There’s No Doubt About It — We Are at War: Fr. Raymond J. de Souza, National Post, June 14, 2016 — After the (second) jihadist massacre in Paris last year, I listed 20 cities that had been visited by the scourge of terrorism since 2001.
Orlando Atrocity Highlights America’s Divisions: Ben Cohen, JNS, June 15, 2016— In the days since the massacre of 49 people and the wounding of hundreds more by an Islamist gunman at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, America’s political leadership has sounded more discordant than ever.
The West’s Most Powerful Ally: Islamic Dissidents: Giulio Meotti, Arutz Sheva, June 13, 2016— Islam, warned the best-selling Algerian novelist, Boualem Sansal, is going to split European society. In an interview with German media, this brave Arab writer painted a vision of Europe subjugated by radical Islam.
Last Nazi Trial: Verdict Friday for Former Auschwitz Guard: Michele Mandel, Toronto Sun, June 16, 2016— They are the last eyewitnesses, their hair white, their gait unsteady, but cloaked in determination as powerful as their searing memories.
An Israeli Rabbi’s Response to Obama’s Speech on Radical Islam (Video): Thelandofisrael, June 15, 2016 — All administrations are short-sighted.
How Many Bodies Will it Take?: Phyllis Chesler, Jewish Press, June 15, 2016
Sacks to the Rescue: David M. Weinberg, Jerusalem Post, June 13, 2016
Israel and Diaspora Jewry – A Looming Crisis: Isi Leibler, Candidly Speaking, June 14, 2016
THERE’S NO DOUBT ABOUT IT — WE ARE AT WAR
Fr. Raymond J. de Souza
National Post, June 14, 2016
After the (second) jihadist massacre in Paris last year, I listed 20 cities that had been visited by the scourge of terrorism since 2001. The travelogue of terror encircles the globe, I wrote then, and now we add Orlando, Fla. The relevant news this time was that the killer attacked a local haven for the gay and lesbian community, a place where many of them felt safe. Jihadist violence against homosexuals is not exactly new, but the scale certainly was, as was the location, in the American homeland.
Before Saturday night, when the world thought about Orlando, people would think about Disney World. I don’t know if they sing It’s a Small World there anymore, but our world is just that, and it’s been made smaller by the fact that Paris, Lahore and Orlando are apparently equally vulnerable to the brutality of Islamist terror.
So what can be said this time that wasn’t said when about 130 were killed in Paris last November, or when 70 were killed in Lahore while celebrating Easter Sunday? It being America, there was no shortage of people shouting on television and the Internet — incendiary commentary being another doleful hallmark of our times, along with identity politics and the gun culture. That the massacre in Orlando brought all three together made it difficult to watch or listen to the news.
So what to say this time? We can’t speak about the Paris attacks of “last year” without distinguishing between the attack in January and the one in November. The travelogue of terror is such that we rarely even notice attacks in Israel anymore. Three days before the murder of 49 people in Orlando, four were killed in a terror attack at the Sarona Market in Tel Aviv. Per capita, that’s a greater loss of life in Israel than in America last week. There is so little left to say.
Maybe we should just say less. There is a war afoot, and in war it does not behoove one to explain particular acts of war as having some independent significance. The talk about mental illness, gun laws, gay marriage, immigration and all the rest is an understandable attempt to put a more useful frame, even if it doesn’t fit, onto an act best explained as one of war, in which civilians were targeted and killed. The latest report that the killer might himself be gay, as suggested by his ex-wife, show how fruitless that approach is. Who knows? What if he was? I don’t think it matters very much.
What matters is that in this war with violent jihadism civilians are targeted for death and societies for terror. These civilians were at a gay nightclub, so the gay community feels the loss in a particular way that invites our solidarity, but when jihadis kill fellow Muslims as well as Christians, Jews, concert-goers, shoppers and cartoonists, it is of limited usefulness to the war to inquire as to why this particular nightclub was the target. It is necessary to comfort America in her grief, and the gay community in particular, but the over-analysis of supposed ancillary causes is not necessary when the primary cause is told to us by the killer himself.
The war we are in is not a conventional one between nations; it is a war between a radical ideology, in this case a theologically corrupt form of Islam and, well, it seems everyone else, beginning with alternative forms of Islamic society. In war, one speaks about the enemy more than the tactics. That’s why U.S. President Barack Obama is so awkward when confronted by terror, because in this war he desires to speak about the tactics rather than the enemy. I share Obama’s views about assault weapons — as does almost the entire world outside the United States — but countries with far stricter gun laws than America have suffered worse terror attacks than Orlando.
The danger of not speaking about the enemy with clarity is that we end up speaking about ourselves falsely, too. President Obama said America “needs the courage to change” attitudes toward the gay community. Perhaps America should legalize gay marriage and mandate transgender washrooms in schools? Would that help? In war, the attacks are not about the victims, but the perpetrators. The cause of the Blitz was not to be found in London, but Berlin. There is a peculiar blindness, even self-absorption, in thinking that the jihadists kill because we celebrate Easter, draw blasphemous cartoons, dance in gay nightclubs, drink coffee in cafés or go to work in skyscrapers. Next time the jihadists strike — and there will be a next time — let’s say less, for there is little left to say. Instead, we should do more. That’s how wars are won.
ORLANDO ATROCITY HIGHLIGHTS AMERICA’S DIVISIONS
Ben Cohen
JNS, June 15, 2016
In the days since the massacre of 49 people and the wounding of hundreds more by an Islamist gunman at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, America’s political leadership has sounded more discordant than ever. Never mind the absence of a bipartisan consensus about what we should do; our politicians are engaged in unsightly squabbling about the nature of the problem itself.
In one corner, we have the Democratic Party, led by President Barack Obama, aggressively steering the national debate towards gun control. According to this camp’s account, there was this vague, slippery phenomenon known as “hatred” that prodded and pushed the febrile mind of gunman Omar Mateen, but what really matters is the fact that he legally purchased an assault rifle to carry out his bestial attack.
In the other corner, we have presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump and his rainbow coalition of the angry, the cheated, and the merely racist. Listening to Trump again advocating for a ban on Muslims entering this country, one could easily picture the many Republicans who would gladly transfer to a parallel universe where a Marco Rubio or a Ted Cruz or even a Jeb Bush is leading their party’s response to the Orlando massacre. That they are stuck with Trump after eight years of the Obama administration tells you all you need to know about how the American conversation about national security has degenerated.
It can and should be recognized that there are many legitimate concerns bound up with the Orlando bloodbath: access to guns, immigration policy, the ugly persistence of homophobia, the vulnerability of soft targets like clubs and restaurants, the fetish for violence that is a feature of nearly all extremist ideologies and individual pathologies. But none of these particular aspects should divert us from appraising the root cause of all this—that is, Islamism.
Depressingly, this argument should be obvious, but it isn’t. Most Americans have known since 9/11 that Islamism, whether in its “constitutional” Muslim Brotherhood guise, or its Shi’a Iranian variant, or in the Sunni version that has spawned both al-Qaeda and Islamic State, is founded on the principle that coexistence with Western civilization and its values should be opposed at all costs. It is violently anti-Semitic, violently homophobic, and violently anti-democratic, and it cannot be anything else. These core precepts explain why Mateen was able to declare support for the Shi’a terrorist group Hezbollah as well as the Sunni Islamic State.
Yet everywhere this understanding of Islamism’s essence, reinforced by each attack, is compromised by parochial agendas. To listen to many Democrats, you’d think that Islamic State was just one of several extremist groups native to America, rather than a creation of the Middle East region (specifically, of the power vacuum in the region left by the Americans, and filled by the Russians and the Iranians.) That, of course, brings us neatly to matters like gun control, hate speech, bullying, and all the other progressive bugbears. Most importantly, it means we can avoid a discussion about our foreign policy and ignore the reality that Islamic State is a global phenomenon that has struck in Paris and Brussels as well as in Orlando.
Trump is no better. He, too, wants to present the Islamist threat as a domestic issue, with his solution involving a ban on Muslims entering the country instead of more restrictions on gun ownership. The corollary of this offensive, lazy, and downright stupid proposal is that we leave the policing of the Middle East to Russian dictator President Vladimir Putin, the one foreign leader idolized by Trump. That means, at least in the short term, the further empowerment of the Iranian regime and its Syrian puppet, President Bashar al-Assad.
Where would that leave the U.S.? That depends on who you think is better placed to manage and leverage the next evolutions in the Middle Eastern balance of power—a former KGB officer, or a reality TV star whose hair would fall out at the first crackle of gunfire. And if your answer is “Hillary Clinton,” I’m afraid that only generates another set of difficult questions, among them whether she can get tough with our enemies with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party breathing down her neck, and how she would sell a future foreign military engagement to the American public with the disastrous intervention in Libya on her record.
This is the reality that we must deal with: two presidential candidates—one compromised by her past record, the other a vulgar neophyte—competing for the votes of a deeply polarized nation. No longer do terrible events like the Orlando atrocity bring us together. To the contrary, they shine a blinding light on our political divisions. In times of grief, it is natural to seek comfort. In the wake of Orlando, though, comfort is in scant supply. There are no soothing words to offer, nor is there much prospect of a positive change in policy on the horizon. All that is visible are the threats: more terrorist attacks here and in Europe, the collapse of the nuclear non-proliferation regime inside and outside the Middle East, the continued flow of refugees from Syria’s brutal civil war. Most of all, our real enemies will multiply outside our borders while we obsess about the phantom enemies, from transgender celebrities to Muslim taxi drivers, within them.
THE WEST’S MOST POWERFUL ALLY: ISLAMIC DISSIDENTS
Giulio Meotti
Arutz Sheva, June 13, 2016
Islam, warned the best-selling Algerian novelist, Boualem Sansal, is going to split European society. In an interview with German media, this brave Arab writer painted a vision of Europe subjugated by radical Islam. According to Sansal, the terror attacks in Paris and Brussels are directed at the Western way of life: “You can not even defeat the weak Arab states, so they have brought in fifth columns to bring the West to destroy itself. If they succeed society will fall.”
Mr. Sansal, who has been threatened with death, belongs to a rapidly growing army of Muslim dissidents. They are the best liberation movement for millions of Muslims who aspire to practice their faith peacefully without submitting to the dictates of fundamentalists and fanatics. These Muslim dissidents pursue freedom of conscience, interreligious coexistence, pluralism in the public sphere, criticism of Islam, and respect for the rule of common law. For the Islamic world, their message could be devastating. That is why the Islamists are hunting them down.
It is always individuals, such as Lech Walesa, who make all the difference. The Soviet Union was defeated by only three beings: Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II — and the dissidents. When Professor Robert Havemann died in East Germany, few people noticed it. This intrepid critic of the regime was confined under house arrest in Grünheide, guarded by the Stasi. But the old professor never allowed himself to be intimidated. He continued to fight for his ideas.
A hero of Czechoslovak anti-Communism, Jan Patočka, died under grueling police interrogation. Patočka paid the highest price for fighting silencing. His brilliant lectures were reduced to a clandestine seminar. Although unable to publish, he continued to work in a tiny underground apartment. Hunted by the KGB, Alexander Solzhenitsyn set down the chapters of his Gulag Archipelago and hid them with different trusted friends, so no one possessed the entire manuscript. In 1973 only three copies existed. When the Soviet political police managed to extort the typist, Elizaveta Voronyanskya, to reveal one of the hideouts, thinking the masterpiece was lost forever she hanged herself.
Today a new Iron Curtain has been erected by Islam against the rest of the world, and the new heroes are the dissidents, the apostates, the heretics, the rebels, and the non-believers. It is no coincidence that the first victim of a fatwa was Salman Rushdie, an Indian-British writer from a Muslim family. Pascal Bruckner called them “the free thinkers of the Muslim world.” We should support them — all of them. Because if the enemies of freedom come from free societies, those who kneel before Allah’s enforcers, some of the bravest defenders of freedom come from the Islamic regimes. Europe should give financial, moral and political support to these friends of Western civilization, while our disgraced intelligentsia is engaged in slandering them.
One, an Algerian author, Kamel Daoud, who called Saudi Arabia “an Isis that had made it,” recently sparked an “Islamophobia” row for having directed his own anger at the naïve people, who he says ignore the cultural gulf separating the Arab-Muslim world from Europe. Another, an Iranian exile, now in the Netherlands, the jurist Afshin Ellian, works at Utrecht University, where after the murder of Theo Van Gogh, he is protected by bodyguards. After the massacre at Charlie Hebdo, while Europe’s media were busy in blaming the “stupid” cartoonists, Ellian promoted an appeal: “Don’t let terrorists determine the limits of free speech.”
Another brave dissident and author, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, had to flee from the Netherlands to the U.S., where she rapidly became one of most prominent public intellectuals. The Moroccan mayor of Rotterdam, Ahmed Aboutaleb, is also guarded by police. He recently told fellow Muslims who protested against freedoms they found while living in the West to “pack your bags and f… off.” A heroic Christian defender of these freedoms in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders, is now on trial accused of “discrimination.” “I am in jail,” he has said, referring to his safe houses, “and they are walking around free.”
Many of these dissidents are women. Shukria Barakzai, an Afghan politician and journalist, declared war on Islamic fundamentalists after the Taliban’s religious police beat her for daring to walk without a male escort. A suicide bomber blew himself up near her car, killing three. Kadra Yusuf, a Somali journalist, infiltrated Oslo’s mosques to denounce the imams, especially regarding female genital mutilation, not even required in the Koran or the Hadith (added by Mohammad). In Pakistan, Sherry Rehman called for “a reform of Pakistani blasphemy’s laws.” She risks her life every day. She is branded by Islamists “fit to be killed” for being a woman, a Muslim and a secular activist. The Syrian-American author and psychiatrist, Wafa Sultan, was also branded an “infidel” deserving of death.
Le Figaro recently published a long report about Muslim French personalities threatened with “execution”. “Placed under permanent police protection, regarded as traitors by Muslim fundamentalists, they live in a hell. In the eyes of Islamists, their freedom is an act of betrayal of the ummah [community].” They are writers and journalists of Arab-Muslim culture who denounce the Islamist threat and the inherent violence of the Koran. They stand alone against Islamism which uses the physical terrorism of Kalashnikovs, and against the intellectual terrorism which submits them to media intimidation. Seen as ‘traitors’ by their communities, they are accused by the élites in the West of stigmatizing.”…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
LAST NAZI TRIAL: VERDICT FRIDAY FOR FORMER AUSCHWITZ GUARD
Michele Mandel
Toronto Sun, June 16, 2016
They are the last eyewitnesses, their hair white, their gait unsteady, but cloaked in determination as powerful as their searing memories. Gathered from around the world, they crossed oceans and continents in their twilight days to testify in what may well be this country’s final Nazi trial. And now to this quaint city, they return for the verdict which is expected Friday. Their numbers are quickly dwindling and so for them, the added responsibility to seek justice, to speak for the 1.1 million people murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau; for their mothers and fathers, younger brothers and baby sisters, complete families and entire towns, who did not share what in Yiddish is called their mazel, the luck, to escape Hitler’s Final Solution.
For seven decades, Reinhold Hanning has had luck of a different kind. Before he retired, the 94-year-old widower ran a dairy in the neighbouring town of Lage, where no one knew of his SS past, or didn’t care. He wasn’t one of the leaders or the decision makers, just a former young, low-ranking SS sergeant in starched uniform and jackboots following orders. Or so the excuses go. At his comfortable home surrounded by a well-tended garden of pink and salmon roses, the grandfather of three is not available to speak. “This is very difficult for us and for him, too,” says his daughter-in-law.
Hanning almost escaped this day of reckoning, as so many have, except for this belated race against time, a new legal push by some extraordinary German jurists ashamed of their nation’s poor efforts in the past to prosecute its lower level henchmen. In the last five years, lawyers have argued that these SS functionaries at Auschwitz were indispensable cogs in the engine of genocide who must be tried as accessories to murder. The novel legal strategy won convictions against John Demanjuk in 2011 and Oskar Groning, the “Bookkeeper of Auschwitz”, in 2015. Now, after a trial that began in February, Hanning will arrive by wheelchair at the courthouse Friday to hear judgment on charges he aided and abetted the murder of more than 100,000 Jews at Auschwitz. If convicted, prosecutors are seeking a six-year sentence.
In the courtroom to see justice done will be many of the Holocaust survivors who testified against him earlier this year, including two plaintiffs from Toronto. They walk each day haunted by the horrors they witnessed at Auschwitz, yet Bill Glied, 85, and Hedy Bohm, 88, are remarkably free of hatred and bitterness. They share a quiet elegance, an old world sense of culture and courtliness that can be traced back to their youth in Europe before the Second World War. They feel compelled to return here not to seek vengeance, they say, but the due process their murdered siblings and parents never received from the Nazis.
“This is monumental for us, absolutely monumental,” explains Bohm hours after she’s arrived back in Detmold for the second time in three months. “Seventy years ago, this man helped murder my family and I wouldn’t be here when he’s brought to justice? Wouldn’t you be? This is something I never ever dared to dream of.” For her, the victory is that her voice was heard in the heart of a nation that once enslaved her and ordered the extermination of her entire race. “I thought it would be terrible to be here in Germany and to be surrounded by the German language that I dreaded in Auschwitz, but because of the wonderful people I have met, it took the weight and the heaviness from my heart.”
She bristles when asked about those who suggest that as an old man, Hanning should be left alone. “Whoever asks that question of me, I would ask them, ‘How would they feel if their mother and father and family were murdered, would it matter if they found the murderer 70 years later?’ I’m sure they would want justice, no matter how long it took. It would have been better sooner, but justice is being served. Finally. Finally.”
For Glied, this is a moment in history he dare not miss. “This is the very last of the Nazi trials. I don’t think there will be more,” he predicts days before leaving his Toronto home filled with art and antiques. While there other former Nazis still alive, those closely associated with efforts to track them down are doubtful there will be time to bring them to justice before the last of them passes away, which is why Hanning’s verdict has such historical significance. “The world has to know what has happened. In particular, I’m concerned nowawdays so many of the neo-Nazis and their helpers seem to say, ‘Well, the Holocaust never happened and that the only people who talk about it are so-called Holocaust survivors.’ “And I’d like to be able to say, ‘Don’t listen to me. Listen to a German court, a German court that says: ‘Here is a man who’s convicted of the crimes.’”
On Friday, Glied will face the former SS guard with his daughter and granddaughter by his side – the ultimate revenge against Hitler and his disciples who tried to annihilate his family and millions of other Jews. “There’s going to be three generations there,” says the proud father of three and grandfather of eight. “I think that, in itself, is an important factor, that we can say, ‘Hey, you didn’t win at the end. We’re here.’”… [To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
AS WE GO TO PRESS: NAZI TRIAL VERDICT: FORMER AUSCHWITZ GUARD SENTENCED TO 5 YEARS IN PRISON IN GERMANY (Berlin) — A 94-year-old former Auschwitz guard was found guilty Friday of being an accessory to the murder of more than 170,000 people for his role in helping kill 1.1 million at the Nazi death camp during World War II, the Associated Press reported. Reinhold Hanning was sentenced to five years in prison. He had faced a maximum of 15 years. (IBT, June 17, 2016)
CIJR Wishes All Our Friends & Supporters: Shabbat Shalom!
An Israeli Rabbi’s Response to Obama’s Speech on Radical Islam (Video): Thelandofisrael, June 15, 2016
How Many Bodies Will it Take?: Phyllis Chesler, Jewish Press, June 15, 2016 —After being written off as a racist Islamophobe for fifteen years because I raised precisely the same points that both Carl Bernstein (!) and Barney Frank (!) raised earlier today; after viewing the sweet, doomed faces of the 49 murdered gay and perhaps non-gay people, mainly Latinos and Latinas, often people of color, on my TV screen—what do I have to say?
Sacks to the Rescue: David M. Weinberg, Jerusalem Post, June 13, 2016 —Western civilization is in deep crisis, beset from within by moral decline and struck from without by powerful radical enemies. Avoiding disaster requires recommitment to the values taught by biblical tradition, and specifically the ethical and ideological principles embedded in Jewish civilization.
Israel and Diaspora Jewry – A Looming Crisis: Isi Leibler, Candidly Speaking, June 14, 2016 —The Jewish world, both in Israel and the Diaspora, is undergoing dramatic demographic and ideological changes. The past decades have witnessed a steep decline in the power and influence of Diaspora Jews. Israel’s centrality to Jewish life and the ties which link Jews in the Diaspora to Israel are facing considerable stress. Yet Israel has clearly emerged as the guarantor of the continuity of Jewish life.