Israel’s War with the Muslim Brotherhood

Posted By Daniel Greenfield On July 22, 2014 @ 12:55 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 8 Comments

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

Israeli soldiers ride atop a tank outside the southern Gaza, July 7, 2014. (Baz Ratner)


Despite the cries of furious hipsters waving cardboard signs stained with fake blood, there is no ethnic cleansing going on in Gaza. No more than there was when the US began bombing the Taliban.

The last act of ethnic cleansing took place in the summer of 2005 when the Israeli government gave in to international pressure by forcibly evicting all the Jews from the Gaza Strip. Even the graves were dug up.

The media, which had been up in arms when Israel had evicted 400 Hamas terrorists, had nothing but applause for the forced ethnic cleansing of thousands of Jewish families. The synagogues they left behind were also torched to the applause of the same media now filling the airwaves with fake outrage.

CNN described one synagogue as “very controversial because it is the Jewish synagogue.” The Los Angeles Times wrote of Muslims venting “their fury over the occupation by laying waste to the synagogues.” “Youths set fire to synagogues and other symbols of the hated occupation,” the London Times scribbled. The Age tried for the poetic with “Burning synagogue lights Gaza dawn”.

The Nazi Minister of Propaganda had written under similar circumstances, “I wish to return to my hotel and see a glow as red as blood. The synagogue is burning.” The mainstream media had erased any distinction between themselves and the Kristallnacht propaganda of Joseph Goebbels
The ethnic cleansing of Jews from Gaza made the Hamas takeover possible. The current conflict is rooted in that tragic act of appeasement.

And it wasn’t only the Jews who suffered.

Under Muslim Brotherhood rule, the Christian population of Gaza was cut in half. The Baptists nearly disappeared after a Christian bookstore was bombed twice and its manager was clubbed and shot.

What happened to the Christians of Gaza was the same thing that had been happening to Christians across the Middle East under Islamic rule. While the media is focusing on Gaza, ISIS has just finished ethnically cleansing the Christians of Mosul by demanding that the non-Muslim residents of this Iraqi city convert to Islam, pay Jizya or die.

ISIS is a cousin of Hamas. Both organizations are outgrowths of the Muslim Brotherhood. Its current leader came out of the Muslim Brotherhood and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the man originally behind Al Qaeda in Iraq, was released from a Jordanian prison to win favor with the local Muslim Brotherhood.

When Zarqawi was finally killed, Hamas issued a statement mourning him as “a martyr of the nation.” Protesters in Gaza demanded revenge for his death. The Islamic Action Front, the Brotherhood’s political arm in Jordan, openly expressed its admiration for the mass murderer.

ISIS, Hamas and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood have all driven out Christians in areas under the control of their Jihadists. Hamas’ attacks on Israel are motivated by that same xenophobic impulse.

Hamas is doing to Gaza what ISIS is doing to Mosul, slowly transforming it into a terrorist slum at war with the rest of the world, until it becomes a Qaeda, a base, the Muslim equivalent of a Liberation Theology base community.

Christians, Jews and other minorities cannot survive this process. Their only choices are to flee or fight.

When Israel pulls back after this latest round of fighting, Gaza will be as Muslim as ever. But under Hamas rule, it will not be very long until it is as empty of Christians as it already is of Jews.
And that is real ethnic cleansing.

Genocide isn’t the empty theater played out by Hamas and its media and social media allies. It isn’t terrorist groups launching rockets using human shields and then palming off scenes from Final Destination 4 as Israeli atrocities.

It’s the eradication of an entire minority population. It’s what happens when synagogues and churches vanish and are replaced by mosques.

The ultimate goal of Hamas is envisioned in Article Seven of its charter which looks forward to the genocide of the Jews when “The Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: ‘O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him!’”

Or as the Secretary General of the Muslim Brotherhood had already proclaimed long ago, “The Zionist question is but a Jewish question with all that the word entails.”

Unlike Israel’s surgical strikes at Hamas assets, this is genocide and it is the regional endgame of the Arab Muslim conquerors and colonists.

Hamas is not a persecuted minority lashing out as its oppressors. It is one outpost of a supremacist Sunni Muslim majoritarian organization that is terrorizing minorities across the region. Its mission is to continue the thousand year project of Islamic colonialism to destroy indigenous cultures and religions.

The Jews of Jerusalem, like the Christians of Mosul, happen to be in the way. Hamas’s charter makes its genocidal mission clear. But every Islamist group whose mission is to impose the absolute rule of Islam is equally committed to the ethnic cleansing of non-Muslim and even Muslim populations.

The real genocide in Gaza and throughout the Middle East is being committed by Muslims against non-Muslims with the complicity of Western media and governments. There were no UN resolutions when Jews were ethnically cleansed from Kfar Darom in Gaza and parts of Jerusalem in 1948 by Muslims.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s battalion attacked the village of Kfar Darom and forty-five Israeli militia members protected 400 men, women and children. The Brotherhood’s attacks were beaten back with determined resistance until its Jihadists were forced to retreat leaving behind seventy of their dead.

After the village came under attack from Egyptian armor and air power, it had to be abandoned for decades until Israel liberated the territory on which it had stood. Then the diplomats and reporters  who hadn’t cared about the tiny village before, suddenly declared that Kfar Darom was a settlement and the Jews who lived there were occupiers for resettling the land that Muslims had conquered in 1948.

When Kfar Darom was ethnically cleansed again in 2005, the media and the diplomats cheered. Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar entered the Kfar Darom synagogue and laid claim to it in the name of Islam.

There were no resolutions or boycotts when the Jews were forced out of East Jerusalem in 1948 and the Jewish Quarter was blown up by a Muslim commander who said, “For the first time in 1,000 years not a single Jew remains in the Jewish Quarter.” But when Israel liberated and reunited Jerusalem in 1967, the Jews moving into their own city and one of the oldest cities in the world were denounced as “settlers.”

The international principle that has been adopted universally is that when Muslims conquer a place, it belongs to them permanently, even if they only conquered it a few decades ago. Muslims always have superior rights to Christians, Jews or any other non-Muslim group in their own countries or any country.

This principle acknowledges that that the ethnic cleansing carried out by ISIS or Hamas is legitimate. It enshrines Muslim privilege up to and including the point of genocide. While the media wails over Gaza, Muslim campaigns of ethnic cleansing continue in Syria, Nigeria and Iraq and a dozen other places.

Israel has become a flashpoint in the region because it is the only place where an armed non-Muslim minority has been able to make a stand against Muslim genocide.  Israel has been fighting the forces of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza since right after the Holocaust. Its soldiers are fighting so that the same forces that have been ethnically cleansing the Christians and Jews of the Middle East do not reach Israel.

Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.

Subscribe to Frontpage’s TV show, The Glazov Gang, and LIKE it on Facebook.

---

Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://www.frontpagemag.com

URL to article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/israels-war-with-the-muslim-brotherhood/

The Real 'Forever War'

By: Mordechai Ben-Menachem

http://humanevents.com/

7/21/2014 

Palestinian Hamas militants carrying weapons ride on a vehicle during an anti-Israel parade in Gaza City March 10, 2014. Photo by Reuters

In the late 1970’s, the novelist Joe Haldeman wrote one of the better-known science fiction books, “The Forever War.”  The novel is ostensibly about the Vietnam War, at least so the author describes it in the 1997 edition, which he calls the “definitive edition” in the Author’s Note that precedes it (pp. ix).  At the time of its writing (1970+) this war seemed interminable, though at the time of the Author’s Note is had already ended, even if not so much within the heads of some of those who actually took some part.

The problem is, that there really IS a “Forever War” and it is being fought right now – or rather, one of its perennial battles is; perhaps one of its Great Battles, if Europeans do not interfere with a decisive result.

This war began in year 1652 by reckoning of the Hebrew calendar, or 4122 years ago.  This is as close to a definition of “Forever War” as possible.  The war with Hamas began with The Flood.  In that case, the battle was fought directly by the Divine Intervention.  After this great battle, the world knew peace from this concept for a while – until Israel gained its independence on its own land.  Essentially, the world knew quiet from Hamas until King David.

What is Hamas?  The Arabs that perpetrated this “movement” upon the world claim it is an Arabic acronym (“Harkat al-Makuma al-Aslamiya).  The ‘acronym’ was invented after-the-fact.  “Hamas” is a Hebrew word.  It appears many times in the bible.  The first time it appears is in the description of the reason for the Great Flood.

The definition of Hamas is very strange.  To English, it is usually translated as theft. Theft is usually the act of taking something for the purpose of the thief’s wealth.  Hamas is quite different.  The purpose of Hamas is not wealth; it is to cause maximum harm to the other.  In other words, the idea of Hamas is a definition of egregious evil.  Evil for evil’s sake; harm for the sake of causing the other to hurt.

Hamas is discussed 65 times in the bible; of these, thirteen in Psalms (chapters 7, 11, 18, 25, 27, 35, 55, 58, 72, 73, 74 & 140).  The term is consistently used to depict more then ‘just’ an evil impulse, but a general concept of intentionally causing extreme harm to others, for no clear gain by the person or group performing Hamas.  The other uses of the word throughout the bible, in all of its parts, are entirely consistent with this meaning.

David referred to the Philistines as Hamas, and repeatedly begs Heaven for divine intervention.  He doesn’t receive it.  Again, “Hamas” is not ‘simply theft’ it is an expression of evil intent to cause harm.

Historically, we see two pre-conditions for Hamas, Israel in its land and self-governing its land (ignoring that first instance, of the Flood).

A brief glance at the history of this instance of Hamas shows that the organisation rears in 1982, when the population of Israel passed four million, 34 years after self-governance – even evil takes time to ripen.  However, the choice of this ‘telling’ name is equally Divine Intervention and is not “chance”.

What is the evidence that this Hamas is the historical Hamas?  PM Binyamin Netanyahu: “We use missile defence to protect people; they use people to protect missiles.”

A brief review of the recent history shows that in 2005 Israel evacuated every last Jew from the Gaza Strip, even the graves of the dead.  Until the evacuation, the hothouses of the area were worked by Arab labourers and they achieved, at their peak, some one hundred million dollars in agricultural revenue.  Fourteen days after the evacuation, the area had returned to being desert, all the hothouses had been burned to the ground, all of the equipment (worth tens of million of dollars) had been destroyed.

Hamas had not yet taken control of the area and did not govern anything.  Only two years later, in 2007, Hamas took over governing the area, while massacring all the PLO (Palestinian Authority) representatives.  This rump mini-state proceeded to garner billions of dollars of support from various international forums, nations and persons.  All ‘donors’ expected that this money would be used, at least in part (no sane person had any idea that rampant corruption would NOT be practiced) for betterment of the citizens of the area.  In fact, not a penny was spent on civil infrastructure, on work places, on export industry or on ‘defence’.  None of it was spent on weapons for attacking and killing ‘enemy’ soldiers.  Instead, all of it was spent on building a fantastically complex infrastructure for killing civilians, and only civilians.

In their perennial warring on the Israeli villages, towns and cities across the border, they continually fire only at civilians, with a preference for children.  Their main transport infrastructure is based upon use of ambulances to transport bombs and missiles.  They continually use their own citizens as Human Shields – even ordering them to ignore Israeli warning of imminent bombing.  See the testimonials, for instance, of UK Colonel Richard Kemp, both to the BBC and before the United Nations.

The Hamas Charter and Manifesto openly declares that their ultimate objective is annihilation of all Jews, anywhere in the world; not Israelis.  If they were ‘nasty’ only to Israelis, one could perceive them as a military or militant organisation, for instance, to depose and distance those who they perceive as conquerors and interlopers.  If they were ‘nasty’ only to Jews one could try to claim that they are fighting “simply a race war.”  But they are equally cruel to their own folks.

There is no choice, in logic, in absolute facts or in perception but to comprehend that we are speaking of an organisation that perceives ultimate evil, for its own sake, as their primary objective. In fact, historical Hamas.

Once Derek Jeter retires, everything the Yankees dynasty era represents goes with him

You tell me who carries on all the old-Yankee values and traditions at Yankee Stadium once Jeter is gone for good. I used to love it when people used to say that Jeter wasn't a vocal leader with the Yankees. It was never words with him, it isn't words now, it was and is the way he went about his business.

By Mike Lupica
http://www.nydailynews.com/sports
July 21, 2014



American League All-Star Derek Jeter #2 of the New York Yankees at Target Field on July 15, 2014 in Minneapolis, Minnesota (AFP Photo/Rob Carr)

The Yankees had Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera and Andy Pettitte and Jorge Posada and Bernie Williams, and for a time it was as storied a five as the Knicks once had in the old days. One by one they all left, and now it is only Jeter left. And when he is gone at the end of this season, the Yankees will go on, the brand of the Yankees will go on, the big business of the Yankees sure will. But more than Jeter's extraordinary career ends when he goes. The extraordinary culture that he and his own storied teammates helped create — or recreate with the Yankees — goes with him.

Oh, we will continue to hear about how the pinstripes and the uniform and the place will transform the new hired guns they bring in. That will happen just by hype and old glory, like the kind we get about Madison Square Garden still being a mecca of basketball after one victory in a playoff series in the past 14 years.

The Yankees have only had one World Series title over those same 14 years, even as they are constantly treated and covered like some sort of sleeping baseball giant about to rise up and roar again. But across that time, they have mostly made the playoffs, even as their old stars have left one by one, and more hired guns have been brought in to replace them.

But once Jeter is gone, there is no one who connects to any of that. There really is no one. It is why the notion that Jeter got too much money in that last contract scrum he had with the Yankees a few years ago was always so chowderheaded, and short-sighted. Or it was just people just thinking and saying what the people running the Yankees wanted them to think and say. You could never properly quantify what Jeter has meant to the brand, and still means.

Tim Duncan will never be treated or considered the way Jeter has been, like that kind of surpassing and iconic star of this time in American sports. Duncan never had New York, never had the Yankees, never was marketed that way because he frankly didn’t want to be. But the two of them are remarkably the same, and not just because they have each won five championships.

Duncan came along in 1997, one year after Jeter became the Yankee starter at shortstop. Only now, after all the winning he has done with the Spurs, he still is part of the Core Three in San Antonio along with Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker. They just won another NBA title together a month ago, and thrilled us all the way they did. The supporting cast in San Antonio, incidentally, has been replenished without spending a fortune year after year — after year — on hired guns.

You tell me who carries on all the old-Yankee values and traditions at Yankee Stadium once Jeter is gone for good. I used to love it when people used to say that Jeter wasn't a vocal leader with the Yankees. It was never words with him, it isn't words now, it was and is the way he went about his business and, along with the Core Four Plus Bernie, and Joe Torre, changed the way people thought and felt about the Yankees, whether they were Yankee fans or not.

The current manager of the team is a good guy. CC Sabathia seemed to embrace the culture before he broke down this way, and the back end of his contract became the pitching version of Alex Rodriguez's. We will never know how Robinson Cano's presence and excellence — and the fact that he was actually the first star, homegrown position player since Jeter — would have factored into all of this, because the Yankees chose not to give him 10 years at a time when they gave Jacoby Ellsbury seven.

For now, Jeter gets people to keep coming to the ballpark in numbers commensurate with what the Yankees have drawn in the past, so people can continue operating under the illusion that they are as big and entertaining as ever, when clearly they are not. He gives the Yankees another farewell tour after Mo Rivera's last season.

But this is the last farewell tour that matters at the Stadium. The dynasty ended a long time ago. Those days are gone, the way the big Yankees who helped Jeter win four World Series in five years are long gone. The dynasty effectively ended, as my friend Buster Olney wrote in a book once, with Game 7 of the 2001 World Series against the Diamondbacks.

The Yankee name will always be treated like the royalty of American sports, properly so. It does better these days than the Celtics or Lakers or Dallas Cowboys. The face of that royalty, more than anyone, as much as anybody the Yankees have ever had, has been Jeter.

The Yankees will go on, and will win again. It just won’t be like the winning they got from Jeter and Bernie and Mo, Pettitte and Posada. And Paul O'Neill. There will never again be a time like this. Jeter takes that with him. They can buy a lot at Yankee Stadium, maybe even one more postseason for Derek Jeter.

But when he goes, in all the ways that matter at the Stadium, there is no one.

***

“The Mike Lupica Show” can be heard Monday through Friday at noon and Sunday at 9 a.m. on ESPN 98.7.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/baseball/yankees/lupica-derek-jeter-retires-era-dies-article-1.1873488#ixzz386Eqxdj1

Today's Tune: Bruce Springsteen - "Hunter Of Invisible Game"

Overlooked trait essential to Jeter’s lore

By Joel Sherman

http://nypost.com/

July 19, 2014

Derek Jeter's warm personality often makes it easy to overlook his toughness.Photo: Charles Wenzelberg

Derek Jeter smiles easily. He is expert at being polite and non-controversial. He connects quickly with children. His fraternity with his peers is unforced and pleasant, whether the exchange is with a Quadruple-A hanger-on or All-Star clubhouse mate.

This all has helped form a public perception of Jeter that, I believe, robs perhaps his greatest attribute as a player — his toughness.

Yep, you don’t think of it quickly with Jeter, not when you have volumes of liners to right field and jump throws from the shortstop hole.

But you don’t come back from a separated shoulder at the earliest possible date without toughness, nor do you fight your way back from two ankle fractures at this late juncture of your career.

On Friday night, Jeter started his 2,610th game at shortstop. That moved him past Omar Vizquel for the most in major league history. It might not be Lou Gehrig or Cal Ripken stuff, and it came and went without confetti and fanfare. But you do not start that many games in the middle infield — all those double-play pivots, etc. — without a sense of responsibility, a reservoir of pride and a steely constitution. The day-after-day mental and physical grind ultimately defeats every athlete. But some endure better than others. And Jeter is at the top 1 percent.

“We all consider rolling over and shutting the alarm clock off,” Joe Torre said by phone. “Jeter never rolls over. He gets out of bed. It is never a consideration to take a day off. It is a sense of responsibility to his team and to himself.”

Modal Trigger

Fans cheer on Jeter at Yankee Stadium.Photo: Paul J. Bereswill

I remember a conversation long ago with Gene Michael when he was still the Yankees general manager. We were discussing the traditional five tools — hitting, hitting for power, running, fielding and throwing.

That day I disagreed with the confines of the five tools. I suggested there were so many more than five tools. Aptitude was vital. You could have five tools, but if you couldn’t apply them, what was the use? Victor Martinez might only have two tools, but he has pretty much maximized them. That is so much more valuable than having five that excite scouts but never come out in games with consistency.

Grace under pressure is a tool. Again, you could have the physical stuff down, but if you can’t do it with 40,000 people in attendance or in October, what is the point?

Discipline is a tool. Are you going to keep working out, avoid perks that could drain your energy and skill?

And durability is a tool. Danny Tartabull used to tell me to project his stats over a full season and I finally told him, “Why? You never play a full season.” Mark Buehrle might not be blessed with the stuff that makes scouts drool, but wind him up and he gives you 200 innings. Every year. Year after year.

I remember that conversation with Stick because he agreed with me, and that felt large because of how much I respected his scouting acumen. I often have thought about it since watching Jeter.

Because I believe it is in all these areas beyond the traditional tools that Jeter was an A-plus and took very good traditional tools to a Hall-of-Fame level.

His aptitude, his grace under pressure, his discipline and — for me — especially his toughness.

He refused to discuss injuries. Jeter had the Chili Davis Code: If I am playing, I am healthy enough to play. He never played the “I am 80 percent” game to provide an alibi. Never told you off the record how he was really feeling, again, as a way to set up the excuse. “I’m all right.” That he what he told managers and media.

Jeter felt a responsibility to play, that the team was best when he did. Torre and Joe Girardi have known they could write his name into the lineup game after game, season after season. Do you know how much easier that makes the managing job?

“There was a playoff series in which he had pretty much a broken hand, got shot up for Game 1, couldn’t feel his hand and said he would rather just play with the pain,” Torre said. “There was never a consideration that he wouldn’t play. He came to the ballpark to play. It certainly made my job a whole lot easier. You talk about a guy who is a leader. You have someone who wants to rest, they look across the locker room and see him. He forced other people to play, not literally, but by example.”

Troy Tulowitzki is part of the legion of players to wear No. 2 out of respect and idolization of Jeter. He probably has more “tools” than the prime-aged Jeter. But in his first seven full seasons, Tulowitzki has exceeded 140 games started at short three times and 150 one time. Jeter started at least 148 games in each of his first seven years.

Jeter separated his shoulder in Season Eight, started 118, then started at least 147 games in each of his next seven seasons. Tulowitzki never has exceeded 155 starts at shortstop in a season.

Jeter has 157 starts at short — in the postseason. Yep, he had an entire extra year’s worth of shortstop work in the playoffs that didn’t count toward knocking Vizquel from his mantle.

Next time we talk about Tulowitzki or Jose Reyes succeeding Jeter, let’s remember how fragile both have been. The tools are there, but not always the durability.

Meanwhile, Jeter fell backward into the stands during the 2001 playoffs and marshaled on a damaged player. He famously dove into the stands on July 1, 2004, to make a catch and smashed up his face against the Red Sox. He started the next day.

That is why when he finally broke in the 2012 ALCS it was such a shock — because he went down and couldn’t get up. We assumed it was pretty much for good when 2013 was such a physical disaster for Jeter. But Derek Jeter has a Die Hard ethos. After all those other top shortstops have come and gone — Alex Rodriguez, Miguel Tejada, Nomar Garciaparra — he endures.

Start No. 79 of this season was No. 2,610 of his career. More than anyone ever. That seemed right. It was a number that screamed what Derek Jeter never would:

I am tough.

The Malaysia Airlines crash is the end of Russia’s fairy tale

By Anne Applebaum

http://www.washingtonpost.com/

July 18, 2014

A woman walks at the site of a crashed Malaysia Airlines passenger plane near the village of Rozsypne, eastern Ukraine Friday, July 18, 2014. Rescue workers, policemen and even off-duty coal miners were combing a sprawling area in eastern Ukraine near the Russian border where the Malaysian plane ended up in burning pieces Thursday, killing all 298 aboard. (AP Photo/Dmitry Lovetsky) (Dmitry Lovetsky/AP)

Before there is any further discussion of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, it’s important that one point be made absolutely clear: This plane crash is a result of the Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine, an operation deliberately designed to create legal, political and military chaos. Without this chaos, a surface-to-air missile would not have been fired at a passenger plane.

From the beginning, the Russian government did not send regular soldiers to Ukraine. Instead, it sent Russian mercenaries and security service operatives such as Igor Strelkov — the commander in chief in Donetsk and a Russian secret police colonel who fought in both Chechen wars — andVladimir Antyufeyev, the Donetsk “deputy prime minister” who led the Latvian KGB’s attempt to overthrow the independent Latvian government in 1991.

With the help of local thugs, these Russian security men besieged police stations, government offices and other symbols of political authority to delegitimize the Ukrainian state. In this task, they were assisted by the Russian government and by Russia’s state-controlled mass media, both of which still constantly denigrateUkraine and its “Nazi” government. Just in the past week, Russian reporting on Ukraine reached a new pitch of hysteria, with fake stories about the supposed crucifixion of a child and an extraordinary documentary comparing the Ukrainian army’s defense of its own country with the Rwandan genocide.

Into this ambiguous and unstable situation, the Russians cynically funneled a stream of heavy weapons: machine guns and artillery and, eventually, tanks, armed personnel carriers and anti-aircraft missiles. In recent days, the separatist forces were openly using man-portable air-defense systems (MANPADS) and boasting of having taken down large Ukrainian transport planes, clearly with Russian specialist assistance. Indeed, Strelkov on Thursday afternoon reportedly boasted online of having taken down another military plane before realizing that the plane in question was MH17. The blog post was removed. In late June, several different Russian media sources published photographs of Buk anti-aircraft missiles that they said had been captured by the separatists — though they were probably outright gifts from Russia. These posts have also been removed.

This is the context within which a surface-to-air missile was aimed at a passenger plane: a lawless environment; irregular soldiers who might not be so good at reading radar; a nihilistic disregard for human life; scorn for international norms, rules or standards. Just for the record: There weren’t any Ukrainian government-controlled anti-aircraft missiles in eastern Ukraine because the separatists were not flying airplanes.

Until now, these unorthodox methods have worked well for the Russians. They unnerved and distracted the Ukrainian government while allowing foreign governments, and European governments in particular, to turn a blind eye. Because the war was not a “real” war, it could be described as “local,” as “containable,” it could remain a low priority for European foreign policy or indeed for anybody’s foreign policy.

If it has done nothing else, the crash of Flight 17 has just put an end to the “it’s not a real war” fairy tale, both for the Russians and for the West. Tragically, this unconventional non-war war just killed 298 people, mostly Europeans. We can’t pretend it isn’t happening any longer or that it doesn’t affect anyone outside of Donetsk. The Russians can’t pretend either.

Without the fairy-tale pretense, some things are about to become clear. For one, we are about to learn whether the West in 2014 is as united and as determined to stop terrorism as it was 26 years ago. When the Libyan government brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, the West closed ranks and isolated the Libyan regime. Can we do the same now — or will too many be tempted to describe this as a “tragic accident” and to dismiss what will inevitably be a controversial investigation as “inconclusive”? It is insufficient to state, as President Obama now has , that there must be a “cease-fire” in Ukraine. What is needed is a withdrawal of Russian mercenaries, weapons and support. The West — and the world — must push for Ukrainian state sovereignty to be re-established in eastern Ukraine, not for the perpetuation of another frozen conflict.

We will also learn something interesting about the Russian president. So far there is no sign of shock or shame in Russia. But in truth, this tragedy offers Vladimir Putin an opportunity to get out of the messy disaster he created in eastern Ukraine. He has the perfect excuse to denounce the separatist movement and to cut its supplies. If he refuses, then we know that he remains profoundly dedicated to the chaos and nihilism he created in Donetsk. We can assume he intends to perpetuate it elsewhere. And if we are not prepared to fight it, we should be braced for it to spread.

Read more from Anne Applebaum’s archive, follow her on Twitter orsubscribe to her updates on Facebook.

Read more about this issue:

The Post’s View: The world must know downed the Malaysia Airlines plane

Zbigniew Brzezinski: Putin’s three choices on Ukraine

Henry Kissinger: To settle the Ukraine crisis, start at the end

An Obama-Caused Border Disaster

Make no mistake, the president has instigated the present influx of illegal aliens. 

By Andrew C. McCarthy

http://www.nationalreview.com/
July 19, 2014

US President Barack Obama delivers a statement on the urgent humanitarian situation following his meeting with local elected officials and faith leaders on July 8, 2014 in Dallas, Texas. 

Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty

It is a grave error to view the swarming of illegal aliens across our southern border as anything other than a challenge to our sovereignty — a challenge abetted, rather than repulsed, by a president who vows to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.” The challenge brings into sharp relief a question I’ve repeatedly pressed (see, e.g., here, here, here, and here): If the states cannot or will not defend themselves, are they still, in any real sense, sovereign?

As expected, the president’s mainstream-media allies portray Obama as a man struggling to manage a crisis beyond his control, a crisis their thin and exhausted playbook instructs them to blame on George W. Bush. Nonsense.

In Faithless Execution, I detail Obama’s immigration lawlessness — at least the very extensive record compiled as of mid-spring 2014, when I had to stop writing in order to make an early June publication date. If you’re keeping track, mid-spring was before the ramping up of the ongoing invasion, which already involves close to 300,000 illegal aliens (less than 20 percent of whom are, according to the New York Times, “unaccompanied minors”). It was, however, months after what we now know was the Obama “Homeland Security” Department’s solicitation of escort services to help handle an anticipated arrival of 65,000 illegal-alien minors.

As one would expect, the usual Obama apologists claim that the administration was not conspiring in the invasion. Rather, it was preparing for a humanitarian crisis it had heard alarms about but was somehow powerless to avert. On its face, this is laughable: The executive branch has many ways of discouraging and stopping attempts by foreigners — whether as an armed force or in overwhelming numbers — to enter our country. More significantly, the facts here point unmistakably to willful administration collusion.

The January 2014 solicitation published by DHS’s bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement foretells (a) the arrival of 65,000 “unaccompanied alien children,” and, tellingly, (b) the administration’s intention to transfer them to “Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) shelters located throughout the continental United States.” Weasel Zippers points out the glaring fact, largely ignored by the press, that by planning to dispatch the new arrivals to ORR, the administration implicitly presumed that they should be deemed refugees, not excludable or deportable illegal aliens.

The mission of the ORR is to settle “new populations” within the United States, not to detain them pending expulsion. Clearly, the plan was — is — to seed thousands of illegal aliens in cities and towns throughout the country. That is perfectly consistentwith other aspects of the administration’s radical agenda, such as “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing,” Obama’s plan to have the executive branch engineer the racial and ethnic composition of American neighborhoods.

The president has spent nearly six years giving effective legal immunity to millions of illegal aliens already here. His administration, meanwhile, hooks them on the government gravy train and fights state efforts to detain them, deny social services to them, and prevent them from fraudulently voting. Under those circumstances, the rolling out of a federal red carpet for teeming masses of illegal aliens must be understood as intentional.

To be sure, the administration, in its arrogance and ideological zeal, underestimated the resulting groundswell of American protest. It has thus fallen back on its modus operandi, which should be painfully familiar by now: Once assured that an Obama-caused disaster is fully underway, the president endeavors to evade accountability by making a couple of disingenuous gestures in seeming opposition to the crisis he has orchestrated — enough for his courtiers to run with.

So, after 300,000 illegal aliens of all ages have spent thee months pouring in, Obama finally tells ABC News that “unaccompanied children” should not be sent to the United States because the trip here is dangerous and “if they do make it [here], they’ll get sent back.” Right. Then, even as his administration, under a veil of secrecy, transfers tens of thousands of illegals to communities across the country (without notifying state officials), Obama ceremoniously deports a grand total of 38 Hondurans. That’s —  as Sweetness & Light computed — one-one-hundredth of a percent of the swarm that has crossed our border since April. Predictably, the president’s media accomplices highlight these trifling, cynical ploys as clear proof that Obama opposes the invasion he has instigated. And while we are diverted debating that claim, thousands more invaders are resettled as refugees.

In the interim, the press blames Bush. It’s a shrewd gambit: The charge is plausible because the GOP establishment has desperately pushed amnesty for years; even better, the charge involves a complex 2008 law, so it is difficult to unwind. Indeed, even conservative pundits have accepted the premise that what the press monotonously tells us is a “Bush-era law” has contributed mightily to the border crisis.

In reality, this 2008 measure, known as the “William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Act,” was a Democratic amendment, added by Senator Dianne Feinstein and then-Senator (and Vice President-elect) Joe Biden to the seemingly uncontroversial reauthorization of a Clinton-era anti-human-trafficking law. Yes, Bush did sign the measure just before leaving office — the third time he’d signed a reauthorization of the feel-good, anti-human-trafficking law. But to blame this law for the crisis is to blame a leak in the kitchen faucet for the flood that is carrying the house away.

The act gives extensive due-process protections to “unaccompanied alien children” who come to the United States from “non-contiguous” countries — i.e., not Mexico or Canada (which is why the swarm originates in Central America). But only if these children are actually victims of human trafficking, the narrow class the legislation aims to protect. As a new report from the Center for Immigration Studies explains, the Wilberforce law is “largely irrelevant” to the situation at hand, which involves illegal aliens willingly smuggled into the country so they can live here, not coercively trafficked into the country for purposes of sex slavery or other indentured servitude. As the report elaborates, immigration law distinguishes smuggling from trafficking.

Moreover, the children at issue are not really “unaccompanied” as that term is defined in the federal code. Again, the law is intended to protect children who are forced to come to our country for certain nefarious purposes. The children in this case overwhelmingly have family members who have taken up residence in the U.S., often illegally. Joining these family members is the objective of their illegal entry. Many of the “children” are also gang members who, while technically minors, voluntarily come here to wreak havoc. 

Finally, even if we were to concede, for argument’s sake, that the human-trafficking law truly applies, its own terms allow its suspension in exceptional circumstances — a fact acknowledged by Senator Feinstein, an author of the law, who told the New York Times that the law has the “flexibility” to allow for accelerated removal proceedings.

The “Bush-era law” actually contributes to the border crisis in only one significant way: as the sleight-of-hand by which our lawless president suddenly claims to be bound by the rule of law. It is the due-process camouflage for his ruinous and legally unnecessary importation and strategic dispersal of thousands of low-skilled, unassimilated, future Democratic voters.

Make no mistake: President Obama has instigated this crisis — a two-fer that advances the project of remaking the country while crowding the IRS, the VA, Benghazi, Bergdahl, the Taliban, ISIS, Hamas, the EPA, Obamacare, Ukraine, and other debacles out of the public’s finite attention span. The invasion was invited by a systematic campaign to gut the immigration laws.

As Faithless Execution relates, that campaign has included punishing states that attempt to police illegal immigration. Obama’s Justice Department unabashedly contended in court that it was immaterial whether state enforcement practices conformed to congressional statutes; what mattered was whether the state was in violation of Obama’s immigration policy — i.e., the policy of non-enforcement. If not, state self-defense measures had to be invalidated.

In addition, when Congress, prodded by intense public opposition to Obama’s agenda, declined to legislate amnesty for various categories of illegal aliens, the president unilaterally and unconstitutionally decreed this amnesty — also presuming to confer benefits like work permits and “unlawful presence waivers.” Further, while padding statistics to create the illusion of significant deportation activity, the administration contorted the doctrine of prosecutorial discretion into a rationale for dropping pending criminal cases, and otherwise declining prosecution, against thousands of illegal-alien felons, who have been loosed on our streets.

The administration has become infamous for its complicity in conspiracies to smuggle illegal aliens into the United States. Think that’s hyperbole? Consider this scathing opinion filed late last year by Judge Andrew S. Hannen of the federal district court in Texas. The case involved a Salvadoran alien named Patricia Salmeron Santos, who entered our country illegally and took up residence in Virginia. As the judge related, she then

started this conspiracy by hiring alien smugglers to transfer her child from El Salvador to Virginia. . . . The criminal conspiracy . . . was temporarily interrupted when [the co-conspirator smuggler, Mirtha Nava-Martinez] was arrested [trying to smuggle the ten-year-old child into the country with a false birth certificate]. 

Despite this setback, the goal of the conspiracy was successfully completed thanks to the actions of the United States Government. This Court is quite concerned with the apparent policy of the Department of Homeland Security (hereinafter “DHS”) of completing the criminal mission of individuals who are violating the border security of the United States. Customs and Border Protection agents stopped the Defendant at the border inspection point. She was arrested, and the child was taken into custody. The DHS officials were notified that Salmeron Santos instigated this illegal conduct. Yet, instead of arresting Salmeron Santos for instigating the conspiracy to violate our border security laws, the DHS delivered the child to her — thus successfully completing the mission of the criminal conspiracy. It did not arrest her. It did not prosecute her. It did not even initiate deportation proceedings for her. . . . 

The DHS, instead of enforcing our border security laws, actually assisted the criminal conspiracy in achieving its illegal goals. . . . In summary, instead of enforcing the laws of the United States, the Government took direct steps to help the individuals who violated it [sic]. A private citizen would, and should, be prosecuted for this conduct.

Judge Hannen went on to recount that this was the fourth case in as many weeks that followed this fact pattern. In each case, illegal-alien parents funded criminal conspiracies to smuggle their illegal-alien children into the country; in each case, Obama’s DHS stopped the smugglers and the children at the border, yet — instead of arresting the illegal-alien parents behind the scheme — willfully perfected the conspiracy by doing what the smuggler had been illegally recruited to do: deliver the children to their illegal alien parents. “The DHS,” the court concluded, “has simply chosen not to enforce the United States’ border security laws.”

Just so. And if a renegade United States government is not going to secure the borders of the United States, the states must secure their borders or surrender. As the Supreme Court recognized in 1837, each state has a sovereign right and duty of self-defense — one that is never “more appropriately exercised” than in preventing her citizens from being

exposed to the evil of thousands of foreign emigrants arriving there, and the consequent danger of her citizens being subjected to a heavy charge in the maintenance of those who are poor. It is the duty of the state to protect its citizens from this evil.

It still is. Or maybe they should just wait a few years. By then, perhaps Speaker Boehner’s lawsuit against President Obama will be over and he’ll be ready to sue Central America.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a policy fellow at the National Review Institute. His latest book, Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment, was released by Encounter Books on June 3.