In Saudi Arabia on Sunday, President Trump declared unswerving American commitment to help Riyadh in “confronting the crisis of Islamic extremism and the Islamist and Islamic terror of all kinds.” A new coalition of American lawmakers believes he should make an equally important commitment to Israel when he lands there today.

Official U.S. policy on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute has long been centered on a “grievance-based approach” to conflict resolution and counterterrorism. Addressing the stated grievances of Palestinian extremists, the reasoning goes, reduces their motivations for fighting and enables their leaders and those of Arab states to make peace. Thus the perennial goal of American diplomacy has been to pressure or coax the democratic State of Israel into making concessions to the authoritarian PLO-turned-Palestinian Authority (PA) in hopes that they will placate the Palestinian masses (most of whom, including 1.6 million in Hamas-ruled Gaza, do not live in disputed territory).

While the “land for peace” formula — pressuring Israel to hand over land to those it has defeated for the promise of peace to come — pleased Arab governments and career diplomats at the State Department, it was a disaster on the ground. Each new concession was seen by Palestinian leaders as signaling an Israeli weakness ripe for exploitation, stoking their fantasies of ultimate victory and thus prolonging the misery of the Palestinian people and everyone involved.

History shows that wars end definitively only when one side has no more hope at all of success, as happened in Germany and Japan after World War II.

Of course, unconditional surrenders of the kind that took place on the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay have been rare since the creation of the UN shortly thereafter. Wars often linger on for years, even decades, as winning sides are dissuaded by international pressure from bringing conflicts to an end.

An old-school exception to this rule came in 2009, when Sri Lanka broke free of its decades-old cycle of conflict with the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelan (LTTE). Eschewing yet another round of negotiation, followed by impasse, terrorist strikes, and government retaliation, the government launched a decisive, all-out war to defeat the LTTE and fully reclaim the northern part of the island nation.

Since then, Sri Lanka has been effectively terrorism-free. Tamil nationalists still have their grievances, of course. But with Sri Lanka having risen over the past eight years to become “South Asia’s most prosperous country” and an oasis of calm considered to be “at the forefront of the hot destinations queue” for South African tourists, few feel aggrieved enough to pick up a gun.

Israel’s situation is not so very different than that of Sri Lanka. The Palestinians still have not given up their fantasy of a Palestinian state “from the river to the sea.”

The best way for Washington to advance a peace process is by convincing the Palestinian leaders of Israel’s insurmountable strength. “After the leadership recognizes this reality, the Palestinian population at large will follow, as will eventually other Arab and Muslim states, leading to a resolution of the conflict,” explains Middle East Forum President Daniel Pipes, the driving intellectual force behind the newly-created Israel Victory Congressional Caucus.

If President Trump really wants to succeed where others have failed in resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict, he should demonstrate that the U.S. supports its Israeli ally unreservedly. He might start, for example, by announcing from Israel this afternoon that the United States is moving its embassy to the country’s capital of Jerusalem.

(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

A.J. Caschetta is a Shillman-Ginsburg fellow at the Middle East Forum and a senior lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Since Donald Trump’s election, media-fuelled panic has engulfed Europe, including over defence and security. We are told that World War III is imminent, that Trump will jump into bed with Putin and pull the US out of NATO. Such fantasies are put about by media cheerleaders for European political elites, terrified that Trump’s election will inspire support for populist candidates in the forthcoming elections in Germany, the Netherlands and France.

In fact, it is the EU, not Donald Trump, that threatens to undermine NATO and the security of the West. In recent days, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, his foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, and German Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen have suggested that Trump’s election should give greater impetus to a European defence force.

This has been an EU aspiration for many years. Citing Trump is just a cynical pretext for speeding it up. It is already well advanced and has gained greater focus since the UK’s decision to leave the EU. The EU army is a vanity project, seen by many European leaders as a necessary instrument of the ever-closer union they desire. Speaking at a meeting of the European Defence Agency in Brussels the day after Trump’s election, Ms Mogherini suggested that the EU needs “the full potential of a super power, in the field of defence and security.”

To the economically atrophied EU, a defence union also has the potential for enormous financial savings. The intention will be to aggregate national military capabilities under what will no doubt be described as rationalization and efficiency. This will bring swingeing cuts to European defence capability. It will also severely reduce flexibility and the redundancy which is so vital to military forces that have any expectation of combat in which attrition and multiple simultaneous threats might occur.

The byzantine EU bureaucracy, combined with timidity in so many European nations, will ensure its army could never be deployed in anger. An EU defence union will also present a direct threat to NATO, competing for funds, building in duplication and confusion, and setting up rival military structures. In her speech, Ms Mogherini even spelt out the need for a single EU headquarters for military missions, which she likened to SHAPE, the NATO command centre.

The German defence minister told reporters on the day Trump was elected that he must treat NATO as an alliance of shared values rather than a business. She said: “You can’t say the past doesn’t matter, the values we share don’t matter, but instead try to get as much money out of NATO as possible and whether I can get a good deal out of it.”

This is breath-taking hypocrisy from the defence minister of a nation that spends less than 1.2% of GDP on defence against an agreed NATO minimum target of 2%, while freeloading off the United States’s 73% contribution to NATO’s overall defence spending. How much are “the values we share” worth to her country?

Britain is one of the few European countries that achieve even the minimum 2%, with some spending only half that. This is what Trump was talking about when he said European nations need to pull their weight. Contrary to political and media spin, he has not threatened to take the US out of NATO nor, apparently, will he do so — unless forced into it by the EU’s drive to become a super-state with its own army. European leaders would do well to recognize that they need the US more than the US needs them, and that real, concrete, committed defence from the world’s greatest military power is more beneficial to them than a fantasy army that will have plenty of flags, headquarters and generals but no teeth.

In his insistence that the Europeans contribute more, Trump will have a fight on his hands because they have no intention of doing so. Neither do most European governments have any intention of the serious use of military force ever again. Britain may still be an exception to this, and France less so. Britain’s bilateral defence and intelligence ties with the US are already far closer than any other European state. The UK should now be looking at strengthening these even further, and drawing yet closer to the US in the face of the military impotence that would accompany an EU defence union.

The European media have also made hay with Trump’s non-confrontational approach towards President Putin, spreading fears that this too will undermine international security. This is nonsense. He may find more effective ways to accommodate the Russian president than his predecessor, including resisting provocative and misjudged European Union expansion eastwards, but he is not the sort of man to appease the likes of Putin.

Trump will also make a stronger stand against other threats to the US and the West than Obama has, and it is vital that he does so. He described Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran as “the worst deal ever negotiated” and has vowed to counteract Iran’s violations, if necessary hitting them with tough new sanctions and perhaps tearing up the deal altogether.

Tellingly, since the announcement of Trump’s victory, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has already shown how much this worries him. Expect to see Iran’s anti-American provocations curtailed when Trump becomes president. A stronger US stance is urgently hoped for by troubled US allies in the Middle East, including Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the Gulf states, all of which fear growing Iranian aggression throughout the region.

There is a conflict between the necessary hard-line approach against Iran and greater cooperation with Russia. US President Barack Obama, in his desperation to achieve and sustain his legacy nuclear deal, prostrated himself to the ayatollahs and left a power vacuum across the Middle East. Both Iran and Russia seized on his pusillanimity. Re-asserting American influence in the region will be one of Trump’s greatest challenges.

A priority is to hammer the Islamic State and their jihadist bedfellows wherever they raise their heads. Trump must, in his words, “hit them so hard your head would spin.” He should also prioritize both practical and moral support to anti-Islamist regimes in the Middle East, such as Sisi’s Egypt.

He needs to do the same at home as well, strongly countering the spreading and corrosive Islamic radicalization in the US. He has said he will crack down on domestic supporters of the Islamic State, shutting radical mosques and revoking the passports of US citizens who travel to fight with them. Not only would this enhance homeland security, it would also help undermine IS’s global appeal, especially if European countries followed his lead.

Time and again, history has shown that only strong leaders, not appeasers, can maintain peace and security. It was the strength of Ronald Reagan with Margaret Thatcher at his shoulder that brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had threatened and attacked Western democracies across the globe for decades.

(Image source: Twitter/Donald Trump)

European leaders need to recognize this too. Rather than spreading fear and false propaganda about Donald Trump, they should be praying that he will provide the strength that is so desperately needed today, and working out how best they can support rather than attack him.

Colonel Richard Kemp was Commander of British Forces in Afghanistan. He served in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the Balkans and Northern Ireland and was head of the international terrorism team for the UK Joint Intelligence Committee.

Editor’s Note: Following is a condensed version of Amir Taheri’s remarks as part of a special panel of diplomats and academics, addressing journalists at the Palace of the Nations, the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva, on June 22, under the auspices of UNESCO’s liaison office.

The panel took place as part of the UN’s 32nd session on human rights, and in response to UN Secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon’s special report on “violent extremism.”

Mr. Taheri spoke on the question of: “Should the United Nations play a role in countering hate speech and expressions of ‘violent extremism’ and ‘Islamophobia’ in the media?”

Since I haven’t prepared a written speech, permit me to offer an unadorned response to the various plans exposed here. I believe many in our profession might share my sentiments.

The plans evoked here contain a number of words with military tonalities that set alarm bells ringing in my head. Here are some: combat, campaign, plan of action, order, discipline, protection etc.

Then there are phrases that either mean different things to different people or their meaning is cancelled by their component parts. For example: violent extremism, which implies that you could be violent without being extremist or be extremist without being violent, but does not tell us in what dosage of its ingredients it would operate as a concept.

Here is another phrase: the “right balance,” which the Secretary-general insists we must establish in the media. Is there a wrong balance?

Or do we mean a faux balance, like “five minutes for Hitler, five minutes for the Jews?”

There is also talk of stopping “hate speech”.

But hate, like love, is hard to define and the UN has offered no definition of it. Thus anyone could use it as an excuse for “stopping” or restricting freedom of expression.

In this room, I feel haunted by the ghosts of the 1970s and 1980s, when an alliance of the Soviet bloc and Third World powers tried to use UNESCO as a vehicle for imposing control on the media across the globe. I was always deeply suspicious of international organizations trying to legislate a one-size-fits-all scheme to regulate freedom of expression.

In those bad old days, the move in that direction was called The New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO), a brainchild of the Soviet bloc in the context of the Cold War. The architects of that scheme proposed to issue UNESCO media permits for journalists across the globe, and impose rules binding on all member states. In other words, they wanted to fence us in by pretending they were protecting us.

The efforts of undertaken the IPI (International Press Institute) and other groups dedicated to press freedom led to the total defeat of NWICO and a major victory for freedom of expression throughout the world.

Today, anyone trying to revive that monster would be laughed out of the room. Nevertheless, we have to remain vigilant against any attempt at media control via the UN or UNESCO.

A majority of the members of the UN and the UNESCO, which is part of it, are states that cannot be regarded as lovers of press freedom, to say the least.

To ask them to regulate the media with the pretext of controlling “hate speech” and preventing “Islamophobia” is to give them license to intensify their system of censorship.

For decades, the UN has not succeeded to define “peace” or “terrorism” and would not be able to define the word “hate” either, and thus cannot pretend to regulate the media in the name of “combating hate speech.” The most the UN or UNESCO can do is to create a new bureaucracy, for example The Office of Combating Hate Speech and Islamophobia (UNOCHSI). Then we will have one of the despots who head a majority of UN members propel a nephew into the post of UNOCHSI Director, while fellow despots across the globe use the “guidelines” set by it to intensify media censorship under the auspices of the mythical international community.

At a time that freedom of expression is under attack by a variety of groups from all parts of the political spectrum, the last thing we should wish for is a UN stamp of approval for censorship in any form. What we need is a free flow of information that cannot be subjected to bureaucratic rules and regulations. Unlike despotism, which is brutally “clean”, freedom is always a bit messy, the rough coming with the smooth, and thus difficult to control.

As for “combating Islamophobia”, those who unfurl that banner ignore the fact that it could mean creating a special category for Islam to shield it against any form of criticism, precisely at a time that Islam could benefit from serious critical scrutiny.

The Secretary-General’s plan has a romantic tone inasmuch as it aims at managing freedom of speech in a way that no one is ever offended and no pen is ever dipped in a poison ink. Freedom, however, is not romantic; it is the fruit of a prosaic approach to existential reality, which takes into account our imperfections as fallible human beings.

The UN and UNESCO would do well to mind their own business. If they wish to be useful, they should provide space and opportunity and resources to those — that is to say a majority of mankind at present — who cannot exercise their right to freedom of expression. They could give a voice to the voiceless. They should ask their member states not to imprison so many journalists or, maybe, even create an annual Index of Press Freedom to expose and oppose regimes that use silence and terror as instruments of government.

Two facts encourage me in thinking that this meeting is not going to endorse any plan for reviving the demon of NWICO under a new mask. The first is that Finland is a co-sponsor of the session. And we have not forgotten that Finland, along within other Nordic countries and Great Britain, was the most steadfast supporter of our cause of press freedom against the threat of NWICO more than two decades ago.

The second is that the session is also co-sponsored by Elaph, the oldest Arabic language website newspaper, now blowing 15 candles, and a champion of freedom of expression in a dark region of the world. Any talk of regulating freedom of speech puts us on a slippery slope that could lead to censorship, curtailing freedom of expression — which is a basic human right. My message to you on behalf of journalists everywhere is simple: Don’t try to fence us in!

Amir Taheri, formerly editor of Iran’s premier newspaper, Kayhan, before the Iranian revolution of 1979, is a prominent author based on Europe. He is the Chairman of Gatestone Europe.

Islamist front groups in Canada and the West have dragged the media and the political “elites” into their extremist messaging. Rather than learning about why extremism and terrorism come out of their religion, Islamists instead concentrate on preventing the victims of their violence from speaking out. They do this by shouting “Islamophobia” at every opportunity, and do so most loudly at modernist or secular Muslims.

The Parliament of Canada, for example, passed an “anti-Islamophobia” motion on October 26, 2016. Samer Majzoub, the president of the Canadian Muslim Forum, was the person behind the Parliamentary petition against “Islamophobia”; it generated some 70,000 signatures. The sponsor of the motion in the House of Commons was MP Frank Baylis.

Both Majzoub and the Canadian Muslim Forum have a rather long list of dubious connections to Islamist groups and the foreign money used to support them. This includes the Muslim Brotherhood.

What is the real intent of Samir Majzoub, the Canadian Muslim Forum and its exploitation of the over-hyped concept of “Islamophobia”? As noted, Islamists, including Majzoub, have a long history of dragging prominent people and organizations into their arguments about extremism, terrorism and radicalization. These Islamists do not use their influence to drain the resources of Islamic terrorism in Canada and elsewhere, nor do they seek to stop young Canadians from joining ISIS. They did not stop suicide bombers in Canada such as Aaron Driver or Calgary-based Salma Ashrafi, who became a suicide bomber in Iraq. They do not use their knowledge or money to dismantle the infrastructure of extremism, nor do they attempt to dismantle the historical and religious arguments in favor of terrorism. Rather than do any of this, they instead make it their priority to intimidate, harass or sue those who speak out against Islamist extremism and its accompanying terrorism.

Samir Majzoub (left), the Islamist president of the Canadian Muslim Forum, was the person behind the recent Canadian Parliamentary petition against “Islamophobia.” Both Majzoub and the Canadian Muslim Forum have a long list of dubious connections to Islamist groups and the foreign money used to support them. This includes the Muslim Brotherhood. (Image sources – Majzoub: Canadian Muslim Forum video screenshot; Parliament: Saffron Blaze/Wikimedia Commons)

Why should life be dangerous for Muslims, their families and others who reject the charges of Islamophobia?

The prevailing religious interpretation of groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and its adherents is that anyone who objects to their interpretation of Islam is to be considered a disbeliever. Because of their disbelief, they deserve to be killed in the present life and should then suffer the punishment of Allah in the next life. If killing them in this life is not an option, then spreading hate and anger against them is acceptable.

The side effects of the supposed “Islamophobia” activity is an increased threat to Muslim families in Canada and the USA. Modernist and secular Muslims are afraid to speak out against extremism, for fear of being labelled as traitors to their own community. They also fear for their businesses and their children, who may come under verbal and physical attack. Because of petitions and Parliamentary actions such as those in Canada, modernist and secular Muslims and their families are forced either to agree with the false precepts of “Islamophobia” as advanced by extremist front groups, or to disagree with them but remain silent. Unfortunately, disagreeing with the Muslim Brotherhood and its front groups can be dangerous and even fatal.

The other main problem with the Parliamentary action against “Islamophobia” is that it gives the false impression that groups such as the Canadian Muslim Forum or the Muslim Brotherhood can speak for Muslims. In fact, they do not. Groups such as the Canadian Muslim Forum or the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) have little evidence to show they have anything approaching majority support. In the UK, it was recently revealed that only about 2% of UK Muslims feel that the Muslim Council of Britain represents them. Moreover, CAIR, despite its claims of moderation, was declared to be a terrorist entity by the United Arab Emirates.

With no mandate to speak on behalf of Muslims, Islamists such as Majzoub should not be regarded as “leadership” figures. They intimidate other Muslims and work to silence anyone who speaks against them. This is a sort of intellectual fraud: no one elected them to speak on behalf of Muslims. From an Islamic religious perspective, it should be noted that Allah has no agents or representatives on Earth, so their claim to speak on behalf of Muslims is theologically weak, at best.

At the same time, these Islamists do all they can to hide their finances; they refuse to show how much money they receive from Saudi Arabia or Qatar. They are constantly caught financing terrorism and their front-group members are often charged with criminal offences related to extremism and terrorism.

In Canada, Islamist-run schools use extremist literature from the Middle East to teach their children. It is not just that they have extremist literature in Canadian schools and mosques; it is that in some cases they have nothing but extremist literature. It is also not just Islamist-run schools and mosques that are the problem. The Ottawa Public Library, for instance, has nothing but extremist literature in its Arabic language collection.

Conclusions

The Parliamentary motion condemns all forms of “Islamophobia,” without making any attempt to define what that means. As Judith Bergman put it:

The questions need to be asked: What exactly are they condemning? Criticism of Islam? Criticism of Muslims? Debating Mohammed? Depicting Mohammed? Discussing whether ISIS is a true manifestation of Islam? Is any Canadian who now writes critically of Islam or disagrees with the petitioners that ISIS “does not reflect in any way the values or the teachings of the religion of Islam now to be considered an “Islamophobe”?

The Canadian Parliamentary motion on “Islamophobia” is indeed a large stick that is designed to be swung at anyone who makes even the vaguest criticism of extremist Islam and its front groups. Rather than draining the extremist swamp or defunding their centers of activity, motions such as this are intended to weaponize words so that critics can be silenced by criminalizing anything that varies from political correctness, as in the clearly politically-motivated conviction of Dutch MP Geert Wilders last week.

The first victims of this will be secular and modernist Muslims who oppose extremism — and their families.

Saied Shoaaib is a journalist and author originally from Egypt. He was the editor and manager of the Alyoum7 news website and the manager of “United Journalist.” In 2007, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt raised questions about his work in the Egyptian Parliament. The questions were specifically aimed at the Attorney General of Egypt. For many years, his life and his family have been at risk because of constant threats aimed at his writings against and Islamists, terrorism and Islamic extremism. He has written several books on extremist Islam, journalism and the electronic media.