Pregnant Christian woman sentenced to death in Sudan

Michael L.

Abdelmoneim Abu Idris Ali writes the following for the Times of Israel:

HARTOUM, Sudan (AFP) — A Sudanese judge on Thursday sentenced a Christian woman to hang for apostasy, despite appeals by Western embassies for compassion and respect for religious freedom. 

Born to a Muslim father, the woman was convicted under the Islamic sharia law that has been in force in Sudan since 1983 and outlaws conversions on pain of death. 

Meriam Yahia Ibrahim Ishag, 27, is eight months pregnant and married to a Christian national of South Sudan, which separated in 2011, human rights activists say.  

“We gave you three days to recant but you insist on not returning to Islam. I sentence you to be hanged,” Judge Abbas Mohammed Al-Khalifa told the woman, addressing her by her father’s Muslim name, Adraf Al-Hadi Mohammed Abdullah.  

Khalifa also sentenced Ishag to 100 lashes for “adultery.” Under Sudan’s interpretation of sharia, a Muslim woman cannot marry a non-Muslim man and any such relationship is regarded as adulterous.

And this is precisely why we need to speak out against political Islam and al-Sharia.

If we cannot bring ourselves to stand up against the single most vicious, fascistic and rising political movement in the world today then we have no business referring to ourselves as "liberal" or "progressive."

I am not saying that we need to wage war against the forces of political Islam throughout the Muslim world.  What I am saying is that we need to speak out against this movement and we need to stop funding and supporting Islamist organizations like the Brotherhood and possibly, soon, Hamas.

It is just a matter of basic human decency and common sense.  How it is that the Obama administration thought that funding the Big Daddy of all Islamist groups in Egypt - the Brotherhood, of course - and providing them not only with diplomatic cover, but heavy weaponry, was a good idea?

And here is another question:

How is it that pro-Israel supporters of Israel do not conceive of Obama administration support for the Muslim Brotherhood as representing support for the Muslim Brotherhood?

I find it exceedingly odd.

Obama gave money to the Brotherhood.

He gave weaponry to the Brotherhood.

He invited them to various soirees and discussions.

He provided them with diplomatic cover and even sent Secretary of State Clinton to Cairo to ensure a smooth transition to an Islamist government.

And, yet, I have been told by highly intelligent people that Obama does not, and did not, support the Muslim Brotherhood or political Islam.

It simply defies the imagination.

A Quick "Thank You" to Fizziks

I want to thank "fizziks" for taking the time to address my piece entitled, The Fizziks Ostrich.

And while he did an admirable job explaining why it is that he prefers Democrats to Republicans, he did not actually address the question.

The question is this:

Is it true, or is it false, that the primary venues of BDS and anti-Semitic anti-Zionism in the West today primarily come from the progressive-left, including the grassroots / netroots of the Democratic Party?

What is the answer?

{Anyone?}

Who will give a clear and simple answer to an obvious question?

Love of the Land Links

Michael L.


Haaretz is anything but an unwitting accomplice

Dear John, 'Apartheid' Isn't On Israel's Agenda

Opting for humanity in an ocean of savagery

Promoting Revisionist Israeli History at the Economist

It is important that we continue to stand with our friends and relatives who live within the Jewish heartland of Judea and Samaria.

This whole notion, which U.S. special envoy Martin Indyk has recently been repeating, that a Jewish presence on 3,500 years of Jewish land is such an understandable abomination to the "indigenous" Arab-Muslim population that of course Jews should not be allowed to live, and thus build housing for themselves, in Judea.

The shear bigotry of it is profound and the fact that this bigotry against the Jews of Judea and Samaria also gets spread by Jews within the diaspora, at the behest of the Obama administration, leads to a slight retching in the back of the throat.

In any case, we here at Israel Thrives continue to wish our friends Yosef and Melody in Hevron nothing but the very best in this world.

I Love the Big Bang Theory

Michael L.



This speaks for itself and good for Mayim.

{And a Big Tip 'O the Kippa to the Elder.}

Say "Hello" to Scott Smith

Michael L.

One of the great things about commenting upon the Arab-Israel conflict is that often people comment back and sometimes those people have some very interesting things to say.

In that regard I would recommend my readership to the comments of Scott Smith beneath my piece for the Elder entitled, The Erasure and Confiscation of Jewish History.

Scott has a number of interesting criticisms and questions, but for the moment I want to take just one.

He writes:

there were instances in history in which Islam was highly repressive of the Jews and there were few if any instances in which Islam accorded American like freedom to its Jews, by the low standards of pre-enlightenment Christendom, pre-modern Islam was usually an improvement.

This idea has been prominent in the historiography for a long time, although I am uncertain of the truth of it.  I am not an historian of the Middle East, but what most historians of the Middle East would agree upon is Scott's central assertion.  The Jews generally had it better in the Middle Ages under Islam than under European Christianity.

What I worry about, however, is that this truth - if it is, indeed, true - will be used to white-wash the fact that for 1,300 years the Jews of the Middle East lived as second and third-class non-citizens under the boot of Arab-Muslim imperialism.  Upon freeing ourselves from the system of subservience known in Arabic as dhimmitude in the twentieth-century, via the movement for Jewish Liberation (Zionism), the Arab world launched a war against the Jews of the Middle East that continues to this day.

I would ask Scott to consider this quote from Efraim Karsh (Head of the Middle East and Mediterranean Studies Programme, King's College, London) in his Palestine Betrayed:

At the time of the Muslim occupation of Palestine in the seventh century, the country's Jewish population ranged in the hundreds of thousands at the very least; by the 1880s, Palestine's Jewish community had been reduced to about 24,000, or some 5 percent of the total population. 

(Efraim Karsh, Palestine Betrayed, Yale University Press, 2010, pg. 8)

Just how is it that if the numbers of Jews living in the Land of Israel at the time of the Muslim conquests was in the hundreds of thousands, why were there only around 24,000 by the 19th century?

Just what transpired over the course of 12 centuries that might account for the almost never-remarked upon brutal decimation of the Jewish population of the region?

Depending upon the conclusions that we draw from this question, we might consider incorporating those conclusions into our understanding of the long Arab-Muslim conflict against the Jews in the Middle East.

The truth of the matter is that the Jews in that part of the world were nearly wiped out between the arrival of Muhammad's armies and the rise of the Movement for Jewish Liberation, otherwise known as Zionism, in the nineteenth-century.

So, yes, I have clearly drawn my conclusions.

And Peace to You, Jimmy Baby

Michael L.

{Cross-posted at Jews Down Under.}

Former American President, Jimmy Carter, has an op-ed in the Washington Post today entitled, United Palestinian government may provide new opportunities for peace.

He writes:

The Palestinians’ plans for the coming months are relatively clear: to form a new unity government and expand involvement in the United Nations. Although condemned by some, the decision by the leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization and Hamas to reconcile their differences and move toward elections can be a positive development. In the past, similar efforts have been abandoned because of strong opposition from Israel and the United States, but the resolve to succeed is now much stronger among leaders in the West Bank and Gaza. This reconciliation of Palestinian factions and formation of a national unity government is necessary because it would be impossible to implement any peace agreement between Israel and just one portion of the Palestinians.

It is hard to fathom how anyone could think that folding a genocidally anti-Semitic organization into the PLO is a good thing.  It is obvious, of course, that Israel can reach no meaningful peace agreement with only a portion of the Palestinian-Arab people, but it is equally obvious that an organization that calls not only for the destruction of the Jewish State of Israel, but for the genocide of the Jews, represents a sworn enemy, not a partner for peace.

Hamas has made no gestures that would suggest that they are interested in two states for two peoples.  Quite the contrary, Hamas opposes a negotiated conclusion of hostilities, yet a former President of the United States, a nuclear engineer, no less, thinks that it is in the best interest of the Jews of the Middle East to recognize and uplift an organization that screams to the hillsides for Jewish blood.

The wrong-headedness of such a notion goes well beyond casual naivety.

As anyone who knows anything about this tumor that emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza knows that they encorporate a particular part of one of the hadiths into their charter.

The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.

That is what Jimmy Carter believes that the Jews of the Middle East have a moral obligation to negotiate with?

And considering the damage that Carter has done to Israel and to the Jewish people via the Apartheid Smear, would not a wise individual choose to remain quiet?  Surely Carter knows that his reputation among very many Jewish people is rather shaky.  The reason for this, of course, is that of all the countries in the world, and all the atrocities that they collectively commit, he declares the one, lone, sole Jewish country to be immoral.

What, after all, is apartheid if not a form of state sanctioned immorality?  And if Israel commits apartheid on the allegedly indigenous Palestinian-Arab population, what does that say about those of us who support Israel?  It says that we, too, are immoral and in support of an immoral country and an immoral people, the Jewish people.

Of course, as a huge fan of the Hamas charter this is my favorite part:

With their money, they took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others. With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein. They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about, here and there. With their money they formed secret societies, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests. With their money they were able to control imperialistic countries and instigate them to colonize many countries in order to enable them to exploit their resources and spread corruption there.

The Freemasons?  Really?  Rotary Clubs?  And, I have to say, I had no idea that the Detroit Lions football team was in anyway involved in the Vast Zionist Conspiracy to Rule the Universe.

Here is a question to ask:

How is it that a political organization could write such wild and genocidal nonsense directly into their charter and a seemingly rational former President of the United States reaches out his hand to such people?

Can anyone imagine Carter reaching out to any white European organization that claimed that the Jews seek world domination and thereby need to be eliminated?

Some say that Jimmy Carter is an anti-Semite, although I have never drawn that conclusion.  What  I think is that Carter remains entrenched within the kind of left-leaning, soft-hearted, soft-minded, Vietnam War era sensibility that vilified western imperialism and romanticized anti-imperialist forces of any sort - however violent, however vile - so long as they represented "people of color."

How else to explain Carter's equanimity with Hamas's articulated genocidal intentions?

How else to explain that he honestly believes that murderous lunatics make for good negotiating partners?

I tell you what.  I have a better idea.  Instead of folding Hamas into the PLO - which, itself, is a terrorist organization, of course - why do we not defeat Hamas and thereby make it go away?

I know that wishing to actually defeat one's mortal enemies is today considered dangerously hard-right radical, but I feel reasonably certain that Franklin Roosevelt approved of the notion.