RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/europes-year-of-the-jihadist?f=must_reads

Among the trends of 2014 – “Gone, Girl,” Lena Dunham, and $55,000 potato salad – was another the list-makers seem to have missed: it was also a very good year for Islamic jihad. And while this was true on the battlefields of Syria and the cities and villages of Pakistan, it was true, too, in more subtle ways throughout the West – and especially in Europe. It was, for instance, the year of Mehdi Nemmouche’s slaughter of four Jews at the Jewish Museum in Brussels.

It was the year that Belgium itself was named a “terrorist recruiting hub” by the Wall Street Journal. And in Germany, France, England, and the Netherlands, pro-Islamic State demonstrations laid bare the growing support of terrorism and Islamic jihad among Europe’s expanding Muslim population – all while politicians either stood back or even contributed to the praise.

Throughout 2014, Europeans faced pro-IS, anti-Jew demonstrations in Paris, Hamburg, Amsterdam, London and The Hague, and the establishment of “sharia zones” in London, Wupperthal, and elsewhere. True, such zones do not necessarily delineate areas in which sharia law, rather than state law, applies. But the term helps them define those largely-Muslim neighborhoods whose residents tend to be radical and who often support jihadist movements both at home and abroad.

Combined, these events signal the increasing success of Islamists who are working to change Europe from within – sometimes through violence, but more often through strategies known as “stealth jihad” – a way of applying social and political pressures to transform the current culture.

Take, for instance, the response of Josias van Aartsen, mayor of The Hague, to radical Muslims who called for the death of Dutch non-Muslims and Jews during pro-IS rallies in August: then on holiday, Van Aartsen declined to return home, ignoring even the throwing of stones at non-Muslims and the police. Only when a counter demonstration against IS was planned in the same, Muslim-majority neighborhood did Van Aartsen take action: he forbade it. “Too provocative,” he said.

Or there are the recently-leaked intelligence briefs in France, as reported by the Gatestone Institute, that “Muslim students are effectively establishing an Islamic parallel society completely cut off from non-Muslim students,” while “more than 1000 French supermarkets, including major chains such as Carrefour, have been selling Islamic books that openly call for jihad and the killing of non-Muslims.”

Everyone with half a brain (and not silenced by diplo speak) knows the Palestinians don’t really want a two-state solution — the vast majority of them anyway. If they had wanted a state of their own beside Israel, they could have had one decades ago. Sure, it wouldn’t have been a hundred percent of what they sought, but it would have been ninety or even ninety-five percent. That’s not bad. After all, it would have been the Israelis giving up the territory, as they did in Gaza. But it was never enough for the Pals.

Most of us who have been involved in negotiations — and that’s almost everybody — know that if you really want something, ultimately you compromise. When you don’t really want something (a deal, a state), lack of perfection becomes an excuse to walk away. That’s what happens with the Palestinians every time. They want a one-state solution — it’s inescapable (except perhaps to Peter Beinart and the gang at J-Street).

At least Hamas is honest about that. The Palestinian Authority plays it cozy, preferring to act, from time to time anyway, as if they do want some sort of settlement to keep the graft rolling in. Any idea of the net worths of Mahmoud Abbas, Saeb Erekat or Hanan Ashwari at this point? It’s probably not quite up with Fidel’s cool billion on an individual basis, but added together I wouldn’t be surprised. At the same time the Palestinian people are expressing their love of peace on social media with their latest video hit “How to Stab a Jew [1].” This is at the very moment the Palestinians went to the Security Council, trying to force a peace solution with Israel with a one-year deadline and no measures for Israel’s security. Who could possibly have voted for that?

Well, the French [2] for one. You know — the country that made ISIS look like amateurs when it came to beheadings and was right up there with Hitler when it came to anti-Semitism, deporting some 67,000 Jews from Drancy to the extermination camps, 4000 of them arrested in one night from just one district of Paris. [3]

But the morally superior French know what the Israelis should do, assuring us all they will be back in the Security Council to enforce a solution again.

The difference between Sharia and common decency reaffirmed once again.

Originally published by Veritas International Enterprise.

Muslim attempts at “reformation” continue to be limited to words not actions. A few days ago, efforts to set a minimum age for marriage in Saudi Arabia “received a blow after the Grand Mufti said there was nothing wrong with girls below 15 getting married.”

Two years earlier, the justice ministry began pushing for setting a minimum age in the Arabian kingdom. According to Gulf News, “It submitted an integrated study on the negative psychological and social effects of underage marriages to religious scholars and requested a fatwa that sets a minimum age.”

However, the ulema—the “religious scholar,” the learned ones of Islamic law—responded by totally ignoring the request. Saudi Arabia’s highest religious authority, its Grand Mufti, Sheikh Abdul Aziz, shrugged the whole matter off by saying “There is currently no intention to discuss the issue.” In other words, case closed.

Although the brief Gulf News report focuses on the age 15, going back to earlier reports when the justice ministry began bringing this issue up, one discovers that the issue at stake is full-blown pedophilia.

Back in 2011, for example, Dr. Salih bin Fawzan, a prominent cleric and member of Saudi Arabia’s highest religious council, issued a fatwa asserting that there is no minimum age for marriage and that girls can be married “even if they are in the cradle.”

Appearing in Saudi papers, the fatwa complained that “Uninformed interference with Sharia rulings by the press and journalists is on the increase”—likely a reference to the justice ministry’s advocacy—“posing dire consequences to society, including their interference with the question of marriage to small girls who have not reached maturity, and their demand that a minimum age be set for girls to marry.”

Fawzan insisted that nowhere does Sharia (or Islamic law) set an age limit for marrying girls: like countless Muslim scholars before him, he relied on Koran 65:4, which discusses marriage to females who have not yet begun menstruating (i.e., are prepubescent) and the fact that Muhammad, Islam’s role model, married Aisha when she was six or seven, “consummating” the marriage—or, in modern/Western parlance, raping her—when she was nine.

Recently, I claimed that everyone—politicians, academics, and media commentators—who promoted the idea that police brutality is a national “epidemic,” or even a “growing concern,” as one self-styled libertarian put it, share some culpability for the murders of the two NYPD officers who were gunned down in their vehicle right before Christmas.

More specifically, they are responsible, obviously, not for intending or consciously encouraging the murder of police, but for creating a climate for police officers that’s even more hostile than that in which officers must spend their days and nights. After all, we don’t need Richard Weaver to inform us that “ideas have consequences.” Even simpletons and liars will concede this much.

And only simpletons and liars can deny that this idea—the idea of a “pandemic” of police brutality sweeping the nation—has the consequence of endangering police officers.

Yet this idea isn’t just dangerous.

It is also a lie. And it is a huge lie at that.

“Police brutality” is an all-purpose piece of rhetoric that, as such, can mean anything and everything—and, thus, nothing at all. When anti-police misologists—a “misologist” was the word that the 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant used when referring to an enemy of reason—sound off about “police brutality,” they are referring to the police’s unjustified use of force.

Now, all but anarchists concede that police are authorized to use force when necessary and when it’s proportionate to the situation in question. When, however, the force deployed is unnecessary and/or excessive, then the force is unjustified. This—the unnecessary and/or excessive use of force—is “police brutality.”

So, is this a growing national phenomenon, an epidemic?

Which terrorist will Obama set loose next from Gitmo? A better question might be is there any terrorist he won’t free? Is there an Al Qaeda or Taliban Jihadist who poses too much of a threat to the United States for Obama to free with a lot of airline miles and Michelle Obama’s recipe for arugula fruitcake?

If Obama has a red line when it comes to releasing terrorists, we haven’t seen it yet.

There appears to be no threat that a terrorist can pose and no crime he has committed too severe to prevent him from getting a plane trip out of Gitmo at taxpayer expense.

The last releases saw terrorists rated as high risk freed by Obama. They included fighters with experience on the battlefield and covert operations. Obama set loose a suicide bomber, a document forger and a bomb maker who trained other terrorists to make bombs. Those are exactly the sorts of enemies whose license to Jihad will cost lives.

But that’s nothing compared to Obama’s latest gift to the Jihad.

When Mohammed Zahir was caught, among his possessions was found a small sealed can marked, in Russian, “Heavy Water U235 150 Grams.”

According to the classified report, the uranium had been identified by Zahir “in his memorandum as being intended for the production of an “atom bomb.”

Zahir was not just another captured Jihadist. He was the Secretary General of the Taliban’s Intelligence Directorate and was in contact with top leaders of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. His possessions included a fax with questions intended for Osama bin Laden and he had been arrested on suspicion of possessing Stinger missiles.

But that may not have even been the worst of it.

As the calendar turns toward the final two years of the Obama Presidency, this is a moment to consider the world it has produced. There is no formal Obama Doctrine that serves as the 44th President’s blueprint for America’s engagement with the world. But it is fair to say that Barack Obama brought into office a set of ideas associated with the progressive, or left-leaning, wing of the Democratic foreign-policy establishment.

“Leading from behind” was the phrase coined in 2011 by an Obama foreign-policy adviser to describe the President’s approach to the insurrection in Libya against Moammar Gaddafi. That phrase may have since entered the lexicon of derision, but it was intended as a succinct description of the progressive approach to U.S. foreign policy.
***

The Democratic left believes that for decades the U.S. national-security presence in the world—simply, the American military—has been too large. Instead, when trouble emerges in the world, the U.S. should act only after it has engaged its enemies in attempts at detente, and only if it first wins the support and participation of allies and global institutions, such as NATO, the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and so on.

In an interview this week with National Public Radio, Mr. Obama offered an apt description of the progressive foreign-policy vision. “When it comes to ISIL, us devoting another trillion dollars after having been involved in big occupations of countries that didn’t turn out all that well” is something he is hesitant to do.

Instead, he said, “We need to spend a trillion dollars rebuilding our schools, our roads, our basic science and research here in the United States; that is going to be a recipe for our long-term security and success.”

That $1 trillion figure is one of the President’s famous straw-man arguments. But what is the recipe if an ISIL or other global rogue doesn’t get his memo?

“Herzl Part 4: The Uganda Proposal” is now available. You can see it directly via the following link:

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“Herzl Part 4: The Uganda Proposal” describes Theodor Herzl’s pursuit of the British offer to establish a Jewish home in Africa. Herzl’s decision led to deep dissension within the Zionist movement. This is the final unit in a 4-part series on Herzl. As part of our ongoing work to present a first-rate educational resource on Zionism, we are going back over our “Founding Fathers” course in order to raise the quality to the level of our subsequent films.

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Arizona GOP Sen. John McCain’s team is on a campaign to rid the Arizona Republican Party of tea party officials, replacing them with allies to the senator in advance of an expected bid for a sixth term in 2016.

According to Politico. which spoke to nearly a dozen sources, McCain’s team has been working with strategists and fundraisers across the country to undermine the standing of conservatives in his state who could pose a challenge to his political future.

“There’s been a huge organizational effort that I’ve never seen before,” Gordon James, an Arizona public relations executive and McCain ally, told Politico. “A lot of the party folks who were hostile to John McCain have been marginalized, and that’s a good thing.”
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In January, members of the state committee lead by tea party supporters formally censured the 2008 GOP presidential nominee for not being conservative enough, particularly on the issues of immigration and the Affordable Care Act.

Since then, McCain’s team managed to oust the man who authored the censure resolution, Timothy Schwartz, who had been serving as a GOP legislative district chairman.

“It’s very clear what’s going on,” Schwartz told Politico, blaming his ouster on McCain. “Look, John McCain has prominence and money and influence and because of that he thinks he can ramrod us.”

The latest demographic survey of the Palestinian population by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics overestimates the number of Palestinians resident between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan by around 1.2 million, a leading Israeli expert on demography has told The Algemeiner.

Ambassador Yoram Ettinger, a former Israeli diplomat who now works as lecturer and consultant and is well-known in policy circles for his research on Palestinian and Israeli demography, said that the Palestinian statistics, released yesterday, “are inflated by more than 1 million in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) and by almost 400,000 in Gaza.”

According to the Palestinian statistics bureau, there are over 6 million Palestinians living west of the Jordan; Ettinger calculates the number at 4.8 million.

The inflated numbers are a key factor behind the current claim that Palestinians will outnumber Jews living in Israel and the Palestinian territories by 2016. Similarly false claims have been made in previous years, triggering the politically-loaded conclusion that Israel, in supposedly becoming a country where a Jewish minority rules over an Arab majority, has effectively emerged as an apartheid state.

Ettinger identified several methodological flaws in the official Palestinian count. “According to their own records, they include over 400,000, mostly in Judea and Samaria, who are abroad for more than a year,” he said. This contradicts, Ettinger said, the “international standards” which dictate that a person who lives outside his or her country for more than a year should not be included in a count of the resident population.

“The only entity that doesn’t follow this practice is the Palestinian statistics bureau,” Ettinger said.

Some things can’t be fixed. I learned this painful lesson the hard way when I was 4 years old. I had my heart set on a toy steam shovel. A tiny bucket at the end of a string could be reeled in to lift a teaspoon of mud. A little boy could build an interstate highway system with it.

My mother bought it in October for Christmas, putting it in layaway and paying for it with a dime or three nickels and sometimes a quarter at a time. She was as pleased as I was on Christmas morning when she saw my face. I took it out at once to the alley in the back of the house, eager to make it work. After digging a small hole in the ground, I hurried inside to see the rest of Christmas. When I returned to the steam shovel an hour later, it lay in a tiny heap of tin and cotton string, as flat as a pancake. I looked up through my tears to see a large truck disappearing down the alley.

I was not really worried. My mother would fix it. She fixed everything — a missing button, a skinned knee, a broken flashlight. She could fix a broken heart. I carried the remains into the house and handed them over. I couldn’t understand her tears, but she knew she couldn’t fix it, and had no more dimes and nickels for a replacement Christmas. Some things can’t be fixed, not even by a mother.