The U.S. and Global Security Review - Blog by Michael Novakhov

Listeria in Sabra Hummus Prompts New Wave of Recalls
New York Times
Two food manufacturers have issued nationwide recalls of products because of the discovery of the potentially lethal bacterium listeria, which federal authorities have now linked to three deaths and five illnesses in Texas and Kansas. On Wednesday, the ...

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Durst pleads not guilty; writes letter to LA Times - seattlepi.com
Thursday April 9th, 2015 at 10:00 PM

World: World News, International News, Foreign Reporting - The Washington Post

seattlepi.com

Durst pleads not guilty; writes letter to LA Times
seattlepi.com
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Millionaire Robert Durst, wanted in California on a murder charge, pleaded not guilty Thursday to two Louisiana weapons charges related to his arrest last month. And his legal problems continued to mount. Even as he entered his ...

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WorldViews: After 23 years, the U.S. is dropping its claim that Cuba sponsors terrorism. Here’s what it means.by Ishaan Tharoor
Thursday April 9th, 2015 at 9:59 PM

It hasn't happened yet, but President Obama is expected to remove Cuba from the U.S. State Department's official list of state sponsors of terrorism at some point this week. The move, long anticipated, would signal a significant, symbolic step toward the normalization of ties between Washington and Havana and the potential opening of embassies in both countries.Read full article >>

Obama says concerned China uses size to bully others in region
Thursday April 9th, 2015 at 9:57 PM

World News + Video | The Guardian

(Reuters) - President Barack Obama said on Thursday the United States is concerned China uses its "sheer size and muscle" to push around smaller countries in the South China Sea.

Police dashcam footage shows Walter Scott running from car before shooting - video by Guardian Staff
Thursday April 9th, 2015 at 9:57 PM

New video released by South Carolina authorities shows Walter Scott running from a police traffic stop before he is shot dead. Police officer Michael Slager has been released by authorities in South Carolina – the officer has been charged with murder after shooting Scott in the back eight times Continue reading...

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Obama Offers $20 Million in Energy Aid to Caribbean Nations - Wall Street Journal
Thursday April 9th, 2015 at 9:56 PM

World - Google News

Wall Street Journal

Obama Offers $20 Million in Energy Aid to Caribbean Nations
Wall Street Journal
President Barack Obama met with Caribbean leaders in Jamaica on Thursday, offering $20 million in funding to advance green energy investments in a region long dependent on oil from economically troubled Venezuela. The assistance is part of the Obama ...
Obama Says in Pot-Friendly Jamaica Not to Expect Eased U.S. LawsBloomberg
Obama tells Jamaicans to go easy on the 'ganja'Reuters
UPDATE 2-Obama touts clean energy in bid to restore US leadership in CaribbeanReuters UK

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Texas Executes Man for Police Officer's 2002 Shooting Death - New York Times
Thursday April 9th, 2015 at 9:56 PM

AP Top Headlines At 10:30 P.M. EDT

Breitbart News

Texas Executes Man for Police Officer's 2002 Shooting Death
New York Times
HUNTSVILLE, Texas — Texas prison officials on Thursday executed a man convicted in the slaying of a Dallas-area police officer during a 2002 shootout that followed the killing of a customer outside a convenience store. Kent Sprouse, 42, became the fifth ...
State of Texas Executes Cop-Killer by Lethal InjectionBreitbart News
Texas set to execute man for 2002 killing of police officerWaxahachie Daily Light

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2 women sentenced in slaying of Mississippi black manby By JEFF AMY
Thursday April 9th, 2015 at 9:55 PM

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) -- In a hearing that lasted more than five hours Thursday, a federal judge sentenced two women to the maximum prison terms for their roles in the 2011 death of James Craig Anderson, the last of a series of white-on-black attacks....

Man shot at the Census Bureau - Washington Post
Thursday April 9th, 2015 at 9:55 PM

CBS News

Man shot at the Census Bureau
Washington Post
A security guard was critically injured in a shooting at the U.S. Census Bureau headquarters in Suitland, Md. April 9, 2015 An office looks toward U.S. Census Bureau building in Suitland, Md. as officers prepare to walk toward it after reports that a security ...
Guard Shot at Entrance to US Census Bureau HeadquartersWall Street Journal
Guard shot outside Census Bureau HQUSA TODAY
Gunman barricaded after shooting guard at US Census Bureau in MarylandReuters
CBS News -ABC News -Huffington Post
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Mexican Official Quits Over Helicopter Rideby ELISABETH MALKIN
Thursday April 9th, 2015 at 9:55 PM

A close associate of the president resigned after photographs showed him using a government helicopter for family purposes, the most recent in a series of missteps by officials.

How Obama Is Readying the Way to Meet Castro by kvick1271
Thursday April 9th, 2015 at 9:54 PM

TIME

The United States is not hosting the Summit of the Americas; the meeting of Organization of American States members convenes on Friday in Panama City. But the Obama administration has spent the days leading up to it in a flurry of straightening, smoothing and generally endeavoring to assure that things go smoothly—especially for the newest guest: Cuba.

On Wednesday, Obama received a long-awaited report from the State Department on whether Cuba should be removed from the list of states supporting terrorism. Speaking in Jamaica, where he stopped on Thursday en route to Panama, Obama said he cannot act on the report until other executive agencies review it, but he has repeatedly made it clear that he believes Cuba no longer belongs on the terror list with Iran, Sudan and Syria. That in turn should clear the way for Havana and Washington to re-open embassies. A Cuban official last month told TIME the negotiations over exchanging ambassadors and more fully normalizing relations had stalled over Havana’s inclusion on the terror list.

Meanwhile, a senior State Department official made a surprise visit to Venezuela, which has been Cuba’s strongest supporter, and a target of sharp criticism from the U.S., which recently slapped sanctions on seven senior officials for abusing protestors and opposition leaders. And while no explanation was offered for the discreet visit on Tuesday by Thomas A. Shannon Jr., a veteran diplomat who holds the title of State Department counselor, the White House has been making it clear that it is not looking to escalate tensions with Caracas, where President Nicolas Maduro has capitalized on the language contained in the executive order announcing the sanctions (and on Tuesday promoted two of the sanctioned officials).

“The United States does not believe that Venezuela poses some threat to our national security,” Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes told reporters in a conference call on Tuesday. The language in the order declaring Venezuela to be even worse—”an unusual and extraordinary threat”—was, Rhodes said, boilerplate legalese not intended to make an enemy state of the fourth-largest foreign supplier of oil to the United States. “Completely pro forma,” Rhodes said.

And so the way is smoothed and the air freshened for the kind of meeting both Washington and Havana had in mind on Dec. 17, when Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro jointly announced they would renew relations after half a century of estrangement. The men shook hands at the Dec. 2013 funeral of Nelson Mandela, and spoke by phone to cement the December announcement. But the Summit in Panama has been held out as the venue that would showcase the countries’ long-awaited rapprochement.

“In general, but particularly at this summit, symbolism matters,” says Shannon O’Neil, senior fellow for Latin American studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Castro’s presence is news in itself— this is the first time Cuba has attended an OAS summit since it was suspended in 1962, following its embrace of the Soviet Union. Castro stayed away even after the suspension was lifted in 2009, as Latin American countries rallied around the country the United States had tried to isolate for so long, and with steadily diminishing results. By the time of December’s announcement, Rhodes noted, U.S. policy on Cuba was having the perverse effect of isolating Washington, not the other way around.

So removing Cuba as a polarizing issue should help relations across Latin America, O’Neil says. “For so many years, this U.S.-Cuba standoff has been an overriding difficulty with all sorts of countries, not just the ones we have chronic difficulties with like Venezuela,” says O’Neil. And if Venezuela appears poised to replace Cuba as an polarizing topic, the State Department outreach may serve to temper that, taking Maduro almost instantly up on his reported willingness to smooth out relations with Washington rather than escalate. “The worry here is that all the other good change with Cuba might be overshadowed by Venezuela,” says O’Neil.

Not all see the change with Cuba as good, of course. Polls show a majority of Americans and almost every Cuban favors the opening, but much of the Cuban exile community based in south Florida oppose the reconciliation, and the anti-Castro titans of Congress warn that they will try to block any effort to remove it from the terror list. Passions run high — and in Panama City exploded into fisticuffswhen pro-Castro and anti-Castro protestors encountered one another Wednesday in front of the Cuban embassy. A video of the brawl, with grown men struggling to both land blows and hold their sports coats, might be the cartoon version Clauswitz’s observation that war is a continuation of politics by other means. — With reporting from Dolly Mascarenas in Panama City

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U.S. State Dept. recommends removing Cuba from terrorism list: Senate source
Thursday April 9th, 2015 at 9:54 PM

WASHINGTON/KINGSTON, Jamaica (Reuters) - The U.S. State Department has recommended that President Barack Obama remove Cuba from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism, a U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee aide said on Thursday.

Iran's Supreme Leader Says Sanctions Must Lift When Nuclear Deal Is Signed - New York Times
Thursday April 9th, 2015 at 9:54 PM

Iran's Supreme Leader Says Sanctions Must Lift When Nuclear Deal Is Signed
New York Times
TEHRAN — Iran's supreme leader on Thursday challenged two of the United States' bedrock principles in the nuclear negotiations, declaring that all economic sanctions would have to be lifted on the day any final agreement was signed and that military sites ...
Ayatollah Blasts Terms of Nuclear FrameworkWall Street Journal
Senate nears Iran deal rebuke to ObamaCNN
Obama is waging an all-out campaign for Iran dealMiami Herald
Los Angeles Times -ABC News
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Ukraine’s Parliament Moves to Shore Up Battered Economyby DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
Thursday April 9th, 2015 at 9:54 PM

Christian Science Monitor | USA

A series of legislative votes came as new evidence emerged of just how badly the business sector has been shattered in the last year.

Why Obama might not get expected glow at Americas summit (+video)
Thursday April 9th, 2015 at 9:30 PM

Washington — President Obama's trip to Panama Friday for his third Summit of the Americas was once expected to be a victory lap over his move to normalize relations with Cuba – a decision that paved the way for Cuba to attend the forum focused on hemispheric trade and democracy for the first time.

But now the two-day summit is likely to test the claims by administration officials that the meeting would showcase a new turn in US relations with Latin America. US-Cuba relations may be on the upswing, but new storm clouds are gathering on the hemispheric horizon in the wake of deteriorating US-Venezuela relations.

Indeed, the glow of a highly anticipated summit handshake between Mr. Obama and Cuban President Raúl Castro could be dimmed by recent US action against the leftist government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Obama’s slapping of sanctions on seven Venezuelan officials last month for human rights violations – and in particular the naming of Venezuela as a “national security threat” as part of the sanctions justification process – have evoked bad memories across the region of an interventionist Uncle Sam. Now some regional experts wonder if Venezuela might emerge as the new Cuba that dashes US hopes of more productive relations with the hemisphere.

“There is a new spirit to the relations of the US with the Americas, but it doesn’t lessen the tensions with Venezuela or wipe away all the historical misgivings over US intervention in the region,” says Anthony Quainton, a former ambassador to Nicaragua and Peru, now at American University’s School of International Service in Washington. “It’s no surprise [administration officials] are giving this a silver lining, but the specifics holding the relationship back don’t change much as a result of one summit.”

In the run-up to the summit, the White House has been vaunting how Obama’s opening to Cuba has cleared away an impediment to more effective and results-oriented dialogue on regional issues like democracy, human rights, government accountability, and equitable development.

Ever since the summit was launched in 1994 as a vehicle for advancing democracy and free trade in the Western Hemisphere, Cuba’s isolation by the United States has dominated the periodic gatherings of leaders and remained a thorn in the side of US relations with Latin America.

“The president has a clear legacy that he is aiming to build in the hemisphere that is focused on moving beyond some of the past divisiveness within the Americas, finding new ways to engage our partners on a basis of mutual interest and mutual respect, and making concrete progress on very profound security challenges,” says Ben Rhodes, Obama's deputy national security adviser. “Having gone through two previous summits, [we] did not think it was constructive for the United States to continue to try to isolate Cuba.”

But ever since the US announced the Venezuela sanctions on March 9, the White House has found to its dismay that regional leaders – including some close allies – are treating Mr. Maduro with kid gloves while expressing open opposition to the American recourse to sanctions on another Latin government.

Administration officials have hinted that Obama’s regionally popular opening to Cuba should have won the US more trust and support for efforts to pressure the Maduro government on human rights violations and anti-democratic moves. The senior State Department official for Latin America, Roberta Jacobson, said she was “disappointed” the US measures were not more widely defended in the region.

“A lot of US officials feel that the region has treated the Maduro government easily and let it off the hook for far too long,” says Michael Shifter, president of the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue.

“Now we have this US mind-set that because of what the US did with Cuba,” he adds, “which is something Latin America has long wanted, the region should reciprocate and ‘do what we want you to do with Venezuela,’ ” which would mean regional pressure on Maduro to reverse his anti-democratic actions.

But the US should not expect any “dividend” for its Cuba opening to translate to support on Venezuela, says Mr. Shifter, who is also an adjunct professor of Latin American studies at Georgetown University in Washington. Calling the way some US officials have linked Cuba and Venezuela “not helpful,” he says the US is understandably disappointed at the weak regional response to Venezuela’s anti-democratic measures – but should also understand what explains it.

For example, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, a strong Washington ally, called the Venezuela sanctions “counterproductive.” Helping to explain that response, Mr. Quainton says, is the fact that Colombia is in the final stages of peace talks with the FARC, the country’s oldest guerrilla movement. The talks are hosted by Cuba and have enjoyed the crucial support of Venezuela, Colombia’s neighbor.

Mexico, another close US partner, can hardly be expected to come down hard on Venezuela’s human rights abuses, Shifter says, when Mexico is dealing with its own human rights challenges.

Even Brazil, South America’s political and economic powerhouse, has kept quiet on the Venezuela crisis, limited as much by its own political scandals and economic doldrums as by a desire not to upend its close economic ties to oil-producer Venezuela.

The US-Venezuela standoff could even heat up a notch at the Panama summit, as Obama plans to meet on the sidelines with Venezuelan dissidents, and Maduro has pledged to present Obama with a petition signed by 10 million Venezuelans demanding the US lift the sanctions and cease its “imperialist” actions toward the country.

But at the same time, broader interests in addressing Latin America’s issues and some appreciation for Obama’s less paternalistic approach could still make this a pivotal summit, some regional experts say.

The 35 leaders expected at the summit “are facing real pressures ... to get things done,” says Mack McLarty, a Clinton White House initiator of the summit process with a longtime interest in Latin America. Those demands from domestic publics for effective leadership and results will motivate leaders to focus on summit agenda topics like energy, economic competitiveness, and democracy, and to play down controversy, he says.

In addition, Mr. McLarty says that an overall shift under Obama in the way the US deals with Latin America on longstanding issues like drugs and immigration – seeing the demand for illicit drugs less as a “war” and more as a health issue, for example – will have more significant impact on US-Latin relations than the Venezuela crisis.

“Venezuela clearly is on the flash-point list,” he says, “but overall, there are fewer distractions at this summit than in the past.”

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Obama set to test engagement doctrine with Cuba
Thursday April 9th, 2015 at 6:02 PM

Washington (CNN)Emboldened after striking a preliminary nuclear deal with Iran, President Barack Obama heads to a gathering of South and Central American leaders this week prepared to test his doctrine of engaging sworn U.S. enemies, this time Cuba.

After a brief stopover in Jamaica Wednesday to meet with Caribbean leaders, Obama heads to the Summit of the Americas in Panama, where officials say he plans to "interact" with Cuba's President Raul Castro following his decision to improve relations between the two countries.

Castro is attending the gathering for the first time after Cuba was drummed out of the Organization of American States more than half a century ago.

Unlike past summits, when the United States' stance on Cuba was a major point of contention, White House officials expect the realignment to be hailed at the two-day event, during which Obama also plans to tour the Panama Canal and seek to ramp up commerce with Latin America.

Obama and Castro aren't scheduled to meet formally this week, but Obama's aides have hinted at a set agenda for whatever conversation emerges when they encounter one another on the sidelines of the conference.

That includes finalizing plans to reopen embassies in Havana and Washington and continuing to bolster commercial ties between the neighbors, which began to form after Obama lifted long-standing restrictions on commerce and travel last year.

It's also likely to center on Obama's decision to remove Cuba from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terror, a commitment officials say he'll make this week after receiving a recommendation on the matter from the State Department. The State Department recommended removing Cuba from the list. Obama said Thursday he was aware of the decision but hadn't been formally presented with the recommendation and therefore wouldn't comment further.

Cuba has raised the designation as a major objection in its talks with U.S. officials regarding normalizing relations between the two Cold War adversaries.

Obama, in an interview with NPR this week, signaled his predilection for removing Cuba's terror status.

"The criteria is very straightforward: 'Is this particular country considered a state sponsor of terrorism,' not, 'do we agree with them on everything,'" he said. "Those standards, those criteria are the ones that are going to be measured against the current activities of the Cuban government."

Obama and Castro, who spoke on the phone after the U.S. announced in December it was seeking to thaw frozen relations between the two countries, last interacted in person at Nelson Mandela's funeral in 2013 when they shook hands spontaneously.

Analysts predict their interaction this time around will be more substantive — though not yet exactly chummy.

"I don't think there will be lots of hugs and kisses," said Ted Piccone, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution Latin America Initiative. "I think it will be serious and it will be respectful and measured, and they will reinforce the larger theme...that dialogue and engagement is better for constructive relations than negative sanctions."

Since the handshake in South Africa, officials in both countries have worked to ease the decades of U.S.-Cuba enmity, culminating in the announcement late last year that diplomatic relations were reopening. Some in Cuba have lamented the pace of the thaw, though Obama's aides argue the high stakes mandate careful deliberation.

"When you have two countries that haven't really spoken to each other like this in over 50 years, you have a lot of issues to work through," Obama's Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes said, noting that talks to reopen embassies weren't likely to be complete by this week's summit — originally an administration goal.

Officials insist they're otherwise pleased at the progress toward reestablishing diplomatic ties, which the White House argues has helped improve relations with other countries in the region.

"We felt it was long overdue and takes a huge irritant out of our policy in Latin America and the Caribbean," said Roberta Jacobson, the Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs who's led talks with Cuba reestablishing diplomatic ties.

The summit meetings Friday and Saturday will mark the first time Cuba participates in the conference, which takes place every three years. At the two Obama previously attended, in Trinidad and Colombia, reception toward the U.S. delegation was icy.

"It was really painful to see how isolated (Obama) was, what a punching bag he was. I think that atmosphere will be very different now three years later," said Richard Feinberg, who handled inter-American affairs in President Clinton's National Security Council and is now a professor of international political economy at the University of California, San Diego.

While Cuba may help smooth U.S. overtures to Latin America, a more aggressive stance against Venezuela could prove troublesome for Obama. In March the White House announced it was expanding sanctions on certain Venezuelan officials for human rights abuses following political unrest.

The country's president Nicolas Maduro planned to present Obama with petitions signed by millions of his countrymen protesting the executive order, which declared Venezuela a "national security threat."

U.S. officials insist the language in the sanctions order was pro forma and that Venezuela doesn't pose a threat to U.S. security. But they acknowledge agitation over the sanctions in the region will arise during the summit.

"It will certainly be an issue," Rhodes said. "But again, what we'll be making clear here is that we stand up for a set of universal values everywhere."

Like negotiating with Iran, renewing ties with Cuba sparked outrage from some lawmakers, who argued it was a misguided effort to engage a corrupt government. But Obama, in an interview with the New York Times this week, argued there were few risks of pursing a better relationship with Cuba.

"For us to test the possibility that engagement leads to a better outcome for the Cuban people, there aren't that many risks for us," he said. "It's a tiny little country. It's not one that threatens our core security interests, and so for us to test the proposition and if it turns out that it doesn't lead to better outcomes, we can adjust our policies."

CNN's Elise Labott contributed to this report.

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Obama’s Moral Equivalence Ignores Islamic Doctrine
Thursday April 9th, 2015 at 4:08 PM

The Counter Jihad Report

PJ Media, By Andrew C. McCarthy On February 6, 2015

The insipid moral equivalence in President Obama’s apologia for Islam at the National Prayer Breakfast Thursday morning has already been deconstructed by such commentators as Roger Simon, Victor David Hanson and Jonah Goldberg. I am bothered, though, by the president’s presumption of equivalence between doctrinal apples and oranges. If, as he maintains, we must engage in comparative religion with a focus on what believers do in the name of their varying faiths, then we should also analyze what their varying faiths tell them to do.

Sounding more like the executive director of CAIR, the president of the United States warned Christians and other non-Muslims to stay off “our high horse” regarding the sadistic murder of a Jordanian pilot, Lieutenant Mouath al-Kasaebeh, by Islamic State terrorists. We must have some humility, explained famously humble Mr. Obama. After all, over the last millennium, “people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.”

In Islamic doctrine, Jesus (Isa) is considered not God but a prophet. He is deemed to anticipate the final prophet, Mohammed, and to preach a Gospel subsequently perfected by the revelations of the Koran.

From that perspective, then, an analogous answer to Obama’s assertion could be made y recounting the terrible things Muslims have done in the name of Mohammed — an answer that wouldn’t require mining a millennium since it has been just three weeks since Lt. al-Kasaebeh’s immolation and the scene of mass-murdering jihadists braying, “Allahu Akbar! The prophet has been avenged!” as they fled the offices of Charlie Hebdo.

I’m more interested, though, in the deeds of Mohammed himself. When Christians resort to the wrongs cataloged by Obama, they are blatantly deviating from the example of Christ. Can the same be said for Muslims and the example of Mohammed?

In 627 AD, the prophet orchestrated the mass-murder of the Jewish Banu Qurayza tribe after they had surrendered to the Muslims. He presided over the beheadings of somewhere between 600 and 900 members of the tribe – including all young boys who had reached puberty. The women and the remaining children were taken as concubines and slaves (with some of the women sold for horses and armor). All the tribe’s wealth was confiscated.

This is not speculation. The incident is explicitly recorded in Koran. (By the way, I use the Koran approved and published in various languages, side-by-side with the original Arabic, by the Saudi government’s Ministry of Hajj and Endowments. The Kingdom has widely disseminated this version throughout the world, particularly Islamic schools.)

As recounted in Sura 33:25-27:

Allah turned back the unbelievers for (all) their fury: No advantage did they gain; and enough is Allah for the believers in their fight. And Allah is full of strength, exalted in might.

And those of the people of the book [the Banu Qurayza] who aided them – Allah did take them down from their strongholds and cast terror into their hearts, (so that) some ye slew, and some ye made captives.

And He made you heirs of their lands, their houses, and their goods, and of a land which ye had not frequented (before). And Allah has power over all things.

Mohammed’s first authoritative biographer, Mohammed ibn Ishaq (d. 768), elaborates with this account (reproduced at wikiislam.net):

Then [the Banu Qurayza] surrendered, and the apostle confined them in Medina[.]… Then the apostle went out to the market of Medina (which is still its market today) and dug trenches in it. Then he sent for them and struck off their heads in those trenches as they were brought out to him in batches. Among them was the enemy of Allah Huyayy b. Akhtab and Ka`b b. Asad their chief. There were 600 or 700 in all, though some put the figure as high as 800 or 900.

As they were being taken out in batches to the apostle they asked Ka`b what he thought would be done with them. He replied, “Will you never understand? Don’t you see that the summoner never stops and those who are taken away do not return? By Allah it is death!” This went on until the apostle made an end of them. Huyayy was brought out wearing a flowered robe in which he had made holes about the size of the finger-tips in every part so that it should not be taken from him as spoil, with his hands bound to his neck by a rope. When he saw the apostle he said, “By God, I do not blame myself for opposing you, but he who forsakes God will be forsaken.” Then he went to the men and said, “God’s command is right. A book and a decree, and massacre have been written against the Sons of Israel.” Then he sat down and his head was struck off.

Ibn Kathir, a revered fourteenth century scholar of sharia jurisprudence and biographer of Mohammed, adds:

Then the Messenger of Allah commanded that ditches should be dug, so they were dug in the earth, and they were brought tied by their shoulders, and were beheaded. There were between seven hundred and eight hundred of them. The children who had not yet reached adolescence and the women were taken prisoner, and their wealth was seized.

This was six centuries after the Gospel of the New Testament. Even if he did not turn the other cheek, the prophet could have shown compassion to his enemies. They had surrendered. Even if he had been determined to seize their territory and wealth, he could have allowed them to evacuate. Instead, he killed, enslaved, and sold them off.

Some background is necessary before we get to a second incident in the life of the prophet. Earlier this week, the Islamic State released a slick video showing Lt. al-Kasaebeh being burnt alive in a cage. The Obama administration spun into action … fresh off offending both the Egyptian government and most Americans by hosting some of its friends from the outlawed and virulently anti-American Muslim Brotherhood at the State Department. Echoing Islamists, administration officials assured us that, while this sort of barbarity was a staple of fifteenth century Christianity — it was against everything Islam stands for, and thus utterly slanderous for ISIS to rationalize it as Islamic warfare.

Inconveniently, the Koran proclaims that immolation is a punishment favored by Allah, so much so that the skin is constantly replaced to prolong the agony. It is imposed, moreover, not for anything particularly treacherous — just for refusing to accept Islam. Sura 4:56 explains:

Those who reject Our signs, We shall soon cast into the Fire. As often as their skins are roasted through, We shall change them for fresh skins, that they may taste the chastisement: for Allah is Exalted in Power, Wise.

Now, according to “Muslim clerics” far and wide, as reported by Reuters, immolation is “considered despicable by Islam, no matter what the context.” How can that be when the Koran tells us Allah Himself has prescribed immolation as a suitable punishment? Because, Islam’s defenders rationalize, the immolation promised in the Koran is for Allah alone to impose in the afterlife, not for men to presume to impose in this life. “Only God tortures by fire,” tweeted Salman al-Odah, a Saudi sheikh.

That’s not very persuasive. There are, after all, numerous cruel penalties that Islamic scripture has Allah directing Muslims to impose — scourging, stoning, beheading and so on. Indeed, while in one breath condemning the torching of the pilot as a “lowly terrorist act” by a “Satanic, terrorist” group, Reuters quoted Grand Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, Grand Sheikh of al-Azhar (the ancient seat of Sunni scholarship), as pronouncing in the next breath that the ISIS killers should be “killed, crucified of have their limbs amputated.”

As Robert Spencer points out, the grand sheikh clearly drew that sharia sentence straight out of the Koran. Specifically, according to Sura 5:33:

The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger, and strive with might and main for mischief through the land is: execution, crucifixion, or the cutting of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land[.]

The verse goes on to say that, for those condemned, these punishments are to be “their disgrace in this world”; then, after death, another “heavy punishment” awaits them — presumably, the eternal barbecue foretold by Sura 4:56.

So at best, fire is frowned upon, but death by crucifixion and amputation is recommended. Not terribly comforting.

But it gets worse. There is also an eye-for-an-eye dimension of Islamic jurisprudence. Back to Sura 5, this time verse 45: “We ordained therein for them, ‘Life for life, eye for eye, nose for nose, ear for ear, tooth for tooth, and wounds equal for equal.” This is why, for example, in Saudi Arabia, where sharia is the law of the land, the government had a prisoner’s eye surgically removed after he was found guilty of an assault that damaged his victim’s eye.

Lt. al-Kasaebeh was captured while on a mission to firebomb Islamic State targets. The jihadists thus contend that setting him on fire was the reciprocal, scripturally prescribed punishment. That rationale is disturbing to us in the West, where — unless you’re frozen, Obama-like, in the fifteenth century — we do not criminalize honorable combatants who conduct legitimate attacks on enemy forces (and we don’t, in any event, do immolation).

Nevertheless, ISIS’s argument carries considerable weight in Islam. Even in the Reuters report that tries hard to depict universal Muslim condemnation of ISIS, a Jordanian cleric known as Abu Sayaf (a/k/a “Mohamed al-Shalabi) is quoted as grudgingly saying, “Even if the Islamic State says [the Jordanian pilot] had bombed and burnt and killed us and we punished him they way he did to us, we say, ‘OK, but why film the video in this shocking way?’” In other words, burning the pilot alive is justifiable; it’s the bad PR from recording it that is unacceptable.

Now, with all that as context, let’s consider another episode from the prophet’s life, which, as Mr. Spencer points out, is conveniently omitted by al-Azhar’s grand sheikh, his fellow sharia jurists, and Islam’s Western apologists in the White House and beyond. The incident is recorded in Ibn Ashaq’s biography of the prophet (italics mine):

Kinana b. al-Rabi`, who had the custody of the treasure of B. al-Nadir, was brought to the apostle who asked him about it. He denied that he knew where it was. A Jew came … to the apostle and said that he had seen Kinana going round a certain ruin every morning early. When the apostle said to Kinana, “Do you know that if we find you have it I shall kill you?” he said Yes. The apostle gave orders that the ruin was to be excavated and some of the treasure was found. When he asked him about the rest he refused to produce it,so the apostle gave orders to al-Zubayr b. al-Awwam, ‘Torture him until you extract what he has,’ so he kindled a fire with flint and steel on his chest until he was nearly dead.Then the apostle delivered him to Muhammad b. Maslama and he struck off his head, in revenge for his brother Mahmud.

So at Mohammed’s direction, a man’s chest was set on fire to extract information from him before he was beheaded. Well, at least he wasn’t waterboarded.

Robert adds a hadith from the authoritative Sahi Bukari collection (No. 626 in Book 1, Volume 11) (again, my italics):

Certainly I decided to order the Mu’adh-dhin (call-maker) to pronounce Iqama [the call to prayer] and order a man to lead the prayer and then take a fire flame to burn all those who had not left their houses so far for the prayer along with their houses.

Relatedly, Raymond Ibrahim directs our attention to an incident involving the prophet, recorded in another Bukari hadith (No. 261 in Book 4, Volume 52). The story involves eight starving tribesmen who sought the prophet’s help. Mohammed directed them to a shepherd, who fed them until they recovered their health. But they turned on the shepherd, killing him, and renouncing Islam. When he was informed, Mohammed ordered that they be captured and – besides having their hands and feet cut off – that iron be heated by fire and passed over their eyes, blinding them.

President Obama says we need to approach comparisons of religion with humility. I’m all for that. In a 2011 NRO column, I traced the evolution of Christianity in America from the often harshly theocratic origins of the original colonial settlements to the tolerant pluralism of modern times. The president, however, misses the point of humility. It is to refrain from dismissing out of hand the hope that Islam, too, will eventually evolve. It is not license to remain willfully blind to the dangers posed to us by its doctrine, as widely understood and practiced by a mainstream faction of Islam for centuries, right up to the present day.

Courageous Muslim reformers are laboring to advance an evolution — and they risk death at the hands of radical Muslims who regard them as apostates, an offense Islam punishes by death. We can humbly encourage the reformers while rationally acknowledging that their labors are very uphill. To repeat what I wrote in the 2011 column:

Cultures are dynamic. They change drastically over time. [But] there are grounds for concern that Islam’s will have a harder time evolving — the blights on our history are rooted in human failure to apply Judeo-Christian doctrine, not in the doctrine itself. [By contrast,] Islam’s problems are more about Islam than about Muslims.

That remains true, Obama’s wayward moral equivalence notwithstanding. Islam regards the Koran as the immutable word of Allah. In Sura 33:21, Allah gives Muslims the following admonition regarding Mohammed, “Ye have indeed in the Messenger of Allah an excellent exemplar for him who hopes in Allah and the Final Day.” Muslims are commanded to imitate their prophet. It is undeniable that their prophet was, to put it mildly, an aggressive warrior.

With regard to that aspect of Mohammed’s legacy, there is nothing equivalent to it in Christianity.

It is not humility but delusion to pretend that modern Islam is just fine as is. It is not humility but cowardice to indulge the suicidal notion that our own past sins render us unfit to condemn today’s atrocities.

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