out of Iran between October 2000 and February 2001.” After the 9/11 attacks, several members of bin Laden’s family sought sanctuary in Iran.

For Iran, terrorism comes first. It has been known for a considerable period that Iran is the primary sponsor of Hezbollah (a Shia terrorist group) and has assisted Hamas (a Sunni terrorist organization). The common principle they share is inflicting violence on and in Israel.

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MY SAY: THE HIGH DUDGEON OF MR. KHIZR KHAN

Posted By on August 1st, 2016

This is not a defense of Trump’s oafish response to the Khans….

I totally understand and empathize with the grief of parents who lose their children in war or sickness or violence. There is, however, something that rankles, when their grief is used for dirty politics. So it was when the mothers of young black men killed by police and the Khans were highlighted at the Democratic convention as shills for Hillary Clinton. Where were the mothers of innocent cops killed in Dallas? Where were the mothers of the soldiers of Fort Hood who died at the hands of an enlisted American Moslem soldier on a jihad? And where is Mr. Khan on the record speaking against jihad against Americans in San Bernardino or Orlando. His gratuitous offer of his copy of the constitution was theater. Who scripted him?

Robert Spencer makes the point exactly in his column listed below:

Khizr Khan, Servant of the Global Umma ​His son died in service of the U.S. military; now his father is using his memory to advance a different cause. Robert Spencer

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Lashing and Flogging: Islam and Iran Vicious and inhumane punishments are on the rise in the Muslim world. Dr. Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on August 1st, 2016

The ruling clerics of Iran are increasing their reliance on public flogging not only for punishing people, but also for threatening those who are violating minor Islamic and Sharia laws.

Public lashing is orchestrated for several reasons, including to punish the person who has violated Sharia laws, impose fear in the society, humiliate the victims and cause psychological harms to the individuals.

Holding a girlfriend/boyfriend’s hand, kissing in public (even for a married couple), listening to music, drinking alcohol and wearing non-Islamic dress can all be grounds for flogging under the Islamic law of Iran. As an Iranian prosecutor, Esmail Sadeghi Niaraki, who recently arrested people for “dancing and jubilating,” said, “We hope this [flogging] will be a lesson for those who break Islamic norms in private places.”

Yesterday, according to Iran’s state-owned news agency, Tasnim, Iranian officials arrested 150 young people for being at a mixed-gender birthday party in the city of Islamshahr, close to the capital of Tehran. Young people who are arrested for attending mixed-gender parties are often fined, flogged, beaten and sometimes raped.

According to Colonel Mohsen Khancherli, Iran’s police commander for the west of Tehran Province:

“After we obtained a report about a mixed-gender party in a garden in the vicinity of Islamshahr in the west of Tehran Province, an operation was carried out by the police and another organization, leading to the arrest of dozens of boys and girls.”

He added:

“Some 150 boys and girls had gathered at the mixed-gender party under the guise of a birthday party in this garden which is situated next to a studio where unlawful music was produced and recorded. Upon arrival of the police, all those present were arrested and sent before the judiciary.”

A few weeks ago, more than 30 college students were arrested, and within 24 hours the judge ordered each to receive 99 lashes for attending a graduation party. In the last two months, approximately 600 people have been arrested, fined and lashed for celebrating.

In this video, a teenager is being lashed for helping a girl whom the moral police were attempting to arrest for wearing bad hijab. He can be heard begging for mercy.

According to Ismaeil Sadeqi Niaraki, a top Iranian cleric, Iran will not tolerate “freedom” or “having fun.” He praised the moral police for arresting and punishing those who break the Islamic laws: “Thanks [sic] God that the police questioning, investigation, court hearing, verdict and implementation of the punishment all took place in less than 24 hours.”

According to Chapter III of the Iranian Islamic constitution, Enforcement of Sentences of Flogging, Article 27: “Flogging will be administered by a woven leather belt of approximately one meter in length and one-and-a-half centimeter in width.” The penal code goes on detailing how one should be flogged:

Article 32: Enforcement of hadd for female convicts will be carried out while the convict is in a sitting position with her body fully covered by clothing.

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Hungary Blasts EU with Common Sense on Islam The writing was on the wall a long time ago. Raymond Ibrahim

Posted By on August 1st, 2016

In “an astonishingly savage tirade”—to quote from the UK’s Express—Hungary’s Prime Minister Victor Orban recently tore into the European Union “over [Muslim] migration and taunted Angela Merkel for failing to protect German people from Islamist terror.”

(Click here to learn why central and eastern European nations, Hungary chief among them, are wary of Islam.)

In the course of his speech, Orban made two important points that I habitually make, and which explain the true reasons behind the unprecedented rise of terrorism in EU nations: 1) Islam’s Rule of Numbers; 2) Western enablement of Islam.

In regards to the first point, Orban

issued a stunning rebuke to Mrs Merkel on migration, blaming recent terror attacks on the mas[s] influx of refugees… Migration, he argued, “increases terrorism and crime” and “destroys national culture” in a thinly-veiled swipe at Mrs Merkel’s decision to roll out the red carpet to millions of people from the Middle East.

This is as simple as it gets. Over three years ago, in May 2013, I explained why a Muslim man decapitated a British solider in the middle of a busy street in London as follows:

It reflects what I call “Islam’s Rule of Numbers,” a rule that expresses itself with remarkable consistency: The more Muslims grow in numbers, the more Islamic phenomena intrinsic to the Muslim world—in this case, brazen violence against “infidels”—appear….

Thus as Muslim populations continue growing in Western nations, count on growing, and brazen, numbers of attacks on infidels—beheadings and such.

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The Month That Was – July 2016 Sydney Williams

Posted By on August 1st, 2016

“Freedom has its life in the hearts, the actions, the spirit of men, and so it must be daily earned and refreshed –else, like a flower cut from its life-giving roots, it will wither and die. Dwight Eisenhower (1890-1969)

“Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.” So wrote Thomas Paine, in the aftermath of the Continental Army’s defeat at Brandywine Creek, on September 12, 1777. Freedom is not free, and Paine’s message to General Howe was filled with the patriotism that inspires us to this day. He added toward the end of his essay: “We fight not to enslave, but to set a country free.” They did; though it took four more years. It is fitting that the month that celebrates the birth of our nation is also a time to look back and remember those who died at Gettysburg, a battle that was fought over the three days preceding the 87th birthday of the United States – a battle in a war that ensured our country would be slave-free and would stand undivided. It is a month we remember the 19,240 British soldiers who were killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the single worst day in British military history – one battle in a war to ensure that freedom would flourish on the European Continent.

Democracy is neither free nor easy. It is a constant struggle, against those from the outside who would defeat it and from those on the inside who would impede it. At the moment, freedom’s greatest external threat are the fanatics who comprise Islamic extremists – be they ISIS, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force, the Haqqani Network, Hezbollah, the Taliban or Hamas. To defeat them, we must identify them, and then puncture the ideology that has caused a religion to become a cauldron of hatred. Obviously, our greatest ally in this fight should be peace-loving Muslims. Unfortunately, they have not stepped to the plate in the numbers necessary. In the meantime, Mr. Obama’s refusal to name the enemy is reminiscent of the failure of Neville Chamberlain’s Conservative Party in Britain, in the mid and late 1930s, to acknowledge the evil embedded in Nazism and Fascism. His not doing so only emboldened the Axis. Dictators and fanatics see democracy as mushy, as it depends on the will of the people rather than on an all-powerful leader. We are seen as soft by the barbarians who lead these Islamic terrorist groups. But, what those philistines miss is that when aroused a free people fight more resolutely than others. But first, we must be aroused.

Internally, democracy is at risk when citizens become complacent, more interested in their well-being than in recognizing the fragility and rarity of liberty – when people become blindly obedient to their leaders. Democracy and freedom are also at risk when the media serves as lap dogs rather than watch dogs.

The two conventions consumed the last two weeks of the month. In both cases, the establishment circled their wagons, Democrats more successfully than Republicans, though help from the DNC failed. Politics has become less about service and more about being served. The purpose of government should be to enact and uphold laws; to protect the lives and inalienable rights of its citizens, and to do those things individuals cannot do for themselves. Instead, it has become a path to personal wealth and power for the chosen (and corrupt) few.

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Europeans, Hit by Terror, Exalt Palestinian Master Terrorist The irresistible “charm” of Marwan Barghouti. P. David Hornik

Posted By on August 1st, 2016

Last Tuesday terrorists broke into a French church, murdered an 85-year-old priest, and severely wounded another person. On Friday it was reported that several French municipalities had initiated the granting of honorary citizenship to jailed Palestinian terrorist Marwan Barghouti.

Arrested by Israel in 2002, in 2004 Barghouti was sentenced to five terms of life imprisonment on five counts of murder. Leader at the time of the Tanzim militia, he is seen as the mastermind of the most vicious sustained terror assault in history—the Second Intifada (2000-2005), which, in a country one-tenth the size of France, killed over a thousand people in five years.

As the Israeli ambassador to France, Aliza Bin-Noun, wrote in an open letter on Thursday: “Barghouti is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people. At a time when Western countries should unite against the threat of terrorism, the French support for Barghouti in fact legitimizes his actions.”

Barghouti’s popularity in France, however, is of long standing. From 2007 to 2010, a dozen French municipalities made him an honorary citizen. In 2013 another municipality, Bezons, gave him that distinction along with Majid al-Rimawi, who took part in the murder of an Israeli cabinet minister in 2001.

And in December 2014 the Parisian suburb of Aubervilliers conferred the honor on Barghouti, three months after another Parisian suburb, Valenton, had done the same.

In all or most of these cases, the municipalities paying homage to the Palestinian terrorists were Communist-led. In recent years the French Communist Party’s fortunes have declined, and today it holds only a small minority of legislative seats and runs only a small minority of municipalities.

So far the reports on last week’s new round of moves to honor Barghouti don’t say whether the municipalities in question are Communist-led ones. But even if Barghouti’s fan club in France is not that large, he is a cause célèbre elsewhere in Europe as well.

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The Marketing of the Democratic Candidate What’s left to justify a Hillary presidency? Bruce Thornton

Posted By on August 1st, 2016

The Democrats’ convention ended after striving mightily to persuade most of America that Hillary Clinton is somehow more human, likable, caring, and accomplished than the public record of her scandals and behavior would suggest. Unfortunately for the Dems, not Bill, not Obama, not Hillary herself can transform Hillary. There is no political alchemy that can turn that base metal into gold.

For years, armies of political consultants, publicists, and marketing geniuses have not been able to make people like Hillary. We’re on at least the fifth version of Hillary, and all the oxymoronic advice like “act naturally” or “be likable” has not been effective. She’s still inauthentic and unlikable, and 56% of voters disapprove of her. She’s like New Coke or Betamax, a bad product no amount of advertising could sell in the real world of market accountability. Yet the mainstream media have labored like Trojans on this project, downplaying her crimes and failures, believing her lies, and rationalizing her faults.

We had a representative example recently in Scott Pelley’s interview with Hillary on 60 Minutes. After she whined and whined about the invidious “Hillary Standard” –– the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy version 2.0––Pelley gently asked in therapeutic Oprah tones, “Why do you put yourself through it?” In other words, he accepted the ridiculous premise that her negative image is the consequence not of her actions, but of “Unfounded, inaccurate, mean-spirited attacks with no basis in truth, reality,” as she put it. A real journalist would have challenged her by asking about the long catalogue of financial improprieties from the Whitewater scandal to the Clinton Foundation, or the self-serving lies from “landing under sniper fire” in Bosnia to telling the grieving parents of the four Americans murdered in Benghazi that an obscure Internet video was responsible. But skilled courtiers know that royalty can’t stand too much reality.

This year’s Democratic Convention speakers didn’t do much better, when they could be heard above the Berniacs’ booing and jeering. Their catalogue of lies about Hillary’s résumé––her alleged achievements on Middle East peace, “climate change,” getting Iran to negotiate over its nuclear weapons program––smacks of desperation, given how many light-years from the truth they are. The Middle East has descended into a Darwinian jungle in which ISIS, Russia, and Iran are the alpha predators. Even if Anthropogenic Global Warming is true, all the much touted international agreements from Kyoto to Paris have done and will do nothing to cool the planet. As for Iran, it takes remarkable shamelessness to tout this disaster, given the mounting evidence that the world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism has been serially cheating and is likely to obtain nuclear armaments within a couple of decades.

Bill Clinton, the fading Big Dog of the party, gave a tedious convention speech that spent a lot of time trying to “humanize” Hillary by talking about their courtship and marriage and other random acts of compassion and caring. Apart from the preposterous premise that they have had a happy and loving marriage (see Crisis of Character), humanizing Hillary is a fruitless task. She obviously lacks her husband’s political brilliance and powers of empathy. Of course, his empathy is phony, but like Truman Capote’s Holly Golightly, Bill is a real phony. He believes all this crap he believes. Hillary has been in the public eye for 25 years, and in all that time she has consistently appeared mean, entitled, insincere, vindictive, petty, elitist, money-grubbing, and insatiable for power.

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Khizr Khan, Servant of the Global Umma ​His son died in service of the U.S. military; now his father is using his memory to advance a different cause. Robert Spencer

Posted By on August 1st, 2016

The mainstream media is wild with enthusiasm these days over Khizr Khan, the father of a Muslim soldier, Humayun Khan, who was killed fighting in Iraq in 2004. Khizr Khan, brimming with self-righteous anger, spoke at the Democratic National Convention, where he delivered what the Washington Post dubbed a “brutal repudiation of Donald Trump.” Trump responded, elevating Khizr Khan to the status of full-fledged flavor-of-the-moment media celebrity. There’s just one catch: Khizr is using his son’s memory not to advance the cause of the United States, as his son apparently died trying to do, but to advance a quite different cause: that of the global umma.

The well-heeled and powerful backers of the global jihad – those who have enabled the Islamic State (ISIS), al-Qaeda, and other jihad groups to grow as powerful as they have today — are enraged at Donald Trump. They are deeply worried by his call for a temporary moratorium on Muslim immigration into the United States, as that will make it much more difficult for jihadis to get into this country. They are anxious to stigmatize any and all resistance to jihad terror – and so, happily enough for them, is the Democratic Party, which has eagerly signed on to the longtime strategy employed by Islamic supremacist advocacy groups in the U.S., to demonize all effective measures against jihad terror as “bigoted” and “Islamophobic.”

So it was that Khizr Khan, in the full fury of his indignation at the DNC, trotted out a straw man, falsely claiming that Trump wanted to “ban us from this country.” Trump has said nothing about banning Muslim citizens of the U.S. from the country, only about a temporary moratorium on immigration from terror states. Even worse, all the effusive praise being showered on Khizr Khan in the last few days overlooks one central point: he is one man. His family is one family. There are no doubt many others like his, but this fact does not mean that there is no jihad, or that all Muslims in the U.S. are loyal citizens.

Khizr Khan is enraged at Donald Trump, but is Trump really the cause of his problem? Jihad terrorists, not Donald Trump or “Islamophobes,” killed his son in Iraq. And if Donald Trump or anyone else looks upon Muslims in the U.S. military with suspicion, it is with good reason: does any other demographic have as high a rate of treason as Muslims in the U.S. military? In 2003, a convert to Islam, Sgt. Hasan Akbar, murdered two of his commanding officers in Kuwait. In 2009, Major Nidal Malik Hasan murdered 13 Americans at Fort Hood.

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Who’s Afraid of Religious Liberty? by Richard Samuelson

Posted By on August 1st, 2016

Seeking to prohibit every kind of “discrimination,” activists in and out of government threaten the free practice of, among other faiths, Judaism.

Not so long ago, doubts about the ability of Jews to live and practice Judaism freely in the United States would have been dismissed as positively paranoid: relics of a bygone era when American Jews could be turned away from restaurants and country clubs, when restrictive covenants might prevent their purchase of real estate or prejudicial quotas limit their access to universities and corporate offices.

None of that has been the case for a half-century or more. And yet recent developments in American political culture have raised legitimate concerns on a variety of fronts. To put the matter in its starkest form: the return of anti-Semitism, by now a thoroughly documented phenomenon in Europe and elsewhere around the world, is making itself felt, in historically unfamiliar ways, in the land of the free.

Statistics tell part of the tale. In 2014, the latest period for which figures have been released by the FBI, Jews were the objects of fully 57 percent of hate crimes against American religious groups, far outstripping the figure for American Muslims (14 percent) and Catholics (6 percent). True, the total number of such incidents is still blessedly low; but what gives serious pause is the radical disproportion.

The rise and spread of anti-Israel agitation, particularly on the nation’s campuses, is the most common case. Such agitation, expressed in the form of defamatory graffiti, “Israel Apartheid” demonstrations, and the verbal or physical abuse of pro-Israel students, feeds into and is increasingly indistinguishable from outright anti-Semitism. Even the most zealously “progressive” young Jews are targeted as accomplices-by-definition with the alleged crimes of Zionism. As one student who has fallen afoul of his campus’s orthodoxies has lamented, “because I am Jewish, I cannot be an activist who supports Black Lives Matter or the LGBTQ community. . . . [A]mong my peers, Jews are oppressors and murderers.” Such is the progressive doctrine of “intersectionality,” according to which all approved causes are interconnected and must be mutually supported, no exceptions and no tradeoffs allowed.

Lately, this brand of wholesale anti-Semitic vilification under the guise of anti-Zionism has leapt beyond the precincts of the academy to infiltrate American political discourse, becoming vocally evident on both the political left and the political right and insidiously infecting this year’s presidential campaign and party maneuverings. For an analysis of the campus assault’s underlying mechanisms and wider effects, Ruth Wisse’s Mosaic essay, “Anti-Semitism Goes to School,” is unsurpassed. So far, the trend shows no sign of abating.

But there is another danger, equally grave though as yet less open and less remarked upon. It is connected with longer-term shifts in Americans’ fundamental understanding of themselves and of their liberty, and consequently with the laws that embody and reflect that understanding: in particular, the laws enshrining America’s commitment to religious liberty and, relatedly, liberty of association or, as the Constitution has it, assembly. Coming to the fore over issues of personal identity, most saliently in relation to the gay-rights movement, same-sex marriage, and transgender rights, it has resulted in a legal battle in which the radioactive charge of “discrimination,” borrowed from the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, is wielded as a weapon to isolate, impugn, and penalize dissenting views held by Americans of faith and informing the conduct of their religious lives.

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A Guide to the Palestinian Lexicon by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on August 1st, 2016

Many Palestinians refer to cities inside Israel proper as “occupied.” Jaffa, Haifa, Acre, Tiberias, Ramle and Lod, for example, are often described in the Palestinian media as “Palestinian Cities” or “Occupied Cities.” Jews living in these cities, as well as other parts of Israel, are sometimes referred to as “Settlers.”

Many Palestinians have still not come to terms with Israel’s right to exist. For them, this not only about the “occupation” of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. The real “occupation”, for them, began with the creation of Israel in 1948.

Non-Arabic speakers may find this assertion baseless, because what they hear and read from Palestinian representatives in English does not reflect the messages being relayed to Palestinians in Arabic.

It is no secret that Palestinian leaders have failed to prepare their people for peace with Israel, and deny its right to exist.

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” — George Orwell, 1984.

What do you do if you do not like Israel, but have only one outlet for that dislike: expressing it in rhetoric and print?

Well, if you are a Palestinian, you can always come up with your own terminology — one that sheds negative light on Israel and anything that is associated with it. This is precisely the tack Palestinians have taken over the past few decades, inventing their own terms and phrases when talking about Israel.