WarSclerotic

U.S. President Barack Obama vows to veto any sanctions on Iran, pleading to Congress, “Just hold your fire” • In unusual move, British Prime Minister David Cameron personally calls U.S. senators to lobby against new sanctions on Iran.

The Associated Press and Israel Hayom Staff

U.S. President Barack Obama speaks during a joint news conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron at the White House, Friday|

Photo credit: AP

U.S. President Barack Obama came out swinging Friday against congressional attempts to slap fresh sanctions on Iran, warning such a move would likely destroy nuclear talks and increase prospects for a military showdown. Vowing to veto any sanctions that reach his desk, Obama pleaded, “Just hold your fire.”

In an unusual move by a foreign leader, British Prime Minister David Cameron said he was personally calling U.S. senators to say that new sanctions would drive a wedge through international unity.

Standing side by side with Cameron at the White House, Obama said world powers would be sympathetic to Iran and would blame the U.S. if Congress moved ahead with more sanctions while fragile negotiations are under way. At that point, Obama argued, the world would lose its best chance to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

“Congress should be aware that if this diplomatic solution fails, then the risks and likelihood that this ends up being at some point a military confrontation is heightened — and Congress will have to own that as well,” Obama said in his most impassioned rebuke yet of the sanctions effort.

Clinching a nuclear deal would be a major foreign policy victory for Obama, who for years has fended off accusations of naiveté in engaging diplomatically with countries like Iran. Obama said prospects for a deal are still 50-50 at best, insisting he wouldn’t agree to any deal that fails to ensure that world powers can verify Iran’s actions or to protect Israel’s security.

Iran maintains that its program is solely for energy production and medical research purposes. Under the interim deal, Iran agreed to some restrictions to its program in exchange for billions of dollars in relief from U.S. economic sanctions.

The U.S. ,Britain and other world powers are struggling to reach a framework accord with Iran by March, with hopes of finalizing a longer-term deal by July that would limit Iran’s ability to produce a nuclear weapon. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has spent much of the week holed up in European hotels with his Iranian counterpart, Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif, as both countries seek to infuse the talks with fresh urgency.

But in Washington, many lawmakers are so skeptical of the negotiations that they have insisted the U.S. move forward with additional sanctions to keep tightening the screws on Iran.

A tense exchange between Obama and a top Democrat this week illustrated the degree to which Obama’s diplomacy with Iran has rattled even members of his own party.

At a closed-door strategy meeting with Senate Democrats, Obama and Sen. Bob Menendez, a Democrat, traded arguments about whether fresh penalties would undermine or bolster the negotiations. It was then that Obama renewed his longstanding vow to veto sanctions legislation passed by Congress while talks are still ongoing.

“We just have a fundamental disagreement,” Menendez told reporters Friday in New Jersey. “It is counterintuitive to understand that somehow Iran will walk away because of some sanctions that would never take place if they strike a deal.”

Menendez, who until recently chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has been working across partisan lines with Sen. Mark Kirk, a Republican on new sanctions on Iran’s economy that would kick in only if Iran fails to sign or live up to a nuclear deal in time.

Yet Obama argued that Iran would rightfully interpret any new sanctions — even ones that don’t kick in right away — as violating the terms of the interim deal reached in 2013 that made the current talks possible. He said the likelihood that Iran would pull out of the talks was “very high.”

“They would be able to maintain that the reason that they ended negotiations was because the United States was operating in bad faith and blew up the deal,” Obama said. “And there would be some sympathy to that view around the world.”

Cameron, who was holding two days of meetings with Obama, took the rare step of calling another nation’s lawmakers to lobby them against proceeding with more penalties. Cameron said his calls Friday to U.S. senators were intended not to tell them what to do, but to convey that sanctions have already had their desired effect.

via Israel Hayom | Obama comes out swinging against new Iran sanctions.

Israel Hayom | Obama explains it all.

Boaz Bismuth

Europe rounds up 25 jihadi suspects. Crackdown hamstrung by lack of counterterrorism center.

Belgium elevates terror level

In the last two days, 25 jihadi suspects were rounded up in secret cells uncovered in Belgium, France and Germany. But these counter-terror operations lifted just one corner of the Islamist terrorist network of active cells spread across Europe, made up of dedicated killers, armed to the teeth and expertly trained in Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan in the skills of mass murder.

debkafile’s counterterrorism and intelligence sources note that genuine operational cooperation among Europe’s intelligence and security services at state level is far too rare, even among otherwise friendly governments with common interests.

The Belgian counter-terror operation, which forestalled a Charlie Hebdo-scale attack, was the rare product of an ad hoc partnership with French counter-terror agencies, rather than part of organized intelligence-sharing and regular updates for forestalling assaults.

And so, notwithstanding relaxed interstate diplomatic relations, systemic collaboration is lacking among West Europe’s intelligence agencies, except on rare opportunities when they are pushed into synchronizing their efforts and data by an outside power or ally, or when common diplomatic or economic interests are at stake.
Europol is Europe’s sole central mechanism for fighting crime at continental level – and even its operational effectiveness is in doubt.
The continent has no centralized strategy or a common security mechanism for concerted action to locate or counter a peril that jumps out of the shadows from inside and outside Europe.
The sheer numbers are overwhelming: Belgium has roughly 750,000 Muslims, France – some 5 million; Germany – 4.2 m, Italy – 1.5 m, Netherlands – around 1 m, Spain – 1.2 m and Britain – app. 3 m.
The tasks of hunting needles in these haystacks before the peril jumps out of the shadows from inside or outside – or both – are daunting.

The insular approach by individual European member-nations puts them at a serious disadvantage because the Islamic terrorist organizations share a strong, unified mission and operational and intelligence resources. These groups uniformly condemn all parts of Europe alike as infidels, without distinctions of nationality, language or geographical borders. Each separate country is therefore easy prey for the dedicated, single-minded jihadists, especially when it declares – as Belgium did incredibly – that no links with any other cells were discovered.

Overnight Thursday, German security police raided 11 Muslim residential apartments in Berlin and other places. Two or more suspected members of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant were detained.

In Paris, French police rounded up 10 people suspected of connections with last week’s terrorist violence. One is a woman who gave the Kouachi brothers her Citroen as their getaway car after their massacre at Charlie Hebdo.

In the Belgian counter-terror raid on 10 apartments Thursday, two suspects were killed in a firefight with the police in the eastern town of Verviers. Searches were also carried out in the Brussels area. Thirteen suspects were arrested in Belgium and two more in France. Weapons, munitions and explosives were found, as well police uniforms and large sums of money. These raids thwarted a plan to kill policemen on the street and at police stations, Belgian prosecutors said Friday. The attacks were imminent.

Jittery French security officials evacuated the big Gare de l’Este railway station Friday over a bomb threat.

In Belgium, Jewish schools, institutions – and even synagogues, for the first time since WWII – closed their doors Friday morning.  In France, Jewish schools are also closed for now.
But bombs and submachine guns are clearly not the only weapons the ISIS is wielding against the West.

For some days now, French Internet sites have been under assault. By Friday, 19,000 sites had been hacked.

debkafile’s counter-terrorism and cyber experts report that the Islamist hackers are working out of different locations world wide, many of them in the Middle East, from Iraq, Tunisia, Egypt and the Gaza Strip – but some also out of Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam.
The hackers mostly replace the targeted French site’s home page with ISIS flags and slogans and passages from the Koran. Some websites have crashed under DDOS (Distributing Denial of Service) assault.
The attacks cover a wide range of targets in the Paris region – from banks, public health clinics and hospitals, and government and local authority offices, up to academic research institutions and even a gardening landscape firm and pizza chain.

Adm. Arnaud Coustilliere, director of cyber warfare in the French army, has been placed in charge of measures to combat the ISIS cyber war which holds the threat of infrastructure mayhem in France.

Our sources identify one group of Islamist hackers as the Tunisian FallaGa, whose Facebok page carried a list of its targets along with the messages and images it is planting on their sites.

Joint operations against cyber-attacks top the agenda of UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s talks with President Barack Obama in Washington Friday.

Into the Fray: Sisi or ISIS? – Opinion – Jerusalem Post.

It’s difficult to overstate the potential importance of the Egyptian president’s New Year speech on Islam – and equally important to avoid overly optimistic expectations as to its practical impact.

“Is it possible that 1.6 billion people [Muslims] should want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants – that is 7 billion – so that they themselves may live? Impossible!” – Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Al-Azhar, January 1

“O ye who believe! Fight those of the disbelievers who are near to you, and let them find harshness in you, and know that Allah is with those who keep their duty.” – Koran, Sura 9:123

“Violence… occurs between Muslims, on the one hand, and Orthodox Serbs in the Balkans, Jews in Israel, Hindus in India, Buddhists in Burma and Catholics in the Philippines. Islam has bloody borders.” – Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs, 1993

On New Year’s Day, Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi delivered a remarkable address at Cairo’s Al-Azhar University.

The Obama-Sisi contrast

He directed measured, but nonetheless severe, censure at much of the Islamic clergy, their interpretation of religious texts and their prescription for how Muslims should practice their faith in the modern day: “I am referring here to the religious clerics. We have to think hard about what we are facing – and I have, in fact, addressed this topic a couple of times before. It’s inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire umma [Islamic world] to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world. Impossible!”

Ironically, Sisi spoke at the same venue that Barack Obama chose to deliver his 2009 “Outreach Speech” to the Muslim world. But the contrast between the two could hardly be more striking. As one US analyst deftly noted: “Obama began the 2009 speech by praising the same seminary that Sisi reprimanded,” emphasizing “That [Obama’s approach] is different from Sisi, who is trying to suppress the Brotherhood movement and push Al-Azhar’s Islamic leaders toward modernity.”

Sisi used the occasion to condemn the ongoing practices in the Islamic world, after having coercively removed the regressive and ruinous regime of the Muslim Brotherhood from power. By contrast, Obama heaped effusive praise on Islam, and insisted on places of honor for senior Brotherhood representatives – to the chagrin of his host, president Hosni Mubarak. Indeed, many consider Obama’s words and gestures in Cairo as providing a considerable – arguably, crucial – fillip in the process that swept the Brotherhood to power barely two years later.

Revolution not reform

Although Sisi was at pains to appear respectful to Islam as a religion per se, there was little doubt as to the grim view he took of the consequences of the manner in which Muslims were being instructed to observe their faith.

“That thinking – I am not saying ‘religion’ but ‘thinking’ – that corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the years, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible, is antagonizing the entire world!” he said.

Sisi appealed to the religious establishment for a “more enlightened perspective”: “I am saying these words here at Al-Azhar, before this assembly of scholars and ulema [top Islamic scholars] – Allah Almighty be witness to your truth on Judgment Day concerning that which I’m talking about now…you cannot feel it if you remain trapped within this mindset. You need to step outside of yourselves to be able to… reflect on it from a more enlightened perspective.”

But despite his ostensible deference, Sisi made no bones about what was called for. Not gradual reform but swift revolution. “I say and repeat again that we are in need of a religious revolution. You, imams, are responsible before Allah. The entire world, I say it again, the entire world is waiting for your next move,” he urged.

Tendency to appease

Sisi is undoubtedly correct in his diagnosis of Islam as comprising “a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world.” However, until recently the tendency of the “rest of the world” has been to appease rather than oppose, to understand rather than withstand, to excuse rather than expunge.

Nonetheless, lately there does appear to be the beginning of rumbling discontent in the West, and indications that resistance to Islamic-inspired outrages is beginning to emerge – albeit far too timidly and far too slowly.

It is still too early to assess whether the savage slaughter in Paris last week will prove a tipping-point in the mood toward Islam and shift it from angst to anger. There is, however, considerable room for skepticism.

For despite the short-term uproar the killings at Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher has generated, the death toll pales when compared to far-greater Muslim-motivated atrocities perpetrated in the West without producing a sustained, resolute response to deal adequately with the manifest menace.

With 17 dead, last week in Paris seems unlikely to become a watershed event. After all, the Madrid train bombings left 191 dead and 1,800 wounded in 2004; the London subway bombing 52 dead and 700 wounded in 2005; the Mumbai attacks almost 170 killed and over 600 injured in 2008, and the Moscow metro bombing 40 dead and over 100 injured in 2010. This of course is but a minute sample of a long, gory list of post 9/11 Muslim massacres, carried out in the name of their religious belief.

Islam’s bloody borders

It is difficult to see why the ordeal in Paris, gruesome as it was, will produce the required stiffening of resolve.

After all, the incipient clash between the Islamic and non-Islamic worlds has been part of the public discourse for over two decades. In his controversial – some might say, prescient – article “The Clash of Civilizations?” in Foreign Affairs (1993), the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington predicted: “The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.” He warned: “… the great historic fault lines between civilizations are once more aflame. This is particularly true along the… boundaries of the… Islamic bloc of nations, from the bulge of Africa to central Asia…. Islam has bloody borders.”

In a subsequent book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1998), Huntington wrote: “No single statement in my Foreign Affairs article attracted more critical comment than: ‘Islam has bloody borders.’… Quantitative evidence from every disinterested source conclusively demonstrates its validity.”

Subsequent events and statistics strongly corroborate Huntington’s contentions.

Bloody borders (cont.)

It is possible to fill tomes with examples of obdurate Islamic enmity to Judaism and Christianity. But Islamic intolerance is not confined to the monotheistic People of the Book.

One of the most graphic illustrations of Islam’s abiding rejection of all that is not Islamic is provided by the 2001 destruction of the giant Buddha statues in Afghanistan.

The statues, which stood for 15 centuries (!) were designated by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site, and were perhaps the best-known cultural landmark of the region. Despite all this, and ignoring international appeals, the Taliban government reduced the statues to rubble, in a determined, prolonged and complex effort.

According to the then-Afghan culture minister, 400 religious clerics from across the country decided the “statues were un-Islamic.”
The Taliban’s spiritual leader and supreme commander Mullah Muhammad Omar, proclaimed: “Muslims should be proud of smashing idols. It has given praise to God that we have destroyed them.” The then-foreign minister told a Japanese daily: “We are destroying the Buddha statues in accordance with Islamic law… it is purely a religious issue.”

This implacable enmity toward the un-Islamic is reflected in the appalling statistics regarding Islamic violence.

Some estimates indicate that since 9/11, there have been a staggering 25,000 lethal acts of Islamic terrorism.

Islam’s bloody innards

In his Al-Azhar address, Sisi issued a stern warning: “… this umma [Islamic world] is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost – and it is being lost by our own hands.” The warning is timely and accurate.

For, as I pointed out in last week’s column, as appalling as Muslim violence against non-Muslims might be, it pales into insignificance when compared to violence among Muslims themselves.

In a sense, Sisi was echoing views Huntington articulated in his book: “Islam’s borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and… obsessed with the inferiority of their power.”

Judging from the scope of the carnage, Islam’s innards are if anything bloodier than its borders, and the enmity for fellow Muslims far outstrips that for the infidel.

Quite apart from the well-known Sunni- Shia rift that has resulted in untold deaths, the myriad massacres in mosques, marketplaces and madrassas across Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere in the Muslim-dominated Dar a-Salaam (Zone of Peace) make it impossible for anyone other than a learned expert to decipher the patterns of intra-Islamic rivalries and the reasons for their lethal consequences.

Sisi’s passionate cry that the Muslim world is being torn apart at its own hands is corroborated everyday by a never-ending stream of blood-soaked facts.

‘No stronger retrograde force exists…’

Well over 100 years ago, in his book The River War (1899), Winston Churchill predicted with stunning prescience much of the realities which Sisi laments in his New Year address: “How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful, fatalistic apathy.”

Churchill warned of adverse effects on Muslim economies and societies: “The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live… the influence of the religion paralyzes the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.”

On Islam’s attitude to women, he wrote: “The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property – either as a child, a wife or a concubine – must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.”

Regarding conflict with the West, he provided an ominous caveat: “Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science… the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome… ”

Given the situation in Europe today, this is a prognosis that should not be lightly dismissed.

Ataturk or Anwar Sadat?

It’s difficult to overstate the importance that Sisi’s speech could have – and equally important to exercise sober caution in developing excessively optimistic expectations as to the practical impact it may have.

Earlier this week, the influential US columnist George Will raised both the prospects and the perils: “…as head of the Egyptian state, Al Sisi occupies an office once occupied by Anwar Sadat who was murdered by Islamic extremists for his opening to Israel. This was an act of tremendous bravery by Sisi, and if the Nobel Peace Prize committee is looking for someone who plausibly deserves it, they could start there.”

Will Sisi be able to initiate a Kemalist-like transformation of Egypt as Kemal Ataturk did in Turkey just under a hundred years ago (and now disintegrating rapidly under the Islamist Erdogan regime)? The answer is far from certain. The times and circumstances in today’s Egypt are vastly different – and arguably more daunting – than those in post-WWI Turkey.

Egypt faces almost insurmountable socioeconomic challenges, and failure by Sisi to address them adequately will provide his numerous radical opponents much grist for their extremist mills to grind.

Recent reports (The Jerusalem Post, January 12) that a newly exposed Islamic State-affiliated cell that “planned to assassinate government ministers, media personalities and businessmen in the coming days” dramatically underscore how a tragic rerun of political assassination in Egypt cannot be discounted.

So while Sisi’s endeavor should be warmly applauded – and supported – its chances of success are sufficiently uncertain – indeed, remote – that it would be more than imprudent of the West and for Israel to make any assumption of such success a basis for future policy.

Sisi, ISIS & Israel

The outcome of the titan battle between Sisi and Islamic State will, of course, have dramatic impact on Israel, particularly with regard to the fate of Sinai, and the ramifications this will have on our long southern border and the city of Eilat.

But that is a topic for another – and somewhat depressing – article in the future.

Martin Sherman (www.martinsherman.org) is the founder and executive director of the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies http://www.strategicisrael.org.

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