I was afraid it had been swept up in the current tidal wave of moral equivalency and political correctness and been replaced by a nation where cozying up to despots and dictators seems to be more politically expedient than long lasting alliances between friends who share common values.

In a long, personal struggle for one of my newest and dearest friends, the America that stands for freedom against tyranny triumphed this week.

At least in the following case, the America that I believe in has not disappointed me. However, the battle between the two America’s with two very distinct , conflicting philosophies remains strong, and we have to be vigilant about preserving the sort of America that many, if not most Americans of good will want to believe in.

My newest and dearest friend is Mosab Hassan Yousef. Mosab was born to a family of aristocracy within the world of radical Islam.  His grandfather was a radical Imam in Ramallah, his father a founder of Hamas.

When Mosab was 18, he participated in a youthful operation that landed him in an Israeli jail for many months. It was while serving out time in an Israeli prison that this extremely intelligent and idealistic young man was first forced to confront the sadism and cruelty within Islamic society. This is because Israel allows prisoners within the various terrorist organizations, (Hamas, Fatah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad), to live amongst themselves and develop their own internal power structures.

From a neighboring cell, Mosab could hear the constant nocturnal screams of Hamas members who were from poor, rural or otherwise not well connected families, being tortured as “Israeli collaborators” by those who were better connected. He realized that his tortured Hamas brothers had been singled out arbitrarily, and came to the conclusion that there is a deeply rooted sadism and cruelty within Palestinian society. He was also impressed by the relative compassion and humanity of his Israeli captors.

Mosab further concluded that Hamas has nurtured and exploited this sadism and cruelty for their own political muscle and hegemonic aspirations. This cruelty and sadism, according to Mosab, who has lived within the world of Islam, and is in a position to know a great deal more about it than those of us in the West, has its roots directly within the Koran.

It was from within the walls of an Israeli prison that Mosab then decided that there was something fiercely wrong with the society in which he was raised and nurtured, in which everyone he knew and loved  deeply had lived.  He began to secretly work for the Shin Bet, simply to save lives, irrespective of whether or not they were Israeli or Palestinian.  A while after that, he secretly converted to Christianity.

This was not an easy decision for the young man to have made. Mosab still feels an empathic love for his family and the people living within the culture in which he was reared.  He doesn’t blame Muslims. He simply feels that they have been misled and exploited by the teachings of the Koran, and that according to his words, (not mine), “The God of the Quran is a God of hate…I chose a God of love over a God of hate.”

For almost ten years, Mosab worked hand in hand with his Shin Bet handler, Gonen Ben Yitzchak, developing an extremely close friendship. They describe one another as “my brother”. In Fact, Gonen Ben Yitzchak , himself, has acted quite heroically, risking criminal prosecution by coming to the United States and revealing his identity publicly in order to vouch for his friend. (This is something that goes against the legal guidelines of the Shin Bet, and although Gonen has been out of the Shin Bet for four years, the statute extends to five years since retirement.)

According to Ben Yitzchak, “Mosab gave us an insight into the workings of Hamas we would never have had without him. He saved hundreds of lives, both Israeli and Palestinian…He didn’t care if it was in imam or a Knesset member, as long as he saved lives.” (Although Mosab modestly interrupts him and says,  “Don’t exaggerate..I know I thwarted dozens of suicide attacks…but we will never know exactly how many lives would have been killed…so we can’t say exactly how many I saved”)

It was Mosab’s work that had led to the capture of a Hamas terrorist and his handler, just as his handler had given the would-be- bomber  his suicide belt in the Manara Square , Mosab had warned the Shin Bet, who immediately moved in to arrest them.

In another operation five Hamas terrorists came knocking at Mosab’s door because their contact had been arrested, and had figured someone from his family would naturally want to help them. They requested money, tea and a ride to a Hamas safe house. He gave them what they had asked for and then proceeded to tip off the Shin Bet, and thwarted another suicide explosion.

Mosab had been responsible for capturing and bringing to justice the Hamas terrorists who had been responsible for the Hebrew University Cafeteria bombing of July 31, 2002, in which four Israelis and five Americans had been killed.

In 2007, Mosab began to grow tired of constantly living a life of duplicity and of struggling with profound conflicting loyalties and loves.  He came to America on a tourist visa and sought political asylum.

It is an absolutely categorical fact that if Mosab had been returned to anywhere in the Middle East that would have been the equivalent of immediately sentencing him to the death penalty. That is because he had committed three cardinal sins, according to Islam: 1.) Collaborating with Israel, 2.) Converting to Christianity and 3.) Publicly criticizing Islam.

It is an also categorically undeniable fact that heroic young men like Mosab would be terrific role models for anyone growing up within the tyranny of radical Islam. He is living proof that an intelligent person can transcend the culture of incitement and propaganda to hate and to kill, and to penetrate through to the core of what makes us all truly human. He chose a path of love for the sanctity of human life, irrespective of the accident of one’s birth.

In 2009, Mosab came out with a book, “Son of Hamas” documenting his incredible life’s story.

Unfortunately, some people from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with either tunnel vision or another agenda entirely, (which we shall later discuss), had read discreet passages from Mosab’s book and had taken them entirely out of context.

Mosab’ s attorney, Steven A. Seick had reported that the lead attorney from the DHS that was working on Mosab’s case , Kerri Calcador had sworn that if Mosab would have won his case on June 30^th, the DHS would appeal, and continue to do so.

She said that this was not her own decision, “but came from orders from above, directly from Washington.”

Why had there been so much effort to deny political asylum to someone so incredibly worthy of it?

Some investigative journalists, such as Richard Miniter have traced the difficulties that Mosab encountered with the DHS back to the time that Arif Alikhan had been appointed by President Obama as a leading official in the Department of Homeland Security.

Mr. Alikhan had recently spoken at a fundraiser for the Muslim Public Affairs Council, (MPAC) an organization with close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. One of the founders of MPAC is Dr.Muhar Hathout . Dr Hathout credits Hassan al Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical Islamist organization that was founded in Egypt in 1928, as being his primary teacher .[1]

Hassan al Banna is famous for the two extremely revealing quotes:  “It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.”  [2]

“God is our purpose, the Prophet our leader, the Quran our Constitution, Jihad our way, and dying for God our Supreme Objective.”[3]

MPAC along with CAIR, (The Council for American Islamic Relations), have become very excellent in the art of concealing their true intentions, and have masqueraded themselves as simply American Muslim Civil Rights Organizations.

Yet neither of these two groups have ever met a terrorist incident that they have not blamed on the root cause, which is the existence of the state of Israel.

Neither would ever blame the true root cause: the constant incitement for hatred of the Jew and the Christian, and the elimination of the state of Israel and its replacement with the state of Palestine, which Mosab personally experienced growing up as a young Muslim growing up in Ramallah and attending UNRWA schools that use every opportunity to preach such hatred.

It is certainly understandable that someone who was the featured speaker at an MPAC dinner would be threatened by the surgically incisive statements that Mosab Hassan Yousef dared to utter about Islam, coming out of the mouth of someone who had personally lived it and experienced it.

We seem to forget that radical Islam, the Islam of Hassan al Banna of the Muslim Brotherhood, declared war on the United States on September 11, 2001, and that  American GI’s are dying today at the hands of radical Islamists in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Our embracement of political correctness and moral equivalency tends to blindside us to the very pernicious philosophy that is at the very root of many of the organizations such as CAIR and MPAC that many Americans would like to embrace as “mainstream”.

It is with a great deal of gratitude to some remarkable individuals, such as James Woolsey, former director of the CIA, Rep Doug Lamborn of Colorado and twenty one other congressmen, and Tzachbai Hanegbi, Director of the Knesset Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee who wrote letters on Mosab’s behalf. All of this might have contributed to the fact that on June 30^th at the hearing concerning Mosab in San Diego, his request for asylum in this country was granted by the government.

What worries me profoundly, however, is that the America that was born out of a deep understanding of the philosophical foundations of Western liberalism, ensuring religious liberties for all, is being eclipsed by an America that allows people into positions of great authority who might, at best, simply overlook or ignore the odious teachings of the founders of organization such as MPAC or CAIR, or at worst, secretly concur with them.

If we do not remain vigilant, we are in danger of losing the America which has been that beacon of religious freedom for the generations of immigrants that brought many of our ancestors to these shores.

In the meantime, however, let’s savor the sweet victory of my newest and dearest friend, someone whose friendship I will always cherish, as a victory not only for Mosab, personally, but for the America that most of us love.

[2] Ibid.  pg 5.

[3] Ibid.  pg 5.

This has happened, despite the fact that Prime Minister Netanyahu immediately apologized, both publicly and privately for the unfortunate timing of the announcement, saying that Israel had never had the slightest  intention, whatsoever of ever embarrassing the Vice President of the United States. Yet  members of the Obama administration have since let the rhetoric escalate  and heat way up out of proportion.

Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, employing an unusually harsh tone, berated the Prime Minister for forty-three minutes over the telephone on Friday, calling the statement “provocative” and  saying that Israeli building plans sent “a deeply negative signal” towards the US-Israeli relationship and the peace process.  The rhetoric was again turned up during an ABC news interview with  top Obama official David Axelrod  calling the statement “insulting”, and “seemed calculated to undermine the ‘proximity talks’” When the preposterous question was asked by ABC news correspondent Jake Tapper if the statement “puts American troops at risk in the region”, he did not directly confirm or deny it.

The Palestinians have not lost any ground in inflaming the situation and using the new-found American ally of the Obama administration to embolden them. As soon as the Vice President’s plane left Ben Gurion Airport a new school was named in Ramallah after Dalal Mughrabi, perhaps one of the most notorious terrorists in the bloody history of the Palestinian conflict against Israel.

Ms. Mughrabi was the 19-year-old leader of a Palestinian squad that in 1979 sailed from Lebanon and landed on a beach between Haifa and Tel Aviv. She and her cohorts killed an American photojournalist, hijacked a bus and commandeered another, embarking on a bloody rampage that left 38 Israeli civilians dead, 13 of them children.

What is even more horrific is that members of the Palestinian Authority Leadership,(note this is NOT Hamas, this is the P.A.), including Fatah Central Committee Member Tawfiq Tiwari hailed Ms. Mughrabi as a heroine and a martyr.

“We are all Dalal Mughrabi,” declared Tawfiq Tirawi, a member of the Fatah Central Committee, the party’s main decision-making body, who came to join the students. “For us she is not a terrorist,” he said, but rather “a fighter who fought for the liberation of her own land.”

The PA is obviously feeling emboldened by the apparent rift between America and the United States, and is using it to show their true colors, as people who glorify terrorism and the murder of innocents. Might we also point out that the road between Haifa and Tel Aviv lies in the heart of pre-1967 Israel?

Why no word of rebuke from the Obama administration for the PA’s glorifying the murder of innocents? What is more detrimental to peace, incitement to terror or building some apartments on a hill in Northern Jerusalem that had already been established and is inhabited, but needs to expand because of natural growth?

Would it have been alright if the area was designated for Arabs only, and not for Jews? Isn’t it somewhat racist that Jerusalem, Israel’s designated eternal capital, is one of the only places in the world where, according to our government Jews are not allowed to live?

Let’s take a sober look at the situation at the heart of this that lies under the inflammatory rhetoric. Ramat Shlomo is an already established Jewish neighborhood in the northern part of Jerusalem.  Even the most far-reaching peace proposals such as that offered by Prime Minister Ehud Barak to Chairman Arafat on July 25, 2000, have always considered this area as part of Israel.

Going back to 1967, every single Israeli Prime Minister, including those from the Labor Party, have always regarded  Jerusalem as Israel’s sovereign capital, and have included  neighborhoods surrounding the Western part of the city as  belonging to Israel.  This includes Prime Ministers Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir, Menachem Begin, Yitzchak Shamir, Yitzchak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert.  All have built neighborhoods beyond the 1967 lines, including Ramat Eshkol, French Hill, Ramot, Gilo, Pisgat Zeev and Ramat Shlomo.

We already know that offering portions of Jerusalem to the Palestinians in a final solution will be a deal breaker. Why is the Obama administration turning up the rhetoric to such a degree and reinforcing the unrealistic dream that Jerusalem will sometime fall into Palestinian hands?

Although building has always gone on in Jerusalem since 1967, why is the Obama administration letting this rhetoric get so out of hand, even after an official apology was made and accepted?

What is going on here and why? Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that this past January, 16, Gen. David Petraeus had sent a team from CENTCOM to the Pentagon to and briefed Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mullen on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, presenting a 45 minute slide show saying Arab leaders were “disgusted with Israeli intransigence”, and that “America has to stand up to Israel”.

Can I ask you what else is new? Since 1948 the Arab world has been saying this. They never wanted a Jewish state and are now rejoicing in the fact finally, there an administration in the White House who is using a simple mistake to fan the flames between America and Israel and to make a silly blunder into an international crisis.

Please, I implore you, President Obama, it is time to please tone down the rhetoric, and to finally concentrate on the real problems at hand affecting both Israel and the United States, and the entire free world as we know it, which is the looming Iranian nuclear bomb.

But perhaps the administration is using this mistake as a decoy so that we do not have to concentrate on it, after all. And that is the scariest thought of all.

Update: Since Monday when this article was submitted for publication there has been statements on both sides to reduce the temperature of the discussion. We hope that this trend of cooler heads continues, and no more “mountains are made out of mole hills.”

A version of this article also appeared in the Washington Jewish Weekly

From Jpost, (h/t Carl in Jerusalem):

“I do not see any chance of establishing a viable Palestinian entity in Judea and Samaria and/or the Gaza Strip that could sustain itself economically,” Ya’alon said. “The gap between Israel as a First-World country and a Palestinian Third-World country is a recipe for instability. I also don’t see a chance to form a viable Palestinian entity in Judea and Samaria and/or the Gaza Strip that could bring stability on the security front, while chances the entity would be adversarial are very high.”

Ya’alon instead suggested educational, economic, political, police and military reforms for the PA, while cooperating with Arab countries on issues like the humanitarian plight of Palestinians who consider themselves refugees. But he said even this could not take place without a responsible and able Palestinian leadership that would recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

Only through real analysis like this which rejects old saws in favor of describing the situation in the territories as they actually exist can there be any progress towards a solution.

One positive outcome of this atrocity  coming to public knowledge is that it has opened many eyes to the reality of the Taliban, and what they represent. The flogging has ignited protests across the country. I participated in one in Lahore last week. I was glad to see that apart from many old friends, a large number of young people and students also took part in the march. One popular slogan was: ‘Pakistan kay do shaitan: fauj aur uskay Taliban’ (‘Pakistan’s two demons: the army and its Taliban’). My favourite banner at the rally asked: ‘$12 billion in aid to fight terrorism. Where is it?’ Where indeed?

During Richard Holbrooke’s recent visit to Pakistan, our government responded to the new Obama plan to fight the Taliban with an ill-concealed resentment.

Clearly, the establishment is not enjoying having its reluctance to fight held up under a spotlight. As in the past, it wants the promised flow of dollars to remain unimpeded by any serious questions about its will to carry the fight to the Taliban. Our television warriors echo this sentiment, and demand that the country should not follow ‘American dictates’.

But as we are about to discover, there really is no such thing as a free lunch.

There’s more good stuff in there, so click over and read the whole thing, but I think it highlights very well the problem and risk with Pakistan (and equally other Muslim countries facing Islamist insurgencies, or similarly efforst to get the Palestinian Authority to stamp out Anti-Israeli terrorism). Military and intelligence organizations are either too corrupt to properly utilize aid to fight terrorism (because they are busy stealing it usually), or in the case of Pakistan’s ISI, core elements of the organization are Pro-jihadist , and support the aims of the people they are recieving aid to oppose.

The Obama administration, already on treacherous domestic political ground with its outreach to Iran, Cuba and others, has opened the door, if only slightly, to engagement with the militant group Hamas.

The Palestinian group is designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization and under law may not receive federal aid. But the administration has asked Congress for minor changes in U.S. law that would permit aid to continue flowing to Palestinians in the unlikely event that Hamas-backed officials become part of a unified Palestinian government.

The aid measures may never come into play, given that power-sharing negotiations between Hamas and its rival, the U.S.-backed Fatah faction, appear deadlocked. The two groups have been bitterly divided since 2007, when Hamas seized control of Gaza.

Nevertheless, the move has alarmed congressional supporters of Israel as they watch for any sign that the new White House might be more sympathetic to Palestinians than was the Bush administration.

The Obama administration’s proposal is akin to agreeing to support a government that “only has a few Nazis in it,” Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) told Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week.

Clinton also defended the proposal by pointing out that the U.S continues to support the Lebanese government even though it includes as a coalition member, terrorist group Hezbollah.

She argued that the U.S. should try to gradually change the attitudes of Hamas members, as it did in Northern Ireland, where it help broker a peace deal.

“We don’t want to … bind our hands in the event that such an agreement is reached and the government that they are part of agrees to our principles,” she said.

As Secretary Clinton points out, it would make for a more consistent foreign policy if we DID allow funds despite  Hamas membership, since after all Fatah doesn’t meet the legal requirements of recognizing Israel, renouncing violence and honoring previous agreements either. But I’d rather have an inconsistent foreign policy, than one that is consistently bad. Let’s hope that congress stands firm.

Several studies have been conducted both before and since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks (some better than others), which have looked at the social make-up of terrorists. In one study by Princeton-trained economist Claude Berrebi, 335 members of radical Palestinian Islamist terrorist organizations Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad were analyzed. The terrorists surveyed were mainly “shahids,” or martyrs (read murderers), over a period from 1987 to 2002. The results of his survey, and its comparison to the Palestinian population as a whole, delivered a striking indictment to the “poverty creates terrorists” crowd.

Berrebi discovered that 16 percent of the radical Islamist terrorists he surveyed could be considered poor compared to 31 percent of the male Muslim population between the ages 18 and 41 in the Palestinian territories as a whole. Thirty-three percent of the terrorists could be considered “well off” compared to only 20 percent of the Muslim male Palestinian population between 18 and 41 years of age. Additionally, while 10 percent of the terrorists were considered “very well off” according to the survey, 0 percent of Muslim Palestinian males between 18 and 41 could be considered the same. The study also indicated that the radical Islamist Palestinian terrorists were generally more highly educated than the male Muslim Palestinian population between 18 and 41.

Given the evidence, Berrebi was left to conclude, “If there is a link between income level, education and participation in terrorist activities, it is either very weak or in the opposite direction of what one intuitively might have expected.”

In another study by terrorism expert Marc Sageman, 102 Islamist radicals involved in global jihad were analyzed. Like Berrebi, Sageman could find no correlation between poverty and terrorism with only about a quarter of the jihadis he looked at able to be classified as coming from impoverished backgrounds. “[M]embers of the global Salafi jihad,” Sageman writes in his book Understanding Terror Networks, “were generally middle-class, educated young men from caring and religious families, who grew up with strong positive values of religion, spirituality and concern for their communities.”

One study of Islamist radicals in Egyptian prisons (and elsewhere) in the late 1970s by Saad Eddin Ibrahim also helps explode the poverty-produces-terrorists myth. “The typical member of the militant Islamic groups,” Ibrahim discovered, could be “described as young (early 20s), of rural or small-town background, from the middle or lower-middle class, with high achievement and motivation, upwardly mobile, with a scientific or engineering education, and from a normally cohesive family.” He went on to conclude that if the Islamist radicals he analyzed were out of the ordinary in any way, it was “because they were significantly above the average of their generation” in education, financial background and motivation.

Of course these types of studies do not seem to overcome the false meme regarding: poverty or despair creating suicide bombers, of the kind that one continues to hear, even on Capitol Hill.  If the real correlation is not a negative correlation between poverty and terror, but instead a positive correlation between “education” and terror, as the studies seem to suggest to me,  than we should put our emphasis not on providing truckloads of reconstruction cash to Gaza. ($900 million the proposed figure) but instead on ending incitement in the Arab media and textbooks.

“The pirates fired rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons at the vessel, which sustained damage,” said a statement from New York-based Liberty Maritime Corporation, which owns the vessel.
The ship was carrying U.S. food aid for African nations, the statement said.
The pirates never made it onto the ship and the vessel is now being escorted by a coalition ship, still bound for Mombasa, officials said.

The attacks highlight something important which is that ultimately, the piracy is not about the money, which is indeed lucrative. As Robert Spencer notes in Human Events today:

In August 2008, when the pirates became especially active off the Horn of Africa, Andrew Mwangura, head of the East African Seafarers’ Assistance Programme, declared that Al-Shabaab, a group of jihadists in Somalia, use piracy to fund their jihad: “According to our information, the money they make from piracy and ransoms goes to support al-Shabaab activities onshore.”

Al-Shabaab of course is the Al-Qaeda linked Somali Islamist terrorists which has been recruiting American Somalis from Minneapolis and else where to fight in their effort to extend Shariah law to that country after their predecessor the Islamic Courts Union, was ousted from Moghadishu by Ethopian and Somali troops. Spencer rightly points out, that while dangerous in its own right, the matter of piracy in the Gulf of Aden should not be  viewed as seperate from the wider Jihad against the West.

UPDATE: From the Times Online, “Somali Attack on US vessel was ‘act of revenge not piracy (h/t Jawa Report):

“This attack was the first against our prime target,” Abdi Garad, a pirate commander, said today. “We intended to destroy this American-flagged ship and the crew on board but unfortunately they narrowly escaped us.

“The aim of this attack was totally different. We were not after a ransom. We also assigned a team with special equipment to chase and destroy any ship flying the American flag in retaliation for the brutal killing of our friends.”