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The “Other” Palestinians by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on August 31st, 2016

Nearly 3,500 Palestinians have been killed in Syria since 2011. But because these Palestinians were killed by Arabs, and not Israelis, this fact is not news in the mainstream media or of interest to “human rights” forums.

How many Western journalists have cared to inquire about the thirsty Palestinians of Yarmouk refugee camp in Syria? Does anyone know that this camp has been without water supply for more than 720 days, and without electricity for the past three years? In June 2002, 112,000 Palestinians lived in Yarmouk. By the end of 2014, the population was down to less than 20,000.

Nor is the alarm bell struck concerning the more than 12,000 Palestinians languishing in Syrian prisons, including 765 children and 543 women. According to Palestinian sources, some 503 Palestinian prisoners have died under torture in recent years, some female prisoners have been raped by interrogators and guards.

When Western journalists lavish time on Palestinians delayed at Israeli checkpoints and ignore bombs dropped by the Syrian army on residential areas in Syria, one might start to wonder they are really about.

It seems as though the international community has forgotten that Palestinians can be found far beyond the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. These “other” Palestinians live in Arab countries such as Syria, Jordan and Lebanon, and their many serious grievances are evidently of no interest to the international community. It is only Palestinians residing in the West Bank and Gaza Strip that garner international attention. Why? Because it is precisely these individuals that the international community wield as a weapon against Israel.

Nearly 3,500 Palestinians have been killed in Syria since the beginning of the civil war in 2011. But because these Palestinians were killed by Arabs, and not Israelis, this fact is not news in the mainstream media. This figure was revealed last week by the London-based Action Group For Palestinians of Syria (AGPS), founded in 2012 with the goal of documenting the suffering of the Palestinians in that country and preparing lists of victims, prisoners and missing people in order to submit them the database to human rights forums.

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Islam and Anti-Semitism in Malaysia by Mohshin Habib

Posted By on August 31st, 2016

Wahhabi doctrines spread by Saudi-financed imams are redefining the way Islam is practiced in Malaysia. Politicians are now competing with each other to show off their Islamist credentials. These practices are eroding the tolerance for which the country was previously known.

Young Malaysians are being radicalized as a result of the Islamism and anti-Semitism that their leaders espouse. According to Malaysian police, there are at least 50,000 Islamic State sympathizers in the country.

Recently, an influential opposition party introduced a bill that would implement harsher hudud laws (brutal physical punishments for transgressions like adultery and theft) in the state of Kelantan.

Malaysia, a majority-Muslim country in Southeast Asia, is rapidly turning to Islamic fundamentalism through the state’s sharia-like legal system and the country’s growing number of Islamic militant sympathizers. Malaysia’s government is a federal parliamentary democracy under an elected constitutional monarchy. The country of more than 30 million people is made up of 13 states and three federal territories. It is a multi-ethnic country: Malay Sunni Muslims make up 50.1% of the population, Chinese people make up 23.6%, indigenous people 11.8% and Indians 6.7 %. However, the Malaysian Constitution declares Islam alone to be the official religion.

Malaysia is dominated by an iteration of Islamic culture that is highly influenced by the Saudi Arabian version of Islam. The use of political Islam has been a deliberate move by some Islamists in even the highest levels of Malaysian government to create a sharia-based nation. According to the Wall Street Journal, conservative Wahhabi doctrines spread by Saudi-financed imams are redefining the way Islam is practiced in Malaysia, and politicians are now competing with each other to show off their Islamist credentials. These practices are eroding the tolerance for which the country was previously known.

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U.S. Offers $3M Reward for U.S.-Trained Tajik Commander Who Joined ISIS By Bridget Johnson

Posted By on August 31st, 2016

WASHINGTON — The State Department announced a $3 million reward in the U.S. effort to nab an American-trained Tajik special forces commander who now lends his skills to ISIS.

Colonel Gulmurod Khalimov, a sniper who led a special paramilitary unit in Tajikistan’s Ministry of Interior, was named a specially designated terrorist by the State Department in September 2015 after appearing in an ISIS propaganda video — and a few months after the U.S. government acknowledged Khalimov was trained in part by the United States.

“From 2003-2014 Colonel Khalimov participated in five counterterrorism training courses in the United States and in Tajikistan, through the Department of State’s Diplomatic Security/Anti-Terrorism Assistance program,” spokeswoman Pooja Jhunjhunwala told CNN in May 2015.

The Tajik vowed in an ISIS video released that month, “God willing, we will find your towns, we will come to your homes, and we will kill you.” The commander of the elite police unit OMON (Special Purpose Mobility Unit) defected to the Islamic State in April 2015.

“Listen, you American pigs: I’ve been to America three times. I saw how you train soldiers to kill Muslims,” he said in Russian. “You taught your soldiers how to surround and attack, in order to exterminate Islam and Muslims.”

Khalimov said he took a U.S. course with contractor Blackwater. He also received training in Russia.

Interpol issued a red notice for Khalimov in June 2015, noting that the 41-year-old speaks English in addition to Russian and Tajik.

The State Department encouraged anyone with information on the Tajik’s whereabouts to contact the Rewards for Justice office via the website, info@rewardsforjustice.net, or at 1-800-877-3927.

According to the department’s 2015 terrorism report, 700 Tajiks had joined ISIS by the end of the year. That statistic pulls from Tajik government estimates.

countering violent extremism. Tajikistan sought to increase military and law enforcement capacity to conduct tactical operations through bilateral and multilateral assistance programs, including programs funded by the United States. The United States, Russia, Japan, and the EU also provided funding for border security programs,” said the report.

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Kerry to the Media: Cover Terrorism Less, So ‘People Wouldn’t Know What’s Going On’ By Tyler O’Neil

Posted By on August 31st, 2016

In his remarks in Bangladesh on Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry explicitly asked the media to cover terrorism less, so “people wouldn’t know what’s going on.” The line also drew applause from the audience.

While discussing terrorism, Kerry said “it’s easy to terrorize … you can make some noise.” He then suggested, “Perhaps the media would do us all a service if they didn’t cover it quite as much. People wouldn’t know what’s going on.”

Here is the context of his remark (from the official State Department transcript):

Remember this: No country is immune from terrorism. It’s easy to terrorize. Government and law enforcement have to be correct 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. But if you decide one day you’re going to be a terrorist and you’re willing to kill yourself, you can go out and kill some people. You can make some noise. Perhaps the media would do us all a service if they didn’t cover it quite as much. People wouldn’t know what’s going on. (Applause.)

In emphasizing the difference between government and terrorists, the secretary of State made a good point: that it is easier for a terrorist to grab people’s attention than for the government to do so. The reasons for this are obvious: terrorists threaten life and limb, while government should not do so. In reality, government does abuse its citizens, but since its primary aim is to serve them, such scandals are comparatively rare.

Terror attacks happen nearly every day around the world, however, and they more easily draw media attention. But here’s the rub — they deserve media attention.

The media’s job isn’t to ignore these events, no matter how much the terrorists want the media to focus on them. Indeed, the job of the press is exactly the opposite of what Kerry is explicitly calling for — that “people wouldn’t know what’s going on.” Journalism exists to let people know what’s going on, even if the events in question were caused by an insane radical.

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Chicago’s Murder Rate Spirals Out of Control By Jack Dunphy

Posted By on August 31st, 2016

We turn our attention once again to the city of Chicago, where, as of this writing, 2,858 people have been shot and 487 have been killed so far this year (both numbers will surely be higher by the time you read this). The website HeyJackass.com tabulates these and other figures related to crime in Chicago, and it reports that on average someone is shot every two hours and murdered every twelve. But these averages are for the year overall; we are now in the prime shooting season of summer, and the averages for August approximate to someone being shot every ninety minutes and murdered every eight hours. August, says the Chicago Tribune, has been the most violent month in Chicago in 20 years.

Despite these grim numbers, there persists among many the notion that it is the city’s police officers who bear the greatest share of blame for all that ails Chicago. Propagating this myth most recently is this same Chicago Tribune, which on Friday published a story about the 435 police shootings that occurred in Chicago between 2010 and 2015.

The story begins by noting that over the six years examined, a Chicago police officer fired at someone every five days, killing 92 people and wounding 170. “While a few of those incidents captured widespread attention,” says the Tribune, “they occurred with such brutal regularity — and with scant information provided by police — that most have escaped public scrutiny.”

Given the statistics cited in the opening paragraph above, it would seem it is not the police who are shooting people with “such brutal regularity.” Indeed, many of the Tribune’s readers, aware that they live in a city where someone is shot every hour and a half and murdered every eight, might not be all that disturbed – and might even welcome it – when the police manage to shoot at some evil-doer every five days.

But of course it is not merely the number of police shootings that so discomfits the enlightened ones at the Chicago Tribune, it is the skin color of those who are shot. In the second of a series of bullet points near the top of the story, we are informed that “about four out of every five people shot [by police] were African-American males.” Such use of racial data is at minimum misleading if not dishonest, but at least the Tribune made an effort at offering some context in the story for those who bothered to read beyond the first few paragraphs. Police shootings, says the story, “were more common on the South and West sides, in crime-ridden blocks profoundly shaken by decades of drugs, gangs and unrelenting poverty.” Even less subtle with the racial angle was Time magazine, which on its website cited the Tribune story under this headline: “Majority of Chicago Police Shooting Victims are Black Men or Boys: Report.”

And from this bit of information the uninformed reader is expected to conclude the number of officer-involved shootings is excessive, most especially those involving black males. “For years,” says the Tribune, “examining the full scale of the problem in Chicago was impossible because the city refused to release most details about police-involved shootings.”

So the Tribune labels this as a “problem” but doesn’t say why, other than to mention that over the six years studied, Chicago had more police shootings than Los Angeles, New York, Houston, or Philadelphia. It fails to mention the pertinent fact that Chicago has far more violent crime than any of the other cities listed. In the first half of 2015, for example, Chicago had 207 murders while New York City, with 5.5 million more people, had 164. So far this year, Chicago has experienced almost 100 more murders than Los Angeles and New York combined.

And if the Chicago Tribune feels the demographics of those shot by the police are somehow out of kilter, perhaps they should consider this: according to the U.S. census, the population of Chicago is 32.9 percent black, yet blacks make up 78.6 percent of the city’s murder victims. In Chicago and elsewhere, almost all murders are intra-racial, so we may safely conclude that blacks are similarly over-represented among Chicago’s killers. The fact that four out of five people shot by Chicago police officers seems far less startling now, doesn’t it? CONTINUE AT SITE

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Ilan Pappe destroys BDS, claims its central pillar is not true : David Collier see note please

Posted By on August 31st, 2016

Pappe, now residing as and academic in London is a blackbelt “calumnist” of Israel and David Collier is a blogger in London a blackbelt Israel defender….rsk

Ilan Pappe is the head of a department of a UK University. Below is a video apparently signaling Pappe believes it is ‘important’ to push a line for the ‘historical record’, even if it is not ‘the truth’. What is scary is that his cause and the subjects he teaches are intimately related. How can the university not address this? In the video Pappe also seems to indicate that the BDS call did not come from within.

What does this crucial revelation do to the central pillar of the BDS movement?
Background

Although the Arab boycott against the Jews preceded the state of Israel, it was always limited in scope. The extreme left wing international activists only began to view boycott as a viable tactic following the successful boycott of South Africa. For the top strategists in the anti-Israel camp, replicating South Africa became the central aim.

So from 2002, we began to see academic and cultural boycotts arising from radical left wing groups. Here too they failed to gain momentum. As the main victims of such a boycott would be the Arabs themselves, it would be almost impossible to gain ethical support from amidst the humanitarian organisations.

Noam Chomsky speaking in 2004 said this as the boycotts faltered:

“Sanctions hurt the population. You don’t impose them unless the population is asking for them. That’s the moral issue. So, the first point in the case of Israel is that: Is the population asking for it? Well, obviously not.”

This statement was made incredibly (coincidentally?) just 12 months before the ‘Palestinian call for ‘BDS’.
The ethical problem

What concerns activists is what we witness on the street. A combination of choreographed efforts that allow antisemitic thugs to express themselves on campus under a flag of humanitarian concern. But a major part of the delegitimisation campaign is occurring in academia. It is here the theoretical ethical battle is being fought. Putting aside what you believe of the conflict itself, Chomsky in 2004 had exposed a major weakness of any call to boycott.

Israelis were never going to call to boycott Israel, but for those advocating a one state solution, the ethical problem could be restructured by including the Arab population of the 67 lands in the calculation. If residents of Ramallah, Jericho and Hebron call for boycott, then it becomes theoretically possible to claim the situation is similar to the requested ANC boycott of South Africa. For those wishing to draw parallels, this became a neccessity.

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Multiple Outrages in Clinton-Obama Benghazi Obstruction : Andrew McCarthy

Posted By on August 31st, 2016

As Ian reports, it has now come to light that Hillary Clinton attempted to destroy about 30 emails related to the 2012 Benghazi massacre. They were recovered by the FBI, notwithstanding the use by Mrs. “Like With a Cloth or Something” of an advanced software program – “BleachBit” – in a willful effort to erase the contents of her servers so thoroughly that no one would be able to recover her emails (many of which were government records, which it is a felony to horde and destroy).

Obviously, these emails were kept from the congressional committees that investigated the Benghazi massacre. Mrs. Clinton was also clearly trying to shield them from discovery by defense lawyers in the prosecution of the lone terrorist the Obama administration has thus far charged (in connection with an attack that involved scores of jihadists whom Obama promised to “bring to justice”).

The depth of Mrs. Clinton’s misconduct regarding the unlawful email system and the obstruction of investigations into a terrorist attack in which four Americans were killed is breathtaking – as is the media’s indifference to it. As I’ve repeatedly argued, Clinton ought to be impeached. How much more contempt for Congress does she need to exhibit before some dim memory of self-respect moves lawmakers to take some action?

Nearly as reprehensible, however, is the Obama administration at large. Evidently, it has just today gotten around to telling a United States court that these 30 emails have never been disclosed, even though they have been sought for years, the Justice Department has known the FBI had them for months, and the State Department, too, has to have known they were in the possession of the administration as it litigated Freedom of Information Act claims yet said nothing.

Just as astounding: In making their grudging disclosure today, administration lawyers claimed that they needed another month (until the end of September) to review the emails so that classified information could be redacted before they are disclosed.

Mind you: Mrs. Clinton told us there were no government-business related emails on her servers and certainly no classified information. It turned out there were tens of thousands of government-related emails, with thousands containing classified information. Clinton lawlessly withheld these emails for years, and the executive branch has known about them for months. Indeed, the FBI director told Congress and the public that the FBI went through a painstaking process with intelligence agencies to determine which of the recovered emails had classified information in them. And yet, despite all that, the State Department has the audacity to tell a federal judge that it needs another 30 days to review less than three dozen emails?

Seriously?

When I was a federal prosecutor, neither I nor any of the government lawyers I worked with would have had the nerve to look a federal judge in the eye and make such a mind-blowing request. We’d have been too worried about what we’d say when the judge inevitably asked, “Why am I just hearing about this now?” – and ordered us to produce affidavits from every government official potentially involved in the delay while all these investigations and FOIA requests regarding Benghazi were underway.

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Why Hillary Is Never Held Accountable for Her Lies The media excuse her mendacity because it serves the progressive cause. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on August 31st, 2016

Everyone rightly catalogues Donald Trump’s fibs, distortions, and exaggerations: his assertions about his net worth, his charitable contributions, his initial supposed opposition to the Iraq War, or his “flexible” positions on illegal immigration. After all, he is flamboyant, right-wing in his present incarnation, and supposedly bends the truth either out of crass narcissism or for petty profiteering. So the watchdog media and popular culture have no problem with ridiculing Trump as a fabricator.

But not so with Hillary Clinton, whose untruths far overshadow Trump’s in both import and frequency, but are so often contextualized, excused, and forgotten because of who she is and the purpose her outright lying supposedly serves.

Lying in America has become not lying when “good” liars advance alternative narratives for noble purposes — part of our long slide into situational ethics and moral relativism.

Every new bad idea in America today can ultimately be traced to the university. And it seems to take only about 30 years for academia’s nihilism to filter through the elite institutions and make its way into popular culture. So it is with our present idea of truth as a mere construct.

In the 1980s and 1990s professors in the liberal arts became enamored of the French-speaking postmodern nihilists — among them notably Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan. They refashioned an old philosophical strain of relativism found as far back as the Greek sophists and Plato’s discussion of the noble lie. They were influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche’s attacks on absolute morality, and their youth was lived during the age of Joseph Goebbels and Pravda. The utter collapse of France in six weeks in May and June 1940 and the later shame that most of the nation either was passive or actively collaborated with the Nazi occupiers rather than proving brave resistance fighters made the idea of empiricism and truth an especially hard pill to swallow for the postwar French postmodernists.

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Barry Shaw: The Consequences of a Failed Palestinian Authority

Posted By on August 31st, 2016

A month ago I wrote an article entitled ‘The Failed State of the Two-State Solution.’ In it, I wrote that “by the ballot or by the ballot Hamas will head any Palestinian state as they did when Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005.”

So what has happened in the short time since I released that article?

In Nablus, on August 27, an estimated 120,000 protesters demonstrated against the Palestinian Authority after an Arab was beaten to death by PA security men. Many called for an international investigation into the murder as the Palestinian Authority threatened to arrest some of the leaders of the protest march. The town of Nablus has been described as being in “total anarchy.”

Sporadic violence has broken out in recent days against the Palestinian Authority, often by individuals but also by tribal groups or clans at odds with the increasingly unpopular rule by perceived corrupt leaders.

Universities are the crucibles that produce the next generation of opinion and influence makers. What has flown below the radar of the international community is that, at Birzeit University, the student body overwhelmingly elected students affiliated to Hamas with the Islamic List taking a majority 26 seats against Fatah’s 19. For the uninitiated, Birzeit is not a campus in the Gaza Strip. Birzeit University is located ten kilometers north of Ramallah, an easy march to Palestinian Authority headquarters.

Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah, propped up by the international community and, by default, the Israeli government, has failed this community by his stubborn refusal to negotiate with Israel, a refusal based on his adamant rejection of living alongside a Jewish state.

He has clearly also failed his own people who elected him back in 2005 and have been barred from expressing their democratic voice ever since.

Surveys show a sharp fall in Palestinian Arabs supporting a two-state solution. There has been a radical fall in support for an Abbas-led Palestinian rulership and a rise in support for Hamas.

The persistent fever for violence against Israel was highlighted in a study made in March 2016 by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Study which found that the majority of Palestinian Arabs yearn for violence. 60% of West Bank Arabs and three quarters of Gaza Strip Arabs favor violence against Jews.

If truth be told, Arabs living under Palestinian control are angrier at their leaders than they are against Israel.

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CUI BONO BY MARILYN PENN

Posted By on August 31st, 2016

The media coverage blares that Anthony Weiner has been “at it again” – sexting to women, this time with his 4 year old son next to him in bed. But the date on the text tells a different story; this actually occurred more than a year ago on July 31, 2015. Why then has it just been splashed across front pages and tv screens? The eponymous legal title – Latin for who benefits – may offer some plausible explanations.

After last week’s revelations of Huma Abedin’s pivotal role in arranging for various international donors to the Clinton Foundation to receive consideration and favors from our Secretary of State, it became necessary to deflect negative criticism of both her and her boss. What better way to turn Huma into an object of sympathy than to make her the ongoing victim of a serial sexual pervert. It worked well for Mrs. Clinton when the news reported Bill’s novel use of a cigar with Monica Lewinsky, turning him into someone far less palatable to mainstream America than a routine adulterer and shooing Hillary into her victorious election as senator from a state to which she was barely connected. Anyone who has seen the documentary of Weiner, released this year, would have reason to question the judgment of Ms. Abedin, not only for staying married to a man who cannot control his sexual cravings or his temper when baited by hecklers, but for her acquiescence in allowing their young son to be photographed as a prop to make both father and mother appear more wholesome. Even publicity-hungry celebrities in our Kardashian-crazed culture draw the line at letting their innocent children be photographed or filmed. One watched this documentary wondering why nobody called Child Protective Services, something which has suddenly been mentioned after the release of the sext in the current spotlight.

Politicos understand that it’s better to control your candidate’s negative publicity pre-emptively – in this case, before the debates begin and with sufficient lead time to insure that a fickle public will have forgotten all this by November. Huma needed a divestment from her unsavory husband so that Hillary would not be tarnished with the hangover from Bill’s sordid pecadilloes just before voters pulled the election levers. End of August is traditionally a time when many Americans are on vacation, not reading the daily papers and less concerned with the daily ritual of watching the news on tv. In two weeks’ time, this will all be stale and Huma will be the aggrieved little woman who stood by her man until he left her no choice. The truth is that we don’t know whether Anthony Weiner has continued with his exhibitionistic perversions since July, 2015 – we only know that the Post dug up an old picture and smeared it across its front page to divert our interest from Huma’s role in Hillary’s sordid and illegal involvement with many foreign interests, not to mention her foundation’s enormous monetary gain from this indefensible pay for play.