2016 Rio Olympics

What’s Holding the Arab World Back?

Published by Papa Giorgio

What’s holding the Arab world back? Why, by nearly every measure, are Muslim nations so far behind the West economically, culturally and scientifically? Bret Stephens, Global View columnist for the Wall Street Journal, explains.

See my LARGE POST on the topic of Israel…

JIHAD WATCH notes this about the above video:

TV host Mataz Matar demanded that El Shehaby withdraw: “My son watch out, don’t be fooled, or fool yourself thinking you will play with the Israeli athlete to defeat him and make Egypt happy. Egypt will cry; Egypt will be sad and you will be seen as a traitor and a normalizer in the eyes of your people.”

A normalizer. Islamic supremacists are determined never to treat Israel normally. They want it destroyed. That is all. No negotiated settlement will ever mollify them. But Western leaders persist in their fantasies nonetheless.

The WASHINGTON TIMES notes this anti–Semitism at the Games:

…The 2016 Olympic Games have been billed as an opportunity to put politics aside in the spirit of international camaraderie, but that’s not necessarily how it’s working out for Israeli athletes.

Animosity toward the 47-member delegation has triggered a reprimand from the International Olympic Committee and alarm from Jewish groups such as the Anti-Defamation League, which issued a statement this week decrying anti-Israel “hostility” in Rio de Janeiro.

“Shocking but not surprisingly, the Lebanese and Saudi delegations obviously have the wrong idea about the Olympic Games,” said a statement Wednesday by Roz Rothstein, CEO of the pro-Israel group Stand With Us.

“Instead of using the events to forget animosity and promote peace between people, they have brought their brainwashed minds to Rio,” she said. “How unfortunate that they could not implement the good, peaceful intentions of the Olympics, and instead have used it as a forum to spread hate and continued rejection of peace.”

[….]

On Sunday, however, the IOC issued a reprimand to the head of the Lebanese Olympic delegation after he blocked Israeli athletes from entering a bus that the teams were supposed to share to reach the opening ceremony.

Instead, Olympic organizers placed the Israeli athletes on a “special vehicle,” said Israeli sailing team trainer Udi Gal.

“The bus driver opened the door, but this time the head of the Lebanese delegation blocked the aisle and entrance,” Mr. Gal said on Facebook. “The organizers wanted to avoid an international and physical incident and sent us away to a different bus.”

He said he was “enraged and shocked by this event.”

“How is it possible that they let something like this happen and on the opening night of the Olympic Games?” he said.

Miri Regev, Israeli minister of culture and sports, blasted the Lebanese incident as “anti-Semitism, pure and simple, and the worst kind of racism.”

The Lebanese delegation head, Saleem al-Haj Nacoula, who was reportedly hailed in Lebanon as a hero, told Arabic media that he was “surprised to see the Israeli delegation approaching and trying to get on.”

“I told the bus driver to close the door, but a trainer who was with the Israelis prevented him from doing so,” he said, as reported by The Times of Israel. “I had to physically stand at the door and block him and the rest of the delegation from boarding, knowing that some were trying to force their way through and were looking for trouble.”

Days later, Joud Fahmy of Saudi Arabia forfeited a first-round judo match Sunday in what the Israeli press described as a tactic to avoid facing Israel’s Gili Cohen in the second round.

The Saudi team disputed the charge, insisting on Twitter that Ms. Fahmy had sustained injuries to her arms and legs during training, although episodes of Arab and Muslim athletes refusing to compete against Israelis are relatively common in international sports.

In June, Syrian boxer Ala Ghasoun refused to participate in an Olympic qualifying match against an Israeli, saying that to do so “would mean that I, as an athlete, and Syria, as a state, recognize the state of Israel.”

“I quit the competition because my rival was Israeli, and I cannot shake his hand or compete against him while he represents a Zionist regime that kills the Syrian people,” Mr. Ghasoun said in Arab media, according to Jerusalem’s i24 News.

During the 2012 London Olympics, Iranian judo champion Javad Mahjoud withdrew from a match against Israeli Arik Ze’evi. Mr. Mahjoud cited health concerns, but he previously admitted to throwing matches to avoid facing athletes from Israel, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

Israel’s national soccer team and its clubs have to compete in the World Cup and the continental tournaments in Europe rather than Asia, as geography would dictate, because so many Middle Eastern countries refuse to play them….

(WASHINGTON TIMES)

A Quick Commentary On the Middle-East (Larry Elder)

Published by Papa Giorgio

Here is some of the WALL STREET JOURNAL article “The Sage” was reading from (followed by a portion of his article):

….As a historical phenomenon, this is not unique. In a 2005 essay in Commentary, historian Paul Johnson noted that wherever anti-Semitism took hold, social and political decline almost inevitably followed.

Spain expelled its Jews with the Alhambra Decree of 1492. The effect, Mr. Johnson noted, “was to deprive Spain (and its colonies) of a class already notable for the astute handling of finance.” In czarist Russia, anti-Semitic laws led to mass Jewish emigration as well as an “immense increase in administrative corruption produced by the system of restrictions.” Germany might well have won the race for an atomic bomb if Hitler hadn’t sent Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller into exile in the U.S.

These patterns were replicated in the Arab world. Contrary to myth, the cause was not the creation of the state of Israel. There were bloody anti-Jewish pogroms in Palestine in 1929, Iraq in 1941, and Lebanon in 1945. Nor is it accurate to blame Jerusalem for fueling anti-Semitism by refusing to trade land for peace. Among Egyptians, hatred of Israel barely abated after Menachem Begin relinquished the Sinai to Anwar Sadat. Among Palestinians, anti-Semitism became markedly worse during the years of the Oslo peace process.

In his essay, Mr. Johnson called anti-Semitism a “highly infectious” disease capable of becoming “endemic in certain localities and societies,” and “by no means confined to weak, feeble or commonplace intellects.” Anti-Semitism may be irrational, but its potency, he noted, lies in transforming a personal and instinctive irrationalism into a political and systematic one. For the Jew-hater, every crime has the same culprit and every problem has the same solution.

Anti-Semitism makes the world seem easy. In doing so, it condemns the anti-Semite to a permanent darkness.

Today there is no great university in the Arab world, no serious indigenous scientific base, a stunted literary culture. In 2015 the U.S. Patent Office reported 3,804 patents from Israel, as compared with 364 from Saudi Arabia, 56 from the United Arab Emirates, and 30 from Egypt. The mistreatment and expulsion of Jews has served as a template for the persecution and displacement of other religious minorities: Christians, Yazidis, the Baha’ i.

Hatred of Israel and Jews has also deprived the Arab world of both the resources and the example of its neighbor. Israel quietly supplies water to Jordan, helping to ease the burden of Syrian refugees, and quietly provides surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities to Egypt to fight ISIS in the Sinai. But this is largely unknown among Arabs, for whom the only permissible image of Israel is an Israeli soldier in riot gear, abusing a Palestinian.

Successful nations make a point of trying to learn from their neighbors. The Arab world has been taught over generations only to hate theirs….

And here is Larry’s aforementioned article excerpt:

Recall that the United Nations commissioned Arab scholars and analysts to publish the Arab Human Development Report. What causes the backwardness, the scholars wondered, of 22 Arab states, covering nearly 300 million people? Their conclusion? Of all world regions, the Arab countries scored the lowest in freedom, media independence, civil liberties, political process and political rights. The report found 65 million illiterate adults. Half of Arab women still cannot read or write. Ten million children between 6 and 15 years of age are not in school. The report points to a “severe shortage” of new writing. In the last 1,000 years, the Arabs have translated as many books as Spain translates in just one year. Only 1.2 percent of the population uses a computer, and only half of those access the Internet. In short, the peoples of these countries lack economic and political freedom.

[….]

Democracies tend not to attack each other. The future of Iraq, the defense of America, and a successful prosecution of the War on Terror mean this: repressive, brutal, un-free, non-transparent governments must fall. A free Iraq threatens to ignite what the president called, in this most historic inaugural address, the “fire of freedom.”

Ibtihaj Muhammad: Poster Girl for the Enemies of Freedom

Published by Papa Giorgio

I really enjoyed this commentary:

First, let us deal with the Leftists in the media wanting Ibtihaj Muhammad to be the flag barer for the United States Olympic team in the opening ceremony, and not a “tall, successful, rich white guy,” wait, I thought the Olympics were suppose to be apolitical? Alternatively, they couldn’t find a LGBT Muslim? [<< I don’t need to explain that do I?].

Here is a short on the issue via CHICKS ON THE RIGHT:

Michael Phelps was chosen by his teammates to be the flag bearer during the Opening Ceremony. Rightly so. He deserves it. He has what? 22 medals? But his accomplishments be damned. No matter how talented he is or how many medals he holds, at the end of the day, he’s still a white guy. That’s why liberals urged him to give up his position as flag bearer and hand it over to Ibtihaj Muhammad, a black Muslim woman who’s famous for wearing a hijab during fencing matches.

I’m dead serious.

She’s so much more qualified than Phelps. I mean, she’s a triple threat. She’s a woman. She’s black. She’s Muslim. And as an added bonus, she hates Donald Trump!

“When you incite hateful speech and rhetoric like that, the people who say it never think about the repercussions and how that affects Muslims,” Muhammad said of the Republican candidate.

CNN even ran an op-ed by W. Kamau Bell, who urged Phelps to give up his position. He’s not deserving of it because America’s sick of “tall, successful, rich white guys hogging the spotlight trying to make America great … again.”

DEBBIE SCHLUSSEL has the best biography of the U.S. Women’s Team Sabre bronze medal winner at the 2016 Rio Olympics:

…Here are the Cliff’s Notes on Ms. Muhammad you should know. Her parents are converts to Islam, who joined via the racist, bigoted Nation of Islam, which–to date–embraces Black supremacism, Jew-hatred, and White-hatred. But you never hear the media ask her to denounce it. Instead, you only hear the media tell us how much of a “victim” this Islamo-narcissist is to some unnamed “bigotry” she alleged suffers. It’s scary that her father, Eugene Muhammad, was a police officer. Would the New Jersey police department that hired him also hire a member of the Ku Klux Klan? Don’t bet on it. Also, don’t bet on the media asking Muhammad to denounce the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan’s history of racist, bigoted statements. This is all aside, mind you, from the fact that Islam is the religion that sold Blacks into slavery–something no one ever asks her about.

She is Black, Muslim, and female, so she gets a triple-pass away from and out of any accountability for her deeds and statements. And that’s why she gets away with a lot of bigotry.

For starters, Muhammad is a HAMAS supporter and a believer in jihad. She hates Israel. She hates Jews and supports their genocide. And since she supports HAMAS, why isn’t the media asking her to condemn HAMAS’ “creative” executions of gays–throwing them off high-rise buildings, dragging them alive via motorcycle to disintegrate to blood and guts on the streets, etc.? Why doesn’t the media ask her to denounce HAMAS’ anti-Semitic charter?

[….]

Muhammad also hates America, which gave her every opportunity imaginable. She criticizes America in every single interview. Sadly, that same America–via the hypocritical, fraudulent minions of imbeciles at the Hillary/Kerry/Obama State Department–continues to throw gobs of cash at this ingrate, making Muhammad a U.S. State Department sports ambassador, traveling the world on your dime for the Empowering Women and Girls Through Sport Initiative.

(READ IT ALL)

[fbvideo link=”https://www.facebook.com/ibtihajmuhammadusa/videos/vb.165214850191487/1128554880524141/?type=2&theater” width=”680″ height=”400″ onlyvideo=”1″]

A good short about Ms. Muhammad is found at Young Cons who then throws us to Pamela Geller (which will follow):

  • Ibtihaj Muhammad has been the darling of the liberal media at the Rio Olympics thus far. She’s a black Muslim American fencer who proudly wears her hijab while competing. Muhammad blasted America because she doesn’t feel safe, and was also congratulated by Hillary Clinton. As if those two things weren’t bad enough. Now, an old Facebook post from Muhammad sees her praising a female terrorist. (YOUNG CONS)

For many Tweets by this racist black Muslim, see PAMELA GELLER, here is one example explained by Pamela:

Here she lauds Imam Suhaib Webb — more than once. Suhaib Webb is currently the imam of the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, which is part of the same entity under the same ownership as the Islamic Society of Boston, where Boston Marathon bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev worshipped. Webb spoke alongside the late al-Qaida senior operative Anwar al-Awlaki at a Sept. 9, 2001 fundraiser for an Islamic radical who killed two police officers, according to FBI surveillance documents.

The former imam of the Islamic Society of Boston, Suhaib Webb, is revered in the mainstream media as a “moderate,” but he has actually denounced secularism as a “radical lunatic ideology.” Webb also once headed up a fund-raiser for a cop killer with arch-terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki.

Webb previously served as imam of the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City, where an Ohio jihadi beheader reportedly worshiped.

And don’t forget this either:

Obama’s pastor not only was a minister in The Nation of Islam, an anti-Semitic/racist group, but the church’s book store sells sermons by Louise Farrakhan, who teaches that the white man was created on the Island of Cyprus by a mad scientist, Yakub. (Mr. Farrakhan also believes he was taken up on a UFO to meet God, and was told he was a little messiah, take note also that he was directly involved in the deaths of police officers as well.) Louise Farrakhan was featured twice on the church’s magazine which reach 20,000[plus] homes in the Chicago area. Even placing on the cover with Louise Farrakhan a third time the founder of the Nation of Islam, Elijah Muhammad. Elijah Muhammad likewise taught that the white man was created by Yakub 6,600 years ago. Walter, Louise Farrakhan teaches that the Jews in Israel do not belong there, and that the true Jews are the black people. Louise Farrakhan was invited into Obama’s church, to the pulpit and given a “lifetime achievement award.” In fact, the New Black Panthers and members of the Nation of Islam often times sat in the pews for sermons by Rev. Wright, whom Obama called a mentor. Not to mention Obama’s wife pictured with racist, anti-Semetic, UFO cult members.