Europe’s Betrayal of Women

Obama & the UN

Dry Bones: Migrant Gangs Attacking Women

The volcano of Islamic terrorism

Israel Hayom

By Yoram Ettinger

Yoram Ettinger

Terrorism has dominated the history of Islam, as demonstrated by the murder of three of the first four caliphs who succeeded the Prophet Muhammad: Umar ibn Abd al-Khattab (644 C.E.), Uthman Ibn Affan (656 C.E.) and Ali ibn Abi Talib (661 C.E.). Islamic terrorism has been one of the most active and dangerous volcanoes -- domestically, regionally and globally -- since the inception of Islam in the seventh century. Historically, all Arab regimes have achieved, sustained and eventually lost power through domestic violence, subversion or terrorism.

Currently, Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Libya have become battlegrounds of rival Islamic terror organizations. Pro-U.S. Arab regimes such as Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and the UAE face clear and present terror threats. Iran and Saudi Arabia -- the two leading sources of funding for Islamic terrorism -- are confronting each other militarily, economically, ideologically and religiously. Intra-Muslim fragmentation, unpredictability, instability, intolerance, subversion, terrorism and the provisional nature of Islamic regimes have been recently intensified in an unprecedented manner.

So far, the lava of Islamic terrorism has affected mostly Muslims, but it is aiming to spill over into the abode of the "infidel" and is currently spreading into the streets of the U.S., Europe, Russia, China, India, Africa, Asia and Australia.

While most terrorists are Muslims, the majority of Muslims are not terrorists. However, the will of the majority has been systematically suppressed or oppressed in most Muslim societies (including Muslim communities in Western countries). These Muslim societies have never experienced democracy, exposing the majority to tectonic eruptions of violence by rogue regimes and organizations.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the 1,400-year-old volcanic Islamic terrorism has traditionally not been triggered by social and economic deprivation or by the absence of civil liberties. It has been triggered by the 14-century-old megalomaniacal, supremacist, intolerant, anti-democratic, repressive, non-negotiable and eternal aspiration -- led by educated Islamic elites -- to force the world of the infidel and the apostate to submit to Islam. The latter is, supposedly, the only legitimate religion, divinely ordained to rule the world.

According to the Quran, Islam is the only worthy and legitimate successor to the Abrahamic and Mosaic Judaism. Thus, the subordination of humanity to the legacy of Muhammad should be achieved, preferably, via nonviolent means (dawah), deceit/double-talk (taqiyya) and immigration (hegira). But, in face of defiant infidels and apostates, the believers should resort to non-compromising, non-merciful violence (jihad), subversion, breach of international accords and terrorism.

Unlike the Western definition of terrorism (the deliberate and systematic targeting of civilians), the Quran's definition of terrorist (irhab) is the derivative of the verb arhaba (to terrify, scare), which is a tactic employed against the infidel to advance the goals of Islam (Quran 8:60). The Muslim bottom line is that "there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet."

Contrary to political correctness -- and as demonstrated by the 1,400-year-old track record of Islamic violence and terrorism and the lack of intra-Muslim peaceful coexistence -- Islam has never considered itself to be "a religion of peace" as defined by Western dictionaries.

According to Muhammad's legacy, the term salam (peace) -- which is derived from the same root as Islam -- is employed when addressing fellow Muslims, but not when addressing non-Muslims, unless constrained by temporary military, economic or political inferiority.

Furthermore, Arab/Muslim societies invoke verses from the Quran and precedents from Islamic history as guidelines for contemporary, daily, personal, tribal, regional and national conduct. For example, Sura 20, verses 47-48 state that "peace be on whoever follows the guidance [of Allah] ... and punishment shall afflict those who deny and turn their back [on Allah]." Thus, salam is reserved only for those who submit to Islam, while those who renege on their commitment to Islam are doomed. Moreover, any agreement with the infidel is defined as sulh, hudna, a tenuous truce of limited duration, until the balance of power facilitates total submission of the infidel to Islam.

Sacrificing reality and long-term national security on the altar of political correctness and short-term convenience, key Western policymakers and public opinion molders have refused to recognize the central role (or any role) played by Islam in the intensifying threat of terrorism. These movers and shakers have also insisted that providing employment and educational opportunities is the most effective way to combat terrorism.

Tariq Alhomayed, the former editor-in-chief of leading Saudi daily Asharq Al-Awsat, wrote on February 22, 2015: "ISIS is not looking for jobs, neither are al-Qaida or Hezbollah. ... According to [U.S. President Barack] Obama, oppressing the opposition leads to extremism and terrorism. However, the oppression of the Green Revolution by the Iranian regime has not led to extremism or terrorism in Iran. ... Why is the entire Middle East, except Iran, targeted by terrorism? Why are some of al-Qaida's leaders in Iran?"

Winston Churchill's famous words on relations with communists apply even more so to terrorists: "Trying to maintain good relations with a communist is like wooing a crocodile. You do not know whether to tickle it under the chin or beat it over the head. When it opens its mouth, you cannot tell whether it is trying to smile or preparing to eat you up. ... An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping that it will eat him last."

The Cologne Portent

In the spirit of Christian charity, Merkel has imported Muslim misogyny.

Protesters in Leipzig, Germany, Jan. 11.

By  BRET STEPHENS

Among the hard lessons of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, surely one of them is that it’s foolish to expect that backward and often barbaric societies can be transformed into functioning liberal democracies. So why do liberals seem so surprised that so many people from these societies behave in barbaric ways after they’ve shoved their way into the West?

As I write, 516 criminal complaints have been filed in Germany against men of mainly North African or Arab origin who went on a New Year’s Eve sexual-assault rampage in the city of Cologne.

“Twenty or 30 men, foreign men, surrounded us and we couldn’t even move anymore,” a woman identified as Michelle told the BBC. “They just grabbed our arms and tried to tear us apart and pushed our clothes away and tried to get between our legs.”

Similar events also took place in Hamburg, Stuttgart and Berlin. In Sweden, a scandal erupted after it emerged that police had suppressed a report of mass groping by Middle East migrants at a festival last summer. In September, Soeren Kernof the Gatestone Institutechronicled some 30 cases of rape and sexual assault perpetrated by migrants against German and migrant women alike.

“In Bavaria, women and girls housed at a refugee shelter. . . are subject to rape and forced prostitution on a daily basis,” Mr. Kern writes, citing reports from women’s rights groups. “The price for sex with female asylum seekers is 10 euros.”

For anyone even minimally acquainted with Mideast mores, none of this is news. Mob sexual assaults in Egypt became notorious after the 2011 attack on reporter Lara Logan, but they have become a staple of Egyptian life. “Suddenly I was in the middle, surrounded by hundreds of men in a circle that was getting smaller and smaller around me,” one Egyptian woman wrote of a 2013 attack in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. “They were touching and groping me everywhere.”

The World Economic Forum publishes a Global Gender Gap Report, which ranks the status of women in 142 countries. Bottom of the list: Yemen, Pakistan, Chad, Syria, Mali and Iran, all Muslim-majority countries. A 2013 Pew survey of Muslim views on women’s rights found that only 22% of Egyptians and 14% of Iraqis thought that women should have a right to divorce their husbands, while fully 92% of Moroccans and 87% of Palestinians thought a wife must always obey her husband.

Put bluntly, there is a pronounced tendency among Middle Eastern men to view women either as chattel or as whores. This is not a pleasant reality to acknowledge, but it’s an even more dangerous thing to ignore. So why is it ignored?

Mr. Kern writes that police have remained silent about incidents of rape “because they do not want to give legitimacy to critics of mass migration.” That fits the pattern in Sweden, as it does with the Rotherham child sex-ring case, involving some 1,400 English girls abused over 16 years by men of Pakistani descent. In that case, police and social services ignored evidence of the abuse for fear of “giving oxygen to racist perspectives,” according to the Independent Inquiryinto the case.

Or, as Denis MacShane, Rotherham’s former Labour MP and self-declared “Guardian-reading liberal leftie” put it, it was a matter of “not wanting to rock the multicultural community boat.”

That’s a telling admission. Multiculturalism is a liberal fetish that is also the antithesis of liberalism, classical or modern—a simultaneous belief in individual autonomy and cultural equality, irrespective of whether different cultures believe in individual rights or not.

Typically liberals have elided this incoherence by pretending, as President Obama often does, that Western cultures are no better than non-Western cultures in respecting human rights, or by demanding radical liberalism inside the West while supinely accepting violent anti-liberalism outside it.

But the events in Cologne make a nonsense of this. What was outside the West is now inside. In the spirit of Christian charity, Angela Merkel and other European leaders have imported a culture of Muslim misogyny. In the name of humanity, the benefactors are asked to close their eyes to the brutishness of so many of their beneficiaries.

***

At his State of the Union address Tuesday night, Mr. Obama is expected to make the case for opening our doors to Syrian refugees. As the son of a displaced person who arrived with her mother in the United States after World War II with seven dollars, I’m sympathetic to immigrants, particularly the lowliest among them. Whether their papers are in order doesn’t matter to me. It’s their intentions that count.

No amount of vetting is going to find all the bad apples in the new wave of Middle Eastern refugees. So here’s my modest proposal, for Mr. Obama and Ms. Merkel. Let’s open our doors wide to women, young children and the elderly. And let’s close it shut to the men. They have a mess to clean up in their own countries. And much to prove in the horrifying wake of Cologne.

William Safire's article from 1985 titled - MAD Is Dead

The New York Times

Opinion

THE NEW STRATEGIC REALITY: MAD IS DEAD

Published: March 11, 1985

      

William Safire

 WASHINGTON— The exchange between the Ukrainian Communist Party boss Vladimir Shcherbitsky and Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office last week was considerably more spirited than reported.

Mr. Shcherbitsky, a high-ranking Politburo member, was sent here to test the President's mettle on the eve of the resumption of arms talks.

Mr. Reagan, as usual, began to ladle out the charm, but the Soviet leader did not respond with the crabbed stolidity of a Gromyko: instead, Mr. Shcherbitsky had been instructed to cut through the small talk with a harsh threat about the huge buildup and cold war in store if the U.S. pursued its new space- defense strategy.

The President's memoirs will draw on a memcon that shows how the charm ladle was promptly set aside. Mr. Reagan jabbed back, and Mr. Shcherbitsky renewed the verbal attack, insisting that the Russian people would not permit this new threat. Mr. Reagan replied sharply to the effect that ''the people in the Soviet Union don't have much to say about what their Government does.'' The Kremlin likes to measure American leaders by shaking them up. President Kennedy responded too mildly to the verbal testing by Khrushchev in Vienna in the early 60's, which led to a mistaken judgment and the Cuban missile crisis. A decade later, President Nixon responded icily to the furious initial bombast of Brezhnev in his dacha outside Moscow, which led to a realistic Russian assessment and a period of detente. Mr. Shcherbitsky has undoubtedly reported to the Sanhedrin of decrepitude composing the Politburo that Mr. Reagan, when pushed hard, pushes back hard. The President, after the meeting, was troubled by the Ukrainian's tough gambit and wondered whether he had been wise to let Mr. Shcherbitsky get his dander up. Secretary of State Shultz assured Mr. Reagan that his natural response was on target: It had been important to signal the Russians that intimidation would not work, and for good measure, ''this is not the sort of talk they ever get to hear.''

The Shcherbitsky report will be useful to the Kremlin, because the arms- control negotiations (ACNE) resuming in Geneva this week are based on a new reality. The decade that led to the Russian superiority in offensive missiles and in battle-management radar protection of those missiles has ended; the decade of defense has begun.

Many Americans resist that reality. Some with silly scorn at ''Star Wars,'' others with reasoned argument against the abandonment of Mutual Assured Destruction deterrence theory, hold that Mr. Reagan's new approach threatens the Russians by removing their ability to retaliate if we launch a first strike.

The serious objections have weight. But the President's proposal to build up defense and reduce offense has an intellectual underpinning, and has the added weight of an election. The President's judgment is challengeable, and his budgeting is debatable, but in the end most Americans acknowledge he has been elected to be responsible for nuclear strategy. MAD is dead. It started to die exactly two years ago, in March of 1983, when Mr. Reagan first proposed to leapfrog the Soviet Union's offensive advantage; the old, naked-to-mine- enemy deterrence made rattling sounds in the campaign, when Mr. Mondale supported it in televised debate; the old theory died forever with Mr. Reagan's landslide re-election. The new idea made possible by technology - a defense shield to protect most of us against incoming missiles - is now unstoppable. It protects both superpowers against the greatest immediate nuclear danger, from a terrorist nation armed with bomb and missile and no concern for retaliation, as there will surely be soon. Because it will no longer depend on the sanity of dictators or the kindness of strangers, it returns defense to the hands of the defender. This galls the Russian leaders, who spent 20 years catching and passing the Americans in nuclear offensive power. Strategic dominance was in sight; now here they are, either obliged to compete in an expensive space-defense race, or forced to settle for permanent nuclear equality.

No wonder they bluster and glower at the new reality. They will try, for a time, to preserve their land-missile advantage, railing against the sea- change in nuclear strategy, for no nation resists change like the U.S.S.R.

One day, not soon, they will deal with reality. We will recall then what Mr. Reagan said dryly to Mr. Shcherbitsky, as they parted: ''I hope the negotiators do better than we did.''

****

From Wikipedia:

SDI and MAD  

SDI was criticized for potentially disrupting the strategic doctrine of Mutual assured destruction. MAD postulated that intentional nuclear attack was inhibited by the certainty of ensuing mutual destruction. Even if a nuclear first strike destroyed many of the opponent's weapons, sufficient nuclear missiles would survive to render a devastating counter-strike against the attacker. The criticism was that SDI could have potentially allowed an attacker to survive the lighter counter-strike, thus encouraging a first strike by the side having SDI. Another destabilizing scenario was countries being tempted to strike first before SDI was deployed, thereby avoiding a disadvantaged nuclear posture. Proponents of SDI argued that SDI development might instead cause the side that did not have the resources to develop SDI, too, rather than launching a suicidal nuclear first strike attack before the SDI system was deployed, instead come to the bargaining table with the country that did have those resources, and, hopefully, agree to a real, sincere disarmament pact that would drastically decrease all forces, both nuclear and conventional.^{[citation needed]} Furthermore, the MAD argument was criticized on the grounds that MAD only covered intentional, full-scale nuclear attacks by a rational, non-suicidal opponent with similar values. It did not take into account limited launches, accidental launches, rogue launches, or launches by non-state entities or covert proxies.

Defy America, pay no price

The Washington Post     

By Charles Krauthammer

f you’re going to engage in a foreign policy capitulation, might as well do it when everyone is getting tanked and otherwise occupied. Say, around New Year’s Eve.

Here’s the story. In October, Iran test-fires a nuclear-capable ballistic missile in brazen violation of a Security Council resolution explicitly prohibiting such launches. President Obama does nothing. One month later, Iran does it again. The administration makes a few gestures at the U.N. Then nothing. Then finally, on Dec. 30, the White House announces a few sanctions.

They are weak, aimed mostly at individuals and designed essentially for show. Amazingly, even that proves too much. By 10 p.m. that night, the administration caves. The White House sends out an email saying that sanctions are off — and the Iranian president orders the military to expedite the missile program.

Is there any red line left? First, the Syrian chemical weapons. Then the administration insistence that there would be no nuclear deal unless Iran accounted for its past nuclear activities. (It didn’t.) And unless Iran permitted inspection of its Parchin nuclear testing facility. (It was allowed self-inspection and declared itself clean.) And now, illegal ballistic missiles.

The premise of the nuclear deal was that it would constrain Iranian actions. It’s had precisely the opposite effect. It has deterred us from offering even the mildest pushback to any Iranian violations lest Iran walk away and leave Obama legacy-less.

Just two weeks ago, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards conducted live-fire exercises near the Strait of Hormuz. It gave nearby U.S. vessels exactly 23 seconds of warning. One rocket was launched 1,500 yards from the USS Harry S. Truman.

Obama’s response? None.

The Gulf Arabs — rich, weak and, since FDR, dependent on America for security — are bewildered. They’re still reeling from the nuclear deal, which Obama declared would be unaffected by Iranian misbehavior elsewhere. The result was to assure Tehran that it would pay no price for its aggression in Syria and Yemen, subversion in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, and support for terrorism.

Obama seems not to understand that disconnecting the nuclear issue gave the mullahs license to hunt in the region. For the Saudis, however, it’s not just blundering but betrayal. From the very beginning, they’ve seen Obama tilting toward Tehran as he fancies himself Nixon in China, turning Iran into a strategic partner in managing the Middle East.

This is even scarier because it is delusional. If anything, Obama’s openhanded appeasement has encouraged Iran’s regional adventurism and intense anti-Americanism.

The Saudis, sensing abandonment, are near panic. Hence the reckless execution of the firebrand Shiite insurrectionist, Sheik Nimr Baqr al-Nimr, that has brought the region to a boil. Iranians torched the Saudi Embassy. The Saudis led other Sunni states in breaking relations with Tehran.

The Saudis feel surrounded, and it’s not paranoia. To their north, Iran dominates a Shiite crescent stretching from Iraq, Syria and Lebanon to the Mediterranean. To the Saudi south, Iran has been arming Yemen’s Houthi rebels since at least 2009. The fighting has spilled over the border into Saudi Arabia.

The danger is rising. For years, Iran has been supporting anti-regime agitation among Saudi Arabia’s minority Shiites. The Persian Gulf is Iran’s ultimate prize. The fall of the House of Saud would make Iran the undisputed regional hegemon and an emerging global power.

For the United States, that would be the greatest geopolitical setback since China fell to communism in 1949. Yet Obama seems oblivious. Worse, he appears inert in the face of the three great challenges to the post-Cold War American order. Iran is only the most glaring. China is challenging the status quo in the South China Sea, just last week landing its first aircraft on an artificial island hundreds of miles beyond the Chinese coast. We deny China’s claim and declare these to be international waters, yet last month we meekly apologized when a B-52 overflew one of the islands. We said it was inadvertent.

The world sees and takes note. As it does our response to the other great U.S. adversary — Russia. What’s happened to Obama’s vaunted “isolation” of Russia for its annexation of Crimea and assault on the post-Cold War European settlement? Gone. Evaporated. John Kerry plays lapdog to Sergei Lavrov. Obama meets openly with Vladimir Putin in Turkey, then in Paris. And is now practically begging him to join our side in Syria.

There is no price for defying Pax Americana — not even trivial sanctions on Iranian missile-enablers. Our enemies know it. Our allies see it — and sense they’re on their own, and may not survive.