Dr. Zuhdi Jasser: How to Win the New Cold War Against Muslim Theocracy via You Tube, March 8, 2015
(Please see also Dr. Jasser gives reaction to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech. — DM)
Posted tagged ‘Islamic Jihad’
Dealing With the Iranian Death Cult
March 6, 2015Dealing With the Iranian Death Cult, American Thinker, Warren Adler, March 2, 2015
The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and the resultant bloodbath should stand as an example of how a rigidly brainwashed death cult like Iran will choose the apparent path of negotiation while hiding its lethal ambition under a camouflage of lies.
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While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel laid out a strong case for mistrusting Iranian intentions, he did not define the bedrock reason why Iran cannot be trusted. To do that, one must understand the captive mentality of the cult phenomena and how it distorts reason, brainwashes its adherents, and creates unquestioning followers.
For those of us with strong cognizant memories of the events before, during and after the stunning Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941, the current negotiations with Iran to prevent this terror-sponsoring cultist state from developing a nuclear weapon seems chillingly similar.
Prior to that “day of infamy” as then President Franklin Roosevelt so aptly characterized it, the United States was locked in tense and complicated negotiations with Japan to settle conflicts that divided our two countries. They were many, involving a clash of perceived power divisions in the Pacific with underlying territorial and psychological issues leaving both countries at loggerheads.
The United States, satisfied that it had broken the Japanese military codes, felt secure enough that it could divine the Japanese positions on its statecraft and military plans. The Japanese, who had entered into a tripartite agreement with Hitler and Mussolini, felt secure in their military might and those of their Axis allies in the face of a largely militarily unprepared America to extract whatever concessions they were seeking from the United States.
It is true that America is not negotiating alone with Iran, but its position in the discussion and eventual outcome, by virtue of its historical leadership role, makes the comparison worth noting.
America in 1941 was facing comparative angst. President Roosevelt, who had promised to stay out of the war, was dealing with a reluctant public that had little appetite to enter the fray, although he had been persuaded by Winston Churchill to assist the Allies by providing armaments through the Lend-lease program. Even as negotiations with the Japanese proceeded, the Japanese had no intention of rapprochement and had actually been planning the assault on Pearl Harbor for many months before.
Worse, the American intelligence community was divided in their assessment of Japanese intentions and had not a clue about its cultist discipline. They were monstrously naive about the power of cult psychology and, unfortunately, they still are. Iran is run by death cult adherents operating under the guise of religion with all power, despite all the outward signs of alleged diversity, vested in one man.
Japan at that time was also being manipulated by cultists enmeshed in the doctrines of State Shinto, based on a degraded interpretation of the samurai Bushido code. They later initiated the suicide bomber pilot program, finding recruits eager to kill themselves for the emperor by smashing their planes into American ships. If that isn’t death cult conduct, then I’d like to know what is.
At the time of Pearl Harbor, Adolf Hitler, a charismatic and ruthless megalomaniac, had turned the Nazi Party into a brutal master race entitlement cult determined to make “Deutschland Uber Alles” a reality. Indeed, by then the Nazis had brainwashed the German people into the fanatic belief that they were going to fulfill that destiny in a thousand-year Reich, and Hitler had demonstrated his military prowess designed to reach that goal. He held total sway over the Germans, not unlike Ayatollah Khamenei and his cult followers in their control over Iran.
Nothing happens in Iran without the ayatollah’s approval. Indeed, the Islamic terrorist tentacles of the Iranian regime is considerable and unlikely to be deterred by mere negotiations. “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” are not just empty slogans. They are chosen statements of intent officially approved by the regime leader.
The State Shinto cult of emperor worship was manipulated by Japan’s power-hungry military to have the Japanese people believe in the inevitability of their own destiny to carve out their own empire in the Pacific. Indeed, they managed to persuade the revered Emperor Hirohito himself to agree to their machinations. His naive approval was all that was needed to bring the Japanese people on board, a typical cult scenario.
The weakest partner in this ménage a trois, Benito Mussolini, had earned himself some cred by an African adventure in Eritrea and North Africa.
Using the cult comparison, there seems to be little difference between Khomeini and Hitler, at least in terms of power. Hitler, like Khamenei today, calls the shots. Khamenei, his minions, and their vast network of Iranian-armed and financially-supported death cult Islamic terror cells is, by any rational measure, an existential danger to America, and certainly to Israel.
Indeed, nuclear bombs and long-range missiles in the hands of this cult could easily transform a mere perceived danger into a planetary disaster and fulfill their “death to” sloganeering. Such power in the hand of the Iranian death cult will create a destructive capacity that by comparison makes Hitler’s armies seem like toy soldiers.
What history has taught us is that cults that have gained total power over their adherents will always use any means to gain their ends. They will employ any tactic that hastens their victory. They will lie, cheat, charm, brutalize, and kill anyone who stands in their way. They will demolish any obstacle that confronts them and inhibits their goals. They will dissimulate and deceive.
The idea that sanity will prevail when it comes to cult leaders is a false notion. Hitler, by the evidence of his suicide, appeared to have understood that death was a finality. Islamic terrorist’s have been brainwashed to believe that death, by sacrificing oneself to what they believe is their Prophet’s desire, is a continuation of physicality, offering perpetual pleasure through eternity in some imagined paradise.
The comparison with Pearl Harbor may seem farfetched and hysterical to some, but as 9/11 has illustrated, a cult in which adherents have no fear of death is a weapon of enormous power. Those who believe that leadership sanity and logic will prevail if Iran gets its bomb and actually uses it against their “Death to” objectives should understand that retaliation, which will surely come, could be welcomed by the Iranian perpetrators of the Jihad cult as a glorious suicide mission guaranteeing an entry ticket to their imagined paradise.
The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and the resultant bloodbath should stand as an example of how a rigidly brainwashed death cult like Iran will choose the apparent path of negotiation while hiding its lethal ambition under a camouflage of lies.
Bad Ideas Breed Bad Foreign Policy
March 4, 2015Bad Ideas Breed Bad Foreign Policy, Front Page Magazine,
The triumph of secularization has disarmed us in the fight against modern jihadism. No matter how often jihadists evoke the religious foundations of their actions, no matter how many Koranic verses and Hadith they quote, we cannot imagine a people for whom the spiritual realm is more real than the material world. We cannot imagine a life permeated with the divine and directed by submission––what “Islam” literally means––to Allah and the model of Mohammed. We ignore, as Bernard Lewis has written, the fact that “in most Islamic countries, religion remains a major political factor,” for “most Muslim countries are still profoundly Muslim, in a way and a sense that most Christian countries are no longer Christian.” Hence the worldwide Muslim support for shari’a law and its codified sexism, intolerance, and penal cruelty.
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Barack Obama’s foreign policy will go down in U.S. history as one of the most dangerously inept ever. Created by equal amounts of ignorance, arrogance, and partisan politics, the president’s policies have left behind a world in which rivals and enemies are on the march, while allies and friends are endangered and alienated. He deserves the opprobrium with which future history should load him.
But focusing on individuals and their personal flaws can prevent us from seeing the larger bad ideas that transcend any one person or party. We justly remember British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain as the architect of the 1938 Munich conference that paved the way for Hitler’s aggression. And indeed, Chamberlain’s flaws of character––most important a vanity about his personal powers of persuasion that blinded him to Hitler’s brilliant diplomatic misdirection about his true intentions––contributed to that debacle. But we should also remember the delirious public joy that greeted Chamberlain when he returned to England, and the global acclaim he received for avoiding war with Germany. Millions of people thought Chamberlain had heroically succeeded because many shared the assumptions and ideas that drove his decisions.
So too today, Obama’s vanity and self-regard have from the beginning led to dangerous foreign policy decisions. His belief that he was a global “transformational” and “world-historical” figure drove him to court inveterate enemies like Iran, the Taliban, and the Muslim Brothers, who he mistakenly believed would be seduced by his brilliance and sympathy for their grievances. His fatuous Cairo speech in 2009 and his numerous groveling letters to Iran honcho Ayatollah Khamenei were predicated on Obama’s notion that as a person “of color,” who had spent a few childhood years in a Muslim country and was ashamed of America’s global sins, he had an instant rapport with hard, cruel men who despise the West as “Crusaders,” godless infidels to be conquered, converted, or killed. Indeed, Obama’s delusional self-estimation recalls Chamberlain’s comments to his cabinet that in the negotiations over Czechoslovakia “Hitler was speaking the truth,” and that “he had established some degree of personal influence over Herr Hitler.” Herr Hitler, in fact, considered Chamberlain “a little worm.”
But beyond these failures of character and self-knowledge, larger cultural ideas have contributed to this country’s mistakes in dealing with a resurgent Islamic jihad. Most important has been the triumph of secularism in the West, the marginalization of religion in our politics and culture. Anyone who believes the received wisdom that the U.S. is a religious country should ignore the polling data on churchgoing and look instead at our public culture. Sordid sexual content in movies, television shows, and popular music; 58 million abortions since 1973; the legitimization of same-sex marriage; the incessant demonization of any participation of religion in schools or politics––all bespeak a culture in which religion has been reduced to a private life-style choice and comforting holiday rituals, as Obama suggested when he reduced the First Amendment’s protection of religion to the “freedom to worship.” Anyone who does take Christianity or Judaism more seriously than that is considered, to quote Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, “shamans or witch doctors from savage tribes whom one humors until one can dress them in trousers and send them to school.”
More important, the animus against faith has contributed to the fashionable self-loathing and dislike of their home country on the part of many progressives and leftists, who have implicated Christianity in the crimes of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism. Hence Obama’s bringing up and distorting the history of the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition in a speech about religious violence. Meanwhile, a noble-savage multiculturalism masquerading as tolerance for the oppressed “other” considers Islam an exotic “religion of peace,” despite its 14 centuries of slaughter, invasion, pillage, slaving, occupation, and colonization. Those tolerant Muslims of Granada in 1066 killed as many Jews in one day as the Spanish Inquisition did in its 3 centuries of existence.
The triumph of secularization has disarmed us in the fight against modern jihadism. No matter how often jihadists evoke the religious foundations of their actions, no matter how many Koranic verses and Hadith they quote, we cannot imagine a people for whom the spiritual realm is more real than the material world. We cannot imagine a life permeated with the divine and directed by submission––what “Islam” literally means––to Allah and the model of Mohammed. We ignore, as Bernard Lewis has written, the fact that “in most Islamic countries, religion remains a major political factor,” for “most Muslim countries are still profoundly Muslim, in a way and a sense that most Christian countries are no longer Christian.” Hence the worldwide Muslim support for shari’a law and its codified sexism, intolerance, and penal cruelty.
Given this failure of imagination, we have misunderstood jihadism ever since it burst onto the global scene in 1979 with the Iranian Revolution, when our foreign policy establishment ignored or dismissed its religious roots. Thirty-five years later, Obama continues the same mistake, refusing to identify ISIS as an expression of Islamic doctrine, or to use the adjective “Islamic” to describe the numerous jihadist movements active today, or to recognize the apocalyptic messianism and genocidal aims of the Iranian mullahcracy. This blindness reflects widespread delusions like the long mischaracterization of Islam as the “religion of peace,” the reinterpretation of jihad to mean a self-improving “inner struggle,” or the historical fantasies of Islamic “tolerance” in Ottoman Turkey or Andalusian Spain.
Behind this Orwellian rhetoric lies the assumption that all religions are basically the same and preach the same doctrines of “love thy neighbor” and “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” This reduction of religion to Hallmark-card sentimentalism is yet another instance of the refusal to take spirituality seriously, and to acknowledge that all spiritual aims are not the same or compatible. How much easier it is to indulge a flabby ecumenicalism and dismiss the jihadists as “evil” or “barbaric,” as though we are dealing with psychopathic serial killers rather than fervent believers in a worldwide faith with doctrines and practices dating back to the 7th century.
Finally, the dismissal of spiritual causes leads us to focus on material ones, which in turn creates the preposterous analyses of jihadism as a reflection of material conditions or psychological dysfunctions created by them. Hence this administration recently has talked about “root causes” like “lack of opportunity for jobs” (State Department spokesman Marie Harf); the need for “peaceful democratic change” and “economic growth and devoting more resources on education, including for girls and women” (Barack Obama); “alienation, poverty, thrill-seeking, and other factors” (John Kerry); and “the perceived effect of U.S. foreign policy in the Muslim world” (Rashad Hussain, recently named Obama’s Special Envoy and Coordinator for Strategic Counter-terrorism Communications), to name a few.
Yet even some Christian and observant Jewish conservatives have ignored the power of spiritual imperatives and religious differences, particularly in their focus on democracy promotion as the cure for jihadist terror. George W. Bush, in his 2002 National Security Strategy, focused U.S. foreign policy on promoting a “single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise,” for “these values of freedom are right and true for every person, every society.” These dubious ideals became strategic aims during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And for all he styles himself the anti-Bush, Barack Obama has made the same claims, as in his 2012 remarks at the U.N. “Freedom and self-determination,” he said, “are not unique to one culture. These are not simply American values or Western values—they are universal values.”
But no matter how potentially true these claims may be, to those pious Muslims who consider themselves the “slaves of Allah,” freedom and democracy as we understand them are incompatible with shari’a law, and “national success” will be achieved by restoring Islam to its original purity, and following the “model” that empowered Allah’s warriors to create a global empire stretching from the Atlantic to China. If we take seriously Islam’s spiritual aims––the necessity of obeying Allah’s precepts in order to create for Muslims a totalizing political-social order of justice, piety, and equality, and to ensure an eternity of bliss in paradise––then we will see that our notions of earthly freedom, leisure, confessional tolerance, and prosperity are to millions of Muslims mere temptations to abandon their faith and risk their eternal souls. And we will understand that waging jihad against those responsible for those temptations, especially a rich and powerful infidel West, is the communal duty of the Islamic ummah, and death in that battle the key to paradise.
Trapped in our own secularist and materialist assumptions, we mistake the nature of the enemy and thus create policies––most important the appeasement of Iran through negotiations and concessions that will end with the world’s foremost terrorist state in possession of nuclear weapons––doomed to fail and damage our security and interests. But Barack Obama will not be the only father of that failure.
From The Mediterranean to the Golan, Iran Builds Active Front And Direct Military Presence
February 23, 2015From The Mediterranean to the Golan, Iran Builds Active Front And Direct Military Presence On Israel’s Border To Deter Israel And Further Ideology Of Eliminating The Zionist Regime
By: Y. Carmon and Y. Yehoshua*
February 16, 2015
Israel faces a fateful crisis. As much as it feared the Iranian nuclear program, it never imagined that Iran would be standing on its border even before its nuclear agreement with the Americans was complete. The Iranian threat to Israel is no longer theoretical, nor does it have anything to do with Israel’s deterrent of using its nuclear weapons, which cannot be used considering the international power balance. The threat has become direct, practical and conventional.”[1]
Introduction
In recent years, Iran has based its deployment in Syria on the establishment of a new Hizbullah Syria organization along the lines of Hizbullah Lebanon, as well as on the direct presence of Iranian forces in Syria, particularly in the Golan Heights.
Iran’s deployment in Syria, and particularly the presence of its forces in the Golan Heights, at first only as command posts and a limited number of special forces, reveals a trend of Iranian activity in the region that is direct, not only by proxy as it has been to date. According to the Iranian plan, the command posts are meant to operate “130,000 trained Iranian Basij fighters waiting to enter Syria,” as is evident from May 2014 statements by Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) senior official Hossein Hamedani, that were censored and removed immediately after publication in Iran.[2]
Statements expressing intent to establish a front of anti-Israel activity in the Golan were heard from Iranian and Syrian officials as early as 2013, and have been implemented openly and in practice in the past two years (see MEMRI Special Dispatch No. 5307, Assad And His Allies Threaten To Open A Front In Golan Heights, May 21, 2013). During this time, there were also a few terror operations as well as operations to collect intelligence information in the Golan, which Israel claims were carried out by Hizbullah and Iranian elements; for example, there have been rocket fire, roadside bombs, drones launched, and weapons transferred to Hizbullah. Israel for its part has carried out pinpoint counter-operations inside Syrian territory, such as bombing missile deliveries and attacking senior Iranian officials in Syria, for example, the January 2015 assassination of Gen. Mohammad Ali Allahdadi and other IRGC soldiers who have not been publicly identified, alongside several Hizbullah operatives, and the February 2013 assassination of top IRGC official Hassan Shateri, which Iran claims was carried out by Israel.[3]
Iran’s direct deployment in the Golan creates a single battle front against Israel from Rosh HaNikra to Quneitra.[4] It also constitutes a violation of the status quo of the Golan Heights front, which has been quiet since the Separation of Forces Agreement of 1974,[5] and comes on top of Hizbullah’s violations of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701.[6] Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Al-Mu’allem said in an interview on Iran’s Al-Alam TV channel that “there is resistance in the Golan that is acting against Jabhat Al-Nusra and against the Israeli plans.”[7] Lebanese analyst Anis Naqash, who is close to Hizbullah, also said that “there is indeed resistance in the Golan.” According to him, there have been several actions against Israel by the Golan resistance, which he called popular Syrian resistance, and Israel has not acknowledged this so as to not reveal its helplessness. Regarding the violation of Resolution 1701 he said: “From the onset there was confusion about it. We – the resistance camp – violated Resolution 1701 from the moment they began implementing it.”[8]
Furthermore, Iran’s deployment on the border has implications for the chances of a war breaking out in the region and for the character of such a war. This, because it increases the possibility that any local eruption could quickly develop into a regional conflict, since Iran now commands the theater that stretches from Iran and Iraq through Syria and Lebanon and the Mediterranean.[9] It should be noted that Hizbullah’s January 28, 2015 retaliatory attack against Israel’s January 18 attack in itself did not develop into a broader conflict only because Israel refrained from responding to it. A senior Iranian spokesman assessed that this was due to Israel’s “intense fear of the outbreak of an all-out war.”[10]
Iran’s aim in deploying in the Golan Heights is not only to deter Israel from acting against its nuclear program, defend Syria as part of the resistance axis, and establish an active front for anti-Israel terror attacks in the Golan and even liberate the Israeli Golan. It also meshes with the Iranian regime’s ideological perception of Israel as an entity that must be eliminated, as is evident in statements by Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. According to this perception, the West Bank must be armed, as the Gaza Strip was, in advance of eliminating the state of Israel.
It should be noted that in addition to its deployment for the purpose of eliminating the state of Israel, Iran is building capabilities and ways of operating against Israel and against Jewish/Israeli targets worldwide; these are occasionally put into action.[11]
Iran’s front on Israel’s northern border, in addition to its involvement in other arenas in the region, creates tremendous pressure on its dwindling resources and exhausts it, intensifying its dependence on regional forces. But the export of Iran’s Islamic Revolution always contributes directly to the survival of the Iranian regime. This is because the mobilization of Iranian national forces and Iranian youth in the ideological framework of struggle outside Iran inoculates Iran’s dictatorial regime against internal uprising and rebellion against it.
I. Regional Background: Under Guise Of Fighting Sunni Jihadi Organizations, Iran Deploys On Israel’s Border
In recent years Iran has taken advantage of the fact that the theater between Iraq and the Mediterranean – that is, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon – has become a veritable no man’s land like Afghanistan, and has tightened its grip there and built up its deployment vis-a-vis Israel. Following the abandonment of the Syrian theater by the West, primarily the U.S., and the absence of any operation to decide the conflict following the Syrian uprising, Syria has become an arena of regional and global conflict. Participating in this conflict are fighters in the global jihad, such as Jabhat Al-Nusra and the Islamic State (ISIS), which have the support of Sunni elements, and on the other side Iran and its satellites, such as Hizbullah Lebanon and Hizbullah Syria, as well as the Iraqi militia Asa’ib ‘Ahl Al-Haqq and “the Fatimiyyoun Brigade” of Afghan Shi’ites.[12]
The West’s nonintervention in Syria has spawned not only Iran’s infiltration into that country but also its infiltration into two additional theaters where it has tightened its grip. First, the non-intervention has brought about the undermining of the situation in Lebanon, where in addition to the influx of millions of refugees and the collapse of the political system, the country has become an arena of conflict between Iran and the Sunni jihadis. Likewise, it has brought about the complete undermining of the situation in Iraq, where ISIS – which first established itself in Syria – has invaded the Sunni region and has consolidated its status there. The Iraqi army has collapsed, leading to the emergence on the ground of pro-Iran militias and of troops of the IRGC’s Qods Force, which is headed by Qassem Soleimani.[13]
Thus, Iran has created for itself a single theater of operation stretching from Iran to the Mediterranean, as Iranian officials describe it. For example, Yahya Rahim Safavi, former IRGC commander and security affairs advisor to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, boasted in May 2014: “Our strategic depth reaches to the Mediterranean, and above Israel’s head.”[14] In recent similar statements, Ali Saeedi, Khamenei’s representative in the IRGC, said: “The borders of Islamic Iran have expanded [all the way] to the shores of the Mediterranean, and the countries of the region are supported by Iran.” He said further that “we must prepare the ground for the globalization of the Islamic Revolution.”[15] In another speech, he said: “In the past, our borders were Haji Omran [on the Iran-Iraq border], while today our borders are the shore of the Mediterranean and Bab El-Mandeb [in Yemen].”[16] IRGC commander Mohammad Ali Jafari said: “Today, the borders of Islamic Iran and [its Islamic] Revolution have expanded, and we are not defending our country from its own borders but are standing fast and fighting together with our Shi’ite and Sunni brothers against the front of the arrogance [i.e. the West, headed by the U.S.] many kilometers from Iran’s borders.”[17]
In deploying directly on Israel’s border, Iran has effectively become a country neighboring Israel, despite being geographically distant, while Syria and Lebanon have become components in a broader Iran-led regional resistance entity bordering Israel.
II. Building A Single Conflict Front With Israel From Rosh HaNikra To Quneitra
Implementing the statements it has made over the past two years, Iran has created a single conflict front with Israel stretching from Rosh HaNikra to Quneitra, where it and its satellites, Hizbullah Lebanon and Hizbullah Syria, operate freely against Israel in violation of UN Resolution 1701 and while changing the status quo that has existed between Israel and Syria since the Separation of Forces Agreement of 1974.
As part of this implementation, the Syrian Golan has become an Iranian theater of operation as well. This strategic Iranian presence in the Golan was at first clandestine, under the auspices of “defending the resistance axis” and in the name of “the war on Sunni terrorism,” but later became public, and was accompanied by open threats to target Israel from the Syrian border. Thus, for example, in response to a May 2013 Israeli airstrike in the Damascus area targeting Fateh-110 long-range missiles being transferred from Iran to Hizbullah, spokesmen in Iran, Syria, and Hizbullah issued statements regarding the need for resistance in the Golan.[18] At a May 7, 2013 meeting with Iranian foreign minister Ali Akbar Salehi, Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad announced, “The Golan will become a front of resistance.”[19] Iranian Army chief of staff Hassan Firouzabadi also revealed that “according to Assad’s strategic decision, a popular resistance based on the Hizbullah template is being established across Syria.”[20]
In their statements, the top leaders of the resistance axis stress that, in addition to forming an active front in the Syrian Golan vis-a-vis Israel, the axis means to actually “liberate the Syrian Golan” from Israeli control. The deputy of the Iranian chief of staff, Mas’oud Jazeyeri, promised that the region would see many changes, “some of which will pass through the Golan,” and added that “the liberation of the Golan is not impossible.”[21] Hizbullah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah announced, for his part, that his organization would aid the Syrian resistance “in order to liberate the Syrian Golan.”[22] Nahed Hattar wrote in the Lebanese Al-Akhbar that “ending the Syria war [i.e., expelling the jihad organizations from it] is meaningless without wresting the Golan from Israeli hands.”[23]
In the framework of this plan for creating a single front from Rosh HaNikra to Quneitra, Hizbullah Lebanon is ignoring the Lebanon-Syria border and is operating freely in Syria, particularly in the Golan, despite criticism in Lebanon.[24] Nasrallah’s January 30, 2015 speech, delivered two days after Hizbullah’s counterattack following Israel’s January 18 attack in Quneitra, amounted to an acknowledgement of a reality in which “there is no recognition of division into arenas” and the resistance is entitled to confront the enemy “wherever it wants and however it wants.” Moreover, in this speech Nasrallah described the death of Hizbullah and IRGC operatives in Israel’s operation as “the mingling of Lebanese blood with Iranian blood on Syrian soil” and stated that this reflected the fact that there is “one cause, one destiny, and one battle.”[25] He also declared in his speech that “the rules of engagement” with Israel had now changed, referring to the rules set out in UN Resolution 1701; as a matter of fact, Hizbullah is indeed violating this resolution in various ways, including with its presence south of Lebanon’s Litani River, alongside the presence of IRGC forces.
III. Elements Of The New Iranian Deployment In Syria: Hizbullah Syria And A Direct Iranian Presence On Israel’s Border
The building of the new Iranian front has two elements: a) establishing a Hizbullah Syria based on the Hizbullah Lebanon model, and b) Iranian forces’ direct involvement in the Golan.
A. Hizbullah Syria – Another Resistance Arm Against Israel
The new Hizbullah Syria is also being established as part of an extensive strategic view and in preparation for the coming conflict with Israel. Senior IRGC official Hossein Hamedani said in a May 2014 speech that “Syria has become a decisive geopolitical region in the regional power balance” and that Iran has established “a second Hizbullah – popular militias in 14 Syrian governorates with 70,000 members, from Syria’s Shi’ites, Sunnis, and Alawites.”[26]
Likewise, an April 21, 2014 analysis published by the moderate conservative Iranian website Farda stated, “The establishment of a Hizbullah Syria, as a bud of resistance, will not only impact the Syrian crisis but will also serve as a mighty arm of the resistance that will give the Zionists nightmares. The Zionist regime, which was previously concerned with the threats along the Lebanese border, must now prepare itself for the new situation. As ongoing events show, the resistance front is uniting from day to day, and the situation for the Zionists and their supporters is worsening.”[27]
Also, Mohammad Reza Naqdi, commander of the Basij paramilitary force, explained: “Hizbullah emerged after the 1982 war in Lebanon. The Palestinian resistance was born after the attacks against Palestine. And today in Syria we are witnessing the establishment of a military force, following the aggression and plots against Syria.” He added, “The resistance force will liberate Jerusalem.”[28]
B. Direct Iranian Activity In The Golan And Lebanon
In the past, Iran preferred to manage the conflict with Israel exclusively through its proxies and allies – Assad and Hizbullah. However, there has recently been open physical presence of IRGC and Qods Force soldiers in Syria, specifically in the Syrian Golan. As mentioned above, Hossein Hamedani, former IRGC commander in the Tehran province, even stated in a speech that “there are 130,000 trained Iranian Basij fighters waiting to enter Syria.”[29]
Arab media also published reports that Iranian forces have been present in the Golan since May 2013. The reports included details provided by Syrian oppositionist circles regarding important bases in the Golan where IRGC forces were present: bases in the Tal Al-Sha’ar area and Tal Al-Ahmar, the Division 90 headquarters, an espionage base near Mazari’ Al-Amal, and a camp in Al-Shuhada.[30]
Testimony also appeared regarding significant IRGC presence on the Israeli-Lebanese border, including on a Twitter account close to the IRGC which posted photos indicating that “the IRGC soldiers of the Islamic revolution are on the border of [Lebanon and] occupied Palestine.”[31] In this context it should be mentioned that, back in January 2012, there was outrage in Lebanon following statements by the commander of the IRGC’s Qods Force, General Qassem Soleimani, who said that “Iran has a presence in South Lebanon and Iraq” and that “these regions are under the influence of the activity and philosophy of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”[32]
The physical presence of senior IRGC generals in the Golan and South Lebanon also indicates the importance of this arena in Iran’s eyes. Examples are presence of Iranian General Mohammad Ali Allahdadi in the Golan, which was exposed after he was killed in an Israeli airstrike in January 2015, and of Iranian General and IRGC commander in Lebanon Hassan Shateri, who was killed in February 2014 in an attack on a military convoy from Damascus to Beirut.[33] This, alongside reports that General Qassem Soleimani was present in Syria in general and in the Quneitra and Dar’a areas in particular.[34]
IV. Calls In Palestinian Resistance Movements To Join Northern Front
Palestinian resistance movements such as Hamas also expressed willingness to join the northern front against Israel by activating Palestinians living in refugee camps there.
Hamas official Mahmoud Al-Zahar called to enable the establishment of military groups belonging to the Al-Qassam Brigades – Hamas’s military wing – in Lebanese and Syrian refugee camps in order “to resist the enemy from northern Palestine.”[35] At the same time, there have been increasing reports recently on renewed Hamas contacts with Iran and Hizbullah, after a period of tension between them due to Hamas’s support for the Syrian revolution.[36]
Abu Ahmad Fouad, deputy secretary-general of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), supported Al-Zahar’s call and said that the establishment of these militias “should take place as part of a general framework of resistance movements, including the Lebanese Hizbullah.” He told the Al-Mayadeen TV channel: “We believe what Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah said regarding uniting the fronts against the Israeli occupation, and there are ongoing meetings to develop the Palestinian resistance operation and coordinate it with the Lebanese resistance.”[37]
‘Imad Zaqout, news director for Hamas’s Al-Aqsa TV, even admitted for the first time that the ‘Izz Al-Din Al-Qassam Brigades have already operated groups in neighboring countries, and that the rocket fire from Lebanon into Israel during the 2014 conflict in Gaza had been ordered by the Brigades. He added: “Hamas thought and planned for every future war with the Zionist enemy to be a total one. Meaning that it would include every inch of land in Palestine and inflict large-scale damage on the enemy.”[38]
V. The Iranian Front In The Golan – Implementing Iranian Ideological Perception Regarding Need To Eliminate Israel
Constructing a united front from Rosh HaNikra to Quneitra meshes with Iran’s comprehensive strategy to eliminate Israel. Iranian regime heads have repeatedly stated their commitment to this goal over the years, from Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to other regime and military leaders.[39]
To bring only a handful of examples, in a July 23, 2014 speech, Khamenei said that “the only solution is to destroy the Zionist regime.”[40] Furthermore, Mehdi Taeb, head of Khamenei’s “Ammar Headquarters” think tank and the brother of IRGC intelligence chief Hossein Taeb, said in a November 12, 2014 speech in Qom that “Iran’s sword is currently stuck in the throat of the accursed Israeli regime, and according to the instructions of the founder of the Islamic Republic [Ayatollah Ruhollah] Khomeini, we must remove this oppressive regime from the world map… The Imam Khomeini saw the Basij [as a force] that would destroy the Zionist regime, and today, thanks to divine grace, Iran has besieged Israel with those same popular forces.”[41] Similar statements were repeatedly made by IRGC officials as well. On August 27, 2014, IRGC Deputy Commander Hossein Salami said: “Destroying the Zionist regime is a very simple matter… [It] will take place gradually. It is a matter of divine faith, [it is] more than a mere wish for us.”[42] On November 26, 2014, Basij Commander Mohammad Reza Naqdi said: “The Iranian nation and Basij members are determined to hold victory prayers led by their Imam [Khamenei] at the Al-Aqsa Mosque.”[43] The next day, IRGC navy official Ali Razmjou said that the Zionist regime “will be eliminated from the world map in the near future thanks to the resistance of Basij and Hizbullah members throughout the world.”[44]
VI. Developing The Palestinian Front By Arming West Bank, Israeli Arabs
To comprehensively implement this Iranian strategy to eliminate Israel, in addition to its activity in Syria and the Golan, the Iranian regime has increasingly expressed its intent to arm the West Bank, and even the Israeli Arabs, as it has armed the Gaza Strip.[45] Khamenei called on several occasions to arm the West Bank. In a July 23, 2014 speech, he said: “Allah willing, the day will come when this regime is destroyed. [But] so long as this false regime is on its feet – what is the solution? The solution is total armed resistance against this regime. This is the solution… Therefore, it is my belief that the West Bank should be armed just like Gaza.”[46] A July 26, 2015 post on Khamenei’s Facebook page said: “The West Bank should be armed like Gaza.”[47]
Other officials also referred to the arming of the West Bank as part of a strategic policy of the Iranian regime. The deputy chair of the Majlis National Security Committee, Mansour Haghighatpour, said: “One of our goals is to arm the West Bank, because it is the best measure for fighting the Zionist regime.”[48] Ahmad Vahidi, who was defense minister under Ahmadinejad and commander of the IRGC Qods Force, said that “arming the West Bank is a strategic policy of the Leader [Khamenei], whose implementation will transform the Palestine arena,” and even called to arm the territories that were conquered in 1948, in addition to the West Bank. [49] Iranian Defense Minister Hossein Dehghan said in a rally honoring the Hizbullah members killed in the Quneitra attack, held on January 27, 2015 at the Hizbullah representation in Tehran: “We will utilize every available capability in order to arm the West Bank… The policy of the Islamic Republic regime is to arm the West Bank and strengthen the resistance axis and the forces of Hizbullah in order to fight the usurping and occupying Zionist regime.”[50]
In an August 29, 2014 message of congratulations to the Palestinian people at the close of the 2014 Gaza conflict, IRGC commander Jafari expressed Iran’s support of the Gaza resistance, while mentioning the hope for the elimination of the Zionist regime. He said: “We shall stand fast with you to the end. Continue to raise the banner of jihad in the path of God, for your honor and the honor of all Muslims is linked to this holy jihad. And know that, with Allah’s help, eliminating this crumbling and bloodthirsty Zionist regime will be the greatest achievement on this divine path, and the final victory is not so far away.”[51]
VII. The Battle In The Dar’a Region – Completing The Siege Around Israel
It should be mentioned that the Syrian army, Hizbullah and Iranian forces recently launched a large-scale joint attack on the southern front to expel the rebels from the Dar’a region. During this campaign, titled “The Quneitra Martyrs Battle,” the Syrian regime admitted openly for the first time that Iranian forces were fighting in Syria alongside Assad’s forces. In addition, Gen. Qassem Soleimani visited the region, and Hizbullah and IRGC flags were flown there.[52]
This joint effort to wrest control of the southern Syria front from the hands of the rebels is regarded by Syria, Iran and Hizbullah as part of their struggle against Israel and its allies. A victory in this region will bring the Iranian forces closer to the Jordanian border in the south and the Israeli border in the west, will prepare the ground for defeating the opposition forces in the Quneitra area, and will enable the creation of a territorial continuum of resistance axis forces stretching from Dar’a through Damascus and Quneitra to Lebanon.
A Syrian army commander admitted on Syrian TV that the operation in the Dar’a region was being carried out “in collaboration with the resistance axis – Hizbullah and Iran.” He added that the goal of the army’s actions in the Dar’a and Quneitra area was “to ensure calm on the borders with the neighboring countries [Israel and Jordan] and disrupt the security zone they are attempting to establish.”[53]
The Al-Hadath News website, which is close to the Syrian regime, also exposed Iran’s involvement in the fighting, and even posted a photo of Gen. Qassem Soleimani in the area. It reported: “Iran, which had been taking part in the fighting in Syria by means of military advisors within the Syrian army, recently decided to join the military conflict officially and openly.” According to the site, Soleimani arrived in the area “to supervise and follow the campaign in southern Syria, and take part in directing it,” and his presence there lends the campaign “a clear geopolitical military character” that means that “the resistance is calling the shots in southern Syria.” The site added that the first goal of this attack was to defeat the armed opposition forces in Dar’a in advance of defeating them in Quneitra, which would be “a blow to the Zionist enemy.” This, in addition to preventing them from advancing towards Damascus. The site stated further that “southern Syria is clearly no longer involved in an inter-Syrian conflict, or a conflict between Syrians and takfiri forces [i.e., the jihad groups], but rather in a conflict between the resistance axis [comprising] Iran, Syria and Hizbullah on the one hand and the Israel-Jordan-U.S. alliance on the other.”[54]
Ibrahim Al-Amin, board chairman of the Lebanese Al-Akhbar daily, which is close to Hizbullah, wrote on this matter on February 11 that the top leadership of the resistance axis has decided “to create new political, military and security facts [on the ground] along the border between Jordan and occupied Palestine.”[55]
VIII. The Implications Of Iran And Its Proxies Surrounding Israel
Iran’s presence in the Golan, as well as in Lebanon and on the Mediterranean, creates a situation where any local conflict can rapidly escalate into a comprehensive regional war with direct Iranian involvement. Though Nasrallah stressed in his speech in late January 2015 that Hizbullah had completed its punitive measures for the killing of its six operatives in Quneitra, and that it is not interested in war, Iran continues to threaten further attacks, and may arrange further eruptions in the region or outside it by employing Hizbullah cells in various parts of the world.[56] In addition, articles in the Lebanese press spoke of the possible outbreak of a regional war.[57]
As long as Hizbullah operates from Lebanon, Israel is able to deter it, since Israel’s response to an attack from Lebanon employing the full force of Hizbullah’s missile arsenal (comprising over 100,000 missiles) will be the destruction of Lebanon’s infrastructures, a scenario that deters Hizbullah. However, if Hizbullah is activated from outside Lebanon, Israel will not be able to respond in the same manner.
As for Iran, it does not regard itself as deterred by Israel, now that it has built a single, comprehensive front against Israel stretching from the Mediterranean to southern Syria. It also has the capability of activating Hizbullah, despite the heavy price this organization will pay.
In fact, the Syrian front in general, and especially in the Golan, has become Iran’s favored theatre of operations, since acting there diminishes the chance of a war within its own borders. In this context, Khamenei’s advisor Ali Ahmad Velayati said on February 8, 2013 that “Iran has planned its defensive positions outside its own borders, and has linked its fate to the fate of the Islamic countries; this is why it will support those such as [Syrian President] Bashar Al-Assad to the end…”[58] Mehdi Taeb, the head of Khamenei’s “Ammar Headquarters” think tank, said in one of his speeches: “The loss of Syria will lead to the loss of Tehran itself.”[59]
Moreover, Iran’s presence on the Israeli border limits Israel’s ability to use military measures against Iran’s nuclear program. This, since Iran is building up its response capabilities in the region, to complement its long-range missiles. In the past, it was Hizbullah Lebanon that deterred Israel, to some extent, from acting militarily against Iran’s nuclear program. Today this deterrence is significantly strengthened by the advent of Hizbullah Syria and the direct presence of Iranian forces in the Golan.
According to Mehdi Taeb, the centrality of Hizbullah to Iran’s deterrence vis-a-vis Israel was already demonstrated in the 2006 Lebanon war. In a 2013 speech, he said that Iran never had to attack Israel’s nuclear warheads because “we completely locked up [Israel] with Hizbullah. During the 2006 Lebanon war, the Zionist regime tried to break this lock [i.e. Hizbullah], but after 33 days [of fighting], it gave up, and left [Lebanon].”[60]
Al-Akhbar columnist Nahed Al-Hattar also addressed the implications of Iran’s deployment on Israel’s border. He said that, while Israel is unable to use its nuclear capabilities due to international considerations, Iran has created a “practical, direct and conventional” threat against it: “Israel faces a fateful crisis. As much as it feared the Iranian nuclear program, it never imagined that Iran would be standing on its border even before its nuclear agreement with the Americans was complete. The Iranian threat to Israel is no longer theoretical, nor does it have anything to do with Israel’s deterrent of using its nuclear weapons, which cannot be used considering the international power balance. The threat has become direct, practical and conventional.”[61]
*Y. Carmon is President and Founder of MEMRI; Y. Yehoshua is Vice President for Research and Director of MEMRI Israel.
Endnotes:
[1] From a February 13, 2015 article by columnist Nahed Al-Hattar in the Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar.
[2] Fars (Iran), April 5, 2014. See also MEMRI Special Dispatch No. 5848, Iranian Media Reports Deleted Following Publication (1): Senior IRGC Official Speaking On Iran’s Military Involvement In Syria Says Iran Has Established ‘Second Hizbullah’ There, September 25, 2014.
[3] In the last two years, numerous security incidents have occurred on Israel’s northern border. The incidents include the launch of a drone from South Lebanon in April 2013, which, according to Israeli estimates, was carried out by IRGC members; rocket fire towards the Hermon outpost in May 2013; a roadside bomb near the Israeli-Lebanese border in August 2013; roadside bombs on the Israeli-Syrian border in March and October 2014; anti-tank missile fire from Syria towards an Israeli vehicle in June 2014; a drone infiltrating Israel from Quneitra in August 2014; and rocket fire on the Golan in January 2015. This, alongside Israeli attacks on weapons shipments such as a shipment of SA-17 anti-aircraft missiles to Hizbullah in Syria in January 2013, an attack on a truck convoy carrying missiles and a launcher in February 2014, and an attack on a warehouse storing Russian-made missiles that were on their way from Syria to Lebanon in December 2014.
[4] The notion of a single front from the Rosh HaNikra to Quneitra (i.e., from the Mediterranean to the Golan) was expressed repeatedly in the Lebanese press. See for example a January 19, 2015 article in the daily Al-Safir, an article by Firas Al-Shoufi from the same date in Al-Akhbar, and Nahed Hattar’s January 21, 2015 article in Al-Akhbar. The head of Al-Akhbar‘s board of directors, Ibrahim Al-Amin, expressed a similar notion in the daily as early as May 27, 2013.
[5] This violation of a decades-long status quo is so grave that, in a late January 2015 interview with Foreign Affairs magazine, Bashar Al-Assad persisted in denying that it was happening, claiming, “Never has an operation against Israel happened through the Golan Heights since the cease-fire in 1974. It has never happened. So for Israel to allege that there was a plan for an operation—that’s a far cry from reality, just an excuse, because they wanted to assassinate somebody from Hizbullah.” Foreign Affairs (U.S.), January 25, 2015.
[6] On Hizbullah’s violations of Resolution 1701, see MEMRI Special Dispatch No. 5857, “Daily Close To Hizbullah: In Violation Of UNSCR 1701, Hizbullah Has Resumed Operations South Of The Litani River,” October 13, 2014.
[7] Al-Alam TV (Iran), February 2, 2015.
[8] LDC (Lebanon), January 29, 2015.
[9] Many columnists close to Hizbullah and Iran addressed the scenario of an imminent all-out war with Israel. For example, columnist Wafiq Qanso described Hizbullah’s considerations prior to reacting to the Israeli attack as follows: “The time, place, and manner of a reaction is subject to the examination of the leadership of the resistance.” He said that such an examination takes into account several elements, including “the reality in the region and the possibility of a counter-reaction [by Israel] and a slide into extensive war.” Al-Akhbar (Lebanon), January 21, 2015. Lebanese analyst ‘Ali Haidar wrote: “It is now clear that direct Israeli military intervention will trigger a parallel regional intervention on an [even] larger and more dangerous scale, leading to a scenario of regional escalation.” Al-Akhbar (Lebanon), February 13, 2015. Iranian analyst Hassan Hanizadeh, who is close to Iranian regime circles, wrote: “The current confrontation is a prelude to a comprehensive war that will not be confined to South Lebanon, and may even spread south of Quneitra.” Fars, Iran, January 28, 2015. Al-Akhbar’s Ibrahim Al-Amin wrote, “The possibility of an all-out conflict breaking out that will leave no border between Lebanon and Syria is valid and in effect.” Al-Akhbar, Lebanon, May 27, 2013.
[10] Brigadier Yadollah Javani, an advisor to Khamenei’s representative in the IRGC, said in a February 15, 2015 interview on Iran’s Al-Alam TV: “Nasrallah announced they [Hizbullah] would respond to the [January 18] attack, and we saw how this response was carried out. The beauty of it is that the Zionists, for their part, did not respond at all. The reason is their intense fear of the outbreak of an all-out war.”
[11] Recently, many Iran and Hizbullah cells across the world planning attacks against Israeli and Jewish targets were discovered. For example, Uruguay in early January 2015 expelled a top diplomat at the Iranian Embassy in Montevideo on suspicion of his involvement in placing a bomb near the Israeli Embassy in the city; see: English.alarabiya.net, February 6, 2015. Likewise, in April 2014, two Hizbullah operatives planning an attack against Israeli tourists were arrested in Thailand; see: English.alarabiya.net, April 18, 2014. In May 2013, Nigerian security forces uncovered a Hizbullah terror cell that planned to carry out attacks against Israeli targets in the country and in other parts of West Africa. In February 2013, Nigerian security forces uncovered a terror squad operated by the IRGC’s Qods Force that was planning attacks against Chabad House and against offices of the Israeli Zim shipping lines in the city of Lagos. See: Haaretz, IBA, May 30, 2013.
[12] Reports on Iranian forces participating in the fighting in Syria appeared in Iran as early as 2013. See MEMRI Inquiry & Analysis No. 1040, “Despite Denials By Iranian Regime, Statements By Majlis Member And Reports In Iran Indicate Involvement Of Iranian Troops In Syria Fighting,” December 4, 2013.
Recently, Al-Sharq Al-Awsat reported, citing Ahmad Ramadan, a member of the National Coalition for Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces, that Iran was airlifting Shi’ite warriors, especially Iraqis and Afghans, to Latakia, Syria, where they are trained by the IRGC before being dispatched to Dar’a. Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, London, February 13, 2015.
[13] See MEMRI Special Dispatch No. 5877, Iranian Campaign Touts IRGC Qods Force Commander Qassem Soleimani As ‘Savior Of Iraq’; Soleimani: Iran Has Thousands Of Organizations Like Hizbullah; I Pray To Die A Martyr, November 10, 2014.
[14] Mehr (Iran), February 5, 2015.
[15] Tasnim (Iran), February 11, 2015.
[16] Tasnim (Iran), February 4, 2015.
[17] Mehr (Iran), January 30, 2015.
[18] See MEMRI Special Dispatch No. 5848, Iranian Media Reports Deleted Following Publication (1): Senior IRGC Official Speaking On Iran’s Military Involvement In Syria Says Iran Has Established ‘Second Hizbullah’ There, September 25, 2014.
[19] Al-Quds Al-Arabi (London), Almayadeen.net, May 7, 2013.
[20] ISNA (Iran), May 11, 2013.
[21] The statements were made in an interview on Hizbullah’s Al-Manar TV. Irinn.ir, May 17, 2013.
[22] Al-Safir (Lebanon), May 10, 2013.
[23] Al-Akhbar (Lebanon), February 13, 2015.
[24] Recently, former Lebanese prime minister Sa’d Al-Hariri, chairman of the Al-Mustaqbal faction, expressed harsh criticism of Hizbullah’s involvement in Syria. In a speech marking the 10th anniversary of the assassination of his father, Rafiq Al-Hariri, he said: “[In the past] we said to Hizbullah: entering the Syrian war is lunacy in itself. It has brought the terrorist insanity into our country. Today we say to it that connecting the Golan with the South [of Lebanon] is also lunacy, and another reason for us to say to it: Get out of Syria. Stop importing Syrian conflagrations into our country, first a terrorist conflagration, then a conflagration from the Golan, and tomorrow who knows where [the conflagration] will come from.” See Youtube.com/watch?v=G90oHQpD-AU#t=174, February 14, 2015.
On earlier criticism inside Lebanon on Hizbullah’s involvement in Syria, see MEMRI Inquiry & Analysis No. 980, Lebanon Openly Enters Fighting In Syria, June 13, 2013. The Lebanese press close to Hizbullah has since May 2013 mentioned numerous times the notion of abolishing the Lebanon-Syria border and the expansion of the resistance front from Lebanon to Syria in the framework of all-out conflict with Israel. For example, Ibrahim Al-Amin wrote in Al-Akhbar: “Everyone must act based on the expansion in practice of [Israel’s] northern front, [which now stretches from Lebanon to Syria]. In the near future, we may see the border with Lebanon remaining calm, while the most active front will be on the Palestine-Syria border [in the Golan]… We are simply facing a new level of unity between the resistance in Lebanon and [that in] Syria… such that the possibility of an all-out conflict breaking out that will leave no border between Lebanon and Syria is valid and in effect.” Al-Akhbar, Lebanon, May 27, 2013. Columnist Nahed Hattar wrote in Al-Akhbar recently that the Golan was “a pan-Arab arena shared by the Lebanese, the Syrian, the Jordanian, and the Iraqi [people]. From today onwards, there is no longer room for partial resistance and for partial national plans.” Al-Akhbar, Lebanon, January 23, 2015. See also MEMRI Inquiry & Analysis No. 1138, Following Killing Of Hizbullah Operative Jihad Mughniyah, New Information Comes To Light Regarding Hizbullah, Iranian Activity In Syrian Golan On Israeli Border, January 28, 2015.
[25] Al-Safir (Lebanon), January 31, 2015. The previous day, similar statements were made by IRGC commander Jafari: “Iran and Hizbullah are one, and everywhere the blood of our martyrs on the front is spilled together, and our response will be the same.” Fars, Iran, January 30, 2015.
[26] Fars (Iran), May 4, 2014. See MEMRI Special Dispatch No. 5848, Iranian Media Reports Deleted Following Publication (1): Senior IRGC Official Speaking On Iran’s Military Involvement In Syria Says Iran Has Established ‘Second Hizbullah’ There, September 25, 2014.
[27] Farda (Iran), April 21, 2014.
[28] Al-Manar TV (Lebanon), May 10, 2013.
[29] Fars (Iran), May 4, 2014.
[30] See MEMRI Inquiry & Analysis Series Report No. 1138, Following Killing Of Hizbullah Operative Jihad Mughniyah, New Information Comes To Light Regarding Hizbullah, Iranian Activity In Syrian Golan On Israeli Border, January 28, 2015.
[31] See MEMRI Special Dispatch No. 5915, Iranian Army Twitter Account, Iranian Army-Affiliated Blog Report: IRGC Troops At Lebanon-Israel Border, December 26, 2014.
[32] ISNA (Iran), January 18, 2012. The Lebanese government requested clarifications on these statements, which resulted in denials by the Iranian foreign ministry. See Fars (Iran), January 25, 2012.
[33] Al-Gumhouriyya (Egypt), Alarabiya.net, February 15, 2014.
[34] The Syrian opposition reported that Soleimani was spotted in Quneitra. Al-Nahar (Lebanon), January 19, 2015. Another report indicated that, on January 11, 2015, “Qassem Soleimani visited Damascus on his way to Beirut, where he met with the resistance leadership.” Al-Akhbar (Lebanon), January 21, 2015. There were also reports, accompanied with photos, that Soleimani recently visited the Dar’a region. Alhadathnews.net, February 10, 2015.
[35] Almanar.com, February 4, 2015.
[36] Al-Akhbar (Lebanon), January 10, 2015, October 23, 2014.
[37] Alwatanvoice.com, February 6, 2015.
[38] Alwatanvoice.com, February 6, 2015.
[39] See MEMRI Special Dispatch No. 5906, Iranian Regime Escalates Threats To Annihilate Israel, December 17, 2014.
[40] See MEMRI TV Clip 4366, Iran’s Leader Khamenei: Armed Struggle Should Continue until Israel Is Destroyed by a Referendum, July 23, 2014.
[41] Snn.ir, November 12, 2014.
[42] Fars (Iran), August 27, 2014.
[43] Fars (Iran), November 26, 2014.
[44] IRNA (Iran), November 27, 2014.
[45] See MEMRI Special Dispatch No. 5906, Iranian Regime Escalates Threats To Annihilate Israel, December 17, 2014.
[46] See MEMRI TV Clip No. 4366, “Iran’s Leader Khamenei: Armed Struggle Should Continue until Israel Is Destroyed by a Referendum,” July 23, 2014.
[47] See Special Dispatch No. 5808, “Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei Calls For The Annihilation Of Israel,” July 28, 2014.
[48] Fars (Iran), November 27, 2014.
[49] Tasnim (Iran), July 26, 2014.
[50] ISNA (Iran), January 27, 2015.
[51] Tasnim (Iran), August 29, 2014.
[52] On Soleimani’s presence in Dar’a, including photos, see Alhadathnews.net, February 11, 2015. There have recently been many other reports in the Arab press on the involvement of Iranian troops in the fighting in Dar’a. See a February 13, 2015 report in the Lebanese Al-Akhbar, as well as reports in Al-Sharq Al-Awsat from February 12 and February 13. The February 12 article in Al-Sharq Al-Awsat stated that Hizbullah’s leadership in the area was stationed in a special war room in the 9th Division base in Sanamin, north of Dar’a.
[53] Lbcgrouop.tv; Al-Riyadh (Saudi Arabia), February 12, 2015.
[54] Alhadathnews.net, February 11, 2015.
[55] Al-Akhbar (Lebanon), February 11, 2015.
[56] Iran has made numerous threats to this effect. IRGC Qods Force deputy commander Esmail Qaani said after the Quneitra attack: “We will not rest until Israel is eliminated,” Mehr (Iran), January 22, 2015. IRGC commander ‘Ali Jafari threatened a response by means of Hizbullah’s cells across the world: “They [Israel] are surely familiar with the capabilities of the Hizbullah cells that have been established around the world [to fight] the enemies of Islam, and they fear them. If they expect Hizbullah to respond to their action, they must expect a firm and crushing response not only in the region of their border but in any part of the world where there are Zionist Israelis or their supporters” Fars (Iran), January 30, 2015.
[57] On this, see note 9.
[58] Yjc.ir, February 8, 2013.
[59] See MEMRI Inquiry & Analysis No. 946, “Iranian Official: The Loss Of Syria Will Lead To The Loss Of Tehran Itself; Syria Is An Iranian Province; Iran Has Formed A 60,000-Strong Syrian Basij; Israel Is Our Only Threat,” March 11, 2013.
[60] See reference in note 59.
[61] Al-Akhbar (Lebanon), February 13, 2015.
Iran won’t accept incomplete, vague nuclear deal
February 22, 2015Iran won’t accept incomplete, vague nuclear deal
via Iran won’t accept incomplete, vague nuclear deal.
Is there a crack in the iranian government ?
Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 22
By Umid Niayesh – Trend:
Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said that Iran will not accept any “incomplete, vague” deal with the P5+1 over the country’s nuclear program.
“No other deal will be reached before achieving a complete agreement,” Zarif said, Iran’s Mehr news agency reported Feb. 22.
He also emphasized that the nuclear negotiating team is following the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamanei’s guidelines about a one stage deal.
“Neither Iran, nor other party would benefit small, separate and permanent agreements,” Zarif said.
Khamenei said on Feb. 8 that he doesn’t agree with a two-stage accord on the Islamic Republic’s nuclear case.
“If an agreement is reached, it should include both the generalities and details in one stage,” Khamenei explained.
This is while the US Secretary of State John Kerry said US President Barack Obama had “no inclination whatsoever” to extend the talks facing a March 31 deadline for agreement on a political framework for the deal.
Iran and the P5+1 (the US, the UK, Russia, China, France and Germany) extended their talks to reach a comprehensive nuclear deal, with the aim of reaching a high-level political agreement by March 31, and confirming the full technical details of the agreement by July 1.
After the sides failed to meet the Nov. 24, 2014 deadline they also extended the Geneva nuclear deal, which was signed in November 2013 to provide Iran with some sanctions relief in exchange for Tehran agreeing to limit certain aspects of its nuclear activities.
Zarif also referred to the remaining gaps in the negotiations saying differences are mainly “mental.”
Some western countries, especially the US and some factions in this country consider sanctions as advantage for them in achieving their goals, Zarif said, adding that however, with these sanctions they have only harmed themselves.
While answering a question about presence of Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization in the negotiations Zarif said that the negotiations have reached a stage that presence of Salehi, who is fully involved in the country’s nuclear issues was necessary.
He also touched upon participating of Hossein Fereydoun, the younger brother of Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani in the nuclear talks and said his presence is needed for coordination with president and the Islamic Republic’s senior officials
Iran and the US have started a fresh round of talks in Geneva to narrow remaining gaps ahead of the March 31 deadline for political agreement.
Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister for Legal and International Affairs Abbas Araqchi and US under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman held over 5 hours of talks on Feb. 20.
On Feb. 21 Ali Akbar Salehi held talks with the US energy secretary Ernest Moniz at the second day of the negotiations over Tehran’s disputed nuclear program.
Mohammad Javad Zarif and his US counterpart John Kerry are scheduled to join the talks on Feb. 22 and hold discussions for two days.
Iran prepares to attack Northern Israel
February 22, 2015February 21, 2015
Iran prepares to attack Northern Israel
By James Lewis
via Articles: Iran prepares to attack Northern Israel.
Take an old-fashioned iron bar magnet and a flat piece of white paper with hundreds of scattered iron filings. As soon as the paper is placed on the magnet, all the particles align around the two separate poles of the bar’s magnetic field. Every iron particle becomes polarized around one of the two extremes.
This is what Obama and Jarrett have managed to achieve in the Middle East. It is not an accident. We know that the two-person cult of Obama-Jarrett have been secretly “negotiating” with the mullahs since the beginning of the Obama years. But time is running out, and everybody over there is planning for the post-O years.
For the Iranians that means moving as fast as possible to capitalize on a historic moment of Western weakness, collusion, and accommodation. The mullahs remember what happened when Ronald Reagan won over Jimmy Carter. They have less than two years to grab whatever they can.
That is why Iranian Revolutionary Guard troops are now moving through Syria into high mountain positions to attack the Golan Heights, the northeastern tip of Israel. Syrian Army forces and Shi’ites recruited in Pakistan and Afghanistan are working under the command of Iran’s Guards.
DEBKAfile has a detailed article on this. (Debka is linked to Israeli intelligence, but this kind of stuff they don’t kid about).
DEBKAfile February 18, 2015, 9:04 AM (IDT)
“Even in stormy winter conditions, the Syrian army continued Wednesday to press forward with Iranian, Hizballah and imported Afghani and Pakistani Shiite forces towards the Golan and Israeli lines. Their immediate objective appears to be the lofty Tel al-Hara mountain fortress, which the Syrian army lost to rebel forces. … Our military sources report that the fall of Tel al-Hara would lay Quneitra (on the Goland Heights) open to attack. …(In) Quneitra… Tehran plans to establish a major military outpost and forward command center up against Israel’s Golan deployment. This is the first instance of Syria’s Bashar Assad agreeing to pass a warfront to Iranian command.”
In response, Israel has conducted a successful decapitation strike across the border, killing half a dozen top Guard officers and half a dozen Hizb’allah planners. Syrian artillery has reportedly killed 200 Guards in a “friendly fire” accident -– but Israel probably knows how to penetrate Syrian battlefield electronics.
Of all the extremely dangerous events that are now gathering momentum in the region, the Iranian-Syrian drive against northern Israel is the most dangerous. The reason is simple. Israel has a sophisticated nuclear, WMD, and missile deterrent, to be used under military doctrines similar to our own. For rational nations, WMDs are a last resort, only usable when a threat is direct and existential. Iran has always played the crazy card, a big show of irrational fanaticism and rage. Maybe they really are crazy — nobody knows for sure.
The mullahs are now trying to push Israel to the wall –- which is when a Western-style deterrent doctrine comes into force. Ayatollah Khamenei, the “Supreme Guide,” has obviously decided this is the moment when America will not defend its former allies. Maybe Obama and Jarrett have actually told him so; maybe Iran has penetrated this supremely foolish and malignant administration. Whatever the case may be, Iran is moving military forces through Syria toward Israel. Iran is also winning power in Yemen (which controls the narrow entrance to the Red Sea). All these moves directly threaten Saudi Arabia and Egypt, as well as Israel and U.S. naval and air force assets in the region.
This is an enormous Iranian gamble, maybe a martyrdom gamble, following Khomeinist war theology.
This is therefore the most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. It is a moment of unpredictable confrontation, with nuclear weapons in the offing.
Obama and the Iranians are gambling everything on the toss of a coin.
Israel does not have the manpower to match Iran, Syria, and Hizb’allah at the Golan border. If the Iranians stage a blitzkrieg against the Golan, using a force of fifty or more tanks now located in Syria, Israel may resort to unconventional weapons. These can range from massive electronic warfare to arming the Syrian Sunni rebels, to a wide range of WMD’s.
If the Golan becomes the flashpoint, a likely outcome is a huge regional war, pitting Shi’ite Iran against Sunni Arabs. Israel has long had contacts with the Saudis and Egyptians on how to respond to Iranian aggression. If Israel is drawn into regional chaos, it is likely to support the Sunni powers, who will need all the help they can get.
Iran has a Shi’ite martyrdom creed, which suggests it is trying to provoke an Israeli strike that will predictably enrage Obama and Western liberals, so that Iran can play the aggrieved victim. The Muslim world, which is 80% Sunni, may then back Shi’ite Iran.
The most intelligent form of preemption on the Golan is therefore the most invisible one. Big nuclear bangs are self-defeating. Silent strikes may work. There is now a range of unconventional weapons available to technically advanced nations. However, any local war can spread unpredictably around the Middle East.
Obama has brought us to the nuclear brink. It is vital to understand that this is not an accident. It is purposeful. It is a continuation of the Carter-Brzezinski strategy that put Ayatollah Khomeini into power forty years ago — the first Islamic Caliphate. The Obama-Carter strategy makes no rational sense at all, except perhaps in some drunken faculty lounge. The risks are enormous, and the potential for a major violent backlash against the United States and Europe is very great. Iran now has ICBMs that can reach Europe and soon, the United States.
The single biggest factor in this crisis is the vacuum of American power. For decades the United States was trusted to keep the peace in the Persian Gulf, where Persians and Arabs have been staring at each with implacable hatred for a thousand years, across fifty miles of water.
Obama has destroyed any trust in America. We have “community disorganized” the Middle East.
When Netanyahu comes to Washington in defiance of Obama, the Iranians and ISIS will cheer for Obama.
But maybe the American people will come to their own conclusions.
Obama kept reform Muslims out of summit on extremism
February 21, 2015Obama kept reform Muslims out of summit on extremism, Washington Examiner, Charles Hoskinson, February 21, 2015
Some of the most prominent reformers have argued for years that the ideological and theological roots of Islamist extremism must be addressed, but administration officials carefully avoided exactly that subject during Obama’s three-day summit.
The White House is also undermining its own efforts by working with people who sympathize with the goals of violent extremist groups, if not their methods, the reformers say.
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The White House excluded members of a prominent group of reformist Muslims from its terror summit this week, apparently because President Obama rejects their argument that such groups as Islamic State of Iraq and Syria are actually motivated by Islam.
A group of 23 prominent Muslim reformers signed a full-page ad in the Sunday New York Times on Jan. 11 asking “What can Muslims do to reclaim their ‘beautiful religion’?”
But Obama and officials throughout his administration deny any connection between Islam and the terrorists beheading and burning their victims in a reign of terror in the Middle East.
Muslim reformers say the administration is ignoring them because they disagree with Obama’s refusal to acknowledge the Islamic roots of the extremists’ ideology.
Some of the most prominent reformers have argued for years that the ideological and theological roots of Islamist extremism must be addressed, but administration officials carefully avoided exactly that subject during Obama’s three-day summit.
The White House is also undermining its own efforts by working with people who sympathize with the goals of violent extremist groups, if not their methods, the reformers say.
“We have to own the issue of extremist Islamic theology in order to defeat it and remove it from our world. We have to name it to tame it,” Muslim journalists Asra Nomani and Hala Arafa wrote in an essay published Friday by the Daily Beast.
“Among Muslims, stuck in face-saving, shame-based cultures, we need to own up to our extremist theology instead of always reverting to a strategy of denial, deflection and demonization.”
Nomani, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, was close friends with her colleague Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped and beheaded by Islamist extremists in Pakistan in 2002.
At the summit, Obama and other officials insisted there is no link between Islam and the Islamist extremist groups that have been at the forefront of a dramatic spike in terrorist violence worldwide.
“Al Qaeda and [the Islamic State] and groups like it are desperate for legitimacy. They try to portray themselves as religious leaders — holy warriors in defense of Islam,” Obama said Wednesday.
“We must never accept the premise that they put forward, because it is a lie. Nor should we grant these terrorists the religious legitimacy that they seek. They are not religious leaders — they’re terrorists. And we are not at war with Islam. We are at war with people who have perverted Islam.”
The summit aimed at empowering community leaders to help Muslims resist the extremists’ message and improved strategies to communicate a more moderate message. But the administration’s refusal to identify the threat — and the exclusion of those who do from the conversation — works against meeting those goals, reformers said.
Maajid Nawaz, a former Islamist radical andone of those who signed the Times advertisement, is co-founder of the Quilliam Foundation, an anti-extremist British think-tank. The refusal of Obama and his officials to name their real enemy is referred to among reformers as the “Voldemort effect,” after the villain in the Harry Potter books whose name could not be mentioned.
Nawaz told CNN on Wednesday that refusing to address the Islamist ideology directly puts all Muslims at risk of being blamed for the actions of a tiny minority — the exact opposite effect of what Obama intended by his approach.
“When the president said there’s a poisonous ideology that needs to be refuted by Muslim clerics, the average everyday non-Muslim, the only word they know for that is the religion of Islam and they will think that the ideology we are referring to is the faith of Islam itself and thereby they would end up blaming all Muslims,” Nawaz said.
“Islam is a religion like any other with all the various sects and denominations. Islamism is a desire to impose Islam over society. And that is a very theocratic extremist desire. It can manifest itself violently. When it does, I call it jihadism. But it can also manifest itself politically. It’s still a problematic ideology because any desire to impose anyone’s faith over anyone else is inherently flawed and must be challenged,” he said.
“Al Qaeda didn’t inspire extremism. It was this extremist Islamist ideology that inspired al Qaeda. And unless and until we recognize the problem isn’t these Mafiosi-style groups that we can just take out by taking out their leaderships, but it’s the ideology that inspires them, we’ll have a new [Islamic State] tomorrow.”
The ad, by the Gatestone Institute, states, “If Islam is a religion that stands for justice and peaceful coexistence, then the quest for an Islamic state cannot be justified as sanctioned by a just and merciful creator. It is the duty of us Muslims to actively and vigorously affirm and promote universal human rights, including gender equality and freedom of conscience.”
One of the 23 signatories, Tarek Fatah, is a columnist for the Toronto Sun in Canada, and has noted the lack of response from administration officials and journalists.
“Instead of engaging with these progressive Muslims and supporting their call for reform, not only did the White House ignore them, but every media outlet I saw other than Fox News did as well,” he wrote on Feb. 3.
Instead, the White House and many in the mainstream media work with Muslim leaders who sympathize with the extremists, says Zuhdi Jasser, a doctor and former Navy officer who leads the American Islamic Foundation for Democracy.
“This is a Muslim problem that needs a Muslim solution,” he told the Washington Examiner in November. “You can’t just say it’s about violence. You need sermons that call upon America as the leading force for goodness in the world.”
Jasser’s activism against Islamist theocracy recently landed him a prominent role in what the left-wing Center for American Progress calls the “Islamophobia network.” In a report released Feb. 11, the group said Jasser “promotes conspiratorial claims that America is infiltrated by radical Muslims.”
But many so-called mainstream Muslim groups that Jasser has criticized have documented extremist ties. Sympathies with the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egypt-based Islamist movement, landed two U.S. groups, the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim American Society, on the list of terrorist organizations banned by the United Arab Emirates.
Though both groups vigorously deny extremist sympathies or ties, there is ample evidence that CAIR was founded by supporters of Hamas, the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch and a banned terrorist organization in the United States, and that the Muslim American Society is the Brotherhood’s U.S. branch.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Obama Must Confront the Threat of Radical Islam
February 21, 2015Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Obama Must Confront the Threat of Radical Islam, Time, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, February 20, 2015
ISIS is recruiting young Muslims from around the globe to Jihad, and the White House apparently doesn’t understand why.
Aiding Islamic Terrorists Is Our Foreign Policy
February 20, 2015Aiding Islamic Terrorists Is Our Foreign Policy, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, February 20, 2015
In the White House, Obama has tried to shape an Islamist future for the Middle East, favoring Islamist governments in Turkey and Islamist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood. He saw his role as paving the way for the next generation of regional regimes that would be explicitly Islamist.Obama’s foreign policy in the region has been an elaborate exercise in trying to draw up new maps for a caliphate. The inclusion of terrorist groups in this program isn’t a mistake. It’s not naiveté or blindness. It’s the whole point of the exercise which was to transform terrorist groups into governments.
Obama’s foreign policy in the region has been an elaborate exercise in trying to draw up new maps for a caliphate. The inclusion of terrorist groups in this program isn’t a mistake. It’s not naiveté or blindness. It’s the whole point of the exercise which was to transform terrorist groups into governments.
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Obama says that we are not fighting a war on Islam. What he leaves out is that under his administration the United States is fighting in a civil war that is taking place within Islam.
It’s not a conflict between the proverbial moderate Muslim and the raging fanatic. That was an outdated Bush era notion. Instead Obama has brought us into a fight between Muslim governments and Muslim terrorists, not on the side of the governments we were allied with, but on the side of the terrorists.
It’s why Egypt is shopping for French planes and Russian nukes. Yemen’s government was run out of town by Obama’s new Iranian friends in a proxy war with Saudi Arabia. And the Saudis are dumping oil.
Iran and Qatar are the regional powers Obama is closest to. What these two countries have in common, is that despite their mutual hostility, they are both international state sponsors of Islamic terrorism.
Obama’s diplomats will be negotiating with the Taliban in Qatar. Among the Taliban delegation will be the terrorist leaders that Obama freed from Gitmo. And Iran gets anything it wants, from Yemen to the bomb, by using the threat of walking away in a huff from the hoax nuclear negotiations as leverage.
In Syria and Iraq, Obama is fighting ISIS alongside Islamic terrorists linked to Al Qaeda and Iran. In Libya, he overthrew a government in support of Islamic terrorists. His administration has spoken out against Egyptian air strikes against the Islamic State Jihadists in Libya who had beheaded Coptic Christians.
At the prayer breakfast where he denounced Christianity for the Crusades was the foreign minister of the Muslim Brotherhood government of Sudan that has massacred Christians. Unlike Libya, where Obama used a false claim of genocide to justify an illegal war, Sudan actually has committed genocide. And yet Obama ruled out using force against Sudan’s genocide even while he was running for office.
The United States now has a strange two-tier relationship with the Middle East. On paper we retain a number of traditional alliances with old allies such as Egypt, Israel and Saudi Arabia, complete with arms sales, foreign aid and florid speeches. But when it comes to policy, our new friends are the terrorists.
American foreign policy is no longer guided by national interests. Our allies have no input in it. It is shaped around the whims of Qatar and Iran; it’s guided by the Muslim Brotherhood and defined by the interests of state sponsors of terror. Our foreign policy is a policy of aiding Islamic terrorists.
It’s only a question of which terrorists.
Obama’s familiar argument is that ISIS and Al Qaeda fighters shouldn’t be called Islamic terrorists. Not even the politically correct sop of “Radical Islam” is acceptable. The terrorists are perverting Islam, he claims. The claim was banal even before September 11, but it bears an entirely new significance from an administration that has put Muslim Brotherhood operatives into key positions.
The administration is asserting the power to decide who is a Muslim. It’s a theological position that means it is taking sides in a Muslim civil war between Islamists.
This position is passed off as a strategy for undermining the terrorists. Refusing to call the Islamic State by its name, using the more derogatory “Daesh,” denying that the Islamic terrorists are acting in the name of Islam, is supposed to inhibit recruitment. This claim is made despite the flood of Muslims leaving the West to join ISIS. If any group should be vulnerable to our propaganda, it should be them.
But that’s not what this is really about.
According recognition to a state is a powerful diplomatic tool for shaping world politics. We refuse to recognize ISIS, as we initially refused to recognize the USSR. Obama resumed diplomatic ties with Cuba. His people negotiate and appease the Taliban even though it was in its own time just as brutal as ISIS.
Obama is not willing to recognize ISIS as Islamic, but he does recognize the Muslim Brotherhood as Islamic. Both are violent and murderous Islamists. But only one of them is “legitimate” in his eyes.
Those choices are not about terrorist recruitment, but about building a particular map of the region. Obama refuses to concede that ISIS is Islamic, not because he worries that it will bring them more followers, this is a tertiary long shot at best, but because he is supporting some of their rivals.
The White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism has brought a covert strategy out into the spotlight. Despite its name, it’s not countering violence or extremism.
The new director of the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, the axis of Obama’s CVE strategy, is Rashad Hussain who appeared at Muslim Brotherhood front group events and defended the head of Islamic Jihad. In attendance was Salam Al-Marayati of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, yet another Muslim Brotherhood linked group, who had urged Muslims not to cooperate with the FBI and defended Hamas and Hezbollah.
In Syria, the United States is coordinating with Assad and backing the Syrian rebels, who have their own extensive ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and even Al Qaeda. This could be viewed as an “enemy of my enemy” alliance, but this administration backed the Brotherhood before it viewed ISIS as a threat. Top Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi and John Kerry, had focused on outreach to Assad under Bush.
They’re not allying with Assad and the Brotherhood to beat ISIS. They’re fighting ISIS to protect the Brotherhood and their deal with Iran.
In the White House, Obama has tried to shape an Islamist future for the Middle East, favoring Islamist governments in Turkey and Islamist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood. He saw his role as paving the way for the next generation of regional regimes that would be explicitly Islamist.
The Arab Spring was a deceptive code name for a clean sweep that would push out the old leaders like Mubarak and replace them with the Muslim Brotherhood and other likeminded Islamists. Islamic terrorism, at least against the United States, would end because their mission had been accomplished.
Stabilizing unrest by putting the destabilizers in charge wasn’t a new idea. Carter helped make it happen in Iran. And the more violent an Islamic terrorist group is, the more important it is to find a way to stop the violence by putting them in charge. The only two criteria that matter are violence and dialogue.
So why isn’t Obama talking to ISIS? Because ISIS won’t talk back. It’s impossible to support a terrorist group that won’t engage in dialogue. If ISIS were to indicate any willingness to negotiate, diplomats would be sitting around a table with headchoppers in less time than it takes a Jordanian pilot to burn.
And that still might happen.
Obama isn’t trying to finish off ISIS. He’s keeping them on the ropes the way that he did the Taliban. Over 2,000 Americans died on the off chance that the Taliban would agree to the negotiations in Qatar. Compared to that price in blood, the Bergdahl deal was small potatoes. And if Obama is negotiating with the Taliban after all that, is there any doubt that he would negotiate to integrate ISIS into Iraq and Syria?
Obama’s foreign policy in the region has been an elaborate exercise in trying to draw up new maps for a caliphate. The inclusion of terrorist groups in this program isn’t a mistake. It’s not naiveté or blindness. It’s the whole point of the exercise which was to transform terrorist groups into governments.
Stabilizing the region by turning terrorists into governments may sound like pouring oil on a fire, but to progressives who believe in root causes, rather than winning wars, violence is a symptom of discontent. The problem isn’t the suicide bomber. It’s our power structure. Tear that down, as Obama tried to do in Cairo, and the terrorists no longer have anything to fight against because we aren’t in their way.
Bush tried to build up civil society to choke off terrorism. Obama builds civil society around terrorists.
Obama does not believe that the terrorists are the problem. He believes that we are the problem. His foreign policy is not about fighting Islamic terrorists. It is about destroying our power to stop them.
He isn’t fighting terrorists. He’s fighting us.
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