Proof the West doesn't get Islam
Still need proof that the West doesn't get Islam? Consider this from elitist Ken Roth:
Now recall what I wrote about Jordan
executing its ISIS prisoners earlier today.
But unlike the West, the Jordanians are fellow Muslims and they know how
to deal with ISIS. You can bet that they will - very publicly - execute
every ISIS prisoner they are holding.
Jordan gets it. The only way to answer Islamist violence that has a chance of making an impression on them is to outdo them. Not to make nice.
Roth wants to make nice. How well has that gone? Consider President Obama's
experience with Iran.
Unfortunately, the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, ignored the
president’s invitation. Five months later, in June 2009, when the Green
Movement was born, his autocratic fist was still clenched. As the
streets of Tehran exploded in the largest anti-government demonstrations
the country had seen since the revolution of 1979, he used that fist to
beat down the protesters. For their part, the protesters, hungry for
democratic reform and enraged by government rigging of the recent
presidential election, appealed to Obama for help. He responded meekly,
issuing tepid statements of support while maintaining a steady posture
of neutrality. To alienate Khamenei, after all, might kill the dream of a
new era in U.S.-Iranian relations.
If this show of deference was calculated to warm the dictator’s
heart, it failed. “What we intended as caution,” one of Obama’s aides
would later tell a reporter, “the Iranians saw as weakness.” Indeed, the
president’s studied “caution” may even have emboldened Tehran to push
forward, in yet another in the long series of blatant violations of its
obligations under the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), with its
construction of a secret uranium enrichment facility in an underground
bunker at Fordow, near Qom.
This time, Obama reacted. Revealing the bunker’s existence, he placed
Khamenei in a tough spot. The Russians, who had been habitually more
lenient toward the Iranian nuclear program than the Americans, were
irritated by the disclosure of this clandestine activity; the French
were moved to demand a strong Western response.
But when Khamenei finessed the situation by adopting a seemingly more
flexible attitude toward negotiations, Obama quickly obliged. Delighted
to find a receptive Iranian across the table, he dismissed the French
call for toughness, instead volunteering a plan that would meet Iran’s
desire to keep most of its nuclear infrastructure intact while proving
to the world that it was not stockpiling fissile material for a bomb. In
keeping with his larger aspirations, the president also placed Moscow
at the center of the action, proposing that the Iranians transfer their
enriched uranium to Russia in exchange for fuel rods capable of powering
a nuclear reactor but not of being used in a bomb. The Iranian
negotiators, displaying their new spirit of compromise, accepted the
terms. Even President Ahmadinejad, the notorious hardliner, pronounced
himself on board.
Obama, it seemed to some, had pulled off a major coup. Less than a
year after taking office, he was turning his vision of a new Middle East
order into a reality. Or was he? Once the heat was off, Khamenei
reneged on the deal, throwing the president back to square one and in
the process weakening him politically at home, where congressional
skeptics of his engagement policy now began lobbying for more stringent
economic sanctions on Tehran. To protect his flank, Obama tacked
rightward, appropriating, if with visible reluctance, some of his
opponents’ rhetoric and bits of their playbook as well. In 2010, he
signed into law the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and
Divestment Act (CISADA), which eventually would prove more painful to
Iran than any previous measure of its kind.
In later years, whenever Obama would stand accused of being soft on
Iran, he would invariably point to CISADA as evidence to the contrary.
“[O]ver the course of several years,” he stated in March 2014, “we were
able to enforce an unprecedented sanctions regime that so crippled the
Iranian economy that they were willing to come to the table.” The
“table” in question was the negotiation resulting in the November 2013
agreement, known as the Joint Plan of Action (JPOA), which we shall come
to in due course. But masked in the president’s boast was the fact that
he had actually opposed CISADA, which was rammed down his throat by a Senate vote of 99 to zero.
Once the bill became law, a cadre of talented and dedicated
professionals in the Treasury Department set to work implementing it.
But the moment of presumed “convergence” between Obama and his
congressional skeptics proved temporary and tactical; their fundamental
difference in outlook would become much more apparent in the president’s
second term. For the skeptics, the way to change Khamenei’s behavior
was to place him before a stark choice: dismantle Iran’s nuclear
program—period—or face catastrophic consequences. For Obama, to force a
confrontation with Khamenei would destroy any chance of reaching an
accommodation on the nuclear front and put paid to his grand vision of a
new Middle East order.
Iran is on the verge of a nuclear weapon. Who was right?
The only way to deal with Islamists is to hit them harder than they hit you.
More at
Twitchy.
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Iranian nuclear threat, Islamic State, Islamist, Jordan, Kenneth Roth
Jeffrey Goldberg blasts Human Rights Watch's Ken Roth
Jeffrey Goldberg has blasted 'human rights watch' director Ken Roth for
blaming Jews for anti-Semitism.
A few days ago, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, tweeted
the following statement: “Germans rally against anti-Semitism that
flared in Europe in response to Israel’s conduct in Gaza war. Merkel
joins.” Roth provided a link to a New York Times article about the rally, which took place in Berlin.
Roth’s framing of this issue is very odd and obtuse. Anti-Semitism in
Europe did not flare “in response to Israel’s conduct in Gaza,” or
anywhere else. Anti-Semitic violence and invective are not responses to
events in the Middle East, just as anti-Semitism does not erupt “in
response” to the policies of banks owned by Jews, or in response to
editorial positions taken by The New York Times. This is for the simple reason that Jews do not cause anti-Semitism.
It is a universal and immutable rule that the targets of prejudice
are not the cause of prejudice.
Just as Jews (or Jewish organizations,
or the Jewish state) do not cause anti-Semitism to flare, or intensify,
or even to exist, neither do black people cause racism, nor gay people
homophobia, nor Muslims Islamophobia. Like all prejudices, anti-Semitism
is not a rational response to observable events; it is a manifestation
of irrational hatred. Its proponents justify their anti-Semitism by
pointing to the (putatively offensive or repulsive) behavior of their
targets, but this does not mean that major figures in the world of
human-rights advocacy should accept these pathetic excuses as
legitimate.
A question: If a mosque in Europe or in the U.S. were to be attacked
(God forbid) by Islamophobic arsonists, would Ken Roth describe such an
attack as a manifestation of “anti-Muslim hatred that flared in response
to the conduct of Muslim groups in the Middle East?”
...
I don’t know what motivated Ken Roth to blame the Jewish state for the
violent acts of anti-Semites. I do hope that he reconsiders his position
on the root cause of anti-Jewish prejudice.
Read the whole thing. Goldberg is spot-on.
Labels: Angela Merkel, anti-Semitism, Germany, Human Rights Watch, Jeffrey Goldberg, Kenneth Roth
'Human Rights' Watch comments on teenagers' kidnapping
A 'Human Rights' Watch spokesperson had the following
comment on the kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers by 'Palestinian' terrorists (Hat Tip:
Mrs. Carl).
To ensure the proper response to the kidnapping by Palestinians of
three Israeli teenagers last week, Human Rights Watch has hired a team
of crickets, which will chirp at regular intervals to highlight the lack
of condemnation emanating from the organization.
HRW is among the quickest to denounce alleged Israeli violations of
Palestinian rights, often parroting Palestinian activists’ accusations
without thorough investigation. To avoid the impression that the
organization’s one-sidedness stems from incompetence or negligence, HRW
specifically engaged a troupe of the musical insects to stress that it
had a consistent approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and that
the anti-Israel bias is not haphazard.
“It would be unprofessional of us to waffle on where we stand
vis-à-vis Israel and Palestine,” said the organization’s executive
director Kenneth Roth. “We made a strategic decision long ago that when
it comes to those two entities, we must always consider a given case
through the same lens: how can it be interpreted to depict Israel as
immoral and unworthy of continued existence?” The crickets, he said, had
experience filling the silence on other issues, notably the persecution
of Christians in Palestinian areas, of homosexuals throughout the
Muslim Middle East, and of antisemitism in Europe.
“Chirp,” said the crickets.
Hillel Neuer explains why Roth has hired the crickets: They do a
better job of commenting than Roth does.
After repeated appeals from
Twitter users for HRW Executive Director Kenneth Roth to end his
silence on the abductions, Roth finally responded with this
carefully-constructed tweet:
But why would Roth even bother to mention that the youths — two of them aged 16 — studied in an “illegal settlement”?
In all of history, was there ever a case where
the head of a human rights group issued a statement concerning innocent
hostages — while they were still in the hands of kidnappers
— which deliberately connected them to an “illegal” act, let alone
devoting half the text to it?
Although Roth appears to insist that this fact
“doesn’t legitimize” their kidnapping, the only possible reason he
mentioned it was to equivocate his appeal, which amounted to nothing
more than “they should be freed.”
HRW’s standard procedure is to call out actions as violations of international law.
Indeed, in other like cases, HRW has issued lengthy press releases and reports condemning the abductions of civilians as a war crime, citing chapter and verse of the Geneva Conventions.
Yet here not only does Roth’s tweet
exceptionally fail to invoke the law against the perpetrators of
the kidnapping, but he instead invokes the law against the victims — for attending school at an “illegal” settlement.
Read the whole thing.
The Obama administration has also hired the crickets to comment on President Obama's behalf....
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Hillel Neuer, Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, kidnapping, Palestinian terrorism
Yediot: NY Times refused to publish Goldstone retraction
Although I haven't found it online yet, the above is a picture of the print edition of Yediot Aharonot, Israel's largest circulation Hebrew newspaper. That light blue headline at the bottom right says "the world's most important newspaper [i.e. The New York Times] refused to publish Goldstone's retraction article." In an earlier post, I reported the
strange coincidence that the Times had published Goldstone's three previous op-eds, but did not publish this one.
I would not jump to conclusions just yet. Someone with whom I correspond who knows the ins and outs of op-eds far better than I do notes in an email this morning that Goldstone's three previous articles were ghost written by Kenneth Roth, the director of 'Human Rights Watch.' This article apparently took Roth completely by surprise. Roth has many connections at the Times, and is far more capable of getting articles published there than is Goldstone, according to my source. Goldstone may just not have known whom to ask.
Labels: Kenneth Roth, New York Times, Richard Goldstone, Washington Post
