Doc's Talk

The Muslim Brotherhood Moderation Myth Revealed, Then Quickly Dropped Down the Memory Hole

2012-02-01T22:28:00.001+02:00

Barry Rubin

It is amazing how mass media coverage of the Middle East switches gears and implicitly admits to having been wrong while continuing with the same themes. Or sometimes, buried deep inside an article, there's a flash of truth that conflicts with everything else that's been said, even by the same reporter. But then the light goes out; the stygian dark returns; and it was as if that flash had never taken place.

In working on a new edition of my book, Islamic Fundamentalists in Egyptian Politics, I have reviewed media coverage from January 2011 to the present. It is virtually impossible to find a single reference--and certainly not directly from a journalist--saying that the Muslim Brotherhood was a radical group.

Instead we were told daily that it was moderate, pragmatic, against violence, not really anti-American, and so on. We were told that it was full of moderates and factions, especially of young people. Instead, the narrative is being falsely shaped in this way:

--The Brotherhood is protecting Egypt from the even more radical Salafists so the West should support them.

--The real battle is between the military and the civilians so the Brotherhood is--or, at least, if it chooses to be--the champion of democracy against the armed forces. Supposedly, then, the liberal Egyptians will be grateful to the Islamist group even as it crushes them.

Now, in a new article, New York Times correspondent Robert Worth tells the story of Mohamed Beltagy, a beloved and heroic (according to Worth) Muslim Brotherhood figure who opposes repression by the military. Worth doesn't tell us that the Brotherhood supports the repression because it helps it to get rid of moderate--though politically inept--rivals. It is, however, clear that people like Beltagy have no real influence in the Brotherhood. In other words, if there are moderates they are marginal in a party that has almost half the seats in parliament.

But then--suddenly!--there's this amazing admission stuck way down in the story and not highlighted in any way:

"By July [2011], many of Beltagy’s young and more vocal friends had been ejected from the [Brotherhood] movement. Their sin was the establishment of the Egyptian Current, a youth party that blended young Islamists and a range of leftists. To Brotherhood youth, this was one more sign of the movement’s rigidity and narrowness.“

In other words, most of the real or so-called moderates in the Brotherhood have long since been kicked out. All that talk about young people changing the Brotherhood and splits within the movement amounted to absolutely nothing. And do you remember hearing anything about the Egyptian Current party? Did it win any seats in the election? Of course not. Even the "Facebook kid" party won less than 2 percent, after months of our being told they were going to run the country.

These people weren't powerful or important they were just guys with whom Western reporters liked to hang out. We were being told nonsense or--when the reporters knew it was nonsense--nothing at all.

Here's proof in Worth's conclusion: "The fact remains that only the Islamists have the power to face down Egypt’s military and deliver a more democratic government. And if they fail to do so, they may face a rebellion within their own ranks."

First, the Brotherhood is now going to be in power. If anything will contain them it won't be the military--which is quite willing to turn over power to them and just has some narrow, self-interest demands of its own--but the election of Amr Moussa as president.

Second, a "more democratic government" means that the parliamentary majority of Brotherhood people and Salafists, will rule as they please. And what possible reason is there to believe that a tiny number of powerless dissidents, most of whom have been expelled, will launch a rebellion against a group that has just proven itself the most successful organization in the entire Middle East?

To Worth, the Brotherhood is led by a group of "anxious old men who are accustomed to autocracy and now find themselves in a frightening new era." Yes, they are supposedly trembling at taking power when they are actually just being smart and cautious. No doubt Hamas, Hizballah, the Iranian and Syrian regimes, the Islamists in Tunisia and Libya, and the rulers of Turkey are also just plain scared since they allegedly know they have no business being in power? Wrong. They are on a mission from God. And aside from that, they want power, wealth, and the implementation of their radical program to the greatest degree possible.

Treasure the moments when the mass media narrative splits open and shows what lies behind it. They are rare indeed.

Note: Memory Hole in the title is a reference to George Orwell's 1984 where the truth is destroyed so that the lowly citizens are kept ignorant.

Professor Barry Rubin, Director, Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center http://www.gloria-center.org
The Rubin Report blog http://rubinreports.blogspot.com/
He is a featured columnist at PJM http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/.
Editor, Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal http://www.gloria-center.org

Israel warns against Syrian WMD transfer to Hezbollah

2012-02-01T17:28:00.003+02:00

Defense official says Israel concerned that Syrian President Bashar Assad will transfer unconventional weapons, long-range missiles and advanced anti-aircraft weapons to Hezbollah • Security Council debates resolution demanding Assad relinquish power.

Yoav Limor, Yoni Hirsch, Daniel Siryoti and News Agencies

The transfer of chemical weapons from Syria to Hezbollah would be tantamount to a declaration of war, a senior defense official said on Tuesday, adding that Israel would not accept such a move and would act to prevent it. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has been facing a nearly 11-month-long popular uprising in which more than 5,000 Syrians have been killed, according to U.N. estimates. Rebel forces briefly gained control of the eastern suburbs of the capital, Damascus, in a startling advance last week but Syrian government forces launched a swift offensive Monday and Tuesday to crush the remaining resistance. Yet the fact that rebels made it to the doorstep of Damascus, the seat of Assad's power, was a dangerous development for the regime.

The bloodshed in Syria has increased in recent days as Western and Arab countries have stepped up pressure on Russia over action at the U.N. Security Council. A draft resolution submitted demands that Assad halt the crackdown and implement an Arab League peace plan that calls on him to transfer power to his vice president, and allow creation of a unity government to clear the way for elections. If Assad fails to comply within 15 days, the council would consider "further measures," a reference to a possible move to impose economic or other sanctions.

In light of the recent events unfolding in Syria, Israeli officials are concerned the regime may try to transfer its advanced weapons – including non-conventional weapons – to the Lebanese-based terrorist organization Hezbollah.

Syria has transferred advanced weapons to Hezbollah control in recent years, but the weapons have remained on Syrian soil in accordance with Assad's instructions, to avoid their possible destruction by Israel. With the increasing belief that Assad's rule is expected to end in the near future, some analysts have warned he may decide to transfer arms to Hezbollah in Lebanon. The delivery could include a large number of long-range missiles, advanced anti-aircraft systems that could threaten Israel Air Force flights in the north, and chemical weapons.

Syria is believed to possess the world's largest stockpile of chemical weapons, including some of the deadliest chemical agents known, such as sarin and the nerve agent VX. Their chemical agents have already been integrated in warheads mounted on advanced Scud missiles.

The weapons are currently under the tight supervision of military forces loyal to Assad, but may be transferred to Hezbollah – possibly even at Iran's behest – because Lebanon is currently perceived as more stable than Syria. "We are seeing a paradoxical process unfold, in which Syria is undergoing a process of 'Lebanonization' and vice versa," said the senior Israeli defense official. "Syria, which was an island of stability in the past is now being torn apart by military clashes. Lebanon is now perceived as being the more stable of the two," the official added.

For Israel, the transfer of such weapons – and especially chemical weapons – to Hezbollah would be crossing a red line. The senior official said such a situation would be tantamount to "a declaration of war." Unlike Syria, whose weapons are mainly a deterrent, "Hezbollah is a terrorist organization that is much less predictable and cannot be allowed to entertain itself with unconventional weapons," the official said.

The subject of a possible weapons transfer from Syria to Hezbollah has been the subject of much discussion in security and defense-related forums both in Israel and abroad. The West shares Israel's concerns, and some officials have warned Damascus not to succumb to the temptation to move weapons into Lebanon.

Israel Air Force Commander Maj.-Gen. Ido Nechushtan last week warned that the current instability in Syria could lead to conflict on Israel's northern front and insisted that Israel must prepare for such an eventuality.

Speaking to reporters last Wednesday, Nechushtan reiterated, "Everything that is happening [in Syria] every day is reason for us to reexamine the situation, closely follow the developments and make decisions as necessary."

Meanwhile, the U.N. Security Council held a session on Tuesday to discuss the Syrian crisis and the draft resolution backed by the Arab League and Western countries to demand that Assad transfer authority to Syrian Vice President Farouk al-Sharaa within 15 days. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, British Foreign Secretary William Hague, French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe, and Arab League Secretary-General Nabil Elaraby were among those present.

Diplomats said the proposal is supported by 10 of 15 Security Council members, which would force Russia or China to veto the move to prevent its approval.

Clinton called on Council members to approve the Arab League's plan, saying, "It is time for the international community to put aside our own differences and send a clear message of support to the people of Syria. I know that some members here may be concerned that the Security Council is headed toward another Libya. That is a false analogy. We all have a choice: Stand with the people of Syria and the region or become complicit in the continuing violence there."

Clinton told Security Council member, "Despite its ruthless tactics, the Assad regime's reign of terror will end and the people of Syria will have the chance to chart their own destiny. The question for us is: How many more innocent civilians will die before this country is able to move forward toward the kind of future it deserves?"

Russia, for its part, remained at odds with the West's position. "The Western draft Security Council resolution on Syria does not lead to a search for compromise," Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov wrote Tuesday on Twitter. "Pushing this resolution is a path to civil war."

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Tuesday at a news conference in Amman, Jordan, that he was "encouraged by the League of Arab States' initiative to seek a political solution" to the Syrian crisis. "It is more urgent than ever to put an end to this bloodshed and violence, to start a credible political solution that addresses the legitimate aspiration of the Syrian people and to protect their fundamental freedoms," Ban said.

Violence throughout Syria continued on Tuesday with more than 50 people killed in clashes between forces loyal to Assad and the "Free Syrian Army" defectors on the outskirts of Damascus.

Muslim Firsters and Israel Firsters

2012-02-01T17:11:00.002+02:00

Sultan Knish

If you were to suggest in a public forum that just possibly Israel's failure to reach a peace agreement with a terrorist organization, run by kleptomaniacs and homicidal maniacs, which still continues to applaud the murder of Israeli children, might possibly be due to the terrorists and not because of Israel, then according to the consensus of the left, you are an Israel Firster.

The paradigm of the Israel Firster only works if you assume that the America First position is to support Islamic terrorists. Even if we were to dismiss the threat of Islamic terrorism to the United States then a position sympathetic to the territorial claims of Islamic terrorists in Israel would still not be the America First position, it would be the Muslims First position.

The left which deploys names like Israel Firsters is certainly not calling for neutrality in the conflict, rather it would like us to side with the Muslim Brotherhood and the assorted Islamic terrorists scattered throughout the region. Arguably the United States has been doing this for some time already. Obama stuck his finger in Prime Minister Netanyahu's chest, but bowed to the Saudi King. When he visited Turkey, he made no mention of the Turkish settlements in occupied Cyprus, but when Biden visited Israel, he threw a fit over a partial approval for a few houses in Jerusalem. The United States doesn't fund many terrorist groups, but the bulk of the funding that it allots to terrorists goes to terrorists operating in Israel and killing Israelis.

Last week the State Department put out a list of designated terrorist organization. That list includes the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. The Brigade has not only committed numerous atrocities against Israelis, it at one point threatened to launch terrorist attacks against America. The Brigade is the military arm of the Fatah group which controls the Palestinian Authority. The Authority is the beneficiary of an average of 600 million dollars a year in direct assistance, and indirectly through the UNRWA which has already received an initial 55 million dollars from the United States in 2012.

Terrorists who murder Israelis don't just indirectly benefit from American aid, that money is going to pay the salaries of convicted terrorists in Israeli prisons. Some of those terrorists received training and weapons from the United States. I would like to be able to say that this sort of thing is one of the innovations of the Hussein Administration, but it's an an artifact of two previous administrations.

This is usually how countries treat other countries that they are at war with. In this case it is an artifact, not of an Israel Firster policy, but of a Muslim Firster policy. There is no interpretation of Israel Firster that accommodates the United States arming and funding terrorists. But there is an extensive global policy of rewarding and appeasing Muslims.

Opponents of Israel often complain that they are being "silenced" in some intangible ways, but the United States government has certainly never criminalized criticism of Israel, however it continues to conduct discussions with the OIC, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, on ways to suppress and censor criticism of Islam. Nor has the Secretary of State suggested that critics of Israel should be subject to "peer pressure and shaming", which she has for critics of Islam.

American soldiers have been dying incessantly to protect Muslims for decades now. They died in Somalia to protect aid to Somali Muslims. They died in the Gulf War to liberate Kuwait and protect the Muslim holy sites of Mecca and Medina from Saddam Hussein. They died over Yugoslavia to build a state for the Muslim terrorists of the KLA. Thousands of American soldiers have died to protect Muslims from other Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In the last year alone, the United States has helped overthrow secular governments to make way for Muslim ones. When the Libyan ruler refused to resign, Obama sent in NATO jets to bomb his forces into submission so that the Al Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood affiliated Libyan Islamic Fighting Group could take power.

While the United States abandoned Iranian students protesting against an Islamist regime, it overthrew governments in Egypt and Tunisia to make way for Islamist takeovers. The Saudis got to use tanks in Bahrain, but Gaddafi was hunted down and killed for a genocide that never happened.

What do you call all that but a Muslim Firster foreign policy?

In The Audacity of Hope, a book title taken from a sermon of his vilely Anti-Semitic former Black Muslim mentor, Obama wrote, "I will stand with the Muslims." And he has done it.

Obama has stood with the Muslims in Cote d'Ivorie, where armed force was used to illegally seat a Muslim ruler against the ruling of the country's supreme court. He has stood with the Muslims in Kenya, where his cousin and his Muslim backers forcibly wrote Sharia Law into the Constitution. He has stood with the genocidal Muslims in Indonesia, not the Christian Papuans whose land is occupied and whose representatives are persecuted.

He has stood with Muslims against Denmark and its freedom of speech. He has stood with Muslims against France. He has stood with Muslims against Israel. If slapping down traditional allies on behalf of Muslims is not a Muslim Firster foreign policy, then what is?

The American flag may be burned, the Koran may not. Cartoons depicting Jews as monsters can run, cartoons depicting Mohammed cannot. Six year olds must be strip searched in airports, but the people who actually are a flight risk cannot be singled out in any way.

In Cairo, at Al Azhar University, the home of Egyptian Islamism, Obama boasted that his administration has gone to court to "punish" those who would refuse to accede to the Hijab's oppression of women. We have two new Muslim diplomatic posts. NASA is no longer able to actually reach space, its new chief mission is outreach to the Muslim world. While America is piggybacking on the Russian space program, NASA has gotten a Muslim chief scientist in order to better focus on its core mission of pandering to Islam.

If any other group had received this level of favoritism, this degree of pandering at the expense of everyone else, the outrage would have been boundless. But we dare not say anything. Those who offend Muslims are held responsible for the murder of American soldiers by Muslims. In this perverse moral landscape, to speak out against the bigotry and hate preached by the Koran is to be responsible for the atrocities that the bigots will commit in outrage that anyone has spoken ill of their genocidal text.

Meanwhile the Muslim Firsters keep chanting Israel Firster at anyone who doesn't agree that Israel is the worst country on the planet. Anything that gets in the way of the Muslim Firster foreign policy program is denounced in the most ruthlessly bigoted language possible, and when those who use it are called on it, they claim that there is a Jewish conspiracy to silence them.

This kind of obnoxious behavior has become routine. The consensus among Muslim Firsters is that Charles Freeman was a highly qualified candidate to head the National Intelligence Council, despite working at a front group for Saudi Arabia. In an interview, Freeman said that, "It is irresponsible not to question Israeli policy and to decide what is best for the American people.” But no one is allowed to question Saudi policy or decide if the Saudi Muslim lobby and its countless affiliates should be deciding what is best for the American people.

Israeli policy is questioned non-stop. Hardly a week goes by without editorials in every newspaper complaining that Netanyahu hasn't spent enough time at the negotiating table with one half of an unelected Palestinian Authority government. When a bunch of lunatics held protests outside a girls school in a town in Israel that hardly anyone in the media had ever heard of before, there were a thousand news stories. When Saudi Arabia beheaded a woman for witchcraft, the story was quickly buried, along with her body. Unlike the Israeli school story, Hillary Clinton did not feel the need to comment on it. Not that the Saudis would listen. Masters don't pay attention to slaves.

The thirty-five Christians arrested in Saudi Arabia at a prayer service and then beaten and subjected to body cavity searches last month, are not an item for our foreign policy agenda. No matter how many American soldiers died, how many more were wounded and how many have gone on suffering from undiagonsed ailments in order to keep the House of Saud safe from Saddam. The thousands of Americans who died on September 11 because an opponent of the Saudi regime saw the presence of American forces in the holy land of Islam as an opportunity to declare a holy war against the United States are all part of the price we pay for the Muslim Firster agenda.

Carter helped replace a secular government in Iran with an Islamist terror state. The United States has been protecting the Gulf oil clans for most of the 20th century despite the covert war the domestic brutality of their slave states and the covert war they have been conducting against us. Now Obama has turned half of North Africa into an Islamist paradise. And the Muslim Firsters still aren't happy.

They want Israel and they want Europe on a platter. They want to eliminate freedom of speech and silence anyone who speaks out about the countless dead and the destruction of free nations that will follow if they get their way.

After decades of the Muslim Firster agenda, we are under siege. There is hardly a nation in the free world that isn't scrambling to study Israeli anti-terrorism techniques, because they are all becoming Israel. France has its own Intifada. Oslo is dangerous enough that the American embassy has to put out an advisory. London is swiftly becoming Londonistan. The end of the last states that might have been described as Muslim and secular is swiftly approaching. And still the Muslim Firsters haven't had enough, but maybe it's time that the rest of us have had enough of them.

If they want to condemn a Pro-Israel bias in American foreign policy, then let's take a long honest look at whom American foreign policy really helps and which group it puts first.

Documenting Palestinian criminality

2012-02-01T17:08:00.001+02:00

Isi Leibler

We are told, day after day, that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is a genuine moderate committed to achieving a peace settlement with Israel. In addition to the international community, even some Israelis – admittedly a dwindling minority – also chant this mantra.

Abbas and his spokesman Saeb Erekat bolster this theme by uttering soothing statements in English, endorsing peace to the gullible international community. Yet they speak with forked tongues because to their own people, in Arabic, they deny Israel’s right to exist and promote vicious hatred against Jews. They also claim to have reneged violence. But the PA never conceded that terrorism was immoral. They simply concluded that having failed to achieve their objectives by violence, their goals could best be promoted by temporarily suspending terrorism in order to gain Western support. Abbas made it clear that he "had the honor of firing the first shot in 1965" and was only opposed to terrorist attacks "at this time" for tactical reasons and that "in the future things may change." Yet, even within this framework, Fatah has still succeeded in killing more Israelis than Hamas.

The true objectives of the PA are reflected in the poisonous hatred against Jews and Israel inculcated to their people through the broad range of institutions they control, permeating every level of society – from kindergarten on.

This can be traced to the very inception of the Oslo Accords. Before that, the relationship between Palestinians and Israelis, while far from ideal, was certainly better than now, when polls indicate that 84% of Palestinians endorse the murder of Israelis.

In addition to denying Jewish sovereignty, the PA from the outset indulged in the most horrendous demonization, describing Jews as the descendants of apes and pigs, comparing them to Nazis while simultaneously praising Hitler, accusing them of stealing Palestinian body parts, using human blood during Passover, promoting AIDS, and many other loathsome blood libels.

This defamatory torrent directly affects Israel’s diminished standing in the international community.

In response to this, an important book compiled by Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik titled "Deception: Betraying the Peace Process," has just been released. It meticulously documents the poisonous behavior of the Palestinian Authority during 2010 and 2011 throughout the broad range of institutions they control. It will become an important source for pro-Israeli activists and provide irrefutable evidence in response to those denying the criminality pervading Palestinian society.

Itamar Marcus founded Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) in 1966 as a nonprofit organization to monitor the Palestinian media. Its documentation of Palestinian behavior, including systematically taping Palestinian State TV, became important sources for parliamentarians and serious journalists throughout the world. His briefing of U.S. legislators was a major factor contributing to the prevailing pro-Israel orientation of Congress and the American people.

The book and the PMW website (www.palwatch.org) chronicle obscene examples of incitement, especially in the wake of the release of the terrorists in the Gilad Schalit prisoner exchange. Abbas, who publicly embraced these mass murderers, summed up the PA approach when he stated, "Every prisoner is for us a saint and we must exalt him." He subsequently appointed Mahmoud Damra, a notorious terrorist, as his adviser.

The state-controlled Palestinian media sanctified the murders committed by the released terrorists. Thus Ahlam Tamimi, the woman who orchestrated the suicide bombing at the Jerusalem Sbarro restaurant, which killed 22 civilians including seven children, was quoted proudly proclaiming she would do it again; Abbas al-Sayed who perpetrated the Passover suicide attack at the Park Hotel in Netanya that killed 30 Israelis was described by Abbas as a "hero" and "symbol of the Palestinian Authority."

Only recently, while commemorating the 47th anniversary of Fatah, Jerusalem's Grand Mufti Muhammad Hussein, the PA's highest religious authority appointed by Abbas, proclaimed that the killing of Jews was a major Islamic goal required before the Islamic Resurrection. The moderator introducing him, reiterated that "our war against the descendants of apes and pigs is a war of religion and faith."

And just last week PMW reported how the PA State TV conveyed “greetings” to Hakim Awad, the barbaric and unrepentant murderer of the Fogel family, which included a 3-month-old infant and children aged 4 and 11 years old. His mother was honored on the program and conveyed “greetings to dear Hakim, the apple of my eye, who carried out the operation in Itamar, sentenced to five life sentences." His aunt also related to “Hakim Awad, the hero, the legend." How can people claiming to be promoting human rights conceivably associate themselves with a regime that adulates such monsters on its controlled television outlets?

The book itself chillingly provides documentation demonstrating how an entire generation is brainwashed into absorbing a culture of death and slaughter. Palestinian children's programs promoting hatred and evil are incorporated into textbooks, music videos and summer camps all blatantly indoctrinating the sanctity of Shahada (martyrdom) and murder of Jews.

Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, purportedly the most moderate of all Palestinian leaders, is cited for his speech praising four terrorists and sponsoring of a Palestinian children’s summer camp in which the participants were divided into groups labeled with the names of terrorists including a notorious bus hijacker.

Marcus and Zilberdik point out how, in the course of one day, a Palestinian child can walk on a street named after the mass murderer Abu Jihad, to a school named after the founder of Hamas, where he will read hate-filled textbooks, work in a computer room named after a suicide bomber, spend the afternoon at a soccer tournament with the teams named after suicide bombers, go in the evening to the Abu Iyad community center, the orchestrator of the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, and finally return home to view anti-Semitic cartoons on TV before going to bed.

After reading this book, a number of questions come to mind.

The U.S. Congress was considering terminating the funding of the PA general budget unless it terminated incitement, glorification of suicide bombers as heroic role models, payment of more than $5 million a month for “salaries” to 5,500 terrorists in Israeli prisons, and pensions to the families of terrorists. Why did Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ask them to desist?

Why does Prime Minister Netanyahu so frequently pay lip service to Abbas as a peace partner and, other than very recently, fail to systematically highlight the criminality of the Palestinian leaders? If our prime minister agreed not to publicly highlight these evils in order to placate U.S. President Barack Obama, we are likely to pay a bitter price. If the civilized world is made aware of the culture of death and hatred that permeates Palestinian society, we would be in a far stronger position in the ongoing war of ideas.

And finally, how can President Obama and Western countries justify their repeated vitriolic condemnations of Israeli construction in Jewish suburbs of Jerusalem and yet have so little to say about a society that indoctrinates its children with such a barbaric worldview? How can U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton validate her silence over these issues after having so passionately condemned Palestinian incitement against Israel when she was a senator?

After reviewing these horrific texts that document such a savage state-imposed Jihadi culture, it is surely delusional to view the current Palestinian leadership as peace partners. Such a calculated policy of deception reflected by the disparity between reality and duplicitous statements designed for foreign consumption is not merely an expression of malice. It is a manifestation of a determined policy to poison the people against any possible accommodation with Israel. It provides a devastating response to the question raised in the introduction to the book. Was a genuine peace process ever intended?

The writer’s website can be viewed at www.wordfromjerusalem.com.

He may be contacted at ileibler@netvision.net.il.

Federal Workers Overpaid, and CBO Agrees

2012-02-01T16:56:00.001+02:00

Mike Brownfield

February 1, 2012

Here’s some news that federal bureaucrats in Washington — and indeed around the country — don’t want to hear: According to a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report released this week, federal workers are paid higher than their private-sector counterparts.

The “alarming news” hit the national media yesterday, but there’s a funny thing about the report. None of it is really “news” — in fact, The Heritage Foundation long ago uncovered the truth about federal pay. The CBO’s report this week was spurred in part by two years of work on federal compensation conducted by Heritage the American Enterprise Institute. In July 2010, Heritage’s James Sherk explained that Americans are overtaxed to pay the civil service. Salaries and benefits–for identical jobs–are 30 percent to 40 percent higher in the federal government than in the private sector. And in June 2011, Heritage’s Jason Richwine authored a study showing that workers who change jobs receive a substantially larger raise when they switch into federal employment rather than into another private job. In fact, Sherk testified before Congress on this very subject in March 2011, bringing the fact of the pay disparities to the House’s attention:

The federal pay system unnecessarily inflates federal pay. My research shows that, on average, federal employees earn hourly wages 22 percent higher than otherwise comparable private-sector workers. Numerous studies by researchers whose personal views span the political spectrum come to similar conclusions.

Federal employees also receive premium benefits. They receive both a defined-benefit and defined-contribution pension plan, can retire with full benefits at 56, and receive significantly more paid leave than their private-sector counterparts. Accounting for the value of these benefits raises the federal compensation premium to between 30 percent and 40 percent above similar private-sector workers. All told, the federal compensation premium will cost taxpayers $47 billion this year.

Their analysis drew significant and at times vicious criticism. Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry described their work as “a misinformation campaign.” The public-sector employee unions weighed in, of course, with the National Federation of Federal Employees calling our work “lies;” the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers labeling it “scapegoating;” and Colleen Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union smearing the work as “self-serving, self-created data.” Their attempt to deny reality and attack the messenger isn’t surprising. After all, those unions exist to inflate the wages of those they represent, and the taxpayers are the ones left footing the bill.

But the unions weren’t the only ones on the attack. The liberal ThinkProgress blog asserted that Heritage’s work was “riddled with errors” and that the “claims are baseless.” Meanwhile, Economic Policy Institute President Lawrence Mishel said that the idea that federal workers are overpaid is “a conservative myth.”

Despite the criticism from the left, Heritage continued making its argument, explaining its methodology, and carrying the message that, based on the research, federal workers are in fact overpaid and that action is warranted. Specifically, Congress should implement a pay-for-performance system, expand the contracting of federal work to private companies, reduce the generosity of federal benefits, and end the near-absolute job security for underperforming federal workers. Now it’s time for the critics on the left to recognize this truth and get on board with reality.

Quick Hits:

Iran is “now more willing to conduct an attack in the U.S. in response to real or perceived U.S. actions that threaten the regime,” according to new warnings from the latest intelligence assessment. Read our expert analysis on The Foundry.
Now that Floridians have voted, Nevada is the next stop for Republican presidential primary candidates. The state’s caucuses will be held on Saturday with all four candidates indicating that they will compete.
As a violent crackdown on anti-government protesters in Syria rages on with at least 48 people killed on Wednesday, the United Nations continues to debate how to respond to the country’s crisis.
Right-to-work is nearly a done deal in Indiana. The state’s Senate is expected to give final approval to the measure today, through which workers at unionized businesses can refuse to pay union dues.
The Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation, an organization that promotes cancer treatment, is ending its partnership with Planned Parenthood, through which it provided cancer screenings at Planned Parenthood clinics.

American Tyrants

2012-02-01T15:22:00.002+02:00

Daniel Greenfield

When Elizabeth Warren went on MSNBC to deny that she was a member of the 1 percent despite her nearly 15 million dollar net worth, the denial had a cultural element to it. Despite being a millionaire, Warren did not see herself as “wealthy.”

The current debate over the 1 percent and the 99 percent is notable mainly for the shifting boundaries that are not based on economics, but on identity. For all its ‘Power to the People’ antics, American liberalism is not a movement of struggling people; there is a reason why the word limousine so often comes before liberal. Its roots lie in an upper class New England strata that relentlessly fought against Southern Baptists and working class Catholic immigrants. Those roots define modern day liberals much more so than the Jacksonian populism that they occasionally try to imitate. The American liberal is not a populist, he is still a New England preacher, but without a religion to preach. He has a great faith in the virtues of an ordered moral society, even if that ordered moral society would have been completely incomprehensible and unacceptable to his forebears. It is a society based on the virtues of tolerance and the rule of the enlightened.

The inflow of the European left has brought in a strain of power to the people populism, but that has not made the American liberal take seriously the notion that the people whose rights he defends are his intellectual or social equals, no more than the 19th century New York Republicans patting African-Americans on the head while stomping on the Irish viewed either group as equals.

American liberalism has traveled a slightly altered road to get to the same place. But its place is still at the top and everyone else’s place is still at the bottom. Its persistent denial of this basic truth leads to the perennial absurdity of millionaires like Elizabeth Warren playing class warrior when the only class they represent is the class of people who work for the government.

The oligarchy which is busy bleeding the country dry does not represent any group of working people anywhere in the country. Not Protestant or Catholic, black or white, or of any other creed or identity. Like every ideology incarnated in a system, it represents its own interests. The Democratic Party is the government party. It exists to create jobs in government, to dispense government subsidies and to expand the power and scope of its organization. It is not fundamentally any different than Putin’s United Russia or Israel’s Kadima or similar political creatures around the world.

The strange intermarriage of New England moralists, New York merchants and European radicals eventually led to a system of pushing immigrants into government service, mandating tolerance and running every aspect of human life through Washington D.C. It took a while to get there, but the system is a decade or two away from being complete. When it is complete then all our lives will be run in every possible way by the Elizabeth Warrens who will smile condescendingly at us, nudge us in the direction we are supposed to go, and when we don’t go there, then the fines and the tasers come out.

No matter how far back you go, the roots of American liberalism lie in a fear of the people, a distrust of the great unwashed. American liberals have championed voting rights, so long as they were confident that those voting were their inferiors and could be herded into voting the right way. They have always distrusted the instincts of the public, no matter how much pious ink they spilled fighting on their behalf.

That view of man’s sinful nature still informs their deepest thinkers, and the sins are still the same, the failure of fellowship, the refusal to consider the welfare of others and march in lockstep to create that ideal society. The New Jerusalem of universal brotherhood. Those ideas have been dressed up in modern clothing, transmitted as denunciations of racism and bigotry, immigration advocacy and hate crime laws, but underneath is the same notion that a society of good will to all can be forced through rigorous regimentation by the truly enlightened.

The populism of the American liberal is a cynical dumbshow where representatives of the oppressed gather in conclaves to demand more oppression by their liberal oppressors. This spectacle is at the heart of a political oligarchy, which like every oligarchy is built on government subsidies and special access to power for the privileged. And like all oligarchies it must disguise its nature by playing the protector of the people. Unlike them it must also disguise its true nature from itself.

The convergence of the ideal society and the government society was inevitable from the start. It took a while to overcome the technological and cultural barriers to running an entire country from a central point. Those barriers have never been truly overcome, but the technocratic mirage makes it seem as if they have been. And the ongoing faith in a perfectible society run by the saints makes it seem as if it must be.
The American liberal would still like to play at being humble, a 99 percenter fighting against the chimera of a 1 percent oligarchy. But the entire 99 percent theme is that the 1 percent isn’t paying enough taxes. And whom do those taxes go to but to the administration and employment of the professional class warrior millionaires.

It is the very Everest of hypocrisy for the members of the oligarchy to be bemoaning all the extra tax money that could be used to pay their six figure salaries, while passing off their naked greed as a crusade on behalf of the oppressed.

There is nothing of working class advocacy in a government party looking to shovel more tax revenues into the insatiable gaping maw of its bureaucratic machinery. The idea that those monies will be used to help the downtrodden is a delusion that a brief glimpse at how much money went to connected companies and to the expansion of the government bureaucracy should easily cure. This isn’t any 99 percent at work here. It’s the 9 percent against the 63 percent.

Warren thinks of herself as not wealthy because despite her millions, she is engaged in the pious practice of public service. However big her financial resources may be, they are part of the collective whole of the oligarchy and in a different category altogether from the wealth that is earned or inherited.

To the American liberal, riches are not a matter of economics, but of identity. Wealth is a moral entity, not an economic one. What distinguishes pious millionaires like Warren from the heathens who make their money the old fashioned way is that the former achieve it through the moral pursuit of the public good, which is all the more pious for taking them to a Harvard professorship or a job in government, while the latter achieve it through economic transactions in the private sector. The former is a form of public service, the latter is public exploitation.

But a closer look at the bones and carcass of this system turns those definitions on their head. It is the Warrens who are the exploiters, consuming the wealth of a nation and spawning more committees, regulations and regulatory committees to keep on feeding off the wealth. What they give to us in exchange for what they take is not a service, it is oppression masquerading as feudal protectionism.

The American liberal is eager to protect us from powerful interests, but who will protect us from his protection, and who will turn off that protection and the money it costs us to pay for it, and worse still the freedoms that are consumed in order that we may be properly protected from ourselves.

No tyrant looks in a mirror and sees an oppressor. Tyrants are always protectors of the people. And our own American Tyrants are equally certain that they are the protectors of a people who would otherwise run off cliffs, throw lawn darts at each other, tear the tags off mattresses, make racist jokes, open pill bottles too easily, have inappropriate opinions and reinforce the oppressive heteronormative patriarchy which they have thoughtfully replaced with a vast echoing bureaucratic state in which everyone is free to be different in the same way.

The American liberal does not like the people very much. Most disguise it a bit better than Elizabeth Warren but that discomfort is always there. And the discomfort comes with a distrust. They don’t like us and they don’t trust the sort of shenanigans we might get up to when they aren’t looking. Instead they are always looking, always nudging, always telling us what to think and how to live and otherwise protecting us from ourselves.

The tyrannical impulses were always there in American liberalism and like water on lilies, power brought them forth. Now we live under a system which strangles us to protect us from ever getting rid of it. The men and women strangling us smile awkwardly and tell us that it is for our own good. This tyranny for our own good requires that they toss aside our laws and replace them with their own. It requires that they spend us into bankruptcy, with much of the proceeds going to them, but in the name of a higher cause. And it demands that we praise them and if we won’t do that, then it demands that we shut up and stop broadcasting our dissatisfaction. There is no place in their ideal national community for people like us.

Iran Welcomes Leader of Gaza Terror Group

2012-02-01T15:09:00.002+02:00

The Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report

Hamas Prime Minister En Route To Iran

Reuters is reporting that Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh has left for a tour of Iran and the Gulf States in a continuation of his recent grand tour of Arab and Muslim countries. According to the report:

GAZA(Reuters) – The leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Ismail Haniyeh, left Monday for a tour of Iran and Gulf states, continuing a diplomatic drive to realign the Palestinian Islamist movement after a year of political change in the Arab world. Non-Arab Iran, along with its Arab ally Syria, have been principal backers of Hamas. Iran has supplied funds and – according to Israel – weapons to use against the Jewish state. Hamas spokesman Taher al-Nono said Haniyeh, who travels via Egypt since Israel bars other exits from Gaza, was going to Tehran at the invitation of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But he gave no details of the agenda for talks in Tehran. The upheavals across the Middle East are obliging the Palestinians and their rival political movements, Hamas and Fatah, to review alliances – though how Hamas may adjust its strategies, or its stance toward Israel, is far from clear. Among Hamas’s challenges is financing. A diplomatic source told Reuters that Iran had funded Hamas in the past with up to $300 million per year, but the flow of money had not been regular in 2011. “Payment has been in suspension since August,” said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Iran is under tough international economic sanctions over suspicions, which it denies, that it is secretly developing nuclear weapons in violation of international agreements. Analysts and diplomatic sources say Iran is unhappy with Hamas for its refusal to offer public support to its ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who has hosted the Hamas leadership in exile in his capital Damascus for the past decade. Diplomatic and intelligence sources say Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal no longer spends much time in Syria, where over 5,000 people have been killed in 10 months of conflict. In a Middle East increasingly divided on sectarian lines between Sunni and Shi’ite Muslim powers, Meshaal appears politically embarrassed by finding his group, which like most Palestinians is Sunni, hosted by a Syrian government dominated by Assad and his Alawite minority, whose sect has its roots in the Shi’ite Islam practised in non-Arab Iran. Tehran’s other Arab allies include Lebanon’s Shi’ite Hezbollah movement and Iraq’s Shi’ite-led government.

Read the rest here.

A series of earlier posts covered Haniyeh’s tour of Egypt, Tunisia, and other countries while another post while MEMRI has posted an article titled “Isma’il Haniya’s First Regional Tour Transforms Him From Hamas PM in Gaza to Regional Palestinian Leader.”

The Hamas charter states that it is ” is one of the wings of the Muslim Brothers in Palestine” and an early media report indicated that shortly after Hamas took over the Gaza strip, Muslim Brotherhood representatives were present to review Hamas military formations. In 2007, a Hamas journalist acknowledged the role that the “international Muslim Brotherhood” has played in providing funds for the purchase of weapons and in 2008, an Israeli TV station reported that Muslim Brotherhood “representatives” had traveled to Gaza from Egypt through the open border to meet with Hamas. Hamas is supported financially and politically by the global Muslim Brotherhood and a NEFA Foundation report has documented the Hamas fund-raising activities of the Union of Good, a coalition of Islamic charities linked to the Brotherhood that provides financial support to both the Hamas “social” infrastructure, as well as its terrorist activities. Previous posts have also discussed the worldwide campaign orchestrated by the global Brotherhood against Israeli actions in Gaza during the 2008-2009 conflict with Israel. Anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli incitement in Hamas media is commonlyreported.

Free Speech - For Some

2012-02-01T15:06:00.002+02:00

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.

According to the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), there is a grave threat to America that must be suppressed at all costs. The threat is that Lieutenant General William “Jerry” Boykin might be allowed to exercise his constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech.

This proposition is bizarre on multiple levels. For one, General Boykin, who is a friend and greatly admired colleague of mine, is one of the United States’ most accomplished and decorated military heroes. He served in and led our most elite special forces units for decades, including in many of our most dangerous recent combat operations. He also held a number of senior positions in the intelligence community, including as the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. For another, Jerry Boykin is also an ordained minister. And the sorts of events CAIR has lately insisted he must not address include prayer sessions convened by the mayor of Ocean City, Maryland and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

What makes the suppression of General Boykin’s right to express himself – and, for that matter, to enjoy freedom of religion – all the more outrageous is the nature of the organization demanding that he be silenced. Four federal judges have affirmed that CAIR is associated with the Muslim Brotherhood and was spawned by one of its American affiliates – the Islamic Association for Palestine. Indeed, we know from wiretapped conversations at the time of its founding that CAIR was established by Muslim Brotherhood operatives as a political arm and fundraising mechanism for Hamas, a designated terrorist organization and the Brotherhood’s franchise in “Palestine.”

Unfortunately, CAIR and its fellow Muslim Brotherhood fronts are not simply trying to muzzle Jerry Boykin. They have gone after a number of other truth-tellers about the doctrine the Brothers seek to insinuate into this country – the totalitarian, supremacist politico-military-legal program the Islamists call shariah.

For example, another colleague, former Congressman Fred Grandy, was removed from his position as one of Washington’s most popular talk radio show hosts when he refused to allow Muslim critics to dictate who could appear on his program and what they could say.

Last fall, Stephen Coughlin – one of the nation’s foremost non-Muslim experts on shariah – was similarly subjected to a CAIR-led effort to deny his ability to speak. In that case, he was denied by the Obama administration the opportunity to provide training to Central Intelligence Agency personnel about what impels our enemies to engage in murderous and stealthy forms of jihad, namely shariah.

More recently, New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has been subjected to a campaign of vilification by CAIR and its friends. His offense? Mr. Kelly gave an interview to the makers of a superb documentary, “The Third Jihad,” and allowed that film to be used in training his officers.

CAIR’s desire to suppress this film is not hard to understand. After all, The Third Jihad brilliantly exposes what it and other Muslim Brotherhood fronts are up to in this country. In the words of the Brotherhood’s own strategic plan, that is “a kind of grand jihad…in destroying and eliminating the Western civilization from within” by our own hands.

The movie’s narrator and central figure is Zuhdi Jasser. Dr. Jasser happens to be one of the most prominent and courageous of American Muslims who oppose political Islam and its use of shariah to justify the subversion and destruction of our Constitution, form of government and society.

Obviously, it is difficult to pillory Zuhdi Jasser the way CAIR et.al. attack such non-Muslims as Messrs. Boykin, Grandy, Coughlin and Kelly, namely as “Islamophobic.” The Brotherhood and its official, multinational counterpart – the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) – brandish this term as a means of intimidating, smearing and silencing those who understand what they are about and oppose them effectively. In fact, the more effective the opposition, the more intense are the Islamists’ efforts to silence those mounting it.

Dr. Jasser’s right to free expression is being subjected to a similar kind of suppression. As he put it recently in the New York Post, “One of the chief ways that radical Islamists across the globe silence anti-Islamist Muslims is to publicly push them outside of Islam, to declare them non-Muslims, not part of the community (ummah), and so subject them to takfir (declaring them apostates). That is what the vicious distortions about this film do to my work and the work of so many others within the House of Islam who are trying to publicly take on the American Islamist establishment.”

Of particular concern is the fact that the U.S. government is now effectively encouraging what amounts to free speech for some – and abetting it. Team Obama has begun according Islamophobia the status of a serious problem. Worse yet, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has joined forces with the OIC in trying to find ways to suppress this fictitious problem by treating instances of what should be protected free speech as prosecutable “incitement.”

To paraphrase the famous German pastor, Martin Niemöller, first they are coming for the “Islamophobes” and for Muslims who oppose shariah’s political agenda. How soon will they decide that you have no right to speak freely, either?

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributor Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy, a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio, heard in Washington on weeknights at 9:00 p.m. on WRC 1260 AM.

Abdullah, pick up the phone

2012-02-01T08:38:00.001+02:00

Willian Mehlman, MID EAST OUTPUT

When all the wild, desperate, improbable solutions to a problem have been exhausted, there is nothing left to turn to but the obvious.

In respect to the Arab-Israel conflict, the “obvious” has been staring us in face for over 40 years. Encapsulated in the mantra “Two States for Two Peoples on Two Banks of the Jordan River,“ it has the distinction of being the most ignored testament to rationality and common sense in the history of international diplomacy.An “invented ”nation the so-called Palestinians surely are, but given the world’s acceptance of their claim to sovereignty, it is on the shoulders of the world, not on Israel’s, that the realization of that aspiration rests.
(Read more…)
Hamas denounces Jordan as Palestinian homeland

Ted Belman

Khaled Meshaal, the head of Hamas, visited King Abdullah of Jordan on Jan 29 and made a special point of saying publically:

“Hamas stands firm against Israel’s schemes to turn Jordan into a substitute homeland. Jordan is Jordan and Palestine is Palestine. We insist on restoring Palestinian rights,”

King Abdullah added his two cents:

“Jordan supports the Palestinian Authority as well as Palestinian reconciliation,”

“Uniting the Palestinian stand will strengthen the Palestinian people and help restore their rights,”
Of course they were both referring specifically to the efforts of Mudar Zahran to do just that, namely, “turn Jordan into a substitute homeland” for the Palestinians.

I am glad they went public with this issue. Zahran’s plan and its opposition are now front page news.

Meshaal referred to it as “Israel’s scheme” without any evidence in support. But that is to be expected, because Hamas blames Israel for everything.

Israel for its part wants nothing to do with it. She wants the status quo and the Peace treaty with Jordan to remain. Zahran, for his part, wants nothing to do with Israel. It would just prejudice his chances of success. Zahran is doing this for the Palestinians living in Jordan and not for Israel.

Dr Josef Olmert in Huffington Post dealt with this today:

“Interestingly enough, the King did not mention the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as a root cause of his and his Kingdom’s problems, an omission that comes as a sharp contradiction to what he said in some of his other recent interviews. In them, he blasted Israel for its lack of effort in the peace process, attacked those in Israel (though never mentioning specific names) who relate to Jordan as the alternate Palestinian homeland — the misguided Jordan-is-Palestine crowd of extreme Israeli right-wingers — and went as far as threatening to use his military to prevent it from happening.

“The rhetoric was harsh, and to many in Israel it seemed totally irrelevant, as the King knows full well that the current Israeli government completely rejects the Jordan-is-Palestine outcry. It seemed that the King has decided to assume a new role — that of the regional pontificator-in-chief, particularly when it concerns Israel and its PM Benjamin Netanyahu. “

But there is nothing new here in that both Hamas and Abdullah don’t want Jordan to become Palestine. This would be so even if Zahran were not organizing his Jordanian Palestinians.

The idea that Israel is behind it, real or imagined, would fortify their efforts to prevent it though no more fortifications are necessary.

If the Muslim Brotherhood really believed that they would win the elections, they would insist on them at a time of their choosing. Their alliance with Abdullah would only be temporary. This supports Zahran’s argument that the Muslim Brotherhood would not win the elections, the Palestinians would.

Israel’s real concern is that Zahran’s initiative may destabilize the peace treaty with Jordan. This treaty was threatened by the King when Israel poisoned Meshaal in 1996 in Jordan, resulting in the King demanding from Israel the antidote on pain of ending the treaty.

Jordan is not stable now and is expected to be less stable if and when Assad falls. One cannot expect that things will remain as they are. Either Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood will take over and kill the peace deal, as they are threatening to do in Egypt, or Zahran will succeed.

Certainly Israel has a stake in developments. It is for her to decide whether to be passive or active.

Obama Exploits Navy Seals

2012-01-31T20:17:00.001+02:00

Ed Lasky

For a basketball player, Barack Obama sure can stoop low.

Leif Babin, a much-decorated Navy Seal, takes President Obama to task for exploiting Navy Seal operations to gain votes. This is not harmless credit-hogging by Barack Obama for the heroism and tough decision-making by our military. Babin -- joining a range of others -- writes in today's Wall Street Journal that Barack Obama is endangering the lives of Navy Seals for cheap political points:
America's premier Special Operations force is once again in the headlines after a team of Navy SEALs rescued two hostages from captivity in Somalia last week. Elite U.S. forces have carried out such operations periodically over the past decade, always with skill and bravery. The difference in recent months is that the details of their work haven't remained secret. On the contrary, government officials have revealed them for political gain -- endangering our forces in the process.

The floodgates opened after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden last May, and the Obama administration's lack of discretion was on display again at last week's State of the Union address. As President Obama entered the House chamber, in full view of the cameras, he pointed to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and exclaimed: "Good job tonight, good job tonight." Clearly something had happened that he wanted the world to know about.

After delivering his speech, which included multiple references to the bin Laden raid, the president again thanked Mr. Panetta. "That was a good thing tonight," he said as if to ensure that the viewing public, if they missed it initially, would get it a second time around.

Sure enough, shortly thereafter, the White House announced the successful rescue of the hostages in Somalia by U.S. Special Operations forces. Vice President Biden appeared on ABC's "Good Morning America" to highlight the success the next morning, and Mr. Panetta also publicly praised it. Then came the "anonymous U.S. officials" to provide extensive details of who conducted the raid and how. As with the bin Laden operation, the top-secret unit that carried it out was again front-page news, as were its methods and tactics.

Babin noted that the work of special ops teams are highly classified for good reasons that make it illegal for military personnel to divulge details to anyone. However, President Obama and his team have opened the floodgates -- virtually every detail of the bin Laden raid was widely publicized and is now available to anyone with the click of a mouse. The Defense Secretary added to the problems when he disclosed the name of a Pakistani doctor who was key to discovering the whereabouts of bin Laden. That doctor is now is a Pakistani prison and Panetta's disclosure will undoubtedly make his life worse.

These disclosures endanger lives and will make future operations that much riskier. Babin, who has put his life at stake numerous times in battle, knows the game being played with him and his fellow soldiers serving the roles of pawns in a political farce:

It is infuriating to see political gain put above the safety and security of our brave warriors and our long-term strategic goals. Loose lips sink ships.

Babin, as noted above, is not the only observer to question Obama's priorities.

J.D. Gordon, a retired navy commander, writes in the Washington Times about Obama's deadly new PR firm:

The dramatic rescue of an American aid worker and her Danish colleague in Somalia by Navy commandos was a terrific encore to the killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan nine months ago. However, all the White House-driven publicity for both events has helped turn the once-secret SEAL Team 6 into a household term, with likely negative consequences...

The military still avoids discussion of the unit and its highly classified missions...

The one and only reason why there has been so much recent publicity on SEAL Team 6 rests with the commander in chief.

Casting aside decades of careful leadership to keep these stealth warriors out of the public eye, away from would-be revenge-seekers and assorted far-left protesters, Mr. Obama has discussed their exploits to such an extent that their mystique is largely diminished - and their identities closer to being disclosed.

Gordon sharpened his focus and characterizes Obama's unwanted publicizing of Navy Seals missions for what it is: a political ploy:

The first problem with Mr. Obama singling out our elite units is that they all live and train somewhere. High-profile discussions draw more attention to them personally, their families, their bases and their local communities. That presents force-protection concerns in our open society, where the Sept. 11 hijackers lived freely and the "Occupy" protesters have run amok.

The second problem is that heaping such praise on a select few in uniform can be deceiving. Instead of Americans focusing on how Mr. Obama is weakening the military with a projected $1 trillion in defense cuts over the next decade, the elimination of 100,000 ground troops, cuts in personnel incentives such as tuition assistance for college, and raised retiree health care costs, many might mistakenly conclude that he actually is a strong, pro-military leader. Thus, voters might be tempted to give him a second term, while in reality, he is slashing defense budgets, as Mr. Carter did.

Who would have guessed that Navy Seals -- among the most courageous of our soldiers -- have been drafted to serve as Obama reelection campaign volunteers?

Ironically, the Pentagon spending cuts that the administration is planning will put even more demands on special operation forces. Thousands of combat troops will be eliminated from the Army and Marines Corps. The Obama team is trying to allay fears regarding our weakness by suggesting that Special Operations can pick up the "slack." However, the members of Special Forces are selected from a larger pool of personnel in regular forces. By reducing the strength of those units, the pool of good recruits gets smaller. Also, Special Forces operate in conjunction with larger units in the Army, Navy, and Marines Corps. By reducing the strength of those forces, Special Operations units may not be as potent. Even more impactful and damaging that at the same time the administration is stating its goal is to rely more on Special Forces, its own actions are endangering future missions.

But, of course, the exploitation get worse. Obama is allowing his Hollywood donors to coin a profit from the heroic bin Laden mission the Seals undertook. Obama supporters in Hollywood are rushing to make a film about the raid originally scheduled to be released one month before the election. Apparently, the administration is greasing the way for the people behind the film/campaign spot to have high-level access to speed along the production.

Congressman Peter King, chairman of the House Security Committee, has called for an investigation, as Caroline May of the Daily Caller has noted:

The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee has called for an investigation into reports that the Obama administration is granting Sony Pictures and director Kathryn Bigelow "high-level access" for a film about the Navy SEAL operation which killed Osama Bin Laden. The movie is scheduled for release one month before the 2012 presidential election. By the time it hits the screen, will Obama be portrayed as a heroic commander-in-chief in the way that John F. Kennedy and Dwight Eisenhower were? Hollywood is one creative town.

New York Republican Rep. Peter King sent a letter Tuesday to Defense Department Inspector General Gordon Heddell and CIA Inspector General David Buckley, expressing his concern about declassifying sensitive information for pure entertainment.

Obama is masking with photo-ops the fact that he is eviscerating our military to fund programs that reward his base. Obama has previously defined politics as all about rewarding friends and punishing enemies. He has been sending hundreds of billions of dollars to his base (government workers, crony capitalists, environmentalists -- the list goes on and on) while slashing funds for our military. He rewards his friends in Hollywood by using the powers of his office to aid them in producing a film that will undoubtedly reflect well on him. Cleverly, the Hollywood cast of characters behind this film do not even have to declare the millions spent on this film as a campaign contribution. Barack Obama is cynically using our soldiers as political props for his campaign.

When the Commander-in-Chief exploits the heroic work of our military he not only degrades the office but endangers the lives of our soldiers.

This is a dereliction of duty on his part-and he should suffer the political equivalent of a court martial come November.

Hamas and the Washington establishment

2012-01-31T19:57:00.002+02:00

Caroline Glick

To date, the Republican presidential primary race has been the only place to have generated any useful contributions to America's collective understanding of current events in the Middle East. Last month, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich became the first major political figure in more than a generation to pour cold water over the Palestinian myth of indigenous peoplehood by stating the truth, that the Palestinians are an "invented people."

As Gingrich explained, their invention came in response to Zionism, the Jewish national liberation movement. Since they were created somewhere around 1920, the Palestinians' main purpose has not been the establishment of a Palestinian state but the obliteration of the Jewish state.
For his truth telling, Gingrich was attacked by fellow politicians and policy hands on both sides of the ideological divide. To his credit, Gingrich has not backed away from the truth he spoke. Rather he has repeated it in two subsequent Republican candidates' debates.

The second important contribution that Republican presidential candidates have made to the discourse on the Middle East was undertaken by Texas Gov. Rick Perry during a candidates' debate in South Carolina on January 17, shortly before he pulled out of the race. When asked about Turkey, Perry said that country "is being ruled by what many would perceive to be Islamic terrorists." He went on to say that the US ought to be having a debate about whether Turkey should continue to serve as a member of NATO.

Like Gingrich, Perry was pilloried by all right thinking people in the US foreign policy elite. And like Gingrich, Perry was right. The hoopla his statement generated showed just how destructive so much of America's received wisdom about the Middle East has become. Moreover, it demonstrated the extent to which the US has adopted Middle East policies that are inimical to its national interests.

After Hamas won the Palestinian elections in January 2006, Turkey was the first country to invite Hamas's terror master Khaled Mashal to Ankara. Turkish Prime Minister Recip Tayyip Erdogan's move provoked criticism from the Bush administration. But Erdogan just shrugged it off. And he was right to do so. By 2006, then secretary of state Condoleezza Rice had come to view Erdogan as the US's indispensable ally in the Muslim world. As she saw it, he was proof that Islamist parties could be democratic and moderate.

The fact that Erdogan embraced Hamas could not get in the way of Rice's optimistic assessment. So, too, the fact that Erdogan embarked on a systematic campaign to stifle press freedom, curb judicial independence and imprison his political critics in the media and the military could not move Rice from her view that Erdogan personified her belief that moderate jihadists exist and ought to be embraced by the US.

Rice's starry-eyed view of Erdogan set the stage of US President Barack Obama's even stronger embrace of the increasingly tyrannical Turkish Islamist. Since Obama took office, not only has Ankara stepped up its support of Hamas, and ended even the pretense of a continued strategic alliance with Israel that it maintained during the Bush years. Turkey began serving as Iran's chief diplomatic protector while vastly expanding its own strategic and economic ties with Tehran.

In the face of Turkey's openly anti-American behavior and actions, Obama clings to Erdogan even more strongly than Rice did. Obama reportedly views Erdogan as his most trusted foreign adviser. According to the media, Obama speaks with Erdogan more often than he speaks to any other foreign leader. In a recent interview with Time magazine, Obama listed Erdogan as one of the key foreign leaders with whom he has formed a friendship based on trust.

Over the past few weeks, Turkey has emerged as Hamas's largest financier. During an official visit in Turkey, Hamas's terror master in Gaza Ismail Haniyeh received a hero's welcome. Erdogan pledged to finance the jihadist movement to the tune of $300 million per year.

COMMENTATORS CLAIM that Turkey's sponsorship of Hamas was necessitated by Iran's abandonment of the terror group. Iran, it is claimed, cut Hamas off in August due to the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood's refusal to actively assist Iran's other Arab client - Syrian President Bashar Assad - in massacring his domestic opponents.

These analyses are problematic for two reasons. First, it is far from clear that Iran cut Hamas off. Iran's rulers have invited Haniyeh to Tehran for an official visit. This alone indicates that the mullahs remain committed to maintaining their relationship with the jihadist movement that controls the Gaza Strip.

And why would they want to cut off that relationship?

By serving as Hamas's chief sponsor since 2006, Iran has won enormous credibility in the Arab world. This credibility has bought Tehran influence with the likes of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and beyond. Particularly now, with the Brotherhood taking over Egypt and much of the Arab world, Iran would only stand to lose by cutting off Hamas.

The second problem with these assessments is that it makes little sense to believe that Turkey has replaced Iran as Hamas's main state sponsor since Iran and Turkey are not necessarily competing over Hamas. Given the interests shared by Tehran and Ankara, it is far more reasonable to assume that they are coordinating their moves regarding Hamas.

Iran became Hamas's chief financier and weapons supplier the same year that Erdogan emerged as Hamas's most important political supporter. And in the six years since then, Iran and Turkey have become strategic allies. Even with regards to Syria, the fact that Assad remains in power today is due in no small measure to the fact that Erdogan has used his influence over Obama to ensure that the US has remained on the sidelines and so effectively supported Assad's survival.

In light of Erdogan's enormous influence over leaders in both US parties, it is little wonder that Perry's factual statement about the nature of the Turkish government and the need for the US to reassess its strategic alliance with Turkey provoked such an across the board outcry. Erdogan's close relationship with Obama - like his previously close relationship with Rice - renders it well nigh impossible for US government officials and inside-the Beltway "experts" to make the kind of commonsense assessments of Turkey's counterproductive regional role that an outsider like Perry was able to make from his perch in Austin, Texas.

CONTRARY TO what several leading commentators have argued since the onset of the Syrian popular rebellion against Assad, Hamas has not been seriously damaged by the events. True, its leaders are looking for a new place to station their headquarters. But there is no law that requires terrorist organizations to have one central office. The families of Hamas's leadership have decamped to Jordan. Hamas leaders have close relations with the Qataris - who remain major funders - as well as with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and the Sudanese regime.

In addition to these state supporters, through its relations with Turkey and Fatah, Hamas has Washington as well. To understand how Washington acts as Hamas's protector, it is necessary to consider not only the corrosive impact of Washington's relations with Turkey, but also the nature of the Palestinian-Israeli peace process.

Since its inception in 1993, the peace process has been predicated on Israeli concessions to the Palestinians. To the extent that Israel makes concessions, the peace process is seen as advancing. To the extent that Israel fails to make concessions, the peace process is seen as collapsing. True, at certain times, the Bush administration blamed the Palestinians for the failure of the peace process, but the blame owed to the fact that Palestinian terrorism made Israel less amenable to concession making.

Palestinian terrorism was not in and of itself blamed for the demise of the peace process. Rather it was perceived as the means through which Israel avoided making more concessions. And at certain times, the US supported Israel's avoidance of concession making.

Since Israeli concessions to the Palestinians are the only tangible component of the peace process, the US, as the chief sponsor of the peace process, requires the Palestinian Authority - run by Fatah - to be accepted as a credible repository for Israeli concessions regardless of its actual nature. Consequently, despite Fatah's two unity deals with Hamas, its sponsorship of terrorism, its incitement of terrorism, its refusal to accept Israel's right to exist, its adoption of negotiating positions that presuppose Israel's demise, and its conduct of political warfare against Israel, neither the Bush administration nor the Obama administration ever showed the slightest willingness to consider ending their support for the PA.

If Israel has no peace partner, then it can't make concessions. And if it can't make concessions, there is no peace process. And that is something that neither the Bush administration nor the Obama administration was willing to countenance.

It is true that under Obama the US has become far more hostile towards Israel than it was under Bush. The most important distinction between the two is that whereas George W. Bush sought to broker a compromise deal between the two sides, Obama has adopted Fatah's negotiating positions against Israel. As a consequence of Obama's actions, the peace process has been derailed completely. Fatah has no reason to compromise since the US will blame Israel no matter what. And Israel has no reason to make concessions since the US will deem them insufficient.

Noting this distinction, Washington Post commentator Jennifer Rubin wrote this week that for the benefit of the peace process, it is important for a Republican administration to be elected to replace Obama in November. As she put it, "If history is any guide, progress is made in the 'peace process' when the Israeli prime minister operates from a position of strength and has the full support of the US president. We might get there, albeit not until 2013."

The problem with her analysis is that it is of a piece with the insiders' attacks on Gingrich and Romney alike. That is, it is based on the false assumptions of the peace process and the generally accepted wisdom embraced by the American foreign policy elite on both sides of the aisle that the PA is a reasonable repository for Israeli concessions.

Here it is worth noting that this week Fatah-controlled PA TV aired a sequence venerating the murderers of the Fogel family. Udi and Ruth Fogel and their children Yoav, Elad and Hadas were brutally murdered in their home last March.

Fatah's glorification of their murderers is yet further proof that the foundations of the peace process are false. Peace cannot be based on appeasing societies that uphold mass murderers as role models. It can only be based on empowering free societies to defeat societies that embrace murder, terror and in the case of Hamas, genocide.

And this brings us back to the Republican primaries and Gingrich's and Perry's statements. For the US to secure its interests in the Middle East, it requires leaders who are willing to reassess what passes for common wisdom on both sides of the aisle.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Response to Ron Paul: Did U.S. Policy Make Today's Islamist Iran Hate America?

2012-01-31T19:50:00.001+02:00

Barry Rubin

Presidential candidate Ron Paul has said repeatedly that Iranians hate America because of its role in the 1953 coup overthrowing Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadegh. Like his frequent claims that the September 11 attack was a response to a supposed decade-long U.S. bombing of Iraq.

In fact, about the only intense bombing of Iraq done by the United States in the last twenty years was for two weeks at the start of the 2003 war and one time in retaliation against an assassination plot against former president George Bush. From time to time, U.S. planes also hit Iraqi radar defenses, not likely as a source for the September 11 attacks. The picture that Paul's statement implies is some sort of constant attack targeting Iraqi civilians.

But people know far less about the 1953 case, though it has long been a source of complaint by left-wing critics of U.S. foreign policy. I was the first scholar to see the U.S. government records for the crisis hen writing my book, Paved with Good Intentions: The American Experience and Iran, in 1979. Here is a brief summary of the key points. The nationalist government of Muhammad Mossadegh had nationalized the British oil company. While a well-intentioned democratic-minded modernizer, Mossadegh was also a personally erratic and incompetent prime minister. And the social base for parliamentary democracy in Iran was clearly not strong enough. In the face of a British embargo on Iran selling its oil--the British argued that it was "stolen property"--and many domestic problems, the country was spiraling into chaos. While the British were interested in getting the oil company back, the United States was worried about a Communist takeover. A group of pro-Shah Iranians teamed up with the British to propose a "counter-coup" in which the Shah would break openly with Mossadegh and the monarch's supporters would overthrow the prime minister.

First, the pressure for the coup came from the British. The Truman Administration, which left in office in January 1953, opposed American involvement. However, the situation worsened and the Eisenhower Administration changed U.S. policy on the issue.

Mossadegh was an extremely unstable person and leader. He was clearly losing control of the country and the Communist Party, which backed him, was gaining power steadily. A close examination of the documents shows that whether it was correct or not U.S. fear of a Communist takeover was based on serious evidence. This was the midst of the Cold War and the USSR was Iran’s northern neighbor. The Soviets had occupied northern Iran from 1941 to 1946, to secure the country’s oil during World War Two, set up puppet regimes inside the country, and only withdrew under intensive U.S. pressure.

On balance, and after long consideration, I think the coup was a proper move for U.S. policy. One can say that it denied Iran a democratic regime but the way things were going, that was about to collapse into anarchy, a coup, or a Communist takeover anyway.

What is especially interesting in retrospect is that one of the main supporters of the move were the Iranian Muslim clerics, including Ayatollah Kashani, the man who would be a role model for Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. I saw how he and his colleagues met with U.S. officials and urged a coup, since they also feared a Communist regime. It is ironic for Islamists to complain about a U.S. policy that they actively backed at the time.

Second, in legalistic terms the U.S. argument was that this was actually a “counter-coup” because the shah had the right to dismiss Mossadegh. The regime—as opposed to a particular prime minister—was not being overthrown by a coup but rather it was being saved from a coup by Mossadegh. This case is not rock-solid but has some standing. The situation was not like a Latin American military overthrowing a democratic government.

I have stated things here briefly and have not done justice to the complexity of the situation. A real argument can be mounted against U.S. policy at the time but in the end I don't find it convincing and this is certainly not a case of an unjustified action aimed against someone because he was a liberal reformer or moderate nationalist.

But the most important point for today is the question of how this action reverberated over time: the Shah ruled for a quarter-century and basically did about as good a job as anyone was going to do there. He was a dictator, the regime had a high level of corruption, and the secret police used torture. Yet in many ways the succeeding regime has been even worse.

For U.S. policy, the two key questions were: did a better alternative exist and is a quarter-century success a failure because it comes to an end. I’d say a better alternative didn’t exist at the time and that if a policy works for 25 years that policy isn’t a failure.

As for the coming to power of a radical Islamist regime—as we are now seeing in countries like Egypt and Libya—that isn’t due to American backing for the previous ruler but to the nature of the societies involved.
All of this, however, only leads up to responding to Ron Paul’s claim. Liberal nationalist Iranians have blamed the United States for overthrowing Mossadegh, who after all was their leader. Yet these people have never been in power in Iran and only comprise a small portion of its population (though a larger portion of the exiled intelligentsia, the people who write book on the subject).

One of the very first acts of the Islamist regime—whose predecessors in the 1950s supported U.S. policy by the way—was to repress the followers of Mossadegh. Consequently, a country whose rulers supported a coup and then repressed the opponents of the coup can scarcely be said to hate America for supporting the coup.

There is one more point that doesn’t fit well with the currently hegemonic radical ideology expressed by the supporters of both Obama and Ron Paul but it must be included if one is ever going to understand Iran. Power is respected; weakness is not. In 1978 and 1979 the Carter Administration basically refused to support the Shah in the belief that this diffidence would win Iranian’s love. In fact it led to disaster.

The Clinton Administration in effect tried to do the opposite of what American policy had been in 1953. You can see the results for yourself. Many Iranians, especially those unhappy with the Islamist regime, believe that the United States put Khomeini in power the way that it returned the Shah to power a quarter-century earlier. In short, American power is exaggerated by Iranians who are either going to jump on the U.S. bandwagon or blame the United States no matter what happens.

Why is Ron Paul so much like Barack Obama on foreign policy? Because both men tend to blame America first and neither have a firm grasp of the realpolitik principles that must usually guide international policy. They also both overstate the role of things like popularity in global affairs.

In Paul's case this makes him an isolationist, arguing that if the United States doesn't bother other countries they will leave America alone.

In Obama's case, he believes that America is bad for the world, mistakes America's enemies as the good guys, and rejects U.S. interests in the belief that it is better to please other countries believing it will make them leave America alone. .

They also have something else in common: they ignore or misunderstand the internal realities of other countries. The Islamist regime in Iran doesn't hate America because of its past policy toward Iran but because it stands in the way of Tehran's program: Islamist revolutions everywhere; the destruction not only of Israel but of virtually all regimes in the region; and their replacement by Iran-style governments and societies.

The issue--as with the USSR and the fascist states--is not hatred of either U.S. policies or freedom but the fact that America is a geopolitical enemy, making it harder or impossible for their radical ideology to conquer the world or at least their part of it.

Barry Rubin's latest book, Israel: An Introduction, has just been published by Yale University Press.

For further reading on this issue, see:
Barry Rubin, Paved with Good Intentions: The American Experience and Iran, hardcover: Oxford University Press; paperback: Viking/Penguin. Published in Persian in Tehran as The War for Power in Iran.

“Regime Change and Iran: A Case Study,” Washington Quarterly, 2003, and published as "Lessons from Iran," in Alexander T. J. Lennon and Camille Eiss,Reshaping Rogue States: Preemption, Regime Change, and U.S. Policy toward Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, (Boston, MIT Press, 2004), pp. 141-156.

Palestinian kids created as "fertilizer," to saturate the land with blood

2012-01-31T16:42:00.002+02:00

Fatah: "Our children... were created to be fertilizer
for the land of Palestine, and for our pure land
to be saturated with their blood"

PA children sing: "My pure land, I shall saturate you
with my blood... redeem you with my life"
http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&doc_id=6255

by Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik

Dying for the sake of "Palestine" as an ideal, even for Palestinian children and youth, remains part of Palestinian discourse.

This week, official Palestinian Authority TV reported from a Fatah celebration in a refugee camp in Lebanon and chose to focus on the following slide shown at the celebration. Fatah's message was that children are created so that their blood will be "fertilizer" to saturate the land: "Our children are our glory and honor,
they were created to be fertilizer for the land of Palestine,
and for our pure land to be saturated with their blood."

Earlier this month, a PA-Fatah celebration in Ramallah featured a performance with the same message. In front of senior PA leaders, including Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, young children and youth performed a song that included the following words:
"My pure land, I shall saturate you with my blood...
redeem you with my life."

Palestinian Media Watch has reported extensively on the PA's teaching of children to die as Martyrs for "Palestine." During the PA's terror campaign (the "Intifada," 2000-2005), the PA encouraged children to aspire for Martyrdom death as a central part of its message to children. Today, the message that children should die for "Palestine" is less prominent, but still found in PA schoolbooks and is expressed in cultural settings through song and dance.

During the terror campaign, PA TV videos presented martyrdom death for children as "sweet." One PA TV music video broadcast hundreds of times from 2001 to 2004, showed a young boy falling dead on the ground to the words: "How sweet is Shahada (Martyrdom), when I am embraced by you, my land!"
As a result, children presented death for kids as "sweet" in TV interviews. In 2002, at the height of the terror campaign, an 11-year-old Palestinian girl said on PA TV: "Of course Shahada is sweet. We don't want this world, we want the Afterlife."

As a result of the many years of PA urging children to become Martyrs, Palestinian adults and children still see Martyrdom death as an ideal. Parents speak with honor of their "heroic" children who fell as Martyrs, and children talk of becoming Martyrs.

The following is the text displayed at a Fatah event in a refugee camp in Lebanon, shown on PA TV:

PA TV narrator: "In the refugee camp Ein Al-Hilwe [in Lebanon], a rally was held in celebration of the [47th] anniversary [of Fatah]. A political symposium was also held on the occasion of the event."
Text on slide at event:
"Our children are our honor and glory,
they were created to be fertilizer for the land of Palestine,
and for our pure land to be saturated with their blood"
[PA TV (Fatah), Jan, 24, 2012]

The following is an excerpt of a song performed by children at an event marking the 47th anniversary of the Fatah movement. PA leaders applaud kids sing "I shall saturate you with my blood... redeem you with my life":

Present at the ceremony: Prime Minister Salam Fayyad; Secretary General of the Presidential Office, Al-Tayeb Abd Al-Rahim; Secretary of the PLO Executive Council, Yasser Abd Rabbo; District Governor of Ramallah and El-Bireh Laila Ghannam; Fatah spokesman Ahmed Assaf.

Song by the Raji'in group (children and youth):

"How beautiful you are, my country
The love in my heart for you is great
You have brought up and educated
generation after generation,
You waited patiently and discovered your heroic children
Oh, my pure land, I shall saturate you with my blood
I shall live and die upon your green ground
Your ground satiates us, your goodness satisfies us
I shall redeem you with my life, oh my land
Your embrace warms us
Your ground satiates us, your goodness satisfies us
I shall redeem you with my life, oh my land
Your embrace warms us"
(emphasis added)

Applause by PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, Secretary General of the President's office Tayeb Abd Al-Rahim and PLO Secretary General Yasser Abd Rabbo.
[Live PBC broadcast from Ramallah, PA TV (Fatah), Jan. 5, 2012]
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American Tyrants

2012-01-31T15:15:00.002+02:00

Sultan Knish

When Elizabeth Warren went on MSNBC to deny that she was a member of the 1 percent despite her nearly 15 million dollar net worth, the denial had a cultural element to it. Despite being a millionaire, Warren did not see herself as "wealthy".

The current debate over the 1 percent and the 99 percent is notable mainly for the shifting boundaries that are not based on economics, but on identity. For all its 'Power to the People' antics American liberalism is not a movement of struggling people, there is a reason why the word limousine so often comes before liberal. Its roots lie in an upper class New England strata that relentlessly fought against Southern Baptists and working class Catholic immigrants. Those roots define modern day liberals much more so than the Jacksonian populism that they occasionally try to imitate. The American liberal is not a populist, he is still a New England preacher, but without a religion to preach. He has a great faith in the virtues of an ordered moral society, even if that ordered moral society would have been completely incomprehensible and unacceptable to his forebears. It is a society based on the virtues of tolerance and the rule of the enlightened.

The inflow of the European left has brought in a strain of power to the people populism, but that has not made the American liberal take seriously the notion that the people whose rights he defends are his intellectual or social equals, no more than the 19th century New York Republicans patting African-Americans on the head while stomping on the Irish viewed either group as equals.

American liberalism has traveled a slightly altered road to get to the same place. But its place is still at the top and everyone else's place is still at the bottom. Its persistent denial of this basic truth leads to the perennial absurdity of millionaires like Elizabeth Warren playing class warrior when the only class they represent is the class of people who work for the government.

The oligarchy which is busy bleeding the country dry does not represent any group of working people anywhere in the country. Not Protestant or Catholic, black or white, or of any other creed or identity. Like every ideology incarnated in a system, it represents its own interests. The Democratic Party is the government party. It exists to create jobs in government, to dispense government subsidies and to expand the power and scope of its organization. It is not fundamentally any different than Putin's United Russia or Israel's Kadima or similar political creatures around the world.

The strange intermarriage of New England moralists, New York merchants and European radicals eventually led to a system of pushing immigrants into government service, mandating tolerance and running every aspect of human life through Washington D.C. It took a while to get there, but the system is a decade or two away from being complete. When it is complete then all our lives will be run in every possible way by the Elizabeth Warrens who will smile condescendingly at us, nudge us in the direction we are supposed to go, and when we don't go there, then the fines and the tasers come out.

No matter how far back you go, the roots of American liberalism lie in a fear of the people, a distrust of the great unwashed. American liberals have championed voting rights, so long as they were confident that those voting were their inferiors and could be herded into voting the right way. They have always distrusted the instincts of the public, no matter how much pious ink they spilled fighting on their behalf.

That view of man's sinful nature still informs their deepest thinkers, and the sins are still the same, the failure of fellowship, the refusal to consider the welfare of others and march in lockstep to create that ideal society. The New Jerusalem of universal brotherhood. Those ideas have been dressed up in modern clothing, transmitted as denunciations of racism and bigotry, immigration advocacy and hate crime laws, but underneath is the same notion that a society of good will to all can be forced through rigorous regimentation by the truly enlightened.

The populism of the American liberal is a cynical dumbshow where representatives of the oppressed gather in conclaves to demand more oppression by their liberal oppressors. This spectacle is at the heart of a political oligarchy, which like every oligarchy is built on government subsidies and special access to power for the privileged. And like all oligarchies it must disguise its nature by playing the protector of the people. Unlike them it must also disguise its true nature from itself.

The convergence of the ideal society and the government society was inevitable from the start. It took a while to overcome the technological and cultural barriers to running an entire country from a central point. Those barriers have never been truly overcome, but the technocratic mirage makes it seem as if they have been. And the ongoing faith in a perfectible society run by the saints makes it seem as if it must be.

The American liberal would still like to play at being humble, a 99 percenter fighting against the chimera of a 1 percent oligarchy. But the entire 99 percent theme is that the 1 percent isn't paying enough taxes. And whom do those taxes go to but to the administration and employment of the professional class warrior millionaires.

It is the very Everest of hypocrisy for the members of the oligarchy to be bemoaning all the extra tax money that could be used to pay their six figure salaries, while passing off their naked greed as a crusade on behalf of the oppressed.

There is nothing of working class advocacy in a government party looking to shovel more tax revenues into the insatiable gaping maw of its bureaucratic machinery. The idea that those monies will be used to help the downtrodden is a delusion that a brief glimpse at how much money went to connected companies and to the expansion of the government bureaucracy should easily cure. This isn't any 99 percent at work here. It's the 9 percent against the 63 percent.

Warren thinks of herself as not wealthy because despite her millions, she is engaged in the pious practice of public service. However big her financial resources may be, they are part of the collective whole of the oligarchy and in a different category altogether from the wealth that is earned or inherited.

To the American liberal, riches are not a matter of economics, but of identity. Wealth is a moral entity, not an economic one. What distinguishes pious millionaires like Warren from the heathens who make their money the old fashioned way is that the former achieve it through the moral pursuit of the public good, which is all the more pious for taking them to a Harvard professorship or a job in government, while the latter achieve it through economic transactions in the private sector. The former is a form of public service, the latter is public exploitation.

But a closer look at the bones and carcass of this system turns those definitions on their head. It is the Warrens who are the exploiters, consuming the wealth of a nation and spawning more committees, regulations and regulatory committees to keep on feeding off the wealth. What they give to us in exchange for what they take is not a service, it is oppression masquerading as feudal protectionism.

The American liberal is eager to protect us from powerful interests, but who will protect us from his protection, and who will turn off that protection and the money it costs us to pay for it, and worse still the freedoms that are consumed in order that we may be properly protected from ourselves.

No tyrant looks in a mirror and sees an oppressor. Tyrants are always protectors of the people. And our own American Tyrants are equally certain that they are the protectors of a people who would otherwise run off cliffs, throw lawn darts at each other, tear the tags off mattresses, make racist jokes, open pill bottles too easily, have inappropriate opinions and reinforce the oppressive heteronormative patriarchy which they have thoughtfully replaced with a vast echoing bureaucratic state in which everyone is free to be different in the same way.

The American liberal does not like the people very much. Most disguise it a bit better than Elizabeth Warren but that discomfort is always there. And the discomfort comes with a distrust. They don't like us and they don't trust the sort of shenanigans we might get up to when they aren't looking. Instead they are always looking, always nudging, always telling us what to think and how to live and otherwise protecting us from ourselves.

The tyrannical impulses were always there in American liberalism and like water on lilies, power brought them forth. Now we live under a system which strangles us to protect us from ever getting rid of it. The men and women strangling us smile awkwardly and tell us that it is for our own good. This tyranny for our own good requires that they toss aside our laws and replace them with their own. It requires that they spend us into bankruptcy, with much of the proceeds going to them, but in the name of a higher cause. And it demands that we praise them and if we won't do that, then it demands that we shut up and stop broadcasting our dissatisfaction. There is no place in their ideal national community for people like us.

The Pragmatics of Lebanon's Politics

2012-01-31T15:12:00.002+02:00

Hilal Khashan
Middle East Quarterly
Winter 2012 (view PDF)

http://www.meforum.org/3162/lebanon-pragmatic-politics

Lebanese society has had a remarkable ability to overcome deep-rooted sectarian and religious divides that could readily have imploded less problematic countries. This has been largely due to its pragmatic political system, which avoids acting upon polarizing issues on principle, opting instead for pragmatic loopholes. Given their confessional political system, Lebanese are conditioned to think pragmatically even when the issue at hand is divisive and does not lend itself to resolution. In Lebanon, pragmatism is a necessity and not an option as failure to accommodate other sects might ruin the country's delicate fabric.

Three vivid illustrations of this dynamic can be seen in the handling of the issues preoccupying Lebanese decision-makers these days: Hezbollah's continued militarization, the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL), and the Syrian connection Hezbollah's Militarization

Demands to disarm Hezbollah have grown since its 2006 war with Israel from Sunni as well as from some Shiite politicians only to be countered by other leaders in the patchwork politics that is Lebanon.
Most non-Shiite Lebanese find it difficult to accept Hezbollah's armament and have not missed an opportunity to express displeasure with the fact that, while the 1989 Ta'if agreement called for the demilitarization of all Lebanese militias, Hezbollah was exempted on the grounds that it was resisting Israel's presence in southern Lebanon. As much as they disapprove of Hezbollah's behavior, Lebanese find it politically correct to praise its "resistance." The proverb "kiss the hand you cannot bite" seems to fit the way many Lebanese view the militant Islamist group.

Against this backdrop, it is hardly surprising that Hezbollah's military buildup and its rivals' intensifying demand for its disarmament have been the most divisive issue since Israel's withdrawal from its security zone in south Lebanon in May 2000. This demand for disarmament gained considerable momentum after the July 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war as the eviction of Hezbollah from its bases south of the Litani River and the deployment of the Lebanese army in its place led critics to question the need for the group's continued militarization.

Thus, for example, the pro-Hariri member of parliament (MP) Ahmad Fatfat argued that Hezbollah's primary concern had shifted from confronting Israel to controlling Lebanon "and transforming it into a forward base on the Mediterranean for Iran."[1] His parliamentary peer Sami Jemayyil compared "Hezbollah's expansionist behavior in Lebanon" to that of the Zionists, while former Lebanese president Amin Jemayyil noted that "Hezbollah seems preoccupied these days with controlling the site of the Lebanese government in Beirut and the Special Tribunal's location in [the] Hague."[2] Addressing his supporters on the sixth anniversary of the March 14 coalition, former prime minister Saad Hariri criticized "the supremacy of [Hezbollah's] arms and the manner in which it is influencing the formation of the country's forthcoming cabinet [of Najib Miqati]."[3]

Even Nabih Berri, speaker of parliament and leader of the Shiite Amal movement—who showered Hezbollah with praise and defended its right to resist "the Israeli occupation" as "nonnegotiable"[4]—was paraphrased by a released Wikileaks cable as having privately said that "he supported Israeli military action against Hezbollah in 2006 as long as it did not backfire and create more public support for the party."[5]

It makes eminent sense for Berri to wish the demise of Hezbollah, whose rise to prominence among Lebanese Shiites came at Amal's expense. This does not seem to be the case with Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, who has perfected the shadowy art of doublespeak, rejecting Hezbollah's use of arms for domestic purposes while refusing "to expose Lebanon to Israeli aggression."[6] Jumblatt won notoriety for continuously vacillating from one political camp to another. His ambivalent statement above suggests that he does not preclude the possibility of returning to the March 14 coalition should Hezbollah's fortunes wane.

But most surprising and perplexing was the change of heart of Bishara Boutros Rai since his appointment as Maronite patriarch in March 2011. In his previous capacity as archbishop of Byblos, he voiced deep concern over Hezbollah's arsenal.[7] Once appointed to the top religious post, however, he expressed understanding of the group's reluctance to disarm: "The international community has not pressured Israel to pull out of Lebanese territory. Hezbollah also wants to help armed Palestinians in Lebanon who want to be granted the right of return to their lands. … When this happens, we will tell Hezbollah to disarm."[8] Ibrahim Amin Said, head of Hezbollah's politburo, concurred: "The issue has nothing to do with the manner in which the resistance uses its arms as some would like to argue; the issue pertains to the justification of the very existence of the resistance, and whether Lebanon should have a defense force capable of deterring the Israeli enemy."[9]
Special Tribunal for Lebanon

The issue of the U.N. Special Tribunal is even more divisive than Hezbollah's militarization. While Hezbollah takes pride in its weapons, presented as a deterrent to Israel, its implication in the 2005 assassination of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri brings shame to the organization. It seems that Hezbollah is more concerned about the moral blow to its image and prestige attending an association with the assassination than the arrest of its indicted members and their surrender to the U.N. Special Tribunal. The tribunal for its part scaled down the scope of its investigation, choosing to indict individuals in Hezbollah rather than the organization itself.

Accommodation and pragmatism have been extended even to the pursuit of justice where a delicate balance was struck between law enforcement and public peace. At least in their public pronouncements, Hezbollah spokesmen were still dissatisfied with the tribunal, even in its reduced scope. In a press conference held by Muhammad Raad, head of Hezbollah's parliamentary bloc, he described the tribunal as a "creation that serves international interests at the expense of the will and interests of the Lebanese people and their constitutional institutions" and called upon "all free, honorable, and nationalist Lebanese, regardless of their affiliations and positions, to boycott the tribunal's requests."[10] Nabil Qawuq, deputy chair of Hezbollah's Executive Council, derided the indictment of Hezbollah personnel as "an effort by the U.S. to compensate for its political defeats in Lebanon and the rest of the region."[11] Hashim Safieddine, chair of the council, ridiculed the Special Tribunal as "a political and media farce totally divorced from the pursuit of justice."[12]

Despite the overwhelming evidence implicating Hezbollah in the assassination, Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah and his allies have never ceased to plead the group's innocence. As soon as the tribunal indicted four Hezbollah members in the assassination, Nasrallah described them as honorable men who resisted Israel's occupation and, instead, laid the blame on the Jewish state, which had allegedly plotted the indictments.[13] When the tribunal revealed the names of these operatives shortly afterward and requested the Lebanese government to turn them in within thirty days to stand trial, Nasrallah responded disdainfully: "They cannot find them or arrest them in thirty days, or sixty days, or in a year, two years, thirty years, or three hundred years."[14] Nasrallah advised the leaders of the March 14 opposition not to expect the government of Prime Minister Najib Miqati to do in connection with the tribunal "what the government of his predecessor Saad Hariri couldn't do."[15]

For his part, Miqati emphasized Beirut's commitment to fulfill its international commitments, which included "paying its share of $32 million toward the cost of the STL operations,"[16] yet refused to "talk about solutions now, because I want the government efforts to succeed."[17] He also disregarded U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's concern about the Lebanese government's reaction to the deepening crisis in Syria, noting that he would not "endanger Lebanon by violating the rules of the international legitimacy."[18]

This did not escape Hezbollah's eye. Though repeatedly voicing his disapproval of financing the tribunal, Nasrallah and his colleagues were sympathetic to Miqati's predicament, claiming that the prime minister "must not be embarrassed by the reaction of the international community and his own constituency if he reneges on Lebanon's commitments."[19] They understand all too well that there is nothing they can do to stop the working of the tribunal. They can resent it and plead their innocence with their Shiite constituents—the main target audience of Hezbollah's rhetoric. As far as Hezbollah's leadership is concerned, what matters is how the Shiite community perceives them; the tribunal's activities are of far lesser concern as they seem to believe that its eventual impact will be minimal.
The Syrian Nexus

Lebanon's government finds itself in an unenviable position of having to accommodate Syrian interests and sensitivities, on the one hand, and the positions of its own divided communities vis-à-vis Syria, on the other. Ever since Lebanese independence, Damascus has been a constant political actor in its neighbor's affairs, forcing successive Lebanese governments to play a delicate game of appeasing everyone. Thus, for example the Lebanese government has recently stated that it cannot support a U.N. Security Council resolution on Syria, but it will abide by international resolutions, irrespective of what it thought of them.[20]

For their part, the Syrians have never reconciled themselves to Lebanon's creation on what they perceive as part of their territory. They also resented Beirut's development during the French Mandate from a slumbering provincial city into a business, medical, and educational hub, and it did not take long for relations to sour after the French departed in 1946. In 1950, the Syrian regime unilaterally dissolved the bilateral customs union and instigated the practice of closing down passenger and trade routes at will. Since then, bilateral relations have been characterized by envy, suspicion, resentment, and hate. It took the entry of the Syrian army into Lebanon in 1976 to finally give the Damascus regime a sense of vindication. Damascus's hegemony in Lebanon lasted until 2005 when the Syrian army pulled out shortly after Hariri's assassination.

Given their intense involvement in Lebanese affairs, the Syrians could always count on Lebanese allies. Certainly, any government in Beirut, irrespective of its relations with Damascus, understands the inherent mindset of the regime, which views the Lebanese as unappreciative of the selfless sacrifices of the Syrians on their behalf. Because Syrian officials seem to believe that retribution follows ingratitude, their Lebanese counterparts have been especially careful to avoid incurring their wrath. This has been particularly the case since the beginning of the Syrian uprising in mid-March 2011. The simultaneous inception of the Syrian protests with the decision of the March 14 coalition to boycott the Miqati cabinet gave ammunition to Damascus's official claim that "the security of the two countries is inseparable."[21] The Bashar al-Assad regime immediately accused the Future Trend party of providing material support for anti-regime elements. The secretariat general of the March 14 coalition responded by issuing a denouncement of the Baath regime's "baseless accusations of intervention in Syrian affairs, including support for saboteur networks."[22]

There is no denying that many Lebanese, especially Sunni Muslims, have expressed jubilation about the Syrian uprising, criticizing the Miqati government's decision to refrain from providing relief for the thousands of refugees fleeing Syrian army reprisals. Tripoli MP Muhammad Kabbara urged the Lebanese people to take the side of the Syrian people: "I hurt because the brotherly Syrian people are subjected to a systematic massacre, and I am ashamed because we are letting them down. We are under history's watchful eye. We must take political, moral, and humanitarian action to lend support to the Syrian people."[23] As in most protest organizing in Arab countries, the mosques played a key role in galvanizing Lebanese support for the anti-Assad movement. One hundred Sunni clerics convened in a Tripoli mosque to "express solidarity with the glorious popular uprising in Syria and to condemn the brutality of the Assad regime against unarmed protesters." They took issue with the regime's "labeling of demonstrators as foreign lackeys."[24]

In response to a call by the militant Hizb al-Tahrir al-Islami (Islamic Liberation Party)[25] for a pro-rebel demonstration in downtown Beirut, Lebanon's Arab Youth Party (a Syrian intelligence creation with no active membership) organized a counter rally in support of Assad. Party head Nadim Shimali condemned the anti-Assad rally as a violation of the 1989 Ta'if agreement, which stipulated that Lebanon would not allow itself to provide a base for any force, state, or organization seeking to undermine Syria's security. He urged the Lebanese authorities to crack down on anti-Syrian activities, threatening that otherwise his party would be forced to take matters into its own hands.[26] "The security forces complied with Shimali's warning and ensured that no activity would take place in Beirut or Tripoli to support the Syrian protest movement," lamented a communiqué issued by Hizb al-Tahrir. "They threatened to prevent any show of support outside mosques. In contrast, the [Lebanese] authorities allowed a handful of the Syrian regime's gangsters to demonstrate."[27]

However, this complaint was not entirely true. The government tried to strike a middle-of-the-road approach to the Lebanese divide vis-à-vis the Syrian upheavals. Lebanon's open political system did not interfere with the free expression of opinion on the Syrian situation. The Phalange Party, for example, announced that its branches in northern Lebanon were providing humanitarian and social aid "to Syrian families seeking refuge there."[28] The Future Trend party and Islamist groups threw themselves into providing humanitarian aid to several thousand Syrian refugees despite protests by the Syrian government and Hezbollah on the grounds that the refugees included subversive elements. The Lebanese military simply pulled out from the border area and allowed the Syrian army to chase defectors while, at the same time, it did not attempt to prevent sympathetic Lebanese groups from providing them with shelter. The Beirut government did all within its power to minimize the damage to its relations with Damascus as a result of the strong support among most Lebanese for the Syrian uprising. Foreign Minister Adnan Mansur made it clear that Beirut would not vote in favor of a Security Council resolution condemning Damascus.[29] This position was hardly defensible or consistent given that Lebanon's ambassador to the U.N. had proposed that the Security Council implement a no-fly zone over Libya to protect its people from the excesses of the Qaddafi regime.

The spread of protests inside Syria coincided with the deterioration of the security situation in Lebanon, including several attacks against the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) in the south of the country. According to Fares Said, coordinator of the secretariat of the March 14 coalition, the surge of violence in Lebanon appears to be tied to statements from Damascus. Said was specifically alluding to the attacks on the French and Italian contingents in UNIFIL, the abduction of seven Estonians in the Bekaa Valley, and the Marun al-Ras incident where the Israelis opened fire on demonstrators who attempted to climb the border fence.[30] Indeed, Assad's cousin Rami Makhluf had warned that Israelis could not expect to live in peace while Syrians suffered from turmoil whereas Syrian foreign minister Walid Muallem threatened that EU sanctions against Damascus were bound to have an adverse impact on Europe's security.[31]

Small wonder that the Assad regime exhibited anger at expressions of solidarity with the protesters, especially by the Lebanese armed forces and the Phalange. Phalange MP Nadim Jemayyil made a statement that particularly infuriated the Syrian regime: "We cannot but side with the Syrian people in their confrontation of the repressive and dictatorial regime. We are willing to open a new chapter with the Syrian people and join hands to build a new Middle East founded on freedom and democracy."[32] Assad's people expected nothing less than such statements as Hezbollah MP Hassan Fadlallah asserted that Washington was punishing Damascus by promoting the Syrian protest movement "in order to settle historical scores with the country that has always stood on the side of the forces of opposition to Israeli and American occupation."[33]

President Assad seemed in no mood for advice, certainly not from mercurial Druze chief Jumblatt who exhorted him "to think differently and recognize his people's legitimate demands in order to prevent Syria from slipping into chaos." Speaking carefully to avoid triggering a defensive reaction, Jumblatt explained that "the best advice he could give to the Syrian president had to be motivated by truthfulness, and not flattery."[34] When the Druze leader would not cease his repeated calls on Assad to reform, the Syrian authorities finally informed him that he was unwelcome in Damascus.[35] For Assad, his late father's brutally repressive practices of the 1970s and 1980s appeared fully appropriate in the second decade of the twenty-first century. He may have believed that his Tunisian and Egyptian counterparts fell too soon because they did not use sufficient force to suppress the opposition. Among his many repressive measures, Assad instructed his Beirut ambassador Ali Abdulkarim to chase and apprehend Syrian enemies of the regime in Lebanon. Indeed, Abdulkarim was singled out for U.S. and EU sanctions for his role in abducting opposition members in collusion with Lebanese authorities.[36]

The Lebanese government clamped down on Syrian opposition in Lebanon because of heavy pressure by the Assad regime to do so. Yet it showed leniency in dealing with the anti-Assad Lebanese protesters. Members of the Syrian opposition in Lebanon are not part of the country's political process and can be readily controlled. Dealing with the Lebanese groups and sects, by contrast, is a different matter altogether as they have a veto power and can bring the country's political system to a standstill.
Rational Polemics

Lebanon is not a failed state. Though its self-steering capability is grossly wanting, it is perfectly capable of making waves. Its political system may be akin to a person paralyzed below the waist but with functioning arms and intact vocal abilities. The creation of Greater Lebanon may not have been an entirely happy historical accident, yet it appears to be quite capable of dealing with its disabilities. It cannot make its own sovereign decisions, but it can almost always modify them to fit the exigencies of its unique political formula. For some countries, controversy can be politically debilitating; in Lebanon, it is a means of survival.

Hilal Khashan is a professor of political science at the American University of Beirut.

[1] An-Nahar (Beirut), Mar. 14, 2011.
[2] Ibid., Sept. 2, 2011.
[3] Al-Liwa (Beirut), Mar. 14, 2011.
[4] As-Safir (Beirut), Sept. 3, 2011.
[5] "No One Likes Them," Now Lebanon (Beirut), Sept. 15, 2011.
[6] Al-Hayat (London), Mar. 28, 2011.
[7] Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation (Beirut), Feb. 9, 2010.
[8] As-Safir, Sept. 9, 2011.
[9] Al-Manar TV (Beirut), Mar. 21, 2011.
[10] An-Nahar, Mar. 5, 2011.
[11] Al-Jarida (Beirut), Mar. 6, 2011.
[12] An-Nahar, May 15, 2011.
[13] BBC World News, July 3, 2011.
[14] Ibid., July 29, 2011.
[15] As-Safir, July 4, 2011.
[16] As-Siyasa (Kuwait), Sept. 6, 2011.
[17] The Daily Star (Beirut), Sept. 12, 2011.
[18] An-Nahar, Sept. 3, 2011.
[19] Ukaz (Riyadh), Sept. 7, 2011.
[20] Ar-Rai (Kuwait), Oct. 4, 2011.
[21] Al-Jarida, May 28, 2011.
[22] An-Nahar, Apr. 21, 2011.
[23] Ibid., May 17, 2011.
[24] Al-Akhbar (Cairo), May 9, 2011.
[25] Committed to the reintroduction of the worldwide caliphate, this party rejects the existing order in all Arab and Islamic states and advocates its violent overthrow.
[26] The Daily Star, June 4, 2011.
[27] An-Nahar, June 4, 2011.
[28] Al-Anwar, May 27, 2011.
[29] As-Siyasa, Sept. 18, 2011.
[30] An-Nahar, May 29, 2011.
[31] Ibid.; al-Akhbar, Apr. 11, 2011.
[32] Al-Liwa, May 31, 2011.
[33] An-Nahar, May 9, 2011.
[34] Ibid., May 24, 2011.
[35] Al-Anba (Fallujah), Sept. 24, 2011.
[36] Ukaz, Sept. 7, 2011.

Rick Santorum Shows Us the Strong and Weak Points of Republican Foreign Policy Thinking

2012-01-31T15:10:00.000+02:00

Barry Rubin

As Republican candidates begin to define a foreign policy alternative to President Barack Obama, it’s useful to analyze an international affairs’ speech given by presidential candidate Rick Santorum.

I am not writing to praise or criticize him as an individual—I’m not backing any candidate—but to show where strategic ideas are going and where they should be going. Everything said regarding Santorum also applies to Newt Gingrich and Mitch Romney.

Santorum is the most conservative. Note that this speech was given to an Orthodox Jewish synagogue audience in all-important Florida before the primary there. Thus, Santorum might be expected to pander by proving that he’s the most extreme and militant candidate supporting Israel and on the Iran issue. In fact, he doesn’t do so but rather proposes a policy that Democrats and real liberals should also support. Note well that he explicitly rejects a military attack on Iran There has been much foolish talk either about how an attack is a great idea or that it is a terrible notion that those crazy, warmongering Republicans eagerly embrace. That’ wrong on both counts.

Actually, Santorum proposes the kind of policy that Democrats and real liberals should support, too. At the same time, though, it shows how conservatives and Republicans are often careless when talking about foreign policy.

Santorum begins:

“The president says `the threat of war is receding’ but he’s wrong. The war is on, and its front lines are advancing towards us and our allies, above all toward Israel.”

But that’s not what Obama said but rather the “tide of war is receding” at the Pentagon recently, referring to direct U.S. engagement in Iran and Afghanistan. Santorum’s basic concept is right but the quote is taken out of context. He could have found a better one. That might not seem important to you but later in a campaign the mass media would have a field day ridiculing Santorum.

He continues:

“We're facing a global alliance that includes Russia, North Korea, China, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Ecuador and of course Cuba. They are outspoken in their desire to weaken us and drive us out of their regions. Some of them-- Iran, and the radical Islamists whose rise to power has been facilitated by this president--speak eagerly of destroying us, and our allies, especially Israel.”

Again, this is the kind of carelessness could be easily ridiculed by Obama’s supporters. Are these countries in a ‘global alliance”? Of course not. Is there evidence of a Chinese attempt to drive America out of Asia? No. Does the United States want to treat both Russia and China as enemies despite some real problems with conflicting policies? Dangerous adventurism.

On substance, though, Santorum is correct: there are powerful radical forces attacking U.S. interests and subverting its allies. This is the number one issue to which the United States must respond. Santorum says it perfectly when he continues: “We have no strategy to deal with this gathering storm. Indeed, our leaders act as if things are getting better every day.”

Unfortunately, Santorum doesn’t evince any broad counter-strategy that would be better but it isn’t hard to articulate one in clear terms the public can understand:

Recognize and define the threat; form a broad international coalition under U.S. leadership to combat it; back U.S. allies; wage appropriate struggles everywhere to stop the radicals’ advance and if possible push them back.

Santorum also barely mentions a critical issue where Obama is vulnerable: the gains made by revolutionary Islamism during the last year in Arabic-speaking lands.

That doesn’t mean he lacks some good, sophisticated arguments:

“President Obama seems to believe that sanctions on Iran will compel the fanatical rulers in Tehran to abandon their nuclear weapons program, fearing they will lose power if our sanctions continue and intensify. Has he considered the case of North Korea? Fanatical rulers do not care…about their people at all….And then they laugh at us, and organize thousands of people to chant `Death to America!’"

He adds that one reason radical regimes—largely a euphemism for revolutionary Islamists, right?--are so bold is that “we have yet to make them pay a price for the slaughter.”

Santorum really shows the right stuff in saying: “Indeed, our political leaders never talk about that. They talk about nukes and nukes alone, as if that were the only issue. But it isn't.” Yes, but bringing down the Iranian regime—largely because it is developing nuclear weapons?—is also not the only issue.

Here is something especially newsworthy from Santorum:

“Some say that this means we have to launch a military attack against Iran. I don't believe that. I think most Iranian people want to be free of their evil regime, and millions of them have taken to the streets, in the face of security forces all too happy to kill them, to show their contempt for their leaders. It's a revolutionary force, and we should support it.

“We defeated the Soviet Union without using military means. We supported the Soviet dissidents and refuseniks, and the Soviet regime collapsed. I believe we can do the same thing in Iran.

“Supporting those who fight for freedom in Iran is both strategically smart and morally just, and any president with moral and strategic vision would do it.”

While I agree with him about not attacking Iran militarily and the importance of supporting the Iranian opposition, Ronald Reagan could tell Santorum that the United States largely defeated the Soviet Union was by economic means, wearing it out in an arms’ race and through sanctions, too. Economic pressures certainly have an important role to play also.

Santorum ends with a six-point program for an Iran policy:

“1. First and foremost, publicly embrace the opposition, and call for regime change. We need a president and a secretary of state with the political courage to say, `Khamenei and Ahmadinejad must go. The Iranian people must freely choose their form of government and freely choose their leaders.’"

This makes sense because of the specific situation within Iran where there is strong opposition. Critics would respond that Iranian patriotism and the regime’s calling the opposition foreign agents would make such a policy counterproductive. This deserves serious discussion but since the regime does that anyway there is less to lose by such a strategy than it might appear.

Of course, Iran is not Libya. The United States is not going to bring the opposition to power, certainly not by military means. In my opinion, the regime is not about to fall either. But a declaratory policy—like sanctions—signals that the regime has provoked the United States to a point endangering their survival. Iranian political culture overstates U.S. power and influence within Iran and the rulers would take such a declaration seriously.

While avoiding any direct military activity that might lead to war, U.S. interests would benefit from more regime fear and less arrogance. Of course, as with current policy, it can also be made clear that if the regime changes course the United States would take that into account.

“2. Publicly condemn the regime's repression, the ghastly human rights violations, the systematic misogyny, the censorship of press, internet, access to international broadcasting (including VOA, Farda, etc.).”

The Obama Administration can argue that this has already been done but it has not been emphasized and the Iranian regime—with good reason--doesn’t take Obama seriously.

“3. We must publicly support freedom for Iranian workers, and then work with international trade union organizations to build a strike fund, just as we did for the Solidarity trade union in Poland in the last years of the Cold War.”

That policy seems more relevant to Poland than to Iran.

4. “We must help members of the opposition to safely communicate with one another. During the Cold War, we provided fax machines to Solidarity and Soviet dissidents; today the equivalent technologies include anti-filtering software built into cell phones and computers.”

“5. We have to talk to the dissident leaders. This is tricky. The Green Movement insists that they have no spokesmen or representatives outside the country. We need to establish reliable channels into Iran. It is best to do this without public attention, obviously, but it can be done.

“6. We need a campaign of public support for Iran’s political prisoners. We must identify them individually, by name. American diplomats attending international meetings and conferences should have a list of political prisoners, and call for their release and humane treatment.”

These last three are good ideas but what is glaringly missing here is a regional strategy of countering Iran’s efforts in Iraq, Lebanon, Bahrain, and elsewhere. Saying you favor regime change and helping the opposition is fine but isn’t going to change much.

If Santorum and others want to look to U.S. Cold War strategy fine but let them comprehend what that means. It wasn’t only about backing Soviet dissidents by any means. Even in the dissident department, it was far more about helping Eastern European dissidents. In the Middle East case this means the real democratic oppositions in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey. But we should also be aware that even this is no magic solution because these forces tend to lose elections. Supporting electoral “democracy” is not a panacea as last years’ experience (and Palestinians and Lebanese politics, too) clearly indicates.

Santorum closes with a good theme but one more problematic than it seems at first glance. Referring to an article suggesting Obama led from behind, Santorum said: “I will lead from the front, which is America's mission.”

But he and the other Republican candidates should study the foreign policy sections of Obama’s State of the Union message. The president’s case is that he has led: I got bin Ladin; I stopped al-Qaida; I put together an international coalition to strengthen sanctions against; I won in Iraq and Afghanistan and am now withdrawing; I made America respected again.

Isn’t that at least a claim of having led from the front? Won’t a lot of Americans accept those claims?

A lot more work on the substance and message of foreign policy and national security strategy is needed if Obama is going to be defeated on that issue.

Professor Barry Rubin, Director, Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center http://www.gloria-center.org
The Rubin Report blog http://rubinreports.blogspot.com/
He is a featured columnist at PJM http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/.
Editor, Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal http://www.gloria-center.org

Why does the ailing west aid its Islamist enemies?

2012-01-31T06:41:00.001+02:00

The Australian

Was there ever a more perverse and self-destructive society than the contemporary West? In its attitude to the Middle East and the Islamic world, it appears to suffer from the political equivalent of auto-immune disease: turning on its allies while embracing its enemies.

One year ago, the US and Britain helped street protesters to overthrow president Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. Hailing the revolutionary tumult of the "Arab Spring" as the equivalent of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the West went on to help armed Libyan rebels remove president Muammar Gaddafi by military force. This regional strategy was promoted even though it was obvious from the start that the people who were best organised to take advantage of any elections in the Arab world were Islamists of one stripe or another - religious extremists all, united by their hostility to the West.

And so it has proved. The Islamists are coming to power in Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Tunisia, and in turn are being increasingly empowered elsewhere. In Libya, sickening atrocities, including the torture and killing of Gaddafi himself by a lynch mob, have been carried out by those brought to power with the assistance of British and US bombing raids.

Yet Western politicians are even now hymning the brave new dawn of democracy throughout the Muslim world. British Foreign Secretary William Hague conceded earlier this month that the regional violence and votes for Islamism were a "setback", but he insisted: "Greater freedom and democracy in the Middle East is an idea whose time has come."

And the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist organisation now in the ascendancy, which uses violence and political manipulation to advance its aim of world domination for Islam, is suddenly being hailed by Western leaders as the acme of moderation.

Yet in helping to get rid of Mubarak and Gaddafi, Britain and the US have managed the signal feat of ousting oppressive regimes that were at least helpful to the West, and replacing them with oppressive regimes that are acutely hostile to the West.

One immediate result is that the Sinai desert, neutralised as a trouble spot ever since Israel made peace with Egypt in 1979, has now become an acute threat to Israel's southern border. Hamas is now building arms-manufacturing facilities in Sinai, including those for building rockets, and other Islamic extremists are piling in.

Arms are being smuggled from Egypt into Gaza without interruption. Oh, and Libyan weapons, including Russian-made anti-plane rockets, are now making their way into the Gaza Strip. Well done, Britain and America!

And then there's Iran. Ever since the Islamic revolution in 1979, when the ayatollahs declared war on the West, Iran has been involved in many acts of terrorism against the US and Western interests. Tehran regularly threatens to wipe Israel off the map, and is now racing to develop nuclear weapons to realise its infernal goals.

Yet despite all this, the West has refused to fight back or even to acknowledge the Iranian war against the West, with President Barack Obama advertising US weakness by extending his hand in friendship to the regime.

Obama's catastrophic strategy has given Iran the one thing it needed above all else: time to bring its nuclear weapons program to fruition.

Only now, with the hands on the doomsday clock pointing to midnight, have Britain, the US and Europe finally imposed tough sanctions against Iran. But what use are these when they will almost certainly be busted by Russia and China?

Sanctions are supposed to force Iran to ‘come to its senses’ and stop its nuclear energy program from producing weapons. But the Tehran regime is dominated by fanatics who believe the Shia messiah, the Mahdi, will return to earth either as result of or to bring about the apocalyptic end of days.

That is why the argument that "They wouldn't dare launch a nuclear attack because they know half of Iran would be obliterated as a result" is fatuous. They would be happy if this were to occur.

But despite all this, Western leaders still behave as if the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is the dominant issue in the Arab world, and that the expansion of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land is the dominant issue in the Arab-Israel conflict.

Barely a week goes by without Western politicians or the media blaming "Israeli intransigence" in general, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in particular, for blocking the Israel-Palestinian peace process.

British Prime Minister David Cameron says time is running out for the two-state solution to the conflict because of "facts on the ground" - code for the Israeli settlements.

His deputy, Nick Clegg, went further, claiming the "illegal" settlement-building amounted to "an act of deliberate vandalism" that jeopardised a peaceful two-state solution.

Yet this was to ignore the fact it is the Palestinians, not Israel, who refuse to negotiate without preconditions. It ignores the fact that Israel has twice offered the Palestinians a state on most of the West Bank, to which the Palestinians have merely responded by terrorist campaigns.

And it ignores the absolutely fundamental fact that Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas has said the Palestinians will never accept Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state.

So why does the West fail to see what is under its nose? There are several reasons, including prejudice, ideology, strategic short-sightedness and simple funk.

But the deeper reason is surely the Western belief that the world is basically governed by rationality. So all conflicts arise from grievances, and all parties can be persuaded to settle a quarrel in their own interests.

Refracting everything in the world through the prism of its unshakeable faith in universal reason, the West is incapable of recognising or understanding religious fanaticism, and insists instead on treating the fanatic as a rational actor.

The ghastly irony is that in making a fetish of reason, the West is behaving irrationally by refusing to acknowledge the mortal threat posed to its own existence by the Islamic world.

In other words, this could be the point in history at which the West simply disappears up its own arrogant backside.

Dr. Sowell on the occupiers

2012-01-31T06:38:00.002+02:00

Thomas Sowell (born June 30, 1930) is an American economist, social theorist, political philosopher, and author. A National Humanities Medal winner, he advocates laissez-faire economics and writes from a libertarian perspective. He is currently a Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Sowell was born in North Carolina, but grew up in Harlem, New York City. He dropped out of high school, and served in the United States Marine Corps during the Korean War. He had received a bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1958 and a master's degree from Columbia University in 1959. In 1968, he earned his doctorate degree in economics from the University of Chicago. Dr. Sowell has served on the faculties of several universities, including Cornell and University of California, Los Angeles, and worked for "think tanks" such as the Urban Institute. Since 1980 he has worked at the Hoover Institution. He is the author of more than 30 books.
____________________________________________________

The following is written by Dr. Sowell, and I quote:

"The current Occupy Wall Street movement is the best illustration to date of what President Barack Obama's America looks like. It is an America where the lawless, unaccomplished, ignorant and incompetent rule. It is an America where those who have sacrificed nothing pillage and destroy the lives of those who have sacrificed greatly.
"It is an America where history is rewritten to honor dictators, murderers and thieves. It is an America where violence, racism, hatred, class warfare and murder are all promoted as acceptable means of overturning the American civil society. "It is an America where humans have been degraded to the level of animals: defecating in public, having sex in public, devoid of basic hygiene. It is an America where the basic tenets of a civil society, including faith, family, a free press and individual rights, have been rejected. It is an America where our founding documents have been shredded and, with them, every person's guaranteed liberties.

"It is an America where, ultimately, great suffering will come to the American people, but the rulers like Obama, Michelle Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Joe Biden, Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, liberal college professors, union bosses and other loyal liberal/Communist Party members will live in opulent splendor.

"It is the America that Obama and the Democratic Party have created with the willing assistance of the American media, Hollywood, unions, universities, the Communist Party of America, the Black Panthers and numerous anti-American foreign entities. "Barack Obama has brought more destruction upon this country in four years than any other event in the history of our nation, but it is just the beginning of what he and his comrades are capable of.

"The Occupy Wall Street movement is just another step in their plan for the annihilation of America. "Socialism, in general, has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.""
Thomas Sowell

We Must Lead From The Front

2012-01-31T06:35:00.002+02:00

Speech as Prepared to Be Given

The Orthodox Union Presidential Forum
The Boca Raton Synagogue

The president says "the threat of war is receding" but he’s wrong. The war is on, and its front lines are advancing towards us and our allies, above all toward Israel.

We're facing a global alliance that includes Russia, North Korea, China, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Ecuador and of course Cuba. They are outspoken in their desire to weaken us and drive us out of their regions. Some of them--Iran, and the radical Islamists whose rise to power has been facilitated by this president--speak eagerly of destroying us, and our allies, especially Israel.

We have no strategy to deal with this gathering storm. Indeed, our leaders act as if things are getting better every day. President Obama seems to believe that sanctions on Iran will compel the fanatical rulers in Tehran to abandon their nuclear weapons program, fearing they will lose power if our sanctions continue and intensify. Has he considered the case of North Korea? Fanatical rulers do not care if their people go hungry. Indeed they do not care about their people at all. If their people complain, they go to prison or to the torturer or the hangman. And then they laugh at us, and organize thousands of people to chant "Death to America!"

What does President Obama think they mean? It certainly doesn't mean "yes, America, you are right, let's reason together."

It means, we're going to keep killing your men and women wherever we can, from Iraq to Afghanistan. And why not? We have yet to make them pay a price for the slaughter.

Indeed, our political leaders never talk about that. They talk about nukes, and nukes alone, as if that were the only issue. But it isn't.

The Iranians and their creatures throughout the Middle East and deep into our hemisphere are killing and wounding Americans every day. And even as the president preens himself for sanctions that he reluctantly accepted when Congress demanded them, and which he delays whenever he can, Hezbollah is training and indoctrinating terrorists to our south, Iran and its allies are assembling weapons--including drones and missiles--in Venezuela, and a steady flow of Iranian military and intelligence personnel flows into hostile Latin nations on direct flights from Tehran.

A couple of weeks ago Univision presented an excellent documentary on “The Iranian Threat,” which told one frightening story after another about Iranian-Venezuelan-Cuban plans to attack the United States. The most famous of these was the plot to assassinate the Saudi Arabian Ambassador to Washington, but another one—a two-step operation for a cyber attack, and then a physical assault, against American targets—precipitated the expulsion of Venezuela's consul general in Miami.

That’s a rare event, and it shows the gravity of the crisis we face. That global network weakens us in many ways, and threatens our security very directly. That network enables Iran and Syria to mitigate many of our sanctions. Money flows east, to Chinese banks, as the Europeans join us in blocking transactions with the Iranian Central Bank. Money gets laundered through Russia and Latin America. Weapons move from Russia to Venezuela, and then to Iran and Syria, enabling the Russians to pretend they are not arming the Middle Eastern fanatics.

And yet the president says the tide of war is receding.

Any concerned American looking at the facts must conclude that the tide of war is swelling. Iran has been at war with us since 1979, and is planning to escalate. That is why the global anti-American alliance was created. Shi'ite mosques in Venezuela are not the reflection of the religious convictions of the Venezuelan people; they are there so that Iranian agents can plan attacks against America.

When President Ahmadinejad recently toured the capitals of Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua and Ecuador, it was not a form of cultural diplomacy; it was primarily to increase the tempo of preparations for the war against America.

It is long past time for us to respond, but instead our president declares imminent victory.

We must respond, and even the Washington Post knows what is at stake: if you want an end to the Iranian nuclear weapons program, the Post's editorialists recently wrote, you have to bring down the regime in Tehran. This regime is not going to give up the dream of becoming a nuclear power. And everyone here knows what the Iranian leaders intend to do with the atomic bombs: they intend to remove Israel from the map, and then bring their jihad to the United States.

Some say that this means we have to launch a military attack against Iran. I don't believe that. I think most Iranian people want to be free of their evil regime, and millions of them have taken to the streets, in the face of security forces all too happy to kill them, to show their contempt for their leaders. It's a revolutionary force, and we should support it.

We defeated the Soviet Union without using military means. We supported the Soviet dissidents and refuseniks, and the Soviet regime collapsed. I believe we can do the same thing in Iran.

Supporting those who fight for freedom in Iran is both strategically smart and morally just, and any president with moral and strategic vision would do it.

But we don't. On the contrary, at the crucial moment a couple of years ago, President Obama reached out to the regime, not to the Iranian people. That was a shameful moment, and the shame continues. Neither the president nor the secretary of state, indeed not a single Administration official, has said "the regime must go." That language was reserved for long-time American friends like Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. Even in Syria, an enemy, the president reluctantly called for a new government only after the slaughter had reached such a level that even the Arab League said change seemed necessary.

Paradoxically, President Obama’s constant call for open negotiations with Iran only convinces them that they can do anything they wish—even kill Americans, or take them hostage, or frame them for espionage, as they have just done with a young Marine, and we will do nothing to threaten their rule. So our failure to move against the regime itself actually makes military conflict more likely.

What would a serious president do about Iran? What would I do?

I would do six things right away:

1. First and foremost, publicly embrace the opposition, and call for regime change. We need a president and a secretary of state with the political courage to say, "Khamenei and Ahmadinejad must go. The Iranian people must freely choose their form of government and freely choose their leaders."

2. Publicly condemn the regime's repression, the ghastly human rights violations, the systematic misogyny, the censorship of press, internet, access to international broadcasting (including VOA, Farda, etc.).

We need a president who will deliver the contemporary equivalent of President Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech, which inspired a generation of Soviet dissidents and freedom fighters. And we need a president with the political courage to take action against the Iranian regime.

For example, we should take action to end the jamming of our (and other free countries') broadcasts. Meanwhile, we should deny Iran the ability to broadcast to the United States. A president who really understood the gravity of the crisis would shut down Press TV on the basis of reciprocity, just as the British Government has.

3. We must publicly support freedom for Iranian workers, and then work with international trade union organizations to build a strike fund, just as we did for the Solidarity trade union in Poland in the last years of the Cold War.

4. We must help members of the opposition to safely communicate with one another. During the Cold War, we provided fax machines to Solidarity and Soviet dissidents; today the equivalent technologies include anti-filtering software built into cell phones and computers. They may also include safe portals for Iranians to enter...these technologies will change constantly; we need to work with the smartest techies to stay ahead of the Iranian/Chinese censors and listeners.

5. We have to talk to the dissident leaders. This is tricky. The Green Movement insists that they have NO spokesmen or representatives outside the country. We need to establish reliable channels into Iran. It is best to do this without public attention, obviously, but it can be done.

6. We need a campaign of public support for Iran’s political prisoners. We must identify them individually, by name. American diplomats attending international meetings and conferences should have a list of political prisoners, and call for their release and humane treatment.

Even the Nazis found it more difficult to kill prisoners who were publicly named. It's easier to kill those who are anonymous, who don't receive mail, who aren't publicly supported. Once again, our strategic and moral imperatives coincide. We only lack a president with the courage to do what is right and necessary.

I want to close with a reiteration of what I said at the debate; not only does our President not have the courage to do what is right and necessary, in his efforts to appease our enemies he actually has sided with them against our allies.

Our policy in Central and South America under this administration has been abysmal. Take Honduras as an example. When the country’s legislature and judiciary exercised their constitutional right to protect the integrity of their democracy, President Obama said that their efforts were “not legal and that President Zelaya remains the president of Honduras.” This is after Zelaya, an ally of Chavez and outspoken critic of America, tried to abrogate its constitution and change it to seek re-election beyond his four-year term.

Instead of standing behind the parliament we sided with the despots in region who have been aligned with Iran. This administration has had a consistent policy of siding with the leftists and appeasing those who threaten our security. We haven’t stood up for our friends like Colombia, we haven’t undertaken the effort necessary to build the relational capital and trust necessary to develop a regional economic alignment to compete with the European Union. The EU understands in a global economy the only way to compete it to build economic alliances, why has this escaped our leadership?

I am committed to one of my first trips abroad as President to be to Central and South America, and I am committed to visiting it repeatedly. With the threat of radical Islam growing in the region, the parallels with the Cold War are even clearer. And with this radical ideology comes a new virulent strain of anti-Semitism that is taking hold in our hemisphere. We need a President who understand this threat and takes it seriously.

In closing, instead of leading the forces of democracy, this president lags behind the course of events. "Leading from behind"; waiting for others to make the hard choices and take the hard actions, and then jumping on board. We see this in the Middle East. We see this in Central and South America.

I reject this. I don't think we should wait until Israel is attacked, or until Israel, out of desperation and despair that the United States will not act, moves against Iran. We can’t with until a missile is placed in Venezuela that can reach our soil and then cry fowl.

We can’t wait for our friends to do the hard things, when we are better placed, have greater power, and have better options.

I will lead from the front, which is America's mission.

New York Times Scandalized as NYPD is Trained on Muslim Violence

2012-01-30T15:30:00.001+02:00

Gregory D. Lee

This week, the New York Times breathlessly reported in its New York Region section that the New York Police Department had committed a politically incorrect felony by using a film, The Third Jihad, to train its officers on the hidden agenda of many Muslims residing in the U.S. That hidden agenda is the destruction of the United States.

Apparently, the Times doesn’t realize that some Muslims in and out of this country want to harm New Yorkers and other Americans. The article says about the film: “Ominous music plays as images appear on the screen: Muslim terrorists shoot Christians in the head, car bombs explode, executed children lie covered by sheets and a doctored photograph shows an Islamic flag flying over the White House.
“This is the true agenda of much of Islam in America,” a narrator intones. “A strategy to infiltrate and dominate America. … This is the war you don’t know about.”

Apparently the reporter at the Times didn’t know about it either. What is apparent is that the NYPD felt it was important to educate its officers and to give them insight into the goals of some radical Muslims residing in this country. Obviously, the NYT lacks insight because it’s blinded by political correctness.

Never mind that the FBI and NYPD have uncovered plots by radical Muslims to kill soldiers at Ft. Hood, Texas, blow up Times Square, kill soldiers at a recruiting station in Little Rock, Arkansas, shoot up the Pentagon and Marine Corps museum in Virginia, attack soldiers at Ft. Dix, New Jersey, set off a bomb at Ft. Hood, blow up spectators at a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Oregon, and attack several sites in Tampa, Florida. These are examples of the scores of incidents perpetrated by immigrant and native-born Muslims living in this country.

The Times headline described the film as “a dark film on U.S. Muslims,” and reported that the film has been “shown to more than a thousand officers as part of training in the New York Police Department.” Can you imagine a big city police department training its officers about the perpetrators of actual and potential future terrorist attacks?

The Times reporter gleefully wrote that once “the news broke” last January that the NYPD had shown the film to its officers, a “top” police official originally denied it. However, the Times was on the case to uncover the extent of the training, and find out how many other politically incorrect conspirators it could identify. An NYPD officer said the department received the DVD documentary from the Department of Homeland Security. When the Times reporter interrogated an unnamed DHS spokesman, the official said a DHS “contractor” might have provided it because the documentary is not part of its curriculum.

Under New York’s Freedom of Information Law, the relentless Times reporter discovered to his horror that 1,489 officers had viewed the film, and not just a “couple of times” by mistake, as originally stated by a unnamed NYPD official. The reporter makes it seem that anyone who views the film will catch a fatal disease so it must be reported.

Never once in the article was the accuracy of the film questioned.

Instead of reporting what radical Muslims say or write about plotting to destroy American and Western culture, the newspaper chooses to attack the NYPD, which is doing its best to prevent terrorism within the city limits.

According to The New York Times, being politically incorrect is a far greater crime than any crime a Muslim has committed or is plotting to commit.

Family Security Matters Contributing Editor Gregory D. Lee is a retired Supervisory Special Agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the author of three criminal justice textbooks. While on DEA diplomatic assignment in Pakistan, he was involved in the investigation of several notable terrorism events and arrests. He recently retired after more than 39 years of active and reserve service from the U.S. Army Reserve as a Chief Warrant Officer Five Special Agent for the Criminal Investigation Division Command, better known as CID. In 2011 he completed a combat tour of duty in Afghanistan while on special assignment to the Special Operations Command Europe. His articles also appear at North Star Writers Group. Contact him at info@gregorydlee.com.

Weaponizing the Passenger Plane

2012-01-30T15:15:00.002+02:00

Sultan Knish

On September 11 the passenger jet as a weapon came crashing into the consciousness of the citizens of the country which had made international air travel viable. Muslim terrorists had viewed planes in terms of the passengers and hijacked planes to take people hostage. But at the beginning of the millennium it was no longer the people that mattered, only the use of the plane as a makeshift missile aimed at the institutions and infrastructure of the free world.

This change of tactics was a game changer because it meant the potential casualties of airplane hijackings were no longer limited to the passengers in the air who were now flying around in ICBM's with much less explosive payload, but enough to take down skyscrapers and kill thousands of people. Every passenger was no longer just a risk to other passengers, but a risk to everyone in the Empire State Building, the Sears Tower or any other clumping of people in target areas that could be hit. Jet engine aircraft had passed from military to civilian applications, but the military applications of high speed transportation now returned to dominate the civilian tourism and travel industry that had sprung up and become widely available at the cost of jet travel went down.

The most obvious military application of high speed travel is troop transportation and the Muslim world had been using the jet plane for transporting millions of settlers to Western countries. To most citizens of the free world, the military applications of this wave of settlement were not obvious. They would not become obvious until the settlers had given birth to second and third generations which became demographic and domestic terrorist threats. And even then it would remain mostly undiscussed.

With the settlement project going full swing, transforming the vehicles of Muslim demographic conquest into flying missiles was dangerous, but the use of domestic flights sidelined much of the security and the discussions that would have followed had the 9/11 hijackers hijacked flights from outside the country. The use of domestic flights by Muslim terrorists who had spent extensive time in America and Europe revealed just how comfortable the Jihad had become operating on infidel soil.

Muslim enclaves in America and Europe made it easier for terrorists entering the United States to operate and for the rise of native born Muslim terrorists. At a time when Bin Laden's role had declined, the man who eclipsed him briefly even before his death and played a role in a series of attacks against the United States was Anwar Al-Awlaki, born in New Mexico, whose termination by drone is still agonized over in some liberal and libertarian circles.

September 11 went beyond previous airline hijackings which had managed to make air travel more dangerous, but not permanently so. Those hijackings had temporarily hijacked the infrastructure of air travel, but the weaponization of passenger aircraft did so permanently. The damage extended beyond international air travel and border security, it reached deep into the infrastructure of domestic air travel which Americans had come to rely on to transverse a large nation with a handicapped rail system.

The rise of Muslim populations in the West made Islamic terrorism into a domestic problem in societies under a legal and cultural mandate to eliminate any negative or discriminatory attitudes toward minorities. That attitude made profiling too dangerous a topic to discuss openly, just as the specific sources of terrorism could not be discussed except in terms of American foreign policy. The only way for those societies to cope was with broad range laws and tactics that applied to everyone.

Nanny state nations had been drifting into police states through the inevitable logic of centralized bureaucracy and urban malaise. There was a growing number of regulations that had to be enforced and immigration, economic uncertainty and industrial decline created crime problems that made entire portions of world capitols uninhabitable without increasingly systematic police tactics.

The creeping militarization and federalization of American law enforcement had kept pace with the rise of crime syndicates, rapid transportation, deadlier weapons and regulatory overreach. As civil liberties monitoring increased, the laws became broader and law enforcement discretion vanished. Combined with doses of sociology and psychology, law enforcement no longer enforced laws, it enforced attitudes. Statistical analysis allowed for broad targeting of neighborhoods and cities with crackdowns meant to change the attitudes of residents on quality of life offenses.

While this was considered a triumph for conservative politicians, it meant that law enforcement had become the billy club of the nanny state. Laws mattered less than nudging, fining and terrorizing the residents into maintaining the right attitude toward their neighborhood and their city. Systematic procedures developed by experts to be carried out by anyone with the right training were the future of law enforcement. The police officer with instincts and a feel for the neighborhood was on the way out. The future was the TSA.

That this process had worked well enough in urban areas said less about its effectiveness and more about the dysfunctional cities created by half a century of liberal regulationism. In the wake of the programs the cities had not become any better, the process of managing their residents however had vastly improved. But all the management really did was keep the lid on while the subsidies were poured in. And the most vital element was still the old fashioned cop who understood the area, while his captain was hard at work meeting with community leaders.

The TSA emerged out of this environment as another reflexive denial of the problem and applied the same solution. Broad range security procedures that applied to everyone, but this time they were overseen by people who would not have been accepted to work in any police force in the country. This was the age of the mall cop set up as the first line of national defense with the power to steal, grope and single out passengers for the most trivial of reasons. The one thing that the mall cops of the TSA were not allowed to do was profile terrorists.

Strip searching children was fine, alienating Muslims was not. Children after all were not likely to become offended and blow up buildings. Muslims were and the entire purpose of the TSA was to apply broad range security procedures that did not single out or offend Muslims.

Like most mall cops, the real purpose of the TSA was to provide the perception of security, rather than the reality. The TSA was never really meant to stop an actual terrorist and it never has. All it could hope to do was discourage them. Its real goals however were to restore confidence in air travel and reshape public attitudes to make flyers easier to manage.

The latter seems to miss the point of the crisis, but it actually is the point. Leaders who don't know how to cope with a crisis respond by limiting the freedom of action of those under them. Generals, CEO's or directors all follow the same pattern of ensuring compliance in subordinates to make the system more manageable and remove as many possible sources of chaos from the system.

Islamic terrorism has shut down the decision making process of the modern Western state by attacking their core assumptions about the future being a place of open borders, multicultural populations and international consensus. Instead rapid air travel is a threat, multicultural cities are becoming No Go Zones and the future is heading toward a clash of civilizations.

The assumptions on which they built their vision of the future are crumbling under them creating the kind of situation where good leaders reevaluate and admit their mistakes while bad leaders try to keep pushing forward in the hopes that this is only a temporary problem. A passing phase that can be resolved by reaching out to the Muslim world, encouraging their reforms and stabilizing their conflicts. Any remaining tensions would be dealt with the time honored methods of liberals, fighting discrimination and promoting positive role models, while covering up the mess by giving law enforcement broad powers over everyone.

A single major successful terrorist attack that gets by the TSA will result in major cosmetic changes for the agency, but no substantial ones. And the lack of meaningful debate over the nature of the problem that it exists to solve means that we are stuck in a debate between broad range security measures and hard line libertarians, both of whom deny that there even is a war on terror. The one thing to come out of a debate between Eric Holder and Ron Paul is that neither believes that Islamic terrorism is a problem, which means that neither of them has anything to say about a solution.

The war against us has been made possible by a leadership that is unable to identify the problem, let alone formulate a meaningful response to it. The weaponization of the passenger plane represented one aspect of how the enemy undermined and exploited our assumptions. Everything that has happened since then has been more of the same.

The jet plane brought the world closer within reach, without considering the consequences of what that growing proximity would mean.The airline hijackings, mass migration and deployment of hijacked aircraft to cause mass destruction all shifted the balance of power over global transportation away from the builder societies of the free world and toward the destroyer societies of the Muslim world.

The Revenants

2012-01-30T15:11:00.001+02:00

Nurit Greenger

The definition of the word revenant is: a person who returns after a lengthy absence, or someone who has returned from the dead.

The origin of the word revenant is French, from present participle of revenir, meaning to return. (Participle is a word formed from a verb and used as an adjective or a noun.)

The word revenant was first known to have been used in 1818.

The Jewish Nation is a revenant nation.

The Jews have returned to the Land of Israel, after lengthy absence, several times, thus the name revenant is the most appropriate for any Jew living in the land of Israel.

The Babylonian empire, under the ruling of Nebuchadnezzar II, conquered and occupied the Kingdom of Judea between 597-586 BC. In 586 BC, the Babylonian army, under the commandment of Nebuchadnezzar, destroyed the First Temple in Jerusalem and exiled the Jews to Babylon, mostly, the middle class and above Jewish population. The exiled Jews in Babylon, the first known Diaspora, never lost their affinity for Jerusalem and their faith. According to the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, in 538 BC, approximately seven decades after they were expelled from their Homeland, the Jews in Babylon were allowed to return to the Land of Israel. Cyrus the Great, the ruler of the Persian Empire then, issued the Cyrus's declaration, the decree that granted the Jews the right to worship their God in Jerusalem, in some form of an autonomy. Around 50,000 Jews made the first – Aliyah - revenir, to the Land of Israel, and most of the exiled Jews chose to remain in Babylon. During the next 110 years to follow, since the decree of Cyrus the Great, Jewish deportees returned to Judea- returned to Zion. These Jews were the first Jewish revenants.

These Jewish revenants re-established the city of Jerusalem and rebuilt the Second Temple at the original site of King Solomon's First Temple, which had remained a devastated heap during the approximately 70 years of exile. Work resumed at approximately 521 BCE, under the Persian King Darius (Ezra 5) and was completed during the sixth year of his reign in 518/517 BCE. Around 19 BCE, Harod the Great renovated and expanded the Second Temple.

On 70 CE, under Titus, the Romans conquered and destroyed Jerusalem, and burned the Second Temple.

When the Second Temple was destroyed in 70 A.D. the second exile of Jews from Judea began. The Jewish people were soon to be scattered throughout the earth knows to be the Diaspora. For the next 2000 years the Jews would have no authority in their land their God gave to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. However during most of the 2000 years Second Exile there have always been some Jews living in the Land of Israel, mostly in Jerusalem. Although most of the Jewish nation was in exile from its land, the Jews in the Diaspora never forget their Jerusalem.

Aliyah- revenir of Jewish revenants is a basic tenet of the Zionism ideology. The return to the Holy Land has been a Jewish aspiration since the Babylonian exile. Sizable scale of Jewish immigration to Eretz Israel and later the State of Israel began in 1882. Aliyah- revenir of Jewish revenants to the State of Israel still takes place today when Jews arrive to love in the State of Israel from all four corners of the world.

In 1948 the nascent Jewish state, comprised of 600,000 revenants, had to fight for its survival when, on May 15, one day after the creation of the State of Israel, the Arab armies of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon invaded the new Jewish state. Israel won the war but lost a portion of its land to the Arabs. The Gaza strip and Sinai remained under Egypt's control and Judea and Samaria and a part of Jerusalem – the old city – fell into the hands of Transjordan. For nineteen years Israel was missing several of her limbs, which, legally and according to International law, belong to the Jewish State.

In 1967 Israel was compelled to defend itself again from Egypt, Jordan and Syria. The result of the Six Day War was that Israel gained her land back, the land the Arabs were holding to, illegally for two decades.

Jewish revenants began settling their newly gained land in Judea and Samaria and Gaza. While the State of Israel did the unthinkable and made Gaza Judenrein, a growing number of Jewish revenants are inhabiting Judea and Samaria.

Unfortunately, the Arabs are still harboring one goal in mind, which is to capture the State of Israel and destroy it. Along this ominous goal, they have been demonizing and delegitimizing the state of Israel in any method possible. The Arabs' stealth jihad against Jews gained much support from the Jewish state herself. The Jewish revenants, living in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, are known to be called by Israelis and Arabs alike "settlers," which is a pejorative and dismissing term. These pioneers, who elected to inhabit the Jewish land that did not see a Jewish inhabitant for over 2000 years, are also called by the enemies of the Jews and the State of Israel, who want to see her fall, by other derogative names such as "racists," "occupiers," "bigots" and the like.

There are two sides to every story. The world chose to hear and narrate only one side of this story and simply refuses to acknowledge the other side of the story. This is therefore, the other side.

The derogative word "settler" has 'occupation' connotation attached to it. Since the French word 'revenir', means to come back after a long time to something that belongs to you, these revenants did just that, returned, after a lengthy absence, to their Biblical land of Judea and Samaria, which is a part and parcel of the Jewish state, Israel. Places which are mentioned in the Bible, such as Shilo, Israel's first Capital in the Promised Land after fleeing Egypt, and where the tabernacle first stood, are resurrected and built by Jewish revenants-pioneers. Ancient Biblical names come alive again.

The Jewish people's Land is Israel. This land was given to Abraham in an unshakeable covenant by God over 3,000 years ago. But not only according to God this land belongs to the Jews. This land was finally, legally and unanimously, returned to the Jews by the world's nations in 1922.

Since the Jewish revenants began heading for the hills of Judea and Samaria, the State of Israel has been in a state of a confusion mode.

The Israelis signed the Oslo Accords and Camp David with terrorists who had no inclination to keep and abide by any of the terms of those agreements; the Israelis disengaged from Gaza and parts of Judea and Samaria and gave the Arabs reasons to demand they disengage from more parts of the Jewish land. These political moves had one goal in the mind of the Jews only, which is achieving peace under false pretence. Every time a so called "peace treaty" agreement was signed, Israel's safety was reduced. It appears that Israel is forever seeking world's approval, without finally realizing that she does not need any approval. God gave His approval to the Jews. What Israel needs is people's fortitude, the Israeli leadership recognition of what is at stake through their judgment and decision making.

Therefore, when the media portrays the Jewish citizens of communities in Judea and Samaria, a/k/a West Bank, as fanatics and intolerant bigots, our response must be, they are simply Jewish revenants. The word "settlers" must be taken out of the lexicon and forgotten. We must end defaming the people who have made Aliyah – revenir to the land God gave the Jewish Nation. These Jewish revenants are pioneers in the land from which the Jews were illegally kept away since 1949 and it was finally returned to her Jewish owners in 1967, through a bloody war of self defense. These revenants-pioneers are principled Jews who chose to live in Judea and Samaria, along majestic aspirations and a great deal of fears of the unknown that only politics can inflict on them. (http://www.israelmuse.com/2010/08/news-videos-show-human-face-of.html)

The Other Side: The Jews of Judea and Samaria, Part 1, 2, 3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDQBucm8wiU&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77tWaF9qZVk&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVTokJ0Ljco&feature=player_embedded

Take the H.O.R.S.E by its rein and say: These Jewish revenants have legal and [H]uman rights to live in the Land of Israel from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean land; they are not [O]ccupying any land that belongs to someone else; they are not [R]acists and there are no [S]ettlements; there are simply Jewish towns and villages in Judea and Samaria.

Change the lexicon, change the future of the State of Israel.

Denying Islamists Federal Security Clearances

2012-01-30T06:54:00.002+02:00

David J. Rusin
In Politics,Religion
http://pjmedia.com/blog/denying-islamists-federal-security-clearances/?print=1

Federal departments and agencies tasked with safeguarding the U.S. must first safeguard themselves against Islamist [1] infiltration [2]. Recent news items about Muslims having security clearances rejected or revoked suggest that at least some government entities are forgoing political correctness and taking this problem seriously. More need to follow suit, but the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR [3]) is determined to make life difficult for them.

The disclosures began last June when the Investigative Newsource [4] (IN), then called the Watchdog Institute, published a report [5] in the Orange County Register describing how a multiagency probe had led the Department of Defense (DoD) one year earlier to remove the secret-level clearance of Rahim Sabadia, president of Sabtech Industries [6], a California-based company that manufactures electronics and computer systems for military use. This kept his firm from completing work on a classified contract for the U.S. Navy. Apparently the Pentagon had expressed concerns about Sabadia’s “charitable contributions.” IN’s findings [5] indicate that Sabadia, through his family foundation, “is a frequent donor to Muslim and international charities.” Only one Islamic beneficiary is identified: CAIR has received upwards of a million dollars from Sabadia over the past decade. The IN researchers also note that Omar Zaki, the former executive vice president of Sabtech, has sat on CAIR’s national board. In addition, Sabadia is linked [7] to the Council of Pakistan American Affairs (COPAA [8]), which often teams up with CAIR and other Islamist groups on various initiatives [9], events [10], and letters [11], though the IN piece does not mention any financial backing of it by Sabadia.

As is typical, the government has provided few specifics about why Sabadia lost his clearance. It is conceivable that his COPAA affiliation could have been viewed as placing him too close to Pakistan [12], but the defense contractor’s generous funding of CAIR is particularly intriguing as a potential cause. Surely it should have raised red flags for the DoD, given CAIR’s well-documented radicalism [13] and its status as an unindicted co-conspirator [14] in the trial of the Holy Land Foundation (HLF [15]), whose bankrolling of Hamas resulted in 108 guilty verdicts [16]. This prompted the FBI to cut off contact [17] with CAIR. A judge later ruled [18] that “the government has produced ample evidence to establish the associations of CAIR … with Hamas.”

Hussam Ayloush, head of CAIR’s Los Angeles chapter (CAIR-LA [19]), played the victim card in response to Sabadia’s woes. “It would be very unusual if it has anything to do with CAIR,” he insisted [5], because “you’re talking about the Muslim community’s NAACP.” Denying CAIR’s connections to Hamas, Ayloush opined that “the whole situation we’re dealing with is part of an attempt to smear the American Muslim community by targeting its organizations and business leaders.”

One important aspect of the Sabtech case — and another example of how Islamists walk through doors [20] opened for them — is the role of Congressman Gary Miller [21], a Republican from California. Miller, who has collected significant campaign contributions from Sabadia and his employees, “set aside $9.6 million in defense contract earmarks exclusively for Sabtech” since 2008, according to the IN article [5]. Miller pleaded ignorance about any charitable donations that could have led to Sabadia’s clearance troubles, adding, “If Sabtech was taken off that list, shame on them.”

Yet it is unlikely that Sabadia’s massive support of CAIR would have perturbed Miller, given his own record of friendly relations with the group. Not only has Miller attended at least one CAIR-LA banquet, in 2004 [22]. He also dispatched a sugary letter [23] to the 2008 event, extolling CAIR-LA for its supposed ability to help “ensure that our great country continues to be the world’s beacon of freedom and democracy” and for “playing a vital role in the integration of the Muslim community into American society in an effort to promote patriotism and pride in their home country.” To this day, CAIR’s national website carries a quote [24] from Miller’s encomium.

The 2008 CAIR-LA banquet took place more than a year after CAIR’s designation [14] in the HLF case. Additionally, CAIR-LA is quite problematic itself, due to the radical views [25] of Ayloush, its executive director. Readers who wish to ask Miller if he stands by his earmarks for Sabtech and praise for CAIR-LA may reach his office here [26].

Another revocation of a Muslim’s security clearance — one previously spotlighted [27] by Islamist Watch [28] — emerged several months ago in a federal lawsuit [29] filed against the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA [30]). Though budget analyst Mahmoud M. Hegab’s legal complaint [31] argues that the loss of his credentials amounts to religious discrimination, the real issue appears to have been the Islamist links of his new wife, Bushra Nusairat, whom he married [32] after passing his original screening but before starting work in January 2010.

Nusairat’s past — including her leadership position [33] with the radical Students for Justice in Palestine [34] during college and her prior graduation [35] from Virginia’s Islamic Saudi Academy [36], which has a history of using violent, bigoted textbooks [37] and whose 1999 valedictorian [38] conspired with al-Qaeda to assassinate President George W. Bush — drew the NGA’s attention as it reevaluated Hegab. However, his complaint indicates that the deal breaker [39] for his clearance was Nusairat’s “current affiliation with one or more organizations which consist of groups who are organized largely around their non-United States origin.”

This passage likely refers [40] to her job with Islamic Relief USA (IRUSA [41]), the country’s most prominent Muslim charity [42]. While IRUSA collaborates with federal [43] bodies [44] on humanitarian projects, it also distributes millions of dollars [45] per year to an international partner immersed in jihad [46], Islamic Relief Worldwide (IRW [47]). A NEFA Foundation analysis [48] states that IRW helped launch [49] the Union of Good [50], designated [51] by the U.S. Department of the Treasury for being a Hamas-financing coalition. In 2006, the Israeli government announced the arrest of an operative [52] of “IRW’s Gaza branch” who had “worked to transfer funds and assistance to various Hamas institutions and organizations”; on his computer were photos of “senior Nazi German officials” and Osama bin Laden. Furthermore, several IRW leaders [53] have been tied to the Muslim Brotherhood [54].

Hegab, who ultimately was placed on unpaid leave [35], may be the first to have lost a federal clearance [29] due to a spouse’s Islamist connections. The lawsuit is pending.

A third controversy involving Muslims and clearances came to light in a heavily redacted letter [55] to the DoD from Amara Chaudhry, civil rights director of CAIR’s Philadelphia office (CAIR-PA [56]). Dated November 30, 2011, it is written on behalf of a client “in response to your agency’s tentative denial of his eligibility for access to classified information based upon your concerns regarding his susceptibility to ‘foreign influence.’” A summary [57] on the CAIR-PA website describes him as “a federal employee with over three decades of service” who “was offered a merit-based promotion which required a top-level security clearance.” It states that “his recent pilgrimage to Mecca caused him to have ‘contacts with persons in places in the Middle East,’” thus sparking the rejection. CAIR-PA’s claims cannot be independently verified at this time.

At the core of the dispute is Guideline B [58] of the U.S. government’s Adjudicative Guidelines for Determining Eligibility for Access to Classified Information, which declares that “foreign contacts and interests may be a security concern if the individual has divided loyalties or foreign financial interests, may be manipulated or induced to help a foreign person, group, organization, or government in a way that is not in U.S. interests, or is vulnerable to pressure or coercion by any foreign interest.” An important consideration is whether the foreign country in question “is known to target United States citizens to obtain protected information and/or is associated with a risk of terrorism.”

Chaudhry uses an accompanying blog post [59] to lament that “in practice, the contacts which create such a ‘heightened risk’ are contacts in Muslim-majority countries” — no surprise, given the radicalism and terror being exported by many of them. She goes on to reason that due to their “disproportionate negative impact on American Muslims,” the provisions of Guideline B are “motivated, in whole or in part, by anti-Muslim bias and enacted with discriminatory intent.” Warning of a potential lawsuit, Chaudhry’s letter [55] demands not only that the DoD grant her client his clearance and promotion, but also that the government water down Guideline B.

Denying federal clearances based on support for suspect organizations, a spouse’s dealings with these groups, or contacts in nations of concern is nothing new; it was a common occurrence [29] during the Cold War. Without a doubt, an employee’s links to those who back the jihad should worry the U.S. government no less than did links to communist fronts half a century ago. After all, both Islamism and communism are totalitarian, utopian ideologies that seek to build their “paradises” on the ashes of Western liberal democracy — and both utilize stealth and subversion to advance their goals.

Howls of “anti-Muslim bias” cannot obscure the history of Islamist-aligned insiders abusing their posts to obtain confidential information for illegal ends. A 2008 piece [2] by Daniel Pipes collates numerous examples, including Nada Nadim Prouty [60], who as an FBI special agent searched restricted files on Hezbollah to determine whether family members had been tied to the group, and Weiss Rasool [61], a police officer in CAIR’s orbit [62] who alerted the subject of an FBI counterterrorism investigation to data that had a “disruptive effect” on the case. The trend continues. Last October, Mohamed Elibiary [63], a Khomeini-honoring Islamist [64] who inexplicably serves on an advisory council for the Department of Homeland Security and had been given unique access [65] to law enforcement intelligence records, was accused of downloading materials and shopping them to the media in hopes of furthering the “Islamophobia [66]” narrative.

Despite the aforementioned positive signs at the DoD and NGA, much remains to be done to combat Islamist penetration. Confidence in the overall integrity of background checks for federal security clearances took a hit following a 2011 report [67] about investigators “submitting forms saying they conducted interviews or verified official documents when they never did”; these bureaucratic holes need to be plugged. Additionally, the Elibiary saga demonstrates that various parts of the U.S. government are still largely blind to stealth jihad and all must be more proactive in rejecting Islamists before they do damage. With CAIR-LA’s Ayloush having boasted [5] that “many of our members … end up working for the defense industry and the State Department” and columnist Daniel Greenfield having identified several Muslim defense contractors [12] with unsettling associations, redoubled efforts to weed out Islamists cannot come soon enough.

Muslims should not be excluded from holding sensitive government jobs just because they are Muslims. However, the multifaceted conflict with radical Islam and the inescapable fact that every Islamist is a Muslim first make it imperative for agencies on the front lines to jettison political correctness, realistically appraise the threat, concentrate limited resources, and apply the greatest possible scrutiny [68] to Muslim employees and partners. Eternal vigilance [69] is the price of liberty, but that vigilance is most effective when properly focused.

Article printed from PJ Media: http://pjmedia.com

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/blog/denying-islamists-federal-security-clearances/

URLs in this post:

[1] Islamist: http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2005/01/islamists-penetrate-western-security

[2] infiltration: http://www.danielpipes.org/5834/the-wests-islamist-infiltrators

[3] CAIR: http://discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6176

[4] Investigative Newsource: http://www.inewsource.org/

[5] report: http://www.ocregister.com/articles/sabtech-303104-sabadia-miller.html

[6] Sabtech Industries: http://www.sabtech.com/

[7] linked: http://www.councilofpakistanamericanaffairs.org/garymiller.html

[8] COPAA: http://www.councilofpakistanamericanaffairs.org/

[9] initiatives: http://www.lacp.org/2006-Articles-Main/MuslimsAndHomelandSecurity.html

[10] events: http://www.mpac.org/events/muslim-youth-take-up-911-i-will-challenge.php

[11] letters: http://www.muslimadvocates.org/end_profiling/over_40_muslim_south_asian_and_2.html

[12] too close to Pakistan: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/09/29/the-defense-contractors-of-islam/

[13] well-documented radicalism: http://www.investigativeproject.org/profile/172

[14] unindicted co-conspirator: http://www.nysun.com/national/islamic-groups-named-in-hamas-funding-case/55778/

[15] HLF: http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6181

[16] 108 guilty verdicts: http://articles.latimes.com/2008/nov/25/nation/na-muslim-charity25

[17] cut off contact: http://www.investigativeproject.org/985/fbi-cuts-off-cair-over-hamas-questions

[18] ruled: http://www.investigativeproject.org/2340/federal-judge-agrees-cair-tied-to-hamas

[19] CAIR-LA: http://ca.cair.com/losangeles/

[20] walk through doors: http://www.islamist-watch.org/7954/the-us-government-failed-history-of-muslim

[21] Gary Miller: http://garymiller.house.gov/

[22] 2004: http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/518

[23] dispatched a sugary letter: http://thehollytree.blogspot.com/2008/11/evening-at-cair-socal-banquet-november.html

[24] carries a quote: http://www.cair.com/AboutUs/WhatTheySayAboutCAIR.aspx

[25] radical views: http://www.americansagainsthate.org/cw/profiles_cw.php

[26] here: http://garymiller.house.gov/Contact/

[27] previously spotlighted: http://www.islamist-watch.org/blog/2011/11/security-clearance-pulled-due-to-wife-islamist

[28] Islamist Watch: http://www.islamist-watch.org/

[29] federal lawsuit: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/post/worker-suing-intelligence-agency-claims-anti-muslim-bias/2011/10/31/gIQABMU0bM_blog.html

[30] NGA: https://www1.nga.mil/

[31] legal complaint: http://www.islamist-watch.org/documents/8449.pdf

[32] married: http://www.islamist-watch.org/documents/8449.pdf#page=3

[33] leadership position: http://www.islamist-watch.org/documents/8449.pdf#page=5

[34] Students for Justice in Palestine: http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/Articles/sjpstand4facts25.html

[35] graduation: http://www.islamist-watch.org/documents/8449.pdf#page=4

[36] Islamic Saudi Academy: http://www.saudiacademy.net/

[37] violent, bigoted textbooks: http://www.uscirf.gov/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2206&Itemid=1

[38] 1999 valedictorian: http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1849

[39] deal breaker: http://www.islamist-watch.org/documents/8449.pdf#page=10

[40] likely refers: http://www.islamist-watch.org/documents/8449.pdf#page=11

[41] IRUSA: http://www.irusa.org/

[42] most prominent Muslim charity: http://moneyjihad.wordpress.com/2010/09/07/double-digit-growth-for-islamic-relief-usa/

[43] federal: http://www.usaid.gov/press/releases/2011/pr110504.html

[44] bodies: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/08/10/islamic-relief-usa-starts-its-first-summer-food-service-program

[45] millions of dollars: http://moneyjihad.wordpress.com/2011/09/07/islamic-relief-worldwide-islamic-relief-usa/

[46] immersed in jihad: http://www.peaceandtolerance.org/docs/irmemo.pdf

[47] IRW: http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6625

[48] NEFA Foundation analysis: http://www.nefafoundation.org/miscellaneous/FeaturedDocs/nefaunionofgood0109.pdf

[49] helped launch: http://www.nefafoundation.org/miscellaneous/FeaturedDocs/nefaunionofgood0109.pdf#page=25

[50] Union of Good: http://www.terrorism-info.org.il/malam_multimedia/html/final/eng/sib/2_05/funds.htm

[51] designated: http://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/hp1267.aspx

[52] arrest of an operative: http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Terrorism-+Obstacle+to+Peace/Terrorism+and+Islamic+Fundamentalism-/British+national+arrested+for+assisting+Hamas+29-May-2006.htm

[53] IRW leaders: http://globalmbreport.org/?p=4938

[54] Muslim Brotherhood: http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6386

[55] heavily redacted letter: http://www.islamist-watch.org/documents/8973.pdf

[56] CAIR-PA: http://pa.cair.com/

[57] summary: http://pa.cair.com/civil-rights/representative-cases/

[58] Guideline B: http://www.state.gov/m/ds/clearances/60321.htm#b

[59] blog post: http://pa.cair.com/blog/federal-employee-denied-promotion/

[60] Nada Nadim Prouty: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/13/AR2007111302033.html

[61] Weiss Rasool: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/22/AR2008042201994.html

[62] CAIR’s orbit: http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=31352

[63] Mohamed Elibiary: http://pjmedia.com/blog/breaking-homeland-security-adviser-allegedly-leaked-intel-to-attack-rick-perry/

[64] Khomeini-honoring Islamist: http://bigpeace.com/pspoole/2010/10/18/homeland-securitys-muslim-advisor-mohamed-elibiary-spoke-at-conference-honoring-ayatollah-khomeini/

[65] given unique access: http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2011/11/03/alleged-dhs-leaker-elibiary-the-only-adviser-given-access-to-sensitive-law-enforcement-database/

[66] Islamophobia: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/09/07/islamophobia-thought-crime-of-the-totalitarian-future/

[67] 2011 report: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/jun/21/top-secret-clearance-checks-falsified/

[68] greatest possible scrutiny: http://www.danielpipes.org/1009/the-enemy-within-and-the-need-for-profiling

[69] Eternal vigilance: http://wiki.monticello.org/mediawiki/index.php/Eternal_vigilance_is_the_price_of_liberty_%28Quotation%29

David J. Rusin
David J. Rusin is a research fellow at Islamist Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.

"Pushing Back, Pushing Forward"

2012-01-30T00:45:00.000+02:00

There's a good deal happening, and much to respond to. Please read this through and act. I like to think of my readers as also actors in the important fights we are fighting -- against some things, for others. Your assistance does make a difference.

~~~~~~~~~~

I begin with a link to my latest article on Front Page Magazine, "Answering Obama's Israel Lies."

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/27/answering-obamas-israel-lies/

It exposes the distortions and half-truths that have been put out in a campaign video purporting to show what a good friend to Israel Obama is. Please, circulate broadly.

Here's the link to the original video, in case you haven't seen it. It's making the rounds big time and must be responded to in a serious fashion, for it's so easy to be taken in if you don't know the facts. When you DO know the facts, the response to this is some combination of rage and deep disgust.

https://my.barackobama.com/page/share/america-and-israel?source=20120120_da&utm_medium=email&utm_source=obama&utm_campaign=20120120_da&email=fallets%40bellsouth.net&zip=33446&firstname=&lastname=Fallet

(My thanks to Debbie B.) very significant vote is coming up in the Knesset this week. The issues are complex and YOUR COOPERATION HERE IS EXCEEDINGLY IMPORTANT.

You've heard about this legislation from me previously: Proposed by MK Zevulun Orlev (Habayit Hayehudi), it would forbid the dismantling of communities of more than 20 families in Judea and Samaria without properly filed documentation that the land was Arab-owned. This would negate the vague, unsubstantiated claims of land being "Arab" that are currently filed in court by Peace Now.

What is more, this legislation stipulates that if the documentation of Arab ownership is filed after a specified period of time (four years, as I understand it), the community still wouldn't be taken down and instead the Arab land owner would be provided with monetary compensation.

~~~~~~~~~~

Prime Minister Netanyahu -- at the behest of Minister Benny Begin, who is attempting to negotiate a "deal" with the residents of Migron and wants them to feel squeezed -- has secured a negative vote on this legislation in the Ministerial Committee for Legislation. Nothing prevents the promoters of a piece of legislation from bringing it to the Knesset without the approval of the committee -- it is simply that without this endorsement it is less likely to pass in the Knesset.

An appeal has been filed -- requesting a re-vote in the committee -- by Minister of Diaspora Affairs Yuli Edelstein (Likud) and Minister of Science Daniel Hershkowitz (Habayit Hayehudi) -- but there has been no response to this. There is reason to believe the original vote would overturned if there were a second vote.

~~~~~~~~~~

Now MK Oren has decided to bring this proposed law before the Knesset -- possibly by Wednesday.

And here's where you have to pay attention to understand the situation and its serious implications:

Coalition discipline will not be invoked, so that members of the Knesset will be free to follow their conscience on this important matter rather than having to vote a party line.

HOWEVER, since the Ministerial Committee voted against the legislation, ministers are expected to also vote against it in the Knesset. They can, if they choose, vote for the legislation, but then, according to the rules, Netanyahu can fire them. He is not obligated to fire them, he is simply at liberty to do so.

Needless to say, Netanyahu is applying pressure, and making noises about firing those who do not toe the line.

~~~~~~~~~~

This has an unpleasant echo of Gush Katif, when then PM Sharon applied every sort of strong-arm technique possible to keep his ministers in line so they'd vote as he wished. We cannot let this happen again. Sharon betrayed his mandate when he behaved this way, and Netanyahu is now playing matters in a similar fashion. I've cut him slack with regard to many issues. But I cut him none here.

~~~~~~~~~~

In my last posting, I asked you to write to the Likud ministers in support of Migron. Now I ask you to write again, to these ministers and those of Shas and Yisrael Beitenu as well:

Say that you understand that legislation that would save Migron and other communities in Judea and Samaria is about to come before the Knesset. It would release Israel from the strangle-hold of Peace Now and prevent Jewish communities from being destroyed.

Remind them that the mandate given to the coalition by the voters was nationalist and that they would be betraying this mandate if they voted against this legislation.

Tell them that, even more importantly, if they vote against it they would be taking a position that is not in the best interests of the State of Israel.

Let them know that you see it as imperative that they vote their conscience on this matter. It is not acceptable for them to place job security ahead of what is best for Israel. In any event there is no guarantee that the prime minister will fire any ministers, and less likely if many ministers stand together to do what is right.

Voters and those who support the parties are very tired of political game playing. The ministers must know that they are being watched and that support in the future will depend on their readiness to do the right thing now.

~~~~~~~~~~

Do NOT send a group message; the message to each minister should be separate. But there is no reason to be intimidated by the fact that there are several names on the list that follows.

There is a way to make it easy for yourself: Compose a message that says "Dear Minister," followed by text of that message. Copy that message and salutation. Then, in turn, click on each minister's e-mail address, paste in the greeting and message, and hit send.

LIKUD:

Minister of Improvement of Government Services Michael Eitan

meitan@knesset.gov.il

Minister of Environmental Protection Gilad Erdan

gerdan@knesset.gov.il

Minister of Welfare Moshe Kahlon

mcachlon@knesset.gov.il

Minister of Transportation Yisrael Katz

yiskatz@knesset.gov.il

Minister of Culture Limor Livnat

llivnat@knesset.gov.il (a previous typo in this address has been corrected)

Minister Yosi Peled

ypeled@knesset.gov.il

Minister of Education Gideon Saar

gsaar@knesset.gov.il

Minister of the Development of the Negev Silvan Shalom

sshalom@knesset.gov.il

Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz

ysteinitz@knesset.gov.il

Minister of Strategic Affairs Moshe Yaalon

myaalon@knesset.gov.il

SHAS:

Minister of Internal Affairs Eli Yishai

eyishay@knesset.gov.il

Minister Meshulam Nahari

mnahari@knesset.gov.il

Minister of Religious Affairs Yakov Margi

ymargi@knesset.gov.il

Minister of Housing Ariel Atias

aatias@knesset.gov.il

YISRAEL BEITENU:

Minister of Tourism Stas Misezhnikov

smiseznikov@knesset.gov.il
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman
aliberman@knesset.gov.il

Minister of Immigrant Absorption Sofa Landver
slandver@knesset.gov.il

Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Danny Ayalon
dayalon@knesset.gov.il

~~~~~~~~~~

If Gush Katif infuriated you or pained you, if you want to be part of a democratic process that protects Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, if the idea of their having to turn over their land to Arabs distresses you, please! take the time to do this.

Numbers count a great deal. Send this to others who are likely to also respond.

Thank you. More will follow tomorrow.

~~~~~~~~~~

In closing, a note of clarification, very broadly, for those who are outside of Israel and perhaps confused by our system: Parties receive mandates (seats) in the Knesset according to the percentage of votes they secured in the previous election. If one party does not have sufficient seats (i.e., more than 60) to constitute a majority of the Knesset, then a coalition is formed; this always happens. Once the coalition is in place, there are ministerial positions allocated to the various parties in the coalition. With very rare exceptions, the ministers are chosen from the ranks of those within the parties who have been elected to the Knesset. Those who are ministers sit in the Cabinet and constitute the government, but they are still members of the Knesset.

~~~~~~~~~~

© Arlene Kushner. This material is produced by Arlene Kushner, functioning as an independent journalist. Permission is granted for it to be reproduced only with proper attribution.

See my website at www.arlenefromisrael.info Contact Arlene at akushner@netvision.net.il

This material is transmitted by Arlene only to persons who have requested it or agreed to receive it. If you are on the list and wish to be removed, contact Arlene and include your name in the text of the message.

2012-01-30T00:37:00.000+02:00

David J. Rusin
PJ Media

http://www.meforum.org/3161/islamists-security-clearance

Federal departments and agencies tasked with safeguarding the U.S. must first safeguard themselves against Islamist infiltration. Recent news items about Muslims having security clearances rejected or revoked suggest that at least some government entities are forgoing political correctness and taking this problem seriously. More need to follow suit, but the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is determined to make life difficult for them.

The disclosures began last June when the Investigative Newsource (IN), then called the Watchdog Institute, published a report in the Orange County Register describing how a multiagency probe had led the Department of Defense (DoD) one year earlier to remove the secret-level clearance of Rahim Sabadia, president of Sabtech Industries, a California-based company that manufactures electronics and computer systems for military use. This kept his firm from completing work on a classified contract for the U.S. Navy. Apparently the Pentagon had expressed concerns about Sabadia's "charitable contributions."

IN's findings indicate that Sabadia, through his family foundation, "is a frequent donor to Muslim and international charities." Only one Islamic beneficiary is identified: CAIR has received upwards of a million dollars from Sabadia over the past decade. The IN researchers also note that Omar Zaki, the former executive vice president of Sabtech, has sat on CAIR's national board. In addition, Sabadia is linked to the Council of Pakistan American Affairs (COPAA), which often teams up with CAIR and other Islamist groups on various initiatives, events, and letters, though the IN piece does not mention any financial backing of it by Sabadia. As is typical, the government has provided few specifics about why Sabadia lost his clearance. It is conceivable that his COPAA affiliation could have been viewed as placing him too close to Pakistan, but the defense contractor's generous funding of CAIR is particularly intriguing as a potential cause. Surely it should have raised red flags for the DoD, given CAIR's well-documented radicalism and its status as an unindicted co-conspirator in the trial of the Holy Land Foundation (HLF), whose bankrolling of Hamas resulted in 108 guilty verdicts. This prompted the FBI to cut off contact with CAIR. A judge later ruled that "the government has produced ample evidence to establish the associations of CAIR … with Hamas."

Hussam Ayloush, head of CAIR's Los Angeles chapter (CAIR-LA), played the victim card in response to Sabadia's woes. "It would be very unusual if it has anything to do with CAIR," he insisted, because "you're talking about the Muslim community's NAACP." Denying CAIR's connections to Hamas, Ayloush opined that "the whole situation we're dealing with is part of an attempt to smear the American Muslim community by targeting its organizations and business leaders."

One important aspect of the Sabtech case — and another example of how Islamists walk through doors opened for them — is the role of Congressman Gary Miller, a Republican from California. Miller, who has collected significant campaign contributions from Sabadia and his employees, "set aside $9.6 million in defense contract earmarks exclusively for Sabtech" since 2008, according to the IN article. Miller pleaded ignorance about any charitable donations that could have led to Sabadia's clearance troubles, adding, "If Sabtech was taken off that list, shame on them."

Yet it is unlikely that Sabadia's massive support of CAIR would have perturbed Miller, given his own record of friendly relations with the group. Not only has Miller attended at least one CAIR-LA banquet, in 2004. He also dispatched a sugary letter to the 2008 event, extolling CAIR-LA for its supposed ability to help "ensure that our great country continues to be the world's beacon of freedom and democracy" and for "playing a vital role in the integration of the Muslim community into American society in an effort to promote patriotism and pride in their home country." To this day, CAIR's national website carries a quote from Miller's encomium.

The 2008 CAIR-LA banquet took place more than a year after CAIR's designation in the HLF case. Additionally, CAIR-LA is quite problematic itself, due to the radical views of Ayloush, its executive director. Readers who wish to ask Miller if he stands by his earmarks for Sabtech and praise for CAIR-LA may reach his office here.

Another revocation of a Muslim's security clearance — one previously spotlighted by Islamist Watch — emerged several months ago in a federal lawsuit filed against the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). Though budget analyst Mahmoud M. Hegab's legal complaint argues that the loss of his credentials amounts to religious discrimination, the real issue appears to have been the Islamist links of his new wife, Bushra Nusairat, whom he married after passing his original screening but before starting work in January 2010.

Nusairat's past — including her leadership position with the radical Students for Justice in Palestine during college and her prior graduation from Virginia's Islamic Saudi Academy, which has a history of using violent, bigoted textbooks and whose 1999 valedictorian conspired with al-Qaeda to assassinate President George W. Bush — drew the NGA's attention as it reevaluated Hegab. However, his complaint indicates that the deal breaker for his clearance was Nusairat's "current affiliation with one or more organizations which consist of groups who are organized largely around their non-United States origin."

This passage likely refers to her job with Islamic Relief USA (IRUSA), the country's most prominent Muslim charity. While IRUSA collaborates with federal bodies on humanitarian projects, it also distributes millions of dollars per year to an international partner immersed in jihad, Islamic Relief Worldwide (IRW). A NEFA Foundation analysis states that IRW helped launch the Union of Good, designated by the U.S. Department of the Treasury for being a Hamas-financing coalition. In 2006, the Israeli government announced the arrest of an operative of "IRW's Gaza branch" who had "worked to transfer funds and assistance to various Hamas institutions and organizations"; on his computer were photos of "senior Nazi German officials" and Osama bin Laden. Furthermore, several IRW leaders have been tied to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Hegab, who ultimately was placed on unpaid leave, may be the first to have lost a federal clearance due to a spouse's Islamist connections. The lawsuit is pending.

A third controversy involving Muslims and clearances came to light in a heavily redacted letter to the DoD from Amara Chaudhry, civil rights director of CAIR's Philadelphia office (CAIR-PA). Dated November 30, 2011, it is written on behalf of a client "in response to your agency's tentative denial of his eligibility for access to classified information based upon your concerns regarding his susceptibility to 'foreign influence.'" A summary on the CAIR-PA website describes him as "a federal employee with over three decades of service" who "was offered a merit-based promotion which required a top-level security clearance." It states that "his recent pilgrimage to Mecca caused him to have 'contacts with persons in places in the Middle East,'" thus sparking the rejection. CAIR-PA's claims cannot be independently verified at this time.

At the core of the dispute is Guideline B of the U.S. government's Adjudicative Guidelines for Determining Eligibility for Access to Classified Information, which declares that "foreign contacts and interests may be a security concern if the individual has divided loyalties or foreign financial interests, may be manipulated or induced to help a foreign person, group, organization, or government in a way that is not in U.S. interests, or is vulnerable to pressure or coercion by any foreign interest." An important consideration is whether the foreign country in question "is known to target United States citizens to obtain protected information and/or is associated with a risk of terrorism."

Chaudhry uses an accompanying blog post to lament that "in practice, the contacts which create such a 'heightened risk' are contacts in Muslim-majority countries" — no surprise, given the radicalism and terror being exported by many of them. She goes on to reason that due to their "disproportionate negative impact on American Muslims," the provisions of Guideline B are "motivated, in whole or in part, by anti-Muslim bias and enacted with discriminatory intent." Warning of a potential lawsuit, Chaudhry's letter demands not only that the DoD grant her client his clearance and promotion, but also that the government water down Guideline B.

Denying federal clearances based on support for suspect organizations, a spouse's dealings with these groups, or contacts in nations of concern is nothing new; it was a common occurrence during the Cold War. Without a doubt, an employee's links to those who back the jihad should worry the U.S. government no less than did links to communist fronts half a century ago. After all, both Islamism and communism are totalitarian, utopian ideologies that seek to build their "paradises" on the ashes of Western liberal democracy — and both utilize stealth and subversion to advance their goals.

Howls of "anti-Muslim bias" cannot obscure the history of Islamist-aligned insiders abusing their posts to obtain confidential information for illegal ends. A 2008 piece by Daniel Pipes collates numerous examples, including Nada Nadim Prouty, who as an FBI special agent searched restricted files on Hezbollah to determine whether family members had been tied to the group, and Weiss Rasool, a police officer in CAIR's orbit who alerted the subject of an FBI counterterrorism investigation to data that had a "disruptive effect" on the case. The trend continues. Last October, Mohamed Elibiary, a Khomeini-honoring Islamist who inexplicably serves on an advisory council for the Department of Homeland Security and had been given unique access to law enforcement intelligence records, was accused of downloading materials and shopping them to the media in hopes of furthering the "Islamophobia" narrative.

Despite the aforementioned positive signs at the DoD and NGA, much remains to be done to combat Islamist penetration. Confidence in the overall integrity of background checks for federal security clearances took a hit following a 2011 report about investigators "submitting forms saying they conducted interviews or verified official documents when they never did"; these bureaucratic holes need to be plugged. Additionally, the Elibiary saga demonstrates that various parts of the U.S. government are still largely blind to stealth jihad and all must be more proactive in rejecting Islamists before they do damage. With CAIR-LA's Ayloush having boasted that "many of our members … end up working for the defense industry and the State Department" and columnist Daniel Greenfield having identified several Muslim defense contractors with unsettling associations, redoubled efforts to weed out Islamists cannot come soon enough.

Muslims should not be excluded from holding sensitive government jobs just because they are Muslims. However, the multifaceted conflict with radical Islam and the inescapable fact that every Islamist is a Muslim first make it imperative for agencies on the front lines to jettison political correctness, realistically appraise the threat, concentrate limited resources, and apply the greatest possible scrutiny to Muslim employees and partners. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, but that vigilance is most effective when properly focused.

Why Syria’s Regime is Surviving a Revolution

2012-01-30T00:34:00.001+02:00

Barry Rubin

Despite what is now the longest-running revolution in Middle Eastern history, the Syrian regime will probably be in power on December 31, 2012. I don’t say that because it’s what I want to happen—Syria’s revolution is more democratic-minded than those in Libya or Egypt; the government is far more repressive than the former dictatorships in Tunisia or Egypt—but because it seems inevitable.

Why is it that after so many months of massive demonstrations and really bloody repression, that President Bashar al-Assad seems likely to survive? Of course no one knows what will happen but there are three reasons to think that Assad's regime is surviving, though the cost of that is a great deal of suffering and the wrecking of the country.

First, the rulers know that it is a case of kill or be killed. Given the hated and sectarian nature of the regime—overwhelmingly dominated by Alawites who comprise only about 12 percent of the population—the elite can expect no mercy if it falls. At least, the Alawite elite and its closest allies among the Sunni Arab Muslims will lose their wealth and power; at most, they and even their families will lose their lives. A negotiated solution of any sort is not a real possibility and the elite’s members—including army generals—are aware that they must all hang together or they will all hang separately. When they look at Egypt, where they see the former president on trial and the armed forces under serious challenge, they are not encouraged to believe they should compromise with the opposition. And when they remember Libya and Iraq, where the former leaders were executed, that conclusion is reinforced.
Second, the revolutionaries don’t have a strategy for seizing state power. They daily hold courageous demonstrations and suffer severe losses through killings and repression, yet the protests cannot force a determined dictatorship out of power. As in Iran—but not as in Egypt and Tunisia, where the armies were unwilling to mow down their own people—the regime's ruthlessness makes it quite willing to pursue a strategy of brutality.
The Free Syrian Army is the opposition’s other potential route to power. But it remains too small, too inexperienced (many or most of its recruits are not former soldiers), and too lacking in international support to overthrow the dictatorship by force.
Third, the Syrian dictatorship is receiving ample international support, mainly from Iran but also from Russia. While the Arab League has supposedly come out against the regime, its intervention is so toothless and time-wasting that it serves the regime because as long as the League doesn’t call for tougher measures neither will Western countries.
The lack of Western intervention is another international problem for the opposition and advantage for the regime. At present, the opposition has two main requests, drawn from experience in Iraq and Libya. It asks that the West impose a no-fly zone on the Syrian military and that it helps establish an exclusion area along the Turkey-Syria frontier where refugees and dissidents can flee, an opposition government can create a liberated zone, and the Free Syrian Army can mobilize.
There does not appear to be the slightest chance of this happening. Why? I almost wish that I could say it was due to Western fear of an Islamist takeover of Syria. In fact, however, the U.S. government has actually helped the Islamists there. The real reason is fear of making another Middle East commitment, along with a strange radical ideology in the West which makes it more eager to help anti-Western forces than friendly ones.
Obviously, no one could seriously propose sending Western forces to Syria. Yet enforcing a no-flight zone would be a relatively easy, low-cost effort that might help break the regime that has been the main Arab sponsor of terrorism (always exceeding Iraq in that respect) during the last forty years and also the Arab government that has done the most to sabotage any Arab-Israeli negotiated settlement. Again, though, there isn’t any chance of this happening, certainly not under an Obama Administration. Indeed,Russia is selling Syria advanced warplanes so the regime can attack the opposition more effectively! So much for a no-fly zone.
What might break President Bashar al-Assad’s regime? Other than his being assassinated, the only likely development would be if some Syrian generals decided that the rest of the elite can only survive by eliminating him and his family. Even then, though, they would probably try to continue the regime under a different name, offering the opposition a face-saving compromise of making some concessions in exchange for an end to the revolt. This is an offer the opposition, unless it is really desperate by that point, might well reject as insufficient.
Nevertheless, the prospects are quite likely that Assad will be in power when the year ends. If the deadlock goes on without apparent end the revolution might die down, as it did in Iran. Syria will then be another case to show that revolutions usually succeed only when the elite is divided and loses its nerve, rather than being an inevitable response to oppression.
It will also show that in the Middle East only pro-Western regimes (including the temporarily “cooperative” Libyan dictatorship) get overthrown. In contrast, anti-Western governments prosper, often with Western protection or help. Go figure.

Professor Barry Rubin, Director, Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center http://www.gloria-center.org
The Rubin Report blog http://rubinreports.blogspot.com/
He is a featured columnist at PJM http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/.
Editor, Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal http://www.gloria-center.org
Editor Turkish Studies,http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=t713636933%22

What self inflicted blindness!‏

2012-01-30T00:31:00.002+02:00

Israel Matzav

Just a few hours ago, I reported that the Obama administration plans to reward the Muslim Brotherhood for refusing to speak with Israel by speeding up US aid to Egypt. Now, it appears that the shoe is on the other foot as well. Perhaps that will change things.

Reports out of Cairo indicate that six Americans who were working for American-funded organizations promoting democracy in Egypt have been barred from leaving the country. One of them is Sam LaHood, the son of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. Ray LaHood is a Republican and the son of a Lebanese father and an American mother. Sam (pictured with his father at the father's swearing-in ceremony) is being held in what's being called de facto detention. And the Obama administration is said to be outraged (Hat Tip: Memeorandum).

The travel ban came to light on Thursday after the International Republican Institute, an American-backed democracy-building group, disclosed that the Egyptian authorities had stopped its Egypt director, Sam LaHood, at the Cairo airport on Saturday before he could board a flight to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.

Mr. LaHood is the son of Ray LaHood, the secretary of transportation and a former Republican congressman from Illinois. He is one of six Americans working for the Republican Institute or its sister organization, the National Democratic Institute, whom Egypt has blocked from leaving as part of a politically charged criminal investigation into their activities. ust a day before Mr. LaHood was detained temporarily, President Obama had warned Egypt�s leader, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, that this year�s American military aid hinged on satisfying new Congressional legislation requiring that Egypt�s military government take tangible steps toward democracy, said three people briefed on the conversation.

Mr. Obama referred specifically to the criminal inquiry into several democracy-building groups with foreign financing, including the Republican Institute, the people who were briefed said, and he made clear that Egypt had not fulfilled the Congressional requirements, but Field Marshal Tantawi did not seem to believe him.

So it's Tantawi's fault and not the Brotherhood's? Of course, why didn't I think of that? But the result will be the same: This could lead to a hold-up of US aid money to Egypt.

But here's the weird part. The Obama administration seems to be wanting to play good cop, bad cop over this - and to make Congress the bad cop.

Then, after the travel ban on the Americans became public on Thursday, the administration made the warning public as well. �It is the prerogative of Congress to say that our future military aid is going to be conditioned on a democratic transition,� Michael H. Posner, an assistant secretary of state responsible for human rights issues, said at a previously scheduled press conference in Cairo on Thursday.

Boy is that one rich. Didn't Hillary Clinton argue precisely the opposite six months ago? This is from the Times:

Though members of Congress have talked this year of imposing conditions on American aid to Egypt, the Obama administration had previously opposed the idea.

The White House negotiated intensely to allow the president the option of waiving the conditions, if necessary, in the name of national security. Now Hillary Rodham Clinton, the secretary of state, is required to certify that Egypt is making democratic progress � carrying out �policies to protect freedom of expression, association and religion, and due process of law� � before releasing the aid this fiscal year.

I don't see how she can certify any of those things regardless of whether these six people are released. Freedom of religion with a parliament that's dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists? You've got to be kidding.

Representative Frank R. Wolf, a Republican from Virginia who serves on the House Appropriations Committee, said the Egyptian government continued to flout American efforts and to undermine democratic rights. �This is out of control,� Mr. Wolf said on Thursday. �If the administration follows the law, there�s no way they can continue the aid.�

And in case you're wondering about the head count...

In addition to Mr. LaHood, four other employees from the Republican Institute, including two Americans, had been barred from travel. Officials of the National Democratic Institute said that six of its employees had been banned, including three Americans.

Hmmm.

Free Market Socialism

2012-01-29T19:14:00.002+02:00

Sultan Knish

Before Obama got around to digging up his copy of last year's State of the Union address, crossing out a few lines, adding something about Iraq and Bin Laden, before heading out for another round of golf, David Brooks wrote a New York Times column urging Obama not to forget to mention the importance of promoting education for a free market economy. He titled it, Free-Market Socialism.

Now the idea that Obama or any Democratic politician running for the presidency would forget to mention what has become the chief talking point of their political class on jobs and globalization is about as likely as Bill Clinton taking a vow of chastity. When the working class timorously asks where the jobs are, that are always told the jobs are mostly gone and the only way they will ever come back is if they educate themselves for the better jobs that are out there somewhere.

Obama has added the refrain has added to it a warning that if we don't spend more money on education that China will out-compete us. Given that China's biggest asset is cheap labor and our assets are factories that are too expensive to run, natural resources we can't touch and a massive over-educated and over-entitled class that was promised jobs and instead got student loans, it's hard to see how more of the same will fix the problem. If our chief competitors in the economic arena were Russia, Japan or Sweden, pushing college degrees might make more sense. Or at least engineering degrees, but we're not losing a competition for college jobs, we're losing a competition for industries. American manufacturing hasn't gone down the tubes because we don't have enough college grads, it's gone down the tubes because it became too expensive and too difficult to be worth the effort.

New York, Minnesota and North Dakota have some of the highest degree rates in the country. New York has 8 percent unemployment. North Dakota has 3 percent unemployment. Because as it turns out degrees do not magically create jobs. They can only fit existing jobs. New York has a surplus of graduates. North Dakota seems to have just about enough though I suspect a sizable amount of that 3 percent are degree holders too.

To prop up his thesis, Brooks reaches for an Atlantic article that studies the case of a South Carolina woman who works on an assembly line, who had to drop out of school due to a pregnancy and is raising two children as a single mother making it difficult for her to continue her education. Instead she makes 13 dollars an hour in a unskilled job.

Brooks expects us to see this as a tragedy when quite a few college graduates would kill for a 13 dollar an hour job. The woman had planned to go to a four year college to become an animal control officer. The website for one South Carolina county advertises an animal control officer position at 15 dollars and 28 cents an hour.

Would Brooks' victim really be better off if she had gone into debt for a four year college program only to earn less than 2.50 more an hour? And would anyone really be better off with another government employee on the payroll instead of a productive worker?

The ability to get a decent paying work in the manufacturing sector is what really built a prosperous middle class in the United States. The decline of that middle class has been proportional to the growth industry in bureaucratic activists. Take the factory that is the topic of piece. Why is it located in South Carolina? Among other things, South Carolina is a right to work state and a business friendly state. Moving to South Carolina is a patriotic alternative to moving to China.

Rather than ask why there's a factory in South Carolina that's operating close to the economic redline as a family owned business competing with international conglomerates, the Atlantic and Brooks wonder how the workers can be moved into better paying jobs. As it turns out they can't be because there is no money for it. And there's no money for it because the cost of manufacturing is too high.

For decades the Democrats have offered the same technocratic prescription, more education for the high paying technology jobs of tomorrow. Never mind that our technology revolution was the brainchild of college dropouts and outsourced to Chinese factories. The high tech jobs of tomorrow are still in Shanghai and technology has made outsourcing much easier than ever. The technology revolutions of tomorrow will only do the same thing. Americans can take the lead in innovation, but unless those innovations are translated into viable manufacturing jobs than all the brilliant ideas coming out of Harvard and Yale grads will still end up being assembled in Chinese factory towns.

When Democratic presidents went around touting the college mantra did they seriously believe that we could replace every lost job with a college job without further raising the costs to employees and employers resulting in a continuing diminution of purchasing power? And did they really believe that those jobs wouldn't be able to be outsourced either? If Clinton could have feigned naivete back in the nineties, today when radiology, records and programming jobs are being organically outsourced at the establishment level it's more ridiculous than ever for Obama to make the same old college pitch.

We already have David Brook's "Free Market Socialism" which has done a fantastic job of attracting unskilled workers who take jobs at lower rates than American workers do. All those policies have done is attract illegal aliens who want the benefits and are willing to work at illegal per hour wages and without the rules and regulations. They haven't empowered Americans to work, all they have done is expanded the underclass by undermining working class jobs.

The higher education boondoggle has done an excellent job of shifting jobs from the private sector into the public sector through government or government subsidized jobs. The shift is as much cultural as it is economic, its mainspring is the perception that ordinary jobs are worthless and the truly meaningful jobs are their kinds of jobs. The culture extends to the kind of people that they seek to create. Out with the working middle class, in with the college graduate who has spent an extra four years being programmed by the more sophisticated model of their indoctrination machine and who will think more like them and live more like them, who will share their values and politics.

Mass education also devalues the actual education being received. Today's college students know less than yesterday's high school graduates. Today's high school graduates know less than a middle schooler from 50 years ago. And there is no way around that. Tossing everyone into the same system and expecting the same results leads to a lower quality system. The more education is universalized, the more it is simplified.

Making matters worse is technocratic standardization which insists that the only reason some students fail is inadequate teaching or funding, which leads to more money being tossed into the shredder and more national standards that expect teachers to accomplish the impossible. Either the results have to be faked or the standards have to be lowered. Usually a combination of both which leads to a nation where everyone has a degree and no one knows anything.

Russia, which still leads the world in degrees, mastered this version of universal education in the Soviet period, pumping out degrees for everyone, while still lagging behind the rest of the world in every area that mattered. Like so many other collective efforts, its mass production and central programming did not lead to success, it led to worthless results and purely statistical achievements.

Like the Soviet Union we can push to be the nation with the most degrees dispensed, which will be a costly statistical achievement because our educational system costs a good deal more than the Soviet one did. The USSR could afford to process students like cattle, but trying to duplicate this achievement with a college education that often costs as much as a house, will lead to a huge burden on the taxpayers and on the students.

Obama's response to this economic reality was equally predictable. Faced with high costs, socialists demand that the producers lower their prices. Obama demanded that universities bring tuition down, which if he is really serious about it they will do. At a price. The cost of higher education may be inflated, but it's not going to be reduced by cutting the non-essentials, it's going to be reduced by cutting the essentials, which means an education that will be increasingly worthless as the mass production model is used to drive costs down.

In the State of the Union, Obama demanded that all states compel students to finish high school. And after that why not make higher education into a mandatory mandate as well? If everyone can be forced to buy health care, then the same economics can be applied to forcing everyone to buy a higher education as well. Sallie Mae will get more customers and colleges will get reluctant students that they can quickly dispense with at low cost and high profit. Call it ObamaEducation.

Will any of this help us beat China? About as well as the Soviet Union beat us with its degree mills. Our problems are not that we don't have enough education options, it's that we have a liberal elite with a disdain for traditional jobs and a conservative elite with a disdain for protecting American jobs. Combine the two elites together and you get the Free Market Socialism that Brooks is calling for. But there's no need to call for it, it's already here.

Between the socialists and the free traders, we're bleeding jobs and industries, we are overwhelmed by immigrants and the cost of subsidizing a post-American society on a post-American economy. And no amount of degrees is going to fix that as long as we have a surplus of ideologues talking about jobs, without considering the real world consequences of their policies.

Foreign Woman Attacked in Egypt’s Tahrir Square

2012-01-29T05:48:00.002+02:00

CHALLAH @ Bikya Masr

A foreign woman was stripped and sexually assaulted on Wednesday evening in Egypt’s iconic Tahrir Square, one eyewitness said on Twitter and another confirmed in an email to Bikyamasr.com.

The woman, who’s identity has not been revealed, was taken away in an ambulance after being assaulted for 10 minutes. Her husband reportedly was unable to intervene and witnessed the incident.

“I saw the woman and then dozens of men surrounded her and started grabbing her, when she screamed for help some people came, but they were hit in the face,” wrote one witness.

What happened next was “appalling,” said the trusted witness, who asked for anonymity. “The men just started tearing at her clothes and grabbing her body all over. When she fought back, they pushed her. It was chaos.”

There were unconfirmed reports that the men “violated” her with their hands.

The report adds some interesting and shocking statistics:

Instances of sexual assaults on female journalists covering the events in Tahrir Square have continued in the year since Mubarak’s ouster. According to studies conducted by the Egyptian Center for Women’s Right (ECWR) in 2008, 98 percent of foreign women and 83 percent of Egyptian women surveyed had experienced sexual harassment in Egypt.

Meanwhile, 62 percent of Egyptian men confessed to harassing women and 53 percent of Egyptian men faulted women for “bringing it on.”

This assault should bring forth memories of the assaults on Lara Logan, Mona Eltahway, and Caroline Sanz.

Update: Bikya Masr now has an interview with the attacked foreigner.

“They started fighting over who was going to do what,” Heather told Bikyamasr.com in an exclusive interview. She came forward after seeing the report on a foreign woman who was stripped naked and assaulted only hours after her own incident.

“My roommates and I fell to the ground when they attacked us. The people pulled our pants off even as we yelled and tried to fight,” she continued.

The incident occurred around 7:30 PM local time, just as night was taking hold of the city. Heather said the attack happened “in the center of Tahrir.”

She said that after the men pulled their pants off, they continued to grab and grobe the women’s bodies. “It is disgusting. They put fingers up my ass,” she revealed.

Later in the report we learn

Heather said that she came forward to talk about what happened to her “because people need to know what goes on. It is the only way to start making it a problem that will have to be dealt with.”

However, many people told her to not reveal what happened to her because she was told, “it would hurt the image of the revolution.” But Heather said after seeing the reports of others and their assaults, “I felt it was right to say something.”

Update: In a third article at Bikya Masr, Joseph Mayton adds:

At least four women have been reported to have had their clothes ripped from their bodies, assault and groped endlessly by mobs of men in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Certainly more reports of assaults will flood editors’ email in the coming days. It seems whenever there is a mass protest in Egypt it is accompanied by attacks against women.

Egyptians have attempted to avoid the situation plaguing society for far too long. If it happens to a foreigner, they apologize, but if it happens to their sister, their mother, their girlfriend, their spouse, there has always been a tacit denial of any real problem. Instead of trying to save face, what should be happening is a real dialogue, a real open discussion about the causes of sexual violence in society. Without one, these women will not be the last victims of sexual brutality.

Update: Below is a video of the incident.

Romney and Gingrich on Peace Between Palestinians and Israel

2012-01-29T05:42:00.001+02:00

Lauren Appelbaum, Political Director

Washington – In last night’s CNN Debate, an audience member who identified himself as a Palestinian-American Republican asked how the republican candidates would bring peace to Palestine and Israel. Both former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich blamed the Hamas leadership for the lack of peace in the region. Below is the transcript. Also, read Fact Checks on Romney and Gingrich’s Statements

BLITZER: Let’s take another question from the audience. Please give us your name and tell us where you are from. (UNKNOWN): Abraham Hassel (ph) from Jacksonville, Florida. How would a Republican administration help bring peace to Palestine and Israel when most candidates barely recognize the existence of Palestine or its people? As a Palestinian-American Republican, I’m here to tell you we do exist.

BLITZER: All right. Let’s ask Governor Romney, first of all. What would you say to Abraham?

ROMNEY: Well, the reason that there’s not peace between the Palestinians and Israel is because there is — in the leadership of the Palestinian people are Hamas and others who think like Hamas, who have as their intent the elimination of Israel. And whether it’s in school books that teach how to kill Jews, or whether it’s in the political discourse that is spoken either from Fatah or from Hamas, there is a belief that the Jewish people do not have a right to have a Jewish state.

There are some people who say, should we have a two-state solution? And the Israelis would be happy to have a two-state solution. It’s the Palestinians who don’t want a two-state solution. They want to eliminate the state of Israel.

And I believe America must say — and the best way to have peace in the Middle East is not for us to vacillate and to appease, but is to say, we stand with our friend Israel. We are committed to a Jewish state in Israel. We will not have an inch of difference between ourselves and our ally, Israel.

This president went before the United Nations and castigated Israel for building settlements. He said nothing about thousands of rockets being rained in on Israel from the Gaza Strip. This president threw – (APPLAUSE)

I think he threw Israel under the bus with regards to defining the ’67 borders as a starting point of negotiations. I think he disrespected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

I think he has time and time again shown distance from Israel, and that has created, in my view, a greater sense of aggression on the part of the Palestinians. I will stand with our friend, Israel.

BLITZER: Thank you, Governor. (APPLAUSE)

BLITZER: Speaker Gingrich, you got into a little hot water when you said the Palestinians were an invented people.

GINGRICH: It was technically an invention of the late 1970s, and it was clearly so. Prior to that, they were Arabs. Many of them were either Syrian, Lebanese, or Egyptian, or Jordanian.

There are a couple of simple things here. There were 11 rockets fired into Israel in November. Now, imagine in Duvall County that 11 rockets hit from your neighbor. How many of you would be for a peace process and how many of you would say, you know, that looks like an act of war.

You have leadership unequivocally, and Governor Romney is exactly right, the leadership of Hamas says, not a single Jew will remain. We aren’t having a peace negotiation then. This is war by another form.

My goal for the Palestinian people would be to live in peace, to live in prosperity, to have the dignity of a state, to have freedom. and they can achieve it any morning they are prepared to say Israel has a right to exist, we give up the right to return, and we recognize that we’re going to live side-by-side, now let’s work together to create mutual prosperity.

And you could in five years dramatically improve the quality of life of every Palestinian. But the political leadership would never tolerate that. And that’s why we’re in a continuous state of war where Obama undermines the Israelis.

On the first day that I’m president, if I do become president, I will sign an executive order directing the State Department to move the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to send the signal we’re with Israel. (APPLAUSE)

Syrian capital flight intensifies

2012-01-28T23:25:00.000+02:00

Abigail Fielding-Smith in Beirut

Money has been streaming out of Syria as fears for the unstable economy lead Syrians to seek a safer place for their assets, according to members of the country’s business community.

Cash is being smuggled over the border to Lebanon “every day, every hour,” said one Syrian businessman, while another claimed Syrian money is being stashed in the grey economy that has long existed between the two countries.
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In what many see as an example of the cross-border transfer, Syrian state news reported last month that officials had intercepted over $100,000 worth of Syrian pounds being smuggled across the Lebanese border under the seat of a car.

Samir Seifan, a Dubai-based Syrian economist, estimated Syria’s middle and upper classes had moved between three and five billion dollars out of the country since unrest broke out in March, alarmed by pressures on the currency and the dearth of investment opportunities.

“The easiest way to smuggle money out of Syria is into Lebanon,” said Mr Seifan. “There are established channels.”

Reports of the cash exodus highlight the growing financial pressure on President Bashar al-Assad’s Damascus regime, after nearly eight months of bloody confrontations between anti-government protesters and the regime’s brutal security forces. The loss of foreign currency earnings from the decimation of the tourism industry and an EU embargo on Syrian oil exports have put pressure on the Syrian pound, which has lost 10 per cent of its value against the dollar on the black market since the start of the unrest.

Capital controls introduced by Damascus in August prevent people from buying more than $2,000 a year in Syria without justification. Though locals say dollars can still be bought, with increasing difficulty and risk on the black market, many people are said to be seeking ways around restrictions on transferring money out of the country.

According to one of the Syrian businessman interviewed by the Financial Times, some people exchange Syrian money brought into Lebanon ‘under the table’. “We’re not Europe,” he said wryly.

As quantities appear to be either small or bypassing formal channels, the money does not show up in financial institutions in Lebanon, Syria’s neighbour, which is a crucial link to the wider world. The banking sector, under the watchful eye of the US Treasury, which this year placed sanctions on a Lebanese bank it alleged was laundering drugs money, has increased its customer accountability requirements, and overall deposits of local currency and dollars have gone up by less than they did over the same time period last year.

Lebanon’s usually freewheeling money changers are reluctant to talk about Syrian money, although the owner of one exchange bureau in Beirut said he was currently processing 400-500,000 Syrian pounds a day (roughly $8-10,000), compared with 100-200,000 ($2-4,000) a week before the crisis.

Another man in the bureau warned: “Its more dangerous to talk about this than politics,” an oblique reference to the Syrian security services’ tentacular reach into Lebanon.

Jihad Yazigi, an economic analyst and editor of the newsletter ‘The Syria Report’, said Syrians had “got used to finding ways to get money out of the country,” after years of tough restrictions on capital movement before limited economic reforms began in 2005. He said one trick was to pay someone inside Syria in Syrian pounds, in exchange for a return payment in a foreign currency in a bank overseas.

Observers of the capital flight say it is a steady flow rather than a panicked rush that could bring the Assad regime down in the short term. The Syrian Central Bank governor recently claimed Damascus had $18bn worth of foreign reserves – about 30 per cent of GDP – to keep the pound stable.

But analysts say the real amount of resources with which Mr Assad’s government has to defend the pound – and keep itself alive economically – is unknown because of a lack of transparent accounting. “The truth is that probably no one knows – not even the regime,” said one diplomat in Damascus.

The Perry Mason school of life

2012-01-28T16:19:00.002+02:00

SARAH HONIG

Israel’s elected leaders shouldn’t be subjected to diktats whereby they must suppliantly seek permission to save Israel from annihilation.

Back in 1940, as whodunit author Erle Stanley Gardner’s The Case of the Baited Hook got typically tangled, fictional legal wizard Perry Mason opined to his trusty secretary Della Street that “Every time you stop to figure what the other fellow’s going to do, you unconsciously figure what you’d do in his place.

“The result is that you’re not fighting him, but yourself. You always come to a stalemate. Every time you think of a move, you think of a perfect defense. The best fighters don’t worry about what the other man may do.”

Words to live by – unless, like America’s current commander-in-chief, the last thing you want is to conceive of yourself as a fighter.

Clearly, President Barack Obama didn’t attend the Perry Mason School of Law. Instead he honed his attitudes at Harvard Law. It’s a crucial difference – quite possibly the single biggest danger to global peace and, most immediately and acutely, to Israel.

Regardless of whether he lacks the intellectual integrity to unfetter himself from what was inculcated into him or whether he cannot resist the expediency of exploiting superficial truisms for political ends, Obama appears to expect all international arena players to abide by Harvard conventions. All are required to non-judgmentally tolerate adversarial viewpoints, to submit a priori that no cause is unavoidably more just than any other and to effectively prefer Third World ostensible underdogs with a peeve.

My country, Obama was taught at Harvard, isn’t necessarily more right, democracy isn’t necessarily democratic or superior and belligerents can be soothed with sufficient sympathy, flattery and concessions. Obama’s 2009 tour de force at Cairo University epitomized the ethos of post-hippie-era Harvard.

Its bottom line is that fanatics like Iran’s ayatollahs or the Muslim Brotherhood have compelling grievances and that it behooves us to see things through their eyes. This would, in theory, enable us to get a feel for their strategy and anticipate their tactical moves. They’d thereby be humanized in our view, the fear factor would abate and levelheaded accommodation would ensue.

So while Obama ups his anti-Iranian nukes rhetoric, he simultaneously escalates his pressure to prevent Israel from launching a preemptive operation against Tehran’s nuclear facilities.

Despite years of Israel warning and Washington dithering, the plain fact of the matter is that not much has changed. Israel still warns and Obamaesque Washington still dithers.

Despite a tough Senate sanctions bill, Obama is loath to fully impose it. He still palavers about that elusive international coalition to browbeat Iran, although it cannot evade the cognizance of even his most starry-eyed spinmeisters that Russia, China and assorted hangers-on won’t do their utmost to foil Iranian nuclear ambitions (that is, if they at all go through the motions).

Why, then, would the ayatollahs see reason, as Obama supposes they should? Iran consistently receives indications that it isn’t obliged to mend its thuggish ways.

For example, when Obama’s top defense officials underscore the negative consequences of resorting to military means, the Iranians get a message diametrically contradictory to the one Obama insists he’s sending. Rather than abide by his Harvard guidelines, the Iranians deduce that they can proceed with impunity to make whatever mischief strikes their fancy – nuclear or otherwise.

It boggles the mind that at this exceedingly late stage the delusion still persists that Iran can be somehow dissuaded from its nefarious plots, that it’ll be wowed by dynamic diplomacy and see last-minute sense.

Obama may have been given a stick by America’s legislators but he’s hesitant to wield it. He’s still trying to figure out what Ahmadinejad is going to do, which, as per Perry Mason’s insightful observation, means that Obama subconsciously strives to envisage what he’d do in Ahmadinejad’s place.

Here, however, the result isn’t a stalemate because the Iranian bomb becomes a more potent threat with each wasted day. Counting on a miraculous Iranian epiphany is as far-sighted as believing in the blossoming of the Arab spring that has so far only sprouted Muslim Brotherhood weeds throughout the region.

Rarefied Harvard moral relativism, though, can portray invasive noxious weeds as desirable fragrant roses. And so Obama rationalizes that the Brotherhood (its rabidly pro-Nazi roots dismissed from mind) could well become the nurturer of the tardy flowering of democracy and civil liberties in the Arab sphere.

His secretary of state Hillary Clinton confirmed reports that the Obama administration would work with ascendant Islamist parties in the Muslim world.

She’s willing to do business with the infidel- bashers, arguing that they might not be quite as bad as depicted by their deposed antagonists: “For years, dictators told their people they had to accept the autocrats they knew in order to avoid the extremists they feared. Too often we accepted the narrative ourselves.”

The line now is that moderate Islamists comprise the Brotherhood’s mainstream, that they can be counted upon to conduct a sane foreign policy, uphold the rights of women and religious minorities and justify Obama’s Harvard hopes.

They probably will. Just like Tehran’s ayatollahs did.

This is painfully reminiscent of Neville Chamberlain’s foreign secretary Lord Halifax, one of the prime architects of appeasement, who signaled Hitler that German designs on Austria, chunks of Czechoslovakia and Poland weren’t altogether unpalatable to British tastes, so long as German territorial expansion was “peaceful.”

Only after the Axis bully began misbehaving with particular impudence following 1938’s Munich pact did Halifax finally work out that this wasn’t quite cricket. But to his credit Halifax did agonize, even if belatedly, and he did draw some extremely cogent conclusions. “I often think how much easier the world would have been to manage,” he mused, “if Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini had been at Oxford.”

But they weren’t – just as the entire Middle Eastern coterie of baddies never imbibed Harvard liberalism. However, nothing suits these jihadists better than a leader of the free world who so dutifully complies with Harvard rules. So what if he assumes that they would too. Let him. They’ll do as they please, undeterred because he’s Harvard-bound to consider their perspective.

Israel, in contrast, is ineligible for similar indulgence and is slated to pay the price for Obama’s broadmindedness toward our region’s Muslim warlords.

The onus for quelling the chaos isn’t on the merchants of mass-murder but on Israel.

While Israel doesn’t ask that a single US soldier lay his life on the line for it, neither should Israel’s elected leaders be subjected to diktats whereby they must suppliantly seek permission to save Israel from annihilation. No Israeli government was elected to preside over another Holocaust.

That’s why the Jewish state’s coalition and opposition both must memorize Perry Mason’s precept.

Obama might kid himself that he’s playing for time till after November’s Election Day. Only by then, all bets will likely be off. Obama’s inaction inexorably pushes Israel to the desperate unilateral action it itself is leery of. We cannot remain pawns in Obama’s gamble that Ahmadinejad can be converted to Harvard niceties. Or as Perry Mason reiterated: “You can’t sit back and wait for things to happen to you.”

Islamists Take Over Tunisia

2012-01-28T16:15:00.000+02:00

Anna Mahjar-Barducci

In the aftermath of the Tunisian Jasmine revolution, Salafists, as in Egypt, are taking advantage of the new freedoms to be a threat to the growth of democracy. Islamist groups are now flourishing and are trying to transform Tunisia into an Islamic emirate. For now, they did not manage to take over big cities, however they are expanding their control over the Tunisian town of Sejnane with its 5000 inhabitants, located in the country's northwest. According to Tunisian media, a group of about 250 individuals managed to "talibanize" Sejnane , imposing their hardline Islamic rule, without being in any way contravened by the country's security forces.

Famous for its pottery artifacts, Sejnane is not different from many other Tunisian towns, in its sidewalk cafés, small shops, a few mosques and dusty roads. However, in Sejnane about 80% of the population lives under the poverty line; unemployment is almost 60% with no sign that this situation may get any better. In this environment, for the last few months a group of Salafists, most of them young, have been imposing Islamic law . Salafist gangs of young individuals have begun terrorizing people, in search of "disbelievers." There have been countless episodes of intolerance and violence --- including a man beaten after the mosque service for having argued that tobacco was not haram (forbidden); another man wounded in his leg while buying cigarettes; a wine vendor having his fingers broken; and a young girl attacked at school for not wearing a veil.

Salafists have also established in Sejnane Sharia tribunals and even a jail, where they have been torturing people arrested for not "respecting" the Islamic code. It was reported that Salafists arrested people for celebrating the New Year Eve. Salafists not only forbade the sale of alcohol, but also the sale of cakes on New Year's Day, on the pretext that it was a Christian holiday that a true Muslim is not supposed to celebrate.

There are seven mosques In Sejnane, the most important of which is run by a young imam. "He is a Salafist," a Sejnane dweller declared to the media. "He is only 22 and did not even finish high school." "The state is absent," complained another man, "and the Salafist seized the opportunity to fill this void." According to reports, the head of the Salafist group in Sejnane is an old jihadist close to Al-Qaeda. He is accused of having attempted a coup in 2006 and was therefore sentenced to 104 years of prison. He was, however, freed in a general amnesty after the revolution.

The population in Sejnane feel abandoned by the government, which is doing nothing to protect their individual freedoms. The new regime seems absent and not willing to take any steps to crack down on Islamist violence. The President of the Tunisian League of Human Rights (LTDH), Abdel Sattar Ben Moussa, finalized a report on the situation in Sejnanel: he said the Salafist phenomenon is present throughout the country, but managed to proliferate in Sejnane due to the lack of functioning government institutions in the area.

Some media called Sejnane "the First Salafist Emirate in the Country," mentioning that if nothing will be done, other emirates will flourish in Tunisia. Liberal journalists have already been attacked and beaten for having denounced the Salafist violence in the country on the media. Hamadi Dimassi, a secular, liberal journalist attacked by Islamists, claims that there is a silent complicity from the Islamist party, Ennahda, which won the largest share of seats in Tunisia's Constituent Assembly, towards the Salafists. Sofiene Ben Hamida, another journalist recently beaten, declared that the government is not taking any serious actions to try to halt the Salafists.

Ennahda leaders admit that they are backing Salafist tendencies in the country, claiming that the government is not absent, but is simply "cautious" about take any actions that might worsen the situation or deepen the divide between the different parts.

In the meantime, this Ennahda's "caution" is transforming a revolution that was liberal and secular into a religious one. A nurse from Sejnane declared to the media that her home town now belongs to the Salafists and they are the ones now making the laws. If the government will continue its policy of not acting, as looks likely, the population will be scared to denounce the violence or to rebel, leading the country towards becoming another new Islamist State.

A Taste of Islam: An Interview with Bill Warner

2012-01-28T16:13:00.001+02:00

Mark Tapson

In the years after the 9/11 attacks, more non-Muslims than ever before have studied Islam to understand the religious motives of those who had declared war on us. And yet non-believers who are alarmed at what they have found in the foundational texts of Islam are always told by apologists that we don’t understand the true Koran, that we labor under misconceptions about the Religion of Peace, that we don’t understand the complexities of sharia, that our objections and criticisms stem from racism (even though Islam is not a race) and an irrational fear of Islam and its adherents. The problem always seems to lie with us. What is the truth and how can we get to it behind the contradictions and the mystification?

Bill Warner has the answer. The founder and director of the Center for the Study of Political Islam (CSPI), he holds a PhD in physics and math. He has been a university professor, a businessman, and an applied physicist. But Dr. Warner has also had a lifelong interest in religion and its impact on history, and so the day after 9/11 he decided to make the source texts of Islam available for the average person who wants to know more. As part of that effort, Mr. Warner has produced a dozen books, including a Koran, a biography of Mohammed and a summary of the political traditions of Mohammed. He writes articles and produces news bulletins that record the suffering of the victims of political Islam. And he has spoken nationally and internationally about Islamic political doctrine.

Mark Tapson: Mr. Warner, your background is in physics and mathematics. How did you come to devote yourself to the study of religion and to feel compelled to share your insights on political Islam? How did the field of statistics shape your perspective on Islam?

Bill Warner: I was raised in a very religious family and read the Bible a great deal. I studied physics and math, but my interest in religion expanded to the effects of religion on history. After graduate school I was attracted to mysticism and Eastern religions. So, forty years ago, I looked into Sufism, mystical Islam. I went to Sufi dances, learned zikr (a Sufi devotional practice), met Sufi masters and read Sufi literature. But, there was always this jarring background noise of the history of Islam. So, I left my study of Sufism.

Twenty years later as a professor I had Muslims in my classes and they sparked my interest in the Koran. It was a tough read, but I read it cover to cover. The text was literally a puzzle, but I set it aside until 9/11.

On 9/11 as soon as the second plane hit the second tower, I knew it was an act of jihad. I stood up, turned off the TV and I haven’t watched it since. In that moment it came to me that the rest of my life would be spent explaining the meaning of Islamic texts.

I sat down and reread the Koran, read the Sira (Ishaq and Al Tabari), read the Hadith (Bukhari and Muslim). These are the absolute foundational texts of Islam, the source code, the DNA. I was following Sun Tzu’s advice; know your enemy and attack your enemy’s strategy.

My attack was to reveal the Koran, Sira and Hadith in a rational form that was easy to read. This became the Trilogy Project. I assembled a team of volunteers and paid writers and editors. From the beginning, I knew that it was the political aspect of Islam that offered the only chance of success. The religious aspect has too much misunderstood protection of the First Amendment.

MT: What is the Trilogy Project?

BW: The approach to the Trilogy was new and unorthodox, and its only chance of success lay in a scientific approach to the texts. Every paragraph can be verified by going back to the source texts. These books are not opinion, but give us the facts of the sources. For this reason, nearly every paragraph has an index number that allows it to be verified.

The greatest fun was solving the Koran puzzle. The Koran must be the most famous book that is not read or understood. The first step, which is not unique to me, is to lay out the Koran in the correct time sequence. The bookstore Koran is arranged by chapter length, and is not in the right time order. It was created by Uthman, the third caliph. The bookstore Koran is Uthman’s Koran.

If you take the life of Mohammed, the Sira, and lay it out alongside the Koran in the right time order, it is like matching a key to a lock. What is happening to Mohammed is reflected directly in the Koran. So if you integrate the life of Mohammed into the same text as the Koran and use separate fonts, so there is no confusion, you get a recreation of the Koran of Mohammed, the historical Koran. The Koran becomes an epic story that begins with a hymn to god and ends with the triumph over the world—the annihilation of all other civilization.

In 2006, I published the complete foundational doctrine of political Islam in three volumes. The Trilogy Project was finished. Now anyone can read and understand the Koran, Sira and Hadith. You can know Allah and Mohammed from the source texts.

This system of knowledge integrates the entire body of Islam into one view. If it is in the Trilogy, it is Islam. If it is Islam, it must be in the Trilogy.

Once the Trilogy was assembled, there was a bonus prize. Part of making the texts readable included sorting and reordering of the ideas. Once the work was all correlated, concepts leapt off the page. The ideas of Islamic ideology stood out. The simple statistical method of counting the words devoted to ideas clearly showed the themes of the doctrine.

The biggest statistical surprise was the dualistic nature of Islamic doctrine. Islam holds contradictory ideas that are simultaneously true. Now this confounds all Western logic, but this gives Islam its great strength. Islam is peace. Islam is jihad. Islam is a brother to Christianity and Judaism. Islam annihilates Christianity and Judaism.

I find it revealing that 64% of the Koran deals with Kafirs (non-Muslims), not Muslims. The Trilogy has a greater textual devotion to Jew hatred, 9%, than Mein Kampf. We are led to believe that there are a few verses about jihad in the Koran, but 24% of the Koran written in Medina is about jihad.

My work is from the view point of the Kafir, the non-Muslim. The Kafir is the victim in nearly every verse by Allah and most actions by Mohammed. The grandest lie of Islam is that Muslims have the correct view of Islam. But dualism demands that there are two correct views that contradict each other and cannot be logically aligned. Hence, there is the Kafir-centric view of Islam that is equally valid as the Muslim-centric view. Islam, the universities, and the apologists all insist that only the Muslim view is the true view. This is an error that is not supported by facts.

We can now hold fact-based discussions about Islam. There is no longer any need for “experts”, since we have the supreme experts in our hand — Mohammed and Allah.

MT: You’re speaking in Los Angeles on “A Taste of Islam.” Why is it necessary to appreciate “the full menu” of Islam in order to understand it?

BW: It is impossible to understand Islam based on just the Koran, but it is simple to understand when you look at the entire picture, both of Allah and Mohammed.

Muslims and their apologists want us to look at Islam one verse at a time. But this is like trying to understand a jigsaw puzzle by looking at it one piece at a time. If we put all the pieces together, as a system, the picture is obvious.

MT: Pointing out the theological motivation of Islamic fundamentalists always brings the politically correct objection that they constitute a “tiny minority of extremists” who have “hijacked” a religion of peace and interfaith tolerance. How are we to answer that objection?

BW: The use of the term “extreme” implies that something is being measured, and it is off the chart. There is one and only one measure of Islam and that is its doctrine as found in the Trilogy. For example, Mohammed preached the religion of Islam for thirteen years and made only 150 converts. But when he turned to jihad, ten years later he died, he was the ruler of Arabia and every Arab was a Muslim. Conclusion: jihad is normal, not extreme. But notice that since Islam is dualistic, Muslims can claim that it is peaceful.

As to the claim that the jihadists are few in number, look at war statistics. During WW II only 10% of our population was in the military. Did that mean we were not at war? No. In war only a few are doing the actual work, the rest of the country backs them with labor, money and morale.

There are four ways to be a jihadist – sword, pen, speech and money. Jihad is incumbent on ALL Muslims; therefore, it is the sixth pillar of Islam.

MT: Especially in the wake of the Arab Spring, the Obama administration wants us to draw a distinction between the terrorists and the “moderate” Islamists we can work with. How do you respond to that?

BW: First, a terrorist is a jihadist, modeled after Mohammed, the supreme jihadist. A moderate Muslim can be one who is not observant or it can be a Muslim who is following the Koran of Mecca, the religious Koran.

The apologists always want to talk about people, Muslims, not doctrine. Remember: when a Muslim is talking to a Kafir, there are twelve verses of the Koran that state that a Muslim is not the friend of a Kafir. Also, Mohammed repeatedly told Muslims to deceive the Kafir if it would advance Islam. There is one Muslim who will tell us the complete truth about Islam and that man is Mohammed.

The iron rule of Islamic doctrine is: if someone is talking about Islam and does not mention Mohammed or Allah (Koran) they are only building castles in the air.

An Islamist wants Sharia. Sharia destroys human rights and Kafir civilization. Why would we want to cooperate with someone who wants Sharia?

We don’t need politicians, religious leaders or academics to explain about Islam, we now have Mohammed and Allah. Forget the opinions of experts. For the first time in history, the common man can read the facts of the Trilogy and find out all of the answers without the “experts.”

Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://frontpagemag.com

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/16/a-taste-of-islam-an-interview-with-bill-warner/

Dredging the BottomDredging the Bottom

2012-01-28T15:57:00.001+02:00

Sultan Knish

Republican primaries are like visiting embarrassing relatives, no matter how bad you think it's going to be, it always turns out to be even worse. After months of this we're going to have a convention where we will be asked to believe in one of these men.

The latest attack is that Gingrich was actually anti-Reagan or at least had strong differences with Ronald Reagan. That is a serious attack or would be, if the conclusion to be drawn from even the heavily censored and selected quotes are that Gingrich thought Reagan was being too liberal.

So far the revelations are that Gingrich wanted budget spending frozen, Reagan refused because it would undermine defense. Gingrich said of Reagan's meeting with Gorbachev that it was, "the most dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met with Neville Chamberlain in 1938 in Munich." And overall that the United States lacked a comprehensive dedicated strategy for defeating the USSR.The takeaway is that Gingrich was attacking Reagan from the right. Which is not all that damning unless you assume that any deviation from Reagan's positions in any direction is treason. It seems to help Gingrich's conservative credentials more than it hurts him.

If you actually look at the context of some of the remarks, then the tone changes a great deal.

"The fact is that George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Irving Kristol, and Jeane Kirkpatrick are right in pointing out the enormous gap between President Reagan's strong rhetoric, which is adequate, and his administration's weak policies, which are inadequate and will ultimately fail."

Was Gingrich wrong? His views on sitting down with Gorbachev were not all that unusual for many conservatives at the time. Freezing spending might not have been that bad of an idea, whether it was workable is another question. And the United States did not have much of a strategy for defeating the USSR, which spared us the trouble by defeating itself.

When Romney distanced himself from Reagan he appeared to be doing it from the left, the Gingrich attacks appear to have come from the right. The only way they work is if we detach Reagan from conservative principles and place him above them.

As a bonus. Misleadingly edited videos always help make the case. More at The Hayride

Jeffrey Lord at the American Spectator has a piece putting some of the quotes in context, but he doesn't provide the complete floor statement either. It would be good if he did, to avoid all these snippets and see what Gingrich actually said in full so we can decide for ourselves.

SMOKING A KORAN

Pakistan’s largest real export is its off-the-books heroin trade and its economy runs on heroin. The ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence agency, which backed the Taliban, also took a cut of Afghanistan’s highly profitable opium trade. Iranian and Pakistani interference in Afghanistan marry their Islamic initiatives with the drug trade as Sunnis and Shiites compete for the lucrative traffic in the world’s leading source of opium which is smuggled through Pakistan and Iran.

Speaking of Iran, the Islamic Republic has the world’s highest percentage of heroin addicts, and the traffic is run by the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution which acts as the religious thugs of the ayatollahs. One of their means of smuggling heroin out of Iran is piggybacking the trade on Shiite Muslim pilgrims visiting holy sites abroad.

The Muslim world doesn’t have much to export besides oil and drugs. Countries that don’t have oil export drugs. Countries that do have oil, export drugs anyway. Terrorist groups with their secret cells, forged documents and covert funding sources make perfect drug smuggling networks until it is impossible to tell whether they are Islamic terrorists who smuggle drugs to fund their operations or drug smugglers who kill people to religiously justify their drug smuggling. When the commanders and the foot soldiers have spent enough time in the drug trade and are sampling their own product then they stop knowing the difference.

See my entire piece on the Islamic drug connection at The Islamic Paradise of the Needle and Powder

LOOK TO THE FUTURE

The good news is that our economy is recovering. We have not only broken the back of the recession, but kicked in the spleen of its brother the depression, and karate chopped the wrist of its uncle, the complete economic meltdown. The stock market is riding high thanks to its transformation from an index of companies, to an index of racehorses and greyhounds. I have been told by GE CEO Jeff Immelt that his horse, Foreseeable Disaster is coming up 4th, behind Microsoft's Blue Nag of Death, GM's Safety Issues and EcoTech's Al Gore. Betting is high and anyone who wants to get in on the action, please come see Vice President Biden in the cashier's cage to the right.

And there is still more good news. After yesterday's speech commemorating those killed in the Seattle Polar Bear Invasion, my popularity has shot up all the way to 27 percent. This puts me ahead in the polls, in front of my rivals, Republican challenger, George Prescott Bush III and my Neo-Monarchist challenger, the King of Nebraska, but still well behind Chinese Supreme Leader Hu Jintao, who has seized control of several key states.

Additionally with my new proposal to take all our remaining money and bury it in Michelle's vegetable garden, we may finally have a plan to cut spending that really works. At least until we dig it up that same night and spend it on one of those really bad ideas that I and my advisers come up with when we get high together.

How I saw the State of the Union Address 2012 shaping up. It could still happen...

THE WORDS... THEY HAVE NO MEANING

"To talk with Gingrich supporters is to enter a world where words have no meaning... Romney is now the only remaining candidate for president who opposes amnesty for illegals."

From Coulter's "Re-elect Obama: Vote Newt"

"Romney described immigration proposals by McCain and others as 'quite different' from amnesty, because they required illegal immigrants to register with the government, work for years, pay taxes, not take public benefits, and pay a fine before applying for citizenship. 'That's very different than amnesty, where you literally say, 'OK, everybody here gets to stay,''

Boston Globe, 3/16/07

THERE ARE NO ATHEISTS IN MUSLIM FOXHOLES

The trajectory of persecution is not very difficult to calculate. In the UK, Muslims outnumber Jews six to one. In France, Muslims outnumber Jews ten to one, and in Sweden by as much as twenty-five to one. These are not just numbers; they also accurately chart the trajectory of religious persecution, with the Muslim persecution of Jews spiking horrifyingly in Sweden, high in France, but not as high in England. One reason why the situation is not yet as bad as in the United States is because Jews still outnumber Muslims at least two to one.

Muslim persecution of a hated minority group increases proportionally in relation to their numerical advantage. Atheists are a larger percentage of the population in Europe, but demographics are still catching up to them. In the United States the demographic race may already be done, as far as atheists are concerned.

In the United States approximately 0.7 percent of the population identifies as atheist and 0.8 percent of the population as Muslim. If these surveys are correct then the number of Muslims in the United States has already exceeded the number of atheists. While not a single member of Congress identifies as an atheist, two identify as Muslims.

from my article, The Most Dangerous Place to be an Atheist

BUT HE ONLY SUPPORTS RAPING US AT THE STATE LEVEL

Whether you like a state-wide insurance mandate or not, it's a world of difference when the federal government does it... It was on account of the difference between state and federal powers that the Supreme Court overturned the federal Violence Against Women Act. The court was not endorsing rape, but reminding us that states make laws about rape, not Congress.

Romney supported the idea of other states doing something along the lines of his health care bill, but always opposed insurance mandates from the federal government (just as I oppose the federal government issuing general laws about rape, but support state laws against rape.)

From that same bulletin from CoulterWorld.

So Coulter's proposal is that we nominate a rapist because his rapine instincts are governed by the Constitution and though he supports rape at the state level, he will oppose it at the Federal level.

The only thing keeping Romney from raping us at the Federal level (Coulter's metaphor, not mine) is that he's apparently solid on State's Rights. Probably as solid as he is on immigration, the second amendment, abortion, gay rights and well any other issue.

If we do put our faith in Romney as a rapist within the Constitution, then he'll hand out the state waivers on ObamaCare. But what if he prioritizes rape over constitutionalism just like every other president from both parties going back further than we would like to think about?

If a candidate opposes a policy, then regardless of his Constitutional integrity, we at least have some confidence that he will not implement it. But if a candidate supports a policy, but opposes it only at the Federal level, then we have to put our faith in his restraint to not use the powers of the office that he has, or in this case to actively use them to undermine a policy that he supports in practice, but not in legal principle.

Ron Paul might have an inkling of credibility arguing that he would not enact a policy that he supports at the Federal level. Considering his earmarks dance, it's a small inkling, but he at least has some credibility on the issue.

With Romney, his establishment defenders have been reduced to arguing that Romney may support the practice of ObamaCare, but he will oppose it to protect states rights. Not only is this position ridiculous, not only does it ask us to take so much on faith that it's downright mindboggling. In Coulter's own metaphor it asks us to elect a rapist and trust that his principles will prevent him from raping us.

Worst of all Coulter has conceded and even defended the mandate, and is now just arguing against it on a Federal level.

"In a world where words have meaning, Mitt Romney is not the "moderate" in this race. He is the most conservative candidate."

The problem is that in CoulterWorld, the words mean something different than they mean here. It's entirely legitimate to state that none of the remaining three candidates are conservative. That is a defensible view.

Billing a man who called himself progressive and repeatedly disavowed the conservative label until it came in handy, who is conservative is demeanor, but has no consistent conservative record on the issues, as the most conservative candidate is a head spinner.

To seriously believe that Romney is more conservative than Santorum isn't the worldview of a world where words have meaning, it's a world where the word conservative has no meaning.

BUFFALOED SPENDERS

Yesterday, the Republican-controlled House passed HR 1022, a bill that would require the Secretary of the Interior to conduct a study of the history of Buffalo Soldiers in the establishment of national parks. The study will cost $400,000.

Voting in favor of this fantastic piece of budget cutting legislation was budget cutting hero, Paul Ryan. Michelle Bachmann voted against.

In between various bills about the importance of the budget, Ryan voted to authorize the Secretary of the Interior to study the suitability and feasibility of designating prehistoric, historic, and limestone forest sites on Rota, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, as a unit of the National Park System.

The bill was co-sponsored by five Democrats and one Republican. Can we really afford to be extending the national park system into the Northern Mariana Islands. Is that really the priority now?

SOROS MANUFACTURED CHAOS IN ISRAEL

In the warm summer of 2011, a twenty-something Israeli named Daphne Leef set up a Facebook protest page agitating against the high cost of housing in Tel Aviv. She pitched a tent and helped touch off a social protest movement that received national and international attention.

While the protests were billed as grassroots, there was nothing grassroots about them. The protests had been organized and funded by the New Israel Fund. Daphne Leef worked as a video editor for the New Israel Fund.

In the winter of that same year, as the protests had died down, a woman named Tanya Rosenblit boarded a bus which runs through religiously hyper-conservative neighborhoods and staged an incident with the passengers. Rosenblit was dubbed an Israeli Rosa Parks and her stunt helped generate waves of articles about major social problems in Israel.

Rosenblit was associated with One Voice, an organization funded by the New Israel Fund, whose board included Alon Liel, the husband of New Israel Fund director Rachel Liel. Hardly had the NIF gotten through manufacturing one phony social protest movement than it was hard at work on another.

See the entire piece at Front Page Magazine in Soros Manufactured Chaos in Israel

AND NOW THE ROUNDUP

Western Rifle Shooters has found a truly fantastic illustration to go with my SOTU parody. This should be Obama's presidential portrait.

Dress for success and the going rate for a 99 percent secretary

Romney hearts Hezbollah's health care system from Pamella Galler at Atlas Shrugs The takeaway here is that Romney operates on truisms from the same foreign policy experts who helped put the Brotherhood into power. He really does not get it.

Hezbollah and Hamas and the Brotherhood in Egypt are not popular because they offer health services or food. Those are bonuses that help lock in people. It's their Islamic beliefs that are popular and Romney is foolish to think that if America provided health care to them that it would swing them around.

... in other good news

The inauguration of Egypt's new parliament is an important step toward fulfilling public demands for the establishment of a regime based on Islam, said Ali Larijani, speaker of the Iranian parliament, in a letter on Wednesday. The letter was sent to Saad al-Katatny, People's Assembly speaker.

Shouldn't he have sent the letter to Obama who deserves much of the credit for the Caliphate?

New York Times now outsourcing its stories to CAIR

Learn about the legal claim to the State of Israel, from Eli Hertz, who has done a great deal of research on the topic at a Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors event in February

Another way

Yes, I am an Arab and despite that I love the Jewish people and the Land of Israel. I believe in the responsibility of Arabs to be loyal to the State of Israel and I believe that Jews should be able to settle everywhere in Israel,

With a predictable ending

Into The Fray: A study in impotence

2012-01-28T15:53:00.002+02:00

MARTIN SHERMAN

Israel’s diplomatic reaction to recent charges that its water policy is racist exposes a preference for passivity over preemption.

Water reveals a new apartheid in the Middle East. The 450,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank use as much or more water than some 2.3 million Palestinians... even if only a few dare to use the word, all indications are that the Middle East is the scene of a new apartheid.... And in this situation, water is a particular element of conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. – Excerpt from the French parliamentary report on “The Geopolitics of Water” My most recent columns have been devoted to analyzing Israel’s public diplomacy, the reasons for its manifest ineptitude, and the mechanisms that produce this abysmal performance.

Last week, by coincidence, an illustrative example, underscoring precisely what I have been trying to convey, broke into the headlines.

It came in the form of a French parliamentary report on Israel’s water policy, authored by Jean Glavany, a Socialist member of the National Assembly, and accusing Israel of using water as an instrument of apartheid and oppression against the Palestinians.

Responses, recriminations, repudiations
The report sent Israeli officialdom into a tizzy.

The media were peppered with responses, repudiations and recriminations. Foreign Ministry officials claimed to have been unaware of the document until several days after its posting on the National Assembly website.

One diplomatic source characterized the report as “a serious mishap that... has seriously damaged Israel’s image in France.” The embassy in Paris was accused of falling asleep on the job for not alerting the Israeli authorities of the impending publication and the malevolent nature of its contents.

Israel robustly repudiated the report. The Foreign Ministry spokesman condemned it – correctly – as “unacceptable,” “loaded with the language of vicious propaganda, far removed from any professional criticism” and tainted with “blatant tendentiousness.”

Moreover, according to official Israeli sources, some members of the working group involved in compiling the report disassociated themselves from its anti-Israel tenor.

However, the damage had already been done. Israel had – once again – been linked to the dreaded “A-word.”

Cyberspace was replete with websites seizing on the report as yet another affirmation of the odious nature of the Jewish state and its dastardly discrimination against the “other.”

Delusional derogatory drivel
Israel’s firm rebuttal of the report was factually correct and morally justified. This was a document that comes as close to unadulterated, uninformed drivel as the written word can get, with accusations as malicious as they were mendacious.

Its allegations range from the highly implausible to the totally impossible. For example, one of its more ludicrous allegations is that Israel’s security barrier – “the wall”– “prevents Palestinian access to the Jordan River.”

However – as the most cursory glance at any map will show – the “wall” is located along, or close to, the 1967 Green Line, so it cannot constitute an impediment of any kind to Palestinian access to the Jordan River.

The river has anyway been reduced to a highly polluted trickle south of the Kinneret.

As such, it has been insignificant as a water source for decades, and access to it – or lack thereof – is irrelevant to Palestinians’ hydrological situation. So contrary to the impression the report creates, it has no bearing on the quantity of water available to them.

Only marginally less absurd is the document’s supposition that avaricious hydrological calculations lay behind the construction of “the wall,” to ensure Israeli supplies and to prevent Palestinians from extracting water from sites in the adjacent “buffer” zone.

In fact, construction of the security barrier was undertaken solely in response to the horrific Palestinian terrorism that took place between 2000 and 2003. It seems that a few “minor” details eluded Monsieur Glavany’s memory when forming his opinion of the function of the security barrier and the events that lead to its construction – such as the Passover massacre at Park Hotel in Netanya, and the carnage at the Sbarro restaurant and the Moment Café (both in Jerusalem), the Dizengoff Center and the Dolphinarium (both in Tel Aviv), and at the Beit Lid and Meggido junctions, to name but a few.

Had it not been for Palestinian terrorism there would have been no barrier. To suggest otherwise is either ignominious or ignorant.

Passivity over preemption
Despite all this, the French hydro-report episode was indeed a diplomatic debacle for Israel, not because of what was done after its publication, but because of what was not done before it.

Once again, Israeli diplomacy was seen to be slamming the stable doors long after the horses had bolted, reacting to events rather than anticipating them. It was a classic illustration of what I described in last week’s column, of “Israeli [diplomatic] endeavors [being] reduced to defensive tactical responses, chasing events rather than preempting them, and doomed to failure.”

There is little room for excuses, particularly when it comes to the water issue.

For while it may not have been possible to predict publication of this particular report at this particular time, the appearance of some similar document from some source or other was a near certainty, which should have been foreseen and preempted.

Sense of déjà vu
The situation that has arisen in the wake of the Glavany report has an eerie sense of déjà vu about it. It was barely two years ago that a similar document was produced by Amnesty International, brandishing similarly baseless accusations berating Israel’s water policy as an instrument of apartheid.

The report immediately became a centerpiece of a US lecture tour by Omar Barghouti, arguably the most prominent leader of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel. Flyers billing his talks splashed the title: “Thirsting for Justice: Israel’s control of water as a tool of apartheid and means of ethnic cleansing.”

The Israel diplomatic establishment had ample warning of Barghouti’s appearances.

Despite this, no action was taken on suggestions – including from this writer – to preempt his appearances with the massive distribution of factual material, refuting the cavalcade of distortions, falsehood, exaggerations, omissions and half-truths that comprised his talk.

Lessons unlearned
The lessons of the Amnesty/Barghouti episode remained unlearned.

Rather than adopt an offense strategic initiative to remove Israel’s water policy for the list of topics that can be used to denigrate the country, those charged with the conduct of its public diplomacy have opted for defensive tactical responses to hostile initiatives. Rather than launch an ongoing enterprise to set, a priori, the context in which later events are interpreted/perceived, they have opted to fend off individual accusations and condemnations, made in the inimical context prevailing today.

This is particularly exasperating in the case of water, which is one of the topics most amenable to mounting such an preemptive enterprise.

For while it is always possible to find heartrending anecdotal evidence involving highly localized incidents in which an elderly Palestinian may have been inappropriately treated, or in which the IDF damaged a cistern, these in no way reflect the intent or consequences of Israeli policy. This can only be fairly assessed by the overall impact that policy has had on the Palestinians’ water situation.

Here the facts are unequivocal. They should be used to quash any allegation of discriminatory deprivation, as part on an ongoing proactive initiative to inform opinion-makers, hydro-professionals and the general public, and to create a context in which any accusatory documents are likely to be dismissed with the contempt they richly deserve.

Facts, figures, fabrications
The Palestinians’ hydrological situation improved beyond all recognition under Israeli administration, not only in absolute terms compared to initial pre-“occupation” conditions, but in relative terms compared to that of Israelis.

Whether one focuses on overall consumption of fresh water; per capita consumption of fresh water; consumption of fresh water relative to Israelis; accessibility of running water to households; the area under agricultural cultivation; or the size of the agricultural product, the conditions for the Palestinians have been dramatically enhanced by Israeli rule.

Between 1967 and 2006, the overall annual consumption of fresh water by “West Bank” Palestinians grew by 300 percent, from 60 million cubic meters to 180 m.cu.m. The annual per capita consumption in the same period rose by almost 15%, from 86 cubic meters to 100 cu.m.

Overall consumption by Israel dropped by 15% (from 1,411 m.cu.m. to 1,211 m.cu.m.), while the per capita consumption plummeted by 70% (from 508 cu.m to 170 cu.m.), a remarkable decrease made possible not only by more efficient usage but also by massive replacement of fresh water by recycled sewage for irrigation, and of naturally occurring fresh water by desalinated water for domestic use.

By contrast, the Palestinians have steadfastly refused to undertake agreed-upon sewage purification projects, allowing untreated effluents to endanger “downstream” Israeli supplies.

Palestinian claims that it is Israel which has prevented the construction of recycling plants are preposterous. For what twisted logic could conceivably induce the fiendishly cunning Zionists to oppose the construction of installations that would protect their own water resources from Palestinian pollutants?

The wimpiness of ‘Zionist oppression’?
Moreover, from 1967 to the years just before Oslo, Palestinian household consumption rose dramatically – by almost 600%, significantly higher than the 230% in Israel.

Similarly, water-conveyance to households also increased impressively.

Whereas in 1967 only 10% of the “West Bank” Arab population was connected to a running water system, the figure today stands at 95%. So much for discriminatory deprivation.

Palestinian agricultural performance improved dramatically as well, even though water allocations were not increased. (In recent years Israeli farmers have had their freshwater allocations slashed by 50% and more.) This was facilitated by the introduction of more advanced methods of irrigation and cultivation, resulting in an increase of the area cultivated by about 160% and of the agricultural product by 1,200%.

As world-renowned soil-physicist and hydrologist Daniel Hillel observes, by the 1990s, farming “was transformed from a subsistence enterprise to a commercial industry.”

Furthermore, the inflammatory claims that luscious lawns and shimmering swimming pools in Jewish settlements unfairly and provocatively deprive Palestinians of water are belied by a single statistic: Israel conveys more water (nearly 56 m.cu.m.) from inside the pre-1967 borders into the “West Bank” than the total consumption of the entire Jewish population in the settlements across the “Green Line” (just over 48 m.cu.m.).

In other words, there is a net inflow of water from pre-1967 Israel to the Palestinians which more than compensates for the much-maligned lawns and pools.

Demand – not discrimination
While claims that per-capita consumption of water by Israelis is much higher than that of the Palestinian population are true, this is principally a result of differences in demand – not supply – because of differences in lifestyles. (Clearly, the fact that a millionaire in an opulent penthouse in Manhattan will use far less water than equally affluent owner of a sprawling estate in Bel Air is not a matter of discriminatory deprivation).

Different rates of consumption are found between the Jewish and Arab populations within pre-1967 Israel – and between different socioeconomic groups within the Jewish population – without anyone raising the claim that this is the result of purposeful deprivation.

Interestingly, per-capita consumption in the frequently vilified settlement of Kiryat Arba is 25% lower than in the Beduin city of Rahat – and 90% lower than in up-market Savyon). What perverse discrimination does that indicate?

The perils of PC-diplomacy
These facts and many others should be assertively and proactively inserted into the public discourse, not only as a response to attacks, but as part of an ongoing endeavor to mold public awareness and perception of the realities that pertain to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

One of the principal reasons that this is not occurring is the PC (Palestinian-compliant) perspectives of the Israeli civil society elites, discussed in my previous columns, who exert a dominant influence on the conduct of our public diplomacy.

These entrenched elites cannot permit accurate portrayal of Palestinian society without undermining their own worldview.

(With regard to the water issue, I can attest to this personally.) After all, this would entail exposing the fundamental reasons why the Palestinians find themselves in the miserable state in which they are today: a) a chronic and cavalier disregard for the truth; b) an enduring propensity to blame others for their fate; and c) an obdurate refusal to take responsibility for their own actions – and inaction.

And that is something one does not say in polite company.

www.martinsherman.net

Europeans Increasingly Converting to Islam

2012-01-28T15:38:00.001+02:00

Soeren Kern

http://www.stonegateinstitute.org/2790/europeans-converting-to-islam

Irish actor Liam Neeson says he is thinking about becoming a Muslim after undergoing a spiritual awakening in Turkey.

Neeson, who was born into a Roman Catholic family in Ballymena, Northern Ireland, told the London-based newspaper The Sun that he was impressed by the religious atmosphere in Istanbul while filming a movie in the city.

He said: "The [Islamic] call to prayer happens five times a day, and for the first week, it drives you crazy, and then it just gets into your spirit, and it's the most beautiful, beautiful thing. There are 4,000 mosques in the city. Some are just stunning, and it really makes me think about becoming a Muslim."Neeson is just one of hundreds of thousands of Europeans who are trading their Christian heritage for the supposed exoticism of Islam. The surge in conversions is contributing to the mainstreaming of Islam in Europe and contributing to the Islamization of the continent.

In Britain, the number of Muslim converts recently passed the 100,000 mark, according to a survey conducted by an inter-faith group called Faith Matters. The survey revealed that nearly two thirds of the converts were women, more than 70% were white and the average age at conversion was just 27.

The survey, conducted by Kevin Brice from Swansea University in Wales, asked converts for their views on the negative aspects of British culture. They identified alcohol and drunkenness, a "lack of morality and sexual permissiveness" and "unrestrained consumerism."

More than one in four acknowledged there was a "natural conflict" between being a devout Muslim and living in Britain. Nine out of ten women converts said their change of religion had led to them dressing more conservatively. More than half started wearing a head scarf and 5% had worn the burka.

Separately, government authorities revealed that an increasing number of inmates at British prisons are converting to Islam. For example, one-third of the inmates at one of Britain's most notorious youth jails are Muslims and the religion is attracting a large number of converts.

There are 229 Muslims out of a total of 686 youngsters detained at Feltham Young Offenders' Institution in West London, according to Ministry of Justice figures. There are now so many worshippers at Friday prayers that they have to be split between Feltham's mosque and its gym.

Prison insiders say most non-Muslims are locked up during Friday prayers because so many guards are needed to monitor the lunchtime service. As a consequence, many disillusioned youngsters are becoming attracted to Islam by the prospect of getting better food and superior treatment at the prison.

One of the more prominent Britons to convert to Islam is Lauren Booth, sister-in-law of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Booth, who converted after feeling a "shot of spiritual morphine" on a trip to Iran, now wears a hijab head covering whenever she leaves her home and prays five times a day.

In France, an estimated 70,000 French citizens have converted to Islam in recent years, according to a report by France 3 public television. As in Britain, the majority of converts to Islam in France are young women who say they are disenchanted with materialism.

Conversions to Islam are also rife in Austria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Holland, Hungary, Ireland, Luxembourg, Norway (and here and here), Poland, Portugal and Spain.

In Italy, Ambassador Alfredo Maiolese, an Italian MP, recently became a Muslim and now dedicates his time trying to improving the image of Islam in the West. In Sweden, there are now at least 5,000 converts to Islam.

In Germany, at least 20,000 people have converted to Islam in recent years, according to a report by RTL television. Some of these converts are playing a growing role in jihad in Germany. In 2010, for example, two German converts to Islam who were found guilty of plotting to create what a judge called a "monstrous blood bath" by carrying out terrorist attacks against American targets in Germany.

"This trend has taken on a very threatening quality toward our security, and while not every convert is a potential terrorist, we are facing a sort of homegrown terrorism that has sprouted in our own backyard," according to Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble.

Many European coverts to Islam on fact become vastly more pious than Muslims who were born into Islam. Such converts, taking an absolutist approach, are often easily led into extremism.

In Belgium, for example, Muriel Degauque, a woman from Charleroi and a convert to Islam, committed a suicide car bomb attack in November 2005 against American troops in Iraq. A bakery worker, Degaugue had married a Muslim man and quickly became radical in her religious views.

In Switzerland, young converts to Islam are a potential threat to the country's security, according to Alard du Bois-Reymond, who was head of the Swiss Migration Office until he was removed for his politically incorrect observations.
Du Bois-Reymond told the German-language newspaper NZZ am Sonntag that Swiss converts include people who want a "radically different society" and are "resistant to dialogue." He described the Central Islamic Council of Switzerland, which was founded and is run by Swiss converts to Islam, as "the most radical group in Switzerland."
Also in Switzerland, Daniel Streich, a former member of the Swiss People's Party (SVP) who rose to fame for his campaign against the construction of minarets for mosques, converted to Islam. He now says Switzerland needs more mosques.

In Spain, at least 50,000 native Spaniards have converted to Islam in recent years, many of them women. Webislam.net, a Spanish-language website devoted to propagating Islam in Spain, recently published an article that encourages Spanish women to wed Muslim men. The article describes marriage to a Muslim this way: "Multiculturalism is a rewarding experience for all concerned."

Soeren Kern is Senior Fellow for Transatlantic Relations at the Madrid-based Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group. Follow him on Facebook.

Obama: Of course I intend to prevent a nuclear holocaust . . . in a few months

2012-01-28T15:34:00.002+02:00

Caroline B. Glick

In truth, American Jewry's diffidence towards taking a stand on Iran, or recognizing Obama's dishonestly on this issue specifically and his dishonestly regarding his position on US-Israel ties generally, is not rooted primarily in American Jews' devotion to Obama. It isn't even specifically related to American Jewry's devotion to the political Left. Rather it has to do with American Jewish ambivalence to Israel

European and American perfidy in dealing with Iran's nuclear weapons program apparently has no end. This week we were subject to banner headlines announcing that the EU has decided to enact an oil embargo on Iran. It was only when we got past the bombast that we discovered that the embargo is only set to come into force on July 1.

Following its European colleagues, the Obama administration announced it is also ratcheting up its sanctions against Iran in two months. Sometime in late March, the US will begin sanctioning Iran's third largest bank.

At the same time as the Europeans and the Americans announced their phony sanctions, they reportedly dispatched their Turkish colleagues to Teheran to set up a new round of nuclear talks with the ayatollahs. If the past is any guide, we can expect for the Iranians to agree to sit down and talk just before the oil embargo is scheduled to be enforced. And the Europeans — with US support — will use the existence of talks to postpone indefinitely the implementation of the embargo.

There is nothing new in this game of fake sanctions. And what it shows more than anything is that the Europeans and the Americans are more concerned with pressuring Israel not to attack Iran's nuclear installations than they are in preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power.

For his part Obama has a second target audience — American Jews. He is using his fake sanctions as a means of convincing American Jews that he is a pro-Israel president and that in the current election season, not only should they cast their votes in his favor, they should sign their checks for his campaign.

For their part, both Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak were quick this week to make clear that these moves are insufficient.

They will not force Iran to abandon its nuclear weapons program. More is needed. As to American Jewry, the jury is still out.

In truth, American Jewry's diffidence towards taking a stand on Iran, or recognizing Obama's dishonestly on this issue specifically and his dishonestly regarding his position on US-Israel ties generally is not rooted primarily in American Jews' devotion to Obama. It isn't even specifically related to American Jewry's devotion to the political Left. Rather it has to do with American Jewish ambivalence to Israel.

The roots of that ambivalence — which is shared by other Western Jewish communities to varying degrees -- predate Obama's presidency. Indeed, they predate the establishment of Israel. And now, as the US and the EU have given Iran at least another six months to a year to develop its nuclear bombs unchecked, it is worth considering the nature and influence of this ambivalence.

Today's principal form of Jew hatred is anti-Zionism. Anti-Zionism is similar to previous dominant forms of Jew hatred such as xenophobic and racist anti-Semitism, and Communist anti-Jewish cosmopolitanism in the sense that it takes dominant, popular social trends and turns them against the Jews. Anti-Zionism's current predominance owes to the convergence of several popular social trends which include Western post-nationalism, and anti-colonialism.

The problem that anti-Zionism poses for American Jewry is that it forces them to pay a price for supporting Israel. This is problematic because Zionism has never been fully embraced by American Jewry. Since the dawn of modern Zionism, the cause of Jewish self-determination placed American Jewish leaders in an uncomfortable dilemma.

Unlike every other Diaspora Jewish community, the American Jewish community has always perceived itself as a permanent community rather than an exile community. American Jews have always viewed the United States as the new Promised Land.

With the formation of the modern Zionist movement in the late nineteenth century, American Jews found themselves on the thorns of a dilemma. Clearly, the state of world Jewry was such that national self-determination had become an existential necessity for non-American Jews.

But while supporting Jewish refugees and a scrappy little country was okay, support for the Zionist cause of Jewish national liberation involved an acceptance of the fact that Israel — not the US — is the Jewish homeland. Moreover, it involved accepting that there are Jewish interests that are independent of — if not necessarily in contradiction with — American interests. For instance, irrespective of the prevailing winds in Washington, and regardless of whether the US supports Israel or not, it is a Jewish interest that Israel exists, thrives and survives.

In a recent oped in Haaretz, Hebrew University political science professor Shlomo Avineri contrasted world Jewry's massive mobilization on behalf of Soviet Jewry in the 1970s and 1980s and their relative silence today in the face of Iran's Holocaust denial and open calls for the annihilation of the Jewish state. Avineri is apparently confounded by the disparity between Western Jewry's behavior in the two cases.

But the cause of the disparity is clear. Supporting the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate was easy. Unlike Israel, Soviet Jews were powerless. As such, they were pure victims and supporting them cost Diaspora Jews nothing in terms of their position in their societies. Just as importantly, the cause of freedom for Soviet Jewry was perfectly aligned with the West's Cold War policies against the Soviet Union. The frequent Jewish demonstrations outside Soviet legations provided Western leaders with another tool to fight the Cold War.

In contrast, supporting Israel, and the cause of Jewish freedom and self-determination embodied by Zionism is not cost free for Diaspora Jews. At root, to support Israel and Zionism involves accepting that Jews have inherent rights as Jews. To be a Zionist Jew in the Diaspora means that you embrace and defend the notion that the Jews have the right to their own interests and that those interests may be distinct from other nations' interests. That is, to be a Zionist involves rejecting Jewish assimilation and embracing the fact that Jews require national independence and power to guarantee our survival. And this can be unpleasant.

Pro-Israel American Jews have historically tried to tie their support for Israel to larger, more universal themes in order to extricate themselves from the need to admit that as Jews and supporters of Israel they have a right and a duty to support Jewish freedom even if it isn't always pretty. Again, for Israel's first several decades, it was about helping poor Jews and refugees. In recent years, the predominant defense has been that Israel deserves support because it is a democracy.

Certainly, these are both reasonable reasons for supporting Israel. But neither support for Israel because it was poor nor support for Israel because it is free are specifically Zionist reasons for supporting Israel. You don't have to be a Zionist to support poor Jewish refugees and you don't have to be a Zionist to support democracy.

You do have to be a Zionist however, to defend the Jews in Israel and throughout the world in a coherent manner when the predominant form of Jew hatred is anti-Zionism. You have to be willing to accept and defend the right of the Jewish people to freedom and self-determination in our national homeland against those who deny that right. You have to be a Zionist to defend Israel's right to survive and thrive even though it is no longer poor and its democratically elected government is not liked by the Obama administration.

And you have to be a Zionist to realize that since Jewish survival is dependent on Jewish power, and anti-Zionists reject the right of Jews to have power, that anti-Zionists seek to bring about a situation where Jewish survival is imperiled.

The weakness of American Jewry's response to Iran's genocidal intentions towards Israel is of a piece with its weak response to the forces of anti-Zionism generally and to Jewish anti-Zionists particularly. Since 2007, the US government has effectively ruled out the use of force against Iran's nuclear weapons program and embraced a policy of pursuing negotiations with ayatollahs while enacting impotent sanctions to quell Congressional pressure. At least in part, this policy owes to the US's assessment that a nuclear Iran does not pose a high-level threat to US national security.

At the same time, both then president George W. Bush and Obama determined that an Israeli military strike against Iran's nuclear weapons program does pose a high-level threat to the US. As a consequence, both administrations have taken concerted steps to prevent Israel from attacking Iran.

On the merits, both of these policies are easily discredited. But the fact that they continue to be implemented shows that they are supported by a large and powerful constituency in Washington.

To oppose Iran's nuclear program effectively, American Jews are required to oppose these strongly supported US policies. And at some point, this may require them to announce they support Israel's right to survive and thrive even if that paramount right conflicts with how the US government perceives US national interests. That is, it may require them to embrace Zionism unconditionally.

No doubt, if they do so, their own conditions will improve. They will finally be able to speak coherently against the gathering forces of anti-Zionism — both from within the Jewish community and from without. This in turn will act as a lightning rod for inspiring American Jews to embrace their Judaism.

With their leaders to date having abjectly failed to contend with the most powerful form of Jew hatred, it is no wonder that so many Diaspora Jews are leaving the fold. If they reverse course and go after their attackers, American Jewish leaders will give community members a meaningful reason to proudly embrace their identity.

In a speech this week at the Knesset, Netanyahu explained the different lessons the Holocaust teaches the international community on the one hand, and the Jews on the other. As far as its universal lessons are concerned, Netanyahu said, "The lesson is that the countries of the world must be woken up, as much as possible, so that they can organize against such crimes. The lesson is that the broadest possible alliances must be forged in order to act against this threat before it is too late."

As for the Jews, Netanyahu embraced Zionism's core principle: "With regard to threats to our very existence, we cannot abandon our future to the hands of others. With regard to our fate, our duty is to rely on ourselves alone."

We must hope that world Jewry will recognize today that the fate of the Jewish people in Israel and throughout the world is indivisible and rally to Israel's side whatever the social cost of doing so. But even if they do not recognize this basic truth, the imperatives of Zionism, of the Jewish people, remain in place.

Ireland's top diplomat in Gaza to see blockade impact

2012-01-28T02:33:00.002+02:00

GAZA CITY - Agence France-Presse

Irish Foreign Minister Eamon Gilmore (L) shakes hands with UNRWA commissioner-general Filippo Grandi during his visit to the UNRWA aid distribution centre in the Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip on January 27,2012. AFP photo

Irish Foreign Minister Eamon Gilmore (L) shakes hands with UNRWA commissioner-general Filippo Grandi during his visit to the UNRWA aid distribution centre in the Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip on January 27,2012. AFP photo
Visiting Irish Foreign Minister Eamon Gilmore on Friday kicked off a three-day trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories with a brief visit to the Gaza Strip.

It was Gilmore's first visit to the Hamas-ruled coastal territory which has been languishing under an Israeli blockade for more than five years.

"Ireland is completely opposed to the blockade," Gilmore told AFP in Gaza City. "It has a huge impact on people who are living in Gaza and it is clearly having a devastating impact on the local economy," said the minister.

"The blockade should be ended soon in order to allow the local economy to grow and ensure that people who live in Gaza can exercise their human rights: freedom of movement and travel." Gilmore's spokesman Philip Grant earlier said the minister wanted to see first hand the impact of the embargo.

"Within the European Union, Ireland has been one of the most forceful countries calling for a lifting of the Gaza blockade. He is here to see what the economic and social impact has been on the people of Gaza," he said.

The minister's visit comes nearly three months after Israeli forces blocked a vessel carrying 15 Irish activists, among them a member of the European parliament, from reaching Gaza in defiance of Israel's controversial naval blockade.

The move sparked tensions with Dublin, which has repeatedly expressed its opposition to the Israeli embargo that was first imposed in 2006, then tightened a year later when Hamas seized control of the territory.

"Flotilla is a voluntary activity by individuals and organisations -- they do that obviously in response to the blockade," Gilmore said.

"The role of the Irish government is playing through the European Union and the United Nations and international organisations, and we made very clear the position of the Irish government -- that it opposes the blockade, and that we believe it is wrong." Irish activists were also part of an earlier 10-ship flotilla which tried to reach Gaza in July but their vessel was damaged, with the organisers accusing Israel of sabotage.

At the time, Dublin said it would take a "very serious view" if the allegations were proven.

During his brief visit to the coastal territory, Gilmore met representatives of Palestinian civil society and also talked with officials from UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, but did not meet any Hamas representatives in line with EU policy, which blacklists the group as a terror organisation.

He left around midday (1000 GMT) and headed to Jerusalem where he was to be briefed by OCHA, the UN agency for humanitarian affairs, before heading out on a tour of the Old City and a visit to the flashpoint Palestinian neighbourhood of Silwan in the city's annexed eastern sector.

Israel has vigorously defended its right to maintain a blockade on the Gaza Strip, saying it is necessary to prevent weapons from entering the Hamas-run territory.

Last September, a UN report into a deadly Israeli commando raid on a Turkish-led flotilla in May 2010, which left nine activists dead, found the Jewish state had acted with "excessive force" but said its naval blockade on Gaza was legal.

Mahmoud Abbas Continues Ruthless Campaign Against Opponents

2012-01-28T02:30:00.002+02:00

Challah Hu Akbar

Last week I reported that Mahmoud Abbas was monitoring the phone calls of political opponents. A few weeks before that Jordan, at Abbas’ behest, seized Mohammad Dahlan’s assets as well as those of his brother and an unidentified individual.

Palestine Press and Palestine Today are both reporting that Fatah has expelled Samir Mashharawi. Mashharawi is a friend of Dahlan and worked with him in Gaza, when Dahlan was in charge of the security forces. Dahlan was expelled from Fatah back in June, with ratification of the expulsion coming in August. According to Palestine Press, Mashharawi slammed Fatah a few weeks ago in an article on Al-Arabiya. Mashharawi reportedly said that Fatah “lacked leadership” and had lost “the spirit of the struggle.” According to Al-Quds Al-Arabi, Mashharawi has been residing in the UAE, where he is engaged in business dealings with Dahlan.

Abbas is also targeting Mashharawi due to his comments in support of Dahlan in the Abbas-Dahlan affair. According to Mashharawi, the dispute between Dahlan and Abbas is“personal” and Abbas is using it as a distraction as he “wants to run away from five years of failure in running the Palestinian Authority and the political portfolio.”

In July 2011, Palestinian Authority security forces, at the behest of Abbas, raided Dahlan’s home in Ramallah. During the raid they arrested 23 guards and confiscated 16 guns and two vehicles. According to Mashharawi, Abbas wanted to do far more.

“They wanted to initiate an armed clash with Dahlan’s men so that the police could open fire. The goal was to kill Dahlan and then announce that he was part of a conspiracy to overthrow the Palestinian president.”

All of these events further emphasize the points recently made by Jonathan Schanzer.

All things considered, Dahlan’s fate is inconsequential. His star fell long ago. More noteworthy is the ruthlessness Abbas has employed in pursuing him. With Washington’s full support to fend off Hamas’s challengers, Abbas has become relentless against anyone who dares challenge him.

While Dahlan will probably not pose a political threat from exile, Abbas will likely keep after him. But it won’t end there, either. The Palestinian president has also picked fights with other potential political threats, including Prime Minister Fayyad, and Yasser Abbed Rabbo of the PLO. All three share a belief that the Palestinian Authority under Abbas has become less transparent and strayed from its original goal: a viable and transparent state that coexists with its neighbors, including Israel.

The Dahlan affair can best be understood as a witch hunt. It underscores the fact that Abbas has consolidated power, and that he will abide no challenges. Abbas’s whims bode poorly for the Palestinian Authority, which may now expend more energy settling scores than resolving the long-standing conflict with Israel.

Don’t you just love Palestinian politics?

Turkey is Hamas’ New Primary Funder

2012-01-27T20:23:00.002+02:00

Challah Hu Akbar | Jan 27, 2012

Back in December IMEMC reported:

Turkish sources reported that Prime Minister of Turkey, Receb Tayyip Erdogan, sent a confidential letter to Ismail Haniyya, Prime Minister of the Hamas-led government in the Gaza Strip, inviting him to visit Turkey, and informing him that he has decided to grant Haniyya’s government $300 Million.

Jonathan Schanzer wrote shortly thereafter:

…this pledge would cover nearly half of Hamas’s reported $769 million budget next year, and would make Turkey its primary benefactor.

Hamas and Turkish officials deny the report, and Hamas probably won’t submit to an external audit any time soon. But let there be no doubt: Hamas is for sale, thanks to the Iranian nuclear program and the Arab Spring. .With Iran stepping back, could Turkey step in? From publicly clashing with Israeli president Shimon Peres over Israel’s Hamas policy at Davos in 2009 to sponsoring the ill-fated flotilla that attempted to breach Israel’s blockade of Gaza in 2010, Erdogan has become a champion of the Hamas cause.

In recent years, the Turkish government has provided nominal assistance to Hamas in Gaza through a series of charities. Hamas reportedly now operates on Turkish soil, meaning Ankara is already a patron. And Hamas recently announced that leader Ismail Haniyeh plans to visit Turkey soon.

Now, more confirmation of that IMEMC report has arrived. A diplomat was quoted by Reuters today.

“Iran used to give $250 million to $300 million to Hamas but there have been interruptions in the payments in past year. Our understanding is that there has been no payment since August 2011,” he said.

Hamas Gaza Strip leader Ismail Haniyeh was thought to have “received promises from Turkey to provide the movement and his administration with $300 million a year to help Gaza”.

In addition to this Reuters report, Palestinian news sources are reporting that Yediot Ahranot in its Friday paper is reporting that Turkey has agreed to provide Hamas with $300 million.

The Yediot Ahranot article does not appear to be online currently. If it becomes available I will link to it. If anyone has a hard copy and would like to email it, please do.

A Slashed and Burned Military

2012-01-27T18:53:00.001+02:00

Mike Brownfield

January 27, 2012

The future is not bright for the U.S. military. Yesterday, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta gave America a glimpse of the half-trillion dollars in defense spending cuts requested by the Obama Administration and detailed how the U.S. military’s capabilities would be affected in practical terms. The result is a slashed and burned military that woefully lacks the forces it needs to meet America’s security challenges on a global scale.

On the ground, in the sea, and in the air, American forces will shrink drastically — the Army will shrink by 72,000 people, the active Marine Corps will be reduced by 20,000, the Air Force will see six tactical fighter squadrons de-established while an additional training fighter squadron will be eliminated, the next-generation F-35 Join Strike Fighter procurement will be slowed, and the Navy will retire seven cruisers and two amphibious ships at an early juncture while delaying the procurements of new ships. To put these cuts in context, we are returning to ground forces levels we had under President Bill Clinton when the Army strained and scrambled to execute smaller missions like Kosovo and Bosnia–let alone significant ground force operations. In order to compensate for the drastically reduced military capabilities, the Administration plans to increase reliance on unmanned drones and special-operations teams based around the globe. But special operations are a scalpel, not a Swiss army knife. They are not an “easy-button” substitute for the many security missions the United States undertakes worldwide. And they rely on a strong backbone of conventional forces in order to succeed. The U.S. Navy’s presence was essential in Somalia during the recent hostage rescue, as was the Air Force’s support in the first phase of Afghanistan and the Army’s muscle during the surge in Iraq. Special forces without robust conventional forces is like a wide receiver without a quarterback and a line.

In a new paper, The Heritage Foundation’s Baker Spring, the F. M. Kirby Research Fellow in National Security Policy in the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies, explains that the U.S. military is in danger of becoming the broken force it was in the Carter era:

As was the case following the Vietnam War in the 1970s, defense budget reductions of the scope previewed by Panetta generally lead to reduced combat readiness and, ultimately, a hollow force. This is because a force that is too small has to endure higher operating tempos and rotation cycles. It also results in a reduction in the technological edge that permits the U.S. military to achieve victory on the battlefield quickly and with fewer casualties. Finally, it becomes more difficult to man the force with high-quality personnel and maintain high morale.

Unfortunately, these cuts are just the beginning. Under the Budget Control Act that Congress passed last summer, the military will face automatic budget cuts amounting to as much as $600 billion in addition to those that Panetta laid out yesterday. As Spring explains, the only way to avoid these automatic cuts is for the Budget Control Act to be amended or repealed — a measure that President Obama has said he would veto.

All of this comes despite the fact that spending on national defense — a core constitutional function of government — has declined significantly over time, despite wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Spending on the three major entitlements–Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid–has more than tripled. And while Washington attempts to cut spending, it is the military that is taking the brunt of it: For every dollar the President hopes to save in domestic programs, he plans on saving $128 in defense.

This leaves America in a precarious position. Fewer troops in all the services will be scrambling in a global shell game to mask the fact that the United States can’t defend all of its interests. The force will be even more stressed than at the height of Iraq and Afghanistan. By cutting the defense budget, the United States is undermining the responsiveness of its defense industrial base. In addition, without proper investments, the United States will lose technological advantages vis-a-vis its future strategic competitors.

Meanwhile, America’s enemies are watching. They can count our troops, our planes, and our ships. They can look on as America’s military retreats and loses its ability to project forces around the world. And they will quickly realize that the United States will not be able to cover its responsibilities worldwide. That is an invitation for the sort of security threats America cannot afford — and they are threats that America may not be able to respond to with its stripped-down military.

Quick Hits:

The U.S. economy anemically grew 2.8 percent in the fourth quarter last year, and indicators point to even slower growth in the beginning of 2012, leading the Federal Reserve to say it expects to keep interest rates low through late 2014.
GOP presidential candidates engaged in their 19th debate last night, their last chance to spar before Florida’s primary vote on January 31.
A “very high escalation” of violence has been reported in Syria over the last four days despite the presence of Arab League observers sent to monitor the organization’s plan to end the 10-month-old crisis.
Censorship is coming to Twitter. The micro-blogging company announced that it will begin to censor content in countries where particular words are against the law but will be displayed in countries where they are legal.
LUNCHTIME CHAT: How have President Obama’s economic policies impacted America? Find out in our live chat with Bill Beach, director of Heritage’s Center for Data Analysis, today from 12 PM to 1 PM ET. Click here to join in.

The Zionist imperative

2012-01-27T18:50:00.002+02:00

Caroline Glick

European and American perfidy in dealing with Iran's nuclear weapons program apparently has no end. This week we were subject to banner headlines announcing that the EU has decided to place an oil embargo on Iran. It was only when we got past the bombast that we discovered that the embargo is only set to come into force on July 1.

Following its European colleagues, the Obama administration announced it is also ratcheting up its sanctions against Iran... in two months. Sometime in late March, the US will begin sanctioning Iran's third largest bank.
At the same time as the Europeans and the Americans announced their phony sanctions, they reportedly dispatched their Turkish colleagues to Tehran to set up a new round of nuclear talks with the ayatollahs. If the past is any guide, we can expect for the Iranians to agree to sit down and talk just before the oil embargo is scheduled to be enforced. And the Europeans - with US support - will use the existence of talks to postpone indefinitely the implementation of the embargo.

There is nothing new in this game of fake sanctions. And what it shows more than anything is that the Europeans and the Americans are more concerned with pressuring Israel not to attack Iran's nuclear installations than they are in preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power.

Obama has a second target audience - American Jews. He is using his fake sanctions as a means of convincing American Jews that he is a pro-Israel president and that in the current election season, not only should they cast their votes in his favor, they should sign their checks for his campaign.

Both Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak were quick this week to make clear that these moves are insufficient. They will not force Iran to abandon its nuclear weapons program. More is needed.

As to American Jewry, the jury is still out.

In truth, American Jewry's diffidence towards taking a stand on Iran, or recognizing Obama's dishonesty on this issue specifically and his dishonesty regarding his position on US-Israel ties generally is not rooted primarily in American Jews' devotion to Obama. It isn't even specifically related to American Jewry's devotion to the political Left. Rather it has to do with American Jewish ambivalence to Israel.

The roots of that ambivalence - which is shared by other Western Jewish communities to varying degrees - predate Obama's presidency.

Indeed, they predate the establishment of the State of Israel. And now, as the US and the EU have given Iran at least another six months to a year to develop its nuclear bombs unchecked, it is worth considering the nature and influence of this ambivalence.

Today's principal form of Jew-hatred is anti- Zionism. Anti-Zionism is similar to previous dominant forms of Jew hatred such as Christian anti-Judaism, xenophobic and racist anti- Semitism, and Communist anti-Jewish cosmopolitanism in the sense that it takes dominant, popular social trends and turns them against the Jews. Anti-Zionism's current predominance owes to the convergence of several popular social trends which include Western post-nationalism, and anti-colonialism.

The problem that anti-Zionism poses for American Jewry is that it forces them to pay a price for supporting Israel. This is problematic because Zionism has never been fully embraced by American Jewry. Since the dawn of modern Zionism, the cause of Jewish self-determination placed American Jewish leaders in an uncomfortable dilemma.

UNLIKE EVERY other Diaspora Jewish community, the American Jewish community has always perceived itself as a permanent community rather than an exilic community. American Jews have always viewed the United States as the new Promised Land.

With the formation of the modern Zionist movement in the late 19th century, American Jews found themselves on the horns of a dilemma. Clearly, the state of world Jewry was such that national self-determination had become an existential necessity for non-American Jews.

But while supporting Jewish refugees and a scrappy little country was okay, support for the Zionist cause of Jewish national liberation involved an acceptance of the fact that Israel - not the US - is the Jewish homeland. Moreover, it involved accepting that there are Jewish interests that are independent of - if not necessarily in contradiction with - American interests. For instance, irrespective of the prevailing winds in Washington, and regardless of whether the US supports Israel or not, it is a Jewish interest that Israel exists, thrives and survives.

In a recent op-ed in Haaretz, Hebrew University political science professor Shlomo Avineri contrasted world Jewry's massive mobilization on behalf of Soviet Jewry in the 1970s and 1980s and their relative silence today in the face of Iran's Holocaust denial and open calls for the annihilation of the Jewish state. Avineri is apparently confounded by the disparity between Western Jewry's behavior in the two cases.

But the cause of the disparity is clear. Supporting the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate was easy. Unlike Israel, Soviet Jews were powerless. As such, they were pure victims and supporting them cost Diaspora Jews nothing in terms of their position in their societies.

Just as important, the cause of freedom for Soviet Jewry was perfectly aligned with the West's Cold War policies against the Soviet Union. The frequent Jewish demonstrations outside Soviet legations provided Western leaders with another tool to fight the Cold War.

In contrast, supporting Israel, and the cause of Jewish freedom and self-determination embodied by Zionism, is not cost-free for Diaspora Jews. At root, to support Israel and Zionism involves accepting that Jews have inherent rights as Jews. To be a Zionist Jew in the Diaspora means that you embrace and defend the notion that the Jews have the right to their own interests and that those interests may be distinct from other nations' interests. That is, to be a Zionist involves rejecting Jewish assimilation and embracing the fact that Jews require national independence and power to guarantee our survival. And this can be unpleasant.

PRO-ISRAEL AMERICAN Jews have historically tried to tie their support for Israel to larger, more universal themes, in order to extricate themselves from the need to admit that as Jews and supporters of Israel they have a right and a duty to support Jewish freedom even if it isn't always pretty. Again, for Israel's first several decades, it was about helping poor Jews and refugees. In recent years, the predominant defense has been that Israel deserves support because it is a democracy.

Certainly, these are both reasonable reasons for supporting Israel. But neither support for Israel because it was poor nor support for Israel because it is free is a specifically Zionist reason for supporting Israel. You don't have to be a Zionist to support poor Jewish refugees and you don't have to be a Zionist to support democracy.

You do have to be a Zionist however, to defend the Jews in Israel and throughout the world in a coherent manner when the predominant form of Jew-hatred is anti-Zionism.

You have to be willing to accept and defend the right of the Jewish people to freedom and self-determination in our national homeland against those who deny that right. You have to be a Zionist to defend Israel's right to survive and thrive even though it is no longer poor and its democratically elected government is not liked by the Obama administration.

And you have to be a Zionist to realize that since Jewish survival is dependent on Jewish power, and anti-Zionists reject the right of Jews to have power, that anti-Zionists seek to bring about a situation where Jewish survival is imperiled.

The weakness of American Jewry's response to Iran's genocidal intentions towards Israel is of a piece with its weak response to the forces of anti-Zionism generally and to Jewish anti- Zionists particularly. Since 2007, the US government has effectively ruled out the use of force against Iran's nuclear weapons program and embraced a policy of pursuing negotiations with ayatollahs while enacting impotent sanctions to quell congressional pressure. At least in part, this policy is due to the US's assessment that a nuclear Iran does not pose a high-level threat to US national security.

Both then-president George W. Bush and later Barack Obama determined that an Israeli military strike against Iran's nuclear weapons program does pose a high-level threat to the US. As a consequence, both administrations have taken concerted steps to prevent Israel from attacking Iran.

On the merits, both of these policies are easily discredited. But the fact that they continue to be implemented shows that they are supported by a large and powerful constituency in Washington.

To oppose Iran's nuclear program effectively, American Jews are required to oppose these strongly supported US policies. And at some point, this may require them to announce they support Israel's right to survive and thrive even if that paramount right conflicts with how the US government perceives US national interests.

That is, it may require them to embrace Zionism unconditionally.

No doubt, if they do so, their own conditions will improve. They will finally be able to speak coherently against the gathering forces of anti-Zionism - both from within the Jewish community and from without. This in turn will act as a lightning rod for inspiring American Jews to embrace their Judaism.

With their leaders having abjectly failed to contend with the most powerful form of Jew-hatred, it is no wonder that so many Diaspora Jews are leaving the fold. If they reverse course and go after their attackers, American Jewish leaders will give community members a meaningful reason to proudly embrace their identity.

In a speech this week at the Knesset, Netanyahu explained the different lessons the Holocaust teaches the international community on the one hand, and the Jews on the other.

As far as its universal lessons are concerned, Netanyahu said, "The lesson is that the countries of the world must be woken up, as much as possible, so that they can organize against such crimes.

The lesson is that the broadest possible alliances must be forged in order to act against this threat before it is too late."

As for the Jews, Netanyahu embraced Zionism's core principle: "With regard to threats to our very existence, we cannot abandon our future to the hands of others.

"With regard to our fate, our duty is to rely on ourselves alone."

We must hope that world Jewry will recognize today that the fate of the Jewish people in Israel and throughout the world is indivisible and rally to Israel's side whatever the social cost of doing so. But even if they do not recognize this basic truth, the imperatives of Zionism, of the Jewish people, remain in place.

Originally published in the Jerusalem Post.

Settlements Freeze – an Obstacle to Peace!

2012-01-27T18:29:00.000+02:00

Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, "Second Thought”
"Israel Hayom” Newsletter, November 4, 2011
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=770

Abu Mazen's September 23, 2011 UN speech and the Palestinian Authority's education system reaffirm the fact that Jewish settlements within pre-1967 Israel – and not in Judea and Samaria (J&S) – are the root cause of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

In his UN speech, Abu Mazen highlighted the "63 years old occupation” since 1948; this message is reinforced throughout his K-12 education system. He heralded the PLO – which was established three years before the 1967 War and before the establishment of contemporary Jewish settlement in J&S - as his supreme authority. Abu Mazen denies the existence of Jewish roots between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

Thus, the root cause of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is not the J&S settlements, but the existence of the Jewish State. Freezing Jewish settlements in J&S diverts attention away from the core cause of the conflict. Moreover, it constitutes an obstacle to peace, by reflecting submission to pressure, thus fueling further pressure, radicalizing Arab demands, intensifying Arab terrorism and eroding Israel's posture of deterrence, while the only peace-possible is deterrence-driven peace.

The pre-1967 area of Israel was the focus of the systematic campaign of Arab terrorism during the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, as well as of the conventional Arab wars on Israel in 1948, 1956 and 1967.

A giveaway of all Jewish settlements in J&S was offered by former Prime Minister Ehud Barak in October 2000. Abu Mazen and Arafat responded with an unprecedented wave of suicide bombings in pre-1967 Israeli towns, which are defined as "settlements” by Abu Mazen's school textbooks.

The September 2005 uprooting of 25 Jewish settlements in J&S and Gaza induced an unprecedented barrage of missiles, hitting Jewish settlements in pre-1967 Israel.

*If the 350,000 Jews, among 1.6MN Arabs, in J&S constitute an obstacle to peace, are the 1.5MN Arabs, among 6MN Jews, within pre-1967 Israel, an insurmountable obstacle to peace?!

*If Jewish construction in J&S should be frozen, lest it prejudge the outcome of negotiations, then Arab construction in J&S should be frozen as well, unless one wishes to prejudge the outcome of negotiations.

*If the uprooting of Jewish communities advances peace, why would the uprooting of Arab communities undermine peace?!

*The uprooting of Arabs communities would be immoral; so, too, is the uprooting of Jewish communities.

*No opposition to an Arab presence in pre-1967 Israel should be tolerated; so, too, should the opposition to a Jewish presence in J&S.

*Illegal Jewish homes in J&S are razed by Israel; so, too, should the 1,100 illegal Arab homes built annually in Jerusalem and the thousands of illegal Arab homes in J&S?

The 1950-67 Jordanian occupation of J&S was recognized by only Britain and Pakistan. The most recent internationally-recognized sovereign over J&S was the 1922 British Mandate, which defined J&S as part of the Jewish National Homeland. Article 6 of that Mandate acknowledges the right of Jews to settle in J&S. Judge Stephen Schwebel, former President of the International Court of Justice, determined that Israel's presence in Judea and Samaria was rooted in self-defense and therefore did not constitute "occupation." Eugene Rostow, former Dean of Yale Law School, former Undersecretary of State and co-author of UN Security Council Resolution 242, asserted that 242 entitled Jews to settle in J&S. The Oslo Accord does not prohibit the construction of Jewish settlements in J&S. Moreover, settlements are established on state-owned – and not private – land.

Peaceful coexistence and the determination to uproot Jewish or Arab communities constitute an oxymoron. The concepts of "Durable peace” and "Judenrein areas" contradict each other. The litmus test of Palestinian/Arab intent is the acceptance or rejection of Jewish settlements presence in J&S.

Jewish settlements in J&S are not the root cause of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. They are located at the roots of 4,000 years old Jewish religious and national aspirations. They are located at the crux of Israel's national security which also provides 40% of Israel's water supply. The mountain ridges and water aquifers of J&S are the "Golan Heights” of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and 80% of Israel's transportation, business, economic, health, education, scientific and irrigation infrastructure in the 9-15 miles wide sliver, which is the pre-1967 Israel.

Freezing of Jewish construction in J&S is not a peace-enhancer; it is an appeasement-enhancer, thus undermining the cause of peace and advancing the cause of war.

Shabbat Shalom,

Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, "Second Thought: US-Israel Initiative"
www.TheEttingerReport.com

Obama Administration holds talks with Muslim Brotherhood, speeds pace of aid to Egypt

2012-01-27T18:27:00.002+02:00

Jihad Watch

The Brotherhood and the Salafis don't even need to collect the jizya from the Copts, as long as they've got Barack Obama.

"Obama set to speed aid to Egypt: official," by Warren Strobel for Reuters, January 25 (thanks to Wimpy):

(Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama plans to accelerate the pace of American aid to Egypt, a top State Department official said on Wednesday, as the most populous Arab nation reaches a critical stage in its uncertain transition away from autocratic rule.

Undersecretary of State Robert Hormats, part of a U.S. delegation that held unprecedented talks last week with Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, said Washington wanted to provide "more immediate benefits" to Egyptians, who earlier this month conducted their first democratic elections in decades. "During this period, we want to be as supportive as we can. This is an historic moment. Egypt's a country of enormous importance," Hormats said.

Under the plan, some non-urgent U.S. aid slated for other countries - he did not name them - would be redirected to Egypt. And funding in the pipeline for long-term programs in Egypt would be shifted to quick-impact projects, he said.

Hormats, speaking to Reuters on the sidelines of the annual World Economic Forum, emphasized that the White House had not made any final decisions, and that he was providing Washington's "broad thinking" on the subject.

It was unclear whether the total amount of U.S. aid to Egypt would be increased. "Whether it's an increase or whether it's reprioritizing existing assistance, we're still working this out," Hormats said.

Still, he made clear the United States wants to be seen as doing more to assist a hoped-for democratic evolution in Egypt, where the military still holds ultimate power on the first anniversary of protests that ousted President Hosni Mubarak.
Egypt has long been among the top recipients of U.S. aid, which began flowing in substantial sums after it became the first Arab nation to sign a peace agreement with Israel in 1979, regarding the money as an investment in regional security.

According to a report by the Congressional Research Service, the United States gave roughly $2 billion or more annually for 25 years after the peace agreement, most of it for the military.

That figure has drifted down to hold steady at around $1.55 billion in recent years.

Congress approved $1.3 billion in military aid to Egypt for the current fiscal year, but with conditions attached. It also approved $250 million in economic aid, as well as an "enterprise fund" of up to $60 million.

For the money to flow, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton must certify that the Egyptian government is supporting the transition to a civilian government, including holding free and fair elections, and implementing policies to protect freedom of expression, association, and religion, and due process of law.

In addition, the law says that none of the aid, military or economic, can be spent unless Egypt is meeting its obligations under the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty.

U.S. lawmakers appear in no mood to approve more, at least for Egypt's military, which has earned U.S. criticism for cracking down on pro-democracy non-governmental organizations and for the way security forces have treated women protesters.

SUPPORT FOR DEMOCRACIES

In his State of the Union address Tuesday, Obama said the United States had a "huge stake in the outcome" of the revolutions that have swept the Arab world. He pledged to "support policies that lead to strong and stable democracies," but offered no concrete proposals for additional assistance.

Obama is to unveil his proposed federal budget for fiscal year 2013, including foreign assistance, on February 13.

He has yet to announce major new aid packages following the overthrow of governments in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya.

U.S. officials have cited fiscal restraints at home, as well as resistance in the Congress.

"It's unfortunate the juxtaposition, that our budgetary constraints come at the same time that you have this enormously hopeful series of changes in the region," Hormats said.

When the Cold War ended in 1989 and it was clear which anti-Communist leaders would take power in former Soviet bloc states, Congress was quick to provide backing "without a lot of cajoling," Hormats noted.

Following the revolts of the "Arab Spring," and in Egypt particularly, "you have a much more fluid situation, and we don't know what the government's going to look like," he said.

Underscoring that point, Hormats last week held what he called the first-ever economic meetings between a senior U.S. official and the Muslim Brotherhood, a once-banned Islamist group that this month won the biggest share of seats in Egypt's lower house of parliament.

The delegation that met with the Brotherhood, which Washington had long kept at arm's length, was led by Deputy Secretary of State William Burns.

Hormats described the half-dozen Brotherhood officials he met with as "very pragmatic. They understand, they're the majority party now in the parliament. They are going to be the primary political party in Egypt. They need to deliver results."

"And their focus primarily is on small- and medium-enterprise" as generators of job creation, he said.

Earlier this month, Representative Frank Wolf, a Virginia Republican, wrote to Obama and Clinton, warning them that recent raids on foreign non-governmental organizations in Cairo could jeopardize U.S. military assistance.

While acknowledging lawmakers' concerns over trends in Egypt and other Middle East countries where dictators have been toppled, Hormats said, "democracy is not always a smooth or predictable process."

"We have to understand that and not expect miracles. ... We have to explain to the American people that patience is needed and support is needed," he said.

Along with formal government assistance to Egypt, the Obama administration is promoting expanded trade ties; supporting efforts by the International Monetary Fund to reach an agreement with Cairo; and encouraging U.S. firms to explore investment.

A U.S. business mission led by General Electric (GE.N) is headed to Egypt next month, Hormats said.

(Additional reporting by Susan Cornwell and Arshad Mohammed in Washington; Editing by Jon Boyle and Sandra Maler)

'Israel doesn't have to face Iran alone,' says French envoy

2012-01-27T18:23:00.002+02:00

French Ambassador to Israel Christophe Bigot tells Israel Hayom's weekend edition: "The Iranian nuclear program is a threat to the entire world...and every country has the right to defend itself. But we are not there yet" • He says the West needs to offer Iranian opposition support.
Boaz Bismuth

Earlier this week, the EU voted to impose an unprecedented embargo on Iranian oil. This was not an easy task. For Greece and Spain, this marked a significant concession. France was one of the countries that worked tirelessly to win the agreement of the 27 EU partners. In recent years, France has been among the leaders in pushing a militant stance against the Iranian nuclear program. Still, sanctions are one thing, but talk of military action is another. Christophe Bigot, the 46-year-old French ambassador to Israel, knows this country and its inhabitants very well. He served for three years here as the deputy ambassador before returning to us as top envoy in the summer of 2009. Since coming back, he has not rested for a moment, though he did manage to find time in his schedule this week to speak with Israel Hayom about a host of issues, including the Iranian nuclear program, Gilad Schalit, and the issue that most riles up the Israelis – the French nationals suspected in causing the hit-and-run death of Lee Zeitouni, who subsequently fled the country to evade arrest and trial. To some Israelis, France has come to represent a safe haven for criminals.

This week the EU decided to impose a historic oil embargo on Tehran. There are those who see this as substantive sanctions with teeth, but they will only come into effect in July. Mr. Ambassador, since we are all aware that time is running out, why wait until July?

“Since 2003, we have been trying to put an end to the Iranian nuclear project. We worked hard to achieve this goal. First we tried to persuade the Iranians, to get clear answers from them, promises. We tried again in October to get clear answers regarding the uranium enrichment, but we didn’t get any answer from them.

“In November, the International Atomic Energy Agency issued its report, which laid bare what many of us already knew to be true or suspected was true: The Iranian nuclear program was geared toward military purposes. In the wake of the report, French President Nicolas Sarkozy demanded unprecedented sanctions against Iran. You have to remember that oil represents 80 percent of Iranian exports, so we decided on an embargo on Iranian oil. In addition, we also decided to freeze assets belonging to the Iranian central bank, so here we are touching the heart of the matter, touching the money. This wasn’t all done in a day. I’m aware of the fact that there are those who are raising a brow and asking, ‘Why wait and give the Iranians time?’

“Indeed, many countries have agreements with Iran that need to expire. In countries that did not have agreements, the embargo has already come into effect, and the markets are already responding to the embargo. One can see how this is having an impact. The Iranian economy is beginning to collapse.”

So should Israel be satisfied?

“Israel seems to feel that it is all alone in facing the Iranian nuclear threat, but Israel is not left to face Iran on its own. First, because Israel has friends, and also because the Iranian threat is against the entire region. The Iranian nuclear program is a threat to the entire world. The Iranian nuclear program poses an existential threat. What we need is for fewer states to purchase oil from Iran, and those who continue to do so will pay low prices, so either way Iran comes out on the losing end.”

What about a new round of sanctions in the Security Council?

“We are certainly hopeful that this will happen, but the Russians and the Chinese reject this idea.”

Is the military option a legitimate one?

“I would not put it that way. Every country has the right to defend itself. But we are not there yet. We are currently in the exploratory stage of figuring out what is the most efficient means that we can utilize to change the situation in Iran. The most efficient thing is for the entire international community to join unprecedented sanctions against Iran. This is what we are trying to do. For some, this will always be too little, too late. But when one examines the decisions from this week, they are unprecedented.”

There is much talk about the Arab Spring that began in Tunisia, but there are those who believe it began with the protest movement in Iran following the president elections that were 'stolen.'

“I absolutely agree with you on this point.”

Did U.S. President Barack Obama err in not extending his support to the Iranian demonstrators? Was it not a mistake by the West to refrain from aiding the wave of unrest?

“France offered extensive aid. When people talk about Iran, people always think about the nuclear issue, and this is obvious, but there are other issues as well. At the U.N. and the Human Rights Council in Geneva, we had very harsh words about the state of human rights in Iran and resolutions were passed.

“You have to remember that the Arab Spring was initially a ‘Persian Spring,’ and that Iran is not North Korea. There are students, there are universities, and there is a population that is much more pro-Western than we tend to think. We also need to work in providing assistance to the opposition there, and to bolster it. There are radio stations whose frequency is picked up in Iran. I am hopeful that the Arab Spring that started in Tehran will resume there.

“Take for example [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial. On this issue, we are also quite clear. Whenever he raised the matter in Geneva or New York, we left the assembly hall. There is no compromise on an issue like Holocaust denial.”

Perhaps the option as to how to deal with Iran will come from the Iranian people who will topple the ayatollah regime. In that scenario, nobody would be particularly moved by an Iranian nuclear program that is civilian in nature, just like there was during the reign of the Shah, correct?

“We have no problem with a civilian nuclear program in Iran. The problem is that Iran lied. Iran is developing a nuclear program that is not aimed for civilian purposes. The Iranian regime is issuing aggressive statements. We say ‘yes’ to a civilian nuclear program, so to that end we proposed a plan that would call for providing the Iranians with fuel rods instead of enriched uranium, and they could then use those rods for doing medical research. The problem is when this nuclear program becomes militarized.”

Does Paris have information as to how far the Iranians have progressed toward a nuclear weapon?

“This is a matter for our intelligence people, but I can say that we need to act quickly. Time is working against us. This is why the sanctions that were approved by the European Union are so important. Now we need to persuade Russia and China to sign on.”

“An end to the oppression in Syria”

Let us revisit the Arab Spring, if you will. Does Paris agree with Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s assessment that Syrian President Bashar Assad is living on borrowed time?

“I think that a leader who raises his hand against his own people, and who does so repeatedly, has a serious problem of legitimacy. It seems to me that there are already 5,000 deaths in Syria from the start of the rioting. Europe imposed sanctions against the Syrian regime. We are demanding a democratic process and an end to the oppression.”

Let us assume that Assad survives in power. In such a scenario, could France resume working with him?

“Assad has shown no signs of returning to his top form. We need to look forward, and forward means democracy.”

France was the driving force behind the recent war in Libya. Why not in Syria as well?

“The situation is different. In Libya, there were two resolutions passed by the U.N. Security Council. As for Syria, Russia and China have opposed any resolution in the Security Council. We are acting according to the principle of respecting international law. You need to remember that in Libya there was support for military action from all countries in the region, including the Arab League. In Syria, the Arab League is active, but it opposes military intervention. Syria’s neighbors and the Arab League are opposed to a military operation.”

I know the extent to which you were involved, both personally and emotionally, in the efforts to free Gilad Schalit. Would France go to the same lengths as Israel did for the sake of one of its own prisoners of war?

“We are in the same situation. You have been in a state of war since 1948. This is not the case with France. But we too have soldiers fall into enemy captivity every year, many soldiers. We have had dozens in Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Africa, and Yemen.”

But in France there isn’t that same public pressure on the authorities to release prisoners as there is in Israel.

“I’ve been serving for more than five years in Israel. I got to know Schalit's family and his exceptional parents. In December, when it was cold outside, there weren’t always a lot of people at their tent. France saluted the Israeli government’s difficult decision to release Palestinian prisoners because we know that there are families of the victims of terrorist attacks. But the Schalit prisoner swap gave much honor to the state of Israel.”

“We believe in a Palestinian state”

Why did France vote in favor of Palestine’s membership in UNESCO?

“We believe that the solution to this crisis is a Palestinian state. UNESCO, a place that represents peace and culture, was the appropriate stage to show that one day there needs to come into existence a Palestinian state. But that same week we also said that we would abstain from voting to admit Palestine into the U.N. because on that stage we think that this would lead to tension. That request would not advance peace.”

“The judges will decide”

The hit-and-run accident that killed [25-year-old Israeli woman] Lee Zeitouni [in Tel Aviv in September 2011] harmed France’s image since both suspects fled to France, where they are walking free. Could France do more to act against these two suspects?

“I visited the family of Lee Zeitouni at Kibbutz Neve Or in the Beit Shean valley, and I didn’t discern any desire for revenge on the part of her parents. I promised them that day that I would extend them my full support. What happened was shocking, and justice needs to be done.

“France wants to arrest the suspects and bring them to trial, but Israel needs to make an official request, or the family needs to do this. Both options are available. I am as frustrated as Israeli citizens, seeing two suspects walking around free. I am frustrated because I know that they could be brought to trial in Israel.

“There are two ways to arrest them. This is the message that I sent to the Knesset. I passed this information along to the highest level of Israeli authorities. This was mentioned by the French president, but it hasn’t been done.

“Why? Because they would have preferred to stand trial in Israel. I too would have preferred for them to be tried in Israel. They lived in Israel, they were not tourists. The accident occurred in Israel and the victim was Israeli, but these people said via their attorney that they did not wish to return to Israel. I am French, and from a moral standpoint, I think that they need to return to Israel."

Is it not possible to extradite them given the severity of the crime which they are suspected of committing?

“We don’t extradite French citizens to Israel just as we don’t extradite them to Australia, Canada, the U.S., New Zealand, or Switzerland. We don’t do this solely in cases involving EU states. So people tell me that we need to change the law. In this instance, the law states that France does not extradite its citizens to countries outside of the EU.

“There are a number of other countries who do not extradite their citizens. Israel began extraditing in 2002. Since we do not change the law and these people do not wish to return to Israel – and I am sorry for this – the only way is for them to stand trial in France.

“I am of the opinion that there is no possibility remaining for the suspects to return to Israel. I will say that since the accident, the Israeli authorities have made a number of secret requests and we have acceded to them. An investigative judge has been named to the case and a police investigation is ongoing. The results of the investigation have been turned over to the Israelis.

“We located the suspects in October. We know where they are, but our hands are tied because we have not received an Israeli request to arrest them. You need to trust the French judicial system. People say that prison terms in France are lighter but this is only when talking about maximum penalties. The results are different when one speaks of the average sentences that are meted out.

“We are both democratic countries, and the judges are the ones who will make the ruling. I appeal to you: Trust the French courts. Morally, it is inconceivable that the individuals responsible for the death of Lee Zeitouni will not stand trial. The French media have reported extensively on the accident. The French president spoke with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the issue. Sarkozy’s wife sent a letter to Lee Zeitouni’s mother. I don’t remember an instance where an accident that didn’t take place in France has been covered so extensively.”

‘Peace Now’ Faults Israel For Palestinians’ Genocidal Urges

2012-01-27T18:13:00.002+02:00

Arlene Kushner
Jan 27th, 2012

On January 19, President Barack Obama’s campaign staff released a video, “America and Israel: An Unbreakable Bond” – a piece rife with half-truths and distortions. As patently false as it seems to anyone with a properly jaundiced eye, it nonetheless requires a response. For one suspects that those American Jews eager to find a reason to vote for Obama may be all too ready to stand convinced of what they are being told.

Recently elected NY Congressman Bob Turner gave an interview in Israel last week, in which he said, “I think American support militarily has been more an investment in our own defense..” It was a refreshingly honest and significant observation that directly applies here.

Obama likes to claim – as he does in this video – that US military cooperation with Israel makes him a huge supporter of Israel. But this cooperation serves US needs and goals in important ways: the US requires an Israel that is militarily solid. Nothing wrong with that. It means US interests coincide with Israeli interests in this respect. But Obama misrepresents when he claims the US does this for Israel. And it should be noted here that it is the Pentagon, which understands the military situation, that has always been the major promoter within the US of cooperation with Israel. This same principle applies to other, related, matters. Last year the Israeli embassy in Cairo was attacked. The ambassador and his staff got out, but two Israeli security guards were caught in the building and in danger of being killed. Obama (and I note here there were others from elsewhere involved as well) intervened and helped get those guards out safely. He then made a great deal about how he worked on Israel’s behalf. Nonsense. Imagine what would have happened if those guards had been killed, when, according to international law, a country is responsible for the safety of foreign embassy personnel within its borders. Israel would have had to respond very strongly – perhaps there would have been war. Obama knew this, knew that there was risk of a disastrous turn of events in the Middle East and he had to try to cool things. All to the good. But he didn’t do this for Israel.

Did Israelis, including Netanyahu, thank him for his actions here and elsewhere? Of course. That’s the diplomatic thing to do. But the Israeli prime minister did not do so with the expectation that Obama would use this expression of appreciation as an endorsement come election time. The Obama team merely borrowed an earlier clip and added it to their video. I haven’t discussed this with Netanyahu personally, but I am reasonably confident that the prime minister is privately praying that Obama loses – for Obama has been rude to him and a thorn in his side in many respects. But it’s neither politic nor appropriate for him to voice any opinion in the matter.

As to Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s praise of Obama, which is given considerable play in the video: It’s long been known in Israel that Barak is an Obama “buddy.” This is a man who is intensely disliked by those Israelis who care about preserving their nation. Barak is the one who sanctions middle of the night expulsions of people in “unauthorized” communities in Judea and Samaria, allowing young children to be dragged from their beds into cold rain. What Barak says should carry no weight with caring people.

The imagery of Obama at the Kotel, which begins the video, is designed to grab at the heart. But for some this is more likely to grab the stomach: Obama has not visited Israel once since he’s been in office – even though he is a much-traveled president. Where does he travel? To Muslim countries, mostly. He had no trouble visiting Indonesia, which is engaged in horrendous human rights violations. Not a word about that. But from a podium in Indonesia, of all places, he criticized settlements in Judea and Samaria. It was no accident – he was showing Muslims how tough he is with Israel. This is a friend of Israel?
The footage in the video showing Obama in Israel comes from his time as a candidate, when he needed to appear friendly to the Jewish State in order to garner support (financial and electoral) from American Jews. Much as he needs to do now. In the video he talks about how touched he was with the hardships of the people of Sderot, who get hit by rockets from Gaza. But from Israel he went to Germany for a major speech. In that speech he addressed the problems nations of the world are having with terrorism. He spoke about Spain and Great Britain, etc. etc., but neglected to mention Israel. No point in appearing supportive of Israel on the international scene. The Arabs might not like it. This is a friend of Israel?

As to Obama’s unswerving dedication to Israel’s security, it should be noted that he is the first president to explicitly call for a freeze on settlement building, and for the ’67 lines (with minor adjustments) to be the basis for negotiations with the PA. Those lines would not constitute a secure border for Israel. This has been widely acknowledged since 1967; the Security Council resolution 242 said as much. But Obama denied that he had to honor the letter written to then PM Sharon by his predecessor President Bush regarding recognition of settlements in Judea and Samaria in the course of final negotiations. Some friend to Israel.

In another respect, Obama has severely weakened Israel’s security, by courting Islamic forces. He does not work to strengthen Western interests in the Middle East and his policies have been a horror. While his errors of judgment are too numerous to detail in full here, some examples will suffice:

In Egypt, the overthrow of Mubarak (who supported the peace treaty with Israel and was an ally of the US) and the rising influence of the Muslim Brotherhood (which is virulently anti-Israel as well as being anti-Western) came about to a very great degree because of Obama policies.

The US, as commentator Caroline Glick has just observed, has actually intervened on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood since 2009: When Obama addressed the “Muslim world,” in his speech at Cairo University (a Brotherhood stronghold), he was embracing the Muslim Brotherhood vision of a pan-Arab world, which they see united by Islam via a caliphate. This was a rejection of Arab nationalism and constituted a direct hit on Mubarak’s national legitimacy. Subsequently, Obama played a primary role in pushing out Mubarak.

Additionally, the US has now embraced Turkey, which is moving into the Islamist camp, as its most solid ally in the Middle East.

Obama refused to support the Green Movement in Iran, which was seeking to overthrow the Islamist regime, even as they begged for assistance.

And where Iran is concerned, it gets even worse. In spite of the fact that Iran is an enormous danger to Israel and all moderate interests in the Middle East, Obama has not applied sanctions with the stringency that the Congress endorsed. In fact, using Turkey as a conduit, he is – incredibly – reaching out to Iran yet again regarding “dialogue.” What he is doing is buying time for a duplicitous Iranian regime.

Thus, there are solid reasons for not voting for Obama even beyond his failure to be a true friend to Israel. He is, more broadly, making the world less safe for the forces of moderation and freedom.

The Islamic Paradise of the Needle and Powder

2012-01-27T18:08:00.002+02:00

Daniel Greenfield

The world’s largest drug field was formerly in the Bekaa Valley where the land is warm and moist. Reflecting the poor state of agriculture in the Muslim world, some of the most arable land in Lebanon where the Romans raised acres of wheat was turned over to cannabis and opium production. In the ’90s the situation was so bad that 80 percent of the world’s cannabis came out of the valley. The valley helped finance the PLO, Hezbollah and the Syrian army which invaded Lebanon partly to get in on the drug trade. The Clinton Administration cut deals with the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Syrian occupation of Lebanon to try and cut down on production. Officially production went down, unofficially the party never really stopped.

With the Syrians gone and the PLO living off American foreign aid on the West Bank of Israel, the lucrative Lebanese drug trade is in the hands of the Shiite Islamists of Hezbollah. Drugs have turned the Party of Allah into a global narcoterrorist ring with tentacles in Latin America and ties to Marxist narcoterrorists there and up to America and out across Europe and Asia.

There is no contradiction between the Islamic identity of Hezbollah and its drug trade financed wealth. The Mumbai terrorists of the Army of the Righteous, who during their killing spree murdered a rabbi and his pregnant wife, snorted cocaine. The Beslan terrorists of the Islamic Brigade of Martyrs who murdered hundreds of children were running on heroin. Forensic tests conducted on the bodies of suicide bombers have found that they were routinely given heroin before being sent off on their missions. And if we had been able to run forensic tests on the Al-Qaeda terrorists who carried out September 11 there would probably be a miniature pharmacy in their bodies.

The intimate connection between drugs and Islam began with the prohibition of alcohol. The ban on wine and other spirits made the need for alternatives more urgent. Coffee was the safer alternative to alcohol, and the Middle Eastern obsession with it reflected the outlawing of wine and beer. Religiously coffee was also useful as a stimulant and came in handy in some Muslim rites. But there were more efficacious stimulants that could do more than coffee and those were equally popular.

While there were at times attempts to similarly prohibit drugs, they never achieved the same status as the ban on liquor. Hashish in particular had useful religious and military effects. The right drugs could give the devout the illusion of a mystical experience, allow them to stay up all night memorizing verses from the Koran or make it easier for them to kill and for Muslim leaders to control their private armies.

The Order of Assassins, whose name “Hashishin” derives from the substance they were addicted to, consisted of young men given the drug and told that their visions were a foretaste of paradise. While the Hashishin achieved legendary status the same pattern has become commonplace among Muslim terrorist groups who ply their followers with drugs to addict them and direct them along the path of Islamic terror as the road to the paradise of the powder and the needle.

Culturally the use of drugs is far more widely accepted in the Muslim world than alcohol is. The Ayatollah Khomeini even ruled that, “Wine and all other intoxicating beverages are impure, but opium and hashish are not.” In some countries drug use is so widespread that it has practically become a national identity. That is the case with Qat in Yemen, a plant-based amphetamine whose use is so widespread that its cultivation consumes nearly half the country’s water supply.
While the Yemeni Qat addiction is fairly obvious, entire Muslim countries which do not have oil run on their drug trade. Pakistan’s largest real export is its off-the-books heroin trade and its economy runs on heroin. The ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence agency, which backed the Taliban, also took a cut of Afghanistan’s highly profitable opium trade. Iranian and Pakistani interference in Afghanistan marry their Islamic initiatives with the drug trade as Sunnis and Shiites compete for the lucrative traffic in the world’s leading source of opium which is smuggled through Pakistan and Iran.

Speaking of Iran, the Islamic Republic has the world’s highest percentage of heroin addicts, and the traffic is run by the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution which acts as the religious thugs of the ayatollahs. One of their means of smuggling heroin out of Iran is piggybacking the trade on Shiite Muslim pilgrims visiting holy sites abroad.

The Muslim world doesn’t have much to export besides oil and drugs. Countries that don’t have oil export drugs. Countries that do have oil, export drugs anyway. Terrorist groups with their secret cells, forged documents and covert funding sources make perfect drug smuggling networks until it is impossible to tell whether they are Islamic terrorists who smuggle drugs to fund their operations or drug smugglers who kill people to religiously justify their drug smuggling. When the commanders and the foot soldiers have spent enough time in the drug trade and are sampling their own product then they stop knowing the difference.

The miserable state of agriculture in Muslim countries can be partly attributed to this toxic mix of drugs and jihadists. Subsidized food prices give farmers more incentive to cultivate opium than wheat. Islamic groups provide protection and drug smuggling routes to fund their activities. Food prices rise and the popular protests are hijacked by the Islamic groups who can hand out food backed by their real cash crops. From that angle the Arab Spring looks more like an Islamic Cartel Woodstock. FARC with a Koran instead of Das Kapital.

Drunks are not particularly dangerous. It’s hard to weaponsize them in the same way that Islamic groups have weaponized drug users. Islamic drug cartels are in the process of turning parts of Asia and the Middle East into theocracies overseen by the Koran and the needle. But while the cartels make much of their money selling their products to the infidels in America and Europe, most of their real users are at home.

The American and European drug trade brings big profits but requires long journeys that pass under the vigilant eyes of first world customs inspections. It’s much easier and simpler to sell the stuff at home in Iran and Pakistan. The godfathers of Islamic terrorism in Tehran and Islamabad are not only funding Islamic terror using drug money, they are addicting their own populations en masse. Countries cannot become major drug exporters without also creating a major domestic market for drugs along the way. While the ISI and the mullahs have tried to poison the West for profit, they have done a much more thorough job of poisoning themselves with their own wares.

While Islamists like to think of themselves as the moral alternative to the decadent West, they have thoroughly corrupted themselves and their own people. The heroin addicts of Iran and Pakistan are a grim reminder that Islam is not only brutal and violent; it is also a force of moral decay that justifies any crime in the name of its religious aspirations. The millions of Muslim heroin addicts who were made that way by heroin smuggled in the name of Islam are the true fruits of the Islamic Revolution.

Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model

2012-01-27T17:10:00.002+02:00

Frontpagemag.com
on Jan 27th, 2012

Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich recently made news by referring to Barack Obama as a “Saul Alinsky radical” whose philosophy is destructive of traditional American values. Who was Saul Alinsky? What was his message? How has his radical vision, a key element of the 1960s leftist assault on America, influenced Obama?

You can find the answers by reading David Horowtiz’s Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model posted below. Since its publication in 2010, more than 2 million copies of this best selling pamphlet have been distributed. Horowitz shows the entire iceberg whose tip was revealed in Newt Gingrich’s comment.FrontPage has been covering the connection between Obama and Alinsky and other 60s radicals since the election of 2008. This leftist network, which heavily influences the current White House, is dissected in detail in our encyclopedia of the Left, discoverthenetworks.org.

Please help the Freedom Center educate our citizens in this critical time about Obama’s efforts to radically transform America—his intellectual inheritance from Saul Alinsky. Please support the Freedom Center and help us immediately get another printing of Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model into circulation.