WarSclerotic

Fearing violent backlash to Muhammad cartoons, France to close 20 embassies Friday | The Times of Israel.

( Dieu bénisse le peuple de France. – JW )

Officials defend satirical magazine’s right to publish caricatures mocking response to controversial anti-Islam film

A French policeman stands guard outside the headquarters of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo in Paris, Wednesday, September 19, 2012 (photo credit: AP Photo/Michel Euler)

France stepped up security at some of its embassies on Wednesday and announced that it would be closing 20 embassies across the Arab world on Friday, fearing a violent backlash after a satirical Parisian weekly published crude caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. The prime minister said he would block a demonstration by people angry over a movie insulting to Islam as the country plunged into a fierce debate about free speech.

The government defended the right of magazine Charlie Hebdo to publish the cartoons, which played off of the US-produced film “The Innocence of Muslims,” and riot police took up positions outside the offices of the magazine, which was firebombed last year after it released an edition that mocked radical Islam.

The amateurish movie, which portrays the prophet as a fraud, a womanizer and a child molester, has set off violence in seven countries that has killed at least 28 people, including the US ambassador to Libya.

Government authorities and Muslim leaders urged calm in France, which has western Europe’s largest Muslim population.

CFCM, an umbrella group for French Muslims, issued a statement expressing “deep concern” over the caricatures and warning that “in a very tense context, it risks exacerbating tensions and provoking reactions.”

It urged French Muslims to “not cede to provocation and… express their indignation in peace via legal means.”

Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said organizers of a demonstration planned for Saturday against “Innocence of Muslims” would not receive police authorization.

“There’s no reason for us to let a conflict that doesn’t concern France come into our country,” Ayrault told French radio RTL.

Paris prosecutors have opened an investigation into an unauthorized protest last Saturday around the US Embassy that drew about 150 people and led to scores of arrests.

The tensions surrounding the film are provoking debate in France about the limits of free speech.

The small-circulation weekly Charlie Hebdo often draws attention for ridiculing sensitivity around the Prophet Muhammad, and an investigation into the firebombing of its offices last year is still open. The magazine’s website was down Wednesday for reasons that were unclear.

One of the cartoonists, who goes by the name of Tignous, defended the drawings in an interview Wednesday with The Associated Press at the weekly’s offices, on the northeast edge of Paris amid a cluster of housing projects.

“It’s just a drawing,” he said. “It’s not a provocation.”

The prime minister said freedom of expression is guaranteed in France, but cautioned that it “should be exercised with responsibility and respect.”

Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, speaking on France Inter radio, said the principle of freedom of expression “must not be infringed.”

But he added: “Is it pertinent, intelligent, in this context to pour oil on the fire? The answer is no.”

He said he had “sent instructions to all countries where this could pose problems. We are taking specific security measures.”

On the streets of Paris, public reaction was mixed.

“I’m not shocked at all. If this shocks people, well too bad for them,” said Sylvain Marseguerra, a 21-year-old student at the Sorbonne. “We are free to say what we want. We are a country in which freedom prevails and… if this doesn’t enchant some people, well too bad for them.”

Khairreddene Chabbara disagreed. “We are for freedom of expression, but when it comes to religion it shouldn’t hurt the feelings of believers.”

Israel Hayom | A slap on the US’s cheek.

Israel Hayom | Intelligence and its discontents.

Israel Hayom | The fall of the American empire.

In his book “The Clash of Civilizations,” Professor Samuel Huntington addresses the Islamic and Chinese conflicts with the West. Huntington prophesied that cultural and religious identities would be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world. Recent events in the Middle East and around the Pacific Ocean attest to the accuracy of Huntington’s theory.

At the beginning of 2009, the new president who took residence at the White House believed that kind words and good intentions would turn the looming clash into a giant global hug. Huntington’s book obviously didn’t influence U.S. President Barack Obama’s foreign policy.

The riots in the Arab world (triggered by a film that insults the Prophet Muhammad) and in China (in light of a bitter dispute between China and Japan over a chain of small islands in the East China Sea) has made Huntington’s book more relevant than ever. The world’s only superpower, the U.S. has assumed a low profile during the Obama era. The consequences weren’t long in coming: In one term, Obama managed to agitate the Arab street, which hasn’t been too impressed with his wooing and his apologies, and he managed to ferment the Pacific Ocean. They weren’t exaggerating in 2008 when they attributed magical powers to the incoming president.

Obama believed that he inherited a disconnected, unpopular America from his predecessor, George W. Bush. Obama viewed the country as a train speeding through a dark tunnel, claiming that he could see the light at the end of it. He didn’t realize, however, that it wasn’t the light at the end of the tunnel that he was seeing, but an oncoming train, the one Huntington wrote about in his book.

Obama believed that his personable style of sitting down to eat hamburgers with world leaders would change the course of history. But no special sauce can resolve geopolitical crises or heal open wounds like the conflict between China and Japan. Empires have risen and fallen throughout history, but the one thing that the Persian, Roman, Mongolian and other empires had in common was their length — hundreds of years. At this rate, if the U.S. remains on its current path, it will go down in the annals of history as the world’s shortest-lived empire. And it seems that Obama is going there willingly. The American president believes that in this way the world will become more equitable, more just, more considerate, calmer. But, at the culmination of Obama’s first term, is the world really a calmer or safer place?

Let’s begin with our own neighborhood: the Middle East. In Muslim Brotherhood-era Egypt, in theory there should have been at least a short- to mid-term romance between the U.S. and the government of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi. The Washington Post reported this weekend, however, that the U.S. has temporarily frozen aid talks with Egypt because the U.S. is angry with the Egyptian government over its response to riots in Cairo.

Maybe the White House is finally asking itself “how did this happen?” The U.S. finds itself having to increase security in Libya after its ambassador is murdered there, in Lebanon classified documents are being destroyed for fear that the angry anti-American mob will charge the American Embassy (like in Tehran in 1979 during the Carter administration), and in Iran we are seeing the same slogans that we did in 1979, disparaging the U.S. in complete disregard to Obama’s recently issued Iranian New Year greetings.

Here in Israel we are obviously concerned about Iran, but America is more concerned about events in the Pacific Ocean. U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta obviously didn’t like hearing the threats his Chinese counterpart was issuing to Japan, an American ally, during his visit to China. Chairman Mao must be jumping for joy in his grave. The deterioration of China-Japan relations could drag the Americans into an armed conflict. Fortunately for Obama, China, the world’s biggest factory, still needs a few more years of calm to keep selling and building its foundations before it is ready for a revolution.

“The Libyan fiasco reflects the American policy’s sad reality” reported the official Chinese newspaper The Global Times several days ago. The Chinese can smell the Americans’ weakness. And not just the Chinese, but North Korea, and another country here in our neighborhood called Iran, making it our problem, too.

Israel Hayom | Perpetuating Muslim myths.

On Sept. 28, 2000, Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Because of the political controversy over the holy site, Sharon’s ascent to the holy site had to be coordinated in advance.

And so it was. Then Public Security Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami gave the green light to Sharon, after receiving assurances from Palestinian Authority security chief Jibril Rajoub that this would not be cause for trouble. Rajoub gave his consent on condition that Sharon not enter Al-Aqsa mosque during his visit; but warned that if any problems were to arise, the Palestinian police would not intervene to protect Sharon. As a result, the Israeli police had to be on alert.

Sharon followed the rules. He went to the site during normal visiting hours for tourists and did not enter the mosque. He was there for half an hour.

For the remainder of the day, Palestinians came out to cause a stir, shouting and throwing rocks from the Temple Mount at security forces below. By nightfall, 28 policemen had been wounded.

The next day, the official Palestinian Authority media called on all Palestinians to “defend Al-Aqsa mosque,” and buses were organized to take Palestinian teenagers to the Temple Mount so that they could participate in the riots.

The day after that was the eve of Rosh Hashana. Palestinians gathered on the Temple Mount to throw rocks at Jews praying at the Western Wall. That Sept. 30 marked the official beginning of what the Palestinians named the “Al-Aqsa Intifada,” which began with violent rioting in Arab cities throughout Israel and the Palestinian-controlled territories, and mushroomed into a full-blown five-year suicide-bombing war against the Jewish state and its inhabitants.

The real impetus for that war was not Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount, but rather PLO chief Yasser Arafat’s response to the breakdown of the Camp David Summit in July of that year — a breakdown that he himself orchestrated. This was not merely proven by the Mitchell Report, published in April 2001, but was subsequently — albeit indirectly — acknowledged by the Palestinian leadership through its state-run press.

None of the above stopped the Israeli Left and its amen corner in the local and foreign media from attributing the incessant blowing up of buses, shopping malls and cafes across the country to Sharon’s Temple Mount “provocation,” however. Indeed, to this day, one still hears people mentioning that event as the catalyst for what non-Arabs call the “Second Intifada.” Only those who call it by its most accurate name — the “Oslo War” — are under no illusions.

The same kind of phenomenon is unfolding before our very eyes today in the Arab world. Interestingly, it too began on the eve of the Jewish New Year. But it was not connected to Israel. Instead, it was a “gift” to the United States on the 11th anniversary of the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings.

It began in Libya, with the brutal murder of the U.S. ambassador and three other innocent Americans. It quickly spread like wildfire to every Muslim community in the world.

The ostensible cause of this continuing carnage — including yesterday’s suicide bombing in Afghanistan that killed at least a dozen employees of an American aviation firm working for the U.S. government — was a YouTube clip portraying the Prophet Muhammad as a sexual deviant.

All evidence suggests that the Libyan attacks that spurred on the rest of the region were carefully planned in advance, without regard to the third-rate film that had been around for a long time before anyone picked up on it.

This, however, has not prevented the Obama administration and the Clinton State Department from perpetuating the myth that the mass anti-American frenzy is due to “provocation” on the part of the Los Angeles-based pornographic filmmaker. Nor has it lessened Washington’s apologetic stance in relation to the poor Muslims who were offended by the short movie — nor altered the way the media have been reporting on the daily abominations.

In this case, as in that of Sharon and the Temple Mount, the motive of Western leftists to perpetuate a similar type of falsehood is the same. As long as they can blame America and Israel for radical Islamist behavior, they can remain true to their belief in conflict resolution through goodwill gestures.

No matter how many times this idea literally and figuratively blows up in their faces, they refuse to let it go.

Luckily for the rest of us — who would rather live in the real world than be slaughtered in la-la-land — the Islamists make no bones about their hatred or intentions.

Post script: In my last column, I relied on press reports claiming that U.S. Ambassador to Egypt Anne Patterson forbid marines stationed at her embassy from having live ammunition in their rifles. The following day, other reports emerged claiming that this was not true. I apologize for the inaccuracy.

Ruthie Blum is the author of To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama, and the ‘Arab Spring,’ now available on Amazon and in bookstores in Europe and North America.

Assad plans to transfer chemical weapons to Hezbollah: Syrian defected general.

Wednesday, 19 September 2012

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad might transfer the chemical weapons to the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah. (Reuters) hare

Bernard-Henri Lévy: The Eternal Culprit (Israel, a Film, and the Media).

Last week’s demonstrations in the Arab Muslim world have already cost lives, many lives, beginning with that of American Ambassador Stevens, a friend of Libya and architect of its liberation.

War through weakness | Shreveporttimes | shreveporttimes.com.

Israel, Iran and the all-seeing eye of the Mossad – Telegraph Blogs.

Israeli surprise drill on Golan. Khamenei: Iran will never bend to the West.

DEBKAfile Exclusive Report September 19, 2012, 11:47 AM (GMT+02:00)

IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz

Israeli reservists drafted at no notice, Air Force, Central Command and other IDF units were flown to Israel’s northern Golan border early Wednesday, Sept. 19, for a surprise exercise called by Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz under the codename “National Asset.”
However, over the last weekend, witnesses reported heavy traffic of convoys of tank and APC carriers and military vehicles with emergency store markings heading north, just days after the IDF completed a large-scale war game on Israel’s Syrian and Lebanese borders simulating a Hizballah attack.
Since early September, therefore, the Israeli Defense Forces have been in the midst of preparations which have the appearance of readiness for a real war rather than an exercise. Those preparations peaked Wednesday under a codename which signified its goal: the defense of national assets.
Another sign of an impending conflict was provided by US diplomats who Monday began destroying classified documents and sensitive equipment at the Beirut embassy. As Islamist anti-US violence raged across Arab and Muslim countries, the State Department said this was a precautionary measure, without naming any specific threat. The trashing of embassy documents usually signifies preparations to evacuate an US embassy at short notice. It would be imperative in a war situation to keep them out of Hizballah hands.

The official IDF announcement described the exercise as focusing on fire power under the command of chief Artillery Commander, Brig. Gen. Ro’i Riftin and due to end Wednesday night. The rapid deployment of military strength on this scale for a live-fire drill is required practice for an army facing the onset of war aggression.
In the Persian Gulf, the US is leading 25 West European and Arab nations in a gigantic 12-day war game in the Straits of Hormuz which began Sunday, Sept 16. It includes a large-scale minesweeping drill to simulate the breaching of the Strait of Hormuz against Iranian efforts to block oil passage through the strategic waterway. The exercise – entirely by simulated measures – will also drill operations for destroying Iranian naval, air and missile bases in the Persian Gulf area and countering Iranian speedboats aiming to sabotage naval vessels and oil tankers.
Among the participants are the UK, France, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The United States has deployed three aircraft carriers with aerial strike forces. Military sources estimate that when the war game ends on Sept 27, these forces will not disperse but stay on hand in the event of Israel attacking Iran’s nuclear program.
As the exhibition of colossal Western might got underway opposite Iranian shores, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was quoted on his official website as saying: Iran will never bend to Western pressure The Islamic Republic, he told a military audience, “makes its decisions solely based on the interests of its people and the country, even if all of the world’s powers get angry at its decisions.”

It “does not accept the demands of any superpower,” he added.

The Ayatollah also accused “Western and Zionist media” of fabricating reports on the biting effects of economic sanctions, hinting that the Iranian economy was not suffering.