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December 2015

Refusing to Give Up the Ghost of Oslo By Sarah N. Stern

Pundits, analysts, and self-proclaimed “experts” refuse to acknowledge that the Oslo paradigm has been an abysmal failure
There is a complete industry that has grown up around the Oslo Accords that has kept many people employed for two decades now, inside the Beltway, far removed from the daily reality of the knifings and vehicular deaths that the people in Israel have to endure on a daily basis. Pundits, analysts, and self-proclaimed “experts” refuse to acknowledge that the Oslo paradigm has been an abysmal failure, and has only served to empower a group whose leaders daily inculcate their people towards hatred of Israelis and Jews and who harbor and encourage maximalist fantasies of what a final solution will look like.

A prominent Washington think tank held a seminar last week with former Labor Party Member of the Knesset, Einat Wilf, and Ghaith Al-Omari, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute and the former Executive Director of the American Task Force on Palestine. Al-Omari previously held various positions within the Palestinian Authority, including advisor to the Palestinian negotiating team during the 1999-2001 permanent-status talks.

Ms. Wilf candidly opened up her remarks with this statement: “I want to start by saying, often, when I am asked by diplomats, ‘How can I help? What can I do for peace?’ Actually my answer is always, ‘If we were left alone it would be best. Because we do not benefit by having this conflict constantly played out on the world’s stage.’”

How to Deal With Terrorists Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin thought rescuing the hostages was infeasible. His rival, Shimon Peres, insisted that surrender wasn’t an option.By Jordan Chandler Hirsch

Israeli lawyer Akiva Laxer might be the most star-crossed traveler since the invention of the airplane. In May 1972, he was at Israel’s international airport, roughly a dozen miles outside of Tel Aviv, when members of a leftist terror group allied with the Palestine Liberation Organization staged a mass shooting that killed 26 people. A few months later, he was in Munich for the Olympic Games when Palestinian terrorists kidnapped and murdered 11 Israeli athletes. And then, on June 27, 1976, he found himself a hostage on an Air France plane in the midst of perhaps the most storied terror attack and rescue in the 20th century: the hijacking in Entebbe, Uganda.

Dozens of books and movies have tried to capture the menace and the romance of the operation, most famously “Raid on Entebbe,” the 1977 TV movie starring Peter Finch and Charles Bronson. It’s no wonder. The event sports a colorful cast of heroes and villains. In “Operation Thunderbolt,” British historian Saul David relies on extensive interviews with the captors, kidnapped and rescuers to retell the story in a tick-tock trek from Tel Aviv bunkers to the airport in Entebbe. The effect is heart-racing.

The tale began when Air France announced that Flight 139, departing from Israel, would make an unscheduled layover in Athens. The news rattled 12-year-old passenger Olivier Cojot, who told his father, Michel: “If I were a terrorist I would get on at the stopover.” In 1976, there were roughly three plane hijackings each month. Even young Olivier knew that a flight carrying Israelis through Athens, an airport with lax security, presented a prime target.

Bring Them Home, Mr. President Iran learned from the first hostage crisis how to make U.S. prisoners pay off.By William McGurn

On Thursday night as the ball drops in Times Square, millions of Americans watching on TV will join the revelers in Manhattan to celebrate the new year. For other Americans, alas, the arrival of Jan. 1 will mark only the beginning of another year behind Iranian bars.

It’s long past time to bring these men home.

At last year’s White House welcome for Bowe Bergdahl—the soldier who walked away from his combat post in Afghanistan and will soon be tried for desertion and misbehavior before the enemy—President Obama did manage to refer to other Americans “unjustly detained abroad” who also “deserve to be reunited with their families.”

So what has happened since? Last summer, scarcely a year after that Rose Garden ceremony, Secretary of State John Kerry announced a nuclear deal with Tehran. The agreement puts the Iranians on a path to a bomb and releases billions of dollars that had been frozen by sanctions. But no American walked free. When asked on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” about these prisoners, Mr. Kerry answered this way:

The Retaking of Ramadi The victory has lessons for the battles for Mosul—and Syria.

The retaking of central Ramadi on Monday by Iraqi security forces is good news by itself but even better if it signals an overdue revival of the moderate Sunni forces in Iraq and the region.

The Ramadi victory was accomplished largely by the Iraqi military, mainly by its Sunni forces with the help of local Sunni tribes, who were aided by U.S. training and weapons. That formula could be a model for success in clearing Islamic State (ISIS) from the rest of Western Iraq and Syria.

The U.S. has helped by picking up the pace of its assistance in recent weeks, inserting more special forces into the theater and supplying more arms. Tactical bombing by the U.S. has limited Islamic State movement, and shoulder-fired antitank weapons have been able to stop ISIS truck bombs from a distance. Recapturing Ramadi, which Islamic State captured last May as the Iraqi army fled, also removes an immediate ISIS threat to Baghdad.

The Revenant – A Review By Marilyn Penn

The fee for screenwriter for The Revenant must be the highest ever paid if you count the actual number of words in the script – for the overlong mid-section, the film is virtually silent. Alejandro Inarritu, the recent Oscar winner for Birdman, has fashioned a tedious survival epic out of difficult circumstances, harsh injuries and heavy breathing. The plot can be summarized in two sentences: Mountain guide leading fur trappers is repeatedly mauled by a huge bear, is left to die, survives that, starvation, a tempestuous body skim down some rapids, along with a Thelma and Louise soar off a cliff on horseback, landing in a tree, then falling to the ground. Despite all of the above plus the trauma of seeing his only son killed, he lives to trek across the snowy wilderness, eat raw buffalo meat. carve a protective bed out of a horse carcass, listen to the spirit of his dead Indian wife, attack the man who murdered his son and ultimately recognize that only God can exact revenge. Most of this becomes predictable as soon as we see Leonardo de Caprio stir from his comatose state and realize that this movie is more superman cartoon than biography. Even though there was a man whose life provided the inspiration for this film, he’s less a realized individual than an avatar of legendary mountain men. We know he’s better than most because he married an Indian woman and loves his half-breed son; also, because he leaves the ultimate job of executioner to someone else in a burst of spiritual awareness.

Sisi and Rouhani on Crisis in Islam By Rachel Ehrenfeld

Two Muslim Presidents. Two speeches celebrating the anniversary of Prophet Muhammad’s birth. Two very different messages.
Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, on two different occasions ((Dec. 22 and Dec. 24) iterated his call for “changes in approach” that would bring Islam peaceful coexistence of all races, religions and doctrines. He stated: “No one should define someone by their appearance or religion.”

Sisi insisted Muslims should acknowledge that times have changed and, therefore, Islam has to be modernized.
He called again upon the religious scholars at al-Azhar, the highest institute of Sunni Islamic learning, urging them, “Refute the malicious ideas and warped interpretation. Dispel the perplexity of minds and hesitation of hearts. Change all this into an established faith that tolerance does not contradict with religion and that accepting the other does not oppose faith and that the best of people is the most who benefits them all, not benefits Muslims only.”

10 Things America Must Do To Defend Itself From Jihad — on The Glazov Gang

http://jamieglazov.com/2015/12/28/10-things-america-must-do-to-defend-itself-from-jihad-on-the-glazov-gang/

This special edition of The Glazov Gang was guest-hosted by Michael Finch, the president and Chief Operating Officer of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

Michael interviewed Robert Spencer, the Director of JihadWatch.org and the author of the new book The Complete Infidel’s Guide to ISIS.

The two discussed 10 Things America Must Do To Defend Itself From Jihad, with Robert crystallizing the crucial steps the U.S. must take to reverse the tide.

Don’t miss it!

Romancing the Sunni: A US policy tragedy in three acts; Act I By Angelo Codevilla

Lifting the veil

Today, as Daesh/ISIS — a sub-sect of Sunni Islam — murders and encourages murdering Americans, our foreign policy establishment argues that doubling down on efforts to “gain the confidence” of Sunni states, potentates, and peoples will lead them to turn against the jihadis among themselves and to fight Daesh with “boots on the ground.”

For more than a quarter century, as Americans have suffered trouble from the Muslim world’s Sunni and Shia components and as the perennial quarrel between them has intensified, the US government has taken the side of the Sunni. This has not worked out well for us. It is past time for our government to sort out our own business, and to mind it aggressively.
President George W. Bush doing sword dance with then prince (now Saudi king) Salman bin Abdul Aziz in 2008.

President George W. Bush doing sword dance with then prince (now Saudi king) Salman bin Abdul Aziz in 2008.

To understand why hopes for help from the Sunni side are forlorn, we must be clear that jihadism in general and Daesh in particular are logical outgrowths of Wahhabism, Saudi Arabia’s (and the Gulf monarchies’) official religion, about how they fit in the broader conflict between Sunni and Shia, as well as about how the US occupation of Iraq exposed America to the vagaries of intra-Muslim conflicts.

Romancing the Sunni: A US policy tragedy in three acts; Act II By Angelo Codevilla

A surge of confusion

After the February 2006 Sunni bombing of the Samarra Golden Mosque, the US proved unable to hold back the tide of Shia retaliation. The UN estimated that, during 2006 alone, Shia death squads had slaughtered some 34,000 Sunni, many with exemplary cruelty.

Iraq’s Sunni leaders, awakened to the reality that far from cowing the Shia while punishing the Americans they were now in danger of their very lives. They offered to stop killing Americans if the Americans could stop the Shia from killing them. The US government set about doing that. This was “the surge.”
Ruins of Samarra Mosque

Ruins of Samarra Golden Mosque

Note well, however, that the US had offered the Sunni a similar deal in 2004. At that time, the Sunni still thought that they could beat both the Americans and the Shia. By 2006, they were begging for their lives.

But the US government, far from driving a hard bargain, chose to see their request for something approaching an alliance against the Shia as the “awakening” of the Sunni populations’ inner “moderation” and rushed to empower its leaders with money and weapons.

The US choice to neglect the massive fact that fear of the Shia had led the Sunni to stop fighting Americans fit all too well with the US foreign policy establishment’s perennial, ignorant, practice of categorizing foreigners as “moderates” or “extremists” (aka. good guys and bad guys). That practice eliminates the bother of learning what foreigners actually have in mind.

Romancing the Sunni: A US policy tragedy in three acts; Act III By Angelo Codevilla

Reality vs. romance

On Jan. 1, 2015, Egypt’s president Abdel Fattah al Sisi told Sunni Islam’s leading scholars gathered at Cairo’s Al Azhar University, its leading temple of knowledge, that they had been leading Islam on a course disastrous for itself and leading to war with the rest of the world.

He said : “ You, imams, are responsible before Allah … that corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the years … is antagonizing the entire world. It’s antagonizing the entire world … Is it possible that 1.6 billion [Muslims] should want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants – that is 7 billion — so that they themselves may live? Impossible! … I say and repeat again that we are in need of a religious revolution.”
The Disney version

The Disney version

That is reality. It is also reality that no such revolution is in the works, in part because the West continues to deal with the Sunni world by trying to appease it, romance it, seduce it.

Imagine the predicament of an Islamic scholar at Al Azhar who agrees with al Sisi: what could he say to Saudi or Qatari royals, or to the citizens Mosul or Raqqa — never mind to young people besotted with blood and enjoying their slaves that might cause them to turn against Daesh/ISIS?