Iran’s Ominous Red Sea Move

by P. David Hornik

Both Israel and Iran have sent warships into waters south of Israel. FoxNews reported on Wednesday that Israel had deployed two more warships to its Red Sea border with Egypt; Israel already has an unspecified naval presence in the area. Iran, for its part, was dispatching its 15^th fleet to the Red Sea.

An earlier report on Ynet noted that Iran’s 15^th fleet comprises a submarine and several warships.

Although it’s an uncertain call, the reports give the impression that Israel’s move came first and Iran’s is a response. As Ynet also reports:

Israeli security sources told the Associated Press on Tuesday that two additional warships have been dispatched…. Another source said that the operation was routine, telling Reuters that “two naval craft have been sent to the Red Sea. This is not unusual.”

As for Iran’s navy commander Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari, he told Iranian TV that the Iranian fleet was being deployed for routine patrols and preventing pirate attacks.

Or as he put it: “The presence of Iran’s army in the high seas will convey the message of peace and friendship to all countries.”

Israel’s dual message to AP and Reuters sounds calculated to emphasize its move without unduly, one might say, ruffling the waters. As for Admiral Sayyari’s fraternal tidings, they’re certain not to be read literally in Israel.

With or without an Iranian move, Israel has already been on a special footing since Monday when its chief of staff Lt.-Gen. Benny Gantz ordered a heightened alert throughout southern Israel and particularly near the Israeli-Egyptian border. Civilian roads have been closed and forces stationed at the border in a deployment that has been called unprecedented.

What prompted this full-blown alert was earlier intelligence about a squad of about ten Islamic Jihad terrorists making their way through Egyptian Sinai from Gaza. They were seen as aiming to infiltrate the Israeli-Egyptian border and carry out a terror attack even larger than the one on August 18, when terrorists from another Gaza-based organization, the Popular Resistance Committees, crossed the border and killed eight Israelis.

As DEBKAfile points out, since that attack Israel has been engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with the Gaza terror haven. It was at dawn on August 24 that the Israeli air force killed Ismail al-Asmar, an Islamic Jihad commander, in a missile strike—one of a string of assassinations of Gaza terror leaders that were aimed at restoring Israel’s deterrence after the August 18 attack.

And it was later that day that the Islamic Jihad squad in question set out from Gaza—“turning this equation on its head,” claims DEBKA, “by demonstrating that Israeli attacks on Palestinian terrorist targets in the Gaza Strip bring forth Palestinian reprisals from Sinai.”

Where’s Egypt in all this? Israel has been trying to get Egypt to clamp down—to an extent still constrained by the 1979 Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty—on the growing chaos and terror threat in Sinai. Reports in the Egyptian media say the Egyptian military has started operating against the terror hubs there.

DEBKA, for its part, claims such accounts are “pure fiction” and that “the Egyptian army…is sitting on its hands as the jihadists take up assault positions on its side of the Sinai border”—which is exactly what the Egyptian army did at the time of the August 18 attack.

Israel still hopes post-Mubarak Egypt won’t turn into another “Iran.” As for the Iran that already exists, it’s not about, at this point, to get involved on the tactical level should a border skirmish between Israeli forces and Islamic Jihad (a direct Iranian creation and proxy) break out. But its Red Sea naval presence is a reminder to Israel that Iran is the patron of Gaza terror and that the conflict is ultimately on the strategic level with Israel’s survival as the stakes.

The “Arab spring” has already erupted in a hot summer for Israel. With Egypt almost certain to get even less friendly and cooperative, and so long as neither the U.S. nor Israel is prepared to confront Iran as the strategic problem that it is, the fall augurs no relief.

P. David Hornik

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/09/01/iran%E2%80%99s-ominous-red-sea-move/

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

NY Times Would Prefer Settlers Defenseless Against Palestinian Attacks

by Leo Rennert

In a couple of weeks, the Palestinian Authority will be at the UN seeking statehood recognition over all of Gaza, all of the West Bank and all of East Jerusalem, including Judaism's holiest shrines. And the UN General Assembly is likely to oblige.)

It's in this context that the New York Times, in an Aug. 31 dispatch by Jerusalem correspondent Isabel Kershner, reveals the startling news that the Israeli military has been training settlers in the West Bank to defend themselves if unilateral UN recognition of Palestinian statehood triggers attacks on Jewish settlements in the West Bank -- or, as Kershner puts it in more politically correct terms -- should there occur "major disturbances." ("Israel Intensifies Training Of Settler Security Teams" page A4).

Kershner is clearly upset about Israel's chutzpah in training settlers in self-defense tactics. The military, for example, is drawing boundaries around settlements as "no-go" lines to warn potential Palestinian demonstrators not to enter any settlements. So, Kershner huffs that "it was not clear how the boundaries would be made clear to protesters."

Kershner also is concerned that settler rapid-response teams have been armed with M-16 automatic rifles. Presumably, she'd be happier if they only had squirt guns or water pistols.

The military's explanation that, to ensure the safety of settlers, it is "preparing them to deal with any possible scenario" doesn't satisfy Kershner. The military, she informs Times readers, "declined to go into further detail regarding what it called its 'operational preparedness.'''

It's typical, of course, for Kershner and the Times to huff and puff about settlements as the alleged obstacles toward peace, rather than Hamas's total control of Gaza and Mahmoud Abbas's refusal to make any compromises whatsoever to achieve a two-state solution. That basic reality is not to be found in Kershner's piece. Nor is the historical fact that Israel repeatedly has vacated settlements or offered to vacate them whenever there was a glimmer or prospect of peace with its neighbors -- i.e. the evacuation of all Sinai settlements as part of a peace deal with Egypt, the abandonment of all settlements in Gaza when Ariel Sharon foolishly believed this would pave the way for a an incipient, peaceful Palestine, the offers to vacate 95 percent of the West Bank by Ehud Barak in 2000 and Ehud Olmert in 2008.

None of this matters as much to Kershner as those pesky settlements portrayed as sole obstacle in the path toward peace.

Leo Rennert

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2011/08/ny_times_would_prefer_settlers_defenseless_against_palestinian_attacks.html

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

How to Topple Iran; Hamas Moving to Cairo?

by Anna Mahjar-Barducci

The Hamas government in Gaza failed to pay the salaries to its 40,000 employees of public and security services last July. Hamas leaders then promised full payments in August, but even this month, not all employees received their wages. Reuters reports that Hamas has denied that the movement is undergoing a financial crisis but says that "it faces liquidity problems stemming from inconsistent revenues from tax collection in the Gaza Strip and foreign aid". However, according to Arab media outlets, the reasons behind the lack of liquidity lie in the deterioration of its relations with Iran.

According to diplomatic sources, Iran has allegedly suspended aid to Gaza, primarily in retaliation for Hamas's silence about the uprising in Syria, Iran's staunchest ally. "Iran has cut back or even stopped its funding of Hamas after the Islamist movement, which rules the Gaza Strip, failed to show public support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad," Reuters reported.. Hamas's leadership has not made any statement either in support of Assad or against the protestors, mainly because the Syrian regime recently extended its brutality to a Palestinian refugee camp near the port city of Latakia. Syrian forces opened fire on the camp, causing an undisclosed number of victims and obliging 10.000 refugees to flee.

The Jerusalem-based Media Line reported that Basem Ezbidi, a Syrian political scientist at Bir Zeit University in Ramallah, said that Hamas is facing the "greatest dilemma," as Hamas is findin difficulties to reconcile its conflicting interests: "On the one hand, Hamas does not want the Syrian regime to disappear," Ezbidi told The Media Line; "but on the other hand, how can it justify its strategic alliance with a state that kills Palestinians?"

Further, in April, the Saudi daily Al-Hayat wrote that Hamas's political leadership were ordered to leave Syria following its neutral stance towards the popular uprising. According to the report, Qatar agreed to host Hamas political bureau chief Khaled Mashal. Hamas denies the allegations, however, and its political leadership remained in Damascus. Nevertheless, according to reports, there are rumors that Hamas might shift its political bureau from Damascus to Cairo

There are also rumors that Iran has started to finance a Salafist groups in Gaza. These most extreme fringes, however, although plentiful in the Gaza Strip, seem to be fragmented and, for the moment at least, with little or no central coordination -- of course that could change. Hamas has a contradictory relation with Salafist groups: at times it represses them, and at times it uses them to achieve its own goals. Political analysts seem to agree that these movements do not have a serious chance to take over Gaza, which will remain, in the foreseeable future, under the grip of Hamas.

Media Line also reported that Ayman Shaheen, a political scientist at Gaza's Al-Azhar University, said that Hamas will be flexible in adapting to the new political reality in the Middle East: "Hamas is wise. It will create a new set of alliances to replace the Teheran-Damascus-Gaza axis," Shaheen said. "Qatar is always open to Hamas, and there is rapprochement with Egypt as well." Hamas's finances cannot be sustained without external support. Last year Hamas's budget was $540 million; with taxes on merchants and goods from Israel only accounting for $55 million. Apart from donations received from different countries in the region, the rest of the funds needed have so far beenr provided by Iran, whose annual aid is estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Iran, however, has another reason for cutting financial aid to Gaza: The Iranian government itself is at the moment experiencing a financial crisis partly due to sanctions, but above all due to difficulties in keeping up with oil production. As indicated by the Financial Times, "[Iran] produces 3.7 million barrels of oil a day. After years of insufficient investment in infrastructure, however, that output is threatened. Iran's deputy oil minister, Mohsen Khojasteh-Mehr, said that the country will have to invest at least $32 billion to maintain its production capacity. If it does not do so, output will fall to 2.7 million barrels per day by 2015."

All indications are that at a moment when the Syrian regime might be toppled, Iran is neithet politically nor economically in the best position to defend its vital ally, Syria. Political analysts consider Syria Iran's Trojan Horse in the citadel of the Arab world. Without Syria, Iran will never be able accomplish its dream of a renewed Persian Empire spanning up to the Mediterranean, with Israel wiped off the map.

The West woiuld do well to realize that such favorable conditions will be be difficult to meet; it should therefore push harder for the fall of the Syrian regime. Irs collapse would be a deadly blow to the hegemonic aspiration of the Ayatollahs, and might even lay down the condition for its fall. All that is necessary would be to show half the political and military determination displayed against former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

Anna Mahjar-Barducci

Source: http://www.hudson-ny.org/2384/topple-iran-hamas-cairo

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

The Rise of Islamic No-Go Zones

by Mark Tapson

Three and a half years ago, one of the Church of England’s most senior bishops, Pakistani-born Michael Nazir-Ali​, warned that Islamic extremists had created “no-go”areas across Britain too dangerous for non-Muslims to enter. His politically incorrect concern sparked a firestorm of denial and criticism. The Muslim Council of Britain, for example, dismissed it as the Bishop’s “frantic scaremongering” and “intolerance,” and scoffed,

We wouldn’t allow “no-go” areas to happen. I smell extreme intolerance when people criticise multiculturalism without proper evidence of what has gone wrong.

Well, the evidence of how multiculturalism “has gone wrong” is in. This week Soeren Kern at the Hudson Institute documented the proliferation of such no-go zones throughout Europe – autonomous Islamic “microstates” under Sharia rule (having rejected their host countries’ legal systems), where non-Muslims must either conform to the cultural, legal, and religious norms of fundamentalist Islam or expect to be greeted with violence. As Daniel Pipes puts it, “a more precise name for these zones would be Dar al-Islam” – the House of Islam, or the place where Islam rules.

England, Sweden, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands – in every European country with a large Muslim immigrant population, the story is the same: Islamic supremacists refuse to assimilate into the Western melting pot; instead they carve out a foothold in a neighborhood, and then, through intimidation or outright violence, push out the infidels whose failed secular values are no longer acceptable. Even public services such as police, firefighters and ambulances are often driven out of such neighborhoods with stones, bottles or bullets. Lacking the political and cultural will to assert control in areas that in some cases have become urban war zones, the authorities have simply retreated and abandoned them. As Germany’s Chief Police Commissioner Bernhard Witthaut confesses,

In these areas crimes no longer result in charges. They are left to themselves. Only in the worst cases do we in the police learn anything about it. The power of the state is completely out of the picture.

In Britain, where there are already as many as eighty-five Sharia courts in operation, an Islamist group called Muslims Against the Crusades has launched an ambitious campaign to turn twelve British cities into independent Islamic states, including Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, and what the group calls “Londonistan.” In the Tower Hamlets in East London – or as the Muslims there refer to it, “the Islamic Republic of Tower Hamlets” – imams known as the “Tower Hamlets Taliban” issue death threats to unveiled women, and gays are attacked by gangs of young Muslim men. The neighborhood has been littered with leaflets announcing, “You are entering a Sharia controlled zone. Islamic rules enforced.” It was in East London, remember, that the Islamist Abu Izzadeen challenged former Home Secretary John Reid by saying: “How dare you come to a Muslim area?”

In France, there are an astonishing 751 so-called Sensitive Urban Zones (ZUS). “Sensitive” indeed: the nature of the ZUS, and chaos like the nightly burning of cars in Paris, are topics that the French media largely downplay to avoid accusations of racism or Islamophobia – hence, for example, their generic description of the immigrant gangs running wild in Paris Métro stations as “youth.”

An estimated (as of 2004) five million Muslims live in these ZUS, and there is barely a single French city that lacks at least one. In Paris and other French cities with a high percentage of Muslim populations, like Lyons, Marseilles and Toulouse, thousands of Muslims make their presence felt by blocking streets and sidewalks for Friday prayers. Some mosques have begun broadcasting sermons and chants of “Allahu Akbar” via loudspeakers into the streets. Local authorities sit on their hands rather than confront this “occupation without tanks or soldiers,” because they are afraid of the situation escalating into violence in the streets.

The Dutch government has released a list of forty “no-go” zones in the Netherlands. In Brussels, Belgium, which is twenty percent Muslim, police have to patrol with two police cars, to watch each other’s back. And yet the multiculturalist mindset is so deeply entrenched in Europeans that it is the police who are expected to avoid offending cultural sensitivities: officers, for example, who frequently are targeted with rocks by Muslim youth, have been ordered not to drink coffee or eat in public during the Islamic month of Ramadan.

In Sweden, which an imam there has labeled “the best Islamic state,” whole patches of the city of Malmö – which is more than twenty-five percent Muslim – are no-go zones. There and in Gothenburg, Muslim teenagers have been burning cars, attacking emergency services, throwing.stones at patrolling officers and temporarily blinding them with green lasers.

And where such zones have not been officially established, the process is underway. In Italy, for example, Muslims have been commandeering Rome’s Piazza Venezia for public prayers. In Bologna, Muslims have repeatedly threatened to bomb the San Petronio cathedral because it contains a fresco which depicts the Islamic prophet Mohammed being tormented in hell.

These dangerous enclaves are, the Hudson Institute’s Kern writes, “the byproduct of decades of multicultural policies that have encouraged Muslim immigrants to create parallel societies and remain segregated rather than become integrated into their European host nations.” Indeed, as the scholar of Islam Robert Spencer has put it, what the Islamic supremacists want is not merely a place at the table – equal rights under the law, as previous minority groups have sought in civil rights movements – but their own separate table, utterly distinct from the manmade laws of infidels.

Mark Tapson

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/08/31/the-rise-of-islamic-no-go-zones/

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

The Hypocrisy of the Israeli Left

by Charles Bybelezer

Jerusalem Post contributor Alon Pinkas recently penned an article entitled “September: Palestine, Stalemate or Armageddon?” in which he spews venom on the “policy-devoid [Israeli] government,” and condemns Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for “not com[ing] up with a peace plan” to avert the Palestinians’ September gambit to seek UN statehood recognition. Likewise, self-proclaimed far-leftist-cum-centrist Benny Morris​ last week wrote a National Interest article, “How Netanyahu Could Have Stopped Palestinian Statehood Bid,” denouncing Netanyahu’s failure to “publicly, clearly chart out the main lines of a territorial compromise,” which, Morris presumes, would have induced the Palestinians to abide by the Oslo Accords and forego the UN option.

The great paradox is that according to the Professional Peace-Processor Association (PPPA), which counts as members both Pinkas and Morris, a comprehensive peace plan is intended to be devised through bilateral negotiations, which Netanyahu is unequivocally calling for. In Netanyahu’s own words, “I am prepared to immediately start direct negotiations with [PA President] Mahmoud Abbas​. I am willing to invite [Abbas] to my house in Jerusalem and I am willing to go to Ramallah.”

Yet Netanyahu’s willingness to resume negotiations with an obstinate PA is irrelevant to both Pinkas and Morris, since the prime minister, according to Pinkas, is presently “enhance[ing] the [international community’s] impatience with the perpetual ‘Israeli-Palestinian’ conflict/peace process/crisis/stalemate.” By refusing to do what, one might ask? Who knows: neither author informs the reader as to the steps they believe Netanyahu should be taking (although Pinkas does implore Netanyahu to “entertain” the Saudi Peace Plan, conveniently omitting the fact that the “peace” plan was devised by a country that bars entry to Israelis). Instead, they simply criticize the prime minister for “blatantly and foolishly, almost frivolously, fail[ing] to play the game,” in Morris’ words. The irony is that if Netanyahu had in fact forwarded a peace plan, chances are Pinkas and Morris would have devoted their columns to condemning the prime minister’s “offensive” unilateralism, while explaining away the Palestinians’ UN bid as a fair, in kind reaction.

Furthermore, like all leftists, both Pinkas and Morris view the current impasse in a contextual vacuum, ignoring that Netanyahu has already taken considerable steps to propel the peace process forward. They neglect that Netanyahu already broke with his own ideological lines by formally endorsing in 2009 the creation of a Palestinian state. They also ignore the fact that Netanyahu implemented a 10-month construction moratorium last year in Israeli “settlements,” which the Palestinians spurned (Morris nonetheless goes so far as to overtly blame the prime minister for not curbing settlement expansion, despite the fact that the construction moratorium for the most part remains de facto in place). Most importantly, both authors overlook that Netanyahu recently succumbed to the Palestinian—and White House—demand that Israel withdraw to the 1967 borders as a basis for jump-starting negotiations with the Palestinians, specifically in order to ward off the Palestinian Authority’s UN ambitions.

To recap: Netanyahu is to be condemned for not playing a “game” (although he has clearly done so via ongoing concessions to the Palestinians for more than two years), which, incredibly, both Pinkas and Morris then concede is merely a charade that has no chance of success given the Palestinian unwillingness to engage. In Morris’ words, “Abbas would still have refused to negotiate…[as] he has no interest in a two-state solution and is unwilling to recognize Israel as a Jewish or legitimate entity.” According to Pinkas, the “Palestinians seem to have concluded that a meaningful peace process is not tenable.”

Go figure.

Despite their blatant hypocrisy, the authors proceed to validate the Palestinians’ UN drive, with Pinkas borderline commending the Palestinians for “chang[ing] their strategy” in light of Netanyahu’s “[sitting] back, in love with the status quo.” Morris validates the PA’s UN move by invoking Opposition Leader Tzipi Livni’s most recent tirade, in which she “squarely laid the blame for the corner into which Israel has painted itself at Netanyahu’s feet,” and by suggesting that the recent approval by Israel to build an additional 277 homes in Ariel “[gave] the Palestinians their excuse for avoiding negotiations.”

The problem with both authors’ analyses—that “September is a cruel reminder that if you don’t come up with a policy, others will,” in Pinkas’ opinion—is that it resides upon two self-indulgent, leftist fallacies: the patently false assertion that anything other than their policy is equivalent to no policy, and the subsequent gross misattribution of Palestinian belligerence to the failure to implement said policy.

The result is that the Palestinians can do no wrong, their ongoing antagonism invariably ascribed to the Israeli Right (due to its not pursuing ‘their” policy, of course). For Pinkas, when Netanyahu was bowing to world pressure and conceding to Palestinian whims, the prime minister’s policy was “lean, mean…flexible and creative.” However, now that Netanyahu has run out of plausible ways to prevent Palestinian intransigence, the author denigrates the Israeli government as “paralyzed,” “cumbersome” and “devoid of ideas.” For Morris, Netanyahu “still has a very good hand,” implying that he was wisely conducting affairs when he was kowtowing to Palestinian demands, however, presently he is “fail[ing] to play it.”

All the while, no mention is made of the fact that the Israeli Left has been unable to usher in a modicum of enduring peace, despite 20 years of implementing its Oslo-ian policies. This rejection of reality also precludes the authors from conceptualizing a crucial point: that maintaining “the status quo” is in itself a policy, and one that Netanyahu is likely pursuing at all costs. For if Netanyahu shifts any closer to the likes of Pinkas and Morris, he will have effectively negated his own self.

Tragically for Pinkas and Morris, this occurrence would require them to revert back to their default-position: blaming Palestinian rejectionism on the so-called “occupation.” And they would once again find themselves in the familiar position of promoting a falsity that has been disproved time and again.

Charles Bybelezer

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/08/31/the-hypocrisy-of-the-israeli-left/

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

The Secret Deals of the Gulf War

by Jamie Glazov

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Pavel Stroilov, the exiled Russian historian and the author of Behind the Desert Storm. A secret archive stolen from the Kremlin that sheds new light on the Arab revolutions in the Middle East.

FP: Pavel Stroilov, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

The subtitle of your new book states that it “sheds a new light on the Arab revolutions in the Middle East.” Yet, most of it is based on the Soviet secret archives about the 1990-1991 Gulf War​, or even older events. It may be interesting to a historian, but what is its relevance to the current events in the Arab world?

Stroilov: Thanks Jamie.

These revolutions may have come as a bolt from the blue to many politicians and experts, but in fact, they had been inevitable for decades. Sooner or later, any socialist regime exhausts its economy and the patience of its people. All these regimes – Egypt, Libya, Syria – are socialist regimes and former Soviet clients. What we witness today is simply the collapse of the Soviet empire in the Middle East, part of the same process which we had seen in Europe in 1989-1991. Unfortunately, at that time the Red Arabs were allowed to survive. They could be – and should have been – overthrown at least twenty years earlier, and with much better results. Why that did not happen is a long story; and I hope I have told much of that story in my book.

Amusingly, I thought I finished the manuscript just before the revolt in Tunisia erupted; and I concluded it by predicting that the Red Arab regimes would be overthrown. I did not expect that to happen so soon that I would have to update the book several times as the events unfolded. Yet, that was where the evidence had led me. The value of this book lies not in my own expertise (fairly modest), but in the unique documents it reveals.

FP: Tell us about the documents and how you obtained them.

Stroilov: Most of the documents are verbatim transcripts of closed-door negotiations between the political leaders of those times. They are still top secret in Russia; and analogous documents in Western countries have not been declassified either.

They came into my hands through a chain of lucky coincidences. When the Soviet regime collapsed in 1991, and Gorbachev was being thrown out of the Kremlin, members of his private office staff made copies of top secret documents they had access to. Those copies were then stored in the Gorbachev Foundation, unknown to the Kremlin at that stage. A decade later, Gorbachev allowed some limited access to the documents to researchers he thought to be friendly, myself included. In fact, I was not that friendly: when I realized what a valuable archive was there, I played some tricks with passwords on their computers, turned my limited access into an unlimited one, and copied the whole archive. That was just in time. In 2003, the Kremlin learned about the existence of that archive, and put pressure on Gorbachev to stop sharing it with researchers. But it was too late – I had already stolen it. I am now working to make it public, and hopefully, this book about the Middle East is only the beginning.

FP: So, what do we still not know about the Gulf War?

Stroilov: Many things.

For example, there were secret negotiations between Washington and Baghdad during the fall of 1990, with the Soviets mediating, in an attempt to resolve the conflict peacefully. Indeed, they were close to an agreement on that – and on fairly scandalous terms, too. Saddam would withdraw from Kuwait voluntarily in exchange for big concessions over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – it would have to be resolved under the Soviet scheme of a UN-sponsored international conference. That would certainly mean, to put it simply, a disarmament and a dismemberment of Israel.

The documents show that George W. H. Bush Administration agreed to that deal in principle. However, they were very keen to keep the ‘linkage’ between Kuwait and Israel completely secret. They wanted Saddam to withdraw from Kuwait as if unconditionally, and then the United States would help to put pressure on Israel as a part of a supposedly unrelated ‘peace process’. On September 9, 1990, George W. H. Bush asked Gorbachev to ‘sound’ Saddam out about such a deal, Gorby sent an envoy on a long round of shuttle diplomacy, but eventually, Saddam refused. He would agree to such a deal if it was made openly, but he did not trust the Americans to adhere to their side of a secret bargain.

Worse still, although the deal with Saddam was not reached, the Bush-senior Administration made many promises on Israel to their anti-Israeli allies in the Gulf War – to Gorbachev, to Mitterrand, to Mubarak, to Assad, etc. It seems that much in the subsequent ‘Middle East peace process,’ disastrous as it has been for Israel, is rooted here.

FP: These are serious allegations; you have the evidence to support this?

Stroilov: It is all in the book. There is a verbatim transcript of the summit-meeting between Bush and Gorbachev in Helsinki on September 9, 1990, where Gorbachev explains his ‘peace plan’ and eventually persuades reluctant Bush to accept it. Gorbachev then proposes to ‘send someone’ to Saddam and to ‘sound him out’; Bush gratefully agrees to that, but asks to keep those negotiations completely secret. It is interesting to compare that transcript with the accounts of that summit-meeting given in the memoirs of Bush-senior, Brent Scowcroft, and James Baker​. All of them give a fictitious story: they mislead us to believe that Gorbachev wanted to mention Israel and Palestinians in a joint public statement, but then conceded the point. In fact, as the document shows, the argument was about a secret deal, not a public statement, it was Bush who conceded the point, and Gorbachev who won it.

In October, Gorbachev sent his envoy Yevgeny Primakov to Baghdad, then to Washington, and then to Baghdad again. Those trips were known at the time, but the substance of the negotiations was not. Again, Bush, Scowcroft and Baker pretend in their memoirs that the ‘Primakov’s mission’ took them completely by surprise. They mention briefly that Primakov brought some compromise proposals from Saddam, which Bush and Co. firmly rejected, and then reprimanded Gorbachev for his initiative. However, the Soviet archives suggest that both Bush and Baker actually thanked Gorbachev for it.

It was only in November 1990, just after Saddam’s firm rejection of the ‘peace plan,’ that the US began military preparations for an offensive into Kuwait.

FP: What about evidence of other agreements leading to the Israeli-Palestinian ‘peace process’?

Stroilov: At the same summit-meeting in Helsinki, according to the transcript, Bush promised to Gorbachev that the United States would no longer oppose the Soviet presence in the Middle East and would cooperate with Moscow to start an Arab-Israeli ‘peace process.’ In further negotiations, they discuss the role of the UN and of Western Europe. In effect, one can see in these documents that the present ‘Middle East Quartet’ was established secretly long before it started operating publicly; and its roots are in the secret diplomacy of the Gulf War.

At the meeting with Gorbachev near Moscow on July 31, 1991, Bush and Baker discuss arrangements for deceiving Israel and making it negotiate on unacceptable terms. Thus, they would bring some ‘moderate’ Palestinians to a negotiating table, but promised to Gorbachev that the PLO would be allowed to ‘command its people behind the stages’ from Tunisia. They openly promised to Israel that the status of East Jerusalem would not be negotiated, and secretly promised to Gorbachev and to the Palestinians that the issue would be eventually smuggled into the talks.

Some of the discussions of that period include much bolder proposals. Thus, French President Mitterrand talks about a two-state solution on the basis of not even 1967 borders, but of the 1947 partition plan. Italian Prime Minister Andreotti also supported that idea.

FP: Why would the US Administration make all these concessions? What for?

Stroilov: They developed a very peculiar theory at that time – which, unfortunately, became universally accepted by now. The theory is that a military intervention is ‘legal’ only if it is authorised by the UN; and therefore, you need a very wide global coalition in order to attack some petty dictator like Saddam in 1991 or Gaddafi now. Time and again, this approach leads to disastrous results. In 1991, it prolonged the life of Saddam’s regime for another 12 years. In the documents, we can see why that happened: the Soviets and the French put the pressure on Bush not to go beyond liberation of Kuwait, i.e. strictly follow the UN resolution.

Today we know this approach led to all sorts of disasters, including several further wars, and millions of people lost their lives because Saddam had been allowed to stay in power. And yet, when the West had to intervene in Libya this year, we took the same absurd approach: asked for UN authorization, for an Arab League authorization, and obtained all sorts of resolutions to tie our hands. It was ‘legal’ to bomb Gaddafi’s forces while they advance but ‘illegal’ to bomb them while they retreat. It was ‘legal’ to kill Gaddafi by accident but ‘illegal’ to kill him deliberately. As a result, it took many months for the whole might of the Western world to defeat a petty backward dictatorship.

In the documents of the Gulf War, we can see the detailed mechanism of a cumbersome and unfriendly coalition practically sabotaging the war; and even more importantly, we find the explanation why America agrees to that. Bush and Baker had a peculiar idea which they called ‘the new world order,’ introduced and supported by UN as a ‘prototype of the world government,’ to use Gorbachev’s expression. It was agreed between the world leaders at the time that America must no longer be a ‘global policeman,’ and the role should be gradually taken over by a UN-based world government.

Of course, you cannot fight a real war on the basis of such utopian ideas. On the one hand, Saddam fully exploited its weakness by making a very logical argument: well, if UN resolutions are now taken seriously and implemented by force, why do you start from me and not, for example, from Israel? After all, there is plenty of UN resolutions against Israel. On the other hand, the wide coalition opposing him inevitably included a powerful anti-American and anti-Israeli wing, led by Gorbachev, Mitterrand and Mubarak. They joined the coalition for real politik reasons, but between themselves, they openly said they did it only to ‘restrain the Americans.’ That is why the US had to agree to all those secret talks with Saddam, promise all these concessions at the expense of Israel, and eventually had to turn back from the gates of Baghdad and not overthrow Saddam. Even after Bush himself appealed to the Iraqis to revolt against Saddam and they did so, he abandoned them and left them at Saddam’s mercy just because a further military intervention would upset the Soviets and the French. The massacre that followed was the first bloody fruit of the ‘new world order’ utopia.

FP: Do you think similar things are happening with Libya now?

Stroilov: Of course. After reading these documents, you can see these events are simply inevitable in a global coalition of this kind. With all these limitations, it is lucky that NATO has won that war at all; but I bet we still don’t know the full price of that victory. The secret deals of the Gulf War are still haunting us twenty years later. It is because of these secret deals that Israel is now besieged and the whole region is still overwhelmed by wars and tyrannies. No doubt, there were similar secret deals in every ‘new world order’ war, in every global coalition constructed since then; and those deals will have equally serious consequences.

FP: How does Gorbachev look in these documents?

Stroilov: Whatever may be said about Gorbachev’s other policies, domestic and foreign, he was a typical Soviet leader as far as the Middle East was concerned. He did not change anything. The Soviet support to all sorts of terrorists continued as usual, and it is all well documented. Assad remained Moscow’s main ally in the region, and the transcripts of their meetings also suggest that Gorbachev and Assad-senior were personal friends. Gorbachev even backed the idea of a united socialist Arab superstate under Assad’s leadership. Gorby still saw Israel and the US as the main enemies in the Middle East. Thus, the transcript of Gorbachev’s talks with Arafat in 1988 record them as discussing a detailed plan of the first Intifada, which was certainly orchestrated from Moscow.

Take another example: in the run-up to the military operation against Saddam, two of Gorbachev’s advisors wrote a memo suggesting sharing information about Iraqi’s chemical and bacteriological weapons with the Americans. Gorbachev refused to do that. A month later, Margaret Thatcher​ raised the subject of Saddam’s WMDs in a conversation with Gorbachev. Not only did he decline to tell her anything, he actually told her a lie: he confirmed Saddam had chemical weapons but said he had no knowledge about the existence of Iraqi bacteriological weapons. At that time, this lie could have very serious consequences. Nobody knew whether Saddam would use his WMDs in the upcoming war. Imagine what would happen if the West believed Gorbachev, assumed he had no bacteriological weapons, and then Saddam had suddenly used them.

FP: Tell us about Ted Kennedy and his role in the Gulf War.

Stroilov: Ted Kennedy supplied Moscow with confidential sensitive information at least since the late 1970s, sometimes through KGB channels. This is all very well documented in my book. In the run-up to the US military operation against Iraq, in November 1990, the Bush Administration was still telling the Soviets they were prepared to resolve the conflict peacefully if Saddam withdraws from Kuwait. In that situation, Kennedy secretly sent his chief of staff, Larry Horowitz, to Moscow, to tell the Soviets this was not true: ‘a final decision to solve the crisis in the Gulf by military means has already been taken in the White House. The deadline is spring.’

There are a number of similar episodes with Kennedy and Larry Horowitz, many of them unrelated to Iraq or Middle East.

FP: With hindsight, what was the main mistake of the West in dealing with the 1990-1991 Gulf crisis?

Stroilov: Playing ‘new world order’ is a serious business, involving not only the world’s oil supplies, but millions of human lives.

FP: What should have we done instead?

Stroilov: They should have done what they successfully did 12 years later, in a much more difficult situation: forget about the UN and ‘world community’, fight that war as a normal war, and win it. Be a global policeman. Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait was not a very difficult problem in itself. In military terms it was fairly easy to drive him out. But it was also an opportunity which the West missed. We should have removed Saddam from power in 1991, and unlike 12 years later, the Western troops would then be greeted with flowers as liberators. There was a nationwide uprising again Saddam, provoked by Bush’s own appeal to the Iraqi people; and then the West allowed to drown it in blood. No wonder the West became not very popular with the Iraqis after such a betrayal. This is not to mention the fact that Saddam’s regime was given another 12 years to prepare for a full-scale guerrilla war.

We should have supported the uprising, removed Saddam, and established democracy in Iraq, which would have been much easier at that point. Furthermore, we should have made efforts to help that democratic revolution spread into other countries of the region. Again, it is happening now anyway, but in a much more difficult situation, where there is a very real danger that the revolution would be hijacked by Islamic Socialists or Socialist Islamists of some kind. In 1991, in the atmosphere of the end of the Cold War​, the mood of the people would be much more pro-Western and pro-democratic, while the regimes would not have another twenty years to prepare their defences.

Unfortunately, the West not only missed that opportunity, but created all sorts of complications by pursuing its ‘new world order’ chimera. Worse still, we have not learnt anything even now, and repeat all the same mistakes in the present Middle East crisis. The war in Libya is the brightest example of this.

FP: Pavel Stroilov, thanks for joining Frontpage Interview.

Jamie Glazov

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/08/31/the-secret-deals-of-the-gulf-war/

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Islam Is Not Part of Our Civilization

by Bill Warner

Obama said at the latest White House Iftar dinner(A meal served at the end of the day during Ramadan, to break the day's fast):

Like so many faiths, Islam has always been part of our American family, and Muslim Americans have long contributed to the strength and character of our country, in all walks of life.

These words have no basis in fact. Islam is not part of our civilization because its foundational principles are opposite to ours. Our civilization is built on the foundation of critical thought (how we think) and the Golden Rule (ethics). Islam is built on submission (authoritative thought) and ethical dualism.

Let’s compare the principles, of these different thought systems, starting with authoritative thought and critical thought. Critical thought (also: analytic thought, scientific thought) is the necessary reasoning or intellectual basis for our culture of democracy. Critical thought is objective--no matter who does the work, they get the same results. It is fact-based, uses cause and effect, and is intellectual, not emotional. Critical thought’s tie into morals is that you don’t lie or cheat about data.

Let’s look at some authoritative reasoning. Authoritative reasoning is based on expert opinion and asserts it truth by power. It is so, because the Establishment says it is so.

The Meccan Koran, the early Koran, has one new idea—Mohammed is the prophet of Allah. (The ideas found in the Koran are derivative.) The proof of Mohammed’s prophecy is repetition of “Mohammed is the prophet” and what happens if you don’t accept that. The reasoning is circular—Mohammed is the prophet of Allah, because Allah says so. (Actually, the archangel of Allah says so.) How do we know what Allah says? Mohammed tells us what Allah says.

The Koran of Medina (the later Koran) contains one new idea—if you don’t believe that Mohammed is the prophet of Allah, then you can be murdered in jihad. If you are not persuaded, then you can be eliminated. Now that is authoritative reasoning.

More on authoritative reasoning can be found in the Sharia. The Sharia (Muslim or Islamic law, both civil and criminal justice as well as regulating individual conduct both personal and moral) says that apostasy (leaving Islam) is a capital offense. And what entails apostasy?

• To be sarcastic about Allah or any verse in the Koran
• To deny the consensus of the Islamic scholars
• To deny that Islam is to be the world’s only religion
• To be sarcastic about Sharia

And people say that Islam just needs to be reformed. Good luck on dealing the authoritative rules of thought and reform. It is not that you are wrong, you are dead wrong. Want more examples of authoritative thought? Try Salman Rushdie, the author of the Satanic Verses, a novel. Islam’s reaction to the novel was a death fatwa. When the Mohammed cartoons were published, people died in riots.

So far in America what happens if you differ with Establishment thought about Islam, you are called names, such as bigot or hater, and insulted as a punishment. However, the Establishment keeps flirting with the expanded versions of hate speech being criminalized. Hate speech is speech that the Establishment doesn’t like.

Critical thought does not deal with punishment, just cause and effect along with Aristotelian logic. If you lose an argument under the rules of critical thought, you have had a learning experience, not a life threatening experience. Nor do insults and threats play a part in critical thought.

Now to ethics, the Golden Rule is that we should treat ALL others as we would be treated. This is a unitary ethic, one rule for all peoples. Islam does not see it that way. Islam has one set of ethics for the Muslim and another set for the Kafir. The Hadith and the Koran are very clear that a Muslim is a brother to all other Muslims. A Muslim is a brother to any Muslim before he is the brother to any member of his Kafir blood family.

Look at Mohammed’s ethics. Mohammed is the divine human prototype, the perfect man, as it says in 91 Koranic verses. How did Mohammed treat his neighbor? In Medina he gave neighboring tribes the chance to become to submit to Islam. If they did not, he attacked them. Submit or die--no Golden Rule.

Mohammed repeatedly said that Muslims should lie to Kafirs (a person who is not a Muslim)if it would advance Islam—pure ethical dualism. Here we have the hadith:

Bukhari 5,59,369 Mohammed asked, “Who will kill Ka’b, the enemy of Allah and Mohammed?”
Bin Maslama rose and responded, “O Mohammed! Would it please you if I killed him?”
Mohammed answered, “Yes.”
Bin Maslama then said, “Give me permission to deceive him with lies so that my plot will succeed.”
Mohammed replied, “You may speak falsely to him.”…

Our Constitution’s Bill of Rights is an expansion on the Golden Rule. We eliminated slavery based on the Golden Rule. Do we live up to the Golden Rule on every occasion? No, but that does not diminish its guidance, because we can use the Golden Rule to criticize those that fail to meet it.

To sum it all up: our civilization is based on the principles of the Golden Rule and critical thought. Islam is based on dualistic ethics and authoritative thought. There is no compromise between the opposites of the Golden Rule and dualistic ethics. There is no half-way between authoritative thought and critical thought. Islam’s principle of submission means that only active resistance can let us survive.

We have a 1400 year history of the interaction between Islam and Kafir nations. The data matches the theory. Centuries after Islam enters the culture the host culture is annihilated--see Turkey. There is no compatibility between Islam and us. Islam is not now, nor can it ever be, a part of our civilization. It is the final goal of Islam to annihilate all Kafir civilizations. Its first stage of--we are just like you, only different—should be seen for what it is. No amount of preaching by apologists can change Islam’s political doctrine and history.

Bill Warner, Director, Center for the Study of Political Islam

Source: http://www.politicalislam.com/blog/islam-is-not-part-of-our-civilization/

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Terrorist Prison Blues

by IPT News

Life in prison is difficult, especially for 20 Muslim inmates at a high security unit housing 30 people in total. They miss their families, sometimes squabble among themselves and struggle to maintain hope during long days.

That's the message offered in an article published this month by the Muslim Link, an online and print bi-weekly newspaper which serves the Washington and Baltimore metropolitan areas.

Take 48-year-old Adham Hassoun, who "can joke 24 hours a day. But behind this humor hides a great concern for the Muslim Ummah," the article says. He also "is ready to help whenever called upon, and will leave behind everything which is important to him to do that, unless he is watching Stargate on the SciFi Channel."

Hassoun also is "a co-defendant of the well-known Jose Padilla, and is serving a 15 year sentence on terrorism charges," the article says. But Hassoun's conviction stems from support for al-Qaida, and his 2007 convictions for conspiracy to commit murder abroad and provide material support to terrorists included "actively recruiting mujahideen fighters and raising funds for violent jihad." In prison, though, he's good at dispute resolution, "for he holds in his heart immense mercy for his brothers."

The article, purportedly written by an inmate of the Communications Management Unit (CMU) in Terre Haute, Ind., emphasizes the prisoners' positive characteristics, concluding with a mailing address for people to write letters of support. "It is because of the sacrifices of these few that many still live in peace," it says. "It is by the virtue of their sincerity, supplication and prayer that insha Allah Islam will be victorious. Indeed it is by the virtue of their sacrifices that they are honored as the few among the few in the CMU."

According to the group that established the newspaper,"[s]everal elected officials read the Muslim Link to keep abreast of issues important to their constituents, while some governmental agencies partner with the Muslim Link to ensure their public announcements and services reach all segments of society." In addition, the Muslim Link boasts that it is "the premier source for information about the Muslim community in MD, DC and VA," and the paper won media awards for its reporting.

Among the prisoners featured in the article:

• Mohamad Hammoud is described as "an inspiration of hope" for maintaining an active schedule and inspiring the others not to give up. Hammoud, a Lebanese native, was convicted in 2002 for providing support to Hizballah through a cigarette smuggling ring based in North Carolina. Evidence in the trial revealed links between Hammoud and Hizballah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah. Hammoud's original 155 year sentence was reduced in January to 30 years.
• Kevin James is "known throughout the California state prison system for his dedication to Islam," the article says, noting his 10-year sentence for terrorism charges. But that dedication may have led to his incarceration. In 2007, James pled guilty to conspiring "to levy a war against the Government of the United States through terrorism." While an inmate in California state prison, James created a terror cell "to target for violent attack any enemies of Islam or 'infidels,' including the United States Government and Jewish and non-Jewish supporters of Israel."
• Mukhtar Al-Bakri was sentenced to 10 years in prison in December 2003 on charges of providing material support to al Qaida. He traveled to an al-Qaida training camp near Kandahar, Afghanistan, where he received weapons, explosives, training and provided guard duty. Al-Bakri also met Osama Bin Laden while at the al Farooq camp. The Muslim Link story describes Al-Bakri as "the champion of the workout galaxy. Nobody in his weight class is stronger than him in the CMU."
• Ali Asad Chandia was a member of the "Virginia Paintball Jihad" network, and was charged in 2005 and found guilty the next year of providing material support to the terrorist organization Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT). The Virginia Paintball Jihad Network was described by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2003 as the largest American-based terror cell connected to LeT. By the end of the investigation more than a dozen conspirators were implicated. The story says, "He [Chandia] gets along with everyone, avoids disputes, and spends much of the time in his cell."
• Shukri Abu Baker, former head of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), is serving 55 years in prison. His "crime was to feed the poor, build schools and hospitals, and provide scholarship and relief to the people in war torn countries across the globe," the story says. In fact, jurors found that HLF illegally routed more than $12 million to Hamas through a series of charities controlled by the terrorist group. HLF was the financial arm of a Muslim Brotherhood conspiracy in the United States called the Palestine Committee, which sought to serve Hamas with "media, money and men."

There's nothing wrong with providing moral support to prison inmates, despite whatever crimes they may have committed. But the article published by the Muslim Link minimizes their wrongdoing, or casts them as victims incarcerated for merely trying to help needy people. Instead, the article says, "readers will get a firsthand account of who these prisoners are and, since the day they were snatched from their loved ones, how they were able to maintain their sanity. Perhaps, if the world gets to know these prisoners and prays for them, Allah will bring an immediate end to their ordeal."

IPT News

Source: http://www.investigativeproject.org/3134/terrorist-prison-blues

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Roll Back the Muslim Brotherhood

by Frank Gaffney

In recent weeks, we have been put on notice repeatedly: Absent a fundamental course correction, America will go the way of Europe and others before it, succumbing to an insidious totalitarian doctrine known as shariah whose purpose, in the words of its prime practitioners - the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) - is to "destroy Western civilization from within."

Hurricanes, earthquakes and fiscal crises are preoccupations of the moment. Unless we heed the warnings being issued by three of our most brilliant strategic thinkers, Mark Steyn, Bat Ye'or and Andrew McCarthy, however, we risk an irreversible national calamity.

Each of these authors has published in the past month powerful alarums about the steady erosion of the West's societies, governing institutions and freedoms at the hands of shariah's adherents and their enablers on the left.

Mark Steyn released After America: Get Ready for Armaggedon, a much-awaited sequel to his best-seller, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. Bat Ye'or - who popularized the terms "Eurabia" and "dhimmitude" to describe what is befalling the Europeans at the hands of those seeking, in accordance with shariah, to subjugate all non-believers as enslaved "dhimmis" - published Europe, Globalization and the Coming Universal Caliphate. And just last week, Andy McCarthy, author of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, wrote a brilliant column for National Review Online, "Losing Malmo, and Brussels and Rome and Amsterdam."

A consistent theme of these three important works is that we run grave risks in taking for granted the permanence of a world order dominated by liberal democracies and led by the United States. Yet, we are doing so even as evidence accumulates that Islamists, led by the Muslim Brotherhood and the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), are making steady strides towards their goal of establishing a new, transnational order. They would have it take the form of a global "Caliphate," in which the world will be ruled in accordance with shariah.

Sounds crazy? It may be. But if history teaches us anything, it is that determined, disciplined and ruthless people can do incalculable harm to others in the pursuit of crazy, supremacist goals.

What is truly crazy, though, is the role being played today by "progressive" elites that doing today what they have done in the face of totalitarians of the past: facilitating the latters' frightening ambitions. I have had the privilege of interviewing each of these three authors over the past few weeks on Secure Freedom Radio and the message could not be more clear: We persist in such behavior at our extreme peril.

Of particular concern is the corrosive effect of the phenomenon known by such names as "transnationalism," "multiculturalism" and "globalization." For many in Europe, it has become effectively a new religion, contributing to the precipitous decline of Christianity. To paraphrase Karl Marx, this post-modern, post-national program provides a kind of opiate that numbs the masses to the dangers of acquiescing to the Muslim Brotherhood's "civilization jihad."

European nations are now increasingly reaping the whirlwind thus sown. Of particular concern are what are known as "no-go zones" - areas where the authorities dare not enter. These are becoming increasingly common across the continent and in the U.K. as Muslim-populated enclaves apply shariah law and drive out those who do not conform. These zones are the direct result of accommodations made in the name of "diversity" and "sensitivity" to Islamic religio-cultural norms, read the supremacist doctrine of shariah. European leaders are beginning publicly to renounce such practices but their governments have yet to act accordingly.

Make no mistake. If we fail to heed the warnings of Mark Steyn, Bat Ye'or and Andy McCarthy, a similar fate awaits us. Already, the U.S. government has been engaged in serial acts of appeasement of Muslim Brotherhood fronts and other shariah-adherents. These include: a Director of National Intelligence who admits to relying on such groups to provide "advice, counsel and wisdom" about "extremists" in their midst; White House direction that all government-funded counter-terrorism training will be conducted in accordance with direction of a Department of Homeland Security deeply compromised by the Brotherhood; a new Obama "strategy" for local law enforcement that requires "partnering" with what amount to enemy front organizations; and a Hillary Clinton-engineered initiative with the OIC aimed at curbing expression that can have negative "consequences" for Muslims.

In the face of such folly, Members of Congress and private citizens are striving not merely to halt these and other examples of reckless official "engagement" with the Muslim Brotherhood; they are beginning to roll back the MB. With the leadership of two freshmen congressmen, Reps. John Duncan (R-SC) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ), the House of Representatives has adopted amendments aimed at denying any taxpayer funding to the Brotherhood. These and similar initiatives by citizens across the nation are being profiled at a new website sponsored by the Center for Security Policy: TheRollback.org. Their stories serve as a powerful inspiration and as impetuses for similar efforts by others.

It is past time for Americans to awaken to the danger posed by shariah and its adherents. We can no longer ignore the inroads made by these forces into Western civilization's European flank. And we certainly cannot delude ourselves into believing that our homeland will remain immune from their predations as long as we persist in the same sorts of appeasement that havebrought our friends and allies across the Atlantic to their present, parlous state.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy, a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the nationally syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio, heard in Washington weeknights at 9:00 p.m. on WRC 1260 AM.

Source: http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/p18806.xml

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

The Perils of a Remilitarized Sinai

by Caroline Glick

Will the Egyptian military be permitted to remilitarize the Sinai? Since Palestinian and Egyptian terrorists crossed into Israel from Sinai on August 18 and murdered eight Israelis this has been a central issue under discussion at senior echelons of the government and the IDF.

Under the terms of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty, Egypt is prohibited from deploying military forces in the Sinai. Israel must approve any Egyptian military mobilization in the area. Today, Egypt is asking to permanently deploy its forces in the Sinai. Such a move requires an amendment to the treaty.

Supported by the Obama administration, the Egyptians say they need to deploy forces in the Sinai in order to rein in and defeat the jihadist forces now running rampant throughout the peninsula. Aside from attacking Israel, these jihadists have openly challenged Egyptian governmental control over the territory.

So far the Israeli government has given conflicting responses to the Egyptian request. Defense Minister Ehud Barak told The Economist last week that he supports the deployment of Egyptian forces. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Sunday that he would consider such deployment but that Israel should not rush into amending the peace treaty with Egypt.

Saturday Barak tempered his earlier statement, claiming that no decision had been made about Egyptian deployment in the Sinai.

The government's confused statements about Egyptian troop deployments indicate that at a minimum, the government is unsure of the best course of action. This uncertainty owes in large part to confusion about Egypt's intentions.

Egypt's military leaders do have an interest in preventing jihadist attacks on Egyptian installations and other interests in the Sinai. But does that interest translate into an interest in defending Israeli installations and interests? If the interests overlap, then deploying Egyptian forces may be a reasonable option. If Egypt's military leaders view these interests as mutually exclusive, then Israel has no interest in such a deployment.

ISRAEL'S CONFUSION over Egypt's strategic direction and interests echoes its only recently abated confusion over Turkey's strategic direction in the aftermath of the Islamist AKP Party's rise to power in 2002. Following the US's lead, despite Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's hostile rhetoric regarding Israel, Israel continued to believe that he and his government were interested in maintaining Turkey's strategic alliance with Israel. That belief began unraveling with Erdogan's embrace of Hamas in January 2006 and his willingness to turn a blind eye to Iranian use of Turkish territory to transfer arms to Hezbollah during the war in July and August 2006.

Still, due to US support for Erdogan, Israel continued to sell Turkey arms until last year. Israel only recognized that Turkey had transformed itself from a strategic ally into a strategic enemy after Erdogan sponsored the terror flotilla to Gaza in May 2010.

As was the case with Turkey under Erdogan, Israel's confusion over Egypt's intentions has nothing to do with the military rulers' behavior. Like Erdogan, the Egyptian junta isn't sending Israel mixed signals.

Former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was never a strategic ally to Israel the way that Turkey was before Erdogan. However, Mubarak believed that maintaining a quiet border with Israel, combating the Muslim Brotherhood and keeping Hamas at arm's length advanced his interests. Mubarak's successors in the junta do not perceive their interests in the same way.

To the contrary, since they overthrew Mubarak in February, the generals ruling Egypt have made clear that their interest in cultivating ties with Israel's enemies - from Iran to the Muslim Brotherhood - far outweighs their interest in maintaining a cooperative relationship with Israel.

From permitting Iranian naval ships to traverse the Suez Canal for the first time in 30 years to opening the border with Hamas-ruled Gaza to its openly hostile and conspiratorial reaction to the August 18 terrorist attack on Israel from the Sinai, there can be little doubt about the trajectory of Egypt's relations with Israel.

BUT JUST as was the case with Turkey - and again, largely because of American pressure - Israel's leaders are wary of accepting that the strategic landscape of our relationship with Egypt has changed radically and that the rules that applied under Mubarak no longer apply.

After Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in August 2005, terrorists in Gaza and Sinai took down the border. Gaza was immediately flooded with sophisticated armaments. Then-prime minister Ariel Sharon made a deal with Mubarak to deploy Egyptian forces to the Sinai to rebuild the border and man the crossing point at Rafah. While there were problems with the agreement, given the fact that Mubarak shared Israel's interests, the move was not unjustified.

Today this is not the case. The junta wants to permanently deploy forces to the Sinai and consequently is pushing to amend the treaty. The generals' request comes against the backdrop of populist calls from across Egypt's political spectrum demanding the cancellation of the peace treaty.

If Israel agrees to renegotiate the treaty, it will lower the political cost of a subsequent Egyptian abrogation of the agreement. This is the case because Israel itself will be on record acknowledging that the treaty does not meet its current needs.

Beyond that, there is the nature of the Egyptian military itself, which was exposed during and in the aftermath of the August 18 attack. At a minimum, the Egyptian and Palestinian terrorists who attacked Israel that day did so with no interference from Egyptian forces deployed along the border.

The fact that they shot into Israel from Egyptian military positions indicates that the Egyptian forces on the ground did not simply turn a blind eye to what was happening. Rather, it is reasonable to assume that they lent a helping hand to the terror operatives.

Furthermore, the hostile response of the Egyptian military to Israel's defensive operations to end the terror attack indicates that at a minimum, the higher echelons of the military are not sympathetically disposed towards Israel's right to defend its citizens.

Both the behavior of the forces on the ground and of their commanders in Cairo indicates that if the Egyptian military is permitted to deploy its forces to the Sinai, those forces will not serve any helpful purpose for Israel.

THE MILITARY'S demonstrated antagonism toward Israel, the uncertainty of Egypt's political future, the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the hatred of Israel shared by all Egyptian political factions all indicate that Israel will live to regret it if it permits the Egyptian military to mobilize in the Sinai. Not only will Egyptian soldiers not prevent terrorist attacks against Israel, their presence along the border will increase the prospect of war with Egypt.

Egypt's current inaction against anti-Israel terror operatives in the Sinai has already caused the IDF to increase its force levels along the border. If Egypt is permitted to mass its forces in the Sinai, then the IDF will be forced to respond by steeply increasing the size of its force mobilized along the border. And the proximity of the two armies could easily be exploited by Egyptian populist forces to foment war.

In his interview with The Economist, Barak claimed bizarrely, "Sometimes you have to subordinate strategic considerations to tactical needs." It is hard to think of any case in human history when a nation's interests were served by winning a battle and losing a war. And the stakes with Egypt are too high for Israel's leaders to be engaging in such confused and imbecilic thinking.

The dangers emanating from post-Mubarak Egypt are enormous and are only likely to grow. Israel cannot allow its desire for things to be different to cloud its judgment. It must accept the situation for what it is and act accordingly.

Caroline Glick

Source: http://www.carolineglick.com/e/2011/08/the-perils-of-a-remilitarized.php

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.