An immense stretch of Sinai desert populated by half a million people is under siege, as the Egyptian army fights off a major offensive by the Islamic State’s Egyptian affiliate, the Sinai Province, against its positions in northern Sinai. The battle, which Monday, July 6, went into its sixth day, is being fought in an area bounded by the northern town of Sheikh Zuwaid, Rafah on the Gaza border, and up to Kerem Shalom and Nitzana on the Israeli border to the south. DEBKAfile’s military sources report a news blackout on the ongoing warfare except for Egyptian army handouts.
Egyptian security sources reported Monday that the latest round of helicopter strikes and ground operations had killed 63 Islamists in villages between Sheikh Zuwaid and Rafah, where four of their hideouts had been located. Our sources add that these air strikes are directed against civilian dwellings, especially in farming districts, where ISIS fighters are suspected of hiding out. No figures have been released by Cairo on civilian or Egyptian army casualties.
DEBKAfile describes the contest as an asymmetrical one between an army that depends heavily on aerial operations and ISIS terrorists, who have resorted mainly to guerilla warfare. By night, they flit swiftly on foot between the dunes to strike Egyptian army positions. By day, their foot soldiers trap Egyptian soldiers by setting up ambushes around those positions and on the roads of Sinai to keep Egyptian troops pinned down. Terrorist operations are a constant on their agenda.
The Egyptians respond with blanket air strikes which swoop on any moving object in the embattled area – whether by car or on foot
The hide-and-seek tactics employed by ISIS are sustainable in the long term, especially when the Islamists can rely on a constant influx of reinforcements, weapons and ordnance, the sources of which DEBKAfile disclosed in an exclusive report Sunday, July 5.
The Islamic State is rushing reinforcements to Egypt from Libya and Iraq for its battle with Egyptian forces in northern Sinai, which went into its fifth day Sunday, July 5, and other offensives, DEBKAfile’s intelligence and counter-terror sources report. After sustaining hundreds of casualties, both sides claim to have won the upper hand but the tenacious struggle is not over.
An Islamist manpower pool is provided by Egyptian extremists who crossed into Libya in the past and settled in bases around Benghazi. Last week, ISIS summoned them to take up positions in Cairo and the Suez Canal and wait for orders to go into action. They crossed back with the help of smugglers. Those rings, dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood underground, with branches controlled by Hamas and Hizballah, bring illicit weapons and ammunition supplies to Sinai from Libya via Egypt.
President Abdel Fatteh El-Sisi is therefore obliged to earmark substantial military and intelligence resources for defending the Suez Canal and Cairo – more even than the Sinai front.
The other source of jihadi reinforcements is Iraq, They use another branch of the smuggling network which carries them through southern Jordan to the Gulf of Aqaba where they are picked up by smugglers’ boats and ferried across to the eastern coast of the Sinai Peninsula.
The IDF had more than one reason for its decision last Wednesday to close to traffic Rte 12, Israel’s main southern highway, which runs parallel to the Egyptian border up to Eilat: It was a necessary precaution lest ISIS turned its terrorists and guns against Israel from next-door northern Sinai. The other reason was to deter the Islamists coming from Iraq from trying to transit Israel and reach Sinai with the help of Bedouin smugglers operating on both sides of the Israeli-Egyptian border.
Our military sources estimate that some 1,000 jihadists are directly engaged in the North Sinai battle with the Egyptian army, but add that they could quickly recruit supplementary fighting manpower from Bedouin tribes near the warfront who already play ball with the terrorists.
Egyptian tacticians have strictly limited the army action on this front to air and helicopter strikes and local ground and armored forces. They are focusing on defending three Sinai enclaves, the northern district around Sheikh Zuweid, El Arish port and Rafah, and Sharm el-Sheikh in the south, to pin ISIS forces down in those places and prevent them from fanning out into areas controlled by the big Bedouin tribes.
When President El-Sisi visited the troops in northern Sinai Saturday, July 5, he disclosed that only one percent of the Egyptian army of 300,000 men was assigned to Sinai. He indicated that his army was perfectly capable of wiping out the Sinai terrorist threat in no time if all its might were to be thrown into the fray.
This strategy leaves ISIS with free rein in central Sinai. However, El-Sisis, like his predecessor Hosni Mubarak, is not prepared to go all out against ISIS in its “dens” any time in the near future, because he needs all his military resources and assets he can muster to defend the capital Cairo and the Suez Canal.
Neither the Islamic Army nor the Muslim Brotherhood or any other radical Islamists make any secrets of their next plans. ISIS has announced that it is setting its sights on Egypt’s pyramids, the Sphinx of Giza, and the country’s unique historic monuments in general, after its savage vandalism and looting of other precious world heritage sites.
In a new message released Friday, July 3, a number of radical Islamist leaders, including the ISIS “caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, told their followers that the destruction of Egypt’s national monuments, such as the pyramids and the sphinx, was a “religious duty” that must be carried out by those who worship Islam, as “idolatry is strictly banned in the religion.”
This message has sharply ratcheted up the jihadist element of ISIS military confrontation with Egypt to a higher, more inflammatory level.
(Not much chance of that. General al-Sisi supported the large masses of Egyptians who wanted then President Morsi deposed. He was later elected President of Egypt. Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood — which uses terrorism to gain and keep power — is an Obama favorite. Besides, al-Sisi’s efforts to reform Islam run counter to Obama’s delusion that Islam, as it is and has long been, is a wonderful religion of peace. — DM)
The silence was truly deafening. Not a sound from Archbishop Desmond Tutu or Alice Walker or the eager boycotters of Israel or the United Nations Human Rights Council about the brutal massacre of more than 70, perhaps 100, Egyptian soldiers and civilians by Islamist terrorists in the northern Sinai peninsula.
Since Israel, after the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, withdrew all its forces and all settlements — including Yamit — by 1982, the Sinai peninsula has been plagued by terrorist attacks, especially against tourists, by kidnappings, and by violence. After the 2011 Egyptian revolution and consequent uprisings, a major terrorist group emerged and became even more belligerent after the coup that deposed President Mohammed Morsi on July 3, 2013. This was Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis (ABM) that has claimed responsibility for numerous attacks against both Israeli interests and Egyptian personnel.
These assaults included an attack in July 2012 against a Sinai pipeline, a rocket strike in August 2012 on Eilat in south Israel, suicide bombings in el Tor in southern Sinai in May 2014, downing an Egyptian military helicopter in a missile attack, car bombings and hand grenades in Cairo, assassinations and attempted assassinations of Egyptian officials, beheading of four individuals in October 2014, an attack on a security checkpoint, and the June 29, 2015 murder in Cairo of Hisham Barakat, the Egyptian Prosecutor General, who in only two years in office had detained hundreds of members of the Muslim Brotherhood. He was the most senior Egyptian government official murdered.
In November 2014, ABM declared its allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (IS) and accepted the new self-appointed Caliph. It appears to have several hundred trained operatives and collaborators. There are different opinions about the actions of the Sinai Bedouin population, especially that of the largest of the 10 major tribes, the Tarabin tribe in northern Sinai, a tribe that is notorious for drug dealing, weapons smuggling, and human trafficking in prostitutes and African labor workers. Tarabin is said to have called for unification of all the tribes against the terrorists, but rumors of clashes appear to be untrue, and some even allege collaboration with the terrorists. What is true is that local Bedouin tribesmen, alleging discrimination by the state against them, have launched attacks against government forces in Sinai.
Over the last two years ABM, now regarding itself as a dedicated affiliate of IS, has tried to undermine the rule of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. It has attacked Egyptian army posts, and security centers, and also the UN Multilateral Force in northern Sinai, that oversees the terms of the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, and tried as well to infiltrate Israeli territory.
There had already been terrorist attacks on October 2014 and January 2015 when more than 30 were killed on each occasion in northeast Sinai. The most dramatic deed of ABM, which now seems to have changed its name to Province of Sinai, (POS) was the series of simultaneous coordinated attacks on July 1, 2015 on fifteen army centers of security forces and checkpoints in northern Sinai. The attacks, including three suicide bombers, killed at least 70 soldiers and civilians.
Evidently POS, imitating its mentor IS that has taken and now rules cities in Iraq and Syria, wanted to take over the city of Sheikh Zuweid, close to Israel, and cut off Rafah from al-Arish.
The danger to all of the democratic countries is immediate for a number of reasons. The first is that the success of the terrorists in their daring ambushes, control of the roads, taking police officers hostage, and planting mines in the streets, indicates not only their disciplined activity but also the influence of IS operatives directly and indirectly through training. IS in Iraq and Syria has operated in just this aggressive and disciplined fashion. All authorities responsible for security in the United States should be conscious of and take account of this highly organized success and of the threat of future similar attacks in the U.S. itself.
The second reason is that Hamas in Gaza is providing support to POS with weapons and logistical support, and even with Hamas terrorists taking part in operations. These have come from Hamas commanders in the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades that have been prominent for anti-Israeli attacks, including suicide bombings against civilians inside Israel. One particular active commander is Wael Faraj, who has smuggled wounded fighters from Sinai into Gaza.
A third problem is the obvious attempt to undermine and aim at the overthrow of President Sisi, a voice of sanity in the Muslim world. He has courageously criticized the extremists of his religion. In his remarkable speech at al-Azhar University in Cairo on January 22, 2015, he said that fellow Muslims needed to change the religious discourse and remove from it things that have led to violence and extremism. The Muslim religion, he said to imams, is in need of religious reform.
Since he assumed power on June 8, 2014, Sisi has attempted to stem the tide of terrorism by reinforcing the Sinai, restricting traffic, imposing curfews in the area, and demolishing homes of suspected terrorists in Rafah. He sought to create a buffer zone along the border with Gaza, and to destroy the tunnels built by Hamas. But clearly Sisi needs help to survive. It is imperative for the U.S. together with Israel to provide that help to the overwhelmed Egyptian army and intelligence services.
Israel is acutely aware of the danger. POS captured armored vehicles on July 1, 2015 that it can now use to penetrate the border fence between Sinai and Israel. That fence is unlikely to deter a trained terrorist group that now has combat experience. Israel responded by closing roads and two border crossings as a precautionary measure. But all the democratic countries, especially the United States, and also the United Nations because of its Multilateral Force, are now aware that the Islamist terror is at their doors as well as at the outskirts of Israel, and should act accordingly.
By Roman Super and Claire Bigg July 03, 2015 Via Radio Free Europe
Nearly 5,000 Russians migrated to Israel in 2014 [Source: Courtesy Photo]
(Still, a lot of folks wonder why Israel builds all those settlements. – LS)
Just a year ago, Russian journalist Vladimir Yakovlev was one of Moscow’s most influential media figures.
Today, he lives a quiet life in Tel Aviv and has swapped his Russian passport for an Israeli one.
Yakovlev, the founder of the respected Kommersant publishing house and the Snob magazine, belongs to a new wave of disillusioned Russian Jews deserting their country for the relative stability of Israel.
“The big problem with Russia, and the main reason why I left, is the fact that our value system was destroyed,” he says. “Life in Russia has turned into Russian roulette. Every morning you turn the roulette wheel, you never know what is going to happen to you.”
Spooked by Russia’s actions in Ukraine and by the increasingly stringent punishments for anyone deemed critical of the Kremlin, Russians of Jewish descent have been fleeing in droves over the past 18 months.
Surge From Eastern Europe
According to Israeli authorities, as many as 4,685 Russian citizens relocated to Israel in 2014 — more than double than in any of the previous 16 years.
And the trend seems to be accelerating.
The nongovernmental Jewish Agency for Israel has released figures showing a 40-percent surge in immigration to the country between January and March of this year, compared to the same period in 2014.
The study suggests that while the majority of immigrants still come from Western Europe, Russians and Ukrainians are responsible for this increase. The number of Jews migrating from Western Europe has remained largely the same.
Yakovlev, however, doesn’t consider himself a simple immigrant. He is, in his own words, a refugee.
“People usually emigrate due to domestic circumstances,” he says. “People are now leaving because they are scared to stay where they would like to live. They are running from Russia.”
Zeyev Khanin, an official at Israel’s Immigrant Absorption Ministry, says the average Russian immigrant has changed dramatically since the last mass exodus of Jews from Russia ebbed in the late 1990s.
He says newcomers from Russia are significantly younger, more educated, and, as a rule, hail from Moscow or St. Petersburg.
“The average education level is on the rise and the number of people with degrees in humanities has increased massively,” he tells RFE/RL. “Today’s repatriates are mostly the creative intelligentsia.”
Mikhail Kaluzhsky was among the 4,685 Russians who moved to Israel last year.
A journalist and playwright from Moscow, he is typical of the new wave of Russian immigrants described by Khanin.
Kaluzhsky says his decision to leave Russia is “directly linked to politics.”
In January 2014, he traveled to Ukraine to witness the Maidan pro-democracy protests that toppled Russia-friendly President Viktor Yanukovych.
He says the unwavering determination of Maidan protesters left a deep impression on him, together with an uncomfortable realization that Russian antigovernment activists lag far behind their Ukrainian counterparts.
“I understood that our protests were worthless,” he says. “After the Bolotnaya protests [in Moscow in 2012] in our country, demonstrators went to the restaurant. Activists on Maidan did not go anywhere, they stayed until victory.”
Then, Kaluzhsky lost his job with the Sakharov human rights organization as a result of Russia’s new “foreign agent” law.
The controversial law, signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2012, forces NGOs that receive foreign funding and are deemed to carry out political activities to register as “foreign agents.”
“The center’s financial situation deteriorated as soon as talk about foreign agents started in Russia,” says Kaluzhsky. “Western foundations said they could no longer fund initiatives that may be shut down tomorrow.”
In fall 2014, the Sakharov Center was forced to scrap its theater projects, to which Kaluzhsky had actively contributed.
Crimea Seizure
Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine was the last straw.
“After Crimea, our family decided to distance itself from all of this, most of all from the government,” he says.
The Kaluzhskys now live in the outskirts of Tel Aviv. Their son attends a local Jewish pre-school and already speaks good Hebrew.
They have sold all their belonging in Russia and do not plan to return.
Vladimir Yakovlev, too, sees his future in Israel.
He and his wife have settled in downtown Tel Aviv, in a bright flat with a balcony full of flowers.
Most of their friends are other Russian intellectuals, and many of these friendships date back from their life in Moscow.
Yakovlev says Israel offers the best of both worlds — a sunny, friendly climate and the same circle of liberal, educated Muscovites that surrounded him in Russia.
“My group of friends here is almost the same as I had in Moscow,” he says. “We live in the same house as friends from Moscow, and I keep meeting people in the streets whom I regularly spent time with in Moscow.”
“No one,” he adds, “should be forced to spend their life dealing with this Russian nonsense.”
Many in Jerusalem think efforts to block accord are a lost cause as world powers prepare to resume substantial economic dealings with Tehran
By Times of Israel staff and APJuly 6, 2015, 3:57 am
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is greeted by members of congress prior to addressing a joint meeting of congress on Capitol Hill in Washington DC, March 03, 2015. (photo credit: Amos Ben Gershom/ GPO)
Israel was preparing for the next phase of its fierce opposition to the Iran nuclear deal, by lobbying US Congressmen and women to block the emerging comprehensive agreement once it is finalized and goes to lawmakers for approval. But some in Jerusalem fear it is a lost cause given the belief that the potential economic benefits from resuming business with Iran could significantly outweigh political considerations.
The US-led P5+1 world powers and Tehran are currently in the midst of negotiations to hammer out a deal to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions and remove crippling sanctions imposed on the Islamic Republic. On Saturday, the Associated Press reported that the powers and Iran had drawn up a draft document on the pace and timing of sanctions relief, advancing on one of the most contentious issues at their negotiations.
Israel reacted furiously to the development, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warning on Sunday that the six world powers were dangerously caving to the Islamic Republic’s every demand.
“It seems that the nuclear talks in Iran have yielded a collapse, not a breakthrough,” Netanyahu said at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting. “The major powers’ concessions are growing.”
On Sunday, US Secretary of State John Kerry said that while “genuine progress” had been made and the sides “have never been closer, at this point, this negotiation could go either way. If the hard choices get made in the next couple of days, and made quickly, we could get an agreement this week.”
Speaking from talks in Vienna, Kerry added: “But if they are not made, we will not.”
Assuming the final accord is submitted to Congress by July 9, US lawmakers will have a 30-day review period for any agreement during which sanctions on Iran cannot be waived. Should the deal fail to pass, President Barack Obama will have the right to veto, a power he has vowed to use. To overcome the veto, the deal will need to be rejected in a second round of voting by two thirds of Congress and the Senate.
Israel, according to a report in Ynet, intends to use diplomatic pressure to have the deal quashed in the first round in Congress but is also gearing up to double down should that effort fail and Obama uses his presidential veto, to have the deal blocked in the next round.
Sources in Jerusalem assess that the deal will likely be approved in the initial stage, with Congress fearing that any delay could harm US industry, as the other world powers rush to resume business with Iran. Others believe not all is lost and the deal can be defeated, with the right diplomatic work on Israel’s part.
Around 100 French companies are reportedly planning to participate in a delegation to Tehran in September to review business opportunities in the Islamic republic.
Other countries are likely to follow, assuming a deal is reached.
VIENNA—Secretary of State John Kerry said on Sunday that the United States and Iran may fail to reach a final nuclear agreement despite the talks being extended past their June 30 deadline so that the sides could hash out remaining differences over the scope and scale of the Islamic Republic’s contested nuclear program.
Western observers suggested the statement from Kerry was designed to provide cover for the administration if a deal with wide-ranging concessions to Iran is struck.
Kerry told reporters in a brief press conference Sunday afternoon that he is prepared to leave town without a deal that has been viewed as the Obama administration’s biggest foreign policy priority.
“I want to be absolutely clear with everybody: We are not yet where we need to be on several of the most difficult issues,” Kerry said. “And the truth is that while I completely agree with Foreign Minister [Javad] Zarif that we have never been closer, at this point, this negotiation could go either way.”
“If hard choices get made in the next couple of days and made quickly, we could get an agreement this week. But if they are not made, we will not,” Kerry said.
Critics of the administration were not impressed by Kerry’s tough stance.
Asked by the Washington Free Beacon about Kerry’s remarks, one Western observer present in Vienna visibly rolled his eyes and said, “If the State Department thinks they’re fooling anybody, they are literally the only ones who think that.”
U.S. officials and diplomats have been quiet in public, declining to brief reporters on record about the status of the talks and what a final deal could look like.
If a deal is not reached by July 7, it is expected that the world powers and Iran will not make one.
“If we don’t get a deal, if we don’t have a deal, if there’s absolute intransigence, if there’s an unwillingness to move on the things that are important, President Obama has always said we’ll be prepared to walk away,” Kerry said.
The secretary also defended a virtual news blackout that has left reporters with very little insight into the status of the critical talks.
“In the coming hours and days we’re going to go as hard as we can. We are not going to be negotiating in the press,” Kerry said. “We’ll be negotiating privately and quietly. And when the time is right, we will all have more to say.”
Asked if he thinks a deal in attainable in the announced time period, Kerry demurred.
“Right now we’re aiming to try to finish this in the timeframe that we’ve set out,” he said. “That’s our goal and we’re going to put every bit of pressure possible on it to try to do so.”
Shortly after Kerry’s remarks, he walked back into another meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif.
Iranian officials also remained quiet over the weekend, but have hinted that disagreements remain over the future scope of Iran’s nuclear program and the timetable in which international sanctions will be removed.
Wire reports have claimed in recent days that the United States and Iran are close to sorting out the sanctions issue, which has remained one of the most contested issues in the talks.
U.S. lawmakers and other critics have expressed repeated concerns that Iran will pocket billions of dollars in sanctions relief while doing little to stop its most controversial nuclear work.
Meanwhile, Iran announced on Sunday that Russia had agreed to supply it with a range of naval equipment.
“Talks between the Iranian delegation and the Russian side were held at the International Maritime Defense Show (IMDS) in St. Petersburg on Saturday. They spoke about boosting bilateral military-technical cooperation, including on deliveries of a wide range of naval equipment and armaments,” an Iranian military official was quoted as saying in the country’s state-run press.
(The views expressed in this post are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)
Napoleon sometimes claimed to be a Muslim. Obama often claims to be a Christian. Napoleon sought, and Obama seeks, power and glory through pretense.
Napoleon Bonaparte
Napoleon’s life and history are summarized at Wikipedia. He supported the French Revolution and was appointed General of the Army of Italy at the age of twenty-five. Three years later, he commanded an expedition against Egypt. This post compares his and Obama’s religious and political efforts to gain the confidence of Muslims. The lengthy quotations provided in this section of the post are from Worlds at War – the 2,500 year struggle between East and West, 2008, by Anthony Pagden.
While en route to conquer Egypt, Napoleon had his “Orientalists” compose a “Proclamation to the Egyptians.”
It is worth taking a closer look at this document for it summarizes not only the French hopes for the ‘Orient’, but also the ultimate failure of both sides to come to any approximate understanding of each other. It began with a familiar Muslim invocation: ‘In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate. There is no God but God. He has no son nor has he any associate in His Dominion’, which was intended to indicate clearly that the French were not Christians. It then went on to assure the Egyptian people that Napoleon Bonaparte, commander of the French army, and ‘on behalf of the French Republic which is based upon the foundations of Liberty and Equality’, had not come to Egypt, as the Mamluks had put it about, ‘like the Crusaders’ in order to destroy the power of Islam. Nothing, Napoleon assured his readers, could be further from the truth. Tell the slanderers that I have not come to you except for the purpose of restoring to you your rights from the oppressors, that I, more than the Mam-luks, serve God— may He be praised and Exalted— and revere his prophet Muhammad and the glorious Qur’an … And tell them also that all people are equal in the eyes of God and that the circumstances which distinguish one from another are reason, virtue and knowledge. 578 Having thus done his best to conflate the principle of human rights— in a language in which there exists no obvious translation for the word ‘right’ 579— with what the Orientalists had persuaded him were the basic tenets of Islam, the man whom Victor Hugo would later describe as the ‘Muhammad of the West’ continued,
O ye Qadis [judges], Shaykhs and Imams; O ye Sharbajiyya [cavalry officers] and men of circumstance tell the nation that the French are also faithful Muslims and in confirmation of this they invaded Rome and destroyed there the Holy See, which was always exhorting the Christians to make war on Islam. And then they went to the island of Malta from where they expelled the knights who claimed that God the Exalted required them to fight the Muslims. 580 [Emphasis added.]
It is hard to say how much Napoleon believed in all this. One of his generals later told a friend in Toulouse that ‘we tricked the Egyptians with our feigned love of their religion, in which Bonaparte and we no more believe in than we do in that of the late pope’. 582 But Napoleon’s personal beliefs were largely beside the point. The point was policy. Napoleon had always practised religious toleration because he knew that religious faiths could make deadly enemies. Toleration, however, was one thing; credence, even respect, was another. It is indeed highly unlikely that Napoleon had read much of the Qur’an he claimed to venerate. As he told Madame de Rémusant, the only holy book which would have been of any interest to him would have been one he had written himself. [Pagden, pp 326 – 327] [Emphasis added.]
Egyptians did not appreciate Napoleon’s Proclamation.
Just as most Muslims today have failed to be persuaded that Western social values can be made compatible with the Holy Law, the Shari’a, so too were the Egyptians who confronted Napoleon. We know something of how they reacted to Napoleon’s profession of love for Islam from the account of the first seven months of the occupation written by a member of the diwan— or Imperial Council— of Cairo named Abd-al Rahman al-Jabarti. Al-Jabarti was a well-read perceptive man who was not unimpressed by French skills and technology (he was particularly taken by the wheelbarrow) and ungrudgingly admired French courage and discipline on the battlefield, which he compared, glowingly, to that of the mujahedin, the Muslim warriors of the jihad. 585 But for all that he was a firm Muslim who could conceive of no good, no truth which did not emanate from the word of God as conveyed by the Prophet. He excoriated Napoleon’s declaration for its language, for its poor style, for the grammatical errors, and the ‘incoherent words and vulgar constructions’ with which it was strewn, and which often made nonsense out of what Napoleon had intended to convey— all of which was no tribute to the skills of Venture de Paradis or those of the French Arabists in the expedition. But al-Jabarti reserved his most searing criticism for what he repeatedly describes as French hypocrisy. The opening phrase of the declaration suggested to him not, as Napoleon had meant it to, a preference on the part of a tolerant nation for Islam; but rather that the French gave equal credence to all three religions— Islam, Christianity, and Judaism— which in effect meant that they had no belief in any. Toleration for a Muslim such as al-Jabarti was as meaningless as it would have been for any sincere believer. It was merely a way of condoning error. The years when some kind of rapprochement between Judaism and its two major heresies might have been possible were long since past. There could now be only one true faith, and any number of false ones. Napoleon could not claim to ‘revere’ the Prophet without also believing in his message. The same applied to the Qur’ an. You could not merely ‘respect’ the literal word of God. You had to accept it as the only law, not one among many. ‘This is a lie,’ thundered al-Jabarti; ‘To respect the Qur’an means to glorify it, and one glorifies only by believing in what it contains.’
Napoleon was clearly a liar. Worse he was also the agent of a society which was obviously committed to the elimination, not only of Islam, but of all belief, all religion. The invocation of the ‘Republic’, al-Jabarti explained to his Muslim readers, was a reference to the godless state which the French had set up for themselves after they had betrayed and then murdered their ‘Sultan’. By killing Louis XVI, the French had turned against the man they had taken, wrongly because their understanding of God was erroneous, but sincerely nevertheless, to be God’s representative on earth. In his place they had raised an abstraction, this ‘Republic’ in whose name Napoleon, who had come not in peace as he claimed but at the head of a conquering army, now professed to speak. Since for a Muslim there could be no secular state, no law which is not also God’s law, the French insistence that it was only ‘reason, virtue and knowledge’ which separated one man from another was clearly an absurdity. For ‘God’, declared al-Jabarti, ‘has made some superior to others as is testified by the dwellers in the Heavens and on the Earth.’ There are few things a believer, especially a believer in the fundamental sacredness of a script, dislikes more than a non-believer. To al-Jabarti the French seemed to be not would-be Muslims, but atheists. [Emphasis added.] [Id. at 329].
Obama
Napoleon, in his mix of religious and political doctrine, was a power-grubbing scoundrel and liar. How about Obama?
Obama has not claimed to be a Muslim and I don’t know what He is. To claim to be a Muslim would be politically inexpedient. However, He has proclaimed His respect and even reverence for Islam and for the “Holy” Qur’an.
overlap, and share common principles — principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.
Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance. . . . People in every country should be free to choose and live their faith based upon the persuasion of the mind and the heart and the soul. This tolerance is essential for religion to thrive, but it’s being challenged in many different ways. [Emphasis added.]
“Tolerance? Egyptian President al-Sisi is remarkable among Muslim leaders for his efforts to promote religious tolerance. Obama appears to despise him for supporting massive public protests against President Morsi and eventually becoming president. Morsi was a Muslim Brotherhood supporter and Obama appears to cherish the Muslim Brotherhood terrorist organization.
Islam is not part of the problem in combating violent extremism — it is an important part of promoting peace.
And, as Obama tells us, the Islamic State and other such groups are not Islamic.
That sort of stuff didn’t work out well for Napoleon. Are Islamists more dedicated to religious tolerance now than in the days of Napoleon? It does not seem that they are. See, e.g., Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and other Islamic nations.
The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam. But to be credible, those who condemn that slander must also condemn the hate we see in the images of Jesus Christ that are desecrated, or churches that are destroyed, or the Holocaust that is denied.
He sought power and glory by opposing those who offend “slander” Islam, including the maker of the You Tube video on which He and others in His administration blamed “spontaneous” September 11, 2011 “demonstrations” at the U.S. Benghazi annex.
I have made it clear that the United States government had nothing to do with this video, and I believe its message must be rejected by all who respect our common humanity. It is an insult not only to Muslims, but to America as well — for as the city outside these walls makes clear, we are a country that has welcomed people of every race and every faith. We are home to Muslims who worship across our country. We not only respect the freedom of religion, we have laws that protect individuals from being harmed because of how they look or what they believe. We understand why people take offense to this video because millions of our citizens are among them.
I know there are some who ask why we don’t just ban such a video. And the answer is enshrined in our laws: Our Constitution protects the right to practice free speech.
Obama, who claims to want a peaceful “two state solution” for the Israelis and Palestinians, has said little if anything about the propensity of Israel’s “peace partner,” the Palestinian Authority, to slander Israel and Judaism on a daily basis while honoring those who murder Jews.
Obama’s romance with Islam
Daniel Greenfield recently wrote a Front Page Magazine article titled Barack Obama’s Unholy Alliance: A Romance With Islamism. Please read the whole thing; it’s long but well worth the time. Mr. Greenfield notes, in connection with the Benghazi attack,
When the killing in Benghazi was done, the Jihadists left behind the slogan “Allahu Akbar” or “Allah is Greater” scrawled on the walls of the American compound.[6] These were the same words that Obama had recited “with a first-rate accent” for the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof. Obama had called it [the Islamic call to prayer] “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth.”[7] On that too, the murderers of four Americans agreed with him.
Those who disagreed and were to be denied a future included Mark Basseley Youssef, a Coptic Christian, whose YouTube trailer for a movie critical of Islam was blamed by the administration for the attacks.
Two days after Obama’s UN speech, Youssef was arrested and held without bail. The order for his arrest came from the top. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had told Charles Woods, the father of murdered SEAL Tyrone Woods, “We’re going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video.”
The ACLU, which had developed deep Islamist connections,[9] sent a letter to Hillary Clinton thanking her for her support of freedom of speech.[10]
The Supreme Court’s “Miracle Decision”[11] had thrown out a blasphemy ban for movies, but Obama’s new unofficial blasphemy ban targeted only those movies that offended Islam. The government had joined the terrorists in seeking to deny such movies and their creators a future.
At the United Nations, Obama had compared the filmmaker to the terrorists. He had used a Gandhi quote to assert that, “Intolerance is itself a form of violence.”[12] Americans who criticized Islam’s violent tendencies could be considered as bad as Muslim terrorists and if intolerance of Islam was a form of violence, then it could be criminalized and suppressed. That became the administration’s priority.
. . . .
At the National Prayer Breakfast, Obama attacked Christianity for the Crusades in the presence of the foreign minister of Sudan, a genocidal government whose Muslim Brotherhood leader had massacred so many Christians and others that he had been indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.[20][21] And he told Christians that they were obligated to condemn insults to Islam.[22]
Women’s rights? Obama supports those that don’t offend Islam. Continuing with Mr Greenfield’s linked article,
In August 2013, Al-Wafd, a paper linked to one of Egypt’s more liberal parties which supports equal rights for women and Christians, accused Obama of having close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. [60]
A year earlier, Rose El-Youssef magazine, founded by an early Egyptian feminist, had compiled a list of six Muslim Brotherhood operatives in the administration.[61][62]
Beyond Huma Abedin, Hillary’s close confidante and aide, the list included; Arif Alikhan, Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Policy Development; Mohammed Elibiary, a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council; Rashad Hussain, formerly the U.S. Special Envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference and currently the Coordinator for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications; Salam al-Marayati, co-founder of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC); Imam Mohamed Magid, president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and Eboo Patel, a member of President Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based Neighborhood Partnerships.
These were the types of accusations that the media tended to dismissively associate with the right, but both Egyptian publications were on the other side of the spectrum.
Egyptian liberals were the ones brandishing placards of a bearded Kerry in Taliban clothes or a photoshopped Obama with a Salafist beard. The protesters Obama had supposedly sought to support by calling for Mubarak to step down were crowding the streets accusing him of backing terrorists.
What made the Egyptian liberals who had seen America as their ally in pursuing reform come to view it as an enemy? The angry Egyptian protesters were accusing Obama of supporting a dictator; the original sin of American foreign policy that his Cairo Speech and the Arab Spring had been built on rejecting.
The progressive critiques of American foreign policy insisted that we were hated for supporting dictators. Now their own man was actually hated for supporting a Muslim Brotherhood dictator.
By 2014, 85% of Egyptians disliked America. Only 10% still rated America favorably.[63] It was a shift from the heady days of the Arab Spring when America had slid into positive numbers for the first time.[64]
Obama had run for office promising to repair our image abroad. As a candidate, he had claimed that other countries believed that “America is part of what has gone wrong in our world.” And yet the true wrongness was present in that same speech when he urged, “a new dawn in the Middle East.”[65]
That dawn came with the light of burning churches at the hands of Muslim Brotherhood supporters. Under Obama, America really did become part of what had gone wrong by supporting the Muslim Brotherhood. It is a crime that Obama will not admit to and that the media will not report on.
The Muslim Brotherhood was born out of Egypt and yet Egyptian views of it are dismissed by the media. Despite the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s final orgy of brutality as President Mohammed Morsi clung to power, despite the burning churches and tortured protesters, it is still described as “moderate.”
Morsi, who had called on Egyptians to nurse their children on hatred of the Jews,[66]was a moderate. Sheikh Rachid al-Ghannouchi, the leader of Ennahda, the Tunisian flavor of the Muslim Brotherhood, who had called for the extermination of the Jews “male, female and children,”[67] was also a “moderate.” Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, the spiritual guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, went one better with a fatwa approving even the murder of unborn Jews.[68] Qaradawi was another moderate.[69] [Emphasis added.]
. . . .
Obama sits at the center of a web of intertwined progressive organizations. This web has infiltrated the government and it in turn has been infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood.
Consider the case of Faiz Shakir, who went from the Harvard Islamic Society where he helped fundraise for a Muslim Brotherhood front group funneling money to Hamas, the local Muslim Brotherhood franchise, to Editor-in-Chief and Vice President at the Center for American Progress, heading up the nerve center of the left’s messaging apparatus, to a Senior Adviser to House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and then Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid.[73] The next step after that is the White House.
Time magazine described the Center for American Progress as Obama’s idea factory, crediting it with forming his talking points and his government.[74] In an administration powered by leftist activists, the integration between the Muslim Brotherhood and the left resulted in a pro-Brotherhood policy.
Egyptian liberals had expected that the administration’s withdrawal of support for Mubarak would benefit them, but the American left had become far closer to the Muslim Brotherhood than to them. Instead of aiding the left, it aided the Brotherhood. The Egyptian liberals were a world away while the Brotherhood’s activists sat in the left’s offices and spoke in the name of all the Muslims in America.
The [American] left had made common cause with the worst elements in the Muslim world. It formed alliances with Muslim Brotherhood groups, accepting them as the only valid representatives of Muslim communities while denouncing their critics, both Muslim and non-Muslim, as Islamophobes. [Emphasis added.]
. . . .
When Obama declared to the UN that the future must not belong to those who criticize Islam’s brutality, bigotry and abuse of women, he was also defining whom it must belong to. If the future must not belong to those who slander Mohammed, it will instead belong to his followers and those who respect his moral authority enough to view him as being above criticism in image, video or word. [Emphasis added.]
With these words, Obama betrayed America’s heritage of freedom and announced the theft of its future. The treason of his unholy alliance with Islam not only betrays the Americans of the present, but deprives their descendants of the freedom to speak, write and believe according to their conscience.
Obama has placed the full weight of the government’s resources behind Islam. He has suppressed domestic dissent against Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood while aiding their international goals.
Is Osama Obama worse than Napoleon?
Napoleon represented a nation which, during the French Revolution, had become largely secular. Obama’s America, under His “leadership,” is becoming largely secular. Napoleon sought, and Obama seeks, each in his own way, to promote himself as deserving the approbation of Islam. Napoleon sought power and glory by lying. Obama does much the same, but He most often lies to the denizens of His America.
In the years immediately following the French Revolution, France was considered a great nation. When Obama took office, America was as well. Although some still celebrate America’s freedoms from tyranny on Independence Day, during the Reign of Obama she has become less free and large numbers of “His people” have become increasingly dependent. It’s time to put America back the way she was.
Postscript: I have read of no reported Independence Day incidents of workplace violencerandom violence Islamic terror attacks on Obama’s America. Might it be possible that Obama has convinced the (non-Islamic) Islamic State, et al, that, so long as He remains in power, terror attacks would interfere with His plans to promote Islam and otherwise to destroy the nation.
Loading the MOP during a 2007 test in New Mexico [Source: Unknown]
(Happy 4th of July everyone! – LS)
As diplomats rush to reach an agreement to curb Iran’s nuclear program, the U.S. military is stockpiling conventional bombs so powerful that strategists say they could cripple Tehran’s most heavily fortified nuclear complexes, including one deep underground.
The bunker-busting bombs are America’s most destructive munitions short of atomic weapons. At 15 tons, each is 5 tons heavier than any other bomb in the U.S. arsenal.
In development for more than a decade, the latest iteration of the MOP — massive ordnance penetrator — was successfully tested on a deeply buried target this year at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. The test followed upgrades to the bomb’s guidance system and electronics to stop jammers from sending it off course.
U.S. officials say the huge bombs, which have never been used in combat, are a crucial element in the White House deterrent strategy and contingency planning should diplomacy go awry and Iran seek to develop a nuclear bomb.
Obama has made it clear that he has no desire to order an attack, warning that U.S. airstrikes on Iran’s air defense network and nuclear facilities would spark a destabilizing new war in the Middle East, and would only delay Iran by several years should it choose to build a bomb.
“A military solution will not fix it,” Obama told Israeli TV on June 1. An attack “would temporarily slow down an Iranian nuclear program, but it will not eliminate it.”
Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, speaking to reporters Thursday at the Pentagon, sought to downplay the likelihood or the utility of an attack. He said no plan under consideration, including use of the bunker-busters, could deliver a permanent knockout blow to Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and enrichment plants.
“A military strike of that kind is a setback, but it doesn’t prevent the reconstitution over time,” he said. “And that basically has been the case as long as we’ve had those instruments and those plans, and I don’t think there’s anything substantially changed since then.”
U.S. officials have publicized the new bomb partly to rattle the Iranians. Some Pentagon officials warned not to underestimate U.S. military capabilities even if the bunker-busters can’t eliminate Iran’s nuclear program.
Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, suggested at the same Pentagon news conference Thursday that airstrikes might be ordered multiple times if Iran tries to build a bomb.
The military option “isn’t used once and set aside,” he said. “It remains in place. … We will always have military options, and a massive ordnance penetrator is one of them.”
A dynamic of escalation, action, and counteraction could produce serious unintended consequences that would … lead, potentially, to all-out regional war.
With negotiators in Vienna facing a self-imposed deadline of Tuesday, the White House views a layered military response as a potential fallback if the emerging deal — which would block Iran’s nuclear weapons capability for at least a decade in exchange for easing of economic sanctions — collapses and evidence shows that Iran is building a bomb.
Contingency plans include airstrikes by cruise missiles and stealth bombers on Iran’s major nuclear facilities, including the uranium enrichment plant at Natanz, a heavy-water reactor at Arak and a nuclear enrichment site at Fordow, which is inside a mountain and fortified with steel and concrete.
B-2 stealth bombers would be required to drop the MOP, which is designed to burrow 200 feet underground before it detonates. Multiple MOPs probably would be aimed at the same target to bore deeper and achieve maximum destruction.
The U.S. began secretly developing the MOP in 2004 after U.S. forces scoured caves in eastern Afghanistan in the hunt for Osama bin Laden. They discovered some sites so deeply buried they appeared impervious to existing bombs.
The Air Force and bomb builder Boeing Co. flight-tested the GPS-guided MOP in 2008 at the White Sands range, where the first atomic bomb was tested during World War II. The 20-foot-long bombs were dropped on multistory buildings with hardened bunkers and tunnels.
But development ramped up in 2010 after Fordow was uncovered and concern about Iran’s nuclear capabilities rose. Since then, the military has spent at least $400 million — including $40 million this year — to build and upgrade 20 bombs, according to budget documents.
Analysts offered mostly pessimistic predictions of how Iran would respond to a U.S. attack on its nuclear facilities.
“A military strike would result in the worst of all worlds,” said Dalia Dassa Kaye, director of the Center for Middle East Public Policy at the nonpartisan Rand Corp. “It may eliminate some facilities. But it would not eliminate Iranian scientists’ technical know-how and would likely further incentivize Iran to pursue a weapon at all costs.”
Iran could increase support for regional militant groups, such as Hezbollah, and perhaps back a terrorist attack on the United States, she said. U.S. forces battling Islamic State fighters in Iraq could find themselves targeted by Iranian-backed militias who are in tacit alignment in the war against the Sunni extremists.
A U.S. attack also could spark a broader war in the world’s most volatile region. Iran has hundreds of medium-range missiles capable of hitting Israel, Jordan and other American allies, according to defense intelligence estimates.
“A dynamic of escalation, action, and counteraction could produce serious unintended consequences that would … lead, potentially, to all-out regional war,” according to a recent study by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars that was endorsed by 32 high-ranking former military and government officials.
Iran’s nuclear program has already been attacked through covert digital action. In 2010, the U.S. and Israel reportedly slipped a destructive computer worm called Stuxnet into Iranian computer systems controlling the fast-spinning centrifuges that enrich uranium.
The cyberattack destroyed centrifuges and delayed enrichment, but Tehran soon recovered, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations nuclear watchdog agency.
Stuxnet did not lead to overt Iranian retaliation. U.S. airstrikes, and the casualties they would cause, almost certainly would spark a different response.
“It would create huge problems,” said Michael E. O’Hanlon, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution. “That said, it’s hard to rule out if talks fail.”
In apparent hoax, unsubstantiated reports claimed Thursday that Saudi Arabian prince and wealthy media tycoon Talal Bin Waleed was planning a …
“All my Muslim brothers and sisters must understand that it (is) a moral imperative for all …to desist their absurd hostility toward Jewish people,” the Prince was quoted as saying.
In an unprecedented overture, Saudi Arabian prince and wealthy media tycoon Talal Bin Waleed announced Thursday that he is planning a seven-day-trip to the Jewish State and urged all the Arab nations in the region to “strive for a more peaceful, prosperous and homogenous Middle East,” according to Saudi Arabian news media.
“All my Muslim brothers and sisters must understand that it became a moral imperative for all inhabitants of war-torn Middle-East, namely Arabs, to desist their absurd hostility toward Jewish people,” Okaz reported the prince saying, an Arabic-language Saudi news agency.
“My sovereign, King Salman has instructed me to open a direct dialogue with Israel’s intellectual (community), building amicable ties with our Israeli neighbors,” Bin Waleed added.
Bin Waleed also mentioned in his statements that he hopes his visit would herald a new beginning in “peace and fraternity” between Israel and its Arab neighbors, stressing the importance of fostering better relations between each other’s military and intelligence communities.
The Saudi prince said that he plans to pray at the Al-Aksa mosque located on top of the Temple Mount when he visits Jerusalem’s old city, the holiest site in Judaism and the third holiest site in Islam.
It was not clear when the Saudi prince would embark on his visit to Israel.
Although the two are considered to be historic enemies, with Saudi Arabia refusing to recognize the Jewish State’s right to exist, they never-the-less have engaged in a campaign of clandestine diplomacy in an effort to thwart Iran’s growing influence in the Middle East.
In fact, Israel and Saudi Arabia have held five secret meetings since the beginning of 2014 to discuss the common threat the Islamic Republic posses to the region, it was revealed for the first time in early June at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, according to Bloomberg.
The five bilateral meetings over the last 17 months occurred in India, Italy and the Czech Republic.
The two-day festival was cancelled Organisers at RAF Lakenheath – home to the USAF 48th Fighter Wing – and nearby RAF Mildenhall were forced to pull out of the July 4 celebrations due to “the most current local threat assessments”.
Tomorrow’s event, marking US Independence Day, would have attracted more than 25,000 visitors to the nearby village of Feltwell in Suffolk, which is also attended by thousands of service members and their families every year.
They were expecting to enjoy displays by the Red Arrows, the RAF Falcons’ parachute team, and a show of vintage aircraft flying in the skies as well as live bands and fireworks.
However, due to the fears of the threat posed by Islamic State (ISIS) sympathisers – following last week’s Tunisa terror attack and the upcoming anniversary of the London 7/7 attacks – security chiefs cancelled the planned the two-day festival last night.
Colonel David Eaglin, 48th Fighter Wing vice commander said: “While we were certainly looking forward to this year’s celebration and hosting the US and UK communities, we have to put public safety first and foremost.
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