Apropos Of Nothing

Claire Berlinski has called my attention to a new push among European Union officials to clamp down on language that “cause[s] frustration among Muslims and increase[s] the risk of radicalisation”. A prime example of a necessary change is the banning of the phrase “Islamic terrorism” to describe…uh…Islamic terrorism. The phrase that should be used instead is “terrorists who abusively invoke Islam”.

This new phrase is part of a “non-emotive lexicon for discussing radicalisation” the EU officials have devised. They plan to submit it for adoption by European governments, the European Commission and the European Parliament.

Well, I think this is a swell idea. Heaven knows that when faced with a billion-strong religion well-stocked with highly vocal people eager to kill you and your children and destroy every vestige of your civilization, what’s needed is to call a spade an unembossed multi-functional gravy ladle and earth re-sifter.

Frankly, I don’t think the Europeans have gone far enough. It’s all well and good to instruct ignorant Westerners on how to communicate effectively with members of the Religion of Peace. But the next step, surely, is to instruct us on how to interpret the language the Religion of Peace uses towards us.

I’ll just kick off with a couple of easy ones and you boys in Brussels can take it from there.

1. “Israel should be wiped from the map.” — Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of Iran

We must first of all congratulate Ahmadinejad for bravely using the word “Israel”, which was for many years verboten among the more radical Islamic regimes. His use of “Israel” in a speech to be broadcast to the Arab street — rather than “Zionist Entity” or “Little Satan” — can only be interpreted as a sign of his desire to bring peace to the Middle East. The subtlety of his expression of a desire for peace, particularly to so notoriously difficult an audience, should be applauded, not denounced.

Note too that he does not say “I want to wipe Israel from the map” or “We will wipe Israel from the map,” which are expressions of intent. He says, “Israel should be wiped from the map,” which is an expression of preference. Civilized people do not censor one another’s opinions and desires, and they certainly don’t attack one another because of them. Indeed, Ahmadinejad is to be again congratulated for expressing himself with words and not actions. We might suggest that the Israelis take a lesson from this while they’re firing up their F-16s.

There is no reason to infer future hostile action on Ahmadinejad’s part from this simple statement of opinion. We are aware that there are those — particularly on the American right coast, if you catch our drift — who interpret his nuclear program as hostile, but he has stated repeatedly that his intentions are entirely peaceful. To disbelieve him without ample hard evidence would be unconscionably racist. And besides, even if he were putting together a bomb or two, it’s entirely his right, given that Israel has the bomb already. It is not our place to pick and choose who is capable of precipitating global nuclear annihilation. That wouldn’t be fair.

Also, we feel compelled to point out: Ahmadinejad didn’t say Europe should be wiped off the map. He said Israel. Israel’s an awfully small country, and it’s caused quite a lot of trouble. He might be onto something is all we’re saying. Think big picture.

2. Muslim demonstration grab-bag from the Cartoon Jihad: “Behead”, “Slay,” “Exterminate”, “Massacre,” “Annihilate”, “Holocaust”.

Here we have to be careful to avoid the temptation — all too often the downfall of our friends across the Atlantic, alas — to be too literal-minded. True, the terms listed above are startling to Western eyes, but remember that the Muslims who paraded them through British and European streets were simply yearning to be heard in the wake of an appalling provocation.

If we truly believe in the right of freedom of speech, we cannot condemn selected individuals for exercising that right on our own soil. Indeed, the incendiary language of the Muslim protests stands as an eloquent rebuke to our own hypocrisy, particularly since the protesters stopped short of actually slaughtering any large groups of Europeans. Such dignified restraint in the face of our contempible disrespect for their sensibilities was intended to humiliate us. It did, and we deserved it.

Drop me a line if you need any more text interpretations. I’m happy to help.

Why the prospect of John Kerry running for President again should make us very, very afraid:

What you need and what I’ve suggested is that you have a date in the accords–like [a] summit where you bring all the parties together—and I mean all the parties. You need to bring Iraq’s neighbors together. Khalilzad has now been authorized to talk to the Iranians. Bring the Iranians, bring the Syrians, bring the Jordanians, the Saudis, the Egyptians and others. You have a conference at which you have the United Nations, the Arab League and all of the factions. And you sit there, and you pound out the differences.

Yeah, that’ll work. As Oxblog puts it, “[W]ho has a better track record for resolving thorny international conflicts than the United Nations and the Arab League?…Heck, why doesn’t Kerry just suggest that we resurrect the League of Nations and hope that it does a better job now than it did in the 1930s?”

That’s Kerry talking last Sunday on Meet the Press. His idea apparently is to declare a 40-day deadline for the Iraqis to get their act together and then pull out on the 41st day, regardless what’s happening on the ground. Again, Oxblog:

…a threat to withdraw in forty days will never be able to break the habits that Iraqi politicians have developed over the past three years. Moreover, it will be seen as a betrayal by those numerous politicians who have trusted us to see the democratic process through to its conclusion. And it will embolden those who believe intransigence is the best way to get rid of the Americans.

If you were the insurgents, how would you respond to a forty-day ultimatum? I think you would slaughter as many Shi’ite and Kurdish civilians as humanly possible in forty days in order to render impossible the sort of compromises necessary to form a government. Then, after forty days, you would be rewarded with a historic victory over the United States that would ensure your immediate entrance into the pantheon of great Arab heroes.

My mind is open to alternatives to Bush, who to my mind was right to enter Iraq but wrong to do so with no idea how to conduct an occupation, particularly in terms of adequate troop numbers. But I can’t even begin to consider a Democrat if the best they can offer is someone this delusional.

This one stings.

Israel has been condemned by FIFA, the organization that governs international soccer. Now, we’re pretty used to condemnations around these parts, both just and (usually) otherwise. But this is ridiculous.

FIFA claims to be entirely nonpolitical — or such has been its excuse over the years on the many occasions when it has pointedly ignored extreme human rights violations, going back generations, that have involved soccer stadiums and players. Consider, for example, the following cases (all taken from a recent National Review article by Tom Gross), none of which elicited a response of any kind from FIFA:

1. Saddam Hussein’s son Uday had Iraqi soccer players tortured in 1997 after they failed to qualify for the 1998 FIFA World Cup Finals in France.

2. Uday, who was chairman of the Iraqi soccer association, had star players tortured again in 1998.

3. In 2000, following a quarterfinal defeat in the Asia Cup, three Iraqi players were whipped and beaten for three days by Uday’s bodyguards. The torture took place at the Iraqi Olympic Committee headquarters.

4. The Taliban used U.N.-funded soccer fields to slaughter and flog hundreds of innocent people who had supposedly violated sharia law in front of crowds of thousands chanting “God is great.” (Afghan soccer coach Habib Ullahniazi said that as many as 30 people were executed in the middle of the field during the intermissions of a single soccer match at Kabul’s Ghazi Stadium.)

5. Soccer stadiums in Argentina were turned into jails.

6. According to the International Red Cross, about 7,000 prisoners were detained (and some tortured) in Chile’s national soccer stadium after Augusto Pinochet seized power in 1973.

7. Chechen president Akhmad Kadyrov was murdered by a bomb explosion at Grozny’s Dynamo soccer stadium.

8. FIFA refused to criticize the decision to name a Palestinian soccer tournament after a suicide terrorist who murdered 31 people at a Passover celebration at the Park Hotel in Netanya in 2002. (At the tournament, organized under Yasser Arafat’s auspices in 2003, the brother of the suicide bomber was given the honorary role of distributing the trophies to the winning team.)

9. FIFA failed to condemn the suicide bomb at the Maxim restaurant in Haifa in October 2003 which injured three officials from the leading Israeli soccer team Maccabi Haifa.

But last week, as Gross puts it, “FIFA finally found a target worthy of its outrage, and leapt into action.” That target was us.

What could we possibly have done to stir FIFA out of its torpor? Hold onto your hats, people. We conducted an airstrike on an empty Gazan soccer field. Why? Because it has been appropriated for training exercises by Islamic Jihad and the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, who have been sending Qassam missiles into Israel with the express intent of killing and injuring civilians since the withdrawal from Gaza.

In fact, the Israeli strike took place two days after the Palestinians sent a Qassam missile barrage into Karmiya, an Israeli kibbutz. With a certain poetic irony, the missiles landed in the kibbutz’s soccer field.

Needless to say, that attack was A-OK as far as FIFA is concerned.

The deputy general secretary of FIFA, Jerome Champagne, has publicly condemned us — an unprecedented act — for hitting the Gazan field, and flatly refuses to issue a similar condemnation against the Palestinians for their prior missile attack on the kibbutz. More than that, he has consulted with FIFA president Sepp Blatter on the “appropriate action” that should be taken against us. (Champagne has defended himself from charges of discrimination with the following incisive argument: his wife is Jewish, so he can’t possibly be biased against Israel. Glad we cleared that up.)

Naturally, Israeli soccer fans (and Israel is every bit as soccer crazy as every other country in the world, save the US) are appalled over this condemnation. As Gross points out, they have several excellent questions for FIFA:

Where is FIFA when anti-Semitic banners go up in European soccer stadiums, and there are chants from spectators about sending Jews to the gas? …Where…are the FIFA sanctions against the Arab or Asian countries that refuse to allow Israel to compete in Asia? …why has FIFA moved games from Israel because guest teams were afraid to come to Israel, but has never banned any other national teams from playing home games on account of local Islamic violence? Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey were allowed to continue playing matches at home.

Furthermore, FIFA has a long history of placidly ignoring the boycotting of Israeli athletes:

In February, Tal Ben Haim — the Israeli national soccer team captain, who plays his club soccer for the English Premiership team Bolton Wanderers — was banned from joining his Bolton teammates for their training matches in Dubai. FIFA pointedly ignored this…last week, another English club, West Ham, left their two Israeli players, Yossi Benayoun and Yaniv Katan, at home when they went to Dubai. FIFA naturally had nothing to say.

No one is expecting satisfactory explanations for any of this. FIFA is otherwise occupied right now encouraging psychotic Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to attend the opening of the World Cup in Germany in a few weeks despite his history of Holocaust denial (a crime in Germany) and openly expressed desire to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. Blatter’s response to questioning on the Ahmadinejad question: “”We’re not going to enter into any political declarations. We in football, if we entered into such discussions, then it would be against our statutes. We are not in politics.”

Still, as Gross notes,

Not all is rotten in world soccer…Last week, Ronaldinho, the Brazilian superstar widely regarded as the best current player in the world, donated signed footballs and shirts to Israeli child suicide bomb survivors, saying he hoped his gifts would “warm the hearts of the children who have suffered so much.”

Thank you, Ronaldinho. We appreciate it more than you know.

Look. I’m buying the album. I like the music. But please, I’m begging you…stop the madness.

I’m gasping for breath here, John, and not in a good way…

(Via Go Fug Yourself.)

The Saudi leadership is planning to build a security fence (read: “very large wall”) along the entire length of its 560 mile border with Iraq to keep out insurgents (read “suicide bombers”), many of them home-grown, heading back from Iraq.

I find this plan profoundly offensive. How dare some cossetted oligarchy place a barrier between homicidal maniacs and their native land? Who do the Saudis think they are, using their ill-gotten and undeserved wealth to create an ugly fact on the ground — a racist object, a hideous visual emblem of their corrupt system’s inherent apartheid nature — the only purpose of which is to thwart the natural desire of crazed fundamentalist lunatics to kill large numbers of random civilians? Who is the Saudi royal family to object to such a desire among native Arabs, who are merely acting out their natural frustrations at a world order that is cruelly conspired against them? And how dare they hide behind the revolting euphemism “security fence”! How typical of their cunning that they try to use language to conceal what this abomination truly is: the tool of an oppressive establishment to stomp on the Allah-given rights of the real sons of the land!

I propose an immediate boycott of Saudi oil in response to this disgusting provocation. And there should certainly be a full academic boycott of all Saudi scholars who are attempting to insinuate themselves into the global academy — the sooner their sinister influence is purged, the better. I’d like to see petitions, too — Journalists Against Saudi Discrimination Against Mass Murderers, that kind of thing. And we can surely get together some kind of solidarity movement with the bombers — photo ops at the wall, guys in their explosive belts weeping against giant slabs of concrete, delicate English twenty-somethings mopping the bombers’ brows with keffiyehs and standing between them and the bulldozers…the visuals could be great.

According to the article cited above from the British Times, this “multimillion-pound project…will attract interest from British defence companies”. As opposed to attracting hysterical shrieking from British academics. Well, I guess that makes a nice change.

(Via Little Green Footballs.)

The Americans have indicated repeatedly that they do not trust Hamas to direct aid money where its donors intend it. In its effort to maintain humanitarian aid for ordinary Palestinians while keeping it out of the hands of the terrorist government, the US is apparently planning to funnel more money through UNRWA (the UN Relief and Works Agency).

That’s a curious piece of logic.

UNRWA is a criminally negligent terrorist enabler that has done everything in its power in its 56 years of existence to promote Palestinian grievance — and violence — against Israel. The UNRWA was supposed to be a temporary organization, the purpose of which was to provide relief to the million or so Palestinians displaced by the Israeli War of Independence. It was distinct, however, from the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), which is responsible for the world’s refugees, in that its remit did not contain any obligation to actually assist in alleviating the Palestinians’ plight. Such a practical end would not have served its political purpose, which was quite different.

In its early days, while the Palestinians waited in vain for some genuine assistance, the self-designated responsibility of UNRWA was simply to define the term “Palestinian refugee”. Step one was to declare any Arab migrant who had lived in Palestine for two years a Palestinian refugee. Step two — an unprecedented and staggeringly fateful step — was to declare the descendants of refugees as refugees, a definition that the UNHCR has never applied to any other group. As a result of this arbitrary redefinition, the Palestinian refugee population has quadrupled since 1948. As far as I am aware, they are the only refugee population to increase in size with each passing year.

UNRWA’s political bias has been transparent from day one. Its entire ethos is based on the premise of a right of return that is not recognized in international law — thereby stoking a grievance among the refugee population rather than taking steps to improve their lives. The radicalism engendered by this approach is maintained by the UNRWA’s penchant for employing terrorists, an equal-opportunity policy that has resulted in the transformation of UNRWA refugee camps into bomb-manufacturing plants and terrorist-recruitment centers.

A report published by the Israel Resource News Agency and the American Center for Near East Policy Research goes into explicit detail on the UNRWA’s history of complicity with and encouragement of Palestinian terrorism. There are many illuminating passages in the report — about bald corruption, the mistrust many of the refugees themselves feel toward UNRWA, the unapologetic determination of UNRWA to educate generations of Palestinian youngsters to hate Israel, and so on. This last is particularly enlightening about UNRWA’s position and intentions. As the report states,

UNRWA runs one of the largest educational systems in the Arab world–providing schooling for the children of all families registered as refugees. It spends roughly half its budget on education; more than 70% of its staff is concerned with education. But UNRWA does not produce its own textbooks. It is stated UNRWA policy to utilize the textbooks of the host (administrative authority) of an area where a camp is located– Syrian textbooks in camps in Syria, etc.
…
The Committee for Monitoring the Impact of Peace (CMIP), using UNESCO guidelines, has done a thorough analysis of these books. Findings which can be found in their entirety at www.edume.org include the following:

- Israel’s name does not appear on any of the maps, and several Israeli cities, as well as an archaeological site, a region and mountain are defined as Palestinian.

- Jerusalem is presented as a Palestinian city.

- Peace is not mentioned at all, while war against Israel as a usurper, occupier and aggressor is implicitly encouraged.

- The refugee issue is also mentioned within the context of the destined return to the 1948 homes.

- There is praise of and encouragement for the waging of Jihad–Holy War.

- Jews and Israelis are represented as being cunning and deceitful.

The walls of UNRWA schools are plastered with Hamas, Islamic Jihad and PFLP graffiti, maps of Palestine that encompass the entire country of Israel, and violent imagery of machine guns, exploding Israeli boats, burning Israeli Jeeps, exploding grenades, and the like. As the report notes, in 2001 Hamas brought the linkage into the open by holding a conference at a UNRWA junior high school in the Jabalya refugee camp at which Sheik Ahmed Yassin told the students that they were the vanguard of the Palestinian jihad. “This is the generation of liberation and victory”, he said. “The Zionist enemy wants to overpower us and make us give up Palestine, Acre, Haifa, Jerusalem and the Al Aqsa mosque, but this will not happen”. Tellingly, Yassin was followed on the dais by Saheil Alhinadi, representing the UNRWA teaching sector. Alhinadi explicitly praised students who had recently become Hamas suicide bombers. In case the assembled student body missed the point, he went on to state: “The road to Palestine passes through the blood of the fallen, and these fallen have written history with parts of their flesh and their bodies”.

Of the 27,000 people who are employed by UNRWA in the territories, 23,000 of them are themselves Palestinian refugees, and a significant proportion of them are members of terrorist organizations. As IDF Colonel (ret.) Yoni Fighel, a former military governor in the territories, put it, “As long as UNRWA employees are members of Fatah, Hamas, or PFLP, they are going to pursue the interests of their party within the framework of their job… Who‘s going to check up on them to see that they don‘t? UNRWA? They are UNRWA.”

The UNRWA has ensured that its schools, and the refugee camps in general, have become military training camps. The object appears to be an ultimate showdown with Israel. These are the people the US is now entrusting humanitarian aid money to:

In the summer of 2000, it was public knowledge that UNRWA was allowing 25,000 Palestinian Arab youngsters to use their schools as military training camps; children, ages 8 to 16, were trained in the art of preparing Molotov cocktails, roadside bombs and throwing stones during military confrontations with IDF troops.

…each UNRWA camp hosts a local steering committee in charge of distributing the funds received as charitable donations from relief organizations and donor countries around the world. It is that local steering committee which decides how to spend the money at its disposal–whether to provide food or weapons (emphasis mine). The UNRWA website states, “The camp committees in each camp are considered official bodies.” This means it was an official UNRWA body that sanctioned purchase of weapons with charitable donations.

The most extreme example of the transformation of a UNRWA refugee camp into a terrorist installation is Jenin, which was exposed as such during the IDF incursion in 2002. The occupants of Jenin had taken advantage of the Israeli withdrawal from their city eight years before not to turn Jenin into a functioning and healthy city, but to turn it into what Fatah itself described as the “suicide bombers’ capital” (A’simat Al-Istashidin, [in Arabic], Fatah Jenin branch report to Marwan Barghouti, September 25, 2001). As is well known, the response of the UN and UNRWA to the revelation of the extent of the Palestinian terrorist infrastructure in Jenin was to ignore it completely and offer blind support to revolting Palestinian lies about Israeli conduct during the operation. Though the Palestinian version of the operation has been thoroughly discredited, no retractions have ever been offered by anyone at the UN or UNRWA to any of the falsehoods that they so eagerly promoted. More importantly, no effort whatsoever has been made to flush out or even to acknowledge the terrorist character of the UNRWA refugee camp in Jenin.

Any one of the Israeli victims of the 28 (yes, 28) terrorist attacks committed by residents of Jenin might have been able to offer some enlightenment on that point, but unfortunately they were not available for consultation. UNRWA bears considerable responsibility for their deaths, and for the general degeneration of the situation between the two peoples over the past half century. Today’s mess is largely of UNRWA’s making. It’s hard to imagine anything more foolish than relying on it to keep aid money out of terrorists’ hands.

ADDENDUM: Since posting this item I found an article by Honest Reporting that lists a few instances of UNRWA/terrorist activity:

? May 2004: Armed Palestinians are filmed using UNRWA ambulances to transport terrorists and, possibly, remains of fallen Israeli soldiers in Gaza.

? Sept. 2003: After the Israeli military court convicts three UNRWA employees for terrorist activities (such as throwing firebombs at a public bus), Israel detains at least 16 other UNRWA staff members for various security-related matters.

? Dec. 2002: A Shin Bet report indicates that numerous UNRWA facilities in the West Bank and Gaza had been used by Palestinian terrorists as meeting grounds and for weapons storage.

? Sept. 2002: Nahd Attala, a senior official of UNRWA in Gaza, reveals that in June-July 2002, he used his UNRWA car for the transportation of armed members of Fatah who were on their way to carry out a missile attack against Jewish settlements. In addition, Nahd admits he used an UNRWA car to transport a 12 kg explosive charge for his brother-in-law, a Fatah member.

? August 2002: Nidal Nazzal, a Hamas member and ambulance driver employed by UNRWA, confesses to transporting weapons and explosives in an UNRWA ambulance, and that he had taken advantage of the freedom of movement he enjoyed to transmit messages among Hamas members in various Palestinian towns.

? February 2002: Alaa Muhammad Ali Hassan, a Tanzim member, confesses during interrogation that he had carried out a sniper shooting from the school run by UNRWA in the al-Ayn refugee camp near Nablus. He also told his interrogators that bombs intended for terrorist attacks were being manufactured inside the UNRWA school’s facilities (emphases mine).

Gosh. There appears to be a consensus that I have been unduly harsh on Jill Carroll. On reflection, I can see that it is inappropriate to take a person directly at their word when they have been held captive in a state of what was almost certainly constant terror for three months. I’ll be very interested to hear what you have to say when you’ve been thoroughly debriefed, Ms. Carroll, and have gotten to spend time with your family. I hope you can put your appalling experience in the past as soon as possible.

I flipped my lid at your comments, as I explained in the previous post, because of their apparent erasure of the victim who suffered most grievously from your ordeal: your murdered translator, who was as unprotected as you and your driver were when you decided to explore a dangerous section of Baghdad without bodyguards. I recognize now that there was probably a good deal of calculation in the way you presented yourself in your pre-release video, and that it would have been unwise to bring up your kidnappers’ savagery while they were still pointing large weapons at your head. I blamed you squarely for the oversight and for that I apologize.

I would like to explain myself — not excuse myself, just clarify my reaction. I read the stories coming out of Iraq all the time, and am always horrified by the way the deaths of innocent locals are glossed over when those deaths are brought about by fellow Muslims. It particularly irks me the way those same voices in the media that are so quick to condemn the US forces for heartless and cavalier attitudes toward “collateral damage” can’t bring themselves to condemn Muslim terrorists for deliberately causing civilian losses. The bombers who target US soldiers while they are distributing candy to Iraqi children are an obvious example. Those children were instantly forgotten by the very people who purport to care profoundly for the Iraqi people. It’s hard to imagine anything more muddle-headed than identifying the Muslim terrorists who dole out violent death to Iraqis, whose whole raison d’etre is to steal from the Iraqi people any hope of a progressive, democratic, forward-looking, healthy future, as the great defenders of Iraqi citizens against the vile American occupier.

So when I read your words — your description of these evil thugs as “fighting the good fight” — and found no mention of your slaughtered colleague, I saw red. Perhaps it’s because I live where I live — in a place where the murder of our civilians is widely considered to be a fact of life that we should stop whining about — that I’m a little hypersensitive on the subject of locals dying at the hands of terrorists and being instantly forgotten.

I’m very glad you are safe, Ms. Carroll, and wish you a speedy recovery from your ordeal. I hope your time as public relations officer for the mujahideen will be brief, but I recognize that it is not for me to dictate the duration of your recovery.