PA minister threatens war over Jerusalem

"The term 'war' will not be erased from the lexicon...
as long as Jerusalem is occupied"
said PA Minister of Religious Affairs in sermon
in the presence of PA Chairman Abbas

by Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik The Minister also warned that "If Jerusalem is dishonored, if Jerusalem is disgraced, if [Jerusalem] is lost, it may leave the door open to all possibilities of struggle, all possibilities of war. The term 'war' cannot be erased from the lexicon of this region as long as Jerusalem is occupied..."

PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas was present in the audience while Habbash made these statements.

Click here to view

The following is the excerpt from the Friday sermon from the mosque at Mahmoud Abbas's office in Ramallah broadcast on PA TV:

Speaker: Mahmoud Al-Habbash, PA Minister of Religious Affairs
PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas is in the audience.

"Jerusalem is not just a city. Al-Aqsa is not just a mosque. Jerusalem is the key to peace, and Jerusalem can ignite a thousand and one wars. Unless the issue of Jerusalem is solved, so that it returns to its owners; unless Jerusalem will be Palestinian, as it was throughout history, the capital of the Palestinian state and the capital of the Palestinian people, the place which is the object of heartfelt longing and which all Muslims aspire to reach; unless Jerusalem is like that way, there is no peace. There is no peace without Jerusalem. There is no stability without Jerusalem. If Jerusalem is dishonored, if Jerusalem is disgraced, if [Jerusalem] is lost, it may leave the door open to all possibilities of struggle, all possibilities of war. The term 'war' cannot be erased from the lexicon of this region as long as Jerusalem is occupied, as long as Jerusalem is disgraced, as long as the residents of Jerusalem are being targeted. It's not possible; Jerusalem has to return to its owners. And we are its owners."
[PA TV (Fatah), Aug. 20, 2010

Why Does Louisiana Think This is Obama's Katrina?

Heritage Foundation

President Barack Obama finished-up his 10-day vacation on Martha’s Vineyard yesterday by flying down to New Orleans where he gave a speech at Xavier University marking the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. The President specifically linked the 2005 disaster with the region’s most recent troubles telling the audience: “Even as you’ve been buffeted by Katrina and Rita, even as you’ve been impacted by the broader recession that has devastated communities across the country, in recent months the Gulf Coast has seen new hardship as a result of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill.” Obama then rattled through all that has administration has done for the Gulf since the oil spill before concluding that the legacy of Katrina must be “not one of neglect, but of action; not one of indifference, but of empathy.” But if the Obama administration has treated New Orleans with action and not neglect, with empathy and not indifference, then why does the latest survey from Public Policy Polling, a liberal polling firm, show that not only do Louisianans disapprove of Obama’s actions in the aftermath of the spill by a 61%-32% margin, but a majority, 54%, believe that President George W. Bush did the better job of helping Louisiana through Katrina? The answer was given by Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) shortly after the President’s Xavier speech when Jindal told reporters: “The experts all agree, we can end this moratorium before six months. Let’s put our people back to work.”

The moratorium Gov. Jindal was referring to was President Obama’s job-killing oil drilling moratorium which was put in place a full month and a half after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 20. The experts Gov. Jindal were referring to was the Bipartisan Policy Center which issued a report to the President’s national oil spill commission last Thursday recommending that the ban be lifted. Jindal continued:

I don’t think they understood how the energy industry worked – I think they really thought that the rigs could simply flip a switch. I hope [they] now have a better understanding of what’s at stake, the jobs that are at stake. Until they came down here, they didn’t understand the human impact in terms of the small businesses and jobs.

President Obama’s oil drilling ban is set to end on November 30, but hopefully the White House will begin to show some understanding of how the Gulf economy works by ending the ban before that. But don’t hold your breath. President Obama made no mention of his oil drilling ban in his Xavier speech. And the mainstream media is intent on letting him get away with it. Brian Williams interviewed President Obama for NBC News last night and asked only two questions about the oil spill and another about the economy, but made no mention of the oil ban.

The President’s oil drilling moratorium aside, there’s another larger lesson from both Katrina and the Deepwater spill: the federal government can better defend the homeland domestically by returning power to states and localities. For far too long states have grown dependent on FEMA for their disaster response capabilities. As we wrote in April:

In the short span of 16 years, the yearly average of FEMA declarations has tripled from 43 under President George H. W. Bush to 89 under President Clinton to 130 under President George W. Bush. In his first year, President Barack Obama issued 108 declarations—the 12th highest in FEMA history—without the occurrence of one hurricane or other major disaster. In the first three months of 2010, President Obama has issued 32 declarations, which puts him on pace for 128 declarations for the year—the sixth most in FEMA history.

There are two pernicious effects from this dependency: 1) states and localities lose their disaster response capabilities since they believe the federal government will bail them out: 2) FEMA becomes distracted by routine disasters instead of focusing their resources on truly national threats. Let’s save FEMA and its resources for the Hurricane Katrinas and place the burden of responding to routine natural disasters back in the hands of states and localities.

The Obama administration’s approach to the fallout from its oil drilling ban illustrates why that local approach is a better one. Gov. Jindal explained: “In the beginning, the administration suggested people file BP claims with unemployment claims. We made it clear that people want to go back to work.” Less dependency. More work. The Obama administration must end the oil ban and let Louisiana heal.

Quick Hits:

* Faced with mounting debt and looming costs from Obamacare, many local governments are closing their hospitals.
* Aging baby boomers who fought nuclear power a generation ago feel the battle is starting all over again.
* According to USA Today, record numbers of Americans are dependent on government anti-poverty programs.
* Small businesses have put hiring on hold until there is some policy stability in Washington.
* The progressive coalition Health Care for America Now is fighting hard to help reelect lawmakers who voted for Obamacare, but they are refusing to talk about it.

Obama's Fictitious "Moderate Muslim Majority"

August 30, 2010 - Joel Gilbert

Webster’s Dictionary defines the word “story” as ‘an imaginary account of real people and events’ and ‘a yarn’. President Barack Obama has long dispensed the following fiction to Americans: the Muslim world is divided between “radicals” and “moderates.” Unfortunately, this narrative is at the forefront of US foreign policy, and its lack of basis in reality is leading to the failure of US efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, while raising a false sense of security at home. President Obama’s “story”goes like this: adherents of Islam are comprised of two groups, "radical Muslims" and "moderate Muslims.” The "radical Muslims" believe in the use of violence, because they are “against freedom.” Fortunately, "radical Muslims" represent a very small minority, while the “vast majority” of Islam’s one billion Believers are "moderate Muslims.” According to President Obama, "moderate Muslims" and Americans have “shared values and common aspirations.” Obama also preaches that “moderate Muslims” wish to join America’s fight against “radical Muslims.” The President assures America that its human and material sacrifices in Iraq and Afghanistan will succeed due to the partnership with "moderate Muslims" in those countries. Meanwhile at home, "moderate Muslims" should make Americans feel safer, as “moderates” will report “radicals” to local authorities.

Television news provides daily graphic depictions of "radical Muslims." However, if they really exist, where are the "moderate Muslims" that President Obama speaks of so often? Americans are left to imagine what "moderate Muslims" look like, where they might be located, and whether they have organizations with websites they can visit. And, if there are "radical Muslims" and "moderate Muslims,” mustn’t there also be "liberal Muslims? Why doesn’t CNN cover those “liberal Muslim” pro-Israel street demonstrations?

In fact, there are no such groups as “radical Muslims” or “moderate Muslims.” These designations do not exist in the Islamic world. These terms were invented in recent times only because Islamic goals and values are not understood or shared by the West. From the very inception of Islam, the Christian West has had difficulty understanding Islam as a different religious phenomenon than Christianity. When Muslims conquered the Iberian Peninsula in the 8th century, Christians referred to Muslims arriving from North Africa as “Moors.” Over the centuries, Spaniards continued to refer to Muslims as Moors, even if they were from India or Indonesia. In the rest of Europe, Muslims were referred to as “Turks,” after the group of central Asian nomadic invaders who converted to Islam and governed the Islamic Empire in the Middle Ages. In Asia minor, Christians referred to Muslims as “Tartars,” an ethnic name. When Europeans finally understood that Islam was not an ethnic group, they mistakenly perceived it in terms of a Western religious group. In the early 1900's, Europeans began referring to Islam as “Muhammadism,” and Muslims as “Muhammadans,” incorrectly assuming the Prophet Muhammad had the same role in Islam that Jesus did in Christianity. To this day, misunderstandings continue: Westerners describe the mosque as a “Muslim church,” equate the Muslim Friday to the Christian Sunday, refer to the Koran as the “Muslim Bible,” and believe sheiks to be “Muslim priests.”

Westerners also incorrectly group Muslims politically, using Western terms such as “moderate,” “conservative,” and “radical.” So different are Western and Muslim world views, that identical words can have two different meanings. In the West, “freedom” is the right of individuals to participate in the formation, conduct, and lawful removal of governments from power - the basis of constitutionalism and parliamentary government. For the Islamic world, “freedom” means “independence”from foreign rule, which they equate with “tyranny.” In the West, the opposite of tyranny is “freedom.” In Islam, the opposite of tyranny is “justice.” For Muslim thinkers, “justice” is the ideal, and justice distinguishes good leaders from bad leaders. For the majority of Muslims, bad leaders are those who have Western values and are allied with the West. The rise to power of Islamist political parties everywhere free elections are held in the Middle East speaks volumes.

Because the West considers its development of “separation of church and state” and "secularism" as the highest evolution of humanity, those not sharing Western values are dismissed as “radical,” or essentially “nuts.” Though lacking a shred of evidence, President Obama insists there exists a “vast majority” of “moderate Muslims” who do share Western values. After all, part of the “story” is that "radical Muslims" are just a small group of former "moderate Muslims" who have been "radicalized," as one can become a "radical Muslim" only through brainwashing.

A more accurate description of political loyalties in the Islamic world is that the majority of Muslims are either active or passive supporters of the movement of Islamism. The movement for Islamic Revival or “Islamism,” is an indigenous, grass-roots movement championed by both poor and educated Muslims throughout the Muslim world. "Islam is the solution!" is the Islamist call to action against Westernization and secular governments in the Muslim world, which provide the masses with little hope or future. Islamists do not consider themselves to be revolutionaries, in the sense of revolution changing society in a new way. Rather, Islamists strive to rebuild internally by applying traditional principles to reestablish the past strength and glory of Islam. A return to success necessitates the purification of Islamic society from secular government systems, legislation, and institutions borrowed from or imposed by the West. For Islamists, political upheaval, if needed by the sword, is a necessary part of the purification of their society, hundreds of years in the making. Islamism advocates the implementation of Shari’ah (Islamic law) and the restoration of the Koran as the sole authority for government in Muslim countries. Meanwhile, Western military presence in Muslim countries constitutes an affront to Islamists. Islamists believe that dominance by unbelievers is blasphemous, as it can lead to abasement of faith, immorality, and violations of Holy Law. Islamists view Israel as the center of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, whose purpose is to infiltrate Muslim countries, destroy Islamic values, and instill the germ of Westernization, with the ultimate goal of eradicating Islam. Despite wishful thinking in the West, Islamism is the only serious alternative to secular forms of government in the Middle East, and does represent the aspirations of the majority of Muslims across the Islamic world.

Discarding President Obama’s fictitious “story” of “moderate Muslims” and “radical Muslims,” the true reality emerges with regard to Iraq and Afghanistan: America has no real allies in these countries, and there is little or no support for secular, Western democracy. Following a US withdrawal, its only a matter of time before the US backed governments collapse and Islamist forces seize power, leaving the American public to ask “what happened to our allies, the moderate Muslim majority?” The answer is that this was only a “story,” a yarn composed by politicians due to their lack of understanding. This misunderstanding has been the basis of US foreign policy failures for years. Jimmy Carter was guilty of it when he withdrew support from America’s ally, The Shah of Iran, believing Western secular democracy would break out in Iran. Its the very same misunderstanding that led President Bush to believe that once the Taliban and later Saddam Hussein were toppled, that “moderate Muslims” in those countries would establish Western democracies. Yet the “story” continues with President Obama, that a “vast majority” of Muslims are “moderate Muslims,” and are America’s allies. Absent any evidence, this “story” should be relegated to Saturday morning cartoons where such imagination is not fatal.

© 2010 Joel Gilbert

Joel Gilbert is an Islamic history scholar and writer/director of two recent documentary feature films on the Middle East. His newest release is the award winning ATOMIC JIHAD: Ahmadinejad's Coming War for Islamic Revival and Obama's Politics of Defeat.

Here is one suggestion: A letter from Prime Minister Netanyahu to President Obama:

Ruth King


Dear President Obama:

Greetings! I deeply and respectfully regret to inform you that I must cancel my forthcoming visit to the United States for the purpose of commencing negotiations. I recognize and share your sense of urgency in resolving the current impasse, but grave international events which threaten Israel as well as the United States make the regional war of Arabs against Israel less pressing and an item for another time and another venue. Please let me explain.



Your State Department has tried to reassure us that Iran will not complete nuclear arms for one year. However, one of the “Quartet” members, namely Russia, helped finish building the Bushehr Iranian Nuclear project which is well on its way to becoming weaponized. Reliable sources are convinced that the reactor will be fully operational since military action against it could lead to widespread contamination in the entire Middle East.



There is an old saw, Mr. President: “If you want to know what a man is thinking, listen to him.”



Iran’s ruthless tyrant has issued genocidal threats to destroy Israel, and has repeated them virtually every day. I would be remiss not to heed him and I would be equally remiss in trusting any dialogue on the future survival of my country with any nation that continues to enable and encourage Iran.



Furthermore, I cannot accept the participation of entities such as the United Nations and the European Union who continually indulge in the most anti-Semitic and anti- Israel harangues, as participants in any discussion of my nation’s security and destiny. They share the conviction that Israel, of all the world’s nations has a negotiable “right to exist” and may not make its own decisions on what constitutes secure and defensible borders. While they maintain a studious silence on massacres, famines, civil wars elsewhere they join their own enemies in denouncing Israel. This “quartet” would not play Brahms, but would gladly perform a funeral dirge for Israel.



Furthermore, Mr. President, what constructive input can come from nations such as Egypt and Jordan whose bias against Israel and Jews is evidenced daily by their media, their schoolbooks, their sermons and their national rules forbidding Jewish ownership of land and citizenship?



In fact, President Obama, the Arab League recently announced a summit, where Jordan and Egypt will convene with Syria, “Palestine” Saudi Arabia, Libya and Algeria next February in Qatar in a conference to discuss the status of Jerusalem.



Would you countenance discussion of the status of Washington D.C. by any foreign powers, let alone enemies?



Finally, Mr. President, there is no need to travel so far for meaningful discussions. Our land is small and enjoys a fine highway system. Mr. Abbas can take a car to Jerusalem or I can take one to Ramallah. We would both be home in time for dinner.



And, speaking of Mr. Abbas, it certainly did not enhance our confidence when he and other members of his governing committee recently attended the funeral of Amin Al-Hindi, the mastermind of the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, and praised him in the most lavish terms as a martyr and leader.



Mr. President, you and I are both democratically elected leaders with a fractious body politic. We both face serious security threats which must continually be balanced with utmost respect for the civil liberties of our citizens.



The media reports of daily threats to the United States from North Korea, from China and from the drug cartel war on your southern border which has already claimed thousands of lives and threatens to infiltrate your cities. On your northern border there is increasing activity of terrorists plotting attacks on the United States. Your economy is still in precarious condition.



How could the disposition of approximately two thousand square miles of West Bank alter any of these crises?



Mr. President, your nation and mine are beacons of freedom and democracy. Our destinies are intertwined and Israel is the greatest supporter and ally of the United States in the world. We are bipartisan in our respect for America. Since President Harry Truman rose in the middle of the night and against the wishes of his State Department gave de jure recognition to our independence, we have enjoyed the support of thousands of legislators from both parties.



July fourth is a national holiday for America and a day of national pride for Israel because on that day in 1976 when the United States was celebrating the Bicentennial, Israel conducted the most dazzling rescue of hostages in Entebbe. My brother Lt. Col. Jonathan Netanyahu was killed on that day in that operation. He is a hero in that long line of Israelis and Americans who have died in defense of freedom.



Mr. President, on September 8th Jews throughout the world commence observance of a new year marking 5,771 years of Jewish existence. The holiday Rosh Ha Shana culminates on Yom Kippur a day of atonement, fasting and renewal.



Among my prayers, I will include a prayer for peace and prosperity for both our nations.



What I will not do, Mr. President, is come to Yom Kippur atoning for having endangered Israel by attending the September 2 meetings.



God bless our nations.



Respectfully yours,



Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel

The Liberal-Islamist Alliance

Daniel Greenfield

The Ground Zero Mosque debate is only the latest in a long series of incidents in which liberals have chosen to side with Islamists, while denying their victims a fair hearing or any hearing at all. Opponents of the mosque are painted as "Islamophobic Extremists" representing nothing but bigotry and hate. This is much the same way that the liberal cultural elite has placed the blame for over a thousand years of Muslim persecution of Jews on "Zionist Extremism". While a Koran in the toilet becomes a front page story, the ongoing persecution of Hindus, Zoroastrians and Christians in Muslim countries is only a footnote in the State Department's human rights report.
This ugly bias is the product of a political alliance between Liberals and Islamists. And the cost of that alliance may be the world as we know it. That alliance is the reason why the US and Europe attacked Yugoslavia on behalf of a Muslim separatist group in the name of a non-existent genocide, while refusing to take any action against the very real and very horrifying Sudanese Muslim genocide of Africans. It is why Israel is constantly barraged with hateful propaganda from the same left, which defended Saddam's sovereignty in Iraq. The very same media propagandists who champion the flotilla on behalf of Hamas rule in Gaza, have next to no interest in Saddam's rape rooms, his ethnic cleansing of the Marsh Arabs, or his use of chemical weapons against the Kurds. While the American media becomes wildly exercised over a Disney employee's right to wear a Hijab or some other trivial bit of Islamic lawfare-- hardly any newspaper outside of Der Spiegel has covered allegations that Turkey may be using chemical weapons against the Kurds.

This is worse than mere bias. It amounts to ignoring mass murder and genocide because it is inconvenient. It means that the United States entered a war on behalf of a Muslim terrorist organization over a lie widely promoted by the media, which refused to call for armed intervention in the actual genocides taking place in Africa. The media has eagerly demonized entire ethnic and religious groups, because of Islamic hostility to those groups. The persecution and assaults on Jews in Europe today, can be added to the ugly tab of a media that has vigorously taken the Muslim side, and promoted their hatred of a minority group in Europe and the Middle East.

The excuses do not hold water. In the name of fighting racism, the media has been unapologetically racist. In the name of tolerance, it has been wickedly intolerant. In the name of preventing persecution, it has turned a blind eye to ethnic cleansing and genocide by Muslims-- while provoking and perpetuating Muslim separatist conflicts In Asia, Europe and the Middle East. And tricking the American public into a war on behalf of one such separatist group under false pretenses. These are crimes. More than that, these are the actions of bigots whose biases are rigid and fixed, and who like the Nazis, use a political ideology as the basis for valuing some lives below those of others, based on ethnic and religious criteria.

But the question is why. What is so appealing about the Islamists and their ideology, that the left is willing to go to such horrifying lengths to champion their cause. The answer may lie in the liberal view of religion as a tool of social change. The theology behind this goes by many names in different denominations and religions, from Liberation Theology to Prophetic Justice to Tikkun Olam, the common denominator is that they hijack religion to serve as a vehicle for social justice. Indeed the Communist party itself was born out of The League of the Just, a Christian organization. The common denominator is religion becomes reduced to the lyrics of the The Internationale, its only mandate to uplift the "downtrodden" and usher in a utopian age of mass equality and brotherhood.

Seen from that angle, it is not surprising why the Islamist agenda would appeal to liberals. It is after all also religion used as a tool of social change. Islamist groups are revolutionary, they want to overthrow the existing order in order to build a perfect society as defined by Sharia law. They operate social services centers for their followers and claim to be fighting for justice. But what liberals fail to understand is that while for them religion is a means, to the Islamists, religion is an end. Both liberals and Islamists equate religion with social justice. But for liberals, social justice is equivalent to religion, for Islamists religion is equivalent to social justice. While liberals talk about religion in order to bring about what they believe is a better society, Islamists talk about a better society in order to impose their religion on all Muslims and non-Muslims alike. If liberals were able to understand this, they might wake up long enough to realize the "deal with the devil" they had made.


The paradox of champions of equality allying with a religious cult that seeks to impose unequal rights on all seems absurd. However, this is nothing new for liberals, who have frequently allied with narrow interest liberationist groups such as the Black Panthers or La Raza, who did not believe in universal equality, but were fueled purely by racial or sectarian anger. Most have forgotten the racist origins of socialism, whether it was Jack London proclaiming, "I am a White Man first, and only then a Socialist", Marx sneering at the "Lazy Mexicans" or Woodrow Wilson and FDR promoting segregation. The socialists frequently pandered to racism, both in the US and Europe, in order to win over a working class and rural base. Then they jettisoned that base, for another, while still employing racist tactics.

Within a generation, the Democrats went from protecting racist white rioters to protecting racist black rioters. It did not make much difference to them. They had come to think of people as groups that they could manipulate like building blocks for political coalitions. The socialists too went from arguing that working class solidarity was urgently needed to prevent racial and ethnic minorities from taking the jobs of white workers, to championing racial warfare. The differences were not so much philosophical, as tactical. In the same way, Russian Communists were for the rights of minorities before they took power, and morphed into Russian Nationalists once they were in power, and needed to consolidate their grip on an empire.

As I wrote last week in Why the Left Hates Democracy,when liberals talk about equality, they mean "Actual Equality", not "Legal Equality". That means Constitutional equality or a state of affairs in which everyone has the same rights under the law, is not what they are after. Their goal is "Actual Equality", a state of affairs in which they overthrow all the existing power structures, in order to build a society where no one has any advantages over anyone else anymore. So naturally arguments which point out that Islam is discriminatory have minimal impact. Cuba after all has racial segregation. That hasn't stopped liberals from flocking to kiss Fidel's ring, no more than the USSR's ethnic cleansings prevented the socialists of their day from doing the same.

Liberals are not concerned with Islam's treatment of women or gays. Eldridge Cleaver's description of his serial rapes as an "insurrectionary act", did not dissuade liberals from gushing over the Black Panthers. The Nation didn't fire Eric Alterman for his homophobic remarks. To liberals, these like all other minorities, are just building blocks in their political coalition. Not people, building blocks. They still think of Muslims the same way. And the Islamist way seems to them to coincide with their own social justice agenda.

Joining forces with the Islamists, helps build a new left wing consensus in the West, and Islamic revolutions across the Middle East that will topple the old royalist and military regimes associated with the West. That is how the left sees it anyway. And the growing power of the Lib Dems in the UK and Barack Hussein Obama's rise to power in the US seem to be testaments to the power of the Liberal-Islamist Alliance. Anti-Semitism helps seal the deal and silence the cries of pain from their first victims. Hurling insults at the troops gives the Muslim Rage Boys and Leftist Rage Girls something in common besides their Keffiyahs. A common enemy for a temporary alliance.

Both Liberal and Islamists believe in a mandatory overhaul of society from top to bottom, but they differ in the details and the question of the final authority. And collaborations between them before in the Middle East have invariably ended with leftists in prison cells and Mullahs on the throne. The liberal betrayal of the First World will end the same way, given enough time and leeway. The Islamists feed leftist radicalism, and vice versa, but such political and cultural vandalism eventually runs into a wall, when both sides have amassed sufficient power so as not to need the other anymore.

European Socialists think that Islamic immigration will give them for rearranging their countries any way they please, in reality they will find that Islamic immigration means that their Islamist allies have a base, and they have Dhimmis and rape victims. Israeli leftists think that terrorism will lead to a dismantling of Israel in favor of a one state solution, they are right about that, but their role in such a state will be the same one as the Jews in Iran, and the token minorities that any genocidal regime displays to prove it really isn't as monstrous as its actions suggest. American liberals think that Islam is their latest wedge against the establishment and the rights and freedoms of ordinary Americans, they are correct, but what they have not considered, is that when the dust settles, it will be with them firmly at the bottom.

The Liberal-Islamist alliance is the death sentence of the free world, an alliance between a fifth column and the barbarians at the gate.

The last refuge of the liberal

C. KRAUTHAMMER

What’s a liberal to do when he’s lost the argument? Pull out the bigotry charge.

Liberalism under siege is an ugly sight indeed.

Just yesterday it was all hope and change and returning power to the people. But the people have proved so disappointing. Their recalcitrance has, in only 19 months, turned the predicted 40- year liberal ascendancy (James Carville) into a full retreat. Ah, the people, the little people, the smalltown people, the “bitter” people, as Barack Obama in an unguarded moment once memorably called them, clinging “to guns or religion or” – this part is less remembered – “antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.” That’s a polite way of saying clinging to bigotry. And promiscuous charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on incorrect thinking.

• Resistance to the vast expansion of government power, intrusiveness and debt, as represented by the tea party movement? Why, racist resentment toward a black president.

• Disgust and alarm with the federal government’s unwillingness to curb illegal immigration, as crystallized in the Arizona law? Nativism.

• Opposition to the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history, as expressed in Proposition 8 in California? Homophobia.

• Opposition to a 15-story Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero? Islamophobia.

NOW WE know why the country has become “ungovernable,” last year’s excuse for the Democrats’ failure of governance: Who can possibly govern a nation of racist, nativist, homophobic Islamophobes? Note what connects these issues. In every one, liberals have lost the argument in the court of public opinion. Majorities – often lopsided majorities – oppose President Obama’s social-democratic agenda (e.g., the stimulus, Obamacare), support the Arizona law, oppose gay marriage and reject a Ground Zero mosque.

What’s a liberal to do? Pull out the bigotry charge, the trump that preempts debate and gives no credit to the seriousness and substance of the contrary argument. The most venerable of these trumps is, of course, the race card. When the tea party arose, a spontaneous, leaderless and perfectly natural (and traditionally American) reaction to the vast expansion of government intrinsic to the president’s proudly proclaimed transformational agenda, the liberal commentariat cast it as a mob of angry white yahoos disguising their antipathy to a black president by cleverly speaking in economic terms.

Then came Arizona and SB 1070. It seems impossible for the left to believe that people of goodwill could hold that: (a) illegal immigration should be illegal, (b) the federal government should not hold border enforcement hostage to comprehensive reform, i.e., amnesty, (c) every country has the right to determine the composition of its immigrant population.

As for Proposition 8, is it so hard to see why people might believe that a single judge overturning the will of 7 million voters is an affront to democracy? And that seeing merit in retaining the structure of the most ancient and fundamental of all social institutions is something other than an alleged hatred of gays – particularly since the opposite-gender requirement has characterized virtually every society in all the millennia until just a few years ago? AND NOW the Ground Zero mosque. The intelligentsia is near unanimous that the only possible grounds for opposition is bigotry toward Muslims.

This smug attribution of bigotry to two-thirds of the population hinges on the insistence on a complete lack of connection between Islam and radical Islam, a proposition that dovetails perfectly with the Obama administration’s pretense that we are at war with nothing more than “violent extremists” of inscrutable motive and indiscernible belief. Those who reject this as both ridiculous and politically correct (an admitted redundancy) are declared Islamophobes, the ad hominem du jour.

It is a measure of the corruption of liberal thought and the collapse of its self-confidence that, finding itself so widely repudiated, it resorts reflexively to the cheapest race-baiting (in a colorful variety of forms).

Indeed, how can one reason with a nation of pitchfork-wielding mobs brimming with “antipathy toward people who aren’t like them” – blacks, Hispanics, gays and Muslims – a nation that is, as Michelle Obama once put it succinctly, “just downright mean”? The Democrats are going to get beaten badly in November. Not just because the economy is ailing.

And not just because Obama overread his mandate in governing too far left. But because a comeuppance is due the arrogant elites whose undisguised contempt for the great unwashed prevents them from conceding a modicum of serious thought to those who dare oppose them.

Hizbullah, Syria to cooperate on conflicts with Israel'

J Post

Lebanese group and Syrian military have joint headquarters to plan attacks and defense; Assad urges Lebanese support for Hizbullah, calls for "calm and dialogue" in Lebanon. Lebanese guerilla group Hizbullah and the Syrian military have reportedly agreed to cooperate on any future conflicts with Israel, according to Kuwaiti newspaper a-Rai.

Sources told the newspaper that Hizbullah and Syria now have joint headquarters from which they can coordinate any operations pooling resources and information, to be jointly commanded by officers from the two groups.

These operations would include air, land and sea and plans reportedly include strategies for attacks on Israel as well as defense of Lebanon in the event of an Israeli attack.

Lebanese Prime Minister Sa'ad Hariri met with Syrian President Bashar Assad in Damascus early on Monday, to discuss Syrian-Lebanese ties and to consolidate "coordination between the two countries in all fields," Syria's state-run news agency SANA reported Monday.

Hariri has visited Damascus repeatedly this year in a sign of Syria's renewed influence over Lebanon in the years since Damascus withdrew its military in 2005, ending a nearly three-decade hold on Lebanon.

According to the report, Assad called for "calm and dialogue to solve impending problems." He also reiterated his support for the "resistance against foreign threats," and urged Hariri to support Hizbullah.


On Sunday, Ash-Sharq al-Awsat newspaper reported that the Lebanese Armed Forces will continue receiving military equipment from France despite pressure from Israel and the US to halt such assistance.

Last week, street battles in Beirut between Hizbullah and a small Sunni group killed three people, exacerbating sectarian tensions in Lebanon.

AP contributed to this report.

David Horowitz Debates the Ground Zero Mosque

Frontpagemag.com

The following is a debate between David Horowitz and Daniel Luban reprinted from Tabletmag.com.

When Daniel Luban published an essay in Tablet Magazine last week finding resonances between what he called Islamophobic opposition to the Park51 Islamic center and past anti-Semitism, one comment on the piece jumped out at us. “This article is in serious denial,” began a brief, angry response from David Horowitz, the conservative intellectual and activist and the author, most recently, of A Cracking of the Heart, a book about his daughter. We invited Horowitz and Luban to extend their debate about Luban’s theory. Here is their exchangeMARC TRACY, Tablet Magazine: David, in your comment on Dan’s piece, you said that “Jew hatred is part of the gospel of Islam and the practice of all Muslim states in the world today.” By contrast, a premise of Dan’s article is that there are in the world a relatively small group of Islamists—fundamentalists who subscribe to a violent, anti-Semitic, mutant strain of Islam—and, for the most part, ordinary Muslims who do no such thing, and that, contrary to the arguments of writers like Andrew McCarthy, most American Muslims are not Islamists. How do you respond to that? Is the problem with Islam or with Islamists? And if it’s with Islamists, how influential are Islamists in America? Are the people behind the Islamic center Islamists?

DAVID HOROWITZ: Like many Jews who are in denial about the existential threat to Israel and to Jews generally from the Islamic world, Daniel Luban thinks that the radical, Jew-hating element in Islam is relatively small, and consequently the threat is a pathology, which people like him call “Islamophobia.” Among such deniers there is a notable absence of attention to what the Islamic world actually does and says in relation to Jews or how seriously Muslims take the word of their God, who refers to Jews as “apes and pigs” and calls for their extermination (as per this infamous and well-known saying of the prophet: “The day of Judgment will come when Muslims fight the Jews and kill them”). Here are some corrective observations:

After the Sept. 11 attacks there were several public opinion surveys conducted in the Muslim world about Muslim views of Osama Bin Laden and his terror war against “crusaders and Jews.” The number of Muslims who supported Osama and the attacks ranged from a low 10 percent, or 150 million Muslims, to 50 percent, or 750 million (the latter figure coming from a poll conducted by Al Jazeera). These cannot be dismissed as insignificant minorities, even if reduced by a factor of 10.

The Iranian dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—head of a nation of 70 million and a man who claims to speak in the name of Islam—has called for wiping Israel from the face of the earth, a comment seconded by a former prime minister of Malaysia. Leaders of the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank are openly opposed to the existence of the Jewish state, officially celebrate mass murderers of Jewish civilians as “martyrs” and “saints,” and run a school system that teaches kindergarteners to hate Jews and aspire to kill them. The charter of the Islamist terror organization Hamas calls for Israel’s extinction in the name of Allah, while the head of Hezbollah, the largest terrorist army in the world, armed with 30,000-plus rockets courtesy of Syria and Iran, has called for the liquidation of Israel and the extermination of the Jews.

That’s the open and frank admission side of the ledger, the millions of Muslims with genocidal designs on the Jews. Copping to genocide by the way is something that Hitler never dared to do. He thought it prudent to keep the Final Solution hidden until it was a fait accompli, lest he incite civilized opposition to his plan. In contrast, the demand for a second Holocaust has been trumpeted from the Islamic rooftops, and there has been no official opposition from the Islamic world. This is a reasonable indication that these open calls are the tip of a very ugly iceberg of Jew hatred that runs the length and breadth of Muslim ummah. There are some 57 Islamic nations in the world, and not one of them has condemned these genocidal proclamations. Au contraire. They have added their own condemnations of Israeli crimes in hundreds of U.N. resolutions they sponsored. But there is not a single U.N. resolution condemning 60 years of terrorist acts by Palestinians and Arabs, beginning with the creation of the Fedayeen in 1949. Not a single one.

The same silence over genocidal intentions blankets virtually all the mosques in America, at least 80 percent of which are funded by the rulers of Saudi Arabia, the most bigoted promoter of jihadism and its Jew-hating ideology in the world today. The same can be said of the principal Muslim organizations in the United States, the Muslim American Society, the Islamic Society of North America, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

All of these organizations are elements of the Muslim Brotherhood network, which spawned al-Qaida and Hamas. (CAIR is a direct spinoff of Hamas.) None of them have condemned Hezbollah and Hamas or their patrons in Teheran. The same is true of the Muslim Students Association, representing most Muslim students in American universities, which is also a part of the Muslim Brotherhood network. The Muslim Students Association is currently conducting a nationwide campaign to support the Islamic crusade to eliminate the Jewish state, which it refers to as “occupied Palestine.” When I confronted a former officer of the Muslim Student Association on the University of California, San Diego, campus and asked her if she were for or against a genocide of the Jews she said, “For it.” Refusal to condemn Hezbollah and Hamas, which in my experience is universal among Muslim Students Associations, is tantamount to such an endorsement. (You can see our exchange here.) The same Judeophobic campaign is now a principal focus of the secular left, although these secularists don’t seem to fully grasp the implications of their support. All these elements are also supporting the Ground Zero mosque whose leader also finds Islamic terrorism “too complex” to condemn.

These are troubling indicators of evil afoot. Dismissing them as figments of a conspiratorial paranoia is a sign of intellectual bankruptcy and a form of psychological denial. It is not an argument that anyone, let alone a Jew, should take seriously.

DANIEL LUBAN: David Horowitz’s response to my article is primarily devoted to reciting a familiar litany of examples of anti-Semitism in Muslim-majority countries. Many of his arguments in this regard are cherry-picked or otherwise misleading, but I won’t spend time answering them, for they are irrelevant to the point of my piece. My argument was not about attitudes toward Jews in Syria or Saudi Arabia, but about attitudes toward Muslims in America.

Even if I were to concede all of Horowitz’s arguments about the prevalence of anti-Semitism in Muslim-majority countries, this would not answer the central question, which is whether the theories of the American “anti-jihadi” movement are a sane response to the situation in which we find ourselves. If they are not, if—as I argued—they represent a kind of bigotry and paranoia akin to anti-Semitism, Know-Nothingism, or McCarthyism, it is not particularly relevant whether equally paranoid or odious views are prevalent elsewhere in the world.

For Horowitz’s defense of the “anti-jihadis” to hold water, he needs to show not merely that many Muslims in other countries hold objectionable views, but that Muslim-Americans are actually engaged in the kind of conspiracy against the United States that people like Andrew McCarthy and Pamela Geller posit. On this count, his arguments are remarkably thin. The primary piece of evidence he offers to show that most Muslim-Americans are genocidal anti-Semites is that not enough of them for his liking are willing to publicly denounce Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist groups.

One does not need to be fond of either group to notice how shaky the logic is here. Peter King, the hawkish New York congressman who has been a leader of the anti-mosque campaign, is a longtime apologist for the IRA, and I similarly imagine that it would be nearly impossible to get New York Jewish politicians like Sen. Chuck Schumer or Rep. Anthony Weiner to publicly label as “terrorists” Zionist militant groups like the Irgun or the Stern Gang. What follows from this? That King, Schumer, and Weiner are terrorist conspirators against the United States? I suspect the reason that even many Muslim-Americans who privately abhor Hamas and Hezbollah’s attacks on civilians are reluctant to “denounce” them to David Horowitz is that they realize, correctly, that he will simply pocket these denunciations and use them in the service of a broader Likudnik agenda that they find abhorrent.

The YouTube video that Horowitz posts is unintentionally revealing in this regard. A UCSD student confronts Horowitz over his allegation that her campus Muslim Students Association has financial ties to terrorist groups and presses him to provide some evidence for this claim. Rather than doing so, Horowitz—who is nothing if not a savvy showman—quickly changes the subject to the student’s own personal attitudes toward Hamas. Of course, whether an individual college student is willing to publicly denounce Hamas has nothing whatsoever to do with the factual question of whether the UCSD student association has financial links to terrorist groups, which Horowitz is content to insinuate without providing any evidence.

To determine whether people like McCarthy and Geller represent a measured response to a real threat or a hysterical response to a conspiracy of their own imagining, it might be helpful to examine the central claims that they make. Let’s leave aside the most obviously insane bits (Bill Ayers is the real author of Obama’s memoir; Malcolm X is Obama’s real father) and focus on their views about the Muslim threat to the United States. Does Horowitz really believe that the goal of the large majority of Muslim-Americans is “to supplant American constitutional democracy with sharia law”? Does he really believe that Muslims who privately live according to religious values within their own communities are doing so purely instrumentally, as a way to take over the country and impose these values on everyone else? Does he really believe that the president is a “neocommunist” who is secretly working in cahoots with these Islamists to implement a shared totalitarian vision in the United States?

If he genuinely does believe these things, I admit that there simply isn’t much more that I can say to him. But if he doesn’t—as I suspect he doesn’t—then I have to wonder how he feels about the fact that these views and those similar to them are rapidly becoming ubiquitous on the American right. Many hawks seem to feel that the Pamela Gellers of the world may be nutty and misguided, but that they make useful shock troops for fighting these political battles, so it’s best simply to hold one’s nose and make good use of them. It seems to me that there is something very dangerous in this logic, and that the anti-jihadis—egged on by conservative elites like Newt Gingrich, Bill Kristol, and Horowitz himself—are leading the country into a very ugly place.

MARC TRACY: David, I think Daniel is conceding—or if not conceding, at least saying that for the sake of argument he would concede—your point about Muslim anti-Semitism in other parts of the world, but he is challenging you on the question of Muslim anti-Semitism in the United States specifically. Can it happen here and does it happen here? Is the mosque a manifestation of it, or a potential manifestation?

DAVID HOROWITZ: Daniel Luban has failed to understand my comments and therefore dodged the issue between us. A sign held up at the counter-demonstration by supporters of the Ground Zero mosque summarizes the real nub of our contention: “Groundless Fear Is the Real Enemy.” Is it?

The point of my response was not that there is “anti-Semitism” and not just “in Muslim countries” but that there is a global Muslim movement for a genocide of the Jews, beginning with the destruction of the Jewish state; and that this movement was spawned by the Muslim Brotherhood and is supported by the major Muslim organizations in the United States including the main supporters of the Ground Zero mosque, and wittingly or unwittingly, enabled by their allies on the political left.

Luban does not challenge a single fact I presented, which shows how deaf, dumb, and blind critics of the “anti-jihadis,” as Luban calls us, can be. Luban studiously ignores the elaborate documentation of the political beliefs and aims of the Muslim Brotherhood network and of Islam itself, which we have presented and instead attempts to draw ludicrous parallels designed to show a moral equivalence between Jewish and Muslim terrorists and their apologists. The difference is obvious to all but the politically obtuse. When some Jews commit acts that are heinous, Jews condemn them, they don’t build $100-million monuments on or near the site where the crimes were committed. Only Islam would build a mosque—the Dome of the Rock—right on top of the holiest place of another religion and then name a terrorist army (the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade) after it. The silence of the central organizations of the Muslim world both here and abroad in the face of atrocities committed in the name of their God and their refusal to condemn by name those who commit them is both deafening and telling; and the failure of Daniel Luban and the left generally to appreciate this is ominous for Americans and Jews.

EC: Obamacare’s Bureaucracy Nightmare

Tait Trussell

We now see how the regulatory bureaucracy works—or probably can’t work– and how it “may well push us into the single-payer health care system,” Grace-Marie Turner astutely pointed out Aug. 26 in the Detroit News. Turner is president of the Galen Institute, a research organization focusing on health policy. Under a single-payer system, the federal government would be the paymaster making the medical decisions. hree influential House Democrats are now pushing for a public option (single-payer). ModernHealh.com reported July 22. Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif), chairman of the House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee, is leading the movement. The “public option offers lower cost competition to private insurance companies,” added Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif ) co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Il), is the third Member.

Even before a single-payer system could evolve, ObamaCare has the potential to topple from bureaucratic overload. Uncountable unelected and untested bureaucrats will be making life-affecting decisions. At this stage, not even experts who have pored over the 2,000-plus-word law know how many bureaucracies are hidden away in the ObamaCare statute. According to Politico no one can figure out exactly how many new agencies ObamaCare will spawn once it comes into full effect. Congress authorized a “self-perpetuating bureaucracy, one that can expand on its own and make determinations far outside of the boundaries Democrats promised during the ObamaCare debate.”

A Congressional Research Service Report, “New Entities Created Pursuant to the Patient Protection and Affordability Care Act (PPACA) is a dramatic eye-opener. Curtis W. Copeland earnestly attempted to compile and briefly explain the pieces and parts of the regulatory jungle in a 40-page report in July. In his summary section, author Copeland, described as a specialist in American National Government, writes:

Some of these new entities are offices within existing cabinet departments and agencies, and are assigned certain administrative or representational duties related to the legislation. Other entities are new boards and commissions with particular planning and reporting responsibilities. Still others are advisory bodies that were created to study particular issues, offer recommendations, or both. Although PPACA describes some of these new organizations and advisory bodies in detail, in many cases it is impossible to know how much influence they would ultimately have over the implementation of the legislation.

This report describes dozens of governmental organizations or advisory bodies that are mentioned in PPACA but does not include other types of entities…(e.g. various demonstration projects, grants, trust funds, programs, systems, formulas, guidelines, risk pools, websites, ratings areas, model agreements, or protocols)….The precise number of new entities that will ultimately be created…is unknowable….PPACA significantly increased the appointment responsibilities of the Controller General of the United States, and it is unclear how the Government Accountability Office (GAO) will be able to independently audit entities whose members are appointed by the head of GAO.

Seemingly always conscious of racial matters, an example of the minority health provision that the CRS analysis mentions “requires the heads of six separate agencies within Health and Human Services to each establish their own offices of minority health.”

This astonishingly frank description of the law’s provisions reminds one of Shakespeare’s Act 3, Scene 4 when Lady Macbeth says “You have displaced the mirth…with most admired disorder.” A law perhaps admired by some in Congress, but certainly in disorder.

The Center for Health Transformation (CHT), founded by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, estimated 159 new offices, agencies, and programs created by the health law, Politico reported Aug. 3. “Even in the few cases in which the PPACA set explicit creation dates for organizations, the consequences for missing these deadlines remain unknown.” The law’s provisions “vary dramatically in specificity.” It states a lot about some provisions, but a little about many other provisions. “Some have been authorized without any instructions on who is to appoint whom, when that might happen and who will pay.”

PA TV to kids: Israeli cities Haifa, Jaffa, Lod, Ramle, Acre are all "occupied cities"

http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&doc_id=2962

Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik

Official Palestinian Authority TV continues to teach children that all of Israel is "occupied Palestine." A repeating message on the children's show The Best Home, currently broadcast three times a week during the month of Ramadan, is that all Israeli cities are "occupied" Palestinian cities. The PA TV host refers to cities in Israel alternately as "1948 occupied cities," "occupied cities" or "occupied territories." The Israeli cities described as Palestinian cities include Haifa, Jaffa, Lod, Ramle and Acre.

The following are examples from three of the TV programs in which the PA TV host refers to Israeli cities as "occupied Palestinian cities."

Click here to view

PA TV host to girl: "You live in Jerusalem. Do you visit the 1948 occupied cities (Israeli cities)?"
Girl: "I've been to Hebron."
TV host: "No, Hebron is a city [in the Palestinian Authority] that we all can enter. The occupied cities - such as Lod, Ramle, Haifa, Jaffa, Acre (all Israeli cities) - have you visited them?"
Girl: "I've been to Haifa and Jaffa."
TV host: "Tell us, are they beautiful?"
Girl: "Yes..."
TV host: "We hope all children of Palestine will be able to go to the occupied territories, which we don't know and have never been able to see. Personally, I have never been there."
[PA TV (Fatah), Aug. 25, 2010]

PA TV host to children in studio:
"No doubt you've all been waiting to know lots of things about Ramadan in those days, in some of the occupied areas, in the occupied territories. Today we'll find out lots about Jaffa in those days of Ramadan."
[PA TV (Fatah), Aug. 22, 2010]

PA TV host to children in studio:
"Don't you want to see Ramadan from those days in an occupied Palestinian city, to which we hope to return?"
The children are told a story of Ramadan in Ramle.
[PA TV (Fatah), Aug. 24, 2010]

PA TV is controlled by Chairman Mahmoud Abbas's office.

See more examples on PMW's website of how the PA presents Israel as "occupied Palestine."

"The mosque developers are tax deadbeats," to the tune of $224,270.77

Jihad Watch

Remember, this group could qualify for taxpayer-supported public financing. Looks like they need to pony up a little taxpayer support of their own.

Still more on this story. "Mosque big owes 224G tax," by Isabel Vincent and Melissa Klein for the New York Post, August 29 (thanks to all who sent this in): The mosque developers are tax deadbeats.

Sharif El-Gamal, the leading organizer behind the mosque and community center near Ground Zero, owes $224,270.77 in back property tax on the site, city records show.

El-Gamal's company, 45 Park Place Partners, failed to pay its half-yearly bills in January and July, according to the city Finance Department.

The delinquency is a possible violation of El-Gamal's lease with Con Edison, which owns half of the proposed building site on Park Place. El-Gamal owns the other half but must pay taxes on the entire parcel.

The lease agreement, obtained by The Post, specifies that El-Gamal's company pay taxes on the property and submit receipts to Con Ed.

The utility said it would have to review any possible lease violations.

The late taxes are the latest wrinkle in the controversial plan to put the 15-story mosque near the World Trade Center site.

Before any building can go forward, the developers also must get approval from the MTA because the 2 and 3 subway lines run under a portion of the Park Place property, The Post has learned.

El-Gamal's spokesperson insisted to The Post that the taxes had been paid and that the "subway lines do not pose a problem."

El-Gamal plans to tear down the two buildings on the Park Place site, which housed a Burlington Coat Factory store but have been empty since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when one was damaged.

The Post revealed this month that El-Gamal owned only half the site. Gamal purchased the lease to the Con Ed property for $700,000 last year when he bought the other building on the site for $4.8 million.

He has told Con Ed he wants to buy the building at 49-51 Park Place, which Con Ed is appraising to determine fair market value.

El-Gamal insisted to The Post that the lease permitted him to demolish the property at any time.

But the lease agreement says El-Gamal must provide Con Ed with a copy of a financing commitment or other proof that money is available to "cover the estimated cost of demolition of the building and construction of the new building."

Will an IDF Withdrawal from the West Bank Mean a Safe Haven for Extremist Groups?

Col. Richard Kemp
JCPA

To stand any real chance of success, every insurgent or terrorist movement needs a safe haven to operate from. Israel has had more than a flavor of what it can mean to leave hostile groups in control of lands adjacent to its own borders in southern Lebanon and in Gaza. Any similar move to totally cede control to the Palestinians of the West Bank or a part of Jerusalem would carry immense risk.
* Some might argue that a modern high-tech state can monitor hostile activities outside its borders. But surveillance and intelligence collection against a deeply embedded, secretive, extremist network operating within a dense civilian population is the most difficult target, and no national intelligence organization can be confident that it will have a high success rate against such a target.

* It has been suggested that an international force, perhaps a NATO force, should replace the IDF presence in the West Bank, an idea that raises a number of very serious questions. Where are the NATO troops going to come from and how long are they going to stay? Some nations are simply not prepared to put their troops into undue danger.

* What would happen to those who were prepared to take part in such a force when the going got tough, as it inevitably would? Think of Lebanon in 1983 when suicide bomb attacks killed 300 troops and led to the withdrawal of the French and American peacekeeping forces, or al-Qaeda's attack in Madrid which led to the withdrawal of Spanish forces from the Iraq campaign. Just how sure could we be that the electorates in contributing countries would allow their militaries to remain deployed in the West Bank under these kinds of pressures.

* To what extent would a NATO mission get in the way of a vital Israeli effort to protect their own people? Finally, a failed NATO mission and a West Bank under extremist control, flourishing under a security vacuum there, would encourage and strengthen violent jihadists everywhere in the world.
he Implications for Asymmetrical Activity by Extremist Groups

To stand any real chance of success, every insurgent or terrorist movement needs a safe haven to operate from - one that is outside the control of the state being targeted and preferably in a land that is free from interference by the target state or its allies, whether due to geography, the protection of a friendly regime, or operating within a failed state. The Vietnam conflict was a classic example of the use of a safe haven. More recently, in the Iraq campaign, Sunni extremists had a safe haven in Syria which was their main logistic support base and a pipeline for suicide bombers flowing into Iraq. They also used extensive support networks in Iran, which also provided a safe haven for Shi'ite insurgents attacking coalition forces, as well as through the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and Hizbullah, which provided training, organization, munitions, and direction.

Today the Afghan Taliban's safe haven and support base is in Pakistan, although the second largest extremist group engaged in Afghanistan, Hizb-i-Islami, has its main base in Iran itself. In March, General Petraeus, the Head of U.S. Central Command, in testimony to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, revealed that Tehran is letting al-Qaeda leaders travel freely between Pakistan and Afghanistan, effectively using Iranian territory as a safe haven, while permitting them also to hold meetings in Iran to plan terrorist attacks against U.S. and other Western targets.

Israel has had more than a flavor of what it can mean to leave hostile groups in control of lands adjacent to its own borders in southern Lebanon and in Gaza. Any similar move to totally cede control to the Palestinians of the West Bank or a part of Jerusalem may have considerable attraction for any peace process, and that is certainly the view of many in the international community. But both prospects would carry immense risk from the perspective of asymmetrical activities against Israel.

Some might argue that a modern high-tech state can monitor hostile activities outside its borders. Yet we've seen many failures of intelligence in relation to offensive activities by conventional forces and war plans by nation-states which are generally relatively easy to identify and monitor. But surveillance and intelligence collection against a deeply embedded, secretive, extremist network operating within a dense civilian population is the most difficult target, and no national intelligence organization can be confident that it will have a high success rate against such a target.

Despite many spectacular successes, including the killing in Pakistan of al-Qaeda's number three, Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, the unrivalled technological supremacy of the U.S. military has failed to effectively dent the Taliban's ability to smuggle munitions and infiltrate large groups of fighters across the Afghan border. I do not for a moment underestimate the difficulties this entails. Jordan's support or effectiveness in countering extremist activity directed at Israel from the West Bank could not be counted upon, and extremists would also seek to destabilize Jordan, an important stepping stone to the destruction of Israel.

We can look again at Pakistan and Afghanistan to get an insight here. NATO puts in a significant effort to coordinate cross-border security measures with the government of Pakistan. Some of this is successful some of the time. Some elements of the Pakistan government have different agendas, supporting the Taliban when it suits them or at least turning a blind eye, but Pakistan itself is suffering a very serious, dangerous, and worsening insurgency from its own Taliban. Despite the contrary views of some, its own Taliban, closely linked to the Afghanistan Taliban, is intent on bringing down Pakistan's government, a goal shared by al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan, and despite efforts on both sides of the border, insurgents operate with relative freedom. The importance of safe havens to extremists is well understood by the Pakistan military. One of their greatest fears is that NATO forces will withdraw precipitously from Afghanistan, leaving a vacuum from which their own insurgency could be supported and strengthened. That, of course, leaves a prospect of a nuclear-armed state falling into the hands of extremists.


Questions Surrounding a Prospective NATO Peacekeeping Deployment

It has been suggested that an international force, perhaps a NATO force should replace the IDF presence in the West Bank. While I would not exclude that idea in principle, it raises a number of very serious questions. First of all, where are the NATO troops going to come from and how long are they going to stay? Let us not forget the difficulties that NATO has had for years and still has in mustering forces for the war in Afghanistan - and this is for a campaign that is NATO's declared main effort and its only real, current, live operation. Many of the troops that are there are restricted by significant national caveats, including restricting deployments to the safest areas. Some nations are simply not prepared to put their troops into undue danger. Unfortunately, undue danger goes hand in glove with war and with the toughest peacekeeping operations, and the West Bank would fall clearly into that category. Some NATO nations can't operate after dark and they leave the insurgents to control the night, with all the implications that this has.

There is a significant risk that in trying to develop and maintain good relations with all parties, the peacekeepers would instead become the enemy of both sides. Potential contributors to the international forces would know that. What would happen to those who were prepared to take part when the going got tough, as it inevitably would? Think of Lebanon in 1983 when suicide bomb attacks killed 300 troops and led to the withdrawal of the French and American peacekeeping forces. An extremist with global reach will not have forgotten al-Qaeda's attack in Madrid twenty years later which led to the withdrawal of Spanish forces from the Iraq campaign. And let us not for a moment assume that sinister, yet powerful, hands would not turn their attention onto the peacekeeping forces in the West Bank, especially if they showed signs of succeeding in their mission to bring lasting peace into the region. Iran has a track record of stiffening the resolve of insurgent groups that show any sign of faltering in their aggression against Israel, and a track record of attacking Western forces using their proxies.

Just how sure could we be that the electorates in contributing countries would allow their militaries to remain deployed in the West Bank under these kinds of pressures, and how effective would NATO be as a peacekeeping force in the demanding circumstances that we are considering? The only previous success that NATO is able to claim in this field, and it is by no means uncontroversial, was in Kosovo, which also in practice was a far less complex situation.

NATO is, of course, not peacekeeping in Afghanistan, but we can get some insight from its activities there. I've already mentioned the national caveats. Similar difficulties apply to differing national rules of engagement and tactical procedures, including a very wide variety of constraints on air support. Would a NATO mission be ready and able to take on insurgents, and if not, to what extent would they then get in the way of a vital Israeli effort to do so to protect their own people?

After seven years in Afghanistan, how effectively has NATO taken control of the insurgency there? In the six-month period up to March 2010 the number of attacks against NATO forces increased by over 80 percent over the same period in the previous year, and in the same time frame, attacks on the civilian population in Afghanistan were up by over 70 percent. And how assiduous has NATO been in its civilian reconstruction and governance efforts, a critical element of its role in Afghanistan? Reconstruction has been notable by its relative inability to gain traction and provide essential depth for the military element of the counter-insurgency campaign.

In many ways peacekeeping is far tougher and more challenging than fighting as combatants. It is one thing to act robustly against people that are attacking you and your comrades. It is quite another to put your troops' lives on the line when it is not them but others who are in danger. Dutch forces have fought gallantly and effectively in Afghanistan. They've been brave and they've taken many casualties, but Srebrenica cannot be forgotten. More than 8,000 civilians were massacred there in 1995 under the eyes of Dutch UN peacekeepers.

To conclude, I would neither exclude the possibility of an IDF withdrawal from the West Bank nor their replacement with a NATO force, but before either can be seriously contemplated there are some fundamental questions to be resolved. These issues are critical to NATO, the West as a whole, and the entire Middle East because a failed NATO mission and a West Bank under extremist control, flourishing under a security vacuum there, would encourage and strengthen violent jihadists everywhere in the world.



* * *



Col. Richard Kemp is former Commander of British Forces in Afghanistan. This Jerusalem Issue Brief is based on his presentation at a conference on "Israel's Critical Security Needs for a Viable Peace," held in Jerusalem on June 2,

'Islamophobia' and Islamo-reality

Andrew G. Bostom

Count me among those daring to rationalize -- and echo -- the sentiments of 70% of my fellow Americans, who oppose the Ground Zero mosque/Islamic center edifice for ecumenism. But simply expressing legitimate, widespread concerns about this project has unleashed a torrent of obloquies emanating from distressingly ill-informed political and media cultural relativists, decrying "bigotry" and "intolerance." Contrast this outpouring of self-righteous indignation by these elites about the purported "Islamophobia" of Americans opposing the mosque with their own egregious ignorance of, and/or silence about, the extensive writings, pronouncements, and living, hateful legacy of the late Muslim Pope, Sheik Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi. For over a thousand years, since its founding in 792 A.D., Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt, has served as the academic shrine -- much as Mecca is the religious shrine -- of the global Muslim community. Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi was Sunni Islam's " moderate" papal equivalent, Grand Imam of this Muslim Vatican, Al-Azhar, from 1996 until his recent death on March 10, 2010.

Tantawi was born in 1928 in Selim Al-Sharqiya, Egypt. He graduated from Al-Azhar University's Faculty of Religious Studies in 1958 and received his Ph.D. in 1966. Tantawi's Ph.D. thesis, Banu Israil fi al-Quran wa-al-Sunnah (Jews in the Koran and the Traditions), was published in 1968-69 and republished in 1986. Two years after earning his Ph.D., Sheikh Tantawi began teaching at Al-Azhar. In 1980, he became the head of the Tafsir (Koranic Commentary) Department of the University of Medina, Saudi Arabia -- a position he held until 1984. Sheikh Tantawi became Grand Mufti of Egypt in 1986, a position he was to hold for a decade before taking on his final post, first assumed in 1996 and serving for fourteen years, as the Grand Imam.

Lengthy extracts translated into English from Tantawi's 700-page magnum opus Banu Israil fi al-Quran wa-al-Sunnah,are provided in my compendium, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism. This brief excerpt summarizes, in Tantawi's own words, the salient features of the Koran's normative Muslim Jew-hatred:

[The] Koran describes the Jews with their own particular degenerate characteristics, i.e., killing the prophets of Allah [Koran 2:61 / 3:112], corrupting His words by putting them in the wrong places, consuming the people's wealth frivolously, refusal to distance themselves from the evil they do, and other ugly characteristics caused by their deep-rooted lasciviousness...only a minority of the Jews keep their word [Koranic citation, here] ... [A]ll Jews are not the same. The good ones become Muslims [Koran 3:113], the bad ones do not.


Tantawi was apparently rewarded for this scholarly effort by being named Grand Imam of Al-Azhar University in 1996. These were the expressed "carefully researched" views on Jews held by the Muslim Pope -- the former head of the most prestigious center of Muslim learning in Sunni Islam for fourteen years, which represents some 90% of the world's Muslims. And Sheikh Tantawi never mollified such hatemongering beliefs while serving as the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar as his statements on "dialogue " (January 1998) with Jews, the Jews as "enemies of Allah, descendants of apes and pigs" (April 2002), and the legitimacy of homicide bombing of Jews (April 2002) made clear.

The statements on dialogue Tantawi issued shortly after he met with the Israel's Chief Rabbi, Israel Meir Lau, in Cairo on December 15, 1997, provided the late Grand Imam another opportunity to reaffirm his commitment to the views expressed about Jews in his Ph.D. thesis:

... anyone who avoids meeting with the enemies in order to counter their dubious claims and stick fingers into their eyes, is a coward. My stance stems from Allah's book [the Koran], more than one-third of which deals with the Jews...[I] wrote a dissertation dealing with them [the Jews], all their false claims and their punishment by Allah. I still believe in everything written in that dissertation [i.e., Jews in the Koran and the Traditions, cited above].


Unfortunately, Tantawi's antisemitic formulations are well-grounded in classical, mainstream Islamic theology. The Koranic depiction of the Jews -- their traits as thus characterized being deemed both infallible and timeless -- highlights, in verse 2:61 (repeated in verse 3:112), the centrality of the Jews "abasement and humiliation" and being "laden with God's anger," as elaborated in the corpus of classical Muslim exegetic literature on Koran 2:61, including the hadith and Koranic commentaries. The terrifying rage decreed upon the Jews forever is connected in the hadith and exegeses to Koran 1:7, where Muslims ask Allah to guide them rightly, not in the path of those who provoke and must bear His wrath. This verse is in turn linked to Koranic verses 5:60 and 5:78, which describe the Jews' transformation into apes and swine (5:60), or apes alone (2:65 / 7:166), having been "... cursed by the tongue of David, and Jesus, Mary's son" (5:78). Moreover, forcing Jews, in particular, to pay the Koranic poll tax "tribute" (as per verse 9:29) "readily," while "being brought low," is consistent with their overall humiliation and abasement in accord with Koran 2:61 and its directly related verses.

An additional, much larger array of anti-Jewish Koranic motifs build to a denouement (as if part of a theological indictment, conviction, and sentencing process), concluding with an elaboration of the "ultimate sin" committed by the Jews (they are among the devil's minions [Koran 4:60], accursed by God [Koran 4:47]), and their appropriate punishment: If they do not accept the true faith (i.e., Islam), on the day of judgment, they will burn in the hellfire (Koran 4:55). As per, Koran 98:6, "The unbelievers among the People of the Book and the pagans shall burn forever in the fire of Hell. They are the vilest of all creatures."

However, understanding and acknowledging the Koranic origins of Islamic antisemitism is not a justification for Tantawi's unreformed, unrepentant modern validation of these hateful motifs -- with predictably murderous consequences. Within days of the Netanya homicide bombing massacre on a Passover Seder night, March 27, 2002, for example, Sheikh Tantawi issued an abhorrent endorsement (April 4, 2002) of so-called "martyrdom operations," even when directed at Israeli civilians.

And during November 2002 ("Tantawi: No Antisemitism," Associated Press, 11/19/2002), consistent with his triumphant denial, Sheikh Tantawi made the following statement in response to criticism over the virulently antisemitic Egyptian television series ("Horseman Without a Horse") based on the Czarist Russia forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion:

Suppose that the series has some criticism or shows some of the Jews' traits, this doesn't necessitate an uproar ... The accusation of antisemitism was invented by the Jews as a means to pressure Arabs and Muslims to implement their schemes in the Arab and Muslim countries, so don't pay attention to them.


On January 22, 2008, it was reported that Tantawi cancelled what would have been an historic visit to the Rome synagogue by Ala Eldin Mohammed Ismail al-Ghobash, the imam of Rome's mosque. The putative excuse for this cancellation was Israel's self-defensive stance -- a blockade -- in response to acts of jihad terrorism (rocket barrages, attempted armed incursions) emanating from Gaza. The Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, commenting aptly about these events, observed that the cancellation proved that "... even so called Muslim moderates share the ideology of hate, violence and death towards the Jewish state." Al Azhar, Corriere della Sera further argued, which in the absence of a central Muslim authority constituted a "Vatican of Sunni Islam," had in effect issued "a kind of fatwah." The paper concluded by noting that "[w]hat the Cairo statement really means is that Muslim dialogue with Jews in Italy is only possible once Israel has been eliminated."

This is the overall context in which to view Tantawi's better-known -- if meaningless -- bland condemnation of generic terrorism as "un-Islamic." Tantawi's case illustrates the prevalence and depth of sacralized, "normative" Jew-hatred in the contemporary Muslim world. Arguably Islam's leading mainstream cleric, the late Grand Imam of Al-Azhar University, Sheikh Muhammad Tantawi, epitomized how the living legacy of Muslim anti-Jewish hatred and violence remains firmly rooted in mainstream, orthodox Islamic teachings, not some aberrant vision of "radical Islam."

It is axiomatic that our elites will declare this whole discussion "Islamophobic" -- despite the contents being based almost entirely on Islam's sacred texts and Tantawi's own expressed words and actions. Fortunately, tens of millions of Americans are not playing our elites' endless, self-destructive game of Wonderland croquet, and they understand the stark difference between Islamophobia and Islamo-reality -- some 16,000 jihad terror attacks after 9/11.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/08/islamophobia_and_islamoreality.html at August 30, 2010 - 02:06:48 AM CDT

NY Times hits bottom, sticks

Frsnozionism

One would have thought that the New York Times could not possibly descend any lower, with regular columnists like Roger Cohen and Nicholas Kristoff — and then they strike the semi-solid layer of excrement at the bottom of the bubbling pool of filth in which they live and feed, and give a platform to Ali Abunimah. Market forces will soon flush away this shitty little newspaper, as it well deserves. It can’t happen too soon.

Abunimah’s arguments are barely worth discussing. He draws an analogy between Hamas and Sinn Fein, suggesting that the initial refusal of the British to negotiate with the latter can be compared with Israel’s shunning of the former.

Of course Catholic nationalists did not intend to rid Northern Ireland of Protestants, nor did they believe that God commanded them to murder Protestants wherever they could be found. They did not believe that Ireland was a Catholic waqf and that the only solution to the presence of any Protestants on Irish soil was violent jihad (Hamas says all this and more about Jews and Israel).

It is one thing to enter negotiations with a group that has committed terrorist acts. It’s another entirely to talk to one that believes that it is their religious duty to kill you, all of you.

It was possible to get the IRA to declare a cease-fire and to “permit Sinn Fein to enter into inclusive political negotiations” because there was an intersection between outcomes acceptable to Sinn Fein and the British government. There is no such intersection possible between Israel and Hamas, whose bottom line is simply that there must be no Jewish state — indeed, no non-subjected Jews — in ‘Palestine’.

He writes:

Why should Hamas or any Palestinian accept Israel’s political demands, like recognition, when Israel refuses to recognize basic Palestinian demands like the right of return for refugees?

You must give Abumimah and his friends credit for chutzpah: first, they invent a ‘right’ — the repatriation of the descendants of refugees from a war that their own leaders caused — that has never existed in history, then they breed a whole population in misery for years to make a demographic weapon of mass destruction out of them, and finally they demand that they be allowed to use it to end the Jewish state. What will remain for them to ‘recognize’?

Naturally, he believes that the reason the US was tough on the British but will not get tough on Israel is the nefarious Jewish (OK, he says ‘Israel’) Lobby. Hamas knew about the Jewish Lobby all along. Here’s what they wrote in their charter:

For a long time, the enemies have been planning, skillfully and with precision, for the achievement of what they have attained … With their money, they took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others. With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein. They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about, here and there. With their money they formed secret societies, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests. With their money they were able to control imperialistic countries and instigate them to colonize many countries in order to enable them to exploit their resources and spread corruption there.

…They were behind World War I, when they were able to destroy the Islamic Caliphate, making financial gains and controlling resources. They obtained the Balfour Declaration, formed the League of Nations through which they could rule the world. They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains by trading in armaments, and paved the way for the establishment of their state. It was they who instigated the replacement of the League of Nations with the United Nations and the Security Council to enable them to rule the world through them. There is no war going on anywhere, without having their finger in it…

Today it is Palestine, tomorrow it will be one country or another. The Zionist plan is limitless. After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. When they will have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying. — Hamas Covenant, sections 22, 28, 32

Abunimah, like Hamas, knows what he wants: no more Israel. Israel, one hopes, knows how to deal with Hamas.

But what does the New York Times want?
Click here for more

‘Obama will get Israel nuked’ say protesters at Glenn Beck rally

Tens of thousands rally in Washington at ‘Restoring Honor’ event organized by Fox personality; Protester: Obama wants to see Israel annihilated.

Natasha Mozgovaya and The Associated Press

Tens of thousands of predominantly white conservative activists rallied Saturday to help restore traditional American values at the site where Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. A group of civil rights activists organized by the Rev. Al Sharpton held a counter rally at a high school, then embarked on a three-mile (five-kilometer) march to the site of a planned monument honoring King.

Glenn Beck, who organized the conservative rally, is a controversial TV and radio talk show host and he insists it's just a coincidence that his Restoring Honor rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial is overlapping with the 47th anniversary of King's speech.

Beck is known for his extreme views and statements. He has described President Barack Obama, as a racist.

Two months before nationwide Congressional elections, which could cost Obama's Democrats their majority in the House of Representatives and perhaps the Senate as well, Beck's rally becomes only the latest symptom of rampant political partisanship that is splitting the country and drowning out voices of moderation.

While Beck billed his event as nonpolitical, conservative activists from around the nation said their show of strength was a clear sign that they can swing elections across the country and much of the country is angry with what many voters call an out-of-touch Washington.

Conservative favorite Sarah Palin joined Beck, telling the tens of thousands who stretched from the marble steps of the Lincoln Memorial to the grass of the Washington Monument that calls to transform the country weren't enough.

"We must restore America and restore her honor," said the former Alaska governor, echoing the name of the rally, Restoring Honor.

Speaking with Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, the participants made sure to stress how angry they were with Obama's policy regarding Israel.

"He [Obama] will get Israel nuked," said 61-year-old Victoria Nikolov from New York, who had left home at 1 a.m. in order to make it to the rally on time. "He's not doing anything to prevent [Iran from developing nuclear weapons]. I came here to protect you, even though I'm not Jewish, and to restore the constitutional republic to this country."

"I've done my research, I've read both his books" she continued. "I am confident that if he had to choose between America and Islam, he’d choose Islam. But I am afraid he might stay president, because he has the support of the press, and when the press supports a president, the people just don’t get the truth."

"We are inch away from socialism. I think African Americans could make great presidents – just other people, like Condoleezza Rice or Walter Williams," she went on to say.

Rob Arnold from Washington's Pentagon City said "You can't spend and dupe this country into oblivion and hope to get away with it."

"He [Obama] was a friend and neighbor of Louis 'suck the blood of Jews' Farrakhan. He had Jeremiah 'God damn America' Wright for his pastor. A man who is a friend of these people can't be a friend of Israel," Arnold told Haaretz.

"And he arranged peace talks in Washington?" he asked. "It's all for show. I believe that if he could, he would rather see Israel annihilated. I don't think he believes Israel belongs to the Jews. I think he sympathizes with terrorists. I believe he is an anti-Semite."

Mark DelMaestro from Phoenix, Arizona, a Vietnam war veteran, told Haaretz that "maybe he [Obama] did some good things, but the bad things he did are overwhelming."

"I don’t think he represents the fulfillment of Martin Luther King’s dream. He represents socialism, communism, oppression and all the things that stand against freedom. I am the man of 'God bless America' and he is a man of 'God Damn America.'"

"I am very worried about Iran, I am confident the moment they get the bomb they will drop it on Israel. Obama has to do everything possible to stop it, even the military option as a last resort. He must understand that unlike other places, we don’t fight for Israel, we fight with Israel, we have the same color of soul."

Two months before nationwide Congressional elections, which could cost U.S. President Barack Obama's Democrats their majority in the House of Representatives and perhaps the Senate as well, Beck's rally becomes only the latest symptom of rampant political partisanship that is splitting the country and drowning out voices of moderation.

The crowd - organizers had a permit for 300,000 - was vast, with people standing shoulder to shoulder across large expanses of the Mall. The National Park Service stopped doing crowd counts in 1997 after the agency was accused of underestimating numbers for the 1995 Million Man March.

Civil rights leaders protested the event and scheduled a 3-mile (5-kilometer) plus march from a high school to the site of a planned King memorial near the Tidal Basin and not far from Beck's gathering.