Uzay Bulut : Covering Up Armenian Genocide

Covering Up Armenian Genocide

by Uzay Bulut
January 18, 2017 at 4:00 am

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/9769/turkey-armenian-genocide

• "In all of these operations children were part of the general population targeted for wholesale destruction. In many instances they were also subjected to separate and differential forms of mass murder." — Professor Vahakn Dadrian, in Children as Victims of Genocide: The Armenian Case.
• These forms of murder included methods such as mass drowning, mass burning, sexual assaults, and mutilations.
• "In Ankara province, near the village of Bash Ayash, two rapist-killers -- a brigand, Deli Hasan, and a gendarme, Ibrahim -- raped twelve boys, aged 12-14, and subsequently killed them. Those who did not die instantly were tortured to death while crying 'Mummy, Mummy.'" — Professor Vahakn Dadrian, in Children as Victims of Genocide: The Armenian Case.
• "A female survivor from Giresun relates how in Agn (Egin), Harput province, some 500 Armenian orphans collected from all parts of that province were poisoned through the arrangement of the local pharmacist and physician." — Leslie A Davis, U.S. Consul at Harput.
• More than 100 years after the genocide, Turkey still denies it and Turkish history textbooks even blame the genocide on the Armenians themselves.
• When experts deny the Armenian genocide and even try to prevent the U.S. government from officially recognizing it, they are killing the victims all over again.
• "As long as the genocide remains unrecognized, justice will not be established. The curse of the genocide will not leave this land, and Turkey will never see the light of day. This is not a prediction, but a statement of fact." — Turkey's Human Rights Association, 2016.

U.S. President-Elect Donald J. Trump was recently called on to "guarantee" to Turkey that the Armenian genocide will not be properly acknowledged by the U.S. Congress, in a set of proposals regarding "U.S. Policy on Turkey".
"The United States can quietly guarantee Turkey that the Armenian Genocide resolution in Congress will not pass. This has always been critical in the relationship, and most Turks care deeply about the issue," reads a part of the paper issued by The Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), and authored by former U.S. ambassador to Ankara James F. Jeffrey and Turkish scholar Dr. Soner Cagaptay.

In the meantime, an Armenian protestant church in the Turkish city of Elazig (historic Kharpert/Harput) has been turned into a parking lot, the Dicle News Agency (DIHA) reported.
The walls of the church, which served as a place of worship for the Armenian and Assyrian communities alike, is now loaded with advertising boards, installed by the managers of the parking lot. Before that, the church was used as a flour plant, a marketplace and a livestock market.
The city of Elazig is located in the Armenian highland of eastern Turkey.
Professor Benjamin Lieberman in his book, Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe:

"Elazig is a small city in Eastern Turkey of several hundred thousand inhabitants, situated near a series of lakes created by a dam on the Euphrates River. Today its residents are mostly Turks and Kurds, but as late as the spring of 1915 it was also very much an Armenian town. In 1915, Armenians called it Kharpert while Turks referred to it as Harput. It had been an Armenian center for many centuries."[1]

The historic town and citadel of Harput (also called Harpoot, Karpoot, and Kharperd) means "rock fortress" in Armenian. After the founding of the Turkish republic in 1923, the government changed the city's name to "Elazig".
According to professor Richard Hovannisian, the Armenian genocide was the "physical elimination of the Armenian people and most of the evidence of their ever having lived on the great highland called the Armenian Plateau, to which the perpetrator side soon assigned the new name of Eastern Anatolia".[2]
No matter how much the Turkish government is trying to erase the Armenian heritage in Harput and the rest of Turkey, the Armenian roots of the region are undeniable. As a medieval town, Harput seems to have developed under the Byzantine rule (10^th and 11^th centuries – 938 onwards). According to the author T.A. Sinclair, "The Byzantines presumably valued the site for the powerful castle rock, but once a military base became established here a civilian population started to form. No doubt this population, ethnically Syrian and Armenian, came in part from the city of Arsamosata [a city in the Armenian Kingdom near the Euphrates] further east, which started to give way to Harput, as well as from nearby villages."[3]
The Ottomans captured the region in 1515. Under the Ottoman administrative system, the province was called Mamuretul-aziz. But the Armenian presence in the city remained strong despite all of the massacres and pressures to which they were subject, such as forced conversions to Islam.
According to another author, George Aghjayan: "On the eve of the genocide... The figures as presented indicate that the Armenian population of Kharpert remained relatively static for almost a century, never deviating much from approximately 40,000."
It was in 1915 that Armenians were exposed to what they often call "Medz Yeghern" or "the Great Disaster" when the leaders of the Turkish government set in motion a plan to expel and massacre them.
The plan resulted in the systematic extermination of 1.5 million Armenians. Today, most historians call this event a genocide–a premeditated and systematic campaign to exterminate an entire people.

Armenian civilians, escorted by Ottoman soldiers, marched through Harput to a prison in nearby Mezireh (present-day Elazig), April 1915. (Image source: American Red Cross/Wikimedia Commons)

Professor Vahakn Dadrian, an expert on the Armenian Genocide, wrote in his article, "Children as Victims of Genocide: The Armenian Case":

"In the provinces of Sivas, Harput, Trabzon, Erzurum, Diyarbekir, as well as the independent sanjaks of Urfa and Maras the genocide was earned out in part through deportations and in part through massacres... In all of these operations children were part of the general population targeted for wholesale destruction. In many instances they were also subjected to separate and differential forms of mass murder."[4]

These forms of murder included methods such as mass drowning, mass burning, sexual assaults, and mutilations.

"[O]rphanages in which Armenian children were gathered after the liquidation of their families served as transit camps for subsequent annihilation through drowning."

U.S. Consul at Harput, Leslie A Davis, described a horrendous scene of butchering around Lake Goeljuk [Golcuk/Hazar Lake] near Harput:

"In the mass burning of Armenian orphans, plain sadistic fiendishness was mostly at work. After eliminating the rest of the Armenian population, these remnants had become a nuisance to the perpetrators. In several regards it was deemed most economical to end their misery by torching them en masse. In four provinces, Diyarbakir, Harput, Bitlis, and Aleppo, this method was applied with special ferocity."

After describing the gaping bayonet wounds on most of the naked bodies, usually in the abdomen or chest, sometimes in the throat with the victims showing "signs of barbarous mutilation," Consul Davis declared:

"That which took place around beautiful Lake Goeljuk in the summer of 1915 is almost inconceivable. Thousands and thousands of Armenians, mostly innocent and helpless women and children, were butchered on its shores and barbarously mutilated."

Mass poisoning and rapes of children were also widespread.

"An Armenian boy, adopted by a Turkish family in Mezre, Harput province, related a graphic description of rapes committed regularly by a Turkish man with the full knowledge of his wife in that household. The other modality involves rape before murder. In Ankara province, near the village of Bash Ayash, two rapist-killers — a brigand, Deli Hasan, and a gendarme, Ibrahim — raped twelve boys, aged 12-14, and subsequently killed them. Those who did not die instantly were tortured to death while crying 'Mummy, Mummy'.
"A female survivor from Giresun relates how in Agn (Egin), Harput province, some 500 Armenian orphans collected from all parts of that province were poisoned through the arrangement of the local pharmacist and physician."

According to the author Deirdre Holding, Davis sent a letter to his boss, the American ambassador at Constantinople, on 24 July 1915. It reads in part,

"I do not believe that there has ever been a massacre in the history of the world so general and thorough as that which is now being perpetrated in this region, or that a more fiendish, diabolical scheme has ever been conceived in the mind of man."[5]

More than 100 years after the genocide, Turkey still denies it, and Turkish history textbooks even blame the genocide on the Armenians themselves.
Turkey's persistent denial is a known fact but much of the world has also failed to recognize the genocide and sufficiently support the survivors. Today, similar crimes are committed by other criminal governments or organizations such as the Islamic State (ISIS), AL-Qaeda and Boko Haram.
When experts such as Amb. James F. Jeffrey and Soner Cagaptay deny the Armenian genocide and even try to prevent the U.S. government from officially recognizing it, they are not only killing the victims all over again but are also preventing Turks from learning historical truths that they need to learn in order to take the necessary steps to democratize their country.
However, there are also a few very courageous voices in Turkey who are trying to challenge the denial perpetrated by the government and much of the public. Turkey's Human Rights Association (IHD), for example, declared in a statement last year:

"Genocide denial perpetuates genocide. Denial is the exculpation of the perpetrator and the criminalization of the victim. From course books to special publications, from newspapers to television programs, Armenians have been represented as those who deserve genocide. Since the foundation of the Republic, the Armenians of Turkey have been living to this day in a society that remains hostile to them and in close quarters with the grandchildren of perpetrators who think exactly the way their predecessors did.
"As long as the genocide remains unrecognized, justice will not be established. The curse of the genocide will not leave this land, and Turkey will never see the light of day. This is not a prediction, but a statement of fact."

Uzay Bulut, a journalist born and raised a Muslim in Turkey, is currently based in Washington D.C.

---

[1] Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe, by Benjamin Lieberman. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2013.
[2] The Armenian Genocide: Cultural and Ethical Legacies, by Richard G. Hovannisian, Transaction Publishers, 2007.
[3] Eastern Turkey: An Architectural & Archaeological Survey, Volume III: 3 Kindle Edition, by T.A. Sinclair. Pindar Press, 2014.
[4] "Children as victims of genocide: the Armenian case", by Vahakn N. Dadrian. Paper presented at the international Association of Genocide Scholars, Galway, Ireland, June 6-10, 2003.
[5] Armenia: with Nagorno Karabagh, by Deirdre Holding. Bradt Travel Guides, 2014.

• Follow Uzay Bulut on Twitter

==============

Stefan Frank : Germany's New 'Ministry of Truth' War against Free Speech

Germany's New 'Ministry of Truth'

War against Free Speech

by Stefan Frank
January 24, 2017 at 5:30 am

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/9822/germany-ministry-of-truth

• It seems that all ideas suspected of being "populist" -- or simply those ideas without the blessing of the elites -- will now be banned in Germany. This restriction applies to criticism of the government (especially regarding immigration and energy policies), of the EU, of Islam, of government officials and of the media.
• As in communist dictatorships, the more obvious the failings of the government, the more aggressively the establishment attacks those who speak out about them.
• Large companies such as Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile), BMW, Mercedes-Benz and the supermarket chain REWE obeyed straightaway and promised to place Breitbart on the blacklist immediately, and never to advertise there again.
• A plucky little pizza delivery service responded to the blacklisting demand by declaring that it was "not the morality police". The company was denounced by Der Spiegel as "inept", and after "protests from customers", it ended up capitulating, as the newspaper reported with much satisfaction.

The elites and intellectuals are apparently now counted among the German minorities in need of protection.
Toward the end of last year, Germany experienced a previously unheard-of boycott campaign – funded by the German government, no less -- against several websites, such as the popular "Axis of Good" ("Achse des Guten"). The website, critical of the government, was suddenly accused of "right-wing populism".
The German government's efforts at thought control seem to have begun with the victory of Donald J. Trump in the US presidential election -- that seems to set the "establishment" off. Germany's foreign minister and the probable future federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier -- one of the first to travel to Iran after the removal of sanctions there to kowtow to the Ayatollahs -- called America's future president a "hate preacher".
Germany's newspapers were suddenly littered with apocalyptic predictions and anti-American fulminations.
For hard-core Trump-haters, however, a witch hunt by itself is insufficient; they want activism! Since November, Germany's left-wing parties have had a strong increase in membership, as reported by Der Spiegel. At the same time, the federal government evidently decided, at least regarding the federal elections taking place in 2017, that it would no longer count on journalists' self-censorship. The German government, instead of merely hoping that newspapers would voluntarily -- or under pressure from the Press Council -- refrain from criticising the government's immigration policies, decided that it, itself, would inaugurate censorship.

The Federal Government's "Ministry of Truth"

To this effect, as reported by Der Spiegel, the Federal Interior Ministry, intends to set up a "Defense Center against Disinformation ("Abwehrzentrum gegen Desinformation") in the fight against "fake news on social networks". "Abwehr" -- the name of Nazi Germany's military intelligence agency -- is apparently meant to demonstrate the government's seriousness regarding the matter.
"It sounds like the Ministry of Truth, 'Minitrue,' from George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984", wrote even the left-leaning daily, Frankfurter Rundschau.
Frank Überall, national head of the German Association of Journalists (DJV), bluntly stated: "This smells like censorship."
It seems that all ideas suspected of being "populist" -- or simply those ideas without the blessing of the elites – will now be banned in Germany. This restriction applies to criticism of the government (especially regarding immigration and energy policies), of the EU, of Islam, of government officials and of the media.
The Federal Agency for Political Education -- the information agency of the Interior Ministry – is quite open about it: "Anti-elitism", "anti-intellectualism", "anti-politics" and "hostility toward institutions" are the "key characteristics of populism".

"Fat, Stupid White Men"

Toward the end of 2016, one of the biggest German media scandals in recent memory erupted when Gerald Hensel, undoubtedly a member of Germany's elite, tried to introduce a new form of internet censorship with the help of a team of media agencies and political players. Until recently, Hensel was "Director of Strategy" at Scholz & Friends, one of Germany's two big advertising agencies. The firm counts among its clients multinational corporations such as General Motors, the German federal government and the European Commission; so one might say the company is close to the state.
Apparently in anger over Trump's election victory, Hensel demanded: "Let us freeze the cash flow of the right-wing extremist media!" He had previously written a strategy brief declaring debate to be useless; instead, the political enemy -- the "populists" – needed to be fought, even with questionable methods:

"The liberal center must, especially in these new digital and information-based wars, take off the kid gloves. We have to turn the tables and learn about populism, particularly on the Internet... Thus, we have to respond in a more wide-spread digital manner and with explicitly less sympathy to those people who want to force their own future on us -- and do this long before the next federal election... Political storytelling, targeting the political enemy, influencers, forums, rumours..."

"Measures," he added, have to be taken against the "new right" – measures that:

"are 'Below the Line' and also digital. We need 'good' troll factories in our fight against Frauke Petry, Beatrix von Storch, Geert Wilders, Marine Le Pen and the fat stupid white men behind them. Ideally, as quickly as possible. Starting in 2017, they will continue to dismantle the EU and thus our future and that of our children."

Advertising Agency as Thought Police

Toward the end of November, Hensel appealed to his colleagues in various advertising agencies, under the banner of "no money for the right", to boycott all those who fit the description of his bogeyman -- because they were "hostile towards the EU," or because they might even harbour sympathies for Donald Trump. He was jumping on a bandwagon. A witch hunt was already under way against the American website Breitbart, due to the closeness of its former executive chair, Steve Bannon, to Donald Trump. Without providing any kind of proof, countless German newspapers and broadcasters claimed that Breitbart was "racist", "sexist", "xenophobic", "anti-Semitic" and "Islamophobic", and a "hate site". The state-owned German television station ARD described Breitbart as an "ultra right-wing" platform for "white supremacy". Other journalists followed suit.

Those Not Reading Newspapers are Suspect

Hensel went one step farther. In the style of a prosecutor during the Inquisition, he called to break the "dominance of right-wing micro media". He seems to consider particularly dangerous and subversive, anyone who reads articles that do not originate from one of Germany's media empires:

"While I may satisfy my thirst for information with my subscriptions to ZEIT or Le Mode Diplomatique, the brave new-right freedom-fighter likes to stay informed via online media such as the Axis of Good or Breitbart News."

This alone raises several suspicions. Hensel, whose website (which since December can only be accessed with a password) is graced by the display of a Soviet red star, likes to eliminate his opponents swiftly. Breitbart, for example, is deemed fascist ("salon-fascists"). Why? Because the blog -- and here he, supposedly for simplicity's sake, quotes an article from the Süddeutsche Zeitung -- "covers all the topics of German right-wing populism"; Breitbart reports about "the migrant and refugee policies of the German federal government, as well as of supposed criminal acts conducted by migrants and Islamic activities."
Hensel's solution? Boycott!

"There is freedom of speech in my stupid little world. Undoubtedly, websites such as Breitbart News and the Axis of Good... are legal media. Nevertheless, one could ask brand names whether they... are aware that their banner ads appear on these particular websites and represent their brand there."

This type of "asking", of course, roughly corresponds to the mafia "asking" the pizzeria owner if he has fire insurance.

(Image source for Hensel: Internet Archive screenshot)

Alliance for Censorship

Hensel also considerately provided detailed instructions for his readers. Those employed by an enterprise should check whether the websites that he deemed "right-wing" are registered on a blacklist. Employees of advertising agencies should form a team, with Hensel and other authoritarians, for internet censorship:

"If your career in a media agency has propelled you a little higher up the hierarchy, you might be able to bring up the topic at the next media get-together with colleagues. 2017 is an election year. You, dearest colleagues, clearly have a part in determining who receives our advertising dollars."

Hensel also suggests that consumers put direct pressure on companies or approach them via social media, to dissuade them from advertising on "hate publishers" and "destroyers of the future".
This manifesto was only published on a private blog -- one that barely anyone had ever heard of before. But the power of which Hensel boasted -- the networks in the advertising agencies and editorial offices -- is real. On Hensel's command, big newspapers and websites reported on the operation with much sympathy, along with the hashtag #NoMoneyForTheRight.

Companies Submit to Pressure

Large companies such as Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile), BMW, Mercedes-Benz and the supermarket chain REWE obeyed straightaway, and promised to place "Breitbart" on the blacklist immediately and never to advertise there again. Der Spiegel cited Hensel's "resistance" (!) and pilloried one business that did not follow suit: A plucky little pizza delivery service that responded to the blacklisting demand by declaring that it was "not the morality police". The company was denounced by Der Spiegel as "inept", and after "protests from customers", it ended up capitulating, as the newspaper reported with much satisfaction.
Breitbart will cope with missing out on a few hundred dollars of advertising revenue from Germany. Hensel, however, was successful in his attempt to motivate his ad agency colleagues against German websites such as the Axis of Good. Within a few days, none of them advertised there anymore. Advertising revenue, equally important for websites as it is for newspapers, came to a halt. Hensel had achieved his goal.

State-Financed Boycott

For this campaign, Hensel also received support from the group Network Against Nazis ("Netz gegen Nazis"), which receives financing from by Germany's federal government, the German Football Association and the newspaper Die Zeit, and which, until recently, also counted Scholz & Friends among its supporters. In the tried and true Orwellian fashion of calling things their opposite, the definition of "Nazi", for Network Against Nazis, encompasses anyone who is "Islamophobic" or "hostile toward the media".
Shortly after Hensel's call for boycotts, the Axis of Good was place on a list of "popular right-wing blogs" by Network Against Nazis -- together with the liberal publisher Roland Tichy and the evangelical civil rights activist Vera Lengsfeld (who is a thorn in the side of communists, because she fought against the East Germany's dictatorship in the 1980s). The Amadeu-Antonio Foundation, which runs the Network Against Nazis website, receives almost a million euros per year from the federal government. Not surprisingly, it demonstrates its gratitude with character assassinations of critics of the government.

"The Trend of Denouncing People as Right-Wingers"

Within a short time, Hensel had put together a kind of mafia, bent on economically ruining whoever rejected his ideological commands, by using libel and slander to scare away their customers.
As the Frankfurter Allgemeine daily newspaper commented:

"It is very fashionable right now to stigmatize people and denounce them as 'right-wing' if they do not share your views. Companies want nothing to do with that label, and, as you can see on Twitter, they quickly change direction if they are aggressively made aware that they support the wrong side with their ads (which are often automatically activated and run on the internet)."

In response to the boycott campaign against it, the Axis of Good showed how a business can defend itself: the editors raised a public alarm about Hensel's campaign in a series of reports and commentaries. Thousands of readers complained on the Facebook page of Hensel's employer, Scholz & Friends, which, after its initial support, began to distance itself from its employee's campaign and finally severed ties with him.
According to Hensel's version, his campaign was "so successful" that he wanted to take his employer "out of the line of fire".

"My former employer and I became the victims of a massive hate storm consisting of countless of tweets, emails and comments on social media... This is a systematic campaign."

Propaganda Offensive ahead of the Federal Election

Of course, it was Hensel himself who initiated a systematic campaign, including dirty tricks, which were waged with an eye to the government's apparent plans to consolidate the population ideologically. As research by the Axis of Good has revealed, Hensel's boycott operation was closely tied to the plans by the Federal Ministry of Family Affairs to conduct an advertising campaign in support of an open-door immigration policy in 2017. For this, an advertising agency was necessary, as reported in September by an industry journal:

"As revealed by a Europe-wide announcement, the Federal Minister of Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth is looking for an agency to advertise the brand 'Living democracy! Actively against right-wing extremism, violence and inhumanity'."

Ad agencies were invited to submit their suggestions by the middle of December. The Axis of Good concluded:

"There is a suspicion that this [boycott] operation was a hurried pilot project for the bid for the million-euro project by Schwesig's Family Ministry. A free trial run for the so-called 'advertising pitch'."

Regarding the question of how much economic damage was caused to the Axis of Good by the boycott campaign, Henryk M. Broder, the website's publisher, told Gatestone:

"It is significant, but how big it really was, we will only know in a few months. After all, it is not the companies themselves that stopped advertising, but the agencies. The damage for Scholz & Friends could be even bigger, but they do not talk about it."

The Hamburger Abendblatt daily referred to Hensel's campaign as an "attack on the freedom of the press," adding: "It seems as if the shot from the activists backfired."
As in communist dictatorships, the more obvious the failings of the government, the more aggressively the establishment attacks those who speak out about them.

Stefan Frank, a journalist and writer, is based in Germany.

=================

Maha Soliman : Radicalization in Public Schools

Radicalization in Public Schools

Why We are Concerned

by Maha Soliman
January 26, 2017 at 4:00 am

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/9786/radicalization-public-schools

• Radicalization is not only manifested through the use of violence, but also through desiring to live by and impose sharia law on society.
• One reason for the increased popularity of sharia is the radicalization of second- and third-generation Muslims in Western societies.
• The school board said it believes that the checks and balances put in place will ensure that the Friday sermons are not used for radicalizing Muslim students; however, as laws against "Islamophobia" become a reality in Canada, and attempts to raise a concern are labelled hate speech, one should not count on it. With the passing of time, vigilance will be abandoned and people who express concern will find themselves vulnerable to bullying and defamation if they try to address an issue or crack down on a violation.
• Saied Shoaaib, a Muslim authority and expert on political Islam, points out that the dilemma for Western societies is that the only version of Islam available to them is the radical version, mostly in mosques and Islamic schools, and also in public libraries.
• The ongoing demand for the accommodation of Muslims in Western societies is a situation worth understanding. In the documentary "The Third Jihad", Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, an American Muslim who dedicates his life to fighting radicalization, explains that it is a cultural jihad that is meant to destroy our society from within -- slowly and gradually to impose the sharia way of life.

On January 10, 2017, I attended the Peel District School Board's meeting where recommendations for allowing Muslim students to write their own sermons (khutbah) for congregational Friday (Jumma) prayers in public schools were received. For more than 15 years, students were allowed to pray in the school but not in a congregational setting. In June 2016, the Jumma prayer was officially adopted but the students were only allowed to read from a list of pre-approved sermons.

Mississauga is one of three cities in the Peel region and the sixth largest city in Canada with high ethnic diversity and a population nearing one million. One of Mississauga's calls to fame is that it is home to at least eight members of the "Toronto 18" -- the first terrorist cell uncovered in 2006 and that aimed to create an Al-Qaida type of operation in Canada. Some of the 18 attended public schools: Saad Khalid, for example, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for pleading guilty to a single count of acting "with the intention of causing an explosion or explosions that were likely to cause serious bodily harm or death or damage property". He was known to have attended the Meadowvale Secondary School. There, he had started an Islamic Club and, in the lecture hall, had led Friday prayers, which he attended with fellow arrestees Fahim Ahmad and Zakaria Amara. If people like Khalid are the champions of organizing Jumaa prayers and Khutbah in their schools, it is no wonder that pre-scripted sermons were the way to protect public safety while allowing Muslim students still to practice their faith.

Canadian police arrest some of the "Toronto 18" terrorist plotters, in 2006. (Image source: CBC News video screenshot)

Today, radicalization in Western societies is becoming epidemic. It has become a reality of life in general, and an everyday concern to parents in particular -- especially parents who want their kids safe from terrorism as well as parents who want their kids safe from radicalization.

This crisis could not be more highlighted than by a segment recently aired by 1010 News Talk, ironically on the same day, the morning January 10, 2017: "What do you do if your child decides to join ISIS?" -- a topic that was probably unimaginable a few years ago, when protecting public safety trumped sensitivity, but has become a reality today as sensitivity seems to overpower protecting public safety.
The school board said it believes that the checks and balances put in place[1] will ensure that the Friday sermons not be used for radicalizing Muslim students; however, as laws against "Islamophobia" become a reality in Canada, and attempts to raise a concern are labelled hate speech, one should not count on it. With the passing of time, vigilance will be abandoned and people who express concern will find themselves vulnerable to bullying and defamation if they try to address an issue or crack down on a violation.
While the case of Ghada Sadaka, a principal in the York Region District School Board, is slightly different. She was forced to apologize for postings on Facebook and comments such as:

"A good start, but where is the voice of Muslims who are not extremists and of which they condemn these acts of terrorism. This is the time of vocalizing "where you stand"!!!"

Sadaka was simply posting her thoughts on social media without addressing a particular issue at schools. Yet, the purportedly moral war launched against her is only a pilot project: it is a warning to any other principal who tries to create awareness about radicalization or condemn it.

Radicalization is not only manifested through the use of violence, but also through desiring to live by and impose Sharia law on society. Under Sharia, polygamy is legal, honour crimes and female genital mutilation (FGM) are not punishable, amputations are welcome as a form of punishment, gays and apostates should be killed, and women's rights are no more.

A 2016 survey noted that one in four UK Muslims prefer to live under Sharia. This troubling finding led to former head of the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission, Trevor Phillips, who popularized the term "Islamophobia", to admit that he was wrong. He said: "I thought Muslims would blend into Britain... I should have known better." Today, the UK is plagued with having two parallel legal systems: the UK courts and the Sharia courts.

One reason for the increased popularity of sharia is the radicalization of second and third generation Muslims in Western societies. Uncovering the root cause of that radicalization can be found in the book Lovers of Death, authored by the Muslim authority and expert on political Islam, Saied Shoaaib. In his book, Shoaaib points out that the dilemma for Western societies is that the only version of Islam available to them is the radical version, mostly in mosques and Islamic schools, and also in public libraries. Even when he visited the Ottawa public library and handed them books that represent a more peaceful outlook on Islam to balance out what is already there, the library never considered including them in their Arabic language collection.

The idea of increasing the Islamic content in the public sphere is pathetic; especially in a society where so many people seem to have agreed that the founding Judeo-Christian values should take a back seat in an attempt to make everybody feel "included". These accommodations result in the immense risk to our freedom of speech and way of life. There is also an economic penalty, as in the reduced opportunities for employment and lost business recently highlighted by the closure of the Peugeot auto plant, due to the excessive prayer breaks requested by Muslims who constitute the majority of the workers.

The ongoing demand for the accommodation of Muslims in Western societies is a situation worth understanding. In the documentary "The Third Jihad", Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, an American Muslim who dedicates his life to fighting radicalization, explains that it is a cultural jihad that is meant to destroy our society from within - slowly and gradually to impose the Sharia way of life. Produced exactly 10 years ago, the documentary was re-released in 2017, to demonstrate how his accurate predictions of societal transformation have come to pass.
Now, for an accurate prediction of where Canada will be in 2026 if we continue on the same path, one need to look no farther than the report, "The Islamization of Britain in 2016" at Gatestone Institute, by the meticulous scholar, Soeren Kern.

Maha Soliman is based in Canada.

---

[1] Recommendations included:

• All prayer spaces will continue to be supervised by school staff.
• Prayer will be led by students only, on Friday, for Jummah prayer.
• Two or more students can pray together on any other day but prayers would not be led nor include a sermon.
• Students may write their own sermon (khutbah) or can use a sermon (khutbah) from a bank of prewritten sermons, obtained from the school MSA or a local faith leader.
• Sermons will be presented in English, except for any verses quoted directly from the Quran.
• Sermons must comply with the school code of conduct, the Education Act, its Regulations and the Ontario Human Rights Code.
• As with all student activities in schools, appropriate disciplinary and corrective action will be taken where there are any contraventions of the Ontario Human Rights Code or the school code of conduct.
• =================

Shoshana Bryen : Immigration Priorities: Translators, and Victims of Genocide

Immigration Priorities: Translators, and Victims of Genocide

by Shoshana Bryen
January 27, 2017 at 4:30 am

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/9848/immigration-translators-genocide

• Prioritize two groups from the Middle East: those who have worked for the U.S. military as translators (and their families); and Middle East Christians who, according to then-Secretary of State Kerry, were being subjected to genocide in Syria and Iraq.
• In 2008, Congress authorized 20,000 special visas for Iraqis who served the U.S. for a year or more; and in 2009, authorized 7,500 visas over seven years for Afghan translators. The idea was to get allies who had risked their lives for American troops out as quickly as possible, but thousands have waited for years.
• Iraq and Afghanistan are countries in which being tagged as helpful to the U.S. military can be, and has been, a death sentence. And worse, in July 2016, an extension of the visa program failed to make it out of the Senate.
• Of the 10,801 refugees accepted in fiscal 2016 from Syria, only 56 (0.5 percent) were Christian.
• Making a concerted effort to bring those two desperately threatened groups to the United States would meet our commitment to the translators, give concrete expression to our revulsion at genocide, protect the interests of the American people, and ensure that America remains hospitable to immigrants and refugees.

If you want security clearances in the United States, the government "vets" you quite thoroughly. They begin by asking you questions and then ask for a list of people to interview -- family, friends, employers, etc. They take your list and ask those people for more people who will talk about you, then take that list and ask those people for more people who will talk about you -- and so on until the lists have the right number and combination of names that overlap. If you have a vindictive ex-wife, watch out. They do a credit check, a criminal background check, a motor vehicle records check, and a medical records check. Psychiatrist? That too.
When discussing visas for people coming to the U.S. from countries with terrorism issues, it is useful to know what it means to "vet" and why there is no possibility of vetting (or "extreme vetting," whatever that means) refugees and potential immigrants who have no links to their former lives. Vetting -- whether for security clearances or visas -- is all about your life to this point.
President Trump's executive order halting immigration from seven countries for 30 days -- for a start -- is a reasonable response to the increasing understanding that people from certain countries can pose more of a security risk than people from other countries, even when all the countries are Muslim-majority. The seven are Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya and Somalia; the U.S. government, under previous presidents, had cited all for terror links. Countries such as Kuwait, Egypt, Jordan, Indonesia, Oman and Tunisia and other Muslim-majority countries are not affected.
A "Muslim ban" would be racist, wrong, and a violation of deeply held American principles; but the claim by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) that visa restrictions are tantamount to slavery and denying women the right to vote is slanderous, exaggerated, inaccurate and anti-American. Restrictions -- and post-fact checks -- on people who enter the United States from countries with clear links to terrorism, and to which we cannot turn for record-checks and interviews, are simply something the United States does.
In 1979, the U.S. Embassy in Tehran was occupied by radical Islamists bent on war with the United States. The Carter Administration ordered all Iranians with student visas to report physically to U.S. immigration officials or face possible deportation. Ten months later (Carter's order had to go through the courts), the New York Times, citing an Immigration and Naturalization Service spokesman, reported that nearly 60,000 students had registered as required, about 430 had been deported, and 5,000 had left voluntarily. In the interim, Carter ordered federal officials to:

"invalidate all visas issued to Iranian citizens for future entry into the United States, effective today. We will not reissue visas, nor will we issue new visas, except for compelling and proven humanitarian reasons or where the national interest of our own country requires. This directive will be interpreted very strictly."

Iran remains at war with the United States and al Qaeda and ISIS are no less at war simply because they lack a central government.
In 2015, the assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of Consular Affairs told a House hearing that the U.S. government had revoked more than 9,500 visas over terrorism concerns since 2001 (the number is now more than 13,000). The attacks of 9/11 were followed by more attacks and plots against symbols of American military, law, justice, and governance as well as trains, bars, and shopping centers that are symbols of everyday life. Mass-casualty attacks in San Bernardino and Orlando were only the latest catalysts for Americans' underlying concern that have been growing for years about terrorism and the government's ability to protect us.
If "vetting" is not possible and American security requirements are real, is there a way to bring together our historic sympathy for refugees and historic welcome of immigrants with our reasonable concerns?
Yes.
Prioritize two groups from the Middle East: those who have worked for the U.S. military as translators (and their families); and Middle East Christians who, according to then-Secretary of State Kerry, were being subjected to genocide in Syria and Iraq.
In 2008, Congress authorized 20,000 special visas for Iraqis who served the U.S. for a year or more; and in 2009, authorized 7,500 visas over seven years for Afghan translators. The idea was to get allies who had risked their lives for American troops out as quickly as possible, but thousands have waited for years. Iraq and Afghanistan veteran Spencer Case wrote early in 2016:

"State Department numbers show that an Iraqi applying for a special visa could expect to wait for 292 business days before hearing back -- and hearing back may just be another delay or a denial. In Afghanistan, the average wait time is 417 business days."

Iraq and Afghanistan are countries in which being tagged as helpful to the United States military can be, and has been, a death sentence. And worse, in July 2016, an extension of the visa program failed to make it out of the Senate.
Secretary Kerry described his understanding that Christian women were sold as sex slaves, and both women and men were massacred in areas of Syria and Iraq controlled by ISIS. But of the 10,801 refugees accepted in fiscal 2016 from Syria, only 56 (0.5 percent) were Christian.

When a few persecuted Iraqi Christians crossed the border into the U.S., they were thrown in prison for several months and then sent back to the countries persecuting them, possibly to be enslaved, raped, or murdered. Pictured above: Members of California's Iraqi Christian community and their supporters protest the months-long detention of Iraqi Christian asylum-seekers at the Otay Mesa detention center. (Image source Al Jazeera video screenshot)

Making a concerted effort to bring those two desperately threatened groups to the United States would meet our commitment to the translators, give concrete expression to our revulsion at genocide, protect the interests of the American people, and ensure that America remains hospitable to immigrants and refugees.

Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of the Jewish Policy Center.

==================

Soeren Kern : Germany Downplayed Threat of Jihadists Posing as Migrants

Germany Downplayed Threat of Jihadists Posing as Migrants

by Soeren Kern
January 27, 2017 at 5:00 am

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/9837/germany-migrants-jihadists

• More than 400 migrants who entered Germany as asylum seekers in 2015 and 2016 are being investigated for links to Islamic terrorism, according to the Federal Criminal Police.
• The German experience with jihadists posing as migrants serves as a case study on errors for other countries to avoid. German authorities allowed hundreds of thousands of migrants, many lacking documentation, to enter Germany without a security check. German authorities admitted they lost track of some 130,000 migrants who entered the country in 2015.
• German authorities knew in early 2015 that Walid Salihi, an 18-year-old Syrian who applied for asylum in Germany in 2014, was recruiting for the Islamic State at his asylum shelter in Recklinghausen, but they did nothing.
• Anis Amri, the Tunisian jihadist who attacked the Christmas market in Berlin, used at least 14 different identities, which he used to obtain social welfare benefits under different names in different municipalities.
• "We have probably forgotten to take into account what political opponents such as the Islamic State are capable of doing and how they think." — Rudolf van Hüllen, political scientist.

German political leaders and national security officials knew that Islamic State jihadists were entering Europe disguised as migrants but repeatedly downplayed the threat, apparently to avoid fueling anti-immigration sentiments, according to an exposé by German public television.
German officials knew as early as March 2015 — some six months before Chancellor Angela Merkel opened German borders to more than a million migrants from the Muslim world — that jihadists were posing as refugees, according to the Munich Report (Report München), an investigative journalism program broadcast by ARD public television on January 17.

More than 400 migrants who entered Germany as asylum seekers in 2015 and 2016 are now being investigated for links to Islamic terrorism, according to the Federal Criminal Police (Bundeskriminalamt, BKA).

The revelations come amid criticism of U.S. President Donald J. Trump's plans to suspend immigration from select countries until mechanisms are in place to properly vet migrants entering the United States. The German experience with jihadists posing as migrants serves as a case study on errors for other countries to avoid.
Based on leaked documents and interviews with informants, the Munich Report revealed that German authorities knew in early 2015 that Walid Salihi, an 18-year-old Syrian who applied for asylum in Germany in 2014, was recruiting for the Islamic State at his asylum shelter in Recklinghausen, but they did nothing. Some six months later, a search of Salihi's accommodation produced a shotgun. Salihi was not deported.

It later emerged that between 2011 and 2015, Salihi had used seven aliases to apply for asylum not only in Germany, but also in Austria, Italy, Romania, Sweden and Switzerland. He had also been charged in several countries with a laundry list of crimes, including physical assault, robbery and weapons offenses.
In February 2014, for example, Salihi was arrested for sexually assaulting women at a discotheque in Cologne. That same month, he physically assaulted a homeless man, attacked a random passerby and attempted to strangle a fellow resident at his asylum shelter. Police later traced his cellphone to downtown Cologne on December 31, 2015, when hundreds of German women were sexually assaulted by mobs of Muslim migrants.

On January 7, 2016, Salihi stormed a police station in the 18th district of Paris while shouting "Allahu Akbar." He was carrying a butcher knife, an Islamic State flag and was wearing what appeared to be an explosive belt. Police opened fire and shot him dead.
A former roommate described Salihi: "He was very aggressive, especially when it came to religion. To him, all unbelievers were worthless and had to die."
Salihi was not an isolated case. According to the Munich Report, in early 2015 American intelligence agencies warned German authorities that Islamic State jihadists posing as migrants were making their way through southern Europe with the aim of reaching Germany.
The warnings, however, were ignored, and in the summer of 2015, German authorities allowed hundreds of thousands of migrants, many lacking documentation, to enter Germany without a security check.
At the time, leading German security experts insisted that the Islamic State would not send jihadists to Europe. In October 2015, for example, Holger Münch, President of the Federal Criminal Police (Bundeskriminalamt, BKA), said: "We do not have a single case yet in which it has been confirmed that members of a terrorist group from Syria or Iraq have come here to Germany specifically to commit attacks."

Münch also said: "If you look at the risks you face by coming to Germany via the Mediterranean Sea, I think there are simpler ways to get here if you plan to do so, and you do not need a stream of refugees."
Gerhard Schindler, President of the Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst) said: "It is unlikely that terrorists will use the dangerous boat route across the Mediterranean to get to Europe."
German political scientist Peter Neumann, who is Director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence at King's College in London, said:

"There is not a single shred of evidence, proven evidence, that an Islamic State sympathizer has been smuggled to Europe. There is even less evidence that this has been an active strategy of the Islamic State. It is important that politicians do not express their own opinions and strengthen the public's fears."

Neumann also said:

"In recent weeks there have been a series of Islamic State videos in which it was quite clearly stated that supporters of the Islamic State should remain in the Islamic State and that they should not try to emigrate, and that this active infiltration strategy, about which is sometimes reported, is non-existent."

Less than a month later, on November 13, 2015, Islamic State jihadists, the majority of whom entered Europe by posing as migrants, carried out the coordinated Paris attacks in which 137 people died and nearly 400 were injured.

On July 19, 2016, a 17-year-old Afghan asylum seeker seriously injured five people on a train in Germany, while shouting "Allahu Akbar." He is shown at left in an Islamic State video saying, "In the name of Allah, I am a soldier of the Caliphate and am launching a martyrdom operation in Germany... I will slaughter you in your own homes and in the streets." Right: The attacker's body is removed from the place where police shot him, after he charged at them with the axe.

In 2016, the true scale of the German problem of jihadists posing as migrants began to come into focus:

• February 4. German police arrested four members of a cell allegedly planning jihadist attacks in Berlin. The ringleader — a 35-year-old Algerian who was staying at a refugee shelter in Attendorn with his wife and two children — posed as an asylum seeker from Syria. He had reportedly received military training from the Islamic State.
  
• February 5. Hans-Georg Maassen, the head of Germany's BfV domestic intelligence agency, revealed that more than 100 Islamic State fighters may be living in Germany as refugees, some of whom are known to have entered the country with fake or stolen passports.
  
• February 8. German police arrested an alleged Islamic State commander, living at a refugee shelter in Sankt Johann. The 32-year-old jihadist, posing as a Syrian asylum seeker, entered Germany in the fall of 2015.
  
• February 29. German authorities admitted they lost track of some 130,000 migrants who entered the country in 2015. The revelation raised concerns that unaccounted migrants could include jihadists who entered the country posing as refugees.
  
• June 2. German police arrested three suspected Islamic State members from Syria on suspicion of preparing an attack in Düsseldorf.
  
• June 3. The head of the German police union, Rainer Wendt, said that budget cuts in the public sector made it impossible to vet all of the migrants coming into Germany. He was responding to demands that all migrants undergo immediate security checks.
  
• July 19. A 17-year-old Afghan asylum seeker brandishing an axe and shouting "Allahu Akbar" seriously injured five people on a train in Würzburg. The assailant was shot dead by police after he charged at them with the axe. The teenager had been placed with a foster family just two weeks before the attack as a reward for being "well integrated."
  
• July 24. Mohammed Daleel, a 27-year-old migrant from Syria whose asylum application was rejected, injured 15 people when he blew himself up at a concert in Ansbach. The suicide bombing was the first in Germany attributed to the Islamic State.
  
• July 25. The Federal Criminal Police revealed that more than 400 migrants who entered Germany as asylum seekers in 2015 and 2016 were being investigated for links to the Islamic State.
  
• September 13. German police arrested three Syrian jihadists in Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony. Prosecutors said the three came to Germany in November 2015 posing as migrants and with the intention of "carrying out a previously determined order from Islamic State or to await further instructions."
  
• September 17. Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann accused the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) of failing to root out potentially tens of thousands of fake passports. Many migrants who entered Europe as Syrians are, in fact, from another country of origin. Almost 40% of all Moroccans who entered Greece falsely represented themselves as Syrians, according to one study.
  
• October 10. The BAMF knowingly allowed more than 2,000 asylum seekers with fake passports to enter Germany.
  
• October 27. Public prosecutors charged Shaas Al-M, a 19-year-old Syrian jihadist who arrived in Germany posing as a refugee, with plotting to bomb popular tourist sites in Berlin, including the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag, for the Islamic State.
  
• December 19. At least 12 people were killed and dozens injured after a truck rammed into a Christmas market in Berlin. The main suspect in the attack was Anis Amri, a 23-year-old migrant from Tunisia who arrived in Germany in July 2015 and applied for asylum in April 2016. Although Amri's application for asylum was rejected in June 2016, he was not deported because he did not have a valid passport.
  

On January 5, 2017, it emerged that Amri used at least 14 different identities, which he used to obtain social welfare benefits under different names in different municipalities.
German political scientist Rudolf van Hüllen concluded:

"We have probably forgotten to take into account what political opponents such as the Islamic State are capable of doing and how they think. We have not tried to understand their mentality, and therefore we have overlooked the fact that for the Islamic State it was an obvious option to use the safe refugee routes. This is a quite logical matter."

Soeren Kern is a Senior Fellow at the New York-based Gatestone Institute. He is also Senior Fellow for European Politics at the Madrid-based Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group. Follow him on Facebook and on Twitter.

• Follow Soeren Kern on Twitter and Facebook

===================

Khadija Khan : Crimes against Humanity: "Normal" Treatment of Middle Eastern Women

Crimes against Humanity: "Normal" Treatment of Middle Eastern Women

by Khadija Khan
January 28, 2017 at 5:00 am

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/9761/middle-eastern-women

• Mullahs seem to prefer protecting inhuman laws to protecting humans.
• Most full coverings for women are black, which absorbs heat, and are made not of cotton but of non-porous cloth - in the scorching heat.
• In a province of Indonesia, Aceh, a woman, accused of being intimate with her boyfriend is caned, in front of a jeering crowd. Later, a photograph of the screaming woman is published as a token of pride for the men who had just exacted this "justice" -- on her; no consequence for the boyfriend. It was a lesson to remind women to submit to their place in society.
• Turkey last year presented a bill for tackling its widespread child-marriage issue: the Turkish government introduced a bill that pardons a rapist if he marries his victim. The victim is not consulted.
• All forms of exploiting women are presented as divine law, sharia, in which women have no say, which they are unable to use in their own defence, and which they are forced to accept as their fate.
• These are countries where men are not only permitted, but invited, to consider woman a pet -- to be killed, burned with acid, benzene or a weapon of choice supposedly to preserve a family's "honour".
• These laws, put in place by the governments and the clergy, provide a safe escape for criminals, such as those who kill their women and claim it is in the name of "honour".
• The deeper horror is that all these abuses -- child marriage, confinement, FGM, rape, torture, and legal discrimination -- have accomplices. These enablers are often well-meaning people from the West, "multiculturalists" who are reluctant to pass judgement on other people's customs no matter how brutal they might be.
• Sadly, they are unable to see that they are actually part of the huge jihadi radicalization machine working under the very nose of even governments in the West.
• As the British in India effectively got rid the people of the cultural practice of suttee, in which Hindu widows were required to throw themselves on their husband's funeral pyre, if people would really like to do "good", they will please help to stop similar crushing practices.

A bitter truth, often glossed over in the name of "tradition," is the religious teachings and the responsibilities of a Muslim woman. Most glossed over is the violence that men are still allowed to inflict on their women in the name of their religion and culture on such a massive part of the planet.
This brutality not only takes place in ISIS-held territory but across most Muslim societies. All around you, you see women killed, molested, imprisoned, maimed and incarcerated while their men sugar-coat the abuse as "modesty", "honour", "divine law" or even "justice".
In addition to warning would-be ISIS recruits of the horrors that await them if they jump onto the bandwagon of terrorist organizations, let us take a look into "normal" Muslim societies.
Women in Saudi Arabia, in the name of laws and "traditions", are kept effectively non-existent. They are forced, outside the house to wear full-body covering, abayas. Most full coverings for women are black, which absorbs heat, and are made of non-porous, cloth -- not cotton -- in the scorching heat.
Women are also not allowed to drive, they cannot leave the house without a male guardian, they are liable to be flogged, stoned to death or beheaded if found guilty of even the smallest infractions, and often, as in being raped, even if they are factually innocent.
Campaigns have been launched to abolish the guardian system, in which women must be escorted outside their homes by a male relative or "guardian".
The mainstream religious lobby immediately went on the defensive. Saudi Arabia's highest Islamic figure, the grand mufti, denounced the call to abolish guardianship as a crime against Islam.
Mullahs seem to prefer protecting inhuman laws to protecting humans.
In Iran, women are forced to cover themselves and need a guardian to step outside the home, if they want to be "protected". Bicycling is prohibited.
Women are also forced to live with an abusive husband, as dictated by abusive marital laws and social taboos.
Moral brigades by the name of Gasht e Ershad ("guidance patrol") coerce females to behave "decently". Now Sharia patrols and curbs against women also exist in England and France – an indication where these extremists want to drive the West.
In parts of France, women cannot go out onto the street "unaccompanied" or even enter a café. "Here," men tell them, "we do things like in our home countries!"
In a province of Indonesia, Aceh, a woman, accused of being intimate with her boyfriend, is caned in front of a jeering crowd. Later, a photograph of the screaming woman is published as a token of pride for the men who had just exacted this "justice" -- on her; no consequence for the boyfriend. It was a lesson to remind women to submit to their place in society.

A sharia-policeman canes a woman who was accused of being intimate with her boyfriend, in Aceh, Indonesia. (Image source: Getty Images)

Under the newly proposed Sharia laws, women are also forced to be accompanied by a male guardian to "protect" them. Banda Aceh also banned women from entertainment venues after 11pm unless they are accompanied by a male family member. Aceh district has also banned unmarried men and women from riding together on motorbikes.
Turkey last year presented a bill for tackling its widespread child-marriage issue: the Turkish government introduced a bill that pardons a rapist if he marries his victim. The victim is not consulted. After the rage of the masses, the bill was withdrawn – at least for the time being.
Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said at a news conference in Istanbul:

"We are taking this bill in the parliament back to the commission in order to allow for the broad consensus the president requested, and to give time for the opposition parties to develop their proposals."

The government seems determined to bring it back after making some minor changes.
Many Muslim countries follow similar restraints, effectively keeping women under house-arrest. All forms of exploiting women are presented as divine law, sharia, in which women have no say, which they are unable to use in their own defence, and which they are forced to accept as their fate.
The practice of female genital mutilation (FGM), not required by Islam, is a pre-Islamic tribal norm across the African belt of the Muslim region, as well as in parts of India, Indonesia and Middle East.
In Pakistan, the hudood ordinance, promulgated in 1979 to curb outside-of marriage-sex, has actually turned out as a monstrosity for female rape victims.
The ordinance demands, under sharia law, that a rape victim be grilled in a court of law as if she is the perpetrator. She is asked to produce four male witnesses to prove her case or else she is booked as having committing adultery and having already confessed to the crime.
These are countries where men are not only permitted, but invited, to consider woman a pet to be killed, burned with acid, benzene or a weapon of choice supposedly to preserve a family's "honour".
These laws, put in place by the governments and the clergy, provide a safe escape for criminals, such as those who kill their women and claim it is in the name of "honour".
A killer can be pardoned in court by the victim's next of kin, who, thanks to much clan intermarriage, is usually a family member of the assailant as well. The judge, with the stroke of a pen, therefore lets these criminals walk free.
Although recently Pakistan passed a bill barring the family members from pardoning assailants in the name of sharia (Qissas) or reconciliation, the flickering hope of its implementation is still in question as no court has so far set this new law as a precedent in the hundreds of pending cases across the country. That neglect means that despite the new law, in practice, rulings are "business as usual".
Such taboos are also safeguarded by the clergy, who rule the society through the loudspeakers of the mosques.
Afghanistan remains perhaps the most brutal country in terms of women's rights violations.
Farkhanda Malikzada, for instance, a 27-year-old seminary student accused by a fortune teller a custodian of a shrine, of burning a Quran, was simply thrown to hound-like mob of men who beat and burned her to death -- in front of a number of police officers and cameras in broad daylight. Most of the identifiable assailants were never punished, while the fortune teller who unleashed this horror had his death sentence commuted.
Investigators also revealed that Farkhanda might have questioned sexual orgies by the shrine's custodians, who were later found inside the holy place with condoms and Viagra.
"Yet," reports Alissa J. Rubin, who wrote the New York Times report, "Afghan women most need the legal system to defend them: They are largely powerless without the support of male family members, and it is usually family members who abuse them."
Being covered in black, non-porous cloth in the desert heat; being stoned to death or beheaded; being confined to a house as a brood-mare and servant, effectively enslaved, unable to leave or earn an independent living, are the reality that millions of women are made to suffer every day – supposedly for their "protection".
To add insult to injury, in most societies, these discriminations are imposed by the mullahs as religious obligations.
In the 21st century, an unchaperoned woman outside the house is regarded as subhuman, fair game to be raped, assaulted, humiliated, burned alive or decapitated -- based on patriarchal norms.
The deeper horror is that all these abuses -- child marriage, confinement, FGM, rape, torture, and legal discrimination -- have accomplices. These enablers are often well-meaning people from the West, "multiculturalists" who are reluctant to pass judgement on other people's customs no matter how brutal they might be. What they are really doing, however, is providing crucial support for savage injustices either by sweeping them under the carpet or by defending barbarism as "cultural norms".
Three- or four-year-old girls go to kindergarten wearing a headscarf -- no longer just in the Middle East or Africa but in England, Germany and virtually throughout Europe.
These kinds of abuses are permitted and even encouraged by an indoctrination that runs deep through the generations, and that are tragically perpetuated by well-meaning "multiculturalists" in Europe who actually think they are doing "good" by preserving these barbaric conditions.
Sadly, they are unable to see that they are actually part of the huge jihadi radicalization machine working under the very nose of even governments in the West.
As the British in India effectively got rid of the practice of suttee, in which Hindu widows were required to throw themselves on their husband's funeral pyre, if people would really like to do "good", they will please help to stop similar crushing practices.

Khadija Khan is a Pakistan-based journalist and commentator.

===============

Denis MacEoin : The Trial of Georges Bensoussan

France's New Islamist Guillotine

The Trial of Georges Bensoussan

by Denis MacEoin
February 7, 2017 at 5:00 am

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/9895/france-islamist-guillotine

• It is not racist to accuse Muslims of wrongdoing; Islam is a religio-political system, not a race. This conflation of two very different things already causes endless confusion and miscarriages of justice. Such scattershot accusations fail to make a distinction between genuine hatred for Muslims and fair and balanced criticism of some of their behavior and their religion.
• "Anti-racism... an instrument of intellectual terrorism has become today the greatest channel of the new anti-Semitism". — Georges Bensoussan.
• The CCIF's charge of "Islamophobia" is almost certainly built, not so much about Arabs but about perceptions of a refusal by Muslim immigrants from North Africa to integrate into French society,
• "To say that one drinks in anti-Semitism from one's mother's milk means that it is transmitted culturally. I have not spoken of a transmission through blood, which implies a genetic transmission. And I maintain that in some Arab families in France, anti-Semitism is taught. ... I have not invented the Kouachi brothers, who, after the attack on Charlie Hebdo, asked the printer with whom they took refuge if he was Jewish." — Georges Bensoussan.
• "This visceral anti-Semitism proven by the Fondapol survey by Dominique Reynié last year cannot remain under a cover of silence. Conducted in 2014 among 1,580 French respondents, of whom one third were Muslim, the survey found that they were two times and even three times more anti-Jewish than French people as a whole". — Georges Bensoussan.
• Why should this be surprising? Anti-Jewish feelings in Muslim countries and elsewhere are deeply embedded, with roots in the Qur'an, the Hadith, Islamic law-books, and general social attitudes from the 7^th century onwards.
• If Bensoussan is convicted, the CCIF and other organisations like it will start further prosecutions of other innocent people and succeed in shutting down debate about what is the greatest single threat to the stability not only of France and Europe, but the West.

The French historian and philosopher Georges Bensoussan is best known for his studies of matters relating to the Jewish world, on topics such as the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, Zionism, and the fate of the hundreds of thousands of Jews expelled from Arab countries after the declaration of Israel's independence in 1948 and the signal defeat of Arab armies which invaded the new state between then and 1949. He himself was born in Morocco in 1952, but moved with his family to France in his early years.
After a doctorate in history from the University of Paris I in 1981, Bensoussan became director of a journal for Holocaust history (Revue d'histoire de la Shoah) and went on to develop a training service for Holocaust education. Over the years, he has published several well-researched books on the Holocaust, Zionism, and related topics. Juifs en pays arabes: Le grand déracinement 1850-1975 (2012) covers the too-little known history of the way in which nearly a million Jews in Arab countries were reduced in fewer than thirty years to about 5,000. His intellectual and political history of Zionism, Une histoire intellectuelle et politique du sionisme 1860-1940 (2002), counters the modern use of the term Zionist as a pejorative.
Given these credentials as a leading opponent of Europe's oldest form of racism, one might very well expect that Georges Bensoussan would be one of the last people fit to be labelled a racist. And you would be correct.

But on January 25, Bensoussan was obliged to present himself at the 17^th chamber of the Tribunal Correctionel of Paris to face a charge of "provocation of racial hatred" ("provocation à la haine raciale"). A more honest description of the charge would have read "provocation of 'Islamophobia'". It is not racist to accuse Muslims of wrongdoing; Islam is a religio-political system, not a race. This conflation of two very different things already causes endless confusion and miscarriages of justice.
The charge against Bensoussan was brought by the Collectif contre l'Islamophobie en France (CCIF)[1] an Islamic activist organization that seeks to defend Muslims from perceived attacks ("Islamophobia") in the secular system of the country. Such scattershot accusations fail to make a distinction between genuine hatred for Muslims and fair and balanced criticism of some of their behavior and their religion. Leading the accusation in court was a hijab-wearing woman, Lila Cherif, in charge of the CCIF's legal team. On the public gallery sat an assemblage of anti-racist organizations: SOS-Racisme, a much criticized French and international group, the prestigious Ligue Internationale Contre le Racisme et l'Antisémitisme (LICRA), the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic Mouvement contre racisme et pour l'amitié entre les peoples (MRAP) – which is part of the Platform of French NGOs for Palestine that supports trying to destroy Israel economically – and the anti-Israel League of Human Rights (Ligue des droits de l'homme).

Nowadays, there are several principal international definitions of anti-Semitism – the US State Department's "Working Definition" of Anti-Semitism, the original EU Monitoring Centre's "Working Definition", and the most widely recognized International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's Definition. All three definitions include anti-Israel speech, writing and actions as fully anti-Semitic, and it is on this basis that some of these self-styled anti-racist groups may be described as anti-Semitic. In that context, their presence in the public gallery may have much to do with antagonism to Bensoussan's work in claiming anti-Semitism in his writings.

According to Raphaëlle Bacqué, in Le Monde on January 26, the specific charge against Bensoussan is based on a couple of statements he made in 2015 during a radio broadcast in an episode of Répliques, a much-respected program that discusses current affairs, often linked to new publications by those interviewed. The first statement was as follows (author's translation):

"Today, we find ourselves at the heart of the French nation in the presence of another people, who take a backwards view of a certain number of the democratic values which we have carried. There will be no integration so long as we cannot rid ourselves of the atavistic anti-Semitism which is hidden like a secret."

He then went on to say:

"An Algerian sociologist, Smaïn Laacher, with great courage, has just said in a film broadcast on France 3: 'It is a shame that, in order to maintain this taboo, to know that in Arab families in France – and everyone knows this but nobody wants to say it – anti-Semitism is sucked in with a mother's milk.'"

Days later, Laacher, a lecturer at the University of Strasbourg, denied that he had said this. Writing in the investigative journal Mediapart, he sternly declared "I have never said nor written anything of this ignominious nature". He condemned Bensoussan for suggesting that Algerian anti-Semitism was created naturally, meaning racially. "How could anyone believe for half a second that in these [Arab] families that anti-Semitism is transmitted in the end through blood".
But that is not what Bensoussan had said. He had not mentioned blood, just transmission through a mother's milk.
Underneath Laacher's response, however, a commenter named Aimelle turned Laacher's remarks upside down, writing as follows:

Fallacious? Really?
Here is a record (including the "ums" and the repetitions of what M. Laacher said in the documentary (at the 56^th minute):
"It is a monumental hypocrisy not to see that this anti-Semitism is in the beginning domestic, and quite evidently, is without doubt reinforced, hardened, legitimated, almost naturalized with various distinctions um... externally. He will find it at home and will sense no radical lack of continuity between home and the external environment. Because the external environment, is, in reality, the most often [experienced]. It is to be found in what are termed the ghettos, it feels as though it is in the air one breathes, it is not at all strange. And it is difficult to escape from it in those places, particularly when you find it in yourself."
Certainly, he does not say "sucked in with a mother's milk" – an expression which, in French, is a metaphor employed to define something one acquires "in the atmosphere", "in the language", "on the tongue". But the idea is much the same.

Bensoussan argued that "sucked from a mother's milk" and "transmitted through blood" are not the same. His argument was based on Laacher's own statements in that television documentary. Why Laacher reacted so fiercely to Bensoussan's use of his own argument that Arab culture fosters anti-Semitism, so far as to deny he had ever said anything like that, is not easy to determine. Was it simply because he did not want to be associated with views that might so easily have been interpreted (as they were in Bensoussan's case) as racist in nature? In an interview with Alexandre Devecchio for Le Figaro, published on the day his trial opened, Bensoussan argued that anti-racism has been turned into an instrument that may be used to silence "the majority of the French people". He speaks of "delinquent anti-racism" ("l'antiracisme dévoyé"), and goes on to cite Elizabeth Badinter, an academic and, according to Jane Kramer writing in The New Yorker, France's "most influential intellectual", who has spoken of "collaboration through anti-racism", using "collaboration" in the French 1940s sense of collaboration with the enemy.
He himself says this illuminates that

"anti-racism, this legitimate struggle, has been progressively made a delinquent as the religion of anti-racism, indeed an instrument of intellectual terrorism has become today the greatest channel of the new anti-Semitism".

To make things more difficult for Bensoussan, the charge of "racism" was tangled up by the CCIF, who added to it a charge of being an "Islamophobe". This, ironically, is quite unrelated to the Laaser complaint, which is based on Arabs, not necessarily Muslims. But for Muslim activists, it is possible to attack on both fronts, conflating race and religion.

Because, as Bensoussan states, anti-racism is a form of religiosity in France (and indeed in other Western countries), using that charge serves effectively to intensify public outrage against any questioning of Islam within important sectors in a country with growing sensitivities about race-crime on the one hand and fear of Islamic terrorism exemplified by the attacks in Paris and Nice.
The CCIF's charge of "Islamophobia" is almost certainly not so much about Arabs but about perceptions of a refusal by Muslim immigrants from North Africa to integrate into French society, with its core Enlightenment values of liberté, égalité, fraternité, the country's motto.

Bensoussan has written two books on this subject: Les Territoires perdus de la République (2002) and Une France soumise: Les voix du refus (2017) ("Lost Territories of the Republic" and "A Submissive France: The Voices of Refusal")
In a long analytical interview with Caroline Valentin concerning Bensoussan's most recent book, Mathieu Bock-Côté (writing in Le journal de Montréal) summed up the issue:

"France is the principal theatre of the Islamist offensive in Europe. In saying that, we are not only thinking of the attacks which have marked the last two years, but of the creation on French territory of a veritable counter-society which does not speak its name and dissociates itself more and more from the nation. The desertion of the elites, criticism of French identity, cultural and physical insecurity, the increase of unreasonable compromises in schools and hospitals: it is in order to analyze and denounce this sloppiness that this book has appeared just now."

It is no secret that those who create this "counter-society" and disaffiliation from the French nation state are disproportionately Muslims – in this case mostly Muslims from North Africa – who refuse to integrate or are deterred by their communities from doing so. Many studies place the blame for this lack of integration on the French state and racial discrimination, and no doubt there is much truth in that. However, many modern surveys in countries like the UK indicate that Muslims are the hardest of all immigrant and minority groups to integrate, and that increasing numbers choose not to. A recent example is the December 2016 report by Dame Louise Casey for the British government which, among much else, concluded:

Polling in 2015... showed that more than 55% of the general public agreed that there was a fundamental clash between Islam and the values of British society, while 46% of British Muslims felt that being a Muslim in Britain was difficult due to prejudice against Islam. We found a growing sense of grievance among sections of the Muslim population, and a stronger sense of identification with the plight of the 'Ummah', or global Muslim community. (pp. 12-13)

Bensoussan's argument that Muslim communities contribute to the development of a society within society clearly attracted the attention of the CCIF, which introduced the notion that he is both a racist and an "Islamophobe". This opinion was reinforced when the lawyer for the CCIF instrumentalized anti-Semitism as a further means of defaming Bensoussan, saying that "What seems to us inadmissible is to attribute anti-Semitism to all the members of a group. That is essentialism." Essentialism here means defining an entire community with a single "essential" characteristic. To this, Bensoussan makes his strongest defence against that charge:

"To say that one drinks in anti-Semitism from one's mother's milk means that it is transmitted culturally. I have not spoken of a transmission through blood, which implies a genetic transmission. And I maintain that in some Arab families in France, anti-Semitism is taught. I have not invented Mohamed Merah [who murdered seven people in 2012, including three children at a Jewish school, admitting to anti-Semitic motives]. I have not invented the Kouachi brothers, who, after the attack on Charlie Hebdo, asked the printer with whom they took refuge if he was Jewish."

French historian Georges Bensoussan has defended remarks he made about anti-Semitism among French Muslims, saying: "To say that one drinks in anti-Semitism from one's mother's milk means that it is transmitted culturally. I have not spoken of a transmission through blood, which implies a genetic transmission. And I maintain that in some Arab families in France, anti-Semitism is taught. I have not invented Mohamed Merah". Merah murdered seven people in 2012, including children at a Jewish school, admitting to anti-Semitic motives.

Bensoussan's claim of culturally-transmitted anti-Semitism in Muslim and Arab communities is strongly backed by two important polls. The Anti-Defamation League's (ADL) Global 100 report on anti-Semitism worldwide gave figures for anti-Semitic attitudes in 16 Arab states, plus Turkey and Iran. The results are disturbing, ranging from 93% for the West Bank and Gaza, and 92% in Iraq, through ten countries scoring in the 80% to 90% range, four scoring in the 70%s, and Turkey and Iran at the bottom, with 69% and 56% respectively. The highest in Eastern Europe was 45% (Poland) down to 13% (Czech Republic); in Western Europe, there was only one high percentage, 69% for Greece, with figures from 37% for France down to 4% for Sweden.

These figures are bolstered by a 2011 Pew Global survey, which shows low figures for positive attitudes to Jews in Arab and Muslim countries: Turkey 4%, Egypt and Jordan with 2% and so on in two other Muslim states: Indonesia (the world's largest Muslim population) at 9% and Pakistan at 2%. That shows three Muslim countries – i.e. non-Arab states – with high levels of anti-Semitism. That in itself shows that this has nothing to do with genetics, but relates to culture, specifically Islamic culture.

Bensoussan himself has also drawn attention to a 2014 survey carried out in France:

"This visceral anti-Semitism proven by the Fondapol survey by Dominique Reynié last year cannot remain under a cover of silence. Conducted in 2014 among 1,580 French respondents, of whom one third were Muslim, the survey found that they were two times and even three times more anti-Jewish than French people as a whole."

Why should this be surprising? Anti-Jewish feelings in Muslim countries and elsewhere are deeply embedded, with roots in the Qur'an, the hadith, Islamic law-books, and general social attitudes from the 7^th century onwards.[2]
Bensoussan has summed the matter up as follows:

"I am speaking about a cultural notion, not genetic. To confuse milk and blood is bad faith or stupidity. Yes, in some Arab families in France, anti-Semitism is passed on. To speak of a biological anti-Semitism would take me back to deny thirty years of my work. What culture can do, culture can undo; we can leave anti-Semitism behind. But I have not invented Mohamed Merah nor the friends of his family who expressed regret that he had not killed more Jewish children."

The verdict in the Bensoussan case will not be delivered until early March. But whether he is found guilty or innocent, he has already joined a long and growing list of Western thinkers and politicians who have been put on trial and sometimes convicted for outspoken criticism of Islam or criticism of some Muslim behavior, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, "Gregorius Nekschot", Lars Hedegaard, Michael Smith, Geert Wilders and others.

If Bensoussan is convicted, the CCIF and other organisations like it will start further prosecutions of other innocent people and possibly succeed in shutting down debate about what is the greatest single threat to the stability not only of France and Europe, but the West.

It could scarcely be more grotesque to find that a man who stands up to the rampant anti-Semitism within the Muslim community is twisted into the shape of a racist and purportedly an "Islamophobe".

Denis MacEoin (PhD, University of Cambridge, 1979, is a commentator on matters related to Islam and is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Gatestone Institute.

---

[1] For a well-documented and highly critical evaluation of the Collectif in French, see here.
[2] For a broad survey, see Andrew Bostom, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History, USA, reprint ed. 2008.

=====================