Why Muslims like Hitler, but not Mozart.

 

by Fjordman

I have had some interesting discussions with my good friend Ohmyrus, who is an ethnic Chinese man but appreciates some aspects of Western civilization that many Westerners themselves appear to have forgotten, or rejected. He is not unique in this regard. One of the best books about European culture published in recent years is Defending the West, written by the former Muslim Ibn Warraq who was born in the Indian subcontinent, not in the Western world. Essentially, according to modern Multiculturalism, every culture has the right to exist — except the Western one. The Iranian-born ex-Muslim Ali Sina denounces Multiculturalism for precisely this reason in his book Understanding Muhammad, which I have reviewed online:

"If any culture needs to be preserved, it is the Western, Helleno-Christian culture. It is this culture that is facing extinction. It is to this culture alone that we owe the Enlightenment, Renaissance, and democracy. These are the foundations of our modern world. It would be a terrible mistake not to preserve this culture. If we do nothing, we face a future where democracy and tolerance will fade and Islam's more primitive instincts will subjugate humanity. All cultures are not made equal ... We owe our freedom and modern civilization to Western culture. It is this culture that is now under attack and needs protection."

As a native European, it is strange to notice how many (non-Muslim) Asians apparently appreciate my civilization more these days than so-called intellectuals in my own country do. It is challenging to explain how the West could make so many advances in the past and yet be as stupid as it currently is. The question of what went wrong with the West is far more interesting than what went wrong with the Islamic world. The best answer I can come up with is that maybe our current flaws are related to our past virtues, at least indirectly. For instance, being stubborn can be a strength or a weakness, depending upon the situation. The West is a non-traditionalist civilization. We have unquestionably made advances that no other civilization has done before us, despite what some critics claim, but perhaps the price we pay for this is that we also make mistakes that nobody has done before us. Organized science is a Western invention. Organized national suicide, too, is a Western invention. The Western university system once represented a great comparative advantage for Europe vis-à-vis other civilizations. Today that same system is undermining the very civilization that gave birth to it.

Since European civilization is so far the only civilization to have had a truly global impact, this means that all other civilizations have to face the challenge of dealing with a layer of impulses and ideas which are not their own. There is no doubt that this has been a disruptive process in many cases, but it is also true that different non-Western cultures deal very differently with the Western challenge and appropriate very different parts of its heritage.

The Arabs had no significant pictorial tradition of their own even before Islam. The Islamic ban on pictorial arts was not always enforced, just like the ban on alcoholic beverages was not always strictly enforced, but pictorial arts were discouraged and consequently never occupied a prominent place in that culture. Some Muslim rulers could interpret the religious rules regarding the depiction of human figures quite liberally. A tradition for book illustration and miniature painting did develop, but it is important to remember that even the paintings that did exist were intended as illustrations of a text and were almost never designed for exhibition on a wall or in a gallery. Historian Bernard Lewis explains in his book What Went Wrong?:

"One of the attractions of Western art and particularly of Western portraiture must surely have been the use of perspective, which made possible a degree of realism and accuracy unattainable in the stylized and rather formal art of the traditional miniature ... In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Western influence becomes very clear, both in the structure of buildings and in their interior decoration. By the nineteenth century it is almost universal, to such a degree that the older artistic traditions were dying and being replaced by this new art from Europe. As the perception and measurement of space affected the visual arts, so too did the perception and measurement of time affect music — though to a much lesser extent ... A distinguishing characteristic of Western music is polyphony, by harmony or counterpoint ... Different performers play together, from different scores, producing a result that is greater than the sum of its parts. With a little imagination one may discern the same feature in other aspects of Western culture — in democratic politics and in team games, both of which require the cooperation, in harmony if not in unison, of different performers playing different parts in a common purpose."

In contrast, here is what Lewis writes in The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years:

"Since Muslim worship, with the limited exception of some dervish orders, makes no use of music, musicians in the Islamic lands lacked the immense advantage enjoyed by Christian musicians through the patronage of the Church and of its high dignitaries. The patronage of the court and of the great houses, though no doubt useful, was intermittent and episodic, and dangerously subject to the whims of the mighty. Muslim musicians devised no standard system of notation, and their compositions are therefore known only by the fallible and variable medium of memory. There is no preserved corpus of classical Islamic music comparable with that of the European musical tradition. All that remains is a quite extensive theoretical literature on music, some descriptions and portrayals of musicians and musical occasions by writers and artists, a number of old instruments in various stages of preservation, and of course the living memory of long-past performances."

There are those who are critical of Mr. Lewis as a scholar and consequently believe that he shouldn't be quoted as an authority. You should always maintain a healthy criticism of any scholar, but I know from other sources that the above mentioned quotes are largely correct.

Many forms of music are banned in Islam. The Reliance of the Traveller by Ahmad Ibn Lulu Ibn Al-Naqib and Noah Ha Mim Keller has been formally approved by al-Azhar in Egypt, the highest institution of religious learning among Sunni Muslims. It quotes a number of ahadith, authoritative sayings of Muhammad and his companions which form the core Islamic texts next to the Koran, among them one which says that "There will be peoples of my Community who will hold fornication, silk, wine, and musical instruments to be lawful ..." Another quote says that: "On the Day of Resurrection, Allah will pour molten lead into the ears of whoever sits listening to a songstress." The scholarly conclusion is that "All of this is explicit and compelling textual evidence that musical instruments of all types are unlawful." Another legal ruling says that "It is unlawful to use musical instruments — such as those which drinkers are known for, like the mandolin, lute, cymbals, and flute — or to listen to them. It is permissible to play the tambourine at weddings, circumcisions, and other times, even if it has bells on its sides. Beating the kuba, a long drum with a narrow middle, is unlawful."

Moreover, while I do disagree with Mr. Lewis sometimes, in my experience he occasionally errs by being too positive when writing about Islamic culture, not too negative. If you believe Lewis, "The earliest specifically anti-Semitic statements in the Middle East occurred among the Christian minorities, and can usually be traced back to European originals." This view fits well with the anti-European, Multicultural bias of modern media and academia, yet it is completely and utterly wrong, as Dr. Andrew G. Bostom has conclusively demonstrated in his extremely well-researched book The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism.

Dehumanizing Jews as apes (Koran 2:65/7:166), or apes and pigs (Koran 5:60) has been common throughout Islamic history, more than 1300 years before the establishment of the state of Israel. Muhammad himself referred to the Medinan Jews of the Banu Qurayza as "apes" before orchestrating the slaughter of all of their men. As one Muslim living in Germany said, "Jews are the enemy of Allah." Referring to Adolf Hitler he stated: "The man was a hero, almost a Muslim. I'm one of his fans." A disproportionate amount of Europeans who convert to Islam are neo-Nazis or Communists.

In 2005, Hitler's autobiography Mein Kampf was among the top bestsellers in Turkey, behind a book about a Turkish national hero detonating a nuclear bomb in Washington D.C. Adolf Hitler remains widely popular in many other Islamic countries, too. At the same time, Turkish PM Erdogan stressed that Islamophobia must be treated as "a crime against humanity." It is banned by law to discuss the Armenian genocide in Turkey, a genocide that allegedly inspired the Nazis in their Holocaust against Jews. Would a country the size of Germany, with a history of a thousand years of continuous warfare against its neighbors and where Adolf Hitler is a bestselling author, be hailed as a moderate, Christian country?

The earliest evidence we have of musical instruments dates back to the Old Stone Age. We know that there were rich musical traditions in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, China and elsewhere. Indirectly, it is possible that some aspects of Babylonian musical theory and practice influenced the Greek, and by extension European, musical tradition. The ancient Greeks had a number of musical instruments such as harps, horns, lyres, drums, cymbals etc. Greek music theory evolved continually from Pythagoras before 500 BC to Aristides Quintilianus in the late third century AD, whose treatise De musica (On Music) is an important source of knowledge of the Greek musical tradition.

Music was closely connected to astronomy in Pythagorean thought; the great astronomer Claudius Ptolemy wrote on music. Mathematical laws and proportions were considered the underpinnings of both musical intervals and the heavenly bodies. Plato and Aristotle both argued that education should stress gymnastics to discipline the body and music to discipline the mind. Plato was, as usual, the stricter of the two and would only allow certain types of music for limited purposes, lest it could distort the mind. He asserted that musical conventions must not be changed, since lawlessness in art leads to anarchy. Aristotle was less restrictive and argued that music could be used for enjoyment as well as for education. For the Romans, music was a part of most public ceremonies and was featured in entertainment and education.

The Christian Church was the dominant social institution in post-Roman Europe and deeply affected the future development of European music. The ancient Greek system of notation had apparently been forgotten by the seventh century AD, when Isidore of Seville (ca. 560-636) wrote that "Unless sounds are remembered by man, they perish, for they cannot be written down." But with the development of complex chants, what was needed to stabilize them was notation, a way to write down the music. The earliest surviving European books of chant with music notation date from the ninth century. During the early Christian era, the Classical legacy was used, but modified. From the Jews came the practices of singing psalms and chanting Scripture. Church leaders drew on Greek musical theory but rejected pagan customs, and elevated worship over entertainment and singing over instrumental music.

It is instructive to consider the fact that Middle Eastern Muslims, too, had access to Greek musical theory, yet they decided not use it, just like they did not utilize the Greek artistic legacy. Both music and pictorial arts were integrated into religious worship in Christian Europe in a way that never happened in the Islamic world. In fact, it was Gregorian chant and the growth of polyphonic music in medieval European monasteries and cathedrals which established the musical tradition that would eventually culminate in the works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven centuries later. There was no Mozart or Beethoven in the Islamic world, just like there was no Copernicus, Galileo or Newton.

The invention of musical notation enabled musicians to build upon the work of the past. It may have been a necessary condition for the expansion and development of musical expression, but it is not alone sufficient to explain later advances. The discovery of the connection between mathematical ratios and musical intervals attributed to Pythagoras — and independently the Chinese — was important, but not as important as polyphony. According to Charles Murray, "Just as linear perspective added depth to the length and breadth of painting, polyphony added, metaphorically, a vertical dimension to the horizontal line of melody."

China had a well-developed musical tradition at least as far back as the Zhou period (1122-256 BC). Chinese opera is generally familiar to outsiders, but this art form dates from the early centuries of the current era, especially from early medieval times (the Tang Dynasty). Music played a central role in the Chinese court life during the sixth and fifth centuries BC, at the time of Confucius. It was believed by early thinkers to have great moral powers, although some forms of music were better than others for promoting harmony. The word "music" was written with the same character as "enjoyment."

According to The Cambridge Illustrated History of China by Patricia Buckley Ebrey, "Archaeologists have unearthed quite a few sets of instruments used in court performances in Zhou times. Key instruments were stone chimes, bronze drums, stringed lute-like instruments, bamboo flutes, and sets of bells, struck from the outside. The biggest cache of instruments was discovered in the tomb (c. 433 BC) of Marquis Yi of Zeng, ruler of a petty state in modern Hubei just north of the great state of Chu. In the tomb were 124 instruments, including drums, flutes, mouth organs, pan pipes, zithers, a 32-chime lithophone, and a 64-piece bell set. The zithers have from five to twenty-five strings and vary in details of their construction; they may have come from different regions and been used for performances of regional music. The bells bear inscriptions that indicate their pitches and reveal that they were gifts from the king of Chu. The precision with which the bells were cast indicates that the art of bell-making had reached a very advanced state."

There is no direct equivalent to Mozart or Beethoven in Asia, but perhaps the fact that they have such an ancient and deeply-rooted native tradition makes in easier for the Chinese to appreciate the fruits of other musical cultures. Many East Asians are at the turn of the twenty-first century eagerly appropriating the best traditions of European Classical music.

David P. Goldman writes under the pen name "Spengler" as a columnist for the Asia Times Online. He thinks that "The present shift in intellectual capital in favor of the East has no precedent in world history." According to him, European Classical music "produces better minds, and promotes success in other fields." This is because "Western classical music does something that mathematics and physics cannot: it allows us to play with time itself."

There is some basis for these statements. Albert Einstein received a thorough philosophical education by studying the thoughts of Kant, Schopenhauer and Spinoza in addition to the physical theories of Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday and James Maxwell. It taught him how to think abstractly about space and time. "The independence created by philosophical insight is — in my opinion — the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth," Einstein once wrote. He was an accomplished amateur musician as well, and would furiously play his violin as a way of thinking through a difficult physics problem.

A strikingly high proportion of the students at top Western musical schools are now Asians, followed by Eastern Europeans. For some reason, there are comparatively few North Americans or Western Europeans among the best instrumentalists, in Spengler's view because many of them simply don't have the discipline to practice eight hours a day. One of China's most famous musicians at the moment is the pianist Lang Lang (born 1982).

According to Spengler, "the Chinese nation that looks to Lang Lang as one of its heroes is learning the high culture of the West with a collective sense of wonder. Something more than the mental mechanics of classical music makes this decisive for China. In classical music, China has embraced the least Chinese, and the most explicitly Western, of all art forms. Even the best Chinese musicians still depend on Western mentors. Lang Lang may be a star, but in some respects he remains an apprentice in the pantheon of Western musicians. The Chinese, in some ways the most arrogant of peoples, can elicit a deadly kind of humility in matters of learning. Their eclecticism befits an empire that is determined to succeed, as opposed to a mere nation that needs to console itself by sticking to its supposed cultural roots. Great empires transcend national culture and naturalize the culture they require....Except in a vague way, one cannot explain the uniqueness of Western classical music to non-musicians, and America is governed not by musicians, but by sports fans."

Other civilizations most easily appropriate that in Western culture which speaks to them and which resonates with their own heritage. Westerners have virtually nothing in common with Muslims. While different, we can find common ground with Hindus, Buddhists and Christian Asians when it comes to pictorial arts, for instance, while we share absolutely nothing in this field with Muslims since Islam is rather hostile to many forms of music and most forms of art.

I don't think it's bigotry to state that Beethoven and Mozart represent a peak in the world history of music, not just in the European tradition. But the great European composers lived in the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Europe clearly was the leading region on the planet in science and technology. There appears to be a close correlation between the sciences and the arts. Perhaps it has something to do with cultural confidence and sense of purpose, or lack of such. In the early twenty-first century, not only do Europeans not produce composers that are anywhere near the stature of a Mozart or a Beethoven; many of us do not even listen to the works of great composers we once produced.

Very few young people in Western Europe seriously study European Classical music these days. Asians thus adopt the highest cultural achievements of European civilization at a time when many people of European descent themselves appear to be on the verge of forgetting them, which is symbolic on many levels. On the other hand, Asians are more or less immune to the self-loathing of the contemporary West. I see this as a sign that they appropriate the best aspects of the Western traditions but stay away from the worst ones, which makes sense.

It is sad that people from other cultures sometimes copy our bad ideas such as Communism more readily than our good ones, of which we do have many. I don't by that mean to imply that Europeans alone "invented" totalitarianism. The Incas practiced something resembling Communism in South America. While I may be critical of aspects of Confucianism, I don't think it can properly be called totalitarian. Totalitarianism in the true sense of the word does, however, have a native Chinese precedent in the ideology of Legalism, which was supported by the state of China's brutal First Emperor. There is a reason why the Communist dictator Mao Zedong (1893-1976) personally identified with the First Emperor, not with Confucius.

Despotism comes quite natural to Islamic culture. When confronted with the European tradition, many Muslims freely prefer Adolf Hitler to Rembrandt, Michelangelo or Beethoven. Westerners don't force them to study Mein Kampf more passionately than Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa or Goethe's Faust; they choose to do so themselves. Millions of (non-Muslim) Asians now study Mozart's piano pieces. Muslims, on the other hand, like Mr. Hitler more, although he represents one of the most evil ideologies that have ever existed in Europe. The fact that they usually like the Austrian Mr. Hitler more than the Austrian Mr. Mozart speaks volumes about their culture. Koreans, Japanese, Chinese and Middle Eastern Muslims have been confronted with the same body of ideas, yet choose to appropriate radically different elements from it, based upon what is compatible with their own culture.

One of these cultures has a future, the other one does not.
 

Fjordman is a Norway-based writer. He appears in Brussels Journal, Gates of Vienna, Faith Freedom International, Jihad Watch and Think-Israel, amongst other websites. He is the author of Defeating Eurabia.

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

 

Obama's Apartheid Plan For Jerusalem.

 

By: Steven Plaut

When Barack Obama was elected president, many around the world saw it as the culmination of decades of successful efforts by the American civil rights movement. How ironic, then, that the Obama administration has been conducting a campaign against Jews who wish to live in certain Jerusalem neighborhoods.

 

The administration has a real problem with Jews seeking to live in two neighborhoods of Jerusalem, the Sheikh Jarrah section, at the foot of Mount Scopus, and the Simon the Righteous neighborhood, located close to the pre-1967 cease-fire lines that once separated Israel from Jordan. The latter is an area whose Jewish roots go back at least two millennia. It was Jewish when the Arabs were still moon worshippers and London just a field of mud.

 

Even worse, the Obama people are promoting an arbitrary, selective apartheid for Jerusalem directed only against Jews - Arabs, including Arabs from the West Bank, who do not hold Israeli citizenship should be free to live in any predominantly Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem (as well as in Jewish neighborhoods in Haifa, Tel Aviv, Beersheva and elsewhere).

 

During World War II, Hitler's main agent for recruiting Muslims to the Nazi banner was Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. A terrorist leader, he fled Jerusalem when the British attempted to arrest him and spent part of the war as the guest of honor of the Nazis.

 

The Mufti had owned some property in what is now the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. That property was legally purchased by American businessman Irving Moskowitz, who has owned the property for 20 years now and has a permit to construct an apartment building there in place of the current structure on the site, the Shepherd's Hotel.

 

The Obama administration is claiming that since the property once belonged to the Grand Mufti and is now in a predominantly Arab neighborhood in East Jerusalem, Israel should freeze and halt all Jewish building there. Evidently, under Obama's new affirmative apartheid policy for Jerusalem, only Arabs should be permitted to build in East Jerusalem.

 

Now, Obama happens to lives not far from Arlington Cemetery, which sits on land confiscated from Confederate General Robert E. Lee during the Civil War. Israel has at least as much right to use the property taken from the Grand Mufti as the U.S. has to fill up Gen. Lee's plantation with graves.

 

The idea that Israel should prevent Jews from building in East Jerusalem because Palestinians claim some sort of right to it is as absurd as suggesting that all construction in the District of Columbia be frozen because the British once claimed rights over it.

 

Obama's people are also up in arms because Israel removed some illegal Arab squatters from land they did not own in Jerusalem's Simon the Righteous neighborhood. This was a Jewish neighborhood until the Jordanians conquered it and evicted all the Jews there in an act of ethnic cleansing. The Israeli Supreme Court has repeatedly ruledthat the land in question belongs legally to Jews.

 

The United Nations Partition Plan of 1947 called for the creation of a Jewish state and an Arab state alongside it. The Arab state never arose because the land that had been set aside for it was gobbled up by the Arab countries that sent their armies to annihilate the Jews.

 

The UN partition granted Jerusalem's Mount Scopus, with its hospital and university facilities, to Israel. Access by Jews to the area was supposed to be free and unfettered. But Arab terrorist militias placed Mount Scopus under siege and attacked any vehicle trying to reach it. The Mufti himself plannedthe massacre that followed.

 

On April 13, 1948, a large convoy consisting mainly of Jewish doctors and nurses tried to reach the hospital on Mount Scopus. It was attacked in Sheikh Jarrah at the mount's foothills. The Jewish vehicles were hit by mines and strafed by gunfire and other weapons.

 

Some 79 Jews and a British soldier were murdered by the terrorists of Sheikh Jarrah. The bodies were so badly burned that most of them could not be identified. The victims included the head of Hadassah hospital and the head of its medical school.

 

In recent years, Arab-occupied Sheikh Jarrah has again been the frequent scene of terrorism and violence against Jews. During the recent Gaza campaign, Arab thugs attacks Jews driving or walking near Mount Scopus.

 

Obama is concerned about the potential for unrest and violence if Jews move to the property they own in Sheikh Jarrah and other Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem. But of course he would never propose removing the Arab residents of those areas in order to restore tranquility. His Klan Plan consists only of preventing Jews from moving in and ruining the neighborhood.

 

Jews have exactly as much right to Sheikh Jarrah as the U.S. government had to the Lee Plantation that became Arlington Cemetery. And the rights in both cases were won in exactly the same way - through bloodshed.

 

 

Steven Plaut is a professor at the Graduate School of the Business Administration at the University of Haifa and is a columnist for the Jewish Press.

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

 

 

New faces of an unreformed, hard-line Fatah.

 

by Khaled Abu Toameh

Many of the newly-elected members of Fatah's Central Committee may be younger than their ousted predecessors, but that does not necessarily mean that they are more reform-minded or less corrupt.

Nor does the election of the young guard representatives signal a shift toward moderation.

Fatah must be given credit for getting rid of many old guard figures whose names have become synonymous with embezzlement, financial corruption and abuse of power.

But who said that the new members of the Central Committee are any better?

The assumption that Muhammad Dahlan, Jibril Rajoub, Marwan Barghouti and Tawfik Tirawi are more moderate than old-timers like Ahmed Qurei, Nabil Sha'ath and Hani al-Hassan is completely mistaken.

Fatah's strongman in Lebanon, Sultan Abu al-Aynain, who was also elected as member of the committee, is being described by some media outlets as one of Fatah's "fresh faces."

But Fatah insiders say Abu al-Aynain is known as a "ruthless thug who does not hesitate to liquidate anyone who stands in his way."

In fact, all the newly-elected Central Committee members voted during the Fatah convention in Bethlehem last week in favor of a political platform that does not rule out the armed struggle option against Israel.

The young guard members also voted in favor of a series of hard-line resolutions that were brought before the conference, including one that endorses Fatah's armed militia, the Aksa Martyrs Brigades, as an official organ of the faction, and another that states that the Palestinians will never relinquish the "right of return" for refugees to Israel proper and that they are willing to make "sacrifices" to liberate Jerusalem.

It's unrealistic to expect changes in Fatah's policies now that younger leaders are sitting in the Central Committee. Even if Barghouti, Dahlan and Rajoub wanted to adopt a more moderate approach in peace talks with Israel, they would face fierce opposition from the Fatah General Assembly.

The assembly has actually tied the hands of the Fatah leadership by setting a series of "red lines" that no Palestinian - not even Mahmoud Abbas - is entitled to cross.

Fatah has said quite loudly and clearly that it's either 100 percent or nothing. Israel must withdraw to the pre-1967 borders, including from all of the eastern part of Jerusalem, allow Palestinian refugees to return to their original homes inside Israel, dismantle all the settlements, including ones built in Jerusalem such as Pisgat Ze'ev and Ramot, and evict all settlers living there and in the West Bank. Only then, according to Fatah, will there be a chance for peace with Israel.

Barghouti, Dahlan and Rajoub neither have the will nor the mandate to cross any of these red lines.

Fatah's young guard operatives may be popular among the faction's 2,200 delegates who met in Bethlehem over the past week, but there is much doubt as to the extent of the support they enjoy among the larger Palestinian public.

Barghouti, who is serving five life terms in Israeli prison, was the head of the Fatah list that lost to Hamas in the January 2006 parliamentary election. The fact that he was in prison back then did not prevent a majority of Palestinians from casting their ballots for the rival Hamas movement.

Dahlan, Rajoub and Tirawi are all former security commanders who served as Yasser Arafat's henchmen and enforcers after the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 2004. The three men can be described as anything but reformists and moderates. They are best remembered for building detention centers, prisons, big villas and a casino for the Palestinians.

The main task of the security forces they presided over was to suppress and intimidate political opponents, human rights workers, journalists and anyone who dared to challenge Fatah's corruption-riddled regime.

Moreover, one of the trio's missions was to hunt down Palestinians suspected of "collaboration" with Israel, many of whom were later executed by firing squad. At one stage, Tirawi's men kidnapped and murdered a number of Palestinians from Jerusalem who were suspected of selling land and houses to Jews.

During the Fatah meetings in Bethlehem, most of the young guard activists appeared to be more radical than their older colleagues, especially with regards to the peace process with Israel.

The power struggle between the old and new guards in Fatah has never been over ideology or the future of the peace process. On these issues, there's almost no difference between Barghouti's views and those of Sha'ath and Qurei.

Rather, it's a power struggle between a camp that for two decades denied young guard activists a larger say in decision-making and access to public funds and jobs, and those younger activists.

What's certain is that the change of guard does not necessarily mean that Fatah is about to regain the confidence of a majority of disillusioned Palestinians. Nor does it show that Fatah is on its way to reforming itself or softening its policies.

 

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

 

The Iranian Threat.

 

by Dore Gold

 

 

Only severe sanctions backed by military threat will have any impact.

 

Defying both history and logic, the idea that the West should diplomatically engage with Tehran still commands an important following.

 

Despite the massive waves of demonstrators across Iran who charged their government with rigging the June 12 presidential elections, there still are officials in the Obama administration who seem to believe that engagement with the Islamic Republic should "remain on the table," as columnist Roger Cohen put it in the New York Times Magazine this week. Javier Solana, the European Union foreign policy chief, agrees: "We would like very much that soon we will have the possibility to restart multilateral talks with Iran on the important nuclear issues," he said on June 24.

 

But they're wrong, just as they have been from the start. Indeed, there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about sticking to engagement. The main one is that it has already been tried -- and utterly failed. Iran has consistently used the West's willingness to engage as a delaying tactic, a smoke screen behind which Iran's nuclear program has continued undeterred and, in many cases, undetected.

 

 

The Islamic Republic has already proved it only uses talks with the West as a delaying tactic as it relentlessly pursues nuclear arms.

 

Back in 2005, Hassan Rowhani, the former chief nuclear negotiator of Iran during the reformist presidency of Mohammad Khatami, made a stunning confession in an internal briefing in Tehran, just as he was leaving his post. He explained that in the period during which he sat across from European negotiators discussing Iran's uranium enrichment ambitions, Tehran quietly managed to complete the critical second stage of uranium fuel production: its uranium conversion plant in Isfahan. He boasted that the day Iran started its negotiations in 2003 "there was no such thing as the Isfahan project." Now, he said, it was complete.

 

Rowhani's revelation showed clearly how Iran exploited the West's engagement. Moreover, the Iranians violated their 2004 agreement with the EU and brilliantly dragged out further negotiations that followed. Equally important, they delayed Western punitive moves against them, keeping the U.N. Security Council at bay for years.

Mohammed Javad Larijani, a former deputy foreign minister and brother to Rowhani's successor as chief negotiator, admitted the logic of diplomatic engagement from the Iranian side: "Diplomacy must be used to lessen pressure on Iran for its nuclear program."

 

Advocates of engagement with Iran often use an unfair argument to advance their case: Their cause, they claim, is opposed mainly by Israel, which is pushing its own narrow agenda. True, Israel is a target of Iran, whose leadership calls for the "elimination of Israel from the region" -- to quote the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who said this years before President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. So that there would be no confusion about Iranian intent, Khamenei's words were hung from a Shahab 3 missile in a military parade in 2003.

 

But Israel is not Iran's only target. If that was the case, the Iranians would have had no reason to develop missiles that fly well past Israeli territory to Central Europe and beyond.

 

 

Israel is not Iran's only target.

 

In fact, the greatest engagement skeptics today are the leaders of the Sunni Arab states from Morocco to Bahrain. The Gulf states in particular have repeatedly been the targets of Iranian subversion operations. Bahrain was called the 14th province of Iran earlier this year by one of Khamenei's key advisors. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia have been attacked by Iranian-backed Hezbollah operatives in the past. Iran still occupies islands belonging to the United Arab Emirates, close to the oil tanker routes that go through the Strait of Hormuz.

 

And Cairo just cracked a large Iranian-supported Hezbollah cell that was planning attacks on key economic centers in the Egyptian state.

For these reasons, Arab officials don't need prompting from Israel. Their common fear is that a nuclear Iran will embolden groups such as Hezbollah, which will feel it enjoys a nuclear sponsor protecting it from any retaliatory action. Unlike their Western counterparts, these Arab officials are savvy enough to distinguish between status quo states that just want to assure the security of their borders and ideologically driven revolutionary powers like Iran with expansive aims.

 

An Iran with hegemonial aspirations will not be talked out of acquiring nuclear weapons through a new Western incentives package. Only the most severe economic measures aimed at Iran's dependence on imported gasoline, backed with the threat of Western military power, might pull the Iranians back at the last minute. Until now, U.N. sanctions on Iran have been too weak to have any real impact.

 

It is critical to understand that an Iran that crosses the nuclear threshold after repeated warnings that doing so is "unacceptable" would be even less likely to be deterred in the future. It would provide global terrorism the kind of protective umbrella that Al Qaeda never had back on 9/11, including Hezbollah cells located at present in Central Europe and Latin America. Some Arab states, like Qatar, have already been largely "Finlandized," to borrow a Cold War term for states that make their foreign policy subservient to the wishes of a powerful neighbor. But as Iran's nuclear program continues unopposed, more Arab states will follow, changing the Middle East entirely.

 

Halting the Iranian nuclear program is a global imperative; acquiescing to a nuclear Iran in the hope that it will pragmatically understand the limits of its own power would be a colossal mistake.

 

 

Dore Gold's new book, "The Rise of Nuclear Iran: How Tehran Defies the West," will be published next month

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

 

Fatah Congress Fails Miserably and Shows Extremism;

 

.... Much Media Reports It As Outstanding Success Which Proves Moderation

by Barry Rubin

The sober Financial Times speaks of the "agony" of Fatah. Khalid Abu Toameh of the Jerusalem Post, the best reporter covering Palestinian politics, compares it to the Iraqi Ba'th party. The Fatah Congress has been a dismal failure, even a disaster.

You'd never—or only very partially—know this based on much of the mainstream media coverage.

Consider some points being either taken for granted or downplayed:

--Fatah defined itself not as a political or even as a governing party for a state on the road to independence but as a "national liberation movement." Think about what this phrase means: its job is not to run an administration or negotiate or prepare for full independence or to serve its people's material needs but to struggle.

In the words of one resolution which sounds as if it came out of the 1960s, Fatah considers itself part of the Arab liberation movement. What does this mean? Who else is in this movement? The forces defining themselves in that manner nowadays are Hamas, Hizballah, and Syria. In contrast, Fatah is floating on Western donor money and diplomatic protection. Yet it still acts the way it did when Arafat led a Fatah conference in a rousing rendition of that old ditty, "America is the head of the snake."

Implicitly, this says that Fatah doesn't believe Israel is sincere about wanting a peaceful, compromise solution. It isn't just distaste for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. They said, and say, similar things about Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert, and Tsipi Livni, the last five prime ministers.

--There is no change or moderation. Abu Toameh says that the resolutions passed in this meeting were virtually identical as those at the last conference twenty years ago. Since I was there covering that conference I can confirm that he's right.

--There was no serious discussion of internal shortcomings, of why Fatah didn't get state in 2000, of why it lost the election and the war in the Gaza Strip to Hamas. No report on the state of Fatah or on the spending of its money was offered, angering some delegates.

--The Congress unanimously passed a resolution claiming that Israel had murdered Yasir Arafat. This is no funny little marginal deed but a demonstration that the conspiracy-ridden world view in which Israel is demonized still dominates the group.

On one point, Fatah may be less extreme than charged. Its resolution on Jerusalem is ambiguous and doesn't clearly intend to claim all of Jerusalem but just the eastern part. Possibly it was copying Israeli rhetoric by calling it the "eternal capital" of the Palestinians. Israel does claim all of Jerusalem. But up until now Fatah has not done so since 1993. If this position has changed it may be a mirror image of Israel's position but is still a major escalation of Palestinian demands.

Now, did the New York Times coverage reflect any of these points? No, it was a whitewash designed to show that Abbas is a good leader and Fatah is moderate. For example:

"In a victory speech…[Abbas] said he wanted to tell the world that Fatah `adheres to the national project' and…would continue to work for an independent Palestinian state."

No mention of the armed struggle issue. In fact, it is relegated to the past:

"Mr. Abbas charted Fatah's course from its early years of armed struggle in the 1960s, which he called a `necessity,' to its current efforts to forge peace deals with Israel. The challenge, he said, is how to turn the limited autonomy the Palestinians have into a `normal state.'"

So we are to believe that Fatah engaged in armed struggle in the 1960s but that was a long time ago. How about the 1970s, 1980s, early 1990s, and from 2000 to 2005? Moreover, after many reporters long denied or downplayed the connection of the al-Aqsa Brigades, which often committed terrorist acts, from Fatah, aren't we entitled to know that the meeting explicitly adopted this group as an official Fatah military arm?

Abbas is also said to have "urged the Palestinians to hold fast and be patient `as long as there is a glimmer of hope' of negotiating a settlement."

This sounds like a moderate man, horrified of violence and desperate for peace. Abbas is made to seem like a popular leader rather than an institutional dictator.

As for hardliners and violence advocates, we are to believe these are marginal opposition forces that have nothing to do with Fatah's current leadership:

"Delegates at the conference have been pushing Fatah leaders to take tougher positions against Israel, participants said, rejecting the idea of negotiations for their own sake and insisting on reserving the option of some kind of resistance should peace talks fail."

You get that? Abbas is moderate, but the bad guys are a small fringe of hardliners pushing for a tougher policy. In fact, all the hardline rhetoric and policies (and even individuals) in the current leadership are airbrushed out of existence.

This has nothing to do with the reality of Fatah and, thus, cannot explain its continued intransigence and failure. From such coverage, the Fatah congress would seem to be an outstanding success. So when there is no successful peace process for the next 10 or 20 or 30 years, you'll never be able to understand why.

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

 

Full Text Of Fatah Political Program After It Was Ratified By Fatah Conference.

 

"Fatah adopts all legitimate forms of struggle along with clinging to the
option of peace without limiting the options to negotiations to achieve
peace. Among the forms of struggle that can be exercised with success in the
current phase to support and activate the negotiations or to act as
alternative to the negotiations if the negotiations don’t achieve their
goals: ..."
[Dr. Aaron Lerner - IMRA: emphasis on "can be exercised with success in the
current phase" = murdering Israeli children may not necessarily be in the
game plan this week - but not because it is intrinsically wrong to do - but
rather a question of efficacy - this week. Now if in another "phase"
murdering Israeli infants "can be exercised with success" then there is
nothing in the Fatah Political Program to rule it out.]

FULL TEXT OF FATAH POLITICAL PROGRAM AFTER IT WAS RATIFIED BY FATAH CONFERENCE

As published in al-Ayyam Translation provided by The Jerusalem Media &
Communications Center

The political program said the continuation of negotiations without
achieving real progress within a set time ceiling constitutes a danger on
our rights and becomes foul play that allows Israel to use the negotiations
as cover up for the continuation of settlements and consolidation of the
occupation. The program defines eleven rules in order to engage in
negotiations with Israel and outlined five options in case of the failure of
the current dialogue with Hamas and ratified four steps to confront the
siege imposed on Gaza and talked about seven forms of struggle.

Fatah Movement rejected the alternative homeland in Jordan and refuses to
sign any agreement that does not lead to the release of all prisoners. Fatah
stressed on rejecting the principle of forceful resettlement or the calls
for the alternative homeland: there wont be resettlement in Lebanon and
there wont be an alternative homeland in Jordan.

Fatah stressed on serious work towards the release of all prisoners and we
will not sign any peace agreement until all prisoners are released. Fatah
stressed on the independence of the movement in the context of the PLO and
the PNA.

The political program of Fatah pointed out that in order to avoid a
situation where the negotiations become foul play and waste of time; we have
to make sure that the PLO abides following rules in order to engage in the negotiations:

1- To link the negotiations process with real progress on the ground
according to clear and concrete indicators, mainly the complete halt of
settlements especially in Jerusalem and to stop changing the features of
Jerusalem and to stop the Judaization process of Jerusalem and these are two
conditions that must be met in order for resumption of any peace
negotiations; we need to ensure also that Israel end its incursions,
arrests, assassinations, and the end of the siege imposed on our people in
Gaza, and the removal of the checkpoints in the West Bank, and the
withdrawal until the September 28, 2000 borders as a first step towards
withdrawal until the borders of June 4, 1967; these are clear and concrete
indicators that must be seen on real grounds and to link progress in
negotiations with achieving the above mentioned steps and measures.

2- Negotiations will be on the basis of international legitimacy and its
main resolutions (181, 194, 242 and 338) and in the context of the Arab
Peace Initiative, as long as the continuation of negotiations meet our
interim and strategic goals.

3- To continue work towards holding a new international peace conference
that consolidates our rights and pushes towards quick negotiations that
result in a peace agreement that achieves our goals.

4- To insist on setting up a clear and binding time table and a time ceiling
for the negotiations.

5- To reject delaying negotiations over Jerusalem and the refugees cause or
any of the final solution issues.

6- To reject the idea of the state with temporary borders.

7- To totally reject recognizing Israel as a Jewish state in order to
protect the rights of the refugees and the rights of our people inside the
Green Line.

8- To insist on international participation during the negotiations and on a
mechanism for arbitration upon the eruption of a dispute when implementing
the agreements and this mechanism should be binding for both sides.

9- To insist on international monitoring and an international peace keeping
mechanism to guarantee the implementation of the agreement.

10- Our success in achieving our goals through negotiations requires a
national professional committee capable of negotiations that will remain
under the PLO supervision and to be monitored by a higher committee which should include the factions and Palestinian competent figures and another
Fatah Committee to follow up the negotiations and to submit its reports to
Fatah Central Committee and Fatah Revolutionary Council.

11- We must head to popular referendum to adopt the peace agreement that
will be reached through the final status negotiations.

Fatah defined five options that it will adopt in case the current dialogue
with Hamas fails. Fatah said that the continuation of the split between the
two parts of the homeland constitutes a threat to the fate of the national
cause of the Palestinian people and Hamas bears responsibility for the
continuation of the split; we have to move forward to achieve success in
comprehensive national dialogue, mainly with Hamas, on the basis of ending
the split in Gaza and the establishment of a national reconciliation
government that organizes concurrent presidential and legislative elections
and unify the security services as national services that protect the
security of the homeland and the citizen and to handle the traces of the
split and achieve national reconciliation and release of the detainees.
Fatah stressed that the failure of the dialogue because of Hamas
intransigence does not downplay the importance and priority of the dialogue
and its continuation, but forces Fatah to adopt alternative options:

First: To restructure Fatah Movement in Gaza as deemed by the current
situation and provide full support to our organization in Gaza to confront
the split.

Second: To push the cadres and members of Fatah in Gaza to reinforce popular
action and mobilize the Palestinian masses to confront the split and
dictatorship.

Third: To expose the measures of Hamas; these measures which are not part of
our Palestinian traditions and norms, and the crimes committed against the
Palestinian people.

Fourth: To demand Arab security support in Gaza Strip during the interim
phase.

Fifth: To reinforce media action in the Arab and Islamic street to expose
the policies and measures of Hamas.

With regards to ending the siege imposed on Gaza, Fatah outlined four steps:

1- to reinforce the steadfastness of Gaza in face of the siege and grant it
priority in national support through the finances of the PNA and
international; grants and to solve the urgent problems of Gazans who reside abroad (students and patients).

2- To launch an international humanitarian campaign against the siege and
the attempts to cause famine in Gaza and to inform the world about the
crimes against humanity that Israel commits against the citizens in Gaza and
to link the negotiations with Israel with the condition of ending the siege.

3- To start a process of gradual dismantling of the linkage of the
Palestinian economy with the Israeli market, especially in electricity,
fuel, gas, basic food items and replace them with Egyptian, Jordanian and
Arab markets.

4- to work on implementing the international agreement on Rafah Crossing and
try to develop the agreement in a manner that does not give Israel the
chance to control the crossing or the chance to close this important
crossing.

Fatah adopts all legitimate forms of struggle along with clinging to the
option of peace without limiting the options to negotiations to achieve
peace. Among the forms of struggle that can be exercised with success in the
current phase to support and activate the negotiations or to act as
alternative to the negotiations if the negotiations don’t achieve their
goals:

a- To mobilize popular struggle against settlements and its successful
modern form is the continuous confrontation in Bil’in and Ni’lin against
settlements and the wall, and to save Jerusalem and reject its Judaization.
We have the task to mobilize all citizens to engage in the activities and to
achieve Arab and foreign popular participation and offer all support from
the PNA apparatuses in order to make them succeed and Fatah popular and
official leaders need to lead the most important activities.

b- To be creative in finding new forms of struggle and resistance through
popular initiatives and other initiatives by the cadres of the movement and
to stress on the determination of our people to remain steadfast and resist
in accordance with the legitimate norms and laws.

c- To boycott the Israeli products inside the territories and abroad through
popular moves, in particular commodities that have a local alternative and
exercise new forms of civil disobedience against the occupation and work to
escalate an international campaign towards boycotting Israel and its
products and its institutions through making use of the experience of South
Africa.

d- To pose and discuss Palestinian strategic alternatives if it is not
possible to achieve progress through the current negotiations, including poising the idea of the unified democratic state that rejects racism, hegemony and occupation, and to develop struggle against Israeli Apartheid and Racism or return to the idea of declaring the state on the 1967 borders and other strategic alternatives.

e- To continue tireless work towards the release of the prisoners and
detainees and end the external siege and the internal checkpoints and
achieve freedom of movement.

f- To return to the UN and the Security Council and demand that they assume
their responsibilities in ending the conflict and ending the occupation and
to continue work towards the issuance of Security Council resolutions on the
basis of the Seventh Chapter of the UN Charter which carry the binding
character.

g- To regain our direct and strong relations with the Israeli peace camp and
reactive it to work for the sake of a just peace without confusing this with
normalization which is rejected as a policy under the occupation.