Palestine Shouldn’t Exist - American Greatness

 Palestine Should Not Exist

Palestine Shouldn’t Exist

By refusing to accept Palestinians into the neighboring land, Arabs were able to make them a permanently aggrieved class.

By Dan Gelernter

May 18, 2021

History of the Armenian Genocide

 History of the Armenian Genocide

A look at the Armenian genocide

As many as 1.5 million Armenians were killed in what was the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Yet the Turkish government has refused to acknowledge the crime as genocide, even to this day.

Etchmiadzin Cathedral

Etchmiadzin Cathedral - Wikipedia

Armenian Religion (Christian)

As of 2011, most Armenians are Christians (97%) and are members of Armenia's own church, the Armenian Apostolic Church, which is one of the oldest Christian churches. It was founded in the 1st century AD, and in 301 AD became the first branch of Christianity to become a state religion.

The West's Love of Feeding the Beast :

 

Once Again: The Naive West Freely Gives to a Hate-Filled Islam

BY RAYMOND IBRAHIM 

FEB 05, 2021 5:41 PM

 

Few relationships feature one party that freely gives and another party that only takes as blatantly as the relationship between the West and Islam. Thus, according to a Feb. 1, 2021, report, “The British taxpayer has shelled out over £15,000 to the widow of the mastermind behind the 2017 London Bridge terror attack, while the families of victims were denied similar financial support.”

During that attack, Zahrah Rehman’s husband, Khuram Butt, and two other Muslims, killed eight people and injured another 48, by running over them with a van and stabbing them with knives. If the police had not managed to shoot and kill the three terrorists, many more passersby would likely have been killed.

The distaste felt by some Brits at learning that their taxes are going to the wife of a savage terrorist is further soured by the fact that — and despite her claims otherwise — evidence suggests she knew and may even have shared in his “ISIS” worldview: “I knew it was a possibility that he wanted to go to Syria,” she confessed, “but he never told me that he hates this country and wanted to attack this country.” Such a defense is beyond silly: wanting to go and fight for the Islamic State in Syria is synonymous with hating Britain and any “infidel” nation.  Moreover,

In video evidence provided to the hearing, Ms Rehman is seen talking with her extremist husband about naming British airports after radical Islamists….  Another video presented before the inquiry showed the couple on their honeymoon in Pakistan and her husband hailing “Dawlat al-Islamiyah” – a monicker for Islamic State. Rehman denied that she understood what Butt was saying, claiming she could not understand Arabic.

At one point in the video, she even suggested renaming a London airport after Britain’s most notorious hate-preacher, Anjem Choudary, a man who helped “radicalize” her murderous husband and who spent five years in prison for his ties to ISIS.  When confronted about her suggestion, Rehman shrugged it off as “just a stupid joke.”

 It is further ironic — or rather telling — that she mentioned Anjem Choudary (whom I once debated here).  He is the same man who — while holding all of the usual beliefs currently styled as “extremist” — also encourages Muslims to receive welfare at the hands of their hated enemies, the infidels, just as Rehman is benefiting.

In 2013, Choudary was secretly videotaped telling a Muslim audience to follow his example and get “Jihad Seeker’s Allowance” from the government (a pun on “Job Seeker’s Allowance).” The father of four, who was then annually receiving more than 25,000 pounds in welfare benefits, referred to British taxpayers as “slaves,” adding,

We take the jizya, which is our haq [Arabic for “right”], anyway. The normal situation by the way is to take money from the kafir [infidel], isn’t it? So this is the normal situation. They give us the money — you work, give us the money, Allahu Akhbar! We take the money.

According to Koran 9:29, jizya is monetary tribute subjugated non-Muslims (dhimmis) are required to pay to Muslims as the price for not killing them.  This practice was only (and formally) abolished in the nineteenth century, thanks entirely to European intervention.

Choudary’s position on accepting infidel money — and Rehman’s acceptance of it — is not out of the Islamic mainstream. Sometime back, for instance, I watched a roundtable discussion on U.S. foreign aid to Egypt on Al Hafiz TV, an Arabic-language Islamic station.  At one point, one of the guests, a cleric, insisted that the U.S. must be treated contemptuously, like a lowly and downtrodden dhimmi; that Egypt must make the U.S. conform to its own demands; and that, then, all the money the U.S. offers to Egypt in foreign aid can be taken as rightfully earned jizya.

The Muslim cleric further recommended that Egypt be less cooperative with the U.S. — while simultaneously demanding more monetary aid. Then, “America will accept; it will kiss our hands; and it will also increase its aid. And we will consider its aid as jizya, not as aid. But first we must make impositions on it.”

When the host asked the learned cleric, “Do the Americans owe us jizya?” he responded, “Yes” — that is the price Americans have to pay “so we can leave them alone!”

At any rate, here, then, is yet another way that the liberal Left and the illiberal Islam complement one another: the one stupidly gives, while the other selfishly takes — all while despising and plotting the destruction of its benefactor.

Britain, especially, thrives on conforming to this model. According to a recent report, a ban preventing Anjem Choudary from preaching — he had “radicalized” several other Muslim murderers aside from Butt — is set to be lifted in May 2021, “and now security sources fear that Choudary will immediately resume his campaign to radicalise young Muslims.”

Duh.

Raymond Ibrahim, author of Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West, is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute.

WHAT’S LEFT OF ENGLAND: : USA Could Be Next

SULTAN KNISH ON

 WHAT’S LEFT OF ENGLAND:

Muslim sex grooming gangs, like drugs or prostitution, are too widespread to be enforced out of existence because, like college students and pot, the culture doesn’t accept that they are wrong.
The police did nothing because these were not isolated crimes by criminals, but clashes of morals and values between two communities, one of which does not believe that child rape is wrong because its sacred texts tell it that Mohammed married Aisha and consummated his marriage when she was 9.

There are nearly 2 million child marriages in Pakistan. The notion that a woman’s consent to sexual relations matters is an utterly foreign concept in a culture where unaccompanied women are fair game.

The child rapists did not believe that their actions were wrong under Islamic law. And they weren’t.
The Manchester City Council and the GMP just accepted this reality as they have accepted it so often. They buried the minutes, shut down the investigation, and walked away from the screams of the girls.

They did it for multiculturalism, integration, and community relations. They did it for social justice.

We know that no real action was taken because the girls were troubled. They didn’t matter. And their bodies and lives could be sacrificed for the greater good.

The real tragedy is not that the rapists didn’t understand it was wrong. It’s that the UK no longer does.

Indeed.

239Posted at 6:24 pm by Glenn Reynolds   

S

The Motives Behind the False Narrative on Islam and the West

The Motives Behind the False Narrative on Islam and the West

 

BY RAYMOND IBRAHIM NOVEMBER 27, 2019

CHAT COMMENTS

  

Any honest and objective appraisal of Islam’s historic jihad on the Christian world must be eye-opening, to say the very least. In the first century of its existence (between 632-732) Islam permanently conquered, Arabized, and Islamized nearly three-quarters of the post-Roman Christian world, thereby permanently severing it. Europe came to be known as “the West” because it was literally the remaining and westernmost appendage of Christendom not to be swallowed up by Islam.

For roughly a millennium thereafter, Arabs, Berbers, Turks, and Tatars—all of whom called and saw themselves as Muslims—launched raid after raid, all justified and lauded as jihads, into virtually every corner of Europe. They reached as far as Iceland and provoked the U.S. into its first war as a nation. The devastation was indescribable; some regions in Europe, particularly in Spain and the Balkans, remain inhabitable due to the incessant raiding. Some 15 million Europeans were enslaved during this perennial jihad and, according to contemporary records, treated horrifically.

In short, “if we … ask ourselves how and when the modern notion of Europe and the European identity was born,” writes historian Franco Cardini, “we realize the extent to which Islam was a factor (albeit a negative one) in its creation. Repeated Muslim aggression against Europe between the seventh to eighth centuries, then between the fourteenth and the eighteenth centuries … was a ‘violent midwife’ to Europe.”

Here the inevitable question arises: How could such a long, well-documented history of unmitigated Islamic aggression that had immense repercussions on the development of Western civilization now be presented as the antithesis of reality?

The answer revolves around a number of modern philosophies—from the Enlightenment to moral/cultural relativism—that have each contributed to an all-pervasive “Narrative” concerning the historic relationship between Islam and the West. In presenting the West as aggressor and Islam as victim—hence the latter’s ongoing “grievance”-based animosity—this history is as entrenched as it is the reverse of reality.

To understand this, one must first understand that, despite its many manifestations, permutations, and emphases over the centuries, the Narrative’s unspoken driving force has largely been the same: to demonize and thus justify a break away from Europe’s traditional heritage, religion, identity, and mores. If this sounds farfetched, consider: whereas by any objective standard the West is responsible for practically every boon taken for granted today—from scientific, technological, economic and medicinal advances, to the abolition of slavery and anti-discrimination laws—today no people of any race or civilization despise their heritage except Western people. Clearly something is amiss.

Or consider how leftists/liberals/progressives, who forever whine against any vestige of Western traditionalism, habitually make common cause with Islam—despite the latter’s truly oppressive qualities. Thus feminists denounce the Western “patriarchy”—but say nothing against the Muslim treatment of women as chattel; homosexuals denounce Christian bakeries—but say nothing against the Muslim execution of homosexuals; multiculturalists denounce Christians who refuse to suppress their faith to accommodate the religious sensibilities of Muslim minorities—but say nothing against the entrenched and open Muslim persecution of Christians.

 The reason for these discrepancies is simple: “The enemy [Islam] of my enemy [Christianity] is my friend.”

From here, how and why such a formally well-known history of Muslim aggression against Europe was not merely suppressed but reversed should start making sense: of all non-European, non-Christian peoples, only Muslims lived alongside and interacted with (that is, constantly encroached and warred on) Europe for over a millennium; this made Muslims the only people—the only foil—that could be used to support the Narrative’s argument against premodern Europe. But first, an intellectually satisfying way of casting Muslims as victims not conquerors was needed.

Enter literary professor Edward Said’s 1978 book, Orientalism. Its central thesis is that the Orientalists—the Europeans who began the academic study of the East centuries ago—were not writing objectively about Muslims and their history, but rather intentionally slandering and stereotyping them in order to justify dominating them during the colonial era.

This made perfect sense—but only because the postmodern Western mind had already been primed for it. For if, as Marxist Materialism teaches, ideas/religions have no influence on history (and thus, economic want, not “jihad,” caused Muslims to expand); if, as Relativism and its spawn Multiculturalism teach, there are no absolute truths, religious or otherwise (and thus no culture or civilization is “better” than another); if, as pop psychology teaches, violent and negative behavior is always a product of societal injustices (and thus the more Muslims behave violently, the more that only proves they are frustrated victims)—then what does one make of the aforementioned centuries of European writings that uniformly depict Muslims as ideologically driven by violence and lust?

Simple: dismiss them all as bigoted and hypocritical lies by nefarious Christians and Europeans intent on demonizing a superior, more tolerant faith and civilization. Thus a whole new academic approach to Islam—stripped of all historic writings not conforming to the Narrative—was born. History would no longer shape ideas and attitudes; rather, preexisting ideas and attitudes—wishful thinking—would shape history.

Bernard Lewis, himself a target of Edward Said’s Orientalism, summarized this new approach—or “pseudo-history”—well:

According to a currently fashionable epistemological view, absolute truth is either nonexistent or unattainable. Therefore, truth doesn’t matter; facts don’t matter. All discourse is a manifestation of a power relationship, and all knowledge is slanted. Therefore, accuracy doesn’t matter; evidence doesn’t matter. All that matters is the attitude—the motives and purposes—of the user of knowledge, and this may simply be claimed for oneself or imputed to another. In imputing motives, the irrelevance of truth, facts, evidence, and even plausibility is a great help. The mere assertion suffices” ( Islam and the West, 115).

Orientalism’s success lay less in anything intrinsic to it—American classicist Bruce Thornton characterizes it as an “incoherent amalgam of dubious postmodern theory, sentimental Third Worldism, glaring historical errors, and Western guilt”—and more because it fit the West’s prevailing zeitgeist (which, of course, thrives on “dubious postmodern theory, sentimental Third Worldism, glaring historical errors, and Western guilt”).

Nor does the Narrative predominate today because people are well-read or pay attention to academe; as French historian Marc Ferro demonstrated in his Cinema and History (1988), the overwhelming majority of Western people’s knowledge of history comes from movies. And almost any major film dealing with premodern Europeans and Muslims—Robin Hood (1991), Kingdom of Heaven (2005), etc.—contrasts hypocritical, intolerant, and fanatical Christians with sophisticated, advanced, and tolerant Muslims. Commenting on such films back in 1997, Lewis wrote, “The misrepresentation of the past in the cinema is probably the most fertile and effective source of such misinformation at the present time…”

Twenty years later the Narrative has only metastasized and infected all aspects of public life, including politics and so-called “mainstream news.” Meanwhile, social and other media giants—YouTube, Google, Facebook, Twitter—increasingly censor material that contradicts the Narrative.

Such is how a previously well-known history was turned upside down and used to weaken the West—the greatest sin of which is ever again to think or behave like its “awful” ancestors did concerning Islam.

For more on the true history between Islam and the West, see the author’s recent Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West.

Obama Biden Blew It In Iraq; Allowed Rise of ISIS

FLASHBACK:
Mattis: You won’t believe how Obama and Biden bungled Iraq and allowed the rise of ISIS.

Related: ‘Ignoring reality’: Biden got it wrong on Iraq, Mattis says.

 “‘He was past the point where he was willing to entertain a ‘good idea.’ He didn’t want to hear more; he wanted our forces out of Iraq. Whatever path led there fastest, he favored. He exuded the confidence of a man whose mind was made up, perhaps even indifferent to considering the consequences were he judging the situation incorrectly.'”

Mattis winds up basically blaming Biden for the rise of ISIS, adding, “It would take many years and tens of thousands of casualties, plus untold misery for millions of innocents, to break ISIS’s geographic hold. All of this was predicted — and preventable.”
Related item here.

11Posted at 9:25 pm by Glenn Reynolds   

Y

Turkey and the Kurds: It’s More Complicated Than You Think

By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY

October 10, 2019  

We are grateful for the Kurds’ help, and we should try to help them in return. But no one wants to risk war with Turkey.

On Monday, President Trump announced that a contingent of fewer than 100 U.S. troops in Syria was being moved away from Kurdish-held territory on the border of Turkey. The move effectively green-lighted military operations by Turkey against the Kurds, which have now commenced.

Some U.S. military officials went public with complaints about being “blindsided.” The policy cannot have been a surprise, though. The president has made no secret that he wants out of Syria, where we now have about 1,000 troops (down from over 2,000 last year). More broadly, he wants our forces out of the Middle East. He ran on that position. I’ve argued against his “endless wars” tropes, but his stance is popular. As for Syria specifically, many of the president’s advisers think we should stay, but he has not been persuaded.

The president’s announcement of the redeployment of the Syrian troops came on the heels of a phone conversation with Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. This, obviously, was a mistake, giving the appearance (and not for the first time) that Trump is taking cues from Ankara’s Islamist strongman. As has become rote, the inevitable criticism was followed by head-scratching tweets: The president vows to “totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey,” which “I’ve done before” (huh?), if Turkey takes any actions “that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits.” We can only sigh and say it will be interesting to see how the president backs up these haughty threats now that Erdogan has begun his invasion.

All that said, the president at least has a cogent position that is consistent with the Constitution and public opinion. He wants U.S. forces out of a conflict in which America’s interests have never been clear, and for which Congress has never approved military intervention. I find that sensible — no surprise, given that I have opposed intervention in Syria from the start (see, e.g., here, here, here, here, here, here, and here). The stridency of the counterarguments is matched only by their selectiveness in reciting relevant facts.

I thus respectfully dissent from our National Review editorial.

President Trump, it says, is “making a serious mistake” by moving our forces away from what is described as “Kurdish territory”; the resulting invasion by superior Turkish forces will “kill American allies” while “carving out a zone of dominance” that will serve further to “inflame and complicate” the region.

Where to begin? Perhaps with the basic fact that there is no Kurdish territory. There is Syrian territory on Turkey’s border that the Kurds are occupying — a situation that itself serves to “inflame and complicate” the region for reasons I shall come to. Ethnic Kurds do not have a state. They live in contiguous parts of Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. Most are integrated into these countries, but many are separatists.

The Kurds have been our allies against ISIS, but it is not for us that they have fought. They fight ISIS for themselves, with our help. They are seeking an autonomous zone and, ultimately, statehood. The editorial fails to note that the Kurds we have backed, led by the YPG (People’s Protection Units), are the Syrian branch of the PKK (the Kurdistan Worker’s Party) in Turkey. The PKK is a militant separatist organization with Marxist-Leninist roots. Although such informed observers as Michael Rubin contend that the PKK has “evolved,” it remains a formally designated foreign terrorist organization under U.S. law. While our government materially supports the PKK’s confederates, ordinary Americans have been prosecuted for materially supporting the PKK.

The PKK has a long history of conducting terrorist attacks, but their quarrel is not with us. So why has our government designated them as terrorists? Because they have been fighting an insurgent war against Turkey for over 30 years. Turkey remains our NATO ally, even though the Erdogan government is one of the more duplicitous and anti-Western actors in a region that teems with them — as I’ve detailed over the years (see, e.g., here, here, here, here, and in my 2012 book, Spring Fever). The Erdogan problem complicates but does not change the fact that Turkey is of great strategic significance to our security.

While it is a longer discussion, I would be open to considering the removal of both the PKK from the terrorist list and Turkey from NATO. For now, though, the blunt facts are that the PKK is a terrorist organization and Turkey is our ally. These are not mere technicalities. Contrary to the editorial’s suggestion, our government’s machinations in Syria have not put just one of our allies in a bind. There are two allies in this equation, and our support for one has already vexed the other. The ramifications are serious, not least Turkey’s continued lurch away from NATO and toward Moscow.

Without any public debate, the Obama administration in 2014 insinuated our nation into the Kurdish–Turk conflict by arming the YPG. To be sure, our intentions were good. ISIS had besieged the city of Kobani in northern Syria; but Turkey understandably regards the YPG as a terrorist organization, complicit in the PKK insurgency.

That brings us to another non-technicality that the editors mention only in passing: Our intervention in Syria has never been authorized by Congress. Those of us who opposed intervention maintained that congressional authorization was necessary because there was no imminent threat to our nation. Contrary to the editorial’s suggestion, having U.S. forces “deter further genocidal bloodshed in northern Syria” is not a mission for which Americans support committing our men and women in uniform. Such bloodlettings are the Muslim Middle East’s default condition, so the missions would never end.

A congressional debate should have been mandatory before we jumped into a multi-layered war, featuring anti-American actors and shifting loyalties on both sides. In fact, so complex is the situation that President Obama’s initial goal was to oust Syria’s Assad regime; only later came the pivot to fighting terrorists, which helped Assad. That is Syria: Opposing one set of America’s enemies only empowers another. More clear than what intervention would accomplish was the likelihood of becoming enmeshed, inadvertently or otherwise, in vicious conflicts of which we wanted no part — such as the notorious and longstanding conflict between Turks and Kurds.

Barbaric jihadist groups such as ISIS (an offshoot of al-Qaeda) come into existence because of Islamic fundamentalism. But saying so remains de trop in Washington. Instead, we tell ourselves that terrorism emerges due to “vacuums” created in the absence of U.S. forces. On this logic, there should always and forever be U.S. forces and involvement in places where hostility to America vastly outweighs American interests.

President Obama has wrongly been blamed for “creating” ISIS by leaving a vacuum in Iraq. Couldn’t be the sharia-supremacist culture, could it? No, we’re supposed to suppose that this sort of thing could happen anywhere. So, when Obama withdrew our forces from the region (as Trump is doing now), jihadist atrocities and territorial conquests ensued. Eventually, Obama decided that action needed to be taken. But invading with U.S. troops was not an option — it would have been deeply unpopular and undercut Obama’s tout that Islamic militarism was on the wane. Our government therefore sought proxy forces.

Most proved incompetent. The Kurds, however, are very capable. There was clamor on Capitol Hill to back them. We knew from the first, though, that supporting them was a time bomb. Turkey was never going to countenance a Kurdish autonomous zone, led by the YPG and PKK elements, on its Syrian border. Ankara was already adamant that the PKK was using the Kurdish autonomous zone in Iraq to encourage separatist uprisings in Turkey, where 20 percent of the population is Kurdish. Erdogan would never accept a similar arrangement in Syria; he would evict the YPG forcibly if it came to that.

Yes, we had humanitarian reasons for arming the Kurds. But doing so undermined our anti-terrorism laws while giving Erdogan incentive to align with Russia and mend fences with Iran. ISIS, meanwhile, has never been defeated — it lost its territorial “caliphate,” but it was always more lethal as an underground terrorist organization than as a quasi-sovereign struggling to hold territory. And al-Qaeda, though rarely spoken of in recent years, is ascendant — as threatening as it has been at any time since its pre-9/11 heyday.

Those of us opposed to intervention in Syria wanted Congress to think through these quite predictable outcomes before authorizing any further U.S. military involvement in this wretched region. Congress, however, much prefers to lay low in the tall grass, wait for presidents to act, and then complain when things go awry.

And so they have: The easily foreseeable conflict between Turkey and the Kurds is at hand. We are supposed to see the problem as Trump’s abandoning of U.S. commitments. But why did we make commitments to the Kurds that undermined preexisting commitments to Turkey? The debate is strictly framed as “How can we leave the Kurds to the tender mercies of the Turks?” No one is supposed to ask “What did we expect would happen when we backed a militant organization that is tightly linked to U.S.-designated terrorists and that is the bitter enemy of a NATO ally we knew would not abide its presence on the ally’s border?” No one is supposed to ask “What is the end game here? Are we endorsing the partition of Syria? Did we see a Kurdish autonomous zone as the next Kosovo?” (We might remember that recognition of Kosovo’s split from Serbia, over Russian objections, was exploited by the Kremlin as a rationale for promoting separatism and annexations in Georgia and Ukraine.)

It is true, as the editors observe, that “there are no easy answers in Syria.” That is no excuse for offering an answer that makes no sense: “The United States should have an exit strategy, but one that neither squanders our tactical gains against ISIS nor exposes our allies to unacceptable retribution.” Put aside that our arming of the Kurds has already exposed our allies in Turkey to unacceptable risk. What the editorial poses is not an “exit strategy” but its opposite. In effect, it would keep U.S. forces in Syria interminably, permanently interposed between the Kurds and the Turks. The untidy questions of how that would be justifiable legally or politically go unaddressed.

224

President Trump, by contrast, has an exit strategy, which is to exit. He promises to cripple Turkey economically if the Kurds are harmed. If early reports of Turkey’s military assault are accurate, the president will soon be put to the test. I hope he is up to it. For a change, he should have strong support from Congress, which is threatening heavy sanctions if Turkey routs the Kurds.

Americans, however, are not of a mind to do more than that. We are grateful for what the Kurds did in our mutual interest against ISIS. We should try to help them, but no one wants to risk war with Turkey over them. The American people’s representatives never endorsed combat operations in Syria, and the president is right that the public wants out. Of course we must prioritize the denial of safe havens from which jihadists can attack American interests. We have to stop pretending, though, that if our intentions toward this neighborhood are pure, its brutal history, enduring hostilities, and significant downside risks can be ignored.