Daily Blurb #3

Free Jonathan Pollard

Yesterday Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented a letter to Barack Obama requesting clemency for Jonathan Pollard, a man who has been in prison for 25 years for a crime which usually attracts prison time of  no more than four to seven years.  Pollard’s crime was to deliver  classified documents to the Israeli government which had a bearing on U.S. relations with the Soviet Union and greviously affected the intelligence gathering this involved.  It was claimed at the time that Pollard’s spy work led directly to the death of U.S.  operatives in the Soviet Union  and around the world.  Following the opening of the Soviet archives  in the late 1990s, it became clear that Pollard’s activities had almost no impact on U.S.-Soviet relations and in the words of late former  Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, who had at one time become the most devoted anti-Pollard declaimer,  its impact on U.S. intelligence gathering “was minor.” Why, then, is he still in jail, serving a life sentence for activities that put  him on the same level of Aldrich Ames and Robert Hansen, whose spying really did result in the deaths of American operatives?

The answer is that as much as at least two  presidents have sought to commute his unreasonable sentence ( which was itself imposed in direct contravention of a plea bargain), the outcry from the defense and intelligence establishment has been so strenuous that neither  Bill Clinton nor George W. Bush felt the political costs worth the effort.

Yet coming at a time when U.S.- Israel relations are at an all time low, the release  of Pollard, who became an Israeli citizen a decade ago, could aid efforts to improve attitudes on both sides.   Certainly Barack Obama, who has the most unfavorable rating among the Israelis of any American president in history, could benefit from this beneficent act.  Notwithstanding the fact that basic justice demands it.

Iran Rejects Western Culture

There is no better indicator  of Islamic  Iran’s approaching death rattle than this piece from yesterday’s Washington Post.  Iranian universities and public schools, which have been surprisingly free during the course of the revolution to teach Western science and the humanities are now being overhauled to be properly Islamicized.   The government’s ” Program for Fundamental Evolution in Education and Training,” amount to the kind of social and cultural engineering predicted by George Orwell in 1984.  By seeking to strip the curricula of schools and universities of Western humanistic values the regime, in an effort to control a burgeoning middle class whose increasing emphasis is on individualism, will only feed the fire of counter revolution, the embers of which still smolder from the June, 2009 uprising.  The Internet, which the regime is also seeking to control, will play a leading role in bringing together opposition groups who will eventually join to topple the regime.  Perhaps the gutting of the education system may prove the last straw.

Jeff Danzinger and the Ivory Coast Cartoon

I have always wondered why cartoonists are cut far more slack than any other editorial writer.  They literally get away with murder in both their irreverence for facts and their willingness to parody the truth.  Take Jeff Danzinger’s cartoon which appeared in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times.  Danzinger’s makes the unsubtle comparison here between Ivory Coast’s defeated president Laurent Gbagbo and the Bush/ Cheney victory in the 2000 election.  Both, you see, failed to receive a plurality of votes from the public, but both nevertheless clung to power – supposeldy, at least in Danzinger’s mind, illegitimately.

The analogy is as spurious as it is hateful.   Gbagbo’s followers have unleashed a campaign of violence and intimidation against the declared victor Ouattara’s supporters, resulting inthe  suspected deaths of 200 people.   A mass grave report is being investigated.  Nothing of the sort followed the inconclusive Bush- Gore election of 2000.   During the month it took to sort out the results, there were no violent uprisings, no killings and both camps conducted themselves with dignity  as the results of the Florida returns were examined.

The matter eventually fell to the U.S. Supreme Court which adjudicated the matter and assigned the victory to Bush who had constitutionally secured enough electoral votes to assume office.

We should note that Danzinger’s cartoon, which draws such an invidious comparison, actually mocks our own Constitution by assuming that Bush was as illegitimate a leader as an African tinpot dictator.  It is unfathomable how such a stupid and constitutionally illiterate a comparison could be made by a cartoonist of such experience and renown.    The readers of the Los Angeles Times deserve much better.

Europe’s Islamic Republic

‘Eurabia’ has become a popularly employed neologism in recent years to describe the slow melding of cultures in Europe.  Those fearful of an eventual eclipse of European civilization by a fast growing Muslim population have emphasized Europe’s ever widening acceptance of Muslim practices and beliefs – even when they directly conflict with notions of Western morality and accepted behavior.

But as events in London last week clearly demonstrate, political developments on the continent may be fast outstripping the pace of cultural transformation.  The startling election of the Islamist Lutfur Rahman as the first executive mayor of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets could offer us a harrowing glimpse into Europe’s Eurabian future.

Mr. Rahman belongs to the Islamic Forum of Europe, an organization which has expressed contempt for democracy and support for jihad and the imposition of sharia law on British society.  In March, the Channel 4 program Dispatches, undertaking an investigate report of the organization, found that Islamist influences were dominant in the organization.  Azad Ali, the IFE’s community affairs coordinator in London, was quoted declaring: “Democracy……..if it means at the expense of not implementing the sharia, of course no one agrees with that.” A  2009 recruitment manual for the group states its program in unequivocal language:

“Our goal is not simply to invite people and give da’wah [call to the faith]. Our goal is to create the True Believer, to then mobilise those believers into an organised force for change who will carry out da’wah, hisbah [enforcement of Islamic law] and jihad [struggle]. This will lead to social change and iqamatud-Deen [an Islamic social, economic and political order].”

The organization maintains close ties with the East London Mosque in which Jammat al Islami – a fundamentalist Bangladeshi Islamic party, holds sway.

After the Dispatches broadcast, the former U.K. Minister for the Environment, Jim Fitzpatrick, took up the anti-IFE banner claiming that the IFE had a carefully constructed plan to infiltrate the British Labour Party:

“They are acting almost as an entryist organisation, placing people within the political parties, trying to get individuals selected and elected so they can exercise political influence and power.”

The rise of a politically active class of Islamic fundamentalists has long been expected in Europe but few thought their rise would be so swift and sudden in Britain.  Due to some recent voter approved structural changes in the political organization of the Borough, the new mayor of the town has almost sole authority over a nearly $1 billion budget. His authority to effect change to Borough rules and regulations is without precedent in the history of local British government.

What, then, can the non-Muslim denizens of Tower Hamlets now expect?

Construction projects for one  – such as the so-called “Hijab Gates” – huge arches in the shape of the Muslim veil – at either end of the area’s famous Brick Lane.  Community libraries filled, as they have been over the past two years, with extremist Islamic literature; Streets renamed with Islamic motifs ( many street signs already appear in  English  and Bengali);  Major community thoroughfares blocked and closed down in celebration of the Eid Festival;  and the increasing harassment of Muslim and non- Muslim women who dress immodestly ( as was witnessed during the mayoral election campaign).

It is natural for certain areas of large Western cities to go through  significant demographic change over time.  The East End of London, after all, once maintained a very strong Jewish population and flavor.   But at no time could the area have ever been described as controlled by Jewish law.

That Tower Hamlets may indeed become the first of its kind in Europe – an autonomous Islamic enclave governed primarily by Islamic law – is a worrying development that no one in Europe now has the luxury to ignore.

Avi Davis is the President of the American Freedom Alliance in Los Angeles.  He blogs at  The Intermediate Zone and  Los Angeles Jewish Journal’s On the Other Hand

Do the U.C. Regents Really Know What is Going On?

Several weeks ago, my friends Tammi Rossman- Benjamin, a lecturer in Hebrew at U.C. Santa Cruz and Leila Beckwith, Professor Emeritus at UCLA,  contacted me about a letter which they wished to address to Mark Yudof, President of U.C. California – the largest college system in the United States.    They expressed their outrage with the failure of Yudof and the U. C. Regents to adequately address the rising tide of anti-Semitism on  California college campuses and the apparent ease with which Muslim groups and other left wing organizations are able to demonize Jews and Israel in the most vile and inciting language.

In the letter, to which they asked me to append  my name and the endorsement of the American Freedom Alliance, they outlined some of the outrageous attacks to which Jewish students have been subjected over the past several years.  To wit:

“ Over the last several years, Jewish students have been subjected to -  swastikas and other anti-Semitic graffiti; acts of physical and verbal aggression; speakers, films and exhibits that use anti-Semitic imagery and discourse; speakers that praise and encourage support for terrorist organizations that openly advocate murder against Israel and the Jewish people; the organized disruption of events sponsored by Jewish student groups; and most recently, the promotion of student senate resolutions for divestment that seek to demonize and delegitimize the Jewish State.”

The crowning incident of these macabre developments occurred when grotesque gestures and obscene epithets were hurled at Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, when he attempted to deliver an address to students at U.C. Irvine on February 8.  Eleven students , most of them belonging to the college’s Muslim Student Union, were arrested for civil disturbance.

The incident not only shone a kleig light on the problematic campus but also pointed to intense problems of oversight within the U.C. system itself.   The failure of the Board of Regents to adequately discipline  a campus which has witnessed repeated instances of  anti- semitic outbursts from Muslim students and has paid little attention to the growing climate of intolerance, was a making a farce of  the Regents’ professed multicultural ethos.

President Yudof’s answer was to institute a series of  campus climate committees -  groups of academics, campus administrators and lay leaders who might represent a broad multicultural approach to resolving campus problems.

Tammi and Leila’s letter attacked the Yudof plan as being out of touch with reality since it does not expressly deal with the most egregious form of bigotry and hatred -  the attack on Jews and supporters of Israel.  In other words, their contention was that the campus climate committees have not been convened to specifically address anti-Semitism – which accounts for 80% of the threatened violence and racial slurs on campus, but have been given wide purview for an investigation embracing all forms of racism.   The letter composed by Rossman- Benjamin, Beckwith and U.C. Irvine lecturer Roberta Seid, gave explicit recommendations for the course the U.C. President ( himself an observant Jew) , should undertake.

They are too numerous to enumerate here but fall under the rubric of one basic directive : Call this intolerance and bigotry for what it is -  a resurgence of the same anti-Semitism which has  its roots planted deeply in Western history.

Yudof, disappointingly, has not risen to this challenge.  In a letter, dated July 2 and addressed to the fourteen named leaders of organizations who signed the original June 28 letter( myself included)  he ducks the demand that the Board of Regents  expressly name anti-Semtism as the number one cause of disturbances  on our campuses.   Instead he urges that the multicultural campus climate change committees be given the opportunity to do their work and provide their recommendations for dealing with outbreaks of racism.

Fair enough.   I can take Yudof at his word and wait for his committees to do their work.   But we are  all, nevertheless, absolutely correct to be skeptical.   For multicultural panels throughout the West , such as the ones he has convened, have proved themselves regularly inept in addressing outbreaks of anti-Semitism, particularly from within the Muslim community.  Read almost any British newspaper these days ( or the reports that we present weekly from that country in The Western Word) and you will find evidence of multicultural city councils, police boards and government agencies  surrendering to the cultural sensitivities of Muslim communities, abjectly bowing to their supposed ‘multicultural’ and rights of free speech to express anger about  Israeli policies and against any Jew who supports them.

I rather like Sharon Rappeport’s response to Yudof’s letter.    She states that sensible monarchs learned centuries ago that  there is never a  substitute for first hand experience and every now and then it is good for the King to wander amongst his subjects to see for himself what is really going on in the streets of his towns and villages.

“  May I suggest then that you dress as do many of your ( observant Jewish)  students:  with a beard, kippa, and tzitzit–the strings hanging on the outside. Then attend a free speech “talk” by Abdul Malek at U.C. Irvine or Santa Cruz and discover what it feels like to be pointed at and screamed at by him and intimidated by his menacing bodyguards. Hang out at “the wall” during “Israel Apartheid Week”–choose any of the U.C. campuses–and try entering a discussion with the organizers of that hate fest, surrounded by banners equating Jews with Nazis. They will tell you straight out that they believe you should be killed.”

It seems inevitable that while the climate change committees slowly deliberate over the nature of  violent rhetoric that has engulfed California campuses in recent years,  actual violence and murder may not be too far away.

At that point, with blood  spilled on our campuses, it may be too late for Mark Yudof and his Board of Regents to officially recognize that, yes, indeed, we have an antisemitic problem that cannot be met by subscription to the usual multicultural pieties or soft touch policies.  They can only be stamped out by resort to the most draconian methods  – either the dissolution of campus organizations, expulsion of the offending students or direct charges of criminal behavior.

Lessons from the Fall of Stanley McChrystal

Reading Rolling Stone Magazine for its journalism is no easy task for anyone who is in the least sanguine about our most important financial and political institutions.   Its raging tirades against corporations, multinationals, Wall Street bankers, Republicans and George W. Bush are so bilious that they leave screaming provocateurs like MSNBC’s Keith Olderman in the dust.

So it is quite in keeping that the Magazine has launched its latest anti-establishment jeremiad against the Afghanistan War and  done its best to expose Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his staff as sneering insubordinates who have no respect for the army’s civilian commanders.

But reading the same  article that  led to the General’s downfall, the intention to destroy the general’s career, does not exactly shine through.

In fact, quite the opposite is the case.   The article is a competent examination of  army leadership during war time and a portrait of the century’s long disconnect between civilian commanders – in -chief  and generals in the field.

Stanley McChrystal was, after all, not the first military  man to express frustration with civilian leaders in Washington.

George Washington did son during the Revolutionary War;  George McClellan did so to Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War;  General  ” Black Jack” Pershing criticized Woodrow Wilson in the First World War and Douglas McArthur did the same to Harry Truman in Korea.

Generals become exasperated with the failures of the civilian command to understand or appreciate military strategy and to consider diplomatic or political considerations before military ones.

We shouldn’t forget how difficult it is to convey the seriousness of any given military situation without actually seeing the situation on the ground.

For this reason Winston Churchill, who had served several periods in the army during war time, made a point of traveling regularly to the front (particularly after the invasion of Normandy), in order to confer directly with his generals about the war’s progress.  Adolf Hitler  spent most of the Second World War in a bunker complex on the Eastern Front,  so determined was he to remain close to the action.

In Stanley McChrytal’s case, it was only a few words – references to the incompetence of the civilian command in the persons of the Ambassador to Afghanistan, the Vice President and the President – but those same impressions are almost certainly on the mind of most of the American servicemen in that country.   This should be no wonder  since they are repeatedly told that that they can not undertake such and such an action, lest it bring about severe political consequences.

This  is made no clearer than in the The Last 600 Meters – a documentary AFA screened last Sunday.  In its portrayal of the Battles for Fallujah and Najaf in 2004, the two deadliest battles of the Iraqi War, soldiers who fought in the battles, report themselves as mystified by the decisions of the civilian commanders to shackle them and forbid advances which could have eliminated significant strategic threats to the stability of Iraq.  In one instance,  the Mahdi Militia is cornered and about to be annihilated, ( removing a significant threat to American and Iraqi lives), when an order emerges from Washington, via Paul Bremer, to withdraw.

The soldiers are shown to be completely exasperated by the order and it is only explained to them well after the fact that the damage to Iraqi infrastructure and the loss of civilian life in the towns has forced upon the politicians a reconsidered approach.

Since the far off  days of Julius Caesar, civilian commanders have been wary of the runaway general in the field, who arrogates to himself all decision making.  The fear of  a general drunk on power, without sufficient restraints and respect for his own commanders, is an abiding concern of all democracies.

But we should not forget that while a professional army in a republic such as ours  works for us and is there to do our bidding, a commander-in-chief such as Barack Obama, who comes to the job  with less experience than any President in history, should learn better when to defer to his men in the field, invest a measure of faith in their experience and acumen and treat their military decisions with respect.

No, they should not have to tolerate open insubordination or publicly expressed contempt.  But at the same time they should have the humility to understand that the vital success of a military mission rests on the clear eyed vision of men in the field and there will never be a substitute for that bird’s eye view.

“Constructive Dialogue” on California Campuses

It is not often that you get a chance to look directly into the face of what Hannah Arendt termed the banality of evil.  But  David Horowitz had a chance to do just that at  U.C. San Diego earlier this week.   Horowitz was speaking at an event organized by the College Republicans.

As Michael Totten reports on his blog:

“Horowitz and his bodyguard received multiple verbal threats from members of the Muslim Students Association as they walked into the lecture hall.  One student threatened, “Horowitz! Why don’t you come back here without your bodyguard and see what happens.”  In spite of the threats, Horowitz’s lecture was attended by a crowd of about 200 students and supporters, and he was able to deliver his presentation without interruption.

The most notable moment of the evening came during the question and answer period when Horowitz had a chilling exchange with a member of the MSA in which he prodded the student to reveal the depraved depths of her Jew-hatred.

After the student refused to condemn the terrorist organization Hamas which seeks the extermination of the Jews, Horowitz addressed her saying, “I am a Jew.  The head of Hizbollah has said that he hopes that we will gather in Israel so he doesn’t have to hunt us down globally. For or against it?”

The MSA member responded, “For it.”

Horowitz then thanked the student for attending his lecture and revealing to everyone the Muslim Students Association’s true intentions towards the Jews and Israel.

“The surprising part about this exchange is not the depth of the student’s hatred for the Jews, but that she was willing to admit it in front of an audience,” commented Horowitz. “When I spoke at UC-Santa Barbara, fifty members of the MSA were sitting in the audience, and not one of them would condemn Hamas or Hizbollah.”

The startling thing about this exchange  is that such bare faced advocacy for the annihilation of an another people does not flutter an eyelash among university administrators, College Democrats or many left wing Jewish organizations.   There is a tacit acceptance that such a response deserves to stand as a reflection of the student’s right to hold and express whatever views she wishes.

A teacher of the student at UCSD was quick to condemn Horowitz but not the student.He wrote on Horowitz’s blog:

” This girl is actually my student.”  A. Casavantes wrote on the comment’s section of  Howrowitz’s blog.  ” I know her to be an intelligent , moral young woman who actually believes in peace.  As a peace loving Catholic teacher , I am saddened that this speaker – her elder- manipulated the conversation in this fashion to make her look like someone she isn’t , out of an egotistical desire to prove his own point rather than engaging in a constructive dialogue.”

But there is nothing intelligent nor moral about the student’s response.  Nor can Horowitz be seen to be manipulating anything at all.  He asked a direct question and received a direct answer.   What the comments reveals  is that UCSD professors are apparently willing to condone the expression of views of murder on campus but have only words of vitriol to level at conservative speakers who expose them.

Another nail in the coffin of our hallowed institutions of learning where constructive dialogue long ago became a fig leaf for the importation of the most hateful and destructive ideologies.

How English is Your Burqa?

Five years ago no one thought it could happen.   But today the traditional Islamic dress for women -  a burqa or veil that covers the entirety of a woman’s body save for a narrow opening for the eyes -  is under assault throughout Europe.

France has been debating legislation for nearly two years to ban the burqa and recent polls indicate that nearly 70% of respondents favor the ban.  As the Financial Times revealed in a report on March 2, in Spain 63%  favor the ban while in Italy the number is 65%.  In Germany the number is slightly less at 52%, but nevertheless shows a majority in favor.

Across Europe, there is a deep sense that change is in the air.   Switzerland voted in January to ban the further construction of minarets in Swiss towns and polls at the time revealed continent wide support for the measure.   In Denmark, Kurt Westegaard, the cartoonist who penned the now famous ‘Mohammed with a bomb in his turban’ cartoon and which is said to have sparked Muslim riots around the world, is being treated  as a local hero and the trial of Geert Wilders,whose film Fitna ( a 14 minute collection of film clips without narration depicting the development of Islam in modern times) is fast transforming him into one of the most popular politicians in Europe.

The burqa, for many Europeans, has become a symbol of clerical oppression and female subjugation and a portent of what awaits them if current trends continue.  Religious liberty, one of the great accomplishments of the French Enlightenment and a hallmark of liberal democracy, is now slowly giving way to a sense that tolerating the intolerant is not resulting in the expected assimilation of restive minorities, but with an anti-democratic cancer metastisizing in the very heart of their continental enterprise.

Why is this happening now?   Simply this:  Continental Europeans are beginning to awaken from their long multicultural slumber.   Quite aware that loose immigration policies, extensive welfare benefits and collapsed social programs have failed to absorb Muslim minorities, Europeans are demanding that brakes be placed on multicultural policies that have only served to erode national identity and create virtual autonomous zones within certain European countries where police fear to tread.

That is all true enough for the continent.  But in the U.K. things are decidedly different.   As I have written repeatedly over the past few years, ( see England’s Muliticultural Revolution and Combating Terrorism for example) and have debated at our international conference  The Collapse of Europe? ,  the United Kingdom is on a fast track to civilizational collapse with very few politicians, academics or social leaders displaying enough courage to challenge the country’s most important institutions in the apparent accommodation of a Muslim ascendancy.

Why, we might ask, has England – the lone holdout against Nazism in the early 1940s and a country renowned for pride in its traditions, allowed itself to be so weakened by multicultural pieties and appeasing attitudes?  The answer is that leftist politcians, from the former mayor of London Ken Livingstone and parliamentarian, George Galloway to former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, have cravenly bought into the notion that England’s future is dependent on respecting foreign cultures, even when those which express no respect for England’s heritage, system of government or democratic values.    This attitude, cultivated at British universities by leftist ideologues and imbued in schoolchildren from an early age,  has resulted in a society fatally unsure of itself and insecure about its place in the world.  It is a country given over to a panic that the rise of militant Islam within its midst has been, against all better judgment, the result of  its own racist policies and the denial to Muslims of the proper expression of their identity.  The result is more accommodation, not less  – and the staggering growth in Muslim power.

These elites, of course, bear deep guilt.   They are embarrassed that the British Empire might have once been so indulgent as to have sought to expand its territories;  they are ashamed by the rapacity of  its colonial ambitions;  they feel humiliated that British mercantile trade  might have grown fat on the backs of native labor.  The sins of the fathers, so the current thinking goes, can only be salved through a national campaign of repentance.

Therefore, while Continental Europe begins to pull out of its tailspin, the United Kingdom, with Scotland and Wales perhaps peeling off at some point in the future and the former Commonwealth countries turning their backs, may be in for a civil strife that it could never have been anticipated when it first opened its doors to Muslim immigrants in the mid-1960s.

Suffice to say, English legislation to ban the burqa on the lines of the French, will almost certainly never be proposed.  But the absence of such legislation, while the rest of Europe begins its slow awakening, is a bitter commentary on the future of a once proud nation.

History Dead or Alive!

Anyone with the desire to obtain a sense of what our children are learning about Islam in school, would be well served by paying attention to some of our children’s history text books.  

The California standard 7^th Grade text for history is titled , “History Alive! The Medieval World and Beyond.” Not only is it rife with mistruths about medieval history, but it blatantly glorifies and promotes Islam at the expense of  Christianity.

History Alive! is a standard text and used in most of our country’s public schools. You would think that an American text book devoted to the medieval world would provide a balanced picture of pre-Enlightenment Europe and its accomplishments. 

But you would be wrong.  

This text barely scrapes together an outline of the Western civilization’s growth and development, but spends an inordinate amount of space displaying the growth (and worth) of Islam.   In fact an entire unit, 55 pages, featuring such chapter titles as The Geography of the Arabian Peninsula, The Prophet Muhammad and Islam’s Contribution to World Civilization, glorifies Islam’s contributions to our civilization while failing entirely to  recount  the bloodshed that accompanied its conquest of most of the Mediterranean world. 

The obvious impression left is that Islam’s spread was peaceful and benign, being implemented through trade and cultural exchange. Unanswered is how Islam converted populaces so implicitly unhappy with their heritage, that they forsook Christianity to take up a new religion. 

Strangely enough Christianity, in the same time period, has only 15 pages devoted to it – mainly centering on the Crusades, which are described as violent campaigns and massacres launched as attempts to regain captured lands.    Judaism is barely mentioned except in terms of the Spanish Inquisition.  There is no reference at all to the philosophical contributions of St. Thomas Aquinas, Maimonides, Solomon Ibn Ezra and William of Ockam.    Nor is there much discussion of English Common Law, crucial to the growth of the continental legal system and the future American system of justice.

Additionally, Christian beliefs are presented as legends while the claims of Islam are presented as facts. For instance, “Moses claimed to receive the Ten Commandments from God” but Mohammad simply “received the Koran from God”. 

On the subject of Jihad: “Muslims should fulfill jihad with the heart, tongue, and hand. Muslims use the heart in their struggle to resist evil. The tongue may convince others to take up worthy causes, such as funding medical research. Hands may perform good works and correct wrongs.” 

No mention of the carnage and havoc wrought by Jihad’s call to arms throughout the medieval period. 

There was also substantial puffery and misinformation. The text tells us that Muhammad “taught equality and told his followers to share their wealth and to care for the less fortunate in society,”  –  a fact even most Islamic scholars might dispute. 

Where does all this come from? 

Well in 1998, the California State Board of Education adopted “History, Social Science Content Standards for CA Public Schools” which explicitly defines the content that students need to learn at each grade level.  For 7^th Grade history,  students are required, among a number of other things, to analyze the geographic, political, economic, religious, and social structures of the civilizations of Islam in the Middle Ages. Within the prescribed activities, they must explain the significance of the Qur’an and the Sunnah as the primary sources of Islamic beliefs, practice, and law, and their influence in Muslims’ daily life, discussing the expansion of Muslim rule through military conquests and treaties while emphasizing the spread and acceptance of Islam and the Arabic language. 

In other words, Californian 7th grade students must receive instruction and engage in activities to learn about Islamic history, culture and religious practices, whether they want to or not.  The guidelines indicate that the school’s approach to religion should be academic, not devotional and that the school may sponsor study about religion, but may not sponsor the practice of religion. 

It is important to note that the textbook’s publisher, Teacher’s Curriculum Institute (TCI), enjoys a close relationship with the Islamic Networks Group (ING), a Muslim propaganda agency based in San Jose, California. The ING website was formerly connected to several Islamist websites, including a propaganda outlet in Madinah, Saudi Arabia.   It sported a website devoted to corrupting American history–and endorsing TCI textbooks. ING promotes no other schoolbook publisher.

The book credits Ayad Al-Qazzaz as its chief author-advisor on Islam. Al Qazzaz is professor of sociology at California State University, Sacramento who is a Muslim apologist and  a frequent speaker in Northern California school districts promoting Islam and Arab causes. He also co-authored The Arab World Notebook, issued by the Arab World and Islamic Resources (AWAIR) which is a proselytizing non-profit organization that conducts teacher workshops and sells supplementary materials to schools.

 Maybe it all began innocently enough with a State Board attempting to create a balanced multicultural approach to education.  

But this text is only multicultural in the sense that it presents the historical narratives of a range of cultures, without critique or comment and without offering any support for the value of the culture and civilization to which the students belong. 

The American Textbook Council (ATC), a national non-profit watchdog group, singled out History Alive! for its bias and prejudice, excoriating it for “an incomplete and confected view of Islam that misrepresents its foundations and challenges to international security.” 

In a 2008 report, ATC spells out a damning indictment of the way such spurious material like this makes it into school texts throughout the country.   Its conclusions are worth quoting in full: 

“Textbook editors try to avoid any subject that could turn into a political grenade. Willingly, they adjust the definition of jihad and sharia or remove these words from lessons to avoid inconvenient truths that the editors fear activists will contest. Explicit facts that non-Muslims might find disturbing are varnished or deleted. Textbooks pare to a minimum such touchy subjects as Israel and oil as agents of change in the Middle East since 1945. Terrorism and Islam are uncoupled and the ultimate dangers of Islamic militancy hidden from view.

 None of this is accidental.  Islamic organizations, willing to sow misinformation, are active in curriculum politics. These activists are eager to expunge any critical thought about Islam from textbooks and all public discourse. They are succeeding, assisted by partisan scholars and associations. It is not remarkable that Islamic organizations would try to use ready-made American political movements such as multiculturalism to adjust the history curriculum to their advantage. It is alarming that so many individuals with the power to shape the curriculum are willfully blind to or openly sympathetic with these efforts. 

These distortions and biases about Islam in history textbooks could not prevail were it not for the all-important bridge between Islamist activists and multicultural organizations on and off campus. Both are eager to restrict what textbooks say about Islam. Multiculturalists are determined that social studies curricula do not transmit “Eurocentric”or “triumphalist” presuppositions about Western history and society. Middle East centers on campuses promote an uncritical view of Islam, often with a caustic anti-Western spin. Historians actively interested in taking world history curricula in this direction are prominent in textbook authorship. Encouraged to do so by reputable authorities, textbook publishers court the Council on Islamic Education and other Muslim organizations—or at least try to appease them. This legitimacy is bestowed in spite of longstanding questions about sources of funding and degree of control over publishers.”

 All parents should be concerned about these developments and should demand to be given a say in how Islam is portrayed in our children’s textbooks.  For the current curriculum and the texts themselves amount to a whitewash of Islamic teachings and history, failing entirely to account for a 1400-year- long legacy of Jihad and attempts to subvert the West.

The fact that the global  terrorist campaigns we witness today derive their legitimacy and inspiration from the same teachings that drove the Islamic conquests of medieval times, should be something our students know and learn.   This must be so no matter how and whether it breaches the boundaries of accepted multicultural dogma or aspirations.

Europe’s Malaise

Europeans have it good these days. Their life expectancy has never been higher. Benevolent state health care systems take care of their ailments from cradle to grave; working hours are short and vacations long; they are the wealthiest inhabitants of the continent in history, possessing an average continent-wide per captia income of $22,500.

Then why are they so damn miserable?  

The European impending sense of doom is addressed in Theodore Dalrymple’s  The New Vichy Syndrome :  Why  European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism.

A fatalistic world view is certainly not new to Europe.  Since the First World War, French artists, Spanish writers, Italian politicians and British poets have predicting the demise of the West  and the collapse of  social order.  That grew, as Dalrymple points out, from a manifest disillusionment about a war that served  little purpose yet annihilated an entire generation. 

Dalrymple quickly puts to rest an argument offered by a host of other polemicists  such as Mark Steyn and Bruce Bawer, that Muslim population growth and declining European fertlity rates will soon enough result is a catastrophic demographic shift.  In fact, fertility rates are declining in the Muslim population almost as rapidly as they are in regular European society. In addition, Muslims are assimilating faster than either Bawer or Steyn would care to admit, even though what remains publicly apparent is the extremist version of Islam, represented by flailing Imams and rioting youth.

No, Europeans, according to The New Vichy, are undergoing a far more devastating internal existential crisis, one in which they can no longer see  much value in Europe’s  storied past or undoubted achievements and can’t see much of a future either. 

What are the symptoms that Dalymple, a retired physician, has diagnosed  in his patient?

The first is bitterness at the loss of  European power and significance.  Since the end of the Second World War, Europe has lagged behind the United States in both production and productivity while allowing the technological revolution to be centered in places like Silicon Valley and Herzilya  and not at the Sorbonne or the British Midlands.

Second, they bear limitless guilt  for having imposed upon the world colonialism, the Holocaust  and a raft of totalitarian ideologies which resulted in the mass murder of tens of millions. 

The Europeans can’t seem to forgive themselves for having ruined the world and for having  been tied to every malevolent development in world history since the beginning of the 20th century.

Third, is  the sense that the elites of Europe – the intellectuals, political class, media and entertainment communities have felt the loss their entitlements as leaders of social change.  And what better way to achive social change than the wholesale restructing of society to suit their own ends?   This underlines the reason the environmental movement and global governance movement has gained so much traction in Europe.   They offer these same elites a respository for their disillusion and a way forward for the reconsolidation of their power. 

It all adds up to an acute attack of miserablism, an orotund term that Dalrymple employs as a designation for the nihilistic disease which afflicts European elites today.

Well, that all could be.  But the author seems to skip over the most salient fact of all – Europeans have opted to live in the apparent comfort of a post-enlightenment world, where there is neither good nor evil, right nor wrong and where the benefits of democracy and the results of a hard won freedom are largely ignored in favor a politically relativist culture.  Europeans have forgotten what it means to be free and in the process, denuded their own culture and civlization of any moral purpose. 

Dalrymple might have developed this theme a little more forcefully by actually focusing on the writings of leading contemporary European intellectuals and revealing how morally spent they are.  Offering an examination, for example, of the writings of  Labévière, del Valle, Burgat or Gallois might have buttressed his argument with specific examples of the kind of intellectual, political and economic malaise he describes.

For all that, The New Vichy Syndrome is a powerful book  which raises some significant questions about the fate of  Europe and the bloated Union it has established.  At the very least the book furnishes proof  that there do exist Europeans who are still capable of understanding the mess continent is in and willing to state plainly how it got that way.

A True Prisoner of Conscience

The spectacle of a former prominent member of Amnesty International publicly lambasting that institution for its support of foreign despots and serial human rights abusers, should make everyone sit up and take notice.

Gita Sahgal was once a senior official of Amnesty International, heading the International Secretariat’s Gender Unit.   That was until she sent an email to Amnesty’s top bosses, suggesting that the organization had mistakenly allied itself with Cage Prisoners , a group led by Moazzem Begg, a former Guantanomo Bay inmate.

“I believe the campaign fundamentally damages Amnesty International’s integrity and, more importantly, constitutes a threat to human rights,” Sahgal wrote in the email  of January 30. “To be appearing on platforms with Britain’s most famous supporter of the Taliban, whom we treat as a human rights defender, is a gross error of judgment.”

Within days she was summarily suspended from her position.

For those who might be unfamiliar with his name, Moazzem Begg is an Islamist who insists that the Taliban was the best government available to Afghanistan and who unabashedly promotes its jihadist insurgency.   His organization defends Islamists  such as Abu Hamza, leader of the mosque that sheltered Richard “Shoe Bomber” Reid , among many other violent and criminal characters who have have nothing at all to do with freedom of expression.    Its  senior members can also be seen speaking in defense of jihad at rallies sponsored by the extremist groups such as  Hizb-ut Tahrir (banned in many Muslim countries) and Tablighi Jamaat.

Going public, Sahgal stated inthe Sunday Times:  

” As a former Guantanamo detainee, it was legitimate to hear his experiences, but as a supporter of the Taliban it was absolutely wrong to legitimise him as a partner,”

So what exactly is a nice organization like Amnesty International doing with creeps like this?  That is a question I’ve been asking for nearly 20 years.

Many of us in Southern California who listen to Santa Monica-based radio station KCRW, remember how Amnesty International was once held in rather high esteem there.   For years Ruth Seymour, the station’s general manager, offered listeners the opportunity each month to provide financial and moral support to one of Amnesty’s  Prisoners of Conscience – dissidents who might be rotting away in a foreign jail for no other crime than expressing their right to free speech.  Listeners would be urged to write letters to appropriate government officials urging humane, legal treatment of the prisoner or advocating the prisoner’s release.  

Nothing wrong with that.  In fact, the moral rectitude of AI’s mission was always unassailable: ” to undertake research and action focused on preventing and ending grave abuses of the rights to physical and mental integrity, freedom of conscience and expression, and freedom from discrimination, within the context of its work to promote all human rights.”

But over time, the organization’s very concept of  “human rights,” began to expand.  Not content to be a mere reporter of crimes committed against individuals, it sought a role in molding events.    To reap influence, the leaders of the London based institution decided that “human rights” needed to embrace not simply  individual cases of repression but the concept of social justice as well.

So from the early 1990s onwards, Amnesty International, unbeknownst to its global membership, began a surrpetitious slide into shadowy political advocacy, a position that would ultimately align it with the most vile human rights abusers on the planet.

 Today it is not only authoritarian despots who conceive of AI as a far left organization with a political agenda, but large numbers of  former supporters whose politics have not kept up with AI’s rapid radicalization.  The organization’s extraordinary level of animus leveled at the United States; its incessant promotion of  Noam Chomsky (infamous for his denials of the Cambodian killing fields,  Serbian concentration camps and latter day support for the Taliban); its preference for extolling the virtues of repressive regimes such as Cuba, Myanmar and Zimbabwe and its enthusiastic participation in the 2001 Durban United Nations World Conference Against Racism, an antisemitic hatefest, has underlined the complete erosion of its founding principles in the interests of radical politics.

Thats not to mention its problems with the very existence of the State of Israel.   In fact, more energy is given over by Amnesty to its attacks on Israel than any other areas of  its activities.  In May 2007, NGO Monitor released the results of its quantitative analysis of Amnesty International’s 2006 publications and alerts vis a vis human rights violations. According to the study, Israel had been the subject of 63 such Amnesty documents that year, more than any country in the Middle East except Iran. The corresponding numbers for other nations and notable entities in the region were as follows: Sudan (61 documents), Syria (51), Iraq (29), Hezbollah (20), Algeria (19), Tunisia (15), Egypt (13), Jordan (12), the Palestinian Authority (10), Libya (6), Saudi Arabia (6), and Morocco (5). 

Now you wouldn’t know any of this if you lived in London today.   Amnesty International’s  reputation for dispassionate reporting on human rights abuses is so pristine that it is supported by a host of celebrities from Bono to John Cleese to Yoko Ono.  It has innumerable political supporters in Parliament and is regularly lauded and quoted by members of the Labor Party.

Sahgal has already encountered the risks of going mano a mano with such a high profile institution.    Doors of famous Amnesty donors have closed on her and friends won’t return calls.  She has also experienced considerable difficulty in finding an attorney in London’s extensive  civil rights legal community to take on her case.  As she says:

 ”Although it is said that we must defend everybody no matter what they’ve done, it appears that if you’re a secular, atheist, Asian British woman, you don’t deserve a defense from our civil rights firms.”

But for all of that she can be at least proud that she has begun the process of exposing Amnesty’s agenda that has been warranted for so many years.  In the process she is fast transforming herself into a true prisoner of conscience, the victim of  an intolerant, hypocritical culture that has no patience for dissent within its own ranks.

Maybe even KCRW, having long ago severed its Amnesty connection, will take up her cause.

Israel Does the West’s Dirty Work

The outrage in Britain that has followed the revelation that eleven Israelis, traveling under false British passports, executed a Hamas mastermind in Dubai last month, is a wonder to behold.    Prime Minister Gordon Brown has sputtered that Israel has questions to answer about the theft of the passports.  The British foreign secretary, David Millband, has gone on record threatening to sever ties with the Mossad.  Opposition leader David Cameron, together with his shadow foreign secretary, William Hague, are demanding an inquiry. And the British press is howling for retribution. 

The British establishment has made it clear that it has very little interest in the maintenance of  Israeli security.  But does it have any real interest in the maintenance of its own? .  Just this week, the second most senior justice in  the country exposed   the workings of  Britain’s own intelligence network and its link with the Americans, when he excoriated the agency for its handling of the ex-Guantanomo inmate Binyam Mohamed, severely compromising MI5’s ability to work in concert with foreign intelligence services; Lax British immigration policies, its ludicrously benevolent welfare system and an insistence of the right of free speech for even those who preach the overthrow of the British government and the destruction of the West, has transformed London into “terrorist central”  and a major node for the financing of terrorist activity world wide.

You’ll notice though that none of the British protests actually involve a denial that Mahmoud al Mabhouh was an innocent.  That is because the British government is well aware  that the Israelis bumped off a dangerous guy, a weapons purchaser and smuggler, whose activities have caused hundreds of Israeli deaths and injuries over the past 15 years. He trafficked in death and knew the risks of doing so. 

Lets also not forget that the British government and public are  no strangers to extra-judicial killings by British agents.  Countless works of  British fiction, from the 1840s and the Great Game onward, have been based on real life British spies knocking off villains who threaten British security in places as distant as Singapore, Kabul and Kenya. 

Today, however, we live in a different world, where terrorists use technology to network with one another and share their own forms of intelligence.  Hamas is a vital part of this network and no one should think for a moment that it does not have its own operatives in the U.K. supporting the financing  and coordination of military operations in Gaza and Damascus.  When are the British elites going to understand that this worldwide terrorist network, is poised as much at the heart of Britain as it is against the United States  and Israel?   Will it ever appreciate that those countries’ enemies  are as much their own  as any?

 Mahmoud al Mahbouh  stood as much  a  threat to  British security as it does to Israel’s. Rather than lambasting that country for its impudent use of British passports, it should be expressing its gratitude, much as it should have following the Entebbe Raid in 1976 and the Iraq’s Osirak Reactor Raid in 1981.   As a Western democracy, the Israelis demonstrated that they will not sit by idly, lugubriously building legal justifications for intervention, while terrorists plot and plan the murder their citizens.