COMMENTARY / OPINION
Jew-Hunting: Open Season in the West by Guy Millière
December 8, 2024 at 5:00 am Gatestone Institute
- “We have become the Gaza of Europe. I will NOT accept that. NEVER. The authorities will be held accountable for their failure to protect the Israeli citizens. Never again”. — Dutch MP Geert Wilders, X, November 8, 2024.
- In Europe, saying that one is for the Palestinians has become the politically correct way of saying one loathes Israel and Jews.
- So long as courageous politicians like Geert Wilders are pushed to the margins, the situation in Europe can only get worse. European political leaders are afraid of Muslim unrest and of losing potential votes. They have commensurately become increasingly anti-Israel. French President Emmanuel Macron urged completely stopping arms deliveries to Israel.
- “Offering to negotiate with Islamic terrorists is a statement of weakness. Jihadists only offer to negotiate out of fear, weakness or to entrap us, and they assume we do the same thing. Nothing would ever convince them that we genuinely want to live in peace with them, or that we prefer alternatives to violence. So any time we offer to negotiate, they see it as weakness or a trick. If our diplomats ever understood this cultural reality, they would stop being baffled when the negotiations fall apart.” — Daniel Greenfield, Gatestone Institute, December 2, 2024.
November 7. Amsterdam. As soon as a soccer match between the Netherlands’ AFC Ajax, a Dutch soccer club, and Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv ends, Maccabi supporters who came from Israel and several European countries to attend the match, are attacked. Many are chased through the streets, beaten, thrown to the ground, punched, kicked, stabbed, and thrown into the icy water of the city’s canals. While the attackers shout anti-Semitic slurs, the victims, in an attempt to escape, shout back that they are not Jewish.
The attackers film what they do, then post the videos on social networks. Five Israelis are hospitalized; dozens of others, some wounded, lock themselves for hours in their hotel rooms. The Israeli government sends planes to rescue the Jews. A jihadi pogrom has just taken place in the city where Anne Frank and her family hid until they were turned over to the German occupiers and sent to death camps.
“This is a very dark moment for the city, for which I am deeply ashamed,” said Femke Halsema, Amsterdam’s “left wing” mayor.
“We must not look away from antisemitic behavior on our streets,” King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands was even more explicit.
“History has taught us how intimidation goes from bad to worse, with horrific consequences. Jewish people must feel safe in the Netherlands, everywhere and at all times.”
“There is nothing, absolutely nothing to serve as an excuse for the deliberate search and hunting down of Jews,” stated Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof, also “left-wing”.
“We have become the Gaza of Europe,” said Dutch MP Geert Wilders.
“I will NOT accept that. NEVER. The authorities will be held accountable for their failure to protect the Israeli citizens. Never again.”
One of the victims wrote:
Syria: Enemies Masquerading as Friends by Amir Taheri
December 8, 2024 at 4:00 am Gatestone Institute
- [T]he use of the label “Levant” (Sham) puts a question mark in front of the “liberating force.” Using that medieval term instead of the word Syria, which jihadists have always regarded as alien because it was put in use under the French mandate, the group and its backers implicitly deny the existence of a Syrian nation-state.
- Some in Turkish political circles regard the creation of “artificial states” after the fall of the Ottoman Empire as an act of revenge by Western powers against the Turkish caliphate, which for centuries had represented the Islamic challenge to Christendom’s goal of ruling the world.
- In Erdogan’s view, that could reopen the Turkish claims, if not of sovereignty at least as having “special rights,” to parts of Iraq and Syria.
- Denying the existence of a Syrian nation with full rights to statehood and territorial integrity poses a risk to the security and stability of the whole region.
Almost dormant for four years, last week the volcano of the Syrian uprising erupted with a vengeance. In four days, its lava covered the country’s second largest city Aleppo before moving towards central cities of Hama and Homs on its way to the capital Damascus.
The force that carried out the operation came under the label “Mission to Liberate the Levant” (Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham) but was quickly identified as a reincarnation of the Victory Front (Jabhat al-Nusra), which was the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda.
Whoever redesigned that force as a “new and improved product” wanted to achieve three goals.
The first was to transform it into something resembling a regular army with uniforms, high-quality arms and matériel, and plans for creating an administration in conquered areas.
The second aim was to distance itself from jihadism by claiming it will protect religious minorities and avoiding the usual blood-curdling jihadist rhetoric. Thirdly, it is marketed as an army of liberation whose primary aim is to drive out unspecified “foreign occupiers.”
Nevertheless, the use of the label “Levant” (Sham) puts a question mark in front of the “liberating force.” Using that medieval term instead of the word Syria, which jihadists have always regarded as alien because it was put in use under the French mandate, the group and its backers implicitly deny the existence of a Syrian nation-state.
Instead, they see a vast ungoverned land, which could be reshaped in a variety of ways, including the creation of several mini-states reflecting the current reality on the ground.
Over the past decade, Syria has been divided into several fiefdoms with Russia, Turkey, Iran, the United States, remnants of ISIS and the truncated Assad regime controlling patches of territory through local elements or imported mercenaries.
The idea of carving Syria into mini-states is most reflected in the Turkish media but also echoed elsewhere.
For the past two years, Turkey has made several moves in that direction, by forming an administration in areas under the control of its allies in Idlib and imposing the Turkish lira as the local currency.
It has also started “encouraging” some of the Syrian refugees in Turkey to return home, often as employees of Turkish businesses.
The capture of Aleppo by the “Levanter” force could enable Ankara to revive Turkish economic presence in the industrial heart of Syria.
Before the Syrian civil war started in 2011, more than 400 Turkish companies, including many small- and medium-sized businesses, were located in Aleppo, representing over $50 billion in direct investment, the country’s second-biggest venture after the one in Libya.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan may have another interest in seeing Syria redesigned as a galaxy of mini-states: the elimination of the Kurdish threat supported by the Syrian state under the Assad dynasty since the 1970s.
Some in Turkish political circles regard the creation of “artificial states” after the fall of the Ottoman Empire as an act of revenge by Western powers against the Turkish caliphate, which for centuries had represented the Islamic challenge to Christendom’s goal of ruling the world.
Erdogan has always seen the treaties imposed on the Republic of Turkey, especially the Treaty of Lausanne, as a humiliation. Next year marks the centenary of that treaty and its legal expiration, something that Erdogan has hinted at as an opportunity to “correct injustices done to Turkey.”
In Erdogan’s view, that could reopen the Turkish claims, if not of sovereignty at least as having “special rights,” to parts of Iraq and Syria.
By shattering the illusion of re-stabilizing Syria under Assad, this month’s events encourage those who regard Syria as an artificial state. Pro-Erdogan Turkish political circles, however, forget that all nation-states are artificial, because none fell from the skies fully shaped. The Republic of Turkey, created in 1924 is only 22 years older than the Syrian Arab Republic, which was born in 1946 at the end of the French mandate. Independent Iraq was born only eight years after the Republic of Turkey.
The argument that dividing the region into mini-states would reduce the risk of war is also unsustainable. One example is Gaza, which isn’t even a state.
Denying the existence of a Syrian nation with full rights to statehood and territorial integrity poses a risk to the security and stability of the whole region.
Anyone familiar with realities on the ground would know that while the term “Levant” (Sham) is an arcane shibboleth, the word Syria designates a national identity that none could deny.
This sense of “Syrianity” started to take shape soon after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. In a series of reportages about Syria under French mandate, the writer Joseph Kessel observed the emergence of “Syrian identity” in its earliest phases. In a different tone, the same reality is reflected in the 1951 Hollywood movie “Sirocco” which depicts the Syrian national liberation struggle against the French.
English novelist Agatha Christie observed the same reality in the 1930s when she spent two years in Raqqa with her archaeologist husband, Sir Max Mallowan. They arrived in Raqqa assuming Syria was a desert inhabited by Bedouin tribes in perpetual conflict and with no sense of belonging to a broader concept named Syria. She found that they had been wrong. The result was her book Come, Tell Me How You Live, a fascinating reportage on how Syria, a chunk of old empires, was morphing into a nation.
Those who deny the existence of the Syrian nation cannot masquerade as friends of Syria and advocates of stability in the Middle East.
Amir Taheri was the executive editor-in-chief of the daily Kayhan in Iran from 1972 to 1979. He has worked at or written for innumerable publications, published eleven books, and has been a columnist for Asharq Al-Awsat since 1987. He is the Chairman of Gatestone Europe.
This article originally appeared in Asharq Al-Awsat and is reprinted with some changes by kind permission of the author.
Western humanitarians: the Islamist avatar Giulio Meotti
Khan has transformed the Court into an Islamist instrument used to wage a judicial war against non-Muslims on behalf of the Umma. And now Amnesty International charges Israel, the people who survived Auschwitz and Treblinka, of “genocide” in Gaza. Opinion.
Dec 8, 2024, 7:04 AM (GMT+2) Israel National News – Before disappearing into an Algerian prison, where at 75 years old he now risks ending his days, the great novelist Boualem Sansal gave this last extraordinary interview to the Journal du dimanche:
“Self-flagellation is gaining ground throughout the West and is becoming a danger. I do not understand why governments are not worried about this galloping epidemic and are not taking any action to prevent the disasters that it will eventually cause. We can begin to believe that the West is committing suicide and in the most amusing way. Good deal for the BRICS and the Islamists who dream of a great replacement. We are overwhelmed by fear. And fear causes in man as in animals one or the other reaction, or even both at the same time: the subject becomes violent and attacks or submits to fear and goes as far as mutilating himself to show his submission. Self-flagellation and Wokism are acts of symbolic self-mutilation, they express atonement, submission, preparation for liberating suicide”.
And submission also comes from a corrupt humanitarianism.
After targeting Israel in favor of Islamic terrorists, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, the Pakistani Muslim Karim Khan, is now attacking the leaders of Myanmar for their dispute with the Rohingya Muslims. Myanmar is not a member of the Court, but Islamic Bangladesh, which is part of the dispute, is.
Khan has transformed the Court into an Islamist instrument used to wage a judicial war against non-Muslims on behalf of the Umma.
A year ago, Khan met with the Qatari ambassador to the Netherlands. Then the Turkish Erdogan.
A scandal has just broken out at the Oxford Union, where speakers have been singing the praises of October 7th. Little wonder if we consider that Qatar has filled Oxford with millions of pounds in recent years. Qatar has also filled King’s College London, the university of the Hague prosecutor Khan, with money.
Qatar did not have any moral credibility to mount a “genocide” case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. It had the money and the will, but zero ethical standing. What to do? Who better than the “rainbow democracy” to nail the Jewish state to The Hague? With the title “South Africa, Hamas, Iran and Qatar: The Hijacking of the African National Congress and the International Court of Justice”, the American think tank Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism has published an investigation into South Africa’s decision to charge Israel with genocide at the Court of Justice that prompted the Criminal Court to issue the arrest warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu.
Or take Canadian professor William Schabas, who headed a UN commission on Gaza. A professor of international law at Middlesex University in London, Schabas had to resign when a consultancy he had done for the Palestine Liberation Organization came to light.
Former UNRWA commissioner Pierre Krahenbuhl met with leaders of Palestinian terrorist organizations during his tenure, UN Watch has just revealed. The meeting took place in Beirut and was attended by representatives of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Palestine Liberation Front.
The European Centre for Law and Justice revealed that many rapporteurs at the UN received donations from Qatar.
Boualem Sansal. An Algerian. A writer. A political prisoner. A dictatorship. The usual ingredients of the ideal martyr to defend. Instead, no. “Still no reaction from the impostors of Amnesty International who, in this affair, clearly support the Algerian dictators,” writes Clément Weill-Raynal. Last April, Palestinian Arab terrorist Walid Daqqah, who kidnapped and murdered soldier Moshe Tamam, died in prison in Israel from illness. In prison, the terrorist began writing novels. When he died, Amnesty International mourned the death of the terrorist as a “Palestinian writer”.
Now Amnesty International charges Israel, the people who survived Auschwitz and Treblinka, of “genocide” in Gaza.
Gita Sahgal, who resigned from Amnesty International as head of the gender office after having denounced its relations with the English supporters of the Taliban, explains this alliance with the devil as follows: “It is as if these organizations, Amnesty and others, felt the duty to challenge their government on the ground of rights as soon as we get close to Islam”.
But it is not a question of moral duty: some madmen may even believe it, but for most it is just a question of opportunism. Judges at The Hague, UN rapporteurs and NGO leaders, have you noticed that the Muslim Brotherhood is over the moon and starting to dream: what if everything goes much faster than expected?
Assad is gone. The “inclusive” Caliph rises Giulio Meotti
Yesterday it was called Al Nusra, today it is called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an offshoot of Al Qaeda. Opinion.
Dec 8, 2024, 5:53 PM (GMT+2) Israel National News – 1971-2024: the Assad dynasty in Syria has ended.
Dictatorships never end well and no matter how resistant (like Soviet communism for 80 years) they always have an expiration date, let alone family dictatorships with 10 percent of Alawites tyrannizing over 80 percent of Sunnis.
It is incredible that Damascus fell in a week without a fight. Like Iraq under the advance of ISIS and “Western” Kabul before the Taliban.
The Syrian civil war had transformed Syria into a puppet regime controlled by Iran and Russia.
After the fall, Syria will follow demographic lines. Demography, in the Middle East but also in Europe, is always in favor of Islam. Perhaps the country will divide into ethnic-religious enclaves or perhaps it could turn into a real civil war or, most likely, into a terrible combination of the two. The only thing the Middle East is not known for is stability. And chaos is the only thing you can bet on in the Middle East. And only Westerners rotten to the core do not see that Israel is our only rock in that part of the world, so decisive for history, religion, energy and terrorism.
Who wins and who loses from this watershed moment? There are more losers and even those who win have a lot to lose.
The Iranians lose, they who used Syria as a base and passage. Whether the fall of Damascus will be the “Kabul moment” of the Islamic Revolution remains to be seen.
The Russians lose, not only their bases on the Mediterranean, but a historic ally after 1991.
The Kurds lose, they are the ones who have everything to fear from the advent of an Islamic regime and who were our only true allies in this war between barbarians. Erdogan and Islam cannot stand this small people who arm women, who have their hair in the wind, who leave religion in the private sphere and who helped us destroy ISIS.
“No Good Guys” Middle East Expert says What NO ONE else will about Syrian Civil War [33:36] Yishai Fleisher and Dr. Mordechai Kedar
52,447 views • Dec 6, 2024 – Explaining Syrian Complexity as only he can, Dr. Mordechai Kedar walks us through the steps of rebellion against the Assad Regime from early days of the regime, to the Arab Spring protests in 2011, to the years of brutal suppression, and the events leading up to the current rebel takeover and what this all means for Israel and the broader Abrahamic Region.
For more from Dr. Kedar on Youtube: @DrMordechaiKedarEnglish
A COUP ATTEMPT IN THE SHADOW OF OCT. 7 by Caroline Glick
December 7, 2024 – Many fingers are pointed in the direction of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But the evidence—and blame—says otherwise.
(Dec. 6, 2024 / JNS)
This week, Channel 11’s journalist Ayala Hasson broadcast a two-part exposé on the Israel Defense Forces’ self-investigation of the massacre at the Nova music festival on Oct. 7, which took place a kilometer from the Gaza Strip. Hasson’s reports reinforced the fact that the IDF and Shin Bet top brass are to blame for Hamas’s successful day of genocide.
A total of 364 people were brutally murdered at the Nova music festival and along avenues of escape. Thirty-nine were taken hostage. The rave opened on Oct. 5 with 3,800 revelers.
According to earlier investigative reports, the IDF intercepted Hamas’s invasion plans a year before Oct. 7. They received multiple, rapidly escalating warnings of the impending invasion from a variety of sources in the Southern Command in the months, weeks and days prior to that day. Intelligence head Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi and Shin Bet director Ronen Bar did not share the warnings or Hamas’s intercepted invasion plans with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Instead, they repeatedly briefed him that Hamas was deterred, and Israel simply needed to provide it with more cash from Qatar and more work permits for Gazans in Israel to keep the terrorist regime fat, happy and deterred.
On Oct. 10, we learned that on the night between Oct. 6 and Oct. 7, Halevi, Bar, Southern Command Chief Maj. General Yaron Finkleman, Operations Directorate Chief Maj. Gen. Oded Basiuk and Haliva’s assistant (Haliva was on vacation and not answering his phone), held two telephone consultations, at midnight and 4 a.m., when they discussed multiplying indications that Hamas was about to carry out its invasion, slaughter and kidnapping plan. They chose to do nothing, told no one and agreed to meet again at 8 a.m. Hamas invaded at 6:30. [Emphasis added]
Domestic Alert! SITREP 12.05.24 [40:31] Monkey Werx US
Levin: Preemptive Pardon Corrupts The Language As It Corrupts The Law [15:36]
December 6, 2024 Mark Levin
We are on the precipice of a grave Constitutional crisis. Preemptive pardons by President Biden could be the most egregious assault on our constitutional system yet. A preemptive pardon corrupts the language as it corrupts the law. If Biden does this there would be no choice but to impeach him. The purpose wouldn’t be to remove him from office – it’s the process that should be triggered to make it clear that what he’s doing is a high crime.
