Considering that Easter, one of the highest Christian holidays, comes in April, Christian persecution in Muslim nations—from sheer violence to oppressive laws—was rampant last month: In Nigeria, where jihadis seek to expunge all traces of Christianity, a church was bombed during Easter Sunday, killing some 50 worshippers; in Turkey, a pastor was beaten by Muslims immediately following Easter service and threatened with death unless he converts to Islam; and in Iran,Easter Sunday saw 12 Christians stand trial as “apostates.”

The persecution of Christians has come to regions not normally associated with it. As in Nigeria, Muslim militants are running amok in Timbuktu, Mali—beheading a Christian leader and threatening other Christians with similar treatment. Sharia law has been imposed, churches are being destroyed, and Christians are fleeing Timbuktu in mass.

Categorized by theme, the rest of April’s batch of Muslim persecution of Christians around the world includes (but is not limited to) the following accounts, listed in alphabetical order by country, not severity:

 Church Attacks

Azerbaijan: A church in the Muslim-majority nation has “become the first religious community to beliquidated by a court” since the country’s “harsh new Religion Law,” requiring all previously registered religious institutions to re-register, came into force in 2009. Greater Grace Protestant Church in the capital, Baku, “was stripped of its registration at a 15-minute hearing on 25 April. The decision, which was made in the absence of any church representatives, makes any activity by the church illegal and subject to punishment.”

Indonesia: Gunmen opened fire on the GKI Yasmin church, causing much damage in the latest attack on the building, which has been illegally sealed off by authorities since 2088, due to Muslim demands. Another Protestant church unlawfully sealed off by the authorities—despite meeting all requirements for a permit—was met with violent opposition from Muslims for trying to hold a service on the street in front of their sealed-off church building. Muslim residents made death threats, played loud music, and even rode a motorcycle through the congregation. A church spokesman said: “We are constantly having to change our location because our existence appears to be unwanted, and we have to hide so that we are not intimidated by intolerant groups… We had hoped for help from the police, but after many attacks on members of the congregation, we see that the police are also involved in this.”

Kenya: Two separate grenade attacks on churches occurred: 1) Muslims threw grenades into an open-air Christian church gathering, killing a woman and a boy, and wounding some 50 other Christians: Muslims had been holding a meeting near the gathering, and Christians could hear their preachers railing against Christianity right before the attack took place. 2) In a separate incident, a Muslim man pretending to be a worshipper at a church threw three grenades during service, killing a 27-year-old university student and injuring16. The terrorist, who, according to eyewitnesses, appeared to be of Somali origin, “looked uncomfortable and always looked down. He threw three hand grenades and only one exploded. He took off, and he fired in the air three gunshots.”

Nigeria: An early morning attack on a Christian church service left at least 16 people dead: Jihadi gunmen on motorcycles stormed Bayero University in the city of Kano on a Sunday morning during a Catholic mass held in the school’s theater hall, hurling improvised explosive devices, and opening fire as people fled. “The attack follows a string of violent incidents against Christians in the predominantly Muslim north.”

Sudan: A Christian compound in Khartoum was stormed by a throng of Muslims “armed with clubs, iron rods, a bulldozer and fire,” the day after a Muslim leader called on Muslims to destroy “the infidels’ church.”Shouting “Allahu Akbar [God is greater]” and “No more Christianity from today on—no more church from today on,” the jihadis stormed the Bible school bookstore, burning Bibles and threatening to kill anyone resisting them. “What happened could not be imagined—it was terrible,” said an eyewitness. “They burned all furniture of the school and the church as well.” As usual, “Police at the compound stood back and did nothing to prevent the mob from vandalizing the compound.”

Tunisia: The Christian Orthodox Church in Tunis, one of very few churches in the nation, is being “abused” and receiving “threatening messages.” Church members are “living in a state of terror,” so much so that the Russian ambassador in Tunis specifically requested the nation’s Ministry of Interior to “protect the church.” The abuse has gotten to the point where “Salafis covered the cross of the church with garbage bags, telling the church members that they do not wish to see the vision of the Cross anywhere in the Islamic state of Tunisia.” Separately, a Muslim burst into a church to deliver a letter from an Islamist party inviting the archpriest to convert to Islam or to take down the church’s crosses and pay jizya, Islamic subjugation tribute.

Apostasy and Blasphemy: Death and Prison

Algeria: A Christian was sentenced to five years in prison for “shaking the faith” of Muslims. He had discussed his faith with a Muslim man at a food court when the Muslim became angry and accused the Christian of “insulting Muhammad.” Police arrested the man and found a large amount of Christian materials in his apartment. The judge gave him the maximum sentence of five years in prison, even though the prosecutor himself had recommended a lesser sentence.

Bangladesh: A former Muslim prayer leader who converted to Christianity was “welcomed by threats and violence.” Members of his Muslim community “beat him almost to death,” causing him to be hospitalized for almost two months: “the same Muslims who followed him and held him in high esteem when he was their imam now cannot accept his new status.”

Egypt: Two incidents of “blasphemy” convictions occurred: 1) A juvenile court sentenced a Coptic Christian teenager to three years in prison for allegedly “insulting Islam,” due to claims that he posted unflattering cartoons of Muhammad on Facebook. When the incident originally came to light, Muslims rioted, fire-bombing his home and at least five other Christian-owned homes. 2) Another judge upheld a six-year prison sentence for a Christian convicted of “blasphemy”: after a Muslim had told the 49-year old Christian convict that Jesus had illegal sex with at least ten women, the Christian countered “by stating that Muhammad, the founder of the Islamic religion, had more than four wives—a view commonly held by Islamic scholars.” Police subsequently arrested him and, in a 10-minute mock trial with no defense attorney present, the judge sentenced him to six years in prison for “insulting the prophet.”

Iran: A Christian convert from Islam has been sentenced to six years in prison. Originally arrested in December 2010 as part of a major crackdown on the country’s house church movement, “the married father of two has been held in the notorious Evin prison ever since, spending several months in solitary confinement,” where he was likely goaded into returning to Islam. He is accused of “action against the regime’s security, being in contact with foreign organizations and religious propaganda.” In short, according to Iranian Christians, “his ‘crime’ was practicing his Christian faith.”

Pakistan: Two incidents of “blasphemy” charges occurred: 1) A Christian man was arrested and charged with “blasphemy” for rescuing his 8-year-old nephew from a beating at the hands of Muslim boys who sought to force the boy to convert to Islam. “Seeing the attack from a distance, Masih [the man] shouted and rushed to the scene, rescued his nephew and then went to his work as a painter. Soon after the incident, a Muslim mob of about 55 led by the village prayer leader besieged Masih’s house,” insisting that “the blasphemer” be turned over to them. He was eventually released from prison, after being threatened and harassed by Muslim inmates and jail officials. 2) The mother of a newborn baby has been illegally jailed for over a month: authorities have failed to file a charge sheet within the mandatory 14-day period against the 26-year-old Christian woman accused of “blaspheming” the prophet of Islam. The woman was arrested after neighbors accused her of “uttering remarks against Muhammad.”

Philippines: Two pastors were slaughtered by Muslim assailants: 1) A former Muslim who became a Christian pastor was murdered in front of his wife in his home: “My husband staggered into our bedroom and I was shocked because he was full of blood,” she recalled. “I brought him to the hospital right away. He was operated on for eight bullet wounds, but did not survive.” The Philippines is a mostly Christian nation, but in the south, “Muslim fundamentalists are trying to build an Islamic state. Christians there face persecution and even death…. This year, at least four house churches closed down after their pastors and lay leaders were killed by Muslim extremists.” 2) Another pastor was shot in the head five times and killed by two “unknown gunmen” in front of his teenage daughter.

Dhimmitude

[General Abuse, Debasement, and Suppression of non-Muslims as "Tolerated" Citizens]

Egypt: A recent “reconciliation meeting” between members of a sword-wielding Muslim mob that earlier brutalized a Christian school proved to be “nothing less than an attempt at legalized extortion.” In exchange for peace, members of the mob that stormed the school last month without provocation—holding two nuns hostage for several hours—demanded in the meetings that the school sign over land that includes the guesthouse they attacked. “Human rights groups and Coptic rights activists, say the meetings are just a way to pressure powerless groups and people into giving away what little rights they have.” Likewise, the judges appointed to investigate the Maspero massacre, which claimed the lives of 27 Christians and injured 329,closed the case, due to “lack of identification of the culprits.” As one Christian lawyer put it: “We said all along that it was just a show and this is the outcome we got.”

India: Muslims stormed and terrorized a home where a Christian prayer meeting was being held, beating the Christians, including a 65-year-old widow. The Muslims “called them pagans as they kicked, slapped and pushed the Christians…. The Christians were running in all directions for their lives, including the children who were crying in fear,” even as one Muslim, “brandishing a sickle, chased many of them, hurling all kinds of insults and attempting to murder them all…. 500 Muslims had gathered and were watching in amusement as the extremists chased and harassed the Christians for about 90 minutes.”

This week’s guest was Nonie Darwish, the author of the new book, The Devil We Don’t Know: The Dark Side of Revolutions in the Middle East.

To listen to the program, click here.

Or go to: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/radio-jihad/2012/04/18/the-jamie-glazov-show

See you next Tuesday night!

Join the Jamie Glazov Show on Tuesday, April 17, 2012 at 8-9 pm Pacific (11-12 pm EST) on Blog Talk Radio.

This week’s guest is Nonie Darwish, the author of the new book, The Devil We Don’t Know: The Dark Side of Revolutions in the Middle East.

To listen to the program, click here.

Or go to: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/radio-jihad/2012/04/18/the-jamie-glazov-show

Phone-in # is (347) 857-1380

See you on Tuesday night!

For the first part of this interview, click here.

Mark Tapson:  You write that “liberty and equality for women in the Middle East are closely linked to defeating sharia.” But you note that “Islamic feminism is a twisted kind of feminism that champions pride in Islamic bondage.” Can you elaborate on that?

Nonie Darwish: It is a fact that there is hardly any Islamic feminist movement. How could it be that female citizens of the most oppressive anti-women system on Earth fail to take the opportunity of the Arab Spring to change their destiny and the destiny of their daughters and granddaughters? The answer to this question is very complex and part of the larger problem of Islam itself. Muslim women are at a much greater disadvantage if compared to Western feminists who did not have to overcome death penalties, humiliation, flogging and societal rejection and isolation if they violate religious laws.

There are some who believe that the defeat of Sharia and reformation of Islam itself will come at the hands of its most oppressed group – the women. That seems to be a logical conclusion, but I disagree that Muslim women can do it alone. One cannot expect the prisoner to be in charge of her own release when the guards of her prison are often Muslim women themselves. For centuries Muslim women have molded their lives to adapt to Sharia and its prison, which has resulted in many having grown comfortable hiding behind their burqas. In many cases they have created a warped mechanism of coping with a system that treats them as a minor juvenile who needs the permission of male family members to travel, to tell her who she can befriend and who not, and even whom to marry.

When Muslim women open the Muslim scriptures they read descriptions of women as being half the value of men, deficient in intelligence and religion, not to be trusted or entrusted and that they are slaves, possessions and toys to their husband, and even that they are like dogs in distracting a man. For Muslim women to rise against what Islamic holy books and laws condemned them to be, they must criticize Sharia, which is an act of apostasy in itself. Expecting Muslim women to be behind the reformation of Islam and Sharia is like asking slaves to end their own slavery without the approval of their masters or asking prisoners to get out of prison without the guards opening the doors.

That does not mean that there are no brave and strong women in Muslim society. To the contrary, the brutality of Islam has produced some of the sharpest, most aggressive and persistent women in the world. But Islamic feminism has incredible obstacles to overcome, the most important of which is the accusation of apostasy if they criticize Sharia. That is one reason they find it extremely hard to develop a grassroots movement and bring onboard the majority of the population. A Muslim woman’s inferior status in Muslim society has gone too deep and is intertwined with all Islamic institutions. For Muslim women to simply revolt against it would be regarded as an act of subversion that is anti-man, anti-family, anti-religion, anti-government and, worst of all, anti-Allah himself.

Women who defy Sharia or try to change it are harshly attacked and silenced and they end up withdrawing from the scene altogether. Islamists admit that the attacks against feminists are partially made to make an example of them for any woman who would dare to follow in their footsteps. Another major obstacle that Muslim feminists face is the difficulty in connecting and reaching out to other women, especially the poorer and less educated majority. Isolation in their homes, distrust of strangers, and social taboos are major factors in Islamic gender-segregated societies that restrain women’s relationships, even with each other, and prevent them from organizing, especially for feminist causes.

Because of blasphemy and apostasy laws forbidding anyone from speaking or criticizing Islam and Sharia, feminists end up dancing around the issues without hitting the bulls-eye or getting concrete results. The only feminism allowed in this dynamic is the militant Muslim woman wearing her Islamic garb with pride and promoting Sharia, the very law that oppresses her. The only outlet for respect, power and dignity to a Muslim women, is compliance and submission to Islam. In other words, she can earn her dignity and pride only by accepting her bondage.

That is why the few Islamic feminists seem to be running in circles only to achieve minor cosmetic changes that scratch the surface, and they have done so at a heavy price of earning disrespect and threats without being taken seriously. And even more sadly, their example has produced a group of Muslim women who embrace another solution: those who believe if you can’t beat them, then join them. They have discovered that the key to power and respect in Muslim society is to become as radical, if not more radical, than men. We have all seen Muslim women in black showing nothing but their eyes, demonstrating in London carrying signs against British law and in support of Sharia and warning Europe of another holocaust and another 9/11. Sharia enforcers are pursuing a policy of generously rewarding women who tell the world that women are happy under Sharia. And many embrace jihad with open arms. We have all seen Arab mothers celebrate the death of their jihadi sons and volunteering their other children for jihad. I do not know what is in the hearts of these women, but mothers who did so in Gaza were highly respected and rewarded handsomely with life pensions; one mother was even elected to a position in the Palestinian parliament.

An extreme and almost laughable case of pandering to Sharia occurred in mid-2011 when a Kuwaiti woman, Salwa al-Mutairi, spoke to the Kuwait Times demanding the re-establishment of sexual slavery for the poor Muslim men. Seducing Muslim women to be on the side of Sharia has reached even as far as U.S. academia. Islamic and Middle East Studies departments in the U.S. have a good number of Muslim female professors who defend the veil as “liberating.”

Dalia Mogahed, the head-covered Muslim Brotherhood sympathizer and Sharia defender who became President Obama’s Islamic advisor, has been recently voted the most powerful woman in the Arab world. Only defenders of Sharia and Islamism get such honor.

Bestselling writer and speaker Nonie Darwish is author of the compelling autobiography Now They Call Me Infidel, about growing up in Egypt and her break from Islam, and Cruel and Usual Punishment, an exposé of the stark reality of sharia. Her new book, The Devil We Don’t Know: The Dark Side of Revolutions in the Middle East, explains what really lies behind the Arab Spring movement, and it exposes Islam as the belief system that will inevitably doom those revolutions.

This is the first of a two-part interview. Part two will appear in Frontpage’s Monday, April 16, issue.

Mark Tapson: Nonie, you note in your introduction that you have written The Devil We Don’t Know not merely to criticize Islam but as a challenge, a plea to Muslims. What are you asking of them with this book?

Nonie Darwish: The purpose of writing The Devil We Don’t Know is not to shame Muslims or criticize Islam for the fun of it. The purpose is to expose the dark side of Islam and its laws that obstruct political, social and individual development, causing the Islamic political system to fall into a continual dysfunctional cycle of tyrannies and revolutions.

Muslims need to understand that the reason Islam is highly criticized is because it has assumed the role of government and a warlike confrontational and oppressive draconian legal system, and thus Islam has opened itself to criticism. But unfortunately Muslims, as a group, ignore or are unaware of such an important reason for why Islam is highly criticized. What Muslims need to understand is that the worldwide rejection, fear and criticism of Islam is not an unjustified phobia.

The number one enemy of Islam as it is practiced today is the truth, and thus my plea to Muslims is to understand that being open to an honest dialogue is best for everyone. Muslims who truly love their religion need to lay down their pride, shame and guns and honestly acknowledge the challenges of Islam today, not only for themselves, but also for the rest of the world. Acknowledging historical atrocities and evolving into a better faith in tune to human rights are values that apply to everyone, every religion and ideology, if they are to stand the test of time. Islam and Muslims are no exception. It is Islam’s turn today to look within, seeking forgiveness and redemption as a first step towards healing the wounds with the rest of the non-Muslim world. The whole world will stand in support of a brave movement of cleansing Islam, especially its written books, from the factors that contribute to its dysfunctional system. There is nothing to fear for Muslims to let go of their fears and be willing to face reality, admit their imperfections and their need to change course. That will be the most positive, constructive and honorable thing Muslims can do today.

These are the questions that Muslim revolutionaries today must face: are Muslims confident and secure enough in their faith and its survival without resorting to enforcing it through the government and legal system under penalty of death? Why do Muslims not dare remove Sharia from their constitutions? Why do they dread letting go of total control of every aspect of a Muslim’s life and the institutions that govern him? What is behind their insecurity and feelings of inadequacy? What is it that forces them to rely on government and not the freedom of the Muslim individual to choose?

MT: You write that the West misunderstood the Arab Spring revolutions by assuming that Middle East dictators like Saddam Hussein, Mubarak, and others were secular. What were they really, and how were they perceived by the Islamic fundamentalists?

ND: The West describes Mubarak, Assad, Hussein and other regimes as secular when in reality they were not. It is true that many of these dictators did come from a military background and their wives do not wear Islamic clothes, but at the same time many of them, in their youth, had been members of the Muslim Brotherhood; for example, Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar El Sadat. Many of the so-called secular dictators govern under constitutions that state that Sharia is the primary law of the land. No Muslim leader in the Middle East can get away with a true secular rule, or even survive one day in office if he rejects Islamic law. It was during Mubarak’s rule in 1991 that Egypt signed the Cairo Declaration for Human Rights, which declared that Sharia supersedes any other law. So even though Sharia is not applied one hundred percent in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan or Tunisia, it is officially the law of the land. Mubarak, like all Muslim leaders, had to appease the Islamists to avoid their wrath.

In fact, according to Sharia, a Muslim head of state must rule by Islamic law and preserve Islam in its original form or he must be removed from office. Islamic law leaves no choice for any Muslim leader but to accept, at least officially, that Sharia is the law of the land or else be ousted by a mob of Islamists who are commanded by Sharia itself to remove any leader who is not a true Muslim. Because of that law Muslim leaders must play a game of appearing Islamic and anti-West while trying to get along with the rest of the world. It’s a game with life-and-death consequences and that is why Anwar Sadat was killed for violating Sharia when he signed a peace treaty with Israel.

MT: One of the new book’s chapter titles is “A Muslim’s Burden: How Islam Fails the Individual.” How does Islam fail the individual?

ND: The reason Western civilization achieved its goals of democracy and freedom was because they had the right moral foundations at the individual level that produced the constitutions and democratic governments of the West. On the other hand, Muslim culture failed to equip the individual with the moral foundation for democracy. The Islamic state has failed the Muslim individual, his morality and his humanity. For centuries, the Muslim mind believed in values contrary to those espoused in the rest of the world.

After 17 years in the Egyptian educational system I was never taught values such as the brotherhood of man, respect for human rights, pursuing peace and harmony in our relationships with people outside of our faith and treating our neighbors, including neighboring countries as we wished to be treated. Such values are never taught in Islamic culture, not even in a non-religious social setting. It was all about jihad, martyrdom, paranoia, conspiracy theories and hatred of the other. And the sad thing is that Muslims as a group have never found anything unusual or bad about this.

Editor’s note: The following talk by Congressman Ed Royce (R-CA) was delivered at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 2012 West Coast Retreat, held March 30th-April 1st at the Terranea Resort in Palos Verdes, California. Video of congressman’s speech can also be seen below.

Congressman Ed Royce:  Thank you very much.  Michael and I were just talking about the fact that yes, yes we did run Barney Frank out.  That is true.  But he said, “Well, who’s in line to be chairman if the Democrats take the House in Financial Services?”  Well, Maxine Waters has been given the nod.  So, you know, one step forward, two back.

I did want to share with you a few thoughts this morning, just about some of the ways in which the President has been working to fundamentally transform America with respect to his policies on debt, with respect to the policies as it relates to energy, as it relates to foreign policy.  And I think I’ll just start with the healthcare bill because a few of you noticed the estimate that just came out of the Congressional Budget Office that the President’s original estimates of $900 billion cost over the next 10 years was a little shy.  It’s actually going to be double that.  Now, that’s the bad news for President Obama.  The good news, I guess, is that we’re now 30^th in math, so nobody will notice the fact that we now have doubled the cost of a new entitlement, a new entitlement.

And this is what I think is most stunning to me, because as one of the deficit hawks who used to go to the floor and press the President and, yes, Karl Rove, on the $161 billion deficit that we had reached, wow, those were the good old days.  Because within one year, one year later with all the stimulus spending, President Obama had that at tenfold, the worst deficit that we had seen.  We were at $161 billion; all of a sudden we go to $1.6 trillion.

And guess what?  The President has no plan to ratchet this back down.  Every year we’re at $1.5 trillion in new deficit spending under this president for as far as the eye can see.  And the consequences of this is the $5 trillion addition to the debt under this administration.  And not one — when you look at it, I mean, we’ve gone through four St. Patrick’s Days now and we haven’t had one green job, one net green job created here.  The unemployment rate is the same as it was four years ago, but the number of people out of work, the number of people in the workforce is dramatically higher.

And the other concept here is the fact that as you’ve got young people graduating from high school or college into the workforce, you’ve got to grow that economy at 2%.  So if you have more people out of work that have left the labor force than four years ago, where are you going with this economic plan?

And what is this plan?  With respect to energy, what is the vision here?  And I want to just speak to an issue that I’ve held a number of hearings on and that is our energy policy, which seems to be to drive up the price of gas.  I think it was $1.83 a gallon when the President came into office and now it’s $4 a gallon.  Drive up the price by driving down the amount that can be produced on public lands.  Occasionally you’ll hear, well, there’s some more gas production that’s going on on private lands.  Yes, that’s the production they haven’t figured out a way to stop yet.

And still the number of permits that are actually given out are a fraction of what they were historically.  And at the same time you have on these major projects — and let’s just look at one of them, the attempt by Canada to create a market for its reserves out of Alberta, which are the third largest in the world.  And so you have a situation with the Keystone Pipeline where there was an attempt to use gravity and connect that pipeline up with our refineries here in the United States.

Now, as you know, the Canadian Prime Minister, Harper, after the President turned down this proposal, has met with Hu Jintao, the head of state for China, and they have now discussed China, which already has vast energy holdings, by the way, in British Columbia.  China has been preparing for this day.  And just as across Africa and across Latin America they have been able to make these major investments, now they’re in British Columbia.  And the requirement that the Canadians have in order to find a source for their oil now that it has been blocked will produce a pipeline, but it will go west instead of south.

We had an opportunity to be less reliant on Middle Eastern oil.  We had an opportunity to buy our oil from our ally instead of our adversaries and to send those dollars north to an ally in which 85% of the money, according to economists, would be regenerated back into our economy.  But we decided rather than to do that, we would take an alternative option, foreclose that pipeline, and create a circumstance where, instead of today where oil prices, energy prices are 20% higher in Asia than in the United States — our economic competitors pay 20% higher for their energy costs with respect to their manufacturing than we do.  And we are now going to inverse that relationship.  We are going to do what we can do to make certain that China has possession for the next 30 years of what comes out of Alberta and so that its energy costs for production and its competition against the United States can now be lower than ours.

This is really astounding, that the President in the face of opposition from labor, in the face of opposition from the Chamber, who estimates that it’s a quarter million jobs — the President will te- — well, it’s only 20,000 direct jobs in terms of the pipe manufacture.  Right, but what about the Caterpillar tractors and all the rest of it?  What about the indirect impact of this kind of activity?  And what about what it would mean in terms of generating or rebooting the economy if you were to further bring down the cost of energy long term in the United States?

Well, you’ve got to hand it to this administration.  I mean, they are committed to fundamentally transforming this economy and they have their vision in terms of what they’re going to do in terms of higher energy prices.  They’ve said they want to double it.  They have indicated they want to go the route that Europe is on in this.  But, you know, our labor costs are higher here.  The way we always competed economically was that our energy costs were lower.  And we are now giving that up.

And I also had some observations just in terms of the Administration’s policies with respect to foreign policy.  Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, and a great author, by the way, was in my office a few weeks ago.  And we reviewed the map surrounding Israel.

And of course on one border you’ve got an imploding Syria.  On another border you have Lebanon rearming, rearming with Hezbollah basically now getting an inventory of longer-range missiles than the ones that I saw in 2006.  I went there during the Hezbollah war.  And at that time I watched that port in Haifa that was closed for almost 30 days.  Now, that’s the artery in which, you know, Israel’s survival is dependent upon that.  I watched that come in under attack every day, every day, from those missiles.  This is the kind of environment that we see there.

We see Fatah and Hamas come up with this unity pact.  Now I remember when we pressed the Administration on this what was — about making the statements that would make it clear that we would not countenance such an arrangement.  But instead of bold statements, instead of the statement that the United States would not support a terrorist government, we just heard talk out of the Administration.  And finally, when it’s done, when it’s a done deal, the spokesman from the State Department says it’s an internal matter for the Palestinians.

Egypt used to be Israel’s stable neighbor and now the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists are the dominant parties.  The cops are fleeing.  We didn’t use the influence that we had between our Pentagon and the military in Egypt to force the kind of constitution and changes that moderate forces were demanding.  And so now they’re not in a position to influence the outcomes.

And the Sinai’s the Wild West.  And Israel is, understandably, rushing to build a fence there now.

And these are just the threats on Israel’s immediate borders.  These are just — this is just small potatoes compared to the big threat.  Because you and I know, I mean, Iran might be struggling under sanctions, but the Iranian enrichment continues day after day.  And the IAEA now gives us the results every month in terms of the ability to build and deliver a nuclear weapon.  So this is the time more than ever when Israel needs friends.

And so I thought I would just look at some of the statements coming out of the Administration in terms of this fundamental transformation of our foreign policy.  You’ve got the Defense Secretary, Leon Panetta, saying, asking this question to reporters — “Is it enough to maintain a military edge?”  He’s speaking of Israel.   “Is it enough if you’re isolating yourself in a diplomatic arena?”

Then we’ve got the President’s stern lecture to Israeli leaders in front of the United Nations, and in Egypt, and in Turkey.

And then, speaking again of Mr. Panetta’s remarks, well, he’s got backup for those remarks.  President Erdogan of Turkey said, “Oh,” he said, “Mr. Panetta’s correct in his assumptions.”

Mr. Obama had that meeting with the President of France, with Nicholas Sarkozy.  And we heard about the exchange.  The President of France says, “I can’t stand Netanyahu.”  Now, this is an opportunity — well, you could respond if you’re the President of the United States, “We’ve got to understand all of the pressure that he’s un-…”  I mean, there are ways to diplomatically respond to a comment like that, other than this quote from the President, where rather than defend Israel’s back, rather than counter, he says, “You’re tired of him?  What about me?  I have to deal with him every day.”  Those are the words of the President when he didn’t know the microphone was on.  That’s not the first time, by the way.

So they asked the President of the United States and he says, “Oh, Prime Minister Erdogan of Turkey is one of the five world leaders with whom I’ve developed a bond of trust.”  This is not said before, it is said after that flotilla is sent with six ships from Turkey in order to try to bust the arms embargo off the coast of Gaza.  All right?

And then last month you had the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, she was asked about Mr. Obama pandering to Zionist lobbies, was the question.  And she acknowledges that that’s a fair question, “a fair question,” in her words.  And then says that during an election season, again in her words, “There are comments made that certainly don’t reflect our foreign policy.”

Some anti-Israel church activists in the West blast Israel in time for Christmas. Others choose Easter.  Recently, World Vision chief Richard Stearns, who heads one of the largest U.S. evangelical relief groups, proclaimed in the Huffington Post that Palestinian Christians are enduring a Holy Week of “trial and tribulation” thanks to Israel.

Claiming Israel allows only 2,000-3000 travel permits for Jerusalem during Holy Week to a population of about 50,000 Palestinian Christians, Stearns never bothered to acknowledge why Israel has security concerns about visitors to Jerusalem.  Quoting a Palestinian colleague who attended church in Jerusalem in 2010, Stearns ominously recalled: “The crowd, striving to stay joyful, could still feel the change of what Easter had now become and the dark cloud of checkpoints, police forces, and denial of entry that had obscured the joy of this holiday.”  Stearns announced he’s praying for the “miracle” of “full religious freedom to the Christians in the West Bank and Gaza.”

If he has time, maybe Stearns can pray for all Christians in the Middle East, whose problems entail considerably more than travel inconveniences.

Responding to Stearns, Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren said Israel has provided more than 20,000 permits this year for Palestinian Christians to enter Jerusalem for Holy Week, plus 500 permits for the handful of Christians left in Hamas-controlled Gaza.

“With the exception of the very few individuals who have raised security concerns, and notwithstanding the measures we must take to protect our citizens, any Christian from the West Bank can reach Jerusalem on Good Friday and Easter,” Oren said.  “Israel, the only Middle Eastern country with a growing and thriving Christian population, remains committed to maintaining its superb relations with Christian communities worldwide. Though we face serious and continuing defense challenges, we uphold the principle of free access to the Holy Places to all religions.”

Ambassador Oren has recently had to address the realities that confront the Middle East’s shriveling Christian populations while many Western Christians prefer silence or blaming Israel.   In   a Wall Street Journal op-ed recently he described the Christian exodus from Palestinian territories thanks to Islamist intimidation.  The Religious Left and its preferred Palestinian voices responded indignantly, since Oren had challenged their narrative that only Israel can be faulted for Christian difficulties in the Middle East.

Oren’s facts were indisputable. About 20 percent of the Middle East a century ago was Christian. Today it’s 5 percent and plunging, as churches are burned in Iraq, Egypt and elsewhere, forcing thousands to flee. Oren likened the Christian exodus to the 800,000 Jews forced from their homes in Arab lands after Israel’s creation.  The only safe place for Christians in the current Middle East is in Israel, he observed with understatement.

As a minority, Christians experience some “intolerance” in Israel, Oren admitted.  “But in contrast to elsewhere in the Middle East where hatred of Christians is ignored or encouraged,” he wrote, “Israel remains committed to its Declaration of Independence pledge to ‘ensure the complete equality of all its citizens irrespective of religion.’”

In contrast, half of Gaza’s almost tiny Christian community has fled since the Hamas coup in 2007, Oren noted.   On the West Bank, the Christian community has fallen to under 2 percent.  Although Israel is commonly blamed for Christian emigration, most Palestinian Christians live in West Bank cities under the Palestinian Authority.  And the Muslim majority population continues to grow.  In Bethlehem, where Christians where once the majority, they have become 20 percent since the Palestinian take-over in 1995.

“The extinction of the Middle East’s Christian communities is an injustice of historic magnitude,” Oren concluded.   But an anti-Israel Christian group called Kairos Palestine denounced Oren’s op-ed as “inaccurate and manipulative” for faulting Muslims instead of Israel’s “illegal Israeli occupation.”  Their response, helpfully broadcast by the United Church of Christ’s Global Ministries Board, did not identify any specific inaccuracies by Oren.  Instead, the Palestinian activists blamed Christian “persecution” on the “occupation that systematically degrades all Palestinians” and the “underlying political oppression that afflicts Christians and Muslims alike.”

Israel has become the only safe haven for Christians in the Middle East, Ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, wrote in a recent op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal.

“As 800,000 Jews were once expelled from Arab countries, so are Christians being forced from lands they’ve inhabited for centuries”, Ambassador Oren stated, comparing the expulsion of Jews after the establishment of the state of Israel with the Arab countries’ current treatment of their Christian minorities.

The numbers are telling. Today there is only one Middle Eastern country where the number of Christians has grown: Israel. As documented in the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, the Christian community that numbered 34,000 people in 1949 is now 163,000-strong, and will reach 187,000 in 2020.

In the rest of the Middle East, the drive for Islamic purity is going to banish all traces of pre-Islamic pasts. When the Islamists will have prevailed, the Middle East will be completely green, the colour of Islam.

Therefore, it is time for Christians to recognize Israel’s survival as critical and vital also for them. Instead, Arab Christians chose to react to Ambassador Oren by embracing Islam and demonizing the Jews.

“As Christian leaders in Palestine, we were appalled by the baseless allegations you published in the Wall Street Journal”, says one letter signed by many  Arab Christian personalities published in the Palestinian media outlets. “Your attempt to blame the difficult reality that Palestinian Christians face on Palestinian Muslims is a shameful manipulation of the facts intended to mask the damage that Israel has done to our community. The Israeli occupation is the primary reason why so many members of the oldest Christian communities in the world have left the holy land, Palestine. Our reality is one of occupation, oppression and loss”.

The letter is signed by Palestinian ministries, activists, priests and mayors and members of the PLO.

Arab Christianity is near its extinction everywhere. “Christianity in Iraq could be eradicated in our lifetime, partially as a result of the US troop withdrawal”, declared Leonard Leo, chairman of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom.

In Egypt, 100,000 Christians already have left the country - after Hosni Mubarak’s fall last year. The Egyptian Union of Human Rights is denouncing this “mass exodus”.

Even more dramatic is the collapse of Christian Arab society following Israel’s handing over of large parts of Judea and Samaria to the Palestinian Authority. Christians have suffered the most from the mafia-style rule of Yasser Arafat’s kleptocracy.

Christian sites and cemeteries were desecrated by Muslims. Slogans like “Islam will win” and “First the Saturday people, then the Sunday People” have been painted on walls, and PLO flags were draped over Jesus crosses.

Ramallah was 90% Christian before the 1948 War of Independence and Bethlehem was 80% Christian. Today Ramallah is a large Islamic city and Bethlehem’s Christians are near extinction.

Given their common status as minorities within an overwhelmingly Islamic region, you might expect Christian Arabs to find common cause with Jews and Israel. But the traditional hatred of Eastern Christianity for Judaism, combined with the futile hopes for assimilation within the Arab world, have closed off that option.

As the letter clearly shows, Arab Christians are lost to Islam. This unavoidable historical process has been explained by the pioneer Bat Ye’or, the most important historian of the “dhimmitude”.

The following article was originally published by the 

Apologists often try to explain away Islamic terrorism as a byproduct of something else. The usual argument is that, because Muslims are politically, socially, or militarily weak—the archetypal example often given is Israel vis-à-vis the Palestinians—they have no choice but to resort to terror to strike at their stronger adversaries.   In other words, they resort to terrorism simply to even the odds—hence the argument that terrorism is the “weapon of the weak.”

Though this narrative is widely accepted, it is demonstrably false.  Consider the following account that took place a couple of weeks ago in Muslim-majority Egypt:

More than 300 Muslim lawyers inside and outside a courthouse in the southern Egyptian province of Assuit today [3/16] prevented defense lawyer Ahmad Sayed Gabali, who is representing the Christian, Makarem Diab, from going into court. Mr. Diab was found guilty of “Insulting the Muslim Prophet” and was scheduled today for a hearing on his appeal. Attorney Dr. Naguib Gabriell, head of the Egyptian Union of Human Rights Organization, said there was “terror in the Assiut Court today.” He added that he was on his way to court when he was advised that Muslim lawyers have issued death threats to any Christian lawyers who attend the court session. “Makram Diab was assaulted by Muslim lawyers during his transfer from the courtroom and security failed to protect him.”  Peter Sarwat, a Coptic lawyer, said that Muslim lawyers representing the plaintiffs prevented the defense team from entering court: “They said no Muslim will defend a Christian. It was agreed that Christian lawyers would take over and two Coptic lawyers volunteered, but the Muslims decided later that even Christians would not defend him.” Sarwat said the Muslim lawyers wanted to assault the chief judge but he managed to leave the court via a rear door [emphasis added].

The report goes on to explain how Muslim lawyers and activists went to court to defend Diab’s right to a fair trial only to be assaulted by other Muslim lawyers: “They were assaulting us in a beastly and strange way just because we went there to defend a citizen who happened to be a Christian,” said one of the lawyers, adding that exiting the court required security intervention: “We left court in a security vehicle which took us to Security headquarters, otherwise, we don’t know what the outcome would have been for us.”

Editor’s note: This is the edited transcript of the speech given by David Horowitz at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill on March 12, 2012. 

I want to thank Brandon Hartness, the Committee for a Better Carolina, and Christians United for Israel for inviting me to speak tonight. I wish I had also been invited by Jewish groups on this campus, but the Jewish groups on this campus are in a state of denial when it comes to the threat facing Israel.

The subject of my talk is Israel, but it is really about America as well.  Israel is the canary in the mine.  When you watch Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, lead tens of thousands of Muslims in Lebanon in chants of “Death to America, death to Israel,” you understand they are linked.  When you hear Iran’s dictator, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, lead similar crowds in chants of “Death to Israel, death to America,” you see they are linked.  The coiner of the slogan that linked them for the Islamic revolution was the Ayatollah Khomeini, father of the modern Jihad against the West, who called America “The Great Satan” and Israel “The Little Satan.”

When gauging human conflicts it is important to look at people’s intentions. Probably none of you ever wondered why we don’t have missiles pointing towards our northern neighbor, or an army stationed on the Canadian border. That’s because we understand that even though Canadians are often resentful of what they think of as “American imperialism,” their intentions towards us are friendly and benign.  We even share a “National Hockey League” with them. If people understood or correctly read Hitler’s intentions in the ‘30s, 70 million lives might have been saved. Hitler systematically violated the International Peace Agreements that were meant to keep Germany from re-emerging as a major aggressive power. Then he took a piece of Czechoslovakia and a piece of Austria, but there were always people in the West, leaders in the West, who said, “We can do business with Hitler, we can negotiate him, we can appease his appetites short of war.” And they were wrong.

The Jews, too, misread Hitler’s intentions. There would be a lot more Jews in the world, if the Jews then had understood the intentions of the Nazis.  There were 500,000 Jews imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto. But they didn’t think the Germans were going to kill them. They organized themselves to make it easier for the Germans to ship them out to what they thought were work camps. They actually made it easier for the Germans to kill them because they thought the Germans were too civilized to plan to exterminate them. They misread the intentions of the Germans.

So I want to begin this little talk tonight by reading some statements made by Palestinian leaders, which express their intentions towards the Jews. Mahmoud al-Zahar is a founder of Hamas and one of its current leaders, and this is what he has said: “There is no place for you Jews among us, and you have no future among the nations of the world.  You are headed for annihilation.”

Ahmad Bahar, who is acting chairman of the Gaza Parliament and a member of Hamas said, “Be certain that America is on its way to disappear.  Allah take hold of the Jews and their allies. Allah take hold of the Americans and their allies. Allah count them and kill them to the last one, don’t leave even one.”

On the official Hamas website there is a video of a Hamas suicide bomber, and he can be seen saying this: “My message to the Jews is that there is no god but Allah.  We are a nation that drinks blood and we know that there is no blood better than the blood of Jews.  We will not leave you alone until we have quenched our thirst with your blood and our children’s thirst with your blood.”

Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, has said that he hopes we Jews will gather in Israel so he won’t have to hunt us down worldwide.

Youssef al-Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, spoke not long ago to a million people in Tahrir Square and said this:  “Throughout history Allah has imposed upon the Jews people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler by means of all the things he did to them — even though they exaggerated this issue — he managed to put them in their place.  This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hands of the believers.”  In other words, Islam will finish the job that Hitler started.

The prophet Muhammad has said, “The day of judgment will only come when Muslims fight the Jews and kill them.  When the Jews hide behind the rocks and the trees and the rocks and the trees cry out ‘Oh, Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.’”

This genocidal saying of the prophet is quoted in the Hamas Charter, which also says, “Islam will obliterate Israel as it has others before it.”

On American campuses across this country, members of Students for Justice in Palestine and the Muslim Student Association chant: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”  The river is the Jordan, which is Israel’s border to the east; the sea is the Mediterranean, which is Israel’s border to the west. “From the river to the sea” is Israel. What Students for Justice in Palestine and members of the Muslim Students Association are chanting is a statement of intention to obliterate the state of Israel. Israel is fighting for its survival against global forces who want to destroy it.

What is “Palestine?”

It’s not an Arabic name. It’s a name that was given to Judea and Samaria, which is now called the West Bank, and which is the historic homeland of the Jews. In 66 A.D. the Jews had the bad judgment to go up against the Roman Empire, and they were defeated and a million Jews were killed. To further humiliate the Jews of Judea, the Romans renamed the territory they inhabited after their enemies, the Philistines. There were no Arabs, by the way, in this region at that time. The Philistines were red-headed Aegean sailors. They were not Arabs.

For 2000 years after that, there was no people calling itself Palestinian.  In fact, there was no people calling itself Palestinian until 1964, 15 years after the state of Israel was created, which is one of the reasons that Newt Gingrich said that the Palestinians are an invented people. Palestine is the name of a region, it’s like New England.  In 1948 if you talked about Palestinians, you’d be talking about Jews. We inhabit a kind of surreal universe now, particularly in universities, which are the most conformist institutions in our country, which is why these facts seem strange. The university has become a one-party state where people on the left talk to each other with nobody to challenge them, which is why everything I’m going to say tonight will probably seem strange. But if you can overcome your emotions and actually look at the facts, you’ll see that everything that I’m saying is quite correct.

The, Big Lie which is repeated by Hamas and the PLO, and by everyone on the political Left and by all supporters of the Palestinian cause, is this; the claim that Israel occupies Palestinian land, or that it occupies Arab land.

This is false. The land that Israel was created on, which is the same land that Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan were created on, belonged to the Turks for 400 years prior to that. Turks are not Arabs. The Turks were on the losing side in the First World War, which meant that when the war was over the Ottoman Empire would be dismantled.  This is according to both international law and international tradition.  After the war, the European victors were given mandates over the conquered empire, and they carved out the five nations I mentioned.

The “Palestine Mandate,” which described a portion of this territory, referred to a region, not a people. There were Arabs living in this region, but there was no “Palestinian people.” In 1922, Churchill assigned 80% of the Palestine Mandate to Jordan, created the state that is now called trans-Jordan. Seventy-percent of the people living in this area were Arabs who inhabited the region called “Palestine.” In other words seventy-percent of Jordan is Palestinian. But you never hear anybody complain that Jordan is “occupied” by the Hashemite minority that rules the state. Jordan is a Hashemite monarchy with a majority Palestinian population. It is 80% of the land mass of the original Palestine Mandate. Where is the movement for the self-determination of the Palestinians of Jordan?  There is none.  There is none because the agenda of the Palestinians and their leftwing supporters is not to create a Palestinian state but to push the Jews into the sea. That’s it. The Palestinian movement is not about self-determination.

[At this point about 40 members of the audience, some wearing kaffiyeh’s the terrorist symbol created by Yassir Arafat, most of them members of the Muslim Students Association and Students for Justice in Palestine, supporters of Hamas marched out on a pre-arranged cue.]

Goodbye everybody. These are supposed to be college students, supposed to be learning…

The British government, which created the state of Jordan (or Trans-Jordan as it was then known), stipulated that no Jew could own land in Jordan. Today, no Jew is welcome in Jordan, a country which occupies 80% of the Palestine Mandate that had been promised to the Jews.

The British and the United Nations then divided the remaining 20% of the original Palestine Mandate between the Jews and the Arabs, who lived on the west bank of the Jordan River, the Arabs who – it so happened – lived in Judea and Samaria, the historic homeland of the Jews. They divided the remaining 20% equally, except that they gave the Jews three slivers of land not exactly contiguous and 60% of that land was an arid desert.

The Arabs rejected their share of the land and instead, on the day Israel was created in 1948, eight Arab dictatorships attacked the new born state with the stated intention of pushing the Jews into the sea. That war has never ended. It is the Arabs’ aggression against the state of Israel and their desire to push the Jews into the sea that is the cause – the sole cause – of the conflict in the Middle East.

When the Jews won the 1948 war, they offered to sign a peace with the Arabs and to live side by side with an Arab state. But the Arabs did not want a Palestinian state, then or for the next sixty years. They have rejected a state every time it has been offered to them because that is not their goal. Their goal was once to expel a non-Arab people from the region, and is now to make it Muslim. Islam is – and has always been — an imperial religion that expands by force. No one can leave Islam. For apostates the sentence is death. Similarly, once an area is Muslim, it has to stay Muslim. That is the creed.

When the war ended in 1949, Egypt annexed Gaza, and Jordan annexed the West Bank. There was not a peep out of the entire Arab world about the annexation of Gaza or the annexation of Jordan, or the fact that the so-called Palestinians not only didn’t have a home now, they didn’t have the land they had been promised to build on. Why was there no protest? Because it’s not about self-determination for the Palestinians or the Arabs, for that matter. It’s about getting rid of the Jews. It’s about pushing the Jews into the sea.

The founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, was an admirer of Hitler who translated “Mein Kampf” into Arabic in the ‘30s. In 1948, al-Banna said, “If the Jews get a state in Israel, Islam will push the Jews into the sea.” That’s the agenda, and it has never changed.

In 1964, when the West Bank was still part of Jordan, and Gaza was still part of Egypt, the Egyptian dictator, Nasser, sponsored the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization as a weapon against the Jews. You can read the original PLO charter on the Internet. You will not find a word about liberating the Palestinians of the West Bank, or about self-determination for Palestinians of Gaza.  It’s all about obliterating the Zionists — Israel. That’s who these people are.

The West Bank and Gaza were liberated from Egypt and Jordan as a result of Israel’s victory in the ’67 war.  This was the second Arab aggression in 20 years whose stated purpose was to destroy the Jewish state. When this war was ended, Israel offered to return Gaza and Jordan back to Arab rule in exchange for a peace treaty that would recognize Israel’s right to exist. The offer was rejected. The Arab aggressors all met in Khartoum in 1967 and they issued a joint statement which is generally referred to as “The Three No’s” – “No recognition of Israel; No negotiation; No peace.” That is the reason why Israeli troops have occupied Gaza and the West Bank. Their purpose is to prevent further aggressions by the Arab states through these corridors, and also – and more recently — their use as terrorist launching pads by the PLO and Hamas — and that’s why Israeli troops are stationed here.

Israel cannot just unilaterally withdraw from where its troops are stationed and allow those who seek its destruction to attack again. They need to have a peace treaty that recognizes their right to exist and they need to redraw their borders to make their territory more defensible. It is the internationally recognized procedure for dealing with aggressors when they lose to re-draw the map so that their victims have a greater ability to defend themselves the next time.

Germany attacked Poland twice in the 20^th century, so in 1945 the Allies took the entire region of East Prussia, which was the industrial heartland of Germany, and gave it to Poland.

How many Germans do you think had to be resettled?  How many Germans did they pull out of East Prussia and resettle when the Allies gave East Prussia? Twelve million. Twelve million Germans were uprooted from places they had inhabited since the Middle Ages. And nobody complained.  If the Jews had acted the way other nations act, they would have annexed the West Bank in 1967 and they would have moved all the Arabs into Jordan which is a majority Palestinian state. But they didn’t do that. The Jews tried to be nice. They thought: if we’re nice to them, they’ll be nice to us. No they won’t. They hate you, and want to push you into the sea.

When Israel was the ruling authority in the West Bank and Gaza in the ‘70s and ‘80s, they poured hundreds of millions of dollars into these territories and created universities. The economy of the West Bank grew at a rate that was the fifth fastest in the world. Then came the Oslo so-called peace process, which established the Palestinian Authority and brought the terrorist Arafat back from Tunisia and gave him control. I had to pinch myself when I read the statistics, but within six months the standard of living in Gaza had declined by 25% and the unemployment rate went from 10 to 40%. These are the real oppressors of Palestinians: The PLO and Hamas.

It’s not like the malicious intent towards the Jews, the hatred for the Jews, the “kill the Jews” mentality is extraneous to this struggle. It is this struggle. The father of Palestinian nationalism is Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who led massacres of the Jews in the ‘20s and ‘30s because they were Jews – well before the creation of the state of Israel.  Al-Husseini was a Nazi, literally a Nazi, who went to Berlin to serve Hitler. Al-Husseini was a protégé of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.  He recruited an Arab legion to fight for Hitler and he also drew up his own plans to create an Auschwitz – a death camp for Jews in the Middle East. The only reason his plan wasn’t implemented was because Rommel was defeated in the battle of El Alamein. Today, Al-Husseini is honored on the West Bank with a holiday as the George Washington of the Palestinians.

This is a Nazi movement. The statements I read at the outset of this talk are Nazi statements. The difference is this: Hitler hid his plans for the Final Solution from the German people because he thought they were too civilized to accept them. The Palestinians of Hamas and the Iranians shout it from the rooftops. Where is the great dissent from this in the Muslim world? It’s too bad that all our Muslim friends have left and did not stay to hear this, but there are good Muslims and there are bad Muslims, and the majority of Muslims are probably good Muslims – decent, law abiding and desiring peace. But there were good Germans too, and in the end, they didn’t make a damn’s worth of difference. I will know a moderate Muslim when they stand up and condemn these kinds of statements and the actions that they inspire. It’s not really hard to know who your friends are. But a lot of people have difficulty in knowing who their enemies are and that is the problem we are facing today.

Since Gaza for the younger people here is something they remember, I will use Gaza to make this case. After the 1967 war, as I said previously, the Jews offered to give Gaza back to Egypt. Egypt rejected the offer because the Arabs had decided on the “Three No’s” — no negotiation, no recognition, no peace. The reason that Israeli troops occupied Gaza was that Israel had been invaded twice already – and in 1973 would be attacked for a third time. Nonetheless, the world is bent on encouraging Arab aggressions. There was enormous international pressure from the left on Israel to retreat from Gaza without a peace, without security guarantees.

The following article was originally published by the Stonegate Institute.

Half of Iraq’s indigenous Christians are gone due to the unleashed forces of jihad, many of them fleeing to nearby Syria; yet, as the Assad regime comes under attack by al-Qaeda and others, the jihad now seeps into Syria, where Christians are experiencing a level of persecution unprecedented in the nation’s modern history.   Likewise, some 100,000 Christian Copts have fled their native Egypt since the overthrow of the Mubarak regime; and in northern regions of Nigeria, where the jihadi group Boko Haram has been slaughtering Christians, up to 95 % of the Christian population has fled.

Meanwhile, the “big news” concerning the Muslim world in the month of February—the news that flooded the mainstream media and had U.S. politicians, beginning with President Obama, flustered, angry, and full of regret—was that copies of the Koran in Afghanistan were burned by U.S. soldiers because imprisoned Muslim inmates were using them  “to facilitate extremist communications.”

Categorized by theme, February’s batch of Muslim persecution of Christians around the world includes (but is not limited to) the following accounts, listed in alphabetical order by country, not severity.

Church Attacks

Algeria: Armed men raided and ransacked a church formally recognized since 1958, dismantling the crucifix above the premises.  The pastor and his family, trapped inside, feared that “they could kill us.” The pastor “has been repeatedly threatened and attacked since being ordained as pastor in 2007. In the summer of 2009 his wife was beaten and seriously injured by a group of unknown men. Then, in late 2011, heaps of trash were thrown over the compound walls while an angry mob shouted death threats.”

Egypt: Thousands of Muslims attacked a Coptic church, demanding the death of its pastor, who, along with “nearly 100 terrorized Copts sought refuge inside the church, while Muslim rioters were pelting the church with stones in an effort to break into the church, assault the Copts and torch the building.” They did this because a Christian girl who, according to Islamic law, automatically became a Muslim when her father converted to Islam, fled and was rumored to be hiding in the church.

Iran:  Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence has ordered the last two officially registered churches holding Friday Farsi-language services in Tehran—Farsi being the nation’s language—to discontinue the language: “Friday services in Tehran attracted the city’s converts to Christianity as well as Muslims interested in Christianity, as Friday is most Iranians’ day off during the week.” Banning church use of Farsi prevents most Iranians from hearing the Gospel.

Kazakhstan: A new report notes that “Churches are being raided, leaders fined and Christian literature confiscated as the Kazakh authorities enforce new laws intended further to restrict religious freedom in the country.”

Kuwait: A parliamentarian is set to submit a draft law banning the construction of churches.  Originally, Osama al-Munawer announced on Twitter his plans on submitting a draft law calling for the removal of all churches in Kuwait. However, he later “clarified,” saying that existing churches can remain, but the construction of new ones must be banned.

Macedonia: A two-century-old Christian church famed for its valuable icons was set on fire in response to “a carnival in which Orthodox Christian men dressed as women in burkas and mocked the Koran.”  Earlier, “perpetrators attacked a[nother] church in the nearby village of Labunista, destroying a cross standing outside” and “also defaced a Macedonian flag outside Struga’s municipal building, replacing it with a green flag representing Islam.”

Nigeria: A Muslim suicide bomber forced his way into the grounds of a major church, killing two women and an 18-month-old child during Sunday morning service; some 50 people were injured in the blast. In a separate incident, Muslims detonated a bomb outside a church building, injuring five, one critically: “The bomb, planted in a parked car, was left by suspected members of Boko Haram, which seeks to impose sharia (Islamic law) throughout Nigeria.”

Pakistan: A dozen armed Muslims stormed a church, seriously wounding two Christians: one man was shot and is in critical condition, the other risks having his arm amputated; another church member was thrown from the roof, after being struck repeatedly with a rifle butt. “The extremist raid was sparked by charges that [the] church was trying to evangelize Muslims in an attempt to convert them to Christianity. The community several times in the past has been the subject of assault and the pastor and his family the subject of death threats.”  As usual, the police, instead of pursuing the perpetrators, have opened an investigation against the pastor and 20 other church members.

Syria: Some 30 armed and masked jihadis attacked a Catholic monastery—unprecedented in Syria’s modern history—demanding money. According to the Catholic Archbishop of Damascus, “the situation in the country is spiraling out of control as the armed opposition spreads its influence to different regions of the state.”

Dhimmitude

[General Abuse, Debasement, and Suppression of non-Muslims as “Tolerated” Citizens]

Bangladesh: Three American Christians were injured after their car was attacked by a Muslim mob that suspected they were converting Muslims into Christians: at least 200 angry locals chased the missionaries’ car and threw stones at it, leaving three with cuts from broken glass.

Egypt: Rather than punishing the perpetrators who opened fire on and ran tanks over Christians protesting the constant destruction of their churches, the government arrested and is trying two priests in connection to the Maspero massacre. And although Egypt’s new parliament has 498 seats, only six are Copts, though Copts make up at the very least 10% of the population, and so should have approximately 50 seats.  Finally, evincing how bad the situation is, Coptic protesters organized a demonstration in front of Parliament to protest “the disappearance and abduction of Coptic girls.”

Indonesia: The Islamist Prosperous Justice Party complained about the Red Cross’ symbol of a cross, saying it is too identifiable with Christian culture and traditions. Red Cross volunteers and activists rejected the claim, saying that any changes to the logo would be “tantamount to giving in to the extremists.”

Iran: A pastor of a major house church movement began serving a five-year prison sentence for “crimes against the order.”  According to one activist,  “His ‘crimes’ were being a pastor and possessing Christian materials.” He is being beat in jail and getting sick, to the point that his hair has “turned fully gray.”

Israel: A mob of some 50 Palestinian Muslims stoned a group of Christian tourists atop Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, wounding three Israeli police officers in the process. The attack is believed to have been instigated by the former Muslim mufti of Jerusalem.

Pakistan: Yet another Christian woman, a teacher, has been targeted by Muslims due to allegations that she burned a Koran.  A mob stormed her school in an attempt to abduct her, but police took her into custody. Also, a Christian student who missed the grade to get into medical school by less than 0.1% would have earned 20 extra points if he had memorized the Koran—though no bonus points for having similar knowledge of the Bible.

Richard Falk, Princeton University professor emeritus of international law and United Nations Human Rights Council special rapporteur for the Palestinian territories, is well-known for his hostility towards Israel. Indeed, this antagonism, and his high-profile involvement in any number of anti-Israel organizations, led to his expulsion from the country in 2008.

A recent lecture at Stanford Law School entitled, “Imagining Israeli-Palestinian Peace: Why International Law Matters,” provided a platform for more of the same vitriol. Approximately 100 people attended, about evenly split between students and local residents. One of the latter, when asking a question, described himself as an “activist” and an elderly couple sporting keffiyehs and political buttons sat in the front row, nodding enthusiastically in agreement throughout the lecture.

Falk’s solution for how to achieve “peace” in the Middle East was to “move from the domain of reason and analysis to the domain of imagination,” which, throughout his lecture, trumped facts, analysis, and history.

For instance, he suggested that policy makers “conceive of a region-wide solution, coupled with the establishment of a nuclear free zone for the Middle East,” which, against all evidence, he claimed Iran would fully support. In Falk’s view, Israel’s alleged nuclear capabilities threaten stability in the Middle East, whereas Iran’s push for nuclear armament, constant threats to annihilate Israel, and attempts to destabilize the region count for nothing.

Of the relationship between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas and its effect on the “peace process,” Falk asserted that “Israel could not hope for softer Palestinian leadership” and disparaged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for making “Palestinians . . . choose between making peace with Hamas and making peace with [Israel].”

Imagination drifted to fantasy as he argued that, despite the Palestinians’ “extraordinary concessions . . . what Israel is willing to offer is much less than what [they] could afford to accept,” and that the “cycle of tension . . . keeps the region in pre-war conditions” that robs attention from the “ordeal of suffering imposed on Palestinians.”

Falk was encouraged, however, by what he called a “strong shift in tactical emphasis from armed resistance to popular resistance” and chalked up this alleged “shift to non-violent militancy” as the reason for increased global support for the Palestinian cause. He claimed that the public is beginning to see the conflict as “unfinished business from the colonial era” in which the Palestinians are victims who can no longer be consigned to this “intolerable ordeal.” And he lamented Israel’s “unlawful” settlement expansion in East Jerusalem, which he claimed amounted to “ethnic cleansing.”

During the question and answer period following the lecture, Joel Beinin—Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and professor of Middle East history at Stanford University—expressed his admiration for Falk’s work. Beinin, best known for his anti-American and anti-Israel pontificating, was heartened by Falk’s portrayal of the U.S. as a declining world power relative to China and India and asked whether this, “among all the other positive diplomatic and geo-strategic factors [Falk] mentioned, is also likely to change the balance of forces in favor of the Palestinian people?”  Falk said he was “grateful for the construction of the issue,” but was less optimistic, given what he sees as America’s ingrained, pro-Israel stance.

Itchy trigger fingers can cause wars.  A pre-emptive conventional weapons bombing strike against Iran’s known nuclear facilities could do more harm than good….or at least so say some.[i]

And indeed there is the real and frightening possibility that an Israeli or American attack might unite Iran’s disaffected anti-Mullah 30-somethings into a furious show of patriotism and thus lock in the current mullah-cracy (aka the Islamic Republic of Iran) for another generation.  Such an attack might also have a similar effect on the current Syrian regime; radicalize the Muslim world against the West; ignite Hezbollah on the Lebanese border; re-invigorate a flagging Hamas; endanger US troops in Iraq; spark revenge terror attacks; propel oil prices skyward; trigger a regional war; prompt Iran’s closure of the Straits of Hormuz; and cause stock markets world-wide to plummet.  And then again, it might not.

But what happens if one does not bomb?

Some current analysis suggests that an Iranian Islamist regime armed with nuclear weapons will trigger a regional nuclear arms race; destroy the non-proliferation treaty; increase the danger of miscalculation that could bring on a nuclear exchange; allow Iran to escalate its destabilizing influence throughout the region and the world; threaten Israel and moderate Arab regimes; manipulate energy markets to its benefit; pose as a guardian of Muslim communities even beyond the Middle East; and, perhaps worst of all, share its nuclear technology with its non-state proxies and terrorist groups.  Thus empowered, Iran just might be able to throw its nuclear weight behind the current Syrian regime; radicalize the Muslim world against the West; ignite Hezbollah on the Lebanese border; re-invigorate a flagging Hamas; endanger US troops in Iraq; provide a measure of impunity for Muslim terror attacks; propel oil prices skyward; trigger regional wars anywhere it wants; close the Straits of Hormuz with impunity; and cause stock markets world-wide to plummet.

And to make matters worse, the Iranian nuclear threat may by now be global. Israeli sources disclosed that recently Iran began working on missiles with a 10,000 kilometer (c. 6,200 miles) range, capable of striking targets in the western hemisphere.  But even worse is the slowly emerging reality that Iran and Hezbollah are working with drug cartels in Mexico and with the Venezuelan government to smuggle materials into South America, creating a conduit that could one day be used to smuggle nuclear weapons into South America for deployment against North America.  An Iranian nuclear attack on North America, via long-range missiles or from bases in South America, could involve the detonation of a nuclear device high in the atmosphere to send a massive electromagnetic pulse that would paralyze virtually all U.S.-based electronic defense systems, destroying America’s electrical grid, and shutting down everything from cars to computers to airplanes and refrigerators.  And if detonated closer to the ground, such a device would vaporize millions of Americans.

But Iran does not need to actually drop the bomb.  The moment Iran goes nuclear, other countries in the region will feel compelled to do the same, sparking a nuclear arms race among the world’s most unstable and fanatical regimes and their proxy terrorist forces.  And such threats, without a single missile being launched, would have a devastating effect on the Israeli economy and society:  withdrawal of overseas and Israeli investors, a record number of Israeli emigrants, a sharp decline of Jewish immigration, dwindling tourism, intensification of military-political-economic dependence on the U.S., and the transformation of Israel from a strategic asset to a strategic liability.

Should Iran achieve nuclear military capacity, it will be free to advance its Islamist revolution throughout the world with impunity from attack.  So it may well be that by not bombing, the world, and especially the USA and Israel, will pay a much higher and more horrific price.

But what about the IAEA, inspections, and sanctions?

The problem with the IAEA and its inspections is that it has failed numerous times to detect clandestine WMD activity in countries that are signatories to the non-proliferation treaty.  Such embarrassing gaffs include North Korea, Libya, Russia, China and most recently Syria and Iran.  Moreover, there is no method of enforcement of IAEA inspections.  With complete impunity, Iran recently barred inspectors from the most sensitive and suspicious of its WMD sites.

Moreover, Iran possesses the most clandestine-capable nuclear-weapon technology in history: the gas centrifuge. Gas centrifuge installations can be housed in a room the size of a high school gymnasium, and require very little external power, thus making it almost impossible to detect.  Iran can now make centrifuges on an entirely indigenous basis.

Sanctions have failed to bring Iran to its knees, even though the most recent ones have thrown the Iranian economy into turmoil.  And this is one of the most problematic aspects of sanctions:  in a country where leaders have no concern for the well-being of their own people, sanctions can harm the innocent without influencing the government. Enhanced incentives have not only failed to entice Iran to give up its nuclear program, but they have had the reverse effect of validating its uncompromising policy against making any concessions in the nuclear arena.  Moreover, Iran has successfully evaded US sanctions against its state shipping company simply by painting new names on its ships. Equally problematic is the willingness of Russia, China, North Korea and Venezuela to supply Iran with whatever it needs, including WMD expertise and uranium, to vitiate the effects of the West’s sanctions.[ii]

The Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control reported in November, 2011 that by December 2008 Iran had one atomic bomb. By 2009 it had two, and by 2011, five.  The IAEA garnered evidence that Iran was testing nuclear explosives and working on weaponization (fitting nuclear warheads to nose-cones of missiles). In January 2012 Iran announced publicly that its uranium enrichment site was about to become operational, prompting the IAEA to warn the world that Tehran now has the ability to make whatever nuclear weapons it chooses, within months.

On January 29, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta was interviewed on CBS news.  When asked about the situation with Iran, Secretary Panetta responded: “[I]f they [Iran] decided to [build a nuclear device], it would probably take them about a year …  [and] …if they proceed and [if] we get intelligence…then….there are no options that are off the table” for the US commitment to stop Iran from building a nuclear arsenal.

Sounds good, except for all the “ifs:”  “if they produce” and “if we get intelligence” and “if they decide to do it”

Panetta’s “ifs” create the impression that there may in fact be no threat from Iran, that Iran may not be pursuing nuclear capacity, that there is as yet no actionable intelligence about Iranian WMDs, and that maybe Iran has not decided to pursue a nuclear option.

But facts of which Mr. Panetta must be aware tell us the opposite.

Back in the ‘60s the Shah tried to start a WMD program for Iran but it floundered and was abandoned.  In the mid-1990s the Ayatollahs restarted the program. Iran said it wanted nuclear power for clean energy needs, but in 2002 an Iranian exile group shared with Western intelligence secret Iranian documents revealing a clandestine program to enrich weapons-grade uranium.  The facility at Natanz was built with the assistance of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear program.  Under threat of sanctions, the government agreed in 2003 to halt work on uranium enrichment; but in 2006, less than a year after Akhmedi-Nejad took power, the Iranian government announced that it was going to restart its uranium enrichment. No “ifs” about that.

From 2005 onward US intelligence organizations and the Israeli Mossad worked together to locate and sabotage the financial underpinnings of the Iranian nuclear project.  On September 9, 2009, American intelligence concluded that Iran had the nuclear fuel necessary to build an atomic bomb, thanks in part to a hitherto undocumented underground plant near the city of Qom. Most recently in January of this year, Iran announced defiantly that it was going to start an additional uranium enrichment site, fortified to withstand even the most powerful of America’s bunker-busting bombs. No “ifs” about that either.

In May 2011, Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akhbar Salehi addressed a regional economic summit in Tehran.  He told his audience that he was optimistic that nuclear inspectors would not find anything amiss when they visited Iran.  Of course he was optimistic. For the past 20 years Iran has done a great job of hiding those of their WMD sites that were devoted to the development of military uses for nuclear weapons.

American efforts to counteract the Iranian threat have been limited to sanctions and efforts to persuade EU allies to cease cooperation with Iranian financial institutions, the most significant of which were H.R. 1905, the Iranian Threat Reduction Act of (May) 2011, and the Senate’s decision in December 2011 to approve sanctions against Iran’s central bank. Although, as has recently become clear, President Obama does not support such actions, even though a nuclear Iran now threatens the American continents, he nonetheless signed these newest and most comprehensive sanctions on December 31, 2011.  No “ifs” in the opinion of Congress nor in Obama’s acquiescence.

Throughout the past decade Iran has argued that it merely wants to generate clean, green electricity with its nuclear program; but a host of reports from the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), thoroughly documented in a series of articles in the NY Times, create the more than merely credible case that Iran has been well on its way for over a decade to developing a nuclear device for military use. The New York Times offers no support for any “ifs.”

On January 21, Raymond Ibrahim, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, spoke at an event titled ”The Persecuted Church: Christian Believers in Peril in the Middle East,” hosted by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (read this report for more details on the conference).  Raymond’s talk, which provided “context and continuity,” can now be seen on video, which follows:

Part I

Part II

Part III

Congressman Ron Paul showed in the January 17th Fox News debate why he would be so dangerous as president and commander-in-chief. He believes, in a twist on the Judeo-Christian Golden Rule, that our Islamist enemies are only assaulting us because we assaulted them first. Sorry, appeaser-in-chief Paul, but the Koran commands devout jihadists to use whatever means are necessary to destroy all infidels, no matter what we have done or plan to do to them.

As part of an exchange involving the appropriate response to al Qaeda and their Taliban supporters, Paul exclaimed:

My point is, if another country does to us what we do others, we’re not going to like it very much. So I would say that maybe we ought to consider a golden rule in — in foreign policy. Don’t do to other nation… what we don’t want to have them do to us.

Paul even offered the absurd analogy comparing our killing of the mass murderer Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil, where he was provided a sanctuary, to the Communist Chinese government deciding to go after a Chinese dissident seeking freedom in the United States. Newt Gingrich properly labeled this comparison “utterly irrational.”

Ron Paul may have some good ideas on reining in the power of the Federal Reserve and on the need to control federal spending. But he is clueless in dealing with our Islamist enemies. He either does not understand or refuses to believe the ideology that drives them. They want to kill us because our nation is governed on the basis of principles derived from Judeo-Christian beliefs including the true Golden Rule. They hate us because of who we are, not for any alleged harm that we’ve ever caused them.

Only three years after the United States won its independence, when there was no Jewish state for Muslims to resent, and no American troops on Muslim soil, Thomas Jefferson, then U.S. ambassador to France, and John Adams, then U.S. Ambassador to Britain, learned from a Muslim ambassador to Britain why the Muslims were so hostile towards Americans. Jefferson and Adams were attempting to negotiate a peace treaty with the Muslim “Barbary pirates,” an exercise that ultimately proved to be futile.

As Jefferson and Adams later reported to Congress, the Muslim ambassador explained to them that Islam

Was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman [Muslim] who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise.

All that Ron Paul needs to do is take a look at the Koran itself, cited by that Muslim ambassador more than 200 years ago, to understand the source of the  jihadist ideology that we are still fighting today.

Here is a sample:

• “Kill the disbelievers wherever we find them.” (Koran, 2:191)

• “O ye who believe! Take not the Jews and the Christians for your friends: They are but friends to each other.” (Koran 5:51)

• “Shall I tell you who, in the sight of God, deserves a yet worse retribution than these? Those [the Jews] whom God has rejected and whom He has condemned, and whom He has turned into monkeys and pigs because they worshiped the powers of evil.” (Koran 5:60)

• “I will inspire terror into the hearts of unbelievers: you smite them above their necks and smite all their fingertips off of them.” (Koran, 8:12)

• “So when the sacred months have passed away, then slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captives and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush, then if they repent and keep up prayer and pay the poor-rate, leave their way free to them; surely Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.”

•  “[F]ight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book [Christians and Jews], until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.” (Koran, 9:29)

• “When we decide to destroy a population, we send a definite order to them who have the good things in life and yet sin. So that Allah’s word is proven true against them, then we destroy them utterly.” (Koran, 17:16-17)

Islamist apologists argue that the Koran also contains verses calling for tolerance and understanding.  If the verses written while Muhammad was living in Mecca, where he and his followers were then surrounded by much stronger non-Muslim populations, constituted the entirety of the Koran, they may have had a point. However, the milder verses were superseded by the far more war-like and intolerant verses written during Muhammad’s time in Medina where he successfully launched his jihad of conquests against non-believers, especially against Jews who refused to convert to Islam. Moreover, when one examines the real meaning of jihad according to Muhammad from other primary sources such as Bukhari (the Hadith, which are oral traditions relating to the words and deeds of Muhammad), the fact is that 97% of the jihad references are about war and 3% are about so-called inner struggle.

On January 19^th 1991, during the first Gulf War, the United States sent Patriot Missiles and a contingent of U.S. service members into Israel on temporary assignment. This was the least we could have done for Israel as they vowed not to respond to Saddam’s SCUD attacks which reached deep inside Tel Aviv. Never have U.S. forces found a permanent home inside the Holy Land—until today.

Twenty years later, the United States committed to a permanent presence in Israel. According to Defense News, as of September 21^st 2011, the United States deployed a high-powered, high-frequency, transportable X-band radar system to Israel along with a small contingent of support personnel. Designed to detect and track ballistic missiles soon after launch, the AN/TPY-2 Transportable Radar Surveillance/Forward Based X-band Transportable (FBX-T), its ancillary components, and some 120 EUCOM personnel are prepared to defeat any Iranian missile attack. Today, these service members make home at Israel’s Nevatim Air Base.

In an attempt to comfort those who may feel alarmed by this news, rest assured that a U.S. military presence in Israel has been planned for some time now. In fact, since 2007, the U.S. Army solicited contractual opportunities for Israel’s Nevatim Air Base. Solicitation number W912GB-07-R-0013 was released in April 2007 specifically designed for the new construction of two aircraft hangars, hazardous material storage buildings, hangar annex buildings, a dining facility, a utility building, a boom treatment station, part washing and storage facilities, a laboratory and workshop building, as well as site development to include roads, parking, taxiways and landscaping.

Well, it seems the Obama team lately was running short of things over which to bash Israel and so it decided that the treatment of women in Israel is something that needs condemnation. Led by Hillary Clinton, the Obama administration thinks that Israel does not treat its women nicely or respectfully enough.  This is the same Hillary Clinton who never had much to say about the treatment of women in the Clinton White House. Other administration bashers of Israel joined the feeding frenzy.

This is the same Obama team that rarely has had anything to say about the treatment of women in the Muslim world, without a doubt the very worst such treatment that can be found on the planet.  Hillary insisted that Israel’s treatment of women is as bad as that in Iran, although Obama people do not exactly speak out against the treatment of women in Iran before breakfast each day.  Hillary also used the same opportunity to condemn Israel for considering the adoption of transparency laws that would require disclosure of foreign funding to political NGOs operating inside Israel, laws that are similar to what the United States and many other democratic countries already have.  After all, how will those who desire Israel’s annihilation be able to finance picayune treasonous radical anti-Israel propaganda NGOs inside Israel if such transparency ever takes effect?

So when Hillary Clinton recently decided to speak out against the mistreatment of Middle Eastern women, she singled out Israel for condemnation, and then turned around to welcome a delegation of Saudi feudalists with cordiality.  If Hillary considers Israel a force of anti-feminine darkness and repression, just imagine how awful she must regard Scandinavia.  She compared Israel’s treatment of women with the racial segregation that once was so common in the American South. Israeli public figures, led by the secularist non-Orthodox Minister of Finance Yuval Steinitz, denounced Hillary’s comments as absurd and incorrect.  He was joined by numerous other secularist Israelis.

The Obama administration is largely silent when it comes to the plight of women in the Muslim world, but keeps condemning the only country in the Middle East that has a woman chief justice, plenty of women in its parliament, more women MDs and than men, countless women army officers and court judges, and which has had a woman as head of state, something the US has never had.  Israel is also the only country in the world where a panel of judges, two of them women, put a former president in prison for alleged rape and sexual abuse of women.  But perhaps that is what really has Bill Clinton’s wife so hostile to and suspicious of Israel.

Women university students in Israel have been the majority out of all undergraduate Israeli students since 1980, reaching 58% of students in 1999.  That is without including teachers colleges in the computation, where women are a far larger share.  Women students are the majority of students, not just in the fields of education and humanities, but also in such “non-traditional” fields for women as biological sciences and agriculture.  Women are a majority of medical students, 48.3% of law students, and 39% of physics students, according to the latest survey.  There are also oodles of women students in math, engineering, and computer sciences.   Women students are also a small majority of those pursuing MA and PhD studies.

So just what got Hillary and the Obama team so upset?  Well, it seems that Israel has been debating the behavior of some small ultra-religious Jewish sects, groups that believe in strict gender separation, especially in public spaces.  Known as the chareidim, these are religious radicals, best known for their black clothing, long sidecurls, anti-modern life styles, and especially for their ideas about “modesty” for women.  No Jew anywhere has to belong to such communities and women in those communities unhappy with the life style may leave at any time.

In some communities of these chareidim, there have been initiatives to introduce a small number of special bus lines in which women and men do not sit together.  When a secularist Israeli woman rider challenged the initiative and sat in the “men’s section” of one such bus Israel’s ultra-secularist leftist media proclaimed her the Israeli Rosa Parks, and Hillary picked up the cue.  In another incident, some religious soldiers requested not to be required to attend a concert in which women were singing, on grounds that according to their religious outlook such singing is erotic and immodest.  And in yet other incidents, some signs were put up in the neighborhoods of chareidim asking women not to congregate on a street next to a synagogue, or calling on men and women in the name of modesty to walk on opposing sides of some streets in those neighborhoods.

A distinguished panel joins Jamie Glazov’s new television program to discuss the Islamists’ victory in Egypt. Below is Part II of a three part episode (To see Part I about Putin’s Power, Click Here; to see Part III, about The Road Less Traveled, Click Here.):

Three distinguished guests recently joined Jamie Glazov’s tv program, The Glazov Gang, to shed light on Gingrich’s chances of rising to the top. The All-Star cast included Conservative political pundit Al Sonja Schmidt, America’s #1 Conservative Comedian Evan Sayet and Political Analyst Austin Dragon. Below are the three segments to the program (parts 2 and 3 dealt with Obama and the Middle East):

Part I, Gingrich Rising:

Part II, Obama’s Destructive Designs on America:

Part 3, Bye-Bye Middle East:

To get the whole story on why the Left sympathizes with enemy death cults, read Jamie Glazov’s book, United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror.