Daniel Pipes – The Conservative-Patriot Christian Right

Muslim Roulette

Yesterday I posted that Asia Bibi has found Western Liberty by Canada giving her asylum. I mentioned that the Muslim reaction in Pakistan to Asia Bibi’s acquittal of breaking the liberty-breaking Blasphemy Law. Pakistani Muslims screamed for Asia Bibi’s head – literally. The Muslim reaction in Pakistan is evidence of the absurdity of the existence of a moderate and radical Islam.

Then I ran into this post by Bosch Fawstin [In case you are interested, The Objective Standard has a 2015 profile and interview] editorializing correctly that Islam is Islam. For individuals following the revered writings of Islam, there can be no moderate or radical Islam. ONLY ISLAM!

The place I first discovered Fawstin’s article on Islam at the MeWe Group Infidels with Attitude posted by Justin Smith. Here are Justin’s introductory remarks:

I have stated the same thing in scores of articles and on the street corners of America, for over 40 years now. All those who proclaim moderates exist in Islam, whether it is Daniel Pipes or the Clarion Project, are just simply plain wrong, as perfectly exhibited across the span of time Islam has been working its evil. Finally people everywhere are beginning to awaken in America and elsewhere around the globe, thanks to the hard, continued efforts of many like-minded opponents of Islam, such as Bosch Fawstin. ~ Justin O Smith

JRH 5/10/19

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Muslim Roulette

By Bosch Fawstin

May 8, 2019

Geller Report

This is an article that I published in my book, Peaceful Death Threats.

A is A. Islam is Islam.

There is no such thing as ‘Good’ Islam vs ‘Bad’ Islam. Islam is a totalitarian religion, while Muslims are individual human beings who may or may not practice Islam faithfully. I’ve come to the conclusion that there are active Muslims and there are passive Muslims, the faithful and the unfaithful, the submitted and the un-submitted in Islam, but there is no obvious way to tell the difference between them, which has its benefits for those who are committed to spreading Islam by any means necessary. Mohammed said ‘War is deceit’ and practiced it, and Muslims have followed their leader in using deception against non-Muslims to this day. When Islam, the very antithesis of peace, is sold to us by Muslims and their useful idiots as being the very definition of peace, and actually gains traction, it would have made Hitler blush.

That Islam must be misrepresented by Muslims in order to appear at all appealing to non-Muslims speaks volumes, and its purpose is to make Islam appear harmless until it’s too late. And the enemy’s major weapon against us is us. From our multiculturalism which the unicultural enemy exploits, to our crippling political correctness which ‘protects’ us from the truth we need to know and act upon, to our irrational tolerance of the intolerant. Another weapon the enemy uses against us is that many Muslims, especially those in the West, are Muslims in name only, and the false perception that they themselves represent Islam makes Islam look good. But they do not embody Islam, they are not its true, consistent practitioners. They are hacks when it comes to doing their Islamic duty as the Koran demands of them. And then there are those who are moderately Islamic, but who advertise themselves as ‘Moderate Muslims’, who have hijacked the normatively immoderate Islam, not by thoroughly repudiating the inherent violence within Islam, but by merely mouthing the words ‘Islam means peace’, and allowing our desire to believe it to do the rest.

The widespread usage of the term ‘Moderate Muslim’ is a tacit confession of Islam’s extremism. When’s the last time you heard the term ‘Moderate Christian’? Moderate Jew? Moderate Hindu? Moderate Buddhist?

But let me add this, after making it clear that Muslims are individuals who may or may not be following Islam: Most Muslims have shown us that when it comes down to it, the majority of them will side with Islam against the non-Muslim world, no matter what. They’ve made it clear, in their indifferent silence and inaction in the face of the daily horrors committed in their religion’s name, that in the end, they don’t give a damn about anything except Islam and its reputation. I’ve read one too many accounts of Muslims whose first response after a particularly horrific Muslim terrorist attack, was to run to the rescue of Islam, the ideological source of the attack itself. ‘Education by Murder’, as Daniel Pipes* writes of it. The price we’re paying for not knowing the full truth about Islam is too high, but it looks like it will take more death and destruction for the civilized world to learn about Islam and the evil at the heart of it before we are ready to ruthlessly act on our behalf against it.

*About Pipes, I’ve appreciated his efforts against Jihad over the years, and I know that counter-jihadists don’t necessarily have to agree with every conclusion we as individuals arrive at, so long as the big picture is in sight . . . but his unwarranted preoccupation with ‘Moderate Islam’ is a Pipes Dream, it is his subjective wishes overstepping reality. There is no such thing as ‘Moderate Islam’, there is only Islam. And that there may be moderate Muslims doesn’t exonerate Islam, which was built to be even Muslim proof. When a Muslim concedes the Islamic point that the Koran is the verbatim word of allah, who is he to deem himself to be allah’s editor?

No, Muslims will only rethink Islam, will only consider transforming the religion, when their desire to destroy the non-Muslim world is trumped by their desire to survive.

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Falsehoods and Facts about the Middle East Forum: A Top Ten List

Unsurprisingly, the Middle East Forum (MEF) has been the recipient of Fake News lies all based on the Multiculturalist accusation of Islamophobia. Evidently the lies have become so huge that the MEF has decided to answer those lies with a Top Ten List.

Below is an email alert introduction to that Top Ten List which I will follow with cross post of that list.

JRH 8/11/17

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Falsehoods and Facts about the Middle East Forum: A Top Ten List

By Greg Roman

Sent 8/9/2017 3:22 PM

Sent by Middle East Forum

Dear Reader:

As the Middle East Forum’s reach and influence expands, so too does the flurry of ad hominem, distorted, and plainly false attacks on the organization, mostly from Islamists and the far Left.

Institutions leading this assault include the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), J Street, Jewish Voices for Peace, and most recently the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. George Soros’ Open Society Foundations has a special place in our hearts for funding anti-MEF research.

Our opponents attack us for different reasons. Islamist activists loathe our national security views, advancement of women’s rights, and efforts to protect freedoms of moderate Muslim authors, activists, and publishers. Israel-haters oppose our efforts to puncture Palestinian illusions. Academics want to discredit our efforts to improve Middle East studies in North America. America-haters can pretty much take their pick of reasons.

Regardless of their motives, they all draw on the same tired canards that we so often refuted on an ad hoc basis. To save the curious some legwork, we are publishing a list of the top ten falsehoods, refuting them all at once, and maybe once and for all. Please take a look.

Regards,

Gregg Roman
Director Middle East Forum

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Falsehoods and Facts about the Middle East Forum: A Top Ten List

August 9, 2017

Middle East Forum

The Middle East Forum (MEF) is the object of repeated falsehoods. To clear the record, here follows the top ten and our corrections.

Falsehood 1: The Middle East Forum is anti-Muslim, or “Islamophobic.”

False Statements

Center for American Progress: “The Middle East Forum is at the center of the Islamophobia network.”

Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR): Daniel Pipes is “considered by many Muslims to be America’s leading Islamophobe.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center: Daniel Pipes is “at the center of what is a large and evolving network of Islam-bashing activists.”

Fact 1: Far from being biased against Muslims, MEF challenges a radical ideology responsible for unfathomable Muslim suffering, and one which most Muslims reject. Middle East Forum President Daniel Pipes has been emphasizing the distinction between Islamism and the Islamic religion – and between the “completely justified fear of Islamists and unjustified fear of all Muslims” – for decades.

The only people who maintain there is little or no distinction between detesting Islamism and detesting Muslims are Islamists themselves and fellow travelers of the sort quoted above. The “Islamophobia” accusations they level at MEF and others are designed to conflate Islamism and Islam, claiming an attack on one is an attack on the other.

This conflation also attempts to delegitimize non-Islamist Muslims working to free their faith from the grip of extremists, and it is no coincidence that Muslim reformers are often viciously attacked. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a far-left organization known for its often inaccurate claims, lists Maajid Nawaz of the Quilliam Foundation alongside Mr. Pipes as an “anti-Muslim extremist.”

The SPLC has branded Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz as an “anti-Muslim extremist.”

A lot of money finances these allegations. The Center for American Progress, for example, received a $200,000 grant from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations (OSF) to “research and track the activities” of the Middle East Forum and other NGOs working to combat the spread of radical Islam in America. The Brookings Institution’s recent focus on so-called “Islamophobia” in America likely has much to do with its decade-long partnership with Qatar, which provided it with a $14.8 million 4-year grant in 2013.

The latest organization to level the “Islamophobia” accusation at MEF is the Silicon Valley Community Foundation (SVCF), which lashed out after we revealed publicly that it had provided $330,524 to two extremist organizations, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and Islamic Relief. It turns out SVCF is getting paid too. According to its 990 form, the extremist International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) provided SVCF with $500,000 in “program assistance” in 2015.

Falsehood 2: Daniel Pipes regards Muslim organizations as subversive.

False Statements

Jewish Voice for Peace: “Pipes views almost every possible Muslim activity as subversive and threatening.”

Center for American Progress: “The alarmist rhetoric of Daniel Pipes … brand[s] Muslims, Sharia, and even the instruction of Arabic as affronts to American freedom.

Fact 2: In keeping with Mr. Pipes’ oft-repeated belief that “radical Islam is the problem, moderate Islam is the solution,” MEF’s Islamist Watch project was established with a mission to “expose the Islamist organizations that currently dominate the debate, while identifying and promoting the work of moderate Muslims.”

MEF has a long history of supporting, employing, and collaborating with Muslims working to free their community and faith from the grip of Islamists.

See a list here of Muslim organizations the Forum regards as vital allies in this fight, some of whom it helps fund.

Falsehood 3: Pipes supports interning Muslims, akin to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

False Statements

Jewish Voice for Peace: “The Southern Poverty Law Center notes that ‘Pipes endorsed the internment of Muslims in America,’ referencing WWII Japanese American concentration camps as a model to be used against Muslims today.”

Silicon Valley Community Foundation: “Daniel Pipes, president of Middle East Forum, has written in support of the model of Japanese internment camps in relation to American Muslims.”

Fact 3: This canard is a paradigmatic example of how charges initially levelled by one radical organization metastasize through repetition by others. The SPLC report misquoted at right by Jewish Voice for Peace actually states, “In 2004, Pipes endorsed the internment of ethnic Japanese in American prison camps in World War II and held that up as a model for dealing with Muslims today.”

But even this isn’t true. In 2005 an Islamist organization in Canada had to apologize and make a charitable donation to the Middle East Forum for making this claim.

The original article did not argue for internment camps as a model (a follow-up explaining how CAIR and others distorted Pipes’ position can be read here), but rather concluded with support for author Michelle Malkin’s thesis about threat profiling: “She correctly concludes that, especially in time of war, governments should take into account nationality, ethnicity, and religious affiliation in their homeland security policies.”

Falsehood 4: MEF is wrong to label CAIR as “terrorism-linked.”

Clockwise from top left: Randall (“Ismail”) Royer, Ghassan Elashi, Bassem Khafagi, Rabih Haddad, Nabil Sadoun, and Muthanna Al-Hanooti

Fact 4: Here are many reasons why MEF can reasonably describe CAIR as “terrorism-linked.”

CAIR was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing trial.

During that trial, U.S. District Court Judge Jorge Solis concluded that, “The government has produced ample evidence to establish the associations of CAIR…with Hamas.”

In 2014, the United Arab Emirates, a Muslim ally of the United States, designated CAIR a terrorist organization.

Six CAIR leaders have been arrested, convicted, or deported for terrorism-related crimes: Randall (“Ismail”) Royer, Ghassan Elashi, Bassem Khafagi, Rabih Haddad, Nabil Sadoun, and Muthanna Al-Hanooti.

CAIR itself implicitly acknowledged the truth when it settled a 2004 libel lawsuit against a group making this allegation called Anti-CAIR, with no apology, retraction, or removal of offending Internet materials.

Falsehood 5: CAIR, Islamic Relief, and other Muslim groups criticized by MEF are respectable civil rights organizations.

False Statements

Jewish Voice for Peace: “Contrary to the Middle East Forum’s smear campaign, CAIR is a nationally-recognized civil rights organization that has received praise from seventeen U.S. Senators and 85 U.S. Representatives from both sides of the political aisle.”

Fact 5: CAIR and Islamic Relief are focused on promoting social insularity and distrust of authorities among U.S. Muslims, not defending their civil rights. In fact, both groups frequently host and promote extremist speakers who advocate against civil rights as most Americans understand them.

Siraj Wahhaj, for example, preaches that homosexuality is a “disease” of society, that the punishment for adultery is death, and that Muslims shouldn’t have non-Muslim friends. Omar Suleiman has rationalized honor killings, telling women thinking of promiscuity that they could be killed by their fathers for “offending Allah.” Jamal Badawi has said that men have a right to beat their wives. Abdul Nasir Jangda has argued that they have the right to rape their wives.

Falsehood 6: CAIR and Islamic Relief have clean bills of health on links to terrorism from the federal government and from charity watchdogs.

False Statements

Silicon Valley Community Foundation: “The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and Islamic Relief … are nonprofit organizations in good standing with federal agencies, and do not appear on any U.S. government list as having been tied to terrorism.”

Silicon Valley Community Foundation: “GuideStar reports … whether a nonprofit organization is identified as a ‘Specially Designated National’ on the Office of Foreign Asset Control’s list. In simpler terms, this is the list of U.S. organizations designated as having links to terrorist organizations. Neither CAIR nor Islamic Relief is on this list.”

Fact 7: MEF is a research institution that promotes American interests. Islamist Watch presents factual research on the influence and activity of non-violent U.S.-based Islamist groups and their leaders. Some oppose Israel, to be sure, but most are more focused on targeting women, homosexuals, and others.

Campus Watch researches, analyzes, and critiques the academic study of the Middle East. It argues against “analytical failures, the mixing of politics with scholarship, intolerance of alternative views, apologetics, and the abuse of power over students,” but it accepts divergent perspectives. Campus Watch recently published a favorable review of a lecture at the City University of New York (CUNY) by Sari Nusseibeh, a former senior PLO representative under Yasser Arafat whose views hardly qualify as pro-Israeli. A cursory examination of the project’s research articles demonstrates that the characterization of Campus Watch as Israel-centered is false. As for the “dossiers,” CW took down those initial eight profiles 15 years ago in favor of an institution-focused survey method.

Falsehood 8: Daniel Pipes and the Middle East Forum have funded the political campaigns of Dutch right-wing leader Geert Wilders.

False Statements

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: “David Horowitz and Daniel Pipes are reported to have put some $150,000 of foundation money into his campaign.”

Fact 8: Not a penny from Daniel Pipes or the Middle East Forum has gone to Wilders personally, his political party, or his campaign.

MEF did provide a grant to pay legal bills in Mr. Wilders’ trial over his film on radical Islam.

As the New York Times notes: “the funds that were sent to Geert Wilders were to help him in his legal cases and were not political donations.”

Falsehood 9: Campus Watch seeks to stifle academic freedom.

False Statements

CAIR: Campus Watch [is] part of a larger anti-intellectual campaign aimed at regulating discourse on the Middle East.

Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, The Nation: Campus Watch is “neo-McCarthyite” and part of the “New McCarthyism” that seeks to silence anyone with whom it disagrees.

Fact 9: Campus Watch critiques contemporary Middle East studies, which years ago jettisoned rigorous scholarship and teaching for politicized, biased, and inferior work. There is nothing wrong with scrutinizing and criticizing academic research.

No cliché is more hackneyed, no charge intellectually lazier than that CW engages in “McCarthyism” (see right). Unlike the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy, Campus Watch—a private organization—neither possesses nor seeks the ability to silence or persecute anyone.

Only in the fevered imaginations of some professors do rigorous critiques by outsiders equate with an anti-Communist witch-hunt.

Falsehood 10: Daniel Pipes has lost the support of his former academic colleagues

False Statements

Al Jazeera [interviewing a spokesman from the Center for American Progress]: Pipes has a “scholarly background, but … he has lost the support of many of the people he used to work with, and associate with, when he was a well-respected scholar.”

Fact 10: Mr. Pipes never stopped being a “well-respected scholar” When President George W. Bush nominated him to the board of directors of the U.S. Institute of Peace in 2003, 30 academics signed a letter in support of the appointment. For a more recent example, Professor Edward Alexander of the University of Washington lavished praise in 2016 on Pipes’ Nothing Abides.

That said, it is true that a radicalized academia condemns Pipes and the Forum for their mainstream outlook – and especially for their role in exposing the failure of Middle East studies.

_________________

MEF About Page

With roots going back to 1990, the Middle East Forum has been an independent tax-exempt 501(c) (3) nonprofit organization based in Philadelphia since 1994.

Mission

The Middle East Forum promotes American interests in the Middle East and protects Western values from Middle Eastern threats.

The Forum sees the region — with its profusion of dictatorships, radical ideologies, existential conflicts, border disagreements, corruption, political violence, and weapons of mass destruction — as a major source of problems for the United States. Accordingly, we urge bold measures to protect Americans and their allies.

In the Middle East, we focus on ways to defeat radical Islam; work for Palestinian acceptance of Israel; develop strategies to contain Iran; and deal with the great advances of anarchy.

At home, the Forum emphasizes the danger of lawful Islamism; protects the freedoms of anti-Islamist authors, activists, and publishers; and works to improve Middle East studies.

Methods

The Middle East Forum realizes its goals through three main mechanisms:

Intellectual: The Forum provides context, insights, and policy recommendations through the Middle East Quarterly, staff writings, public lectures, radio and television appearances, and conference calls (see below for details).

Operational: The Forum exerts an active influence through its projects, including Campus Watch, Islamist Watch, Legal Project, Washington Project, Apartheid Monitor, and Shillman/Ginsburg Writing Fellowship Program (see below for details).

Philanthropic: The Forum annually distributes US$1.5 million in earmarked donations through its Education Fund, helping researchers, writers, investigators, and activists around the world.

Activities

…

MEForum.org (this website) hosts a complete archive of Middle East Quarterly articles; articles by MEF staff; audio recordings and summary accounts of guest lectures and conference calls; and MEF alerts for Forum events, media appearances, and news releases.

Middle East Quarterly, published since 1994 and edited by Efraim Karsh, it is the only scholarly journal on the Middle East consistent with mainstream American views. Delivering timely analyses, cutting-edge information, and sound policy initiatives, it serves as a valuable resource for policymakers and opinion-shapers.

Public Outreach. Television and radio rely on Forum specialists, who appear on virtually all the major American over-the-air and cable news programs, plus stations around the globe. MEF staff also brief ranking officials of the U.S. government, testify before Congress, and conduct studies for executive branch agencies.

… READ ENTIRETY

Hussam Ayloush – CAIR-LA – wants to Overthrow USA

John R. Houk

© November 14, 2016

Is it racist Islamophobia when have an outcry against the CAIR-LA leader Hussam Ayloush has called for the overthrow of the U.S. Government in the wake of President-Elect Trump’s victory on November 9? Let the Left be in a utopian delusion and say “yes” and let Conservative Patriots and Counterjihadists say “NO”.

To understand just how nefarious and Anti-American Ayloush truly is, here are some excerpts from an article entitled, “Muslim terrorist CAIR exposed”:

…

… Charles Schumer, by then a U.S. senator, wrote Secretary of State Madeline Albright and Attorney General Janet Reno to demand that the government shut down HLF. A press release on Schumer’s website stated, “The Holy Land Foundation…has clear links to the terrorist organization Hamas.”

Nonetheless, CAIR continued to solicit donations for HLF. At an October 22, 2000 rally outside the Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles, CAIR Southern California’s Hussam Ayloush told the crowd, “We need to make sure to send our donations” to HLF.

[Blog Editor: The Holy Land Foundation was once the largest Muslim charity in America. Five HLF leaders were convicted on all 108 counts as a Muslim front soliciting for and funding the Islamic terrorist organization Hamas in November 2008.]

…

In January 1998, the Associated Press quoted Qaradawi as writing, “There should be no dialogue with these people [Israelis] except with swords.” And in April 2001, commenting on suicide bombings, he said, “They are not suicide operations…These are heroic martyrdom operations.”

And yet, at the 2002 Orange County CAIR fundraiser, Hussam Ayloush referred to Qaradawi as a “scholar:” [Blog Editor: Bold emphasis mine]

Several people were asking about the eligibility claim for CAIR. And according to many scholars including Yusuf Qaradawi, basically this is one of the venues of Zakat for your money as vis a vis basically educating about Islam in America and the West.

[Blog Editor: Yusuf al-Qaradawi is an evil man who absolutely hated everything non-Islamic:

Yusuf al-Qaradawi is an Egyptian Islamic scholar associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. He is known for his militant religious rulings and political commentary in support of acts of terrorism and repression of women. He is currently the host of Al Jazeera’s most popular show, “Shariah and Life,” and, largely because of this, has become a very influential force among Muslims worldwide. Al-Qaradawi also serves as chairman of the board of trustees at the Islamic American University, a subsidiary of the Muslim American Society.[1]

Al-Qaradawi’s fatwas, or religious edicts, have been numerous and far-reaching. Topics that have been influenced by al-Qaradawi’s religious interpretation range from “justified” killings, to familial affairs and domestic conflict. Additionally, al-Qaradawi has made a number of public speaking appearances, both in the U.S. and abroad, where he has further expounded his often contentious doctrine.

In 1995, at a conference held by the Muslim Arab Youth Association (MAYA) in Toledo, Ohio, al-Qaradawi said, “Our brothers in Hamas, in Palestine, the Islamic resistance, the Islamic Jihad, after all the rest have given up and despaired, the movement of the Jihad brings us back to our faith.”[2]

At that same conference, he declared what he saw as the fate and goals of his faith:

What remains, then, is to conquer Rome. The second part of the omen. “The city of Hiraq [once emperor of Constantinople] will be conquered first”, so what remains is to conquer Rome.’ This means that Islam will come back to Europe for the third time, after it was expelled from it twice… Conquest through Da’wa [proselytizing], that is what we hope for. We will conquer Europe, we will conquer America! Not through sword but through Da’wa.

…

But the balance of power will change, and this is what is told in the Hadith of Ibn-Omar and the Hadith of Abu-Hurairah: “You shall continue to fight the Jews and they will fight you, until the Muslims will kill them. And the Jew will hide behind the stone and the tree, and the stone and the tree will say: ‘Oh servant of Allah, Oh Muslim, this is a Jew behind me. Come and kill him!’ The resurrection will not come before this happens.” This is a text from the good omens in which we believe.”[3] (Yusuf al-Qaradawi; Profile – Investigative Project on Terrorism)

Hussam Ayloush fully supports the theopolitical ideology of Qaradawi.]

… READ ENTIRETY (Muslim terrorist CAIR exposed; Freedom Post)

So now that you have some clarity on this Muslim-American totally devoted to the doctrines of Islam even when they contradict America’s U.S. Constitution, YOU must agree it is not Islamophobic to call for the prosecution of Hussam Ayloush for subverting the USA in calling for the overthrow of the U.S. Government!

JRH 11/14/16

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Hamas-CAIR Leader Calls For Overthrow Of U.S. Government

By PAMELA GELLER

NOVEMBER 13, 2016

Freedom Outpost

Ayloush let his mask slip, and showed the world what Hamas-tied CAIR is really all about. Remember this, because as the Trump administration gets going, we are going to see a lot more of it.

“CAIR Leader Calls For Overthrow Of U.S. Government,” Hannity, November 11, 2016:

The left-wing histrionics continue in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory on Tuesday. The latest example of over-the-top rhetoric comes from Hussam Ayloush, the head of the Council on American Islamic Relations’ Los Angeles office.

In a tweet on Wednesday, Ayloush suggests an Arab Spring-like overthrow of the United States Government.

Take a look:

According to Daniel Pipes of the Mideast Forum, “that second line is Arabic (“الشعب يريد إسقاط النظام‎‎”) for ‘The people wants to bring down the regime.’”

Not exactly subtle.

The slogan was first used during the Tunisian Revolution which kicked off the Arab Spring. It was also used frequently during the Egyptian revolution in which the regime of Hosni Mubarak was overthrown.

Despite Ayloush’s tweet, other CAIR leaders showed restraint in the face of Trump’s election.

According to The Daily Caller, Nihad Awad, the longtime CAIR executive director and Hamas sympathizer, struck a conciliatory tone.

“As citizens of this great nation, we accept the result of the democratic process that has bound us together as one nation,” Awad said. “Regardless of who won or lost yesterday’s election, American Muslims are here to stay. We are not going anywhere, and will not be intimidated or marginalized.

Screen Shot Tweet by Hussam Ayloush 11-9-16

________________

Hussam Ayloush – CAIR-LA – wants to Overthrow USA

John R. Houk

© November 14, 2016

________________

Hamas-CAIR Leader Calls For Overthrow Of U.S. Government

About the Author

Pamela Geller

Pamela Geller is the founder, editor and publisher of PamelaGeller.com and President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) and Stop Islamization of America (SIOA). She is the author of The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America, (foreword by Ambassador John Bolton), (Simon & Schuster). Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. She is also a regular columnist for World Net Daily, the American Thinker, and other publications. Follow her on Facebook & Twitter

Nice Islamic Terrorist Attack Thoughts

John R. Houk

© July 15, 2016

France had another Islamic terrorist attack last night in Nice in which at least 84 people died. The death count might still rise because I understand many people are still listed in critical condition.

In saying this I found a couple of email notifications that have either a video editorial or information relating to the Nice attack. The first I think you may have some interest in is from Daniel Pipes. The Pipes video is about if Europe does not change its Multiculturalist ways the continent will be so Islamized that the phrase “Eurabia” will be closer to reality than a scar tactic theory coined by Counterjihad writers. Pipes goes on to predict that European voters will eventually reject the Multiculturalist paradigm of the EU elites and begin voting for nationalistic and/or anti-immigration political parties. He cites the recent close election in Austria. I could cite the recent Brexit decision by UK voters. Daniel Pipes does have a warning about the political swing of European voters and I’ll let listen to the video hear that warning.

The second email notification is from The Counter Jihad Report looking at the Nice attack through the lens of Former Special Forces Master Sergeant Jim Hanson who is the Executive Vice President for the Center for Security Policy (CSP). Hanson believes there should be less attention to beefing preventative security and more efforts in destroying the Caliphate ideology of various Islamic terrorist organizations such as ISIS, al Qaeda, Boko Haram and the like.

For me the most interesting parts of the post are two videos. The first video is a little over an hour of the Fox & Friends early show which includes the thoughts of Jim Hanson. The video shows how horrendous the Nice attack was. The second video is a three-minute or so video that explains the ideology of Islamic terrorists.

JRH 7/15/16

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VIDEO: Jihad Awakens Europe

Posted by Gatestone Institute

Published on Jul 15, 2016

At least 84 people were murdered yesterday in France’s third major Islamist terrorist attack in less than a year. Daniel Pipes talks about Europe’s crossroads: Will Europeans succumb to Islamization, or will they rise to fight radical Islam and hold onto Western values? How it looks so far…

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Nice Attack: Cut Down the Black Flag, Target Sharia

CounterJihad

July 15, 2016

Cut Down the Black Flag

Former Special Forces Master Sergeant Jim Hanson, currently the Executive Vice President for the Center for Security Policy, has an answer to the problem of constant terror attacks. First, though, he dismisses the strategy of attempting to prevent attacks by adding additional levels of security. “Even in a police state, you couldn’t secure every gathering,” Hanson said, noting that this was just a simple delivery truck like any other.

VIDEO: #Fox News – Fox & Friends (July 15, 2016) Terror in France #1

Posted by & Politics News

Published on Jul 15, 2016

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#Fox News Show Playlist: https://goo.gl/pLnE16

“You have to look at the people who are conducting these terror attacks,” he told “FOX & Friends.” A focus on methodology won’t work, as the truck attack plainly shows: “It’s not guns, it’s not bombs, it’s not trucks,” but rather “the ideology of sharia and jihad that motivates them to kill.”

Hanson is the author of Cut Down the Black Flag: A Strategy To Defeat the Islamic State. Unsurprisingly, he believes that destroying the caliphate is an important part of the solution. However, he argues that the caliphate is only a symptom — albeit a major one — of the real problem. “You start in the Islamic State. You start with their caliphate, and you cut down their black flag there. But… that’s not going to solve the problem, that treats a symptom. The ideology of sharia, which calls for a holy war of jihad, is something we need to deal with.”

Citing a poll that sharia law enjoys large-scale support among Muslims worldwide, Hanson crossed into disputed territory. CounterJihad has reported on this controversy before.

The central issue to empirical science is the ability of others repeating the experiment to replicate your findings. If you replicate the same findings using the same methods, that’s telling. If you replicate the same findings with both the same and different methods, that’s even more suggestive that you’re on to something. Every poll of Muslim populations, regardless of its methodology, shows strong support for sharia.

Last summer, the Center for Security Policy commissioned a poll that found 51% support for sharia among American Muslims. There were critics who pointed out that this poll was an online poll, and one that only surveyed those who opted in. However, the Pew polling service found that half of American Muslims are recent immigrants, chiefly from countries in which their global survey of support for sharia tops 80%. Three of the leading countries for Islamic immigration to the United States are Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. The figures for those countries are 91%, 84%, and 99% respectively.

When you find the same thing no matter how you study the question, you’re probably finding something that’s really there.

Hanson’s solution of targeting sharia also enjoys strong support from the American people. A recent poll conducted by a firm out of Atlanta found that more than seven in ten American voters think Muslim immigrants should be screened for the ideological belief in enforcing sharia law. More than 80% of those who agreed say all immigrants ID’d as Sharia adherents should be barred from entering the United States.

The popularity of the solution does not mean that it will be enacted, at least not for the next few months. A recent survey of US President Barack Obama’s calendar shows that he never met with former National Director of Intelligence LTG(R) Michael Flynn. He and his administration’s top officials did meet with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which has been proven in Federal court to be linked to the Foreign Terrorist Organization Hamas. In fact, CAIR has had hundreds of White House meetings.

Both of President Obama’s likely replacements have described the France attacks as acts of war, and both seem clearer-eyed than President Obama about the nature of the threat. However, asked which one was more likely to take the threat seriously, Hanson gave the nod to Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton would be too hamstrung by political correctness, he argued. Only Trump was likely to move strongly against Islamic terror.

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VIDEO: Killing for a Cause: Sharia Law & Civilization Jihad

Posted by CounterJihad Video

Published on Jun 29, 2016

This video is a primer on Sharia law, violent jihad and what the Muslim Brotherhood calls “Civilization Jihad”

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Nice Islamic Terrorist Attack Thoughts

John R. Houk

© July 15, 2016

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Jihad Awakens Europe

About Gatestone Institute

“Let us tenderly and kindly cherish, therefore, the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write.” — John Adams

Gatestone Institute, a non-partisan, not-for-profit international policy council and think tank is dedicated to educating the public about what the mainstream media fails to report in promoting: … READ THE REST

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Nice Attack: Cut Down the Black Flag, Target Sharia

The Counter Jihad Report Home Page

Genocidal Jew-Hater Amin al-Husseini

An Introduction by John R. Houk

© October 31, 2015

About a week ago in Jerusalem Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at the World Zionist Organization’s 37th Zionist Congress. At the Congress the Prime Minister spoke of the Jerusalem Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini’s participation in Hitler’s Holocaust against the Jews which resulted in their brutal murders to the tune of about SIX MILLION human beings by the end of 1945.

It boggles my mind that the Leftist media has joined in a chorus of heated criticism of Netanyahu’s finger-pointing at al-Husseini as a joint Holocaust instigator with Hitler. SO WHAT if Netanyahu was off about the degree of pivotal involvement in convincing Hitler to cleanse Europe of Jews rather than deport them?

The real point should be that al-Husseini cooperated so much with Hitler’s Final Solution against European Jews that he brought the Nazi Jew-hatred ideology back to Muslim dominated areas inspiring genocidal concepts against Jews that continue to this very day. This is evidenced in particular by the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians current murder spree against Jews in Israel.

Haj Amin al-Husseini

Below is a Middle East Forum backgrounder on al-Husseini followed by a more in depth look at the dead Jew-hater by Pamela Geller.

JRH 10/31/15

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Backgrounder: Hajj Amin al-Husseini

Compiled by Gary C. Gambill

October 30, 2015

Middle East Forum

MEF backgrounders highlight select news-relevant research and analysis from Middle East Forum staff, fellows, and publications. Sign up to the MEF mailing list to stay abreast of our work.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu caused a storm of controversy on October 20 by quoting Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the infamous grand mufti of Jerusalem during the interwar years, as having told Adolf Hitler in 1941 to “burn” rather than deport the Jews of Europe, insinuating that this influenced the unfolding Nazi genocide.

Hitler and Husseini in Berlin, November 1941

While the veracity of this quote is in question, few dispute that Husseini could well have said something to this effect given his genocidal hatred of Jews, penchant for blood-curdling rhetoric, and determination to prevent Jewish immigration to Palestine. However, opinions differ sharply, even among MEF staff and fellows, as to the degree of Hussein’s influence, both in Nazi Germany and the Middle East.

MEF Hochberg Family Writing Fellow Wolfgang G. Schwanitz, coauthor of Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East (2014), argues that two components of this question are unmistakably clear. First, Husseini’s overarching goal prior to and during Hitler’s reign, he notes, was that “whatever happens with Jews under Hitler’s reign in Europe, they should not come to the Middle East.” At the very least, the Germans understood that deportation as a solution to Europe’s “Jewish Question” risked alienating their top protégé in the Arab world – a region they expected in 1941-42 to be invading soon.

Second, Schwanitz notes that the historical record shows the mufti to be unquestionably the “foremost extra-European adviser in the process to destroy the Jews of Europe.” Adolf Eichmann and his subordinates frequently briefed Husseini as the genocide unfolded, “as if to reassure him that Hitler had not changed his mind,” he writes in a forthcoming article.

Husseini (left), Indian nationalist leader Subhash Chandra Bose, and Iraqi leader Rashid Ali al-Gaylani in Berlin, 1943

In contrast, MEF fellow Jeffrey Herf, author of Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (2010), contends that the Husseini’s “importance in Nazi Berlin lay far more in assisting the Third Reich’s Arabic language propaganda … and in mobilizing Muslims in Eastern Europe to support the Nazi regime.” Although these achievements surely facilitated Nazi atrocities, Hitler “made the decisions to implement the Final Solution and had communicated those decisions to key actors in the Nazi regime at the latest a month before his [1941] meeting with Husseini.”

Whatever his role in the Holocaust, MEF staff and fellows widely agree that Husseini was a critical ideological progenitor of Middle Eastern extremism today. The mufti was among the first to “exploit the draw of the Islamic holy places in Jerusalem to find international Muslim support” for the anti-Zionist cause, notes MEF President Daniel Pipes, a theme very much in evidence today among Palestinian Islamists.

Moreover, Husseini “can be largely held responsible for the Middle East’s endemic antisemitism,” writes Daniel Pipes in a recent Washington Times op-ed, pointing to his postwar tutelage of Yasser Arafat and other rising Palestinian figures, as well the Muslim Brotherhood during his stay in Egypt after the Nazi defeat.

Hitler’s Mein Kampf has been a bestseller in the Middle East since the 1930s.

As Boris Havel illustrates in a recent Middle East Quarterly article, Husseini’s propaganda traced “alleged Jewish power and ambitions” in the here and now “to supposed Jewish activities at the time of Muhammad,” a theological innovation that is today a staple of Islamist discourse.

Because of Husseini, there remains an “inescapable and inextricable connection between Islamists … and the Nazi movement” today, MEF Director Gregg Roman told Al-Jazeera English on October 22. In an early Middle East Quarterly article, famed Princeton University historian Bernard Lewis notes (without specific reference to Husseini) the “astonishing degree” to which “the ideas, the literature, even the crudest inventions of the Nazis and their predecessors have been internalized and Islamized” in the Middle East.

At the same time, it is important not to overstate Husseini’s influence. When the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) placed ads on Philadelphia buses displaying a photo of Husseini and Hitler with a caption reading “Adolf Hitler and his staunch ally, the leader of the Muslim world,” Daniel Pipes cautioned that the “text is factually inaccurate,” calling Husseini “a British appointee in the Mandate for Palestine, where Muslims constituted less than 1 percent of the total world Muslim population.”

Compiled by Middle East Forum web editor Gary C. Gambill

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Pamela Geller, WND Column: Netanyahu tells truth about mufti’s role in Holocaust

By Pamela Geller

October 29, 2015

Pamela Geller – Atlas Shrugs

The mufti of Jerusalem, Muhammad Hajj Amin Husseini, visits the volunteer Nazi Waffen-SS division in Bosnia, made up of Bosnian Muslims

If case you missed my column at WND this week:

DEFENDING THE WEST
Netanyahu tells truth about mufti’s role in Holocaust

Exclusive: Pamela Geller defends Bibi against onslaught of media attack

The condemnations have been way over the top: Benjamin Netanyahu is being denounced by the media and political elites all over the world, in a way that the openly genocidal jihadist Mahmoud Abbas never has been. Netanyahu’s crime? He told the Zionist Congress last Tuesday, “Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time; he wanted to expel the Jews.” Netanyahu quoted Hitler asking the mufti, “So what should I do with them?” The mufti responded, according to Netanyahu, “Burn them.’”

Those who are excoriating Netanyahu for this are overlooking one fact: Netanyahu was right.

The mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, lived in Berlin from 1941 to 1945 and recruited a Muslim SS division for Hitler. And Netanyahu was correct: The Nazis originally pursued a policy of exiling Jews to Eastern Europe, and even to Palestine – until the mufti protested that they must not be sent there. The decision to exterminate the Jews came soon after that.

It is good to see that Netanyahu is not backing down. He called the criticism of his remarks “absurd,” which it is: Netanyahu’s remarks mirror my ads highlighting the role of the Muslim world during the Holocaust, and Netanyahu is experiencing the same blowback from Islamic supremacists and Islamic apologists that I got.

The premier front man for the failed idea that we should place all our hope in “moderate Islam,” Daniel Pipes, claimed several months ago that our ad campaign in Philadelphia calling attention to the mufti’s relationship with Hitler was a failure. Pipes took issue with our factual assertions, asserting that the mufti’s meeting with Hitler was a “one-time, opportunistic consultation.” Really? Tell that to the 400,000 Jewish women and children Husseini sent to their deaths at Nazi concentration camps. Tell that to the victims of the Muslim armies in Bosnia that Husseini raised for Hitler.

Pamela Geller’s commitment to freedom from jihad and Shariah shines forth in her books – featured at the WND Superstore

Al-Husseini lived in Berlin during World War II on Hitler’s dime and made weekly radio addresses from Berlin to the Axis power nations and the Muslim world. In one, he screamed: “Arabs, rise and fight as one for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases Allah, history and religion. This saves your honor, Allah is with you.”

The mufti made similar appeals, always pointing to the Quran, time and time again in his radio addresses during the war. He organized propaganda services to the Muslims of the world from Berlin. He used Axis radio stations calling Muslims to arms in a holy war against the Allies. He aided the Nazi espionage service. He raised Muslim parachute groups for sabotage in the Middle East. He raised Muslim formations to fight the allies. He helped in the Nazi plan to exterminate nearly 6 million Jews.

“Hitler,” Netanyahu said in further remarks after the media firestorm began, “was responsible for the Final Solution to exterminate six million Jews; he made the decision. It is equally absurd to ignore the role played by the mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, a war criminal, for encouraging and urging Hitler.”

Right again. At my website, PamelaGeller.com, I have been calling attention to this for years. SS Hauptsturmfuehrer Dieter Wisliceny, a close collaborator of Adolf Eichmann, testified that “the grand mufti, who had been in Berlin since 1941, played a role in the decision of the German government to exterminate the European Jews the importance of which must not be disregarded. He had repeatedly suggested to the various authorities with whom he had been in contact, above all before Hitler, Ribbentrop and Himmler, the extermination of European jury. He considers this as a comfortable solution of the Palestine problem. In his messages broadcast from Berlin, he surpassed us in anti-Jewish attacks. He was one of Eichmann’s best friends and has constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures. I heard say that, accompanied by Eichmann, he has visited incognito the gas chamber it Auschwitz.”

Eichmann made the statement referred to in the affidavit in his office in Budapest on June 4, 1944; the confirmation by Wisliceny was given some days later also in Budapest.

To his Eminence the Grand Mufti, a Souvenir, July 4, 1943” H. Himmler

Not only that: According to testimony at the Nuremberg trials, “[T]he mufti was a bitter arch enemy of the Jews and had always been the protagonist of the idea of their annihilation. This idea the mufti had always advanced in his conversations with Eichmann.”

The mufti’s role in the Holocaust has been covered up. The New York Post reported back in 1948 that “on Aug. 28, 1946, Dean Acheson, then Acting Secretary of State, announced that ‘the State Dept. is preparing a White Paper concerning the activities of the ex-Mufti of Jerusalem.’ Acheson said the publication would be in the form of a book, which would cover all the documents concerning the ex-Mufti seized from German files. This White Paper has not yet been published, although 17 months have passed. What keeps the State Dept. from publishing it? Who is interested in the delay? Are all the documents safe?”

That delay has now continued for nearly seventy years. The white paper was never published. I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request several years ago, asking for a copy of it, as well as of all State Department correspondence relating to it. The State Department responded that such a white paper did not exist and had never existed, and that there was no correspondence about it.

So what did happen to that promised white paper? Under whose auspices, and for what reason, has the mufti’s role in the Holocaust been shrouded in silence?

Netanyahu did the world a great service by calling attention to this. The intensity of the attacks against him only testifies to how much he struck a nerve. In the mainstream media, Islam and Muslims must never, ever be criticized. We may only hope that the controversy will lead to some of the details being revealed about the mufti’s role in Hitler’s genocide.

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Genocidal Jew-Hater Amin al-Husseini

An Introduction by John R. Houk

© October 31, 2015

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Backgrounder: Hajj Amin al-Husseini

This text may be reposted or forwarded so long as it is presented as an integral whole with complete and accurate information provided about its author, date, place of publication, and original URL.

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Pamela Geller, WND Column: Netanyahu tells truth about mufti’s role in Holocaust

About Pamela Geller

Pamela Geller is the founder, editor and publisher of Atlas Shrugs.com and President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) and Stop Islamization of America (SIOA). She is the author of The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America, with Robert Spencer (foreword by Ambassador John Bolton) (Simon & Schuster) and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance (WND Books). She is also a regular columnist for World Net Daily, the American Thinker, Breitbart.com and other publications.

Geller’s activism on behalf of human rights has won international notice. She is a foremost defender of the freedom of speech against attempts to force the West to accept Sharia blasphemy laws, and against Sharia self-censorship by Western media outlets. Her First Amendment lawsuits filed nationwide have rolled back attempts to limit Americans’ free speech rights and limit speech to only one political perspective, and exposed attempts to make an end-run around the First Amendment by illegitimately restricting access to public fora. Her free speech event in Garland, Texas led to the capture or killing of several murderous jihadists, smoking out terror cells, leading to an increase in the threat level to BRAVO and to the consequent arrests of jihadists in several states.

Geller has also led awareness campaigns in U.S., Europe, and Israel on behalf of the victims and potential victims of honor killing, for the human rights of apostates from Islam, for the freedom of speech, and more. She has placed ads nationwide on … READ THE REST

Michael Oren Interviewed by Daniel Pipes

This is an interview conducted by Daniel Pipes with Michael Oren centered around the book “Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide”. The interview brings out Oren’s thoughts on Barack Obama, how Obama has conducted foreign policy with Israel and Obama seemingly allowing Iran to develop nuclear weapons.

JRH 7/22/15

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Michael Oren Interviewed by Daniel Pipes
A discussion reveals how Obama purposefully broke the historic US-Israel alliance

Interview

June 24, 2015

DanielPipes.org

Originally: FrontPageMag.com

Daniel Pipes Email Sent: 7/21/2015 9:16 AM

N.B.:

(1) This interview took place at the Free Library of Philadelphia. FrontPageMag.com transcribed it and I edited it. The transcript does not include the question-and-answer period but the video does.

(2) The video is available to watch here.

(3) About the alarm that goes off at the very end: As Amb. Oren was answering my final question, a buzzer went off, we could not continue talking, the event organizer came on the stage to announce that the library had to be evacuated immediately, and the video camera suddenly shuts off. This unceremonious conclusion, fortunately, was just a drill and no one or property were harmed.

(4) The transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Daniel Pipes

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Multimedia for this item

Video [Link]

[Blog Editor: Explicit language ALERT. When Oren tells a story relating to Rahm Emanuel and Washington-Speak, the profanity flies especially the F-bomb.]

http://www.danielpipes.org/audio-video/embed_iframe.php?av_id=319

Daniel Pipes: I am delighted to be here with Michael Oren.

I’ll admit that when I began reading his book, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide, a very well-written account of his four-plus years as Israeli ambassador to the United States, I started at the beginning, as one tends to do with books, so I had no idea of the news bombshells that lay ahead. (Laughter)

The first inkling came to me when I read a column by John Podhoretz, who suggested that “the annals of diplomatic history” had never witnessed “anything quite like this astonishing account” that “makes news on almost every page.” Indeed, the next few days saw a furor over the book and its related three articles. “Borderline hysteria” is how one Israeli journalist, Ben Caspit, summarized the Obama administration’s response.

Because of the enormous attention the book has attracted, I will make the assumption that you, the audience, know something about its contents, and I will focus my questions on specific issues regarding three topics: US-Israel relations, the response to the book, and Barack Obama.

Michael: You portray two principles governing historic US-Israel relations—no daylight and no surprises. You argue these have been broken since 2009 and you hope they’ll be quickly reasserted. But do you really see this as possible in the year and a half left of Obama’s administration? Or do you only hope for this after he leaves office?

Michael Oren: The US-Israel relationship is not static but has evolved. We fought the ’67 war with French bullets, not American ones. Beginning in the 1980s, in the middle Reagan years. These two principles, no surprises and no daylight, began to coalesce. What I mean by them?

No surprises: if the United States is going to set out a major new policy position on issues related to the Middle East and Israel’s security, it will give us an advance draft of the speech or paper to give us a chance to look at it, give our comments.

No daylight: the two governments will differ over settlements, Jerusalem, and a lot of other issues. But we keep these differences behind closed doors, not display them in public where our mutual enemies will discern the distance between us and will insinuate themselves between us.

Photo: Obama and Oren in the Oval Office

I can’t say that these two principles were always honored; we did surprise one another; there was occasional daylight. But these were the historic twin pillars of our alliance. Starting in 2009, however, the new Obama Administration as a matter of policy decided it would not preserve these two pillars.

On surprises, the rupture isn’t a matter of debate. For example, the president went to Cairo in June 2009 and gave a very long speech (twice as long as his first inaugural address) which served as the foundational document of his administration’s positions on the Middle East. It also touched on many issues vital to Israel’s security, such as America’s relationship with what Obama called the Muslim world, particularly the outreach to Iran and Iran’s right to nuclear energy. Although it had amazing and far-reaching ramifications for Israel, we in the embassy never saw a draft of it, we had no warning of it. And that was just one of many such speeches.

As for daylight, the president openly said, “Look at the past eight years [a reference to the George W. Bush administration]. During those eight years, there was no space between us and Israel, and what did we get from that? When there is no daylight, Israel just sits on the sidelines, and that erodes our credibility with the Arab states.” Turns out, he put daylight between the two countries on other issues too, like Iran.

These two pillars were jettisoned and they must be restored. It’s not only in the interest of the United States and Israel but, given the immense chaos in the Middle East, it’s important for that region as well. Indeed, it’s needed for the wellbeing of the world. Why? Because everybody looks at the US-Israel bond. Whether jihadist or Japanese, the globe looks at the way the United States treats its Israeli ally as a litmus test of its ability to rely on the United States.

Therefore, the two pillars need to be restored. Whether that’s possible in the year and a half remaining of this presidency, I don’t know. All I can say is, I hope so. My book is an ardent and impassioned call to bring this relationship back from the brink, which we’ve reached, and restore it.

Daniel Pipes: Along with the problems you just delineated, all in the know agree that the US-Israel military relationship is better than ever. How is this possible, what’s the logic behind it?

Michael Oren: True, it is better than ever. The cooperation on weapons development, on military aid—which is close to $4 billion a year (75 percent of it spent in the United States)—joint maneuvers, ports of call, and intelligence sharing are indeed superb right now.

Why so? Because the Obama administration distinguishes between diplomatic daylight and security daylight and it calculated that the closer relations are in the security field, the greater leeway it has to put daylight in the diplomatic field. This amounts to a very interesting intellectual exercise, one that did not work.

Middle Easterners simply do not distinguish between diplomatic and security daylight. In the Middle East, daylight is daylight. Daylight in our area of the world, where the sun is very strong, can be blinding and searing. What most Middle Easterners saw over the course of the last six-plus years was the United States and Israel drifting quite far apart in spite of increased security cooperation.

By the way, if you define security relationship more broadly, things look differently. If you include the fact that the United States negotiated for seven months with the Iranians—and that has a certain impact on our security—without even telling us, you can’t say the security relationship is better than ever.

Daniel Pipes: You mentioned being unaware of US-Iranian discussions, yet, the president has said that he and his administration have consistently shared information with Israel. True?

Michael Oren: We had a longstanding, intimate dialog with the United States on the Iranian nuclear program which I was privileged to take part in. The Americans were very candid. We looked at the same data and often derived the same conclusions. But we were unaware of the content of that secret track taking place in the Persian Gulf.

Daniel Pipes: You quote former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel waking you up early one morning and yelling, “I don’t like this eff-ing excrement.”

(Laughter) On another occasion, the deputy secretary of state, the number-two man in the State Department, Tom Nides, screamed at you, “You don’t want that eff-ing UN to collapse because of your eff-ing conflict with the Palestinians.”

Michael Oren: You understand, if we were in Israel, we’d have no problem actually saying this word? (Laughter) So American. (Laughter)

Daniel Pipes: My question: Is this really the state of diplomacy today? (Laughter)

Michael Oren: Yes. (Laughter) Yes, it is funny. As an aside, Ally went through seven security vettings by the State of Israel: the military censor, two departments within the Defense Ministry, the Mossad, and others. They were very good; believe me, it’s amazing there’s actually a book.

I was never a diarist, I never before wrote a book in the first person. Making that transformation was profound for me and not at all easy. But when I took this job, my wife Sally gave me a little diary and said, “Hey, you may want to jot down a few things.” I replied, “Nah, I don’t believe in diaries.”

Then, soon after that, Rahm Emanuel calls me at 2 o’clock in the morning and says—can I say this? “I don’t like this f**king s**t.” (Laughter) And it’s like 2 o’clock in the morning. And I said, “Well, I don’t like this f**king s**t, either.” And it begins from there. (Laughter) So I wrote this incident into my diary. The diary is not classified; you’re not going to find secrets in there. But it did provide a lot of color and depth to the book.

Tom Nides—poor Tom Nides. That line, “UNESCO teaches Holocaust studies, for chrissakes. You want to cut off f**king Holocaust studies?” gets quoted a lot as evidence of Nides’ animus against the State of Israel. But it’s just the opposite: Tom Nides is a great friend of mine and of the State of Israel. In Washington, that’s just the way people talk.

One story I didn’t include in the book, from a high-ranking member of the administration, a very sweet, young man, who says to me something like, “We’re getting out of f**king Iraq, because we’ve f**king had it with the f**king Iraqis. And we’re coming f**king home.” And then he looks at me and says, “Why am I talking like this?” (Laughter)

Daniel Pipes: Did you get “special” treatment because you’re a born American? Had you been from another country, and not a Native American, would you have been treated the same way?

Michael Oren: No I wouldn’t have. This is the flip side of the special US-Israel relationship.

It was also part of my special relationship with people like Rahm Emanuel, who I’d known for a long time before I got into office. Rahm’s father had fought in the Irgun, in the Israeli War of Independence. (Hence, his name, Rahm, or thunder.) Rahm had a deli accident when he was 16 and sliced off the top part of a finger. According to Obama, when he lost the top part of that finger, he lost half of his vocabulary. (Laughter) I used to get that finger, all the time.

But when Rahm left the White House and went off to be the mayor of Chicago, I viewed it as a loss for me because he was somebody I could call in the middle of the night. Yes, I was going to get that language. Even though we had serious policy disagreements sometimes, I know he cared passionately about Israel. He was a proud Jew, proud of his father. That created a link that couldn’t be broken by policy differences.

Photo: Emanuel and Oren in the mayor of Chicago’s office.

The same thing’s true with Dennis Ross (who doesn’t talk like Rahm). Dennis was that rare Washington Middle East expert who wasn’t, as we say in Washington-speak, stove-piped. Which means, you know, you go to somebody who’s an expert in Lebanon between 1976 and 1977, that’s what they know. (Laughter) Dennis was the only person I knew in Washington who saw the entire region and also saw it historically. He saw it vertically and horizontally. And he had a personal memory too, having been involved in peacemaking for 30 years. When he left, there was another huge loss.

Daniel Pipes: I’d like to try out two favorite theories of mine on you. First: Noting that the government of Israel tends to give away too much when relations are really warm between Jerusalem and Washington, I believe that low-level tensions between the two governments are actually good.

Michael Oren: Here I’d beg to disagree. Historically, Israelis make concessions when we feel secure. In his first meeting with American Jewish leaders, as I quoted earlier, Obama said that he’s going to put daylight between Israel and the United States because when there is no daylight, Israel “just sits on the sidelines.”

Interesting observation, but empirically wrong. During the Bush years, for example, there was no daylight, so Israelis felt secure. As a result, Israel yanked up 21 settlements from Gaza in 2005. It made a full offer of Palestinian statehood to Mahmud Abbas in 2008: all of Gaza, most of the West Bank, half of Jerusalem. At the height of the second intifada in 2002, Israeli support for a two-state solution was exactly zero; by the time I came onboard in 2009, the intifada was behind us and 70 percent of Israelis supported a two-state solution.

So, when we feel secure, we make more concessions. Strangely enough, the person who understood this best was Richard Nixon: give them support, they’ll make concessions.

Daniel Pipes: That was my point.

Michael Oren: Okay. I’m sorry.

Daniel Pipes: I’m saying when US-Israel relations are flourishing, Israelis hand things over. For example, the Philadelphia Corridor in 2007, but that was a mistake. Therefore, I don’t mind seeing—

Michael Oren: Oh, you want a little low-level tension, so we don’t give in.

Daniel Pipes: Exactly.

Michael Oren: Well, I can’t argue with that.

But my responsibility as ambassador was to try to get us on the same page. They were coming to us and asking us to do many very difficult things: “We demand a settlement freeze on the West Bank, a building freeze in eastern Jerusalem, a final-status map for the Palestinians.” Take the map issue: every time we gave the Palestinians a map, they put it in their pocket, walked away, and came back two years later saying, “Okay, let’s start negotiating from the map you gave us last time.” So, we didn’t want to give them another map, although the administration demanded we do so.

I would say all the time to the administration, “Rather than threaten us, try love.” That was always my line, “Try love, try love.” Because Israelis make concession when we feel secure. That’s not just Israelis, it’s human nature.

Daniel Pipes: Second theory: there used to be a consensus, say in the 1980s, between Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, on Israel. It’s falling apart, with conservatives ever more friendly to Israel and liberals ever cooler to Israel. From the anecdotes in your book, it sounds like you agree with this analysis, correct?

Photo: Michael Oren and Daniel Pipes

Michael Oren: My anecdotes point to the challenges we faced from certain segments of the American electorate. American opinion on Israel is a little like what physicists say about the universe—it’s expanding and contracting at the same time. If you look at all the polls, support for Israel in this country keeps on going up. Even last summer, at the height of Gaza war with the terrible images coming out of Gaza, American support for Israel went up. When I left Washington, something like 74 percent of Americans defined themselves, to one degree or another, as pro-Israel. Crazy! We were right behind Sweden and Canada, which is amazing, considering all the bad press we get.

On the other hand, if you break these statistics down demographically by ethnic group, age group, and party affiliation, the picture’s a lot less sanguine.

I’ve lived in Israel for close to 40 years. Yes, I’ve come back and even taught at various universities. But for the first time in 2009, I returned for an extended period. I had a Rip Van Winkle experience, as though I’d woken after 25 years and didn’t recognize my own village. America had transformed demographically.

America is no longer a white majority population. There are more single-parent families than two-parent families. There was one Jewish judge on the Supreme Court and the rest basically WASPs; now, there’s not a single WASP on the Supreme Court but three Jews and six Catholics. The populations growing the most and having greater political influence, especially the Hispanics, lack a traditional attachment to Israel.

Because many Israeli leaders, including our prime minister and defense minister, had been educated in America in the ’70s or ’80s; they remembered a different America. So, I had to tell them, “Guys, the America you remember … it ain’t there anymore.”

I saw Obama’s election in 2008 as the symptom of a transformative moment. I’m no prophet but I told Israeli leaders back in 2009 that we have to plan for a two-term president because these changes are permanent. The election of 2012 was much more significant than 2008; it confirmed that the changes are permanent and that Israel has to adjust to them.

Israel has a paramount strategic interest in preserving support for Israel as a bipartisan issue; we should never become the monopoly of one party. This has become increasingly challenging because Israel’s experience with terror moved it significantly to the right even as America moved to the left. Israel became more traditional; America less traditional. I had to grapple and try to bridge this reality. Did I succeed entirely? Obviously not. Can we give it up? We cannot. We have to keep on reaching out.

Daniel Pipes: Turning to responses to your book—American officials have been incensed by Ally. Secretary of State John Kerry‘s spokesman said that it is “absolutely inaccurate and false.” Your former counterpart, the US ambassador to Israel, Daniel Shapiro, said, “I can say as an ambassador that sometimes ambassadors have a very limited view of the conversations between the leaders, and his description does not reflect the truth about what happened.” Oddly, Shapiro says he doesn’t know anything and therefore you don’t know anything. Your response?

Photo: Criss-crossing ambassadors: Daniel Shapiro and Michael Oren.

Michael Oren: It’s a strange remark for one ambassador to say about another ambassador. In the past week and a half, I’ve been called a moneygrubbing politician, delusional, and some other choice words. But all these ad hominem attacks aside, nobody’s taking on the book substantively. I tell a story in 400 pages and virtually no one says the facts are faulty: that, say, the Americans did not negotiate for seven months without telling us or that the administration did not cancel flights to Ben Gurion Airport in mid-2014. No one says I just imagined these events.

I think part of the reaction I’ve received from people in government—notice people in government, not people out of government—has been an oversensitivity to the issues I’m trying to raise.

Which brings me to my reason to bring the book out now. June is a terrible time to bring out a nonfiction book. It’s already summer reading, when you bring out Jaws. (In this spirit, I told Random House we should change the name of the book to Jews.) (Laughter) People will read it on the beach! They won’t go in the water! You bring out a book like this in October or November to take part in Jewish book month in November and jump on the Christmas-Hanukkah book season.

Also, I’m in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, which means I can’t promote the book as I should. I previously went on two-month book tours, which I cannot do with this one.

Nonetheless, I brought it out now because in the next week or so there is liable to be an agreement signed between the United States, other permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany, with the Islamic Republic of Iran. The State of Israel—not just my party, not just the prime minister—views this as a terrible deal, one that deeply endangers us. I would be derelict if I did not tell this story right now. The book had to come out now to trigger the precise conversation we’re having tonight. What do they expect from us—to go silently into that night of the signing of this agreement? The Jewish people can’t do that.

Daniel Pipes: Let’s turn to the last of the three topics: the American president. What do you better think explains Obama’s approach to the Middle East and the world: a grand strategy or improvising responses as things happen?

Michael Oren: Barack Obama—as all presidents—came into the White House with a worldview. His happens to be very challenging for the State of Israel. It does not include the notion of American exceptionalism or American leadership. Instead, it prefers a collegial approach to crisis management and world affairs. It implies a certain recoiling from the use of military might and a heavy reliance on international organizations, like the UN, that are not always so friendly to the State of Israel.

Some of us wake up in the morning and say a little berakhah [blessing] that the greatest democracy in the world just happens also to be the greatest military power. It’s a wonderful thing. In this light, one of the most illuminating remarks I ever heard Barack Obama make was at the nuclear security summit in 2010, where he said—these words are engraved on my soul, “Whether we like it or not, we remain a dominant military superpower.” Think about that for a second. That was very revealing about the president’s attitude toward military might. Would John Kennedy have said that? Would Bill Clinton? George W. Bush?

And then there are Obama’s positions on our specific issues, such as his outreach to the Muslim world. I thought it perfectly fine, indeed, it’s in our interest, that America improves relations with Muslims—so long as it’s not at our expense. The unprecedented support for the Palestinian cause and the reconciliation with Iran, are very problematic for us, however.

This worldview has collided with reality and the result looks like patchwork. Intervention against Qaddafi but nonintervention against Assad. Sort of implicitly cooperating with Shiite forces against ISIS in Iraq but kind-of resisting what Saudi Arabia is doing in Yemen against ISIS and definitely opposing what Egypt is doing against ISIS in Libya. I can go on.

After almost five years of unprecedented turmoil, violence, and disappointment in the Middle East, that worldview has remained mostly impermeable to change.

______________________________________________

Edited by John R. Houk (particularly profanity)

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On Syria – Obama Indecision may be Worse than Decisiveness

John R. Houk

The current Syrian government – a client State of Iran – has been massacring its own citizens for months now. Unlike in Libya, the Obama solution is to look the other way. Why?

My best guess is that the consequences of aiding Syrian revolutionaries (the Sunni-Islam majority weary of the Alawite-Islam minority) have too many unknowns for President BHO to enter the fray to stop the genocide.

If BHO actively supports the revolutionaries will Iran have the guts to send troops into Syria to defend its client? And if Iran sends troops will Israel use the excuse to enter Syria militarily because of Iranian threats to wipe Israel off the map? Will the real Lebanese government in the form of Hezbollah offer military support to Assad’s Syria since Hezbollah is both a client of Iran and Shias like Alawites are Shias? Again, will Hezbollah action force Israel’s entrance into Syria?

I am sure there are other possible consequences that BHO does not want to deal with in an election year; nonetheless you can see that revolution in Syria could be the first domino leading to at least a Middle East regional war or worst WWIII.

If Obama Foreign Policy spinelessness continues his indecision might tip the first domino making things worse in a war somewhat like Britain and France waited on Hitler to have some common sense until the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939.

Below are some Leslie J. Sacks thoughts on the slaughter in Iran which is a bit different than my thoughts.

JRH 3/1/12 (Read the Sacks thoughts at the end of my thoughts at SlantRight 2.0)

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