WORLD NEWS TREND

Isi Leibler
October 7, 2008
http://www.leibler.com/article/365

Five years ago, I wrote that the civilized world would benefit from the dissolution of the United Nations, already then a dysfunctional assembly of nations dominated by tyrannies and dictatorships.

Since then, despite the welcome replacement of secretary-general Kofi Annan by Ban Ki-Moon and aside from a few symbolic meetings in New York condemning anti-Semitism, the situation has dramatically worsened. The newly created UN Human Rights Commission, intended to be more balanced than its predecessor, shamelessly promotes medieval anti-Semitic blood libels and demonization of Israel at levels unprecedented even by UN standards. Many of the Israel-speeches dominating the agenda could have been delivered at Hizbullah gatherings. Israel is routinely condemned as the world’s worst example of human rights violations by apologists for monstrous regimes like Sudan.

Likewise, representatives from states such as Libya, Iran and Cuba hold key positions controlling the UN Durban II Conference agenda and are unabashedly displaying a determination to produce a replay of their first gathering in 2001 that became the springboard for the new global wave of ant-Semitism cloaked as anti-Zionism. It is no coincidence that the preparatory committee this year scheduled a meeting to review xenophobia on Yom Kippur.

Although occasionally expressing concerns about anti-Semitism, most democratic countries have displayed a penchant to assume positions of neutrality in the face of toxic anti-Israeli hostility. So it is especially regrettable that when Canada courageously called for a boycott of Durban II, Israel hesitated when firm support might have tipped the US and other democracies to follow suit - a move which would have relegated Durban to a coven of discredited dictatorships and extremist NGOs.

But it was at the last General Assembly plenum at the end of last month, when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad transformed the podium into a launching pad for demonic Jew hatred unprecedented since the Nazi era, that UN hypocrisy and double standards reached their nadir. A similar diatribe from such a platform against any other religion or ethnic group would have been inconceivable. The obscene outburst paraphrased the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, accusing “Zionist murderers” of controlling international finance, the media and furtively manipulating global politics. The Iranian president who had repeatedly been calling for the elimination of the Jewish state reiterated that the world would soon benefit from the collapse of Israel, a member state of the organization he was addressing.

The response from many of the government and UN officials will be recorded as a day of infamy for an organization established after the defeat of Nazism to create a new world order based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the rule of international law.

Not only was Ahmadinejad’s tirade greeted by many representatives with enthusiastic applause, but the secretary-general, who only a short time earlier had condemned anti-Semitism, remained silent. The president of the General Assembly, Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, a former Nicaraguan foreign minister and a Catholic priest, made a point of publicly embracing the Iranian Holocaust denier after his vile address, and then attending the bitterly protested dinner in honor of the Iranian president.

If the Ahmadinejad diatribe fails to trigger a dramatic response, there is little doubt that similar depraved onslaughts by representatives of tyrannies will become the order of the day. Indeed, there is even a serious effort under way to elect Iran to a non-permanent seat on the Security Council.

What does this say about the UN? That an organization dominated by tyrannies and dictatorships, not surprisingly, is being exploited as a platform for promoting evil. Moreover, the situation will continue to deteriorate if the tensions between Western nations and Russia degenerate into a new cold war, and the Russians intensify their existing support for rogue states like Iran and Syria.

This horrific UN General Assembly session extending the welcome mat to Ahmadinejad, coincided with the 70th anniversary of the Munich agreement, when Britain and France betrayed Czechoslovakia in a vain effort to appease Hitler, paving the way for the most terrible war in history. Despite the fact that there is not a single recorded instance in which appeasement of terrorist regimes succeeded in achieving peace, the same blunders are repeated, even though the US-led democratic world is militarily far superior to those Islamic extremist regimes challenging Western civilization. What is lacking is the will, fuelled by a combination of cowardice and economic greed, to confront rogue states like Iran before they are able to evolve into immensely more dangerous nuclear powers.

Needless to say, this has special relevance to Israel. Yet in recent weeks, just when some of the more powerful democracies might have been more inclined to back a firm principled stand, our policy toward the UN seems to have taken a step backward.

Our newly appointed UN representative, Gabriela Shalev, while condemning the General Assembly’s embrace of Ahmadinejad and capitalizing on the superb address delivered by President Shimon Peres, was reported to have dismissed the shocking behavior and passivity of delegates as traditional diplomatic behavior. She ludicrously added that some of the ambassadors applauding the Iranian president’s Jew baiting had privately praised Israel to her.

Even more bizarre were media reports quoting Shalev saying that in addition to defending Israel at the UN, she considers her job to be “correcting the UN’s image in the eyes of the people of Israel.” If these reports are true, we may have replaced our former outstanding ambassador Dan Gillerman with an unqualified academic.

Our aspiring prime minister, Tzipi Livni, must be made aware that if her appointees to the UN are going to defend or make excuses for that body, even our allies will conclude that we have taken leave of our senses.

We should initiate a global campaign highlighting the extent to which the UN has deviated from the original hopes and aspirations of its founders, transformed into an instrument for subverting democracy and undermining the civilized world.

We should encourage the emerging view that challenges the validity of democratic states bearing the brunt of the cost of financing a global body exploited for the promotion of evil objectives by the numerically dominant tyrannies. Today, the case for the dissolution of the UN political framework while retaining those welfare agencies which make a constructive contribution has never been greater.

What should be mooted as a substitute is a new multilateral association of countries limited to those who are broadly democratic and display respect for human rights. Such a body could serve as a vehicle to promote democracy throughout the world, simultaneously providing an inducement to autocratic regimes to reform to qualify for inclusion. It would also enhance constructive multilateralism; in the absence of destructive extremist blocs, it would also create a more realistic environment for improved superpower consultations and co-operation.

Such an approach would undoubtedly now find increasing support among increasingly progressively more exasperated democracies including the United States.

ileibler@netvision.net.il

This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1222017478876&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

Prime Minister Olmert meets with Russian minister shortly after landing in Moscow. Israel maintains Kremlin sees eye-to-eye with Jerusalem on concerns regarding Tehran’s nuclear ambitions
Roni Sofer

MOSCOW - Russian Foreign Affairs Minister Sergey Lavrov said in his meeting with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Monday evening that “Russia is committed to preventing the nuclearization of Iran for military purposes.” Olmert, who landed in Moscow in the late afternoon, is scheduled to meet with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Tuesday. Concerns regarding Iran’s nuclear program topped the agenda at the meeting, with Olmert telling Lavrov it is “crucial that Russia take part in the international effort to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear power and putting an end to Iran’s enrichment operations.”

The two discussed the cooperation between Jerusalem and Moscow and agreed it would continue. Israel maintains “both sides see eye-to-eye in regards to the importance of preventing the nuclearization of Iran.”

Lavrov also said Moscow is working to secure the release of kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit, assuring Olmert their efforts towards this end would continue. Sources within Olmert’s entourage also reported the foreign affairs minister had said outright that Russia would not engage Hamas so long as the latter failed to meet the conditions set by the Quartet.

The two leaders also discussed the importance of strengthening the standing of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas ahead of the upcoming elections in the Palestinian Authority (in January 2009). Likewise, they agreed that peace negotiations between Israel and the PA must continue to prevent extremists from gaining clout in the region.

Olmert expressed his concerns regarding the supply of Russian arms to hostile groups in the Middle East, including Iran, Syria and Hizbullah. “It’s important that Russia do everything within its power to keep weapons from falling into the hands of terrorists in Lebanon,” Olmert was quoted as telling his host.

The matter will also be breached during Olmert’s meeting with President Medvedev.

Sergey’s Courtyard makes waves

Many in the prime minister’s entourage were surprised by the extensive media coverage dedicated to Israel’s decision to restore the ownership of Sergey’s Courtyard in Jerusalem to Russia. The property was owned by the USSR until it severed its diplomatic ties with Israel in 1967. The motion to return it to

Russian hands was passed as part of a goodwill gesture ahead of Olmert’s visit to Moscow, likely his last as prime minister.

Reports on the courtyard’s ‘repatriation’ garnered headlines in newspapers, internet websites, radio programs and television news broadcasts.

Despite the political turmoil the issue caused in Israel, it was met with warm appreciation in Russia. Chairman of the Russian Auditing Chamber, Sergei Stepashin, even joined part of Olmert’s meeting with Lavrov to thank the prime minister in person.

Dr. Hamad Al-Majid
Asharq Alawsat

The American elephant, symbol of the Republican Party, received a painful stab in its side from the sharp Horn of Africa. The piracy acts off the Somali coasts are the natural outcome of the reckless and ill-planned American intervention in Somalia on the pretext of fighting terror (and making the world safer). And here are now the countries of the world whose ships used to sail through the Horn of Africa fearing no one but God and the sharks are now the target of the biggest piracy in history. Though the benefiting countries knew that piracy was taking place off the troubled Somali coasts, yet they did not care much, first, because they considered them some kind of hooliganism by the gangs of a hungry people where there is no state and no order and, secondly, because they paid sums of money which were not large compared to insuring commercial ships carrying goods worth hundreds of millions of dollars until statistics showed that the monies paid to the Somali pirates during one year reached $30 million. But the Ukrainian ship carrying tanks and heavy weapons inflamed the issue of piracy in the Horn of Africa because the prey this time is valuable and fat and therefore the ransom for this ship alone equals the pirates’ income in a whole year. The American elephant is being gored these days by the Horn of Africa, suffocated by the Taliban’s Afghan turban, restrained by the Iraqi headdress, muzzled by the Iranian carpet, and provoked by the recovering Russian bear and is almost being swept up by the American financial crisis.

The United States is now begging Taliban, which the world expected it to be crushed forever, to sit at the negotiations table with the collapsing Karzai Government. Taliban is rejecting the negotiations offer except under its conditions and agendas. Somalia, where the Islamic Courts imposed control after 20 years of anarchy, the United States intervened to crush it as it crushed its sister Taliban only to return as a major player on the Somali stage and with a more dangerous role. We do not rule out the likelihood of the Ukrainian ship and its ransom ending up as a cool booty in the “terrorists’” hands. Had the United States tried to coexist with the moderate voices in the Somali factions and in the Taliban movement, it would have spared itself and the world this chaos in which these two countries are living. As for Iraq, though the United States did deliver strong blows to Al-Qaeda organization and those moving in its orbit, yet they do not seem to be fatal blows and we do not know if this organization is bending its head these days before the American storm only to raise it again as the “Islamic Courts” had done in Somalia and Taliban in Afghanistan? These dangerous crises which the Republican elephant has failed to tackle do not make us feel optimistic that the coming Democratic donkey can solve them no matter how much is said about its patience and perseverance.

Is this American failure to deal with the chronic crises an early sign of the start of the countdown for loosening the grip around the world and the beginning of the end of America’s global hegemony? It appears to be so.

Here is North Korea, which bent before the American storm and threats and announced it was abandoning and dismantling its nuclear program, announcing these days it is backing down on this announcement. Russia exploited America’s quandaries in the international crises to announce its arrival in strength through the Georgian door. Iran is meanwhile continuing to implement cleverly its nuclear program knowing it is safe from the wounded American giant. The world’s move from unipolar hegemony to competition from other powers is in the interest of world peace because the world was safer during the Cold War between the West and east than it is now in the age of unipolar dominance. Ask the official spokesman of the Somali pirates who is speaking from aboard the hijacked Ukrainian ship, sitting with one leg over the other and blowing smoke from his cigarette as he waits for the $30 million ransom and mocking America and the world that has become safer!

Tariq Alhomayed
Asharq Alawsat

The issuing of statements by new armed organizations that go by various names has become a familiar occurrence in the Palestinian territories, particularly in the Gaza strip, Hamas’s stronghold. The common denominator between all these different groups is their possession of weapons, and their readiness to use them The relative size of these groups is not important, however what is important is the following:

Firstly, the rhetoric from these groups has intensified; every statement released is more stringent than the one before. Secondly, the Gaza strip is following in the footsteps of Afghanistan with regards to the abundance of arms, poverty, and division between one armed group and another, who are more than prepared to fight, leading to even greater divisions.

We have seen the Jaish Al Umma (Army of the Islamic Nation) group which some claimed did not to exist, even though Hamas arrested its leader Abu Hafs and then released him. We have seen a bloody conflict between the forces of Hamas and the Doghmush family, and today we see the so-called Palestinian Hezbollah.

The transformation of the Gaza strip into another Afghanistan is a future whose first casualty will be the Palestinians and their cause which has been shattered by Hamas who want to rule as they will, and are waiting for the world to accommodate them. The first thing we must do is stop this nonsense of saying that Hamas came to power through elections. For those who come to power via elections do not have the right to be selective with regards to agreements made by the legitimate authority - the very same authority which pushed for the elections which Hamas won in the first place. Unfortunately this view is taken not only among the public, but also by some Arab politicians. Those who call for elections must respect all previous agreements.

And what must be said at this juncture is that Hamas is a very real danger to the Palestinian cause. They have already blown the chance of creating a Palestinian state thanks to their division from the legitimate authority of Abu Mazen. The coming days will certainly be worse with the possibility of the imminent departure of the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas next January, and so tolerating Hamas will be an Arab sin so long as Arabs are supporting the Palestinian cause.

The Gaza strip has been transformed into a potential land mine due to the poverty, repressions and the proliferation of arms. moreover, Hamas has shown that it won’t unleashing its fury against the Israelis but rather against Egypt and its borders, they have become a real danger to the Egyptians, which is what we have seen with the breach of the Gaza-Egypt border.

Hamas tried to drag Egypt into this crisis with this breach of borders while it enjoys a truce with Israel, turning the Gaza strip into a front as peaceful as the Golan Heights, while at the same time they dare accuse the Palestinian government of meekness and forgetting the Palestinian cause.

And in conclusion, we have yet to see a reasonable trend within the Hamas organization which appreciates the consequences of governing Gaza. We have not heard protests of Hamas’s threat to occupy the West Bank, and control it as they did the Gaza strip. And so we must take a decisive stand against Hamas, and for a simple reason, the boat which they are drilling holes in will not only drown them, but drown all of us, and we will all be the victims. We cannot allow Hamas to fragmentize the Palestinians as they wish, or to plot with Iran as they see fit.

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Al Jazeera

The Palestinian group Hamas that governs Gaza says it will stop recognising Mahmoud Abbas as the Palestinian president in three months.Hamas, citing a Palestinian law, said one of its own leaders must fill the top post after Abbas’s tenure officially expires on January 8.

The announcement came after Hamas legislators voted on a resolution in Gaza City on Monday, a move seen as at attempt to step up pressure on Abbas and his Fatah party ahead of talks brokered by Egypt over a power-sharing deal between the rival camps.

A Fatah member said the vote was simply “an attempt to sabotage the Egyptian effort to reconcile the Palestinian division”.

The Basic Law, a forerunner to a Palestinian constitution, says that both president and parliament are elected to four-year terms.

Legal loophole

But a loophole in the law, which Fatah is relying on, suggests that Abbas’s term could be extended another year if it were deemed to be in the “national interest”.

Hamas says Abbas’s tenure as Palestinian president ends on January 8 [EPA]
Abbas was elected president in January 2006 but a year later Hamas defeated his movement by a landslide in parliamentary elections in Gaza.

Neither Hamas nor Fatah appear keen to share power in governing the Gaza Strip, which has been under Hamas control following a violent takeover in June last year, leaving Abbas with only nominal control of the occupied West Bank.

During Monday’s vote, Hamas threatened to install Ahmed Bahar, the deputy parliamentary speaker, as Abbas’s temporary successor if Abbas fails to announce a new presidential election by Wednesday.

Shalit talks

Meanwhile, Khaled Mashaal, the exiled Hamas political leader, said talks with Israel over the possible release of an Israeli soldier have stalled and blamed Israeli negotiators for continuing to rehash previously-agreed issues.

He was quoted in Le Figaro newspaper on Monday blaming “a lack of reliability of Israeli negotiators” in discussions pertaining to Sergeant Gilad Shalit who was captured two years ago.

Dhimmi Watch

Arabs and Muslims, it has been said, cling to their past. And it’s true: they do cling to “their” past, as long as that past is the past that came after the pre-Islamic past that went before, which is merely one long Jahiliyya, or Time of Ignorance. There is no real interest in that past, though one will find the Iraqi peacock-proud that “civilization started here” — but he won’t know about that “civilization.” He won’t have been part of the discovery and recovery and study of that “civilization” — Ur and Babylon and Assyria. For that was a Western thing, a thing that Western Infidels, from Henry Austen Layard to Leonard Woolley, undertook. Copts in Egypt are a very different matter, because they know, even if they do not always say aloud, that they are the true inheritors of Egypt’s civilization. They are the ones linked continuously back to Egypt’s pre-Islamic civilization, including the language that existed before the Arabs arrived and came, in fits and starts, to reduce the Coptic percentage of the population. Massed forcible conversions were not unknown, especially in certain centuries when a ruler would be particularly aggressive in “spreading” the “truth” of Islam.

Islam is, as has been written here before, “history-haunted.” It has to be. It has to be in order to make up for the obviously miserable actual state of Muslims, their civilizational disarray, their primitiveness in everything that should matter and by which civilizations are judged — and that excludes the trillions of dollars in unmerited oil revenues, and will continue to exclude them, no matter how many Western skyscrapers and companies and luxury goods and palaces at home those trillions buy.

Instead, they look back to a mythical past, of highly exaggerated glories: the wonders of Old Fustat (Cairo), the splendors of Baghdad. In this narrative, the non-Muslims who contributed so much to what there was are not recognized. It’s an “Islamic science” and “Islamic civilization” — when, in fact, if you take away many who were Christians or Jews or Zoroastrians, or if they were not, if they had converted to Islam, then they were only one or two generations removed from being Christians or Jews or Zoroastrians, the numbers of non-Muslims were still sufficient to ensure that the milieu would not be bleakly Islamic in the first few hundred years after the initial Islamic conquests.

But now, because of the behavior of the Muslims themselves, they have been emptying out their lands of non-Muslims. The Jews — who, for example, constituted a third, an important enlivening third, of the population of Baghdad in the 1920s — are all gone, driven out, or killed. The Christians hang on, here and there, but they were killed en masse in Iraq — 100,000 Assyrians massacred — after the British left in 1932, and the exodus of the past few years, in response to the Islamic terror, has led to a dimidiation of Christian numbers, with more decreases to come. In Egypt, the Copts hang on, and even exhibit, at times, the usual depressing phenomenon of islamochristian attitudes when, with Muslims in power and of course vigilantly observing, they cannot complain as they would like about their status, and they often must parrot the party-line about Israel — while they are held captive to Muslim masters in Egypt. When they attain freedom in the West, they can and are more candid, less frightened, less wary.

And of course all those Levantines — those Greeks and Italians, as well as those Armenians and Jews and other nationalities, once made Cairo and Alexandria more interesting places, where in high-ceilinged coffee rooms, with newspapers including locally-produced French and English language newspapers, one could sit and read and talk to one’s friends and play cards or possibly tric-trac. And now I find myself practically writing some Farouk-era scene — or back, back further, to the last days of Lord Cromer — for the script of some movie, to be filmed by some Egyptian director, full of nostalgia (see “The Yacoubian Building”) for those Italians, and Greeks, and Jews and Armenians, and all the others, including British subjects, who were booted out by Nasser, and all of their property seized (that had been slowly amassed over many generations).

No, Ungaretti and Cavafy were both born in Alexandria. But there won’t be any more ungarettis or cavafys coming out of Egypt. There won’t, similarly, be much coming out of Baghdad. No latter-day mutannabis from a Muslim-only land will be coming out of a culture that thinks of poetry now as merely an extension of propaganda — see Adonis on the state of “Arabic literature” (he says angrily that “there is no Arabic literature” but only propagandistic trash). Nor will they be coming out of the Maghreb, now that the French (and others — Spanish, Italians, Jews) left Algeria, and Morocco, and Tunisia. The wasteland that Islam creates is obvious to all. That is why Muslims themselves keep harking back to some earlier time, some time when things were so different, their books exaggeratedly tell them (the Self-Esteem problems of an entire civilization is a difficult task to deal with), and they were sitting on top of the world.

But one wants to say, as one looks over the past thousand years or so of Muslim history, and failure to produce — see the West, see the East (the real East) — to the Islamic world, something like:

What Have You Done For Us Lately?

And then one would like to go further, and see how many of the most advanced people who were born into Islam and live in that world, can begin to catch a hint of a glimmer of why it is that Islam itself prevents the enterprise of science. Its view is that the individual is unimportant and merely part of a collective, the Umma, or Community of Believers, a mentally submissive Believer who must be a “slave of Allah” and never dare to question the rules set down by Allah (and derived by Islamic scholars from the Qur’an, as glossed by the contents of the Sunnah). A believer must be punished for any display of free and skeptical inquiry, which prevents the enterprise of science (though not of technology, not for example of computer engineering or certain kinds of medical practice — but not scientific research, unless undertaken in the West, by someone who though nominally a Muslim, has become only a “cultural Muslim”). And art, the varieties of artistic expression that are simply haram in Islam — all sculpture, and depictions in paint, or drawings, of living creatures, and most music, so that one is left with calligraphy and architecture.

All of this, at some point, intelligent Muslims and Arabs are going to have to recognize, little by little, and some are even going to have to discuss it openly. And that will be made easier for them if we Infidels show that we are perfectly at ease in recognizing that the political, economic, social, moral, and intellectual failures of Muslim states and societies, polities and peoples, are connected to the texts, and tenets, and attitudes naturally arising from those tenets, of Islam itself.

If we show that we not only can laughingly reject the nonsense about how the “root causes” of Islamic disarray, and violence, and aggression, and failures, have something to do with us and everything to do with them, and what’s more, if we can articulate it (though never as well as the defectors from Islam are able to do, for they know where every little secret lies, and we don’t), that is the only way to bring about the kind of “change” that makes sense in the Arab and Muslim world.

Robert Spencer
Jihad Watch

“If Obama were elected president, 50 percent of the anti-Americanism in the world would disappear.”

I predicted this enthusiasm for Obama among Muslims around the world in March 2007: “Given Obama’s politics, it will not be hard to present him internationally as someone who understands Islam and Muslims, and thus will be able to smooth over the hostility between the Islamic world and the West — our first Muslim President.” It is clear from that article — read it for yourself — that by “our first Muslim President” I did not mean that Obama was secretly a Muslim, as a Washington Post “journalist” cravenly misrepresented me as saying, but that his background and politics would make him attractive to Muslims. Will this enthusiasm translate to anything other than substantial American concessions — perhaps even including “hate speech” laws that outlaw critical discussion of Islamic jihad supremacism?

From “Fareed Zakaria GPS [Global Public Square]” at CNN, October 5 (thanks to Awake):

ZAKARIA: I’m here in Singapore with three very distinguished analysts of international affairs: Kishore Mahbubani, the dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy; Simon Tay, the chairman of the Singapore Institute of International Affairs; and Raja Mohan, who is on loan from India, where he is a columnist for the “Indian Express,” but also here at the Rajaratnam School in Singapore.

Kishore, what I am struck by is coming to Singapore and listening to the usually very hard-nosed Singaporeans, who have tended to be very cool, realistic, and generally prefer Republicans, because they are hard-headed. And I notice that many of you are in something of a swoon over Obama.

You wrote in Newsweek that, if Obama were elected president, 50 percent of the anti-Americanism in the world would disappear.

Why is it that Singapore is Obama-crazy?

KISHORE MAHBUBANI, DEAN, LEE KUAN YEW SCHOOL OF PUBLIC POLICY, SINGAPORE: Well, let me emphasize, not all of Singapore is Obama- crazy. But there are many in Singapore who are actually troubled by the growing divide between America and the world.

And you must remember that Singapore lives in a region where, indeed, Singapore is surrounded by more Muslims than Israel is. Right?

And so, as a consequence of that, we have to put our finger on the pulse of what’s happening in the Islamic world. When it gets angry, it affects us. If it calms down, it’s a better environment for us.

And Obama clearly will work a magic in the Islamic world.

I mean, I was asked by President S.P.Y. to deliver the presidential lecture a few weeks ago.

ZAKARIA: The president of Indonesia.

MAHBUBANI: The president of Indonesia. And he was very clear. And he said, and several other people said that, if Obama - if the Indonesians could vote, 200 million Indonesians would vote for Obama, partly because he will be the first Bahasa-speaking American president.

And also, at the same time, I think he understands, you know. He can connect with the rest of the world in a way that I think McCain cannot. The psychological universe of McCain is a very confined one. The psychological universe of Obama understands the diversity of the world.

And what puzzled me is, there is - not just in Singapore, but when I met a billionaire from India - I can’t mention his name - he said to me, “Kishore, root for Obama. Root for Obama.”

So, there is a magical effect that Obama is having on the rest of the world. And that’s why, frankly, all the polls show - most of them, with some exceptions - the Muslim world for Obama.

ZAKARIA: But the lowest number is in India, Raja.

RAJA MOHAN, COLUMNIST, “THE INDIAN EXPRESS,” AND PROFESSOR, RAJARATNAM SCHOOL OF INTERNATIONAL STUDIES, SINGAPORE: I think in India, I think our heart is with Obama, but our head is with McCain. Our heart is with Obama, because I think Obama represents not only, you know, the American system’s capacity to change, it’s also we’re debating in India, about how do we empower our minorities, how to empower our lower castes.

If Obama can become the U.S. president, there’s also a debate in India that the Dalit leader, Mayawati, can become the next prime minister.

ZAKARIA: She has come from a very lower caste background, yes.

MOHAN: Yes. So, in a sense it’s very positive.

But at the same time, when we look at the issues on trade, I think any day I would take the Republicans. On outsourcing, I would take the Republicans. On immigration, I would take the Republicans.

ZAKARIA: Well, on immigration you’d take McCain, I think it would mean.

MOHAN: Yes.

ZAKARIA: Because the Republican position, you wouldn’t accept it.

MOHAN: And the problem with the Democrats is that they come with their single-issue groups. Somebody does nonproliferation, somebody does human rights, somebody does workers’ rights. I mean, you have them going around pricking everyone in Asia, without a sense of a coherent vision.

I agree with Kishore. Obama honeymoon will last for six months. But after that, we’re going to have serious problems.

Jihad Watch

At the reliably truth-free publication known as The American Muslim today, Sheila Musaji has published an article, “What exactly is required to be considered a ‘moderate’ Muslim?” In it, she takes me to task for this statement: “And I wonder why Sheila Musaji has never written an article about the physical and emotional distress that peaceful Muslims suffer when their coreligionists commit violence in the name of their religion, and why she has never called upon those Muslims to stop committing acts of violence and supremacism in Islam’s name.” Musaji responds by offering a blizzard of links purporting to demonstrate that she and many other Muslims have done just that, and that I am willfully ignoring them in order to demonize Muslims. And not only that, but there’s the inevitable tu quoque: “I don’t see any articles by Robert Spencer condemning violence and terrorism carried out by Christians.”

Actually, Sheila Musaji apparently missed my book Religion of Peace?, in which I do just that, but the issue here isn’t really acts of violence committed by Muslims as opposed to acts of violence committed by Christians. Human nature is everywhere the same, and you can find people of every creed and philosophy committing acts of violence and brutality. But in Islam violence and supremacism are taught by authoritative sources, whereas in Christianity and other traditions they are not. So what is needed is not a simple tally of Bad Things Done By Religious People, followed by condemnations in number matching the tally. What is needed is a recognition by people like Sheila Musaji and other Muslims in America that there are these supremacist and often violent doctrines in Islam, and a genuine rejection of them and attempt to reform them. None of that, however, is forthcoming — and at that point that is itself no surprise.

And that is the problem with her exhaustive (and exhausting) list of Muslim groups condemning “terrorism,” and with her own articles doing just that. Take, for example, this:

As the Editor of The American Muslim (TAM), I issued a statement on 9/11 in which I said: ”We are Americans and Muslims and proud to be both. We are as shocked and horrified by this insane act of terrorists as any other Americans. Our hearts go out to the victims and their families. We also want those responsible to be caught and brought to justice. They may happen to consider themselves Muslims (as Timothy McVey [sic] and Slobodon Milosovic may have considered themselves to be Christians) and may even have twisted the teachings of their religion to justify their actions, but terrorism is not the act of any person who understands anything about the teachings of any of the world’s religions. There is no religious justification for such actions.”

Note her tu-quoque assertions about McVeigh and Milosevic, and her assertion that they may have “twisted the teachings” of Christianity — presumably to justify the bombing of office buildings and genocide. But in fact, neither McVeigh nor Milosevic ever offered any justification for their actions that was based on the teachings of Christianity, twisted or untwisted. Neither pointed, or could have pointed, to teachings of Christianity that justify violence against unbelievers to justify their actions, because there are no such teachings of Christianity. This is in sharp contrast to Osama bin Laden and Islamic jihadists the world over, who regularly and copiously quote the Qur’an and Sunnah, as well as the teachings of authoritative Islamic jurists, to justify their actions. Compare, for instance, the writings of Sheila Musaji and Osama bin Laden, and see who quotes the Qur’an and invokes Muhammad’s example more often.

But glaringly and conspicuously absent from Musaji’s own writings, as well as from all the Muslim condemnations of terrorism to which she links, is any recognition of, much less condemnation of, the fact that there is not a single traditional school of Islamic jurisprudence that does not teach that it is an obligation of the Muslim community to wage war against unbelievers and subjugate them under the rule of Islamic law.

Here is proof:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of course, these are all extremely old authorities — such that one might reasonably assume that whatever they say couldn’t possibly still be the consensus of the Islamic mainstream. The laws of the United States have evolved considerably since the adoption of the Constitution, which itself has been amended. So why shouldn’t this be true of Islamic law as well? Many observers assume that it must be, and that contemporary jihadists’ departure from mainstream Islam must be located in its preference for the writings of ancient jurists rather than modern ones. But in this, unfortunately, they fail to reckon with the implications of the closing of the gate of ijtihad.

Ijtihad is the process of arriving at a decision on a point of Islamic law through study of the Qur’an and Sunnah. From the beginning of Islam, the authoritative study of such sources was reserved to a select number of scholars who fulfilled certain qualifications, including a comprehensive knowledge of the Qur’an and Sunnah, as well as knowledge of the principle of analogical reasoning (qiyas) by which legal decisions are made; knowledge of the consensus (ijma) on any given question of Muhammad, his closest companions, and the scholars of the past; and more, including living a blameless life. The founders of the schools of Islamic jurisprudence are among the small number of scholars — mujtahedin — thus qualified to perform ijithad. But they all lived very long ago; for many centuries, independent study of the Qur’an and Sunnah has been discouraged among Muslims, who are instead expected to adhere to the rulings of one of those established schools. Since the death of Ahmed ibn Hanbal, from whom the Hanbali school takes its name, in 855 A.D., no one has been recognized by the Sunni Muslim community as a mujtahid of the first class — that is, someone who is qualified to originate legislation of his own, based on the Qur’an and Sunnah but not upon the findings of earlier mujtahedin.

Islamic scholar Cyril Glasse notes that “‘the door of ijtihad is closed’ as of some nine hundred years, and since then the tendency of jurisprudence (fiqh) has been to produce only commentaries upon commentaries and marginalia.”

So — will Sheila Musaji care to condemn the supremacist imperative delineated by these authoritative, traditional sources? Specifically, since she is asking me what is required to be considered a moderate Muslim, I can tell her that I believe it would be sufficient to do the following:

1. Acknowledge the existence of and repudiate the traditional Islamic imperative, taught by all the schools of Islamic jurisprudence that Muslims recognize as orthodox, to impose Islamic law upon non-Muslims, whether by force or by stealth.

2. Renounce any intention, now or in the future, to replace the U.S. Constitution with Islamic law.

3. Clarify, and call upon other Muslims in America to clarify, what is meant by the words “terrorism” and innocent” in Muslim condemnations of terrorism, so that it is clear that what is being condemned is the murder of American and other non-combatants by Muslims acting in the name of Islamic jihad.

4. Repudiate the idea that Muslims have a divine mandate to force, when possible, Jews, Christians, and other “People of the Book” to pay a special religion-based tax from which Muslims are exempt (Qur’an 9:29).

5. Call upon Muslims in America to institute comprehensive, honest, and transparent programs in mosques and Islamic schools, teaching the virtues of the non-establishment of religion, and teaching directly against Islamic supremacism and the idea that Muslims must fight against Jews and Christians until they “feel themselves subdued” (Qur’an 9:29).

6. Call upon Muslims in America to institute comprehensive, honest, and transparent programs in mosques and Islamic schools, teaching against honor killing, and against the idea — which is enshrined in Islamic law — that a parent faces no penalty for killing his or her own child (see ‘Umdat al-Salik o1.1-2).

7. Call upon Muslims worldwide, including in Saudi Arabia, to end all institutionalized discrimination against and harassment of non-Muslims, and to allow churches and other houses of worship to be built in majority-Muslim countries with an ease comparable to that with which mosques are currently built in Western countries.

8. Repudiate the idea that a Muslim who renounces Islam and adopts any other faith or no faith at all should be killed — as is the teaching of Muhammad and all the schools of Islamic jurisprudence — and call upon Muslim groups in America to teach the freedom of conscience as a God-given right in American mosques and Islamic schools.

9. Call upon Muslims in America and worldwide to drop the traditional and authoritative Islamic prohibition of marriage between non-Muslim men and Muslim women, and to repudiate and teach against the idea of divinely sanctioned wife-beating (Qur’an 4:34).

10. Condemn Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist organizations, and the Islamic Republic of Iran for its continuing the barbaric practice of stoning people to death. Call upon Muslim groups to teach against stoning as a punishment for adultery or anything else in American mosques and Islamic schools.

Do those things, Ms. Musaji, and I will happily acknowledge that you are indeed a “moderate” Muslim.

Thomas Sowell
Tuesday, October 07, 2008

Critics of Senator Barack Obama make a strategic mistake when they talk about his “past associations.” That just gives his many defenders in the media an opportunity to counter-attack against “guilt by association.” We all have associations, whether at the office, in our neighborhood or in various recreational activities. Most of us neither know nor care what our associates believe or say about politics.

Associations are very different from alliances. Allies are not just people who happen to be where you are or who happen to be doing the same things you do. You choose allies deliberately for a reason. The kind of allies you choose says something about you.

Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger, William Ayers and Antoin Rezko are not just people who happened to be at the same place at the same time as Barack Obama. They are people with whom he chose to ally himself for years, and with some of whom some serious money changed hands.

Some gave political support, and some gave financial support, to Obama’s election campaigns, and Obama in turn contributed either his own money or the taxpayers’ money to some of them. That is a familiar political alliance– but an alliance is not just an “association” from being at the same place at the same time.

Obama could have allied himself with all sorts of other people. But, time and again, he allied himself with people who openly expressed their hatred of America. No amount of flags on his campaign platforms this election year can change that.

Unfortunately, all that most people know about Barack Obama is his own rhetoric and that of his critics. Moreover, some of his more irresponsible critics have made wild accusations– that he is not an American citizen or that he is a Muslim, for example.

All that such false charges do is discredit Obama’s critics in general. Fortunately, there is a documented, factual account of what Barack Obama has actually been doing over the years, as distinguished from what he has been saying during this election campaign, in a new best-selling book.

That book is titled “The Case Against Barack Obama” by David Freddoso. He starts off in the introduction by repudiating those critics of Obama who “have been content merely to slander him– to claim falsely that he refuses to salute the U.S. flag or was sworn into office on a Koran, or that he was born in a foreign country.”

This is a serious book with 35 pages of documentation in the back to support the things said in the main text. In other words, if you don’t believe what the author says, he lets you know where you can go check it out.

Barack Obama’s being the first serious black candidate for President of the United States is what most people consider remarkable but how he got there is at least equally surprising.

The story of Obama’s political career is not a pretty story. He won his first political victory by being the only candidate on the ballot– after hiring someone skilled at disqualifying the signers of opposing candidates’ petitions, on whatever technicality he could come up with.

Despite his words today about “change” and “cleaning up the mess in Washington,” Obama was not on the side of reformers who were trying to change the status quo of corrupt, machine politics in Chicago and clean up the mess there. Obama came out in favor of the Daley machine and against reform candidates.

Senator Obama is running on an image that is directly the opposite of what he has been doing for two decades. His escapes from his past have been as remarkable as the great escapes of Houdini.

Why much of the public and the media have been so mesmerized by the words and the image of Obama, and so little interested in learning about the factual reality, was perhaps best explained by an official of the Democratic Party: “People don’t come to Obama for what he’s done, they come because of what they hope he can be.”

David Freddoso’s book should be read by those people who want to know what the facts are. But neither this book nor anything else is likely to change the minds of Obama’s true believers, who have made up their minds and don’t want to be confused by the facts.

Copyright © 2008 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

Arlene Kushner

The issue is Sergei’s Courtyard, which is of considerable importance from many aspects.

Sergei’s Courtyard is the portion of the Russian Compound in the heart of Jerusalem — right off Rehov Yaffo — that is now being transferred to the ownership of the Russian government by the Israeli government. he Russian Compound, which was for many years owned by the USSR, was bought by Israel in 1964. Sergei’s Compound was not part of that purchase because it was not owned by the USSR — it had been owned privately by one Count Sergei. Until just months ago, Sergei’s Courtyard was managed by the Israeli Administration for Unclaimed Properties, because the descendants of Count Sergei — who would have been the inheritors of the property — could not be located.

Israeli law says that if property remains unclaimed for 15 years, it can be transferred to Israeli ownership, but for a long period of time this was not done. Meanwhile, the government of Russia, expressed a desire to acquire it. This past January, letters were exchanged between Israel and Russia regarding the transfer of ownship of this Courtyard. There was no quid pro quo proposed in the letters: Israel was not demanding anything of Russia, not even a purchase price. The property was to be given as a gift.

In late July, the government went to the court and legally acquired ownership of Sergei’s Courtyard. The matter could have stopped there, it was now fully Israeli. But the government had an ulterior motive: This was a step towards transferring it to Russia.

~~~~~~~~~~

On Sunday, Olmert brought the issue before the Cabinet, which approved the transfer.

Olmert is now on his way to Russia. There he will discussing issues of the greatest import: Russia’s possible willingness to sell arms to Syria and Russia’s lack of cooperation with regard to sanctions

At the same time, Olmert will be symbolically making the gift to the Russian government of the Courtyard — symbolically, because the deal is already done for all practical purposes.

~~~~~~~~~~

The Legal Forum for the Land of Israel, greatly disturbed about what is going on, took two actions:

One, it wrote to Attorney General Menachem Mazuz, protesting that Olmert’s government, as a transition government with limited powers, should not be permitted to do this. As of this writing, Mazuz has not responded to the Forum.

Two, it registered a brief with the High Court requesting that this be stopped. The Court will hold a hearing after Olmert has already gone to Russia. Legally, according to Forum lawyers, it is possible for the Court to say that the transfer was invalid. But it is considered highly unlikely that this will happen.

~~~~~~~~~~

A note as this goes out: There is some news that the Municipality of Jerusalem is objecting to this action, but where this will lead is unclear.

~~~~~~~~~~

Very often we hear that Israelis are passive and will not respond to any political situation with an outcry. This is the silence that cannot be acceptable any longer. And here is an opportunity to make your voices heard.

This is not a case of crying out to change things (hopefully there will be many times for this), but to protest as loudly as possible a situation that is not acceptable. The offending parties in the government have to hear from the people.

Where there is silence, the message is delivered to the parties in the government that no one is watching and they can get away with whatever they please. NOW is the time to start delivering another message.

No time to be defeated! No time for cynicism or passivity!

~~~~~~~~~~

There are several reasons why this is an unacceptable situation:

* It is a form of appeasement. Olmert has indicated that he hopes this will help convince Russia not to arm Syria and to work towards blocking Iran from going nuclear. This is laughable, and makes a joke of Israel. It weakens us, as appeasment never works.
* It provides a government that is not a friend with a foothold in the heart of our capital. This is totally unacceptable. When the USSR formerly owned the Russian Compound, the KBG was located there.
* It sets a horrendous precendent. Israeli land is Israeli land. We are not the Ottoman Empire, to be divided up between various international parties. Other entities — in particular the Orthodox Church — will be demanding land that was formerly theirs. And this is at a particularly sensitive time with regard to the unity of Jerusalem!

With all of this, there is still another reason: The government of Israel doesn’t play by the rules. It proceeds as it wishes and manages to get away with it. If nothing else, a transition government is restricted in its ability to act — it is to behave with restraint, doing only what is necessary to keep the country going and taking no action that will bind its successors to an agreement that need not be made immediately. In this case, as in many others, the Court turns a blind eye, as does the Attorney General.

This is painful to discuss. But it must be discussed. And protested.

~~~~~~~~~~

This appeal is to Israeli citizens (others, keep reading). This is an Israeli issue and must be addressed by each of you. Please contact the persons listed below and register your protest, briefly and clearly — as citizens.

Then forward this message to everyone else you can think of inside of Israel who might respond. Either copy this and paste into a new e-mail text. Or hit “forward” for this message and clean it up, eliminating all the “forward” information. Where it is appropriate, translate this into Hebrew, or French, or Russian, before sending it on.

Those outside of Israel: Please, following the same technique, send this to everyone you know inside of Israel — friends, relatives, business acquaintances — who might respond.

Numbers will make the difference.

~~~~~~~~~~

Keep in mind that faxes are the most effective means of getting your message across, and e-mails are the least effective.

Send to:

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, because she is head of Kadima now and has to get the message from the people loud and clear.

Phone: 02-530-3531 or 02-675-3285 Fax: 02-675-3792 E-mail: zlivni@knesset.gov.il
Aide: 050-620-3010

_________

MK Binyamin Netanyahu, head of Likud, because he is leader of the opposition and he needs to know that people expect him to take a strong stand.

Phone: 03-606-8000 or 02-640-8456 Fax: 02-649-6659 E-Mail: bnetanyahu@knesset.gov.il
Aide: 050-200-2004

_________

Minister of Industry and Trade Eli Yishai, head of the Shas faction, because he always tells us that Shas is concerned about the status of Jerusalem and he needs to know we want him to be serious about this.

Phone:02-666-2252 or 02-6408406/7 Fax: 02-666-2909 E-mail: eyishay@knesset.gov.il
Aide: 050-400-5080
_________

Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz of Kadima, because he is disgruntled now, knowing well how unfair things can be, and just might be ready to hear concerns of the people.

Phone: 02-666-3004 or 02-649-6115 Fax: 02-649-6421 E-mail: shaulm@knesset.gov.il
Aide: 050-623-0294
___________

Attorney General Menachem Mazuz, who had it within his capacity to stop this and should have stopped it on legal grounds, as the current government is a transitional government with limited powers.

Phone: 02-646-6521/2 Fax: 02-646-7001

Can also be reached via Moshe Cohen, spokesman for the Justice Department.

Phone: 02-646-6487/363 Fax: 02-646-6722 Cell: 050-621-7077