Wednesday 21 September 2011

State of Hostilities (Updated)

As the Palestinian Authority continues its attempt to achieve statehood beginning with full acceptance of United Nations membership, here are three reasons why this action should be opposed by the international community.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1. Under international law, the first condition required for a political entity to be considered a state is as follows:

The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: a ) a permanent population; b ) a defined territory; c ) government; and d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states.

The Palestininian Authority has no complete legal control over a permanent population, and therefore cannot be classified as a state.

2. PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, in line with the general policy of the Fatah group he leads, has repeatedly refused to recognise Israel as a Jewish state, failed to condemn terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians (something which even Yasser Arafat did, although his condemnations were obviously insincere), and rejected groundbreaking peace offerings from successive Israeli Prime Ministers Ehud Olmert and Binyamin Netanyahu (see details here, here and here).

3. By the admission of its own MPs, Fatah's drive to form a "two-state solution" based on the 1967 armistice lines is a purely practical political initiative, designed as a temporary step toward annexing the whole of Israel. This process does not differ significantly from the terrorist group Hamas' intention to conquer all of Israel - an existing United Nations member state - using a transitional "Palestinian state" as a first step in a long-term plan (see final paragraph here). This objective is clearly incompatible with the image of a "state" that wants and deserves official recognition at the UN.
Link
UPDATE: What was I saying?

Palestinian Authority representatives in the United Nations are handing out maps of "Palestine" that show it in place of all of Israel, including Tel Aviv, reports David Bedein of the Israel Resource Review.

Bedein, who is currently in the United States, told Arutz Sheva: "They do not want a Palestinian state, but all of Palestine. The maps they hand out in their offices include all of 'Palestine.' They erase Israel completely in their maps."

Tuesday 20 September 2011

Thursday 15 September 2011

Feeding The Lions

Never fear - he only wants good sharia, not bad sharia


In what he will undoubtedly consider to be his finest moment as Prime Minister, thousands of Libyans turned out to cheer David Cameron, along with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, in Benghazi today.

"It is great to be in free Libya," Mr Cameron said. "Col Gaddafi said he would hunt you down like rats, but you showed the courage of lions."

Very poetic and stirring words...if only they were in support of a more worthy cause.

We already know that the National Transitional Council, upon whom NATO have put such hopes in forging a new "freedom-loving" Libya, consist partially of Islamic jihadists who fought AGAINST our troops in Iraq, and partially of others who may have had similar inclinations but whom we can't be bothered to investigate. It is even reported today by CNN that an anonymous senior defense official at the Pentagon, when asked if there were members of terrorist groups operating inside the NTC, replied, "Yeah, probably".

Cameron and Sarkozy's best friend during this whole adventure has been Mustafa Abdul Jalil, an NTC leader. On the one hand, Jalil has said that the new Libyan government "will not accept any extremist ideology", and that he is for "moderate Islam" - after which Cameron apparently stopped listening, since he has also stated explicitly:

"We are seeking to establish a state government by law and welfare - and Shari'ah - Islamic law - should be the main source of law".

Only three months ago, Cameron fought tooth and nail against some of his own MPs - including Nick Clegg - to get the official government definitions of "Islamic extremism" altered to include "the advocacy of sharia law". Is he against sharia law in the UK, but not against it in Libya? If so, why? If sharia is good enough for a "free Libya", in his words, why would it not be good enough for the UK, as well?

Needless to say, if you go to the link above and read the apologetic article which quotes Jalil's sharia statement, you will see that it is written by Dr. Abdul Wahid, Chairman of the UK Executive Committee of Hizb ut-Tahrir. Dr. Wahid fully supports the NTC's sharia vision for Libya. Hizb ut-Tahrir openly promote sharia in the UK, and David Cameron has on several occasions called for them to be banned. What would he make of the fact that an organisation he wants to outlaw support the stated governmental ambitions of his new ally, who himself advocates a form of governance Cameron deems to be incompatible with with the "freedom" he wants to promote in Libya?

Monday 12 September 2011

Ten Years On, Are We Safer?

Perhaps the single most asked analytical question as we reached the tenth anniversary of 9/11 was a variation of the following: "Ten years after those attacks, are we safer now than we were then?"

I believe that the answer to this question lies not so much in what is happening in the military realm of which side - us or the terrorists - has the most men left standing, but in the ideological world, where our understanding of the threat must necessarily come from.

The terrorists who committed those acts did so in the name of Islam. As several 9/11 conspirators stated in an "Islamic Response" to the American government who put them on trial, "killing you and fighting you, destroying you and terrorizing you, responding back to your attacks, are all considered to be great legitimate duty in our religion. These actions are our offerings to God. In addition, it is the imposed reality on Muslims in Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, in the land of the two holy sites [Mecca and Medina, Saudi Arabia], and in the rest of the world, where Muslims are suffering from your brutality, terrorism, killing of the innocent, and occupying their lands and their holy sites. Nevertheless, it would have been the greatest religious duty to fight you over your infidelity. However, today, we fight you over defending Muslims, their land, their holy sites, and their religion as a whole."

The conspirators quote from the Qur'an at least a dozen times in their response, including immediately following the statement that "In God's book, he ordered us to fight you everywhere we find you, even if you were inside the holiest of all holy cities, The Mosque in Mecca, and the holy city of Mecca, and even during sacred months."

Elsewhere, al-Qaeda and rafts of other terrorist groups have justified their actions, again and again, by referring to Islamic texts and teachings.

And yet, despite all this, a decade on, we still live in a world where even to speak about such things is not only considered politically incorrect, but actually the height of vulgarity. Again and again, our political leaders insist that even though the terrorists themselves say that Islam is their motivation, actually it is not, and we must ignore Islam in all this and focus on "extremism".

Only a few days ago, Liam Fox, the Defense Secretary of the current British government, insisted on BBC's Question Time that "we must not fall into the trap" of believing that terror attacks by Muslims "have anything to do with Islam", and the lemming-like audience applauded him. Even David Cameron, while critiquing the failed policy (or pet project) of multiculturalism, claimed that "The point is this: the ideology of extremism is the problem; Islam emphatically is not."

So even though Islam contains within it doctrines which are violent and supremacist, and even though terrorists repeatedly invoke those teachings to justify their actions, we must overlook this, because David Cameron says that there is this "ideology of extremism" that is out there somewhere, and can presumably be invoked as the terrorists' true inspiration, and we should focus on that instead, and that will help us beat them.

Rrrrriiiiigggghhhtt.....

It is a sad time for the rational thinking person when a Muslim in Fort Hood, Texas, gives an academic lecture to his victims explaining that he is soon going to attack them because of his religion, and yet this atrocity is not only allowed to still happen, but the man's reasons for committing it are later whitewashed in the US military's official reports on the incident.

Similar willful ignorance has also led to widespread political support for the so-called "Arab Spring", despite the recent antisemitic rioting in Egypt, and despite a whole host of other things that make the Middle Eastern Muslim commitment to "democracy" (when understood in its expansive Western formulation) seem questionable at best.

Self-imposed unawareness of the threat doctrine has also led to the increasing capitulation to sharia throughout the Western world. Sharia is a draconian system of totalitarian law that violates fundamental human rights and crushes individual freedom. And yet, in America, sharia has been considered or applied in state court judgements in at least 23 states, in violation of the US Constitution. In Germany, it is frequently used in court decisions. And here in the UK, sharia is an increasingly threatening - and worryingly sanctioned - shadow legal system that is issuing rulings that run counter to British law.

All of this was happening to a certain extent BEFORE 9/11. But since, it is almost as if the fall of those towers has acted as the catalyst for the Western world to hasten its own decline, out of fear and shame. Those infamous events have produced greater levels of organised resistance to the jihad threat than existed before them. But we cannot possibly consider ourselves "safer" when we will not even acknowledge the motivations, goals and origins of the ideological threat we face. We cannot be "safer" when we are so fixated on one organisation - al-Qaeda - that we ignore the well-developed mindset and worldview that generated it. Although the attacks gave us the kick up the backside our security agencies needed to guard us more effectively against all future attacks, that in itself will not be enough.

As sad as it is, a decade on from 9/11, we are only marginally safer now than we were then.