Daniel Greenfield, Author at Israel Rising

November 7, 2017

PERMANENT INVESTIGATION: HOW THE MEDIA USES THE ANTI-NETANYAHU PLAYBOOK AGAINST TRUMP

And how to resist it.

The latest news from Israel’s left-wing media outlets is that Ratan Tata, an Indian billionaire, testified to the Israeli police about Prime Minister Netanyahu. The story turned out to be fake news. And that’s true of most of their anti-Netanyahu hit pieces along with the police investigations that accompany them.

But that doesn’t matter.

Americans are just now being introduced to the permanent investigation and its scandal rolodex. Israelis have been living with this Deep State assault against their democracy for much longer. Over eight long years, leftists in the judicial system and the media have manufactured a non-stop campaign of scandals and investigations against Netanyahu. The investigations and the scandals fall apart, but it doesn’t matter because there are usually several being rotated in and out from the scandal rolodex.

The scandals and investigations fall into two categories that should be familiar to Trump supporters.

Category one scandals link some random billionaire to Netanyahu through a chain of connections. The random billionaire in this case is Indian. Then there’s an Australian billionaire in Mexico, German shipbuilders and whatever part of the globe the media-judicial alliance throws a dart at next.

The fake news media in this country is following the same game plan. The latest media hit pieces target Wilbur Ross, Trump’s Secretary of Commerce, in much the same way. Indeed the Russia scandal developed out of media hit pieces that used Trump’s international network of businesses to build up very similar conspiracy theories about foreign interests and influences.

These types of scandals constantly imply corruption without ever actually proving it. But by generating a whole lot of them, they create the sense that Netanyahu or Trump must have done something wrong.

Though no one can say what, because no one can keep track of all the fake scandals.

Category two scandals are character attacks. “He’s a bad person.” Typical examples are Trump’s condolence call controversy and accusations that Netanyahu’s wife is mean to employees.

These types of scandals are straightforward gossip. But lefties have tried to transform them into legal cases. Just about anyone who has ever worked for the Netanyahu family can walk out of the door and have a standing offer to file a lawsuit and do a tour of the media alleging horrible treatment. And the left is trying to advance similar lawsuits against President Trump.

There are lessons to be learned for Trump and Trump supporters from Netanyahu’s experiences.

First, permanent investigations don’t resolve. Trying to wait them out doesn’t work. They never go away until the left wins. An investigation that doesn’t pan out gets swapped out for another one. There are three investigations targeting Netanyahu. If none of them get results, there will be three others.

Everyone knows that.

Second, the purpose of a permanent investigation isn’t to get results. The left would love it if their investigations finally brought down Trump or Netanyahu, but they know that’s a long shot.

The permanent investigation’s real goals are to inflict electoral and policy damage: tying down a targeted politician in scandals so that the public loses confidence in him and preventing him from focusing on his policies. What the left wants is to win elections and stop conservative policies.

The scandals and investigations are political sabotage. And should be treated that way. They’re not about Trump or Netanyahu. They’re about protecting illegal immigration and Islamic terrorists.

Third, the investigations isolate their target by harassing staffers, friends, donors and political allies.

The investigations are a political operation. And so their targets are political. The purpose of the attack is to take out loyal staffers and force allies to keep their distance out of fear that they’ll be next.

Taking out Flynn left Trump with few options except McMaster. And that allowed the swamp to reclaim the National Security Council and protect the eavesdropping operation against Trump. The likely Flynn charges have little to do with the reason he was forced to resign or any accusations against Trump.

But that doesn’t matter. The real goal was to remove Flynn. The details don’t matter.

Thinning out a target’s inner circle makes it harder for him to find competent and loyal replacements. And that makes it all too easy for the swamp to plant its own people in his inner circle. And even if the staffers and allies stay loyal, the investigations make it harder for them to get anything done.

And that too is the point.

This may seem like a grim picture of what the next term or two will look like. But it’s not all grim.

Netanyahu made it through eight years by not letting the scandals drag him down. Even when the attacks against him and his family were as vicious, nasty and personal as the left could get.

He even turned the constant scandals and investigations into a hilarious campaign ad.

Prime Minister Netanyahu has accepted them as a fact of life in a political system where the left’s anti-Israel extremism has made it toxic to voters even while it still controls much of the establishment.

The permanent scandal has been met with permanent scandal fatigue by the public. Israelis have been living through years of hysterical headlines about Netanyahu’s ice cream eating (CNN did its own version of a Trump ice cream scandal with “Trump gets 2 scoops of ice cream, everyone else gets 1”), his wife’s bottle deposits, their children’s misbehavior, their nannies and his bed.

Hardly anyone outside the media bubble cares. Netanyahu’s reputation has been damaged with the media’s low information voters, but he’s still Israel’s longest serving consecutive prime minister.

The Israeli lefty media reacted to its narrative failures the same way that its American counterparts did.

After Trump’s win, the media launched a crusade against “fake news” enlisting Google and Facebook to censor results based on the opinions of the media’s “fact check” operations. Their Israeli counterparts were even more brazen. After a previous Netanyahu victory, they rolled out the “Law for the Advancement and Protection of Written Journalism in Israel”.

The law “advanced and protected” written journalism by banning the distribution of successful free newspapers. The real purpose of the law was to ban the pro-Netanyahu paper, Israel Hayom.

But the media’s censorship crusade didn’t accomplish anything.

The media has an exaggerated sense of its own power and of the gullibility of the public. The two fallacies are interrelated. When people don’t listen to it, the media assumes that since they’re too stupid to have their own ideas, they must be getting all their ideas from some other source. Stamp out this other source, online or offline, and the people will go back to believing what they’re told.

It doesn’t work so well when the media has a worldview and interests that are at odds with the people.

Netanyahu is still around because he represents the public better than the establishment does. The same is true of Trump. And the establishment can’t look in the mirror long enough to understand that.

In free countries, the left operates on two tracks: the democratic and the undemocratic. When it loses democratically, it redoubles its undemocratic efforts to retain power. Scandals and investigations are the tools of an undemocratic establishment. But they can’t overthrow the will of the people.

When conservative leaders stay strong, the scandals and investigations blow away like the wind.

Originally Published in FrontPageMag.

October 24, 2017

OUR TAXPAYER FUNDED PALESTINIAN SADDAM

Terror, lies and taxpayer money.

A tree may grow in Brooklyn, but a Saddam Hussein memorial has grown in Qalqilya.

Qalqilya is one of those ancient, historic “Palestinian” cities. So it dates back all the way to 1893. The population of Qalqilya more than quadrupled under Israeli rule. That’s typical of Zionist genocide which somehow vastly increases the number of Arab Muslims and their shrill accusations of genocide.

In the ancient 19^th century Palestinian city of Qalqilya, dating back all the way to the days of President Grover Cleveland and the invention of the jukebox, Hamas is popular. It even elected its own mayor before he was removed from office and the Palestinian Authority’s Fatah was put back in charge. Politics in Qalqilya remains a pitched battle between Hamas and Fatah over who hates the Jews more and has the best plan for destroying them.

There isn’t much to do in Qalqilya except visit its zoo. The Qalqilya Zoo is the worst zoo in the world and embodies everything wrong with “Palestine”. Israelis helped set up the zoo as a gesture of peace. It was supposed to be a “jewel in the crown of Palestinian national institutions.”

And it just might be.

Recently, a bear ate a 9-year-old boy’s arm at the zoo. The zebras and the giraffes allegedly died as a result of Muslim attacks on Israelis near the zoo. The self-taught taxidermist who runs the zoo has an exhibition of dead animals he has stuffed and mounted, and whose deaths he blames on Israel.

Like everything else about “Palestine”, Israeli goodwill ended in death and anti-Israel propaganda.

But Qalqilyans or Qalqilyites now have something else to do besides get their arms ripped off by a bear or visit one of the city’s 26 mosques. They can stop by the Saddam Hussein Memorial.

One side of the memorial has Saddam Hussein in a beret saluting himself. The other shows an older Saddam waving his rifle in the air. If the city fathers of Qalqilya had been more on the ball, they could have acquired the Ruger M77 bolt-action rifle in question for under $50K after it was taken from the rubble of his presidential palace in Mosul and sold at auction by a senior CIA officer in Baghdad.

The Saddam Hussein Memorial bears such cheerful welcoming messages as “Saddam Hussein – The Master of the Martyrs in Our Age,” and “Arab Palestine from the River to the Sea.”

Governor Rafi Rawajba compared Saddam, Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas: the current head of the Palestinian Authority. “Saddam was an emblem of heroism, honor, originality and defiance, as was the martyr Yasser Arafat.”

“President Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) makes sure to follow in the footsteps of these two great leaders,” he gushed.

Qalqilya Mayor Othman Daoud, also of Fatah, had previously paid tribute to Saddam for sticking to “his principles and the Palestinian cause until his death as a Martyr.”

The governor of Qalqiliya was appointed by Abbas. While the Palestinian Authority president doesn’t have Saddam’s arsenal or snazzy berets, he has the same affinity for democracy as Saddam.

President Abbas was elected to a four-year term in 2005. It’s been the longest four years ever.

Governor Rafi Rawajba was appointed by Abbas, not elected. He’s a member of Fatah, which is the political movement that dominates the PLO, and the PLO runs the Palestinian Authority. Also present was an official from the Arab Liberation Front which is also part of the PLO. The ALF was a project of Saddam Hussein and he used it to hand out cash to the families of Islamic terrorists in Israel.

Before the latest Iraq War, the ALF promised to hand out a million dollars to terrorist families. The Bush administration used that as evidence that Saddam Hussein supported terrorists and had to be removed.

There’s just one problem.

The ALF claimed that Saddam had handed out $35 million to terror families in 3 years. The Palestinian Authority pays out over $300 million a year. It’s currently at $355 million.

The PA spends 10 times more on terror payments in 1 year than Saddam did over 3 years.

And the best part is that most of the money comes from us. The Palestinian Authority doesn’t have much of an economy. It relies on foreign aid. Some of that money comes from Europe, Japan and the Saudis. A whole lot of it comes from Americans.

Even while we were fighting to remove Saddam Hussein, we were funding the PLO which included a faction under Saddam’s control that was doing the very thing we were condemning him for.

The Taylor Force Act, named after an American veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq murdered by a Fatah-supported terrorist, is slowly wending its way through Congress. If it isn’t neutered, it will cut off some of our aid to the Palestinian Authority until it stops funding terrorism.

Taylor Force was murdered by Bashar Masalha.

Palestinian Authority television reported that, “In Qalqilya, hundreds of citizens accompanied by the body of Martyr Bashar Masalha.”

“The Martyr Bashar Masalha returned from Qalqilya to his village Hajja in a procession,” PA TV gushed, describing the burial of a terrorist who had murdered an American as a “national wedding” in which he was “embraced by the soil of his homeland as a Martyr.”

Qalqilya is not the only Muslim settlement in Palestinian-occupied Israel to have its own Saddam Hussein memorial. There’s one in Beit Rima, a town square in the Palestinian Authority’s capital of Ramallah and a UN refugee center in Jenin.

And, if business goes on as usual, the PA will be funded by hundreds of millions in taxpayer money.

Maybe it’s time we finally stopped funding the Palestinian Authority, its terrorists and the aspirations of its dictator to follow in Saddam Hussein’s footsteps.

If the Muslim colonists of the Palestinian Authority want to continue their war with Israel over settlements like Qalqilya illegally built on the indigenous territory of the Jewish people, they can do that without our help. As they were doing it without our help for decades until Bill Clinton decided that a greasy Egyptian former Muslim Brotherhood member named Arafat was his key to a Nobel Prize.

American taxpayers are paying Muslim terrorists to murder Americans. We’ve poured money into the Qalqilya Governate which has benefited from numerous USAID projects. And, in return, the locals are erecting monuments to Saddam Hussein. And a Fatah thug appointed by President Abbas, the dictator we subsidize with hundreds of millions a year, claims that Abbas is following in the footsteps of Saddam.

After spending thousands of lives in Iraq, we’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars funding a Palestinian Saddam.

Making the Taylor Force Act into law is the only decent thing to do. But Secretary of State Tillerson also needs to end the doubletalk about the Palestinian Authority’s funding of terrorism. And Abbas’ enablers, in the media and the Jewish world, have to be held accountable for the lies and the terrorism.

The Palestinian Authority’s terror boss has made it abundantly clear that he doesn’t want peace. The latest reconciliation effort with Hamas is another reminder of it. He isn’t interested in democracy either. Not unless the elections are rigged. What does Abbas want? If you believe his crony in Qalqilya, he wants to be Saddam Hussein. If he wants to follow in Saddam’s footsteps, he can do it without our cash.

Or the next Saddam Hussein memorial can be on us.

Originally Published in FrontPageMag.

October 9, 2017

THE AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORICAL SOCIETY HOSTS DESTROY ISRAEL EVENT

Hamas, Hezbollah and BDS in a Jewish organization.

The American Jewish Historical Society was founded to study and preserve Jewish history. These days it’s instead partnering with Jewish Voice for Peace: an anti-Israel BDS hate group that defends anti-Semitism and which sponsored talks by an anti-Semite who accused Jews of drinking blood.

The fruits of the AJHS and JVP partnership have been a series of events attacking Israel.

Coming up in late October is “The Balfour Declaration: Support for a Jewish Homeland or Jewish State?”

The two speakers are Robert Herbst, the coordinator of the Westchester chapter of JVP, and Jonathan Kuttab, who advocates a one-state solution for eliminating Israel. He had tweeted, “EU no longer considers #Hamas a terrorist group. Time for US to do same.”

Kuttab has defended Islamic anti-Semitism by claiming that the “distrust Moslems feel towards Jews” is due to “two acts of betrayal by Jewish tribes against the Prophet.” And that Jews suffer from a “Holocaust Syndrome” of entitlement. He justified hijacking planes, described suicide bombers as “taking the supreme sacrifice” and defended Hezbollah as “an armed-resistance movement”

He has claimed that the “Jewish community gradually consolidated its power, wealth, and influence in all sectors of society” especially in “crucial sectors like banking, finance, media” where “their influence both as individuals and an organized community far exceeded their numbers” and that their power strengthens “conspiracy theories about ‘Jewish control’ that are reminiscent of the infamous “’Protocols of the Elders of Zion.’”

Robert Herbst and Jonathan Kuttab are both supporters of a one-state plan for eliminating Israel.

The American Jewish Historical Society is co-sponsoring a JVP anti-Israel event by two opponents of Israel, one of whom has defended Hamas. An organization that hands out the Emma Lazarus Award, named after a passionate Zionist, at its posh dinners is hosting attacks on the existence of Israel.

The “Jewish Homeland” or “Jewish State” argument is a hook for contending that the Balfour Declaration didn’t endorse Israel, but some sort of Jewish Bantustan within a Muslim country.

That worked so well for the Christians and Jews of the Middle East.

The American Jewish Historical Society is not only co-sponsoring a one-state event by an anti-Israel hate group. But it’s also hosting it at the Center for Jewish History’s headquarters. AJHS is a component of the Center for Jewish History. And the partnership between AJHS and JVP sheds light on the controversy over the appointment of David N. Myers, an anti-Israel activist, to head the Center for Jewish History.

During the Myers controversy, the Center took pains to disassociate Myers and themselves from JVP because a JVP handout had listed him as a “JVP Academic Advisory Board Member.” But in reality the Center, through AJHS, has an ongoing relationship with JVP.

The Balfour event was not AJHS’ only partnership with JVP. In December, the AJHS will feature “Rubble Rubble”, a play by Dan Fishback based on his trip to Israel. Fishback is a BDS supporter and a member of the JVP Artists Council. His goal is to “normalize Jewish anti-Zionism”. AJHS and JVP members get discounted admission. The venue is once again the Center for Jewish History. Specifically the Leo and Julia Forchheimer Auditorium at CJH. Leo Forchheimer’s philanthropy had left its mark on Israel. What would he think if he knew the anti-Israel purposes that CJH is putting his gift to?

A third AJHS-JVP event featured Efrat Yerday, an anti-Israel activist, accusing Israel of racism.

Efrat has claimed that, “Zionism does not only dispossess Palestinians, but it also dispossesses in a very sophisticated way, non-white Jews. Being Jewish is highly identified with being white because of Zionism.”

AJHS will claim that it is only offering different perspectives. But when it comes to Israel, there’s only one perspective.

“Balfour” and “Rubble Rubble” are to be part of AJHS’ “1917: How One Year Changed the World”. The exhibition is supposed to cover WWI, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Balfour Declaration. But the only Balfour program on the list questions whether Israel should even exist. The exhibition closes with Fishback’s anti-Israel agenda. And these are the only listed AJHS programs that focus on Israel.

JVP is also the only organization that AJHS chooses to partner with on political events.

The American Jewish Historical Society appears to be uninterested in holding any pro-Israel events. It’s uninterested in partnering with pro-Israel groups. Instead it’s providing a forum for a BDS hate group.

And it’s no mystery why.

The AJHS Academic Council is packed with anti-Israel activists. Lila Corwin-Berman, the chair of the AJHS Academic Council who also serves on its board of trustees, is a member of the Open Hillel Academic Council. Open Hillel seeks to “open” the campus group to BDS and other anti-Israel views.

Berman has defended the anti-Israel hate group IfNotNow, which employs JVP tactics, and condemned efforts to fight BDS. She signed a petition in support of BDS activists being allowed to enter Israel.

Other AJHS Academic Council members who signed the pro-BDS activist petition include Ari Kelman, Riv-Ellen Prell, Deborah Dash Moore, Rachel Kranson, Libby Garland and Kirsten Fermaglich.

When we look at what is going on in CJH’s components like the AJHS, the elevation of David N. Myers to head CJH is unsurprising. Myers is a symptom of the problem. As is AJHS’s partnership with JVP. A great deal of shocking behavior is taking place inside Jewish organizations whose inner workings most people in the Jewish community generally pay very little attention to.

Unlike CJH, the American Jewish Historical Society is an organization that dates back to the 19^th century. Its perversion by the radical anti-Jewish and anti-Israel left to serve anti-Semitic narratives is tragic.

And yet it’s inescapable.

Even as the Myers scandal continues to simmer, the AJHS partnership with JVP is making the choice painfully clear. The radical anti-Israel left will not be satisfied with embedding “moderate” opposing voices into Jewish organizations. Instead it seeks to normalize the furthest extremes of anti-Israel hatred.

And it will not be satisfied with anything less.

During the Myers controversy, defenders of his appointment, including some figures named here, claimed that it was an issue of apolitical scholarship. Is co-sponsoring events with a hate group that has sponsored talks by a woman who accused Jews of drinking blood also apolitical scholarship?

The anti-Israel leftists at the AJHS are clearly not leaving their politics at home. And support for them and for Myers cannot be distinguished from support for their views. Not when JVP is at AJHS.

We all have choices to make. Sometimes the choices are murky. Other times they are simple and easy.

When the American Jewish Historical Society hosts and co-sponsors an event by a BDS hate group attacking the existence of Israel and featuring a speaker who had defended terrorism and anti-Semitism, the choice becomes easy. Either you stand with BDS, Hamas, blood libels and those who want to destroy Israel or with Jews.

As the anti-Israel radicalism of the left grows, such choices will become even more obscenely simple. But they will not be any less difficult.

Opposing the anti-Israel left makes many important enemies and wins few friends. The anti-Israel left has built networks that can blacklist, smear and silence almost anyone in an academic field.

Speaking out against hate is easiest when it’s weakest. It’s hardest when it’s strongest.

When we think about Nazi Germany, we remember those who spoke out. We don’t remember those who were too intimidated and uncertain to rise against anti-Semitism when they saw it and heard it.

History tells us why so many people are afraid to do the right thing when it counts. It also tells us how irrelevant history makes them.

There are lessons here for the Center for Jewish History and the American Jewish Historical Society, for those on the inside who see the corruption of their organizations every day and for those on the outside who are worried about speaking up. There are lessons here for all of us.

If you can’t speak out against the American Jewish Historical Society’s partnership with a hate group linked to a literal blood libels and a speaker who defends Hamas, when will your voice be heard?

Originally Published in FrontPageMag.

September 11, 2017

TRUMP SHOULD BLOCK OBAMA MOVE TO SEND STOLEN JEWISH RELIGIOUS ARTIFACTS TO IRAQ

The Point has been covering this story for a while. This goes back to 2013.

Iraq in the 40s had 350,000 Jews. Today it has somewhere between four and none.

Despite that the Obama administration plans to send the Jewish Archive consisting of religious artifacts, bibles, marriage contracts, community records and private notebooks seized by the Iraqi Secret Police from the Jewish community back to Iraq.

The material is not the property of the Iraqi government, either Saddam’s regime which stole it, or its Shiite successor which claims to want it, but not the Jews who owned it. It’s the property of Iraqi Jewish refugees and their reconstituted communities in America, Israel and anywhere else.

The personal material, like marriage contracts and school books, should go to the families that owned them and to their descendants. The religious material, which a Muslim country that purged its Jewish and Christian communities has no use for, should go Iraqi Jewish religious communities wherever they are now.

Jewish bibles seized from the custody of the Nazi SS would not be sent to the German government. There is no reason to send Jewish bibles into the custody of the Iraqi government.

Despite that, the State Department has announced that the stolen Jewish property will be sent to the Iranian puppet regime in Baghdad.

The United States will return to Iraq next year a trove of Iraqi Jewish artifacts that lawmakers and Jewish groups have lobbied to keep in this country, a State Department official said.

A four-year extension to keep the Iraqi Jewish Archive in the U.S. is set to expire in September 2018, as is funding for maintaining and transporting the items. The materials will then be sent back to Iraq, spokesman Pablo Rodriguez said in a statement sent to JTA on Thursday.

Rodriguez said the State Department “is keenly aware of the interest in the status” of the archive.

“Maintaining the archive outside of Iraq is possible,” he said, “but would require a new agreement between the Government of Iraq and a temporary host institution or government.”

No, it doesn’t. The archive doesn’t belong to the Iraqi government, but to the Jewish population that was ethnically cleansed from Iraq.

The United States recovered the archive and should have turned it over to the Jewish community. Instead we had a bizarre Kafkaesque process in which the archive was restored to be turned over to the thieves who stole it.

Jewish political leaders have invested a lot of energy into looted art in Europe. And that’s a worthwhile cause. Yet this is a far more compelling issue. The archive contains the history of a Jewish community. It matters far more than a Klimt painting. Sadly, the priorities are those of a secular Ashkenazi leadership that is uninterested in the Iraqi Jewish archive because it’s Sephardi and religious. Meanwhile the American Sephardi Federation’s Ashkenazi boss Jason Guberman-Pfeffer seems far more interested in defending the hateful anti-Israel prejudices of David N. Myers, than in fighting for the archive.

And, another factor was the reluctance of a largely liberal leadership to stand up to Obama.

The archive is set to be exhibited at the Jewish Museum of Maryland Oct. 15-Jan. 15. The exhibit page says the items include a Hebrew Bible with commentaries from 1568, a Babylonian Talmud from 1793 and an 1815 version of the Zohar, a Jewish mystical text.

“There is no justification in sending the Jewish archives back to Iraq, a country that has virtually no Jews and no accessibility to Jewish scholars or the descendants of Iraqi Jews,” Gina Waldman, founder and president of Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa, said Friday in a statement to JTA. “The U.S. government must ensure that the Iraqi archives are returned to its rightful owners, the exiled Iraqi Jewish community,”

Stanley Urman, executive vice president for Justice for Jews from Arab Countries, echoed Waldman in saying there was no justification for sending back the archive.

“This is Jewish communal property. Iraq stole it and kept it hidden away in a basement. Now that we’ve managed to reclaim it, it would be like returning stolen goods back to the thief,” Urman told JTA on Friday.

It’s exactly like it. Meanwhile here’s the bizarre anti-Semitic justification on the Iraqi side for wanting the archive. Here’s Al Arabiya’s explanation

Experts add that Israel is keen on obtaining the manuscripts in order to prove their claim that the Jews had built the Tower of Babel as part of its attempt to distort the history of the Middle East for its own interests.

Wonderful.

Harold Rhode, who discovered the trove while working as a Defense Department policy analyst assigned to Iraq’s transitional government, said he is “horrified” to think the material would be returned when it had been “stolen by the government of Iraq from the Jewish community.”

“It would be comparable to the U.S. returning to the German government Jewish property that had been looted by the Nazis,” he told The Jewish Week.

It’s exactly like it.

I don’t expect Tillerson to care. Between McMaster at the NSC, Mattis on Defense and Tillerson, foreign policy is under the control of the usual Islam Firsters who are very concerned with Muslim feelings, particularly in the oil states, and very little else. And so the old Obama plan to turn over stolen Jewish religious items to a hostile Islamic regime is moving forward.

But President Trump can and should block the move. It’s the right thing to do. And Jewish activists should make that case.

Originally Published in FrontPageMag.

September 5, 2017

WHY IS HOMELAND SECURITY FUNDING ANTI-ISRAEL TERROR DEFENDERS?

You can’t counter terrorism by defending it.

Countering Violent Extremism was one of the great counterterrorism frauds of the Obama era. Not only was CVE useless, but it was an excuse for building ties with assorted Muslim Brotherhood groups.

A week before President Trump’s inauguration, Jeh Johnson, Obama’s Secretary of Homeland Secretary, gave his allies one last gift with millions in CVE grants. The list of grantees included the Muslim American Leadership Alliance, Unity Productions Foundation and Ka Joog. Once Kelly took over at DHS, some were either removed or, like Ka Joog, claimed that they had opted out to protest the Muslim travel ban.

But when the final grantees were announced, two troubling organizations remained on the list: Peace Catalyst International and Masjid Muhammad.

Though it bills itself as the ‘Nation’s Mosque’, Masjid Muhammad was set up by the racist hate group known as the Nation of Islam which believed that white people were racially inferior. Lucius Bey Muhammad, who set it up, had said, “The black man is indeed the greatest. His genes are stronger! No white man can produce a baby darker than himself.”

Elijah Muhammad, whom the mosque’s site still praises, had allied with the American Nazi Party. He had preached that, “these enemies of Allah are known at the present as the white race”

While the branch of the movement represented by Masjid Muhammad has parted ways with Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, they still maintain a relationship. At the mosque’s 53^rd anniversary, Farrakhan’s personal representative phoned in with remarks.

Should Countering Violent Extremism funding be going to a mosque set up by violent extremists and which still seems unable to end all connections with one of the nation’s worst racist hate groups?

But the case of Peace Catalyst International is in some ways more troubling than Masjid Muhammad.

Peace Catalyst International claims to “create safe spaces and foster authentic relationships between Christians and Muslims”. While PCI strongly emphasizes its Christian identity, its agenda largely seems to involve propagandizing for Islamists. Sometimes to an extremely disturbing degree.

PCI boss Rick Love wrote, “Some Pakistanis do hate us for these reasons: the war in Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq on false pretenses, decades-long support for oppressive regimes in the Muslim world, bias in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the killing of thousands of innocent Muslims described as ‘collateral damage’”.

PCI’s latest post is from Jennifer S. Bryson and it includes a call to Christians to engage in “sacrificial listening” to Muslims. Even if they’re ISIS supporters. Bryson heads the Zephyr Institute and its pet project, the Center for Islam and Religious Freedom. Also working at the Center for Islam is convicted Jihadist Ismail Royer. Bryson was formerly a member of the Board of Directors of PCI.

An earlier posting consists of PCI boss Rick Love interviewing Imam Taha Hassane who urges readers to understand “the roots of terrorism”. “When we drop drones on innocent people in Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and kill innocent civilians, what do we expect these people to think about us?” Hassane says. Rick and the Imam then discuss how supporting Black Lives Matter is Sharia.

This isn’t opposing extremism. It’s making excuses for it while echoing its talking points. And that sums up much of what is already wrong with CVE.

Love had already signed a letter claiming that “support of the Black Lives Matter movement demonstrates the truth that the Word became flesh.”

Rick Love has been criticized before for his flirtation with Islamist groups. On his own site, Love insists that Jihad is inner struggle or defensive warfare, that Mohammed did not spread Islam through the sword and that, “Islamic law in practice, however, is mostly relegated to family status law.”

An article at Peace Catalyst International insists, “You do NOT need to be fearful about Sharia taking over America.”

“The US Constitution is upheld in courts. No Muslim organization has ever called for it to become subordinate to Sharia, and that’s not even something American Muslims want.”

This is the sort of distorted reality that could just as easily come from any Islamist organization.

“Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran … should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth,” CAIR co-founder Omar Ahmad had declared.

“I wouldn’t want to create the impression that I wouldn’t like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future,” CAIR co-founder Ibrahm Hooper had admitted.

Peace Catalyst International ought to know as it collaborates with CAIR.

But there is another area that makes Peace Catalyst International’s CVE grant deeply troubling. On the same page where Love denies that Jihad is anything but personal or defensive, he also writes, “The issue of jihad for the sake of Palestine has gained lots of traction among many Muslims internationally.”

One of Peace Catalyst International’s “favorite peaceworkers” is Sami Awad whom the organization has worked with and promoted.

Awad is an anti-Israel BDS activist often praised for his non-violence. That non-violence is a pose. On his own blog, Sami Awad writes that a demonstration “is not a substitute for the armed struggle”.

He describes Islamic terrorism as, “The Palestinian armed resistance, labeled ‘terrorism’ by Israel.”

Awad also insists that, “The struggle to end the occupation and establish an independent Palestinian state does not gain or lose legitimacy if nonviolent means are preferred over violent means and vice versa.” Non-violence, like terrorism, is a tactic. It’s a means to achieve the same ends.

At one point, Awad even claimed that, “We’ve actually done training in non-violence for Hamas leaders.”

Rick Love’s own position isn’t subtle. In response to a question as to whether he prefers, Coexistence or Coresistance, he endorses “Coresistance”. That’s a euphemism for hostility to Israel over peacemaking. When an organization with “peace” in its time picks resistance over coexistence, it’s revealing.

It’s hard to see any of this as countering violent extremism. Instead it seems to be aiding it.

Peace Catalyst International doesn’t push back against Islamism. Instead it lies about it. It follows the usual leftist line that Islamic terrorism is the work of a tiny minority who ought to be disregarded. It denies the linkage between Islamic teachings and Islamic violence.

That is the standard CVE position. And there is no reason for it to be funded in the Trump era.

And DHS should really not be in the business of providing legitimacy to Peace Catalyst International’s anti-Israel activism, which includes supporting BDS activists.

But the problem with Countering Violent Extremism was always in the name. Not only is its name a deliberate effort to avoid using the “I word”, but the issue isn’t mere violence. And, as Sami Awad and Rick Love tragically show us, the solution isn’t to be found with tactical displays of non-violence.

The core issue isn’t violence. It’s Islamic supremacism. The violence is just a natural symptom.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s Islamist takeover in Egypt wasn’t accomplished through suicide bombings. The Brotherhood won an election. But once in power, it persecuted Christians. And before long, its followers had embarked on a series of attacks on churches.

Tactical non-violence combines virtue signaling with support for terrorists. It’s an abomination that should be disavowed by anyone who genuinely believes in non-violence as a principle, not a tactic.

The Islamic conquests were accompanied by clever tactics of divide and conquer. Muslim warlords pitted Christians against each other, promising one Christian denomination protection against another. The Islamists working to conquer the West are once again cleverly making inroads among their Christian and Jewish enemies. And any move to counter Islamism should oppose such groups, not fund them.

Originally Posted on FrontpageMag.