The Reporting of Information of Events associated with Islam

Lebanese Christian: “Donald Trump is good for Middle Eastern Christians”

NOVEMBER 6, 2016 6:58 PM BY ROBERT SPENCER82 COMMENTS
Here is an eye-opening article that shows the mainstream narrative of Trump’s “racism” for what it is. “This piece is not a defence of Donald Trump.” It is something more insightful, and valuable, than that.


“Donald Trump is good for Middle Eastern Christians,” by Najwa Najib, Medium, October 29, 2016:

The 2016 presidential election has turned into a breeding ground for op-eds about every possible topic under the sun, though most focus on Donald Trump and the supposed danger he poses to the world in general and to Muslims in particular. People who have absolutely no right to speak on topics of domestic policy, foreign policy, Islam, whatever, have suddenly been given soapboxes. Where these used to be targets at which we all mostly rolled our eyes, they are now elevated. Off the top of my head, I can think of big names with big things to say about Donald Trump’s policies. Louis CK compares Trump’s run to “being Germany in the ’30s,” where apparently they did not “[see] the shit coming”. In a New York Times op-ed, Aziz Ansari, not a practicing Muslim, fears for his Muslim family’s safety because he thinks that, in rounding 0.03% of Muslims being investigated for potential ISIS extremism down to 0, those 1,000 under investigation will do the same damage as 0 extremists could. Jill Soloway, creator of a show no one wants to watch, said in the press room following her Emmy win that “any moment [she has] to call Trump out to being an inheritor to Hitler, [she] will,” because Trump apparently ‘otherises’ Muslims. This defence of Muslims comes after screaming “topple the patriarchy” twice on stage during the actual show. She defended Islam, the inherently patriarchal religion whose adherents gruesomely and happily punish the “Jewish people, queer folk, trans folk” she patted herself on the back for featuring on her television show in her Emmy acceptance speech. Clearly, Jill Soloway’s grasp of Islam is matched only by Aziz Ansari’s statistical genius and Louis CK’s history knowledge.

While simultaneously pushing the narrative that Donald Trump’s candidacy would not have been possible without the media — apparently, the Hollywood elite feel that Donald Trump’s history-making run for President is due to Celebrity Apprentice and not to a widespread fatigue of the self-congratulating same-old same-old — the media also pushes the notion that Donald Trump is Hitler. Donald Trump is Hitler on the Emmys stage. Donald Trump is Hitler in the New York Times. Donald Trump is Hitler in newsletters. Donald Trump is Hitler anywhere that statement can be repeated, over and over again, unopposed and unchallenged.
Other more invested people can write and have written about how of course Donald Trump is not Hitler, about the sheer audacity of saying such a thing about a man whose daughter and grandchildren are Jewish. Those people might also explain how Führer Trump could only have run and won in 2016 because of that audacity, because of what the media pass for truth, because of the death of journalistic integrity.
But this piece is not a defence of Donald Trump.

I don’t know if I’m allowed to write passionately and honestly about anything, even about the continued genocide and erasure of my people and of all Middle Eastern Christian peoples. Where does this lament for my people fit in a world where click-bait and listicles pollute what’s left of journalism and where it seems almost everyone operates under the notion that “Donald Trump is literally Hitler”? My people — Middle Eastern and North African Christians, Arabs, Assyrians, Armenians, Coptic, Catholic, Orthodox, etc. — where do we fit?


Social Justice Warriors and Wankers

Today, black Americans are allowed to carry on as if they are the most persecuted people in the world, as if such a thing could be measured and as if any data point to them as inherently oppressed. I guess bullying and guilting white people is a win, a win leading to unearned invitations to the Oscars, thinkpieces about sitting out the national anthem, and a shift from an important conversation about violence in inner cities to cop killings that, following the Aziz Ansari method, amount to an infinitesimal number of deaths. This win allows black Americans part of this movement to say that black lives matter (which, sure, OK) but also that all white people are terrible. All white people are supposed to “check their privilege” and stop pushing their “mayo” opinions on people. White is bland and boring and violent and hateful. Fifty years ago, black activists and their allies sought to end segregation. In 2016, blacks want ‘safe spaces,’ places where they segregate themselves from others, and no non-blacks can possibly be allies because we are all part of the problem and everyone is an anti-black racist and Donald Trump is literally Hitler. This is of course ridiculous but actually it is not. This is the majority’s way of thinking now. This is what we have devolved into. Everyone is either a racist or a self-hating ally or black.

But what about Middle Eastern Christians? Where do we fit?

Middle Eastern Christians are not white or black or bound by Western ideas of race and privilege. There is indeed privilege in the Middle East but it is not racial. Actually, privilege extends only to Muslims. In the Middle East, all the things black people wrongly complain about are true for non-Muslims. Black Americans can pretend they are oppressed but they can run for office, they can own land, they can worship freely, they can sit out national anthems, they can work and provide for themselves and their families, they can rest in their graves undisturbed. Middle Eastern Christians by and large can’t do any of that. Wanting people to like you is not a civil rights issue, no matter how much the Black Lives Matter movement tries. In the Middle East — a blanket term for the Levant, the Gulf, North Africa, whatever country geopolitical analysts ascribe to it on any given day — Muslims don’t like non-Muslims and that has for 1,400 years meant that we cannot live proverbially or literally. To be clearer, Muslims take our livelihoods and our lives. Muslims are the white people of the Middle East but with the added social justice bonus of every charge against them actually being true.

I personally think that the Quran is garbage and that the prophet of Islam was not a great guy. (I’d phrase that differently but then some Muslims might blow the publishers’ headquarters up. Doesn’t seem worth it.) If anyone is literally Hitler, Mohammad’s mass killings of Jews and other non-Muslims, his conquests and warmongering campaigns, his slaves, his propensity for rape, make him a pretty good candidate. (I personally think and believe these things and get enjoyment out of saying them because people do not want me to. But real criticisms of Islam come from its ex-Muslim scholars and their stuff is available to read and dissect everywhere. (And people really should because guess what? We’re all kuffar in this together.))

My issue, right now, is not Islam but is Muslims. I don’t mean the Muslims in the ISIS videos, either. I mean regular Muslims, the non-silent majority of Muslims.


Muslim Victims and Muslims’ Victims

Muslims are not innocent. Sure, if we pretend all Muslims in the world are the self-righteously offended ones who do not like Donald Trump, then maybe we can find a way to cry for whatever perceived wrongs people like Linda Sarsour and Hend Amry are making careers out of. Most Muslims, though, live in the Middle East or in places like Indonesia and Malaysia and Pakistan, where they treat non-Muslims with the same hate and violence and psychopathic homicidal delight that Middle Eastern Muslims reserve for my people. In reality, most Muslims are not Aziz Ansari’s family and they’re not ISIS. Most Muslims are just everyday jerks, enjoying the spoils of their ‘privilege,’ happily forcing non-Muslims in general and Christians in particular to eat it. I would not ordinarily take the time to be eloquent about the treatment of my people and then devolve into calling Muslims “jerks” but, hey, if it’s good enough for white people…

That is my main problem. If oppression, whether perceived or real, means that the victims have the right to say anything about their oppressors because their victimhood absolves them of basic decency, then Middle Eastern Christians, African Christians, Pakistani Christians, Indonesian Christians, etc. should be the only people allowed an opinion about Muslims. We are not a monolith but most of us do not have much good to say.
So let’s talk.

In Egypt, Copts are “garbage people”. The Zabaleen, a literal translation, are trash collectors who must also live from and among that trash on the outskirts of the rest of society because, for the average Egyptian Muslim, that’s all a Christian should be entitled to. The government in Egypt blocks the construction of Coptic churches and hardly reacts when those already standing are torched by Muslims weekly. Copts are considered suspicious by Muslims: they are educated and humble so their girls and women are therefore worth kidnapping for the purpose of forced conversion and marriage. Despite the beheadings of 21 Copts in an ISIS video, it is not ISIS that poses the biggest day-to-day risk to Copts. It’s just Muslims.

In Iraq and Syria, Assyrians are on their way out. A proud people that have maintained their ethnoreligious identity and, unlike the Copts and against all odds, have kept their liturgical and colloquial languages intact, Assyrians have suffered several genocides and massacres since adopting Christianity in its infancy. Since 2003, Assyrian populations have plummeted. Church massacres, displacement, etc. all precede ISIS and, when Mosul fell to the group, it is mostly because so many of the Sunni residents welcomed it. Assyrians, indigenous to the Middle East, will soon be wiped from it. It takes a long time to wipe an indigenous people from its land. It takes about 1,400 years.

In the rest of the Middle East, Christians fare no better. Churches are torched, large Muslim mobs are encouraged to harm Christians by sheer ineffectual Muslim policing, apostasy is punishable by death both by Middle Eastern governments and by proud Muslim parents who honour-kill their deviating-from-Islam children. In Jordan, sharia is given priority by the government.Sharia bans conversion from Islam and prohibits children who do not convert to Islam with their parents from receiving inheritances. In Saudi Arabia, being openly Christian is a crime. In Yemen, killings of nuns doing charity work supporting an entirely Muslim population have been documented for over 20 years. The swell propelling all of this is just Muslims.

Muslim concepts like jizya — a tax for non-Muslims that amounts to no more than a protection racket — have allowed Muslims to subjugate non-Muslims in the Middle East for centuries. Middle Eastern Christian history has been bulldozed, painted over, ruined. I could forgive that if it had remained history but Muslims have never stopped. Conquests and the cultural changing of hands is part and parcel of civilisation-making but Muslims still do it while simultaneously claiming to be oppressed and blaming American imperialism for the state of the Middle East as if pan-islamisation is not the real culprit. For Muslims and in Islam, Muslim supremacy is to be enforced with an iron fist — more appropriately, with a sword.

Inevitably, Muslims will point to ancient holy wars to forgive their collective history. “But the Crusades!” Crusaders did not much differentiate between the Muslim and non-Muslim people they came to fight and Middle Eastern Christians, with the exception of Lebanese Christians who fought with the Crusaders, took the brunt of the fighting between the knights and the Saracens. Besides, even with a series of Crusades launched, the Crusaders eventually stopped. Muslims haven’t.
Where do we fit?


Communal Pain

Most Middle Eastern Christians can’t trace their family trees back more than a couple of generations. I can’t trace my family tree back more than a couple of generations. The ones before them were exterminated or chased away from one home to another. The churches that kept their records were burned, destroyed. Some oral history of both sides of my family remains and some of it is substantiated by genealogical studies and migration maps. It’s a sad state of affairs, a multi-century cycle of being exiled and orphaned. I do not know the names of great-grandparents, of those before them. I’ll never know. All I know is what was done to us and who did it.

But I’m apparently not allowed to mourn this and I’m also not allowed to talk about what Muslims still do to us because that’s somehow racist. Muslims are brown and brown is better than white so I should just shut up about 1,400 years of oppression. If by sheer dumb luck there is an audience receptive to Middle Eastern Christians’ justified wariness of Muslims, it’s the right-wing Protestant contingent, sympathetic to our plight so long as we forsake our rites and become Bible-thumping evangelicals, born again and divorced from the first and oldest Churches.
Where do we fit?

It hurts me when I see Muslims and non-Muslims both shouting Middle Eastern Christian voices down. It wounds me. It kills my ancestors all over again. It burdens our coming generations with genetic bitterness and anger. And I’m jealous. I’m jealous of how deftly Muslims in the West have scrubbed their history and their hellish Allahu akbar mobs from the discourse. I’m jealous of how they have aligned themselves to movements like Black Lives Matter which demonise both white people and Christianity for being their religion (“Christianity is the white man’s religion”). I’m jealous of how they have shielded themselves from criticism, shielded their religion from criticism. And I’m angry.

I’m angry that my people — my ancestors, my family back home — have been stabbed in the back, have had their mouths muffled by those in the West with whom we happily and successfully integrated. Middle Eastern Christians came to America 100 years ago and we made it better, as doctors, lawyers, scientists, law-makers, engineers, entrepreneurs. Now, when we talk about the Muslims who drove us here because we feared for our lives, it’s the white Americans who once welcomed us who shut us up. Black deaths at the hands of a select few police officers apparently warrant more of a platform than hundreds of years of unrecognised genocides. Muslims who make a couple of superficial gestures to support black activism (laughably, Muslim groups — masters of PR, if nothing else — raised money to rebuild black churches in America but have never done anything to rebuild Middle Eastern churches and Churches they themselves destroyed) fall on the right side of what’s acceptable. Middle Eastern Christians with justified reservations? Not so much.
So we don’t fit. Everyone is either a racist or a self-hating ally or black. Brown Middle Eastern Christians Lives Don’t Matter.


On Presidents and Prophets

In 2012, at an event as global and critically important as the United Nations General Assembly, President Obama, after using Copts, women, and broke students as talking points, said that the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam. That’s a direct quote, one that gets a lot of play in the alt-right spheres of the internet, on the Facebook accounts of hillbillies who are convinced that Obama is a secret/not-so-secret Muslim intent on destroying the Constitution and replacing it with whatever hadith most Muslims can agree on. I don’t think that’s likely. Obama has killed thousands of Muslims through his drone strikes, his policies on Libya (aka the new and thriving capital of the so-called Islamic State), his arming of death-mongering ‘Syrian rebels’. Apparently, the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam but it’s ripe for the taking for American presidents who wholesale kill his followers.
But still. He said it. He said it on a global stage. He said in English what Quranic Arabic has proclaimed for 1,400 years. In Islam, those who do not follow the Muslim idea of Allah are disbelievers to be fought, vanquished. Muslims have always believed that the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam and they’ve left a trail of Middle Eastern Christian blood behind them where they’ve instated that belief.

But maybe it’s better if Middle Eastern Christians aren’t remembered by the political class. Ted ‘Zodiac’ Cruz, before he became a footnote in a book about the intersection of memes and politics, said to us that, “If [we] will not stand with Israel and Jews, then [he] will not stand with [us]”. Never mind that Israel persecutes Christians, picking up the slack for Middle Eastern Muslims on the rare occasions they drop it. John McCain looked downright suicidal when a Syrian Christian woman held him and America accountable for what they have done to Syria, to Syria’s Christians. His callous lack of emotional response — a microcosmic representation of American foreign policy — did not change, even as she told him that Middle Eastern Christians are sick and tired of being considered collateral damage by most of the American political class. (It’s also worth mentioning that Senator Robert Black, GOP member of the Virginia Senate, has been lampooned by Democrats and Republicans alike for his support of the Syrian Arab Army, support which notably stems from the Army’s protection of Syria’s Christians.)

Hillary Clinton, a bloodthirsty war hawk even by the standards of the Clinton-friendliest of publications, pushes for intervention, considers Libya a win, and wants to do the same to Syria. Where will Syria’s Christians, including indigenous Assyrians, go then? If ISIS bastion Libya is a win, what does Clinton, noted warmonger and harbinger of death, have planned for Syria’s Christians?
American presidential candidates aren’t good for Middle Eastern Christians. That is, they weren’t, before Trump.


Donald Trump Is Good for Middle Eastern Christians

Donald Trump had no business running for president. He’s not presidential material, whatever that means, and he’s not part of the political elite who subscribe to the same rhetoric and stances. (Ask people in the Middle East if bombs raining down on them from Republican presidents are different from the ones Democrats send.) Trump was supposed to be a joke. You’re not allowed to say ‘crazy’ things when you’re running for president and you’re certainly not allowed to win Republican primaries, become the Republican nominee, and change the political landscape forevermore.
It’s that last one that really interests me.

Like him or not, Donald Trump is effectively changing the world. We’ve thrown out ideas of traditional candidates, acceptable sound bites, political correctness. In his brash presence in this election, Trump has carved a place out for those of us who did not fit anywhere before. Sure, the alt-right loves him and the liberal left hates him but in the hubbub of their back-and-forth those of us previously left out have found a way in. We can now ask Muslims outraged at Trump’s run why his words are more offensive to them than Clinton killing and displacing thousands of Muslims. We can now point out that Omar Mateen was an extremist by everyone’s standards but the mosque he attended where anti-gay rhetoric was spewed regularly is attended by the ‘moderate Muslims’ liberals love to court so much. We can now interject with a pointed “um, no” when Muslims in the West claim that they pose no danger to America because they live “side-by-side with Christians” back home.
Middle Eastern Christians relish this: we can finally call Muslims out on their hypocrisy but, more importantly, we have a voice. That’s not something Hitler went around giving people, I’m pretty sure.…​

Read the rest here.

Raymond Ibrahim: Obama’s ‘Traditional Muslim Bias’ against Christians
Hugh Fitzgerald: Geert Wilders, Or, A Daniel Come to Judgment “More In Sorrow”

 

Pope Francis denounces “politics of fear,” says “all walls fall”

NOVEMBER 6, 2016 4:33 PM BY ROBERT SPENCER76 COMMENTS

The “politics of fear” — here again, the Pope speaks as if fear were something always and in every case to be shunned, despised, and rejected. But is that really the case? The proper response to the jihad threat should not be fear, but determined resolution to stand for freedom; still, is fear really something that is tantamount to being morally wrong? If someone has a headache that lasts for days and goes to the doctor because he is afraid he has a serious illness, should the doctor say, “Go home and don’t give in to fear”? If a hiker is confronted by a hungry, ferocious lion, should he refuse to flee because that would be giving in to fear?

“Mercy is the best antidote against fear.” And as for jihad terrorism, “the best antidote is love. Love heals everything.”
Well, maybe. But I expect that right after the Pope puts a flower in the barrel of an Islamic State rifle, the Islamic State rifleman will pull the trigger.

Note also that the Pope is much more exercised about the Trump proposals regarding immigration than about the Clinton campaign’s support for abortion, which the Catholic Church opposes on the basis of the fifth commandment. As I have noted before, the Catholic Church of today is more concerned about enforcing its policies on contemporary issues — such as its willfully ignorant fiction that Islam is a religion of peace — than it is with teaching and propagating its actual dogmas and doctrines.


“Days Before U.S. Election, Pope Francis Warns Against Politics of Fear,” by Michael O’Loughlin, America Magazine, November 6, 2016:

In a speech delivered at the Vatican just three days before the U.S. presidential election, Pope Francis urged social justice activists from around the world not to give into the politics of fear by building walls but instead work to build bridges.​

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“Because fear—as well as being a good deal for the merchants of arms and death—weakens and destabilizes us, destroys our psychological and spiritual defenses, numbs us to the suffering of others,” he said.​

“In the end,” he continued, “it makes us cruel.”​

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The pope did not mention the Nov. 8 U.S. election, but many of the themes he touched on have played out in debates between Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton in recent months.​

For example, the pope reiterated his plea for nations to respond more generously to the global refugee crisis, which he blamed on “an unjust socio-economic system and wars.”​

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He pointed specifically to the hundreds of thousands of people who have died in the Mediterranean Sea seeking entry into Europe in recent years and, he said, “no one should be forced to flee their homeland.”…​

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On the issue of migration more generally, Francis devoted several minutes of the speech to condemning “physical and social walls” that “close in some and exclude others.”​

Mr. Trump has proposed building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, which led to a tussle with the pope earlier this year.​

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In February, following a visit to the border, the pope said in response to a question from a journalist that politicians who propose building walls instead of bridges are “not Christian,” leading to objections from the Trump campaign. The Vatican later clarified the remark, saying that the pope was not speaking about specific candidates….​

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The pope said on Saturday that Christians should not give into the temptation to build walls, even in the face of “hateful and cowardly attacks,” a reference to global terrorism.​

“Dear Brothers and Sisters,” he said, “all walls fall.”…​

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Francis said “mercy is the best antidote against fear” and that it “is much more effective than walls, that barbed wire fences, than alarms and arms, and it is free. It is the gift of God.”​

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He also touched on the need for individuals at the grassroots level “to revitalize” democracy around the world that are imperiled due to “the enormous power of economic and media groups that seem to dominate” and repeated his condemnation of placing money above human beings.​

Christians have a duty, he said, to be active in political life, but he warned against corruption and arrogance.​

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“Anyone who is too attached to material things or the mirror, who likes money, lush banquets, sumptuous mansions, refined suits, luxury cars,” he said, should avoid going into politics—as well as the seminary. Instead, political leaders must lead by example, living frugally and humbly.​

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Francis also offered some advice on how to fight terrorism and oppression, saying, “the best antidote is love. Love heals everything.”​

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Hugh Fitzgerald: Geert Wilders, Or, A Daniel Come to Judgment “More In Sorrow”​

Islamic State to U.S.: jihadis "have come to slaughter you and smash your ballot boxes"​

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Cometh the Hour, Cometh the (Wo)Man, Or, Ayaan Hirsi Ali for Ambassador to the U.N.

NOVEMBER 10, 2016 4:12 AM BY HUGH FITZGERALD98 COMMENTS


Donald Trump’s first appointment – one he could announce urbi et orbi within the week, if the person I have in mind is willing – should be that of Ayaan Hirsi Ali as the next American ambassador to the United Nations.
What are her qualifications?
She is supremely intelligent, articulate – soft-spoken but steely – in speech, a lucid and impassioned writer, and, what never hurts in making a case at the U.N. or on television, unusually attractive.
She has written four books: The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam; Infidel: My Life; Nomad: From Islam to America. A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations; and Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now.

Were she to be appointed, those books will no doubt be reprinted, and read, by diplomats at the U.N. who want to find out more about her, by people in chanceries all over the world, and even in courses on Islam (those that are not taught by propagandists for the faith).
She was born in Somalia, and spent her first nine years there. She then lived in Saudi Arabia and Kenya before moving to the Netherlands. There she worked with mistreated Muslim women, learned Dutch, and became a member of the lower house of the Dutch Parliament.

In the Netherlands, Ayaan Hirsi Ali had the freedom to study and question Islam, which ultimately led to her abandoning the faith forever. But she did not drop the subject. She did not forget what so disturbed her about Islam, a faith which, through no fault of her own, she was born into. She has seen Islam as it was practiced in Somalia, in Saudi Arabia, in Europe and in the United States. She was a friend of Theo van Gogh, with whom she made the movie Submission, about the position of women in Islam. For his pains, van Gogh was murdered by a Muslim. Ayaan Hirsi Ali moved to the United States.
As the American representative at the U.N., she would make the freshly-minted charge that the presidential election signaled the triumph of “white nationalists” look ridiculous. And on meeting with her predecessor to discuss the job, Hirsi Ali would be able to speak truth to Power.

And she would be able to drive the Muslim representatives mad with fury as no one else possibly could. Every attempt at Taqiyya or Tu-Quoque by these representatives will be held up by her for inspection and mockery. She will be able to quote – and will be sure to quote – from the Qur’an and the Hadith. What will they say? How can they respond? That she doesn’t know what Islam is all about? She knows.
Ambassadors from the non-Muslim lands have so far not dared to speak truthfully about Islam. No doubt some are willfully ignorant, or intolerably stupid, while others have a hypertrophied fear of offending the Muslims who are now in their midst, living in the countries that these diplomats represent. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s ability to discuss Islam with authority, to quietly but relentlessly refute what the defenders of the faith offer, will at first be a source of secret delight. And then some of those formerly fearful representatives will be emboldened to add their voices to what started out as a chorus of one: Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

There is one more thing. It’s the matter of security. Wherever Ayaan Hirsi Ali goes, wherever she speaks, there must be bodyguards. There are already plenty of guards all over the U.N. But more would be needed to guard a particular person, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. There are logistical problems. There is the extra cost. But it would be worth it. The very presence of those bodyguards would be a constant reminder to everyone of the threat of Muslim terrorism and of what Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and others who leave Islam and proclaim the reasons for their apostasy, must endure. And that’s not a bad thing. It should even be possible to have the U.N. pay the bill for her security, because “the terrorism that threatens Ayaan Hirsi Ali threatens the world” – or at least for the American government to loudly make that request of the U.N. and, if turned down, at the very least make that refusal widely known, or even threaten to deduct the cost of that extra security from what our government contributes to the U.N.
As they used to say on Delancey Street, what’s not to like?

Germany: ‘We’re Somalis, we don’t pay’: Muslim migrants smash bistro with iron bars
Robert Spencer in FrontPage: President Trump: Now What?

 

Hugh Fitzgerald: Arsalan Iftikhar and Trump’s Reign of Terror

NOVEMBER 17, 2016 12:48 PM BY HUGH FITZGERALD92 COMMENTS


The Muslim hysteria is upon us. I don’t mean hysteria about Muslims, for none is discernible; rather, it is the hysteria of Muslims, or many of them, their expressions of supposed terror – in the newspapers, the airwaves, and the Internet — over what a President Trump will do. These reports of “terrified” Muslims are appearing all over the place, short on facts but long on fear. For what exactly has Trump said or done to strike such putative terror? He’s suggested that the vetting of Muslim migrants leaves a lot to be desired. Given how many Muslims have been admitted to the United States in how short a time, and given that our government has been a positive hindrance to those of its agents who would like to find out more about the ideology of Islam, and given, too, how hard it has been to read the minds of Muslim migrants, at least some of whom we have good reason to believe (see New York, Washington, Fort Hood, Boston, Chattanooga, Orlando, San Bernardino, or outside this country, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, London, Madrid, Moscow) may be intent on sowing murder and mayhem among the Infidels, doesn’t Trump; have a point? On December 7, 2015 (for Muslims, a date which will apparently live in Trump-infamy), Donald Trump called “for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.” This was apparently beyond the pale, as “ far-right” or as “white nationalist” (the newly-fashionable term of opprobrium for anyone who voted for Trump) as all get-out.

Was it really? What exactly had Trump called for? It had not escaped Trump’s notice that since 9/11/2001 there have been nearly 30,000 terrorist attacks by Muslims around the world, and that quite a few of those terrorists have the habit of quoting from the Qur’an and Hadith to justify those attacks, while others remain quiet about their plans; officially, we in the Western world (see Tony Blair, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Pope Francis, Angela Merkel) are all encouraged to believe that these attacks “have nothing to do with Islam.” But res ipsa loquitur, as the lawyers like to say, the thing speaks for itself. Confusion is piled upon confusion when it comes to Islam. And since many people seem still to be unfamiliar with what is in the Qur’an and Hadith, and many in the American government, as elsewhere in the West, are fearful of offending Muslims by suggesting there might be something in those texts to worry about (which is why Robert Spencer found himself a pedagogue non grata as far as those now running the Homeland Security industry were concerned, when he insisted on reading the texts rightly), so it was perfectly sensible for Trump to say that in these matters the government has a duty to “figure out what the hell is going on” before even more Muslims are admitted, given the life-and-death stakes. There is nothing outrageous about that. Just because so many others have been derelict in their duty is no reason for Trump to score easy points by following suit.

One example, among so many, of hysterical fear-mongering is provided by Arsalan Iftikhar, a Muslim “international human rights lawyer,” who the day after the election was quick off the mark with a piece in the Washington Post that appeared under the scare headline “Being a Muslim in Trump’s America is frightening.”

Now I haven’t – have you? — noticed any round-up of Muslims en masse, heard about any raids on mosques and madrasas, or gestapo-knocks in the night at the homes of Muslim families. That’s right – more than a full week has gone by since the election, and yet nowhere in this country has a single Muslim been subject to a single raid. In France on July 16, two hundred mosques were raided. A few days ago, there were nearly 200 raids on mosques, offices, and homes of Muslims, in Germany. But in the United States since the terrifying Trump was elected? Nothing at all, and not the slightest suggestion of similar raids to come once Trump is actually sworn in. The only “terrifying” thing since Trump’s election has been this unending series of articles telling us that we have a positive duty to rally around Muslims, give them moral and other kinds of support, lest they feel any anxiety about their position in American society, for that would never do. And if non-Muslims for some reason feel anxiety? Well, they have it coming to them.
The “terrified” Arsalan Iftikhar, having been hounded into appearing in The Washington Post (try getting into The Washington Post if you are the least detectable bit unsympathetic to Islam and its adherents) offers a piece that is instructive, though not in the way that he imagines.
Here’s his first sentence:

In the seismic aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, there is only silver lining [sic] for millions of women, African Americans, Hispanics, people with disabilities and 7 million American Muslims like me. Now, every minority demographic group in the United States must now feel a sense of collective urgency to mobilize together for the future of our multicultural society based on what we witnessed during this presidential election.
​

The first thing to notice is that he starts his piece with a Big Lie casually tossed off. He inflates – more than doubles – the number of Muslims in the United States, from the 3.3 million in the latest Pew Report to “7 million American Muslims like me.” Iftikhar doesn’t justify this number, doesn’t explain why it should be accepted instead of the numbers in the Pew Report. Where did he get this figure of 7 million Muslims? He plucked it from the air, he made it up. He wants you to believe that there are more than twice as many Muslims in this country than any reputable compiler of statistics has suggested; by next year, you may see Iftikhar suggest, with the same casual authority, a figure of 7.5 or even 8 million Muslims. Muslim numbers must be inflated; the more numerous they are, the more politically powerful they will be. Of course, at the same time, Muslims are being depicted as a persecuted and powerless minority. Iftikhar, like so many Defenders of the Faith, wants it both ways.
In the same first paragraph, Iftikhar attempts to convince us that there is a commonality of interest between Muslims and every other group whom he thinks Trump has insulted. So he wants “millions of women, African Americans, Hispanics, people with disabilities” to make common cause with “Muslims like me.”

But a moment’s thought would make any fair-minded person realize that it is bizarre to think that men who adhere to the relentlessly misogynistic faith of Islam and “millions of women” can “make common cause.” Why do I call it “relentlessly misogynistic”? According to the Sharia, Muslim women can inherit half as much as men (Qur’an 4:11); their testimony is worth half that of a man (2:282); polygamy is licit (Muhammad, the Perfect Man, allowed himself twelve or fourteen wives, depending on whether or not one sex slave is counted as a wife) and so are female slaves, “those whom your right hand possesses”; a Muslim man is allowed to beat his disobedient wife, though “lightly”; a Muslim man need only pronounce the triple-talaq to divorce his wife; and women are described in the Qur’an as inferior to men, for “the men are a degree above them” (2:228); and in the Sahih Bukhari (6:301) “[Muhammad] said, ‘Is not the evidence of two women equal to the witness of one man? They replied in the affirmative. He said, ‘This [is because of] the deficiency in her intelligence.”

And why should those lumped together as “Latinos” – almost all of them Christians – decide to make “common cause” with Muslims, who regard themselves as the “best of peoples” and Christians and Jews as the “vilest of creatures”? Hasn’t the unending spectacle of Christians being attacked and murdered in Pakistan and Afghanistan, in Egypt and Nigeria, in Iraq and Syria, in Libya and Algeria, in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, in Bangladesh and Kosovo, and Ethiopia and the Sudan, done enough to dissuade Latinos from being manipulated into supporting Muslims on the basis of a factitious commonality of interests? Any “Latino” — a word one uses with many reservations — need spend only a few minutes scrolling through the record of Muslim attacks on Christians in recent years, in several dozen countries all over the world, to see what’s so sinister about Iftikhar’s proposed alliance. And what contempt he must have for those whom he thinks will forever remain unaware of that record.

As for African-Americans, what common cause should they make with Muslims when black African Christians are being kidnapped and killed by Boko Haram in Nigeria, as they had previously been killed before the days of Boko Haram, since the late 1960s, with more than a million massacred in the “jihad” (the word used by Colonel Ojukwu in the Ahiara Declaration to describe the Muslim war on Christians), that is, the Biafra War of 1967-69? What common cause should African-Americans make with those Muslim Arabs who raped, looted, and murdered their way through the villages of black African Christians in the southern Sudan, for more than 20 years, until international pressure finally led to the creation of a separate Republic of Southern Sudan? Will African-Americans forget that Nasser sent Egyptian Migs to bomb Nigerian Christian villages? And will they overlook Darfur, where Muslim Arab raiders, the Janjaweed, seized property from black Africans, and killed them by the tens of thousands, even if they were fellow Muslims, because they were black Africans and not Arabs? Arsalan Iftikhar chooses not to recognize that not only are Muslims “the best of peoples” and Unbelievers the “vilest of creatures” but that within Islam, Arabs are seen as superior to non-Arabs; this “universalist” faith actually is a vehicle for Arab supremacism. Hence the attacks of Muslim Arabs on Muslim blacks in Darfur. The attempt of Muslims, including Arsalan Iftikhar, to presume that others should be their natural allies overlooks the ideology of Islam, where Muslims are the “best of peoples” and Arab Muslims the best kind of Muslim.
Iftikhar again:

In addition to his blatant misogyny and anti-immigrant xenophobia during his presidential campaign, we have also seen Donald Trump’s political campaign successfully normalize Islamophobia as part of the current national Republican Party platform as it exists today.
​

As to “blatant misogyny,” please see above the discussion of how women are regarded and treated in Islam, and compare that institutionalized misogyny, which is fixed forever in the Qur’an and Hadith, with an unseemly handful of sentences expressing individual bad taste and locker-room bragging.
Has Trump exhibited “anti-immigrant xenophobia”? Has he expressed hatred of foreigners? He has not. Or opposition to legal immigrants? He has not. Again and again he has distinguished illegal immigrants from legal ones, has merely maintained that he thinks the laws concerning immigration deserve to be obeyed, that every country has a right to decide whom it wants to allow in (immigration is not, pace Pope Francis, a right but a privilege) and to bar or expel those who refuse to observe the laws put in place to regulate immigration.

As for Arsalan Iftikhar’s predictable charge of “Islamophobia,” the correct response to this remains always the same: the word “Islamophobia” properly describes the irrational fear (and hatred) of Islam. There is plenty of evidence – in the Qur’an and Hadith, in the history of Muslim conquest over the past 1400 years of many non-Muslim lands and the subsequent subjugation of many non-Muslim peoples, and in the observable behavior of Muslims toward non-Muslims all over the world today — that fear (and hatred) of Islam is not irrational for well-informed Unbelievers to feel. All this evidence is being downplayed or ignored in the Western world by the political and media elites who keep insisting that there is nothing about Islam to worry about, and in the countries of the West, political and media elites have convinced themselves that whatever problem may arise is merely a justified Muslim response to, and resentment of, how they are treated in the West, and the more understanding and welcoming we Unbelievers are, the more all manner of things shall be well. It’s up to us, not to Muslims, to solve whatever problems arise. And no one asks the simple question: Why? Why should the Western world have to accommodate Muslim demands, change its laws and customs in order, it is forlornly hoped, to better “integrate” Muslims?

The possibility that there are problems with a large-scale Muslim presence not just in “Trump’s America” but in Hollande’s France, and Merkel’s Germany, and May’s United Kingdom, and that those problems are not susceptible of solution, given that they have their origin in the Qur’an, which is regarded by Muslims as immutable, and which clearly teaches permanent hostility toward all non-Muslims, is too disturbing for many non-Muslims to allow themselves to acknowledge. So they don’t, and instead allow the arsalan-iftikhars to peddle their taqiyya wares of victimization without fear of refutation.

Here’s what Iftikhar reports as an example of what he considers a nasty little response by Trump:

In a rare display of journalistic pushback, after Trump once confirmed to reporters that he would set up a database for Muslim Americans, an NBC News reporter asked him point-blank in response:
“Is there a difference between requiring Muslims to register and Jews in Nazi Germany?”
“You tell me,” Trump replied while walking away.
​

Iftikhar thinks the meaning of this exchange is obvious: Trump, embarrassed by the reporter’s piercing question, which pointed up a supposed similarity between Trump’s plan for having a database for Muslims, and the registration of Jews in Nazi Germany, did not know how to reply, and could do no better than “you tell me” and – presumably mortified at having of the similarity of his plan and that of the Nazis pointed out – then walked away.
I read this exchange quite differently. I read it as Trump being so disgusted by the comparison that he did not think it deserved anything more than being turned back against its asker. His “you tell me” meant “you tell me what similarity could there possibly be between the ‘database’ that might be set up to identify those Muslims most likely to engage in terrorist attacks and the registration the Nazis required of Jews in order to better round them up to be killed.” What kind of idiocy must someone possess to suggest that proposals for keeping track of Muslims in the West by means of “databases” (already being used by the anti-terrorist police in Europe), which presumably would contain such obviously relevant information such as whether the subject logs onto Islamic websites, or has travelled to IS-held parts of Syria, Iraq, or Yemen, or spent a lot of time at a mosque that is known for the dangerous views of its imam, given that there have been nearly 30,000 terrorist attacks by Muslims around the world since 9/11/2001, have anything in common with the Nazis forcing entirely inoffensive Jews, who were no threat to anybody, to register with German authorities so that they could be more easily seized and, as ultimately happened, murdered? A database designed to prevent mass murder is very different from a database intended to facilitate mass murder. Far from being, as Arsalan Iftikhar thinks, horrific, Trump’s answer was one of his finest moments, because, he knew, only one decent reply was possible: “You tell me.” What Arsalan Iftikhar describes as admirable “journalistic pushback” was, in fact, an example of moral myopia. I’m not sure there’s a prescription strong enough to correct that level of impairment.

Meanwhile, we can all wait for the Reign of Trump Terror to begin, with the knocks at midnight, and the sound of mechanized tumbrils rolling, and for America to become – why, it’s halfway there already, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, mein damen und herren – the new Nazi Germany, and Muslims will be, why, according to them they already are, the new Jews, and what will we tell our children we did in this time of testing? Did we stand with the brave truth-teller Arsalan Iftikhar or with the likes of Donald Trump?


New York Times' Nicholas Kristof: Respond to Trump by joining Hamas-linked CAIR
Austria: Sharia patrol attacks girl for not wearing hijab

 

Hugh Fitzgerald: Nicholas Kristof’s 12-Step Program (Revised Edition)

NOVEMBER 22, 2016 9:51 AM BY HUGH FITZGERALD41 COMMENTS



Just a brief note from Nicholas Kristof, or a reasonable facsimile thereof:

As I am “the moral conscience of our generation of journalists,” the winner of two Pulitzer prizes, the first blogger on the New York Times’ website, a journalist of whom it has been said that “there is no one in journalism anywhere in the United States…who has done anything like the work he has done to figure out how poor people are actually living around the world,” who in 2007 U.S. News & World Report named as “one of “America’s Best Leaders,” and who in 2011 was named one of seven “Top American Leaders” by the Harvard Kennedy School and the Washington Post, someone whose “writing has reshaped the field of opinion journalism,” in 2013 I was still impressing enough people to be awarded the Goldsmith Award for Career Excellence in Journalism by Harvard University.

And I find it extremely humbling that Alex S. Jones, the Pulitzer Prize-winning director of Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Shorenstein Center, declared in presenting the award to me that “the reporter who’s done more than any other to change the world is Nick Kristof.” In the same year, I was named “an International Freedom Conductor by the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, largely for my work exposing human trafficking and linking it to modern slavery.” And it may interest you to know that the last person named to receive the title before me, two years earlier, was the Dalai Lama. Half the Sky, a book I wrote with my wife Sheryl WuDunn on the condition of women around the world, was called by one reviewer “one of the most important books I have ever reviewed,” and another reviewer upped the ecstatic ante, calling it “the most significant book that I have ever reviewed.”

You can find out more about my accomplishments and the recognition I have received at my Wikipedia entry, which someone is constantly updating in great detail. Whoever said that his Wikipedia entry was “the lengthened shadow of a man” – or for that matter, woman — was surely onto something. And though some have suggested that I be given a Nobel Prize (I’m not sure whether they had in mind the prize for peace or that for literature), at this point I think that honor, the awarding of which, no matter what the category, I would accept in all humility, as of now might be somewhat premature.

Recent responses to my 12-step program for those who want to fight back against the Age of Trump and the Darkness Descending have suggested to me that I might expand on my proposals having to do with Islam. In the hope of spreading understanding of one of the world’s great religions and giving victimized Muslims reason to hope, I started a few days ago to do something I have long wanted to do, but what with one thing and another (I’ve visited 150 countries, I’ve pocketed dozens of awards) never did find the time. But now I hope that you, my more than 1.1 million followers of my Twitter account (who have made me the most followed journalist in the world), will choose to study Islam along with me.

So here’s my revised 12-step program, now devoted entirely to Islam, below:

1. I WILL not put off any longer my study of Islam. I am now in the midst of reading the Qur’an, an effort that should take about 30 hours from start to finish. I pledge to reread it each month, in order to keep fresh my understanding of Islam’s central text. And I hope many of you among my 1.1 million followers on Twitter will join me in this effort. Our Muslim brothers deserve no less.

2. I WILL read a tafsir or commentary to the Qur’an, to help me make sense of difficult or obscure passages, of which there are many, and to understand more fully the relations of the parts to the whole. I want to better grasp the interpretative doctrine of naskh, or abrogation, which I have just learned privileges the later, more militant passages that contradict earlier, milder passages, that is, the Medinan over the Meccan verses. I urge my readers to do the same. I have been told that Blogging the Qur’an by Robert Spencer is a particularly useful exegesis, but I am still reluctant to recommend his work, for I remain sure – though I am not exactly sure why I am sure, since I have refrained from reading a word of it – that there must be something very wrong with it. So say Reza Aslan, Cathy Young, the heads of CAIR and the Southern Poverty Law Center, and other grand panjandrums of compassion and diversity and outreach too numerous to mention. Quod erat demostrandum. Still, I just might have a look. Perhaps it’s time. You never know.

3. I WILL carefully note those Qur’anic passages that have to do with the treatment of women, which is only natural, given how much of my life as a journalist has been spent reporting on the mistreatment of women. I think we all ought to be aware that Muslim women inherit half as much as men (Qur’an 4:11); that their testimony is worth half that of a man (2:282); that polygamy is licit in Islam, and so are female slaves, “those whom your right hand possesses”; that a Muslim man is allowed to beat his disobedient wife, that a Muslim man need only pronounce the triple-talaq to divorce his wife; and that women are described in the Qur’an as inferior to men, for “the men are a degree above them” (2:228); and in one of the most respected compilations of Hadith, which are the stories about Muhammad’s words and deeds, the Sahih Bukhari, “[Muhammad] said, ‘Is not the evidence of two women equal to the witness of one man? They replied in the affirmative. He said, ‘This [is because of] the deficiency in her intelligence.’”(6.301)
As the “moral conscience of our generation of journalists” and the author, with my wife Sheryl WuDunn, of Half the Sky, about examples of misogyny around the world, I will prepare a plan for ending the mistreatment of women under Islam. This means that I will devote at least one column every month to the condition of Muslim women. If for some reason results are not forthcoming from our State Department, or the United Nations, I’ll devote two columns per month to the condition of women under Islam. Or even, quite possibly, three.

4. I WILL hold up for inspection those passages in the Qur’an that deal with Unbelievers, and how they are to be treated in a Muslim society. These will include, but not be limited to, the following:
Qur’an 2:191 “Slay the unbelievers wherever you find them”
Qur’an 3:21 “Muslims must not take the infidels as friends”
Qur’an 5:33 “Maim and crucify the infidels if they criticize Islam”
Qur’an 8:12 “Terrorize and behead those who believe in scriptures other than the Koran”
Qur’an 8:60 “Muslims must muster all weapons to terrorize the infidels”
Qur’an 8:65 “The unbelievers are stupid, urge all Muslims to fight them”
Qur’an 9:5 “When the opportunity arises, kill the infidels wherever you find them”
Quran 9:123 “Make war on the infidels living in your neighbourhood”
Qur’an 22:19 “Punish the unbelievers with garments of fire, hooked iron rods, boiling water, melt their skin and bellies”
Qur’an 47:4 “Do not hanker for peace with the infidels, behead them when you catch them”.
I will invite readers of my column, and my 1.1 million followers on Twitter, to interpret the words and arrive at the real meaning of these passages.

5. I WILL describe for my readers the concept of the Dhimmi in Muslim jurisprudence, a word applied to those non-Muslims who, if they agree to a host of legal (economic, social, political) disabilities, can continue to live, and even practice their faith (provided their faith is Christianity or Judaism, that of the Peoples of the Book) in a Muslim polity. In the hundreds of columns I have written that touched on Islam, I now realize I had overlooked the concept of the Dhimmi, and especially ignored the required payment of the capitation tax, or Jizyah, so I will be sure to discuss the legal status of non-Muslims under Muslim rule, and refer readers to Antoine Fattal’s “Le statut legal des non-Musulmans en pays d’islam.” And of course I hope that some of the 1.1 million followers I have on Twitter, if they know enough French, will take up my suggestion.

6. I WILL explain to my readers how, in Islam, the world is seen as divided between Dar al-Islam, the Domain of Islam, where Muslims rule, and Dar al-Harb, the Domain of War, where Muslims do not yet rule, and that between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb unending war is prescribed, until Islam everywhere dominates, and Muslims rule, everywhere.

7. I WILL read the most accessible works of at least a dozen scholars of Islam who wrote before the present Age of Inhibition, and include excerpts from them in my columns, so that those wishing to go deeper into their own study of Islam will have Recommended Readings available. I will also post those excerpts permanently at my website. These scholars will include Joseph Schacht, Snouck Hurgronje, Henri Lammens, K. S. Lal, Ignaz Goldziher, Sir William Muir, St. Clair Tisdall, Arthur Jeffrey, Samuel Zwemer, Georges Vajda, David Margoliouth, and Majid Khadduri. I will urge my 1.1 million followers on Twitter to emulate my example.

8. I WILL publicize the work of defectors from Islam who have found refuge in the West, including Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Nonie Darwish, Ibn Warraq, Wafa Sultan, and Magdi Allam, and include excerpts from each of them in my columns and at my website. I will explain why these defectors are as valuable to the Western world as were defectors from the K.G.B. during the Cold War. I will explain why they are all under a permanent death threat from Muslims, requiring many of them to be attended by bodyguards. Therefore, it behooves us to pay careful attention to their testimonies of life under Islam.

9. I WILL discuss the description in the Qur’an of Unbelievers as “the most vile of created beings” (Qur’an 98.6) and of Muslims as “the best of peoples”(Qur’an 3.110). I will invite my 1.1 million Twitter followers to come up with their own interpretations of these phrases and what they could possibly mean. I will post both the most plausible replies — and the most implausible –- in my column and at my website.

10. I WILL discuss details of the life of Muhammad, who is regarded by Believers as the Perfect Man (al-insan al-kamil) and the Model of Conduct (uswa hasana) for all time. I will explain the consequences of his marriage to little Aisha for Muslim marriages over the past 1400 years. I will discuss Muhammad’s pleasure at learning of the murders of his mockers Asma bint Marwan and Abu ‘Afak, and at witnessing the massacres of 600-900 bound prisoners of the Banu Qurayza. I will discuss the significance of the raid on the Jewish farmers of the Khaybar Oasis for subsequent Muslim behavior toward Infidels, and especially toward Jews.

11. I WILL explain the Islamic concepts of Taqiyya and Kitman, or religiously-sanctioned deception that is justified as protecting either the Faith of Islam, or the beliefs of some of its adherents.

12. I WILL examine the words “Islamophobia” and “racism” that, I now realize, may have been deployed, lazily or deliberately, as terms of abuse to silence all criticism of Islam. I hereby promise to stop using such terms, and urge my 1.1 million Twitter followers to do the same.


I WILL discuss what the leading Muslim intellectual and poseur in Europe, Tariq Ramadan, meant when he said that “We are here. We are here to stay. It’s over.”
That is the baker’s or faker’s dozen which I offer as a revised edition of my previous 12-step program, so that others, especially journalists, may fulfill their role of being, in that most memorable of my latest phrases, “watchdogs, not lapdogs.” In other words, emulate moi, and you too may someday be described, at your own Wikipedia entry, as “the moral conscience of our generation of journalist.”

Germany: Muslim migrants burn down hall, screaming “There isn’t enough Nutella, Gummibears, and chocolate”
Islamic State jihadis from US now returning, pose jihad threat at home

 

Hugh Fitzgerald: George Soros, Karl Popper, and Podsnap

NOVEMBER 28, 2016 10:50 AM BY HUGH FITZGERALD36 COMMENTS


George Soros has just pledged $15 million to fight “hate crimes.” Who could object to this? Well, I could, and you could, if by “hate crimes” Soros means truthful statements about what Islamic texts — Qur’an and Hadith and Sira – contain. But those texts and teachings of Islam do represent a menace to all non-Muslims, and it would be folly not to recognize this. And I could object, and you could, if Soros means to exclude as “hate crimes” (or “hate speech” precedent to “hate crimes”) a Muslim quoting those exact same texts because, in his view, if made by a Believer, they cannot possibly be “hate speech.” For if they were, that would mean that the texts of Islam itself would have to be called into question, and that – according to the Defenders of the Faith such as George Soros – can simply never be. A Muslim reports, for example, that the Qur’an says that Muslims are the “best of peoples”(3:110) and non-Muslims the “most vile of creatures.”(98:6) This is both accurate and, for George Soros, not a “hate crime.” But when some non-Muslim reports that Muslims say that the Qur’an says that “Muslims are the best of peoples” and “non-Muslims the most vile of creatures,” George Soros and the Muslim groups he funds regard those statements as whipping up hatred against Muslims; that is, they constitute a “hate crime.” For Soros, what the Muslim quotes in such a case says hardly matters; Soros long ago made up his mind that these passages don’t matter or don’t exist or are being taken out of context or surely have to be interpreted differently, and in any case, who cares about such remarks except for those Islamophobes always trying to sow distrust and hate.

Soros has, through his Open Society Foundation, shown a deep interest in defending Muslims and in deflecting attention from Islam’s texts. His foundation has consistently given grants to organizations, such as the Muslim Advocates, that seek to water down anti-terrorist measures, and to constrain the effectiveness of domestic intelligence in monitoring likely terrorists, and has been responsible for forcing the NYPD to end some of its most effective programs, including its monitoring of mosques. After the Dec. 2, 2015 attack in San Bernardino, for example, the Open Society’s Muslim grantees did not express horror at the attack by a Muslim couple on their Infidel fellow workers, but rather, according to a hacked document, immediately “mobilized to counter anti-refugee and anti-Muslim immigration sentiment.” The policy agenda of the Open Society Foundation is to insist that the main source of “hate crimes” in the United States is a never clearly-defined “Islamophobia,” which vague term is used to describe and consign to the outer darkness all criticism of Islam, to suggest that Islam itself is always and everywhere beyond criticism, which – given the observable behavior of Muslims in the United States and all over the world – becomes more ludicrous every day. Can anyone with a straight face still maintain that all those who are made anxious, angry, fearful about Islam, because of what has happened in Paris and Nice, in Brussels and Amsterdam, in London and Madrid, in Moscow and Beslan, in Beijing and Bali, in New York and Washington and Boston, at Fort Hood and in Chattanooga and San Bernardino (you can fill up notebooks with the list of nearly 30,000 attacks by Muslim terrorists, following the texts of Islam, that have been committed since 9/11/2001) are merely hate-filled Islamophobes?

Soros has not listened to, much less heeded, the testimony of that growing number of ex-Muslims who actually grew up within Islam, and in the West found both the intellectual freedom and physical security (though that security is relative; most must live under constant guard for fear of their former coreligionists), to find their way out of Islam and have chosen to sacrifice their safety in order to alert the non-Muslim world about the teachings and texts of Islam. These ex-Muslims are particularly worrisome because they are thoroughly versed in what Islam teaches, cannot be bullied into backing down by claims they “don’t know what they are talking about,” and offer from the inside an authentic view of Islam and of Muslims, which may be unflattering, but also happens to be true. If Soros were truly interested in “reforming” Islam – assuming that such a difficult and doubtful undertaking might improve matters – then surely one would want to publicize and to promote Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wafa Sultan, Nonie Darwish, Ibn Warraq, Magdi Allam and others like them. Soros has never been interested sin these witnesses; for him there are only victimized Muslims and Islamophobes. Yet these ex-Muslims are as valuable now as, decades ago, were defectors from the K.G.B. who alerted the West to the full menace of Soviet Communism.

When Ayaan Hirsi Ali, for example, writes that on September 11, 2001 she was horrified by the news of the attack on the World Trade Center, but not at all surprised, because she knew from her own Muslim upbringing of the intense hatred of Infidels to be found in Islam, does Hirsi Ali’s remark constitute “hate speech”? When Wafa Sultan or Nonie Darwish or Magdi Allam describe in similar terms the passages of murderous hatred toward non-Muslims to be found in the Qur’an and Hadith, and that they were constantly subjected to when they grew up in Muslim environments in Syria and Egypt, shouldn’t George Soros want to support them in their commitment to warning the West? Soros has taken his stand: he will do nothing to encourage the truthful study of Islamic texts, and will instead do everything he can to avoid having the American public be made aware of, for example, this telling — if oft-repeated — list of Qur’anic passages pertaining to Infidels:

Qur’an 2:191 “Slay the unbelievers wherever you find them”
Qur’an 3:21 “Muslims must not take the infidels as friends”
Qur’an 5:33 “Maim and crucify the infidels if they criticize Islam”
Qur’an 8:12 “Terrorize and behead those who believe in scriptures other than the Koran”
Qur’an 8:60 “Muslims must muster all weapons to terrorize the infidels”
Qur’an 8:65 “The unbelievers are stupid, urge all Muslims to fight them”
Qur’an 9:5 “When the opportunity arises, kill the infidels wherever you find them”
Quran 9:123 “Make war on the infidels living in your neighbourhood”
Qur’an 22:19 “Punish the unbelievers with garments of fire, hooked iron rods, boiling water, melt their skin and bellies”
Qur’an 47:4 “Do not hanker for peace with the infidels, behead them when you catch them”

Soros does not want to acknowledge such passages. I suspect at this point nothing could induce him to read the Qur’an and Hadith. He doesn’t want to know for certain what he suspects he might find. He wants, rather, to live in a comfortable cocoon of high-minded ignorance, where he is flattered sycophantically by the recipients of his largesse, and can remain happily convinced that for some reason he can’t quite fathom, all over the world, Christians and Jews, Hindus and Buddhists, atheists and agnostics, are engaged in an effort to persecute defenseless Muslims in an orgy of Islamophobia. For Soros, there is only one way to bring about the heavenly kingdom, or some reasonable facsimile thereof, which is for non-Muslims to recognize, and reject, the “climate of fear” they have created for Muslims, a fear for which there is no discernible reason. Never mind the Muslim clerics who speak openly about deliberately leaching on Infidel societies, with Muslims helping themselves to a proleptic Jizyah both from the receipt of every possible welfare-state benefit they can get, and by property crimes, also seen as a kind of Jizyah, against Infidels. Never mind the skyrocketing statistics on Muslims committing sex crimes on non-Muslims (women, men, children of both sexes). Never mind those Muslims who speak openly of how they are using demography as a weapon of Jihad – outbreeding while battening on their helpless hosts, so that with each year their percentage of the population inexorably rises.
Here is Hirsi Ali in a 2007 interview in the London Standard:

Just like Nazism started with Hitler‘s vision, the Islamic vision is a caliphate — a society ruled by Sharia law – in which women who have sex before marriage are stoned to death, homosexuals are beaten, and apostates like me are killed. Sharia law is as inimical to liberal democracy as Nazism.” In this interview, she said, “Violence is inherent in Islam – it’s a destructive, nihilistic cult of death. It legitimates murder.​

​

Islam – not “Islamism” –is a cult that you can be born into, or join, but once in you can’t get out; the punishment for apostasy is death. It is both a fanatic and a fighting faith, where Infidels are likened to animals, women and homosexuals can be beaten or killed, and those who leave the faith killed for defecting from the Army of Islam. Could George Soros allow himself to recognize the simian similarities between Islam and the Nazism from which he just barely escaped? Does George Soros think that apostates are not killed, that women are not beaten (or killed) for sex outside marriage, that homosexuals are not killed simply for being homosexuals? Does he think the murderous depiction of Infidels, and especially of Jews (for being the firmest in their opposition to Muhammad) is simply made up?

And why does Soros promote campaigns that spread false Islamophobia on social media? There is so much of this already going around, these anti-Muslim “hate crimes” designed to elicit sympathy for Muslims that turn out to be hoaxes, that Soros need hardly bother. The latest example is the story about one Abdul Aziz Usmani, a 7-year-old whose father claimed he was repeatedly beaten up by fellow students on a school bus in Cary, North Carolina, though neither the bus driver nor any of the other students noticed anything awry, and furthermore, the boy bore no signs of any injury, nor reported any attack, until his father did. Liza Luten, a spokesman for the school, told BuzzFeed news: “[The principal] interviewed seven students sitting near this child, and none of the students, nor the bus driver, witnessed any type of altercation or incident.” When [the family] originally shared the information, they didn’t share any information about religion or race, and just that their child was bullied.

The police investigated, and concluded that it was a charge without merit, one more pretend-hate crime. Robert Spencer has also noted the case in New Jersey of a Muslim who was convicted of a murder that he had tried to depict as an “Islamophobic” attack, and another in California of a man convicted of killing his wife, an attack he tried to blame on “Islamophobia.” And then there was the woman who said she was called a terrorist and her cheek slashed in Manhattan, who later admitted she made up the story. If you click on each word here — CAIRand other Muslims have on many occasions not hesitated — you will have ten more examples of claimed anti-Muslim “hate-crimes” that turned out to be hoaxes. And tomorrow, or next week, there will be still more to add to the list.

Does George Soros allow himself to know anything about this long catalogue of “hate crimes” where there was no crime, or where the crime in question was indeed committed, but by Muslims? A moment’s thought would tell him that if he really cared about the reputation of Muslims, he would want to do whatever he could to put a stop to these false reportings. For when they are finally revealed (as so many of them have been), they only earn Muslims still more suspicion and contempt. But Soros will have none of that. He prefers simply to ignore the whole lengthening list of fabricated hate crimes, and instead, dwells in a phantasmagoric world where Muslims live in constant fear of attack. Nor is there convincing evidence of such fear. Instead of cowering, Muslims appear quite aggressive throughout the Western world in pushing their own agendas: demands for prayer rooms in schools and workplaces, insistence upon wearing hijabs that violate longstanding dress codes, prayer times that interrupt the work day schedule, rewriting of history in school textbooks — wherever they sense Infidel weakness, demands are made.

George Soros seems strangely unaffected by the rise of antisemitism in Europe. Though he escaped from the Nazis by the skin of his teeth, he appears unwilling to recognize the source of the new wave of antisemitism in Europe – the burgeoning population of Muslims. One wonders if he is aware of the description of the Jews in the Qur’an as the “descendants of apes and pigs,” the people who were most firm in their opposition to Muhammad, and who even were responsible — see the Sira — for poisoning Muhammad. Here is the conclusion to a 700-page treatise, Jews in the Qur’an and the Traditions, by Grand Sheik Tantawi, Sunni Islam’s leading cleric, and the head of Al-Azhar University in Cairo:

[The] Qur’an describes the Jews with their own particular degenerate characteristics, i.e. killing the prophets of Allah, corrupting His words by putting them in the wrong places, consuming the people’s wealth frivolously, refusal to distance themselves from the evil they do, and other ugly characteristics caused by their deep-rooted lasciviousness … only a minority of the Jews keep their word. … [A]ll Jews are not the same. The good ones become Muslims, the bad ones do not.​

​

Descriptions of Jews by prominent Muslim clerics are quoted by Robert Spencer in an omnium-gatherum article on the persistence of antisemitism in Islam:

The grand sheikh of Al-Azhar, Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, the most respected cleric in the world among Sunni Muslims today, has called Jews “the enemies of Allah, descendants of apes and pigs.” Saudi sheikh Abd al-Rahman al-Sudayyis, imam of the principal mosque in the holiest city in Islam, Mecca, said in a sermon that Jews are “the scum of the human race, the rats of the world, the violators of pacts and agreements, the murderers of the prophets, and the offspring of apes and pigs.” Another Saudi sheikh, Ba’d bin Abdallah al-Ajameh al-Ghamidi, made the connection explicit: “The current behavior of the brothers of apes and pigs, their treachery, violation of agreements, and defiling of holy places … is connected with the deeds of their forefathers during the early period of Islam—which proves the great similarity between all the Jews living today and the Jews who lived at the dawn of Islam.​

​

The steady rise in anti-Semitic attacks in Europe has been attributed, by European authorities, to Muslims who have taken to heart what the Qur’an and Hadith have to say about Jews. Why should we not believe that as the Muslim population grows in the United States, there will not be the same rise in hate crimes by Muslims against Jews here, too? Or should we believe, as some fondly do, that there is something unique about “American” Muslims – uniquely tolerant, as opposed to Muslims elsewhere in the world, even though all Muslims read the same Qur’an, the same Hadith, the same Sira? Doesn’t the less aggressive behavior, so far, of American Muslims reflect only the fact of lesser numbers, of their constituting 1% rather than 3% or 5% or 10% of the population?

It is too bad that George Soros, with his willingness to deploy millions to work his will, remains adamantine in his refusal to look at the evidence of Muslim “hate speech” that then gives rise to “hate crimes.” It is too bad that he has decided that it is Muslims who need to be protected from a potential wave of violence from “Islamophobes,” though there has been no such wave, not in North America, and not anywhere in the Western world. It is too bad that George Soros does not recognize that the charge of “Islamophobia” is a Muslim invention, designed to silence all criticism of Islam, and misleadingly characterizing as “irrational hatred” the criticism of Islam that is solidly based on a familiarity with the contents of the Qur’an, Hadith, and Sira.

George Soros fancies himself more than merely a supremely enlightened Maecenas. He thinks of himself as a philosopher, keeper of the flame of the late Karl Popper who, like Soros, was of Jewish descent and, like Soros, escaped the Nazis in time. Popper’s most influential work for Soros was his “The Open Society and Its Enemies.” But whatever Soros learned from that work of political philosophy, he seems not to have taken to heart the single most celebrated remark of Popper, made in 1945, after the final defeat of the Nazis: “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.” Soros may have learned, or thinks he learned, a great deal from Karl Popper,but he did not learn this. And because he is more than tolerant of the most intolerant and fanatical force now bestriding the earth, he has made himself one of the enemies of the “open society” that Popper championed.

But there is one personage whom Soros, in his willful blindness about Islam, does resemble. That is Dickens’ Mr. Podsnap:

…Mr Podsnap settled that whatever he put behind him he put out of existence. There was a dignified conclusiveness–not to add a grand convenience–in this way of getting rid of disagreeables which had done much towards establishing Mr Podsnap in his lofty place in Mr Podsnap’s satisfaction. ‘I don’t want to know about it; I don’t choose to discuss it; I don’t admit it!’ Mr Podsnap had even acquired a peculiar flourish of his right arm in often clearing the world of its most difficult problems, by sweeping them behind him (and consequently sheer away) with those words and a flushed face. For they affronted him.​

“I don’t want to know about it; I don’t choose to discuss it; I don’t admit it” – that is George Soros, on Islam. He fancies himself a disciple of Karl Popper. But when it comes to “clearing the world of its most difficult problems,” he turns out to be, though he would be outraged at the suggestion, merely, and maddeningly, an avatar of Mr. Podsnap.​

​

Jihad at Ohio State University: Man who attacked with knife and car "tentatively identified" as Somali Muslim
Muslim cleric: Happiness over Israeli fires "is in keeping with the Sharia"





OCTOBER 10, 2016 7:23 AM

How George Soros’ Money and a Muslim Rights Group Undermined Homeland Security

by John Rossomando


George Soros. Photo: Wiki Commons.


A Muslim legal group, girded with $1.8 million in grant money from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations (OSF), has helped influence major policy changes in the war on terror — including the Department of Homeland Security’s screening of individuals with suspected terror ties, and the FBI’s training program for its agents who work in counterterrorism.
Internal records, made public by the hacking group DC Leaks, show that OSF spent $40 million between 2008 and 2010 on programs aimed at weakening US counterterrorism policy.
Muslim Advocates (MA)’s Executive Director, Farhana Khera, played a key role in shaping the foundations’ spending. Khera co-authored a 2007 memo that “informed” the foundation of MA’s decision to create the National Security and Human Rights Campaign (NSHRC).



DECEMBER 20, 2016 7:36 AM
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Mideast Studies Departments Display Further Moral Rot in Lenient Treatment of Sexual Harassment

The famously self-righteous field of Middle East studies, which lambastes outside criticism as "censorship" and condemns America, Israel and the...
The NSHRC’s goals included:

• Closing Guantanamo Bay, eliminating torture and methods such as the extraordinary rendition of prisoners, and ending the use of secret prisons;
• Ending warrantless and “unchecked” surveillance;
• Ensuring that anti-terrorism laws and law enforcement activities do not target freedom of speech, association or religious expression;
• Reducing ethnic and religious profiling of people of Muslim, Arab or South Asian extraction;
• Decreasing secrecy and increasing oversight of executive actions, and expos[ing] U.S. government or private individuals who abuse or violate the law.

​

Some of these policies, such as closing Guantanamo and ending enhanced interrogation techniques, were also advocated by the Obama administration. OSF claimed its work laid the groundwork for implementing them. The Edward Snowden leaks cast light on the depth of the government’s warrantless surveillance activity. The other goals are more difficult to assess.
Muslim Advocates was founded in 2005 as an offshoot of the National Association of Muslim Lawyers. It often criticizes US counterterrorism strategies that use sting operations and informants as discriminatory.

Papers released by the anonymous hacker group DC Leaks show that OSF budgeted $21 million for the NSHRC from 2008-2010. OSF spent an additional $1.5 million on the effort in 2010. The NSHRC also received a matching $20 million contribution from Atlantic Philanthropies, a private foundation established in 1982 by Irish-American Chuck Feeney, a billionaire businessman.
OSF made 105 grants totaling $20,052, 784 to 63 organizations under the NSHRC program. An Investigative Project on Terrorism tally shows that Muslim Advocates received at least $1.84 million in OSF grants between 2008 and 2015.

A funders’ roundtable created by OSF in 2008 helped coordinate the grant-making among several left-leaning foundations, ” in order to “dismantle the flawed ‘war on terror’ paradigm on which national security policy is now based.” At least “two dozen” foundations participated in the roundtable’s strategy sessions by the end of 2008.
Zuhdi Jasser, president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, called the Soros foundations’ $40 million program both hypocritical and ironic. He noted that the 2011 OSF-funded Center for American Progress report “Fear, Inc.” complained that seven conservative foundations donated $42.6 million to so-called “Islamophobia think tanks between 2001 and 2009.” The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and other major Islamist groups routinely use this to portray their opponents as being pawns of dark forces.

By contrast, OSF and Atlantic Philanthropies spent $41.5 million in just three years. OSF dedicated another $26 million to the NSHRC program from 2011 to 2014.
OSF additionally funded a study by the New America Foundation that equated the terror threat posed by right-wing extremists with the threat posed by Al Qaeda. An October 17, 2011, memo discussing NSHRC grants notes that New America received $250,000, partly to write two reports. The first was aimed at creating a “‘safe space’ in which Muslims in America feel free to hold controversial political dialogues, [and] organize without fear of unwarranted government surveillance.” The second aimed to “correct mistaken public beliefs that Al-Qaeda’s brand of terrorism is unique to Islam and that most terrorists are Muslim.”

The paper promised “to show how adherents of each extremist ideology use different language to justify very similar political means and goals. By demonstrating parallels among militant groups, this paper will aim to separate politically focused terrorism from the religion of Islam.”
Arguments from this report continue to help frame how Democrats and their allies talk about the jihadist threat. New America’s statistics and arguments recently came up in a House hearing about the threat from homegrown Islamic terrorists.

“According to the New America Foundation, there have been more incidents of right-wing extremist attacks in the United States than violent jihadist attacks since 9/11. I’m not minimizing jihadist attacks. In that light, can you explain what your office plans to do with respect to domestic right-wing extremism?” Rep. Bill Pascrell, D-N.J., asked Department of Homeland Security Office of Community Partnerships Director George Selim during a House subcommittee hearing last month.
New America’s effort to conflate right-wing extremists with Al Qaeda glosses over a major difference — namely Al Qaeda’s reliance on mass casualty attacks and suicide bombings.
New America’s latest data shows that jihadists have killed more people since 9/11 than right-wing extremists.

“What you’ve uncovered is the fact … that the Soros foundation works to obfuscate on national security,” Jasser said. “Muslim Advocates clearly is a prime example of the sickness in Washington related to dealing with the central reforms necessary to make within the House of Islam. You’ll see that the Soros foundation is spending money on organizations that deny the very principles they are defenders of, which are feminism, gay rights, individual rights. Muslim Advocates’ entire bandwidth is spent on attacking the government and blocking any efforts at counterterrorism.”
Muslim Advocates also opposes discussion on reform within the Muslim community and supports those who have theocratic tendencies, Jasser said.
“You have evidence here that the Soros foundation is part and parcel of the reason for the suffocation of moderation voices — reformist voices — in Islam,” Jasser said. “Muslim Advocates really ought to change their name to Islamist Advocates, and what the Soros foundation really is doing is just advocating for Islamists.”

OSF also contributed $150,000 in 2011 and $185,000 in 2012 to a donor advised fund run by Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. It used this money to pay Hattaway Communications, a consulting firm run by former Hillary Clinton adviser Doug Hattaway to develop a messaging strategy for Muslim Advocates and similar organizations. Hattaway’s message strategy painted Muslims as victims of American national security policies.

Khera used Hattaway’s strategy to paint the New York Police Department’s mosque surveillance strategy as “discriminatory.”
“Their only ‘crime’ is that they are Muslim in America,” Khera wrote in a June 6, 2012, op-ed posted on CNN.com.
Some of the OSF-funded groups, including Muslim Advocates, the ACLU, and the Center for Constitutional Rights, filed lawsuits challenging the NYPD’s surveillance program as unconstitutional. Police Commissioner William Bratton ended the policy in 2014.

A federal district court dismissed the suit, but the Third Circuit Court of Appeals revived it in October 2015. New York settled the lawsuit in January, placing the NYPD under supervision of an independent observer appointed by City Hall.


Downplaying Radicalization and the Jihadist Threat

The OSF has accused conservative opponents of “borrowing liberally from Joe McCarthy’s guilt by association tactics.” It complained in a September 14, 2010, memo to its US Programs Board that the “homegrown terrorism narrative” resulted in “discriminatory” targeting of Muslims by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the FBI.
Khera often expresses similar sentiments. She accused the FBI of engaging in “entrapment operations” to target “innocent” Muslims, after former Attorney General Eric Holder called sting operations an “essential law enforcement tool in uncovering and preventing terror attacks.”
Khera likewise characterized law enforcement training materials discussing the Islamic extremist ideology as “bigoted, false, and inflammatory” in her June 28 testimony before a Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight, Agency Action, Federal Rights, and Federal Courts.

She and her organization played a central role in the 2011 effort to have the Obama Administration purge FBI training materials that the organization deemed to be offensive. FBI counterterrorism training materials about Islam contained “woefully misinformed statements about Islam and bigoted stereotypes about Muslims,” she complained in a September 15, 2011, letter. She objected to describing zakat — the almsgiving tax mandate on all Muslims — as a “funding mechanism for combat.”
Yet numerous Muslim commentators describe zakat as a funding mechanism for jihad. A footnote for Surah 9:60 found in “The Meaning of the Holy Qur’an,” says that zakat can be used to help “those who are struggling and striving in Allah’s Cause by teaching or fighting or in duties assigned to them by the righteous Imam, who are thus unable to earn their ordinary living.”
The Assembly of Muslim Jurists in America issued a 2011 fatwa saying zakat could be used to “support legitimate Jihad activities.”
Following Khera’s letter, then-White House counterterrorism advisor John Brennan announced a review of “CVE-related instruction across all levels of government.” This review resulted in a purge of 700 pages of material from 300 presentations. This included PowerPoints and articles describing jihad as “holy war” and portraying the Muslim Brotherhood as a group bent on world domination.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s bylaws describe these ultimate ambitions and imply the need for violence: “The Islamic nation must be fully prepared to fight the tyrants and the enemies of Allah as a prelude to establishing an Islamic state.”


Khera’s Influence With the Obama Administration

Khera enjoys close connections with the Obama White House. Visitor logs show that Khera has been to the White House at least 11 times.
Khera played a central role persuading the Obama Administration to purge Department of Homeland Security records related to individuals and groups with terror ties, former Customs and Border Patrol (CPB) Agent Phil Haney told the Investigative Project on Terrorism.
His superiors ordered him to “modify” 820 CPB TECS records about the Muslim Brotherhood network in America, Haney said. Irrefutable evidence from the 2008 Holy Land Foundation (HLF) Hamas financing trial proved that many of these groups and individuals assisted Hamas, Haney said.

The HLF trial substantiated deep connections between American Islamist groups such as the Islamic Society of North America, the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and a Hamas-support network created by the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States.
A 2009 OSF funding document claims credit for helping persuade then-Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano to order a review of border screening procedures. It also reveals that Muslim Advocates worked with “DHS staff to develop a revised border policy.”

The Muslim Advocates’ report recommended the “review and reform of … [Customs and Border Patrol] policies and practices that target Muslim, Arab and South Asian Americans for their First Amendment protected activities, beliefs and associations; and … law enforcement and intelligence activities that impose disparate impacts on Muslim, Arab and South Asian communities.” It also asked DHS to prevent CPB agents from probing about political beliefs, religious practices, and contributions to “lawful” charitable organizations.

Muslim Advocates claimed a pivotal role in getting the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to reverse a new 2010 policy enhancing the screening on travelers from 14 countries, many of them predominately Muslim. The rule was proposed in the wake of the attempt by underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to blow up a Detroit-bound plane weeks earlier.
Muslim Advocates and several OSF grantees met with Napolitano and other top DHS officials, and the policy was canceled three months later. Muslim Advocates claimed that the Obama Administration “made special mention” of its role in reversing the TSA policy.

“This broke into the open with the great purge of 2011 and 2012,” Haney said, recalling Brennan’s letter to Khera announcing that materials she complained about would be removed.
The purge accompanied a practice of meeting with Islamist groups as community partners, Haney said.

In addition to the purge of training material, documents related to people and groups with terrorism ties such as Canadian Muslim Brotherhood leader Jamal Badawi and the Pakistan-based Tablighi Jamaat movement also disappeared from CPB records. (Tablighi Jamaat often serves as a de facto recruiting conduit for groups such as Al Qaeda and the Taliban.)
Investigators might have had a better chance of thwarting the San Bernardino and the Orlando shootings had those Tablighi Jamaat records remained available, Haney said, because the shooters’ respective mosques appeared in the deleted 2012 Tablighi Jamaat case report.
The Obama administration’s “absolute refusal to acknowledge that individuals who are affiliated with networks operating here in the United States, and their deliberate deletion of any evidentiary pieces of information in the system, has made us blind and handcuffed,” Haney said. “The proof of it is San Bernardino and Orlando. They obliterated the entire [Tablighi Jamaat] case as if it never existed.”

Haney’s claims have been met with some skepticism. Haney stands by his claims and says critics “made a lot of factual errors.”
Still, according to an OSF document, Muslim Advocates’ success in reversing the TSA policy showed that it “has proved itself to be an effective advocate on the national stage.” It recommended renewing a $440,000 grant to “support the core operating costs of Muslim Advocates.”
In doing so, the Soros-funded OSF weakened US national security and potentially left it vulnerable to the jihadi attacks we have been seeing in the homeland since the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.

 

Hugh Fitzgerald: “A President Should Not Say That”

DECEMBER 2, 2016 12:18 PM BY HUGH FITZGERALD14 COMMENTS


Now that Francois Hollande has taken himself out of the running for President of France, knowing that he was certain to lose, it is time to consider his continuing education, and mixed signals, on the subject of Islam. In his speech on December 1, he worried about “extremism,” by which he apparently meant not Muslim terrorists but rather Marine Le Pen, whose Front National is outspoken in its opposition to the growing Muslim presence in France, a position that has earned the National Front the usual misleading epithets of “right-wing” and “extreme right-wing.” From this one might conclude that Hollande had learned little about the Islamic threat during his quinquennat. But just months before, in October, an astonishing book appeared, A President Should Not Say That… (Un président ne devrait pas dire ça…), which details 61 private conversations Hollande held with Le Monde journalists Gerard Davet and Fabrice Lhomme between 2012, shortly after his election, and this year.

Hollande showed in his replies to the journalists that he had indeed learned something about Islam, and consequently was anxious about the future of France in light of its burgeoning Muslim population.
The revelation that Francois Hollande is worried about the influence and power of Islam, disturbed by the demographic gains made by Muslims, can only be regarded as salutary, for if a Socialist President expresses alarm about Muslims, this acts as a license for others to do likewise. There is less inhibition, less fear of being tarred with that epithet “Islamophobic” when even Socialists— first Manuel Valls, and now Francois Hollande — speak some home truths about Islam in France.

What did President Hollande say? He admitted what was obvious to many, but a big leap for the Left, that France has a problem with Islam: “it’s true there’s a problem with Islam. It’s true. It’s not in doubt.” And while he hadn’t recognized it before (before, that is, the series of Muslim terrorist attacks in Paris and Nice and Rouvray and Magnanville and Toulouse), he has also changed his mind on mass Muslim immigration; he now warns that “I think there are too many arrivals.” Everyone understood that he meant by that “too many Muslims.”

His most contentious and misunderstood remark was that “the veiled woman of today will be the Marianne of tomorrow.” Marianne is, of course, the symbol of France, the France of liberty and reason. Hollande’s remark was taken out of context, with many assuming he meant it as a warning of a Muslim takeover. Hollande himself explained that what he meant was merely this: that a Muslim woman who did not wear the hijab, who was “liberated” and fully integrated into the culture of France, could indeed symbolize France: “In a way if we can offer the conditions for her self-fulfillment, she will free herself from her veil and become a French woman, whilst remaining religious, if she wants to be, capable of having an ideal,” Hollande said. “This woman would prefer liberty to subjugation.”

The confusion here is not yours, dear reader, but Hollande’s. He seems to believe that a Muslim woman can still be considered a Muslim – by other Muslims – even when she not only stops wearing the veil, but becomes “a French woman,” which would mean, among other things, enjoying complete equality with Muslim men. What Muslim cleric, what Muslim man, would consider such a woman to be a “Muslim”? What Muslim man would permit his wife, or his daughter, to behave as if they were equal to men, no longer subject to his commands? In what way could such a hypothetical Muslim woman “remain religious,” if she sheds everything that is required of Muslim women, including their submission to their husbands and fathers? Such a woman might well “prefer liberty to subjugation” — but the subjugation of women is central to mainstream Islam. Hollande’s hypothetical Muslim Marianne is only a forlorn hope, a Muslim-for-identification-purposes-only Muslim. But at least Hollande admitted that a Muslim, if veiled, should not be considered to be “French.”

Where does this leave Francois Hollande on the subject of Islam? Confused, and confusing. On the one hand, he says that “it’s true there’s a problem with Islam.” He does not say – he cannot allow himself to say – that this “problem” is not susceptible of solution, but only of amelioration (by limiting the number of Muslims in France, and by ending the support of all kinds, from every level of government, on which Muslim families batten, including free or heavily subsidized housing, free medical care, free education, even family allowances for children or, in some cases, free food), because that “solution” would require tampering with the texts of Islam, above all with the immutable Qur’an that cannot be touched. He says that “there are too many arrivals,” but does not follow that observation with a commonsensible demand for a halt to all Muslim immigration, and still less would he have dared to suggest that Muslim migrants ought to be sent home. He seems to think a Muslim woman can become in every respect a “French woman” and somehow still remain a Muslim in the eyes of other Muslims, which means he misunderstands the permanently subordinate role of women in Islam, an ideology that describes women as clearly inferior to men.

On December 1, announcing his decision not to run again, Hollande – as noted in the first paragraph above — spoke of his fear of “extremism.” By this, he made clear, he meant not the “extremism” of certain Muslims in France whose presence has forced the French nation into a permanent etat d’urgence (state of emergency), with both police and the military out in force in cities, towns, and even villages all over France (offering an unnerving contrast to the many gaily-lit Christmas markets that are under special protection), but rather, Marine Le Pen, the one political figure who has consistently focused on the problem of Islam and is prepared to do something about it. And finally, as his last confusing word on the subject, Hollande tweeted on December 1 that “I only have one regret, and that’s to have proposed a policy allowing the government to strip citizens of their nationality.

I thought it would unite us, but it has divided us.” For his only regret to be about what was perhaps his most sensible proposal, to strip convicted terrorists with dual-citizenship of their French nationality, and then to deport them, is disturbing.
So, when the hurly-burly’s done, and the battle’s lost and won, and the French election is over, and the successful candidate – whether Valls or Fillon or Le Pen, any one of whom will be harder on Islam than Hollande was while in office — would it be too much to ask of Francois Hollande to tell us exactly what he has learned about Islam in France, and what he thinks ought to be done about it, to speak without any regrets or backtracking, since now, out of office, he should feel freer to speak his mind, in order to clear up the confusion which he has exhibited so far, and left, so far, as his main legacy? Please, help us out, aidez-nous. Will the real Francois Hollande please stand up?



Aisha Tubman, Mahmoud Douglass, and the Straight Path Railroad
Iranians face terrorism charges after filming Israeli embassy in Kenya

 

Jimmy Carter, Lord Caradon, the Palestine Mandate, and U.N. Resolution 242 (Part I)

DECEMBER 4, 2016 4:36 PM BY HUGH FITZGERALD55 COMMENTS



The glad news is that Jimmy Carter is again bringing peace to the Middle East, by saving Israel from itself, as he has tried so many times before, and without a moment to lose. He wants to make sure that the American government, while still under Obama, joins 137 other countries in recognizing a country called “Palestine.” It’s the “solution” of “two states, living side by side in peace,” about which we have heard so much over decades. Carter’s plan is sure to satisfy the “Palestinians” because, according to Carter, he’s gotten nothing but “positive feedback” from them. As for those pesky Israelis, the ones who keep building those awful “settlements” on “occupied Palestinian land,” they’ll just have to be satisfied with those “borders” they had prior to the Six-Day War, the ones that worked so well before.
Here’s Jimmy:

ATLANTA — We do not yet know the policy of the next administration toward Israel and Palestine, but we do know the policy of this administration. It has been President Obama’s aim to support a negotiated end to the conflict based on two states, living side by side in peace.
That prospect is now in grave doubt. I am convinced that the United States can still shape the future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before a change in presidents, but time is very short. The simple but vital step this administration must take before its term expires on Jan. 20 is to grant American diplomatic recognition to the state of Palestine, as 137 countries have already done, and help it achieve full United Nations membership.

Back in 1978, during my administration, Israel’s prime minister, Menachem Begin, and Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat, signed the Camp David Accords. That agreement was based on the United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, which was passed in the aftermath of the 1967 war. The key words of that resolution were “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East in which every state in the area can live in security,” and the “withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.”
The agreement was ratified overwhelmingly by the Parliaments of Egypt and Israel. And those two foundational concepts have been the basis for the policy of the United States government and the international community ever since.

This was why, in 2009, at the beginning of his first administration, Mr. Obama reaffirmed the crucial elements of the Camp David agreement and Resolution 242 by calling for a complete freeze on the building of settlements, constructed illegally by Israel on Palestinian territory. Later, in 2011, the president made clear that “the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines,” and added, negotiations should result in two states, with permanent Palestinian borders with Israel, Jordan and Egypt, and permanent Israeli borders with Palestine.”
Today, however, 38 years after Camp David, the commitment to peace is in danger of abrogation. Israel is building more and more settlements, displacing Palestinians and entrenching its occupation of Palestinian lands. Over 4.5 million Palestinians live in these occupied territories[if we count Gaza, which is no longer “occupied” by Israel], but are not citizens of Israel. Most live largely under Israeli military rule, and do not vote in Israel’s national elections.

Meanwhile, about 600,000 Israeli settlers [Israelis] in Palestine [Judea and Samaria]enjoy the benefits of Israeli citizenship and laws. This process is hastening a one-state reality that could destroy Israeli democracy and will result in intensifying international condemnation of Israel.
The Carter Center has continued to support a two-state solution by hosting discussions this month with Israeli and Palestinian representatives, searching for an avenue toward peace. Based on the positive feedback from those talks, I am certain that United States recognition of a Palestinian state would make it easier for other countries that have not recognized Palestine to do so, and would clear the way for a Security Council resolution on the future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Security Council should pass a resolution laying out the parameters for resolving the conflict. It should reaffirm the illegality of all Israeli settlements beyond the 1967 borders, while leaving open the possibility that the parties could negotiate modifications. Security guarantees for both Israel and Palestine are imperative, and the resolution must acknowledge the right of both the states of Israel and Palestine to live in peace and security. Further measures should include the demilitarization of the Palestinian state, and a possible peacekeeping force under the auspices of the United Nations….
​

That is the piece by Jimmy Carter that appeared in the New York Times on November 28. It disturbs for many reasons: the indifference to Israel’s security needs, the disregard for the relevant history, the inattention to Israel’s legal, moral, and historic claims, especially those based on the Mandate for Palestine and the “secure and defensible borders” provision of U.N. Resolution 242, and the ignorance Carter shows about Islam, and of what explains the unappeasable Muslim hostility to the Jewish state, no matter how tiny that state may become.

Let’s start with Carter’s attempt to describe what U.N. Resolution 242 says. He claims that the key words of that resolution were “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East in which every state in the area can live in security,” and the “withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.”

These are not the key words of Resolution 242. In fact, the first phrase he quotes, about the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East in which every state in the area can live in security” is not even to be found in the Resolution proper, but appears in the non-binding preamble to it, a statement of principle only. And what’s more, Carter wants you to think that the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war” refers to Israel, and its winning, by force of arms in the Six-Day War, of the Sinai, Gaza, and the territory we have fallen into the habit of calling the “West Bank,” the name given to it after 1949 by the Jordanian Arabs, who were determined to efface, as too obviously Jewish, the place-names Judea and Samaria, though they had been in use in the Western world for 2000 years.

But it is Jordan, and not Israel, to which that phrase “inadmissibility of acquisition of territory by war” properly applies. It is Jordan that had no legal claim, but only the claim of a military occupier, since hostilities ended in 1949, to the “West Bank.” But Israel’s claim to the same territory (the West Bank, or Judea and Samaria, if we want to respect and resurrect the most venerable of toponyms) is based on the Mandate for Palestine; that legal and historic claim survived the 1948 war and the Jordanian occupation that lasted from 1948 right up to the war of June 1967. Though Israel’s claim remained unchanged, after the Six-Day War one thing did change: that claim could at last be satisfied. In other words, while the Six-Day War created the conditions that allowed Israel to now enforce its legal claim under the Mandate for Palestine, it is that Mandate, and not the 1967 military victory, that is the original basis of Israel’s claim as of right and not of sufferance. And that claim is further buttressed by the requirement, in Resolution 242, for establishing “secure and defensible borders.”

In 1922, the British, as Mandatory authority, had unilaterally declared that all of the territory east of the Jordan River that had previously been allocated to the Mandate for Palestine, constituting fully 77% of its original land area, would no longer be open to Jewish immigration. This was done for reasons of big-power Realpolitik. The British wanted to have territory to offer to the Hashemite Emir Abdullah, the older brother of Feisal, whom the British installed on the throne of Iraq. They were worried that if Abdullah were not given some territory to rule, he would likely make a move on Syria, and thereby complicate matters for the British in their relations with France, the Mandatory for both Syria and Lebanon. So they chose to lop off from the Mandate for Palestine all of the territory east of the Jordan and present it to Abdullah, as what became the Emirate of Transjordan. That meant that the territory allocated to the future Jewish state was thereby reduced to 23% of what had originally been envisioned.

And while the Mandate for Palestine was intended for the establishment of the Jewish National Home, at the same time the Arabs were provided with four mandates by the League of Nations. These included Lebanon and Syria, with France as Mandatory, and Iraq and Jordan (its actual status being somewhat more complicated) with Great Britain as Mandatory. Jimmy Carter doesn’t want anyone to remember what the Mandate for Palestine was all about, much less take a look at its precise terms. He doesn’t want you to know that the 1948-49 war did not extinguish Israel’s claim to all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean (with a southern border from Rafah to the Gulf of Aqaba, and a northern border that was roughly a straight line from the Mediterranean to Metulla, and then northward up to the Golan Heights.)

Carter certainly doesn’t want the world to remember how well-provided the Arabs were with mandates, and even endowed with territory taken from the proposed Jewish National Home. Nor does he think worth mentioning the fact that the total land area of the 22 members of the Arab League is 13,000,000 million square kilometers, or roughly 600 times Israel’s land area of 22,000 square kilometers. That might put things in perspective, and equity is not Carter’s strong suit. He wrongly calls the armistice lines of 1949 the “borders” of Israel. And Carter simply accepts as a given the existence of a “Palestinian people” who have apparently existed forever, instead of understanding that they came into being as a deliberate construct, created for political reasons, so that the Arab and Muslim war on Israel could be presented, more acceptably, as a simple matter of “two tiny peoples, each struggling for its homeland.”

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Jimmy Carter, Lord Caradon, the Palestine Mandate, and Resolution 242 (Part II)

DECEMBER 5, 2016 1:48 PM BY HUGH FITZGERALD62 COMMENTS


Jimmy Carter treats a sentence from the non-binding preamble to Resolution 242 as if it were a binding part of the Resolution itself. He thinks that the phrase about the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war” applies to Israel, when examination of the Mandate for Palestine reveals that it is Jordan, not Israel, that is claiming territory in the “West Bank” based on its acquisition by war (in 1949). Carter then asserts that the other key words of Resolution 242 are these: “the withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” He wants you to think that this means that Israel is required to withdraw from “all the territories” that it won in the 1967 war. And indeed, the Arab diplomats at the U.N. sought, repeatedly, to have the words “the” or “all the” inserted before “territories.” But they failed.

The chief drafter of Resolution 242 was Lord Caradon (Hugh M. Foot), the permanent representative of the United Kingdom to the United Nations from 1964-1970. At the time of the Resolution’s discussion and subsequent unanimous passage, and on many occasions since, Lord Caradon always insisted that the phrase “from the territories” quite deliberately did not mean “all the territories,” but merely some of the territories:

Much play has been made of the fact that we didn’t say “the” territories or “all the” territories. But that was deliberate. I myself knew very well the 1967 boundaries and if we had put in the “the” or “all the” that could only have meant that we wished to see the 1967 boundaries perpetuated in the form of a permanent frontier. This I was certainly not prepared to recommend.
​

On another occasion, to an interviewer from the Journal of Palestine Studies (Spring-Summer 1976), he again insisted on the deliberateness of the wording. He was asked:

The basis for any settlement will be United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, of which you were the architect. Would you say there is a contradiction between the part of the resolution that stresses the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and that which calls for Israeli withdrawal from “occupied territories,” but not from “the occupied territories”?
​

Nota bene: “from territories occupied” is not the same thing as “from occupied territories” – the first is neutral, the second a loaded description. Lord Caradon answered:

I defend the resolution as it stands. What it states, as you know, is first the general principle of inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war. That means that you can’t justify holding onto territory merely because you conquered it. We could have said: well, you go back to the 1967 line. But I know the 1967 line, and it’s a rotten line. You couldn’t have a worse line for a permanent international boundary. It’s where the troops happened to be on a certain night in 1948. It’s got no relation to the needs of the situation.
​

“Had we said that you must go back to the 1967 line, which would have resulted if we had specified a retreat from all the occupied territories, we would have been wrong.”
Note how Lord Caradon says that “you can’t justify holding onto territory merely because you conquered it,” with that “merely” applying to Jordan, but not to Israel, because of the Mandate’s explicit provisions allocating the territory known now as the “West Bank” to the Jewish state. Note, too, the firmness of his dismissal of the 1967 lines as nothing more than “where the troops happened to be on a certain night in 1948,” that is, nothing more than armistice lines and not internationally recognized borders.

Jimmy Carter thus misreads and misleads, in every important particular, Resolution 242. He misidentifies a statement of principle in the non-binding preamble as among the “key words” of the Resolution itself. He twists the meaning of the phrase “from territories” intended by its chief author, Lord Caradon, to ensure that there would be no retreat to the pre-1967 armistice lines, to “all the territories.” He fails to mention the record of Israeli withdrawals from 95% of the territories won in the Six-Day War and the great sacrifice Israel made in giving back to Egypt the entire Sinai peninsula, together with billions of dollars of oilfields, air bases, and the resort at Sharm el-Sheik. He fails to mention that that very Sinai had been the launching pad for Egyptian attacks in 1948, 1967, and 1973, and for thousands of attacks by Egyptian Fedayeen from 1949 until 1956, when the Sinai campaign put an end to them.

Israel might have stopped there, after giving back that 95% of territories won, but chose to give up the entire Gaza Strip as well, closing down all the settlements that had been created there as a defensive barrier, and handing over to the Gazan Arabs extensive greenhouses in the hope that they might make good use of them, but instead the Gazan Arabs chose to destroy them. This is hardly the record of unbroken land grab by the Israelis.
Carter paints a damning picture of Israel as the obstacle to peace by failing to mention any of this yielding of territory. Instead, he complains, “Israel is building more and more settlements, displacing Palestinians and entrenching its occupation of Palestinian lands.” Apparently he is unfamiliar with the fact that Jewish “settlements” are approved by the Israeli government only after a rigorous investigation to see if the land in question is considered to be “state or waste lands” that, by Article 6 of the Mandate, are explicitly to be used for Jewish settlements:

The Administration of Palestine, while ensuring that the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced, shall facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and shall encourage, in co-operation with the Jewish agency referred to in Article 4, close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes.
​

In building on “state and waste lands,” there has been no “displacing” of “Palestinians.” By definition, “state and waste lands” are those to which no individual has valid title. The procedure for getting approval for a “settlement” from the Israeli government is long and arduous. First, notice is given for private parties to produce evidence of ownership. If no valid titles are produced, the parcel of land is regarded as “state and waste lands.” In a few cases, settlements on private land have been deemed legal, but only if they were determined to be a military necessity. In those cases, the original owner retains title to the land and must be paid rental fees for its use.

That scrupulous reliance on decisions of the Israeli Supreme Court, that solicitousness for the rights of Arab owners, paints a very different picture from that which Jimmy Carter offers of Israel “displacing Palestinians and entrenching its occupation of Palestinian lands.” There has been hardly any “displacement,” and what Carter calls the “occupation of Palestinian lands” misleads. One more time (it can’t be repeated often enough): these are not “Palestinian lands,” but territory allocated in 1922 to the Palestine Mandate, which had as its exclusive aim the creation of the Jewish National Home. And Article 6 (see above) required of the Mandatory (Great Britain) that it both “facilitate Jewish immigration” and “encourage …close settlement by Jews on the land, including State and waste lands.”

The Israeli claim under the Mandate is further buttressed by the requirement, set out in Resolution 242, for “secure and defensible borders.” If Israel were to be pushed back within the pre-1967 armistice lines, with an 8-mile wide waist from Qalqilya in the West Bank to the sea, and lose control of the Judean and Samarian hills, this sliver of a country would have great difficulty defending itself, and would have to remain in a permanent state of high alert, of a degree and kind that no other country has ever been asked to endure.

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Jimmy Carter, Lord Caradon, the Palestine Mandate, and U.N. Resolution 242 (Part III)

DECEMBER 6, 2016 1:03 PM BY HUGH FITZGERALD26 COMMENTS


The real ”key words” of Resolution 242, as crafted mainly by Lord Caradon, are those about the need for “secure and defensible borders.” Carter doesn’t even mention this phrase, which Lord Caradon thought was the most important provision of the Resolution. For Carter surely knows that the pre-1967 lines he wants Israel to be forced back into would fit no one’s definition of “secure and defensible borders.” But what would constitute “secure and defensible borders”? As noted in Part I, the Israelis certainly think command of the heights of Judea and Samaria, and thus of the Jordan Valley and the invasion route from the East, remain essential. Were Israel pushed back to the 1949 armistice lines, a massed Arab army, with the weaponry the Arabs now possess, and coming from the East, could slice Israel in two at its 8-mile-wide waist.
In 1967, President Johnson asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff to study what territorial adjustments would be necessary to meet Israel’s minimum defense needs. They duly presented their military assessment of what, for Israel, would constitute “secure and defensible borders.” Here is what they concluded:

MEMORANDUM FOR THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE
(JCSM-373-67)
Subject: Middle East Boundaries

1. Reference is made to your memorandum, dated 19 June 1967, subjects as above, which requested the views of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, without regard to political factors, on the minimum territory, in addition to that held on 4 June 1967, Israel might be justified in retaining in order to permit a more effective defense against possible conventional Arab attack and terrorist raids.[emphasis added]
2. From a strictly military point of view, Israel would require the retention of some captured territory in order to provide militarily defensible borders. [emphasis added] Determination of territory to be retained should be based on accepted tactical principles such as control of commanding terrain, use of natural obstacles, elimination of enemy-held salients, and provision of defense in-depth for important facilities and installations. More detailed discussions of the key border areas mentioned in the reference are contained in the Appendix hereto. In summary, the views of the Joint Chiefs of Staff regarding these areas are as follows:
3. The Jordanian West Bank. Control of the prominent high ground running north-south through the middle of West Jordan generally east of the main north-south highway along the axis Jennin-Nablus-Bira-Jerusalem and then southeast to a junction with the Dead Sea at the Wadi el Daraja would provide Israel with a militarily defensible border. The envisioned defensive line would run just east of Jerusalem; however, provision could be made for internationalization of the city without significant detriment to Israel’s defensive posture.
4. Syrian Territory Contiguous to Israel.Israel is particularly sensitive to the prevalence of terrorist raids and border incidents in this area. The presently occupied territory, the high ground running generally north-south on a line with Qunaitra about 15 miles inside the Syrian border, would give Israel control of the terrain which Syria has used effectively in harrassing the border area.
5. The Jerusalem-Latrun Area.See subparagraph 2a above.
6. The Gaza Strip. By occupying the Gaza Strip, Israel would trade approximately 45 miles of hostile border for eight. Configured as it is, the strip serves as a salient for introduction of Arab subversion and terrorism, and its retention would be to Israel’s military advantage.
7. The Negev-Sinai Border. Except for retention of the demilitarized zone around Al Awja and some territory for the protection of the port of Eilat, discussed below, continued occupation of the Sinai would present Israel with problems outweighing any military gains.
8. The Negev-Jordan-Aqaba-Strait of Tiran Area. Israel’s objectives here would be innocent passage through the Gulf of Aqaba and protection of its port at Eilat. Israel could occupy Sharm ash-Shaykh with considerable inconvenience but could rely on some form of internationalization to secure free access to the gulf. Failing this, Israel would require key terrain in the Sinai to protect its use of the Strait of Tiran. Eilat, situated at the apex of Israel’s narrow southern tip, is vulnerable to direct ground action from Egyptian territory. Israel would lessen the threat by retention of a portion of the Sinai Peninsula south and east of the Wadi el Gerafi then east to an intersection with the Gulf of Aqaba at approximately 29’° 20′ north latitude.
9. It is emphasized that the above conclusions, in accordance with your terms of reference are based solely on military considerations from the Israeli point of view.

​

The Joint Chiefs thought Israel should retain Gaza; it did not. Gaza then became a terrorist center, lobbing missiles into Israel, which led to the Israeli incursion that defeated Hamas.
But Israel still retains, and likely will not give up, control of the “West Bank.” It needs a minimum of defensive depth – that 8-mile wide waist will simply not do — and needs to control the Judean and Samarian hills. Anyone reading the report of the Joint Chiefs, or simply looking at a map, would likely conclude that Israeli command of the “West Bank” is absolutely essential to its security. But, someone might object – say, Jimmy Carter — didn’t Israel win the 1967 war without that control? Yes, it did, but that was in a different world, before the OPEC trillions helped buy the Arab states hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of armaments; they now possess between ten and twenty times the weaponry that they had in 1967, and that includes advanced planes and missiles, that a half-century ago they did not possess. The element of surprise – and superb training – that allowed the Israelis to destroy the Egyptian air force in the first few hours of battle on June 4 is not something that Israel can count on ever again; nor should Israelis be asked to rely on such a near-miracle for their survival. The Israelis remember that the surprise Arab attack in October 1973 inflicted many casualties. The outcome was a near thing; the country held on by the skin of its teeth, thanks to American re-supplies of arms that, in a different political environment – with the likes of Keith Ellison presiding over the Democratic Party apparatus – can not necessarily be counted on.

None of this Israeli need for “secure and defensible borders” registers with Jimmy Carter. He thinks Israel should not only live permanently in a state of maximum peril, but trust to guarantees by the Palestinian Arabs – the “peace-loving” Slow Jihadists of the Palestinian Authority, rather than the Fast Jihadists of Hamas. Is he aware of the blood-curdling statements Mahmoud Abbas makes about Israel to his own people? Has he ever watched the celebration of killing Jews on children’s programs broadcast by “Palestinian” television? Or noted the naming of sites in the West Bank after terrorists?
In addition to their rights derived from the Mandate for Palestine, Israelis should not be prevented from exercising their right, under Resolution 242, not to give back “all the” territories it won by force of arms, but instead to keep territories needed for “secure and defensible borders.” The Israelis have a perfect right – legally and morally – to hold onto those parts of Judea and Samaria that they now control. And they have a perfect right to build towns and villages (not “settlements,” for that word has come to imply both transience and illegitimacy) on “state and waste lands,” as the Mandate for Palestine specifically allows.
Jimmy Carter is hellbent on arriving at a “solution” to the Arab-Israeli conflict. But what makes Jimmy Carter think there is a “solution” to the Arab and Muslim war against Israel? The evidence supports quite a different view. I don’t think there is a “two-state” or three-state or n-state “solution” to a conflict that will continue forever, because it is based on Muslim hostility to a Jewish state, whatever its dimensions, on land Muslims once possessed, and in the midst of Muslim Arabdom.

That a conflict cannot be “solved” does not mean it is not manageable. Right now Israel can manage things. El-Sisi’s Egypt is clearly more worried about the Muslim Brotherhood and terrorists in the Sinai, and Hamas in Gaza. It’s Egypt that is now destroying the tunnels to Gaza, not Israel. And Syria is now and in the future will be wracked by internecine warfare. Assad and the Alawites are unlikely to risk everything they have managed to hold onto by taking on Israel.

But the Muslim masses do not accept Israel and never will. Right now the greatest threat comes from Iran, as it once came from Egypt and Syria. Israel is a permanent affront for many Muslims and it does not become less of an affront if it is pushed back, as Jimmy Carter wants it to be, to the armistice lines of 1948-49. The two metaphors the Arabs routinely use for Israel are that it is a “knife” in the heart of Arabdom, or a “cancer” within the Arab body. You don’t pull a “knife” only part-way out, nor excise only part of a cancer. You have to remove the whole blade, cut out the whole tumor.
Carter’s obsession with pushing Israel back to the pre-1967 lines, his completely ignoring the Mandate for Palestine, his misreading of Resolution 242, his unshakeable belief that Israel should entrust its security to the likes of Mahmoud Abbas doing his no-one-here-but-us-accountants impersonation – all this suggests that behind the sweet habitat-for-humanity smile, and the treacly self-righteousness, Jimmy Carter suffers from a well-known pathological condition. Meanwhile, if you want to really understand the legal, historic, and moral claims of Israel, begin by reading the Mandate for Palestine. And then, to understand what U.N. Resolution 242 actually means, you should turn not to Jimmy Carter, but to the man who was most responsible for drafting that resolution, that is, the commonsensical Lord Caradon.


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French town orders removal of Virgin Mary statue, but burkini okay

 

French town orders removal of Virgin Mary statue, but burkini okay

DECEMBER 6, 2016 12:57 PM BY CHRISTINE WILLIAMS45 COMMENTS

One of the world’s most secular countries, France strongly separates religion and public life.
A string of southern French beach towns near Nice banned the burkini full body swimsuit over the summer, but the bans by municipal decree were struck down by the country’s highest constitutional court.
​

The big controversy about the poor innocent Muslim woman being forced to remove her burkini on the beach, under intimidation from four policemen, that led to the lifting of the burkini ban, turned out to be a set-up. No matter how France or any Western nation tries to separate “religion and public life,” only Islamic symbols somehow manage to slip through, due to the raving success of charges of “Islamophobia” and/or because of the success of endeavors to “cast terror into the hearts of unbelievers” (Quran 3: 151).



“French town ordered to remove Virgin Mary statue to respect secularism”, by Henry Samuel, Telegraph, December 5, 2016:
A town in eastern France has been ordered to remove a statue of the Virgin Mary to comply with secular rules banning religious symbols in public.
An administrative court ordered the commune of Publier, in the Haute-Savoie region to take down the offending statue which overlooks Lake Geneva and has been in place in a public park since 2011.
The town has three months to comply with the ruling on pain of receiving a fine of €100 (£85) per day, the November 24 judgement stipulates.
Gaston Lacroix, the town’s mayor has pledged to find a new home for the religious icon “on private land”.

The statue of the mother of Jesus has been the focus of controversy since it was installed in 2011 without any prior debate in the town council, in particular because municipal funding was used.
In an attempt to resolve the issue, the statue was then sold to a religious cultural association. But the parcel of land it stood was still owned by the municipality, meaning it remained on public property and therefore continued to breach French rules regarding religious symbols.

One of the world’s most secular countries, France strongly separates religion and public life.
In 2010, France became the first country in Europe to ban the full Muslim veil in public spaces.
A string of southern French beach towns near Nice banned the burkini full body swimsuit over the summer, but the bans by municipal decree were struck down by the country’s highest constitutional court.
In a decision hailed by human rights groups, the court found that the bans in around 30 seaside towns were a “serious and manifestly illegal violation of fundamental freedoms” and that the swimsuits did not constitute a clear threat to public order…….

Jimmy Carter, Lord Caradon, the Palestine Mandate, and U.N. Resolution 242 (Part III)
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“The Quran Teaches That All Human Beings Are Equal”: Beliefs (Part I)

DECEMBER 11, 2016 2:05 PM BY HUGH FITZGERALD46 COMMENTS


In the latest example of Muslim propaganda, the Dallas chapter of the Islamic Circle of North America has put up twelve billboards.
Though there is a generic appeal to viewers to find out more about Islam by calling a hotline, 877-whyisam, or going to the website whyislam.org, the specific message that targets African-Americans on each billboard is this: ISLAM=Racial Equality. And with that assurance, when you have called that hotline and found out all kinds of good things – “the volunteers are trained to tell the callers that the religion promotes peace and does not condone any violence” — you will certainly want to Come To-Islam.

Where shall we start with this travesty? With a dozen, or several dozen, quotes from the Qur’an that mandate the killing, in various gruesome ways, of non-Muslims who refuse to convert, or to endure lives of permanent dhimmitude? If Islam “promotes peace and does not condone any violence,” then why are Muslims commanded in the Qur’an to tolerate non-Muslims, but to make constant war against them until they submit — some peace! And then non-Muslims are forced to endure all sorts of disabilities under the rules – some tolerance! – that insist on permanent submission to Muslims.

But, it might be argued, this inequality is not based on “race” but on “belief” — non-Muslims being considered permanently inferior to Muslims. The Dallas reporter sought validation for the billboards’ claims from none other than John Esposito, tireless Defender of the Faith, who is described as an “Islamic Studies professor at Georgetown University.” Esposito is also the head of the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, an impressive-sounding title for some, a suspect one for others, given that the Center receives many millions of dollars in contributions from a Saudi prince. If you check out that Center’s activities here, you find that it appears devoted less to instructing and more to misleading ill-informed Christians about Islam, under the guise of disinterested scholarship. What the world gets are parodies of real scholarship, sanitized studies of Islamic doctrine, soothing sanctimony about all the terribly unfair attacks on an inoffensive Islam, and a manic focus on “Islamophobia” – that about sums up the “Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding.”

Esposito, asked about the billboard campaign, did not disappoint. He declared that “the billboards’ message that Islam promotes racial equality is a valid one.” And he added that “the Quran teaches that all human beings are equal, regardless of race, sex or beliefs.” Apparently the reporter didn’t dare to take issue with this absurd statement; after all, Esposito is that impressive thing, a full professor, and what’s more, heads his own Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. Surely that is Authority enough?

But we who are disinclined to simply accept Esposito’s claim that “the Qur’an teaches that all human beings are equal regardless of race, sex, or beliefs” may want to take a closer look. Where shall we start with this travesty? Why not with Esposito’s tossed-off claim that the Qur’an teaches “that all human beings are equal, regardless of ‘beliefs’”? In other words, Esposito is claiming that in Islam, non-Muslims are equal to Muslims. What do we find if we actually read the Qur’an? It’s accessible, it’s right on the Internet, and when you encounter textual difficulties, simply consult the commentary at “Blogging the Qur’an,” which is also online here.

We find many dozens of quotes that expand upon the description of non-Muslims as the “vilest of creatures” against whom war should be waged by Muslims, the “best of creatures,” until they submit. If they are Ahl al-Kitab, that is, People of the Book, Christians or Jews, they have available three options: to convert to Islam, or to submit to the many disabilities that non-Muslims must endure under Muslim rule, including the exaction of the capitation tax, or Jizyah, or to be killed. Those who are not People of the Book have it even worse: Hindus and Buddhists from India to the East Indies found that initially their only options were to be converted or to be killed. But after a while, their Muslim rulers wanted to leave some alive, and not require them to be converted. This was a policy based not on a sudden attack of tolerance, but rather reflected budgetary considerations, for if all non-Muslims were killed or converted, who would be left to continue to finance the Muslim state through the Jizyah?

When so much of the Qur’an and the Hadith are devoted to describing and prescribing war against non-Muslims, insisting that they are permanently inferior to Muslims, and describing in detail the often gruesome punishments they deserve, it seems extraordinary that anyone, least of all an “Islamic Studies professor,” who surely has read the Qur’an dozens of times, would dare declare that in Islam people of all beliefs are “treated equally.”

If they are treated “equally,” as Esposito claims, then why is it that Muslims are commanded to impose severe social, political, and economic disabilities on those non-Muslims who wish to remain alive, but not to convert? Why have Muslims engaged in the wholesale destruction of churches and synagogues, of Hindu and Buddhist temples, if in Islam all “beliefs” are “treated equally”? Why can’t non-Muslims repair their places of worship, or build new places, without the approval of Muslims? Just how “equal” are those People of the Book, Christians and Jews, against whom the Qur’an inveighs, and against whom so many stories are told in the Hadith? And even worse is the treatment meted out to Buddhists and Hindus who, not being Ahl al-Kitab, or People of the Book, have two options only, either to convert or die, according to the texts of Islam. (As noted above, some were kept alive as quasi-dhimmis so that they might continue to supply the Jizyah needed by the Islamic state).

Does this fit the claim of John Esposito, “Islamic Studies professor,” and recipient of millions of dollars of Saudi largesse for his Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding,” that the “Qur’an teaches that all human beings are equal, regardless of… beliefs”? Would it not be truer to say that the Qur’an is uncompromisingly a Manuel of Inequality, which sets Muslims above non-Muslims, and for all time, and that the main, obsessive theme of Islam – in the Qur’an, Hadith, and Sira – is the tremendous unbridgeable gulf between Muslims (“the best of peoples”) and their permanent inferiors, that is, all non-Muslims (“the vilest of creatures”)?

In making his casual claim that “the Quran teaches that all human beings are equal, regardless of race, sex or beliefs” Esposito shows his contempt for his audience, for he must assume that they are so ignorant of Islam, so unlikely of critically checking up on his remarks, so likely to be impressed by mere titles (Professor of Islamic Studies, Head of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding), that he can get away with making such a preposterous claim, that Islam teaches that those who have different beliefs are treated “equally.” How wonderful it would have been if the Dallas News reporter had challenged this remark, if only by quoting in his piece a few of the Qur’anic verses that flatly contradict Esposito – say, 98:6, 3:110, 9:5, 9:29 – with the remark that “in light of these verses, perhaps Professor Esposito may want to revise his views.” But no one ever does bother to check, or to challenge such remarks, whether from laziness, or simple parti pris.

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“The Qur’an Teaches That All Human Beings Are Equal”: Sex (Part II)

DECEMBER 12, 2016 8:29 AM BY HUGH FITZGERALD19 COMMENTS


What about Esposito’s next claim, that “the Qur’an teaches that all human beings are equal, regardless of…sex”?
Before we weigh this statement, let’s review what we know about the treatment of women in Islam. Can there be equality between men and women, when a man can marry four women but a woman only one man? When a man can triple-talaq his way out of any marriage, even being allowed now to fax his triple-talaq message home for it to be valid? When male heirs inherit twice as much as female ones? When the blood-money payable for a murder is twice as large for a male victim as for a female? When the Qur’an itself gives instructions on when and how, and how hard, to beat a wife? When the testimony of a woman is worth half that of a man? When, if a woman makes an accusation of rape, she must have four male witnesses to back her up? Or when a woman is raped, or otherwise been sexually attacked (or even just looked over), it is often she who is in danger of being killed by her own father, or brothers, or uncles, all in order to preserve the family’s honor, a strange code indeed that punishes the victim? And if we need Qur’anic passages to explain these practices, they are easy to locate, along with several excerpts from the most authoritative collection of Hadiths, that by Bukhari:
In the Qur’an we find:

Quran (4:11) – (Inheritance) “The male shall have the equal of the portion of two females.” In Islam, sexism is mathematically established.
Quran (2:282) – (Court testimony) “And call to witness, from among your men, two witnesses. And if two men be not found then a man and two women.”
Quran (2:228) – “and the men are a degree above them [women]“
Quran (5:6) – “And if ye are unclean, purify yourselves. And if ye are sick or on a journey, or one of you cometh from the closet, or ye have had contact with women, and ye find not water, then go to clean, high ground and rub your faces and your hands with some of it.” Men are to rub dirt on their hands, if there is no water to purify them, following casual contact with a woman (such as shaking hands).
Quran (2:223) – “Your wives are as a tilth unto you; so approach your tilth when or how ye will…” A man has dominion over his wives’ bodies as he does his land. This verse is overtly sexual. There is some dispute as to whether it is referring to the practice of anal intercourse.
Quran (4:3) – (Wife-to-husband ratio) “Marry women of your choice, Two or three or four.” Inequality by numbers.
Quran (53:27) – “Those who believe not in the Hereafter, name the angels with female names.” Angels are sublime beings, and would therefore be male. So those with wrong beliefs (“not in the Hereafter”) would “name the angels with female names.”
Quran (4:24) and Quran (33:50) – A man is permitted to take women as sex slaves outside of marriage. Note that the verse distinguishes wives from captives (those whom thy right hand possesses.).
In the Hadith and Sira
Sahih Bukhari (6:301) – “[Muhammad] said, ‘Is not the evidence of two women equal to the witness of one man?’ They replied in the affirmative. He said, ‘This is the deficiency in her intelligence.’“
Sahih Bukhari (6:301) – continued – “[Muhammad said] ‘Isn’t it true that a woman can neither pray nor fast during her menses?’ The women replied in the affirmative. He said, ‘This is the deficiency in her religion.’“ Allah has made women deficient in the practice of their religion as well, by giving them menstrual cycles.
Sahih Bukhari (2:29) – Women comprise the majority of Hell’s occupants. This is important because the only women in heaven mentioned explicitly by Muhammad are the virgins who serve the sexual desires of men. (A weak Hadith, Kanz al-`ummal, 22:10, even suggests that 99% of women go to Hell).
Sahih Bukhari (62:81) – “The Prophet said: “‘The stipulations most entitled to be abided by are those with which you are given the right to enjoy the (women’s) private parts (i.e. the stipulations of the marriage contract).'” In other words, the most important thing a woman brings to marriage is between her legs.
Sahih Bukhari (62:58) – A woman presents herself in marriage to Muhammad, but he does not find her attractive, so he “donates” her on the spot to another man.
Sahih Muslim (4:1039) – “A’isha said [to Muhammad]: ‘You have made us equal to the dogs and the asses’“ These are the words of Muhammad’s favorite wife, complaining of the role assigned to women under Islam.
​

Do these Qur’an passages and reports of what Muhammad said in the Hadith (and there are many more that could be adduced) in any way support the claim of Esposito that men and women are “treated equally” in Islam? Do you think he could possibly be unaware of these passages? Or is he willing to state utter falsehoods, prepared to brazen it out should anyone dare to question his claim? He could do this brazening in two ways: The first is just to insinuate that any such challenger is merely exhibiting “Islamophobia,” and thus need be paid no never mind. That often ends the discussion. The second is the argument from authority: could the head of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Professor John Esposito, be deliberately misleading us about the treatment of the sexes in the Qur’an and Hadith? You bet he could. He could, and he does.


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“The Qur’an Teaches That All Human Beings Are Equal”: Race (Part III)

DECEMBER 13, 2016 11:23 AM BY HUGH FITZGERALD25 COMMENTS


But what about John Esposito’s third claim, the one that is the focus of those Dallas billboards, about the supposed “racial equality” in Islam? There are a few passages, it is true, in the Qur’an, in which it is obliquely suggested that all men are equal, regardless of the “diversity of your color.” Here are the most quoted:

‘And mankind is naught but a single nation” (Quran 2:213)
“Among his signs is this, that he created you from dust. And then, behold, ye are men scattered (far and wide). “
“And among his signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth and the variations and diversity of your tongues and of your color, verily in that are signs for those who know.” (Qur’an 30.22)
“O mankind we created you from a single (pair) of a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes, that ye may know each other. Verily the most honored of you in the sight of God is (he who is) the most righteous of you and God has full knowledge and is well acquainted (with all things).” (Qur’an 49:13)

Nothing here suggests inequality among the various “nations and tribes,” what with everyone descended from the same couple, nor is there any ranking of the “diversity of tongues and colors,” and therefore, Muslims argue, these passages should be understood to express Islam’s belief in the equality of all mankind.

But there are other passages in the Islamic texts that suggest quite a different view of mankind, one where being black is regarded as a mark of inferiority. For example, what happens on the Day of Resurrection. Allah promises (Qur’an 3:185) that life in this world is an illusion, that every person shall die, and every person will receive his judgment on the resurrection day, and in Qur’an 5:26 that all that is on earth will perish. Allah says that He will reward the doers of good with paradise and much more; their faces will be radiant-stained [i.e. white]. They will never be humiliated. (Qur’an 10:26).
Here is more on “white faces” in the Qur’an, or in the exegeses to the Qur’an of Ibn Kathir, taken from postings by an ex-Muslim, Abul Kasem:

It is clear from the exegesis of these verses that Allah likes white people and dislikes the black people, so much so, in fact, that even when a Black Muslim is entitled to enter Islamic Paradise, he will not enter it until Allah has turned him into a white person. Verse 20:102 says that on the day the trumpet is sounded (resurrection day), the sinners will be gathered together with blue eyes and black faces. A hadith in Mishkat says that on judgment day, Muslims will have white faces, white arms, and white legs (Mishkat al-Masabih, Ibn Abdullah Tabrizi, Sheikh Wali-ud-Din Muahmmad, Tr. Abdul Hameed Siddiqui, Kitab Bhavan, 1784 Kalan Mahal, Daraya Ganj, New Delhi-110002, India.1990, p.1.168).

Allah’s preference for light-skinned people and His disdain for dark-skinned people is repeated in verse 7:46. Ibn Abbas writes that this verse tells the joy of the believers when they know those who enter hell by their darkened faces and blue eyes and those who enter Paradise by their lightened faces: at once handsome and radiant.
Allah says in verse 86:8-9 that He will bring back life for Muhammad to commence judgment. According to ibn Kathir, on resurrection day, a banner will be raised for every deceitful person from his anus; the size of this banner will depend on the size of the perpetrator’s calumny. Thus, Muhammad will have no trouble sifting the believers from the non-believers. All Muslims will be of white complexion, and all infidels will be of black complexion, with a banner on his/her anus.

In verse 18:29 Allah says that He does not care whether people believe or disbelieve in Islam. The disbelievers (non-Muslims) and the wrongdoers will be surrounded by the tent of fire; they will be given water (acid) like molten brass to shower and to scald their faces. Ibn Kathir says that this verse means the water of Hell is black, and it itself is black and its people are black.
In verse 3:107 Allah emphatically pronounces that white faces on the judgment day will receive His mercy. Jalalyn writes that, on judgment day, Muslims’ faces will be white.
In Mishkat (ibid, p.1.76) we read humans were emitted as white ants from Adam; paradise is for the whites, hell is for the blacks.
Islamic Paradise will offer its white male residents unlimited, unbridled, uninterrupted sex with houris of exquisite beauty. These houris will also be of fair (read white), radiant complexion (44:54, 55:70) quite similar to the Hollywood movie actresses. Even the wine-serving boys will be white, like pearls (52:24, 76:19).
There is more about “white” and “black” in Islam:

Muhammad was white, according to Sunaan Abu Dawud, 1.486.
In various Hadith Muhammad is asked for and described as “This white man reclining on his arm.” Or when asked to describe him, another early Muslim said “he was white.” And again: “And a white person who is requested to pray for rain. And yet again, the Prophet raised his hands so high that the “whiteness of his armpits became visible.” And one more: “He uncovered his thigh and I saw the whiteness of the thigh of the Prophet.”

Here is one hadith from Sahih Bukhari (1.3.63) Narrated Anas bin Malik
“While we were sitting with the Prophet in the mosque, a man came riding on a camel. He made his camel kneel down in the mosque, tied its foreleg and then said: “Who amongst you is Muhammad?” At that time the Prophet was sitting amongst us (his companions) leaning on his arm. We replied, “This white man reclining on his arm.” The man then addressed him, “O Son of ‘Abdul Muttalib.”
Tabari writes that Muhammad was of white complexion (al-Tabari, Abu Ja’far Muhammad b. Jarir, History of al-Tabari, Translated by Ismail K. Poonwala. State University of New York Press, Albany, 1990, p.ix.157).
In Ash-Shifa, Allah, an apparently shared disdain among Muslims for black people is expressed in this manner:

Ahmad ibn Abi Sulayman, the companion of Sahnun said, “Anyone who says that the Prophet was black should be killed. (Ibn Musa al-Yahsubi, Qadi ‘Iyad. Ash-Shifa. Tr. Aisha Abdarrahman Bewley. Medina Press, P.O. Box 5531, Inverness IV5 7YA, Scotland, UK, fifth print 2004, p.375)


Muhammad was white. His arms were white, his thighs were white, even his armpits were white. This was very important to establish. And anyone who said he was black should be killed. Then there is the hadith where God is said to divide humanity first into two groups, and then one of those groups divided further into three parts, and then He separated the “best” one of those three parts into two halves, with all non-Arabs in one half, and all Arabs in the other half. And then, God further divided the Arabs between those of the favored Quraysh tribe, and all the others. And finally, among the Quraysh, the family of Muhammad is separated from all the others of the Quraysh tribe, as the very best of the “best of peoples.” This can be found in the well-known biography (Sira) of Muhammad by ibn Sa’d:
…Abu Damarah al–Madani Anas Ibn ‘Iyad al–Laythi informed us; he said: Ja’far Ibn Muhammad Ibn ‘Ali informed us on the authority of his father, Muhammad Ibn ‘Ali ibn Husayn Ibn “Ali Ibn Abi Talib, who said: Verily the Prophet said: God divided the earth in two halves and placed (me) in the better of the two, then He divided the half in three parts, and I was in the best of them, then He chose the Arabs from among the people, then He chose the Quraysh from among the Arabs, then He chose the children of ‘Abd al–Muttalib from among the Banu Hashim, then he chose me from among the children of ‘Abd al–Muttalib (Ibn Sa’d, Abu Abd Allah Muhammad. Kitab al-Tabaqat, vol i. Translated in English by S. Moinul Haq, Kitab Bhavan, 1784, Kalan Mahal, Daraya Ganj, New Delhi, India, 1972, p1.2).
​

Muhammad, then, is the best man from the best stock (the Quraysh) of the best people (the Arabs). And he is – this is also important – a white man, with white thighs, white armpits, white legs.
And the unflattering portrait of black men in the Qur’an, Hadith, and Sira should not be forgotten, even if John Esposito would prefer that you do so:

Umar, who was one of the Companions of Muhammad, and his friend, and his successor, after Ibn Bakr, as Caliph, had a profound dislike for black people
“Among them, with Muawiyah b. Hudhayl, were young men of black complexion and straight hair. ‘Umar turned his face away from them several times until it was said to him: “Do you have anything against these people.” He said: “I am perplexed with regard to them. No Arab tribe more hateful to me than these has ever passed by me.” He then let them go, but he frequently mentioned them with hatred, and people were puzzled by ‘Umar’s attitude”.
​

Muhammad himself preached unquestioning obedience to authority in this way: “you should listen to and obey your ruler even if he was an Ethiopian (black) slave whose head looks like a raisin” (obey him, that is, despite his being an Ethiopian).

The constant references to Muhammad’s whiteness, the pejorative remarks made about black faces (the faces of those who on Judgment Day will go to hell are all black, while all those going to Heaven will have white “radiant” faces), the hatred that Umar, friend and companion to Muhammad, felt for blacks, the repeated statement that “anyone who calls Muhammad a black man ‘should be killed,’” strongly suggest that in Islam the importance placed on the superiority of the white Quraysh tribe undercuts Esposito’s claims about a lack of “racial inequality” in Islam.
And what is the evidence for racial discrimination in the practice of Islam? First, of course, is the matter of slavery. Muslims recognized slavery as legitimate, given that Muhammad, the Perfect Man and Model of Conduct, had slaves, even bought and sold them. But, it should be conceded, those enslaved could be black or white. More than one million Europeans were enslaved by Arabs who raided the coasts of Europe over the centuries, or attacked Christian shipping in the Mediterranean. But the slave trade developed by the Muslim Arab slavers was almost entirely about enslaving blacks. The Arabic word for “slave” – abd – became synonymous with “black.” That African slave trade involved tens of millions of black Africans — estimates are that 85 million blacks, mostly women, and children, were taken by Arab slavers from Africa (some estimates run much higher). Only 20% of them, or 17 million, survived the journey.

There was another aspect to the trade in black African slaves by Arab slavers that distinguished it from the Atlantic trade: the women were used as concubines, and the boys made into eunuchs for work in the harems. These black slaves were far more numerous than the white slaves whom North African Arabs captured in their raids along the European coasts, or when they preyed on Christian shipping in the Mediterranean. Black Africans were thought to be ideal for the Arab harems. In The Hideous Trade, Jan Hogedorn describes how young black boys were captured in the bush, then castrated on the spot, and those who survived the painful and dangerous operation would then be brought by coffle and dhow to the slave markets of Islam, including Jiddah, Cairo, and Constantinople. Jan Hogedorn estimates that only 10% of those boys originally captured survived both the castration and the journey, and were still alive to be sold in those slave markets.

Already in the ninth century, blacks were imported by the Arabs into southern Iraq and put to work as enslaved agricultural laborers; their harsh treatment by the Arabs led to the Zanj Rebellion in southern Iraq, from 869 to 883 A.D., and its bloody suppression. From then on, all African blacks were commonly referred to by Arabs as the “Zanj.” The Arabs always regarded the blacks with contempt, many of them likening those they called “Zanj” to animals. It is startling to read what famous figures in Islamic history had to say about the black Africans.
The celebrated Arab traveler Ibn Battuta, for example, one of the most important figures in Islamic cultural history, wrote that “the Zanj are people of black color, flat noses, kinky hair, and little understanding or intelligence.” And he repeats this judgement, in different sauces, again and again.

The geographer al-Idrisi ascribes “lack of knowledge and defective minds” to the black peoples. Their ignorance, he says, is notorious; men of learning and distinction are almost unknown among them, and their kings only acquire what they know about government and justice from the instruction of learned visitors from farther north.
Like the crow among mankind are the Zanj for they are the worst of men and the most vicious of creatures in character and temperament.
We know that the Zanj (blacks) are the least intelligent and the least discerning of mankind, and the least capable of understanding the consequences of actions.
Their nature is that of wild animals. They are extremely black. [About the Sudan:] Among themselves there are people who steal each other’s children and sell them to the merchants when the latter arrive.
The Zanj are so uncivilized that they have no notion of a natural death. If a man dies a natural death, they think he was poisoned. Every death is suspicious with them, if a man has not been killed by a weapon.
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Ibn Battuta is regarded not as a tangential figure, but rather as the most important Muslim traveler of all time (he claimed Berber descent, but the Arabs were eager to claim him, too); Morocco has even named a ship after him. His views on blacks, then, cannot be easily dismissed or deliberately ignored as those of a minor figure.
Then there are the statements of Ibn Khaldun, that most famous of all Arab (or more exactly, Berber) historiographers and historians. His remarks on black Africans rival those of Ibn Battuta for what we today would have no difficulty in describing as racism. Those below are taken from his celebrated Muqaddimah (or Prolegomena):

Beyond [known peoples of black West Africa] to the south there is no civilization in the proper sense. There are only humans who are closer to dumb animals than to rational beings. They live in thickets and caves, and eat herbs and unprepared grain. They frequently eat each other. They cannot be considered human beings.
Therefore, the Negro nation are, as a rule, submissive to slavery, because [Negroes] have little [that is essentially] human and have attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals, as we have stated.
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Many similar examples might be given, and not only from Ibn Khaldun and Ibn Battuta. But surely what has been adduced so far is sufficient to conclude that whatever statements can be found in the Qur’an to suggest that “racial equality” is part of Islam – these being statements not precisely about “racial equality” but rather, of the “all men share the same origins” sort, which is a different thing — many more statements can be found, especially in the Hadith, to support the opposite view. Muhammad is “white,” the texts insist, and anyone who says he is black should be killed. Some of Allah’s remarks, too, about who will be white and who black on the Day of Resurrection, and even more, statements by Umar, Muhammad’s friend, who then became the second Caliph in the Rashidun Caliphate, can clearly be described as racist.

Slavery and inequality are part of the DNA of Islam. And since that exemplar of conduct, Muhammad, was a slaveowner, at no time did Muslims try to stop their own slave trade. There never was a Muslim William Wilberforce. It was the Royal Navy halted the Arab trade in African slaves. And while the slave trade was officially outlawed in the West in the 19^th century, it continued right up to the late 20^th century in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and formally outlawed in those two countries as late as 1962. In the Sudan, from 1983 to 2005, during the Second Sudan War, Arabs again enslaved blacks. And even now, blacks continue to be enslaved, despite treaties and entreaties, by Arabs in Mauritania and Mali. Given the general inattention to the history of Arab attitudes toward, and exploitation of, black Africans, and the widespread ignorance about anti-black racism among Muslim Arabs, and the Arab slave trade in Africa, those Muslims now putting up billboards in Dallas are probably right to be secure in their belief that if they put up such a statement as ISLAM = Racial Equality no one will call them on it. And no one in Dallas has.

When John Esposito declares that “the Quran teaches that all human beings are equal, regardless of race, sex or beliefs,” he is wrong, and not innocently so, in each of his three claims. He knows, but hopes you don’t, that in the Qur’an, the immutable word of God, Muslims are the “best of peoples” (3:110) and non-Muslims “the vilest of creatures” (98:6). And wrong, too, are these Come-To-Islam billboards that shamelessly assert that ISLAM=Racial Equality. What can one do? One way to deal with this disinformation campaign is to write to the Dallas News, explaining, in necessarily abridged fashion, what the Qur’an and other Islamic texts really say about distinctions – discriminations — based on race, sex, and (religious) beliefs.

But it would be far better if billboard were to answer billboard, and for every misleading message put up by Muslim propagandists, a different and truthful message that shines a light on unflattering aspects of Islam should be put up in answer. For example, one such billboard could be devoted to the subject of The Arab Slave Trade. It would consist of a map of Africa and of the Middle East, clearly showing where the Arab slave traders seized their booty, and the routes they used, and how many slaves survived – especially among the African boys they caught and castrated in the bush — to make it alive to the slave markets of Islam, which can also be shown on the map. And there should be room to include information (billboards are big, use all that space) about when that slave trade began, what was its geographical extent, what means were used to capture the slaves, how they were transported to the slave markets of Islam, then bought by whom, and for what purposes. And what were the total number of black Africans taken as slaves, and how did that number compare with the size of the Atlantic slave trade, this being a question that ought to receive more attention, because it turns out that the Arab slave trade began much earlier, lasted much longer, and claimed far more victims, than did the Atlantic slave trade about which we hear so much. One striking statistic among many: the mortality rate for slaves crossing the Atlantic was 10%, while the mortality rate for those transported from Africa to Arabia was between 80 and 90%. Possibly African-Americans may become less enthusiastic about Islam when they learn about this kind of thing.

Another billboard’s text would be devoted to The Eradication of the Arab Slave Trade. It would explain that because Muhammad was a slaveowner (that revelation should infuriate quite a few Muslims), slavery remains permanently legitimate in Muslim eyes. That is why eradication of the Arab slave trade came long after it was ended in the West. Further information should be given about how the Royal Navy halted the Arab slave trade, though it took much longer to end slavery itself. Most telling are thee years when Muslim states outlawed slavery. Note should be made that Saudi Arabia and Yemen, countries that finally succumbed to Western pressure, and outlawed slavery as late as 1962. And even today, that billboard should explain, in several Arab states – Mauritania, Mali, Sudan – Arabs are still enslaving black Africans. That might at least make some people stop and think and wonder, and begin to search for more information about the Arab slave trade. And that’s exactly what you want.

Still a third billboard might be devoted to Racism In Arab Islam. On this billboard, quotes about the “whiteness” of Muhammad, and the death penalty proposed for anyone who dared to call him “black,” could be followed by some of the more appalling remarks on blacks by Caliph Umar, and by Ibn Khaldun and Ibn Battuta. That should flutter the dovecotes among the Muslim propagandists in Dallas, who never expected to be refuted in such a way.
And all three of these billboards, and others in the same vein, should have in large letters placed below the text, a statement now turned upon itself and made into an unanswerable question. To wit: “Racial Equality In Islam?” That should be enough. Even, at this point, as an opening salvo, more than enough.


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