RUTHFULLY YOURS

6-minute-video #10 http://bit.ly/1T5WK2S in a mini-seminar http://bit.ly/1ze66dS

According to President Obama’s worldview the Palestinian issue is a principal Muslim concern and a major source of Muslim animation and frustration, which has fueled regional violence, intensifying Islamic terrorism.

However, irrespective of Obama’s far-reaching gestures to the Palestinian Authority, the number of Muslim terrorist cells in the US has increased, as have Islamic terrorist attacks on the US mainland, such as in San Bernardino (2015), Boston (2013), Times Square (2010), Ft. Hood, Texas (2009), Little Rock, Arkansas (2009), Dallas, Texas (2009), etc.

Moreover, in 1983, while President Reagan brutally pressured Israel to end its offensive against the PLO in Lebanon and withdraw to the international border, Islamic car bombs blew up the US embassy and the Marines’ headquarters in Beirut, murdering 300 US Marines. In 1998 and 2000, while President Clinton pressured Israel to make dramatic concessions to the Palestinians, and made Arafat a frequent foreign visitor to the White House, Islamic car bombs hit the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, murdering 300 persons, and Islamic terrorists hit the “USS Cole” at the port of Aden, murdering 17 US sailors. Furthermore, “September 11” was planned while President Clinton pressured Israel to repartition Jerusalem, retreat to the pre-1967 lines and accept a limited version of the Palestinian “claim of return” to the pre-1967 area of Israel.

President Obama was right when declaring in June, 2009, at Cairo University: “Islam has always been part of America’s story.” Indeed, Islamic (Barbary) terrorism targeted US ships between 1776 and the beginning of the 19th century. John Quincy Adams, the sixth US president (1825-1929), researched the causes of anti-US Islamic terrorism, concluding that the core cause was Islam’s endemic hostility toward the “infidel” as expressed in the Quran.

On Maundy Thursday a Muslim shopkeeper in Glasgow was brutally murdered. Forty-year-old Asad Shah was allegedly stabbed in the head with a kitchen knife and then stamped upon. Most of the UK press began by going big on this story and referring to it as an act of ‘religious hatred’, comfortably leaving readers with the distinct feeling that – post-Brussels – the Muslim shopkeeper must have been killed by an ‘Islamophobe’. Had that been the case, by now the press would be crawling over every view the killer had ever held and every Facebook connection he had ever made. They would be asking why he had done it and investigating every one of his associates.

But it then appeared that although the Asad Shah murder was being treated by police as ‘religiously motivated’ the suspected killer might in fact have been another Muslim and that, it was speculated, there might also have been a connection with a message on Facebook in which Mr Shah wished a very happy Easter to his ‘beloved Christian nation’ and suggesting people follow in ‘The Real Footstep of Beloved Holy Jesus Christ’.

Mr Shah was an Ahmadiyya (Ahmadi), a member of – against some stiff competition – one of the most persecuted sects within Islam. Persecution against them in Pakistan and elsewhere around the Islamic world is rife. Yet despite that (or perhaps for that very reason) they are probably the most peaceable and indeed admirable sect within Islam. Among other things, Ahmadiyya Muslims formally reject the concept of Jihad that other schools cling to. In Britain whenever there is a vaguely positive news story about Islam it almost invariably involves Ahmadi Muslims. Remember the bus adverts a few years back saying that Islam had ‘love for all, hatred for none’. That was paid for by Ahmadiyya Muslims. Remember the stories of a Muslim group not burning poppies but actually selling them for the Royal British Legion? Ahmadiyyas again.

Faced with a fresh barrage of threatening rhetoric by North Korea, its fourth nuclear test (January 6), and its subsequent successful launch of a ballistic missile capable of reaching the mainland United States, on March 31 President Barack Obama advocated closer security ties among America’s chief allies in the Far East. More significantly, he also urged increased cooperation with China to discourage Pyongyang.

As world leaders gathered for the fourth Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, Obama first met with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and South Korean President Park Geun-hye. He then had a meeting with China’s President Xi Jinping at which both leaders urged North Korea (DPRK) to give up its nuclear arsenal. Xi also agreed to fully implement the latest economic sanctions against the regime of Kim Jong-un which were imposed by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) on March 2. The wording of that resolution was stronger than initially expected, primarily due to China’s displeasure at Pyongyang’s tendency to take Beijing’s support for granted even when its actions run contrary to China’s strategic interests.

China’s longstanding priorities of “no war, no instability and no nukes” on the Korean Peninsula—in that order of priority—have produced ambiguous policies over the past decade. Two influential power centers in Beijing, the People’s Liberation Army General Staff Department and the International Department of_the_Communist_Party, continue to regard North Korea as an important geopolitical buffer between China and South Korea. They see the stability of the DPRK regime as more important than its compliance with non-proliferation strictures. Following North Korea’s second nuclear test (June 2009) China initially supported a sharply worded UN Security Council resolution, but in October of that year reversed its approach and effectively became North Korea’s protector and enabler, with former prime minister Wen Jiabao saying it was necessary to “put all our efforts without fail to boost peace and stability in Northeast Asia.”