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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
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Four parties caused Syria’s genocidal calamity. Should Israel get involved?

September 6, 2015

Four parties caused Syria’s genocidal calamity. Should Israel get involved? DEBKAfile, September 6, 2015

migrants_along_railways_5.9.15

Refugees flooding into Europe

Chapter by chapter, a long list of the guilty parties must bear responsibility for the Syrian catastrophe hacking the ruined country into bleeding parts.

1. The first culprit is undoubtedly its insensate president Bashar Assad and his close family, who have had no qualms about spilling the blood of some 300,000 men, women, children and old people – some estimate as many as half a million – and making some 11 people homeless, to keep himself in power. No one has ever counted the number of people maimed and crippled by the war, but they are conservatively estimated at one million.

These figures add up to genocide or serial mass murder, which has been allowed to go into its fifth year.

2. Iran warrants second billing for this mass crime.

Tehran has laid out the stupendous sum of some $40 billion to keep the mass marderer Assad in power with total disregard for his methods of survival. The motives behind the ayatollahs’ military and political boost are well recorded. Worth mentioning here is that Tehran not only pressed its Lebanese proxy, the Shiite Hizballah group, into service alongside Assad’s army, but sent its its own generals to orchestrate the war, led by the Al Qods Brigades chief Qassem Soleimeni.

We can reveal here that 22 Iranian generals have died fighting for the Assad cause.

3. The third place belongs to the United States and President Barack Obama. His refusal to put American boots on the ground may have been the correct decision for the US, but it had four direct consequences:

a) The slaughter of the Syrian people continued unchecked. Even after President Obama declared that chemical warfare was a red line, he backed down at the last minute against intervening and ordered the US fleet to draw back from the Syrian coast.

To this day, Assad continues to use chemical weapons to poison his enemies.

b) Obama and his Secretary of State John Kerry let Iran use its military backing for Assad as a high card in the negotiations for a nuclear accord. Instead of making it a condition for a deal against the lifting of sanctions, Washington allowed Tehran to come away from the table with US non-intervention in Syria as one of its concessions for buying Iran’s assent to the Vienna deal.

Tehran, in a word, won Washington’s tacit approval for propping up the atrocious Syrian ruler.

c) The rest of the world, including the United Nations and the European Union, followed the Obama administration’s lead and stood aside as at least 11 million Syrians became homeless refugees.

The lifeless body of a three-year old Syrian child washed up from the sea has figured in the Western media as a symbol of the tragic fate of Syria’s refugees. However, his tragedy came after the hair-raising atrocities endured by millions of those refugees for nearly five years.

Many families were forced to sell their daughters as sex slaves to buy food, their young sons to pedophile predators. The slave markets were centered on the Persian Gulf. Young Alan Kurdi died aged three. Many thousands of Syrian refugee children still live in appalling circumstances. No humanitarian organization has started an outcry or a campaign to rescue them.

d) US refusal to intervene in the most savage humanitarian tragedy the world has seen for many decades opened the door to the belligerent branch of al Qaeda, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, to march into the vacuum. The videotaped records of beheadings, the massacre of the Iraqi Yazdi people, the enslavement of its women and the burning alive of “apostates,” followed in quick succession.

The strongest nation in the world fought back with an ineffective trickle of air strikes on ISIS targets, allowing the group to go forward to conquer terrain and gain in strength.

4. Russia bears a heavy weight of guilt – and Israel would do well to watch its cynical conduct and draw the right conclusions. Like the ayatollahs, President Vladimir Putin led the second world power to total commitment for keeping Bashar Assad in power. Among other motivations, Putin pursued this policy to settle a score with Obama for the overthrow of Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi.

With one world power on the sidelines and a second jumping in with two feet, the Syrian imbroglio was bound to have devastating historical repercussions.

Throughout the Syrian conflict, Israel refrained from interfering, with only one exception: It supported Syrian rebel groups holding a strip of southern Syria, as a buffer against Iranian, Hizballah and Syrian army encroachment on its northern borders.

More than a thousand injured Syrians were treated and their lives saved in Israeli hospitals after receiving first aid at a field hospital on the Israeli-Syria border.

The esteemed Israeli historian Prof. Shlomo Avinery said Sunday, Sept 6, that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu did the right thing in steadfastly keeping Israel out of the Syrian conflict. He very much doubted that Syrian refugees would seek asylum in a country they regard as the Zionist enemy.

Israel’s opposition leader Isaac Herzog nonetheless urged the government to take in a limited number of Syrian asylum seekers from among those flooding into Europe, and not to forget that “we are Jews.”

One wonders why he never had a word to say about US dereliction when Assad committed his atrocities across Israel’s border.

Herzog’s favorite advice to Netanyahu is to go to Washington right now, beard President Obama in the Oval Office and hammer out an agreed policy on Iran.

Netanyahu referred to the Syrian refugee crisis at the weekly cabinet meeting Sunday: “While Israel is not indifferent to the human tragedy of refugees from Syria and Africa, it is a small country that cannot throw its doors open to them,” he said.

“We have conscientiously treated thousands of wounded from the fighting in Syria, and we have helped them rebuild their lives,” the prime minister recalled. “But Israel is a very small country, with neither demographic nor geographic depth, and therefore we must control our borders.”

Regarding a visit to Washington, the prime minister has a problem: Just as President Obama has not invited any Syrian refugees to come to America, he has not issued Netanyahu with an invitation to come to DC, whether to discuss the Iranian or the Syrian questions.

Categories: Assad, Asylum seekers, Defense of Israel, Europe, Foreign policy, Germany, Human rights, Immigration, Iran - Syria war, Iran scam, Iranian proxies, Islamic supremacy, Islamism, Israel, Netanyahu, Obama, Obama's America, Obama's legacy, P5+1, Russia - Syrian war, Syria war
Tags: Assad, Asylum seekers, Defense of Israel, Europe, Foreign Policy, Germany, human rights, Immigration, Iran - Syria war, Iran Scam, Iranian proxies, Islamic supremacy, Islamism, Israel, Netanyahu, Obama, Obama's America, Obama's legacy, P5+1, Russia - Syrian war, Syria war

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U.S. and West Victimize Christians Fleeing ISIS

September 6, 2015

U.S. and West Victimize Christians Fleeing ISIS, Gatestone Institute, Raymond Ibrahim, September 6, 2015

Western nations are not merely ignoring Muslim persecution of Christians in the Middle East, they are actively supporting it by sponsoring “moderate” rebels who in reality are as “radical” and anti-Western as the Islamic State.
“Why the federal government has failed to take steps to expedite such reunification in cases where family and religious leaders are willing to vouch for and help those seeking asylum here… remains an unfathomable mystery.” —East County Magazine, San Diego.
Such “unfathomable mysteries” are reminiscent of the U.S. State Department’s habit of inviting Muslim representatives but denying visas to Christian representatives. Since the start of 2015, 4,205 Muslims have been admitted into the U.S. from Iraq, but only 727 Christians. For every Christian granted asylum, the U.S. grants asylum to five or six Muslims — even though Christians, as persecuted “infidel” minorities, are in much greater need of sanctuary.
“Most European governments, especially those that are Christian explicitly or implicitly, are failing in their duty to look after their fellow Christians in their hour of need.” — Lord Weidenfeld.
When persecuted Christian minorities manage to flee the Islamic State and come to the West for asylum, they are imprisoned again. All the while, Muslims — in the Mideast and in the West — are being empowered and welcomed in the West with open arms.

Not only does the West facilitate the persecution of Christians in the Middle East, but in the West as well.

According to a recent NPR report, the U.S. supported “moderate” coalition fighting both Bashar Assad and the Islamic State in Syria “has extremists in its own ranks who have mistreated Christians and forced them out of their homes” — just as the Islamic State (IS) has done.

Christian minorities forced out of their homes who manage to reach Western nations — including the United States — sometimes encounter more trouble.

Despite having family members to sponsor them, a group of 20 Christians who fled the Islamic State in Iraq have been imprisoned indefinitely, some since February, at the Otay Detention Facility in San Diego, even though they have local family members and Christian leaders who vouch for them (a primary way that the majority of detained foreign nationals are released is to the supervision of American citizens who vouch for them).

Activists say that the men and women in detention have been held for too long, including by the U.S. government’s own standards. Some have been imprisoned for over seven months with no hearing date for release even set.

“They are being held without a real reason…. They’ve escaped hell. Let’s allow them to reunite with their families,” said Mark Arabo, a spokesman for the Chaldean community in San Diego.

The detainees include a woman who had escaped the clutches of IS, and who had pleaded to see her sickly mother. Her mother died before she could see her. “She had been begging to be let out to see her dying mother,” said a priest familiar with the case.

Discussing the ongoing plight of these Iraqi Christians, San Diego’s East County Magazine concluded: “Why the federal government has failed to take steps to expedite such reunification in cases where family and religious leaders are willing to vouch for and help those seeking asylum here, then, remains an unfathomable mystery.”

Such “unfathomable mysteries” are reminiscent of the U.S. State Department’s habit of inviting Muslim representatives but denying visas to Christian representatives. Since the start of 2015, 4,205 Muslims have been admitted into the U.S. from Iraq, but only 727 Christians. For every one Christian the U.S. grants asylum, it grants asylum to five or six Muslims — even though Christians, as persecuted “infidel” minorities, are in much greater need of sanctuary, not to mention more assimilating to American culture than Muslims.

Faith McDonnell, of the Institute on Religion & Democracy, said regarding the detainment of Iraqi Christians in San Diego:

This follows the disturbing pattern that we have seen from the State Department of ignoring the particular targeting of Christians by ISIS while giving preferential treatment for asylum to other groups with expedited processing — like Somalis, Iraqis, and Syrians, some of whom could very well be members of jihadist movements.

The same is happening in the United Kingdom. Church leaders accuse David Cameron of “turning his back” on Christians facing genocide in Syria and Iraq by failing to grant them refuge in the UK — even though thousands of Muslims have been allowed entry.

Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, signed a petition calling on the UK government to “welcome Christian refugees and give them priority as asylum seekers,” emphasizing that “Syrian and Iraqi Christians are being butchered, tortured and enslaved.”

Similarly, Lord Weidenfeld, 95, who fled Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938 with the help of British Quakers, said:

Why is it that the Poles and the Czechs are taking in Christian families and yet the British government stands idly by?

This mood of indifference is reminiscent of the worst phases of appeasement, and may have catastrophic consequences. Europe must awake and the Conservative British Government should be leading from the front.

Most European governments, especially those that are Christian explicitly or implicitly, are failing in their duty to look after their fellow Christians in their hour of need.

This is not necessarily true of east European nations. Along with countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia, Slovakia recently went so far as to say it will only accept Christians when it takes in Syrian refugees under an EU relocation scheme. The Slavic nation argues that “Muslims would not be accepted because they would not feel at home,” including because there are no mosques in Slovakia.

Meanwhile, many of those Christians who are granted asylum in Western countries arrive there only to be further persecuted by Muslim asylum seekers — indicating, once again, who does and who does not really need asylum; who does and who does not assimilate in Western culture.

Most recently in Sweden, two small families of Christian asylum seekers from Syria were recently harassed and abused by approximately 80 Muslim asylum seekers, also from Syria.

The Christians and Muslims — described by one Swedish newspaper as “fundamentalist Islamists” — resided in the same asylum house. Among other humiliations, the Muslims ordered the Christians not to wear their crosses around their necks and not to use the communal areas when in use by Muslims.

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Asylum seekers in the Swedish city of Kalmar, where Christian refugees were forced to move out of public housing after being harassed and threatened by Muslims.

After continuous harassment and threats, these Christian refugees, who had managed to escape the Islamic State, left the Swedish asylum house “fearing for their own safety.” A spokesman for the government migration agency responsible for the center they had been staying in said:

“They dared not stay. The atmosphere became too intimidating. And they got no help… They chose themselves to organize new address and moved away without our participation because they felt a discomfort.”

Western nations are not merely ignoring Muslim persecution of Christians in the Middle East, they are actively supporting it by sponsoring “moderate” rebels who in reality are as “radical” and anti-Western as the Islamic State. And when these persecuted Christian minorities manage to flee the Islamic State and come to the West for asylum, they are imprisoned again. All the while, Muslims — in the Mideast and in the West — are being empowered and welcomed in the West with open arms.

Categories: Asylum seekers, Christians, Europe, Foreign policy, Human rights, Immigration, Islamic State, Islamic supremacy, Islamic war on Christians, Islamism, Multiculturalism, Obama's America, Syria war
Tags: Asylum seekers, Christians, Europe, Foreign Policy, human rights, Immigration, Islamic State, Islamic supremacy, Islamic war on Christians, Islamism, Multiculturalism, Obama's America, Syria war

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Genocide, Islam and weaponized empathy

September 5, 2015

Genocide, Islam and weaponized empathy, The Declination, The study of a civilization in decline

(A powerful narrative. — DM)

But back to the central point, why, then, if America sheltered my family, must the West turn back the refugees of Syria, of Somalia, of Libya?

Because they bring the source of infection with them. Armenians had managed, through some strength I sometimes find difficult to fully grasp, to hang on to their European culture and Christian religion through millenia of conflict with Islam. They had stubbornly resisted assimilation into Islam and its ideals. These refugees, for all that my heart yearns to give them sanctuary and a place to escape to, nonetheless carry Islam with them.

Leftists, take your Weaponized Empathy elsewhere. We understand that the world is full of terrible things, of children dying, of women enslaved. But we have to find our resolve and protect our own.

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As some of my readers know, I am part Armenian by ancestry. It used to be a thing that didn’t enter into my daily thought process, for I am also partially of English descent and am fully American, in culture, language and appearance. Armenians can generally tell that I am of Armenian ancestry, but few others can. But as militant Islam made its presence felt, increasingly in recent years, that identity has resurfaced because of the connection my own family has to the affair.

Then I saw this photo of a drowned Syrian boy:

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Leftists would have you believe that us on the Right have no empathy. We wish to deny the endless migrations away from crisis areas in the Islamic world and that, they would tell us, is incompatible with human rights, dignity, empathy and so on.

My grandfather told me stories of Armenia (Armenians, then, lived throughout Anatolia), which he remembered only dimly. For he had been only a few years old when my family escaped, just ahead of the genocide in the dying Ottoman Empire. Mostly, he remembered it through the stories told in the Armenian exile community.

Entire villages were erased, all the inhabitants slaughtered, the buildings burnt to the ground, the movable wealth stolen and melted down. Nothing of them remained. In the days before the genocide, two dialects of the Armenian language existed, colloquially referred to as the Western, or Anatolian, dialect and the Eastern dialect. The Western dialect has mostly gone extinct, spoken only by a few elders in the diaspora. My grandfather could speak it, but my mother knew only a few words. Only the Eastern dialect survives. Half of Armenia ceased to exist.

These were hardy Christians who had survived on the edge of the Byzantine and Islamic worlds for centuries. They had fought alongside Greeks and Crusaders. They were among the earliest — perhaps the very first — nations to convert to Christianity. They spoke an ancient language, a variant of the Indo-European language set that appears distantly related to Greek, and unrelated to any other.

Islam nearly erased them.

Now that Christians in the Middle-East are approaching extinction, the new target is the insufficiently Muslim. The Yazidis with their syncretic half-Muslim religion, or the Kurds who elevate their own nationalism over their religion (a rarity in the Muslim world).

I feel for them. I really do. In fact, I cannot tell you how much it pains me to see these things. On my grandfather’s knee, I heard the stories of Armenian survivors. In particular, one woman stands out. She was a child when the Turks came for her family, but she was comely and pretty. Her parents and brothers were killed and she was sold as a slave for a wealthy Turk’s harem. Her story of survival and escape was terrifying to me as a child, and it instilled a sense of resolve where Islam was concerned that has not abated to this day.

Can you imagine this? Seeing your family slaughtered, and only surviving to be used as a sex slave by those who did the deed? Blacks in America lecture me about my White privilege, saying that their ancestors were slaves. Mine were slaves much more recently than theirs. Mine were slaughtered wholesale.

But back to the central point, why, then, if America sheltered my family, must the West turn back the refugees of Syria, of Somalia, of Libya?

Because they bring the source of infection with them. Armenians had managed, through some strength I sometimes find difficult to fully grasp, to hang on to their European culture and Christian religion through millenia of conflict with Islam. They had stubbornly resisted assimilation into Islam and its ideals. These refugees, for all that my heart yearns to give them sanctuary and a place to escape to, nonetheless carry Islam with them.

There are good Muslims in the world, and I want to make this clear. My own family lived only because an Ottoman official warned my great-grandfather that genocide was coming. This man, whose name I cannot remember — something that genuinely pains me, for my grandfather died when I was young and his stories are almost dream-like to me, now — paid for the ticket to America for my family, for English language lessons, and everything else needed to escape before it was too late.

I hope that I will meet this good and righteous man in the life to come. I hope God saw fit to accept him into His kingdom.

But Islam nonetheless is a contagion, even if some maintain a stubborn moral immunity to the infection. Where Islam goes, this violence will follow. You will never save all the little boys, you will never stop the slaughter. All you will do is bring it to your own shores.

And if there is something I know for certain, it is that my ancestors did not escape Islam only to see their descendants fight it again, once more in their own homes.

There were tears in my grandfather’s eyes, at times, as he recounted the things he knew. And I know what his reaction would be to this boy’s death. He would feel empathy and sadness, far more acutely than the moral busybodies of Progressive Leftism. But then he would turn off the TV and tell me the truth: that we could not help them without also dooming ourselves to the same.

So, Leftists, take your Weaponized Empathy elsewhere. We understand that the world is full of terrible things, of children dying, of women enslaved. But we have to find our resolve and protect our own.

For if we do not, it could be my son laying on that distant beach, and that I will not allow.

Categories: Armenians, Foreign policy, Immigration, Islam, Islamic slaughter, Islamic supremacy, Islamic war on women, Islamism, Kurds, Ottoman Empire, Yazidis
Tags: Armenians, Foreign Policy, Immigration, Islam, Islamic slaughter, Islamic supremacy, Islamic war on women, Islamism, Kurds, Ottoman Empire, Yazids

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The hijrah into Europe

September 4, 2015

The hijrah into Europe, Front Page Magazine, Robert Spencer, September 4, 2015

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If you don’t accept the brave new world that is sure to bring more jihad and more Sharia to Europe, you’re a Nazi and a racist.

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Approximately 104,460 asylum seekers arrived in Germany during the month of August, setting a new record. That makes 413,535 registered refugees and migrants coming to Germany in 2015 so far. The country expects a total of around 800,000 people to seek asylum in Germany this year. And that’s just Germany. The entire continent of Europe is being inundated with refugees at a rate unprecedented in world history. This is no longer just a “refugee crisis.” This is a hijrah.

Hijrah, or jihad by emigration, is, according to Islamic tradition, the migration or journey of Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Yathrib, later renamed by him to Medina, in the year 622 CE. It was after the hijrah that Muhammad for the first time became not just a preacher of religious ideas, but a political and military leader. That was what occasioned his new “revelations” exhorting his followers to commit violence against unbelievers. Significantly, the Islamic calendar counts the hijrah, not Muhammad’s birth or the occasion of his first “revelation,” as the beginning of Islam, implying that Islam is not fully itself without a political and military component.

To emigrate in the cause of Allah – that is, to move to a new land in order to bring Islam there, is considered in Islam to be a highly meritorious act. “And whoever emigrates for the cause of Allah will find on the earth many locations and abundance,” says the Qur’an. “And whoever leaves his home as an emigrant to Allah and His Messenger and then death overtakes him, his reward has already become incumbent upon Allah. And Allah is ever Forgiving and Merciful.” (4:100) The exalted status of such emigrants led a British jihad group that won notoriety (and a shutdown by the government) a few years ago for celebrating 9/11 to call itself Al-Muhajiroun: The Emigrants.

And now a hijrah of a much greater magnitude is upon us. Evidence that this is a hijrah, not simply a humanitarian crisis, came last February, but was little noted at the time and almost immediately forgotten. The Islamic State published a document entitled, “Libya: The Strategic Gateway for the Islamic State.” Gateway into Europe, that is: the document exhorted Muslims to go to Libya and cross from there as refugees into Europe. This document tells would-be jihadis that weapons from Gaddafi’s arsenal are plentiful and easy to obtain in Libya – and that the country “has a long coast and looks upon the southern Crusader states, which can be reached with ease by even a rudimentary boat.”

The Islamic State did not have in mind just a few jihadis crossing from Libya: it also emerged last February that the jihadis planned to flood Europe with as many as 500,000 refugees. Now the number is shooting well beyond that in Germany alone. Of course, not all of these refugees are Islamic jihadis. Not all are even Muslims, although most are. However, no effort whatsoever is being made to determine the refugees’ adherence to Sharia and desire to bring it to their new land. Any such effort would be “Islamophobic.” Yet there are already hints that the Islamic State is putting its plan into effect: jihadis have already been found among the refugees trying to enter Europe. There will be many more such discoveries.

Eight hundred thousand Muslim refugees in one year alone. This will transform Germany, and Europe, forever, overtaxing the welfare economies of its wealthiest nations and altering the cultural landscape beyond recognition. Yet the serious public discussion that needs to be had about this crisis is shouted down by the usual nonsense: the Washington Post Wednesday published an inflammatory and irresponsible piece likening those concerned about this massive Muslim influx into Europe to 1930s Nazis ready to incinerate Jews by the millions. Hollywood star Emma Thompson accused British authorities of racism for not taking in more refugees – as if British authorities haven’t already done enough to destroy their nation.

And so it goes. If you don’t accept the brave new world that is sure to bring more jihad and more Sharia to Europe, you’re a Nazi and a racist. Meanwhile, no one is bothering even to ask, much less answer, one central question: why is it incumbent upon Europe have to absorb all these refugees? Why not Saudi Arabia or the other Muslim countries that are oil-rich and have plenty of space? The answer is unspoken because non-Muslim authorities refuse to believe it and Muslims don’t want it stated or known: these refugees have to go to Europe because this is a hijrah.

This is also Europe’s death knell.

Categories: Arab nations, Britain, Europe, Germany, Human rights, Immigration, Islamic jihad, Islamic supremacy, Islamic terrorism, Islamism, Islamophobia, Libya, Racism, Sharia law
Tags: Arab nations, Britain, Europe, Germany, human rights, Immigration, Islamic Jihad, Islamic supremacy, Islamic terrorism, Islamism, Islamophobia, Libya, Racism, Sharia law

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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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Germany’s Muslim Demographic Revolution

August 31, 2015

Germany’s Muslim Demographic Revolution, The Gatestone Institute, Soeren Kern, August 31, 2015

The surge in Germany’s Muslim population — propelled by a wave of migration unprecedented since the Second World War — represents a demographic shift of epic proportions, one that critics of the country’s open-door immigration policy warn will change the face of Germany forever.
“There are 20 million refugees waiting at the doorstep of Europe.” — Johannes Hahn, EU Commissioner for European Neighbourhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations.
According to Aiman Mazyek, head of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, attendance at many mosques has doubled in the past month alone.
A large number (40%) are from countries in the Balkans, including Albania and Kosovo. This implies that nearly half of those arriving in Germany are economic migrants, not refugees fleeing war zones. — Thomas De Maizière, German Interior Minister.
Muslim men residing in Germany routinely take advantage of the social welfare system by bringing two, three or four women from across the Muslim world to Germany, and then marrying them in the presence of an imam. Once in Germany the women request social welfare benefits, including the cost of a separate home for themselves and for their children, on the claim of being a “single parent with children.” — From an exposé broadcast by RTL television.
“For us today, what is at stake is Europe, the lifestyle of European citizens, European values, the survival or disappearance of European nations, and more precisely formulated, their transformation beyond recognition. Today, the question is not merely in what kind of a Europe we would like to live, but whether everything we understand as Europe will exist at all.” — Viktor Orbán, President of Hungary.

Germany’s Muslim population is set to skyrocket by more than 700,000 in 2015, pushing the total number of Muslims in the country to nearly 6 million for the first time.

The surge in Germany’s Muslim population — propelled by a wave of migration unprecedented since the Second World War — represents a demographic shift of epic proportions, one that critics of the country’s open-door immigration policy warn will change the face of Germany forever.

At a press conference on August 19, German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière revealed that a record 800,000 migrants and refugees — the equivalent of nearly one percent of Germany’s total population — are expected to arrive in Germany in 2015, a four-fold increase over 2014. He said that 83,000 migrants had arrived in July alone, and that the figure for August would be higher still.

De Maizière said that although many of the migrants are from the Middle East and North Africa, a large number (40%) are from countries in the Balkans, including Albania and Kosovo. This implies that nearly half of those arriving in Germany are economic migrants, not refugees fleeing war zones.

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According to German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle, the Berlin refugee center pictured here receives up to 2000 applications for asylum per day. (Image source: Deutsche Welle video screenshot)

Of the 800,000 migrants and refugees arriving in Germany in 2015, at least 80% (or 640,000) are Muslim, according to a recent estimate by the Central Council of Muslims in Germany (Zentralrat der Muslime in Deutschland, ZMD), a Muslim umbrella group based in Cologne. This estimate is not in dispute.

In addition to the newcomers, the natural rate of population increase of the Muslim community already living in Germany is approximately 1.6% per year (or 77,000), according to data extrapolated from a recent Pew Research Center study on the growth of the Muslim population in Europe.

Based on Pew projections, the Muslim population of Germany reached an estimated 5,068,000 by the end of 2014. The 640,000 Muslim migrants arriving in Germany in 2015, combined with the 77,000 natural increase, indicates that the Muslim population of Germany will jump by 717,000, to reach an estimated 5,785,000 by the end of 2015. This would leave Germany with the highest Muslim population in Western Europe.

By way of comparison, the surge in Germany’s Muslim population would be equivalent to the Muslim population of the United States increasing by 3 million in just one year.

Critics say that German officials, under pressure to solve Europe’s migration crisis, are ignoring the long-term consequences of taking in so many migrants from the Middle East and North Africa.

In addition to security concerns (Islamic radicals are almost certainly trying to enter Germany disguised as refugees), they say, the surge in Muslim immigration will accelerate the Islamization of Germany, a process that is already well under way.

Islam is the fastest growing religion in post-Christian Germany. This is evidenced by the fact that an increasing number of churches in Germany are being converted into mosques, some of which are publicly sounding calls to prayer (the adhan) from outdoor loudspeaker systems. The increase is such that some neighborhoods in Germany evoke the sights and sounds of the Muslim Middle East.

Islamic Sharia law is advancing rapidly throughout Germany, with Sharia courts now operating in all of Germany’s big cities. This “parallel justice system” is undermining the rule of law in Germany, experts warn, but government officials are “powerless” to do anything about it. At the same time, German judges are increasingly referring and deferring to Sharia law in German law courts.

Polygamy, although illegal under German law, is commonplace among Muslims in all major German cities. In Berlin, for example, it is estimated that fully one-third of the Muslim men living in the Neukölln district of the city have two or more wives.

According to an exposé broadcast by RTL, one of Germany’s leading media companies, Muslim men residing in Germany routinely take advantage of the social welfare system by bringing two, three or four women from across the Muslim world to Germany, and then marrying them in the presence of an imam (Muslim religious leader). Once in Germany the women request social welfare benefits, including the cost of a separate home for themselves and for their children, on the claim of being a “single parent with children.”

Although the welfare fraud committed by Muslim immigrants is an “open secret” costing German taxpayers millions of euros each year, government agencies are reluctant to take action due to political correctness, according to RTL.

Spiraling levels of violent crime perpetrated by shiftless immigrants from the Middle East and the Balkans have turned parts of German cities into “areas of lawlessness” — areas that are de facto “no-go” zones for police.

In Wuppertal, groups of bearded Muslim radicals calling themselves the “Sharia Police” have tried to enforce Islamic law on the streets by distributing yellow leaflets that explain the Islamist code of conduct in the city’s Sharia zones. In Hamburg, Muslim radicals have infiltrated dozens of primary and secondary schools, where they are imposing Islamic norms and values on non-Muslim students and teachers.

In Berlin, local officials have waived rules prohibiting religious dress in public buildings so that Muslim women can wear headscarves. In Bavaria, Muslim children are being exempted from mandatory visits to former concentration camps as part of Holocaust education programs.

In Bremen, city officials signed an agreement with the city’s 40,000-strong Muslim community. The agreement guarantees the protection of Muslim community properties, the approval of the construction of mosques with minarets and domes, the allotment of land for Muslim cemeteries, the supply of halal food at prisons and hospitals, the recognition of three Muslim holidays, Muslim representation in state institutions and other rights and privileges.

More than 700 German Muslims have joined the Islamic State and traveled to Syria and Iraq, and some of them have continued to receive welfare benefits from the German state while on the battlefields of the Middle East. Jihadists who have returned to Germany and pose an acute threat to national security threat are nevertheless eligible to receive benefits once again.

Germany is home to more than 7,000 Salafists who adhere to a branch of radical Islam that is vehemently opposed to Germany’s democratic order. German officials say that 1,000 of these individuals are especially dangerous (some are believed to have joined sleeper cells) and could attack at any time.

At the same time, however, Salafists are allowed to openly proselytize on German streets to find new recruits and thereby increase their numbers. In a recent recruitment initiative, Salafists launched an unprecedented nationwide campaign, “A Koran in Every Home,” to distribute 25 million copies of the Koran, translated into the German language, to every household in Germany, free of charge.

And yet the guardians of German multiculturalism have been working overtime to silence critics of the rise of Islam in Germany. In Bavaria, for example, German activists opposed to the construction of a mega-mosque in Munich have been classified as “extremists” and are being monitored by German intelligence.

German media consistently accuse commentators on the rise of Islam of engaging in hate speech, in an underhanded effort to try to intimidate them into silence. A particular object of wrath is a very popular German-language website called Politically Incorrect (PI), which over the years has grown into a major information resource for people concerned about the spread of Islam in Germany. PI’s motto reads “Against the Mainstream, Pro-American, Pro-Israel, Against the Islamization of Europe.” Not surprisingly, German media elites want PI shut down.

It is quite possible that German Chancellor Angela Merkel — who recently admitted that German multiculturalism has failed — views mass immigration from the Muslim world as the solution to Germany’s collapsing birth rate, which is among the lowest in the world.

The German government expects the population to shrink from roughly 81 million today to 67 million in 2060, although Germany’s statistics office, Destatis, recently reported that high levels of immigration would cause the country’s population to shrink more slowly than previously expected.

A study by the Hamburg-based World Economy Institute has warned that the low birthrate threatens the long-term viability of the German economy. “No other industrial country is deteriorating at this speed despite the strong influx of young migrant workers,” the report said. “Germany cannot continue to be a dynamic business hub in the long-run without a strong jobs market.”

Germany will need to do a far better job of integrating immigrants if they are to be a net gain for the German economy. A recent study by the Cologne Institute for Economic Research showed that Muslim immigrants were more likely to be unemployed and living off the social welfare state than any other migrant group in Germany. The report said that root cause for the high unemployment rates is the lack of educational attainment and job training qualifications.

Meanwhile, the migration crisis shows no sign of abating. At a summit on migration held in Vienna on August 27, the EU Commissioner for European Neighbourhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations, Johannes Hahn, said: “There are 20 million refugees waiting at the doorstep of Europe. Ten to 12 million in Syria, 5 million Palestinians, 2 million Ukrainians and about 1 million in the southern Caucasus.”

On August 21, Germany suspended the so-called Dublin Regulation — a law that requires people seeking refuge within the EU to do so in the first European country they reach — for asylum seekers from Syria. This means that Syrians reaching Germany will be allowed to stay while their applications are being processed. Critics say the move will encourage even more migrants to make their way to Germany.

Most Germans seem to be unfazed by what is happening to their country. An August 21 poll for German broadcaster ZDF showed that 60% of Germans thought their country could cope with the high number of refugees, and 86% said that Germany was a country of immigration.

In an interview with the newspaper Der Tagesspiegel, Aiman Mazyek, the head of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, said that so many Muslims have been flowing into the country that attendance at many mosques has doubled in the past month alone. Commenting on the demographic revolution sweeping Germany, Mazyek summed it up with an understatement: “The number of Muslims in Germany will increase significantly.”

In nearby Hungary, President Viktor Orbán has been one of the few European heads of state to sound the alarm. “A year ago I said that we live in times when anything can happen, and I still say so today,” he said recently. “Who would have thought that Europe would not be capable of protecting its own borders against unarmed refugees?” He added:

“For us today, what is at stake is Europe, the lifestyle of European citizens, European values, the survival or disappearance of European nations, and more precisely formulated, their transformation beyond recognition. Today, the question is not merely in what kind of a Europe we would like to live, but whether everything we understand as Europe will exist at all.”

Categories: Free world, Germany, Ideology, Immigration, Islamic supremacy, Islamic terrorism, Islamism, Islamophobia, Moral equivalence, Multiculturalism, Muslims, Political correctness, Sharia law
Tags: Europe, Free world, Germany, Ideology, Immigration, Islamic supremacy, Islamic terrorism, Islamism, Islamophobia, Moral equivalence, Multiculturalism, Muslims, Political correctness, Sharia law

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Obama’s Politicized Intelligence

August 29, 2015

Obama’s Politicized Intelligence, Washington Free Beacon, Matthew Continetti, August 28, 2015

(Please see also, Pentagon Not Targeting Islamic State Training Camps. Is there anything that Obama has not distorted for political purposes? — DM)

“Analysts,” reports the Daily Beast, “have been pushed to portray the group as weaker than the analysts believe it actually is.” This sort of dishonesty helps no one—except a president whose primary concern is leaving office with his reputation for ending wars intact, and the military brass who wish to remain in his good graces.

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The anniversary of the U.S. war against the Islamic State passed with little notice. It was August 7 of last year that President Obama authorized the first airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq, a campaign he expanded a month later to include targets in Syria. So far this month, the president has delivered remarks on the Voting Rights Act, his deal with Iran, the budget, clean energy, and Hurricane Katrina. ISIS? Not a peep.

Obama’s quiet because the war is not going well. Despite the loss of Tikrit earlier this year, the Islamic State’s western boundary is stable, and its eastern boundary now encroaches on Damascus. The president’s air campaign is one of the most limited and desultory America has fought in decades—ranking last in daily averages of strike sorties and bombs dropped. In late July, when the Turks permitted America the use of their air bases to launch attacks on ISIS, a “senior administration official” told the New York Times that the decision was “a game changer.” In the ensuing days the number of airstrikes in Syria actually fell.

The growing number of U.S. advisers—there are now more than 3,300 American military personnel in Iraq—has been unable to repair the damage wrought on the Iraqi Army by sectarian and political purges after our 2011 withdrawal. Even as the administration brags about killing more than 10,000 ISIS terrorists, a number that strains credulity, the Caliphate has become more deeply entrenched in its territory, and inspires attacks abroad.

Meanwhile the congressional authorization that the president sought is dead. One of our most gifted generals predicts the conflict will last “10 to 20 years.” And now comes news that the Pentagon is investigating whether intelligence assessments of ISIS have been manipulated for political reasons. “Analysts,” reports the Daily Beast, “have been pushed to portray the group as weaker than the analysts believe it actually is.” This sort of dishonesty helps no one—except a president whose primary concern is leaving office with his reputation for ending wars intact, and the military brass who wish to remain in his good graces.

What’s especially galling about this allegation is that Obama and the Democratic Party have spent years spuriously accusing President Bush of lying the United States into war in 2003. Spend a moment thinking of what the news cycle would be if George W. were still our president and the Pentagon inspector general opened an investigation into whether the bureaucracy was sprucing up intelligence to make it politically palatable: The chorus of “Bush lied, people died” would be deafening, Congress would demand investigations, the national security leak machine would start humming, John Conyers would reconvene his mock impeachment hearing, and the entire controversy would be set against the backdrop of antiwar marches and publicized denunciations of militaristic policy. What have we instead? ABC’s Good Morning America mentioned the Pentagon investigation. No other broadcast network did.

It’s an unanticipated consequence of Barack Obama’s presidency: his immobilization of the antiwar legions, the way his election immediately neutered the zealots who, if a Republican were in office, would be marching against drone strikes and mass surveillance and war in Afghanistan and air war in Libya, Syria, Iraq and proxy war in Yemen. What does it say about the left that the most spirited attacks on Obama national security policy have come from the right: On drones, surveillance, and congressional authorization for war, you are far more likely to hear criticism from Ted Cruz or Rand Paul than from the politicians who rode into office denouncing Bush’s misadventure in Iraq. The protestors who flooded New York in 2004 and fell to the ground at the D.C. “Die-In” in 2007—they either support the president or are too busy with Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter to care.

Obama has thus been allowed to wage a war for more than a year not only without the authorization he called for but also without the accountability that pressure from his left would bring. He’s flying solo, and below him are an endless, inconclusive war, a terrorist state built on sharia law and sex slavery, rampant chemical weapons use, civilian casualties, and a refugee crisis that is causing social, economic, and political instability in Europe. The only thing missing from this picture is outrage—elite fury over the geopolitical and humanitarian results of the president’s evasive policy, of doing only the bare minimum necessary to convince people that you aren’t ignoring the problem.

There’s no outrage because the media, our bipartisan political establishment, and indeed the American people themselves are unwilling to face the scope of the challenge the Islamic State presents. To uproot it we would have to send U.S. ground forces to Iraq in large numbers, not just special forces operating in tandem with unrestricted air support. We would have to retake and hold ground lost in the years since we departed Iraq, and we would have to commit to remaining in Iraq and Syria for a long time. To deal a blow to radical Islam that would deter recruitment, stop the bandwagon effect, and secure America from attack by militants and their fellow-travelers would require a military and economic commitment the United States, and least of all our president, is simply not prepared to make.

Easier to perform the illusion of activity, of success and advance, so that all the boxes are checked, all our consciences placated. Easier to pretend that the problem of ISIS can be “contained” and that our new ally Iran can handle the situation in its emerging capacity as regional hegemon. Easier to go about our business, to spin or outright ignore the war our country has been waging in Iraq and Syria for more than a year. So much easier not to worry about what’s happening over there—until, that is, the enemy attacks us here.

Categories: Air strikes, Denial, Foreign policy, Iranian proxies, Islamic State, Islamism, Obama, Obama's America, Obama's legacy, Terrorism, U.S. combat troops, U.S. politics
Tags: Air strikes, Denial, Foreign Policy, Iranian proxies, Islamic State, Islamism, Obama, Obama's America, Obama's legacy, Terrorism, U.S. combat troops, U.S. politics

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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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Iran Deal: A Potential Kiss Of Death For Liberalism In The Middle East’

August 28, 2015

Iran Deal: A Potential Kiss Of Death For Liberalism In The Middle East’, MEMRI, August 27, 2015

In a July 19, 2015 article on Al-Ahram’s English-language website titled “Iran Deal: A Potential Kiss of Death for Liberalism in the Middle East,”[1]Egyptian blogger and political commentator Nervana Mahmoud criticized the claim made, inter alia, by U.S. President Barack Obama and others in his administration, that the nuclear deal with Iran will strengthen moderate elements in that country.[2] Rather than promote liberals, she writes, the deal will only vindicate Iran’s current theocratic leadership by ending Iran’s isolation. It will also, she stresses, send a message to other authoritarian regimes in the region that the U.S. is likely to overlook their crackdown on dissidents, while encouraging Islamist movements to emulate Iran by embracing extremism.

Ms. Mahmoud goes on to accuse the Obama administration of promoting “illiberalism” by defining as moderate “any group, entity, or state willing to show pragmatism and cooperation with the United States, regardless of that state’s intolerant actions on the ground.”

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Nervana Mahmoud (Image: Nervana1.org)

“For The Iranian Mullahs, The Nuclear Deal Is An Indirect Acknowledgment From The West That Their Anti-Modernity Model Is Viable And Successful”

“After 12 years of diplomatic proposals and 20 months of tough negotiations, theocratic Iran and world powers have reached a nuclear deal that, regardless of its potential advantages, is undoubtedly a victory for smart illiberalism and a potential kiss of death for the prospect of liberal, pluralistic democracies in the Middle East.

“Both illiberal Shi’a and Sunni Islamists and illiberal non-Islamist autocrats could receive an enormous boost from the deal.

“A few years ago, against all advice, I visited the Islamic Republic of Iran. To my surprise, I found a vibrant nation, with many liberal youth yearning for freedom and democracy. Those youth may now celebrate the lifting of sanctions and the end of isolation, but it is doubtful the nuclear deal will bridge the deep divide between them and their theocratic rulers.

“For the Iranian Mullahs, the nuclear deal is an indirect acknowledgment from the West that their anti-modernity model is viable and successful. U.S. President Barack Obama may be genuine in his hopes that Iran will abandon its ‘path of violence and rigid ideology’ following this ‘historic agreement,’ but his hopes may turn out to be no more than wishful thinking.

“The regime – now less isolated–has less incentive to couple its agreed abandonment of its nuclear program with an abandonment of what it sees as successful ideology than ever before.”Many commentators have pointed out that the deal could not have come at a worse time for the Arab world. With open sectarian tension in many Arab countries, a strong Islamic Iran will only inspire other political Islamic groups to try to match up to the Mullahs.

“Iran’s regional influence in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen will only prompt a counter-movement by forces that share an underlying belief in Islamism, but differ in its sectarian interpretation. Since 1979, Sunni Islamism has learned one important lesson from Iran: ‘Yes, we can’ -– a slogan the Islamists touted quietly, long before Obama uttered those words in 2008.

“Arab Islamists saw theocratic Iran as a perfect model for fulfilling their dream of ruling Muslim societies. The new nuclear deal will add two more lessons, and liberal democracy is not one of them– defiance and lobbying in Washington…

“Last Saturday, Ahrar Al-Sham, an Islamist Sunni insurgent group fighting in Syria, published an article in the Washington Post claiming to believe in ‘a moderate future for Syria.’ Charles Lister, a visiting fellow at Brookings, scrutinized their claim: ‘Ahrar Al-Sham has been one of the most consistent military allies of Al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat Al-Nusra.’ The publication of the article in itself indicates how some people in the corridors of power in Washington are willing to buy Ahrar’s narrative.

“The implication for Syria could not be more serious. Syria will continue to be torn between two mutually exclusive Sunni versus Shi’a forces; many of them are radical, ruthless, and undemocratic. Somehow, the Obama administration seems to see no problem in embracing both…’However, tacitly embracing radical Shi’a militias’ fight against radical Sunni groups such as the Islamic State (ISIS), while pretending that other radicals such as Ahrar Al-Sham are moderate, does not seem to be a sound strategy.”

“It Is Dangerous For The U.S. To Empower Illiberalism In A Region That Suffers Mainly As A Consequence Of Its Illiberal Players”

“In Egypt, neither the removal of Hosni Mubarak nor the ousting of Muhammad Mursi has produced a liberal democracy. Moreover, a significant section of the Muslim Brotherhood, despite its antipathy to Shia Islamism, has started to view the Iranian model as the way forward to regain power.

“They wrongly attribute their failure to run the country during Morsi’s tenure to what they describe as their ‘reluctance to embrace revolutionary politics.’ The Mullahs’ violent ejection of their opponents in 1979 is seen as ‘a model.’ In addition, the Muslim Brotherhood and its supporters will continue to lobby in Washington, hoping that its projection of an Iranian–style defiance will convince the Obama Administration to exert pressure on the leadership in Cairo to change its posture toward the group.

“On the other hand, many among President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi’s supporters will use Iran as a pretext to justify more crackdown on opponents, and argue that world powers, which are willing to lift sanctions against the Iranian regime, despite 36 years of ruthless rule, have no moral ground on which to judge Egypt.

“In his speech in Cairo in 2009, President Obama advocated tolerance, respect for minorities, and religious freedom. He also said elections alone do not constitute a true democracy.

“Now, as Hisham Melhem, Bureau Chief of the Al Arabiya News Channel in Washington, has pointed out, ‘after almost six and a half years of trying to shape events in the Middle East, President Obama has very little to show for it except the nuclear deal with Iran.’ More alarmingly, the American president seems to have lowered the bar, and is now willing to accept a softer definition of moderation to include any group, entity, or state willing to show pragmatism and cooperation with the United States, regardless of that state’s intolerant actions on the ground.’

“There are intrinsic reasons behind the metastasizing sectarian and ethnic conflicts that followed the failed Arab awakening. It is unreasonable to expect the United States to ‘fix’ the region; however, it is dangerous for the U.S. to empower illiberalism in a region that suffers mainly as a consequence of its illiberal players. It would be a pity if President Obama went down in the history books as the man who fumbled with the West’s anti-illiberalism alarm button, and embraced the enemies of liberalism in the Middle East.”

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Endnotes:

[1] English.ahram.org.eg, July 19, 2015.

[2] See for example Obama’s interviews in Al-Sharq Al-Awsat (Aawsat.net, ,May13, 2015) and with National Public Radio (Npr.org, April 7, 2015).

Categories: Egypt, Foreign policy, Iran scam, Iranian proxies, Islamic supremacy, Islamism, Muslim Brotherhood, Obama's legacy, P5+1, Reform Islam, Sisi, Theocracy
Tags: Egypt, Foreign Policy, Iran Scam, Iranian proxies, Islamic supremacy, Islamism, Muslim Brotherhood, Obama's legacy, P5+1, Reform Islam, Sisi, Theocracy

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