Also please read my article, “One Leader Who Will be Re-elected: Israel Goes to Elections.”
—–
Over and over again I hear them: Egyptians who have lost hope that their country can be saved from Islamist dictatorship (this is what the people want, one says); the Lebanese who can no longer stand up to the threats of the Hizballah-dominated government; Turks disgusted as the Western media ignore the arrests and persecutions of respected people who have devoted their lives to the country or contemporary dissidents; and so on.
In a recent letter to me, a Middle Eastern democracy advocate who fled revolutionary Islamism to the West–there will be thousands more in the years to come–reflected on his experiences in light of my articles. These are the people the West is betraying, to its own detriment. The so-called liberals (leftists pretending to be liberal) who apologize for, lie about, and even help anti-Western Islamist dictatorships should take note of such individuals who are the hope of their homelands but have themselves lost hope:
“At the very beginning of the Iranian revolution (before the revolution was highjacked by the Islamists), many youth including myself considered ourselves as leftists. To us, people on the left were progressive, social justice oriented and were struggling to establish freedom and equality.
But once the Islamists took power and consolidated their dictatorship, these young moderates were “killed, [went into] hiding or forced to leave Iran.
When I came to the West, I connected myself to the leftist movement right away, but distanced myself more and more from them when I realized that I could not convince them of the dangers involved with the Islamist ideology. They did not believe my own personal stories of horrific life in Iran under a reactionary-repressive Islamic regime. I still challenge them whenever I can regarding the crimes committed by Hamas and other Islamists in the Middle East or elsewhere. However, unfortunately, we have no voice among the so-called progressive leftists.
“I am disgusted by seeing how narrow minded they are and how ignorant they are toward crimes done by Hamas and the Islamic regime in Iran. These so-called leftists are nothing by a bunch of hypocrites who have nothing to offer to the oppressed people of the Middle East. Now, I consider myself as a liberal, a true liberal who cannot ignore nor forget the oppressive life in Iran and who stands for freedom, and social justice.”
And the smug, ignorant, over-paid academics, journalists, government officials, and various self-declared “experts” are willing to throw these people under the Islamist bus, to ignore their pleas and warnings.
Many years ago, for my book, Istanbul Intrigues, I interviewed courageous people who had fought against Nazism in the underground of various countries, especially Czechoslovakia and Hungary. The Czech intelligence officers recounted how they had tried to warn the West, and Stalin, too, about Hitler’s aggressive plans, all to no avail. They cried as their country was overrun and fled from one place to another, keeping just ahead of the advancing German armies. This is what I think of now.
What, pray tell, warranted removal of my question?
…….and my thoughts on the arrant hypocrisy of any so called “moderate Muslims”. I said the very term was oxymoronic.
We already know how beautiful it is to live within the Ummah. Why is the enmey being sent here? The west?
Hate, and discondent? The global Tower of Babel?
I used the term “enemy” in my earlier post here which was deleted. As far as your, …”Why is the enmey being sent here?”…
…is concerned, it’s my premise that they’re (our self-declared Muslim enemy)coming over to our America to become effective “sleepers” in Dearborn-istan, and uncomfortably close to me in nearby Northern Virginia-istan. (cf: their madrassas and mosques)
I said earlier that I’m of an age with those who can remember the Red “Fellow Travelers” of the 1940′s and onwards, up till the end of the Cold War. (cf: Alger Hiss, the Rosenberg’s, et.al.)
Our contemporary electronically truncated attention spans don’t permit such comparisons.
I make a plea for us Americans to shed our literally dangerous “political correctness” and wake up and admit to each other that we are indeed at War with our self-declared Muslim enemy, regardless of any guise they assume, for example, via Saudi financed “chairs” and adroit practice of their taqiyya. Muslims make no secret of their hatred for our way of life, why should we blind ourselves toward this reality. Word games abound.
Moreover, I question, unwashed Christian that I am, the ability of practicing Muslims who read their Koran to be able to “straddle”, as it were, our sharply contrasting cultures while they’re earning a prosperous living embedded in our crass commercialism.
Here’s an interesting corroboration of my earlier post on Muslim/American hypocrisy…
Read today’s (04May2012}http://www.investigativeproject.org/list/track.php?u=aHR0cDovL3d3dy5pbnZlc3RpZ2F0aXZlcHJvamVjdC5vcmcvMzU2NS90aGUtZW5kLW9mLXRoZS1pbnNwaXJlLWVyYQ%3D%3D&m=5248&s=14915
Here’s a cogent paste:
….”Although it was intended to be released last fall, most of the issue’s ideological material remains relevant and dangerous.
In “Blended Duality: Muslim and American?” Khan argued that being Muslim and American are inherent contradictions.
“To say one is proud of being American is not merely a cultural declaration but one of allegiance,” he wrote. Being American is “to undertake that which Allah detests,” and all attempts to create a “moderate” Islam are just “Muslims throwing the Qur’an behind their backs.”…..
Regarding the article about the Israeli elections, I would add, for the American readers, that our parliamentary system is different from the American system and similar to various European systems. We vote for the Knesset and the Knesset’s makeup determines the government. There are many parties, but the ruling party isn’t necessarily the one who gets the most votes – it needs the support of a majority in the Knesset. Usually the party that gets the highest number of votes will indeed be the ruling party, but in our last elections Kadima got one Knesset seat more than Likud, yet couldn’t get a majority support in the Knesset and create a government coalition because the right wing had a majority in the Knesset. That prevents a minority party from becoming the ruling party in case the opposition is represented by more than one party (Likud lost votes to other right-wing parties, not to the left).
Why is that meaningful in the context of Rubin’s article? Because Rubin is talking about the fractionalization of the opposition. It is a factor, but a more important factor is that even if all the left and center-left parties had united to form a single party, that party woudln’t get a majority in the Knesset today, so it still wouldn’t be able to create a government coalition.
One should look not only at the individual parties, but at the sizes of the different blocs. The right-to-center bloc is currently larger than the left-to-center bloc and is likely to remain so. Another option is a centrist bloc, a so-called national-unity government, where the center-right party (Likud) and the center-left party/ies form a geovernment coalition together. The option of a left-wing majority and a left-wing government coalition don’t seem realistic at the moment.
The Israeli left became what it is today not because its policies were a huge success, but because its vision literally exploded in our faces. We voted for a two-state solution (one Jewish state and one Arab state, and not two Arab states – one next to Israel and one instead of Israel) and got a major terror campaign that killed over a thousand Israelis, followed by over a decade of rocket attacks on our civilian populations in our towns. The more territories we transferred to the PA the worse things became. They used the territories under their control to launch terror and rocket attacks on a larger scale than Israel had ever known before. If we don’t have massive suicide bombing campaigns today it’s not for lack of will on the other side, but thanks to the security fence that the internatioanl left wants us to take down, so terrorists could easily cross into Israel and kill more and more of us. The international left has no credibility whatsoever. The Israeli left at least doesn’t demand we’d take the fence down, so hundreds of Israelis could be freely murdered in the streets again, but it’s been such a colossal failure that it’s a wonder they still get the number of votes that they do.
You are completely correct. I was saving those points until closer to the election.
Thanks a lot Rubin for writing the truth. I am a Turk and I feel exactly like you say, betrayed. I am horrified by the ignorance of my European friends. I am an agnostic and I am afraid to talk sometimes even afraid to walk in Turkey. It changed rapidly in the last 10 years by the ruling islamic party and western governments were giving him awards. There is tremendous pressure on educated people in my country, on journalists, on classical musicians, on theater players and so on. With the middle east policies Obama is the worst ever.