In this excellent video published by the Clarion Project in December 2015, Raheel Raza, president of Muslims Facing Tomorrow, talks truthfully about radical Islam.

(Hat-tip to our Facebook commenter, Darryl Kerney)

… high minded skulduggery and narrow minded illusion.

The Washington Free Beacon reports:

Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton considered a secret plan created by her then-advisers to foment unrest among Palestinian citizens and spark protests in order to push the Israeli government back to the negotiating table, according to emails released as part of the investigation into the Democratic presidential frontrunner’s private email server.

In a Dec, 18, 2011, email, former U.S. ambassador to Israel Thomas Pickering suggested that Clinton consider a plan to restart then-stalled peace negotiations by kickstarting Palestinian demonstrations against Israel.

Pickering described the effort as a potential “game changer in the region”, recommending that the United States undertake a clandestine campaign to generate unrest. …

“What will change the situation is a major effort to use non-violent protests and demonstrations to put peace back in the center of people’s aspirations as well as their thoughts, and use that to influence the political leadership,” Pickering wrote.

“This is far from a sure thing, but far, in my humble view, from hopeless,” he continued. “Women can and ought to be at the center of these demonstrations. Many men and others will denigrate the idea. I don’t and I don’t think that was your message.”

Palestinian women, he noted, are less likely than men to resort to violence.

“It must be all and only women. Why? On the Palestinian side the male culture is to use force,” Pickering wrote, comparing the effort to the protests in Egypt that deposed former leader Hosni Mubarak. “Palestinian men will not for long patiently demonstrate — they will be inclined over time and much too soon to be frustrated and use force. Their male culture comes close to requiring it.”

So Palestinian men, in the “humble” view of this presumptuous man, cannot be expected to demonstrate non-violently because “much too soon” they will use force. Indeed, “their male culture comes close to requiring it”.

And yet he thinks it perfectly possible to put “peace back in the center” of their “aspirations”?

They have shown no sign of wanting peace for 68 years, but if the women can be stirred up to protest against something-or-other, suddenly peace will pop into their minds?

Pickering noted that the administration must keep its role in the demonstration a secret, so as not to aggravate ties with Israel.

And he thought Mossad would never find out that the Obama administration was once again up to its dirty tricks in the land (like its efforts to influence elections, which were not kept secret for long)?

“Most of all the United States, in my view, cannot be seen to have stimulated, encouraged or be the power behind it for reasons you will understand better than anyone,” he wrote, suggesting that the government enlist liberal non-profit groups in Israel. “I believe third parties and a number of NGOs [non-government organizations] on both sides would help.”

Cannot be seen to be doing it, but do it without compunction. Because – you see, Hillary, who will understand this better than anyone – it is for the great good of reviving a non-existent “peace process”, and such high-minded goodness can be allowed to resort to low-down duplicity and subterfuge.

To the Left, the ends always justify the means, though the ends may be unrealistic, and the means predictably foul.

As relations with Israel remained tense, another Clinton confidant, Anne Marie Slaughter, sent a staff-wide email to Clinton staffers recommending that they undertake a “Pledge for Palestine” campaign aimed at convincing US millionaires and billionaires to donate significant portions of their wealth to the Palestinian cause.

The effort, Slaughter wrote in the September 2010 email, could help shame Israel.

“Shame Israel”. There’s a high minded plan.

“Such a campaign among billionaires/multi-millionaires around the world would reflect a strong vote of confidence in the building of a Palestinian state and could offset the ending of the moratorium for Palestinians,” Slaughter wrote. “There would also be a certain shaming effect re Israelis, who would be building settlements in the face of a pledge for peace.”

A pledge, that is, on the part of “millionaires and billionaires” around the world, not the Palestinians.

Slaughter, who described the effort as a “crazy idea”, suggested tapping the “Clinton fundraising network” in order to raise the money needed.

“With even 30 calls to the right people in the Clinton fundraising network it should be possible to generate a substantial enough amount quickly enough to capture the public imagination,” she wrote in the email, which was sent to top Clinton staffers, including Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin.

Note the assumption that “the public imagination” is readily stirred for the Palestinians. These plotters round Hillary Clinton, like the whole of the Obama administration, seem to have been marvelously insulated from public opinion.

We have to assume that either these plots were not put into effect, or they were tried and failed. And we can see why Hillary, having such advisers and given such advice on top of being the ideologically twisted being that she is, failed totally as Secretary of State to achieve anything good for her country, but did a great deal of continuing harm.

We quote Paul Sperry’s article at Investor’s Business Daily, titled Can America Survive Obama’s Pro-Muslim Bias?:

In a new NPR interview, President Obama complains that “strains in the Republican party suggest that somehow I’m different, I’m Muslim, I’m disloyal to the country, which unfortunately is pretty far out there”.

Is it?

While there’s no evidence to suggest Obama is a practicing Muslim, there is plenty to suggest he is disloyal. He not only shares Muslim hatred for America and Israel, but actually sympathizes with the endless anti-Western grievances lodged by Muslim terrorists.

The reason the president won’t engage this enemy is because he sides with it, not because he can’t see it or understand it. It is not a matter of incompetence. It is a matter of bias.

If this sounds like betrayal, that is because it is.

Here is a bill of indictment:

Count 1:In 1995, in his first memoir, Obama shares the “rage” of his Kenyan Muslim grandfather who he claims was tortured by British colonizers, while exalting his Muslim-convert brother Roy, who swore off “the poisoning influences of European culture,” as “the person who made me proudest of all”.

Count 2:In 2004, in a little-noticed preface to his re-released memoir, the newly elected senator implied that America was punished for past wrongs on 9/11, writing that “history returned with a vengeance” on that terrible day.

Count 3:In 2006, in his second memoir, Obama vowed that he “will stand with” Arab and Pakistani Muslims to protect “their sense of security” should their community be implicated in another terror attack on America.

Count 4:In 2009, Obama in his first foreign speech apologized to world Muslims for the War on Terror, inviting banned Muslim Brotherhood leaders to sit on the front row of his Cairo address, while declaring “Islam is not part of the problem” and demanding that Israel give Palestinians “a state of their own”. 

Count 5:That same year, Obama stopped cold a major investigation of terror-supporting Muslim Brotherhood front groups and mosques following the successful prosecution of Brotherhood charities by U.S. attorneys.

Count 6:Then he ordered the FBI and Homeland Security to delete “jihad” from counterterrorism manuals and fire all trainers who linked terrorism to Islam.

Count 7:Obama vowed to close the Guantanamo Bay military prison and bring 9/11 terrorists to America, where they would enjoy full rights, including habeas corpus, in civilian courts.

Count 8:As Obama kicked off a two-day summit on combating generic “violent extremism”, he argued that Muslim terrorists have “legitimate grievances” that must be addressed.

Count 9:He also asserted that “the Muslim world has suffered historical grievances”, and blamed the rash of global terrorism in part on “a history of colonialism” in the Mideast, Africa and South Asia.

Count 10:At the National Prayer Breakfast, Obama told Christians to get off their “high horse” about Muslim terrorism and “remember the terrible deeds in the name of Christ” committed by Crusaders 1,000 years ago.

Count 11: He credited Muslims with “building the very fabric of our nation” and “the core of our democracy”.

Count 12:The president boycotted January’s world march against terrorism in Paris following the slaughter of anti-Islamist cartoonists by two French Algerians, in a shocking move that would have made Obama’s late hero, Algerian mujahedeen Frantz Fanon, proud.

Count 13:Obama agreed to release five Taliban commanders for a POW who he knew was a deserter and who may turn out to be a traitor.

Count 14: Obama removed sanctions on Iran’s ballistic missile program, despite overwhelming evidence by Israeli and U.S. intelligence showing that Tehran is developing nuclear weapons to wipe our closest and most trusted Mideast ally off the map.

Count 15:Obama broke his promise to 9/11 families to release the 28 pages documenting Saudi Arabian and other foreign Muslim sponsorship of the 9/11 attacks.

Count 16: The president insists on calling ISIS “ISIL” — which stands for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant — because it includes “Palestine”, a slap at Israel.

Count 17: Despite his entire security team warning that such Muslim immigrants cannot be screened for terrorist ties and evidence that ISIS has infiltrated their ranks, Obama stubbornly insists on bringing another 10,000 Syrian refugees to the U.S.

Count 18: In the heat of the San Bernardino attacks, as bodies were being removed from the scene, Obama called a high-level security meeting to keep a lid on the Muslim connection.

Count 19: In his prime-time terrorism speech, the president spent half his time warning Americans not to blame Muslims.

Count 20: Obama insists on emptying Gitmo of terrorist prisoners, even after one of his earlier releases re-emerged as a leader of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula.

Count 21: The Obama regime has invited members of Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood front groups to serve in the Homeland Security and State departments, and meet regularly with the attorney general, as well as the president and his security advisors in the White House.

Obama is hellbent on shuttering the detention camp and is queuing up for release another 17 dangerous al-Qaida terrorists, earlier classified as “forever detainees” due to the high threat they pose to America.

Americans should know that if we are attacked again in a major way in his remaining 13 months in office, Obama “will stand with” Muslims over Americans, meaning that he will continue to back off radical mosques, refuse to connect terrorism to Islam and continue to hold open the floodgates to mass Muslim immigration.

This president, who had Pakistani roommates in college, is more concerned about “their sense of security” than non-Muslims threatened by Muslim terrorism like the massacre carried out by the two Pakistani Muslims who attacked San Bernardino.

What if the enemy of the state is actually the head of state?

The bill of indictment, long and bad as it is, is incomplete. It does not, for instance, include Obama’s instruction to NASA to concentrate on reaching out to Muslims rather than to outer space; nor his close friendship with President Erdogan of Turkey; nor his persistent persecution of Israel; nor his long refusal to allow the assassination of Osama bin Laden and his reluctance in finally permitting it; nor – worst of all –  his fanatical wooing of Iran, in the course of which he has given the regime everything it has demanded, and swept away every impediment to its becoming a nuclear armed power.    

Sperry’s list is more than sufficient, however, to make the case. As we have been saying for years: Yes, the enemy of the state is actually the head of state.

The US secretary of state, John Kerry, blames the victims for the stabbing attacks on Israelis by Palestinians.

No surprise there.

Here’s another opinion:

It is painful to hear the phrase “lone wolves” applied to the handful – and perhaps tomorrow the dozens and then the hundreds – of killers of Jews “liked” by thousands of “friends”,  followed by tens of thousands of “Tweets,” and connected to a constellation of sites (such as the Al-Aqsa Media Center and its page dedicated to “the third Jerusalem intifada”) that are orchestrating, at least in part, this bloody ballet.

So writes the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy (translated by Steven B. Kennedy).

It is equally painful to listen to the refrain about “Palestinian youth no longer subject to any control” after seeing the series of sermons opportunistically placed online by the Middle East Media Research Institute, in which preachers from Gaza, facing the camera, dagger in hand, call upon followers to take to the streets to maim as many Jews as they can, to inflict as much pain as possible, and to spill the maximum amount of blood; doubly painful to hear that refrain having heard Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas himself, at the outset of this tragic chain of events a few weeks back, describing as “heroic” the murder of the Henkins in the presence of their children and then expressing indignation at seeing the “dirty feet” of Jews “defiling” the “Esplanade of the Mosques”, and, in the same statement, declaring “pure” “each drop of blood” shed by “each martyr” who dies for Jerusalem.

Not only painful and intolerable, but also inapplicable, is the canned phrase about “political and social desperation” that is mouthed to explain – or excuse – criminal acts, when everything we know about the new terrorists, their motives and the pride their relatives take in converting, post-mortem, crime into martyrdom and infamy into sacrifice, is, alas, much closer to the portrait of the robotic jihadist who yesterday would take off for Kashmir and today turns up in Syria or Iraq.

It is highly doubtful that “intifada” is the right term to apply to acts that bear more resemblance to the latest installment of a worldwide jihad of which Israel is just one of the stages.

Doubtful that erudite disquisitions on occupation, colonization and Netanyahu-esque intransigence still explain much about a wave of violence that counts among its favored targets Jews with sidelocks – that is, those Jews who are the most conspicuously Jewish, those whom their killers must consider, I imagine, as the very image of the Jew and who, by the way, are often at odds with the Jewish state when not in open secession from it.

Doubtful that the very question of the state, the question of the two states, and thus the question of a negotiated partition of the land – which is, for moderates on both sides, the only question worth posing – has anything at all to do with a conflagration in which politics has given way to fanaticism and to theories of vast conspiracy, one in which some decide to stab random others as they pass by because of a vague rumor reporting a secret [and utterly false -ed] plot to deny Muslims access to Islam’s third-most-holy site.

We do not agree that there should be yet another Arab state. 80% of “Palestine”, as the territory was called under the British mandate, was given by the British, in defiance of their own Balfour Declaration, to one of their Hashemite allies, to establish the Emirate of Transjordan (later the Kingdom of Jordan). So there is already an Arab state of Palestine. All Palestinian Arabs ought to be able to become citizens of it without question. The rest of the territory, from the Jordan to the Med, should be one state, the State of Israel. It is on King Andullah of Jordan that the pressure of the geat powers should be brought to solve the “Palestinian problem”.

But we do agree that the “bloody ballet” is jihad, not an expression of Palestinian “frustration”, as John Kerry has claimed.

Doubtful, in other words, that the Palestinian cause is being helped in any way by the extremist turn. On the other hand, it is absolutely certain that the cause has everything to lose by it, that the reasonable heads within the movement will be the ones who wind up flattened by the wave, and that the last proponents of compromise, along with what remains of the peace camp in Israel, will pay dearly for the reckless condemnations of the imams of Rafah and Khan Younis.

Intolerable and inapplicable, too, is the cliché of the “cycle” or “spiral” of violence, which, by putting the kamikaze killers and their victims on the same footing, sows confusion and amounts to an incitement to further action.

Intolerable, for the same reason, are the rhetorical appeals “for restraint” and disingenuous pleas “not to inflame the street”, which, as with the “spiral of violence”, reverse the order of causality by implying that a soldier, police officer, or civilian acting in self-defense has committed a wrong equal to that of someone who chooses to die after spreading as much terror as he possibly can.

Strange indeed, the tepid condemnations of the stabbings of innocent passers-by, the rammings of bus stops, condemnations that I have to think would be less half-hearted if the acts had occurred on the streets of Washington, Paris, or London.

More than strange – disturbing – is the difference in tone between the equivocal reaction to the recent killings and the unanimous and unambiguous international outpouring of emotion and solidarity elicited by the fatal hatchet attack on a soldier on a London street on May 22, 2013, a scenario that was not very different from those unfolding today in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

Intolerable, again, that most of the major media have paid the grieving Israeli families only a fraction of the attention they have paid the families of the perpetrators.

Intolerable, finally, the minor mythology growing up around this story of daggers: The weapon of the poor? Really? The weapon one uses because it is within reach and one has no other? When I see those blades I think of the one used to execute Daniel Pearl; I think of the beheadings of Hervé Gourdel, James Foley and David Haines; I think that the Islamic State’s videos have clearly gained a following and that we stand on the threshold of a form of barbarity that must be unconditionally denounced if we do not want to see its methods exported everywhere.

And I mean everywhere.

An Arab-Israeli reporter, Lucy Aharish, powerfully deplores the outbreak of murderous violence by Arabs against Jews in Jerusalem.

Among the many pleasures available to the free and the sane, is the joy of laughing at the Others.

In his latest video, Pat Condell provides exciting ways to insult “progressives”:

The UN must be destroyed.

The US must stop funding the UN – headquarters of international political evil.

Senator Ted Cruz is serious about it. He has sent this letter to the Secretary-General of Evil HQ:

June 3, 2015

His Excellency Ban Ki-moon
Secretary-General of the United Nations
United Nations

First Avenue at 46^th Street
New York, NY 10017

Dear Mr. Secretary-General:

I write to you to convey my outrage that the State of Israel may be added to your list of “parties to conflict who commit grave violations against children.”[1] This designation would falsely and shamefully equate Israel with some of the most barbaric terrorist organizations around the world. The decision to add Israel is solely your decision to make and, therefore, is entirely in your power to prevent from taking place.

As you are well aware, this list is part of your annual report on Children and Armed Conflict.  It is my understanding that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) may be added for the alleged violations described below.  The 2014 report on Children and Armed Conflict listed more than 59 parties including terrorist organizations such as Boko Haram, Taliban, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and Al Qaeda who “recruit or use children, kill or maim children, commit rape and other forms of sexual violence against children, or engage in attacks on schools and/or hospitals in situations of armed conflict.”[2]

Such deplorable atrocities rightfully should be condemned by the United Nations. But there is absolutely no legitimate basis for adding Israel to such a list that includes parties which only represent the greatest of evil, honor death over life, and deliberately massacre women and children.  Unlike those parties on your list, Israel cherishes life and goes to extraordinary lengths to minimize civilian casualties during a conflict. In fact, Israel’s careful warfare tactics set an example for other nations to emulate, including the United States, which, according to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, recently sent a team of senior military officers over to Israel to learn more about these tactics.[3]

As the entire world observed last summer, Israel began its justified military operation in response to the kidnapping and murder of three Jewish teenagers by Hamas, two of whom were 16 years old and another 19 years old. As Israel engaged in an operation to find the Hamas terrorists responsible and bring them to justice for this heinous act, the conflict further escalated when Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad began to launch rockets and use underground tunnels deliberately targeting Israeli civilians, in an indiscriminate attempt to murder as many Israelis as possible. These terrorist groups are motivated by the stated desire to destroy Israel within any borders, not by any legitimate interest in making peace with Israel.

Acting in self-defense, Israel targeted only areas in Gaza that posed a threat and where members of Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad were located. The IDF took such steps as dropping leaflets, making announcements, placing telephone calls, and sending text messages directly to residents in Gaza to provide advance warning of an imminent attack to minimize civilian casualties. Members of Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad purposefully hid themselves and stockpiled weapons in densely populated areas including UN facilities, schools, hospitals and mosques.  They used civilians, including children, as human shields. Hamas’ main command center was located underneath the al-Shifa hospital in Gaza, which made the primary source of medical care to Gaza residents a legitimate military target if Israel’s objective was to destroy Hamas’ terrorist leadership. These terrorists even encouraged residents in Gaza to ignore the IDF warnings and remain in their homes in an attempt to use them as pawns in their ongoing propaganda war to demonize the Jewish State.  The very lives of Gaza residents are of no concern to Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad, for whom casualties are not an unintended consequence of war, but rather a deliberate objective. The United States Congress unanimously passed a resolution last year condemning their actions.[4]

Meanwhile to Israel’s northeast a civil war wages in Syria. In an action completely alien to the parties on your list, Israel has offered medical care, free of charge, to the casualties of this action.  Israeli physicians have treated and saved the lives of more than a thousand Syrians injured in that conflict, including children.  The contrast could not be more clear: Hamas and other terrorist groups exploit medical facilities as human shields to launch operations against Israel, while Israel uses theirs to provide cutting-edge medical care to people whose government’s avowed goal is to destroy the Jewish State.

Mr. Secretary-General, I submit that, should you determine to add more parties to your list, you should focus on those who actually exploit their own children as human shields, indoctrinate and raise their children to glorify violence and martyrdom, and target the children of others to achieve their destructive goals who should receive priority consideration, such as Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad.  There is absolutely no moral equivalence between radical Islamic terrorists, who are motivated by these factors, and Israel, which is justifiably motivated solely by the defense of her people.

Mr. Secretary-General, under no circumstances should Israel be added to your list. As the largest contributor to the United Nations, Congress will have no choice but to reassess the United States’ relationship with the United Nations and consider serious consequences if you choose to take this action.

Sincerely,

Ted Cruz
United States Senator

 

[1] “Listing Parties to Conflict Who Commit Grave Violations Against Children,” Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict, Accessed June 2, 2015, https://childrenandarmedconflict.un.org/our-work/sg-list/.

[2] “Report of the Secretary-General: Children and Armed Conflict,” United Nations, May 15, 2014, http://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/68/878&Lang=E&Area=UNDOC.

[3] Lisa Ferdinando, “Chairman Says Israel Acted Responsibly in Gaza Operation,” Army News Service, U.S. Department of Defense, November 7, 2014,http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=123589.

[4] H. Con. Res. 107, Agreed to December 10, 2014, http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-113hconres107enr/pdf/BILLS-113hconres107enr.pdf.

 

Colonel Richard Kemp, formerly Commander of the British forces in Afghanistan, deplores the abandonment by the Western world of the values that made it strong and great, and explains why he admires and defends Israel. (We have a difference of opinion with him over the expression “Judeo-Christian values”, but heartily agree with everything else he says.)

Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. Jew-hatred is not a result of the existence of Israel or of anything Israel does. The cause and result go the other way round. Israel is hated because Jews are hated.

We are not talking about the religion of Judaism. Strange to say, it’s very rare to hear even the most rabid anti-Semite attack the Jewish religion. (We ourselves do, in a rational way, because we attack religion as such, but we are not anti-Semites.) We are talking about hatred of the Jews as a people.

The root of anti-Semitism is, however, in religion.

First, the author of the Christian religion, St. Paul, spread his weird belief that the Jewish god had been born as a man. He picked an actual person, a Jew born in the time of Augustus Caesar; a religious fanatic who tried to lead a little insurgent band against Roman rule and was consequently executed. St. Paul claimed that the man lived on after his death as a co-divine being, and that the failure of the Jews to acknowledge this “truth” excluded them from the redemption from sin that belief in the god-man alone provided. His converts told a whopper in their novels (called the gospels) about the god-man – that the Jews had begged to be held guilty forever for killing him.

Next, some three hundred years later, the Romans, having themselves crucified the man as was their wont with insurrectionists, decided that he was indeed a god, the God that the Jews had first invented – or at least part of the God in some mystical way or other – and insisted on the wildly improbable story that blamed the crucifixion on the actual man’s fellow Jews.

For two thousand years Christianity (though not all Christians) held the Jews to be bad. Not their religion, which Christianity came round to adopting as the pre-history of the god-man, but the nation, the people, who were dispersed from their own land and scattered among other nations when their general mutiny against Roman rule failed. They were cast in the role of handy scapegoats for every ill that afflicted the peoples they lived among.

With the rise of Islam, the Jews who lived in the lands that Muslims conquered were maltreated for a different badness: they, like the Christians, would not accept the “truth” of Muhammad’s religion, so must suffer the consequences of their obstinacy and pay to stay alive, or die. When, in 1948, the Jews in their recovered homeland mustered an army which actually defeated six invading Arab armies, the Arabs felt deeply humiliated. Something had gone very wrong. Allah simply could not allow such a thing to happen. Islam had conquered that once-Jewish territory centuries earlier, and no one else was allowed to own it.

The Jews were allowed to re-establish a Jewish state in 1948 by the consent of the great powers which had taken custody of the region after they defeated the Islamic Ottoman empire in the war of 1914-1918. First some 80% of the ancient Jewish homeland had been allocated to an Arab emir for a new state called Transjordan (one of 21 Arab despotisms, some of them newly created at that time). Then they divided the remaining 20% between  the Jews and some other Arabs. The Jewish people – what remained of it after six of its fifteen million had been systematically killed in Christian Europe – unhesitatingly took its portion. The Arabs wanted all of the 20% or nothing. So they got nothing. Hundreds of thousands of Jews, survivors of the attempted genocide, went home to Zion. Their patriotism is called Zionism. It is not more or less legitimate than the patriotism of any other people.

But it is the only patriotism that is reviled. The Jewish state is the only state whose legitimacy is continually called into question in forums of the Christian and Islamic worlds.

Dennis Prager, with whom we almost always agree on political issues though never on religion, writes at Townhall:

Whenever I have received a call from a listener to my radio show challenging Israel’s legitimacy, I have asked these people if they ever called a radio show to challenge any other country’s legitimacy. In particular, I ask, have they ever questioned the legitimacy of Pakistan?

The answer, of course, is always “no.” In fact, no caller ever understood why I even mentioned Pakistan.

There are two reasons for this.

First, of all the 200-plus countries in the world, only Israel’s legitimacy is challenged. So mentioning any other country seems strange to a caller. Second, almost no one outside of India and Pakistan knows anything about the founding of Pakistan.

Only months before the U.N. adopted a proposal to partition Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state in 1947, India was partitioned into a Muslim and a Hindu state. The Hindu state was, of course, India. And the Muslim state became known as Pakistan. It comprises 310,000 square miles, about 40,000 square miles larger than Texas.

In both cases, the declaration of an independent state resulted in violence. As soon as the newly established state of Israel was declared in May 1948, it was invaded by six Arab armies. And the partition of India led to a terrible violence between Muslims and Hindus.

According to the final report of the United Nations Conciliation Commission from Dec. 28, 1949, the 1948 war of Israel’s independence created 726,000 Arabs refugees. Many sources put the figure at about 200,000 less. A roughly equal number of Jewish refugees — approximately 700,000 — were created when they were forcibly expelled from the Arab countries where they had lived for countless generations. In addition, approximately 10,000 Arabs were killed in the fighting that ensued after the Arab invasion of Israel.

Now let’s turn to the creation of Pakistan. According to the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees, the creation of Pakistan resulted in 14 million refugees — Hindus fleeing Pakistan and Muslims fleeing India. Assuming a 50-50 split, the creation of Pakistan produced about seven million Hindu refugees — at least 10 times the number of Arab refugees that resulted from the war surrounding Israel’s creation. And the Mideast war, it should be recalled, was started by the Arab nations surrounding Israel. Were it not for the Arab rejection of Israel’s creation (and existence within any borders) and the subsequent Arab invasion, there would have been no Arab refugees.

And regarding deaths, the highest estimate of Arab deaths during the 1948 war following the partition of Palestine is 10,000. The number of deaths that resulted from the creation of Pakistan is around one million.

In addition, according to the Indian government, at least 86,000 women were raped. Most historians believe the number to be far higher. The number of women raped when Israel was established is close to zero. From all evidence I could find, the highest estimate was 12.

Given the spectacularly larger number of refugees and deaths caused by the partition of India and the creation of Pakistan, why does no one ever question the legitimacy of Pakistan’s existence?

This question is particularly valid given another fact: Never before in history was there a Pakistan. It was a completely new nation. Moreover, its creation was made possible solely because of Muslim invasion. It was Muslims who invaded India, and killed about 60 million Hindus during the thousand-year Muslim rule of India. The area now known as Pakistan was Hindu until the Muslims invaded it in A.D. 711.

On the other and, modern Israel is the third Jewish state in the geographic area known as Palestine. The first was destroyed in 586 B.C., the second in A.D. 70. And there was never a non-Jewish sovereign state in Palestine.

So, given all these facts, why is Israel’s legitimacy challenged, while the legitimacy of Pakistan, a state that had never before existed and whose creation resulted in the largest mass migration in recorded history, is never challenged?

The answer is so obvious that only those who graduated from college, and especially from graduate school, need to be told: Israel is the one Jewish state in the world. So, while there are 49 Muslim-majority countries and 22 Arab states, much of the world questions or outright only rejects the right of the one Jewish state, the size of New Jersey, to exist.

If you are a member of the Presbyterian Church, send these facts to the leaders of the Presbyterian Church USA who voted to boycott Israel. If you are a student in Middle Eastern Studies — or for that matter, almost any other humanities department — and your professor is anti-Israel, ask your professor why Pakistan is legitimate and Israel isn’t.

They won’t have a good answer. Their opposition to Israel isn’t based on moral considerations.

The Pope has said something that has been interpreted as a probable reference to the on-going persecution of Christians in the Islamic world. He did it in the context of a speech recalling the genocide of Christian Armenians* by the Muslim state of Turkey a hundred years ago.

He said:

Today too, in fact, these conflicts at times degenerate into unjustifiable violence, stirred up by exploiting ethnic and religious differences.

That was it. That’s all. He added a suggestion that the heads of states and “International Organizations” might do something about it:

All who are Heads of State and of International Organizations are called to oppose such crimes with a firm sense of duty, without ceding to ambiguity or compromise.**

Uncountable numbers of Christians have been killed in this century by Muslims. In Nigeria, the Muslim organization Boko Haram shoots, hacks, burns its victims to death, buries them alive, enslaves them, and scatters them, destitute, from their homes. The Muslims cut off the limbs of living babies or throw them on fires. (See our post with pictures here.)

In Iraq and Syria, Christians are victimized in just such savage ways by the Islamic State (IS/ISIS/ISIL).

In Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, and in Judea under the government of the Palestinian Authority – notably in Bethlehem, the putative birthplace of the Christian God – Christians are mercilessly oppressed. The numbers of Christians in Muslim lands continually dwindle as those survivors escape who can.

What is the Christian world doing about it? Nothing.

Are Christian leaders speaking out in angry protest? No, except for the remark made in passing by Pope Francis a few days ago. Maybe another Pope will talk about it more fully in another hundred years.

So what is the good of Christianity? If ever in its history it has been put to the test, it is now.

And it fails.

But it does not recognize its failure.

Recently we had a Christian visitor to this site who called himself/herself “LilySmith”. (I’ll use the pronouns “she” and “her” since it is a woman’s name.) She commented in defense of Christianity under our post A perfect match. She wrote this about what her Christian group is doing about the victimization of Christians by the Islamic State:

Governments, not individuals, are responsible for law enforcement and going to war. Christianity isn’t a government. Instead we are taught as individuals to overcome evil with good. In that vein, we support the work of Christian friends living in Iraq serving the people there in any way needed. We also support those helping Christians in the ME who are under stress right now.

What form does that “help” for the victims of “stress” take which she and her friends “support”? Food, clothing, shelter, a secure refuge? Or just sympathy? She did not say.

Nor did she say anything about wanting to see justice done. Nothing about stopping and punishing the perpetrators. That sort of thing is the concern of governments not Christians, she says.

Thinking like that is as true to Christianity as savage cruelty is true to Islam. Both are true to their holy texts.

Christianity does not speak of justice. It orders Christians to love and forgive the evil-doer. “Resist not evil,” it commands.

Christian websites which report the sufferings of Christians at the hands of Muslims, dwell on the brave endurance of the victims.

Here again we quote from the Pope’s speech from the Vatican, April 12, 2015, on the centenary anniversary of the Armenian genocide:

As Saint John Paul II said to you, “Your history of suffering and martyrdom is a precious pearl, of which the universal Church is proud …” .

… Saint Gregory of Narek, an extraordinary interpreter of the human soul, offers words which are prophetic for us: “I willingly blame myself with myriad accounts of all the incurable sins, from our first forefather through the end of his generations in all eternity, I charge myself with all these voluntarily.”  …

The Church thrives on suffering, on bloodshed, on agony. It invites persecution, and is thus a promoter of evil. And that makes it co-responsible for the atrocities Islam inflicts on Christians.

The Christians who are having their throats slit, their heads sawn off, their babies burnt alive, are martyrs, potential saints, and that is what matters; because Christianity is not a religion for the betterment of the life we live on this earth. Its concern is with an imaginary afterlife in an eternal heaven or hell.

So Christianity has not failed by its own lights.

But –

By every measure of reason, by the yardstick of accustomed morality and the norms of civilization, by the judgment of common-sense, by the test of whether it serves good and opposes evil, Christianity has failed utterly.  

* On the Armenian genocide, Dr. Ileana Johnson Pugh, writing at Canada Free Press, quotes Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, who “published in 1918 his personal account of the Armenian genocide”. ( A Personal Account of the Armenian Genocide, Henry Morgenthau, Cosimo Classics, New York, 2010). We extract a small part of the passages she quotes which describe the atrocities committed by the Turks.

Throughout the Turkish Empire a systematic attempt was made to kill all able-bodied men, not only for the purpose of removing all males who might propagate a new generation of Armenians, but for the purpose of rendering the weaker part of the population an easy prey.

When thousands failed to turn in weapons, the Turks ransacked churches, desecrated altars, marched the naked men and women through the streets, letting them be whipped by angry Turkish mobs. Those imprisoned who did not manage to flee into the woods and caves were subjected to the “bastinado” torture, the beating of the soles of the feet until they burst and had to be amputated.

Crucifixion, pulling of fingernails, of hairs, of eyebrows, tearing of flesh with red-hot pincers, and then pouring hot oil into the wounds were some of the barbaric methods of torture drawn from the records of the Spanish Inquisition.

Torture was just the beginning of the Armenian atrocities. What was to come was the actual destruction of “an entire Armenian race” by deporting it to the south and southeastern part of the Ottoman Empire, the Syrian desert and the Mesopotamian valley. …

The deportations took place through the spring and summer of 1915. The entire Armenian population of villages were ordered to appear in the main square, sometimes with little time to prepare, their homes and possessions confiscated for “safekeeping” and then divided among Turks. Once the deported Armenians had traveled several hours, they were attacked and killed in secluded valleys by Turkish peasants with clubs, hammers, axes, scythes, spades, and saws.

Out of a population of two million Armenians, only about 500,000 Armenians survived the genocide.

(Later in the twentieth century, Turkey was admitted as a member of NATO.)

** When the Inquisition condemned a heretic to be burnt at the stake, the Catholic Church handed the victim over to the secular authorities whom it compelled to carry out the atrocious deed, so the Church might keep itself clean of the sin of killing. The term used by the Church for the handing-over was that he or she was “relaxed”.