Displaying posts categorized under

WORLD NEWS

Palestinians: “We Are Proud of You. You Killed Jews!” by Bassam Tawil

Musbah Abu Sbeih is now the latest “hero” of many Palestinians and not only his family. He is being hailed as a “brave” man and a “hero” because he woke up in the morning, grabbed an M-16 assault rifle and set out on a mission to kill as many Jews as possible.

These calls have come not only from Hamas and Islamic Jihad extremists, but also from “moderate” leaders such as Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah faction.

“We bless every drop of blood that has been spilled for Jerusalem, which is clean and pure blood, blood spilled for Allah, Allah willing. Every martyr will reach Paradise and everyone wounded will be rewarded by Allah.” – Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian leader.

As holders of Israeli ID cards, they were even entitled to drive cars with Israeli plates, which is what Abu Sbeih took advantage of to carry out his attack in Jerusalem. His family owns at least two homes in the city and are considered middle-class. Still, this did not stop Abu Sbeih from setting out on his deadly mission. And it did not stop his family members from celebrating the attack.

This is the inevitable result — as in the Spanish Inquisition, the French Revolution, the Turkish Genocide of the Armenians, Rwanda, Darfur, or Nazi Germany — of the poisoning of a people.

The family of Musbah Abu Sbeih say they are “very proud” of what their 40-year-old son did. So are many Palestinians representing all walks of life in Palestinian society. Members of his family, including his parents and daughter, have appeared on too may TV stations to keep track of to commend Abu Sbeih. They have even gone out onto the streets to hand out sweets in jubilation over the terror attack that he carried out in Jerusalem this week, which resulted in the death of a 60-year-old grandmother and a 29-year-old police officer.

Unprecedented: Hungary Opens Office for Persecuted Christians Its “right wing” government appears to know something about Muslims and Christians that the West doesn’t. Raymond Ibrahim

The nation of Hungary recently did something that is as unprecedented as it is commonsensical and humanitarian: it “has become the first government to open an office specifically to address the persecution of Christians in the Middle East and Europe.”

Zoltan Balog, Hungary’s Minister for Human Resources, explained:

Today, Christianity has become the most persecuted religion, where out of five people killed [for] religious reasons, four of them are Christians. In 81 countries around the world, Christians are persecuted, and 200 million Christians live in areas where they are discriminated against. Millions of Christian lives are threatened by followers of radical religious ideologies.

“Followers of radical religious ideologies” is of course code for Muslims—they who are responsible for the overwhelming majority of Christian persecution in the world.

This move comes “after Hungary’s right-wing prime minister, Victor Orban, drew criticism in the EU by saying Europe should focus on helping Christians before helping millions of Muslims coming into Europe.”

Orban explained: “If we really want to help, we should help where the real problem is.… We should first help the Christian people before Islamic people.”

But do Western governments “really want to help” those suffering true persecution? For if they did, not only would taking in “Christian people before Islamic people” be the most humane thing to do; it would also benefit Western nations as well.

Consider some facts:

Unlike Muslims, Christian minorities are being singled out and persecuted simply because of their despised religious identity. From a humanitarian point of view, then—and humanitarianism is the reason being cited for accepting millions of refugees—Christian refugees should receive greater priority over Muslim migrants. Even before the Islamic State was formed, Christians were and continue to be targeted by Muslims—Muslim individuals, Muslim mobs, Muslim regimes, and Muslim terrorists, from Muslim countries of all races (Arab, African, Asian)—and for the same reason: they are infidel number one. (See Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians for hundreds of anecdotes before the rise of ISIS as well as the Muslim doctrines that create such hate and contempt for Christians.)

From Yemen to Turtle Bay How Iran is driving the U.S. out of the Middle East. Caroline Glick

Iran’s game is clear enough. It wishes to replace the US as the regional hegemon, at the US’s expense.

Since Obama entered office nearly eight years ago, Iran’s record in advancing its aims has been one of uninterrupted success.

Iran used the US withdrawal from Iraq as a means to exert its full control over the Iraqi government. It has used Obama’s strategic vertigo in Syria as a means to exert full control over the Assad regime and undertake the demographic transformation of Syria from a Sunni majority state to a Shi’ite plurality state.

In both cases, rather than oppose Iran’s power grabs, the Obama administration has welcomed them. As far as Obama is concerned, Iran is a partner, not an adversary.

Since like the US, Iran opposes al-Qaida and ISIS, Obama argues that the US has nothing to fear from the fact that Iranian-controlled Shiite militias are running the US-trained Iraqi military.

So, too, he has made clear that the US is content to stand by as the mullahs become the face of Syria.

In Yemen, the US position has been more ambivalent. In late 2014, Houthi rebel forces took over the capital city of Sanaa. In March 2015, the Saudis led a Sunni campaign to overthrow the Houthi government. In a bid to secure Saudi support for the nuclear agreement it was negotiating with the Iranians, the Obama administration agreed to support the Saudi campaign. To this end, the US military has provided intelligence, command and control guidance, and armaments to the Saudis.

Iran’s decision to openly assault US targets then amounts to a gamble on Tehran’s part that in the twilight of the Obama administration, the time is ripe to move in for the kill in Yemen. The Iranians are betting that at this point, with just three months to go in the White House, Obama will abandon the Saudis, and so transfer control over Arab oil to Iran.

For with the Strait of Hormuz on the one hand, and the Bab al-Mandab on the other, Iran will exercise effective control over all maritime oil flows from the Arab world.

It’s not a bad bet for the Iranians, given Obama’s consistent strategy in the Middle East.

Obama has never discussed that strategy.

Indeed, he has deliberately concealed it. But to understand the game he has been playing all along, the only thing you need to do listen to his foreign policy soul mate.

According to a New York Times profile published in May, Obama’s deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes is the president’s alter ego. The two men’s minds have “melded.”

Rhodes’s first foreign policy position came in the course of his work for former congressman Lee Hamilton.

In 2006, then-president George W. Bush appointed former secretary of state James Baker and Hamilton to lead the Iraq Study Group. Bush tasked the group with offering a new strategy for winning the war in Iraq. The group released its report in late 2006.

What’s Putin’s big worry? By James Lewis

Vladimir Putin is putting up spectacular aggressive displays these days, making near-miss air attacks on our recon planes, expanding his military bases in Syria and Iran, and probably helping the Yemeni Houthis launch cruise missiles perilously close to our naval vessels in the Straits of Hormuz.

Putin is strategic in his thinking, and a lot of his anti-American posing is phony, simply because the West poses no genuine threat to Mother Russia. Certainly not compared to jihad.

The question is, therefore, why Putin is stirring up the biggest post-Soviet fuss ever. What does he stand to gain from Western scare headlines?

Russia is not interested in nuclear confrontations, where everybody loses and nobody wins. Instead, he is putting on his war dance to gain Obama concessions that most Americans may never see, like tactical retreats by U.S. forces in the Gulf, oil price concessions from the Saudis, and a free hand against Chechen ISIS terrorists who would love to go back to kill Russian infidels in Moscow.

Because Obama is the weakest U.S. president in history, Putin may see the coming months as the best time to squeeze out the last American concessions. He may also calculate that Hillary wants to stop the email leaks so badly that she might promise concessions if she is elected.

Obama can no longer hide his secret support of Muslim jihad in Syria, in Libya, and here at home, while Hillary’s closest aide is Huma Abedin, who received lifelong indoctrination in an activist Muslim Brotherhood family.

Like it or not, Huma fits the profile of an M.B. agent to perfection. The Moobers could wish for nothing better than high-level loyalists at the top of the U.S. government. That is why many millions of M.B. dollars are flowing through the Clinton Foundation into Democratic (and maybe Republican) pockets.

Jihadist infiltration is a humongous political scandal, and only Donald Trump seems to be willing to talk about it.

A Guest Post: Islamization Planned : Machteld Zee

Machteld Zee Ph.D. is a Dutch scholar who investigated Sharia courts in the UK for her Ph.D. thesis. This interview was published in the Algemeen Dagblad, a nationwide Dutch newspaper, on October 4, 2016.

This post will feature Zee’s discoveries and conclusions about how Islamization is carried out in Sharia courts, without anyone else hearing anything about it.

Sharia law is the Islamic legal system, derived from the Koran and the rulings of Islamic scholars, known as fatwas. As well as providing a code for living – including prayers, fasting and donations to the poor – Sharia also lays down punishments as extreme as cutting off a hand or death by stoning for adultery. Critics of Sharia law – such as Ms Zee, after conducting her research – say it downgrades women and is incompatible with European human rights legislation. Men need only say the word to have a religious divorce (uttering “I divorce you” three times), but women need the sanction of clerics. Without it, they risk being called adulterers if they do remarry. T

The Islamization of Europe follows a strategy, according to Machteld Zee in her book Holy Identities, which was published today. ‘Once you have knowledge of it, you understand what is going on.’

‘I discovered a comprehensive system of law that contradicts our secular laws.’

Investigating Sharia courts

Machteld Zee (32), a Dutch political scientist from the University of Leiden, studied Sharia courts in the UK and wrote her Ph.D. thesis on it in 2015.

She was one of the few outsiders who gained access to the sessions of these Islamic courts. 95% of the cases before these courts are divorce cases. Her investigations resulted in a pamphlet, Holy Identities.

‘If you compare the Netherlands in the 1980s with today,’ says the political scientist and law school graduate Machteld Zee, ‘you will see an increased influence of Islam everywhere. Saudi Arabia and other countries flooded the world with thousands of imams, Islamic text books, mosques and tons of money.’

Machteld Zee needed barely 150 pages to describe the background of Islamic fundamentalism, which is gaining ground in Western countries. Her book Holy Identities: On the Road to a Sharia State is an analysis of the problems of the multicultural society.

You say that conservative Muslims want to convince their fellow Muslims to embrace Sharia, the religious law of Islam. These fundamentalists are being helped by ‘useful non-believers’, non-Islamic intellectuals, politicians and opinion leaders who don’t want to offend Muslims.

‘Yes, leading multiculturalists actually believe that Muslims should be shielded from criticism because it would inflict psychological damage on them. Although many Muslims consider this an idiotic point of view, others use it to call those who criticize Islam ‘Islamophobes’ and ‘racists’.

You described yourself as left-leaning liberal when you started your investigation on Sharia courts in the UK. Now you warn against a lack of knowledge of and a lack of resistance against the advancing radical Islam.

‘I discovered a comprehensive system of law — far more systematic then I had expected — that contradicts our secular laws. Many Muslim women are locked into a religious marriage because their community thinks a divorce according secular law is insufficient. In these communities — Muslim communities — Sharia law trumps secular law when it comes to marriage. Women have to ask a Sharia judge or an imam to dissolve their marriage, for example when the husband physically abuses her. Even Dutch Muslim women travel to the UK to appear before Sharia courts. It is a parallel society. I object to it because these practices go against women’s rights.’

You have analyzed the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood. It is a political and religious movement that aims for world domination, and is supported by lots of money from fundamentalist circles. The Sharia courts are part of this project, you wrote.

‘That is why it is so important that we know what is going on. Authors that I studied for my investigation were generally benevolent towards Sharia courts. It turned out, however, that none of them ever attended a session of such a court. They don’t know what is going on in these courts. Now they ask me to tell all about it. Women are advised by these courts to accept polygamy and to not file criminal complaints in case of domestic violence. Physically abusive fathers are given custody of their children. I have the impression that the tide of the public debate is turning now that these facts are becoming public. I hardly hear anyone pleading in favor of Sharia courts anymore.’

Unesco Draft Resolution Raises Israel’s Ire The resolution, up for formal approval next week, criticizes Israel’s actions toward some holy sites in Jerusalem By Rory Jones see note please

There is not a single issue associated with the UN- a tribunal for tyrants and war criminals- that does not bash Israel. rsk

TEL AVIV—The United Nations’ cultural agency on Thursday passed a draft resolution that played down Jewish ties to religious sites in Jerusalem, in a decision Israel called “absurd.”

The resolution from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, or Unesco, heavily criticized Israel’s actions toward holy sites in Jerusalem’s Old City.

The resolution omitted the Jewish name for a shrine holy to both Jews and Muslims. Instead, it referred to what Jews call the Temple Mount as the Haram Al-Sharif, as it is known to Muslims.

A 58-member committee passed the draft resolution, put forward by Arab states at meeting in Paris, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity as the resolution isn’t official yet.

It will be referred to Unesco’s executive board for formal approval next week and isn’t expected to be challenged, the person said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the failure to acknowledge the Jews’ connection to the Temple Mount was “absurd” and called the U.N. and Unesco a “moral farce.”

“What’s next? A Unesco decision denying the connection between peanut butter and jelly? Batman and Robin? Rock and roll?” he said in a statement posted to Facebook.

Obama’s Iran Missile War He doesn’t want to talk about America’s new proxy war in Yemen.

The White House doesn’t want Americans to notice, but the tide of war is not receding in the Middle East. The Navy this week became part of the hot war in Yemen, with a U.S. warship launching missiles against radar targets after American vessels were fired on this week. Just when President Obama promised that American retreat would bring peace to the region, the region pulls him back in.

The destroyer USS Nitze fired Tomahawk cruise missiles to take out three radar sites on the Yemen coast believed to be manned by Houthi rebels. Though the Houthis deny it, the Pentagon believes they were responsible for the multiple-missile attack on Sunday against the USS Mason, another destroyer patrolling in international waters. This was no mere warning shot. The Mason had to use active defenses, including interceptor missiles, to prevent a strike that could have killed dozens of sailors.

Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook called the USS Nitze’s response Thursday “limited self-defense strikes [that] were conducted to protect our personnel, our ships, and our freedom of navigation in this important maritime passageway.” That’s another way of saying this was the minimum the U.S. could do to defend our sailors and get the Houthis to stop firing, and we hope it works.

But there’s more to this story because the Houthis are one of Iran’s regional proxy armies. They are fighting to control Yemen against a Saudi-led coalition that is trying to restore the former Sunni Arab government in Sana’a. The U.S. has been quietly backing the Saudis with intelligence and arms, though the Saudi coalition has been fighting to a draw with the Houthis, who are supplied by Iran. The cruise missiles used against the USS Mason are also used by Hezbollah, another Iran proxy army.

Don’t expect the White House to acknowledge this because the ironies here are something to behold. Mr. Obama is backing the Saudis in Yemen in part to reassure them of U.S. support after the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal that the Saudis opposed. Mr. Obama’s Iran deal was supposed to moderate Iran’s regional ambitions, so Mr. Obama could play a mediating role between Tehran and Riyadh. But the nuclear deal has emboldened Iran, and fortified it with more money, so now the U.S. is being drawn into what amounts to a proxy war against Iran. Genius. CONTINUE AT SITE

Antisemitic hate festival in Lichfield Cathedral David Collier

I have just spent a weekend at Lichfield cathedral for a conference “on the Israel/Palestine Conflict and the prospect of peace”. And what a weekend it was! A naïve Dean, antisemitism, conspiracy theories, global control, blood sucking Jews, child kidnappers, Arabs in 100ad. and of course, Jesus the Palestinian.http://david-collier.com/?p=2328
Lichfield Cathedral is breath-taking. A Gothic structure that dominates the local horizon, the unique fixture of the three spires can be seen long before signposts welcome you to the city. The current masterpiece was started in 1195. The work was to take over a hundred years to complete.

Just 5 years before this work began there had been brutal massacres of Jewish people in London and York in 1190. As Lichfield Cathedral grew and began to dominate its surroundings, persecution of Jews grew as a fever and swept through England. The Nave was started in 1260, just as the Jewries in places such as London, Canterbury and Winchester were looted.

Long before the last bricks were placed on the ‘Lady of the Chapel’ in 1330, the entire Jewish community had been dispossessed and expelled from England.

History is a major passion of mine. The placing of events into perspective and context. So I wonder what a cathedral such as Lichfield would have looked like to Jews in the 13th century? As they saw the cathedral grow, as they felt the persecution begin to strangle their livelihoods and freedoms, did one come to symbolise the other? How terrifying to the Jews then, a display of power such as Lichfield Cathedral must have been.

I personally grew up in a different England. We had jumped almost 700 years since the expulsion, 300 years since the return of Jews to these islands. As a young adult I visited cathedrals as places of beauty. Stunning buildings of history that were to be cherished and adored. National treasures.
The church speaks

lichI had not been to Lichfield before. There had recently been an unsavoury anti-Israel exhibit at Hinde St Methodist church that had drawn much anger. I understand that the Church desires to help when it sees suffering. When this suffering is being registered in the birthplace of Christianity, that urge becomes an irresistible compulsion. With this I have no quarrel. However there remains a gulf between charity and pointing a finger of blame. One requires compassion, the other reminds us of darker days in Christian history.

Following the Hinde Street incident, many voices were heard from within the church community that denounced the exhibition. Former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord George Carey criticised the stunt as ‘demonising and singling out Israel’ in its defensive fight against terrorism.

In light of rising Jew hatred in the UK, the current Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby recently called antisemitism ‘an insidious evil’. He remarked that it “latches onto a variety of different issues” including discourse about Israel. Given what was about to occur to me personally in Lichfield, his reference to the conspiracy, “the perverted and absurd argument that a small group runs or plots against our society and manipulates international affairs” is particularly poignant.
The Lichfield Cathedral event

Encouragingly, with one eye on the event in the cathedral, the Bishop of Lichfield Michael Ipgrave also delivered a statement on antisemitism. This an extract:

“To me there seems no question that denying the right of Israel to exist, failing to take seriously the claim of its citizens to security and recognition, viewing the complex situation in the Holy Land as an unparalleled example of injustice when it is fact surrounded by egregious instances of oppression and unsettlement, adopting a one-sided view which fails to recognise the legitimate interests and real anxieties of all sides – all these can be manifestations of, or excuses for, real antisemitism.”

If this is what he truly lichfield speakersbelieves, he will be absolutely horrified to hear what was relayed inside the walls of his cathedral.

I had little doubt I was walking into a hate-festival. One of the ‘secrets’ of such an event is that the range of speakers is always skewed. People such as Ilan Pappe see sharing a stage with Zionists as ‘normalisation’. Jewish self determination, the right of a ‘Jewish home’, these are positions too ‘dirty’ for anti-Israel activists to accommodate. Therefore if Pappe is present, you know their views have been ideologically protected by the structure of the event itself. The building has been cleansed of all support for the Jewish national movement.

If Jewish Israelis are present, they must be those that come bearing 1000 apologies for ‘Israeli crimes’. Thus reinforcing the imagery of Israel the oppressor. (See Daphne Anson for a breakdown and analysis of the speakers).

DAVID COLLIER: HATE FESTIVAL IN ENGLISH UNIVERSITIES

Its 27th September 2016. Summer is over and the new academic year begins. Across the country, political activists such as those in the SOAS Palestinian society hold ‘freshmen’ sessions to attract new recruits to their cause. Everyone knows SOAS is important to BDS and Palestinian activism. When you walk into SOAS you enter the BDS UK student stronghold. But I am used to being inside the SOAS halls now. The atmosphere and venomous tone no longer intimidate me. I come so often they should consider presenting me with a special award.http://david-collier.com/?p=2315

Today’s talk, was part of a BDS workshop for new recruits. The person leading the talk was Riya Hassan, a SOAS alumni, who now works for the BDS central committee. Although she didn’t tell the crowd, Riya was apparently born in Lakiya (Laquia) in the Negev. That being the case, Riya failed to tell the audience that she is one of the only Arabs in the Middle East who can vote. Part of the most liberated Arab community in the entire region.

The format is typical of a BDS recruitment session. They spend the first 30 minutes or so, engaging with the crowd, asking them what they already know of BDS, where they are from, why they are here and most importantly what criticisms of BDS they have heard.

Then Riya began to speak. The first thing that Riya wanted to impress on those listening was that:

“BDS is a tactic. A tactic within a broad spectrum of tactics that an indigenous people who are fighting for liberation deploy”.

BDS: Flattening the conflict

This means that to understand BDS we need to recognise it is not alone, but rather part of the arsenal. It lines up alongside Hamas rockets, knives, suicide belts and terror tunnels, Arab violence, another ‘tactic’ that is ‘deployed’ to destroy Israel. Like ‘lawfare’ or attempts to delegitimise Israel at the UN, BDS does not oppose violence, it operates alongside it.

Riya is desperate to skip to talking about what BDS wants these students to do, but first she needs to circumvent the small issue of why Israel is so evil it needs to be (B)oycotted, (D)ivested from and of course (S)anctioned.

This is always an incredible element of any session. And it invariably follows the same pattern of history.

Firstly, 1917. Balfour. The idea that the British gave away the land of the indigenous people to European colonists. In line with this, Riya managed to discuss Balfour without even mentioning the word ‘Jewish’.

Then they skip to 1948. As if the week after 2nd November 1917, was 9th November 1948. This is done for a simple reason. For the Palestinian narrative to hold true, European colonists simply turned violent against an indigenous civilian population so as to ethnically cleanse the villages because they had to make room for more European colonists. It was as Riya suggested a ‘pre-planned expulsion’.

Romania: Lawsuit Launched to Stop Bucharest Mega-Mosque “Romania is not a Turkish province.” by Soeren Kern

The original deal called for a “mutual exchange” in which Romania would build a new Orthodox Church in Istanbul, while Turkey would build the mosque in Bucharest. In July 2015, however, Prime Minister Victor Ponta revealed that the Romanian government had abandoned the Istanbul church project because it is “not allowed under Turkish law.” Ponta approved the Bucharest mosque project anyway, saying it was a multicultural symbol of Romania’s acceptance of the Muslim community.

Ponta’s decision to approve the mosque, which will mimic Ottoman-era architecture, was greeted with outrage in a country that was under Ottoman Turkish domination for nearly five centuries until 1877.

“This plan is not about worship, it is about marking the territory of their authority through a monument.” – Ozgur Kazim Kivanc, a Turkish activist opposed to Erdoğan’s destruction of public commons to build mosques.

“Once Islam enters a land, that land becomes Islamic and Muslims have the duty to liberate it someday. Spain, for example, is Islamic land, and so is Eastern Europe: Romania, Albania, Macedonia, Serbia, Kosovo and Bosnia…” – Omar Bakri Muhammad, a prominent Sunni Islamist cleric.

“We consider the disposal of free land which, ironically, belonged to the family of Prince Constantin Brâncoveanu, who was beheaded by the Turks on August 15, 1714, to be a betrayal of the Romanian people.” – Pending lawsuit calling on the court to annul the government’s grant of free city land for the mosque project.

Opponents of a proposed Turkish mega-mosque in Romania’s capital, Bucharest, have filed a lawsuit against the government in an effort to halt the project. The court is set to begin hearing the case on October 14.

The lawsuit seeks to reverse a June 2015 decision by the Romanian prime minister at the time, Victor Ponta, to approve construction of what could become the largest mosque in Eastern Europe — second only to the Blue Mosque in Istanbul — on a large tract of city-owned land in northern Bucharest.

The property, valued at more than four million euros ($4.4 million), is being provided for free by the Romanian government, while the construction costs, estimated at three million euros ($3.3 million), are being paid for by Turkey.

Ponta said the mosque will reap economic benefits for Romania because Turkey is the country’s leading non-EU trading partner. The mosque’s critics, including an array of Romanian academics, historians, politicians, anti-immigration groups and even some Muslims, counter that not only will it increase Turkish influence over Romania, it will also encourage Muslim immigration to the country.