On Friday the 13th, ratings agency Standard & Poor’s (S&P) downgraded the credit status of nine European nations. The ratings of Cyprus, Italy, Portugal and Spain were lowered by two notches while Austria, France, Malta, Slovakia and Slovenia were lowered by one. Italy’s rate cut from A to BBB+ reflects the second S&P downgrade since September 19th, and Portugal’s debt has now reached “junk” status. “Today’s rating actions are primarily driven by our assessment that the policy initiatives that have been taken by European policy makers in recent weeks may be insufficient to fully address ongoing systemic stresses in the euro zone,” said S&P in a written statement.

The downgrade was hardly a surprise. On December 5th, S&P put 15 European nations on review, warning them that the decisions made during the European Union (EU) summit ending on December 9th would be the primary basis for determining those nations’ credit ratings going forward. The result of that meeting, the EU’s fifth attempt to stem its credit crisis, produced a “deal” best described as an agreement to come to an agreement. The only real highlight of the summit was English Prime Minister David Cameron’s rejection of the treaty in favor of a concept increasingly out of favor among other EU leaders: national sovereignty.

Despite the warning by S&P, the downgrade is being characterized as a “rebuke” of the EU’s prime movers, French president Nicolas Sarkozy, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Both are on politically shaky ground. Sarkozy is running for re-election in the spring and the downgrade of France to AA+ for the first time since 1975 does not bode well for a man who had often cited his country’s AAA rating as a “badge of honor.” In Germany, one of Merkel’s partners in her governing center-right coalition, the Free Democrats Party (FDP), is sliding deeper into crisis, threatening her grip on power as well.

Germany was the only EU nation to emerge from this latest downgrade completely unscathed. It retained both its AAA rating and a stable outlook going forward. 14 other EU countries–Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, and Spain–were put on a “negative” outlook. This means the S&P believes that there is a better than one-in-three chance a country’s rating will be lowered in 2012 or 2013. “It will make it harder to erect firewalls around struggling euro zone economies and convince investors that things are more sustainable,” said Simon Tilford, chief economist for the Center for European Reform in London.

Two countries to watch in that regard are Italy and Spain. Both began the year with fairly successful debt sales, but after Friday’s downgrade both countries saw their bond yields rise, along with those of France and Belgium, while safe-haven German Bund futures hit a new high of 140.22, up over a full point for the day. Another possible complication arising from the downgrade is the likelihood that the European Financial Stability Fund (EFSF) will also lose its AAA rating as well, because its guarantor nations have had their ratings cut. An EFSF downgrade could be avoided if the four remaining AAA nations–Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, and Luxembourg–would increase the size of their guarantees, but such a move is not considered likely.

The Tribal Update, the media satire television-on-Internet brought to you every week by Latma, the Hebrew-language satirical media criticism website Caroline Glick runs, has  produced a special Christmas song for its Christian friends:

As German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Nicolas Sarkozy do their best to put on a public face of cooperation in resolving Europe’s escalating sovereign debt crisis, behind the scenes both leaders are seething.

They are angry with each other, angry with each other’s policy choices, angry with each other’s friends and allies.

It’s well-known that German taxpayers are fed up with footing the bill for Greeks who take longer vacations than they do and retire on full government pensions many years earlier than they can. Less known is that the German government is actively considering allowing Greece – and possibly Portugal and even Italy and Ireland – to drop out of the Euro-zone.

“If the Euro fails, it will be Merkel’s fault,” a senior advisor to French president Sarkozy told me recently. “Germany has been resisting efforts to prop up the Euro. If the Euro collapses, it will be as much Germany’s fault as it will be that of the over-indebted Euro-zone members.”

Europeans are used to duplicity. That’s why they weren’t surprised to hear President Obama sharing derogatory personal remarks about Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to French president Sarkozy when both leaders apparently thought the microphones were off.

But the duplicity of German Chancellor Merkel – smiling at Sarkozy in public, while throwing daggers at him in private – takes the cake.

The European media often talks of the Paris-Berlin axis, a code phrase meant to signify a marriage of reason between Europe’s two biggest economies.

But the extent of the falling out between Merkel and Sarkozy goes way beyond a marital spat. It is verging on divorce.

As the French rely increasingly on Britain and the United States, Germany is leering to the east. “What we are seeing is the emergency of a new Berlin-Moscow-Tehran axis,” the Sarkozy advisor warned.

There are many signs of trouble just beneath the surface.

First, there is Germany’s ongoing trade with Iran. Despite strong European Union sanctions on Iran, top German firms continue to do a booming business with Tehran.

Even worse: German trade associations are actively promoting exports to Iran, even as the EU calls for halting trade entirely.  Here are a few of these trade promotion events from just the past two months:

-          On October 10, 2011, a delegation from southwest Iran visited Dresden seeking to expand Iran’s purchase of oil and gas field technology from German firms. (The organizers of this event have no sense of irony, as their website slogan shows: “European-Iranian ventures, Your Economic Success”)

-          On October 26, the German Foreign Policy Association hosted Iran’s Vice Minister of Economics and Finance, Dr. Mohammad Reza Farzin, to a public forum to promote cooperation with Iran and oppose sanctions.

-          On November 8, the German Business Association hosted a German-Iranian Business Congress in Berlin, spotlighting “Iranian Business Women Power.”

-          On November 22, the Bavarian Ministry for Economics held its annual Export Promotion Day, with a special emphasis on exploring “better market chances in Iran, possibilities to invest, finding business partners in Iran.”

(Hat tip to the enterprising group known as Stop the Bomb for keeping close tabs on German exports to Iran).

We’ve been through this song and dance before with Libya and Iraq in the 1980s, where the Germans were building poison gas factories and ballistic missile plants. It became known as trade über alles.

At the same time, Merkel’s government has been pressing hard behind the scenes to block EU sanctions against the Iranian Central Bank, an initiative being promoted by French president Sarkozy.

So what’s going on? At a closed door meeting among European intelligence czars recently, top officials at Germany’s BND (their equivalent of the CIA) shocked their counterparts with the virulence of their ant-American remarks.

There’s a 1930’s style resurgence of nationalism in Germany that has caught the attention of many Europeans, the top Sarkozy advisor told me. “It’s Germany first, and to hell with Europe,” he said.

At the same time Germany is eager to protect its business ties to Tehran, Chancellor Merkel has been forging a closer political and economic relationship with Russia.

Some observers see the covert hand of Russia’s SVR intelligence service in the recent anti-nuclear campaign that led to Merkel’s surprise announcement on May 30 that Germany will close all of its 17 nuclear power plants by 2022.

The French, of course, are particularly sensitive to such things since they rely on nuclear power to produce around 80% of their electricity and are the world’s foremost exporter of nuclear power technology.

At the recently held Cannes G-20 Summit, the host, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, unaware of the fact that his lapel microphone was live, said to U.S. President Barack Obama, “I cannot stand Netanyahu. He’s a liar.”  And, according to the report by French media website Arret Sur Images, Obama responded with, “You’re fed up with him, but I have to deal with him every day.”  The shameful and hypocritical behavior of Sarkozy and Obama, not to be outdone by Britain’s Prime Minister Cameron, speaks volumes about their perfidy and treachery.

Earlier this year, Sarkozy and Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron threatened Israel with severe consequences if Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not accept the Hamas-Fatah unification, and agree to their demands as a price for the resumption of “peace” talks.  Sarkozy (and Cameron) hinted he will certainly vote for a Palestinian State. Although France ultimately abstained on Palestinian statehood, France voted for the Palestinians to have full membership in UNESCO.

French treachery vis-a-vis Israel has a history.  And, on the eve of the 1967 Six-Day War it was on full display, when French President Charles de Gaulle decided to reverse the country’s foreign policy to one in favor of the Arabs, and placed an embargo on weapons deliveries to Israel, despite France’s contractual agreements with Israel. De Gaulle, who had served as founder and president of France’s Fifth Republic from 1959-1969, had forged an alliance with the Jewish state during a time when both France and Israel fought Arab nationalism in Algeria and Nasser’s Egypt respectively.

In 1960, France promised to supply Israel with 200 AMX-13 tanks and 72 Mystere fighter jets over the next 10-years.  On June 2, 1967, three days before the war broke out, de Gaulle cut Israel off cold.  He told his cabinet that “France will not give its approval to, and still less, support the first nation to use weapons.” De Gaulle’s statement was hypocritical and treacherous since he had already decided to abandon Israel and embrace the Arabs. On November 27, 1967, in a televised news conference, de Gaulle described the Jewish people as “this elite people, sure of themselves and domineering.”

Much of the instability and violence in today’s Middle East has its antecedents in the actions taken by the British and French governments.  While World War I was still going on they met and began to draw the map of the Middle East and drew up what would became known as the Sykes-Picot secret agreement of May 1916.  Following the end of war and the defeat of the Ottoman Empire they created new and mostly artificial nations such as Iraq, Trans-Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, while abandoning minorities such as the Kurds.
On August 10, 1920, a pact between the allies (Britain and France) and the representatives of the Ottoman Turkish government, known as the Treaty of Sevres, abolished the Ottoman Empire and obligated Turkey to renounce all rights over the Arab Middle East and North Africa.  The treaty also provided for the establishment of an autonomous Kurdistan.

The Turks rejected the Treaty of Sevres, and in 1923, Turkey was recognized as an independent nation, with the Treaty of Lausanne subsequently replacing Sevres.  Under its terms, Turkey was no longer obligated to grant the Kurds autonomy.  The treaty divided the Kurdish region among Turkey, Iran, and Syria – with British and French collusion.

Syria became a hodge-podge of ethnic and religious groups.  The French, who were wary of Sunni-Arab nationalism, granted autonomous status to the Alawites. They created an officer cadre from amongst the Alawites, which eventually gave rise to the Assad dictatorships, and Alawite domination of the Syrian military. Today’s upheaval in Syria has a great deal to do with those early French policies. The majority Sunni-Arabs resent the Alawite monopoly on power, and they remember (as the Kurds do) the betrayal of the French.

Syrian dictator Bashar Assad can feel the noose around his neck tightening. France is now calling for a humanitarian corridor in Syria and multiple reports talk of a Turkish-Arab military action following an authorization from the Arab League. The U.S. is telling its citizens to immediately leave the country. War may be on the horizon.

On Thursday, the French Foreign Minister asked the Arab League to endorse a “secured zone to protect civilians” in Syria. France is also officially embracing the Syrian National Council, an umbrella of opposition groups and figures, as a legitimate body. Foreign Minister Alain Juppe played a game of semantics, saying France was not endorsing a military intervention for a “buffer zone,” while admitting that the proposed “secured zone” would need military protection to ensure the delivery of aid.

At the same time, Israeli officials expect Turkey to soon establish buffer zones within Syrian territory near the border to create a safe haven for civilians and military defectors. The Turks are already housing the leadership of the Free Syria Army that is waging an armed struggle against Assad. The Kuwaiti Al-Rai newspaper is being told by senior sources in Europe that the plan is for a no-fly zone to be enforced by Arab and possibly Turkish air power after the Arab League approves of it. The U.S. will be involved behind-the-scenes, offering logistical support but no direct participation. NATO has ruled out military action in Syria.

According to the report, the no-fly zone will not be limited to only stopping Syrian airplanes and helicopters, which have been rarely used in putting down the uprising. It will enforce a ban on all movement of military vehicles and artillery, forcing them off of the streets. It is hoped that Assad’s military will be forced to end operations “in less than 24 hours.” This account differs from the Israeli one in that it states that Turkey has ruled out sending its military into Syrian territory to create a buffer zone.

Turkish state television revealed on Tuesday that the commander of the army was evaluating the forces stationed along the border with Syria. The Syrian military is reinforcing its positions in the area, digging trenches and moving tanks behind trees. The Turkish government is telling its citizens returning from their pilgrimage to Mecca not to travel through Syria following an incident where Assad’s security forces fired upon two buses filled with Turkish citizens.

The U.S. is telling its citizens in Syria to immediately depart. Ambassador Robert Ford’s planned return to Syria has been canceled. It should be noted that the Obama administration waited to support military intervention in Libya until all American citizens had left.

Three cities near the Turkish border have become the focal points of the protests and the fighting between the regime and the Free Syria Army: Idlib, Homs and Hama, the lattermost being the base of the Muslim Brotherhood revolt in 1982 that was crushed by the regime. Part of Idlib is said to be free of the regime’s control. This makes it a candidate to be the Syrian version of Libya’s Benghazi where the opposition headquartered its revolution.

The Free Syria Army’s strategy is to create a safe haven in northern Syria near Turkey and then win international support for its fight to overthrow Assad. The leader of the Free Syria Army claims to have 15,000 defectors under his command, up from the number of 10,000 he regularly boasted of. This may be an exaggeration, but it is clear that the forces’ capabilities are increasing. It recently carried out attacks on the Air Force Intelligence headquarters near Damascus and the ruling Baath Party headquarters in the capital.

The brutal and charismatic terrorist once known all over the world as Carlos the Jackal, already serving a life sentence pronounced in 1997 in France for the murder of two policemen and an informant in 1975, went on trial again this week in France – this time for terrorism charges, for which he faces another life sentence.

Describing himself to the court as “a professional revolutionary,” the 62-year-old Carlos launched into diatribes against “racist” Israel and “Zionist exploiters,” drawing applause from supporters in the packed courthouse, to whom he blew kisses. He denied involvement in the crimes in question, from 1982-3 in France; but in an interview the day before, he boasted that the operations he plotted in his career resulted in 2000 deaths. As for the innocent victims, Carlos justified their Marxist-inspired murders this way: “There were very few. I calculated that they were fewer than 10 percent. So out of 1,500 to 2,000 killed, there were not more than 200 civilian victims.” One of his defense attorneys asked the court instead to spare a thought for “victims” of Western-backed wars in Libya and Afghanistan.

Born Ilich Ramirez Sanchez in Venezuela, Carlos was named after Vladimir Ilich Lenin, whom Carlos’ rabidly Marxist father called “the biggest man in all humanity” (Carlos’ younger brothers were named Vladimir and Lenin). “Humanity before the bomb is divided into two periods,” his father said, “before and after Lenin, not Christ who was an ordinary, run-of-the-mill man.”

The successful lawyer spoonfed ideology to his child with an almost religious devotion, setting the boy on a path of ideological hatred and terrorist violence early on. “Revolution is my supreme euphoria,” Carlos claimed. He joined the Venezuelan Communist Youth at 15, where he organized anti-government street marches and learned how to make Molotov cocktails and set cars on fire.

He was then supposedly sent to Cuba at the age of 17 to complete his education in a political indoctrination camp which also ran courses in sabotage techniques, run by Castro’s secret service and a local KGB boss. There he was trained in small arms, explosives, cryptography, falsification of documents, and other revolutionary skills.

Sent to London to study, he joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in 1970 at the age of 21, after further Marxist student activism and training in guerrilla warfare. An affluent young Latin playboy who enjoyed living large while plotting to rid the world of capitalist oppression, Carlos, whose motto was “life, duty, revolution,” idolized another murderer, Ché Guevara. He fumbled his way through an assassination attempt, then botched (but deadly nonetheless) grenade and bomb attacks in Paris, and two failed RPG attacks at Paris airports, before shooting dead two French detectives and fleeing to Beirut.

The unrepentant killer led a bold assault on the OPEC headquarters in Vienna in 1975 (for which he donned a beret in the style of Ché), a hostage-taking operation that catapulted him to international fame and earned him upwards of $20 million in ransom payout. But his failure to follow orders and to execute specific hostages cost him his membership in the PFLP.

Thereafter and throughout the ‘80s, Carlos connected with a variety of terrorist partners, including Saddam Hussein, to continue his reign of terror. He even spearheaded a plot to assassinate Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, only to have the Muslim Brotherhood beat him to it.

It has been evident for some time that President Obama intensely dislikes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Then again, Obama does not have much use for Israel altogether.

The latest example occurred during an unscripted moment when microphones were accidentally left on after a G-20 press conference in Cannes last week had concluded. They picked up a private conversation between Obama and French President Nicholas Sarkozy exchanging bitter words about Netanyahu.

Sarkozy went first. He said, “I cannot stand him. He is a liar.”

Obama couldn’t help himself. He tried to outdo Sarkozy in expressing his displeasure with Netanyahu. “You’re fed up with him, but I have to deal with him every day,” Obama replied spontaneously without his usual teleprompter to guide him.

Reporters heard the two leaders’ childish insults because the microphones were inadvertently still operating. They were asked afterwards not to disclose what they heard, and many of the journalists went along with the gag request. Fortunately, there are at least a few honest journalists who don’t much like government censorship of a legitimate news story.

France had just voted in favor of the Palestinians’ full membership in UNESCO. It also has reportedly decided to abstain, rather than vote no, when the Security Council takes up consideration of the Palestinian bid for full UN membership.

The United States voted no in UNESCO. It will, if necessary, also veto any Security Council resolution recommending full state membership for the Palestinians in the entire UN system. Obama knows that to do otherwise would cost him dearly in next year’s presidential election amongst Jewish voters whom would normally be in his corner.

However, we all know what Obama really thinks. This is a president who has gone out of his way to visit Muslim countries in the same region as Israel, but has yet to visit Israel itself since taking office. Obama had no trouble bowing to the Saudi king, while insulting the Israeli prime minister at every turn.

Obama’s latest blast at Netanyahu recalls his snub of Netanyahu during the prime minister’s first visit to the Obama White House in March 2010. Obama presented Netanyahu with a list of demands, including a halt to all settlement construction in East Jerusalem. When Netanyahu resisted Obama’s charms, Obama picked up his marbles. He stormed out of the meeting and declared, “I’m going to the residential wing to have dinner with Michelle and the girls.” Obama also refused the normal protocol of a joint photograph with the Israeli leader.

“There is no humiliation exercise that the Americans did not try on the prime minister and his entourage,” Israel’s Maariv newspaper reported on the treatment of the leader of our closest ally and only genuine democracy in the Middle East. “Bibi received in the White House the treatment reserved for the president of Equatorial Guinea.”

I received this post from a friend in NY. One of his friends is living in France and posted this to him with the request that he distribute it to his American friends. He prefaces with:

Once again, the real news in France is conveniently not being reported as it should. To give you an idea of what’s going on in France where there are now between 5 and 6 million Muslims and about 600,000 Jews, here is an email that came from a Jew living in France. Will the world say nothing – again – as it did in Hitler’s time? He writes:

“I am a Jew — therefore I am forwarding this to everyone on all my e-mail lists. I will not sit back and do nothing. Nowhere have the flames of anti-Semitism burned more furiously than in France: In Lyon, a car was rammed into a synagogue and set on fire. In Montpellier, the Jewish religious center was firebombed; so were synagogues in Strasbourg and Marseilles; so was a Jewish school in Creteil – all recently. A Jewish sports club in Toulouse was attacked with Molotov cocktails, and on the statue of Alfred Dreyfus in Paris, the words ‘Dirty Jew’ were painted. In Bondy, 15 men beat up members of a Jewish football team with sticks and metal bars. The bus that takes Jewish children to school in Aubervilliers has been attacked three times in the last 14 months.

According to the Police, metropolitan Paris has seen 10 to 12 anti-Jewish incidents PER DAY in the past 30 days. Walls in Jewish neighborhoods have been defaced with slogans proclaiming ‘Jews to the gas chambers’ and ‘Death to the Jews.’ A gunman opened fire on a kosher butcher’s shop (and, of course, the butcher) in Toulouse, France; a Jewish couple in their 20′s were beaten up by five men in Villeurbanne, France The woman was pregnant; a Jewish school was broken into and vandalized in Sarcelles, France . This was just in the past week.

So I call on you, whether you are a fellow Jew, a friend, or merely a person with the capacity and desire to distinguish decency from depravity, to do, at least, these three simple things:

Here we go again. Charlie Hebdo, a humor magazine in Paris which had produced a spoof issue “guest edited” by, as The New York Times and other media outlets refer to him, the “Prophet Mohammed,” was firebombed early Wednesday just as the special edition was on its way to the newsstands. Hackers had also disrupted its website with a message in English and Turkish cursing the magazine: “You keep abusing Islam’s almighty Prophet with disgusting and disgraceful cartoons using excuses of freedom of speech. Be God’s curse upon you!”

The magazine had announced the special issue in satirical salute to the “Arab Spring” victory of an Islamist party in Tunisian elections: “Charlie Hebdo has asked Mohammed to be the special editor-in-chief of its next issue,” the magazine said in a statement. “The prophet of Islam didn’t have to be asked twice and we thank him for it.” It renamed itself Charia Hebdo, a pun on the word “shariah,” for the occasion, and featured an editorial by Mohammed entitled “Halal Aperitif” and a women’s supplement called “Madam Sharia.” On the cover was a cartoon of Mohammed announcing, “100 lashes if you don’t die of laughter.”

But Islamic law forbids depictions of its prophet, and as Iran’s glowering Ayatollah Khomeini once famously remarked, “There is no fun in Islam.” Muslim fundamentalists were apparently not amused by the magazine’s mocking tone, and a Molotov cocktail was thrown through the window of Charlie Hebdo’s offices in the wee hours of the morning, devastating the premises.

Its editor, Stephane Charbonnier, said,

We can’t put out the magazine under these conditions. The stocks are burned, smoke is everywhere, the paste-up board is unusable, everything is melted, there’s no more electricity.

But the issue will appear as scheduled and the magazine’s website appears to have been restored.

Charbonnier said the magazine had received “quite a few letters of protest, threats, insults” on Twitter and Facebook before the attack, but not as many as in 2007 when the publication, with a track record of offending all religions, was criticized by Muslims for reprinting the infamous “Danish cartoons” that caused violent outrage around the Muslim world.

The editor did not see the attack as the work of French Muslims, but of “idiot extremists,” though he did not clarify what kind. He said the attackers could not even have read the offending magazine:

The arsonists haven’t read this paper, nobody knows what’s in the paper except those who buy it this morning. People are reacting violently to a paper without knowing anything of its contents, that’s what’s most abhorrent and stupid.

Actually, what’s most abhorrent and stupid is that Islamic fundamentalists like the 57-member (56 Muslim nations and the Palestinian territories) Organization of the Islamic Cooperation have made the criminalization of any criticism of Islam their top priority, and too many dhimmis in the West, like the Obama administration, are facilitating their demands.

Islamic supremacists have firebombed and caused extensive damage to the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine in Paris, after it ran an issue featuring Islam’s prophet Muhammad as the guest editor.

Some Muslims didn’t get the joke. Recently the magazine’s website was hacked; the hackers left this message: “You keep abusing Islam’s almighty Prophet with disgusting and disgraceful cartoons using excuses of freedom of speech. Be Allah’s curse upon you!” The firebombing followed shortly thereafter.

The destruction of the Charlie Hebdo offices is the ugly obverse of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation’s ongoing campaign to compel Western states to criminalize criticism of Islam, including discussion of how Islamic jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and supremacism. The objective of this campaign, of course, is to render Western countries mute and hence defenseless against the advancing jihad.

Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, the OIC’s secretary general, has explained that Islam is under attack and must be defended. That Islam would not be “under attack” were not so many Muslims committing acts of violence and hatred in its name does not faze him for one second. The OIC is dedicated to getting the United Nations to approve a “legal instrument” that would criminalize “Islamophobia,” which “cannot be dealt with,” Ihsanoglu declared, except through “a robust political engagement” – that is, restrictions on the freedom of speech. Abdoulaye Wade, the President of Senegal and chairman of the OIC, made this point explicit several years ago: “I don’t think freedom of expression should mean freedom from blasphemy. There can be no freedom without limits.”

Ihsanoglu has expressed his pleasure with the success of this campaign: “In confronting the Danish cartoons and the Dutch film ‘Fitna’, we sent a clear message to the West regarding the red lines that should not be crossed. As we speak, the official West and its public opinion are all now well-aware of the sensitivities of these issues. They have also started to look seriously into the question of freedom of expression from the perspective of its inherent responsibility, which should not be overlooked.”

The pressure to accommodate Muslim demands to place Islam off-limits to critical discussion has been met with widespread success. While this self-censorship is presented as an act of “tolerance,” in reality it is a deliberate erosion of core Western concepts of free expression, which is an indispensable foundation of the American Revolution and of republican government in general. And we are surrendering it, gradually and voluntarily, to those who seek to impose on us a value system that elevates the sanctity of Islam over freedom.

Last August, the International Islamic News Agency reported that Secretary of State Clinton had agreed to “coordinate” with Ihsanoglu on ways in which “defamation of religions” could be prevented – an operation that cannot possibly be performed without placing freedom of speech restrictions into law, and giving some government agency the power to determine what is “hate speech” and what isn’t.

No one at France’s national satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, was laughing this week after the publication’s Paris offices were destroyed by a firebomb overnight late Tuesday or early Wednesday morning. It is believed Islamists, angry that the editors had named the Prophet Mohammad as guest “editor-in-chief” for this week’s edition, were responsible for the attack. The edition was dedicated to a satire of sharia law, but the firebomb assault took place before it had even hit the newsstands on Wednesday.

“We received threats, but no one had seen this edition,” said Stephane Charbonnier, the magazine’s designer and director. “People reacted violently to the paper yet they were completely ignorant of the edition’s contents; that is the most aberrant and idiotic.”

The leftist weekly publication, founded in 1960, came up with the idea to satirise sharia law and to honour Mohammad with the editor title after the victory of the Islamist Ennahda party in Tunisia’s election last week and the announcement sharia law would be introduced in Libya. The editors proclaimed the upcoming sharia theme in a humorous statement they released in advance that elicited “quite a few letters of protest, threats, insults,” on Twitter and Facebook.

“To fittingly celebrate the victory of the Islamist Ennhada party in Tunisia…Charlie Hebdo has asked Mohammad to be the special editor-in-chief of its next issue,” the statement read. “The prophet of Islam didn’t have to be asked twice and we thank him for it.”

When it appeared on Wednesday, the controversial edition’s front page showed a caricature of a “visibly happy” Mohammad and had him saying “100 lashes if you don’t die laughing.” The edition had also had its title changed to ‘Sharia Hebdo’ and contained a women’s section called “Madame Sharia” as well as an editorial by Mohammad titled the ‘Happy Halal Hour.’ There are also two pages of cartoons with sharia law as their subject, and Mohammad appears again on the last page, wearing a clown’s nose, with, ironically, the caption: “Yes, Islam is compatible with humour.”

As it turns out, the magazine was wrong. Its headquarters were also not the only target singled out for attack. In what may have been a co-ordinated move with the firebombing, Charlie Hebdo’s website was simultaneously hacked. On Wednesday morning, its home page showed the words “no god but Allah” accompanied by a picture of the grand Mosque in Mecca with a message in English and Turkish.

“You keep abusing Islam’s almighty Prophet with disgusting and disgraceful cartoons using excuses of freedom of speech,” the message read. “Be God’s curse upon you!”

French politicians and France’s newspaper association were all quick to condemn the assault on the Charlie Hebdo offices and express solidarity with its staff. French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said the “…every attack against the freedom of the press must be condemned with the greatest firmness,” while the French minister of culture, Frederic Mitterand, called the assault “intolerable.

This story is cross-posted from LisaGraas.com

At Two Circles, a popular site in India for Muslims, comes a curious article by Rehan Ansari.

According to the site’s “About” page:

We will not publish articles that is racist, sexist or makes baseless allegation against a person or community.

Well, that’s nice of them, but let’s just see about that, shall we?

Ansari writes: Happy Birthday to Catholic State of France!

The article claims that because “approximately 80%” of French citizens are “at least nominally” Catholic, then the recent burqa ban must mean that France is now a “Catholic state”, ostensibly imposing Church law on Muslim women. (Like Sharia?)

The question which arises then, is the France truly a secular democratic country? Or a Majoritarian state that ascribes to the Catholic religion and where the majority has a right to crush tiny minority because only 1800 to 2000 women observe veil as reported in the media.

And…

The French counsel did not forget to mention the strict rules in Saudi Arabia and said that when French women visits in Saudi Arabia they follow the rules and lives according to the Saudi culture. But I am sure he will not be able to answer that Saudi Arabia is a declared Islamic state and France proclaims to be a Secular Democracy.

Since Ansari is Muslim, I cannot expect him to understand what Catholicism teaches, nor can I expect him to understand the difference between a secular democracy that gives Christians and Muslims an equal vote, and Sharia Law….but I will try to explain for him where his attempt at logic fails.

Osama bin Laden has threatened terror attacks on France for banning of the face veil, while Islamic extremists in Britain are threatening to kill women who do not wear a head scarf.   From the stealth Jihad perpetrated by the Muslim Brotherhood to violent Jihad, Islamists have and continue to impose Sharia law on Western soil, becoming increasingly emboldened.  Note Bin Laden’s warning to France:

If you unjustly thought that it is your right to prevent free Muslim women from wearing the face veil, is it not our right to expel your invading men and cut their necks?”

France is to be applauded for its stance.  Westerners that will defend the rights of women to wear the veil and defend the right of Muslims to practice their faith in contradiction to Western values have provided the fertile soil for the seeds of creeping Sharia to grow.

Three years ago, Islamic law was officially adopted in Britain to oversee Muslim civil cases in Sharia courts which have continued to multiply, while Canada (in the province of Ontario) narrowly escaped it. Here’s how it almost happened, but failed:  In 1991, Ontario changed its Arbitration Act to include faith-based arbitration to settle family disputes, such as divorce, inheritance and custody issues, outside the court system. CAIR-CAN was pleased and in 2004, released a statement that this was “a form of accommodating the needs of religious minorities within a multicultural society”.

Shortly after, the Islamic Institute of Civil Justice pushed the envelope by stating that it wanted this faith-based arbitration based on “Sharia Law.”  The proposal was met with stiff resistance from women’s groups and the Muslim Canadian Congress, which put an end to this drive.  The congress argued:

[S]haria is flawed because it does not view women as equal and therefore cannot provide equal justice to all parties in a dispute especially on issues of divorce, child custody and division of property.

Five months ago, Oklahoma passed a ballot initiative—70-30%– to forbid state courts from relying on Sharia in what was dubbed a “pre-emptive strike” by supporters. Yet Farhana Khera, executive director of Muslim Advocates, commented, “The Oklahoma ballot initiative struck us as silly and absurd — a proposed solution chasing a problem that doesn’t exist.”  He added that the initiative “underscores the deep level of misunderstanding of Muslims and Islam in America.”

The conjoined twins of violent jihad and stealth jihad —>

Fred Branfman, author, blogger and early contributor to the current California economic miracle under Governor Jerry Brown, has written a very long apologetic about Noam Chomsky, or more accurately a standard screed against US imperialism and capitalism using Chomsky as a prop. Presumably he thought that invoking the grand old man’s name would somehow spur the faithful to actually read through this door stopper, but I’m not sure the unearthed memoirs of Lenin could have done that. This is very much a “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” kind of piece and Branfman clearly hopes that if nothing sticks at least his readers will succumb to exhaustion and boredom before realizing it.

He needn’t have gone to so much trouble. The basic theme can be summarized in two sentences (spoiler alert for those of you actually thinking of navigating this tome):

• America is really, really bad.
• Communism will fix it.

In fairness, Branfman’s innovative variation is “I think America is very, very bad and Communism will fix it, and look Chomsky agrees with me!” but the basic approach remains the same. This is a patented two-step and Branfman pays close attention to the painted feet on the floor.

On the first point, demonizing America is reasonably straightforward as long as you remember to cherrypick the facts you don’t actually make up, and frame your questions with careful dishonesty. Branfman appears to have this down. Consider:

Which nation’s leaders since 1945 have murdered, maimed, made homeless, tortured, assassinated and impoverished the largest number of civilians who were not its own citizens?

I have asked this question of Americans in every walk of life since I discovered the bombing of Laos in 1969. It’s a simple matter of fact, not involving judgments of right and wrong, and I remain astonished at how most answer “the Russians,” “the Chinese,” or just have no idea that their leaders have killed more noncitizen civilians than the rest of the world’s leaders combined since 1945.

They have no idea because it isn’t true. Apart from the dearth of evidence to support such a claim the sophistry here is so obvious it’s like watching a third rate magician not quite able to get that red hanky into his sleeve. The qualifier “not its own citizens” conveniently excludes “the Russians” and “the Chinese” (proving conclusively that the Americans he talked to were smarter than he was), to say nothing of Pol Pot, Castro, Kim Jong Il and any other half-dozen dictators you could pull at random from the Communist Who’s Who. Among them, these “agrarian reformers” have killed more people on an off-day than the US would contemplate in a decade, but never mind; it’s just their own citizens.

By thus ignoring the Tiananmen Squares and killing fields of history, Branfman takes the apples and oranges fallacy one step further by denying the existence of the orange altogether.

Not that he understands the apples any better. Words like “murdered”, “maimed” and “tortured” are designed to evoke images of the Sopranos, not the unavoidable, if obviously tragic, consequences of war he is actually talking about. The US has, for all practical purposes, undertaken the defense of the free world since World War II.  It is therefore not surprising that it would inflict more civilian casualties in wars and police actions than, say, France—which like the rest of Europe reserves the right to be self-righteous about US military power while at the same time relying on it for protection.

Rendered of its fat, that’s all he’s got, which among any rational audience should provoke a vigorous “And so …?”

To which Branfman might then reply, “Wait guys, don’t go, you haven’t given me a chance to inflate the numbers yet!”

These would include the huge proportion of civilians among the 3.4 million Vietnamese that Robert McNamara estimated were killed in Vietnam (over 90 percent by U.S. firepower), Laotian and Cambodian civilians felled by the largest per capita and most indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets in history, the 1 million to 1.5 million Iraqis estimated by the U.N.‘s Denis Halliday to have died from Clinton’s sanctions “designed,” in Halliday’s words, “to kill civilians, particularly children,” and the hundreds of thousands killed as a result of the Bush invasion. The total number of civilians killed, wounded, made homeless and impoverished by U.S. leaders or local regimes owing their power to U.S. guns and aid—in not only Indochina and Iraq but Mexico, El Salvador, Israel/Palestine, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Egypt, Iran, South Africa, Chile, East Timor, Haiti, Argentina, Ecuador, Brazil, Bolivia, Venezuela, Cuba, Jamaica, the Philippines and Indonesia—is in the tens of millions.

Credible estimates put Vietnamese war dead at 3.8 million, over a span of 43 years (which for you history buffs includes the French and other combatants)—2.3 million if you exclude those who died by assassination, forced relocation, labor camps and various civil uprisings in that period. (For an example of someone who’s actually done his homework see R.J. Rummel: Statistics of Democide, Chapter 6.)

So I stand corrected, the French will occasionally shoot somebody if sufficiently provoked.

A greater canard is the Iraq number.

How Branfman’s can present Denis Halliday (anti-Israel flotilla activist and former head of the UN’s wildly successful Oil for Food program) as a credible source, without kicking the dirt and avoiding eye-contact, is a testament to his chutzpa. As Reason Magazine’s Matt Welch points out the sanctions were administered by the UN, not the US, and the civilian numbers were grossly exaggerated. What interest Halliday could possibly have had in ginning up the numbers–beyond providing poster children for his program and an exit strategy when he needed it—is anyone’s guess.

I don’t know about you, but even if we throw in Canada and the Virgin Islands (the only two countries he doesn’t seem to think we’ve decimated) I don’t know how he gets to “tens of millions.” But then again, he’s not expecting  anyone over at TruthDig to check. Just keep nodding and smiling boys.

Branfman then goes on—and on, and on—in this fashion, trying through sheer volume of prose to make the case that America is the source of all evil in the world.

His solution is a shocker.

Chomsky thus argues that human survival requires changing the system, not merely periodically replacing those running it.

[…]

The real choice, Chomsky makes clear, is not free enterprise versus statism, but state capitalism for (A) the few or (B) the many. The latter would include breaking up the banks, a focus on job creation and safety net expansion where needed, single-payer health insurance, higher taxes on the wealthy, far lower military spending, public members on corporate boards, greater employee workplace control and, above all, a new public-private partnership to see America become a leader in a clean energy economic revolution.

Got it. Apologies to Branfman and Chomsky for incorrectly believing they were dragging us down the road to serfdom once again. If it’s got the word “capitalism” in it, it must be good, right? Just like the word “democratic.” Since I know for a fact that Communists have never appropriated words to conceal their true intentions I know I’ll rest easy.

One wonders if Newsweek will soon come out with a “We’re All State Capitalists Now” issue.

According to the Ministry of the Interior in France, there are 20,000 African polygamous Muslim men living there. These Muslim immigrants know how to work the system. First, they come in with a tourist visa, apply for a residency card, and then go on social welfare.  Even though it is an illegal practice, France will not deport them because of the children involved. And the more children they have, the wealthier they become.  According to the statistics, there are 300,000 people living under such arrangements.  A little math will tell you that this translates into an average of 15 people to a family and French taxpayers are on the hook for them, since they are occupying social housing–an expensive venture.

In Ontario, Canada, a similar thing is happening:  although polygamous marriages are illegal, these Muslims have found a loophole: When they simply marry several wives in another country, the existing arrangements are permitted into Ontario.  A scandalous report came out in the Toronto Sun charging that hundreds of polygamous men are receiving welfare and social benefits for each of their spouses.

There needs to be a public outcry, but because of political correctness–fueled by special interest guard dogs and of course the far Left manipulated media–nothing is done.

Many of these polygamous marriages are not only a drain on taxpayers, but a throwback to the strides made toward women’s equality.  These women exist like sub-humans ruled by Neanderthal men, and preference is always given to those women who give birth to boys.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a brave Somali-born Muslim who became an atheist.  This courageous lady is as despised and hated by Islamists as Salman Rushdie is.  She provided personal tell-alls in her  books Infidel and Nomad, both describing the oppressiveness of living under Islamic rules.  She deals with the polygamy issue as described in a book review:

Ms. Ali’s maternal grandmother supplied her husband with nine children.  But only one of them was male and so her life spiralled into jealousy and bitterness when a new wife came along and quickly produced a trio of boys.

Ms. Ali’s mother was abandoned (along with her three co-wives) by her polygamist husband, and spent her last years alone, hauling wood for camel herders. – National Post

This is the degrading and wretched life Islamists are transporting into the West as hardworking taxpayers continue to fund it at the expense of their own children. It’s a  lucrative deal, particularly for the men.  Some other alarming cases:

• In London, a mother of 8 boasts about her luxurious 3.8 million dollar townhouse funded by British taxpayers.
• In Australia, a Muslim man sets up multiple homes with multiple wives and he’s so pompous and brazen about it, he throws a chair at an investigating news crew.  Click here to see video.

It is mind boggling that there are those still denying the phrase,  ”a clash of cultures.”  Those who practice such backward customs and live off of taxpayers are multiplying exponentially, having no guilt about using our hard earned dollars to support and further their way of life, while detesting us. If we don’t stop them, who will?

The UN Security Council approved a resolution yesterday (Wednesday, June 9th) imposing a fourth round of sanctions on Iran in response to its continued nuclear enrichment program, which is in violation of prior Security Council resolutions.  The vote was 12 in favor, 2 against (Brazil and Turkey) and 1 abstention (Lebanon).  The new resolution imposes new financial restrictions on Iran, expands an existing arms embargo, and authorizes a greater capacity to stop and search Iranian cargo ships. Targeted sanctions on specific individuals and entities were expanded. The resolution also includes measures directed against Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

While the United States, Great Britain, and France were the resolution’s strongest sponsors, China and Russia also expressed their verbal support along with their votes — although the Russian ambassador added a major caveat in his response to a reporter’s question about Russia’s prospective sale of a sophisticated anti-aircraft system to Iran.

Lebanon’s decision to abstain was a pleasant surprise, considering the influence of Iran-backed Hezbollah in the Lebanese government. Brazil and Turkey, as expected, opposed the new resolution on the grounds that it could undermine a proposed nuclear fuel swap between Iran and the two countries. They seemed to forget that the European Union has been trying to negotiate with Iran since 2005 and the Obama administration waited 18 months while trying to engage Iran before seeking passage of this resolution.  Only when new sanctions became a real possibility did Iran come around to the fuel swap concept that it had first agreed upon and then promptly reneged on last fall.

U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice told reporters after the vote that the “resolution is strong, it’s tough and it’s comprehensive. And it is something that Iran fought very hard to prevent passage today. The effort, the time, the money, and the poise that they employed to try to prevent this resolution’s passage only underscores their understanding, that this is a major blow.”

Despite the ineffectiveness of the three prior resolutions, Ambassador Rice expressed confidence that the cumulative effect on Iran of all the resolutions is “harmful and hurtful.”

Iran remains unbowed. Its representative told the Security Council after the vote that it had no intention of changing its present course. He accused the United States and Great Britain in particular of continuing a long pattern of interference in Iran’s affairs and displaying a double standard vis-a-vis Israel. Ambassador Rice told reporters that these comments were “reprehensible, offensive, and inaccurate.”

On paper at least, the new resolution does appear to represent a significant move forward from the prior three. More specifically, the resolution prohibits Iran from investing in sensitive nuclear activities abroad, like uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities, as well as activities involving ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons. The ban also applies to investment in uranium mining.

States are prohibited from selling or in any way transferring to Iran various categories of heavy weapons (battle tanks, armored combat vehicles, large caliber artillery systems, combat aircraft, attack helicopters, warships, and certain missiles or missile systems). States are similarly prohibited from providing technical or financial assistance for such systems, or spare parts.

The resolution also sets up a new cargo inspection framework. States are expected to inspect any vessel on their territory suspected of carrying prohibited cargo, including banned conventional arms or sensitive nuclear or missile items. States are also expected to cooperate in such inspections on the high seas.

States are called upon to prevent any financial service and to freeze any asset that could contribute to Iran’s proliferation.

Most significantly, the resolution targets the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) for its role in proliferation and requires states to mandate that businesses exercise vigilance over all transactions involving the IRGC. Fifteen IRGC-related companies linked to proliferation will have their assets frozen. The IRGC is the major power center in Iran’s economic and military spheres as well as one of the government’s primary instruments for suppressing political dissent. Impairing the IRGC’s freedom of operations will be a significant accomplishment, if successful.

UN Security Council sanctions resolutions against pre-liberation Iraq, North Korea, and Iran have had a bad track record in actual practice. The resolutions have been easy for the sanctioned countries to evade through the use of multiple front entities, money laundering and trading partners unwilling to give up short term advantage for longer term peace and security.

Also, enforcement of the cargo inspection at sea will be a challenge if Iran, as expected, refuses to cooperate. When the French UN ambassador, for example, was asked what measures France would be willing to take in such a scenario, he refused to answer what he called a “hypothetical question.”

Most ominously, the Russian UN ambassador told reporters that Russia did not consider the sale of its sophisticated S-300 anti-aircraft system to Iran to be within the resolution’s scope. The S-300 missile defense system would no doubt be used by Iran to shield its nuclear sites against a potential air strike, should military force become necessary to stop Iran from producing nuclear bombs. The Russian ambassador is technically correct because the resolution’s ban on the transfer to Iran of certain missile systems is written in such a way that it creates a big loophole for Russia to walk through in delivering to Iran its ground-to-air missiles, including its S-300 anti-aircraft missiles and anti-missile interceptors.

The Obama administration will spin the latest sanctions resolution against Iran as a major diplomatic triumph and a significant obstacle in the way of Iran’s progress towards achieving nuclear arms capability.  But  until the S-300 loophole is closed, until the U.S. and its allies figure out a way to effectively stop evasions of the sanctions, and until enough countries show that they are willing to enforce the cargo inspections, the Obama administration might want to wait before it celebrates.

"Suspected Muslim polygamist charged with welfare fraud," from Agence France-Presse, June 9:

AFP - A French Muslim butcher at the centre of a firestorm over polygamy was charged on Wednesday with welfare fraud and his four companions will also face charges, a prosecutor said.

Lies Hebbadj, who runs a halal butcher shop in the western city of Nantes, made headlines after his wife was fined for driving in her full-face veil in April.

Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux had threatened to strip the Algerian-born man of his French passport after accusing him of polygamy, which is illegal in France.

Following a nearly two-month investigation, Hebbadj has been charged with welfare fraud and violating labour laws, Nantes prosecutor Xavier Ronsin told a news conference.

The 35-year-old was placed under judicial control, forced to hand in his passport and pay a 10,000 euro (12,000 dollar) bail before leaving the court house in a police van, hidden from journalists.

His four companions including his wife will be summoned to appear before a magistrate soon to also be formally charged with welfare fraud, said the prosecutor.

The charges stem from a number of alleged violations showing that Hebbadj cashed in on welfare benefits to which he was not entitled, the prosecutor said.

Two of his companions lived in Dubai for a year while continuing to receive welfare benefits worth 10,000 euros in France.

Hebbadj fathered 15 children and soon will have 17 with the women who received benefits over the past three years totaling 175,000 euros.

Psychology 101: Behavior that gets rewarded, gets repeated.

Many of the women and children lived under the same roof and Hebbadj used his companion's debit cards to access funds from the social security payments, according to the prosecutor.

Hebbadj is also charged with hiring 13 foreigners and foreign students to work in his shop without proper visas, he added. The employees were paid below minimum wage.

Police stopped Hebbadj's 31-year-old wife in Nantes on April 2 and fined her 22 euros (29 dollars) on the grounds that her niqab restricted her view so she could not drive safely....

While the slogan for the “The First National Jewish Anti-Zionist Gathering” isn’t actually “anti-Semites of the world unite!” that would have been a fitting choice, combining both of the “gatherings” two underlying themes: hatred of Israel and adoration of communism. The event is scheduled for June 19 through 22 and will be held, fittingly enough, in Detroit. The once proud and now crumbling Motor City is perhaps the nation’s best example of what happens when leftist dreams come true. Even better, from the organizers point of view, the Detroit metropolitan area is home to a large number of Muslims, so the jihadis living among them can be counted on to make the radical Jews who organized the event feel even better about their self-loathing.

Specifically, the organizers are the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network and the Middle East Children’s Alliance. Neither organization bothers to hide their radical, leftist world-view, a perspective that dovetails nicely into their sure and certain belief that Palestinians and Israelis could easily live in peace and harmony, if only Israel would grasp the hand that Hamas and Hizbullah have repeatedly extended in friendship and if only Israel would abandon its foolish alliance with those imperialistic Americans. Or, to put those concepts in less-comprehensible terms, here’s the conference’s official statement of purpose:

“To gather together as anti-Zionist Jewish (AZJ) activists committed to social justice and to challenging racism, colonialism and imperialism – first and foremost by contributing to efforts to overcome Zionism and decolonize Palestine. The Assembly hopes to provide a forum to share political perspectives, campaigns and other activities, culture and ritual, and build relationships toward collective work. Through building assessment of the current moment in the US and international Palestine solidarity movement, larger social justice movements and political context, we hope to build a shared direction for anti-Zionist Jewish organizing in the United States. This is in the interest of making our work more effective.”

To coin a phrase: dhmittude never sounded so good. But, with the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network leading the way, such sentiments are hardly surprising. The IJAZN was created in 2008 when Professor Moshe Machover and Selma James announced the adoption of the organization’s charter at a press conference in London. Machover and James’ extremist, radical views – and both would readily accept, indeed would be proud of, the use of those two adjectives to describe their views – have been well documented. While their organization serves as a lightning rod for anti-Semites of all cultures and faiths, one wouldn’t describe either Machover of James (both of whom are Jewish) as anti-Semites themselves. They are rather utopians of the communist variety, wholly incapable of understanding that the price one pays for pursuing the unachievable leftist nirvana is drenched in blood and soaked in misery.

Machover, born in Tel Aviv in 1936, is an unrepentant admirer of all things Marxist. He scorns representative democracy, because in his view our system of government doesn’t give appropriate weight to radical ideas. Oddly enough though, the one representative democracy that comes closest to getting it right in Machover’s world is the nation he hates most of all: Israel. In April 2010 he wrote: “But here is a rare, perhaps unique, exception: Israel has just about the most democratic electoral system possible in a bourgeois state: a consistent form of proportional representation… Minority voices, including that of the Arab national minority, have regularly been heard on the floor of that house.” Not that providing Arabs living in Israel with the very things that Arabs deny non-Muslims in every nation they control – a voice in government and freedom of worship – excuses Israel’s many sins in Machover’s world. Of course not.

Machover has also rewritten history in order to defame the father of modern Israel, saying: “Ben-Gurion preferred to invade Egypt, alongside France and Britain, rather than to make peace with Egypt”.  And, for Machover, the reason for ongoing conflict in the Middle East has nothing to do with Israel’s enemies. He has said: “…it became clear to us that the roots of the Israeli-Arab conflict lay, not in the conflict between Israel and the Arab states, but rather in the conflict between Zionist colonialism and the Palestinians over the land of Palestine and its independence.”

For her part, Selma James founded the “International Wages for Housework Campaign” in 1972. Under this scheme, governments would have had to compensate stay-at-home moms for their efforts. She’s also a buddy of Venezuelan tyrant Hugo Chavez and has been a member of Chavez’s socialist “Venezuelan Revolution” movement since 2002.

The Middle East Children’s Alliance is just as radical. Founder and Executive Director Barbara Lubin, a Norm Chomsky disciple, was abducted by Hizbullah in 1991. Recognizing that their captive was coming down with a bad case of Stockholm syndrome, the terrorist organization released her, prompting Lubin to observe that: “They’re just ordinary schleps like the rest of us.” Ordinary schleps armed with missiles and RPGs perhaps, but why quibble with a humanitarian like Lubin? She’s obviously a high-minded pacifist, is she not? Take a look for yourself.

Given the alternate universe in which the organizers flourish, it’s not at all difficult to predict the themes of The First National Jewish Anti-Zionist Gathering. According to their world view, the aggressors in the Middle East are nobly defending their rights and their land, while a nation under siege has somehow become an agent of American imperialism. What’s truly troubling is that, based on their words and deeds, there’s little doubt that the organizers actually believe that represents an accurate portrayal of the on-going struggle in the Middle East and that Machover, James and Lubin don’t know how they are being used – and will continue to be used – by terrorists bent on the destruction of Israel.

Seventy years ago an obscure, extremist, anti-Semetic Norwegian politician by the name of Vidkun Quisling helped undermine his nation and welcomed Nazi invaders with open arms. On June 19 another generation of Quislings will do their best to undermine the security of their people’s ancient homeland, not because they actively wish to see Israel destroyed and its people enslaved, but because their minds are so clouded by idyllic, extremist dreams of a leftist-utopia they are unable to comprehend that is exactly the kind of end result that they are in fact supporting.

Srinagar, June 5: The alleged blasphemous images of a mosque on undergarments sparked protests in Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian Kashmir on Saturday with the protestors clashing with police and paramilitary soldiers, who fired tear smoke shells and resorted to cane charge.

And it turns out it wasn't even a mosque:

Police said after verification it was found that the image does not resemble to any Muslim religious place or building.

The protests started in Nowhatta area of Srinagar after some people spotted brown colored sketch of a building with a huge dome fitted with a cross mast and a transept imprinted on an undergarment. Some people termed it as blasphemous depiction of holy Al-Aqsa Mosque. The residents in Nowhatta and the adjoining localities of the old city started gathering and started protesting against the incident.

Terming it the blasphemous depiction of holy Al-Aqsa Mosque, the residents of the area and adjoining localities took out a protest march and staged demonstrations. Chanting pro-Islamic, anti-Israel and anti-India slogans, the agitating people alleged that conspiracies against Muslims are being hatched across the globe.

Just to reiterate: It's a pair of underwear.

"The images of sacred places on the undergarments have hurt our sentiments. It is a conspiracy of America, Israel and other Western countries to hurt Muslim sentiments," said a protestor Javed Ahmad.

He said Muslims cannot tolerate such indecent acts.

As the protestors amidst chanting of anti-India and anti-Israeli slogans tried to march towards city centre, police and paramilitary soldiers swung into action. They fired tear smoke shells and resorted to heavy baton charge to disperse the agitating people.

The clashes also broke out between the cops and protestors at Nowpora, Khayam, Rainawari, Maisuma, Koker Bazar and other other places in Indian Kashmir. At least a dozen persons including some protestors were injured in the clashes that continued for quite some time.

The shopkeepers in old city and some other parts of Indian Kashmir closed shutters of their business establishments as a mark of protest against the alleged blasphemous images.

However, police spokesman said the undergarment did not bear imprints of any Islamic workshop place.

"The underwear garment in question was produced and examined and it was found that it carries the imprints and sketches of various buildings on it which resemble places like Big Ben in London, St. Paul's Cathedral of London and other places. No sketch has any likeness to any Muslim religious place or building. The attempt to create tension in the society is a deliberate move to disturb the situation by indulging in blasphemous rumors.

St. Paul's Cathedral? When was the Christian riot? Oh, wait...

The general public is advised to remain calm and caution against such elements," he said.

Two weeks after delivering a blow to the U.S.-led efforts to strengthen sanctions against Iran by mediating a uranium exchange agreement involving the Islamic Republic and Brazil, Turkey once again has seized the international spotlight in the wake of the deadly clash between Israeli commandos and armed Turkish activists aboard the Gaza-bound flotilla. Turkey’s central role in both developments is no coincidence. It is a reflection of the current Turkish government’s determined efforts to shed the secular legacy of its predecessors, to consolidate power at home, and to align the country with the Islamic world – which means a collision course with America and, especially, with Israel.

The flotilla ship, the Mavi Marmara, originated from the Turkish port, Antalya and the majority of those killed and wounded in the confrontation with Israeli commandos were Turkish citizens. While Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan warns Israel “not to test its patience,” Turkey is leading the international chorus of denunciations against the Jewish state. While it may appear as if the latest controversy is one more bloody chapter in the long saga of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the deadly confrontation in the Mediterranean is in reality more about Turkey’s destiny and its upcoming and planned confrontation with Israel.

The ruling party in Turkey, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), seems to be driven by two main factors. On the eve of the upcoming national elections, the AKP is desperate to stave off defeat at the hands of the surging opposition. Under such circumstances, the AKP seeks to exploit people’s sense of patriotism and religious solidarity with Muslim Palestinians by forcing a confrontation with Israel. However, it would be wrong to attribute the behavior of the AKP government to Machiavellian instincts alone. The religious and political forces behind the AKP, long suppressed and dormant in republican and secular Turkey, believe in the idea of a transcendent Islamic identity and reject the concept of a secular nation state founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

The objective of AKP Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is to do away with Turkey’s republican system. The actions of his administration have eroded Turkey’s standing with the West and now, with the flotilla incident, a fundamental shift has transpired in Turkish foreign policy. This shift did not occur overnight. In retrospect, the AKP’s refusal to grant passage to U.S. troops on the eve of the Iraq War in 2003 was the opening act of the distancing between Ankara and Washington. The result of the Turkish denial of invasion routes from the north, and hence, the forced concentration of U.S. military operations in the Shia-populated south, no doubt contributed to the rise of the insurgency in the Sunni Triangle and increased casualties. In 2005, Turkey itself became the victim of the anarchy in Iraq as the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) expanded its base in Iraqi Kurdistan and launched deadly attacks on Turkish targets. Ankara threatened Washington with the invasion of northern Iraq. Loath to wreck its relations with the long-standing ally, the U.S. accommodated the Turkish demand by supplying it with satellite intelligence and leaning heavily on the Kurdish authorities in the region to crack down on PKK. US-Turkish relations now seemed cordial on the surface. But the goodwill between the two nations evaporated rather quickly. A public survey in 2007 showed, for instance, that only nine percent of the Turks had favorable views toward the United States.

There is a proverb in Turkish: When you cannot beat the donkey, punch the saddle. It would be tempting to surmise that since Erdogan lacks the resources and capacity to pick a fight with the United States, Israel became the next obvious target. But the situation is more complicated. Unlike Islamic Iran, where Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini distinguished America and Israel as, respectively, the Great and Little Satan for decades, Turkey maintained a solid military alliance with Israel. Turning the “Little Satan” into an enemy in the Turkish public eye was no small feat. For years, the Israelis had been actively involved in the upgrading of Turkish fighter planes and weaponry. The two countries did not just share military technology; they had also shared common enemies. Just as Syria posed a threat to Israeli national security, the government of Hafez Assad laid claims to Turkish territories and harbored PKK leaders in its territories. Oriented toward the West, Turkey’s relations with other Arab countries were lukewarm at best. After all, most Turks never forgot what they regarded as the Arab betrayal of Ottoman Turkey during the First World War when many Arabs sided against the Turks and their German patrons and fought for the British in what they saw as a war of independence against Turkish domination.

The Erdogan government viewed repairing relations with the Arab world as essential to its domestic as well as global agenda. The key figure in the tectonic shift was the architect of the new Turkish foreign policy, Ahmet Davutoglu, who inaugurated a policy called “zero problems with neighbors.” On the surface, it looked as if Davutoglu was the faithful follower of Ataturk’s dictum – “Peace at Home, Peace in the World.” But having been brought up in a religious household and having been a product of the Islamic education system, Davutoglu’s intentions widely differed from those of the founder of the secular state. By establishing warm relations with their country’s autocratic neighbors to the East, the new Turkish government had, in fact, begun quietly steering Turkey away from the West. All along, the AKP leadership insisted on its strong desire to enter the European Union. But behind the scenes, both the European political elite and the Turkish leadership shared a similar objective: to keep Turkey away from Europe and, as the AKP hoped, to integrate Turkey with the rest of the Islamic community of nations. This way, the Europeans would be free, despite their public statements, from a secret fear – an EU with millions of Turks. In its turn, the AKP would get an eastward looking Turkey with autocratic tendencies and Islamist orientation. Bashing and isolating Israel was an integral part of the strategy that accompanied epic changes in Turkish politics.

To accomplish its objectives with regard to Israel, the Erdogan government took an unusual route. Abandoning the long-standing tradition of non-interference in the Mideast conflict, in 2006, Ankara took the initiative to mediate peace between Israel and Syria. As the negotiations went forward, the Israelis began to realize that the so-called mediation was in fact a cover by the Turkish Islamists to engage in deeper contact with Israeli enemies without provoking concern in the mass Turkish domestic public or in the West. How else could the leader of a secular republic and NATO ally justify shaking hands with the representative of Hamas? With the eruption of war in Gaza in 2008, the Erdogan government openly sided with Israel’s enemies by issuing severe criticism of Israel.

During this period, anti-Israel hysteria began to grip Turkish society. The Turks began boycotting Israeli goods en masse. In Ankara, the Israeli basketball team was run off the court by mobs shouting “Allah Akbar.” Israeli-Turkish hostility escalated further after the shocking confrontation between Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Shimon Peres at Davos where the Turkish leader called the Nobel Peace Prize winner a “murderer.”  In the ensuing months, a Turkish soap-opera TV series portrayed Israelis as bloodthirsty child-killers and lionized a fictional film secret agent who shoots and kills a treacherous-looking Israeli ambassador who is engaged in trading body-parts – classic anti-Semitic themes.

The recent incident in the Mediterranean has now greatly escalated tensions between Turkey and Israel. But the progression of events suggests something far more sinister and disturbing with regard to Turkey’s trajectory as a nation. In 1923, when Ataturk established the republic, he repudiated the expansionist ambitions of the Ottoman Empire in favor a peaceful, inward-looking nation state. Having seen his share of dreadful fighting, Ataturk did not wish his nation to become embroiled in territorial conflicts with its neighbors. To accomplish that task, he enacted reforms in politics and society that sought to make Turkey more like France rather than Egypt.

Ataturk’s philosophy of governance turned out to be a spectacular success. Since 1923, with the exception of the Cyprus invasion in 1974, Turkey has successfully managed to avoid being drawn into conflicts and thus saved the lives of millions of its citizens from the murderous currents of the 20th century. Turkey’s success in foreign policy did not just emanate from its peace-loving Kemalist philosophy, but was owed to the wise investment of its republican leadership in the alliance with the West, specifically with the United States. Without the support of Washington and its alliance with NATO, it is doubtful that Turkey would have succeeded in fending off pressures from the USSR to the north and Syria to the southeast. Moreover, its strong ties with the West also enabled Turkey to build a modern military that served as a potent deterrent against aggression. The Erdogan government clearly views this policy as the reduction of Turkey’s status as a global player and has decided to do away with it and replace it with a more aggressive, externally focused policy.

Even the Ottoman Empire, which the AKP government is clearly seeking to emulate, had turned westward after its defeats in the 18^th century — long before Ataturk’s radical push for cultural reformation. It should be noted that much of the Tanzimat reforms that brought changes to the Ottoman socio-political infrastructure were inspired by the imperial envoys’ observations in the capitals of Europe. During the Crimean War of 1853-56, the Turks fought side by side with the British and French soldiers against the Russian armies. Moreover, the goodwill between the Turks and the Jews dates back to 1492 when Sultan Bayezid II welcomed the Jewish refugees fleeing the persecution of King Ferdinand of Spain. According to renowned historian of Islam, Bernard Lewis, “the Jews were not just permitted to settle in the Ottoman lands, but were encouraged, assisted and sometimes even compelled.” The Ottoman leadership viewed the Jews as an industrious group whose economic success would bring generous revenues to the state treasury, and treated them with courtesy.

Erdogan’s brand of Islamism and anti-Semitism is not entirely new or original. It was always there within certain elements of the population. But coupled with an ideological zeal and thirst for power, it now threatens to undo most of the accomplishments of the Turkish republic. Erdogan and those around him do not wear turbans or mullah-style robes, but the illusion of a golden Islamic past under the first four caliphs in the 8th century has been drilled into them at the madrases they attended when they were young. Even more powerful than the ideological sympathy for Islamic solidarity is Erdogan’s desire to retain internal political power at all cost. He is an Islamist, but the most important feature distinguishing Erdogan from all previous heads of the Turkish republic is his drive to dismantle all checks and balances to his power. Erdogan’s increasing assault on the top leaders of the military that have long been viewed as the guardians of the Kemalist democracy, together with his “reforms” of the court system and of the constitution, has served the aim of keeping the AKP in power long enough to change the character of the Turkish state. In that sense, Erdogan’s struggle is mostly a domestic one – at this moment, at least.

In recent weeks, Erdogan has been especially alarmed by the rise of an opposition leader in the person of Kemal Kilicdaroglu. In the aftermath of the resignation of the disgraced leader of the Republican People’s Party, Deniz Baykal, who was videotaped having sex with one of his political aides, Kilicdaroglu has emerged as a promising leader and the new face of the Kemalist opposition. Affectionately called “The Turkish Gandhi” by the Turkish people, Kilicdaroglu inspires them with qualities rare for a Turkish politician. He is competent, humble and not corrupt. In the last congress of the party, just prior to the flotilla incident, Kilicdaroglu vowed to defeat the AKP in the upcoming national elections and form the next government. In the face of a serious internal political challenge, Erdogan believes he has found an easy formula of drumming up popularity at home by provoking Israel.

There is, however, a price to be paid for the sinister methods by which Erdogan has sought to manipulate pubic opinion. As the Islamist leader stokes the fires of hatred against the Jewish state, he is dragging Turkey further out of its safety zone and toward uncharted territory. Erdogan may reap personal dividends from throwing stones at Israel, but for a country with a substantial Kurdish minority that grows increasingly restless in its aspirations for independence, expressing outrage at the alleged oppression of the Palestinians may spell disaster. The segment of Turkish society that supports Erdogan’s policies vis-à-vis Israel might also start to recognize its own share of responsibility for the reckless actions of its government.

Perhaps some of the AKP’s ambitions emanate from the fact that for nearly a century, Turkey has not fought a major war. Not a single living Turk has a memory of the calamities that ripped the Turkish society apart in the beginning of the 20th century. Following the loss of millions of Turkish lives, leaders such as Ataturk developed a strong distaste for the type of adventurism that now characterizes the behavior of the Erdogan government on the international stage. Thanks to the wisdom of its traditional experience, the Turkish homeland has not come under an attack during its entire existence as a republic. The Turks will only keep the peace if they can keep the republic.

Askar Askarov received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Maryland in 2007. He is as an instructor at the Elliott School of International Affairs.