Tag Archives: Antisemitism

Chelsea Manning is a Traitor, Not a Hero

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Published at The International Business Times

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on January 18, 2017

Chelsea Manning (REUTERS/U.S. Army)

It might have been thought that a consistent opposition to treason was not all that difficult. But President Barack Obama’s surprise decision last night to commute the sentence of Bradley, now Chelsea, Manning, showed how deeply political partisanship has penetrated into areas like national security, where ideally country would be put before party or ideology. Continue reading →

Islamic State Denounces Those Who Make Palestine the Foremost Muslim Cause

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on April 2, 2016

An article in the twenty-second edition of al-Naba, the Islamic State’s (IS) newsletter, released on 15 March 2016, explained why the group has not made fighting Israel a priority.

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A Myth Revisited: “Saddam Hussein Had No Connection To Al-Qaeda”

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Book Review: The Connection: How al-Qaeda’s Collaboration With Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America (2004) by Stephen Hayes

By Kyle Orton(@KyleWOrton) on June 21, 2015

 

More than twelve years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, the conventional wisdom is that Saddam’s regime had no connection with al-Qaeda, and such “evidence” as was adduced was tortured out of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi in the Bush administration’s desperation to cobble together a casus belli. But if one puts ideology on hold, and considers the evidence of Stephen Hayes’ The Connection, a rather different picture emerges. Continue reading →

Bernard Lewis and the Armenian Genocide Question

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on June 7, 2015

In 2012, Bernard Lewis published his memoirs, Notes on a Century: Reflections of a Middle East Historian, which included a chapter on the court case brought against him in France in the 1990s for refusing to agree that the massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915-16 constitute genocide in the original sense of the term, as applied to the Nazi Holocaust of European Jewry. The chapter is reproduced below.

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Islamic State Spokesman Presents the Caliphate as Utopia, Says the Coalition War Against it is Failing

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on April 5, 2015

The spokesman of the Islamic State, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, gave a speech on 12 March 2015 entitled, “They Kill and Are Killed” (فيَقتلون ويُقتلون), a phrase drawn from the Qur’an [9:111]. A translation of the speech is given below.

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Mohammed Emwazi’s Path To The Islamic State

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on March 13, 2015

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Having written two posts on the overwhelming evidence that the British video-beheader of the Islamic State (ISIS), Mohammed Emwazi (“Jihadi John”), was a longstanding member of an al-Qaeda network in London that funnelled fighters and other resources to al-Shabab in Somalia, refuting the claim that Emwazi’s radicalisation came about after contact with British security services, I now want to offer the remaining available evidence we have on how Emwazi moved from these associations—which he made in 2007—to fighting for ISIS. Continue reading →

The Islamic State Officially Expands to Afghanistan

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 26 January 2015

The spokesman of the Islamic State (ISIS), Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, gave a speech today entitled, “Say, ‘Die in Your Rage’,” which is drawn from a Surah of the Qur’an [3:119]. The main announcement from Adnani is the acceptance of another wilayat (province), i.e. foreign branch of IS, this time in Afghanistan, led by Hafiz Saeed Khan, a former Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) or “Pakistani Taliban” commander who broke away and formed a pro-ISIS faction in October. This follows the first declaration on this matter a month ago by IS’s caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, which accepted “provinces” from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, and Algeria. Adnani went on to make the foredoomed request that the Afghan jihadists “abandon disunity and factionalism” in order to join ISIS. Continue reading →

Black September: the PLO’s Deniable Terrorism Wing

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on January 19, 2015

A Black September terrorist appears on the balcony in the Olympic Village in Munich, September 1972 (photo via AP)

The Black September group was formed in September 1971, ostensibly as a splinter from the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), but in reality the PLO retained control of Black September and used it to carry out terrorist operations that raised the Palestinian organisations’ profile, without staining the PLO with these atrocities. Continue reading →

Democracy Is The Answer For The Palestinians—But It Might Be The End Of The Peace Process

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on July 5, 2014

Another grisly week in the Holy Land. On Monday, three Jewish teenagers—Eyal Yifrach, Naftali Frankel, and Gilad Shaar—who had been kidnapped three weeks ago were found murdered on the West Bank. The studious attention to not releasing details suggests that something horrific was done. As they were being laid to rest on Wednesday, a Palestinian boy, Mohamed Abu Khudeir, either 16 or 17, was kidnapped in a revenge-attack, and burned alive.

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