Saudi Blogger Raif Badawi: 'I Say What I think' - Stephen Schwartz and Irfan Al-Alawi

by Stephen Schwartz and Irfan Al-Alawi

All restrictions on freedom of religious belief are abominable, but they are particularly despicable when they are trumped up as a pretext to suppress independent debate - as happened to Badawi.

^{Originally published under the title, "The Writings of Saudi Blogger Raif Badawi."}

Saudi Arabia's clerical establishment hopes that the threat of ritualized public torture will keep dissidents like Raif Badawi in line.

In 2012, Raif Badawi, a blogger in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) who is now 31, was arrested in his native land and charged with offenses ranging from parental disobedience to cyber-crime and apostasy from Islam. Badawi had written in Arab media and established a website, "Free Saudi Liberals." When he was jailed, the site was closed by the Saudi regime.

His detention then was not the first action by the KSA against Badawi. As noted by Human Rights Watch, he was held for one day in 2008 after launching the "Free Saudi Liberals" site, and, in 2009, was banned from travelling abroad, with a freeze of his financial assets.

After a trial in 2013, Badawi was sentenced to seven years in prison and 600 lashes. But the outcome of an appeal, in 2014, was worse: his punishment was increased to 10 years in jail and 1,000 strokes of a whip, with a fine of 1 million Saudi riyals (about $267,000).

Apostasy from Islam is a capital crime in the KSA, and BBC News reported in 2013 that the apostasy allegation against Badawi had been rejected by a higher court. Evidence for the claim was ridiculously flimsy, including such assertions as that he pressed a "Like" button on a Facebook page for Arab Christians.

Raif Badawi is not a critic of Islam, although he favors a secular state.

All restrictions on freedom of religious belief are abominable, but they are particularly despicable when they are trumped up as a pretext to suppress independent debate - as happened to Badawi. On January 9, 2015, a first session of 50 blows was imposed on Badawi at a mosque in Jidda, the KSA's commercial capital and seaport.

The infliction of 1,000 lashes was to be extended over 20 weeks, with 50 applied weekly. Since the beginning round of his caning, continuation of Badawi's beating has been suspended repeatedly, originally on medical grounds. The deeper reason for the continued postponement is, nevertheless, unclear. International protests have been extensive and may have played a role. But Badawi was dragged to be lashed this year when the health of the late Saudi King Abdullah was failing and his successor, Saudi King Salman, had yet to assume power.

Elements in the Saudi-Wahhabi clerical apparatus may have acted recklessly to make an example of Badawi, but were then halted in carrying out their scheme. On June 7, 2015, the Saudi Supreme Court upheld the judgment against Badawi, but, again, no further whipping has taken place.

While it is difficult to predict the outcome of Badawi's case, some of his writings will soon be available to English-speaking readers. A slender volume titled 1000 Lashes: Because I Say What I Think is scheduled for release in July in Canada, in August in the U.S., and in October in the U.K., with the support of Amnesty International.

The collection has already appeared in French as 1000 coups de fouet: parce que j'ai osé parler librement. The personality of Badawi and his message appear in its pages to be very different from what many Westerners might expect.

A collection of Badawi's English-translated writings will be published next month.

Some of the articles therein were posted on the pan-Arab news portal Al-Jazeera, which is considered aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood (two dated April and May 2012, with two more undated) and six were published in the Saudi newspaper Al-Bilad (The Country).

Raif Badawi is not, as expressed in his own words, a critic or enemy of Islam, although he favors a secular state. Indeed, it may be argued that he seeks to save Islam from the Saudi-Wahhabi clerics and other fanatics. In one text from 2011 that provoked the apparent rage of the Wahhabis, titled "Astronomy According to Sharia," Badawi criticized Wahhabi doctrinaires who condemn as incorrect and in violation of the Qur'an the Renaissance understanding of the solar system (which recognizes that the planets circle the sun). But this is an old debate that was settled presumably in 1985 when Prince Sultan, son of the now-ruling King Salman, traveled in a U.S. space shuttle and observed the relations of the heavenly bodies.

In another, unfortunately prescient article, titled "Dreams of a Caliphate," from 2012, Badawi linked Saudi Islamists who preached a revived caliphate - like that of the so-called "Islamic State" - with the habit of Muslim caliphs from the eighth to the tenth centuries C.E. in killing their opponents for alleged apostasy, as a cover for politicized Islam. This also is hardly a new criticism in Islamic historical thought.

In the same article, Badawi, surprisingly, rejected statements that another incarcerated blogger, Hamza Kashgari, a Uyghur originating in Central Asia, but whose family moved to the KSA, is a liberal. Kashgari was held from 2011 to 2013 for a series of tweets addressed to Prophet Muhammad. According to Badawi, Kashgari is closer to the Muslim Brotherhood and has never expressed liberal views.

Badawi is a non-conformist whose opinions cannot be classified. In a 2010 text on the anniversary of the atrocities of September 11, 2011, he denounced the project for construction of a mosque at the site of the World Trade Center in New York, which he described as "a flagrant provocation against the collective memory of Americans in particular and humanity in general."

On the topic of Israel and the Palestinians, in another article dating from 2010, he decried the Israeli occupation of Arab lands but also said he would fight against Hamas. He wrote, "I am not for the occupation of an Arab country by Israel, but, at the same time, I do not want to replace Israel with an Islamic nation installed on its ruins, and of which the only aim would be to promote a culture of death and ignorance." Sadly, however, Badawi's short book concludes with praise for the ill-fated "Arab Spring" revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, and Libya.

Violations of religious and intellectual liberty are hardly rare in the world, as seen by radical Islamist violence, from the global assault on Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses beginning in 1989 to the homicidal raid on the French satirical journal Charlie Hebdo in January of this year. Cultural vandalism by religious extremists has been displayed to the world in the KSA and in the territories controlled by the spurious "Islamic State" in the Middle East and "Ansar Dine" in North Africa.

Such acts against personal conscience are not limited to Muslim lands. An Indian court suit forced the withdrawal of a scholarly work on that country's history, The Hindus, by Wendy Doniger, from the Penguin India publisher's list in 2014. The military regime in Burma, a/k/a Myanmar, allows anti-Muslim agitation that has driven thousands of Rohingya Muslims to flee the country by sea, in ramshackle boats. Russia, reviving its nationalist ideology, refuses to recognize the legal status of the Roman Catholic church.

But the KSA stands alone in banning public observances by any religion other than Islam and harassing metaphysical Sufis and Shia Muslims. Muslims around the world are currently observing the holy fasting month of Ramadan, during which it is customary for Islamic rulers to proclaim an amnesty for prisoners. This year's Ramadan ends on Eid Al-Fitr, 16-17th July by the Western calendar. Saudi King Salman would improve the image of the KSA if he orders the release of Raif Badawi as an act of Ramadan mercy.

Stephen Schwartz, a fellow at the Middle East Forum, is executive director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism in Washington, DC. Irfan Al-Alawi is executive director of the London-based Islamic Heritage Research Foundation.

Source: http://www.meforum.org/5373/raif-badawi

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

MK Seeks to Name and Shame Foreign-Funded NGOs Inside Knesset - Ari Soffer

by Ari Soffer

MK Bezalel Smotrich says the public has the right to know which NGOs are funded by foreign governments to subvert Israeli policy.

MK Smotrich

Miriam Alster/Flash 90

 

Recent months have seen increased scrutiny in Israel of foreign-funded, left-wing NGOs and the role they play in subverting Israeli democracy, as well as in the global campaign to "delegitimize" and isolate the State of Israel internationally.

The issue was perhaps most graphically illustrated last month, when it was revealed that left-wing, European-funded Israeli NGOs provided a significant amount of the testimonies against Israel in the UN Human Rights Council's recent report on Operation Protective Edge. The revelation echoed a similar one made in the aftermath of the infamous Goldstone Report, which found that far-left Israeli NGOs - most of them supported by the radical New Israel Fund - provided the majority of testimonies against Israel.

Arutz Sheva also exposed how at least one European-funded NGO played a prominent role in the latest Gaza flotilla, which attempted to illegal break Israel's blockade of Gaza - in blatant contravention of both Israeli and international law.

The controversy has prompted, among other things, a revival of the so-called "NGO Bill" in the Knesset, which would place higher taxes on political NGOs receiving funds from foreign governments.

But MK Bezalel Smotrich (Jewish Home), says that legislators need to look a lot closer to home first. He notes that, scandalously, NGOs funded by foreign governments to oppose Israeli government policies can often be found operating with impunity inside the Knesset itself - with MKs often unaware of their hostile affiliations.

To tackle that issue, Smotrich recently proposed a bill which would require foreign-funded NGOs to be more transparent about the sources of their funding and the true nature of their activities. Apart from forcing them to fully disclose their foreign donations for public scrutiny, the bill will also essentially name and shame NGOs attempting to influence Israeli politicians on behalf of foreign governments.

According to the bill, if any such organizations’ representatives lobby members of the Knesset, they must wear a name tag identifying the foreign state or states which fund them, as well what their goals are.

Additionally, any advertisements that such organizations publicize through social media would similarly have to state which foreign government they are supported by. If the registrar has reasonable evidence that these provisions have not been met, the Attorney General would have the right to impose a fine of 29,000 NIS.

"The principle is simple," Smotrich told Arutz Sheva. "Anti-Israel NGOs are being funded by foreign governments and it is appropriate that the public know this."

"There are countries in the western world which strip citizenship from citizens who receive such funding from foreign states, (because) they see it as treason against the state," Smotrich added.

In contrast - despite fierce opposition from left-wing parties and the NGOs themselves - Smotrich notes that his bill is far less harsh, in that it does not seek to criminalize such organizations, but merely to hold them accountable to scrutiny by the public and public officials. 

"My bill does not seek to impose a punishment, but when a foreign state is operating from within Israeli civil society it is appropriate that at the very least there be an obligation to disclose the source of its money."

"We won't enable foreign government to harm the sovereignty of the State of Israel," he vowed.


Ari Soffer

Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/198009#.VaKPWPmzchQ

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

Trump Is Right About Illegals, Says Grieving Father - Matthew Vadum

by Matthew Vadum

Why it's time to take criminal aliens out of the shadows, shackle their hands and feet, and put them on airplanes.

A fiery black opponent of so-called sanctuary cities whose teenaged son was murdered in cold blood by an illegal alien gangster from Mexico is cheering on Donald Trump for demanding that the U.S. government enforce existing immigration laws.

“I felt happy for the first time,” Jamiel Shaw Sr. said in an interview with Fox News.
“When that happened, I felt good. I felt hope. This is the hope that Obama thought he was gonna get. That was false hope."

Shaw was referring to the explosively controversial remarks by the ultra-high profile Trump, an outspoken New York-based billionaire who is seeking the Republican Party's presidential nomination for 2016. Trump became the focus of water cooler and social media conversations across America and beyond when he spoke last month of the problems that illegal aliens from Mexico cause the host country they invade.

"When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending the best," Trump said at the launch of his presidential campaign. He continued:

They're not sending you, they're sending people that have lots of problems and they're bringing those problems. They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime. They're rapists and some, I assume, are good people, but I speak to border guards and they're telling us what we're getting.

Shaw said he hadn't planned on voting next year but he has changed his mind. Now he intends to cast his ballot for Trump.

“This is a beautiful thing," he continued, adding that seven years after his son was cut down, recent events mean, "if you’re trying to stop illegal immigration, everybody’s listening.”

If one particular illegal alien had been prevented from entering the U.S. or captured and deported, Shaw says his son would still be among the living.

“We call it getting killed by invisible people, because they aren’t supposed to be here,” he said.

Shaw is far from alone. Americans have been begging the federal government for years and years and years to get serious about immigration enforcement and border security. Their concerns about porous borders are even more urgent today as the U.S. battles Islamofascist terrorists hellbent on harming the country these totalitarian medieval barbarians call the Great Satan.

Sanctuary cities, or immigration enforcement no-go zones, defy federal law and shelter illegal aliens from Uncle Sam, providing a powerful incentive for even more illegal aliens to sneak across the border. (I looked at the issue of sanctuary cities and examined how leftist groups like the ACLU promoted this treasonous assault on America in a FrontPage article yesterday.)

The nonpartisan Center for Immigration Studies unveiled a map yesterday showing more than 200 sanctuary cities in 32 states and the District of Columbia. But Jessica Vaughan, CSI's director of policy studies, says there could be more than 300 sanctuary cities in the U.S.

"One could also argue than any jurisdiction that provides drivers licenses, or welfare benefits, or public housing, or municipal ID cards [to illegal aliens] is a sanctuary."

Whatever the total count may be, the list of sanctuary cities, which are overwhelmingly Democrat-controlled, is long and growing longer. A list compiled by an activist shows there are at least 30 in California alone including Oakland, San Bernardino, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego. Other major sanctuary cities across the country are Albuquerque, Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Miami, Minneapolis, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Providence, Salt Lake City, Seattle, and Washington D.C.

Although their friends on the Left vehemently deny it, what these traitor cities do is itself unlawful, according to Hans von Spakovsky. But they get away with it because President Obama is determined to dismantle America's immigration system in order to swamp the nation with desperately poor, barely educated, unskilled or low-skilled peasants from the Third World. It's part of his scheme to fundamentally transform America.

Sanctuary cities, the Heritage Foundation scholar writes, are

directly violating federal law ... Under Section 642 of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (8 U.S.C. §1373), it is a violation of federal law for any state or local government to “prohibit, or in any way restrict” law enforcement or other government officials from sending or receiving information from the federal government on the “citizenship or immigration status, lawful or unlawful, of any individual.”

Amazingly, federal racketeering charges have not been brought against organizers and agitators promoting sanctuary cities. If it could be proven that they have acted in concert around the country in a conspiracy to block the enforcement of federal law, some of these crime-loving advocates could end up bankrupt or in prison.

Returning to Jamiel Shaw Sr., this man's unexpected journey began in the early evening of Sunday, March 2, 2008, when his son Jamiel Shaw Jr., reportedly a clean-cut 17-year-old star high school athlete, was gunned down by a young illegal alien while walking home.

Shaw, the FoxNews.com article states,

has spent the seven years since his son was killed fighting so-called "sanctuary" policies in cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, where police refuse to work with federal authorities when they apprehend illegal aliens who, by law, should be deported. The crimes they subsequently commit -- including murder -- should never happen, Shaw said.

Shaw said the senseless killing last week of Kathryn Steinle on Pier 14 in San Francisco by a five-time deportee from Mexico made him think again of the "invisible people" phrase. Her murder coupled with Trump's comments appear to be changing the dynamic of the 2016 electoral contest by putting the long-simmering issue of sanctuary cities that unlawfully harbor illegal aliens back on the front burner.

Steinle was shot in the back for reasons unknown by Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, a 45-year-old illegal alien with a second grade education who reportedly has seven felony convictions. He promptly confessed to the murder on television and acknowledged he kept returning to San Francisco because he knew no pesky law enforcement personnel would bother him there.

This leftist utopia of San Francisco, whose officials regard laws that prevent foreigners from sauntering into America at will as unjust, previously released the man even though federal officials characterized him as an "enforcement priority" and filed an "immigration detainer" asking jailers to hold him until they could take custody of him.

As in the case of Steinle, the murder of Shaw's son took only a moment.

Police say two Latino males jumped out of a car in Arlington Heights, a neighborhood in Central Los Angeles, and demanded to know what gang Jamiel was a member of. A regular churchgoer who relatives said didn't belong to a gang, Jamiel had been talking to his girlfriend on his cellphone and didn't answer immediately. He was then shot in the head and back just three doors away from his residence.

“My son was shot in the head by an illegal alien gang banger while he lay on his back with his hands up," according to his father. "He still shot him through his hand into his head and killed him.”

At the time his mother, U.S. Army Sgt. Anita Shaw, was on her second tour of duty in Iraq.

"She's over there trying to protect us from guns and bombs, and then she has to hear that her son is dead over here," Mr. Shaw said. "I've got my own personal Iraq now."

Jamiel's distraught mother contacted his aunt, Althea Shaw, from Iraq.

"She called crying, saying, 'Tell me it's not my son,' " said the aunt. "She was so proud. She felt he had made it through the hard times. She still called him her baby, even though he was taller than her."

In November 2012 Jamiel's murderer, a Mexican national named Pedro Espinoza, who by this point was 23 years old, was sentenced to death for his crime by Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Ronald Rose. "This defendant executed the victim ... as he lay defenseless and incapacitated on the ground, without a weapon," the judge said.

Espinoza, a confirmed member of the notorious 18th Street Gang, slew Jamiel because he was carrying a red-colored Spider Man backpack, prosecutors said. Espinoza apparently misinterpreted the display of the red backpack, believing Jamiel was flying the colors of rival gang the Rolling 20s. (Although it has no direct bearing on the question of Espinoza's guilt, some local commentators insisted Jamiel was a gang member, as LA Weekly reported at the time.)

Even at his sentencing hearing, Espinoza was trying to game the system, just as he had done for years as an illegal alien gaming the immigration system and undoubtedly taking advantage of the near-boundless generosity of America through its taxpayer-supported social programs. His lawyers argued Jamiel really was a gang member, as if that might somehow mitigate the brutal slaying.

The judge wasn't sympathetic to Espinoza's motion for a new trial.

"It's not uncommon for attorneys to attempt to fall on their swords in order to save their client's life," Rose said to defense lawyer Csaba Palfi. "The defendant is a very intelligent individual, who through his refusal to cooperate with his own attorneys has tried to establish that his attorneys are incompetent."

Convinced that his son would be alive today if authorities had gotten around to deporting Espinoza, Shaw campaigned to get the proposed "Jamiel's Law" on the ballot for the March 2009 election but fell short. The measure would have repealed Special Order 40, a Los Angeles Police Department document that in 1979 established the City of the Angels as the first U.S. sanctuary city.

Special Order 40 forbids police officers from inquiring about the immigration status of individuals not suspected of crimes. The LAPD explained the rationale for the directive this way:

The Department is sensitive to the principle that effective law enforcement depends on a high degree of cooperation between the Department and the public ... [and] also recognizes that the Constitution of the United States guarantees equal protection to all persons within its jurisdiction. In view of those principles, it is the policy of the Los Angeles Police Department that undocumented alien status in itself is not a matter for police action.

Left-wingers helped to kill the Jamiel's Law plebiscite.

Professional race hustler Earl Ofari Hutchinson, a black commentator who was born in the sanctuary city of Chicago, is a well-known illegal alien sympathizer. He said at the time:

The Shaws are well-meaning, and public sympathy was with them. But race and politics have rammed their way into this debate with a vengeance. My fear is that this is pitting blacks against Latinos by people who know illegal immigration hits a sore nerve with African-Americans. And so they latched on to this and have made it part of their political agenda.

This is one of the more creative excuses devised to allow the LAPD's lawless assault on the nation's borders, language, culture, and its struggling, illegal alien-saturated labor markets to continue.

It needs to be said that Hutchinson, a prolific author of paranoid race-obsessed drivel, isn't exactly a rational, neutral observer. He adores kooky conspiracy theories and has served as a useful idiot for the former Soviet Union. For example, he publicly opposed the canonization of Pius XII, the wartime Roman Catholic pope, claiming the pontiff was a Nazi sympathizer complicit in the deaths of many Jews.

Along with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic hoax, the claim that Pius was a vicious Jew-hater is also a politically-motivated hoax. In reality Pius, like Oskar Schindler, went out of his way at great personal risk to shield Jews from the Nazis. The lie is popular on the Left and was reportedly invented by Soviet intelligence agents during the Cold War to discredit the Catholic Church. Moscow took aim at the Vatican because the Polish-born Pope John Paul II (now Saint John Paul the Great) vocally supported the trade union Solidarity which was leading the fight against Poland's then-Soviet-aligned Communist state.

Undeterred by Hutchinson and his ilk, Shaw has taken his fight to eradicate the scourge of sanctuary cities to Congress.

The illegal alien who "murdered my son only served four months of an eight month sentence for assault with a deadly weapon and battery on a police officer,” Shaw told a House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee panel in February.

“He was released from the county jail the day before he executed my son. Why was this violent illegal alien allowed to walk the streets of America instead of being deported?”

“Do black lives really matter or does it matter only if you are shot by a white person or a white policeman?” he said after referring to the "hands up, don't shoot" mantra that went viral after white police officer Darren Wilson shot black 18-year-old Michael Brown in self-defense after a physical altercation in Ferguson, Mo., last summer.

At the hearing Shaw embraced a legislative fix proposed by Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.).

“Until the FBI is allowed to track and report illegal alien crime, it is doubtful that the American people will understand how severe the problem of violent illegal alien crime is,” Shaw said. “What we really need is comprehensive immigration enforcement.”

Shaw would agree that it's time to take these "invisible people" out of the shadows, shackle their hands and feet, and put them on airplanes and busses bound for their various countries of origin.
¡Si se puede!

Oh yes we can.

Matthew Vadum

Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/259427/trump-right-about-illegals-says-grieving-father-matthew-vadum

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

Turkey Finds China Too Big To Bite - Burak Bekdil

by Burak Bekdil

• The self-declared "caliph" of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, put China at the top of his list of countries that violate Muslim rights.
• The owner of the (no longer) "Happy China" restaurant, almost in tears, told reporters: "We are Turkish. Our cook is an Uighur Turk ... We do not even sell alcohol here ... It seems I will close down the restaurant and leave." Also in Istanbul, a group of nationalist Turks attacked a group of Korean tourists, mistaking them for Chinese.
  

These days, it is quite dangerous for anyone with Far Eastern facial features to take a stroll on a Turkish street or to enjoy a plate of sushi. To angry Turks, every Far Easterner is a Chinese to attack. In protesting China's alleged ill treatment of Muslim Uighur Turks, angry Turkish Turks attacked a Chinese restaurant in Istanbul's Tophane district. Cihan Yavuz, the owner of the (no longer) "Happy China" restaurant, almost in tears, told reporters: "We are Turkish. Our cook is an Uighur Turk ... We do not even sell alcohol here ... It seems I will close down the restaurant and leave."

Istanbul's "Happy China" restaurant, after its window was smashed by an anti-Chinese mob.

In an even more painful incident, also in Istanbul, a group of nationalist Turks attacked a group of Korean tourists, mistaking them for Chinese. One can only cry at this primitive blend of ignorance and fanaticism. The staff at a popular Chinese restaurant in downtown Ankara mentioned they had requested police protection.

On the morning of July 5, this otherwise-very-quiet neighbourhood in Ankara was noisy with chants from the same angry protesters. Unluckily, the Chinese Embassy is located just about a hundred yards away. The protesters were waving Turkish and East Turkestan flags (identical except their colors: the Uighurs' flag features the same white crescent and star against a sky-blue background, as opposed to Turkey's red.) The group's entry into the street, where the embassy building is located, was blocked by the police. The group consisted of a strange assortment of Uighurs and nationalist and Islamist Turks, loudly vowing to take revenge on the "the red bastards of China." Occasionally, they would shout the cliché Islamist slogan "Allah-u aqbar" (In Arabic: "God is the greatest.") They asked the police to "surrender the consulate to them" probably so that they could lynch the personnel.

By early evening, the protesting group had grown into a few thousand. Most of the roads in the neighbourhood were blocked or shut. The chanting of slogans, featuring a rich menu of ultra-nationalist, racist and Islamist genres, continued on until late in the evening before the crowd dispersed, luckily, without a serious incident.

When the incidents of unrest erupted in China's Xinjiang province, where most Uighurs live -- and, reflecting their fight for independence, call the region "East Turkestan" -- an Islamist newspaper, Yeni Akit, ran the headline: "China, Israel's twin." The story claimed that this was "China's unnamed war against Islam and Muslims." It quoted Seyit Tumturk, vice president of the World Uighur Congress, as explaining what the problem was: "The Chinese organized a drinks festival in order to mock at Muslims' fasting [during Ramadan] and provoke them [into violence.]" In the Uighur man's thinking, non-Muslim Han Chinese should not consume alcohol because otherwise Muslim Uighurs would be provoked. And what happens when they are provoked?

According to a Turkish magazine, Aktuel, the killings in Xinjiang province were sparked after a car tried to escape a police checkpoint. Chinese police officers who reportedly followed the car were fatally stabbed by the occupants of the vehicle. Backup police officers then came and began shooting suspects on sight. In the ensuing violence, 28 Uighurs were reportedly killed.

The problem is deeper than occasional unrest and violence, based on the Uighurs' more than six-decade-long fight for an independent homeland, which often includes terrorist methods.
Chinese officials accuse Turkey of systematically allowing for a safe passage of militant Uighurs into the ranks of jihadist warriors in Syria and Iraq, and then letting them cross back into Turkey, where are secretly hosted and sent to China for terrorist activity there. "We suspect there are over 1,000 Uighurs subscribed into extremist groups [in Syria and Iraq]. They are potential security threats to China," one Chinese official said on condition of anonymity.

China has legitimate concerns. The self-declared "caliph" of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, in his declaration of the caliphate, put China at the top of his list of countries that violate Muslim rights. Al Baghdadi also circulated on Twitter maps purporting to highlight ISIS's expansion plans, which included substantial parts of Xinjiang, China's largest province.

Once again, nationalist and Islamist Turks are angry. But their government, compared to earlier anti-Israeli tirades over the Arab-Israeli dispute, is unusually quiet. In 2009, when similar incidents took place in Xinjiang, and around 100 Uighurs were killed in clashes, then-Prime Minister (now President), Recep Tayyip Erdogan, called their killing "an almost genocide." That angered China. In addition, the Turkish government called for a boycott of Chinese products.

Then, as political relations between Turkey and China soured, geopolitical realities came into the picture. Erdogan et al forcefully grasped that China was too big to bite. Meanwhile, the Turkish boycott over Chinese products showed the level of seriousness when Turks threaten economically to hit a foreign country. Turkey's imports from China nearly doubled from $12.6 billion in 2009 to $24.9 billion in 2014. What is the Turkish word for hypocrisy?

Turkey keeps on making new enemies -- in its region and far away. This is the result of bringing the popular sentiment on foreign matters into making public policy.

The Turks feel both hostile to, and threatened by, most of the world -- not surprising in a country where the national dictum seems to be, "A Turk's only friend is a Turk." The latest Turkish-Chinese drama is merely another example showing how Turkey's desire to play the savior of all Muslims and Islamists in foreign lands is sometimes embarrassingly disproportionate to its power.
 

 

Burak Bekdil, based in Ankara, is a Turkish columnist for the Hürriyet Daily and a Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

Source: http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/6121/turkey-china

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

Shameless Iran cheating while talking - Christopher Carson

by Christopher Carson

The regime has so far not been able to rebut claims that it is seeking to build nuclear weapons. Despite official avowals to the contrary, Iranian agencies are extremely interested in pursuing their illegal attempts to procure proliferation-relevant material in Germany. In particular, they are interested in items which can be used in the field of nuclear technology.

Iran seems to have perfected the art of shamelessness.  It's been widely reported that Iran has been blessed with a near straight flush of concessions from John Kerry and the other P5+1 powers in the Vienna talks supposedly designed to prevent the Islamic Republic from getting the bomb.  Now, "a senior Iranian official speaking on condition of anonymity" blamed the West for "shifting their positions and backtracking" on the April 2 "interim agreement" for having "red lines."  Iranian foreign secretary Javad Zarif agreed, claiming that the P5+1 has "excessive demands."  For his own part, Secretary Kerry praised the "constructive atmosphere" in Vienna, wherein he agreed to the third extension in three weeks to work out a deal – apparently, any deal at all – over inspections, sanctions, and answers to pending mysteries about Iran's suspicious activities.

Meanwhile, crowds of Iranians turned out in the streets this week for "Qods Day," otherwise called "Death to Israel day," maniacally shouting slogans about the Great Satan.

But the real shamelessness isn't even with Iran's past efforts at getting a nuclear weapon, but its current, ongoing efforts to get a nuclear weapon.

We probably won't hear much about this from the Obama administration, but Germany's domestic spying agency last week released its own intelligence estimate of the situation, called the 2014 Annual Report on the Protection of the Constitution: Facts and Trends.  As the Report summarized:

The regime has so far not been able to rebut claims that it is seeking to build nuclear weapons. Despite official avowals to the contrary, Iranian agencies are extremely interested in pursuing their illegal attempts to procure proliferation-relevant material in Germany. In particular, they are interested in items which can be used in the field of nuclear technology.

Germany noted Iran's willingness to pay a spectacular price for violating its promises and guarantees to the West about its nuclear program, describing it as "a quite dramatic collapse in the country's economic performance on account of sanctions imposed against its nuclear programme."  Not only is the government of Iran attempting to buy banned technology from German companies at an ever-increasing rate, Germany's intelligence agency verified, but the clear thrust of the attempts is always nuclear.

It is almost as if Iran is in a race to get the nuclear know-how, which perhaps explains its endless stalling in the Vienna negotiations.  The German BfV's report describes "increased" attempts in the last year by Iran to get useful and illegal technology not only for its missile programs, but also for missiles that specifically could carry nuclear weapons.  The report concluded that "Germany anticipates that Iran will continue its intensive procurement efforts in Germany (especially via covert structures)."


British foreign secretary Phillip Hammond describes the Vienna talks as "painfully slow," while   Iran continues to enrich uranium.  Perhaps the overriding mystery is why the Obama administration seems unable to see any connection between the two behaviors.  Iran is there to wear us down.

Christopher Carson, an attorney, is formerly with the American Enterprise Institute.

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/07/shameless_iran_cheating_while_talking.html

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

Obama's Killing the Left: Let's Help Him - Clarice Feldman

by Clarice Feldman

Barack Obama has done more to destroy liberal political power in the Congress and in the statehouses than any Democratic politician since the 1920s.

I have enormous respect for Victor Davis Hanson and read with great interest his account this week that the people are getting fed up with the liberal elites. 

Amid all this leftish high-fiving about court decisions and executive orders, we forget political and electoral reality. Barack Obama has done more to destroy liberal political power in the Congress and in the statehouses than any Democratic politician since the 1920s. His executive orders and neglect of enforcing existing law have green-lighted the executive power of the next Republican president in a way that Richard Nixon could hardly imagine. He has discredited the idea of a disinterested media to such a degree that its biased audits of the next future Republican administration will be seen as laughable.
Europe and the United States are seeing glimpses of the ultimate leftist trajectory -- a mixture of Greece and Detroit, de facto non-enforcement of the law, the Iranian nuke deal, a new McCarthyism, and race, class, and gender hatred -- and are becoming afraid and perhaps appalled. A growing number of people sense that 21st century leftist elites are not pragmatic working people, but a privileged sect that callously experiments with other people’s lives on the understanding that they are insulated and immune from the inevitable disasters that follow from their own ideas.
A great pushback is awakening here and abroad, but its timing, nature, and future remain mysterious.

And there is plenty of evidence to support his view. For example, 70% of the people who voted for Obama’s re-election now regret doing so, according to a YouGov poll, and the astounding response Donald Trump is getting suggests that it is not just name recognition and “nativism” in play.

Indeed, if you’re of a conspiratorial mindset you might conclude that Obama’s a deep undercover conservative who decided that making crystal clear the idiocies of the liberal elite would force people to finally reject them for good. Here are just a few of this week’s epic fails by Obama and his fellow travelers and supporters which evince a deliberate plan to disaffect us from the left.

Diversity Over Competence

From the outset of this administration it has been clear that “diversity” (which to Obama means advancing the careers of every one of his cronies at the expense of non-Hispanic whites and males) over competence has been a major goal. And each week we see how much that harms national needs and shatters national unity.

This week’s big domestic fail, amusingly spun as “data exfiltration” of the over 21 million personnel files at the OPM, reveals the utter incompetence of Obama’s select OPM (Office of Personnel Management) head, Katherine Achuleta, who finally was axed.

 It's hard to top the Office of Personnel Management when it comes to government incompetence. The agency -- which houses data on millions of current and former government workers, including security clearance files -- had been repeatedly warned that its network was vulnerable and that it was not in compliance with federal information security requirements. And it did next to nothing.
In May 2009, OPM's inspector general issued a "flash audit alert" noting its "security policies and procedures continue to remain severely outdated" and this was "compromising the confidentiality, integrity and/or availability of information."
By 2012, the IG was still complaining that OPM "does not have the ability to detect unauthorized devices connected to the OPM network."
Last year, it said OPM lacked "a comprehensive inventory of servers, databases and network devices," didn't do routine scans of its network for trouble and had substandard authentication requirements.
In the weeks since OPM revealed the latest attacks, it has managed to look even more incompetent. First, it downplayed the attack, then repeatedly revised the numbers upward, and even now laughably calls the attack an "incident" that involved "data exfiltration."

How significant was the incompetence?

Business Insider explains: 

 Contractors in Argentina and China were given "direct access to every row of data in every database" when they were hired by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to manage the personnel records of more than 14 million federal employees, a federal consultant told ArsTechnica.
The massive breach of OPM's database -- made public by the Obama administration this month -- prompted speculation over why the agency hadn't encrypted its systems, which contain the sensitive security clearance and background information for intelligence and military personnel.
Encryption, however, according to Ars, would not have helped in this case because administrators responsible for managing these records had root access to the system, Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Cybersecurity Dr. Andy Ozment testified yesterday at a two-hour hearing before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
And it turns out that a systems administrator responsible for handling the agency's records "was in Argentina and his co-worker was physically located in the [People's Republic of China]," a consultant who worked with an OPM-contracted company told ArsTechnica.
"Both had direct access to every row of data in every database: they were root."[snip] The OPM IT team frequently outsources its work to foreign contractors working in their home country. Those holding Chinese passports are no exception.
"Another team that worked with these databases had at its head two team members with [People's Republic of China] passports," the consultant told Ars. "I know that because I challenged them personally and revoked their privileges."

The War On (Heterosexual) Sex

The bizarre inconsistencies involving sexual education and conduct must be creating a generation of celibate nutters.

At the same time that children are being exposed in the classrooms to the sort of sex education only sailors on leave in major ports once had, we are making heterosexual conduct by young people fraught with criminal consequences. In tony Fairfax, Virginia, for example, elementary students will be taught about oral, anal sex, and incest  from which lessons parents cannot opt out. This sexualization of the young in our schools is not unique. 

Federal tax dollars are being withheld from school systems that do not conduct gender identity classes and educators are taking this to be an order to sexualize our children already bombarded by twerking, rap culture, and other execrable behavior.

Oregon, home of the multimillion dollar ObamaCare state healthcare fail, is now allowing 15-year-olds to get state-subsidized sex change operations without parental notification. 

The list of things 15-year-olds are not legally allowed to do in Oregon is long: Drive, smoke, donate blood, get a tattoo -- even go to a tanning bed. 
But, under a first-in-the-nation policy quietly enacted in January that many parents are only now finding out about, 15-year-olds are now allowed to get a sex-change operation. Many residents are stunned to learn they can do it without parental notification -- and the state will even pay for it through its Medicaid program, the Oregon Health Plan.

My online friend “Ignatz Ratzkvwatzkv” asks if Oregon will provide name tags:

“so when the parents get home they know who the strange girl on the couch staring vacantly at the TV is instead of the strange boy that was there when they left?”

At the same time, teenagers and young adults are facing criminal charges and college expulsion for engaging in sexual relations.

California legislators are doing their part to kill passion in a society where the young have been sexualized from kindergarten on:

The California legislature has passed a bill requiring colleges and universities that receive state funds to adopt policies on sexual assault, including a first-of-its-kind mandate that students engaging in sexual activity obtain "affirmative consent" -- commonly referred to as the "yes means yes" requirement.
[snip]
Those would include a standard of "affirmative, conscious and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity" that is "ongoing throughout a sexual activity and can be revoked at any time."[snip] The move comes amid increased federal scrutiny of U.S. colleges and universities over their handling of sexual-assault claims and a growing movement of sexual-assault victims sharing their stories and filing federal complaints against their schools.
The bill also calls for "victim-centered policies" that ensure victims' and witnesses' privacy as well as other support during an investigation.

Recall, if you will, the effect of “victim centered policies” in the Duke Lacrosse Case and the 

University of Virginia made-up rape story. These policies uniformly deprive young males of any reasonable due process protections. Eventually, claims by these young men will foster a new source of law firm revenue and bankrupt those colleges that comply with these misbegotten policies.

Aside from the federal mandates on sex education and federal and state mandates on Star Chamber sex tribunals on campus, there is the awful overreach of the sex offender statutes.

First came the story of Elkhart, Indiana’s Zach Anderson, which hit the front page of the The New York Times on Sunday (you read it here first). Zach, 19, had sex with a girl who told him she was 17 but turned out to be 14, and a judge decided that makes Zach a sex offender for life. Learning about his case, another family in Elkhart couldn’t believe it.
Their son was living out the exact same story.
As Fox28 reports, Darian Yoder, also a 19-year-old, met a girl on the same app Zach used, "Hot or Not." The girl said she was 17 but turned out to be 13 -- a fact Darian learned months after the encounter, when he was arrested for sexual misconduct.
Judge Dennis Wiley, the same judge who sneeringly told Zach, "That seems to be part of our culture now: meet, hook up, have sex, sayonara. Totally inappropriate behavior,” presided over Darian’s trial and sentenced him to the same draconian fate. Darian, like Zach, is now officially a sex offender, for life. As such, he cannot be around anyone under the age 18, as if he were some insatiable child molester. That includes his younger brother and sister, whom he has not seen since he was sentenced. His devastated family has been torn apart.
[snip]
The young man can't go to church, a park, or even a mall.
"It's just far too much," said Yoder.  "I have no life. I can't do anything."
[snip]
Darian says he can't be near anyone under age 18, including his younger brother and sister, whom he hasn't seen since his arrest.
"I mean we can't have Christmas," said Messick. "He can’t see them on his birthday, he can't... anything"
[snip]
That is the power we give judges and prosecutors with our all-encompassing definition of what constitutes a sex offender. [snip] Of the 800,000 registered sex offenders, roughly a quarter of them were added as minors, because young people have sex with other young people.
The sex offender list is a dungeon we can throw people in on the slightest pretext. Politicians and grandstanders exhort us to fear those on it. But it’s a lot scarier to think about how easy it is for our sons to end up on that list themselves. 

Illegal Immigrants

On the other hand, as we criminalize normal adolescent behavior which in fact we encourage in elementary-school classrooms, if you live in one of the left-wing enclaves which claim the high moral mantle of “sanctuary cities” and commit a crime you will not be held accountable and deported. And if you do this in the super left-wing city of San Francisco, the sheriff will even connive to spring you so you can take a privately-owned gun stolen from an FBI agent who carelessly left it in his car and use it to shoot dead a beautiful young woman walking with her father.

…according to a new report in the San Francisco Gate, San Francisco Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi (who has a criminal history of his own) requested Sanchez be transferred into his jurisdiction.
San Francisco Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi has deflected blame in the release of a Mexican national now facing murder charges in the Pier 14 slaying by demanding to know why federal authorities returned him to San Francisco to face a 20-year-old marijuana charge in the first place.
The answer, it turns out, is that the Sheriff’s Department asked federal officials to do so.
Mirkarimi’s agency requested custody of Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez as he was completing a 46-month stint in federal prison in March in San Bernardino County, according to a Sheriff’s Department letter obtained by The Chronicle. Lopez-Sanchez had been deported five times to Mexico and had been imprisoned for illegally re-entering the U.S.
Sanchez was released by the Sheriff's Department in March of this year. Four months later, he shot and killed Kate Steinle.
Sheriff Mirkarimi said in an interview with CNN earlier this week that he believes sanctuary city policies keep San Francisco citizens safe and said it's proper to keep those policies in place. 

It seems to me that cities that treat the ICE (the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency) as enemies ought to be deprived of federal funds, but I guess that’s not as bad in the eyes of our “progressive” officeholders as refusing to teach gender identity, anal, and oral sex to kiddies, or depriving college men of the right to a fair trial when charged with sexual misconduct.

Urban Planners and the War on Suburbia

Americans like living in suburbs but the left is engaged in a war on the suburbs,one which is growing.

Theoretically, the suburbs should be the dominant politically force in America. Some 44 million Americans live in the core cities of America’s 51 major metropolitan areas, while nearly 122 million Americans live in the suburbs. In other words, nearly three-quarters of metropolitan Americans live in suburbs.
Yet it has been decided, mostly by self-described progressives, that suburban living is too unecological, not mention too uncool, and even too white for their future America. Density is their new holy grail, for both the world and the U.S. Across the country efforts are now being mounted -- through HUD, the EPA, and scores of local agencies -- to impede suburban home-building, or to raise its cost. Notably in coastal California, but other places, too, suburban housing is increasingly relegated to the affluent.
The obstacles being erected include incentives for density, urban growth boundaries, attempts to alter the race and class makeup of communities, and mounting environmental efforts to reduce sprawl. The EPA wants to designate even small, seasonal puddles as “wetlands,” creating a barrier to developers of middle-class housing, particularly in fast-growing communities in the Southwest. Denizens of free-market-oriented Texas could soon be experiencing what those in California, Oregon, and other progressive bastions have long endured: environmental laws that make suburban development all but impossible, or impossibly expensive. Suburban family favorites like cul-de-sacs are being banned under pressure from planners.  

Like Hanson, the author of this article on the progressive assault on the suburbs predicts a coming political firestorm.

The left, however stupid, may sense this backlash, which along with their never-ending power grabs, might explain the increasingly outrageous assault on our constitutional rights. If I’m right that Obama’s failures expose them to a counterpunch, the left has and continues to violate the constitution to retain its hold on power.

The Assault on our Constitutional Rights

My friend Alex Bensky, the sage of Detroit, notes: “Let's see -- a leader who embodies the people, calls for national unity on his terms, and criticism of whom is ipso facto illegitimate and can only be motivated by illegitimate motives... the instruments of government suborned to promote the interests of the party and used to quash opposition and suppress dissent... a reorganization of the economy so it remains in private hands but not only is controlled by the government, but companies see the source of markets and profits to be the government, not customers... To quote Rocket J. Squirrel: "That voice... where have I heard that voice?"”

Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin, for example, who opposes the right of corporations to free speech, also opposes the rights of individuals to exercise it.

Does this cluelessness matter? I mean, she is the first woman Wisconsin elected to the Senate. Doesn’t that override her ignorance and tyranny?

She’s unfortunately not the only Wisconsin officeholder who wants to forbid any fightback against left-wing government.

This week we learned that former IRS apparatchik Lois Lerner was illegally conspiring to jail Obama opponents:

The FBI and Justice Department worked with Lois Lerner and the IRS to concoct some reason to put President Obama’s opponents in jail before his reelection, and this abuse resulted in the FBI’s illegally obtaining the IRS files of innocent Americans,” said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch. The conservative watchdog group uncovered an IRS document that shows how the agency furnished the FBI with 21 computer disks bearing 1.25 million pages from some 113,000 tax records. This transfer included the improper disclosure of “confidential taxpayer information,” which is covered by two laws that carry criminal penalties: Internal Revenue Code Section 6103 and the federal Privacy Act. Given Team Obama’s Chinese-style stonewalling, congressional investigators are unlikely to solve this mystery. They also lack police power to do much about it. 

We also learned that Lerner was quite obviously working with the ironically named Wisconsin Government Accountability Board (GAB) and Obama supporters elsewhere to stifle opposition:

Wisconsin prosecutors saw their pursuit of independent groups as part of a common agenda with national Democrats.[snip]
These interconnections matter because they reveal that the use of tax and campaign laws to limit political speech was part of a larger and systematic Democratic campaign. Speaking at the University of Wisconsin in 2010, President Obama sent his own political message to investigators.
[snip]
Conservative nonprofits like the Wisconsin Club for Growth and Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce were later subpoenaed and bound by secrecy orders as their fundraising all but ceased. Liberals worked together to turn the IRS and the GAB into partisan political weapons. 

Fed up yet?

You can get sharpened pikes and pitchforks from my conveniently located shop on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. Better yet, work hard to oust these leftist elites; ridicule and resist them at every opportunity; and join together state by state to refuse to follow their ill-conceived dictates. Your choice, but do something, don’t just stand there.

Clarice Feldman

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/07/obamas_killing_the_left_lets_help_him.html

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

Temple Institute Raising a Genuine Red Heifer - Arutz Sheva Staff

by Arutz Sheva Staff

Temple Institute partnering with expert Israeli rancher to raise herd of red heifers, for future use in Third Temple.

In partnership with an experienced Israeli cattle rancher, The Temple Institute has decided to raise a Red Heifer, in accordance with the Biblical commandment. 

The Red Heifer was a cow brought to Temple priests as sacrifice, and its ashes were used for ritual purification of those who had come into contact with a corpse. 

A prerequisite of the Third Temple, in order for a Red Heifer to be considered kosher for use, it must be raised from birth in Israel under specific conditions and in a controlled environment. 

To raise awareness and funds for the first ever project of its kind, The Temple Institute has launched a crowd funding campaign entitled "Raise a Red Heifer in Israel" on Indiegogo. 

During antiquity, Israelites waited for the birth of a potential Red Heifer, but with a combination of Torah knowledge and advanced science, The Temple Institute believes a Red Heifer can be bred in our modern times. 

Under the guidance of Temple Institute rabbis, frozen embryos of Red Angus cattle will be implanted into domestic cattle in Israel, leading to the introduction of this breed into the Jewish state. 

This method, authorized by Israel's Agriculture Ministry, has already proved successful with the birth of a number of male Red Angus.

“Three decades of research and preparation have led us to this special day," the Institute said in a statement. "During this period known as the 'Three Weeks,' as world Jewry mourns the destruction of the Second Holy Temple, The Temple Institute has taken a bold move towards the third." 

"Having already prepared over 70 sacred vessels including the golden menorah and High Priest’s gemstone-encrusted breastplate, now is the time to fulfill the commandment of the Red Heifer. Make no mistake, this project is no less than the first stage of the reintroduction of Biblical purity into the world, a prerequisite for the building of the Third Temple.”


Arutz Sheva Staff

Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/197996#.VaK0UfmzchQ

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

Still too eager for a deal - Prof. Abraham Ben-Zvi

by Prof. Abraham Ben-Zvi

The last pitfall on the way to a deal is basically about Obama's relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, which center on the Kremlin's ongoing military activity in the eastern Ukraine and the economic sanctions the West applied to Russia in response. Given this highly charged relationship, the White House has no interest in any step that could even slightly improve Russia's grim economic situation. This is the connecting thread between the Russian-American axis and the current field of negotiations with Iran.

The fact that the latest deadline for a final nuclear deal between Iran and the world powers is behind us, without smoke billowing over the negotiating room in Vienna, is astonishing. After all, there are no signs indicating that Washington's eagerness for a successful end to the talks has weakened. In fact, it is the opposite. In recent months, it has become clearer that U.S. President Barack Obama has made a deal with Iran a main goal of his legacy. In his view, a deal with Iran will obfuscate all his failures in the Middle East and herald a new regional agenda, with the new partner from Tehran at its center. 

Obama seems steadfast in his belief that a conciliatory, compensatory policy based on a range of trust-building economic steps, will quickly set the regime of ayatollahs on a moderate, pragmatic path. The carrot of economic investment and the cancellation of the rule of sanctions will lay the cornerstone for a strong diplomatic and strategic partnership between Washington and Tehran, central to which will be the Iranian regime's willingness to take on a key role in containing the Islamic State group. To bring that vision to fruition, the Obama administration is charging ahead toward a final nuclear deal at almost any price, while shutting its eyes and continuing to put the agreement together, the ongoing terrorist activity and widespread subversion emanating from the Iranian capital and spreading out over the entire area. 

It's not only that no link whatsoever between nuclear weapons and conventional and semi-conventional weapons exists in the almost final version of the "Vienna Treaty," but also that the nuclear core of the nascent deal is spotty and full of holes that will give the Iranian regime a golden opportunity to surge ahead toward a nuclear bomb a decade from now, when all oversight of the regime comes to an end. 

In light of that, the fact that the official signing ceremony did not take place on July 9 as expected makes one wonder. The explanation, which is only tangentially related to the nuclear issue, does not at all indicate that the American superpower is coming to its senses at last, but is anchored in the web of U.S.-Russian relations. The last pitfall on the way to a deal is basically about Obama's relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, which center on the Kremlin's ongoing military activity in the eastern Ukraine and the economic sanctions the West applied to Russia in response. Given this highly charged relationship, the White House has no interest in any step that could even slightly improve Russia's grim economic situation. This is the connecting thread between the Russian-American axis and the current field of negotiations with Iran. 

Russia, which because of the sanctions in place against it desperately needs foreign currency, wants a fast entry into the Iranian weapons market. So, together with China, it is lending its fervent support to Iran's demands that the deal also lift the embargo against supplying it with conventional weapons, which the U.N. Security Council decreed in 2006. Especially since a deal for Russia to sell Iran S-300 surface-to-air missiles by 2007 has been frozen since 2010. Thus, Russia's growing economic distress joins the rest of Putin's geostrategic considerations and is creating an aggressive Russian position in favor of a quick removal of military sanctions from Iran, which in turn encourages Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif to dig in their heels. 

Russia strengthening its position as an ally and a main weapons supplier to Iran worries the U.S. The 44th president is steadfast on reaching a deal, and even the current dispute won't prevent him from achieving his dream, even at the price of laying the groundwork for an extremist regional power that would attempt to threaten its strategic environs. There is nothing left to do but hope that the U.S. Senate, which will have 60 days to scrutinize the agreement after it is signed, will meet the challenge it is faced with.

Prof. Abraham Ben-Zvi

Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=13143

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