Shaaban Abdul Sattar
Cairo, Asharq Al-Awsat- Dr. Rashad al-Bayoumi is the deputy head of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. His organization could be set to play a significant role in Egypt's latest political chapter, having recently declared the intention to form a political party. This move has been met with concern in Western circles, with fears that Egypt's domestic and foreign policies could dramatically shift, if it were governed by an Islamist trend.
Dr. Al-Bayoumi, 74, is a long-serving member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and also works as a professor of geology at Cairo University. He has spent a total of 18 years in prison, during the era of the former regime, when the Muslim Brotherhood was a banned organization. His most recent arrest came in 2006, when he along with other Brotherhood members were detained for holding an organized meeting. Asharq al-Awsat recently spoke with Dr. al-Bayoumi to learn about the Muslim Brotherhood's plans for the coming phase in Egypt. During the interview, he elaborated on his organization's political motives, as well as discussing several controversial aspects of the Muslim Brotherhood manifesto. Dr al-Bayoumi also reflected on the success of the Egyptian revolution, and what needs to be done to build on this. The following is the text from the interview:
[Asharq Al-Awsat] Was the Muslim Brotherhood organization waiting for one of its leaders to be chosen [by the Supreme Military Council] as part of the interim Egyptian government, which is now incorporating some political opposition figures?
[Al-Bayoumi] Not in the current government, or in any other. We are not asking to be placed in a position of authority, and we do not aim to be in a position of power or have a parliamentary majority, whether in the current phase or in the future.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] Some people have expressed their skepticism about a political group making such concessions, why has the Muslim Brotherhood agreed to these political concessions?
[Al-Bayoumi] This is because we feel that there are those who want to play the card of warning against the Muslim Brotherhood, and some people have accused the Muslim Brotherhood of wanting to hijack the revolution of the youth, despite the fact that we have lived this revolution from its first day and we have our martyrs. However we only want to be partners of the people, and we have announced that we are of the people and that we do not want to come to power, or form a government, or even put forward [parliamentary] candidates to achieve a parliamentary majority. Our goal is reform.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] However on Egypt's Friday of Victory [18 February 2011] we saw some Muslim Brotherhood figures attempt to promote the role they played in the Egyptian revolution…and Dr. Yusuf al-Qaradawi's Friday sermon at Tahrir Square also gave the proceedings a Muslim Brotherhood flavor. What is your response to this?
[Al-Bayoumi] Firstly, al-Qaradawi is too great a figure to be included in any single category or group, he is the head of the International Union of Islamic Scholars, which means that he enjoys a consensus [of support] from all Muslim scholars, and his presence in Tahrir Square was an expression of his general mantle [as head of the International Union of Islamic Scholars], rather than his personal mantle. It is unreasonable to imagine that everybody in Tahrir Square on the Friday of Victory was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and those who were present were attended as Egyptian nationalists, so these accusations have no basis. The Copts have embraced al-Qaradawi, his Friday sermon was addressed to all Egyptians, and the revolution belongs to all Egyptians. We are an effective component of [Egyptian] society, and we are keen to engage with members of all faiths, and we do not have any ambition for leadership or rule.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] If the Muslim Brotherhood has no ambitions for power, why isn't this simply an Islamic Dawa [missionary] organization?
[Al-Bayoumi] Political work is an integral part of Islamic work, for Islam is a comprehensive religion and politics is part of general Islamic work. It is our duty, with regards to what was happening in the country, to put forward ideas, participate, and offer sacrifices. Those who do not want to understand this perhaps failed to understand what was happening in Egypt, and our experiences are the best evidence [of this]; for at the parliamentary elections our slogan was "participation not combat."
[Asharq Al-Awsat] Now your demands have been met and former President Hosni Mubarak has stepped down from power. What's next for the Muslim Brotherhood?
[Al-Bayoumi] This is not accurate, for this was not just our demand, but the demand of the entire Egyptian people. Everybody must [also] be aware that there are hands belonging to the remnants of the former regime playing in the shadows, and some figures [of the former regime] are still taking action or trying to regain control, trying to hijack the revolution and overturn it. There are figures of the former regime who still remain on the scene, figures such as former State Minister of Parliamentary Affairs Mufid Shahab, and he – along with former parliamentary speaker Ahmed Fathi Sarour – was a fundamental partner in the destruction of the constitution and laws. Their presence, with others, raises large question marks. In addition to this, questions remain over other demands issued by the Egyptian revolution which have yet to be met, including the state of emergency that we have been living under for more than 30 years, as well as the state security apparatus continuing their operations, particularly as it was this octopus-like organization which devastated the country. In addition to this, [questions marks remain over] detainees in prison, defendants convicted by exceptional courts. However above all else, there is the current government that was formed by the former president and sworn in by him. All of these issues require detailed attention, and the realization that we have a lot of work in front of us in order to preserve the popular revolution.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] Is the Muslim Brotherhood content with Mubarak stepping down from power, or will you seek to bring him to trial, whether this is regarding the sources of his wealth in particular, or the policies of the former regime, in general?
[Al-Bayoumi] The trial of the regime is inevitable, the trial of all members of the regime and its policies, and it is enough to recall that there are 365 martyrs [who died in the Egyptian uprising] and we do not know who is responsible for their death by live ammunition. The public demand now is for the officials who are responsible for what happened in the country – from corruption and more – to be handed over [to the courts], and the priority, of course, is for the crime of murder which occurred against the people of this nation. What is strange is that we are trying former Interior Minister Habib el-Adly for corruption, before we bring him to trial for ordering the killing of people in the streets.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] Is the Muslim Brotherhood satisfied with the decisions taken by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, since it took over running the country?
[Al-Bayoumi] Until now, we can consider what has happened to be a beginning, but this has not quenched the thirst of the people, for this is not the hope of the people, the issue was not toppling Mubarak, but rather toppling the entire regime; all of its members, pillars, and policies. The issue is not one of figures, but rather of policies pursued by the Mubarak regime devastated Egypt on different levels throughout the decades of his reign.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] The Muslim Brotherhood has announced that it intends to form a political party, but has yet to clarify what the relationship will be between the political party and the [international] Muslim Brotherhood organization. Can you clarify this relationship?
[Al-Bayoumi] The thinking is of a political party that has been present for a long period of time, and there is a decision from the Muslim Brotherhood's Shura Council to this effect, for political work is part of the Muslim Brotherhood organization's work, as we said before, and the political party's will have a role at a specific level. However the fundamental for us, with regards to political work, is binding this with the moral framework and what unites the Muslim Brotherhood organization with the political party is the ideological framework. As for the political party structure, this will certainly be separate from the Muslim Brotherhood organization, and we are not – within the Muslim Brotherhood's institutions – studying the existing [political] models for this in the neighboring countries.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] The Muslim Brotherhood's political manifesto for 2008 was the subject of severe criticism, particularly with regards to your organization being against Copts or women standing for the presidency. This raised a lot of concerns, both internally and externally, can you tell us if the Muslim Brotherhood remains committed to this proviso?
[Al-Bayoumi] We consider our position with regards to who can potentially assume the presidency [of Egypt] to be part of the freedom of choose an Islamic jurisprudential opinion, and a Muslim has this choice, and we have chosen this [jurisprudential] opinion as it is the opinion of the majority of Islamist scholars and we do not impose this upon anybody, but rather we, for our part, will not put forward a Coptic or woman candidate for the presidency, however other parties will have the right to do so or not.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] If another party chose a woman or a Copt as a presidential candidate, and this candidate won the elections to become president, what would the Muslim Brotherhood's position be?
[Al-Bayoumi] So long as it is the [Egyptian] people who chose this figure and voted, we do not mind, however we are facing a world that is open to us [as Muslims], but can a Muslim become president in the US, or France, or Italy? Of course there are no provisions preventing this, however the majority decides, in Egypt the majority is Muslim, therefore why should the Muslim Brotherhood be subject to all of these attacks when we speak about this? The Muslim Brotherhood is looking at this issue due to its responsibilities and tasks, including leading the Muslims. Can a non-Muslim or woman undertake these responsibilities? However even if a woman should win the elections we will not stand against this, and we will accept this choice, however our own position within our party regarding [presidential] nominations is clear, we will not nominate a Copt or woman.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] The Muslim Brotherhood continually acknowledges following the creed "whenever you must choose between two things, it is better to choose the easier" which is based upon a hadith of the Prophet Muhammad. Why do you therefore stick to this hard-line position with regards to the electoral nomination of a Copt or a woman, particularly when Islamic scholars such as Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Sheikh Mohamed Salim al-Awa, have said that there is nothing religiously impermissible about a Copt or woman leading a Muslim country?
[Al-Bayoumi] We have not taken a hard-line position, this is the opinion of the majority, and there is a prohibition about shifting between one jurisprudential view and another to choose the easiest. However, God said "and the Jews will not be pleased with you, nor the Christians until you follow their religion." [Surat al-Baqara, Verse 120]. This is clear, whatever we say or do. This issue is being studied and perhaps the Muslim Brotherhood will decide to take a different position.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] Some people fear Egypt's foreign relations will be affected by the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, particularly international agreements that your group may be against. How do you respond to this?
[Al-Bayoumi] We respect international agreements and major political issues, whatever they may be, however with regards to an objective and academic look [at this issue], it is the right of either side, or any one side, to review and discuss according to the circumstances and requirements. The Camp David Accords were never put to the people or even to the parliament in the proper manner, but rather these were enforced from above. One of the most important articles of this agreement was the establishment of a Palestinian State, very well, but let us ask: where is this [Palestinian] state? Secondly, where is this comprehensive peace in light of the daily massacres and brutal attacks that the Palestinians are subject to? Who has destroyed this agreement, in light of the genocidal plans against the Palestinian people, and the systematic move to Judaize Jerusalem and destroy the al-Aqsa Mosque? There is also the issue of the secret articles included in this accord, from selling Egyptian natural gas to Israel at a fifteenth of its real price. All of this must be put to the people, and it is the people's right to reconsider thee conventions. Of course, we do not accept the Camp David Accords at all, but re-evaluating and dealing with this must be done according to the law.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] Some people believe Egypt could be subject to international or even regional isolation should the Muslim Brotherhood come to power, as occurred when Hamas came to power in Palestine. What is your opinion of this?
[Al-Bayoumi] We [the Muslim Brotherhood] are the keenest of all Egyptians for Egypt to return to the Arab and Muslim body, for Egypt's isolation from the Arab and Islamic world only occurred due to the signing of the Camp David Accords, and we want to return to the Arab world, and return it to its status and prestige internationally. We are also calling the most strongly for connecting with the Arab and Islamic societies, and we want to restore Egypt to its place at the fore-front of the Arab world, for Egypt to always lead the way.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] The success of the Egyptian revolution has resulted in lifting the ban on the Muslim Brotherhood organization and institutions. How will this effect the organization?
[Al-Bayoumi] We ask God this, and we hope to meet and consult with one another in public, and for everybody to know what we say, and what we want for our people and countries, because what we are saying is no secret, for what we want is to raise up the Muslim ummah, and we do not want anybody to think that we are working in the shadows or against anybody's interests.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] Don't you think this will anger the West?
[Al-Bayoumi] What's this got to do with them? Why should we care about what they say in the outside world?
[Asharq Al-Awsat] The Muslim Brotherhood was previously interested in communicating with opposition parties; will you remain committed to this policy after the success of the revolution?
[Al-Bayoumi] Certainly…we remain keen to communicate with everybody, as long as this is in the interests of society.
Wednesday, March 02, 2011
Tuesday, March 01, 2011
"Stop the Presses"
Arlene Kushner
I've written before about the UN, the most vilely corrupt of institutions. And I've certainly written plenty about Barack Obama, who is a horror as president. One major problem with him is that he has chosen to relinquish US power, opting instead to be an internationalist, which for him includes participation at the UN.
Now I have information that juxtaposes the two in a shocking (or maybe not so shocking) revelation.
That information comes straight from Anne Bayefsky, of Eye on the UN (www.EYEontheUN.org), a thoroughly reliable source.
~~~~~~~~~~
The story involves the UN Human Rights Council, likely the most blatantly anti-Israel of all UN agencies.
The Council, you must understand, is not a two-bit operation. It has sizeable headquarters in Geneva:
~~~~~~~~~~
Reversing the policy of his predecessor, George Bush, who shunned the Council, Obama became the first president to seek membership for the US on the Council. As Bayefsky puts it, this was "the flagship of his UN-focused foreign policy." The reason given by the president for joining was to engage "from the inside" in the reform process that was going on at the Council. The Council had been established in 2006 to replace the thoroughly discredited Human Rights Commission, and was given five years to review its failings and make necessary corrections.
That five years has now come to an end, and the review process has turned out to be nothing but "an abysmal failure."
~~~~~~~~~~
The Council's most blatant and egregious flaw has been its "standing agenda that governs all of its operations." There are ten items on the agenda. "One is dedicated to condemning the state of Israel and one is for the remaining 191 UN countries that it might be interested in should it ever decide there was another 'human rights situations that require[d] the Council’s attention.'"
The Council's use of "its so-called human rights system to demonize the Jewish state has been a roaring success. Half of its special sessions on specific countries and half of all its resolutions and decisions critical of any state condemn Israel alone."
"When President Obama joined the Council, it [the Council] promised that changing the discriminatory agenda would be their first priority. On Thursday, we discovered, it was a hoax." (Emphasis added)
The review process had been taking place under the jurisdiction of a working group of all interested members of the UN. On Thursday, the working group adopted its report by consensus. The US was present. If we move past the "usual opaque UN language," and look at it plain English, the consensus report states that it's business as usual: the discriminatory agenda, adopted in June 2007, stands.
~~~~~~~~~~
"Last year...the US delegation placed on the table its demands for reform...Agenda reform was top of the list."
Read the US demand: "The most entrenched and indefensible manifestation of structural bias in this Council comes in the form of…the only agenda item devoted to one country…it is incumbent upon us…to do what is right to help the Council become more evenhanded and depoliticized."
That demand was made available to the American public, but that's as far as it went.
"...when the business-as-usual UN 'reform' report was approved late Thursday, the only thing the US delegation did was to make a short statement that it 'did not support' the permanent Israel-bashing item...." (Bayefsky calls this diplomatic backstabbing -- agreeing to participate in the consensus, but hedging in a manner that has no clout.)
"If the Obama administration had really wanted to stand on principle they could have said 'we do not join consensus on this document.' (The point is that the US delegation permitted themselves to be counted in the consensus.) They could have demanded that there be a vote in the Council on the document before sending it to the General Assembly for formal approval, and then voted against it for the world to see. And most importantly, they could have made it very clear that the absence of a change would result in the US departure from the Council. They did none of the above."
"Instead, Obama caved. Saving the Council was most important and the US was going down with the ship. The 'reform' process will now proceed merrily through the UN system without a glitch. The President of the General Assembly said...: 'I congratulate the Working Group on adopting the Human Rights Council review by consensus.' The US delegation was all present. Nobody peeped." (Emphasis added)
~~~~~~~~~~
My American friends, I can only hope that you are deeply ashamed of this official US action -- or lack thereof. And that you are sufficiently enraged -- is smoke coming out of your ears yet? -- to make as much noise about this as you can.
Clearly, the Obama administration had hoped all of this would pass under the radar screen. And indeed it might have, except for the report of a tireless Anne Bayefsky.
My bet, as well (this has got to be a sure thing), is that Obama was less motivated to take genuine action in the Council because it was Israel that was being vilified. Less motivated than he would have been, for example, if Jordan were on the block.
~~~~~~~~~~
It's important to understand how much duplicity is at work here. Hillary Clinton, secretary of state and Obama lackey, was in Geneva yesterday doing damage control.
One of the things she addressed in a public statement at the opening of the current session of HRC was this:
"The structural bias against Israel -- including a standing agenda item for Israel...-- is wrong. And it undermines the important work we are trying to do together. As member states we can take this council in a better, stronger direction."
Try not to gag. How cheap and easy are words for public consumption, compared with the hard work of really doing something. Here's the evidence that the administration was counting on our not knowing what actually went on inside the Council. And notice the consistent use of "we." The US is one of the guys now, and what horrendous company they are in.
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2011/02/28/obama-hillary-working-hard-prop-human-rights-demons-united-nations/
~~~~~~~~~~
As if all of this was not enough, there is yet another major issue confronting the UN Human Rights Council right now -- which Bayefsky says Clinton is attempting to paper over "to protect the administration’s investment..."
This has to do with Libya's involvement with the Council. In 2003, this nation actually held the presidency of the now defunct Human Rights Commission. I wish this were a joke, but it is not. It was subsequently elected as a full member of the Human Rights Council.
As John Bolton once pointed out, the General Assembly resolution that set the Human Rights Council in place included no membership criteria. All that was required was that: "when electing members of the Council, Member States [of the UN General Assembly] shall take into account the contribution of candidates to the promotion and protection of human rights and their voluntary pledges and commitments made thereto."
A website was set up on which prospective members of the Council were able to post their "pledges." "This is what Libya posted: 'The Libyan Arab Jamahiriya [a term coined by Gaddafi that means, roughly, "people's republic"] is fully committed to the promotion and protection of human rights principles…including the right to direct participation in public life…The Libyan Arab Jamahiriya has paid great attention to human rights over the past 30 years.' That statement was good enough to garner the votes of 155 of 188 UN members and to send Libya to the Council."
Of course, Saudi Arabia, China, and Cuba were also deemed fit to be members of the Human Rights Council.
This is surreal.
~~~~~~~~~~
At any rate, the Council prides itself on an innovation called the Universal Periodic Review, which is supposed to review the human rights record of each nation of the UN, in due course, including the members of the Council itself. During the review process, other nations sitting on the Council are permitted to comment.
Last November, the human rights record of Libya was reviewed. See this Eye on the UN video, with comments by the likes of Saudi Arabia, N. Korea, Iran, Egypt and Cuba:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgNH6AHh6RE
~~~~~~~~~~
The formal report based on this review of Libya -- which praises Libya's human rights accomplishments -- was placed on the agenda of the current session of the Council, to be presented on March 18 and then accepted at the end of the month.
Even in the face of the on-going horrendous human rights violations of Gaddafi and the call to remove Libya from the Council, this remained on the agenda. To allow this presentation to move forward would be a travesty of justice, and make a mockery of everything that is sensible.
And here I refer to another fine organization, UN Watch (http://blog.unwatch.org). Its tireless executive director, Hillel Neuer, has been leading the campaign to remove the report from the session's agenda. "The report is a fraud, an insult to Libya's victims, and should be withdrawn immediately," he has said.
~~~~~~~~~~
I devoted today's posting to this, instead of J Street and a host of other hot issues, because it is information everyone needs to have, and which is not given enough prominence.
Bravo and bravo, to Neuer and to Bayefsky, for their important work.
But it's time for every American to ask the president and the secretary of state precisely what the US is doing as a member of the Council.
Do the American representatives to the Council in Geneva do anything beyond using their tucheses (their rear ends) to warm their seats?
Did Clinton avoid calling for the removal of the positive report on Libya from the Council's agenda because exposing the current situation would have made clear to one and all what sort of Council the US had opted to join?
~~~~~~~~~~
Take note, please, of how Bayefsky closes this particular piece on the UN:
"And then there’s this: On Friday, March 4, Iran – the country that buries women naked to their waist and then stones them to death for 'adultery' – is going to take its seat as a full-fledged member of the UN Commission on the Status of Women.
"If President Obama and his secretary of state really understood the error of using the United Nations to prop up human rights demons, then, rather than attempting, even today, to help the Human Rights Council cover its tracks, it should be telling the world and the UN to remove Iran from the Commission on the Status of Women.
"And it should resign from the Human Rights Council effective immediately now that its 'reform' has proved to be impossible – as was obvious to human rights victims from the start.
"But don’t hold your breath. The Obama administration would rather promote the institution of the United Nations than save real people from the UN’s grotesque neglect."
~~~~~~~~~~
© Arlene Kushner. This material is produced by Arlene Kushner, functioning as an independent journalist. Permission is granted for it to be reproduced only with proper attribution.
see my website www.ArlenefromIsrael.info
I've written before about the UN, the most vilely corrupt of institutions. And I've certainly written plenty about Barack Obama, who is a horror as president. One major problem with him is that he has chosen to relinquish US power, opting instead to be an internationalist, which for him includes participation at the UN.
Now I have information that juxtaposes the two in a shocking (or maybe not so shocking) revelation.
That information comes straight from Anne Bayefsky, of Eye on the UN (www.EYEontheUN.org), a thoroughly reliable source.
~~~~~~~~~~
The story involves the UN Human Rights Council, likely the most blatantly anti-Israel of all UN agencies.
The Council, you must understand, is not a two-bit operation. It has sizeable headquarters in Geneva:
~~~~~~~~~~
Reversing the policy of his predecessor, George Bush, who shunned the Council, Obama became the first president to seek membership for the US on the Council. As Bayefsky puts it, this was "the flagship of his UN-focused foreign policy." The reason given by the president for joining was to engage "from the inside" in the reform process that was going on at the Council. The Council had been established in 2006 to replace the thoroughly discredited Human Rights Commission, and was given five years to review its failings and make necessary corrections.
That five years has now come to an end, and the review process has turned out to be nothing but "an abysmal failure."
~~~~~~~~~~
The Council's most blatant and egregious flaw has been its "standing agenda that governs all of its operations." There are ten items on the agenda. "One is dedicated to condemning the state of Israel and one is for the remaining 191 UN countries that it might be interested in should it ever decide there was another 'human rights situations that require[d] the Council’s attention.'"
The Council's use of "its so-called human rights system to demonize the Jewish state has been a roaring success. Half of its special sessions on specific countries and half of all its resolutions and decisions critical of any state condemn Israel alone."
"When President Obama joined the Council, it [the Council] promised that changing the discriminatory agenda would be their first priority. On Thursday, we discovered, it was a hoax." (Emphasis added)
The review process had been taking place under the jurisdiction of a working group of all interested members of the UN. On Thursday, the working group adopted its report by consensus. The US was present. If we move past the "usual opaque UN language," and look at it plain English, the consensus report states that it's business as usual: the discriminatory agenda, adopted in June 2007, stands.
~~~~~~~~~~
"Last year...the US delegation placed on the table its demands for reform...Agenda reform was top of the list."
Read the US demand: "The most entrenched and indefensible manifestation of structural bias in this Council comes in the form of…the only agenda item devoted to one country…it is incumbent upon us…to do what is right to help the Council become more evenhanded and depoliticized."
That demand was made available to the American public, but that's as far as it went.
"...when the business-as-usual UN 'reform' report was approved late Thursday, the only thing the US delegation did was to make a short statement that it 'did not support' the permanent Israel-bashing item...." (Bayefsky calls this diplomatic backstabbing -- agreeing to participate in the consensus, but hedging in a manner that has no clout.)
"If the Obama administration had really wanted to stand on principle they could have said 'we do not join consensus on this document.' (The point is that the US delegation permitted themselves to be counted in the consensus.) They could have demanded that there be a vote in the Council on the document before sending it to the General Assembly for formal approval, and then voted against it for the world to see. And most importantly, they could have made it very clear that the absence of a change would result in the US departure from the Council. They did none of the above."
"Instead, Obama caved. Saving the Council was most important and the US was going down with the ship. The 'reform' process will now proceed merrily through the UN system without a glitch. The President of the General Assembly said...: 'I congratulate the Working Group on adopting the Human Rights Council review by consensus.' The US delegation was all present. Nobody peeped." (Emphasis added)
~~~~~~~~~~
My American friends, I can only hope that you are deeply ashamed of this official US action -- or lack thereof. And that you are sufficiently enraged -- is smoke coming out of your ears yet? -- to make as much noise about this as you can.
Clearly, the Obama administration had hoped all of this would pass under the radar screen. And indeed it might have, except for the report of a tireless Anne Bayefsky.
My bet, as well (this has got to be a sure thing), is that Obama was less motivated to take genuine action in the Council because it was Israel that was being vilified. Less motivated than he would have been, for example, if Jordan were on the block.
~~~~~~~~~~
It's important to understand how much duplicity is at work here. Hillary Clinton, secretary of state and Obama lackey, was in Geneva yesterday doing damage control.
One of the things she addressed in a public statement at the opening of the current session of HRC was this:
"The structural bias against Israel -- including a standing agenda item for Israel...-- is wrong. And it undermines the important work we are trying to do together. As member states we can take this council in a better, stronger direction."
Try not to gag. How cheap and easy are words for public consumption, compared with the hard work of really doing something. Here's the evidence that the administration was counting on our not knowing what actually went on inside the Council. And notice the consistent use of "we." The US is one of the guys now, and what horrendous company they are in.
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2011/02/28/obama-hillary-working-hard-prop-human-rights-demons-united-nations/
~~~~~~~~~~
As if all of this was not enough, there is yet another major issue confronting the UN Human Rights Council right now -- which Bayefsky says Clinton is attempting to paper over "to protect the administration’s investment..."
This has to do with Libya's involvement with the Council. In 2003, this nation actually held the presidency of the now defunct Human Rights Commission. I wish this were a joke, but it is not. It was subsequently elected as a full member of the Human Rights Council.
As John Bolton once pointed out, the General Assembly resolution that set the Human Rights Council in place included no membership criteria. All that was required was that: "when electing members of the Council, Member States [of the UN General Assembly] shall take into account the contribution of candidates to the promotion and protection of human rights and their voluntary pledges and commitments made thereto."
A website was set up on which prospective members of the Council were able to post their "pledges." "This is what Libya posted: 'The Libyan Arab Jamahiriya [a term coined by Gaddafi that means, roughly, "people's republic"] is fully committed to the promotion and protection of human rights principles…including the right to direct participation in public life…The Libyan Arab Jamahiriya has paid great attention to human rights over the past 30 years.' That statement was good enough to garner the votes of 155 of 188 UN members and to send Libya to the Council."
Of course, Saudi Arabia, China, and Cuba were also deemed fit to be members of the Human Rights Council.
This is surreal.
~~~~~~~~~~
At any rate, the Council prides itself on an innovation called the Universal Periodic Review, which is supposed to review the human rights record of each nation of the UN, in due course, including the members of the Council itself. During the review process, other nations sitting on the Council are permitted to comment.
Last November, the human rights record of Libya was reviewed. See this Eye on the UN video, with comments by the likes of Saudi Arabia, N. Korea, Iran, Egypt and Cuba:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgNH6AHh6RE
~~~~~~~~~~
The formal report based on this review of Libya -- which praises Libya's human rights accomplishments -- was placed on the agenda of the current session of the Council, to be presented on March 18 and then accepted at the end of the month.
Even in the face of the on-going horrendous human rights violations of Gaddafi and the call to remove Libya from the Council, this remained on the agenda. To allow this presentation to move forward would be a travesty of justice, and make a mockery of everything that is sensible.
And here I refer to another fine organization, UN Watch (http://blog.unwatch.org). Its tireless executive director, Hillel Neuer, has been leading the campaign to remove the report from the session's agenda. "The report is a fraud, an insult to Libya's victims, and should be withdrawn immediately," he has said.
~~~~~~~~~~
I devoted today's posting to this, instead of J Street and a host of other hot issues, because it is information everyone needs to have, and which is not given enough prominence.
Bravo and bravo, to Neuer and to Bayefsky, for their important work.
But it's time for every American to ask the president and the secretary of state precisely what the US is doing as a member of the Council.
Do the American representatives to the Council in Geneva do anything beyond using their tucheses (their rear ends) to warm their seats?
Did Clinton avoid calling for the removal of the positive report on Libya from the Council's agenda because exposing the current situation would have made clear to one and all what sort of Council the US had opted to join?
~~~~~~~~~~
Take note, please, of how Bayefsky closes this particular piece on the UN:
"And then there’s this: On Friday, March 4, Iran – the country that buries women naked to their waist and then stones them to death for 'adultery' – is going to take its seat as a full-fledged member of the UN Commission on the Status of Women.
"If President Obama and his secretary of state really understood the error of using the United Nations to prop up human rights demons, then, rather than attempting, even today, to help the Human Rights Council cover its tracks, it should be telling the world and the UN to remove Iran from the Commission on the Status of Women.
"And it should resign from the Human Rights Council effective immediately now that its 'reform' has proved to be impossible – as was obvious to human rights victims from the start.
"But don’t hold your breath. The Obama administration would rather promote the institution of the United Nations than save real people from the UN’s grotesque neglect."
~~~~~~~~~~
© Arlene Kushner. This material is produced by Arlene Kushner, functioning as an independent journalist. Permission is granted for it to be reproduced only with proper attribution.
see my website www.ArlenefromIsrael.info
Legalistic delegitimization blarney championing an Arab Palestine
http://blogs.jpost.com/content/legalistic-delegitimization-blarney-championing-arab-palestine
The campaign of delegitimization Israel has been facing in a global organized fashion since Durban I, which has evolved not “just against Israel…[but]…also against the Jewish People,” isn’t really new. Anti-zionism during the early Mandate period, even including outstanding Jewish personages almost succeeded in overturning the Balfour Declaration policy (see: “Was Balfour Policy Reversible? The Colonial Office and Palestine, 1921-23” by Sahar Huneidi in the Journal of Palestine Studies; and a series of articles published in the Daily Mail that became a book, “The Palestine Deception” by Joseph M. N. Jeffries). Let us not forget that on June 21, 1922, the idea of the Palestine Mandate for Jews was defeated in a vote of 60 to 29 in the UK House of Lords with Lord Islington pronouncing the following: “I venture to say that Zionism, as it is now in practice in Palestine, is really the antithesis of the true principles embodied in the mandatory system.” Indeed, as Shmuel Katz has highlighted, the first Arab political organization, the Moslem Christian Association (MCA), was organized at the inspiration of Jaffa’s District Military Governor, Lt. Col. J. E. Hubbard, who had formally proposed to his superiors in the military government administration the setting up of an Arab organization under the personal direction of the district head of British Intelligence, Captain Brunton. Sir Wyndham Deedes later admitted that from its inception the Moslem Christian Association had enjoyed “the support and financial aid of the British administration.” Does this subversive interference not sound familiar in a current phenomenon? So, too, the EU funding of Israeli NGOs as outside subversive interference isn’t new either.
Lawfare is one form of this delegitimization onslaught but a more invidious manipulation of the science of the law I found in this academic paper, "Sovereignty, Colonialism and the 'State' of Palestine Under International Law" by John Reynolds of the Irish Centre for Human Rights, from 2009.
I’ve picked out four problems with this presentation and the first concerns Reynolds presumption of what he defines as:
The creation of a Palestinian State
Actually, the idea was the reconstitution of the Jewish national home in which Arabs had no special mention but were lumped together in the demographic pool of simply "non-Jews." Not a “Palestinian state” but a Jewish national home in the territory known as “Palestine.” Here:
Whereas the Principal Allied Powers have also agreed that the Mandatory should be responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 2nd, 1917, by the Government of His Britannic Majesty, and adopted by the said Powers, in favor of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country; and whereas recognition has thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country…
Those underlined words, it is obvious, would seem very clear to even someone not steeped in legalisms as not supporting Reynold's thesis. The Jews, indeed, are to be granted the political national rights in and to the country and all others, and Arabs are not even mentioned specifically, receive but civil and religious rights to be honored by the Jewish state.
The second problem is in this formulation of his, that:
Conceptions of that State had changed according to prevailing social and political circumstances
Again, he pushes “that State” which was not conceived as being the purpose of the Mandate as he would have had us believe and then he hides from his readers what those “circumstances” were. He glosses over the reality that they were basically quite illegal attempts by Arabs to violently thwart the Mandate decision, and thus violate international law. The Arabs, in 1919-20 in Jerusalem, in 1921 in Jaffa, in 1929 in Hebron and other locations throughout the country in the three year riots of 1936-1939, broke the laws, slaughtered, murdered, raped, robbed and pillaged Jews and destroyed and burned property. That effort sought to deny Jews any place for their "home" anywhere in the territory defined as "Palestine."
Moreover, the British themselves betrayed the Mandate decision in 1939 by issuing a White Paper policy statement that was considered an illegal act in that it broke with the terms of the British Mandate as decreed by the League of Nations and the Balfour Declaration. As was the report of the Permanent Mandates Commission to the Council of the League, the Commission unanimously stated:
...The policy set out in the [1939] White Paper was not in accordance with the interpretation which, in agreement with the Mandatory Power and the Council, the Commission had placed upon the Palestine Mandate
As further made clear, what the British government did was to:
Declare unequivocally that it is not part of their policy that Palestine should become a Jewish State
And that was wrong and ultimately, was an indirect collaborative effort with Nazi Germany during the Holocaust when Jews, because of that White Paper, could not enter the Mandate. With no where to go and with British officials assuring they could not leave Europe for the Palestine Mandate, only the concentration camps and crematoria were the option.
My third point I chose from his writing is this terminology, the buzz words of radical progressive thought:
The history of decolonisation, the appropriate framework for succeeding foreign rule
Despite repeated attempts by Arabs and their supporters, Jews returning to their national patrimony were not and are not "colonisers" or engaged in "colonisation" (and read this). We are home, not in some overseas colony. We are not imperialists.
The fourth negative element is this phrase:
The Palestinians, as a people that identifies itself as a national group connected to a Palestinian homeland
In my opinion (and read Eli Hertz’s opinion), self-identification is simply not sufficient especially as there is an internationally legally-recognized pre-claim by the Jewish people that surely is superior to any Arab-related claim by any objective parameter since the Arabs were conquerors and occupiers of the Jewish homeland beginning in 638 CE, 2000 years after the Jewish presence. During the Mandate period, the nationality of "Palestinian" applied to Jews and non-Jews as so even according to this "analysis," Jews still have at least (and so much more) an equal claim as any Arab. And in any case, Jews can also claim a “self identity” claim at least as equal to Arabs who assert they are “Palestinian” other than the Mandate Palestinian nationality.
Today, the assertion of a separate "Arab Palestinian" identity, which is distinct from, say, a Jordanian identity – and we need recall that Jordan was a fiction of British colonialism created in the March 1921 Cairo Conference - is a fabrication and cannot compare with the historical, religious, cultural and physical connection Jews had and have with the Land of Israel.
In all, Reynold's legal mumbo-jumbo is all blarney, nothing but deceptive nonsense and misleading talk. Which is too bad since Reynold is a doctoral candidate at the Irish Centre for Human Rights and also a Government of Ireland Scholar; NUI Travelling Scholar; LL.M International Human Rights Law (NUI Galway); BBLS (University College Dublin). His academic papers are here.
Mr. Reynold seems to be ideologically driven by a political viewpoint, which is unfortunate for him and academia. It is also unfortunate for Israel that such claptrap is considered wisdom amongst too many self-appointed intellectual elites.
The campaign of delegitimization Israel has been facing in a global organized fashion since Durban I, which has evolved not “just against Israel…[but]…also against the Jewish People,” isn’t really new. Anti-zionism during the early Mandate period, even including outstanding Jewish personages almost succeeded in overturning the Balfour Declaration policy (see: “Was Balfour Policy Reversible? The Colonial Office and Palestine, 1921-23” by Sahar Huneidi in the Journal of Palestine Studies; and a series of articles published in the Daily Mail that became a book, “The Palestine Deception” by Joseph M. N. Jeffries). Let us not forget that on June 21, 1922, the idea of the Palestine Mandate for Jews was defeated in a vote of 60 to 29 in the UK House of Lords with Lord Islington pronouncing the following: “I venture to say that Zionism, as it is now in practice in Palestine, is really the antithesis of the true principles embodied in the mandatory system.” Indeed, as Shmuel Katz has highlighted, the first Arab political organization, the Moslem Christian Association (MCA), was organized at the inspiration of Jaffa’s District Military Governor, Lt. Col. J. E. Hubbard, who had formally proposed to his superiors in the military government administration the setting up of an Arab organization under the personal direction of the district head of British Intelligence, Captain Brunton. Sir Wyndham Deedes later admitted that from its inception the Moslem Christian Association had enjoyed “the support and financial aid of the British administration.” Does this subversive interference not sound familiar in a current phenomenon? So, too, the EU funding of Israeli NGOs as outside subversive interference isn’t new either.
Lawfare is one form of this delegitimization onslaught but a more invidious manipulation of the science of the law I found in this academic paper, "Sovereignty, Colonialism and the 'State' of Palestine Under International Law" by John Reynolds of the Irish Centre for Human Rights, from 2009.
I’ve picked out four problems with this presentation and the first concerns Reynolds presumption of what he defines as:
The creation of a Palestinian State
Actually, the idea was the reconstitution of the Jewish national home in which Arabs had no special mention but were lumped together in the demographic pool of simply "non-Jews." Not a “Palestinian state” but a Jewish national home in the territory known as “Palestine.” Here:
Whereas the Principal Allied Powers have also agreed that the Mandatory should be responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 2nd, 1917, by the Government of His Britannic Majesty, and adopted by the said Powers, in favor of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country; and whereas recognition has thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country…
Those underlined words, it is obvious, would seem very clear to even someone not steeped in legalisms as not supporting Reynold's thesis. The Jews, indeed, are to be granted the political national rights in and to the country and all others, and Arabs are not even mentioned specifically, receive but civil and religious rights to be honored by the Jewish state.
The second problem is in this formulation of his, that:
Conceptions of that State had changed according to prevailing social and political circumstances
Again, he pushes “that State” which was not conceived as being the purpose of the Mandate as he would have had us believe and then he hides from his readers what those “circumstances” were. He glosses over the reality that they were basically quite illegal attempts by Arabs to violently thwart the Mandate decision, and thus violate international law. The Arabs, in 1919-20 in Jerusalem, in 1921 in Jaffa, in 1929 in Hebron and other locations throughout the country in the three year riots of 1936-1939, broke the laws, slaughtered, murdered, raped, robbed and pillaged Jews and destroyed and burned property. That effort sought to deny Jews any place for their "home" anywhere in the territory defined as "Palestine."
Moreover, the British themselves betrayed the Mandate decision in 1939 by issuing a White Paper policy statement that was considered an illegal act in that it broke with the terms of the British Mandate as decreed by the League of Nations and the Balfour Declaration. As was the report of the Permanent Mandates Commission to the Council of the League, the Commission unanimously stated:
...The policy set out in the [1939] White Paper was not in accordance with the interpretation which, in agreement with the Mandatory Power and the Council, the Commission had placed upon the Palestine Mandate
As further made clear, what the British government did was to:
Declare unequivocally that it is not part of their policy that Palestine should become a Jewish State
And that was wrong and ultimately, was an indirect collaborative effort with Nazi Germany during the Holocaust when Jews, because of that White Paper, could not enter the Mandate. With no where to go and with British officials assuring they could not leave Europe for the Palestine Mandate, only the concentration camps and crematoria were the option.
My third point I chose from his writing is this terminology, the buzz words of radical progressive thought:
The history of decolonisation, the appropriate framework for succeeding foreign rule
Despite repeated attempts by Arabs and their supporters, Jews returning to their national patrimony were not and are not "colonisers" or engaged in "colonisation" (and read this). We are home, not in some overseas colony. We are not imperialists.
The fourth negative element is this phrase:
The Palestinians, as a people that identifies itself as a national group connected to a Palestinian homeland
In my opinion (and read Eli Hertz’s opinion), self-identification is simply not sufficient especially as there is an internationally legally-recognized pre-claim by the Jewish people that surely is superior to any Arab-related claim by any objective parameter since the Arabs were conquerors and occupiers of the Jewish homeland beginning in 638 CE, 2000 years after the Jewish presence. During the Mandate period, the nationality of "Palestinian" applied to Jews and non-Jews as so even according to this "analysis," Jews still have at least (and so much more) an equal claim as any Arab. And in any case, Jews can also claim a “self identity” claim at least as equal to Arabs who assert they are “Palestinian” other than the Mandate Palestinian nationality.
Today, the assertion of a separate "Arab Palestinian" identity, which is distinct from, say, a Jordanian identity – and we need recall that Jordan was a fiction of British colonialism created in the March 1921 Cairo Conference - is a fabrication and cannot compare with the historical, religious, cultural and physical connection Jews had and have with the Land of Israel.
In all, Reynold's legal mumbo-jumbo is all blarney, nothing but deceptive nonsense and misleading talk. Which is too bad since Reynold is a doctoral candidate at the Irish Centre for Human Rights and also a Government of Ireland Scholar; NUI Travelling Scholar; LL.M International Human Rights Law (NUI Galway); BBLS (University College Dublin). His academic papers are here.
Mr. Reynold seems to be ideologically driven by a political viewpoint, which is unfortunate for him and academia. It is also unfortunate for Israel that such claptrap is considered wisdom amongst too many self-appointed intellectual elites.
Don't Shoot the Messenger
Patrick Dunleavy
No one loves the bearer of bad news, but attacking the messenger often seems easier than addressing the issue at hand. This has become a reality when discussing the current problem of homegrown terrorism and radicalization in the Islamic community. In the last 12-18 months the number of incidents involving individuals who, after becoming exposed to some form of radical Islamic teaching, then carried out or attempted to carry out vicious and violent acts against the United States, has increased. Yet it seems that immediately following the reporting of any of the individual cases, there proceeds an outcry from certain Muslim community organizations of entrapment or Islamophobia. This happened in the case of Major Nidal Hassan, the Fort Hood shooter. It also happened in the case of the Newburgh Four and more recently in the cases of Mohamed Osman Mohamud, the Portland Christmas tree bomber, and Antonio Martinez who plotted to blow up a military recruiting station outside of Baltimore in December Immediately following the reporting of the facts of the stories, out would march a spokesperson from the Council on American Islamic Relations or the Muslim Public Affairs Committee to issue a statement denouncing the legitimate law enforcement use of informants and undercover activities in their communities. Taking it a step further in February of this year CAIR and the ACLU joined hands to file a lawsuit against the FBI alleging discrimination and selective investigation of individuals based on religious belief. This strategy of litigation for the purpose of inhibiting or intimidating is often referred to as “lawfare” and has been used against both governmental agencies and individuals who have written about the phenomena of radicalization in the Islamic community.
If that tactic didn’t work, often times spokespersons talking in “PC Speak”(political correctness) would attempt to disassociate the individual terrorist from his religious beliefs. Saying it was irrelevant to the facts of the case. As if somehow ignoring the elephant in the room would make it go away. When Nidal Hassan shouted “Allah Akbar” before opening fire on his fellow soldiers it was relevant. When Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square Bomber tells the sentencing judge, “Brace yourself for war with Muslims…” It is very relevant. Yet some current Islamic organizations in the United States often find it easier to obscure the facts and attack the messenger than to address the very real issue of radicalization in their community.
I’m often reminded of the old TV show “Dragnet” when Detective Joe Friday would say these famous words; “all we want are the facts ma’am” or to paraphrase, “just the facts ma’am, just the facts”
Facts don’t lie and denying them won’t make them go away. A search for the facts or the reporting of the facts surrounding homegrown terrorism should not be met with an attack on the messenger.
This type of strategy has also been demonstrated in the political arena. When Representative Peter King, Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee announced that he intended to hold hearings on the issue of homegrown terrorism and radicalization, it was immediately met with opposition from certain Muslim organizations even though King had stated that he intended to invite Muslim community leaders to the hearings for their testimony.
Instead of welcoming an opportunity to tell their side of the story, out marched Abed A. Ayoub, the legal director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, saying that King’s proposal "has bigoted intentions." Followed by Salam al-Marayati, the executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, who thinks King "basically wants to treat the Muslim-American community as a suspect community." And finally CAIR issued its response saying, “King has a long history of extremist rhetoric and baseless allegations against American Muslims…” adding, “Congressman King seems determined to go forward with his witch hunt targeting the Muslim community.”
It seems they have already prejudged the process before it has begun.
So what will happen to those who come forth to offer testimony before the committee? Will they be ostracized or vilified for their participation? Will moderate Muslims who are genuinely concerned about the influence of radical Islamic teaching in their communities be intimidated or threatened with ostracism if they come forth to participate in the hearings. Let us hope not.
Reasonable people can disagree about the facts. They can also debate the facts, but please don’t shoot the messenger who brings the facts to light.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributor Patrick Dunleavy is the former Deputy Inspector General for New York State Department of Corrections. He is the author of the upcoming book, "The Fertile Soil of Jihad: Terrorism’s Prison Connection," details of which can be found at his website, and he can be contacted at: mail@ptdassociates.com.
COPYRIGHT 2011 FAMILY SECURITY MATTERS INC.
Erdogan and his boys show what honor-shame folks do when they feel strong
Richard Landes
Erdogan is in Europe trying to get the folks there to accept Turkey in the EU. But he’s not going hat in hand. On the contrary, he clearly thinks he’s in the strong position (or he doesn’t care). Apparently, Germany’s idea that Turkish immigrants should become part of German culture is deeply offensive. (HT: David Steinman) Row over treatment of immigrants reopens Turkey’s rift with Europe
Prime Minister blasts German policy on trip to promote EU bid
By Tony Paterson in Berlin
Monday, 28 February 2011
The Turkish Prime Minister yesterday issued a stinging rebuke to Germany over its treatment of Turkish immigrants.
In remarks that highlight the resentment that has built up over the European Union ‘s continued refusal to allow Turkey to join the club, Recep Tayyip Erdogan lambasted the Berlin government’s attempts to integrate its 3.5 million Turkish immigrants, and said policies that encouraged them to renounce their culture and speak German were a “violation of international law”.
This is, of course, a spill-over of the nonsense that Europe has accepted from the Palestinians about anything Israel does being violations of international law, as if either the Palestinians or the Turks had any notion of what international law was about. Too bad the Europeans were so eager to sell out the Israelis. Now it’s blowback time.
Mr Erdogan – in Berlin on the first stop of a visit designed to strengthen his country’s bid to join the EU – delivered his surprisingly outspoken verdict on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s integration drive hours before he was due to address a large gathering of Turkish immigrants in the western city of Düsseldorf last night.
His comments came after a senior member of Ms Merkel’s government sparked an acrimonious row by demanding the negotiations over EU membership be halted because of Ankara’s failure to permit religious freedom.
Of course for Erodgan, lack of religious freedom is not a violation of international law, especially when it’s a Muslim state that denies others that freedom. This German move is exactly what I (and others) have been advocating for a while now – some reciprocity. Erdogan seems to find the very notion that Turks should show reciprocity deeply offensive.
Mr Erdogan told the Rheinische Post newspaper that Germany’s integration policies failed to consider the needs and expectations of its Turkish communities. Addressing the government’s campaign to encourage more Turks to speak German, he added: “Any policy which seeks to revoke the language and culture of migrants violates international law.”
One has to admire his confidence. Note the language of “needs and expectations.” For those who have not read Bat Ye’or’s (allegedly) conspiratorial book Eurabia, the right to refuse assimilation was one part of the “deal” that Arab diplomats made with the Europeans. That’s why European Muslim immigrants of the last thirty years have reversed a near-universal trend of immigration in the modern world – the second generation is less integrated than their elders.
The Turkish Prime Minister’s comments seemed destined to stir up an already heated integration debate in Germany, which culminated last month with a declaration by Ms Merkel that attempts to build a multicultural society had “utterly failed”. David Cameron came to almost the same conclusion in speech delivered in Germany in early February.
Only a decade or so late. Just hopefully not too late.
Fears that Germany has allowed its Muslim communities to develop “parallel societies” have been stoked by a controversial book entitled Germany is Doing Away with Itself by a former Bundesbank board member Thilo Sarrazin. The book claims that laissez-faire policies have produced an underclass of Muslim underachievers. The book has been widely dismissed as racist, but it has sold more than a million copies since last October.
The dismissal as racist is the standard ploy of the useful infidels on the “left.” For a recent example in the USA, compare the NYT’s treatment of problems with immigrants in Sweden with that of Barry Rubin. For the Grey Lady’s reporter, it’s all about cheap, xenophobic, Islamophobic Swedes who don’t want to share their bounty with their Muslim immigrants. No mention of gang rapes, assaults on Jews and other targeted communities, no-go zones where the cops dare not enter.
Ms Merkel’s coalition of conservative Christian Democrats and liberals has publicly advocated policies encouraging Turkish immigrants to speak German ever since. There have also been widespread calls for a tightening of legislation governing the entry of Turkish immigrants who make up the majority of Muslims in Germany.
In an initial response to the Turkish Prime Minister’s comments, the government’s conservative integration commissioner, Maria Böhmer, said that Mr Erdogan should promote integration rather than criticise it. “It would send a strong signal to our migrants of Turkish origin to tell them to learn German and take advantage of the opportunity to send their children to kindergarten,” she insisted.
Let’s hope this was said ironically (something, I am learning, Germans are not noted for). I hope she doesn’t think this is a persuasive argument.
Mr Erdogan was also unsparing in his criticism of Ms Merkel, who together with the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, has strongly opposed Turkey’s attempts to gain full EU membership. Both advocate that Ankara should be given “privileged partnership” status instead.
The Turkish Prime Minister accused Ms Merkel of using “stalling tactics” in order to placate German voters who are opposed to Turkey’s membership. “Never before have such hurdles been put before an EU accession country,” he insisted. “The Turkish people expect Germany to take the lead role in the EU’s membership negotiations with Turkey.”
This man clearly thinks he is in the driver’s seat. Hopefully he’s wrong.
Ms Merkel is expected to reiterate the position held by President Sarkozy when she meets Mr Erdogan today. During a visit to Ankara last week, Mr Sarkozy said that he believed Turkey did not belong in Europe and that another form of partnership had to be considered.
Mr Erdogan will tomorrow make his first visit to Brussels since 2009 and is expected to reiterate his calls for full membership. However, the stalemate over Cyprus and scepticism about Turkey’s ability to push through key reforms before key June parliamentary election are likely to mean that they will fall on deaf ears.
An insult to chew over
President Nicolas Sarkozy’s recent visit to meet Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was supposed to be an opportunity to promote better relations between Ankara and Europe – but instead it has been overshadowed by an escalating political spat over the etiquette of chewing gum.
After Mr Sarkozy was seen chewing gum as he got off his plane in Ankara on Friday, the mayor of the city has revealed that he deliberately decided to chew gum himself when seeing the French president off yesterday, as part of a calculated retaliatory snub.
“He stopped for a moment, looked around and continued to chew. I personally was offended,” Melih Gokcek said. He did not specify whether either politician chewed with his mouth open.
This is a perfect example of the kind of infantile behavior that honor-shame cultures engage in all the time. Again, the aggressive response indicates that the Turks feel they are in the strong position and can finally give the West a piece of their mind.
As part of this aggressive new form of petition to enter the EU, Erdogan openly urged Turks in Germany not to assimilate:
Erdogan Urges Turks Not to Assimilate
‘You Are Part of Germany, But Also Part of Our Great Turkey’
By Özlem Gezer and Anna Reimann in Düsseldorf
Thousands of Turkish immigrants gave Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan a rock star welcome in Germany on Sunday in a show of national pride that remains fervent, even after decades spent in Germany. He told them they remain part of Turkey, and urged them to integrate into German society — but not to assimilate.
The lyric keeps echoing around the hall in Düsseldorf. “The land belongs to us all.” The sentence isn’t referring to Germany, but to Turkey.
Immigrants are waving hundreds of Turkish flags and the chanting and the music are deafening. One woman shouts “Turkey is great!” into a microphone to cheers from the crowd. Everyone in the ISS Dome, a huge sports and concert venue, is fired up, as if they’re waiting for a rock star. There’s only one show in town this Sunday, and his name is Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The Turkish prime minister has come to Germany. He wants to meet Chancellor Angela Merkel but first he wants to speak to his “compatriots.” To people who have been living in Germany for decades, who were born here, and of whom many have German passports.
They have come from all over Germany to see him live, some 10,000 people. They say things like: “The Germans will never accept us, but we have Erdogan.” Or: “At last someone feels responsible for us, for the first time a Turkish prime minister isn’t forgetting his compatriots abroad.” One woman says: “Erdogan may get Merkel to see us as part of this society. He is our savior.”
You really have to admire the logic here. It has nothing to do with reality; indeed, Erdogan’s behavior will have the exact opposite effect. Is this woman sincere? Or is she sticking it to the Germans? Given how stupidly the Europeans have been behaving for well over a decade, Muslims have every reason to expect them to continue to so behave.
Some 3 million people of Turkish origin live in Germany, most of them descendants of Turks invited by the government in the 1950s and 1960s as ” guest workers” to make up for a shortage of manpower after World War II.
Muslim immigrants have been the focus of a heated public debate in Germany over the last year, with conservative commentators and politicians accusing them of failing to integrate into German society. Many immigrants in turn complain that they are still being called “foreigners” even if they were born in Germany, have German citizenship and speak the language perfectly.
‘I Am Here to Show That You’re Not Alone!’
The savior arrives almost an hour and a half late. “Turkey is proud of you,” the crowd chants in this city in the heart of the Rhineland. “We are proud of you,” Erdogan replies.
He starts out by appealing straight to people’s hearts: “I am here to feel your yearning with you, I am here to enquire about your welfare. I am here to show that you’re not alone!”
Erdogan wants to give his audience a clear identity. “They call you guest workers, foreigners, or German Turks. It doesn’t matter what they all call you: You are my fellow citizens, you are my people, you are my friends, you are my brothers and sisters!”
“You are part of Germany, but you are also part our great Turkey,” says Erdogan.
It sounds like a domestic campaign speech ahead of elections in Turkey this summer. Erdogan is wooing for votes among Germany’s Turkish population. In previous elections, immigrants with Turkish passports flew to Ankara, Istanbul or Antalya just to cast their ballots at the airport.
That is why Erdogan keeps highlighting the successes of his government in his speech, and paints a picture of Turkey as a modern, major power. “We’re not a country that draws on help, we provide help too,” he says. And: “Now my compatriots are no longer traveling in buses, they go by plane.” There are martial-sounding tones too: “Now Turkey will at last start building its own war planes.”
‘No One Has the Right to Deprive us of Our Culture’
Erdogan portrays himself as a supporter of democracy and freedom of opinion. Turkey is changing, he says, adding that all artists and writers who left Turkey and went into exile should return. The message is that the European Union should let Turkey join.
In his (much maligned) book on the Arab Mind, Patai talks about the tendency of Arabs to so love their language that they believe they can create reality just by articulating wishes. Apparently it’s not restricted to Arabs.
In a newspaper interview published ahead of his speech, Erdogan urged Merkel to drop her opposition to Turkey’s accession to the EU. “Never have such political obstacles been put in the path of an accession country,” he said.
Of course, never has a country been less suited, more unlike, the other countries in the EU. If Europe were smart about their future and clear on the threat that Islam constitutes, they’d take Israel into the EU. It would allow them to set the standard for democratic values very high.
Human rights, innovation, progress — the rural way of life that many Turks now living in Germany left behind them in the 1960s, no longer exists, Erdogan told the crowd. “We mustn’t cling to it anymore. I want you to learn German, that your children learn German, they must study, do their masters degrees. I want you to become doctors, professors and politicians in Germany,” says Erdogan.
And then he repeats the sentence that caused such a stir at a speech he held in Cologne three years ago. He warns Turks against assimilating themselves. “Yes, integrate yourselves into German society but don’t assimilate yourselves. No one has the right to deprive us of our culture and our identity.”
In other words, infiltrate.
Erdogan knows that this statement amounts to a provocation in Germany — no politician here is demanding that Turkish immigrants should deny their roots or give up their culture. Erdogan adds: “German newspapers will pick up on this tomorrow, but that’s a mistake.”
His message to devout Muslims is similar. “Islamophobia should be seen in the same way as anti-Semitism,” he says.
And he has brought along a gift for his compatriots — a kind of light-weight dual citizenship. The so-called “Blue Card,” which gives Turks with German citizenship certain rights in Turkey, is to be upgraded. Holders of the card will, in the future, have the same rights as Turkish citizens in dealings with authorities and banks.
For minutes, confetti in the red and white Turkish national colors rains onto the stage. Erdogan’s speech is over.
It was a call for more integration but with strict conditions attached. Adapt yourselves a bit, don’t allow yourselves to be treated badly and if there’s a problem, I’ll come and help! It was a speech that did nothing to reinforce any feeling of belonging to Germany — Erdogan steadfastly appealed to the Turkish national pride of people who have been at home in Germany for four generations.
One woman stood outside the hall with tears streaming down her face. “I don’t need to go on a summer vacation this year. In my heart, I’ve just spent hours in Anatolia.”
The question is, will such behavior at last awaken in the Germans and other Europeans a clear sense of the threat, and a sense of sufficient self-respect that they can say clearly, “no thanks” to the Turkish request for membership (which would, among other things, throw open the gates of immigration to over 75 million Muslims)?
The Lawless Middle East
Daniel Greenfield
While a great deal of attention has been paid to the motives and methods of the Middle Eastern protesters, the question of why so many governments have collapsed in the face of the protests has gone mainly unaddressed. The Middle East's governments are governments of men, not of laws. There are plenty of laws, but none of them actually matter as the ultimate authority in any situation is that of men, not of laws. Their institutions, from the military to the bureaucracy, depend not on laws, but on personal fealty. Laws are covenants. And covenants must derive their authority from some unifying principle. An idea that the entire society can agree on. National exceptionalism can then base itself on that covenant, depicting its national history as the expression of that ideal. The laws then become the guardians of that national ideal. For example, subtract individualism from America and the Constitution ceases to make sense, its hallowed principles become gibberish and the legal system derived from them implodes on itself. (This is arguably what is taking place today, and why we no longer have governments of laws, but of men only.)
For all the flags being waved in the air, the Arab nations have tribal identities, not national identities. There is no such thing as Egyptian or Tunisian exceptionalism. And no national principles of law and government. The Arab world has plenty of legal traditions, but they are not married to any institutions. The nations of the Arab world are orphans of colonialism. Fictional entities trumped up to fill a void. Arabs will passionately champion them the way they do soccer teams, but it is a collective identification with a thing that has no identity. There are peculiar national jokes and antipathy toward citizens of Arab nations, but this is only tribal identity. And tribal governments are personal, not lawful.
In a government of men, day to day decisions may be made by following the rules, which provides a veneer of lawfulness, but any larger conflict is resolved through personal allegiance. Whether the police will take action, does not depend on the laws, but on the parties involved. The power of the complainant or the defendant is what determines police action. A foreigner against a native leads to a complex balancing act, calculating the loss of tourist revenue and foreign displeasure, over loyalty to one's own. The law never enters into it, except as justification after the fact. Map the micro onto the macro, and you can see that what happened in Egypt had nothing to do with democracy or law.
Within the United States a protest will be treated as a law enforcement matter. The police will act within the limits of the law to enforce public order, regardless of whether they are sympathetic to the protesters or not. (Deviations from this norm are aberrant and usually occur under the influence of political authorities, e.g. the Crown Heights Pogrom.) Within the Middle East however, a protest is a test of political allegiances between supporters and opponents of the government. The police are dispatched as supporters of the governments, not as law enforcement officers. Because there is no 'law' to enforce. In a government of men, law derives from the will of the authorities. There is no law, but that which the authorities make, and spoken commands trump legal codexes. The protests were a test of will between two sides, regime opponents and regime supporters, which got thrown into the bailiwick of a third party with a monopoly on armed force, the military, serving as arbitrators of the conflict.
Middle Eastern regimes operate by (1) controlling limited resources, e.g. food, oil, money and (2) the use of force. Systems based on personal authority invariably corrupt resource distribution, by skimming from the top and manipulating prices, causing perennial dissatisfaction which necessitates the use of force. Resources are used to buy the loyalty of the enforcers. This happens more subtly in Egypt, where the officer class holds a privileged position in the economy, or more blatantly in Bahrain, with its foreign mercenaries.
The essential problem of power in the Middle East is how to leverage force, without putting the military in power. Most of the Kings and Sheiks that the British and French colonial authorities put into power were quickly overthrown by their own armies. The more Arab leaders depend on the military, the faster they are overthrown by it. The Egyptian officers who overthrow Egypt's royal family got their idea for it when King Farouk sent them off to try and destroy Israel in 1948. When the Jan 25 protests grew too furious, Mubarak's need for the army put it in the driver's seat. Mubarak left office, but the military remained in charge. Similarly the Iranian protests may have put the Revolutionary Guard in charge there.
Many Arab rulers closely identify themselves with the military, giving themselves military ranks (e.g. Colonel Khadafi, Field Marshall Saddam Hussein, General Bashar Assad) to artificially place themselves within the military's hierarchy of command. Some rule through a minority elite, such as the Sunnis of Iraq or the Alawites of Syria, who live better off, dominate the upper ranks of the military and are loyal because they know that any change in power will throw them on the mercy of the larger populace which hates and despises them. Secret police forces are used to threaten those at the top and maintain authority over the population through terror. All these approaches have obvious and easily apparent weaknesses.
The problem of power has a long history in the Middle East. Rulers once relied on slave armies such as the Janissaries and the Mamluks, but these armies invariably turned on the rulers. The Mamluks did so successfully, and the Jannisaries unsuccessfully (the reason for the difference is that the Mamluks were culturally integrated with the population, and the Jannisaries were not.)
The slave armies were an attempt to use a minority elite, that was individually powerless and collectively powerful. Such a formula was inherently unstable. Political eunuchism, or the use of eunuchs in government, was a more explicit attempt at reining in the dynastic excesses of tribalism. A eunuch might hold power, but he could not pass that power on to his son. His loyalty had to be personal, as it could not be dynastic. Both slave armies and eunuchs depended on tearing men out of the tribal system, through slavery or castration, to compensate for the essential instability of any system of governance in the region.
Dynastic power is still commonplace in the region. Royal families rule in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain. Saddam Hussein, Assad and Mubarak were secular leaders who overthrew royal families, but still attempted to pass on power to their sons. Even when the rulers change, the powerful families usually remain the same. The institutions may wear a Western patina with modern titles and systems, but underneath all that, the powerful sons of powerful fathers go on giving jobs to their cousins and nephews, consolidating dynastic power for the clan. Getting anything done means dealing with members of the clan and their political machine tied together by blood.
A dynastic power structure is only as stable as the next link in its chain. Mubarak's loss of support was closely tied to his son's reformist agenda. Syria's Assad Jr has become a pawn of Iran. Jordan's new king is at odds with his people. The Saudi royal family is much less secure than it looks. A false step and the entire lot of them will come tumbling down the tightrope.
There is of course one unifying element which has gone unmentioned. Islam. But for all the golden caliphate dreams, the reality is dung and sour ash. An Islamic republic is just another oligarchy, with clerics as the rulers, and the Islamic institution as the incubator of tyrants. Despite its Velayat-e Fiqh trappings (the theory of the guardianship of Islamic jurists) it inevitably also becomes dynastic, as in the case of Iran where powerful families quarrel with each other over control of the resources.
The case of Mohammed is instructive. The first Muslims were members of his own family. His first outside non-family was Abu Bakr, a bargain sealed with the sexual abuse of Aisha, Bakr's six year old daughter given in marriage to Mohammed. And Abu Bakr became the first Caliph after Mohammed. Like most dynastic systems, Islam proved unstable. The Sunni-Shiite split happened over a debate of succession between Mohammed's extended family. What most take for a religious split, was actually a political civil war. Sunni and Shiite Muslims are split by the question of whether Abu Bakr or Imam Ali was Mohammed's chosen successor. A theological split that hinges on whether Mohammed should have been succeeded by his father-in-law or his son-in-law is not a theological debate, but of dynastic politics.
The Islamists promise an Allah sanctioned regime that will be fair, honest and ethical. But even their prophet couldn't manage a stable transition-- within his own family. His failure split Islam to the present day. Do they really imagine that they can do any better?
Mohammed's wars were really tribal conflicts cloaked in thinly patched together borrowed religions set to Bedouin poetry. Like most fanatical revolutions, modern Islamists begin by beheading everyone in sight and then eventually settle down to dividing the wealth and setting up their own power structures. And those power structures inevitably become dynastic. For all that Muslim clerics pride themselves on being jurists, they follow no law but their own. Convoluted interpretations of Islam legalized "temporary marriages" in Iran, relabeling everything from premarital sex to prostitution as marital relations so long as the fee gets paid. For all that Islam inveighs against the Bedouin love of wine, women and song-- they always come sneaking in through the back door anyway. And an Islamic republic which flogs women for showing their hair-- has brought back the concubine under the sanction of its own clerics.
Islam is no solution to the problem of power in the Middle East. It is only a perpetuation of the existing problems. Islam cannot create modern Arab states. It cannot provide those states with a meaningful identity. It can only spread more misery, terror and death.
Nor will the so-called democratic elections do any better. The cult of democracy can be as bad as that of Islam. The adherents of both confuse their ideals with a change in culture. But that will not work, no more than it did in Russia. Democracy in the hands of a culture which is not individualistic, is no more than another tribal referendum leading to factional chaos and eventually another oligarchy or tyranny by the strongest and the best organized. There is a long tradition of that sort of thing in Egypt, from the Mamluks to the Muhammad Ali Dynasty. And either the military or the Muslim Brotherhood are the likeliest beneficiaries.
The essential problem is that of law. The clerics speak of it, the activists invoke it and the reformers promise it-- but their law is still that of the government of men. Their authority is still derived from violent mobs, the military and militias. And the law of force is their true law. It is the true law of the entire region, ruled over by the orphans of colonialism, tribesmen who call themselves presidents and military coup leaders who call themselves prime ministers. Referendums will not civilize it and the Koran will not moralize it. A man abides by his own laws. A nation abides by the laws that give it meaning. The Arab world has not found those laws yet. And until it finds them, then lawless it will remain.
National Call to Action Part II
March 1, 2011
By Paul E. Vallely
Barack Obama has been President for just over two years and during that time we have seen unprecedented government expansion and invasive regulation of nearly every aspect of our lives: guns, land, commerce, healthcare, climate, banks, automobiles, energy, and food. He has circumvented Congress by appointing Czars, and has legislated through regulation, Executive Orders, and Signing Statements. He has also flooded the National Labor Relations Board with his Union cronies. He is a one-man government, and has changed our country from the rule-of-law, to the rule-of-man. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition”
James Madison
Is the President Above the Law?
President Barack Obama’s decision not to fully enforce the Defense of Marriage law eventually could lead to a constitutional crisis, as he has directly violated his constitutional duties by arbitrarily suspending a law. If any other President especially a Republican took these Obama actions, there would be calls for Impeachment and there should be. This constitutional crisis is moving to constitutional chaos. The country is doomed unless it slashes its debt and radically revamps the popular Social Security and Medicare programs, but instead, he chastises Governors for making tough choices he refuses to make at his own level.
Attorney General Eric Holder said that the administration will not defend the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act in the courts, which has banned recognition of same-sex marriage for 15 years. President Clinton signed the act into law in 1996. Obama’s decision to forego a legal defense of the law has caused a firestorm of anger from conservative groups. Obama must be taken to task for his decision and as Newt Gingrich points out; Obama is not a one-person Supreme Court and his decision sets a “very dangerous precedent” that must not be allowed to stand.
The Oath of Office versus the ‘Rule-of-Obama’
Obama swore an oath on the Bible when he became President, that he would uphold the Constitution and enforce the laws of the United States. The idea that we now have the Rule of Obama instead of the rule-of-law should frighten everybody. The fact that the Progressives support the policy, is allowing them to ignore the fact that this is a very unconstitutional act. It is absolutely critical for Obama to comply with Congress and the constitutional process.
The House Republicans must pass a resolution instructing the President to enforce the law and to obey his own constitutional oath, and they should say if he fails to do so that they will zero out [defund] the office of Attorney General and take other steps as necessary until the president agrees to do his job. His job is to enforce the law, that’s the job of the Chief Executive of the USA. For us to start replacing the rule-of-law with the Rule-of-Obama is a very dangerous precedent.
Clearly Obama’s and Holder’s actions are a dereliction of duty and a violation of constitutional oath and are something that cannot be allowed to stand.
Have these individuals set out to create a constitutional crisis under the Saul Alinsky and Cloward/Piven model? I think they do not understand the implication that having a President personally suspend a law is clearly unconstitutional, or do they? This is the uncomfortable question many Americans are asking after President Obama’s lawless decision to stop defending the law of the land on the institution of marriage in federal court.
The Obama administration SAID that it will no longer defend the federal law that bans the recognition of same-sex marriage because it considers the legislation unconstitutional, a sudden and rare reversal. Gay rights groups hailed the administration’s move, saying it will bolster their argument that laws that apply a different standard to people based on sexual orientation are unconstitutional. At least three challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act are working their way through the federal courts. Until the courts decide, Obama must enforce the law as it is written.
In effect, Obama is the new ‘Judicial Czar’
Is this the end result of his dubious czar appointments: that he has, in effect, appointed himself “Constitution Czar?” In one move, Obama would override the Constitution and redefine marriage! In Clintonian fashion, Obama will continue to enforce a law he thinks has no constitutional basis. So much for three co-equal branches of the Federal Government.
The Disgrace
Now let’s talk about the disgrace of Attorney General Eric Holder as a citizen and a member of the Obama progressive team. From day one, Judicial Watchvigorously opposed the Holder nomination due to his corrupt record in the Clinton administration as a Deputy Attorney General under Janet Reno. It was apparent that Holder would be a disaster as Attorney General. One could not have predicted just how bad the situation would get on his watch. Just take a moment to review Holder’s record so far:
1 – The top political appointees at Holder’s Justice Department were intimately involved in the decision to dismiss the voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party for Self Defense, a “civil rights” group that brandished weapons, blocked a polling station and hurled racial insults at voters on Election Day 2008.
2 – During the course of a year-long investigation of the Black Panther scandal, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights made startling accusations of racism at Holder’s Justice Department, a charge corroborated by Justice Attorney Christopher Coates.
While failing to protect the country from the scourge of rampant illegal immigration, the Holder Justice Department made matters worse by suing the State of Arizona for implementing a new get-tough illegal immigration law, S.B. 1070. Judicial Watch represents Arizona State Senate President Russell Pearce, the author of S.B. 1070, and the entire Arizona Legislature against this shameless legal assault by Holder’s Justice Department.
3 – Judicial Watch recently received documents from the Department of Justice that show Holder’s DOJ worked hand-in-hand with the radical leftist ACLU in mounting their respective legal challenges.
4 – Just one week after suing Arizona, Holder’s Justice Department announced it would not prosecute sanctuary cities who flout federal immigration laws.
5 – To this day, Eric Holder refuses to initiate any investigation of the corrupt enterprise known as ACORN, despite the organization’s long, sordid history of election fraud. In fact, while noting that ACORN had engaged in “questionable hiring and training practices,” Holder’s Justice Department actually closed down one ACORN investigation in March 2009, claiming ACORN broke no laws.
Meanwhile, the organization, now splintered into corrupt cells across the country, continues to violate the law. Holder’s unwillingness to prosecuteACORN calls into question his impartiality, considering the fact that President Obama previously worked with the organization.
6 – Holder’s record on national security is abysmal. Not only is Holder leading the Obama administration’s ridiculous on-again, off-again campaign to close Guantanamo Bay, but it was Attorney General Holder who made the disastrous initial decision to grant a civilian criminal trial to 9/11 terrorist mastermindKhalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) and other 9/11 terrorists in New York City. AsCNN pointed out, Holder has still not told the American people of his final plan to hold 9/11 terrorists and how they will be brought to justice. I suspect, however, it will not be the justice they deserve. According to press reports, at least seven attorneys inside Holder’s Justice Department previously represented terrorist suspects in court.
7 – And if all of this isn’t enough evidence of Holder’s corruption and incompetence, Fox News has its own expanded list of Holder’s greatest hits. This week’s latest assault on the rule of law lends further support to Judicial Watch’s effort to “Dump Holder.” America needs an Attorney General who will defend the constitutional order and not be a political, personal lawyer for a president who seems to know no constitutional restraints on his power.
You see, we do not need you in government other than to represent us, the People, and abide by and protect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. We will not permit the leaders in the White House and Halls of Congress to lead us down a road of Progressive Socialism and destruction of the Republic. The Patriotic Revolution that I forecasted well over a year ago is happening now.
We Constitutionalists face a battle that is unknown to our generations so we must be aggressive in our collective efforts to continue to turn back the tide. The Fate of the country is now in our hands and the plea from the majority of our citizens is to enforce the Constitution, severely limit the Federal Government and it’s out of control spending. There is a growing list of documented violations of the Constitution and their Oath of Office by current elected and appointed government officials.
Some thoughts to ponder as you think about these points:
The Declaration of Independence states:
“To secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to affect their Safety and Happiness.”
Lincoln issued this warning in his inaugural address:
“Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government and form a new one. This is a most valuable and sacred right – a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world.”
Thomas Jefferson said:
“If once the people become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions.”
James Madison, Federalist No. 51, February 8, 1788
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?
Paul E. Vallely is a retired Major General, US Army, and is the CEO and founder of Stand Up America.
Paul E. Vallely MG, US Army (Ret)
Chairman – Stand Up America
E-Mail: standupamericaceo@gmail.com
www.standupamericaus.com
www.veterandefenders.org
www.soldiersmemorialfund.org
www.patriotsunion.org
By Paul E. Vallely
Barack Obama has been President for just over two years and during that time we have seen unprecedented government expansion and invasive regulation of nearly every aspect of our lives: guns, land, commerce, healthcare, climate, banks, automobiles, energy, and food. He has circumvented Congress by appointing Czars, and has legislated through regulation, Executive Orders, and Signing Statements. He has also flooded the National Labor Relations Board with his Union cronies. He is a one-man government, and has changed our country from the rule-of-law, to the rule-of-man. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition”
James Madison
Is the President Above the Law?
President Barack Obama’s decision not to fully enforce the Defense of Marriage law eventually could lead to a constitutional crisis, as he has directly violated his constitutional duties by arbitrarily suspending a law. If any other President especially a Republican took these Obama actions, there would be calls for Impeachment and there should be. This constitutional crisis is moving to constitutional chaos. The country is doomed unless it slashes its debt and radically revamps the popular Social Security and Medicare programs, but instead, he chastises Governors for making tough choices he refuses to make at his own level.
Attorney General Eric Holder said that the administration will not defend the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act in the courts, which has banned recognition of same-sex marriage for 15 years. President Clinton signed the act into law in 1996. Obama’s decision to forego a legal defense of the law has caused a firestorm of anger from conservative groups. Obama must be taken to task for his decision and as Newt Gingrich points out; Obama is not a one-person Supreme Court and his decision sets a “very dangerous precedent” that must not be allowed to stand.
The Oath of Office versus the ‘Rule-of-Obama’
Obama swore an oath on the Bible when he became President, that he would uphold the Constitution and enforce the laws of the United States. The idea that we now have the Rule of Obama instead of the rule-of-law should frighten everybody. The fact that the Progressives support the policy, is allowing them to ignore the fact that this is a very unconstitutional act. It is absolutely critical for Obama to comply with Congress and the constitutional process.
The House Republicans must pass a resolution instructing the President to enforce the law and to obey his own constitutional oath, and they should say if he fails to do so that they will zero out [defund] the office of Attorney General and take other steps as necessary until the president agrees to do his job. His job is to enforce the law, that’s the job of the Chief Executive of the USA. For us to start replacing the rule-of-law with the Rule-of-Obama is a very dangerous precedent.
Clearly Obama’s and Holder’s actions are a dereliction of duty and a violation of constitutional oath and are something that cannot be allowed to stand.
Have these individuals set out to create a constitutional crisis under the Saul Alinsky and Cloward/Piven model? I think they do not understand the implication that having a President personally suspend a law is clearly unconstitutional, or do they? This is the uncomfortable question many Americans are asking after President Obama’s lawless decision to stop defending the law of the land on the institution of marriage in federal court.
The Obama administration SAID that it will no longer defend the federal law that bans the recognition of same-sex marriage because it considers the legislation unconstitutional, a sudden and rare reversal. Gay rights groups hailed the administration’s move, saying it will bolster their argument that laws that apply a different standard to people based on sexual orientation are unconstitutional. At least three challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act are working their way through the federal courts. Until the courts decide, Obama must enforce the law as it is written.
In effect, Obama is the new ‘Judicial Czar’
Is this the end result of his dubious czar appointments: that he has, in effect, appointed himself “Constitution Czar?” In one move, Obama would override the Constitution and redefine marriage! In Clintonian fashion, Obama will continue to enforce a law he thinks has no constitutional basis. So much for three co-equal branches of the Federal Government.
The Disgrace
Now let’s talk about the disgrace of Attorney General Eric Holder as a citizen and a member of the Obama progressive team. From day one, Judicial Watchvigorously opposed the Holder nomination due to his corrupt record in the Clinton administration as a Deputy Attorney General under Janet Reno. It was apparent that Holder would be a disaster as Attorney General. One could not have predicted just how bad the situation would get on his watch. Just take a moment to review Holder’s record so far:
1 – The top political appointees at Holder’s Justice Department were intimately involved in the decision to dismiss the voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party for Self Defense, a “civil rights” group that brandished weapons, blocked a polling station and hurled racial insults at voters on Election Day 2008.
2 – During the course of a year-long investigation of the Black Panther scandal, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights made startling accusations of racism at Holder’s Justice Department, a charge corroborated by Justice Attorney Christopher Coates.
While failing to protect the country from the scourge of rampant illegal immigration, the Holder Justice Department made matters worse by suing the State of Arizona for implementing a new get-tough illegal immigration law, S.B. 1070. Judicial Watch represents Arizona State Senate President Russell Pearce, the author of S.B. 1070, and the entire Arizona Legislature against this shameless legal assault by Holder’s Justice Department.
3 – Judicial Watch recently received documents from the Department of Justice that show Holder’s DOJ worked hand-in-hand with the radical leftist ACLU in mounting their respective legal challenges.
4 – Just one week after suing Arizona, Holder’s Justice Department announced it would not prosecute sanctuary cities who flout federal immigration laws.
5 – To this day, Eric Holder refuses to initiate any investigation of the corrupt enterprise known as ACORN, despite the organization’s long, sordid history of election fraud. In fact, while noting that ACORN had engaged in “questionable hiring and training practices,” Holder’s Justice Department actually closed down one ACORN investigation in March 2009, claiming ACORN broke no laws.
Meanwhile, the organization, now splintered into corrupt cells across the country, continues to violate the law. Holder’s unwillingness to prosecuteACORN calls into question his impartiality, considering the fact that President Obama previously worked with the organization.
6 – Holder’s record on national security is abysmal. Not only is Holder leading the Obama administration’s ridiculous on-again, off-again campaign to close Guantanamo Bay, but it was Attorney General Holder who made the disastrous initial decision to grant a civilian criminal trial to 9/11 terrorist mastermindKhalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) and other 9/11 terrorists in New York City. AsCNN pointed out, Holder has still not told the American people of his final plan to hold 9/11 terrorists and how they will be brought to justice. I suspect, however, it will not be the justice they deserve. According to press reports, at least seven attorneys inside Holder’s Justice Department previously represented terrorist suspects in court.
7 – And if all of this isn’t enough evidence of Holder’s corruption and incompetence, Fox News has its own expanded list of Holder’s greatest hits. This week’s latest assault on the rule of law lends further support to Judicial Watch’s effort to “Dump Holder.” America needs an Attorney General who will defend the constitutional order and not be a political, personal lawyer for a president who seems to know no constitutional restraints on his power.
You see, we do not need you in government other than to represent us, the People, and abide by and protect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. We will not permit the leaders in the White House and Halls of Congress to lead us down a road of Progressive Socialism and destruction of the Republic. The Patriotic Revolution that I forecasted well over a year ago is happening now.
We Constitutionalists face a battle that is unknown to our generations so we must be aggressive in our collective efforts to continue to turn back the tide. The Fate of the country is now in our hands and the plea from the majority of our citizens is to enforce the Constitution, severely limit the Federal Government and it’s out of control spending. There is a growing list of documented violations of the Constitution and their Oath of Office by current elected and appointed government officials.
Some thoughts to ponder as you think about these points:
The Declaration of Independence states:
“To secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to affect their Safety and Happiness.”
Lincoln issued this warning in his inaugural address:
“Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government and form a new one. This is a most valuable and sacred right – a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world.”
Thomas Jefferson said:
“If once the people become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions.”
James Madison, Federalist No. 51, February 8, 1788
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?
Paul E. Vallely is a retired Major General, US Army, and is the CEO and founder of Stand Up America.
Paul E. Vallely MG, US Army (Ret)
Chairman – Stand Up America
E-Mail: standupamericaceo@gmail.com
www.standupamericaus.com
www.veterandefenders.org
www.soldiersmemorialfund.org
www.patriotsunion.org
28 PA municipalities boycott US aid
PA: The American administration
"cannot extort the Palestinian people
and humiliate it with a bit of aid"
http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&doc_id=4736
by Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik
Twenty eight Palestinian Authority municipalities in the West Bank have announced "a boycott of the American consulate, its diplomats, and the American institutions in Jerusalem." The announcement was made by Hatem Abd Al-Qader, holder of the Jerusalem portfolio in the Fatah party, who explained that the Americans "cannot extort the Palestinian people and humiliate it with a bit of aid." This message repeats PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas's snub of US financial support, reported last week by Palestinian Media Watch. Abbas said he would not allow US aid to "dictate" PA policy.
PA TV news reported that it is specifically the American "aid organizations" that are being boycotted:
"Twenty-eight institutions and local councils in the Jerusalem district have announced their intention to boycott American aid organizations and to cancel the agreements signed with them." [PA TV (Fatah), Feb. 24, 2011]
PA TV quoted Kais Abd Al-Karim, member of the political bureau of the Democratic Front:
"The Palestinian people prefer to start a boycott against these American organizations, which provide so-called assistance, because we prefer liberty and dignity over bread dipped in humiliation and submission." [PA TV (Fatah), Feb. 24, 2011]
Al-Qader explained that the boycott "will continue until the American administration changes its stance... and apologizes to the Palestinian people and its president, Mahmoud Abbas."
It should be noted that the "bit of aid" that the PA is rejecting totaled more than half a billion dollars in 2010 alone [Hillary Clinton speech, Nov. 10, 2010, US State Dept. website]. The PA boycott of American "so-called assistance" will impact significantly on the 28 PA municipalities. The following is just one example of US aid listed on the USAID website under "Water Resources and Infrastructure/ EJP - Emergency Jobs Program":
"Successes : Completed 201 construction activities... Generated more than 350,000 person-days of employment benefiting approximately 1.5 million Palestinians. Graduated 117 Fellows from the Engineering Fellows Program... -Completed four women's centers... with a combined budget of $658,400, generating 6,700 days of employment. Completed a girls' school... one of 15 girls' schools completed throughout the West Bank through EJP with a budget of $428,997, generating 3,495 days of employment. Completed five youth club projects to... benefit more than 38,900 youth and have a combined budget of $2,608,675, generating 19,610 days of employment to date... EJP completed nine health clinic renovations and new construction projects impacting 86,093 beneficiaries with a combined budget of $319,894, generating 5,797 days of employment to date... Life of Project: 09/30/2007-01/30/2011; Total Estimated Cost: $34,000,000."
As stated, this list is just one of many listings of the "bit of aid" and "so-called assistance" the US is currently giving to the PA.
The following is the article in the official PA daily announcing the boycott:
"Hatem Abd Al-Qader, who holds Fatah's Jerusalem portfolio, announced a boycott of the American consulate, its diplomats, and the American institutions in Jerusalem, in protest over the American veto of the proposed law [i.e., resolution] at the [UN] Security Council denouncing the Israeli settlements.
Abd Al-Qader told Agence France Presse: 'The local councils and municipalities in the Jerusalem district, 28 in total, have decided to boycott the American consulate in Jerusalem and all the American institutions, American personnel and diplomats, in protest over the decision of the Barack Obama administration to use its veto power to sabotage a proposed Palestinian resolution denouncing Israeli settlements in the West Bank and in occupied East Jerusalem.'
Abd Al-Qader stated that 'the Palestinian factions in Jerusalem are inclined towards a comprehensive boycott' of American institutions in Jerusalem. He added that this boycott 'will continue until the American administration changes its stance concerning the Palestinian cause, and especially concerning the issue of settlements, and apologizes to the Palestinian people and its president, Mahmoud Abbas.'
Abd Al-Qader said that the American administration 'cannot extort the Palestinian people and humiliate it with a bit of aid and support for Palestinian institutions, and therefore we have decided to boycott these personnel, including the American consulate in occupied Jerusalem.'"
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Feb. 24, 2011]
"cannot extort the Palestinian people
and humiliate it with a bit of aid"
http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&doc_id=4736
by Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik
Twenty eight Palestinian Authority municipalities in the West Bank have announced "a boycott of the American consulate, its diplomats, and the American institutions in Jerusalem." The announcement was made by Hatem Abd Al-Qader, holder of the Jerusalem portfolio in the Fatah party, who explained that the Americans "cannot extort the Palestinian people and humiliate it with a bit of aid." This message repeats PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas's snub of US financial support, reported last week by Palestinian Media Watch. Abbas said he would not allow US aid to "dictate" PA policy.
PA TV news reported that it is specifically the American "aid organizations" that are being boycotted:
"Twenty-eight institutions and local councils in the Jerusalem district have announced their intention to boycott American aid organizations and to cancel the agreements signed with them." [PA TV (Fatah), Feb. 24, 2011]
PA TV quoted Kais Abd Al-Karim, member of the political bureau of the Democratic Front:
"The Palestinian people prefer to start a boycott against these American organizations, which provide so-called assistance, because we prefer liberty and dignity over bread dipped in humiliation and submission." [PA TV (Fatah), Feb. 24, 2011]
Al-Qader explained that the boycott "will continue until the American administration changes its stance... and apologizes to the Palestinian people and its president, Mahmoud Abbas."
It should be noted that the "bit of aid" that the PA is rejecting totaled more than half a billion dollars in 2010 alone [Hillary Clinton speech, Nov. 10, 2010, US State Dept. website]. The PA boycott of American "so-called assistance" will impact significantly on the 28 PA municipalities. The following is just one example of US aid listed on the USAID website under "Water Resources and Infrastructure/ EJP - Emergency Jobs Program":
"Successes : Completed 201 construction activities... Generated more than 350,000 person-days of employment benefiting approximately 1.5 million Palestinians. Graduated 117 Fellows from the Engineering Fellows Program... -Completed four women's centers... with a combined budget of $658,400, generating 6,700 days of employment. Completed a girls' school... one of 15 girls' schools completed throughout the West Bank through EJP with a budget of $428,997, generating 3,495 days of employment. Completed five youth club projects to... benefit more than 38,900 youth and have a combined budget of $2,608,675, generating 19,610 days of employment to date... EJP completed nine health clinic renovations and new construction projects impacting 86,093 beneficiaries with a combined budget of $319,894, generating 5,797 days of employment to date... Life of Project: 09/30/2007-01/30/2011; Total Estimated Cost: $34,000,000."
As stated, this list is just one of many listings of the "bit of aid" and "so-called assistance" the US is currently giving to the PA.
The following is the article in the official PA daily announcing the boycott:
"Hatem Abd Al-Qader, who holds Fatah's Jerusalem portfolio, announced a boycott of the American consulate, its diplomats, and the American institutions in Jerusalem, in protest over the American veto of the proposed law [i.e., resolution] at the [UN] Security Council denouncing the Israeli settlements.
Abd Al-Qader told Agence France Presse: 'The local councils and municipalities in the Jerusalem district, 28 in total, have decided to boycott the American consulate in Jerusalem and all the American institutions, American personnel and diplomats, in protest over the decision of the Barack Obama administration to use its veto power to sabotage a proposed Palestinian resolution denouncing Israeli settlements in the West Bank and in occupied East Jerusalem.'
Abd Al-Qader stated that 'the Palestinian factions in Jerusalem are inclined towards a comprehensive boycott' of American institutions in Jerusalem. He added that this boycott 'will continue until the American administration changes its stance concerning the Palestinian cause, and especially concerning the issue of settlements, and apologizes to the Palestinian people and its president, Mahmoud Abbas.'
Abd Al-Qader said that the American administration 'cannot extort the Palestinian people and humiliate it with a bit of aid and support for Palestinian institutions, and therefore we have decided to boycott these personnel, including the American consulate in occupied Jerusalem.'"
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Feb. 24, 2011]
United We Can Achieve It!
Steven Shamrak
We write good articles full of facts supporting the rights of Israel to exist and exposing lies of our enemies, protest anti-Israel media bias, sign an endless stream of petitions, call our political representatives and still wonder why nothing has changed. Meanwhile, the situation in Israel is getting worse! All of these activities are very important, but in order to defeat our enemies and bring peace to Israel, if we honestly examine the history, we have to admit that these efforts will never change the world's attitude toward Jews and Israel. It has never really worked! Only a strong Israel and a self-respecting Jewish nation will be able to change the current ugly reality. We must set our own goals, develop plans of action and execute it. That's what people do in sports, business and in their personal life to make a difference. The biggest secret is - any goal can be achieved - one just needs to have a burning desire, followed by action, to achieve it!
Our enemies love when we squander our time and resources on a rebuttal of their stupid accusations and anti-Israel smear campaigns. This takes our attention away from the pursuit of our national goals. Hazborah is an important part of the process of defeating enemy propaganda, but it leads nowhere without action toward reunification of all Jewish land, freeing it from Arab occupation and establishing all of Eretz-Israel!
Unfortunately we have corrupt and inept current Jewish political leadership in Israel and in the Diaspora at the moment! Therefore, only the network of people dedicated to true Zionist ideals can make a difference. Idealists who are united by one goal are needed!
Currently, our most important step must be to unite and combine our efforts in order to become a more effective and formidable political force. The goal is much bigger than just promoting support for Israel, because unfortunately for quite a while Israeli governments have not been representing Zionism - the Jewish independence movement. There is another two-state solution, which may bring peace to Israel. It is the Sinai Option!
In order to achieve our goal we need less debate and more unity. Please, visit and read following links:
http://www.shamrak.com/hauma.php
http://www.shamrak.com/sh_articles/EA_The Jewish National Goal.htm
http://www.shamrak.com/sh_articles/EA_Sinai Option.htm
We write good articles full of facts supporting the rights of Israel to exist and exposing lies of our enemies, protest anti-Israel media bias, sign an endless stream of petitions, call our political representatives and still wonder why nothing has changed. Meanwhile, the situation in Israel is getting worse! All of these activities are very important, but in order to defeat our enemies and bring peace to Israel, if we honestly examine the history, we have to admit that these efforts will never change the world's attitude toward Jews and Israel. It has never really worked! Only a strong Israel and a self-respecting Jewish nation will be able to change the current ugly reality. We must set our own goals, develop plans of action and execute it. That's what people do in sports, business and in their personal life to make a difference. The biggest secret is - any goal can be achieved - one just needs to have a burning desire, followed by action, to achieve it!
Our enemies love when we squander our time and resources on a rebuttal of their stupid accusations and anti-Israel smear campaigns. This takes our attention away from the pursuit of our national goals. Hazborah is an important part of the process of defeating enemy propaganda, but it leads nowhere without action toward reunification of all Jewish land, freeing it from Arab occupation and establishing all of Eretz-Israel!
Unfortunately we have corrupt and inept current Jewish political leadership in Israel and in the Diaspora at the moment! Therefore, only the network of people dedicated to true Zionist ideals can make a difference. Idealists who are united by one goal are needed!
Currently, our most important step must be to unite and combine our efforts in order to become a more effective and formidable political force. The goal is much bigger than just promoting support for Israel, because unfortunately for quite a while Israeli governments have not been representing Zionism - the Jewish independence movement. There is another two-state solution, which may bring peace to Israel. It is the Sinai Option!
In order to achieve our goal we need less debate and more unity. Please, visit and read following links:
http://www.shamrak.com/hauma.php
http://www.shamrak.com/sh_articles/EA_The Jewish National Goal.htm
http://www.shamrak.com/sh_articles/EA_Sinai Option.htm
Bylaws Disappear from Brotherhood's English-language Site
PT News
February 28, 2011
http://www.investigativeproject.org/2635/bylaws-disappear-from-brotherhood-english
The Muslim Brotherhood seems to be trying to preserve its recently burnished image as a moderate party dedicated to maintaining a modern, secular, and just Egypt.
In keeping with this apparent internal strategy, the Brotherhood has removed its explicitly worded bylaws from its English-language website, the Investigative Project on Terrorism has learned (H/T to the Strategic Engagement Group). The bylaws are still available via an archived version of the webpage.
Read more at: http://www.investigativeproject.org/2635/bylaws-disappear-from-brotherhood-english And here is the rest of it.
February 28, 2011
http://www.investigativeproject.org/2635/bylaws-disappear-from-brotherhood-english
The Muslim Brotherhood seems to be trying to preserve its recently burnished image as a moderate party dedicated to maintaining a modern, secular, and just Egypt.
In keeping with this apparent internal strategy, the Brotherhood has removed its explicitly worded bylaws from its English-language website, the Investigative Project on Terrorism has learned (H/T to the Strategic Engagement Group). The bylaws are still available via an archived version of the webpage.
Read more at: http://www.investigativeproject.org/2635/bylaws-disappear-from-brotherhood-english And here is the rest of it.
To See The Future of Egypt....Just Look At the Present of Gaza
Yid with Lid
If you want to predict what the Muslim Brotherhood will do to Egypt, just take a look at what Hamas -- the organization they sired -- is doing to the Gaza Strip. What most people know is that Hamas has been using the Gaza Strip as a staging ground for terrorist attacks on Israel. The big secret the American media doesn’t tell you is Hamas is trying to ethnically cleanse Gaza of not only of non-Muslims but Muslims who are not fundamentalist enough I know what some of you are thinking, how can that be true? After all, Hamas is part of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper says that the Muslim Brotherhood is a secular organization. As for Hamas specifically, look, they have been vouched for by former President Jimmy Carter who says they are not a terrorist organization; he even told President Obama to take them off the terrorist list.
For those of you who exist in the real world the charges are not surprising.
Soon after Hamas took over the Gaza Strip, they announced that they will be governing via strict Islamic law.
Hamas has announced that Gaza will now be ruled according to Islamic Law, all women must wear the head scarfs, no alcohol missionaries face death you know the usual stuff that you see in countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia. That Missionary Law is interpreted broadly so a Christmas tree or a printed gospel can get your head separated from the rest of your bodies.
As Hamas solidified its power in Gaza a series of attacks was directed toward Christians whose purpose was to “encourage” them to leave. In rapid fire a YMCA, school, and internet café were bombed. One would have thought that attacks against the Christian minority would have made big news in the United States, but outside of reports in the Catholic Press the mainstream media has been silent.
The latest news comes from the British paper The Telegraph. It seems Hamas is now terrorizing all people who are not “Muslim enough.”
Hamas has bullied men and women to dress modestly, tried to keep the sexes from mingling in public and sparked a flight of secular university students and educated professionals. Most recently, it has confiscated novels it deems offensive to Islam from a bookshop and banned Gaza's handful of male hairdressers from styling women's hair.
Some argue that the case of Gaza could also be a warning sign for those pushing for quick democratic reforms in the region. Hamas rose to power in part by winning internationally backed parliamentary elections held in 2006.
Unfortunately The Telegraph is romanticizing history; Hamas did win the parliamentary election but became sole owner of the Gaza Strip via a military power grab In June 2007.
Hamas officials say that they are not trying to Islamize Gaza. Their claim is that these latest charges are meant to help deter the international community from recognizing Hamas rule.
But the truth is before Hamas took over Gaza was largely secular in nature where you could find many westernized entertainment venues such as bars and movie theaters. But as the fundamentalist Hamas began to build its power those venues became the target of attacks.
In recent years, hardliners have burned down the cinemas. Their charred remains are still visible in Gaza City. Militants blew up the last bar in 2005.
Gaza women, whose attire once varied from Western pants and skirts to colorful traditional embroidered robes, began complying with the 2007 dictate, donning ankle-length loose robes, face veils, once rarely seen in Gaza, are now a common sight.
Today, plainclothes officers sometimes halt couples in the streets, demanding to see marriage licenses. Last year, the Interior Ministry banned women from smoking water pipes in public. Islamic faith does not ban women from smoking, but it is considered taboo in Gaza society.
"In the end, the people who think differently are leaving," said Rami, a 32-year-old activist in one of Gaza's few secular groups. He refused to give his last name, fearing retribution.
Why is any of this important, after all the Gaza Strip is just a tiny bit of land with a little over 1.6 million residents?
There are a few reasons why it is important to understand Gaza.
* It is a reflection of the farce under which the United Nations operates. As the Human Rights Council presents its Anti-Israel resolution of the week, it is Hamas who is making the human rights violations against the Gaza residents.
* Land for Peace. Israel began to withdraw from Gaza on August 15, 2005 and was totally gone by September first of the same year, totally removing the argument Hamas gave for terrorism from Gaza. Within weeks of the withdrawal Hamas expanded its use of Gaza as a launching pad for terrorism. Proving that for the fundamentalist Hamas it’s not really about Gaza, it’s about removing all of the “infidels” from Muslim lands. What they are doing to Gaza is what they want to do to all of the disputed territories and eventually all of Israel. Do we really want to encourage Israel to abandon Judea and Samaria as long as Hamas is a threat to take it over?
* Egypt. For those in the leftist media (such as the progressive NPR) who still believe that the Muslim Brotherhood is a moderate, secular organization one need only look at Hamas to know what life in Egypt under a Muslim Brotherhood-influenced government would be. For proof that Hamas is still part of the Brotherhood, one need only look at article two of the Hamas Charter.
* The Islamic Resistance Movement [Hamas] is one of the wings of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine. The Muslim Brotherhood movement is a global organization and is the largest of the Islamic movements in modern times. It is distinguished by its profound understanding and its conceptual precision and by the fact that it encompasses the totality of Islamic concepts in all aspects of life, in thought and in creed, in politics and in economics, in education and in social affairs, in judicial matters and in matters of government, in preaching and in teaching, in art and in communications, in secret and in the open, and in all other areas of life.
The Gaza Strip has gone from a westernized, secular piece of land to a population that has been intimidated into the fundamentalist Islamic way of life. With a growing influence in the remaining territories under the Palestinian Authority, given the opportunity, Hamas will turn Judea and Samaria into an Islamist dominated area and a terrorist staging ground.
Keep in mind that the terrorist group is part of the global Muslim Brotherhood movement so by looking at how Hamas is “behaving” in Gaza, we can see how the Muslim Brotherhood will act if it is allowed to take control of Egypt
The West's proxy war against the Jews
CAROLINE GLICK
It was a stunning moment of moral clarity. As the South Vietnamese refugees clambered onto rickety boats in the South China Sea to escape the victorious Communists, the American Left that orchestrated the US defeat through a sustained campaign of propaganda and fake calls for peace stood silent. As Pol Pot, the "progressive" dictator tortured and murdered a third of his people in Cambodia, the leftists "peace" activists in the US and Europe who never saw a US military operation that was justified, turned a blind eye.
The silence of the likes of Susan Sontag, Jane Fonda, Noam Chomsky and their fellow travelers came to mind last week when the Western media and intellectual elites averted their gaze as Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the long exiled spiritual guide of the Muslim Brotherhood spoke before a crowd of millions at Cairo's Tahrir Square.
Qaradawi, who had been living in exile in Qatar during Hosni Mubarak's reign, became an international jihadist superstar thanks to Qatar's unelected potentate Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani who gave him his jihad indoctrination show on Al Jazeera. From his internationally televised soapbox, Qaradawi regularly preaches international jihad and genocide of Jewry to millions of fans worldwide.
Two important things happened during Qaradawi's appearance in Cairo. First, his handlers refused to allow Google's Egyptian Internet revolutionary Wael Ghonim to join the cleric on the dais. For anyone willing to notice, Qaradawi's message in spurning Ghonim was indisputable. As far as the jihadists are concerned, Ghonim and his fellow Internet activists are the present day equivalent of Lenin's useful idiots.
They did their job of convincing credulous Western liberals that the overthrow of Mubarak was all about sweetness and light.
And now they are no longer needed.
The second message was Qaradawi's call to destroy Israel. With millions of adoring fans crying out "Amen," and "Allahu Akhbar," Qaradawi called for a Muslim conquest of Jerusalem - that is, for the destruction of Israel. As a first step, he demanded that the Egyptian military open the Egyptian border with Gaza.
In the dismal tradition of its Vietnam-era teachers, today's international Left had nothing to say about Qaradawi's genocidal speech. In the New York Times' write-up of Qaradawi's triumphant return to Egypt for instance, the murder-inciting cleric was referred to as a champion of democracy and pluralism.
Leftist writers like Peter Beinart have spent the better part of the past month whitewashing and belittling the significance of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The same Muslim Brotherhood that was founded in 1928 and got its first boost from the Nazis who funded their anti-Jewish pogroms in Cairo and Alexandria in 1939 is seen as nothing to worry about. US President Barack Obama's Director of National Intelligence James Clapper assured Congress that the Muslim Brotherhood is largely secular. This is the same Muslim Brotherhood whose motto is, "Allah is our objective; the prophet is our leader; the Koran is our law; Jihad is our way; Dying in the path of Allah is our goal."
THE SAME Left who champions Qaradawi as a liberal is absolutely adamant that the revolutions now raging throughout the Muslim world are a mere sideshow to the region's chief drama. The revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan, Oman, Morocco and Saudi Arabia are nothing. And the anti-regime protests in Iran have no strategic significance whatsoever to the West, which is mortally threatened by the mullocracy.
Who cares if the Arabs are ruled by tyrants, democrats, jihadists, or fascists? The only thing that matters is that "Palestine" is free of Israeli "occupation."
How can anyone get excited about the future of the oil-dependent global economy when Jews still reside in Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria and Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem?
The Left's essential indifference to the plight of hundreds of millions of Arabs and its significance for the West was exposed in a news analysis by Brendan O'Neill in The Australian on February 16. O'Neill noted that whereas the demonstrators in Cairo were fairly silent on the issue of the Palestinians, anti-Mubarak demonstrations throughout the West prominently featured anti-Israel slogans and chants of "Free, free Palestine!"
O'Neill concluded that the contrasting messages, "reveals something important about the Palestine issue.... [It] has become less important for Arabs and of the utmost symbolic importance for Western radicals at exactly the same time."
Actually, it is important to Western leftists and jihadists, which is why the Palestinians only became a salient issue in Egypt after the Muslim Brotherhood began taking control over the opposition movement with Qaradawi's sermon on February 18.
IN A groundbreaking study of the propaganda war against Israel entitled "The Big Lie and the Media War against Israel: From Inversion of Truth to Inversion of Reality," published in Jewish Political Studies Review in March 2007, Joel Fishman showed that the Muslim Brotherhood's propaganda war against Israel, like the Left's propaganda war against Israel, relied heavily on Nazi propaganda against Jews.
The early partnership between the Brotherhood and the Nazis, brought together by Palestinian Arab leader and Nazi agent Haj Amin el Husseini imported European anti-Semitism to the Muslim world. Beginning in the early 1950s, Nazi war criminals immigrated to Egypt. There they recreated much of Josef Goebbels' anti-Semitic propaganda operation for Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Fishman also documented how in the aftermath of World War II, and particularly after Israel's victory in the Six Day War, the Soviets adapted Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda to demonize Israel as the new, collective Jew and in turn demonize the collective Jew as the new Nazi Germany.
Two sources fed the Soviet anti-Jewish/anti-Zionist propaganda machine: former Nazi propagandists in Egypt; and former Nazi propagandists employed by the East German Communist regime. According to Fishman, the messages developed by these ex-Nazi propagandists were the basis for the Soviet campaign to delegitimize Israel which began in earnest after 1967. The call to arms was published first in a Pravda editorial in October 1967. There, Zionism, the Jewish national liberation movement was reviled as dedicated to "genocide, racism, treachery, aggression, and annexation...all characteristic attributes of fascists."
With both the Soviets and the Arabs spewing the same inverted message, it didn't take long for it to become the rage in Europe. Europe's adoption of the Nazi-inspired propaganda in which reality was inverted and Israel - the victim of Arab imperialist, genocidal aggression - became the imperialist, genocidal aggressor was facilitated by France's embrace of the Arab camp after its withdrawal from Algeria and effective withdrawal from NATO.
By 1975, with the UN General Assembly's adoption of the Soviet-Arab sponsored resolution 3379 defining Zionism as racism, most European governments had fallen in line with the Soviet-Arab propaganda war.
They in turn spent the next generation bringing their message to America.
TODAY, THAT message has become the sum total of Europe's Middle East policy. From their massive global funding of anti-Israel NGOs, to their financing of anti-Zionist films, plays, art exhibitions and educational curricula throughout the world and their bankrolling of the Palestinian Authority, the Europeans have put their money where their mouths and well-washed brains are.
As Norway's plan to run the Israeli embassy out of Oslo because its security measures annoy its neighbors; to European authorities' refusal to provide police protection for their threatened Jewish communities; to initiatives like the Dutch Parliament's current bid to outlaw Jewish ritual slaughter all make clear, hatred of Israel runs seamlessly into outright governmental aggression against Jews.
So too, as The Guardian's recent onslaught against the PA for its leaders' willingness to make minor compromises with Israel in the framework of a peace treaty demonstrates, mainstream forces in Britain and throughout Europe now side openly with Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood in their annihilationist war against the Jewish state.
It is this obsessive campaign against Israel that explains the so-called Middle East Quartet's insistence that the most urgent item on the international agenda is coercing Israel to surrender land and rights to the PA.
Whereas the EU cannot figure out a coherent policy regarding Libya even as Muammar Gaddafi massacres his own citizens and sets fire to his oil fields, Europe's leaders are unified in their firm conviction that the so-called "peace process" must be reinvigorated.
So too, the Obama administration remains incapable of lifting a finger to prevent an Iranian proxy from taking over Bahrain or a consortium of al-Qaida terrorists from taking over Yemen. Obama refuses to take any action to help the Libyan people overthrow Gaddafi. As for Iran, Obama maintains his steadfast refusal to take any action to help the Iranian people overthrow their nuclear-proliferating, terror-supporting regime.
But at the same time, the president and his advisors are absolutely committed to coercing Israel to block Jews from building homes in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem and ensuring that everyone is clear that Jews have no legitimate right to our capital city and historic heartland.
As for the Left itself, as Ron Radosh reported in Pajamas Media this week, attendees at J Street's annual post-Zionist confab could barely muster polite applause for the mildly Zionist MKs from Kadima that spoke at the conference. But they broke into raucous applause when Arab and Jewish anti-Zionist speakers proclaimed that all progress in the region is tied to Israel ending its so-called "occupation."
AND THIS brings us back to 1975, to the boat people in the South China Sea, the killing fields in Cambodia, and the Left that couldn't care less about them.
It could be argued that the Bill Ayres, Howard Zinns and Jean Paul Sartes of the world can be forgiven for their decision to side with the Soviets and their Third World proxies against the US and the Western alliance.
After all, they had nothing personal at stake. The Soviets were not threatening their freedom.
And what did they owe to "unprogressive," "reactionary" people from Southeast Asia who agreed with America that Communism was evil and wished to be free?
But the situation is different today. By waging its war against Israel through Palestinian proxies, the West threatens itself. The Nazi propaganda recycled by the Soviets which has enslaved the peoples of Europe and much of America's intellectual elite has not only turned them into willing participants in the new war against the Jews. It has turned them into instruments for their own destruction.
By focusing their attention entirely on Israel and its imaginary crimes, the Europeans and their American admirers ignore the fact that the Islamic war against Israel is itself a proxy war for global jihad.
That war, informed by the same Nazi propaganda, but refined through the prism of Islamic Jew hatred and totalitarian imperialism, does not see Israel's destruction as its ultimate aim. The jihadists, whom the West so happily ignores and whitewashes, have made it absolutely clear that destroying Israel is but the first skirmish in their great war. Their ultimate aim is the conquest of what remains of Western civilization.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.
It was a stunning moment of moral clarity. As the South Vietnamese refugees clambered onto rickety boats in the South China Sea to escape the victorious Communists, the American Left that orchestrated the US defeat through a sustained campaign of propaganda and fake calls for peace stood silent. As Pol Pot, the "progressive" dictator tortured and murdered a third of his people in Cambodia, the leftists "peace" activists in the US and Europe who never saw a US military operation that was justified, turned a blind eye.
The silence of the likes of Susan Sontag, Jane Fonda, Noam Chomsky and their fellow travelers came to mind last week when the Western media and intellectual elites averted their gaze as Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the long exiled spiritual guide of the Muslim Brotherhood spoke before a crowd of millions at Cairo's Tahrir Square.
Qaradawi, who had been living in exile in Qatar during Hosni Mubarak's reign, became an international jihadist superstar thanks to Qatar's unelected potentate Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani who gave him his jihad indoctrination show on Al Jazeera. From his internationally televised soapbox, Qaradawi regularly preaches international jihad and genocide of Jewry to millions of fans worldwide.
Two important things happened during Qaradawi's appearance in Cairo. First, his handlers refused to allow Google's Egyptian Internet revolutionary Wael Ghonim to join the cleric on the dais. For anyone willing to notice, Qaradawi's message in spurning Ghonim was indisputable. As far as the jihadists are concerned, Ghonim and his fellow Internet activists are the present day equivalent of Lenin's useful idiots.
They did their job of convincing credulous Western liberals that the overthrow of Mubarak was all about sweetness and light.
And now they are no longer needed.
The second message was Qaradawi's call to destroy Israel. With millions of adoring fans crying out "Amen," and "Allahu Akhbar," Qaradawi called for a Muslim conquest of Jerusalem - that is, for the destruction of Israel. As a first step, he demanded that the Egyptian military open the Egyptian border with Gaza.
In the dismal tradition of its Vietnam-era teachers, today's international Left had nothing to say about Qaradawi's genocidal speech. In the New York Times' write-up of Qaradawi's triumphant return to Egypt for instance, the murder-inciting cleric was referred to as a champion of democracy and pluralism.
Leftist writers like Peter Beinart have spent the better part of the past month whitewashing and belittling the significance of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The same Muslim Brotherhood that was founded in 1928 and got its first boost from the Nazis who funded their anti-Jewish pogroms in Cairo and Alexandria in 1939 is seen as nothing to worry about. US President Barack Obama's Director of National Intelligence James Clapper assured Congress that the Muslim Brotherhood is largely secular. This is the same Muslim Brotherhood whose motto is, "Allah is our objective; the prophet is our leader; the Koran is our law; Jihad is our way; Dying in the path of Allah is our goal."
THE SAME Left who champions Qaradawi as a liberal is absolutely adamant that the revolutions now raging throughout the Muslim world are a mere sideshow to the region's chief drama. The revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan, Oman, Morocco and Saudi Arabia are nothing. And the anti-regime protests in Iran have no strategic significance whatsoever to the West, which is mortally threatened by the mullocracy.
Who cares if the Arabs are ruled by tyrants, democrats, jihadists, or fascists? The only thing that matters is that "Palestine" is free of Israeli "occupation."
How can anyone get excited about the future of the oil-dependent global economy when Jews still reside in Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria and Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem?
The Left's essential indifference to the plight of hundreds of millions of Arabs and its significance for the West was exposed in a news analysis by Brendan O'Neill in The Australian on February 16. O'Neill noted that whereas the demonstrators in Cairo were fairly silent on the issue of the Palestinians, anti-Mubarak demonstrations throughout the West prominently featured anti-Israel slogans and chants of "Free, free Palestine!"
O'Neill concluded that the contrasting messages, "reveals something important about the Palestine issue.... [It] has become less important for Arabs and of the utmost symbolic importance for Western radicals at exactly the same time."
Actually, it is important to Western leftists and jihadists, which is why the Palestinians only became a salient issue in Egypt after the Muslim Brotherhood began taking control over the opposition movement with Qaradawi's sermon on February 18.
IN A groundbreaking study of the propaganda war against Israel entitled "The Big Lie and the Media War against Israel: From Inversion of Truth to Inversion of Reality," published in Jewish Political Studies Review in March 2007, Joel Fishman showed that the Muslim Brotherhood's propaganda war against Israel, like the Left's propaganda war against Israel, relied heavily on Nazi propaganda against Jews.
The early partnership between the Brotherhood and the Nazis, brought together by Palestinian Arab leader and Nazi agent Haj Amin el Husseini imported European anti-Semitism to the Muslim world. Beginning in the early 1950s, Nazi war criminals immigrated to Egypt. There they recreated much of Josef Goebbels' anti-Semitic propaganda operation for Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Fishman also documented how in the aftermath of World War II, and particularly after Israel's victory in the Six Day War, the Soviets adapted Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda to demonize Israel as the new, collective Jew and in turn demonize the collective Jew as the new Nazi Germany.
Two sources fed the Soviet anti-Jewish/anti-Zionist propaganda machine: former Nazi propagandists in Egypt; and former Nazi propagandists employed by the East German Communist regime. According to Fishman, the messages developed by these ex-Nazi propagandists were the basis for the Soviet campaign to delegitimize Israel which began in earnest after 1967. The call to arms was published first in a Pravda editorial in October 1967. There, Zionism, the Jewish national liberation movement was reviled as dedicated to "genocide, racism, treachery, aggression, and annexation...all characteristic attributes of fascists."
With both the Soviets and the Arabs spewing the same inverted message, it didn't take long for it to become the rage in Europe. Europe's adoption of the Nazi-inspired propaganda in which reality was inverted and Israel - the victim of Arab imperialist, genocidal aggression - became the imperialist, genocidal aggressor was facilitated by France's embrace of the Arab camp after its withdrawal from Algeria and effective withdrawal from NATO.
By 1975, with the UN General Assembly's adoption of the Soviet-Arab sponsored resolution 3379 defining Zionism as racism, most European governments had fallen in line with the Soviet-Arab propaganda war.
They in turn spent the next generation bringing their message to America.
TODAY, THAT message has become the sum total of Europe's Middle East policy. From their massive global funding of anti-Israel NGOs, to their financing of anti-Zionist films, plays, art exhibitions and educational curricula throughout the world and their bankrolling of the Palestinian Authority, the Europeans have put their money where their mouths and well-washed brains are.
As Norway's plan to run the Israeli embassy out of Oslo because its security measures annoy its neighbors; to European authorities' refusal to provide police protection for their threatened Jewish communities; to initiatives like the Dutch Parliament's current bid to outlaw Jewish ritual slaughter all make clear, hatred of Israel runs seamlessly into outright governmental aggression against Jews.
So too, as The Guardian's recent onslaught against the PA for its leaders' willingness to make minor compromises with Israel in the framework of a peace treaty demonstrates, mainstream forces in Britain and throughout Europe now side openly with Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood in their annihilationist war against the Jewish state.
It is this obsessive campaign against Israel that explains the so-called Middle East Quartet's insistence that the most urgent item on the international agenda is coercing Israel to surrender land and rights to the PA.
Whereas the EU cannot figure out a coherent policy regarding Libya even as Muammar Gaddafi massacres his own citizens and sets fire to his oil fields, Europe's leaders are unified in their firm conviction that the so-called "peace process" must be reinvigorated.
So too, the Obama administration remains incapable of lifting a finger to prevent an Iranian proxy from taking over Bahrain or a consortium of al-Qaida terrorists from taking over Yemen. Obama refuses to take any action to help the Libyan people overthrow Gaddafi. As for Iran, Obama maintains his steadfast refusal to take any action to help the Iranian people overthrow their nuclear-proliferating, terror-supporting regime.
But at the same time, the president and his advisors are absolutely committed to coercing Israel to block Jews from building homes in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem and ensuring that everyone is clear that Jews have no legitimate right to our capital city and historic heartland.
As for the Left itself, as Ron Radosh reported in Pajamas Media this week, attendees at J Street's annual post-Zionist confab could barely muster polite applause for the mildly Zionist MKs from Kadima that spoke at the conference. But they broke into raucous applause when Arab and Jewish anti-Zionist speakers proclaimed that all progress in the region is tied to Israel ending its so-called "occupation."
AND THIS brings us back to 1975, to the boat people in the South China Sea, the killing fields in Cambodia, and the Left that couldn't care less about them.
It could be argued that the Bill Ayres, Howard Zinns and Jean Paul Sartes of the world can be forgiven for their decision to side with the Soviets and their Third World proxies against the US and the Western alliance.
After all, they had nothing personal at stake. The Soviets were not threatening their freedom.
And what did they owe to "unprogressive," "reactionary" people from Southeast Asia who agreed with America that Communism was evil and wished to be free?
But the situation is different today. By waging its war against Israel through Palestinian proxies, the West threatens itself. The Nazi propaganda recycled by the Soviets which has enslaved the peoples of Europe and much of America's intellectual elite has not only turned them into willing participants in the new war against the Jews. It has turned them into instruments for their own destruction.
By focusing their attention entirely on Israel and its imaginary crimes, the Europeans and their American admirers ignore the fact that the Islamic war against Israel is itself a proxy war for global jihad.
That war, informed by the same Nazi propaganda, but refined through the prism of Islamic Jew hatred and totalitarian imperialism, does not see Israel's destruction as its ultimate aim. The jihadists, whom the West so happily ignores and whitewashes, have made it absolutely clear that destroying Israel is but the first skirmish in their great war. Their ultimate aim is the conquest of what remains of Western civilization.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.
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