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Contents:
“Slaves Seeking Slavery”: the Alliance of Secular Leftists and Islamists: Paul Merkley, Bayview Review, Dec. 17, 2014— Anyone feeling the need for a quick boost of morale should take a quick look at the site…
Israel Looks on Europe With Dismay: Barry Shaw, Jerusalem Post, Dec. 22— Political tremors are being felt across Europe.
After Synagogue Attack, Jerusalem’s New Holy War: Daniel Gordis, National Post, Nov. 20, 2014 — There are terror attacks, and there are pogroms.
The Ethics of Protective Edge: Asa Kasher, Jewish Review of Books, Fall, 2014— Even my loves are measured by wars,” wrote the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai:
Domestic Terror Threat Becomes Real for Canada: Alistair MacDonald & Rita Trichur, Wall Street Journal, Oct. 22, 2014
Top 10 Worst U.N. Decisions Of 2014: Buzzfeed, Dec. 21, 2014
Europe's Year of the Jihadist: Abigail R. Esman, IPT News, Dec. 29, 2014
Research on the Islamic State: Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, Middle East Forum, Nov.-Dec., 2014
THE ALLIANCE OF SECULAR LEFTISTS AND ISLAMISTS
Paul Merkley
Bayview Review, Dec. 17, 2014
Anyone feeling the need for a quick boost of morale should take a quick look at the site http://www.markhumphreys.com/left.html where he can watch an incredibly brave man, Robert Spencer, the Director of Jihad Watch, as he speaks to a crowd of secular-left and Islamist groups at a Pax Europe rally in Suttgart, Germany, in June 2011: You are already subjugated! You are already their useful idiots…. You are out here in their service. And you think your fight is for freedom. You are fighting for you own slavery! … You are fighting for the destruction of all the freedoms that you enjoy. You are fighting for the defeat of your own selves, of your own lives. You are slaves seeking slavery. You are the most foolish, you are the most evil, foolish people on Earth…. Shame on you!” Deep-thinkers in the crowd tried to drown our Spencer’s message by throwing bottles, ice, eggs, and manure at the stage.
By now, we are all well-acquainted with this theatre: massive rallies throughout the Western world, organized and manned by leading lights of the European secular-Left and Muslim activists. They appear arm-in-arm under banners denouncing the Apartheid Zionist Entity and its brutality towards innocent Palestinians. They call down shame upon the pro-Israel bias of Canada’s government, the evil legacy of the Crusades and the “Islamophobia” that informs the perception that they are out of line with our parochial Western values and legal traditions.
The spokesmen assigned by these groups to be interviewed by our television networks lose no time in getting to the message: that everything that Muslims suffer today at the hands of godless Westerners and their Zionist co-oppressors could be averted if we would only practise the toleration towards minorities that made Arab empire – all of them long gone – great and prosperous and enlightened. Jews and Christians were “Protected” communities under Muslim Empire, they declaim. But they never pause to ask “Protected Against Whom?”
The governing reality of inter-religious relations during the centuries of Muslim empire was the dhimma. This was the pact, or contract, under which conquered “People of the Book” (Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians) acknowledged the inferiority of their religion, and accepted to live under the command of their communities’ leaders – who, in turn, agreed to supervise the people’s adherence to specified limitations on their lives and to report on their compliance to the Muslim masters. Dhimmi people (that is, all Christians and Jews) paid a heavy tax (jizyah) from which Muslims were exempt. They were forbidden to own land– which greatly limited the economic prospects of the Islamic masses. Their clothing was restricted to certain types and styles, and on it they wore distinguishing badges – a symbol of a monkey for the Jews, a symbol of a pig for the Christians – so that they lived without dignity. The “protection” which the Muslims extended towards the Jews and Christians was of the sort dispensed by the mafia — from themselves, not from some third party – as all others were converted or liquidated. It is this blessed state of affairs that the newly-proclaimed Caliph has in mind as he calls the Christians who come under the mercies of his Caliphate in Syria and Iraq —and then eventually everywhere – to renounce Christ, and convert – or die.
But there is a third category, this one not eligible for the blessings of dhimmitude : these are Harbis, non-Muslims who do not meet the required for living as a community under Protection (dhimmitude)—those who are neither Muslims, Jews or Christians, all those who profess other religions, or who profess no religion at all – (that is, those whom we call atheists” or “agnostics.”) These uncontracted trash have no right to live at all – anywhere. Responding to the beheading of James Foley by ISIS, Muslim cleric Hussein bin Mahmoud presumes to speak for the authentic Islamic tradition, noting that, under Islamic law, Foley was a harbi, i.e. a non-Muslim whose life was not protected by an agreement of protection.
Millions of Muslims have been killed, tortured and driven from their homes; tens of thousands of Muslim women have had their honor violated and have been sexually abused by the Americans – yet people are weeping over a Christian American harbi infidel who entered the Islamic State, knowing full well what the Islamic State is, and without a pact [of protection]. Were the soldiers of the Islamic State supposed to pat this American harbi on the back and smile at him? All scholars, without exception, agree on the permissibility of killing a harbi infidel, and agree that his blood and property are fair game. Most of them [also] agree on the permissibility of killing him if he is taken prisoner. So where does this condemnation of the IS come from?… Many Muslims are influenced by the West’s false views and its repulsive ideas, which are exported to the Islamic nation in order to weaken it and change the perception of its youth so that [the youth] become cowardly and subdued and abandon the means of power and terror, and thus create a generation that does not know fighting or the cutting of necks…A moment’s thought will bring to mind that this category of harbi embraces at last one-half of humanity today – those who are not Muslims, Jews, or Christians; and one’s second thought must be that within this company must be included perhaps a third of those who are citizens of Canada…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
Paul Merkley is a CIJR Academic Fellow
ISRAEL LOOKS ON EUROPE WITH DISMAY
Barry Shaw
Jerusalem Post, Dec. 22, 2014
Political tremors are being felt across Europe. In Britain, we see the rise of an emerging independence party, UKIP, which is euroskeptic and takes a corrective line on the UK’s unbridled open-door immigration policy. In France, the Socialist François Hollande looks likely to be replaced by the center- right Nicolas Sarkozy. The left-wing Swedish government barely lasted three months before being forced to abandon a failed leadership. This gave it sufficient time to rush through a “Palestine” vote which may be overturned by an incoming center-right government. Polls show that center-right parties would win the popular vote in Norway and Denmark if elections were held now.
Across Europe, voters are objecting to poor economic and immigration policies. They are offended by the rise of crime perpetrated by immigrants they had welcomed into their once decent countries. Cultural changes are rendering their countries unrecognizable. One prominent reason for the political swing has been politicians pandering to Islamic sensitivities at home. This is causing pause and division among their populations. The recent outbreak of symbolic parliamentary voting for an ill-defined Palestinian state is one outward manifestation of politicians catering to a rising constituency against which their grassroots citizenry are rebelling. The swing in the polls reflects a desire to return to an old patriotism of long-lost national values, lost in the mire of multiculturalism brought on by uncontrolled immigration against a background of recession and poor economic performance.
They are in search of a once-was national character. A yearning to return to the past will however not save them from the reality that now exists. Nevertheless, we will see European nations shift, possibly polarize, as populations demand that their voices be heard above the growing needs and demands of strong minority and troublesome migrants and left-wing anarchists. But will these changes come in time to save a sinking Europe from the misguided, immoral decisions being taken by a largely Socialist and fractured continent? One nation outside of Europe that is suffering from misguided European policies is Israel. Israelis look at Europe as a continent that feels the need to cater to an unruly Muslim population that offers their politicians votes but on the other hand can, and does, cause problems and violence if its causes are not addressed. This has expressed itself in displays of violent anti-Semitism that leave local Jews vulnerable.
Countries, one after another, fall prey to the lobbying of left-wing fringe groups allied to a Palestinian agenda by the introduction of anti-Israel resolutions. One after another, nations fall like dominoes, not wishing to appear out of step with an ill-considered mantra of Palestinianism that contradicts European commitments that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must be settled by the two parties involved, without any external or unilateral moves that may endanger or foreclose such an outcome. The Oslo Accords, signed on the White House lawn between Israel and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, called for mutual recognition, something that is totally lacking from Hamas, the leading political body of Palestinian Arabs, or from the rejectionist Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority. The notion of “two states for two peoples” has been rejected by the Palestinians. Europe has ignored this. Why? An end to terrorism is yet another condition for peace. Can anyone honestly say that this has been achieved in light of the grotesque Palestinian rocket attacks that erupted out of the Gaza Strip last summer? Or the horrendous sight of Palestinian terrorists coming out of the ground near Israeli farms and villages, intent to capture or kill huge numbers of Israeli civilians including women and children? Yet, on December 17, the European General Court removed Hamas from the EU list of terrorist organizations. This just days after the Hamas leadership celebrated in Gaza by parading its rockets and suicide bombers, vowing to eradicate the Jewish State of Israel.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu summed up the feeling of all Israelis and Jews: “It seems that too many in Europe, on whose soil six million Jews were slaughtered, have learned nothing. But we in Israel, we’ve learned. We’ll continue to defend our people and our state against the forces of terror and tyranny and hypocrisy.” The statement was aimed squarely at a Europe that fails to support the only liberal democracy in the region but bends over backwards to establish a state that will, in all likelihood, be headed by an Islamic terrorist group or by a rejectionist body with a shared motivation to remove Israel as part of a “liberating Palestine” agenda. Europeans need to be asked: If Hamas is not a terrorist organization, what is? As European parliaments fall, one by one, to a “Palestine” vote, and its court cannot understand what constitutes a terrorist organization if it is cloaked in Palestinian clothing, no other issue has unified the Israeli parliament like the European court’s decision. Wall to wall condemnation was heard across Israel’s divergent political parties against the European court, whose decision demonstrates the loss of a moral path, in the words of Bayit Yehudi leader Naftali Bennett…Clearly, Europe does not have the stomach, or the political will, to fight Islamic terrorism with all its force, if at all. As Knesset speaker Yuli Edelstein said, the European Union “must have lost its mind!” This is clearly the case. The question is whether the winds of political change will arrive in Europe in time to save it and Israel from the damaging tsunami of current political moves.
AFTER SYNAGOGUE ATTACK, JERUSALEM’S NEW HOLY WAR
Daniel Gordis
National Post, Nov. 20, 2014
There are terror attacks, and there are pogroms. The attack at a Jerusalem synagogue … that killed four rabbis was a pogrom. It was an attack motivated not by politics but by religious hatred; it was directed not at Israelis but at Jews. The killers were armed with hatchets and guns instead of suicide belts, and they came not to kill Jews but to butcher them. The images are horrific: a prayer shawl in a pool of blood; a prayer book turned crimson, from which one of the victims had been worshiping as he was killed; and more haunting, the hand of a dead man, still wearing his phylacteries, soaking in his own blood. Witnesses said a worshiper’s arm, also wrapped in a leather prayer strap, had been hacked off its torso.
To Jews schooled in Jewish history, these images are not new; they are the images of a destiny from which Israel had been intended to redeem the Jews. Consider this description of the Kishinev Pogrom in 1903: “[One young boy], blinded in one eye from youth, begged for his life with the offer of sixty rubles; taking this money, the leader of the crowd … gouged out [his] other eye, saying “You will never again look upon a Christian child.” Nails were driven through heads; bodies, hacked in half; bellies split open and filled with feathers. Women and girls were raped, and some had their breasts cut off.” Jews knew that sort of hatred could not be combated with reason. Violence of that sort was not motivated by economics, by contested territory or even by history. It was, they understood, malignant Jew-hatred at its core, driven by a millenniums-old sickness from which Europe would never recover. The 20th century was to have been the century of reason, of banishing ancient hatreds. But when the Kishinev poison was unleashed with the new century already under way (they had no inkling, of course, of how horrific the century would become), they knew they needed to flee.
At the Sixth Zionist Congress in 1903, Theodor Herzl, the father of modern political Zionism, evoked Kishinev not as an event, but as a condition. “Kishinev exists wherever … [Jews’] self-respect is injured and their property despoiled because they are Jews. Let us save those who can still be saved!” The Jews, he insisted, needed a state of their own. He was not the first to say this. When the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881 unleashed a similar burst of murderous anti-Jewish violence, an earlier Zionist, Yehuda Leib Pinsker, wrote that “the misfortunes of the Jews are due, above all, to their lack of desire for national independence; … if they do not wish to exist forever in a disgraceful state … they must become a nation.” As long as the Jew was landless and stateless, Pinsker argued as Herzl would once again a decade and a half later, the Jew would persist in a “disgraceful state.” He, too, argued that there was no choice — the Jews needed to flee Europe.
So flee they did, by the many millions. Most went to America, but some newly committed Zionists went to Palestine where they hoped to build a nation-state for the Jews. The Italians had Italy, the Poles had Poland and the Germans had Germany. Each had a language, a history, a culture. So, too, did the Jews; what they lacked was a state, and the price of that statelessness, they believed, was Kishinev. The Jewish State was supposed to put a stop to those images. Yes, a tragic and bloody conflict over land erupted, but Jews — later called Israelis — believed the conflict could be resolved. Israel would sign treaties with its Arab neighbors, sometimes giving up land (as with the Sinai Desert in the case of Egypt) and sometimes not (since Jordan essentially required no meaningful territorial concession). When Palestinian nationalism emerged and then became the world’s darling, left and centrist Israelis remained unfazed. This was a conflict over territory, they reasoned; when the Palestinians were ready to live side by side, Israel would cede more land, and the conflict would be over.
But the images of Jewish bodies hacked to death on a blood- soaked synagogue floor are about a hatred too deep to be assuaged by territorial concessions. Those images tell Israelis that although they fled Europe and have built their national home, they are still assailed by the same venomous loathing they had sought to escape. This time, 7 million Jewish Israelis have nowhere to run. To where would they go? While Hamas has praised the butchery and Palestinians have celebrated by handing out candies to children and posing with hatchets and photographs of the killers, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called for restraint, urging Jews not to take the law into their own hands. Yet while Netanyahu seeks restraint on the part of private Israelis, he is unlikely to show restraint himself. For if this horror cannot be stopped, the fundamental premise of Zionism and the promises that it bore for the Jewish people — that the butchery was over — will be upended. And no Israeli prime minister can willingly allow that to happen on his or her watch.
Asa Kasher
Jewish Review of Books, Fall, 2014
Even my loves are measured by wars,” wrote the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai: I am saying this happened after the Second World War. We met a day before the Six-Day War. I’ll never say before the peace ’45–’48 or during the peace ’56–’67. I first heard air raid sirens during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, and I heard them most recently in August, during Operation Protective Edge. In 1948, an Egyptian plane dropped bombs on the center of Rishon Lezion, where I then lived; more recently the threat took the familiar form of rockets launched by Hamas from the Gaza Strip and intercepted by the Iron Dome system far above my head in another town near Tel Aviv. During the 1948 air raid, I saw my father, at the time an officer in a northern infantry brigade, treating a wounded female soldier, who died soon thereafter. She was the first casualty of war that I personally witnessed. Recently, my 17-year-old granddaughter Ahiraz encountered her first casualty when a soldier who had been a member of her neighborhood scout troop fell in the present operation.
As Amichai says, our lives in Israel are marked by the wars through which we have lived. In addition to living through the many wars, actions, and operations of the last 66 years as both a civilian and a soldier, I have also spent a great deal of time thinking about the ethics of fighting them, both in official capacities—when, for example, I led the writing of and co-authored the IDF’s code of ethics in the 1990s—and in an unofficial one, as a commentator. As I write this, in late August, rockets are once again being fired from Gaza, and Operation Protective Edge has resumed after another brief ceasefire. Although—or perhaps precisely because—hostilities are ongoing, it is important to re-examine the challenges that terrorists in general and Hamas in particular pose to the Israel Defense Forces and to do so in light of first principles, both those of traditional Just War doctrine and of specific Israeli military doctrine and values. Israel, like every other state, upholds the right and duty of self-defense. A state’s right to defend itself when attacked is just as unquestionable as an individual’s right to self-defense when attacked. This right is invoked on the level of international relations and is confirmed by Just War doctrine, international law, and the United Nations charter, not to speak of common-sense ethics. The duty of self-defense, on the other hand, is the responsibility that a state has to protect its citizens. Thus, Israel has both the international right and the domestic duty to respond when Hamas attacks its citizens.
The second fundamental principle of the State of Israel in general and of the IDF in particular is the duty to respect human dignity. This means that people may never be treated as mere objects or instruments. Their liberty can be restricted only when there is a compelling justification for doing so. Note that this second principle extends not only to citizens or other persons under Israel’s effective control, such as visitors or foreign workers, but also to Palestinians in Gaza who pose no terrorist threat. It even comes into play with respect to terrorists themselves when kill-or-capture options are carefully considered. Nonetheless, as I have argued at greater length elsewhere, no state has or should shoulder as much responsibility for the safety of enemy civilians as it does for its own people. Special duties belong to the essence of relationships within a family, a community, and a state. These two fundamental principles of warfare are jointly applicable under all circumstances. During war or in the course of any other military activity, the principle of self-defense is what establishes the ends in question, namely an effective defense of the people and their state, while the second principle imposes restrictions on the means used in pursuit of those ends. Generally speaking, the latter principle requires ceaseless efforts to diminish or “alleviate the calamities of war,” to use a very old but still apt expression from the 1868 St. Petersburg Declaration Renouncing the Use, in Times of War, of Certain Explosive Projectiles.
Other democratic states share the basic principle of respect for human dignity and direct the activities of their military forces in accordance with it. It is, however, worthy of note that the IDF is the only military force of which I am aware that has included it among its explicitly stated values. Two of the values listed in its code of ethics, Ruach Tzahal, are those of respecting and preserving human life and the duty to retain “purity of arms,” that is to use the minimum force necessary to subdue the enemy. In the early 1990s, when I presented an early draft of the first such code to the IDF General Staff, then-Chief Lieutenant-General Ehud Barak and about 100 IDF groups of commanders, absolutely no one objected to the inclusion of these values. This is because they merely codified strongly entrenched parts of the IDF ethos. I have often been asked what is Jewish about the IDF code of ethics. In answering, I have always pointed to these two values, which are rooted in the Jewish religious and moral traditions of the sanctity of human life and of self-discipline.
It is not hard, however, to think of circumstances in which the principles of restraint and respect for human dignity in times of war might be disregarded. In his famous address to Parliament in 1940 Winston Churchill spoke of “Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survival.” But as much as such statements may once have thrilled and heartened people, they are now obsolete, not only for ethical reasons but for strategic ones. To grasp the nature of the change that has taken place in the character of war and its end-state, at least for Israel, compare the consequences of the Six-Day War with the consequences of the Second Lebanon War. In 1967, our enemies’ military forces were essentially destroyed. In Lebanon, on the other hand, we significantly diminished the military force of Hezbollah, but it could and actually did continue launching rockets at northern Israel for a time.
In the “new” wars of recent decades, victory has been replaced by the ideal of successfully accomplishing given missions. The missions of Operation Protective Edge were defined in the course of the fighting as the elimination of the threat to Israel created by the Hamas offensive tunnels and the reduction if not elimination of the threat that Hamas’ rockets pose to most parts of Israel…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
Domestic Terror Threat Becomes Real for Canada: Alistair MacDonald & Rita Trichur, Wall Street Journal, Oct. 22, 2014 —Long a target of extremist threats, Canada has for decades avoided foreign-linked terrorist killings on its soil.
Top 10 Worst U.N. Decisions Of 2014: Buzzfeed, Dec. 21, 2014—10. U.N. Elects Iran to Women’s Rights Commission
Europe's Year of the Jihadist: Abigail R. Esman, IPT News, Dec. 29, 2014—Among the trends of 2014 – "Gone, Girl," Lena Dunham, and $55,000 potato salad – was another the list-makers seem to have missed: it was also a very good year for Islamic jihad.
Research on the Islamic State: Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, Middle East Forum, Nov.-Dec., 2014
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