The Bookworm Beat 9/28/16 — the Israel and Islam edition

Israeli Palestinian baby carriage protect or useBibi’s speech to the UN. Bibi Netanyahu gave an amazing speech to the UN in which, after cheerfully castigating the UN for its biased and reprehensible behavior, he equally cheerfully assured the UN that Israel is a thriving, dynamic culture making strong new alliances all over the world. You can watch the speech, which takes about 40 minutes or if you prefer reading here’s a link to the transcript:

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The UN, begun as a moral force, has become a moral farce. So when it comes to Israel at the UN, you’d probably think nothing will ever change, right? Well think again. You see, everything will change and a lot sooner than you think. The change will happen in this hall, because back home, your governments are rapidly changing their attitudes towards Israel. And sooner or later, that’s going to change the way you vote on Israel at the UN.

More and more nations in Asia, in Africa, in Latin America, more and more nations see Israel as a potent partner – a partner in fighting the terrorism of today, a partner in developing the technology of tomorrow.

Today Israel has diplomatic relations with over 160 countries. That’s nearly double the number that we had when I served here as Israel’s ambassador some 30 years ago. And those ties are getting broader and deeper every day. World leaders increasingly appreciate that Israel is a powerful country with one of the best intelligence services on earth. Because of our unmatched experience and proven capabilities in fighting terrorism, many of your governments seek our help in keeping your countries safe.

Obama, with his Leftist idea of historical determinism will discover sooner rather than later that his drive to abandon Israel and partner with Iran will be looked upon as one of the greatest mistakes, not just in American history, but in world history.

Abbas, of course, had to content himself with lies big and small when he spoke.

Bibi is not idly boasting — Israel is stronger.  When Bibi made the above statements, he meant what he said. Despite the dangerous neighborhood in which Israel lives, and our President’s determined efforts to undermine both Netanayahu and Israel, Bibi has managed to guide Israel through myriad perils and to come out not just safer, but stronger as well:

There is perhaps only one thing harder for the American mind to process than the fact that President Obama has been a terrible foreign policy president [Note: Although I think Obama fully achieved his dangerous and stupid goals], and that is that Bibi Netanyahu is an extraordinarily successful Israeli Prime Minister. In Asia, in Africa, in Latin America, Israel’s diplomacy is moving from strength to strength. Virtually every Arab and Middle Eastern leader thinks that Bibi is smarter and stronger than President Obama, and as American prestige across the Middle East has waned under Obama, Israel’s prestige — even among people who hate it — has grown. Bibi’s reset with Russia, unlike Obama’s, actually worked. His pivot to Asia has been more successful than Obama’s. He has had far more success building bridges to Sunni Muslims than President Obama, and both Russia and Iran take Bibi and his red lines much more seriously than they take Obama’s expostulations and pious hopes.

The reason that Bibi has been more successful than Obama is that Bibi understands how the world works better than Obama does. Bibi believes that in the harsh world of international politics, power wisely used matters more than good intentions eloquently phrased. Obama sought to build bridges to Sunni Muslims by making eloquent speeches in Cairo and Istanbul while ignoring the power political realities that Sunni states cared most about — like the rise of Iran and the Sunni cause in Syria. Bibi read the Sunnis more clearly than Obama did; the value of Israeli power to a Sunni world worried about Iran has led to something close to a revolution in Israel’s regional position. Again, Obama thought that reaching out to the Muslim Brotherhood (including its Palestinian affiliate, Hamas) would help American diplomacy and Middle Eastern democracy. Bibi understood that Sunni states like Egypt and its Saudi allies wanted Hamas crushed. Thus, as Obama tried to end the Gaza war on terms acceptable to Hamas and its allies, Bibi enjoyed the backing of both Egypt and Saudi Arabia in a successful effort to block Obama’s efforts. Israel’s neighbors may not like Bibi, but they believe they can count on him. They may think Obama has some beautiful ideas that he cares deeply about, but they think he’s erratic, unreliable, and doesn’t understand either them or their concerns.

It’s a superb analysis and quite pithy, so be sure to read the whole thing.

Trump supports Israel. For those who support Israel, really support her, not just give her Leftist lip service while undermining her security, it’s significant that Trump, during his meeting with Netanyahu, promised to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. This is a highly important matter because refusing to recognize a nation’s self-chosen capital — one, moreover, that has been self-chosen for around 3,000 years — is to deny implicitly that nation’s legitimacy.

It is true that past presidents have promised, during their campaign, to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, but they’ve always backed off once elected. Roger L. Simon thinks Trump may be different:

To begin with, Trump attended the meeting Sunday in the company of his son-in-law Jared Kushner. Kushner — a real estate investor himself and publisher of The Observer who has emerged as one of Trump’s key advisers — is an Orthodox Jew and therefore takes the Jerusalem issue quite seriously, far more than almost any politician or political professional would.  This could only signal to Netanyahu — and should to all of us — that Trump was not taking the meeting, or anything he said in it, lightly.

[snip]

More importantly, Trump, not being a lifetime politician, would be the first president, basically ever, well-positioned to follow through on the pledge. He has never participated in the seemingly endless rounds of Middle East negotiations.  The ins-and-out of the increasingly dubious Oslo Accords were not his doing.  He can come to all of this fresh, with, let’s hope, common sense.

Recognizing  Jerusalem as the capital of Israel is just the kind of action I think Trump would enjoy taking because, after the initial brouhaha, everybody would realize that nothing really had changed.  The facts on the ground would be the same, Israel would still be allowing Muslim worship at Al Aqsa, and the absurdity of Jerusalem not being recognized as the capital of Israel when it really is would be unmasked.

Obama’s crazy, mixed-up Middle Eastern policy explained. I knew something was deeply wrong with Obama’s foreign policy when he refused to speak up on behalf of the Green Revolution in Iran during the first year of his presidency. I knew that Obama intended to upend the entire Middle East even if meant destroying Israel when he entered into the dangerous and irresponsible Iran agreement. What didn’t occur to me was that every bad thing Obama did in the Middle East from the Green Revolution to the Iran Agreement was all part of the same continuum:

America’s settled policy of standing by while half a million Syrians have been killed, millions have become refugees, and large swaths of their country have been reduced to rubble is not a simple “mistake,” as critics like Nicholas D. Kristof and Roger Cohen have lately claimed. Nor is it the product of any deeper-seated American impotence or of Vladimir Putin’s more recent aggressions. Rather, it is a byproduct of America’s overriding desire to clinch a nuclear deal with Iran, which was meant to allow America to permanently remove itself from a war footing with that country and to shed its old allies and entanglements in the Middle East, which might also draw us into war. By allowing Iran and its allies to kill Syrians with impunity, America could demonstrate the corresponding firmness of its resolve to let Iran protect what President Barack Obama called its “equities” in Syria, which are every bit as important to Iran as pallets of cash.

[snip]

America’s Syria policy can, therefore, be best understood not in the terms most familiar to Mideast analysts, such as “getting Assad to step aside” or “supporting the moderate opposition” or “paving the way to a peaceful transition and elections.” Rather, it is a strategic-communications campaign tightly run from the White House, whose purpose was and is to serve as a smokescreen for an entirely coherent and purposeful policy that comes directly from the president himself, but which he and his aides did not wish to publicly own. The goal of the president and his closest aides is to convince the Iranians that we would meet our commitments to them while confusing and obscuring the real reasons behind the president’s set decision of nonintervention in Syria from American legislators and the public alike.

Obama has proven much more intelligent than I initially gave him credit for being. He’s horribly ill-informed, but he is smart, or he had least has the smarts to employ Machivellian advisors who are able to take his ill-informed and often downright evil theories and turn them into reality.

Things would have been better for America and the world if Obama had been as stupid as his ignorance seemed to indicate. It turns out you don’t need to know what language Austrians speak or about Auschwitz’s liberation to have the type of feral, manipulative intelligence that changes the world for the worse.

The real war on women is in the Muslim world. All my Progressive women friends on Facebook have spent the last two days posting articles explaining “mansplaining” and weepily describing how Trump horribly victimized poor Hillary during the debate. If I’m feeling particularly snarky, I comment that Hillary is going to be functioning in a man’s world, at least when she ventures out of US borders, and that if she can’t handle dealing with Trump, I’m worried about how she’ll manage dealing with, say, Putin….

The other thing I like to do is put up articles about Islam’s inhumane treatment of women, along with the caption that these reports tell of “macro aggressions in the real war against women.” I never hear a peep from the Progressives when I highlight articles such as these:

“Christian Girls are only Meant for One Thing, the Pleasure of Muslim Men”:

  • Recently in Iraq, 19 Yazidi girls were placed in iron cages and burned alive in front of a crowd of hundreds, for refusing to copulate with jihadis.
  • “Religious minority women under IS [Islamic State] control are often repeatedly sold from jihadi to jihadi. Once militants get tired of raping and abusing one particular girl, they usually sell them off to one of their militant buddies so they can rape and abuse them at their own pleasure.” — Samuel Smith, The Christian Post.
  • After their children were abducted by the Islamic State, a couple answered their door to find the body parts of their daughters and a video of them being tortured and raped.
  • “Christian girls are considered goods to be damaged at leisure. Abusing them is a right. According to the community’s mentality it is not even a crime. Muslims regard them as spoils of war.” — Local residents, Pakistan.

A WIFE FOR AN HOUR IN IRAN : How the Islamic Republic is increasing its abuse of women — and using a religious cloak to do it.:

Under Iran’s Islamic and Sharia law, there exist two kinds of halal (religiously permissible) marriages: permanent and temporary. The latter is called “sigheh” or “motaa” (enjoyment). Sigheh is a verbal contract that can last as long as desired; an hour, two hours, half a day, a week, a year, or more. Although sigheh is sold to women as a real marriage and that the man will truly treat the woman as his wife, the real story is different. Normally, in such a contract, the man gives something to the woman (money, place to sleep, etc.) in exchange for sex and complete control over her body and emotions.

[snip]

The “pious” Muslim man or cleric in Iran will normally prey on women who live in poverty and are financially desperate. Some men blackmail women by forcing them into a temporary marriage. Many personal stories reveal how Iranian officials and judges exploit detained girls and promise them that they will set them free if they marry them temporarily. Some virgin girls who are about to be executed are forced to temporarily marry the judge because virgins should not be executed according to Islamic law.

The latest mall shooting and the media’s Muslim narrative. In the old days, reporters allegedly had a saying along the lines of “Dog bites man is not news; man bites dog is.” What the modern media has been trying for some time to do is to turn Muslim mass shootings into non-stories — or, at least, turn the Muslim part of the mass shootings into a dog bites man issue that doesn’t merit reporting.

It’s no surprise that, in the wake of the Cascades Mall shooting, the media, possibly in cahoots with the police, insisted until it was impossible to do so that the shooter was Hispanic. (And yes, I’m sure Hispanics are grateful for the honor). Then, when it turned out he was a Turkish Muslim who supported ISIS and Hillary, the media had nothing to say. All that reporters could do was to keep repeating that he was a scary guy, with the implication that the “scary” had nothing to do with the Islam.

The media’s effort to normalize Muslim shootings, though, might backfire:

So Cetin had a history of violent, abusive behavior, and sexually harassed women. Not coincidentally, he comes from a cultural that sanctifies violent, abusive behavior, particularly toward women: “Men have authority over women because Allah has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because Allah has guarded them. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and send them to beds apart and beat them” (Qur’an 4:34). The Qur’an also teaches that Infidel women can be lawfully taken for sexual use (cf. its allowance for a man to take “captives of the right hand,” 4:3, 4:24, 23:1-6, 33:50, 70:30). The Qur’an says: “O Prophet, tell your wives and your daughters and the women of the believers to bring down over themselves of their outer garments. That is more suitable that they will be known and not be abused. And ever is Allah Forgiving and Merciful.” (33:59) The implication there is that if women do not cover themselves adequately with their outer garments, they may be abused, and that such abuse would be justified.

Arcan Cetin may not have known or cared about any of those Qur’an passages. But he may have lived in an environment in which such attitudes were taken for granted. Ex-Muslim cartoonist Bosch Fawstin has recounted how, even growing up in a secular, non-observant Muslim household, anti-Semitism and misogyny were commonplace and taken for granted. Even though no one in the house was particularly devout, no one thought to question the bedrock assumptions that Jews were evil and women were inferior.

It seems appropriate to mention that Ahmed the clock boy is suing everyone in sight. It will be yet another failure of American justice if Hillary walks, but Ahmed’s targets are found liable.

The real crusades came from Muslims.  We haven’t heard much lately about whites being guilty of the crusades. Perhaps the UN is too busy trying to extort the US over the long-ago slave trade, never mind that the slave trade is still alive and well amongst Muslims in the Middle East and Africa, and never mind that every nation in the world has practiced slavery at one time or another (including the Brits who were the ones who got it started in the Caribbean and the Americas, first with the Irish who died too easily and then with the more sturdy African slaves). Nevertheless, it’s useful to remember that, if you’re looking for a religion that’s all about conquest and slavery, look no further than Islam:

And finally, a song for the current generation of colonizers. The song is from Australia, but I think you’ll get the gist: