Ωφέλιμα Άρθρα, (Αναδημοσιεύσεις), Μόνον Για Τους… Μελετητές μας!..
1. WE’RE NOT THE THOUGHT POLICE
That being said, what are you thinking?
April 9, 2018
To read Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch website regularly is to get an unsettling daily dose of real-life Islam-related horrors. But on April 4, Robert posted a half-hour audio that was even more disturbing than the bulk of his usual offerings. The audio records the visit by a couple of British police officers to the home of a British subject who had apparently been reported to the authorities for posting anti-Islam comments on social media. The householder in question greeted the cops with surprising – perhaps nervous? – cheeriness, and for a half hour he earnestly, willingly, and good-humoredly answered their indefensibly intrusive and insulting questions about his opinions. Among them: What were his political beliefs? What did he think of Islam? Did he hate Muslims? Was he a racist? Was he a Nazi?
It quickly became clear that this man – whose name we never learn, unless I missed something – is anything but a racist or Nazi or hater of any kind. On the contrary, he is a thoughtful citizen who, after considerable study, has come to some sensible conclusions about Islam. He made it clear that, unlike his visitors, he had read the Koran, had acquainted himself with the major specifics of the life of Muhammed, and knew the basics of Islamic theology. He was, it emerged, a strong opponent of Islam for precisely the right reasons, including (as he mentioned) the fact that it commands believers to do harm to infidels, Jews, and gays.
Yet even as he spelled out these indisputable truths about Islam, the police officers responded as if he was imagining it all. They suggested that he might want to sit down for a conversation with an Islamic scholar, who could clear up what they seemed determined to view as his misunderstandings. They insisted, moreover, that they were not the Thought Police – even though there is no other word for police officers who show up at the home of an innocent citizen to interrogate him about his personal opinions.
A couple of reader comments on the Jihad Watch audio suggested it was fake, on the grounds that police officers in a free country would surely never do such a thing. Wrong. For me, the audio brought back vivid memories – for I’ve had my own very similar encounter with European policemen. My experience was slightly different in that instead of being visited at home, I was summoned to a local police station in Norway, where I live. But the encounter itself, which took place in January 2014, was strikingly similar to the one recorded on the Jihad Watch audio. My interrogators even assured me, as their British colleagues assured the fellow in the audio, that they were not the Thought Police. When I heard that statement on the audio, I couldn’t help wondering: are cops around Europe, even in different countries, working off of the same script?
Immediately after returning home from my visit to the police station back in January 2014, I sat down and typed up everything I could remember about the exchange I’d had with my new uniformed friends. The conversation had been in Norwegian, and I wrote it out in Norwegian. I sent copies to a few friends of mine, including Hans Rustad, editor of the vitally important Norwegian website document.no, who, in response, told me that he had heard similar, and equally disturbing, accounts from other people living in Norway. He actually took a copy of my testimony with him to a meeting at the Norwegian Ministry of Justice, where he confronted officials with this example of thoroughly inappropriate police conduct.
My Norwegian-language account of my exchange with the police officers later appeared in print (but not online) in a document.no publication, but has never appeared in English. After hearing the audio at Jihad Watch, however, I decided that it might be worthwhile to translate my account into English so that any doubters might understand that, yes indeed, this how at least some police officers in Europe conduct themselves in this era of Islamization.
So here it is, without further ado, but with newly added comments and explanatory information in brackets:
On January 9, I received a phone call from a policeman in Skien [the county seat of Telemark, where I live]. He said he wanted to meet me because he thought my knowledge of Islam could help the police in the fight against Islamic terrorism. He explained that someone at PST [the Norwegian Police Security Service, Norway’s equivalent of the NSA or MI5] had recommended that he speak with me. I said I would be glad to be of help. We agreed to speak again a few days later to agree on a time and place.
During the days that followed I spent a good deal of time preparing for what I imagined would be a crash course in Islam. When we spoke by telephone for the second time, I thought I detected a subtle change in his tone and immediately suspected that his objective was, in fact, not to draw on my expertise but to interrogate me. This suspicion was reinforced when he said, at the end of the conversation, that he himself was a PST officer.
This was precisely the same thing that had happened to me during the [mass murderer Anders Behring] Breivik trial [in 2012], when Geir Lippestad [Breivik’s lawyer] summoned me as an “expert witness.” His real intention at that time was not to make use of my “expertise” but rather to expose me to scorn and derision as one of several writers who had supposedly “influenced” the killer and who thus shared in the blame for his crimes.
On January 15, I met the PST officer and a colleague of his, also from PST, at a police station near my home. Indeed, it turned out that they had no interest in learning anything about Islam from me. They wanted to know about other things. How, for example, had I come to be so critical of Islam? Which other members of the anti-Islam community was I acquainted with? Which far-right websites was I in the habit of reading? Had I experienced discomfort in encounters with Muslims? Did I know Hans Rustad, editor of document.no, which publishes critical aticles about Islam and European immigration policy? Had I ever posted comments on his website?
At first I played along – too much. I told them about the time my partner had been assaulted by a Muslim with a knife at a bus stop at St. Hanshaugen in Oslo, and about the time a Muslim yelled “faggot” at him and kicked him on the tram. I mentioned the doctor I knew who had been killed at his office by a Muslim asylum seeker. As for Hans Rustad, I said, “Yes, I know him. He’s a terrific guy and he has a terrific website. But no, I’ve never commented on articles there.”
They asked about Fjordman [counterjihadist writer Peder Are Nøstvold Jensen]. Had I ever met him? Yes, we had gotten together for beers 3-4 times in Oslo several years ago. We had also both attended a conference in The Hague sometime around 2006. Oh yes? Which conference? The Pim Fortuyn Memorial Conference. Who arranged that? I don’t know. Who else took part? Robert Spencer, Bat Ye’or, several others. They seemed to be interested in these details. They asked me what I thought about Fjordman. I answered the question rather exhaustively.
Then they came to Breivik. How had I felt when I learned that Breivik had read some of my books and articles? They emphasized that they were fully aware of the dangers of Islamic terrorism, but they were also worried that a writer like me could help “create a new Breivik” or several of them. It was at about this point that I began to fire back a bit. I said that Breivik was a maniac, and that if he hadn’t happened to get hooked on Islam as an object of hate, he would have gotten hooked on something else to hate. They didn’t seem to be willing to accept the possibility that Breivik was just a crazy man, an isolated case. I got the impression that they were working from the premise that Breivik was a cold-blooded counterjihadist who had been created by other counterjihadists.
In a slightly irritated tone, one of the two men reminded me that during the first hours after the government buildings in Oslo were bombed, that is before Breivik was identified and before his motives were known, many people in Oslo had assumed that the city was under attack by Muslim terrorists, and that this had resulted in people assaulting Muslims in the streets. [Note: I have never seen any documentation of this claim.] One of PST’s concerns, he said, was that if a Norwegian Muslim committed a murder like the horrible killing of Lee Rigby in London, there would be a violent anti-Muslim reaction. [They always worry more about the anti-Muslim “backlash” that virtually never happens than about the actual Islam-motivated atrocity.]
My interlocutors had read Breivik’s “manifesto.” They talked about his patchwork of plagiarized historical essays and information about weapons in a way that suggested that, in their eyes, it was a key document for the understanding of the counterjihad movement.
“Have you read the Koran?” I asked.
“No,” both of them said. They were not at all embarrassed about it.
“Well, you should,” I said. “If you want to understand the mentality that underlies Islamic terrorism, you’ll find its origin there.”
One of them answered quickly. “We know that radical Muslims have misinterpreted the Koran.”
“It’s not a question of interpretation,” I replied. “The passages in question are very clear.” I emphasized that while none of the writers they were trying to link to Breivik had called for killing, the Koran calls for killing infidels again and again.
They paid no heed to this. In fact they seemed to find it distasteful to talk about the Koran in this way.
They wanted to know what I thought about the “Eurabia conspiracy theory.”
“What do you mean by that term?” I asked.
“Haven’t you heard it before?”
“Of course, but I hope you understand that this is an expression one almost never hears outside of Norway. It’s a concept that has been invented by the Norwegian left. What does it mean to you?”
“It’s about Muslims wanting to take over Europe.”
“That’s not a conspiracy theory. Jihad is a reality, it’s a core Islamic idea. Do you know how Islam divides the world?”
They shook their heads.
“The world consists of the House of Islam, where Islamic law prevails, and the House of War, which is the part of the world where Islamic law does not yet prevail. According to the Koran, there will not be peace in the world until the House of War is totally conquered by Islam.”
They weren’t interested in hearing about this, either. One of them explained what they meant by the “Eurabia conspiracy theory”: “What we’re referring to is the idea that, for example, Stoltenberg [Jens Stoltenberg, Labor Party politician and Prime Minister from 2000-1 and 2005-13] is secretly conspiring with Muslims with the goal of transforming Norway into an Islamic state.”
What struck me about this was that they talked about Stoltenberg as if he were still Prime Minister. [Just as America’s Deep State is Democratic, Norway’s is Labor.]
At one point, they asked a question that led me to say something very critical about the attempt, after July 22 [the date, in 2011, of Breivik’s atrocities], to limit freedom of expression in Norway. One of them asked me, do you think that there is greater freedom of expression in the U.S. than in Norway? I replied that there’s much more freedom of expression in the U.S. than in all of Western Europe. I mentioned Lars Hedegaard, Geert Wilders, and others who had been put on trial in various Western European countries because of things they had said or written about Islam.
“Where is the limit, then?” asked one of the PST guys, his tone rather sharp.
“There shouldn’t be any limit, unless you call for violence,” I said. They seemed to react to this. I had the impression that they felt I had crossed a line.
During the conversation they reassured me at least three times that this was not an interrogation – but that’s exactly what it was. A couple of times they said that they had no plans to arrest me – which, of course, served as a reminder that they had the power to do so. They also insisted a couple of times that they were not “Thought Police” [tankepoliti]. At one point, one of them mentioned that they can’t do everything the NSA can do, because the law doesn’t allow it, but that they do absolutely everything they can within the framework of Norwegian law.
The entire conversation lasted about an hour and a half. It was intense. They fired questions at me almost without a break. Several times they returned to questions I had already answered. When the whole thing was over, they informed me that they might be contacting me again.
Afterwards, I regretted that I hadn’t just stood up and walked out when I realized that I had been summoned there under false premises. In these times, when certain critical voices and opinions are considered illegal, I would never knowingly have put myself in such a situation with the police. But this was a trap, and they were clearly betting that I would stay there and answer their questions because it would have seemed both uncomfortable and rude to do anything else.
They were right: I stayed there because I didn’t want to make a scene. But while I’m sorry I answered some of their questions so dutifully, I’m glad I took advantage of the opportunity to put up at least something of a challenge. In any event, what emerges from the audio at Jihad Watch is that those bobbies in Britain (apparently Lancashire), like my PST buddies in Norway, have been trained to view Islam as essentially benign and criticism of Islam as a danger. Both sets of cops manifestly consider it part of their job to hunt down critics of Islam and try to intimidate them into silence. And none of them have the slightest regard whatsoever for freedom of speech. They don’t even seem to grasp the concept.
They’ve also apparently been taught – and this is the creepiest part – to emphasize that they’re not Thought Police. This is obviously a result of training, because it would never occur independently to such people – who have plainly never read a word of Orwell – to make such a declaration in the first place. This, then, is what we are up against in today’s western Europe: police departments that are producing Thought Police – and, as part of that production process, are instructing them to reassure the proles that, no, of course they’re not Thought Police.
Sure. And war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.
2. THREE WAYS OBAMA CAUSED THE SYRIAN DISASTER
The Radical-in-Chief didn’t just support one monster. He backed two.
April 9, 2018
Obama owns the disaster in Syria in a way that no one else does. Three of his policies intersected to cause the bloodshed, devastation and horrors there.
- The Iraq Withdrawal
- The Arab Spring
- The Iran Deal
Obama’s Iraq withdrawal turned the country over to Iran and ISIS. The tensions between the Shiite puppet regime in Baghdad (which Obama insisted on backing) and the Sunni population created a cycle of violence that reduced the country to a bloody civil war between Shiite militias and Al Qaeda in Iraq.
The collapse of the multicultural Iraqi army allowed Al Qaeda in Iraq to seize huge swathes of territory. And ISIS and Iran began carving up Iraq into their own ethnically cleansed dominions.
Then his Arab Spring empowered the Muslim Brotherhood’s Sunni forces to seize power in countries around the region. Unlike Egypt and Tunisia, whose governments fell under White House pressure, and Libya, which Obama bombed and invaded, the Iranians and Russians didn’t cut their Syrian allies loose.
Iraq’s civil war spread to Syria. Initially Obama backed the Sunni Brotherhood militias. These groups represented themselves as free, secular and democratic. They were actually nothing of the kind. But as Libya and Yemen turned into disasters, and the Syrian militias clamored for direct military intervention, Obama instead turned to Iran. The Sunni Islamists hadn’t worked out so he cut a deal with the Shiites.
Obama’s new deal with Iran was sealed with a fortune in illegal foreign currency shipments flown in on unmarked cargo planes, a virtual blank check for Iran’s nuclear program, the collapse of sanctions and the withdrawal of support for the Sunni militias in Syria. And that gave Iran a free hand in Syria.
If you want to understand why Syria is a disaster area, these are the three reasons.
Obama empowered ISIS and Iran next door to Syria. Then he empowered Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda militias in Syria. And then he finally empowered Iran, Assad and Russia in Syria.
If he had set out to cause as much death and devastation as possible in Syria, he couldn’t have done any more damage without dropping nuclear bombs or his campaign propaganda on its major cities.
Every major terror player in Syria was empowered by Obama’s terrible decisions.
ISIS and Iranian expansionism grew in the vacuum his policies had created. He backed the Brotherhood and Al Qaeda militias with training, political support and weapons shipments. And then he decided to create another vacuum that would allow Iran to overrun the region to do the work he didn’t want to do.
Syria is just the culmination of a series of bad decisions guided by a single disastrous philosophy.
Obama’s foreign policy was a leftist response to 9/11 and the Iraq War. Its central premise was that Islamic terrorism was our fault. Islamic terrorists had attacked us because of our support for the governments in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. This idea was implicitly expressed in his Iraq War speech.
“Let’s fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East, the Saudis and the Egyptians, stop oppressing their own people, and suppressing dissent, and tolerating corruption and inequality, and mismanaging their economies so that their youth grow up without education, without prospects, without hope, the ready recruits of terrorist cells,” he had declared.
The solution was withdrawing from Iraq. And withdrawing political support from our allies.
The Islamic terrorists would run for office, win elections and then stop being terrorists. Or at least they would limit their terrorism to domestic and regional violence. There would be no more justification for our “imperialist” military interventions in the region. That was Obama’s “smart power” foreign policy.
Instead it all went badly wrong.
The alliance between the Muslim Brotherhood, Qatar and the Obama regime toppled friendly governments and replaced them with terror states across the Middle East. But popular uprisings against Islamist rule in Tunisia and Egypt forced out Obama allies: Mohammed Morsi and Rashid Ghannouchi. Obama’s illegal invasion of Libya led to everything from the return of slave markets to ISIS cities. Libya’s Brotherhood allied with Al Qaeda influenced terror militias leading to the Benghazi attack.
Obama’s other worst Arab Spring disasters happened in Syria and Yemen. Iran used the Brotherhood bids for power as an opening. The fighting between Shiite and Sunni Jihadists devastated both countries. Obama wanted the Muslim Brotherhood to win, but he didn’t want to keep invading countries to do it.
The Muslim Brotherhood couldn’t take power or hold on to it without military support. Hillary Clinton had talked Obama into invading Libya. But he didn’t want any more wars. Especially after Libya.
When some of his advisers urged him to intervene more strongly in Syria, he wavered.
The Nobel Peace Prize winner, who vacationed all over the world, couldn’t actually find anyone except the French to actually support action in Syria. And he was too used to leading from behind to take the lead. The red line had been broken. He slowly crawled all the way up to action. And then ran away while pathetically blaming the British for his own cowardice, double-dealing and broken promises.
The former UK PM would reportedly describe Obama as, one of the “most narcissistic, self-absorbed people”.
Obama avoided the war by humiliating his own Secretary of State and colluding with the Russians. He dodged having to deliver on his red line by agreeing to pretend that Syria had destroyed its WMDs.
Triumphant press releases and media accounts claimed that all the chemical weapons were gone.
This fake deal would serve as a precedent for another fake deal to stop Iran’s own WMD program. Both deals were equally worthless and were backed by the experts and reporters who are now demanding action all over again against the Syrian WMDs that, if you listened to them, weren’t supposed to exist.
“The credible threat of force brought about an opening for diplomacy, to come in, which then led to something that no one thought was possible,” Derek Chollet, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, said.
There was no credible threat of force. And there was a reason no one thought that it was possible.
It wasn’t.
The Russians and Iranians had played Obama. And they would go on playing him. But Obama wanted to be played. He wanted to save face by handing over his disaster to the Russians and Iran.
He wanted to implement regime change in the Middle East. But he didn’t want to get his hands dirty.
It all began with his backing for Sunni Islamist takeovers. Then he switched to backing Shiite Islamists.
As Hillary once said, “What difference does it make?” Except to the dying and the dead.
We support monsters.
That is the familiar leftist critique of American foreign policy during the Cold War. The same radicals who supported the racist Sandinistas, who chanted, “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win” at their anti-war rallies, and wore red Che t-shirts, claimed that we wrongly supported anti-Communist dictators.
But the left is always twice as guilty of its own accusations.
In Syria, Obama didn’t just support one monster. He backed two. The bloodshed in Syria is entirely a product of the decisions that he made. But he wasn’t satisfied with supporting just one bunch of genocidal Islamic fanatics in a holy war. In one of the most extraordinary crimes, he backed both.
And he closed his eyes and allowed a third, ISIS, to rise.
Obama wanted to overthrow the dictators who were our allies. And he turned to the Brotherhood to do the job. When the Brotherhood couldn’t stand up to Iran or ISIS, he turned to Iran. He violated the law numerous times, providing weapons to Sunni Jihadists and cash to Shiite Jihadists, launching one illegal war and threatening to launch another, and it all ended in a miserable disaster that he ran away from.
The blood of 500,000 people is on his hands.
3. WHAT THE SECRET SERVICE THREAT ASSESSMENT IGNORES
Mental illness isn’t the issue.
April 11, 2018
The Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center (NTAC) has released its report on mass public attacks in 2017. It mentions, “terrorism” only once and the word “Islam” doesn’t appear in it at all.
That’s strange because two of the attacks, the Lower Manhattan car ramming and the Fort Lauderdale airport shooting rampage, were Islamic terrorist attacks. The perpetrators, Sayfullo Saipov, an Uzbeki immigrant, and Aashiq Hammad (Esteban Santiago), both credited ISIS with inspiring their killing sprees. These two Muslim terrorists had managed to kill a combined 13 people while wounding another 18.
And then there was Kori Ali Muhammad who had murdered 4 people in Fresno. Muhammad had shouted, “Allahu Akbar” when confronting the police just like Sayfullo Saipov would 3,000 miles away.
But Muhammad was apparently also a member of the Democrat’s favorite racist hate group: the Nation of Islam. The NOI combines two favorite topics of the left, Islam and hating white people. Louis Farrakhan, its leader has met or appeared with numerous top Dems, including Obama, Keith Ellison, a former NOI hate group memberwho is now number two at the DNC, Rep. James Clyburn, the third-highest ranked Democrat in the House, and many other members of the Congressional Black Caucus.
(Muhammad also endorsed Bernie Sanders, like James T. Hodgkinson, the Bernie Sanders supporter who opened fire at a Republican charity baseball practice, who also appears on the Secret Service list.)
Even with 17 victims killed in domestic terror attacks, 2017 was a slow year for Islamic terrorists. But the deadliest mass shooting attacks of 2016 and 2015 were both carried out by Islamic terrorists.
Together the San Bernardino and Pulse terrorists were responsible for 63 dead and 80 wounded.
Since the San Bernardino attack, a year hasn’t passed without a Muslim mass shooting. Of the 10 major mass shootings in the last decade with double digit death tolls, 3 were committed by Muslim terrorists. Muslims are less than 1% of population in this country, but carried out 33% of the major mass shootings.
Those are trends that the Secret Service ought to be concerned about. But instead it ignores them.
The Secret Service report mentions ISIS only once and equates terrorists with white supremacists and “radical black nationalists”, but emphasizes that mental illness was the real cause, “histories of hallucinations, paranoia, and/or delusions were also present for five of these seven attackers, and for two of them, their particular psychosis played a dominant role in the adoption of their belief systems.”
Mental illness is the overall theme of the report. “Nearly two-thirds of the attackers… experienced mental health symptoms prior to their attacks,” it claims. These included everything from paranoia and hallucinations to delusions and suicidal thoughts. But anyone who launches a suicide attack is likely to have suicidal thoughts. Islam glorifies suicide-murder killing sprees as martyrdom and draws hallucinatory images of a paradise filled with perpetual virgins and endless pleasures of the flesh.
The Secret Service report would have benefited from closing their copy of DSM-5 and opening a Koran.
The average Muslim terrorist is likely to fantasize about his own death, to believe in paranoid conspiracy theories about the CIA, the Jews and the Freemasons, and to be convinced that the infidels are out to get him. That might qualify as abnormal ideation in America, but it’s conventional in Pakistan or Yemen.
We often have no useful way of distinguishing irrational convictions that are utterly alien to our way of thinking from mental illness. Son of Sam thought he was getting orders to kill from a dog. That’s aberrant thinking in our culture. Believing that you will enjoy 72 virgins if you kill non-Muslims is just as foreign to our culture, but has ages of history and theology behind it in Islamic cultures.
The Secret Service report dismisses beliefs while emphasizing psychological and circumstantial explanations. It’s part of a pattern of efforts by the authorities to reinvent Islamic terrorism as mental illness. There’s hardly a terrorist in past decades whose crimes weren’t cloaked in mental illness.
Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood Jihadist, Omar Mateen, the Pulse mass shooter, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving Boston Marathon bomber, Michael Adebowale, one of the Lee Rigby beheaders, and dozens of others have either pleaded mental illness or had their lawyers and media defenders do it for them.
Between them these named men had murdered 65 people and wounded 306 other victims for Islam.
Were they mentally ill? Doubtfully. But it also doesn’t really matter. Hitler was quite clearly insane. That didn’t change the nature of the problem we faced. Even if some Islamic terrorists are mentally ill, the problem isn’t mental illness. Some of the mass shooters on the Secret Service report’s list might have been helped. But ideological violence can’t be reduced to a mental health issue. Or solved that way.
Some Islamic terrorists, like Hammad-Santiago, might be aberrant members of our culture who are attracted to Islamic terrorism. Most however belong to an entirely different culture with its own national allegiances and religious obligations. They aren’t broken Americans who need to be helped. Sane or not, they are fighting as part of a religious movement that predates our country and civilization.
The Secret Service report with its emphasis on mental illness and threatening communications treats the Islamic terrorists like all the other broken killers. But it’s exactly this attitude that helps terrorists kill.
Omar Mateen was able to carry out one of the deadliest rampages of the century in Orlando because FBI investigators assigned psychological explanations to his terrorist threats. Had the FBI taken him at his word, instead of letting him convince them that he was being persecuted by Islamophobes, the 49 people whom the Islamic terrorist murdered at the Pulse nightclub would still be alive today.
Hammad-Santiago walked into an FBI field office in Alaska and told agents that he was having “terroristic thoughts”. He blamed the CIA for forcing him to watch ISIS videos. The authorities sent him for a psychiatric evaluation and then let him go. They ignored the evidence that, whatever his mental state, he was actually serious about Islamic terrorism and had built a whole Jihadist identity.
(Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel, currently under fire for negligence in the Parkland school shooting, was also criticized for failing to properly admit Hammad-Santiago’s Islamic terrorist motivations.)
The Secret Service report repeats these same errors which led to the deaths of 54 people. In both cases, the FBI dismissed a serious threat because the terrorist’s claims seemingly lacked credibility. Omar Mateen claimed to have family in Al Qaeda while belonging to Hezbollah. Hammad-Santiago blamed his ISIS habit on the voices in his head. But the psychological explanation turned out to be fatally flawed.
Omar Mateen and Hammad-Santiago proved that they were terrorists in a definitive and horrifying way.
Treating Islamic terrorism as a mental or criminal problem gets people killed. The Secret Service’s threat assessment fails to grasp the real threat. Its predictive model ignores what actually makes terrorists tick.
And Islamic terrorists are most dangerous when we don’t see them coming.
4. ERDOGAN’S TWISTED VISIONS
Who he sees as terrorists and freedom fighters.
April 13, 2018
The international reaction to Hamas’ provocative “March of Return” had its predictable voices mired in typical hypocrisy. The European Union (EU), and the Human Rights Watch (HRW) called for “an independent and transparent investigation” into Israel’s use of live ammunition to quell the rioting. The United Nations (UN), that “paragon of virtue,” called for an emergency Security Council meeting with the aim of condemning Israel. France called on Israel to “show restraint.” The most blatant attack on Israel came from Turkey’s dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He called Israel’s Prime Minister “a terrorist.”
The EU seems to be interested in investigations only when Israel is involved and when the victims are Palestinians. That is not the case when Israelis are murdered by Palestinian terrorists. The UN, beholden to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which is its most powerful component in the General Assembly and other UN institutions, is clearly a biased party. The UN has habitually devoted the lion’s share of its proceedings to condemn Israel. Nikki Haley, U.S. ambassador to the UN observed (12/10/2017): “The UN has outrageously been of the world’s foremost centers of hostility towards Israel.”
Turkey’s President Erdogan exceeded all others in his hypocritical righteous indignation. At a Saturday speech (April 1, 2018) in Istanbul, Erdogan declared: “I strongly condemn the Israeli government over its inhumane attack.” He was referring to the Hamas organized riot called the “March of Return,” in which 15 Palestinians died in clashes with Israeli soldiers. Erdogan added on his social media page, “Israel will get trapped under the oppression it inflicts in Palestine. We will continue to support our Palestinian sisters and brothers in their rightful cause until the very end.”
The following day, Erdogan continued his attack, this time on Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu personally, calling him “a terrorist.” In a televised speech in Adana, Southern Turkey, he shouted “Hey Netanyahu! You are an occupier. And it is as an occupier that you are on those lands. At the same time you are a terrorist.” Reuters quoted Erdogan the same day as saying (referring to Israel)
“You are a terrorist state. It is known what you have done in Gaza and what you have done in Jerusalem. You have no one that likes you in the world.” This last remark revealed Erdogan’s anti-Semitic disposition.
Netanyahu, on his part, responded to Erdogan’s attacks stating that, “The most moral army in the world will not accept the moral preaching from someone who for years has been bombing a civilian population indiscriminately.” It was a clear reference to Erdogan’s brutal attacks against unarmed Kurdish civilians in Turkey, Syria and Iraq. Moreover, Turkish forces occupied Northern Cyprus in 1974, and a large number of Turkish-Muslim settlers from Anatolia, Turkey, have moved to Northern Cyprus.
Michael Totten in World Affairs, (March 1, 2018) wrote: “Turkey’s increasingly paranoid and deranged President Recep Tayyip Erdogan insists that everyone involved with the Kurdish Democratic Union Party, even peripherally, is a terrorist.” Since the 2016 coup attempt in Turkey, which might have been engineered by Erdogan himself in order to seize emergency powers, he has purged more than 150,000 people, including university professors, journalists, and novelists. At the same time, Erdogan has mounted a bloody campaign against alleged Kurdish “terrorists” and their supporters inside Turkey. In the process he has jailed thousands of Turkish citizens. One such victim is a former Kurdish member of the Turkish parliament named Hasip Kaplan. Erdogan’s terror against his Kurdish citizens includes the arrest of more than 11,000 members of the secular, and predominantly Kurdish party, (in the Turkish parliament) the People’s Democratic Party (HDP).
The Washington Post (January 31, 2018) reported that under the ironic name of “Operation Olive Branch,” Turkish forces in January waged war against Syrian Kurds in the predominantly Kurdish populated enclave called Afrin. “Reports suggest Turkish air and artillery strikes have damaged villages, and killed civilians there, in addition to killing dozens of Syrian Kurdish fighters.”
Erdogan’s hypocrisy is transparent and outrageous. Erdogan supports Hamas’ terror against Israel, but labels all Kurds as terrorists. Unlike Israel, whose sovereignty and the lives of its citizens are threatened by Hamas’ terror – Turkish, Syrian and Iraqi Kurdish civilians are not threatening Turkey’s sovereignty. And while the Kurdish PKK has been engaged in terror, most Kurdish civilians in Turkey, Syria and Iraq reject PKK’s terrorist methods. Erdogan’s army bombed and killed innocent Kurdish civilians in their sleep, while Israeli soldiers exhibited extra caution to not harm the innocent protestors.
“The March of Return” as the Hamas instigated riot was labeled, was a long planned campaign on which the terrorist organization has spent $15 million, according to Israel’s Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman. Despite the dire economic situation in Gaza, (a CIA estimate of unemployment for 2017 at 26.7%, and in reality closer to 40% unemployment), and major dependency on international welfare, Hamas used funds at its disposal to recruit “protesters” from mosques, schools, and randomly on the streets of the Gaza Strip. Hamas used social media, as well as radio and television to promote what is meant to be the “March into Israel.” On the ground, not far from the border crossing into Israel, Hamas prepared embankments, water pipes, portable toilets, and tents.
It is clear to everyone that Hamas is in utter desperation, and it is attempting to rouse the Gaza populace to be its “sacrificial lambs” for its selfish quest to get headlines and deflect attention from the misery it has inflicted upon the people of Gaza. Hamas seeks to mobilize the international community to act against Israel, counting in particular on the United Nations, and the European Union for political and financial support. Hamas can no longer provide economic sustenance to the Gazan people, nor is it willing to hand over governance of the Strip to the Palestinian Authority (PA). The PA has in turn cut down payments to civil servants (particularly following the attempted assassination of PA Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah) in Gaza, putting further constrains on Hamas.
The Gulf Arabs have more pressing issues than supporting the Palestinian Authority intransigence, and Hamas’ adventurism. (Jordan is constrained by its majority Palestinian population, and is compelled to express support for Palestinian victims in Gaza). They are preoccupied with countering Iran’s hegemonic ambitions and its attempts to overthrow the pro-Western Sunni regimes. Gulf Arabs view Iran, not Israel, as a major existential challenge. Saudi Arabia likewise considers Turkey’s Muslim Brotherhood oriented dictator, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as a major challenger to its leadership position in the Islamic world. For Hamas’ Sunni-Muslim leadership, Iran’s Islamic Republic is a reliable source of support, albeit, it is a Shiite regime. Turkey’s Erdogan is however, Hamas’ major political and economic supporter, and Hamas is banking on him for both political support, and financial relief.
The megalomaniacal Erdogan sees himself as the Sunni-Muslim Caliph, and the Sultan of the Muslim world, much like his Ottoman predecessors. He has threatened to attack the U.S. troops imbedded with Kurds in Northeastern Syria, and calls ordinary Kurds “terrorists.” Yet he fully encourages and supports Hamas’ terror against Israel. That is simply blatant hypocrisy.
5. ISRAEL AND ANNE FRANK’S JEWISHNESS
The deeper meaning behind the distortion of the Holocaust victim’s legacy !!!!!!!!!!!!!
April 13, 2018
Originally published by the Jerusalem Post.
On the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, the New Israel Fund announced it signed a partnership agreement with Anne Frank Fonds, the foundation Anne Frank’s father, Otto Frank, established in 1963 to administer the profits from the sales of her diary.
Frank’s diary has sold more than 30 million copies in 60 languages since it was first published in 1947. Its sales and global reach make it the most famous book authored by a Jew aside from the Bible.
The New Israel Fund’s deal with the Anne Frank Foundation is a symbolic expression of the existential struggle being waged in the Jewish world today. That struggle pits the government of Israel against much of the American Jewish leadership. It pits Israel’s public against the justices of the Supreme Court. It pits IDF line soldiers and commanders against the General Staff.
The effective merger of the New Israel Fund with the Anne Frank Foundation is the latest chapter in the theft of Anne Frank’s legacy, which began in the 1950s.
In 1952, a Jewish-American journalist named Meir Levin discovered The Diary of Anne Frank in French translation. Levin recognized that her diary was the ideal vehicle for telling the story of the genocide of European Jewry to the American public.
Frank was a Westernized Jew. Her family wasn’t religious. They were cosmopolitan German Jews who decamped to Amsterdam in 1933 when the Nazis rose to power, and immediately fit right in.
But for the Nazi occupation of Holland in 1940, Anne would likely never have received any Jewish education. But when the Dutch collaborationist government implemented the Nazi race laws, and expelled all Jewish children from public schools, in 1941 her parents were compelled to enroll her in a Jewish school.
As Prof. Ruth Wisse explained in her discussion of Anne Frank in The Modern Jewish Canon, Anne’s period in the Jewish school gave her a chance to develop a familiarity with Jewish tradition and history and to develop a positive sense of her Jewish identity.
“Thus,” Wisse wrote, “by the time the family was forced into hiding, she was well armed to face the assault against her as a Jew.”
By the same token, Anne’s family’s Westernism, coupled with the fact that they were hidden by Dutch Christians, made her proud of her Dutch citizenry. Wisse noted that in one of her diary entries, Anne resolved to sacrifice her life, “like a soldier on the battlefield” for Holland.
When he read Anne Frank’s diary in 1952, Levin recognized in Anne’s split identity the millennial condition of Jews in exile. He believed that her innocent explication of that condition, as a young Jewish Dutch girl hiding from the Nazis made Anne Frank’s diary the perfect means to tell the story of the Holocaust and the story of the Jews in the Holocaust to the American public.
But Levin lost control of her story almost as soon as the English translation of The Diary of Anne Frank was published.
Guided by playwright and Stalinist Lillian Hellman, Anne’s father chose intellectuals from America’s Jewish far-left elite to adapt her diary for stage and screen. For these intellectuals, Jewish particularism and Jewish nationhood were completely unacceptable. Playwrights Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich purged the screen and stage version of Anne’s diary of all Jewishness and transformed the Holocaust into a tale of universal persecution.
Wisse quoted Garson Kanin, who directed the play on Broadway, explaining how the dejudaization worked.
“Anne says, ‘We’re not the only Jews that’ve had to suffer. Right down through the ages, there have been Jews and they’ve had to suffer.’
“This strikes me as an embarrassing piece of special pleading. Right down through the ages, people have suffered because of being English, French, German, Italian, Ethiopian, Mohammedan, Negro, and so on…. The fact that in this play the symbols of persecution and oppression are Jews is incidental, and Anne, in stating the argument so, reduces her magnificent stature.”
In the end, Kanin just wrote her Judaism out of the script. The offending line was edited to say, “We’re not the only people that’ve had to suffer. Sometimes one race… sometimes another.”
According to Wisse, Levin spent the rest of his life fighting against the dejudaization of Anne Frank and was literally driven mad by his losing battle.
Levin’s loss was preordained. There were too many powerful actors pushing to revise her life story and transform her from a Jewish girl murdered in the Holocaust to a symbol of universal suffering.
It wasn’t just the Hellman-led Jewish intellectuals driving the train. The Dutch government became fully engaged in denying Anne Frank her Jewishness the Nazis murdered her for.
The Dutch government’s enthusiasm for Anne Frank derived from its desire to airbrush the wartime Dutch government’s and people’s active collaboration with the Nazis out of world history.
It is true that Dutch Christians hid Anne and her family. But it is also true that Dutch Nazis arrested the Franks and another 100,000 Dutch Jews. Dutch Nazis interned the Franks and 100,000 other Dutch Jews at Westerbork detention camp. Dutch Nazis deported them to German death camps.
The Dutch government embraced Anne Frank as a “Dutch heroine,” and turned the attic where she and her family hid into a national museum. As Wisse noted, one of Anne’s childhood friends wrote in the guest registration book at the Anne Frank museum, “Anne Frank didn’t want this.”
The co-option of Anne Frank’s legacy by intellectuals and political forces who pretended away her Jewishness may have been the first successful attempt to deny the antisemitic nature of the genocide of a third of the Jewish people. But it wasn’t the last one.
Ahead of Holocaust Remembrance Day, as it does every year, the IDF Education Corps distributed an instructional guide to commanders directing them how to discuss the Holocaust with their soldiers.
The Education Corps’ booklet tells commanders to tell their soldiers that the Holocaust was caused by “the deterioration of the rule of law and the decline of democracy” in Germany.
Ignoring the fact that the Nazis rose to power by winning an election, and pretending away the fact that Germany had no liberal tradition for the Nazis to subvert, the Education Corps’ manual instructs commanders to emphasize to their soldiers “the importance of democratic institutions and checks and balances that protect the democratic method.”
In other words, as far as the IDF’s Education Corps is concerned, the Holocaust was not caused by the German people’s thousand-year history of Jew-hatred and demonology. The Nazis’ weren’t elected because their antisemitism resonated with the German public. Rather, they rose to power because Germany lacked effective checks on its executive branch.
Where did this bizarre, ahistoric view of history, which whitewashes antisemitism – the chief driver of the Holocaust – out of the Holocaust come from?
The apparent source of the Education Corps distortion of the historical record and its decision to erase antisemitism from the IDF’s discussions of the deliberate annihilation of European Jewry is the worldview of retired Supreme Court president Aharon Barak.
Barak’s worldview is largely a function of his political convictions. Barak oversaw Israel’s so-called “constitutional revolution” of the 1990s. That “revolution” transformed Israel from a parliamentary democracy into what is often referred to as a “jurisdocracy,” where judges exercise unchecked power to overturn laws and abrogate government policies.
Since the 1990s, Barak’s political convictions have become the intellectual foundation of the Left’s ideological and programmatic identity. The Nazis play a major role in Barak’s justification of that worldview.
Barak explained his convictions in an interview with Yediot Aharonot in 2015. As is his wont, he began his justification of unchecked judicial power by invoking Nazis.
“The Nazi party was also elected with a democratic majority,” he said.
“The rule of law isn’t just enforcing the law. The rule of law involves enforcing law on the basis of an internal morality.”
And what is the source of Barak’s “internal morality”?
As far as Barak is concerned, it isn’t the Bible, which instructs the Jewish people that all men are created in God’s image that ensures the “internal morality” of Israel. It is Barak, and his fellow justices. They are the only thing preventing the Jews of Israel from becoming goose-stepping stormtroopers marching down Dizengoff Boulevard.
Importantly, there is nothing uniquely Jewish or Israeli about Barak’s judges. They could just as easily be Germans.
Barak said, “In Germany of the early 1930s, the Supreme Court didn’t have the power to abrogate laws. I believe with perfect faith, that if Germany had a powerful court and judicial oversight back then, it would have been possible to prevent Hitler.”
Barak’s position, the Education Corps’ position, the position of the leftist Jewish-American intellectuals who erased Anne Frank’s Judaism, and the New Israel Fund’s goal of creating a “New Israel” devoid – like Anne Frank’s legacy – of all Jewish character, are all based a common view. For political and ideological reasons, they all agree that Jews must assimilate into a universal world in which antisemitism plays no role and Jewish identity, history and tradition have no place.
The diary entry that Anne Frank ended by pronouncing her determination to die for Holland “like a soldier on the battlefield,” began with the following meditation.
“Who has made us Jews different from all other people? Who has allowed us to suffer up till now? It is God that has made us as we are, but it is God, too, who will raise us up again…. We can never become just Netherlanders or just English or any nation for that matter, we will always remain Jews, we must remain Jews, but we want to, too.”
Hanging in the balance in all the battles over Israel’s identity and the identity and character of the Jewish people is one question: Was she right?
Do we want to remain Jews? Should we want to remain Jews?
Are we uniquely subjected to hatred and persecution because we are Jews? Or is our Judaism a meaningless distinction that attracts no unique animus and violence? Should we stand together to defend ourselves, and our rights as Jews, recalling that the Holocaust was caused by annihilationist hatred directed against assimilated and devout Jews alike just because they were Jewish? Or should we view the Holocaust as just another bad thing that some people did to other people?
Should we aspire to write the next chapters of our history as our forefathers authored our past, or would it be better to throw caution and history to the winds, embrace a universalist identity and depend on the internal wisdom of judges or communists or progressive American Jews to prevent us from becoming Nazis or becoming victims once again?
6. JIZYA, “MILITARY EXEMPTION,” AND MURDERED CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS
How the present sheds light on the past.
April 13, 2018
One of the staples of the Islamic whitewashing industry is the claim that jizya—the extortion money subjugated Jews and Christians were required to pay (a la Koran 9:29)—actually “entitled them to Muslim protection from outside aggression and exempted them from military service,” to quote Georgetown University’s John Esposito.
By this widely held logic, Muslim invaders did not demand that the conquered infidel populations ransom their lives with money—as virtually all Muslim jurists explain it—but rather were kind enough to offer their non-Muslim subjects “protection” and exemption from military service for a small fee.
The irony, of course, is that this claim continues to be contradicted by the deeds of Muslims in the modern era. Most recently, on March 14, Matthew Samir Habib, a 22-year-old Coptic Christian in Egypt’s military was killed by his Muslim counterparts—simply for being Christian. He is merely the latest of about nine Christian soldiers to be killed in recent months and years by Muslim soldiers on account of their faith.
And in virtually every case, a similar pattern follows: despite all the evidence otherwise (such as physical bruises all over the bodies of the slain), military officials insist that—due to some sudden and inexplicable bout of depression—all these Christians supposedly committed “suicide”; meanwhile the dead Christian soldiers’ families and those closest to them insist their slain sons and brothers were happy and healthy, that they were observant Christians, and that there was evidence that they were being persecuted by their Muslim “brothers-in-arms” for their evident Christianity.
For example, in this latest case from March 14, the murdered Copt was shot twice—and still authorities maintain it was suicide. (Click here for several more examples of military authorities offering strange reasons for the deaths, and Christian families rejecting them.)
Why these Christians were killed is not difficult to comprehend. For many Muslims in Egypt and elsewhere, war is synonymous with jihad—and it doesn’t do much for morale to have lowly infidels fighting alongside would-be jihadis.
From here we understand why Christians and Jews were truly “exempt” from military service: not because they paid jizya-tribute, but because, as conquered infidels, they themselves were the enemy and had to remain separate and subjugated—as Egypt’s Copts remain to this day. (As one example, their requests to open or renovate churches are always met with mass violence and upheavals, often enabled if not instigated by local Muslim authorities: as infidels, Christians are not allowed to build or renovate temples of worship that openly challenge the teachings of Muhammad.)
Apologists like Esposito twist the facts around in another important way: while payment of jizya did indeed purchase “protection” (of a sort) for the conquered infidels, that protection was never against an outside hostile force, but against inside hostile forces—that is, Muslims themselves: sharia manuals make clear that failure to pay jizya made the lives of dhimmis forfeit.
Finally, that the Koran itself requires conquered non-Muslims “to give the jizya willingly while they are humbled” (9:29), puts to rest any claim that payment of jizya was a mere business transaction but rather a ritual show of Islamic dominance over—and contempt for—infidels.
7. Mete Yarar, Ege’de kurulmak istenen tuzağı yazdı
Yunanistan, Türkiye ile savaş mı istiyor?
SuperHaber yazarı Mete Yarar, Türkiye’nin güney sınırlarında terörle mücadelesi sürerken Ege’de tansiyonu yükselten eylemlerini arttıran Yunanistan’ın planını yazdı.
Gündem 02.04.2018 09:47
Yarar, Karar gazetesindeki yazısında, “Normalde Yunanistan’ın durumunda olan bir ülke, Türkiye ile sorunlarını en azından dondurmaya, sonrasında Ege ve Kıbrıs açıklarında ortak enerji yatırımlarına girmeyi tercih eder. Savunma giderlerini de düşürerek bir çıkış yolu bulmaya çalışır. Bunun dışında bir yol izliyor ise bu akıl dışı yolu finanse eden bir motivasyon kaynağına ihtiyacı vardır.” diye yazdı.
İşte o satırlar:
Türkiye Suriye ve Irak’ta terör örgütleri ile mücadele ederken, bir taraftan da mülteci sorununu kalıcı bir şekilde çözmek isterken, Yunanistan sizce bu düşmanca tavırları ile ne yapmak istiyor?
Açıkçası bu sorunun cevabı, herşey iyi giderken bir anda FETÖ’cülere, DHKPC ve PKK terör örgütü mensuplarına yeniden sahip çıkmasının ve Türkiye ile ilişkileri sıkıntılı olan Mısır ve israil ile adalar bölgesinde hava ve deniz tatbikatları yapmasının ardından gizli.
Bu yapılanların bir tanesi bile aslında ilişkileri germeye yetecekken Yunanistan, geçmişi hatırlatan isimler vererek tatbikatlar yapmakta, bazı adalar üzerinde hak iddia ederek güç gösterisine devam etmektedir. Bunları yaparken de AB’yi arkasına alarak yüksek perdeden konuşmaktadır.
Yunanistan’ı bunlara yapmaya iten birkaç motivasyondan bahsedelim. Birinci bölümde kendi iç motivasyonlarından bahsetmek lazım.
1990 yılındaki GSYH baktığınızda Yunanistan’ın yaklaşık 100 milyar dolar ve Türkiye’nin de 150 milyar dolar olduğunu görebiliriz. Bu rakam günümüzde ise Türkiye lehine neredeyse üç misli artmış durumda. Bu da bütün dengeleri altüst ediyor. ABD’nin ısrarla sürdürmek istediği o 7/10 dengesi çoktan Türkiye lehine bozulmuş durumda.
***
Savunma sanayisinde dışa bağımlılığı azalmış ve uzun menzilli füze sistemlerine sahip bir Türkiye de Yunanistan için korkulu bir rüya. Bu bağımsızlık daha önce kullandığı argümanları da boşa çıkarmış durumda. Ne zaman Türkiye ile bir sorun yaşasa ya ABD üzerinden ya da AB üzerinden Türkiye’ye gizli silah ambargoları koydurmayı hep başarmıştı. Bu kullandığı büyük silah da artık elinde değil.
Geçmişte Türkiye ile Rusya sorun yaşadığında Yunanistan bu gücü dini bağlantılarını kullanarak hep kendi lehine çevirmeyi başarmıştı. Türkiye’nin Rusya ile stratejik ortaklığa gitmesi kendi oyun planlarını da altüst etmiş durumdadır. Siyasal destekçilerini kaybetmeye başlayınca kendisine yeni oyun partnerleri aramaya başlamıştır. Bunlar da ‘düşmanımın düşmanı benim dostumdur’ kontenjanından gelen ülkeler olmaya başlamıştır.
Türkiye kendi iç sorunlarını ( terör ve siyasal istikrarsızlık ) çözmeye başlarken Yunanistan ekonomik ve siyasal krizler ile boğuşmaya başlamıştır. Kişi başı milli gelir yüksek olmasına rağmen devlet gittikçe fakirleşmeye devam etmektedir.
Türkiye ve Yunanistan arasındaki nüfus dengesi çığ gibi büyümeye devam etmektedir. Yunanistan nüfusu sabit kalmaya devam ederken bir taraftanda yaşlanmaya başlamıştır. Türkiye ise en genç dinamik nüfusuna sahip ülkedir. Bu ise en önemli milli güç unsuralarından biri olan nüfus sayısının güç çarpanını Türkiye lehine artırmaktadır.
Sınır sorunlarını çözmesi ile beraber Türkiye’nin başını Ege’ye ve Kıbrıs’a çevireceğini Yunanistan çok iyi bilmektedir. Bu nedenle sorun çözme işlemi devam ederken gerilimi artırmak şu an için işine gelmektedir. Arkasına AB’yi alarak yaptığı bu gerilim ile ekonomik olarak da Türkiye’nin önüne yeni açmazlar koymak istemektedir.
***
Türkiye’nin savunma doktrini; bir taraftan bir veya birkaç terör örgütü ile düşük veya orta ölçekli bir mücadele ederken, aynı anda bir ülke ile savaşı kabul etmesi üzerinedir. Bu doktrini Yunanistan da NATO partneri olarak çok iyi bilmektedir.
Bunu bilmesi işin içinde tuzak olduğunun da açık bir göstergesidir. Yunanistan savaş çıkarmadan Türkiye’yi kontrollü gerilimin içine çekmeye çalışmaktadır.
Bu saydığım iç faktörlere sizler de eklemeler yapabilirsiniz.
Gelelim yurt dışı motivasyon kaynaklarına; Ülkenin borç yükü ödenemez bir boyutu çoktan geçmiştir. Ülkenin bir çok önemli tesisi ya satılmış ya da işletme hakkı otuz yıllığına devredilmiştir. Bu ödenemez borç, ülkenin milli kararları alması sırasında farklı yerler tarafından istenmeyen noktalara savrulmasına yol açabilir. Sanırım açmaya da başlamış durumdadır.
Normalde Yunanistan’ın durumunda olan bir ülke, Türkiye ile sorunlarını en azından dondurmaya, sonrasında Ege ve Kıbrıs açıklarında ortak enerji yatırımlarına girmeyi tercih eder. Savunma giderlerini de düşürerek bir çıkış yolu bulmaya çalışır. Bunun dışında bir yol izliyor ise bu akıl dışı yolu finanse eden bir motivasyon kaynağına ihtiyacı vardır.
Türkiye kendisine kurulan tuzakları bir bir geçerek yoluna ilerlemeye devam etmektedir. Türkiye büyüdükçe sorunlarının boyutu küçülmeye devam edecektir. Sorun çıkaran ülkeler de buna dahildir.
8. J STREET, ANTI-ISRAEL GROUPS CONDEMN BOLTON FOR BEING MEAN TOIRAN
March 30, 2018
A coalition of anti-Israel groups issued a statement opposing President Trump’s choice of John Bolton, an experienced pro-Israel diplomat, as his National Security Adviser.
J Street, Peace Now, T’ruah, the New Israel Fund, Ameinu and the National Council of Jewish Women (the NCJW continues to make it clear that it’s now an official part of the anti-Israel lobby) condemned Bolton for his willingness to challenge Obama’s protection of Iran’s nuclear program.
The coalition of anti-Israel groups condemned Bolton’s refusal to support the Islamic terrorist groups occupying Israel. They were concerned that he might scuttle the deal that allowed Iran to maintain its nuclear program. And they were concerned that Bolton was aligned with counterterrorism experts willing to challenge the Islamic Supremacist teachings calling for the murder of Jews and all non-Muslims.
J Street and the coalition of anti-Israel lobby groups denounced the new National Security Advisor for having “rejected the idea of Palestinian self-determination and statehood.” By that, they mean the PLO and Hamas, whose government some of the pro-terror groups on the list have endorsed. Others in the coalition have endorsed various flavors of BDS despite posturing in this statement as pro-Israel groups.
The statement is an important reminder that the anti-Israel lobby feels extremely threatened by the first pro-Israel administration this decade. And John Bolton especially excites their ire.
Jimmy Carter has already condemned Trump’s choice of Bolton. J Street’s condemnation only further enhances Bolton’s stature as a man who will stand up to terrorists while supporting our allies.
9. THE GROWING IRANIAN CYBER SECURITY THREAT
The most underestimated weapon in Iran’s arsenal.
March 16, 2018
When it comes to cyber security, much attention has been focused on Russia due to that nation’s recent cyber efforts to interfere with the 2016 general election. This includes the creation of bots to spread fake news as well as attempts to penetrate voter registration rolls. China too is active in this new realm of virtual warfare engaging in systematic efforts to steal Western technology. China’s J-20 and J-31 fifth generation jet fighters are said to be based on stealth technology stolen from the United States. China also hacked into U.S. Steel’s computers and stole trade secrets for advanced, high-strength steel and then incorporated that technology in its own manufacturing processes. Other bad actors include North Korea which, in 2014, infamously hacked Sony Pictures Entertainment and also engaged in attempts to digitally loot banking institutions including an unsuccessful effort to loot the Federal Reserve to the tune of $1 billion.
But when it comes to mischief-making, it’s a sure bet that the Islamic Republic is lurking and cyber terrorism is no exception. While Iran’s cyber hacking operatives have not reached the level of sophistication and capability of their Russian and Chinese partners in crime, they are very active in this new area of virtual warfare and are learning quickly.
Iran first connected to the internet in 1992, and by 2000, most Iranians were connected to the information superhighway in some form. Iranian cyber terrorists operating at the behest of the regime initially focused their activities internally; spying on dissidents and those deemed to be headaches for the regime but soon exported their mischief globally.
In 2009, Iranian hackers, calling themselves “Iranian Cyber Army” forced Twitter to shut down for several hours after the hackers defaced the site. Twitter had been used by Green Revolution activists to spread the word about Iran’s rigged 2009 elections.
In the summer of 2011, Iranian hackers struck again, this time targeting the prestigious Dutch certificate authority security company DigiNotar. The hack, which sent shudders through the world of cyber security, enabled Iranian cyber operatives to compromise the Gmail accounts of some 300,000 Iranian citizens. Iranian internal spy agencies were then able access the contents of those accounts. The embarrassing but audacious security breach forced DigiNotar into bankruptcy and dissolution.
Iranian hackers graduated from defacing Twitter and compromising Gmail accounts to destroying critical infrastructure. On the morning of August 15, 2012 at precisely 11:08, an Iranian virus known as Shamoon infected the corporate PCs of one of the world’s largest oil companies, the Saudi firm Aramco. August 15 was a religious holiday in Saudi Arabia so most employees stayed home. When they returned to work the following morning and switched on their PCs, they discovered that their data vanished, replaced by a burning American flag. The attack, which destroyed data on some 35,000 computers, was regarded by cyber security experts as among one of the most destructive of its kind.
The following month, Iranian hackers struck again launching a series of denial-of-service attacks directed at U.S. banks. DoS attacks flood a website with volumes of traffic until the site crashes. Customers of Bank of America, Citigroup, HSBC, Wells Fargo, and Capital One among others were not able to access their accounts online.
Iranian cyber-attacks tapered off in 2015 following the signing of the catastrophic Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action but have since resumed. In November 2016 and January 2017, Saudi agencies and companies became targets of Shamoon 2, a variant of the virus that wreaked havoc on Aramco’s computers in 2012.
Iran has become adept in using proxies to carry out its dirty work in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and other regions throughout the Mideast. By doing so, Iran limits its own casualties and can also deny direct involvement by claiming that these proxies are indigenous movements fighting against U.S.-backed imperialism. This strategy extends to hostile Iranian cyber activities. Hackers directed by the Islamic Republic have become proficient at hiding their tracks. Often, they will leave red herring clues designed to deflect suspicion away from the Iranian government.
In addition to its rogue nuclear activities (which have not ceased despite the signing of the JCPOA), its advanced ICBM program, its use of proxies to spread misery throughout the Mideast, its narco-terror and money laundering schemes, the West now has to contend with growing Iranian cyber security menace.
While the Iranians are lightyears behind their American and Israeli counterparts in the fields of cyber warfare and cyber security, the menace posed by the Islamic Republic in this relatively new area of warfare cannot be overstated. The only way to stop this Iranian sponsored aggression is by remaining vigilant and by informing the mullahs in no uncertain terms that attacks of this nature will be met by responses that are manifestly more destructive in size and scope. Iran may be expert at killing women and children and suppressing internal dissent with ruthless efficiency but this is one theater of warfare where Iran is at a distinct disadvantage and will remain so for decades to come.
“ΑΝΤΙΛΑΛΟΣ“
-/-
ΥΓ.
1. Την βρήκαμε και μας άρεσε! Δείτε την και εσείς την “φωτό” αυτήν παρακάτω! Είναι τραβηγμένη στην Άγκυρα !..
Ιβάν Ιγκνατίεβιτς Σαμπιντίς (Γνωστός) και Μεβλιούτ Τσαούσογλου (“Τρέχων” Τ/ΥΠΕΞ)
ΚΟΥΪΖ (Για Έλληνες + Ξένους…, πχ Αμερικανούς) : Τί πήγε να κάνει ο Ιβάν στην Άγκυρα;
2. Το επόμενο Φύλλο της τ-ε/φ “Türkiye”, μόνον για τους πιο μάγκες… εκ των μελετητών μας!
-/-
