The Bogeyman Cometh - Radical Islam Arrives in Ramallah

The Palestinian Authority leadership is using Muslim radicals to scare Western donors into continuing, or perhaps increasing, their financial aid to the Palestinian government in West Bank.

Khaled Abu Toameh..
Gatestone Institute..
05 June '13..

What happened on Tuesday In Ramallah -- often referred to as the bastion of Palestinian secularism and moderation -- serves as a reminder that radical Islam has found its way to this West Bank city. Hundreds of Muslim fundamentalists marched through the streets Tuesday to mark the 92nd anniversary of the fall of the Caliphate.

The Palestinian Authority, which had in the past cracked down on Hizb-ut-Tahrir [Party of Liberation], the radical organization that led the march, instructed its security forces not to intervene, even as PA spokesmen condemned US Secretary of State John Kerry's efforts to revive peace talks between the Palestinians and Israel.

Hizb-ut-Tahrir is a radical, Islamist political organization that calls on all Muslims to unify under an Islamic state ruled by Islamic law, Sharia, and a Caliph. The march in Ramallah was organized by members of its Palestinian branch, who, along with their fundamentalist followers, lamented the long-ago decision by the Grand National Assembly in Angora, Turkey, to depose Caliph Abdul Medjid Effendi and abolish the Caliphate.

Palestinian residents of Ramallah expressed surprise at the Palestinian Authority's decision to allow hundreds of Muslim fundamentalists to march in their city in scenes that appear to be taken from the streets of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. "Since when does the Palestinian Authority allow Al-Qaeda supporters to stage demonstrations in our cities?" asked a Palestinian shopkeeper.

Remarked another Palestinian university student who witnessed the event: "Today I felt as if I'm in Syria or Gaza. It's strange that the Palestinian Authority, which arrests people who post critical comments on Facebook, allows Muslim extremists to march in Ramallah, calling for the establishment of a Caliphate."

Think Again: The still lethal obsession

To ignore Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric today is perhaps worse than ignoring Hitler’s threats against world Jewry prior to the Holocaust.

Jonathan Rosenblum
Opinion/JPost
26 November '10

No matter how many prizes Prof. Robert Wistrich’s massive tome A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad garners, the book still deserves more attention than it has received. Indeed no amount of attention would be sufficient.

Its packed 938 pages of text reflect neither authorial grandiosity nor editorial lassitude. The copious detail amassed is required so that Wistrich’s central arguments not be dismissed as cherry-picked quotes used to exaggerate the seriousness of the phenomena under discussion. Random House, a commercial publisher, did not request him to cut a single sentence.

A Lethal Obsession stands as a refutation of three widespread misconceptions fostered in the West, partly out of ignorance and partly out of fear. The first is that radical Islam is a relatively minor phenomenon in the Muslim world. On his recent visit to India, US President Barack Obama provided a good example of Western ignorance or dissembling. Asked about jihad, he began his reply by insisting that jihad has several meanings in Islamic thought. Wrong. In contemporary Muslim discourse, jihad invariably refers to conquest to establish the domain of Islam.

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First, name the conflict

Fresnozionism.org
04 November '10

The midterm elections in the US made it clear that many Americans are unhappy with the performance of their leadership. Of course, most of the unhappiness is due to the poor economic situation. But not all of it.

I think that many of us believe that we haven’t come to grips with the challenge posed on 9/11. We are involved in two hugely expensive wars, seriously stressing our volunteer military, wars which are certain — because of the way they’ve been financed by borrowing — to cause further economic problems in the future. And the fact is that these wars have been inconclusive at best. After nine years, Osama bin Laden is still at large, Baghdad is in the throes of a violent terrorist attack as I write, and we appear to be looking for a way to surrender safely in Afghanistan.

The US is in full retreat from the Middle East, apparently unable to challenge Iran which every day moves closer to establishing its domination of the region. We’ve allowed Hizballah to rearm and Syria and Iran to subvert Lebanon. We’ve stood by and watched as one of the most powerful states in Middle East, Turkey, moved from being a Western ally to joining the Iranian axis.

It’s always dangerous to make historical comparisons, but the best analogy I can think of is the period of ideological competition, diplomatic maneuvering and vicious proxy wars that characterized the “Cold War” between the West and the Soviet Union. There is one major difference, though:

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Which Side Are You On?: The "Moderate Muslim" Litmus Tests

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
26 August '10
Posted before Shabbat

In the controversy over the "Ground Zero" mosque in New York and other issues, Muslims are often asked if they condemn terrorism, Iran, or Hamas and other revolutionary Islamist groups, along with other questions. The idea is to determine whether they are moderates or radicals. Each of these questions also has an unnoticed "internal Muslim" aspect as well that makes them all the more important.

Yet this question is often placed in the context of whether or not they support murderous attacks on non-Muslims or calls to wipe out Israel. This is a valid consideration, but it misses a key point about why Islamic activists should be asked and how they should answer such questions.

There is an important additional factor embedded in this question. One is that these are revolutionary Islamist groups or countries. If you don't condemn them you are in effect accepting their program for a radical transformation of Muslim-majority (and even other) countries, the imposition of a radical interpretation of Sharia law on every aspect of society. If you are a nationalist, or a liberal, or a moderate Islamist the prospect of your enemies seizing state power and perhaps repressing you would be a most upsetting prospect.

In other words, a moderate would condemn these groups and Iran not for the sake of Israel or the West, but for the sake of his own people and anti-Islamist cause. It is impossible to be neutral on this point: Do you want to live (or see most other Muslims live) under a caliphate, a theocratic dictatorship, a repressive regime as exists in Iran or the Taliban's Afghanistan or not?

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Playing Chess with the Persians

Fresnozionism.org
28 May '10

The consensus of opinion is that the sanctions to be applied against Iran’s nuclear project will not stop it. Even if they were truly ‘biting’ (to use one of our President’s favorite expressions), one has only to consider the importance of nuclear weapons to Iran’s overall goal to realize that they would have to bite really, really hard to outweigh this.

And these sanctions barely nip. Now the talk is about the best way to ‘contain’ the nuclear Iran.

Israel’s position seems to be that the costs for it to strike Iran will be so high and the benefits so temporary that it will not do so unless there is a clear and present danger of a weapon being used against it. This may well be correct.

To be honest, although the outcome is vital for Israel, Israel is only a minor player in the game, which is about the expulsion of Western influence from the Middle East, representing the defeat of the United States of America by the Islamic Republic of Iran.

It seems to me that we are at one of those watershed moments. Future historians will point to it and say “this is when the Pax Americana ended and the Second Islamic Conquest began.”

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