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We are told that there is a difference between extremist Islam and peaceloving normal Islam.      Judging by their behavior, Muslims are anti-West, anti-Democracy, anti-Christian, anti-Jewish, anti-Buddhist, and anti-Hindu. Muslims are involved in 25 of some 30 conflicts going on in the world: in Afghanistan, Algeria, Bangladesh, Bosnia, Congo, Cote d'Ivoire, Cyprus, East Timor, India, Indonesia (2 provinces), Kashmir, Kazakastan, Kosovo, Kurdistan, Macedonia, the Middle East, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Somalia, Sudan, Russia-Chechnya, Tajikistan, Thailand, Uganda and Uzbekistan.      Doesn't this mean that extremist Islam is the norm and normal Islam is extremely rare?

"The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct 'Palestinian people' to oppose Zionism.       "For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa. While as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan."   (PLO executive committee member Zahir Muhsein, March 31, 1977, interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw.) The Palestinian leadership, including Ahmed Shukar and Yasser Arafat, has openly admitted Palestinian "peoplehood" is a fraud; See here.

"It should be remembered that in 1918, with the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Britain and France were handed more than 5,000,000 square miles to divvy up and 99% was given to the Arabs to create countries that did not exist previously. Less than 1% was given as a Mandate for the re-establishment of a state for the Jews on both banks of the Jordan River. In 1921, to appease the Arabs once again, another three quarters of that less than 1% was given to a fictitious state called Trans-Jordan."   (Jack Berger, May 31, 2004.)

The total for all the 22 Arab League countries is 6,145,389 square miles (SM). By comparison, all 50 states of the United States have a total of 3,787,318 SM. Israel has 8,463 SM, about one-sixth of that of the State of Michigan. Iran, Turkey, Pakistan and Afghanistan are Muslim but not Arab and are not included.      World Arab population: 300 million; World Jewish population: 13.6 million; Israel's Jewish population: 5.4 million.  (Dr. Wilbert Simkovitz, http://dehai.org/archives/dehai_news_archive/apr04/0223.html)

"... during the late 1940s, more than 40 million refuges around the world were resettled, except for one people. They [Palestinian arabs] remain defined as refugees, wallowing 60 years later in 59 UNRWA refugee camps, financed by $400 million contributed annually by nations of the world to nurture the promise of the "right of return" to Arab neighborhoods and Arab villages from 1948 that no longer exist."  (Noam Bedein, Jerusalem Post, January 6, 2009.)

Some 900,000 Jews left behind $300 billion in assets when they were forced to flee for their lives from the Arab countries in the 1940s. They hold deeds for five times Israel's size.  (Independent Media Centre, Winnipeg)

Re Israel's irrevocable ownership of Israel, Samaria, Judea, the Golan and Gaza: "Nothing that Israel's legal system says can change the facts that: (1) the legal binding document is the Mandate of the League of Nations and (2) the obligations of the Mandate are valid in perpetuity."  (Professor Julius Stone)

"By 1920 the Ottoman Empire had exercised undisputed sovereignty over Palestine for 400 years. In Article 95 of the treaty of Sevres, that sovereignty was transferred to England in trust for a national homeland for the Jews. The local Arabs had never exercised sovereignty over Palestine and so they lost nothing. Their rights were fully protected by a provisio in the grant: '...it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine...' The proviso has been fully observed by the Israelis. Since 1950 the Arabs have built some 261 new settlements in Judea and Samaria — more than twice as many as the Jews, but you never hear of them. They fill them with Arabs from Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan and by the grace of God they become Palestinians. Allahu Akbar! The Arabs call Judea "the West Bank' because they would look silly claiming that Jews are illegally living in Judea."  (Comment by Wallace Brand on Martin Peretz "Narrative Dissonance" The New Republic, July 1, 2009)

"More Americans need to become familiar with the concept of baseline budgeting. In simple terms, if an agency's budget is $100, and they are expecting an increase of $10.00 next year, but they only get $8.00, politicians characterize that as a $2.00 cut in spending. Concerning the entire $1.2 trillion in 'cuts' engendered by the sequester, it must be understood that they are not really cuts at all. They are really a lowering of the projected increase in federal spending going forward. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) cuts through the fog. 'For the 2014-2023 period, deficits in CBO's baseline projections total $7.0 trillion. With such deficits, federal debt would remain above 73 percent of GDP — far higher than the 39 percent average seen over the past four decades,' it reports. Thus, over the next decade, we are 'cutting' our way to adding another $7 trillion of debt to the $16-plus trillion we have already amassed. As far as the administration, Democrats and their media enablers are concerned, any attempt to mitigate that 'paying-for problem' will turn America into a Third World nation of vegetable eaters. Yet the simple truth remains inarguable: absent the genuine entitlement reform critically necessary to get our spending under control, we are headed for national bankruptcy. At that point, even vegetables may be a luxury item. [..] over the next decade, we are 'cutting' our way to adding another $7 trillion of debt to the $16-plus trillion we have already amassed.' (Arnold Ahlert, February 19, 2013)

Read More Quotes Here

PART 1: GENERAL ARTICLES

PART 2: LEGAL CONCEPTS AND PERTINENT LEGAL DOCUMENTS

RELATIONSHIPS AMONG THE PERTINENT LEGAL DOCUMENTS CONFIRMING THE JEWISH OWNERSHIP OF THE LAND OF ISRAEL

The articles in this set connect the relevant legal documents, emphasizing the importance of the San Remo Conference and the ensuing Mandate for Palestine.

• The Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916): Also known as the Asia Minor Agreement, this was a secret agreement between Britain and France on how they would divide the Middle East region of the Ottoman Empire among the Allied Powers, with specific areas marked out on an official map. France would control today's Syria, Lebanon, northern Iraq and southeast Turkey; Britain would control the area that is today's and the Negev would be a single Arab state or a confederation of Arab states; and the area southward from Gaza to the Dead Sea and covering the Ottoman Sanjak of Jerusalem would be under international administration. Jerusalem and Jewish interests were not mentioned. They did worry about controlling arms importation into the Arab territory. The treaty was officially nullified by the Allies at the San Remo conference in April, 1920. The full text is available at
  avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/sykes.asp.
• The Balfour Declaration (November 2, 1917): This was the famous letter Lord Arthur James Balfour sent to Baron Walter Rothschild acknowledging that: "The British government favored the creation of a Jewish national home in Palestine." The full text is available at
  http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/balfour.asp.
• The Covenant of the League of Nations (1919 plus amendments to 1924): This detailed the structure and membership of the newly-formed League of Nations. Some of the text indicated concern with how to implement the League's Mission, which was: to promote international co-operation and to achieve international peace and security. Article 8, for example, called for reducing national armaments. According to Article 12, arbitration was the method of choice for settling disputes. Article 22 of the Covenant established "the principle that the well-being and development of ... peoples [not yet able to stand by themselves] form a sacred trust of civilization." The full text is available at
  http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/leagcov.asp.
• The San Remo Conference (April 19-26, 1920): The Allied Supreme Council passed resolutions at San Remo, Italy, that created mandates for administering the new partitions of the once Ottoman Empire. The boundaries would be finalized by the Principal Allied Powers. On April 24th, they passed the resolution for Palestine, confirming, as Joshua Teitelbaum put it (September 15, 2010, here) "the historic roots of the internationally-recognized right of Jewish self-determination. It recognized the existence of the Jews as more than individuals who subscribed to a certain religion – Judaism – but rather as a corporate group deserving of national expression, in this case in the form of a national home." This document, backed by the entire membership of the League of Nations, authorized the decision to put the land on both sides of the Jordan River, the land that was once Biblical Palestine, in a permanent trust for the Jewish people with the understanding "that this would not involve the surrender of the rights hitherto enjoyed by the non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country...." It incorporated the provisions of the Balfour Declaration combined with Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant. The full text is available at
  http://www.cfr.org/israel/san-remo-resolution/p15248
• The Treaty of Sèvres (August 10, 1920): This was one of group of documents that spelled the end of the Ottoman Empire. In signing the Treaty of Sèvres, the Ottomans relinquished all of their non-Turkish territory. The treaty spoke of an independent Armenia and an autonomous Kurdistan; these provisions were later voided by the Treaty of Lausanne. Articles 94 and 95 of Section 6 of Part 3 recapitulated the San Remo provisions; Britain was given the mandate for the southern half of the Ottoman province of Syria, the region known as Palestine. The full text is available at
  http://www.hri.org/docs/sevres/
• The Franco-British Boundary Convention (December 23, 1920): This demarcated the boundaries between Palestine, Mesopotamia and Syria-Lebanon — between the British and French mandates — rectifying the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916. Much of the Golan was illegally put in the French-controlled area, and hence removed from the Palestine Mandate. Otherwise, with some modifications, Palestine was most of the land that had been Jewish in Biblical times. It was land on both sides of the Jordan River. The full text is available at
  https://www.jstor.org/stable/2213236
• The British White Paper (June 3, 1922): In response to the violence starting in 1920, where the Arabs rioted, looted Jewish shops and massacred Jews, the British issued this White Paper reassuring the Arabs (!) that the Balfour Declaration did not "support "the disappearance or the subordination of the Arabic population, language, or culture in Palestine." And, as the Jewish Virtual Library put it (here), it "also established the principle of 'economic absorptive capacity' as a factor for determining the immigration quota of Jews to Palestine." On the other hand, it stated unequivocally that "the Declaration, reaffirmed by the Conference of the Principle Allied Powers at San Remo and again in the Treaty of Sevres, is not susceptible of change." The White Paper noted that letter from Sir Henry McMahon to the Sharif of Mecca did indeed promise Arab independence from the Ottomans within particular territories. However, the same letter excluded "the portions of Syria lying to the west of the District of Damascus. This reservation has always been regarded by His Majesty's Government as covering the vilayet of Beirut and the independent Sanjak of Jerusalem. thus excluded from Sir Henry McMahon's pledge." The full text is available at
  http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/brwh1922.asp
• The Mandate for Palestine (July 24, 1922): Between the time the provisions of San Remo were formulated and the time they were confirmed and detailed in the Mandate for Palestine, Winston Churchill illegally handed over "the administration" of Transjordan (the land west of the Jordan and ove three quarters of Mandated Palestine) to Abdullah, Sharif Hussein's second son; the region eventually became the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The Mandate gave "civil and religious rights" to all the residents of the Land (no mention was made specifically of "Arabs"). Article 2 said, "The Mandatory shall be responsible for placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home, as laid down in the preamble, and the development of self-governing institutions, and also for safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective of race and religion." The full text is available at
  http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/palmanda.asp
• The Anglo-American Convention (December 3, 1924): In 1922 President Warren G Harding signed the unanimous joint resolution of Congress recognizing a future Jewish state in "the whole of Palestine." The Anglo-American Convention is a follow-up document. President Calvin Coolidge by proclamation confirmed the United States of America's acceptance of the provisions of the Mandate for Palestine. It included the full text of the Mandate for Palestine. The US needed a separate document, other than the Mandate for Palestine, because it was not a member of the League of Nations. There was the ambiguity that the USA's acceptance was in part because "the Principal Allied Powers have also agreed that the Mandatory should be responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on the 2nd November, 1917, by the Government of his Britannic Majesty," when Palestine meant the land on both sides of the Jordan River, not just the land that remained after Britain essentially gave TransJordan 78% of the land in 1921. The full text is available
  http://www.alliedpowersholocaust.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/1924-Anglo-American-Convention.pdf
• The United Nations Charter (1945): The assets of the League of Nations, including the Palestine Mandate, were transferred to the new United Nations organization — it came into being June 26, 1945 --- after its Charter came into effect on October 24, 1945. The League of Nations held its last assembly in April 8, 1946, and dissolved itself on April 20, 1946. The UN charter has 19 Chapters and covers membership, agencies, the General Assembly, the Security Council and the Secretariat, among other subjects. Chapters, in turn, contain Articles, that specify rules, regulations, policy, and procedures. Article 80, Chapter 12, is most relevant to the Mandate for Palestine. Speaking of the International Trusteeship System, it states that "nothing in this Chapter shall be construed in or of itself to alter in any manner the rights whatsoever of any states or any peoples or the terms of existing international instruments to which Members of the United Nations may respectively be parties." Often informally labeled the Jewish People's clause, Article 80 of the UN Charter means that the Jewish right to Palestine and the Land of Israel continues in perpetuum, even though the Mandate expired May 15, 1948, when Israel became a sovereign State. It confirms that the right to the Land of Israel and Palestine is vested in the Jewish People and can not be altered or abrogated. This means, for example, that it would be illegal for the UN to transfer ownership of any part of Palestine to the Palestine Authority. The full text of the Charter is available at
  http://www.un.org/en/charter-united-nations/

Return to What We Are Talking About

MANDATE FOR PALESTINE

by Eli E. Hertz, November-December, 2012

This is a superb presentation by Eli E. Hertz on the Legal Aspects of Jewish Rights to the Land of Israel. It begins by asking What is Palestine? It explains the importance of the term Mandate and presents the chronology of the events leading to signing of the document that placed Mandated Palestine in an irrevocable trust for the Jewish people, to develop into a Jewish state. Three facts are of particular importance. (1) The representatives of the League of Nations viewed the Mandate as reinforcing an already existing historic connection between the Jews and their ancient homeland. The Land was theirs by right. The Jews would be redeeming, reconstituting and recreating their national Home in situ. (2) The rest of the Middle East part of the Ottoman Empire (some 99.99% of the land) was cut up into states that were given to the Arabs. In some cases there was a long-established connection to the land. In others, boundaries were arbitrary and were a poor fit to the clans and sects of the various local Arabs living in that particular region. (3) The Assets, Rights and Obligations of the League of Nations were transferred to the United Nations where it came into being. The Palestine Mandate is valid.

The version on Think-Israel of Hertz's article is in slides format. A presentation that emphasizes the text material is available on the Myths and Facts website here.

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SUMMARY OF ISRAEL'S LEGAL RIGHTS TO JUDEA AND SAMARIA

by Ted Belman, November-December, 2009

Ted Belman summarizes the unbroken series of treaties and resolutions, laid out by the San Remo Resolution, the League of Nations and the United Nations, that give the Jewish People title to Mandatory Palestine and the city of Jerusalem. Ownership of the Land went from the defunct Ottoman Empire to the present State of Israel. The Arabs were never involved. The "Palestinians" had never owned the land; they had never had a state on the land. Considering that during the same period and by the same mechanisms, the Arabs acquired title to over 99% of the Middle East, the Arabs can hardly be considered to be deprived of land.

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WHY IS THE SAN REMO CONFERENCE SO IMPORTANT?

by Canadians for Israel's Legal Rights, August 10, 2011

This article focuses on the sequence of events that led to the San Remo Conference. It describes the context and environment within which the San Remo Conference took place. It also serves as a sister paper to the next article below, Howard Grief's article on the San Remo conference. It was produced by the Canadians for Israel's Legal Rights (CILF).

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THE RIGHTS OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE OVER THE LAND OF ISRAEL UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAW

by Howard Grief, December 5, 2010

Howard Grief discusses the documents that established the firm legal foundation of Israel being the exclusive owner of the land designated as Jewish by the League of Nations. The Land of Israel — current Israel, Samaria and Judea (aka West Bank), the Golan and Gaza — was given to the Jewish people as a perpetual trust and handed in that condition to the successor to the League of the Nations, the United Nations. This is a clear presentation of the documents that preceded the document of ownership and some of the history of the time. Any whittling away of this trust is illegal, whether it is attempted by a foreign country, the Israeli government or the U.N. itself. The question that remains is why have successive Israeli governments not asserted their claim. For that matter, why would a Jewish government allow control of the Temple Mount, its most holy site, by the Arabs?

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TWO NOTABLE EVENTS RECALLED THROUGH THE PRISM OF HISTORY

by Alex Rose, June 6, 2010

Alex Rose writes about two notable events of historical importance. The first was the San Remo Conference of 1920. "It recognized the exclusive national Jewish rights to the Land of Israel under international law, on the strength of the historical connection of the Jewish people to the territory previously known as Palestine." The San Remo Resolution "remains irrevocable, legally binding and valid to this day." The second was Abba Eban's speech to the UN General Assembly's Special Political Committee in 1958 suggesting transfer of the Arab refugees to the states responsible for the problem — the Arab states that had invaded Israel in 1948 and 1967. Actually, these states were responsible for two sets of refugees: the Arabs from Israel and the Jews from the different Arab countries. Israel, with few resources, took in the Jews. The Arabs had huge resources but have reneged. It's time they faced up to their responsibility.

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'PALESTINE' IN THE LAND OF ISRAEL?

by Jerold S. Auerbach, June 29, 2011

Jerold Auerbach does what shouldn't be necessary — he reminds the politicos of the U.N. that its creating a Palestinian State in what was Mandated Palestine would be illegal. It would violate the U.N.'s own role as guarantor that what was Mandated Palestine is held in an irrevocable trust for the Jewish people. It is, in fact, incorporated in the UN Charter as Article 80. Auerbach also explores why Israel has not made this information generally known. He writes, contrasting a secular government and more or less religious settlers: "At best ambivalent - and usually hostile - toward Jews in Judea and Samaria, government officials have resolutely maintained silence about the international guarantees for the 'close settlement' of Jews west of the Jordan River." But that doesn't do away with reality: Israeli settlements are legitimate because Samaria and Judea belong to Israel. They are legally Israel's by the same authority that gave the rest of the Ottoman Middle East to the Arabs. "The Palestinian claim, by contrast, is a contrived recent invention. ... Devised by Arabs who only recently identified themselves as 'Palestinians,' it is built on the foundation of perpetual victimization claims, the international determination to delegitimize Israel, and - perhaps most revealing - the pillaging of Jewish and Zionist history." Annexation by Israel of at least pieces of Samaria and Judea is a low-keyed but necessary solution.

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APPLICABLE LEGAL CONCEPTS AND TERMINOLOGY

The articles in this Section are concerned with some fundamental legal concepts and how they do and do not apply in determining whether Israel is occupying Jewish land or Arab land. Specifically, the first article discusses what the rights of a sovereign state entail in context of the Jewish ownership of the Land of Israel. In the second article, the oft-times clashing concepts of self-determination versus the rights of a sovereign state frame a discussion of the legality of the settlements in Judea and Samaria. The third article explains the essential difference between legal and legitimacy. The final article in the set discusses the impact of media sloppiness in using legal terminology and citing legal documents.

Because some of the information in Part 2 on Israel's claim to Jewish land depends on the legal concept of a Trust, we repost here "The Palestine Mandate in a Nutshell", written by Wallace Edward Brand. It first appeared in Introduction to the September-October 2014 Issue (see here and below). The "unshelled" version is at
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2385304. See also Brand's discussion of Israel's ownership as applied to Judea and Samaria here.

The text of San Remo Agreement provided: "The High Contracting Parties agree to ENTRUST... the administration of Palestine . . .

Trust law for non-lawyers

After finding an intention to set up a trust, look for:

1. The "settlor", the person or entity setting it up. He contributes the trust res.
2. The cestui que trust or "beneficiary" of the trust.
3. The trustee.
4. The trust res or the thing place in trust.
5. The purpose of the trust.
6. The term of the trust.

These are the vital elements of a trust. Some are expressed; others may be inferred. For example if you place a delicate Ming dynasty bowl in trust for your daughter aged 5, others may infer that the purpose of the trust that is to vest when she is 30 is to preserve and protect it until she is capable of doing that herself.

The 1920 San Remo agreement of the Allied Principal War Powers contained the British Balfour Declaration of Policy word-for-word. The 1922 Palestine Mandate approved by 51 countries that were members of the League of Nations, and also by the United States, filled in the details needed to apply the Balfour Policy.

One. At San Remo, the settlor of the trust was the Supreme Council of the Allied Principal War Powers in WWI. They defeated Germany who commenced the war and the Ottoman Empire who joined Germany in making war on the Allies. Under customary International Law, the victors in a defensive war may negotiate with the vanquished to establish new boundaries for it and keep all the territory outside the new boundary. In this way the Ottoman Empire was reduced to Turkey. The remaining Turkish territory in Europe was allocated by the Supreme Council at the 1919 Paris Peace Talks. Claims for territory in the Middle East — Syria, Mesopotamia and Palestine — were resolved at the reconvening of the group at San Remo, the following year. At the Paris Peace talks the Allies set up the League of Nations including Article 22 of its Covenant that provided for "mandates". These were combination trusts and guardianships for countries that had been colonies of Turkey for 400 years. The Mandatory was to provide stability and tutelage for their political development to become independent representative governments over time.

Two. The cestui que trust is the beneficiary. The beneficiary has no right to go to a "law court" to protect his rights. That is only the right of the trustee. He has legal dominion over the trust res. For a tangible piece of property, such as a Ming dynasty bowl, only the trustee has the right of possession. If it is stolen, only the trustee can go into a court of law to reclaim it. The beneficiary is limited to protecting his rights against abuse by the trustee. He is entitled to go into a court of equity. The beneficiary here was the Jewish People or World Jewry. It was the Jewish people and the Arab people who had submitted competing claims for collective political rights to Palestine at the Paris Peace talks. Woodrow Wilson's Commission of Inquiry in searching for those throughout the world having the right of self-determination had said of the Jews that Palestine was "the cradle and home of their vital race" and noted that the Jews were the only people that had no other land.

An express term of the trust made the World Zionist Association the formal advisor to the mandate government. Another term required the trustee to facilitate only Jewish immigration so the Jews could become a majority.

Three. The mandate was based on English law concepts of trusts and guardianships. Britain volunteered to be trustee or "mandatory" and was selected.

Four. The thing placed in trust, the trust res, was an intangible, the collective right of a group to establish a government and provide for its administration. This is referred to as "group political rights". An individual political right, sometimes referred to as included in "civil rights", is the right to one vote for each citizen.

Five. The purpose of the trust was, in the case of most of the mandates, providing a stable government until such time as the majority of the people in the territory of the state developed politically and could represent themselves - there having been no opportunity in the last 400 years for the inhabitants of the former Turkish colonies to do that. It was also, in the case of the Palestine Mandate, to avoid an antidemocratic Jewish government. At the time the Jews were in the minority in the entire territory of Palestine and if they had legal dominion over the political rights, an antidemocratic government would be in power. One purpose of the Palestine Mandate was to delay representative self-government until the Jews were in the majority within the area to be ruled.

Six. The term of the trust — it was to end when the Jewish population in the area to be ruled was in the majority and the Jews had the capability, just as any European Government to exercise sovereignty. That would avoid an antidemocratic government such as later was founded in Syria by the French, of a minority of Alawites that under Hafez Assad and Bashir Assad has caused so much misery and destruction.

Historical note

In 1948 the Jewish population within the Armistice Line in Palestine became the majority. The trust res partially vested. In 1967 it became completely vested. Coincidentally the UN Partition Resolution 181 was enacted on November 29,1947, not long before 1948 when Israel proclaimed its independence. That is why many people believe that Resolution 181 is the root of Israel's sovereignty. But the Arabs rejected this Resolution. By law it was only a recommendation that must be approved by all involved before becoming international law. It died at birth when rejected by the Arabs.

In 1964 the PLO charter was drafted in Moscow. It posited that there was a "Palestinian Arab People". In the '60s also the Soviet Diplomats at the UN promoted two International Conventions dignifying the right of any "people" to have the right of political self-determination not just under natural law, but also under international law. These became effective in 1976. But the drafters at the UN made sure that these rights under international law were subordinate to the right of a preexisting state to territorial integrity because since the new world order was established after the Peace of Westphalia, national boundaries of sovereign states have been inviolable.

Return to What We Are Talking About

LEGAL RIGHTS AND TITLE OF SOVEREIGNTY OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE TO THE LAND OF ISRAEL AND PALESTINE UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAW

by Howard Grief, February 2004

Howard Grief's book, "Legal Foundations and Boundaries of Israel under International Law" was one of the first and one of the most complete explanations of Israel's indisputable sovereign rights under international law to Israel, Samaria, Judea, Golan and Gaza. In this essay, Howard Grief brilliantly fulfills his objective "to set down in a brief, yet clear and precise manner the legal rights and title of sovereignty of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel and Palestine under international law." He makes clear that Jewish National Home meant the Jewish State and its boundaries are co-extensive with those of Palestine, including both Cisjordan and Transjordan. He makes clear that the existence of a Palestinian nation "is the greatest hoax of the 20th century and continues unabated into the 21st century. This hoax is easily exposed by the fact that the 'Palestinians' possess no distinctive history, language or culture, and are not essentially different in the ethnological sense from the Arabs living in the neighboring countries of Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq." He makes clear that "The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 and the Hague Regulations of 1907 are acts of genuine international law, but they have no direct application or relevance to the legal status of Judea, Samaria, the Golan and Gaza which are integral territories of the Jewish National Home and the Land of Israel under the sovereignty of the State of Israel. These acts would apply only to the Arab occupation of Jewish territories, as occurred between 1948 and 1967, and not to the case of Israeli rule over the Jewish homeland." He makes clear that Israel's title to all of Palestine was not abrogated by later UN resolutions asserting that the "Palestinian people" have legal right to Judea, Samaria and Gaza. This paper should be part of your cache of information for the next time you are told that Resolution XXX of the U.N. guarantees the rights of the Palestinian Arabs to YYY.

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INTERNATIONAL LAW, SELF-DETERMINATION AND THE SOVEREIGN STATE: AS APPLIED TO THE STATUS OF SAMARIA AND JUDEA

by Wallace Brand, January, 2016

Part I examines the legal basis of the Levy report, which concluded that Jewish settlements are legal. In fact, the legality of Israel's presence in Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem was res judicata as of April 25, 1920, when [at the San Remo Conference] World Jewry received a beneficial interest in the political rights to Palestine that was intended to mature into a legal interest. The policy for the Arab States that were established at around the same time by other Mandates was to deal with the current Arab inhabitants but the beneficiary for Mandated Palestine was World Jewry. The Mandate thus confirmed a living connection between the Jews and their homeland, extending over some 3700 years. As Wallace Brand writes, "... under International Law, the Jewish People have sovereignty over Palestine west of the Jordan River and the Arab people residing in Palestine calling themselves "The Palestinian Arab People" do not." Part II "shows that International Law does not support unilateral claims of secession from a sovereign state such as that of the alleged Palestinian Arab People because when there is a tension between the right of a 'people' to self-determination and the territorial integrity of a sovereign state, the latter is paramount."

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SETTLEMENTS, AGREEMENTS, LEGITIMACY

by Michael Zebulon, September 5, 2010

Michael Zebulon provides us with a lively exposition of a serious topic: the legality of the Jewish settlements in Samaria and Judea. It is written in the form of a rebuttal to Pres. Obama who has questioned their legitimacy. Zebulon delves deeply into the concept of legitimacy and why the term is not twin to legality This essay provides a well-rounded description of the commitment in international law to the all-member ruling by the League of Nation that what was called Mandated Palestine s in an irrevocable trust for the Jewish people for all time. The trust was given over with no changes or exceptions to the U.N. Read this. It will sharpen your understanding of why settlements are legal. And legitimate.

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DOES THE INTERNATIONAL NEWS MEDIA OVERLOOK ISRAEL'S LEGAL RIGHTS IN THE PALESTINIAN-ISRAELI CONFLICT?

by Dan Diker, June 10, 2003

This is a meticulous examination of how the media, by using sloppy language, intentionally or unintentionally further Arab land claims. The media promote the wrong idea that the Arabs have international law on their side, even though, as an example, the drafters of Resolution 242 did not plan on an Arab state, except Jordan, west of the Jordan River. As Dan Diker writes, "The emotionally charged Palestinian liberation story is, for many reporters, more compelling than the dry, factual context of history, especially existing international laws and resolutions that support Israel's narrative."

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ISRAEL'S LEGAL OWNERSHIP OF THE LAND OF ISRAEL: SIGNIFICANCE AND IMPLICATIONS

There are far-reaching consequences of Israel's legal ownership. This section deals with some of the implications of Israel's ownership of the Land of Israel. As Matthew Hausman writes (see here.)

The acceptance of the San Remo program by the League of Nations — and the restatement of its ambitions in the 1922 Mandate for Palestine — evidenced an acknowledgment of the Jews' status as an indigenous people and their right to settle anywhere in their homeland, including Judea and Samaria, and thus underscored the legal basis for the reestablishment of the Jewish state. Consequently, traditional recognition of the Jews' indigenous rights should inform any proposals for resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict. This would be consistent with the ideals set forth in the "Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples," voted on by the U.N. in 2007. Of particular relevance is the language contained in Article 10, which states:

Indigenous peoples shall not be forcibly removed from their lands or territories. No relocation shall take place without the free, prior and informed consent of the indigenous peoples concerned and after agreement on just and fair compensation and, where possible, with the option of return.

Though the true intent of this nonbinding declaration may have been to promote the Palestinian cause at Israel's expense, it cannot be divorced from the long-standing recognition under international legal conventions that the Jews are indigenous to the Land of Israel. Accordingly, it implicitly reinforces the Jewish connection to lands the Palestinians now attempt to claim as their own, and provides justification for potential resolutions that are premised on legally-cognizable Jewish claims, rather than on politically-motivated or apocryphal Palestinian pretensions.

Hausman points out, "A Palestinian state created by dispossessing Jews from their ancestral lands would be in violation of international law and would represent a repudiation of history." Arguably, this would also be the case were an Israel government itself to act against Jewish ownership of the land. Two articles in this section examine this issue.

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INTERNATIONAL LAW REGARDING THE LAND OF ISRAEL AND JERUSALEM

by Elliott A. Green

Elliot Green brings the significance of San Remo up to the present time. "International Law" is often used as a buzz word implying that Israel is violating international Law and is "occupying" the Land of Israel illegally. On the contrary, as Green writes:

International law has recognized Jewish rights to sovereignty over the Land of Israel and to settlement throughout the land. In April 1920, at the San Remo Conference (part of the post-World War I peace negotiations), the Principal Allied Powers, acting on behalf of the international community, recognized all the land between the Jordan River and the sea, including Jerusalem, as part of the Jewish National Home, based on the Jewish people's historic rights.

[...] The San Remo decision for the Jewish National Home was ratified by the the League of Nations in 1922 and endorsed by a joint resolution of the United States Congress that same year, with a more official US endorsement coming in the Anglo-American Convention on Palestine (proclaimed 1925).

[...] When the UN was founded in 1945, it reaffirmed through its Charter the existing territorial rights of peoples as they had been before the war (Article 80). This applied of course to the Jewish National Home. [...] Hence, the areas that Jordan called "West Bank," as well as east Jerusalem (which had thousands of Jewish residents before 1948), remained part of the National Home even during Jordanian occupation.

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THE EXCLUSIVE POLITICAL RIGHTS GRANTED TO THE JEWS IN 1920 AT SAN REMO

by Wallace Edward Brand, September-October, 2012

 Wallace Brand writes that the solution to the Arab-Israeli Conflict is usually presented as either a single bi-national state with an Arab majority OR two states, with the Arab state cutting Israel or residing in its heartland. He reminds us there is a third way that is based on rights to the territory granted at San Remo almost a hundred years ago: a single Jewish state. In this article, he discusses the background, details and implications of the momentous San Remo decision.

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SAN REMO: THE FORGOTTEN MILESTONE

by Salomon Benzimra, May-June, 2009

Salomon Benzimra points out the significance of the Sam Remo Conference. For one, "for the first time in history, Palestine became a legal and political entity." The so-called Palestinian people — the local Arabs in Israel and the Territories — had never had a state or sovereignty. Also, the "de jure sovereignty of Palestine was vested in the Jewish people." The San Remo conference was, as Benzimra notes,"a major historical milestone," yet in recent time, the irrevocable grant of sovereignty over the Land of Israel by the Jewish people made by the international community has hardly been mentioned, thus allowing nonsensical claims that the Jews were illegally occupying the land to be taken seriously [emphasis added].

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A LEGAL CHALLENGE TO SHARON'S UPROOTING POLICY

by Yoram Shifftan, March-April, 2005

This was written before PM Sharon evacuated the Jews from Gaza. But it is applicable to any giving away of Jewish land. Yoram Shifftan provides a meticulous analyses of the legal status of the "territories". He bases the legitimacy of the Jewish claim to Biblical Israel — Gaza, Samaria and Judea (aka the West Bank) — on rock-solid international law. Israel holds Biblical Israel as a sacred trust for all future generations and can not gift it away. What is surprising — and appalling — is that Israel's diplomatic corps and its educational system did not proclaim these truths; they were mute while the Arabs invented fanciful claims that the world accepted as valid. A decade later, we are still suffering the consequences of the Gaza give-away.

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ISRAEL'S STRANGEST SELF-DEFEATING PARADOX: Forgetting To Teach Itself And The World Jewish National Rights In Palestine

by Yoram Shifftan, July-August, 2004

Yoram Shifftan expands on earlier articles that discussed the centrality of international law to support Israel's right to mandated Palestine — land the Arabs claim as theirs. He suggests that Israeli leaders have been delinquent in not teaching the facts to their own citizens as well as proclaiming them to the world. He emphasizes the continuing obligations of the Mandate.

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JERUSALEM IS A JEWISH ISSUE

by Ted Belman, November 28, 2007

This was written at the time of the Annapolis Summit, which based "peace" activities on false premises in yet another attempt to nibble away more of the land that is Jewish. One indication that Jerusalem was on the cutting board was P.M. Olmert's clearly expressed annoyance that diaspora Jews believe they have a stake in and a say about Jerusalem. Olmert claimed Jerusalem was solely an Israeli issue. Ted Belman summarizes the arguments that acknowledge the legality of world Jewry's claim to Jerusalem.

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JERUSALEM

by Eli E. Hertz, September-October, 2007

Eli E. Hertz demolishes the propaganda piously sprouted by those who want to break the indivisible connection of Jews and Jerusalem. How does he do this? By stating the facts of history, contrasting the age-old and ageless connection of Jews to Jerusalem to the meager and politically-motivated connection of Muslims to Jerusalem. Legal information on the internationalization of Jerusalem and U.N. resolutions on Jerusalem are to be found in the second half of the article. This essay is both readable and worth reading.

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DOES ISRAEL OWN JUDEA AND SAMARIA? ARE THE SETTLEMENTS LEGAL?

The Land of Israel is in a perpetual trust for the Jewish people. Because Judea and Samaria (aka the West Bank) and every bit of Jerusalem are part of the Land of Israel, they belong to the Jewish people. There should be no need for additional discussion. However, Jordan occupied the area for some nineteen years after she invaded Israel in 1948, so there was time for all sorts of fanciful concoctions to take root. In 1967, when Israel was able to reclaim the Territories — Judea, Samaria, the Golan and the Gaza Strip — and the eastern section of Jerusalem, like Jack's beanstalk, these fantasies grew tall and expansive. Unfortunately, Israel didn't appreciate how important it was to set the record straight right away. In fact, since the Oslo Accords of 1993, Israeli governments have not even responded to Arab accusations that Israel is violating international law by building settlements in Samaria and Judea. Perhaps they fear introducing reality into that long-playing fantasy: the Peace Process. Perhaps they fear being the ones to put a spoke in the mum-mum policy Western politicians cherish: making global peace by putting another Arab state inside Israel.

The attacks on the settlements have been vicious and successful. Most of the world is sure the Jewish settlements should not be allowed. Even the White House, when it isn't fighting for transgender bathrooms, bemoans settlement activity. The American Administration ignores the crumbling of the fragile political structures in the Middle East, while using its power to eat away at land that legitimately belongs to Israel. This misguided mission is more than irrational when you consider it speaks quaintly of two people, Israelis and Palestinians, who need to share the same land, ignoring that new forces, more vicious and more recalcitrant than Fatah or even Hamas, are acting as directed by the Koran to use any and all means to put the entire world under Sharia law.

In 2012, PM Netanyahu appointed a committee of legal experts to focus on a specific issue: are the Jewish settlements in Samaria and Judea legal or are they violating international law? The Committee's report was a well-phrased reiteration of some of what became international law at the San Remo Conference almost a hundred years ago, namely, the Jewish people own Judea and Samaria. Nothing has changed that fact. The Levy Report has affirmed that the decades-long presence of Israel in Judea and Samaria is not "belligerent occupation." Israel has the legal right to settle in Judea and Samaria. To date, PM Netanyahu hasn't acted on the Report, while those that wish to do to the Jews in the Territories what Ariel Sharon did to the Jews of Gaza continue to tell tall tales.

[Part of this introduction was taken from the introduction to the November-December 2013 Issue of Think-Israel.]

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WHY ISLAM IS A RELIGION OF WAR

by Daniel Greenfield

Daniel Greenfield makes the case that "Islamic violence is a religious problem." When salafist terrorists murder and rape, "[t]hey are not perverting a great religion, as our politicians claim, they are living it." Greenfield makes the point crystal clear by this comparison: "What the Ten Commandments are for the Jew, or the resurrection of Jesus is for the Christian — the physical dominance of Islam is to the Muslim. It is the basis and fulfillment of his faith." Muslims may talk the spirituality lingo — it's persuasive propaganda in the West — but, as Greenfield says, "Islam is not primarily an inward spiritual experience, but an outward expression of tribal honor." Islam is a religion of war, not peace.

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THE ANATOMY OF DENIAL: MULTICULTURALIST DELUSIONS IN AN AGE OF TERRORISM

by Bruce Thornton

While salafists proudly boast how well they mirror Mohammad's activities — slaughter, violence, invasion, enslavement, rape, vandalism — Western multicultural ideologues insist that Islam is a religion of peace. Bruce Thornton suggests several reasons for this, including differences in religious intensity. He notes that "Western secularism has rendered us incapable of understanding passionate religious beliefs." For the most part, religion in the West is or is becoming compartmentalized and tepid whereas "the commands of Allah and the words and deeds of Mohammed are a living presence in every aspect of a devout Muslim's life." If Mohammed condoned violence fourteen hundred years ago, violence is acceptable today, no apologies necessary. This is a thoughtful essay directed at the problem why all sorts of palliative treatments are suggested to stop Muslim expanionism and violence, but the obvious source of the problem, Islamic doctrine, is willfully ignored.

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KINETIC RELIGION OF ISLAM

by Barry Shaw

Barry Shaw describes Islam as a kinetic religion because it must, by its own rules, continue to press on and never stop until it obtains its religious objective: the expansion of Islam to every part of the world. Muslims may come into a new host country weak and ill-equipped but they have the obligation to establish a presence there and "turn it into solid Launchpad from which to expand to other locations, which must be controlled and fortified before spreading out to the next stage of the expansion. This can be done militarily or peacefully, depending on the political environment into which Islam intends to expand." But done it must be, no matter how much Western appeasers would like to pretend it ain't happening.

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CATASTROPHIC FAILURE: A REVIEW

by Edward Cline

Stephen Coughlin is a leading expert and lecturer on how Islamic jihad is directly derived from Islamic religious doctrine and how the Holy Books serve as primers for current terror activities. Many of us have read how he was fired by the Defense Dep't because associates of the Muslim Brotherhood objected to his factual lectures on the clear and present danger of Islam to America (see here). If firing Coughlin was intended to suppress his message, it boomeranged — Coughlin has published his analysis as a book that is reaching a larger audience. Moreover, being fired for revealing the source of Islamic terrorism serves as authentication of the truth of Coughlin's charges today in the same way that being 'banned in Boston' by self-appointed book censors certified the importance of the ideas expressed in a book a half century ago.

In this article, Edward Cline reviews Coughlin's book, "Catastrophic Failure: Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad." Part 1 of this review describes how criticism of Islam, even if true, is against Sharia Law, and thus is considered to be religious blasphemy. In the USA, executive edicts from the White House have forbidden government training manuals and data bases for military and defense analysts to associate terrorism and Islam. Hence our defense and security agencies are blocked from openly identifying acts of terror committed by Muslims, unless these acts are called aberrations of the Religion of Peace. In actuality, the commands for jihad against all non-Muslims, for violence, for plunder, for slaughter and for viewing women as chattel are directly from the to-be-followed more recent instructions of the Koran and Hadiths. The earlier peaceful sections have been abrogated. In part 2 of this review, Cline focuses on Coughlin's "explication of the roles of Sayyid Qutb, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in the emasculation of America's power to defend itself from 'civilization jihad'." As Cline notes, "If there is a 'failure to communicate' the peril in which America finds itself, it is not Stephen Coughlin's failure."

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THE RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS OF SUICIDE BOMBINGS: ISLAMIST IDEOLOGY

by David Bukay

This classic essay by David Bukay points out the disparity of the Western belief — promoted by Islamic apologists such as Professor John Esposito of Georgetown U. and John Brennan, Director of the CIA — that jihad is some sort of internal spiritual struggle and the actual meaning of jihad as spirited warfare against all who are not yet in submission to sharia law. Bukay points out that jihad was defined as an internal struggle only when "Muhammad and his band of followers were small and relatively weak and so prone to compromise." This interpretation was abrogated (i.e., canceled, voided, superceded) by Mohammad himself. Since then, Jihad has meant the necessary violent and non-violent never-ending struggle to ensure Islam's victory over every non-believer everywhere. It is a compulsory duty for Muslims, not subject to debate. It justifies every way of conquering the enemy, including committing suicide, which is otherwise prohibited by Islamic law. Those killed participating in jihad are considered to be living with Allah in Paradise, where they enjoy special rewards. Jihad is as central to Islam today as it was in Mohammad's time. As powerful and as deadly.

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LEADERSHIP OF THE ISLAMIC WORLD AND ISLAMIC JIHAD IS WHAT IS AT STAKE FOR MUSLIMS

by Col. Tom Snodgrass (Ret.)

Tom Snodgrass provides a primer explaining the similarities and differences between the Sunnis and Shi'ites. Both are dedicated to replacing the US Constitution — and the administration of every non-Muslim country — with sharia law. Neither will give up until they obtain this objective. The US has been dealing with the different factions piecemeal, supporting the Sunnis here, the Shi'ites there. Snodgrass suggests the US needs to "adopt a comprehensive strategy which is based on the reality that the U.S. loses regardless who triumphs in the Islamic religious sectarian war: Islamic State Sunni Salafist Wahhabis, al-Qaeda Sunni Salafist Wahhabis, Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, or Shia Khomeinist Twelvers."

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IS IT IRAN'S MIDDLE EAST NOW?

by Jonathan Spyer

In the current war between the Sunnis and the Shi'ites in the Middle East, Iran is the major source of funding for the political-military organizations acting as Iranian proxies and fighting for the Shi'ite side in Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria. Jonathan Spyer explores how successful these different alliances have been. Spyer believes Iran will be more successful creating chaos in the region than developing a sustainable hegemony over the Middle East.

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A RAGE AGAINST HISTORY

by Clive S. Kessler

Clive Kessler has an interesting perspective: Islam since it fell behind the West, has tried various governmental and administrative fixes, from secular to military to Marxist. It has now gone back to its violent religious beginnings, to sharia-dominant "pure" Islam and idealization of that perfect man, Mohammad. Kessler talks about only a minority taking the terrorist route. But given there were 2.08 billion Muslims in the world as of 2014, even if only 15% are terrorists and their support structure, that is 312 million people, which is close to the entire population of the USA (318.9 million in 2014). Not proven is whether Islam ever actually discarded Sharia as society's glue. Not proven is whether Islam ever had the creativity it takes for success. Soon after its formation it absorbed the Persian and Hebrew cultures, inter alia. Its rampages were effective but are hardly proof that Islam intrinsically can build and create as well as it can pillage, destroy and make subservient. Islam's blaming everyone and everything but itself and its lack of introspection stands in sharp contrast to the way, for example, the Chinese, another ancient people, found its way to modernity through many blunders and false starts. It reshaped its people, not the world.

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ISLAMISM: THE ROOT CAUSE OF ISLAMIST TERROR

by Mark Humphrys

For years, we were told that the Po' Palestinian Arabs were sadistically violent only because they had no other way to fight the Jewish invaders of their homeland, an explanation that assumed incorrectly that these Arabs owned the land. As justification for barbaric behavior, the notion they were fighting to regain a homeland began to fall apart when the salafists started doing unto the West what it had done in Israel. One could patch together a commonality that the West was under attack because it aided Israel or because it had done Islam wrong, but the uniqueness of the underpinning of Arab terror — that it was fighting for its land — was lost. As Brig.-Gen (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser wrote (December 3, 2015, here.)

"What disturbs the Palestinians is that as radical Islam's direct warfare against the West expands, they lose a key asset for promoting their goals. If, as is becoming increasingly clear, the Palestinian issue is not the heart of the problem, then the West's expression of regret for its "crimes" on this issue will not solve the greater problem. The request for penance must be much more far-reaching; Iranian President Hassan Rouhani recently made dialogue with the United States conditional on an American request for Iran's forgiveness. In addition, the more the connection between the two kinds of terror grows, the more the radical Islamic component of the Palestinian rejection of Israel's existence as the democratic nation-state of the Jewish people and preference for a violent struggle to eliminate it, is exposed. The West would better understand how difficult it is to promote a settlement and may (as Israel would hope) come to understand that the terror against Israel is essentially part and parcel of the terror against the West."

The Pro-Palestinian propagandists are now using a second line of justification: the actions of the terrorists are due to 'frustration, desperation, fury at being dealt a poor hand, shame, etc.' — environmental and external reasons, not part of the Religion of Peace. Nevertheless, it is becoming clear that they don't want a homeland — they rejected Genl Sisi's offer of a homeland in the Sinai. What they want is to take over all of Israel and evict the Jews because they controlled the area for a time centuries back. The reasons for terrorizing the West have also become suspect. It isn't because the West wronged them. It isn't because they suffer from frustration or poverty or desperation. It's because they have a mission to impose Sharia globally on all.

In this essay, Mark Humphrys rejects the absurd notion that the fight for a Palestinian homeland is the well-spring for Arab terrorism throughout the Middle East. He points out that the sociological certainty that poverty and frustration cause acts of terrorism is also wrong. Most terrorists capable of the self-direction needed to carry out a successful terror attack come from the upper classes. He identifies the motive power of Islamist terrorism: Islam.

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FROM PERSIA TO IRAN — A LEGACY OF ANTISEMITISM

by Alex Rose

Alex Rose traces the treatment of the Jews through the dynasties from ancient Persia to its transformation to modern-day Iran. With few exceptions, Jews, like other religious minorities, were treated harshly by successive rulers, well before the Arabs conquered Persia. The Arab rulers were Shi'ite, so the traditional brutality of the Muslims was reinforced by the Shi'ite doctrine of purity, najis, which emphasized the fear of uncleanliness caused by non-believers — Jews and Christians. An episode of Jewish "pollution" was often the trigger for a pogrom or forced conversion to Islam. The current rulers of Iran, the mullahs, may be conversant with modern technology but they are as obsessed with Jew-hate as most of their predecessors.

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IRANIAN NUCLEAR DEAL IS A CATASTROPHIC HOAX

by Roger Aronoff

The Iran Nuclear Deal was not signed, not affirmed by raised hand, not treated as a treaty by the US executive, not voted on directly by the US Congress. It is a non-binding set of plans, which unfortunately the USA Administration seems to feel honor-bound to implement, while Iran has announced it will do what it wants, when it wants. Roger Aronoff points out that the State Dep't's spin on these facts is to emphasize verification rather than contractual agreement, even though Iran has already stated it is now and will continue to be non-compliant when the Deal interferes with its own plans. As for the rigorous monitoring that verification demands, IAEA, the monitoring agency, has already shown itself to be incapable of standing up to Iran's bullying. The upshot is that "President Obama is perpetrating a dangerous hoax through his triumphal advocacy for this so-called deal, and the media, for the most part, are participating."

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THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES

by Yigal Carmon

Yigal Carmon, co-founder of MEMRI, an institute that does scrupulous translations from the Arab media, has examined the end-game activities of the Iran nuclear deal. The final bits and pieces were to be in place by December 15, 2015 so the participants could begin carrying out their agreed-upon Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Instead, "[t]he JCPOA is best characterized by bangs and whimpers — by bold prohibitions on Iran that peter out in qualifying terms such as 'unless,' 'except if,' and the like." Moreover, by her actions and temper tantrums, Iran has totally "rewritten" the JCPOA so Iran will be doing just what she wants to do. In fact, Iran is the one stipulating conditions the West must agree to — or else Iran will stop her version of cooperation. The IAEA monotoring agency has long been intimidated into not going against Iran's inperious demands. As Carmon says, "With every passing day, Iran is more and more in violation of the JCPOA. But neither the Republicans nor the Democrats, nor the media, nor anyone else will acknowledge this, for the implications are too devastating."

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THE LOOMING GLOBAL NUCLEAR WEAPONS CRISIS

by Emily B. Landau

The Obama Administration continues to tout the Iran Nuclear Deal as having thwarted Iran's ability to acquire nuclear weapons for at least a decade. Even if Iran doesn't already have the bomb, Obama's claim is unlikely. It ignores "other crucial requirements for effective nonproliferation." Emily Landau examines the impact of the JCPOA on the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), which was enacted in 1970 as the way to stop "the spread of nuclear weapons and the destabilization that could result." She points out that "[i]nstead of shoring up the nonproliferation regime, the Iran deal is likely to dangerously undermine it" in that it will likely lead non-nuclear NPT members to reexamine their commitment to current NPT regulations and restrictions. As it is, taking advantage of a loophole, Iran, a member of the NPT, like North Korea and Iraq before it, has already been substantially advancing "a military nuclear capability under the cover of a supposedly civilian one." The supposedly mature nuclear countries irresponsibly have made no attempt to punish the rogue countries, which quickly learned that in pushing nuclear proliferation beyond legal limits, they would suffer no loss in "long-term status, wealth, and power."

Contrariwise, as Landau writes in an article entitled "The NPT's Challenge To Israel" (see here), over the years, there has been intermittent but substantial pressure on Israel, not a member of NPT, to become a member — maybe the only member — of a "nuclear-weapon-free zone" in the Middle East. As Landau writes, "the only way for Israel (or any of the other states outside the treaty) to join the NPT is as a non-nuclear weapon state; therefore the call for Israel to join the NPT is necessarily a call for Israel to disarm itself of whatever nuclear capability it is assumed to have."

Ignoring Iran's genocidal rants and NPT's own, albeit weak, acceptance of the right of self defense, many have argued that Israel and Iran should have equal NPT obligations. Now that Iran has shown itself to be erratic — using its growing expertise in nuclear matters to intimidate — logically, we'd expect the pressure on Israel to disarm itself would discontinue. But logic isn't a prominent feature of Arab demands. Landau concludes that much depends on whether the Arabs think that "increasing attention to Israel had a realistic chance of producing results."

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THE MENTAL STATE OF THE POLITICAL ELITES

by Edward Cline

Edward Cline write about the demented mental state of the political elite of Europe who, ignoring the devastation, crime, social diseases and economic disruption the Muslims has brought to their countries, continue to preach a distorted form of Christianity: when faced with Muslim anti-social behavior, turn the other cheek and pretend even harder that Muslims will allow themselves to be reshaped into civilized Europeans with Western values. As Cline notes, using German Chancellor Angela Merkel as a supreme example of ideology-motivated behavior, "Her 'mind-set' of plurality and diversity is directly at odds with those of the disdained hoi polloi." Ordinary folk who rely on the evidence of their eyes are sneered at and given misinformation or no information to keep them from objecting to the social upheaval the Muslims have engendered. To paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The political elite are different from you and me."

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ISRAEL AT THE FOREFRONT

by Dr. Haim Shine

Haim Shine writes bluntly and accurately, "For many years, European policymakers have endlessly regurgitated the fallacy that the 'suffering' of Palestinians motivates terrorists across the globe. This baseless and hypocritical claim stems from a desire to appease Arab countries and promote European business interests." There is no connection between the Israel-Palestinian conflict and Islamic terror. Instead, there are two facts that are for the most part disregarded: (1) Salafists regard France and Germany as 'Crusader states' and are ready to continue their battle with the Christian Crusaders; and (2) through no desire on its part, nevertheless, "Israel stands at the forefront of the war against terrorism." Until this is acknowledged and the war against Islamic terrorism becomes serious, people will die from terrorist acts. It would behoove European and American politicians to stop pushing Israel to make suidical concessions and to understand that, as Shine writes, "Any ceded land would turn into a forward base of radical Islam."

WAKE UP AND START CONNECTING THE DOTS

by Mordechai Kedar

An indication of how ill-prepared Israelis are attitudinally to fight effectively is that we are in the midst of the Third Intifada and Israelis are still debating how to handle a terrorist neutralized after he's committed his act of terror. They aren't even sure if the context should be normative civil law or wartime necessity. Mordechai Kedar writes of the basic political differences that underlie the opposing views. Morally superior liberals don't want to stoop to the level of the enemy. They "relate to the terrorist stabber and murderer as though he is a member of civilized society who has, unfortunately, strayed from the proper path, but is entitled to all the protection afforded by law to any criminal..." Unfortunately, because the terrorist is treated as a hero by the Arabs and enjoys generous benefits in prison, including the ability to obtain advanced degrees at Israeli taxpayer expense, this ends up encouraging terror and murder. Whatever the morality of killing the terrorist on the spot, it does have the effect of deterring terrorism. As Kedar points out, in the Middle East, he "who succeeds in convincing his enemies that he is invincible and that they had better leave him alone for their own good, has a chance of achieving peace."

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SUNNI POLITICAL ISLAM: ENGINE OF THE 'ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN' CONFLICT

by Jonathan Spyer

With all due respect to those that insist that the current problem with the Muslims is not their religion but their political aspirations — and not denying that the Muslim movers and shakers do indeed plan to rule the world under sharia by utilizing politics, social acceptance and terrorism, among other means — Islam's domination of all other religions is an unshakable part of their religious tenets. It is also, as Jonathan Spyer, points out, significant in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where the "centrality of religion continued to fire the various movements fighting Israel. The very name "Fatah," for example, which is often — absurdly — described as a "secular" movement, is a religious term. "Fatah" is in Arabic a term literally meaning to "open," but is used in context to mean "to conquer a land for Islam. [...] [T]he core energy on the Arab side is one of religious rage — a feeling that the re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty in parts of the land formerly ruled by Muslims constitutes a crime against god."

It would seem to me that an outsider, unfamiliar with the history and geography of the conflict, is likely to side with the Arabs, because instinctively he knows true owners of land do not willingly give up their land. Thus Israel has weakened its irrefutable biblical, historic, legal and conquest claims to the land by promoting the secular and rational and offering to share the land, while downplaying the deep-rootedness of the love that Israelis, even secular Jews, have for their homeland.

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I'M GETTING TO KNOW MY MOTHER; IGNORANCE IS BLITZ; FLAMES; ONE MORE LAST THING; AND OTHER ESSAYS

by Moshe Saperstein

Rachel and Moshe Saperstein lived in Gush Katif in Gaza until the Israeli Government of Ariel Sharon unilaterally kicked them and another 10,000 productive and patriotic Jews out of their homes and greenhouses. One theory claimed that tightening the borders by cutting away Gaza would make defense more efficient. In point of fact it brought Hamas closer to Jewish population centers and gave them more room to train terrorists and assemble explosives. From reading the Saperstein essays over the years, we understand how this moronic displacement affected the involuntary participants. We know the struggle it has been not to sink into depression but continue to fight a recalcitrant and inefficient bureaucracy to regain permanent housing for members of the original Gush Katif community. Every so often we hear rumors that the politicians are prepared to kick the Jews out of Samaria and Judea and the eastern part of Jerusalem so the local Arabs can have their own state. One wonders how the politicians, who in ten years, have not yet completed the resettlement of the 10,000 members of Gush Katif community plan to handle some 800,000 new Jewish refugees.

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KAHANE ON THE PARSHA

by Barbara Ginsberg

On the road they have traveled these last seventy years, American Jews have come to a fork they had not anticipated. There was optimism after World War II. It was symbolized by the formation of the United Nations, which was founded on the belief that hostilities between countries could be talked out and negotiated. Wars weren't necessary to solve differences. Jews, too, since the end of second World War, have been optimistic. They have been more than comfortable as secular-appearing members of the liberal intellectual culture: sophisticated, open to all ideas, tolerant almost to excess, concluding from the Holocaust that they should take a low profile as Jews while passionately defending the human and civil rights of others.

Jews adored the idea that they could vote for an attractive, articulate black man as President. Unfortunately, Prez Obama didn't return their love. He was raised as a Muslim and had internalized the major goal of the Koran: make Islam supreme; all other religions are inferior, members of all other religions are dhimmis His antipathy was reinforced by his long-standing preference for socialism over democracy, a socialism that includes despising religion.

Right now Jews are at a place where the familiar road has stopped. The Liberals — now called Progressives — continue to deviate further and further towards the extreme Left. The old-fashioned benign liberal is considered quaint. To stay liberal means adopting Marxism, socialism, white-hate and Jew-hate, as well as becoming a partner to Muslim activists, who don't negotiate or tolerate. Otherwise, one must go to the Right, to the group still imagined by many as old-white-men, fossilized Republicans lacking a sense of humor and disliking Jews. But the Right, at least by a large majority, has abandoned Jew-hate, and does uphold the Jewish ethic that hard work and family values are the way to a happy and productive life. As more Jews realistically assess what their new political choices are, the writings of the prophetic Rabbi Meir Kahane become more appreciated. In this article, Barbara Ginsberg writes of the Rabbi's take on Israeli security.

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THOUGHTS OF AN IDF SOLDIER AFTER A MONTH IN THE WEST BANK

by Noga Gur-Arieh

Noga Gur-Arieh transmits some thoughts a reservist IDF soldier named Yoav shared with her. He spend a month in Samaria and Judea. What he found most troubling was the behavior of the journalists and "human rights" activists who "watch as Palestinians aggravate and interrupt the soldiers there, and when the soldiers finally respond, they turn their cameras on, making it seem as if the Israeli Defense Forces is all about war and conquest, and the Palestinians are weak and helpless." Often the media precipitate episodes of violence. A video such as
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2QoGtJwZH0&feature=youtu.be captures the sort of abuse the IDF soldiers are subjected to by Arab children who have learned from experience that they won't suffer harm by taunting the solders.

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JEFFREY GOLDBERG FINALLY GETS IT, THEN QUICKLY LOSES IT AGAIN

by Vic Rosenthal

Years of brilliant propaganda have demonized the Settler Movement. Yet most people would be hard put to explain rationally why they feel the Jews should not establish towns and communities in Samaria and Judea. There is indeed a logic behind it. A very simple one.

IF the Arabs are to succeed in taking over the Territories
THEN the Jews must be discouraged from living in Samaria-Judea.

HOW? Get the Jews out of the Territories by hook, by crook, by terror, by murder, by blandishment. Demonize the Jews. Lie. Lie. Lie. Demonize the settlers. Any and every Jewish settlement (a tainted word for a town or city located in Samaria and Judea) is evil. Never mention the illegal Arab settlements.

THE RESULT: Thanks to the major media and the UN/EU politicos conditioning the public, lots of Arab money and a quiescent Israeli government, the evil nature of the settlers has become an unshakable belief, resistant to facts and logic.

Vic Rosenthal shows how hollow this pernicious blather is. As context, he presents the limited reasoning of someone, Jeffrey Goldberg, who is much better informed about the facts than most. Goldberg agrees that eliminating the Jewish towns in the Territories would have little impact on creating peace between Arab and Jew. But he is still in favor of destroying the settler movement, because he hopes that eliminating the settlements may somehow eventually pacify the Arabs, or at least, not rouse them to more extreme violence.

Goldberg doesn't pursue his own logic. If freezing the Jewish settlements isn't the way to peace Then why bother recklessly and pointlessly destroying a culture that is productive and patriotic? Realistically, in giving up Samaria and Judea, we would only make it easier for the Arabs to carry out their avowed mission to destroy all of Israel.

If we put aside the belief that there is a magic way to make peace with Arabs that want to destroy the Jewish state, there is another matter to deal with. The Arabs declare that any state of theirs will not allow a single Jew to live there. And the Jews could happily live without the presence of uncivilized practitioners of the cult of death. Both sides want a separation. As Rosenthal says "In any divorce, one of the ex-spouses has to move out. Goldberg, like Obama and like other American and European diplomats, can't shake the idea that it should be the Jews — possibly because he thinks they can be more easily pushed around." But there is no reason for Israel to consent to this idiocy.

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RENAMING PLACES TO MAKE JEWS SEEM OCCUPIERS

by Richard H. Shulman

The usual reason for semantic cleansing — rebranding — is to downgrade a well-recognized name that has, for one reason or another, become tarnished. In this case, the New York Times has started calling Jewish holy places such as the Temple Mount and the Cave of the Patriarchs by their Arab names. Richard Shulman notes that the Times deliberately targets Jewish holy places. This had the dual effect of downplaying that the Temple Mount is the holiest site in Judaism and pretending that the site has been exclusively Muslim from time immemorial. Previously, they stopped using the name Judea. Perhaps they feared some Times readers might notice the obvious connection between Jew and Judea. The Times calls ancient Judea and ancient Samaria the West Bank, a name that came into being in 1948.

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POISONING THE WELL FROM WHICH OUR YOUTH DRINK

by Raheel Raza

Raza Raheel is a Canadian Muslim who speaks out against radical Islam. On the common Muslim gambit of playing the victim, she has said, "Let's get over this victim ideology that we, Muslims, are being persecuted." She has observed that "[t]he OIC have a powerful grip at the UN because their numbers are high and they have an unspoken agreement to stand up for each other, regardless of cause. So if the word "Sharia" is ever used in any resolution or speech and is connected to, for example, stoning of women, since Sharia is associated with the Muslim religion and is practiced in many Muslim countries, they will object and not allow that point to be documented." In this article, she examines one example of how salafist radicalization is inculcated.

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BUSTED: NEW YORK TIMES INVENTS BACKLASH AGAINST NEW YORK MUSLIMS

by Jack Engelhard

Jack Engelhard captures the ambience at the NY Times and its respect for truth and accuracy in this story of supposed backlash against Muslims that appeared in the Times on November 25, 2015. The headline informs us that day by day New York Muslims are growing ever more fearful for their lives - they fear retribution after the Paris massacre. Muslim self-defense organizations have all weighed in with predictions of doom and gloom and the mullahs have loudly worried about backlash — not about the monstrous crimes their fellow-Muslims have been committing. But how many of these hate crimes have been confirmed, or at least attached to a actual person? Two or possibly three separate women say they were spat upon by men who cursed and threatened. One woman wearing a hijab claims to have been deliberately tripped as she was rushing to an exam. In NYC, that's too ambiguous to count. That's a lot of brouhaha over a couple of minor incidents. Well, you can't blame the Times for dramatizing a whole lot of nothing'. It was a slow newsday. On the other hand, considering the Times won't tell the real stories of Muslim overt hostility to others and their attempts to take over NY campuses, it must be hard to fill a news sheet most of the time.

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MARTIN INDYK'S LEGACY REMEMBERED TODAY

by David Bedein

Martin Indyk claims to be a Jew but has been the tool of American presidents, from Clinton through Obama, who act as if they believe the claims of the so-called Palestinians. The pressure is always on Israel to make high-risk concessions. The simplest way to tag him is to know that he served on the board of the Israel-hating New Israel Fund. Moreover, as Executive Vice-President of the Brooking Institute, an influential think-tank, he accepted a $14.8 million dollar "donation" from Qatar, a top funder of Hamas. That was around the time he led the 2014 American-initiated peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs. Of course, he blamed Israel for his failure (see here and here.) In this article, David Bedein explains how "Indyk is one of the people who paved the way for Yassir Arafat and the PLO armed control to gain control over most of the Palestinian Arab population." Committed to the idea that Israel withdraw from territories, legitimately hers, that she got back in the 1967 Six Day War, "Indyk oversaw every step of the Oslo process with that precise policy in mind — Israel giving up land that is vital to her defense." Quel creep!

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THOMAS JEFFERSON AND RADICAL ISLAM'S WAR ON THE WEST

by David L. Hunter

Prez Obama has described Islam as having always been part of America, implying that Islam has helped strengthen America. David Hunter writes that it is true that as far back as Colonial times, we interacted with Muslims — mainly Muslim pirates who were capturing American cargo ships and selling American citizens into slavery. The US had no warships so it unhappily paid ransom until the increase in ugly incidents was deemed intolerable. Thanks to the grainy irritant of Islamic piracy, America began developing a pearl of a navy. So yes, if we tweak historical fact sufficiently, Obama's assertion is sort of true.

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IS THE WEST INDEBTED TO ISLAM?

by Mark Durie

It is often said that we should be grateful Islam kept Greek and Hindu intellectual accomplishments safe for the West during the "dark ages." Mark Durie sets the record straight. He points out that the Islamic conquest and "resulting Arab control of the Mediterranean, stunted scientific progress in Europe." Indeed, it was "Islam's disruption of Mediterranean civilization [that] ushered in the so-called European 'Dark Ages'." Islam didn't maintain contact between Eastern learning and the West; it destroyed it.

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THE OTTOMAN-GERMAN ATTACK ON THE SUEZ CANAL — 1915

from the Israel Daily Picture website

The Ottomans attacked British positions along the Suez Canal in January 2015 at the start of World War 1. These pictures are, for the most part, from the Ottoman Imperial Archives.

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HOW THE MUFTI OF JERUSALEM CREATED THE PERMANENT PROBLEM OF PALESTINIAN VIOLENCE

by Edy Cohen

Edy Cohen writes on Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, who was "a fervent anti-Semite, the most important Nazi collaborator in the Arab world, and a political activist who worked tirelessly for the ethnic cleansing and physical destruction of the Jews in Palestine and in the Middle East as a whole." His brazen lies — he claimed, for example, that the Jews wanted to conquer Muslim sites — incited the local Arabs and helped initiate riots and terror attacks, models of current-day terrorist tactics. The British response was to disregard their legal and moral duty to help the Jews settle their homeland. Instead they curtailed Jewish immigration. During WW2, the Mufti gathered troops to massacre the Jews in Palestine, a plan that, thanks to the British victory in North Africa in 1942, didn't come to fruition. He was more successful in recruiting Muslims to fight for Germany. "In the western Balkans, he raised three SS divisions composed of Bosnian and Albanian Muslims who participated in the killing of Jews in Croatia and Hungary," He blocked thousands of Jews from escaping from Europe to Palestine. Above all, he rejected peace with the Jews. His ideology lives on in the Arab world.

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ABOVE AND BEYOND

by Martha Hall Kelly

When the modern state of Israel came into being in 1948, its Arab neighbors immediately invaded it. The Jews had little weaponry, few trained fighters and no air force. Britain turned over its stock of weapons to Egypt and TransJordan before it vacated the region. Except for Czechoslovakia, the members of the United Nations — who had just voted for the formation of the Jewish State — embargoed the sale of military weapons to Israel. The Arabs had every reason to expect to have an easy time carrying out their declared mission: to push the Jews into the sea. Martha Hall Kelly writes about "Above and Beyond," a Paramount film shown at the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival. It tells the story of World War II aviators who cobbled together an air force from inadequate last-leg planes to prevent a second Holocaust. For additional information, look at the an hour-long documentary entitled A Wing And A Prayer. It was produced by Boaz Dvir and narrated by William Baldwin (Hawaii-Five-O, Backdraft). It is available here and here. It features firsthand accounts by the operation leader, Al Schwimmer, and some of the group of daring aviators he recruited.

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40TH ANNIVERSARY OF "ZIONISM IS RACISM": MOYNIHAN'S HISTORIC SPEECH

by UN Watch

The passing of Resolution 3379 at the United Nations on November 10, 1975 declaring that 'Zionism is Racism' was a significant event in the progressive demonization of Israel at the UN. The US Ambassador to the UN, Patrick Moynihan, denounced the resolution the same day. He observed that it was an outrageous act on the part of a number of countries "and thereafter, the outrageous thing having been done, to profess themselves outraged by those who have the temerity to point it out, and subsequently to declare themselves innocent of any wrong-doing in consequence of its having been brought about wholly in reaction to the 'insufferable' acts of those who pointed the wrong-doing out in the first place." What a great description of what has since become commonplace: the tendency of Arab leaders to declare themselves victims of the outrageous terror acts that they themselves have perpetrated. The worrisome thing to them is not the act of terror but the possibility of backlash against the perpetrators and abettors of the acts of terror.

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NUTS AND BOLTS OF THE IRAN DEAL: IS IT REALLY BAD?

by Daniel Grynglas

Daniel Grynglas points out that we sent two American amateurs against first class bluffers and tricksters. What else could we expect but an Iranian win? The Americans were charged with coming home with a deal, any deal; the other negotiating countries were eager to partake of the billions Iran would acquire when it agreed to a deal.The eagerness of the P5+1 negotiators was a weakness that Iran knew how to exploit. And. in the face of the P5+1 very many bargaining chips, it did so successfully. Grynglas provides a list of the main provisions, referencing the pertinent clauses in the JCPOA document. He points out treaty defects, including some large legal loopholes; the built-in ability for Iran to drag out the time between when inspection is requested and when (and if) it happens; and how easy it will be for Iran to hide evidence of illegal nuclear activity. As he says, "This agreement is full of loopholes and gives Iran more-than-ample opportunity to cheat." There is also the serious problem of what's omitted: "...the agreement includes a very long list of various individuals, companies, transportation units, and entities related to the sanction regimen," but only a few of the ~70 known nuclear sites are named; so the agreement may easily become a focal point of contention and/or the basis of an Iranian argument that only these sites can be inspected. The ingenuity and skill shown by the Iranian negotiators is now being matched by the misleading and mendacious arguments the Obama administration is using to convince the US to accept a deal that will allow Iran to become an nuclear power unrestrained by moral inhibitions.

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FACTS AND FANTASIES ABOUT THE IRAN NUCLEAR DEAL, FROM SEVERAL SOURCES

by Richard H. Shulman

Richard H. Shulman explores the actuality of the terms of the Iran nuclear deal and the likely consequences of the treaty stipulations that are praised by the pro-deal news media. The writings of The New York Times writer, Richard Cohen, illustrates what's wrong with much of the pro-treaty arguments: pro-treaty writers are prone to wishful thinking instead of assessing the treaty realistically. Lacking sensible arguments, they resort to denigrating those who question the theory, and they invent fantasies that endorse the empowerment of a rogue country. Afraid to examine the consequences of accepting this ill-designed document, they assert that non-acceptance will lead to war. As Shulman points out, Iran has already declared war on us. The issue for us is how best to fight it, rather than to deny what's going on. Shulman also references several anti-deal writers, who have made important observations that can be summed up this way: the treaty appears to have ways to handle cheating and flouting the terms of agreement, but, realistically, other transactions such as Russia's agreeing to sell Iran an anti-missile system already nullify some of the ways the treaty plans to handle non-compliance. Shulman concludes, "Every alleged restriction, if not already removed from negotiations, has a major loophole." The treaty is a fraud. A dangerous fraud.

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THE IRAN NUCLEAR AGREEMENT KEY SHORTCOMINGS

by House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Chairman: Ed Royce

This summary of the elements of the Iran Nuclear Agreement was produced by the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. The Committee has held two dozen hearings since 1913 and continues to do so. This paper highlights major shortcomings of the treaty, whether one invokes the standards Obama's own former advisors would use or the standards implicit in the terms of the treaty itself.

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SURRENDER IN VIENNA: THE FALSE ASSUMPTIONS OF THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION

by Allan Myer

The Israel Project's The Tower has published an excellent briefing entitled "Surrender in Vienna: Why We Need A Better Nuclear Deal With Iran. (ISBN: 978-1-943842-05-6; see here.). It discusses Iran's destabilizing drive for regional hegemony and the danger Iran poses worldwide, given the agreement's weaknesses that allow the continuation of nuclear development, the removal of sanctions and a weak inspection protocol. It may be downloaded as a PDF document. This article by Allan Myer serves as the introduction to the set of articles. As Ben Cohen wrote in the Preface:

Allan Myer asks the pertinent question: "Does the President's conclusion match up to the world as it is, or is the conclusion based on series of profoundly false assumptions?" Regrettably, and despite President Obama's insistence that the agreement with Iran is grounded on empirical verification rather than plain trust, the assumptions of the current administration concerning Iran and its future behavior have, as Myer asserts, created an outcome whereby research on advanced centrifuges is permitted and, at the same time, the bans on Iranian weapons imports and ballistic missile programs are removed. All in all, this provides "a significant boost to the legitimacy of a regime with a truly despicable human rights record."

Obama assumes that Iran, a major sponsor of terrorist activities in the Middle East, Europe and America, will be a stabilizing influence in the Middle East. He apparently believes the terms of this agreement will circumvent cheating. Unfortunately, these assumptions are contradicted by Iran's past interactions with other countries in the Middle East, by its sorry history of cheating, by its high-handed reinterpretations of contractual obligations, by its lack of cooperation and by its linking its pursuit of nuclear power to its profound hatred of America and Israel. These unrealistic assumptions constitute a shaky foundation to base an agreement that will have major influence on the restructuring of the Middle East. Any agreement based on them will soon show itself to have no way of restraining Iran in its bid for global domination.

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OBAMA'S GAMBLE WITH IRAN'S THEOCRATIC REGIME

by Robert D. Onley

Robert D. Onley writes that "Obama's Iran deal is a direct manifestation of the President's fundamentally misguided worldview, one that wishes away danger and then believes in the wishes." No amount of tweaking will fix its structural unsoundness. Onley suggests that "President Obama's willingness to concede Iran's new-found normalized membership in the community of nations on the basis of this nuclear deal is an affront to the liberal, free, democratic principles that have stood against the forces of tyranny throughout American history." It may also be unconstitutional. "By seeking approval of the deal under the UN Security Council, President Obama has bound the United States under international law without Senate consent [and] ... the Iran deal may directly conflict with U.S. obligations as a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). As a number of critics have pointed out, the Iran deal may be unconstitutional, violate international law and feature commitments that President Obama could not otherwise lawfully make." These are reasonable grounds for halting the precipitous acceptance of the Iran Nuclear Deal in its present state.

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IRAN PUBLISHES BOOK ON HOW TO OUTWIT US AND DESTROY ISRAEL

by Amir Taheri

To put the best face on the American President's encouragement of a nuclear Iran, it has been said that what Prez Obama wants from Iran is not a non-nuclear Iran. He is willing to settle for a much less ambitious result, detente, a lessening of hostile relations between Iran and much of the rest of the world. It is most unlikely that even this can be achieved. This article by Amir Taheri gives us insight into Iran's attitude toward peaceful coexistence with any non-Muslim country once ruled by Muslims. Iran's Ayatollah Khameni has just published a book in which he directs specific hatred towards Israel because "it is a loyal 'ally of the American Great Satan' and a key element in its 'evil scheme' to dominate 'the heartland of the Ummah.'" Here and elsewhere, Iran's leaders have often publicly stated they have no intention of foregoing terrorism and belligerency and complying with the terms of the Iranian nuclear deal.

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IF THE IAEA INSPECTED RESTAURANTS WE'D ALL GET FOOD POISONING!

by Dr. Robin McFee

Robin McFee juxtaposes the scrupulous care with which restaurants are monitored with the sloppy and inadequate way the IAEA will verify activity at suspected nuclear sites. The article makes a humorous comparison about a deadly situation, namely, that Iran is in control, one way or another, of how its nuclear sites are inspected and its conformity to treaty regulations verified. To reduce the problem to its simplest terms, Iran will decide what facilities the IAEA can visit. If allowed, IAEA inspectors have to request permission to visit and the time to the actual inspection can be creatively stretched out long enough to allow even union labor to dismantle a nuclear facility. In many cases, IAEA inspectors are not allowed direct access. Iranian technicians will take the soil samples that determine what type of nuclear activity has been going on. This has been likened to accepting a urine sample brought in from the outside by a person suspected of illegal drug use. To add insult to injury, the US — even though Obama is the biggest promoter of the Iran Deal — has no control on verifying whether Iran is working on nuclear weaponry. The procedure is laid down in a 'secret' side agreement between Iran and the IAEA.

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THE "IRAN NUKE DEAL:" ANOTHER UNREAD BESTSELLER — AND WITH ALL THE "USUAL" SCARY PARTS

by Daniel Gallington

Whatever agencies will be in charge of dealing with Iran if, or more likely when, it breaks its promises, will find it almost impossible to enforce the agreement. Definitions are poorly spelled out. Actual procedures are as vague as reassurances are optimistic. Already, the elastic has gone out of 'Snapback', whereby sanctions were to be automatically restored, should Iran violate the Deal. Secretary Kerry stated, "The arms embargo is not tied to snapback." His mind may have been on the slippery means by which the diplomats were able to take such a crucial enforcement tool off the table without collapsing the deal, for he continued, "It is tied to a separate set of obligations. So they are not in material breach of the nuclear agreement for violating the arms piece of it," (August 11, 2015, see here).

As usual, every bitter grain of reality is coated with honeyed reassurances. In this case, Kerry reassured us that the P5+1 has "ample tools at our disposal" should Iran try to send weapons to Hezbollah or to the Shia militia in Iraq. But these alternatives to sanctions are unspecified and the protocols for invoking them are unwritten. Realistically, once sanctions, the major enforcement tool, are removed, they will never be reinstated, making it more difficult to prevent or punish Iran for abrogating any part of the deal at will. The greater amount of enforcement activity will be dissipated in determining whether any particular incident is worth the effort of proving it is anti-agreement and then determining how to enforce the rules, such as they are. And meantime, Iran works on.

Gallington writes of his concern that nothing we do will have any effect on Iran's covert program to build nukes. For several reasons, enforcement is almost impossible. As he points out, "It's virtually impossible to separate a 'peaceful' nuclear energy program from one intended to produce material to make nuclear weapons. This is because perhaps 95 percent of the 'nuclear fuel cycle' pertains to both programs, and so most of the 'dirty work', i.e., the secret weapon building part, happens at the very end of a so-called 'peaceful nuclear program'."

Then too, because an agreement is written in several languages, inevitably there are subtle changes in the meaning, context and usage of words between versions, so an agreement, especially one drawn up by politicians, is often sufficiently ambiguous that it becomes grounds for bickering and indecision rather than for action. Add to this the "side agreements' and 'secret protocols' that might contradict or nullify the guidelines for verification in the Deal, making it uncertain when enforcement is required.

Initiating enforcement implies that the authorities have verified that there is illegal nuclear activity. In what is a grotesque division of labor, the terms under which the IAEA (the agency to verify Iran's compliance or lack of compliance) operates are in a secret agreement separate and independent of the Iran Nuclear Deal and inaccessible to the P5+1 countries. What we do know is that the IAEA has already abdicated its role, letting Iran control access to nuclear sites and procedures for obtaining evidence.

Gallington emphasizes that committing a rogue country to a set of laws is counterproductive. The agreement acts to shield countries such as Iran while they do whatever they want. At most, this deal slows down Iran's nuclear program for a while, assuming that she does not yet have the bomb. But the amount of slowdown time is uncertain. Even if Iran still does not have nuclear weaponry, the promise by the negotiating countries to use their experience and technology to help Iran acquire the skills to make a bomb nullifies the assertion that Iran won't break out a bomb for some eight years. As Alan Dershowitz has pointed out, "The devil is not so much in the details as in the broad outlines of this deal and its understanding by the parties," (here) It's not a question of more or less. The whole approach of defining the borders of Iran's nuclear estate is wrong. Iran is a terrorist state and shouldn't have any such property.

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IAEA TELLS CONGRESSMEN OF TWO SECRET SIDE DEALS TO IRAN AGREEMENT THAT WON'T BE SHARED WITH CONGRESS

by Fred Fleitz

There are two side deals that are independent of the Iran Nuclear Agreement. They are separate agreements between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), who do inspection and verification. Fred Fleitz writes that "[o]ne of these side deals concerns inspection of the Parchin military base, where Iran reportedly has conducted explosive testing related to nuclear-warhead development... The other secret side deal concerns how the IAEA and Iran will resolve outstanding issues on possible military dimensions (PMDs) of Iran's nuclear program."

Senator Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) and Congressmen Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.) had discovered these side agreements when they met with IAEA officials in Vienna. Their press release points out that "Both arrangements will not be vetted by any organization other than Iran and the IAEA, and will not be released even to the nations that negotiated the JCPOA [Iran nuclear agreement]."

In a word, these side deals were designated as secret, and are not accessible to the US. This means that knowing there is adequate compliance, rigorous verification, and timely enforcement depend primarily on accepting the conclusions issued by the IAEA, but we have no information on how they will carry out inspections and/or whether they succumbed to political pressures. Talk about buying a naked pig in a shielded poke! It doesn't require knowledge of nuclear science to deduce that the negotiators knew that the inspection protocols, which are crucial to serious monitoring of Iran's nuclear program, were likely inadequate. Iran has often controlled the negotiations by stubborn refusals or arrogant demands, putting progress on hold. Were verification adequate, the verification protocols would be proudly displayed in the Deal document. Instead, they were cleverly taken off the table so that methodology would not be subject to questioning by Congress or the American public.

As Fleitz points out, "This means that two crucial measures of Iranian compliance with the nuclear agreement will not be disclosed to Congress despite the requirements of the Corker-Cardin bill (the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act), which requires the Obama administration to provide the U.S. Congress with all documents associated with the agreement, including all "annexes, appendices, codicils, side agreements [emphasis added], implementing materials, documents, and guidance, technical, or other understandings and any related agreements, whether entered into or implemented prior to the agreement or to be entered into or implemented in the future."

We might also ask: what else is being kept secret?

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IRAN: NO IAEA INSPECTORS WERE PRESENT AT SUSPECT MILITARY BASE WHEN WE COLLECTED SAMPLES

by Patrick Goodenough

Without rigorous verification, there is no way to know whether Iran is complying with the terms of the Iran Nuclear Deal (IND). A major weakness of the IND is that the verification procedures are not part of IND. They are part of secret contractual arrangements between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Essentially then, we have to trust IAEA's verification procedures; we have to trust that IAEA is trustworthy.

We had already discovered that IAEA inspectors can not simply walk into any Iranian site at any time. They have to request permission and the entire process can take months. We had already learned that Iran has refused to let IAEA into military sites. Now there is more news.

Patrick Goodenough writes about the mid-September 2015 IAEA inspection of Iran's base at Parchin. Parchin has been a particular site of interest to the IAEA, which has tried to inspect there since 2005. It is more urgent now because there is evidence that Iran has recently been sanitizing the place. Iran appeared to capitulate and the site was finally inspected. Now we learn that "Atomic Energy Organization of Iran spokesman Behruz Kamalvandi told the IRNA state news agency Monday [September 21, 2015] that Iranian experts had collected the samples 'in the absence of the inspectors affiliated to the International Atomic Energy Agency,' before the samples were handed over to IAEA officials."

Well, that certainly tells us how much we can trust the procedures that verify Iranian compliance with the terms of the Iran Nuclear Deal. Immediately afterwards, we learned from IAEA chief Yukiya Amano how much we can trust IAEA in general. Amano insisted the "the process was carried out under our responsibility and monitoring." Certainly it was the IAEA's responsibility. But even allowing Iranian technicians to participate let alone collect the samples seems an odd way for the IAEA to monitor sample collection.

The IAEA is in the process of collecting information on allegations that Iran had been trying to developing atomic weapon capability. Its report is due mid-October, with a final report due December 2015. Care to take a guess what their findings will be?

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THE IRAN DEAL, EXPLAINED

by Noah Pollak

When Truth Revolt reprinted Noah Pollak's article (see here), they wrote: "In a news conference (Wash Post, July 15, 2015), President Obama touted the Iran nuclear deal as a 'powerful display of American leadership and diplomacy' that shows 'what we can accomplish when we lead from a position of strength and a position of principle.' So what exactly did we 'accomplish'? To answer that question, Noah Pollak has provided a devastating 'balance sheet' that 'cut[s] through the rhetoric surrounding the Iran deal' by listing in 'simple and non-technical' terms what we get out of the Iran deal versus what the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism gets. The reader is free to make up his own mind about the merits of the deal and the extent to which it advances U.S. interests and U.S. security, and that of our allies,' writes Pollak, but as he implies, it's hard to imagine how anyone can look at the actual terms of the deal and not agree with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that this is a 'stunning historic mistake.'" (see here.)

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IRAN WINS, WE LOSE

by Herbert London

Herbert London writes that the Iranian leadership had four objectives when negotiating with P5+1. They wanted to continue their nuclear projects, including work on a nuclear bomb; they wanted sanctions removed; they wanted their criminal record — anti-Iran resolutions by the Security Council — deleted and the nuclear record expunged. They were completely successful. As London writes: "What this agreement has done from Rohani's point of view is legitimate Iran as a nuclear power, ignoring its role as the leading state sponsor of terror and a nation responsible for the death of at least 1000 Americans. No wonder Iran celebrates. This agreement is a victory the Shia have sought for 1400 years since the split with the Sunni majority."

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SYRIA AND TURKEY — A HISTORY OF A COMPLEX RELATIONSHIP

by Euronews Staff

This article by Euronews Staff focuses on the changing relations over time between Turkey and both Syria and Isis. Turkey and its neighbor, Syria, have had good and bad relations over many years. The situation has been more complicated since the rise of Isis. When Isis has behaved itself in its dealing with Turkey, Turkey has focused on its chronic disagreements with Syria. When ISIS has forced a confrontation, Turkey has focused on fighting ISIS. In general, they are allies, even though ISIS is fighting Iran, with whom Turkey does deals.

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SYRIA'S NEW DIPLOMACY

by Jonathan Spyer

Jonathan Spyer explains how what was initially a civil war in Syria has splintered into multiple independent conflicts, involving Sunni Arab rebels, the Kurds, IS, and Turkey. Spyer makes an important point about these separate wars being fought inside Syria. "So even if Assad's declining fortunes were to lead to his departing the scene, the war for Syria's succession, and the suffering of its inhabitants, would almost certainly not be at an end."

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WHAT TURKEY WANTS IN SYRIA

by Burak Bekdil

Currently, Turkey has joined the West's fight against ISIS in Syria. Aside from this giving Turkey an opportunity to hit at the Kurds, as Burak Bekdil writes, Turkey has emphasized that it wants to install a moderate group when it clears the area of ISIS. It has suggested the Free Syrian Army (FSA), a group that doesn't have the ability to fight IS or Syria. Moreover, the FSA, once touted as a democratic group seeking civil rights in Syria, has been shown to be just as prone to practices such as recruiting children as soldiers as any Salafist terror gang. Bekdil suggests Turkey's actual objective is to find a new safe home for the Sunni Salafist Muslim Brotherhood, a group that both Turkey and the Obama administration like, encourage and shelter.

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OBAMA STRIKES AGAIN

by Caroline Glick

Caroline Glick provides the major highlights of what Turkey is doing in Syria. She emphasizes the important point that under the guise of cooperating with Western forces in fighting ISIS, Turkey devotes most of its effort to killing Kurds. "As for that 'safe area' in northern Syria, as the Kurds see it, Erdogan will use it to destroy Kurdish autonomy. He will flood the zone with Syrian Arab refugees who fled to Turkey, to dilute the Kurdish majority. And he will secure coalition support for the Sunni Arab militias - including those still affiliated with al-Qaida - which will be permitted by NATO to operate openly in the safe area." This is being done with Obama's concurrence and in a most sanctimonious manner. Obama could do no better.

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THE RISE OF THE 'IRAN LOBBY': TEHRAN'S FRONT GROUPS MOVE ON — AND INTO — THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION

by Clare M. Lopez

This article by Clare Lopez on the Iran Lobby was written in 2009. As Lopez noted in a more recent article (see here), the 2009 article "was offered as a warning about the constellation of forces that was just then moving into power positions from which to influence U.S. foreign policy in ways supportive of the Tehran regime's objectives."

There have been some changes in personnel and group names and people have changed jobs if not ideology. The Campaign for a New American Policy for Iran (CNAPI) website no longer exists. Sahar Nowrouzzadeh had left her job at NIAC but didn't leave her ideology behind when she become Director for Iran for America's National Security Council. Joseph Cirincione directs Ploughshares.com, a site that, with a tone of sweet reasonableness, urges the West to forgo military action and try diplomacy, chiding the U.S. as if we were unreasonable to worry that it isn't safe to give the bomb to a country whose salafist leaders can't stop blurting out their hatred of the US and Israel. WND's Aaron Klein (November 15, 2014. see here) notes that Ploughshares "has also partnered with a who's who of the radical left, including Code Pink, the pro-Palestinian J Street, United for Peace & Justice, the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation and the Demos progressive group, where Obama's former green jobs czar, Van Jones, serves on the board." In December, 2012, former CNAPI experts, James Dobbins and Amb. Thomas Pickering, were among those that signed an open letter suggesting that easing sanctions would have a greater influence on Iran's "willingness to modify its nuclear program and to cooperate in verifying those modifications" than if we demand more ambitious objectives such as "capitulation to all U.S. demands or regime change." They needed not have worried. The Deal gives Iran sanction easement and a lot more. At no cost. In fact, As David Rutz July, 7, 2015, see here.) pointed out, "On issue after issue over a potential nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration has caved... U.S. has fallen short, misled or simply kowtowed on sanctions, uranium enrichment, Iran's breakout capacity, whether Iran could be a good actor and more."

New avenues of projecting how cooperative Iran has been have opened up. The social media have expanded. Tweeting and its clones have proven ideal media for communicating with the attention-handicapped: one can assert a "factoid" without the need to back it up with facts. The Huffington Post just launched an Arabic Edition. It will be managed by Anas Fouda and Wadah Khanfar, both from al-Jazeera, which supports the Muslim Brotherhood. And academics that hate Israel and democracy have become bolder in disseminating their ideology.

But basically, Lopez's excellent reference article on the people and groups who toil to carry out Iran's Mullahs bidding, without balking at anything the Mullahs do, remains fresh and useful.

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TRAITOR SENATORS TOOK MONEY FROM IRAN LOBBY, BACK IRAN NUKES

by Daniel Greenfield

IAPAC is a pro-Iran lobby group which clearly had AIPAC on the brain when it came time to name itself. Daniel Greenfield names US senators that have accepted donations from the Iranian American Political Action Committee (IAPAC) and are for the Iran Nuclear Deal. It is ironic that one of them, Senator Markey, wants to tighten control of gun ownership to "address the plague of gun violence" but is voting for a deal with Iran — a major money-source for international terrorism and a known cheat — that will allow her much more pernicious weaponry in a few years. In addition to other senators that had a conflict of interest, Secretary-of-State Kerry and Vice-President Biden, both of whom are involved in the Iran nuclear deal, have taken money from IAPAC. As Greenfield points out, "While the so-called 'Israel Lobby' is constantly scrutinized, the fact that key foreign policy positions under Obama are controlled by political figures with troubling ties to an enemy of this country has gone mostly unreported by the mainstream media."

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SURPRISE! THE STATES CAN REJECT THE IRAN DEAL

by Joel B Pollak

Joel Pollak writes about states rights. He notes that " States and local governments do not play much of a role in foreign policy. However, they cannot be forced to implement an international treaty or agreement that is not self-executing—i.e. one whose implementation requires new congressional laws." And they are in control of who bids on state contracts. Moreover, " 30 states have passed divestment laws, roughly a dozen have passed contracting restrictions, and some have passed supplemental legislation, such as a 2012 law passed in California that applies to the state's insurance industry." These forbid "pension funds and contractors from providing economic benefits to Iranian companies and the Iranian regime." As Pollak points out, "That leaves great power in the states' hands to trigger the deal's collapse—or force Obama to re-negotiate."

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LOOKING BEYOND STRATEGY AT THE STILL-HIDDEN FLAWS IN IRAN DEAL.

by Louis René Beres

The nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), to which the U.S. is a party, is legal under the Constitution. It explicitly "obligates its nuclear-weapon State Parties '...not in any way to assist, encourage, or induce any non-nuclear-weapon State to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices, or control over such weapons or explosive devices'." As Louis Beres points out, this means that JCPOA is in violation of Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution, commonly known as the Supremacy Clause. JCPOA is also in violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention, which "criminalizes not only genocide per se, but also 'conspiracy to commit genocide,' and 'direct and public incitement to commit genocide.'"

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THE IRAN NUCLEAR DEAL'S FALLOUT ON THE UNITED NATIONS

Salomon Benzimra

The deal was between members of the Security Council of the United Nations( UNSC) plus Germany and Iran. Salomon Benzimra writes of problems the JCPOA makes for the United Nations because the JCPOA would negate several UNSC resolutions currently in effect that call on UN members to punish acts of terrorism. The UN Charter states, "All Members shall refrain...from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state..." (Art. 2[4])" but the Iranian mullahs rant against Israel and declare they will destroy her. As Benzimra points out, "it is worrisome that the major world powers, led by the U.S. administration, have concocted the lame JCPOA agreement which, beyond all its flaws, casts a serious doubt — by commission and omission — on whatever credibility the United Nations still has as an international institution designed to preserve world peace and fair relations between its member states.

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WILL THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION IMPLEMENT THE STRINGENT SANCTIONS AUTHORIZED UNDER THE IRAN AGREEMENT?

by Patrick CLawson

Patric Clawson writes about Iran's banking structure and how the JCPOA might impact them, impeding normal trade. He discusses how sanctions would impact Iran's banking practices in several areas: "sanctioning foreign banks involved in Iran trade, supporting seizure of Iranian assets, highlighting the risks from Iranian deceptive financial practices, and maintaining regulatory pressure." As an example, private U.S. lawyers and plaintiffs have to date seized some $46 billion of Iranian assets because of Iranian support of terrorist attacks against specific Americans. Because regulator pressure has been maintained, many major international banks have suffered "billions of dollars in fines for sanctions violations or actions including improper handling of mortgages and manipulating interest rates and foreign exchange rates." Clawson concludes, "Even if the Obama team does little to retain the pressure on foreign financial institutions, the next U.S. administration could decide to be more proactive. Much could be done within the framework of the JCPOA because Washington has only pledged to take extremely modest steps. The failure of the Obama administration to clarify the meaning of various provisions — which on their face appear to provide much sanctions relief but on close reading suggest that need not be the case — has fed the critics' skepticism about what the Obama team plans to do."

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THE POLITICAL NATURE OF TODAY'S MIDDLE EAST STUDIES

by Andrew C. McCarthy

Andrew McCarthy writes about Edward Said, a major corrupter of an entire area of academic study: Middle East studies. He eventually tainted sister department such as linguistics and political science in many universities. His method of attack was simple. He decreed that Westerners could not understand the Middle East and, even more damaging, they were only interested in justifying colonialism. "The point of pursuing knowledge about 'the languages, culture, history, and sociology of societies of the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent,'" Said elaborated, "was to gain more control over the 'subject races' by making 'their management easy and profitable.'" He buffaloed otherwise intelligent academics into accepting this nonsense. He helped make "modern Middle East studies .. a political movement aligning leftism and Islamism under the guise of an academic discipline." This included demonizing Jews and accepting the myth that there existed a Palestinian people whose land was occupied by Israel.

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THE MYTH OF SUSIYA

by Elder of Ziyon

The Arabs and their geographically-challenged media cohort claim that the Arab village of Susiya has been there for centuries and the authorities had no right to expel the villagers from their homes. There indeed was an ancient town of Susiya, but it was Jewish and is now an archeological site. Some Arabs, who actually live in Yatta in the Palestinian Authority sector, in recent years and illegally put up some structures in Susiya as part of a land grab funded by the European Union. The Supreme Court heard the case and ordered demolition. The pro-Arab press and Western diplomats howled in outrage.

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AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL'S ISLAMIST PROBLEM CONTINUES, SENIOR FIGURE ACCUSED OF MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD LINK

by Donna Rachel Edmunds

Donna Rachel Edmunds writes about the hitherto-denied connection between a senior Amnesty International (AI) official and the Muslim Brotherhood. AI said: "Amnesty International does, however, take very seriously any allegations that would call into question our impartiality and is therefore investigating the issues raised." Peter Kolding, a reader of the original article, pointed out an ironic inconsistency; he wrote: "Let's just understand this: An organization accused of partiality, and with a grotesque record of malice, lies and contempt for democracy and the sovereignty of nations, will be investigating its own impartiality."

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BOSTON UNIVERSITY PROF BLAMES U.S. FOR ISLAMIC STATE SEX SLAVERY

by Robert Spencer

In this article, Robert Spencer dismembers Kecia Ali's defense of Muslim sex-slavery. In a recent article, she wrote, "In focusing on current abuses in the Middle East, perpetrated by those claiming the mantle of Islam, Americans — whose Constitution continues to permit enslavement as punishment for crime — deflect attention from partial U.S. for the current crisis in Iraq." Spencer retorts, "See, the Islamic State doesn't practice sex slavery because it is sanctioned in the Qur'an and Sunnah, but because the U.S. did bad things in Iraq. This is what passes for analysis on most university campuses these days."

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IRAN, HEZBOLLAH ALSO RESPONSIBLE FOR 9/11, RULES FEDERAL JUDGE

by Janice Kephart

Clever pro-Iranian media suggest Iran is all talk, no do. It rants. It says outrageous things. But what has Iran actually done? Hmn? Of course, this works best when written for the ignorant, the readers of the New York Times, for example, an audience that happily ignores that Iran has done both Hezbollah — and at the moment — Hamas proud. Their weapons storehouses are stocked to the brim. Their training camps are full. True, Iran's beleaguered client, Assad of Syria, has his hands full staying alive despite Iran's prodigious help. So, under the radar of that civil war, Iran has been directly attacking the Jews who live on the Golan Heights (See Benjamin Korn, here). More generally, Iran has been attacking Western countries directly and outside of the Middle East for sometime now. It was a major contributor to the 9/11 attack. Janice Kephart writes about "the case of Fiona Havlish, et al v. Usama Bin Laden, et al, 03-CV-9848 (GBD) and is part of the consolidated proceeding In Re Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001, Civil Action No. 03 MDL 1570 (GBD)." Based on the "preponderance of the evidence", the Islamic Republic of Iran and its offshoot, Hezbollah, were indicted by a US judge of "providing material support" for the 9/11 attack on the USA. Iran began planning 9/11 in the mid 1980s, when it set up a terrorist task force to plan "unconventional attacks." But this has received little publicity.

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ISLAMOPHOBIA: FACT OR FICTION?

by Denis MacEoin

There are relatively few hate crimes committed against Muslims. As a group, they are more likely to commit hate crimes than be victimized by them. Yet, being labeled an Islamophob is beginning to have serious consequences. Muslims allow no criticism of Islam and are seeking to criminalize 'Islamophobic' speech and writing. Should that happen, the fact that the text is completely factual will be no excuse; it will still be treated as a criminal offense. Denis MacEoin explores some of the background of a ploy that threatens to restrict Western freedom of speech.

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THE ANTI-HISTORY THAT SUSTAINS ANTI-ZIONISM.

by Paul Merkley

In recent years, the mainline Protestant churches — joined by the niche Quakers and Mennonites — have wholeheartedly subscribed to the political BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) campaign intended to destroy Israel. Simultaneously, ignoring history, Bible and cultural differences, their theology now asserts that it is not the Jews but the Palestinian Arabs, a 'people' that, in 1964, sprung full-grown and in an instant from Yasir Arafat's brow, that are the ancient Israelites. Paul Merkley writes of this bizarre inversion of factual history. There is one other notable correlation with the churches adopting this Arabian counter-history. As Merkley pointed out previously (here), the United Churches of Christ "has lost approximately 300,000 members (about 20% of its membership) since 2005, the year when its convention passed its first divestment resolution." Indeed, the rate at which the Methodist, Episcopal and Lutheran churches have also lost members makes the designation "Mainline Protestantism" questionable.

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WHY WAS A NAZI FLAG FLYING FROM A JERUSALEM HOTEL IN THE 1930S?

by Lenny Ben David

Lenny Ben David presents historic pictures of the Fast Hotel near the Jaffa Gate. It served kosher food but its owners were Protestants, members of a community of German Templars in Jerusalem. And in 1933, it housed the German Consulate, complete with Nazi flag. The hotel lasted longer than the Nazis, but it too is now gone.

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FEATURED STORIES

THE FEAR OF VIOLATING AN OATH WAS OVERTURNED: THE SAN REMO CONFERENCE 95 YEARS AGO

Menahem Rahat

The establishment of many of the Middle East countries was determined at a League of Nations congress at San Remo some ninety-five years ago. There, the international community gave the Jewish people an irrevocable trust to its ancient land, with the assurance that it would eventually create a Jewish State. Yet few Israelis know of the Conference, and successive administrations, in their quest for peace with recalcitrant neighbors, seldom allude to it. Menahem Rahat explores its power to wipe out Jewish uneasiness at renewing ownership of its land and encouraging its rebirth.

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SHOULD JEWS RECLAIM THE WORDS "PALESTINE" AND "PALESTINIAN"?

by Richard Mather

As Richard Mather points out, "the postmodern notion of a deep-rooted Arab Palestinian culture is a sham." The myth-makers assert that the local Arabs in Israel and its territories are a people who have been there since time immemorial. Mather presents some pertinent facts that contradict the Arab fantasy and make clear the "Palestinian people" has no coherency and is mainly a cludge of Arabs coming from Syria, Egypt and other parts of the Arab world. The land had a meager population for centuries. In the entire area, there was a little over a quarter of a million non-Jews in 1800 and a little less than half million in 1890. Then, the population rose began to rise more rapidly, not coincidentally just when the Jews, coming from Europe to redeem their land, creating economic opportunities for Arabs coming in from neighboring land.

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SAN REMO: THE FORGOTTEN MILESTONE

by Salomon Benzimra

Salomon Benzimra points out the significance of the Sam Remo Conference. For one, "for the first time in history, Palestine became a legal and political entity." The so-called Palestinian people — the local Arabs in Israel and the Territories — had never had a state or sovereignty. Also, the "de jure sovereignty of Palestine was vested in the Jewish people." The San Remo conference was, as Benzimra notes,"a major historical milestone," yet in recent time, the irrevocable grant of sovereignty over the Land of Israel by the Jewish people made by the international community has hardly been mentioned, thus allowing nonsensical claims that the Jews were illegally occupying the land to be taken seriously [emphasis added].

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ISRAEL NEEDS TO STOP ARGUING THE PALESTINIANS' CASE AND START ARGUING ITS OWN

by Evelyn Gordon

Evelyn Gordon writes an article that shouldn't have to be written. As the title says, it's time Israel stopped acting as unofficial spokesmen pleading the Palestinian cause. With all its savvy in medicine and technology, one would think she could come up with some intelligent way to talk to the world and tell it about the irrevocable right of the Children of Israel to the Land of Israel.

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FORWARD TO EXTINCTION

by Tabitha Koral

Tabitha Koral writes of a subspecies of Jew bred by the centuries in which Jews lacked a sovereign country and often lived as dhimmis. Taking on the attitudes of those that despised them, these Jewish turncoats promote any action that will weaken Israel. Korol writes specifically of Jay Michaelson, contributing editor to the Forward, who advocates giving up Jewish land to the Arabs for a spurious peace.

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ISIS IS THE FOURTH REICH

by V.S. Naipaul

The Dail Mail UK, the original publishers of this article by V.S. Naipaul wrote, "A long-term critic of Islam as a global threat, he [Naipaul] also challenges those who say the extremists have nothing to do with the real religion of Islam..." Change ISIS to SALAFISTS and Naipaul's article might appear even 50 years from now as an excellent summary of our present day conflict.

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THE TERROR STRATEGIST: SECRET FILES REVEAL THE STRUCTURE OF ISLAMIC STATE

by Christoph Reuter

According to documents accessed by Der Spiegel, Haji Bakr was the Islamic State's strategist who planned the organizational structure and the operations ISIS would perform to take over parts of Syria and Iraq. Christoph Reuter writes about the notes and organizational charts drawn up by Baki and discovered after his death. They details ISIS mode of operation and they clarify how ISIS's phenomenally rapid rise was possible. It is also possible to reconstruct the events surrounding the birth of ISIS from the initial membership of ex-officers from Saddan Hussein's army and start-up funds from al-Qaeda. When they targeted a town, they first set about getting information about the religious and sexual activities of the members of the local power structure. This gave ISIS the material to blackmail some of the people, entice others to join them and list which people they would need to eliminate. Controlling the populace, training the troops and having the funds to carry out operations were prime objectives. And when the infrastructure was in place, they declared the caliphate was resurrected.

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PRAGMATIC COOPERATION BETWEEN ENEMIES

by Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Center

Life is simpler in the West. Adversaries are well-defined and separate. They wear different uniforms. You root for one team or for another. Things are different in the Middle East. As the Meir Amit Center demonstrates, arch enemies will trade and create economic alliances while carrying on brutal actions against each other. ISIS has conquered most of the Syrian oil fields in northern and eastern Syria but they don't have the skilled workers to maintain them. Syria supplies the workers. Syria needs oil and gas. ISIS needs the revenues from the sale of oil and gas. They worked out a deal. A side benefit is that ISIS is supplied with a reliable source of electricity. When I read this article I thought about how different things are in Israel. For some reason that I don't understand, Israel supplies the Palestinian Arabs with electricity for free. The Arabs show their gratitude by taking pot shots at the men who come to fix the grid.

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HOSTILE TAKEOVER: HOW ISIS ATE AL QAEDA

by Olivier Guitta

Olivier Guitta writes that terror groups around the world have joined the Islamic State as affiliates. The reward for affiliates is that they can share in ISIS's celebrity status. In return, they contribute their ability to wreak terror and destruction in their particular locales. Boko Haram had been a particularly important asset for al-Qaeda, obtained training and funding from al-Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM), while helping AQIM expand into Nigeria. It has shifted its allegiance to the Islamic State, leaving al-Qaeda much weakened.

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THE RISE OF THE IRANIAN EMPIRE

by David Daoud

With good reason, anyone who can see two checker moves ahead worries about the Iranian unswerving intention to build nuclear bombs. As this article by David Daoud makes clear, non-Arab Iran is also building up its holdings in neighboring Arab countries. As the introduction to Daoud's article puts it, "With the fall of Yemen to Iranian-backed rebels, the subordination of the Iraqi army to Iran-backed militias, and the continuing dominance of Iranian proxies in Syria and Lebanon, it seems that a new empire has emerged—right under the nose of the United States."

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A BAD AGREEMENT WITH IRAN WILL UNDERMINE MIDDLE EAST STABILITY

by Lt. Col. (ret.) Michael Segall

Michael Segall sees the struggle in the Middle East as one between "between the proponents of change — such as Islamic State, Al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran; and the proponents of stability — the moderate Arab states including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, and Tunisia, along with Israel." This is a particularly bad time for Iran to be given advantages. Segall puts into succinct and precise language how Iran is outmaneuvering the world. He confirms the trepidations most of us have felt as we learn that Iran is not only continuing its nuclear weaponry program but literally gaining ground — Arab country by Arab country — as well as regional political power. Iran's "growing entrenchment in the Syrian-Lebanese domain" and the increased coordination of Hizbullah, Hamas and other Palestinian terror organizations, will enable it to encircle Israel. Institutions such as the European Union, the P5+1 and the American administration, which should be stopping Iran's progress, aid and abet her ascent, while reassuring us that all is well. Two of Segall's conclusions — "the West repeatedly capitulates in the negotiations" and "The Iranian regime will not change in nature." — add up to a frightening future for the world.

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THE PHANTOM FATWA

by Bernice Lipkin

Bernice Lipkin writes about a fatwa said to have been issued by Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, against Iran's developing nuclear weapons. The fatwa simply doesn't fit with Iran's monomania to build nuclear facilities or with the bellicose statements of its leaders. Yet Western leaders, including President Obama, have eagerly used the fatwa as linch pin to reassure the world that Iran was building nuclear facilities for peaceful purposes. It is not known where and when the fatwa was issued, if it were actually issued. It doesn't have even a fake birth certificate.

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THE DIPLOMATIC TRACK TO WAR

by Caroline Glick

Prez Obama asserts the agreement with Iran will prevent war and has called anyone who disagrees a warmonger. On much firmer ground, Caroline Glick shows why Obama's policy of nuclear appeasement will actually lead to a devastating war. A concerted diplomatic effort might still work but only if it is linked to collateral activities that would include supporting the Middle East countries that are already in a de facto war with Iran; wrecking Iran's nuclear installations ballistic missile storage facilities; and striking Revolutionary Guards command and control bases. With Obama in command, that won't happen. By threats, promises, stubbornness, deceit, broken promises and unexpected moves, Iran has routed the diplomats and, with Obama's support, has paralyzed any effective way to stop her brazen progress toward nuclear capability other than by warfare. This forces other Middle Eastern countries to try to acquire nuclear capability, making the possibility of a nuclear devastation in the region all the more likely.

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STRATEGIC FOLLY IN THE FRAMEWORK AGREEMENT WITH IRAN

By Maj. Gen. (res.) Yaacov Amidror

Yaacov Amidror makes a gloomy but realistic assessment of what life in the Middle East will be like if the US and European powers permit Iran to acquire nuclear weaponry and become a nuclear power. In addition to creating a "new, violent Middle East," in what is already an unstable region where thousands of civilians have already been slaughtered, Iran would also become a global power, with a heightened ability to inflict its Salafist ideas on the rest of the world. It is mystifying that Prez Obama would facilitate Iran's dominance and its horrifying consequences, when even now it would only take a few days for the US to completely destroy Iran's nuclear facilities. And he continues to thwart Israel's ability to do so.

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INSIDE THE MIND OF A JIHADIST

by Soeren Kern

Soeren Kern writes of a terrorist from Morocco and his Spanish wife, who have recently had a child in the Islamic State, on land which was once part of Syria. By birth, the child is Spanish. His mother is one of more than 100 Spanish citizens who have joined ISIS. Think of it. This ISIS couple already has photos for their family album — look! look! there is Daddy waving the heads of men he decapitated. He did it for Allah and Islam. As a conscientious father concerned that his children be brought up properly, it is likely he will teach them how to bomb, decapitate, shoot, knife and otherwise rid the world of those who go against Islam. He is a pious man and does what the Koran tells him to. And as the jihadists of IS take wives and start families, they will have a renewable home-grown source for future terrorists in addition to the usual recruits, who come for the romance, the excitement and the reassurance that Islam gives them permission to act out their anger. As Kern points out, we will soon have "a generation of Western passport-holding jihadi parents who are — presumably — inculcating their "Western" children with fundamentally anti-Western values."

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ACTING ON ISLAM'S CORE BELIEF

by Mark Durie

Islam is an all-encompassing paean of hate. Many with advanced insight insist Resurgent Islam is making a political ideological statement. And it is. At the same time, its acts of terrorism are making a statement about its core beliefs as a religion. Mark Durie writes of Muslim slaughter of Christians because they are Christian and of the Sura in the Koran that supports such activity. Incidentally, the accompanying photo of Muslims beheading Christians is sufficiently stylized that the Metropolitan Opera could use it next time it presents a sympathetic songfest lauding Muslim terrorists.

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THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD-ISIS CONNECTION

by Arnold Ahlert

In some ways the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) and ISIS are similar. Both are excellent in organizing and planning an operation in coordinated detail and in consolidating and expanding their gains. They differ in that the MB prefers stealth jihad, infiltrating a host country's infrastructure, creating a strong network connection with politicians and academics and influencing policy from within. ISIS prefers big, bold, fast and utterly demoralizing operations. A matter of style, not ideology. Albert Ahlert writes of the history of a group that has had many a name change and currently is called ISI (Islamic State of Iraq), ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), or ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), depending on what territory is referenced. It's getting so big and stable, it often goes by its short all-encompassing name: IS (Islamic State). MB, founded in the 1920s, was the first in recent history to focus on bringing back the Caliphate and Sharia. MB has directly spawned groups such as Hamas and, if Egyptian sources are accurate, ISIS. And it has influenced the formation of many other salafist groups, which share the obsession of revitalizing Islam, recreating the Caliphate and living under sharia law. ISIS is also linked to the Muslim Brotherhood via al-Qaeda, which promoted its growth and with which it has had a fluctuating relationship. Currently, depending on the particular event, one can make a case that ISIS and MB work hand in glove (see here) or are on the outs. Or, in typical Arab fashion, denounce each other, while cooperating on other matters.

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"SOMETHING RADICALLY NEW" IN THE MIDDLE EAST

by Paul Merkley

Much of Western foreign policy in the Middle East is based on the assumption that what drives the Arab states and unifies the people of the region is the need to destroy that element perceived as alien, the Jewish state. Without the irritant of Israel, the Arabs would be content, peace and harmony would prevail. Paul Merkley suggests that recent events such as the banding together of Sunni countries to destroy the Shiite Houthi rule of Yemen show this is manufactured nonsense. In actuality, the core animosity is the mutual hatred of Sunni and Shi'ite, each out to prove it is authentic Islam, the other a heretic imitation.

Dry Bones. The True Moslems, May 29, 2015.

As Merkley puts it, "what is tearing the Middle East apart today is the fact that the Muslim powers hate each other more than they hate us. This is not necessarily a comfort. But it does make clear that we have a range of responses that otherwise would be beyond consideration." He points out that "the largest obstacle standing in the way of a recalculation of diplomatic possibilities in the Middle East may well prove to be the determination of the President of the United States and his Secretary of State to keep on the world's agenda the hopeless issue of resumption of the Peace talks between Israel and Mahmoud Abbas."

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COMPARING AL QAEDA AND ISIS: DIFFERENT GOALS, DIFFERENT TARGETS

by Daniel L. Byman

Daniel Byman compares the differences in modus operandi and method of recruitment of two major Sunni terror groups, Al Qaeda and ISIS. Both are salafist and both are ambitious to be top dog in Islam, which they believe should be the top dog religion in the world. Al-Qaeda regards the US as its major enemy, and "the root cause of the Middle East's problems," and commits acts of terror often, as on 9/11, in dramatic and spectacular ways. ISIS, which emerged in Iraq, saw as its first task the securing of its local environment and since then has extended its control over more and more of the region, doing so in shockingly brutal ways. Terror groups that sign on as affiliates tend to focus on the parent concerns, ISIS troops slaughtering the local Shi'ites, al-Qaeda recruits attacking Western outposts. Based on his analysis, Byman suggests counter tactics for the US. I'm not sure I agree that the local Arab population will reject ISIS's tactics, as they become more grotesque. The local Arabs in Israel's Territories chose Hamas as against Fatah, gravitating to the terror organization with the more open violence.

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THE UPHEAVALS IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND ISRAEL'S STRATEGIC BALANCE

by Amos Yadlin and Carmit Valensi

For years, Arab propaganda claimed the so-called Arab-Israeli conflict (or its lite version: the Palestinian-Israeli conflict) was the root cause of whatever bedeviled the Middle East. In 2010, the Arab Spring triggered a set of events that unhappily have resulted in bloody salafist attacks that have killed or injured hundreds of thousands of people and taken large chunks of land out of several of the Arab states. All of these new powers are sincere in their dedication to promoting the dominance of Islam and the authority of sharia. Amos Yadlin and Carmit Valensi suggest that what we are seeing is the acting out of religious differences, where each group is certain it is one that is correctly interpreting Mohammad's wishes. They point out that the Arabs are no longer preoccupied with Israel, now that they must deal with the viability and survival of their own countries. Unfortunately, these new circumstances continue to demand Israel's attention and will continue to do so. Asymmetric conflict, border flare-ups, the local Arabs acting on the belief that they are an ancient people and all of Israel was once a Palestinian state can flare up. ISIS can decide to test out its strength by provoking a fight. And there is Iran building a bomb, undeterred by the EU, the UN or the USA. And yet the new configuration creates opportunities. As Yadlin and Valensi note, a "wide congruence of interests has come into being for Israel and moderate Sunni Arab states, such as Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and Jordan. This represents an opportunity for regional cooperation..." Egypt is blocking smuggling tunnels, which makes it hard for Hamas to accumulate weapons of war. The Kurds are pioneering the concept of an ethnic group with autonomy that transcends state borders. Israel has much to contribute to regional cooperation should partnerships with moderate Arab states become possible. Israel needs to review its policy options.

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A LEGAL AND OPERATIONAL ASSESSMENT OF ISRAEL'S TARGETING PRACTICES

by Michael Schmitt and John Merriam

Primarily using data from Israel's July 2014 excursion into Gaza, Michael Schmitt and John Merriam examined Israel's "targeting methods and even some of its specific positions on the law of armed conflict (LOAC)," within the "unique operational and strategic context in which the IDF operates." IDF is a conscript force, not a professional army, so the IDF must take into account that the public justifiably has a strong fear of capture or death of its soldier-children in combat. So it puts a high priority on operations such as discovering and destroying tunnels the Arabs build to sneak up on troops. The IDF must also contend with the Arabs putting "fighters and military objectives among civilian persons and objects." To avoid hitting civilians, it resorts to warning when and where it will strike, which eliminates the important element of surprise; and it treats only voluntary human shields as hostile participants. IDF operations are also monitored by an independent judiciary on an on-going basis. Schmitt and Merriam conclude that "we found that their approach to targeting is consistent with the law and, in many cases, worthy of emulation." The only problem is that Israel's being a boy scout when it needs to put a stop to its enemy's missile attacks may be praiseworthy but it is not effective in that it doesn't wipe out missile attacks.

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WHEN OUR ENEMY FIGHTS OUR ENEMY

by Jonathan Spyer

Jonathan Spyer points out "that Israel has no natural allies on either side of Syria's civil war—neither among the Iran-allied 'regime' forces, nor with the overwhelmingly Sunni Islamist 'rebels.'" Israel has avoided involvement as much as possible. It does not participate in the current war between Hezbollah and the Al Nusra Front. Its activities are limited to stopping specific shipments of weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon via Syria and preventing the presence of a strong terrorist group on the Golan border. It also provides humanitarian and medical aid to wounded rebels and Syrian civilians living near the border. Israel's goal is to maintain a secure border and stem spillover of the Syrian civil war into Israel. Spyer details some of Israel's interaction with Al-Nusra, a very capable group of Sunni jihadists fighting the Assad regime, to prevent their encroachment on the border.

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ISRAELI SECURITY POLICY IN SYRIA

by Brig.-Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser

As in the previous article by Jonathan Spyer, this article by Yossi Kuperwasser discusses Israel's policy to avoid "open intervention or taking sides in the bloody Syrian conflict." Clearly, Israel does not support either of the two main sides in the civil war — the Iranian-led radical axis and the radical Sunni axis led separately by Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra." Of particular interest in Kuperwasser's article is how "Israel and the Iranian-led radical axis" set the rules of the game in Syrian territory without coming to sustained and open battle.

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A "CRAZY STATE" DOES NOT PLAY BY THE RULES

by Eli E. Hertz

Stripped of its phony history and the fake story of how badly it's been treated by Israel, the Palestinian pseudo-state can be seen for what it is: another failed Middle East attempt at government. This is true whether it's the Palestine Authority — whose illegal head of state pockets much of the millions of dollars the West bestows on the local Arabs in Israel and the Territories — or Hamas in Gaza, which has imposed its notions on its Arab subjects of how to live 7th Century in the 21st Century. Long before ISIS emerged, before al-Qaeda choreographed 9/11, the Palestinian Arabs were innovating new and devastating ways of disrupting civilization and ignoring civilized conventions. Eli Hertz discusses how well the Palestinian self-government already fits the characteristics of a Crazy State.

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LEGAL RULES AND ANTI-TERRORISM WARFARE: THE CASE OF MUSTAFA DIRANI, REVISITED

by Keren Aviram and Yoram Schweitzer

Large-scale terrorism, neither random nor sporadic, is leading to a reexamination of the use of stylized rule-driven conventional warfare, now that asymmetric warfare has become the rule. Applying civil court procedures on terrorist activities has also come in for a reexamination. In this important paper, Keren Aviram and Yoram Schweitzer discuss a new ruling, using the case of Mustafa Dirani as prototype, where the Israeli Supreme Court expanded the "common law rule precluding the examination of an enemy's claim during wartime and applied it to members of terrorist organizations operating out of foreign countries, even if not in a formal state of war with Israel."

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ARE AMERICAN JEWS TRAUMATIZED?

by Karin McQuillan

Given Judaism amazing record for family stability, high creativity, low social pathology, financial success and strong moral teaching, one would suppose American Jews would encourage their children, even their intermarried children, to raise Jewish families. But "Jewish parents don't act as if it is in their children's best interest for a happy, good, meaningful life, to be Jewish." American Jews act as if, deep down, they don't really believe they are as accepted in American culture as they proclaim. In this essay Karin McQuillan examines why it is that, despite their success, so many "American Jews display the faulty reactions typical of trauma victims." Many of them exhibit "existential insecurity", acting out the judgment of their abusers in their 2000 years in the diaspora, exhibiting the defensive and convoluted reactions typical of the abused victim: "the self-blame, the guilt, the false accusations of being worse than the abuser, the pretense you were the one who caused the problem." Many a liberal Jew confuses "self-betrayal with proof of moral goodness," Using Israel as his proxy and inverting reality, he condemns Israel for mistreating the Palestinian Arabs. The world media also deny the obvious fact that the Arabs are neo-Nazi and insist that murder-obsessed Arab society is the "real" victim. As McQuillan writes, "Any group that tries to publicize Arab hate is criticized and marginalized as right wing. News of Arab anti-Semitism is routinely and thoroughly censored by NPR, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, because the reality of these facts is unwelcome."

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CARTOONISTS ARE CONTROVERSIAL AND MURDERERS ARE MODERATE

by Daniel Greenfield

Considering how protective TV media such as CNN and newspapers such as the Washington Post are of Muslim 'sensitivity', it should come as no surprise that when the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) held a Draw Muhammad cartoon contest which incensed a couple of Islamic terrorists so they came to shoot up the contest participants, the media blamed the AFDI for provoking the shooters. As Daniel Greenfield puts it:

"A contest in which Bosch Fawstin, an ex-Muslim, drew a cartoon of a genocidal warlord is 'controversial' and 'provocative', while the Muslim Students Association (MSA), which has invited Sheikh Khalid Yasin, who has inspired a number of terrorists, including apparently one of the Mohammed contest attackers, is a legitimate organization that is only criticized by controversial, intolerant and provocative Islamophobes."

Was the Cartoon Contest designed to provoke? Of course. Just as Martin Luther King marched in towns that overtly hated blacks, not down safe streets in quiet towns. That's just the point. Provocative, in-your-face, unwelcome speech must be allowed. Polite talk that raises no ire raises no issues. The cockamamie Mainstream Media reaction of blaming the victim while "understanding" the sensitive hurt feelings of the terrorist has become so commonplace that people no longer see how sick and dhimmi-ish this is. In the inverted moral sphere in which the media spin, what is important is to protect the Islamic Victimizer from punishment for his immoral and illegal behavior.

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SHARIA AND THE EUROPEAN UNION

by Leslie Lebl

The disparity between the law and its enforcement doesn't just affect free speech. Politicians and judges may make strongly-worded statements against violence against women yet refuse to back up their strong words with strong action. Leslie Lebl writes of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) describing sharia as "incompatible with ... democracy" yet its reports on human rights don't identify sharia law as a major reason for Muslim mistreatment of and violence against women. Polygamy is so obviously against Western values that we'd expect laws against polygamy to be strictly enforced in the Muslim immigrant community. Instead, as Lebl notes, "Although polygamy is illegal in all EU member states, it probably exists in all of them, and in some has been de facto legitimized." European countries ignore polygamous unions, debate polygamy rather than enforce the law, allow it if it was legal where it occurred, or classify Muslim wives as single mothers so they receive welfare. Thanks to the many loopholes, "perhaps some 300,000 people in Britain are living in polygamous families, many if not most at state expense." Similarly, the Council is strongly against violence against women. It "does not, however, recognize the critical difference between domestic violence and the sharia-justified violence against women, especially honor killings." Little by little, sharia becomes the de facto law of the land — and not just for the Muslims.

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MAKING DAVID INTO GOLIATH: HOW THE WORLD TURNED AGAINST ISRAEL

by Joshua Muravchik. Reviewed by Shoshana Bryen

Joshua Muravchik wrote in "Making David into Goliath", "Israel's image is not undermined by what Israel actually does as much as by deliberate, popular, and well-funded sources pursuing warfare against Israel off the battlefield." As Shoshana Bryen observes in her review, "with the triumph of the Six-Day War. ... Israel ceased to be perceived as endangered and therefore ceased to command the world's sympathy... The Arab states, in one of the most impressive political turns of the modern age, switched the conversation from Arab rejection of Israel to Israel's occupation of the Palestinians." Muravchik writes of the large number of Leftists, Jews and non-Jews, Israelis, Europeans and Americans, academicians, media people and think-tankers who, for money or ideology or job security, have maligned Israel. They were and are willing to tell outright lies, distort or ignore what they actually see and know, and omit critical facts to further the Arab cause. Bryen writes that "Muravchik comes to the ugly—and current—truth of European politics: European countries were willing to barter with Palestinian organizations in order that they mostly leave Europeans alone." From appeasement to slavishly doing the Muslim bidding was not much of a step.

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REZA ASLAN HYPES 'ISLAMOPHOBIA'

by Cinnamon Stillwell

Cinnamon Stillwell writes about Reza Aslan, a lecturer at UC Riverside. He has a monochromatic description of what's wrong with Islam: there's nothing wrong with Islam. What's wrong is the bunch of Islamaphobic bigots, who have a big pot of money donated by big business bigots and spend it all to stir up Islamaphobia by criticizing Islam. He has no use for information that comes from independent sources. He sticks to material that comes mainly from the Center for American Progress (CAP), a far-left organization. Armed with a few statistics that are debatable and chiefly ad hominem arguments, he dismisses the possibility that Islam is dangerous. He praises diversity and the American tolerance for differences, ignoring that, when Islam gains control of a country, its tolerance disappears and only a rigid Koran-based life style is permitted. CAP and academic followers such as Aslan have invested much effort in making people fear being called a bigot. They make it simple to avoid being called islamophobic: just don't criticize anything in Islam, ignore Islam's attitude to women and polygamy, ignore its anti-Semitism and hatred towards Christianity, Hinduism and all other religions. Ignore its battling with everyone, even other Muslims, ignore Muslims teaching their children how to behead someone. And you won't have to fear that someone will call you an islamophob.

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ISRAEL'S BASKIN CASE

by Kane Rooks and David Bedein

Kane Rooks and David Bedein summarize some of Gershon Baskin's "questionable statements of supposed fact that Baskin weaves into his writings." Many of Baskin's statements are confident reassurances that the Palestinian Arabs do not want to destroy Israel. A pity that Abbas and Hamas don't talk the same talk. This article provides a summary of Baskin's most flagrantly wrong statements, questionable declarations and pompous profundities.

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FRIEDMAN'S FANTASY

by Michael Devolin

In this essay, Michael Devolin takes on Thomas Friedman, the Shimon Peres of journalism. Both Peres and Friedman can sustain a lofty tone and the pretense of having carefully examined all that needs considering, combined with an impressive ignorance of consequences and incompatibilities. In a recent column, Friedman reassured us that in his pondering on the forthcoming nuclear deal with Iran, he was considering small details like verification and larger matters like the "wider American strategic goals in the region." In Friedman's dream sequence, transforming Iran into a civilized country would take place after Iran and the Saudis played out their ancient feud, pummeling each other "until they get exhausted." Devolin points out a few defects in Friedman's analysis. First, if the Sunnis and the Shi'ites have been fighting from soon after Mohammad's time, why would Friedman expect them to patch up things before Iran acquires the bomb and misuses its new power? Iran's incurring a tragic number of deaths during the Iran-Iraq war didn't shorten the war. Why would it now? Second, it may be true that given a resurrection of the U.S. relationship to the Shah — the one Jimmy Carter ruined — the US might be able to use Iran to counterbalance the Sunni forces, but there is no such relationship now. And Iran's open hatred of America and Israel is hardly an indication that Iran wants to be our buddy. As Devolin observes, "untruths and fantasy are today common fare for the Western journalist."

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ISRAEL'S BAD PRESS

by Andrew E. Harrod

We seem to be in the beginning of a trend where journalists, previously forced by their editors or the Arabs to engage in the practice of exaggerating Israel's mistakes or inventing nasty stories about Israel out of whole cloth, while ignore the actual and bestial behavior of the Arabs, tell all. First, there was Mattie Friedman. Now, as Andrew Harrod writes, Mark Lavie has revealed how distorted journalism has become, with reporters accepting Arab fraudulent claims without investigation. Lavie also talks about frank intimidation. For many years, reporters have justifiably feared their families would be harmed if they told the truth about the Arabs or showed footage of Arabs whooping it up in delight that Israelis or Americans were dead.

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POLITICAL ISLAM'S DISINFORMATION

by Rachel Ehrenfeld and Ken Jensen

Rachel Ehrenfeld and Ken Jensen ask how the Muslim Brotherhood and others who practice disinforming the West about the nature of Islam have been so successful for so long. They conclude that these jihadist groups spin lies and stretch truth within the context of simple and high-minded but false 'explanations' such as 'lack of economic development and social injustice.' Ehrenfeld and Jensen use as example the now-deposed Morsi government, which was voted in to protect human rights, but, instead, decreed shari'a law for Egypt. They might also have used the West's sympathy to the Palestinian Arabs as example. Palestinians are excused their knifing, sniping, stoning and lobbing missiles at Israeli civilians because they are too frail militarily to rid Palestine of Jewish occupation. Thanks to years of conditioning, the West, even supposed historians, ignores that there is no Palestinian people, there never was a Palestinian state, and it is the Arabs who invaded land set aside by international law for a Jewish state.

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THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY

by Mark Steyn

Using a recent event that is destined for the history books, Mark Steyn writes on how to present a case and how not to present a case. He emphasizes the importance of the style and substance of Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to the US Congress by comparing it to Prez Obama's "small and petty" belittlement of the Israeli Prime Minister. Netanyahu warned of the dangers of Iranian expansionism in territory and its ability to produce nuclear weaponry. Netanyahu also pointed out an important fact when dealing with Muslim countries: ISIS may be on the outs with Iran, but that doesn't mean ISIS is friendly to the West. Steyn also admonishes us that 'your enemy's enemy is not automatically friendly' also applies to us in the US.

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COULD JEWISH SOLDIERS IN THE BRITISH ARMY CELEBRATE PASSOVER IN JERUSALEM IN 1918?

by Lenny Ben-David

Using photographs and old letters, Lenny Ben-David asks whether Jewish soldiers in the Jewish Legion in the British army and the individual Jews serving in the armies of Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand were allowed to celebrate Passover in Jerusalem in World War 1. The Jewish Legion was commanded by Col. John Henry Patterson, and letters written by the Colonel indicate that he was furious about the anti-Semitic policy which denied his soldiers permission to celebrate Passover in Jerusalem in 1918 and again in 1919, yet there are old photos showing Jewish soldiers doing just that. Although Jews were in the majority in Jerusalem, the British-run municipality allowed Arab violence against them, Hebrew was "officially disregarded and humiliated," and "Arab notables who betray pro-Jewish feeling" were penalized. Another photo suggests Jewish soldiers did have their seder in Jerusalem, but not those in the Jewish Legion "perhaps because of the army's desire to restrict a distinctly Jewish, nationalistic corps in its midst." The Jewish Legion made Pesach, but not in Jerusalem.

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THE LESSONS OF ARMENIA SHOULD NOT BE LOST

by Clifford D. May

The current spate of ugly ways to torture and murder people by both the Shiite and Sunni branches of Islam is not new. Clifford May makes the point that in recent history the "slaughter of Armenian Christians 100 years ago [was] preface and precedent to what's happening in the Middle East today." The fact that the world quickly forgot the Armenian victims reassured the Nazis that they too could slaughter people for the crime of a member of a particular ethnic or religious group without the world making much of a fuss. Nor do today's Muslim terrorist groups need to contend with a hostile aroused media as they exterminate Middle Eastern Christians. They cage prisoners, use 12-year old children to behead captives, rape women and sell children into slavery. They proudly act as practitioners of the Religion of Peace have always done.

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TWO STATES IS A FRAUD

by Drora bat Melech

Drora bat-Melech is an Israeli whose parents and grandparents were authentic refugees. Together with some 150 to 250 thousand other Jews, they were forced to flee from Iraq in the 1940s-early 1950s, even though the Jews had lived in Iraq for some 2500 years, more than a thousand years before the Arab invaders conquered the area. Not only were they kicked out, leaving most of their possessions and real estate behind, they had to pay the Arab government for the privilege of being allowed to leave alive. The scene was replayed in the other Arab states. The Jews received no help or compensation from the U.N., but the new state of Israel absorbed them and made them citizens. Bat-Melech was a refugee from Iraq but she was an 'aboriginal' in Israel because in 1922 their ancient land was restored to the Jews in recognition of their historic attachment to it; it was held in trust until they could develop the infrastructure and population to be a state. In 1948, when the neighboring Arab states invaded the new state of Israel, Arabs who fled — many of them left on orders of their leaders, and expected to return as soon as Israel was demolished — were placed into camps in their 'aboriginal' land, but they were treated as aliens and denied citizenship. Unlike any other group of refugees ever, they were given refugee status in perpetuum, they and their descendants, even those "refugees" who had come new to the area by June 1946.

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WAQF'S NEW WEAPON: SCREAMING GIRLS

by Gil Ronen

Gil Ronen reports on a new gambit used by the local Arabs, "citizens of Israel," to show disrespect to Judaism and to Jews on the Temple Mount. Arab men and women of all ages, including youngsters, especially young girls, are paid to harass Jews verbally and physically to ensure they can't worship there. They can't even enjoy a moment of contentment or contemplation on this most Holy of the Jewish Holy sites. And the police, paralyzed by politicians who fear bad publicity, either do nothing or arrest the Jewish "troublemakers". An Addendum lists some relevant videos.

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ARAB MK AHMED TIBI FLIES PLO FLAG ON TEMPLE MOUNT

by Tzvi Ben-Gedalyahu

An Arab Member of the Knesset flies the PLO flag on the Jewish Temple Mount and the police do nothing. Tzvi Ben-Gedalyahu asks, "If a Kahane flag is illegal, is the PLO flag on Temple Mount kosher?" Perhaps the question should be, "In WW2, would the USA allow a Nazi flag fly from the National Cathedral?" Have we forgotten that Resurgent Islam has declared war on the West and Israel; and the faux-people, the Palestinians, are foot soldiers in that war? As an aside, the Arabs don't just fly their terrorist flag, they burn flags of other countries on the Temple Mount. See them burning the French flag here.

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STATUS QUO? 'JEWS PRAYED ON THE TEMPLE MOUNT FOR CENTURIES'

by Hillel Fendel

Hillel Fendel "explores the origins of the hotly-contested 'status quo' at Judaism's holiest site." As he says, everyone "religiously" is determined to continue the "status quo"— even those who blather about freedom of worship. But, as Fendel asks, what is the status quo? At the moment, Jews are forbidden by their Government to pray on the Har HaBayit (The Temple Mount). The reason for preventing Jews from praying is said to be that Jews might inadvertently step on a forbidden area. If the intent is to prevent desecrating a sacred place, why are Arabs allowed to run wild and destroy ancient relics? Besides, historically, Jews prayed there for hundreds of years without hindrance. The real reason appears to be to not stir up Arab anger. But if so, it isn't working. It is only emboldening the Arabs employed by Hamas et al to behave despicably.

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HOW IMPORTANT IS GOD'S TEMPLE MOUNT

by Jan Willem van der Hoeven

Who would have believed in the 1930's, as Hitler was starting his genocidal war against the Jews, that some eighty years later the Jewish State would be a major safety zone for Christians in the Middle East, the victims of another genocidal war, this time one conducted by the Islamic States? And Christians are among the strong voices declaring how important the Temple Mount is for Jews. Jan Willem van der Hoeven writes what even secular Jews should know and understand.

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JERUSALEM ALSO HAS 'NO-GO' ZONES

by Tuvia Brodie

Tuvia Brodie reports on the presence of no-go zones in Jerusalem. In Europe, 'For Muslims Only' areas are land patches — usually in a large city that has a sufficient concentration of Muslims — that are completely controlled by Muslims and only obey sharia law. Non-Muslim are not allowed in, not even police or firemen [See, for example, documentation of no-go zones in France here.] Israeli no-go zones differ from those in European countries only in that the surrounding Arab villages are also, for the most part, no-go zones, so that Jerusalem is more and more ringed by hostile bands of Arabs, who are citizens of Israel but identify with the Muslim Jihad against Israel.

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ON "SUPERSESSIONISM": ABRAHAMIC FAITHS IN HISTORY

by Clive Kessler

Religious supersessionism is the belief that one's religion has replaced or fulfilled its predecessor religion(s). In this article, Clive Kessler concentrates on making explicit the supersessionist substrate of Islam. He examines the weakening of such an attitude toward Jews in current Christianity, thus suggesting that a religion can reverse a negative attitude without doing violence to itself. The essay also suggests that attempts at interfaith understanding are doomed to fail when some the participants are innately supersessionist. Christianity has come a long way towards reorienting itself to respect Judaism. Muslims, however, still suffer from the conviction that Islam is — or should be— the religion that dominates any and all others. In practice and because of their unbending attitude, they take advantage of members of other religions who are trying so hard to show acceptance that they end up doing the bidding of the Muslims.

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THE MUSLIM'S CONUNDRUM

by Edward Cline

Edward Cline examines sharia law— the thorn in the side of ecumenism— from the point of view of the burdens it places on Muslims. It is a distasteful but incontestable fact that sharia is a package deal, sanctioning primitive, violent sexual practices, enforcing a supercessionary attitude and encouraging jihad against everything and everyone that is not Islamic. As Cline says, "Muslims of whatever stripe are stuck between a rock and a hard place — between the totalitarian nature of Islam, and its absolute, non-negotiable imperatives of Islamic dogma." Western media and academia and political leaders have placed no restrictions on "the stealthy and incremental Islamic incursions into Western culture," accompanied with its offensive behavioral patterns. So, non-violent Muslims have the additional burden of solving the problem of how to behave in a civilized fashion, a problem that they, not us, need to solve.

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INTERFAITH MUSLIMS GIVE REASONS FOR JIHAD

by Paul Austin Murphy

When pushed to the wall, Muslims engaged in interfaith dialogue can always claim that violent jihad is only carried out for the just cause of autonomy for Muslims, as in Kashmir, Palestine and Chechnya— the Islamic version of 'you can't make omelets without breaking eggs'. This appears to be the virtuous excuse provided no matter what the size of the Muslim population relative to the size of non-Muslim groups in the country— which begs the question why are the Muslims the only ones entitled to be in charge of their own destiny. Probe further and it becomes clear that the request for autonomous space is actually the desire for a beachhead, from which Islam can eventually force and enforce sharia law on all of us.

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ISLAM COMES TO THE NATIONAL CATHEDRAL

by Diana West

In this essay, Diana West describes what was wrong with the Muslim service conducted by a prestigious group of salafists and associates of Islamic terrorists at the prestigious Washington National Cathedral. Like the majority of Muslims globally, these Muslims strongly uphold sharia law, which means, in practice, that they have no doubt that Islam has replaced the imperfect religions of the Christians and the Jews— an attitude not conducive to genuine tolerance. The Episcopals thought they were being ecumenical, but judging from the surus read, all that these benighted Christians got for their efforts was a lecture larded with some very nasty appraisals of Christianity and Judaism. In Arabic, of course.

Baron Bodissey of the Gates of Vienna website wrote of a surprising and little-known fact about the event in an article entitled "The Washington National Masjid." "The administrative leaders of the Episcopal Church obviously have no idea what it means to allow their building to be used a place where formal Islamic prayers take place [emphasis added]. Or maybe they do, and they don't mind. In any case, once Muslims have said their prayers as an assembled group, the structure becomes a masjid, a mosque, and the property of the waqf board, the Islamic trust for the Ummah. The local Islamic community may decide to defer taking formal title to the building until their numbers in the Washington area are sufficient to make it prudent to do so, but after tomorrow, the National Cathedral will have become a mosque. And not just any old mosque, but one with full connectivity to the Muslim Brotherhood." As the Baron notes, the Muslim service was "a highly symbolic demonstration of Islamic supremacism" by a religious group that assumes other religions should accommodate them but would not themselves be foolish enough to reciprocate the Cathedral's hospitality.

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CHRISTIANS IN THE HOLY LAND: DON'T CALL US ARABS

by Aryeh Tepper

Aryeh Tepper writes the story of what is happening because an ethnic group of Israelis put Israel's claim to take diversity seriously to the test. Perhaps inspired by the revitalization of Jewish identity in the Jewish homeland and certainly unhappy at being lumped in the non-homogeneous cludge of ethnicities labeled Arab, the Israeli Aramean Christian community asked that they be legally identified as Aramean, a specific and unique Israeli minority, just as are the Druze and the Circassians. This hasn't pleased the Palestinian Authority, but while Israel has been reluctant to stir up the easily-inflamed Muslim Arabs, it has shown little tolerance to anti-Aramean incitement by these Muslims. Tepper makes the case that there is a regional movement in Arab countries and well as in Israel of minorities who are beginning to think of themselves in terms of their own history, rejecting both pan-Arabic philosophy and Muslim Arab political domination. There have been a sufficient number of groups emphasizing their identities before the Arab invasion that "the belief that the Middle East is somehow essentially Arab" has come into question. The fact that Arabs are Johnny-come-lately in contrast to the newly-assertive native populations is being recognized. Why is Tepper's article in this section? The interfaith interaction of the Jews and the Arameans is based on a genuine commonality: both groups are loyal citizens of the Jewish state and both have a strong interest in preserving it.

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OBAMA'S FAILED NUCLEAR POLICY AND KHAMENEI'S DUPLICITY

by Majid Rafizadeh

Majid Rafizadeh points out the serious defects in Prez Obama's handling of the most consequential crisis of the current century. "The primary objective of the nuclear negotiations was to completely dismantle Iran's nuclear program in order to remove the threat of Islamists obtaining nuclear weapons... when Iranian leaders realized that President Obama is more desperate than Iran to get a nuclear deal at any cost, Tehran began dictating and setting the terms in the talks, shrewdly threatening Obama to walk away from the talks if they are not satisfied...In the next few months, Obama is likely to give more concessions." Given his amateurish, waffling-and-wavering inept management, it is not surprising that many people suspect, as did a reader, JayWye, who wrote in FrontPage Magazine that: "Comrade Obama WANTS Iran to achieve nuclear weapons. Comrade BHO is not working for America,he's working AGAINST the US."

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TRASH TALK DIPLOMACY, US-ISRAEL RELATIONS, AND IRAN

by Jeffrey Herf

It is perhaps an indication that Israel and the US once had strong relations that Prez Obama is as hostile to Israel as he has become to Britain, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, once stout allies of the US. The issue, as Jeffrey Herf writes, is that Obama hates Israel because he perceives Israel as an obstacle to what has become obvious: Obama's policy towards Iran is one of appeasement. Even worse, it appears Obama will do nothing to stop Iran obtaining nuclear weapons, but will instead thwart and punish anyone who dares object. Acting more as a street thug than a diplomat or leader of a powerful nation, Obama has resorted to nasty language, direct insults as when he left Netanyahu in a room and trotted off to his dinner, and other shows of petulant and insulting behavior. He has also leaked information that prevented Israel from directly attacking Iran's nuclear facilities. As Herf reminds us. "Only if the President is willing to turn down a bad deal with Iran will there be a chance of success via diplomacy and sanctions short of war." But the president continues to be angry with anyone who points out he's heading recklessly in the wrong direction.

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VARIATION ON THE BIRD-JEW THEME

by Sarah Honig

Sarah Honig uses Sholem Alechem's story of the bird-Jew to anchor an egregious example of "the fear of giving offense to one's mortal enemies..." In this newer version, she takes to task those who argue that it is PM Netanyahu's "duty to obediently assume the role of the bird-Jew and self-destruct" to appease Prez Obama's anger at Netanyahu contradicting Obama's empty reassurances that Iran will not possess nuclear weapons. And doing it publicly. This view ignores that Congress is independent of the Executive Branch and that Obama's overt hostility didn't start or even blossom because of Netanyahu's addressing Congress and warning them against a deal that would allow Iran to build nuclear weapons, thus gaining the means to lord it over the other countries in the Middle East, threaten oil supply globally and be in a position to devastate Israel or any place in the Western world. Honig points out that if there be interference in a sovereign country's domestic policy, it is Obama who is the culprit, blatantly meddling in the Israeli election and encouraging the craven worship of Obama by Israel's bird-Jews, the Leftists.

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EXPANSIONIST IRAN, OBAMA AND THE BOMB

by Bernice Lipkin

It seems as if we've been negotiating with Iran for eons, initially to prevent her from acquiring nuclear weaponry, and now, it appears, to hope she uses her power wisely. Bernice Lipkin suggests reasons that might account for the West's lack of urgency and concern.

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ISIS: PORTRAIT OF A JIHADI TERRORIST ORGANIZATION

by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC)

This article is the Overview Section of a monograph issued by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC). The monograph is a comprehensive examination of "the nature of the Islamic State in Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS), an Islamic Salafist-jihadi terrorist organization founded a decade ago as a branch of Al-Qaeda in Iraq." It is an excellent and reliable reference on the roots of ISIS; its ideology; its military and financial capabilities and areas of control; its military campaign in Syria and Iraq (to mid-November 2014); how it has and will continue to increase regional instability; the American campaign against ISIS; and the danger it poses to Israel. The researchers took into account that they were dealing with a dynamic organization in situations subject to rapid change. To understand and prepare a comprehensive yet readable report on ISIS meant the researchers needed to assess, evaluate and integrate information from a multiplicity of primary sources dealing with the "history Islam, the Sunni-Shi'ite schism, the Salafist-jihadi movement from which ISIS sprang; the changes in Al-Qaeda and the global jihad; the developments in the civil wars in Syria and Iraq and the various aspects of the Middle Eastern upheaval." One can only admire how well they have succeeded.

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WHAT MAKES ISLAMIC STATE SO ATTRACTIVE?

by Mordechai Kedar

Mordechai Kedar focuses on what makes ISIS outstanding if not unique. And why it is so popular with young Muslim volunteers, who come from all over the world to be part of ISIS. Kedar observes that it projects strength. ISIS members are encouraged to kill citizens of powerful countries and these countries do little or nothing in response. Isis has reestablished the caliphate, which was dissolved some ninety years ago, They announced the caliphate wasn't some dream in the future; it had come into existence and it came complete with a caliph, who just happened to be the head of ISIS. Moreover, ISIS has apparently established a reputation for being authentic Islam. Its unabashed use of decapitation, burning and torture certainly is modeled on how the founder of Islam treated apostates, captives and the disobedient. As Kedar says, "Islamic State — at this point — seems a young and vibrant one, whose actions are in true accordance with Islamic precepts and which does not give any consideration to the heretical, materialistic and permissive cultural mores with which Western culture tries to inculcate Muslims all over the world."

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THE MYSTERY OF THE ISLAMIC STATE

by Rachel Ehrenfeld

Rachel Ehrenberg cites Abu ZBakr Al-Baghdadi of ISIS, who argues that it is reasonable "to unite all the jihadi groups under one umbrella. After all, they all seek the same result: fight the jihad to establish a global Islamic rule." It is more common, however, for Muslim groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood that practice stealth jihad to ascribe terrorism to "Political Islam, so that they can call Islamic religion a religion of peace.

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IT'S ISLAM, STUPID!

by Martin Sherman

Martin Sherman makes the point that terrorism is very closely linked to Islam. Muslim apologists point out that the majority of Muslims are not violent. True, but if we go by population figures, some 17% of the world's population is Muslim, so we'd expect they'd commit roughly 17% to 20% of the acts of terrorism. Instead, Muslims are the majority of the terrorists. They kill infidels. They kill other Muslims. They kill. And polls indicate that in Muslim countries, either the majority of people or a significant minority are "in favor of harsh corporal punishments (whipping/amputation) for theft/robbery; death by stoning for adultery; and death for apostasy." Muslim terrorism is said to be done as a response to colonialism, globalism, and Western hostility. But India was colonized, and Hindus don't behave like Muslims. We are told Muslims turn to terrorism because of poverty or because they are on the fringe of society. But many terrorists come from homes that are seemingly integrated into the community and are well-educated. When the facts are promulgated, these arguments are also discredited. What does hold up, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali put it, "Islam is not a religion of peace. It's a political theory of conquest that seeks domination by any means it can. Every accommodation of Muslim demands leads to a sense of euphoria and a conviction that Allah is on their side. They see every act of appeasement as an invitation to make fresh demands."

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THE PERPETUITY OF JIHAD

by Michael Devolin

In this essay, Michael Devolin explains how aptly the term perpetuity describes the history of Islamic jihad from the time of Mohammad until now. Perpetual Jihad is an Islamic imperative. As Devolin says, "Islamic jihad is never satisfied with its own, but only with complete possession of the other. They want only the field next to theirs, and once in their possession, Islam and the Muslim world concede nothing. It is meaningless to the Arab Muslim that the Temple Mount in Jerusalem has been a holy site for Jews long before the Prophet Mohammed and even longer before his Muslim hordes invaded ancient Israel. The sensibilities of Christians are of no concern to the Muslim extremist whose religious intolerance has made Nazareth today almost uninhabitable for them." Their program is facilitated by their anti-democratic pro-Palestinian supporters in the West. Also posted are some comments by readers of the original publication. The last one, by Ronald B, is an excellent description of stealth jihad.

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WE HAVE ISLAMONAUSEA

by Nicolai Sennels

Nicolai Sennels suggests that the "aspects of [Muslim] behavior that make us sick" aren't symptoms of islamophobia. It just means we have justifiable islamonausea. Despite all the efforts invested into convincing us we are Islamophobic when we critize Muslim behavior, as Sennels points out, "There is nothing phobic or racist about feeling nauseous when hearing about the countless, bloody massacres committed by Muhammad and his many devout copycats throughout history and all over the world today."

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THE SHATTERING OF WESTERN MYTHS BY ISIS

by Dan Illouz

The rise of the Islamic State has finally shocked some people into a belated awareness of what's been going on in Middle East. The belief that peace negotiations are possible even though Muslims will never abandon their goal of conquest has been undercut. Dan Illouz writes of some of the lessons learned: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not the central conflict in the Middle East; territorial withdrawals strengthen terrorism; Iran needs to be stopped; and, finally, Israel must stand up to pressure.

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THE IDEOLOGICAL ROOTS OF MEDIA BIAS AGAINST ISRAEL

by Matti Friedman

Matti Friedman writes "about how the media dissect and magnify Israel's flaws while purposely erasing those of its enemies." While working for the Associated Press (AP), he became "aware of certain malfunctions in the coverage of the Israel story — recurring omissions, recurring inflations, decisions made according to considerations that were not journalistic but political, all in the context of a story staffed and reported more than any other international story on earth." He points out that this is not limited to AP; it is true of the international press with few exceptions. Friedman has since become a whistler blower who provides anecdotal and summation evidence, confirming what many of us have long assumed. As Friedman writes, by the rules of much of the international media, "Jewish hatred of Arabs is a story. Arab hatred of Jews is not... 100 houses in a West Bank settlement are a story. 100 rockets smuggled into Gaza are not. The Hamas military build-up amid and under the civilian population of Gaza is not a story. But Israeli military action responding to that threat — that is a story, ..." Friedman understands there is a larger and more sinister context. He points out, "The only group of people subject to a systematic boycott at present in the Western world are Jews, appearing now under the convenient euphemism 'Israelis.' The only country that has its own 'apartheid week' on campuses is the Jewish country." He clearly sees how the media have demonized the Jews — Jews/Israelis are occupiers, they are human rights violators, they are the vilest of the vile — and he understands how journalists and reporters and cameramen function as pro-Palestinian propagandists. He makes the important point that the alleged occupation of Jews of Arab land has become the central symbol of evil, which anchors and gives meaning to any story about victimization anywhere in the world. But he is apparently still certain that Israel really is occupying Arab land, when the reverse is the actual case. I hope as he progresses in understanding, he reads some factual history. The San Remo Conference of 1920 and the various Middle East Mandates that created both the single Jewish state and many of the current Arab states would be a good starting point. He might begin here, here, here, here, here and here.

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PBS: AMERICA'S "MOST TRUSTED INSTITUTION" AND ITS COVERAGE OF ISLAM

by Denis MacEoin

The Public Broadcasting Station (PBS) has convinced the public it is a superior, unbiased and trustworthy educational instrument. In point of fact, as Denis MacEoin demonstrates, they have acted as apologists for Islam. In a recent series on Islam, they "broadcast, through a film and on the internet, religious propaganda in place of balanced educational, instructional, and public information material, despite elaborate claims to the contrary." This is not a casual assertion, because, certified by the authority of PBS, this material has influenced the views of millions of Americans about Islam, yet it is littered with propagandistic bits, some of which are false, and many of them misleading and incomplete. Some sponsors "are linked to dubious organizations"; and some advisors have links to terror organizations, are salafist ideologues and have no scruples about lying and denying ugly facts about Islam. One, Azizah al-Hibri, asserted that Islam is compatible with women's rights and that the "concept of the separation of church and state came from Islam." A speaker, M. Cherif Bassiouni, is both a prominent lawyer and a defender of Hamas. He has argued "that Islamic law does not punish apostasy — a statement that might have come as a surprise to the many thousands of Muslim apostates and heretics who have been executed from the time of Muhammad to the present day." Perhaps the biggest howler was the unduly flattering portrait of Mohammad and the biggest error of judgment was presenting Karen Armstrong disingenuous distortions as historical facts. The material is suitable for a missionary video but in no way can it serve as a serious source of information about Islam.

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THE CONTROVERSY OF 'FROM TIME IMMEMORIAL'

by Nadav Shragai

Although the UN had an agency to handle the millions of refugees around the world, it set up a special agency, UNRWA exclusively for the Arabs who fled Israel in 1948 when Israel became a state. Most of them fled because Israel's neighbors who invaded the fledgling state told the residents to clear out until they could kill off the Jews and/or for fear the Jews would do unto them as they would have done unto the Jews. The Jews survived that invasion and another two after that, but the collection of refugees were pure gold as propaganda in that Arab propagandists claimed they were the aboriginal people of the land, which the Jews stole from them. Joan Peters determined that the facts and the Arab story didn't match and published the results in 1984 in a book entitled From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine. For her efforts, she was denounced by a host of Palestinian Arab supporters. Joan Peters died this year in January. Nadav Shragai tells us about her accomplishment.

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WHY THE LEFT REFUSES TO TALK ABOUT MUSLIM ANTI-SEMITISM

by Daniel Greenfield

The mainstream press, which is mostly Leftist, spends much time on the sins of the European far right. A major sin of these Rightists is that they don't like what Muslims are doing to European countries and they say so. But the press becomes timid when the subject is Muslim anti-Semitism. Daniel Greenfield points out that Muslim anti-Semitism has been "the dominant form of violence against Jews in Europe. And it has been that way for some time now." "When Western leftists make common cause with Arab and Islamic nationalists, they aren't being post-colonial, they're advocating an earlier form of colonialism [under Arab rule] that led and is once again leading to ethnic cleansing, genocide, mass slavery and the destruction of indigenous cultures; including that of the Jews." In such an environment, Jews would again live as dhimmis under Arab control as they did for hundreds of years. Their investment in "[t]he post-colonial narrative obligates academics and journalists to favorably contrast the Muslim treatment of Jews, then or now, with the European treatment of Jews." Meantime, "Muslim Supremacist anti-Semitism remains interested in persecuting and killing Jews.

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WILL AMERICAN JEWRY AGAIN FAIL TO CONFRONT HISTORIC THREAT?

by Atera Beck

With the declared threat by Iran to wipe out Israel when they get the bomb the lack of indignation by the general population, and the lack of strong response by the Jewish organizations, it is beginning to look much like it did in the 1930s, when Hitler was just getting started. Atara Beck asks whether American Jewish leaders are repeating the same tragic mistakes of the Nazi era? She writes that in the 30s, grassroots American Jews wanted to help their co-religionists in Europe, but the major Jewish organizations did little, and some actually fought the idea of helping the Jews in Europe. In the year 2015, while Iran broadcasts it can't wait to get nuclear weaponry to use on Israel, the American administration, particularly Secr.-State Kerry and National Security Advisor Rice attacked PM Netanyahu for voicing his concern that Iran's nuclear program hasn't yet been stopped. Rabbi Boteach placed an ad in the New York Times "castigating rice." At the that point, many American Jewish organizations "rushed to denounce Boteach for daring to insult Rice." Will they never learn!

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THE NAZI A-BOMB WAS FOILED

by Bernard Shapiro

If I tell you that Moe Berg spoke fifteen languages and went to Princeton, the Sorbonne and Columbia Law School, you might think this will be about yet another Jewish intellectual/academic. What if I add that he played baseball so-so but he won the Medal of Freedom and it is displayed in the Baseball Hall of Fame? Bernard Shapiro tells of Moe's wartime exploits during World War 2, one of which won him the medal.

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AUSCHWITZ SURVIVORS RETURN SEVENTY YEARS LATER

by Auschwitz Survivors

On January 27, 1945, Auschwitz was liberated. Seventy years later, three hundred survivors of Auschwitz returned to the Camp.

These videos are about their return to Auschwitz and Auschwitz itself:

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NAZI DIARY REVEALS BRUTAL TACTICS EMPLOYED AGAINST LODZ JEWS

by Kobi Nachshoni

Nazi officers kept a record of day-to-day life in the Lodz Ghetto. A diary containing their notes has been uncovered. It records punishments they inflicted and the brutal ways they had to obtain information. They hunted Jews that had managed to stay out of the ghetto. They were cruel and created a reign of terror. They recorded the details of what they did but in sanitized language. This is contrast to Muslim salafists who take pleasure in broadcasting videos showing them decapitating and shooting their victims.

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HAMAS-BACKING QATAR ALSO FUNDING BROOKINGS INSTITUTE, HOME OF FORMER U.S. MIDEAST ENVOY INDYK

by Dave Bender

A comment that came to Think-Israel acutely summed up that the salafists had purchased another way to influence public opinion: "Qatar is buying Washington clout by funneling large amounts of cash into the Brookings Institution, a leading progressive DC think tank, through Martin Indyk, who evidently has been co-opted by their money... Brookings serves as a major source of policy for Democrats in Congress...It is also a classic example of the mainstream press ignoring a major conflict of interest story willfully." In this essay, Dave Bender emphasizes that Qatar also funds Hamas and, as do other Middle East Arab countries, it expects value for its money from grantees, terrorists and "non-combatants" alike. The discovery that Qatar was a major contributor to Brookings took on additional significance because it highlighted a major conflict of interest. Martin Indyk, a high echelon member of the Brookings Institute, while posing as neutral in his role as US negotiator, blasted Israel, claiming it, and it alone, was responsible for the latest collapse of the so-called "Peace Talks". Was he speaking from his experience as a negotiator or as a hireling of a foreign power?

It is important to recognize that the Brookings Institute isn't an isolated example. Unfortunately, many supposedly objective Washington research groups and think-tanks have been corrupted — in the sense that their awareness of their funding sources' interests leads them to self-censorship. They ignore or downplay or distort important information. It is also true that toeing the line is often openly a required condition of future funding.

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THE HIJACKING OF HISTORY BY OPERA: THE DEATH OF KLINGHOFFER

by Phyllis Chesler. With examples of script falsification by Richard H. Shulman

Phyllis Chesler examines the artistic and not so artistic aspects of The Metropolitan Opera staging of "The Death of Klinghoffer," a reenactment of the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro by a group of Arab terrorists, who shot a wheelchair-bound passenger, Leon Klinghoffer, in the head and then threw him overboard. Their reason? He was a Jew and they were homeless because of the Jews. Putting aside the fact that the Jews hadn't stolen the land from the Arabs because the Arabs didn't own the land, call me stupid, but I don't get how killing a defenseless Jew can be presented as an inevitable or effective or even expected way to assuage anger and loss. If, as is claimed, this is an attempt to understand humans acting out their agony, shouldn't the script have probed deeper? Are killing and torture routine responses to being deprived of a home? If so, why aren't Jews terrorists? After all, at the very least, some 800,000 Jews were forced to flee Arab countries roughly around the time the families of the stage Arabs agreed to leave their homes at the behest of the Arab countries invading the new state of Israel. So maybe there's something in the nature or nurture of the Arab 'victims' that drives them to bestiality. But the opera doesn't go there. It follows the trite formula of pitting the good guys against the bad guys, with the terrorists and the Jewish passengers acting as stand-ins for Arabs and Israelis. The terrorists sing good-guy lyrics, so we know they must be good guys. Richard Shulman points out the gross tampering with historic facts that was required to make the terrorists seem to be good guys and the libel needed to make villains of the Jews. What an inversion of history!

Actually, there is one aspect of the opera's conception that is worthy of exploration: the appealing vision of terrorists who have a human concern for lost homes and wrecked families was concocted by the composer/librettist. The real terrorists hijacked the boat to force Israel to release another terrorist, Samir Kuntar, in prison for invading an Israeli home, seizing a father and his four-year old daughter, and smashing the head of the child against a rock in front of her father. As Chesler writes, the librettist, bought up as a Jew and now an Anglican priest, appears enamored of the theme of murder-crucifixion of a Jew. The composer is an admirer of Edward Said, who falsified his own history and used his academic standing to strengthened the illusion that the Palestinian Arabs were an actual people. So there is the interesting question: was the substitute plot designed to enhance the opera's artistry or was it because even a librettist much more talented than the Klinghoffer librettist could not have squeezed out sympathy for the real terrorists, who like beasts of the field did what they did with pride and the admiration of their families, but without human conscience.

We are left to ask: why did the Met, which prefers to keep dramatic controversy tidily on the stage and not moving into the audience, put this on? Not surprisingly, many people automatically assume that the Arab Jihad, having secured a forum for its world view in academia, is now ready to tackle the arts. Even if the lavish presentation was not pre-soaked in oil money, it says something about the anti-Semitic climate the Arabs have been paying to create that the Met had no qualms putting on such a show.

The actions of some Jewish Met donors have also been called into question. As Mark Langfan of AFSI (see here) noted: not one rich black donor would support an opera that explained the 'perspective of a white lynch mob' lynching a black man... But, today, with this evil opera glorifying the terroristic Palestinian murder of an American Jew, there are still many, many rich American Jewish Metropolitan Opera donors who are still going to donate millions upon millions to the Metropolitan Opera. And, that ... is sickness." Even worse, the large Jewish organizations that have ignored the harassment of Jews at colleges and the hostility of the Obama administration towards Israel remain stuporous, even though this malodorous production at the Met looks like the start of yet another phase of Arabs spewing money to encourage holocaust-level Jew-hate while Jews pretend it isn't happening.

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IT'S TIME TO BEAT THE JEW HATERS

by Caroline Glick

Too many Jews respond to the growing overt antagonism to Jews by Jew-haters who lie deliberately or distort the truth by using the "everyone is entitled to speak" argument. Caroline Glick spells out how far we've come from small acts of violence against Jews to systematic bans, divestments and sanctions. Dock unions won't unload Israeli goods; academic unions won't affiliate with Israeli universities; Jewish students are subjected to harassment and violence, which the university administrations ignore. Increasingly, as Glick puts it, "another dam has been breached. Another safe zone has become a no-go zone." and there is no end in sight. Yet the Jews have been slow to respond and when they do, their quiet remonstrances have been ignored. There are better ways to deal with the wave of non-random attacks designed to demonize, terrorize and isolate Jews. For example, ZOA demanded that those major Jewish donors that continued to donate after the Met staged a propagandist anti-Jewish opera be called to "account for their decision not to revoke their multi-million dollar support for the opera house." Responding to anti-Jewish thug tactics should be by exposing the front group's backing and ties to terrorism. Intimidation can be met by restraining orders and filing criminal complaints. Lawsuits against academic administrators who allow Jewish students to be subjected to attacks ranging from verbal abuse to physical assaults are more effective than writing polite letters suggesting the administrators do when they already know they should be doing and have no intention of doing. As Glick suggests, "an aggressive campaign of legal, political, social and financial opposition to those who seek to demonize Jews and deny Jews civil rights as Jews as well as those who enable them can go a long way toward making members of these hate groups and their supporters rue the day they decided to go after the Jews."

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STOP DENYING THE OBVIOUS: ISLAM IS A PROBLEM

by Geert Wilders

Over many years, Geert Wilders has fought the Islamic Jihad by political action and educational means. Although a member of the Dutch parliament, he was put on trial for the hate crimes of telling the truth about Islam in articles and making a documentary called Fitna, which had the audacity to quote passages directly from the Koran. In this article, he asserts we must do more than "bomb its strongholds in the Middle East." It is also necessary to confront Western-born Muslim jihadists at home in the West. As Wilders says, "war has also come to our streets" and every Westerner is a potential target. This, in many ways, is more difficult to do, because it runs counter to political correctness and insists that homeland security is more important than subscribing to the ideology of multiculturalism.

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GERMAN POLICE RAID MOSQUE, ISLAMIC CENTER, AND MUSLIM FLATS OVER SUSPECTED TIES TO THE ISLAMIC STATE

by Bare Naked Islam

This article records an unusual happening: the German police rounding up those with connections to ISIS. As in other European countries, the police don't want to be perceived as persecuting a minority religion, especially Islam. In an unusual move, German police arrested members of ISIS in several raids. This article appeared in Bare Naked Islam. Several comments suggested the Germans would act stronger if they weren't inhibited by their reputation for brutality, which they earned by slaughtering Jews in World War 2.

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HOW BRITISH NEWSPAPERS HANDLE MUSLIM CRIMES AND ACTS OF TERRORISM

by Bernice Lipkin

Bernice Lipkin describes the discrepancy between the shallow way Islamic terrorism and Islamic crimes are handled in the British Press — the major objective is to keep the peace — and the savvy understanding of what's actually going on by many of their readers, who recognize that too many of their Muslim neighbors have no intention of fitting into Britain's culture but wish to remold England's style of life to suit their own needs as Muslims. In this instance, the public was made aware that some Muslims, though born in Britain, have chosen to fight for ISIS in the Middle East and perhaps to destroy some of their fellow citizens when they return home. At the same time, the newspapers headlined that Muslim gangs have been grooming white lower-class British children as prostitutes. Yet the main concern of the press was not why the Muslims were so destructive to the English life style. Instead they worried that people might resent what was happening and make life hard for their Muslim neighbors.

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THE INCOHERENT EXCUSES FOR HATING ISRAEL

Bruce Thornton

Scenes of Islamic terrorists who wish to make European institutions Islam-compatible fighting police are dramatic, but it is some of the subtler types of Islamic influence that are the greater danger. Bruce Thornton writes of the illogical, sometimes absurd, arguments used to bolster hate of Israel, As Thornton writes, "there is no question that hatred of Israel reflects the continuing existence of anti-Semitism in Europe, intensified by millions of Muslim immigrants for whom hating Israel is theologically justified."

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MUSLIMS STONE WOMAN TO DEATH FOR ADULTERY

by Robert Spencer

In skill in persuasion, public relations by Salafists such as IS is even more amateurish than Israel's. The only difference is that the global media doesn't disseminate every Muslim mumble and fumble. Robert Spencer describes a gory event somewhere between an honor killing and group entertainment, where a woman accused of adultery was stoned. Her father had the honer of hurling the first stone. The participants were recorded by a devotee of sharia law using modern technology. Will it have any impact on the certainty by so many that Islam is a religion of peace? Unlikely.

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NEGATING THE PROPAGANDIST RUSE OF NPR

by Tabitha Korol

As demonstrated by Tabitha Korol, NPR is likely to do for an autodidatic education what Peace Now and Oxfam have done for human rights, namely, destroy its good name. NPR has proven itself untrustworthy as a vehicle of education in that it is notoriously agenda-driven, describing the terrorist cohorts of Islam as following a religion of peace, innocent victims of the very same Israelis that they slaughter. Conversely, NPR describes Israel's precision in targeting enemy missiles while avoiding civilians in terms that suggest that Israel deliberately targets civilians. A mite of logic would suggest that the Arabs wouldn't hide their weaponry in the midst of women and children if they didn't know the Jews care more about Arab civilians that the Arab governments do. They'd lose too many of their weapons.

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ARE AMERICAN JEWS PURPOSELY WEARING BLINDERS?

by Shari Goodman

There was a time when Israelis were trying to convince themselves that the thuggish, Jew-hating Arafat and his buddies could, for the right price, give them peace. Their official and unofficial spokesmen would go on such shows as Charlie Rose on TV and blather that their desire was to see a Palestinian state neighboring or inside Israel. That aberration seems, for the most part, to have worn itself out, but Israelis, when given the opportunity to tell it as it is to Jews in a position to spread the word, still yack on about the desirability of peace, not the impossibility of compromising with those who have a monomaniacal desire to kill Jews. They don't say straight out that war and jihad and terror and killing infidels and raping and beheading and looting are not aberrations in Islam; they are what Mohammad wanted his followers to do. Shari Goodman recounts an evening when Michael Oren, once Israeli ambassador to the U.S., spoke at a parlor event. He pooh-poohed Muslim infiltration in the White House and US defense agencies, knowledge of which is so widespread that some has even reached the mainstream media. Most egregiously, Oren saw Arabs hostility as a land claim and not as what it is: an all-out war where the only endpoint the Arabs will accept is an Islamic victory over all other groups with a different religion or ideology, with the Jews being an immediate target. From all indications, Israel will have to work hard just to get up to the starting point of educating the world, let alone doing an effective job.

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DOES ISRAEL HAVE FREEDOM OF THE PRESS? NEW YORK TIMES: "NONSENSE"

by First One Through

To get one's news mainly from the New York Times (NYT) is to believe that Israel restricts the press. It's true that Israel has been appraised as having a free press by Freedom House. It's the only country in the Middle East that does. Another authoritative group, the Foreign Press, has protested Hamas's censorship of reporters in Gaza. But why bother with statistics, when an NYT Bureau chief claims to have contradictory evidence from unnamed sources. The White Queen of the Times declared of Israel's record of freedom of the press, "Nonsense." And she, herself, has said it. Though it isn't to her credit. Nor does it help counter the decline of the NYT as a reputable source of information.

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HOW I STOPPED BEING A JEW

by Shlomo Sand. With Foreword by IAM Editor and Review by Gordon Haber

Half a dozen years or so ago, Shlomo Sand, who was something of a mediocrity, academic-wise, realized there was a easy route to fame and fortune. He could capitalize (I hope that Sand, a Marxist in good standing, won't find the term offensive) on two facts: he was born Jewish and he had an academic union card. All he needed to do was change his audience. Since then he has written an anti-Judaism trilogy that has succeeded in bringing comfort and confirmation of their every belief to Jew haters everywhere, particularly those in Europe. His first two books attempted to rip Judaism from its historical and theological roots. His latest book details how he stripped away his own Jewish identity. It provides no world shaking insights or original philosophy, but his saying "I stopped being a Jew" seems on the mark. I wonder though — now that he has denied himself the right to use Jewish credentials to certify how evil Judaism is — will his assertions be worth as much to the Jew-haters he has inspired?

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PERFIDIOUS ALBION

by Kenneth Levin

Joan Swirsky, who sent this article by Kenneth Levin to Think-Israel, wrote: "This essay traces British animus (strongly virulent) against the Jews. Thwarting Jewish safety, toadying to Arab prejudice, preventing Jewish defense, encouraging Arab violence by offering false charges as 'cover' for Arab attacks." British sympathy to the Arab cause remains as true as it was a hundred years ago. As Levin notes, "But even beyond the context of violence, anti-Israel distortions of realities in the territories are pervasive in Britain." As example, when Israel gained control of Gaza, she improved the lives of the Arabs still living in refugee camps by building them permanent homes with electricity and running water and finding them employment in Israel. This radically changed when Hamas gained control. But to read the British media, the exact opposite is true: Hamas is painted as a fair-minded governor, while, inconsistently, the Gazans suffer under (phantom) Israeli occupation.

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WAS BRITAIN'S SEVERING TRANSJORDAN FROM THE JEWISH HOMELAND AN ACT OF PREJUDICE, MISJUDGMENT OR BETRAYAL OF THE JEWS?

by Alex Rose

Thomas Jefferson once said it was not honorable to take legal advantage when it was contrary to justice. Alex Rose provides us with a comprehensive analysis of what seems a bizarre act by Britain when it held the Mandate for developing the ancient land of Israel as a homeland for the Jewish people. The entire area set aside was a minuscule piece of the Ottoman Empire while the Arabs were given over 99% of the area. Yet when England wanted to reward the Hashemite Abdullah a consolation prize because the Saudis, a rival clan, got Mecca and Medina and a huge land surround, Britain chopped three-quarters of the one percent destined to become Israel, using as pretext that these Arabs would merely administrate the land, not own it.

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OLD ANTIPATHIES DIE HARD

by Sarah Honig

Sarah Honig summarizes succinctly what the other articles in this section flesh out in detail and brings the story up to the present day. She also puts the lie to the notion that the foreign policy of a supposedly rational country is primarily determined by calculated national interest. As she makes clear by describing Britain's behavior, ideology and historic prejudice may counteract self-interest.

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A TIME FOR SPIRITUAL HEROISM

by Michael Freund

This is the season that we celebrate the start of the new year of 5775. It is a time that we are encouraged to reflect and think about bringing a sense of service to HaShem into our everyday lives. If we choose to do so, circumstances are seldom much of a hindrance. Michael Freund writes of a Rosh Hashanah in Auschwitz, when Naftali Stern, a cantor, took upon himself the task of conducting a full Rosh Hashanah service in the camp, where just surviving was almost impossible. To do so, he swapped his bread rations for pencil and sacks on which he wrote out the prayers for Rosh Hashanah from memory. And on Rosh Hashanah, he held a service for the assembled Jews.

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THE U.S. NAVY SAVED JEWS OF ERETZ YISRAEL 100 YEARS AGO

by Lenny Ben-David

It was 1914. World War 1 was starting, and the Ottomans, then the rulers of the Middle East including the land that would become the modern State of Israel, were massing troops, preparing to move against the British. Their preparations including looting food and supplies and conscripting the locals, including the local Jews, who were already living close to the edge of disaster, suffering from poor crop yield, plundering by government officials and the enforced enlistment of their breadwinners. They needed money to tide them over. The money was forthcoming from some American millionaires. The problem was how to get the money to the needy by avoiding the sticky fingers of Turkish officials. The U.S. navy came to the rescue. American ships monitoring the eastern Mediterranean between Beirut and Cairo carried money and supplies to sustain the beleaguered Jewish community.

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REMEMBERING THE BATTLE OF TOURS

by Mark Tapson

In 732, the hitherto unstopped conquest of the Middle East and Europe by the Muslims was brought to a halt at Tours, some 175 miles from Paris. The victorious army was led by a Frankish duke who earned his sobriquet Charles Martel (Charles the Hammer) at the battle. It wasn't a one-shot victory, but it marked the beginning of Europe's ability to fight off the Muslim invaders. Mark Tapson tells the story, with emphasis on the contrast between Charles the Hammer and the present-day dhimmi, Prince Charles, who inter alia has encouraged the demographic invasion of England by Muslim immigrants. The Islamic means are different; the goal the same.

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THE FLAWED SCIENCE BEHIND AMERICA'S COUNTER-TERRORISM STRATEGY

by Katharine C. Gorka

The Obama administration and its academic expert advisers hold that Islamic terrorism is the response to legitimate grievances. Consequently, countering Violent Extremism (CVE) must be done by addressing environmental causes — we must attack poverty, alienation, low political and social status, and other such traumatizing experiences. Others in the Counter-Terrorism community, with greater real-world experience and knowledge of the Muslim psyche, struggle to make the public understand that Islamic jihad is not another expression of societal unrest and discontent. As Katharine Gorka makes clear in this plainly written study, terrorism is a weapon traditionally used by pious Muslims, salafists, who, no matter what their socio-economic status, believe that Muslims have a religious obligation to make Islam prevail over the adherents of all other religions and belief systems. No matter how much the government restructures the terrain and softens the experiences of Muslim immigrants and chants mantras about the virtues of multiculturalism, it won't change the fact that Islam is intrinsically incompatible with the Western belief that the individual matters and is capable of running his own life to actualize his own goals. She makes clear that until we correct the diagnosis, we will not rid ourselves of the disease.

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THE LONE-WOLF CANARD

by Andrew C. McCarthy

In an essay on the Boston Massacre (see here.) I pointed out that the so-called lone wolf was a cost-effective way for a terrorist group to create a terror incident. "Supplies are cheap and terror enthusiasts are plentiful." I suggested that "specific training in particular weaponry could be reduced if preparation ... created a fervently strong emotional commitment to Islam. [...] Complete top-down hierarchical control wasn't necessary. This didn't imply the terrorist was a free agent, unaffiliated with an organized group of terrorists." Just the opposite. In this article, Andrew McCarthy informs us that the term 'lone wolf' "is actually a surveillance-law concept", designed to allow investigators to track individuals doing things like buying explosives or casing a bridge. Even if they did not yet know what terrorist group was running him, "the involvement of a foreign terrorist organization" was presumed. Thanks to denial politics and political correctness, 'lone wolf' has come to mean just the opposite, i.e., it now signifies an unaffiliated individual who has somehow radicalized himself without access to jihadist literature and/or to those who preach dedication to Islam. It is now an article of political faith that his actions have nothing to do with Islam, "no matter how many 'Allahu Akbars!' are shouted as bullets fly, bombs blast, or heads roll." Deciding ahead of time that the lone wolf is unaffiliated makes it unnecessary to pursue possible associations. So investigators don't have to go against the Obama administration's decree that jihad and Islam must not to be linked. And only the public suffers.

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'LONE WOLF,' OR 'KNOWN WOLF'? THE ONGOING COUNTER-TERRORISM FAILURE

by Patrick Poole

Patrick Poole writes about other consequences of the fallacious belief that we need to Counter Violent Extremism (CVE) rather than fight devout Muslims willing to be extremely violent in the service of Islam, sustained by the certainty that Mohammad would approve of what they do. Poole makes the case that far from being untraceable nonentities, "terrorist actors are almost always part of a network who were involved in recruiting and tasking terrorist activity." As evidence, he writes of cases we've all heard of. As one example, Russian Intelligence had alerted the FBI that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the brothers who blasted people watching the Boston Marathon, was a radical Islamist. He was also readily tied to the near decapitation of three Jews, one of whom was said to be Tsarnaev's best friend, in what may have been a terrorist 'rite of passage'. But there was no follow-up. Major Hasan at Fort Hood is another example. I don't know what else Hasan could have done to alert people that he was fanatical about protecting his people, other Muslims. Yet the army authorities ignored all indications because he was a Muslim. Which raises another question: why would the Obama administration lay the blame for terrorist acts on everything but what the Koran decrees is acceptable behavior in the service of Islam?

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THE MYSTERIOUS MODERATE MUSLIM

by Carol Brown

Carol Brown points out that one can't claim the Koran preaches peace because the 'peaceful' verses in the Koran are abrogated by the later verses that advocate mass murder and mayhem in the service of Islam. And these teachings are followed today as 'religiously' as they were a thousand years ago when Mohammad's followers sliced through a crowd as if they were scything grass. As Brown says, "there are those Muslims who are not outwardly violent (yet), but who support those who are and/or who participate in creeping Sharia. Throw taqiyya into the mix and it becomes extremely difficult to know or trust who is the ever-elusive moderate Muslim."

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MODERATE ISLAM IS OUR NEW RELIGION

by Daniel Greenfield

In an article entitled "When Will Uncle Sam Pursue American, Not Islamic, Interests?" (here), Diana West wisely pointed out that in the Middle East it is a waste of time and money to support whichever group is judged at the time to be 'moderate' "as a means of defusing the 'extremism' of Islam." Currently, "President Obama plans to fight against ISIS in Iraq and to support ISIS-allied forces in Syria." She suggested it's time we "acknowledge publicly that 'moderates' in the Islamic world are as common and/or as reliable as unicorns, and 'extremism' is the basis of Islam, and formulate new policy." Muslim leaders and clerics never tire of telling us, there is only Islam; there is no moderate Islam. But we and our policy makers don't listen. As Daniel Greenfield puts it, "You won't find the fabled land of moderate Muslims in the east. You won't even find it in the west. Like all myths it exists in the imagination of those who tell the stories. You won't find a moderate Islam in the Koran, but you will find it in countless Western books about Islam. [...] 'Moderate Islam' isn't what most Muslims believe. It's what most liberals believe that Muslims believe." When we assert there is a form of Islam that is moderate and that people who follow this version are Moderate Muslims, we are actually talking about secular Muslims who follow Islam only minimally, if at all. It is the more or less secular Muslim, mislabeled as Moderate, that liberals in the west believe in, religiously. Their faith remains unshaken, no matter what the facts. They will hear no evil spoken against moderate Islam because it makes possible their belief in multiculturalism and the brotherhood of man. Why they hold such beliefs is another question.

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ISLAM'S 'GOOD COP/BAD COP' ROUTINE

by Raymond Ibrahim

There is a mistaken belief among many academics and "experts" that we can work with non-violent salafists. They forget that methods and deadlines may differ, but all salafists work towards the same goal: "the resurrection of a Sharia-enforcing caliphate." Raymond Ibrahim discusses a tactic where the efforts of a 'moderate' terrorist group are combined with an openly terrorist group. He phrases it in terms of the good cop-bad cop routine that severely rattles a detainee and then gives him a way out of his difficulty by suggesting he cooperate with the good cop. When the players are salafists and the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) is cast as the good cop, the persuasive argument is that the West should deal with the supposedly non-violent MB, thus avoiding violence from any one of a number of overt terrorist groups (that the MB has spawned).

Israelis are familiar with the version practiced by the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the Territories and Hamas in Gaza. Both hate Jews and want to destroy Israel. To the extent that the PA acts in an almost civilized fashion when compared to Hamas, it has been foisted on Israel as a partner for peace by a world that refuses to look too closely at the real situation. The PA plays the role of rehabilitated thug and only occasional terrorist. One might describe the PA collectively as moderate terrorists, if this description weren't nonsensical, given the history of Fatah. The members of Hamas are openly terrorist, reminding Israelis that if they say out loud that the PA is no different than Hamas, they will have to admit that both these groups of Palestinian Arabs are the enemy that they actually are.

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SHIFTING ALLIANCES IN THE MIDDLE EAST

by Ofir Haivry

Ofir Haivry subdivides the current major "teams" in the Middle East into five geographically-fuzzy coalitions, which he describes as "loosely ideological confederations." These are (1) the Autocratic Sunni Coalition led by Saudi Arabia; (2) the Sunni-Populist Coalition led by Turkey and propelled by the Muslim Brotherhood; (3) the Shia-Radical Coalition led by Iran, which keeps the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria from collapse; (4) the Sunni-Jihadist Coalition led by ISIS, whose boldness and unequivocal savagery have captured the loyalty of Sunni Arabs, especially young recruits from around the world; and (5) the Coalition of the Nation States, which until recently consisted of one member — Israel — which alone carried the banner of democracy and national self-determination, goals now starting to be sought by some of the region's oppressed groups such as the Kurds and the Druze of Lebanon and Syria. Haivry makes the important point that the goals of the first four groups "are shaped by some shade of Islamism ... where political opposition is crushed, women are subjugated, and Salafist Islam rules..." The good news is that the Middle East countries haven't, except for Qatar, wasted much time supporting Hamas. The bad news, not discussed by Haivry, is that the US, the UN and the EU have taken on the role of major supporters of Hamas and its anemic sister, the PA. Haivry's sensible advice is that the US should not by worrying about which of the first four groups to support. It should be "strengthening the critical alliance with Israel, supporting the Kurds, and exploiting the weaknesses of the four other coalitions."

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QATAR'S SUPPORT OF HAMAS AND JIHADIST FORCES IN THE MIDDLE EAST

by JCPA

As the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA) notes, in the fluid restructuring of alliances in the Middle East, Sunni Qatar stands out because — while appearing friendly to the West and its Sunni neighbors — it is using its enormous oil wealth lavishly to support jihadist groups such as "Hamas, Muslim Brotherhood, Jabhat al Nusrah, al-Qaeda affiliates, Libyan Islamists, and even ISIS" and to undermine other Sunni countries: "Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain." It is also one of the few states in the Middle East devoting much effort currently on trying to destroy Israel by supporting Hamas. The constant in all this support to salafist movements in the Middle East and in various African states appears to be Qatar's need for muscle in its hassles with Saudi Arabia over land and power.

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LATEST BIG LIE: 'WE HAVE NO STRATEGY'

by Michael Ledeen

The major way the public is instructed an event is significant is by way of the newspaper and TV media broadcasting it, explaining it, cogitating on it and doing so again and again. But the mechanism of media is largely broken. And so the public is often ignorant of major changes in policy, though these are independently recognized by think-tankers and experts in counter terrorism. Although Iran is moving steadily towards acquiring nuclear weaponry, it has become clear that the Obama Administration has shifted its allegiance from Sunni Saudi Arabia to Shiite Iran. We can expect therefore he will help by convening conferences and blathering about sanctions, but will do nothing to stop Iran. Indeed, we can expect the US to continue to run interference and not let any other country stop Iran or its proxy, Syria. And any harm we do to ISIS will enhance Iran's position.

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THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY IS MY ENEMY

by Yoram Ettinger

Yoram Ettinger notes that the enemy of my enemy is my friend (EEMF) credo that has guided Western and Israeli policy over decades is decidedly wrong in the Middle East. "The misguided characterization of Iran" as a potential ally because it is fighting ISIS "could produce a nuclear conflict, a mega-trillion dollar cost to the U.S. taxpayer, an unprecedented level of fatalities, a tidal wave of global anti-U.S Islamic terrorism, and tectonic eruptions of insanity throughout the globe." Similarly, "[t]he victory of wishful thinking over reality was also the basis for Israel's 1993 policy toward the PLO — the enemy of Hamas — which was gullibly expected to align itself with Israel's war on Palestinian terrorism, in return for the unprecedented Israeli territorial concessions of the Oslo process. Instead, since 1993, Israel has been a victim of an unprecedented wave of PLO/Hamas anti-Israel terrorism..." A policy based on EEMF can't work because it flies in the face of the mission of salafist Muslims, whether Sunni or Shi'ite, to make Islam the supreme religion in the world, with all other religious and ethnic groups subservient to it.

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TERROR GROUP KHOROSAN SAID TO POSE MORE OF A THREAT TO U.S. THAN ISIS. GROUP TURNS OUT TO BE OBAMA HOAX

by Andrew C. McCarthy

As if we didn't have enough problems trying to determine who's on what team and how to keep tabs on the more than one thousand terrorist groups in Syria, the Obama administration has introduced unnecessary noise in the system. In June of this year, the news media began writing about an extremist group called the Khorasan Group. It was said to be more dangerous than the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). By September, the media informed us the US had initiated some airstrikes against both ISIS and the Khorosan in Syria. This information carried with it the not so subtle message that Obama wasn't ineffective, at least not in war. He had put together a working coalition of Arab countries — Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. The air strikes against ISIS, some sloppily hitting largely civilian areas, did indeed occur. There is only one problem The Khorosan Group was a hoax, a fictitious name the Obama administration invented with malice a forethought. Andrew McCarthy tells us about it.

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PORTRAIT OF A PSYCHOPATH

by Edward Cline

This essay by Edward Cline is based on a recent book by F.W. Burleigh entitled It's All About Muhammad: A Biography of the World's Most Notorious Prophet. Islam is as it is because Muhammad was as he was. Islam is not based just on what Muhammad said. It is equally true that whatever Muhammad did is approved behavior for everyone for all time. What makes today's Islam and jihadists tick? As Cline says, "Basically, it's Muhammadan insanity armed with a razor-sharp sword looking for a convenient neck to strike, or an empty, weak, malleable mind to fill. And whether they're called al-Qaeda, or the Taliban, or ISIS, or Hamas, or Hezbollah, or the Muslim Brotherhood or any of its sundry and cousinly franchises, they are all nihilistic psychotics."

An Addendum from The Muslim Issue website entitled "Islam — The Crimes of Prophet Mohammed" is a list of specific acts we in the West regard as criminal or at least immoral. They are acceptable and even admired in Islam; they serve as a model for how to behave properly. Thus, child marriage is acceptable because Mohammad married a 6-year old.

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RADICAL ISLAM, ISRAEL AND AGITPROP

by Guy Millière

Guy Millière writes a brief but excellent contextual history of the modern development of Resurgent Islam, which began when it became obvious to Muslim clerics and leaders that Islam was far behind the West. Some leaders looked to the West for solutions. Others, despising what they saw in the West, proposed, as reformation, a return to the "original principles" of Islam. A corollary ambition was the re-creation of a single sovereign government for the Arabic-speaking people of the Middle East. This dream suffered when the League of Nations in the early 1920s split the conquered Middle East empire of the Ottomans into many Arab states and one Jewish state by separate mandates for Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Transjordan and Mesopotamia, creating states that ranged from fundamentalist (Saudi Arabia) to secular (Turkey). While the concomitant growth of modern Zionism, a national liberation movement, was compatible with regimes that held different world views, the theology of both Islamic fundamentalism and Arab nationalism was not, because it was based on the intolerant supremicist principles of early Islam. Radical Islam crystallized with the formation of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928. It promoted a meticulous return to living by Muhammad's words and deeds; but it was also "influenced by Western totalitarian dogmas: Marxism, Leninism, fascism, National-Socialism." It is capable of blatant lying about its history, tenets and goals to gain adherents and disarm opponents; clever in creating a faux people, the Palestinians, to make spurious claims to Jewish land; and brilliant in building networks and bribing, blackmailing and bullying its way into Western infrastructure. Yet basically it simply divides the world into the House of Islam and the yet to be conquered House of War. As Millière points out, while Israel has brought fruitful inventions to the world's store of technology, science, art and medicine, Radical Islam has become "the most destructive force of the twenty first century. It brings only chaos and sterility; it is dangerous and has no future."

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THE MIDDLE EAST MASQUERADE PARTY

by Mordechai Kedar

Mordechai Kedar writes about the false images Middle East leaders project and the false claims they make. An egregious example is the supposed "Pan-Arab Nation" — the commonality of history and mission that is said to bind all Arabs together. In actuality, as Kedar points out, "The idea of the Pan-Arab Nation never succeeded in replacing the loyalties of many Arabs to traditional, secondary frameworks such as the tribe, religion (Muslim, Christian, Yazidi, etc.) or sect (Sunni, Shiite, etc.)." As do other Arab leaders that Kedar describes, Qatar's rulers flip between incompatible persona: they consistently fund terrorist organizations that target Westerners, while proclaiming themselves friends of the West. They even, when necessary, join the coalition of countries that plan to wage war against IS, the Islamic State. Kedar emphasizes that it is important for Israel to understand it can not "build its future relying on the temporary masks hiding the faces of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the Emirates and Egypt."

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THE FUTILITY OF 'LAND FOR PEACE'

by Prof. Paul Eidelberg

This is an essay in two parts, both written by Professor Paul Eidelberg but published separately. Part 1 argues that peace and land can not be compared so their degrees of value can not be compared. They can, however, be examined in relation to the motivational and cognitive environment of the particular culture. The Israelis have gone to extreme, almost suicidal, lengths to obtain peace, starting with returning the entire Sinai Peninsula, when President Sadat of Europe hoped for a return of a small amount, and they have honored the terms of the 1993 Oslo Accords, which gave administrative control of land legally owned by Israel to the PLO. The Arabs have not provided the peace they promised. In fact, they met none of the terms they'd agreed to. Part 2 discusses the differing cognitive environments of the two cultures and how Israeli efforts for peace are futile, given how Arab culture influences Arab behavior.

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GAZA 2014

by Richard H. Shulman

Richard Shulman presents facts about Gaza that many in the news media avoid or de-emphasize, in their attempt to whitewash Hamas. As example, the UN acts as if it were neutral and impartial. In point of fact, most of staff of the UN agency, UNRWA, which provides Arab "refugees" with cradle-to-grave welfare, are themselves Palestinian Arabs. And the UN peacekeepers have a record of conspiring with terrorists. He also dissects the war the media, in particular the New York Times, wages against Israel, while purporting to present a balanced view. It's time people asked why the media are horrified by the 2000 deaths in Gaza and ignore the 200,000 deaths in Syria, let alone the deaths in the civil wars in many other Arab countries. Shulman explains why a diplomatic solution won't work with a jihadist enemy, and why Israel's way of waging war is also defective: Israel loses the element of a surprise attack by messaging civilians that they are going to bomb an installation containing weaponry in a few minutes. (BTW: Israel's reward for such civility is that organizations such as Human Rights Watch (HRW) think that's insufficient notification; HRW ignores that many Israelis have only 15 seconds warning that a rocket is about to strike near them.) He also points out that Fatah, though presenting a slicker veneer, is no better than Hamas.

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GAZA: A JUST WAR FOUGHT CHELM-STYLE

by Jack Engelhard

When the war began, Jack Englehard brushed aside the mean, the vicious, the trite and the silly reasons for ignoring Hamas's constant barrage of missiles extending further and further into Israel. He focused on the main issue: Hamas needed to be taken down. It was a long-due just war. The troops were dedicated and trained, Israelis were almost unanimous in wanting Hamas destroyed, the military had the technology to end the operation in hours, take Gaza over in two day, conquer it completely in seven days and would be in a favorable position to destroy terrorist infrastructure, which will take another two years. (Freund, JPost, 18Aug2014) — and this against a very nasty group of people. But Israel has a major weakness — pusillanimous politicians, so afraid of "the world's opinion" they don't protect their own citizens. And so it was that the IDF fought, as Englehard writes, as if the battle plans were designed by the sages of Chelm.

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THE CONTINUING BLUNDER OF RETREAT

by Victor Sharpe

Victor Sharpe writes critically of the 2005 "'disengagement plan,' a euphemism for unilateral retreat from Gaza,' where Israel evacuated every Jew living in Gaza. That made it possible for Hamas to take over Gaza and have an easy time manufacturing explosives and lobbing missiles into Israel and the Territories. In this latest foray by Israel into Gaza, Israel meticulously pinpointed targets and warned civilians to evacuate targeted areas, a strategy that can be billed as highly moral but which has little impact on turning the Gazan Arabs against bombing Israel. There is concern that instead of being effective by wiping out Hamas, the politicians will return to the familiar game of offering real land — this time parts of Samaria and Judea (aka the West Bank) — for an ephemeral "peace." There's one problem with this approach — Hamas was designed for one purpose only: to destroy the Jewish state, not live peaceably next to it. It's in their charter and they abide by it.

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THE LAST TIME LAND FOR PEACE DIDN'T WORK

by Jeff Dunetz

Jeff Dunetz reminds us of the great expectations Ariel Sharon voiced when he expelled a patriotic and productive group of Jews from Gaza in August 2005. To others, unfortunately a minority, it was a daft idea grounded in a nebulous hope, not experience. And so it has proven to be. Besides contributing to the economy and to new technology, the Jews were also a sort of early warning system, able to monitor incipient terror plots and military training and weapons manufacture, activities that continues to absorb the energy of many of the Arabs of Gaza. The expulsion didn't make for peace. Quite the contrary.

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GAZA 2005

by Bernice Lipkin

Bernice Lipkin recalls the story of the idealistic and technically skilled Jews who lived in Gaza and grew wonderful vegetables, while keeping an eye on their Arab neighbors, who were prone to initiating new and clever ways to kill Israelis. All the Jew was expelled from Gaza in 2005, leaving it to the terrorists groups to squabble over. Synagogues were replaced by terrorist training camps. Public buildings became bomb factories. Thriving businesses were replaced by mosques preaching Jew-hate. Gaza was soon taken over and governed by Hamas. Thanks in large part to the funds sent it by the UN, EU and the West including the US, Gaza's larders were filled with missiles and its murderous inclinations became more ambitious. In 2014, we are still paying the price for acting on the idiotic idea that giving land to terrorists who want to decapitate you will make them peaceful and neighborly.

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PROPORTIONATE RESPONSE; DREAM THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM; TWICE BETRAYED; and other essays

by Moshe Saperstein

These essays by Moshe Saperstein help us understand what it is like to live in a trailer exposed to the missiles constantly being launched from Gaza, while trying to live a normal life. He and his wife Rachel were among the 10,000 Gazan Jews that became refugees in their own state when, in 2005, the Sharon government expelled all the Jews living in Gaza in the bizarre belief that this would cause their terrorist neighbors to make peace. Left to their own devices and no longer monitored by the local Jews, the Arabs of Gaza used the extra elbow room to train terrorists and manufacture and/or assemble ever more sophisticated weaponry. It is bitter irony that all Israel is suffering from missile attacks from Gaza and this would never have happened if Israel hadn't kicked settler Jews like the Sapersteins out of Gaza in the first place.

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FACTS OVER FEELINGS

by Amanda Berman

Amanda Berman discovered people she had once respected actually harbored ugly notions about Israel, while showering sympathy on the Arabs of Gaza. They suppressed or trivialized the fact that Hamas murders, stones, booby-traps and kidnaps Israelis and hangs those of its own people who won't conform. They were even capable of ignoring the fact that Hamas uses its women and children to shield the terrorists and their weaponry. The essay contains an excellent precis of facts that should be common knowledge. They serve as anchor references when confronted by Jew-hate disguised as humanistic concern for Arab "civilians".

If I have any quarrel with the article, it is that I disagree with Berman's opinion that "occupation" is a legitimate topic of debate. From context I assume she doesn't mean Arab illegal encroachment on Jewish land, which is a fact, but is referencing the fable that Jews are occupying Muslim Arab Palestinian Land. Oh, if only the Israeli Government were bold enough to throw away its investment in promoting a non-viable two-state solution and would broadcast that Samaria and Judea as well as Gaza and Israel itself are Jewish property, made so at San Remo in 1920 by the same international consensus that created most of the current Arab states.

How much more neurons must flash, how many more dendrites must integrate data before the airheads of the world figure out what's going on? How long before those that claim wide-ranging spiritual lives with a deep appreciation (pronounced ah pree see A shun) of the finer things of life, how long before these aesthetes in jeans acquire sufficient imagination to even describe the current reality accurately, let alone understand it in a multi-layered fashion.

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FIGHT, DON'T TALK

by Steve Kramer

Steve Kramer describes the prevailing attitude of Israelis toward the attacks on them by the Arabs in Gaza, who have broken every one of the recent ceasefires the diplomats have forced on Israel. He uses as example the partial change in attitude by the well-known, well-to-the-left Israeli author, Amos Oz, who send an autographed copy of of his books together with a love letter to Marwan Barghouti, terrorist and mass murderer of Jews (See Meotti, INN, 13May2014). As recently as two months ago Oz had no difficulty ignoring life-threatening rock throwing by young Arabs while denouncing young Jewish activists as neo-Nazis supported by "numerous nationalist or even racist legislators, as well as rabbis". At the end of July, in an interview in Deutsche Welle predictably he said that Israel's ground offensive in Gaza was excessive. What was different was that he made clear Israel's dilemna in how to handle Hamas's use of civilians and their houses to store weaponry and launch rockets. In a pretzel-like conclusion, he declared, that "at least in some points the military action is excessive - justified, but excessive." Huh? Ah well, it's a start toward reality.

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EVIDENCE OF A SHIFT TOWARDS ISRAEL IN INDIA?

articles by Chandan Nandy and by Mrutyuanjai Mishra

Despite harassment and terror attacks by Muslims, for many years, India was solidly against Israel and voted with those condemning Israel for anything and everything in the U.N. The articles and comments below indicate there has been a shift. How much is yet to be seen. Some writers were far ahead of the politicians, but starting in around 2011, political attitudes began to show change publically. The article by Chandan Nandy focuses on a recent pro-Israel rally in Kolkata that attracted some 20,000 participants. Mrutyuanjai Mishra discusses the expansion of the jihadist war against the world. The comments to his article would suggest many of the readers of the Times of India are more knowledgeable about what's going on in Gaza than the readers of the New York Times.

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HOW ISLAM BUILT THE VERY FABRIC OF AMERICA

Oleg Atbashian

With his jaunty air and extraordinary ability to fabricate, Prez Obama asserted that Muslim Americans have contributed much to "the very fabric of our nation." Some people responded that until 9/11 the major Muslim contribution to USA history was the Barbary Pirates preying on American ships. Oleg Atbashian at The People's Cube Blog takes a different tack: he show us what governmental fabric woven by Muslims would look like. Unlike Obama's version, Atbashian's depiction of a Muslim-influenced America isn't made out of whole cloth.

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ISIS MUSLIM RADICALS INFILTRATING US VIA MEXICAN BORDER

by Dave Jolly

As if we didn't have enough problems because of illegal immigrants, now we need to think seriously about Islamic terrorists coming into the States through our porous border with Mexico. It's been known for years that Korans and prayer mats have been found at the border, but the major media have ignored the implication that members of sleeper cells are likely being put in place. Now Dave Jolly tells us that reliable analysts believe "Muslim radical members of ISIS may be infiltrating the United States." At this point, we can demand confirmatory evidence — positive evidence such as another 9/11 — or we can agree with the Mexican newspaper editor who wrote this headline, "The Arab terrorists were here!" Putting it another way, we can wait for Prez Obama to think about deciding it might be an idea to deal with it in the future indefinite, or we might lend the border states political reinforcement so they will deal with it.

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BACKGROUNDER: STUDENTS FOR JUSTICE IN PALESTINE (SJP)

by Lee Kaplan

The organization called Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is misnamed. It is not led by students. And it isn't interested in Justice in Palestine. As Lee Kaplan makes clear, SJP is yet another organization supported by Arab oil money and devoted to destroying Israel. Led by devotees of sharia law, it is well-organized and runs effective training sessions, disruptive demonstrations and dramatic street theatre. It works hand in hand with other pro-Palestinian groups such as the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), which sends young Westerners such as Rachel Corrie to act as human shields for Arab terrorist groups. Kaplan recounts the history of the SJP, "a conglomeration of ISM activist types, former or secular Jews, mostly Muslim Arabs, but some Christians and radically socialist communists." The glue holding these disparate groups together is unabashed anti-Semitism. Before the Arab countries found themselves fighting for their own lives, the major ambition of these pious Muslims, Sunni and Shi'ite, was to see Islam taking its rightful place as the most important religion in the world. For hundreds of years, Muslims have fought for supremacy. They conquered the Middle East and encroached on Europe and the East, the American continents not being "discovered" as yet. Nowadays, two major blocks hinder this ambition, the big Satan, the USA, and the little Satan, Israel. Were Israel to be extinguished, they could devote their monetary and political clout to bringing sharia to the West without hindrance.

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LABOUR MP: BRITISH MUSLIMS ARE DOING 'HUMANITARIAN WORK' IN IRAQ/SYRIA, JOINING ISIS NO DIFFERENT TO JOINING ISRAELI ARMY

by Raheem Kassam

Yasmin Qureshi is the epitome of the moderate Muslim. She was born in Jhelum, Pakistan and moved to the UK when she was nine. She is married, lives in Bolton South East, and practices law as a Barrister in Manchester. She has been actively involved in community work for over twenty years with the Citizen Advice Bureau and local law centres. She has been the governor for a college and three schools. She was the Head of the Criminal Legal Section of the UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) and later the Director of the Department of Judicial Administration in Kosovo. She is a past President of the Pakistan Club (UK). She is the former Chair of the Human Rights and Civil Liberties Working Group of the Association of Muslim Lawyers. And, as Raheem Kassam writes, she defends Muslim terrorists, asserting that the British Muslims fighting for ISIS are humanitarians.

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THE GLOBAL POGROM

by Benjamin Kerstein

Benjamin Kerstein writes about the global pogrom that has been underway for well over a decade. "[It] has taken lives. It has destroyed property. It has injured, brutalized, and terrified Jews and Jewish communities in many nations." He writes mainly about the atrocities that have occurred in France; in fact, in 2013 40% of all hate crimes in France targeted Jews. Because of its large Jewish and large Muslim populations, the systematic harassment of the Jewish community by Muslims is very clear in France, but the same trend is to be seen all over Europe. A chilling fact is that the Muslims may be the instigators, but the participants in the sieges, street violence, looting, store burnings, fire bombs, vandalism and hate-filled rallies are both Muslims and Europeans, and usually the police look the other way. The Pogrom mentality has spread to the USA, Canada and even Australia. In the Muslim countries, which expelled Jews when Israel was created, there is the phenomenon of anti-Semitism without Jews, where medieval anti-Jewish confabulations are taken as facts. The one country which has had Jews in any numbers since the 1950s is Turkey. Egged on by the current Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan, the pogrom is in progress there, too. Everywhere, "for all practical purposes, [there is] no distinction between hatred of Israel, hatred of Zionism, and hatred of the Jews." Kerstein expects this anti-Jew fury to spread where ever there are Jews. He might also have noted that this hate will not be satiated with Jewish blood. It is likely that, as is the usual sequence, the Jew may be the first to be attacked, but he is never the last.

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STOP BLAMING ISRAEL AND WAKE UP: THE BLACK FLAG OF JIHAD IS THE REAL THREAT TO THE WORLD

by Douglas Murray

Those who blame Israel for the ills of the Middle East, if not those of the entire world, are right about one thing: there is a single cause riling up the world's lemmings and making trouble for other cultures. But it's not Judaism. It is, as Douglas Murray writes, resurgent Islam, split into separate groups but united in this single cause and waving the same black flag of terror. He makes the important point that the current spate of anti-Semitism is causing problems for Jews today, but tomorrow people in other countries and other ethnic group will suffer from the same Muslim hatred and violence. As Murray puts it, "Israel is not the cause of the world's problems. It is simply on the front line of them."

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THE MYTH OF PALESTINIAN CENTRALITY

by Efraim Karsh

Despite Obama's shallow view of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as central to the instability of the ME, the facts are otherwise. While the Arab states are vocally for the right of the 1948 Arab refugees to return to Israel — they fled in 1948 when the neighboring Arab countries invaded the newly-declared modern State of Israel — and for statehood for the local Arabs calling themselves Palestinians, operationally speaking the locals are only useful for creating sympathy for the Arab mission of destroying the Jewish State. Their major objective is the creation of a single Arab state, which, ironically, is what was initially envisioned after the Western Allies defeated the Ottomans in World War 1. The major subsidiary issue is: which Arab group is going to control the single Arab state or caliphate that is envisioned by pious Sunnis. Giving the Palestinian Arabs a state carved out of Israel is not a cure for the Arab craving for a pan-Arab state that will control the world. This essay provides an excellent historical analysis for understanding the non-connection of the lip-service for a Palestinian state and the Salafist obsession for a renewed Caliphate.

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UNDERSTANDING THE ISRAELI-EGYPTIAN-SAUDI ALLIANCE

by Caroline Glick

There is an unofficial alliance to repel Iran's ambition to dominate the Middle East and influence global politics. As Caroline Glick points out, this is a direct consequence of the American president's policy of punishing friends such as Israel and Egypt and cozying up to declared enemies such as Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood. She might have also pointed out that when confronted by a situation as in Syria where the Assad regime is protected by Iran but is fighting Al-Qaeda, one of Obama's not-so-secret friends, he dithers. When I asked a friend raised in the Middle East how a Muslim can hug you with one arm and knife you with the other, he said, "That's the nature of the Middle East." It's not behavior Westerners can understand intuitively, if at all.

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THE GROWING SHADOW OF ISIS

by Ilana Freedman and Jerry Gordon

Resurgent Islam continues to try to dominate the world. In the West, except for some isolated incidents, quickly forgotten, Muslim Salafist groups have not drawn much attention to their activities. And like lobsters in water that is slowly heated, Westerners have adapted. We haven't noticed how much our educational and political systems and media have been infiltrated. In the Middle East different groups of pious jihadists are in control of some or all of many Arab countries and openly wage war against secularists, non-Muslims and even other Salafists. They have bombed, lobbed rockets, sniped, stoned, gouged, waterboarded and fought but, over time, even these acts have become familiar, dreaded but expected. Occasionally, an murderous act have gained attention by being particularly shocking — a woman who wouldn't repudiate Christianity had a large cross shoved down her throat, an al-Qaeda terrorist ate the liver of someone he just shot, three Israeli teens and 300 Nigerian girls were kidnapped, a honor killing was coupled with a beheading, Christian women and children were beheaded. In this essay, Illana Freedman and Jerry Gordon write about ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), one of the known groups, which recently morphed into something rather new. Outlandishly brutal but with military discipline and competence, it has great confidence and — thanks to a talent for robbing banks and looting weaponry — a couple of billion dollars, part of which it spends not only on equipment but on artful propaganda, which has attracted many foreign-born Muslims to come to be trained as terrorists. What really set them apart is that they didn't just yearn for the reestablishment of the Caliphate, they announced they had brought it about and their leader was Caliph for all Muslims. The immediate impact was to delight some and enrage others, with few undecided. They might be scary enough to wake up the world to the dangers of Resurgent Islam.

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ACROSS TIME AND DEATH: IRAN AND THE ISIS CHALLENGE

by Lt. Col. (ret.) Michael Segall

Michael Segall assesses the ISIS phenomenon mainly from the point of view of its confrontations with Iran, and the likely regional and global consequences. ISIS has been able to ride roughshod over the Iraqi army and is fighting Hizbullah on its homeground in Lebanon, so it has become "a real threat to Iran's strategic assets in Syria and Lebanon and especially to its aspiration to restore Shiite supremacy." Segall is almost unique in emphasizing that Iran will "leverage its influence and deep involvement in Iraq, along with its common interests with the West (and even with some of its regional adversaries) when it comes to containing ISIS's expansion southward in Iraq and westward to Jordan. The aim of this leverage will be to extract concessions on the nuclear issue."

I believe, the worst thing that can happen in the region is for Iran to acquire nuclear weaponry. If that happens, it won't be a quantitative difference. It would take the current chaos and the battling and the shocking deaths and the rearrangement of borders and the shifts in the power structure to a totally different place, good for no one except perhaps the Iranian government. So why does the USA want to help Iran destroy ISIS when it is in our best interest to let ISIS damage and distract Iran? It is awful what ISIS is doing to civilian Yazidis, but the Obama Administration is able to ignore that Syrian children are being slaughtered in the thousands. Actually, we could rescue the relatively few Yazidis quietly by airlift, just as the Israelis patch up wounded Syrian civilians in field hospitals near the Syrian border. We can let ISIS and Iran duke it out in the Middle East, while we focus on curtailing ISIS's (and al-Qaeda's) ability to attract and train Westerners and Muslims born in the West, because these trained terrorists would be a direct threat to America, Europe and Israel when they return home.

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A LOVE LETTER FROM HAMAS TO ISIS (WITH 10 TIPS)

by Noah Beck

Noah Beck packs a lot of information about Hamas's and ISIS's tactics in what purports to be advice on how to be a evil perpetrator yet be accepted by most of the media as innocent victim. A reader, Daniel, adds this tip: use the language of "freedom" — West loves it. For example: "Free Iraq from colonial powers", "Free Syria from oppression", etc. West has hard time opposing such slogans, for example "Free Gaza" or "Free Palestine" are very popular, and nobody is bothering to check the facts...

Hamas and Isis have the same religious and political ideology and the same sense of mission, and they both enjoy behaving barbarically. As Benjamin Netanyahu said, "Hamas is ISIS, ISIS is Hamas." There is, however, a difference in how they are perceived and treated. Prez Obama rushed to save the Yazidis who have been under siege by ISIS but when Israel finally responded to daily bombardment from Hamas, he stopped shipping missiles to Israel until it agreed to stop bombing Hamas, even though it had not completed the job of dismembering Hamas.

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THE TRUTH IS HANGING ON BY A THREAD

by Nidra Poller

A reporter, Matti Friedman, in an article called "An Insider's Guide To The Most Important Story On Earth", observed that "there was a malfunction in the practice of journalism" in that when it comes to reporting on events involving Israel, reporters come into the Middle East being anti-Israel. As example, he pointed out that "[m]ost reporters in Gaza believe their job is to document violence directed by Israel at Palestinian civilians." In this essay, Nidra Poller describes how unshakable their built-in prejudice is. Many in the mainstream press are scrambling to keep themselves from examining their cheerleader attitude on behalf of the Salafists. At the moment, reality has them under strong assault but they are resisting with all their might the meaning of ISIS's latest contribution to global entertainment: the beheading of James Foley, a journalist who like them was fanatically anti-Semitic and a strong supporter of Sharia and the Arab jihad.

Assassinations were easier to ignore when Jews or half-Jews that lived in Arab villages like the actor Julian Mer-Khamis, who lived in Jenin and marched to a Salafist drummer, were exterminated by their hosts. Obviously, Mer-Khamis should not have invaded the village; he wasn't welcome. It was easy for them to understand the Muslim Brotherhood stoning, flaying, beheading, burning and pushing large crosses down the throats of Egyptian Coptic Christians. After all, did Christians behave all that differently when they ruled the region? When Daniel Pearl was beheaded, they could argue that Daniel Pearl was a Jew, so in some collective sense he deserved beheading. But James Foley was one of them. As Daniel Green writes (see here) "James Foley was one of a new breed of activists calling themselves journalists. He didn't travel to report on a story, but to promote an agenda... Foley came to Syria to support the Sunni Islamist rebels against the Syrian government. He was a vehement advocate and while he didn't necessarily side with any single group, he echoed the one sided narrative rather than telling the truth about the Islamists." It was their ox that was gored. James Foley was unblemished ideologically and his death was deliberate.

Poller writes that the truth hangs in the thread joining ISIS and Hamas, both believers in Sharia law, both beheaders of their own people, but it's unlikely the media will make the connection. They will continue to believe that if they blame the Jews, they are ensuring their own safety. Foley's execution might be an intimation of what's in store for other Western reporters, no matter how committed to the jihad. Nevertheless, all things considered, it is predictable the journalists will overcome this shock to their ideological system. Unfortunately for them, troublesome facts are emerging. Back home, their own Muslim immigrants refuse to behave in a civilized fashion. And thousands of their citizens who went off fight for jihad will return with terror skills and a hatred of their native land. What then?

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I DON'T LIKE JEWS BECAUSE...

by Justin Amler

Justin Amler rakes up for our edification notions about Jews much of the world believes are true: Jews are stubborn, Jews don't listen to their friends like the UN and the Arab League, Jews are aggressive and attacked the Gazan Arabs for no reason at all, etc., etc. With tongue-in-cheek, he suggests these depictions of the Jews must be true because reliable sources from the Main Stream Media and international political groups like the UN right down to Yasser Arafat and Bishop Tutu have said so, again and again. It's not the world's fault the Jews are to blame for all the problems of the world, is it?

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MAKE RACHEL CORRIE INTO ISRAEL'S ACTIVIST

by William A. Levinson

William Levinson argues that in fighting the battle of words, the best defense is an offense. Tools used by the enemy can be taken and used against them. He uses as example the story of Rachel Corrie, who was manipulated by ISM to act as shield for the Arabs against the IDF. When she died, struck by debris while playing "chicken" with an Israeli bulldozer, she was billed by ISM as a idealistic activist, martyred in the cause of peace. In fact, the first eye witness reports claimed the driver backed up and ran her over again. That accusation ceased when it was realized that would have left her as flat as a pancake; (it did lead to her being called St. Rachel of IHOP.) ISM acknowledged Corrie was more useful to them dead than alive, so Levinson suggests Israel should have agreed she was an idealist but should have emphasized that she was duped by ISM, which knowingly and recklessly endangered her life. Essentially, he is suggesting jiu-jitsuing the arguments of the anti-Israel organizations against them. As he says, "PsyWar is an offensive weapon" and speed in structuring the way an event is described is essential. Unfortunately, Israel continues to lose this important war.

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ISIL'S OTTOMAN "CALIPHATE" FORBEARS BRUTALLY SLAUGHTERED 250,000 ASSYRIAN-CHALDEAN, AND ORTHODOX CHRISTIANS A CENTURY AGO

by Andrew G. Bostom

Andrew G. Bostom describes a massacre by the Ottomans that took place during World War 1, between 1914 and 1919 in what is now northern Iraq and eastern Anatolia. Of the 250,000 people killed, most was slaughtered between June and September 1915. All the victims were Christians; the murderers were mostly local Muslims armed with knives and rocks, who were incited by State officials and politicians. Thousands of ordinary villagers participated in the orgy of slaughter. The victims were unarmed and were tied up. They were shot, stabbed, stoned, drowned and decapitated; their throats were crushed and they were thrown off roofs — just as infidels are treated in the Middle East nowadays when Arabs riot or when terrorists murder Israelis. As is the case currently when Muslims go on the rampage in the Middle East and Africa against their Christian neighbors, the "massacre was accompanied by serial mass rape of the women. Young girls were abducted as sex slaves and children as household servants." Other Christians were forced to flee. Many of them were massacred primarily by the Muslim Ottoman army or were attacked by local Arab gangs. How modern it all sounds. I wonder what excuses were used to justify routine Muslim barbarism.

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INTERVIEW WITH AN AUSCHWITZ GUARD: 'I DO NOT FEEL LIKE A CRIMINAL'

interview by Felix Bohr, Cordula Meyer and Klaus Wiegrefe

Felix Bohr, Cordula Meyer and Klaus Wiegrefe interviewed a 91-year old man named Jakob who had been a guard in Auschwitz. He denies he ever hit a prisoner but he no longer denies, as he did in earlier years, that he knew about the wholesale killing of Jews at Auschwitz. Now he says strongly, "When the crematorium is constantly burning, then everyone knows tha something is going on." After the war, most everyone involved and those living in the neighborhood of the camp denied knowing. Jakob has come forth to bear witness that they knew.

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THE WEDDING GOWN THAT MADE HISTORY

by Helen Zegerman Schwimmer

Helen Schwimmer writes of a wedding that took place more than a half century ago. What makes this wedding different is that Lilly and Ludvig, the bride and groom, had survived the Holocaust and were now incarcerated in a Displaced Person's (DP) camp in Bergen Belsen. Lilly dream of being married in a white gown was fulfilled because a German ex-pilot swapped his useless parachute for coffee beans. A seamstress cut the parachute into the wedding gown that the bride wore when she was married in the synagogue the DPs had renovated. Lilly's sister wore it soon after, and then a cousin, and then one bride after another in the camp. Some 50 years later the gown, stitched, restitched, redesigned, and redecorated very many times was donated to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. where it is on display. As Schwimmer writes of Lilly and her sisters, "As young brides, they had stood underneath the chuppah and recited the blessings that their ancestors had been saying for thousands of years. In doing so, they chose to honor the legacy of those who had perished by choosing life."

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