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Progressivism: Easing the Way to Mass Murder

September 26, 2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Holocaust Museum defends Muslim Brotherhood Nazis

September 25, 2015

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

united-states-holocaust

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Khamenei Publishes Book About The Annihilation Of Israel

September 5, 2015

Khamenei Publishes Book About The Annihilation Of Israel

By Missing Peace

Source: Khamenei Publishes Book About The Annihilation Of Israel | Missing Peace | missingpeace.eu | EN

Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, just published a book in which he outlines a ‘slow and painful’ strategy to annihilate Israel.

The 416-page book, titled Palestine, was edited by Saeed Solh-Mirzai–but received full approval from Khamenei’s office and is thus Khamenei’s most authoritative document regarding his views on the issue, the Goldstone Institute think tank reported.

The book was published only weeks after six world powers, including the United States, reached a controversial agreement about Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Khamenei’s plan for Israel will promote “the hegemony of Iran” while it will remove “the West’s hegemony” from the Middle East, the Ayatollah claims in the book. How this goal will be reached is described in detail by Khamenei.

“Israel has no right to exist” is the central theme of the book. Khamenei uses three words to describe the destruction of Israel. “One is “nabudi,” which means “annihilation.” The other is “imha,” which means “fading out.” And finally, there is “zaval,” meaning “effacement,” the Gatestone Institute reported.

The annihilation of Israel will not be achieved via conventional warfare, Khamenei argues, but via a never ending string of terror attacks and low-intensity conflict that will make life unbearable for the Israeli Jews.

In the end, they would pack their bags and leave the country for another country in the West–or return to their country of origin–because many Israelis have dual citizenship, the Iranian Supreme Leader thinks. This same way of thinking caused Yasser Arafat to launch the Second Intifada, but Israelis never even contemplated leaving the country during the five years of continuing terror.

Khamenei writes that his strategy for the annihilation of the Jewish State has nothing to do with anti-Semitism but with “well-established Islamic principles.”

The overriding principle is that Israel was established on territory that belongs to the Ummah (Islamic nation) and, therefore, is part of the Dar al-Islam (house of Islam). Such land can never be ceded to non-Muslims and must be brought under Muslim control again.

There are, however, three other reasons Khamenei gave for the mandatory destruction of Israel.

The first is that Israel, which he labels “adou” (enemy) and “doshman” (foe), is the ally of the “Great Satan” (United States) and is conspiring with the U.S. in an “evil scheme” to dominate the heartland of the Ummah.

The second reason is that Israel has become “Kaffir al-Harbi,” a hostile infidel because of the numerous wars it fought against Muslim armies.

The third reason Israel must be destroyed is that it “occupies” Jerusalem, the third holy city in Islam, according to Khamenei, who is honored with the title “The flagbearer of Jihad to liberate Jerusalem” on the cover of the book. He writes that one of his “most cherished wishes” is to pray in Jerusalem one day.

Khamenei is counting on increasing “Israel fatigue” in the international community that makes it more likely that the world will force his version of the one-state solution upon Israel, he thinks.

What is this solution?

The Supreme Leader wants to organize a referendum among at least 8 million Palestinian Arabs and their descendants and only 2.2 million Israeli Jews, those who did not immigrate to Israel.

The United Nations would run the affairs in the new country until the referendum takes place; and after that, Khamenei would be willing to let the Jews continue to live in the new “Palestine” as second-class citizens (Dhimmi’s).

Khamenei also boasts that Iran was behind the Second Lebanon War between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006 and the 22-day long war with Hamas in Gaza last year.

In his book, Khamenei denies the Holocaust and writes that he regards it as “a propaganda ploy” or a disputed claim. “If there was such a thing we don’t know why it happened and how,” he claimed.

Amir Taheri, the Iranian journalist who wrote the Gatestone article, added the following:

Khamenei has been in contact with professional Holocaust deniers since the 1990s. In 2000, he invited Swiss Holocaust-denier Jürgen Graf to Tehran and received him in private audiences. French Holocaust-denier Roger Garaudy, a Stalinist who converted to Islam, was also feted in Tehran as “Europe’s’ greatest living philosopher.”

It was with Khamenei’s support that former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad set up a “Holocaust-research center” led by Muhammad-Ali Ramin, an Iranian functionary with links to German neo-Nazis who also organized annual “End of Israel” seminars.

Despite efforts to disguise his hatred of Israel in Islamic terms, the book makes it clear that Khamenei is more influenced by Western-style anti-Semitism than by classical Islam’s checkered relations with Jews.

His argument about territories becoming “irrevocably Islamic” does not wash, if only because of its inconsistency. He has nothing to say about vast chunks of former Islamic territory, including some that belonged to Iran for millennia, now under Russian rule.

Nor is he ready to embark on Jihad to drive the Chinese out of Xinjiang, a Muslim khanate until the late 1940s.

Israel, which in terms of territory accounts for one per cent of Saudi Arabia, is a very small fry.

Khamenei’s book has been published in Farsi, the language of Iran. An Arab translation is expected soon.

Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: Anti Semitism, Iran, Iranian nukes, Islam, Islamic Jihad, Israel, Middle East, Muslim Brotherhood, Netanyahu, Nukes, Obama, P5+1, Terrorism, U.S. Congress, USA

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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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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.”

_____________________

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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One Rocket a Month Since Hamas ‘Ceasefire’

August 28, 2015

One Rocket a Month Since Hamas ‘Ceasefire’ Figures show 12 rockets have hit Israeli sovereign territory 1 year since last summer’s ‘truce,’ many more fired but didn’t clear border. By Ari Yashar First Publish: 8/28/2015, 1:56 PM

Source: One Rocket a Month Since Hamas ‘Ceasefire’ – Defense/Security – News – Arutz Sheva

This Thursday marked a full year since a ceasefire was sealed between Israel and the Hamas terrorist organization last August 27, bringing Operation Protective Edge to a close – but the ceasefire has been anything but quiet.

Gaza terrorists marked a year since the end of Hamas’s third terror war seeking to destroy Israel by firing a rocket on Wednesday night, giving an ironic edge to the anniversary of the “ceasefire.” The IDF responded by hitting a Hamas weapons manufacturing site.

But Wednesday’s attack was far from the first Gazan breach of the ceasefire.

A review of official IDF and Israel Security Agency (ISA) figures released by Channel 2 on Friday shows that no less than 12 rockets have been fired into Israeli sovereign territory from Gaza since the truce.

That figure doesn’t include the many dozens of rockets fired at Israel that didn’t make it over the security border, falling short within Gaza. Just earlier this month alone three such rockets fell in Gaza, landing short of their mark.

Twelve rockets since the ceasefire works out to an average of one rocket a month hitting Israel since the ceasefire. No more than three months went by without a Gazan rocket striking Israeli territory; fortunately, no one was wounded in any of the ongoing rocket fire.

A breakdown of the rocket strikes by month shows that last September, just a month after the ceasefire, Gaza terrorists fired mortar rounds at Israel. The rocket fire returned in October, and after a quiet November another rocket was intercepted last December.

The first three months of 2015 were surprisingly quiet, but in April another rocket breached the ceasefire, and in May more rocket fire was recorded. Three rockets entering Israeli territory were shot down in June, and two rockets apiece fell in July and August.

Still better deterrence than the past

As noted, those figures do not include the many more rockets fired unsuccessfully at Israel which never made it over the border.

In response to the numerous breaches, the IDF struck 14 terror sites in Gaza since the end of the war in airstrikes, most of them Hamas terror facilities as the IDF holds the terror group responsible for all rocket attacks emanating from the coastal enclave that is under its de facto control.

However, a comparison to the last two Hamas terror wars against Israel shows that despite the many breaches, the IDF achieved an even greater deterrent affect that in the past with its successful campaign to crush Hamas’s rocket arsenals and its will to start another full-out war.

While 12 rockets have hit Israel since Operation Protective Edge, no less than 217 rockets hit Israel in the first year after 2008-2009 Operation Cast Lead, and a full 36 were fired after 2012 Operation Pillar of Defense.

Gadi Yarkoni, head of the Eshkol Regional Council, on Thursday responded to the rocket fire the night before and spoke about the ongoing detrimental affect the incessant rocket attacks are having on the local populace.

“This cannot go on. We cannot allow this rocket fire to turn into a regular event. The Defense Minister and the Prime Minister must decide how to respond in order to prevent escalation of the situation,” said Yarkoni.

“Each time a rocket is fired it brings back bad memories. The government has to do something to prevent rocket fire, as well as put into place obstacles that will prevent Hamas from digging tunnels into Israel and attacking us from them.”

While Hamas has had its rocket arsenals buoyed up by Iranian and other foreign technology, an Israeli crackdown on smuggled weaponry and weapon materials together with an Egyptian siege on the Sinai border has led Hamas to turn increasingly to its domestic rocket production industry to create new missiles.

That domestic rocket development has seen Hamas fire many dozens of rockets into the Mediterranean Sea over the course of the last year as part of its rocket testing program.

Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: Anti Semitism, Iran, Iranian nukes, Islamic Jihad, Jihad, Middle East, Muslim Brotherhood, Obama

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Obama’s Betrayals: Willfully Supporting Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood

August 12, 2015

Obama’s Betrayals: Willfully Supporting Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood

Dare anyone call it treason?

August 12, 2015

Robert Spencer

via Obama’s Betrayals: Willfully Supporting Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood | Frontpage Mag.

Editor’s note: The following is the first article in the FrontPage series “Obama’s Betrayals,” which will explore the president’s record of perfidy, malfeasance and crimes against the American people. As the Obama presidency enters its final stages, examples of this treachery are only becoming more numerous and brazen. “Obama’s Betrayals” will shine the spotlight on these attacks on the American polity, the incredible damage they are inflicting on the nation, and the dangerous agenda the president intends to complete before leaving office.

It doesn’t get any more explosive than this: a high-ranking former Obama administration official charging that the administration made a conscious decision to support al-Qaeda – so where is the mainstream media?

Brad Hoff reported in Foreign Policy Journal last Friday that “in Al Jazeera’s latest Head to Head episode, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency Michael Flynn confirms to Mehdi Hasan that not only had he studied the DIA memo predicting the West’s backing of an Islamic State in Syria when it came across his desk in 2012, but even asserts that the White House’s sponsoring of radical jihadists (that would emerge as ISIL and Nusra) against the Syrian regime was ‘a willful decision.’”

When Hasan asked Flynn if “the administration turned a blind eye” to analyses explaining how the Syrian “rebels” against the Assad regime were actually Islamic jihadists who wanted to establish a hardline Sharia state in Syria, Flynn responded: “I don’t know that they turned a blind eye, I think it was a decision. I think it was a willful decision.”

“A willful decision to support an insurgency that had Salafists, Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood?,” asked Hasan.

Flynn responded: “It was a willful decision to do what they’re doing.” That is, arm those Salafist, al-Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood elements, and do all they could to enable them to succeed.

One has to pause and consider the source for all this. Mehdi Hasan is a highly suspect analyst and Foreign Policy Journal appears to be a pro-jihad paleocon publication, and Al Jazeera is certainly a pro-jihad propaganda outlet. All that is noted, but if this transcript is accurate, former DIA director Michael Flynn is confirming that the Obama Administration knowingly decided to support al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, and directly enabled the rise of the Islamic State.

And given the Obama Administration’s general stance toward the global jihad and Islamic supremacism, what would be unbelievable about that? It has been well known for years that Obama has energetically supported the Muslim Brotherhood – so well known that Egyptians protesting against the corrupt and tyrannical Muslim Brotherhood regime of Mohamed Morsi in 2013 held up signs calling on Obama to “stop supporting terrorism.”

But al-Qaeda? The former head of the DIA revealing that the Obama administration made a conscious decision to aid the organization that murdered 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001 and has been waging global warfare against the United States ever since? That is something else again.

It would, however, be consistent with so many odd aspects of Obama’s behavior. The President has aroused controversy over his affinity with Islam throughout his presidency, with his extravagant praise of the non-existent Islamic role in the founding and growth of the American republic, his exaggeration of Muslim achievements, his refusal to name the global jihad threat in any accurate manner, and so much more – even small incidents such as his notorious 2008 “slip of the tongue” in which he referred to “my Muslim faith,” right up to the one that broke in February 2015, when a photo surfaced from the U.S.-African Leaders’ Summit in August 2014, showing Obama passing by a group of African delegates with his right index finger raised in a gesture strongly reminiscent of the Islamic State’s now notorious one-finger salute.

That Islamic State, of course, was the direct beneficiary of Obama’s Syria policies, and now Michael Flynn has revealed that that was essentially the plan all along. So why isn’t the honking gaggle of Republican presidential candidates saying anything about this – demanding an investigation, asking Flynn for more information, imploring Obama to come clean about his Syria strategy – anything at all? In a sane political atmosphere, this would be enough to bring down the Obama presidency. Instead, it will get little notice and no action whatsoever.

Why that is so remains a mystery. Can it be that Flynn’s allegations are simply too hot to handle for everyone, and that, if taken seriously, they would bring down many more people than just Barack Obama? That seems to be the only remotely plausible explanation. But it is a deeply disquieting one.

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and author of the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His next book, The Complete Infidel’s Guide to ISIS, is coming August 24. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.

Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: Muslim Brotherhood, Obama

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Egypt’s Christians in the Shadow of the Muslim Brotherhood

August 11, 2015

Egypt’s Christians in the Shadow of the Muslim Brotherhood, Washington Free Beacon, Daniel Bassali, August 11, 2015

(Please see also, WFB’s Bill Gertz discusses story on Obama support for Muslim Brotherhood on Steve Malzberg Show. — DM)

Copts view the Obama administration cynically. Egyptians now whisper that the American president who pleased Arab liberals with his speech “A New Beginning” at al-Azhar in 2009 is secretly funding the Muslim Brotherhood and purposefully neglecting the Islamic State. A group of Copts protested outside of the White House in February 2015, demanding more aggressive action against IS following the beheading of the 21 Copts.

Al-Ahram, the largest newspaper in Egypt, published reports in 2013 that the United States diplomatic mission in Egypt, led by Ambassador Anne Patterson, was discouraging Coptic Christians from participating in protests against Morsi. Even though Patterson adamantly denied the accusations, the report sowed more distrust among Copts.

Tensions between the Coptic community and the administration worsened when, in the same year, an Obama Homeland Security adviser named Mohamed Elibiary suggested Copts raising awareness of their persecution were promoting “Islamophobic” bigotry.

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Christian Coptic Priest Father Samuel reacts as he stands inside the burned and heavily damaged St. Mousa church in Minya, Egypt / AP

In the nearly five years of turmoil that have followed the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak in 2011, no group in Egypt has suffered more than the 15 million Coptic Christians. Both a religious and ethnic minority, the Copts are descended from the native population of Egypt who lived and ruled there from the time of the pharaohs until the Roman conquest in 31 B.C. They are the largest Christian community in the Middle East today.

Copts have long been the target of discrimination and persecution in the majority-Arab nation. But this ancient people faced a terrifying new prospect in 2012: Muslim Brotherhood rule.

After Mubarak was ousted, the violence began almost immediately. Churches and schools were burned; peaceful protestors were massacred. When parliamentary elections were held nine months later, they were swept by the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist parties. When Mohamed Morsi won the presidential election in May 2012, the party’s victory looked complete. The same year, Morsi gave himself unlimited powers and the party drafted a new constitution inspired by Sharia law.

Morsi benefitted from the organizational advantage of the Muslim Brotherhood. Backed by imams preaching the benefits of religious rule, the previously banned political party was able to defeat the fractured coalitions of the pro-West, liberal, and secular candidates.

“They used thugs to carry out political intimidation against Christians,” a former member of Egyptian Parliament told the Washington Free Beacon. Chants celebrating the Brotherhood victory echoed through the streets of Cairo. “Morsi won! Copts out!”

Ousted president Mohamed Morsi / AP

During Morsi’s rule, Christians were murdered and tortured by the hundreds. Attacks and abductions of Christian children spiked significantly. “Most Americans do not know how vicious and bloody the Muslim Brotherhood is,” Ahmed, a 24-year old secular Muslim, said. “They really can’t understand.”

Pope Tawadros II, Egypt’s Coptic Christian leader, criticized Morsi for negligence after six Christians were killed when police and armed civilians besieged Egypt’s largest cathedral. “We want actions, not words,” the Pope said.

Public accusations of blasphemy also became ubiquitous. A Facebook post interpreted as undermining Islam could bring a mob of fundamentalists with rocks and Molotov cocktails to the homes of Christians, surrounding them with families trapped inside. Sham trials with no legal representation would follow. Anti-Christian terrorism was not punished, but the wrong words often landed Copts in prison, forcing the church to make public apologies and families to leave their towns and villages.

Lydia, an activist who provides relief supplies to torn Christian communities in Upper Egypt, and who requested that only her first name be used to preserve her safety and that of her colleagues, witnessed the Muslim Brotherhood offer the very poorest Egyptians social services that bought their allegiance. “When you have no food or money, you will listen to anyone who gives you the resources your family desperately needs,” Lydia said. “They brainwash the illiterate with extremism so they hurt Christians.”

Still, Morsi’s authoritarian rule—rewriting the constitution, disbanding the Egyptian parliament, tossing potentially obstructive judges into jail—was not long lived. Barely a year after he assumed office, a reported 35 million citizens took to the streets to protest his rule, leading the Egyptian military, under Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, to remove him from power in July 2013.

Egypt’s ousted President Mohammed Morsi protest at the presidential palace in Cairo, Egypt, Friday, July 26, 2013 / AP

Sen. James Lankford (R., Okla.) told the Free Beacon that had al-Sisi not responded, the promise of Egyptian Democracy would have died. “What it seemed the Egyptian people wanted was more opportunity to be able have some sort of functioning democracy, elections, input into their own government,” Lankford said. “It was the immediate understanding as soon as the Muslim Brotherhood was elected, that was the last election Egypt would have.”

In 2014, al-Sisi was elected Egypt’s new president. He won a solid electoral victory, giving him control of the Egyptian government with the responsibilities of forming a new constitution, a new parliament, and a new judicial system. The Coptic Church fervently supported al-Sisi’s candidacy because the new president promised Copts equality in citizenship, security in their communities, and the ability to build places of worship.

The new Egyptian president challenged the leaders of the Islamic world to push a more moderate message. In December 2014, hundreds of Christian and Muslim theologians gathered at al-Azhar, Egypt’s leading mosque and religious university, participated in a conference to fight “jihad” and promote inclusion. Al-Sisi ambitiously called for a “religious revolution” in January 2015, saying that clerics bear responsibility for the growing extremism in the Middle East.

As president, al-Sisi took many symbolic steps to integrate the Coptic community with the majority Sunni population. In a surprise to most Egyptians, al-Sisi attended a mass at Saint Mark Orthodox Cathedral in Cairo on Christmas Eve, a first for any Egyptian president. Al-Sisi regularly invites Pope Tawadros II to appear beside him when he announces major policy rollouts or requests public dialogue from senior advisers.

Al-Sisi also appointed two Copts as members of his cabinet. Under the constitution, the president of Egypt has the power to select 10 members of parliament. Political observers believe he will select Copts to fill a majority of those appointed seats to offer a more representative parliament.

“Our lives haven’t changed much but one positive result of the revolution is the Egyptian people have politically woken up,” said Hala, a Mubarak-era government official who also wished to be identified by her first name only because she fears political retribution. “We no longer accept what we are told. Egyptians are at least aware of the government’s actions and they are more aware of the troubles Copts face.”

But while al-Sisi’s administration provides a welcome change of tone toward the Coptic community, the day-to-day lives of Copts remain little changed from the Mubarak days.

Coptic Solidarity is a five-year-old public charity organization and advocacy group devoted to advancing equality for Copts in Egypt. Their efforts have helped raise awareness about the persecution Christians face in the Middle East. Alex Shalaby, an Egyptian businessman currently residing in the United States and Coptic Solidarity’s new president, believes Egypt under al-Sisi has continued many of the same practices as previous presidents Sadat, Mubarak, and Morsi.

“Discrimination is rampant, especially in Upper Egypt. We still see reconciliation tactics pressuring the closing of Christian churches and there are still very few Coptic government appointees, he explained. “Coptic Solidarity monitors all developments within Egypt and we are not able to say much has been accomplished in terms of real change to improve Coptic lives in the last 12 months.”

Human rights groups have been critical of al-Sisi’s record. Amnesty International’s Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui accused the president of “employing the same methods of torture and other ill-treatment used during the darkest hours of the Mubarak era.” The Egyptian government received heavy criticism after a court sentenced hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood members to death, intensifying its crackdown on Islamists.

Despite assurances from al-Sisi, sectarian violence still regularly occurs in the rural villages of Upper Egypt where the government has less control.

In Nasreya, Islamists responded to a video of five Christian students making fun of the Islamic State terrorist groups by demanding the students be turned over to the authorities for insulting the religion of Islam. Villagers hurled rocks at Copts and vandalized their property. No arrests were reported for the attacks but the teacher and students were imprisoned for days.

On March 26, 2015, in El Galaa another horde gathered to protest the building of a new church that served 1,400 Christians, also attacking Christian homes in a similar manner. The local government forced the new church to have no outer symbol of Christianity. In Mayana and Abu Qurqas villages, police raided churches, confiscated items from the altar, and shut down reconstruction work.

Lydia, the activist based in Upper Egypt, has witnessed firsthand the damage from these attacks. “I had to console a girl, nine years old, crying because she was afraid her parents were going to be kicked out of their own home,” she said.
“They are poor, illiterate, and now their home is burned and their own community has banned them. All because they are Christians,” she continued.

“The police don’t bother to protect Christians. They do the exact opposite in Upper Egypt,” Lydia said. “The local governments have been loaded with Islamists for years.”

But violence is not exclusive to the country’s outskirts. On June 30, 2015, the two-year anniversary of the popular uprising against Morsi, Islamists detonated bombs by the homes of well-known Christians. Additionally, The Fathers Church in Alexandria was firebombed on July 22, 2015. This summer’s assassination of Egypt’s Attorney General Hesham Barakat in a car bombing, reportedly carried out by a wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, served as an ugly reminder that Egypt’s violence has not passed.

An Egyptian policeman stands guard at the site of a car bombing that killed n Egyptian policeman stands guard at the site of a car bombing that killed Hesham Barakat / AP

Despite these problems, al-Sisi still enjoys support among prominent Copts. Amir Ramzy is a prominent Coptic judge and public figure in Egypt’s legal system, and a loyal defender of al-Sisi’s administration.

“We cannot remove prejudice overnight,” Ramzy said. “We must focus on changing the attitude of the people on the ground first.”

The judge pointed to the dire state al-Sisi found the country in when he took office as reason for slow progress.

“Egypt is fighting Islamists inside and outside our borders. Egypt is fighting a horrid economy with massive unemployment. Al-Sisi is taking on large projects to change these conditions,” Ramzy said. “It is difficult to control chaos and promote social change at the same time.”

The judge referred to the decades it took the United States to implement civil rights reforms. He asked for reasonable expectations out of Egypt’s new president and insists under al-Sisi the country is heading in the right direction. “Just one year after his election, Egypt has new roads, a new canal, new investments, and a new hope for the poor.”

Despite not being content with the pace of progress, Shalaby said al-Sisi is an improvement over his predecessor. As a retired executive, he said he understood national security and economic development should be the president’s priority. “Al-Sisi must do what is best for Egypt first. What is best for Egypt is what is best for Copts. What is good for Copts is good for Egypt.”

Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi / AP

Copts view the Obama administration cynically. Egyptians now whisper that the American president who pleased Arab liberals with his speech “A New Beginning” at al-Azhar in 2009 is secretly funding the Muslim Brotherhood and purposefully neglecting the Islamic State. A group of Copts protested outside of the White House in February 2015, demanding more aggressive action against IS following the beheading of the 21 Copts.

Al-Ahram, the largest newspaper in Egypt, published reports in 2013 that the United States diplomatic mission in Egypt, led by Ambassador Anne Patterson, was discouraging Coptic Christians from participating in protests against Morsi. Even though Patterson adamantly denied the accusations, the report sowed more distrust among Copts.

Egyptians publicly celebrated when Patterson left the country.

Tensions between the Coptic community and the administration worsened when, in the same year, an Obama Homeland Security adviser named Mohamed Elibiary suggested Copts raising awareness of their persecution were promoting “Islamophobic” bigotry. Elibiary, who generated controversy due to views perceived by some to be friendly to the Muslim Brotherhood, released a series of tweets with the R4BIA salute, perceived to be a symbol of hate by many in Egypt.

Elbiary later deleted his tweets and removed the symbol. Bishop Angaelos, Pope Tawadros II’s personal representative called the incident “disturbing.” Elbiary left the Obama administration under pressure from critics in 2014.

Following the ouster of Morsi, the United States canceled weapons deliveries to Egypt and halted all military aid. As the White House took its time to build a relationship with al-Sisi, Russian President Vladimir Putin visited the country and signed a nuclear agreement.

The White House announced in the spring of 2015 that weapons deliveries to Egypt would ultimately be resumed.

Despite the uneasiness in the country, Christians believe they will one day be equal citizens in their homeland. Such progress may be slow and painful, but amidst anxiety there is hope in Egypt.

Much of this hope is derived from the perception of al-Sisi’s decent treatment of the Copts. Ramzy, the judge, told theFree Beacon, “al-Sisi may not be perfect, but he is Copts’ best chance to promote ourselves from second class citizens. He should receive America’s support.”

Categories: Cairo, Christians, Copts, Egypt, Foreign policy, Freedom, Funding terrorism, Human rights, Islamic jihad, Islamism, Moderate Muslims, Morsi, Muslim Brotherhood, Obama, Obama's affinity for Islam, Obama's America, Obama's legacy, Religion of Peace, Sisi, State Department
Tags: Cairo, Christians, Copts, Egypt, Foreign Policy, Freedom, Funding terrorism, human rights, Islamic Jihad, Islamism, Moderate Muslims, Morsi, Muslim Brotherhood, Obama, Obama's affinity for Islam, Obama's America, Obama's legacy, religion of peace, Sisi, State Department

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Column One: Obama’s enemies list

August 6, 2015

Column One: Obama’s enemies list, Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick, August 6, 2015

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US President Barack Obama at the Rose Garden of the White House. (photo credit:OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE PHOTO / PETE SOUZA)

[T]he real question lawmakers need to ask is whether the deal is good for America. Is Obama right or wrong that only partisan zealots and disloyal Zionists could oppose his great diplomatic achievement? To determine the answer to that question, you need to do is ask another one. Does his deal make America safer or less safe? The best way to answer that question is to consider all the ways Iran threatens America today, and ask whether the agreement has no impact on those threats, or whether it mitigates or aggravates them.

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In President Barack Obama’s defense of his nuclear deal with Iran Wednesday, he said there are only two types of people who will oppose his deal – Republican partisans and Israel- firsters – that is, traitors.

At American University, Obama castigated Republican lawmakers as the moral equivalent of Iranian jihadists saying, “Those [Iranian] hard-liners chanting ‘Death to America’ who have been most opposed to the deal… are making common cause with the Republican Caucus.”

He then turned his attention to Israel.

Obama explained that whether or not you believe the deal endangers Israel boils down to whom you trust more – him or Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And, he explained, he can be trusted to protect Israel better than Netanyahu can because “[I] have been a stalwart friend of Israel throughout my career.”

The truth is that it shouldn’t much matter to US lawmakers whether Obama or Netanyahu has it right about Israel. Israel isn’t a party to the deal and isn’t bound by it. If Israel decides it needs to act on its own, it will.

The US, on the other side, will be bound by the deal if Congress fails to kill it next month.

So the real question lawmakers need to ask is whether the deal is good for America. Is Obama right or wrong that only partisan zealots and disloyal Zionists could oppose his great diplomatic achievement? To determine the answer to that question, you need to do is ask another one. Does his deal make America safer or less safe? The best way to answer that question is to consider all the ways Iran threatens America today, and ask whether the agreement has no impact on those threats, or whether it mitigates or aggravates them.

Today Iran is harming America directly in multiple ways.

The most graphic way Iran is harming America today is by holding four Americans hostage. Iran’s decision not to release them over the course of negotiations indicates that at a minimum, the deal hasn’t helped them.

It doesn’t take much consideration to recognize that the hostages in Iran are much worse off today than they were before Obama concluded the deal on July 14.

The US had much more leverage to force the Iranians to release the hostages before it signed the deal than it does now. Now, not only do the Iranians have no reason to release the hostages, they have every reason to take more hostages.

Then there is Iranian-sponsored terrorism against the US.

In 2011, the FBI foiled an Iranian plot to murder the Saudi ambassador in Washington and bomb the Saudi and Israeli embassies in the US capital.

One of the terrorists set to participate in the attack allegedly penetrated US territory through the Mexican border.

The terrorist threat to the US emanating from Iran’s terrorist infrastructure in Latin America will rise steeply as a consequence of the nuclear deal.

As The Wall Street Journal’s Mary Anastasia O’Grady wrote last month, the sanctions relief the deal provides to Iran will enable it to massively expand its already formidable operations in the US’s backyard. Over the past two decades, Iran and Hezbollah have built up major presences in Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ecuador and Bolivia.

Iran’s presence in Latin America also constitutes a strategic threat to US national security. Today Iran can use its bases of operations in Latin America to launch an electromagnetic pulse attack on the US from a ballistic missile, a satellite or even a merchant ship.

The US military is taking active steps to survive such an attack, which would destroy the US’s power grid. Among other things, it is returning the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) to its former home in Cheyenne Mountain outside Colorado Springs.

But Obama has ignored the findings of the congressional EMP Commission and has failed to harden the US electronic grid to protect it from such attacks.

The economic and human devastation that would be caused by the destruction of the US electric grid is almost inconceivable. And now with the cash infusion that will come Iran’s way from Obama’s nuclear deal, it will be free to expand on its EMP capabilities in profound ways.

Through its naval aggression in the Strait of Hormuz Iran threatens the global economy. While the US was negotiating the nuclear deal with Iran, the Revolutionary Guards unlawfully interdicted – that is hijacked – the Marshall Islands-flagged Maersk Tigris and held its crew hostage for weeks.

Iran’s assault on the Tigris came just days after the US-flagged Maersk Kensington was surrounded and followed by Revolutionary Guards ships until it fled the strait.

A rational take-home message the Iranians can draw from the nuclear deal is that piracy pays.

Their naval aggression in the Strait of Hormuz was not met by American military force, but by American strategic collapse at Vienna.

This is doubly true when America’s listless response to Iran’s plan to use its Houthi proxy’s takeover of Yemen to control the Bab el-Mandab strait is taken into consideration. With the Bab el-Mandab, Iran will control all maritime traffic from the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. Rather than confront this clear and present danger to the global economy, America abandoned all its redlines in the nuclear talks.

Then there is Iran’s partnership 20-year partnership with al-Qaida.

The 9/11 Commission found in its report that four of the 9/11 terrorists transited Iran before traveling to the US. As former Defense Intelligence Agency director Lt.-Gen. (ret.) Mike Flynn told Fox News in the spring, Iranian cooperation with al-Qaida remains deep and strategic.

When the US Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in 2011, they seized hard drives containing more than a million documents related to al-Qaida operations. All but a few dozen remain classified.

According to Flynn and other US intelligence officials who spoke to The Weekly Standard, the documents expose Iran’s vast collaboration with al-Qaida.

The agreement Obama concluded with the mullahs gives a tailwind to Iran. Iran’s empowerment will undoubtedly be used to expand its use of al-Qaida terrorists as proxies in their joint war against the US.

Then there is Iran’s ballistic missile program.

The UN Security Council resolution passed two weeks ago cancels the UN-imposed embargoes on conventional arms and ballistic missile acquisitions by Iran. Since the nuclear deal facilities Iranian development of advanced nuclear technologies that will enable the mullahs to build nuclear weapons freely when the deal expires, the Security Council resolution means that by the time the deal expires, Iran will have the nuclear warheads and the intercontinental ballistic missiles required to carry out a nuclear attack on the US.

Obama said Wednesday that if Congress votes down his nuclear deal, “we will lose… America’s credibility as a leader of diplomacy. America’s credibility,” he explained, “is the anchor of the international system.”

Unfortunately, Obama got it backwards. It is the deal that destroys America’s credibility and so upends the international system which has rested on that credibility for the past 70 years.

The White House’s dangerous suppression of seized al-Qaida-Iran documents, like its listless response to Iran’s maritime aggression, its indifference to Iran’s massive presence in Latin America, its lackluster response to Iran’s terrorist activities in Latin America, and its belittlement of the importance of the regime’s stated goal to destroy America – not to mention its complete collapse on all its previous redlines over the course of the negotiations – are all signs of the disastrous toll the nuclear deal has already taken on America’s credibility, and indeed on US national security.

To defend a policy that empowers Iran, the administration has no choice but to serve as Iran’s agent. The deal destroys America’s credibility in fighting terrorism. By legitimizing and enriching the most prolific state sponsor of terrorism, the US has made a mockery of its claimed commitment to the fight.

The deal destroys the US’s credibility as an ally.

By serving as apologists for its worst enemy, the US has shown its allies that they cannot trust American security guarantees. How can Israel or Saudi Arabia trust America to defend them when it is endangering itself? The deal destroys 70 years of US nonproliferation efforts. By enabling Iran to become a nuclear power, the US has made a mockery of the very notion of nonproliferation and caused a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.

The damage caused by the deal is already being felt. For instance, Europe, Russia and China are already beating a path to the ayatollahs’ doorstep to sign commercial and military deals with the regime.

But if Congress defeats the deal, it can mitigate the damage. By killing the deal, Congress will demonstrate that the American people are not ready to go down in defeat. They can show that the US remains committed to its own defense and the rebuilding of its strategic credibility worldwide.

In his meeting with Jewish leaders Tuesday, Obama acknowledged that his claim – repeated yet again Wednesday – that the only alternative to the deal is war, is a lie.

Speaking to reporters after the meeting, Greg Rosenbaum, chairman of the National Democratic Jewish Council, which is allied with the White House, said that Obama rejected the notion that war will break out if Congress rejects the deal with veto-overriding majorities in both houses.

According to Rosenbaum, Obama claimed that if Congress rejects his nuclear deal, eventually the US will have to carry out air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities in order to prevent them from enriching uranium to weapons-grade levels.

“But,” he quoted Obama as saying, “the result of such a strike won’t be war with Iran.”

Rather, Obama said, Iran will respond to a US strike primarily by ratcheting up its terrorist attacks against Israel.

“I can assure,” Obama told the Jewish leaders, “that Israel will bear the brunt of the asymmetrical responses that Iran will have to a military strike on its nuclear facilities.”

What is notable here is that despite the fact that it will pay the heaviest price for a congressional defeat of the Iran deal, Israel is united in its opposition to the deal. This speaks volume about the gravity with which the Israeli public views the threats the agreement unleashed.

But again, Israel is not the only country that is imperiled by the nuclear deal. And Israelis are not the only ones who need to worry.

Obama wishes to convince the public that the deal’s opponents are either partisan extremists or traitors who care about Israel more than they care about America. But neither claim is true. The main reason Americans should oppose the deal is that it endangers America. And as a consequence, Americans who oppose the deal are neither partisans nor turncoats.

They are patriots.

Categories: Al Qaeda, Defense of Israel, Diplomacy, Dishonor, Foreign policy, Freedom of the seas, Iran / Israel War, Iran scam, Iranian EMPs, Iranian nukes, Iranian proxies, Iranian Threats, Islamic jihad, Islamic supremacy, Israel, Khamenei, Latin America, Lies, Muslim Brotherhood, Netanyahu, Obama, Obama's affinity for Iran, Obama's America, Obama's legacy, Obama's motivations, P5+1, Treason, U.S. Congress
Tags: Al Qaeda, Defense of Israel, Foreign Policy, Freedom of the seas, Iran / Israel war, Iran Scam, Iranian EMPs, Iranian nukes, Iranian proxies, Iranian threats, Islamic Jihad, Islamic supremacy, Israel, Khamenei, Latin America, Lies, Muslim Brotherhood, Netanyahu, Obama, Obama's affinity for Iran, Obama's America, Obama's legacy, Obama's motivations, P5+1, Treason, U.S. Congress

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