The peace talks strategy for Syria comes out of Iran and Russia, two countries determined to keep Assad in power. Obama wanted the peace talks in order to rig a fake settlement that would come apart once he was out of office. But the only people fooled by this were stupid enough to get their news from CNN and their talking points from Think Progress. The Sunni side only participated to the extent that they could wreck the talks and extract some demands. They have no intention in signing on to Assad staying in power or to letting Obama get away with a fake solution that does just that.
As the Obama administration pushes for peace in Syria, its credibility is crumbling among Syrian opposition leaders, many of whom increasingly doubt the U.S. is serious about ending the rule of dictator Bashar Assad.
Because he isn’t.
If the talks peter out or collapse, that will further undermine President Barack Obama’s foreign policy legacy, which already has been tarnished by the endless bloodshed in Syria
It’s okay. Obama will blame Tom Cotton or Bush or Israel. Or someone. And the media will go along with it.
“A number of the opposition has expressed the feeling that the U.S. is not acting as an honest broker and that they’ve lost both trust and faith in the ability of the United States to deliver on a political settlement in Syria,” said Andrew Bowen, a senior fellow at the Center for the National Interest who has contacts among Syrian opposition groups.
Obama signed on with Iran. So he’s about as much of an honest broker as any other foreign agent.
“Kerry did not make any promises, nor did he put forward any initiatives,” said Khaled Khoja, president of the opposition Syrian National Coalition, in onestatement questioning U.S. intentions. “He has long been delivering messages similar to those drafted by Iran and Russia, which call for the establishment of a ‘national government’ and allowing Bashar al-Assad to stay in power and stand for re-election.”
Well yes. What else do you expect Kerry to do? This is the only thing he’s been doing since he got to the Senate and even beforehand with the Viet Cong. Traitors gotta traitor.
Among the numerous reports floating around — some of them highly speculative — are those that allege Kerry warned opposition leaders they could lose international support if they didn’t attend Friday’s talks. The reports come as the U.S. has appeared to be backing away from its demand that Assad must leave office by signaling its support for the notion of a transitional period.
And that period will come to an end once Obama is out of office.
But all this is theater anyway as the groups with the most fighters on the ground, including Al Qaeda and ISIS, are not represented. Most of the Islamists aren’t either. So this is just the Muslim Brotherhood, whose actual strength is weak, throwing a tantrum. Even if the Sunni groups signed some sort of deal it would be as worthless as the fake elections Hillary still talks up in Libya
On Wednesday, Jan. 27 a large Hizballah force entered the southern Syrian town of Daraa, a critically dangerous event for Israel’s security. The way to the town, which lies near the Jordanian border and across from the Israeli Golan, was opened before Hizballah by none other than Russian forces. This was a blatant violation of President Vladimir Putin’s commitments to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Jordanian King Abdullah not to permit Iranian and Iran-backed forces, such as Hizballah and Iraqi and Afghani Shiite militias, reach their borders in consequence of Russia’s military intervention in the Syria war.
Daraa is just 32 km from the southern Golan and 12 km from the Jordanian border. Hizballah forces in this town are therefore within easy striking distance from northern Israeli and Jordan.
What happened Wednesday was that a sizeable Hizballah contingent made it into Daraa, the day after a Syrian unit under the command of Russian officers captured the town of Sheikh Maskin, cutting off rebel forces east of Daraa from their comrades to the west.
Control of Sheikh Maskin is the key to the crossroads leading to Damascus in the north, the Druze Mountain town of es-Suwaida in the east, and Quneitra on Golan opposite Israel’s northern defenses.
The battle for Sheikh Maskin was the first in the Syrian conflict to be directly fought under Russian command. Its fall sparked accounts of Russian officers commanding Syrian troops in different parts of Syria.
So far, Israel has not reacted to the Hizballah force’s advance, notwithstanding public statements by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon that this would never be allowed to happen.
DEBKAfile’s military sources explain this reticence by a persistent misreading of the Syrian crisis in the higher ranks of the Israeli defense establishment. Military Intelligence chief Maj. Gen. Herzl Halevi, who has a good grasp of its complexities, is a lone voice against the defense minister and IDF chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Gady Eisenkot
In Amman, however, King Abdullah and his generals signified both alarm and fury. DEBKAfile’s sources report that Wednesday morning, the king shot off an urgent message to President Putin demanding an explanation for the Russian officers’ action in opening the door of Daraa to hostile Hizballah fighters.
Jordan has fought Hizballah and its conspiracies for three years, ever since its security forces seized an arms cache that Hizballah had smuggled into the kingdom for a terror cell to mount attacks in the northern province of Irbid. Amman is now concerned that Hizballah is close enough to make a grab for Al-Ramtha, the only border crossing between Syria and Jordan. That would be a feather in the cap of Iran’s Lebanese proxy, as the first Arab border crossing to fall to a Hizballah force outside Lebanon, and one, moreover, located athwart a main regional water source, the Yarmouk River.
As of Thursday morning, Jan. 28, Abdullah had not received a reply to his missive from Putin, but a message did come through to Amman from Syrian President Bashar Assad.
Using a back-door intelligence channel, he sent a notice in the name of Gen. Bahjat Suleiman, former Syrian ambassador to Jordan until he was expelled in May 2014, that King Abdullah must now face the consequences of his long support for the rebels of southern Syria.
The monarch was also advised to prepare for the influx of thousands of fleeing rebel fighters whom the combined Syrian and Hizballah forces were pushing towards the Jordanian border.
The next hours will be critical for the development of a similar crisis on the Israel-Syrian border in the Golan region.
The US and Russia are in the process of a military buildup in the Kurdish areas of northern Syria. It is ranged along a narrow strip of land 85 km long, stretching from Hassakeh in the east up to the Kurdish town of Qamishli on the Syrian-Turkish border. Facing them from across that border is a parallel buildup of Turkish strength. This highly-charged convergence of three foreign armies athwart a tense borderland is reported here by DEBKAfile’s military sources. It is too soon to determine whether the three armies are operating in sync or at odds, especially in view of the bitter relations between Moscow and Ankara.
US Forces
American Special Operations troops and Air Force attack helicopters landed first at Remelan airport. They are the first US troops to operate from a ground base in Syria, accommodated in living quarters built for them in advance by a US engineering corps unit. The airport runway has been widened for US warplanes.
American Special Operations troops and Air Force attack helicopters landed first at Remelan airport. They are the first US troops to operate from a ground base in Syria, accommodated in living quarters built for them in advance by a US engineering corps unit. The airport runway has been widened for US warplanes.
Russian Forces
Next came two Russian military missions on Jan. 16. One group, led by a general and consisting of air force and Special Operations officers, is preparing to take over a small abandoned base in Syrian army-controlled territory just 80 km from the new US facility at Remelan, and adapt it for Russian use.
The other group, which consists of intelligence officers – some from Russia’s FSB federal security service, the FSB – indicates that Moscow has decided it is high time for professionals to protect the classified information moving around the Russian Task Force in Syria and safeguard it from reaching the wrong hands. .
The abandoned base is less than 3.5 km from the Turkish border, and would act as a Russian barrier between US forces in northern Syria and the Turkish border contingents.
Turkish Forces
This Russian deployment set off alarm bells in Ankara, and so the Turkish army responded with the third troop buildup, arraying tanks and mobile artillery on the border across from Qamishli.
Over the weekend, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan stated, “We have said this from the beginning: we won’t tolerate such formations (in northern Syria) along the area stretching from the Iraqi border up to the Mediterranean.”
At the same time, US Vice President Joe Biden said Saturday, Jan. 23, that the U.S. and Turkey are prepared for a military solution against ISIS in Syria should the Syrian government and rebel-opposition forces fail to reach a peace agreement during its upcoming meeting in Geneva.
However, Ankara views its war on terror as focused on both Kurdish separatists and ISIS, which is subjecting Turkey to multi-casualty attacks.
DEBKAfile’s military and intelligence sources note that Turkey’s military options are very limited. Its leaders know they dare not put a foot wrong because the Russian force in Syria is just waiting for an opportunity to avenge the downing of a Russian Su-24 warplane by the Turkish air force on November 24.
Another group of actors stirring the pot in northern Syria is the Kurds, particularly the YPG militia, the only fighting force in Syria capable of defeating ISIS, which has been reinforced by the Iraqi autonomous Kurdish region’s Peshmerga, as well as the outlawed Turkish PKK Kurdish organization.
At this stage, it is impossible to determine how this triple buildup will play out tomorrow – how far the US and Russia are in concert, at what point they may decide to vie for footholds in the Kurdish region of northern Syria and how far the Turks are clued into the joint US-Russian strategy for bludgeoning ISIS.
(The views expressed in this article are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)
Conservative ideologues want to keep things essentially as they are, making only marginal and generally ineffective changes. Populists want to change things to be more consistent with what “we the people” want. Often, what we the people want is better than what our “leaders” want or try to provide. Under these definitions, Trump is a populist, not a conservative ideologue. That’sgood.
According to Dictionary. com, these are attributes of “conservatives:”
Disposed to preserve existing conditions, restore traditional ones, and to limit change.
Any of various, often anti-establishment or anti-intellectual political movements or philosophies that offer unorthodox solutions or policies and appeal to the common person rather than according with traditional party or partisan ideologies.
Grass-roots democracy; working class activism; egalitarianism.
National Review recently published an entire special edition devoted to attacking Trump on the ground that he is insufficiently conservative. Whom did National Review support in 2008 and 2012? Guess or go to the link. He did not win.
Writing at PJ Media about National Review’s special issue, Roger L. Simon argued that
Many of their arguments revolve around whether Trump is a “true conservative.” Instead of wading into the definitional weeds on that one — as they say on the Internet, YMMV [Your Milleage May Vary] — allow me to address the macro question of what the purpose of ideology actually is. For me, it is to provide a theoretical basis on which to act, a set of principles. But that’s all it is. It’s not a religion, although it can be mistaken for one (communism). [Insert and Emphasis added.]
Ideology should function as a guide, not a faith, because in the real world you may have to violate it, when the rubber meets the road, as they say. For those of us in the punditocracy, the rubber rarely if ever meets the road. All we have is our theories. They are the road for us. If we’re lucky, we’re paid for them. In that case, we hardly ever vary them. It would be bad for business.
Trump’s perspective was the reverse. The rubber was constantly meeting the road. In fact, it rarely did anything else. He always had to change and adjust. Ideological principles were just background noise, barely audible sounds above the jack hammers. [Emphasis added.]
When National Review takes up arms against Trump, it is men and women of theory against a man of action. The public, if we are to believe the polls, prefers the action. It’s not hard to see why. The theory has failed and become increasingly disconnected from the people. It doesn’t go anywhere and hasn’t for years. I’m guilty of it too. (Our current president is 150% a man of theory.) Too many people — left and right — are drunk on ideology. [Emphasis added.]
Were the “old White men” who wrote and signed the Declaration of Independence, and those who fought for the colonies in the Revolutionary War, conservative ideologues? Did they want to preserve existing conditions under the King of England, his governors and military? Or were they pragmatic populists, as well as men of action, who opposed the King’s establishment and offered unorthodox solutions appealing to the “common” people? It took a lot of pushing from such revolutionaries as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, but the pragmatic populists won.
I don’t want to suggest that Donald Trump is this generation’s George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson or Ben Franklin. Times are now sufficiently different that doing so would be frivolous. Among other differences, there should be no need to go to war now because we still have an electoral process, flawed though it may be. Nor are we ruled by an unelected, hereditary king; we are ruled by an elected president who considers Himself a king, ignores or twists the Constitution to fit His needs, often ideological, and acts by royal executive decree when the Congress declines to do His bidding or goes about it too slowly to suit Him.
Be that as it may, what’s wrong with the populist notion encouraging members of the governed class — the “vulgarians” — to have greater voices in how they are governed than those who govern them, often to their own benefit, while mocking those whom they govern? Sometimes we the people make mistakes and sometimes we get it right. Ditto our dear leaders. Why not give us a chance for a change?
Into which category — conservative ideologue or populist — if either, does Donald Trump fit, do we need him now and, if so, why?
Here’s the 2012 video Whittle referred to in the video above:
Which of the current Republican candidates has taken, or is the most likely to take, positions comparable to those suggested in the above video?
What we have now is not a movement because we have not defined what it is we hope to win. We have built reactive movements to stave off despair. We must do better than that. We must not settle for striving to restore some idealized lost world. Instead we must dream big. We must think of the nation we want and of the civilization we want to live in and what it will take to build it. [Emphasis added.]
Our enemies have set out big goals. We must set out bigger ones. We must become more than conservatives. If we remain conservatives, then all we will have is the America we live in now. And even if our children and grandchildren become conservatives, that is the culture and nation they will fight to conserve. We must become revolutionaries. [Emphasis added.]
I also suggested that if we don’t seek real — even revolutionary — change we might as well try to join the European Union. That would keep things pretty much as they now are and would, therefore, be more the “conservative” than the populist thing to do.
Our unelected and unaccountable bureaucracy could merge with that of the EU and our Congress could merge with the impotent EU Parliament.
Here’s a new Trifecta video about a proposal by the Governor of Texas to amend the Constitution which, he contends, has been broken by those who have improperly increased the power of the Federal Government while diminishing that of the states.
The Constitution is not broken. It’s just been poorly interpreted, twisted and otherwise ignored. In recent years Obama — who claims to be a “constitutional scholar” — has done more to ignore, twist and misinterpret it than any other president I can remember. Depending on what amendments might be adopted and ratified, an Obama clone (Hillary Clinton?) might well do the same; perhaps even worse. A president can personally stop that process by not doing it. A president can halt poor judicial interpretations only by nominating judges unlikely to make them.
Conclusions
Trump is not perfect; nobody is. However, he says what he thinks rather than spew multiculturally correct pablum. Few are sufficiently thick-skinned to do that. A “vulgarian,” he is not politically correct. Others are because they don’t want to offend. Trump recognizes that Islam is the religion of war, death and oppression and does not want the further Islamisation of America, which is already proceeding apace. Few leaders of either party are willing to take that position, mean it and act on it effectively if elected.
We are mad, not insane. We want to give we the people a bigger and stronger voice in how and by whom we are governed. If, by voting to make Trump our President, we make a big mistake so be it. Worse candidates with fewer qualifications have been elected and reelected. During His first and second term as President, Obama has gone far in His quest to transform America fundamentally and in the wrong directions. If Trump does not come sufficiently close to correcting course to meet our expectations during his first term, we won’t vote to reelect him. In the meantime,
Three Muslim Brotherhood supporters who caused a row in Egypt last year after they met with Obama administration officials and members of Congress returned to the U.S. Wednesday, according to the Facebook page of Egyptian Americans for Freedom and Justice (EAFJ).
During their 2015 trip, Brotherhood leader Gamal Heshmat, former Egyptian Judge Waleed Sharaby and Maha Azzam, head of the Egyptian Revolutionary Council (ERC) lobbied State Department and White House officials for help against the government of Egyptian President Abdel Fatal al-Sisi.
The ERC formed in 2014 with the aim of toppling Sisi and bringing the Brotherhood back to power in Egypt. Sisi took power in 2013 after the Egyptian army ousted President Mohamed Morsi, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party.
Heshmat has a long history of supporting Palestinian terrorists and was photographed in June 2014 with Hamas political chief Khaled Meshaal.
The State Department agreed with the delegation’s position that Sisi had not brought stability to Egypt, and that his removal would pave the way for a transition to democracy, Sharaby told Egypt’s Mekameleen TV in an interview last February. But that has not translated into concrete action to topple Sisi.
EAFJ leaders Mahmoud El-Sharkawy, Hani Elkadi and Aber Mostafa greeted Heshmat, Sharaby and Azzam at New York’s JFK airport and posed for a picture with them displaying the Brotherhood’s four-fingered Rabaa salute which has become representative among those wanting the Brotherhood’s return to power in Egypt.
The three are scheduled to speak Friday at an event titled “Egyptian Revolution from Sacrifices to Victory” in North Bergen, N.J.
The event is timed to commemorate the Jan. 25 anniversary of dictator Hosni Mubarak’s fall from power in 2011. Heshmat wrote that his group had no plans to meet with Obama administration representatives during this visit, due to their “position biased” toward Sisi’s regime. They hope to speak with some congressmen, academics and others.
El-Sharkawy is a Brotherhood member and serves as liaison with Brotherhood members exiled in Turkey, Egypt’s Al-Bawaba newspaper reported last April.
He frequently reposts Muslim Brotherhood communiqués on his Facebook page. In December, El Sharkawy encouraged “all youth and revolutionaries” to distribute the official page of Brotherhood spokesman Muhammad Muntasir.
Elkadi seemed to self-identify as a Brotherhood member in a March 9 Facebook post showing an cartoon of a man holding a sign with the Brotherhood logo and the words which translate to, “I am [Muslim] Brotherhood and I’m not threatened.”
Last year, Elkadi, El Sharkawy and Mostafa posted graphics on their Facebook pages seeming to support violence in Egypt.
El Sharkawy and Elkadi posted a Feb. 10 communiqué from the Popular Resistance Movement (PRM) which has launched attacks against Egyptian police and other targets. It features an image of a blood-red map of Egypt with a fist superimposed over it. It claims responsibility for targeting two police cars. “God, martyrs, Revolution,” it said.
Mostafa posted the personal information of a pro-Sisi owner of an Egyptian soccer team with the word “Attaaack!” the same day.
(The views expressed in this article are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)
Obama keeps telling us what America isnot. What does He think she is? Does He think that Obama’s America is America, or that His supporters are what America is? Does He think they make America great? Will America become acceptable to Obama, and hence “who we are,” only after He or His successor finishes her fundamental transformation?
By virtue of the now-implemented Iran nuke “deal,” Iran’s possession of an atomic and/or hydrogen bomb will be delayed for a few years unless she cheats (as in the past), reneges on the “deal” or out-sources nuke development to her long term partner, North Korea.
The Islamic Republic of Iran is now reaping the benefits of more than $100 billion in immediate sanctions relief plus a settlement of Iranian claims amounting to $1.7 billion.
Secretary of State John Kerry said today that the settlement is $400 million debt and $1.3 billion in interest dating back to the Islamic revolution. That’s separate from the sanctions windfall Iran will receive.
Iran will also benefit on a long-term basis from trade with countries formerly prohibited by sanctions.
Back in June 2015, Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei had outlined the general policies of the country’s 6th quinquennial development plan.
On defense and security, the proclamation necessitated an increase in Iran’s defense capabilities at the level of a regional power in order to fulfill the national interests by allocating at least 5 percent of the national budget to boosting the defense power. [Emphasis added.]
With increased funding, Iran will be able to increase its already substantial support for Shiite terrorism throughout the Middle East; it will likely do so.
Iranians continue to experience Islamic human rights. Here’s a link to an article titled The Real War on Women in a Nightmarish Islamic Stateby Dr. Majid Rafizadeh. An Iranian-American political scientist and scholar, he is the president of the International American Council and serves on the board of the Harvard International Review at Harvard University.
When it comes to executions, girls are systematically more vulnerable due to the Islamist penal code of Sharia law.
Let’s take a look at the Islamist state of Iran, which creates its laws from the legal codes of Sharia and Quran. The first type of discrimination is related to age: girls are held criminally accountable at the maturity age of 9 Lunar years. (This will automatically put girls at a higher risk of execution by the court.)
Iranian ruling politicians hold the highest record when it comes to the most executions per capita in the world. Intriguingly, in the last two years that the so-called moderate, Hassan Rouhani, has been in office, there have been more than 2000 executions conducted in Iran. That is nearly 3-4 executions a day.
More importantly, Iranian leaders are also the largest executioner of women and female juveniles. Some of these executions were carried out on the mullahs’ charge of ‘Moharebeh’ (enmity with Allah), or waging war against Allah, ifsad-i Fil Arz (Sowing Corruption on Earth), or Sab-i Nabi (Insulting the Prophet). [Emphasis added.]
There are three methods of execution for women and female juveniles: 1. Stoning 2. Public hanging 3. Shooting. Some women are also beaten so severely in the prison that they die before reaching the execution. Shooting, which is the fastest method of the three for execution, has not been used since 2008. Instead, the most common method to execute women is public hanging or stoning. Some of these women are flogged right before they are hanged. Public hanging not only imposes fears in the society but also aims at dehumanizing and controlling women as second-class citizens. According to the Islamist penal code of Iran, women offenses are classified as: Hadd, Diyyih, Ta`zir, and Qisas. [Emphasis added.]
Please read the entire article. Isn’t it heartwarming that “we” are giving even more than a mere $100 billion to Iran? Perhaps some of the new money can be used to buy sharper stones and new devices for hangings. How about some new torture devices?
Islam, The Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates
The Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas-affiliated Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) claims to represent Muslims in America. They do represent those who favor terrorism and despise human rights (in the name of which they ironically claim to act).
[T]he Council on American-Islamic Relations, is a prominent Islamic group, but which has a long history of involvement with extremist and terrorist causes. In 2009, during the Holy Land Foundation terror financing trial, U.S. District Court Judge Jorge Solis concluded that, “The government has produced ample evidence to establish the associations of CAIR… with the Islamic Association for Palestine, and with Hamas.” [Emphasis added.]
During the trial, CAIR was designated an “unindicted co-conspirator.” As a result of CAIR’s apparent links to a terrorist movement, the Justice Department in 2009 announced a ban on working with CAIR. The FBI also severed relations.
[F]or the past seven years, the Obama White House has opened its doors to the entire spectrum of radical Islamist groups, just like CAIR. These groups have rationalized the actions of Islamic terrorist groups that have killed Americans, warned American Muslims against cooperating with law enforcement, smeared genuine Muslim moderates like Zuhdi Jasser and Asra Nomani as traitors and accused anyone who dared to utter the term “radical Islam” as “Islamophobic.” These are the groups that the White House should have marginalized. The fact that Obama legitimized radical Islamist groups will be his real legacy. [Emphasis added.]
Very few American Muslims, however, seem to feel that CAIR is a legitimate ambassador for American Islam. According to a 2011 Gallup poll, about 88% of American Muslims said that CAIR does not represent them. Muslims all over the world, in fact, apparently do not think CAIR is a moderate or legitimate Muslim group: in 2014, the United Arab Emirates, a pious Muslim state, designated CAIR a terrorist organization, along with dozens of other Muslim Brotherhood organizations.
In reality, American Muslims are extremely diverse, and no single group can claim to speak on their collective behalf. American Islam comprises dozens of different religious sects and political movements, many of which advocate distinctly different ideas. But for Islamist bodies such as CAIR, it suits their agenda if American Muslims are portrayed as a monolithic community. If American Muslims can be seen as homogenous, then a group such as CAIR has a better claim to represent their interests.
Even CAIR’s own research, however, undermines their claim to speak on behalf of American Muslims. A 2011 report reveals that a majority of American mosques are not affiliated with any American Islamic body.
Addressing a conference in 2000, Sheikh Abdul Hadi Palazzi, a Muslim cleric and secretary general of the Italian Muslim Assembly, explained that, “[CAIR] is a Muslim Brotherhood front organization. It works in the United States as a lobby against radio, television and print media journalists who dare to produce anything about Islam that is at variance with their fundamental agenda. CAIR opposes diversity in Islam.”
In truth, CAIR only speaks on behalf of a small extremist ideology that, as discovered by federal prosecutors, emerged across the United States during the 1990s out of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. Although CAIR does not represent American Muslims, it managed, before the Holy Land Foundation terror trial in 2008, to persuade a great many people that it did. Enough time has passed that CAIR seems to believe it can try this move once again.
state that Congress believes the Muslim Brotherhood fits the State Department’s criteria of a Foreign Terrorist Organization. The Secretary of State would be required to designate the Brotherhood within 60 days or to provide a detailed report explaining why it does not. Three U.S.-based Brotherhood entities named in the bill are CAIR, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT). [Emphasis added.]
The House version of the bill (HR3892) was introduced by Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL) with Reps. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Randy K. Weber (R-TX), Diane Black (R-TN) and Mike Pompeo (R-KS) as original cosponsors. They are now joined by Reps. Steve King (R-IA); Steven Palazzo (R-MS); Kay Granger (R-TX); Jim Jordan (R-OH); Steve Stivers (R-OH); Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA); Ilena Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL); Charles W. Dent (R-PA); Bill Johnson (R-OH) and David A. Trott (R-MI).
HR3892 was referred to the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security on December 4, 2015. Two cosponsors, Rep. Gohmert and Rep. Trott, sit on that subcommittee.
The Senate version of the bill (S2230) was introduced by presidential candidate Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and later cosponsored by Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT). It was referred to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on November 3. Two of Senator Cruz’s presidential rivals, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) sit on that committee and have not taken a position on the bill.
Although the bill has yet to earn bi-partisan support at this early stage, it is supported by members of Congress from different spectrums of the Republican Party. It includes endorsers of the presidential campaigns of Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush and John Kasich and not only supporters of Ted Cruz.
If enacted by the Congress, Obama will almost certainly veto it. If He signs it, He will ignore or bypass it as He often does.
Britain recently declared the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization. Here are thirteen quotes from the British Government’s review and Prime Minister Cameron’s official statement:
1. “The Muslim Brotherhood’s foundational texts call for the progressive moral purification of individuals and Muslim societies and their eventual political unification in a Caliphate under Sharia law. To this day the Muslim Brotherhood characterizes Western societies and liberal Muslims as decadent and immoral. It can be seen primarily as a political project.”
2. “Aspects of Muslim Brotherhood ideology and tactics, in this country and overseas, are contrary to our values and have been contrary to our national interests and our national security.”
3. “From its foundation the Muslim Brotherhood organized itself into a secretive ‘cell’ structure, with an elaborate induction and education program for new members…This clandestine, centralized and hierarchical structure persists to this day.”
4. “The Hamas founding charter claims that they are the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Muslim Brotherhood treat them as such. In the past ten years support for Hamas (including in particular funding) has been an important priority for the MB in Egypt and the MB international network.”
5. “From at least the 1950s the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood also developed an international network, within and beyond the Islamic world. Europe became an important base for the growing Muslim Brotherhood global network.”
6. “The wider international network of the Muslim Brotherhood now performs a range of functions. It promotes Muslim Brotherhood ideology (including through communications platforms), raises and invests funds, and provides a haven for members of the Brotherhood who have left their country of origin to continue promoting Brotherhood activity.”
7. “[F]or the most part, the Muslim Brotherhood have preferred non violent incremental change on the grounds of expediency, often on the basis that political opposition will disappear when the process of Islamization is complete. But they are prepared to countenance violence—including, from time to time, terrorism—where gradualism is ineffective.”
8. “Muslim Brotherhood organizations and associated in the UK have neither openly nor consistently refuted the literature of Brotherhood member Sayyid Qutb which is known to have inspired people (including in this country) to engage in terrorism.”
9. “[The review] concluded that it was not possible to reconcile these [MB] views with the claim made by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in their evidence to the review that ‘the Muslim Brotherhood has consistently adhered to peaceful means of opposition, renouncing all forms of violence throughout its existence.’”
10. “In the 1990s the Muslim Brotherhood and their associates established public facing and apparently national organizations in the UK to promote their views. None were openly identified with the Muslim Brotherhood and membership of the Muslim Brotherhood remained (and still remains) a secret.”
11. “[MB fronts] became politically active, notably in connection with Palestine and Iraq, and promoted candidates in national and local elections…sought and obtained a dialogue with Government….were active members in a security dialogue with the police.”
12. “The Muslim Brotherhood have been publicly committed to political engagement in this country. Engagement with Government has at times been facilitated by what appeared to be a common agenda against al Qaida and (at least in the UK) militant Salafism. But this engagement did not take into account of Muslim Brotherhood support for a proscribed terrorist group and its views about terrorism which, in reality, are quite different from our own.”
13. “Senior Muslim Brotherhood figures and associated have justified attacks against coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
The linked article goes on to note that
The U.S. government, without even conducting any kind of review of its own, issued a statement to the Investigative Project on Terrorism rejecting any ban or even any “de-legitimizing” of the Brotherhood at all. [Emphasis added.]
Do the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates represent Obama? Are they or Obama “what we are?” I don’t think so and hope not.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali and reformation of Islam
In Heretic (which I reviewed here), Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote,
For years, we have spent trillions on waging wars against “terror” and “extremism” that would have been much better spent protecting Muslim dissidents and giving them the necessary platforms and resources to counter that vast network of Islamic centers, madrassas, and mosques which has been largely responsible for spreading the most noxious forms of Islamic fundamentalism. For years, we have treated the people financing that vast network — the Saudis, the Qataris, and the now repentant Emiratis — as our allies. In the midst of all our efforts at policing, surveillance, and even military action, we in the West have not bothered to develop an effective counternarrative because from the outset we have denied that Islamic extremism is in any way related to Islam. We persist in focusing on the violence and not on the ideas that give rise to it. [Emphasis added.]
Here is a video of which Hirsi Ali was the executive producer. It features Muslim and former-Muslim women discussing Islam and the Islam-mandated male domination of women.
Here’s Part II of Honor Diaries:
Here’s a video characterizing Hirsi Ali as an “Islamophobe.”
Along with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Azeezah Kanji — the featured speaker in the above video — has been very active in disparaging Hirsi Ali and Honor Diaries. Like CAIR, she has ties to the Obama White House and was named a “Champion of Change” by the White House in 2011. What changes in Islam does Ms. Kanji champion? None, apparently, of those intrinsic to it.
Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the CAIR, condemned Hirsi Ali as “one of the worst of the worst of the Islam haters in America, not only in America but worldwide.”
On becoming a U.S. Citizen
Who better represents American values? Hirsi Ali, once a refugee from Somalia and a proud citizen of the United States since April 25, 2013, or President Obama? In the immediately linked Wall Street Journal article, she offers suggestions on American immigration with which I plan to deal in a subsequent post. In the meantime, here is her 2014 address at the William F. Buckley Program at Yale University on the clash of civilizations. If you have not yet watched it, please do so. If you have watched it, please do so again. I just did. Every time I watch it, there is something I had not previously considered.
Conclusions
To Obama and His acolytes, Islam is the religion of peace and tolerance; the Islamic State, its equally non-peaceful and intolerant franchisees and other comparable terrorist organizations are “not Islamic.” If “not Islamic,” what are they?
Despite Obama’s many statements and gestures, He has yet to convince any Islamic terrorist group that it is not Islamic. He has convinced them only that He is ignorant of Islam, a liar or both. Perhaps He needs a better joke writer.
was very striking for the one-sidedness and disproportion of the president’s concern for religious suffering.
President Obama worried that “politicians insult Muslims, whether abroad or fellow citizens.”
But he couldn’t bring himself to worry aloud about the Christians being driven from Middle Eastern countries, the churches being burned from Nigeria to Malaysia, or the 22 Coptic Christians who were beheaded on video on a beach in Libya by Islamic supremacists.
Will our next president at least make a concerted effort to un-transform Obama’s America? Will he name and fight our enemies, foreign and domestic? Or will he simply “go with the flow” and do none of the above. Much depends on who it is and on the composition of the Congress.
During the Democrat Party debate on January 17th, Hillary Clinton “linked herself to the president again and again. And again.” An Obama clone to continue Obama’s fundamental transformation of America is the opposite of what we need. Nor will merely “fixing” broken parts of the governmental apparatus with duct tape and bailing wire be satisfactory. As I wrote last September, To bring America back we need to break some stuff.
In later posts in this series, I hope to deal with immigration, race relations, the ways in which Obama is distorting the Constitution, the decline of education and Obama’s very foreign foreign policy.
(The “Islamic state” in the article is the Islamic Republic of Iran, our wonderful partner for peace — DM)
When it comes to executions, girls are systematically more vulnerable due to the Islamist penal code of Sharia law.
Let’s take a look at the Islamist state of Iran, which creates its laws from the legal codes of Sharia and Quran. The first type of discrimination is related to age: girls are held criminally accountable at the maturity age of 9 Lunar years. (This will automatically put girls at a higher risk of execution by the court.)
Iranian ruling politicians hold the highest record when it comes to the most executions per capita in the world. Intriguingly, in the last two years that the so-called moderate, Hassan Rouhani, has been in office, there have been more than 2000 executions conducted in Iran. That is nearly 3-4 executions a day.
More importantly, Iranian leaders are also the largest executioner of women and female juveniles. Some of these executions were carried out on the mullahs’ charge of ‘Moharebeh’ (enmity with Allah), or waging war against Allah, ifsad-i Fil Arz (Sowing Corruption on Earth), or Sab-i Nabi (Insulting the Prophet).
There are three methods of execution for women and female juveniles: 1. Stoning 2. Public hanging 3. Shooting. Some women are also beaten so severely in the prison that they die before reaching the execution. Shooting, which is the fastest method of the three for execution, has not been used since 2008. Instead, the most common method to execute women is public hanging or stoning. Some of these women are flogged right before they are hanged. Public hanging not only imposes fears in the society but also aims at dehumanizing and controlling women as second-class citizens. According to the Islamist penal code of Iran, women offenses are classified as: Hadd, Diyyih, Ta`zir, and Qisas.
Some of these women are stoned for adultery. But even in stoning, the Islamists and Sharia law differentiate between men and women. Women are buried to the neck while men are buried to the waist. This allows some men to be capable of running away from the stoning, while women do not have a chance for survival, at all. If women are still alive after hours of stoning, a large block normally is smashed over their head.
Women from ethnic and religious minorities, as well as political dissidents, have also been targets of these executions. Based on the latest report, Ahmed Shaheed, the U.N.’s special “rapporteur” on human rights in Iran, pointed out that executing individuals from religious and ethnic minority groups are carried out because those victims were “exercising their protected rights, including freedom of expression and association…..When the Iranian government refuses to even acknowledge the full extent of executions which have occurred, it shows a callous disregard for both human dignity and international human rights law.”
In the latest report, Amnesty International announced: “Execution of two juvenile offenders in just a few days makes a mockery of Iran’s juvenile justice system.” And the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned Iran and warned about the rise of executions in Iran which “reflect a worrying trend in Iran….Over 700 executions are reported to have taken place so far this year, including at least 40 public, marking the highest total recorded in the past 12 years.”
In many of these cases related to women and female juveniles, it is clear that they were executed for either self-defense against forced marriage or a rapist, or for charges such as freedom of expression. They often are forced to marry at a very young age to an older person, or someone they do not like, such as in the case of the child bride, Farzaneh (Razieh) Moradi – who was forced to marry at the age of 15 and was executed in the city of Esfahan. These women were beaten and raped, repeatedly, by their spouses or relatives until they could not take it anymore and defended themselves. Some of these girls are being imprisoned and executed based on the fabricated charges of possessing opium. For example, in the case of the 16-year-old Sogand, the police found opium in her father’s house, but because there was no one at home except her, they arrested her. She is still in prison as none of her family members have come forward to save her life.
Some of these executions are based on the issue of “honor.” For example, some of these girls follow their hearts and fall in love with someone they choose themselves. But since their brothers and fathers disagree with this, the females get punished. For example, in the case of Mahsa, a seventeen-year-old, her brothers are the ones seeking her execution. In addition, if an Iranian Muslim woman has sex with a Christian or Jewish person, she will be executed (but a Muslim man is allowed to have sex with non-Muslim women).
Some of these girls are raped, repeatedly, in the process of investigation and forced into “Sighah”- the Shiite Islamist law of temporary marriage – with a cleric, or a member of Etela’at (intelligence), or Revolutionary Guard Corps before they are executed. Amnesty International previously pointed out that there are a “considerable” number of reports regarding this issue.
While the West is looking to lift sanctions against Iranian leaders in a few days and normalize ties with Iran, it is critical to look at the egregious human rights violations that this country is allowing. Is being silent and turning a blind eye to these human rights abuses appropriate? Doesn’t normalizing ties with the Iranian leaders and releasing billions of dollars to them, facilitate their efforts of executing more people, including women and child girls?
______________________
Dr. Majid Rafizadeh, an Iranian-American political scientist and scholar, is president of the International American Council and serves on the board of the Harvard International Review at Harvard University. Rafizadeh is also a former senior fellow at the Nonviolence International Organization based in Washington, DC and is a member of the Gulf Project at Columbia University. He can be reached at Dr.Rafizadeh@post.harvard.edu. Follow Rafizadeh at @majidrafizadeh.
In recent months, further information about the AKP government’s support for ISIS and other jihadis in Syria has come to light. Turkish journalists who have documented their government’s support for terrorists and who have published evidence of truckloads of arms and ammunition, as well as fighters, being sent into Syria have been threatened, arrested, and imprisoned by Turkish authorities.[1] Foreign media have also extensively covered Turkey’s sponsorship of ISIS and other terrorist organizations, and documented the ease with which thousands of foreign and Turkish jihadis enter and exit Syria under the eyes of Turkish officials.
However, Western governments have refrained from criticizing Turkey’s conduct in this matter, and continue to call Turkey “a partner in the fight against terrorism.” Many in Turkey, including Mehves Evin, columnist for Turkish opposition daily Diken, have asked, in light of this heavy media coverage of Turkey’s sponsorship of jihadi terrorists, “Why isn’t there a peep from the West?”[2]
The following report presents further evidence of the Turkish government’s support and sponsorship of ISIS and other jihadi terrorist organizations:
After Turkish Daily Cumhuriyet Released Video Footage Of Weapons-Filled Syria-Bound Turkish Trucks, Paper’s Editor-In-Chief, Ankara Bureau Chief Are Imprisoned, Charged With Treason, Espionage, And Terrorism
On November 26, 2015, Can Dundar, prominent journalist and editor-in-chief of Turkey’s oldest dailyCumhuriyet, and Erdem Gul, its Ankara bureau chief, were arrested; they are now being held in isolation pending a trial initiated by Erdogan himself, on charges of espionage, treason, and providing support for terrorism. The charges are in connection with the newspaper’s May 29, 2015 publication of video footage of a January 19, 2014 search conducted by Turkish judicial, security, and military officials of three large Syria-bound trucks in the Turkish border province of Adana; the search turned up heavy weaponry concealed under boxes of medicines. The weaponry, including missiles, mortars, anti-aircraft ammunition artillery, and grenades, was being transported by Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization (MIT) to jihadi organizations in Syria. Erdogan, at that time prime minister, immediately intervened to stop the search, and to secure the release of the MIT personnel carrying the arms into Syria.
Earlier, on January 1, 2014, a similar truck was stopped in the border province of Hatay, but no search could be conducted due to intervention by the local governor on behalf of the government.
The Adana and Hatay prosecutors’ investigations into both of the incidents, which came to be known as the “MIT trucks affair,” and all related legal files, were closed; gag orders were issued, and all security personnel, high-ranking military officers, and prosecutors involved in the searches were arrested. Erdogan, the AKP government, and its partisan media claimed that the trucks had only been carrying humanitarian aid to Turkmens in Syria.
Along with the video footage, published 17 months after the incident, Cumhuriyet also published other court documents, under the headline “The Weapons That Erdogan Said Did Not Exist”[3]
The following is the video footage published by Cumhuriyet:
Following Dundar’s imprisonment, an outcry arose in Turkey and in press organizations in Turkey and internationally; he has since received multiple press awards. Additionally, teams of journalists from the anti-AKP media, along with MPs from the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), and artists and intellectuals, have been sitting in shifts outside the gates of the Silivri prison compound in Istanbul, where the detainees are being held, in solidarity.[4]
MIT Transports Jihadis, Weapons From One Syrian Battlefront To Another – Via Turkey
On June 11, 2015, Cumhuriyet also published a video of statements by two bus drivers telling authorities how they had been commissioned by the MIT to transport, on the night of January 9, 2014, over 70 Jabhat Al-Nusra (JN) jihadi fighters, along with a large load of arms and ammunition, from Atme Camp in Syria near the Reyhanli border crossing in the Turkish province of Hatay, to Tel Abyad in Syria, near the Akcakale border crossing in the southeastern Turkish province of Urfa. They showed where they had entered Syria from Turkey, without headlights, stopping near a building in Atme Camp where the JN flag was flying and “La-i-lahe-il-Allah” (“There is no God but Allah”) was painted on the wall. At Atme, they said, they had not been allowed off their buses, and the buses had been boarded there by bearded, Arabic-speaking militants who also loaded large boxes of weapons onto them. The drivers said that they then drove back into Turkey and proceeded without stopping to re-cross into Syria at Akcakale. At around 5:30 AM, near Tel Abyad, the militants disembarked with their weaponry.
It will be remembered that at that time ISIS was fighting to take control of Tel Abyad, and several days later, on January 13, it succeeded in doing so.
According to Cumhuriyet, the jihadis were transported from one point to another in Syria via Turkey because it was unsafe for Islamist fighters to travel through Syrian territory that was under Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) control, such as Kobane.
The drivers also stressed that they had committed no crime, as they had been hired by the MIT to work for the government and had been escorted throughout by MIT operatives in two black vehicles.
The AKP government called the Cumhuriyet report a lie and libel, and, on February 14, 2014, ordered the investigation into the matter and the related files closed, removed the prosecutor from his position, and sealed and covered up the incident.[5]
Left: The Cumhuriyet video showing the building in Atme Camp where the drivers picked up the jihadis. Right: The route taken by the buses carrying jihadis from Atme Camp in Syria to Tel Abyad in Syria, via Turkey.
CHP MP Says Sarin Gas Components Were Transferred To ISIS Via Turkey; Erdogan Accuses Him Of Treason; Criminal Investigation Against Him Is Launched
On several occasions – at an October 21, 2015 press conference, in an early December 2015 interview with the Russian news agency RT, and in a December 10, 2105 speech in the Turkish parliament, CHP MP Eren Erdem said that components for sarin gas had been imported from foreign countries, some of them European, by Turkish businessmen on behalf of an ISIS operative, and delivered to a terrorist organization in Syria, for the production of chemical weapons that were later used in Syria.[6]
Erdem said that his claims were based on a 2013 investigation, case file number 2013/139, by the Chief Prosecutor’s Office in the southern province of Adana. According to this investigation, five Turkish citizens the wanted Al-Qaeda/ISIS militant and Syrian citizen Hayyam Qassap were arrested and prosecuted for procuring the toxic components to be transferred to ISIS in Syria.
Erdem stressed that the statements he was making were not his own, but that he had been quoting a Republic’s Chief Prosecutor. He added that in late June 2013 this case had been closed and a news blackout imposed on it, and that on July 1, 2013 the six accused had been released from prison and allowed to cross into Syria.
Erdem launched a parliamentary inquiry in October 2015 demanding government explanations in this matter, but to date Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has not responded.
On December 18, 2015, Erdogan publicly accused Erdem of treason. The same day, the Ankara Chief Prosecutor’s Office sent a summary of proceedings to the Ministry of Justice for permission to begin legal action against Erdem; if it is sent on to the parliament, the process to strip him of his parliamentary immunity so that he can be tried for treason will begin.[7] Since then, he has been threatened by the pro-AKP media and subjected to a lynching campaign on social media; in addition, he and his family have received death threats.
On December 23, 2015, Erdogan blasted Erdem again, calling him a “traitor,” and also slammed CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu for his defense and protection of Erdem. The previous evening, in a televised interview,[8]Erdem had reiterated that he had accused neither Turkey nor the government, but had only objected to the release of the suspected businessmen and of a Syrian militant who had attempted to procure illegal chemical components to transfer to Syria via Turkey.[9]
“Jihad Hospital” In Turkey For Islamist Terrorists
In September 2015, the Turkish opposition daily Birgun visited a 75-bed “jihad hospital” in the border province of Gaziantep that treats the mujahedeen fighting in Syria, and on September 22 reported:[10] “Turkey… is turning a blind eye to a medical support network serving the Islamic Front militants. The administrators of the six-floor, 75-bed hospital in Gaziantep told Birgun that during the first eight months of 2014 they had treated well over 700 militants; they administrators also expressed their gratitude to the local security officials and the AKP municipality for their assistance, and for the AKP government’s support.”
The Birgun report continued: “The AKP government… continues to assist the jihadi organizations, and by permitting the operations of a medical network that extends from Aleppo to Ankara and Istanbul, is trying to strengthen the hand of the Islamic Front, an umbrella organization for many jihadi groups fighting in Syria, which is structured like ISIS and has at least 45,000 active fighters, especially in the Idlib and Aleppo areas. Their wounded are treated in Gaziantep.
“The treatment of the wounded fighters is made possible by ImkanDer, an Islamist association, whose regional representative is Sait Gokdere. He is the former executive of the Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH), that became known in connection with from the 2010 sailing of the Mavi Marmara to break Israel’s blockade on Gaza. Gokdere told us that the IHH focused their activities on Syria when the civil war broke out, and that thanks to the AKP government’s permission and support, ‘may Allah bless them,’ they were able to provide health services to the mujahideen at this rehabilitation facility and in the many houses in the area that have been turned into clinics, reaching a capacity of 150 beds. He said that the hospital personnel were conducting their activities, and exiting and entering Syria officially, with the permission of the authorities.
“Doctors with whom we [Birgun] spoke explained that the treatment of wounded fighters begins with receiving news [of them] from Aleppo, through their local sources there. They then dispatch vehicles into Syria to bring them over. The seriously wounded are taken to state hospitals in Kilis or Gaziantep, and in the rare cases when they are not able to treat their injuries, they are sent to hospitals in Ankara or Istanbul. Once these wounded mujahedeen are out of intensive care, they are taken to the home clinics or to this hospital. Upon their recovery, they return to Syria to resume fighting.”
A recovering jihadi in the “jihadi hospital” in Gaziantep. Birgun, September 22, 2015
ISIS In Turkey
Since 2013, the opposition media in Turkey have been reporting on the spread of Salafi ideology within the country, and on the steady stream of thousands of Turkish jihadis who join ISIS, Jabhat Al-Nusra, Ahrar Al-Sham, and other terrorist organizations in Syria. An estimated 10,000 Turkish jihadis have gone to Syria to join the fight, as the AKP government has turned a blind eye.
Turkish ISIS Militant In Ankara: ISIS “Loves Turkey, Because Of The Ease At The Borders And For Its Allowing Safe Passage To Fighters Of Many Nationalities”
Birgun interviewed multiple ISIS militants in the Hacibayram district, in Ankara, which has become an ISIS center. While its report, published July 8, 2015, included names of recruiters and recruits, the Turkish government has done nothing to stem the flow of recruits into Syria.
C.A., 29, told Birgun that initially there had been many Al-Qaeda operatives in the area, but that they had declared their allegiance to ISIS. He recounted how, after he decided to go to the Islamic State in February 2014, he had established contact with some well-known people in order to cross the border. He told how upon arrival he had received education in Koranic verses, Hadith, shari’a law, and the high purpose of ISIS’s fight, and then had received military training. He said he fought there for nine months and could not remember how many people he had killed.
Asked whether he had seen any Turkish police or soldiers during his border crossings, C.A. said: “Turkey permits the crossings to Dawla [the Islamic State]. My first time, I came face to face with a military police officer. They see you, but pretend they don’t,” Only once, he said, the last time he returned to Turkey was he caught – and that time he was taken before a judge, who released him. Asked about how ISIS views Turkey, and whether “talk that ISIS militants may [be planning to or intending to] conduct operations inside Turkey” was true, C.A. answered: “Dawla loves Turkey, because of the ease it provides at the borders and for its allowing safe passage to fighters of many nationalities. The mujahideen there [in the Islamic State] criticize Turkey because it is not ruled by Allah’s rule, but there is no thought or intention to fight Turkey. Turkey, on the other hand, helps us because we fight particularly against the Kurdish PKK. Allah knows, if ISIS is given one month without the [coalition and Russian] air raids, we will eliminate the PKK.”[11]
Turkish Jihadi: “Jihad Is A Religious Obligation, Like Daily Prayers; If A Muslim Is Hurt In The Arctic, We Would Go There Too”
The major mainstream Turkish daily Hurriyet tracked ISIS in five Turkish cities, interviewing the families of many who had joined ISIS, and some jihadis. The report, published September 22, 2014, showed how easy it was for thousands of Turkish and foreign fighters to cross the southeastern border of Turkey into Syria, and how a new breed of Islamist associations, Islamist lodges, Islamist chat rooms, and Islamist bookstores and cafes were popping up around the country encouraging young Turks to join the jihad and to receive Islamic education and preliminary training. The report also mentioned young jihadis who had fought alongside ISIS or the Al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat Al-Nusra and who had returned to Turkey to receive medical treatment after being wounded.
An ISIS recruit, interviewed in Istanbul, told the reporters that he had entered Syria five times. Like the other recruits, he said, he had been escorted by militants to the border, jumped the fence, and ran into one of the houses on the Syrian side. First, he had joined Jabhat Al-Nusra, but then switched to ISIS. Asked whether he would also go to fight in other Muslim countries, he answered: “It is a religious obligation. Jihad [is] like daily prayers. If a Muslim is hurt in the Arctic, we would go there too.”
Worried families told Hurriyet that that their sons had gone “to die for the Muslims.” A father in Gaziantep said that his son, 22, and nephew, 34, had both left to join ISIS, and that when he reported this to police, he was told: “Everybody goes there [to ISIS]. Don’t mess with this issue, so as not to get yourself into trouble.”[12]
In a July 2015 column titled “ISIS Among Us,” Aydin Engin wrote in Cumhuriyet that not only were the suicide bomber who carried out the July 20, 2015 attack in Suruc, that killed 33, and the bombers who killed over 100 in Ankara on October 10, 2015 Turkish citizens who had joined ISIS, but that there were thousands more like them across Turkey. He wrote that ordinary citizens in all the cities and towns of the southern border provinces of Turkey can easily point out ISIS houses, ISIS cells, the wounded ISIS militants brought in daily from Syria to their hospitals, and groups of ISIS members sitting at tables in restaurants. Engin asked how it would be possible for the AKP government and the MIT not to be aware of what every citizen knows so well – i.e. that ISIS is everywhere in Turkey.[13]
ISIS Affiliates In Istanbul Hold Events, Call For Jihad – Without Interference By Turkish Security
While Turkish police are always present at protests, and frequently disperse crowds with water cannon, pepper gas, and, sometimes, bullets, Islamist organizations are allowed to openly demonstrate and call for shari’a law and jihad, in major cities. Similarly, the AKP government closes down media outlets and websites of dissenters and Kurds, while Islamist websites disseminating ISIS propaganda are left to operate freely.
ISIS-affiliated group at an encampment in an Istanbul park allocated to them by the AKP celebrates Ramadan, praises ISIS, and calls to jihad. Photos: Rotahaber and Twitter, July 29, 2014.
A general view of houses from a hilltop in Abbottabad, Pakistan. (photo credit:REUTERS)
It is a testament to the precarious state of the world today that in a week that saw North Korea carry out a possible test of a hydrogen bomb, the most frightening statement uttered did not come from Pyongyang.
It came from Pakistan.
Speaking in the military garrison town of Rawalpindi, Pakistani Army chief Gen. Raheel Sharif said that any Iranian threat to Saudi Arabia’s territorial integrity will “wipe Iran off the map.”
Sharif made the statement following his meeting with Saudi Arabia’s defense minister and Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. According to media reports, Salman was the second senior Saudi official to visit Pakistan in the past week amid growing tensions between Iran and the kingdom.
Salman’s trip and Sharif’s nuclear threat make clear that following the US’s all-but-official abandonment of its role as protector of the world’s largest oil producer, the Saudis have cast their lots with nuclear-armed Pakistan.
When last October, the USS Harry Truman exited the Persian Gulf, the move marked the first time since 2007 that the US lacked an aircraft carrier in the region. Nine years ago, the US naval move was not viewed as a major statement of strategic withdrawal, given that back then the US had some one hundred thousand troops in Iraq.
While the USS Truman returned to the Gulf late last month, its return gave little solace to America’s frightened and spurned Arab allies. The Obama administration’s weak-kneed response to Iran’s live-fire exercises on December 26, during which an Iranian Revolutionary Guards vessel fired rockets a mere 1,370 meters from the aircraft carrier as it transited the Straits of Hormuz, signaled that the US is not even willing to make a show of force to deter Iranian aggression.
And so the Saudis have turned to Pakistan.
It would be foolish to view Sharif’s nuclear threat as mere bluster.
By every meaningful measure, Pakistan is little more than a failed state with nuclear weapons. Pakistan appears in every global index of failed or failing states.
To take just a few leading indicators, as spelled out by Basit Mahmood in a report last summer for The Political Domain, barely 1% of Pakistanis pay taxes of any kind. More than half the population lives in abject poverty. The government has no control over most Pakistani territory.
Between 2003 and 2015, more than 58,000 people were killed by terrorism countrywide.
Public health is a disaster. Polio, eradicated throughout much of the world, is now galloping through the country.
Last summer more than 1,300 people died in a heat wave in the supposedly advanced city of Karachi.
These data do not take into account the wholesale slaughter and persecution of minority groups – first and foremost Christians – and the systematic denial of basic human rights and widespread, violent persecution of women and girls.
As for its nuclear arsenal, a 2010 report by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists estimated that Pakistan possesses between 70 and 90 nuclear warheads. Other credible reports estimate the size of the arsenal at 120.
Pakistan refuses to adopt a no-firststrike policy. In the US and worldwide, it is considered to be the greatest threat to global nuclear security.
Following a Pakistani jihadist assault on the Indian parliament in late 2001, India and Pakistan both deployed forces along their contested border. In the months that followed, due to Pakistani nuclear threats, the prospect of nuclear war was higher than it had ever been.
Cold War nuclear brinksmanship – which reached its high point during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis – paled in comparison.
In 2008, following the Pakistani jihadist assault on Mumbai, India threatened to retaliate against Pakistan.
India’s threats rose as evidence mounted that, as was the case in 2001, the jihadists were tied to Pakistan’s ISI spy service. Once again, rather than clean its own house, Pakistan responded by threatening to launch a nuclear attack against India.
And now, following the unraveling of US-strategic credibility, Pakistan’s aggressive nuclear umbrella is officially coming to the Persian Gulf.
Saudi Arabia’s decision to turn to Pakistan for protection indicates that the second wave of the destruction of the Arab state model is upon us. The notion of Arab states was invented nearly 100 years ago by the British and French at the tail end of World War I. The Sykes-Picot agreement, which partitioned the Arab world into states, rewarded national dominion to the most powerful tribal actors in the various land masses that became the states of the Arab world.
With the possible exception of Egypt, which predated Sykes-Picot, the Arab states formed at the end of World War I were not nation states. Their populations didn’t view themselves as distinct nations. Rather the populations of the Arab states were little more than a hodgepodge of tribes, clans and sectarian and ethnic groupings. In each case, the British and French made their determinations of leadership based on the relative power of the various groups. Those chosen to control these new states were viewed either as the strongest factions within the new borders or as the most loyal allies to the European powers.
The first wave of Arab state collapse began six years ago. It submerged the non-royal regimes, which fell one after the other, like houses of cards.
Syria, Libya, Iraq and Yemen ceased to exist.
Egypt, which in the space of two years experienced both an Islamist revolution and a military counter-revolution, still teeters on the brink of collapse.
Lebanon will likely break apart at the slightest provocation.
Today we are seeing the opening stages of the collapse of the Arab monarchies, and most importantly, of Saudi Arabia.
Most of the international attention to Saudi Arabia’s current threat environment has focused on Iran. The Iranian threat to the Saudis has grown in direct proportion to the Obama administration’s determination to realign the US away from its traditional Sunni allies and towards Iran. The conclusion of the US-led nuclear pact with Tehran has exacerbated Iran’s regional aggression as it no longer fears US retaliation for its threats to the Sunni monarchies.
But Iran is just the most visible of three existential threats now besetting the House of Saud.
The most profound threat to the world’s largest oil power is economic.
The drop in world oil prices has endangered the kingdom.
As David Goldman reported last week in the Asia Times, according to an International Monetary Fund analysis, the collapse in Saudi oil revenues “threatens to exhaust the kingdom’s $700 billion in financial reserves within five years.”
The house of Saud’s hold on power owes to its oil-subsidized economy. As Goldman noted, last month dwindling revenues forced the Saudis to cut subsidies for water, electricity and gasoline.
According to Goldman, Riyadh’s mass execution of 43 long-jailed prisoners at the start of the month was an attempt by the aging royal house to demonstrate its firm control of events. But the very fact the Saudi regime believed it was necessary to stage such a demonstration shows that it is in distress.
The third existential threat the regime now faces is Islamic State. Since 1979, the Saudis have sought to deflect domestic opposition by promoting Wahabist Islam at home and Wahabist jihad beyond its borders.
Now, with Islamic State in control over large swathes of neighboring Iraq, as well as Syria and Libya and threatening the Saudi-supported Sisi regime in Egypt, the Saudi royal family faces the rising threat of blowback. Some analysts argue that given the popular support for jihad in Saudi Arabia, were Islamic State to cross the Saudi border, its forces would be greeted with flowers, not bullets.
If the House of Saud falls, then the Gulf emirates will also be imperiled.
The Egyptian regime, which is bankrolled by the Saudis and its Gulf allies will also be endangered. The Hashemite monarchy in Jordan, which is protected by the US and by Israel, will face unprecedented threats.
The implications of expanding chaos – or worse – in Arabia are not limited to the Middle East. The global economy as well as the security of Europe and the US will be imperiled.
Obviously, the order of the day is for the US security guarantee to Saudi Arabia to be reinforced, mainly through straightforward US action against Iranian naval aggression and ballistic missile development.
Unfortunately, the Obama administration can be depended on to take just the opposite approach. And as a consequence, at least for the next year, the main thing propping up the Gulf monarchies, and with them, the global economy and what passes for global security, is a failed state with an itchy finger on the nuclear trigger.
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