Archive for the ‘Obama’ category

« WarSclerotic home page
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

White House Struggles To Distinguish Between The Islamic State and Taliban Prisoner Swaps

January 30, 2015

White House Struggles To Distinguish Between The Islamic State and Taliban Prisoner Swaps, Jonathan Turley’s Blog, Jonathan Turley, January 30, 2015

(President Humpty Dumpty:

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.’

Hence, Islam is the religion of peace and terrorists aren’t terrorists. Will all of the king’s horses and all of the king’s men be able to put him back together again?– DM)

bergdahl
150124201815-nr-dnt-harlow-sajida-al-rishawi-explainer-00001707-large-169

The White House again seems to be struggling with barriers of both language and logic as many raise comparisons between the controversial Bergdahl swap and the effort this week of Jordan to swap a terrorist for one of its downed pilots with Islamic State. During a week where one of the five Taliban leaders released by the Administration has been found trying to communicate with the Taliban, the Jordanian swap has reignited the criticism of the swap for Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, which violated federal law and released Taliban leaders with long and bloody records. The White House seems to be trying to argue that the Taliban are not terrorists in direct contradiction to its prior position that they are indeed terrorists. It shows the fluidity of these terms and how the government uses or withdraws designations as terrorists to suit its purposes. The familiarities between Islamic State (IS) and the Taliban appear to be something in the eye of beholder or, to quote a certain former president, “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”

As a refresher, the Taliban has long been viewed as terrorists, even when they were in power. They have destroyed religious sites, art, and in one of the most infamous acts in modern history, blew up the giant ancient Buddhas at Bamiyan.The United Nations and human rights groups have documented a long list of civilian massacres and bombings carried out by the Taliban. One report described “15 massacres” between 1996 and 2001. The UN estimates that the Taliban were responsible for 76% of civilian casualties in Afghanistan in 2009, 75% in 2010 and 80% in 2011. The Human Rights Watch estimates that “at least 669 Afghan civilians were killed in at least 350 armed attacks, most of which appear to have been intentionally launched at non-combatants.” This includes the widespread use of suicide belts. The Taliban has always had a close alliance with al Qaeda.

That record was put into sharp relief with the swap for Bergdahl with ties to terrorism including one who was the head of the Taliban army, one who had direct ties to al-Qaeda training operations, and another who was implicated by the United Nations for killing thousands of Shiite Muslims. While we have always said that we do not negotiate with terrorists, we not only negotiated for Bergdahl but gave them what they wanted.

20051114181303

The Jordanian swap raised the same obvious concerns. Many have objected, for good reason, to the idea of releasing Sajida al-Rishawi, who participated with her husband in a terrorist attack on a wedding party at the luxury Radisson hotel in the Jordanian capital of Amman on Nov. 9, 2005. al-Rishawi hoped to be welcomed to paradise by walking into a wedding of 300 people enjoying a family gathering with children and murdering them in cold blood. Her husband’s bomb went off but not her bomb. It goes without saying that she is a hero to the murderous Islamic State for her effort to kill men, women, and children at a wedding.

The swap appears in part the result of pressure from Japan to secure the release of one of its citizens. In my view, such a propose swap was disgraceful. al-Rishawi is as bad as it gets as a terrorist. To yield to terrorists who engage in weekly demonstrations of beheading unarmed captives is morally wrong and practically suicidal. Just as the West is funding this terrorist organization through millions of ransom payments, the exchange of a terrorist only fuels their effort to capture and torture more Western captives.

This brings us back to the White House. When asked about the proposed swap with Islamic State, the White House was aghast. White House spokesman Eric Schultz stated “Our policy is that we don’t pay ransom, that we don’t give concessions to terrorist organizations. This is a longstanding policy that predates this administration and it’s also one that we communicated to our friends and allies across the world.”

The media understandably sought guidance on why the swap with Bergdahl was the right thing to do (despite the flagrant violation of federal law) while the swap for the pilot was not. The White House acknowledged that the Taliban are still on a terrorist list but then tried to rehabilitate the organization into something else. The White House is now referring to the Taliban as an “armed insurgency.” It notes that the Taliban are not listed by the State Department as a terrorist organization. However, they are listed as one of the “specially designated global terrorist” groups by the Department of the Treasury. Indeed, they have been on that list since 2002. Worse yet, the statement from the White House came in the same week that the Taliban claimed responsibility for killing three U.S. contractors.

John Earnest tried to thread the needle by explaining “They do carry out tactics that are akin to terrorism, they do pursue terror attacks in an effort to try to advance their agenda.” He seems to struggle to explain what is terrorist attacks and what are attacks “akin to terrorism.” Most people view suicide belts and civilian massacres to be a bit more than “akin to terrorism.”

Earnest also note that, while the Taliban has links to al Qaeda, they “have principally been focused on Afghanistan.” However, “Al Qaeda is a terrorist organization that has aspirations that extend beyond just the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.” That is diametrically opposed to the position of the Administration in claiming sweeping powers to strike targets around the world against any forces linked to al Qaeda and many who have few such links. Indeed, while referencing to the authorization to attack al Qaeda, the Administration attacked Islamic State, which was actively fighting with al Qaeda.

The spin of the White Hosue also ignores the role of the Taliban-aligned Haqqani network in holding Bergdahl, a well-known terrorist group.

There are obviously arguments to make for the Bergdahl swap (though I find little compelling in the arguments that justify the violation of federal law by the White House). However, the argument must acknowledge that we negotiated with a group of hostage taking terrorists and we need to address the implications of that fact. Alternatively, if the White House now believes that the Taliban is no longer a terrorist organization, it needs to take it off its listing of such groups (a listing that subjects people to criminal charges for material support or assistance with the group). It cannot have it both ways and call it a terrorist group unless such a label is inconvenient.

Categories: Foreign policy, Funding terrorism, Guantanamo, Hostages, Insurgents, Iraq, Islam, Islamic State, Jordan, Obama, Terrorism, Terrorists
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Comments: 1 Comment

Swapping Prisoners with Terrorists

January 30, 2015

Swapping Prisoners with Terrorists, National Review Online, Andrew C. McCarthy, January 29, 2015

pic_giant2_092214_SM_Barack-Obama-G_0

Obama’s disastrous policy dates back to his earliest days in office.

Suddenly, there is outrage in the land over President Obama’s policy of negotiating prisoner swaps with terrorist organizations, a national-security catastrophe that, as night follows day, is resulting in more abductions by terrorist organizations.

Well, yes, of course. But what took so long? Sorry if I sometimes sound like I work the “I Told You So” beat at the counter-jihad press. But as recounted in these pages, immediately upon assuming power in 2009, Obama started negotiating exchanges of terrorists — lopsided exchanges that sell out American national security for a net-zero return.

Critics now point to the indefensible swap Obama negotiated with our Taliban enemies in 2012 as if it were the start of the problem. In reality, the springing of five top Taliban commanders in exchange for the Haqqani terror network’s release of U.S. soldier Bowe Bergdahl was fully consistent with what was by then established Obama policy. There was nothing new in our president’s provision of material support to terrorists even as those terrorists continued to conduct offensive terrorist operations against our troops.

Clearly, the Bergdahl–Taliban swap was a disaster. As I’ve previously noted, it would be a profound dereliction of duty for a commander-in-chief to replenish enemy forces in this manner even if the captive we received in exchange had been an American war hero. To the contrary, Obama replenished our enemies in exchange for a likely deserter who may have voluntarily provided intelligence to the enemy and whose treachery cost the lives of American soldiers who tried to find and rescue him.

Even the conservative media are now suggesting it was the Bergdahl–Taliban swap that marked Obama’s reckless departure from longstanding American policy against negotiation with terrorists, and in particular against exchanging captured terrorists for hostages. This policy reversal has indeed incentivized jihadists to capture more Westerners, and prompted state sponsors of jihadists, such as Qatar, to propose more prisoner swaps. Moreover, the Obama strategy has deprived the U.S. of any moral authority or leadership influence to dissuade other countries, such as Jordan, from releasing anti-American jihadists in similar prisoner exchanges.

But the disaster did not begin with the Bergdahl–Taliban swap.

As I detailed in a column soon after Obama took office — specifically, on June 24, 2009 (“Negotiating with Terrorists: The Obama administration ignores a longstanding — and life-saving — policy”):

Even as the mullahs [i.e., the rulers of Iran’s Shiite regime] are terrorizing the Iranian people, the Obama administration is negotiating with an Iranian-backed terrorist organization and abandoning the American proscription against exchanging terrorist prisoners for hostages kidnapped by terrorists. Worse still, Obama has already released a terrorist responsible for the brutal murders of five American soldiers in exchange for the remains of two deceased British hostages.

To summarize: The Iranian government implanted a network of Shia jihadist cells in Iraq in order to spearhead the terror campaign against American troops. The point was to duplicate the Hezbollah model by which Iran controls other territory beyond its borders. In fact, the network of cells, known as Asaib al-Haq (League of the Righteous), was organized by Hezbollah veteran Ali Musa Daqduq.

The network was run day-to-day by two brothers, Qais and Layith Qazali. Both brothers and Daqduq were captured by U.S. forces in Basrah after they orchestrated the assassination-style murders of five American soldiers abducted in Karbala on January 20, 2007.

A few months later, in May 2007, the terror network kidnapped five British civilians. As American troops put their lives on the line to protect Iraq, the terrorist network told Iraq’s Iran-friendly prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, that they would release the Brits in exchange for Daqduq and the Qazali brothers. The Bush administration refused the offer.

But soon after entering office in 2009, President Obama decided to change course and entertain the offer. The new administration rationalized that the trade could serve the purpose of Iraqi political reconciliation — which is to say: Obama, in the midst of pleading for negotiations with the “Death to America” regime in Tehran, prioritized the forging of political ties between Iraq and an Iran-backed terror network over justice for the murderers of American soldiers.

Conveniently, Iran’s influence over Maliki ensured that Iraq would play ball: Maliki’s government would serve as the cut-out, enabling Obama to pretend that (a) he was negotiating with Iraq, not terrorists; and (b) he was releasing terrorists for the sake of Iraqi peace, not as a ransom for hostages.

Layith Qazali was released in July. This failed to satisfy the terror network, which continued to demand the release of Daqduq and Qais Qazali. The terrorists did, however, turn over two of the British hostages — or rather, their remains.

I know you’ll be shock-shocked to hear this, but while Obama’s minions were practicing their so-very-smart diplomacy, the jihadists were killing most of their hostages. At least three of the Brits were murdered. Yet even that did not cause Obama to reconsider his position.

In late 2009, the administration released Qais Qazali in a trade for the last living British hostage, Peter Moore. As The Long War Journal’s Bill Roggio reported at the time, an enraged U.S. military official aware of the details of the swap presciently observed: “We let a very dangerous man go, a man whose hands are stained with U.S. and Iraqi blood. We are going to pay for this in the future.”

Meanwhile, as I related in July 2009, Obama released the “Irbil Five” — five commanders from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s Quds force. Like Daqduq, the Quds force was coordinating Iran’s terror cells in Iraq. At the time, General Ray Odierno, then the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, publicly stated that Iran was continuing to support, fund, and train the terrorists attacking American and allied forces.

As Michael Ledeen pointed out, the release of the five Iranian terrorist commanders – three years before Obama’s release of the five Taliban commanders – was the price the mullahs had demanded to free Roxana Saberi, a freelance journalist the mullahs had been holding. The Obama administration, naturally, claimed that it was not negotiating with terrorists but with sovereign governments (just as it claimed only to be negotiating with Qatar as it cut the Bergdahl deal with the Taliban and the Haqqanis). Besides, said the administration, the president’s hands were tied by the status-of-forces agreement, which purportedly required turning prisoners over to the Iraqi government (for certain return to Iran) — even prisoners responsible for killing hundreds of Americans, even prisoners sure to persevere in the ongoing, global, anti-American jihad.

And then there was Daqduq. His comparative notoriety, coupled with a smattering of negative publicity over the other terrorist negotiations and swaps, caused a delay in his release. But in July 2011, with the Beltway distracted by the debt-ceiling controversy, the Obama administration tried to pull off Daqduq’s stealth transfer to Iraq.

As I noted at the time, however, the Associated Press got wind of the terrorist’s imminent release, and its short report ignited fury on Capitol Hill. Several senators fired off a letter, outraged that the United States would surrender “the highest ranking Hezbollah operative currently in our custody” — a man who would surely return to the jihad “to harm and kill more American servicemen and women” when Iraq inevitably turned him over to Iran, as it had done with other released terrorists.

The administration retreated . . . but only for the moment. Realizing it would be explosive to spring Daqduq during his reelection campaign, Obama waited until the Christmas recess after the election. The president then had the terrorist quietly handed over to Iraq, which, after acquitting Daqduq at a farce of a “trial,” duly released him to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

There is a reason why the Arab press was reporting that the Obama State Department was entertaining discussions with Egyptian authorities about freeing the Blind Sheikh — Omar Abdel Rahman, the convicted terrorist serving a life sentence for running the jihadist cell that bombed the World Trade Center and plotted other attacks against New York City landmarks. There is a reason why, when he assumed power in 2011, Muslim Brotherhood–leader-turned-Egyptian-president Mohamed Morsi proclaimed that his top priorities included pressuring the United States to return the Blind Sheikh to Egypt.

Long before the Bergdahl–Taliban swap, it was well known that the Obama administration was open for business — if the business meant releasing terrorists.

Categories: Foreign policy, Funding terrorism, Hostages, Iran, Iraq, Islam, Islamic slaughter, Obama, Terrorism, Terrorists
Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Comments: 3 Comments

Are Liberals Actually Admitting Islamic Terrorists Exist?!?

January 30, 2015

Are Liberals Actually Admitting Islamic Terrorists Exist?!? PJ Media Trifecta via You Tube, January 29, 2015

(The phrase “literal Islam” is an excellent substitute for “radical Islam.” Literal readings of the Koran and other Islamic “holy” texts support and demand what so called “radical Islamic extremists” do. Perhaps Obama and others who claim that Islam is “the religion of peace” should be labeled “extremist” and/or “radical”  because they — rather than the Islamic State, et al — pervert the basic teachings of Islam. They apparently want us to believe, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, that Islam is just another peaceful religion much like others and is therefore not a problem for secular societies. — DM)

Categories: Caliphate, Executions, Foreign policy, Freedom, Iraq, Islam, Islamic slaughter, Islamic State, Media, Mosul, Obama, Sharia law, Syria, Torture
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Comments: 1 Comment

Open Jihad Declared in Egypt Following State Dept. Meeting with Muslim Brotherhood-Aligned Leaders

January 30, 2015

Open Jihad Declared in Egypt Following State Dept. Meeting with Muslim Brotherhood-Aligned Leaders, Washington Free Beacon,  , January 30, 2015

(Please see also Calls To Kill President Al-Sisi And Egyptian Journalists On Muslim Brotherhood TV Channels. — DM)

Mideast Egypt US El-Sissi

The Muslim Brotherhood called for “a long, uncompromising jihad” in Egypt just one day after a delegation of the Islamist group’s key leaders and allies met with the State Department, according to an official statement released this week.

Just days after a delegation that included two top Brotherhood leaders was hosted at the State Department, the organization released an official statement calling on its supporters to “prepare” for jihad, according to an independent translation of the statement first posted on Tuesday.

The statement also was issued just two days before a major terror attack Thursday in Egypt’s lawless Sinai region that killed at least 25.

“It is incumbent upon everyone to be aware that we are in the process of a new phase, where we summon what is latent in our strength, where we recall the meanings of jihad and prepare ourselves, our wives, our sons, our daughters, and whoever marched on our path to a long, uncompromising jihad, and during this stage we ask for martyrdom,” it states.

Preparation for jihad is a key theme of the Brotherhood’s latest call for jihad.

An image posted with the statement shows two crossing swords and the word “prepare!” between them. Below the swords it reads, “the voice of truth, strength, and freedom.” According to the statement, “that is the motto of the Dawa of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

The statement also invokes the well-known Muslim cleric Imam al-Bana, who founded the Brotherhood and has called for the death of Jews.

“Imam al-Bana prepared the jihad brigades that he sent to Palestine to kill the Zionist usurpers and the second [Supreme] Guide Hassan al-Hudaybi reconstructed the ‘secret apparatus’ to bleed the British occupiers,” the statement says.

The Brotherhood’s renewed call for jihad comes at a time when current Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is cracking down on the group and imprisoning many of its supporters, who notoriously engaged in violence following the ouster of Brotherhood-ally Mohamed Morsi.

Egypt experts said the timing of this declaration is an embarrassment for the State Department.

“The fact that the Brotherhood issued its call to jihad two days after its meeting at the State Department will be grist for endless anti-American conspiracy theories about a supposed partnership between Washington and the Brotherhood,” said Eric Trager, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP). “The State Department should have foreseen what an embarrassment this would be.”

One member of that U.S. delegation, a Brotherhood-aligned judge in Egypt, posed for a picture while at Foggy Bottom in which he held up the Islamic group’s notorious four-finger Rabia symbol, according to his Facebook page.

“Now in the U.S. State Department. Your steadfastness impresses everyone,” reads an Arabic caption posted along with the photo.

Other members of that group included Gamal Heshmat, a leading member of the Brotherhood, and Abdel Mawgoud al-Dardery, a Brotherhood member who served as a parliamentarian from Luxor.

When asked on Tuesday evening to comment on the meeting, a State Department official told the Washington Free Beacon, “We meet with representatives from across the political spectrum in Egypt.”

The official declined to elaborate on who may have been hosted or on any details about the timing and substance of any talks.

The meeting was described by a member of the delegation, Maha Azzam as “fruitful,” according to one person who attended a public event in Washington earlier this week hosted by the group.

The call for jihad, while surprising in light of the Brotherhood’s attempts to appear moderate, is part and parcel of organization’s longstanding beliefs, Trager said.

“Muslim Brothers have been committing violent acts for a very long time,” Trager explained. “Under Morsi, Muslim Brothers tortured protesters outside the presidential palace. After Morsi’s ouster, they have frequently attacked security forces and state property. “

“But until now, the official line from the Brotherhood was to support this implicitly by justifying its causes, without justifying the acts themselves,” he added. “ So the Brotherhood’s open call to jihad doesn’t necessarily mean a tactical shift, but a rhetorical one.”

Terrorism expert and national security reporter Patrick Poole said he was struck by the clarity of the Brotherhood’s call.

“It invokes the Muslim Brotherhood’s terrorist past, specifically mentioning the ‘special apparatus’ that waged terror in the 1940s and 1950s until the Nasser government cracked down on the group, as well as the troops sent by founder Hassan al-Banna to fight against Israel in 1948,” he said.

“It concludes saying that the Brotherhood has entered a new stage, warns of a long jihad ahead, and to prepare for martyrdom,” Poole said. “Not sure how much more clear they could be.”

Poole wondered if the call for jihad would convince Brotherhood apologists that the group still backs violence.

“What remains to be seen is how this announcement will be received inside the Beltway, where the vast majority of the ‘experts’ have repeatedly said that the Brotherhood had abandoned its terrorist past, which it is now clearly reviving, and had renounced violence,” Poole said. “Will this development be met with contrition, or silence? And what says the State Department who met with these guys this week?”

The State Department did not respond to a request for comment before press time.

Categories: Egypt, Foreign policy, Middle East, Muslim Brotherhood, Obama, Obama administration
Tags: , , , , ,

Comments: Be the first to comment

Yazidis ask Israel for help

January 29, 2015

Yazidis ask Israel for help, Al-Monitor, Jacky Hugi, January 28, 2015

A man from the minority Yazidi sect stands guard at Mount Sinjar, in the town of SinjarA man from the minority Yazidi sect stands guard at Mount Sinjar, in the town of Sinjar, Dec. 20, 2014. (photo by REUTERS/Ari Jalal)

[I]t is an unusual overture of friendship for the government of Prime Minister Benjamin   Netanyahu, and it will be interesting to see if and how Israel takes up the gauntlet. Given the sensitivity of the matter, it is quite uncertain whether anyone will hear about it.

******************

“They have already killed many of us. What do we have to fear?” Lt. Col. Lukman Ibrahim responded when I asked him if he was afraid to openly communicate with an Israeli in a recent long-distance phone conversation from Tel Aviv to Sinjar, in northwestern Iraq, near the Syrian border. Ibrahim, a Yazidi militia officer, is hoping to obtain military aid from the State of Israel.

“The Arab countries do not recognize us, nor do they recognize you,” he said. “They are telling us that we are infidels. Why should we be afraid to talk to you, when even neighboring Arab countries have become our enemies? We regard you as a friendly state, with an opportunity for relations on the basis of neutrality and respect. We do not want more than that.”

Ibrahim, a journalist by profession, serves as an assistant to Marwan Elias Badl, one of the senior field commanders of the Sinjar Protection Forces, the Yazidi militia established ad hoc in August 2014 to halt the Islamic State (IS) onslaught against Yazidi population centers west of Mosul. The militia numbers some 12,000 fighters, most of them untrained, ordinary men who rushed to take up arms to thwart IS’ designs. A few of them are rank-and-file fighters, while some are officers with the Kurdish peshmerga. According to internal estimates, the IS militants killed thousands in their pogrom against the Yazidis. About 5,000 Yazidis are still being held by IS.

The Yazidis have no formal relations with Israel, nor an organized leadership. Yet they need aid, in particular military assistance, and they have chosen to make a public plea for help. “We appeal to the Israeli government and its leader to step in and help this nation, which loves the Jewish people,” said Ibrahim. “We would be most grateful for the establishment of military ties — for instance, the training of fighters and the formation of joint teams. We are well aware of the circumstances the Israelis are in, and of the suffering they have endured at the hands of the Arabs ever since the establishment of their state. We, too, are suffering on account of them.”

When asked what kind of weapons they needed, Ibrahim cited protective measures. “We are not acting against anyone,” he clarified. “And we do not covet other people’s land. We just want to protect ourselves. For example, [we need] armored [Humvees], machine guns and light weapons.”

Contact with Israel is a dirty business in this neighborhood, military contact all the more so. Be that as it may, in a reality where all levees have been breached and the worst appears to have already befallen the Yazidis, what could they possibly lose by seeking a rapport with Jerusalem?

The conversation with Ibrahim was not the only call with Sinjar. Majdal Rasho, a native of Sinjar, had settled in Germany and built his life there. He married and had a family, making a living as a manufacturing supervisor at a chocolate plant. In his spare time, he served as a photographer for TV stations broadcasting in the Kurdish language. He returned to Sinjar as a fighter, but also in his capacity as a video photographer for German TV networks.

“What I have seen here, I just can’t describe,” he said by phone from a battle zone. “Our people had no choice but to flee. We are not Arabs, nor are we Muslims. We see ourselves as sharing a fate with the Israelis, who went through similar pogroms. Those besieged on the mountain approached me and asked, ‘Maybe our Israeli brethren could lend a hand?’”

Yazidism is a religion with no more than a million followers. Its adherents are centered around Mosul and the Sinjar mountain range, in northern Iraq. Their largest diaspora in the West is in Germany, estimated to number some 100,000.

A common destiny with the Jews is a recurring theme in the Yazidis’ discourse. “What happened to us is the biggest genocide since the Holocaust of the Jews in Europe,” said Dr. Mirza Dinnay, a pediatrician based in Germany. “In the Holocaust, the goal was to annihilate an entire people, the Jews. IS has a similar plan — to exterminate an entire people, the Yazidis. No such extermination process had taken place in the past 500 years, with the exception of the Holocaust and what came to pass in Sinjar.”

Dinnay left Germany for Sinjar at the outbreak of the pogrom, leading a delegation of human rights activists. During one of the aid flights arranged by the Iraqi air force, a helicopter carrying food supplies and medication to the besieged Yazidis crashed. Some of the passengers aboard, among them Dinnay, were injured.

The communication between the Yazidis and the Israeli media has been coordinated by Idan Barir, 34, a researcher at the Tel Aviv University Yavetz School of Historical Studies. In the months since IS’ offensive against Yazidi population centers, Barir has become Israel’s top expert on the Yazidis, thanks to his extensive connections with members of the Yazidi community.

“I can think of a range of activities that Israel is experienced in that would not undermine the world order,” Barir told Al-Monitor. “For example, providing military assistance to the Yazidi forces in Sinjar who are crying out for cooperation and aid; setting up a field hospital for medical and psychological treatment of the casualties among the displaced in northern Iraq — not only Yazidis, by the way; sending humanitarian aid to displaced Yazidis in the refugee camps in Iraqi Kurdistan; absorption of a symbolic number of displaced Yazidis in Israel, with preference given to humanitarian, whether medical or mental, cases; incorporation of young Yazidis into military service in Israel; and support of civil initiatives aimed at strengthening and deepening ties between Israelis and Yazidis. It all depends on the decision made by the Israeli government, on its determination and goodwill.”

So far, Israel has not officially responded to such calls, which have yet to be fully formulated and have only recently began over the last few days. In fact, no formal request has come from the Yazidis for asylum as refugees. Barir is currently trying to find a way to reach decision-makers in Israel to pass on the messages from his faraway friends. Without a doubt, it is an unusual overture of friendship for the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and it will be interesting to see if and how Israel takes up the gauntlet. Given the sensitivity of the matter, it is quite uncertain whether anyone will hear about it.

“It is a moral obligation to ring every bell and to do everything possible to stop the Yazidi tragedy,” said Attorney Zvi Hauser, the former Cabinet secretary in the most recent Netanyahu government (2009-13). “It is inconceivable that in the 21st century, someone’s attempt to eliminate an entire people, because of its faith and religion, is met with indifference.”

Hauser is the first senior figure in Israel who agreed to comment on the Yazidis’ call for help. As a private person, he refrained from reference to the Yazidis’ request for military aid, taking care to say nothing that might be interpreted as a promise. He believes, however, that Israel should favorably consider the Yazidis’ calls.

“The Yazidi narrative is evocative of ours. We, too, went through 2,000 years of existence without sovereignty, in the course of which we faced extermination schemes,” Hauser said. “Israel is a sovereign state, formed by an ethnic minority. It is the national manifestation of an ancient civilization. It would thus be appropriate to examine ways to establish relations and forge an alliance with them, if only to ensure a pluralistic Middle East. This issue has a universal aspect, as well. The development of human civilization is contingent on the diversity and multiplicity of [ethnic] groups and nations. Hence, the extinction of one of these would hurt not only the Yazidis, but also the entire fabric of human life.”

 

Categories: Caliphate, Foreign policy, Holocaust, Human rights, Iraq, Islamic State, Israel, Kurdish fighters, Kurds, Netanyahu, Obama, Peshmerga, Syria, Yazidis
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Comments: 1 Comment

How to lose friends and empower radicals: the peace prize president’s more dangerous world

January 29, 2015

How to lose friends and empower radicals: the peace prize president’s more dangerous world, Breitbart,  Dr. Sebastian Gorka, January 29, 2015

(Please see the video at the link. — DM)

obama-binoculars-AP-640x480AP Photo/Susan Walsh

Since 2008, the world has become a significantly more dangerous place. In every region, new threats have emerged or old ones have reasserted them. The scorecard is clear: the bad guys are winning and America’s interests are being undermined daily.

As a nation, America has yet to recover from the experience of September 11th, 2001. Public opinion on our national response to the attacks against the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and Flight 93 is today divided. On one side we have the “Bush lied, People Died!” crowd who portray President George W. Bush’s response in terms of a conspiracy, despite the fact that we now know Saddam Hussein indeed possessed thousands of WMD warheads (and had used them in the past).

On the other, we have conservatives who are themselves split between the unsophisticated isolationists/non-interventionists who believe that an American withdrawal from the world will make us safe, and the quietly resurgent neoconservatives who see in the rise of ISIS/The Islamic State a justification for more foreign engagements.

For a moment, let us put Operations Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan), and Operations Iraqi Freedom (OIF), to one side. Instead, let us take an unemotional snap-shot of the global geostrategic situation to see whether the administration whose head was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize during his first year in office has indeed make the world a safer and more peaceful place.

Europe: During most of the last century, American security was tied directly to the continent of Europe. Whether is was the generational genocide of World War One, the racial genocide of WWII, or the class-based totalitarianism of the Cold War, Europe was the source of strategic, and at times existential, threats to America.

During the first Obama Administration, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton declared a “Pivot to Asia” which would deemphasize Europe’s importance and see Washington focus more on our Pacific partners than on old Atlantic Allies.

Since that announcement, an emboldened Vladimir Putin has seen fit to break an almost 70-year-old international taboo by using force to redraw national borders with his annexation of Crimea. This includes, incredibly, the shooting down of a civilian jet-liner by forces armed by Moscow.

At the same time, we have seen the European Union become evermore centralizing and undemocratic as untenable economic and fiscal policies are propped up by a Brussels bureaucracy in the name of “broader and deeper union.” This has naturally led to two types of responses: the unprecedented success of a paleo-conservative backlash,f best typified by the insurgent victories of UKIP in Great Britain, as well the reverse: Utopian socialist populists such as the victorious Syriza party of Greece.

Then there are Europe’s ties to the Global Jihadist Movement. The recent slaughter in Paris, the beheading of a British serviceman on the streets of the UK, and Spanish and Belgian terror-related arrests all attest to the failure of the current international campaign against Islamist terrorism.

The flawed immigration policies of many EU nations have also facilitated the establishment of literally hundreds of ethnic and religious enclaves across the continent where integration is seen as a bad thing and where radical talent spotters for groups such as Al Qaeda and ISIS/IS identify, indoctrinate and recruit murderers such as the Charlie Hebdo killers, as well as thousands of fighters for The Islamic State.

This has led to a grass-roots response from Europeans afraid of the future survival of their countries embodied in the ever-broadening PEGIDA movement that Breitbart London has covered in great detail. The failure of multiculturalist immigration policies has not only encouraged the enclave phenomenon, but is also clearly linked to the disturbing rise of anti-Semitism on the continent which has led to unprecedented numbers of European jews deciding to leave the nations of their birth for good.

If we include Turkey in our European snapshot, the situation is even worse, as we have seen the one viable example of a secular Muslim state slip even deeper into the corruption-ridden maelstrom of Islamic fundamentalism under the Erdogan government which is either incapable or unwilling to prevent Turkey becoming a pre-deployment site for jihadist fighters traveling into Syria and Iraq. All this from a formal NATO ally of the US.

Asia: The much-vaunted Pivot to Asia has clearly not worked. China has, over the last several years, openly challenged the post-Cold War peace in the region with a commitment to its own military build-up coupled with a concerted campaign of intimidation against its smaller and weaker neighbors.

While challenging and intimidating our regional partners, China has continued to grow economically at such a rate that the nation which was once universally ridiculed as the maker of plastic toys for McDonalds Happy Meals has now surpassed the US economy in terms of gross output.  At the same time, China is waging a covert war against America in the cyber domain, stealing not only state secrets for use in developing its new weapons systems, but also billions of dollars worth of intellectual property and commercial secrets from American businesses. See the remarkable report from Mandiant on scale of the threat.

North Korea has also used the internet to assault American interests as the Sony hacking attack attests, while Washington has proven totally ineffective in undermining the world’s last truly fully-fledged Stalinist regime, or its regionally destabilizing nuclear weapons capabilities.

Africa: A giant continent, with threats as bad as they were in 2008, or in several cases much worse. The Global Jihadist Movement continues to consolidate its control in Nigeria through the horrific attacks of Boko Haram, the group made famous for the kidnapping of the girls from Chibok, an attack which is just one part of a vast campaign targeting Christians and anyone who does not want to live under a theocratically run system based upon sharia and 7th century interpretation of the Koran.

In addition to the insurgent-like threat of Boko Haram, we have also witnessed horrific hit and run terrorist tactics used by other African jihadists, as in the Westgate Mall attack in Nairobi by Al Shabaab. At the same time, China proceeds to build its vast network of economic interests in the continent in ways that far outstrip American geostrategic investment in Africa.

Australasia: Of course, the Pivot to Asia should have pleased our Antipodean allies. But the concrete consequences of the declarations and speeches by Secretary Clinton and the White House have amounted to little more than the deployment of a handful of US Marines from Camp Pendleton to Australia. Instead of the security situation improving, Australia faced its own Jihadist attack just before Christmas last year as a self-styled imam took hostages and brought the violent jihad so familiar to New York, London, Madrid, and Paris, to the streets of Sydney.

The Americas: Canada likewise became a direct victim of the Global Jihadist Movement after a spate of attacks against its armed forces and even its parliament which was only stopped when a brave sergeant-at-arms applied deadly force in the face of a rampaging jihadi.

Those who like illicit quality cigars may be celebrating the White House’s “normalization” of relations with Communist Cuba, but if statements by the Castro regime are to be credited as expressing Havana’s true intentions, then the deal was good for the dictatorship and bad for America. And despite the US government’s historic decision, conditions inside Cuba have remained the same, or in many case deteriorated, with last year seeing record-breaking numbers of political arrests on the island nation. And Cuba’s anti-democratic influence is a problem for the region, not just its wretched population, with Raul Castro’s secret police providing aid and expertise in the oppression of dissidentsto the government of Venezuela.

The Middle East and North Africa: Leaving the worst for last we have, of course, the Middle East, and North Africa. The highs hopes for the Arab Spring turned very rapidly into a “Christian Winter” and a victory for the fundamentalist and anti-Democratic forces of the Muslim Brotherhood. One after another, one-man authoritarian regimes fell to Islamist MB governments, or collapsed into deadly civil wars which are still being fought in places like Syria and Libya. Throughout the region, proto-democrats and vulnerable minorities, especially ancient Christian communities, have been targeted for death or persecution, or have been forced to flee.

The one ray of hope, the people’s revolt in Egypt against the Brotherhood government of Mohammad Morsi, which led to his being ousted by a secular military, was rejected by the US administration as a coup, despite the fact that General, now President, Sisi, has been fighting his own war against Jihadi fundamentalists since he was the Chief of the Egyptian Armed Forces.

And now Yemen, which was lauded just a few months ago by President Obama as the poster-child of his successful counterterrorism strategy, has collapsed under insurgent attacks and the resignation of the government in Sanaa.

Then there is Iran, which, much like Cuba, has squeezed concession after concession out of the administration without either stopping its acquisition of nuclear weapons capability, or curtailing its support of Shiite terrorist fighters in either Iraq or Syria.

I said I would leave Afghanistan and Iraq of our the equation, but nevertheless, it is important to recognize that this is a new jihadist threat that is even more dangerous than Al Qaeda. ISIS, the Islamic State, is today a full-fledged insurgency, one that in four dimensions is much more of a threat that [Sic] Al Qaeda ever was.

The Islamic State is more than a terrorist group, it now functions as a quasi-state and controls territory equivalent to the size of the UK. It is the richest non-state threat group in human history. It has an incredibly sophisticated understanding of information warfare and how to use social media as a propaganda platform, and lastly – and relatedly – it has recruited ten of thousands of young Muslim men from around the world, including Europe and the US, to fight for the new Caliphate of Abu Bakr al Baghdadi. Bin Laden dreamt of being this powerful. The Islamic State has turned his dream into a horrific reality.

There is not one area of the world of import to America in which we have either not lost friends, or failed to help our allies to defend themselves against the common enemies that threaten us all. Whatever your politics, or whomever you favor for the next Commander-in-Chief of the United States, one thing is certain: without resolute American leadership the world can become, and now is, a much more dangerous place.

Categories: Caliphate, Europe, European Union, Foreign policy, Free world, Freedom, Human rights, International Community, Iran scam, Islam, Islamic State, Nukes, Obama, P5+1, Sisi, Turkey
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Comments: 1 Comment

Obama targets Netanyahu, Iran targets Israel

January 29, 2015

Obama targets Netanyahu, Iran targets Israel, Israel Hayom, Richard Baehr, January 29, 2015

Obama will tell himself and anyone who wants to ‎hear that he has brought Iran back into the community of nations. ‎Obama, after all, is a rare man. How many others can make 118 ‎self-referential mentions in a half hour talk, as Obama did in India ‎this week?

Is it any wonder ‎why someone who stands for something, say a country’s security, ‎as Netanyahu does, gets under the skin of a man who is primarily ‎concerned with little more than his own greatness, and whose ‎presidency, in a word, has been a “selfie”?‎

**********************

There is a bit of difference between Iran and U.S. President Barack Obama when it comes to ‎Israel. Iran has never been reticent that its goal is to eliminate the State of Israel, ‎and Israelis too while they are it. Iran’s proxy terror army of Hezbollah ‎contributed their part on Wednesday, killing two Israeli soldiers and wounding seven with anti-tank ‎fire from southern Lebanon directed at an Israeli convoy. Obama seems more ‎interested, at least in the next two months, in eliminating one Israeli — namely, Prime ‎Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. ‎

It has been a remarkable two weeks in U.S.-Israel relations. The president ‎delivered his State of the Union address, in which he argued for staying the course ‎with negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, overselling what has already ‎been achieved, as well as what might be achieved. He also threatened to veto new ‎sanctions legislation that might be passed by Congress, where some have called for ‎tougher sanctions to be applied to Iran if a satisfactory deal were not struck ‎between the P5+1 and the Iranians by June 30. Obama argued that passing such a ‎measure now would be a sign of bad faith and drive the Iranians from the ‎negotiating table. It was, of course, an odd prediction, since one area in which the ‎Iranians have shown remarkable consistency has been in negotiating with ‎European powers, or the now expanded negotiating group for over 10 years, ‎always without a satisfactory outcome. The Iranians seem to like being seen as ‎negotiating while their nuclear program advances.‎

Fact checkers awarded Obama a bunch of “pinocchios” for his latest effort, suggesting he was all ‎but lying on the matter. No, the Iranians have not dismantled any centrifuges (they ‎have more running than before), they have not removed any fissile material from ‎the country for safekeeping, they have not allowed inspections on demand, they ‎have not disabled their Arak heavy-water reactor, they have not agreed to end any ‎missile program they are working on for delivery of a nuclear bomb. ‎

‎”Our diplomacy is at work with respect to Iran,” Obama said, ‎‎”where, for the first time in a decade, we’ve halted the progress of ‎its nuclear program and reduced its stockpile of nuclear material.”

James Robbins, a senior fellow in national security affairs at the ‎American Foreign Policy Council, begged to disagree:‎

‎”But has Iran’s stockpile shrunk? Under a deal concluded last ‎November, Iran halted work on the most dangerous material, 20 ‎percent refined uranium. However, Iran is still making lower-grade ‎uranium. According to a report from the International Atomic ‎Energy Agency last November, Iran’s stockpiles of low-enriched ‎uranium gas and 5 percent enriched uranium were both growing. ‎Also, the agency cautioned that their figures only covered ‎‎’declared sites,’ the nuclear facilities Iran has publicly ‎acknowledged and allowed to be inspected.”‎

In the days after his address to Congress, the president repeated ‎his threats about vetoing new sanctions legislation, when meeting ‎with Democratic senators, several of whom, along with a few ‎Republican colleagues, had been lobbied on the matter by Britain’s ‎visiting Prime Minister David Cameron. The president upped the ‎ante, accusing Democratic Senator Robert Menendez of New ‎Jersey, a leader in the attempt to pass new sanctions, of not ‎thinking long-term, but just trying to make his donors (could ‎Obama have meant Jewish donors?) happy.

The idea of a foreign leader directly lobbying members of ‎Congress on an issue like the Iranian sanctions bill took on a new ‎life when House Speaker John Boehner invited Netanyahu to ‎address a joint session of Congress on the Iranian issue on ‎February 11. The White House predictably blew its lid, accusing ‎Boehner of breaking established protocol for such an invitation. (It ‎should have been coordinated with the White House.) The usual ‎Obama water carriers like Jeffrey Goldberg were quick to lambaste ‎Netanyahu for stage managing the invitation so as to embarrass ‎Obama, and in the process threaten U.S.-Israel relations. As Joel ‎Pollak describes Goldberg’s argument:‎

‎”In his most recent Atlantic column, he claims, for example, ‎that Obama worked ‘in tandem’ with Netanyahu to promote ‎sanctions on Iran: ‘Netanyahu traveled the world arguing for ‎stringent sanctions, and Obama did much the same.’‎

“That is simply factually untrue. Obama resisted Iran sanctions ‎for months, defying even a unanimous vote in the Democrat-‎controlled Senate. Not only was Israel frustrated, and ‎Congress, but Europe as well, which accused Obama of re-‎inventing the wheel, resetting diplomacy that had started ‎under (gasp) George W. Bush.‎

“In fact, Obama pushed the world towards a more lenient ‎position on Iran, allowing nuclear enrichment in defiance of ‎U.N. Security Council resolutions.”

And then there is this doozy:‎

‎”It is Netanyahu’s job, Goldberg says, as ‘the junior partner in ‎the Israel-U.S. relationship,’ to make concessions.”‎

When it comes to negotiating with Iran, Netanyahu does not ‎sit at the table with the Iranians, but Obama’s representatives ‎do. And it is U.S. negotiators who have been making ‎concessions month after month since the talks began, in what ‎appears to be a desperate attempt to salvage some deal they ‎can broadcast as having achieved a minimal set of objectives. ‎That objective has now been reduced to providing some ‎minimum breakout time for Iran to achieve nuclear weapons ‎capability if they ditch the deal. What will the West do in that ‎time if Iran moves towards the bomb? It is pretty clear, any ‎military response from Obama is out of the question.‎

The administration has further demonstrated its unhappiness ‎about Netanyahu’s impudence in scheming with ‎Boehner, by announcing that neither the president nor his secretary of state will meet with Netanyahu when he visits ‎Washington, a date now moved back three weeks to overlap ‎his visit to the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference. The excuse, ‎couched in a diplomatic smokescreen, is that it would be ‎improper for the president to meet with a candidate for office ‎abroad so close to the time of that country’s election. That ‎would be equivalent to electioneering and interference in the ‎other country’s race. Presumably when President Bill Clinton ‎met with Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres just weeks ‎before his election contest with Netanyahu in 1996, at a time ‎when Israeli prime ministers were elected in a head-to-head ‎battle, electioneering was the furthest thing from Clinton’s ‎mind. ‎

The Obama team may not meet with Netanyahu when he ‎visits, but an experienced Obama campaign team from 2012 ‎is now in Israel working to defeat Netanyahu. That, in and ‎of itself, is nothing new for Israeli elections. Experienced ‎American campaign teams have aided Israeli candidates from ‎the Left and Right in recent decades. What is new is that the ‎current anti-Netanyahu campaign includes a State ‎Department funded group:‎

‎”U.S.-based activist group OneVoice International has partnered ‎with V15, an ‘independent grass-roots movement’ in Israel that is ‎actively opposing Netanyahu’s party in the upcoming elections, ‎Haaretz reported on Monday. Former national field director for Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign Jeremy Bird is also ‎reportedly involved in the effort.‎

“OneVoice development and grants officer Christina Taler said the ‎group would be working with V15 on voter registration and get-out-‎the-vote efforts but would not engage in overtly partisan activities. ‎She said OneVoice and V15 are still formalizing the partnership.”‎

Obama’s team has gone further to poison the waters for ‎Netanyahu, planting a story in Haaretz that the Mossad was ‎opposed to new sanctions legislation, a charge they publicly ‎rebutted.‎

The Goldberg article was designed to deliver a message that Israel ‎has two important objectives now — to keep Iran from going nuclear ‎‎(for which their best hope of course is to count on Obama to do the ‎job for them in negotiations), and second, to keep American close ‎and happy with Israel’s behavior. Netanyahu, according to Goldberg, is ‎killing the good vibes that presumably must have existed during the ‎Obama years by his recent behavior.‎

There is an alternative interpretation for what is going on. Obama is ‎really not terribly bothered by a nuclear Iran. A bad deal that looks ‎like it delays Iran’s entry to the nuclear club is therefore not a bad ‎option. It also allows Obama to check off one more box on his ‎achievements list before his formal request to have his likeness ‎carved into Mount Rushmore. Pakistan has a bomb. Israel has the ‎bomb. Why not Iran, the leading Shiite nation? Iran, after all, is now ‎our strategic partner, fighting with us to battle ISIS in Iraq. ‎

The latest evidence that Obama is now on the Iranian team is the ‎New York Times editorial calling for accepting that having Assad ‎hang on in Syria is the least bad result, so backing a non-ISIS ‎Syrian rebel team is a bad idea. The New York Times editorial ‎page is little more than a conveyance tool for White House ‎messaging at this point, and so this is now clearly Obama’s ‎posture. How can we fight alongside Iran in Iraq, but support a side ‎that is fighting Iran’s ally Assad in Syria?

Meanwhile, Hezbollah is stepping up its activities in the Golan. The ‎Iranian goal appears to be to establish a base in Syria where Israel ‎can be targeted by the Lebanese group, without getting an Israeli ‎response in Lebanon itself. What is clear is that Hezbollah and Iran ‎have Israel in their sights. If Iran gets the bomb, the retaliation ‎options for Israel when Hezbollah pressure is applied, will be much ‎more limited. There is no certainty that Iran subscribes to the ‎mutually assured destruction deterrence club.‎

But not to worry. Obama will tell himself and anyone who wants to ‎hear that he has brought Iran back into the community of nations. ‎Obama, after all, is a rare man. How many others can make 118 ‎self-referential mentions in a half hour talk, as Obama did in India ‎this week?

Is it any wonder ‎why someone who stands for something, say a country’s security, ‎as Netanyahu does, gets under the skin of a man who is primarily ‎concerned with little more than his own greatness, and whose ‎presidency, in a word, has been a “selfie”?‎

Categories: Foreign policy, Iran, Iran scam, Iranian nukes, Israel, Israeli elections, Netanyahu, Obama, P5+1, Sanctions, U.S. Congress
Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Comments: Be the first to comment

The Imaginary Islamic Radical

January 28, 2015

The Imaginary Islamic Radical, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, January 28,2015

(Ask Secretary Kerry.

Please see also Muslim Brotherhood-Aligned Leaders Hosted at State Department. — DM)

iraqstill-450x281

Our problem is not the Islamic radical, but the inherent radicalism of Islam. Islam is a radical religion. It radicalizes those who follow it. Every atrocity we associate with Islamic radicals is already in Islam. The Koran is not the solution to Islamic radicalism, it is the cause.

******************

The debate over Islamic terrorism has shifted so far from reality that it has now become an argument between the administration, which insists that there is nothing Islamic about ISIS, and critics who contend that a minority of Islamic extremists are the ones causing all the problems.

But what makes an Islamic radical, extremist? Where is the line between ordinary Muslim practice and its extremist dark side?

It can’t be beheading people in public.

Saudi Arabia just did that and was praised for its progressiveness by the UN Secretary General, had flags flown at half-staff in the honor of its deceased tyrant in the UK and that same tyrant was honored by Obama, in preference to such minor events as the Paris Unity March and the Auschwitz commemoration.

It can’t be terrorism either. Not when the US funds the PLO and three successive administrations invested massive amounts of political capital into turning the terrorist group into a state. While the US and the EU fund the Palestinian Authority’s homicidal kleptocracy; its media urges stabbing Jews.

Clearly that’s not Islamic extremism either. At least it’s not too extreme for Obama.

If blowing up civilians in Allah’s name isn’t extreme, what do our radicals have to do to get really radical?

Sex slavery? The Saudis only abolished it in 1962; officially. Unofficially it continues. Every few years a Saudi bigwig gets busted for it abroad. The third in line for the Saudi throne was the son of a “slave girl”.

Ethnic cleansing? Genocide? The “moderate” Islamists we backed in Syria, Libya and Egypt have been busy doing it with the weapons and support that we gave them. So that can’t be extreme either.

If terrorism, ethnic cleansing, sex slavery and beheading are just the behavior of moderate Muslims, what does a Jihadist have to do to be officially extreme? What is it that makes ISIS extreme?

Our government’s definition of moderate often hinges on a willingness to negotiate regardless of the results. The moderate Taliban were the ones willing to talk us. They just weren’t willing to make a deal. Iran’s new government is moderate because it engages in aimless negotiations while pushing its nuclear program forward and issuing violent threats, instead of just pushing and threatening without the negotiations. Nothing has come of the negotiations, but the very willingness to negotiate is moderate.

The Saudis would talk to us all day long while they continued sponsoring terrorists and setting up terror mosques in the West. That made them moderates. Qatar keeps talking to us while arming terrorists and propping up the Muslim Brotherhood. So they too are moderate. The Muslim Brotherhood talked to us even while its thugs burned churches, tortured protesters and worked with terrorist groups in the Sinai.

A radical terrorist will kill you. A moderate terrorist will talk to you and then kill someone else. And you’ll ignore it because the conversation is a sign that they’re willing to pretend to be reasonable.

From a Muslim perspective, ISIS is radical because it declared a Caliphate and is casual about declaring other Muslims infidels. That’s a serious issue for Muslims and when we distinguish between radicals and moderates based not on their treatment of people, but their treatment of Muslims, we define radicalism from the perspective of Islamic supremacism, rather than our own American values.

The position that the Muslim Brotherhood is moderate and Al Qaeda is extreme because the Brotherhood kills Christians and Jews while Al Qaeda kills Muslims is Islamic Supremacism. The idea of the moderate Muslim places the lives of Muslims over those of every other human being on earth.

Our Countering Violent Extremism program emphasizes the centrality of Islamic legal authority as the best means of fighting Islamic terrorists. Our ideological warfare slams terrorists for not accepting the proper Islamic chain of command. Our solution to Islamic terrorism is a call for Sharia submission.

That’s not an American position. It’s an Islamic position and it puts us in the strange position of arguing Islamic legalism with Islamic terrorists. Our politicians, generals and cops insist that the Islamic terrorists we’re dealing with know nothing about Islam because that is what their Saudi liaisons told them to say.

It’s as if we were fighting Marxist terrorist groups by reproving them for not accepting the authority of the USSR or the Fourth International. It’s not only stupid of us to nitpick another ideology’s fine points, especially when our leaders don’t know what they’re talking about, but our path to victory involves uniting our enemies behind one central theocracy. That’s even worse than arming and training them, which we’re also doing (but only for the moderate genocidal terrorists, not the extremists).

Secretary of State Kerry insists that ISIS are nihilists and anarchists. Nihilism is the exact opposite of the highly structured Islamic system of the Caliphate. It might be a more accurate description of Kerry. But the Saudis and the Muslim Brotherhood successfully sold the Western security establishment on the idea that the only way to defeat Islamic terrorism was by denying any Islamic links to its actions.

This was like an arsonist convincing the fire department that the best way to fight fires was to pretend that they happened randomly on their own through spontaneous combustion.

Victory through denial demands that we pretend that Islamic terrorism has nothing to do with Islam. It’s a wholly irrational position, but the alternative of a tiny minority of extremists is nearly as irrational.

If ISIS is extreme and Islam is moderate, what did ISIS do that Mohammed did not?

The answers usually have a whole lot to do with the internal structures of Islam and very little to do with such pragmatic things as not raping women or not killing non-Muslims.

Early on we decided to take sides between Islamic tyrants and Islamic terrorists, deeming the former moderate and the latter extremists. But the tyrants were backing their own terrorists. And when it came to human rights and their view of us, there wasn’t all that much of a difference between the two.

It made sense for us to put down Islamic terrorists because they often represented a more direct threat, but allowing the Islamic tyrants to convince us that they and the terrorists followed two different brands of Islam and that the only solution to Islamic terrorism lay in their theocracy was foolish of us.

We can’t win the War on Terror through their theocracy. That way lies a real Caliphate.

Our problem is not the Islamic radical, but the inherent radicalism of Islam. Islam is a radical religion. It radicalizes those who follow it. Every atrocity we associate with Islamic radicals is already in Islam. The Koran is not the solution to Islamic radicalism, it is the cause.

Our enemy is not radicalism, but a hostile civilization bearing grudges and ambitions.

We aren’t fighting nihilists or radicals. We are at war with the inheritors of an old empire seeking to reestablish its supremacy not only in the hinterlands of the east, but in the megalopolises of the west.

Categories: Al Qaeda, Caliphate, Charlie Hedbo, Cognitive dissonance, Foreign policy, Freedom, Funding terrorism, Gaza, Hamas, Hezbollah, Human rights, Ideology, Iran, Iran scam, Islam, Islamic slaughter, Islamic State, Israel, Kerry, Koran, Middle East, Moderate rebels, Muslim Brotherhood, Obama, P5+1, Palestinian Authority, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sharia law, Terrorism, Turkey
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Comments: 1 Comment

BUSTED: Obama Advisor Working To Defeat Nethanyahu Worked For Israel Hater

January 28, 2015

BUSTED: Obama Advisor Working To Defeat Nethanyahu Worked For Israel Hater
JANUARY 28, 2015 BY CHARLES C. JOHNSON Via Got News dot Com


(Correct me if I’m wrong, but I feel the impact of the White House campaign against Mr. Netanyahu’s re-election will fall short with the Israeli people. It’s truly sad it has come to this. – LS)

Off to try to defeat Nethanyahu, Obama advisor Jeremy C. Bird once worked for an anti-Israel activist condemned by the Anti-Defamation League.

Bird, then a student at Harvard’s Divinity School, worked for Edmund Hanauer, one of America’s most prominent anti-Israel activists, in 2002.

Bird worked for Hanaeuer while Hanaeuer wrote a virulently anti-Israel op-ed that accused Israel of “state terrorism” and “war crimes,” and called for the arrest and prosecution of Israeli soldiers.

Bird and Hanaeur also attacked Israel in speeches. Hanauer showed an anti-Israel film to a Harvard audience and gave a speech at Harvard in 2002. Bird also spoke about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and introduced Hanaeur.

Here‘s the Harvard Crimson’s description of the event:

A viewing of a short documentary film on the Abu Ghneim Mountain Israeli Settlement Project opened the event. Hanauer later referred to the project as an example of Israeli expansion into Palestinian lands. It was followed by introductory remarks by Hanauer and Jeremy C. Bird, a second-year HDS student who has been working with Hanauer for the past year.

Bird said a “cycle of violence” has contributed to the tensions between Palestinians and Israelis. Rather than using violence themselves, both sides must peacefully campaign for justice, he added.

Bird got his political start in anti-Israel and anti-Netanyahu activism while he studying abroad. Bird also took an influential class with socialist professor and activist Marshall Ganz titled, “Organizing: People, Power, and Change.” In one of Bird’s first classes he worked asa community organizer in Boston.

Now Bird, fresh off losing Battleground Texas’s pro-Wendy Davis campaign, is off to Israel to defeat Benjamin Netanyahu with a State Department-funded group called “OneVoice.”

This is not Bird’s first time dealing with Israel.

“The first political rally I went to was at the University of Haifa for Ehud Barak, who was running against Benjamin Netanyahu for Prime Minister” Bird said to Wabash College, his alma mater. “I couldn’t understand what he was saying, but I noticed how many young people were there.”

“[Edmund] Hanauer is a long-time opponent of Israel and has written that ‘it is the moral obligation of Jews to oppose Zionism,’” wrote Abraham Foxman of the ADL in a letter to the editor to the New York Times in 1981.

An Israeli consulate official said that Hanauer had reached “new heights of venom and outright hate, possibly self-hate” in his pro-Palestinian writings.

In 2003 Hanauer, who died in 2006, falsely claimed in an article for the Boston Globe that Israeli soldiers were killing Palestinian children for sport.

Categories: Netanyahu, Obama

Comments: 4 Comments

Iran-Syria-North Korea Nuclear Nexus

January 28, 2015

Iran-Syria-North Korea Nuclear Nexus, Front Page Magazine, , January 28, 2015

Hassan

As Iranian and American chief diplomats continue to meet to find ways to speed up nuclear negotiations and strike a final nuclear deal that would lead to the removal of all international sanctions on the ruling clerics, the Obama administration persists in ignoring the recent revelations about the Islamic Republic and its covert operations in the region.

A new Western intelligence assessment points to efforts by the Syrian government to renew its operations in an underground and clandestine nuclear facility near Qusair, close to the border of Lebanon, in order to produce nuclear weapons. Citing the Western intelligence assessment, the German weekly Der Spiegel pointed out that the reconstruction of the nuclear facility is being conducted with the assistance of the Islamic Republic, North Korea, and Hezbollah.

The intelligence report indicates that dialogue between Ibrahim Othman, head of the Syrian Atomic Energy Commission of Iranian, and North Korean and Hezbollah affiliates were “intercepted.” In addition, according Abu Muhammad al-Bitar, the Free Syrian Army has also noticed the “unprecedented” presence of Iranian and Hezbollah security members in the town of Qusair on the suburbs of Homs.

If Iran is engaged in such operations assisting Syrian President Bashar al Assad, it is breaching the protocols of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), as well as posing a great threat to security in the region.

If, even before obtaining nuclear weapons, the ruling clerics of Iran are assisting their allies to become nuclear states, how can we trust the Islamic Republic in nuclear negotiations and how can one rely on their claim that they are not seeking to build a nuclear bomb?

Iran-Syria and North Korean-Syria military and nuclear cooperation has been going on for a long time. When it comes to the issues of ballistic missiles, Syria has previously cooperated with both Iran and North Korea.

Syria possess approximately 50 tons of uranium which could be adequate enough to create 5 nuclear bombs. For developing nuclear weapons either highly enriched uranium or an adequate amount of plutonium is required.

Some might make the argument that Syria developed the uranium by itself without the assistance of other countries or other non-state actors. Nevertheless, technically, pragmatically and realistically speaking, Syria does not possess the capability of developing an estimated 50 tons of natural uranium. This suggests that the role of other states and non-state actors have definitely played a significant role. Some of the only allies that the Syrian government has still kept are Iran, North Korea and Hezbollah.

It is crucial to point out that, without a doubt, becoming a nuclear state for the Syrian and Iranian government would be a formidable tool in to suppress opposition, maintain power, and deter foreign intervention in case of crimes against humanity.

There are two major nuclear site in Syria. The first one is the Al Kibar reactor in the northeast of the city of Deir Ezzour and the second one is Marj Sultan in the outskirt of Damascus where the fuel is reportedly stored.

News with respects to the Syrian government renewing its nuclear program were previously reported in 2013. There had been reports that some activities were being carried out at an alleged Syrian nuclear facility close to an eastern suburbs of Damascus, Marj Sultan.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported previously that Damascus was building a nuclear reactor in Deir Ezzour. Reportedly tons of enriched uranium in Damascus are being protected by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps and Hezbollah.

According to Der Spiegel, “Syria’s dictator has not given up his dream of an atomic weapon and has apparently built a new nuclear facility at a secret location…..It is an extremely unsettling piece of news.”

In addition to the aforementioned concerns about the undeclared Syrian nuclear site and nuclear proliferation, one of the crucial issues is that the nuclear material might fall in the hands of multiple other players and Islamist groups. In other words, if these nuclear sites are seized by some radical groups or Al Qaeda-linked affiliates, they might be capable of utilizing the highly enriched uranium and produce nuclear weapons.

Iran’s other indisputable and multi-layered activities and engagements in Syria — including the military, financial, intelligence, and advisory assistance to the Syrian government which have further radicalized and militarized the ongoing Syrian war — persist. In addition, the recent intelligence report and satellite images of secretly renewing nuclear activities with the assistance of the Iranian and North Korean governments poses a grave threat to stability and security in the region. Unfortunately, despite the seriousness of this issue, the Obama administration continues to ignore these issues and persists on trusting the Islamic Republic in the nuclear negotiations.

Categories: Assad, Foreign policy, Hezbollah, Iran, Iran scam, Israel, North Korea, Nukes, Obama, P5+1, Supreme Leader, Syria, Terrorism
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Comments: Be the first to comment

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »