Despite the growing threat from the self-proclaimed Islamic State in Libya, the Obama administration has turned down a U.S. military plan for an assault on ISIS’s regional hub there, three defense officials told The Daily Beast.
In recent weeks, the U.S. military—led by its Africa and Special Operations Commands—have pushed for more airstrikes and the deployment of elite troops, particularly in the city of Sirte. The hometown of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, the city is now under ISIS control and serving as a regional epicenter for the terror group.
The airstrikes would target ISIS resources while a small band of Special Operations Forces would train Libyans to eventually be members of a national army, the officials said.
Weeks ago, defense officials told TheNew York Times that they were crafting military plans for such strikes, but needed more time to develop intelligence so that they could launch a sustained air campaign on ISIS in Sirte.
But those plans have since been put on the back burner.
“There is little to no appetite for that in this administration,” one defense official explained.
Instead, the U.S. will continue to do occasional strikes that target high-value leaders, like the November drone strike that killed Abu Nabil al-Anbari, the then-leader of ISIS in Libya.
“There’s nothing close to happening in terms of a major military operation. It will continue to be strikes like the kind we saw in November against Abu Nabil,” a second defense official explained to The Daily Beast.
The division over what action the U.S. and the international community should take in Libya speaks to the uncertainty about when and where ISIS should be countered.
For Europe, Libya is uncomfortably close and already a jumping off point for migrants willing to take on the rough Mediterranean waters in search of asylum. ISIS pronouncements have previously pointed out that Rome is nearby.
For the United States, there are major concerns about allowing another ISIS hub to emerge in the region. The Libyan city of Sirte is under ISIS control and some believe the terror group seeks to turn Sirte into a center of operations, like Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq.
Leaders across Europe have hinted that more should be done in Libya but have fallen short on specifics. In an interview with Der Spiegel last month, the German envoy to Libya said: “We simply cannot give up on Libya.”
According to U.S. military figures, there are roughly 5,000 ISIS fighters in Libya, a spike from 1,000 just a few months ago. Defense officials believe that ISIS supporters are moving toward Libya, having found it increasingly difficult to travel to Iraq and Syria.
Perhaps because of that, Sirte, and areas around it, are increasingly falling victim to ISIS’s barbaric practices. And some are urging the international community not to wait until Sirte falls further under ISIS control, and filled with fighters mixed in with civilians.
According to this report, residents there cannot leave the city freely as ISIS fighters—many of them from Egypt, Chad, Niger, and Tunisia—inspect cars for signs of residents trying to escape. As in Raqqa and Mosul, residents do not have access to cellphone or Internet networks and live under an ISIS judicial system that issues death sentences to those who do not practice the terror group’s brand of Islam.
Moreover, in nearby cities like Ras Lanouf, ISIS is destroying oil installations, cutting off a key potential source of revenue for any newly cobbled unified Libyan government. ISIS has set its sights across the country, from Misrata in the west to Derna in the east.
Some fear the terror group is hunkering down in places like Sirte in preparation for a potential U.S. offensive.
The administration had said that it would not intervene until Libya, which now is governed by two rival governments on opposite sides of the country, had created a single entity to govern the state.
At a press conference Tuesday, during this year’s summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, President Obama referred to United Nations efforts to help build a government in Libya, suggesting any military effort could create even more political fractures. On Sunday, a member of Libya’s Presidential Council announced that a list of 13 ministers and five ministers of state had been sent to Libya’s eastern parliament for approval.
But while the president said the U.S. would go after ISIS “anywhere it appeared,” he stopped short of saying the U.S. would expand its effort in Libya unilaterally.
“We will continue to take actions where we’ve got a clear operation and a clear target in mind. And we are working with our other coalition partners to make sure that as we see opportunities to prevent ISIS from digging in, in Libya, we take them. At the same time, we’re working diligently with the United Nations to try to get a government in place in Libya,” the president said. “And that’s been a problem.”
Some military officials believe Obama feels that France and Italy, which both have hinted at intervention, should take the lead on any military effort. Both countries were key to the NATO-led campaign in 2011 that led to Gaddafi’s fall. Still others believe the United States wants to limit its war against the Islamic State to Iraq and Syria.
Since Gaddafi’s death in October 2011, the state has become especially susceptible to outside extremists. With no tradition of an independently strong state military, militias have served as security forces and now are unwilling to disarm.
With no stable government or security forces, parts of Libya have become vulnerable to groups like ISIS looking for territory to set up a self-described caliphate.
As many as 435,000 of the country’s 6 million people are internally displaced, according a recent UN report. An estimated 1.9 million require some kind of humanitarian aid. And as of August, 250,000 migrants had entered, turning Libya into a key hub for those seeking to enter Europe.
Tuesday marked the five-year anniversary of Libya’s Arab Spring. It’s now considered a bittersweet day, rather than the beginning of a democratic movement the protests launched that day once promised.
The US and Russia are in the process of a military buildup in the Kurdish areas of northern Syria. It is ranged along a narrow strip of land 85 km long, stretching from Hassakeh in the east up to the Kurdish town of Qamishli on the Syrian-Turkish border. Facing them from across that border is a parallel buildup of Turkish strength. This highly-charged convergence of three foreign armies athwart a tense borderland is reported here by DEBKAfile’s military sources. It is too soon to determine whether the three armies are operating in sync or at odds, especially in view of the bitter relations between Moscow and Ankara.
US Forces
American Special Operations troops and Air Force attack helicopters landed first at Remelan airport. They are the first US troops to operate from a ground base in Syria, accommodated in living quarters built for them in advance by a US engineering corps unit. The airport runway has been widened for US warplanes.
American Special Operations troops and Air Force attack helicopters landed first at Remelan airport. They are the first US troops to operate from a ground base in Syria, accommodated in living quarters built for them in advance by a US engineering corps unit. The airport runway has been widened for US warplanes.
Russian Forces
Next came two Russian military missions on Jan. 16. One group, led by a general and consisting of air force and Special Operations officers, is preparing to take over a small abandoned base in Syrian army-controlled territory just 80 km from the new US facility at Remelan, and adapt it for Russian use.
The other group, which consists of intelligence officers – some from Russia’s FSB federal security service, the FSB – indicates that Moscow has decided it is high time for professionals to protect the classified information moving around the Russian Task Force in Syria and safeguard it from reaching the wrong hands. .
The abandoned base is less than 3.5 km from the Turkish border, and would act as a Russian barrier between US forces in northern Syria and the Turkish border contingents.
Turkish Forces
This Russian deployment set off alarm bells in Ankara, and so the Turkish army responded with the third troop buildup, arraying tanks and mobile artillery on the border across from Qamishli.
Over the weekend, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan stated, “We have said this from the beginning: we won’t tolerate such formations (in northern Syria) along the area stretching from the Iraqi border up to the Mediterranean.”
At the same time, US Vice President Joe Biden said Saturday, Jan. 23, that the U.S. and Turkey are prepared for a military solution against ISIS in Syria should the Syrian government and rebel-opposition forces fail to reach a peace agreement during its upcoming meeting in Geneva.
However, Ankara views its war on terror as focused on both Kurdish separatists and ISIS, which is subjecting Turkey to multi-casualty attacks.
DEBKAfile’s military and intelligence sources note that Turkey’s military options are very limited. Its leaders know they dare not put a foot wrong because the Russian force in Syria is just waiting for an opportunity to avenge the downing of a Russian Su-24 warplane by the Turkish air force on November 24.
Another group of actors stirring the pot in northern Syria is the Kurds, particularly the YPG militia, the only fighting force in Syria capable of defeating ISIS, which has been reinforced by the Iraqi autonomous Kurdish region’s Peshmerga, as well as the outlawed Turkish PKK Kurdish organization.
At this stage, it is impossible to determine how this triple buildup will play out tomorrow – how far the US and Russia are in concert, at what point they may decide to vie for footholds in the Kurdish region of northern Syria and how far the Turks are clued into the joint US-Russian strategy for bludgeoning ISIS.
(The views expressed in this article are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)
Obama keeps telling us what America isnot. What does He think she is? Does He think that Obama’s America is America, or that His supporters are what America is? Does He think they make America great? Will America become acceptable to Obama, and hence “who we are,” only after He or His successor finishes her fundamental transformation?
By virtue of the now-implemented Iran nuke “deal,” Iran’s possession of an atomic and/or hydrogen bomb will be delayed for a few years unless she cheats (as in the past), reneges on the “deal” or out-sources nuke development to her long term partner, North Korea.
The Islamic Republic of Iran is now reaping the benefits of more than $100 billion in immediate sanctions relief plus a settlement of Iranian claims amounting to $1.7 billion.
Secretary of State John Kerry said today that the settlement is $400 million debt and $1.3 billion in interest dating back to the Islamic revolution. That’s separate from the sanctions windfall Iran will receive.
Iran will also benefit on a long-term basis from trade with countries formerly prohibited by sanctions.
Back in June 2015, Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei had outlined the general policies of the country’s 6th quinquennial development plan.
On defense and security, the proclamation necessitated an increase in Iran’s defense capabilities at the level of a regional power in order to fulfill the national interests by allocating at least 5 percent of the national budget to boosting the defense power. [Emphasis added.]
With increased funding, Iran will be able to increase its already substantial support for Shiite terrorism throughout the Middle East; it will likely do so.
Iranians continue to experience Islamic human rights. Here’s a link to an article titled The Real War on Women in a Nightmarish Islamic Stateby Dr. Majid Rafizadeh. An Iranian-American political scientist and scholar, he is the president of the International American Council and serves on the board of the Harvard International Review at Harvard University.
When it comes to executions, girls are systematically more vulnerable due to the Islamist penal code of Sharia law.
Let’s take a look at the Islamist state of Iran, which creates its laws from the legal codes of Sharia and Quran. The first type of discrimination is related to age: girls are held criminally accountable at the maturity age of 9 Lunar years. (This will automatically put girls at a higher risk of execution by the court.)
Iranian ruling politicians hold the highest record when it comes to the most executions per capita in the world. Intriguingly, in the last two years that the so-called moderate, Hassan Rouhani, has been in office, there have been more than 2000 executions conducted in Iran. That is nearly 3-4 executions a day.
More importantly, Iranian leaders are also the largest executioner of women and female juveniles. Some of these executions were carried out on the mullahs’ charge of ‘Moharebeh’ (enmity with Allah), or waging war against Allah, ifsad-i Fil Arz (Sowing Corruption on Earth), or Sab-i Nabi (Insulting the Prophet). [Emphasis added.]
There are three methods of execution for women and female juveniles: 1. Stoning 2. Public hanging 3. Shooting. Some women are also beaten so severely in the prison that they die before reaching the execution. Shooting, which is the fastest method of the three for execution, has not been used since 2008. Instead, the most common method to execute women is public hanging or stoning. Some of these women are flogged right before they are hanged. Public hanging not only imposes fears in the society but also aims at dehumanizing and controlling women as second-class citizens. According to the Islamist penal code of Iran, women offenses are classified as: Hadd, Diyyih, Ta`zir, and Qisas. [Emphasis added.]
Please read the entire article. Isn’t it heartwarming that “we” are giving even more than a mere $100 billion to Iran? Perhaps some of the new money can be used to buy sharper stones and new devices for hangings. How about some new torture devices?
Islam, The Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates
The Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas-affiliated Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) claims to represent Muslims in America. They do represent those who favor terrorism and despise human rights (in the name of which they ironically claim to act).
[T]he Council on American-Islamic Relations, is a prominent Islamic group, but which has a long history of involvement with extremist and terrorist causes. In 2009, during the Holy Land Foundation terror financing trial, U.S. District Court Judge Jorge Solis concluded that, “The government has produced ample evidence to establish the associations of CAIR… with the Islamic Association for Palestine, and with Hamas.” [Emphasis added.]
During the trial, CAIR was designated an “unindicted co-conspirator.” As a result of CAIR’s apparent links to a terrorist movement, the Justice Department in 2009 announced a ban on working with CAIR. The FBI also severed relations.
[F]or the past seven years, the Obama White House has opened its doors to the entire spectrum of radical Islamist groups, just like CAIR. These groups have rationalized the actions of Islamic terrorist groups that have killed Americans, warned American Muslims against cooperating with law enforcement, smeared genuine Muslim moderates like Zuhdi Jasser and Asra Nomani as traitors and accused anyone who dared to utter the term “radical Islam” as “Islamophobic.” These are the groups that the White House should have marginalized. The fact that Obama legitimized radical Islamist groups will be his real legacy. [Emphasis added.]
Very few American Muslims, however, seem to feel that CAIR is a legitimate ambassador for American Islam. According to a 2011 Gallup poll, about 88% of American Muslims said that CAIR does not represent them. Muslims all over the world, in fact, apparently do not think CAIR is a moderate or legitimate Muslim group: in 2014, the United Arab Emirates, a pious Muslim state, designated CAIR a terrorist organization, along with dozens of other Muslim Brotherhood organizations.
In reality, American Muslims are extremely diverse, and no single group can claim to speak on their collective behalf. American Islam comprises dozens of different religious sects and political movements, many of which advocate distinctly different ideas. But for Islamist bodies such as CAIR, it suits their agenda if American Muslims are portrayed as a monolithic community. If American Muslims can be seen as homogenous, then a group such as CAIR has a better claim to represent their interests.
Even CAIR’s own research, however, undermines their claim to speak on behalf of American Muslims. A 2011 report reveals that a majority of American mosques are not affiliated with any American Islamic body.
Addressing a conference in 2000, Sheikh Abdul Hadi Palazzi, a Muslim cleric and secretary general of the Italian Muslim Assembly, explained that, “[CAIR] is a Muslim Brotherhood front organization. It works in the United States as a lobby against radio, television and print media journalists who dare to produce anything about Islam that is at variance with their fundamental agenda. CAIR opposes diversity in Islam.”
In truth, CAIR only speaks on behalf of a small extremist ideology that, as discovered by federal prosecutors, emerged across the United States during the 1990s out of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. Although CAIR does not represent American Muslims, it managed, before the Holy Land Foundation terror trial in 2008, to persuade a great many people that it did. Enough time has passed that CAIR seems to believe it can try this move once again.
state that Congress believes the Muslim Brotherhood fits the State Department’s criteria of a Foreign Terrorist Organization. The Secretary of State would be required to designate the Brotherhood within 60 days or to provide a detailed report explaining why it does not. Three U.S.-based Brotherhood entities named in the bill are CAIR, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT). [Emphasis added.]
The House version of the bill (HR3892) was introduced by Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL) with Reps. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Randy K. Weber (R-TX), Diane Black (R-TN) and Mike Pompeo (R-KS) as original cosponsors. They are now joined by Reps. Steve King (R-IA); Steven Palazzo (R-MS); Kay Granger (R-TX); Jim Jordan (R-OH); Steve Stivers (R-OH); Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA); Ilena Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL); Charles W. Dent (R-PA); Bill Johnson (R-OH) and David A. Trott (R-MI).
HR3892 was referred to the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security on December 4, 2015. Two cosponsors, Rep. Gohmert and Rep. Trott, sit on that subcommittee.
The Senate version of the bill (S2230) was introduced by presidential candidate Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and later cosponsored by Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT). It was referred to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on November 3. Two of Senator Cruz’s presidential rivals, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) sit on that committee and have not taken a position on the bill.
Although the bill has yet to earn bi-partisan support at this early stage, it is supported by members of Congress from different spectrums of the Republican Party. It includes endorsers of the presidential campaigns of Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush and John Kasich and not only supporters of Ted Cruz.
If enacted by the Congress, Obama will almost certainly veto it. If He signs it, He will ignore or bypass it as He often does.
Britain recently declared the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization. Here are thirteen quotes from the British Government’s review and Prime Minister Cameron’s official statement:
1. “The Muslim Brotherhood’s foundational texts call for the progressive moral purification of individuals and Muslim societies and their eventual political unification in a Caliphate under Sharia law. To this day the Muslim Brotherhood characterizes Western societies and liberal Muslims as decadent and immoral. It can be seen primarily as a political project.”
2. “Aspects of Muslim Brotherhood ideology and tactics, in this country and overseas, are contrary to our values and have been contrary to our national interests and our national security.”
3. “From its foundation the Muslim Brotherhood organized itself into a secretive ‘cell’ structure, with an elaborate induction and education program for new members…This clandestine, centralized and hierarchical structure persists to this day.”
4. “The Hamas founding charter claims that they are the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Muslim Brotherhood treat them as such. In the past ten years support for Hamas (including in particular funding) has been an important priority for the MB in Egypt and the MB international network.”
5. “From at least the 1950s the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood also developed an international network, within and beyond the Islamic world. Europe became an important base for the growing Muslim Brotherhood global network.”
6. “The wider international network of the Muslim Brotherhood now performs a range of functions. It promotes Muslim Brotherhood ideology (including through communications platforms), raises and invests funds, and provides a haven for members of the Brotherhood who have left their country of origin to continue promoting Brotherhood activity.”
7. “[F]or the most part, the Muslim Brotherhood have preferred non violent incremental change on the grounds of expediency, often on the basis that political opposition will disappear when the process of Islamization is complete. But they are prepared to countenance violence—including, from time to time, terrorism—where gradualism is ineffective.”
8. “Muslim Brotherhood organizations and associated in the UK have neither openly nor consistently refuted the literature of Brotherhood member Sayyid Qutb which is known to have inspired people (including in this country) to engage in terrorism.”
9. “[The review] concluded that it was not possible to reconcile these [MB] views with the claim made by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in their evidence to the review that ‘the Muslim Brotherhood has consistently adhered to peaceful means of opposition, renouncing all forms of violence throughout its existence.’”
10. “In the 1990s the Muslim Brotherhood and their associates established public facing and apparently national organizations in the UK to promote their views. None were openly identified with the Muslim Brotherhood and membership of the Muslim Brotherhood remained (and still remains) a secret.”
11. “[MB fronts] became politically active, notably in connection with Palestine and Iraq, and promoted candidates in national and local elections…sought and obtained a dialogue with Government….were active members in a security dialogue with the police.”
12. “The Muslim Brotherhood have been publicly committed to political engagement in this country. Engagement with Government has at times been facilitated by what appeared to be a common agenda against al Qaida and (at least in the UK) militant Salafism. But this engagement did not take into account of Muslim Brotherhood support for a proscribed terrorist group and its views about terrorism which, in reality, are quite different from our own.”
13. “Senior Muslim Brotherhood figures and associated have justified attacks against coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
The linked article goes on to note that
The U.S. government, without even conducting any kind of review of its own, issued a statement to the Investigative Project on Terrorism rejecting any ban or even any “de-legitimizing” of the Brotherhood at all. [Emphasis added.]
Do the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates represent Obama? Are they or Obama “what we are?” I don’t think so and hope not.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali and reformation of Islam
In Heretic (which I reviewed here), Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote,
For years, we have spent trillions on waging wars against “terror” and “extremism” that would have been much better spent protecting Muslim dissidents and giving them the necessary platforms and resources to counter that vast network of Islamic centers, madrassas, and mosques which has been largely responsible for spreading the most noxious forms of Islamic fundamentalism. For years, we have treated the people financing that vast network — the Saudis, the Qataris, and the now repentant Emiratis — as our allies. In the midst of all our efforts at policing, surveillance, and even military action, we in the West have not bothered to develop an effective counternarrative because from the outset we have denied that Islamic extremism is in any way related to Islam. We persist in focusing on the violence and not on the ideas that give rise to it. [Emphasis added.]
Here is a video of which Hirsi Ali was the executive producer. It features Muslim and former-Muslim women discussing Islam and the Islam-mandated male domination of women.
Here’s Part II of Honor Diaries:
Here’s a video characterizing Hirsi Ali as an “Islamophobe.”
Along with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Azeezah Kanji — the featured speaker in the above video — has been very active in disparaging Hirsi Ali and Honor Diaries. Like CAIR, she has ties to the Obama White House and was named a “Champion of Change” by the White House in 2011. What changes in Islam does Ms. Kanji champion? None, apparently, of those intrinsic to it.
Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the CAIR, condemned Hirsi Ali as “one of the worst of the worst of the Islam haters in America, not only in America but worldwide.”
On becoming a U.S. Citizen
Who better represents American values? Hirsi Ali, once a refugee from Somalia and a proud citizen of the United States since April 25, 2013, or President Obama? In the immediately linked Wall Street Journal article, she offers suggestions on American immigration with which I plan to deal in a subsequent post. In the meantime, here is her 2014 address at the William F. Buckley Program at Yale University on the clash of civilizations. If you have not yet watched it, please do so. If you have watched it, please do so again. I just did. Every time I watch it, there is something I had not previously considered.
Conclusions
To Obama and His acolytes, Islam is the religion of peace and tolerance; the Islamic State, its equally non-peaceful and intolerant franchisees and other comparable terrorist organizations are “not Islamic.” If “not Islamic,” what are they?
Despite Obama’s many statements and gestures, He has yet to convince any Islamic terrorist group that it is not Islamic. He has convinced them only that He is ignorant of Islam, a liar or both. Perhaps He needs a better joke writer.
was very striking for the one-sidedness and disproportion of the president’s concern for religious suffering.
President Obama worried that “politicians insult Muslims, whether abroad or fellow citizens.”
But he couldn’t bring himself to worry aloud about the Christians being driven from Middle Eastern countries, the churches being burned from Nigeria to Malaysia, or the 22 Coptic Christians who were beheaded on video on a beach in Libya by Islamic supremacists.
Will our next president at least make a concerted effort to un-transform Obama’s America? Will he name and fight our enemies, foreign and domestic? Or will he simply “go with the flow” and do none of the above. Much depends on who it is and on the composition of the Congress.
During the Democrat Party debate on January 17th, Hillary Clinton “linked herself to the president again and again. And again.” An Obama clone to continue Obama’s fundamental transformation of America is the opposite of what we need. Nor will merely “fixing” broken parts of the governmental apparatus with duct tape and bailing wire be satisfactory. As I wrote last September, To bring America back we need to break some stuff.
In later posts in this series, I hope to deal with immigration, race relations, the ways in which Obama is distorting the Constitution, the decline of education and Obama’s very foreign foreign policy.
In recent months, further information about the AKP government’s support for ISIS and other jihadis in Syria has come to light. Turkish journalists who have documented their government’s support for terrorists and who have published evidence of truckloads of arms and ammunition, as well as fighters, being sent into Syria have been threatened, arrested, and imprisoned by Turkish authorities.[1] Foreign media have also extensively covered Turkey’s sponsorship of ISIS and other terrorist organizations, and documented the ease with which thousands of foreign and Turkish jihadis enter and exit Syria under the eyes of Turkish officials.
However, Western governments have refrained from criticizing Turkey’s conduct in this matter, and continue to call Turkey “a partner in the fight against terrorism.” Many in Turkey, including Mehves Evin, columnist for Turkish opposition daily Diken, have asked, in light of this heavy media coverage of Turkey’s sponsorship of jihadi terrorists, “Why isn’t there a peep from the West?”[2]
The following report presents further evidence of the Turkish government’s support and sponsorship of ISIS and other jihadi terrorist organizations:
After Turkish Daily Cumhuriyet Released Video Footage Of Weapons-Filled Syria-Bound Turkish Trucks, Paper’s Editor-In-Chief, Ankara Bureau Chief Are Imprisoned, Charged With Treason, Espionage, And Terrorism
On November 26, 2015, Can Dundar, prominent journalist and editor-in-chief of Turkey’s oldest dailyCumhuriyet, and Erdem Gul, its Ankara bureau chief, were arrested; they are now being held in isolation pending a trial initiated by Erdogan himself, on charges of espionage, treason, and providing support for terrorism. The charges are in connection with the newspaper’s May 29, 2015 publication of video footage of a January 19, 2014 search conducted by Turkish judicial, security, and military officials of three large Syria-bound trucks in the Turkish border province of Adana; the search turned up heavy weaponry concealed under boxes of medicines. The weaponry, including missiles, mortars, anti-aircraft ammunition artillery, and grenades, was being transported by Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization (MIT) to jihadi organizations in Syria. Erdogan, at that time prime minister, immediately intervened to stop the search, and to secure the release of the MIT personnel carrying the arms into Syria.
Earlier, on January 1, 2014, a similar truck was stopped in the border province of Hatay, but no search could be conducted due to intervention by the local governor on behalf of the government.
The Adana and Hatay prosecutors’ investigations into both of the incidents, which came to be known as the “MIT trucks affair,” and all related legal files, were closed; gag orders were issued, and all security personnel, high-ranking military officers, and prosecutors involved in the searches were arrested. Erdogan, the AKP government, and its partisan media claimed that the trucks had only been carrying humanitarian aid to Turkmens in Syria.
Along with the video footage, published 17 months after the incident, Cumhuriyet also published other court documents, under the headline “The Weapons That Erdogan Said Did Not Exist”[3]
The following is the video footage published by Cumhuriyet:
Following Dundar’s imprisonment, an outcry arose in Turkey and in press organizations in Turkey and internationally; he has since received multiple press awards. Additionally, teams of journalists from the anti-AKP media, along with MPs from the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), and artists and intellectuals, have been sitting in shifts outside the gates of the Silivri prison compound in Istanbul, where the detainees are being held, in solidarity.[4]
MIT Transports Jihadis, Weapons From One Syrian Battlefront To Another – Via Turkey
On June 11, 2015, Cumhuriyet also published a video of statements by two bus drivers telling authorities how they had been commissioned by the MIT to transport, on the night of January 9, 2014, over 70 Jabhat Al-Nusra (JN) jihadi fighters, along with a large load of arms and ammunition, from Atme Camp in Syria near the Reyhanli border crossing in the Turkish province of Hatay, to Tel Abyad in Syria, near the Akcakale border crossing in the southeastern Turkish province of Urfa. They showed where they had entered Syria from Turkey, without headlights, stopping near a building in Atme Camp where the JN flag was flying and “La-i-lahe-il-Allah” (“There is no God but Allah”) was painted on the wall. At Atme, they said, they had not been allowed off their buses, and the buses had been boarded there by bearded, Arabic-speaking militants who also loaded large boxes of weapons onto them. The drivers said that they then drove back into Turkey and proceeded without stopping to re-cross into Syria at Akcakale. At around 5:30 AM, near Tel Abyad, the militants disembarked with their weaponry.
It will be remembered that at that time ISIS was fighting to take control of Tel Abyad, and several days later, on January 13, it succeeded in doing so.
According to Cumhuriyet, the jihadis were transported from one point to another in Syria via Turkey because it was unsafe for Islamist fighters to travel through Syrian territory that was under Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) control, such as Kobane.
The drivers also stressed that they had committed no crime, as they had been hired by the MIT to work for the government and had been escorted throughout by MIT operatives in two black vehicles.
The AKP government called the Cumhuriyet report a lie and libel, and, on February 14, 2014, ordered the investigation into the matter and the related files closed, removed the prosecutor from his position, and sealed and covered up the incident.[5]
Left: The Cumhuriyet video showing the building in Atme Camp where the drivers picked up the jihadis. Right: The route taken by the buses carrying jihadis from Atme Camp in Syria to Tel Abyad in Syria, via Turkey.
CHP MP Says Sarin Gas Components Were Transferred To ISIS Via Turkey; Erdogan Accuses Him Of Treason; Criminal Investigation Against Him Is Launched
On several occasions – at an October 21, 2015 press conference, in an early December 2015 interview with the Russian news agency RT, and in a December 10, 2105 speech in the Turkish parliament, CHP MP Eren Erdem said that components for sarin gas had been imported from foreign countries, some of them European, by Turkish businessmen on behalf of an ISIS operative, and delivered to a terrorist organization in Syria, for the production of chemical weapons that were later used in Syria.[6]
Erdem said that his claims were based on a 2013 investigation, case file number 2013/139, by the Chief Prosecutor’s Office in the southern province of Adana. According to this investigation, five Turkish citizens the wanted Al-Qaeda/ISIS militant and Syrian citizen Hayyam Qassap were arrested and prosecuted for procuring the toxic components to be transferred to ISIS in Syria.
Erdem stressed that the statements he was making were not his own, but that he had been quoting a Republic’s Chief Prosecutor. He added that in late June 2013 this case had been closed and a news blackout imposed on it, and that on July 1, 2013 the six accused had been released from prison and allowed to cross into Syria.
Erdem launched a parliamentary inquiry in October 2015 demanding government explanations in this matter, but to date Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has not responded.
On December 18, 2015, Erdogan publicly accused Erdem of treason. The same day, the Ankara Chief Prosecutor’s Office sent a summary of proceedings to the Ministry of Justice for permission to begin legal action against Erdem; if it is sent on to the parliament, the process to strip him of his parliamentary immunity so that he can be tried for treason will begin.[7] Since then, he has been threatened by the pro-AKP media and subjected to a lynching campaign on social media; in addition, he and his family have received death threats.
On December 23, 2015, Erdogan blasted Erdem again, calling him a “traitor,” and also slammed CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu for his defense and protection of Erdem. The previous evening, in a televised interview,[8]Erdem had reiterated that he had accused neither Turkey nor the government, but had only objected to the release of the suspected businessmen and of a Syrian militant who had attempted to procure illegal chemical components to transfer to Syria via Turkey.[9]
“Jihad Hospital” In Turkey For Islamist Terrorists
In September 2015, the Turkish opposition daily Birgun visited a 75-bed “jihad hospital” in the border province of Gaziantep that treats the mujahedeen fighting in Syria, and on September 22 reported:[10] “Turkey… is turning a blind eye to a medical support network serving the Islamic Front militants. The administrators of the six-floor, 75-bed hospital in Gaziantep told Birgun that during the first eight months of 2014 they had treated well over 700 militants; they administrators also expressed their gratitude to the local security officials and the AKP municipality for their assistance, and for the AKP government’s support.”
The Birgun report continued: “The AKP government… continues to assist the jihadi organizations, and by permitting the operations of a medical network that extends from Aleppo to Ankara and Istanbul, is trying to strengthen the hand of the Islamic Front, an umbrella organization for many jihadi groups fighting in Syria, which is structured like ISIS and has at least 45,000 active fighters, especially in the Idlib and Aleppo areas. Their wounded are treated in Gaziantep.
“The treatment of the wounded fighters is made possible by ImkanDer, an Islamist association, whose regional representative is Sait Gokdere. He is the former executive of the Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH), that became known in connection with from the 2010 sailing of the Mavi Marmara to break Israel’s blockade on Gaza. Gokdere told us that the IHH focused their activities on Syria when the civil war broke out, and that thanks to the AKP government’s permission and support, ‘may Allah bless them,’ they were able to provide health services to the mujahideen at this rehabilitation facility and in the many houses in the area that have been turned into clinics, reaching a capacity of 150 beds. He said that the hospital personnel were conducting their activities, and exiting and entering Syria officially, with the permission of the authorities.
“Doctors with whom we [Birgun] spoke explained that the treatment of wounded fighters begins with receiving news [of them] from Aleppo, through their local sources there. They then dispatch vehicles into Syria to bring them over. The seriously wounded are taken to state hospitals in Kilis or Gaziantep, and in the rare cases when they are not able to treat their injuries, they are sent to hospitals in Ankara or Istanbul. Once these wounded mujahedeen are out of intensive care, they are taken to the home clinics or to this hospital. Upon their recovery, they return to Syria to resume fighting.”
A recovering jihadi in the “jihadi hospital” in Gaziantep. Birgun, September 22, 2015
ISIS In Turkey
Since 2013, the opposition media in Turkey have been reporting on the spread of Salafi ideology within the country, and on the steady stream of thousands of Turkish jihadis who join ISIS, Jabhat Al-Nusra, Ahrar Al-Sham, and other terrorist organizations in Syria. An estimated 10,000 Turkish jihadis have gone to Syria to join the fight, as the AKP government has turned a blind eye.
Turkish ISIS Militant In Ankara: ISIS “Loves Turkey, Because Of The Ease At The Borders And For Its Allowing Safe Passage To Fighters Of Many Nationalities”
Birgun interviewed multiple ISIS militants in the Hacibayram district, in Ankara, which has become an ISIS center. While its report, published July 8, 2015, included names of recruiters and recruits, the Turkish government has done nothing to stem the flow of recruits into Syria.
C.A., 29, told Birgun that initially there had been many Al-Qaeda operatives in the area, but that they had declared their allegiance to ISIS. He recounted how, after he decided to go to the Islamic State in February 2014, he had established contact with some well-known people in order to cross the border. He told how upon arrival he had received education in Koranic verses, Hadith, shari’a law, and the high purpose of ISIS’s fight, and then had received military training. He said he fought there for nine months and could not remember how many people he had killed.
Asked whether he had seen any Turkish police or soldiers during his border crossings, C.A. said: “Turkey permits the crossings to Dawla [the Islamic State]. My first time, I came face to face with a military police officer. They see you, but pretend they don’t,” Only once, he said, the last time he returned to Turkey was he caught – and that time he was taken before a judge, who released him. Asked about how ISIS views Turkey, and whether “talk that ISIS militants may [be planning to or intending to] conduct operations inside Turkey” was true, C.A. answered: “Dawla loves Turkey, because of the ease it provides at the borders and for its allowing safe passage to fighters of many nationalities. The mujahideen there [in the Islamic State] criticize Turkey because it is not ruled by Allah’s rule, but there is no thought or intention to fight Turkey. Turkey, on the other hand, helps us because we fight particularly against the Kurdish PKK. Allah knows, if ISIS is given one month without the [coalition and Russian] air raids, we will eliminate the PKK.”[11]
Turkish Jihadi: “Jihad Is A Religious Obligation, Like Daily Prayers; If A Muslim Is Hurt In The Arctic, We Would Go There Too”
The major mainstream Turkish daily Hurriyet tracked ISIS in five Turkish cities, interviewing the families of many who had joined ISIS, and some jihadis. The report, published September 22, 2014, showed how easy it was for thousands of Turkish and foreign fighters to cross the southeastern border of Turkey into Syria, and how a new breed of Islamist associations, Islamist lodges, Islamist chat rooms, and Islamist bookstores and cafes were popping up around the country encouraging young Turks to join the jihad and to receive Islamic education and preliminary training. The report also mentioned young jihadis who had fought alongside ISIS or the Al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat Al-Nusra and who had returned to Turkey to receive medical treatment after being wounded.
An ISIS recruit, interviewed in Istanbul, told the reporters that he had entered Syria five times. Like the other recruits, he said, he had been escorted by militants to the border, jumped the fence, and ran into one of the houses on the Syrian side. First, he had joined Jabhat Al-Nusra, but then switched to ISIS. Asked whether he would also go to fight in other Muslim countries, he answered: “It is a religious obligation. Jihad [is] like daily prayers. If a Muslim is hurt in the Arctic, we would go there too.”
Worried families told Hurriyet that that their sons had gone “to die for the Muslims.” A father in Gaziantep said that his son, 22, and nephew, 34, had both left to join ISIS, and that when he reported this to police, he was told: “Everybody goes there [to ISIS]. Don’t mess with this issue, so as not to get yourself into trouble.”[12]
In a July 2015 column titled “ISIS Among Us,” Aydin Engin wrote in Cumhuriyet that not only were the suicide bomber who carried out the July 20, 2015 attack in Suruc, that killed 33, and the bombers who killed over 100 in Ankara on October 10, 2015 Turkish citizens who had joined ISIS, but that there were thousands more like them across Turkey. He wrote that ordinary citizens in all the cities and towns of the southern border provinces of Turkey can easily point out ISIS houses, ISIS cells, the wounded ISIS militants brought in daily from Syria to their hospitals, and groups of ISIS members sitting at tables in restaurants. Engin asked how it would be possible for the AKP government and the MIT not to be aware of what every citizen knows so well – i.e. that ISIS is everywhere in Turkey.[13]
ISIS Affiliates In Istanbul Hold Events, Call For Jihad – Without Interference By Turkish Security
While Turkish police are always present at protests, and frequently disperse crowds with water cannon, pepper gas, and, sometimes, bullets, Islamist organizations are allowed to openly demonstrate and call for shari’a law and jihad, in major cities. Similarly, the AKP government closes down media outlets and websites of dissenters and Kurds, while Islamist websites disseminating ISIS propaganda are left to operate freely.
ISIS-affiliated group at an encampment in an Istanbul park allocated to them by the AKP celebrates Ramadan, praises ISIS, and calls to jihad. Photos: Rotahaber and Twitter, July 29, 2014.
Surely, whatever passed for American foreign or military policy in the past three decades is not working. Just as clearly, in case anyone keeps score these days, the dark side of Islam is ascendant at home and abroad. What follows here is a catalogue of policy initiatives that might halt the spread of Islamic fascism and encourage religious reform in the Ummah.
Some observers believe that the Muslim problem is a matter of life and death. Be assured that the need for Islamic reform is much more important than either. The choices for Islam are the same as they are for Palestine Arabs; behave or be humbled. Europe may still have a Quisling North and a Vichy South; but Russia, China, and even America, at heart, are still grounded by national survival instincts – and Samuel Colt.
Call a spade a spade
The threat is Islam, both kinetic and passive aggressive factions. If “moderate” Islam is real, then that community needs to step up and assume responsibility for barbaric terror lunatics and immigrants/refugees alike. Neither America nor Europe has solutions to the Islamic dystopia; civic incompetence, strategic illiteracy, migrants, poverty, religious schisms, or galloping irredentism. The UN and NATO have no remedies either. Islamism is an Ummah, Arab League, OIC problem to solve. Absent moral or civic conscience, unreformed Islam deserves no better consideration than any other criminal cult.
Western Intelligence agencies must stop cooking the books too. The West is at war and the enemy is clearly the adherents of a pernicious ideology. A global war against imperial Islam might be declared, just as angry Islam has declared war on civilization. A modus vivendi might be negotiated only after the Ummah erects a universal barrier between church and state globally. Islam, as we know it, is incompatible with democracy, civility, peace, stability, and adult beverages.
Oxymoronic “Islamic” states need to be relegated to the dustbin of history. If the Muslim world cannot or will not mend itself, Islamism, like the secular fascism of the 20th Century, must be defeated, humbled in detail. Sooner is better.
Answer the Ayatollahs
Recent allied concessions to Tehran may prove to be a bridge too far. If the Persian priests do not abide by their nuclear commitments, two red lines might be drawn around Israel. Firstly, the ayatollahs should be put on notice, publicly, that any attack against Israel would be considered an attack against America — and met with massive Yankee retaliation. Secondly, any future cooperation with NATO or America should be predicated on an immediate cessation of clerical hate speech and so-called fatwas, those arbitrary death sentences.
Clerical threats to “wipe Israel off the face of the earth” and “death to America” injunctions are designed to stimulate jihad and terror globally. The only difference between a Shia ayatollah and a Sunni imam in this regard these days seems to be the torque in their head threads.
Ostracize the Puppeteers
Strategic peril does not emanate from Sunni tacticians like Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar, or Abu Bakr al-Baghadadi. Nor does the real threat begin with or end with al Qaeda, the Taliban, Hezb’allah, Hamas, or the Islamic State. Lethal threat comes, instead, on four winds: toxic culture, religious politics, fanatic fighters, and furtive finance, all of which originate with Muslim state sponsors. The most prominent of these are Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan.
Put aside for a moment the Saudi team that brought down the Twin Towers in New York. Consider instead, the House of Saud as the most egregious exporter of Salifism (aka Wahabbism) doctrine, clerics, imams, and mosques from which ultra-irredentist ideologies are spread. The Saudis are at once the custodians of Islam’s sacredshrines and at the same time the world’s most decadent, corrupt, and duplicitous hypocrites. Imam Baghdadi is correct about two things: the venality of elites in Washington and Riyadh. The House of Saud, an absolutist tribal monarchy, does not have the moral standing to administer “holy” sites of any description — Mecca, Medina, or Disneyland.
The cozy relationship between Europe, the European Union, and Arabia can be summarized with a few words; oil, money, arms sales, and base rights. This near-sighted blend of Mideast obscenities has reached its sell-by date. The “white man’s burden” should have expired when Edward Said vacated New York for paradise.
Jettison Turkey and Pakistan
What Saudi Arabia is to toxic ideology in North Africa, Turkey and Pakistan are to perfidy in the Levant and South Asia. Turkey and Pakistan are Islam’s most obvious and persistent grifters. Turkey supports the Islamic State and other Sunni terror groups with a black market oil racket. Pakistan supports the Taliban, al Qaeda, and ISIS with sanctuary and tolerance of the world’s largest opium garden. Oil and drug monies from Arabia, Turkey, and South Asia are financing the global jihad. Turkey also facilitates the migration of Muslims west to Europe while sending Islamist fighters and weapons south to Syria and Iraq.
With the advent of Erdogan and his Islamist AKP, Turkey has morphed into NATO’s Achilles Heel, potentially a fatal flaw. Turkey needs to be drummed out of NATO until secular comity returns to Ankara. Pakistan needs to be restrained, too, with sanctions until it ceases to provide refuge for terrorists. Pakistani troops harassing India could be more prudently redeployed to exterminate jihadists.
Sanctions against Russia and Israel are a study in moral and political fatuity whilst Arabs and Muslims are appeased midst a cultural sewer of geo-political crime and human rights abuses. If NATO’s eastern flank needs to be anchored in trust and dependability, Russia, Kurdistan, or both, would make better allies than Turkey. Ignoring Turkish perfidy to protect ephemeral base rights confuses tactical necessity with strategic sufficiency.
Recognize Kurdistan
Aside from Israel, Kurdistan might be the most enlightened culture in the Mideast. The Kurds are also the largest ethnic group in the world not recognized as a state. While largely Muslim, the Kurds, unlike most of the Ummah, appreciate the virtues of religious diversity and women’s rights. Indeed, Kurdish women fight alongside their men against Turkish chauvinism and Sunni misogyny with equal aplomb. For too long, the Kurds have been patronized by Brussels and Washington.
While Kurdish fighters engage ISIS and attempt to control the Turkish oil black market, Ankara uses American manufactured NATO F-16s to bomb Kurds in Turkey and Syria. Turkish ground forces now occupy parts of Iraq too. In eastern Turkey, Ergdogan’s NATO legions use ISIS as an excuse for bookend genocide, a cleansing of Kurds that might rival the Armenian Christian genocide (1915-1917).
Kurdish angel of death
All the while, American strategic amateurs argue for a “no-fly” zone in contested areas south of Turkey. Creating a no-fly zone is the kind of operational vacuity we have come to expect from American politicians and generals. Such a stratagem would foil Kurdish efforts to flank ISIS and allow the Erdogan jihad, arms, and oil rackets to flourish. A no-fly zone is a dangerous ploy designed to provoke Russia, not protect Muslim “moderates.”
Putin, Lavrov, and the Russians have it right this time; Turkish and Erdogan family subterfuges are lethal liabilities, not assets.
Washington and European allies have been redrawing the map in Eastern Europe, North Africa, South Asia, and the Mideast since the end of WWII. The time has come to put Kurdistan on the map too. Kurdistan is a unique and exemplary case of reformed or enlightened Islam; indeed, a nation that could serve as a model for the Muslim world. If base rights are a consideration, Kurdistan would be an infinitely more dependable ally than Turkey or any corrupt tribal autocracy in Arabia. America has a little in common with desert dictators — and fewer genuine friends there either. Indeed, at the moment America is allied with the worst of Islam.
Create New Alliances
NATO, like the European Union, has become a parody of itself. Absent a threat like the Soviet Union or the Warsaw Pact, Brussels has taken to justifying itself by meddling in East Europe and resuscitating a Cold War with the Kremlin. Indeed, having divided Yugoslavia, NATO now expands to the new Russian border with reckless abandon; in fact, fanning anti-Russian flames now with neo-Nazi cohorts in former Yugoslavia, Georgia, and Ukraine.
NATO support for the Muslims of one-time Yugoslavia is of a piece with support for Islamic troublemakers in Chechnya and China too. Throughout, we are led to believe that jihad Uighurs and caliphate Chechens are freedom fighters. Beslan, Boston, Paris, and now San Bernardino put the lie to any notion that Islamists are “victims” (or heroes). Indeed, the Boston Marathon bombing might have been prevented had Washington a better relationship with Moscow.
Truth is, America has more in common with Russia and China these days than we do with any number of traditional European Quislings. Indeed, it seems that Europe and America can’t take yes for an answer.
The Cold War ideological or philosophical argument has been won. Moscow and Beijing have succumbed to market capitalism. Islamism, in stark contrast, is now a menace to Russian, Chinese, and American secular polities alike. The logic of a cooperative or unified approach to a common enemy seems self-evident. America, China, and Russia, at least on issues like toxic Islam, is a match made in Mecca.
The late great contest with Marxist Russia and China was indeed a revolution without guns. Now the parties to that epic Cold War struggle may have to join forces to suppress a theo-fascist movement that, like its Nazi predecessor, will not be defeated without guns. The West is at war again, albeit in slow motion. Withal, questions of war are not rhetorical. Saying that you are not at war does not make it so. Once declared, by one party or the other, the only relevant question about war is who wins and who loses. Losers do not make the future.
If America and Europe were as committed to Judeo/Christian secular values as Islamists are committed to a sick religious culture, then the war against pernicious Islam would have been won decades ago. Or as Jack Kennedy once put it: “Domestic policy can only defeat us; foreign policy can kill us.”
Trump Footnote
Donald Trump made several policy suggestions on the Islamism issue, one on immigration, the other on Mideast oil. On the former, he suggests a hiatus on Muslim immigration until America develops a plan or reliable programs to vet migrants. On Arab oil, he suggests, given the lives and treasure spent liberating Kuwait and Iraqi oil fields, America should have held those resources in trust and use oil revenues to finance the war against jihad, however long that takes. The problem with both Trump ideas is that they come perilously close to common sense, an American instinct in short supply these days.
A recent report by, of all places, the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, found that the Syrian rebels were mostly Islamic Jihadists and that even if ISIS were defeated there were 15 other groups sharing its worldview that were ready to take its place.
And that’s just in Syria.
The official ISIS story, the one that we read in the newspapers, watch on television and hear on the radio, is that it’s a unique group whose brand of extremism is so extreme that there is no comparing it to anything else. ISIS has nothing to do with Islam. Or with anything else. It’s a complete aberration.
Except for the 15 other Jihadist groups ready to step into its shoes in just one country.
Islamic Supremacist organizations like ISIS can be graded on the “Caliphate curve”. The Caliphate curve is based on how quickly an Islamic organization wants to achieve the Caliphate. What we describe as “extreme” or “moderate” is really the speed at which an Islamic group seeks to recreate the Caliphate.
ISIS is at the extreme end of the scale, not because it tortures, kills and rapes, but because it implemented the Caliphate immediately. The atrocities for which ISIS has become known are typical of a functioning Caliphate. The execution of Muslims who do not submit to the Caliph, the ethnic cleansing and sexual slavery of non-Muslims are not aberrations. They are normal behavior for a Caliphate.
The last Caliphate, the Ottoman Empire, was selling non-Muslim girls as sex slaves after the invention of the telephone. ANew York Timesreport from 1886 documented the sale of girls as young as twelve, one of them with “light hazel eyes, black eyebrows and long yellow hair”. An earlier report from theLondon Post described Turks, “sending their blacks to market, in order to make room for a newly-purchased white girl”. This behavior is not a temporary aberration, but dates back to Mohammed’s men raping and enslaving non-Muslim women and young girls as a reward for fighting to spread Islam.
The ISIS behaviors that we find so shocking were widely practiced in even the most civilized parts of the Muslim world around the time that the Statue of Liberty was being dedicated in New York City.
To Muslims, the end of slavery is one of the humiliations that they had to endure because of the loss of the Caliphate. Europeans forced an end to the slave trade. The British made the Turks give up their slaves. The United States made the Saudis give up their slaves in the 1960s. (Unofficially they still exist.) When the Muslim Brotherhood took over Egypt, its Islamist constitution dropped a ban on slavery.
The Muslim Brotherhood is on the moderate side of the Caliphate curve not because it doesn’t want to bring back the Caliphate, it does, or because it doesn’t want to subjugate non-Muslims, it does, but because it wants to do so gradually over an extended period of time using modern political methods.
But whether you take the long road along the Caliphate curve or the short one it still ends up in the same place. Everyone on the Caliphate curve agrees that the world, including the United States, must be ruled by Muslims under Islamic law and that freedom and equal rights for all must come to an end.
ISIS is just doing right now what the Muslim Brotherhood would take a hundred years to accomplish.
We are not at war with ISIS. We are at war with everyone on the Caliphate curve. Not because we choose to be, but because like Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich or Communism’s vision of one world under the red flag, the Caliphate is a plan for imposing a totalitarian system on us to deprive us of our rights.
The Nazis and the Communists had a vision for the world. So do the Islamic Supremacists who advocate the restoration of the Caliphate. All three groups occasionally played the victim of our foreign policy, but they were not responding to us, they were trying to bring about their positive vision of an ideal society.
Nazi, Communist and Islamist societies just happen to be living nightmares for the rest of us.
No one on the Caliphate curve is moderate. Some on the Caliphate curve are just more patient. They put up billboards, create hashtags and try to ban any criticism of their ideology as Islamophobic. But that’s just Caliphatism with a human face. And that makes them a much more dangerous enemy.
ISIS is in some ways our least dangerous enemy. We haven’t defeated ISIS, because we haven’t even tried. Instead Obama fights a war in which 75 percent of strikes on ISIS are blocked and leaflets are dropped 45 minutes before a strike on oil tankers warning ISIS to flee. If we were to fight ISIS by the same rules as our wars in the last century, the Islamic State would have been crushed long ago.
A insta-Caliphate like ISIS isn’t hard to beat. The global networks of Al Qaeda employing more conventional terror tactics are a trickier force because they are embedded within the stream of Muslim migration. And the Muslim Brotherhood is the trickiest of them all because it is so deeply embedded within Muslim populations in the West that it represents and controls those populations.
What ISIS accomplishes by brute force, the Muslim Brotherhood does by setting up networks of front groups. Both ISIS and the Brotherhood control large Muslim populations. ISIS conquers populations in failed states. The Muslim Brotherhood however exercises control over populations in the cities of the West. We could bomb Raqqa, but can we bomb Dearborn, Jersey City or Irvine?
This is where the Caliphate curve truly reaches its most terrifying potential.
The original Islamic expansionism was so devastating not because it managed to seize control over the hinterlands of Arabia, but because it conquered and subjugated civilized cities such as Alexandria, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Athens and Delhi. ISIS envisions repeating these conquests and more, but if it succeeds it will not be because of its military strategy, but because it targets have been colonized.
We can destroy ISIS tomorrow, but we will still be in an extended war with a hundred other groups who all have a vision for restoring the Caliphate. This war will never end until we crush their supremacist agenda by demonstrating that we will never again allow such a horror to exist on this earth. As long as Muslim groups hold out hope for a restoration of the Caliphate this war, in its various forms, will go on.
We are not at war with an organization, but with the idea that Muslims are superior to non-Muslims and are endowed by Allah with the right to rule over them, to rob them, to rape them and enslave them. ISIS is the most naked expression of this idea. But it’s an idea that everyone on the Caliphate curve accepts.
Until we defeat this racist idea, new Islamic groups will constantly keep arising animated by this vision. Wars fueled by supremacist beliefs have historically only ended when the illusion of superiority was destroyed by utterly defeating and humiliating the attackers. It worked with Japan and Nazi Germany.
Our war now will not end until we destroy the supremacist faith in the Caliphate curve.
Americans needs to understand that the evil scourge of terrorism is here to stay until the end of Obama’s presidency. It seems that his real legacy will likely be the establishment of a global haven for terrorism.
*********************
One of the biggest mistakes in dealing with radical Islamic terrorism is to blame only Islamic State (ISIS) when it is, in fact, part of a much broader movement and more than one organization.
Regardless of the specific motives behind the timing of the killing spree in San Bernardino that killed 14 people, this horrific massacre was a clear-cut act of radical Islamic terror.
Not surprising, at the UN climate summit in Paris, a baffled Barack Obama said that the San Bernardino massacre motive is a mystery – then uses the tragedy to push for gun control and declare “climate change is a threat to national security on par with terrorism.”
If this doesn’t sounded profanely dishonest, it is absolutely “delusional.” How can one link the summit to the War on Terror and blame terrorism on climate change?
America wants to know the truth. And yet, federal authorities ignore the U.S. mosques – and social media’s role at the center of Islamic terror attacks. Both are a source of support, recruitment and radicalization of terrorists.
The real truth is unnerving and extremely appalling:
The mosque attended by the terrorist who killed U.S. soldiers at a base in Chattanooga, Tennessee, is affiliated with the same Islamic group as the mosques patronized by the Boston marathon bombers and the 9/11 hijackers who attacked the Pentagon.
Undeniably, the Islamist jihadist terror has come full circle in a “multi-pronged Islamic invasion” under the guise of illegal immigration, known as Islamic Hijrah or jihad by emigration.
On further scrutiny, it is clear the U.S. has been invaded by large numbers of Islamic terrorists since Obama took office.
For the past seven to eight years, the U.S. government has acknowledged the fact that Iranian proxy, Hezbollah and Hamas have strong ties to the Mexican drug cartels, as evidenced by the 2010 Tijuana arrest of Hezbollah militant, who was given the job of establishing a well-armed Hezbollah network in Mexico and South America.
We may never know for sure the exact numbers of Islamic jihadists who are plotting to attack America. However, a December 2015 report by the George Washington University indicated that more people in the U.S. were arrested for alleged connections to ISIS this year than in any previous year.
Almost 400 alleged ISIS adherents are inside the U.S.
ISIS, now is threatening more attacks in the next six months, claiming to have “71 trained soldiers in 15 different states.”
In total, the FBI currently has nearly 1,000 active investigations into ISIS sympathizers.
Since March 2014, 71 individuals in the U.S. have been charged with ISIS-related activities in 21 states. As of fall 2015, 250 Americans have either traveled or tried to travel to Syria or Iraq to join ISIS. Around 40 percent of ISIS sympathizers in the U.S. who were arrested were converts to Islam, whereas 23 percent of American Muslims are converts, according to the report.
Former FBI counter-terrorism Special Agent John Guandolo argued on Breitbart News, the “vast majority” of the 2,200 Islamic organizations, centers, and mosques in the U.S. are a part of a “hostile” and broader “Jihadi network” intent on imposing Sharia Law in America.
Guandolo “came to understand very deeply the massive jihadi network we have in the United States” and discovered that “the leaders of the Islamic organizations… were actually interfacing with government leaders and advising them with how to proceed in the War on Terror.”
The San Bernardino terrorists attended the Islamic Center of Riverside, which is owned by the North American Islamic Trust, which is the bank for the Muslim Brotherhood.
‘The Society of North America (ISNA) was founded by an Al-Qaeda guy who used to advise Bill Clinton and Al Gore and is now in prison.’
“ISNA, the largest Muslim Brotherhood organization— is a Hamas funding entity” and its leadership [has thoroughly infiltrated the Obama administration and other branches of the U.S. government].
The most prominent Muslim Brotherhood Organizations like ISNA, Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), and the Hamas organization-Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) — complained to the White House about the training Guandolo initiated inside the government at the FBI, when he realized that “we were being advised by the enemy on how to investigate and deal with the enemy.”
CAIR, is an Islamic supremacist organization with the same goals as those of Al-Qaeda and ISIS; which was actually named an unindicted c0-conspirator and Muslim Brotherhood-Hamas front group by the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office, in the successful prosecution of a terrorist funding cell organized around one of the largest Muslim charities, the Holy Land Foundation.
MPAC has secured a close working relationship with the Obama White House despite a record of anti-Semitism and whitewashing the terrorist threat while condemning law enforcement.
In the U.S. v. Holy Land Foundation case, FBI internal document say that the purpose of this network within the U.S. is “to wage civilization jihad… until the entire world, and specifically the United States, is under Sharia law and the Islamic State is established here.”
The Muslim Brotherhood assassinated Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat in 1981, and in 2011, with Obama’s help – overthrew Hosni Mubarak, who was also trying to keep the Egypt-Israel peace treaty alive.
Gulf News sources familiar with Obama’s secret presidential directive (PSD-11) show mounting evidence the current U.S. administration has an official policy of backing so-called “moderate Islamists,” and the “jihadist Muslim Brotherhood.”
Kharirat El-Shater, the number two man in the Muslim Brotherhood hierarchy—now in custody by the Egyptian military—has evidence that the Obama regime was funneling millions of dollars to the Muslim Brotherhood.
As reported by Egypt Daily News, Obama secretly transferred a staggering $8 billion to the Muslim Brotherhood to guarantee that the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula be turned over to the Muslim Brotherhood’s terrorist wing Hamas.
Russia says it has proof that, “Obama’s best friend in the Middle East,” Turkey‘s Muslim Brotherhood President Erdoğan is involved in ISIS oil trade.
While Turkey has openly established recruiting stations for ISIS, Qatar is also feeding billions of dollars to ISIS.
After the San Bernardino massacre, the White House downplayed the threat of radical Islamic terrorism for and appointed a foreign policy advisor with links to the terrorist group Hamas to be the administration’s new czar in charge of countering ISIS.
Americans needs to understand that the evil scourge of terrorism is here to stay until the end of Obama’s presidency. It seems that his real legacy will likely be the establishment of a global haven for terrorism.
(It’s a very difficult question, to which even Obama doesn’t have an answer. But be of good cheer. Perhaps some fine day, when we have enough Muslims to evaluate in Obama’s America, we will learn the answer. — DM)
{Originally posted to website PreOccupied Territory, the “Island of Irony” in the Middle East}
Raqqa, December 6 – After years of attempting to directly engage with what it calls the Great Satan in a fateful, apocalyptic showdown, the Islamic State intends to rectify its failure to date to provoke the US into all-out warfare by renaming itself Global Warming in order to convince US President Barack Obama that it must be confronted seriously.
Self-proclaimed Caliph of the Islamic State Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi announced today that the long-sought confrontation with the infidel West can only happen if the Western leadership – at its head the American president – joins the battle. A series of televised hostage executions accomplished little in that regard, and the organization began resorting to attacks on Western targets, either directly or by encouraging local terrorism initiatives. Following last week’s deadly attack in San Bernardino, California, and Obama’s failure to name Islamic terrorism specifically as the scourge to combat, al-Baghdadi said he and his henchmen realized a rebranding was in order, with the aim of casting ISIS in the role of what the Obama administration does see as an imminent threat worth fighting: climate change.
“It is not enough that we traffic in fossil fuels to power our operations,” explained the ISIS leader in a recorded video message. “It is not enough that our signature form of transportation is a fleet of gas-guzzling pickup trucks. We must do more to drive home the urgency with which this confrontation must take place if the End of Days is to come about in our lifetimes.”
“Therefore,” continued al-Baghdadi, “Western angst over whether to call us by our Arabic acronym, or by some bastardized translation, will soon be at an end, for we will take on the name of the force their leadership apparently fears most: global warming. They will have no choice but to fight, for this force represents everything they oppose.”
Baghdadi conceded that it was possible Obama himself would shrink from the confrontation, as he has so far failed to stand up to Putin, Khamenei, and Assad, but that the specter of global warming would terrify others into forcing the president’s hand. “It is their misplaced concern for humanity that will be their weakness,” predicted the leader.
Analysts praised the rhetorical move. “It’s nothing short of brilliant,” gushed New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. “I have so many misapplied, overwrought metaphors I could apply here, but let’s just say this is Baghdadi taking the fight right to virtual Gettysburg with an exploding tuba. In one stroke, he’s forced the Democrats to choose between their ecological values and their reluctance to fight actual wars properly. On top of that, now that he’s renaming the group Global Warming, continued dithering by the administration will open it to charges of Global Warming denial, which is about as disgraceful an act a left-wing figure can admit, other than support for Israel.”
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