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December 2015

Turkey and Israel: A Rickety Handshake by Burak Bekdil

It would be truly embarrassing if a Turkey-Israel normalization results in new arms shipments into Gaza and rockets over Israeli skies — with the only achievement being a temporary peace with Turkey’s Islamists, who never hide their ideological kinship with Hamas.

The future Turkish and Israeli ambassadors would always have to keep their bags packed, ready to return to their own capitals at the first dispute – which could be caused by Israeli retaliation against Arab terrorism or anything that may make Erdogan roar in front of cameras.

How do you shake hands with a man whom you know ideologically hates you and wishes to mess up things at his earliest convenience?

None of this happened half a century ago; the timeline here covers only a span of a year and a half: A Turkish-Kurdish pop star wrote on her Twitter account, “May God bless Hitler. He did far less [than he should have done to Jews].” The mayor of Ankara replied: “I applaud you!” Hundreds of angry Turks, hurling rocks, tried to break into the Israeli diplomatic missions in Ankara and Istanbul. The mayor of Ankara said: “We will conquer the consulate of the despicable murderers.” He blamed the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris on Israel’s Mossad. Islamist columnists close to the government suggested imposing a “wealth tax” on Turkish Jews (who are full citizens). A governor threatened to suspend restoration work at a synagogue. And a credible research group at the Kadir Has University in Istanbul found in a poll that Turks view Israel as the top threat to Turkey.

Why Palestinians Love Baby-Killers by Bassam Tawil

Samir Kuntar murdered four Israelis. One of his victims was a four-year-old girl, Einat Haran. Kuntar smashed her skull. Kuntar was killed this week in Syria while helping President Bashar Assad commit war crimes against his own citizens.

Senior Palestinian official Sultan Abu Al-Einein evidently believes that murdering Jews is not a “despicable crime,” but killing an arch-terrorist such as Kuntar is a “despicable crime.”

When the Western-backed Palestinian Authority openly endorses terrorists and names streets, squares and schools after them, Palestinian leaders are sending a message to their people that murdering Jews is a noble and dignified act. This show of solidarity with a baby-killer is the direct result of ongoing incitement against Israel and Jews in mosques, the press and social media in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

In this sick, twisted society that the Europeans have bought and paid for, anyone who murders Jews is considered a role model. Anyone who supports peace with Israel is denounced as a “traitor.”

Ted Cruz’s View of the Race: Iowa Locked Up, Immigration at the Fore, and a Looming Battle with Rubio By Tim Alberta

Las Vegas — Ted Cruz can see himself on a collision course with Marco Rubio, barreling toward a head-to-head battle with his fellow senator for the Republican nomination — that is, if Rubio can deliver on his end of the deal.

In a wide-ranging interview here Thursday, Cruz predicted that the GOP race will boil down to the familiar dynamic of an establishment favorite squaring off against a conservative challenger after they claim victories in New Hampshire and Iowa, respectively. “I believe I will be that conservative candidate,” Cruz says. “I don’t know who the moderate candidate will be.”

The Texas senator says he has consolidated the conservative “lane” of the race — thanks to the exits of Scott Walker, Rick Perry, and Bobby Jindal as well as to the fade of Ben Carson — and is confident he will win Iowa and become one of the two finalists. “I don’t believe we have peaked,” he says when asked about surging to the top of several Iowa polls this week, and about the potential danger in taking the lead there seven weeks from the caucuses.

Hillary’s Insane Lie about Trump By Jim Geraghty

In Saturday’s Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton claimed that Donald Trump “is becoming ISIS’s greatest recruiter.”

It’s a self-evidently ludicrous claim, unsupported by even the tiniest shred of evidence, as PolitiFact, CNN, and even Vox were quick to point out. But when Meet the Press host Chuck Todd pressed Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta about the claim on Sunday, Podesta pointed to a little-noticed report from NBC News.

“Well look, Chuck, your own network ran a piece citing the most important organization that follows ISIS on social media that said that they are using social media, that they are using Donald Trump as a recruitment tool,” Podesta said. “So that’s what she was referencing and that’s the interpretation we made.”

The report’s headline — “Donald Trump’s Muslim Bashing Aids Cause of Terror Networks, Say Experts” — would seem to give Clinton cover, but its contents are entirely speculative: It never references any specific video or message from the group.

A Congressional Overture to Censorship by Edward Cline

Someone, please, tell me that H.Res.569 is not in violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
Stephen Coughlin alerted me to a House Resolution introduced on December 17th, H.Res.569, “Condemning violence, bigotry, and hateful rhetoric towards Muslims in the United States.114th Congress (2015-2016).” As of this writing, the country remains clueless about this development.

The resolution was introduced by Virginia Democrat Donald S. Beyer, and sponsored by Frank Pallone, a New Jersey Democrat, and endorsed by seventy-one other Representatives, most of them Democrats, and possibly a sprinkling of Republicans. The resolution has gone into committee, but one can predict with confidence that it will emerge virtually unscathed and unaltered. After all, the “victims” are Muslims, and the House wishes to put it in the record that certain of its members are against hurting anyone’s feelings.

Many of the usual suspects have endorsed the resolution: Keith Ellison, a Democrat and Muslim from Minnesota; Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Florida Democrat and chairman of the Democratic National Committee; Charles Rangel, New York Democrat; and Alan Grayson, a Democrat from Florida. Most of the other endorsers’ names I do not recognize. They are all termites who have made careers of eating away at the rule of law and “transforming” America from a Western nation into a multicultural, welfare-statist, politically correct stewpot of no particular character.

Resolutions of this nature have a tendency to be reintroduced later as binding legislation to be forwarded to the Senate. The introduction of this resolution is not yet newsworthy, but it will be if it emerges intact from committee to be voted on by the whole House. One suspects that H.Res.569 was inspired by U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s promise to an audience of Muslim Advocates on December 3rd that she would spend efforts to combat and prosecute anyone guilty of anti-Muslim speech. I do not think the two-week gap between Lynch’s pronouncements and the introduction of the resolution is coincidental. It probably took two weeks to compose and fine-tune its wording.

Of Cannibals and Kings Liberals are eating their kings. By Victor Davis Hanson

Black Lives Matter and other, related groups are still demanding that Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel step down well before his term expires. It appears that Emanuel did not release for over a year a police video showing the possibly unjustified shooting of criminal suspect Laquan McDonald. He apparently was too afraid of losing his reelection bid to another liberal — and expected that, as a former Obama confidant, he would be granted immunity from inner-city anger.

Is liberal anger at the liberal Emanuel a new trend? Will populists one of these days go after the newly declared populist Hillary Clinton for her Wall Street shakedowns? Will greens cannibalize Al Gore and John Kerry for their dinosaur-sized carbon footprints? Will reformers swallow Barack Obama for his scandal-ridden administration?

In Baltimore, crowds of angry minorities rioted and burned stores over the death of detained suspect Freddie Gray — despite the reassurances of a black mayor, black police chief, and black prosecuting attorney. Community anger at police is now a hallmark of nearly every major American city.

Note that in all these cases the protests and riots were directed at city hall and its assorted bureaucracies — run for generations by liberal Democrats. There is not an easy villain, like Bull Connor or Lester Maddox, to be found among current American officials. In both his elections, Obama, for example, captured overwhelmingly the votes in megalopolises like Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. None of these cities in recent years has elected moderate Republican reformers demanding greater transparency, meritocratic hiring practices, lower taxes, less regulation, open bids for municipal services, balanced budgets, and an end to union monopolies.

Counter-Jihad: We’re About Truth, Not Hate Eight leading Counter-Jihad activists speak out. Danusha V. Goska

On December 2, 2015, two Muslim terrorists massacred fourteen Americans at a Christmas party in San Bernardino, California. On December 6, President Obama delivered an Oval Office address. In it, he said, “We cannot turn against one another by letting this fight be defined as a war between America and Islam … It is the responsibility of all Americans to reject discrimination.” Many listeners were disappointed that Obama focused so much passion on lecturing Americans.

Media reported that hostility against Muslims increased after the San Bernardino attack. Public figures including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, filmmaker Michael Moore, and Wheaton college professor Larycia Hawkins insisted that Muslims must be protected against the bigotry, stereotyping, and violence of non-Muslim Americans.

President Obama, Zuckerberg, Moore, and Hawkins are acting on their own bigotry. In hostility and ignorance, they stereotype all Americans (except Muslims, of course) as an inherently ignorant lynch mob. That’s not who we Americans are. If Americans had been hearing from their leaders what they need to hear – a passionate defense of Western Civilization and a ringing condemnation of jihad – average Americans would not feel that they themselves must take on both rhetorical tasks. Americans, as YouTube curmudgeon Pat Condell pointed out, are trying to fill a leadership vacuum and to speak and hear unspoken truths.

It is a demonstrable historical fact that Americans have traditionally not held hatred toward or stereotypes of Muslims. A hundred years ago, if Americans thought of Muslims at all, they associated Muslims with romance. Maud Hull’s 1919 softcore novel The Sheik was a blockbuster bestseller. Superstar Rudolph Valentino made two Sheik films, in 1921 and 1926. They were record-breaking international hits.

It is primarily terrorists and Islam-apologists, people like Obama, Zuckerberg, Moore and Hawkins, who are in fact responsible for the current tension. Politically Correct speech codes suppress and demonize necessary conversations about Islam. Priests and rabbis, presidents and judges, journalists and college professors – the very people whose job it is to wield words to address matters of public import – are complicit. These cultural leaders are all covering their own posteriors, timidly mincing words so that no stray syllable can be used against them. Americans are frustrated and outraged at this absence of frank speech.

Leftist Media Ignore Islamic Terrorist Groups Where is the reporting on Iran’s Islamic terrorist groups that are as monstrous as ISIS? Dr. Majid Rafizadeh

It is intriguing that mainstream media has focused on violent terrorist acts of the Islamic State (IS or ISIS), a radical Sunni Islamist group, while they are deliberately avoiding raising awareness about other Islamist terrorist groups that are as brutal as ISIS, if not worse.

The other groups that I am referring to are primarily the Iranian-backed radical Islamist militias.

Brutal terrorist groups such as Kataib al-Imam Ali (KIA) are not any less violent than ISIS when it comes to the aggressive and horrific tactics they use against civilians. In fact, they are known for showing videos of cut-off heads and bodies burned over open fires. This particular group, which is backed by Iran, originated from the Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army. Shebl al-Zaidi is the secretary-general of Kataib al-Imam Ali and he is known for his sectarian and vicious tactics.

Another militia group that is known locally for its violent attacks is Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq. It reportedly receives approximately $2 million a month from the Islamic Republic.

There exist more than 100 of these Islamist terrorist groups and they are increasing on a daily basis as they branch out.

The Israel Boycotters Who Threaten Us All by Jonathan Neumann

When, in the early 2000s, Arab activists called for a boycott of the Jewish state, it wasn’t especially high on the Israeli agenda. After all, Israel was busy subduing the second Intifada, constructing a security barrier to stop terrorists from getting into Israeli towns and cities, and preparing to pull civilians and the military out of the Gaza Strip. Fast-forward to today, however, and a significant proportion of Israeli diplomacy and pro-Israel advocacy around the world is dedicated to battling the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign. BDS is a diffuse movement — mostly confined to Europe, North America and South Africa — that advocates boycotting Israelis and their nation’s institutions, urges states to sanction Israel, and pressures corporations to divest from the country. Meanwhile, opposition to BDS unites Jews and Zionists, regardless of differences of opinion over Israel’s foreign policy, more than most other issues. Whence, then, did BDS arise, and why? Has it been successful, and what does it say about its supporters? Does it justify the attention Israel and others afford it and, crucially, can it be defeated?

BDS is often dated back to July 2005, when more than a hundred Arab organisations, principally in the West Bank and Gaza, called for a boycott of Israel. But that declaration was in fact the culmination of several years of agitation. Omar Barghouti — widely considered to be the founder and face of BDS — was among several Arab activists to call for such a boycott a year earlier in Ramallah. Earlier still, in April 2002, a letter was published in the Guardian that called for an academic boycott of Israel. It garnered more than 700 signatures (although a counter-petition on the internet boasted more than a thousand), and by October 2002 divestment petitions were circulating on more than 50 campuses in the United States and elsewhere.

SHAME ON THE LIBERALS WHO RATIONALIZE MURDER: NICK COHEN

After the massacres in Paris on November 13, the US Secretary of State John Kerry made a statement so disgraceful you had to read it, rub your eyes, and read it again to comprehend the extent of his folly: “There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that,” Kerry began in the laboured English of an over-promoted middle manager.

“There was a sort of particularised focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of — not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, OK, they’re really angry because of this and that. This Friday was absolutely indiscriminate. It wasn’t to aggrieve one particular sense of wrong. It was to terrorise people.”

The staff of “Charlie Hebdo” in 2006: The cartoonists Cabu, Charb, Tignous and Honoré (first, second, fourth and fifth from left) were all killed in the 2015 attack, and Riss, third from left, was wounded. Meurisse, second from right, happened to be out of the office (© Joel Saget/AFP/ Getty Images)

Did you get that? Then allow me to translate. Kerry believes the satirists Islamist gunmen killed at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris’s 11th arrondissement on January 5 had it coming. It is not that they deserved to die. John Kerry is a New England liberal, after all, and does not endorse the death penalty for journalists. But liberalism is a two-faced creed. It can mean that you believe in individual freedom and abhor every variety of prejudice, including the prejudice that allows men to shoot journalists dead for producing a magazine they disapprove of. Or it can mean that you go to such lengths to take account of your enemy’s opinions you become indistinguishable from him.