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July 2016

David Martin Jones The Illiberal Left and the Rise of Political Islam

“Literature always anticipates life,” Oscar Wilde opined in his essay “The Decay of Lying”; “It does not copy it but moulds it to its purpose.” Recent developments in British politics seem to confirm Oscar’s aphorism. In 2015, Michel Houellebecq published his political fiction Submission, anticipating the democratic rise to power in Europe of the Muslim Brotherhood. Widely dismissed as “Islamophobic”, his dystopian novel, set in France in 2022, identifies how Europe’s political elites abandoned the Enlightenment project, alienated the masses and created the conditions for the emergence of a new extremist politics on both the Left and the Right.

The novel’s protagonist, François, an alienated Sorbonne professor, observes that mainstream political parties had created “a chasm between the people and those who claimed to speak for them, the politicians and journalists”. The latter, “who had lived and prospered under a given social system”, could not “imagine the point of view of those who feel it offers them nothing, and who can contemplate its destruction without any particular dismay”. In this context, the political system “might suddenly explode”.

In France the explosion takes the form of a run-off in the second round of voting for the French Presidency, between Marine Le Pen of the right-wing National Front and the recently emerged Muslim Brotherhood Party’s representative, the charismatic, but fictional, Ben Abbes. To avoid a far-Right victory, both mainstream socialist and conservative parties, eliminated in the first round of the French election process, give their support to Ben Abbes, who becomes the first democratically elected Muslim President of the Republic.

From the outset, the new President distances himself from jihadi fanaticism. Instead, Abbes, a disciple of Machiavelli as well as Mohammed, sees Europe “ripe for absorption into the Dar al Islam”. Subsequently, the Republic runs along sharia-approved but moderate Islamic lines. The University of Paris becomes an Islamic university, polygamy is approved and generous family payments allow women to give up work. Unemployment falls, education is privatised and Islamised through charitable donations, and small business is encouraged. The old elites convert to the faith and France rediscovers the joys of patriarchy and a sense of political purpose.

Although France now has a small Democratic Muslim Party, the least convincing aspect of Houellebecq’s fiction concerns the Muslim Brotherhood Party’s rapid rise to power. It is here that political life, taking its cue from art, has intervened, and not in France, but in the UK, where the electoral system has proved far more accommodating to the rise of a non-violent form of political Islam. Transposing Houellebecq to London and fiction into political reality, recent local elections saw Labour Party candidate Sadiq Khan succeed Boris Johnson as the first elected Muslim Mayor of London. Predictably the British, American and Australian media applauded the result as a victory for tolerance and multiculturalism. Nikki Gemmell, writing in the Australian, positively contrasted London’s election, emblematic of the city’s dynamic “open, and embracing energy”, with Australia’s parochial and “paranoid defensiveness”. In the media’s enthusiastic embrace of Khan, no commentator paused to reflect whether the result in fact demonstrates a new and significant stage in the slow-motion Islamisation of the British political process.

One Year On, Flawed Iran Deal Sees Human Rights, Regional Security Deteriorate

New HJS publication examines key areas where the Iran Deal has failed to live up to its objectives

On the anniversary of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the so-called ‘nuclear deal’ with Iran, a new publication – The Iran Deal a Year On: Assessing Iranian Ambitions by The Henry Jackson Society and the Friends of Israel Initiative called into life by former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar and Lord Trimble, among others, lays bare the failure of the P5+1 strategy to normalise Iran’s international relations.

Despite the lofty promises and high hopes on the part of the deal’s supporters, a year after the nuclear deal, far from being better, the resulting situation is worse. Worse for international security, worse for nuclear non-proliferation, worse for regional stability, and above all worse for the people of Iran themselves. Iran has not become a regular nation-state in the international community, has breached the JCPOA and associated agreements, and has neither changed its course in the region nor made any significant steps towards easing repression domestically.

The new paper released today – The Iran Deal a Year On: Assessing Iranian Ambitions – is a compendium of essays by key experts that examines these angles through the lens of the implementation of the agreement, Iran’s regional ambitions and its human rights record over the last year in detail.

Peter Smith :The Excuse Factory

Every bit as predictable as the next Islamist massacre are the responses that outrage will bring. The perpetrators might be said to have pickled their brains with steroids, hate gays or have enjoyed too-easy access to guns, knives and/or big trucks. Not mentioned will be Islam’s role in Islamic terror.
Did he say it? Did she say it? It must be one of those fabricated memories that psychologists talk about. I thought I heard the French Ambassador say that the perpetrator of the attack in Nice, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, didn’t fit the Islamic terrorist profile because he had a night life and was a gym junkie or some such. I thought I heard Julie Bishop express a “hope” that this would be the last of such incidents. Clearly I am going around the bend; inventing comments that are clearly so inane that they could not possibly have been made.

But one thing is clear even to befuddled minds. Numbers of politicians and commentators are again wondering aloud about the motives of the perpetrator. He was a petty thief, we are told. Well that is illuminating! It is a well known fact that petty thieves are more likely than most to run a truck through hundreds of men, women and children with the aim of killing as many as possible.

I am going to take a guess. With his Tunisian heritage and a name like Mohamed, I bet he was a Muslim. And his motive — another shot in the dark — was to kill infidels. And to complete this exercise in wild supposition, his inspiration was his poisonous religion. At one level he might have been directed or inspired by ISIS or by Al-Qaeda or Ansar al-Sharia or Al-Shabaab or Boko Haram, the list goes depressingly on and on. It doesn’t matter; there is a common factor and a common foe. It is Islam. And some fools think it will end once ISIS is defeated.

Conservatives chide President Obama for refusing to say ‘radical Islamic terror’. They should be chiding him for refusing to say ‘Islamic terror’. Islam is one, according to no less an authority than President Erdogan (unfortunately still in power): “Turkey is not a country where moderate Islam prevails. This expression is wrong. The word Islam is uninflected, it is only Islam.” Let’s take his devout Islamic word for it.

I have said this before and will say it again. Not one so-called moderate Muslim will disavow one word of the very words of Allah in the Koran. All round good guy [Mohamed] Zuhdi Jasser, American medical doctor and former lieutenant commander in the US navy, rejects what he calls political Islam. But, as he has said, he “loves his religion.” So to the question he never seems to be asked: does he embrace or disavow those parts of the Koran which instruct violence against unbelievers (e.g., 9.29) or which relegate women (e.g., 4.34) to subordinate status in perpetuity?

Jasser and other moderates are contortionists. They embrace Western values of tolerance and equality while remaining shackled to a scripture which preaches intolerance and supremacism. It would be fine if all devout Muslims were as flexible. Most aren’t. They are steadfastly Muslim inside and outside their mosques.

Another Police Ambush The thin blue line between order and chaos is attacked again.

The summer of horrific attacks on police continued on Sunday, with what appeared to be a morning ambush in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Three officers died and another three were wounded as they were fired upon as they answered a call about a man with an assault rifle.

The alleged gunman, who was killed by police, was identified as 29-year-old Gavin Long. His motive wasn’t known as we went to press, but he was reported to belong to the anti-government New Freedom Group. Two others were detained for questioning in the incident, police told reporters.

The shooting is eerily like the one in Dallas two weeks ago when five police officers were killed when they were ambushed during a peaceful protest against the deaths of two young black men in police custody. There was no such protest on Sunday, but Baton Rouge has been the scene of recent standoffs between police and demonstrators following the death of 37-year-old Alton Sterling in a scuffle with police on July 5.

The Dallas shooter was a disturbed malcontent, and this one may be too. But the incidents demonstrate once again the ugly forces that can be unleashed when police are demonized. Baton Rouge police have acted with admirable restraint amid the protests, but all it takes is a single gunman to stage an ambush.

The Dallas and Baton Rouge incidents have put police on alert around the country, even in places where police relations with the community have been relatively good. New York is now having its officers patrol in pairs, as are Chicago and Boston. The more police fear they are targets the greater chance for a violent incident if they are challenged in response to a call.

President Obama issued a statement condemning the attack and asking everyone to tone down the rhetoric. That’s good counsel but we’d go further and say it’s time for everyone in public leadership roles to deplore those who portray the police as the source of urban violence. They are part of the solution.

Jewish Baby Boom Alters Israeli-Palestinian Dynamic The jump has calmed the fears of many Israeli Jews of being outnumbered, writes Yaroslav Trofimov

““When you are motivated by fear, you seek to preserve demography by giving away geography,” explained Yoram Ettinger, a former Israeli ambassador and right-wing activist who has been active in publicizing the impact of Israel’s rising birthrate. “But if you examine Israel’s demographics realistically, there is no need to think in such terms.”

JERUSALEM—Israel’s peace camp and its international backers have long used one crude but powerful argument: Arabs make more babies than Jews and unless a separate Palestinian state is created, a demographic time bomb will turn Jews into a dwindling minority akin to white South Africans.

That prospect certainly seemed real when the Oslo peace process began in the 1990s. Fertility among Israeli Jews stood at an average of 2.6 children per woman, compared with 4.7 among Muslims in Israel and East Jerusalem and 6.0 among Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Yasser Arafat at the time famously declared that the womb of the Palestinian woman was his people’s most potent weapon.

Yet over the past decade, a demographic revolution with long-lasting political consequences has occurred. Jewish birthrates in Israel have spiked while Arab birthrates in the Palestinian territories and elsewhere in the Middle East have declined. This unlikely baby boom has made many Israeli Jews a lot less afraid of being outnumbered—one of the underappreciated reasons why the country’s voters have consistently rewarded politicians opposed to Palestinian statehood and to relinquishing land.

Lies, damn lies and demographics: Are Jews now a minority between the river and the sea? By Zack Pyzer

Israeli statisticians bemoan “inflated” Palestinian figures, which suggest Arabs outnumber Jews across Israel and the Palestinian territories.
New official statistics from the Palestinian Authority (PA) suggest that Jews are a shrinking minority between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, however Israeli statisticians firmly disagree.
The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics on Tuesday reported that there are approximately 4.81 million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, with 2.93 million in the West Bank and 1.88 million in the increasingly densely populated Gaza Strip.
According to their calculations, when taking into account the Israeli Arab population, which the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics (ICBS) estimated to be around 1.77 million in May 2016, the total number of Arabs across Israel and the Palestinian territories reaches 6.58 million.
According to the ICBS, the Jewish population stands at 6.34 million, and despite falling birth rates among Arabs across the West Bank, Gaza and Israel, the statistics also seem to suggest that the overall gap is only growing.

The issue of demographics acts as motivator for supporters of varied political solutions to the conflict. While many on both sides cite the demographic trends as a justification for a two-state-solution, others mitigate the divides differently. These include some right-wing Israelis, who support a partial annexation of Jewish majority areas in the West Bank, but no full independence for the Palestinians who remain outside. Others yet call for a fedaralized, European style state for both peoples.

No More After Nice, let’s stop the nonsense. Bruce Bawer

No more attempts to psychologically analyze every new jihadist—to probe his troubled family or professional life in an attempt to figure out what “turned him to violence and extremism.”

No more reflexive reassurances that “this has nothing to do with Islam,” that a handful of bad guys have “hijacked” a “peaceful” faith, and that “the great majority of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims are, of course, peace-loving people who utterly reject this kind of action.”

No more slick pivoting to the subject of gun control, or American homophobia, or whatever other diversion seems useful under the specific circumstances.

No more blaming of Europeans’ supposed failure to accept or embrace or integrate or employ Muslims, or of Muslims’ alleged poverty or hopelessness or frustration or alienation.

No more hand-wringing by journalists, as they stand mere yards from the bodies of the dead, about the possible “backlash” against Muslims (which never really materializes).

No more declarations by U.S. officials that the mere mention of Islam in connection with Islamic terrorism is “dangerous” and “counterproductive” because it “alienates” the Muslim allies and Muslim communities whose help we need in fighting this problem that we dare not properly name.

No more respectful TV interviews with representatives of “Muslim civil-rights organizations” that have been proven over and over again to be fronts for terrorism.

No more outrageous lies by government and media that, almost fifteen years after 9/11, keep so many Americans so outrageously in the dark about the world in which we live now. No more of the despicable day-to-day efforts by the same actors to keep those Americans who do get it in line, to instill in them an unholy fear that, if they dare to address the problem honestly, they’ll be thrust forever out into the dark—beyond the realm of decent society, unacceptable, unemployable, unfriendable.

German police kicking in doors and dragging people away for Facebook posts about Muslim violence By Pamela Geller

This is where it leads when you criminalize speech — it’s a regular occurrence in Muslim countries under the sharia. And so we can expect to see it in Western countries that adhere to speech restrictions in accordance with Islamic law.

This is inevitably where it will lead if we surrender to the leftist/ Islamic warmongers.

Merkel’s new Nazi regime.

It’s why we are suing Loretta Lynch. Yesterday, our law firm, AFLC, filed a lawsuit on grounds that Facebook violated Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act under the First Amendment. Section 230 grants immunity from lawsuits to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, thereby permitting these social media giants to engage in government-sanctioned censorship and discriminatory business practices free from legal challenge.

“Because of the immunity granted by the federal government, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are free to engage in their otherwise unlawful, discriminatory practices.”

“German Police Raid Homes Over ‘Verbal Radicalism’ On Facebook,” By Craig Boudreau, Daily Caller, July 13, 2016

German police conducted, for the first time ever, a series of raids across the country Wednesday targeting people who posted “hate speech” on Facebook.

Some 25 German police departments raided 60 homes in 14 counties in a move to combat what is seen as a growing problem with hate speech permeating the country, The Verge reported Wednesday.

Hate speech has been growing in Germany over the last 18 months, according to the newspaper Deutsche Wells, based on data from a study undertaken by the German anti-racism group, Antonio Amadeu Stiftung (AAS).

“The monitoring report reveals that the agitation is intensifying in the social media,” Anetta Kahane, AAS chairwoman said in a statement.

The rise in hate speech is thought to be directly linked to the massive wave of refugees entering the country. German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, said she welcomed the refugees in 2015. “I’m happy that Germany has become a country that many people abroad associate with hope,” Merkel said at a press conference in Berlin.

The BKA also made the connection, corroborating the link of refugees migrating to Germany and a rise in hate speech. “The action carried out today shows that the authorities are acting firmly against hate on the internet,” Holger Münch, head of the BKA, said in a statement. “Which has grown considerably in the wake of the refugee situation.”

Summer 1974 Flashback: “Secular” Turkey’s Brutal Jihad Conquest and Islamization of Northern Cyprus Andrew Bostom

Although much ballyhooed 42 years later for its unsuccessful attempt to remove current Neo-Ottoman, Islamic Jew-hating President/Muslim despot, Mas-Kom-Ya Erdogan, July 20, 1974, the same putatively “secular” Turkish military waged a “successful” jihad invasion of Northern Cyprus.

Using Cyprus’ own short-lived July, 1974 military putsch (the Greek junta-supported coup had collapsed by August 14, 1974) as a pretext for long sought expansionist designs within Cyprus, pseudo-secular Turkey claimed its 1974 jihad invasion was a “peaceful action,” which sought to “restore” Cypriot rights, territorial integrity, and security, “without any discrimination toward the (Christian majority and Muslim minority) Communities.” But the July-August, 1974 jihad of Turkey’s pseudo-secular military regime, consistent with the devastating half millennial legacy of its Ottoman forbears’ campaigns, was punctuated by Islamic jihadism’s trademark “sacralized” brutality against non-Muslims: massacre, pillage, enslavement, rape, deportation (of infidels), and colonization (by Muslim replacements).

The Sunday Times [of London] managed to secure a copy of the then secret European Commission of Human Rights (ECHR) report, (APPLICATIONS Nos. 6780/74 AND 6950/75, entitled, “CYPRUS AGAINST TURKEY REPORT OF THE COMMISSION,” Adopted on 10 July 1976), and published this harrowing overview (“What Secret Report Tells About Turk Atrocities,” The Sunday Times), on January 23, 1977:

It amounts to a massive indictment of the Ankara government for the murder, rape, and looting by its army in Cyprus during and after the Turkish invasion of summer, 1974…[including] systematic killings of civilians who were not involved in the 1974 fighting; repeated raping of women aged from 12 to 71, often brutally in public; the torture and savage and humiliating treatment of hundreds of Greek Cypriots, including children during their detention by the Turkish army; and charges of extensive looting and plunder which were supported by unpublished United Nations documents.

The July 10, 1976 ECHR report provided an ugly overarching chronicle of the prototypical sectarian jihadist behaviors of the invading Turkish Muslim army:

In the course of the said military operations and occupation, Turkish armed forces have, by way of systematic conduct and adopted practice, caused deprivation of life, including indiscriminate killing of civilians, have subjected persons of both sexes and all ages to torture, inhuman and degrading treatment and punishment, including commission of rapes and detention under inhuman conditions, have arrested and are detaining in Cyprus and Turkey hundreds of persons arbitrarily and with no lawful authority, are subjecting the said persons to forced labor under conditions amounting to slavery or servitude, have caused through the aforesaid detention, as well as by displacement of thousands of persons from their places of residence and refusal to all of them to return thereto, separations of families and other interferences with private life, have caused destruction of property and obstruction of free enjoyment of property, and all the above acts have been directed against Greek Cypriots only, due, inter alia, to their national origin, race and religion.

IF I AM NOT FOR MYSELF: MARILYN PENN

Caving to pressure from 800 alumni of Ramaz, Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, retired principal of the prestigious New York yeshiva, canceled his agreement to deliver a prayer at the Republican National Convention. Many questions arise from both the alumni petition and the rabbi’s decision to withdraw.

Considering that we are living in the most potentially dangerous moment of Israel’s existence, that anti-semitism is rampant throughout Europe, the Middle East and significant institutions in the U.S., and that the Democrat administration has spearheaded a deal with a country openly committed to obliterating Israel, one can only gasp at the lack of concern for these vital issues in the alumni petition. Instead, the former students are primarily incensed at Trump for being racist, misogynistic and daring to suggest that some citizens in this country are “less than others.” For starters, one would hope that any intelligent high school graduate would agree that we should all consider convicted criminals and terrorists as less than others. The language of the petition is as woefully trite as its cliched sentiments: “Rabbi Lookstein, all the good work you’ve done in your life – everything you’ve done for your community, for the plight of Soviet Jews – will be flushed down the toilet for 10 minutes on stage in Cleveland.” Is this the best that the alumni of an outstanding school could pen?