Displaying posts published in

June 2016

Egypt Busts Muslim Brotherhood IED Terror Cell That Attacked Government and Business Targets By Patrick Poole

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/2016/06/11/egypt-busts-muslim-brotherhood-ied-terror-cell-that-attacked-government-and-business-targets/

The Egyptian Ministry of Interior announced on Thursday the arrest of a Muslim Brotherhood IED terror cell that attacked military, police, diplomatic and business targets in Alexandria from January of this year until their arrest. Alexandria historically has been a long-time Muslim Brotherhood base of support.

Meanwhile, bills calling for the designation of the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization are stalled in both the Senate and House of Representatives in the U.S. Congress.

Asharq Al-Awsat reports:

The Egyptian Ministry of Interior yesterday said that security forces have managed to arrest 13 members of a new terrorist cell that is affiliated to the Muslim Brotherhood in the city of Alexandria. The members of the cell, which is called “Lijan Al-Irbaak”, confessed to their involvement in carrying out 10 terrorist operations recently.

Since the former Muslim Brotherhood President Mohamed Morsi was removed in July 2013, the Egyptian authorities have arrested thousands of leaders and supporters of the group including its Supreme Guide Mohammed Badie who is accused of carrying out acts of violence and attempting to overthrow the state. Most of those arrested were given a variety of sentences including the death sentence.

The Ministry of Interior said in a statement issued yesterday that as part of its efforts to prosecute members and leaders of the Brotherhood and thwart their destructive plans, the leader and members of the “Lijan Al-Irbaak” cell that is affiliated to the Muslim Brotherhood were arrested in Alexandria.

The Interior Ministry published the following video subtitled in English. In the vdieo, several of the cell members recount when they joined the Muslim Brotherhood and how they were recruited for the “Disturbance Committee” IED terror cell:

The Ministry also posted on their Facebook page a list of the eleven attacks the cell members admitted to since January.

Last year I reported here at PJ Media on the long list of terror attacks in Egypt involving Muslim Brotherhood members, and even children of senior Muslim Brotherhood leaders who had been killed transporting IEDs and in shootouts with Egyptian police. CONTINUE AT SITE

Dutch Woman in Qatar Arrested for ‘Adultery’ After Rape Claim By Rick Moran

https://pjmedia.com/trending/2016/06/11/dutch-woman-in-qatar-arrested-for-adultery-after-rape-claim/

Attention ladies: If you’re planning a trip to Qatar in 2022 for the World Cup soccer tournament, you might want to rethink your travel plans.

A Dutch woman told police she was drugged and raped, at which point, the very compassionate authorities promptly arrested her for “adultery.”

BBC:

The 22-year-old, who was on holiday, was drugged in a Doha hotel and woke up in an unfamiliar flat, where she realised she had been raped, her lawyer says.

She was arrested in March on suspicion of having sex outside of marriage. She is due to appear in court on Monday.

The alleged rapist is also being held, but says the sex had been consensual.

A Dutch foreign ministry spokeswoman said the woman, who she named as Laura, had been arrested but not yet been charged.

“We have provided assistance to her since the first day of detention. For the sake of the defendant’s case we will not make further comments at this point,” the Dutch embassy said in a statement.

The woman had gone dancing at a hotel in Doha where alcohol was allowed, “but when she returned to the table after the first sip of her drink… she felt very unwell” and realised she had been drugged, her lawyer Brian Lokollo told Dutch broadcaster NOS-Radio1.

Her next memory was waking up in an unfamiliar apartment where she “realised to her great horror that she had been raped,” Mr Lokollo added.

The woman may also be charged with an alcohol-related offence, news website Doha News reported.

It is an offence to drink alcohol or be drunk in public in Qatar, although alcohol is allowed at certain hotels and expatriates can obtain a permit for purchasing alcohol.

In 2013, a Norwegian woman in neighbouring United Arab Emirates was given a 16-month prison sentence for perjury, extramarital sex and drinking alcohol after she told police she had been raped.

She was later pardoned and allowed to return to Norway.

As appalling as this is, think of the Arab women who have to live with these beasts. It’s not surprising in a society so sexually repressive to find men incredibly aggressive sexually. They have to be because the women are terrified.

Then there’s the infidel factor. God gives them permission to rape non-believers, which is convenient — especially when their victims are visiting from a foreign land. CONTINUE AT SITE

No Canada By David Solway

https://pjmedia.com/blog/no-canada/

Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber may have been tactless when he spoke of the “stupidity of the American voter,” but I suspect he might have trotted out the same insult had he surveyed the West in general or the Canadian electoral scene in particular. After all, Canada, a comparatively peaceable country that regards itself as an “honest broker” in international affairs and a beacon of cultural—and multicultural—enlightenment, is fundamentally no different from other Western countries marching down the Hayek Highway. I have written before of the collective foolishness of a presumably educated nation installing a majority Liberal government to manage its affairs despite the readily available evidence of the social and economic malaise that left/liberal politics have inflicted on Western democracies. A cursory reconnaissance of the U.S., the UK, France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Scandinavian countries and others should have sounded a clear warning to Canadians, or at any rate to anyone still capable of cerebral functioning.

But no. We fell for the media hatefest against the Conservative party and its leader Stephen Harper, while subscribing to our own version of “hope and change” as represented by the jejune and deceptive Justin Trudeau and his troupe of trendy mediocrities strutting on the national stage. How could we have travelled this route? As David Mamet points out in The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, we “reject any request for information about the actual mechanics of this ‘Change,’ by referring to ‘Hope’.” Unfortunately, hope is not a policy or a platform, and it is certainly not an expression of a practicable future. It should come as no surprise, then, that electoral promises have been duly and rapidly broken in favor of vanity projects and that a host of destructive policies have been legislated, or are about to be legislated. To take a number of examples:

By introducing Bill C-14, the Liberals have reified their advocacy for physician-assisted dying, depriving doctors and health professionals of moral choice on the issue. Claiming a “deep respect” for Parliament, they have nevertheless imposed substantial limits on debating time.

Trudeau is eager to engineer a change to our “first past the post” electoral system, replacing it with one of a wide variety of possible reforms, such as ranked ballots, proportional representation and online voting. The proposed reforms, based on vote transferability and leftist coalitions, would both introduce an element of needless complexity into the electoral process and, in Canada’s multiparty system, which leans collectively to the left, virtually ensure a permanent Liberal majority. A transformation this vast should require a national referendum, but Trudeau’s minister of Democratic Institutions—a label straight out of Orwell—cites a Twitter hashtag #electoralreform as sufficient reason to sidestep a plebiscite. The 30-year-old, out-of-her-depth, Afghan-born, newly created Minister Maryam Monsef is hostile to referenda because they supposedly exclude the “marginalized.” As National Post columnist Rex Murphy comments, “Evidently, women, people of color, the disabled—build your own list—are allergic to voting in a referendum.” But she is merely doing the bidding of her leader, who intends to strike a committee, in which Canada’s one conservative party will be outnumbered 9 to 3 by left-oriented parties, to determine the best way to implement what is nothing less than a political coup. The Liberals have recently shown signs of relenting on the referendum issue, but the situation reveals their arrogant disregard of the people they presumably answer to.

The Liberals deny that they inherited a balanced budget from the previous Conservative government and have now projected a $30 billion debt, sure to increase in the future, that will serve not only as a fiscal drain on the present but as an economic drogue on generations to come.

Trudeau eliminated selective income splitting for families, a measure ostensibly intended to deprivilege the “wealthy” and thus burnish the party’s popular image, but obviously designed to work against the traditional family structure by making it more costly to sustain the stay-at-home wife/mother arrangement. Cost, however, is not a personal consideration for Trudeau, as it happens, heir to a multi-million dollar trust fund. The nannies looking after his children will soak the Canadian taxpayer $100,000 per annum. Indeed, when he visited Washington to confer with Obama, he was accompanied by a 44-member entourage consisting of celebrities, fundraisers, in-laws and, of course, the nannies, at taxpayers’ expense.

Trudeau has enthusiastically endorsed the feminist agenda and established a gender-balanced cabinet, irrespective of merit or competence. The embarrassing spectacle that Chrystia Freeland, minister of International Trade, made of herself o Bill Maher’s show is no accident. We can expect more of such sophomoric ineptitude in the years ahead. A government that eschews proven or demonstrable talent in favor of gender parity, much like our current universities, and hires or appoints on the basis of sex is monstrously irresponsible.

To strengthen their “social justice” credentials as the party for the times, the Liberals, who long ago jumped on the same-sex marriage bandwagon, have, additionally, projected Bill C-16 providing for an up to two-year prison sentence for anyone convicted of fomenting “hate propaganda” against transgenders. The word “hate” clearly furnishes enormous latitude for interpretation and renders critical discourse problematic and even dangerous, now that the Criminal Code is about to be amended. It seems that freedom of expression contracts with every new piece of social legislation, by no means astonishing in a country whose left/liberal Supreme Court has already pronounced that truth is no defense in cases where offense is given to marginalized groups or individuals.

No less damaging, Trudeau’s well-documented sympathy for Islam has resulted in the importation of many thousands of so-called “Syrian” refugees, all improperly vetted, who will swell the welfare rolls, glut an already grossly dysfunctional single-payer medical network, further disrupt a progressively concessionary educational system, and create more social havoc in the form of Sharia ghettoes and eruptions of Muslim-inspired violence. Bet on it. As Muslim reformer Tarek Fatah reports in the Toronto Sun, Liberal Senator Grant Mitchell accused him of lying and of Islamophobia (!) when Fatah testified to the Senate about Canadian mosques that feature seditious preaching against secular democracy, about Israel as “useless garbage,” and about the necessity of spilling blood. “While this was unfolding,” he continues, the Trudeau government “had authorized a $200,000 grant to a southern Ontario mosque with links to the Muslim Brotherhood.”

In moving decisively to the left and bringing in programs that will inevitably fray the economic fabric of the country while diluting its traditional substance, Trudeau boasts that “Canada is back”—a slogan, Murphy writes, “that’s saccharine and weirdly jingoistic at the same time,” as if his election were “a victory, not for [the] party—which it was—but for the country itself.” Such hubris is both typical and unforgivable. CONTINUE AT SITE

David Singer: Palestine – France, Farce and Folly

France embarked on a journey to nowhere when it hosted 28 delegations in Paris for a ministerial meeting on 3 June marking the first phase of its initiative aimed at promoting peace in the Middle East. Amid the pomp and ceremony, photo opportunities and handshakes, the final communique revealed:

1. Support was reaffirmed for a just, lasting and comprehensive resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The conflict actually requiring resolution is the Jewish-Arab conflict going back to 1917 – well before Israel’s creation in 1948 – which still sees 20 Arab States today denying the Jews the legal rights vested in them by the Mandate for Palestine to reconstitute the Jewish National Home in its ancient biblical and historical homeland.

Only Jordan and Egypt have recognised and signed peace treaties with Israel.

The “Palestinians” were regarded as part of the “existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” by the League of Nations in 1922 and not recognized as a people by the United Nations in the 1947 Partition Plan.

The 1964 PLO Covenant is their birth certificate. PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s claim on 6 June that the “Palestinians” had a 5000 years old history is farcical.

Obama’s Underwater Manhattan Doesn’t Come from Science, but from Science Fiction :Daniel Greenfield

So Obama decided to warn everyone that Manhattan is about to turn into Atlantis.

“The majority of people believe in things like science — and scientists. And so when scientists tell us that the planet is getting warmer and we need to do something about it, the majority of people think that’s a good idea, let’s do something about that, because we don’t want Manhattan to be underwater.”

Manhattan going underwater isn’t science. It’s science fiction.

It’s the sort of thing you get from watching movies like The Day After Tomorrow where evil Republican politicians neglect the Flying Global Warming Monster and suddenly waves cover Manhattan and everything freezes.

That’s not science. It’s hardly even science fiction.

Here’s what Obama’s science really looks like.

New York City underwater? Gas over $9 a gallon? A carton of milk costs almost $13? Welcome to June 12, 2015. Or at least that was the wildly-inaccurate version of 2015 predicted by ABC News exactly seven years ago. Appearing on Good Morning America in 2008, Bob Woodruff hyped Earth 2100, a special that pushed apocalyptic predictions of the then-futuristic 2015.

The West’s Most Important Ally: Islam’s Dissidents by Giulio Meotti

Today a new Iron Curtain has been erected by Islam against the rest of the world, and the new heroes are the dissidents, the apostates, the rebels, the non-believers and the heretics.

This rapidly growing army of Muslim dissidents is the best liberation movement for millions of Muslims who aspire to practice their faith peacefully without submitting to the dictates of fundamentalists and fanatics.

They are alone against all. Against Islamism which uses Kalashnikovs and against an intellectual terrorism which submits them to media intimidation. Seen as “traitors” by their communities, they are accused by the élites in the West of “stigmatizing.”

We should support them — all of them. Some of the bravest defenders of freedom come from the Islamic regimes. Europe should give financial, moral and political support to these friends of Western civilization, while our disgraced intelligentsia is engaged in slandering them.

Islam, warned the best-selling Algerian novelist, Boualem Sansal, is going to split European society. In an interview with German media, this brave Arab writer painted a vision of Europe subjugated by radical Islam. According to Sansal, the terror attacks in Paris and Brussels are directed at the Western way of life: “You can not even defeat the weak Arab states, so they have brought in fifth columns to bring the West to destroy itself. If they succeed society will fall.”

Mr. Sansal, who has been threatened with death, belongs to a rapidly growing army of Muslim dissidents. They are the best liberation movement for millions of Muslims who aspire to practice their faith peacefully without submitting to the dictates of fundamentalists and fanatics. These Muslim dissidents pursue freedom of conscience, interreligious coexistence, pluralism in the public sphere, criticism of Islam, and respect for the rule of common law. For the Islamic world, their message could be devastating. That is why the Islamists are hunting them down.

Annika Hernroth-Rothstein: The Left’s False Prophecy

The Left’s false prophesy

It happened again, this time in a crowded restaurant in Tel Aviv. Two terrorists opened fire on civilians with the intent of taking as many Israeli lives as possible before they would inevitably be stopped. The murderers were successful. They brought lethal weapons to a place of joy and celebration and gunned down the innocent, one by one. We now know that cousins Muhammad and Khalid Muhamra, both 21, carried out the attack. The terrorists were both from the village of Yatta, near the city of Hebron in Judea, and their peers celebrated their crime both on social media and in the city streets, handing out treats to honor the attackers.

Last night, Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai was asked by Army Radio to comment on the Palestinian celebrations following the terror attack in Tel Aviv that took four lives and wounded 18. The mayor responded by saying, “We might be the only country in the world with another people living among us under occupation, without civil rights. … You can’t keep people in a situation where they are under occupation and hope they’ll reach the conclusion that everything is fine.”

Not only is this an outrageous statement — the mayor chooses not to condemn the terrorists or the people handing out food and candies in celebration of what they refer to as “Operation Ramadan,” but rather the Israeli government and its policies — but Huldai’s words also reveal a deep and dangerous naivete.

To blame the murders on “a 49-year occupation” or to believe that giving up Judea and Samaria, or any other piece of land for that matter, would end the violence and the terrorism is to gamble with people’s lives.

I spent a good deal of time on social media in the hours after the Tel Aviv attack on Wednesday, as I do every day, and what I saw on Twitter was not calls for peace or even posts about how, once the Palestinians get the West Bank, they will build a country and create a state. No. What I saw under the hashtag #OperationRamadan were calls for the terrorists not to stop until the entirety of Israel was theirs. This is not a peace process or a protest, but a war that has very little to do with territory or borders, but rather the very existence of the Jewish State.

MARTIN SHERMAN: IMBECILITY SQUARED PART ONE

“Commanders for Israel’s Security” are a group I would much rather respect than ridicule, but drivel is drivel, even when it comes from men with an illustrious past and an accumulated 6000 years of security experience.

One does not have to be a military expert to easily identify the critical defects of the armistice lines that existed until June 4, 1967 (Deputy PM Yigal Allon, former commander of Palmah strike-force, 1976).

…historians a thousand years hence will still be baffled by the mystery of our affairs. They will never understand how it was that a victorious nation, with everything in hand, suffered themselves to be brought low, and to cast away all that they had gained by measureless sacrifice and absolute victory…Now the victors are the vanquished… (Winston Churchill, in the House of Commons, 1938).

The Jews consider Judea and Samaria to be their historic dream. If the Jews leave those places, the Zionist idea will begin to collapse… Then we will move forward (Abbas Zaki, PLO ambassador to Lebanon, 2009).

It genuinely distresses me to have to write this article—but I feel I have little option.

Despite my personal bias

I confess that I have a strong personal bias in favor of men who have devoted years of their lives to the defense of their country and endangered themselves to protect others. The members of the Commanders for Israel’s Security (CIS) certainly fit that bill – comprising a group of over 200 former high-ranking officers in the IDF, intelligence services and police.

Today, however, we are faced with the bitter irony of a spectacle, in which scores of ex-senior security officials, who spent most of their adult life defending Israel, are now promoting a political initiative that will make it indefensible.

Recently, CIS, an allegedly non-politically partisan organization, which ran a virulently anti-Netanyahu campaign in the run-up to the March 2015 elections, published what purports to be a “plan” to break the ongoing deadlock over the “Palestinian issue”, appealingly but misleadingly, entitled “Security First: Changing the Rules of the Game-A Plan to Improve Israel’s Security and International Standing” .

In broad brush strokes, the seminal elements on which the entire proposal is based are that Israel should:

(a) Proclaim, unilaterally, that it forgoes any claim to sovereignty beyond the yet-to-be completed security barrier, which in large measure coincides with the pre-1967 “Green Line”, adjusted to include several major settlement blocks adjacent to those lines; but,

(b) Leave the IDF deployed there—until some “acceptable alternative security arrangement” is found – presumably the emergence of a yet-to-be located pliant Palestinian-Arab who will pledge to recognize Israel as the Jewish nation-state; and

(c) Embrace the Saudi Peace Plan–a.k.a. Arab Peace Initiative (API) subject to certain changes which the Arabs/Saudis recently resolutely refused to consider.

Noxious brew of the fanciful, the false & the failed

HAMAS AND FATAH BREAKING PITA TOGETHER IN QATAR

Hamas and Fatah to hold talks in Qatar (pronounced “gutter” by the cognocenti)
Hamas and Fatah to hold yet another round of reconciliation talks in the Qatari capital next week.

Hamas and Fatah will hold new reconciliation talks in the Qatari capital of Doha next week, the Ma’an news agency reported Friday, citing a statement by Fatah Central Committee member Azzam al-Ahmad.

Al-Ahmad said that the focus of the talks would be to continue discussions on ways to implement the reconciliation agreement between the two major Palestinian parties, adding that the implementation would require honest political intentions to end the division between the political factions.

Hamas and Fatah have been at odds since 2007 when Hamas took over Gaza from Fatah in a bloody coup.

The sides have continued their never-ending war of words despite a unity agreement signed in April 2014 which sought to end seven years of bad blood.

A unity government between Hamas and Fatah collapsed last June when Fatah leader and Palestinian Authority (PA) chairman Mahmoud Abbas decided to dissolve it amid a deepening rift between the sides.

Belfast memorial to Christian Zionist officer vandalized

(JTA) — In what is being treated as a hate crime, a Belfast mural honoring a local Christian citizen who led a historic Jewish legion in World War I and then advocated for the creation of the State of Israel was vandalized.http://www.jta.org/2016/06/09/news-opinion/world/belfast-memorial-to-christian-zionist-officer-vandalized

The memorial to Lt. Col. John Henry Patterson was damaged early Thursday morning after two containers were set ablaze nearby, the Irish News reported. Belfast is in northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom.

An officer in the British army, Patterson during World War I commanded the Zion Mule Corps, the first Jewish fighting force in nearly two millennia, which fought in the Gallipoli Campaign. He went on to become an ardent supporter of the creation of a Jewish state.

His remains were moved to Israel last year and buried alongside the Jewish soldiers, belatedly fulfilling a wish he had expressed before his death in 1947, one year before the establishment of the State of Israel. At the 2015 burial ceremony in Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Patterson “can be called the godfather of the Israeli army.”

“In doing what we are doing today, we are repaying a great historical debt and a personal debt to a great friend of our people, a great champion of Zionism, and a great believer in the Jewish state and the Jewish people,” said Netanyahu, whose father was a personal friend of Patterson.

Netanyahu’s older brother, Yonatan, who was killed leading the 1976 Entebbe rescue operation, was named for Patterson, who was his godfather.