Jimmy Carter All Over Again

by Robert Spencer

The Egyptian Government has released the names of nineteen American citizens that it intends to prosecute for their role in fomenting anti-government protests – a charge they deny. Protests from the American Government have so far been futile, met with sneers of contempt.

The echoes are unmistakable. On November 4, 1979, Iranian thugs stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took 52 Americans hostage. Jimmy Carter’s government wrung its hands in futility for the next fourteen months, until finally the Islamic Republic released the hostages on January 20, 1981, the day Ronald Reagan took office as President of the United States.

The bitter irony in all that was that Carter had betrayed the Shah of Iran, a longtime U.S. ally, and thereby paved the way for the ascent to power of the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian mullahcracy that has ruled Iran ever since. Rather than feel gratitude toward Carter, however, Khomeini viewed his abandonment of the Shah as a sign of weakness, and pressed forward with his jihad against the Great Satan.

Iran has maintained a hostile posture toward the United States ever since then, including gleeful predictions of our nation’s imminent demise. Just days ago, Iran’s Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei, declared to an enthusiastic Tehran crowd that “in light of the realization of the divine promise by almighty God, the Zionists and the Great Satan (America) will soon be defeated….Allah’s promises will be delivered and Islam will be victorious.”

As the Iranian regime inches ever closer toward constructing nuclear weapons, as even Hillary Clinton has acknowledged it is trying to do, these words become more than just empty braggadocio and saber-rattling. The U.S. and Israel have one man to thank for the advent of a genocide-minded regime that considers them both the most implacable of enemies, is not deterred by the prospect of millions of its own people dead, and is racing toward completion of a nuclear weapon.

That man, of course, is Jimmy Carter. And from the looks of recent events, he is back in the White House.

In June 2009, when Barack Obama made his notorious appeal to the Muslim world from Cairo, he specifically stipulated that leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood be allowed to attend – despite the fact that at that time the Brotherhood was still an outlawed group. Last March, as the “Arab Spring” uprisings toppled the sclerotic and brutal regime of Hosni Mubarak, Obama hailed “the peaceful transition to democracy in both Tunisia and in Egypt.” As the regime fell, Obama exulted: “We’ve borne witness to the beginning of new chapter in the history of a great country and a longtime partner of the United States.”

At the same time, Obama signaled his willingness to open talks with the Muslim Brotherhood, and gave every indication that he would not oppose the establishment of an Islamic state in Egypt.

Now, as Egypt rushes headlong toward becoming a Sharia state and adopts a posture of increasing hostility toward the United States, Obama is scrambling to hold at bay the forces he is largely responsible for unleashing.

The parallels are so close, they’re almost eerie. The Shah of Iran was no champion of human rights, and neither was Hosni Mubarak. That gave the opposition groups to both an opportunity to appeal to the world’s conscience as the great hope of their people to live at last in dignity – an opportunity that both exploited with great aplomb. Both the Shah and Mubarak were relatively secular rulers who for decades successfully held at bay the pro-Sharia Islamic supremacist forces that despised and longed to topple them. Both had mutually beneficial relationships with the United States – not perfect ones, by any means, but alliances of convenience that fostered stability in troubled regions.

Both the Shah and Mubarak then ran afoul of leftist Democrat presidents who positioned their betrayal of these undeniably less-than-perfect allies as a responsibility necessitated by their commitment to human rights. These presidents appeared naïve to many, but may not have been simply wrongfooted by events: Jimmy Carter praised the Ayatollah Khomeini as a fellow “man of faith,” and Barack Obama’s Muslim upbringing (quite aside from the ever-swirling rumors about his actual religious affiliation) appear to have given him a warmly positive view of Islam and Sharia. Both, in other words, may have viewed the demise of the relatively secular regimes that the U.S. had supported before they became president as a positive development, an expression of the self-determination of the people of each country, and the installation of the rule of a religion that was – they believed – truly moderate, peaceful and tolerant at its core.

In any case, undeniably Carter in Iran and Obama in Egypt got the regimes they wanted. They got the expression of “democracy” that they assured the American people would usher in a new era of peace and freedom. In both cases, they made their decisions based on politically correct falsehoods and fantasies rather than harsh realities. And in both cases, as is increasingly clear in Egypt, innocent Americans have had to pay for their myopia.

This is the Egypt, and this is the Middle East, that Barack Obama has given us. And in the coming weeks and months, he will find that the forces he has helped unleash will be impossible to contain.

Jimmy Carter was soundly defeated for a second term in the 1980 presidential election. But when Barack Obama took office in January 2009, Carter in effect came back to the White House. It is significant in this connection that Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s National Security Advisor and so viciously anti-Israel that he has declared that U.S. aircraft in Iraq should violently impede an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, has advised Obama extensively on foreign policy issues.

As bad as the situation in Egypt is today, however, by far the worst aspect of Barack Obama’s Jimmy Carter reprise act regarding that unhappy country is that no Ronald Reagan appears to be on the horizon.

Robert Spencer

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/02/07/jimmy-carter-all-over-again/

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

Iran: Genocide a Moral Obligation

by Gavriel Queenann

Ali Khameini

Israel news photo: Wikimedia Commons/sajed.ir

Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Monday endorsed a new doctrine explaining why it would be 'legally and morally justified' to commit genocide and wipe Israel off the map.

The article was written by Khameini's close adviser Alireza Forghani and endorsed by the Supreme Leader whose writings played a critical role in its drafting.

The article has since appeared on numerous Iranian government and military websites.

"Israel is a cancerous tumor in the Middle East," the article in the ultraconservative Farsi-language Alef news site. "Israel is a satanic media outlet with bombers. Every Muslim is required to arm themselves against Israel."

"I have already noted the usurper state of Israel poses a grave threat to Islam and Muslim countries. Islam and Muslim states must not lose this opportunity to remove the corruption from out midst. All of our problems are because of Israel - Israel of America."

"The first step should be the absolute destruction of Israel. To this end, Iran could make use of long-range missiles. The distance between us is only 2,600 KM. It can be done in minutes."

The crux of the piece says Iran would be justified in launching a pre-emptive strike against Israel because of the threat the Jewish state's leaders are posing against its own nuclear facilities.

However, during a lengthy discussion of the 'jurisprudence of Jihad,' the article makes it clear that an Israeli strike 'isn't required' and would ultimately serve as a pretext for genocide.

Instead, he says 'defensive Jihad' justifies annihilating Israel and targeting its civilian population because Israel has "spilled Muslim blood" and "oppresses" its Muslim neighbors.

"With regard to the fake state of Israel in Palestine, which is included in the first Qibla of Muslims, we must defend the sacred blood of Muslims in Islamic Palestine using any means necessary," it goes on to explain.

"If the enemy should invade Muslim lands and spill Muslim blood, it is obligatory upon the Muslim masses to use every means possible to defend the lives and property of their brothers. It does not require a judge's permission.

"But regardless of the Israeli aggression against Palestine and the Muslims, it is clear the heads of this fake regime seek to dominate other Islamic lands on its borders and to develop hegemony over the region," it reads.

The article makes it clear Iran sees no place in the Middle East for the Jews.

"Political subdivisions of states and political boundaries between units are not relevant and what is important is to divide the nations and territories based on beliefs and religions groups, blood and blood. Muslim blood must be separate from Infidel blood," it says, citing Khameini's writings.

The document then cites statistics saying 5.7 million of Israel's 7.5 million citizens are Jewish - as a justification for attack. It then proceeds to break down Israel by region and demographic concentrations in order that the most Jews possible would be killed.

It specifically states that Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa ,contain more than 60 per cent of the Jewish population, which could be hit by Shahab 3 ballistic missiles to "easily kill everyone."

The publication of the doctrine comes after Khamenei announced on Friday that Iran would support any nation or group that attacks the 'cancerous tumor' of Israel.

Since its publications several Iranian officials have called for a strike on Israel "within the year."

Gavriel Queenann

Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/152478#.TzC_NoFvIi4

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

Opinion: The Covert Meaning Behind the Headlines

by Rachel Hirshfeld

Often, what is reported in the media is just as significant as the way in which the information is relayed as well as what stories and details get omitted, determined to be ‘unfit to print.’ Politically savvy readers quickly learn that they must read between the lines, ascertain the nuisances of political headlines and deconstruct the language being used, in order to discern the true message behind the information being conveyed.

On February 3, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei reaffirmed the Iranian regime’s commitment to obtaining nuclear weapons and fighting any country that seeks to hinder such efforts, namely the United States and Israel. He espoused that any attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities would result in an attack “10 times worse for the interests of the United States.”

While the story quickly made headlines, Commentary Magazine’s Jonathan S. Tobin poignantly notes that not all noteworthy publications, namely The New York Times, chose to report such noteworthy news. He states, “there was something missing from the Times report of Khamenei’s speech that was reported elsewhere. Other accounts noted that in addition to threatening the United States, Khamenei said this: ‘The Zionist regime is a cancerous tumor and it will be removed.’ While we don’t know how or why a mention of this element of speech managed to get excised from the account in the Times, it’s a question worth pondering.” As one of the leading newspapers in the United States, one must question whether such an omission was simply a careless oversight, or an intentional omission, aimed at understating Israel right to defend itself, whether or not given the “green light” from the American administration.

Furthermore, last week the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammed Hussein, exemplified the incitement and hatred that is so prevalent in Palestinian society, encouraging and exalting the killing of Jews. Marking the 47^th anniversary of the founding of Fatah he said, “The hour of judgment will not come until you fight the Jews… The Jews will hide behind the stone and behind the tree. The stone and the tree will cry, ‘Oh Muslim, Oh Servant of God, this is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” This statement came only a few days before International Holocaust Remembrance Day, during which world leaders, or at least those still committed to preventing genocides against the Jewish people, pledged to never allow such an atrocity to occur again.

While proclamations of “Never Again” are all very noble and heartwarming, one must ask, given the anti-Semitic trends of our times, if such statements really hold any weight. If President Obama, who, upon his quest for the Jewish vote in the upcoming elections, pledges his commitment to the Jewish people and to the State of Israel, why, then, were there no statements issued condemning the remarks of the Grand Mufti, whose rhetoric, like that of the Iranian regime, directly mirrors the rhetoric used by Hitler and the Nazi party?

While it is true that if one is still surprised by the aforementioned statements, he or she has, apparently, not been keeping up with the political trends of our times or the reoccurring cycle of Jewish history. However, whether leaders, like the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the Supreme Leader of Iran, unmistakably proclaim their desire to obliterate the “Zionist entity” or, whether journalists and politicians, who chose to omit or refrain from issuing harsh and unapologetic statements of condemnation in response, are all embarking down a similar path, overt or covert, characterized by undermining the State of Israel and Jewish People.

Rachel Hirshfeld

Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/152476#.TzFJ14FvIi5

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

The High Price of Telling the Truth About Islam

by Eric Allen Bell

[Frontpage Editor's note: The article below is written by Eric Allen Bell, a filmmaker who was recently banned from blogging at the “Daily Kos” because he wrote three articles that ran afoul of the mindset there, specifically naming “Loonwatch.com” as a “terrorist spin control network.” Frontpage invited him to tell his story, which he does below.]

A strange thing happened to me the other day when I was driving past the Federal Building in Los Angeles. There were a crowd of people assembled there with signs which said that Israel is an aggressive force in the Middle East and that Iran is being picked on. As I stopped at a red light I heard a man with a mega phone lead the protesters in a chant charging Obama with genocide. I saw many young people and several Muslim women with their heads covered. It was an anti-war demonstration that probably a year ago I would have supported. But although I am not in favor of military action, I know that Iran is not another Iraq, and that in fact there is more going on here than the overly-simplified picture that the protestors were painting, as cars drove by honking in support. As the light turned green another sign caught my eye – a picture of the Twin Towers burning which read “911 Was an Inside Job”. As I looked at a sea of Palestinian flags and college kids banging on drums I felt a certain frustration – frustration based on a series of events that have changed my world view.

In the Summer of 2010, having recently escaped Hollywood, CA to take a much needed break from my profession as a film maker, I was driving in my car listening to a story on NPR. It seems the people in my new home of Murfreesboro, TN were up in arms over the proposed construction of a 53,000 square foot mega mosque, to be built in their small town in the middle of the American Bible Belt.

I listened carefully, to the sound bytes, of those who had shown up to a town hall meeting to voice their opposition and, as someone who was rather new to the South, I was surprised by what I was hearing. “America is a Christian nation and there is only one God and his name is not Allah and his son is Jesus Christ” and “America is a Christian Nation” and “These Muslims do not share my values and I don’t want them in my backyard”. Growing up in Southern California, I had never heard anything like this before in my life. And I started to follow the story with great interest.

On the outer edge of town, off a small country road, there was a large parcel of land, right next door to a Baptist church, with a big sign that read, “Future Home of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro”. Over the past 6 months that sign had been defaced twice. Once it was broken in half and another time the words “Not Welcome” were spray painted over it.

Rutherford County, which includes Murfreesboro, only has a little over 100,000 residents and yet the area boasts nearly 200 Christian churches. Having not been much of a fan of Islam or Christianity or religion in general (and that’s putting it mildly) I saw this as something of a David vs. Goliath story – with fanatical Evangelicals bullying a peaceful Muslim population, which had been in the community for over 30 years without there ever being any trouble. And, after learning that in July there was to be a big parade down Main Street to the town square, protesting the construction of this new mosque, I decided someone really needed to make a documentary about this. And even though I had gone to Murfreesboro to escape the film world for a while, it seemed pretty clear that if I did not document this in a movie, no one else would. I wanted to show the world what I was seeing. So I put together a small film crew and began production on a documentary I would title, “Not Welcome”.

I had never seen more American flags assembled together in one place than I had on that hot July morning as the anti-mosque crowd gathered at the base camp to prepare for the parade. Many of the marchers showed up wearing red, white and blue. I had 4 cameras covering the event with one crew embedded with the Liberal activists who were going to counter-demonstrate and the rest of the cameras with me, embedded with those who were to march against the mosque. I conducted several interviews in the school parking lot where locals and those who had driven for hours gathered, prepared to march against what they perceived to be not only a threat to their way of life, but also something of an insult given the events of September 11, 2001. Two Congressional candidates, both promising to “stop the Islamic training camp” showed up and used this opportunity to campaign, one of whom even gave a speech through a mega phone reminding folks to vote for him if they wanted to stop Sharia Law from coming to Murfreesboro. The pastor of Baptist church gathered everyone together in prayer, and the parade took off down Main Street with signs that read “Google the Koran” and “Stop Homegrown Terrorism” and someone in the crowd handed out hundreds of small Israeli flags as several hundred Southerners marched against the mosque.

About six months later I had accumulated over 300 hours of footage, interviewing the parade organizer, both Congressional candidates, the Mayor, the Imam at the mosque and several of its board members, numerous concerned residents on both sides of the issue, Muslim residents, city council members, a Christian Zionist lobbyist who was organizing the opposition to the mosque – and I had even filmed weeks of court proceedings, as a local group had filed suit against the County to stop them from issuing any construction permits to the Islamic Center. The court proceedings were truly a circus with a country lawyer in loud suit with a bow tie argued that Islam is not a religion and that he was prepared to take this matter to the Supreme Court if necessary. That legal action had failed and failed miserably. And although many of the townspeople did in fact have a number of very valid concerns, I felt that those whom they had chosen to represent them were not their best foot forward. In many ways, for the people of Murfreesboro, TN this turned out to be an international embarrassment – given the level of interest from the press.

Also, someone tried to set fire to some construction equipment at the site of the new mosque and the student activist group, calling themselves “Middle Tennesseans for Religious Freedom” put together a candle light vigil where hundreds of townspeople showed up in support of tolerance. A few young men showed up in a pickup truck and honked their horn repeatedly throughout the vigil. Their clothes seemed to indicate they had spent the work day hanging drywall. And when they put up a huge sign in the back of their truck which read “No Mosque” while misspelling the word mosque, I did not hesitate to film them but to also sort of taunt them, in order to provoke a good response on camera. And I got it. One of them said we should suspend the Constitution and went on to say that “All them Mooslums should be shipped home” even the ones who were born here.

Adding more fuel to that fire was an incident that took place when I attempted to interview Kevin Fisher at a Tea Party event on the town square. It was my opinion that in order to avoid accusations of being bigoted, the money interests (a Christian Zionist organization called Proclaiming Justice to the Nations) chose the only person of color, already involved in this issue, to lead the parade and to be a plaintiff in the lawsuit. Kevin Fisher was an African American college dropout, who worked as a prison guard and became a passionate opponent of the new mosque, after his wife divorced him and became, you guessed it, a Muslim convert. When I approached him on the square with a crew that included 4 cameras, saying only “Hi, Kevin” he dialed his cell phone and called 9-1-1 saying that he was being “racially harassed”. This not only made the headlines of the local paper but the incident, including audio from the 9-1-1 call was played over and over that night on the local evening news. This became something of a running joke, when I was recognized at the grocery store in Murfreesboro for instance, people would often point at me and say, “Hey, stop racially harassing me” and then we would all have a big laugh. And Islamic blogs such as Loonwatch.com were only too happy to run an article about how an opponent of the mosque was “playing the race card” against a filmmaker who was just trying to ask questions.

CNN breezed through town and produced a quick hit piece painting all of the mosque opponents as uneducated rednecks and the Islamic community as everyday people who were being wrongly persecuted. Soledad O’Brien’s producer offered to buy some of my footage from me with the explicit promise that their piece was going to be called “Islam: In America” and would not focus more than a few minutes on Murfreesboro. After an inside tip that this producer was lying to me, I confronted him and got some rather vague answers. So I declined to license him any of my material. And sure enough, the CNN documentary did in fact focus exclusively on Mufreesboro and was called “Unwelcome: The Muslims Next Door”. Somehow Hollywood, with its usual backstabbing tricks, had managed to find me hiding out in Tennessee.

I had accumulated a lot of good quality footage. That, combined with the increasing number of physical threats to me personally while filming in large crowds, and death threats that had arrived via email (causing me to look over my shoulder everywhere I went and making it necessary to spend a small fortune on private security) told me it was time. The writing was on the wall. It was time for me to leave Murfreesboro, hire a professional Editor and get to work on assembling my footage to create a feature length documentary for theatrical distribution.

Before I go any further, I should mention that, while all of this was happening, I had become involved in the story itself. I took sides. I sided with the Islamic community in their legal right to build a house of worship and when I was interviewed by the local papers (it’s not every day that a small town like this has someone shooting a documentary there) when I was asked where I stood on the issue I never hesitated to give my point of view. And after a time my point of view was sought out by larger newspapers and several local and syndicated radio programs – mostly Conservative and mostly taking issue with my stance. And I was also invited to write several pieces for Michael Moore’s blog as well.

Although I had left town to edit, there continued to be letters to the editor on a few of the local papers saying that I should leave TN and go back to where I came from. I could not believe the cartoonish way in which those who opposed the mosque were making their case. I felt like I was on the right side of this thing – absolutely certain. But in fact, I was wrong.

Everything I have told you up until now – this version of my story – is exactly how I was seeing things up until something changed. I went home to Los Angeles, showed my 25 minute short version of the documentary to some distributors and backers, and did the usual dog and pony show that had worked so well to raise funds, for other motion picture projects I had been involved with in the past. And sure enough someone said they would back the completion of the movie. It was decided that the focus would be on “the enemy at home” that being what we were calling “Apocalyptic Christianity” (as there was concern about using the word “Zionism” in “Christian Zionism”). The Murfreesboro issue was to be used as something of a jumping off point to take a look at the expanding influence of the End Times Evangelical lobby in the United States and how they use their influence to manufacture consent for the bombing of oil rich Islamic countries and to influence policy on social issues. The theme would focus on the problems we have in America, with our own religious lunatic fringe, rather than on a peaceful group of non-Christians who just wanted to build a place of worship.

After writing a few articles for Michael Moore, I also wrote for a liberal blog called Common Dreams and I wrote over a hundred articles for the Daily Kos, a liberal blog so popular that they receive over one million visitors a day. I felt I was protecting the underdog, going after the bullies. I really believed that I was on the right side of this thing.

But something kept nagging at me on a gut level. Something about all of this didn’t quite feel right. The Arab Spring, which I supported, started to degenerate into the Islamist Winter, and I grew more and more concerned. I flew back to Nashville to shoot a conference on whether or not Islam was conducive with Democratic Values and on the way to my hotel room I learned that my cab driver was from Egypt. I asked him how he felt about the fall of Mubarak, a dictator worth over $70 billion dollars while so much of his country was living in poverty and he told me he was concerned. Concerned? Wasn’t this good news? The cab driver was a Coptic Christian and he told me that he feared for his family back home. “If the Muslims take control, and they will, it will be very dangerous for my parents and my sisters. I’m scared for them right now”. After that conversation, I started to pay more attention to the news coming from the Islamic world in the Middle East.

Over the coming months I watched as the Muslim Brotherhood gained political power in Egypt. I saw that cab driver’s worst fears come true as Coptic Christians were attacked by Islamic mobs. I saw Tunisia institute Sharia, the brutal Islamic Law. After Libya fell, the Transitional Council also instituted Islamic Law. The nuclear armed Islamic government of Pakistan arrested and punished those who cooperated with the United States in killing Osama Bin Laden. A woman under the Islamic government of Afghanistan faced execution for the crime of being raped. Similar news stories emerged from Iran. A man who typed “there is no god” as his Facebook status in Indonesia, the largest Islamic country in the world, was arrested for blasphemy.

Several Muslim men in England were arrested for handing out leaflets to Londoners demanding that homosexuals be executed by hanging for violating Islamic Law with their lifestyle.

And it struck me. Even though these angry townspeople in Mufreesboro, TN had not articulated their concerns very well, they were only half wrong. I remember meeting Frank Gaffney and interviewing him in front of the courthouse and asking him if he really thought that the peaceful Muslims here actually presented a real threat to America and he said no. That caught me off guard so I asked if he really thought it was a credible threat that a community that makes up about one percent of the United States population was just going to suddenly rise up one day and try to take over the country and force Sharia Law onto all of us. Again he said no. Then he told me I was asking the wrong questions. He suggested that I was only looking for answers that would support the conclusions I had already arrived at. He said he had, after much research, arrived at a different set of conclusions and he challenged me to look a little deeper. He gave me a report to look at and many, many months later I did look at his report.

It was at this time that I went to my backers and told them that we were not making an honest documentary. I felt that everything I had put into the 25 minute short version (the one I used to raise the completion funds) was true, but only half true. It was critical that we also show the very real threats that exist within Islam. We needed to show that what is happening to these small communities of peaceful Muslims in America are the exception to the rule. I wanted to show what happens to countries when they gain a Muslim majority, how women are treated, that homosexuals were executed, that free speech did not exist, that the forced Islamic Law was not consistent with Democratic Values – anything and everything I could think of that ought to strike a chord with the Liberal mindset. And the response I received was, “Eric you are starting to sound like an Islamophobe. We don’t want to make a movie that promotes fear. Let’s just stick with the existing plan, okay?”

I fought and I fought. I showed them a book called “The Truth About Mohammed” but was struck down since the author was a man named Robert Spencer and my backers pointed out that the Southern Poverty Law Center named his “Jihad Watch” site as part of a hate group. I asked them to watch a documentary called “Islam: What the West Needs to Know” and pointed out that I had researched independently and verified the truth of what was being presented there, but they would not even watch this documentary as they were sure in advance that it was “hate speech” and “propaganda designed to spread fear”. It probably goes without saying that by now I was very frustrated. I showed my new backers several verses from the Koran that call for the killing of infidels and was told that these verses were probably being taken out of context. I showed them a video clip from MEMRI TV of a young Egyptian child reciting a Hadith that calls for the killing of Jews and was told that “you can’t trust MEMRI because they have an agenda”.

I mentioned the popular Islamophobia watchdog site “Loonwatch” and how I had noticed a pattern of deflection all criticisms of radical and violent Islam by calling anyone who publicly raises these concerns a “Loon” and how I felt this was an intentional effort to provide a smoke screen for the terrorists. I also noted that everything Loonwatch said was in lockstep with the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and now CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation – the largest Islamic charity at one time, which was found to be funneling monies to Islamic terrorist organizations. I also noted that CAIR had ties to both Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and that Al Qeada had come out of the Muslim Brotherhood. I expressed my concerns that the Egyptian Imam of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro might have ties to the MB, something I had failed to properly investigate. But since CAIR had the support of Glenn Greenwald and Amy Goodman’s show, Democracy Now, I was told that I had my facts all wrong. It was also pointed out to me that if CAIR was allegedly some kind of terrorist front then why do they still have a special tax status and why are they still around? When I said I do not know but it was possible that the government might prefer to watch them out in the open rather than risk them going underground I was told that my judgment was sounding less and less clear and that maybe I needed to take a step back from the project for a while.

As a last attempt I showed them footage of the Imam in Murfreesboro condoning stoning, admitting that Mohammed had stoned someone to death, saying that women cannot be trusted with money because they are irrational. Then I pointed out that a board member of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro was investigated after pictures from his MySpace page had surfaced indicating his strong sympathies for Hamas. I was reminded that Hamas was also a political party which was voted in Democratically and that I needed to make a choice – either stick with the original blueprint or else give the money back and go find myself another backer. So I did. I walked. If I can’t make an honest documentary then I’m in the wrong business. I didn’t want to add to more of the noise that’s out there – I wanted to make something that told the truth, even if that truth is hard to swallow.

It’s funny because I run a website called Global One TV, which has had about 23 million visitors so far, and the theme of this blog is that “Inward Revolution Creates Outward Revolution”. And here I was having to take my own medicine. My own inward revolution – the questioning of one’s conclusions in search of a deeper truth – had led me to a very strange place. I thought of the famous Nietzsche quote that says “When you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you”. And with nothing left to lose, I used my position at Daily Kos to go about telling the truth.

In January of 2012 I wrote 3 consecutive articles for the Daily Kos. The first was entitled “Loowatch.com and Radical Islam”. Here I pointed out the how Loonwatch only deflects criticism of radical Islam. I was also critical of Islamic theology while noting over and over that most Muslims were peaceful. The comments section of Daily Kos made me feel like I was attending my own funeral. It was like a public stoning. There wasn’t much in the way of responding to any of the points laid out in my article but hundreds of comments accusing me of being “right wing” a “bigot” and an “lslamophobe”. This was disappointing.

The next day I received an email from Loonwatch.com with an article showing my name and a photograph of my face, going out to much of the Islamic world, calling me the “Loon at Large”. This article was picked up by IslamophobiaToday.com and TheAmericanMuslim.org – later being repurposed by numerous Islamic blogs around the world, including in places where we all know what happens to anyone who is perceived to be the enemy of Allah or who dares to “insult” Islam.

My next article sought to further substantiate my point with regard to these wolves in sheep’s clothing calling themselves “Islamophobia Watchdog sites” and their first line of defense, that being a blogosphere of liberal lemming infidels who are pre-programmed to blurt out the word “Islamophobe” on cue. That article was called “How and Why Loonwatch is a Terrorist Spin Control Network”. And as you might have guessed, this piece was met with the same mob mentality of those who, rather than read the article and criticize it on its merits, instead shot the messenger with charges of “Islamophobia”. There were also 2 Daily Kos articles written in response attacking me personally, another Loonwatch article where someone suggested I must be from TN and have no education, etc. And once again, my name was put out on the street through a network of Islamic Blogs, including the landing page for CAIR, using a form of Islamic double speak which translated to any serious Jihadist means “enemy of Allah” and “insulting Islam”.

Given the incredible density of the popular Liberal mind, how the readers of my articles were unable to see how the beliefs of Islam were in direct conflict with human rights, gay rights, women’s rights and basic Democratic Values, I wrote a final piece called, “Are You In Favor of Human Rights?” and that one of course got me banned from Daily Kos. It should be noted that in one of the Loonwatch.com articles the author, a person simply calling himself “Danios” demanded that DKOS silence me and provided a link for its readers to email the editors of the Daily Kos, demanding that this “Islamophobe” be censored. And it worked – once again proving the oil and water relationship between Islam and tolerance for free speech.

Things got even stranger from there. Robert Spencer himself wrote me an email and we had a rather interesting dialogue. It became apparent almost immediately that there was nothing about this man that was even remotely hateful. So when Robert Spencer asked if I minded if he reprint my email in response to his on Jihad Watch, I said “sure, why not?” Once that surfaced, the friend count on my Facebook fan page dropped suddenly. Friends and acquaintances told me I had become a hatemonger, a fear monger and an Islamophobe. I pointed out that an Islamophobe is someone with an irrational fear of Islam but there was no reasoning with anyone so deeply indoctrinated into the tyranny of political correctness.

And almost right on cue the news story broke about the NYPD using as a training video a documentary narrated by a devout Muslim who opposes terrorism and jihad, someone who has advised law enforcement and served in the military and as a physician to highly placed members of the United States government. That documentary was called “The Third Jihad” and the story surfaced that CAIR was calling this film “Islamophobic” and demanding that the NYPD pull it right away, which of course they did. CAIR demanded the removal of the head of the NYPD and the liberal blogosphere sang backup – most notably with articles on Huffington Post calling “The Third Jihad” propaganda, hate speech and of course more “Islamophobia”. When I posted a link to this documentary on my Facebook page I was met with more charges of being an Islamophobe by people who had only recently told me how much they had been inspired and influenced by my writings.

After Jamie Glazov of Frontpagemag.com – part of the David Horowitz Freedom Center – reached out to me to ask me to be on his radio show (which I agreed to) I surfed the web a bit trying to get a better sense of who exactly David Hororwitz was. It became clear almost immediately that we do not share the same political views, but one thing Horowitz did say that came through with stunning clarity was an assertion that there was an unholy alliance between the Left and Islam, with radical Islam using the Liberal media to create a smoke screen for it – a place where radical can appear moderate and receive Liberal support. He also went on to say that in many universities across America that students were being radicalized, indoctrinated into the far Left. And I remembered something. Nearly all of the organizers for the college aged activist group who demonstrated in favor of the new mosque in Murfreesboro were either Socialists or Communists. These were kids and they all seemed to share one Professor in particular who was something of a mentor to them, a Socialist who always seemed to be hanging around their college parties, infiltrating into their social scene, taking the smarter and more articulate ones under his wing as their campus group called simply “Solidarity” grew in numbers – in fact recruiting quite a few students while organizing in favor of the mosque. Yikes.

So here we are today, as news that Kuwait goes Islamist and the NYPD answers to CAIR, an arm of a terrorist organization, out of concern for political correctness. Have I become a Conservative out of all of this? Not really. I still oppose the invasion of Iraq. I still feel that all wars should be avoided unless absolutely necessary. I still think that George W. Bush was one of the worst things to happen to America in my lifetime. I still support marriage equality. But I’m also still pro-life. Do you see a trend here? I support human rights and oppose anything which I perceive to be in violation of human rights.

Where do I stand on Islam? Let’s look at its founder – a man who raped a 9 year old girl, a slave owner, a leader who ordered people to be tortured, for adulterers to be stoned, for countless nonbelievers to be beheaded, a killer, a warmonger who spread his “religion of peace” by the sword, a man who suffered from hallucinations of voices telling him to do violent things, a tyrant, a homicidal maniac perhaps the equivalent of 100,000 Osama Bin Ladens. And this sadistic lunatic is considered to be the “ideal man” in Islam. What more needs to be said about Islam than that?

So in this climate where innocent people are killed when Korans are burned, when there are riots and bomb threats and killings over cartoons that offend Muslims, when a novelist such as Salman Rushdie is advised by Indian intelligence authorities that it is unsafe for him to enter the country to attend the world’s largest literary festival, when Muslims outside the festival threaten violence such that the festival organizers decide to cancel even patching in a video of Rushdie for the conference, in a world where a man, Theo Van Gough, was shot a couple dozen times in broad daylight, then stabbed, then had a sword rammed into his heart on the sidewalk of a European street simply for making a 10 minute film about the mistreatment of Muslim women – in such a world that is constantly terrorized by Islamic militants whose insanity is co-opted by an army of Liberal bloggers who make excuses for them – who tell us that 911 was probably our fault – what will become of my documentary when I finish it?

How will “Not Welcome” be received? Will movie theaters refuse to show it, just like those many bookstores who removed the Danish cartoons from their shelves? Will film festivals be afraid to screen it? Will my life be in danger? Will some lunatic Islamic cleric issue a Fatwa ordering my death? Will CAIR gain even more political influence and work within the system to get it banned as “hate speech”? Will critics fear for their lives and thus refuse to review it?

Is the Liberal view that Stealth Jihad is just some whacky conspiracy theory really true? Who will win – free speech of the savagery of a growing mob hell bent on Jihad? I can only tell you this. I will not back down. I will not be bullied, threatened, coerced or terrorized by the “religion of peace”.

We each have a responsibility to the other people on this planet, and especially to those whom we will leave this planet to after we are gone. And this sometimes means taking an unpopular stand in order to protect the rights of innocent people. Loonwatch, CAIR and the other numerous terrorist spin control networks – you’ve not seen the end of me. Not by a long shot. As the saying goes, “You have a right to swing your fists, but that right ends when your fist connects with my nose”.

And by the way, I still believe that unless they break the law, the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro has a legal right to build their house of worship. We don’t have to like it, but then again the First Amendment was designed not to protect popular ideas – as they don’t need protecting – but to protect unpopular ideas as well. This is something you won’t find in any Islamic country and it is also something worth protecting – even when the so-called “religion of peace” tries to shut you down.

Peace,

Eric Allen Bell

Eric Allen Bell is a writer and filmmaker. His directorial debut, a short film entitled “Missing Sock” was placed on Film Threat’s prestigious “Top 10 Short Films” of 2004. He went on to direct his first full length feature, “The Bondage” which premiered at the South By South West Film Festival, receiving multiple offers and securing full theatrical distribution. His current project, a documentary entitled “Not Welcome” chronicles the backlash concerning the building of a 53,000 square foot mega-mosque in the middle of America’s Bible Belt. He can be reached at: Eric@BellMedia.org.

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/02/07/the-high-price-of-telling-the-truth-about-islam/

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

Why Did the Arabs Suffer “Nakba” (Disaster) in 1948 and Every Day Since?

by Barry Rubin

The Surprising View of the Man Who Coined That Term

It’s ironic how the West has adopted the narrative of the very people who caused so much disaster in the Middle East. There are two reasons: The ignorance of the Western “experts” and the domination of the radical interpretations that made the mess in the first place.

Here’s an example. In a paper just published by Harvard, somebody named Neil Lewis (where do they find these people to write about Middle East issues who know nothing about them?) argues that the idea the New York Times is biased against Israel is a myth. Not just a partially right or exaggerated claim. Oh, no, it’s completely ridiculous! If anything, he writes, the New York Times–as a radical-controlled British university think tank did a while ago regarding the consistently anti-Israel BBC–is really too biased in favor of Israel! No doubt Mr. Lewis is destined for a fine, well-financed career. Look for his future articles featured in…the New York Times. Oh, wait, what a coincidence! He’s already a New York Times writer! Ah, brave new world that has such people in it!

Isn’t this a conflict of interest? After all, if Lewis criticized the newspaper he would be criticizing himself and his colleagues, even conceivably endangering his future. Who suggested getting a New York Times reporter to analyze the fairness of that newspaper? And yet there is something fitting about it since mass media journalists believe only they can judge the aptness of their coverage. Some decades ago perhaps that was conceivable but in those days there were such things as professional ethics, the belief in the effort to be as objective as possible, the idea that reporting should be to present the news rather than opinion and an ideological agenda, and all those other “old-fashioned” ideas.

Having written scores of specific articles documenting this bias in great detail, I know that Harvard is one more triumph of ideology over serious scholarship. Some have pointed to the things that Lewis’s paper ignored and twisted but my attention was drawn to a wonderful example of special pleading and historical ignorance so common when it comes to bashing Israel and apologizing for Palestinian intransigence. And there’s a big surprise and irony here that I’ll explain in a moment.

Lewis writes:

“The anniversary of the founding of Israel is an occasion for official joy in the country. But for many Arabs, it is instead commemorated as the `nakba’’ or catastrophe, the time when half the region’s Arab population—estimated at between 700,000 and 800,000—had fled or were driven out. Exactly what happened remains a heated debate.”

“‘Part of the appeal of the term `nakba’ for Arabs is certainly the hope that it may provide some rhetorical and moral counterweight to the emotive terms `Holocaust’ and `Shoah’ (Hebrew for “catastrophe.’’). It has been in use among Arabs since 1949, according to one expert.”

“The word does not, however, make its first appearance in The Times until 1998 in an article that was part of a series examining Israel on its 50th anniversary. `Nakba’ which has become a familiar term on university campuses because of the considerable support in such places for the Palestinian cause, subsequently appears in The Times’s news pages only a few dozen more times.”

Lewis’s footnote about that expert [excerpt] reads: “The term `nakba’ was used beginning in 1949 by Arabs after it was part of the title of a book by Constantine Zurayk, a professor at the American University of Beirut, said Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University.”

Thus, Lewis implies that because it didn’t use the word “nakba” until 1998 that proves the Times was pro-Israel and ignored the Palestinians’ plight. Like so much said about the Arab-Israeli conflict it is remarkable how absurd this argument can shown to be in less than 150 words. Here they are:

Everyone who ever lost a war is unhappy about it and suffered. Does the Times discuss the “nakba” of the Confederacy, the Germans in World War One and Two, the Japanese in World War Two, and so on through every modern conflict? Should it speak of Communists’ mourning at the fall of the Soviet bloc? Lewis implies that the Times never discussed the fact that the Arabs were unhappy they lost in 1948 or that there were Palestinian refugees or that they claimed all of Israel. Every week, perhaps several times a week, for a half century or more this information has been published in the Times. The only thing the Times didn’t do–but has “corrected” for quite some time by using the “nakba” concept–is to present Israel’s creation as a tragedy and to imply Palestinian suffering was totally due to Israeli actions. Finally, Palestinian “nakba” commemorations are relatively recent, designed by the PA as propaganda exercises. Why recent? Because the PLO would never seek pity from the West but rather presented itself as heroic warriors headed for victory.

But the man who coined the use of the word “nakba” in this context had views quite different from Lewis, the Times, the PA, the campus anti-Israel demonstrators, and the revolutionary Islamists.

Constantine Zurayk was vice-president of the American University of Beirut. His book was entitled The Meaning of the Disaster. Here’s the key passage:

“Seven Arab states declare war on Zionism in Palestine, stop impotent before it and turn on their heels. The representatives of the Arabs deliver fiery speeches in the highest government forums, warning what the Arab states and peoples will do if this or that decision be enacted. Declarations fall like bombs from the mouths of officials at the meetings of the Arab League, but when action becomes necessary, the fire is still and quiet, and steel and iron are rusted and twisted, quick to bend and disintegrate.”

This is the old style of Arab discourse. Zurayk openly acknowledged the Arab states rejected all compromise, made ferocious threats, and invaded the new state of Israel to destroy it. For him, the “nakba” taught that they needed to modernize and democratize their system. Only thoroughgoing reform could fix the shortcomings of the Arabic-speaking world. What happened instead was another 55 years of the same thing, followed by this new era opening last year which will probably also bring a half-century of the same thing. Nakba has become the opposite of what Zurayk wanted it to be: Blaming your opponent rather than acknowledging your own shortcomings and fixing them.

What was a cry for reform and moderation has now become a call for revenge. If the Palestinian Arab forces had not begun preparing to launch war in 1946, led by the mufti, Amin al-Husaini, freshly returned from Berlin where he had been Hitler’s biggest non-European collaborator (details in the new book by myself and Wolfgang Schwanitz coming later this year) and using hidden Nazi-supplied weapons (1942) there would have been no nakba.

Oh, and does the “nakba”–using Zurayk’s own account–compare to the Holocaust murders of six million Jews by the Nazis and their willing collaborators? Well, the Jews didn’t have a state and they didn’t declare war on Germany and invade it with armies, nor did they threaten to wipe Germany off the map, bomb them, and commit genocide on the Germans.

If Arab states had made some compromise either to prevent Israel’s creation through flexible diplomacy or to accept a two-state solution there would have been no nakba.

If the Palestinian Arabs and the Arab states had accepted the partition plan in 1947 there would have been no nakba. Instead of mourning Israel’s creation they would have been cheering Palestine’s creation.

The true “nakba” was the rejection of partition that would have created a Palestinian Arab state in 1948. Such a state would have already celebrated its sixtieth anniversary. No 1956, 1967, 1973, or 1982 wars; no refugees; no terrorism. Even today, this point has only been discussed in Arabic by a handful of brave, isolated, and ignored people.

In reality, the nakba resulted from an attempt to destroy Israel and yet is now used as the rationale for continuing to try to destroy Israel.

Yet the nakba concept of which Zurayk wrote was much broader, the Arabic-speaking world’s failure to embrace modernity, science, real democracy, an other such things. In that respect, every day is a nakba and 2011 was not the year of the “Arab Spring” but the year of renewing the nakba strategy. It is a self-inflicted nakba and the victims are the Arabic-speaking people themselves.

Like so much said about the Arab-Israeli conflict it is remarkable how absurd this can shown to be in less than 150 words. Here they are: [sic]

So because a Syrian writer produced a book whose title was ignored by Palestinians until the last few years, the West is guilty for not taking up its title decades before the Palestinians did! And because a liberal modernizer analyzed the defeat as the internal failure of Arab states, this should be to the benefit of nationalist dictators and Islamists who rule these states today.

What did Zurayk think about Zionism and its triumph? Here’s what he wrote:

“The reason for the victory of the Zionists was that the roots of Zionism are grounded in modern Western life while we for the most part are still distant from this life and hostile to it. They live in the present and for the future, while we continue to dream the dreams of the past and to stupefy ourselves with its fading glory.”

“To dream the dreams of the past and to stupefy ourselves with its fading glory.” Isn’t that precisely what the Nakba concept is used for today? To say: we cannot make a compromise peace because those horrible Israelis were so mean to us more than 60 years ago. We are victims. We want revenge. We dream of total victory.

And those dreams and that stupefying guarantees failure for the Arabs, and most of all the Palestinians, today.

If Zurayk were alive today he’d be an Arab liberal fighting radical Islamism. Zurayk wanted the Arabs to learn from their mistakes. How does that stand in the context of 2012? How soon will it be before we’re hearing of the Egyptian, Lebanese, Libyan, Syrian, and Tunisian “nakba”? Or how about the Palestinian nakba when Hamas took over the Gaza Strip in a coup? One day we might even hear about the multiple “nakba” pattern caused by the refusal of the PLO and PA to make a compromise agreement with Israel leading to a two-state solution and full peace.

Barry Rubin

Source: http://www.gloria-center.org/2012/02/why-did-the-arabs-suffer-%E2%80%9Cnakba%E2%80%9D-disaster-in-1948-and-every-day-since-the-surprising-view-of-the-man-who-coined-that-term/

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

Egypt Et Cetera: When the Moderates are Radicals You’re in Trouble

by Barry Rubin

Dear readers,

I’d like to share with you a secret. Every day I read and hear things by people who claim to be experts on the Middle East. I have read them on the land; I have read them on the sea; I have read them in the air.

And they will never surrender to reality. Here are the two main causes of error:

–They think the Middle East is just like the West so they can extrapolate from their own experience. When someone would say, “If I were Yasir Arafat, I’d….” My response would be: Stop right there. I must run out to the corner store and get a pack of cigarettes. I have never smoked a cigarette. And I kept on running. You are not Arafat or Khomeini or Saddam Hussein or whatever and unless you have some understanding of how they actually think–and not your own Western pragmatic interpretation of what they should think–there’s no sense in discussing it.

–They think the Middle East is just what they’d like it to be. Peace? Easy. They have a plan. My response: I’d love to hear your plan but I’m all booked up to hear Middle East peace plans for the next three years. I’ll put you on the waiting list and get back to you. By the same token, they sometimes lie to make things seem better. You can’t criticize the Palestinian Authority–or the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hizballah, the Turkish regime, etc.–even by telling the truth about it because that would damage the cause of “peace.” They don’t understand that not telling the truth is the best way to undermine any chance for peace, or any understanding of why there is no peace.

The Middle East is so strange in Western terms, so different, and having its own unique history and institutions that unless you are really aware of those differences please pick something else to be an expert on. Yet the previous statement–so taken for granted by previous generations of specialists–is something near heresy today in the West. Write a sentence like that and you can forget about getting an academic job or receiving tenure. You might even be attacked as an enemy of the people. In other words, error is institutionalized, which guarantees its prevalence.

And that brings me to a case in point that I have before me right now.

The Wafd is a “liberal” “moderate” Egyptian party, right? It is the biggest non-Islamist party in Egypt’s parliament with 7.6 percent (pretty pitiful, huh?) of the seats. So if you are a Western reporter, policymaker, or “expert” you would say that it is one of the great hopes—perhaps the greatest—for moderate liberal Egyptian democracy, right?

And the same people, of course, explain that revolutionary Islamism isn’t really a threat because they are really just all greedy people who’d rather have U.S. aid than Allah.

But how many “liberal” ”moderate” parties have had:

–A deadly shoot-out between two factions over control of their headquarters’ building?

–An alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood which might again be renewed.

–A deputy leader who explains that September 11 was a U.S.-Zionist plot; the Holocaust never happened; and Anne Frank was a phony?

–And now this article, courtesy of the party’s official newspaper, January 27, 2012. Thanks to MEMRI for catching and translating it. I’ll let you read the whole thing for yourself if you want but briefly the article charges that a small U.S. Navy Medical Research Unit in Cairo that conducts research on tropical and Third World diseases is in fact engaged in plotting to send:

“Medicines, pesticides, food products, and seeds [to Egypt], after these have been dangerously tampered with so as to harm the Egyptians’ health” and handling “biological weapons which, if deployed, could exterminate the entire Egyptian nation, or any other nation….”

“They can also manipulate these Egyptian genes, alter their traits, and deform them by means of American medicines or vaccines that are sold dirt cheap to the poor Egyptian people, along with crop seeds and food products…. “

It suggests that various disease epidemics in Egypt were caused by the United States and charges that the U.S. installation, “sees the Egyptian children as an opportunity to test new medicines,” turning the country’s children into lab rats and causing increases “in infertility, mental retardation, and disability among Egyptians born in recent years… as well as [instances of] impotence.”

And all this is done, “in accordance with America’s will, which has Israel standing forcefully behind it” to develop biological weapons for Israel against Egypt.

This one article is a rich source of knowledge about Egypt and the Arabic-speaking world not so much in terms of health issues but in terms of political and intellectual structures. Of course, there are the common conspiracy theories and the idea that the Zionists are everywhere but that’s only the beginning of the issue. Don’t be fooled into thinking that conspiracy theories are silly, funny, archaic ideas that don’t mean anything precisely because they are inaccurate.

Here are some of the implications:

–An American attempt to help Egypt (while also shielding itself from disease) is portrayed as a harmful and aggressive activity.

–The priority for the nation is to fight foreign conspiracies not to fix domestic shortcomings.

–Since internal problems are blamed on outsiders they are thus made impossible to solve. Science and modernity are viewed not as solutions but with suspicion as attempt to destroy one’s own society through imperialist takeover, social transformation, and atheism (or Christianity imposed on Islam).

–If Americans are so evil then it makes sense for people to become terrorists and to slay or drive out the horrible villains. Isn’t it reasonable to slay Americans in revenge or in self-defense? Now important Egyptians are also claiming that U.S. embassy officials are running over Egyptians with their cars (apparently U.S. embassy vehicles were stolen by criminals).

Together these four symptoms block progress, inflame hatred and extremism, and produce conflict. This is a common pattern in the Middle East whether aimed against Israel, the United States, or the West in general.
And guess what? Except for the last sentence of the third aspect, these are also the talking points of hegemonic Western leftism. It’s all there: the West is evil and wants to dominate; underdevelopment is not the result of traditional society and thinking but Western threat and conspiracy; fighting the West from outside and weakening it from inside are justified.

So, in short, the Islamists are not “moderate” and many of the alleged moderates are not moderate. Hence, the hope for moderation and real democracy is limited by the small numbers of those who hold them. We were told not so long ago that the young, social-media using kids who made Egypt’s revolution would dominate the country thereafter.

Question: What percentage of the vote in parliamentary elections did the young, social-media using kids who made Egypt’s revolution get?

Answer: 1.3 percent.

Barry Rubin

Source: http://www.gloria-center.org/2012/02/egypt-et-cetera-when-the-moderates-are-radicals-you%E2%80%99re-in-trouble/

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

On Obama's Watch

by Frank Gaffney, Jr.

On February 5th, President Obama provided his own Super Sunday show. In some respects, it was almost as bizarre as Madonna's performance at half time.

In particular, in his interview with NBC's Matt Lauer, Mr. Obama responded oddly to concerns raised last week by leaders of the U.S. intelligence community. They testified on Capitol Hill that the Iranian mullahs appear to be planning attacks on the United States. Yet, the President told Lauer that, "We don't see any evidence that they have those intentions or capabilities right now."

Now, anyone with an IQ above room temperature has noticed lately plenty of evidence of both hostile Iranian intentions and the capabilities to act on them. Consider a few examples:

Last fall, the Obama administration announced that it had intercepted an Iranian plot to blow up a popular eatery in Washington's Georgetown section in order to kill the Saudi ambassador who frequents it. They did so with the knowledge that more 150 Americans would be murdered in the process. Just last week, Senate Intelligence Committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein used the occasion of a rare open hearing to vouch strongly for the quality of the evidence implicating the regime in Tehran, despite the seemingly unprofessional nature of the assassination plan.

The Iranians have also established a formidable foreign legion in their terrorist proxy, Hezbollah. This Lebanese "Party of God" has already killed Americans elsewhere. And we know that they have established a presence in Latin America, notably under the protection of Iran's ally in Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. There are increasing indications that Hezbollah is also now embedding itself in Mexico, doing business and making common cause with narco-trafficking drug cartels there. Such ties facilitate these jihadists' ability to penetrate the southern U.S. border that Team Obama seems determined not to secure.

What is more, we know that Hezbollah already has active cells in place in the United States. They have been involved here in illicit cigarette trafficking, money laundering and fundraising for the mother ship. It would be dangerously naïve to think that Hezbollah's operatives inside this country are not also preparing for acts of terror. The same goes for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps' al Quds paramilitary units the Obama Pentagon has warned are operating with Hezbollah in our hemisphere.
Even U.S. intelligence is now coming around to another ominous reality: Iran cooperates with al Qaeda.

The evidence is indisputable that Shiites and Sunnis can, when in pursuit of a common foe, overlook differences about particulars of their respective practices of Islam and the bitter enmity that has flowed from them for centuries.

A federal judge recently found that the mullahocracy in Tehran assisted Osama bin Laden's operatives in planning and executing the murderous attacks of 9/11. And Iran's "house arrest" of his family members and top al Qaeda operatives since then is now increasingly recognized as tantamount to providing safe haven, not imposing involuntary incarceration.

That being the case, one must add the capabilities of al Qaeda and its proliferating franchises to the ayatollahs' potential strike packages against this country. Never mind those official assurances that "al Qaeda core" has been diminished by years of drone strikes and Special Forces missions against their leadership. Iranian state-sponsorship ensures that we will face a continuing and growing danger from those terrorists and others committed to imposing worldwide the Islamist doctrine of shariah.

(Interestingly, in his congressional testimony last week, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper actually called this pan-Islamic front the "global jihad movement." This would appear to be a violation of clear Obama administration guidance that no association can be made between "violent extremism" and the Islamic impetuses behind nearly all of it. It also marks a considerable improvement over Clapper's preposterous declaration a year ago that the Muslim Brotherhood is a "largely secular organization" that has "eschewed violence.")

What about the reported agreement between Iran and Venezuela to base some of the former's ballistic missiles on the latter's territory? The timing of this deployment and the speed with which it metastasizes into a new Cuban Missile Crisis cannot be determined at this point. Still, the intent to threaten the United States certainly is evident, even if this particular capability to act on that intention thankfully has yet to be achieved.

Finally, Iran appears to have developed all but one of the ingredients needed to mount what has been described as a "catastrophic" attack on the United States: a strategic strike unleashing a high-altitude electromagnetic pulse. All that is lacking is a working nuclear weapon that can be launched aboard even a short-range missile from a ship off our coast.

Successive government and independent studies have established that such an attack would disrupt for a protracted time, and possibly destroy, our electrical grid and all the infrastructures that rely upon it.

Without them, our society and population simply cannot be sustained - giving rise to the distinct possibility of achieving Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's stated goal of "a world without America."

President Obama's statement that "we don't see any evidence" of Iran's intentions and capabilities to attack us is either witless or deceptive. Either way, it is as strong an argument as any for his defeat in November - assuming the mullahs have not acted in the meantime on their well-documented desire to eliminate us and our friends in Israel.

Frank Gaffney, Jr.

Source: http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/p18928.xml

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

Demography Is Destiny in Syria

by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi and Oskar Svadkovsky

Among the second wave of Arab Spring uprisings that followed Tunisia, Syria was the most spectacular "out of the blue" that suddenly arose in the face of the media and analytic community. Just days before Deraa exploded with protests last March, some analysts were still scrutinizing Syria's circumstances and declaring the country to be immune from the Arab Spring. Nor did reporters who visited the country spot signs of a brewing storm.

In fact, throughout the Arab Spring, the media and experts repeatedly fell into the same trap of confusing the capital city with the whole country. On the eve of the Islamist landslide in Egypt's elections various polls and informed individuals were putting the popularity of radical Salafis at between 5% and 10%. The Salafis have indeed won about 10% of the vote… but only in Cairo. Nationwide they took almost 30%, beating even those unrepentant pessimists who were betting on a Muslim Brotherhood spring. In some provinces they grabbed all of 50%.

This routine of the periphery ambushing the media and analysts during the Arab Spring and making a mockery of their reports and predictions has reached such grotesque proportions in Syria partly thanks to the media restrictions imposed by the regime, but mostly owing to the very peripheral nature of the Syrian uprising itself. This "peripheralism" has also laid waste to the best efforts of Iranian advisers who came to Syria to share with their Syrian colleagues the know-how accumulated by the regime in Tehran in crushing the Greens.

In truth, the escalation in Syria took by surprise only the people who never bothered to examine Syria's population pyramid. It was no "out of the blue" to anybody even slightly familiar with the basic facts on demography and climate in the region. In the Middle East's long list of hopeless basket cases Yemen is surely beyond competition. However, for quite a while Syria has positioned herself as a formidable contender for respectable second place.

In some respects, the seeds of the current disaster were planted as far back as 1956, when Youssef Helbaoui -- head of economic analysis in Syria's Planning Department -- famously declared: "A birth control policy has no reason for being in this country. Malthus could not find any followers among us." Since then Syria has been living in a state of one uninterrupted demographic cataclysm. The regime was so obsessively pro-natalist that in the early 1970s, the trade and use of contraceptives in Syria were officially banned. By 1975, the birth rate reached 50 live births per 1,000 people, with Hafez al-Assad asserting that a "high population growth rate and internal " were responsible for stimulating "proper socio-economic improvements" within the development framework.

Even when other nations in the Middle East began to take measures to curb their population growth as the danger of demographic collapse started to loom over the region, the regime in Syria was struggling to make up its mind on the issue. Only in recent years has the regime introduced some measure of family planning, but by now the sheer amount of population momentum accumulated in previous decades has kept the population swelling to new highs. It's true that the average Syrian woman entering the child bearing age now is expected to have no more than three children in her lifetime. Yet, the sheer proportion of such young people in the population continues to propel the population forward. And the workforce is still expanding at a neck breaking rate of 4%.

The impact of the rapidly mounting population pressures on the economy has been exacerbated by the steady depletion of natural resources that, critically for the regime, included declining oil production, with an output of 385,000 barrels per day (bpd) as of 2010 against the peak of about 583,000 bpd back in 1996. To give the reader some perception on the decline, even after hitting the bottom the oil sector still accounted for a majority of the country's export income and about a quarter of government revenues.

The final blow came during the last decade. With Malthus sending broad smiles in the direction of Syria from his grave, the climate change that has hit the region has wrecked Syria's countryside. Shifts in rain patterns have led to prolonged droughts all around the Middle East in recent years. But their impact was particularly devastating in Syria, where agriculture remains a major part of the economy and the lifestyle of a large section of the population, some 20% of Syria's GDP being generated by this sector. With water shortages reported in many parts of the country, some rural areas have become impoverished disaster zones. Whole villages and fields have been abandoned, while slums around Syrian cities have been swelling with hundreds of thousands of climate refugees.

In 2009, the International Institute for Sustainable Development noted that a decline in rainfall and subsequent aggravation of water scarcity led to the abandonment of around 160 villages in northern Syria in the period 2007-2008. In eastern Syria, the Inezi tribe saw some 85% of its livestock killed between 2005 and 2010 because of prolonged drought. In 2010 the United Nations estimated that more than a million people have left the northeast of the country, "with farmers simply not cultivating enough food or earning enough money to sustain them."

Basically, Syria's GDP per capita was declining during the 1980s and stagnating in the 1990s. This trend was reversed only with the beginning of market reforms in 2000s, but the economic renaissance was largely confined to Damascus and Aleppo and struggled to spread to other parts of the country. A measure of prosperity brought into some cities by the economic liberalization, unevenly distributed in any case, was simply not enough to balance out the tremendous demographic and social pressures that were piling up in provinces like Deraa and Deir ez Zor and spilling into the center from the periphery. Regardless of whether the urban classes in Damascus and Aleppo were fully aware of their precarious existence living by the side of this volcano, they showed limited enthusiasm for fireworks once the volcano finally erupted and sent its flames towards the suburbs of their cities.

To be sure, the peripheral character of the uprising in Syria makes the task of ensuring the survival of the Assad regime rather difficult compared with the experience of its patrons in Tehran. However, getting rid of the regime would be an easy task for the country compared to surviving the post-revolution.

The uprising in Syria has many characteristics of a poor man's revolt and a "periphery against center" conflict at the same time and as such it's the exact opposite of the kind of unrest the regime in Tehran was facing in its big cities in 2009.

While the protest movement in Iran was led by the urban classes of the capital and major city centers, the Syrian uprising is very much powered by the same underclass that in Iran is providing the bulk of the recruits for the Baseej squads that eventually crushed the Green opposition. In Iran, Tehran was the epicenter of the protests, but the Syrian revolution started in the heavily Bedouin and undeveloped Deraa, and from its very beginning the uprising featured a rather unusual degree of mobilization in the countryside against the regime. Protests were regularly reported in villages and small towns. During the siege of Deraa and Hama, nearby villagers were reported trying to break blockades with supply convoys and clashing with security cordons.

Even where the Syrian regime was successfully keeping city centers clean of protesters, the unrest persisted in suburbs and the countryside. In far-flung provinces, towns and localities have been changing hands several times, with protesters and the Free Syrian Army reinfiltrating them immediately after the army had departed. The regime is clearly overstretched and struggling to contain such a widely geographically distributed and increasingly militarized unrest, as shown by the recent reports of unrest creeping in towards the centers of Damascus and Aleppo. More critically for the regime, the challenge of defending the country's energy infrastructure over vast expanses of such a big country seems to be overwhelming the Syrian army, with attacks on oil and gas pipelines escalating.

Much was made of Syria's sectarian configuration, which is indeed one of the most challenging in the region. The steady stream of reports about sectarian killings in Homs suggests mounting tensions and troubles for the future. Yet, even if stripped of all its minorities down to the bare Sunni heartland, the post-Assad Syria is still very likely to be resistant to any notion of unity and stability.

As a poor man's revolt, the uprising in Syria, which by all accounts remains predominantly Sunni, is often blessed with the involvement of the most backward and conservative sections of the society. The Syrian opposition abroad may be represented by the finest intellectuals and members of all Syria's minorities. However, a Voice of America reporter, recently allowed into one of the opposition's strongholds in the area of Damascus-Douma, couldn't help noticing how the place was teeming with fully veiled women.

Many parts of the Syrian periphery are severely impoverished and many are heavily tribal. The tribes in Deir ez-Zor are officially allowed to carry arms as a counterweight to the Kurdish population in the North. Tribes in Deraa and other provinces are also quickly becoming militarized.

The potential for internal conflicts over the country's limited resources remains enormous. The same Deir ez-Zor, for example, is Syria's poorest province. Yet Deir ez-Zor accounts for 70% of Syria's oil production. Once the regime falls, the tribes in the province should be expected to demand their share of the oil revenues, either sending the rest of the country to beg the Saudis for a bailout, or starting a new "periphery against center" conflict.

None of this is to say that the survival of Bashar Assad's regime is necessarily in the interests of the West, Syria's neighbors and even the Syrians themselves. If only because it's not obvious that Syria in its current configuration can survive at all. However, while the Western media can keep cheering on the Arab Spring and the triumph of liberal democracy in the Middle East until it's blue in the face, the basic fact remains that this march to freedom in many parts of the region looks more like a modern species of a classic Malthusian collapse. Syria's immunity to the Arab Spring was a short-lived notion. However, those who think that a better future beckons for the Middle East had better hope that by the time that future arrives Syria will be still hanging around.

Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi is a student at Brasenose College, Oxford University, and an adjunct fellow at the Middle East Forum. Oskar Svadkovsky is a computer networking professional based in Tel Aviv, and the owner of the Happy Arab News Service blog. He graduated in Indian and Chinese Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi and Oskar Svadkovsky

Source: http://www.meforum.org/3170/syria-demography

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

British Muslims Try to Ban Negative Reporting of Islam

by Soeren Kern

A Muslim activist group with links to the Muslim Brotherhood has asked the British government to restrict the way the British media reports about Muslims and Islam.

The effort to silence criticism of Islam comes amid an ongoing public inquiry into British press standards following a phone-hacking scandal involving the News of the World and other British newspapers.

The Leveson Inquiry, established by British Prime Minister David Cameron in July 2011, is currently considering how to increase government oversight of the British media.

But in a move that many worry will result in government regulation of the Internet, Lord Justice Leveson, a British judge who serves as Chairman of the inquiry, now says he wants to include Internet bloggers into any system of press regulation that he proposes.

Observers say the Leveson Inquiry's effort to regulate blogging, combined with the Muslim attempt to ban negative reporting about Islam, poses a clear threat to free speech in Britain.

Appearing before the Leveson Inquiry on January 24, Muslim activist Inayat Bunglawala said the amount of negative stories about Muslims in Britain is "demonizing" Islam and fuelling a "false narrative." He called on the government to do all it can to "ensure a fairer portrayal, a more balanced portrayal of the faith of Islam" in the British media.

In a separate written submission, Bunglawala complained about the "enormous impact of coverage that is proven to be inaccurate, inflammatory, prejudicial and detrimental" to the representation of Islam in Britain.

He continued: "British Muslims as a social group collectively suffer from poor media practices, whether this be the excessive attention granted to fringe Muslim groups, like Muslims Against Crusades, by the media or poor fact-checking prior to publication. Improving media practices and media responsibility on portraying and reporting fairly on Islam and British Muslims, without bias or discrimination or intent to incite anti-Muslim prejudice, is an urgent concern."

His solution: The British media needs a "more robust system of self-regulation…one which mandates the right…to challenge misrepresentations, inaccuracies and false reporting."

Lord Justice Leveson expressed sympathy for Bunglawala's plea and said that any government regulation of the British media would have to extend to the Internet and include blogs, so as to ensure a "level playing field" between print and online media.

Lord Hunt, the chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, a self-regulatory body which deals with complaints about the editorial content of newspapers and magazines, recently said he is looking into the idea of regulating bloggers and online publications. According to him, "at the moment, it [the Internet] is like the Wild West out there. We need to appoint a sheriff."

Lord Hunt would invite bloggers on current affairs to voluntarily agree to regulation. They would receive a seal-of-approval rating that they would lose if complaints against them were repeatedly upheld.

This plan would please Muslim activists such as Bunglawala, who say they are offended by Islamophobia but have no problems purveying anti-Semitic rhetoric about Jews, Zionists, Jewish power and the "Tribe of Judah."

Bunglawala, who says he represents mainstream moderate Muslim opinion, is a director of the Muslim Council of Britain, a self-appointed umbrella group that is closely linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. He strongly objects to the use of the phrase "Islamic terrorism" and has described Osama bin Laden as a "freedom fighter for hundreds of Muslims in Britain."

Bunglawala said the blind Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, was "courageous" and living out his "calling on Muslims to fulfill their duty to Allah and to fight against oppression and oppressors everywhere."

In 2010, Bunglawala published an article in the Guardian newspaper entitled, "If We Care about Free Speech, Let these Muslim Speakers In," in which he urged the British government to "demonstrate its commitment to liberal values" by allowing two Muslim "hate preachers" to enter the United Kingdom.

The late Christopher Hitchens described Bunglawala this way: "A preposterous and sinister individual named Inayat Bunglawala, assistant secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain and a man with a public record of support for Osama bin Laden, was made a convener of Blair's task force on extremism despite his stated belief that the BBC and the rest of the media are 'Zionist controlled.'"

As for the BBC, it already self-regulates when it comes to reporting on Islam. Consider a recent 700-word article on the proliferation of honor-based violence in Britain, in which the BBC failed to mention the words "Muslim," "Islamic" or "Islam" even once.

A poll of Muslims in Britain found little support for freedom of speech. Nearly 80% of Muslims in Britain said that the publishers of the Danish cartoons depicting the Muslim Mohammed should be prosecuted; 68% said that those who insult Islam should be prosecuted; and 62% of Muslims in Britain disagree that freedom of speech should be allowed if it insults and offends religious groups.

Meanwhile, the European Union has offered to host the next meeting of the so-called Istanbul Process, an aggressive effort by Muslim countries to make it an international crime to criticize Islam.

The Istanbul Process -- its explicit aim is to enshrine in international law a global ban on all critical scrutiny of Islam and/or Islamic Sharia law -- is being spearheaded by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a bloc of 57 Muslim countries.

Based in Saudi Arabia, the OIC has long pressed the European Union and the United States to impose limits on free speech and expression about Islam.

But the OIC has now redoubled its efforts and is engaged in a determined diplomatic offensive to persuade Western democracies to implement United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) Resolution 16/18, which calls on all countries to combat "intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatization of … religion and belief." (Analysis of the OIC's war on free speech can be found here and here.)

Resolution 16/18, which was adopted at HRC headquarters in Geneva in March 2011, and was recently backed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the most recent Istanbul Process Conference in Washington in December, is widely viewed as a significant step forward in OIC efforts to advance the international legal concept of defaming Islam.

Soeren Kern is Senior Fellow for Transatlantic Relations at the Madrid-based Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group. Follow him on Facebook.

Source: http://www.stonegateinstitute.org/2822/british-muslims-negative-reporting-islam

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

Arab Heroes - But Where Is The West?

by Ali Alyami

While President Obama and his European counterparts are going out of their way to apologize for defending their citizens' democratic way of life and to assure Muslims, especially the rich Gulf royals, that the West is not "at war with Islam" but rather with terrorists groups such as Al-Qaeda, a cadre of Saudi women is unabashedly challenging Saudi religious extremism and its destructive impact on them, their children, society and the international community.

Prominent among those opposing the ferocious, divisive and hate-promoting religious extremists is a fearless Saudi Princess, Basma Bint Saud. According to a recent interview by the Independent newspaper, UK, "She is the 115th - and last - child of King Saud, the eldest surviving son of Saudi Arabia's founding monarch Abdul Aziz." Basma ("Smile" in Arabic) grew up in luxury, was trained by nuns, is a divorced mother of five and a successful restaurateur who now resides in London to protect her children from possible family reprisals for her outspokenness. She challenges her family's tyrannical rule, rampant corruption and dysfunctional institutions, which she justifiably blames for the government's colossal failure to meet its obligations toward its marginalized populations, especially women and children.

One of her targets is the vicious Saudi government's voluntary religious police, known as the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, or the "Hay'ah" in Arabic. She has correctly challenged their religious legitimacy and their offensive treatment of the public, particularly women. Like many Saudis and human rights groups, she largely attributes the country's backwardness to the medieval mentality and spiteful behavior of the Hay'ah as exemplified by their high-handed treatment of people as guilty until they prove their innocence. In one of her piercing and expressive narratives she wrote, "I searched and re-searched in history's archives, in the Prophet and in his Companions' books and found no mention of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice; but found a phrase in the Quran that said: All Muslims should promote virtue and prevent vice."

Princess Basma stands out because of her status and royal affiliations, which make her work considerably weighty. However, she is not the only or most productive woman who is challenging the government's fierce "religious" police and their relentless social, political and economic war against Saudi women whom the illiterate "religious" police consider incomplete human beings and "perpetual minors." There are many courageous non-royal Saudi women activist pioneers in the academia, businesses, financial, media and technical fields, as well as ordinary mothers, sisters and wives who are demanding better and humane treatment, including the removal of all denigrating restrictions inflicted on women, such as the dehumanizing male guardian system; the ban on driving; the denial of economic opportunities, and forced and childhood marriages which, under international declarations on human rights, are considered rape and child trafficking.

Women such as Eman Al Nafjan, Fawzia Al-Bakr, Wajeha Al-Hwaider, Reem Asaad, Alia Banaja, Hatoon Al-Fassi, Suhair Al Qurashi, Manal Al-Sharif, Ebtihal Mubarak, Hissa Hilal and even two of King Abdullah's daughters, Sitta and Adella, just to name a few, are in the forefront in the struggle for women's rights, considered by the religious establishment a Western value designed to destroy Islam's holy traditions. This view translates into male domination over every aspect of women's lives and livelihoods. The institutionalized system of social, political and economic discrimination against half of Saudi society, women, could not succeed if it were not for the blessing of the Saudi ruling elites, especially its staunchest supporter, Interior Minister Prince Naif, the next in line to inherit his family's throne.

What is becoming increasingly and inexplicably clear to the Saudi people in general, but specifically to Saudi women and to other people involved inhuman rights, is the West's continued support for the Saudi autocracy at a time when many Western governments, with the exception of Bahrain, support the Arab people's uprising against despotism, oppression and the rampant squandering of public wealth. The Saudi people hear, read and see people in the West fighting Muslim terrorists in many parts of the world, while in the meantime, the same people in the West are supporting a system whose institutions are well known for their propagation and financing of religious extremists and terrorists worldwide.

Further, many Saudis and other Arab thinkers and analysts of the Arab World have become increasingly suspicious of the West's overt support for the unprecedented Arab people's uprising. Many began to theorize that the West is in favor of empowering anti-democracy Islamist and Salafist groups, as in Egypt and Tunisia now. These observers argue, mostly in the social media and in one-to-one discussions, that by reaching out to and embracing religiously-based parties who rose to power as a result of the Arab Uprising, the West has duplicitous objectives. These observers see the West's acquiescing to Islamist efforts to derail and Islamize the Arab Uprising as further evidence of the West's duplicity and hidden objectives.

The most convincing argument about the West's double-standard and assumed objectives is presented by many Saudi women from all walks of life, who ask simple questions that are hard to dismiss as conspiratorial or fabricated stories. They ask: If we are willing to face imprisonment, lose our jobs and families, be stigmatized and humiliated under the autocratic and theocratic Saudi system for trying to rid ourselves and the world of dangerous ideologues, why does not the West, which claims to be fighting the same extremists, support our struggle publicly and unequivocally?

The Saudi women's march for their legitimate and citizenship rights are unstoppable and irreversible, whether the Saudi ruling men and their supporters in the West like it or not. Given this courageous reality, wouldn't it be prudent for Western government and their institutions to support Saudi women, especially as they are in the forefront in the fight against religious extremism which poses such a real threat to democracies worldwide?

Dr. Ali Alyami is the Executive Director and founder of the Center for Democracy and Human Rights in Saudi Arabia, based in Washington, DC.

Source: http://www.stonegateinstitute.org/2821/arab-heroes

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