Collected blowback articles of Zenobia van Dongen

https://islamophiliawatch.blogspot.com/2016/02/critique-of-blowback-hypothesis.html

Critique of the blowback hypothesis

The blowback hypothesis states that terrorism against the US is caused by prior imperialist
aggression perpetrated by the US.
Blowback is a form of revenge, reprisals for harm inflicted previously.
This hypothesis seems plausible. I am quite willing to accept that revenge sometimes plays a
role in generating terrorism.
But it does not explain ALL cases of terrorism against the US.
In the 1990s the US saved Bosnian Moslems from Bosnian Serb aggression.
In this scenario the blowback hypothesis would predict that Bosnian Serbs are more likely to
threaten the US than Bosnian Moslems.
Since then several Bosnians have been convicted for terrorism in the US. None of them were
Bosnian Serbs. All of them were Bosnian Moslems.
Consequently in this case the blowback hypothesis fails to explain Islamic terrorism. On the
contrary, this is a clear case of terrorism generated by purely ideological motives.
Posted 6th February 2016 by Zenobia van Dongen
2 View comments
Iyas Safadi, 4 February 2017 at 19:53
Nonsense, Bosnian Serbs and Americans mostly follow the same religion. On the other hand,
America has been supporting Israel unconditionally in its occupation, war crimes and
apartheid against the Palestinian people. That's why Muslims, even Bosnian Muslims, may
detest and hate America. Even Osama Bin Laden cited America's unconditional support of
Israel and its war crimes and cruel blockade of Iraq which caused the death of 500,000 Iraqis
children in the 1990's as reasons for the September 11 attacks.
Zenobia van Dongen, 5 September 2018 at 23:55
What you write proves my point. Bosnian Muslims commit acts of terrorism against the USA,
not because the USA harmed them, but because their Muslim ideology commands them to
hate the USA. One of the many excuses that Muslim ideology uses to justify jihad is
conspiracy theories about Muslims having been harmed somewhere else. All Muslims are
programmed to hate the alleged enemies of Muslims without ever questioning allegations of
abuse. Palestinian students burned the Angolan flag to protest against the banning of Islam in
Angola ... but it turned out to be a big mistake, Islam hadn’t been banned there at all! Likewise
the stories Palestinians tell about Palestinian history are 99% lies.
The trouble is that there is no concept of truth in Islam. Instead of truth, Muslims have tribal
loyalty.

One man’s blowback is another man’s coincidence

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/feb/29/focus-on-islamist-terror-plots-overlooks-
threat-from-far-right-
report?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+main+NEW+H+n
ew+sign+ups&utm_term=159255&subid=11111629&CMP=EMCNE
A group of British and Dutch Establishment-friendly think tanks recently submitted a report
covering all known cases of lone-wolf terrorism in Europe. The countries with most terrorism
are also the ones with most Moslems, by and large. After the UK’s 38 planned terrorist
attacks, France came second with 11. Germany and Sweden both had five. Belgium is the only
outlier, with few attacks in proportion to its large Moslem population.
However the survey revealed that the threat from far-right terrorists is being neglected by
governments and law enforcement. While Islamist plotters (here elegantly labeled
“religiously-inspired” terrorists) are given full attention, the report warns that individuals and
small rightwing extremist groups are in fact more lethal than jihadis, almost as numerous, and
much harder to detect by security services.
That would certainly seem to exonerate Moslems from much of the suspicions to which they
are subjected.
BUT NOT SO FAST, since the report ALSO finds that almost half of rightwing attacks in
Britain over recent years were partly motivated by the murder of Lee Rigby. Rigby was
murdered on the street by a pair of Mohammedan fanatics who had converted to Islam and
been indoctrinated in jihadi ideology by British Moslem hate preachers. Rigby’s death
unleashed a wave of arson attacks and bombings against numerous Mohammedan shrines.
In other words, many rightwing attacks were not spontaneous, but merely reactions to jihadi
provocations.
Pavlo Lapshyn, a white supremacist, migrated from the Ukraine to England in April 2013 and
five days later stabbed a Muslim to death.
Lee Rigby was murdered in London by two Mohammedan fanatics on 22 May 2013. The
following month, on 21 June 2013, Lapshyn started a bombing rampage against local
mosques. His final bomb detonated on the day of Lee Rigby’s funeral.
Blowback? The British police aren’t buying it. Mere coincidence, they say. Police steadfastly
deny that Lapshyn was motivated by Rigby’s murder.
Usually no evidence is produced to demonstrate that Islamic terrorism is nothing but well-
deserved “blowback” for prior evildoing by the West. In such cases, blowback is accepted a
matter of faith. But for some reason, a law of nature perhaps, blowback cannot operate in the
opposite direction. Mohammedan excesses can never be an explanatory factor for rightwing
violence.
The report’s conclusions reflect the situation in Western Europe, which suffers more from
terrorism than central and eastern Europe. However, for the last few years, all terrorist attacks
in central and eastern Europe -- in Austria and Poland for example -- have been committed by
Moslems. Consequently in these countries Islamic terrorism remains the principal terror
threat.
Counter-jihadists have little to gain by committing random acts of violence against
Mohammedans. Acts of lethal anti-Moslem violence are counterproductive. To effectively
contain the Mohammedan menace, we must rely on peaceful exercise of our democratic
rights.
Addendum: I must retract my indignant protest at the English police denying that Pavlo
Lapshyn's crimes were a reaction to the murder of Lee Rigby. Having read more about the
case, I now agree with the cops. The reason is that Lapshyn's trip to England had been
planned long in advance, and while still in the Ukraine, Lapshyn is known to have
experimented with explosives. Consequently Lapshyn's crimes were clearly premeditated. But
that does not imply that anti-Muslim blowback never occurs.
Posted 13th March 2016 by Zenobia van Dongen

Lacking in blowbackicity
Disjointed notes on the care and feeding of blowbacks
It is true that often the media indeed try to avoid blaming Western policy for anti-Western
violence.
On the other hand often the media are quite candid about the cause of the blowback.
For example, a few years ago in Sweden, an Iraqi who had come to Sweden as a child refugee
and had been educated in Swedish schools blew himself up in a crowded shopping area of
Stockholm during the Xmas shopping season. The underlying cause: Sweden refused to
punish a cartoonist who made fun of the prophet Mohammed.
Or isn’t that the kind of blowback you had in mind?
PS. Thanks to a malfunction, he managed to kill only himself.
On this web site the term “blowback” seems to be used far more often than warranted, and
furthermore sometimes used to describe phenomena whose blowbackicity is not always
evident to the uninitiated.
Moreover nowadays blowback is nearly always applied to acts of violence. Its original meaning
was far broader, such as used by Chalmers Johnson.
http://nypolisci.org/files/PDF%20FILES/Chapter%20VIII_%202_Blowback.pdf
I think it is high time to review both usage and meaning of this term.
London 2005
Were the 2005 London bombings “blowback”? In a sense they were, since they were
motivated by the illegal invasion of Iraq. But the perps were not Iraqis. They were Englishmen
of Pakistani descent who had never been to the Middle East. Consequently they were
avenging the deaths of complete strangers to whom they were bound only by a common
religion.
Saddam Hussein and the current president of Sudan killed at least as many Moslems as Tony
Blair and George Bush.
Where was the blowback?
As a matter of fact the Sudanese president is quite popular in the Middle East.
Moslems who kill Moslems get a free pass. Culprits are denounced and punished only if they
are outsiders.
Bosnia
“Revenge can be inspired by other stuff besides the “personal” sort.”
You’re quite right. When revenge is not of the personal sort, it’s generally of the ideological
sort.
There are many cases of Moslem violence that can only be explained by ideological motives.
In the 1990s the US saved Bosnian Moslems from brutal Bosnian Serb aggression.
In this scenario the blowback hypothesis would predict that Bosnian Serbs are more likely to
threaten the US than Bosnian Moslems.
Since then several Bosnians have been convicted for terrorism in the US. None of them were
Bosnian Serbs. All of them were Bosnian Moslems.
Consequently in this case the blowback hypothesis fails to explain Islamic terrorism. On the
contrary, this is a clear case of terrorism generated by purely ideological motives.
Paris and Brussels 2015-2016
To call the Paris and Brussels attacks “blowback” seems to imply that people from the Middle
East went to Paris and Brussels to avenge imperialist crimes committed against their nearest
and dearest. But all the terrorists in Paris and Brussels were natives to those cities. Their only
link to the Middle East was religious and/or ideological. Specifically, the terrorists were
people of Moslem background who chose to ally themselves with enemies of their native
countries principally because those enemies were Moslems.
Consequently, these instances of “blowback” would never have occurred if there were not a
Moslem fifth column in Europe willing to do the bidding of foreign terrorists.
The attacks on Paris and Brussels could only occur because those cities have large Moslem
populations.
Therefore it seems reasonable to conclude that the principal cause of terrorism in Europe is
not blowback but Islam.
Posted 21st April 2016 by Zenobia van Dongen

Terrorism Threat Comes From Pookums, Not

Muslims!
Comment on:
From: Glenn Greenwald on "Submissive" Media's Drumbeat for War and "Despicable" Anti-
Muslim Scapegoating, Democracy Now! November 21, 2015

Glenn Greenwald, bootlicker of Islamic imperialism

Reading this transcript of an interview between left-wing US journalists Glenn Greenwald and
Amy Goodman, I was appalled at their vigorous licking of the Islamic boot. Since they both
appear to be ideology-driven instead of fact-driven, I charitably assumed that they are not
doing it for crass material gain, but doing it instead for that special feeling of blessedness that
derives from dispensing soothing propaganda about looming public menaces.
They’re fighting their grandparents´ wars ... at our expense.
The “Pookum Postulate”
Definition:
PWCMs [pronounced "Pookums”] People Who Claim to be Muslims
Formulated by the French Islamophobologist Yasser Louati in his soon-to-be-renowned
“Pookum Postulate”
A handful of insane, psychotic lunatics suffering from delirium tremens idiotically claim that
Muslims are the main source of terrorism. However, contrary to popular belief, it is actually
the Pookum community that poses the true threat of terrorism to the West, as revealed by an
authoritative French expert on Islamophobia who coined the concept in the course of an
interview with CNN. His ctbn to human wisdom shall go down in history as “the Pookum
Postulate”.
“CNN interview on Sunday morning with Yasser Louati from the Collective Against
Islamophobia in France. CNN anchors John Vause and Isha Sesay spent several minutes
grilling their guest on the role of the Muslim community in the Paris attacks [of 13 November
2015].
...
YASSER LOUATI: “Sir, the Muslim community has nothing to do with these guys.” ... and
cannot accept responsibility “for the actions of someone who just, you know, CLAIMS to be
Muslim.” [those were his very words, so help me dog]
...
CNN anchors: .”.. within the Muslim community to identify what is happening within their
own ranks when it comes to people who are obviously training and preparing to carry out
mass murder?”
 ...
YASSER LOUATI: “They were not from our ranks ... what these terrorists are blaming our
country for is for its failed foreign policy.”
...
This so-called Muslim civil rights activist from Paris talks the talk, but he doesn’t walk the
walk. His whole demeanor of loyalty to France and denying the slightest association with the
Islamic State terrorists, is immediately unmasked as a phony pose when HE EXPRESSLY
AND SPONTANEOUSLY PRAISES THE TERRORISTS’ ALLEGED MOTIVES by saying “what
these terrorists are blaming our country [i.e. France] for is for its failed foreign policy.”
In plaintext: ”Blowback”.
He’s saying the problem is French foreign policy and not the ubiquitous presence of Muslims
in France.
It so happens that the day before this interview between Amy Goodman and Glenn
Greenwald, Swedish police arrested a glum [sic] terrorism suspect who they officially
announced -- as fact, not as suspicion -- was planning attacks in Sweden on behalf of the
Islamic State. https://www.rt.com/news/322926-terrorist-arrest-stockholm-isis/
Was that blowback for Sweden’s war crimes in the Middle East? It would not have been the
first time Sweden has been a victim of Islamic terrorism.
Nonetheless it is well known that Sweden has better relations to the Palestinians than
to Israel. On 15 January 2016 the BBC reported "Israel's Netanyahu: Swedish Foreign
Minister's remarks 'outrageous'". Sweden is one of the most Islamophile countries in Europe,
in terms of willingness to accept Muslim immigrants, subsidize Palestinian refugees and
rake Israel over the coals. And this has been going on for many decades.[1]
Consequently the motive that Yasser implicitly attributes to the Paris attacks (i.e. revenge for
crimes against Islam) is evidently not applicable to Sweden and moreover calls into question
the whole notion behind the “blowback” slogan as it has been recently used, i.e. as a
euphemistic way of justifying Islamic atrocities.
Then comes Yasser Louati’s master stroke, his true claim to fame as the topmost theoretician
of postmodern French demography: he utters the immortal words
“someone who just, you know, CLAIMS to be Muslim”
Thus creating in the twinkling of an eye a pressing new need to distinguish meticulously
between two completely separate population groups, to wit:
1. “Muslims” on the one hand, and
2. people “who just, you know, CLAIM to be Muslims” (i.e. Pookums) on the other hand.
I remember the photos of the Paris perps – they looked typically Franco-Arab, down to those
little beards that hint at certain eternal and world-shaking principles that I will address at
some other time. Their names were all typical Arab Muslim names. They had all been born
in France or Belgium to Muslim immigrants or their progeny.
BUT DESPITE ALL THAT– insists this champion slayer of wicked islamophobes – THEY
WEREN'T MUSLIMS AT ALL, THEY WERE JUST POOKUMS!
In commenting on the Islamic State threat to Sweden, Swedish security officials laid special
stress on the 300 to 500 Swedes who are reported to have traveled to Syria to indulge in
Islamic terrorism. The officials seemed apprehensive that their return to Sweden would
greatly heighten the terrorism risk. The article failed to specify whether, when making their
terrorism threat assessment, the Swedish security officials were taking into account the anti-
terrorist protective effect exerted by so many decades of Swedish devotion to the cause of
the world’s oppressed.
This suggests that the principal measure of an Islamic terrorism threat – at least in Europe --
should be sought, NOT in a country’s foreign policy, BUT INSTEAD in the strength and
composition of its Mohammedan population.
Oh, and I almost forgot to add: PLUS its Pookum population! Perhaps in order to clarify
matters, the French should ditch their tradition of refusing to acknowledge people’s religions
officially. That way it would be printed on your ID card whether you’re an atheist, a voodoo
practitioner, a Scientologist, a Pookum or a Muslim.
Glenn and Amy didn’t seem to notice anything amiss in the yarn dished up by their main
squeeze out Paris ways. Amy and Glenn are no dolts. They know what the score is. They saw
the Paris perps’ mugshots and they read their Muslim names. Nonetheless Glenn and Amy
didn’t seem the least bit surprised to hear that the perps weren’t Muslims at all, but Pookums
instead!
Perhaps they had known all along.
Well, I sure hope Yasser gets the Nobel Prize for his ground-breaking discovery of a hitherto
uncharted segment of the French population: the Pookums, and the menace that the Pookum
community poses to “our” society, as Yasser never tires of repeating. He’s obviously a great
French patriot. Wears a little beard. Just like Marcel Proust.
One consequence of the Pookum Postulate as formulated by that distinguished civil rights
activist and French patriot Yasser Louati, is that people’s appearances, behavior and names
offer no clues to their religious background. Now, if in accordance with aforesaid Pookum
Postulate, i.e. if you cannot tell people are Muslims from their appearance, their behavior or
their names, then ethnic profiling of Muslims is technically impossible.
In that case, how come Louati elsewhere protests against ethnic profiling of
Muslims?[2] Since pursuant to the Pookum Postulate, ethnic profiling of Muslims is a task
technically impossible to perform, it is inconceivable that attempts at such profiling could in
any way affect Muslims´ well-being.
Louati’s only valid objection would be to call it a waste of taxpayers´ money.

[1] I grant that it is conceivable that the Swedish spooks announced this arrest as a favor
to France, in order to deflate the blowback hypothesis for the Paris attacks of 15 Nov.
However, even if this announcement was a mere public relations operation, the fact is
that Sweden has been the target of several Islamic terrorist attacks before. So such
conjectural fakery would not disprove the assumption that the true measure of an Islamic
terrorism threat is not a country’s foreign policy, but instead the strength and composition of
its Mohammedan ( AND Pookum) populations.
This is however merely an empirical rule of thumb that reflects current conditions. There is
nothing inexorable about it.
[2] Even if Louati does not expressly say ethnic profiling “of Muslims”, but merely mentions
ethnic profiling in general, it can be fairly inferred that he means Muslims and not the
population at large, since he is the boss of an anti-Islamophobia organization.
I am not here taking any position regarding ethnic profiling. Even if we consider ethnic
profiling something good in principle, an excess of ethnic profiling is definitely bad. And it
appears that in France [and likely elsewhere] ethnic profiling is used excessively and almost
certainly -- at least sometimes -- constitutes unnecessary harassment of certain subordinate
minorities.
Posted 29th April 2016 by Zenobia van Dongen

Blowback Chronicles 1
Comment on:
Will It Take The End of the World For Obama To Recognize ISIS As 'Islamic'?, by Asra Q.
Nomani and Hala Arafa [two self-described "liberal Muslim feminist journalists" living in
the United States], Daily Beast, 20 Feb 2015
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/02/20/will-it-take-the-end-of-the-world-for-
obama-to-recognize-isis.html

A video of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians having their throats slit

by ISIS on a beach outside Tripoli, Libya.
“As the hostages lay slaughtered, the on-screen script read: ‘This filthy blood is only a portion
of what awaits you to avenge Camelia and her sisters.’”
In other words the ISIL murder of 21 Copts was BLOWBACK for what happened to “Camelia
and her sisters.”
Well, what DID happen to Camelia and her sisters?
The answer is “Nothing”.
“.. Camelia Shehata, the wife of a Coptic priest, who was at the center of a sectarian dispute
in Egypt five years ago. Many Muslims believed she converted to Islam but was illegally
detained and tortured for doing so along with other Coptic women. Although she insisted she
hadn’t converted, the grievance remained.”
So they murdered 21 people because of an urban legend that had been publicly denied by the
principal alleged victim.
This was BLOWBACK FOR A CRIME THAT HAD NEVER HAPPENED.
Islam is an intricate structure of gossip, superstitions, bullshit and innuendo.
Posted 4th May 2016 by Zenobia van Dongen
 Blowback Chronicles 2
Chalmers Johnson’s theory of blowback outsourcing
Chalmers Johnson appears to be the inventor of the term “blowback”. He writes,
“Our [US] government has never been honest about its own role in the 1973 overthrow of the
elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile or its backing, through “Operation Condor,”
of what the State Department has recently called “extrajudicial killings” in Argentina,
Paraguay, Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America. But we now have several thousand of our
own “disappeareds,” and we are badly mistaken if we think that we in the United States are
entirely blameless for what happened to them. The suicidal assassins of September 11, 2001,
did not “attack America,” as our political leaders and the news media like to maintain; they
attacked American foreign policy. Employing the strategy of the weak, they killed innocent
bystanders who then became enemies only because they had already become victims.
Terrorism by definition strikes at the innocent in order to draw attention to the sins of the
invulnerable. The United States deploys such overwhelming military force globally that for its
militarized opponents only an “asymmetric strategy,” in the jargon of the Pentagon, has any
chance of success. When it does succeed, as it did spectacularly on September 11, it renders
our massive military machine worthless: The terrorists offer it no targets. On the day of the
disaster, President George W. Bush told the American people that we were attacked because
we are “a beacon for freedom” and because the attackers were “evil.” In his address to
Congress on September 20, 2002, he said, “This is civilization’s fight.” This attempt to define
difficult-to-grasp events as only a conflict over abstract values—as a “clash of civilizations,” in
current post-cold war American jargon—is not only disingenuous but also a way of evading
responsibility for the “blowback” that America’s imperial projects have generated.” [1]
Johnson writes about “extrajudicial killings” in Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil...” After one
transitional sentence, he starts writing about “The suicidal assassins of September
11, 2001” which “attacked American foreign policy.”
From this passage I infer that 9-11 was Latin America’s vengeance against the US for its brutal
imperialist policies. But how come Latin America outsourced its revenge to Saudi Arabians? That
is one detail that Johnson does not explain. American imperialist crimes were committed against
Latin Americans, but the blowback came from the Middle East.
That is one peculiar thing I’ve noticed about blowbacks. Blowback is seldom carried out by the
victims of imperialist outrages, but instead by volunteers, good Samaritans, so to speak, who are
predominantly Muslims.
Johnson writes, “The United States deploys such overwhelming military force globally that for
its militarized opponents only an “asymmetric strategy,” in the jargon of the Pentagon, has
any chance of success."
I’m not sure if “asymmetric” is the right word for Arabs avenging Latin Americans, especially if
the hijackers never mentioned Bolivia or Guatemala when justifying their acts.
So how many in-house terrorist acts (as opposed to outsourced terrorist acts) have the Latin
Americans committed against the US? How many American victims have there been of in-house
Latin American terrorism
These are the figures:
Number of Americans killed in the
USA since 1927 by Latin American terrorists [directly]
_ONE_1.000_
 Jihadi Psywar
The text of the article reviewed here appears in plain text or boldface for stress. Commentary
by Zenobia underlined
This is a clever little piece of jihadi psywar.
Its propaganda message acts as a kind of kicker for the blowback hypothesis.
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/its-not-killers-problems-its-our-own
It's Not the Killers' Problems—It's Our Own, by Jim Sleeper [1] / Boston Globe [2], July 10,
2016
You see? He got his punch line right into the headline. “It’s our own fault.” I fully agree that
many things that occur in the US are Americans’ fault. But from this postulate one cannot
logically conclude that ALL disasters in the US are domestic output. As in any other country,
some causes of social ills are domestic, while others are foreign. And then there is the
interaction between them, the miscegenation of perniciousness, and so on. In each case one
must distinguish through observation and analysis between the various sources.
He starts off: I don’t really care about the background and beliefs of [I could smell it a mile
off! It’s a re-tweak of “All religions are equally prone to violence”. He says he doesn’t care
about the source of the violence. However I object that some sources can be characterized in
cultural, geographic, political, etc. terms. But this turkey doesn’t care. His mind is made up.
The source of the problem is irrelevant. That is his starting postulate in this psywar piece --
designed to demoralize Americans and break their will to resist islamic imperialism. No
reasons given. Therefore all violences are considered equally unjustified or justified. Violence
becomes a miasma that envelops us, instead of the outcome of certain root causes.
] the [CRIME No. 1] black sniper in Dallas, or of the [CRIME No. 2] white cops who killed
defenseless black men in Baton Rouge and Falcon Heights, Minn. I don’t care about what
drove a [CRIME No. 3] young white man to murder nine members of a church Bible class in
Charleston, S.C., or a [CRIME No. 4] young white man to murder white children and teachers
in Sandy Hook, Conn., or a young [CRIME No. 5] Asian [i.e. Korean, I believe] man to kill 32
people at Virginia Tech. No mention up to now of any Moslem crimes. But sit tight. It’s
coming. Then the 5th and 6th crimes are Moslem. But writing about the 5th crime, it turns out
its Moslem character is immediately called into question.
I’m not interested in whether jihadophilia [invents a critical-sounding term lacking in
substance] or homophobia [seems to assume that these 2 motivations are mutually exclusive,
although they often occur together] in fact motivated a man [how vague -- no distinguishing
characteristics] to commit the devastating massacre of people [likewise no distinguishing
characteristics] in Orlando and whether the killer in San Bernadino was with ISIS or
not. [Red herring inserted to mislead the reader. The real issue is whether he was an Islamic
terrorist. And he was. The question of his organizational pigeon-holing is utterly irrelevant.
This reflects a current fashion among blimps of designating ISIS as the “bad terrorist”, so that
all the “good” Islamic terrorists like Ham-Ass and its New York branch office CAIR get credit
for condemning them. John Feffer made a feeble move in this direction, but his psywar
operation seemed doomed to failure. Nobody was buying his jihadi apologetics.]
If you’re wondering what’s wrong with me, [Don’t worry, kiddo, I know EXACTLY what’s
wrong with you. But don’t worry. It can easily be cured with a shotgun.] I wonder when you’ll
start asking what’s wrong and monstrous about all the chasing around after each new killer’s
derangement, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, or rage at America [Cute. “Rage at America”
instead of jihad. I’m not saying there's no rage at America in Black Africa, Latin
America, Europe, etc. there certainly is. But the important point, which our blimp is
desperately trying to conceal, is that anger does not translate directly into terrorism.
Although the US has exploited and oppressed Latin America for far longer than it has
exploited and oppressed the Middle East, only 1 American has died in the US as a result of
Latin American terrorism, compared to thousands of victims of Middle Eastern
terrorism.] What’s monstrous is what we keep missing in the chase because we’ll do almost
anything but look for it and face it.
Of course, we talk about the historic “frontier” culture, the gun lobby, and the Second
Amendment absolutism that induce Americans to arm themselves against one another, as
citizens of other developed democracies don’t do. We acknowledge the American original sin
of racism and its analogues. We lament the inadequacy of treatment for mental illness. We
even talk about the perfect storm of all three of these factors that, like Hurricane Katrina,
throws them all into high relief.
What we don’t talk about is what’s accelerating that perfect storm instead of diffusing it.
We’re more likely to talk about decisions that melt polar ice caps and ratchet up tsunamis and
tornadoes than we are to talk about the social decisions that are ratcheting up gun usage,
racism, and, arguably, mental illness.
We don’t talk about those social decisions because we’re complicit in them. We vote for them.
Confronted with their consequences, we double down on them until we’re dependent on,
even captive, to them.
The decisions whose dangers we deny are the ones that empower whorls of anonymous
shareholders to glorify violence in our entertainments, thinking, and politics. These mighty
engines aren’t malevolent as often as they’re civically mindless. Their casino-like financing of
predatory marketing has become a relentless, multi-billion-dollar, decades-old campaign to
bypass our brains and hearts on the way to our lower viscera and wallets. It stimulates impulse
buying and anti-social behavior and short-circuits deliberation and sharing by titillating,
intimidating, groping, goosing, addicting, tracking, and indebting us.
Under its influence, a culture that was always violent has succumbed to a profound
misunderstanding of where power really comes from, a misunderstanding immensely
profitable for some, devastating to most, and idiotic to unarmed peoples who, in our own
lifetimes, brought down heavily armed, tyrannical regimes in British India, apartheid South
Africa, and Soviet Eastern Europe.
To put the American challenge I’ve posed in legal terms [3]: We can’t hope to curb destructive
interpretations of the Second Amendment until we’ve discredited destructive interpretations
of the First Amendment that — with the support of the American Civil Liberties Union as
much as of plutocrats and business conglomerates — have expanded commercial
corporations’ “rights,” as legal “persons,” to constitutional freedoms of speech in glorifying
and marketing weapons that kill, and in inundating public decision-making itself about how to
restrain engines we’ve created and have every right to regulate [4].
This isn’t Adam Smith’s or John Locke’s capitalism but its antithesis. [No contest] And the
bitter or crazed loners whose backgrounds don’t interest me very much — the poor souls who
act on these engines relentlessly subliminal or direct prods to resentment, paranoia and
escapism — are simply more acutely attuned to such signals than those of us who filter them
out and do nothing about them.
[Our blimp has now achieved his principal tactical objective: he writes of “engines WE’ve
created” and in the next paragraph, “poor souls who act on [presumably means “are motivated
by”] these engines“, In other words a jihadi is acting on something WE created. Ergo it’s all our
fault.]
The rest of the article is an anti-climax. The author actually says some sensible things. But it’s
just camouflage serving to conceal his prime mission: persuading us that we are to blame for
Mohammedan violence.]
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/jim-sleeper
[2] http://www.boston.com/

Posted 10th July 2016 by Zenobia van Dongen

Equivocations of Judge Dhanidina

This article refers to Lying Muslim Judge, published yesterday on Islamophilia Watch.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Halim Dhanidina.

(Photo: Peggy McInerny/ UCLA)
Judge Halim Dhanidina’s discourse was consistent until he committed the mistake of making
a verifiable statement of fact that, when tested, proved false. Furthermore the apparent
motive for his Honor’s falsehood shows deceit and treachery and is consequently
dishonorable, which for a judge is bad news, unlike for a real estate tycoon.
He starts off by freely acknowledging that widespread mistrust of Muslims is largely a result of
Muslim terrorism and sedition.
In his Honor’s account, he says he first noticed anti-Islam talk in the US in-1979, during the
Iranian Revolution [which featured both anti-Americanism and radical Islam]. On 9/11/2001
he [a prosecutor in the Los Angeles courts!] suddenly found himself member of a suspect
minority. “But even then, I could not have imagined that things would deteriorate to where
they are now (2016) … I never thought that I would raise my kids in an even more hostile
environment.”
By forsaking the standard islamist argument that terrorism against the West is merely well
deserved payback for centuries of oppression (the so-called “Blowback Hypothesis”, which I
examine critically elsewhere) His Honor prudently deflects hostility from his Honor’s person
based on grievance for Mohammedan atrocities, whether real or imagined. By refraining from
justifying terrorism, his Honor tacitly calls old ethno-religious grievances quits and signals that
he is willing to work within the (Western) system.
However his Honor’s discourse of loyalty to the West as analyzed above is mixed with
counter-statements that tend to nullify his initial words.
He writes
1 “Terrorist attacks worsen public perceptions of Muslims”.
2 “I realize that there is a lot of anxiety and a lot of fear on all sides .. And that fear is
legitimate.”
Both of these statements, while appearing to acknowledge that islam is a violent religion (at
least sometimes), are evasive.
Number 1 “Terrorist attacks worsen public perceptions of Muslims”.
This statement acknowledges a cause-and-effect relationship between terrorism and hostility
to Islam, but it makes logical jumps that obscure the full causal chain.
“Terrorism causes hostility to Muslims.” seems rather arbitrary. Why
shouldn’t terrorism cause hostility to Eskimos, instead?
I think everyone would agree that
“Terrorism causes hostility to terrorists.”
So if “Terrorism causes hostility to Muslims,” the likely reason is that the terrorists are, or
appear to be, Muslims. But his Honor’s statement conceals this necessary logical link.
Applied to the US, this reasoning makes sense, because, as his Honor and numerous others
have testified, Islamophobia started in the US after 9/11, which was an atrocity committed by
Muslim terrorists on Islam’s behalf. Moreover, in 2015, of 452 suicide bombings worldwide,
450, or 99%, were committed by Muslims. According to FBI web site, Muslim terrorists
accounted for 93% of all terrorism deaths in the US between 1970 and 2005. These facts show
that distrust and fear of Muslims is perfectly rational, even though very few Muslims are
terrorists. By calling this mistrust “rational” I do not wish to encourage arbitrary discrimination
against Muslims, since it is a well-known fact that rational behavior often leads to injustice. In
such cases the solution is not to punish this rational behavior but instead to remove its source.
When citizens are well informed about the intentions of their Muslim neighbors, and those
intentions prove benign, then mistrust of Muslims will vanish like the morning dew under a
hot sun.
Number 2 “ ... there is a lot of anxiety and a lot of fear on all sides ... And that fear is
legitimate.”
“Fear on all sides” seems a completely inappropriate description.
2.1 Firstly, as far as I can tell there are only 2 sides involved here, to wit
a) Muslims in the US, and
b) non-Muslims in the US.
Since there are only TWO sides, he should have written “BOTH sides”, not “ALL sides”. This
reproach may seem carping at a negligible point, but if you add this specific terminological
haziness to NUMEROUS OTHER terminological hazinesses that abound in His Honor’s
writings, the aggregate terminological haziness ATH [1] leads to a relentless geometrical
progression, which according to Eugene Ionesco, is the incurable disease of the dead.[2]
2.2 His Honor seems to equate
on the one hand the fear of a sudden terrorist attack felt by the US population at large,
including its Muslims, with,
on the other hand the repeated snubs, slights and humiliations that are the lot of
discriminated minorities everywhere.
2.2.1 Firstly the nature and intensity of the respective fears is disproportionate;
2.2.2 Secondly, he has already conceded that the initial offense was made by the Muslim side.
This fact does not necessarily incriminate Muslims as a whole. Nonetheless the reaction by
the non-Muslim side, although often disproportionate, rests on a genuine grievance that must
 at least be verbally acknowledged. But the vapid talk of “legitimate fear on all sides” merely
adds several layers of non-committal vagueness to his Honor’s slithery discourse.
3. There are additional statements that tend to nullify his initial words, that invoke, among
others, an older explanation for hostility to Mohammedans, namely the “free-floating
hostility” hypothesis” (FFHH).
The free-floating hostility hypothesis (FFHH) assumes a roughly steady supply of dominant-
caste bigotry that must be apportioned among the various underprivileged minorities
currently scheduled for oppression. Shifts in the amount of oppression devoted to each
underprivileged minority depend on the political situation and the convenience of the
dominant caste.
The free-floating hostility hypothesis (FFHH) is plausible and logically consistent. No doubt
this model is capable of explaining many situations of social conflict. However, it is difficult to
apply this model to our current Islamophobia for two reasons, both of which his Honor readily
concedes:
Firstly FFHH is not consistent with the existence of any actual motive for hostility. In the
FFHH model, bigotry is allocated to different minorities depending on the dominant caste’s
whim. However fear of terrorism is not a whim, since, as His Honor concedes, “that fear is
legitimate.”
Secondly FFHH requires that different oppressed minorities take turns being scapegoated.
But, as his Honor himself points out, the musical-chairs routine is brutally interrupted by
“legitimate fear” of terrorism, which for OTHER US minorities (AND majorities) is currently
smallish to minor. Consequently Muslims are incessantly “scapegoated” (because there is
actually a REASON to select them and not others).
A second theme
Although his Honor concedes that mistrust of Mohammedans is quasi-legitimate, he
complains it is either excessive or indiscriminate. From my own observation I can fully confirm
that mistrust of Mohammedans (and of many other social groups) is often excessive or
indiscriminate.
On the other hand mistrust is often lacking where it is sorely needed. For example, the guard
at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando neglected to pat down Omar Mateen before he entered the
nightclub and murdered 49 people.
So it’s important to know whom you can trust -- and whom you cannot.
Indiscriminate mistrust is bad. Mistrust of an individual must be based on factual grounds that
reasonably undermine confidence in such individual. But if I know nothing about an individual,
that means that I have no grounds to trust her. Trust must be based on reliable and impartial
information and on a proven attitude of sincerity on the part of the individual deemed
trustworthy.
Accordingly
1) I have no grounds to trust a Mohammedan whom I don’t know personally, and
2) In the specific case of Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Halim Dhanidina, I find he has
failed to display a persuasive attitude of sincerity such as would merit any trust. My ground for
distrusting him is that he’s a liar, as I have proved: he falsely claimed that ‘Jihad Watch.com’
reported on his judgeship under the headline “Sharia Law Judge Appointed in Mexifornia.”
Furthermore, pondering on the apparent motive for his Honor’s prevarication leads me to
suspect that he may well be a Muslim Brotherhood mole whose Islamo-Fascist organization
informed him that his “work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in ... destroying Western
civilization from within ... so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all
other religions.”
[I didn’t even know Allah HAD a religion! Does that mean that He worships Himself?]
The apparent motive for his Honor’s lie is an overwhelming desire to complain about unfair
treatment by the media. This would clinch his second argument, in conflict with the first, that
Muslims are unfairly treated despite their undeniable involvement with terrorism. However
his Honor cannot find any actual examples of such mistreatment. So he invents one.[3] But
instead of inventing one out of whole cloth, he makes the mistake of altering a true event to
make the event confirm his claim of discrimination. This he does by rewriting the headline of a
published news report about him.
The report states that his Honor founded a student group affiliated with the worldwide
Islamist MB organization. This is prima facie evidence of being an MB member or
sympathizer. We can fairly assume that his Honor was offended by this information, although
it is apparently truthful. At least until now nobody, least of all his Honor, has denied that he
founded the MSA cell at Pomona College, where he earned his bachelor’s degree. And he has
had four years in which to deny it, since the article in question was published in 2012.
So it seems that his Honor is trying to blot out clues to his affiliation with an extremist group
that has often dabbled in terrorism.[4]
By altering the Jihad Watch article he makes it defamatory or nearly. His Honor’s new
headline seems inspired by blind prejudice, similar to that postulated by the FFHH model.
Thus he seeks to weaken his initial concession that Islamophobia is to a certain extent
justified.
By changing the headline over the Jihad Watch article he makes the article incriminating, and
at the same time more difficult to locate. Thus His Honor strives to conceal his mendacity
from the public’s gaze -- but in vain, alas! For his wiles are no match for Jihad Watch's 5th-
generation plutonium-drive search engine, so the article was promptly located simply by
reformulating the search parameter, and His Honor’s mendacity duly came to light.
So even while conceding that Islamophobia is to a certain extent warranted, his Honor makes
multiple attempts to reiterate prior hypocritical denials, and at the same time weasels out of
expressly stating the grim fact of islam’s tight connection to terrorism.
His Honor’s protestations of loyalty are revealed to be mere window-dressing, since they are
amply belied by a plethora of partial retractions and equivocations. Moreover he deceitfully
seeks to conceal his affiliation to a totalitarian Mohammedan institution.
According to Jihad Watch, “The Los Angeles-based Muslim Public Affairs Council said it had
advocated for Dhanidina’s appointment for more than a year. “Dhanidina’s appointment is an
important step in ensuring that California’s leaders accurately reflect the communities present
in our great state,” said Aziza Hasan, MPAC”s Southern California Government Relations
director, in a press statement.”
It is a matter for concern that California’s first Muslim judge -- generated by the workings of a
murky ethnic proporz system – is not only a scheming, slithery intrigue artist, but is in all
likelihood the secret agent of a totalitarian death cult that has often announced its intention
of conquering the world on behalf of a mythological creature without any toes.

[1] Aggregate terminological haziness ATH is equal to the vector sum of all the individual
terminological hazinesses [ITHs].
[2] Eugène Ionesco: Amédée, or How to Get Rid of It, Act 1
[3] The fact that Hizzoner couldn't find a single suitable piece of legit islamophobe slander
online and was forced to concoct his own, says much about the media’s (even the
islamophobe media’s) rigid compliance with the rules of political correctness. Political
correctness is not really bad in itself, it’s the overdoses that get you.
[4] Some recent examples of the Muslim Brotherhood’s terrorist ties: The behavior of the MB
leader Morsi as president of Egypt (2011-2013) clearly showed his soft spot for mass
murderers. He appointed as governor of Luxor province the mastermind of the
1997 Luxor massacre, in the course of which several women were disemboweled and verses of
the Holy Qur’an thrust into their abdominal cavities. And he pleaded most movingly to Barack
Obama for the release of the Blind Sheikh, serving a life sentence for blowing up New
York’s World Trade Center in 1993.
 Posted 16th August 2016 by Zenobia van Dongen

Blowback chronicles 3
1. Sunni grievances against Shia
An American journalist interviewed an ISIS terrorist who had been captured by Iraqi police and
condemned to death. The man confessed to having killed 40 or 50 people with roadside
bombs (IUDs).
US journalist -- Why did you join ISIS?
Captured ISIS terrorist -- Someone from my neighborhood came to me. He explained we must
make a change, that Shias were hurting Sunnis.
US journalist -- Did you ever know a Sunni personally who was hurt by a Shia Muslim?
Captured ISIS terrorist -- No. Just rumors.[1]
2. Arab grievances against Jews
1921 Jaffa riots
Summarized from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Jaffa riots in Mandatory Palestine on May 1–7, 1921 started as a fight between 2 different
Jewish political parties.
NOTE: At the time the Arab population of Palestine was about 90% Mohammedan and 10%
Christian. Most police were Arabs.
Hearing of the fighting and believing [mistakenly!] that Arabs were being attacked, the Arabs
of Jaffa went on the offensive. Dozens of British, Arab, and Jewish witnesses all reported that
Arab men bearing clubs, knives, swords, and some pistols broke into Jewish buildings and
murdered their inhabitants, while women followed to loot. They attacked Jewish pedestrians
and destroyed Jewish homes and stores. They beat and killed Jews in their homes, including
children, and in some cases split open the victims' skulls.[1]
As in the previous year's Nebi Musa riots, the mob tore open their victims' quilts and pillows,
sending up clouds of feathers. Some Arabs defended Jews and offered them refuge in their
homes. Many witnesses identified their attackers and murderers as their neighbours.
The Arab leaders submitted a petition to the League of Nations in which they expressed their
demands for independence and democracy, noting that the Arab community contained
sufficient educated and talented members to establish a stable representative democracy.
The report of an investigative commission headed by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court
in Palestine ... confirmed the participation of Arab policemen in the riots ...
"... the fundamental cause of the violence and the subsequent acts of violence was a feeling
among the Arabs of discontent with, and hostility to, the Jews, due to political and economic
causes, and connected with Jewish immigration."
"The racial strife was begun by Arabs, and rapidly developed into a conflict of great violence
between Arabs and Jews, in which the Arab majority, who were generally the aggressors,
inflicted most of the casualties.”
“... the state of popular feeling made a conflict likely to occur on any provocation by any
Jews.”[2]
The raids on five Jewish agricultural colonies arose from the excitement produced in the
minds of the Arabs by reports of Arabs having been killed by Jews in Jaffa. In two cases
unfounded stories of provocation were believed and acted upon without any effort being
made to verify them. The Palestine government imposed fines on Arab villages and tribes
believed to have been collectively involved in the riot. They were Tulkarm, Kakon, Kalkilieh,
Kafr Saba, the Wadi Hawareth Bedouin and the Abu Kishik tribe.
New bloody riots broke out in Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem on November 2, 1921, when five
Jewish residents and three of their Arab attackers were killed ...

[1] Face to Face With an ISIS Killer

by Kimberly Dozier, Daily Beast, 12.28.16
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/12/28/face-to-face-with-an-isis-
killer.html?via=newsletter&source=DDAfternoon
[2] In other words the Jews provoked the Arabs by fighting between themselves.
Posted 23rd February 2017 by Zenobia van Dongen

Islamophobia and terrorism

The people who denounce Islamophobia are the same people who support Islamic terrorism.
Denouncing Islamophobia and waging Islamic terrorism are two sides of the same coin.
They are merely two alternative tactics for waging jihad. They are two different methods,
among others, of driving on Islamic expansionism, or Islamization, which are one and the
same thing.
I have reached this conclusion, not because I am biased, but from observing actual events.
Examples:
1. Linda Hyökki conducts research on Islamophobia. She is a research associate at the Centre
for Islam and Global Affairs at Sabahattin Zaim University in Istanbul, Turkey. Her boss, the
director of the Centre for Islam and Global Affairs, is Sami Al-Arian, a top leader of the
Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist organization.[1]
2. “CNN interview on Sunday morning with Yasser Louati from the Collective Against
Islamophobia in France. CNN anchors John Vause and Isha Sesay spent several minutes
grilling their guest on the role of the Muslim community in the Paris attacks [of 13 November
2015].
...
YASSER LOUATI: “Sir, the Muslim community has nothing to do with these guys.” ... and
cannot accept responsibility “for the actions of someone who just, you know, CLAIMS to be
Muslim.” [those were his very words, so help me dog]
...
CNN anchors: .”.. within the Muslim community to identify what is happening within their
own ranks when it comes to people who are obviously training and preparing to carry out
mass murder?”
...
YASSER LOUATI: “They were not from our ranks ... what these terrorists are blaming our
country for is for its failed foreign policy.”
...
His whole demeanor of loyalty to France and denying the slightest association with the
Islamic State terrorists, is immediately unmasked as a phony pose when HE EXPRESSLY AND
SPONTANEOUSLY [i.e. without any prompting from the CNN correspondents] PRAISES THE
TERRORISTS’ ALLEGED MOTIVES by saying “what these terrorists are blaming our country
[i.e. France] for is for its failed foreign policy.”
In plaintext: ”Blowback”.[2]
3. George Soros has been very active in promoting islamic immigration to Europe and in
promoting the acceptance of islam worldwide. But at the same time he promotes adoption of
sharia law and finances salafist organizations.[3]
4. In the US, CAIR, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood and the US front for the Palestinian
terrorist organization Hamas, is in the forefront of denouncing alleged Islamophobia on every
possible occasion.[4]
Thus there are numerous examples of the the very same people who denounce Islamophobia
at the same time supporting Islamic radicalization and Islamic terrorism.
It is very telling that one of the main items in the official definition of an Islamophobe is that
an islamophobe is someone who believes that islam is associated with terrorism.[5] This
circumstance suggests that the very concept of Islamophobia was purposely designed as a
smoke screen to defend islam in advance from being associated with Islamic terrorist
campaigns THAT WERE ALREADY IN THE PLANNING STAGE. In other words designing and
propagating the concept of Islamophobia was a strategic flanking measure taken in
anticipation of the Islamic terrorist campaigns that have taken place since then.

[1] Employee of Islamic terror boss criticizes Islamophobia

https://islamophiliawatch.blogspot.com/2018/12/employee-of-islamic-terror-boss.html
[2] Terrorism Threat Comes From Pookums, Not Muslims!
https://islamophiliawatch.blogspot.com/2016/04/terrorism-threat-comes-from-pookums-
not.html
[3] “George Soros funds Islamic extremists” and “Why is George Soros pushing sharia law?”,
both on http://islamophiliawatch.blogspot.com
[4] Federal judge rules that CAIR is linked to Muslim Brotherhood
https://islamophiliawatch.blogspot.com/2018/05/federal-judge-rules-that-cair-is-muslim.html
Facsimile of court order at http://www.judicialwatch.org/wp-
content/uploads/2013/07/F_D_2011_usa-v-hlf-order-07012009.pdf?V=1
[5] The deceptive definition of Islamophobia
https://islamophiliawatch.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-deceptive-definition-of-
islamophobia.html
Posted 23rd December 2018 by Zenobia van Dongen

The curse of Nick Turse

I am the first to admit that Western imperialism has done a lot of damage (and also a lot of
good), and none of what follows should be construed as a blanket defense
of Western imperialism or of imperialism in general (i.e. Chinese imperialism, Islamic
imperialism, Persian imperialism, Turkish imperialism, and so forth).
Nick Turse writes a lot about US military deployment in Africa. He stresses certain aspects to
the detriment of other aspects that are equally important. He never tires of emphasizing how
rapid US military involvement in Africa has become, how secretive it has
been, and how this deployment has been accompanied by a parallel increase
in terrorism on that continent.
Turse stresses the large scale of US military intervention and the involvement of many allies:
As part of Flintlock 2014, more than 1,000 troops from 18 nations, including Burkina Faso,
Canada, Chad, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Mauritania, the Netherlands, Nigeria,
Norway, Senegal, the United Kingdom, the U.S., and the host nation of Niger, carried out
counterterror training ... [1]
Turse points out failures:
[the US] extensively mentored the military officer who overthrew Mali’s elected government
in 2012, and that the U.S. trained a Congolese commando battalion implicated by the United
Nations in mass rapes and other atrocities ...[2]
As if military coups, mass rape and other atrocities were a rarity in Africa.
He accuses the US of neo-colonialism:
The Pentagon’s newest tactic: refight the colonial wars in partnership with the French.[3]
... airlifts of French and African troops onto the battlefields of proxy wars ... [4]
In January 2013, former colonial power France launched a military intervention, code-named
Operation Serval, to push back and defeat the Islamists [in Mali].
The former colonial power France first occupied North African territory in 1830 by
invading Algeria. This was the culmination of the Barbary Wars, which were fought by the
British, French, Dutch and Americans to defend themselves from the ”raids and white slave
trade by the Barbary pirates, which ended in the 1830s when the region was conquered by
France. The white slave trade and [slave] markets in the Mediterranean declined and
eventually disappeared after the European occupation.” [5]
In the words of Raymond Ibrahim:
... the Barbary States of Muslim North Africa—specifically Tripoli, Algiers, Tunis—had been
thriving on the slave trade of Europeans abducted from virtually every corner of coastal
Europe—including Britain, Ireland, Denmark, and Iceland. These raids were so successful that,
“between 1530 and 1780 there were almost certainly a million and quite possibly as many as a
million and a quarter white, European Christians enslaved by the Muslims of the Barbary
Coast,” to quote American historian, Robert Davis.[6]
French interventions in the Central African Republic and Mali were responses to
jihad, i.e. Islamic terrorism, in much the same way as the Barbary Wars were response to jihad
in the form of piracy.
Turse refers to American and French allies as “proxy forces”:
At its peak, 4,500 French troops were fighting alongside West African forces, known as the
African-led International Support Mission in Mali (AFISMA), later subsumed into a UN-
mandated Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA). The
AFISMA force, as detailed in an official US Army Africa briefing on training missions obtained
by Tom Dispatch, reads like a who’s who of American proxy forces in West
Africa: Niger, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Côte
d’Ivoire, Togo, Senegal, Benin, Liberia, Chad, Nigeria, Gambia, Ghana, and Sierra Leone.
Calling the armies of all these African countries “proxy forces”
implies that those countries have no interest of their own in defeating Islamic terrorism, and
that if they do combat Islamic terrorism, it is only in order to curry favor with the US. In other
words Turse is telling us that Islamic terrorism is not really a threat to Africa at all.
But there is strong evidence that Islamic terrorism is indeed a threat to Africans at
large. Consider the recently released documentary film “Jihadis” about the Malian Islamists:
Abou Mohamad Toure, chief of the Islamic police in Gao and a commander with the
Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa, concurs. Apparently unburdened by self-
awareness, he points out that “[f]or a long time, we preached in the mosques, went out in the
streets, talked to the people and nothing was put in place. But thanks to God, when we took
up arms to apply religion, God rewarded us.” It seems He does not move in particularly
mysterious ways after all.
The locals, however, do not seem to have got the memo about how much better their lives
have become under sharia law. One exasperated Malian Muslim who the filmmakers
managed to interview complains that the things that once made life worth living—dancing,
cigarettes, music, girlfriends—have now all been outlawed.[7]
This is an account of the early exploits of jihadis in Mozambique:
Village of Monjane located deep in the bush ... 10 people were beheaded in the villages of 25
de Junho and Monjane, remote settlements of mud brick houses without electricity or other
infrastructure. ... Alima Mussá and other residents made the trek with their children, some of
them babies, carried by adults and older siblings, and now depend on food and shelter
provided by relatives and acquaintances.
...“We saw the attackers up close. When they get a woman, it’s to be married, when they get a
man, it’s to kill,” she says. ... travelled cross-country ...abandoning their vegetable plots. ...
Suleimane Issa ...refugees, intends to wait for calm before returning to the village where he
lived. ... Saide Dade, 35, the uncle who welcomed him, also gives shelter to other relatives,
though he has no means to feed them.
...
Ten people were beheaded on Sunday after being seized in two remote villages with no
electricity or infrastructure.[8]
All victims mentioned in this news report from Mozambique were poor, had Muslim names,
lived in mud huts without electricity and fear the terrorists.
Even in Uganda, a predominantly Christian country where the main terrorist threat is the
nominally Christian Lord's Army blah blah blah blah, Mohammedan violence against
Christians occurs frequently.
Patrick Ojangole, a 43-year-old Christian father of five who also supported several children
whose families had disowned them for leaving Islam, was hacked to death. According to the
slain man’s friend, who survived to tell the tale, they were traveling to their village when they
saw Muslim women covered in burqas sitting on the road: “Because it was late in the evening,
we thought they needed some help from us, so we stopped, and while we were still talking
with them, a man arrived [followed by two more men] … The two women immediately pulled
out swords from their burqas and gave them to the men.” One of the three Muslim men
reproached Patrick for refusing to cease his Christian activities. Then the Muslims fell on him
with their swords. “Patrick was a very committed Christian and a hard-working farmer,” said
his friend. “From his farm work, he used to support 10 children from Muslim families who had
been ostracized by their families,” as well as his own five children ranging in age from 7 to
16.[9]
According to the Wikipedia article "Islam in Uganda”,
In June 2016, at least six Muslim villagers murdered a Christian woman in the Naigobya village
of the Luuka District after she refused to apportion her land for the building of a Muslim
mosque. The Muslim in-laws of a Christian woman in Busandha village also in Luuka District
poisoned to death her infant daughter for eating in the daytime of Ramadan.
A July 2016 report said that a former imam, 53-year-old Kuluseni Iguru Tenywa of Budhagali
village, Jinja District, lost his family, home, and business after his family and relatives found
out he had become a Christian. He escaped after hearing their plans to end his life.[10]
Turse also places much weight on NATO’s ill-starred military intervention in Libya in 2011 to
depose Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. As he rightly points out, one of the outcomes
of this adventure was to distribute much of Gaddafi's weaponry throughout northwest Africa,
where much of it ended up in the hands of jihadis.
Turse never ceases reminding us of the perils of blowback and of destabilization that have
indeed accompanied much US military intervention around the globe.
But, as everyone knows by now, correlation does not mean causation, and in order to prove
that US military deployment in Africa has caused blowback, destabilization and terrorism,
some actual facts must be produced, which Turse however never does.
Turse carefully refrains from ever mentioning the growing Islamist presence in Africa, which I
and many others believe is the motive for American intervention on that continent.
Al-Qaeda is however only one component of a much larger composition of radical Islamist
groups and organisations in the region. There is also a number of other indigenous radical
Islamist groups in East Africa, which have varying degrees of semblance to al-Qaeda’s agenda.
As mentioned above, there are also missionary and developmental organisations, many
funded by Saudi and other Gulf charities that actively propagate a radical salafi interpretation
of Islam (Colonel Gabre Egzaiabgher Alemseed, 2011). In places with extreme state fragility
such as Somalia, they have resorted to humanitarian and development work and become
major providers of social services, education and training, health care, orphanages, etc (Salih,
2004; Colonel Gabre Egzaiabgher Alemseed, 2011).
In Somalia, these proselytising and developmental groups were not considered to have any
significance to security in the country before the civil war, a situation possibly linked to Siad
Barre's regime strictly monitoring their activities. It was only after Barre’s regime was ousted
that many Islamic Charity Organisations (ICOs) predominantly from the Middle East
and Africa began operating in a more nefarious way in the country. Some of these ICOs have
greatly contributed towards re-building the civil society institutions thereby becoming
influential and gaining considerable public support (Hon. Abdisalaam Adan, 2011).12 They
seek to change society via education, media, summer camps, youth programs and
publications (Kane, 2007; Terdman and Paz, 2007).
According to General Gabre, through the provision of social services, these radical charity
organisations not only seek to achieve the acceptance of salafi or Wahhabi ideologies among
the local communities, but in some cases they also seek to justify extremism, strengthen their
political support, and facilitate recruitment of Jihadis in the long-run (Colonel Gabre
Egzaiabgher Alemseed, 2011).While not necessarily violent, they may function as a pathway
to terrorism. For example, the Muslim Brotherhood has been the main channel for the spread
of the political message of salafism.13 In East Africa, this Brotherhood has presented itself in
various forms ranging from the Islamic militancy of Hasan al-Turabi's National Islamic Front
(NIF)
...
Ideological rivalry over the infiltration of Islam in the Horn of Africa region manifests itself as a
struggle between the traditional Sufi Islam and salafi and Wahhabi interpretations of Islam
(Rabasa, 2009a). Mitchell has observed that in places where the Wahhabis have established
themselves Sufism has been destroyed and replaced by traditional Wahhabi norms and
practices (Mitchel 1993). Another movement that has played a major role in influencing the
shape of contemporary Islam in the Horn of Africa is the Tablighi Jamaat (Menkhaus 2004).16
The Tablighi Jamaat has a spiritual focus and is apolitical. In Somalia, the leaders of the
Tablighi movement emphasise that the group is committed to a doctrine of non-violence,
which makes it different from the other organisations in the country supportive of terrorism
(Ibid).
While al-Qaeda seeks to incorporate local militants into the global jihad, in East Africa, local
groups in the region, even those with that have most affinity to al-Qaeda have their own
parochial agendas. For example, the al-Ittihad al-Islami (AIAI), a largely defunct group but
active in Somalia in the 1980s and 1990s, was alleged to have established links to al-Qaeda
(Shinn, 2002). However, the AIAI's main goal seems to have been a mix of Islamism and an
anti-Ethiopian Somali nationalist agenda. In the case of Somalia, the situation seems to be
changing with the emergence of al-Shabaab since 2007 (Harnisch, 2010). Other organisations
with alleged links to al-Qaeda include the Popular Resistance Movement in the Land of the
Two Migrations, an offshoot of the radical wing of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU)
of Somalia (Rogan, 2007).[11]
All his arguments are based on analogy to the Middle East, Central Asia and the Libyan
escapade. However Libya is hardly a typical case. In Libya, president Obama, who pursued a
policy of alliance with the worldwide Muslim Brotherhood, joined Qatar, at the time the
Muslim Brotherhood’s principal state patron (now it’s Turkey) and some Al Qaeda defectors to
topple Gaddafi's rule.
But as far as I know the US has not allied itself with Islamists and Mohammedan terrorists
anywhere else on the African continent. Such policies always end badly, as Great
Britain proves. The British have always been the principal proponents of playing off “good
jihadis” against “bad jihadis”.
In the words of Nafeez Ahmad,
... the ability of Islamist extremists to operate on UK soil with such impunity is directly
correlated with the British state’s alliances with extremists abroad in pursuit of dubious
geopolitical gambits from the Balkans to Syria; that for the last decades our closest allies in
the Middle East have funnelled billions of dollars to al-Qaeda affiliated militants in the region
with US blessings to counter Iranian and Syrian influence.[12]
Specifically regarding Libya, the UK pursued a uniquely devious policy. According to Paul
Stott:
Paradoxically, Blair’s rapprochement with Libya appears to have seen counter-terrorism
policy swing from the extreme of not appearing to consider Libyan Islamist exiles an issue, to
the other extreme of assistance in their illegal removal to Colonel Gadaffi’s jails. A
compensation payment of $3.5 million was made by the British government to Sami al Saadi
in December 2012 after exposure of a joint rendition operation between the United
Kingdom, USA and Libya (Al Jazeera, 2012). In its period of cooperation with the Libyan
regime, MI6 reportedly opened a mosque in an undisclosed European city, in partnership with
Libyan intelligence, to lure potential terrorists (Lewis, 2012), and used a Libyan security agent
to monitor exiles across the north west of England (Buaras, 2011).
Such co-operation ceased following the Libyan uprising in 2011, when British policy shifted
again – to support the overthrow of the regime. Interestingly from this point declarations
concerning the problematic nature of Islamist radicals on British soil re-entered the rhetoric of
the Libyan authorities. During the consequent civil war, Gaddafi attempted to characterise
the campaign against him as a terrorist plot, led by jihadists. One example of this was the
parading of Salah Mohammed Ali Abu Obah (named as Salah Mohammed Ali Aboaoba in
some press reports), reportedly captured in fighting on Libya’s north coast.
Mr Abu Obah said he had arrived in Libya from Manchester, England where he had lived for
more than a decade as a member of the LIFG’s economic department, raising money from
local mosques and Islamic charities to fund the group’s operations (Clover, 2011).
Abu Obah went on to inform western journalists he had helped four LIFG members from
Manchester enter Libya via Tunisia, and in an interview with Channel 4 News to state he
raised funds for the LIFG at Didsbury Mosque in south Manchester (Miller, 2011).[13]
As a matter of fact the recklessness of British policy toward Mohammedan terrorism has
fomented its growth worldwide.
It is worth considering how Britain got itself into a situation where it was hosting a succession
of jihadist actors, committed to the eventual establishment of theological states or a cross
national caliphate. In the Thatcher era, the United Kingdom had frequently viewed itself as
taking counter-terrorism matters more seriously than its European neighbours, some of
whom lacked Britain’s direct experience of the subject. This self-perception manifested itself
in policy terms at the diplomatic level. For example, at the Luxembourg meeting of the
European Council in 1985, the UK prevented majority voting being extended onto the issue of
freedom of movement on the grounds the government did not trust European partners to
control the movements of terrorists. Such opposition also characterised Mrs Thatcher’s
opposition to the Single European Act (George, 1991, 195).
At some stage in the following two decades, a role reversal appears to have occurred. In time,
the question emerged not whether Britain’s allies were taking security matters seriously, but if
the UK was doing so, and even whether British polices were beginning to endanger others.
Former Labour Home Secretary Charles Clarke first encountered these concerns when serving
as Police Minister from 1999 to 2001:
There were a number of foreigners, including Ministers of the Interior, who said to me we
were being over sympathetic in allowing people in. We should be keeping people out more.
They went on to attach this argument, that by allowing people in we were colluding with
‘terrorists’. I have never accepted that (Clarke, Interview, 2010).
Some complaints were very specific in their nature. The issue of Abu Hamza and Finsbury Park
mosque was raised with the British government by at least seven countries – Algeria, Belgium,
Egypt, France, Germany, Netherlands and Spain (O’Neill and McGrory, 2006, 288) whilst
evidence of Abu Hamza’s material assistance to terrorists in Yemen in 1998 was gathered by
the British security services (O’Neill and McGrory, 2006, 288-9) and Yemeni authorities. The
pan-national nature of jihadist operations is further demonstrated by the reality that Abu
Hamza, an Egyptian living in Britain, was willingly accepted as an advisor by the Islamic Army
of Aden during its kidnapping of western tourists in 1998 (FBI, 2015).
Writing of the 1990s, Mark Curtis lists four major terrorist groups as operating from London –
the GIA (Algeria), the LIFG (Libya), the EIJ (Egypt) and Al-Qaeda (Curtis, 2010, 256). For this
situation to formulate a very particular police approach was necessary - one which considered
terrorism purely in terms of the instrumental act, not its ancillary elements. To prosper
terrorism requires a safe haven – a place where the actor may develop their tactics, strategy
and resources. In the modern era, this does not need to be in the same country or even
continent as the eventual attack – indeed if the safety of the actor is increased by their usual
distance from the operation, all the better. Prior to 9/11, the British police appear to have
neglected these ancillary elements to terrorism, and concentrated solely on ensuring the act
itself did not occur on their territory. Evidence of this approach is scarce, but where found,
illuminating. Andrew Staniforth of the West Yorkshire Police Counter Terrorism Unit is one of
the authors of “Blackstone’s Guide to Terrorism”, and wrote a long running series “Tackling
Terrorism” in Police Review. He writes “From the early 1990s, groups with links
to Egypt and Algeria began to conduct terrorist operations in Western countries, including
the US and France” (Staniforth, 2009).[14]
It comes as no surprise that Nick Turse’s complete works on US intervention in Africa are
prominently displayed on Open Democracy, the signature website of George Soros. George
Soros makes no secret of his sympathy for sharia law[15] and for the salafilth[16].
Nick Turse is in good company, for Open Democracy also publishes articles by Victoria
Brittain, the terror sheila (”Wiktooria al-Brittaniya”), a prominent apologist for
Islamic terrorism who was eased out of her job at The Guardian and now collaborates with
the jihadi organization CAGE.
On 7 Jul 2013 Victoria Brittain published an article in the Guardian denying that Abu Qatada
was a terrorist.[17] However four years earlier, on 3 Jun 2009, the very same Guardian had
published a news item calling Abu Qatada “the Jordanian known as Osama bin Laden's right-
hand man in Europe.” It said that Al Qaida “killed Dyer on Saturday when its second deadline
expired for the British government to release Abu Qatada, the Jordanian known as Osama bin
Laden's right-hand man in Europe.”[18] Even Nafeez Ahmad, who goes blue in the face when
denouncing Islamophobia, admits that Abu Qatada was a terrorist recruiter. [19]
To sum up, what I criticize in Nick Turse is his blatantly one-
sided and propagandistic approach, which can be summarized in the statement that his
attacks on Western imperialism are designed to conceal Islamic imperialism. He’s a jihadi
pimp.

[1] The heavy imprint of America's 'light footprint', by Nick Turse, Open Democracy, 27 March
2014
https://www.opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/nick-turse/heavy-imprint-of-americas-light-
footprint
[2] The heavy imprint of America's 'light footprint', by Nick Turse, Open Democracy, 27 March
2014
https://www.opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/nick-turse/heavy-imprint-of-americas-light-
footprint
[3] Back to the future: America's new model for expeditionary warfare, by Nick Turse, Open
Democracy, 14 March 2014
https://www.opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/nick-turse/back-to-future-americas-new-
model-for-expeditionary-warfare
[4] The heavy imprint of America's 'light footprint', by Nick Turse, Open Democracy, 27 March
2014
https://www.opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/nick-turse/heavy-imprint-of-americas-light-
footprint
[5] Barbary slave trade, Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_slave_trade
[6] Barbary: Islamic Terrorism and America’s First Military Victory, by Raymond Ibrahim,
06/10/2018
http://raymondibrahim.com/2018/06/10/barbary-islamic-terrorism-americas-first-military-
victory/
This article is partially excerpted from Raymond Ibrahim’s book, Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen
Centuries of War between Islam and the West
[7] “Jihadists” - A Review, by Robin Simcox, Quillette, January 14, 2019
https://quillette.com/2019/01/14/jihadists-a-review/
[8] People displaced by attacks in northern Mozambique call for help, 12:13 CAT | 04 Jun 2018
http://clubofmozambique.com/news/people-displaced-by-attacks-in-northern-mozambique-
call-for-help/
[9] Muslim Persecution of Christians December 2015, by Raymond Ibrahim, Gatestone
Institute 02/08/2016
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_Uganda
[11] Terrorism and Counter terrorism in East Africa, by Patrick Kimunguyi
Research Fellow, Global Terrorism Research Centre and Monash European and EU
Centre, Monash University (Australia)
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267265383_Terrorism_and_Counter_terrorism_in_
East_Africa
[12] White supremacists at the heart of Whitehall, by Nafeez Ahmed, Middle East Eye, 6
March 2015
https://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/white-supremacists-heart-whitehall-789183852
[13] British Jihadism: The Detail and the Denial, by Paul Vernon Angus Stott, pp 141-142
[14] British Jihadism: The Detail and the Denial, by Paul Vernon Angus Stott, pp 158-160
[15] Why is George Soros pushing sharia law?
https://islamophiliawatch.blogspot.com/2018/11/why-is-george-soros-pushing-sharia-
law.html
[16] George Soros funds Islamic extremists
https://islamophiliawatch.blogspot.com/2018/12/george-soros-funds-islamic-extremists.html
[17] I know Abu Qatada – he's no terrorist, by Victoria Brittain, The Guardian, 7 Jul 2013
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jul/07/abu-qatada-no-terrorist
[18] British hostage Edwin Dyer 'killed by al-Qaida', by Matthew Weaver and agencies, The
Guardian, Wed 3 Jun 2009 10.11 BST First published on Wed 3 Jun 2009 10.11 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/jun/03/edwin-dyer-hostage-killed-al-qaida
[19] White supremacists at the heart of Whitehall, by Nafeez Ahmed, Middle East Eye, 6
March 2015
https://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/white-supremacists-heart-whitehall-789183852
Posted 18th January 2019 by Zenobia van Dongen

The Fake News of Nick Turse

Nick Turse's bias is obvious in the following passage, where he makes American aerial attacks
on Boko Haram terrorists the moral equivalent of Boko Haram's genocidal
campaigns against an unarmed civilian population.
Amid the horrific headlines about the fanatical Islamist sect Boko Haram that should make
Nigerians cringe, here’s a line from a recent Guardian article[1] that should make Americans
do the same, as the US military continues its “pivot” to Africa: “[US] defense officials are
looking to Washington’s alliance with Yemen, with its close intelligence cooperation and CIA
drone strikes, as an example for dealing with Boko Haram.”
Message: Drone strikes against Boko Haram are the moral equivalent of mass murder by Boko
Haram.
There have indeed been seemingly warranted complaints about reckless and unjustified US
drone attacks on Yemeni civilian populations, but that is not the same as saying that all drone
warfare or all drone warfare by the CIA is by its nature cringe-worthy. If drone strikes
are conducted recklessly, the proper measures should be taken to avoid such excesses. There
is nothing inherent in drone warfare that makes such excesses inevitable, despite the constant
whining of the jihadi lobby in the US, notably Code Pink.
In his articles on US military activities in North Africa, Turse constantly
implies that they provoked terrorist activity, without ever actually saying so unequivocally.
Turse writes, for example, that in 2000, a U.S. Army report ... “examined the ‘African security
environment’ ... [but] made no mention of Islamic extremism”[2]
Here he implies that any terrorism that arose after 2000 must have been the fault of the US.
Later on, “A careful examination of the security situation in Africa suggests that it is in the
process of becoming Ground Zero for a veritable terror diaspora set in motion in the wake of
9/11”
“set in motion in the wake of 9/11” means it happened after 11 September 2001. Lots of
things happened after 11 September 2001. For example after 11 September 2001 I stopped
drinking red wine and switched to white wine instead.
But then Turse makes the mistake of assuming that his readers are too lazy to read
the articles he links to, and he tells an outright lie, inventing out of whole cloth a causal
link that exists only in his fevered imagination. Referring to an article by Nicholas
Schmidle,[3] Turse writes:
As Schmidle noted, the effects of U.S. efforts in the region seemed at odds with AFRICOM’s
stated goals. “Al Qaeda established sanctuaries in the Sahel, and in 2006 it acquired a North
African franchise [Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb],” he wrote. “Terrorist attacks in the
region increased in both number and lethality.”[4]
Here Turse expressly attributes to Nicholas Schmidle the claim Al-Qaeda in the Islamic
Maghreb was established as one of “the effects of U.S. efforts in the region”. But that is an
outright lie. Schmidle´s article nowhere states or implies that U.S. efforts in the region were a
causal factor in encouraging terrorism in northwest Africa.
Evidently the purpose of Turse´s pseudo-journalism is to discourage American
military activities in Africa by calling them counterproductive. I myself am not
a particular enthusiast of American military adventures abroad, and have always regarded
them with a jaundiced eye. But an analysis of Turse’s output on North Africa reveals no cogent
arguments against US military involvement in that region. On the contrary, the arguments
deployed are invariably deceptive and mendacious.
If that is the best that a dedicated opponent of US military involvement in North
Africa like Nick Turse can do, this would seem to imply that such military involvement is an
excellent idea. However no conclusions are warranted concerning other aspects
of US foreign policy.
A useful antidote to Turse’s paranoid discourse is a brief article by Rafael Friedman.[5] Here
are some of its highlights:
The report that followed the September 11th attacks specifically pointed to the risk
that Africa would become a staging ground and safe haven for terrorists. This has played a
large role in the increase in American military focus on the region in the past two decades,
both in the West and East of the continent. This reflects a shift in US foreign policy away from
material interests as it becomes increasingly concerned about global terror.
...
America’s military presence on the African continent has expanded rapidly since the
beginning of the Global War on Terror ... As opposed to the large scale deployments seen in
other regions, the American military portrays its role in Africa as largely training and
cooperation based. Mostly, US troops act as military trainers that work with domestic
militaries and build internal military capacity. Not all American military deployments in Sub-
Saharan Africa are counter-terrorism operations (there is also a focus on anti-piracy
operations), but the vast majority are.
...
Africom is very insistent that the American military has a very small footprint on the continent
and it stresses how most operations involve “a small number of personnel who conduct short-
term deployments”. Africom officials point out that this is a deliberate tactic to ensure that,
given Africa’s troubled history, the US is not perceived as a new colonising power on the
continent. However, this leads to the scale of America’s presence being concealed and often
misrepresented ... two of the most contentious parts of American security policy in Africa: the
growth of America’s military presence on the continent as well as the increasing prevalence of
unmanned drones in America’s counter-terror operations in Africa ... America has drone bases
in at least eight African countries ... If this strategy becomes more prominent many of the
adverse effects of American drone programmes in the Middle East may emerge on this
continent. A high rate of collateral civilian casualties, and numerous cases of mistaken identity
would likely aid terrorist organisations in their radicalisation and recruitment efforts.
...
Africa is seen as an increasingly important battleground as domestic terror grows on the
continent and raises concerns that it might be exported globally. This has led to much greater
emphasis being placed on assisting African countries to combat terror threats. Concerns
for Africa include both the use of drones and the gross human rights violations committed by
US funded allies, while the secretive nature of US military activities raises anxieties about the
extent of their presence and influence.

[1] Nigeria kidnapping: why Boko Haram is a top security priority for the US, by Chris McGreal,
The Guardian, Fri 9 May 2014
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/09/boko-haram-us-security-policy-nigeria-
kidnap
[2] Blowback Central, by Nick Turse, Tom Dispatch, June 18, 2013
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175714/
[3] The Saharan Conundrum, by Nicholas Schmidle, The New York Times Magazine, Feb. 13,
2009
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/magazine/15Africa-t.html
[4] Blowback Central, by Nick Turse, Tom Dispatch, June 18, 2013
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175714/
[5] America’s war on terror in Africa, by Rafael Friedman, Mar 23, 2017
https://hsf.org.za/publications/hsf-briefs/America2019s-war-on-terror-in-Africa
Posted 19th January 2019 by Zenobia van Dongen

Islamophobia is blowback from Islamic terrorism

According to the certified school psychologist Izzy Kalman, “hatred and fear of Muslims –
‘Islamophobia’” are caused by Islamic terrorism.[1]
Here are some passages from an article he published in Psychology Today in 2016.
Now, with the never-ending flow of news of terrorism committed by radical Muslims and of
the actions of the Islamic State (ISIS), people are much more likely to pick on you because of
hatred and fear of Muslims – ‘Islamophobia.’
...
Where does Islamophobia come from?
Why are they bullying you for being Muslim?
You may think they are simply being evil, that they get pleasure from making Muslims suffer.
But the real reason is that they think Muslims are dangerous. They are afraid that one day you
may try to make them suffer.
All living creatures, including human beings, are biologically programmed to recognize
dangers. You may think snakes are really cute animals. But once you learn that some of them
can kill you with one bite or choke you to death, you will be scared of all snakes. If you see one
in your house, you will certainly want to get rid of it or even kill it. This fear is necessary for our
survival. If we don’t fear snakes, we may want to pick them up and play with them. Until we
learn to recognize which snakes are dangerous to us and which are safe, it is wise to treat all
snakes as hazardous.
Throughout human existence, just about every group had enemies that wanted to kill them.
So just as people learned to recognize signs of dangerous animals, they learned to recognize
signs of dangerous people. In recent years people have been getting news of radical Muslims
committing terrible acts of terrorism; of leaders of Muslim nations calling for “Death
to America! Death to Israel!”; of Muslim clerics preaching that Islam must take over the world
and that anyone who criticizes Mohammed should be killed. It is therefore a normal reaction
for people to see a Muslim as a potential danger. Of course the great majority of Muslims
aren’t dangerous to them, but most people can’t differentiate between those that are and
those that aren’t, so they react emotionally to anyone that resembles a Muslim as a potential
enemy.
Therefore, if people treat you like you are dangerous, don’t blame them. They are only doing
what they are biologically programmed to do to for survival. You would do the same thing if
the roles were reversed. If you want to blame anyone, perhaps you should blame the radical
Muslims that have given Islam a bad reputation.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/experts/izzy-kalman
About the author
Izzy Kalman is a Nationally Certified School Psychologist who has been working in schools and
private practice since 1978. He has developed fun and effective methods that use role playing
to teach basic psychological principles for solving bullying, aggression and relationship
problems. When the Columbine massacre 1999 ignited a worldwide crusade to get rid of
bullying by treating it like a crime that will not be tolerated, he recognized that the approach
could not work. He created a website, www.Bullies2Buddies.com, to teach people how to
handle bullying on their own, based on time-honored psychological principles. He has written
in greater detail on the problems with the bullying psychology than anyone in the world.
Izzy has been working intensively since 2002 with Cross Country Education, which sponsors
his full-day seminars. Over 40,000 mental health professionals and educators throughout
the US and Canada have attended thus far. He is Director of Bullies to Buddies, Inc., the
company he and his wife created to produce materials and provide consultation on bullying.
He is the author of Bullies to Buddies: How to turn your enemies into friends, and other
publications and products for dealing with bullying and relationship problems, and creator of a
whole-school bullying prevention program, Victim-Proof Your School.
AUTHOR OF
Resilience to Bullying
The woldwide movement to protect kids from bullying is failing. It weakens them emotionally,
fosters helplessness and intensifies the bullying problem. This blog is dedicated to promoting
resilience to bullying. When kids have the wisdom for dealing with bullying on their own, no
one can bully them and they don't need everyone around them to protect them. They grow in
self-confidence, self-esteem, maturity and popularity. And bullying decreases in society. Read
now.

[1] Source: Resilience to Bullying "All Muslims Are Terrorists!" What should you do if you are a
victim of Islamophobic bullying? by Izzy Kalman, Psychology Today, Apr 19, 2016
 https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/resilience-bullying/201604/all-muslims-are-
terrorists
Posted 25th January 2019 by Zenobia van Dongen

Wobbly Definition of Race

Once upon a time the term “racist” was tightly associated with the concept of “race”. In turn
the concept of “race”, whatever its validity or lack of same, was always associated
with belonging to a human group that shares hereditary traits. In most cases such traits are
bodily in nature and are recognizable to an untrained observer. But in all cases such traits are
innate and unchangeable. As long as the terms “racist” and “race” kept these meanings, it
was possible to distinguish clearly between racists and non-racists.
However with the extension of the concept of “race” to include traits that are neither
hereditary nor unchangeable, it is no longer possible to determine who is a racist and who is
not. Or alternatively, racism becomes less iniquitous.
Linda Sarsour once announced (I hate the verb “to tweet”):
"When I wasn't wearing hijab I was just some ordinary white girl." -
@lsarsourpic.twitter.com/imFY0jvfLV
— LALO DAGACH (@LaloDagach) September 5, 2017
Presumably by putting on a hijab she became dusky, or a “person of color” in official jargon.
Not to be outdone, Jeremy Corbyn once said: “I’ve held meetings with Muslim women who
have told me horrific stories of routine racist abuse on our streets. If women are abused
because they are wearing a headscarf, then it is a wrong against them and it is a wrong
against all of us.”[1]
If abusing women because they wearing headscarves is racist abuse, then when you put on a
headscarf, you are changing your race. Consequently Corbyn is using the term “race” to
designate traits that are neither bodily nor hereditary nor unchangeable, and thus
attributes to the term “race” a meaning that differs greatly from that of “race” in the
traditional sense of the term.
Some might object that those women would have been abused anyway even if they weren’t
wearing headscarves, because they could be recognized on the basis of other characteristics
pertaining to Muslims.
But I now will present a second instance that clearly proves that in England, at least, Muslims
are abused because of their clothing and not because of their innate physical appearance.
Middle East Eye published an article, written by a British professor of criminology, Imran
Awan.[2]
As an experiment, Mr Awan grew a beard, donned traditional Pakistani garb and took a bus to
downtown Birmingham. He writes, “I was called a ‘typical Paki’, ‘scumbag’ and ‘terrorist
scum’. I was also threatened in a number of public places and told that ‘I did not belong here’”.
... In the author’s words, “The atrocity at the Manchester Arena means anyone who has the
'visible' markers of Islam is now more likely to be a victim of hate crimes”. ... Mr. Awan writes
that in his normal beardless state, when wearing Western attire, he is never importuned on
account of his religion.
This proves beyond any doubt that the so-called “racism” directed at Muslims in Britain is not
triggered by their inborn physical traits, or “race” in its traditional sense, but instead by their
attire and facial hair, probably when combined with certain inborn physical traits. It could not
be otherwise, since Hindus – of whom there are many in Britain -- are by and large physically
indistinguishable from Pakistani Muslims, and I have searched the web in vain for cases of
Hindus being called ‘terrorist scum’ in Britain, or being subjected to vituperation of any sort,
for that matter.
At the same time as he furnishes cogent evidence to the effect that the hijab makes the
Muslim -- much as the habit makes the monk – his article likewise proves (for the umpteenth
time) that Islamophobia is not the outcome of some ancient tribal memory lurking within the
troubled conscience of Western Civ, as disindigenous fabulists like Deepa Kumar would have
us believe, but is instead a reaction -- "blowback", so to speak – to Mohammedan terrorism.
This message is announced loud and clear right at the beginning of the article by the rubric
“Islamophobia” only a few millimeters away from the headline “Manchester attack”. Thus we
see that terminological rearrangements seldom occur in isolation, but instead appear – or are
deployed – in groups, or squadrons, if you will. The meaning of race changes in unison with
the meaning of Islamophobia.
Under the new definition of race, people can change their race with ease. Therefore race
ceases to be a permanent, innate and involuntary attribute. However, being permanent,
innate and involuntary were fundamental attributes of the traditional concept of “race”.
Racists are deemed evil above all because racism seeks to punish people for circumstances
over which they have no control. Racism entails punishment without guilt. That is why racism
is so inherently unfair.
In accordance with this logic, the American NGO Southern Poverty Legal Center (SPLC)
“defines a hate group as ‘an organization that ... attacks or maligns an entire class of people,
typically for their immutable [my stress] characteristics’”[3]
Nonetheless this does not prevent the wily SPLC from trying to portray Islamophobia as a sort
of racism by fraudulently treating religion as an immutable characteristic. See my previous
note “SPLC hypocrisy“.[4] The Sowdy government likewise treats religion as immutable post
facto by executing everyone who forsakes Islam.
If people can change their race at will, then racism need no longer be unjust, although it still
can be.
Curiously enough, this expansion of the meaning of “race” occurred quite recently, perhaps in
the 1990s, at about the same time as the notorious French rightist Alain de Benoist was
redefining what it means to be a right-winger by renouncing the emotional attachment to
genetics that characterized the European far right throughout the 20th century.[5]
This leads us to a discussion of the “racism without races” theory expounded by René
Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein.[6] But I must leave that for another day.
Leftists often continue to call rightists “racists”. Sometimes, as in the case cited by Jeremy
Corbyn above, the epithet racist relies on the new, expanded definition of race that I
outlined before. But on other occasions leftists eager to disparage rightists attribute to
the latter racist notions in the phenotype-based sense of the term.
For example Marcela Gola Boutros falsely charged the Italian government with seeking to
expel foreigners on the basis of their “skin color”. [7] However the Salvini decree, which she
was complaining about, merely provides for expulsion of foreigners designated as undesirable
by provincial committees composed of a deputy prefect, a senior police official, a
representative of local government and a delegate of the UN High Commissioner for
Refugees. There is no mention of the color of a foreigner’s skin, or of any racial attribute at
all.[8] I am certain that any mention of racial attributes would have rendered the decree
void ab initio as incompatible with the Italian constitution.
Likewise the arch-globalist Le Monde, in a veritable paroxysm of mendacity, falsely attributes
phenotype-based racism to Renaud Camus’ great replacement theory:
"The theory is essentially racist, since it is based on the issues of skin color and ethnicity as
criteria for belonging. Even if somebody was born in France to French parents with
a background of several generations in France, if he is not a Caucasian, then he is a
'replacer'".[9]
However, as the noted French demographer Michèle Tribalat points out, Renaud Camus
doesn’t require European ancestry to consider people French; he includes as French
"individuals or families who have assimilated or who intend to do so". Accordingly the great
replacement hypothesis as formulated by Renaud Camus cannot truthfully be called racist in
the traditional or phenotypical sense of the term.

[1] Jeremy Corbyn attacks Islamophobia during mosque visit, by Harriet Sherwood, Religion
correspondent, The Guardian, 18 Feb 2018
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/feb/18/jeremy-corbyn-attacks-islamophobia-
during-mosque-visit
[2] Manchester attack: How Muslims became the enemy within, by Imran Awan, Middle East
Eye, 29 May 2017
https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/manchester-attack-how-muslims-became-enemy-
within
[3] Reported by Will Carless, The Hate Report: 4 takeaways from the big annual hate study
Feb 22, 2019 02:35 pm
[4] https://islamophiliawatch.blogspot.com/2019/02/splc-hypocrisy.html
[5] Alain de Benoist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_de_Benoist
[6] Race, Nation, Class. Ambiguous Identities, by Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein,
Verso 2010
[7] The Refugees’ Tsunami In Italy Turns Out To Be Just A Ripple, by Marcela Gola Boutros,
Social Europe, 2 October 2018
https://www.socialeurope.eu/the-refugees-tsunami-in-italy-turns-out-to-be-just-a-ripple
[8] Refugee issues in Italy, by Zenobia van Dongen, Islamophilia Watch, 4 Oct 2018
https://islamophiliawatch.blogspot.com/2018/10/refugee-issues-in-italy.html
[9] Cited in “La théorie du « grand remplacement », de l’écrivain Renaud Camus aux attentats
en Nouvelle-Zélande “ [Writer Renaud Camus’ “Great Replacement” theory featured in
the New Zealand attacks], by Michèle Tribalat http://www.micheletribalat.fr/442084322
Posted 28th March 2019 by Zenobia van Dongen

Manufacturing blowback
An Austrian website called Steirische Friedensplattform [“Styrian Peace Platform” – Styria is
an Austrian province] reports on the conviction of a Palestinian, Abdel Karim Abu Habel,
for terrorism at Krems in Austria. The charges are firstly that once in Austria, he got in touch
via social media with Palestinians in Gaza, whom he instigated to commit a terrorist attack
with a grenade in Jerusalem, near al Aqsa mosque; and secondly being a member of Hamas.
The website is clearly pro-Palestinian, and it protests vehemently against his conviction and
denounces Israel as a colonial occupier. Here is a passage that shows clearly this website’s
sympathies:
"The [Austrian] court ostentatiously writes (Israel) after "Jerusalem”, thus displaying its
political bias and directly contradicting international law [concerning Jerusalem’s status],
since the al-Aqsa Mosque is located in East Jerusalem, which was illegally annexed by Israel in
1967 and is not recognized as part of Israel by the UN or the Security Council, or even by the
US. The court treated the alleged offense throughout as if it had taken place in Austria. There
is no reference to the colonial context. And of course there is no mention of the fact that
international law explicitly authorizes armed resistance against foreign occupation.”[1]
I wonder whether international law is flexible enough to authorize someone to resist foreign
occupation via social media from a remote unoccupied country.
The witnesses for the prosecution testified via Skype from an Israeli prison,
where they were being held for the same alleged terror plot.

Abu Habel’s image projected onto the Austrian Embassy in London

The Inminds Palestinian website in England gives a very different version:
Working hand in hand with Israel, the Austrian authorities allowed Israeli interrogators to
brutally torture Abu Habel on Austrian soil for 9 months. In a letter he managed to later
smuggle out Abu Habel describes the torture:
"I saw death for nine months of interrogation, I did not see the sun or daylight, I was beaten
and tortured. Even the doctor who came to treat my wounds, because of the severity of the
torture, joined in my beating and at the end they claimed that I assaulted the doctor. At the
beginning, the interrogators denied that they were from the Mossad intelligence service.
However I noticed the presence of the Israeli star and then an officer admitted they were
Israelis." On one occasion they injected him with an unknown substance which caused the
colour of his skin to change - especially his hands which he described in his letter as 'still
burning". He says "I was taken to the hospital several times because of the harsh treatment
during interrogations". When Abu Habel would not break they threatened to kill his wife
in Gaza who was pregnant at the time with his second child.”
...
In the end they charged him, again of being a member of Hamas and for social media
messages. On 24th July 2017 they sentenced Abu Habel to life imprisonment - on practically
the same charges he had already served 9 years for.”[2]
 Top of Inminds page [rearranged for better visibility]

Apparently he served 9 years in an Israeli prison for terrorism charges, but for events that had
occurred many years before.
An Austrian daily newspaper[3] reports that he had fled Gaza in 2016. He
gave different reasons for his flight. One of them is that he feared Hamas, which accused him
of being an Israeli spy and had interrogated him harshly. He admits to being a
Hamas member. He sought asylum in Austria and lived in a shelter for asylum seekers in
Gmünd. Through the shelter wi-fi he then recruited youths in Gaza to commit the attack. He
denies the charge, but his messages were preserved on his cell phone and the prosecutor
called the evidence “overwhelming”.
He was originally charged with assaulting prison guards while he was being taken to see the
prison doctor, but that charge was dropped. In a preliminary hearing he claimed he had been
beaten by guards at the prison doctor’s behest. Consequently he was also charged with
slander. That charge too was dropped. The prosecutor denied the defendant’s claims
of having been assaulted.
Neither the Austrian MSM nor the Austrian Palestine-sympathizing website even hinted at
any allegations that someone had tortured Abu Habel, let alone that Mossad agents had
tortured him for nine months on Austrian soil with the connivance of the authorities, had
injected unknown substances into him or had threatened to murder his pregnant wife in Gaza.
Consequently we can safely assume that these are all merely lurid fabrications maliciously
inserted by the Palestinian website.
After quoting this bogus letter, Inminds, an alleged “human rights” group, issued the
following statement, which is saturated with lies:
This is a shocking injustice that a European state has perpetrated on its most vulnerable
resident on behalf of Israel. When Austria invites Israeli thugs to torture, for 9 months, a
young Palestinian father who has entered Austria legally and respected all its laws, breaking
none of them, it calls into question Austria's sovereignty. It's a shameful mockery of Austria's
justice system when it hands down a life sentence to a victim of Israeli terror on the say so of
Israel, for charges which he has already served his time in an Israeli dungeon.
Quite apart from issues of truthfulness, any Muslim who reads the Palestinian website will get
the impression that Austria allows Israeli torturers onto its soil to torture innocent Palestinians
for months on end. And then at the behest of the Israeli occupation authorities, sentence him
to life imprisonment JUST FOR MEDIA MESSAGES! (or else for something he had already
been punished for -- they switch back and forth from one yarn to the other).
Their blood will boil.
Then the blowback clock will start ticking.
One day some righteous jihadi will decide to avenge the infamy committed by that evil
Austrians against his Palestinian blood brother.
Islamic justice will be done.
https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/fbi-arrests-pakistani-american-at-airport-for-
links-to-jem-isis/article27032104.ece
FBI arrests Pakistani-American at airport for links to JeM, ISIS
PTI Washington:, May 04, 2019
Waqar Ul-Hassan, a ... 35-year-old Pakistani-American national, has been arrested by the FBI
on his arrival from Pakistan for being in contact with two UN-proscribed terror groups the
Islamic State and the JeM [Jaish-e-Muhammad].
...
Hassan told investigators that he was in contact with ISIS as well.
The complaint said because he was angry about what was happening to Muslims around
the world, he was serious about sending USD 175 to Jihadists in Syria.

[1] “Ist das verhältnismäßig? Verdacht auf Gesinnungsjustiz” [Is this fair? Suspicion of
prosecution for political opinions], Steirische Friedensplattform [“Styrian Peace Platform”]
http://www.friedensplattform.at/?p=4842
[2] Guerilla Projection - Austria Free Tortured Palestinian Asylum Seeker Abdel Karim Abu
Habel, Inminds, 15 February 2018
http://www.inminds.com/article.php?id=10789
[3] “Terror-Prozess: Mehrtägige Verhandlung gestartet” [Terrorism trial: Proceedings will last
for several days], Austria Presseagentur, Niederösterreichische Nachrichten, 18 July 2017
https://www.noen.at/niederoesterreich/chronik-gericht/krems-terror-prozess-mehrtaegige-
verhandlung-gestartet-justiz-niederoesterreich-prozess-terrorismus-54785390
Posted 11th April 2019 by Zenobia van Dongen

A Trumpian performance: Matt Duss’ congressional

testimony on BDS
In 2015, Matt Duss, who since 2017 has been Bernie Sanders' foreign policy adviser, gave
testimony to the US Congress about BDS.[1] In just a few minutes he told an alarming number
of lies. This article is devoted to analyzing his Trumpian performance.
These are some of the things he said:
“In order to do that, I first want to take a moment to identify just what we’re talking about
when we refer to BDS. The movement began in July 2005 with a joint call from a number of
Palestinian civil society organizations , with three main demands: An end to the occupation
that began in 1967; equal rights for Palestinians citizens within Israel; and protecting and
promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes in what is today Israel.
The term “BDS” is widely understood to refer to the network of grassroots activists who are
part of a global movement to encourage boycotts, divestment from, and ultimately
international sanctions against Israel to achieve these goals.
“I would also suggest that it is a mistake to focus on the BDS movement while ignoring the
main reason for its continued growth , which is the failure to end the occupation that began in
1967 and achieve Palestinian national liberation and sovereignty. If one is genuinely
concerned about the impact of the BDS movement, the surest way to take the wind out of its
 sails would be to work diligently to achieve those goals, and act against efforts which prevent
them.”
I have selected 5 of his claims, which I examine one by one:
THE CLAIMS
1. BDS ... “began in July 2005 with a joint call from a number of Palestinian civil society
organizations”
2. [BDS wants] “an end to the occupation that began in 1967”
3. [BDS wants] “equal rights for Palestinians citizens within Israel”
4. [BDS supports] “the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes in what is
today Israel”
5. “the main reason for its [BDS] continued growth is the failure to end the occupation that began
in 1967 and achieve Palestinian national liberation and sovereignty”
ANALYSIS
1. BDS ... began in July 2005 with a joint call from a number of Palestinian civil society
organizations
It’s not true that BDS was started by "Palestinian civil society” in 2005. there is no clarity on
when it began. Marc Greendorfer argued in the Roger Williams University Law Review that the
BDS movement is in all respects merely a continuation of the boycott of Israel that the Arab
League proclaimed in 1948.[2]
2. [BDS wants] “an end to the occupation that began in 1967”
BDS does not state that the occupation began in 1967. The BDS website
mentions Israel's “occupation and colonization of ALL Arab lands”, which is generally taken to
mean that ALL of Israel, starting in 1948, is occupied Arab land, not only the territory
that Israel seized in 1967. Consequently Matt Duss was lying to Congress, because he knew
very few Americans support liquidation of Israel.
In the words of Norman Finkelstein, “They don’t want Israel. They think they are being very
clever; they call it their three tier. We want the end of the occupation, the right of return, and
we want equal rights for Arabs in Israel. And they think they are very clever because they
know the result of implementing all three is what, what is the result? You know and I know
what the result is. There’s no Israel!”[3]
3. “Palestinians citizens within Israel” is insider code for Israeli citizens who are ethnic
Arabs. This peculiar terminology reflects the reluctance to call Palestinians Arabs.
4. “The right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes” is a supreme piece of hypocrisy.
According to the UN agency in charge of Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, “Palestine refugees
are defined as ‘persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1
June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the
1948 conflict.’ In other words nobody born after 1948 can
be a Palestine refugee. That means that there are only currently about 30 thousand
Palestinian refugees left. However UNRWA generously rules that “The descendants
of Palestine refugee males, including adopted children, are also eligible for registration.” I
suppose this means registration as refugees. I will pass in silence over the exclusion of the
descendants of female Palestine refugees.[4]
In any case this language reveals that UNRWA itself acknowledges that the descendants of
refugees are not themselves refugees, although it is willing to treat them as such.
But Matt Duss goes UNRWA one better when he not only acknowledges the descendants of
refugees as refugees themselves, but actually claims that these descendants have “homes”
in Israel to which they should be allowed to “return”.
UNRWA refrains from actually designating the great-grandchildren of Palestinian refugees as
refugees themselves. Palestinian propagandists have no such scruples. It may be peculiar to
treat refugee status as a hereditary condition, but since the term “refugee” is a term of law
 and not an everyday English word, this extension of the meaning of the term refugee doesn’t
reach the point of breaching the everyday meaning of English words. But when Matt Duss
claims that the descendants of Palestinian refugees who left their homes 70 years ago
themselves have “homes” in Israel to which they should be allowed to “return”, he is entering
the realm of fantasy, and an ideological fantasy at that.
5. Duss claimed that the main reason that the BDS movement was allegedly growing at the time
of his testimony (in 2015) is that Israel still occupied the West Bank and blockaded Gaza.
This claim is extremely dubious because it posits a direct link between Israeli occupation of
parts of Palestine on the one hand and the motivation of people outside Israel to agitate for a
boycott of Israel. Since people who do not live in Israel/Palestine do not experience Israeli
occupation directly, any urge they may feel to boycott Israel must be mediated through
(mis)information that they receive from Israel/Palestine. Consequently Matt Duss' claim relies
on the assumption that there are no changes in the quality or the quantity of the information
that people outside Israel/Palestine receive concerning the Israeli occupation. Moreover Matt
Duss implies that the information so received is reliable, and that people are becoming
increasingly indignant at the Israeli occupation as time goes by.
The weakness in this line of reasoning is that in fact the information spread abroad by
supporters of the Palestinian cause about Israel and its occupation is firstly extremely
unreliable, and secondly its quality and quantity is subject to variation depending on a number
of factors that are difficult to quantify.
It has often been remarked that all
news provided by Palestinian political organizations is thoroughly tainted by
lies and propaganda, far more so than news from Israeli sources.[5]
Throughout his testimony to Congress, Matt Duss does his utmost to maintain the fiction that
Palestinians recognize Israel's sovereignty over the territory it
seized in 1948, and consequently if Israel withdraws from the West
Bank and Gaza, BDS will wither away. But this contradicts Duss’ own admission that the so-
called right of return is an additional non-negotiable BDS condition. So even
if Israel withdraws and the occupation ends, the Palestinians will remain inflexible
until Israel lets the descendants of Palestinian refugees “return” to Israeli territory.
It is utterly false to suggest that Palestinians on the whole recognize Israel's right to control
the land it held before 1967. The maps in Palestinian schoolbooks show no
border between old Israel on the one hand and the West Bank on the other.[6] Those maps do
not show the cities that Israel has built since 1948. All place names are in
Arabic. Consequently Palestinians’ view of the world does not acknowledge Israel’s
existence as a separate state. This clearly shows that any Israeli withdrawal from the West
Bank would merely constitute the prelude for a Palestinian war of conquest to
destroy Israel proper.
Duss suggests that the Palestinians desire “national liberation”. This might be true with
respect to the PLO. However among Palestinians the PLO has less support than
Hamas, and Hamas’ political stance is completely incompatible with the concept of national
liberation, since Hamas does not recognize nation states. One of Hamas top
leaders, Mahmoud al Zahar, sees the destruction of Israel as part of
a worldwide struggle against all Jews. In 2012 he gave a speech on Hamas’ Al-Aqsa TV station:
“Dear brothers and sisters … we cannot but recall the crimes of these criminal [Jews]
throughout history. … Why did France, in 1253, expel and uproot the Jewish entity which was
represented by the ghetto? Why did they expel them? Because they sucked the blood of the
French, because they shed the blood of the French, slaughtered them, stole their money, and
conspired against them. At the end of the day, the French had no choice but to expel them in
1253. … The series of expulsions continues to this day, … and Allah willing, their expulsion
from Palestine in its entirety is certain to come. We are no weaker or less honourable than the
peoples that expelled and annihilated the Jews. The day we expel them is drawing near. … We
extend our hands to feed these hungry dogs and wild beasts, and they devoured our fingers.
We have learned the lesson: there is no place for you among us, and you have no future
among the nations of the world. You are headed to annihilation.[7]
“National liberation” means enforcement of a nation’s right to self-determination, which is a
cardinal principle in modern international law (jus cogens). It states that nations have the right
to freely choose their sovereignty and international political status with no external
compulsion or interference.[8] However Hamas seeks to establish a state as part of a struggle
to destroy a religion or race, in this case the Jews. Any struggle to destroy a religion or a race
is clearly contrary to international law. Consequently Hamas cannot invoke principles of
international law, in this case the principle of national liberation, to justify its depraved aims.
Taken as a whole, Matt Duss' testimony before Congress is such a tangle of malicious
fables that he is obviously a pathological liar and consequently unfit to be the adviser of a
candidate to president of the US.
Moreover his lies have a single purpose, namely to advance the cause of Hamas, a terrorist
Muslim Brotherhood organization that is single-mindedly devoted to Israel's destruction and
that far from being “progressive”, as Duss claims to be, is an arch-reactionary organization
that is strictly opposed to human rights, democracy, equality of women, sexual freedom,
indeed freedom of any kind, and tolerance for any religious or irreligious attitude other than
its own brand of Islam.

[1] Matthew Duss: Congressional Testimony on Impact of BDS

By Matt Duss, July 29, 2015
Statement by Matthew Duss, President of the Foundation for Middle East
Peace, Washington, D.C.
https://fmep.org/blog/2015/07/matthew-duss-congressional-testimony-on-impact-of-bds/
[2] Greendorfer, Marc (7 January 2015). "The BDS Movement: That Which We Call a Foreign
Boycott, By Any Other Name, Is Still Illegal": 19. SSRN 2531130
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boycott,_Divestment_and_Sanctions
[3] http://www.stopbds.com/
[4] https://www.unrwa.org/palestine-refugees
[5] I have published numerous articles on this subject on my blog Islamophilia Watch at
http://islamophiliawatch.blogspot.com. Their names are Manufacturing blowback, Ilhan Omar
Al Qaeda’s representative, How Palestinians lie, Gideon Levy’s daydreams, Critique of BDS,
Palestinian Humanitarian Marketing Unmasked, How Islamists distort history and Welcome to
Pallywood.
[6] Palestinian maps omitting Israel
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/palestinian-maps-omitting-israel
Textbooks in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textbooks_in_the_Israeli%E2%80%93Palestinian_conflict
How Palestinian schoolbooks indoctrinate students against Israel: Peace with the Jews is not
an option, by David Bedein, Frontpage Mag, January 9, 2019
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272465/how-palestinian-schoolbooks-indoctrinate-
students-david-bedein
[7] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mahmoud_al-Zahar
[8] Wikipedia, Self-determination

Posted 3rd May 2019 by Zenobia van Dongen

Hezbollah hobnobs with European Fascists

Hezbollah, a favorite of CAIR and Islamic militants, is connected to European fascists.
In an article in Consortium News in November 2018, Max Blumenthal rightly denounced Italy’s
fascist Casa Pound party.
https://consortiumnews.com/2018/11/17/blowback-us-funded-ukraine-neo-nazis-mentor-us-
white-supremacists/
Casa Pound is named after the third-rate American poet Ezra Pound, who lived in Fascist Italy
from 1924 to 1945, supported Fascism and made pro-Fascist radio broadcasts to the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra_Pound
But for some reason that staunch anti-fascist Max Blumenthal neglected to report that Casa
Pound is on excellent terms with Iran's sock puppet in Lebanon Hezbollah, as reported by the
Italian daily Repubblica in 2015. According to Repubblica, the European Parliament declared
Hezbollah a terrorist group on 10 March 2005.

On 26 September 2015 a convention called “Mediterranean Solidarity”, “the first international

convention of solidarity [among] identities” was held in Rome attended by Rima Fakhri,
member of Hezbollah’s politburo and Sayyed Ammar Al Moussawi, responsible for
Hezbollah’s international relations, as well as by top Casa Pound leaders like Alberto
Palladino, who was seen in the Donbass during fighting between Russia and the Ukraine,
Franco Nerozzi, who was convicted of international terrorism in Verona after taking part in a
failed coup d’état on the Comoros islands, Casa Pound leader Giovanni Feola, and Luca
Bertoni, representing the Lombardy-Russia Association, who always accompanies Matteo
Salvini, leader of the far-right Lega, on his trips to Moscow.

Italian Fascists protest trial of Roberto Palladino

“Italian right-wingers have consolidated relations with the most fundamentalist and militant
Islamic groups. In 2013 the City of Rome refused permission to the Syrian Uodai Soso
Ramadan, also invited to the congress, to hold a pro-Assad demonstration. At the time he was
staying at Casa Pound.”
Source: Roma, la strana coppia Hezbollah-Casapound insieme al convegno ["Rome: the
strange couple Hezbollah-Casapound together at convention"], by Corrado Zunino,
Repubblica, 20 September 2015
https://roma.repubblica.it/cronaca/2015/09/20/news/roma_convegno_mediterraneo_solidale
_iniziativa_fascio-islamica-123310960/
More recently, according to left-wing German Die Tageszeitung (taz), in March 2019
European neo-Nazis visited the Shiite Hezbollah militia in Lebanon ... Last Saturday in Beirut,
among others, they visited among others, Hezbollah's representative in foreign countries
Ammar Al-Moussawi ... Among them were MEP (Member of the European Parliament) Udo
Voigt of the NPD [German National Democratic Party, an openly neo-Nazi outfit despite its
name], former MEP Nick Griffin of the British National Party, neo-fascist Italian politician
Roberto Fiore and the member of the Croatian parliament and former general Željko
Glasnović ... The delegation "expressed its support for the important role that Hezbollah plays
in the fight against terrorism and Israeli aggression," the delegation announced. "They also
showed their solidarity with the resistance against political and media campaigns conducted
by forces associated with the American-Zionist project."
Rechtsextreme Delegation im Libanon ["Extremist right-wing delegation in Lebanon"], by
Frederik Schindler, Die Tageszeitung (taz), 21 March 2019
https://taz.de/Europaeische-Neonazis-bei-der-Hisbollah/!5582324/
Noam Chomsky take note!
Posted 11 December 2019 by Zenobia van Dongen

Nick Turse article on the Congo

Nick Turse has written a dozen articles on US military intervention in Africa[1]. He never
mentions anything that happens in those countries, only US military doings. Nor does he
mention which enemies if any the US faces in Africa.
Thanks to Turse's selective approach, the reader is spared having to read distressing
information like this:
“I was in class in my village. We heard screaming. Then people started firing guns. They shot
at our teachers and killed one of them. They burnt down the classrooms. I was scared. I felt
weak and lost. Then we just ran.’ – Hussaini, 14
Hussaini should be spending his days on a school bench, reading books, like other students his
age. But since his school was destroyed and he and his family were forced to escape their
village in northern Burkina Faso, he has not set foot in a classroom. ‘I used to love school, to
read, to count and to play during recess,’ says Hussaini. ‘It’s been a year since I last went to
school.’
The attack was not random. Many areas in West and Central Africa are witnessing increased
hostility towards education by warring factions [i.e. jihadists]. Particularly, in the countries of
the Central Sahel and the Lake Chad Basin, ideological opposition to what is seen as Western-
style education – especially for girls – is central to many of these hostilities. As a result,
students, teachers, administrators and the education infrastructure are being deliberately
targeted.”[2]
Or this little item from the Washington Post:
“One evening in late June, gunmen stormed a village in northern Burkina Faso and ordered
people who had been chatting outside to lie down.
Then the armed strangers checked everyone’s necks, searching for jewelry. They found four
men wearing crucifixes — Christians. They executed them.
A spreading Islamist insurgency has transformed Burkina Faso from a peaceful country known
for farming, a celebrated film festival and religious tolerance into a hotbed of extremism. ...
three years ago ... Militants trickled in from neighboring Mali, which was wrestling with its
own insurgency
Attacks by fighters linked to the Islamic State and al-Qaeda have quadrupled since 2017
in Burkina Faso ... at least 70,000 people to flee their homes since January ... the majority of
victims have been Muslim.
The attacks aimed at Christians signal a shift in the militants’ strategy from indiscriminate
gunfire to attempts at dividing communities as they seek to quash any trace of Western
influence ...”[3]
Now he has written an article about the eastern Congo, specifically the city of Goma.[4]
Here he applies the opposite method: he only writes about what happens in Goma, but he
rigorously refrains from mentioning the constant foreign military interventions
that have characterized the region since 1998. Since then there have been 2 wars,
the first[5] and the second[6] Congo wars, in which about a dozen
African countries have intervened in addition to a UN force in which about 20 countries took
part, including India, Uruguay, Guatemala and the Ukraine, plus a European Union force.

The National Geographic wrote in 2011, “One of the largest United Nations forces in the
world, some 20,000 troops, currently maintains a fragile, and often broken, peace.”[7]
So the armies of about 40 different countries have intervened in the Goma area, as late as
2012. Turse mentions these wars but says nothing about foreign armies.
By neatly separating foreign military involvement from everything else, Turse manages to
avoid raising questions about any benefits that foreign military involvement may have yielded
in Africa.
Fortunately for Turse, his left-wing American audience is gullible and easy to manipulate. He
can probably count on maintaining the illusion for years. Handling jihadi terrorism as if
it were a legitimate popular insurgency like those in Central America in the 1980s can only
serve to prevent popular revulsion in the US at the savagery of the jihadi modus operandi.
Turse skillfully presents and withholds information in order to persuade his audience
that foreign military intervention in Africa is unnecessary and harmful. At a time of swift
expansion of jihadism on the African continent, this can only serve the goals of Islamic
extremism.
Explaining why military intervention in Africa is a bad idea is becoming a veritable
cottage industry among journalists of a certain political persuasion.
Juan Cole distinguished himself around 2007 by explaining that the terrorism of Al Qaeda was
a flash in the pan and completely untypical for Islam. When Sadiq Khan was elected mayor
of London, Juan Cole explained that Khan was merely the latest in a long line of distinguished
European rulers of the Muslim faith. It turned out that Cole was referring to officials of the
Ottoman Empire and of Muslim Spain, all of whom ruled by virtue of invasions of Europe from
either Asia or Africa.
Juan Cole recently republished on his web site an article from The Conversation by Bryce
Reeder that explained the consequences of drone strikes against the Somali terrorist
organization Al Shebaab.[8]
The US argues that drone strikes are necessary for two main reasons: to counter the influence
of Al-Shabaab locally; and to prevent the group from reaching out to members of the Somali
diaspora community to inspire tragic terror attacks. Examples include the Westgate Mall
attack in Kenya that killed 67 people, and the attack on a university in Garissa that killed 147.
Earlier this year there was an attack on a hotel in Nairobi that killed 14 people
What happens after an American drone strike depends on the target of the strike. When
the US attacks Al Shebaab bases, Al Shebaab kills civilians, which must be avoided. And when
the US attacks Al Shebaab soldiers, they are easily replaced by new recruits, so there's no
point in attacking Al Shebaab soldiers. So the best thing for the US is to do nothing.
No wonder Juan Cole republished this article.

[1] The heavy imprint of America's 'light footprint', by Nick Turse, Open Democracy, 27 March
2014
https://www.opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/nick-turse/heavy-imprint-of-americas-light-
footprint
The US military's new normal in Africa, by Nick Turse and Tom Engelhardt, 15 May 2014
AFRICOM behaving badly, by Nick Turse and Tom Engelhardt, 22 April 2015
Back to the future: America's new model for expeditionary warfare, by Nick Turse, Open
Democracy, 14 March 2014
https://www.opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/nick-turse/back-to-future-americas-new-
model-for-expeditionary-warfare
Pivot to Africa: AFRICOM's gigantic 'small footprint', by Nick Turse, 10 September 2013
Blowback Central, by Nick Turse, Tom Dispatch, June 18, 2013
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175714/
[2] Education under threat in West Central Africa 2019, UNICEF, pages 6 and 7
https://www.unicef.org/media/57801/file/Education%20under%20threat%20in%20wca%2020
19.pdf
[3] Islamist militants are targeting Christians in Burkina Faso: ‘They are planting seeds of a
religious conflict’, by Danielle Paquette, The Washington Post, August 21, 2019
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/islamist-militants-are-targeting-christians-in-
burkina-faso-they-are-planting-seeds-of-a-religious-conflict/2019/08/20/3d689bf8-b91c-11e9-
aeb2-a101a1fb27a7_story.html
[4] As the World Looks Away, Death Stalks the Democratic Republic of Congo. The forgotten
trauma of a forgotten war, by Nick Turse, Common Dreams, 11 October 2019
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/10/11/world-looks-away-death-stalks-
democratic-republic-congo
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Congo_War
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Congo_War
[7] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2011/04/nyiragongo-volcano/
[8] You Mean we’re at War in Somalia? The Hidden Costs of U.S. Airstrikes, by Bryce W.
Reeder, The Conversation, 4 December 2019
https://www.juancole.com/2019/12/somalia-hidden-airstrikes.html
Posted 18 December 2019 by Zenobia van Dongen