WarSclerotic

Peres decries tone of US-Iran outreach critics | The Times of Israel.

Liberman, however, says Rouhani’s charm offensive is an ‘appeasement campaign’ as Tehran marches toward nuclear weapons

President Shimon Peres meets with US President Barack Obama before the official State Dinner held in Peres’ residence in Jerusalem, March 21, 2013. (photo credit: Avi Ohayon/GPO/FLASH90)

President Shimon Peres on Sunday denounced the “appalling tone” coming from some quarters of the Israeli political establishment in criticism of American efforts to reach out to Iran.

His comments came as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was en route to New York for a speech at the United Nations and meetings with the White House intended to temper efforts at detente between the West and Tehran.

“You can agree or not,” Peres told Army Radio Sunday morning, with US President Barack Obama’s attempts to explore diplomatic opportunities in light of new Iranian President Hasan Rouhani’s recent moderate statements, but he stressed that there was no justification for the harsh attacks on the efforts.

“Other people have brains, not just us,” added Peres.

Hours earlier, Netanyahu told reporters he was going to the US to “tell the truth in the face of the sweet-talk and the onslaught of smiles. One must talk facts and one must tell the truth. Telling the truth today is vital for the security and peace of the world and, of course, it is vital for the security of the State of Israel.”

MK Avigdor Liberman (Likud-Beytenu), chairman of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, took to Facebook Sunday to decry the Iranian outreach to the West, calling it an “appeasement campaign,” and an “exercise in false information, just like North Korea has done.”

“While the world’s attention is focused on the new Iranian president’s attempts to portray himself as moderate and conciliatory,” Liberman wrote, “it is worth mentioning that the Iranians have always behaved like this: tactics of promises, stalling, and false information that they provided time and again to the international community, when all the while they continued to advance toward the goal they set for themselves: obtaining nuclear weapons designed to threaten world peace.”

Israel is concerned over the thaw in Western-Iranian ties that has been developing at breathtaking pace in the last few days and culminated Friday with a phone call between the American and Iranian presidents.

Before leaving New York last Friday, Rouhani chatted with Obama by telephone, marking the first direct contact between American and Iranian leaders in 30 years.

The phone call capped a week of seismic alterations in the relationship, revolving around Rouhani’s participation in the annual UN meeting of world leaders. The night before the two leaders spoke, US and European diplomats had hailed a “very significant shift” in Iran’s attitude and tone in the first talks on the nuclear standoff since April.

The last direct conversation between the leaders of the two countries was in 1979 before the Iranian Revolution toppled the pro-US shah and brought Islamic militants to power. Obama said the long break “underscores the deep mistrust between our countries, but it also indicates the prospect of moving beyond that difficult history.”

Netanyahu issued no direct comment on the Obama-Rouhani conversation and instructed his ministers to remain mum. He intends to discuss Israel’s position on the Iranian president’s charm offensive — which included more benevolent rhetoric on ties with the US and the West, a stated willingness to compromise on transparency of the Iranian nuclear program and an acknowledgement that the Holocaust occurred — during his meetings with senior US officials.

Israeli media reports over the weekend quoted sources in the Israeli government as saying that Iran was only a few months away from possessing enough enriched uranium for a bomb, with one report going so far as to state that Tehran had already produced at least one such weapon.

Raphael Ahren and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Who’s afraid of American-Iranian reconciliation? | The Times of Israel.

Obama’s approach to Iran is ‘naive,’ writes Arab columnist, as dailies focus on ‘historic’ Obama-Rouhani conversation

In this Sept. 10, 2013 photo released by the official website of the office of the Iranian Presidency, Iranian President Hasan Rouhani speaks during an interview with state television at the presidency in Tehran, Iran. (Photo credit: AP/Presidency Office, Rouzbeh Jadidoleslam)

A telephone conversation between US President Barack Obama and Iranian President Hasan Rouhani leads the news in Arabic media Sunday, focusing on reactions to the conversation in Iran.

“Rouhani and Obama’s telephone conversation confuses Tehran,” reads the headline of Saudi-owned newspaper A-Sharq Al-Awsat, reporting on “two narratives” surrounding the circumstances of the conversation. A White House source claimed that Rouhani expressed his will to speak to Obama before leaving New York, while Rouhani himself said upon his return to Iran that he received a phone call from Obama on the way to the airport and the two discussed the Iranian nuclear issue.

“Two conflicting narratives regarding Obama and Rouhani’s conversation; and Washington notified Tel Aviv about the contents of the call,” reads the headline of London-based daily Al-Hayat, featuring a photo of demonstrators — it’s unclear if they’re pro or anti — awaiting Rouhani at the Tehran airport.

According to Al-Hayat, Iranians responded differently to the first such conversation in 34 years, with “fundamentalists considering it a crossing of red lines, while reformists and moderates welcomed it.”

The daily reports on the mixed reception Rouhani received at the Tehran airport, with supporters calling out “we thank you Rouhani” and opponents shouting “death to America” and “death to Israel.” One man even threw a shoe at Rouhani’s motorcade, which according to Al-Hayat missed the president’s car.

Taking the side of Iran’s optimists, Saudi news site Elaph claims that “Iranians expected much, and immediately, from the phone conversation between Hasan Rouhani and Barack Obama. But the matter requires time to regain lost confidence between the two sides, despite the appreciation of Iranians for Obama’s gesture, which they considered a personal farewell to Rouhani,” reads the article.

Qatari news channel Al-Jazeera tries to understand why Rouhani refused to meet Obama during his stay in New York, despite the American wish to realize such a meeting. Jamal Abdi, director of policy at the National Iranian American Council, told the channel that a televised handshake between Obama and Rouhani would bear “historic significance” and the Iranians would prefer such a photo-op to occur after an agreement is reached with the international community on the nuclear issue.

Meanwhile, Arab columnists struggle to understand the new American approach toward Iran.

A-Sharq Al-Awsat columnist Tareq Homayed dubs Obama’s attitude toward Iran “naïve,” claiming that the faltering relationship between the two countries cannot be reduced to the nuclear issue alone.

“The American president placed much hope in the initiative of testing Iran’s ‘seriousness’ to a degree that raises the question of whether Obama is a genius politician who sees something others don’t or whether he is merely an ‘optimistic’ intellectual. We use the term ‘intellectual’ of course as an understatement for the proper description. Will Obama manage to convince Iran to change? And what change? And to whose benefit?”

Iran, claims Homayed, seems much less gung-ho about rapprochement with the US than Obama does.

“Obama’s excitement raises the question: is the American-Iranian crisis only about the nuclear issue? What about a crisis lasting four decades? What about a host of issues troubling Washington’s allies, be they Arab or Israeli? What about Iran’s expansion in the region? What about Tehran’s support for the regime of Bashar Assad and his crimes? Some may claim that Obama is looking out for his country’s interests, which is true, but what is his country’s interest in naively placating Iran?”

“This is not the case of a genius politician as much as an ‘optimistic’ intellectual dealing with the region and politics with utter naiveté,” writes Homayed about Obama. “It seems like the Iranians understand this well.”

Meanwhile, Saudi columnist Jamal Khashaqji claims that Arabs need not be so terrified by Iranian-American rapprochement, since an alliance between the two countries will not necessarily come at the expense of Arabs.

“We are terrified every time American-Iranian reconciliation appears on the political horizon as is happening these days in New York,” writes Khashaqji in Al-Hayat.

“Some of us go so far as to believe in a ‘conspiracy,’ claiming there is a secret alliance and cooperation between the sides that will soon surface. The new alliance, goes the narrative, will soon be declared publicly at our expense in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf; replacing our favor with America in place of Iran and costing us dearly in interests and rights.”

“I think we all need psychological treatment and lessons in realpolitik to regain our self-confidence and realize we are stronger than we think,” continues Khashaqji.

“Reconciliation (and not ‘a deal’, which is an imperialistic word) with Iran has become more possible than any previous historic moment. But the problem is Iran. The Iranians are the only ones who refuse to change and insist on using all the [regional] changes for their political benefit.”

Melting in the warmth of Rouhani’s embrace | The Times of Israel.

The smiling new president’s capacity to so rapidly remake Iran’s international image, without a single substantive concession on the nuclear front, has surely exceeded Khamenei’s most optimistic visions

Iranian President Hasan Rouhani walks through the hallway during the 68th session of the General Assembly at United Nations headquarters, Thursday, Sept. 26, 2013. (photo credit: AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

The conventional wisdom held that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the disheveled, Holocaust-denying, homophobic Iranian president, was the best asset of those, led by Israel, who were warning against the dangers posed by the Islamic Republic’s global ambitions.

If this man, so obviously unpleasant and quite possibly unhinged, was the elected public face of the regime in Tehran, then that regime had to be pretty terrifying. So long as president Ahmadinejad was in place, it was relatively straightforward for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyanu to galvanize international alarm at the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran.

Now, though, with the succession of Hasan Rouhani to the presidency, the limits of such wisdom are becoming all too plain. In retrospect, Ahmadinejad’s eight-year spell in the job worked spectacularly well for the Islamic Republic because it creates so profound a contrast to the new, smiling, seemingly unthreatening president. Now that the Iranian leader at the UN podium is a soft-spoken cleric who’s really sorry that Jews and anybody else were killed by the Nazis, says Iran is a pussycat state that endangers absolutely no one, and speaks more than enough English to send messages of friendship to the American people in television interviews, the international community is falling over itself to welcome not just Rouhani but the apparently remade nation he now represents. After all, he is its elected president — a changed people’s changed choice of leader.

In truth, Rouhani, like Ahmadinejad before him, represents only what the regime wishes him to represent. He serves as president at the supreme leader’s discretion, one of just half a dozen candidates given permission to run in June’s election by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He was perceived as the most reform-minded candidate, and as such his victory does say something about the mindset of the Iranian electorate. But that mindset was never in much doubt; even before 2009′s brutally crushed mini-outburst of public protest, tens of millions of ordinary Iranians were widely understood to have become alienated by the repressive excesses of the regime.

Khamenei is likely to give Rouhani additional leeway on the international stage, while perhaps allowing a little well-controlled opposition to flare publicly at home

Khamenei’s advancement of Rouhani, however, is looking increasingly like a masterstroke. Whether the supreme leader had this all mapped out, anticipating that Rouhani would first capture the people’s vote at home, and then sally forth to such spectacular effect overseas, or whether he has been pleasantly surprised by Rouhani’s capacity to so rapidly remake the Islamic Republic’s international image without a single substantive concession on the nuclear front, the result has surely exceeded even his most optimistic visions.

As a consequence, Khamenei is likely to give Rouhani additional leeway on the international stage, while perhaps allowing a little well-controlled opposition to flare publicly at home — a few more shoes at the airport – the better to remind world leaders of the ostensible fragility of Rouhani’s position, and thus of the ostensible imperative to act quickly and cut a deal with this improbable Sheikh Moderate before he vanishes as quickly as he appeared.

The growing concern, amid the drama that has unfolded in the less than a week since Rouhani delivered his debut address to the UN General Assembly, is that international leaders will allow themselves to be entirely seduced by Rouhani’s one-man Iran-really-loves-you show. The battle to thwart Iran’s drive to nuclear weapons is not yet lost, but it surely will be if economic pressure is lifted from the Islamic Republic irresponsibly — in the absence, that is, of verifiable arrangements to ensure that Iran does not retain the means and the material to accelerate to nuclear weapons within months.

That, after all, is what Rouhani was dispatched to the United States to set in motion: negotiations that would ease sanctions while freezing the rogue nuclear program where it is today, with Iran having mastered all the technology and mustered much of the material necessary for a rapid breakout to the bomb.

It is tempting, under Rouhani’s gentle spell, to believe that Iran truly cherishes the live-and-let-live international relationships he strives to emblemize. We all want to believe that everybody ultimately seeks to live in peace. But the unfortunate truth is that the ruthless Iranian regime that sent him to New York considers Western culture to be decadent, corrupt, and doomed — to be replaced by a global system underpinned by the ideals of the Islamic Revolution. “It is natural that our Islamic system should be viewed as an enemy and an intolerable rival by such an oppressive power as the United States, which is trying to establish a global dictatorship and further its own interests by dominating other nations and trampling on their rights,” Khamenei once told his government officials. “It is also clear that the conflict and confrontation between the two is something natural and unavoidable.” In pursuit of its goals, the regime is guilty of some of the most horrendous acts of terrorism ever committed. And it constructed key parts of its nuclear program in secret — fully intending to trick its way to a nuclear weapons capability before it was exposed.

Rouhani himself was part of that process, presiding over negotiations with the international community that saw the regime freeze its nuclear advance in 2003, when it believed the US would turn to Iran when Saddam was dealt with, only to secretly resume the program when the danger was deemed to have passed. To quote the proverb once memorably mangled by George W. Bush, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

It is not remotely credible to believe, as Rouhani plaintively asserts, that Iran’s nuclear intentions are entirely peaceful, and thus to capitulate in the face of Rouhani’s insistence that pressure to abandon that program is an unwarranted intrusion into Iranian national rights and must be rejected. Not when energy-rich Iran has no need for nuclear power. And not when, as the IAEA has established, its nuclear program has military characteristics.

If the Western response to Rouhani is to utilize the new possibility he brings for substantive diplomatic engagement in order to rapidly ensure the dismantling of Iran’s drive to the bomb, then his arrival to succeed the nasty Ahmadinejad will come to be rightly regarded as a blessing, however unlikely, freeing the West of the need to resort to force in order to thwart the hitherto intransigent ayatollahs.

If, however, the West melts in the warmth of a duplicitous Rouhani embrace, if the threat of military intervention is further weakened and economic pressure eased without the regime being rendered incapable of speeding to the bomb, Iran will have thoroughly outsmarted the West. It will have outmaneuvered a free world so wary and weary of defending itself, so willfully blinded, as to allow its most dangerous enemy the most dangerous weapon.

Iran: More needed than Obama call for full ties – Israel News, Ynetnews.

Two days after historic talk between US President, Iranian counterpart, Tehran lowers expectations, says relations are far from being stabilized

Associated Press

Iran sought Sunday to calm hard-line worries over groundbreaking exchanges with Washington, saying a single phone conversation between the American and Iran presidents is not a sign that relations with will be quickly restored.

The comments by Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi appeared tailored to address Iranian factions, including the powerful Revolutionary Guard, that have grown uneasy over fast-paced outreach last week between the White House and President Hassan Rohani, which was capped by a 15-minute call with President Barack Obama.

“Definitely, a history of high tensions between Tehran and Washington will not go back to normal relations due to a phone call, meeting or negotiation,” Araghchi was quoted by the semi-official Far news agency as saying.

Rohani seeks to restart stalled talks over its nuclear program in the hopes of easing US-led sanctions. Iran, however, has not clarified what concessions it is willing to make with its nuclear program in exchange.

Araghchi also reiterated statements by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who said he no longer opposes direct talks with Washington but is not optimistic about the potential outcome. Khamenei appears to have given Rohani authority to handle the nuclear talks with world powers, scheduled to resume in Geneva in two weeks, and seek possible broader contacts with the Obama administration.

“We never trust America 100 percent,” said Araghchi. “And, in the future, we will remain on the same path. We will never trust them 100 percent.”

The divisions over Rohani’s overtures were on display Saturday when he returned from New York. Supporters welcomed him with cheers, but a smaller pocket of protesters shouted insults.

The US and Iran broke ties after the 1979 Islamic Revolution when mobs stormed the US Embassy in Tehran. A total of 52 hostages were held for 444 days.

A hard-line lawmaker Hamid Rasaei criticized the phone call as “breaking the resistance brand” of Iran – a reference to the self-promoted idea that Iran is the anchor for opposition to Israel and Western influence in the region.

He said acceptance of Obama’s phone call by Rohani was “undignified” and allowed the US to claim Iran seeks to modify its policies.

“You converted a win-lose game to a win-win one” for the US, he said during a parliament session Sunday.

Another conservative lawmaker, Alaeddin Boroujerdi, head of the influential parliamentary committee, interpreted the phone call in a positive way as Rohani trying to help the “failing reputation” of Obama.

The core of the opposition to Rohani appears built around supporters of former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who once sent a letter to then President George W. Bush in an attempt to open dialogue. Ahmadinejad apparently was rebuffed by Bush, and the former president later fell from favor with Khamenei after trying to challenge his authority.

Khamenei’s presumed nod to Rohani to test outreach with Washington may be seen by Ahmadinejad’s backers as another slap.

Ahmadinejad’s first public comments on the Obama phone call carried a noncommittal tone. “I don’t know, maybe it was the right thing to do,” the conservative Baztab news website reported Sunday.

On the flip side, the phone call brought jokes circulating in Iran by text message.

“I know Rohani called Obama first,” read one. “Then Obama told him, ‘It’s better that I call you since you are under sanctions and your call may cost a lot.'”

Obama coming to Rohani’s aid – Israel Opinion, Ynetnews.

Analysis: US president, EU’s Ashton launched diplomatic assault aimed at bolstering moderate camp in Iran

Iran’s diplomatic offensive in New York was undoubtedly successful and effective. President Rohani and Foreign Minister Zarif did a great job at the UN General Assembly and in their appearances on the American media outlets. It is only natural that in response the Western leaders softened their public statements. But what matters is that, as of now, there is no sign of willingness on the part of the West to ease the economic sanctions on Iran, and there is no indication that the West plans to make any significant concessions to the ayatollahs regarding the demand to stop the uranium enrichment and the development of nuclear weapons.

The compliments and gestures Obama and his European counterparts showered Rohani and Zarif with may not be pleasant to Israeli ears, but for now there is no reason to view them as a sign of weakness or that the West is being misled like naïve shoppers at an Iranian bazaar. The western leaders are trying to do what is needed: To expand the diplomatic hole in the hostile Iranian wall, examine whether this is a real turnaround in Iran’s nuclear policy, and, if possible, use this turnaround to reach an agreement on halting Iran’s military nuclear program. The compliments are also aimed at bolstering Rohani politically at home and give him more room to maneuver and flexibility in the negotiations.

This strategy is based on the assessment that Rohani and Supreme Leader Khamenei desperately need an easing of the sanctions. An analysis of the results of the presidential elections and other events indicates that the sanctions are hurting the Iranian population much more than was previously thought in the West and they threaten the regime’s stability. This is why Rohani was elected and this is the reason Khamenei is willing to adopt the “heroic flexibility” policy, as he called it, regarding Iran’s nuclear program.

Seeing that the vast majority of Iranians voted for Rohani in hopes that he would ease the burden on the people, he has to deliver, and fast. Khamenei supports him because he fears the eruption of Arab Spring-style riots against the regime. He is also hurrying, before it will be too late. Those who are against any concessions related to the nuclear program are the conservative ayatollahs who were removed from key positions in the regime and senior Revolutionary Guard members, whose personal wellbeing is not threatened by the sanctions.

The struggle between the camps has yet to be decided, and therefore it is still difficult to ascertain whether the Iranians are really willing to accept the West’s demands. This will become clearer only when the representatives of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany, convene in Geneva next month. This issue may become clearer even sooner should the West and Iran agree on mutual trust-building measures, such as allowing IAEA inspectors to finally visit the military complex in Parchin, where, according to western intelligence agencies, the Iranians have conducted tests in the development of a nuclear bomb. In exchange, the Iranians will receive spare parts for passenger planes. Another measure could be the temporary suspension of uranium enrichment and installation of centrifuges during the negotiations in exchange for the lifting of more significant sanctions.

In the meantime, Obama and Ashton are waging a diplomatic counter-assault that is meant to rally the Iranian people behind Rohani’s moderate camp. The Americans remember that Rohani had already frozen Iran’s military nuclear program once before, and they believe he can do it again. The phone call between Obama and Rohani, as well as the fact that Obama made it a point to mention Khamenei’s “fatwa” – which bans Iran from possessing nuclear weapons – are meant to create for Rohani a comfortable public atmosphere in Iran. This will show the Iranians – from Khamenei all the way down to the average citizen – that the US and Europe respect them and see them as equal partners to the leadership of the world and are not looking to humiliate or defeat them. The goal is to prove to the Iranians that concessions related to the nuclear program will not only ease the economic burden, they will also grant them the status of a global power with civilian nuclear capabilities.

Rohani lands in Iran (Photo: AFP)

 But the West wants more. The deal proposed to Iran by the US, Europe, Russia and China includes Syria and the preservation of Bashar Assad‘s regime. Even if this regime will effectively control only parts of Syria, keeping Assad in power is a key strategic and religious Iranian interest. The Security Council’s resolution on the dismantling of Syria’s chemical weapons, which did not include a direct military threat on Assad in the event that he does not comply, as well as the preparations for a conference in Geneva to reach a diplomatic solution to the civil war, with the participation of Assad regime representatives – all these are giving the regime in Damascus more time, perhaps years, and also serve the strategic goals of its patrons in Tehran. One would have to be blind not to see the connection the Americans are making not only between Iran’s nuclear program and Palestine, but also between Natanz and Damascus.

At the same time it is important to remember that Iran’s technological clock is ticking at double speed. Each day several dozen additional centrifuges become operational and enrich uranium. More kilograms of uranium purified to low and medium levels are accumulated in the bunkers in Natanz and Fordo, while the construction of the heavy water reactor in Arak is being completed. If these processes are not stopped or slowed down, Iran will become a country on the brink of nuclear capability in the first half of 2014. This is why Iran is in a hurry to reach an agreement on the sanctions, and why the West also has an interest in reaching a deal that would block Iran’s military nuclear program before Netanyahu seriously considers a go-it-alone strike. Unlike many people in Israel, Washington is taking the prime minister’s veiled threats seriously. Senior Obama administration officials apparently know why.

Israel has a crucial and constructive role in the West’s attempt to block Iran’s nuclear program through diplomatic means, but Netanyahu is ignoring the circumstances and is causing Israel to be presented in western public opinion as a warmongering state that hates Iran.

Netanyahu shot himself in the foot when he instructed the Israeli delegation to leave the hall during Rohani’s speech before the General Assembly. He should have waited for his speech to simply warn of an Iranian honey trap and offer some of the many examples that prove this point. Such a speech may achieve the desired effect. Instead of taking pride in the fact that he played a part in the imposition of sanctions on Iran which – along with a credible threat of military force – led to Rohani’s election and a change in Iran’s tone, Netanyahu turned Israel into the neighborhood bully that does not know how to deal with complex situations diplomatically.

A Mid-East Journal: Islamist terror and the civilized world.

By NEVILLE TELLER

The civilized world, which includes the vast bulk of Muslim believers, has yet to declare a clear distinction between Islam and Islamist extremists.     

The BBC, dominated as ever by the “politically correct” attitudes of the liberal-left, continues to shy away from calling a spade a spade.  Take its reporting of the recent Kenyan shopping mall siege. In spineless deference to people sympathetic to the jihadists’ cause, BBC news reports consistently refrained from referring to those responsible for the gunning down of over 60 people as “terrorists”.  The furthest they would go was to use the term “militants.”

A row immediately blew up in the British press, parliament and beyond. It was summed up effectively by Douglas Murray associate director of the Henry Jackson Society think-tank: ‘By not calling these jihadists what they actually are, the BBC is effectively covering for them. No-one wants to say they are jihadis, which they are. No-one wants to say they are Islamic extremists, which they are. Most people know what these people are, and it’s only certain sections of government and the media which refuses to point the finger.’

Or as one Member of Parliament said:  ‘Most members of the British public would see the planned and systematic murder of dozens of innocent people in Kenya as terrorism.’
BBC guidelines, which govern journalistic practice within the corporation, suggest avoiding the use of the word ‘terrorism” because it is a “difficult and emotive subject with significant political overtones.” So in a misconceived pursuit of maintaining their reputation for objectivity and accuracy, the BBC avoids using “terrorist” – except when they are quoting someone else. In other words, they prefer sheltering behind some other source bold enough to condemn people who commit monstrous outrages in pursuit of their distasteful agendas.  For the BBC to do so itself is too strong meat for its delicate appetite nowadays.

Objectivity and accuracy.  BBC executives might reflect that the corporation’s enviable reputation for accuracy was established during the second world war, when BBC news broadcasts were renowned for telling the truth, however unpalatable at times, and people across Europe literally risked their lives to listen to London.  “Objectivity” did not feature as a suitable aspiration when the nation was fighting a war to the death against a ruthless enemy. The BBC did not bend over backwards in those days to present Hitler’s point of view.  Everyone knew what he and his Nazi régime were up to, and the BBC, along with everyone else, condemned it outright.
What the BBC, in common with other sections of the western media, a range of non-governmental organizations worldwide, some United Nations agencies, and even some governments, will not acknowledge is that the civilized world is today fighting for its continued existence against enemies just as ruthless as the Nazis – namely, Islamist terrorists, intent on undermining the West and all it stands for.

Many refrain from outright condemnation of Islamist extremism for fear of being dubbed “Islamophobic” – a fear that may well be justified.  However, understanding the reasons for faint-heartedness does not justify it, nor does burying one’s head in the sand remove the danger.
Seth Frantzman, writing in the Jerusalem Post recently, suggested that “terrorism” was not adequate to describe the atrocities being committed continually by Islamist extremists. Citing recent incidents like the killing of 81 people in Pakistan during the bombing of a church. and the slaughter of 159 people in Nigeria, he suggests they should be dubbed “crimes against humanity”, and treated as such by the civilized world.

What inhibits robust condemnation of incidents such as these, Frantzman suggests, is that it is often non-Muslims who are targeted by the terrorists.  This was certainly the case in the Kenya shopping mall siege, where those held hostage who could prove they were Muslims were allowed to go free, while non-Muslims were gunned down.
In an entirely understandable effort to avoid suggesting that there is a battle of ideologies in progress between the Muslim and the non-Muslim worlds – for this is certainly not the case – left-wing opinion is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

The baby, in this case, is Islamist extremism, which is indeed at war with the West, with our democratic values, our standards of justice, tolerance and free speech, and the importance we assign to individual liberty and human life.  In short, by obfuscating or deliberately ignoring the nature and objectives of Islamist terrorism, the civilized world is allowing it to flourish, and is in effect sleep-walking towards its own destruction.

A main protagonist of Islamist extremism of the Sunni persuasion – by far the major part of Islam – is the Muslim Brotherhood and its al-Qaeda-backed adherents like Somalia’s al-Shabaab. Wherever it manifests itself, the Muslim Brotherhood and its associates are dedicated to the tenets set out originally by its founder, Hassan al-Banna, in 1928. He declared, quite simply: “It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.”

That is the agenda of these Islamist extremists. That is why their expansion of influence and activity should concern the Western world far more than it has done up till now. For the Brotherhood not only spans the Middle East but, as political author Lorenzo Vidino has demonstrated, since the early 1960s its members and sympathisers have “moved to Europe and slowly but steadily established a wide and well-organised network of mosques, charities and Islamic organisations”. Islamism has active branches in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France and a variety of other European countries. Its goal, stated quite openly by its leaders, is to create situations in which Sharia law can be imposed on states, with the aim eventually of uniting them and thus continuing the expansion of Islamism. The Brotherhood’s motto includes the chilling words: “Jihad is our way. And death for the sake of Allah is the highest of our ambitions.”

The civilized world, which includes the vast bulk of Muslim believers, has yet to declare a clear distinction between Islam and Islamist extremists, to characterize the jihadists for what they are – dedicated enemies of everything the West holds dear – and to oppose them tooth and nail, using every means at its disposal.

This should include – and why not? – charging in an appropriate judicial setting any who are apprehended, with crimes against humanity.

Israel Hayom | Obama blinked first.

Prof. Abraham Ben-Zvi

Israel Hayom | ‘Winds of Munich’ blowing in the West.

Dan Margalit

Israel Hayom | Netanyahu’s mission at the UN: To expose Rouhani’s fraud.

Israel Hayom | Caution: Delay ahead.

Uri Heitner