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Please pray for the believers in Iran as persecution intensifies there. “Iran’s ayatollahs are showing frustration with Iranians leaving Islam for Christianity in large numbers despite the threat of execution for apostasy,” reports Reza Khalili on The Daily Caller website. “A former intelligence officer in the Guards, who has now defected to Europe, told The Daily Caller that the country’s regime has ordered the domestic intelligence apparatus to use drastic measures to stop them — including imprisonment, torture and the mass-burning of Bibles. According to a report by Mohammad Reza Modaber, the chief editor of the Christian Farsi language Mohabat News, two Christian converts in their mid 20s were arrested in April after intelligence agents entered their home in Tehran without warrants. One agent, responding to the mother of the arrested who asked where they were taking her children and why, responded mockingly, ‘Tell Jesus to come and rescue them.’ TheDC’s source who was formerly an Iranian intelligence officer indicated that in the city of Shiraz alone, with a population of over one million, there were 30,000 files at the intelligence headquarters on individuals who had converted to Christianity….”
Despite the inevitable international outcry, Israel would be left with no choice but to lay waste to swathes of southern Lebanon because Hizbollah has entrenched itself so deeply within the civilian population, he said.
The unusually stark warning comes after months of heightened speculation that the Israeli government is considering unilateral military action against Iran’s nuclear installations despite opposition from the United States.
Although the prospect of an attack in the next few months is unlikely until after Israelis vote in a September general election, Ehud Barak, the country’s defence minister, recently insisted that military strikes had not been ruled out.
Israel has always been aware of the heavy price it could incur from such an attack, with Iran able to retaliate through Hizbollah and Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that controls Gaza. Both Islamist movements have long been funded and armed by Tehran and have built up vast stockpiles of rockets capable of reaching deep into Jewish territory.
But Israel has also sensed an unexpected opportunity as a result of the Arab Spring, which has significantly diminished Tehran’s regional clout.
Hamas has begun to reorient itself towards the resurgent Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and is seen as increasingly unlikely to join a regional war should Iran come under attack.
Unlike Sunni Hamas, Hizbollah remains far more dependant on its fellow Shia patrons in Iran but its popularity in the Arab world has suffered because of its support for the Assad regime in Syria, which has long backed the group.
Hoping to drive a wedge between Hizbollah and Lebanon’s Sunni and Christian communities, the officer urged the Lebanese people not to be drawn into a war for which they, rather than Iran, would bear the brunt of Israel’s anger.
“The situation in Lebanon after this war will be horrible,” the officer, a senior commander on Israel’s northern border with Syria and Lebanon, said.
“They will have to think about whether they want it or not. I hope that Iran will not push them into a war that Iran will not pay the price for but that Lebanon will.”
Israel drew international condemnation in 2006 when it last launched military action against Hizbollah in an offensive that is believed to have killed more than 1,000 people, many of them civilians.
But the officer, speaking on the condition of anonymity, suggested that Israel had taken too cautious an approach in the conflict, leading to the deaths of dozens of Israeli soldiers.
No such mistake would be made in the next conflict, he said, especially as Hizbollah had built military sites in the centre of many villages and towns in southern Lebanon. Pointing to a satellite map of the town of Khiam, he identified a series of buildings that the movement had allegedly taken over for military purposes.
“In these villages where Hizbollah has infrastructure I will guess that civilians will not have houses to come back to after the war,” he said.
“The Lebanese government has to take this into consideration. Many of the villages in southern Lebanon will be destroyed. Unfortunate, but we will have no other solution. The day after (we attack) the village will be something that it will take 10 years to rebuild.”
Since the war in 2006, Hizbollah has acquired a stockpile of 50,000 rockets of greater sophistication and range than it had before and is capable of striking at Tel Aviv, more than 70 miles away, according to Israeli intelligence assessments.
The conflict in Syria has also made it easier for Hizbollah to smuggle weapons into Lebanon, the officer said, and there is concern that some of the Assad regime’s stockpile of chemical weapons could end up in the group’s hands.
Palestine, variously known in history as Canaan, Judaea, Eretz Yisrael, Filastin, and Syria Palaestina, has long been a malleable geographical entity. Renamed by its successive Canaanite, Israelite, Roman, Christian, Mamluk, Muslim, Ottoman, and British conquerors, it became the revered “Holy Land” to 19th-century Western visitors.
World War I transformed geographical nomenclature. On November 2, 1917, British Foreign Secretary Lord James Balfour issued his famous declaration proclaiming his government’s approval for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” But where was “Palestine”?
After violent Arab riots during 1920-21, the British government attempted to mollify infuriated opponents of a “Jewish Palestine.” Winston Churchill, British secretary of state for the colonies, offered reassurance that the Balfour Declaration did not contemplate “that Palestine as a whole should be converted into a Jewish National Home, but that such a home should be founded in Palestine.”
If not “Palestine as a whole,” then where? The League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, approved in July 1924, provided contradictory answers. Article 6 assured “close settlement by Jews on the land” defined as Palestine. But Article 25 retracted that assurance. In convoluted language, it declared: “In the territories lying between the Jordan [River] and the eastern boundary of Palestine as ultimately determined, the Mandatory shall be entitled, with the consent of the Council of the League of Nations, to postpone or withhold application of such provisions of the Mandate as he may consider inapplicable to the existing local conditions.”
In translation: “Palestine” was redefined to mean only the land west of the Jordan River, approximately one-quarter of “Palestine as a whole.” The remaining three-quarters were bestowed upon the Hashemite Sheikh Abdullah, son of the Emir of Mecca, for his role in the wartime Arab revolt against Ottoman rule. His kingdom would become known as Trans-Jordan.
But there was also good news for the Zionist cause. Between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, Jews enjoyed the internationally guaranteed right of “close settlement” — without geographical distinction between the coastal plain stretching from Gaza to Haifa, the mountain ridge of Judea and Samaria, or the Jordan Valley west of the River. No limits were imposed on the right of Jews to settle in their modern cities of Tel Aviv and Haifa, or their ancient cities of Hebron and Jerusalem — or even the Gaza area, where Jews had lived for centuries.
Although the League of Nations expired in 1945, its successor, the United Nations, incorporated in its Charter protection for Jewish settlement rights. Article 80, drafted by Jewish representatives and known as the “Palestine clause,” explicitly protected the rights of “any peoples” under “the terms of existing international instruments to which members of the United Nations may respectively be parties.” It thereby reaffirmed the right of “close settlement” by Jews throughout the land west of the Jordan River. That right has never been abrogated.
For a time, even prominent local Arabs affirmed “Palestine” as Zionist territory. Testifying before the British Peel Commission in 1937, a Syrian leader asserted: “There is no such country as Palestine. … Our country was for centuries part of Syria.” Palestinian Arabs continued to identify with Greater Syria and “the larger Arab people.” Shortly before the birth of the State of Israel, Arab historian Philip Hitti conceded: “There is no such thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not.” A PLO military commander subsequently acknowledged: “There are no differences between Jordanians, Palestinian, Syrians and Lebanese. We are all part of one nation.”
Without a history to call their own, Palestinians have relentlessly plundered Jewish history to compensate for their missing past. So it is that their biblical “forebears” became the Canaanites; the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, site of the ancient Jewish Temples, is their “third”-holiest site, after Mecca and Medina; Me’arat haMachpelah, built over the burial places of the Jewish patriarchs and matriarchs in Hebron, is a mosque; and their Gaza flotillas are modeled on the famous Jewish refugee ship Exodus.
Where, exactly, might another Palestinian state arise? “Another,” because Jordan, constituting two-thirds of Mandatory Palestine, with a Palestinian majority population, already is a de facto Palestinian state. By any test of history or demography, Jordan is Palestine. Gaza is a Palestinian Hamas fiefdom sworn to Israel’s destruction. That makes two Palestinian states. Should any part of the West Bank ever become a Palestinian state, it will make three. That may be at least one too many.
The newly reformed Netanyahu government, which absorbed the centrist Kadima party while retaining Ehud Barak (who relentlessly undermines Jewish settlements) as defense minister, is unlikely to stand firm against Palestinian claims to Jewish land. Netanyahu’s expressed hope for a “responsible peace process” inevitably means Israeli concessions. Finally free of the shadow of his staunchly right-wing father Benzion Netanyahu, who died two weeks ago at age 102, the prime minister is likely to welcome yet another “Palestine” — this time in the biblical homeland of the Jewish people.
Jerold S. Auerbach is the author of Against the Grain: A Historian’s Journey, published this month by Quid Pro Books.
What Do Egyptians Want? A Democratically Elected Islamist Dictatorship
By Barry Rubin
Yes, friends, it’s once again time for that exciting game of Spin the Polls by the Pew Foundation. Here are the rules:
Rule 1: Pew does a good job on the poll itself.
Rule 2: The Pew analysis ignores or misunderstands the implications of the poll.
Rule 3: The Western media and government misread the poll, often misinterpreting the results into the exact opposite of what they actually mean. They then adopt the wrong policies.
Rule 4: If correctly interpreted the polls are a gold mine that can help us comprehend the present and predict the future.
Some years ago, for example, I analyzed a Pew poll. The poll showed that people in Arab countries had a low opinion of al-Qaida. It was then interpreted as meaning that they were moderate. In fact, as I wrote the poll showed a shockingly high level of support for revolutionary Islamism, especially in Egypt and Jordan.
Once again we have the misleading spin beginning with the headline: “Egyptians Remain Optimistic, Embrace Democracy and Religion in Political Life.”
If I were writing the headline it would be: “Egyptians Want Radical Islamist State More Than Anything Else.”
To be fair to Pew, the lead of their analysis is something very significant that couldn’t have been imagined before now: “Opinions of the U.S. and President Obama continue to be overwhelmingly unfavorable.” This is somehow spun, however, to imply that there is no real crisis and that U.S. policy need not be reexamined or changed.
After all, the Obama Administration’s role in helping to overthrow not just President Husni Mubarak (a reasonable action) but the entire regime brought no gain for the United States whatsoever. Instead it helped bring to power an anti-American regime likely to destabilize the region and bring war.
The poll concludes that Egyptians still want the same type of relationship with the United States. But what does this mean other than continuing to take U.S. aid money? Using America as a scapegoat—as Middle Eastern dictatorships have done now for more than a half-century—it won’t be long before hate-America rallies, demagogic anti-American speeches, a lack of cooperation on issues, and violence-inciting broadcasts or articles become routine.
You won’t be surprised to hear that two-thirds of Egyptians want to throw out the peace treaty with Israel. The U.S. Congress has properly determined that this would lead to an end of U.S. aid. So what will the next Egyptian government do? Simple, don’t throw out the treaty formally but just break it in every way possible.
What’s most critical is how Egyptians think of their own country. Here’s a very revealing apparent contradiction. Read carefully.
The Pew poll’s headline says that Egyptians are optimistic but that they also believe the economic situation is not good. Half of them claim things have gotten worse since Mubarak fell. Why then do 53 percent (albeit 65 percent) believe the country is headed in the right direction?
The answer is that they are happy with the political direction—toward radical Islamism—but do not think it will improve their material lives. They make a distinction between material benefit and spiritual-ideological preference. Such a choice is never understood in the West, especially by those who argue that everyone wants the same things in life, so an Islamist regime must deliver prosperity or fall, and consequently that radicals must moderate in order to fill their people’s stomachs.
The following statement from Lawrence O’Donnell is being widely circulated on the Internet. I’m sure that most of those who read it think these are self-evident truths about history proving that Republicans and conservatives are so obviously evil that the issue is beyond reasonable debate. Such credulity in the face of the current hegemonic narrative is an accurate sign of how American history has been taught to the current generation. It also shows us why we hear the equivalent of “the science is settled” on the difference between the two currently competing views of America.
“What did liberals do that was so offensive to the Republican Party? I’ll tell you what they did. Liberals got women the right to vote. Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote. Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty. Liberals ended segregation. Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. Liberals created Medicare. Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. What did Conservatives do? They opposed them on every one of those things, every one. So when you try to hurl that label at my feet, ‘Liberal,’ as if it were something to be ashamed of, something dirty, something to run away from, it won’t work, because I will pick up that label and I will wear it as a badge of honor.”
This statement is well worth analyzing. Begin by noting that while this is supposedly a pro-liberal statement it is actually intended as a pro-Democratic Party statement. The message is by the “Anti-Republican Crusaders” directed explicitly against Republicans. The conflation of the accomplishments listed and the word liberal, on the one hand, and the presentation of Democratic Party as one creates considerable problems for his historical narrative.
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As a side remark, I thought the word “Crusaders” was not PC. Weren’t the Crusaders supposedly aggressive, cruel bigots? What will O’Donnell’s radical Islamist allies think of this usage?
In addition, either O’Donnell doesn’t know much about American history or he thinks the American people don’t. Probably both parts of that statement are true.
I am still a registered Democrat but I’m also someone who tries to be an honest historian. The following analysis is academic–in the old sense of the word–and as balanced as I can make it.
O’Donnell’s list is the dominant narrative in America today. You will find it promoted in every mass media outlet and taught as the only possible interpretation of U.S. history in schools. How accurate is it? Well, that’s the third question that should be asked. The first two are:
–Why is it that Obama and the current radicals-pretending-to be liberals have to run on an old historical record rather than their own record in office and the current anti-liberal ideas they propound?
–Why is it that we should assume that the situation faced by America today is the same as it was in 1913 or 1933 or 1964? Perhaps more government and regulation was needed in those years but since we have had decades of more and more of these things isn’t it possible that we’ve had enough, in fact, far more than enough?
These are two questions most of the American people never see.
Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, briefed Christian supporters of the Jewish state yesterday morning. He told a hushed audience crowded into his Embassy’s Jerusalem Auditorium of a recent visit by U.S. intelligence specialists. They had asked Dr. Oren, the historian, to compare Israel’s situation today with other critical periods in the nation’s past. Without hesitation, he answered: In the best case scenario, it’s May, 1967. In the worst case, it’s May, 1948.
May Day! May Day! That’s the international distress signal. In May, 1967, Israel had to prepare to attack Egypt, Jordan, and Syria before these neighboring states could “drive the Jews into the sea,” as Egypt’s left-leaning dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser was then exhorting Arabs to do. Nasser kicked out UN truce supervisors from the Sinai desert, and he closed off the Gulf of Aqaba to sea traffic, thus blockading Israel’s southern port of Eilat.
Israel responded to these acts of war with a lightning strike against all her enemies. Israel’s spectacular victory in the Six-Day War unified Jerusalem, captured the Golan Heights from Syria, and brought the West Bank regions of Judea and Samaria under Israeli rule for the first time since the days of the Bible.
That’s the best case for Israel. Still pretty scary. The worst case, as the Ambassador described, would be May, 1948. That’s when the UN-ordered partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states occurred. And seven Arab states—Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia–sent troops to exterminate the Jews. They all immediately declared their intention of wiping out the infant Jewish state.
That’s when President Harry S. Truman defied his Sec. of State, George C. Marshall, and recognized Israel, just 11 minutes after she declared her independence. It was on that Independence Day that the Christians had come to the Israeli Embassy to celebrate. The Jews fought with fierce determination not to allow Arabs to effect a final solution to Jewish settlement in the Mideast. Arabs were exhorted by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj-Amin al-Husseini.
This militant Muslim had spent most of World War II in Berlin, urging his fellow Muslims to support Hitler’s genocidal plans for the Jews of Europe.
So much for history. The Ambassador then provided a brisk tour d‘horizon of Israel’s borders right now. Suffice it to say, this is not Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. For thirty years, Israel has relied upon peace on her southern border with Egypt. No more.
Whoever wins Egypt’s presidential election—and there have already been dozens killed in the run-up to the vote—he is unlikely to reaffirm the Camp David accords from 1978. Israel’s military recently disrupted a sophisticated terror incursion from Egypt. There are 10,000 rockets in Gaza, now controlled by the avowedly terrorist Hamas group. In Southern Lebanon, controlled by Hezbollah, there are an estimated 50,000 rockets. Syria is unraveling before our eyes.
No one will miss the Assad regime in Damascus, but we do worry about the largest stash of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) in the world—which Assad controls. Might Assad’s WMD fall into the hands of Hamas? Hezbollah? Who does the opposition to Assad link to? They are employing suicide bombings, which suggests they may not hanker for Westminster-style parliamentary democracy. And then we have Iran. Which supplies Hezbollah. Which supplies Hamas. Which is now the Number One terror apparatus active throughout the region and the world.
Despite this truly terrifying list of lethal threats from bloodthirsty enemies, Ambassador Oren’s presentation was brisk, unemotional, business-like. He feared not. He paid tribute to the resilience, strength, and faith of the Jewish people. And he lauded “the greatest alliance in history—that between the American people and the people of Israel.”
It’s little wonder that U.S. Secretary of State Al Haig referred to Israel as “the largest U.S. aircraft carrier in the world.” If the United States had to use Israel’s territory to launch a strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities, we know what the answer would be.
It does not seem that this administration will strike Iran. It prefers “talks,” as if endless efforts at talks with the militant mullahs of Tehran have not brought Israel, Western Europe and the U.S. itself to the current perilous point. Why don’t we limit our talks to this one question: Will you or will you not stop your nuclear projects today?
Of course, the Iranians won’t stop. Why should they? Day by day, the storm clouds gather. Day by day, this administration and the pacifists of the European Union dither. It is most unfortunate that the only American President to win the Nobel Peace Prize whose policies actually brought peace through strength was Theodore Roosevelt. It was TR who said,” Walk softly, but carry a Big Stick.” If the United States won’t use its Big Stick, then Israel should.
US Navy, Air Force, ground, intelligence and special forces units based at home, in Europe and the Middle East, took part this week in a special exercise ordered by President Barack Obama to simulate reactions to a potential US-Israel strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, debkafile’s exclusive military and Washington sources report.
Sunday, April 22, the US also transferred a number of advanced stealth F-22 fighter bombers, believed to be from the 302nd Fighter Squadron 302, from the joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska to the Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates.
According to our sources, the F-22 jets will join the F-15s of the Massachusetts Air National Guard’s 104th Fighter Wing which were transferred to the Al Udeid base a month ago.
Their mission will be to destroy the Iranian air force and air defense batteries so as to clear the way for US and Israeli bombers to go into action against Iran’s nuclear sites and the strategic infrastructure of its army and Revolutionary Guards Corps.
This unprecedented US buildup of air might – supplementing the aircraft on the decks of the USS Abraham Lincoln and USS Enterprise, to be joined by a third carrier as soon as the offensive gets underway – shows Tehran that the Obama administration is serious about using military means as extra pressure on Iran to give way in diplomatic negotiations – both with the six powers and with the US through clandestine channels.
Both moves took place as the United States and five other world powers prepares for the second round of talks with Iran scheduled for next month to rein in its nuclear program.
The comment Israel’s chief of staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz made to AP on April 26 about “other countries” having readied their armed forces for a potential strike “to keep Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons” referred to the deployment of the F-22 stealth jets. He did not name the other countries.
His comment was received in Washington as Israel’s strongest message till now that it will not be alone in attacking Iran but will have partners, presumably the US – and possibly also Britain, France, German, Holland or Italy.
At the end of the US exercise simulating Day One of this attack, debkafile reports that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey submitted to the White House three conclusions:
1. Iran’s response to a military strike will be “measured,” both to limit the damage to the regime and to conserve military resources for a possible follow-up attack;
2. The Iranians will go back to work on building a nuclear weapon within a short time;
3. The destruction of core elements of its nuclear program is expected to change Iran’s attitude in negotiations, making it less cocky and more submissive to international demands.
Martin Kramer: Anyone Who Doesn’t See the Coming Crisis with Egypt Is…
By Barry Rubin
Martin Kramer is one of the world’s best Middle East experts. Here is his latest dispatch. Remember this is what I’ve been saying since January 2011 and even October 2010. Regarding Martin’s last sentence, below, I vote for “fool.” The U.S. leaders really believe what they are saying and they think themselves very brilliant people. And so do the overwhelming majority of American “experts” and journalists who echo them.
Anyone who doesn’t see a looming clash between a Muslim Brotherhood-led Egypt and Israel is wearing blinders and earplugs. This is an election rally for the MB’s presidential candidate, Muhammad Mursi. It’s an anti-Israel hate fest. (Transcript: http://bit.ly/KCoqKY.) On Sunday, I heard Deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough sugarcoat the chaos in Egypt. He’s either disingenuous or a fool.
Is Islam Innately Evil? Is Islam Innately Good? Why This Debate is A Waste of Time
By Barry Rubin
We all know that the number of Muslims who explicitly put forward a systematically coherent moderate theology of Islam is very small. We also know that radical Islamists pretend to be moderates and fool people in the West. We also know that foolish or dishonest people in the West claim that Islam is innately moderate; that Sharia law as it will inevitably be interpreted at present is no big deal; and that the radicals are a minority, hijackers, or will soon become moderate. People must know the truth about these issues.
However, it is also true that the number of Muslims who are anti-Islamist in politics and relatively moderate in their politics and practice of Islam number in the tens and even hundreds of millions. Their motives range from liberalism through ethnic (Berber; Kurdish) or state nationalism, conservative views that do see Islamism as improper, those who find refuge in the West and want to acculturate to it, ruling groups and their supporters who don’t want Islamists to cut off their heads, etc. These people are our actual or potential allies in the battle against Islamism, and we better understand that and find ways to work with them, even if we don’t agree on everything.
How can we find a way to blend those two different factors and combine them into a standpoint and strategy?
At a moment when we should be analyzing existing political movements, ideas, actions, and the Western failure to meet this threat there is a wasteful, unending battle that subverts the effort to understand and explain what’s happening.
In one corner, we have those who claim—and these are by far the more powerful people today, controlling academia, media, and government policies in many places—that Islam is innately good, a religion of peace. Those who are revolutionaries and terrorists simply misunderstand their own religion. Naturally, the idea that non-Muslims, who are usually quite ignorant of Islam and its history, should define Islam is ludicrous.
There are many important points the religion-of-peace crowd misses but here are five of them:
–Islam, like any religion, is subject to interpretation, which is not always the same in different times and places or among various individuals or even—in Islam’s case—countries and ethnic groups. Thus, to say that the proper interpretation of Islam that is moderate and peaceful interpretation is absurd. Even to say that there are a lot of people who hold a moderate interpretation of Islam–as opposed to a conservative but anti-Islamist one–is absurd.
–If revolutionary Islamism is such a heresy why is it that it can often muster overwhelming support? Why are Islamic clerics, who know far more about Islam than the Western apologists, often supporting such a movement or at least its basic assumptions?
–There is much in Islam’s main texts, historical beliefs, and history that is not at all so peaceful. In fact, the revolutionaries, as a number of scholars have ably shown, base themselves on totally authentic portions of the Koran, the hadith, and the respected commentators of the past. To divorce Islam and revolutionary Islamist political ideology is absurd. The Islamists make clear they see themselves as fulfilling religious commandments and are acting as “proper” Muslims.
To ignore the reality of Islamism’s rootedness in Islam is to ensure that you are fooled by stealth Islamists, underestimate the power of the revolutionaries, and even—worst of all!—are ready to help your worst enemies.
–The idea that Islam has been “hijacked” by Islamists ignores the fact that they have a strong claim to legitimacy. They are not heretics or hijackers but contenders for power. And they may well succeed—helped by the blindness and foolish policies of the apologists—in seizing control of Islam. In fact, that seems to be happening.
–To claim there is such a thing as ”moderate Islamism” is so ridiculous that it boggles the mind. Yet this is what mainstream academics, journalists, and policymakers argue without any evidence but the most superficial and easily disprove propaganda of the Islamists themselves.
This school tends to be apologetic and even to lie and conceal. By doing so, these “Islam is good” people make it impossible to have a successful foreign policy or to understand revolutionary Islamism.
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But in the other corner are those who claim that Islam is innately bad, meaning that its followers are inevitably prone to giving full support to revolutions to seize state power and install radical Sharia-imposing regimes. In this concept, Iran, the Taliban, Hizballah, Hamas, al-Qaida, and the Muslim Brotherhood—as well as the far more subtle revolutionaries running Turkey today–have gotten Islam right and any Muslim who doesn’t support them misunderstands his own religion.
There are many important points they miss but here are five of them:
Sorry, due to my error the link on this story was left off. I am deleting the original and reposting with the link for the benefit of subscribers. I apologize for the error.
By Barry Rubin
The current political crisis in Europe, and in America as well, is not at all hard to understand. Think of it like this: society is not infinitely malleable. If you pull a rubber band far enough it is either going to snap back or it will break.
Western democracies have worked very well for 60 years now. They have been remarkably prosperous; remarkably peaceful. They defeated the Communist challenge. In a sense they—and I include the United States here—are victim of this very success.
Out of rational self-interest, the realities of electoral politics, and a strong sense—misguided or otherwise—the welfare state and the payment of entitlements have been expanding.
You can—as my grandmother used to say—throw around money like a drunken sailor until you run out of money.
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The self-imposed burdens have reached, and exceeded, the limit of what these societies could finance. This problem has been highlighted, of course, by an economic recession but it is not the product of that business contraction.
Things have been made worse by the fact that most governments in power have tried to apply the very old policies that were making the societies ill in the first place. The situation is akin to the medical practice of centuries ago in which an already sickly patient was bled further by the application of leeches. Death often followed.
Those governments buried in the equivalent of “old-think” in the USSR have just three alternatives:
Another monitoring mission, another set of people from all over the world making excuses, trying to explain the unexplainable and getting frustrated and fired upon to boot. When will the world follow a plan that makes sense. To the world we say: Give us what we need to get the mission accomplished, not what you need to feel good about yourselves.” –Syrian Revolution Digest, April 21, 2012
By Barry Rubin
U.S. policy toward Syria is turning into a scandal on both strategic and humanitarian grounds. The next three months will be wasted in a toothless observer effort during which time the Syrian regime will go on massacring people and mopping up the rebellion. In addition, U.S. policymakers admit that they have no real back-up policy and what they should do next.
And then to show how ridiculous the whole thing is, Syrian troops opened fire at oppositionists trying to talk to the UN monitors, forcing the observers to flee for their lives and injuring eight demonstrators. The UN responds by proposing a few dozen more, equally helpless, observers.
This is the same UN that in 2006 promised Israel that it would intercept Syrian weapons being smuggled to Hizballah in Lebanon and stop that radical group from reoccupying its pre-war positions in the south of the country. In six years, not a single weapon has been intercepted and not a single Hizballah terrorist stopped. On the contrary, with Syrian backing, Hizballah has terrorized the thousands of soldiers in the UN forces in Lebanon.
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There should be no question as to what should be done. Along with Iran, North Korea, and Cuba, the Syrian regime is the most anti-American government in the world. It has done everything possible to sabotage U.S. interests, to sponsor terrorism, and to block peace. That regime is also Iran’s main ally.
Any conceivable president who cared about or understood U.S. interests would make the overthrow of the Syrian regime a top priority for the United States. I’m not talking about sending troops or going to war but about every conceivable other means. This should be blindingly obvious.
In addition, any competent president would work hard to help the moderate pro-democratic forces in the Syrian opposition so that they can gain power in the country. Instead, the Obama Administration that subcontracted dealing with the Syrian regime to the UN has subcontracted dealing with the Syrian opposition to the Islamist regime in Turkey. Not surprisingly, the Turkish regime has pushed Muslim Brothers and other Islamists and their clients into the “official” leadership of the Syrian opposition, the Syrian National Council. This has led to a fracturing of opposition leadership.
And the Syrian regime is being rewarded with no more pressure and being given the ability to stall for time even though it has already violated the ceasefire. This is not merely a bad U.S. and Western policy; it is the worst possible policy, lacking any strategy to undermine the radicals and help the moderates.
With the arrival of Jodi Rudoren as correspondent, New York Times coverage of Israel and related issues has now gone to a new level of ridiculous bias, especially after a predecessor who really did try to be fair.
What is most impressive about Rudoren’s record so far is that there is no attempt to give the faintest appearance of balance. She probably doesn’t understand what that concept means. And she certainly knows that the editors and ombudsman won’t hold her accountable.
We in Israel have grown used to media prejudice and, given our low expectations, probably accept more of it without complaint than anyone else in the world.
Yet the following lead was the absolute last straw for me, in an article entitled “Palestinians Go Hungry to Make Their Voices Heard”:
“The newest heroes of the Palestinian cause are not burly young men hurling stones or wielding automatic weapons. They are gaunt adults, wrists in chains, starving themselves inside Israeli prisons.”‘
This is not news coverage but revolutionary romanticism. And consider the implications:
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–The article does not tell us that they are in prison for a reason. These are overwhelmingly people who have murdered or tried to murder civilians during a period, by the way, when their supposed governmental representative, the Palestinian Authority, was not at war with Israel.
–They were in fact “burly young men…wielding automatic weapons” when thrown into prison after trials. Most of them admit–indeed brag about–their crimes and make it clear that they would continue such deeds if released.
–Consequently, these people are NOT heroes to Palestinians, a macho society generally, because they are pitiful, gaunt, and starving but because they were heroes of an armed struggle defined in genocidal terms.
–The Palestinian Authority and Hamas holds these people as role models to young people so that they will be inspired to grow up to kill more Israelis.
–”Gaunt adults, wrists in chains” seems pulled from the nineteenth century novels of Victor Hugo.
–Remember, these are the people still in prison because of the bloodiness of their crimes after Israel has released hundreds of others in prisoner exchanges or amnesties designed to indicate good will and promote negotiations. They are still in jost ail not out of cruelty or even out of a sense of justice and self-defense but because they generally are the most merciless in deliberately slaying those who are weak and helpless.
–The author’s goal is to make readers say, “Those horrible Israelis are so mean and repressive, mistreating those poor people! We must do something!” And it is to make Jewish readers to say, “We must distance ourselves from this evil country (or government) that so betrays basic Jewish principles of mercy and justice.” The former call for pressuring Israel in order to hurt it; the latter urge pressuring Israel for its own good and talk about a crisis of Zionism in producing such a terrible system.
When Nikolai Makarov was born, the ruler of Russia was Josef Stalin. Makarov spent his entire life in the Soviet and Russian military, rising through the ranks to ultimately be named, by proud KGB spy Vladimir Putin, head of the Russian army and then of Russia’s version of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Last week, he threatened to blow the USA’s defensive missile systems in Europe to smithereens in a preemptive strike.
He stated in response to news reports regarding progress in European missile defense: “A decision to use destructive force preemptively will be taken if the situation worsens.”
Mind you, these are merely defensive systems, and their avowed purpose is to protect Europe from nuclear terrorism springing from Iran.
So Makarov is saying to the Europe: You must remain vulnerable to obliteration by Iran so that Russia, too, can be sure of being able to obliterate you at any need. Otherwise, Russia will just have to obliterate you right now.
In other words, Russia sees defensive systems in Europe the same way Israel sees offensive systems in Iran, and feels they justify unilateral preemptive action, action which quite likely would lead to World War III.
So much for the Obama “reset” with Russia! Before Obama, one heard inflammatory, confrontational rhetoric like this out of Russia all the time, but in those days it came from retired generals and KGB operatives who made them from relative obscurity. Under Obama, the statements are coming from folks who, quite literally, have their fingers on the nuclear button.
Perhaps the crowning achievement of Makarov’s career has been his service on the Presidential Commission of the Russian Federation to Counter Attempts to Falsify History to the Detriment of Russia’s Interests (PCRFCAFHDRI – only the Russians can generate an acronym like that!), an entity whose purpose is to rewrite Russian history to glorify the Soviet past, including the mass-murder perpetrated by Stalin. In other words, Stalin may have killed more Russians than any other person in world history, but there’s no need to let Russian children know about it.
This is a man who loves the USSR passionately, and who therefore despises the USA and all it stands for with equal passion. Well, most of the USA that is. He’s pretty keen on Barack Obama though, actually.
Speaking anonymously to the Wall Street Journal, one of Makarov’s henchman stated that if Obama were reelected he was “sure we will reach an agreement that brings no harm to them or to our security. If it’s someone else, surely it will be difficult.”
So Makarov’s side is telling Americans: ”You’d better not vote for Romney. If you do, we might have to launch our first strike.”
Florida Senator Marco Rubio recently gave a speech in which he laid out what might be called the Rubio Doctrine on Russia. The gist of it is this: Russia is ruled by a proud KGB spy who has spent his whole life learning how to hate and destroy the USA and what it stands for. He’s been handed power by the people voluntarily. That’s because Russia is our enemy. It’s time we started acting like it.
It’s about time we started getting real Republican leadership like this.
Russian interests and Americans interests are diametrically opposed. Russia wants high oil prices, and America wants low oil prices. Because of this, Russia wants tumult in the Middle East, while America wants stability. Russia supports dictators, America supports democrats. And Russia’s top military leaders hate the USA so much that they are unafraid of openly threatening the US with preemptive strikes. They know they can make these statements publicly without facing criticism from their fellow citizens, who to the contrary will probably just loudly applaud.
The leadership provided by Barack Obama and his Russia guru Michael McFaul have been abysmal to the point of treachery. They have lied to Americans about the sham Medvedev presidency instead of challenging Putin’s bid for lifetime power. They have betrayed American allies in former Soviet space and Eastern Europe, and in return for their craven appeasement we have only seen more and more aggression from the Russians, so typical of bullies, to the point where we are now being threatened with wanton military action.
So when the Russians tell you that you’d better not vote for Mitt Romney, you know for sure that it’s exactly what you must do.
Why do so many Arabs sound like Nazis when they talk about Jews? The answer lay buried for decades in the archives of the Third Reich. Then a generation of younger German scholars expanded their attention beyond the death camps of Europe to Hitler’s activities in the Middle East. What they discovered: it was Hitler who financed the modern jihadi movement.
Nazi-Arab collaboration was crucial to the Final Solution. The Third Reich financed and trained the Muslim Brothers of Palestine and Egypt in terrorism and focused their anti-modernity rage on Jews. One of the first people Hitler told about his plans to kill Europe’s Jews was the head of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine, the infamous mufti of Jerusalem, Yasser Arafat’s cousin. Hitler and the mufti shook hands on a plan to exterminate all the Jews of the Middle East. The Reich preserved the memo, the minutes, and a photo of their famous handshake.
Husseini was passed along to Goebbels, who established him as the Nazi voice to the Middle East. It was the most popular radio program of the long war years, broadcast daily into every café. This Nazi station was listened to by the entire male population, Arab and Persian, including most famously Ayatollah Khomeini. It was an intoxicating mix of militant Islam, Nazism, and war propaganda.
The Palestinian leadership and Hitler successfully collaborated on a crucial step of the Final Solution — mob violence and a reign of terror pressured Britain to shut down Jewish immigration to what is now Israel. They trapped the Jews in Europe, where six million perished in the killing fields and death camps. Adolf Eichmann’s deputy, Dieter Wisliceny, stated at his Nuremberg trial that the mufti’s importance “must not be disregarded[.] … [T]he Mufti had repeatedly suggested to … Hitler, Ribbentrop and Himmler, the extermination of European Jewry[.] … The Mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and advisor of Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of the plan.”
Winston Churchill spoke in the House of Commons against the shutting down of Jewish immigration to today’s Israel. He clearly saw the Nazi hand behind the Arab riots: “We are now asked to submit, and this is what rankles most with me, to an agitation which is fed with foreign money and ceaselessly inflamed by Nazi and by Fascist propaganda.”
Hitler’s influence has been permanently embedded in Arab culture. During World War II, there was a popular song among Arabs: “Allah in heaven, Hitler on earth.” Sheikh al-Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood today, in his weekly sermon broadcast on Al Jazeera to an audience of 60 million, prayed about the Jews: “Oh Allah, kill them, down to the very last one.” “Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by [Adolf] Hitler.” In Tahir Square, a mob of Arab Spring celebrants screamed, “Jew, Jew, Jew” as they raped blond American journalist Lara Logan. We are all too familiar with Iran’s plans for their nuclear program — to carry out Hitler’s dream.
The Palestinian national movement was founded by Hitler’s henchman, al Husseini, mufti and the head of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine. The founder of the PLO, Yasser Arafat, was trained by German Nazi army officers who were welcomed in Cairo after the war. He adopted the name “Yasser” to honor the Muslim Brother’s terror chief of the 1930s, who kidnapped Arabs in Western clothes and threw them into pits of scorpions and snakes. Their corpses would be left in the street for days, shoes stuck in their mouths, as a lesson for any Arab who believed in tolerating Jews or welcoming modernization. During Oslo, Arafat’s personal bodyguard had sons named Hitler and Eichmann, according to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s book, A Place Among the Nations.
The continuity is striking. Reich set the Brothers up with a printing press and fake photos of alleged torture of Arabs by Jews — just as today, Iranian, Egyptian, and Palestinian state TV broadcasts dramatizations of Jews stealing Arabs’ eyeballs and killing Arab children to use their blood in matzoh. Organizing in mosques, schools, and workplaces with Hitler’s funds, the Brothers spread lies that Jews planned to destroy the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem and trample on the Koran — the same exact lies Yasser Arafat used to launch the second intifada. On the Ramadan after 9/11, Egyptian President Mubarak launched a 41-week dramatization of that Nazi favorite, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in an emotional call for genocide against the world’s Jews.
Hitler has never left the Middle East. For almost 70 years, the Arab world has been pickled in Nazi Jew-hatred. In the words of Matthias Kuntzel, author of Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11, “[i]f there is one theme … which unites Islamists, Liberals, Nasserites and Marxists, it is the collective fantasy of the common enemy in the shape of Israel and the Jews, which almost always correlates with the wish to destroy Israel.” Jew-hatred is indispensible to Arab leaders, from Egypt to Saudi Arabia to Iran to the Palestinian Authority, in their fight against democratic Western values.
Nazi jihadism didn’t win without a fight from the modernizing forces in Egypt. Many signs indicate that Israel would have been a welcome neighbor. Religious leaders fought the Brotherhood’s attempts to politicize Friday prayers with false claims that Jews were attacking Al Aqsa and the Koran. The rector of Al-Azhar, Sunni Islam’s most important university, forbade anti-Jewish propaganda. Ali Mahir, Egyptian King Farouk’s top adviser, called for a united Palestinian state based on mutual tolerance and regulated immigration for both Jew and Arab.
Today, the fight is lost. All of those institutions are firmly entrenched in Nazi-jihadi anti-Semitism. The coalition government of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, which is a terrorist Muslim Brotherhood organization, are united in their denial of Israel’s right to exist. Jew-hatred is so popular that it is possible that no Arab leader can speak out against it. It explains why the Palestinians have turned down a state of their own four times. They are holding out for Hitler’s solution. Peace is the last thing they want. Otherwise, peace would be here today.
Obama is quite wrong. If desired by both sides, peace is easy. It is Nazi-Islamic propaganda that is so hard to solve.
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