Hamas Say it’s Leading Gazans to Their Death

Meanwhile, as Hamas gets hit hard, their leaders are feasting and watching TV in 5-Star Bomb Shelters

Islam, the Religion of Slavery

The slow collapse of Dubai, a desert mirage built on oil money, human misery and the greed of Western businesses, reminds us once again of the fate of all slave economies in the end. But for all the skyscrapers in Dubai, the glittering avenues built by slave labor and the abundance of luxury American and European automobiles—the story of Dubai and Saudi Arabia is very much an old story in a Muslim Middle East, of fat prosperous sheiks clutching their ill gotten gains to themselves and ruling over harems and companies of slaves, until the end comes.

Like Muslim Brotherhood derived terrorists using the latest Web 2.0 social media as part of a quest to drive humanity back into the dark ages, the Gulf States are a very old story with the external gilt and glitz of modernity. While the Muslim world may employ the tools and utilities of the 21st century, even mimic its terminology, it has never left its own dark ages… and its dominant religious and social movements are all geared toward making sure that it never does.

And while above the skyscrapers gleam in Dubai’s night sky, below are the armies of foreign workers, some prosperous Western Dhimmis driving luxury cars who come to do all the higher labor that the native Emiratis lack the ability or will to do, and outnumbering them are the labor gangs of Asian, Indian and Middle Eastern workers who erect the edifices designed by Western architects to fool Western investors into believing that the backward totalitarian sheikdom is actually a modern free republic.

As with any fairy tale, behind the glamour lies an ugly truth. A truth that dates back to Mohammed. That stretches from slave caravans to slave ships. From England to America and through Turkey to Russia, the roots of slavery can be found in the Muslim slave trade.

The African continent was bled of its human resources via all possible routes. Across the Sahara, through the Red Sea, from the Indian Ocean ports and across the Atlantic. At least ten centuries of slavery for the benefit of the Muslim countries (from the ninth to the nineteenth)... Four million slaves exported via the Red Sea, another four million through the Swahili ports of the Indian Ocean, perhaps as many as nine million along the trans-Saharan caravan route, and eleven to twenty million (depending on the author) across the Atlantic Ocean.—The Impact of the Slave Trade on Africa, Elikia M’bokolo

The silent genocide is little spoken of, because it is an inconvenient interruption of the modern liberal historical narrative in which industrialized European powers exploited the unfortunate peoples of what is now the Third World. But Muslim slavery was indeed a genocide, one that stretched on for a thousand years of horror, misery and cruelty. That helped lead into the European era of slavery as well… but what is often forgotten is that before Europeans were slaveholders, they, along with Africans, were slaves of Islam.

While it is European slavery that is best known, it is Muslim slavery that came long before it and lasted long after it into the present day

Many centuries before European slave ships began raiding African coasts, Muslim slave ships were raiding European coasts and sending their armies deep into the heart of Europe. While it is European slavery that is best known, it is Muslim slavery that came long before it, and lasted long after it into the present day. The guest workers who labor on Dubai’s mirage of skyscrapers and luxuries die by the thousands with no civil or human rights, cheated out of wages, imprisoned at a whim and viewed as subhuman by their Emirati masters—are the latest extension of a tradition of Muslim slavery stretching for over a millennium.

Without slavery it is likely that Islam would have never survived long enough to become the worldwide menace that it is today. Mohammed, himself a slaveowner, exploited slavery to gain power in two ways.

First, Mohammed attracted men to join his cause by allowing them to raid caravans and towns, seizing goods and carrying off men, women and children into slavery. The men would be sold to labor, the women would be raped and then perhaps taken as concubines or forcibly married, as Mohammed himself did on more than one occasion. The children would be raised in slavery.

By treating non-Muslims as subhuman property, Mohammed was able to create an important financial incentive for men to join him in his wars to conquer the region—as well as demonstrating to those who refused to convert and join him just what would happen to them and their families if they refused to bow to him. By invalidating the marriages of captured women, Mohammed simultaneously legalizing both rape and adultery under the banner of Islam.

Back when Mohammed was essentially running a biker gang with a religion, his dehumanization of non-Muslims turned anyone who had not become a Muslim into human loot to satisfy their greed and appetites. Had Mohammed not done this, he would have ended up as nothing more than another nomad cultist with delusions of grandeur. But by trading in human chattel, his religion gained “followers” who wanted loot, and slaves more than they wanted “Allah”.

Second, Mohammed promised freedom to slaves who came to join him. This allowed him to expand the ranks of his followers further, while posturing as morally being opposed to slavery. This cynical maneuver in which Mohammed and his followers turned non-Muslims into slavery, yet promised freedom to slaves who agreed to become Muslims is often cited by Muslims who are looking to promote Mohammed as being opposed to slavery.

In fact, Mohammed very much favored slavery, he simply understood that turning his army into a magnet for escaped slaves whom he could transform into free men through his omnipotent religious impramptur, would swell his ranks and diminish those of his enemies. Mohammed himself owned slaves, and raped and abused them. And today, slavery remains far more widespread in the Muslim world, while it has become extinct in Christian and Jewish countries.

Of all these slave routes, the “slave trade” in its purest form, i.e. the European Atlantic trade, attracts most attention and gives rise to most debate. The Atlantic trade is the least poorly documented to date, but this is not the only reason. More significantly, it was directed at Africans only, whereas the Muslim countries enslaved both Blacks and Whites. —The Impact of the Slave Trade on Africa, Elikia M’bokolo

While the European slavery was more labor oriented, with racial justifications used to maintain a slave economy—Muslim slavery has traditionally been more luxury oriented. The Europeans may have seen slavery as a convenient means of production, Muslims traditionally saw slaves as a luxury in and of themselves. That is why slavery in the European world was more limited to developing economies with a labor shortage and high transportation costs such as the Americas, while in the Muslim world it is traditionally the most prosperous countries with a surplus of the wealthy who collected the most slaves.

The Zanj Rebellion in 9th century Iraq in which half a million slaves rebelled against the Muslim Empire of the Abbasid Caliphate virtually prefigures the state of affairs in present day Dubai and Saudi Arabia. And indeed Dubai and Saudi Arabia may well face the same if enough of their abused workers ever turn a riot into an outright uprising, that will likely have to be crushed with borrowed US troops acting on behalf of the Saudis and Emiratis.

Unlike European slavery where the number of slaves related to production, Muslim slavery places no limits on slavery because it is as much a luxury as a means of production. That is also why slavery became extinct in European colonies, as much on economic as on moral grounds, but can never go extinct in the Muslim world, because the moral grounds and personal example for the maintenance of slavery was provided by Mohammed himself, and Muslim slavery is not rooted exclusively in the rationale of production, but in the sense of Muslim superiority.

Slavery may be odious in the free world, but the Muslim world is by no means free

Slavery may be odious in the free world, but the Muslim world is by no means free. And the social nature of an un-free world is a world of masters and slaves. In a society of masters and slaves, the best way to demonstrate your freedom is by owning slaves.

While the prosperous citizens of a free nation demonstrate their accomplishment through hard work, in a master-slave society the prosperous demonstrate their prosperity through public laziness and self-indulgence. In a master-slave society, freedom means the freedom to do nothing, the freedom to have a slave do it for you instead. And that is Dubai, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in a nutshell… in which foreign workers make up much of the population and do everything. A Briton to manage your investments, an American to pump your oil, a Filipino maid for your second wife to boss around, a Ukranian to include in your harem and a Thai to work at your construction site. That is a Muslim’s idea of paradise and the dream of Dubai. It is the mindset behind Muslim slavery and it is why Muslim slavery continues into the present day.

One cannot reform Islam, without first reforming Muslims. Yet, where does one begin reforming the culture of slavery, the ethos of the master and slave that is so deeply embedded into Islam that it in fact is Islam? Muslims describe themselves as the Slaves of Allah, because that is the deepest form of loyalty they can imagine.

Islam is the Master-Slave dynamic of the Middle East writ large into a religion, with Muslims viewing themselves as the slaves of Allah, and everyone else as their slaves. Within Islam, the higher status Saudis who style themselves the keepers of Mecca and the birthplace of Mohammed, feel free to enslave other Arab Muslims. Arab Muslims in turn enslave African and Asian Muslims, whom they consider racially inferior. And these in turn move to Europe where they view Europeans and other resident non-Muslims as inferior to them, as slaves.

Islam, in short, is nothing more than slavery in religious form

Islam, in short, is nothing more than slavery in religious form, relying on the sort of crude punishments you would dispense to a slave, and the sort of crude rewards you would offer to a slave—namely the chance to enslave and abuse others, and sample forbidden luxuries. Islam is a religion of slavery for a religion of slaves.

It is no wonder then that the modern day Jihad is built on slavery, funded by the royal families of the Gulf States, using the oil revenues produced by the oil pumps that they would never sully their own fat fingers with, with the aim of destroying and enslaving the civilized world that stands between them and world power. The Wahhabi mosques rising up across the world, their minarets and crescents, are the banners of a worldwide call to slavery. For mankind to fall to its knees and bow toward Saudi Arabia, to the Masters of Mecca, the paymasters of Al Queda and a thousand other Muslim terrorist groups around the world all clamoring for their own states and territories as part of a new Muslim Empire.

The question is will we dare to resist them?

Report: Corruption in the Stillborn Palestinian State

The investigation of a number Palestinian Authority ministers in Salam Fayyad's current caretaker administration over allegations of fiscal malfeasance and moral corruption puts the lie to claims a PA state would be viable.

On Thursday, the Maan news service reported the PA anti-corruption commission was seeking to have parliamentary immunity lifted on a number of ministers it wants to question pursuant to administrative mismanagement, unfair hiring practices, and pilfering ministerial budgets for their own use.

Rafik Al Natsha, who heads the commission, told Voice of Palestine radio the investigations would be transparent and fair.

The names and number of officials being investigated by the commission have not been released, but the commission said in January it was investigating 80 cases of corruption and had already recovered $5 million from former officials. International observers say $5 million is likely just a drop in the bucket.

Reports of corruption and the plundering of PA coffers under Mahmoud Abbas have pervaded the Israeli media for years - with Channel 10 running a report last year that Abbas himself had withdrawn millions from PA accounts in Amman and Cairo.

Abbas, however, is not under investigation.

Although not officially released, a source close to Fayyad says the Health, Agriculture, and Justice Ministries are facing investigation. The source added two other ministries may also be investigated.

If found guilty of corruption, the ministers face time in prison.

The broadly focused corruption probe comes as Fayyad argues the PA's latest financial crisis - and its dependence oncharitable donations for survival – is not a valid argument against it being considered viable for statehood. 

But the problem is pervasive on an institutional level and dates back to the earliest days of the PA's existence when PLO chairman Yasser Arafat funneled the billions in donations received by the PA through his personal accounts.

So widespread was corruption in the PA regime that, after seeing an anti-corruption report in 1997 citing mass pilfering from his inner circle - many of whom are still in power today - Arafat ordered all future reports to be kept secret.

In 2002 investors demanded Arafat hand over all funds to the Palestine Investment Fund, which Fayyad hailed as "the most successful financial reform in the Arab world."

Auditors then discovered that Arafat was guilty of skimming $2 million a month from the gasoline trade in the territories. At the time of his death some $1billion in funds donated to the PA went missing from his accounts.

Arab donors have been slow to fulfill their pledges as the PA charges headlong into the UN demanding statehood while Fayyad's $331 million out of $970 million promised is pouring through his fingers like sand.

The West's refusal to underwite Fayyad's statehood plans to the tune of $5 billion is also no surprise.

As Protests for Freedom Sweep Across the Middle East, It's Also Time for Regime Change in the Palestinian Authority

While Arabs throughout the Middle East engage in a largely nonviolent effort to overthrow the dictatorial regimes that have enslaved them for decades, the Palestinians have watched helplessly as their plight has fallen off the media’s radar. 

The longstanding claim that the “Palestinian question” is the crux of all problems in the Middle East has once again been exposed as a fallacy as the Arabs in Libya, Egypt, Bahrain and elsewhere have shown no interest in them or Israel. The Palestinians now are responding to the lack of attention by launching new terror attacks, which may garner headlines but also remind Israelis and the rest of the world they are not interested in peace.

We do not know yet if the bombing of a bus in Jerusalem is the start of a new wave of terror patterned after the war instigated by the Palestinians from 2000 to 2005 that claimed the lives of more than 1,000 Israelis, but this atrocity, combined with the escalation of rocket and mortar attacks on Israeli cities from Gaza, is going to force Israel to respond. 

As is so often the case, Israel is facing the impossible choice of how to protect its citizens without playing into the terrorists’ hands and bringing them more attention.

Israel knows that Hamas will use civilians as shields in the hope they will become casualties in Israeli counterstrikes, which will then arouse international ire against Israel. Israel will, as it always does, try to carefully target the terrorists, but as happened this week, despite their best efforts, innocents are sometimes injured. Israelis also know that while the world shows no interest in the inadvertent killing of innocents by U.S. drone strikes in Afghanistan or the civilians who may die in the current campaign in Libya, any Palestinian bystanders injured by their forces will provoke global condemnation and kangaroo court investigations by the U.N.

Recall that it was the wave of suicide bombings during the Palestinian War of 2000-2005 that prompted Israel to construct a security fence. That barrier has proven successful in reducing the number of attacks; nevertheless, Israel was pilloried for that act of self-defense by the U.N.

It is ironic that Arabs are fighting for freedom across the region, but the Palestinians continue to tolerate a leadership that denies them freedom of speech, religion, assembly, and the press and denies rights to women and gays. Rather than demanding that these leaders negotiate peace with an Israeli government that has repeatedly called for talks without preconditions, the Palestinian people support hapless figureheads who still believe they can bomb Israel out of existence or who think they can win independence by asking the international community to recognize a non-existent state in lieu of negotiations.

The Obama administration continues to support a Palestinian regime that is no less ruthless and undemocratic than those we are now opposing throughout the region. Those Palestinians, and it is perhaps the majority, who still prefer a brighter future for themselves and their children based on coexistence with Israel and a two state solution no doubt feel much like the Egyptian protestors who asked where the administration and its predecessors were during the decades of oppression.

It is time for the United States to demand that the Palestinians implement democratic reforms and put an end to the culture of incitement that leads to the horrific murder of Jewish children and their parents in their beds, attacks on public buses and rocket attacks on playgrounds and kindergartens. 

International tolerance of this behavior over the years has given Palestinians reason to believe terror is the way to achieve their goals. Israel, however, will not capitulate to terror or international pressure. Israelis will defend themselves, knowing they will pay a price in the court of public opinion because it is better to be alive and unpopular than dead and beloved.

The Palestinians want attention; they should get it. The president should be clear and unequivocal, something he has had trouble doing both with the Israel-Palestinian conflict and the turmoil in the rest of the region. He should declare that the obstacle to peace is a Palestinian leadership that is undemocratic and represses its people, that refuses to compromise or negotiate, that is unwilling to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish democratic state and that engages in incitement and terror that is perpetuating the conflict. Like the other despotic leaders in the region, they must either change or they must go.

Why does the West cave in to the lies and demands of Arab leaders?

WASHINGTON, D.C. — So repressive governments – Arab governments – lie to their people about Israel, politics and the 21st century to maintain the illusion of security and control at home until the dam breaks. But why do governments in the West, knowing better, nevertheless insist that lies and wishful thinking be accounted for in policy formation at Israel’s expense?

Just because the Palestinians say they are entitled to an independent state where no state ever existed. Just because they demand that their capital be Jerusalem, which has never been the capital of any people except the Jewish people. Just because they say Israel is “illegally occupying” Palestinian land. Just because they say the 1949 Armistice Line is a border that should be the first border of Palestine and houses for Jews east of the line are illegal. Why does anyone who knows better agree?

Just because Hezbollah says Shebaa Farms is Lebanese territory that Israel occupies. Just because Hezbollah says it needs an Iranian-sponsored army inside Lebanon to continue the “resistance” against Israel. Why does anyone who knows better agree? When the Turkish government says the agitators aboard the Mavi Marmara were “peace activists” who were mauled by the vicious IDF. When the Turkish government erects billboards denouncing Israeli “war crimes” in Gaza. Why doesn’t anyone who knows better tell them to stop?

Or, when the president of Iran calls for a world without Israel or the United States and denies the Holocaust, why do people who know better still permit him to address the United Nations, which is supposed to be a civilized place. OK, scratch that last one.

There are two reasons why otherwise well-informed people voluntarily suspend their knowledge of history, religion, international law and political reality when Israel is involved: money and fear. Both lead weak Western leaders to blame Israel for the illusions Arab dictators and potentates have foisted on their own people.

Arab states have lavished millions of dollars on American academia for the sponsorship of Islamic studies programs, paid for private schools that have no requirement for civics education or the history of the countries in which they operate, and set up groups to promote their version of the world from apparently respectable “think tanks.” Where do you think Director of National Intelligence James Clapper got the idea that the Muslim Brotherhood is a diversified secular social service organization?

Oil is also money and the West needs Arab oil because weak leaders have been unable to diversify their sources of energy. Oil states buy Western weapons and technology – this is a financial incentive as well. Fear of upsetting the money line is one problem.

Fear of large Muslim minorities – unassimilated and unassimilable – fear of attacks at home and abroad, fear that the “Strong Horse” really is the rise of radical, jihadist Islam trying to conquer Europe againis the other.

Unless the West develops confidence in Western civilization and willingness to stand up for what is right and demonstrably true – stand up for the democratic ally that is Israel – their fears may well become reality.

Clinton Bluntly Presses Arab Leaders on Reform

DOHA, Qatar — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton delivered a scalding critique of Arab leaders here on Thursday, saying their countries risked “sinking into the sand” of unrest and extremism unless they liberalized their political systems and cleaned up their economies.

Speaking at a conference in this gleaming Persian Gulf emirate, Mrs. Clinton recited a familiar litany of ills: corruption, repression and a lack of rights for women and religious minorities. But her remarks were striking for their vehemence, and they suggested a frustration that the Obama administration’s message to the Arab world had not gotten through.

“In too many places, in too many ways, the region’s foundations are sinking into the sand,” she said to a stone-faced audience of foreign ministers, businesspeople and rights groups. “The new and dynamic Middle East that I have seen needs firmer ground if it is to take root and grow everywhere.”

Mrs. Clinton’s remarks were delivered at the end of an intense, four-day tour of the Persian Gulf that took her from impoverished, autocratic Yemen to the prosperous, comparatively open sultanate of Oman. She also stopped in Abu Dhabi and Dubai before finishing in Qatar, a wealthy fief still exulting in its selection as the site of the World Cup soccer tournament in 2022.

As Mrs. Clinton delivered her critique, events echoed loudly in the background: unrest in Tunisia that threatened its government while serving to buttress her arguments; and a developing political crisis in Lebanon that illustrated both the range and the limits of American influence in the region.

The United States has little leverage over the pivotal players in Lebanon, notably the militant group Hezbollah, whose ministers walked out of the coalition government in Beirut on Wednesday, forcing its collapse.

While Mrs. Clinton applauded signs of progress in Qatar and elsewhere, it was Yemen, with its crippled economy and creeping subculture of Islamic terrorism, that seemed to stick in her mind.

A day after her visit Tuesday, the Yemeni government announced that for security reasons citizens would need permits to visit foreign embassies, according to the official news agency, Saba. Mrs. Clinton had met opposition figures at the American Embassy in the capital, Sana.

“Those who cling to the status quo may be able to hold back the full impact of their countries’ problems for a little while, but not forever,” Mrs. Clinton said. “If leaders don’t offer a positive vision and give young people meaningful ways to contribute, others will fill the vacuum.”

She added, “Extremist elements, terrorist groups and others who would prey on desperation and poverty are already out there, appealing for allegiance and competing for influence.”

Mrs. Clinton saved her most scathing remarks for corruption, which she said was corroding Arab economies and making life impossible for foreigners who ran businesses in Arab countries.

“Trying to get a permit,” she said, “you have to pass money through so many different hands. Trying to open up, you have to pay people off. Trying to stay open, you have to pay people off. Trying to export your goods, you have to pay people off. So by the time you pay everybody off, it’s not a very profitable venture.”

Mrs. Clinton’s audience listened silently, though the foreign minister of Bahrain, Sheik Khalid bin Ahmed al-Khalifa, calmly defended his country’s record. Bahrain is much more open than a decade ago, he said, with major growth in advocacy groups and labor unions.

Even when Mrs. Clinton was pressed on why the Obama administration tolerated Israel’s expansion of settlements in the West Bank — an issue that rankles throughout the Arab world and has contributed to a breakdown of the Middle East peace process — she pushed back.

The United States, she said, gazing pointedly around the room, fails to get a lot of countries to do what it wants. And she said that Americans bore a disproportionate burden of settling the world’s conflicts.

Mrs. Clinton also noted that the United States was the top financial donor to the Palestinian Authority — an implicit rebuke of Arab states, which champion the Palestinian cause but, in the view of critics, do too little to support its efforts to build institutions on the West Bank.