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Progressivism: Easing the Way to Mass Murder

September 26, 2015

Progressivism: Easing the Way to Mass Murder, American Thinker, Kenneth Levin, September 26, 2015

The progressive creed as it relates to foreign policy, and as represented most notably by our Progressive-in-Chief, President Obama, holds that the impact of United States behavior in the world has largely been negative. It casts American foreign policy as a variation on European colonialism: exploitative, indifferent to the peoples subjected to American attention and intervention, and inexorably engendering anti-American sentiment among those peoples.

The translation of this comprehension of the world into a progressivism-informed foreign policy has had the effect of making the world safer for mass murder.

President Obama has offered apologies for past American policy to Europeans, to Arabs and the Muslim world more broadly, to the peoples of Central and South America. Various media outlets have noted that, according to a 2011 Wikileaks publication, only a negative response by the Japanese government prevented Mr. Obama from going to Hiroshima in September, 2009, and offering apologies for America’s atomic bomb attack on the city.

But whatever the President’s erstwhile intentions vis-a-vis Hiroshima, the broader focus of his apologetics has been on those nations and peoples that are hostile to America. His key foreign policy syllogism, and that of America’s progressive camp, is that anti-American sentiment is essentially a product of American abuses and that American self-reform and accommodation, a kinder, gentler United States, will bring an end to current hostility and engender a new comity between this nation and its long-time victims.

Most of the world’s nations offer their citizens at best very limited rights. Some authoritarian regimes have close relations with the United States; others are hostile to the United States. One might think that progressives would object to despots of whatever sort and aspire to the liberation of populations from such governments.

But that is not case. The progressivist pattern, rather, is to oppose despotic regimes with which this nation has had positive relations but to be sympathetic and accommodating towards those that have viewed us as the enemy — that view being congruent with progressive orthodoxy.

Moreover, the advocates of genuine democratic reform in closed societies of either sort, pro- or anti-American, are essentially given short shrift. Such advocates typically look to the United States as a model for their aspirations, and that is sufficient to alienate, and preclude any hoped for support from, the progressive camp. Within pro-American authoritarian regimes, American progressives reserve their sympathy primarily for anti-regime forces that likewise look to America as the source of their respective nations’ ills and seek to replace those in power with a despotism of their own, a despotism with an anti-American stamp.

In Latin America, a number of democracies have in recent decades been subverted by left-wing populists who gained power at the ballot box and then proceeded to dismantle their nations’ democratic institutions with, for example, measures against competing parties, a free media and an independent judiciary. The pattern was established by Hugo Chavez, who became president of Venezuela in 1998, and was followed by, among others, Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador. The new despots commonly justified their anti-democratic measures as necessary to counter the supposed nefarious aims of parties domestic and foreign, among which the United States is commonly trotted out as key bogeyman.

Obama and his administration displayed a notable sympathy for Chavez and have likewise done so for his emulators. The victims — among media figures or political opponents — that suffered at the hands of the post-democratic strongmen have enjoyed no such sympathy. Amazingly, when President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras likewise sought to undo his nation’s democracy and consolidate his personal control of the country but had his subversion of Honduras’s constitution blocked by the nation’s parliament and courts, the Obama administration backed Zelaya, attacked the “coup” that pushed him from power, and sought his reinstatement.

All of these populist despots were supported, of course, by Castro’s Cuba, which remains the chief example of anti-democratic leftism in Latin America both in terms of its longevity and in terms of its record of thousands murdered and myriad more imprisoned among those who have dared to take issue with the island’s dictatorship. But here, too, the progressive camp, and the Obama administration, have chosen to look upon the regime’s anti-American cant sympathetically, to see the proper way forward as American reform and cultivation of the Castros, and to close their ears and eyes to the regime’s victims.

But this progressivist cultivating of despotic forces which have only their anti-Americanism to recommend them takes on an even more sinister hue — indeed, much more sinister, in terms of the slaughters perpetrated by such forces and essentially ignored by American progressives — in the arena of the Muslim Middle East.

Virtually from its inception, the Obama administration has demonstrated support for the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood, founded in 1928 and closely linked to the Nazis during World War II, has consistently promoted an anti-American, anti-Western and anti-Semitic agenda. Its offshoot, Hamas, openly declares its dedication not only to the murder of all Israel’s Jews but of all Jews worldwide. Yet the Obama administration has appointed American Muslims associated with the Muslim Brotherhood to government posts and even as liaisons with federal law enforcement and security agencies and the military, and Brotherhood associates have been frequent guests at the White House.

Obama intervened to provide Brotherhood leaders prominent audience placement for his 2009 Cairo speech in which he apologized for America’s past role in the Middle East and sought more generally to propitiate the Arab and broader Muslim world. The President subsequently undercut pro-American Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak when the so-called “Arab spring” exploded in Egypt. He helped force Mubarak from office, and, as in Latin America, rather than support moderate, democratically oriented, groups in Egyptian society in the shaping of an alternative to Mubarak (including groups that consisted of Muslims and Coptic Christians working together for a democratic Egypt), threw his support behind the Brotherhood. One expression of this was the administration’s pushing for quick elections, which provided less time for challengers to the Brotherhood — the best organized political group in Egypt — to mount effective campaigns.

The election in June 2012, did bring the Brotherhood to power, with Mohamed Morsi as president and with the White House’s blessing. In the ensuing months, which saw increased murderous Brotherhood assaults on Egypt’s Coptic Christians — more than ten percent of the population and the Middle East’s largest Christian community — as well as Brotherhood cultivation of its Hamas protégés, the Obama administration continued to offer its support. (The only high profile criticism of Morsi came in the wake of the rarest of events, a New York Times front page, above-the-fold piece on Muslim anti-Semitism, in this instance a newly revealed Morsi anti-Semitic diatribe recorded some years earlier. On this occasion, the White House finally felt obliged to break from its typical indulgence of the Brotherhood and its leaders by releasing some comment condemning Morsi’s remarks.)

The Brotherhood ultimately lost popular favor, in large part because of its failure to address Egypt’s economic ills. But Egyptians were also put off by Morsi’s pursuit of the Brotherhood’s Islamist agenda. As, for example, The Economist noted

“… [I]n power the Brotherhood began to abandon its previous caution regarding its foes. Mr Morsi appeared to dismiss secular opponents and minorities as politically negligible. Instead of enacting the deeper reforms that had been a focus of popular revolutionary demands, such as choosing provincial governors by election rather than presidential appointment, or punishing corrupt Mubarak-era officials, the Brothers simply inserted themselves in key positions…

“When nearly all the non-Islamist members of a body charged with drafting a new constitution resigned in November 2012, the Brothers brushed the problem aside. Mr Morsi issued a snap decree rendering him and his constitution-writers immune from court oversight. This was when his popularity started to slide…

“The Brothers pushed through a hastily drafted constitution to a national referendum despite angry criticism from all other parties, and the referendum went Mr Morsi’s way. But his high-handedness lost him a crucial part of the electorate…”

But, again, none of this seemed to dampen Obama’s enthusiasm for Morsi and the Brotherhood, and when the Egyptian army under Abdel Fattah al-Sisi deposed Morsi in July, 2013, with wide popular support, the White House condemned the coup and dismissed its popular backing and the transgressions of the Morsi regime that generated that support. For much of the subsequent two years, the administration has given the pro-American al-Sisi the cold shoulder. Its withholding of military grants and sales to Egypt — only recently softened to some degree — has pushed al-Sisi to renew Egypt’s long dormant military links with Russia.

Before its victory in Egypt, the country where the Muslim Brotherhood had been most successful in gaining power had been Sudan, where its members made up a large part of the government following the 1989 coup d’état by General Omar Hassan al-Bashir. Bashir, who still rules Sudan, led a genocidal campaign against the black and non-Muslim — Christian and animist — population of southern Sudan over many years, until that region successfully seceded and established its independence. He currently continues a campaign of mass murder and displacement of the Muslim — but, again, black rather than Arab — population of Darfur. Bashir is under indictment by the International Criminal Court for genocide in Darfur.

President Obama, during his 2008 campaign as well as in earlier speeches, promised to act against the Darfur genocide. But he has done nothing, even as the slaughter, displacement and suffering continue. On the contrary, the Obama administration has reached out to Bashir. In addition, consistent with the Sudan government’s wishes and despite the horrible consequences for the people of Darfur, the administration appears to be supporting the downsizing of the UN peacekeeping mission in Darfur. Once again, for President Obama, appeasing anti-American entities such as the Muslim Brotherhood, an appeasement consistent with progressive orthodoxy, trumps supporting the victims of those entities.

Obama’s favorite Middle East leader has long been, according to various sources, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Turkey is, of course, a NATO member and remains so even under Erdogan’s Islamist regime. It is not openly anti-American. But Erdogan has clearly turned away from the West, has developed close ties with the Muslim Brotherhood and has sought to establish himself as the leading figure in a Middle East and broader Muslim world dominated by Islamist policies that emulate those of the Brotherhood.

Having notably described democracy as like a streetcar from which one exits upon reaching one’s destination, Erdogan has done much to undermine Turkish democracy. He has essentially dismantled the nation’s independent judiciary, closed down opposition media and arrested journalists — with Turkey having more journalists incarcerated than either China or Iran — and engineered his Islamist camp’s infiltrating and seizing control over other Turkish institutions, both public and private.

Erdogan was an enthusiastic supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power in Egypt, is reported to have cried over the downfall of Morsi and the Brotherhood, and some months ago declared that he still regards Morsi rather than al-Sisi as Egypt’s president. He remained silent over and apparently indifferent to the Brotherhood’s slaughter of Egyptian Christians both before and during its period in power.

Erdogan likewise supports the Brotherhood offshoot Hamas in its genocidal war against Israel and has, through statements by him and leaders of his party and through his party-controlled media, whipped up domestic anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiment. He has opened Turkey as a refuge for members of both Hamas and the Egyptian Brotherhood, and attacks on Israelis, such as the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers last year, have been orchestrated by senior Hamas agents in Turkey.

Yet none of this seems to have shaken President Obama’s enthusiasm for the Turkish leader. On the contrary, Erdogan’s turning from the West and embracing an agenda close to that of the Brotherhood has, once more consistent with the president’s progressive world view, rendered him worthy of the administration’s propitiation.

Obama’s reaching out to the Iranian mullahs virtually from the moment of his taking office in 2009 is likewise in line with his progressivist comprehension of foreign hostility to the United States as a response to past American transgressions. Following from this, his path to ending the hostility lay in breaking from that past, offering mea culpas for it, and cultivating new policies of understanding and comity.

More particularly, the CIA’s involvement in the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1953 (which in fact at the time had the support of Iran’s religious establishment) and America’s subsequent ongoing support for Shah Reza Pahlavi are construed as the source of Iranian enmity and the history for which the President seeks to apologize and atone.

The popular uprising that followed the disputed reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June, 2009, led to the regime’s killing of dozens of protesters and the arrest and reported torture and rape of thousands more. Protesters urged the outside world, particularly the United States and President Obama, to support them, but Obama refrained even from offering significant verbal support, apparently not wanting to do anything that might undermine his outreach to the mullahs.

In the ensuing years, torture, including rape, and murder of political prisoners, among them suspected student critics of the regime culled in raids on Iranian universities, have been an ongoing fact of life in Iran. So, too, have been the imprisonment and execution of homosexuals and individuals accused of religious crimes, and abuses targeting members of the embattled Baha’i community and elements of Iran’s ethnic minorities, who represent more than fifty percent of the nation’s population.

But on all of this the Obama administration has been essentially silent as it has pursued its policy of winning over the apocalyptic Iranian theocracy through accommodation and concessions. That policy culminated this summer in the agreement on the Iranian nuclear program, which provides Iran with a path to nuclear weapons and even offers American aid to Iran in defending its nuclear program against sabotage and attack.

Nor has the administration let Iran’s role in killing Americans in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Iraq, and Iran’s assertions of never compromising in its enmity towards America, interfere with Obama’s agenda of pursuing its progressivist fantasies of peace with Iran through accommodation. Nor has the mullahs’ genocidal anti-Semitism, including their openly and repeatedly declared determination to destroy Israel, or their arming and training of Hezb’allah and Hamas to pursue Israel’s annihilation, led to the administration’s wavering from its course. On the contrary, the nuclear agreement appears to offer Iran protection against any Israeli attempt to derail the Islamo-fascist theocracy’s development of nuclear weapons. It also promises to soon provide the regime with tens of billions of dollars in previously embargoed funds, which has already translated into Iran’s embarking on a massive acquisition of advanced warplanes and other major weapons systems from China and Russia and its promising enhanced military aid to Hezb’allah and its other terrorist allies for use in pursuit of Israel’s destruction.

But the off-handedness regarding existential threats to Israel, and regarding as well myriad instances of wholesale human rights abuses, including mass slaughter by those the Obama administration has sought to propitiate, is apparently due to such matters being regarded as of no great consequence when measured against the central international dynamic as construed by progressivism. Administration indifference to the fact of some of those hostile regimes and non-state entities — the objects of American cultivation — having dismantled working democracies or having strangled incipient democratic movements derives from the same worldview. All their various crimes are mere epiphenomena, at most secondary, and potentially an unwelcome distraction, when measured against what is comprehended as the essential world-shaping dynamic: hostility towards America whose roots lie in past American abuses, and an end to hostility and creation of a more peaceful world through American contrition and accommodation.

In this way, Obama’s, and the progressive camp’s, comprehension of reality and playing out of that delusional “reality” on the world stage inexorably makes the world safer for the crimes, including mass murder, of the anti-American forces that are the object of progressivist propitiation.

Categories: Antisemitism, Appeasement, Dishonor, Egypt, Foreign policy, Free world, Hamas, Hezbollah, Human rights, Iran scam, Iranian proxies, Islamic nations, Islamic supremacy, Islamism, Israel, Latin America, Leftists, Middle East, Muslim Brotherhood, Obama - rogue president, Obama's America, Obama's legacy, Political Islam, Rogue nations
Tags: Antisemitism, Appeasement, Egypt, Foreign Policy, Free world, Hamas, Hezbollah, human rights, Iran Scam, Iranian proxies, Islamic nations, Islamic supremacy, Islamism, Israel, Latin America, Leftists, Middle East, Muslim Brotherhood, Obama's America, Obama's legacy, Political Islam, Rogue nations

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The Holocaust Museum defends Muslim Brotherhood Nazis

September 25, 2015

The Holocaust Museum defends Muslim Brotherhood Nazis, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, September 25, 2015

united-states-holocaust

Despite the constant threats to destroy the Jewish State, Iran is also rated at low risk. Instead the Holocaust Museum claims that the real threat of genocide is in Egypt which is “experiencing a mass killing episode perpetrated by the current regime against the Muslim Brotherhood and oppositionists.”

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The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum was tainted from the start.

Carter created the President’s Commission on the Holocaust to pander to the Jews after endorsing a PLO state. Then Carter complained that there were too many Jews on the Commission. One of the Jews he was complaining about was a Presbyterian with a German last name, but he was too bigoted to care.

The Museum hit a new low when the Clinton administration pressured its chairman to invite Arafat, a protégé of Hitler’s Mufti who had been trained to kill Jews by a former Nazi officer. It hit an even lower low when it brought in John K. Roth who had compared Israel to the Nazis.

Now the Holocaust Memorial Museum has rolled out an “Early Warning Project” to warn of the risk of mass killings and genocide.

According to the “Project,” Israel is not at risk of genocide. Its risk assessment is lower than the UK or Panama. If another Holocaust happens, it’s more likely to take place in London or Brazil. (But the EWP also claims that America and New Zealand are at a higher risk of mass killings than Cuba even though the Castro regime, unlike New Zealand Prime Minister John Key, actually engaged in mass killings.)

Despite the constant threats to destroy the Jewish State, Iran is also rated at low risk. Instead the Holocaust Museum claims that the real threat of genocide is in Egypt which is “experiencing a mass killing episode perpetrated by the current regime against the Muslim Brotherhood and oppositionists.”

Jews don’t face genocide in the Middle East. The Nazi-influenced Muslim Brotherhood does. Muslim Nazis are the real victims of a new Holocaust.

The Muslim Brotherhood was allied with Hitler. It distributed Arabic translations of Mein Kampf. Hitler’s Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who headed the Muslim Brotherhood’s affiliate in Israel, had personally met with Hitler, encouraged the extermination of the Jews and visited the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

The Mufti had preached genocide, encouraging Muslims to “get rid of this dirty race… Kill the Jews, burn their property, destroy their stores” making him one of the earlier promoters of BDS.

Five years after the Holocaust, Sayyid Qutb, the Muslim Brotherhood’s leading thinker, wrote a pamphlet titled, “Our Struggle with the Jews”. Qutb’s Muslim Brotherhood had been heavily influenced by Nazi Germany and the title and theme were deliberate echoes of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

Qutb claimed that the Jews were the source of all evil. Like Hitler, he insisted that there was a struggle for world domination, except instead of a struggle between Aryans and Jews, it was a struggle between Muslims and Jews. He echoed Hitler’s claims that the Jews had invented sex and materialism and blamed them for everything from the Sunni-Shiite split to the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

The intellectual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood even insisted that Hitler had been an instrument of Allah to punish the Jews. The claim was recently repeated by Sheikh Qaradawi, the Brotherhood’s current Qutb, who said, “Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them – even though they exaggerated this issue – he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hands of the believers.”

The “believers” are the Muslims. As opposed to the unbelievers who are everyone else. The Muslim Brotherhood likes what Hitler did to the Jews, but it wants to carry out the next Holocaust on its own.

Or as Qaradawi put it, “count their numbers and kill them down to the very last one.”

If the Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Early Warning Project were really concerned about “genocide” in Egypt, it might have noted the Muslim Brotherhood attacks on Christians and churches.

It might have spoken up when video emerged of the Muslim Brotherhood’s former Egyptian president, Mohammed Morsi, urging his followers “to nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred for them: for Zionists, for Jews.”

Egyptian children, “must feed on hatred; hatred must continue,” he said. “The hatred must go on for Allah and as a form of worshiping him.”

The Early Warning Project might have noted that the charter of the Muslim Brotherhood affiliate in Gaza, the terrorist group Hamas, states, “The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews”. And Hamas is doing its best to advance that date.

But instead the front page of the Holocaust Museum focuses on Syrian refugees. The piece on the Muslim migrants invading Hungary begins with the statement that, “In the 1930s, the world watched as Nazi Germany forced its beleaguered Jewish population to leave their homes.”

The piece is written by a Syrian who served as the Holocaust Museum’s Director of Special Events.

The Holocaust Museum has spent a good deal of time on Syria. It even hosts a paper describing the Muslim Brotherhood’s Sheik Moaz al-Khatib as “a well-respected, moderate Sunni cleric”. It leaves out his statement that Saddam Hussein’s positive legacy was “terrifying the Jews”.

The Museum obsesses over false Muslim claims that they are being persecuted by Buddhists in Burma and Hindus in India. It takes the time to visit Syria, but not Sderot. It puts up photos of Syrians, but not Jewish families murdered by members of genocidal Islamofascist terrorist organizations.

Despite all the propaganda, the Muslim Rohingya illegal aliens in Burma are not being exterminated. Muslim terror against Jews in Israel however is part of an ongoing campaign of genocide.

Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, warned, “If the Jewish state becomes a fact, and this is realized by the Arab peoples, they will drive the Jews who live in their midst into the sea.”

“Kill the Jews wherever you find them,” the Mufti of Jerusalem had proclaimed. “Allah is with you.” Hamas declares that, “Killing Jews is worship that draws us close to Allah”.

There was a reason why Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust, turned for sympathy to the Muslim world. “You 360 million Mohammedans to whom I have had a strong inner connection since the days of my association with your Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. You, who have a greater truth in the surahs of your Koran. I call upon you to pass judgment on me.”

The Holocaust Museum’s Early Warning Project is ignoring Muslim genocide aimed at Jews while promoting the bizarre myth that the Muslim Brotherhood is at risk of genocide. It couldn’t be any stranger if the Holocaust Museum had begun insisting that Neo-Nazis face genocide in Germany.

“Either this place will be a sanctuary, or it will be an abomination,” Elie Wiesel had said of the museum.

It did not take long for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to become an abomination. From its early days, a museum dedicated to teaching about the evil of the Final Solution instead became a platform for promoting the newest attempt to solve the “Jewish problem” with the Two-State Solution.

Now it approaches the final phase of the left’s Post-Holocaust Anti-Semitism where Muslims are transformed into Jews so that Jews may be transformed into Nazis to justify another Holocaust.

After all this time, the Holocaust Museum has decided that the Nazis were the real victims.

Categories: Antisemitism, Arafat, Carter, Death to Israel, Egypt, Hamas, Hitler, Human rights, Ideology, Iranian Threats, Islamic supremacy, Israel, Jews, Judaism, Leftists, Morsi, Muslim Brotherhood, Nazis, Religion, Sisi
Tags: Antisemitism, Arafat, Carter, Death to Israel, Egypt, Hamas, Hitler, human rights, Ideology, Iranian threats, Islamic supremacy, Israel, Jews, Judaism, Leftists, Morsi, Muslim Brotherhood, Nazis, Religion, Sisi

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Egypt’s War on Terrorism Bears Fruit

September 24, 2015

Egypt’s War on Terrorism Bears Fruit, Gatestone Institute, Khaled Abu Toameh, September 23, 2015

Egyptian President Sisi’s war against the smuggling tunnels will undoubtedly weaken Hamas and other radical groups in the Gaza Strip. Sisi should be commended, rather than criticized, for his courageous actions against Islamist terrorists, both in the Gaza Strip and in Sinai.
Sisi’s actions will benefit not only Egyptians, but also many Palestinians who are opposed to Hamas and radical Islamist groups.
When the Egyptians destroy a Hamas tunnel, that is called “war on terrorism.” But when Israel destroys a tunnel, that is condemned as an “act of aggression.” This moral slithering is why it is important for the international community to stand behind Sisi’s relentless war on radical Islam.
Without such backing, Islamists will continue to pose a major threat not only to Israel, but to many Arabs and Muslims who oppose Hamas, Islamic State and Islamic Jihad.
The environment of the Gaza Strip is the last thing that Hamas cares about. Hamas did not think about damage to the environment or to agricultural fields when it used those fields, as well as populated areas, as launching pads for attacking Israel.

Egypt began this week flooding smuggling tunnels along their border with the Gaza Strip with water from the Mediterranean Sea — a move being condemned by Hamas and other Palestinian factions as a “disturbing nightmare.”

The Egyptian army’s move is another sign of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s determination to destroy the tunnels that were used to smuggle weapons, people and merchandise from Sinai to the Gaza Strip and the other way around.

This act is also a sign of Sisi’s resolve to pursue his military campaign against Islamist terror groups that are waging war against the Egyptian authorities in Sinai. The Egyptians are convinced that Hamas and other Palestinian groups have been providing aid to the terror groups in Sinai.

Since the beginning of the year, dozens of Egyptian soldiers and police officers have been killed in a spate of terror attacks launched by Islamist groups in Sinai.

Earlier this week, Egypt’s Interior Ministry announced that terrorists shot dead an Egyptian general in Sinai. In another similar shooting a few days earlier, a terror group killed General Khaled Kamel Osman.

The decision to pump water into the smuggling tunnels is seen as a severe blow not only to the terror groups in Sinai, but also to Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other Palestinian factions inside the Gaza Strip.

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Seawater covers parts of the ground where Egypt has been pumping water into smuggling tunnels along the border with Gaza. (Image source: Al Jazeera video screenshot)

Judging from the reaction of the Palestinian groups, it is clear that they are in a state of hysteria as they see their tunnels collapsing one after the other.

In a statement published in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian groups, including Hamas, denounced the flooding of the tunnels as a “disturbing nightmare” for the Palestinians. The factions appealed to the Egyptian authorities to “stop this despicable crime against the Palestinian people and their environment.”

“The Palestinian people are surprised by the Egyptian move, which will tighten the blockade on the Gaza Strip, destroy vast areas of agricultural land and harm those living near the border (with Egypt),” the statement said.

Initially, Hamas leaders did not take the reports about flooding the tunnels seriously. Some Hamas leaders, in fact, first thought that these were rumors designed to scare them and other Palestinian groups in the Gaza Strip.

But when Hamas leaders woke up on September 13 to discover that the Egyptians had begun pumping water into the smuggling tunnels, they could not believe what they were seeing.

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri announced that his movement asked the Egyptians to stop flooding the tunnels with seawater. “We hope that the Egyptians will comply with our demand,” Abu Zuhri said. “This measure is completely unacceptable and poses a threat to many families living alongside the border.”

Sources in the Gaza Strip noted this week that the Egyptian move has thus far proven to be effective and successful. They said that since being flooded with water, several tunnels have collapsed.

It is worth noting that despite its outrage, Hamas has stopped short of issuing threats against Egypt in response to the flooding of the tunnels.

Hamas’s response would have been different had it been Israel that was flooding the tunnels with water. But Hamas knows very well that it would not be a good idea to mess with the Egyptian authorities and President Sisi.

During the past two years, the Egyptians have destroyed hundreds of smuggling tunnels along their border with the Gaza Strip. Nevertheless, Hamas did not dare launch one terror attack against Egypt.

Hamas is now pretending that it is concerned about the damage to the environment that is caused by the flooding of the smuggling tunnels. But the truth is that the environment of the Gaza Strip is the last thing that Hamas cares about.

Hamas did not think about damage to the environment or to agricultural fields when its men fired thousands of rockets at Israel in the past few years. In fact, Hamas used these fields, as well as populated areas, as launching pads for attacking Israel.

Hamas is interested only in one thing: preserving its rule in the Gaza Strip. The tunnels that are now being destroyed by the Egyptians were used by Hamas to smuggle all types of weapons into the Gaza Strip. Hamas warlords are also believed to have earned millions of dollars from the smuggling industry during the past few years.

Sisi’s war against the smuggling tunnels will undoubtedly weaken Hamas and other radical groups in the Gaza Strip. The Egyptian president should be commended, rather than criticized, for his courageous actions against Islamist terrorists, both in the Gaza Strip and in Sinai.

Sisi’s actions will benefit not only Egyptians, but also many Palestinians who are opposed to Hamas and radical Islamist groups. Israel also stands to benefit from Sisi’s war against Hamas. The destruction of the tunnels means fewer weapons used by Hamas to attack Israel.

However, Israel still has good reason to be worried about Hamas’s plans and intentions.

While Sisi is busy flooding the tunnels on the border with Egypt, Hamas continues to dig new ones on the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel.

It is no secret that Hamas has also managed to rebuild many of the terror tunnels that were used to infiltrate gunmen into Israel during last year’s military confrontation between the two sides. Hamas is planning to use these tunnels in the future, to dispatch its men to kill as many Israelis as possible.

The Israelis have thus far been monitoring the situation very closely and have refrained from attacking the tunnels. That is because Israel is keen on maintaining the unofficial truce with Hamas that was reached in the aftermath of last year’s war, known as Operation Protective Edge.

There is not much that Israel can do at this stage other than hope that Sisi will continue with his measures to undermine Hamas. Any attempt by Israel to flood a Hamas tunnel will most likely spark an international outcry and bring condemnations from the United Nations. In addition, such a move on the part of Israel is likely to trigger a violent response from Hamas — one that could lead to another war.

When the Egyptians destroy a Hamas tunnel, that is called “war on terrorism.” But when Israel destroys a tunnel, that is condemned as an “act of aggression.” This moral slithering is why it is important for the international community to stand behind Sisi’s relentless war on radical Islam. Without such backing, the Islamists will continue to pose a major threat not only to Israel, but to many Arabs and Muslims who oppose Hamas, Islamic State and Islamic Jihad.

Categories: Defense of Israel, Egypt, Gaza, Hamas, Islamic terrorism, Israel, Siani, Sisi, Terror tunnels
Tags: Defense of Israel, Egypt, Gaza, Hamas, Islamic terrorism, Israel, Siani, Sisi, terror tunnels

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Ben Carson in CAIR’s crosshairs

September 21, 2015

Ben Carson in CAIR’s crosshairs, Front Page Magazine, Robert Spencer, September 21, 2015

(Isn’t it shameful that Dr. Carson is a politically incorrect “Islamophobe?” What is that, anyway?

Don’t we want ~~another~~ a Muslim in the White House? Then Obama could be truly proud of America. What could possibly go wrong? — DM)

ben-carson

Carson was right. But now the media sharks, ever eager to do the bidding of Hamas-linked CAIR and other Islamic supremacists, will be circling – and hungry. If he is forced to drop out for saying things CAIR doesn’t like, it will be just one more nail in the coffin of the free society that CAIR disingenuously professes to love and support, but which it is actually doing all it can to subvert.

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If Ibrahim Hooper of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has any say in the matter, whoever the next President is, it won’t be Ben Carson. “He is not qualified to be president of the United States,” fumed CAIR’s Ibrahim Hooper, no doubt an unimpeachable authority on who is and is not qualified to be President, on Sunday. “You cannot hold these kinds of views and at the same time say you will represent all Americans, of all faiths and backgrounds.” What views? Carson said: “I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not agree with that.” He said that this was because Islam contradicted important Constitutional principles.

CAIR, designated a terror organization by the United Arab Emirates, sent out an email Sunday saying it would hold a news conference demanding that Carson withdraw from the presidential race for daring to say these things. “Mr. Carson clearly does not understand or care about the Constitution, which states that ‘no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office,’” said CAIR top dog Nihad Awad. “We call on our nation’s political leaders – across the political spectrum – to repudiate these unconstitutional and un-American statements and for Mr. Carson to withdraw from the presidential race.”

But the problems with a Muslim being President aren’t religious, they’re political. Islamic law infringes upon the freedom of speech, forbidding criticism of Islam. Islamic law denies equality of rights to women. Islamic law denies equality of rights to non-Muslims. If a Muslim renounced all this, he or she could be an effective Constitutional ruler, but in today’s politically correct climate, no one is even likely to ask for such a renunciation. Instead, no one even acknowledges that these really are elements of Islamic law.

No one, that is, except the Muslim clerics who agree with Carson. Syrian Islamic scholar Abd Al-Karim Bakkar said in March 2009: “Democracy runs counter to Islam on several issues….In democracy, legislation is the prerogative of the people. It is the people who draw up the constitution, and they have the authority to amend it as well. On this issue we differ” — because in Islamic thought, only Allah legislates.

Abd Al-Karim Bakkar was reflecting a common view. Pakistan Muslim leader Sufi Muhammad said in May 2009: “I would not offer prayer behind anyone who would seek to justify democracy.” Mesbah Yazdi, leader of the Shia Taliban in Iran, said in September 2010 that “democracy, freedom, and human rights have no place” — in Islam, that is. Australian Muslim cleric Ibrahim Saddiq Conlan said in June 2011: “Democracy is evil, the parliament is evil and legislation is evil.”

In January 2013, the Saudi Islamic scholar Sheikh Abdul Rahman bin Nassir Al Barrak declared: “Electing a president or another form of leadership or council members is prohibited in Islam as it has been introduced by the enemies of Moslems.” The idea of popular elections, he said, “has been brought by the anti-Islam parties who have occupied Moslem land.”

Some Muslims in the West hold these views as well. In April 2015, Muslims in Wales plastered Cardiff with posters reading: “Democracy is a system whereby man violates the right of Allah and decides what is permissible or impermissible for mankind, based solely on their whims and desires. This leads to a decayed and degraded society where crime and immorality becomes widespread and injustice becomes the norm. Islam is the only real, working solution for the UK. It is a comprehensive system of governance where the laws of Allah are implemented and justice is observed.”

And two Muslim groups in Denmark last June called on Muslims to boycott the elections that were held that month. One explained: “We are committed to being active participants in our society, but it has to be on Islam’s terms, without compromising our own principles and values. Democracy is fundamentally incompatible with Islam, and it is a sinking ship.” The Grimshøj mosque in Aarhus agreed, issuing a statement saying that “people should stay clear of the voting booths. We have concluded that only Allah can pass laws, as he says himself in the Koran that this is so.”

Tunisian author Salem Ben Ammar wrote last month: “‘To hell with democracy! Long live Islam!’ One hundred percent of Muslims agree with that. To say anything else is apostasy from Islam. These two competing political systems are antithetical to each other. You can’t be democratic and be a Muslim or a Muslim and be a democrat. A Jew can’t be a Nazi and a Nazi can’t be a Judeophile.”

Question for Hamas-linked CAIR’s Hooper and Awad: are all these Muslims “Islamophobes” for saying that Islam and democracy are incompatible, or is that honor reserved only for Carson (and other infidels)? And are either or both of you cognizant of the irony of pretending to uphold Constitutional values while demanding that a man drop out of the Presidential race for the crime of exercising his freedom of speech? Are either or both of you aware that you have thereby just become poster children for how correct Ben Carson really was?

Carson was right. But now the media sharks, ever eager to do the bidding of Hamas-linked CAIR and other Islamic supremacists, will be circling – and hungry. If he is forced to drop out for saying things CAIR doesn’t like, it will be just one more nail in the coffin of the free society that CAIR disingenuously professes to love and support, but which it is actually doing all it can to subvert.

Categories: CAIR, Doctor Ben Carson, Freedom, Hamas, Human rights, Islam, Islamic jihad, Islamic slaughter, Islamic supremacy, Islamism, Islamophobia, Obama's affinity for Islam, Political correctness, Sharia law, Theocracy, U.S. 2016 elections, U.S. politics, U.S. President, Western media
Tags: CAIR, Doctor Ben Carson, Freedom, Hamas, human rights, Islam, Islamic Jihad, Islamic slaughter, Islamic supremacy, Islamism, Islamophobia, Obama's affinity for Islam, Political correctness, Sharia law, Theocracy, U.S. 2016 elections, U.S. politics, U.S. President, Western media

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Watch: Children on Hamas TV Say they Want to ‘Blow Up the Jews’

September 17, 2015

Watch: Children on Hamas TV Say they Want to ‘Blow Up the Jews,’ Elad Benari, September 17, 2015

Hamas is continuing to use its media to educate young children to carry out “jihad” against Jews.

The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) has exposed a clip from a children’s show on the Hamas-owned Al-Aqsa TV channel which shows young children, dressed in military fatigues, asked what they want to be when they grow up.

One of the children said that he wanted to be an engineer, “so that I can blow up the Jews.” Another recited a poem, “I shall liberate [Jerusalem] from the Jews by means of the Al-Qassam Brigades.”

MEMRI has in the past published several clips which show Arab youths vowing to fight “the occupation”.

A clip released by MEMRI earlier this year showed footage from a youth camp organized by Hamas’s so-called “military wing”, in which young cadets learn how to use weapons and simulate the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier.

A previous clip shows a televised graduation ceremony for a similar Hamas youth camp in Gaza. At the ceremony, suicide terror attacks against the “Zionist enemy” were glorified by Hamas officials.

Hamas has also in the past released a cartoon honoring its “military wing”.

Categories: Child soldiers, Death to Israel, Gaza, Hamas, Islamic supremacy, Israel, Jews, Palestinian heroes, Palestinians, Two state solution
Tags: child soldiers, Death to Israel, Gaza, Hamas, Islamic supremacy, Israel, Jews, Palestinian heroes, Palestinians, Two state solution

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Nuclear Jihad

September 7, 2015

Nuclear Jihad, Gatestone Institute, Denis MacEoin, September 7, 2015

In the year 628, Muhammad, now ruling in Medina, signed the ten-year Treaty of Hudaybiyyah with his long-time enemies, the tribal confederacy of Quraysh, who ruled Mecca. Twenty-two months later, under the pretext that a clan from a tribe allied with the Quraysh had squabbled with a tribe allied to the Muslims, Muhammad broke the treaty and attacked Mecca, conquering it. It is as certain as day follows night, that the Iranian regime will find a pretext to break the deal. Already, on September 3, the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamene’i made it clear that he would back out of the deal if sanctions were not completely removed at once.
The Iranian regime not only despises democracy; it considers all Western law, including international law, invalid.
The Shi’a consider themselves underdogs, who are willing to sacrifice all to establish the rights of their imams and their successors. That was what the 1979 revolution was all about, and it is what present the Iranian regime still insists on as the justification for its opposition to Western intrusion, democracy, women’s rights and all the rest, which are deemed by Iran’s leadership as part of a plot to undermine and control the expansion of the Shi’i faith on the global stage. These are not Anglican vicars.
The Iranian Army and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps “have responsibility… for a religious mission, which is Holy War (Jihad) in the path of God and the struggle to extend the supremacy of God’s law in the world.” — Iran’s Constitution, Article “The Religious Army”.
A Third World War is already taking place. The Iran deal strengthens the hands of a regime that is the world’s terrorist state, a state that furthers jihad in many places because its clerical hierarchy considers itself uniquely empowered to order and promote holy war.
Obama’s trust in Khamene’i’s presumed fatwa of 2013, forbidding nuclear weapons, rests on the assumption that it even exists. It does not. Even if it did,fatwas are not permanent.
Why, then, is this deal going ahead at all? Why is one of the world’s most tyrannical regimes being rewarded for its intransigence, and especially for repeatedly violating the Non-Proliferation Treaty?

“[Some] analysts,” writes the historian and former Israeli Ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, “claimed the president [Barack Obama] regarded Iran as an ascendant and logical power — unlike the feckless, disunited Arabs and those troublemaking Israelis — that could assist in resolving other regional conflicts. I first heard this theory at Georgetown back in 2008, in conversation with think tankers and former State Department officials. They also believed Iran’s radical Islam was merely an expression of interests and fears that the United States could with sufficient goodwill, meet and allay. … Iran, according to Obama was a pragmatic player with addressable interest. For Netanyahu, Iran was irrational, messianic, and genocidal – ‘worse,’ he said, ‘than fifty North Koreas.'”[1]

Since the signing of the deal at the UN, hot-tempered criticisms and defences have gone into overdrive in the political, journalistic, and diplomatic spheres. Acres have been written and are still being written about the deal, making it the hottest political potato of recent years. Expert analysts such as Omri Ceren and, more recently, Joel Rosenberg have cut through the deliberate obfuscation to show the extent of the dangers the deal presents to the Middle East, the United States, Israel, and the world.

The deal’s supporters insist that it will bring peace and calm to the region, while a host of denigrators — chief among them Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu — have exposed the enormous risks it entails. Already, a vast majority of American citizens are opposed to the deal.

Within the U.S. Congress, bipartisan opposition to the deal is high and mounting. Yet, on September 2, President Obama succeeded in winning over a 34^th senator, enough that ultimate passage of the deal is a foregone conclusion. That does not, however, mean that the debate will end. In all likelihood, it will grow fiercer as time passes and true consequences become clearer to the public and politicians alike.

Recent revelations that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which oversees nuclear developments worldwide, has agreed that only Iranians will be allowed to inspect the most controversial of Iran’s nuclear sites, have raised anxieties about proper monitoring of the deal. The military complex of Parchin, where Iran is suspected of work on nuclear weapons, will be closed to outside inspection, making it certain that, if Iran decides to cheat (something it has done before), it will be able to do so with impunity. Sanctions will not be re-imposed. And, as we shall see, cheating on the deal can be justified by the Iranians who could always refer to the practice of the prophet Muhammad with the Quraysh tribe in Mecca.

Obama, his Secretary of State John Kerry, and the entire US administration are not merely behind the deal, but almost fanatically so. Many argue that Obama is more interested in securing his “legacy” as the world’s greatest peacemaker (or war-creator, as the case may well turn out to be), the statesman par excellence who alone could bring the theocratic regime of Iran in from the cold and shower the Middle East with true balance in its troubled affairs.

To bring this about, Obama has had to diminish, if not leave totally open to obliteration, American support for Israel, the single country in the world most clearly exposed to a possible genocide should the Iran’s Islamic regime choose to exterminate it, as it has so often threatened to do.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s words mellal-e Eslami bayad Esra’il-ra qal’ o qam’ kard – “the Islamic nations must exterminate Israel” — have been given renewed vigour now that it is highly likely that Iran, evading serious inspections by the IAEA, will soon possess the weapons to do just that.

Even if the treaty is a done deal, it is time to show yet another massive hole in the administration’s strategy. Already, Obama, Kerry and the tightly knit administration have shown themselves remarkably obdurate in turning a blind eye to the many concerns that surround the deal. At the end of the “sunset period,” if not sooner, Iran gets to have, legitimately, as many bombs as it likes. Other problems include breakout times; centrifuge production; centrifuge concealment; uranium enrichment by stealth; refusal to allow the IAEA to inspect military sites; the acquisition of intercontinental ballistic missiles — presumably to be used intercontinentally at guess who. It is no secret that the hardliners in Iran still speak of America as “The Great Satan” and consider it their enemy. That does not even include the implications of lifting sanctions on, and paying billions of dollars to, the world’s main sponsor of terrorism.

As Michael Oren has shown, however, the American president presumably thinks he is doing a deal with a logical and pragmatic regime. Barack Obama, an intelligent, well-read man of Muslim origin, knows almost nothing about Islam; that is the greatest flaw in the Iran deal he has fought so hard to inflict on the human race. With access to platoons of experts, to some of the greatest libraries with holdings in Islamic doctrines and history, and with the Mullahs and Iran’s public still daily promising to destroy America, Obama apparently still believes Islam is a religion of peace and that a theocratic, terror-supporting, medieval regime should have the power to make nuclear bombs. The obverse is that he might like, perhaps not wittingly, to see America, Israel and the West brought to their knees.

This author has previously exposed one aspect of Iran’s serious lack of logic, rationality, or pragmatism — namely the extent to which apocalyptic thinking, messianic prophecy, and dreams of Islamic transcendence through universal conflict pervade the clerical elite, a high percentage of the masses, and even the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. One might assume that this would be especially true when they are flush with cash and nuclear weapons, and the risk to their own survival is substantially lower.

On August 17, just over a month after the signing of the nuclear deal, Iran’s Supreme Leader, ‘Ali Khamene’i, addressed a religious conference, where he expressed his undying hatred for the United States. He said, for example:

We must combat the plans of the arrogance [i.e. the West, led by the U.S.] with jihad for the sake of Allah. … jihad for the sake of God does not only mean military conflict, but also means cultural, economic, and political struggle. The clearest essence of jihad for the sake of God today is to identify the plots of the arrogance in the Islamic region, especially the sensitive and strategic West Asian region. The planning for the struggle against them should include both defense and offense.

The deal has done nothing whatever to stop military threats to Israel, an ally of the United States (though treated with disrespect by America’s president). Speaking on 2 September, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp’s top commander in Tehran province, Brigadier General Mohsen Kazemayni, stated that, “… they [the US and the Zionists] should know that the Islamic Revolution will continue enhancing its preparedness until it overthrows Israel and liberates Palestine.”

There is a simple word for this: warmongering.

Why is the U.S. President insisting on a bad deal with a warmongering regime?

When a military force at its strongest fantasizes about the coming of a Messiah (the Twelfth Imam) to lead them to victory over all infidels, talk of logic, rationality and pragmatism seems acutely out of touch with reality.

Obama’s assumption that there is something solid about the Iranian regime that makes it suitable as a recipient for such largesse and the chance to enrich uranium until kingdom come seems to be based on false consciousness. The regime has been in place for almost forty years, quite a respectable time for a dictatorship. In part, that has been because it has mastered the art of suppression, giving its people a degree of freedom that is missing in several other Islamic countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Sudan, or Afghanistan. These partial freedoms, especially for young people, lull the population into risk-averseness, possibly helped along by the memory in 2009 of pleas for more freedom, which the United States ignored and the mullahs savaged.

Obama, in his ongoing attempt to portray Islam as benign — and a dictatorial regime as a sold basis for peace and understanding in the Middle East — ignores the religious element of the theocracy, as well as the sadistic repression, and in doing so misses a lot.

First of all, Shi’ite Islam is different from its Sunni big brother. It is deeply imbued with features largely absent from Sunni Islam. The most important Shi’i denomination is that of the Twelvers (Ithna’ ‘Ashariyya), who, from the beginning of Islam, have believed themselves to be not only the true version of the faith, but the group destined by God to rule in its name. Beginning with ‘Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet and the fourth Caliph of the Sunnis, the Shi’a began as his supporters. (Please see the Appendix that follows this article: it contains material that even Barack Obama and his advisors need to know; without it, they simply will not “get” what the ayatollahs are about. It comes to an important conclusion that has considerable bearing on today’s events — and not the one you may expect.)

Beneath the smiles and banter lie the unsmiling masks and the taqiyya-flavoured lies. Beneath the wheeling and dealing and the refusals to compromise lies a sense of destiny for the regime, a belief that it stands on the brink of the realization of the centuries-old Shi’ite dream: that God will finally set his people on the pinnacle of the world and usher in the never-ending reign of the Imam Mahdi, with all injustice gone, the martyrs in paradise, the ayatollahs and mujtahids andmaraji’ in glory, and all the infidels in hell.

It is precisely because Barack Obama and his aides have never got down and dirty to take in hard information that they have remained utterly out of touch with the real springs and cogs of Iranian Shi’ite thinking.

Obama has, when all is said and done, let himself be deluded by the charm offensive of Hassan Rouhani and his henchman Javad Zarif. Obama may not believe in the mystical land of Hurqalyaor the white steed on which the Twelfth Imam will ride to the world’s last battle any more than you or I do. But the clerical elite of Iran, and those who follow them blindly — men and women brought up from birth on these tales, and who travel in the thousands every day to send a message to the Imam at the Jamkaran Mosque near Qom — believe these things with absolute devotion, and that is why this story matters, because it has political consequences.

Shi’i Muslim law enshrines jihad, holy war, as fully as does Sunni law. For Sunnis, jihad has always been possible under the authority of a Caliph, whether fought under his orders or led by kings and governors under his broad aegis.

The Shi’a, however, do not recognize the Caliphate and have often been the victims of Sunni jihads. They may feel impelled to fight a holy war, but under what authority could they do so?

The power of the clergy had waned under the anti-clerical reign of Iran’s Pahlavi dynasty (1925-1979), only to burst out more strongly than ever in the Islamic Revolution, which placed all authority in a new system of government: rule by a religious jurist, a faqih.[2] Overnight, a jihad state was brought into existence; a jihad state with vast oil reserves, modern military equipment, and, at first, the support of almost the entire Iranian population. The clerical hierarchy under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini did not just intend to prepare the way for the coming of the Mahdi. They were now his earthly deputies, in whose hands lay life and death for millions.

The new Shi’ism allowed the clergy to take on powers they had never imagined. More and more economic and legal power came to be concentrated in the hands of a narrow body of scholars, and sometimes a single man could be the source of religious and legal authority for the entire Shi’i world — in Iran, Afghanistan, eastern Arabia, Bahrain, and so on. Thus were the foundations laid for the revolutionary rank of Supreme Leader, taken by the Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamene’i.

Look for a moment at the preamble to the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran.[3] You will see quickly that this does not read like any other constitution you have seen. The preamble sets the tone. Here, in an account of the circumstances leading to the revolution we read of the clergy as the ruhaniyyat-e mobarez, “the militant or fighting clergy.” These are not Anglican vicars at their prayers or rabbis studying Talmud. A mobarez is a warrior, a champion, a fighter. Not far down the preamble, one encounters a description of their struggle as “The Great Holy War,”jihad-e bozorg. We are not in Obama’s world of logical and pragmatic striving for political and diplomatic coherence. This is made even clearer in one of the constitution’s earlier articles, “The Religious Army.” Here, we read that the Iranian Army and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps “have responsibility… for a religious mission, which is Holy War (Jihad) in the path of God, and the struggle to extend the supremacy of God’s law in the world.”

How do you reach a compromise and a pragmatic deal with a regime that thinks in this way? Are the U.S. administration and the P5+1 blind to something the Iranians have never even bothered to conceal? Do they really take everything in the talks at face value? Perhaps they think references to jihad and fighting clergy are nothing more than pious talk “for domestic consumption,” as they tried to explain — as real and everyday as the myths and legends of other faiths. If they do, then they have far less excuse for their blindness, for the Iranian regime is already at war and is already fighting its jihad.

In Iraq, for example, a country with a majority Twelver Shi’i population, Iranian-backed militias have been at war for many years, first against the Americans, then the Sunnis, and now the hordes of Islamic State. In June 2014, Grand Ayatollah al-Sayyid ‘Ali al-Husayni al-Sistani issued a fatwa calling on Iraqis to fight against Islamic State, justifying their fight as jihad wajib kafa’i: a Jihad that is compulsory for those who choose it, but not for the entire population. The ruling calls for a struggle against ISIS’s irhab – their “terrorism.” Jihad is a religious and legal duty, and even though ISIS may call its fighting jihad, it is here condemned as terror.

Hezbollah, created and backed by Iran, is by far the largest terrorist group in the region. Hezbollah is considered a state within a state, with forces and infrastructure inside Lebanon and Syria. It has used the name “Islamic Jihad Organization” to cover its attacks on Israeli forces in Lebanon. In its 1988 Open Letter (Risala maftuha), it describes its followers as “Combatants of the Holy War” and goes on — in terms similar to those in the Hamas Covenant — “our struggle will end only when this entity [Israel] is obliterated. We recognize no treaty with it, no cease fire, and no peace agreements, whether separate or consolidated.”

Hezbollah and its creator, the Iranian Islamic regime, have a curious link to the Palestinian terror movement, Hamas, despite Hamas being exclusively Sunni. By financing, arming, and defending Hamas, Iran is fighting a strange proxy jihad that serves its own purposes of defying the West, achieving regional hegemony, and winning praise from all Muslims in the world for its own war against Israel. It also furthers the goals of the Muslim Brotherhood (of which Hamas is the Palestinian branch) in the same struggle.

I have dragged you through the briars and mud because it is important here to see another culture through its own eyes. If we insist in pretending that Shi’i Muslims think like Sunni Muslims or, worse still, like Jews or Christians — if we brush all that history and all those doctrines under the carpet of “any deal is better than no deal ” — we will go on making the same mistakes. We will believe that a purely political and diplomatic enterprise to bring Iran in from the cold and create a new trading alliance will transform an evil regime into a land of sweetness and light.

Members of the U.S. Congress must wake up and examine, in however cursory a fashion, these views that motivate the Iranian leadership, and must stop pretending that they are as logical and pragmatic as would be convenient for the wishes of the West.

Not that Obama and Kerry have ever sounded logical or pragmatic in how they have approached this debate and this deal-making process. In an act of supreme folly, the White House has dismissed Ayatollah Khamene’i’s recent call for “Death to America;” they pretend it is just empty rhetoric for the Iranian people.

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Left: Senior Iranian cleric Ayatollah Mohammad Ali Movahedi Kermani, speaking on July 17 in Tehran, behind a banner reading “We Will Trample Upon America” and “We defeat the United States.” Right: Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, proclaims “Death to America” on March 2

We are walking with a blindfold toward sure disaster. Forget the dreams of a Messiah if you will, but do not for one moment let yourself be lulled into thinking that only ISIS is serious about waging a jihad.

Despite their oft-expressed delusion that “Islam is a religion of peace,” President Obama, Secretary John Kerry and other leaders are, like it or not, already engaged in a war against jihad. They have already fought it in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and elsewhere. However much Obama wants to stand off from involvement in the jihad struggles of the Middle East, he cannot: Western states are fighting jihad, sometimes abroad, increasingly at home.

A Third World War is already taking place, a war the Islamists and Islamic states understand, but which many in the West still refuse to grasp. They are not even willing to respect the true motivations of the enemies against whom they fight. The Iran deal strengthens the hands of a regime that is the world’s terrorist state, a state that furthers jihad in many places because its clerical hierarchy considers itself uniquely empowered to order and promote holy war.

Let us for the moment ignore the nuclear aspect of this deal and look instead on what it offers the world’s leading jihad state. The removal of sanctions coupled with the business deals Europeans and others are rushing to secure, the delivery of perhaps $150 billion to Tehran, and the turning of many blind eyes to both Iran’s internal repression and its jihad wars in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Gaza, and Lebanon leave the ayatollahs poised to dominate much of the Middle East.

And that is not all. Obama’s belief in the stability of the Iranian regime seems to rest on its endurance since 1979. His trust in Khamene’i’s presumed fatwa of 2013, forbidding nuclear weapons rests on the assumption that it even exists. It does not. No one has ever seen it. Even if the fatwa did exist, fatwas are not permanent. They are always regarded as temporary rulings with Twelver Shi’ism. This is a crucial technical point that the White House seems incapable of — or ill-disposed to — grasping.

Further, Obama’s faith in Iranian President Hassan Rouhani as a reformer and moderate flies in the face of Rouhani’s devotion to the hardline clerical leadership of which he is a part. Here are a few facts:

‘Ali Khamene’i is 76 years old, but his health is poor and he may not live much longer. Already, factions within the hierarchy will be jostling for the Supreme Leadership.
In the Usuli Twelver version of Shi’ism, once a Mujtahid dies, his fatwas are no longer valid. A new Mujtahid or, in this case, a new Supreme Leader, has to issue fatwas of his own. A new fatwa may confirm an old one or radically differ from it.
A new Supreme Leader is an unpredictable personality.
The Iranian nuclear program is already up and running.
The breakout time for weapons grade materials may be as short as three months.
Iran already has and is acquiring ballistic missiles with an intercontinental range.
Jihad is hard-wired into the regime’s philosophy.
Iran is already conducting a series of jihad wars abroad.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has expressed a hope to return to the presidency in 2017. Ahmadinejad and his clique are bent on apocalyptic outcomes and actions to bring the Hidden Imam back to this world.

We only have to get this wrong once. Chants of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” are not narcotic iterations of slogans but sincerely felt expressions of intent.

Khamene’i last month praised the Iranian people for calling for the deaths of the USA and Israel, and said that he hoped God would answer their prayers because in at most ten years, the Iranian mullahs and their IRGC will possess the power to exterminate Israel, if they and their God so wish.

Why, then, is this deal going ahead at all?

Why are sanctions against the world’s leading exporter of jihadi terrorism being lifted, not strengthened?

Why is one of the world’s most tyrannical regimes being rewarded for its intransigence, and especially for repeatedly violating the Non-Proliferation Treaty?

Why has Israel’s Prime Minister been vilified and sidelined simply for drawing attention to the weaknesses of a deal that could lead to the death of all of his people?

Why have the P5+1 never taken seriously the Shi’ite rule that it is permitted to lie to infidels and conceal one’s own true intentions?

Why are secrets being kept — such as the contents of the two side-deals?

Why is the U.S. Congress being asked to vote without the benefit of full disclosure?

Why is the IAEA banned from spontaneously inspecting only declared Iranian nuclear sites, and why are military sites completely off-limits?

The questions are so many and so critical that we remain in the dark about where this will lead mankind. No one who has ever done a financial or political deal would ever sign on the dotted line until they had answers to all their questions. Far more hangs on this deal than perhaps any deal in history. Yet those who want to make it enforceable under international law are uninformed about the most basic contents of the deal, as well as the beliefs and historical roots of their enemy.

Such folly is almost without precedence, except possibly in the process of appeasement that endeavoured to placate the Third Reich and treat Adolf Hitler as the best friend of democracy.

The Iranian regime not only despises democracy, it considers all Western law — including international law — invalid. This view has several deep roots. For both Sunni and Shi’i Muslims, only rule under God is valid, under a Caliph or a clerical theocracy under a Supreme Ruler. Human beings have no right to interfere. Democracy leads to the making of human laws that may contradict shari’a law, and such effrontery is considered arrogant and presumptuous. The democratic elements in Iran are tightly controlled, and supremacy rests in all areas beneath clerical authority. The same principle applies to international law, UN resolutions, treaties and so forth.

Iran has openly genocidal intent, as well as a devotion to holy war that goes to the very deepest level.

Before we leave the subject of jihad, there is one other factor that everyone has overlooked. It is the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, the most important agreement in early Islamic history. In the year 628, Muhammad, now ruling in Medina, signed the ten-year Treaty of Hudaybiyyah with his long-time enemies, the tribal confederacy of Quraysh, who ruled Mecca. Twenty-two months later, under the pretext that a clan from a tribe allied with the Quraysh had squabbled with a tribe allied to the Muslims, Muhammad broke the treaty and attacked Mecca, conquering it.

What is important about this is that Muhammad had made the treaty while he was still relatively weak. But in the months after signing it, his alliances and growing conversions meant that he now possessed superior military strength — and that was when he pounced.

In 1994, the treaty became crucial to the issue of peace between Israel and the Palestinians.[4]In September 1993, Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat signed the Oslo Accords along with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and the following year the two leaders were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

However, even as he awaited that prize, Arafat spoke at a mosque in Johannesburg alluded to the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah and referred to “a jihad to liberate Jerusalem”: “I see this agreement,” he said, “as being no more than the agreement signed between our Prophet Muhammad and the Quraysh in Mecca.”

Non-Muslims may well have misunderstood this as a reference to some early Muslim peace-making. But Arafat made his meaning clear: “We now accept the peace agreement, but [only in order] to continue on the road to Jerusalem.”[5]

The nuclear deal that President Obama and his supporters have imposed will strengthen Iran considerably, removing sanctions and delivering perhaps $150 billion to the country. It is as certain as day follows night, that the Iranian regime will find a pretext to break the deal. Already, on September 3, the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamene’i made it clear that he would back out of the deal if sanctions were not completely removed at once.

Whatever happens in the days ahead, the U.S. Congress, backed by a majority of the American public, needs to strike this madcap deal down before it wreaks a storm of tribulations on everyone.

Denis MacEoin has a PhD (Cambridge 1979) in Persian Studies and has written widely on Iran and its religious beliefs.

Appendix

‘Ali became the first in a line of twelve imams, all deemed the true leaders of Islam, but all denied their right to rule and all but one assassinated (or so it is claimed) by the Sunni Caliphs. From this comes the Shi’i sense of suffering, injustice, oppression by despots, neglect and rights — all of which played an important part in the 1979 revolution and continue to play out across society.

The Shi’a are the underdogs who are willing to sacrifice all to establish the rights of their imams and their successors. That was what the 1979 evolution was all about, and it is what present the regime still insists on as the justification for its opposition to Western intrusion, democracy, women’s rights and all the rest, which are deemed by Iran’s leadership as part of a plot to undermine and control the expansion of the Shi’i faith on the global stage.

The twelfth imam, according to Shi’ite legend, was a young boy, Muhammad al-Mahdi, the son of the murdered eleventh imam. Born in 869 in the Iraqi city of Samarra during the reign of the Sunni Abbasid Caliphate, his father, Hasan al-‘Askari, died when Muhammad was born.

It is said that young Muhammad, in order to avoid his enemies, went into something called Occultation (ghayba). Even if this originally was physical, he was never seen alive again and is supposed to have entered the celestial realm of Hurqalya, from which he will one day return as the promised Saviour, the Qa’im bi’l-Sayf, the One Who will Arise with the Sword to do battle with injustice and infidelity.

This belief is what waters modern Shi’i apocalypticism, something promoted intensely by former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This expectation has considerable significance for Iran’s drive to nuclear power. But that is not why I raise the issue here. There is another, more mundane, aspect to the Imam’s disappearance and continued Occultation, and it may be even more relevant to the matters at hand.

The answer to what authority they could fight under was that only the Imam in each generation could order or lead jihad. But when the twelfth Imam vanished from human sight, was jihad to remain in abeyance until his return or could it be fought under another authority? The answer was not at first simple, but one thing started to happen: the Shi’a began to consider their religious scholars to be the intermediaries with the Imam, and this laid the basis for the possibility that they might have the right to order jihad. For some time, this was just conjectural, for the Shi’a had little worldly power.

In 1501, a new dynasty, the Safavids, came to power in Iran, forced most of the population to convert to Shi’ism, and created a line of kings under whom the clerical class became more and more powerful. The Shah could still lead jihad, but the clergy were needed to give permission. The Safavid dynasty lasted till 1722, and an interregnum was followed by the emergence of a new line of Shahs, the Qajars, who ruled from 1796 to 1925.

Under the Qajars, the Shi’i clerical hierarchy underwent deep and lasting changes, producing today’s version of Twelver Islam, the Usulis.

The newly powerful ‘ulama of the 19^th century took on the mantle of deputies for the Hidden Imam and ordered jihads in 1809 and 1826 (against Russia), 1836, 1843, and 1856-7 (against the British). In 1914, when the British occupied Iraq at the start of World War I, the Shi’i clergy in the shrine centres there declared jihad to reinforce the call for Holy War by the Ottoman empire.

__________________________________

[1] Ally by Michael Oren

[2] As in Khomeini’s theory and book, Velayat-e Faqih, the Custodianship of the Jurisprudent.

[3] Here in English, here in Persian.

[4] For a detailed discussion of the treaty and its implications for making peace with Muslims, see Daniel Pipes, “Lessons from the Prophet Muhammad’s Diplomacy,” The Middle East Quarterly, September 1999, pp. 65-72.

[5] Natasha Singer, “Arafat Text Raises Ire,” Forward, May 27, 1994.

Categories: Death to America, Death to Israel, Diplomacy, Dishonor, Fatwa, Foreign policy, Freedom, Hamas, Hezbollah, Hidden Imam, Human rights, IAEA, Iran / Israel War, Iran nuke inspections, Iran scam, Iranian military sites, Iranian missiles, Iranian nukes, Iranian proxies, Iranian Threats, Islamic jihad, Islamic supremacy, Islamic terrorism, Islamism, Israel, Javad Zarif, Kerry, Khamenei, Middle East, Netanyahu, Obama, Obama's affinity for Iran, Obama's affinity for Islam, Obama's affinity for Obama, Obama's America, Obama's legacy, P5+1, Political Islam, Rouhani, Sanctions, Shiite, Sunni, Theocracy
Tags: Death to America, Death to Israel, Diplomacy, Fatwa, Foreign Policy, Freedom, Hamas, Hezbollah, Hidden imam, human rights, IAEA, Iran / Israel war, Iran nuke inspections, Iran Scam, Iranian military sites, Iranian missiles, Iranian nukes, Iranian proxies, Iranian threats, Islamic Jihad, Islamic supremacy, Islamic terrorism, Islamism, Israel, Javad Zarif, Khamenei, Middle East, Netanyahu, Obama, Obama's affinity for Iran, Obama's affinity for Islam, Obama's affinity for Obama, Obama's America, Obama's legacy, P5+1, Political Islam, Rouhani, Sanctions, Shiite, Sunni, Theocracy

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The Fiction of Political Islam

September 2, 2015

The Fiction of Political Islam, The Gatestone Institute, Bassam Tawil, September 2, 2015

To this day, the Obama administration mourns the fall of Egypt’s Islamist President Morsi, and turns a cold shoulder to forward-looking President el-Sisi, who is (sometimes) trying to take Egypt into the 21^st century and extricate Egypt from its economic and societal crisis.
Muslim Brotherhood terrorism against the Egyptian regime is a perfect example of how this “political movement” is in reality a terrorist movement whose objective is the violent overthrow of Egypt’s government. The White House, fully aware of the facts, continues hosting senior Muslim Brotherhood officials and shows them respect during consultations about the American Islamic community and U.S. policy in the Middle East.
Events in Sinai prove there is no such thing as “political Islam.” There is a radical Islamist leadership that represents itself to the gullible West as “moderate,” preaches violence from mosques, cloaks itself in ideological-religious tradition, and employs Islamist terrorists to attack civilians and Egyptian government targets.
It is hard not to conclude, looking at President Obama’s record (ignoring protesters of 2009 in Iran; “I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone”; the dictatorial way the Iran deal is bypassing the democratic process) that in his heart-of-hearts, he is far more committed to supporting extremist Islamist regimes — whether the mullahs of Iran or the Muslim Brotherhood — than to supporting democracy, individual freedoms or human rights.
The Europeans are more aware of the situation but woke up too late. As hundreds of thousands of migrants from Muslim lands continue to pour over Europe’s open borders, there is little doubt that radical Islam is poised to take over the West. Islamic communities and terrorist cells continue to mushroom throughout the cities of Europe.
The world is beginning to understand that the catastrophes of the Middle East have nothing to do with the resolution of the Palestinian issue but are caused by the innate homicidal tendencies of the Arab rulers and the regional Islamist terrorist organizations.

Hamas is in trouble. Its relations with Egypt are going from bad to worse, and the influx of money, primarily from Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the mosques in the Western world — where charity (zakat) was collected to finance anti-Israel terrorism — has dwindled to almost nothing. So has the flow of arms and explosives from Iran, Libya, Sudan and Lebanon. The resulted is the weakening of Hamas rule in the Gaza Strip, making it ever more difficult for Hamas to continue its ongoing subversion of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank and its non-stop attempts to overthrow President Mahmoud Abbas to take over the West Bank and establish there the sort of Islamic emirate it established in the Gaza Strip.

Hamas’s military buildup was halted when the President Mohamed Morsi’s radical Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt was toppled and General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi was elected President. Morsi, it will be recalled, strangely received support from President Obama until he was ousted. The Obama administration supported him despite Morsi enabling for the flow of money and arms to Hamas in Gaza to continue unhampered through the tunnels in the Sinai Peninsula. The weapons were used not only to attack Israel, but also to sabotage peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians and, indirectly, to attack the Palestinian Authority.

The Islamist terrorism festivities ended when President el-Sisi clamped down on the Islamists in Egypt, destroyed the tunnels and sealed Egypt’s border with Gaza. Since el-Sisi has been president of Egypt, Muslim Brotherhood rule has ended and the tunnels have been destroyed. It is hard to fathom why, to this day, the Obama administration mourns the fall of the Islamist Morsi administration and turns a cold shoulder to forward-looking el-Sisi, who is (sometimes) trying to take Egypt into the 21^st century and extricate Egypt from its economic and societal crisis.

Since el-Sisi has been in power, money and arms no longer flow through the tunnels into the Gaza Strip; instead they began to flow in the opposite direction, from the Gaza Strip into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. Since the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliated terrorist organizations, Hamas among them, have not accepted defeat, there has been an increase in terrorist attacks targeting the Egyptian regime both inside the country proper and in the Sinai Peninsula. The terrorist campaign receives ongoing support from the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ military-terrorist wing, and the ISIS-affiliated Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis. Both continuously attack the Egyptian police and army in the Sinai Peninsula, murder Egyptian officials and target Egyptian institutions.

The endless terrorist campaign in Egypt has proven yet again that the claim of a political Islam, separate from the terrorist organizations, is simply a lie. Muslim Brotherhood terrorism against the Egyptian regime is a perfect example of how the “political movement” tries to represent itself as dealing only with the da’wah [proselytizing], while in reality it is a terrorist movement whose objective is the violent overthrow of el-Sisi’s administration. The White House, fully aware of the facts, continues hosting senior Muslim Brotherhood officials and shows them respect during consultations about the American Islamic community and U.S. policy in the Middle East.

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While being hosted by the State Department on a visit to Washington in January 2015, Muslim Brotherhood judge Waleed Sharaby (left) flashed the organization’s four-finger “Rabia” sign. At right, ousted Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi (from the Muslim Brotherhood) displays the Rabia sign.

The events in the Sinai Peninsula prove there is no such thing as “political Islam.” There is a radical Islamist leadership that represents itself to the gullible West as “moderate,” preaches violence from the mosques, cloaks itself in ideological-religious tradition, and employs a hard core of Islamist terrorists to carry out attacks on civilians and Egyptian administration targets.

In the meantime, the real victims are the Egyptians. The Muslim Brotherhood’s terrorism has paralyzed Egypt’s tourist industry, as foreigners fear to visit Egypt’s antiquities. And now there are terrorist threats to the New Suez Canal, a project initiated and carried out under the leadership of General Sisi to turn both banks of the two canals into an international logistics, commercial and industrial area.

The Islamists’ plans are clear. First, they want to leverage violence, murder and countless Egyptian army casualties into establishing an autonomous terrorist enclave in the Sinai Peninsula. Then they will try to overthrow the Egyptian government and reinstate an Islamist Muslim Brotherhood regime headed by Morsi. That is exactly what their offshoot, Hamas, did in the Gaza Strip when it liquidated Palestinian Authority officials and established an Islamic emirate. The writing on the wall is still illegible as far as the U.S. government is concerned. Or else the Obama administration is still in the thrall of extremist Islam and its Muslim Brotherhood leaders. The two main ones are Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has just called new elections so that he can try again to acquire enough seats in parliament to amend Turkey’s constitution to award himself a one-man Sultanate, an absolute dictatorship-for-life to go along with his new palace. The other is Mohamed Morsi, whom Obama apparently is still backing.

It is hard not to conclude, looking at the U.S. president’s record (ignoring the protesters of 2009 in Iran; “I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone” and the dictatorial way the Iran deal has been short-circuited to bypass the democratic process) that in his heart-of-hearts, he is far more committed to supporting extremist Islamist regimes — whether the mullahs of Iran or the Muslim Brotherhood — than to supporting democracy, individual freedoms or human rights.

The Europeans are more aware of the situation but unfortunately woke up too late. As hundreds of thousands of migrants from Muslim lands continue to pour over Europe’s open borders, there is little doubt that radical Islam is poised to take over the West. Islamic communities and terrorist cells continue to mushroom and gather strength throughout the cities of Europe.

From the beginning of the wave of attacks in Egypt, senior Egyptian security officials threatened Hamas. Egypt warned Hamas to stop training, arming and sending its terrorists to collaborate with ISIS operatives in attacks against the Egyptian army. Hamas steadfastly denies any involvement, even as it continues collaborating with ISIS against Egypt.

As far as Hamas is concerned, destroying the Egyptian army is essential, because its continued actions along the Rafah border and in Sheikh Zuweid in the northern Sinai Peninsula prevent Hamas from acquiring money and stockpiling weapons to fight Israel, which weakens its subversion against Mahmoud Abbas and its plans to take over the West Bank.

Despite profuse denials, at the end of August 2015, four operatives from Hamas’s military-terrorist wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, were taken off a bus by armed Egyptians on the way from Rafah through the Sinai Peninsula to Cairo. Hamas immediately accused Israeli intelligence of responsibility and warned the Egyptian authorities that “the abduction of its operatives will not go unpunished.”

In response, Dina Ramez, a co-host on Egypt’s official TV station, called Hamas out on its lies and denials of its terrorist activities in the Sinai Peninsula against the Egyptian regime. She asked Hamas, “If you are not involved in terrorism, what were your senior Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades operatives doing in Sinai?” and called them “cockroaches.”

Sources in Hamas called her a “whore,” and called Egypt a loser country defeated by Israel, using a peace treaty to sell Palestine to the enemy. Was that really the way to thank Egypt for everything it has done for the Palestinians, sacrificing its army and soldiers for us? It is a sad situation for the Palestinians and for our leadership.

What have we Palestinians gained from Hamas’s military actions against Egypt? What have we gained from our solidarity with Islamist organizations fighting against Assad in Syria, or joining organizations such as the “Palestinian Liberation Army” fighting for Assad? Why are we killing each other in the Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp? Why do we refuse everything the Israelis offer us?

Anyone who remembers history remembers the ungrateful path trodden by the Palestinians against the Kingdom of Jordan, when our leaders, headed by Arafat, tried in 1970 to overthrow King Hussein, despite the refuge Jordan offered us during the catastrophes of the Nakba in 1948 and the Naksa in 1967. Then we did the same thing in Lebanon, to where we fled from Jordan. The PLO relocated its headquarters to Beirut, and went on to turn Lebanon into a terrorist country and the lives of the Lebanese into a nightmare. If the Israelis had not invaded Lebanon in 1982, and forced the PLO to relocate to Tunisia (where its behavior was also criminal), the Palestinians definitely would have destroyed Lebanon.

The Middle East is in chaos, and Palestinian factionalism and ingratitude continue to inflame the dissolution of the Arab states and the internal Palestinian division between Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.

The world is beginning to understand that the catastrophes of the Middle East have nothing to do with the resolution of the Palestinian issue, but are caused by the innate homicidal tendencies of the Arab rulers and the regional Islamist terrorist organizations.

The only person left who believes the Israeli-Palestinian nonsense is President Barack Obama, even though he is witness to the murders, rapes, beheadings and the millions of refugees, next to which the Palestinian issue is an old, irrelevant and very tired joke.

Categories: Defense of Israel, Egypt, Foreign policy, Gaza, Hamas, Iranian proxies, Islamic supremacy, Islamism, Morsi, Obama, Obama and Israel, Obama's America, Obama's legacy, Palestinian Authority, Palestinian heroes, Palestinians, Political Islam, Reform Islam, Siani, Sisi, Support for terrorism, West Bank
Tags: Defense of Israel, Egypt, Foreign Policy, Gaza, Hamas, Iranian proxies, Islamic supremacy, Islamism, Morsi, Muslim Brotherhood, Obama, Obama and Israel, Obama's America, Obama's legacy, Palestinian Authority, Palestinian heroes, Palestinians, Political Islam, Reform Islam, Siani, Sisi, Support for terrorism, West Bank

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Rocket from Gaza follows IDF-Palestinian clash in West Bank town of Jenin

September 1, 2015

Rocket from Gaza follows IDF-Palestinian clash in West Bank town of Jenin, DEBKAfile, September 1, 2015

Palestinian rocket fire from the Gaza Strip put southern Israel on red alert before dawn Tuesday. Sept 1 in the wake of a major clash that erupted in the West Bank refugee camp of Jenin Sunday night. The circumstances of that episode are not entirely clear. Israel playing the Jenin encounter down, whereas the Palestinians are presenting it as “the biggest battle of the third initifada.” An Israeli soldier and five Palestinians were injured.

It began, DEBKAfile’s military sources report, when a large combined force of the IDF, Shin Bet and Police Special Operations, riding in dozens of vehicles, entered the Jenin camp Monday night to round up Islamic Jihad and Hamas terrorist suspects. In the Al-Hadaf district, they surrounded the homes of Bassam Al-Saeedi, reputed Jihad chief on the West Bank, and Majdi Abu al-Hejja, a local Hamas military arm operative.

At some point, Israeli rocket fire badly damaged Al-Saeedi’s house.

The IDF sources say it was a single small rocket, without explaining why it was fired. The IDF spokesman first reported “a heavy exchange of fire” around the building. Early Monday, the word “heavy” was dropped from the briefing to reporters and finally, there was no reference to any exchange of fire at all.

The Palestinians claim that the Jihad leader was not at home at the time of the raid and so escaped his pursuers. But there is no word on either side about the fate of any occupants of building and whether any were killed.

Did the IDF decide to knock the building down in response to gunfire coming out of it? Or was it a warning to the Islamic Jihad and other Palestinian terrorist groups to halt their latest spate of violence or lose their homes?

Another mystery is how Bassam Al-Saeedi came to be away from home, confounding the information reaching the Shin Bet? Did he get a tip-off of the impending Israeli raid for his arrest?

If armed Palestinian groups on the West Bank have taken to posting spotters outside their areas to forewarn them of approaching Israeli forces, this would ratchet up their operational tactics to the military level observed by fellow Hamas and the Islamic Jihad groups in the Gaza Strip.

While Bassam Al-Saheedi escaped arrest, the Hamas operative Majdi Abu al-Hejja and his brother were captured and taken away for interrogation.

In weighing in heavily for a preventive detention operation against suspected terrorist leaders Sunday night, Israeli security chiefs were almost certainly acting on a decision to avert any possible terrorist action for disrupting the opening of the school year Monday, Sept. 1. The level of Palestinian violence on and from the West Bank and Jerusalem has risen sharply in recent weeks.

Thirteen years ago, at the peak of the Palestinians’ Second intifada, Israel launched a major assault on the Jenin refugee camp. Thirteen Israeli soldiers were lost in this major battle on April 5, 2002. Since then, the refugee camp has claimed to hold the flag of armed Palestinian resistance to Israel and its army. Security forces arriving there to detain suspects routinely come under a hail of rocks and firebombs. However, the current clash of arms represented a sharp escalation in the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation on the West Bank.

Categories: Defense of Israel, Hamas, IDF, Iranian proxies, Islamic jihad, Israel, Palestinians, West Bank
Tags: Defense of Israel, Gaza, Hamas, IDF, Iranian proxies, Islamic Jihad, Israel, Palestinians, West Bank

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Dividing the Arabs: America and Europe’s Double Game

August 29, 2015

Dividing the Arabs: America and Europe’s Double Game, The Gatestone Institute, Bassam Tawil, August 29, 2015

Iran is on its way in a few years to having nuclear weapons capability. The breakout time, according to President Obama, would effectively be “zero.” Iran could then make as many bombs as it would like, along with intercontinental ballistic missiles to delver them to major American cities, directly from Iran, from South America, or — making identification and retaliation impossible — from submarines submerged off the U.S. coast.
Obama with one hand allows Iran to glide to nuclear capability and encourage the Muslim Brotherhood and similar Islamist terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State in the Sinai Peninsula — while with the other hand, he claims to support Israel.
Qatar’s role is duplicitous. It plays host to U.S. military bases at the same time that it funds and supports ISIS.
Hamas, since last year’s war, has chosen to use its scant resources to rebuild its kidnapping tunnels and war capability, instead of developing businesses and turning the Gaza Strip into a magnificent Arab Riviera, as Dubai has become. Hamas’s failure does not come from a lack of resources; it comes from a deliberate choice of how to use them.
The Iranians, in opposing American policy, which is a tissue of amateur plans and plots, are flexible and exploit Islam’s taqiyya [dissimulation] — religious approval to lie in the cause of Allah and to further Islam. However, they are not even bothering with that, they are telling the truth: “Death to America; Death to Israel.”

The United States is playing a double game in the Middle East: empowering Shiite Iran, while at the same time enabling Sunni ISIS to overthrow the moderate Arab regimes, as if to stop Iran.

The Americans are well aware that the Sunni Arab countries around Iran will now have to arm themselves to the teeth, thereby gutting the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

America, despite its power and the image it projects of working against ISIS in Iraq, does not touch ISIS in its real headquarters, Syria, where ISIS actually could actually be hurt. So nothing really changes, and both Iran and ISIS continue to strengthen.

Even as the members the UN Security Council, eager do business with Iran, voted to allow Iran to build nuclear weapons, the Iranians continue to fund Hezbollah, Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip — all Iranian proxies — in order to split the Arab ranks.

In other words, the hypocritical Obama administration, in backing the Iranians, keeps trying to sabotage the Arabs and provoke dissension.

The U.S. “divide-and-conquer” policy can also be seen in America’s ongoing support for Turkey and Qatar, both loyal to the Muslim Brotherhood. Turkey and Qatar, however, do nothing but foment incitement and support terrorist organizations. Both countries have totally abandoned the real existential interest of the Arab nation: its historic battle against Iran.

Qatar’s role is duplicitous. It plays host to U.S. military bases at the same time that it funds and supports ISIS, which is working against the West and against moderate Arab regimes.

The worst, however, is Turkey, which supports ISIS — the enemy of the West — despite Turkey being a member of NATO. Turkey also expends inordinate efforts at retaining its control of occupied Cyprus. Above all, its hypocrisy is scandalous. While it claims to care about the independence and human rights of the Palestinians, Turkey is really nothing but a radical Islamist country now denying independence and human rights to its own Kurdish citizens. At the same time, it supports Hamas and Iran in their effort to crush the unity of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the PLO as the only legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people.

Turkey, like many other nations, including the countries that negotiated with Iran, is just waiting for the sanctions to be lifted from Iran, so that its dubious military and economic relations with the Mullahs will finally be acceptable.

Turkey and Qatar have also divided the Sunni Islamic camp and fragmented the Arab ranks. Both countries give the Palestinians political support, the deluded hope of “return,” and funding that is used for rebuilding Hamas’s military capabilities and kidnapping tunnels.

It is both folly and underhandedness for the United States to provide these countries with even a tattered umbrella of military aid.

Not only the U.S. but Europe, which supports Iran, would like to see Hamas — a terrorist offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood — become stronger at the expense of the Palestinian people.

Europe would like to empower Hamas even further by handing it diplomatic and political support. There are rumors that the UN is planning to grant Hamas observer status in the General Assembly, as it did the Palestinian Authority.

We all know that the issue of Palestine could have been resolved long ago by establishing a demilitarized Palestinian state next to Israel, and giving the descendants of the original Palestinian refugees living in the Arab states full citizenship. But the manipulations employed by the Europeans and Americans deliberately perpetuate the Palestinian issue by using “good cop – bad cop” tactics. (Emphasis added. — DM)

Europe and the U.S. whitewash not only Hamas’s threats to Israel, but also, more importantly, its deadly subversion of Palestinian Authority. Both Europe and America totally disregard Hamas’s planned coup against PA leader Mahmoud Abbas last year, Hamas’s war crimes in the Gaza Strip, and the unspeakable treatment of its own people at home. Only one year ago, Hamas was murdering its own citizens extra-judicially, and ordering them to be cannon fodder for the benefit of international television crews.

Hamas, since then, has chosen to use its scant resources to rebuild its kidnapping tunnels and war capability, instead of to develop businesses and turn the Gaza Strip into a magnificent Arab Riviera, as Dubai has become. Hamas’s failure does not come from a lack of resources; it comes from a deliberate choice of how to use them.

Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are now operating against Egypt and Israel not only from the Gaza Strip, but from the Sinai Peninsula as well. Thus, in addition to allowing Iran to sail to nuclear weapons capability, President Obama encourages the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State in the Sinai Peninsula with one hand, while with the other hand he claims to support Israel.

After all is said and done, if we Arabs had joined ranks — even temporarily and even with Israel — we could have long ago put a stop to Iran’s plans for expansion.

But because of our own shortsightedness, we waited too long and now the Iranians have established footholds in the Arabian Gulf and the Red Sea, and are increasing their control of Arab states such as Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.

Iran is on its way in a few years to having nuclear weapons capability. The breakout time, according to President Obama, would effectively be “zero.” Iran could then make as many bombs as it would like, along with intercontinental ballistic missiles to delver them to the major cities of the “Great Satan,” the United States, directly from Iran, from South America, or — making identification and retaliation impossible — from submarines submerged off the U.S. coast.

The Iranians, in opposing American policy, which is a tissue of amateur plans and plots, are flexible and exploit Islam’s taqiyya [dissimulation] — religious approval to lie in the cause of Allah and to further Islam. However, they are not even bothering with that, they are telling the truth: “Death to America; Death to Israel.”

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U.S. President Barack Obama (left). Iranian President Hassan Rouhani (right).

By this point, near the end of the process of Sunni Muslim self-destruction, a large part of the Arabs’ energy has been wasted on internal wars and the misallocation of resources to the barren, useless confrontation with Israel, even while many Arab states secretly collaborate with the Zionists.

All that will be left for the Arabs will be to continue to argue among themselves and with the Israelis about the Palestinian issue. We should instead stop the distractions and the wounds we are inflicting upon ourselves, and put the Palestinian problem behind us by granting equal rights and citizenship to Palestinians residing in Arab countries, in order to shift our focus totally, if belatedly, to the real battle: The Islamic Republic of Iran.

Categories: Arab nations, Arabs, Foreign policy, Hamas, Iran scam, Iranian nukes, Iranian proxies, Islamic State, Islamism, Israel, Middle East, Obama, Obama and Israel, Obama's America, Obama's legacy, P5+1, Palestinian Authority, Palestinians, Peace process, Sunni states
Tags: Arab nations, Arabs, Foreign Policy, Hamas, Iran Scam, Iranian nukes, Iranian proxies, Islamic State, Islamism, Israel, Middle East, Muslim Brotherhood, Obama, Obama and Israel, Obama's America, Obama's legacy, P5+1, Palestinian Authority, Palestinians, Peace Process, Sunni states

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Egypt and the Hamas “Cockroaches”

August 26, 2015

Egypt and the Hamas “Cockroaches,” The Gatestone Institute, Khaled Abu Toameh, August 26, 2015

“What were your four [Hamas] men doing in Sinai? Haven’t you denied in the past the presence of any Hamas men in Sinai? So where did these men pop up from?” — Dina Ramez, Egyptian journalist.
The incident also proves that Hamas does not hesitate to take advantage of Cairo’s humanitarian gestures to smuggle its men out of the Gaza Strip. Obviously, the four Hamas men were not on their way to receive medical treatment. That they are members of Hamas’s armed wing, Ezaddin al-Qassam, speaks for itself.
The Egyptians are particularly fed up with reports about Hamas’s increased involvement in their internal affairs and links to terror groups in Sinai.
This practice by Hamas is something that the Egyptian authorities have come to understand, which is why they are refusing to reopen the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt. The question now is whether the international community will understand Hamas’s true intentions and plans — namely to prepare for another war against Israel.

Egypt’s President Abdel Fatah Sisi has once again proven that he and his country will not tolerate any threats from Hamas or other Palestinians.

The crisis that erupted between Sisi’s regime and Hamas after the removal from power of Muslim Brotherhood President Mohamed Morsi two years ago, reached it peak in the past few days with the kidnapping of four Hamas operatives in Sinai.

The four men were snatched from a bus shortly after crossing from the Gaza Strip into Egyptian territory on August 19. Reports said that unidentified gunmen stopped the bus and kidnapped the four Hamas men, who are wanted by Egypt for their involvement in terrorism.

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A bus carrying Palestinians drives through the Rafah crossing, from the Gaza Strip to Egyptian Sinai, on August 23, 2015. (Image source: Aqsatv video screenshot)

Although initial reports suggested that the kidnappers belonged to a salafi-jihadi group based in Sinai, some Hamas officials have accused Egyptian security forces of being behind the abduction. The Hamas officials even issued veiled threats against Sisi and the Egyptian authorities, and said that they held them fully responsible for the safety of the Hamas men.

A statement issued by Hamas warned the Egyptian authorities against harming the four men. “These men were the victims of deception and their only fault is that they are from the Gaza Strip,” the statement said. “This incident shows that the criminals are not afraid to target our people.”

Hamas leader Musa Abu Marzouk said that his movement holds the Egyptian authorities fully responsible for any harm caused to the abductees. He said that the kidnapping raises many questions and its circumstances remain unclear.

Hamas claims that salafi-jihadi groups in Sinai have informed its representatives that they did not kidnap the four men. According to Hamas officials, the abduction took place near the border with the Gaza Strip — an area where the Egyptian army maintains a large presence.

Sources in the Gaza Strip, however, have confirmed that the four men belong to Hamas’s armed wing, Ezaddin al-Qassam. The sources said that the men were apparently on their way to Iran for military training. The sources pointed out that the four had received permission from the Egyptian authorities to leave the Gaza Strip through the Rafah border crossing. The visas, however, are supposedly for civilians, not for Hamas operatives.

Hamas’s threats against Egypt have, meanwhile, enraged the Egyptian authorities as well as some top journalists in Cairo.

Egyptian authorities responded by refusing to give permission to Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and some leaders of his movement to travel to Qatar and Lebanon through the Rafah border crossing. The Hamas leaders were hoping to hold talks with some of their colleagues in those two countries about the possibility of reaching a long-term truce with Israel.

The Egyptians’ refusal to allow the Hamas leaders to leave the Gaza Strip has further strained relations between the two sides. Hamas representatives in the Gaza Strip were quoted as accusing the Egyptian authorities of “conspiring” against the movement and all Palestinians.

In Cairo, Egyptian security officials denied any link to the kidnapping of the four Hamas men. However, the denials have fallen on deaf ears and no one in Hamas seems to believe the Egyptian authorities. Even worse, Hamas representatives continued over the past few days to issue warnings and threats against Egypt.

As in the past, each time tensions rise between Hamas and Egypt, the Egyptians unleash some of their senior journalists against the Islamist movement. Since President Morsi’s removal from power, the Egyptians have displayed zero tolerance when it comes to Hamas. They are particularly fed up with reports about Hamas’s increased involvement in their internal affairs and links to terror groups in Sinai.

During the last war between Israel and Hamas, several Egyptian journalists and public figures openly expressed hope that the Israelis would destroy the movement for once and for all. Other journalists in Cairo, who are openly affiliated with the Sisi regime, have even urged their government to launch attacks against Hamas bases in the Gaza Strip.

This week, and in wake of the renewed tensions between Hamas and Egypt, Egyptian journalists resumed their rhetorical attacks against the movement. The question that most of these journalists asked was: What are Hamas members doing on Egyptian soil in the first place? The journalists accused Hamas of exploiting Egypt’s humanitarian gestures to smuggle its men out of the Gaza Strip.

One of these journalists, Dina Ramez, who is known as a staunch supporter of President Sisi, launched a scathing attack on Hamas, calling its members and leaders “cockroaches.”

Referring to the Hamas threats against Egypt, Ramez said: “Has anyone ever heard of cockroaches or ants that could threaten lions? These cockroaches belong to Hamas, which is threatening Egypt following the abduction of four of its men. I want to ask the Hamas cockroaches a simple question: What were your four men doing in Sinai? Haven’t you denied in the past the presence of any Hamas men in Sinai? So where did these men pop up from? I dare you to approach the border with Egypt. We have confidence in our army and our response will be painful. It will be a strong and deterring response against any cockroach that dares to come close to our border or threaten Egypt.”

Regardless of the identity of the kidnappers, the incident shows that Sisi and the Egyptian authorities continue to view Hamas as a threat to Egypt’s national security. The incident also proves that Hamas does not hesitate to take advantage of Cairo’s humanitarian gestures to smuggle its men out of the Gaza Strip. Obviously, the four Hamas men were not on their way to receive medical treatment or pursue their studies in Egypt or any other country.

That they are members of Ezaddin al-Qassam speaks for itself. Instead of dispatching its fighters to Iran and Turkey, Hamas should have allowed medical patients and university students to leave the Gaza Strip. But Hamas does not care about the well-being of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Rather, it cares about sending its men to Iran and Turkey to receive military and security training.

This practice by Hamas is something that the Egyptian authorities have come to understand, which is why they are refusing to reopen the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt. The question now is whether the international community will understand Hamas’s true intentions and plans — namely to prepare for another war against Israel.

Categories: Egypt, Gaza, Hamas, Iranian proxies, Israel, Palestinians, Siani, Sisi
Tags: Egypt, Gaza, Hamas, Iranian proxies, Israel, Palestinians, Siani, Sisi

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