Tuesday, June 20, 2017

"The world is killing us. Israel is saving us.”

Why Israel is saving Syrian rebels

‘All my life I was told Israel is my enemy. But only Israel is our friend,’ says one fighter from a hospital in Tzfat.
Terry Glavin
June 20, 2017

Molhem Barakat /Reuters
Free Syrian Army fighters carry a fellow fighter wounded during clashes with government forces (Molhem Barakat /Reuters)

On a hospital bed at the Ziv Medical Center, high in the Upper Galilee Mountains, a Syrian rebel who goes by the name Ramadan was still wincing in pain from a bullet that had torn through his right shoulder only 10 days before. But he said there was something important he wanted to tell me. The gruff-voiced, barrel-chested fighter sat up on his hospital bed and began.
“All the world is killing us, all the world,” he said. “All my life I was told Israel is my enemy. I grew up like that, to believe that Israel is the devil. But all the world is against us, and only Israel is our friend. The world is killing us. Israel is saving us.”
How it came to pass that Ramadan ended up in an Israeli hospital in a picturesque mountaintop city said to have been founded by Shem, the son of Noah, is straightforward enough, even with some of the details necessarily left out—Ramadan’s real name, for instance, and the name of his home village, where his worried wife and two sons were waiting for him to come home.
“I am a fighter for the Free Syrian Army. I was in a battle to protect my village from soldiers of Bashar Assad. They were attacking us,” Ramadan said. In the fighting, he was hit by a round fired from an MG3 machine gun. It tore open his upper arm and shredded his shoulder. The FSA unit won the battle. “My village is still free,” Ramadan said. But he’d been severely wounded. He could have bled to death.
“One of my team had a friend from a village near the Israeli border, so they took me there right away. They put me on a donkey. The donkey carried me up to the Israeli border. And then the Israeli soldiers brought me here.”
What is not so straightforward is how it came to pass that more than 3,000 Syrians have been taken in by Israeli hospitals over the past four years.
The story begins with a single, unofficial act of mercy in the middle of the night, on the Golan Heights, in the wee hours of Saturday, Feb. 16, 2013. Seven badly wounded Syrians had been brought to the Syrian side of the border fence. They were found lying on the ground, on mattresses. A snap decision was made at the scene to medevac them straight to the Ziv Medical Center at Tzfat. Their lives were saved. They were returned to the border 10 days later.
Within months, a small-scale, clandestine medical evacuation had become a broad-daylight triage operation, but not without first finding a resolution to a political nightmare and a vexing moral dilemma.
When the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) saved the lives of those seven fighters, the Israeli government knew that word was sure to get out among the Syrian rebel groups that help was at hand, courtesy of the IDF. But word would also get out to the Assad regime, and to the various Islamist factions at war with both the FSA and Assad.
The Israeli government was determined to avoid becoming embroiled in the Syrian catastrophe, but border skirmishes with Assad’s forces—rockets fired at Israel, retaliatory jet fighter strikes—were becoming more frequent. Hezbollah had enlisted as a proxy army for Assad, and Israeli fighter jets were increasingly hitting Lebanon-bound Hezbollah weapons shipments inside Syria.
So how to sort out the problem of the wounded Syrians being brought to the border fence on the Golan Heights? That job fell to Doctor Salman Zarka, a former IDF Colonel and a veteran of the Second Hezbollah War in Lebanon. Zarka had served as the medical corps commander for the IDF’s Northern Command, and one of his key IDF duties had been to plan for the possibility of war with Syria, which had lost the Golan to Israel in the Six Day War of 1967.
Most of the fighting during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which began with a surprise attack on Israel by Syria and Egypt, had taken place in the Sinai Desert and the Golan. Zarka had also served with the IDF’s Golan division. Zarka is a Druze—neither Jews nor Muslims, the Druze people venerate Jethro of Midian, father-in-law of Moses, as their holiest ancestor-prophet. Born in the Israeli Druze village of Peki’in, Zarka was familiar with the Golan’s every nook and cranny.
“Of course we wanted to provide medical support, but we had decided not to take part in this internal conflict,” Zarka told me in an interview. “By 2013, we realized the battles were very close to our borders, and we needed to decide what to do. What is our policy? It is legitimate according to international law to close the border against your sworn enemy. But if we become involved, there are some who would say we are taking part in this internal conflict, so it would be better to say we are not involved in this. But we had other strong reasons to provide medical support.”
Zarka explained the reasoning that went into the policy debate this way: “The first thing is to be a human. The second thing is to be a physician. The third thing is to be, well, it is, I think, it is religious principles. It is written in different Jewish books, and the Torah, that we have to save lives. And it is written in the other religions too. In the Druze religion, in my religion, it is ordered that you have to save lives, so you would have to provide medical support.”
“The other thing that is very unique to the Jewish people is the imperative of the Holocaust, an understanding of what it means to be helpless. So you weigh the different reasons,” said Zarka, 52. “And I am very happy that the reason to provide medical support weighed more than other things.”
After obtaining approvals from the highest levels in Jerusalem, Zarka established a three-echelon triage system: immediate medical assistance to Syrians at the border fence, a field hospital staffed with 20 on-call doctors near the border, and a system for evacuating the worst cases directly to hospitals in the Galilee.
Israel’s border with Syria runs the length of the Golan Heights to a total of 76 km, but it’s only those portions of the Israeli-Syrian frontier controlled by the Free Syrian Army and competing Islamist groups that wounded and sick Syrians are brought to IDF posts along the border fence.
What this means is that it is quite possible that jihadists with a fanatical hatred of Jews and of Israel are being treated at the Ziv Medical Center in Tzfat, and the Western Galilee Hospital in Nahariya, as well as other Israeli medical facilities. The policy is simple: don’t ask. Everyone is to be treated according to Israeli medical standards and practices. “It is not important,” Zarka told me. “When the patient enters the emergency room, it doesn’t matter about colour or gender or country of birth or anything.”
About a third of the 3,000 or so Syrians taken in by Israel since 2013 have been treated at the Ziv Medical Center, where Zarka was appointed director in October 2014.
The flipside is that when the Syrians are discharged from hospital and brought back to the Syrian border—and they all want to go back, to be with their families, or to take up the fight again—great care is taken to conceal the Israeli origin of everything in the “care packages” they’re given. No Hebrew lettering on medications. No evidence of Israeli origin on anything. Collaboration with “the Zionist entity” invites a jihadist death sentence, and much the same from the Assad regime.
The Syrians taken in by Israel are often suffering from the most atrocious kinds of war wounds—severed limbs, bomb-blasted faces, collapsed internal organs—and they’re not all fighters. Many are children, and many are suffering from ailments not directly related to guns or bombs. The Syrian American Medical Society counted 252 attacks on Syrian health centres last year, almost all of them carried out by Assad’s forces and Russian fighters. An unconscious child in diabetic shock was rescued at the border and taken to Tzfat earlier this year. She was treated at the Ziv Medical Center for three months. Her mother was given a year’s worth of insulin and some training in how to administer it, and she and her daughter were returned to the border.
“You become their family,” Zarka said. “You celebrate holidays, birthdays, and then they go back to Syria, and we are sad they are leaving. We are not sure of their destiny.”
Most of the Syrian medical system has been destroyed in what Ban Ki-Moon, the former UN Secretary-General, has called a campaign of deliberate war crimes. But Ramadan, the Free Syrian Army fighter, was not much impressed by the UN. “The world does not want democracy. The world does not want Syrians to have freedom. The United Nations does nothing. It is for talking, that is all.
“The United Nations could take Assad out of Syria, but they do not. They do nothing.”

Monday, June 20, 2016

Stop the injustice against Islam!

Arutz Sheva


Op-Ed: Stop the injustice against Islam!

For scientists and scholars, Judaism and Christianity are as much of an ideology as communism, Maoism, Hinduism, romanticism, impressionism, etc. Yet, when it comes to Islam, scholarship is thrown out the window.
Published: Monday, June 20, 2016 11:29 AM

Why should the presupposition of all our thoughts be that Islam is perfect, and that any imperfection must surely have nothing to do with Islam?

Following the Charlie Hebdo and Hypercacher attacks in Paris in January and those in November, San Bernardino, Brussels, Tel Aviv, Orlando, and those of the past decades that recur again and again and again, I could not simply watch the spectacle of the end of the world anymore and stay silent. No, it did not all start with 9/11, and no, it did not start with the Iranian revolution of 1979.

As a person born and bred in a hard-core Muslim terror-state, as a person who grew up not in one, but two Muslim countries whose laws are more or less those of the Sharia, and as a person who lives in a European country where Islam determines what is allowed or not to be said and to be done, I can tell you that you should stop the injustice applied to Islam.

If you live in Israel, if you live in North America or somewhere in Europe where you can still think as a free individual, then you should consider yourself privileged enough to be the heir to a civilization so great, that it achieved things none others have. The superiority of Western civilization is a fact. Having a pair of eyes can be a luxury, but even if you have just one, and are not stricken with the malady of moral relativism, you get my point.

Nothing in this earthly life is perfect, except for G-d. But you very well might not believe in Him, without being killed or rendered toxic, because Western civilization will protect your rights. Nothing is perfect, and Western civilization is not, either. However being not perfect does not imply not being the best we have got so far. As heirs to this great civilization, it is in our duty to end the prejudice against Islam.

Let me tell you why.

For many years, Western philosophy and science have treated, studied, examined and ultimately criticized Judaism and Christianity. Jews, Christians, atheists, agnostics and people of other religions including Muslims themselves have studied the history of Judaism and Christianity freely, adhering to them or not, in a scientific way.

Without wanting to idealize the European history, these scientific studies on the history and nature of Judaism and Christianity have taken place without any significant incidents or violence committed against the aforementioned scientists, scholars and professors. Cartoons, movies, comedies have been made as well against and about Judaism and Christianity, with reactions going somewhere from people not even noticing them, to being a bit offended and occasional verbal retaliation.

I keep insisting on calling Judaism and Christianity by their name because calling them a “religion” is void of any sense, at least in this day and age. An ideology is a religion only if it calls for faith, and for those who have that faith. So if you do not have faith in a “religion”, you can recognize that it is a religion for others, but it is nothing less than ridiculous to consider an ideology a religion because “they say so” as if in our societies - established on the separation of church and state to various degrees -, there was a “G-d-given” list of “official” religions. And that would imply that we should treat and ultimately respect these religions equally.

What stops any person - good or bad - from claiming to be a prophet, establishing a religion, writing a “holy book”, and asking others to respect and abide by its laws? This leads me to my next point.

Consequently, in a scientific context, a religion ceases - and should cease - to be one. It should turn to be what it is, an ideology with all different aspects that it can encompass such as spirituality, afterlife, rituals, etc, for we know that different philosophical movements also discuss such matters often as seriously as religions do.

Judaism and Christianity have been studied and examined, through data acquired by scientific methods - at least as scientific as human sciences get -, and they have been subject to them as ideologies by scientists who once in their “laboratory”, regard their subjects with an effort to be as neutral as possible. Judaism and Christianity have gone through all the tests and criticism as a set of ideologies, just like any other ideology, be it artistic, be it political, or you name it.

For the scientists and scholars in the “lab” (that includes the laboratory of human sciences), Judaism and Christianity were as much of an ideology as communism, Maoism, Hinduism, romanticism, impressionism, etc.

Yet, when it comes to Islam, Western culture, our scientists, our “thinkers”, our politicians, our “scholars”, university professors and “anyone who is anyone”, throw centuries of critical thinking and scientific examination into the garbage. I beg them all. Please stop this outrageous injustice against Islam.

Please stop calling Islam a religion of peace, whereas Islam does not see itself as peaceful. Islam has never been peaceful. Muhammed was not a peaceful man, and he was not shy about it. Muslims take pride in the warriorship of the founder of their religion and in the violence he and the early Muslims committed in order to conquer foreign lands namely mass rapes and forced conversions against Persians and the neighboring peoples.

Let’s say that Muhammed was not perfect by civilized standards. But, the first men who established the “Islamic church” were not peaceful either. A peaceful Muslim has no one to look for as a role model, no tradition to see other than some fantasy about the “Golden Age” of Islam during which in Muslim-occupied Europe, Arab Muslims forced already forcibly converted Persians and second-class Jews to do great things for them.

The “Golden Age” was one in which Jews and Christians were considered as second-class citizens, paying an exuberant extra tax not to be killed for not being Muslims. We have seen better “Golden Ages” in history. Just look up the Dutch one.

I beg our policy makers, media elite, university professors, leftist loonies and multiculturalists to stop dreaming and halt the wishful thinking circus. Grow up. You are not in kindergarten anymore. If an ideology commands to kill, if terrorists who know the Koran better than you do, who know the life of Muhammed better than you do, and who go to mosque more often than you do, are motivated to kill based on Islamic ideological reasons, who are you then to lecture them and ultimately us, the victims, on what Islam is and is not?

Who on earth are you to say this has nothing to do with Islam? Will you tell us soon that Muhammed’s life had nothing to do with Islam either? The murders, the wars, the pedophilia, and the slavery?
If Islam is a religion of peace, why is it so easily “hijacked” by “radical” Muslims? Why should the presupposition of all our thoughts be that Islam is perfect, and any imperfection must surely have nothing to do with Islam?

Why do we not give this privileged status to any other “religion”, ideological movement or school? Why not simply say that Nazism was hijacked by Hitler and his bunch of murdering thugs now that we are at it? We have based all our conclusions on empirical and measurable evidence, observation and experiment for as long as science has existed. Judaism and Christianity have undergone those methods, yet when it comes to Islam we make an exception.

The fact of the matter is that it does not matter whether you can find here and there “peaceful” verses in the Koran. It does not matter anymore whether a large percentage of Muslims, no matter how large, do not want to kill you. We can not send them gifts and thank you cards for not wanting to kill infidels, gays, Jews and Christians. Not wanting to kill, is the minimum. That’s the bar for any civilized society.

The circus must stop. Do not call something which does not look like a religion, a religion. Those who dream and wishfully think of “moderate” Islam and “moderate” Muslims have as much blood on their hands as anyone else. For once I happen to agree with Erdogan the Prime Minister on Turkey of something: the term “radical” Islam is both ugly and offensive, for it considers those who are not Muslim terrorists, namely Jews and Christians, a bunch of idiots.

Are 14 centuries of forced conversions, mass rape, land appropriation, slavery, pedophilia not radical enough for those who believe in “moderate” Islam to be called “radicals”? Where is the “moderate” version of Muhammed’s life in which he did not wage genocidal wars against non-Muslims, did not take people for slavery and in which he did not marry child brides and his own adoptive daughter in law?
Where is the “moderate” version of the Koran in which there are no calls to strike terror in the heart of the unbelievers? Where is the “moderate” Koran in which Muhammed - far from being exemplary - is not considered the example for each and every Muslim to follow?

Following Muhammed’s example, means that a good Muslim is one that kills infidels, forces people into slavery, rapes children and stones the adulterers. And oh wait… that has already been happening in Syria, even though the media elite and our politicians say that has nothing to do with Islam. Oops, I guess the religion of peace gets hijacked everyday, and so easily so.


Islamophobia is the only rational reaction of a yet well-functioning brain.
And  it gets even better. Everything you see in Syria and in Iraq, has been going on for 14 centuries. Just ask the neighboring people about it. This all has been going on since the day Muhammed considered himself to be a prophet. Well a prophet who never prophesied anything. Not even according to Islam itself.

The moral relativist narrative will continue to tell you that: “Oh well you know, the Bible is violent, too …”. That emanates yet again from the absence of the very scientific empirical and measurable techniques we have used for centuries to study phenomena. The Hebrew Bible has descriptive violence, mostly used against the Hebrews themselves by their very own G-d for they had gone astray.

Any random idiot can tell the difference between the descriptive violence of the Bible and the prescriptive and imperative violence in the Koran, commanded by Allah against non-Muslims and other Muslims else the “religion of peace” determines not good enough at jihad. Islam and the global Muslim community (the ummah) is bound by the Islamic law to turn the world of infidels (which the Islamic tradition calls the world of war) into the world of Islam. Any Muslim who does not want to forcibly convert infidels or bomb them to death is either practicing taqqiya (Islamic dissimulation in order to advance their cause) or is a bad Muslim according to Islam, no matter how good he might be according to our civilized standards.
Islamophobia is the only rational reaction of a yet well-functioning brain.

The moral relativist narrative will continue tell you that you have to be tolerant. Because the G-d-less church of multiculturalism claims all is equal. According to the multiculturalist social justice warriors, all cultures are equally good and bad (well except the Western ones which are a little bit “more bad”). And all religions are equally good and bad (except for Christianity and especially Judaism who are a little bit “more bad”) and so it goes.

They will tell you that you have to respect any culture or religion that claims to be one (no matter if does not look like or act like one), even if they do not respect you. Or worse, even if they want to kill you. Why should a Jew or a Christian respect Islam, if the latter thinks of him as a second-class citizen? Well, of course sadly many do, which is not surprisingly after decades of cultural Marxism, moral relativism and civilizational emasculation and disarming feminism.

The cult of unconditional respect and tolerance towards the most intolerant of ideologies reigns in the West. Even if Islam openly expressed its will at the destruction of our way of life, that does not stop the cult of respect and tolerance from committing suicide, for that is what “unconditional” means. Enslaved.

Hitler and Stalin really missed it, didn’t they? Had they called their ideologies a religion, our moral relativists, politicians, media elite, university professors, journalists, leftist loonies and social justice warriors today would have been as much demanding as they are today, calling for tolerance and respect. It might sound funny. But look around yourself no matter where you are, it is already happening.

Unless we stop the bigotry and the injustice we employ towards Islam, we are doomed to disappear. Westerners, now more servile, docile and disarmed than ever turn so quickly to self-criticism - an admirable quality which led us to our great achievements in the past but which is solely a path to suicide. We adapt our foreign policy accordingly as not to offend the most offensive of people. We welcome “refugees”, we impose halal food on non-Muslims and shut their free speech, literally turning them into second class citizens. We put our Jewish citizens, their cemeteries and synagogues in danger and we make exceptional concessions to an ideology no other religion, ideology or community has ever been granted, yet we will lose once more.

After every attack, our politicians, our journalists and our intelligentsia rush to the media circus. After having made sure of having stated that it has nothing to do with Islam, even if the perpetrators cite the Koran chapter and verse, they proceed to condemn the “cowardly” attacks. Let’s think about this. Muslims have clearly defined their enemies (infidels and the world of war) for 14 centuries. In the recent decades, they have well-programed their invasion into the West, sucked up the social and economic benefits while doing as much harm as imaginable, training themselves more and more professionally, deceived the more and more sophisticated Western intelligence services and yet we call the attacks cowardly.

Thousands of soldiers and policemen were deployed in Paris, both in January and in November during the terror attacks in order to counter terrorists who were better trained, and as well-equipped as them. And we are not even ready to recognize the name of our enemy, put aside taking any rational meaningful actions. You be the judge. Aren’t our moral relativists, politicians, media elite, university professors, journalists, leftist loonies and social justice warriors the cowards? Don’t they have blood on their hands for bringing this terror into the heart of our lives? As the late Christopher Hitchens once famously said: “The barbarians never take a city until someone holds the gates open to them. And it's your own multicultural authorities who will do it for you."

We will lose because we are cowards, reluctant to see that Islam is not solely a “religion”, but an ideology who is here to hate and to kill. We will lose because not only don’t we think we have an enemy, but we welcome our enemy into our homes, as friends, make concessions to it and think that “all religions are equally violent”, or some other nonsense such as “moderate Muslims are our allies”. These excuses ultimately cost the lives of innocent people. Coexistence with Muslims, moderate, peaceful or any other fictional adjective for Islam kills. Multiculturalism kills.

Today more than ever, we need a total separation of Muslims and non-Muslims across the globe. This is not racist as Islam is not a race, not more than communism or Nazism were. And it is not bigoted because bigotry is putting the life of billions of innocent people who are not responsible for the existence of Islam in danger. The mythological “moderate” Muslims who are the favorites of many of our moral relativists, politicians, media elite, university professors, journalists, leftist loonies, social justice warriors and even righteous Jewish and Christian people on our side are however a part of the problem, because they believe in a murderous ideology without wanting to recognize the truth. “Moderate” Muslims also do us more harm than good. They believe in a lie that ultimately ends up killing them and killing us. Yes their “religion” does also kill them and I am sorry that it does. I happen to hold any life sacred, and I mourn the loss of any innocent life. But I feel sorrier for us - infidels - who are the victims of Islam no matter how submissively and generously we behave. So maybe after all we should not.

The later the lie of “moderate Islam” is exposed, the more innocent lives are lost. And “moderate” Muslims stand in the way of anyone who wants to expose the lie. The world the believers in “moderate” Islam have built is the one in which no one is safe anymore. Nowhere, be it in Paris, in New York, in London, in Brussels, not even in Orlando. They all have joined the club Israel has been long a senior member of. But Western politicians will never reconsider their hypocritical hateful preposterous and incessant criticisms of Israel, simply because by multiculturalist standards, Israel is too civilized for their taste. They are used to allies such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia and now Iran with all their primitive behavior towards the world, women, homosexuals and religious minorities and virtually many other innocent citizens of theirs. Yes, Zionism is too civilized for many people to appreciate.

To get back to my initial “moderate mythology” point, I have noticed that our beloved moral relativists, politicians, media elite, university professors, journalists, leftist loonies and social justice warriors have never set any lines after which their mythological “moderate” Muslims become “radical”. Where is the line after all? Does that translate into the fact that we are all already condemned to live with living time bombs before they go off? Is your nice Muslim neighbor, Muslim cab driver, Muslim butcher, who is smiley, generous, warm and hospitable the next one to kidnap you? To behead you? To come to your home, rape and murder you? Have we forgotten the case of Sébastien Selam, the young French Jewish boy whose throat his Muslim best friend decided to slit for no reason? They were childhood friends and neighbors. Sébastien’s only sin was to be Jewish, and to have a “moderate” Muslim friend. How many Muslims have committed crimes and murder against their Jewish colleagues, friends and acquaintances in Israel? Do any lives matter to you? Or only “moderate” Muslim lives matter?

Should I call it funny? Ironic? Or sad and nasty? A black comedy perhaps? Born and bred in the Middle East, with the exception of Arabic, I speak almost all of the official and non-official languages of the area, namely Hebrew, Kurdish, Persian and Turkish. In Iran, Turkey and elsewhere, whose leaders and populace are more Muslim - I believe - than our ruling elite, there exists only one form of Islam. And that is - well you guessed - just your plain adjective-less Islam. Our belief in “moderate” Islam, and our foreign and domestic policy in the West also hurts our true allies in the Middle East, the former Muslims who today are atheists or converts to other religions. It is essential to know that terms used by the ruling intellectuals such as “anti-Muslim racism”, or “Muslim atheists” presuppose that Islam is a race. This is quite racist itself, which makes it all the more surprising why atheist extremists, moral relativists, career politicians, media elite, university professors, journalists, leftist loonies, social justice warriors, feminists and Black Lives Matter activists do not point this out in order to defend former Muslims from speaking out against the atrocities inherent to their religion who targets almost all the categories cited above. Whereas they are put to death for apostasy back home, ex-Muslims are given little or no voice here in West.  No body feels the moral obligation of welcoming the persecuted ex-Muslim atheists and Christians into Europe in lieu of the flow of the so-called “refugees” which as predominantly young men look exactly like an invasive, bringing rape and terror with itself before anything else. Well, it is not the first time that Muslims orchestrate an invasion of Europe, except in the past we were not disarmed with the multiculturalism mental illness and the cult of unconditional tolerance towards anything, especially not rape and murder cultures.

Now, in order to get back to my previous point pertaining to semantics, I must state that I happen to speak English, French and a broken German as well. As any other European citizen, I have noticed the use of words such as “radical”, “moderate”, “Islamism”, “Islamist”, “extremist”, “jihadism”, and so on in our media and the mouth of our ruling pseudo-intellectual elite. Well those words originate and exist only in the West. Erdogan is not shy to disavow them.

For there is only one Islam. The same one that commands to kill. Political correctness extremism and social justice warriorship has metastasized so deep within us that now we think we know someone else’s “religion” better than themselves. We even go as far as inventing vocabulary that Muslim leaders themselves reject. This is what we are committing suicide with. While the Muslim world is laughing at us, distributing cookies and candies celebrating each terror attack in the West, especially if its victims are Jewish, we are busy making up words to exonerate Islam of all responsibility, we are busy fighting against “Islamophobia” as if it were a bad thing, we are busy making bathrooms gender neutral, we are busy importing fake invasive refugees with all their problems and rape culture and we are busy saying that after all nothing Islamic has anything to do with Islam.. We really make their job easy, don’t we?

The thing with terrorism is that terrorists succeed to terrorize. The thing with terrorism is that after what happened in Paris, in Garland, Texas and before that in Denmark and elsewhere over the cartoons of Muhammed, the next time righteous honest people want to say or do something, they think twice before they doing, and they often don’t do it. We are giving in. We are already disarmed by our politicians and by our multiculturalist and third-worldist education. We do not need to disarm ourselves more, literally and figuratively. If you are also revolted and repulsed by each terror attack, then please end the bigotry. Let this ideology of Islam stand up like a big boy that it is, and go through all examinations, studies, research and criticism any other ideology has been through, namely Judaism and Christianity. Stop the injustice against Islam. Stop saying that these terror attacks have nothing to do with Islam, because that is an unjust lie. Because Islam is all it has to do with. Because this is a lie that betrays the perpetrators whom you are so impatient to welcome in Europe and in America by undermining their efforts to reach a promised Muslim heaven of young virgins by murdering innocent people in great numbers. It also betrays the victims who die because of your lies, victims who had no influence in your policy-making enslaved by love and infatuation for the “religion of peace” and the “refugees” who ask for more nothing more than free health-care, free education, free court translators, free public transport, bombing our buses, committing mass murder in our clubs and “free” young Western girls and boys to rape.

To wrap this whole thing up, I just wish you to bring up science again. If a fatal disease were to propagate itself within a society and that quarantine was needed in order to save the lives of millions and billions, science and rationale would command that you keep two groups of people away for the common good: Those who already have the symptoms and those whose contamination you know of, even if they show no symptoms yet.

Other than that, no matter whether you are a policy-maker, a philosopher, a thinker, an activist, or a journalist, you are but a pathetic criminal who wants the death rate of victims to increasingly go higher and higher. “Moderate” Islam and “moderate” Muslims do not exist, and even if they did, not only they do not help, but they are part of the problem. When faced with mortal danger, it is perfectly normal, moral, rational and justified to paint with a broad brush.

What is immoral and irrational is condemning innocent non-Muslims to live with living time bombs, without defining a line after which a “moderate” Muslim becomes “radical”. A line that does not exist. Stop the injustice against Islam. If a “religion” at all, stop calling Islam a “religion” of peace, despite its own efforts, history and tradition to be anything but peaceful.

The writer is using a pseudonym for well-founded fear for his life.

Friday, May 27, 2016

The lessons of Nuremberg

The Times of Israel

The lessons of Nuremberg: Stand up to hate, and remember hate’s victims

MAY 3, 2016, 3:07 PM 2
MONTREAL (JTA) — Yom Hashoah arrives this year on the eve of two historic anniversaries: the 80th anniversary of the coming into effect of the Nuremberg Race Laws, which served as prologue and precursor to the Holocaust, and the 70th anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials, which served as the foundation for the development of contemporary international human rights and humanitarian law.

This historic juncture is the theme of an international legal symposium today, May 3, at Jagiellonian University in Krakow. It will be followed Wednesday by the March of the Living, when some 10,000 young people and survivors will march in remembrance and solidarity from the gates of Auschwitz to Birkenau.
We must ask ourselves two questions: What have we learned? What must we do?
The responsibility of remembrance
The first lesson is the importance of “zachor,” of remembrance of the victims defamed, demonized and dehumanized as prologue and justification for genocide, so that the mass murder of 6 million Jews, and of millions of non-Jews, is not a matter of abstract statistics.
The responsibility to preventstate-sanctioned incitement to hate and genocide
The Holocaust succeeded not only because of the industry of death — of which the crematoria are a cruel reminder — but because of the Nazis’ state-sanctioned ideology of hate. Genocide starts with teaching contempt for, and demonizing, the other. As the Canadian Supreme Court affirmed, “The Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers – it began with words.”
The responsibility to combat old/new anti-Semitism
Anti-Semitism is the oldest and most enduring of hatreds and the most lethal. If the Holocaust is a metaphor for radical evil, anti-Semitism is a metaphor for radical hatred.
From 1941 to 1944, 1.3 million people were murdered at Auschwitz – of whom 1.1 million were Jews – recalling Elie Wiesel’s dictum that “the Holocaust was a war against the Jews in which not all victims were Jews, but all Jews were victims.”
Jews died at Auschwitz because of anti-Semitism, but anti-Semitism did not die there. As we have learned only too tragically, while it begins with Jews, it doesn’t end with Jews.
The responsibility to repudiate false witness
The Holocaust denial movement – the cutting edge of anti-Semitism old and new – is not just an assault on Jewish memory in its accusation that the Holocaust is a hoax and the Jews fabricated the hoax. Rather it constitutes an international criminal conspiracy to cover up the worst crimes in history. The Holocaust denial movement whitewashes the crimes of the Nazis, as it excoriates the “crimes” of the Jews. And now, in an inversion of the Holocaust, Israel is labeled as a genocidal state and the Jews are smeared as the new Nazis.
The danger of indifference and inaction in the face of mass atrocity
Holocaust crimes resulted not only from state-sanctioned incitement to hatred and genocide, but from crimes of indifference and from conspiracies of silence – from the international community as bystander. What makes the Holocaust, and more recently the Rwandan genocide, so unspeakable, is not only the horror of the genocide itself but that these genocides were preventable.
Indifference and inaction always means coming down on the side of the victimizer, never on the side of the victim. In the face of evil, indifference is acquiescence, if not complicity in evil itself.
The responsibility to bring war criminals to justice
If the last century was the age of atrocity, it was also the age of impunity. Few of the perpetrators – despite the Nuremberg Trials – were brought to justice. Just as there must be no sanctuary for hate, no refuge for bigotry, there must be no base or sanctuary for these enemies of humankind. Impunity only emboldens and encourages the war criminals and war crimes.
The responsibility to speak truth to power
The Holocaust was made possible not only because of the “bureaucratization of genocide,” as described by Robert Lifton and personified by Adolf Eichmann – but because of the “trahison des clercs,” the complicity of the elites, including physicians, church leaders, judges, lawyers, engineers, architects and educators.
It is our responsibility, then, to speak truth to power, to hold power accountable to truth.
The responsibility to intervene
It is revealing, as Henry Friedlander pointed out in his work “The Origins of Nazi Genocide,” that the first group targeted for killing were the Jewish disabled.
It is our responsibility to give voice to the voiceless and to empower the powerless, be they the disabled, poor, elderly, women victimized by violence or vulnerable children – the most vulnerable of the vulnerable.
The responsibility of rescue
Remembrance and tribute must be paid to the rescuers, the Righteous Among the Nations, like Raoul Wallenberg, who demonstrated that one person with the compassion to care and the courage to act can confront evil, resist and transform history. Tragically, the man who saved so many was not himself saved by those who could have. We have a responsibility to help discover the fate of this great hero of the Holocaust, whom the United Nations called the greatest humanitarian of the 20th century. (The Raoul Wallenberg International Roundtable, to be held May 20-21 at Budapest’s Holocaust Memorial Center, will attempt to do just that.)
The responsibility to remember the survivors
We must always remember – and celebrate – the survivors of the Holocaust, the true heroes of humanity. They witnessed and endured the worst of inhumanity, but somehow found, in the depths of their own humanity, the courage to go on, to rebuild their lives as they helped build our communities.
Together with them, we must remember – and pledge – that never again will we be indifferent to incitement and hate; never again will we be silent in the face of evil; never again will we indulge racism and anti-Semitism; never again will we ignore the plight of the vulnerable, and never again will we be indifferent in the face of mass atrocity and impunity.
We will speak up – and act – against racism, against hate, against anti-Semitism, against mass atrocity, against injustice, and against the crime of crimes whose name we should shudder to mention: genocide.
Irwin Cotler is professor of law [emeritus] at McGill University and founding chair of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights. A former minister of justice and attorney general of Canada and longtime member of Parliament, Cotler is co-chair with Alan Dershowitz of the forthcoming international legal symposium “The Double Entendre of Nuremberg: The Nuremberg of Hate and the Nuremberg of Justice.”