Betsy's Page: Cruising the Web

Betsy's Page: Cruising the Web

Israel as punching bag

James Taranto links to this essay by Israeli journalist Matti Friedman about how the media cover Israel. Friedman points out that the media cover Israel and the Palestinians as if it's the most important story on earth with move coverage than any other conflict on earth.

Staffing is the best measure of the importance of a story to a particular news organization. When I was a correspondent at the AP, the agency had more than 40 staffers covering Israel and the Palestinian territories. That was significantly more news staff than the AP had in China, Russia, or India, or in all of the 50 countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined. It was higher than the total number of news-gathering employees in all the countries where the uprisings of the “Arab Spring” eventually erupted.

To offer a sense of scale: Before the outbreak of the civil war in Syria, the permanent AP presence in that country consisted of a single regime-approved stringer. The AP’s editors believed, that is, that Syria’s importance was less than one-40th that of Israel....

The volume of press coverage that results, even when little is going on, gives this conflict a prominence compared to which its actual human toll is absurdly small. In all of 2013, for example, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict claimed 42 lives—that is, roughly the monthly homicide rate in the city of Chicago. Jerusalem, internationally renowned as a city of conflict, had slightly fewer violent deaths per capita last year than Portland, Ore., one of America’s safer cities. In contrast, in three years the Syrian conflict has claimed an estimated 190,000 lives, or about 70,000 more than the number of people who have ever died in the Arab-Israeli conflict since it began a century ago.

News organizations have nonetheless decided that this conflict is more important than, for example, the more than 1,600 women murdered in Pakistan last year (271 after being raped and 193 of them burned alive), the ongoing erasure of Tibet by the Chinese Communist Party, the carnage in Congo (more than 5 million dead as of 2012) or the Central African Republic, and the drug wars in Mexico (death toll between 2006 and 2012: 60,000), let alone conflicts no one has ever heard of in obscure corners of India or Thailand. They believe Israel to be the most important story on earth, or very close.

I suspect that part of this discrepancy is that it is much easier and pleasanter to be a reporter in Israel than one in Syria or Pakistan or Tibet or Congo. He goes on to point to how the media frame the story by totally ignoring the Palestinians as having any responsibility for their situation. They ignore the corruption in the Palestinian Authority yet drill down on the slightest negative story about Israeli society. The media ignore or downplay the fact that Hamas censors and intimidates them in their coverage of conflict in Gaza. It is like after the fall of Saddam Hussein, CNN's Eason Jordan told the world of how CNN had kept certain stories to themselves because of their fear of what Saddam would do to Iraqis who had worked with CNN if they had made stories of atrocities committed by Saddam and his sons. Yet reporters in Gaza don't seem to care about presenting a true picture of life in Gaza because they're too focused on blaming everything on Israel. Friedman goes on to say many perceptive things about how the media and their western audiences see conflict between Israel and the Palestinians and fail to see those tensions as part of of conflicts throughout the Middle East. And, by portraying the conflict as simply one between Israel and Palestinians they get to portray Israel as the stronger entity instead of framing the conflict as one between Israel and Arabs or between Israelis and Muslims if one were to include the hostile countries of Turkey and Iran. Such a framing would make Israel be a tiny country of 6 million facing 300 million Arabs in surrounding countries. 

And what explains this invidious depiction of Israel? Westerners can project onto Israel everything they despise about their own nation's histories.

When the people responsible for explaining the world to the world, journalists, cover the Jews’ war as more worthy of attention than any other, when they portray the Jews of Israel as the party obviously in the wrong, when they omit all possible justifications for the Jews’ actions and obscure the true face of their enemies, what they are saying to their readers—whether they intend to or not—is that Jews are the worst people on earth. The Jews are a symbol of the evils that civilized people are taught from an early age to abhor. International press coverage has become a morality play starring a familiar villain....

White people in London and Paris whose parents not long ago had themselves fanned by dark people in the sitting rooms of Rangoon or Algiers condemn Jewish “colonialism.” Americans who live in places called “Manhattan” or “Seattle” condemn Jews for displacing the native people of Palestine. Russian reporters condemn Israel’s brutal military tactics. Belgian reporters condemn Israel’s treatment of Africans. When Israel opened a transportation service for Palestinian workers in the occupied West Bank a few years ago, American news consumers could read about Israel “segregating buses.” And there are a lot of people in Europe, and not just in Germany, who enjoy hearing the Jews accused of genocide.

You don’t need to be a history professor, or a psychiatrist, to understand what’s going on. Having rehabilitated themselves against considerable odds in a minute corner of the earth, the descendants of powerless people who were pushed out of Europe and the Islamic Middle East have become what their grandparents were—the pool into which the world spits. The Jews of Israel are the screen onto which it has become socially acceptable to project the things you hate about yourself and your own country. The tool through which this psychological projection is executed is the international press.

Bret Stephens ponders the intriguing way that Obama's aides describe his personal reactions to various conflicts around the world.

Barack Obama "has become 'enraged' at the Israeli government, both for its actions and for its treatment of his chief diplomat, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. " So reports the Jerusalem Post, based on the testimony of Martin Indyk, until recently a special Middle East envoy for the president. The war in Gaza, Mr. Indyk adds, has had "a very negative impact" on Jerusalem's relations with Washington.

Think about this. Enraged. Not "alarmed" or "concerned" or "irritated" or even "angered." Anger is a feeling. Rage is a frenzy. Anger passes. Rage feeds on itself. Anger is specific. Rage is obsessional, neurotic.

And Mr. Obama—No Drama Obama, the president who prides himself on his cool, a man whose emotional detachment is said to explain his intellectual strength—is enraged. With Israel. Which has just been hit by several thousand unguided rockets and 30-odd terror tunnels, a 50-day war, the forced closure of its one major airport, accusations of "genocide" by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, anti-Semitic protests throughout Europe, general condemnation across the world. This is the country that is the object of the president's rage.

Think about this some more. In the summer in which Mr. Obama became "enraged" with Israel, Islamic State terrorists seized Mosul and massacred Shiite soldiers in open pits, Russian separatists shot down a civilian jetliner, Hamas executed 18 "collaborators" in broad daylight, Bashar Assad's forces in Syria came close to encircling Aleppo with the aim of starving the city into submission, a brave American journalist had his throat slit on YouTube by a British jihadist, Russian troops openly invaded Ukraine, and Chinese jets harassed U.S. surveillance planes over international waters.

Mr. Obama or his administration responded to these events with varying degrees of concern, censure and indignation. But rage?

Nope. Not so much. He saves that for the Israelis.

Bret Stephens: Of Ferguson and Fallujah - WSJ

Bret Stephens: Of Ferguson and Fallujah - WSJ

What Mr. Bratton mainly wants to underscore is that crime in the Big Apple continues to plumb historic lows, never mind recent tabloid headlines. He wants to underscore, also, the reason for it: broken-windows policing methods. Such is his belief in broken windows that he comes to the meeting flanked by the man who helped come up with the idea: George Kelling, the legendary criminologist.
Broken windows stresses that endemic criminality is not primarily a function of the usual "root causes"—poverty, racism, bad schools, broken families and so on. The real problem is disorder itself.
"Disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence," Mr. Kelling observed in a seminal 1982 Atlantic article, co-written with the late James Q. Wilson. The mere appearance of disorder—graffiti, broken windows, an abandoned car, drug dealers or prostitutes openly plying their trades—creates a sense that nobody's looking, nobody cares, nobody is in charge. Bad guys respond to these environmental cues by acting badly. Good people stay off the street, bolt their doors, move out.
....
Last October I wrote a column with the headline "Iraq Tips Toward the Abyss." It was prompted by the news that 7,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed over the previous 10 months alone.
"Americans may think they've changed the channel on Iraq, but the grisly show goes on," I wrote. "Pay attention before it gets worse." The world yawned and the Obama administration did nothing.
In January came the news that a group called the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham had retaken Fallujah, just 40 or so miles west of Baghdad, a city that U.S. Marines had liberated a decade earlier at a major cost in lives. The media ran a few stories about the heartache of the battle's veterans. President Obama said nothing.
In July, ISIS took Mosul and seized six divisions worth of U.S. supplied Iraqi military equipment. For once, President Obama took public notice but waited another month before doing anything, ostensibly because he disapproved of the leadership in Baghdad. That was around the time Kurdistan nearly fell to ISIS and the Yazidis were nearly wiped out.
This is a case study of allowing neighborhoods to decay and disorder to fester; of doing things reactively, not preventively. Where would we be in Iraq today if Mr. Obama hadn't simply walked and looked away for the past three years?
The answer to disorder is to provide order. To engage community leaders. To enforce norms. To reassure good citizens that their security is being looked after and it's not every man for himself. To maintain a visible presence that deters would-be lawbreakers from committing criminal acts. To prevent bad people from acting badly, and to punish them swiftly when they do.

The Complete Chronology of the Benghazi Deception | National Review Online

The Complete Chronology of the Benghazi Deception | National Review Online

March 2011: U.S. secretly approves arms shipments from Qatar to Libyan rebels.

May 2011: Al-Qaeda flags raised over Benghazi.

November 2011: Rebel leader Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi admits a significant number of Libyan rebels were al-Qaeda fighters who fought American troops in Iraq.

April 19, 2012: State Department rejects ambassador to Libya’s request for more security personnel.

June 20, 2012: Assassination attempt on the British Ambassador to Libya.

July 9, 2012: Ambassador Stevens asks the State Department for more security personnel.

August 8, 2012: The number of security personnel at Benghazi reduced by State Department.

August 16, 2012: U.S. Site Security in Benghazi alerts the State Department that conditions are perilous.

September 4, 2012: Gallup presidential tracking poll: Obama 47 percent; Romney 46 percent.

September 4–6, 2012: Democratic National Convention (“al-Qaeda decimated; bin Laden is dead and GM is alive; al-Qaeda is on the run”).

September 11, 2012: Ambassador Stevens alerts the State Department that conditions in Benghazi are deteriorating.

3:40 p.m. (D.C. time): Stevens calls deputy chief of mission Greg Hicks in Tripoli and alerts him that the consulate in Benghazi is under attack.

4:00 p.m.: The White House is advised that the consulate is under attack. 10th Special Forces Group in Croatia is three hours away; Brigadier General (Ret.) Robert Lovell, Deputy Director of Intelligence for AFRICOM, later testifies that intelligence knew immediately that it was not a protest but a terrorist attack; no request for aid comes from the State Department.

5:00 p.m.: Defense Secretary Leon Panetta discusses attack with President Obama.

6:00 p.m.: U.S. Embassy in Tripoli advises the White House and the State Department that al-Qaeda affiliate Ansar al-Sharia has claimed responsibility for the attack. CIA deputy director Mike Morrell later testifies that “analysts knew from the get-go that al Qaeda was involved with this attack.”

8:00 p.m.: Greg Hicks calls Clinton and tells her that consulate is under terrorist attack.

10:00 p.m.: Clinton and Obama talk.

10:30 p.m.: Clinton issues a statement linking the attack to an inflammatory internet video.

11:00–11:30 p.m.: Former Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Ty Woods killed.

September 12, 2012: Redacted e-mail from a State Department official says the official advised the Libyan government that the attack was carried out by Ansar al-Sharia. No mention of video.

September 12–15, 2012: CIA drafts several iterations of talking points; contains no known references to video as cause of the attack.

September 13, 2012: State Department memo blames the attack on terrorists.

September 13, 2012: Defense Intelligence Agency assigns blame for the attack on Ansar al-Sharia in Libya. No mention of a video.

September 13, 2012: Clinton condemns violence against U.S. consulate in Libya due to a video.

September 13, 2012: Jay Carney condemns attack due to a video.

September 14, 2012: State Department says the attack was a spontaneous demonstration due to a video.

September 14, 2012: Obama and Clinton receive the families of the fallen as their caskets arrive at Andrews Air Force Base; blame the attack on a video. Clinton tells Ty Woods’s father, Charles, that they will “get” the producer of the video.

September 14, 2012: Jay Carney blames the video.

September 14, 2012, 8:00 p.m.: Deputy national-security adviser Ben Rhodes sends an e-mail regarding the preparation of Susan Rice for the Sunday talk shows, advising Rice to underscore the video and that the attack is “not a broader failure of policy.”

September 15, 2012: Obama blames the video.

September 16, 2012: Susan Rice appears on five Sunday talk shows and characterizes the attacks as a spontaneous reaction due to a video.

September 16, 2012: Libyan president disputes Rice’s comments, asserting Benghazi was a planned attack.

September 18, 2012: Obama appears on the David Letterman show, blames the video.

September 19, 2012: The head of the National Counterterrorism Center testifies that the attack was not a protest but a terrorist attack.

September 20, 2012: Obama blames the video.

September 20, 2012: Obama and Clinton run an ad on Pakistani TV apologizing for the video.

September 21, 2012: Clinton says it was a terrorist attack.

September 24, 2012: Obama appears on The View, blames the video.

October 4, 2012: Clinton establishes the Accountability Review Board (“ARB”) to examine the circumstances surrounding the loss of personnel in Benghazi. Clinton not interviewed by ARB.

October 11, 2012: At the vice-presidential debate, Joe Biden claims the administration was not informed about requests for more security at the consulate in Benghazi.

October 16, 2012: Obama, in a response to a question from a reporter about whether he denied requests for aid to Benghazi on September 11 responds, “The minute I found out this was going on, I gave three directives. Number one, make sure we are securing our personnel and doing whatever we need to. Number two, we are going to investigate exactly what happened and make sure it doesn’t happen again. Number three, find out who did this so that we can bring them to justice.”

October 18, 2012: Judicial Watch makes a Freedom of Information Act request to the administration for talking points and communications regarding the events in Benghazi. The administration ignores the request.

October 20, 2012: Obama claims that he was not aware of any requests for additional security in Benghazi.

January 23, 2013: Clinton asks, “What difference, at this point, does it make whether it was a terrorist attack or a spontaneous demonstration?”

June 21, 2013: Judicial Watch sues the administration for unlawfully withholding documents pertaining to Benghazi.

July 25, 2013: Obama slams the “endless parade of distractions, political posturing, and phony scandals.”

August 2013: The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform requests Benghazi e-mails. The Ben Rhodes e-mail is not among those produced.

April 18, 2014: Federal court orders the administration to turn over documents to Judicial Watch. 41 documents are released, including the Ben Rhodes e-mail.

May 1, 2014: Tommy Vietor tells Fox News the president was not in the Situation Room on September 11, 2012.

May 2, 2014: Speaker John Boehner announces a vote to form a select committee on Benghazi.

May 4, 2014: Representative Adam Schiff (D.., Calif.), member of the House Intelligence Committee, suggests Democrats boycott the House select committee as a “colossal waste of time.”

May 5, 2014: Carney will not say whether White House will cooperate with the select committee.

(Clearly, much remains to be filled in by the select committee. Numerous questions and lines of inquiry are prompted by the above. The chronology is based on congressional testimony and reports from, among others, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Washington Times, the New York Times, the New York Post and Fox News, and the reporting of Steve Hayes and Jennifer Griffin.)

The Benghazi Scandal In One Email | Power Line

The Benghazi Scandal In One Email | Power Line

One aspect of the scandal, anyway. The administration has released a series of emails in response to FOIA requests by Judicial Watch. You can read them here.....From the earliest hours after the attack, this is how the Obama administration saw Benghazi. The overriding imperative was to deflect attention from the “broader failure of policy” that led to the disaster.....The other striking fact about the emails is the complete absence of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Maybe someone was keeping them informed, but they are never mentioned in the emails (except when someone prepares a statement to be issued under their names). During the crucial hours, they are never referred to. There is no suggestion that they are playing a part; that they are in the loop; that they are making decisions; or that they are, in any way, important players. Maybe there are more emails, not yet disclosed, that would reflect their roles. Or maybe they really were ciphers–seat warmers with no concerns beyond the political, not expected to do anything in an hour of crisis.
UPDATE: And now Jay Carney is lying about the Rhodes email–of which, by the way, he was one of the recipients!

Fools and knaves: New York Times edition | Power Line

Link: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/12/fools-and-knaves-new-york-times-edition.php

In short, the Times story does not pass the smell test. I continue to be amazed by the MSM taking the Times seriously and parroting its reports as if they are gospel.

The New York Times’ revisionist account of Benghazi | Power Line

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/12/the-new-york-times-revisionist-account-of-benghazi.php

The Times bases its claim that neither al Qaeda nor any other international terrorist group had a role in the attack on its view that Ansar al-Shariah is a "purely local extremist organization." But Peter King, a member and former chairman of the House's Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, points out that Ansar al-Shariah is widely believed to be an affiliate terror group of Al Qaeda. King accuses the Times of engaging in mere semantics, and he is probably right.

The Times' claim that the Benghazi attack "was fueled in large part by anger" at the video about Islam also seems unpersuasive. Greg Hicks, the deputy to Ambassador Christopher Stevens who was killed in the attack testified to Congress that the video was "a non-event in Libya." Moreover, an independent review of more than 4,000 social media postings from Benghazi found no reference to the video until the day after the attack.
The New York Times seems to have uncovered social media references to the video that precede the Sept. 11 attack. Even so, the relative absence of such references undermines its claim that the video played a significant role in the attack.
I don't mean to deny that some of those who attacked the U.S. compound were influenced by the video. But the Times' own reporting shows that a "grave" threat to American interests in Benghazi predates the controversy over the video. The failure of the Obama administration, and especially Hillary Clinton, to prepare to meet that threat remains indisputable.
The Times stops short of claiming that the Sept. 11 attack in Benghazi was "spontaneous." It says, instead, that the attack was not "meticulously planned."
That may or may not be true. But the quality of the planning — good enough, as it turned out — seems irrelevant. Again, what matters is that the State Department should have been prepared for the attack and taken action accordingly. This the New York Times does not dispute.

Sultan Knish: War is the Answer

Link: http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2012/11/war-is-answer.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A FromNyToIsraelSultanRevealsTheStoriesBehindTheNews %28from NY to Israel Sultan Reveals The Stories Behind the News%29 (via shareaholic.com)

Hamas is not interested in being engaged. Its goal is the destruction of Israel. This isn't posturing, it's not sullen resentment over being blockaded by Israel or outrage over the latest round of fighting. This is the essential ideology of Hamas, derived from the core Islamic principles over the proper role of non-Muslims in the Muslim world. It is not interested in a two-state solution, job creation programs or any of the meaningless shiny toys that diplomats wave when they arrive in the region. Its goal is to make Islam supreme over all other systems by destroying a non-Muslim state in what it considers to be Muslim territory.

Lara Logan’s War Cry - The Daily Beast

It's said a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged.
Lara Logan is sounding awfully conservative of late.


Link: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/10/09/lara-logan-s-war-cry.html

...the foreign correspondent and 60 Minutes star skewered American policy in Afghanistan and Libya, called for a ramped-up military campaign against terrorists, and criticized the Obama administration and others for both underestimating the Taliban’s strength in Afghanistan and for tolerating Pakistan’s obvious coddling of terrorists killing American soldiers.The Taliban and al Qaeda, she made clear, “want to destroy the West and us,” and we must fight fire with fire, She appeared to leave the assembled alternatively riveted and just a bit troubled by a critique with interventionist implications clearly drawn from her reporting.
As one nonprofit executive, a former magazine editor, put it the next day when asked to describe her speech: “Shoot ’em, bomb ’em, fuck ’em. They will kill your children.”

The Wall Street Journal Falls for Palestinian Fauxtography Hoax

The Wall Street Journal Falls for Palestinian Fauxtography Hoax

via Big Journalism by Evan Pokroy on 1/30/12

The modern Arab-Jewish conflict has played itself out on many fronts in the last 60 years. Israel has been vastly more successful on the field of battle, but the Arabs have managed to co-opt the media narrative. For a generation, the press has been sympathetic to the cause of those who strive to eradicate Israel. This has shown itself over and over again, not only in editorial decisions, but in the blind acceptance of reports coming from Arab sources in the region.
The problem is that those sources have repeatedly shown that they are not interested in reporting the news but, in many cases, in fabricating it. In many cases, these fabrications have been done with the active participation of "respected" news gathering organizations.
In 2006, during the Second Lebanon War, the term Fauxtography was coined to refer to either the embellishing of existing photographs or staging others for the best effect to discredit Israel. The uncovering of tampering resulted in both Reuters and AP disciplining freelance "reporters" as well as having to kill pictures that they had syndicated.
The staging of news photographs, and news in general, is alive and well in disputed areas of Israel even now.
What remains surprising is how otherwise discerning news operations such as the Wall Street Journal still accept, uncritically, the output of suspect sources. Just this past week the Wall Street Journal, as well as a range of other international news operations, posted a picture submitted by Hazem Bader for Agence France-Presse (AFP).

WSJ's "Photo of the Day," Jan. 25, 2012

The caption on the photo explains that the man seen writhing in pain on the ground was intentionally run over by a tractor driven by an Israeli soldier. That is to say that the international press reported, without questioning, that an official representative of the Israeli Government had, without cause, purposely caused a grave injury to an innocent man.
The only problem is that it never happened. There is no record of anyone being injured. CAMERA, a watchdog group that specializes in following anti-Israel media activity, followed all possible leads to find the injured man.

Yet, after checking with both Palestinian and Israeli sources, it seems that the man was not at all injured, and there is no evidence that he was run over. On the Palestinian side, Tthe Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), which provides comprehensive weekly reports about all injuries, fatalities, incursions, and other incidents in both the West Bank and Gaza, makes no mention of this alleged injury in its report for Jan. 19- 25. In addition, the Palestinian Ma'an News Agency did not cover the alleged injury, even though it does report on Israeli army activity that day nearby in Tel Rumeida. And Ma'an also reported a hit and run incident, in which a Palestinian teen was hit by an Israeli driver at a checkpoint this morning. Presumably, then, had this worker actually been run over and injured on Wednesday, Ma'an would have carried the story. Nor does it appear that any English-language wire service or other media outlet covered the alleged injury.

On the Israeli side, Capt. Barak Raz, spokesman for the Judea and Samaria division who had spoken to soldiers at the scene, told CAMERA the following: IDF soldiers were on site to provide security for the Civil Administration, which was preventing Palestinian construction in an area not permitted for building. One Palestinian worker was lying on the ground next to the trailer when he started to scream that he had been run over. Nobody saw him get run over. First he complained that his left leg was injured. An army medic checked him and saw nothing. The medic did, nevertheless, wrap him in a bandage since the worker was carrying on that he had been run over. The man then subsequently claimed that it was his right leg which was injured. According to Raz, the Palestinian Red Crescent, which was also on the scene, checked him, and likewise found absolutely nothing wrong with him.
In short, at worst, this incident is staged, as Raz contends, and the man pretended to be run over and injured, while neither happened. At best, there is zero independent confirmation that he was injured. If neither AFP nor IHT can substantiate the claim, it ought to be immediately retracted.

It doesn't come as a big surprise that AFP is involved in disseminating anti-Israel propaganda after the al-Dura affair. One would, though, expect more from such bastions of serious journalism as the Wall Street Journal.
For shame.
(Special thanks to Elder of Ziyon for bringing this to my attention.)

Raymond Ibrahim: The Closing of the Muslim Mind (Book Review)

Raymond Ibrahim: The Closing of the Muslim Mind (Book Review)

via Jihad Watch by Raymond on 10/20/11

Last week, "Saudi Arabia's religious police arrested an Indonesian housemaid for casting a magic spell on a local family and 'turning its life upside down.'" The maid "confessed" to using sorcery, and "commission experts took the magic items to their office and managed to dismantle and stop the spell."
Far from being absurd aberrations to be dismissed, such accounts, which are becoming better known thanks to the Internet, are stark reminders of the incompatibility between the Western and Muslim worldviews, or, more to the point, the difficulty Western peoples have transcending their own paradigms and understanding the Muslim worldview in its own right—above and beyond the issue of sorcery.
In his book, The Closing of the Muslim Mind, Robert Reilly, a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, helps explain the Muslim worldview by thoroughly documenting the historic and doctrinal roots behind it; by refreshingly bypassing the overly dramatized question of "what went wrong," he explains the more pressing "why it went wrong."
The book is a reminder of the importance of epistemology: before understanding Muslim acts, one must understand the Muslim mind that initiates them. We discover that Shakespeare's dictum "Nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so," in Islam becomes "nothing good or evil but Allah says so."
The author sheds light on the struggles of the different schools of Islam, showing how by the 10th century, the fatalistic, deterministic schools triumphed, delivering the death blow, not only to the notion of free will, but natural law as well: "a theological deformation … produced a dysfunctional culture." From here one can understand the full impact of the popular assertion "the doors of ijtihad [intellectualizing] closed in the 10th century."
Reilly chronicles how the giants of Muslim philosophy, such as Ghazali and Ashari, concluded that knowledge was unknowable, that moral truths can only be ascertained through revelation. Accordingly, all knowledge—the very bounds of reality—came to be limited to the words of the Quran and its pronouncer, Islam's prophet Muhammad.
The ramifications of such intellectual calcification are immense: "All acts are in themselves morally neutral"; "Allah does not command certain behavior because it is good; it is good because he commands it. Likewise, he does not forbid murder because it is bad; it is bad because he forbids it."
Equivocations, such as the following by Ashari, become commonplace: "Lying is evil only because Allah has declared it to be evil…. And if he declared it to be good it would be good; and if he commanded it, no one could gainsay him." Of course and as Ashari knew, the Islamic deity and his prophet are on record permitting and even encouraging Muslims to deceive.
Similarly, the spirit of inquiry perishes: "the only thing worth knowing is whether a specific action is, according to Shari 'a: obligatory, recommended, permitted, discouraged, or forbidden. The rest is irrelevant." It is precisely for this reason that in Islam, the law—what is right or wrong, how one should live—trumps "theology," the latter designated as kalam, that is, mere "words." This is also why in the last millennium Spain alone has produced more books than the Arab world in its entirety.
Likewise in the realm of science: Reilly cites a Pakistani physicist—not an uneducated, impoverished "radical"—saying it is un-Islamic to believe that combining hydrogen and water makes water; rather, Muslims are "supposed to say that when you bring hydrogen and oxygen together then by the will of Allah [which need not always be consistent] water was created."
The Closing of the Muslim Mind explains the singularity of Muslim epistemology and its antithesis to Western sensibilities: it explains why a maid is arrested and charged with sorcery and the dread of bewitched animals; explains why adult "breastfeeding" and habitual lying pose no moral problems; explains why top Muslim clerics insist the world is flat and ingesting the feces and urine of Muhammad is salutary; explains why jihadists believe their terror is pious and a libidinous paradise awaits them.
All these "alternate" ways of thinking make sense when one accepts that, in the purely Muslim mind, intuitive reasoning, the human conscience, and even common sense take a backseat to the literal words of Allah and his prophet, seen as the founts of all truth and reality—or, inevitably from a non-Muslim perspective, the words of a deluded or deceiving 7th century Arab.

Raymond Ibrahim, a widely published Islam-specialist, is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum. He writes a weekly column for Jihad Watch.

Pat Condell: The great Palestinian lie

Pat Condell: The great Palestinian lie

via Jihad Watch by Robert on 10/6/11


"This is not about territory, and it certainly isn't about justice or human rights, because Arab societies don't know the meaning of those words. It's about Jew-hatred, as mandated by the Qur'an and as preached in the mosques and taught to the children in Arab countries day in and day out, generation after poisoned generation."
Be sure to watch it all. There is a special note for pro-Palestinian Leftists toward the end. (Video thanks to Cheryl.)

Debunking the Palestine Lie

Debunking the Palestine Lie

via Big Government by Ben Shapiro on 9/21/11

This week, Sol Stern of Encounter Books released a broadside titled "A Century of Palestinian Rejectionism and Jew Hatred."  In it, Sol details the history of Arab rejection of a Palestinian state.  His point is well summed up in this brilliant video narrated by Bill Whittle:

Sol is very kind when he writes that President Obama's motives are unclear with regard to his ideological support for Mahmoud Abbas' odd iteration of the Palestinian state-to-be.  His motives are absolutely clear.  President Obama is not who New York Magazine pretends he is – he is our first ideologically Muslim president.

That doesn't mean he's a Muslim – far from it (he's an atheist).  He is, however, an ideological Muslim in the same way Hillary Clinton was an ideological lesbian in her college days – he believes in the geopolitical perspective of the Muslim world, namely that the United States and Israel are responsible for all evil and that if Israel had never existed, the world would be a better place.

UN Moves Forward to Implement Goldstone Report

UN Moves Forward to Implement Goldstone Report | The Weekly Standard

The gist of the report: Everything is Israel's fault.

Israel vs Palestine

Israel Cleared Of War Crime Allegations By Judge Goldstone

Israel Cleared Of War Crime Allegations By Judge Goldstone

In September 2009, the UN Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict chaired by Justice Richard Goldstone submitted its report (the Goldstone Report) to the Human Rights Council in Geneva. The Report suggested that war crimes had been committed by all parties in the Gaza Conflict, and has served as the basis for an extensive political and legal campaign against Israel in the international arena.

Now Judge Goldstone paints a very different picture from the original report and concludes that Israel has been truthful all along.

The Volokh Conspiracy » Richard Goldstone: Chief Kangaroo

The Volokh Conspiracy » Richard Goldstone: Chief Kangaroo

It seems the Goldstone report, pinning the blame for all nastiness on Israel, was all wrong.

I think, additionally, that Goldstone took Israel’s refusal to participate in this “game” as a personal affront, rather than causing him, as he should have, to question the whole enterprise.

Egypt

Some cause for concern over the Egypt uprising.  Whoever takes over may not be what we hope for.

From the Wall Street Journal:

It's what the good people on West 40th Street like to call a "Times Classic." On Feb. 16, 1979, the New York Times ran a lengthy op-ed by Richard Falk, a professor of international law at Princeton, under the headline "Trusting Khomeini."
"The depiction of [Khomeini] as fanatical, reactionary and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false," wrote Mr. Falk. "What is also encouraging is that his entourage of close advisers is uniformly composed of moderate, progressive individuals."
After carrying on in this vein for a few paragraphs, the professor concluded: "Having created a new model of popular revolution based, for the most part, on nonviolent tactics, Iran may yet provide us with a desperately needed model of humane governance for a third-world country."
Whoops.

The Muslim Brotherhood claims not to be interested in taking power, but is well enough organized it may get power by default.

Nor should there be any doubt about what the Brotherhood is aiming against. "Resistance is the only solution against the Zio-American arrogance and tyranny," Muhammad Badie, the Brotherhood's supreme guide, sermonized in October. "The improvement and change that the [Muslim] nation seeks can only be attained . . . by raising a jihadi generation that pursues death just as the enemies pursue life."
Such remarks may come as a rude shock to James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence who last week testified in Congress that the Brotherhood was "largely secular" (a remark his office later retracted). They may also surprise a coterie of Western analysts who are convinced that the Brotherhood is moving in a moderate direction and will only be further domesticated by participation in democratic politics. Yet the evidence for that supposition rests mainly on what the Brotherhood tells Westerners. What it says in Arabic is another story.
In 2005, candidates for the Brotherhood took 20% of the parliamentary vote. Gamal al-Banna, Hassan's youngest brother, once told me they command as much as 40% support. Neither figure is a majority. But unless Egypt's secular forces can coalesce into serious political parties, the people for whom Islam is the solution won't find the fetters of democracy to be much of a problem.

Bad theories kill people

This piece looks at the result of a bad theory killing people: Commentary » Blog Archive » Incitement Kills — but Not Always Its Intended Target

The inquiry concluded that “doctors believed Abu Rahmah was sickened by phosphorous fertilizer and nerve gas. She was therefore treated with atropine and fluids, without Palestinian doctors realizing that she had in fact inhaled tear gas.”

Atropine is the standard treatment for poisonous gas. But it can be deadly if given in large doses to someone who hasn’t inhaled poison gas.

And this is where incitement comes in. Anyone who knows anything about Israel would know that the IDF doesn’t even use nerve gas against combatants armed with sophisticated weapons, much less against rock-throwing demonstrators.

But wild allegations of preposterous Israeli crimes are standard fare among Palestinians, and indeed throughout the Arab world. Israel has been accused of everything from poisoning Palestinian wells with depleted uranium to sending sharks to attack Egypt’s Red Sea resorts in order to undermine that country’s tourist industry.

In this case, the theory is "Some gassed by Israeli police will have been gassed with a nerve agent". Acting on this theory -- giving the specific antidote -- killed the victim.

A theory is not just idle woolgathering. It's an explanation which helps you bring order to otherwise chaotic facts. If you have a bad theory, you don't wind up with nothing, you wind up with the wrong answer.

NYT Crosses a Moral Line

The Authoritarian Media - WSJ.com

After the horrific shooting spree, the editorial board of New York Times offered a voice of reasoned circumspection: "In the aftermath of this unforgivable attack, it will be important to avoid drawing prejudicial conclusions . . .," the paper counseled.

Here's how the sentence continued: ". . . from the fact that Major Hasan is an American Muslim whose parents came from the Middle East."

The Tucson Safeway massacre prompted exactly the opposite reaction. What was once known as the paper of record egged on its readers to draw invidious conclusions that are not only prejudicial but contrary to fact. In doing so, the Times has crossed a moral line.

....

In the column, Krugman blames the massacre on "eliminationist rhetoric," which he defines as "suggestions that those on the other side of a debate must be removed from that debate by whatever means necessary." He rightly asserts that "there isn't any place" for such rhetoric. But he falsely asserts that it is "coming, overwhelmingly, from the right."

He provides exactly one example: Rep. Michele Bachmann, a Minnesota Republican, "urging constituents to be 'armed and dangerous.' " Such a statement does seem problematic, although in the absence of context, and given what former Times public editor Daniel Okrent has described as Krugman's "disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults"--an observation that surely applies to nonnumeric facts as well--we are disinclined to trust Krugman's interpretation of Bachmann's statement.

How the US let al-Qaida get its hands on an Iraqi weapons factory | World news | The Guardian

How the US let al-Qaida get its hands on an Iraqi weapons factory | World news | The Guardian
Not provably a WMD cache, but lots of high explosives seem to have gone missing from the site.