Daily Blurb #1

The Battle Over Health Care Will Continue

The Obama Administration’s narrow victory over health care in March 2010 may now be in danger.   See today’s article in the New York Times.  It is has always been my position that the passage of this legislation, forced through against such popular resistance was a monumental mistake for the Administration, a pyrrhic victory that cast the President as both blind and unfeeling about public opinion.  With the Republican dominated House now vowing to take on the Administration on the issue of repeal, the stage is set for a titanic and historic struggle in Congress in 2011.  While many Democrats, charged by their apparent victories on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the START Treaty, are preparing for a fight in the hopes of carrying it as a trophy into the 2012 election season, I firmly believe it will backfire and that Obamacare will in fact hang as an albatross around the party’s neck for years to come.

The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Talk Pantomime Opens its 2011 Season

If 2010 was a frustrating year for Middle East peace activists, wait until you experience 2011.  It will continue to be the Netanyahu Government’s strategy to push the Palestinians for unconditional negotiations while the Palestinian leadership will continue to demand a settlement freeze as a pre-condition for any future negotiations.  But the Palestinians clearly don’t want a simple settlement freeze; they had one from December 2009 through September 2010 and failed to come to the table.  They want Israel to agree to remove all settlements before negotiations even begin. The Palestinian leadership has clearly decided that it has enough international clout to apply pressure to the Israelis by doing nothing and letting other governments to do the talking – and perhaps even negotiating, for them.   The Obama Administration has looked helpless  in the face of such intransigence, choosing to apply pressure to Netanyahu rather than Abbas.  It has been a disastrous policy leading to deepening distrust between the U.S. and Israel and the  ever widening possibilities for the outbreak of violence.  Netanyahu’s statement today is only further evidence of this continuing pantomime.  I will have more to say on this in the coming weeks.

Muslim Abuse of Christians in Egypt

It is extraordinary how little is known about the persecution of the Christian Copts in Egypt.  Over the weekend, following the bombing of a church on New Year’s Eve in Alexandria in which 25 church goers were killed, our attention should be riveted on this issue.  It is representative of a wide scale assault on Christian communities throughout the Muslim world and while the Egyptian government might be wringing its hands over the death of the Copts, how many know that it is the secular Egyptian government itself which maintains an anti-Christian policy, with widespread discrimination legislated against the sect in many areas of daily life.  Even more appalling than this though, is the abject failure of Christian leaders  – most particularly the leaders of major Protestant denominations, to express their outrage and contempt for  the continued harassment of Christian minorities in both Egypt and elsewhere in the Muslim world.

My Letter in the Los Angeles Times

Please see my letter, published in the Los Angeles Times on January 1.   It was written in response to an  oped by Neal Gabler on December 26 which claimed that the Democratic party was not quite progressive or bold enough for his tastes and that the current President is just another Democratic cop out.  Naturally, the letter was edited.  Here is the full text:

Worry no more about the fate of poor Planet Pluto.  It is the terrestrial sphere where Democratic pundits such as Neal Gablereath ( Compromised to Death 12/26 ) have taken up residence. Gabler’s understanding of American politics and the American electorate are so bizarrely out of focus that it is natural to believe he is indeed living on another planet. It is plainly absurd to suggest that Barack Obama has changed course simply because that is the nature of modern Democrats in power.  That is the nature of American politics, period. All of the Democratic presidents he mentions, FDR, Truman and LBJ, moved to compromise when their agendas ran into resistance. The presidential ship regularly founders on the shoals of such political realities and it matters little whether it is helmed by a Democrat or a Republican.

Gabler also seems not to have heard of the Tea Party movement, (not mentioned once in his piece), a grass roots resistance to the ideological purity exemplified by Obama in his first first two years in power and which led the charge in ruthlessly repudiating his agenda in November.  Obama has demonstrated that he is enough of a pragmatist to gauge the direction of the political winds.   It is a skill, sadly, which completely evades pundits such as Gabler.

Avi Davis
Westwood

“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.

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.

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.

The Charmed Life of Binyam Mohamed

No one ever knew that becoming a terrorist would offer such an effortless path to fame and celebrity. Certainly not Binyam Mohammed.

Mr. Mohamed is today the center of British national attention, having acquired the dubious prestige of being tortured at the hands of both MI5 and the CIA.

How did he do it?  He was believed to be involved in a plot to detonate a radioactive bomb in an American or British city.  Arrested in Pakistan in 2002,  he was shackled, threatened, deprived of sleep, and questioned by officers from MI5. He was subsequently “rendered” by the CIA to a prison in Morocco, where he was allegedly subjected to torture.  Mr. Mohamed  thereafter spent six years  at Guantanomo Bay before being repatriated to the United Kingdom in 2009.

He told investigators he had travelled to Pakistan and Afghanistan in an attempt to kick a drug addiction, but was accused of links to Al-Qaeda and charged with plotting to blow up a radioactive “dirty bomb” in the US.   The charges were later dropped when the US admitted its case was based on confessions obtained using torture.

Ethiopian-born Mr Mohamed, 31, who was granted refugee status when he came to Britain in 1994, is now alive and apparently flourishing somewhere in Devon. But at least one MI5 officer is being investigated, and could face trial, simply for asking him questions while he was held in custody in Pakistan.  And MI5 is under taack, not for what it did, but for what it allowed to occur without protest.

A U.K. police inquiry into the officer, which began last July at the request of Attorney General Baroness Scotland,  is understood to be at an advanced stage, and lawyers have discussed whether the officer could be charged under the Human Rights Act, which prohibits torture. An MI6 officer is also under investigation over an unrelated case.

But Mr. Mohamed’s true elevation to star status arrived last week when the U.K. Court of Appeal ordered the disclosure of seven paragraphs of evidence which showed that MI5 knew Mohamed was being mistreated by the CIA.

David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, had tried to prevent the publication of the material.  But to no avail.   In his judgement, (an unpublished draft of which was somewhow leaked to the press) Lord Neuberger, Master of the Rolls, and the second most senior judge inthe country, found that the Security Service had failed to respect human rights or denounce torture and had engaged in a culture of suppression about the information.

Now where have we heard this before?

In the United States the CIA has come under repeated attack from Democrats and human rights organizations for its program of enhanced interrogation.   This, despite the fact that legal clearance was given for their actions.  Many of  those who performed what they thought was their duty in protecting the country, are now under threat of prosecution.  So too are the attorneys who gave them the go ahead.

Bringing calumnies down on our security services seems to be all the rage on both sides of the Atlantic these days.  Since the September 11 attacks, a succession of judgments have gone in favor of terrorist suspects – on the detention of foreign  suspects without trial, on curfew orders, on possession of extremist materials, on the weakening of control orders, on the legality of terrorist asset-freezing orders.  On each occasion, the human rights of terrorist suspects have trumped the demands of national security.

After it emerged that the country’s second most senior judge had accused MI5 of a “culture of suppression” and of misleading Parliament, the Director- General of MI5, Jonathan Evans, stated that was “the precise opposite of the truth”.  He said that accusations that MI5 colluded in torture would be used by the country’s enemies as “propaganda to undermine our will and ability to confront them”.

What exactly, did the Americans do to Mr. Mohamed?   Well, the court said,  Mr Mohamed had been deprived of sleep, shackled and threatened with the suggestion that he would “disappear” and that MI5 was fully aware of it.  He was, however, never waterboarded, never slapped and never subjected to the ” cruel and inhumane ” treatment  that the U.K. 2000 Human Rights Act proscribes.   It is difficult to argue that the treatment described amounted to “torture,” even if one’s moral or ethical sensibilities are offended.

All of this comes with a certain irony.   The Obama Administration built its electoral campaign on the idea that somehow they were more “moral” than the Bush administration by refusing to countenance the use of enhanced interrogation techniques to elicit information from terrorist suspects.  But the Obama Administration is prepared to countenance unmanned predator drone attacks on terrorist targets in Pakistan and Afghanistan.  Why is that action, which often results inthe death of the target,  somehow morally superior to capturing them and then obtaining  information about their operations that could save  more lives?

Those who defend the policy of shooting terrorists are not excoriated for being “amoral fascists”, although it is certainly not unreasonable,  from their point of view,  to claim that killing is at least as bad as torture.  Indeed, that is exactly what pacificists do claim.  An absolute ban on killing is usually criticized for being unrealistic.   But the idea that there should be an absolute ban on the use of any form of torture now has the status of othodoxy: to question it is to put yourself beyond the moral pale.  That’s why the head of MI5 and the Foreign and Home Secretaries never do so, instead insisting that it is impossible that the security services would ever collude in torture.

Another important issue is why should anyone trust what terrorists say?

Al Qaeda detainees, in particular, routinely lie about their treatment.   Much of what Binyam Mohamed has said about his treatment while in custody can’t be verified. For example, Mohamed has claimed that his genitals were mutilated with a razor blade while he was in Moroccan custody.   If that is true, most Westerners  would object to it, as it is not part of any disciplined interrogation regime.

But we don’t know that it is true at all and could simply be a lie.   Lying , after all, is quite an art among terorrists. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed himself, the undisputed orgnizer of the attacks on the World Trade Center attack,  has admitted as much-  ” Thats what I do – I lie and lie and lie and lie. ” Binyam Mohamed was almost certainly schooled in the same lie factory  nd has every reason to fabricate stories about his incarceration since  he is well aware that our supine, credulous media will just lap it up.  They will always  prefer the testimony of hardened killers than the words of servants of the State.

And just because the information against Mohamed was “coerced,”  does not mean it is inaccurate.    In fact, both intelligence services agree that Mohamed was a dangerous terrorist, having trained in exactly the same al Qaeda camps as most of the 9/11 hijackers.  He had extremely valuable information and the fact that his release was ordered by the Obama Administration could prove to be a terrible blow to our ability to gather further vital information that could save American lives.

The argument is  made that such judgments represent a triumph for the rule of law and demonstrate the health of the very democracy we are seeking to protect from those who would do us harm.  But this poses  serious questions about how a liberal democracy is supposed to protect itself from people who do not play by the rules.   If the judicial establishment – egged on by the human rights lobby – routinely thwarts the security services in their vital work (its low opinion of MI5 was laid bare in letters released with the judgment), we must accept that the public’s safety may well be compromised.

Lets also not forget how the squeamishness of the West in attempting to elicit information from these killers, is having untold consequences for vital intelligence gathering.   In his new book, Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe, former Department of Defense speech writer, Marc A. Thiessen, offers a penetrating account of the effectiveness of the CIA procdeures, illustrating how the information gathered from such high profile suspects as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah contributed to the fact that in  the seven years since the  9/11 attacks, not one succesful al Qaida attack was carried out against an American target anywhere in the world.

He also illustrates how preposterous it is to describe the enhanced interrogation procedures as torture while  putting paid to the notion that they were at any time illegal.  He convincingly  dismisses portrayals of the Gunatanomo Bay Detention Facility as a torture camp,  describing such an absurdity as pure propaganda from leftist critics whose first motivation is  the  health and welfare of enemy combatants rather than the safety and security of American citizens.

Thiessen demonstates how the cessation of the CIA program has immeasurably weakened the United States , making it far more vulnerable to an enemy attack for failed intelligence.  He notes that Obama admitted as much when he went to the CIA in April, 2009 to boost the morale of the agency int he wake of the release of the Justice Department memos.

” I’m sure that sometimes its seems as if it means we’re operation with one hand tied behind our back, or that those who argue for a higher standard are naive.  I understand that.   So yes, you’ve got a harder job. And so do I.  And that’s OK. “

No its not OK.   The threat of a renewed terrorist attack on Western targets is real and everpresent.  Another successful attack, as almost occured on Christmas Day, will not be the responsbility of failed intelligence.  It will be the responsibility of a political establishment, more concerned with offending moral sensibilities than with  prosecuting an aggressive campaign against those seeking to kill us.

Meanwhile, Mr. Mohamed can eat his crumpets and scones in Devon with perfect equanimity, in the knowledge that his own campaign to destroy the effectiveness of the West’s intelligence gathering apparatus is proving extraordinarily successful.  Expect to see him soon on British television talk shows hawking his latest book, The War on Terrorism:  The Lies and Deceptions Leading to the Breakdown of Your Civilzation.

It couldn’t come from a more authoritative source.

One Man’s Cemetery Is Another Man’s Parking Lot

On Friday,  the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s commander -in-chief, Rabbi Marvin Hier, duked it out in the opinion pages of the Los Angeles Times with Saree Makdisi, a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA.   

  The object of their tussle is the Center’s attempt to construct a second Museum of Tolerance in the heart of Jerusalem.   Palestinian advocates claim that the museum will be built, at least partly, on the remains of an ancient Arab cemetery.  The Wiesenthal Center contends, and I should say with considerable force, that the area upon which the new building will be constructed had been used as a parking  lot by the Jerusalem municipality for nearly 50 years, with nary a whisper of protest from any living or dead Arab associated with the graveyard nearby.

Having seen the plans for the Second Coming of the Museum of Tolerance ( based on a design by architect Frank Gehry), I have to say that I am no fan nor booster of the project.   Jerusalem actually needs many more parking spaces than it does Museums and I have failed to be convinced that the new construction will be anything more than a rather grotesque monument to Marvin Hier’s ego.

But be that as it may, I had to laugh out loud when Makdisi claimed that:

“Muslim clergy and legal scholars insist on the inviolability of cemeteries in Islam”

Maybe in Islam, buddy, but that notion certainly doesn’t apply to the cemeteries of other faiths.  Who can forget the heart-rending photos of the destruction of the Jewish cemeteries on the Mount of Olives after it was liberated from the Jordanians in 1967?    After nineteen years in Jordanian hands, the cemetery, which had contained the remains of Jews over a period of  two millennia, had been completely desecrated.  Centuries-old tombstones had been shattered and used as paving stones for roads and outhouses. Graves were found open with the bones scattered everywhere and parts of the cemetery had been converted into parking lots and filling stations.  The Intercontinental Hotel itself was built right on top of the cemetery.

 I am also quite astonished to hear Makdisi rhapsodize about the sacredness of Islamic corpses.  The Syrians, in that very  same war, displayed little  concern for their own dead.  When the Israelis offered to return the corpses of the Syrian soldiers who had been gunned down guarding the Golan Heights, (some of whom had been manacled to their machine guns to prevent their surrender), the Syrians refused the offer and the Israelis were forced to bury the Syrians in a common grave. 

 I should also note that the Mamilla Cemetery, as Hier argues, really had been abandoned.  I have walked the paths of  that cemetery dozens of times on my way to the new city and always been astonished at what low regard the cemetery’s Arab custodians held the remains buried there. Each passing year made the cemetery resemble more an uncultivated paddock than sacred ground.  It is spurious to suggest that the custodians have awoken from their neglect and suddenly recognized the true sanctity of the place.

So much for Muslim dignity in death.  Maybe Makdisi should save his censure for those who send women and children to their deaths  and could care less about what becomes of their remains, than an attack on another Jewish institution that preaches a tolerance that his own people would never dream of evincing.

Israel’s Bad Week on Campus

It hasn’t been the best of weeks on campus for  Israel.  

• On Monday, Danny Ayalon, the deputy foreign minister, was almost physically assaulted at Oxford Univesity while giving an address to the Oxford Union.  Antisemitic and anti-Israel abuse was shouted throughout  Ayalon’s speech with onse student even running toward him during the  hour-long session, shouting the Arabic phrase “Itbah Al-Yahud” “(Slaughter the Jews!”).  As many as 10 others, carrying Palestinian flags, made attempts to attack Mr Ayalon but were intercepted and removed by security.
• The same day, on the other side of the Atlantic, Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, attempted to deliver an address at U.C. Irvine in Southern California and was interrupted 10 times before the protestors were forcibly removed.   Eventually eleven of the students involved inthe distrubances were arrested.   At one stage, Oren had to leave the podium for 20 minute while the auditorium was cleared of hecklers.
• On Tuesday it was the turn of Benny Morris, the iconclastic professor from Ben Gurion University of the Negev, who was prevented from giving his plannned speech at Cambridge University.   The Israel Society at Cambridge University succumbed to pressure and canceled  his scheduled addres  after protesters accused him of “Islamophobia” and “racism.”

If anyone thinks that the three incidents are merely coincidental, think again.  All three are part of a concerted plan to demonize I srael on campuses across the world, a campaign that has acheived more success than its organizers  could have ever imagined.  In Morris’ case, according to the Jerusalem Post, the Muslim victory was self -righteously congratulated by Islamic groups: 

“ The  Muslim Public Affairs Committee congratulated Cambridge’s Islam Society on the success of their campaign and lobbying to stop the Islamophobe Benny Morris giving a speech at their university… A simple Facebook group and a well written letter is all that it takes to defend your religion,” the group said.” 

And how did the authorities react?    Well at Oxford there was a reprimand and at UCI, arrests.   But at Cambridge, no figure of authority sought to comment onthe irony that while the actress Miriam Margolis is permitted to depict Jews as both bigoted and blood-thirsty, a historian of Morris’  pedigree – with a reputation for remarkable even handedness is treated as a pariah.   Last October, lawyer Michel Massih, a man distinguished by his defense of such luminaries as Sudan’s President Bashir, dredged up traditional anti-Semitic tropes, merely switching the word ‘Jew’ for Zionist. In  March, 2009  Abdul Bari Atwan, editor of the London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper and who  had declared the  attack on Jerusalem’s Mercaz Harav yeshiva, in which eight students were killed and 15 were wounded, was “justified” as the school was responsible for “hatching Israeli extremists and fundamentalists.”   

And to top it all, in just a few days,  Daud Abdullah, deputy-secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, will speak at Islam Week organized by the Cambridge University Islamic Society. Last year, the British government distanced itself from Abdullah after he signed the Istanbul Declaration, in which he called for attacks on the British navy, were it to enforce a ban on arms smuggling to Gaza.  He has also called for continued military action against Israel. 

Throughout the world, university administrations turn a blind eye to Muslim bigotry and hatred while doing nothing to quell the bilious assault on Jews and Israel.    But the rising tide of venom will not stop at  just Jews and Zionists.   It will eventually swamp the university itself, bringing with it fear and instability. That is a day our universities are attempting to forestall through policies of appeasement.   But like all policies of appeasement,  they will only serve to swell the tide.

A Truth Too Hard to Handle

If anyone wants to get a close look at the way both our government and military delude themselves about fundamental dangers this country faces, then go no further than the recently issued Department of Defense report on the Fort Hood slayings- Protecting the Force: Lessons from Fort Hood.

In this 85 page report, released last week and which relates to the November 5th massacre of 13 enlisted men and women together with an unborn child, you will find recommendations for tighter security for recruitment purposes, updated procedures to help the Department of Defense identify contributing factors to violent conduct and the suggested development of programs to educate DoD personnel when individuals might commit violent acts or become radicalized.

What you won’t find is the following:

• The name of the assassin
• Documentation on his Islamic background
• The characterization of his motives
• Information on how signs of his radicalism were manifested in his actual military career
• The kinds of communications he received from a Yemen based sheikh in the weeks and months prior to the killings.
• The Jihadist inspiration behind the attacks.
• Why the details of the killer’s behavior at Walter Reed Hospital, referred to in his file, were not passed on to his military superiors

So lets fill in the blanks for those military researchers who still remain mind-numbingly agog that such an event could have occurred at all:

• The killer (not the alleged killer) at Fort Hood was Major Nidal Malik Hassan
• He is a Muslim
• His writings, communications with fellow officers prior to the events of November 5,  all provide convincing evidence that that he was a Jihadist, driven by a religious ideology
• He took inspiration from Yemen-based preacher named Imam Anwar AlWaki and had at least ten email communications with him in the 30 days prior to the shootings;
• He shouted “Allahu Akbar “as he sprayed  the dining room with bullets
• He admitted that he committed his acts of murder in the name of Islam

In fact, not once in the report are the words “ Islam,”  “Jihad”  or “anti-Americanism” employed.   Nor are we given a sense that this event registered as anything more than another case of criminal behavior which can be adequately dealt with by the criminal justice system.  Hence the military’s apparent unwillingness to ascribe motivation to the attack or even a name to the ‘alleged’ offender.   After all, to do so would be prejudice Hassan’s upcoming trial, a prospect the report’s authors seem to fear more than the truth itself.

Instead the report is content to commend the military personnel at Fort Hood on how effectively they responded to the attack (in other words ‘it was bad but could have been a helluva lot worse’) and reaches the astonishing conclusion that “identifying potentially dangerous people before they act is difficult” and that “religious fundamentalism in itself is not a risk factor.”

The report screams the word “denial” at us, bathed as it is in the politically correct milk of multicultural sensitivity.   In this regard, of course, it is completely in keeping with the sentiments of Chief of Staff, Gen. George Casey, who, in the wake of the massacre, proclaimed that, “as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.”

No, sir, what is far worse is the obfuscation of a basic truth – that Islamists are among  us and want to kills us.  What registers as an graver issue than even  this however, is the way such cognitive dissonance leads to the eclipse of good judgment within our military leadership.  For underlying this empty report is the notion that the country is not at war at all, but rather faces occasional incidents which amount to little more than isolated criminal nuisances.

It is extraordinary that the most violent act of murder committed against U.S. troops on American soil in modern times, should be summed up as a case of a good soldier gone bad.

But Hassan didn’t ‘go bad.’   He was already bad.   The fact that his colleagues and superiors failed to notice, despite all the warning signs he offered them, is an indictment of the system in which he operated – a system apparently quite comfortable with its soldiers’ regular expression of  rabid anti-Americanism and the spouting of Jihadist ideology.

The true report of what happened at Fort Hood is not yet available.  But when it does become available it will almost certainly not bear the stamp of the Department of Defense.   The truth, apparently, in Jack Nicholson inimitable words, is just a little  too hard for that institution to handle.

The Absurdities of the Far Left

In yesterday’s Ha’artez article  Pro-Gaza Activists Under Seige Imposed By Egypt and Hamas,  we are once again exposed to the absurdities of the far left.   Over 1400 protestors, from 43 countries, descended on Cairo this week to demand that the Egyptian government open the doors to Gaza  so that the protestors could commemorate the one year anniversary of Israel’s  three week long war against Hamas in 2009. 

Here is a little taste of this gathering of odd balls and fantastists:

” The older activists included Hedy Epstein, 85, a German-born American citizen whose life was saved when her Jewish parents sent her to England when she was 14. They later perished in Auschwitz. She sat on a chair under the building housing the UNDP offices, with those on hunger strike, in protest of their being banned from entering Gaza. Hippies in their 50s and 60s cavorted nearby, Italians sang “Bella Ciao,” and South African activists unfurled a banner calling for sanctions on Israel and quoting Nelson Mandela: “Our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

There is nothing quite so moving as a 85 -year-old Holocaust survivor expressing solidarity with terrorists pledged to the murder of Jews and the destruction of the Jewish state.  Its just delicious.

In other parts of the same article, we are given the statements of a young man from Boston who believes that he is doing something positive for Israel.

The protestors, however, received a rude awakening once their 20 buses reached Gaza.   None of them was allowed to stay  in  a private home, despite the fact that this had been expressly billeted before the visit; they were forbidden from communicating with ordinary Gazans, even to speak through chain link fences;  they were shadowed by Hamas security personnel wherever they went and told exactly what they could or could not say to the press.

So disenchanted with  the whole process did the protestors become that one of them was overheard acidly commenting:  ”Now I understand that the call for ‘Freedom for Gaza’ has another meaning,”

Indeed.  The irony is  that Islamic terrorists such as the members of Hamas have no time for these so called seekers of peace,  except as cash machines and the facilitators of media attention.   How could those who gleefully embrace such  left wing ideologies  as  feminism, gay rights, liberation politics for minorities and radical environmentalism really expect anything else from murderers and thieves, who treat such notions with contempt?.

Its not too dissimilar from those starry eyed Americans  – many of them Jews- who fought for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War and who felt so bitterly betrayed by the Soviet Union and the communists in its aftermath.  George Orwell wrote eloquently about this disenchantment in Homage to Catalonia. 

A more recent writer, Jamie Glazov, editor of Front Page Magazine, does a wonderful job exposing the hatred and suspension of good sense among the radical left in United in Hate:  The Left’s Romance With Tyranny and Terror    You hear can hear my interview with Jamie on Western Word Radio here.

I have also written extensively on the subject and as a sampler, see my article Iron in the Soul from the Los Angeles Times from several years ago.

Interrogating the Detroit Bomber

Michael Mukasey, the U.S. Attorney General, 2007-09 writes an outstanding piece in today’s Wall Street Journal  What Does the Detroit Bomber Know?

Mukasey’s views on  the subject  of how the Bomber should have been dealt with are presented succinctly in this paragraph:

” Had Abdulmutallab been turned over immediately to interrogators intent on gathering intelligence, valuable facts could have been gathered and perhaps acted upon. Indeed, a White House spokesman has confirmed that Abdulmutallab did disclose some actionable intelligence before he fell silent on advice of counsel. Nor is it any comfort to be told, as we were, by the senior intelligence adviser referred to above—he of the “no smoking gun”—that we can learn facts from Abdulmutallab as part of a plea bargaining process in connection with his prosecution. “

How much crucial information we may have lost from the failure to regard Abdulmuttalab as a terrorist rather than a criminal, with all the protections that the American system of justice now affords him,  is a symptom of the problems which have engulfed our intelligence services who are politically constrained in executing their responsibilities. Abdulmuttalab is the luckiest terrorist in the world for having landed in the United States.   Where else would someone who had plotted to kill 300 people at the behest  of  an organization determined to see the country of destination destroyed,  be given such immediate assistance and solicitous advice in defending his rights once he lands?  Some state that this bespeaks America’s greatness as a moral nation. 

But what point is there in being moral when you are dead? .

I dealt with this very subject on my radio program yeserday, which you can listen to here.

You might also want to check out other radio programs with similar themes:  The Road from 9/11: How Secure Is the Homeland Today?   and an earlier interview with Victor Davis Hanson The CIA Secret Files: What Are the Consequences for Their Release?

Mukasey’s piece concludes with this terrific final paragraph:

“What the gaffes, the almost comically strained avoidance of such direct terms as “war” and “Islamist terrorism,” and the failure to think of Abdulmutallab as a potential source of intelligence rather than simply as a criminal defendant seem to reflect is that some in the executive branch are focused more on not sounding like their predecessors than they are on finding and neutralizing people who believe it is their religious duty to kill us.”

It couldn’t be said better.