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In this mailing:
by Judith Bergman
• February 15, 2017 at 5:00 am
- The Muslim
Brotherhood (MB) in Egypt released an official statement calling on
its supporters to "prepare" for "jihad", in
January 2015.
- "The
Muslim Brotherhood at all levels have repeatedly defended Hamas
attacks... including the use of suicide bombers and the killing of
civilians." — UK government expert review of the Muslim
Brotherhood, December 2015.
- The Muslim
Brotherhood not only funds one of the most virulent terrorist
groups, Hamas, but there is barely any daylight between the various
leaderships of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Jordan and Hamas.
- Most of the
terrorists who later founded al Qaeda were rooted in the MB. Osama
bin Laden was apparently recruited as a young man to the MB, whereas
Ayman al Zawahiri joined the MB at the age of 14 and went on to
found the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ),"an organization that....
holds many of the same beliefs as the MB but simply refuses to
renounce violence inside Egypt" — Foundation for Defense of
Democracies.
- The Muslim
Brotherhood believes today what it has always believed: that a
caliphate, where sharia law will rule, must be established through
jihad. Refusing to designate the Muslim Brotherhood a foreign
terrorist organization would be a grave mistake, playing straight
into the strategy of the Brotherhood and, once more, revealing to
the world the extreme gullibility of the West.
"The objective, then, is to strike terror into
the hearts of God's enemies, who are also the enemies of the advocates of
Islam..." — Sayyid Qutb, chief ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood
in the 1950s and 1960s.
The Trump administration is considering designating the Muslim
Brotherhood (MB) a foreign terrorist organization, and Human Rights Watch
is outraged.
"Designating the Muslim Brotherhood a 'foreign terrorist
organization' would wrongly equate it with violent extremist groups like
Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State and make their otherwise lawful activities
illegal," said Human Rights Watch. The press release went on to
repeat the old claim that "...the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt
officially renounced violence in the 1970s and sought to promote its
ideas through social and political activities".
Adding its voice to the Muslim Brotherhood's apologists, the New
York Times wrote:
by Denis MacEoin
• February 15, 2017 at 4:30 am
- The importance
of a shift in narratives cannot be overemphasized. It is the key to
peace.
- "Just as
real peace could come to Europe after World War II only after
Germans abandoned the 'German narrative' and accepted the true
history of the war that Germany started, so only abandonment of the
'Palestinian narrative' and acceptance of the true sequence of the
events of 1947-48 can serve as a basis for reconciliation between
Jews and Arabs." — Moshe Arens, former Defence Minister,
Israel.
- Psychologically,
it is easier to embrace a good cause (or, for that matter, even a
bad one) in simplistic, "black and white" terms. For many
people a "good" cause is made up of people who suffer from
"imperialism" and "colonialism", plucky
minorities, third-world victims of first-world oppression,
revolutionary vanguards, and anyone put upon by the United States,
Great Britain, France or any former "imperialist" power.
Other "imperialist" powers, such as Russia, China or Iran,
are conveniently overlooked or forgotten -- not to mention the
centuries of Islamist imperialism that covered Iran, Turkey, Greece,
all of North Africa, Hungary, Serbia, the Balkans, virtually all of
Eastern Europe and which we see still continuing.
- The
Palestinians, in this narrative of "good" and
"bad" have purportedly been permanently
"dispossessed" by, of all people, the Jews -- whom they
had the misfortune to attack in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973 -- and
lose to.
- If members of
the new U.S. administration seek to advance the moribund "peace
process", they could find no better place to start than direct
confrontation with Palestinian rejectionism. This means that those
leaders must be pressed as hard as possible to end their persecution
of their own populations.
- There must be
carrots, but there must also be sticks. The UN, the EU, and the OIC
will offer only carrots. Will the U.S. now add the threat of real
consequences to that mix?
In Khartoum, three months after the Six Day War they
lost in 1967, Arab leaders refused to negotiate with Israel -- "no
peace, no recognition, no negotiations". Pictured from left to
right, on September 2, 1967 in Khartoum: King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, Gamal
Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Abdullah Sallal of Yemen, Sheikh Ahmad Sabah of
Kuwait and Abd al-Rahman Arif of Iraq. (Image source: Wikimedia
Commons/Bibliotheca Alexandrina)
With the advent of President Trump's administration, massive changes
are expected, not just on the domestic front, but internationally. One of
the first regions that will require immediate attention is the Middle
East, where the policies of the Obama administration have led to a
diminished role for the United States and therefore for global freedom.
by George Igler
• February 15, 2017 at 4:00 am
- "Nowhere
has the UN's failure been more consistent and more outrageous than
in its bias against our close ally Israel." — Governor Nikki
Haley, US Ambassador-designate to the United Nations.
- When those
handsomely remunerated within transnational institutions make their
priority spiteful political issues and arguably anti-Semitic
point-scoring -- rather than protecting hard-won humanistic
principles such as human rights -- the very values that
differentiate segments of the modern world from the more barbarous
norms of the past -- their legitimacy is eroded.
- "My
commitment is... to reject any oppression in the name of religion...
a goal that we will reach in a peaceful and law-abiding way." —
Raif Badawi, a Saudi blogger sentenced for such thoughts to 1000
lashes -- in contravention of international law -- followed by ten
years in jail and a fine of approximately $260,000. His lawyer,
Walid Abu'l-Khayr, was jailed as well. Where was the United Nations
then? A royal pardon for both men should be granted immediately.
- It is high time
that democratic nations reasserted their sovereignty in the face of
these unelected, untransparent, and unaccountable transnational
institutions which so often make a mockery of the standards they are
pledged to uphold.
Nikki Haley (pictured above from 2014), President
Trump's appointment to the United Nations, has stated: "Nowhere has
the UN's failure been more consistent and more outrageous than in its
bias against our close ally Israel." (Image source:
defenseimagery.mil)
The "rise of populism" has become an absorbing subject for
political commentators in the West, yet as the Cato Institute scholar,
Alberto Mingardi, helpfully observes, the term is "as slippery as it
is popular."
Perhaps the most noteworthy feature of this current political trend
is why we are struck by it. The nations of the West are, after all,
democracies: systems of government designed to translate popular concerns
into legislative instruments.
An answer to this dysfunction might lie in the layers of
transnational governance, which proliferated after the Second World War,
superseding national, and by implication democratically-accountable,
decision making.
The horrendous carnage that ripped the world apart in the middle of
the last century led to a principled decision by the world's leaders to
promote the formulation, and then ratification, of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights.
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