Daniel Greenfield, Author at Israel Rising

December 27, 2016

The Light of Chanukah

A candle is a brief flare of light. A wick dipped in oil burns and then goes out again. The light of Chanukah appears to follow the same narrative. Briefly there is light and warmth and then darkness again.

Out of the exile of Babylon, the handful that returned to resettle and rebuild the land faced the might of new empires. The Jews who returned from the exile of one evil empire some twenty-six hundred years ago were forced to decide whether they would be a people with their own faith and history, or the colony of another empire, with its history and beliefs.

Jerusalem’s wealthy elites threw in their lot with the empire and its ways. But out in the rural heartland where the old ways where still kept, a spark flared to life. Modi’in. Maccabee.

And so war came between the handfuls of Jewish Maccabee partisans and the armies of Antiochus IV’s Selecuid empire. A war that had its echoes in the past and would have it again in the future as lightly armed and untrained armies of Jewish soldiers would go on to fight in those same hills and valleys against the Romans and eventually the armies of six Arab nations.

The Syrian Greek armies were among the best of their day. The Maccabees were living in the backwaters of Israel, a nation that had not been independently ruled since the armies of Babylon had flooded across the land, destroying everything in their path.

In the wilderness of Judea a band of brothers vowed that they would bow to no man and let no foreigners rule over their land. Apollonius brought his Samaritan forces against the brothers, and Judah, first among the Macabees, killed him, took his sword and wore it for his own.

Seron, General of the army of Coele-Syria, brought together his soldiers, along with renegade Jewish mercenaries, and was broken at Beit Haran. The Governor of Syria dispatched two generals, Nicanor, and Gorgias, with forty thousand soldiers and seven thousand horsemen to conquer Judea, destroy Jerusalem and abolish the whole Jewish nation forever. So certain were they of victory that they brought with them merchant caravans to fill with the Hebrew slaves of a destroyed nation.

Judah walked among his brothers and fellow rebels and spoke to them of the thing for which they fought; “O my fellow soldiers, no other time remains more opportune than the present for courage and contempt of dangers; for if you now fight manfully, you may recover your liberty, which, as it is a thing of itself agreeable to all men, so it proves to be to us much more desirable, by its affording us the liberty of worshiping God.

“Since therefore you are in such circumstances at present, you must either recover that liberty, and so regain a happy and blessed way of living, which is that according to our laws, and the customs of our country, or to submit to the most opprobrious sufferings; nor will any seed of your nation remain if you be beat in this battle. Fight therefore manfully; and suppose that you must die, though you do not fight; but believe, that besides such glorious rewards as those of the liberty of your country, of your laws, of your religion, you shall then obtain everlasting glory.

“Prepare yourselves, therefore, and put yourselves into such an agreeable posture, that you may be ready to fight with the enemy as soon as it is day tomorrow morning.”

Though the Macabees were but three thousand, starving and dressed in bare rags, the God for whom they fought and their native wits and courage, gave them victory over thousands and tens of thousands. Worn from battle, the Macabees did not flee back into their Judean wilderness, instead they went on to Jerusalem and its Temple, to reclaim their land and their God, only to find the Temple and the capital in ruins.

The Macabees had fought courageously for the freedom to worship God once again as their fathers had, but courage alone could not make the Menorah burn and thus renew the Temple service again. Yet it had not been mere berserker’s courage that had brought them this far. Like their ancestors before them who had leaped into furnaces and the raging sea, they had dared the impossible on faith. Faith in a God who watched over his nation and intervened in the affairs of men. And so on faith they poured the oil of that single flask in the Menorah, oil that could only last for a single day. And then having done all they could, the priests and sons of priests who had fought through entire armies to reach this place, accepted that they had done all they could and left the remainder in the hands of the Almighty.

If they had won by the strength of their hands alone, then the lamps would burn for a day and then flicker out. But if it had been more than mere force of arms that had brought them here, if it had been more than mere happenstance that a small band of ragged and starving rebels had shattered the armies of an empire, then the flames of the Menorah would burn on.

The sun rose and set again. The day came to its end and the men watched the lights of the Menorah to see if they would burn or die out. And if the flame in their hearts could have kindled the lamps, they would have burst into bright flame then and there. Darkness fell that night and still the lamps burned on.

For eight days and nights the Menorah burned on that single lonely pure flask of oil, until more could be found, and the men who for a time had been soldiers and had once again become priests, saw that while it may be men who kindle lamps and hearts, it is the Almighty who provides them with the fuel of the spirit through which they burn.

120 years after the Maccabees drove out the foreign invaders and their collaborators, another foreign invader, Herod, the son of Rome’s Arab governor, was placed on the throne by the Roman Empire, disposing of the last of the Maccabean kings and ending the brief revival of the Jewish kingdom.

The revived kingdom had been a plaything in the game of empires. Exiled by Babylon, restored by Persia, conquered by the Greeks, ground under the heel of the remnants of Alexander’s empire, briefly liberated by the Parthians, tricked into servitude and destroyed by Rome. The victory of the Maccabean brothers in reclaiming Jerusalem was a brief flare of light in the dark centuries and even that light was shadowed by the growing darkness.

The fall of the Roman Republic and the civil wars of the new empire, its uncontrollable spending and greed made it hopelessly corrupt. Caesar repaid Jewish loyalty by rewarding the Arab-Idumean murderers of Jewish kings, and his successors saw the Jewish state as a way to bring in some quick money. Out went the Jewish kings, in came the son of Rome’s tax collector, Herod.

The promises made by Senate to the Maccabees ceased to matter. Imperial greed collided with Jewish nationalism in a war that for a brief shining moment seemed as if it might end in another Chanukah, but ended instead in massacre and atrocity. The exiles went forth once again, some on foot and some in slave ships. Israel became Palestine. Jerusalem was renamed and resettled. The long night had begun.

But no darkness lasts forever.

Two thousand years after the Jews had come to believe that wars were for other people and miracles meant escaping alive, Jewish armies stood and held the line against an empire and the would be empires of the region.And now the flame still burns, though it is flickering. Sixty-eight years is a long time for oil to burn, especially when the black oil next door seems so much more useful to the empires and republics across the sea. And the children of many of those who first lit the flame no longer see the point in that hoary old light.

But that old light is still the light of possibilities. It burns to remind us of the extraordinary things that our ancestors did and of the extraordinary assistance that they received. We cannot always expect oil to burn for eight days, just as we cannot always expect the bullet to miss or the rocket to fall short. And yet even in those moments of darkness the reminder of the flame is with us for no darkness lasts forever and no exile, whether of the body of the spirit, endures. Sooner or later the spark flares to life again and the oil burns again. Sooner or later the light returns.

It is the miracle that we commemorate because it is a reminder of possibilities. Each time we light a candle or dip a wick in oil, we release a flare of light from the darkness comes to remind us of what was, is and can still be.

Originally posted on Sultan Knish.

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December 26, 2016

US SHOULD NOT ONLY DEFUND UN BUT WITHDRAW FROM IT

Let’s take our $3 billion and go.

The United States pays 22% of the total UN budget. What we get for our $3 billion a year is a corrupt organization whose dysfunctional and hostile agencies are united in opposing us around the world.

The United Nations does only two things consistently and effectively: waste money and bash Israel. Sometimes it manages to do both at the same time.

After an extended, and no doubt costly, visit to the region, the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women blamed Muslim men beating their wives on Israeli settlements.

No wonder the UN Security Council just condemned them. Who wouldn’t rightfully be upset that Jews living in Jerusalem somehow causes poor Mohammed to batter his wife?

The Jewish State is the UN’s scapegoat for anything and everything. The Palestinian Authority blamed Israel at the UN for Global Warming. WHO denounced Israel for violating “health rights.” And even when Muslim terrorists stab Israelis, it’s still Israel’s fault.

The latest anti-Israel vote at the UN has led to calls to defund the corrupt organization which, even when it isn’t actively trying to hurt us or our allies, is making the world worse every which way it can.

Just this summer the UN admitted that it had spread cholera that killed tens of thousands in Haiti. Sexual abuse allegations against its staffers were up 25% last year. In the spring, the UN admitted that peacekeepers from three countries had raped over 100 girls in only one African country. That’s not the kind of international cooperation that any of the organization’s founders had in mind.

Here’s what we get for our $3 billion.

UNRWA schools are turning out students who want to fight for ISIS. The UN’s email system has been used to distribute child pornography. UN staff members have smuggled drugs, attacked each other with knives and pool cues, not to mention a tractor. This month the UN marked Anti-Corruption Day despite refusing to fight its own corruption. The former President of the UN General Assembly was arrested on bribery charges last year. He had also headed UNICEF’s executive board. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is battling accusations of bribery.

Some of this might be defensible if the UN did anything useful. It doesn’t. It’s just a slush fund for redistributing our money to a vast UN bureaucracy and anyone willing to bribe it for benefits.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded to the UN vote by beginning the process of defunding the UN. And there’s every reason in the world for us to also stop tossing money at the United Nations.

It’s something that we and every sane country should have done decades ago. If you give money to the UN, it will end up anywhere and everywhere except where it’s supposed to go. But defunding the UN isn’t enough. There is no reason for us to remain there at all.

The United Nations has never met any of its lofty goals. During the Cold War it became a playground for the Communist powers. The USSR, the second signatory to the UN charter, helped force out the first signatory, Taiwan. Even while the treaty was being signed, it was taking over Poland, the 51^st signatory.

These days, the United Nations is a forum for Islamist powers and the rotting remains of the Communist front to continue its war against the free world while seducing weak-minded nations into going along.

We are not making the world a better place by being members of this anti-American organization which vacillates between being evil and useless.

You can always count on UN peacekeeping troops to run away whenever they might be called on to use force. The head of the peacekeeping mission in South Sudan was fired by the UN for refusing to protect aid workers, including Americans, who were being raped and assaulted.

One woman, who was raped by 15 attackers, had even contacted specific UN battalions. And nothing.

The UN was brought into being in the aftermath of the horrors of World War II. Instead of ending “the scourge of war,” the UN has a solid track record of uselessness and complicity in the face of genocide.

Israel was the first to alert the UN to Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia. But Moscow and its Syrian ally conspired to protect the Communist dictatorship. The UN did not condemn the killing. And only a generation later did it convene the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, which has been running for almost twenty years. It took ten years to arrest Brother Number Three, the Foreign Minister of the Communist terror state, whose lies the United Nations chose to believe when the butchery was taking place.

He died six years later while still on trial.

The UN has been apologizing for its non-response to the Rwandan genocide for decades. But apologizing for not doing anything is what the United Nations does best. That and condemn Israel.

Earlier this month, the UN Security Council couldn’t even manage to pass a ceasefire resolution on Syria. Venezuela, which championed the anti-Israel resolution, took time out from starving its own people to protect Assad. Why in the world would anyone take this vote, or any UN vote, seriously?

The UN’s Human Rights Council members include China, Cuba, Russia, Saudi Arabia and, of course, Venezuela. UN Women, the body dedicated to empowering women, includes China, which forces women to have abortions; Pakistan, where women can be murdered by their male relatives for marrying on their own; and Iran, where it’s practically illegal for a woman to leave the house.

The United Nations does not promote its own ideals. Or ours. Instead, it sanctimoniously violates them. Providing every brutal dictatorship with equal representation hasn’t ushered in an age of human rights. Allowing Islamic terrorists and the radical left to denounce their enemies hasn’t made the world better. And throwing $3 billion a year at the towering UN swamp on Turtle Bay only wastes our time and money.

If we want to promote human rights worldwide, the first step is real accountability. If you want a loan, don’t cry to us about your poverty. Hold free and open elections. Toss away your blasphemy laws and free your political prisoners. That is a lot more likely to bring about human rights than buildings of scuttling UN bureaucrats moving around pieces of paper and dining out in posh restaurants.

The UN doesn’t share our ideals. It’s time to build our closest alliances with the countries that do.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has called the 2030 agenda a “Declaration of Interdependence.” We must declare our independence from the UN’s interdependency of corruption and tyranny.

We should defund and withdraw. Where quarreling diplomats once preened in the tower above Turtle Bay, seagulls will soar and young couples will walk with their children. The billions we waste on the UN will go toward taking care of our people. And once we are free of the UN, we will actually be able to promote real human rights instead of pandering to the dictators and Islamists of the United Nations.

Like the League of Nations, the United Nations is a failed experiment. The only difference is that, despite decades of wars, genocides and terror, we still haven’t pulled the plug.

President Trump will have the opportunity to pull out of the UN and drain the swamp in Turtle Bay.

Originally posted on FrontPageMag.

December 22, 2016

TRUMP’S ISRAEL AMBASSADOR WILL DRAIN THE TWO-STATE SOLUTION SWAMP

It’s time to end the “Palestinian” hijacking of the US-Israel relationship.

Ten years ago, a guy from Queens made a trip out during a snowstorm to pay a condolence call to a guy on Long Island on the passing of a Rabbi who was also his father. The guy from Queens is now President-elect and the man he was visiting became his close adviser and his choice for ambassador to Israel.

Last week, Trump gave his pro-Israel Jewish supporters an early Chanukah gift. He picked an ambassador who actually likes the Jewish State and hates Islamic terrorists.

It’s supposed to be the other way around.

Ambassador Dan Shapiro, Obama’s emissary to the country he hated almost as much as America, had denounced Israel on the day that a Jewish mother of six who died protecting her children from an Islamic terrorist encouraged to kill Jews by the Palestinian Authority, was being buried.

Shapiro has warned that our backing for Israel is contingent on Israel’s support for a PA-Hamas Islamic terror state inside its own borders and that Netanyahu’s lack of enthusiasm for that terror state “raises questions about Israel’s real intentions.”

But Trump has decided to go with David Friedman, a friend of Israel, instead of an enemy. And the enemies of the Jewish State are united in their fury against Ambassador David Friedman.

“J Street is vehemently opposed to the nomination of David Friedman to be Ambassador to Israel.” the Soros funded anti-Israel group declared. Friedman has been a longtime critic of the hate group, comparing its support for Islamic terror against Israel to its key funder’s Nazi collaborating past.

The head of J Street is so upset that he appears to have found religion. “Lord help friends of Israel if someone like David Friedman is making US policy on Israel rather than John Kerry,” Jeremy ben Ami whined.

The Lord just might be helping Israel by sending Kerry back to Nantucket and David Friedman to Jerusalem. The anti-Israel media was already sputtering early this month when Friedman skipped Kerry’s rant against Israel to attend an event for the Israeli town of Beit El (Bethel or House of God) where Judah Maccabee had his command center in the battle against Antiochus IV that gave us Chanukah.

Our next ambassador chose the House of God and the Maccabees over John Forbes Kerry.

Trump had personally donated to a Jewish school in Beit El. “If I would have known he would be elected president, I would have saved the check,” the town’s co-founder said.

This infuriates the left which believes that the House of God ought to be turned over to Muslim terrorists to become the House of Allah, Jihad and of Kassam rockets falling on Israeli cities.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin of Peace Now, who has charged Israel with apartheid, claimed that it blows up Palestinian babies and praised the “positive consequences” of the racist Muslim terror intifada against the Jews, was most unhappy.

“This man will dismantle everything … State Department policy on the settlements, two states … It’s beyond comprehension,” she sputtered.

To which the only rational response can be… good.

There is no Two State Solution. And there never was. The Islamic terrorists in Gaza and the West Bank want one Islamic state just as much as ISIS does. They stopped even pretending to negotiate years ago. The term “Two State Solution” is an excuse for funding Islamic terrorists inside Israel on the pretext that after decades of rejecting peace and co-existence, they will one day change their minds and play nice.

As long as Israel offers them enough land to build their terror state on.

The “settlements”, a bigoted reference to Jews living in parts of Israel conquered by Muslim invaders in 1948 and liberated by Israelis in 1967, is their excuse for why Muslim terrorists still haven’t made peace.

You can’t expect the Palestinian Authority, funded by US taxpayers, to stop stabbing Israeli mothers as long as there are Jews living in parts of Jerusalem that they want to incorporate into their terror state.

Ambassador David Friedman wants to toss these Goebbelsian lies about Israel aside. He doesn’t believe that a Two State Solution in which an Islamic terror state cuts Israel in half will solve anything except the problem of Israel’s existence.

He knows that the lack of peace isn’t caused by Jews living in Jerusalem, but by Muslim terror.

The Two State Solution allowed Muslim terrorists in Israel to take the US-Israel relationship hostage. These Islamic terrorists of the Palestinian Authority got veto power even over the location of our embassy in Jerusalem. Trump and Friedman want to free our relationship with Israel from the terrorists.

But much of the establishment wants to keep the Palestinian Authority hostage crisis going by appointing hostile hacks to poison the relationship and keep the terrorists in charge. The Foggy Bottom hacks we dispatch to Israel and around the world aren’t supposed to like Israel. Despising the Jewish State is a basic qualification for the job.

Our man in Tel Aviv, in a bizarrely out of touch embassy located more than half the country’s width away from its center of government, must ceaselessly lecture the Israelis on the evils of Jews living in Jerusalem while warning them that our support is based entirely on Israel’s to efforts to create an Islamic terror state inside its borders. Meanwhile the Jerusalem consulate will focus on outreach to the Islamic terror state while refusing to even admit that there are Jews in Jerusalem.

That’s why the establishment is madder at Friedman than a wet cat soaked in a barrel of gasoline.

David Friedman is a “hard-liner” and “right-wing”. David Remnick at the New Yorker fumes that Friedman is a bankruptcy lawyer from Long Island. He probably doesn’t even get invited to any of Remnick’s cocktail parties. But the President of the United States wasn’t supposed to be a guy from Queens who went to Wharton, but a Yale or Harvard type. And the ambassador to Israel is supposed to be a career Foreign Service Officer who has been around the region since the invention of syphilis.

Not a guy from Long Island who doesn’t know enough to bemoan Israel’s “rightward” drift with the best of them at a Georgetown bar. Like so much else, this wasn’t supposed to happen.

The media whines that David Friedman is unfit because he isn’t a professional diplomat. It didn’t have a thing to say when Obama handed out ambassadorships to the UK, Canada, Italy, Germany and France to anyone who raised over six figures for his dirty campaigns.

Obama gave John Kerry’s cousin, married to the heiress of the Jack Daniel’s liquor empire, the ambassadorships of Sweden and the United Kingdom after raising millions for him. Not only isn’t anyone involved in this disgusting affair ashamed of it, but the “ambassador’s” official bio on the embassy site boasts that he was “among the first to join Barack Obama’s National Finance Committee”.

Obama made a soap opera producer who raised over $500K, the ambassador to Hungary and the producer of Dr. Dolittle 2, who raised millions for him, the ambassador to Denmark.

When the media lectures on Friedman’s unfitness, remember what they and their boss consider “fit”.

Behind all that outrage about Friedman is the fear that the Big Lie which has fed Islamic terrorism in Israel, America and around the world is about to come toppling down. Trump is threatening to drain the swamp of Foggy Bottom where the State Department has long sabotaged our relationship with Israel.

And the Two State Solution, the Palestinian Authority with its hundreds of millions in stolen taxpayer money, the professional critics of Israel who blame a thousand years of Muslim anti-Semitism on a Jewish family living in Jerusalem, and all of Foggy Bottom are a swamp that badly needs draining.

A decade ago, a guy from Queens visited a guy from Long Island to pay his respects. Next year the two men may transform our foreign policy toward Israel and drain the swamp of the Two State Solution.

Originally Posted on FrontpageMag.

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December 21, 2016

LIES AND HYPOCRISY OVER ALEPPO

Where are the tears for Aleppo’s Christians and Jews?

250,000 Christians lived in Aleppo before the Sunni-Shiite Islamic civil war began. Today their numbers have fallen to 40,000.

There were no worldwide protests over this ethnic cleansing of Christians from Aleppo as there are over the fall of the Sunni Islamic state whose Jihadis are euphemistically described as rebels. There were no photos of crying Christian children blanketing every media outlet. But today you can hardly open a newspaper without seeing a teary Sunni Muslim kid allegedly being evacuated from Aleppo.

Given a chance, the weeping Sunni Muslims did to their Christian neighbors in Aleppo what they had done to them back during the Aleppo Massacre a hundred years ago when they were upset that the decline of Islamic Sharia power led to Christians gaining some civil rights. The Jewish population of Aleppo, which had once made up 5% of the city, had already been wiped out in the 1947 Muslim riots.

The last Jewish family was evacuated from Aleppo to escape the Sunni Jihadis two years ago.

The destruction of the Jewish and Christian communities of Aleppo happened without a fraction of the hysterical tumult over the defeat of the Sunni Jihadis and their fellow Muslim religious dependents.

“Aleppo will join the ranks of those events in world history that define modern evil, that stain our conscience decades later,” Samantha Power declared at the United Nations.

Why doesn’t the ethnic cleansing of 210,000 Christians stain Power’s conscience? Or the church bombings by Islamists in Egypt, the stabbings of Jewish women in Israel and the Boko Haram genocide of Christians in Nigeria? True modern evil is the righteous conviction of liberals that only Muslim lives matter and that their Christian, Jewish and other non-Muslim victims somehow have it coming.

The fall of the Sunni theocracy is denounced as an outrage that will stain the conscience of the world. Journalists have taken a break from their ski vacations to lecture us on how we should have done something. That “something” being the thing they didn’t want us to do in Iraq, where Saddam Hussein had butchered hundreds of thousands, but that is somehow now a moral imperative in Syria.

Why do the Sunni Muslims of Aleppo matter while the ethnically cleansed Christians of Aleppo don’t? And why was removing Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, a crime that liberals still howl about while removing Assad, an Alawite Shiite, is a moral imperative? Because the “righteousness” axis of our foreign policy is controlled by the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, the Sunni Saudis and the rest of their Sunni Gulfie ilk.

The Muslim Brotherhood set our agenda for the Arab Spring. It’s why our government and our human rights organization backed the popular overthrow of Mubarak, but fought the popular overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Morsi. Kenneth Roth, the head of Human Rights Watch, an organization which despite its name has solicited money from the Saudis, the sugar daddies of the Sunni Jihad, sneers at Copts for supporting the “persecution” of the Muslim Brotherhood. That’s not just Orwellian. It’s evil.

The outrage over Aleppo is a surreal partnership between Islamist butchers and their left-wing enablers.

“Are you truly incapable of shame?” Samantha Power demanded of Syria, Russia and Iran at the UN.

It goes without saying that three brutal dictatorships whose crimes run the gamut from raping teenage girls so that they won’t die as virgins and be allowed into Islamic paradise to radioactive poisonings of its political opponents have nothing that resembles shame or conscience.

But where is Samantha Power’s shame? The Iranian advance in Aleppo is funded by illegal cash shipments that Obama put on unmarked cargo planes and delivered to Iran’s Shiite Jihadists. Iran’s military budget increased 39% thanks to Obama’s cargo pallets full of Swiss Francs and Euros.

The barrel bombs that Power so angrily condemns were bought and paid for by her own boss. They were enabled by every American liberal who switched from defending the proposed Iranian nuclear genocide of millions of Jews to bewailing the Iranian attack on the Muslim Brotherhood in Aleppo.

Where is their shame? Is the American leftist even capable of shame anymore?

Obama’s inaction in Syria wasn’t caused by any philosophical struggle over the limits of intervention, as his media lackeys would have us to believe. The truth is uglier, simpler and more outrageous.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner couldn’t make up his mind if he wanted to back the Sunni or Shiite Islamists. Russia, which went all in on the Shiites, won. Obama tried to play both Islamist sides, funneling arms to the Sunni Jihadists in Syria and cash pallets to the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. He backed the Shiite regime in Baghdad over the Sunnis in Iraq. But he aided the Sunni Jihadis in Syria over the Shiite government in Damascus. Yet he was afraid to go all in for fear of trashing the Iran nuke sellout that even he admits will create a Shiite bomb in a little over a decade.

All the noise over Aleppo doesn’t testify to an atrocity, but to the enormous power of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Saudi lobby to control not only our politicians, but our national narratives.

There is no doubt that the Shiite Jihadist gangs will extract their blood price from Sunnis in Aleppo, that money and gems will disappear, women will be raped and bodies will wind up in mass graves. But the death toll will fall far short of the hysterical rhetoric about Rwanda. And what will happen to Sunnis in Aleppo is the same thing that happened to Shiites when Sunni Jihadists seized a town or village.

There are no good guys in an Islamic civil war. Both sides operate by Mohammed’s ancient Islamic rules that treat the property and women of conquered populations as the rightful loot of the attackers. The atrocities of Shiites and Sunnis, Iranians and Alawites, ISIS, Al-Nusra and the countless Sunni bands are not aberrations from civilized norms, they are the entire horrid purpose of this Islamic conflict.

There are no innocent victims in an Islamic civil war because neither side believes in anything except demonstrating the Allahu Akbaring supremacy of their religious doctrine by subjugating the other.

Beheading captives, raping their wives and looting their belongings was how Islamic Jihadis, dating back to Mohammed, knew that Allah was on their side and favored their murderous cause.

The Jewish population of the Middle East now exists almost entirely in Israel, protected by guns wielded, as often as not, by the descendants of Jewish refugees from Islamic oppression in Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Iran. The Christian population, lacking an independent state of its own, continues to dwindle, dependent on the shaky goodwill of dictators like Mubarak or Assad who find them temporarily useful.

There is no future for non-Muslims in the Muslim world. Christians and Jews in the Middle East first achieved civil rights when European powers gained sway over the region. As Muslim migrants swarm into Europe, Jews and Christians now face Muslim persecution in France, Sweden and Germany.

But the media is far less interested in the tears on the face of 8-year-old Miriam Monsonego in Toulouse when a Muslim terrorist grabbed her by the hair, put a gun to her head in the schoolyard where she had been playing moments ago and pulled the trigger. The gun jammed. He switched guns and shot her. Then, as she lay bleeding, he lifted up her little head and shot the dying Jewish girl two more times.

Muslims in France consider the Muslim terrorist who did this a hero. A child was even named after him.

The Sunni Muslim Jihadis fleeing Aleppo like rats are the same breed of Allah’s killers as the murderer of a little girl in Toulouse, as the hijackers of September 11, as the San Bernardino shooters, the Boston Marathon bombers, the Benghazi militias, the rapists of Yazidi girls and the bombers of Coptic churches.

They are human predators that have nothing that resembles a conscience as we understand it. Their religious doctrine has taught them that preying on non-Muslims and the wrong kind of Muslims is their duty. They believe that their rapes and murders are proof that they love Allah and Allah loves them.

It is as impossible for us to coexist with Islamic supremacists as it was for the Christians and Jews of Aleppo. You can share a room with a tiger, but eventually the tiger will try to eat you.

Aleppo is a tragedy, but not because of the hypocritical theater of lies that the media has put on for us. The tragedy of Aleppo isn’t that of the Sunni Jihadis who failed to conquer the city and complete their ethnic cleansing of the last Christians living there, but of the endless war of Islam against non-Muslims.

And of the collaboration of those who call themselves liberals in that war against human civilization.

Aleppo was once a great center of civilization. Under Islam, it became a sad remnant of its former past. Whoever wins in Aleppo, it is a victory for Islamist triumphalism and a defeat for human civilization.

The bigger question is not who wins in Aleppo, but who will win in Paris, Brussels and Rome.

Originally published on FrontPageMag.

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December 19, 2016

THE ANTI-JEWISH LEFT PROTESTS CHANUKAH AND TRUMP

The left’s latest target is a Chanukah party where it will be protesting Muslims on behalf of Muslims.

If you’re confused, imagine how confused they are.

The Azerbaijani embassy of a secular Muslim country is co-hosting a Chanukah party with the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. But the Azerbaijani embassy had made the political faux pas of obtaining space at the Trump International Hotel in Washington D.C.

Outside the usual anti-Israel contingent of the anti-Jewish left, If Not Now and Jewish Voice for Peace, will be screaming hate. Meanwhile some more organized left-wing Jewish groups, the Union for Reform Judaism, Women of Reform Judaism, the National Council of Jewish Women, along with the anti-Israel activists of Ameinu and Peace Now, not to mention HIAS, which can’t wait to bring the synagogue bombers of tomorrow to America today, are boycotting a Muslim party to protest in favor of Muslims.

Some are demanding that Trump speak out in favor of Muslims before they’ll attend the Muslim party. If they were any more mixed up, they would be tying their shoelaces to someone else’s shoes.

The Workmen’s Circle, which was last relevant when Bundists were helping the Communist butchers of the USSR hunt down Rabbis and religious Jews for the gulags, announced that it was boycotting an event hosted by a Muslim country because Trump is anti-Muslim.

When it comes to Trump, a militant atheist organization is now more Muslim than the Muslims.

Azerbaijan is not the first Muslim country to hold an event at the Trump International Hotel. It won’t be the last. Why does the National Council of Jewish Women seem more outraged about being in a hotel with Trump’s name on it than actual Muslims? Who made the Union for Reform Judaism their Imam?

But when leftists weren’t accusing Trump of being anti-Muslim, they were outraged that the Trump International Hotel was accommodating Muslim countries such as Bahrain and Azerbaijan because, like every single Muslim country on the planet, they have human rights issues. If you don’t have relations with Muslim countries that violate human rights, you can’t have relations with any Muslim countries.

Was the problem that Trump was anti-Muslim or that he was taking money from Muslims?

The deranged left couldn’t decide. Numerous contradictory letters blasted Trump for being anti-Muslim and for doing business with the Muslims of Azerbaijan. A weary Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, asked, “Do you think the president-elect knows who rents rooms for two hours?”

Trump may not, but a left that has lost its mind over Trump most certainly does.

To make the outrage even more ridiculous, the Azerbaijani embassy only picked the Trump International Hotel because of its proximity to the White House so that some of the same left-wing leaders boycotting the party could attend Obama’s Chanukah party and their party on the same night.

Of somewhat less interest to them, but more relevance, the Trump International Hotel, the venue where protesters will arrive clutching their grimy copies of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, was one of the few that could handle Kosher. After the election, I listened to a Rabbi recall how pleased Trump had been at being shown how the kitchen of his Mar-a-Lago resort had been made Kosher.

Unlike JVP, If Not Now, Ameinu, Peace Now and the Union for Reform Judaism, Trump likes Jews.

The anti-Trump mob that loves Muslims, unless they book a room at the Trump International, hates Jews. The party is taking place during a major visit by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to Azerbaijan. The most vocal opponents of the event don’t just hate Trump, they also hate Israel. They hate Israel so much that they’re discovered a sudden interest in the human rights situation in Azerbaijan.

They couldn’t have found Azerbaijan on a map a month ago to save their lives. Now after 5 minutes of googling, they’re instant experts on the human rights situation in a country whose name they can’t spell.

Azerbaijan’s human rights are vastly superior to its enemy, Iran, whose government was illegally supplied with billions of dollars by the Obama regime in a deal that they vigorously supported. The National Council of Jewish Women endorsed the Iran nuclear sellout. Ameinu gathered signatures in support of the hollow agreement which will let Iran go nuclear. Peace Now rallied its members to thank the politicians who supported the pass for Iran’s nuclear program and to yell at those who didn’t.

Ann Toback of the Workmen’s Circle fumed that the party “legitimizes a corrupt country where freedoms have been suppressed”. This is the same radical organization that put out a statement backing the Iran deal which legitimizes a genocidal terror state where freedom hangs at the end of a noose.

The left likes to pretend that it hates Trump because it loves Muslims. But the truth is that it doesn’t love anyone. Not even its Muslim allies for whom it pokes safety pins through its sweaty shirts and dirty blouses. The left does not love. It only hates. It hates Trump, because it hates America. It hates Israel, because it hates Jews.

It rages about the “normalization” of anti-Semitism even as it endorses Keith X. Ellison who defended the anti-Semitism of Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, who accuses Israel of being an apartheid state and Jews of being mobilized by Israel to do its bidding. J Street boss Jeremy Ben Ami insists that Ellison’s views “are perfectly consistent with the views of the majority of American Jews”.

That’s the normalization of anti-Semitism in black and white. Trump isn’t behind it. The anti-Jewish left is. The anti-Jewish left has lost its morals and its mind. Its protest of a Chanukah party is an ugly tantrum in a teapot. It has become so deranged that it’s protesting Muslims on behalf of Muslims. But anything goes when it comes to hating America. Anything goes when it comes to hating Jews.

Originally Posted on FrontPageMag

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