Daniel Greenfield, Author at Israel Rising

August 6, 2017

MCMASTER’S NSC COUP AGAINST TRUMP PURGES CRITICS OF ISLAM AND OBAMA

The National Security Council is becoming a national security threat.

Derek Harvey was a man who saw things coming. He had warned of Al Qaeda when most chose to ignore it. He had seen the Sunni insurgency rising when most chose to deny it.

The former Army colonel had made his reputation by learning the lay of the land. In Iraq that meant sleeping on mud floors and digging into documents to figure out where the threat was coming from.

It was hard to imagine anyone better qualified to serve as President Trump’s top Middle East adviser at the National Security Council than a man who had been on the ground in Iraq and who had seen it all.

Just like in Iraq, Harvey began digging at the NSC. He came up with a list of Obama holdovers who were leaking to the press. McMaster, the new head of the NSC, refused to fire any of them.

McMaster had a different list of people he wanted to fire. It was easy to make the list. Harvey was on it.

All you had to do was name Islamic terrorism as the problem and oppose the Iran Deal. If you came in with Flynn, you would be out. If you were loyal to Trump, your days were numbered.

And if you warned about Obama holdovers undermining the new administration, you were a target.

One of McMaster’s first acts at the NSC was to ban any mention of “Obama holdovers.” Not only did the McMaster coup purge Harvey, who had assembled the holdover list, but his biggest target was Ezra Watnick-Cohen, who had exposed the eavesdropping on Trump officials by Obama personnel.

Ezra Watnick-Cohen had provided proof of the Obama surveillance to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes. McMaster, however, was desperately working to fire him and replace him with Linda Weissgold. McMaster’s choice to replace Watnick-Cohen was the woman who helped draft the Benghazi talking points which blamed the Islamic terrorist attack on a video protest.

After protests by Bannon and Kushner, President Trump overruled McMaster. Watnick-Cohen stayed. For a while. Now Ezra Watnick-Cohen has been fired anyway.

According to the media, Watnick-Cohen was guilty of “anti-Muslim fervor” and “hardline views.” And there’s no room for anyone telling the truth about Islamic terrorism at McMaster’s NSC.

McMaster had even demanded that President Trump refrain from telling the truth about Islamic terrorism.

Another of his targets was Rich Higgins, who had written a memo warning of the role of the left in undermining counterterrorism. Higgins had served as a director for strategic planning at the NSC. He had warned in plain language about the threat of Islamic terrorism, of Sharia law, of the Hijrah colonization by Islamic migrants, of the Muslim Brotherhood, and of its alliance with the left as strategic threats.

Higgins had stood by Trump during the Khizr Khan attacks. And he had written a memo warning that “the left is aligned with Islamist organizations at local, national, and international levels” and that “they operate in social media, television, the 24-hour news cycle in all media and are entrenched at the upper levels of the bureaucracies.”

Like Harvey and Ezra Watnick-Cohen, Higgins had warned of an enemy within. And paid the price.

McMaster’s cronies had allegedly used the NSC’s email system to track down the source of the memo. The left and its useful idiots were indeed entrenched at the upper level of the bureaucracy.

Higgins was fired.

Like Harvey and Watnick-Cohen, Higgins had also become too dangerous to the Obama holdovers. Harvey had assembled a list of names and a plan to dismantle the Iranian nuclear deal. Watnick-Cohen had dug into the Obama surveillance of Trump officials. And Higgins had sought to declassify Presidential Study Directive 11. PSD-11 was the secret blueprint of Obama’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood.

Pete Hoekstra, the former Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, linked PSD-11 to the rise of ISIS and called for its declassification.

Replacing Harvey is Michael Bell. When the Washington Post needed someone to badmouth Dr. Gorka, they turned to Bell: the former chancellor of the College of International Security Affairs at the National Defense University. Bell suggested that Dr. Gorka was an uneven scholar. And Dr. Gorka was accused of failing to incorporate other perspectives on Islam.

The pattern has never been hard to spot.

McMaster forced out K.T. McFarland from her role as Deputy National Security Advisor. Slotted in was Dina Habib-Powell.

McFarland was an Oxford and Cambridge grad who had worked at the Pentagon for the Reagan administration. Dina Habib-Powell had no national security background. She was an Egyptian-American immigrant and former Bush gatekeeper whose pals included Huma Abedin and Valerie Jarrett.

Powell, who has been described as the Republican Huma, said that Abedin “feels a deep responsibility to encourage more mutual understanding between her beliefs and culture and American culture.”

When visiting Egypt, Habib-Powell had assured the locals of how Bush, after September 11, “visited a mosque, took off his shoes and paid his respects.” “I see the president talk of Islam as a religion of peace, I see him host an iftar every year,” she gushed.

K.T. McFarland had written that “Global Islamist jihad is at war with all of Western civilization.”

It’s not hard to see why McMaster pushed out McFarland and elevated Habib-Powell.

Habib-Powell had attended the Iftar dinner with members of Muslim Brotherhood front groups. You can see her photographed at the American Task Force of Palestine gala. The ATFP was originally Rashid Khalidi’s American Committee on Jerusalem. She was there as a presenter at the Middle East Institute after a speech by Hanan Ashrawi. Her achievements under Bush included cultural exchanges with Iran, as well as cash for the Palestinian Authority and for Lebanon after the Hezbollah war with Israel.

While President Trump fights to restrict Muslim immigration, at his side is the woman who had once bragged onCNN, “Over 90% of student visas are now issued in under a week, and that is in the Middle East.”

But that is typical of the McMaster revamp of the NSC. It’s populated by swamp creatures who oppose the positions that President Trump ran on. And who are doing everything possible to undermine them.

President Trump promised a reset from Obama’s anti-Israel policies. McMaster picked Kris Bauman as the NSC’s point man on Israel. Bauman had defended Islamic terrorists and blamed Israel for the violence. He had urged pressure on Israel as the solution. Ideas like that fit in at McMaster’s NSC.

Meanwhile Derek Harvey, who had tried to halt Obama’s $221 million terror funding prize to the Palestinian Authority, was forced out.

This too is part of the pattern. As Caroline Glick has pointed out, the personnel being purged in the McMaster coup “are pro-Israel and oppose the Iran nuclear deal.”

When Adam Lovinger urged that “more attention be given to the threat of Iran and Islamic extremism,” his security clearance was revoked. Robin Townley was forced out in the same way.

Meanwhile, McMaster sent a letter to Susan Rice, Obama’s former National Security Adviser, assuring her that the NSC would work with her to “allow you access to classified information.” He claimed that Rice’s continued access to classified information is “consistent with the national security interests of the United States.”

Why does Susan Rice, who is alleged to have participated in the Obama eavesdropping on Trump people, need access to classified information? What national security purpose is served by it?

The same national security purpose that is served by McMaster’s purge of anyone at the NSC who dares to name Islamic terrorism, who wants a tougher stance on Iran, and who asks tough questions.

And the purge of reformers and original thinkers is only beginning.

The latest reports say that McMaster has a list of enemies who will be ousted from the NSC. And when that is done, the NSC will be a purely Obama-Bush operation. The consensus will be that the Iran Deal must stay, that Islam has nothing to do with Islamic terrorism, that we need to find ways to work with the aspirations of the Muslim Brotherhood, and that Israel must make concessions to terrorists.

If you loved the foreign policy that brought us 9/11, ISIS, and billions in funding to terrorists from Syria to Libya to the West Bank, you won’t be able to get enough of McMaster’s brand new NSC.

And neither will America’s enemies.

The swamp is overflowing. The National Security Council is becoming a national security threat.

President Bush was a good man. And he meant well. But he was surrounded by officials who lied to him. They filled his administration with appeasers and paraded Islamists through the Oval Office. And by the time they were done, thousands more Americans had died and Islamists had developed an even bigger foothold on American soil than they had before September 11. This cannot be allowed to happen again.

If you love America, if you believe that Islamic terrorism needs to be fought, not appeased, then it’s time to take a stand against the McMaster coup and his Obama holdover allies, for our security and future.

It’s not just about a bunch of names. It’s about the survival of America.

Orignally Published in FrontPageMag.

June 5, 2017

RUN, HIDE AND DENY IN LONDON

Islamic terrorism has no religion even when it’s shouting, “This is for Islam.”

As Muslim terrorists rampaged around London, Met police debuted the new “Run, Hide and Tell” program. But instead some Londoners chose to stand and fight. They fought with pint glasses and barstools as the Muslim killers shouting, “This is for Allah” stabbed women in trendy eateries.

Some drivers tried to ram the killers. An unarmed police officer attacked the terrorists with a baton. An off-duty police officer tackled one of the Muslim terrorists. Both men were severely wounded.

Other unarmed police officers ran away.

Met counter-terrorism chief Mark Rowley sympathetically noted that, “If someone acts on instinct and perhaps decides to fight because they have no choice, we would never criticise them for that.”

It was kind of him not to criticize those Londoners who reacted with their base instincts and tried to fight the Muslim killers instead of running, hiding and telling, then reemerging for a vigil or a concert.

After the Manchester Arena attack, Rowley had urged, “Enjoy yourselves. We can’t let the terrorists win by dissuading us from going about our normal business.”

Going about our normal business has become the highest form of courage. Run, Hide and Deny.

Ariana Grande’s manager described her upcoming Manchester concert as representing, “courage, bravery and defiance in the face of fear”. “We’re going to go shopping’ – How defiant Londoners refused to bow to terrorists,” an article at The Independent boasts. Courage, bravery and defiance used to be found on the beaches of Normandy. Now they come from attending a concert or trying on a new blouse.

Londoners took Rowley’s advice. And then they found themselves running and hiding from Muslim killers. Video shows cringing diners lying on the floor of “London’s Coolest Bierkeller” as frantic Met police scream, “Get down”. In the Black & Blue Restaurant, the first “modern American steakhouse” in the city, some hid under the tables. Four friends jammed inside a toilet stall while the screams went on outside. A woman barricaded the door while other diners fled through the back.

At Elliot’s, an eatery “based in the inspiring environment that is Borough Market”, a Muslim terrorist stabbed a waitress hiding behind a partition. At El Pastor, where the tacos are “made from scratch in house every day”, a woman was stabbed before diners drove the terrorist away by throwing chairs at him and then barricaded themselves inside. Diners on lobster risotto at Applebee’s huddled in terror.

Pictures show courageous and defiant revelers trooping out with their hands behind their heads.

Bravely and courageously having butterfly prawns in crispy breadcrumbs or listening to a pop star trying to lip sync only works until grim men shouting about Allah come through the door. And then it’s time to try out the Met’s advice. “Hide: Turn your phone to silent. Barricade yourself in if you can.”

It is at these moments where the real courage of resisting Islamic terrorism is divided from the false courage of going out for a night on the town in “defiance” of terror.

There is no bravery or courage in denying reality. It’s just another form of cowardice.

The champions of nightlife courage mock those who warn of Islamic terrorism for “giving in to fear”. President Trump has been accused of “stoking fear” for calling for common sense migration reform in response to the attacks. Only fools and idiots aren’t afraid of a serious threat. The hollow courage of holding up candles at a vigil or heading to a trendy nightlife spot is no match for the reality of terror.

Denial is always cowardice.

When the UK PM claims that, Islamic terrorism “is a perversion of Islam”, that’s cowardice after an attack in which the Islamic killers made a point of proclaiming, “This is for Islam” and “This is for Allah”.

While the latest wave of Islamic terror swept across the UK, the University of London hosted the Muslim World League’s conference on “Tolerance in Islam”. The League is a Saudi group that has been linked to Al Qaeda whose employees included Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law and one of the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists. The Secretary General of the League has insisted that “terrorism has no religion”.

Indeed.

Meanwhile a friend of one of the attackers claimed that the terrorist had been influenced by the Islamic teachings of Sheikh Ahmad Musa Jibril: a Palestinian Muslim cleric in Dearborn who is popular with Al Qaeda and ISIS Jihadists. He has a degree in Sharia law from the Islamic University in Saudi Arabia.

Jibril was inspired by Salman Al-Awdah, a Saudi sheikh associated with the monarchy. Also inspired by Al-Awdah was a devout Muslim by the name of Osama bin Laden. Jibril’s site urged Muslims that their “heart must contain nothing but HATE to all kafers [non-Muslims]… Not just plain hate it must be the peak of hate”. And “Give them a knife and a bulletful of gun.”

And so the Muslim terrorists in London, inspired by Saudi Sharia scholarship, with hearts containing nothing but hatred for the non-Muslims dining out at trendy nightspots, gave them the knife.

But Islamic terrorism has no religion. Even when it’s stabbing you while shouting, “This is for Islam.”

Courage means running for cover when an attack happens and then denying the obvious. It means believing that what the terrorists really want is to prevent us from enjoying our dinner rather than forcing us to submit to Islamic law.

“We ran into the restaurant and tried to find a safe place but there wasn’t one,” an eyewitness to the attack said.

Run, Hide and Tell. We’ve been running away for generations. The Jewish and Christian populations of the Middle East have mostly fled to America, Europe and Israel. Now there are no more places to hide.

We’re swiftly running out of safe places. There are thousands of soldiers in the streets of London and Paris. German cities on New Year’s Eve are no-go zones. There are thousands of potential terrorists under investigation in every state in the United States. Thousands more in the UK and Europe.

We can stand up to Islamic terror migration. Or hide under the tables and hope they don’t notice us.

The Islamic terrorists are no longer just in Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan. They’re here. They’re outside the room. They’re coming in with knives, guns and bombs. We’re running out of places to hide. And there’s nothing left to deny when the killers shout that they are murdering us for Islam and Allah.

Opposition to Islamic migration reform is support for Islamic terror. We can build walls and border controls. Or we can build barricades of tables in bloodied eateries and throw chairs at the attackers.

We can defend our countries at the border or desperately try to survive a night on the town.

We can acknowledge that the problem is Islam. Or we can courageously eat out while trying not to wonder if that grimacing man with his hand under his coat muttering about Allah is here to kill us now.

Originally Published in FrontPageMag.

May 21, 2017

HOW TO SOLVE THE PALESTINIAN PROBLEM

…and bring peace to the Middle East.

In 1990, there were half as many Palestinians as Kuwaitis in Kuwait. Two years later there were almost none.

With the support of the international community, some 700,000 Kuwaitis expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their country. If they had not done it, basic arithmetic shows that the Palestinians would have outnumbered Kuwaitis in Kuwait in a generation.

The Palestinians of Kuwait were kidnapped, tortured and killed. “Kill a Palestinian and Go to Heaven,” became the slogan. When Kuwait was “liberated”, tanks and armored vehicles were sent into the Hawally suburb of Kuwait City known as Little Palestine. Half the buildings were knocked down by bulldozers. Some detained Palestinians were buried in mass graves. The vast majority, including those who had been born in Kuwait, were deported or forced to flee a land they had lived in for a generation.

The violent ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians went mostly unremarked. While the Kuwaitis were ethnically cleansing their Palestinians, they continued to fund Palestinian terror against Israel and condemn Israel for violating the human rights of those they were deporting.

And the world shrugged.

President George H.W. Bush defended Kuwait’s actions. “I think we’re expecting a little much if we’re asking the people in Kuwait to take kindly to those that had spied on their countrymen that were left there,” he said. This was in the same press conference in which he condemned Israeli “settlements.”

A year later, Israel expelled 400 Hamas members. Every human rights organization was outraged. The State Department “strongly” condemned Israel. And Israel was forced to take them back.

The Kuwaiti Nakba isn’t much remembered. There are no rallies full of old women clutching house keys to lost homes in Hawally. They had made a bad bet by backing Saddam Hussein. And paid the price for it.

Kuwait refused to allow Palestinian Authority leader Abbas to visit until he apologized for supporting Saddam. And apologize he did. “Yes, we apologize for what we have done,” the terror boss whined.

The PLO has yet to apologize to Israel for the Muslim settler role in the attempted 1948 genocide of the indigenous Jewish population and the thousands who were maimed and murdered by its terrorists.

Israel, like Kuwait, should have demanded an admission of guilt from Abbas for the PLO’s crimes.

The Kuwaiti Nakba has much in common with what took place in Israel. Palestinians had arrived in both Kuwait and Israel as a cheap labor force to take advantage of the economic boom of a feudal economy becoming industrialized. The “Palestinians” of Israel were not some ancient people but a mass of migrants, mostly from Israel’s neighbors, but occasionally from as far away as Sudan and Senegal in Africa, who were seeking economic opportunity. The existence of the Afro-Palestinians makes it quite clear that they are not a distinct ethnic or national group, but migrants who came from outside Israel.

Over half of the so-called “Palestinian” population lives outside Israel. Many continue to be economic migrants. That is what brought them to Kuwait. And the Kuwaitis were not the only ones to kick them out. Nor are the “Palestinians” the only migrating group that got caught without a country when the game of national musical chairs ended with a lot of new countries with old names dotting the map.

“Palestinians” embraced an imaginary and ahistorical identity because they had been locked out of every other political setup by new governments and tribal arrangements. And that’s not unique.

Kuwait’s other stateless group are the Bedoon. Like the Palestinians, the Bidoon were migrants. The Kuwaitis chose not to recognize them as citizens. There is one Bidoon for every ten Kuwaitis. But that is typical in a region where large nomadic groups around the region exist outside governmental structures.

In this century, hundreds of thousands of people were displaced in Iraq, Libya and Syria. Many of the countries in the region are on the verge of similar civil wars between quarreling ethnic and religious groups. The mass flow of migrants into Europe is an extension of the migratory nature of the region.

All of these problems have a single cause. That cause is the failure of the Arab Muslim nation state.

This century exposed how fragile and artificial most of the countries whose existence we take for granted, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon and Libya, really are. A little instability and they collapse into quarreling tribes. These tribal conflicts have the same root cause as the “Palestinian” problem.

The Palestinian problem can’t be solved without resolving the problem of the Arab Muslim nation state.

The civil wars in Syria and Iraq, the flow of migrants into Europe and the latest itineration of the failed Palestinian peace process all stem from the conflict between the natural tribe and the artificial nation state. The Arab Muslim nation state is incapable of resolving these tribal conflicts.

That is the source of the tyranny, instability and violence in the Middle East.

No amount of concessions or negotiations by Israel will do anything except create more instability. Decades of Israeli concessions have only led to terrorism, violence, death and misery. If Israel ceased to exist tomorrow, the place where it was would be as much of a disaster area as Yemen or Syria.

It’s often pointed out that the Palestinians are a fictional national identity. But the Iraqis, Syrians and many others are equally artificial; historical names attached to fake countries. We weren’t the first Westerners to think that we could fix the Middle East by making them just like us. Before we tried exporting democracy, the British and the French exported nationhood with all the trimmings of flags, constitutions and anthems. Just like Arab Muslim democracy, the Arab Muslim nation state is a farce that spreads misery, instability and violence.

We can best fix the Middle East by ending all the failed efforts to turn it into Europe and America. And reversing them. Stop recognizing Arab Muslim countries that have incompatible populations. They’re dictatorships on the verge of a civil war. And that civil war will eventually drag us in as Iraq and Syria did.

Whenever possible, deal with tribal and other organic regional leaders, not fake national governments. In Iraq, that means an end to the failed policy of only dealing with the Shiite puppet regime in Baghdad while ignoring the Sunni tribal leaders and the Kurdish authorities. That policy helped create ISIS.

We should recognize discrete regions based on the settlement of natural ethnic, religious and tribal identities. There will inevitably be conflict between these tribal territories, but they will claim far fewer lives than Saddam’s efforts to suppress the Shiites and the Marsh Arabs did. Tribes will kill fewer people than a tribal nation state striving to stamp out rivals and competitors with a powerful domestic military.

Borders should not be viewed as permanent. The Middle East is migratory. It is not Europe. An Arab Muslim who moves from Iraq to Syria or flees Kuwait for Jordan is not a refugee. When you start defining every migrant in a region with an extensive nomadic history as a refugee, the end result is the absurdity of the Palestinian refugee cities of Jordan or the million migrants showing up in Europe.

If you go back far enough, everyone in the Middle East is a refugee.

Instead of trying to resettle fake refugees, we should encourage the settlement of discrete territories with natural borders that create physical and defensible divisions between different groups. That rules out any of the lunatic peace schemes for a Palestinian state with a capital in Jerusalem and a territory that cuts through Israel. These plans have failed and will go on failing for the same reason that Iraqis are still killing each other despite our best efforts to talk, bribe and bomb them out of it.

The indigenous Jewish population and the Muslim migrants who settled in Israel are inherently incompatible. The Palestinian problem might be solved somewhere in Jordan or Syria. History and experience tells us it will never be solved in Israel.

The Israeli government should begin distinguishing between the Muslim settler population based not on artificial borders dating back to a particular war but on clan and ethnicity.

The Circassians who migrated to Israel in the 19th century from the Caucasus have not been a problem. These Ottoman military colonists are Muslims, but they serve in the Israeli military and have no interest in joining in the tribal wars of other Muslims against the Jews. The Husayni clan, which gave us Arafat and the Mufti of Jerusalem, has been a source of strife and violence in the region for far too long.

Israel doesn’t have a national problem with the “Palestinians”, it faces threats from marauding clans which dominate the leadership of Islamic terror groups such as the PLO and Hamas. No one has managed to make peace with the Husaynis yet. And they never will.

The first step to solving the Palestinian problem is to recognize that it doesn’t exist. The second is to determine which clans would be more compatible where. That is a process that must take place across the region in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Israel and beyond. And it is far more likely to bring peace than any amount of negotiations and peacekeeping missions.

The great error of Western foreign policy in the region was the belief that stability was best achieved through modernization. The Arab Muslim world is not going to turn into Europe.

We should let it be what it is. Its tribalism won’t bring peace. But it can limit the scope of its wars.

Originally Published on FrontPageMag.

May 10, 2017

THE NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL’S NEW PRO-HAMAS ISRAEL ADVISOR

The swamp strikes back against Israel and Trump

Kris Bauman, the National Security Council’s new point man on Israel, believes that the “Israel Lobby” is a threat, that Israel should be pressured into making concessions to Islamic terrorists and that “the Obama Administration must find creative (but legal) ways to include Hamas in a solution.”

Yael Lempert, Bauman’s predecessor, had been one of the Obama holdovers that conservatives had fought to pry out of the swamp. Lempert had been described as “Obama’s point person in the White House orchestrating his war against Israel.”

Lee Smith wrote that, “Lempert, one former Clinton official told me, ‘is considered one of the harshest critics of Israel on the foreign policy far left. From her position on the Obama NSC, she helped manufacture crisis after crisis in a relentless effort to portray Israel negatively.’”

Lempert’s mother, Lesly Lempert, had been an anti-Israel activist with the misleadingly named American Israeli Civil Liberties Coalition. Yael had carried on her mother’s work. Her departure should have been a victory for conservatives. Instead the swamp was replaced with more swamp.

Kris Bauman had been part of the failed “peace” efforts in the Obama years working for Hillary ally, General Allen. His views on Israel, the PLO and Hamas were those of the Obama-Kerry team. Bauman believes that Israel is at fault for the failure of previous peace efforts and that peace can only be achieved when the United States applies enough pressure on Israel.

It’s like Yael Lempert never left.

Once McMaster took over as National Security Adviser, the swamp was back. McMaster has warned Trump against talking about Islamic terrorism. He had tried to force out Ezra Cohen-Watnick, who played a crucial role in exposing the Obama eavesdropping, and replace him with Linda Weissgold, the director of the CIA’s Office of Terrorism Analysis, who had helped draft the Benghazi talking points which blamed the Islamic terror attack on “protests”.

President Trump overruled McMaster. Just as he had overruled Mattis’ plot to bring in Michele Flournoy, Hillary Clinton’s likely Secretary of Defense, and move Anne Patterson, the Muslim Brotherhood’s favorite State Department hack, in as undersecretary for policy at the Pentagon.

But not every tidal flow of the swamp can be stopped.

Kris Bauman is exactly whom the swamp and the Deep State want to be there “explaining” the wrong things to the right people. Bauman raised eyebrows when he appeared as the highest ranking administration official at a PA-PLO reception shortly after his appointment.

It won’t be hard to guess what Bauman’s views on the peace process are. He laid them out in great detail in “The Middle East Quartet of Mediators: Understanding Multiparty Mediation in the Middle East Peace Process”. In the hundreds of pages, Bauman makes occasional efforts to pretend that he’s delving into the narratives of both sides, but his conclusion makes it painfully clear whose side he’s on.

Kris Bauman is eager to whitewash the Muslim Brotherhood terrorists of Hamas. He insists that Hamas had “signaled moderation was a real possibility” and bemoans the “failure” of the Quartet,” to capitalize on this event by recognizing Hamas’s signals of willingness to moderate.”

Bauman complains that America’s failure to deal with Hamas played into Israeli hands. “Once Hamas came to power, the US and the EU refused to deal with it. This strengthened Israel’s ‘no partner’ argument as more ‘facts were created on the ground’ daily in the settlements.”

He even defends Hamas against accusations that its takeover of Gaza was a coup.

Bauman accuses, “Israel and the Quartet refused to engage with Hamas and instead turned Gaza into an open-air prison.” This isn’t even an anti-Israel position. It’s Hamas propaganda.

Kris Bauman insists that “given the widespread popularity of Hamas… some kind of inclusion of Hamas is absolutely necessary if a peace agreement is event to be reached, much less implemented and sustained.” He whispers that, “the Obama Administration must find creative (but legal) ways to include Hamas in a solution” and “the Quartet must find a way to meaningfully engage Hamas”.

In Kris Bauman’s twisted mind, the obstacle to peace isn’t PLO and Hamas terrorism, but supporters of Israel in America. He favorably quotes Walt and Mearsheimer’s anti-Semitic tract, The Israel Lobby. Bauman urges overcoming the “Israel Lobby” which he claims “is a force that must be reckoned with, but it is a force that can be reckoned with.”

Progress in the peace process requires that the United States apply diplomatic and economic pressure on Israel. And indeed, Bauman’s recommendations mirrored the policy of Obama, Hillary and Kerry.

Kris Bauman urges that the United States move further away from Israel and adopt “a new US policy on Middle East peace that is closer to the policies of the other members of the Quartet.” In Bauman’s formula that would include not only the UN, the EU, the US and Russia, but also the Arab League.

Kris Bauman not only equates Islamic terrorism and Israeli self-defense against terrorism, but at one point he actually equates Jews living in territory claimed by the terrorists with Islamic terrorism.

And he insists that the latter is worse than the former. “It is true that one could make an analogous argument regarding Palestinian terrorism, but there is one major difference between the two. Israeli government control over settlement expansion is far greater than Palestinian Authority control over terrorism.”

This was the man who had played a key role in defining what security will look like for Israel. And who will likely be doing so once again.

It goes without saying that Bauman doesn’t like Israel and especially dislikes Israeli conservatives. He accuses Netanyahu of “inciting Palestinian violence” and winning because he “played on the public’s security fears”. He accuses Netanyahu of having “derailed the peace process almost completely”.

President Trump had promised to repair relations with Israel. The NSC’s Israel advisor shares Obama’s loathing for Netanyahu. And blames him, instead of the Islamic terrorists, for the violence.

Bauman blames the Second Intifada on Sharon’s visit to the holiest place in Judaism which had been occupied and colonized by Muslim settlers. “Ariel Sharon’s September 28 visit to the Temple Mount / Haram alSharif was a spark on dry tinder,” he writes. “His visit set off a series of demonstrations, suicide bombings, and IDF reprisals that became the Second Intifada.”

Bauman’s statement is a lie. The Second Intifada had been planned by the PLO before Sharon’s visit. But Kris Bauman doubles down, “The Al-Aqsa Intifada spontaneously erupted in the fall of 2000 because of the anger and disillusionment among Palestinians after the failure of Oslo, their ongoing, daily affliction, and the visit of Ariel Sharon to the Haram al-Sharif / Temple Mount area.”

The Intifada was as “spontaneous” as Benghazi. But Bauman is too busy sympathizing with the “affliction” of the terrorists to tell the truth.

Kris Bauman consistently blames Israel for Islamic terror. He suggests that the Muslim violence following the opening of the Hasmonean Tunnel was a “needless provocation of the Palestinians.”

Even Arafat’s rejection of the 2000 Camp David offer under Barak and Clinton was Israel’s fault. “Permanent cantonization, permanent settlements, and essentially, permanent occupation,” he huffs. “Of course they rejected it.”

And of course Kris Bauman stands with the PLO’s rejectionism and makes excuses for it.

Every peace deal in the past, Bauman suggests, “overwhelmingly favored Israeli interests.” The terrorists couldn’t be blamed for rejecting every single peace deal. The United States must turn on Israel and threaten it with the loss of “diplomatic support”.

This should sound familiar. It’s what Obama did. And what Trump blasted him for doing.

But it’s just another day in the swamplands of foreign policy mired in the muck of the Deep State.

Kris Bauman extensively quotes Robert Malley, who was briefly fired by Obama when his Hamas contacts for Soros’ International Crisis Group came to light. Obama later brought Malley in and moved him all the way up. Bauman also quotes and praises the Soros organization’s attempts to push engagement with Hamas. And the swamp doesn’t get any deeper than George Soros and Hamas.

Bauman’s policy prescriptions are relics of the Obama era. He should have become history just like John Kerry, Yael Lempert and his former boss, General Allen who bellowed at the Democratic National Convention that, “Hillary Clinton will be exactly, exactly the kind of commander-in-chief America needs” and warned that Trump’s fight against Islamic terrorism would kill “innocent families”.

Trump had blasted Allen. Why is his former chief of staff now occupying a major position in the NSC?

Draining the swamp is hard work. Because the swamp is bigger than you are. It’s a powerful and influential establishment. And if you look away, the swamp will swiftly come flowing back.

Published first on FrontPageMag.

May 3, 2017

CNN’S ISLAMIST OFFERS CHRISTOPHOBIA, JUDEOPHOBIA AND HINDUPHOBIA

CNN is ready to offend every non-Muslim religion on earth.

Reza Aslan has built a career complaining about Islamophobia. Throw a dart at a map of colleges and the odds were good that Aslan would be speaking at one of them about the rising threat of Islamophobia.

Earlier this year, Aslan, an Iranian Muslim, announced that he was going to change people’s minds about Islam and make them more tolerant, “through pop culture, through film and television.“

“Stories have the power to break through the walls that separate us into different ethnicities,” Aslan rhapsodized, “different cultures, different nationalities, different races, different religions.”

CNN gave Aslan a forum. Nearly every episode of “The Believer” that aired has made some religion that isn’t Islam look freaky, unpleasant and threatening. Instead of breaking through the walls, it has surveyed different non-Islamic religions only to sneer at them as strange and weird.

Instead of Islamophobia, it offers Non-Islam-ophobia.

“The Believer” kicked off with an episode featuring a sect of cannibals whom the show associated with Hinduism. Its last episode spread fear over the threat posed by Orthodox Jews. CNN’s “Believer” clips offer Reza Aslan explaining why he’s a Muslim sandwiched between a doomsday cult leader who calls himself “Jezus”, voodoo, scientology and a Mexican death cult.

Not even Al Jazeera would have been this blatant about its Islamic agenda.

Reza Aslan, CNN and “Believer” have already offended a whole range of religious groups. Hindus angrily denounced the misrepresentation of their religion. But the left has much less interest in Hinduphobia than it does in Islamophobia. Hindu protests outside CNN offices in five cities garnered almost no coverage from the same media that covers every single Islamic protest against Islamophobia.

The media doesn’t believe that all forms of religious bigotry are created equal.

Orthodox Jews condemned Aslan for his fearmongering aimed at Judaism. But the left is uninterested in criticizing anti-Semitism from Islamists. Especially those on its payroll.

“The Believer” has tried to smear Christians, Hindus and Jews. It has yet to profile Muslims. Despite Aslan’s interest in teaching Americans not to be Islamophobes, he seems to prefer pushing Christophobia, Judeophobia and Hinduphobia. But bigots can’t be expected to fight bigotry.

“The Believer” treats non-Islamic religions as a freakshow. The gimmick attracts viewers. See Reza Aslan eat brains, talk to a doomsday cult leader or act afraid of Jews in fedoras. Look at all those freaks!

But don’t expect to see Shiite Muslims cutting their children in the street for Ashura on “The Believer”.

Beneath the hipster approach to religion is malice. Hindus are associated with cannibalism. Orthodox Jews in Israel are swapped in for Islamists. Reza Aslan pretends that Israeli cities are no-go zones as he insists, “If we get out of the car in these neighborhoods, we will be immediately attacked.”

Of course no one attacks him. But Reza Aslan gets to pretend to be afraid of the Jews.

In a CNN article, Aslan warned that Orthodox Jews are “taking on greater political power until, one day, you wake up and find this group has more or less taken over the state.”

If someone were to say such a thing about Muslims, Aslan would be leading a lecture tour to denounce Islamophobia. Last year, Aslan was peddling “Fear Inc.: The Industrializing of Islamophobia.” Now Reza Aslan is, coincidentally, spreading fear of a religion that Muslims view as their leading enemy.

And CNN is serving as Fear Inc. and industrializing Aslan’s Non-Islam-ophobia.

In his CNN hit piece, Reza Aslan cunningly transposes concerns about Islamic birth rates, theocracy, no-go zones and religious police to Jews. It’s inconceivable that CNN would run a documentary worrying about Islamic birth rates leading to theocracy in Europe or America. But all those worries about Islamophobia don’t apply to Islamists fearmongering about other religions.

Israel, Reza Aslan warns, is on the verge of turning into a “Jewish version of Iran”.

That’s certainly a convenient message to peddle if you’re an Islamist opponent of Israel. In the past, Reza Aslan has been utterly unsubtle in his hatred of the Jewish State. Highlights included comparing Israelis to Nazis and insisting that Iran wants nukes because it feels threatened by Israel.

But, as critics know, Reza Aslan has two faces. One is a ranting bigot. The other feigns spirituality. The real Aslan is a bigot. The fake Aslan mouths inanities about the universality of religion even as he attacks every religion that isn’t Islam. You can find the real Aslan on social media and the fake Aslan on CNN.

“The Believer” is the perfect platform for Reza Aslan. Its smirking subtitle “Spiritually curious” and Aslan’s inanities convey the image of a hipster looking for religious meaning everywhere. It’s no doubt how the show was sold to CNN. And CNN execs saw Aslan’s approach of showcasing religious freakiness while disguising it with nostrums about the universality of the search for meaning as a safe bet.

But Aslan isn’t spiritually curious. He’s spiritually hostile. He’s learned to disguise that hostility by sounding like a liberal. On CNN, his attacks on various religions are interspersed with disclaimers. But the disclaimers, like the inanities, are meant to get lost in the overall impression that Hindus eat brains and Jews are Islamic terrorists who want to take over everything. That is what viewers will remember.

Reza Aslan postures as a scholar, but he’s callously ignorant of other religions and he isn’t actually interested in learning about them except to undermine them. His curiosity is only a media pose.

“The Believer” continues the trend that defined Aslan’s career. He writes a book defending Islam and then another that attacks Christianity. Then he responds to the criticism by crying Islamophobia.

The only one who should be allowed to stir up fear and loathing of other religions is Reza Aslan.

Christians, Hindus and Jews have taken apart Reza Aslan’s claims about their religions. But despite Aslan’s posturing, he isn’t a scholar. A scholar wouldn’t be boasting about eating brains or pretending to be afraid of Jews in Israel. “The Believer” isn’t a scholar’s work. It’s a malignant attack on non-Islamic religions disguised in one part universalism and four parts sensationalism.

Reza Aslan’s openness is a sham. As is his enthusiasm. He isn’t a scholar of religion but a promoter of Islam. He appears to embrace other religions, boasting, “I feel Jewish” during one episode and writing a book about Jesus, only to undermine them. He thrives by pitting members of enemy religions against each other whether it’s liberal and conservative Christians or secular and religious Jews.

Nothing better could or should be expected from Reza Aslan. “The Believer” is xenophobia masquerading as tolerance and sectarianism dressed up as universalism. Aslan’s episode on Jews in Israel is exactly what you ought to expect from a slick Hamas apologist. Hindus are likewise in the way of Islamic expansionism. As are Christians. Depicting non-Muslims as bizarre normalizes Islamic violence.

Something more ought to be expected from CNN.

The media has long thrived on mocking conservative Christians. It’s fairly casual about taking swipes at Orthodox Jews. But “The Believer” expanded its hit list to Hindus. How many others will there be?

Islam is involved in conflicts with every major religion on earth. How many religions is CNN ready to allow Aslan to smear? How long before “The Believer” heads to Myanmar to settle scores with the Buddhist monks who are defending themselves against Muslim violence? Or to Sudan to go after the Animists facing Muslim persecution? Islamists have no shortage of enemies. Neither will CNN.

CNN won’t report the truth about Islamic terror. Yet it is ready to offend every other religion on earth.

Originally published in FrontPageMag.