At a conference in Mexico today (Sept. 27), the SpaceX founder and CEO unveiled the company's Interplanetary Transport System (ITS), which will combine the most powerful rocket ever built with a spaceship designed to carry at least 100 people to the Red Planet per flight.
If all goes according to plan, the reusable ITS will help humanity establish a permanent, self-sustaining colony on the Red Planet within the next 50 to 100 years, Musk said at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara.
The great unspoken tension within the progressive-left, today, is the ongoing ideological conflict between the dominant multicultural ideal and the declining ideal of universal human rights.
Given the racialized nature of World War II it is not the least bit surprising that American liberalism shifted from a primary concern with leveling the economic playing-field, under FDR, to what we might call "racial liberalism" as it emerged and evolved in the post-war era with the rise of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement.
It is also not the least bit surprising that the ideal of universal human rights emerged from World War II within two prominent and allied political "communities," despite the fact that it was betrayed by both. The first is the United Nations, an organization that has continually undermined human rights, as well as free speech, due to its inconvenience for a significant number of influential member states, particularly those associated with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).
The second political community that embraced (and betrayed) this central value is the progressive-left as it came to dominate the Democratic Party, the Labour Party in Britain, and the European Union. The multicultural ideal confronted ideals of universal human rights (or social justice) just beneath the surface of politics-as-usual. That is, the twin pillars of progressive-left ideology rubbed against one another because they are mutually exclusive. This tension within the movement remained generally unexamined as it played itself out in recent decades, resulting in the near total triumph of multiculturalism over its pain-in-the-neck rival.
For those of you who may wonder how it is that feminists justify the burka (a symbol of Islamic oppression of women) or why so many Gay people favor the Palestinian Authority over Israel (despite the liberal incorporation of Gay lifestyles into Israeli culture) or how it is that Democrats who favor liberalism and freedom of speech also tend to increasingly despise the only country in that entire part of the world that embraces both, this is the reason.
Universal human rights are generally incompatible with multicultural notions because those notions tend to chasten ideals of social justice when they clash with the prerogatives of other cultures to behave as they will without western "imperialist" intrusion.
One cannot stand for multiculturalism, after all, if one condemns the burka or the status of women, Gay people, and all non-Muslims throughout the Arab-Muslim Middle East. To do so, in today's hyper PC universe, is to display an offensive, "racist," and unacceptable disregard for the rights of other peoples.
The victory of multiculturalism over ideals of human rights was not inevitable and as late as the 1990s western feminists still stood up for the rights of women under Taliban rule in Afghanistan, but those days are now long gone. The current western political atmosphere, particularly under the EU and the Obama administration, is increasingly racialized as a consequence of multiculturalism in its embrace of anti-white prejudice. This is so because white people (no matter what their economic standing) are seen as the heralds and bludgeons of western imperialism, colonialism, sexism, homophobia, militarism, and racism as conjured up by professors such as Rashid Khalidi, Noam Chomsky, and the late Columbia University professor, Edward Said.
Furthermore, those of us who come out of the progressive-left and the Democratic Party - and who still hold fast to the ideals of universal human rights - are regularly defamed as "racist" and "imperialist." If we so much as dare to criticize forms of Islamic jurisprudence that call for stoning women to death, when accused of adultery, or hanging Gay people from cranes, as they do in Iran, then we are considered among Hillary Clinton's "deplorables."
Needless to say, the people who have thrown the ideal of universal human rights directly into the garbage tend to be the same people who endlessly lambaste Israel for its alleged violation of those very same rights. Israel, of course, has a far better human rights record than any country in that part of the world and the relentlessly malicious focus on the lone, sole Jewish State is an indication of the racial dogmatism at the heart of the progressive movement when it plunges itself head-long into Arabs against Jews in the Middle East.
If we happen to be Jewish people who deplore the fact of thirteen-hundred years of Jewish persecution under the boot of Muslim imperial rule - and who are distressed by the ongoing violent threats toward the various minorities, including Jews, Christians, Yazidis, and others - we are excoriated as apologists for genocide and ethnic-cleansing in our support for Israel.
This is because much of the Left still considers Zionism to be a form of racism, as reported by UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 in 1975, before it was rescinded in 1991.
The great irony, of course, is that outside of political Islam, the progressive-left has emerged as the foremost purveyor of racism in the West, today.
Prominent western-left racism is not the old-timey variety as represented by, say, the Ku Klux Klan or Pacific Northwest skin-headed homunculi. Instead progressive-left and Democratic Party bigotry takes the form of "humanitarian racism" which condescendingly views people "of color" as small children in need of protection from white, male barbarians.
Progressive-left and Democratic Party anti-Jewish racism, by contrast, takes the form of endlessly lambasting Israel, while ignoring the far worse human rights records of countries throughout Asia, Africa and Central and South America. And it displays itself in its acceptance of anti-Semitic anti-Zionism as part of the larger progressive-left, Democratic Party coalition.
The Democratic Party price for Jewish admission is a willingness to sit across the table from anti-Semitic anti-Zionists in a spirit of political brotherhood.
This would be something akin to requiring black people to sit across the Democratic Party table from Klansmen for the purpose of defeating Republicans.
African-Americans would never, today, put up with it, yet Jewish Democrats do so on a daily basis.
Some of us, however, are regaining our self-esteem and increasingly willing to stand up and say, "NO."
Michael Lumish
Michael Burd and Alan Freedman (hosts) tell us:
This week we hear from aspiring Glen Eira Councillor Ian Fayman, and then we speak with barrister Geoff Bloch on Section 18C. We also hear from David Bedein who has been following up on the Palestinian text book issue; we chat with Norman Rosenbaum on past and current events surrounding the murder of his brother in New York 25yrs ago, and of course, we hear from Isi Leibler in Jerusalem.
3 min Editorial: Tim Costello and Hadassah Hospital
13 min Ian Fayman, candidate for Glen Eira Council
21 min Geoff Bloch, on Section 18C
41 min David Bedein, on Palestinian textbooks
1 hr 04 minNorman Rosenbaum, brother of murdered Yankel in New York
Heya Guys, this is Michael Lumish talking with ya on
the morning of Monday, September 26, and it is hot, hot, hot here in Oakland,
California.
I mean, good Christ, it’s almost October for crying
out loud and we have temperatures, depending upon just where you live, close to
100 degrees!
In any case, given the rise of political Islam and what seems to be a spike in Jihadi attacks in the United States, but most particularly in Europe, it is both dangerous and disconcerting that the very topic has become verboten. This is because so many people automatically think that if you have some hard criticisms of
Islamic terrorism it must mean that you are vile, irrational, hate-filled racist who
despises Muslims merely because they are Muslims.
What is it that Pamela Geller says?
That they call anti-Jihadis something like, racist,
Islamophobic, anti-Muslim, bigots.
It just rolls off the tongue.
Racist, Islamophobic, anti-Muslim, bigots.
I have to tell you, that is just messed up and wrong
and unjust and inaccurate and does nothing but shut down the conversation,
which is precisely what it is intended to do.
Anti-Jihadis have a name for this.
They call it the Voldemort Syndrome.
In the Harry Potter series the arch-villain whom
everyone fears is Voldemort.
They are so terrified of Voldemort that the magical
community won’t even say his name… despite the fact that they insist that he is
dead.
They would say something like, “He who must not be
named is dead.”
This is the way that huge numbers of westerners –
and, yes, particularly on the left – refuse to think about terrorism
Refuse to think about the rise of political Islam.
And refuse to think about its significance to mass
Muslim immigration into the West.
To even so much as think about such questions makes
one – wait for it - a racist, Islamophobic, anti-Muslim, bigot.
This issue is not to be discussed and terrorism, all
evidence to the contrary, isn’t really that big a deal… or so they would have
you believe.
I mean, more people die every year in road
accidents, by far, than are killed by terrorists. Right?
The thing of it is, the people who refuse to discuss
the Jihad are not afraid of Jihadis. Not at all.
They’re not afraid that some maniac is gonna blow
them up while waiting on line at Starbucks for a half café double tall non fat
foamy mocha.
What they are afraid of, actually, is one another.
They’re afraid that their friends will think of them
as a heinous racist and they, as a consequence, will lose social standing or
even, quite possibly, suffer the loss of employment.
Who needs the grief?
So, people won’t discuss it, even as Obama and
Hillary are preparing to go all Angela Merkel on us and open the friggin’
flood-gates.
It’s just plain dumb.
In the US we’re pretty much all of us the progeny of
immigrants and students are taught to look upon 19th and early 20th
century disdain for immigrants as, itself, disdainful.
And for good reason.
And for a Jew, of all people, to frown upon people fleeing
from a war zone is not just unconscionable. It’s deplorable!
But the fact is, the current wave of Middle Eastern
and North African Muslim immigration is not the same as the eastern and
southern European wave of a century ago and more.
The Jews and the Italians and the Polish and the
Ukrainians and god knows who all, not to mention the Irish and Germans before
them, did not generally despise the United States and their kids and grandkids
assimilated.
Of course, there is no getting away from the fact
that more than a few eastern European Jewish socialists and anarchists
sometimes caused a bit of a ruckus.
My family lived in the Ukraine for who knows how
many generations and I sometimes like to tell people that when they arrived in
New York Harbor in the early 1920s they carried little round bombs in one hand
and a copies of Das Kapital in the other.
But, thankfully, that bit of nonsense was
short-lived, unlike the Jihad which has been ongoing since that Muhammad fellow
started dreaming of the Archangel Gabriel like some hallucinating character in
Tony Kurshner’s Angels in America.
But the point is, not only has the Jihad been
ongoing since Muhammad, it continues to this very day.
Does this mean that all Muslims are Jihadis?
No. But I honestly do not care.
One thing is certain, a percentage of these migrants
are from the Islamic State, if not other Jihadi groups, and Americans will die
because of Obama and Clinton’s naivete or indifference.
Also, of course, let’s not forget that we are
talking about people from a part of the world where rates of anti-Semitism
range from the mid-70th percentile, among the most open-hearted, to
the mid-90th percentile among Palestinian-Arabs.
I am not calling for a ban on Muslim immigration,
but we need to make damn sure that we know who is coming into the United
States.
This is no more racism than opposing Nazism was bigotry toward Germans or opposing Soviet Communism was irrational, bigoted hatred toward Russians. Given 9/11 and Fort Hood and the
Boston Marathon and the 2014 beheading in Oklahoma – most people are not even
aware of this, but there was an actual Jihadi beheading in Oklahoma of all
friggin’ places.
Not to mention San Bernadino, last years Draw
Muhammad contest that got shot up in Texas and then, of course, God rest their souls, 49
dead people in an Orlando nightclub.
Yet, none of this seems to get through to virtually
anybody in the Democratic party.
Look. I don’t care who moves into the United States
so long as they are not Jihadis, are not in opposition to the Constitution of the United States, and harbor no irrational, Qur’anically-based, cosmic hatred
toward Jews.
Aside from that, give us your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
The fundamental basis of the never-ending Arab-Muslim aggression against the Jews of the Middle East is the Muslim religion as outlined in the Qur'an and the Hadiths.
Period. Full stop.
It is not an aggression based upon notions of social justice, as the Palestinian-Arabs, and their friends, would have you believe. In truth, Israel is a social justice Shangri-La compared to the rest of the Middle East.
The Long Arab War against the Jews of the Middle East is a religious war.
And it is within the primary sources of the Islamic faith that we find the basis of this aggression toward the loathsome Infidel, particularly toward those trouble-making Jews.
The Jewish people, however, along with a few Christians, managed to escape dhimmitude - in violation of Islamic theocratic imperatives - with the fall of the Ottoman Empire during World War I and the creation of the Jewish State of Israel after World War II.
From those days to these, the Jews of the Middle East are free and the Arabs do not like it.
When Muhammad created Islam as an imperial-supremacist religion intent on global expansion, he constituted it as the enemy of the Jewish people, the Christian people, and all other "unbelievers."
Furthermore, it is an astonishing testament to the man's will and intelligence that he damn near pulled it off. Within a mere century of The Prophet's death Muslims were already banging on Europe's door in search of conquest, slaves, and booty.
Please understand, however, that the following criticisms are not pointed at Muslims as individuals, but toward the consequences of Islamic doctrine. It is Islam as a theocratic-political ideology, with far-reaching consequences for all of us, that is under scrutiny.
The Qur'an and Muhammad's Will to Power
The Qur'an is an opaque and contradictory book, but there is no question that the spreading of Sharia, and the defeat of the Infidels and "unbelievers," is at its core. What this means, needless to say, is death or conversion for pagans and death, conversion, or dhimmitude for "People of the Book." Jews and Christians hold a higher place within the Qur'anic religious hierarchy and therefore have the honor to choose to live out their lives under the boot of Arab-Muslim imperial rule. This entails the payment of protection money (jizyah) under a system of enforced humiliation and submission to the will of Allah... which is to say, to the will of the Arab theological-political leadership.
It is not, therefore, a coincidence that Islam is famous for its bloody borders and is presently conducting a casual, ad hoc genocide of the Christians of the Middle East and much of Africa. The genocide is casual in the sense that no one, including the Pope, himself, really seems to give a damn and the Arabs conduct it in a here-and-there, sort-of piece-meal fashion.
The reason for the never-ending Arab-Muslim war against the Jewish people, therefore, has virtually nothing to do with Jewish misbehavior toward Arabs and virtually everything to do with the Qur'anic religious imperative to keep "unbelievers" under submission. Many Arabs in the Middle East want Jewish blood for the very same reason that they want Christian blood... because both are Infidel religions that absolutely refuse to bow their heads to The Sword of the Prophet.
The punishment for refusal of submission to Qur'anic law (al-Sharia) is death, sometimes via crucifixion, sometimes via head-chopping, and sometimes, as we read in Sura 5:33, by the chopping off of a hand and a foot from opposite sides of the body.
Indeed, the penalty for those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and strive upon earth [to cause] corruption is none but that they be killed or crucified or that their hands and feet be cut off from opposite sides or that they be exiled from the land. That is for them a disgrace in this world; and for them in the Hereafter is a great punishment,
The Christians of the Middle East, including of course the Egyptian Copts, are not guilty of anything other than being Christians and it is for that crime that Muslim extremists - with the approval of their friends - burn down churches in the thousands, kidnap young Christian girls for purposes of rape and / or conversion, and riot against Christians wherever they may be found.
None of his is due to Christian behavior.
The cause is the Qur'an, its insistence on Muslim supremacy, and Muhammad's will to power.
The Dhimmi That Got Away
A primary difference between Jews and Christians in that part of the world, vis-à-vis the perpetual aggression and contempt of Arab-Muslims, is the IDF. The IDF is the lone, sole reason why the Arabs have not driven the Jews "into the sea" as they once promised during a more honest period of their history.
For thirteen long centuries Arab-Muslims had their way with all non-Muslims in the Middle East. In some times and places dhimmitude was better and in some times and places dhimmitude was worse, but it was never better than the very worst of Jim Crow in the early twentieth-century American south.
In Martin Gilbert's In Ishmael's House: A History of Jews in Muslim Lands, we read:
There could be no building of new synagogues or churches. Dhimmis could not ride horses, but only donkeys; they could not use saddles, but only ride sidesaddle. Further, they could not employ a Muslim. Jews and Christians alike had to wear special hats, cloaks and shoes to mark them out from Muslims. They were even obliged to carry signs on their clothing or to wear types and colors of clothing that would indicate they were not Muslims, while at the same time avoid clothing that had any association with Mohammed and Islam. Most notably, green clothing was forbidden...
Other aspects of dhimmi existence were that Jews - and also Christians - were not to be given Muslim names, were not to prevent anyone from converting to Islam, and were not to be allowed tombs that were higher than those of Muslims. Men could enter public bathhouses only when they wore a special sign around their neck distinguishing them from Muslims, while women could not bathe with Muslim women and had to use separate bathhouses instead. Sexual relations with a Muslim woman were forbidden, as was cursing the Prophet in public - an offense punishable by death.
Under dhimmi rules as they evolved, neither Jews nor Christians could carry guns, build new places of worship or repair old ones without permission,or build any place of worship that was higher than a mosque. A non-Muslim could not inherit anything from a Muslim. A non-Muslim man could not marry a Muslim woman, although a Muslim man could marry a Christian or a Jewish woman.
Martin Gilbert, In Ishmael's House: A History of Jews in Muslim Lands (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2010) 32 - 33.
The Palestinian-Arab leadership, and many of their people, are aggressors who portray themselves as victims in order to advance the Islamic religious imperative of Jihad.
The Palestinian-Arabs are also the cudgel that the rest of the Arab world uses against free Israel.
Arabs outnumber Jews in the Middle East by a factor of 60 or 70 to 1. There are about six million Jews surrounded by 300 to 400 million Arabs in the Middle East. Those Arabs are not the least bit happy about Jewish sovereignty on the ancestral Jewish homeland and it is not because of Israel's record on human rights, which is far-and-away superior to their own.
Arab hatred toward Israel is for the simple reason that Islam claims the Jewish homeland as part of Dar al Islam and therefore, according to Islamic religious law, it must always and forever remain part of Dar al Islam.
However, until the Arabs manage to wrest back control of the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people it will remain, like all non-Muslim lands, part of Dar al Harb, "the House of War."
And it is for this reason that Palestinian-Arab mothers are sometimes happy to see their children commit suicide by intifada - by Jihad - in the streets of Jerusalem or Hebron. If they are fundamentalist in their Islamic faith, then they honestly believe that the violent Jihad is a religious obligation and that their dead sons will go to an eternal life of indulgence in Paradise.
Nonetheless, despite chronic and unremitting Arab-Muslim theocratic animosity toward Jews, we are the only indigenous people in the history of the planet to successfully reconstitute a national home upon ancestral land after twenty centuries of diaspora and thirteen centuries of dhimmitude.
I think that what's bugging me - and believe me, this is not meant as a criticism to you, personally - is how quickly politics descends into a team sport the closer we get toward major elections.
It's Us versus Them.
Good Guys versus Bad Guys.
It's less about issues than it is about demonizing the political "other."
It's not enough to merely criticize Obama or Hillary on the issues.
One must spit loathing and contempt at their very essence, as well as at their followers, or anyone who is not absolutely in opposition to their status as human beings.
About a month, or so, ago I was amazed to see both Trump and Clinton calling each other "racist."
Then the very next week they each flung the defamatory term "psychopath" at one another.
Furthermore, among supporters of either candidate, group-think rules the day and if you so much as question a political stance of one side it means that you must be on the other side... the side of that revolting enemy of all humanity... whoever it might be this cycle.
Or, for example, were I to criticize Black Lives Matter for their violent tendencies in the streets or their support for anti-Semitic anti-Zionism, it must mean that I am a revolting racist who hates black people.
In truth, the Democratic Party and the Progressive-Left, the very party and political movement that I come out of, has taken something worthy and noble, the Civil Rights Movement, and turned it into a bludgeon with which to silence alternative viewpoints or bully people into political submission.
This is politics as rat poison and it is not worthy of any of us with two brain cells to rub together or a political heart that honestly cares.
Writing for the conservative Breitbart website, Joel B. Pollack tells us: Hanan an-Hroub is scheduled to speak at a Clinton Global Initiative event in New York after winning a $1 million teaching award from another charity that donates to the Clinton Foundation. Her husband, Omar al-Hroub, spent 10 years in an Israeli prison for his role in a 1980 bombing that killed six Israelis.
For those willing to take a few moments to think about it, the Hanan Al-Hroub story is ethically complex and, therefore, very interesting.
As with any stories that emphasize Palestinian-Arab terrorism, the mainstream left is reluctant to touch it. The Wall Street Journal has an article behind a wall requiring registration, but Breitbart has a a critical piece and the Times of Israel has a laudatory one.
Trump, needless to say, knows an opportunity to smack around Hillary when he sees one.
Jason Miller, Senior Communications Advisor for the Trump campaign claims that:
Today’s report that the Clinton Foundation is feting the wife of a Palestinian man convicted of helping bomb innocent Israeli citizens is deeply disturbing, especially in the wake of this weekend’s attacks. The decision to honor the wife of a terrorist by Hillary Clinton’s foundation shows a complete lack of judgment and a callousness that should disqualify her from holding the presidency.
Raj Shah, deputy communications director of the Republican National Committee, says:
In the wake of this weekend’s attacks, granting a platform to the spouse of a terrorist bomb-maker just miles away from where explosives were detonated days ago is an insult to the victims and makes a mockery of the Clinton Foundation.
My initial gut-reaction to this story was nausea at Clinton's apparent disdain for the victims of terrorism.
My second reaction was to wonder how dumb must the Clinton people be to publicly honor a figure so closely connected to terrorism directly after still more Jihadi attacks in the United States?
But then, of course, the question becomes, "Just who the hell is this woman?"
Winner of the 2016 Global Teacher Prize, an initiative of the Varkey Foundation, Hanan Al Hroub grew up in the Palestinian refugee camp, Bethlehem, where she was regularly exposed to acts of violence. She went into primary education after her children were left deeply traumatized by a shooting incident they witnessed on their way home from school. Her experiences in meetings and consultations to discuss her children’s behavior, development and academic performance in the years that followed led Al Hroub to try to help others who, having grown up in similar circumstances, require special handling at school. With so many troubled children in the region, Palestinian classrooms can be tense environments. Al Hroub embraces the slogan “No to Violence” and uses a specialized teaching approach she developed herself. Al Hroub has shared her perspective at conferences, meetings and teacher training seminars.
Omitted is any reference to her bomb-making husband and the six people he killed in 1980.
Omar al-Hroub was convicted on charges that he was an accomplice in a deadly bombing attack in Hebron that killed Israelis walking home from Friday night Sabbath prayers. According to an Associated Press account at the time, Omar al-Hroub was a chemist who provided chemicals needed for making the bombs.
This is damning material and, even if Hanan Al-Hroub were some Palestinian-Arab "Mother Theresa," it very much calls into question Hillary Clinton's capacity for sound judgment.
Nonetheless, we cannot discount the possibility that Al-Hroub is entirely innocent of any involvement in her husband's former Jew Killing Hobby or that her work as a teacher since then is not worth every penny of that one million dollars.
Al-Hroub developed techniques to calm children after they witness violence after her own children witnessed Israeli troops shoot and wound their father during the first Palestinian intifada.
The techniques reportedly reduce tendencies to violence among Palestinians. In March, she won the Britain-based Varkey Foundation’s $1 million Global Teacher Prize. Among those congratulating her were Pope Francis, Vice President Joe Biden, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Britain’s Prince William.
Hanan embraces the slogan ‘No to Violence’ and uses a specialist approach she developed herself, detailed in her book, ‘We Play and Learn’. She focuses on developing trusting, respectful, honest and affectionate relationships with her students and emphasises the importance of literacy. She encourages her students to work together, pays close attention to individual needs and rewards positive behaviour. Her approach has led to a decline in violent behaviour in schools where this is usually a frequent occurrence; she has inspired her colleagues to review the way they teach, their classroom management strategies and the sanctions they use.
I don't know that encouraging cooperation among students or rewarding positive behavior - while wearing a clown's wig and red nose - represents some sort-of pedagogical revolution worth a million bucks, but it definitely beats a kick in the head.
What is troubling, however, is the manner in which the media, and Al-Hroub, herself, imply Jewish-Israeli guilt for the violence created by ongoing Palestinian-Arab theocratically-inspired aggression against Jews living on ancestral Jewish land.
For example, The Guardian, in a piece from last March concerning the original announcement of the award, claims in a context-free manner:
In 2000, when her youngest was established at school, Hroub resumed her education part-time at Al-Quds University. Within months, her husband, Omar, and two of her daughters were shot at by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint near Bethlehem. Omar was injured in the shoulder and the girls were traumatised.
I do not doubt it for one moment.
The year 2000 was the first year of Intifada Number Two, the Al-Aqsa Intifada, when Palestinian-Arabs went berserk because Ariel Sharon had the audacity to take a stroll on the Temple Mount.
The Guardian story, of course, also leaves out Omar's history of terrorism.
In conclusion, although I was willing to give Clinton and Al-Hroub the benefit of the doubt, when I see the way that certain media outlets, such as the Guardian, use this story to contrast alleged Palestinian-Arab sweetness and goodness versus Jewish-Israeli barbarism, the ethical dilemma melts away into the aether and all that I am left with is disgust.
For all I know, Hanan Al-Hroub is a terrific woman and a wonderful teacher worth every penny of that million dollars, but when these stories are used in a propagandistic manner to contrast bunny-like Arabs in conflict with Doberman-like Jews, it tells me that there is something more going on here than merely honoring a teacher.
The University of California, Berkeley, has made a quick u-turn in its decision to block a student-led class devoted to demonizing Israel and Morton Klein doesn't like it.
The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) has condemned the University of California (UC), Berkeley for reinstating an explicitly anti-Israel course dedicating to discussing and seeking ways in which to dismantle Israel, thereby robbing the Jewish people of national self-determination.
It's important that we still have staunch pro-Israel organizations like the ZOA and this is particularly true given that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has under its new director, Jonathan Greenblatt, moved into the surrealistic J Street realm of pro-Israel / anti-Israel organizations.
But there is also the important question of where the Jewish and pro-Israel donating Berkeley alums will come down on the issue. My guess is that UCAL, Berkeley has little to fear from the possibility of Jewish financial defections.
The Obama administration, after all, has done a terrific job demonstrating the endurance of American Jewish loyalty to both the Democratic party and progressive-left institutions, such as UCAL Berkeley.
The course, entitled, ‘Palestine: A Settler Colonial Analysis,’ examines the history of the region from the 1880s “through the lens of settler colonialism.” The course, in short, simply presumes that Zionism is colonial movement, rather than a national liberation movement.
That's the key insight.
From what I gather, the course is grounded in the false premise of perpetual Palestinian-Arab victim-hood at the hands of those terrible colonialist Ashkenazi Zionists... i.e., the Jews. As violent intruders, needless to say, the Jews are considered to have no rights to national sovereignty on what is falsely claimed as the land of the "indigenous Arab" population.
It is for this reason that the "instructor student," Hatem Bazian, will also examine “the possibilities of a decolonized Palestine.” Or, to say in more honest terms, the possibility of eliminating Israel as the national and ancestral homeland of the Jewish people.
The course readings consist heavily of anti-Zionist readings from biased, ‘new historians’ like Ilan Pappé and Palestinian activists like Edward Said and so on.
Ilan Pappé has a certain notoriety within the academic community for saying in a 1999 interview:
“Indeed the struggle is about ideology, not about facts. Who knows what the facts are? We try to convince as many people as we can that our interpretation of the facts is the correct one, and we do it because of ideological reasons, not because we are truth-seekers.”
And we even have a photo of Edward Said throwing rocks at the IDF.
According to Morton Klein:
“This course at UC brings into the open what is often merely latent –– that courses at universities today that deal with Zionism, Arab nationalism and the history of Israel and the Palestinian Arabs are inherently biased against Zionism and Jewish national rights, regarding Palestinian Arabs as the only group entitled to such things."
Yes, and this has been going on for many years, now.
One lesson that we can take away from the proliferation of anti-Semitic anti-Zionism on American campuses is that Jewish alumni donors to schools like UCAL, Berkeley, do not much mind the defamation of Israel on those campuses.
Nor do they, apparently, much mind the challenges - physical, emotional, and otherwise - suffered by Jewish supporters of Israel on those campuses.
Either that or the schools are willing to alienate a few Jewish donors and subject pro-Israel Jewish students to harassent in order to support the anti-Zionist project.
It is a shame, really, because if the pro-Israel Jewish alumnus at schools like UCAL, Berkeley would stand up with strength they could make a difference.
Raw Deal # 5: Calling for Intifada, Calling for Jewish Blood
Heya guys,
This is Michael Lumish, 7 AM on the morning of
Monday, September 19, from the city of Oakland in the San Francisco Bay Area,
the land of vineyards and wineries, Chinatowns with delicious food in both
Oakland and San Francisco, and our famous Cioppino, which is Italian seafood
stew made famous in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco, the Ginger
Bread Town.
One of my recent themes, as those of you who follow
Israel Thrives knows, is that it must be acknowledged that cries for intifada
are nothing less than cries for the murder of the Jewish people.
As you guys know, I have been writing about this and
I very much resent the way universities around the country – including, of
course, my old alma mater, SF State – indulge these students and give them a
cookie when they do so.
In other words, within living memory of the
Holocaust, when German students gathered in university quads and called for the
elimination of Jewish people - as well as their books - from German society, so
we now have students throughout western Europe and the United States calling
for the murder of Jewish people via “intifada” and university administrations
couldn’t care less.
But, then, when you think about it, why should they
care when western Jews could hardly care less themselves?
Jewish people, it should be noted, are the only
people on the planet wherein college students feel self-righteous, moral
superiority in calling for murder.
They honestly believe that calling for intifada,
that is, calling for Jewish blood, is a highly commendable and ethical act that
should be rewarded and it is, in fact, rewarded.
In the 1960s, anti-war protesters likewise gathered
in university quads around the country and sometimes even called for fighting
the cops in the streets, but they never targeted a single ethnicity for death,
as we are seeing on university campuses today.
But, as we know, today the western left, in general,
tends to think that the Jews, particularly those of us in Israel, are fair game
because we are allegedly mean to the very people whose ancestors of people who
held us as second and third class non-citizens under the boot of Arab-Muslim
imperial rule for thirteen long centuries.
Jews and Christians were held in contempt by Muslims
living under their dominion and represent a minority population at least as
persecuted as were black people under the system of Jim Crow in the United
States.
At least black people could legally repair their
places of worship, which is far more then we can say about Jews living under
dhimmi status.
Jews and Christians couldn’t build or repair houses
of worship.
Jews and Christians had no rights of self-defense or
access to the courts.
Jews and Christians were disallowed positions of
authority over any Muslim which, ipso facto, meant that Jews and Christians
maintained the very worst jobs in society for 13 long centuries.
Jews and Christians couldn’t ride horses, only donkeys
or mules
Sometimes Jews weren’t even allowed to leave their
places of residence during rainstorms lest their filth wash into the streets
thereby contaminating their Muslim neighbors.
And, let us not forget, that Jews and Christians had
to pay protection money, the Jizyah, like a pizza shop owner kicking protection
money upstairs to Tony Soprano (of the HBO television series, The Sopranos) lest
he send Furio or Chrissy down to kick some ass or kill a few people.
At least Tony, and the North Jersey boys, never
justified their crimes by insisting that their persecution of those around them
for the purpose of financial gain was a sacred religious imperative.
I mean, at least Tony Soprano, for those of you
familiar with the show, never told his people that beating the whole crap out
of those who owe them money was a gleeful delight to the Lord God Almighty.
On the contrary, even one of Tony’s top enforcers,
the character of Chris Moltisanti, referred to Tony as “the guy that I’m going
to hell for.”
So, make no mistake, calls for intifada on
university campuses are nothing less than calls for murder because the Jewish
people simply refuse to live under the terms of Arab-Muslim imperial rule.
It’s not about land, per se.
Israel is no bigger than Jersey, itself, after all.
The conflict is about the Muslim religious
imperative, as described in the Qur’an and the Hadiths, to hold the “people of
the book” – that is Christians and Jews, among others - in a perpetual state of second and third
class non-citizenship.
However if we refuse that status – if we refuse to
pay the Jizyah or refuse to bow and scrape before Islamic religious
authorities, then we are to be crucified or to have a hand and a foot, if not
an arm and a leg, chopped off from opposite sides of the body.
I can’t quite get over that little bit of sadistic
Sharia law.
I mean really, what kind of “religion of peace”
suggests that the chopping off of hands and feet, if not arms and legs, from
opposite sides of the body is an act beloved in the sight of G-d?
They did it in Muhammad’s day and they are doing
similar things, if not precisely the same thing, today in places like Saudi
Arabia and the Islamic State (ISIS).
But Israel is the Dhimmi that Got Away and the Arabs
of the Middle East, on theological grounds, do not like it one little bit.
The Long Arab-Muslim War against the Jews of the
Middle East is not about social justice for Arabs who, traditionally in the
Middle East, could hardly care less about western notions of universal human
rights or social justice.
They dress it up in such terms because it appeals to
well-meaning western muttonheads and many Arabs and Muslims, particularly of
the younger variety, have come to believe it themselves.
When Israeli Arabs send their children out onto the
streets of Jerusalem to kill Jews they do so generally in the false belief that
they are the victims of those nefarious Jews, those children of Gorillas and
Swine.
They aren’t.
The Jews of Israel want nothing more than to be left
the hell alone to create medical and technological doo-dads, litigate against
one another, and send Natalie Portmans out into the world.
Unlike within Islam, Judaism contains no religious
imperative to hold others under subjugation, but that is definitely a prime criterion
of Islam.
This is not about a two-state solution because time
and again, going back 80 years to the British Peel Commission, the Arab world
has declined a Palestinian-Arab state if it means living in peace next to a
Jewish one.
This is not because – as much of the western left
would have you believe – that the Jews of the Middle East are racist,
imperialist fascists – but because under Islamic law any land that was ever
grabbed by the the Islamic community (the Ummah) must always and forever remain
under the Ummah –– until the entire planet is ruled by the children of Muhammad
and the “unbelievers” are shoved back in their holes.
So, therefore, it is not so much about land as it is
about the domination of others.
And this is what the snowflakes of San Francisco
State University – and campuses all throughout the western world – are calling
for when they huddle in their safe spaces and demand the blood of the Jewish
minority in the Middle East.
They do not want an end to the “occupation” because
there is no occupation.
Israel is occupying Judea and Samaria in the way
that the Japanese occupy Japan or the French occupy France.
{This is dedicated to Shirlee of Jews Down Under fame. It was in conversation with her that I came up with the idea for this piece and she is currently recovering from some very serious spinal surgery, so please send good thoughts and prayers her way. - ML}
Those of us who care about the well-being of Israel are part of a movement.
We no longer generally think of it in such terms because Zionism fulfilled itself in 1948 and over the decades Jewish supporters of Israel have lost that sense of solidarity - that movement sensibility - that made the reestablishment of Israel possible to begin with.
What I am calling the "Movement for Jewish Freedom" is an attempt to reengage Zionism as a political movement grounded in solidarity with other groups who share common interests.
I imagine it as a subset of the movement for indigenous rights which, itself, is a subset of the international movement for the maintenance of liberal-democracies.
The Movement for Jewish Freedom is highly individualistic, fiercely idiosyncratic, and entirely non-partisan. It includes people as diverse from one another as Pamela Geller is from Alan Dershowitz.
Because the ideal of liberal-democracy is, by necessity, at the core of the Movement for Jewish Freedom it must oppose Islamic jurisprudence (al-Sharia). The reason for that is because al-Sharia is non-democratic and, according to its central precepts, must strip women, Gay people, and Infidels (kuffar) of their most basic civil liberties... often in a grotesquely violent manner.
Jewish Freedom Under the Umbrella of Liberal-Democracy and Indigenous Rights
Many people who come out of the progressive-wing of the movement will squirm at notions like the necessity to "maintain liberal-democracies throughout the world." It will resonate as right-wing in a sort-of vaguely amorphous manner for many people. The word "neo-con" will quickly come to mind for some.
When I poke around the alleys and byways of the pro-Israel movement, however, I do not see much desire to impose liberal-democracy onto parts of the world that do not want it. This is a matter of culture. Some cultures are open to liberal-democracy and some are not. Liberal-democracy cannot be imposed upon cultures that do not want it, because then it would no longer be liberal democracy, now would it?.
Nonetheless, under the larger umbrella of liberal-democracy stands the movement for indigenous rights.
The movement for Jewish rights, in our ancestral homeland, is just one part of the much larger series of indigenous struggles throughout the world. The movement for the maintenance of liberal-democracy is key to indigenous rights because it is only through liberal-democratic systems that indigenous rights can be pursued as a matter of social justice. While the wheels of justice may grind slowly in the liberal-democratic West, at least they grind. In non-democratic systems, such as those bowing to Islamic law, submission is enforced through state violence. You get no discussion under these terms.
What you get are cracked skulls, wretched prisons, and torture.
A rising star within the Movement for Jewish Freedom, and a stalwart defender of indigenous rights, is Ryan Bellerose. Bellerose, a Métis from Canada - and the lone, sole American-style football playing, Native-American Zionist in the history of the universe - makes the point that Jewish people who care about the well-being of Israel would do well to embrace our own sense of indigeneity because we are, in fact, the only people on the planet with anything resembling a claim to indigenous status in that tiny part of the world.
Indeed, our ancestors lived and built and fought and made families in the Land of Israel for at least 3,500 years.
Our presence there well precedes the development of formal history. Thus to refer to the Arab invaders, who marched upon Judea and Samaria millennia later, as "indigenous" is to spit in the face of history.
I would submit to you that in order for the Movement for Jewish Freedom to advance toward its goal of Jewish autonomy on historically Jewish land - free from perpetual jihadi harassment and the constant screeching for genocide that so often comes out of the mosques - then we need to embrace our own sense as an indigenous people, among other indigenous people, fighting for rights of autonomy upon our own land.
As Bellerose has written, and I paraphrase, it is not merely a matter of standing on our tippy-toes, waving our hands in the air, and saying, "Hey! We're indigenous, too!" Instead, we need to politically engage with other indigenous peoples in a direct manner.
This will be difficult for many pro-Jewish / pro-Israel advocates because we do not generally think of ourselves in such terms and because the Palestinian-Arabs have already claimed that slot. But they have done so in a demonstrably false manner and we need always be ready to point this out.
In short, we need to stand with other indigenous peoples struggling for autonomy within liberal-democratic systems.
Our political opponents often seem comfortable with non-democratic forms of government. We, however, cannot afford to be. Nor, from any ethical perspective, would we want to be.
Some Varieties of Zionist Experience
The Movement for Jewish Freedom is diverse.
It includes Democrats and Republicans and those unregistered with any political party, such as myself. It includes hard-right conservatives and even a few hard-left progressives. (Difficult to imagine, I know.)
We are across-the-board, politically, ethnically, and across religious identities. Most activists in the movement naturally tend to be Jewish people, but some movement activists are not Jewish. Bellerose is clearly not Jewish and neither is another great friend and activist within the movement, Chloe Valdary.
But those who are friendly toward the movement come from all religious backgrounds. The most prominent of these, of course, are American Evangelical Christians who are earnest about Genesis 12:2 and 12:3, which reads:
And I will make you a great nation, And I will bless you, And make your name great; And so you shall be a blessing; And I will bless those who bless you, And the one who curses you I will curse. And in you all the families of the earth will be blessed.
There are also, of course, plenty of Catholics who believe in Jewish autonomy in the Land of Israel. Plenty of Hindus and Buddhists and Theosophists and Rastafarians and even the random Muslim, or two.
One of the reasons for pro-Israel diversity around the world is disapproval of the jihadi tendencies among some within the Muslim faith. Our friends and supporters often recognize that al-Sharia is not only non-democratic, but highly fascistic in its implementation, thereby creating at least some sympathy for the Jewish people in the Middle East.
Jews and Christians lived as second and third-class non-citizens under the imperial boot of Islamic rule for thirteen centuries until the demise of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. That, I think, was probably more than enough.
Furthermore, of course, al-Sharia is not some noxious, but irrelevant, relic from the past, but is the reality of life for hundreds of millions of people from North Africa to the Arab world, on the continent of Asia, all the way to Jakarta.
Throughout the world all sorts of people from all sorts of different faiths and backgrounds and politics recognize this and are potential allies because they, too, understand that there is something deeply sadistic about any religious legal tradition that advocates, for example, the chopping off of a hand and a foot, from opposite sides of the body, as a form of "justice."
There are also ex-Muslims, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who oppose Qur'anic law, not to mention self-identified practicing Muslim reformers who acknowledge that Sharia seriously impinges upon the civil liberties of women, Gay people, and all "unbelievers."
Those of us who actively promote the movement for Jewish rights or Jewish liberty or Jewish freedom (whatever you want to say) include academicians like Cary Nelson and Gabriel Noah Brahm who edited The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel, which, as an aside, includes a piece by Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, of the AMCHA Initiative, entitled, "Interrogating the Academic Boycotters of Israel on American Campuses" that I well recommend.
The movement also includes prominent bloggers, such as the Elder of Ziyon, who - when he isn't plotting with the other Elders to take over first the world and then the rest of the universe - can be found exposing media hypocrisy and the kind of general nonsense that usually swirls around coverage of the Long Arab War Against the Jews.
It also includes artists and musicians, such as Matisyahu, and even much loved cartoonists, like Yaakov Kirschen, the creator of Dry Bones.
But, most importantly, it includes just regular Jews, and regular friends of regular Jews, who do not like the entirely unjust way that Israel is treated by the international community and who do not very much appreciate the kind of long-standing, Koranically-based, hatred and violence that gave us 9/11 and the recent destruction of the ancient city of Palmyra, by the Islamic State (IS), in Syria.
The Enemy
Diaspora Jews, particularly of the left-leaning variety and for perfectly understandable reasons, are deeply uncomfortable with even the notion of "enemy."
No normal people want enemies. Normal people do not want war or to be forced into a position where they must take action against another people.
Unfortunately, the Jewish people, generation upon generation, century upon century, faced grinding hostility by both Europeans and Arab-Muslims. Thankfully, the Christian peoples have moved beyond institutionalized Jew Hatred and today some of our best friends on the planet come out of the western churches.
Sadly, the same cannot be said of the mosques.
Our enemies include virtually every single Arab government and much (if not most) of their religious leadership.
Our enemies do not include Muslims, in general, but merely those who would subject the rest of us to the mercies of Islamic law.
Furthermore, much of the western-left, almost the entirety of the United Nations, the European Union and the Obama administration, have proven themselves consistently hostile to the well-being of the Jewish people through being consistently hostile to the well-being of the Jewish State.
This hostility is justified on the grounds that Israel is a racist, colonialist, imperialist, apartheid state that has pushed the innocent indigenous population off of their land, while refusing to allow them autonomy in a state of their own on that land.
And that is the "Palestinian Narrative" in a concise form.
In truth, Palestinian-Arab nationalism emerged out of the larger Arab nation as a weapon. At the very core of "Palestinian" identity is the cruel goal of eliminating the Jewish State of Israel. It is their very reason to be as an allegedly distinct people. Hostility toward Israel, and towards Jews, is the glue that binds them and allows them to claim a distinct ethnicity, of sorts.
Why?
Because Israel is the Dhimmi that Got Away and the Arabs don't like it.
Jewish sovereignty on the land of our ancestors is understood not only as a terrible humiliation to the entire Arab nation, but as a direct violation of the will of Allah. Thus Jihad is both obligatory and sacred.
The very existence of Israel flies in the face of Qur'anic imperatives to maintain and expand Dar al-Islam at the expense of all non-Muslims. The dhimmi is supposed to be humiliated upon paying the Jizya - they had to crawl - but it is Israeli Jews who have humiliated their former social superiors, through surviving and thriving in freedom from dhimmitude within the State of Israel.
Meanwhile almost the entire Muslim world wallows in poverty and ignorance, violence and genocide against Zoroastrians and Christians and Yazidis and the Ba'hai, and the constant intra-Muslim warfare between Shia and Sunni... and almost all of this they blame on the West or on the insidious, international "Zionist conspiracy."
The Arabs, "Palestinian" or otherwise, are not the victims of the Jews.
On the contrary, it is the Jewish minority in the Middle East who have been constantly persecuted by the great Muslim majority in that part of the world from the early 7th century until the present. It is not merely the Palestinian-Arabs, but virtually the entire Arab and Muslim worlds that are perpetually endeavoring to squeeze the Jews out of Israel, by any means necessary. These means include war and violence and intifada, lawfare, international diplomatic aggressions, the movement to Boycott, Divest from, and Sanction Israel (BDS), heritage theft and attempts at heritage obliteration, cognitive warfare (pdf) and Pallywood.
We can break down the contemporary phases of the Long Arab War Against the Jews as follows:
Phase 1, 1920 - 1947: Riots and Massacres
Phase 2, November 1947 - April 1948: The Civil War in Palestine Phase 3, 1948 - 1973: Conventional Warfare Phase 4, 1964 - Present: The Terror War Phase 5, 1975 - Present: The Delegitimization Effort
There is a possibility that we can eventually overcome this perpetual hostility, but it will not come from Israeli concessions because those concessions are always pocketed by the Palestinian-Arabs and then used as the starting point for demands on further concessions.
Instead, we need solidarity among ourselves and among our allies within a political framework that benefits both.
And on that hopeful note, let's not forget to send some good thoughts and prayers to our friend Shirlee in Oz as she recovers from surgery.
Friday, September 16, 2016
This reflector scope from Ireland in 1845, known as the "Leviathan of Parsonstown," was the biggest telescope of its day.
Given the sizable six-foot-diameter primary mirror, the Leviathan has the honor of being the first scope to detect a spiral nebulae.
Those of you who have read the recently deceased scholar of Middle East politics, Barry Rubin, will recall that he absolutely refused to "lie for peace." Rubin often complained that many of his colleagues would essentially lie to the public on various matters relating to the Middle East out of a sincere desire to smooth over hostilities and bring about a more peaceful world.
They were "lying for peace" and Rubin absolutely refused to do it.
In other words, without fear or favor, figure out what’s going on and say so honestly. You don’t have to “lie for peace”; or tell fibs because you like “doves” and dislike “hawks”; or because you are on the left so you don’t want to give “aid and comfort” to those on the right; or because you really know best for the people involve so you load the dice.
First you figure out what’s happening and THEN you reach a conclusion, rather than the other way around.
Rubin believed that far too many of his colleagues, both in journalism and in scholarship, skewed their conclusions in order to bring about a desired political result. He considered this not only a sin against the very foundation of both scholarship and journalism, but an entirely counterproductive measure that could do nothing but delay an honest reckoning of accounts. Rubin believed that lying for peace did not only not bring peace, but extended the length and ferocity of conflicts because important essential truths were never faced.
And this is why - I suspect - that Barack Obama continually lies about the nature and history of the Islamic faith.
Nonetheless, why he lies about Islam is open to question, but that he lies about Islam is not.
Islam Means Peace
In his February 3, 2016, speech before the Islamic Society of Baltimore, Obama told the assembled members of the faith:
So let’s start with this fact: For more than a thousand years, people have been drawn to Islam’s message of peace. And the very word itself, Islam, comes from salam -- peace. The standard greeting is as-salamu alaykum -- peace be upon you. And like so many faiths, Islam is rooted in a commitment to compassion and mercy and justice and charity.
This is false.
Barack Obama, for obvious reasons, has closer ties, and thus knowledge, of the Islamic world than any US president before him. He spent his early years in Indonesia studying in an Islamic school and, thus, had to know - certainly by the time he became a full-grown President of the United States - that the meaning of the Arabic word Islam is not "peace" but "submission."
So let's start with this fact. Barack Obama lied through his teeth in a mosque filled with Muslims, many of whom knew better. Any self-professed Muslim with the least bit of knowledge concerning his or her own faith knows very well that Obama lied about Islam. Certainly the older and more serious and more knowledgeable members of the Islamic Society of Baltimore knew that he was lying, but they also knew that he was lying in their favor.
My own biases tell me that if Obama were to lie in favor of Judaism, he would never hear the end of it from these kvetching Jews. Jews would write articles and emails and make nasty phone calls and would argue in the streets with one another, stamping their feet and waving their arms around, had Obama the temerity to lie about Judaism in a positive way.
But, just why did he lie about Islam?
He lied for peace!
Furthermore, this lie was not even directed at Muslims. It was directed at you.
It was directed at non-Muslim Americans who, given the daily fact of violent Jihad around the world, might get the impression that the Islamic doctrine of Jihad could have something to do with the Islamic doctrine of Jihad... and that is simply unacceptable.
Because the truth could make American Muslims feel vulnerable, Barack Obama lies to the American public in the hope of creating a positive and amicably pluralistic American cultural atmosphere. His motivation for lying is the very same motivation that Rubin complains about concerning his colleagues who also, counterproductively, lie for peace.
He wants to set things right via deception.
The Holy Koran Teaches...
In his pivotal 2009 speech before the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo, Obama said:
The Holy Koran teaches that whoever kills an innocent is as -- it is as if he has killed all mankind. And the Holy Koran also says whoever saves a person, it is as if he has saved all mankind.
This is also a lie, although in this case it is a lie of omission.
Obama mangled Sura 5:32, in part by leaving out Sura 5:33.
Sura 5:32 reads:
Because of that, We decreed upon the Children of Israel that whoever kills a soul unless for a soul or for corruption [done] in the land - it is as if he had slain mankind entirely. And whoever saves one - it is as if he had saved mankind entirely. And our messengers had certainly come to them with clear proofs. Then indeed many of them, [even] after that, throughout the land, were transgressors.
This is actually an admonishment to the "Children of Israel." It is in the Talmud that we read the above noble sentiment. What we do not have in the Talmud, however, is the punishment for those Jewish "transgressors" that we get in the Qur'an.
The sweet sentiment above, in the Qur'an, is immediately followed by Sura 5:33, which reads:
Indeed, the penalty for those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and strive upon earth [to cause] corruption is none but that they be killed or crucified or that their hands and feet be cut off from opposite sides or that they be exiled from the land. That is for them a disgrace in this world; and for them in the Hereafter is a great punishment,
For some unknown reason Obama left out the bit about crucifying Jewish transgressors or the chopping off of a hand and a foot on opposite sides of the body.
What kind of religion of peace and compassion and sweetness and all-things-good, recommends the chopping off of a hand and a foot from opposite sides of the body as a matter of justice?
And, again, why did Obama lie to the world about the nature of Islam?
He did so, because he lies for peace.
This time, however, he did not merely lie to the American people about the nature of Islam, but lied to the entire world about the nature of Islam. He did so, I am sure, in the sincere hope that people might start "making nice" and hopefully ease the violently psychotic Islamic dream of reestablishing the Caliphate.
Lying for peace, however, did not work, as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Chief Head Chopper of the Islamic State (IS), would readily confirm.
Lying for Peace
Barack Obama lies for peace because as president of the United States he has a solemn obligation to promote harmony in the realm. The chances are very good that he knew that he lied, but politicians lie all the time and usually in far less worthwhile causes. In the cases above, and numerous others that you could find if you were to dig into the matter, Obama is not lying for personal gain, or to club his political enemies over the head, but to help encourage an evolution toward human decency on an international level.
It may be criminally naive and hopelessly idealistic, but there is little malevolence in his motives.
The problem is that we infidels sometimes have a curious nature and are willing to actually learn a thing or two about an ideology that calls for our murder. And make no mistake, the conflict between Islam and the West is not about western imperialism. Given the fact that Islam is the most successful imperialist project in the history of the world, Jihad could hardly be an anti-imperialist project. In fact, Islamic supremacism and imperialism lie at the very heart of Jihad.
The conflict, on the Muslim end, is theocratic and ideological and the Qur'an rallies the "believers" to war against the filthy kuffar, the hypocritical "unbelievers" in an exceedingly material, worldly, and violent manner.
Whatever else Islam may be, for the "unbeliever" Islam is emphatically not a religion of "compassion and mercy and justice and charity."
Western-left bigots tend to think that criticism of Islam is actually a "racist" defamation of Muslims as people.
It isn't.
Muslims, in general, are not running around blowing shit up. They may approve, or disapprove, in various ways and measures, of the violent Jihad, but to conflate jihadis with regular Muslims is, indeed, prejudicial and bigoted.
The sick irony, of course, is that when soft-hearted, progressive-left westerners seek to protect the Muslim community from anti-Jihadis they are unwittingly conflating regular Muslims with Osama bin Ladin and the Head Choppers.
When organizations like CAIR, or the Muslim Students Association (MSA), condemn anti-Jihadis as racist, anti-Muslim, Islamophobic bigots they are implying that day-to-day Muslims are Jihadis.
