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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Middle East</title>
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		<title>The &#8216;Cycle of Violence&#8217; Fantasy in the Middle East</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/steven-plaut/the-cycle-of-violence-fantasy-in-the-middle-east/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-cycle-of-violence-fantasy-in-the-middle-east</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 12 Dec 2014 05:12:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Steven Plaut]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[conflict]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Middle East]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[WWII]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247184</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Imagining how the media would have reported on WWII using today's logic regarding Israel. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/19366_1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247188" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/19366_1.jpg" alt="19366_1" width="283" height="203" /></a>Ernst Eduard vom Rath was a German diplomat representing the Third Reich in <span style="color: #000000;">Paris in 1938.  </span>In November of that year he was shot and mortally wounded by a 17-year-old <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Jew"><span style="color: #0b1480;">Polish Jewish</span></a> youth, <a href="http://www.roizen.com/ron/grynszpan.htm"><span style="color: #0b1480;">Herschel</span><span style="color: #0433ff;">Grynszpan</span></a><span style="color: #000000;">, who had been living in Germany.</span>  Vom Rath was 29 years old.  Ironically, vom Rath had earlier expressed anti-Nazi sympathies, evidently based on the Nazi treatment of Jews, and was under Gestapo investigation at the time for being politically unreliable.  He died of his wounds two days after being shot.  Hitler used the assassination <a href="http://www.holocaustandhumanity.org/kristallnacht/events-leading-up-to-kristallnacht/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">as an excuse to launch Kristallnacht</span></a>, a pogrom against German Jews, shortly after the death.<span style="color: #000000;">   My father attended school with <a href="http://www.roizen.com/ron/grynszpan.htm"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Grynszpan</span></a> and knew him casually; Dad escaped to America by the time of the assassination.</span></p>
<p>Now try to imagine how the Western media would report World War II if they were using the exact same rules of journalism that they apply to the Arab-Israeli conflict.   The assassination of vom Rath by a Jewish youth would be universally held up to illustrate that the German-Jewish conflict was a circle of violence, an ongoing bloody conflict whose roots are so old that no one remembers them, a conflict where each side claims it is retaliating for the violence that the other side perpetrated, a conflict whose causes are all blurred by eons of history.  Sure the Germans were murdering Jews, but then there was the vom Rath assassination, proving the violence was two-directional, symmetric.  Close investigation could probably find a few other examples of Jews using violence against Germans.  Innocent lives are being lost on both sides.  Such senseless tragedy.  Why can&#8217;t both sides just live and let live?</p>
<p>Of course, such a representation of World War II would not only be an absurdity but also an obscenity.   World War II was not about a &#8220;cycle of violence&#8221; between Germans and Jews.  It was unambiguously a campaign of annihilation and oppression of Jews committed by Germans.  The fact that one can identify a handful of outlier events such as the assassination of vom Rath does not convey any symmetry to the &#8220;conflict.&#8221;   Indeed to misrepresent the Nazi campaign of extermination against Jews as some sort of &#8220;symmetric&#8221; pair of movements of violence would be proof that the person so misrepresenting the situation was a Nazi-sympathizer and an anti-Semite.</p>
<p>The Middle East conflict is not a cycle of violence.  It is not a &#8220;symmetric&#8221; campaign of retaliation by Jews against Arabs and Arabs against Jews.  The Middle East conflict is as unambiguously a unidirectional campaign of violence and atrocities as was World War II.  It is about Arabs murdering Jews and not the inverse.  It is about Arabs seeking to deny Jews their human rights and their right to self-determination, and not the inverse.  The Middle East conflict consists of a century of atrocities perpetrated by Arabs against Jews.</p>
<p>But the Western media are willing to go to extreme lengths to force the conflict into the prism of symmetry and the &#8220;cycle of violence&#8221; fantasy.  Several months ago a Palestinian Arab teenager from East Jerusalem, <a href="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Blogs/Message.aspx/5936#.VIhy7DGUf-o"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Mohammed Abu Khdair, age 17,  was kidnapped and murdered</span></a> by a Jew.  The Jew was mentally ill and believed himself to be the messiah.   He was arrested and jailed by Israel.  The killer did not represent anyone, was not sponsored by anyone, and no one in Israel cheered his crime.  The killing of Abu Khdair came shortly after three Jewish teenagers were murdered by the Hamas in a well-planned operation.  That was an operation sponsored, financed and planned by the Hamas and cheered by most &#8220;Palestinians&#8221; and by many Israeli Arabs.   Many passed around candies in celebration.</p>
<p>Since the death of Abu Khdair, the media have exploited the case to sell their &#8220;symmetry cycle of violence&#8221; snake oil.  True, the &#8220;Palestinians&#8221; murder Jewish children all the time but here we have a single incident of an inverted crime, an Arab teenager murdered by a Jew.  The media obsession is far more than a postman-biting-dog stroke of interest in uncharacteristic news stories.  The media have used the death to manufacture the symmetry fiction and spread it.   After all, if it is symmetric, then both sides are wrong, which means both sides are right, which means there is no right and wrong about which to worry our pretty little heads.</p>
<p>The killing of Abu Khdair was as characteristic of the Middle East conflict as the killing of vom Rath was representative of the events comprising World War II.  And it is hardly the only &#8220;vom Rath anomaly&#8221; that drives the reporting of the anti-Israel media.   This week <a href="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/188478#.VIh7tTGUf-o"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Ziad Abu Ein</span></a>, a terrorist murderer serving as a Palestinian Authority &#8220;cabinet minister,&#8221; died from a heart attack after being confronted by Israeli troops.   You see, the media are bleating in unison?  It is not just Palestinians who murder Israelis!</p>
<p>Arabs in the West Bank vandalize Jewish property so often that it is generally never even reported as news, even in the Israeli media, because it is so commonplace.  Arson attacks and vandalism of synagogues by Arabs are so frequent that they rarely make it out of the back pages.  But if a handful of teenage Jewish delinquents vandalize some Arab vehicles or paint graffiti on Arab buildings, not only is this highlighted on the front pages, but it is denounced as evidence of Jewish terrorism.  The media, including the Israeli leftist media, scream that such incidents are hate crimes.  Demands are made to define the graffiti painters as a terrorist organization.</p>
<p>Rock throwing by Arabs at Jews in Israel is even less likely to make it into the press or news or even the social media.   But if Arabs allege that some Jewish &#8220;settlers&#8221; threw some rocks at Arab cars or houses, then stop the presses!   All other news must be removed to page 3.  Arabs in the West bank vandalize Jewish property, including agricultural produce, more frequently than the sun shines in the Middle East.  No one hears about it because it is not considered &#8220;news.&#8221;  After all, dogs chasing postmen are just not very interesting or newsworthy.  But let some Arabs or leftists allege that Jewish &#8220;settlers&#8221; have vandalized some West Bank Arab olive trees and the media shrieks are deafening.  So deafening, in fact, that they drown out reporting about some cases of  Arabs and leftists <a href="http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2012/10/16/did-palestinians-destroy-their-own-olive-trees-and-then-blame-israel-settlers-say-they-have-the-video-to-prove-it/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">intentionally vandalizing</span></a> Arab olive trees as <a href="https://anneinpt.wordpress.com/2012/10/16/slandering-israel-palestinians-and-leftists-filmed-cutting-down-their-own-olive-trees/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">provocations to be blamed</span></a> on &#8220;settlers.&#8221;   And it goes without saying that the firing of thousands of rockets by Gaza terrorists at Israeli civilians is never important enough to be reported as news.  But let Israel fire back at the savages and there &#8211; you see &#8211; we are back in the symmetric cycle of violence.</p>
<p>The symmetry perversion has been played up by the media for so long that few can even keep straight the fundamental underlying truths behind the conflict.  There is a war in the Middle East because the Arabs, controlling territory nearly twice that of the United States (including Alaska), are unwilling for the Jews to control their own state smaller than New Jersey.  The Middle East conflict is not about unwillingness on the part of Jews to accept self-determination for Arabs, but rather by unwillingness on the part of Arabs to accept self-determination for Jews.  Middle East violence is about the campaign of terrorist aggression by the Arab world, including its &#8220;Palestinian&#8221; playthings, to murder as many Jewish children and other civilians as possible.  The number of innocent Palestinian civilians intentionally murdered by Israel is precisely zero.  Palestinians get killed when Israel shoots back and retaliates for Arab terror and aggression and rocket attacks.  When Arabs do not attack Jews, the Jews do not shoot back.  There is no anti-Arab Jewish terrorism.</p>
<p>Arab terrorism is not caused by Israeli &#8220;occupation&#8221; but rather by the removal of Israeli occupation.  The &#8220;Palestinians&#8221; have about as legitimate a claim to statehood and independence as did the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia.   Granting &#8220;Palestinians&#8221; independence will have precisely the same effect as did the granting &#8220;self-determination&#8221; to the Sudeten Germans.  The only reason Arabs demand that the &#8220;Palestinians&#8221; be granted a state is in order to use it to launch an all-out war of annihilation and terror against what would be the rump Israel.</p>
<p>Israel is the only country in the Middle East that is NOT an apartheid regime.  The only Arabs in the Middle East enjoying human rights are those living under Israeli  rule.   The treatment of Arabs by Israel is at least a thousand times better than the treatment of Arabs by Arab regimes.   The &#8220;stateless Palestinians&#8221; are Arabs, and Arabs control 22 states.   No one is stopping any Arabs uncomfortable about living in a Jewish state from moving to any of those 22 states and taking all their assets and wealth with them.  The Middle East conflict is about injustices perpetrated by Arabs against Jews and not the other way around.</p>
<p>None of this belies the possibility that if one seeks hard enough one can find incidents in which some Jews behave badly towards some Arabs.  Just as Hershel Grynszpan may have murdered the wrong German.  But that hardly makes the Middle East conflict a symmetric cycle of violence and injustice.  There was a handful of white slaves owned by slaveholders in the American south before the Civil War and there were <a href="http://www.theroot.com/articles/history/2013/03/black_slave_owners_did_they_exist.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">small numbers of black slave-owners</span></a>.   Using that to paint pre-Emancipation slavery as a symmetry of black and white slaves with black and white slave-owners would of course by an obscenity.   Use of the assassination of vom Rath to create fictional symmetry would be even worse.  But nothing can compete with the malicious, repugnant, and perfidious distortion of the Middle East conflict by the media as a symmetric conflict and a cycle of violence.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Newest Prager University Course: Raymond Ibrahim on Christian Persecution</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/newest-prager-university-course-raymond-ibrahim-on-christian-persecution/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=newest-prager-university-course-raymond-ibrahim-on-christian-persecution</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 11 Nov 2014 05:03:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=244991</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Shillman Journalism Fellow discusses the greatest human rights atrocity of the present day. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong>The newest Prager University course is taught by Raymond Ibrahim, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. In the video-course, titled &#8220;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytdMUddGe-U">The World’s Most Persecuted Minority: Christians</a>,” Ibrahim identifies the greatest human rights atrocity of the present day, its perpetrators, and why the media won&#8217;t talk about it. View the video below.  </strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/ytdMUddGe-U" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
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		<title>Christians ‘Losing Everything’ to Islam</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/raymond-ibrahim/christians-losing-everything-to-islam/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=christians-losing-everything-to-islam</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 10 Nov 2014 05:30:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Raymond Ibrahim]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Struggles with the relentless “Hound of Jihad.”]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><b><i><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/iraq-christian-afp.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-244877" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/iraq-christian-afp-450x337.png" alt="iraq-christian-afp" width="359" height="269" /></a>Originally published by the </i></b><span style="color: #0433ff;"><b><i><a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4857/christians-losing-everything">Gatestone Institute</a></i></b></span></p>
<p><i>“I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things”—</i>Philippians 3:8</p>
<p>When St. Paul wrote the above in his letter to the Christians of Philippi, he and the early church were being persecuted (Paul was eventually executed in Rome).  While today’s Western Christians still quote his words in the context of their daily struggles, an increasing number of Christians around the world, especially the Muslim world, are still literally losing absolutely everything for their faith.</p>
<p>In Uganda, matters have gone from bad to worse to murderous. The plight of Hassan Muwanguzi, for instance, a Muslim convert to Christianity—whose initial sacrifices are recorded in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1621570258/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=1621570258&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=uhurnetw-20"><span style="color: #0433ff;"><i>Crucified Again: Exposing Islam&#8217;s New War on Christians</i></span></a> (page 131)—far from abating, has only gotten worse.</p>
<p>After earning a university degree in Islamic law and then, in 2003, when he was in his early 20s, converting to Christianity, his family immediately threw him out of their home. “Enraged Muslims” beat him. Later that same year, his wife left him and he lost his job as a teacher at Nankodo Islamic School, near Pallisa.</p>
<p>This was just the beginning.  Picking up the pieces of his life and moving on, he eventually opened a Christian school, Grace International Nursery and Primary School, near Muslim-majority Mbale.  Accordingly, “The Muslims have tried to use all kinds of threats to make me close the school—first they used witchcraft,” said Hassan. “This did not work, so then they tried to discourage Muslims from bringing their children to the school, saying that the school was converting Muslim children to Christianity by teaching Christian Religious Education.”</p>
<p>When all else failed, in 2011 an Islamic teacher, Sheikh Hassan Abdalla, filed a false charge claiming that Hassan had “defiled” the sheikh’s young daughter. Together with his fellow Muslim countrymen, the Islamic cleric filed a case at the chief magistrate’s court.  Hassan was subsequently arrested and incarcerated for three weeks.</p>
<p>But because Sheikh Abdalla, his accuser, repeatedly failed to appear in court to testify, Hassan was released.  In his words:  “The judge found out it was a false accusation, hence the case was dropped.  I had been subjected to humiliation, but I forgave them for the sake of my Christian outreach in the area.”</p>
<p>The <a href="http://morningstarnews.org/2013/07/mulinde-other-converts-from-islam-in-uganda-struggle-to-recover/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">next Islamic attack</span></a> came a few months after Hassan was acquitted.  First, the owner of the land where Hassan had built his Christian school denied ever having sold it, leading to a court order to close down the school in May, 2012.  This incurred great losses on Hassan.   The month after, in June, the Christian convert’s home was burnt down by three Muslims:</p>
<blockquote><p>I and my family escaped from the house by grace, but if it had not been so, then by now we would be no more….  This attack was mobilized by Muslim sheikhs, imams and family members after hearing that I had converted to Christianity after studying and completing university with a degree in Islamic law.</p></blockquote>
<p>Less than a year later, on March 31, 2013, Hassan was hospitalized in Mbale after an aunt who had called a “family gathering” slipped some insecticide in his tea.  According to Hassan:</p>
<blockquote><p>After eating and taking tea, I started feeling stomachache, then I realized that she was the one responsible for it—and I believe she did not do it alone, since they have been hunting for me directly and indirectly, because when I left them and converted to Christianity it pained them so much….  The reason they want to kill me is very clear—it is because of being a convert to Christianity; above all, to them it is like I brought shame by converting, as a [former] sheikh. But to God the Almighty Father, this was His plan for me to expand His Kingdom.</p></blockquote>
<p>According to the doctor who treated him, when Hassan arrived at the hospital, he had already vomited, “looked confused with slurred speech” and his “vision was getting very poor,” so that “he could not even recognize the friend who brought him in.?</p>
<p>During the family meeting, when he first began to feel ill, he telephoned a local Christian leader who advised him to leave secretly: “I knew if he were to mention to them that he was getting sick, they would harm him more,” said Bishop Kinyewa.</p>
<p>Now, most recently, on June 16, 2014, four Muslim men barged into his home with one shouting, “Today we shall kill you—you have been a trouble-maker and are not respecting our prophet’s religion.”  The “apostate” fled into a room, thinking they would not hurt his young daughter, Grace Baruka.  But then he heard the 12-year-old girl’s cries, as the Muslim invaders were strangling her.</p>
<p>When he came out of the room they seized him:  “They hit me with a blunt object, and I fell down.  I just woke up and saw neighbors surrounding me while wailing, saying that my daughter is in critical condition.”  Neighbors took Grace to a clinic but she was declared dead upon arrival.  “I am regretting why I survived the poisoning,” said Hassan.  God could have allowed me to die. My daughter has died, and I am now mourning for her death as well [as] have pain all over my body.”</p>
<p>While Hassan’s ongoing experience with the relentless “<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/the-hound-of-jihad/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Hound of Jihad</span></a>” speaks for itself, the reality is that countless Christians around the world—both Muslim converts and born Christians—are quietly “losing everything” at the hands of Muslims, whether family members, “local Muslims,” Islamic regimes and courts, or Islamic terrorist organizations.</p>
<p>According to a human rights activist who recently visited the Christians fleeing the Islamic State’s advance into Mosul, “People are severely traumatized: <a href="http://www.opendoorsuk.org/news/stories/iraq_141031.php"><span style="color: #0433ff;">they have lost everything</span></a>. Often they are fleeing for the second, third or even fourth time.”  One Iraqi Christian man, lamenting his ongoing struggles and sounding like Hassan, told her: “Sometimes I wish my parents had never brought me into the world.”</p>
<p>From one end of the Muslim world to the other, Christians are suffering persecution.  <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/we-need-your-head-muslim-persecution-of-christians-july-2014/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Not one month goes by</span></a> without several attacks on churches, many—for example in Nigeria and Kenya—resulting in large casualties; not one month goes by without several attacks on Christians accused of apostatizing from Islam or “blaspheming.”</p>
<p>Last week a pregnant Christian mother of four and her husband, falsely accused of burning pages of the Koran, were beaten by a Muslim mob and <a href="http://morningstarnews.org/2014/11/islamist-mob-in-pakistan-kills-christian-couple-accused-of-blasphemy/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">throw into a kiln, a fiery oven</span></a> at a brick factory, where they were roasted alive; and the world recalls the plight of Meriam Ibrahim, another Christian wife and mother who, while also pregnant, was imprisoned in Sudan and sentenced to receive 100 lashes followed by execution on the charge of apostatizing from Muhammad’s religion.  Although she has been freed, Pastor Saeed Abedini, an American, is still being held in prison in Iran for apostasy and practicing his Christian faith. His case was apparently not even raised by the Americans negotiating with Iran on its nuclear weapons program.</p>
<p>As tragic as the story of Uganda’s Hassan Muwanguzi is, he is only one of countless Christians and other minorities living under, and losing everything to, Islam.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>How Sweden Saved the Middle East by Recognizing Palestine</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/how-sweden-saved-the-middle-east-by-recognizing-palestine/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=how-sweden-saved-the-middle-east-by-recognizing-palestine</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 31 Oct 2014 04:45:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Middle East]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Palestine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[recognition]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sweden]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=244195</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[But who will save Sweden?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/timthumb1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-244196" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/timthumb1-437x350.jpg" alt="timthumb" width="326" height="261" /></a>On Thursday, Sweden finally solved all the problems in the Middle East by recognizing the State of Palestine. For decades all the instability in the region had been blamed on the lack of a PLO state. Foreign policy experts stood in line to tell us all that the only thing that could end terrorism in the Middle East was a terrorist state.</p>
<p>It was a plan so crazy that it was bound to either work or kill a lot of people. Mostly it’s done the latter.</p>
<p>But our leaders kept the faith. The White House’s Middle East coordinator insisted that Israel’s obstinate refusal to create a Palestinian State, against the wishes of the unelected president of the Palestinian Authority who refuses to negotiate one or to stop the terrorism, was causing instability in the region.</p>
<p>Secretary of State John Kerry had denied that ISIS was Islamic, but blamed Israel for ISIS recruitment.</p>
<p>But it wasn’t John Kerry who saved the Middle East from instability. Instead Sweden did it by recognizing a terror state whose leaders stopped bothering with the onerous duty of holding elections once they realized that the Eurocrats and Obama would keep shoveling money at them even if they chose their unelected terrorist leaders by playing Russian Roulette.</p>
<p>Sweden’s new Palestine not only dispensed with elections, routing the business of governance through its core PLO organizations, but also has no economy, instead employing an army of people who are paid not to run a country that doesn’t exist with money sent over by America, Europe and Japan.</p>
<p>Some would call that a scam, but it’s remarkably similar to how the European Union works.</p>
<p>In addition to lacking such luxuries as an elected government and an economy, the State of Palestine also doesn’t control Gaza, which is run by another terrorist group, Hamas. The international community has been ignoring that minor problem because it wouldn’t do for a bankrupt terrorist state which happens to be our last best hope for stability in the Middle East to be disqualified just because it’s actually two quarreling bankrupt terrorist states.</p>
<p>One terrorist state can’t help but bring stability to the Middle East. Two terrorist states sound downright unstable. If the Arab Muslim settlers in the West Bank and Gaza can’t stop fighting each other long enough to peacefully unite under the banner of one anti-Israel terrorist group, all hope for peace is lost.</p>
<p>With Sweden’s bold step, a bright future dawns over the Middle East. ISIS recruitment is bound to start falling as the Canadian and Swedish Jihadis with their Burqaed brides heading to kill as many Yazidis as they can will realize that there’s no more need for them to behave the way that their religion has for over a thousand years.</p>
<p>There’s a Palestinian State now. All their grievances have been met. A million cartoons and a thousand YouTube videos couldn’t outrage them now. Unless they were about Mohammed.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t be surprised if ISIS transformed into a humanitarian agency for gluing back all the Yazidi, Christian and Shiite heads that it cut off back on the bodies it beheaded. Even now, Sunnis and Shiites are hugging each other all over Iraq and only occasionally blowing themselves up in the process.</p>
<p>Sweden has given a great gift to the world. It’s only a question of how to properly repay it and the answer is obvious. If Sweden recognizing a micro-nation inside Israel’s borders will stabilize the region, it’s only right for Israel, and all right-thinking people, to recognize a micro-nation inside Sweden.</p>
<p>Sweden ended the occupation of Norway, but it continues to occupy such embryonic nations as the Royal Republic of Ladonia and the Republic of Jamtland.</p>
<p>While many of us might know Lars Vilks for his Mohammed cartoons, he also founded the Royal Republic of Ladonia after some of his other artwork was censored by Swedish authorities.</p>
<p>The Royal Republic of Ladonia was founded in 1996, three years after the Palestinian Authority, making it only slightly younger and a lot less violent than that micro-nation. While Ladonia is only around a third of a mile in size, it has a government, a newspaper, a lot of citizens and almost as many nobles.</p>
<p>Queen Carolyn I rules over the constitutional monarchy while President Christopher Matheoss was recently elected by a wide margin over such candidates as Count Wrigley, Antonio Maria De Grandis and Alexander Nevzorov III.</p>
<p>Unlike Palestine, Ladonia holds elections making it a much more legitimate country. And unlike both Palestine and Sweden, Ladonia has freedom of speech and freedom of conscience.</p>
<p>Considering how many newly created countries lack either, the Royal Republic of Ladonia has more of a claim on existence for its mere willingness to extend these freedoms to all.</p>
<p>Israel should recognize the Republic of Ladonia. So should the United States. It’s the only hope for stabilizing Sweden which continues to experience outbursts of Muslim violence in its major cities.</p>
<p>A better case for independence can be made for the Republic of Jamtland, which unlike Palestine, has an ancient history and was an independent peasant republic before the Muslims even invaded Jerusalem.</p>
<p>It declared independence in 1963, a year before the PLO was founded, making it indisputably older than Palestine. Back then the West Bank, which now hosts the PLO, had been annexed by Jordan and Article 24 of the <a href="http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4016156,00.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Palestinian Covenant</span></a> stated that it “does not exercise any territorial sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, on the Gaza Strip or in the Himmah Area.”</p>
<p>The Republic of Jamtland had declared its independence from Swedish occupation while the PLO was still endorsing the Jordanian and Egyptian occupation of Gaza and the West Bank; the territories that it belatedly decided were really the homeland of its independent state after Israel took them back from Jordan, the country which also occupies most of the territory of the Palestine Mandate.</p>
<p>Despite generations of Swedish occupation, the Jamtlanders have not turned to violence. At least not in several centuries. Ten of thousands gather for their Freedom Festivals. Their Jamtland Republican Army remains peaceful even when it sets up its own tolls and checkpoints. The only violence there can be seen from <a href="http://www7.idrottonline.se/JamtlandRepublicanAFF-AmerikanskFotboll/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">the Jamtland Republicans</span></a>, a local American football team, vigorously playing on the field.</p>
<p>Jamtish, a dialect, is spoken. The flag of the Republic, blue for the sky, green for the forests and white for the snow, is waved. And <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/1999/0218/p9s1.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">the European Union and the Swedish government</span></a> are denounced.</p>
<p>Considering the peacefulness and antiquity of the Republic of Jamtland, its sizable population and unique cultural heritage, recognizing this micro-nation would be the right thing to do. It’s time for Sweden to end the long occupation of Jamtland’s rivers and forests and for this brave republic to take its rightful place among the free and democratic nations of the world.</p>
<p>Sweden chose to recognize two terrorist states inside Israel’s borders. It would only be proper for nations of goodwill to recognize two wholly peaceful republics inside Sweden’s borders.</p>
<p>If recognizing breakaway countries can stabilize the unstable Middle East, just think of how much stability it can bring to Europe. Now that Sweden has solved the problem of Muslim violence in the Middle East, perhaps a few breakaway republics will solve Muslim violence in Sweden.</p>
<p>Sweden saved the Middle East. Now maybe someone can save Sweden.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Juan Cole’s ‘New Arab’ Fantasies</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/andrew-harrod/juan-coles-new-arab-fantasies/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=juan-coles-new-arab-fantasies</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 28 Oct 2014 04:07:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Andrew Harrod]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Arab Spring]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democracy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[juan cole]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Middle East]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Tunisia]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=243790</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The vain search for lasting democracy in the Middle East. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/juan-cole.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-243791" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/juan-cole-450x307.jpg" alt="juan-cole" width="355" height="242" /></a>The “advent of a new generation” of Arabs was the overly optimistic theme for University of Michigan history professor Juan Cole’s recent <a href="https://docs.zoho.com/writer/ropen.do?rid=otj666baaa043fca648f191abced399970924#bookmark=http://www.gwu.edu/~imes/events/IMES.cfm"><span style="color: #0433ff;">lecture</span></a> at the George Washington University Elliot School of International Relations.  Cole’s discussion of his new <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Arabs-Millennial-Generation/dp/1451690398"><span style="color: #0433ff;">book</span></a>, <i>The New Arabs:  How the Millennial Generation is Changing the Middle East</i>, to an audience of about fifty, mostly Elliot School students, failed to substantiate his ongoing hopes for the so-called Arab Spring.</p>
<p>Elliot School professor <a href="http://elliott.gwu.edu/gnehm"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Edward W. (Skip) Gnehm</span></a> introduced Cole as a Middle East expert who is popular on television, a supposedly confidence inspiring credential. Cole focused on Tunisia, noting that this comparatively small North African country with no oil resources had received “insufficient press.”  His main concern was “youth revolutionaries,” as the Arab press termed Arab Spring regime opponents in Libya, Tunisia, and elsewhere.</p>
<p>Cole began by claiming that a “relatively successful . . . transition away from authoritarianism” under the “Ben Ali clique,” who were “basically bank robbers,” had marked Tunisia’s Arab Spring.  Nonetheless, Tunisia is still “on a tightrope,” he added, as some Tunisian regions are prone to violence and Tunisia’s neighbor Libya also presents dangers.  The “Mad Max-like scenes of post-apocalyptic horror” previously described in <a href="http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-cole-arab-spring-millenials-20140629-story.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Cole’s writings</span></a> “have . . . dashed” the Arab Spring’s “bright hopes” in Libya and elsewhere.  Elliot School professor <a href="http://elliott.gwu.edu/part-time-faculty-l"><span style="color: #0433ff;">William Lawrence</span></a> noted in a post-lecture conversation that Libya’s parliament has now fled the capital Tripoli for a Greek <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/09/09/libyas-exiled-government-is-living-inside-a-car-ferry/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">car ferry</span></a> moored in Tobruk.  However, in December 2011, Cole stated erroneously that the “Libyan Revolution has largely succeeded, and this is a moment of celebration.”</p>
<p>Cole contrasted Libya with Tunisia, calling the new 2014 Tunisian <a href="http://www.aucegypt.edu/gapp/cairoreview/pages/articledetails.aspx?aid=577"><span style="color: #0433ff;">constitution</span></a> “very good on paper” and “very nicely worded.”  The “secularists won” in defeating attempts to codify sharia, which Cole dubiously compared to Catholic canon law, as well as a gender “complementarity” clause.  “The feminists in the room know what that means,” Cole said of the latter, before equating the “party of the Muslim religious right,” Tunisia’s Islamist, pro-jihadist <a href="http://henryjacksonsociety.org/2012/09/13/moderates-or-manipulators-tunisias-ennahda-islamists/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Ennahda Party</span></a>, initial supporter of both measures, with American conservatives.</p>
<p>But Cole conveniently omitted key passages of Tunisia’s constitution, including the opening traditional Islamic invocation, “In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.”  Other passages stipulate Tunisia’s “Islamic-Arab identity” and “civilizational affiliation to the Arab-Islamic nation.”  The preamble also supports “just liberation movements . . . against all forms of occupation and racism,” whose “forefront . . . is the Palestinian liberation movement.”  Article 1, which “cannot be amended,” further proclaims that Tunisia’s “religion is Islam” while Article 6 denotes state duty “to protect the sacred.”</p>
<p>Tunisia’s regionally unique “broad spectrum of politics” includes “militant” secularists, even though Ennahda won a thirty-seven percent plurality in the October 23, 2011 constitutional assembly <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/africa/2011/11/20111114171420907168.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">elections</span></a>, Cole observed.  “People will say things in Tunisia that if you said them in Cairo you certainly would be killed” by some Muslim vigilante, he noted.  Yet even Tunisia “pushing the boundaries,” erroneously compared by Cole with American history, has its limits.  A television broadcast of <i>Persepolis</i> depicting God as an old man brought a <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/tunisian-who-showed-persepolis-on-tv-fined-in-free-speech-case/2012/05/03/gIQA0GpzyT_story.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">blasphemy conviction</span></a>, he warned.</p>
<p>Cole contrasted his book’s focus on “secular, leftist movements” with what he called the media’s obsession with the “Arab world—Muslim barbarians,” but audience questions prompted him to address the role of Islam.  “I can’t deny that religious themes are very important in politics” in Iraq now, Cole conceded.  Yet Shiites and Sunnis killing each other over theology “just doesn’t seem to me . . . the way the world works,” he incorrectly concluded.</p>
<p>Cole praised the Middle East’s “new political generation,” noting that, according to polls, it’s “significantly less religiously observant” than previous generations.  He warned, however, that democracy is “not necessarily . . . breaking out.” Elaborating on his Arab variant of the secularization thesis (refuted throughout history), he added that countries like Saudi Arabia and Libya had urbanized in past decades.</p>
<p>“At this point in the American Revolution, the British still had Staten Island,” was Cole’s ahistorical Middle East/America comparison.  Presidential term limits in Egypt’s new constitution, for example, show that “things are changing a little bit.”  Events are “still changing . . . fluid,” and it’s “too early to call” on renaming the Arab Spring the “Islamic Winter.”</p>
<p>Despite Cole’s wishful thinking and strained comparisons of Arab upheaval with American political history, the Middle East’s road to liberty under law will remain rocky.  Small, atypically secular Tunisia’s narrow democratic success does not justify Cole’s optimism that the Middle East will develop open societies freed from Islamic atavism.  While the Shiite-Sunni sectarian strife Cole consistently downplays ravages Iraq, Syria, and beyond, jihadists hail from Saudi Arabia, other urbanized parts of the Middle East, and the West.  As with Arab Spring Libya, Cole will certainly err again.</p>
<p><i>Andrew E. Harrod is a freelance researcher and writer who holds a PhD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a JD from George Washington University Law School. He is a fellow with the</i> <a href="http://www.thelawfareproject.org/"><span style="color: #0433ff;"><i>Lawfare Project</i></span></a><i>; follow him on twitter at @AEHarrod. He wrote this essay for</i> <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/"><span style="color: #0433ff;"><i>Campus Watch</i></span></a><i>, a project of the</i> <a href="http://www.meforum.org/"><span style="color: #0433ff;"><i>Middle East Forum</i></span></a><i>.</i></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Islam: Victors Vanquishing Victims</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/terry-scambray/islam-victors-vanquishing-victims/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=islam-victors-vanquishing-victims</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 24 Oct 2014 04:35:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Terry Scambray]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[christianity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Crucified Again]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Middle East]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[persecution]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=243676</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Shillman Fellow Raymond Ibrahim unmasks the brutal extermination of Christianity in the Middle East. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Screen-Shot-2014-10-23-at-7.32.32-PM.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-243677" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Screen-Shot-2014-10-23-at-7.32.32-PM-234x350.png" alt="Screen Shot 2014-10-23 at 7.32.32 PM" width="211" height="316" /></a>Editor&#8217;s note<span style="color: #222222;">: The following book review of Raymond Ibrahim&#8217;s </span><a style="color: #1155cc;" href="http://www.amazon.com/Crucified-Again-Exposing-Islam%C2%92s-Christians/dp/1621570258/ref=pd_sim_b_1?ie=UTF8&amp;refRID=1MK8BDYBRZ2205D7XN83" target="_blank">Crucified Again</a><span style="color: #222222;"> first appeared in the </span><a style="color: #1155cc;" href="http://www.newoxfordreview.org/reviews.jsp?did=1014-scambray" target="_blank">New Oxford Review</a><span style="color: #222222;"> (October, 2014 issue).</span></em></p>
<p>Throughout the Muslim world, from Morocco to Nigeria to Indonesia — and even occasionally in Western Europe and North America — Christians are being harassed, tortured, and murdered. Reuters reported in January 2012 that a hundred million Christians were being persecuted, while a few years earlier Britain’s Secret Service, M16, put the number closer to two hundred million. In November 2012 German Chancellor Angela Merkel called Christianity “the most persecuted religion worldwide,” a statement that elicited condemnation from many world leaders. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe estimates that a Christian is killed for his faith every five minutes.</p>
<p>What is the reason for such atrocity? By any measure, the persecution of Christians is one of the dramatic stories of our time. So why is it ignored? Raymond Ibrahim, a fluent speaker of Arabic and a fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, answers these questions and explains both the sources of Islamic violence and the infirmities that cripple the West in his new book Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians.</p>
<p>History provides a large part of the answer. Islam, from its beginnings, in contrast to Christianity, promised its followers worldly success and prosperity. From Mohammed’s first raids, down through the centuries of conquests that followed, Islam has been a religion of victors vanquishing victims. Contemporary Muslim lands in the Middle East and Africa include what were once great centers of Christendom, such as Jerusalem, Alexandria, Damascus, Antioch, and Constantinople. Lest anyone forget, imperialism is not a Western invention.</p>
<p>Having conquered vast territory, Muslims then went on to dominate it by imposing the cruelties of Sharia law and dhimmitude, both of which reduce “infidels,” non-Muslims, to servile positions. Ibrahim provides examples of brutal conditions under Muslim rule during these early conquests when, “according to one medieval Muslim historian, over the two year course of a particularly ruthless Christian persecution campaign, some 30,000 churches were burned or pillaged in Egypt and Syria alone.” Under the Abbasid rule in A.D. 936, the Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem, believed to have been built atop the tomb of Christ, was burned down. Nearly a century later, Caliph Hakim bi-Amr Allah (996-1021) ordered the dismantling of what was left of the church, including the digging up of its foundations, in addition to the destruction of “Golgotha and the church of Saint Constantine as well as all the sacred grave stones. They even tried to dig up the graves and wipe out all traces of their existence.” Though apologists for Islam admit that Hakim was a madman, they coyly offer him as an aberration, implying that Christians suffered only under his rule. Not so, writes Ibrahim, for there is “no dearth of Muslim leaders throughout the whole of Islamic history that have persecuted Christians and their churches.”</p>
<p>Many of us in our youth read stories of medieval Europe in which “Mohammedans,” “Moors,” “Saracens,” and “Turks” were fearsome antagonists. When we got to high school and university, somehow that feature of European life played a less prominent role or was even absent from history courses. It seems, though, that our earliest stories were accurate, and Ibrahim provides a broad set of facts to support this.</p>
<p>In the first decades of its existence, Islam had conquered half the Christian lands in the world and appeared to be on such a roll that it would soon squash Europe into a single Islamic polity. “In fact,” Ibrahim writes, “Europe as we know it was forged in large measure by the Islamic conquests, which severed the Latin West from the Greek East, turning the once highly trafficked Mediterranean into a ‘Muslim Lake’ — so that, in the words of medieval Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun, ‘the Christians could no longer float a plank upon the sea.’” Belgian historian Henri Pirenne makes the same point when he writes, “The classic tradition was shattered because Islam had destroyed the ancient unity of the Mediterranean” (Mohammed and Charlemagne, 1959).</p>
<p>In 1798 Napoleon invaded and handily conquered Egypt, in the heart of the Muslim world. This conquest was followed in the nineteenth century by other European powers subjugating and colonizing Muslim territories. These invasions traumatized Muslims, for prior to this their centuries-long winning streak intensified the triumphalism inherent in their religion. Muslims’ loss of confidence fell further as they witnessed close-up the power and dynamism of Western ideas and technology. Ibrahim quotes the late Osama bin Laden to the effect that “when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.”</p>
<p>Muslims saw the West, synonymous for them with Christianity, as the strong horse, and they both feared and admired it. As Ibrahim writes with characteristic directness, “The reason for this admiration is simple: Islam, the quintessential religion of might makes right, teaches respect for power.” Some twentieth-century leaders like Mustafa Kemal Attaturk in Turkey, the Shah in Iran, and Gamal Nasser in Egypt attempted to emulate, at least in theory, Western ideas of nationalism, modernism, and secularization. During this time of Western confidence and hegemony, which extended to about 1950, Christians were tolerated in Muslim countries, and some even called this a “Golden Age for Christians” in the Islamic world.</p>
<p>Of course, some Muslims remained loyal to their old ways, but by the early twentieth century Western scholars saw Islam as “a spent force, an ideology on the wrong side of history.” That they would think this is understandable. After all, the much-extolled “secular city” had triumphed in the West, and it became difficult to imagine that the appetites for consumer items and sexual freedom it unleashed could abate.</p>
<p>But then the West began pulling up stakes in the Islamic world and elsewhere, while simultaneously adopting the religion of sentimentality as a replacement for Christianity. Soon, influential Westerners filled the air with mea culpas for their earlier imperialism and other alleged sins. Ibrahim shows in this book, as well as in his first book, The Al-Qaeda Reader, that the West’s orgy of self-criticism handed the Muslims all the propaganda weapons they required to rationalize the renewal of their attacks on the West. These rationalizations were so eagerly swallowed by our useful idiots that bin Laden poured it on even thicker by writing that the 9/11 attack was partly motivated by America’s failure to ratify the Kyoto treaty on climate change!</p>
<p>What few understood amid this confessional pose adopted by the West was that Islam sees imperialism as the normal exercise of power. So when Westerners began apologizing for what to Muslims were normal actions, Muslims’ respect for the West declined further. At the same time, they grabbed these propaganda clubs handed to them and proceeded to bash the infidels with their own words. Ibrahim argues further that this loss of respect spiraled downward into contempt when Islam saw “the new culture of sexual licentiousness, moral relativism, godlessness, and even the Western self-hatred that flooded Western societies in the late 1960s and 1970s, though they had roots going back decades earlier.” Sayyid Qutb, the twentieth century’s most renowned Islamic scholar and author of a thirty-volume commentary on the Koran, came to the U.S. in the 1940s. Though he had advocated that “Muslims should emulate Western science and technology,” visiting America radicalized him. Qutb insisted that, using Sharia law, Muslims must first clean up their own countries and then those of the rest of the world. Islamic supremacy and aggression, features of that old-time religion from the seventh century, were revived.</p>
<p>Nothing better exemplifies this revival than the Iranian Revolution of 1979, when Islam reasserted itself in the fiery leadership of the Ayatollah Khomeini and various bearded and morose mullahs who inveighed against “the Great Satan.” Their exaltation of Islam and loathing of America led to the overthrow of the Shah and the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran — not only an act of war but also a repudiation of centuries-old international protocols. “Islam is back!” these actions screamed loudly, though many people saw them as isolated episodes, perhaps the last gasp of an antiquated ideology, rather than the harbinger of thirty-five years of terrorism. Still wallowing in ignorance, many Westerners dismiss Muslims’ ravaging and killing as merely an extended bad-hair day, a departure from Islam’s enlightened and peaceful past. But the truth is the reverse: The former period of tolerance toward Christians in Muslim lands is an exception, and the present attacks on Christians are the norm.</p>
<p>American and European opinion-makers in the universities, among the intelligentsia, and in the media began to demonize Western tradition in the 1970s and to favor “indigenous peoples” and any exotic “ethnic identity.” Thus came the growth of “multiculturalism” and “diversity,” categories implicitly justified as compensation for centuries of mistreatment. Unfortunately, many ethnic traditions include varieties of tribalism, sometimes expressed as racism or anti-Semitism. Via “noble savage” quackery, Western intellectuals broadened the pathway for once Westward-looking Muslims to return to their roots. History became a melodrama wherein the West is the villain and Islam the noble victim. Within these assigned roles, the true history of the relationship between the West and Islam reversed, with the West cast as greedy, violent crusaders who invaded peaceful, prosperous Muslim lands.</p>
<p>From such melodrama, Ibrahim reports, we get Robert Fisk, correspondent for The Independent, who follows this script of “spot the victim.” Fisk has criticized Christians for supporting status-quo candidates like Ahmed Shafiq in Egypt, not understanding that Christians are the victims and that jihadist alternatives to these regimes will kill Christians and burn their churches while imposing Sharia law. Former President Bill Clinton misreads the situation in much the same way when he relies on materialist explanations. “What’s fueling all this stuff,” he says, is “inequality and poverty.” When the Nigerian government uses force against the Boko Haram jihadist gang for killing Christians, Mr. Clinton preaches that such “violence” will not solve the problem. Violence, however, is the problem. From these ignominious examples, Ibrahim points to a pathetic irony: The Muslims presently persecuting Christians are themselves descendants of Christians who were persecuted by the same ideology and in the same terrible circumstances.</p>
<p>Raymond Ibrahim was born in America of Coptic Christian parents and has traveled widely in the Middle East. He has appeared before the U.S. Congress and on national radio and television, and he writes regularly for major newspapers and scholarly journals. His comprehensive description of the persecution of Christians by Muslims is extensively documented. While Crucified Again might not provide much comfort, it is necessary reading for those who wish to understand the dynamic that propels the Islamic threat.</p>
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		<title>The Blood on Obama’s Hands</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-horowitz/the-blood-on-obamas-hands/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-blood-on-obamas-hands</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 21 Oct 2014 04:58:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Horowitz]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[betrayal]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[A radical president spawns an unmitigated disaster in the Middle East.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/obama.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-243407" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/obama-450x304.jpg" alt="obama" width="284" height="192" /></a><strong>Reprinted from <a href="www.redstate.com">RedState.com</a>.</strong></p>
<p>When conservatives consider the casualties of Obama’s national security policies, their attention is drawn quite naturally to Benghazi. In this shameful episode, the Obama Administration sacrificed an ambassador and three American heroes to protect a deceptive presidential campaign message in which Obama claimed that the war against al-Qaeda was over and won (“Osama bin Laden is dead, and al-Qaeda is on the run”). The facts are these: Ambassador Chris Stevens and three American heroes were sent into an al-Qaeda stomping ground that the British and other diplomatic consulates had already evacuated; they were denied the security they had requested; they were then left to die during a seven hour fire fight when their compound was attacked, and finally betrayed in death, when Obama and his representatives lied to the world about what had taken place and when he failed to bring their killers to justice as he had mendaciously promised he would.</p>
<p>Benghazi can be seen as the collateral damage caused by presidential lies – and worse – presidential denial that there is in fact a war that Islamists have declared on America. Instead Obama insists – in the official language he authorized and that is still in place – that America’s responses to acts of Islamic terror should be described as “overseas contingency operations.” If Islamic murders and beheadings take place in the homeland, Obama calls them “workplace violence.” Benghazi is also the most shameful presidential abandonment of Americans in the field in our history – a disgrace compounded when Obama justified his trade of five Taliban Generals for one American deserter by saying Americans don’t leave their countrymen on the battlefield, which is precisely what he did in Benghazi. All of which justifies the conservative focus on this terrible event.</p>
<p>But the casualties of Obama’s reign in Benghazi are dwarfed by the hundreds of thousands of deaths his policies have led to in Syria and Iraq, and the millions of Iraqis, Syrians and Libyans that those same policies have caused to flee their homes and become homeless in Turkey, Tunisia and other places of refuge. Obama’s legacy is defined by his ideological aversion to American power, his rule as the most anti-military president in our history, and his deeds as an “anti-war” activist, opposed to the “war on terror” because he believes that America’s (and Israel’s) policies are the cause of terrorism and the hatred that Islamic fanatics direct against our country.</p>
<p>Because of his ideological opposition to American power, Obama deliberately and openly surrendered America’s gains in Iraq, which had been won through the sacrifice of thousands of American lives and tens of thousands of American casualties. By deliberately handing over America’s massive military base in Iraq – a country that borders Syria, Afghanistan and Iran – Obama turned that country over to the terrorists and Iran, as his generals and intelligence chief and secretary of defense warned it would. Obama disregarded the warnings from his national security advisers – as no other American president would have – because he regarded America rather than the terrorists as the threat. In abandoning Iraq and deliberately losing the peace, he betrayed every American and every Iraqi who gave their lives to keep Iraq out of the hands of the terrorists and the Islamic Republic of Iran.</p>
<p>Obama’s stubborn refusal to use America’s military might – ground forces backed by air power – when Assad crossed the “red line” Obama had drawn in Syria created a second power vacuum that the terrorists filled, thus leading to the emergence of ISIS or ISIL – the Islamic State in Syria and the Levant. Defenders of Obama will claim that the American public would not have supported a military intervention in Syria even if Obama had ordered one. But why is that? It is because for eleven years, beginning with their assault on “Bush’s war” in Iraq, the Democrats have sabotaged the war on terror, claiming that America’s use of power for anything but “humanitarian” purposes is illegitimate, dangerous and the root cause of the terrorist problem.</p>
<p>Because it was “humanitarian” Obama felt justified in conducting an unauthorized, illegal intervention in Libya to overthrow an anti-al Qaeda dictator, saying it was to prevent an invisible threat to civilians there. The result? Al-Qaeda is now a dominant force in Libya, and 1.8 million Libyans – a third of the population – have fled to Tunisia. Another brutal Obama legacy. Yet, how firm is Obama’s commitment to humanitarian interventions? In Iraq he stood by while more than half a million Christians were either slaughtered or driven into exile by ISIS murderers on their mission to cleanse the earth of infidels. This was the oldest Christian community in the world, going back to the time of Christ, and Obama let it be systematically destroyed before bad press and pressure from his own party caused him to intervene to save Yazvidis and a Christian remnant trapped on a mountain top.</p>
<p>The Obama presidency has been an unmitigated disaster for Iraqis, Syrians, and Libyans. Now that ISIS is in control of territory the size of a state, has access to hundreds of millions of petrol dollars and advanced U.S. ordnance, not to mention chemical weapons that Saddam left behind, it is an impending disaster for the American homeland as well.</p>
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		<title>How the Muslim World Benefits from ISIS</title>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 20 Oct 2014 04:46:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Playing “Good Caliph“and “Bad Caliph.”]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/aa140625-iraq-isis-mosul-street-445a_82f23afee3a82a104ef51a50474e30c6.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-243338" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/aa140625-iraq-isis-mosul-street-445a_82f23afee3a82a104ef51a50474e30c6-450x334.jpg" alt="aa140625-iraq-isis-mosul-street-445a_82f23afee3a82a104ef51a50474e30c6" width="353" height="262" /></a>However the US campaign against ISIS goes, the beneficiaries will be its Sunni Muslim allies who are also doubling as our allies. While on the surface ISIS appears to have cut all ties, threatening even former allies like Turkey and Qatar, underneath the surface the pragmatic connections remain as strong as ever.</p>
<p>Terrorism is the fire of the Muslim world. Everyone plays with it and everyone gets burned. The trick is burning someone else with it first.</p>
<p>Americans still think of the relationship between terrorist groups and countries as servant and master. However it’s often more like feeding a rabid dog and then luring it into your neighbor’s yard. It’s less about direct control of a terrorist group and more about maneuvering it to reshape the political and military environment that your enemies and allies operate in.</p>
<p>That’s why Al Qaeda and Iran, religious enemies, could still occasionally cooperate.</p>
<p>The current campaign against ISIS is a typical example. By empowering ISIS, the Sunni Muslim oil states dragged the United States into an alliance with the bands of Islamic Jihadists commonly known as the Free Syrian Army. When the West balked at intervention even after reports of WMD use, the smart money went to ISIS. By turning Al Qaeda into a major regional threat, the United States would be dragged into the conflict and then forced to make common cause with the Free Syrian Army anyway.</p>
<p>When that still didn’t happen on schedule, mass murder and rape by ISIS did the trick. Now the Kurds have been forced out of their neutral position and into an alignment with the Sunni rebels. Western countries have gotten deeper into an alliance with the Free Syrian Army which will ultimately force them into a NATO intervention in Syria to protect the FSA. That was always the endgame. ISIS was the means.</p>
<p>The ISIS gamble was a dangerous one, especially under Obama, but now it’s beginning to pay off.</p>
<p>Islamic terrorism benefits Muslims directly and indirectly. The direct benefits are obvious. The indirect benefits are more subtle. Whether it’s ISIS and the FSA, Al Qaeda and Saudi Arabia, the “extremist” mosques that openly preach death and the “moderate” mosques that dress it up a little, Islamic violence benefits both sides in the game of “Good Caliph” and “Bad Caliph”.</p>
<p>Islamic “extremism” creates a market for “moderates”. The more bombs go off, the more the affected countries scramble to ally with cooler heads who claim to be able to defuse the anger of the radicals.</p>
<p>It’s a familiar game.</p>
<p>Jihadists set off bombs in Boston and the state partners with local mosques. The Taliban kill girls and the United States pumps more money into Pakistan. ISIS massacres non-Muslims and we ally with the FSA.</p>
<p>The Muslim world needs “extremists” to blow off dangerous steam and to achieve their goals indirectly. Each new extreme may hurt Muslims, but it also makes Westerners more dependent on them while turning yesterday’s unacceptable groups into the new moderates. When we look past the individual groups to the larger objectives of Islamization, we can see that each group in its own way helps put another piece of the puzzle into place. One group may do so through violence, while another promises to counter radical extremists, but all are working to secure the same ultimate totalitarian concessions.</p>
<p>Muslims object to the idea that each of them should be viewed as a ticking time bomb and yet they have benefited enormously from such a perception. PLO terrorism turned Western foreign policy into a tool for pursuing Muslim grievances against Israel. Al Qaeda turned Muslims from an obscure minority into a civil rights priority. ISIS combines both, forcing the West to accommodate Sunni territorial demands in Iraq and Syria through armed intervention while spreading paranoia about ISIS recruitment in the West.</p>
<p>When the current conflict with ISIS ends, it is likely that the Shiites will have been broken in Syria and weakened in Iraq, that Kurdish statehood will once again be a fantasy and that the position of Sunni Muslims in both countries will be stronger than ever after having profited from seizing the properties of Christians and Yazidi who were ethnically cleansed by ISIS. Even if ISIS loses, many of its goals will have been met because they’re also the goals of our Muslim allies in the coalition against ISIS.</p>
<p>We’re not even allying with Stalin to beat Hitler. We’re allying with one wing of the Nazi Party to beat another wing of the Nazi Party. And whichever wing wins, the Nazi agenda still wins.</p>
<p>That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t deal with ISIS. Like its Al Qaeda parent, it does represent a threat to us. But we also need to recognize that the best way to fight it is without the entangling alliances and strategic linkages that reward its backers. The surest way to perpetuate ISIS is to show its backers that they can can drag us into a war on their behalf by arming and funding Islamic terrorists for us to fight.</p>
<p>Too many politicians have bought into the myth that we can’t beat ISIS without allying with “moderates” in Syria despite the fact that even this administration, which can find moderates in Gitmo, couldn’t originally find any that it could safely arm. Our allies against ISIS are also the allies of ISIS.  We are not using them to beat ISIS. They are using us to seize Iraq and Syria.</p>
<p>When we accept the linkage between beating ISIS and helping the FSA, we reward the backers of ISIS. In the future when the Sunni oil states want to drag the US into a war, all they have to do is arm and fund ISIS or another group very much like it. And if we don’t come running when the bell rings, then they’ll have to make it an even bigger threat until it becomes too big for even a Democrat to ignore.</p>
<p>That’s exactly what happened with ISIS.</p>
<p>The answer doesn’t lie in ignoring Al Qaeda or in becoming a puppet of its backers. Instead we have to be aware of the larger political agendas involved. And those political agendas cannot be talked about.</p>
<p>When Biden wandered around the edges of the truth, he was swiftly told to apologize to Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the UAE. The same administration that can blame Israel for ISIS recruitment can’t even admit the fact that its Sunni allies were the ones who provided the money, weapons and manpower for ISIS. And if it can’t admit that, then it certainly can’t admit that it wasn’t a mistake, but a calculated plan.</p>
<p>The weakest and wealthiest Muslim countries compensate for their weakness by turning their dependency on us into our dependency on them. They need Al Qaeda and ISIS to make Western countries dependent on them. Muslims in the West similarly compensate for their weakness and dependency by exploiting the fear of Islamic terrorism to increase their influence and political power.</p>
<p>Islamic terrorism won’t end with airstrikes. It will end when we break this cycle of dependency by recognizing that what really feeds terrorism isn’t oppression or injustice, but Muslim political cynicism.</p>
<p>The backers of ISIS are also our allies against ISIS. Sunni Arab Muslims have aided in the genocide of non-Muslims to force us to back their territorial claims which include the ethnic cleansing of the same people we are fighting to protect. To fight ISIS we have made a deal with the devil to carry out the ISIS agenda.</p>
<p>That is the same thing that has happened each time we allowed ourselves to be led into the trap of allying with the “moderates” to defeat the “extremists.” It’s a road that leads to trying to bring democracy through Islamism and allying with Jihadists to fight Jihadists.</p>
<p>We can’t defeat ISIS by becoming ISIS.</p>
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		<title>Raymond Ibrahim on Obama, the Islamic State, and More</title>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 14 Oct 2014 04:05:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Raymond Ibrahim]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Shillman Journalism Fellow offers illuminating insight on the chaos engulfing the Middle East. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Raymond Ibrahim—a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center—was recently interviewed on &#8220;The Rino Hour of Power,” with host Rick Moran. The 40-minute interview discussion on a variety of topics dealing with the U.S. and Middle East follows below. (Another shorter, 20-minute interview on Reel Talk with Audrey Russo can be listened to by <a href="http://www.audreyrusso.com/Raymond_Ibrahim_1014solo.mp3">clicking here</a>.)</p>
<p><strong>The Rino Hour of Power:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="http://player.cinchcast.com/?platformId=1&amp;assetType=single&amp;assetId=6985499" width="400" height="370" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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<div style="font-size: 10px; text-align: center; width: 400px;">Check Out Politics Conservative Podcasts at Blog Talk Radio with <a href="http://www.blogtalkradio.com/rinopower" rel="nofollow">Rick Moran</a> on BlogTalkRadio</div>
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		<title>Religious Freedom Under Attack in the Muslim World</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/raymond-ibrahim/religious-freedom-under-attack-in-the-muslim-world/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=religious-freedom-under-attack-in-the-muslim-world</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/raymond-ibrahim/religious-freedom-under-attack-in-the-muslim-world/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 13 Oct 2014 04:45:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Raymond Ibrahim]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[apostasy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Middle East]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muslim]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[religious freedom]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[There are many Meriams in Sudan and around the globe.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #202021;"><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Meriam-Ibrahim_2986677b.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-242824" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Meriam-Ibrahim_2986677b-397x350.jpg" alt="Italy Mideast Sudan" width="343" height="303" /></a>Originally published by the <a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4763/muslim-persecution-christians-may-2014">Gatestone Institute</a></em></p>
<p style="color: #202021;">The deplorable state of religious freedom in the Islamic world came to the fore in May when news of the arrest, imprisonment, and death sentencing of a pregnant Christian wife and mother on the accusation that she had left Islam for Christianity reached the world.  On May 15, Meriam Ibrahim of Sudan was sentenced to flogging followed by hanging for apostasy after she repeatedly refused to convert to Islam.</p>
<p>During her 6-month imprisonment with her one-year-old son by her side, she gave birth to another child.  The baby girl was reportedly <a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/sudan/10938264/Meriam-Ibrahim-My-baby-is-disabled-because-I-gave-birth-with-my-legs-chained.html">born with disabilities</a> due to the harsh conditions of the prison cell she was delivered in and because her “apostate” mother was still shackled with chains when she gave birth to her.</p>
<p>However, because Meriam Ibrahim’s plight made it to the mainstream media, international outcry was heard all around the world, prompting Sudan to release her in June.</p>
<p>Prior to her release, Islamic clerics were often sent to her cell where they repeatedly pressured and threatened her with death to convert to Islam.  In a recent interview with Megyn Kelly on Fox News, Ibrahim said: “My faith was the only weapon that I had in these confrontations with imams and Muslim scholars because that’s what I believe.  Faith means life. If you don’t have faith, you’re not alive.”</p>
<p>When Kelly asked her why she didn’t simply do what the clerics wanted and convert to Islam in the interest of freedom, Ibrahim <a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/09/15/sudanese-christian-woman-sentenced-to-death-says-had-god-by-her-side/">replied</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>If I did, that would mean I gave up.  It’s not possible because it’s not true.  It’s my right to follow the religion of my choice.  I’m not the only one suffering from this problem.  There are many Meriams in Sudan and throughout the world.  It’s not just me; I’m not the only one”….  With regard to the situation of Christians, this is a well-known fact that they live under difficult circumstances and they are persecuted and treated harshly.  They are afraid to say they are Christian out of fear of persecution.  Sometimes imprisoned Christians with financial difficulties are told that the government will pay off their debts if they convert to Islam….  If you are a Christian and you convert to Islam it will become hard to leave Islam because if you do so you will be subjected to the death penalty.</p></blockquote>
<p>Ibrahim’s story is in fact the <a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/sudan-mothers-case-tip-of-the-iceberg-on-islamic-persecution/">tip of the iceberg of Muslim persecution of Christians</a>.  The fundamental difference, the reason she was eventually released, is that the mainstream media reported her story—a story which countless untold Christians throughout the Islamic world experience daily.</p>
<p>Some, far from released, are killed for being Christian and refusing Islam.  Thus, around the same time the world was hearing about Ibrahim’s plight, a prominent, <a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://morningstarnews.org/2014/05/key-leader-of-somalias-underground-church-slain/">underground church Christian leader was killed by Muslims from the al-Shabaab group</a> in Somalia.<strong> </strong> “Sadness and grief has befallen our community when our dear brother Abdishakur Yusuf was mercilessly murdered in Mogadishu by unknown gunmen,” said a local source: “He was found outside his house lying in a pool of blood… He was shot in the head multiple times, so that his face is barely recognizable.” <strong> </strong>Yusuf leaves a widow and three children, ages 11, 8 and 5.</p>
<p>Weeks before this, al-Shabaab Muslims publicly beheaded a mother of two girls and her cousin after discovering they were Christians.  According to local sources, the Islamists “called residents to the town center to witness the executions of the 41-year-old mother, Sadia Ali Omar, and her 35-year-old cousin, Osman Mohamoud Moge.”  Before slaughtering the two women, an al-Shabaab member announced, “We know these two people are Christians who recently came back from Kenya—we want to wipe out any underground Christian living inside of <em>mujahidin </em>[jihadi] area.”  The two daughters of one of the women, ages 8 and 15, “were witness to the slaughter,” sources said, with the younger girl screaming and shouting for someone to save her mother.</p>
<p>In the context of Meriam Ibrahim, many Americans wondered why the Obama administration was not saying or doing much, even though her toddler that was imprisoned with her was an American citizen from his father’s side.  Speaking of Ibrahim’s ordeal, Sen. Ted Cruz <a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.cruz.senate.gov/?p=news&amp;id=1474">said</a>:  “There is urgency, a dire need for U.S. leadership.  President Obama should speak out publicly and call upon the government of Sudan to free Meriam Ibrahim. Sec. of State John Kerry should speak out loudly and forcibly and call up on.”</p>
<p>Members of Congress are increasingly urging Obama to speak up on behalf of persecuted minorities throughout the Islamic world.   A few weeks earlier, human rights activists criticized the president for not addressing the plight of Christians and other minorities during his talks with leaders in Saudi Arabia, where Christianity is banned.</p>
<p>According to the Washington-based <a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.persecution.org/2014/03/29/president-obama-silent-on-religious-freedom-in-saudi-arabia/">International Christian Concern</a> advocacy group, Obama did not “publicly broach the subject of religious freedom” during talks on March 28 with Saudi King Abdullah, despite a letter from some 70 members of Congress urging him to “address specific human rights reforms” both in public and in direct meetings with Abdullah and other officials.</p>
<p>“This visit was an excellent opportunity for the president to speak up on an issue that affects millions of Saudi citizens and millions more foreign workers living in Saudi Arabia,” said Todd Daniels, ICC’s Middle East regional manager, adding that it was “remarkable that the president could stay completely silent about religious freedom” despite pressure from Congress “to publicly address the issue, as well as other human rights concerns, with King Abdullah…”</p>
<p>Another story appearing in May further highlighted the U.S. government’s indifference.  A Christian teenage girl told of how Boko Haram in Nigeria came to her household and slaughtered her father and brother <a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://cnsnews.com/news/article/penny-starr/christian-teen-whose-dad-brother-slain-boko-haram-was-denied-us-visa">because they refused to convert to Islam</a>.  After abusing her, they tied her up and left her in a state of shock between the two corpses.  Emmanuel Ogebe, the human rights attorney who helped Peters come to the United States, said that visa requests filed on Peters’ behalf were denied “multiple times” in 2013 with the State Department citing no family ties in the U.S. as the reason. After legal appeals, she was finally allowed to come to the United States and testified in congress last April after Boko Haram abducted 300 schoolgirls, including her cousin, from her village.</p>
<p>Similarly, about a month earlier, the United States Institute for Peace brought together the governors of Nigeria’s mostly Muslim northern states for a conference in the U.S., but the State Department <a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.wnd.com/2014/03/u-s-blocks-christian-governor-from-nigeria-peace-talks/">blocked</a> the visa of the region’s only Christian governor, an ordained minister, citing “administrative” problems.</p>
<p>The rest of May’s roundup of Muslim persecution of Christians around the world includes (but is not limited to) the following accounts, listed by theme and country alphabetical order, not necessarily according to severity.</p>
<p align="center"><strong>Muslim Attacks on Christian Churches</strong></p>
<p><strong>Iran</strong>: Plainclothes security authorities <a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://mohabatnews.com/index.php?option=com_content&amp;view=article&amp;id=8527:a-number-of-christian-converts-arrested-at-easter-service&amp;catid=36:iranian-christians&amp;Itemid=279">raided an Easter service in a house-church</a> in southern Tehran, arresting and hauling off all those in attendance.  Neighbors said that security authorities were “very disrespectful to those in the house-church as well as to the neighbors.”</p>
<p><strong>Malaysia</strong>: Two Catholic nuns in the Muslim-majority nation “were viciously attacked on the grounds of the Church of Visitation in Seremban in what is believed to be a robbery attempt early this morning,” reported the <em>Malaysian Insider</em>.  Sister Juliana Lim was hospitalized in critical condition and on a respirator, while Sister Mary-Rose received treatment for various injuries.  “Both nuns from the Infant Jesus Convent, were left bruised, bleeding and in shock following the attack, said Fr Chan in his Facebook posting, adding: ‘As I anointed them [two nuns], tears streamed down my face. I couldn’t help it. How wicked it is to do this to our nuns, who have given their whole life to God.’”  In response, the Council of Churches of Malaysia said: “The <a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/malaysia/article/two-catholic-nuns-viciously-attacked-on-church-grounds#sthash.kjHNEm0p.dpuf">voices of antagonism and hatred have been on the increase in the country</a> and it would be no surprise if the attack on the nuns were not conspired by those out to cause inter-religious conflict in the country.”</p>
<p><strong>Nigeria</strong>: <a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://morningstarnews.org/2014/05/boko-haram-kills-at-least-29-christians-in-gwoza-area-nigeria/">Seven churches were attacked and 29 Christians slaughtered.</a>  On Sunday, May 25, during worship service, Islamic terrorists from Boko Haram<strong> </strong>killed 21 Christians of a congregation of the Church of Christ in Nations in Gwoza town.  The next day Boko Haram Muslims burned down six more churches and slaughtered eight more Christians in the area.</p>
<p><strong>Palestinian National Authority</strong>:  St. George’s Orthodox Church in Bethlehem was attacked by Muslims during its annual St. George’s Day services on May 6, leaving one Christian stabbed, several injured, and the building damaged. According to <a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://blog.camera.org/archives/2014/05/church_in_beit_jala_attacked.html">Leila Gilbert</a>, “Some local Muslims either tried to park a car too close [to] the church and/or tried to enter the church during a service honoring St. George—the initial instigation isn’t clear. But when the intruders were asked to leave, one of them stabbed a Christian man who was outside the church serving as a guard. He was hospitalized. Several then started throwing stones at the church. 7 or 8 Christians were injured and some physical damage was done—broken windows etc. The police didn’t show up for an hour.”</p>
<p><strong>Tanzania</strong>: <a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://barnabasfund.org/US/News/Archives/Church-premises-in-Tanzania-targeted-in-two-separate-attacks.html">Two churches were attacked</a>.  As Christians were gathered for overnight prayers in the Assemblies of God church, around 80 Muslim men armed with arrows and knives attacked the church building while shouting “death to apostates.” They set fire to the church, leaving its interior in ruins, and then went looking for its pastor, a Muslim convert to Christianity, presumably to slaughter him.   Separately, a homemade explosive device in a plastic bag left inside the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Tanzania exploded in the face of a female worker who found it, causing serious injuries to her face and legs and leaving her in critical condition.</p>
<p><strong>Turkey: </strong>At least one Turkish church was labeled <a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://morningstarnews.org/2014/05/church-website-blocked-as-porn-in-turkish-parliament-legislator-says/">“pornographic” and blocked</a> from computers at the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, prompting one legislator to demand an investigation.  When asked, the speaker for the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) said it was likely a technical glitch, but Aykan Erdemir, the legislator who discovered it, said “I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some malicious intent.”  Umut Ṣahin, general secretary for Turkey’s Association of Protestant Churches, said the ban was “horrible…  It’s a shame.  It really pains us at having this kind of accusation when we have a high moral standard.”</p>
<p align="center"><strong>Muslim Attacks on Christian Freedom: Apostasy, Blasphemy, Proselytization</strong></p>
<p><strong>Egypt</strong>: A Coptic Christian teacher, Bishoy Camille, was <a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.copts-united.com/English/Details.php?I=1122&amp;A=14367">sentenced to four years</a> in prison and fined 10,000 Egyptian pounds.  He was found guilty of sharing cartoons of Islamic prophet Muhammad on Facebook, which prompted Muslim riots against the Copts.</p>
<p><strong>Iran</strong>: A May report by Morning Star News said that “Iran’s secret police and Revolutionary Guard are subjecting Christians to a continuing wave of arrests, and increased torture and brutal beatings, in an effort to crush the house-church movement, activists said.  Human rights activists confirmed that there has been a noticeable increase this month in the number of reported assaults against Christians imprisoned in Iran. The assaults, which are taking place against converts who lead house churches, are meant to send a message to Christians in the country, said a Middle East Concern (MEC) researcher who focuses on Iran.”  On May 5, for example, internal security agents arrested Silas Rabbani, a leader with the Church of Iran in Karaj. Rabbani, a former Muslim, has been <a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://morningstarnews.org/2014/05/iran-steps-up-campaign-of-terror-against-house-churches/">“informally charged” with apostasy and was accordingly beaten while in custody</a>.  “He was then transferred to Gohardasht Prison, also known as Rajai Shahr, where the torture has continued.”</p>
<p><strong>Kenya</strong>: Three weeks after converting to Christianity, Hassan Hussein Mohammed, a 26-year-old former Muslim, was severely beaten in a mosque.  Although he was training to become a Muslim leader, he met some Christians, discussed religion, and eventually converted.  According to Morning Star News, “Mohammed later went to the mosque only to collect his identification papers, but leaders ordered him to stay and conduct evening prayers. After some hesitation, he agreed. A voice within, he later told church leaders, told him not to lead the prayers, and when he tried to say them his mind blanked. He then admitted that he had accepted ‘Isa,’ Jesus. <a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://morningstarnews.org/2014/05/convert-from-islam-in-kenya-beaten-arrested/">Those in the mosque beat him with a blunt object, kicked him and struck him until he was unconscious</a>, he told church leaders. When he regained consciousness a few minutes later, he said, ‘I am ready to die for Isa, and I forgive you for what you have done to me.’”  He managed to escape, but after news of his conversion spread, Mohammed began receiving threatening phone messages and texts.  One said: “You will regret why you left the prophet’s religion.”</p>
<p><strong>Pakistan</strong>: When a Muslim religious leader discovered that four Christians, a married couple, and two women, were <a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.asianews.it/news-en/Sindh,-four-Christians-arrested-for-distributing-religious-materials-31121.html">handing out Christian pamphlets</a>, he immediately informed police who arrested the Christians, taking them away from a growing crowd of angry Muslims.  According to Fr. Arshad John of the Archdiocese of Karachi, who is engaged in the protection of minority rights: “The claims that the religious minorities are free to practice and preach their religion, is clearly evident from this act. Although the act of distributing the religious material and preaching in such areas is not very wise, in the past such cases have produced unfortunate results. We pray for the group and hope they will be released soon.”  Separately, the Pakistan Christian Post reported that Dr. Nazir S Bhatti, President of Pakistan Christian Congress, was concerned about a recent example of double standards concerning the implementation of blasphemy laws.  He said that when any Muslim commits blasphemy on electronic media watched by millions, he or she is <a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.pakistanchristianpost.com/headlinenewsd.php?hnewsid=4862">pardoned after a simple apology note</a>, but when a Christian or Ahmadiyyia community member is accused of blasphemy by one Muslim wittiness, then he faces death sentence even if he swears that he did not insult the name of prophet Muhammad:  “All Christian victims of blasphemy laws after arrests have publically denied committing blasphemy but not any court or complainant have pardoned them but when a Muslim cleric or any Muslim very openly defiles name of Prophet Mohammad then uproar of Islamic decrees appear to Pardon these Muslims.”</p>
<p><strong>Sudan</strong>: In the town of al-Gadarif on Sudan’s eastern border with Ethiopia, another Christian woman, much like Meriam Ibrahim, <a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://morningstarnews.org/2014/05/second-woman-in-jail-for-alleged-apostasy-as-meriam-ibrahim-gives-birth-in-prison/">was incarcerated on the accusation that she had apostatized from Islam</a>.  Immigration/Citizenship arrested Faiza Abdalla, 37, when she responded to officers’ questions about her religion that she was Christian.  They immediately arrested her based on her Muslim name.  (Her family had converted to Christianity before she was born but kept their former name.)  As happened with Meriam Ibrahim and others, a court went on to annul Faiza’s marriage to her husband, a lifelong Catholic from South Sudan, on grounds that she had committed “adultery” by allegedly having left Islam and married a Christian.</p>
<p align="center"><strong>Dhimmitude: Generic Hostility, Abuse, and Discrimination</strong></p>
<p><strong>Egypt</strong>: Lawyers of a Muslim man who attacked Christian properties and persons—<a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://morningstarnews.org/2014/05/lawyers-press-for-insanity-defense-in-killing-of-christian-woman-in-egypt/">stabbing one Coptic woman to death</a>—maintain that he is innocent by reason of insanity, even though psychiatric evaluations found him sane and fit to stand trial.  Last February, Mahmoud Mohamed Ali went on a violent rampage, attacking three Christians with a knife. His intended victim, a male Coptic pharmacy clerk, fought him off, and Ali fled.  Next, Ali stabbed Demian, a Coptic shopkeeper in another Christian-owned pharmacy, severing an artery in her neck; she fell to the floor bleeding to death. Soon after, Ali stabbed a female Coptic high school student, who barely managed to escape with her life.  But according to Morning Star News: “Confirming fears of human rights activists who said attorneys for Mahmoud Mohamed Ali would use a tactic that has freed other Muslims from punishment for premeditated, religiously motivated murder, the lawyers are challenging results of the evaluation.”  Some Islamic teachings state that <a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/islamic-racism-muslim-blood-superior-to-infidel-blood/">the life and worth of a Muslim is greater than that of an “infidel”</a> and so they should not be punished, or should receive the minimum punishment when they kill non-Muslims.  Egyptian human rights activist Osama Wagdy said the “insanity” plea is a tactic commonly used in Egypt by those who have violently targeted Christians: “They are pretending, because that is how they get out of cases…  Nobody thinks he is mentally ill. He went from one place to another knowing what he was doing and told one of the victims, ‘You deserve it.’”  Separately, five “<a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.el-balad.com/931468">unidentified persons</a>” kidnapped a Coptic Christian pharmacy owner at gunpoint in Sohag, Upper Egypt. Soon <a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.el-balad.com/931468">after Friday mosque prayers</a>, a car pulled up in front of the pharmacy and opened fire on it before the assailants raided it and drove off with the kidnapped owner, one Mr. Marcos, a 52-year-old Copt, at gunpoint.</p>
<p><strong>Eritrea</strong>: Five Christians of the Evangelical Lutheran Church <a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://morningstarnews.org/2014/05/eritrea-again-persecutes-christians-of-officially-recognized-faith/">were arrested</a> after their church announced that they were set to be ordained for pastoral ministry. “The arrests clearly show how even government recognized churches, namely the Catholic, [Eritrean] Orthodox [Church] and Evangelical Lutheran churches, are not free from government control,” said an Open Doors source on condition of anonymity.  “The arrest of these pastoral candidates reminds us of one of the greatest challenges churches in Eritrea face….  Due to the constant turnover of pastors due to arrest or threats, continuous and biblically consistent pastoral care for Christians is hampered.”  A further “1,500 Christians are languishing in prison for their faith.”  In 2010, an estimated 3,000 Christians were incarcerated for their faith; most were held in shipping containers in desert camps and others in underground cells; some were tortured to death while others perished in the desert trying to escape.</p>
<p><strong>Germany</strong>:  A Turkish man being treated in a hospital attacked his nurse because there were too many crosses on the wall.   According to Mainpost, a German publication (as translated by Nicolai Sennels for <a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2014/05/germany-sick-turk-attacks-hospital-nurse-because-too-many-crosses-on-wall">Jihad Watch</a>),  “A 34-year-old went to St. Joseph Hospital early on Saturday morning due to a ‘gastro-intestinal flu.’ Suddenly he refused to be treated, because he thought there were too many Christian crosses on the wall.  Because of the crosses, the man started insulting the nurse, calling her a bitch, fascist, and the like. Then the man, according to police report, also started becoming physically aggressive. The hospital called the police. The officers seized the man in front of the hospital and checked him.”</p>
<p><strong>Pakistan</strong>: Five Christian families that, according to Agenzia Fides, were “kidnapped and enslaved by their Muslim employers” in the Punjab were released after nearly three decades of slavery.  After the release, one of the families told their suffering: they were victims of forced labor and were treated as slaves for over 25 years. One of the women, Safia Bibi, began working at the furnace along with her husband, Anwar Masih, right after her wedding. When their nine children were old enough they also started to work in the same place. They lived in the factory complex with no toilets and often did not receive compensation.  If they tried to leave their job, they were beaten and tortured, left days without food. In 2013, Safia’s husband died due to illness and weakness, and no doctor was called. Her children could not attend his funeral—nor go to prayer meetings or celebrate Christmas—because they were forced to work. Nasir Saeed a human rights activist said: “<a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.fides.org/en/news/35725-ASIA_PAKISTAN_5_Christian_families_kidnapped_and_enslaved_by_employers_have_been_released#.VAnu6vldVqU">It is sad to see that even in the 21st century slavery continues to exist in Pakistan</a>. The owners of furnaces are often wealthy and influential and are rarely prosecuted. The workers, often Christian, work a life in slave-like conditions to pay their debts, that last generations. Sometimes they are sold from one furnace to another. The government is aware of the situation, but has never taken serious measures.”</p>
<p><strong>Turkey</strong>: According to ANSamed, “Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government plans to turn Istanbul’s Hagia Sofia Basilica into a mosque in the afternoon and evening and a museum in the morning. The historical monument, which draws millions of tourists every year, will have the Byzantine [Christian] frescoes covering its walls cast into shadow by ‘dark light’ so as to avoid offending Islam.  The government would thus like to turn what is today seen as a symbol of Christianity back into a place of worship for Muslims, as it was after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453.”   <a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/christendoms-greatest-cathedral-to-become-a-mosque/">A campaign to turn the Hagia Sofia back into a mosque has been brewing for quite some time now</a>, raising alarm among Christian communities in the east. Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew I said that “we and all other Christians will oppose it.”  And Athens called it an “<a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.ansamed.info/ansamed/en/news/sections/generalnews/2014/05/08/turkey-hagia-sofia-to-become-half-mosque-and-half-museum_d6e3e0d2-ec16-4516-8916-15e767deed6f.html">insult to the religious sensibilities of millions of Christians</a>.”  Even so, the Islamist party submitted a formal motion in parliament to transform Hagia Sofia into a mosque.</p>
<p align="center"><strong>About this Series</strong></p>
<p>The persecution of Christians in the Islamic world has become endemic.  Accordingly, “Muslim Persecution of Christians” was developed to collate some—by no means all—of the instances of persecution that surface each month. It serves two purposes:</p>
<p>1)    To document that which the mainstream media does not: the habitual, if not chronic, persecution of Christians.</p>
<p>2)    To show that such persecution is not “random,” but systematic and interrelated—that it is rooted in a worldview inspired by Islamic Sharia.</p>
<p>Accordingly, whatever the anecdote of persecution, it typically fits under a specific theme, including hatred for churches and other Christian symbols; apostasy, blasphemy, and proselytism laws that criminalize and sometimes punish with death those who “offend” Islam; sexual abuse of Christian women; forced conversions to Islam;  theft and plunder in lieu of <em>jizya</em> (financial tribute expected from non-Muslims); overall expectations for Christians to behave like cowed <em>dhimmis</em>, or third-class, “tolerated” citizens; and simple violence and murder. Sometimes it is a combination thereof.</p>
<p>Because these accounts of persecution span different ethnicities, languages, and locales—from Morocco in the West, to Indonesia in the East—it should be clear that one thing alone binds them: Islam—whether the strict application of Islamic Sharia law, or the supremacist culture born of it.</p>
<p><strong>Previous Reports</strong>:</p>
<ul>
<li><a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/raped-and-slaughtered-muslim-persecution-of-christians-april-2014/">April, 2014</a></li>
<li><a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/obama-administration-suppresses-talk-of-muslim-persecution-of-christians-march-2014/">March, 2014</a></li>
<li><a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/christians-most-persecuted-group-in-world-muslim-persecution-of-christians-february-2014/">February, 2014</a></li>
<li><a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/becomes-chief-enabler-of-christian-persecution-muslim-persecution-of-christians-january-2014/">January, 2014</a></li>
<li><a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/they-are-slaughtering-us-like-chickens-muslim-persecution-of-christians-december-2013/">December, 2013</a></li>
<li><a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/u-s-chose-to-stay-silent-on-muslim-persecution-of-christians-november-2013/">November, 2013</a></li>
<li><a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/muslim-persecution-of-christians-october-2013/" target="_blank">October, 2013</a></li>
<li><a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/muslim-persecution-of-christians-october-2013/" target="_blank">September, 2013</a></li>
<li><a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/muslim-persecution-of-christians-august-2013/">August, 2013</a></li>
<li><a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/muslim-persecution-of-christians-july-2013/">July, 2013</a></li>
<li><a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/muslim-persecution-of-christians-june-2013/">June, 2013</a></li>
<li><a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/muslim-persecution-of-christians-may-2013/">May, 2013</a></li>
<li><a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/muslim-persecution-of-christians-april-2013/">April, 2013</a></li>
<li><a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/muslim-persecution-of-christians-march-2013/">March, 2013</a></li>
<li><a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/muslim-persecution-of-christians-february-2013/">February, 2013</a></li>
<li><a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/muslim-persecution-of-christians-january-2013/">January, 2013</a></li>
<li><a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/muslim-persecution-of-christians-december-2012/">December, 2012</a></li>
<li><a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/muslim-persecution-of-christians-november-2012/" target="_blank">November, 2012</a></li>
<li><a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/muslim-persecution-of-christians-october-2012/" target="_blank">October, 2012</a></li>
<li><a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/muslim-persecution-of-christians-september-2012/">September, 2012 </a></li>
<li><a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/muslim-persecution-of-christians-august-2012/">August, 2012</a></li>
<li><a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/12215/muslim-persecution-of-christians-july-2012">July, 2012</a></li>
<li><a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/12045/muslim-persecution-of-christians-june-2012">June, 2012</a></li>
<li><a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/11930/muslim-persecution-of-christians-may-2012">May, 2012</a></li>
<li><a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/11713/muslim-persecution-of-christians-april-2012">April, 2012</a></li>
<li><a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/11604/muslim-persecution-of-christians-march-2012">March, 2012</a></li>
<li><a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/11373/muslim-persecution-of-christians-february-2012">February, 2012</a></li>
<li><a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/11152/muslim-persecution-of-christians-january-2012">January, 2012</a></li>
<li><a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/10989/muslim-persecution-of-christians-december-2011">December, 2011</a></li>
<li><a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/10922/muslim-persecution-of-christians-november-2011">November, 2011</a></li>
<li><a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/10724/muslim-persecution-of-christians-october-2011">October, 2011</a></li>
<li><a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/10504/muslim-persecution-of-christians-september-2011">September, 2011</a></li>
<li><a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/10247/muslim-persecution-of-christians-august-2011">August, 2011</a></li>
<li><a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/muslim-persecution-of-christians-july-2011/" target="_blank">July, 2011</a></li>
</ul>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Raymond Ibrahim</strong> on <strong>The Glazov Gang</strong> discussing</em><span id="eow-title" class="watch-title long-title " dir="ltr" title="The Glazov Gang-Raymond Ibrahim on ISIS's Islamic Inspirations."><em><strong> ISIS&#8217;s Islamic Inspirations</strong>:</em> </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/bFkGgNsqQ_4" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
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		<title>Is the Islamic State a Good Thing?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/raymond-ibrahim/is-the-islamic-state-a-good-thing/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=is-the-islamic-state-a-good-thing</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/raymond-ibrahim/is-the-islamic-state-a-good-thing/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 02 Oct 2014 04:55:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Raymond Ibrahim]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ISIS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[islamic state]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Middle East]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=242093</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[An apocalyptic scenario.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><i><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/iraq-shiite-isis.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-242094" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/iraq-shiite-isis-423x350.jpg" alt="iraq-shiite-isis" width="314" height="260" /></a>The following is an envisioning of what might eventually unfold if the Islamic State is left to flourish.  Although it is only one of several scenarios, due to its ostensibly implausible nature, it deserves some delineation.</i></p>
<p>The Islamic State (IS) <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2773268/ISIS-militants-fighting-Iraqi-government-forces-just-six-miles-Baghdad-despite-Western-airstrikes-against-terror-group.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">continues</span></a> expanding its territory and influence through jihad.   Religious minorities that fall under its sway—at least the fortunate ones—continue to flee in droves, helping make the Islamic State what it strives to be: purely Islamic.</p>
<p>Left unfettered, with only cosmetic airstrikes by an indecisive Obama administration to deal with, IS continues growing in strength and confidence, as Western powers again stand idly by.</p>
<p>More and more Muslims around the world, impressed and inspired by what they see, become convinced that the Islamic State is in fact the new caliphate deserving of their allegiance.  Such Muslims—the most “radical” kind, who delight in the slaughter and subjugation of “infidels”—continue leaving Western nations and migrating to the Islamic State to wage jihad and live under Sharia.</p>
<p>In other words, a sizable chunk of the world’s most radicalized/pious Muslims all become localized in one region.  There they openly and proudly display their anti-infidel supremacism.</p>
<p>Throughout, Western media have no choice but to report objectively—so thoroughly exposed for its barbarity has IS become that it is an insurmountable task to whitewash its atrocities.  The world has seen enough about IS to know that this is a savage, hostile, and supremacist state without excuse.   Even Obama, after <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/islamic-state-atrocities-the-product-of-grievances/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">originally citing “grievances”</span></a> as propelling the Islamic State’s successes, recently made an about face, saying “<a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/god-condones-terror-obama-pushes-world-powers-join-fight-isis-fanatics-article-1.1951011"><span style="color: #0433ff;">No grievance justifies these actions</span></a>.”</p>
<p>Put differently, the “Palestinian card” will not work here.  Western media, apologists, and talking heads cannot portray IS terror—including crucifying, beheading, and raping humans simply because they are “infidels”—as a product of “grievances” or “land disputes.”</p>
<p>Indeed, the Islamic State itself, which is largely composed of foreigners, is the one invading other territories (Iraq, Syria), <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/world-ignores-christian-exodus-from-islamic-world/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">massacring and driving out their most indigenous inhabitants</span></a>, from Christians to Yazidis.</p>
<p>In time, the Islamic State’s borders are fully consolidated and the “caliphate” is a fact of reality.  Its war on fellow Muslim “apostates”—<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/new-islamic-caliphate-declares-jihad-on-muslims/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">its current excuse</span></a> for not engaging the greatest of all “infidels” in the region, Israel—eventually comes to a close or stalemate.</p>
<p>Then the inevitable happens: another conflict erupts between Israel and Hamas; Muslims around the word, including those under IS authority, drunk with power and feelings of superiority, demand that the time to wipe out the Jewish infidel has finally come; that the second phase of the caliphate is now or never—<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/the-historical-reality-of-the-muslim-conquests/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">conquest</span></a> of “original infidels.”</p>
<p>As Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/Full-text-of-Prime-Minister-Netanyahus-UN-speech-376626"><span style="color: #0433ff;">recently declared</span></a> during his U.N. speech, “ISIS and Hamas are branches of the same poisonous tree. ISIS and Hamas share a fanatical creed, which they both seek to impose well beyond the territory under their control.”</p>
<p>Thus the Islamic State will eventually be compelled to start saber rattling and worse against Israel.  After all, its entire legitimacy is founded on its namesake—that it is <i>the</i> “Islamic state,” the state that magnifies and protects Islam and Muslims.   It must eventually confront Israel or else be proven the greatest of all hypocrites or <i>munafiqun</i>—a term of great rebuke in the Koran, which <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/new-islamic-caliphate-declares-jihad-on-muslims/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">some Muslim authorities are already applying to IS for not confronting Israel now</span></a>.</p>
<p>Conflicts inevitably ensue between Israel and its neighboring Islamic State.   But unlike the Jewish state’s war on Hamas—which the mainstream media can manipulate and portray as a war on innocent Palestinian women and children—world governments and media will find it exceedingly difficult to criticize Israel should any conflict between it and IS arise.</p>
<p>Unlike sympathy for the Palestinians, non-Muslims around the world vacillate between hate for and fear of the Islamic State; even Karen Armstrong, John Esposito and their ilk cannot apologize for this particular group of Islamic savages—other than to insist that theirs is not true Islam (an irrelevant point for the purposes of this scenario).</p>
<p>Moreover, the argument habitually used against Israel—that its war on Hamas creates innocent Palestinian casualties—loses all legitimacy in any war on the Islamic State.</p>
<p>After all, IS, <i>the</i> <i>state itself</i>—not some terrorist organization ensconced within the state—is beheading, massacring, and enslaving humans <i>solely on the basis of their religious identity</i>.  Its citizens—who went there of their own accord, unlike “displaced” and “trapped” Palestinians—are fanatical, extremist Muslims, whose <a href="http://www.christiantoday.com/article/british.woman.who.joined.isis.calls.for.beheading.of.christians/40161.htm"><span style="color: #0433ff;">greatest aspiration is to decapitate an infidel</span></a>.</p>
<p>No one can apologize for this.   The best that can be said is that this is not “true” Islam.</p>
<p>This is why, even now, the pro-Islamic Obama administration is forced to condemn IS and even (if perfunctorily) militarily engage it.</p>
<p>In short, conventional war becomes very justifiable against IS—especially because there is no longer any worry of accidentally killing this or that moderate or non-Muslim, as they have all been driven away, replaced by Islamic terrorists from around the world.</p>
<p>And conventional war has traditionally been the bane of Islamists, who prefer terrorism, hiding among civilians, using them as shields, and playing the victim.</p>
<p>Safe from international censure and pushed to the edge, Israel eventually obliterates the Islamic State, while even Islam’s greatest apologists in the West must hold their tongue or else be seen as defenders of the state responsible for the greatest atrocities—crucifixions, beheadings, rapes, slavery, and wholesale massacres—so far committed in the 21<sup>st</sup> century.</p>
<p>Three positive consequences emerge from all this:</p>
<p>1. Not only is the Islamic State destroyed, but with it, some of the world’s most supremacist and hate-filled Muslims—those who quit their home countries, including from the West, to persecute and kill the “infidels.”</p>
<p>2. The rest of the world’s Muslims get a major and much needed wakeup call.  Some may start to rethink the notion of “jihad” and eternal enmity for the rest of the world.  Some may start to rethink Islam altogether.</p>
<p>3. The non-Muslim world also gets a much needed wakeup call, another lesson to add to the major wars and conflicts of the 20<sup>th</sup> century, this time about Islamic fascism, which, finally, becomes catalogued as the danger it is.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;"><span style="color: #000000;"><b>Note: </b></span>I am not advocating for this scenario—admittedly, one of many different kinds of scenarios that can develop if the Islamic State is left to flourish—and would prefer to see IS made extinct now. For even if this scenario comes to pass, matters must first get significantly worse before they can begin to get better.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Raymond Ibrahim</strong> on <strong>The Glazov Gang</strong> discussing</em><span id="eow-title" class="watch-title long-title " dir="ltr" title="The Glazov Gang-Raymond Ibrahim on ISIS's Islamic Inspirations."><em><strong> ISIS&#8217;s Islamic Inspirations</strong>:</em> </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/bFkGgNsqQ_4" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
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		<title>Daniel Greenfield on &#8220;A Christian Federation in the Middle East&#8221; &#8212; on The Glazov Gang</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jamie-glazov/daniel-greenfield-on-a-christian-federation-in-the-middle-east-on-the-glazov-gang/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=daniel-greenfield-on-a-christian-federation-in-the-middle-east-on-the-glazov-gang</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 24 Sep 2014 04:28:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jamie Glazov]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Christians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[greenfield]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iraq]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Middle East]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=241667</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Freedom Center's Shillman Journalism Fellow stresses why Middle Eastern Christians have to stop thinking like a minority.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/cv1.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-241670" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/cv1.jpg" alt="cv" width="295" height="171" /></a><strong>[<a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf">Subscribe</a> to <em>The Glazov Gang</em> and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang">LIKE</a> it on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang">Facebook.]</a></strong></p>
<p>This week&#8217;s <em>Glazov Gang</em> was guest-hosted by Renaissance Woman <strong>Ann Marie Murrell</strong>, the Editor-in Chief of <a href="http://www.politichicks.tv/">PolitiChicks.com</a> and the co-author of the new book, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/wwrwbook">What Women Really Want</a>.</p>
<p><span id="productTitle" class="a-size-large"></span>Ann-Marie was joined by Shillman Journalism Fellow <strong>Daniel Greenfield, </strong>who came on the show to discuss <strong>A Christian Federation in the Middle East, </strong>stressing why Middle Eastern Christians have to stop thinking like a minority <strong>[starts at the 6:55 mark].</strong> The dialogue occurred within the context of <strong>&#8220;ISIS Rising,&#8221; </strong>in which Greenfield analyzed Obama&#8217;s policy of fighting terrorists by arming terrorists.</p>
<p>Don&#8217;t miss it!</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/9E8gGysQZzU" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p>Don&#8217;t miss this week&#8217;s second <em>Glazov Gang</em> episode in which Ann-Marie interviews<strong> Robert Spencer</strong>, the director of <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/">JihadWatch.org</a> and the author of the new book, <span id="productTitle" class="a-size-large"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Arab-Winter-Comes-America-Truth/dp/1621572048">Arab Winter Comes to America</a>. Robert discusses <strong>The Fog of Jihad-Denial:</strong></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/S8kxWhX0S50" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe><a id="js_10" class="profileLink _5f0v" tabindex="0" href="https://www.facebook.com/annmariemurrell" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=1258545911"></a></p>
<p><strong>To watch previous <em>Glazov Gang</em> episodes, </strong><a href="http://jamieglazov.com/"><strong>Click Here</strong></a><strong>.</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://www.facebook.com/jamie.glazov"><strong>LIKE</strong></a><strong> Jamie Glazov’s </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/jamie.glazov"><strong>Fan Page</strong></a><strong> on Facebook.</strong></p>
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		<title>Willful Blindness to Global Jihad</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/willful-blindness-to-global-jihad/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=willful-blindness-to-global-jihad</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 24 Sep 2014 04:10:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[al Qaeda]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ISIS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Middle East]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sharia]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=241554</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Raymond Ibrahim discusses Islamic State, the U.S., and much more on Secure Freedom Radio.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/2848102080.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-241559" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/2848102080-423x350.jpg" alt="2848102080" width="280" height="232" /></a>Raymond Ibrahim was <a style="color: #cf0000;" href="http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/2014/09/19/willful-blindness-to-global-jihad/">recently interviewed</a> on Secure Freedom Radio with Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy.   Split into four 10-minute segments, the 40-minute interview follows:</p>
<p style="color: #202021;">PART 1: <a style="color: #cf0000;" title="Download: Ibrahim One" href="http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/podpress_trac/web/189561/0/09192014_Seg1_Ibrahim_web.mp3"><img src="http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/wp-content/plugins/podpress/images/audio_mp3_button.png" alt="" /></a></p>
<ul style="color: #202021;">
<li>How ISIS plays into the bigger picture of global jihad</li>
<li>America’s willful blindness to the fact that to defeat an enemy, one must know the enemy</li>
<li>The American far-left’s apologist-position towards radical Islam</li>
</ul>
<p style="color: #202021;">PART 2: <a style="color: #cf0000;" title="Download: Ibrahim Two" href="http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/podpress_trac/web/189561/1/09192014_Seg2_Ibrahim_web.mp3"><img src="http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/wp-content/plugins/podpress/images/audio_mp3_button.png" alt="" /></a></p>
<ul style="color: #202021;">
<li>Defensive versus offensive jihad in Shariah doctrine</li>
<li>Comparing ISIS and Al-Qaeda</li>
<li>The consequences of ISIS declaring an Islamic Caliphate</li>
</ul>
<p style="color: #202021;">PART 3: <a style="color: #cf0000;" title="Download: Ibrahim Three" href="http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/podpress_trac/web/189561/2/09192014_Seg3_Ibrahim_web.mp3"><img src="http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/wp-content/plugins/podpress/images/audio_mp3_button.png" alt="" /></a></p>
<ul style="color: #202021;">
<li>President Obama’s misleading remarks about the connection of jihadist terrorism to Islam</li>
<li>The long history of Christian persecution in the Muslim world</li>
</ul>
<p style="color: #202021;">PART 4: <a style="color: #cf0000;" title="Download: Ibrahim Four" href="http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/podpress_trac/web/189561/3/09192014_Seg4_Ibrahim_web.mp3"><img src="http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/wp-content/plugins/podpress/images/audio_mp3_button.png" alt="" /></a></p>
<ul style="color: #202021;">
<li>Recommendations for future U.S. policies to combat the global jihad</li>
<li>Lessons learned from the American strategy that defeated the communist ideology of the Soviet Union</li>
<li>Problems with the labels put on those who question the radical aspects of Shariah law</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>A Christian Federation in the Middle East</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/a-christian-federation-in-the-middle-east/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-christian-federation-in-the-middle-east</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 15 Sep 2014 04:20:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ISIS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Middle East]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Middle Eastern Christians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Shia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sunni]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Middle Eastern Christians have to stop thinking like a minority.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/ch.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-241003" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/ch-450x261.jpg" alt="ch" width="298" height="173" /></a>The Middle East as it exists now has no future. Its borders were drawn by European colonial powers for their own purposes. The political agendas behind those borders are long dead. The kings and coalitions they were meant to protect have vanished.</p>
<p>ISIS is determined to tear apart the borders of the region and it’s not alone. Iraq and Syria are caught in cycles of violence because their national borders are prisons trapping incompatible religious and ethnic populations in multicultural tyrannies. The world has spent a lot of time trying to redraw Israel’s borders when it should have been redrawing the borders of the entire region.</p>
<p>There are only two solutions for ending the violence in Iraq and Syria; tyranny or denationalization.</p>
<p>As long as Sunni and Shiite Arabs and the Kurds are trapped together in a single country they will never be at peace.</p>
<p>All of this is really bad news for Arab Christians because they are a fragile religious minority in a region swiftly redefining itself by religion. The Arab Nationalism that shielded them is dead. That leaves them with few options except to form temporary coalitions with the representatives of older systems, the Baath Party and the Egyptian military, or the minority Shiite Islamists.</p>
<p>There is no future in such coalitions. The Egyptian military was nearly toppled by the Muslim Brotherhood. Next time the Brotherhood might finish the job.</p>
<p>The Baath Party in Syria has become a Shiite Alawite front and an arm of Iran. Hezbollah is even more so. Christians are persecuted in Iran. When Shiite Islamists gain the absolute power to impose their clerical will, that will lead to Christians becoming an even more persecuted minority.</p>
<p>It’s inevitable that the lines will be redrawn, whether by international agreement or by ethnic cleansing. ISIS is pursuing the latter course. Even if we destroy ISIS, the best way to preempt it is by redrawing the lines to create countries based on stable ethnic and religious majorities.</p>
<p>And this time we ought to take Christians into account.</p>
<p>If not for Israel, the Middle East would be mostly empty of Jews today. The disastrously unworkable borders that were assigned to Israel were swept away by the Muslim refusal to accept them. Their subsequent two invasions of the Jewish State allowed Israel to redraw more workable borders.</p>
<p>The Christians of Lebanon however were stuck with unworkable borders destined to make them into a minority in their own country. While the British shrank Israel’s borders to make it unlivable, the French expanded Lebanon’s borders to include too many Muslims. Through mass immigration from the USSR and the Middle East, through traditionalist populations, Israel was able to retain some parity with the Muslim birth rate. Christians however fell drastically behind in the demographic competition.</p>
<p>Middle Eastern Christians have the education and the economic skills to run their own states. Unfortunately they don’t have the birth rate to dominate any state under the current borders and they have not been able to unite the various disparate Christian populations under one flag the way that Israel was able to bring together different Jewish populations.</p>
<p>Both of these obstacles would have to be overcome for a Christian state to exist in the Middle East.</p>
<p>Middle Eastern Christians have been following a minority strategy, but the events in Syria and Iraq show that this strategy is no longer viable. The minority strategy depends on patronage from a central government which benefits from the business skills and tax revenues that Christians bring in. As a vulnerable minority, Christians can serve as middle men between the government and the population.</p>
<p>But a different type of government appears to be on the horizon.</p>
<p>In Egypt and Turkey, the political Islamists have built up business oligarchies. Meanwhile in Iraq and Syria, the more direct kind of Islamist offers a choice between conversion and death.</p>
<p>Jews made the decision to abandon being useful to various Caliphs and Sheiks and set up their own country. It will take a leap, but not an impossible one, for Christians to do the same. From Egypt to Syria, from Iraq to Gaza, it is all too obvious that relying on influence over demographics is a doomed strategy.</p>
<p>Gambling on the Arab Nationalists was a bad move, but gambling on the Shiites is an even worse move. And yet the only remaining options are emigration to the West or setting up a religious majority state.</p>
<p>Israel’s experience shows the perils of the latter course, but there may be no better option. Western Christians have the same demographic weakness as Eastern Christians. France, which attempted to set up Lebanon as a Christian enclave only to see it totter under the impact of Muslim demographics, is now seeing its own cities flooded by Muslim immigrants. France expanded its civic borders to admit too many Muslims and may be as doomed as Lebanon.</p>
<p>However Eastern Christians suffer from fewer illusions about Islam than Western Christians do. With a state or states whose borders offer a solid demographic majority, a competent military could secure their territory in ways that Western Christians with no memory of persecution would instinctively reject.</p>
<p>Should the West come to accept the necessity of denationalizing Iraq and Syria into viable religious and ethnic majority states, there would be an opportunity to transform Lebanon by integrating parts of it into more viable Muslim states and to build an independent Christian state or states in Iraq and/or Syria.</p>
<p>The Armenians were able to do it. The Maronites have struggled to hold on to a state. The Assyrians made their own brave effort that ended in the Assyrian Genocide.</p>
<p>And therein lies the problem.</p>
<p>The Islamism that is displacing Christians has placed religion over ethnicity. The ranks of ISIS contain Sunni Muslims of all ethnicities and nationalities. To stand against the rising tide of Islamism, the Christians of the Middle East will have to transcend ethnic and doctrinal differences. They will have to put aside past memories of persecution and old rivalries if they are to have a future in the region.</p>
<p>An independent Kurdish state could also make an independent Assyrian state possible, but it won’t last very long as a purely ethnic enclave.</p>
<p>Israel survived by building the biggest tent possible around a combination of ethnicity and religion. ISIS and its Islamic counterparts have focused on religious purity over ethnicity. A federation of mutually supportive Christian states rooted in ethnicity, but transcending ethnic and religious differences to stand together, are the only option for maintaining Christianity in the Middle East.</p>
<p>Islamic transnationalism can swamp any ethnic state with ferocity and pure numbers. Israel held out because its internal quarrels between Western and Eastern Jews were mediated by religion and its religious differences were mediated by a common ethnicity. This balance allowed Israel to survive. Alternatively the approach of the Agudah would have left Jews in the Christian position, as quarreling fragments striving for influence while floating adrift and persecuted in a Muslim ocean.</p>
<p>If Christians are to survive in the Middle East, they will have to find their own version of that balance. Middle Eastern Christians have shown courage in battle, ingenuity and business skill. They will have to stop thinking like a minority and put those qualities to use in building an independent future.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>The Global Map, 2017</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ben-shapiro/the-global-map-2017/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-global-map-2017</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 10 Sep 2014 04:56:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ben Shapiro]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[allies]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[earth]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Obama's radical transformation hasn't stopped with America. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/world-on-fire-creative-commons.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-240660" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/world-on-fire-creative-commons.jpg" alt="world-on-fire-creative-commons" width="314" height="228" /></a>Barack Obama pledged to radically transform America when he took office. He didn&#8217;t stop at America. President Obama&#8217;s greatest legacy may be the radical reshaping of the global map.</p>
<p>Fast forward three years. Here&#8217;s where we stand.</p>
<p>Given Europe&#8217;s failure to stand up to Russian aggression in Crimea, Russia&#8217;s borders have expanded to include Eastern Ukraine, northern Kazakhstan and larger portions of Moldova. As of 2014, Russia had consolidated its hold on Transnistria, the Eastern region of Moldova, which is heavily Russian; Russia had annexed Crimea; Russia had placed troops inside Eastern Ukraine.</p>
<p>But it didn&#8217;t stop there. Russia began squeezing Georgia again, and pro-Russian regimes are consolidating their power in Kazakhstan and Belarus. Belarus asked the Russian government to place 15 warplanes inside the country in 2014; Kazakhstan got into a tiff with Russia over comments Putin made unsubtly suggesting a possible invasion of the country, then complied with Putin&#8217;s demands when the West did nothing.</p>
<p>Thus far, Putin has not invaded any NATO countries. But that could change, given the high Russian population in Latvia and Estonia.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, in the Middle East, Jordan&#8217;s kingdom has fallen, replaced by a radical Islamist regime. That Palestinian Arab regime has attempted to consolidate its power by forming an alliance with Hamas in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. In Lebanon, the Iranians and Syrians have effectively annexed southern Lebanon. Israel&#8217;s only quiet border is now its southern border with Egypt.</p>
<p>In Syria, Bashar Assad has retained a measure of power by essentially conceding territory to ISIS in the eastern part of the country; after a halfhearted intervention against ISIS, the international community went quiet as ISIS formed its sought-after caliphate in eastern Syria and northern Iraq.</p>
<p>In response, Iran essentially invaded southern Iraq, and Turkey launched covert action against the Kurds in order to prevent the formation of a broader Kurdistan encompassing parts of Turkish territory.</p>
<p>With the withdrawal of the United States and its allies from Afghanistan, Pakistan has once again made its presence felt. The Taliban have effectively taken control of large swaths of territory, with the help of the Pakistani regime, which has shifted leadership but not position with regard to radical Islam.</p>
<p>In the most stunning international move, China has threatened full-scale annexation of Taiwan, barring access to the South China Sea from Western countries and cutting off Taiwan&#8217;s trade routes. The West has refused to leverage China, fearing financial retaliation. China has made similar moves against the Philippines.</p>
<p>Come 2017, this will be President Obama&#8217;s legacy: a world of redrawn borders, all to the benefit of some of the worst regimes on the planet. When America retreats from the world, its enemies expand.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Raped and Slaughtered: Muslim Persecution of Christians</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/raymond-ibrahim/raped-and-slaughtered-muslim-persecution-of-christians/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=raped-and-slaughtered-muslim-persecution-of-christians</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 10 Sep 2014 04:52:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Raymond Ibrahim]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Christian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Muslim]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[persecution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rape]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Another month, another endless list of atrocities.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><i><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/pic_giant_011814_SM_The-US-and-Christian-Persecution.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-240628" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/pic_giant_011814_SM_The-US-and-Christian-Persecution.jpg" alt="pic_giant_011814_SM_The-US-and-Christian-Persecution" width="315" height="262" /></a>Originally published by the </i><span style="color: #0433ff;"><i><a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4666/raped-and-slaughtered-muslim-persecution">Gatestone Institute</a>.</i></span></p>
<p>From one end of the Islamic world to the other, the abduction and rape of Christian girls at the hands of Muslims—both terrorists and laymen—was a dominant theme in April.</p>
<p>On Easter Sunday Morning, for instance, <a href="http://www.asianews.it/news-en/Punjab:-clan-gang-rapes-seven-year-old-Christian-and-kidnaps-father-to-stop-him-reporting-them-30906.html">four Muslim men raped a 7-year-old Christian girl</a> named Sara in a Punjabi village.  Last reported, the child was in an intensive care unit in “critical.” According to Asia News, “the police, instead of arresting the culprits, helped the local clan to kidnap the girl’s father; Iqbal Masih was taken and hidden in a secret place to ‘force the family not to report the story, to reach an agreement with the criminals and to avoid a dispute of a religious background.’”</p>
<p>According to a human rights lawyer involved in the case: “Such cases are <a href="http://www.fides.org/en/news/35620-ASIA_PAKISTAN_A_7_year_old_Christian_Girl_raped_on_Easter_Sunday">frequent</a>: abuse against women and girls by Muslim men are examples of how the minorities in Pakistan live under constant fear of persecution. We believe that many cases of violence go unreported.”  Similarly, a new report appearing in April by the Solidarity and Peace Movement—a coalition of NGOs, associations and institutions including the “Justice and Peace” Commission of the Pakistani Bishops—<a href="http://www.fides.org/en/news/35548-ASIA_PAKISTAN_Every_year_thousands_of_Hindu_and_Christian_girls_kidnapped_and_forced_into_Islamic_marriage_new_Report">confirmed</a> that “an estimated 700 cases per year involve Christian women, 300 Hindu girls.” Even so, “the true extent of the problem is probably much bigger, since many cases are not reported.”  (<a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/raymond-ibrahim/the-rape-and-murder-of-pakistans-christian-children/">Click here</a> for a better understanding of the extent of this tragedy.)</p>
<p>The biggest story, however, came from Nigeria, where the Islamic terrorist organization known as Boko Haram abducted nearly 300, <a href="https://barnabasaid.org/Over-200-schoolgirls-kidnapped-from-Christian-town-in-Nigeria.html">mostly Christian</a>, teenage schoolgirls.  The group justified its actions in Islamic terms; its leader <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/05/world/africa/nigeria-abducted-girls/index.html">declared</a> on video that “I abducted your girls. I will sell them on the market, by Allah….There is a market for selling humans. Allah says I should sell.”</p>
<p>The so-called mainstream media, which <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/how-the-media-whitewashes-muslim-persecution-of-christians/">generally downplays</a> or ignores Boko Haram’s terror campaign, actually reported on this particular atrocity, prompting Western authorities—who are much more accustomed to, and comfortable with, pretending these sorts of things don’t exist—to respond in awkward, hypocritical and, in a word, foolish, ways.</p>
<p>Thus, Secretary of State <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/nigeria-accepts-us-help-to-rescue-girls-kidnapped-by-boko-haram-too-late/">John Kerry</a>, saying the U.S. had been in touch with Nigeria “from day one” of the crisis, asserted “I think now the complications that have arisen have convinced everybody that there needs to be a greater effort.  And it will begin immediately. I mean, literally, immediately.”</p>
<p>It is not clear whom Kerry was referring to when he said “convinced everybody”—unless he was referring to himself.  After all, there might not have been any need for “greater effort,” the need to act “immediately. I mean, literally, immediately” had Kerry only let the Nigerian government do its job one year ago, when they were waging a particularly strong and successful offensive against Boko Haram in the very same region that the schoolgirls were recently kidnapped.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/obama-administration-calls-for-the-human-rights-of-jihadi-murderers/">Back then</a>, in May 2013, soon after Nigerian forces killed 30 Boko Haram members, Reuters reported that “U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry issued a strongly worded statement [to the Nigerian president] saying: “We are … deeply concerned by credible allegations that Nigerian security forces are committing gross human rights violations, which, in turn, only escalate the violence and fuel extremism” from Boko Haram.</p>
<p>As for Kerry’s predecessor, Hillary Clinton, who publicly bemoaned the lot of the kidnapped girls—<a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/07/hillary-s-state-department-refused-to-brand-boko-haram-as-terrorists.html">saying</a> it’s “abominable, it’s criminal, it’s an act of terrorism and it really merits the fullest response possible”—when she was Secretary of State and in a position to help offer “the fullest response possible” she repeatedly <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/07/hillary-s-state-department-refused-to-brand-boko-haram-as-terrorists.html">refused</a> to designate Boko Haram as a “foreign terrorist organizations,” despite the countless atrocities it had already committed, despite the fact that under her tenure Boko Haram had <a href="http://www.kkms.com/11666938/">boasted</a> it would “strike fear into the Christians of the power of Islam by kidnapping their women,” and despite urging from the CIA, FBI, Justice Department, and several congressmen and senators.</p>
<p>Her logic was once voiced by her husband, former U.S. president Bill Clinton.  Back in February 2012, Clinton declared that “inequality” and “poverty” are “<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/clinton-blames-jihad-on-poverty/">what’s fueling all this stuff</a>”—a reference to Boko Haram’s terror—and warned the Nigerian government that “It is almost impossible to cure a problem based on violence with violence.”</p>
<p>The rest of April’s roundup of Muslim persecution of Christians around the world includes (but is not limited to) the following accounts, listed by theme and country alphabetical order, not necessarily according to severity.</p>
<p><b>Muslim Slaughter of Christians</b></p>
<p><b>Afghanistan</b>: <a href="http://www.bosnewslife.com/32723-afghan-christians-mourn-americans-killed-at-hospital">Three Americans were shot and killed</a> at a Kabul hospital funded by an American Christian charity.  The murderer was a policeman employed as a security guard at the hospital.  The Taliban have claimed responsibility for similar attacks this year, but issued no comment.  Those killed were a doctor and a father and son visiting the hospital. “As they were walking out of the hospital, the security guard opened fire on them, killing three and wounding another one,” said the Interior Ministry.  The attack comes amid growing attacks against Christians and Westerners in the country. Three weeks earlier, Associated Press photographer Anja Niedringhaus, 48, was killed and reporter Kathy Gannon, 60, wounded while they were sitting in the back of a car in the east of the country.  Also in March, a gunman shot dead Swedish journalist Nils Horner, 51, outside a restaurant in Kabul.</p>
<p><b>Central African Republic</b>: Father Labbe Christ Formane Willbona was slaughtered by Muslim herdsmen believed to be close to the Islamic rebel organization, Seleka.  Local security sources reported that <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2014/04/centra-african-republic-islamic-jihadists-murder-catholic-priest-mutilate-corpse">the corpse was mutilated before being buried</a>.</p>
<p><b>Egypt</b>: A Coptic Christian teacher in Marzouk prep school in Minya province <a href="http://www.copts-united.com/English/Details.php?I=1085&amp;A=13791">was shot in the head</a> by a student belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood.  Eyewitnesses said that the student was caught smoking in class and was reprimanded. Apparently he decided to show his “infidel” teacher his place, and so shot him in the head while he was returning home. <a href="http://www.fides.org/en/news/35640-AFRICA_EGYPT_Sectarian_clashes_in_Assiut_Two_Christians_killed">Two more Christian Copts were killed</a> due to, according to Agenzia Fides, “sectarian clashes” which broke out in villages near Asyut over land disputes between a Coptic family and local Muslims. On the same day of the Coptic funeral, a young Coptic entrepreneur, Mohsen Morris, was also kidnapped near Asyut. The kidnappers extracted a ransom of 250,000 Egyptian pounds from his family.</p>
<p><b>Libya</b>:  Three more Coptic Christians—all cousins—were targeted in post “Arab Spring” Libya.   One was <a href="http://morningstarnews.org/2014/04/three-egyptian-cousins-go-to-libya-none-comes-back-alive/">slaughtered</a> and brought back to Egypt to be buried in a Coptic cemetery; another was carried back home in an ambulance, half dead with a bullet lodged in his skull; another cousin disappeared and is believed to have been killed by Islamic militants.  Islamic enmity for Christians has been expressing itself regularly in Libya after the U.S. supported “Arab Spring” came there: Christians—<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/three-american-teachers-slaughtered-for-christian-faith-in-muslim-world/">including Americans</a>—have been <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/mass-arrest-and-torture-of-christians-in-libya/">tortured</a> and killed (including <a href="http://morningstarnews.org/2013/09/two-egyptian-christians-slain-in-libya/">for refusing to convert</a>) and <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/hatred-of-christians-unleashed-in-libya/">churches bombed</a>. It’s “<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/open-season-on-christians-in-libya/">open season</a>” on Copts, as jihadis issue a reward to Muslims who find and kill Christians. This was not the case under Gaddafi.</p>
<p><b>Pakistan</b>: A Muslim security guard is accused of <a href="http://morningstarnews.org/2014/04/family-of-christian-shot-dead-in-pakistan-doubts-suicide-claim/">murdering a Christian worker who refused to convert to Islam</a>.   According to Morning Star News,<b> “</b>Sunny Masih, a father of two, was working as a cleaner at a branch of Bank Islami under construction on Nisbat Road in Lahore. On Wednesday morning (April 16), the bank security guard informed police that Masih had shot himself in the forehead with a pump-action shotgun that the guard had left unattended before going to the washroom. The guard, Omar Farooq, of Khushab District in central Punjab Province, told police that Masih ‘looked depressed’ when he arrived at the bank.”  However, all close family members insist that Sunny was, far from depressed, lively and happy.  According to the father, “On April 15, my son told me that Farooq [the guard] had mocked his Christian faith and had asked him to ‘embrace’ Islam. He told my son, ‘You are a good-looking boy, and I don’t like to see you sweeping floors and cleaning the washrooms. If you embrace Islam, I’ll connect you with people who will take good care of you, provide you with a decent job and even get you married into a wealthy Muslim family.’”  Sunny told Farooq that he was satisfied with his Christian faith, and that he should stop nagging him. “My son told me that when he snubbed Farooq, the guard had threatened him that he would have to face the consequences for refusing the <i>Dawaat</i> [an invitation to accept Islam] said the grieving father. I took the matter lightly and told my son not to worry, as being Christians we have to face such people every second day. I told Sunny to avoid discussing religion with Farooq even if he brought up the matter and keep distance from him, and everything would be alright. Little did I know that my son would end up in a mortuary a day later.” According to a Christian activist involved in the case, Sunny “was hit on the forehead just above his eyes, and his skull and brain were completely blown away by the impact at point blank range.  The doctor said he found it hard to believe that Masih could have shot himself in the head with a big weapon such as a shotgun. This is what we want the police to find out, but instead they are trying to cover up the matter. We believe the police are showing bias in its probe because it involves a ‘righteous Muslim’ who was trying to convert a Christian.”</p>
<p><b>Syria</b>: Frans van der Lugt—a 76-year-old Jesuit priest from the Netherlands who had established a community center and farm near the city of Homs where he had worked for over forty years for the betterment of people with disabilities and for Christian-Muslim harmony—was <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27155474">shot dead</a> in the garden of the community center.  After the Islamist-led siege of Homs, the priest continued to care for the sick and the hungry. In early 2014 he made a number of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhQHg6ivGPg">YouTube videos</a>, asking the international community to help the besieged city.  Yet he chose to remain in Homs, struggling with the daily bombings and the lack of food, until he was slain.</p>
<p><b>Uganda</b>: The teenage daughter of a Muslim man managed to attend one church service after converting to Christianity before <a href="http://morningstarnews.org/2014/04/muslim-in-uganda-kills-daughter-for-leaving-islam-sister-says/">her father killed her</a>. Abdul Hakim Ibanda severely beat his 17-year-old daughter and her 19-year-old sister with a blunt instrument after learning that they had attended a church service on April 6.  The surviving sister said, “On Sunday morning we arrived at the United Believers Church…  After prayers we then went to church, where the pastor introduced us to the church and that we were new members of the church. The church faithful were cheerful to receive us.”  However,</p>
<p>local Muslims who saw them enter the church immediately reported it to the father. He gathered a group of 32 “youths” to attack the church but the mob was eventually dispersed without incident.  When the girls returned home, the father, described as “furious,” began questioning and eventually beating them with a blunt object, killing the girl.  According to the pastor of the majority-Christian nation, where Muslims make some 11.5 percent, “The girl [surviving sister] is still traumatized as a result of the death of her sister and needs prayers and counseling.”<i> </i> Said the girl: “I know I cannot go back to my father because I have become a Christian.  I am grateful to the church for welcoming me and taking me as their child. I now have a new home.”</p>
<p><b>Muslim Attacks on Christian Churches</b></p>
<p><b>Austria</b>: After reportedly listening to Muslim chants, a man, known only as Ibrahim A., went on a church vandalizing spree, <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2014/04/vienna-muslim-vandalizes-four-churches-after-listening-to-islamic-chants">desecrating four churches</a>.  According to the Vienna Times, “the attack left Lazaristenkirche with all of its statues and side altars largely destroyed as well as statues damaged at St. Stephen’s, the Breitenfeld church in Josefstadt and the Neuottakring church in Ottakring.” The Archbishop of Vienna described the attack on churches as “so far the worst act of vandalism in my time as Archbishop….  I am shocked by the devastation in the churches.  I hope that the perpetrator or perpetrators did not know what they were doing.”  Ibrahim A., 37-years-old, was caught in the act of vandalizing St. Stephan’s but was released at the time because police did not realize it was one of many attacks that that had been carried out that day. Police have since been unable to find him.</p>
<p><b>Nigeria</b>:  According to AP, “Witnesses and an official say <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/ap/article-2593552/Catholic-church-north-Nigeria-set-aflame.html">angry Muslim youths set ablaze a Catholic church</a> and tried to destroy an attached school in northern Nigeria over an alleged insult to the Prophet Muhammad.  Witness Tukur Musa says soldiers on Monday stopped the mob from setting ablaze the school in Funtua town in Katsina state, but they arrived too late to save St. Rita Catholic Church.  He says the town was in an uproar about an examination question last week which they considered an insult to the Prophet Muhammad. They reported the matter to district authorities. When no action was taken, young Muslims attacked.  Deputy Police Superintendent Aminu Abubakar Saddiq confirmed the church was burned and school damaged but said no one was injured.  Religious strife [code for “Islamic supremacism”] is common in central and northern Nigeria.”  Also, during early Easter Sunday morning, unknown gunmen, later attributed to the Islamic terrorist organization, Boko Haram, launched an attack on the Christian-majority regions of Taraba State.  <a href="http://www.spyghana.com/police-and-boko-haram-massacre-over-150-dead/">The Christian Church of Nigeria was burned down</a>, as well as many Christian homes. Some 15 corpses were seen littered on the streets.</p>
<p><b>Syria</b>:    Gregorios III Laham, Greek-Melkite Catholic patriarch of Antioch, visited some of the dozens of Christian churches hit by Islamic rebels, particularly those in the historic town of Ma‘aloula, where the Christian inhabitants still spoke Aramaic, the language of Jesus, and where some were executed for refusing to convert to Islam.   (<a href="http://english.al-akhbar.com/node/19118">Click here</a> for several pictures of the types of desecration that churches undergo if they fall into the hands of the Islamic terrorists.  In St. Mary’s Greek Catholic Church alone,  icons had their faces scratched out, church pews broken, statues of the Virgin Mary and Christ smashed, and Bibles burned.)  In the prelate’s words: “An apocalyptic spectacle presented itself. Other churches have been destroyed in Syria, but I have never seen anything like this. I cried and I sought in vain a moment of solitude to pray. I am heartbroken.  Ma‘aloula's four historic churches were hit. Our parish church, dedicated to Saint George, is riddled with bullets. The convent’s dome was damaged in two places. The walls were ripped open by cannon fire. Some parts of the convent is in danger of collapsing and must be rebuilt. The icons are scattered on the floor, dirty, or stolen. It is currently completely uninhabitable.”  The patriarch further described the wanton destruction of churches as a “war crime.”</p>
<p><b>Attacks on Christian Freedom: Apostasy, Blasphemy, Proselytism</b></p>
<p><b>Malaysia</b>: An Islamic organization known as Ikatan Muslimin Malaysia <a href="http://www.themalaymailonline.com/malaysia/article/now-muslim-group-complains-of-malay-language-in-easter-pageant">accused a Christian church of trying to evangelize to Muslims</a>, simply because they used Bahasa Malaysia, the national language, for an Easter pageant.  The organization’s website said that while freedom of religion for non-Muslims was guaranteed by the Federal Constitution, the open use of Bahasa Malaysia to promote the event outside the church compound was an abuse of this liberty.  The organization also called on Muslim officials “to closely monitor this Easter Musical.”  It further declared that “the notion of Easter was against Islam.”  In Malaysia—which is regularly portrayed in the West as an example of a moderate Muslim nation—any attempt to promote religions other than Islam is illegal.</p>
<p><b>Pakistan</b>: Eight days after a court in Lahore sentenced <a href="http://morningstarnews.org/2014/03/attorneys-rights-groups-blast-death-sentence-for-christian-in-pakistan/">Sawan Masih</a>, a Christian man, to death for allegedly insulting Islam’s prophet, Muhammad, another illiterate Christian couple in Punjab Province was <a href="http://morningstarnews.org/2014/04/christian-couple-in-pakistan-sentenced-to-death-for-blasphemy/">sentenced to death</a> for allegedly sending blasphemous text messages.  Along with Asia Bibi, a wife and mother incarcerated since 2010, the number of Christians on death row in Pakistan for blaspheming Islam and/or its founder is now four.  Also, a Muslim landlord <a href="http://www.bosnewslife.com/32729-pakistan-christian-worker-beaten-for-observing-easter">almost beat to death</a> his Christian tenant and employee, Saleem Masih, for observing Easter.  According to Mushtaq Gill, a Christian activist and lawyer, because Saleem took time off to observe Easter, “the landlord became furious and beat him severely. He was eventually rescued and saved by some other villagers, otherwise he could have been beaten to death.”  Gill added that many other Christian field workers “are forced into bonded labour, denied minimum wages and harassed and implicated in fake cases if they try to resist the oppression of their influential masters.” As for Mushtaq Gill, the Christian lawyer who is representing the aforementioned Christians, <a href="http://www.fides.org/en/news/35508-ASIA_PAKISTAN_Threats_to_the_lawyer_who_defends_Christians_accused_of_blasphemy">he is facing death threats</a>.  In his own words: “On April 2, a stranger came to the Lahore Court and warned me that I might be attacked or involved in some fake criminal cases or even killed.” Nor are such threats limited to “extremists,” as he received information that he could also be expelled and barred from practicing law.  Said Gill: “What am I supposed to do, stop? Psalm 118 says: ‘The Lord is with me, I have no fear of anything. What can man do to me?’ My other colleagues and I have been threatened and attacked several times by strangers because of our work for human rights in Pakistan. But we are not afraid. We know that we could be killed because we support the campaign for the abolition of the blasphemy law. But this will not close our mouth and will not stop our work on human rights. The Lord tells us to have courage.”</p>
<p><b>Uganda</b>: Muslim relatives of a convert to Christianity <a href="http://morningstarnews.org/2014/04/convert-from-islam-in-uganda-former-sheikh-says-muslim-relatives-poisoned-him/">tried to poison him to death</a>.  Hassan Muwanguzi converted to Christianity in 2003.  Soon thereafter, his wife left him and he was fired from his job as a schoolteacher.  Most recently, he was hospitalized after an aunt put insecticide in his tea.  According to Hassan: “After eating and taking tea, I started feeling stomachache, then I realized that she was the one responsible for it—and I believe she did not do it alone, since they have been hunting for me directly and indirectly, because when I left them and converted to Christianity it pained them so much.  The reason they want to kill me is very clear—it is because of being a convert to Christianity; above all, to them it is like I brought shame by converting…” During the family meeting, when he started to feel ill, he telephoned a local Christian bishop, who advised him that he should leave secretly. “I knew if he were to mention to them that he was getting sick, they would harm him more,” said Bishop Kinyewa.</p>
<p><b>Uzbekistan</b>: Christians are being prevented from burying their dead in the state cemeteries of the Muslim-majority nation.  There have been three known cases so far this year. Most recently, the family of Gayrat Buriyev, who died on 9 April, was told by officials<i>, </i>“The cemetery is state property, but is under the management of the local mosque, and if the imam is against the burial then it will not take place.”<i> </i>And the local imam said he was “acting in accordance with sharia law,” even though Uzbekistan is officially a secular state. The imam also cursed the family for being Christians, calling them “<a href="http://barnabasfund.org/US/News/Archives/Christians-blocked-from-burying-dead-in-state-cemeteries-in-Uzbekistan.html">unclean and defiled infidels</a>.”  Although they took the matter to local authorities, officials refused to intervene, siding with the imam.  (According to Islamic teaching, being buried next to an “infidel” could cause the Muslim corpse to suffer the “<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/jihad-martyrdom-and-the-torments-of-the-grave/">torments of the grave</a>.”)</p>
<p><b>About this Series</b></p>
<p>The persecution of Christians in the Islamic world has become endemic.  Accordingly, “Muslim Persecution of Christians” was developed to collate some—by no means all—of the instances of persecution that surface each month. It serves two purposes:</p>
<p>1)    To document that which the mainstream media does not: the habitual, if not chronic, persecution of Christians.</p>
<p>2)    To show that such persecution is not “random,” but systematic and interrelated—that it is rooted in a worldview inspired by Islamic Sharia.</p>
<p>Accordingly, whatever the anecdote of persecution, it typically fits under a specific theme, including hatred for churches and other Christian symbols; apostasy, blasphemy, and proselytism laws that criminalize and sometimes punish with death those who “offend” Islam; sexual abuse of Christian women; forced conversions to Islam;  theft and plunder in lieu of <i>jizya</i> (financial tribute expected from non-Muslims); overall expectations for Christians to behave like cowed <i>dhimmis</i>, or second-class, “tolerated” citizens; and simple violence and murder. Sometimes it is a combination thereof.</p>
<p>Because these accounts of persecution span different ethnicities, languages, and locales—from Morocco in the West, to Indonesia in the East—it should be clear that one thing alone binds them: Islam—whether the strict application of Islamic Sharia law, or the supremacist culture born of it.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don't miss <strong>Raymond Ibrahim</strong> on <strong>The Glazov Gang</strong> discussing</em><span id="eow-title" class="watch-title long-title " dir="ltr" title="The Glazov Gang-Raymond Ibrahim on ISIS's Islamic Inspirations."><em><strong> ISIS's Islamic Inspirations</strong>:</em> </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/bFkGgNsqQ_4" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><b>Previous Reports on Muslim Persecution of Christians</b>:</p>
<p>•<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/obama-administration-suppresses-talk-of-muslim-persecution-of-christians-march-2014/">March, 2014</a></p>
<p>•<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/christians-most-persecuted-group-in-world-muslim-persecution-of-christians-february-2014/">February, 2014</a></p>
<p>•<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/becomes-chief-enabler-of-christian-persecution-muslim-persecution-of-christians-january-2014/">January, 2014</a></p>
<p>•<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/they-are-slaughtering-us-like-chickens-muslim-persecution-of-christians-december-2013/">December, 2013</a></p>
<p>•<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/u-s-chose-to-stay-silent-on-muslim-persecution-of-christians-november-2013/">November, 2013</a></p>
<p>•<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/muslim-persecution-of-christians-october-2013/">October, 2013</a></p>
<p>•<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/muslim-persecution-of-christians-october-2013/">September, 2013</a></p>
<p>•<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/muslim-persecution-of-christians-august-2013/">August, 2013</a></p>
<p>•<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/muslim-persecution-of-christians-july-2013/">July, 2013</a></p>
<p>•<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/muslim-persecution-of-christians-june-2013/">June, 2013</a></p>
<p>•<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/muslim-persecution-of-christians-may-2013/">May, 2013</a></p>
<p>•<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/muslim-persecution-of-christians-april-2013/">April, 2013</a></p>
<p>•<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/muslim-persecution-of-christians-march-2013/">March, 2013</a></p>
<p>•<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/muslim-persecution-of-christians-february-2013/">February, 2013</a></p>
<p>•<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/muslim-persecution-of-christians-january-2013/">January, 2013</a></p>
<p>•<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/muslim-persecution-of-christians-december-2012/">December, 2012</a></p>
<p>•<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/muslim-persecution-of-christians-november-2012/">November, 2012</a></p>
<p>•<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/muslim-persecution-of-christians-october-2012/">October, 2012</a></p>
<p>•<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/muslim-persecution-of-christians-september-2012/">September, 2012 </a></p>
<p>•<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/muslim-persecution-of-christians-august-2012/">August, 2012</a></p>
<p>•<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/12215/muslim-persecution-of-christians-july-2012">July, 2012</a></p>
<p>•<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/12045/muslim-persecution-of-christians-june-2012">June, 2012</a></p>
<p>•<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/11930/muslim-persecution-of-christians-may-2012">May, 2012</a></p>
<p>•<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/11713/muslim-persecution-of-christians-april-2012">April, 2012</a></p>
<p>•<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/11604/muslim-persecution-of-christians-march-2012">March, 2012</a></p>
<p>•<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/11373/muslim-persecution-of-christians-february-2012">February, 2012</a></p>
<p>•<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/11152/muslim-persecution-of-christians-january-2012">January, 2012</a></p>
<p>•<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/10989/muslim-persecution-of-christians-december-2011">December, 2011</a></p>
<p>•<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/10922/muslim-persecution-of-christians-november-2011">November, 2011</a></p>
<p>•<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/10724/muslim-persecution-of-christians-october-2011">October, 2011</a></p>
<p>•<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/10504/muslim-persecution-of-christians-september-2011">September, 2011</a></p>
<p>•<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/10247/muslim-persecution-of-christians-august-2011">August, 2011</a></p>
<p>•<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/muslim-persecution-of-christians-july-2011/">July, 2011</a></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Obama&#8217;s Foreign Policy of Empty Words</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/obamas-foreign-policy-of-empty-words/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-foreign-policy-of-empty-words</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 09 Sep 2014 04:30:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[For America's enemies, actions speak louder than rhetoric. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/1393766471000-AP-Obama-Budget-001.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-240426" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/1393766471000-AP-Obama-Budget-001-450x337.jpg" alt="1393766471000-AP-Obama-Budget-001" width="316" height="237" /></a></p>
<p><em>“When force threatens, talk is no good.”</em></p>
<p>That line from John Ford’s classic The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance contains wisdom everyone from peasant to king knew before our modern age and its smug illusions. Go back 2,400 years, and you can hear it from the Athenian orator Demosthenes as he chastises his fellow citizens for responding to Macedonian aggression by “forever debating the question and never making any progress” and issuing “empty decrees.” “All words, apart from action,” Demosthenes warned, “seem vain and idle, especially from Athenian lips: for the greater our reputation for a ready tongue, the greater the distrust it inspires in all men.” We’ve had several years now of watching Obama and his foreign policy team prove this eternal truth as they have feebly and fecklessly responded to crisis after crisis in Ukraine, Syria, and a dozen other venues.</p>
<p>Just in the last few weeks we have heard a lot of bluster about Islamic State, the rampaging jihadists in northern Iraq who have left in their wake a trail of traditional Muslim mayhem–- sectarian cleansing, forced conversion, slaving, rape, torture, slaughter, and Koran-inspired beheadings, including two American journalists. In response to these decisive deeds, Obama has thundered that he will “degrade and destroy” the “cancer.” In an op-ed co-written with British Prime Minister David Cameron, he has vowed that the allies “will not be cowed by barbaric killers.” His vice president Joe Biden, with his usual trite hyperbole, has threatened, “We will follow them to the gate of hell until they are brought to justice.” And Secretary of State John Kerry, after the beheading of journalist James Foley, has warned, “The world must know that the United States of America will never back down in the face of such evil. ISIL and the wickedness it represents must be destroyed, and those responsible for this heinous, vicious atrocity will be held accountable.” “By whom” is the question the passive voice artfully leaves unanswered.</p>
<p>To paraphrase Demosthenes, the greater this administration’s ready tongue, the greater distrust it inspires in our allies, and the greater boldness it creates in our enemies. Or to put it in my old man’s more earthy terms when I smarted off, “Don’t let your mouth write checks your ass can’t cash.” Obama has been bouncing foreign policy checks from Ukraine to the South China Sea, and most points in between.</p>
<p>Indeed, the deeds necessary to back these loud boasts have been few. That should not surprise us, since Obama has said and done much to tell the world that we will not act decisively, relying instead on verbal processes and gestures of force like bombing some trucks to create a telegenic illusion of action. He started his presidency with the “apology tour,” on which he called the U.S. “arrogant, dismissive, derisive,” confessed that we are “still working through some of our own darker periods in our history,” proclaimed that we “will be willing to acknowledge past errors where those errors have been made,” confessed that “too often we set [our] principles aside as luxuries that we could no longer afford” and so “we went off course,” and promised that we “are working to improve our democracy.” How could such a tainted and flawed state have the moral authority to act with the confidence and decisiveness that his recent rhetoric implies?</p>
<p>Likewise his domestic deeds have undercut the capacity to enforce his tough foreign policy words. Because of cuts to the military budget––inspired in part by his desire to reduce the U.S. to merely one unexceptional member of an international coalition that supposedly can maintain global order and create collective security––our military capacity is destined “to be an increasingly hollow force,” as Bret Stephens writes, “with the Army as small as it was in 1940, before conscription; a Navy the size it was in 1917, before our entry into World War I; an Air Force flying the oldest—and smallest—fleet of planes in its history; and a nuclear arsenal no larger than it was during the Truman administration.”</p>
<p>Commensurate with this undercutting of America’s armed forces have been Obama’s empty bluster and careless language, something dangerous coming from the Commander-in-Chief of the greatest military power in history. “Leading from behind” in Libya, the vanishing “red line” in Syria, the juvenile scolding of Putin “that in the 21st century, the borders of Europe cannot be redrawn with force, that international law matters,” the “no strategy” gaffe about the “jayvee” jihadists of the Islamic State–– all were instantly refuted and discredited by facts on the ground created by hard men of brutal action. Libya is not a democracy, but the jihadist version of Road Warrior. Syria’s Bashar al Assad is winning in Syria by slaughtering close to 200,000 men, women, and children. The Islamic State still controls northern Iraq and Syria, and still sits at the gates of Baghdad. And Putin has snatched Crimea and is closing in on eastern Ukraine. Throw in Obama’s penchant for berating allies like Israel, ignoring the interests of others like Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, undercutting vulnerable states like Poland and the Czech Republic, and appeasing genocidal mullahs in Iran, and is it any surprise that his words “inspire greater distrust” in everyone except our enemies?</p>
<p>Of course, Obama’s habit of using words to substitute for politically risky deeds is universal in the West. We just saw a NATO confab in which a lot of big talk for the reporters end up so much smoke when the details are parsed. NATO leaders have agreed “to establish a so-called spearhead force of several thousand troops designed to move into trouble spots at short notice,” as The Wall Street Journal reported. Talk about closing the barn door after the Russian bear has got loose. I’m sure Putin is trembling over the thought of “several thousand” NATO troops that someday might materialize to stop his adventurism. If NATO isn’t acting now, what makes anyone think this special “spearhead force” will act in the future, even if NATO members do create it? As Charles Krauthammer writes, the force “is a feeble half-measure. Not only will troops have to be assembled, dispatched, transported and armed as the fire bell is ringing, but the very sending will require some affirmative and immediate decision by NATO. Try getting that done. The alliance is famous for its reluctant, slow and fractured decision-making.”</p>
<p>And haven’t we heard this sort of braggadocio before from Europe? Remember the 60,000-man “rapid reaction force” the EU was going to create so that they could avoid any further embarrassment of having “cowboy” Americans pull their foreign policy irons out of the fire, as happened in Bosnia and Kosovo? Given that only three European NATO members honor the 2% of GDP minimum for military spending, it’s unlikely that the money for creating this alleged “deterrent” will ever be budgeted, not with EU economies in the doldrums, and widespread grumbling over “austerity” budgets. No wonder that, as the Journal reports, “most details of the force . . . remained to be settled.” But don’t worry, NATO leaders have “committed” to spending the 2% on defense they “committed” to in 2002 and subsequently ignored. Better read the fine print: the commitment is non-binding and will be implemented over a 10-year period. Who knows how much more of the old Soviet Empire Vladimir will have taken back by then.</p>
<p>“Word, words, words,” as Hamlet says. But words useful for politicians who want to avoid the risk and uncertainty of action, and don’t want to face disgruntled voters at the polls. And when this perennial calculus is joined to the progressive belief that an exploitative, racist, neo-imperialist America is disqualified by its sins from being the guarantor of global order and stability, you get the world we are rapidly becoming––a Darwinian jungle of feral violence, illiberal hegemons, thug-nations, and nuclear-armed terrorist states.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Hillary’s Two-Faced Foreign Policy</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/hillarys-two-faced-foreign-policy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=hillarys-two-faced-foreign-policy</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/hillarys-two-faced-foreign-policy/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 22 Aug 2014 04:53:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[foreign policy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hillary Clinton]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Middle East]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=239113</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Obama rerun.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/hill3.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-239152" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/hill3-450x270.jpg" alt="hill3" width="293" height="176" /></a>Ever since Hillary broke with Barack over the virtues of doing stupid stuff, the editorial columnists have been pretending that she has some new and exciting foreign policy.</p>
<p>She doesn&#8217;t.</p>
<p>The left has denounced her as an interventionist. They just can&#8217;t explain how she is any more of an interventionist than her boss who bombed Libya, is bombing Iraq and wanted to bomb Syria. And all that is without mentioning his attempt to implement the Arab Spring&#8217;s regime changes.</p>
<p>The closest thing to a disagreement between them was over Syria and considering that Obama was days away from getting into Syria, that&#8217;s not much of a firewall.</p>
<p>Hillary took a cheap shot at Obama. The media spent so much time discussing the hugging summit that it completely ignored the fact that it was a cheap shot with no substance to it. Hillary and Obama have the same ideological DNA and get their ideas from the same narrow circles. Hillary doesn&#8217;t have a better or worse foreign policy. They both have the same foreign policy.</p>
<p>Hillary Clinton is trying to distance herself from the foreign policy of an administration in which she served as Secretary of State. Hillary is trying to distance herself from her own approach to international relations. That&#8217;s a level of schizophrenia that is a bit extreme even for a woman who sheds accents, identities and sports team affinities the way that a snake sheds its skin.</p>
<p>Hillary isn&#8217;t disavowing Obama. She&#8217;s disavowing Hillary.</p>
<p>The new Hillary is suddenly pro-Israel after spending years berating the Jewish State. She suddenly realized the importance of having a coherent foreign policy after having the same confused position on Iraq as John Kerry. And she&#8217;s somehow more of an interventionist than Obama even though they were both intervening in the exact same places.</p>
<p>Hillary is an interventionist. But so is Obama.</p>
<p>The non-interventionist, like the pacifist, is a mythical woodland creature who appears in the fables of many cultures. He isn&#8217;t however to be found in the vicinity of Washington D.C.</p>
<p>Break down the arguments of the non-interventionist and you will find a set of conspiracy theories explaining why every previous intervention was motivated by bad faith, secret agendas and racism. The non-interventionist doesn&#8217;t reject intervention; instead he contends that every previous intervention failed because it was carried out at the behest of the banks, the military-industrial complex, the CIA, the Jews, American arrogance and the oil industry.</p>
<p>But the non-interventionist who makes it into the White House is free to intervene as much as he likes because his motives are pure. He isn&#8217;t trying to secretly build oil pipelines or put money into Haliburton. By assigning evil motives to all his predecessors, he never actually learns anything from them and instead intervenes out of an unrealistic sense of self-confidence in his own judgment.</p>
<p>Because he is certain that they were evil and he isn&#8217;t, he believes that he can do no wrong.</p>
<p>A true non-interventionist would reject intervention wholesale. Our fake non-interventionists turn up their noses at it when their political opponents do it. But once they have the power, they intervene out of entirely pure motives like helping the Muslim Brotherhood take over countries.</p>
<p>Obama is a non-interventionist because he spends a lot of time hesitating and apologizing for each intervention. He doesn&#8217;t however bother getting permission from Congress or even UN approval. Why should he? His motives are pure.</p>
<p>Hillary&#8217;s crime is that she currently sounds somewhat less apologetic and uncertain about intervention, but that&#8217;s not policy, that&#8217;s pose. Hillary&#8217;s husband boasted on the day before September 11 that he passed on killing Bin Laden because of the collateral damage. And Bill Clinton is more of a hawk than his wife.</p>
<p>Anyone who thinks that Hillary is a hawk has forgotten how American personnel in Benghazi were left in a precarious security situation on her watch. It&#8217;s quite possible that Hillary might decide to bomb Syria. But don&#8217;t expect her to bomb in defense of American national interests.</p>
<p>She&#8217;s not that kind of interventionist.</p>
<p>Hillary Clinton knows that many voters are unhappy about American weakness. They don&#8217;t actually want war, but they want someone in the White House whom Putin will take seriously. And they know that isn&#8217;t Obama.</p>
<p>Hillary is temporarily talking tough to convince them that she&#8217;s the woman to make Vladimir respect America again. That doesn&#8217;t mean that she can stand up to Putin any better than Obama. Or that she will. But she needs uncertain Democrats to believe that the new boss will be different than the old boss, when the new boss is really the old boss in a pantsuit and with worse posters.</p>
<p>Unfortunately Democrats and Republicans don&#8217;t currently differ very much on foreign policy. Where they differ is orientation. And that&#8217;s more significant than it sounds.</p>
<p>Both Obama and McCain would have backed the Arab Spring, but McCain would have done it out of a misguided sense that it was in America&#8217;s national interest, while Obama did it to undermine American national interests.</p>
<p>The significance is not so much in the outcome as in attitude and in the tools that they use.</p>
<p>Obama and McCain would have both bombed Libya, but Obama holds the military in contempt and treats it that way. Obama and McCain would have both endorsed the Arab Spring, but Obama did it in a way that signaled American weakness. That is why Obama&#8217;s approach has weakened America even more than the actual outcome of his policies.</p>
<p>A country can survive bad policy. We&#8217;ve had bad foreign policy for much of the 20th century. But a leader who communicates that the bad policy is a symptom of national weakness is a disaster on a whole other scale. Both Carter and Reagan made mistakes, but Carter and Reagan sent two very different messages about American power even while they made their mistakes.</p>
<p>Leadership isn&#8217;t always about what you do. It&#8217;s about how you communicate your values.</p>
<p>Hillary Clinton is trying to package her old Obama policies with a new attitude, but underneath is the same old lefty radical who smooched Arafat&#8217;s wife, brought a Reset Button to Russia and apologized to Pakistan for a YouTube video.</p>
<p>We&#8217;ve already seen Hillary&#8217;s foreign policy on display in Pakistan, Russia and Benghazi. All the cheap shots at Obama won&#8217;t change the fact that Hillary&#8217;s foreign policy is another Obama rerun.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>The Hell That Is the Obama White House</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-horowitz/the-hell-that-is-the-obama-white-house/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-hell-that-is-the-obama-white-house</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 19 Aug 2014 04:55:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Horowitz]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Benghazi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Christians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[IRS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Middle East]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[scandal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Susan Rice]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[White House]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=238895</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[An agenda of destruction at home and abroad. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/635076891073252015奥巴马.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-238901" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/635076891073252015奥巴马.jpg" alt="635076891073252015奥巴马" width="291" height="246" /></a>Originally published by <a href="http://www.redstate.com/diary/davidhorowitz/2014/08/18/hell-obama-white-house/">RedState.com</a>. </em></p>
<p>Let me begin by acknowledging that this inspirational title is lifted from a tweet by screen actor James Woods. And now I will explicate his tweet.</p>
<p>Every sentient human being whose brain isn’t stuffed with ideological fairy dust can see that Obama is behind every major scandal of his administration from Benghazi to the I.R.S. disgrace. How can one know this? Because the culprits haven’t been fired. Moreover, if they are serial liars like Susan Rice, they’ve actually been promoted to posts where their loyalty to the criminal-in-chief can do America and its citizens even more damage, if that is possible.</p>
<p>A president faced with a scandal created by underlings behind his back would be naturally furious at their misbehavior, and want heads to roll. This didn’t happen in any of these scandals because their point of origin was the White House itself. Promoting the culprits is a way of keeping them quiet.</p>
<p>And what exactly is the I.R.S. scandal about — to take just one case? It’s a plan unprecedented in modern American politics to push the political system towards a one-party state by using the taxing authority of the government to cripple and destroy the political opposition. The administration’s campaign to promote voter fraud by opposing measures to stop it (and defaming them as “racist” is guided by the same intentions and desire.</p>
<p>And why shouldn’t Obama want to destroy the two-party system since he is also in utter contempt of the Constitutional framework, making law illegally, and defying an impotent Congress to stop him? Of course every radical, like Obama, hates the Constitutional framework because, as Madison explained in Federalist #10, it is designed to thwart “the wicked projects” of the left to redistribute income and destroy the free market.</p>
<p>The same desire to overwhelm and permanently suppress the opposition drives the war that Obama and the Democrats have conducted against America’s borders and therefore American sovereignty. Their plan is too flood the country with illegals of whatever stripe who will be grateful enough for the favor to win them elections and create a permanent majority in their favor. The immediate result of these efforts is that we have no secure southern border, and therefore no border; and therefore we have effectively invited criminals and terrorists to come across and do Americans harm.</p>
<p>Which brings us to the deepest level of Obama’s hell, which is his anti-American foreign policy. When Obama was re-elected in 2012, the very first thought I had was this: A lot of people are going to be dead because of this election. How disastrously right I was. Since their assault on George Bush and their sabotage of the war in Iraq, Obama and the Democrats have forged a power vacuum in Europe and even more dramatically in the Middle East, which nasty characters have predictably entered with ominous implications for the future security of all Americans.</p>
<p>Take one aspect of this epic default: Obama’s lack of response to the slaughter of Christians in Palestine, Egypt and Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of Christians have been slaughtered and driven from their homes in Iraq – over half a million by some counts. This is the oldest Christian community in the world dating back to the time of Christ. What was Obama’s response to this atrocity until a group of Yazvidi along with the Christians were trapped on a mountain side, and politics dictated he had to make some gesture. His response was to do and say nothing. Silence. Even his statement announcing minimal action to save the Yazvidi and the Christians mentioned the Christians once in passing while devoting a paragraph to the obscure Yazvidi.</p>
<p>What this unfeeling and cold response to the slaughter of Christians tells us is that Obama is a pretend Christian just the way he is a pretend American. What he is instead is a world class liar. That is because his real agendas are anti-American, anti-Christian, and anti-Jewish, and obviously and consistently pro America’s third world adversaries to whom he is always apologizing and whom he is always appeasing. Obama lies about his intentions and policies because he couldn’t survive politically if he told the truth.</p>
<p>The socialist plot against individual freedom called Obamacare was sold as a charitable attempt to cover the uninsured (which it doesn’t), to lower health insurance costs (which it doesn’t) and to allow patients to keep their doctor and their plan (which it doesn’t). What it actually does is to take away a major piece of the freedom that Americans once enjoyed – the freedom to choose their plan and their doctor, and not to have the government control their health care or have easy access to all their financial information.</p>
<p>This devious, deceitful, power hungry administration is just as James Woods described it. But it is also a mounting danger for all Americans. Thanks to his global retreat, the terrorists Obama falsely claims are “on the run” are in fact gathering their strength and their weapons of mass destruction until a day will come when they will cross our porous borders and show us what thyears of perfidy not only by Obama but by the whole Democratic Party have wrought.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Raymond Ibrahim Talks Islam &amp; Christian Persecution</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/raymond-ibrahim-talks-islam-christian-persecution/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=raymond-ibrahim-talks-islam-christian-persecution</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/raymond-ibrahim-talks-islam-christian-persecution/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 15 Aug 2014 04:10:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[christianity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Raymond Ibrahim]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=238554</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Shillman Journalism fellow explains the current conflict engulfing the Middle East. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/0.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-238698" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/0.jpg" alt="0" width="279" height="234" /></a>Raymond Ibrahim, a Shillman Fellow at the Freedom Center, recently did several interviews and presentations on a variety of topics dealing with Islam.  Some of these follow:</p>
<p>•Ibrahim chaired a panel discussion on the Western media at the annual Coptic Solidarity conference held in Capitol Hill, D.C. His segment appears <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAZ024pypZ4">here</a>, starting around the 13:15 mark. (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BftXarF6X64">Click here</a> for the other panelists’ presentations, including Michael Coren, Erick Stakelbeck, Ryan Mauro, and Raymond Arroyo.)</p>
<p>•An interview on In the Market with Janet Parshall, in a segment titled “Islam’s Quest for Control.”  <a href="http://www.moodyradio.org/radioplayer.aspx?episode=138446&amp;hour=2">Click here to listen</a> (the 30 minute segment begins around the 21:30 mark).</p>
<p>•An interview on the “sex jihad” on Huffington Post’s “Huffpost Live,” with host Marc Lamont Hill. <a href="http://live.huffingtonpost.com/r/segment/isis-sexual-jihad-iraq/53a9b36578c90a10c20000be">Click here to view</a>.</p>
<p>•An interview on the “big picture” of Muslim persecution of Christians on the Steve Deace Show. <a href="http://stevedeace.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/deace_hour3_071614.mp3">Click here to listen</a>.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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