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Latest Analysis and Commentary
by Alan M. Dershowitz • September 20, 2017 at 11:00 am
Under our constitutional structure there is no perfect cure for the mistake made by our founders in merging the two incompatible goals of the current Attorney General: that of political advisor to the president; and that of independent chief prosecutor. We are one of the few western democracies that mistakenly merged these roles into one. Our Attorney General is supposed to both advise the president politically... But at the same time, the Attorney General is supposed to be the head law enforcement officer of the United States – the chief prosecutor. The system should be changed. The Justice Department should be broken up into two completely separate agencies, with two separate heads: the Minister of Justice would be a loyal political advisor to the president and a member of his cabinet; and the Director of Public Prosecution would be completely independent, and not a member of the cabinet. This separation will not be easy to achieve. But it may be possible, without a constitutional amendment, if Congress and the courts have the will to do it.
US Constitution (Image source: Jonathan Thorne/Flickr)
Recent news reports describe the President chastising his Attorney General Jeff Sessions for disloyalty. According to the New York Times, after learning that a special counsel had been appointed, President Trump accused Sessions of "disloyalty." Critics insist that the President has the right to demand loyalty of every other member of his cabinet but not of the Attorney General. The Attorney General is different, these critics insist, because he is the chief law enforcement officer of the United States. The Atlantic's David A. Graham, for example, criticized Trump's demand for unconditional "loyalty," saying that, "for Trump, there is only one loyalty: to the president himself. When his aides and staffers make the mistake of following any other principle—rule of law, standard ethics policies, U.S. alliances—that might conflict with the principle of loyalty to Trump, the president becomes enraged."
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by Bassam Tawil • September 20, 2017 at 5:00 am
The agreement makes no reference to Hamas's security control over the Gaza Strip. This means that Hamas and its armed wing, Ezaddin Al-Qassam, will remain the main "law-enforcers" in the Gaza Strip. The idea that Hamas would allow Mahmoud Abbas's security forces to return to the Gaza Strip is pure illusion. There is no mention in the agreement of Hamas's political and ideological agenda. The agreement does not require Hamas to abandon its charter, which calls for the elimination of Israel. Nor does it require Hamas to lay down its arms and accept Israel's right to exist. The agreement absolves Hamas of its financial responsibilities towards its constituents in the Gaza Strip. The resumption of Palestinian Authority (PA) funds to the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip will allow Hamas to redirect its resources and energies to building up its military capabilities in preparation for war with Israel. Hamas will no longer have to worry about salaries and electricity and medical supplies to the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip because Abbas will be taking care of that. The agreement facilitates Hamas's effort to project itself as a legitimate player in the Palestinian arena and win international recognition and sympathy. Hamas will now be able to market itself as a legitimate partner in Abbas's Western-funded PA governments.
Pictured: Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas talks with then Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on April 5, 2007 in Gaza City. Since 2007, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority have announced at least four "reconciliation" agreements to end their rivalry. (Photo by Mohamed Alostaz/PPM via Getty Images)
Since 2007, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority (PA) have announced at least four "reconciliation" agreements to end their rivalry, which began a year earlier when Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections. This week, under the auspices of the Egyptian authorities, the two rival Palestinian parties announced yet another deal to patch up their differences and achieve "national unity." The latest agreement between Hamas and the PA requires the Islamist movement to dismantle its shadow government in the Gaza Strip -- known as the Administrative Committee. It was this shadow government that prompted PA President Mahmoud Abbas to impose a number of punitive measures against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, including cutting off salaries to civil servants, forcing thousands of employees into early retirement, halting payments for electricity supplied by Israel and reducing medicine supplies to hospitals in the Gaza Strip.
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by Denis MacEoin • September 20, 2017 at 4:00 am
As the Hirsi Ali case demonstrated, many serious-minded people simply could not distinguish between genuine, often racist, hatred for Muslims and informed criticism of Islam as an ideology. "[I]n relation to Ms Allman, I am confident [law student Robbie Travers's] actions were in response to her comments and her position, and unrelated to her race." — Catriona Elder, University of Edinburgh. Let us hope that this will be the first of many more recognitions that it is improper, not least in a university setting, for one side to silence the other, especially by deceitful means.
Robbie Travers, falsely accused of "Islamophobia" for calling ISIS terrorists "barbarians." (Photo: Robbie Travers/Instagram)
When Esme Allman, a second-year law student at Edinburgh University, issued a maliciously-worded complaint to the university authorities concerning Robbie Travers on September 6, she must have been confident that her status as a black female politically correct activist would guarantee a listening ear. Her complaint (see below) was constructed in such a way that it seemed Mr Travers would find no way out of the predicament in which she had placed him. Had the university acted on her charges, there is little doubt that Travers's university career and future prospects would be damaged beyond repair. That certainly seems to have been her intent. The story was widely reported in the British press and here on Gatestone, for whom Travers had written. Her specific claim -- that Travers's calling Islamic State fighters "barbarians" and mocking their aspiration to marry 72 virgins in heaven should they die as martyrs in battle was racist and Islamophobic -- did not go down with members of the British public, who were only too aware of the multiple barbarities committed by IS terrorists abroad and in Europe, including in the UK.
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by Douglas Murray • September 19, 2017 at 5:00 am
If you do not have control of your borders, with a meaningful set of immigration laws and the right to keep people out of your country, then you do not really have a country. While the public wants their representatives to control their borders, politicians seem to see only political capital in running the other way. In part this is because there appears to be some kind of "bonus" to be achieved by looking welcoming and kindly, in contrast to the unwelcoming and mean things that borders now appear to represent. By the end of August, it was estimated that almost 12,000 people had arrived in Canada through this route so far this year. It is a number that constitutes little more than an averagely busy week in Italy at any time over recent years. But even this comparatively tiny movement across an entire year has proven too much for Canada. At the end of last month, Prime Minister Trudeau told reporters: "For someone to successfully seek asylum it's not about economic migration. It's about vulnerability, exposure to torture or death, or being stateless people. If they are seeking asylum we'll evaluate them on the basis of what it is to be a refugee or asylum seeker."
Pictured: Two people, who claimed to be from Turkey, illegally cross the U.S.-Canada border into Canada, on February 23, 2017, near Hemmingford, Quebec. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Bombings and other terrorist attacks are now a common feature of life in modern Europe. On just one day (September 15, 2017), an improvised explosive device was placed on a London Underground train, a man wielding a knife and shouting "Allah" attacked a soldier in Paris, and a man with a hammer shouting "Allahu Akbar" badly wounded two women in Lyon. As the former Prime Minister of France and the present Mayor of London have put it, perhaps this is all just a price we have to pay for living in big cities in Europe in the 21st century: we have traffic congestion, great restaurants and terrorist attacks.
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by Bruce Bawer • September 19, 2017 at 4:00 am
Until recently, the very notion that some European neighborhoods were "no-go" zones was vehemently dismissed by politicians and commentators on both sides of the Atlantic as a myth, a lie, a vicious right-wing calumny. But even as Swedish officials were denying the existence of such zones in their own country, they were secretly mapping them out and overseeing a police effort to liberate them. The Sweden Democrats are on the rise because voters finally grasp the extent and significance of the damage their elites have been doing to their country -- and the elites, both in the media and in government, are scrambling to snap into line in order to keep hold on power. In some ways, the winds in Scandinavia may be turning, but it does not seem as if Stanghelle and his ilk are about to speak the whole truth about Islam, or to apologize for their inexcusable abuse of those who have.
Until recently, Denmark, with its far freer atmosphere of debate and more sensible border controls, was almost universally depicted in Norway as a deplorable hotbed of Islamophobia. Pictured: A Danish checkpoint on the border with Germany, near Padborg, on January 6, 2016. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
Not long ago, Norwegian journalists were virtually united in representing Sweden, with its exceedingly liberal immigration policy and its strict limits on public discussion of the subject, as a model of enlightened thinking that deserved to be emulated. Meanwhile Denmark, with its far freer atmosphere of debate (remember the Danish cartoons) and more sensible border controls, was almost universally depicted in Norway as a deplorable hotbed of Islamophobia. That appears to be changing. As Hans Rustad of the alternative Norwegian news website Document.no noted recently, the term "Swedish conditions," which some of us have been using for years to refer to the colossal scale of Sweden's Muslim-related problems, is actually turning up these days in the mainstream Norwegian media -- although the relationship of those conditions to Islam is still routinely underplayed, if not entirely avoided.
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by Khaled Abu Toameh • September 18, 2017 at 5:00 am
Harb's ordeal began in June 2016, when she published an investigative report that disclosed how Hamas and the Palestinian Authority (PA) were using medical care to blackmail Palestinian patients. Her report exposed how some physicians and Hamas and PA officials were demanding bribes in return for issuing permits to patients to leave the Gaza Strip for medical treatment in Israel, the West Bank and Arab and Western countries. Those who cannot afford to pay the bribes are left to die in understaffed and under equipped Palestinian hospitals. Instead of launching an investigation against those involved in the corruption scandal, Hamas chose to punish the journalist who revealed how patients were being mistreated and abused by senior health officials.
If and when Hajer Harb, a courageous Palestinian journalist, recovers from cancer and returns to Gaza, she will be arrested by Hamas and sent to prison for six months, for the "crime" of exposing corruption in the Gaza Strip health system. (Image source: Hager Press video screenshot)
Hajer Harb, a courageous Palestinian journalist, has been found guilty by Hamas of exposing corruption in the health system in the Gaza Strip. On September 13, a Hamas court sentenced her to six months in prison and a fine. It was the first sentence of its kind to be passed on a female journalist in the Gaza Strip. Harb, however, is unlikely to serve her prison term in the near future; she recently left the Gaza Strip to Jordan, where she is receiving medical treatment after being diagnosed with cancer. Her illness, however, did not stop Hamas from pursuing legal measures against her for her role in exposing corruption in the Palestinian health system. Instead of suspending the legal proceedings against her, the Hamas court chose to sentence her to prison in absentia.
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by Judith Bergman • September 18, 2017 at 4:00 am
The Nord-Vest Private School in Copenhagen, came under investigation by Danish authorities during an unannounced visit after teaching materials were found extolling and encouraging young people to commit jihad. Luqman Pedersen, a Danish convert to Islam, admitted to the authorities that the school wishes to create a parallel Muslim society. Two former teachers at the Nord-Vest school described how the children at the school spoke of Danes in terms of "them and us". In a school poetry contest, several of the children composed poems that detailed their wish to beat up and break the legs and hands of the "Danish pigs". "I teach religion, but I was not allowed to teach Christianity. Instead, a visiting imam from Iraq taught Christianity... I could imagine that some of the boys I taught could have been radicalized," a teacher said. The teachers tried to alert both politicians and authorities to some of the problems they had witnessed, but no one would listen.
Mette Frederiksen, leader of Denmark's Social Democratic party, says "When you are a child in Denmark, it is incredibly important that you grow up in Danish culture and Danish everyday life... an independent school based on Islam is not part of the majority culture in Denmark... Nor do I like the lack of equality in schools and these very hateful words against our Jewish minorities." (Image source: News Oresund/Flickr)
Some Muslim schools in Denmark appear to be employing anti-Semitic teachers, enforcing gender inequality, employing violence against students, offering poor education in general, and teaching jihad. There are 26 Muslim schools in Denmark. While they operate independently of the public schools, the state sponsors them heavily -- as it does other independent schools in Denmark -- covering 75 % of their budget. The demand for Muslim schools in Denmark has grown in the last decade, as Muslim schools have increased their number of pupils by almost 50% since 2007; they now cater to almost 5,000 pupils. (It is unknown, however, how many Muslim children learn in the so-called "Koran schools," where Islam and Arabic are taught after school to those children who do not attend a Muslim day school. Koran schools -- as revealed in the Danish TV documentary "Sharia in Denmark") -- are not under any supervision from state or municipal authorities).
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by Soeren Kern • September 17, 2017 at 5:00 am
"It's not clear to me why the Secretary of State wishes to at once usurp the powers of the Congress and then to derail his boss's rapprochement with the Israeli government." — Foreign policy operative, quoted in the Washington Free Beacon. Since he was sworn in as Secretary of State on February 1, Rex Tillerson and his advisors at the State Department have made a number of statements and policy decisions that contradict President Trump's key campaign promises on foreign policy, especially regarding Israel and Iran. "Tillerson was supposed to clean house, but he left half of them in place and he hid the other half in powerful positions all over the building. These are career staffers committed to preventing Trump from reversing what they created." — Veteran foreign policy analyst, quoted in the Free Beacon.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson (left) and President Donald J. Trump (right) on February 1, 2017. (Image source: Michael Reynolds-Pool/Getty Images)
The U.S. State Department has backed away from a demand that Israel return $75 million in military aid which was allocated to it by the U.S. Congress. The repayment demand, championed by U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, was described as an underhanded attempt by the State Department to derail a campaign pledge by U.S. President Donald J. Trump to improve relations with the Jewish state. The dispute is the just the latest example of what appears to be a growing power struggle between the State Department and the White House over the future direction of American foreign policy. The controversy goes back to the Obama administration's September 2016 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Israel, which pledged $38 billion in military assistance to Jerusalem over the next decade. The MOU expressly prohibits Israel from requesting additional financial aid from Congress.
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by Khadija Khan • September 17, 2017 at 4:30 am
How is it that we never see demands for legislation to ban dragging young girls into a system of misogynistic beliefs? The West accepts pampering these extremists in the name of freedom of expression when these extremists themselves do not believe in any such freedom. Female genital mutilation (FGM), despite having been banned since 1985, takes place in the UK every hour. This criminal behavior is made possible only by the British authorities' indifference.
London Mayor Sadiq Khan issued a belated apology for depicting -- in a public-service ad -- a small girl in a headscarf as representative of a Muslim minor. (Image source: Transport for London, Richard Heathcote/Getty Images)
London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who is also chairman of Transport for London (TfL), has issued a belated apology for depicting -- in an advertisement launched by the Children's Traffic Club London (created by TfL to promote traffic safety) -- a small girl in a headscarf as representative of a Muslim minor. In Islam, headscarves are not usually worn until a girl has reach puberty. The Independent reported: "TfL apologised for any offence caused and said the images will be removed from the campaign. London Mayor Sadiq Khan, chair of TfL, also apologised for the campaign". The apology, however, sounds more like just lip service: none of the British authorities has bothered to notice the escalating trend of making Muslim baby girls wear a veil. It took a campaign advertisement to make them realize how a headscarf, the hijab, a symbol of modesty, might be abusive to the minor girls by seemingly sexualizing them at an early age.
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by Amir Taheri • September 17, 2017 at 4:00 am
Syrian football fans at the September 5 Iran-Syria qualifying match, in Tehran, Iran. (Image source: Ruptly video screenshot)
For the past week or so, Iranian official media and social networks have been abuzz with anecdotes woven around a football match in Tehran between Iran and Syria and the light it might shed on a complicated relationship. According to most accounts, a group of Syrians flown in by special charter to cheer their national squad in its bid for a place in the World Cup in Moscow staged an anti-Iran demonstration in the stadium. The Syrian contingent included young ladies who refused to wear the Iranian-style hijab. Their presence in the stadium highlighted the fact that no Iranian woman is allowed to attend a football match after a fatwa by the "Supreme Guide" that women watching young men running around with bare legs might cause "undue excitement"
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by Telegraaf and Geert Wilders • September 16, 2017 at 9:53 am
"Not long ago Professor Koopmans found that as much as seventy percent of Muslims find Islamic rules more important than secular laws." – Geert Wilders. "Research also points out that 11 percent of Dutch Muslims in the Netherlands are prepared to use violence on behalf of their religion. That is a 110,000 people, twice the size of the Dutch army!" – Geert Wilders. I personally believe there are extremist people and moderate people. But I do not believe in two kinds of Islam. There is only one.... You get your head chopped off should you wish to interpret Islam.... People who want to come to the Netherlands from Islamic countries should think: this is not a place we want to go to! And we do not do this to bully Muslims, but to keep the Netherlands of the future a free Netherlands." – Geert Wilders.
Are Islam and modernity compatible? Photo: Wikipedia.
Party for Freedom leader Geert Wilders is deeply concerned about Muslim integration. In our series Islam in the Netherlands he is warning about the "perishing"of our culture. "It is not five to twelve or two to twelve, it is almost morning!" The leader of the second party in the country is pondering about very far-reaching measures. Geert Wilders (54) is not surprised at the shocking poll results released by daily newspaper De Telegraaf. The fact that only thirteen percent of the Dutch population feel that the problem of integration will solve itself is a writing on the wall, according to him. And that only eleven percent of the Dutch see Islam as an enrichment proves in his opinion that what he has been calling for years. "If I had said that three years ago, I would have had tens of thousands of police reports thrown at me. But people are completely fed up with it. " How do you explain the figures?
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by Denis MacEoin • September 16, 2017 at 5:00 am
"No one wants to demonise a particular community but the fact that this is happening again and again in the same circumstances and communities is a fact we cannot ignore. I think there needs to be a national approach..." — Greg Stone, Liberal Democrat party. If we look at a list of 265 convictions for grooming gangs and individuals in the UK between November 1997 and January 2017 (and if we add on another 18 for the recent Newcastle gang), we will note that more than 99% are for Muslim men, mainly young men in their 20s and 30s. It is, however, not just white (that is, non-Muslim) women whom Muslim men hold in such contempt. This abuse starts at home in Islamic countries in the treatment of Muslim women. Its roots lie in aspects of Islamic law and doctrine that are retained in the 21st century, despite having been formulated in the 7th century and later. The idea that a man is not responsible for rape or other sexual assault and that women bear the blame for such a crime goes far to help explain why Muslim men in Britain and elsewhere may feel themselves justified in grooming and sexually abusing young women and girls far less well covered.
Women wearing burqas in Pakistan. (Photo by Paula Bronstein/Getty Images)
Newcastle upon Tyne is a small city in the North-East of England which, in 2017, was acclaimed the best city in the UK in which to raise children (London was the worst). Imagine, then, the shock when the city again became national news on August 9 when a trial at the Crown Court ended in the conviction of 18 people for the sexual grooming of children. Juries "found the men guilty of a catalogue of nearly 100 offences – including rape, human trafficking, conspiracy to incite prostitution and drug supply – between 2011 and 2014." Of the 18, one was a white British woman. The rest were males of Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Indian, Iraqi, Turkish and Iranian backgrounds, all with Muslim names.
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by Giulio Meotti • September 15, 2017 at 5:00 am
This politically correct nonsense highlights even further the infantilization of our culture -- such as the demand for "safe spaces" and "trigger warnings". It may look like a comedy, but its effect is deadly serious. Groupthink is a debilitating force. in any civilization. It undermines one's ability to resist the real enemies of democracy and freedom: it makes us blind to radical Islam and jihadi terrorism, and it gives the impression that our society is a joke. Instead of being intellectually diverse, universities are trying their utmost to impose homogeneity of thoughts and ideas. So-called "right wing newspapers" are banned from certain universities. Recently, at the City University of London, the student union, devoid of irony, fascistically voted to ban some conservative tabloids in order to "oppose fascism".
When the "politically incorrect" commentator and writer Milo Yiannopoulos was due to speak at the University of California, Berkeley on February 1, 2017, a mob of 150 people proceeded to riot, smash and set fires, causing more than $100,000 of damage. (Image source: RT video screenshot)
Headlines every day proclaim the new religion: political correctness, cultural vandalism and censorship -- not from Islamic emirates such as Saudi Arabia, but in Western cities right here. The Writers Union of Canada, for instance, recently apologized for a magazine editorial that defended the right of novelists to create characters from a backgrounds other than their own. Just think of that: a writer defending the right to use one's imagination?! What an insult! At least, to "the new Stalinists" it is. "In my opinion anyone, anywhere, should be encouraged to imagine other peoples, other cultures, other identities," Hal Niedzviecki, who was the editor of the union's magazine, Write, defended freedom in an editorial. The Union then announced that Niedzviecki had resigned.
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by Bruce Bawer • September 15, 2017 at 4:00 am
Norway is the happy beneficiary of North Sea oil; yet for decades, oil profits have piled up a government fund while Norwegians have paid the highest gasoline prices in the world. For years, Statistics Norway, the government agency charged with producing reliable data on every imaginable social and economic metric, has refused to make public certain "sensitive" information relating to Norway's Muslim population, such as the actual numbers of immigrants entering the country through "family reunification." Is there any hope that a second Solberg government including FrP will accomplish any more in the way of curbing immigration than the first Solberg government did? At the moment, there seems little reason for hope.
Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg. (Image source: European People's Party/Flickr)
Those of us who are concerned about Norway's rapid Islamization took great hope from the 2013 parliamentary election. What mattered was not that it resulted in the formation of a right-wing coalition government. What mattered was that the coalition government, for the first time ever, included the Progress Party (FrP). From its founding in 1973, FrP was an outlier among Norway's major parties, of which there many. A quick survey: The Labor Party (Ap), the most powerful party during the postwar era, is the home of the cultural establishment; LO, Norway's equivalent of America's federation of trade unions, the AFL-CIO, is essentially a branch of Ap, and NRK, the government-owned broadcast corporation, is often described by critics as the voice of the Labor Party.
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by Bruce Bawer • September 14, 2017 at 5:00 am
I routinely find the website Document.no to be more reliable on the facts than the state-owned TV and radio stations or any of the big private (but, in many cases, state-supported) dailies. The idea that there are Muslims who seek to turn Europe into an Islamic colony is, of course, no "conspiracy theory." Jihad and the caliphate are core Islamic doctrines. For over a decade, however, Norwegian academics and intellectuals have accused those commentators, who face up to the reality of these doctrines, of "peddling paranoia." I wonder if anyone asked how a statement of opinion can violate "fundamental human rights."
The University of Oslo, in Oslo, Norway. (Image source: Dan Lundberg/Flickr)
In Norway, where the mainstream media systematically bury or whitewash news stories that might reflect badly on the nation's misguided immigration policies, its failed integration policies, or on Islam, a handful of small but heavily trafficked websites serve a vital function: getting out information that is being suppressed and providing a forum for opinions that are being silenced. Perhaps the most prominent of those websites is Document.no, founded in 2003 by Hans Rustad, who still serves as editor and publisher. It is an intelligent, serious, and responsible site, whose contributors tend to know more about the above-mentioned subjects -- and to be better writers -- than the staffers at the major Oslo newspapers. I have yet to read a bigoted word by a contributor to Document.no, and I routinely find the site to be more reliable on the facts than the state-owned TV and radio stations or any of the big private (but, in many cases, state-supported) dailies.
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Spring 2017 Briefing Series
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What To Watch Out For
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Have We Equal Justice Under Law?
- Jason Riley
Urgently Needed for Minorities
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Solutions for the Administration's Challenges
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Identity, Politics and Populism
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