RUTHFULLY YOURS

I awoke on September 11, 2001, in an agitated state. I was going to have to tell my boss that I would be leaving work early to take my son to an appointment. That was uncomfortable enough. But I was also going to have to rush to pick up my child across town, drop him off at an extracurricular activity, do the grocery shopping while waiting for him to finish, dash back home to prepare dinner for the rest of the family, and then head back out for a parent-teacher conference at the school.

Halfway through my shuttling back and forth, trying to be punctual in spite of massive Jerusalem traffic, I turned on the radio to listen for suicide bombings.

Keeping track of every blown-up bus, restaurant and mall had become a national pastime at this point, a year into the Second Intifada. Chauffeuring our kids everywhere, to avoid placing them in potential peril on public transportation, was now the norm. (The more irreverent among my friends would quip that the Palestinians had finally figured out an effective way to destroy the Jewish state: by forcing us parents to become even more enslaved to our offspring than we already were.)

The top story on the 4 p.m. news broadcast was startling. It was about New York for a change.

“Authorities are investigating whether the crash of a plane into the World Trade Center was accidental or deliberate,” the announcer said.

Buckled in the back seat, my 11-year-old asked the meaning of my gasp.

“Never mind,” I said, jerking into a parking space so that I could quickly escort him into the adjacent building and focus on the events in lower Manhattan. I didn’t have time to explain Western political correctness in relation to Arab terror. And this possible “aviation accident” was taking place nowhere near Israel.

Instead of going to the supermarket as planned, I stepped into a nearby cafe. Patrons were beginning to gather around a large TV, tuned in to CNN. We all stood and stared, mouths open, watching the first tower, and then the second, collapse like giant sand castles. American reporters were still not using the “T” word.

But we Israelis instantly knew.

There is just one historically relevant meaning of jihad despite the surfeit of contemporary apologetics. Dr. Tina Magaard-a Sorbonne-trained linguist specializing in textual analysis-published detailed research findings in 2005 (summarized in 2007) comparing the foundational texts of ten major religions. Magaard concluded from her hard data-driven analyses:

The texts in Islam distinguish themselves from the texts of other religions by encouraging violence and aggression against people with other religious beliefs to a larger degree [emphasis added]. There are also straightforward calls for terror. This has long been a taboo in the research into Islam, but it is a fact that we need to deal with.

For example, in her 2007 essay “Fjendebilleder og voldsforestillinger i islamiske grundtekster” [“Images of enemies and conceptions of violence in Islamic core scriptures”], Magaard observed,

There are 36 references in the Koran to expressions derived from the root qa-ta-la, which indicates fighting, killing or being killed. The expressions derived from the root ja-ha-da, which the word jihad stems from, are more ambiguous since they mean “to struggle” or “to make an effort” rather than killing. Yet almost all of the references derived from this root are found in stories that leave no room for doubt regarding the violent nature of this struggle. Only a single ja-ha-da reference (29:6) explicitly presents the struggle as an inner, spiritual phenomenon, not as an outwardly (usually military) phenomenon. But this sole reference does not carry much weight against the more than 50 references to actual armed struggle in the Koran, and even more in the Hadith.

Consistent with Magaard’s textual analysis, the independent study of Australian linguist and renowned Arabic to English translator, Paul Stenhouse, claimed the root of the word jihad appears forty times in the Koran. With four exceptions, Stenhouse maintained, all the other thirty-six usages in the Koran, and in subsequent Islamic understanding to both Muslim luminaries-the greatest jurists and scholars of classical Islam-and to ordinary people, meant and means, as described by the seminal Arabic lexicographer, E. W. Lane: “He fought, warred or waged war against unbelievers and the like.” A concordant modern Muslim definition, relevant to both contemporary jihadism and its shock troop “mujahideen” [holy warriors; see just below], was provided at the “Fourth International Conference of the Academy of Islamic Research,” at Al Azhar University- in 1968, by Muhammad al-Sobki:

Al Gore, former Vice President of the U.S., and his business partner, Joel Hyatt of Hyatt Legal Services, formed Current Television. Richard Blum, husband of Senator Diane Feinstein, was one of four Directors. After a decade the liberal pop culture network failed to gain audience and went on the market. Conservative commentator Glen Beck pursued buying Current, but was rejected. The reason given was that Beck’s Libertarian/Conservative ideology did not agree with the principles of Current. Instead Current was sold to Al-Jazeera Media Network.

Al-Jazeera (AJ) is a propaganda arm of the Al Thani family which rules the wealthy Kingdom of Qatar. AJ is one of the most controversial news outlets in the world; and the premier news channel in the Islamic world. One of their leading personalities, Muslim Brotherhood Cleric Yusuf al Qaradawi, has called for the murder of U.S. Soldiers in Iraq and Jews in Israel. Critics say that AJ is a news source with terrorist ties.

Qatar Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani pledged $400 million to the terrorist group Hamas, donated multi millions to the Clinton Foundation, and to the Brookings Institution. In Libya and in Syria, it is widely reported that Qatar bankrolls al Qaeda. In Egypt, Qatar backed Muslim Brotherhood Mohammed Morsi. According to Jack Keane, a retired four star general and former Vice Chief of Staff of the United States Army, and a defense analyst currently serving as Chairman of the Board for the Institute for the Study of War; Qatar funds ISIS.

Al Jazeera English had no success in the United States. The $500 million purchase of Current Television made it available to more than half of the U.S. market, and it became Al Jazeera America (AJAM) with headquarters in New York City.

Gore and Hyatt announced that the sale to Al Jazeera would “speak truth to power, provide independent and diverse points of view; and tell stories that no one else is telling.” They posit that the legacy of Current made them sensitive to networks not aligned with their point of view. One might conclude that Gore and Hyatt are more aligned with Al-Jazeera’s Islamic point of view, than Glen Beck’s Judeo/Christian point of view.

Al Jazeera America (AJAM) just celebrated its first birthday, and is struggling with its ratings. AJAM’s prime time ratings had about 17,000 viewers this year; compared with 453,000 for CNN; and 1.87 million for Fox News. This in spite of AJAM hiring many American news people from major networks; and having bureaus in Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, New Orleans, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington D.C. Recently AJAM laid off dozens of journalists, and Chief Executive Al Shihabi announced that another round of layoffs is coming.

When Sen. Ted Cruz told an audience of Middle Eastern Christians that they have no better friend than Israel, he stated the literal truth: the Assyrian Christians of Iraq’s north are at greater risk than any Christian population in the world, and their only effective defenders are the Kurdish Peshmerga, which was trained and armed by Israel almost from inception. These facts are widely known. Why, then, did Sen. Cruz’s remarks provoke an eruption of Jew-hatred? A large part of the audience could not control its rage, and drove their keynote speaker from the podium.

There’s a history, and a sad one. I published the essay below in 2009 and reprint it here to help put this event in context. It is a dark day indeed when the government of Egypt can see its way clear to an alliance with Israel against radical Islamists, but many (and perhaps most) Middle Eastern Christians can’t bear the idea of an alliance with Israel. It does not augur well for their survival in the region.

The closing of the Christian womb
By Spengler (crossposted from Asia Times Online)

A century ago, Christians dominated the intellectual and commercial life of the Levant, comprising more than one-fifth of the 13 million people of Turkey, the region’s ruling power, and most of the population of Lebanon. Ancient communities flourished in what is now Iraq and Syria. But starting with the Armenian genocide in 1914 and continuing through the massacre and expulsion of Anatolian Greeks in 1922-1923, the Turks killed three to four million Christians in Turkey and the Ottoman provinces. Thus began a century of Muslim violence that nearly has eradicated Christian communities in the cradle of their religion.

It may seem odd to blame the Jews for the misery of Middle East Christians, but many Christian Arabs do so – less because they are Christians than because they are Arabs. The Christian religion is flourishing inside the Jewish side. Only 50,000 Christian Arabs remain in the West Bank territories, and their numbers continue to erode. Hebrew-speaking Christians, mainly immigrants from Eastern Europe or the Philippines, make up a prospective Christian congregation of perhaps 300,000 in the State of Israel, double the number of a decade ago.
The brief flourishing and slow decline of Christian Arab life is one of the last century’s stranger stories. Until the Turks killed the Armenians and expelled the Greeks, Orthodoxy dominated Levantine. The victorious allies carved out Lebanon in 1926 with a Christian majority, mostly Maronites in communion with Rome. Under the Ottomans, Levantine commerce had been Greek or Jewish, but with the ruin of the Ottomans and the founding of Lebanon, Arab Christians had their moment in the sun. Beirut became the banking center and playground for Arab oil states.

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Nadine Gordimer’s first book was a collection of stories titled Face to Face. It was published in Johannesburg in 1949 by Silver Leaf Books, a firm newly established by my mother. The collection was reissued three years later in New York by Simon & Schuster, retitled The Soft Voice of the Serpent.

Nadine, who died in July aged 90, was married then to Gerald Gavron and had a daughter named Oriane. She told me it was the name of a character in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Unlike most of my parents’ visitors, she talked to me. I was nine years her junior — 17, and in my first year at university — and for all her friendliness I held her in some awe as a published writer, which I aspired to be. I read her stories and admired the vividness of her descriptions. More than her talent, I admired — and envied — her success. Her work began to appear in the New Yorker. I could imagine no higher peak for a writer to attain. I never stopped admiring her skill; but as the years went by, I found it ever harder to like what she wrote, and eventually I liked it not at all.

Nadine often said in her later years that she had been something of a bohemian in her youth. It must have been before I knew her. Soon after the publication of Face to Face she was divorced, moved into a small flat with Oriane, and did not live anything like a bohemian lifestyle. One afternoon when I went with my mother to see her, we came upon her rebuking her black maidservant for not changing, as was the custom in our world, from a morning-blue uniform with matching cap into a black afternoon uniform with a white cap and apron.

She was writing her first novel, The Lying Days, at that time. She worked in the mornings while Oriane was at school. She was extraordinarily self-disciplined. Every day she rose early, did some physical exercises, then worked until lunchtime. Her afternoons were for living: being with her child and later her two children; seeing friends; shopping. That was the routine she established and stuck to throughout her long life, varying it only when she went on her travels. She told me once that she didn’t revise much but wrote “very slowly”. Slowly the works grew: stories for magazines, later collected and republished in a book; the book of stories followed by a novel; then a collection of stories again, and again a novel, in alternation through the years and the decades.

In her own account of her life, she had always, since her childhood, been concerned with the plight of the blacks. But her early writings showed no sign of it. She had nothing to say about white rule and black subjugation — the flaw in the good life we whites could lead in our beautiful, bountiful country, while the greater part of the population endured oppression, humiliation and poverty. But she got to know people who talked about it: some who worked against the regime from within the system, such as the journalist Anthony Sampson, editor of Drum, a magazine for blacks; and politicians, such as my father, Dr Bernard Friedman, a member of parliament in the “liberal” United Party (who later co-founded the anti-apartheid Progressive Party).

While Benghazi Still Smolders, ISIS Burns Bright
– 9.11.14

Though the fires that consumed our diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, two years ago tonight have long since been put out, the incident still smolders in our minds.

Is it because we have never been able to get at the truth behind the attacks? Because we still don’t know what the president said, did, or didn’t do in the thirteen hours Americans were under fire? Is it because the memoirs of people such as Hillary Clinton are still publishing the risible fiction that the attacks were caused by an obscure anti-Muslim video? Or is it because the Obama administration has for two years masterfully ducked, dodged, and bluffed congressional investigators in the most successful cover-up in living memory?

Benghazi is still burning in our minds for all of those reasons, and more. President Obama’s speech last night — in which he proclaimed his “strategy” for defeating ISIS — only fanned those flames.

The thirteenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks has arrived. We don’t know what can or will happen today or tonight anywhere in the world, though it seems likely that more attacks will harm more Americans. We know we haven’t won the wars we’ve fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we don’t have confidence in a president who told us last night that American forces would degrade, and ultimately destroy, what he calls the “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant,” aka “ISIL.”

Most of what we know about the Benghazi attacks is in the January report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. As Bob Tyrrell and I wrote in the March issue, the report left most of the important questions about Benghazi unanswered.

We know that — despite twenty terrorist attacks on several nations’ diplomats before the 9-11-12 attacks — neither were our people in Benghazi given adequate security nor were military forces put on alert to protect them. We know there were ten terrorist camps active inside Benghazi’s city limits on the day of the attacks and that even that fact wasn’t enough to bestir State to get our people out or Defense to provide a substantial covering force on alert all the time. And we don’t know who in the State Department either knew or should have known of the dangers and should have provided proper security or gotten our people out before they were attacked. We are told, by Hillary Clinton, that Amb. Stevens insisted on being there. She courageously blames a dead man.

Former CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus has said that no one in the CIA chain of command ordered anyone to delay a military response to the attacks that might have saved American lives. That statement, more than a year ago, was contradicted by the televised interviews with three of the military contractors stationed at the CIA annex to guard the CIA personnel: Mark Geist, Kris Paranto, and John Tiegen. In an hour-long interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier, they said that they had been ordered — three separate times — to stand down rather than go to the aid of those at the diplomatic mission. They delayed for a critical half hour at the order of their CIA boss, someone named “Bob,” and later went anyway in violation of his orders. By the time they got there, Stevens was missing and Sean Smith was probably dead.

Al Qaeda’s attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, on September 11, 2001, signaled the beginning of the spreading of the global jihadist plague.

The deliberate dismissal of growing jihadist movements the world over has been aided and abetted by the U.S. and other “non-believer” nations.

Exerpts from the “Letter to America,” that in November 2002 was attributed to Osama bin Laden, clearly set the agenda for all jihadist groups. Yet, greed for Arab oil and money led the U.S. and the others to ignore and often discount the rising Islamic tide.

Moreover, they have swallowed every denial and obfuscation of this rise by leading Muslim countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, as well as by Muslim Americans who admit their religious loyalty is to the Nation of Islam, not to the secular United States of America.
The spread of the jihadist plague was further obscured by the U.S. president who just over a year ago declared, “Al Qaeda has been decimated.” His recent dismissal of the increasingly contagious ISIS as a “JV team” did little to contain the disease. Other Western leaders are worried and “surprised.” They shouldn’t be.

A year after al Qaeda attacked the U.S. homeland, Osama bin Laden laid out very clearly the agenda of the jihadist movement. The Arabic document was translated and circulated by Islamists in Britain-whose Prime Minister, David Cameron, is one of the worried and surprised Western leaders-and was published on November 24, 2002, by the Guardian.

Here are some exerpts that should have caught the attention of all Weatern leader, especially those who saw the 9/11 attacks as a deviation from Islam.

The worst part of President Obama’s speech last night was the appalling failure to mention the Benghazi massacre. Today, we mark the second anniversary of that act of war by the enemy we have been at war with for 13 years, an act of war in which the enemy attacked sovereign American territory and murdered the representative of our country in Libya as well as three other brave Americans. Mr. Obama decided our fallen Benghazi heroes did not merit even a fleeting mention. Let’s focus on two things he did say. The first tells us he was not unaware that a speech about terrorism on the eve of September 11 was a time for reflection on the day’s significance:

My fellow Americans, we live in a time of great change. Tomorrow marks 13 years since our country was attacked. Next week marks six years since our economy suffered its worst setback since the Great Depression.

So the economic downturn gets a nod in a speech about the threat Americans face from radical Islam, but nothing about the Benghazi attack that al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri called for and that the local al Qaeda franchise, Ansar al-Sharia, carried out two years ago to the day? Here’s the second passage worth noting:

I have made it clear that we will hunt down terrorists who threaten our country, wherever they are. That means I will not hesitate to take action against ISIL in Syria, as well as Iraq. This is a core principle of my presidency: if you threaten America, you will find no safe haven.

Core principle? The Benghazi massacre was carried out by scores of jihadists. The commander-in-chief took no meaningful action to come to the rescue of Americans during the hours and hours they were under terrorist siege. In the two years since, the Obama administration has done nothing but indict one jihadist – one – in connection with the attack. Moreover, though Obama’s State Department has identified that man, Ahmed Abu Khatallah, as a senior leader of Ansar al-Sharia, his Justice Department did not charge him as one. As I’ve previously explained, it has filed a politicized indictment designed to fit the administration’s fictional account of Benghazi as a spontaneous uprising provoked by “protests” – an indictment that ignores the legacy of 9/11, al Qaeda’s longstanding jihad against the United States, Obama’s disastrous decision to change sides in Libya, the resulting empowerment of our enemies, and the shocking failure to provide adequate security for Americans mysteriously assigned to work in Benghazi (one of the most dangerous places in the world for Americans and one in which Western targets were repeatedly attacked in the months before 9/11/12). We will hunt down terrorists who threaten our country?

*The 21st anniversary of Oslo highlights the tragic gap between the underlying assumption of the architects of Oslo – the New Middle East, transitioning to peace – and the Real Middle East.

*The Real Middle East is represented, most authentically, by the Arab Tsunami, which is gaining momentum, not transitioning toward democracy, in defiance of policy-makers, columnists and academicians who defined it as the Arab Spring.

*The Arab Tsunami is a natural derivative of the Real Middle East, as it has been for the last 1,400 years (in reference to inter-Arab relations): the role model of violent intolerance; non-compliance with agreements; unstable/tenuous regimes, coalitions, policies and agreements, which are signed on ice, not carved in stone.

*The following article sheds light on the critical deficiencies of the Oslo state of mind and its derivatives, such as the two state solution and the “disengagement” from Gaza.

The Oslo Accord Reality Check
Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, “Second Thought: a US-Israel initiative”
“Israel Hayom”, November 1, 2013, http://bit.ly/1aOpfLt

On October 24, 2013 (the Diplomatic Conference) and October 16, 2013 (the memorial ceremony for Prime Minister Rabin), President Peres, the architect of the September, 1993 Oslo Accord, claimed that the Israeli-Palestinian accord was the “opening to dialogue and peace.” Is Peres’ claim vindicated by a reality check?

The Oslo state of mind

The Oslo state of mind was most accurately pronounced by Peres, at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, on Sept. 16, 2000, on the eve of the 2nd Intifada, 2000-2005 wave of Palestinian terrorism: “I believe that the previous borders, made of barbed wire, minefields, military positions, are irrelevant to our life…. I sincerely believe that a good hotel on the border will provide more peace and security than a military position…. I can see very little use for the past. Two things lose their importance: land and history. … To imagine is more important than to remember…. War is out of the question now…. I doubt very much if the Palestinians will go back to terror. … Once a nation’s economy turns from a focus on land to a focus on brains, borders are irrelevant….”