Pompeo States a Home Truth, and the Media Mostly Mocks by Hugh Fitzgerald

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When Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced on November 18 that the Administration did not regard Israeli settlements in the West Bank as violating international law, there was weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth among the Great and Good in our media. The New York Times characteristically did not bother to address the truth or falsehood of Pompeo’s statement. It merely damned the remark for constituting a “reversal of decades of American policy that may doom any peace efforts.” Readers were made to understand that this claim as to the legality of Israeli settlements must be wrong – and all those previous administrations, headed by the likes of the antisemitic Jimmy Carter, and the anti-Israel George H. W. Bush and anti-Israel Barack Obama, that declared them “illegal,” must surely have been right.

What’s more, the Times article on Pompeo grimly predicted that this “reversal…of American policy…may doom any peace efforts.” One might have thought that “peace efforts” – through treaties rather than through deterrence – had long been doomed not by anything the Israelis have done, but by the persistent refusal of Mahmoud Abbas to engage in negotiations. One might also have thought that “peace” between Israel and the Palestinians might be maintained most effectively not through treaties, given that Muhammad’s breaking of the Treaty of Hudaibiyya – that he made with the Meccans in 628 A.D. — has served as a model for all subsequent treaty-making, and treaty-breaking, by Muslims with non-Muslims. Instead, such a peace can only be maintained through deterrence – the same policy that kept the peace between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. 620,000 Israeli Jews living in towns and cities in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem constitute a major part of that deterrence.

The Times also noted that the United Nations General Assembly, the United Nations Security Council and the International Court of Justice have all said that Israeli settlements on the West Bank violate the Fourth Geneva Convention. We can dismiss as hopelessly biased the General Assembly and the Security Council of the U.N., but what about the International Court of Justice? In 2004, when the Court rendered its advisory opinion as to the legality of Israeli settlements, three of its fifteen judges were Muslims, the largest single bloc. And since then there have always been at least three Muslim judges on the court at time.

Despite the fact that the U.N. General Assembly, and the U.N. Security Council, and the International Court of Justice, have all claimed that by building settlements in the West Bank, Israel violates the Fourth Geneva Convention, their judgments are flatly contradicted by the facts. We mustn’t let ourselves be overawed.

First, the Fourth Geneva Convention came out of World War II, a response to the behavior of the Nazis in the countries they occupied and where they both moved peoples out – including Jews who were rounded up and sent to death camps, and also Poles and other Slavic peoples considered as untermenschen — and moved in more ethnic Germans, to parts of Poland, the Baltic states, and Czechoslovakia. But Israel was never an “occupying power” in the West Bank; it was there by right, the right conferred on it in the Mandate for Palestine and, one might add, by the fact that Jews had lived in the West Bank continuously for the past two thousand years. It was only between 1948 and 1967 that the West Bank was rendered Judenrein by the Jordanians. Second, Israel did not move any people out of the West Bank, nor did it forcibly move Jews into the West Bank. Those Jews who moved into West Bank settlements did so of their own volition.

It bears repetition: Israel’s status as the only legal claimant to the West Bank (see the Mandate for Palestine, and accompanying maps), renders the Fourth Geneva Convention — with its statement that “an occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies” — inapplicable. Israel is not an occupying power in the West Bank, and furthermore, the Israeli government has not forcibly “deported nor transferred parts of its own civilian population” to the West Bank.

Many in the media treated Secretary Pompeo’s remark as just one more deplorable pro-Israel act by the Trump administration, with the obvious suggestion of political pandering. But the truth is quite the reverse. It was pandering to the Arabs that led successive American administrations to adopt, and to incessantly repeat, the claim that the West Bank settlements, even if they were not strictly illegal, were “obstacles to peace.” No one even felt it necessary to refer to the legal basis of that claim, if such existed; no mention was ever made of the Mandate for Palestine, which supports not those “decades of American policy,” but rather, the Trump Administration’s “reversal of decades” of such policy.

Pompeo’s remark ought not to have raised any eyebrows among those who knew both the relevant history and international law. He was at long last merely recognizing a truth that should have been insisted upon ever since 1967, when Israel came into possession of the West Bank. All of the West Bank — this has to be constantly underlined, given that merely by constant repetition of the claim that the “Jewish settlements are illegal” so many have been misled – was included in the territory which, according to the Mandate for Palestine, was intended to become the Jewish National Home. Here is the map of Mandatory Palestine just before the 1948 war. Had Israel captured the West Bank in 1948-49, that would have been the end of the matter. The Western world would have recognized Israel’s right to settle everywhere in the West Bank (it would become known by that name only after 1949, when the Jordanians, as occupiers, imposed the toponym “West Bank” to replace “Judea” and “Samaria”), and moved on.

But it was Jordan that won the West Bank, and from 1949 to 1967 held it as an “occupying power.” Israel’s legal right to the West Bank was not extinguished during this period, and when Israel came into its possession in 1967, the Jewish state could at long last enforce that legal right. That is all that Secretary Pompeo and the Trump Administration have done: they have recognized that legal right of the Jews to settle in the West Bank, a right that originates in the Mandate for Palestine itself. Article 6 of the Mandate requires the Mandatory authority to both “facilitate Jewish immigration” and “encourage…close settlement by Jews on the land.” That is exactly what has been going on since 1967 in the West Bank, which remained part of the territory assigned for inclusion in the Jewish National Home: “close settlement by Jews on the land.” It is a source of constant amazement that so many people feel qualified to dismiss those settlements as “illegal” without having read the Mandate for Palestine or studied the Mandate maps. Few seek to study the matter, but instead simply repeat what they have heard before. Laziness and fear also play their part. Politicians and members of the media think to themselves “why should I have to do research on my own when others have told us, with great certainty, that Jewish settlements in the West Bank are ‘illegal’? If the U.N. General Assembly, and the Security Council, and the International Court of Justice, all declare them ‘illegal,’ who am I to say them nay? And besides, it takes fortitude to upset geopolitical applecarts, and dare to question the received wisdom that insists – wrongly, but so self-assuredly – on that ‘illegality.’”

This would be the opportune moment for those who know why the Fourth Geneva Convention is not applicable to Jewish settlements in what was always meant, by the Mandate for Palestine, to be part of the Jewish National Home, to produce articles reinforcing the Administration’s welcome conclusion. It should not be left to Secretary Pompeo to face the mickey-mockers alone, nor should Israel be left alone at the U.N. and similar kangaroo courts to explain, as it now has an opening to do, why those settlements in the West Bank are not only legal, but through the increased deterrence they provide against potential aggressors from the east, will help rather than hinder the cause of peace.

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EDITOR NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

VIDEO: Latest Islamist Tactic to Undermine Programs Preventing Extremism

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Is it just an Islamist response to call programs preventing extremism part of the surveillance state — or is there more to it?

The answer may depend on which country we’re discussing and who is being brought to the table to have that discussion.

Over in the UK, Roundtable recently hosted a conversation that brought together four experts in the field — two of them Muslim — to talk about the progress and pitfalls of programs to prevent extremism.

Watch:

While there is a concern in the UK to make sure prevention programming doesn’t unfairly spotlight Muslims, the same standards don’t necessarily apply in the U.S.

To date, there is no national umbrella organization in the  U.S. for countering violent extremism as there is in the UK.

There is also no cohesive conversation on genuine concerns that can arise in such a space.

Yet in the U.S., instead of a conversation that moves the needle, we have Islamists and their allies setting the tone without participation from non-Islamist Muslims — meaning,  there is no nuance or balance in that conversation.

The most recent of these narrow dialogues will be hosted by the Muslim Student Association on November 25, 2019, in Minneapolis Minnesota. Speakers include Jaylani Hussein, CAIR-Minnesota’s Director, and Hassan Shibly, CAIR-Florida’s Director.

Hussein is a known provocateur and disrupter in Minneapolis. In 2017, he refused to condemn the terrorist organization Hamas. Hussein operates a CAIR chapter which includes members who have openly lamented that Hitler wasn’t alive to “add more casualties” to the Holocaust.

Two months ago, Hussein faced further public humiliation after the U.S. Census Bureau backed out of a town hall with CAIR-Minnesota after public backlash.

The director of CAIR-Florida, Hassan Shibly, is on record as saying that Hezbollah isn’t a terrorist organization. He supports sharia law for Muslim-majority countries. Shibly also entertains conspiracy theories that the U.S. government and Israel frame Muslims for terrorism. He twice posted a video on his Facebook page titled, “Former American Terrorist Denounces American Terrorism.”

Shibly also believes nationalism is a plot against Islam.

All of this is to also underscore that:

(a) There’s a need to have critical conversations about counter extremism programs, but they will never be had in a meaningful way if they only occur in spaces dominated by Islamists, and

(b) There’s a difference between countering violent extremism (CVE) and preventing violent extremism (PVE). CVE focuses on deradicalization programs whereas PVE looks to prevent radicalization from targeting vulnerable populations in the first place.

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Why CAIR Doesn’t Represent American Muslims

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ALINSKY AND THE US BISHOPS: Decades of lying and stealing from faithful Catholics.

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TRANSCRIPT

Watch FBI: CCHD & Alinsky

This weekend most parishes in U.S. dioceses will be taking up a collection for the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD).

Here’s the point: Give nothing to that collection.

It’s a fraudulent collection portrayed as helping the poor, when in reality huge sums of the donations are handed out to pro-abortion, pro-gay groups, not to mention radical, social justice-warrior groups who are also involved in getting out the vote for the Party of Death.

CCHD is a sham. Sure, it may do a good thing here or there, but the thrust of this decades-old endeavor has been to support Saul Alinsky-style community organizing.

Ten years ago Church Militant produced an in-depth investigation on the connection between Saul Alinsky and the U.S. bishops, which began in Chicago.

Alinsky was an atheist Jewish marxist who cozied up to some in the chancery and got them to drink his Kool-Aid. Alinsky founded an outfit called the Industrial Areas Foundation, which was essentially a Democratic Party voter-registration initiative posing as a poverty-fighting agency.

Priests he encountered through that work, especially a Msgr. Jack Egan of Chicago, went on to establish what was first called the Campaign for Human Development — missing the word “Catholic.” The entire initiative was put in place by Chicago’s eventual cardinal, the homopredator satanist Joseph Bernardin.

The annual collection, which usually generates millions, was first overseen by Bernardin back in 1969 and 1970 just as he was gaining a stranglehold on the U.S. hierarchy and installing dozens of homosexual men as bishops and using the cover of social justice to justify it.

In fact, Bernardin’s CCHD produced the most famous community organizer of all time — Barack Obama — who learned the Saul Alinksy tactics of division and class warfare on the Church’s dime, as Bernardin paid for Obama to go to Southern California back in the day to hone his craft.

Obama came back to Chicago and began plying his trade until it got him all the way to the White House, with the destruction of the United States at the top of his agenda. And if you don’t believe it, then listen to Obama himself praise the homopredator cardinal and recognize the contribution Bernardin made to his formation. His comments were made from the graduation stage at Notre Dame in 2009.

Notre Dame itself, bastion of heresy now, played an important role during the very early years of the CCHD. That Chicago priest, Jack Egan, was driven out of Chicago by his cardinal, who saw right through Saul Alinksy’s cover story and recognized the threat to the Church. Egan was then given 13 years of protection at Notre Dame by the notorious Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, who was busy in his own sphere dismantling Catholic higher education.

When you step back and understand the confluence of all these various factors — the alliances between evil, wicked men stretching back decades — the current disaster come straight into focus.

Much of the funding for the dismantling of the culture, and the treason in the Church, was funded by this collection. It still is.

If you’d like to watch the full report, please just click on the link. It’s as timely now as it was then.

In the meantime, how dare the U.S. bishops — who have been met with privately and sent dozens of reports about this evil and refused to act on them — how dare they still lie to faithful Catholics and collect this money?

Last year the CCHD gave a gay group three-quarters of a million dollars for their activity.

But over the years, tens of millions of your money, gotten from you under false pretenses, has been handed out to all kinds of radical, anti-Catholic, anti-American groups.

Don’t do it. Just say no.

If bishops want to fund these horrific groups, then let them dip into their own savings and sell off their luxury mansions, or get some of the enormous sums homopredator Bp. Michael Bransfield stole, or the millions that homopredator Theodore McCarrick had squirreled away.

The laity is done with being lied to and played for fools.

Not. A. Penny.

EDITORS NOTE: This Church Militant video is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

BOOK REVIEW: ‘The Truth Is No Defense’ by Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff [+Video]

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“In a Time of Universal Deceit — Telling the Truth Is a Revolutionary Act” – George Orwell

“When words lose their meaning, people lose their freedom.” – Confucius

Austrian Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff has written a book titled The Truth Is No Defense. It is reminiscent of how far Western Civilization has devolved into a state of universal deceit.

Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff is a diplomat’s daughter, grew up and lived in the United States, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and Libya.  What Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff experienced in these Middle Eastern countries shaped and influenced her passion for freedom.

In the preface to The Truth Is No Defense Dr. Karen Siegemund, President of the American Freedom Alliance, wrote:

And you’ll read about the final verdict brought down by the Austrian Court: that the issue was to balance “free speech” with the “right” to not have your feeling hurt, and guess which side won?

[ … ]

When the truth, in other words, doesn’t set you free, but is a threat, then perhaps one is aligned with a belief system that is harmful rather than beneficial.

Guilty of religious denigration!

Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff was found guilty of “religious denigration.” Sadly, in Austria religious denigration only applies to one religion, that of Islam.

What did Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff do? She accurately quoted the Qur’an and Hadith about Mohammed marrying his foster niece Aisha who was six-year old. Mohammed consummated the marriage to Aisha when she was 9-years old.

Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff writes:

[I]n 2008: The Austrian Freedom Party, the country’s right-of-center party, commissioned me to hold seminars on Islam; however, in 2010, I had to stand before a judge in court of law and defend myself for explaining the basics of Islam via a fully sourced Power Point presentations. And, as I learned ten years later, the truth is no defense. [Emphasis added]

According to WikiIslam:

Narrated ‘Aisha: Allah’s Apostle said to me, “You were shown to me twice (in my dream) before I married you. I saw an angel carrying you in a silken piece of cloth, and I said to him, ‘Uncover (her),’ and behold, it was you. I said (to myself), ‘If this is from Allah, then it must happen.’ Then you were shown to me, the angel carrying you in a silken piece of cloth, and I said (to him), ‘Uncover (her), and behold, it was you. I said (to myself), ‘If this is from Allah, then it must happen.’ ” Sahih Bukhari 9:87:140

A RAIR FOUNDATION USA interview with Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff titled Freedom Fighter Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff’s Dire Warning!:

Elizabeth quotes in her book German novelist and poet, regarded by many as the most important 19th-century German-language realist author Theodor Fontane:

The reason why people are silenced is not because they lie, but because they speak the truth. When people lie, their own words can be used against them. But if they tell the truth, there is no other means than violence.

After it was clear that the Austrian court would not convict on the charge of “incitement to hatred”, Elizabeth writes in The Truth Is No Defense what happened next:

So the judge, at her own discretion, added a second charge, “denigration of religious beliefs of a legally recognized religion,” and it was on that charge that I would be convicted this day.

In other words: presenting the “religious beliefs of a legally recognized religion” in a factually accurate manner may constitute “denigration,” if that religion happens to be Islam.

It was clear from the moment the second charge was added that the Austrian state needed to convict me of something, anything, to set an example so that other “Islamophobes” would be warned.

In The Unknown Deal Ayn Rand wrote, “The right to agree with others is not a problem in any society; it is the right to disagree that is crucial.”

If Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff is anything she is a person who supports everyone’s right to disagree. We can’t say the same for Austria.

VIDEO: Wildly under-reported case of mass murder of Jews in the U.S. by a Muslim in 2010

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Posted by Eeyore

Thanks to Andrew Bostom, who is about to publish a graph showing some uncomfortable facts about Islamic antisemitism in the West.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Vlad Tepes Blog column with video is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

The blood of Christ is now offensive in the UK

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The latest assault on Christians is happening in Speakers’ Corner in London’s Hyde Park. A Christian man has been told that he can no longer display his banner, which declares nothing more than “The blood of Jesus Christ.” Whether this ban on signage is a new law that will be applied to any and all posters being hung by every religious denomination, as well as the rest of the speakers who pontificate at the park, remains to be seen.

As a victim of homophobic abuse from a bunch of Muslim regulars at Speakers’ Corner, which I reported to the police at the time of occurrence, I was told that had the death threats against me happened just metres from where I was standing (outside the park), then the police could make arrests. Speakers’ Corner, as it happens, is outside the law of the UK, according to the Met police. Anything goes, they told me. Anything except a declaration of an allegiance to Jesus. Call for jihad in the name of Muhammad and it’s fine, but make calls for people to come together in Christ and that’s a step too far for the cops in Hyde Park.

This isn’t the first time we’re seeing double standards by the police in relation to Christian preachers here in the UK. Three men were arrested and charged in Bristol for the offence of reading from the Bible on a public street. Meanwhile, dawah stalls litter a large number of streets in London, from Dalston Junction to Woolwich, over to Kilburn and beyond. There is a permanent one set up in Leicester Square which blasts music (noise pollution) and hands out free Qurans and bad advice. These men never get tackled by police or shut down or asked to move along. They certainly don’t get arrested. Lee Rigby’s killers were free to walk around Greenwich park distributing extremist Islamic material with no complaints from the public, and no arrests made by the police. The three Christian men in Bristol, however, were mocked by the public, and the police were applauded and cheered when they made the arrests. It’s a scene that replicates the mocking of Jesus during his arrest, trial and punishment on his way to the cross.

The arresting of Christian preachers can be contrasted with the way the UK police interact with Muslim preachers on the streets. The police generally stand there, impotent, whilst taking a belly and an earful of verbal abuse from yet another angry Muslim screaming “Allahu akbar” at them. The police, in these instances, in a bid to save face in the eyes of the public, are shamed into making a reluctant arrest. And any arrest of a Muslim preacher is not made without the fear of violent reprisal towards the arresting officers. The cops know this, and so they pick on the easy religious targets such as truly peaceful Christians.

The banners that are normally on display in the very small section of Hyde Park that is known as Speakers’ Corner generally verge on the ridiculous. The Blood of Jesus Christ pales in comparison to the rest of the posters and banners which generally tell of the end of the world being nigh, advocate for socialism, claim that meat is murder, offer free psychic healing and hugs, as well as tell tales of extraterrestrial life forms sending radio signals to interfere with our brains. The most offensive sign that I’ve seen at Speakers’ Corner, and on the majority of dawah stalls, are those that tell me Jesus is a Muslim. No, Jesus is not a Muslim. As a Christian, I would not get away with putting up a poster stating that Muhammad was a Christian. I’d be met by a braying mob before being swiftly arrested. The Blood of Jesus is not an offensive statement; it is the very heart of Christianity. The Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation states that we drink it in the Communion wine, with Christ’s body being found and ingested in the wafer.

The Christ energy invigorates the Western world. You could be forgiven for thinking that He is the blueprint for liberalism and leftist ideals — love thy neighbour, welcome the other, communal eating with outcasts, giving of your own wealth to help those in need, and reserving judgement of others whilst here on earth, but His words and deeds are different from big government taking your money from you and redistributing it without your permission. All of that just for starters. The blood of Jesus is understood to be salvific to the Christian mind. It is healing and redemptive. Why is Jesus’ death becoming a dangerous thing to the UK police? It’s baffling to me why our authorities and the general public seem to be siding with Islam rather than Christianity. What has gone wrong with us as a people and a nation that the blood of Christ is becoming a dirty thing in the eyes and minds of the public?

COLUMN BY

JOSHUA WINSTON

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

University of Florida Prof Hails Caliphate as ‘Historic Institution’ That ISIS Is ‘Hijacking’

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My latest in PJ Media:

University of Florida professor Ken Chitwood wrote Wednesday in the Associated Press’ commentary section, “The Conversation,” that “the Islamic State tries to boost its legitimacy by hijacking a historic institution.” He then provided a drive-by overview of the history of various Islamic caliphates, so whitewashed as to rival the Washington Post’s famous characterization of Islamic State (ISIS) caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in misleading duplicity. Even worse, Chitwood tells us that “as a scholar of global Islam, every time I teach my ‘Introduction to Islam’ class,” he teaches this nonsense to his hapless University of Florida students. No surprise there, given the fact that most universities today are little more than Antifa recruitment centers.

“Under Umar,” Chitwood writes blandly, “the caliphate expanded to include many regions of the world such as the lands of the former Byzantine and Sassanian empires in Asia Minor, Persia and Central Asia.”

Yeah, uh, Professor Chitwood, how exactly did that “expansion” occur? In reality, beyond the pseudo-academic whitewash and fantasy that Chitwood purveys, the caliphates always behaved much like the Islamic State, because they were all working from the same playbook. The true, bloody history of the caliphates can be found, detailed from Islamic sources, in the only complete history of 1,400 years of jihad violence, The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS.

The word khalifa means “successor”; the caliph in Sunni Islamic theology is the successor of Muhammad as the military, political, and spiritual leader of the Muslims. The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS demonstrates that the great caliphates of history, from the immediate post-Muhammad period of the “Rightly Guided Caliphs” to the Umayyads, Abbasids, and Ottomans, as well as other Islamic states, all waged relentless jihad warfare against non-Muslims, subjugating them under the rule of Islamic law and denying them basic rights.

These weren’t the actions of a “tiny minority of extremists,” abhorred by the vast majority of peaceful Muslims for “hijacking” their religion, as Ken Chitwood would have you believe. This was, for fourteen centuries, mainstream, normative Islam, carried forth by the primary authorities in the Islamic world at the time. The accounts of eyewitnesses and contemporary chroniclers through the ages show that in every age and in every place where there were Muslims, some of them believed that they had a responsibility given to them by Allah to wage war against and subjugate unbelievers under the rule of Islamic law.

And so it is today: Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi enunciated that responsibility more clearly and directly than most Muslim spokesmen do these days, but he is by no means the only one who believes that it exists.

There is much more. Read the rest here.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

VIDEO of Rev. Bob Armstrong: A Profile in Courage — The Man Who frees women and children from the horrors of ISIS

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I have a very good friend named Bob Armstrong. Reverend Bob Armstrong is the founder of Love-Link Ministries, which for three decades has taught leadership principles to 51,000 pastors and leaders in 13 countries, as well as spearheading evangelistic efforts and humanitarian projects across the globe and in the Middle East.

Every year Bob goes to the Middle East to rescue children, women and families from the horrors of ISIS. Reverend Bob is one of the first alumni of Oral Roberts University. He returned to his alma mater to speak at the 2019 Homecoming about what drives him to do what he does. To me Bob is a hero. His life is truly a profile in courage. He doesn’t seek glory, he just praises the glory of God and His Son Jesus.

Please watch as my friend Bob speaks about his work to save Christians and Muslims from ISIS:

ORU 2019 Homecoming – Bob Armstrong from Oral Roberts University on Vimeo.

© All rights reserved.

VIDEO: Pope embraces imam who has endorsed jihad suicide attacks against Jews and wants converts to Christianity killed

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Pope Francis and the Grand Sheikh of al-Azhar, Ahmed el-Tayeb, early this year published “A Document On Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together,” and it’s as filled with falsehoods and wishful thinking as one would expect coming from a practiced deceiver such as el-Tayeb and someone so eager to be deceived as Pope Francis. Here’s one:

Terrorism is deplorable and threatens the security of people, be they in the East or the West, the North or the South, and disseminates panic, terror and pessimism, but this is not due to religion, even when terrorists instrumentalize it. It is due, rather, to an accumulation of incorrect interpretations of religious texts and to policies linked to hunger, poverty, injustice, oppression and pride. This is why it is so necessary to stop supporting terrorist movements fuelled by financing, the provision of weapons and strategy, and by attempts to justify these movements even using the media. All these must be regarded as international crimes that threaten security and world peace. Such terrorism must be condemned in all its forms and expressions…

Terrorism is due to “an accumulation of incorrect interpretations of religious texts and to policies linked to hunger, poverty, injustice, oppression and pride.”

So are the authoritative sources in Sunni Islam, the schools of Sunni jurisprudence (madhahib), all incorrect in their interpretations of the Qur’an and Sunnah? Here is what they say about jihad warfare against non-Muslims:

Shafi’i school: A Shafi’i manual of Islamic law that was certified in 1991 by the clerics at Al-Azhar University, one of the leading authorities in the Islamic world, as a reliable guide to Sunni orthodoxy, stipulates about jihad that “the caliph makes war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians…until they become Muslim or pay the non-Muslim poll tax.” It adds a comment by Sheikh Nuh Ali Salman, a Jordanian expert on Islamic jurisprudence: the caliph wages this war only “provided that he has first invited [Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians] to enter Islam in faith and practice, and if they will not, then invited them to enter the social order of Islam by paying the non-Muslim poll tax (jizya)…while remaining in their ancestral religions.” (‘Umdat al-Salik, o9.8).

Of course, there is no caliph today, and hence the oft-repeated claim that Osama et al are waging jihad illegitimately, as no state authority has authorized their jihad. But they explain their actions in terms of defensive jihad, which needs no state authority to call it, and becomes “obligatory for everyone” (‘Umdat al-Salik, o9.3) if a Muslim land is attacked. The end of the defensive jihad, however, is not peaceful coexistence with non-Muslims as equals: ‘Umdat al-Salik specifies that the warfare against non-Muslims must continue until “the final descent of Jesus.” After that, “nothing but Islam will be accepted from them, for taking the poll tax is only effective until Jesus’ descent” (o9.8).

Hanafi school: A Hanafi manual of Islamic law repeats the same injunctions. It insists that people must be called to embrace Islam before being fought, “because the Prophet so instructed his commanders, directing them to call the infidels to the faith.” It emphasizes that jihad must not be waged for economic gain, but solely for religious reasons: from the call to Islam “the people will hence perceive that they are attacked for the sake of religion, and not for the sake of taking their property, or making slaves of their children, and on this consideration it is possible that they may be induced to agree to the call, in order to save themselves from the troubles of war.”

However, “if the infidels, upon receiving the call, neither consent to it nor agree to pay capitation tax [jizya], it is then incumbent on the Muslims to call upon God for assistance, and to make war upon them, because God is the assistant of those who serve Him, and the destroyer of His enemies, the infidels, and it is necessary to implore His aid upon every occasion; the Prophet, moreover, commands us so to do.” (Al-Hidayah, II.140)

Maliki school: Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), a pioneering historian and philosopher, was also a Maliki legal theorist. In his renowned Muqaddimah, the first work of historical theory, he notes that “in the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.” In Islam, the person in charge of religious affairs is concerned with “power politics,” because Islam is “under obligation to gain power over other nations.”

Hanbali school: The great medieval theorist of what is commonly known today as radical or fundamentalist Islam, Ibn Taymiyya (Taqi al-Din Ahmad Ibn Taymiyya, 1263-1328), was a Hanbali jurist. He directed that “since lawful warfare is essentially jihad and since its aim is that the religion is God’s entirely and God’s word is uppermost, therefore according to all Muslims, those who stand in the way of this aim must be fought.”

“Leave them; they are blind guides. And if a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a pit.” (Matthew 15:14)

“Pope Embraces Anti-Semitic Imam Who Wants Christian Converts Killed,” by Jules Gomes, Church Militant, November 18, 2019:

Hours before Pope Francis called for the abolition of capital punishment on Friday, he warmly embraced Grand Imam Al-Tayeb, who has expressed his desire that Muslims who convert to Christianity should be executed.

The world’s best-known Muslim leader has also called homosexuality a disease, dismissed the idea of human rights as “ticking time-bombs” and has endorsed suicide attacks against Jewish men, women and children.

Earlier that day in the pontiff’s address to the International Association of Penal Law, Pope Francis compared the rhetoric of conservative politicians who oppose the homosexual agenda to speeches made by Adolf Hitler.

“These are actions that are typical of Nazism, that with its persecution of Jews, gypsies, people with homosexual orientation, represent an excellent model of the throwaway culture and culture of hatred,” he said.

When speaking to al-Tayeb, however, the Holy Father discussed the objectives in the document “Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together,” which he co-signed with the Grand Imam in February.

The two religious leaders engaged in “cordial discussions,” according to the Vatican, talking about the protection of minors in the digital world and goals achieved since Pope Francis’ recent visit to the United Arab Emirates.

In 2016, Al-Tayeb called for “unrepentant apostates” from Islam to be killed. “The four schools of law all concur that apostasy is a crime, that an apostate should be asked to repent, and that if he does not, he should be killed,” he said in an interview in Arabic on television, explaining:

There are two verses in the Quran that clearly mention apostasy, but they did not define a specific punishment. They left the punishment for the Hereafter, for Allah to punish them as He sees fit. But there are two hadiths [on apostasy]. According to the more reliable of the two, a Muslim can only be killed in one of three cases, one of which is abandoning his religion and leaving the community.

Sheikh Al-Tayeb continued:

We must examine these two expressions: “Abandoning religion” is described as “leaving the community.” All the early jurisprudents understood that this applies to someone who leaves his religion, regardless of whether he left and opposed his community or not. All the early jurisprudents said that such a person should be killed, regardless of whether it is a man or a woman — with the exception of the Hanafi School, which says that a female apostate should not be killed.

Asked about the exception for the female apostate, the Muslim theologian responded: “Because it is inconceivable that a woman would rebel against her community.”

The global leader of Sunni Islam, which constitutes the majority of the world’s Muslim population, also dismissed the concept of human rights as “full of ticking time-bombs” and insisted that “the [Islamic and Western] civilizations are different.”

“Our civilization is based on religion and moral values, whereas their [Western] civilization is based more on personal liberties and some moral values,” he told his interviewer.

The Grand Imam’s most severe condemnation was reserved for homosexuality: “My opinion was — and I said this [in the West] — that no Muslim society could ever consider sexual liberty, homosexuality and so on to be a personal right. Muslim societies consider these things to be diseases, which must be fought and treated.”…

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

VIDEOS: Persians Rebel Against the Islamic Republic of Iran

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Posted by Eeyore

MASS PROTESTS CONTINUE IN IRAN – 67 Demonstrators Killed – Regime Fires on Protesters From the Air 

(Many Twitter videos at link above)

1. Police shooting Protestors

2. Woman stands on bridge over stopped traffic and gives anti-regime rant to applause

3. Clashes Between Protesters & Regime’ Security Forces In Shiraz

4. 16 MILLION people in protests in Iran, some deaths on the regime side.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Vlad Tepes Blog column with videos is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

VIDEO: The Vortex — Francis HATES America! He has drunk all the Kool-Aid.

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TRANSCRIPT

It’s become quite apparent that in his admiration for establishing a one-world government administered by a new world order, America is an object of hate for Pope Francis.

The handwriting was on the wall at least two years ago when yet another article from Eugenio Scalfari revealed that the pontiff has so little regard for the United States that he actually thinks we should simply give up our national sovereignty and submit to a new world order.

Maybe the Dems can nominate Pope Francis for their party’s candidate for president. He can assume presidential powers and then dissolve the U.S.A. After all, it seems like he’s got experience doing the same thing with the Church.

The old atheist Italian journalist says that in 2017, Pope Francis called him shortly after the G-20 summit and demanded to see him at four o’clock that afternoon. According to Scalfari, Francis had become agitated about the United States and other nations commanding such power in the world.

Pope Francis told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica that the United States of America has “a distorted vision of the world,” and Americans must be ruled by a world government as soon as possible, “for their own good.”

Now that’s an incredible statement to make, and as the article continued, the disrespect for the idea of national sovereignty mounted. European nations also came under the papal displeasure: “I also thought many times to this problem and came to the conclusion that, not only but also for this reason, Europe must take as soon as possible a federal structure.”

There is without a doubt an extreme dislike with this pope of anything that strikes of nationalism, meaning national sovereignty. Since America seems to lead the world in the area of national pride, the United States is never passed over in the papal condemnations of national sovereignty.

Somewhere, somehow, he has in his head that the idea of individual nations is bad because that translates into immigrants being mistreated, and among rich nations — the First-World nations — poverty escalates and the poor are taken advantage of.

That’s what he thinks, and so the solution for him is to introduce a one-world government, ruled by a single new world order, so all immigrants can get a fair shake out of life.

Last week the reports came out that Pope Francis thinks national pride, touted by political conservatives, is the beginning of Nazism reappearing. He said to an international group of specialists in penal law: “And I must confess to you that when I hear a speech [by] someone responsible for order or for a government, I think of speeches by Hitler in 1934, 1936,” adding, “They are inadmissible behaviors in the rule of law and generally accompany racist prejudices and contempt for socially marginalized groups.”

“It is no coincidence that in these times, emblems and actions typical of Nazism reappear, which, with its persecutions against Jews, gypsies and people of homosexual orientation, represents the negative model par excellence of a culture of waste and hatred,” he continued.

Pope Francis has drunk the Kool-Aid of the Left.

So there it is, perfectly framed by this pontificate: Immigrants and homosexuals need to be protected classes, and sovereign nations must give way to those who do not respect borders and those who reject natural law. And nations, now bordering on embracing Nazism, must surrender their independence because it is the will of God. For their own good, the nations of the world, especially the powerful ones, must pass out of existence, surrender themselves and abolish their borders for their own good.

When Americans are chanting “USA!” at sporting events or political rallies for Republicans, in Pope Francis’ head, that apparently rings as Sieg Heil!

This is dangerous, dangerous stuff. For the occupant of the throne of Peter to be outwardly demonizing nations — especially the leading nation which defeated the Nazis — as Nazis themselves, a line has been crossed from which there is no coming back.

To then turn around and underscore that part of what makes a person a modern-day Nazi is to not go along with the homosexual agenda and resist the evil, this is beyond the pale and must be called out.

Pope Francis has moved into territory that no pope has ever transgressed. He is transferring the mission of the Church from the salvation of souls to the foundation of a one-world government.

What precisely the role of the Church itself would be in that new world order still seems vague, but one thing is clear. Francis never criticizes Islamic nations. He never tells them to clean up their act and stop throwing homosexuals off roofs. He never has a word of criticism for their brutality of FGM (female gential mutilation) or sponsorship of world terror, or torture or forcing people in their nations to convert or have their heads cut off.

Yet he has no problem with hiding behind the Italian military surrounding the walls of the Vatican, protecting him from that same Muslim threat.

This pontificate is a political disaster, one gone completely off the rails.

Serious questions need to be asked about all this: homosexual men, many of whom are either abusers or covered up abuse placed into powerful posts; the theft of hundreds of millions of euros; constant lies and denials of repeated press reports; and multiple appointments of enemies of Christ to high-visibility positions within the Church. And now hurling accusations at political conservatives that their love of country makes them “Nazis,” and opposing the gay agenda means conservatives want homosexuals marched off to gas chambers.

This is outrageous. Francis hates America because America represents everything his twisted political worldview stands in opposition to.

This increased marxist view has been brewing in the Church for decades, and far from being ascendant is now practically the status quo. Love of the homosexual agenda, illegal immigrants, the abolition of nations and Islam’s “favored son” status is what Francis will be remembered for.

The Vatican has yet to comment on the Scalfari interview about Francis reportedly saying America should willingly surrender itself to a one-world government. And actually, no comment is needed. We’ve heard enough.

EDITORS NOTE: This Church Militant video is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

VIDEO: Could Sweden be turning around? An interview with the Swedish woman who’s rant went viral.

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Posted by Eeyore

EDITORS NOTE: This Vlad Tepes Blog video is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Beliefs – and Their Political Traps

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Note: The Great Professor Arkes reminds us today of something everyone should understand about the distinction between faith and reason, especially in the public square. Faith is addressed to reason, but reason – right reason – is quite capable on its own of telling us truths about public questions such as the duty to protect the lives of the innocent, particularly in the womb. Therefore, while Catholics are and must be pro-life, you can be rational and pro-life without being Catholic. These and other crucial questions perpetually need sorting out, and are likely to be especially so as we enter the 2020 election campaigns. We will be here to comment on what is coming – if we can have your support now. Many “things” come under our purview at The Catholic Thing. You can be part of that by making your contribution. Today. – Robert Royal

Hadley Arkes: In abortion debates, if “beliefs,” rather than science and logic, are the basis for argument, other “beliefs” may trump faith-based ones.

he scene:  The Washington law firm of Hogan & Hartson, in the late 1970s.  I was invited in to do a debate on abortion with a young woman from the ACLU.   I sought to show, in my usual way, that the argument on abortion could be cast simply in the form of a principled argument, without any appeal to faith or religion.

I drew, as ever, on a fragment that Lincoln wrote for himself in which he imagined himself in a debate with an owner of slaves, and he put the question of why this man was justified in making a slave of the black man.  Was he less intelligent? Then beware, said Lincoln, you may be rightly enslaved by the next white man more intelligent than you.

As the argument moved on in this way, the upshot became clear: there was nothing one could cite to justify the enslavement of the black man that would not apply to many whites as well.

I pointed out then that we simply draw upon the same mode of reasoning when it comes to abortion: why is that offspring in the human womb anything less than human?  Does it not speak?  Neither do deaf mutes.  Does it lack arms or legs?  Well, other people lose arms or legs in the course of their lives without losing anything necessary to their standing as human beings to receive the protections of the law.

I would point out that, at no point in the chain of reasoning, is there an appeal to revelation or faith. This is an argument that can be understood across the religious divisions, by Catholics, Baptists, Muslims, and even atheists.

Hence the bombshell – that one does not have to be Catholic to understand this argument – and that has been precisely the position of the Church:  The argument can be made by drawing on the scientific evidence of embryology, woven with principled reasoning, which is to say, the moral reasoning of the natural law.

The young woman from the ACLU listened to all of this, smiling.  When I was done, she nodded benignly and said, “That is what you believe.”  I had given her a moral argument carried out through reasons that could be assessed and understood by any functional person, regardless of his religion, and yet she reduced everything bearing a moral argument to a matter merely of personal “belief.”

The late John Courtney Murray, S.J. warned about the tendency to libel religion by reducing it merely to “beliefs” having no claim to be true for anyone apart from those who held them.  With that cliché nicely absorbed, the Bidens and Cuomos of the world could affect a high-minded restraint from imposing the “beliefs” of their Church on anyone else.

We fast-forward to our own day, and we encounter the irony of a false idea turning on itself.  In the awful unfolding of the “culture war,” abortion has been deeply planted in the law, along now with same-sex marriage, and the drive toward “transgenderism.”

But with this turn of affairs, we find people in moral opposition seeking a safe harbor from the demands of the law by invoking their claim to religious freedom.  And so the Green family, the owners of the famous Hobby-Lobby craft stores, sought to avoid a demand of the federal government that they cover contraception and abortion in their medical insurance for employees.

In pursuing their argument, the Greens affirmed their “belief” that life begins at conception. Belief?  The point is contained in every textbook on embryology and obstetric gynecology.

And yet, my friends defending religious freedom in the courts have been willing to settle with this mode of argument because it brought at least the right result for the Greens and others.  But there was this point of awkwardness:  We find people who are not Catholic and yet make precisely the same moral argument about abortion that is made by the Church.

How, in any strict reckoning, could we explain why the Catholic businessmen should be exempted from the obligation to support abortions, while the same exemption is not accorded to the man making precisely the same argument made by the Church but who happens not to be Catholic?

That awkwardness becomes the key to the deeper danger. The people who have been content to rest their arguments on “beliefs” earnestly held seem quite oblivious to the unsettling implications arising from the argument they have put in place:  If indeed our moral judgments can be reduced to matters of beliefs, that woman from the ACLU now has the trump card.

Let us say that Roe v. Wade is overturned, and it becomes legitimate once again for the laws to cast protection over the child in the womb.  But if the pro-lifers could invoke their “religious freedom” not to be obliged to perform or fund abortions, should we be astonished if a comparable freedom were claimed by those who profess to believe in the deep rightness of abortion?

Why should they not claim a “religious freedom” to order abortions, even against the laws that now bar them?  There is a path for protecting the doctors, nurses and others who don’t wish to become complicit in abortions.   But to cast their rights on the ground of religious “beliefs” is to lay the ground for undoing those laws on abortion that some of us have sought so long to restore.

COLUMN BY

Hadley Arkes

Hadley Arkes is the Ney Professor of Jurisprudence Emeritus at Amherst College and the Founder/Director of the James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights & the American Founding. His most recent book is Constitutional Illusions & Anchoring Truths: The Touchstone of the Natural Law. Volume II of his audio lectures from The Modern Scholar, First Principles and Natural Law is now available for download.

EDITORS NOTE: This Catholic Thing column is republished with permission. © 2019 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org. The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

Left progressive antisemitism must be a US electoral ‘wedge’ issue

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As the Democratic primaries approach, leading candidates seem to be reinforcing their anti-Israel credentials to appease their progressive base. Antisemitism already is a ‘wedge’ issue – although Democrats are urging voters to ignore it.

The left’s anti-Israel agenda has been energized recently by radical politicians using their Congressional visibility to slander the Jewish State and its supporters with classical slurs and stereotypes.  Simultaneously, there has been an increase in antisemitic agitation among progressives invoking blood libel imagery and repugnant myths of disproportionate Jewish wealth, influence, and disloyalty.

Such is the backdrop against which Democrats are urging Jewish voters not to treat Israel as a “wedge issue” during the 2020 election season, though what they are really asking is for Jews to ignore the pro-BDS, anti-Israel, and antisemitic vitriol being spewed by reactionaries who influence party doctrine and to overlook party leadership’s appeasement of the left and disregard of hateful prejudice.

By lamenting the use of Israel as a “wedge issue,” Democrats are acknowledging that it already is and that their base’s hostility towards the Jewish State is motivated not by policy concerns, but by antisemitism.  And just as they did in 2016, they are enlisting Jewish party loyalists to promote the fiction that conservatives pose a more serious threat to fellow Jews, despite public opinion research indicating that antisemitic sentiment is prevalent among radicals, progressives and left-wing Democrats.  The same surveys suggest conservative Republicans are more likely to support Israel and condemn Jew-hatred.

The antisemitic Squad

These trends help explain some recent disturbing Democratic behaviors, including the failure to censure Representatives Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for their inflammatory rhetoric and for validating antisemitic public figures like Louis Farrakhan.  Examples of moral disingenuity abound, as when Democrats criticized the Netanyahu government for blocking Tlaib and Omar from a planned trip to Israel that was to be sponsored by an anti-Israel organization. Supporters of the congresswomen were unconcerned that their proposed visit was neither planned as part of an official Congressional delegation nor intended to serve any legitimate governmental purpose.

The Israeli government had initially agreed to allow Tlaib and Omar entry into the country, but withdrew its approval after determining they would not be part of the scheduled Congressional delegation and that their itinerary was intended to disparage Israel and promote boycotts.  The purpose of the trip was no surprise considering it was to be partially sponsored and coordinated by Miftah, the anti-Israel organization founded by Hanan Ashrawi, a PLO Executive Committee member and outspoken Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions advocate, who was barred by the State Department from entering the United States last May.

It seems incongruous that Democrats who express concern about Jewish voters could defend Tlaib or Omar in light of their aspersions against Israel and sponsorship of House Resolution 496, a bill essentially supporting the antisemitic BDS movement.  Though that bill was defeated in a rare display of bipartisanship, its limited support came mainly from progressive Democrats, including Tlaib, Omar, and Ocasio-Cortez. Liberal support for such politicians – or for any who express contempt for Israel, condone violence against Israelis, or spread loathsome stereotypes – suggests that party loyalty and disdain for President Trump often outweigh any sense of Jewish fealty or recognition of antisemitism on the left.

Despite progressive hostility regarding Jewish national rights and affinity for traditional conspiracy theories, Democrats argue their support for Israel and opposition to prejudice are unshakable; and when mentioning leftist antisemitism at all, they chalk it up to aberration or misunderstanding.

Anti-Jewish bigotry is not limited to the “hard left,” however, but rather has infected the party’s mainstream:

  • Congressman Ted Lieu of California, for example, evoked the ancient canard of Jewish disloyalty with a tweet questioning the allegiance (and demanding the resignation) of David Friedman, US Ambassador to Israel;
  • Democratic presidential hopefuls, including Corey Booker, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris, implicitly impugned Israel’s integrity when they snubbed last year’s AIPAC conference.
  • Not a single Democrat vying for the party’s nomination criticized Bernie Sanders (who has falsely accused Israel of killing thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza) for using Linda Sarsour as a campaign shill
  • None have defended Israel against apartheid claims that are facially absurd.

According to the International Criminal Court’s Rome Statute of 2002, apartheid is a humanitarian crime “committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.”  Considering the freedoms that characterize Israeli society – where Arabs are professionals, judges, and legislators and have a higher standard of living than anywhere in the Arab-Muslim world – it is unconscionable when Democrat politicians refuse to defend Israel against spurious charges of racist oppression.

As the Democratic primaries approach, leading candidates instead seem to be reinforcing their anti-Israel credentials to appease their progressive base.

  • The Warren campaign, for example, brought aboard Max Berger, founder of the liberal group IfNotNow, whose members have attempted to infiltrate Taglit Birthright and Jewish summer camp programs to indoctrinate youth against Israel.
  • And Pete Buttigieg stated his intention to cut aid to Israel (though as a foreign policy neophyte he articulated no credible reason for singling out Israel)
  • Warren, Sanders and other prominent Democrats made similar statements at this year’s J Street conference.

It is important to note that:

  • Whereas most potential nominees did support an anti-BDS resolution in the Senate, they have uniformly failed to sanction antisemites within their party, who have instead been rewarded with prestigious appointments to influential committees.
  • Furthermore, the refusal of House Democrats to pass a resolution specifically condemning antisemitism or sanctioning Omar’s outrageous remarks indicates an odious tolerance for bigotry, as long as it targets Israel and comes from the left.

Discomfort regarding Israel is systemic because most Democrats continue to cling to the two-state paradigm, though it is based on revisionist Palestinian mythology that denies Jewish history and is rejected by most Israelis.

Sadly, Jewish liberals are often willing to ignore progressive antisemitism and instead direct their outrage at Mr. Trump (who despite his foibles is the most pro-Israel president ever to occupy the White House), while criticizing Israel for supposedly occupying “Palestinian” lands and oppressing Palestinian-Arabs.  However, “occupation” exists only in the minds of revisionist zealots and propagandists, who must ignore historical and geopolitical reality to justify their position.

Falsified history and ignorance

Progressives’ knowledge of Israeli history is typically sketchy and exhibits little understanding of (or respect for) the Jews’ unbroken connection to their homeland, which is supported by the historical, archeological, and scriptural records.  Moreover, their anti-Israel criticisms are characterized by a refusal to acknowledge Jewish history or the pedigree of lands comprising the modern Jewish State and territories. Instead, liberal angst focuses on the rights of Palestinian-Arabs, whose history is a contemporary political invention of questionable foundation.  The two-state fantasy seeks to restore Palestinian-Arabs to a country that never existed in a land where they never established cultural institutions, exercised political sovereignty, or exhibited any indicia of nationality or statehood.

This historical awareness is crucial for countering the revisionism embraced by progressives who impute ancient stereotypes to the Jewish State – including modern reworkings of the Blood Libel, classical global conspiracy theories, and the myths of disproportionate Jewish influence, power and perfidy.  It is also necessary for dispelling ridiculous and apocryphal claims that Palestinians are descended from ancient Phoenicians or Canaanites – assertions that are intended to imply aboriginal validity but which crumble under the weight of objective scrutiny.

The role of Jewish progressives

For generations, Americans have been rejecting normative Jewish values in favor of progressive ideals that contravene traditional Judaism.  Though most liberal Jews profess support for Israel, their true feelings should be judged not by self-serving affirmations, but by their political priorities and alliances.  Their proclamations of fidelity to Israel are contradicted by the endorsement of candidates who delegitimize the Jewish State, staff campaigns with anti-Israel activists, or snub Jewish organizations like AIPAC.  Moreover, they cannot claim fairness to Israel if they tolerate BDS, support organizations like J Street, or provide forums in their synagogues for Israel-hating artists, activists, and politicos. Or, if they believe hatred of Jews and Israel is merely a partisan “wedge issue.”  Such thinking betrays the elevation of temporal politics over authentic Judaism and concern for cultural survival.

What would Jewish liberals say if Democratic leaders were to ask African-Americans, feminists, or gay activists to disregard racism, misogyny, or homophobia as “wedge issues”?  Certainly, they would denounce such pleas as offensive and lambaste those with the temerity to make them. And liberal rabbis would be shouting from the rooftops about cultural insensitivity and beseeching their congregants to hit the streets in protest.

So how can they accept Democratic condescension that exhorts them to ignore antisemitism within their party and excuse party leadership for trivializing the problem and protecting the perpetrators?

Whether their obsessive political loyalties arise from ignorance, delusion, or self-rejection, the end result is always the same – the abandonment of Jewish kith and kin, the denial of history and heritage, and the devaluation of the Jewish spirit.

EDITORS NOTE: This Israel National News column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

FBI Data: Anti-Muslim hate crimes under Trump are below Obama levels in 2014

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The media has put out numerous pieces based on bad data and hate crime hoaxes claiming that President Trump was responsible for a rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes. Now the FBI data is out and it actually shows that anti-Muslim hate crimes under Trump are below Obama levels in 2014.

Does that mean that Obama was actually responsible for anti-Muslim hate crimes while Trump is a beacon of tolerance? If the media were logically consistent, instead of narratively consistent, then sure. But since the media is narratively consistent, that’s not the conclusion it will draw.

 By the numbers: Of 4,571 reported attacks the bureau tracked, aggravated assaults were up 4%, simple assaults up 15% and intimidation up 13%. The report also shows that assaults targeting Muslims, Arab Americans and African Americans have gone down, while violence against Latinos has risen.

The report says 485 hate crimes were reported against Latinos in 2018, compared to 43 in 2017.

270 hate crimes were reported against Muslims and Arab Americans — the lowest since 2014.

1,943 hate crimes were reported against African Americans — the lowest since 1992.

Guess which one of those numbers the media will play up and blame on President Trump?

Hint: It’s the negative one of the three.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.