RUTHFULLY YOURS

The State of Israel is up in arms over the Palestinian Authority’s recent request for accession to the International Criminal Court and its plans to force a major war crimes trial against the Jewish state. “The Palestinian Authority has chosen confrontation with Israel and we will not sit idly by,” Prime Minister Netanyahu said on Sunday. “We will not allow IDF soldiers and commanders to be hauled before the International Criminal Court in the Hague.” Meanwhile it appears a trial is more likely than ever.

The fact that the Palestinian Authority – an entity that is wholly undemocratic, unjust, and unwelcoming to Jewish sovereignty next door – plans to use the ICC to criminally indict the Middle East’s only democracy stretches the bounds of absurdity even in our topsy-turvy 21st century world.

“Can Europe yet save itself? Can Islamic extremism be defeated? Not easily. But the necessary first step is acknowledging the extent of the problem and the challenge. Or, as Meyer Habib put in Wednesday, first “we have to open our eyes.”

It is Europe’s free press, its freedom of expression, and thus its very civilization, that the Islamists behind the Paris attack seek to destroy. Only if the West internalizes the scale of the threat will it stand a chance of vanquishing it.

Speaking to Israeli television from Paris on Wednesday night, hours after gunmen shouting “Allahu Akbar” had shot dead 12 people at the offices of the “Charlie Hebdo” satirical magazine, the French-Jewish parliamentarian Meyer Habib called the massacre France’s 9/11.

Remember your personal physician? He or she may not be yours much longer. And even if they are still your doctor, the odds are they are not really working for you. Soon, most doctors will have abandoned their private practices and become employees of hospitals, multihospital affiliations, or the Government. Only 35% of doctors currently describe themselves as independent, compared with 62% in 2008. This trend will undoubtedly continue; a doctor graduating from medical school today has little or no chance of starting their own solo practice. How did this happen, and why does it threaten patients?

The main culprits are the Government, insurance companies, and large hospital systems. As a result of the Obamacare payment provisions, the Government essentially encourages hospitals to “own” doctors. With inscrutable logic, the Government pays more for the exact same medical procedure or doctor’s visit if it is done in a hospital clinic rather than in an independent doctor’s office. This is a strong incentive for hospitals to buy physicians and their practices, thereby controlling payment and referral sources. Doctors may have no alternative but to take salaried hospital positions if their practices disband.

Part of the reason that Islamic terrorism continues to proliferate in the western world is that too many of our opinion-molders and interpreters have been hamstrung by not understanding that we are fighting a war which always means that certain freedoms need emergency adjustment. We all accepted the need for us to remove our shoes and submit to personal searches when airplane hijacking became part of our new normality. But we also submitted to the notion that blaming Islam for the murderous deeds of a minority was somehow a “phobic” over-reaction and unacceptable in our politically correct society. So we went out of the way to mislabel a terrorist attack at Fort Hood as “workplace violence” and to insist that not erecting a mosque less than two blocks away from the killing fields of Ground Zero was an assault on our freedom of religion. Some among us became enraged at the revelation of how much data the NSA had collected in its extraordinary surveillance, forgetting that the loss of some privacy may have been essential for increased security from terrorist acts. The tagline for Nicholas Kristof’s article in today’s Times is “Let’s not respond to extremists with our own brand of intolerance.” (1/8/15)

Will we keep on blaming the victims? Perhaps the media assume that it is easier to force good people to keep quiet, or keep their own media offices from being attacked, than to than to tackle the problem of Islamic extremism head-on. It is easier to blame Geert Wilders, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Lars Hedegaard, Suzanne Winters, Salman Rushdie or Charlie Hebdo — and even put some of them on trial — than to attack the attackers, who might even attack back!

The press and the media seem to prefer coerced self-censorship: It is your own fault if you get hurt: none of this would be happening to you if you had only kept your mouth shut. It is easier to denigrate the people warning us about a danger than it is to address the danger they are warning us about.

Do you think a country should change its policies because segments of one community will run into newspaper offices and gun people down if you don’t?

Over several months last year, in an effort to understand the Islamic State movement, Maj. Gen. Michael K. Nagata, commander of American Special Operations forces in the Middle East, sought the advice of Defense, intelligence and State experts, and academicians. According to the New York Times, the general told the group: “We do not understand the movement, and until we do, we are not going to defeat it.” Gen. Nagata admitted: “We have not defeated the idea. We do not even understand the idea.”

Why not?

The terrorist group’s name “ISLAMIC State” should have given at least a vague clue to understanding its ideology, Islam. “Islam does not mean peace but rather means submission to the commands of Allah alone” is constantly and adamantly repeated by all Islamists.

President Obama is wrong. Free expression and a free press are clearly not “universal values,” as he asserted in his condemnation of the attack on Charlie Hebdo’s office in Paris. The terrorist attack today was merely an enforcement of decades-long Islamist intimidation and terrorism campaigns against the West.

The leading Islamist terrorist group, the PLO, has pioneered the use of libel suit as threats against me and the Wall Street Journal and the National Review who published my documentation of the terrorist nature of the Hamas affiliated Holy-land Foundation in the late 1980s, and in the early 1990s, they threaten to sue me and the Wall Street Journal for publishing a detailed expose of Yassar Arrafat’s corruption. But they could scare us.

Collins Bartholomew, the map-publishing company of world-leading publishers, Harper Collins, removed the name of Israel from its Geography Atlas to accommodate “local preferences.” In other words, in the interest of selling maps to an enemy that hopes to also wipe America off the map, the company was willing to erase Israel, as well as dispense with scruples, integrity, conscience, ethics, and credibility. Let’s take this a step further.

I understand that Muslims cannot abide truth; thus they invented the accusation of Islamophobia – to squelch all things that reveal their essence. Islam is at war with the world and reality, and has been since the seventh century. Their culture is a dedication to war and conquest, so that even their people may not grow and prosper. From the moment their children are born, they are robbed of the human spirit – freedom, creativity, imagination – and are twisted into becoming hardhearted “weapons of mass destruction” against their perceived enemies. In the name of their god, they attempt to erase the past by destroying ancient artifacts, refuting history to support their own supersessionist narrative, and call “offensive” all actions that lay bare their true nature, barbarism.

Clash of civilizations, star wars, the big bang, a certain idea of France was murdered in cold blood on January 7th. An allahu akhbar commando stormed into the offices of Charlie Hebdo, executed twelve people, wounded another twenty; four of them critically. It is painfully difficult to sort out nuggets of accurate information from the sound and fury that fills the airwaves and the streets of Paris. [12 noon, one minute of silence has been decreed by the government, outside my window I hear car horns furious at someone blocking the street, rumbling machines working on a nearby building, almost drowning out the dirge sounded by the church bell on the corner, icy rain pelts on hurried passersby…].

In a dozen incidents, four hundred and sixty-eight people died at the hands of Islamic terrorists in the month of December. The list does not include the discovery of a mass grave found in eastern Syria that contained the bodies of 230 tribesmen killed by ISIS. The attacks ranged from 140 killed at the Peshawar school attack in Pakistan, to the two who died in the Sydney, Australia hostage crisis. The scope of Islamic terrorism is global. The attacks in December occurred on every continent except South America and Antarctica. Like it or not, the civilized world is at war with militant Islamist extremists.

While Mr. Obama began his Presidency using euphemisms common to appeasers, he recently has been more circumspect. It has been several months since he has said that Al Qaeda was decimated. He still does not speak about a “war on terror” or even linked the words “terror” and “Islamic.” But there has been nothing recently about “overseas contingency operations.” His refusal to admit that the Fort Hood shooting – the worst Islamic-motivated attack on U.S. soil since 9/11 – was anything more than “workplace violence” remains an outrage to the men and women who were killed that day, to the military as a whole, and as an insult to the intelligence of Americans. It is an outrage because the families of the victims would be eligible for additional benefits if their husbands and fathers had been killed in an attack classified as “terrorist.” On the other hand, Major Malik Hasan remained on the Army’s taxpayer-funded payroll for three and a half years, collecting nearly $300,000, until his conviction in mid 2013. Mr. Obama’s silence on this issue is an insult, as all Americans know the meaning of “Allahu Akbar,” which Major Hasan shouted as he shot his victims.