by Andrew E. Harrod*

Yet again depictions of Islam’s prophet Muhammad are causing controversy. The French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo has published a special edition released in January 2013 entitled La Vie de Mahomet, 1ère partie: Les débuts d’un prophète (“The Life of Muhammad, Part One: The Debut of a Prophet“; part two will follow in June 2013). Press reaction in both France and Germany, however, has not been uniformly welcoming, demonstrating once more a media aversion to open examination of Islam.

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by Michel Gurfinkiel*

On March 17 of this year, François Hollande — the socialist president of France — attended the ceremonies held in Toulouse marking the first anniversary of what is now commonly referred to as “the Mohamed Merah affair.”

On March 11, 2012, this French citizen of Algerian descent, who had joined an Islamist network and had been trained in Pakistan, killed a French soldier in Toulouse. On March 15, he shot three more soldiers in Montauban: two died on the spot; the third was severely wounded in the head and is now quadriplegic.

Four days later, Merah killed three preteen children and one adult at Ozar Hatorah, a school in Toulouse.

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by Richard Butrick,* THINK-ISRAEL

Forget the Five Pillars[1] of Islam. It is the Five Stages of Islam that threaten the fundamental freedoms of Western Democracy. Freedoms which include freedom of thought, expression, and association and the crucial derived right of freedom of the press. We should never forget that “Islam” means submission — the opposite of self-determination and Enlightenment values.

Six years ago Dr. Peter Hammond published[2] a remarkable book which included a statistical study of the correlation between Muslim to non-Muslim population ratios and the transition from conciliatory Islam to fascist Islam. The stages are the same in 2011 but the demographics have changed to show an alarming progression. Many European nations and the U.S. are on the cusp of moving to a higher bracket. The demographics change but the story is the same. First comes the taqiyya and[3] the kitman; then comes the Sword of Islam. Imam[4] Rauf, the Ground Zero Mosque promoter, is the current master of taqiyya. He has gulled everyone from Bloomberg[5] to Maureen Dowd[6] of the NYT — who fanaticizes over male Muslims. Expect doppelgangers of Khomeini for stage 5 and Islamic PEACE at last.

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by Daniel Pipes*

Comes the news that Frederick Cohn, the Jewish defense lawyer for Abdel Hameed Shehadeh, asked Brooklyn-based federal judge Eric Vitaliano to exclude Jews from the jury. Shehadeh is charged with three counts of making false statements in connection with his attempts to join jihadis in Pakistan. “Your Honor” Cohn explained in February, “I’m not wild about having Jews on the jury in this case. Given that there’s going to be inflammatory testimony about Jews and Zionism, I think it would be hard for Jews to cast aside any innate antipathy. The American Jewish community is heavily aligned with Israel and Zionism.”

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by Daniel Pipes*

Terrorism broadly takes two forms: against random individuals who happen to be at a market place or on a bus at the wrong time; or against specific individuals because of who they are. The latter in turn divides into two: against broad categories of people (the military, Jews, people who wear eyeglasses) and against specific public figures, either individuals or institutions. In effect, these last are assassinations (defined by Merriam-Webster as “to murder (a usually prominent person) by sudden or secret attack often for political reasons”).

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by Gary Gerofsky

I sometimes think about the problem of anti-Semitism and why this irrational prejudice preoccupies so many people these days — from elites in Europe, to bureaucrats and Islamists in the UN, to churches, unions and Left-leaning academics and politicians.

I believe that in the minds of people like Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein, both of whom are children of Holocaust victims, they blame the ravages of the Holocaust on the group affiliation of the victims rather than on the perpetrators. They use the Holocaust nightmare to apply retroactive retribution to Jews for the existence of the State of Israel via the murderous hands of the Nazis. They apply a similar retribution to Jews in the present using Islamic terrorism as the battering ram of choice. During speaking engagements by these individuals, they reveal a loathing and disdain for Jews/Israel and perhaps they believe that the brutality of the Nazis was somehow a justifiable component and end result of the anger towards Jews by Europeans against the Jewish religion or against other characteristics of their Jewish victims. Do the “intellectuals” of today think that Jews did something wrong or that their beliefs got them into the mess known as the Holocaust and the wars carried out against Israel by its neighbors since the Holocaust? Do they think that Israel is receiving its just deserts today in terms of terror heaped on the country for being a Jewish state?

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by Nidra Poller*

What is Europe going to do about Islam? Submit? Resist? Or just wait it out, dimwittedly? The recent French presidential election offers insight into the way Islam, or more exactly the Islamist factor, may eventually play out in European politics.

Despite attempts by the Left to focus the debate on the economic crisis, Islam played a decisive role in the contest. The Socialist candidate, whose platform was tilted to favor the party’s Muslim clientele, could not have won without total support in the second round of voting from far Left parties marked by zealous anti-Zionism and a full range of anti-Western ideologies. The question of Islam-in-France was raised with unprecedented candor by incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy of the Movement for a Popular Majority (UMP). For the first time in France, a major party clearly advocated a push back against Islam (qualified of course with the adjective “radical”). This strategy fired up the enthusiasm of the base, mobilized voters, brought tens of thousands to party rallies, and led to a daily increase in Sarkozy’s polling figures. It would be fair to estimate that if he had had one more week to campaign he might have defeated Hollande during the second-round vote on May 6, 2012.

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by Phyllis Chesler

I disagree with my colleague Jonathan Kay’s recent article “American super-hawks demand to know: ‘Are you Jew enough?’”

First, let me thank him for referring to me as “a feminist-turned anti-Islamist” and not as “anti-Muslim” or as an “Islamophobe.” However, in becoming an “anti-Islamist” I did not check my feminist credentials at the door; my work on honour-based violence, including honour killing among Muslims and Hindus (mainly in India) is pure feminist work. The victims are primarily women of colour, and yes, in the West, they are primarily Muslims. I am championing their cause just as I have championed the cause of non-Muslim Western women. I work with Muslim and ex-Muslim dissidents who share my Enlightenment values, a single universal standard of human rights, and who, like me, have taken a stand against the persecution of girls, women, homosexuals, free thinkers and pro-Israel advocates in the Muslim world.

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by Daniel Pipes*

Recent steps taken by the Government of Turkey suggest it may be ready to ditch the NATO club of democracies for a Russian and Chinese gang of authoritarian states.

Here is the evidence:

Starting in 2007, Ankara applied three times unsuccessfully to join as a Guest Member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (or SCO, informally known as the Shanghai Five). Founded in 1996 by the Russian and Chinese governments, along with three (and in 2001 a fourth) former Soviet Central Asian states, the SCO has received minimal attention in the West, although it has grand security and other aspirations, including the possible creation of a gas cartel. More, it offers an alternative to the Western model, from NATO, to democracy, to displacing the U.S. dollar as reserve currency. After those three rejections, Ankara applied for “Dialogue Partner” status in 2011. In June 2012, it won approval.

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by Steven Shamrak

Sometimes I am criticized for using the description “international anti-Semites” too often. I do substitute it with the words “bigots” or “idiots” from time to time. I shall continue to call things by their true names. Regardless of the terminology, there are many facts pertaining to unfair, genocidal and prejudicial treatment of Jews even during recent history that support my use of the term “international anti-Semites:”

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By Barry Rubin

One of the highlights of the 1961 inauguration of President John F. Kennedy, 52 years ago, was a poem by the beloved Robert Frost. That morning I had watched the new vice-president, Lyndon Johnson, leave his home down the street and a bit later watched Frost read the poem on television that snowy day, looking at the same snow outside my window a few miles away.

The poem was entitled, “The Gift Outright,” and it began:

“The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials… .”

That poem could not be read today and if it were the result would be attacks, condemnation, and derision.

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by Hannibal Travis*

It is well known by genocide scholars that in 1939 Adolf Hitler urged his generals to exterminate members of the Polish race.[1] “Who speaks today of the extermination of the Armenians?” Hitler asked, just a week before the September 1, 1939 invasion of Poland.[2] However, while it is generally agreed that Hitler was well aware of the Armenian genocide,[3] some genocide scholars and historians of the Ottoman Empire have questioned whether he actually made the above statement or even intended to exterminate portions of the “Polish race.”[4]

Still, there is evidence that the massacre of the Ottoman Armenians helped persuade the Nazis that national minorities posed a threat to empires dominated by an ethnic group such as the Germans or the Turks. Furthermore, these minorities could be exterminated to the benefit of the perpetrator with little risk. Indeed, it was German officials who had smuggled out of the Ottoman Empire the leaders of the Young Turk regime, culpable for the deaths of over a million Armenians and a million or more other Christian minorities such as the Assyrians and Greeks.[5] Diverse historical evidence suggests that Hitler viewed the Armenians and Poles as analogous; in several ways, his statement about the Armenians was consistent with his other beliefs and writings.

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By Gary Gerofsky

In the conflict taking place in Africa involving France’s military force in Mali there are no UN high commissions, no special “raconteurs” and human rights tribunals demonizing and vilifying France, no international courts filing suits against France, no leftist groups screaming about the disproportionate use of force by France, and no Obama administration telling the world that they want dialogue to begin between France and Al Qaeda as soon as possible and violence to end immediately.

No, that kind of behavior and foreign policy is reserved only for Israel when it is directly attacked by Islamist terrorists who happen to be a lot better equipped than Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and Al Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM). The Maghreb is most of Northwest Africa to the west of Egypt.

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by Yoram Ettinger, “Israel Hayom”

Chuck Hagel established himself as a Palestine Firster on October 27, 2009, speaking at “J Street’s” 1st national conference: “The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is central, not peripheral, to US vital security interests in combating terrorism, preventing an Iranian nuclear weapon, stability in the Middle East and US and global energy security.”

Really?!

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by Yoram Ettinger, Straight from the Jerusalem Boardroom #174

1. Israel’s 2009-2012 economic growth of 14.7% leads the OECD countries, ahead of Australia — 10.7%, Canada — 4.8%, USA — 3.2%, Germany — 2.7%, France — 0.3%, Euro Bloc — 1.5% decline. Israel’s growth was undermined by the stoppage of natural gas supply from Egypt, which requires the acquisition of more expensive sources of energy (“Israel Hayom”, Jan. 2, 2013).

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