Woe Unto Them that Call Evil Good, and Good Evil

Dennis Prager writes the following for NRO:

Israel — an Apartheid State? 

Next month, the U.N.-sponsored Hate-Israel Festival known as Durban III takes place. Under the heading “Anti-Racism,” the great bulk of the conference, like its Durban I and II predecessors, consists of condemning Israel for racism and equating it with an apartheid state.

Of the world’s many great lies, this is among the greatest.

How do we know it is a lie? Because when South Africa was an apartheid state, no one accused Israel of being one. Even the U.N. would have regarded the accusation as absurd. Israel has nothing in common with an apartheid state, but few people know enough about Israel — or about apartheid South Africa — to refute the libel.

So let’s respond. First, what is an apartheid state? And, does Israel fit that definition?
From 1948 to 1994, South Africa, the country that came up with this term, had an official policy that declared blacks second-class citizens in every aspect of that nation’s life. 

Among many other prohibitions on the country’s blacks, they could not vote; could not hold political office; were forced to reside in certain locations; could not marry whites; and couldn’t even use the same public restrooms as whites.

Not one of those restrictions applies to Arabs living in Israel.

One and a half million Arabs live in Israel, constituting about 20 percent of the country’s population. They have the same rights as all other Israeli citizens. They can vote, and they do. They can serve in the Israeli parliament, and they do. They can own property, businesses, and work in professions alongside other Israelis, and they do. They can be judges, and they are. Here’s one telling example: It was an Arab judge on Israel’s supreme court who sentenced the former president of Israel, a Jew, to jail on a rape charge.

Some other examples of Arabs in Israeli life: Reda Mansour was the youngest ambassador in Israel’s history, and is now Consul General at Israel’s Atlanta Consulate; Walid Badir is an international soccer star on Israel’s national team, and captain of one of Tel Aviv’s major teams; Rana Raslan is a former Miss Israel; Ishmael Khaldi was until recently the deputy consul of Israel in San Francisco; Khaled Abu Toameh is a major journalist with the Jerusalem Post; Ghaleb Majadele was until recently a minister in the Israeli Government. They are all Israeli Arabs. Not one is a Jew.

Arabs in Israel live freer lives than Arabs living anywhere in the Arab world. No Arab in any Arab country has the civil rights and personal liberty that Arabs in Israel have.

Now one might counter, “Yes, Palestinians who live inside Israel have all these rights, but what about the Palestinians who live in what are known as the occupied territories? Aren’t they treated differently?” 

Yes, of course, they are — they are not citizens of Israel. They are governed by either the Palestinian Authority (Fatah) or by Hamas. The control Israel has over these people’s lives is largely manifested when they want to enter Israel. Then they are subjected to long lines and strict searches because Israel must weed out potential terrorists. 

Otherwise, Israel has little control over the day-to-day life of Palestinians, and was prepared to have no control in 2000 when it agreed to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state to which it gave 97 percent of the land it had conquered in the 1967 War. The Palestinian response was to unleash an intifada of terror against Israeli civilians.  

And what about the security wall that divides Israel and the West Bank? Is that an example of apartheid? That this is even raised as an issue is remarkable.   

One might as well mention the security fence between the United States and Mexico an example of apartheid. There is no difference between the American wall at its southern border and the Israeli wall on its eastern border. Both barriers have been built to keep unwanted people from entering the country. Israel built its security wall in order to keep terrorists from entering Israel and murdering its citizens.  

What appears to bother those who work to delegitimize Israel by calling it an apartheid state is that the barrier has worked. The wall separating Israel from the West Bank has probably been the most successful terrorism-prevention program ever enacted.  

So, then, why is Israel called an apartheid state? Because by comparing the freest, most equitable country in the Middle East to the former South Africa, those who seek Israel’s demise hope they can persuade uninformed people that Israel doesn’t deserve to exist just as apartheid South Africa didn’t deserve to exist.

Yet, the people who know better than anyone else what a lie the apartheid accusation is are Israel’s Arabs — which is why they prefer to live in the Jewish state than in any Arab state. There are lies, and then there are loathsome lies. “Israel is an apartheid state” is in the latter category.

Its only aim is to hasten the extermination of Israel.
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The Missing Link Wore Underpants

Forget midnight football practice. Michigan’s most famous visiting jihadist, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, aka, the Underwear Bomber, showed what Ramadan observance really means when, “in defense of Muhammad [Peace be Upon Him]” . . . . he “assaulted several officers from his cell” in Milan Prison on Wednesda, “in the Holy Month of Ramadan.”
 
And it’s not just me saying he committed assault. The words above are the U-Bomber’s very own verbatim description of his actions in the handwritten motion he submitted Thursday to the US District Court in Detroit.  In it, he demands that officers not be allowed to respond with “excessive force” when all he was doing was “justly defending Muhammad [PBUH] and his Religion.” Defending them, that is, by launching a pre-emptive and unprovoked assault on several officers.
 
U-Bomber’s motion is in the hallowed jailhouse tradition of inmates who denounce the wicked jailers who brutalize them for no reason when all the inmate was doing was minding his own business.  In U-Bomb’s case, his description of himself minding his own business happens to include charging, unprovoked, several of his guards.  For this, he argues, there is absolutely no reason why he should be punished.

By the U-Bomber’s concept of justice, one he shares with millions of jihadists around the world, an aggressive act is a permissible “defensive” act when waged against anyone defaming Muhammad.   So fundamental a truth is this in the U-Bomber’s  mind that he sees no need to include in his motion any details, real or invented, of any wrongdoing or provcative behavior on the part of the officers that could explain his outbrust of violence.  He never says the officers flushed his Koran, or called him an Islamophobic name, or tried to read to him from the polytheist Bible.  What he does say is that the “ United States legally allows the defamation of Muhammad (PBUH), and by allowing so it is defaming and Abusing Him] PBUH.”
  
This is his legal argument, that because the American system of free speech doesn’t prohibit criticism of Muhammad under pain of execution, (à la Saudi Arabia, Iran, or, soon, Egypt) then it’s clearly lawful for any Muslim to attack Americans whenever and wherever the opportunity arises.
  
To his (Islamic) way of thinking, the U-Bomber’s “defensive jihad”against the officers he attacked was self-evidently justified because, for merely representing an unIslamic legal system that isn’t constituted according to Sharia, the officers were ipso facto aggressors against Islam.


Abdulmutallab isn’t crazy, and he isn’t stupid. Read his motion and it’s clear that not only is he not a raving lunatic, but he’s able to write English better than the average American can.  His rationale is completely consistent.  His failed attack on Flight 253, his attack on the officers this week, and his explanations for both attacks (and what I’m sure will be many more unprovoked attacks through the duration of his long and miserable life as a failed jihadist), follow the conventional Islamist jurisprudence that blesses unprovoked belligerence against nonMuslims. By defining the mere existence of people who willfully choose to disbelieve in Islam as an attack upon the Ummah, every attack on a nonMuslim can be justified as a defense of Allah and his prophet.

And this isn’t just the idiosyncratic misunderstanding of Islam by a deranged, misguided individual who is never going to draw a free breath again.  His views are important especially because they are the views of the imams, the mosques, the Brotherhood, and the Ummah that sent him here to kill as many Americans as possible.
 
Last fall Andrew McCarthy reported how Times Square bomber Feisal Shahzad, “[d]efiant and remorseless to the end,” responded  when asked by Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum, as she sentenced him to life in prison, if he seriously believed the Koran wanted him to kill innocent people?

“The Koran gives you the right to defend,” he replied, adding, ”That’s all I’m doing.”

Robert Spencer wrote that Osama bin Ladin relied on Qur’an 22:39 in his communiques, justifying al Qaeda’s war as “defensive jihad,” not “war because of differences in religion, or in search of spoils of war.”
It is unbelief itself, Spencer explain, that constitutes

aggression for some Islamic authorities, and given the Qur’anic command to fight unbelievers until ‘religion is all for Allah’ (8:39), it is cold comfort to unbelievers, and no restraint for jihadists, to remind them that they should only be fighting aggression.

This is consistent with the views of the Muslim Brotherhood’s intellectual godfather, Sayyid Qutb when, as Spencer recounts, Qutb says that

“aggression has been committed in the first place, against God's Lordship of the universe and against other human beings who are forced to submit to deities other than God.” “Aggression,” then, is rebelling against God and submission to deities other than God: he sees the aggression simply as not believing in Islam.

While it may be a slight overstatement to say that just by sharing the planet with a Muslim an unbeliever in Islam is provoking a retaliation, there still is no shortage of fresh examples of that logic being applied.  Just yesterday Clifford May described what is happening now that Albania has become the first European member of the Organization of the Islamic Conference: 

When local authorities in the northern Albanian, majority-Catholic city of Shkoder announced that Mother Teresa would be commemorated with a statue, three Muslim NGOs protested — calling that a “provocation” against Islam.

Commemorating Mother Teresa a provocation of Islam?  It’s almost as if, in his evil genius, Muhammad had contrived to sanctify and transform into a virtue the base and ancient brutality that Cain used to justify slaying Abel, the harmless brother who provoked him just by being who he was.
Forget that local CAIR and ISNA spokesmen are saying whatever they can to distance Abdulmutallab, our living, breathing, Koran-invoking specimen of Homo Jihadicus, from the fairy image of mainstream Islam they’re determined to project. The reason ISNA’s Imam Steve Mustapha Eltruk calls Abdulmutallab a fool, and Dawud Walid’s public comments sound like desperate signals to his fellow Muslim Brotherhood member that “[h]e really needs to be quiet with these sideshow antics,” is that the U-Bomber, talking, is as destructive to the Brotherhood’s dawa as the U-Bomber, blowing up, was meant to be destructive to Flight 253’s infidels.

Anwar al-Awlaki never assigned Abdulmutallab to be either an apologist for Islam nor one of its taqiyya specialists, pulling wool over our eyes in the Dar-al-Harb.  All he was meant to be were the remains of Seat Zero in the smoldering rubble of Northwest Flight 253 after it came down in a ball of fire on top of my freaking garage. Now he’s still alive by some cruel joke of Allah, giving the local Ikhwan fits when he recites in open court passages from the not-so-Top Secret jihadi training manual.

Properly made use of, (which I doubt very much he will be), the U-Bomber could be priceless as a living diorama for demonstrating to skeptical Americans that there really is an unmistakeable chain linking the attacks of 9/11 with thousands of violent events before and after in what the Muslim Brotherhood defines as the Grand Jihad.

The same way the evolutionary Missing Link (if he weren’t Missing) would complete the Chain of Being between prehistoric apes and your most recent grandchild, the Underwear Bomber directly links contemporary global jihadism, as preached by al Awlaki, Choudhary, Ahmadinejad, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood in North America, just to name a few, with the attacks perpetrated by Mohammed Atta, bin  Ladin, and al Qaeda in 2001.  In other words, we shouldn't be memorializing the attack, but preparing for the next one.
 
Americans in 2011 by and large are harbouring the dangerous delusion that the World Trade Center attacks were an historically isolated incident representing just a few individuals who were misinformed about their own faith -- and the entire threat they posed died with them. This delusion only stays alive and spreads because most of our enemies, and too many of our friends, keep repeating that a billion Muslims couldn’t possibly wish us any harm.

The Underwear Bomber says otherwise.  And I mean he is literally saying otherwise. Because among the ways Missing Link Abdulmutallab differs from the evolutionary version are that a) he actually exists, and b) he’s not fossilized bones but alive and eager to share with us the details of his primitive worldview.    I can’t imagine Richard Dawkins, upon meeting Neanderthal in the flesh, would not want to hear all about his dear old gorilla grandmother and his gifted toolmaking grandson?   Now here we have U-Bomb in captivity, not only having tried to blow our airliner up, but talking about why he was trying to blow our airliner up. Imagine if somehow Mohammed Atta had survived, and instead of plaintively asking oursleves, “Why do they hate us so much?” we couwould be able to ask him: “So, Mohammed? Why do you hate us so much?”
  
And wouldn’t we be insane not to listen to the answer?
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Et Tu, Perry?

I knew there was something about Perry I didn’t like.  Pam Geller explains what it is at American Thinker:

Perry's Problematic Pals

By Pamela Geller

Texas Governor Rick Perry announced Saturday that he is going to seek the Republican nomination for President, and in his speech declaring his candidacy, he sounded great: "we reject this President's unbridled fixation on taking more money out of the wallets and pocketbooks of American families and employers and giving it to a central government," Perry said. "'Spreading the wealth' punishes success while setting America on course to greater dependency on government. Washington's insatiable desire to spend our children's inheritance on failed 'stimulus' plans and other misguided economic theories have given us record debt and left us with far too many unemployed."

Perry promises to fix all that: "We'll create jobs. We'll get America working again. We'll create jobs and we'll build wealth, we'll truly educate and innovate in science, and in technology, engineering and math. We'll create the jobs and the progress needed to get America working again."

Sounds good. But Perry has been sucked into the propaganda vortex, and is now wielding his enormous power to influence changes in the schoolrooms and in the curricula to reflect a sharia compliant version of Islam. He is a friend of the Aga Khan, the multimillionaire head of the Ismailis, a Shi'ite sect of Islam that today proclaims its nonviolence but in ages past was the sect that gave rise to the Assassins. Perry has concluded at least two cooperation agreements between the state of Texas and the Ismailis, including a comprehensive program to feed children in Texas public schools and taqiyya nonsense about how Islam is a religion of peace. Another agreement stipulates that Texas officials will work with the Ismailis in the "fields of education, health sciences, natural disaster preparedness and recovery, culture and the environment." Perry let on that this was all about whitewashing Islam's bloody historical and modern-day record: "traditional Western education speaks little of the influence of Muslim scientists, scholars, throughout history, and for that matter the cultural treasures that stand today in testament to their wisdom."

It gets worse. Last March, Perry gave a speech in Dallas in the company of Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform. Norquist was close to George W. Bush, and Perry's anti-tax, anti-Big Government rhetoric sounds like it's right out of Norquist's playbook. But there is a dark side to Norquist as well: Norquist's ties to Islamic supremacists and jihadists have been known for years. He and his Palestinian wife, Samah Alrayyes -- who was director of communications for his Islamic Free Market Institute until they married in 2005 -- are very active in "Muslim outreach." Six weeks after 9/11, The New Republic ran an exposé explaining how Norquist arranged for George W. Bush to meet with fifteen Islamic supremacists at the White House on September 26, 2001 -- to show how Muslims rejected terrorism.

The only problem was that the ones with Bush didn't. To Bush's left sat Dr. Yahya Basha, president of the American Muslim Council, an organization whose leaders have repeatedly called Hamas "freedom fighters." Also in attendance was Salam Al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, who on the afternoon of September 11 told a Los Angeles public radio audience that "we should put the State of Israel on the suspect list." And sitting right next to President Bush was Muzammil Siddiqi, president of the Hamas-linked Islamic Society of North America, who once told a Muslim crowd chanting pro-Hezbollah slogans that "America has to learn if you remain on the side of injustice, the wrath of God will come."

It was Norquist who ushered these silver-tongued jihadists into the Oval Office of an incurious president after the worst attack ever on American soil. Yet in December 2003, David Horowitz wrote that Norquist "has formed alliances with prominent Islamic radicals who have ties to the Saudis and to Libya and to Palestine Islamic Jihad, and who are now under indictment by U.S. authorities. Equally troubling is that the arrests of these individuals and their exposure as agents of terrorism have not resulted in noticeable second thoughts on Grover's part or any meaningful effort to dissociate himself from his unsavory friends." Nor has Norquist changed course since then.

Grover Norquist was on the Islamic payroll before and after the carnage of September 11. Gaffney revealed Norquist's close ties to Abdurahman Alamoudi, who is now serving time in prison for financing jihad activity. In 2000, Alamoudi said at a rally, "I have been labeled by the media in New York to be a supporter of Hamas. Anybody support Hamas here? ... Hear that, Bill Clinton? We are all supporters of Hamas. I wished they added that I am also a supporter of Hezb'allah." Alamoudi was at that time head of the now-defunct "moderate" group known as American Muslim Council (AMC), and he was active in other Muslim groups in the U.S. that showed sympathy to or support for jihadists. And Alamoudi gave $50,000 to the lobbying group Janus-Merritt Strategies, which Norquist co-founded. Alamoudi also helped found Norquist's Islamic Institute with a $10,000 loan and a gift of another $10,000.

It was bad enough that Bush was close to Norquist. There is no way the GOP can again nominate anyone who is so completely and utterly clueless about the fifth column within. Ten years after 9/11, can't we nominate someone who can speak to the ominous threat posed by Islamic supremacists in this country? There are no secrets here, even if the stealth jihad is covert and sneaky. We know what they are doing. See their whole plan, and how to fight it, in my new book Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance.

Rick Perry must not be the Republican nominee. Rick Perry must not be President. Have we not had enough of this systemic sedition?

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