PDavidHornik

Michael Rubin: You can't make friends with Tehran

Michael Rubin has an outstanding piece about Obama's grave delusions in thinking he can turn over a new leaf with the mullahs. Rubin traces how every U.S. president from Carter on has given a shot at it, always to be contemptuously rebuffed.

"The Islamic Republic is an ideological entity. It roots sovereignty not in the will of its citizens but upon the notion that the supreme leader acts as a place holder for the Hidden Imam."

I'm not sure why so many Western people can't get this through their head--that some foreign powers, particularly the most oppressive and aggressive, are driven by ideologies that the leaders and part of the populace really believe in. They're not our ideologies and not the ideologies we'd prefer these people to have. But they couldn't care less about that.

Jonathan Kay on the world we live in

From his blog the other day:

Having spent this morning catching up on my weekend reading, I came across this Page 4 article from Friday's New York Times. Here's the lead paragraph: "BAGHDAD — At least 80 people died and 120 others were injured Thursday in three bombings, one by a female suicide bomber in Baghdad who, Iraqi officials said, held a young child’s hand as she set off her explosives among a group of women and children receiving emergency food aid."

Even putting aside our baseline revulsion at terrorism, there are three especially hideous things that jump out from this:

1) A mother deliberately taking her (presumed) child with her as she immolates herself. For all the hundreds of suicide bombings that Iraq has already witnessed, this has got to be a first.

2) This was a line for food aid. Islamists have gone from attacking U.S. soldiers, to attacking Iraqi soldiers, to attacking police stations, to attacking the religious ceremonies of rival sects — on down the line of nihilism until, now, they are reduced to blowing up hungry people seeking sustenance.

3) This hideous crime was played on page four of The New York Times. And a quick scan of other media suggests it got similar B-rate treatment elsewhere. This sort of act would have been worth a worldwide banner headline a decade ago. But now, it's just another demented Islamist senselessly slaughtering fellow Muslims. With her kid. Yawn.

Says a lot about the world we live in, doesn't it?

Yes, it does--and it also says that Arab states are a wonderful thing, aren't they, including ones that Western coalition forces have been trying to improve for six years. Anyone for creating a 23d Arab state abutting Israel's airport, capital, vital national infrastructure and arteries, and major population concentrations?

Bibi's powerful statement--seven years ago

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has always understood the fatal dangers a fully sovereign Palestinian-Arab-Muslim state in the West Bank and Gaza would pose to Israel. He still does, but finds himself under diplomatic pressure, and with Obama and others linking--against all reality and logic--this issue to the Iranian-nuke issue (i.e., creating a Pal. state would somehow deflect the mullahs from their path--gross nonsense). In this helpful report on IsraelNationalNews.com, find how Bibi, seven years ago, described the dangers of a Pal. state after then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had expressed his openness to the idea.

It's official: In PA, selling land to Jews is capital crime

Again, this has nothing to do with Hamas--this is the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority, run by Mahmoud Abbas, darling of Western and capitulationist-Israeli diplomacy. The same soft-hearted Westerners who laud Abbas generally regard the death sentence for any crime, including the most heinous, as intolerable. Here it's been meted out for selling land to people of the wrong nationality. Abbas may commute it--to a long prison term. These are not right-wing or left-wing facts, hardline or moderate facts--they're just facts.

In the first case of its kind, a Palestinian Authority "military court" on Tuesday sentenced a Palestinian man to death by hanging after finding him guilty of selling land to Jews.

The verdict came shortly after the PA's chief Islamic judge, Sheikh Tayseer Tamimi, issued yet another fatwa (religious decree) banning Muslims from selling land or houses to Jews. [repeat: this is not Hamas; this is the Palestinian Authority, considered by the ignorant and willfully ignorant to be "secular" and "moderate"]

The man sentenced to death is Anwar Brigith, 59, from the village of Bet Umar, north of Hebron.

The three-judge panel found the defendant guilty of violating PA laws that bar Palestinians from selling property to "the enemy." In its ruling, the court, which convened in Hebron, said that Brigith had acted in violation of a Palestinian "military law" dating back to 1979, which states that it is forbidden for a Palestinian to sell land to Jews.

The accused was also found guilty of violating a law dating back to 1958 that calls for a boycott against Israel, as well as another law from 1953 that bans trade with Israelis.

The judges issued the verdict unanimously and pointed out that the defendant did not have the right to appeal....

Get that, no right to appeal a death sentence? But we know that creating a 23d Arab state in the West Bank and Gaza is an imperative for the world. The others, with their standards, have been such gifts to humanity.

Glick: Obama's blinders on Iran

Masterful and crucial op-ed by Caroline Glick on how Obama's delusions on Iran gravely threaten Israel, the Arab world, Europe, and the United States. Obama--apparently--thinks getting Israel to give up land and expel Israelis from it is the key to stopping Iran's march toward nukes, which is already in the eleventh hour. This is kooky stuff, manifesting a total lack of grasp of Iran's Islamic ideology, its power and persistence since 1979. It's because the situation is so dire that, as Glick stresses, the Arab Sunni countries are now wishing the Israeli air force Godspeed in hitting Iran's nuke program. Don't miss this article.

Why only Ahmadinejad?

Asks Barbara Crook of Palestinian Media Watch, in the Ottawa Citizen:

When hatemongering is common currency

By Barbara Crook, Citizen Special, April 27, 2009

 

The world reacted with outrage at the speech by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the Durban Review Conference on Racism in Geneva. European countries stormed out of his talk and released an array of statements condemning his words.

But the real problem is not that an Ahmadinejad exists, or that he proudly and vociferously spews hatred against Jews and blames Zionism for the world's evils. The problem is that his views are anything but unique in the Muslim world.

Tragically, it seems that western leaders are using Ahmadinejad as their radical Islamic whipping boy in order to content themselves that they are doing all they can to fight growing radical Islamic racism, its calls for a world without Israel and genocide of Jews, and its espousal of Holocaust denial.

In reality, the strong media and government reactions to Ahmadinejad's hate promotion serve only to highlight their hypocrisy in ignoring the same ideology when it's expressed by Arab leaders who have succeeded in making the western world's list of "good guys."

Saudi King Abdullah -- whom president George W. Bush kissed and to whom President Barack Obama bowed earlier this month -- has blamed Israel for terror attacks in Saudi Arabia: "We can be certain that Zionism is behind everything ... I don't say 100 per cent, but 95 per cent." (Saudi 1 Television, May 2, 2004)

Grade 9 children in Saudi Arabia are taught that "the hour (of judgment) will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, until the Jew hides behind rocks and trees, until the rocks or the trees say, 'O Muslim! O servant of God! There is a Jew behind me. Come and kill him!"

Earlier this year, the head of the Department of Islamic Studies at Saud University pronounced that "Jews are the enemies of Allah." Dr. Walid Al-Rashudi also prayed for the extermination of all Jews: "Kill them one by one and don't leave even one." (Al-Aqsa (Hamas) TV, Jan. 12, 2009)

It is the very existence of the Jews, not their actions or even their Zionism, that fuels the rhetoric of many Islamic political and religious leaders.

"If the Jews left Palestine to us, would we start loving them? Of course not ... They are enemies not because they occupied Palestine. They would have been enemies even if they did not occupy a thing," said Egyptian cleric Muhammad Hussein Ya'qoub. "... You must believe that we will fight, defeat, and annihilate them, until not a single Jew remains on the face of the Earth." (Al-Rahma TV (Egypt), Jan. 17, 2009)

Is this any different from Ahmadinejad's calls for a world without Israel?

And look at Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, depicted by the West as a moderate to whom Israel is supposed to offer statehood. But the TV channel directly controlled by Abbas's office regularly runs educational programs to teach Palestinian adults and children alike that there is no state called Israel, and that all Israel's land is actually "occupied Palestine."

Palestinian children are taught that Israeli cities throughout the entire country -- from Haifa in the North, to Jaffa (part of Tel Aviv), to Eilat in the south, are all actually Palestinian cities. Videos feature songs about a "Palestine" that erases Israel and a future when the Israeli cities Jaffa and Haifa will be "liberated."

Hamas, which has convinced many western leaders and journalists that it spends more time building schools than bombing civilians, broadcast a sermon earlier this month depicting the Jews as enemies of humanity, inherently evil, seeking to rule the world and a dangerous threat to Muslims: "The time will come, by Allah's will, when their property will be destroyed and their children will be exterminated, and no Jew or Zionist will be left on the face of this earth." (Al-Aqsa (Hamas) TV, April 3, 2009)

Why is Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial so passionately denounced when Palestinian Holocaust denial is so utterly ignored? Hamas TV broadcast a special documentary last year, explaining that the Holocaust was a Zionist scheme to rid the world of elderly and handicapped, and to gain world sympathy. Fatah's PA TV broadcast a children's program that said explicitly that Israel burned Palestinians in ovens.

So why is Abbas presented as a peace partner, Egypt as a peace broker and Abdullah as a friend of the West? Why does the world not react with outrage to calls for "extermination" of Jews from anyone other than Ahmadinejad?

If the West is serious about peace, all hatred must be condemned. And we must recognize that the real enemies of peace are not only the Ahmadinejads of the world, but the "friends" who have mastered the doublespeak of calling for peace in English while inciting hatred in Arabic.

Barbara Crook, who lives in Ottawa, is associate director and North American representative of Palestinian Media Watch, www.pmw.org

Ominous Obama

From today's Frontpagemag interview with Victor Davis Hanson:

FP: The Obama administration apparently is set to give 900 million to Hamas. In other words, they want to give money to the Palestinian Nazi Party. What do you make of this? What must Obama do toward Hamas, the Iranian-backed Hezbollah, etc? Do you think he will do it and/or is he even capable or cognizant of what is actually going on and what is at stake?

Hanson: I am very worried. Israel I think is alone now. The failed Freeman appointment, the historically puerile al-Arabiya interview (cf. e.g., Obama's praise of the good ole days, some thirty years ago, when Sadat was murdered, Khomeini took over, Saddam was flexing his muscles, Americans were routinely murdered, etc.) the Samantha Power appointment, the 'outreach' to Syria, the video for Iran, the Gaza/Hamas rebuilding, the tough behind-the-scenes lectures to Israel—all this bodes ill.

Does Team Obama really believe that a murderous autocratic cabal like Hamas is merely different from a democratic constitutional republic like Israel? At best we have naiveté at the helm (Obama thinks he can mesmerize misunderstood killers), at worst, a genuine feeling that Israel is an aggressive, Western imperialist power exploiting indigenous people of color who simply wish to be free--in other words, the Rev. Wright-Bill Ayers-Rashid Khalidi view of the Middle East.

Woe betide...

Must-read: Palestinians ready for genocide

Itamar Marcus, who runs the crucial organization Palestinian Media Watch, details how populations get psychologically prepared to commit genocide and how all these symptoms apply to the Palestinians both in Gaza-run Hamas and the Fatah-run West Bank. Marcus ends with:

Israel now faces a society that is very possibly past the stage of genocide framing and at the point of seeing the killing of Israelis, even teens, as justified. All that would be necessary for the population to go along with the final script, detailed so many times by its leaders, would be the means. 

Note also that today it was announced today that a Palestinian who in February murdered a 13-year-old Israeli boy and tried to murder a 7-year-old boy was arrested two weeks ago. Do not miss Marcus's article.

Arab Middle East is a rough place

Today--

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – In a second day of major bloodshed, two suicide bombers wearing explosive vests blew themselves up at the gates of a Shi'ite Muslim shrine in Baghdad on Friday, killing 60 people, Iraqi police said.

This kind of thing keeps happening; so why does the U.S. keep telling Israel to "make peace"? A U.S. occupying army has been in Iraq for 6 years trying to do that. You start to thin out your forces a little, and the bombs start going off...yeah, we know about it. That's why we want to stop pulling our forces out of places where they're needed. With us, it won't be only intra-Arab killing. It'll be us.

Discussing Durban-II incident at Pajamas Media

Frontpage is my home and I haven't been linking individually to my articles at Frontpage here; I'm also sometimes on Pajamas Media, as here currently where I discuss a terrible incident involving Elie Wiesel at Durban-II in Geneva.