A Month of Islam and Multiculturalism in France: June 2017

by Soeren Kern  •  July 23, 2017 at 5:00 am

• "I am in fundamental disagreement with these left-wing people who do everything to dissociate fundamentalism from Islam. Islam has been radicalized for fifty years. On the Shiite side, there was Imam Khomeini and his Islamic revolution. In the Sunni world, there was Saudi Arabia, which used its immense resources to finance the spread of this fanaticism of Wahhabism. But this historical evolution took place within Islam and not outside. When the people of the Islamic State attack, they do it by saying 'Allahu Akbar.' So how can we then say that this has nothing to do with Islam? It must be stopped." — Sir Salman Rushdie, author of the novel The Satanic Verses, who has been hunted to be killed by Muslim extremists for nearly 30 years.

• Residents of the Paris suburb of Mée-sur-Seine complained that a mosque was blasting prayers on outdoor loudspeakers well beyond midnight each night during Ramadan. Mourad Salah, a local Muslim leader, said the city council was to blame for the noise because of its failure to provide Muslims with a larger mosque: "The ball is in the mayor's court. Until we have a place of prayer worthy of the name, with a greater capacity, things will be difficult."

• An online petition — "Women: An Endangered Species in the Heart of Paris" — accused Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo of allowing a large swathe of the city to become a no-go zone for women. Every night, hundreds of migrants from Africa and the Middle East line the pavements to form an intimidating gauntlet for women walking from the Gare du Nord and Gare de l'Est railway stations to their homes, the petition said. Shouts of "bitch" and "dirty whore" are common.

A policeman stands guard near Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, France, on June 6, 2017, after Farid Ikken, a 40-year-old Algerian, attempted to murder a police officer at the site. (Photo by Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images)

June 1. Saber Lahmar, a 48-year-old Algerian who has lived in Bordeaux since his release from Guantánamo Bay in 2009, was charged with "terrorist association" and placed in pre-trial detention. He is suspected of providing financial, logistical and doctrinal aid to French jihadists who were planning to travel to Iraq and Syria. Lahmar was arrested in Bosnia in 2001 after being accused of plotting to bomb the American embassy in Sarajevo. In November 2008, U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon ordered Lahmar to be released from Guantánamo because there was insufficient reason to hold him. In December 2009, Robert C. Kirsch, a lawyer at the firm of WilmerHale, which represented Lahmar in federal court, said: "We are grateful for the courage and generosity of the French people and government, and for the ongoing effort by President Obama... which will now give Mr. Lahmar a chance to rebuild his life in France."

Continue Reading Article

Deny the Holocaust, but Don't Question Sharia?

by Majid Rafizadeh  •  July 23, 2017 at 4:30 am

• Why is it encouraged, even praised, to deny the unimaginable suffering that millions went through during the Holocaust, but if anyone dares to question Sharia their lives are in danger?

• If you dare even to joke about Islam, your punishment can range from torture, long terms of imprisonment, to swift death sentences, either judicial or from mob violence.

• "They have created a myth in the name of the Holocaust and consider it above God, religion and the prophets," — Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on Iranian state television.

Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said that his Holocaust denial was his biggest achievement. Pictured: Then-President Ahmadinejad speaks at Columbia University in New York City, on September 24, 2007. (Photo by Stephen Chernin-Pool/Getty Images)

If you grew up between Iran and Syria, as I did, you would have lived underneath the iron rule of dictators such as Bashar Assad, Ayatollah Khamenei, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. In addition to the fear and oppression they maintained over their people, all of these rulers appeared to have another "tradition" in common. They are all deny the Holocaust.

It was common to hear from whoever worked for the Iranian regime that the Holocaust did not exist. Despite the mountain of clear facts before them, they chose, and continue to choose, not only to believe that the Holocaust was a fabrication, but to spread this belief to their people.

Continue Reading Article

Trump Kicks the Iranian 'Can' Down the Road

by Amir Taheri  •  July 23, 2017 at 4:00 am

Then US Secretary of State John Kerry shakes hands with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in Vienna, Austria, on July 14, 2014, during negotiations that led to the drafting of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). (Image source: US State Department)

Over the past six months, in one way or another, President Donald Trump has kicked several of the cans inherited from Barack Obama down the road.

After several attempts at abolishing it, the so-called Obamacare has been kicked into legislative oblivion. Obama's policy of courting the Castro brothers has been slightly modified but not scrapped. The Paris Climate Accord has been verbally dismissed but not definitely buried, if only because it won't become binding until 2020.

The latest can to be kicked down the road is the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the curious press release which enumerates things that Iran must do about its controversial nuclear project in exchange for the temporary suspension of sanctions.

Continue Reading Article

Metal Detectors and Palestinian Lies

by Bassam Tawil  •  July 22, 2017 at 5:00 am

• The slain police officers were stationed there to ensure the safety of Muslim worshippers. The Palestinian spin doctors are attempting to divert attention from the terror attack by making it look as if the crisis began when Israel installed the metal detectors and not when two police officers were murdered.

• First, the security measures, including the placement of the metal detectors, was not an Israeli initiative but came as a direct and necessary response to a specific terror attack. The Israeli government did not convene and take a decision to install the metal detectors in order to alter the status quo or stop Muslims from praying.

• Second, it was the Palestinians who took the decision not to enter into the Temple Mount unless the metal detectors are removed. The Palestinians and the Waqf are lying to the world by telling it that Israel is denying Muslims access to their holy sites.

• The Palestinian opposition to the metal detectors at the Temple Mount means one thing only: that the Palestinians are determined to turn the holy site into a weapons cache and use it as a launching pad to carry out terror attacks against Israelis. If the mosque were then actually destroyed in the process, guess who would be blamed? Possibly that is even the real agenda.

Approximately 4,000 Palestinian Muslims pray outside the entrance to the Old City of Jerusalem, on July 19, 2017, in protest at the installation of metal detectors at the entrances to the Temple Mount. (Photo by Ilia Yefimovich/Getty Images)

The controversy surrounding the Israeli authorities' decision to place metal detectors at the gates of the Temple Mount calls to mind the famous Arab saying, "he beat me and cried then came to me to complain." This inversion of reality is a common among perpetrators who pretend to be victims.

The decision to install the metal detectors came after Arab terrorists murdered two Israeli police officers at the Temple Mount on July 14. The three terrorists -- Israeli Arab citizens from the city of Umm al-Fahm -- used a submachine gun and knives to carry out their attack. The weapons were easily smuggled into the Temple Mount thanks to Muslim worshippers not having been required to pass through metal detectors or undergo body searches by policemen stationed at the gates.

Continue Reading Article

Sweden: A Failed State?

by Judith Bergman  •  July 21, 2017 at 5:00 am

• The Swedish state, in true Orwellian style, fights those Swedish citizens who point out the obvious problems that migrants are causing.

• When police officer Peter Springare said in February that migrants were committing a disproportionate amount of crime in the suburbs, he was investigated for inciting "racial hatred".

• Currently, a 70-year-old Swedish pensioner is being prosecuted for "hate speech", for writing on Facebook that migrants "set fire to cars, and urinate and defecate on the streets".

In 2015, only 14% of all crimes in Sweden were solved. In 2016, 80% of police officers were allegedly considering quitting the force. Nonetheless, Prime Minister Stefan Löfven (pictured above) refused to call it a crisis. (Photo by Michael Campanella/Getty Images)

The security situation in Sweden is now so critical that the national police chief, Dan Eliasson, has asked the public for help; the police are unable to solve the problems on their own. In June, the Swedish police released a new report, "Utsatta områden 2017", ("Vulnerable Areas 2017", commonly known as "no-go zones" or lawless areas). It shows that the 55 no-go zones of a year ago are now 61.

In September 2016, Prime Minister Stefan Löfven and Minister of Interior Anders Ygeman refused to see the warnings: in 2015, only 14% of all crimes in Sweden were solved, and in 2016, 80% of police officers were allegedly considering quitting the force. Both ministers refused to call it a crisis. According to Anders Ygeman:

Continue Reading Article

The Worst Ideological Enemy of the US is Now Europe

by Drieu Godefridi  •  July 20, 2017 at 5:00 am

• The vast majority of these European courts -- whether the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) or the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) -- in their attempt to be moral and just, have dismissed the sovereign laws of Italy as irrelevant, and trampled the rights of the Italian state and ordinary Italians to approve who enters their country.

• In Europe, Amnesty International and the like are, it seems, a new source of law.

• Those who gave the Statue of Liberty to America in 1886 "to commemorate the perseverance of freedom and democracy in the United States" are willingly trampling their own people's liberties today through courts of appointed, unelected, unaccountable ideologues. The danger is that, with the help of many doubtless well-intentioned, international NGOs, the EU will not stop at its shores.

In Europe, there are now two Supreme Courts: the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg, and the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in Luxembourg (pictured above), in addition to national courts. (Image source: Transparency International/Flickr)

Europe is the worst enemy of the US? You cannot be serious. Islamism, Russia, illegal immigrants... whatever, but surely not Europe! Are we not still together in NATO? Do we not conduct huge amounts of trade every day? Do we not share the same cultural roots, the same civilization, the same vision of the future? Did France not give the US her famous Statue of Liberty – "Liberty Enlightening the World?"

Not anymore. In a sense, Europe looks like a continent where American Democrats have been in power for 30 years, not only in the European states, but also at the level of the European Union.

Continue Reading Article

Is Turkey Becoming Another Iran?

by Uzay Bulut  •  July 20, 2017 at 4:00 am

• Evolution will no longer be taught in Turkish secondary schools, after being described as a "controversial subject" by the government.

• So, the question naturally arises what exactly will Turkish schoolchildren be taught instead. The answer is "jihad." Turkey is in the process of including the concept of jihad in compulsory school curricula. In eighth grade, jihad will also be taught under the title "Struggling on the Path to Allah: Jihad," under a chapter called "Worshipping Allah."

• The Ministry of National Education has also increased class hours for the mandatory course in "religion, culture and morality," and decreased art and philosophy classes to one hour per week.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2015. (Image source: Tasnim News Agency/Wikimedia Commons)

Turkey has recently been in the news for various developments that include, among other matters, its record number of jailed journalists, the destruction of Kurdish towns and forced displacement of thousands of Kurds, the dismissal or suspension of thousands of government employees for political reasons, the arrest of thousands of citizens for allegedly "organizing" last year's failed coup, the creeping conversion of the Hagia Sophia Basilica-museum into a mosque, and the seizure of Assyrian Christian lands, churches and cemeteries by the government.

One additional trend begging the media's attention is the determined Islamization of the Turkish educational system.

Here is a short list of some of the latest developments in Turkish schools and their curricula:

Turkey to stop teaching evolution in secondary schools as part of new national curriculum

Continue Reading Article

UNESCO is an Immoral, Anti-Semitic Organization
Decent Countries Should Leave

by Guy Millière  •  July 19, 2017 at 5:00 am

• Although Europe claims to respect human rights and the rights of peoples, it has been a party to violating the most essential right of the Jewish people: the recognition of its existence for more than 3,000 years, and the anchoring of this existence to its sacred monuments. Worse, Europe does so in the name of a people fictitiously invented less than 50 years ago. No serious scholar can find any trace of a "Palestinian people" before the 1960s. Europe has apparently been all too happy to accept lies.

• While claiming to fight terrorism, Europe complies with the demands of a terrorist movement that does not even bother to hide its terrorist nature. When Mahmoud Abbas speaks Arabic, he continually incites the murder of Jews. He recently repeated that he would not stop paying tried, convicted and imprisoned murderers of Jews, and still calls these murderers heroic "martyrs". On all maps used by the Palestinian Authority and in Palestinian textbooks, Israel does not exist; it is called Palestine.

• Europeans, imbued with a generic sense of guilt, began attributing all that is wrong in the world to Western civilization. Because they had colonized parts of the Muslim world, they failed to note that Muslim culture had, in fact, colonized Persia, the Byzantine Empire, the Middle East, Greece, Cyprus, the Balkans, North Africa, Southern Spain, and, more recently, northern Cyprus.

The director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Lebanon, Ann Dismorr, poses with a map devoid of any trace of the State of Israel, instead presenting it as a map of "Palestine," May 2013. (Image source: Palestinian Media Watch)

On July 7, UNESCO voted for a resolution defining the Old City of Hebron and the Cave of the Patriarchs as Palestinian heritage sites. Before that, in 2016, two resolutions making the same type of counterfactual assertions concerning the Old City of Jerusalem, the Temple Mount and the Western Wall were adopted. And the year before that, in 2015, UNESCO again upended history to rename two ancient biblical sites, Rachel's Tomb and the Cave of the Patriarchs, Islamic holy sites -- even though Islam did not even exist at that time.

Three days before this month's Hebron resolution, still another resolution, reaffirming the Jerusalem resolutions, was passed.

The Israeli government reacted with indignation. It decided to stop cooperating with UNESCO. US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said she was shocked and that the decision would not be without consequences.

The rest of the world has remained silent. How come?

Continue Reading Article

Can Trump Lead the Way to Regime Change in Iran?

by Hassan Mahmoudi  •  July 19, 2017 at 4:00 am

• What is needed now is a push for regime change, a watering of the seeds of popular resistance that are again budding -- after Obama abandoned the Iranian people in 2009, when they took to the streets to protest the stranglehold of the ayatollahs.

Hassan Abbasi, a strategist for Iran's Revolutionary Guards, recently boasted that Iran would lead "global guerilla organizations" against American targets: "If only 11 people carried out 9/11, do you realize that the possibility exists for us to do what we want? We don't need nuclear weapons..." (Tasnim News Agency/Wikimedia Commons)

American leadership expert John C. Maxwell defines a leader as "one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way." During his two terms in the highest office in the world, former U.S. President Barack Obama failed at all three, with disastrous consequences.

There is no realm in which Obama's lack of leadership was more glaring than that of foreign policy, particularly in relation to the Middle East. His combination of action and inaction -- pushing through the nuclear deal with Iran at all costs, while simultaneously adopting a stance of "patience" with and indifference to Tehran's sponsorship of global terrorism and foothold in Syria -- served no purpose other than to destabilize the region and weaken America's position.

Continue Reading Article

Qatar, Saudi Arabia to Islamize One of Europe's Greatest Cathedrals

by Giulio Meotti  •  July 18, 2017 at 5:00 am

• In Islamic symbolism, Córdoba is the lost Caliphate. Political authorities in Córdoba dealt a blow to the Catholic Church's claim of ownership of cathedral by declaring that "religious consecration is not the way to acquire property". But this is how history works, especially in the lands where Christianity and Islam fought hard for dominion. Why are secularists not pressing Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to give Christians back the Hagia Sophia? No one has raised an eyebrow that "Christendom's greatest cathedral has become a mosque".

• The Spanish left, governing the region, would like to convert the church into "a place for the meeting of faiths". Nice ecumenical words, but a death trap for the Islamic domination over other faiths. If these Islamists, supported by the militant secularists, will be able to bring Allah back inside the Cathedral of Córdoba, a tsunami of Islamic supremacism will submerge Europe's decaying Christianity. There are thousands of empty churches just waiting to be filled by the voices of muezzins.

• The Western attempt to free Jerusalem in the Middle Ages has been condemned as Christian imperialism, while the Muslim campaigns to colonize and Islamize the Byzantine Empire, North Africa, the Balkans, Egypt, the Middle East and most of Spain, to name but a few, are celebrated as a season of enlightenment.

The main altar of the Cathedral of Córdoba. (Image source: Wikimedia Commons/© José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro / CC BY-SA 3.0)

Muslim supremacists seem to have fantasies -- as well as a long history -- of converting Christian sites to Islamic ones. Take, for example, Saint-Denis, the Gothic cathedral named for the first Christian bishop of Paris who was buried there in 250, and the burial place of Charles Martel, whose victory stopped the Muslim invasion of France in 732. Now, according to the scholar Gilles Kepel, this burial place of most of France's kings and queens is "the Mecca in Islam of France". The French Islamists are dreaming of taking it over and replacing the church bells with the call of the muezzin.

In Turkey's greatest cathedral, Hagia Sophia, a muezzin's call recently reverberated inside the sixth-century church for the first time in 85 years.

In France, Muslim leaders called for converting abandoned churches into mosques. thereby echoing The late writer Emile Cioran once predicted of Europe: "The French will not wake up until Notre Dame becomes a mosque".

Continue Reading Article

Trump Must Withdraw From Iran Nuclear Deal - Now

by John R. Bolton  •  July 18, 2017 at 4:30 am

• Tehran's violations of the deal have become public, including: exceeding limits on uranium enrichment and production of heavy water; illicit efforts at international procurement of dual-use nuclear and missile technology; and obstructing international inspection efforts (which were insufficient to begin with).

• There is ominous talk of America "not living up to its word." This is nonsense. The president's primary obligation is to keep American citizens safe from foreign threats. Should President George W. Bush have kept the United States in the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, rather than withdraw to allow the creation of a limited national missile-defense shield to protect against rogue-state nuclear attacks?

• Care to bet how close Tehran — and North Korea — now are? Consider the costs of betting wrong.

Donald Trump talks with VIP guests during a rally against the Iran nuclear deal on the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol September 9, 2015 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

For the second time during the Trump administration, the State Department has reportedly decided to certify that Iran is complying with its 2015 nuclear deal with the Security Council's five permanent members and Germany, known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

If true, it will be the administration's second unforced error regarding the JCPOA. Over the past two years, considerable information detailing Tehran's violations of the deal have become public, including: exceeding limits on uranium enrichment and production of heavy water; illicit efforts at international procurement of dual-use nuclear and missile technology; and obstructing international inspection efforts (which were insufficient to begin with).

Since international verification is fatally inadequate, and our own intelligence far from perfect, these violations undoubtedly only scratch the surface of the ayatollahs' inexhaustible mendaciousness.

Continue Reading Article

Another Turkish Ambassador Confronts Me

by Daniel Pipes  •  July 18, 2017 at 4:00 am

• Sending an ambassador to demean and threaten an analyst at a private educational event is the non-violent equivalent of Erdoğan's bodyguards beating up peaceful demonstrators in Washington. Both are integral parts to suppressing dissent against an increasingly megalomaniacal leader.

• Erdoğan's officious diplomats inadvertently make enemies for the regime, bringing closer the day when, bag and baggage, they will wear out their already frayed welcome.

Turkish Ambassador Süleyman Gökçe threatens Daniel Pipes at a talk in Sofia, Bulgaria, on June 29, 2017. (Image source: Daniel Pipes video screenshot)

In February, Turkey's ambassador to Israel told this author to stay away from his country; at least he did so diplomatically. In June, Turkey's ambassador to Bulgaria treated me in a remarkably rude and undiplomatic manner.

The occasion was a talk I gave, "On Turkey and Erdoğan – a partner or a threat," for the Center for Balkan and Black Sea Studies think tank in Sofia. After mentioning my connections to and affection for Turkey, I explained that strongman President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's inability to reconcile three competing priorities — Islam, Turkey, and Erdoğan — and the resulting contradictions that are likely to doom his regime. By the end of the event, Ambassador Süleyman Gökçe confirmed that prediction.

Continue Reading Article

Abbas: Shut Up or I will Arrest You!

by Khaled Abu Toameh  •  July 17, 2017 at 5:00 am

• Critics say the Palestinian Authority's (PA) Cyber Crime Law, which permits the imprisonment of Palestinians for "liking" or sharing published material on the internet, paves the way for the emergence of a "police state" in PA-controlled territories in the West Bank. They also argue that the law aims to silence criticism of Abbas and the PA leadership.

• "What is laughable is that this law carries penalties that are tougher than those imposed on thieves and sex offenders... the law, in its present form, is designed to limit the freedom of the media and punish people for simple matters." — Journalist in Ramallah.

• This latest dictatorial move in the PA-controlled territories might also serve to remind the international community about the current readiness of the Palestinian leadership for statehood, and what such statehood would look like. In its current incarnation, that state would fit in just fine with its brutal Arab neighbors.

Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

A new Palestinian law combating information technology (IT) crimes has sparked a wave of protests from Palestinian journalists and human rights organizations.

The controversial Cyber Crime Law, signed by Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas on July 11, permits the imprisonment of Palestinians for "liking" or sharing published material on the internet.

Critics say the law paves the way for the emergence of a "police state" in PA-controlled territories in the West Bank. They also argue that the law aims to silence criticism of Abbas and the PA leadership.

The new law comes on the heels of the PA's recent decision to block more than 20 Palestinian websites accused of publishing comments and articles critical of the PA leadership.

Continue Reading Article

Turkey: Erdogan's Obsession to Take Jerusalem

by Burak Bekdil  •  July 17, 2017 at 4:00 am

• Simply put, Jerusalem's Judaic history dates back to thousands of years before the birth of Islam, only in the seventh century CE.

• As an American friend delicately asked: "Isn't Turkey supposed to be investing millions to help rebuild Gaza?"

• Not, it seems, when Islamist ideology is involved.

Jerusalem, with the Temple Mount in foreground. (Photo by Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images)

Less than a year ago, Turkey and Israel agreed to end their six-year-long diplomatic stand-off and officially "normalized" their relations. They appointed ambassadors Kemal Okem to Israel and Eitan Na'eh to Turkey, two prominent career diplomats, who, since then, have been struggling actually to normalize formally normalized ties. As some observers, including your humble correspondent, cautioned in 2016:

"Erdogan had pragmatically agreed to shake hands with Israel, but his ideological hostility to the Jewish state and his ideological love affair with Hamas have not disappeared; so the Turkish-Israeli 'peace' would not be easy to sustain".

Continue Reading Article

The Modernization of Middle East is a Sight to See

by Amir Taheri  •  July 16, 2017 at 5:00 am

• In our neck of the woods, that is to say the Middle East, the machinery of state had modernized itself by enhancing its powers and developing new modes of control, manipulation and repression.

• The late Ayatollah Khomeini's discourse owed more to Lenin and Stalin than to the great Muslim philosophers and theologians of ages. Iran became modernized when Khomeini organized the execution of at least 4,000 people in a weekend, something even the bloodthirsty Agha Muhammad Khan Qajar never imagined doing. Syria became modern when Hafez Al-Assad killed 20,000 people in Hama, something no Umayyad Caliph would imagine doing.

• All we have kept from our traditions is that of denying our own responsibility, blaming it all on others.

The footage from Syria and Iraq reminds of newsreels from Japan in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Pictured above: Nagasaki, Japan on September 24, 1945, six weeks after the city was destroyed by an atomic bomb. (Image source: (U.S. Marine Corps/Wikimedia Commons)

In every age intellectuals shape and cling to one concept as the organizing principle for an understanding of the present and speculation about the future. From the end of the 1940s, as the colonial era drew to a close, the fashionable concept was "modernization" and its variants such as "development" and "progress"

But what constituted modernization wasn't quite clear. Nor after what model should nations aspire in their quest for progress and development.

Continue Reading Article