Prince Charles of Arabia

There are many teachers of biblical prophecy who are nowadays delving into Islamic mythology to support the idea that the coming Antichrist will be a Muslim of Middle Eastern birth. One of their arguments is that Muslims would never accept a Westerner as being their expected Mahdi, whom these teachers believe fits the bill for the Antichrist.  Read on to see just how wrong they are when it comes to the man I point to in my book. A man whose ancestry can be traced back to Middle Eastern dynasties.

RONNI L. GORDON AND DAVID M. STILLMAN

Middle East Quarterly

SEPTEMBER 1997, VOLUME 4: NUMBER 3

[T]he effort for these years to live in the dress of Arabs, and to imitate their mental foundation, quitted me of my English self, and let me look at the West and its conventions with new eyes: they destroyed it all for me.
– T.E.Lawrence Seven Pillars of Wisdom¹

Prince Charles has often surprised his future subjects, but few shocks match the allegations of a newspaper article that appeared in October 1996:²

The idea of the Prince of Wales lugging around a prayer mat and turning to face Mecca five times a day sounds a tad unlikely – but, then again, so did confessing to adultery on prime-time television a couple of years ago. So perhaps no one should be shocked by the suggestion in a forthcoming book that Prince Charles has converted to Islam.

This claim was put forward by no less a personage than the grand mufti of Cyprus: “Did you know that Prince Charles has converted to Islam. Yes, yes. He is a Muslim. I can’t say more. But it happened in Turkey. Oh, yes, he converted all right. When you get home check on how often he travels to Turkey. You’ll find that your future king is a Muslim.”³ “Nonsense,” replied a Buckingham Palace spokesman, denying Charles’s supposed conversion. Lord St. John of Fawsley, a constitutional expert, is no less dubious, commenting that “The Prince of Wales is a loyal member of the Church of England.”⁴ Some time later, a leak to the press told of Charles’s “desire to play a greater role in the Church of England,” an apparent attempt to reinforce the prince’s Anglican credentials.⁵

Rumors about the Prince of Wales’s conversion to Islam may well be inaccurate; even so, the fact that spokesmen official and unofficial felt compelled to deny this fact results from persistent speculation about Charles’s religious loyalties that arises out of his statements and actions of recent years. And these, in turn, reflect a larger trend in Western society.

CHARLES’S PUBLIC STATEMENTS ABOUT ISLAM

The future Charles III has made several strong public statements endorsing Islam as the solution to the spiritual and cultural ills of Britain and the West. His public advocacy of Islam appears to go back to 1989, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued an edict (fatwa) against Salman Rushdie, a British citizen, for blaspheming the Prophet Muhammad in his novel The Satanic Verses.⁶ Rather than defend Rushdie’s freedom of speech, Charles reacted to the death decree by reflecting on the positive features that Islam has to offer the spiritually empty lives of his countrymen.

Charles first delivered a major address on Islam on October 27, 1993, at the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford where he is a vice patron of the Centre for Islamic Studies.⁷ He declared that the usual attitude to Islam

suffers because the way we understand it has been hijacked by the extreme and the superficial. To many of us in the West, Islam is seen in terms of the tragic civil war in Lebanon, the killings and bombings perpetrated by extremist groups in the Middle East, and by what is commonly referred to as “Islamic fundamentalism.”

The Prince of Wales then explained the causes for this distorted understanding:

Our judgement of Islam has been grossly distorted by taking the extremes to the norm. . . . For example, people in this country frequently argue that the Sharia law of the Islamic world is cruel, barbaric and unjust. Our newspapers, above all, love to peddle those unthinking prejudices. The truth is, of course, different and always more complex. My own understanding is that extremes, like the cutting off of hands, are rarely practised. The guiding principle and spirit of Islamic law, taken straight from the Qur’an, should be those of equity and compassion.

Charles suggests that European women may even find something to envy in the situation of their Muslim sisters:

Islamic countries like Turkey, Egypt and Syria gave women the vote as early as Europe did its women-and much earlier than in Switzerland! In those countries women have long enjoyed equal pay, and the opportunity to play a full working role in their societies.

Charles considers Christianity inadequate to the task of spiritual restoration and denigrates science for having caused the West to lose its spiritual moorings. Echoing a common Muslim theme, he declares that “Western civilisation has become increasingly acquisitive and exploitive in defiance of our environmental responsibilities.” Instead, he praises the “Islamic revival” of the 1980s and portrays Islam as Britain’s salvation:

Islam can teach us today a way of understanding and living in the world which Christianity itself is poorer for having lost. At the heart of Islam is its preservation of an integral view of the Universe. Islam-like Buddhism and Hinduism-refuses to separate man and nature, religion and science, mind and matter, and has preserved a metaphysical and unified view of ourselves and the world around us. . . . But the West gradually lost this integrated vision of the world with Copernicus and Descartes and the coming of the scientific revolution. A comprehensive philosophy of nature is no longer part of our everyday beliefs.

He concludes by suggesting that “there are things for us to learn in this system of belief which I suggest we ignore at our peril.”

Among the many titles borne by the British sovereign is “Defender of the Faith,” a reference to the fact that the monarch heads not only the government but also the Church of England. But the prince has reservations about this title. In a June 1994 television documentary he declared his preference to be known as “Defender of Faith” rather than “Defender of the Faith,”⁸ leading to a rash of speculation that he favors the disestablishment of the Church of England.⁹

Charles has continued to discuss the role of Islam in the United Kingdom. In a speech at the Foreign Office Conference Centre at Wilton Park in Sussex on December 13, 1996, he called on Islamic pedagogy and philosophy to help young Britons develop a healthier view of the world.¹⁰Praising Islamic culture in its traditional form for trying to preserve an “integrated, spiritual view of the world in a way we have not seen fit to do in recent generations in the West,” he went on to say:

There is much we can learn from that Islamic world view in this respect. There are many ways in which mutual understanding and appreciation can be built. Perhaps, for instance, we could begin by having more Muslim teachers in British schools, or by encouraging exchanges of teachers. Everywhere in the world people want to learn English. But in the West, in turn, we need to be taught by Islamic teachers how to learn with our hearts, as well as our heads.

The results of this study will help Westerners

to rethink, and for the better, our practical stewardship of man and his environment-in fields such as health-care, the natural environment and agriculture, as well as in architecture and urban planning.

In addition to these comments on Islam, Charles has taken steps to give that religion a special status. For example, he set up a panel of twelve “wise men” (in fact, eleven men and one woman) to advise him on Islamic religion and culture.¹¹ This caused much talk, especially as the group was reported to have met in secret. Some noted that no comparable body exists to inform the crown prince about other faiths practiced in his future realm.

REACTIONS

Muslim world. Charles has traveled extensively in the Muslim world, with recent visits to Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and Bangladesh. He has visited Turkey so often that some observers believe that to be the country where his rumored conversion to Islam took place. In addition, he has visited mosques in the United Kingdom, for example, dropping in on one at the end of Ramadan in April 1996.

Some offices of the British government have found a practical use for the prince’s affection for Islam. In particular, the Foreign Office uses him as a point man for British business interests in Muslim countries, leading one journalist to comment that “the Charles of Arabia phenomenon is here to stay,” for it helps assure British commerce with the Muslim world.¹²

Although some Britons may be bewildered at Prince Charles’s infatuation with Islam, he has become a hero among Muslims. His February 1997 visit to Saudi Arabia

got moderate coverage in the British press-but it was huge news in the host country. In Saudi Arabia, the overwhelming theme of the welcoming addresses was of the Prince as candid friend of the Islamic world. The warmth of his welcome was extraordinary.

The writer of this account, John Casey of Cambridge University, warns that the British public lacks a clear understanding of Charles’s standing in the Muslim world:

The extent to which the Prince is admired by Muslims-even to the point of hero-worship-has not yet sunk into the consciousness of the British public. When it does, that public may or may not be pleased.

Casey concludes that the prince of Wales’s “hero status” in the Arab world is permanent. “No other Western figure commands this sort of admiration.”¹³

Charles’s Muslim admirers can be generous in their gratitude. At a private dinner with prince Charles in May 1997, Prince Bandar bin Sultan of Saudi Arabia announced a donation by King Fahd of $33 million to Oxford University to construct a new Centre for Islamic Studies at Oxford, a gift designed “to establish Islamic studies at the heart of the British education system.”¹⁴

Great Britain. Charles’s speeches provoked a flurry of comments in England. In the popular perception, he is a spiritual dilettante, something of a religious butterfly, flitting from faith to faith and veering, increasingly, towards Islam. . . . The sight of the Prince in yet another prayer shawl only compounds the image of a well-intentioned eccentric seeking divine inspiration.¹⁵

Others wonder if Charles is aware of the punishments Islamic law metes out to adulterers-and whether he “exacted some sort of guarantee” before traveling to the Muslim world that he would not be “stoned or beaten by devout Saudi or Bangladeshi natives.”¹⁶

Some Englishmen took their prince’s statements more seriously. Patrick Sookhdeo, director of the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity, raised questions about the coherence of Charles’s approach to Islam, commenting that “It is not fair to compare the best ideals of the Islamic faith with the worst of Western cultural decadence.” Sookhdeo also reminded Charles that many Muslims see in Western traditions the solution to their own problems:

What do Muslims living in a Muslim context feel? Are they content to continue submitting to authority in every detail of their lives? Many are not. We hear much about radical Islamists seeking an even closer adherence to the original teachings of Islam. But we hear little about the opposite phenomenon: the Muslims who are attracted by democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, respect for the rights and worth of the individual and other characteristics of Western society.¹⁷

Another commentator reversed Charles’s argument and held that some of Britain’s million and a half Muslims need instruction in British values:

it would be interesting to know who they [the Muslim leaders with whom Charles associates] are. Do they include Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammad, who supports Hamas, agitates for an Islamic state, and recently called for homosexuals to fling themselves off Big Ben? Or the dissident Dr. al-Mas’ari, who has used the new freedom of speech which we in this country have given him to call for the extermination of the Jews?¹⁸

Prime Minister John Major reacted to Charles’s sentiment about wanting to be known as “Defender of Faith” with the understated comment that “it would be a little odd if Prince Charles was defender of faiths of which he was not a member.”¹⁹

The conflict between Charles’s enthusiasm for Islam and his subjects’ leeriness played itself out recently at Oxford, where the reaction to King Fahd’s huge gift to the Islamic center met with little enthusiasm. Oxford faculty oppose the gift, claiming its proposed location-on a greenfield site near the heart of the city-would constitute “overdevelopment.”²⁰Presumably their ecological opposition hides other motives as well.

Interestingly, Charles himself has mildly experienced the wrath of fundamentalist Islam. Just after Ayatollah Khomeini issued his death decree against Salman Rushdie, Charles was in the Persian Gulf and Tehran radio denounced his presence there “as a snub to Islam.”²¹Because of “heightened security concerns in the wake of Muslim furor over The Satanic Verses,”²² the prince was forced to withdraw from a polo match in Dubai. But this brush with Muslim extremists has not dissuaded Charles from reassuring others that Islam’s problem is only one of image.

It bears noting that Charles is not the royal family’s only link to the Muslim world, for Princess Diana, Charles’s ex-wife, has often been linked to Hasnat Khan, a London-based cardiac surgeon. Just as Charles donned a Muslim prayer shawl, Di wore a traditional shalwar kameezduring her visit to Khan’s family in Pakistan. London’s Sunday Mirror²³reports that Khan’s family has approved a possible marriage of the divorced 35-year-old princess and their son, then quoted the princess (via a “friend”) to the effect that she hoped Khan would father a half-sister to her two sons, princes William and Harry. While Diana’s divorce from the heir to the British throne removes her personally from the royal family, her sons could be the first heirs to the British throne with a Muslim stepfather.

CONCLUSION

The denigration of the West at the expense of a foreign tradition that Charles engages in occurs quite commonly among the West’s intellectual elite. For some it is Islam, for others Tibetan Buddhism, Maoist thought, or American Indian spirituality. In all cases, the alien is assumed superior to the familiar. Arthur Schlesinger replies to this that there remains

a crucial difference between the Western tradition and the others. The crimes of the West have produced their own antidotes. They have provoked great movements to end slavery, to raise the status of women, to abolish torture, to combat racism, to defend freedom of inquiry and expression, to advance personal liberty and human rights.²⁴

Should Charles persist in his admiration of Islam and defamation of his own culture, it could be, as The Independent puts it, that his accession to the throne will indeed usher in a “different kind of monarchy.”

Ronni L. Gordon and David M. Stillman are associate scholars of the Middle East Forum.

Iran opens a war against Israel from Gaza

by Caroline Glick

 

A Kornet anti-tank missile hit a civilian bus transporting Israeli soldiers adjacent to Israel’s border with Gaza at 4:30 in the afternoon on Monday.

According to the bus driver, 50 Israeli soldiers had alighted the bus just moments before it was hit by the missile. The missile struck while the bus was moving slowly towards a parking lot. One soldier, who was standing next to the bus, was critically wounded in the blast.

Immediately after the missile strike against the bus, Hamas and its partner, Islamic Jihad, initiated the largest bombardment of Israel they had ever undertaken from Gaza. By late Tuesday morning, the two terror groups had fired more than 400 projectiles into Israel. Fifty Israelis were wounded in the onslaught. One person was killed when a mortar hit an apartment building in Ashkelon. Hundreds of mortars and rockets and missiles were intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile batteries. And the government announced it was rushing more Iron Dome batteries to the area.

In the hours following the joint Hamas-Islamic Jihad assault, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman (who stepped down Wednesday) ordered the Israel Air Force (IAF) to carry out a large-scale air assault against Hamas command posts and other facilities in the Gaza Strip.

In a media briefing, a senior Air Force commander said the IAF strikes since Monday night have been the most far-reaching raids Israel has ever conducted in Gaza. More than a hundred targets were hit in under two hours, he said.

Israel’s Security Cabinet, which is authorized to order the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to open large-scale operations, including war, convened on Tuesday morning. Its final decision was to walk back the conflict and agree to a ceasefire, with no terms.

The cabinet’s decision was met with fury by residents of the south. They came out in droves, blocked a major highway leading to the embattled border town of Sderot, and set fire to tires while attacking the government for opting not to go to war against Hamas.

Defense Minister Liberman held a press conference Wednesday afternoon announcing his resignation in protest against the decision to walk away from the conflict.

Netanyahu, for his part, defended the government’s decision in a speech on Wednesday morning. With Liberman’s resignation imminent, Netanyahu said that he was acting on information about Israel’s enemies that he cannot share with the public. And he insisted that Israel would take action to defeat them at a time and in a manner of its choosing.

What might he have been talking about?

In all likelihood, he was talking about Iran.

To understand the role Iran is playing in Gaza, it is important to take a close look at the missile strike against the bus on Monday.

Hamas terrorists in Gaza filmed the blast. According to Israel’s Hadashot news network’s veteran Arab affairs commentator, Ehud Ya’ari, the footage of the blast was first broadcast on Iranian television in Lebanon and only later rebroadcast on Palestinian television.

This is highly significant. The initial Iranian broadcast indicates that Hamas and Islamic Jihad are not independent actors in their aggression against Israel. Rather, they are Iranian proxies. They receive their orders from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps and Iran’s Lebanese army, Hezbollah. And they report to their Iranian and Lebanese commanders.

When Hamas and Islamic Jihad go to war against Israel from Gaza, they do so not merely because they have become convinced that Israel will go to great lengths to avoid a major military operation against Gaza that would require the IDF to deploy large numbers of military forces and assets to Gaza. (Although surely their awareness of Israel’s deep-seated desire to avoid another major war with Hamas-Islamic Jihad in Gaza empowers them to attack.)

And they shower Israel with missiles, rockets, and mortars merely because by agreeing to enable Qatar to transfer cash and fuel to Gaza to keep the Hamas regime afloat to secure a ceasefire, Israel showed Hamas that it can be extorted. (Although the knowledge that Israel is willing to be extorted to avoid war certainly also played into the Hamas-Islamic Jihad’s decision to attack Israel.)

The main reason Hamas and Islamic Jihad attacked Israel is because Iran told them to do so.

So when Israel decides not to take the bait but rather accepts a humiliating and – in an election year – politically costly ceasefire, we have to think about the relative balance of power today between Israel and Iran.

Outside of Lebanon, which Iran effectively controls through Hezbollah, Iran’s chief area of operations in Israel’s neighborhood is Syria, where Iran has been going from strength to strength. With each passing day, the Russian- and Iranian-Hezbollah-controlled regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad reasserts and reinforces its control over much of Syrian territory. As it does so, the threat of a major war that will pit Israel against Hezbollah forces in Lebanon, and against Hezbollah, Iranian, and Syrian forces operating under Russian protection in Syria, rises.

Gaza plays a role here, as it has in the past, because if Israel is sucked into deploying large numbers of forces to Gaza to fight Hamas, it will leave its Northern Front vulnerable. That is precisely what happened in the summer of 2006.

One of the most forgotten aspects of Israel’s 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon is that it began in Gaza. Two weeks before Hezbollah opened hostilities against Israel by attacking a military patrol along the border, killing eight IDF reserve soldiers and stealing the bodies of two of the dead, Hamas carried out a similar operation in southern Israel.

On June 25, 2006, a combined force of terrorists from Hamas and the Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO) Fatah faction entered Israel from Gaza through an underground tunnel. They reached an IDF position along the border and attacked a sleeping tank crew. Two soldiers were killed, and three were wounded. One of the wounded, Cpl. Gilad Shalit, was captured and taken to Gaza.

Following the cross-border attack, Hamas and its terrorist allies carried out a large-scale bombardment of Israel with mortar and rocket fire.

Israel deployed a large number of ground and air forces to Gaza. So when Hezbollah attacked two-and-a-half weeks later, Israel was far more vulnerable than it would otherwise have been.

There are two main reasons that the prospect of war between Israel and Iran-Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria has grown. First, Iran is interested in fighting before U.S. sanctions drive it into bankruptcy. And second, Russia’s recent turn towards Iran and Hezbollah and away from Israel has emboldened Tehran.

Until September 17, Russian President Vladimir Putin was sitting on the fence, with everything concerning Russian relations with Israel on the one hand, and Russian relations with Iran-Hezbollah on the other hand. Until September 17, Putin was interested in preventing an Iranian war against Israel even as he enabled Iran to assert control over Syrian through Hezbollah and the Assad regime. To thatw end, while fighting with Iran to secure Assad’s continued hold on power, he agreed to a coordination mechanism with Israel that enabled Israel to attack Iranian targets in Syria that directly threatened Israel. According to the Israeli government, in the 12 months preceding September 17, Israel carried out more than 200 airstrikes – or more than 4 strikes a week – against Iranian targets in Syria.

On September 17, Russia abruptly changed its posture. That day, Syrian forces manning an S-200 surface to air missile battery in Damascus accidentally downed a Russian spy plane.

Rather than blame the incompetent Syrian forces that indiscriminately shot off missiles that downed their plane, the Russians blamed Israel, which had completed a strike in Syria 15 minutes before the Russian jet was downed.

Russia’s seemingly irrational assault on Israel, blaming it for an action undertaken by Syria, was a calculated move. By attacking Israel, Russia was able to use the episode as a means to end its tactical cooperation with Israel in Syria and swing entirely to Iran’s side.

Russia moved rapidly to complete its pivot to Iran.

Right after the Syrians shot down the Russian plane, the Russian Defense Ministry announced that it was deploying the more advanced S-300 surface to air missile system in Damascus. Barely a week later, the S-300 landed at Russia’s Khmeimim air base in Syria and was quickly assembled and deployed.

According to media reports, Israel has severely constrained its air activities in Syria since Russia delivered the S-300 battery. In the meantime, Iran has continued and stepped up its missile shipments to Hezbollah through the Damascus airport.

Last week, Israel carried out a major air exercise with the Greek air force. According to Israeli media reports, the purpose of the exercise was to train pilots to operate in the presence of an S-300 battery. Greece fields an S-300 system.

Since September 17, Netanyahu has tried on multiple occasions to meet with Putin, only to be rebuffed. Netanyahu met with Putin briefly in Paris over the weekend. The Israeli media reported that their brief exchange provoked Netanyahu to brief his cabinet that “the crisis with Putin is far worse than we thought.”

President Donald Trump was scheduled to meet with Putin in Paris. But shortly before Trump left for Paris, the meeting was postponed until November 30.

Given the inflamed situation in the north, Russia’s betrayal and Iran’s clear interest in provoking a two-front war, Netanyahu’s rationale for accepting the politically damaging and humiliating ceasefire with Hamas becomes clear. The main reason that Israel has gone to such great lengths to avoid a major conflict with Hamas is because it is mainly concerned with Hezbollah and Iran in the north. The IDF and the government have no interest in deploying thousands of troops to Gaza, where they will be unavailable to fight in the north when they are needed.

Presumably, Netanyahu is hoping that Trump will succeed where he has apparently failed in weakening Russia’s sudden determination to stand with Iran against Israel. Presumably he is hoping to delay major action against Hamas-Hezbollah-Iran until circumstances are less propitious for Iran both economically and militarily.

But as the missile attack on the bus, and Hamas’s unprecedented, ferocious rocket assault on southern Israel showed, the longer Israel waits to strike its enemies, the more powerful they become. So the longer Israel delays action, the more difficult it will be for it to defeat its enemies in a strategically significant way.

And as Lieberman’s resignation and the protests against the government from the beleaguered and infuriated residents of southern Israel demonstrate, the political price of delaying the inevitable may become prohibitive for Netanyahu and his political partners in his coalition government.

A desperate Emmanuel Macron attacks Donald Trump

by Caroline Glick

 

French President Emmanuel Macron has apparently decided that with his approval ratings in the toilet, his best bet for a political resurgence is to attack the United States.

This isn’t a bad move, for a French president. Hatred for America has been a powerful mobilizing force in France since shortly after the American army liberated the French from Nazi German occupation in 1944.

In his speech at the official ceremony marking a hundred years since the U.S. saved France from Germany and ended World War I, Macron took a direct swipe at President Donald Trump and his voters. Macron said that the “ancient demons” that caused World War I and millions of deaths are growing stronger.

“Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism. Nationalism is the betrayal of patriotism,” Macron pronounced, as Trump and other world leaders looked on.

He added, “In saying ‘Our interests first, whatever happens to the others,’ you erase the most precious thing a nation can have, that which makes it live, that which causes it to be great and that which is most important: Its moral values.”

Macron’s speech on Sunday was his second rhetorical assault against America in under a week. In a radio interview last Tuesday, Macron called for Europe to raise “a true European army,” to defend against the U.S., Russia and China.

In Macron’s words, “We have to protect ourselves with respect to China, Russia and even the United States of America.”

Upon landing in France over the weekend, Trump called Macron’s remarks about defending against America “insulting.” The President tweeted that instead of figuring out a way to fight the U.S., the Europeans should pay their share of NATO’s budget, which the U.S. has been underwriting.

Macron’s anti-Americanism isn’t only fueled by domestic political concerns. He has two other – perhaps even more significant – causes for his hostility.

First, and most fundamentally, Macron rightly views Trump’s presidency and his nationalist vision of America as an existential threat to the European Union. As political philosopher Yoram Hazony explains in his vital book, The Virtue of Nationalism, (Basic Books 2018), globalism, the foundational rationale of the European Union, is in essence an imperialist project.

Like its ideological twin and sometimes competitor in the U.S. — namely, American internationalism or liberal internationalism — the EU is predicated on the idea that nations should be shorn of their power to determine and advance their national interests in accordance with the values and needs of their people.

In the neo-imperialist models advanced by the EU and by American internationalists, national powers should be transferred to international, transnational, or supranational bodies.

Hazony explains that with little to no discussion inside their own societies, and no consent from their respective publics, at the end of the Cold War, “Western leaders became preoccupied with two great imperialist projects: the European Union, which has progressively relieved member nations of many of the powers usually associated with political independence; and the project of establishing an American ‘world order,’ in which nations that do not abide by international law will be coerced into doing so, principally by means of American military might.”

As Hazony explained, the absence of discussion about the imperialist nature of these two projects owed in part to the absence of public support for them. In Europe, the EU’s demand for member nations to surrender their national independence to Brussels has never been popular. A decade ago, the French, the Dutch, and the Irish all voted down increased integration in the European Union. The French, Dutch and Irish all viewed increased integration as a blow to democratic norms.

Rather than respect their objections and forge a less coercive form of union, the leaders of the EU in Brussels drafted a new agreement among themselves that simply rewrote the rejected treaties while blocking member states from putting their actions before their people for approval.

In 2016, of course, the British people voted to abandon the EU altogether in favor of national sovereignty. In the intervening two years, we have seen repeated attempts by the EU on the one hand and by British opponents of Brexit on the other to water down the Brexit vote to meaninglessness.

In the U.S., Donald Trump’s “America First” message resonated in the national psyche after two decades of post-Cold War presidents preaching various forms of liberal internationalism. George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama all in their turn embraced the mantle of American global leadership predicated on various notions of post-nationalist international law, democracy, and liberal internationalism. Each, in turn, involved the U.S. in ideological wars and campaigns that brought few gains to the American people.

As in Europe, American rejection of “Pax Americana: is more visceral than intellectual. Intellectual analysis of the merits of a U.S.-led global world order has been blocked by the unsubstantiated assertion by globalists that nationalism is inherently malevolent. Hazony’s book provides the missing philosophical argument for Trump’s nationalism, and places it in the long tradition of American nationalism that stretched from the Pilgrims to the Second World War.

President Trump’s nationalist message has won the U.S. the appreciation, support and respect of many European nations as well as many nations worldwide. Following the lead of the American voters, the Hungarians and Austrians elected nationalist leaders. Hungarian President Viktor Orban and Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, along with Polish President Andez Duda and others, have embraced Trump’s nationalist model. They rightly view it as an alternative to the EU.

The EU leadership in Brussels, Paris, and Berlin in turn perceives the rise of nationalist governments and parties in Europe as a strategic threat to the European Union. As the leader of this resurgent nationalist wave, coming after four successive U.S. administrations led by presidents who saw the world very much as the European globalists see it, Trump threatens the EU more fundamentally than any single leader ever has.

The final reason that Macron believes his interests are served by picking a fight with Trump is because he is trying to position himself as the heir to outgoing German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s leadership of the EU.

Since taking office, Macron has repeatedly shown that his view of leadership has little to do with actual accomplishments. As France’s economy dribbles along with recession-like growth rates, and the French people express deep seated pessimism about their future, Macron entertains them with stunts and photo-ops. During his meeting with Trump at the NATO summit in Brussels in May 2017, for instance, Macron famously tried to assert his dominance over Trump by squeezing his hand during their handshake.

In his radio interview last week, Macron said the Trump administration’s decision last month to withdraw from the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) is what propelled him to declare that Europe needs to defend itself against the United States, just as it needs to defend itself from Russia and China.

In his words, “When I see President Trump announcing that he’s quitting a major disarmament treaty which was formed after the 1980s Euro-missile crisis that hit Europe, who is the main victim? Europe and its security.”

The ironic aspect of Macron’s statement is that the reason the U.S. pulled out of the INF treaty, which bars the U.S. and Russia from fielding and developing nuclear and conventional missiles and launchers with ranges of 500-1,000 kilometers, is that Russia was systematically breaching it. And Russia’s missile development activities directly threaten Europe.

By withdrawing from the INF, the Trump administration merely granted itself the ability to contend with the reality that the treaty is already dead.

It is impossible to see how Europe would be safer if the Trump administration had simply maintained the Obama administration’s abject refusal to acknowledge that the Russians have been actively developing and deploying intermediate range missiles for years.

This then brings us to the crux of Macron’s conceit – and indeed the conceit of the European Union more generally. The EU presents itself as a world power not by virtue of its actions, but by virtue of its virtue-signaling against America. Trump endangers Europe by rejecting the EU’s assertion of moral superiority in favor of the brick-and-mortar national interests of the American people.

Will The US Stand Up For Asia Bibi?

BY RAHEEL RAZA/CLARION PROJECT

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Will the U.S. stand up for Asia Bibi? The story of Asia Bibi is a tragedy beyond proportions. It also provides us a test as to just how committed the West is to human rights – with some countries, including the “GREAT” Britain failing miserably.

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Bibi is a Pakistani Christian woman and mother of four who was jailed in Pakistan under a trumped up charge of blasphemy nine years ago. The fact that she was in jail for almost a decade is horrific enough, but saga is still ongoing.

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While the Pakistani Supreme Court remarkably and finally found her innocent and ordered her release, riots took place across the country clamoring not only for her death but also for the death of the three judges who found her innocent.

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This shows not only the complete breakdown of law and order in Pakistan, but reveals the psyche of a people gone mad with the taste of blood in its mouth.

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There was a rumour that Bibi had been allowed to leave the country, but Pakistan vehemently denied this. Fortunately, her lawyer fled the country and is vying for her release from a non-disclosed location in Europe.

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So what should Bibi do? Stay in Pakistan and be killed? This is certainly what will happen if she stays. Her only option is to get asylum in another country. Her lawyer and supporters are trying to accomplish this.

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Meanwhile, the UK, a leading Western power, shamefully refused entry to Bibi citing fears of reprisals from its Muslim population. Is this what the world has come to? We seem to have lost our souls and the capacity to think about who is a REAL refugee is and what a REAL human rights violation is.

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Pakistan’s blasphemy crimes

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I was in Pakistan in 2011 when the cold blooded murder of Punjab governor Salman Taseer took place. Taseer had taken up Bibi’s cause. Shortly after that in the same year, Pakistani minorities minister Shahbaz Bhatti, a Christian, was gunned down for speaking out against the blasphemy law.

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In 2012, seven Christian women and children were burnt alive, several dozen people were injured and nearly 180 houses were looted and destroyed in three Pakistani towns.  These acts were carried out on the basis of unsubstantiated allegations of “desecrating the Holy Quran by the Christians.” The government failed to protect the innocent people caught up in this carnage despite prior warning of the attack.

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Pakistan has lost its soul.

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While in Pakistan, I heard educated and refined Pakistanis support the death of Salman Taseer, and it reminded me of Nazi Germany. First ordinary people were in denial, then they were indifferent, and later they accepted the propaganda that made another human being worthy of killing.

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The elephant in the room in Pakistan is the dreaded blasphemy law which few want to discuss, let alone abolish. Over two thousand lawyers and judges have refused to be affiliated with any case which involves the blasphemy law.

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In Pakistan there are three levels of the judicial system. There are military courts that deal with cases of terrorism. Then there are the sharia courts which use archaic laws to settle cases. Finally, there are the civil courts.

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Bibi was convicted in a sharia court. The case was then moved to the High Court and later taken up by the Supreme Court that published a 56-page judgement at the end of October saying she was not guilty, as there was no proof and no credible witnesses.

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How did the blasphemy law come to be?

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The blasphemy law was first established by Pakistan’s British colonizers who made it a criminal offence to commit “deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings of any [stress mine] class by insulting its religious belief.”

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This law was meant to protect the diverse faith groups that lived in pre-partition India. After partition, the law was retained. In his address to the constituent Assembly of Pakistan, Pakistan’s first president, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, said, “What are we fighting for? What are we aiming at? It is not theocracy – not for a theocratic state. You are free to go to your temples; you are free to go to your mosques or any other place of worship in this state of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed – that has nothing to do with the business of the state….”

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In the 1970s, Pakistan’s Islamist military leader General Zia ul-Haq, who ruled the country for 11 years, made several additions to the law, including life imprisonment for those defiling or desecrating the Quran or the Prophet. In 1986, the death penalty was introduced for anyone found guilty of defaming Islam.

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Today, the dreaded blasphemy law is like a cancer in Pakistan and is contrary to every aspect of the U.N. Universal Human Rights Charter. The blasphemy law is in violation of Articles 2, 3 and 4 of the Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and Discrimination based on Religion and Belief. It also violates articles 2 and 4 of the Declaration of the Rights of Persons Belonging to National, Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities.

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Ironically, the blasphemy law has been used in Pakistan as a systematic tool of discrimination and abuse against religious minorities as well as for ethnic cleansing. Under the banner of this inhuman law, it is believed that since 1987, almost 1,000 people have been accused.

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Although religious minorities form only three percent of Pakistan’s population of almost 167 million today, nearly half the victims of this law were Ahmadis, with the others being Christians and Hindus. The U.N. Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief called the punishments accompanying the blasphemy law excessive and disproportionate to the offence.

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Where is the world in taking up the cause of Asia Bibi? We already know where Great Britain stands, but will Donald Trump or my own Canadian prime minister (who calls himself a feminist) take the lead and lobby to bring Asia Bibi and her family to North America so they can live?

Israel’s Kindness Is Repaid With Terror

BY STEPHEN FLATOW/JNS.ORG

 

Israel gives the Palestinian Arabs self-rule in large sections of Judea-Samaria, and they use it to promote terrorism.

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Israel releases Palestinian terrorists from prison as a gesture, and the newly freed prisoners resume engaging in terrorism.

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Israel permits Arab residents of Gaza–enemy territory–special permits so that they can receive medical care in Israeli hospitals or to carry out business transactions in Israel, and they use those privileges to assist terror cells.

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Anybody notice a pattern here?

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This week’s discovery of a huge Hamas terrorist network in the Palestinian territories is chock full of disturbing lessons.

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Let’s start with the very fact that such a network, directed by the Hamas regime in Gaza, has been operating with near impunity throughout the areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority.

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The P.A. has one of the largest per-capita security forces in the world. Yet for some reason, they never noticed all these Hamas terrorists running around. It was the Israeli security services, the Shin Bet, which once again had to carry out the anti-terror operations that the P.A. refuses to undertake.

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“Hundreds” of members of the terror network were captured, the Israeli news media reported this week. Not 20, not 80, but hundreds! They were planning “to conduct large-scale bombing attacks,” and had been instructed by their commanders to “select crowded sites as targets for the attacks … trains, buses, hotels and restaurants.”

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Sites were scouted in order to kill as many Jews as possible. Pittsburgh-style.

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The discovery of the network began with the arrest of a Hamas terrorist named Osweis Rajoub from the village of Dura, near Hebron. Dura has been under the complete control of the P.A. since 1995. It also has more than its share of residents who have been involved in terror incidents.

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Rajoub spilled the beans to his Shin Bet interrogators. The Shin Bet has been criticized by various left-wing groups over the years for supposedly being too rough when questioning murderers and would-be murderers. I don’t know what tactics they used to get Rajoub to talk, but I’m sure glad they did what had to be done.

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Think about how many lives they saved. Think of all the parents who will not be mourning the murder of their children, wives who will not be widows, and all the children who will not be orphans because the Shin Bet interrogators did their job.

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As a result of Rajoub talking, “hundreds of young Palestinians, both men and women, who had been recruited by Hamas,” were arrested, according to the news reports. That’s right, women, too. In Palestinian society, women are silenced, abused and treated as second-class citizens in almost every respect–except in the ranks of the terrorists. If they’re willing to murder Jews, Palestinian women can finally enjoy gender equality.

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How were messages carried from the Hamas leadership in Gaza to its terrorists in the P.A. areas? In two ways, the Shin Bet discovered: “by Palestinians traveling from the coastal enclave to hospitals in Israel” and by “Gazan businessmen with permits allowing them to travel to the West Bank.”

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One of these couriers of death was 53-year-old Na’ama Mikdad, a mother of nine from Gaza “who had been given a travel permit to accompany her sister who had cancer and received medical treatment in Israel.” How nice of Israel to do that. In fact, the Israelis gave her the permit even though they knew she and her sister are the nieces of a Hamas military commander, Muhammad Abu Kuwaik.

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How did Mrs. Mikdad repay Israel’s kindness? She traveled to P.A.-controlled Bethlehem, where she met with the terrorist Rajoub and handed him “trousers into which a cloth strip had been sewn on which instructions … had been written.” He had already been passed a phone to be used in planning the attacks.

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“With the phone and the instructions on how to use it, Rajoub began working with an explosives expert to create the bombs needed for the attacks,” the Shin Bet revealed. He also recruited two assistants from another P.A.-ruled village, Yatir.

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Mrs. Mikdad also brought messages from the Hamas leadership to a terrorist in the P.A. capital city of Ramallah, named Fouad Dar Khalil. He had previously spent 14 years in prison for “taking part in a shooting attack on an Israeli car,” as the Shin Bet put it. Clearly, he was released much too soon. And receiving his freedom evidently did not inspire him to give up his old terrorist ways. On the contrary.

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Israel wants to be a nice guy. I get that. But I wonder how long the Palestinians will continue to repay Israel’s niceness with terrorism before it finally becomes obvious that in rough parts of the world like the Middle East, nice guys finish last–or, all too often, don’t finish at all.

 

While Airbnb boycotts, Israel builds its diplomatic strength

by Caroline Glick

 

Airbnb’s partial boycott of Israel last week came just as the Arab world, Africa, and Eastern Europe moved closer to the Jewish state. These two diametrically opposed developments – one negative and one positive — showed that a race is on between competing global movements to determine whether Israel will sink or swim in the international area.

On the negative side, on November 19, the Silicon Valley-based tourism behemoth Airbnb announced that it is delisting Jewish-owned properties located in “Israeli settlements in the West Bank” from its website. Airbnb chose not to delist properties in the so-called “West Bank” owned by non-Jews.

Airbnb’s decision to adopt a policy that is openly discriminatory towards Jews was the result of years of lobbying and pressure from the UN Human Rights Council, which the Trump administration left in June. The UN Human Rights Council was joined in its campaign by the European Union (EU), by EU member states, and by U.S.-based foundations ideologically aligned with the hard left.

These forces, which share an aversion to nationalism, and ascribe to post-nationalist globalism, have combined since at least 2001 to achieve the goal of delegitimizing the existence of the Jewish state while legitimizing terrorism and war against Israel.

Airbnb’s move is a testament to the effectiveness of this campaign — as are the growing disenfranchisement and intimidation of pro-Israel students on college campuses; the boycotts of Israeli exports; and the mainstreaming of extremist politicians who refuse to accept the legitimacy of Jewish nationalism or Jewish self-determination.

Airbnb seemingly decided that the Palestinian conflict with Israel is so acute and horrible that it makes sense to discriminate against Israel Jews, while giving a pass to Palestinians who enact capital punishment against Palestinians who sell land to Jews and kill Jews who enter areas under their control.

Airbnb also opted to harm the economic interests of Israeli Jews while ignoring regimes that illegally and brutally control disputed areas — from Tibet, to Northern Cyprus, to the Western Sahara.

As Airbnb was striking a blow against Israel on behalf of the informal alliance of globalist anti-Jewish interests, Israel was making extraordinary gains in multiple other theaters.

Three days after Airbnb’s decision, Middle Eastern leaders convened in Rome for the MED2018 conference, organized by the Italian Foreign Ministry.

The Arab leaders assembled in Rome for the MED2018 conference, in contrast to the Western Europeans and the left, are tired of the Palestinians. The clear preference of the leaders of these states is not to boycott Israel, but to expand contacts and relations with the Jewish state. Their behavior in Rome made clear that they are unwilling to subordinate their shared interests with Israel to the Palestinians’ unappeasable animosity towards the Jewish state.

For instance, although Qatar has been one the chief sponsors of Hamas’s terror state in Gaza in the past, its foreign minister chose not to mention the Palestinians in his enumeration of the chief challenges facing the Middle East.

Oman’s foreign Minister Yusuf bin Alawi bin Abdullah resonated with the basic position of the conference’s Arab participants when he called on his fellow Arab governments to “come to terms with the reality that Israel is a fact of life in the region,” and said that Israel deserves its share of “rights as well as obligations.”

(On October 26, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu paid an official visit to Oman – the first by an Israeli leader to the sultanate since 1996.)

In a question-and-answer session at the MED conference with Yuli Edelstein, the Speaker of Israel’s Knesset, almost all the questions related to the threat Iran poses to the nations of the region on the one hand, and Israel’s technological advances on the other.

The events in Rome bore out positions stated off-the-record by senior Arab officials to Breitbart News in recent months. They claim that whereas for seventy years, the Arab League organized itself in opposition to Israel, the time has come for the Arab League to organize itself in opposition to Iran and Turkey, the two states those officials identified as the gravest threats facing the Arab world today.

Notably, in closed discussions, Israeli officials also increasingly acknowledge that Turkey has joined Iran as a major strategic threat to Israel.

On the heels of the MED2018 conference, on Sunday, Chad’s President, Idriss Deby, landed in Israel for a previously unannounced four-day official visit. Majority-Muslim Chad cut off its diplomatic ties with Israel in 1972. But Deby said that he views his visit as a major step towards reestablishing full diplomatic relations between his country and Israel.

Over the past two years, Netanyahu has travelled to Africa three times. In each visit he met with multiple African leaders. In his third visit – a one-day trip to Kenya –Netanayhu met with 11 African leaders in a day. All were keen to develop their agricultural and military ties with Israel.

During Deby’s visit, the Prime Minister’s office revealed that Sudan is also considering reopening diplomatic ties with Israel, and that Netanyahu will soon follow up his trip to Oman with one to Bahrain.

In South America, Brazil’s newly elected president, Jair Bolsonaro, announced days after his election on October 28 that he intends to move quickly to keep his campaign promise to move Brazil’s embassy to Jerusalem and to close the Palestinian embassy in Brasilia.

“Palestine first needs to be a state to have the right to an embassy,” Bolsonaro said on the campaign trail.

Netanyahu intends to attend Bolsonaro’s January 1 inauguration.

The Palestinians have responded with alarm to Israel’s rapid expansion of its diplomatic relations in the Arab world and beyond. But whereas the Palestinians remain a top agenda item for European leaders and leftist politicians and activists in the West, Arab leaders are unlikely to revert to their historic willingness to keep their ties to Israel captive to the Palestinians and their campaign to destroy the Jewish state.

As for Europe, the governments of Western Europe remain committed to their anti-Israel agenda, and indeed, seem continuously to escalate their diplomatic and economic warfare against Israel, both directly and through the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) they utilize as agents But many governments in central, eastern, and southern Europe are moving in the opposite direction.

Shortly after Deby landed in Israel, Czech President Milos Zeman began an official visit to Israel. The purpose of his visit was to open “Czech House” in Jerusalem. While not officially attached to the Czech embassy in Tel Aviv, Czech diplomats will be able to work out of Czech House. Zeman views the move as a step towards the relocation of the Czech embassy to Israel’s capital.

In the spring, Zeman advocated for the Czech Republic to follow the United States’ lead and move its embassy to Jerusalem, but he was overruled by the Czech prime minister, who cited pressure from the EU to retain the embassy in Tel Aviv.

In a meeting with Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, Zeman expressed skepticism at the desirability of Palestinian statehood.

Other Eastern European states are moving in a similar election, against the wishes of EU leaders. Earlier this month, the Jerusalem Post reported that German Chancellor Angela Merkel placed heavy pressure on Romania to prevent the Romanian government from relocating its embassy to Jerusalem.

Netanyahu has worked assiduously to build ties with EU bloc countries outside the power centers surrounding Brussels. At the beginning of November, for example, Netanyahu flewto Bulgaria for a summit with the leaders of Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, and Serbia. He explained that he wants to work with these countries to “change the hypocritical and hostile approach of the EU” towards Israel.

Netanyahu had a similar meeting with the leaders of the three Baltic states in August. Last year, he travelled to Hungary and met with the leaders of the Visegrad countries: Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. He has held several meetings along the same lines with the leaders of Greece and Cyprus.

Since Israel embarked on the failed peace process with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1993, aside from Netanyahu, Israel’s leaders have believed that Israel’s diplomatic status is directly linked to the achievement of peace. That position gave the PLO effective veto power over Israel’s diplomatic initiatives. And the PLO used its power to reduce Israel’s diplomatic standing to unprecedented lows throughout the Western world.

But Netanyahu sees the world differently. In a speech a day before his visit to Oman, Netanyahu explained his view of the Palestinians’ proper place in Israel’s foreign policy calculations:

We always thought that if we solved the Palestinian problem it would open up the doors of peace with the broader Arab world. And that’s certainly true if you could do it. But it may be equally true and perhaps even truer that if you open up to the Arab world and you normalize relations with them it will open the door for an eventual reconciliation and peace with the Palestinians.

As for the wider world, Netanyahu said Sunday that he believes that Israel’s diplomatic position internationally is a function of its strength.

In his words: “Every week we see the implementation of this concept, of cultivating economic-technological strength, alongside security-intelligence strength, to receive political-diplomatic strength. This is happening before our eyes, one might say, on a daily basis.”

Netanyahu’s visionary foreign policy has made him the most successful statesman in Israel’s history. The globalist left’s increased radicalism and its concomitant hostility towards Israel is like a lit fuse that has caused Netanyahu to rush to develop ties with as many governments as possible, as quickly as possible.

The contrary developments this week with Airbnb on the one hand, and Deby and Zemano on the other, show that Israel is in a race against time to secure its position before the left rises to power again in the U.S., in Britain, and in other key Western states.