Iran: The "Fatwa" and Obama's Creative Diplomacy

by Amir Taheri



For decades, the dream, of making a deal with Iran has nurtured a veritable industry in the United States. Like other industries, this has been subjected to cyclical change, booming at times and suffering bust at others.

Since President Barack Obama’s re-election, the “talk to Iran” industry has experienced an unprecedented boom. Obama’s second administration looks as if it is designed to cajole the mullahs into a fresh attempt at deal-making. Obama’s choices of a new Secretary of State, Secretary of Defence, National Security Advisor and CIA chief show that Tehran could not have hoped for a more sympathetic team in Washington.

The “talk to Iran’ lobby uses some old clichés. “Talking is better than fighting” we are told. Also, it is “better to be a trouble-shooter than a trouble-maker”. And who could disagree? Because deal-making is part of their culture Americans admire politicians who can end conflicts with a compromise. Thus, appeasement marketed as creative diplomacy has generated what the American establishment knows as “the realistic school of foreign policy.”

That “school” is founded on a number of assumptions.
The first is that conflicts among nations are exclusively caused by divergent material interests.

Countries compete over access to raw materials, markets, and, in the old days, colonies. They may have territorial claims or harbour irredentist dreams against one another. They may also have security concerns about trade routes and/or treatment of ethnic kith-and-kin in other countries.

Remarkably Marxian in nature, that analysis puts material differences at the root of human conflicts, implicitly ruling out the possibility of existential threats caused by ideological differences.

That leads to a second assumption: differences cam be narrowed down to one or two “concrete” issues.

Successive US administrations narrowed down the conflict with the Soviet Union to the issue of arms control and, over decades, made several deals with Moscow.

Few noticed the absurdity of the exercise. We were told that nuclear weapons prevented war because of the Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) principle. “Nuclear weapons are an instrument for peace,” President John Kennedy’s Defence Secretary Robert McNamara claimed. If that were the case, why would anyone want to reduce the effectiveness of an “instrument for peace”?

In three decades of “creative diplomacy” the US and the USSR reduced their capacities for destroying the earth with nuclear weapons from 40 times to just 22 times!

Meanwhile the Soviet Union continued its expansionist strategy and remained an existential threat to the United States.

In the 1970s, the USSR reached the peak of its global influence, ironically, with financial support from the United States.

In the end, it was only when Russia stopped being the Soviet Union that it ceased being an existential threat to the US and its allies.

Obama’s appeasement squad seems to be heading towards repeating the mistakes of the “realistic school.”

It is trying to reduce issues of conflict with Iran to a single one: Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

It then reduces that issue further by narrowing it down to Iran’s right to enrich uranium.

That is then narrowed down further to Iran’s right to enrich uranium up to 20 per cent. The final narrowing down would let Iran do pretty much what it pleases under “international supervision”.

But what guarantee is there that the Islamic Republic would not continue a clandestine programme?

According to Ramin Mehmanparast, spokesman for the Islamic Republic’s foreign ministry, Tehran proposes to submit a “fatwa” from “Supreme Guide” Ali Khameneni to the United Nations as a guarantee for its commitment not to “develop, test or deploy” nuclear weapons.

Supposing it exists, the “fatwa” does not legally commit the Islamic Republic to anything. Nor could it have any effect in accordance with international law. In 1989, when the late Ayatollah Khomeini issued his “fatwa” for the murder of British novelist Salman Rushdie, successive Tehran officials publicly described it as a religious “opinion” that did not commit the Iranian government.

At that time, Khamenei was President of the Islamic Republic. On a state visit to Belgrade he told a press conference that Khomeini’s “fatwa” concerned “all Muslims throughout the world” but could not be regarded as “the official position of the Islamic Republic.”

Even inside Iran the “fatwa” has no legal authority. Though the highest political authority in the regime, Khamenei lacks the theological status of a “Marja’a al-Taqlid” (Source of Emulation).

A “fatwa” is a religious opinion issued in response to a question put to a “marj’aa”. It must not be confused with a papal bull.

To become legally binding any “fatwa” by Khamenei must go through the constitutional process of legislation, verification and final assent.

However, even if all of that is done, there is no guarantee that Khamenei would not issue another “fatwa” later to cancel the previous one. A regime that violates its own constitution on a daily basis would have little difficulty deceiving the “Infidel” by issuing “fatwas” to buy time. The practice acquires some theological sanctions through the principle of “taqiyah” or dissimulation to deceive an “Infidel” foe.

No doubt Obama thinks that he is a genius and can succeed where five US presidents before him have failed. Obama may be a genius in the American context if only because he has persuaded more than 60 million Americans to vote for him on two occasions. However, when it comes to dealing with mullahs he might fall victim to hubris. Signs indicate that the mullahs are preparing to lead Obama up the same garden path as followed by his predecessors.



Amir Taheri

Source: http://www.asharq-e.com/news.asp?section=2&id=32598

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

The Laundromat of History

by Dr. Reuven Berko

Back in the days of the British Mandate, Jewish community elders used to say in jest that the Palestinians were "a bastard child, born from a Zionist womb and British father." According to broadcasts now coming from the Voice of Palestine radio station, however, the land of Israel never had a Jewish mother.

According to the archaeologists on the Voice of Palestine, the land belongs to the Palestinians because they are the descendants of nations who inhabited it before its invasion by "bandits and murderers" who came here arbitrarily with Moses and went by the name of "Habiru" or "Apiru." These people were documented as ephemeral nomads and thieves, and records of them even appear in the Amarna Letters written during the New Kingdom-era in Egypt.

In Israel, the Palestinians are not denounced. There are those who point to the Jewish origins of rural Palestinians who converted to Islam. Some people posit that there is a genetic link between Jews and Palestinians. Others highlight the influx of laborers from across the Arab world who came here seeking to capitalize on the Zionists' prospering economy. Historians of the Middle East point to the Arab conquest in the seventh century, while European visitors described the land as barren and disease-ridden.

The Palestinians, on the other hand, fundamentally reject us. The Voice of Palestine radio station works at inventing history for a Palestinian people that are never mentioned in any historical document, not even in the Quran. 

The problem is that adopting the false Palestinian narrative is dependent on simultaneously rejecting the Jews' historical rights to the land of Israel, which is presented as a fleeting episode, even though these rights are anchored in Islamic prophecies, Christian historiography, and of course in the book of books, the Bible. 

Yasser Arafat renewed the Palestinian "start-up" as the greatest historical thief of all. At the height of peace negotiations he denied all ties between the Jews to the land of Israel and Jerusalem, and he is the one who created Palestinian birth certificates stating they are the descendants of the Jebusites, the Canaanite tribe which inhabited Jerusalem prior to its conquest by King David.

Arafat's successors propagate a version of history in which Jesus of Nazareth, born to his Jewish mother Miriam, is the "Arab-Palestinian messiah."

The Al-Jazeera documentary series "Our History in Their Archive: Zionist Terrorism" portrays Israel as a fictitious entity built on a false collection of documentation and murderous acts, in contrast to the Palestinians' undeniable historical right.

In Israel, meanwhile, several crafty journalists have appointed themselves heads of political parties. Their publicists describe the "primitive and fervent" right-wing as the brutal denier of the "definite" Palestinian desire for peace. They believe that only the Left can lead and that only it has been endowed with the attributes of universal justice, human rights and social equality, pluralism and socialism. They denounce many portions of the nation, who correctly see the reality of the situation and prefer their own "plebeian" intuitions over the heavenly aspirations of the intellect. 

The naïve voter could confuse the issue: Is the Left only fooling itself, or the public as well? Has it managed to "sneak in" another peace agreement with the Palestinians that even they are unaware of and won't sign?

As opposed to the Jewish operational code — which seeks immediate gratification and peace now and believes that a little demagoguery will lead the Palestinians to cede all of Palestine — the Palestinian operational code of ulterior motives, formulated in Arabic, stipulates that "patience is the key to victory" and that the Jews must be treated according to the Arafat legacy: "Take and then demand more."

In the Gaza Strip, Judea and Samaria and the Palestinian diaspora, the right of return and the destruction of Israel haven't been abandoned. Anyone who listens to the Voice of Palestine understands that the Palestinians are continuing to speak to the world in the language of peace, but in Arabic they sing and chant their inciting desire to "return to Palestine" through the power of the rifle, including to Haifa, Acre, Jaffa and Safed.

Dr. Reuven Berko

Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=3275

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

What is Really Behind Obama’s Condemnation of Morsi?

by Daniel Greenfield

The media maintained its embargo on President Morsi’s speeches until the New York Times chose to run a piece highlighting both the Memri released video and a second video, featured on Bassem Youssef’s show and now also translated and released by Memri, until the New York Times ran a piece on both videos. This was followed by a condemnation from the White House.

The connection between these two events remains unclear. Did the administration prompt the New York Times to run a piece on the videos so that it could condemn Morsi or did the piece lead to the issue coming up?

The question asked of Carney by Ken Thomas of the AP referenced the “nurse our children on hate” quote from the second video, which was not widely known at the time, and so likely was derived from the New York Times article, followed by Carney reading from a prepared statement condemning the remarks.

The New York Times then ran an editorial expressing a species of bafflement at Morsi’s behavior. “When Mohamed Morsi became Egypt’s president in June, he rose, unknown and untested, from the Muslim Brotherhood to the leader of the most important Arab country. He has made missteps and some truly alarming decisions, but there was still reason to hope that he might grow into the job and become the kind of leader that could benefit Egypt and the region.”

Did the Times seriously believe that Morsi would somehow transcend the Muslim Brotherhood? Did they truly not understand what the Muslim Brotherhood was?
In 6 paragraphs, the Muslim Brotherhood is only mentioned once and with no reference points to its Nazi roots or its pervasive anti-Semitism. It’s as peculiar as an editorial taking David Duke or Hitler to task for their bigotry without ever mentioning their political affiliation.

So what exactly is going on here?

1. The New York Times really is this clueless. It’s not inconceivable.  The liberal establishment gets its ideas from the left and is then often completely clueless about their inevitable consequences.

2. This is a show. A carefully staged show whose purpose is to divert attention from something else. And there are a number of candidates for what that something else might be.

The most obvious one is the Hagel nomination. The timing of the two are closely intertwined. Morsi’s comments had been around for a while. A staged condemnation of them however would allow the White House to posture as pro-Israel at an extremely critical period.

Around the same time, Senator Schumer came out of the closet for Chuck Hagel. It is possible that the condemnation was there to give him cover, or perhaps Schumer actually wanted it to happen as part of whatever deal was made behind the scenes to win his support.

These are the two possibilities. Either the Times is dangerously naive about the Middle East. Or it isn’t naive at all.


Daniel Greenfield

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/what-is-really-behind-obamas-condemnation-of-morsi/

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

Islam and Environmentalism: United in Anti-Humanism

by Theodore Shoebat

With Al Gore’s Current TV now sold to Al Jazeera, Woodstock and Mecca now unite, and Allah and Mother Earth are joined together in marriage. The purchase brings us to a much deeper topic, and that is that the ideology of Islam coincides with much of what the environmentalists uphold. Al Gore claims to be a Christian, but in fact he would rather praise Islam than subscribe to any Christian ideals. Gore actually once wrote:

Islam, for example, offers familiar themes. The prophet Muhammad said, “The world is green and beautiful and God has appointed you His stewards over it.” The central concepts of Islam taught by the Qur’ân – Tawheed (unity), khalifa (trusteeship), akharah (accountability) – also serve as the pillars of the Islamic environmental ethic. The earth is the sacred creation of Allah…The Qur’ân declares that “we have created everything from water.” In the Lotus ‘Sutra,’ Buddha is presented metaphorically as a “rain cloud,” covering, permeating, fertilizing, and enriching “all parched living beings, to free them from their misery to attain the joy of peace, joy of the present world and joy of Nirvana…”

Islam really is rooted in naturism. Allah is a product of the Venus goddess Athtar, and is the male counterpart to the earth goddess Allat. The Blackstone itself, the holiest idol in Islam, was originally a fertility symbol, which is still placed in a frame shaped in the form of a vulva.

The result of wholly accepting environmentalism is the exalting of animals and the belittling of man. Hence why the Quran says that humans are of lesser value than is creation: “The heavens and the earth is greater than the creation of man; but most people know not” (Q 40:57). Even the animal kingdom is on par with humans: “No creature is there on earth nor a bird flying with its wings but they are nations like you” (Q 6:38). Abdul Haseeb Ansari, in Islamic Law, explaining the significance of this verse, warns against arrogance and says that the believers (Muslims) are “no better than other creatures” (p. 34). This reminds me of when Ingrid Newkirk, the president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), declared: “When it comes to feelings, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy. There is no rational basis for saying that a human being has special rights.”

The result of disrespecting human life is collectivism, since the individual is trampled upon and made no better than a herd servile to the state. Human life does not belong to God, but to the government. This is exactly what Thomas Malthus, the father of modern human population paranoia, wanted when he wrote:

All children born, beyond what would be required to keep up the population to a desired level, must necessarily perish, unless room is made for them by the deaths of grown persons. We should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavoring to impede, the operations of nature in producing this mortality.

To deem human life as no better than an animal leads to actions such as those committed by these Syrian jihadists, who opened fire on innocent people driving in their car:




Or to purely evil practices, such as burning human beings alive simply for being Christians:



Christianity is the greatest foe to the demeaning of human life, and to the anti-human movement found in both environmentalism and Islam.
It is no marvel, then, that Paul Ehrlich, a proponent of human population control, wrote that in order to dramatically decrease the population in America, the country needs to replace its Judeo-Christian roots with Animism – a religion which only exists predominantly in third world nations:

Somehow we’ve got to change from a growth-oriented, exploitative system to one focused on stability and conservation. Our entire system of orienting to nature must undergo a revolution. And that revolution is going to be extremely difficult to pull off, since the attitudes of Western culture toward nature are deeply rooted in Judeo-Christian tradition. Unlike people in many other cultures, we see man’s basic role as that of dominating nature, rather than as living in harmony with it. Professor Lynn White, Jr., has elegantly discussed this entire problem in Science magazine. He points out, for instance, that before the Christian era trees, springs, hills, streams, and other objects of nature had guardian spirits. These spirits had to be approached and placated before one could safely invade their territory. As White says, “By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects… Both our present science and our present technology are so tinctured with orthodox Christian arrogance toward nature that no solution for our ecological crisis can be expected from them alone. Since the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious, whether we call it that or not.’

Islam too wants to replace Christianity with its cult of Mecca and the Blackstone. Any country which has been taken by Islam loses its respect for human life. Where Christianity is, life is honored; where Islam or Leftism prevails, humanity is lost.


Theodore Shoebat

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2013/theodore-shoebat/islam-and-environmentalism-united-in-anti-humanism/

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

Israel's Netanyahu Might Look to Center After Ballot

by Newsmax


JERUSALEM — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu looks set to form a new governing coalition after next week's election, polls show, with the only question being whether he wants to soften its hard-line contours.
No one party has ever won a majority in parliament in a parliamentary election in Israel, and Tuesday's ballot could be followed by weeks of coalition-building negotiations.

The latest surveys predict Netanyahu's right-wing Likud, running with the ultra-nationalist Yisrael Beitenu party, will take between 32 and 37 of the legislature's 120 seats, outstripping the nearest rival, center-left Labor, which is forecast to win between 15 to 18 seats.

According to the polls, Likud-Yisrael Beitenu, along with other right-wing and religious parties — Netanyahu's traditional coalition partners — will control some 67 seats after the election compared with only about 40 for any center-left bloc.

That would give Netanyahu a narrow but relatively strong majority in the assembly.

However, such a coalition might have an image problem abroad, containing uncompromising elements such as the Jewish Home party, which is set to take up to 15 seats and is adamantly opposed to the creation of any Palestinian state.

After his last election victory in 2009, Netanyahu struck a deal with the Labor party, a reassuring presence in the cabinet for many foreign governments because of its historic commitment to U.S.-backed peace diplomacy.

The Labor party quit the coalition in 2011 and under the new leadership of Shelly Yachimovich has vowed not to enter any Netanyahu government, preferring to stay in opposition.

ULTRA-ORTHODOX DEMANDS

However, the prime minister could reach out to two other center-left parties — Yesh Atid led by former TV host Yair Lapid, and Hatnua, led by ex-Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni.

Neither has ruled out a partnership with Netanyahu, and their parties' participation in a coalition could give him control of some 76 seats, a commanding margin for Israel.

Both parties are committed to resolving the decades-old Middle East conflict. They also want to end military service exemptions for ultra-Orthodox men — a pledge that might complicate life for Netanyahu as he seeks a wide coalition pact.

According to one scenario raised in the Israeli media, Netanyahu could try to exclude ultra-Orthodox parties from his coalition, but that could probably only happen if he does better than expected and takes up to 40 seats.

Leaving the ultra-Orthodox out and bringing centrist parties in would ease the way for him to pass austerity measures likely after news this week that the budget deficit rose to 4.2 percent of gross domestic product in 2012, double the original estimate.

Ultra-Orthodox parties have traditionally balked at steep spending cuts, which they fear could reduce state stipends for their own religious institutions.

Another possibility mooted in the media is for Netanyahu to try to exclude the Jewish Home party, led by the hi-tech entrepreneur Naftali Bennett, who was once close to the prime minister but then allegedly fell out with his fiery wife.
Perhaps aware of this danger, the Jewish Home has run campaign ads portraying itself as a natural ally for Netanyahu, adding that its presence in government would help the prime minister resist outside demands to make concessions for peace.

"A strong [Jewish Home] is the only way that Netanyahu will be able to withstand this pressure," party candidate Jeremy Gimpel told a debate in Jerusalem on Wednesday.



Newsmax

Source: http://www.newsmaxworld.com/newswidget/israel-elections-netanyahu-center/2013/01/17/id/471851?promo_code=EE9E-1&utm_source=jpost&utm_medium=nmwidget&utm_campaign=widgetphase1

© 2013 Thomson/Reuters. All rights reserved.

Mali: "Welcome to the city of Sharia"

by Robert Spencer

"There's really no such thing as just Sharia, it's not one monolithic Continuum - Sharia is understood in thousands of different ways over the 1,500 years in which multiple and competing schools of law have tried to construct some kind of civic penal and family law code that would abide by Islamic values and principles, it's understood in many different ways..." -- Reza Aslan

And yet whenever we see Sharia implemented, it looks the same. Now, why is that?
"Under the Mali militants’ reign of terror: refugees tell of life under Islamist rule," by Colin Freeman for the Telegraph, January 19 (thanks to Lookmann):

Having routed the Malian soldiers who were supposed to keep them at bay, the masked fighters toured the neighbourhood, dishing out sweets to children and stern religious sermons to adults.

Lest anyone fail to get the hint, they also laid waste to Diabaly’s church, used by the small Catholic community that has dwelt among the Muslims there for as long as anyone can remember.

“They removed the church’s cement cross and destroyed it,” said Asseye Touré, 26, who fled Diabaly on his motorbike on Friday, driving 20 miles down a track through rice paddies and onion fields to the government-held town of Niono.

“They said they didn’t want to harm us, but that we should all live under Islamic law.”

Mr Touré, a farmer, was among hundreds who hastily left Diabaly on Friday, some by minibus and others crammed 15-a-piece on the back of rice carts towed by motorbikes.

The militants had rolled into the village in a 40-vehicle convoy on Monday, proving they could still capture new ground despite the onset of the French military offensive against their strongholds across northern Mali.

For proof of just how easily they had done so, Mr Touré brandished a picture he had taken on his mobile phone, showing the corpse of a Malian soldier dumped amid the rushes of a nearby river.

“I saw about three dead bodies there,” he said. “The Malian military could not stop them.”

This weekend, the French military appeared to be having rather better luck, with air strikes forcing the militants to flee Diabaly into surrounding forests near the Mauritanian border.

Even so, officials in nearby Niono remained anxious that the militants might suddenly strike there too, and last night (SAT) a column of French armour arrived to secure the town.

“People are still worried, because there are lots of ways into Niono,” said Moriba Coulibaly, the town’s mayor.

Mr Coulibaly’s words echo fears that Mali’s militants may prove rather more resilient than the French initially thought, and that if they cannot compete in a conventional battle, they will respond with insurgent tactics.

This was demonstrated by last week’s mass seizure of hostages across the border in Algeria.

Critics point out that if a police state such as Algeria cannot stop serious terrorism incidents, then Mali’s coup-weakened government will stand even less chance — with or without foreign military support.

France’s president, François Hollande, ordered the intervention amid fears that Mali, one of the poorest nations in Africa, was on the point of hosting a “terrorist state” on its vast northern desert flank.

The action, expected to involve a total of 2,500 French troops, has been backed by British transport planes, raising fears of a prolonged Western entanglement in another predominantly Muslim region....

In Timbuktu last week, the first hint that the militants might be losing control came in the form of yet another gun-enforced edict.

Having already banned most forms of temptation, including music, dancing, drinking and smoking, the city’s “morality police” warned locals not to take any pleasure in the fact that French warplanes had been bombing their bases and supply dumps.

“On Wednesday night, the Islamist people went round telling everyone not to show any happiness or joy because of the French intervention,” Timbuktu’s mayor, Halle Ousmane, told The Sunday Telegraph.
“They warned that if they did, they would come to their houses and attack them.”

By then, though, the militants’ ability to enforce their threats already seemed to be diminishing.

The French bombardments had already forced many to flee into the surrounding Sahara desert, while those still in the city were said to be panicking every time they heard an aircraft in the distance.
“Until last week, everyone was scared, all the women were covered up except for the eyes,” said Mr Ousmane, 60, who was visiting Bamako when the bombing began.

“But when I spoke to my wife on Thursday morning, she said that she had taken her veil off, as had most of the other women in Timbuktu. The French military intervention has finally brought us some hope.”

The takeover of the north followed a coup last March by the Malian army, whose poorly equipped soldiers were suffering heavy losses in a guerrilla war against the lighter-skinned nomads of Mali’s Tuareg separatist movement.

The Tuaregs, who have long been in tension with the black Africans of the south, had returned to northern Mali with heavy weaponry after fighting as mercenaries in 2011 for Col Muammar Gaddafi.

But while the coup easily toppled the regime of President Amadou Toumani Touré, the ensuing chaos left the north open for takeover by the Tuareg separatist militia, the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad, more commonly referred to by its French abbreviation of MNLA.
And with the separatists came fighters known by a much more sinister acronym — AQIM, or al-Qaeda in the Islamic Magreb.

Having initially formed an alliance of convenience with the Tuaregs, AQIM quickly staged a coup of its own, sidelining the separatists and turning Timbuktu not into a Tuareg homeland, but into a mini-caliphate.

At the entrance to the city, twinned with Hay-on-Wye in Wales in 2007, a new sign went up saying “welcome to the city of sharia”.

While the city’s governor and prefect left, Mr Ousmane decided to stay, requesting a meeting with Timbuktu’s self-declared new masters.

It brought him face-to-face with a short, taciturn al-Qaeda leader named Abu Zaid, whose unassuming appearance belies a brutal reputation.

In 2009, he is believed to have ordered the murder of Edwin Dyer, the British hostage, kidnapped along with three other European tourists after attending a Tuareg cultural festival near the Mali-Niger border.

“At first they didn’t even let us speak at the meeting, and Abu Zaid, along with others, just recited verses from the Koran,” said Mr Ousmane.
“They said we have to talk about religion, and I told them that we were already Muslim people, so why were they here? They said they wanted sharia not just in Timbuktu, but all over Mali. And they told me, 'You are no longer mayor’.”

A Taliban-style regime then took hold, turning a city recently famed for its world music festivals into one where the only melodies allowed — even on mobile telephone ring tones — were Koranic verses.

Those who broke the rules were hauled before a sharia court in a former tourist hotel, where punishments such as flogging by camelhair whip were dispensed.

Suspected thieves would be strapped to a chair and have a hand amputed — sometimes with a painkiller administered by a doctor first, sometimes not. Mr Ousmane’s daughter was arrested by the Islamic morality police simply for wearing a veil that was not black.

“They told her it looked too pretty, and that they could smell the perfume she was wearing at 100 metres,” he said.

Mr Ousmane decided the safest thing to do was to tell his fellow citizens to co-operate, fearing they would be killed if they were provoked into retaliation, such as when the Islamists began destroying Timbuktu’s mud-built Islamic shrines for being “idolatrous”.

“It was horrifying when they did that, but what they destroyed is only mud, and we are Muslims in our hearts,” he said. “The day they leave, we can rebuild them.”

Also nursing reconstruction plans is Sadou Diallo, 57, the mayor of the northern city of Gao, whose private property empire incurred Islamist wrath for rather different reasons.

Not only did he own two raucous nightclubs, frequented by hip hop DJs and local ladies of the night, he also had a chain of hotels rented out to US special forces teams, who until last year, were training troops in Gao as part of a counter-terrorism strategy.

“All of my properties were burned down and I lost about £500,000,” said Mr Diallo, whose office wall in Bamako bears a “certificate of appreciation” from 1st Bn, 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne).

“When the French attacked last week, I felt alive for the first time since last year.”

Quite how long Malians’ new-found love affair with their former imperial masters will last is another matter.

While some see it as a benign intervention that could heal old colonial wounds altogether, others think it will simply reopen them, especially if it attracts even more jihadists to the country.

And while France has pledged to stick with the mission “as long as it takes”, the military side is just one aspect of it.

Equally daunting is the task of holding fresh elections, slated for later this year, that will find a credible replacement for the ousted Mr Touré, whose corrupt, ineffectual regime achieved little more than giving democracy a bad name.

“We used to have a usually very tolerant brand of Islam, but bad governance is pushing people into embracing militant causes,” said one Malian development worker....

That leaves open the question of why people choose Sharia in places not significantly marked by "bad governance." Is Turkey re-Islamizing and discarding Kemalist secularism because of "bad governance"?

Robert Spencer

Source: http://www.jihadwatch.org/2013/01/mali-welcome-to-the-city-of-sharia.html

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

Hawkish General Being Pushed Out Early?

by Max Boot


Jim Mattis, current commander of Central Command, is one of the most revered generals in the recent history of the Marine Corps. He has been nicknamed affectionately “Mad Dog” and the “Warrior Monk,” and he has acquired a considerable and well-earned reputation for battlefield excellence and general strategic acumen over the course of the last decade in Afghanistan and Iraq and now at Centcom. The San Diego Union Tribune has a great profile of him.

Yet, although only 62 years old, his military career may well end in the next few months, because he is slated to leave Centcom. Veteran military correspondent Tom Ricks reports here and here that Mattis may be getting pushed out a bit early because the White House does not appreciate his blunt advice and thinks he is too hawkish on Iran.


I don’t know the truth of the matter, but if Ricks’ reporting is accurate, it does not reflect well on the administration. It would be a shame to lose such a fearless, experienced, and brilliant general who can provide unvarnished advice to an administration whose senior ranks increasingly appear to be stocked with the president’s cronies and loyalists rather than the “team of rivals” Obama was thought by some to try to cultivate in the first term.

Of course Mattis has been at Centcom for a considerable period of time–since 2007, making him the second-longest-service Combatant Command chief–and it is unrealistic to expect that he would stay in the job indefinitely. But it would make sense to find some other employment for him, whether in another prominent command or in an educational capacity helping to groom the next generation of soldiers and marines. Certainly it would be a real loss if he were to retire to farming in Washington State, as he is rumored to be contemplating. America already owes a considerable debt to Mattis, but he is young enough and energetic enough that we can still derive considerable benefit from this wise and inspirational warrior.


Max Boot

Source: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2013/01/20/hawkish-general-being-pushed-out-early-jim-mattis/#more-816642

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

Can Obama’s Luck Hold in his Second Term?

by Jonathan S. Tobin


It is no cliché to note that while all presidents ardently desire second terms they are more often a curse than a blessing. Most of those who have been elected twice in the last century have seen their presidencies run aground for various reasons. George W. Bush had Katrina and the Iraq quagmire. Bill Clinton had Monica Lewinsky and impeachment. Ronald Reagan had Iran Contra. Richard Nixon had Watergate. Lyndon Johnson had Vietnam. Amid the pomp and hope of new beginnings if a second inauguration day always lurk the threat of unseen or dimly understood disasters that sink presidents who leave the presidency as wounded lame ducks worn down by the cares of office. That’s the challenge facing Barack Obama after being sworn in today for another four years in office.

The president’s opponents can comfort themselves after their shocking defeat last November with the thought that he will inevitably be capsized by the usual second term nightmares that have brought down his predecessors.  But that is an assumption, not an argument. Throughout his career Obama has often defied the laws of political gravity and it is by no means impossible that he should do so again. If the economy actually begins a recovery or he is able to pass some kind of immigration reform or a gun control package and begin the process of reforming entitlements while avoiding foreign disasters, Obama could be that rare species of president who does not spend his second term explaining failures or scandals. That’s a tall order but amid clear signs of future disaster, the president does have some factors that would argue in favor of his success.


The first of these is the power of his personality as well as the historic significance of his presidency. Republicans spent the first four years of the Obama administration underestimating the president’s personal appeal. Part of it is a likeability factor that still puzzles conservatives (including this writer). But they also forget that most Americans, including many of those who disagree with Obama’s policies take pride in the idea that we have finally elected an African-American president and are wary of any attempt to treat him with the usual disdain that is accorded our chief executives. That the mainstream media has been more in his pocket than any president since John F. Kennedy is inarguable. The fact that this president has always been graded on a curve may frustrate his opponents but it can’t be ignored when assessing his prospects. No matter what happens in these next 48 months, the willingness of most Americans to think well of him is going to weigh in his favor.

Also to his advantage is the ruthlessly partisan approach he has taken to governance. Barack Obama may have entered the White House talking about being a post-partisan president but he has governed in a completely different manner. He is an outlier among our presidents when it comes to working his the opposition in that his goal has always appeared to be the demonization and marginalization of his Republican opponents. Few presidents have been as uninterested in bipartisan cooperation to pass legislation as he has been.

That has made it difficult for him to get anything from Congress after losing control of the House in the 2010 midterms in the backlash against ObamaCare and the stimulus boondoggle. But the zero sum game he has embraced is well suited to the objective of portraying his foes as extremists with the assistance of his media cheerleaders. Though his demands for higher taxes are every bit as ideological in nature as the Tea Party’s opposition, only one side has been portrayed as outside the mainstream and isn’t Obama’s. The conversion of his re-election campaign apparatus into a permanent political operation whose purpose will be to attack Republicans during the next four years is a sign of the seriousness of purpose that Obama is demonstrating about winning political battles in the coming months and years. Though some of his predecessors were exhausted about the constant struggle or lost their taste for political combat after several years in office, no one should expect that to happen in the Obama White House.

Another plus for Obama is the current weakness and division among the ranks of Republicans. The House GOP has decided to put off another confrontation over the budget for a month but unless they work together, they will wind up being bested again just as they were in 2011 in the first debt ceiling crisis and this past month over the fiscal cliff.

Of course, there are also good reasons to believe that the president will not skate through another four years unscathed by the burdens of office.

Second terms are usually a ripe environment for scandal and that factor is something that could bite the president if and when prosecutors unravel the case about security leaks from White House or other cases that have yet to get much publicity. But anyone that expects this administration to play by the rules and surrender meekly to a special prosecutor the way most others have hasn’t been paying attention the last four years.

This president is dependent on factors that neither he nor his opponents can control. The economy is the chief variable and should it go down rather than up in the next two years, then that is something that no amount of charm, media bias or historical significance can control. President Obama was fortunate that a bad economy did not sink further during his re-election year but in the coming months, as ObamaCare is about to be implemented, the effect of his signature legislative achievement could undermine any hopes for a stronger recovery.

Also looming over any presidency is the chance that foreign affairs will torpedo a second term. Objective historians will probably see his time in office as one during which U.S. influence in the world fell to new lows as he dozed while the Arab Spring turned longtime allies into Islamist strongholds. The looming conflict with Iran is just one possibility for disaster but it is also one that Obama has courted during his first term as he wasted years on a foolish attempt to engage the ayatollahs and then feckless diplomacy that allowed Tehran to get closer to its goal of a nuclear weapon. The odds are that sometime during his second term he will be faced with the choice of allowing Iran to go nuclear or using force to stop it. The longer he waits the higher the risks are that any intervention will be too late or too costly.

Yet above all, Obama will be, as any president is, a hostage to fortune. Napoleon used to ask if his officers were lucky before they received promotion. Though some may deny the existence of luck, Barack Obama is a man who has been fortune’s favorite throughout his career. Had an opponent’s messy divorce not become public, it is unlikely he would have ever been elected to the Senate. He was fortunate in facing two Republican opponents for the presidency who were both poor candidates even if they were both good men. A hurricane hit the country at exactly the right moment to give his re-election a boost and when both the press and at least one self-interested Republican was more interested in letting him play commander-in-chief during a crisis than analyzing the failures of the government to help many Americans.

It may seem superficial to put all this down to luck and there are other explanations for Barack Obama’s rise and re-election. There are many reasons why his ideological rigidity will undermine his second term or why his shortsighted approach to foreign affairs should lead to predictable disasters. It is more than likely that four years from now this country will be closer to insolvency with a weak economy and a worsened security situation abroad. But this is a president who has always gotten a pass from much of the media and much of the public for his mistakes and misjudgments. Anyone who bets that this will change in the next four years shouldn’t mortgage the house on the result.


Jonathan S. Tobin

Source: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2013/01/20/can-obamas-luck-hold-in-his-second-term/

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

Guns, Gays, and Eighteenth-Century Rights

by Robert Oscar Lopez

As of January 13, 2013, when a million French citizens stormed Paris to stop a bill extending marriage and adoption rights to same-sex couples, it became clear that the world is witnessing a compressed, high-speed reprise of the late eighteenth century.  As the internet's magnificent social networking hubs became a means of organizing a human rights movement at lightning velocity in France -- for the march on Paris was, it must be noted, primarily a march for the rights of children -- in the United States, a large swath of the citizenry is enraged over threats to take away their guns and tagging Piers Morgan as the modern-day British magistrate retreading the oppressions that led to the Declaration of Independence.  The key documents that these two mass movements against gay marriage and gun control cite were authored, coincidentally, at roughly the same time: the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified at the end of 1791, and the French revolutionary civil code, soon to be adapted into the Napoleonic Code, was adopted in August 1793.

In the minds of everyone involved, children are at the root of both countries' jaunt back to the eighteenth century.  The Sandy Hook massacre gave an impetus to American proponents of gun control; on January 16, Obama surrounded himself with children as he announced his intent to use executive powers to impose stricter limits on guns.  His detractors point out the large number of children who die of gun violence in Obama's own Chicago, many of them black, who seem not to warrant the immediate urgency that the governing party shows when white children in a wealthy Connecticut town die.  Similar appeals to familial instincts dominate the French debate about gay marriage.  President Hollande and his gay proxies such as Nicolas Gougain insist that gay marriage will protect children already living in same-sex French households -- estimated vaguely around 30,000 -- while the "manifestants" who marched to oppose the gay marriage bill focus on their worries that legalizing gay marriage will only create an underclass of fatherless or motherless children disadvantaged vis-à-vis their peers who have mothers and fathers.  As one gay dissenter from gay marriage stated:

It's true that there are 10s of thousands of children now being cared for by people who aren't their legal parents and who do not have legal rights to them. That's a situation we must no longer tolerate. We have to fix the law to prevent it [not encourage it] tomorrow. This law will not fix life for these tens of thousands. It will add tens of thousands more to the tens of thousands already there.

Both France and the United States are led by left-leaning presidents, elected in 2012, who built their careers on criticizing the allegedly harmful policies of former conservative presidents.  Both have decided to play the war hawk against popular expectation, with Barack Obama drumming his own glory over the killing of Osama bin Laden and François Hollande deciding to ride into one of the less commonly discussed nations of Africa: a place called Mali that most people in France and the United States have never heard of.  Both Obama and Hollande have wandered into tax nightmares, with the Republican House of Representatives locking horns with the Democrats over the sunset of Bush's tax rates, and a high court in France striking down Hollande's plan to tax the income of the wealthiest Frenchmen at 75%.

In recent years, the American Revolution has enjoyed a serious vogue in popular publishing, especially among conservative readers.  Biographies of George Washington outsell Harlequin romances, and James Madison's letters are quoted in polemical Facebook posts.  In the United States, perhaps owing partly to some reckless claims in Ann Coulter's Demonic, conservatives have been fond of contrasting the French Revolution unfavorably against the American one, repeating in slightly abridged versions the charges laid by Edmund Burke in Reflections on the Revolution in France.  But we must not forget that more than a decade separates the Declaration of Independence and the passage of the United States Constitution; the author of the former was in Paris, watching mobs storm the Bastille, while the latter was authored in Philadelphia.  The American "Revolution" was a long and bloody war forged on emotionally charged broadsides that culminated in Thomas Jefferson's brain with the lofty language of the Declaration's first few paragraphs, followed by spiteful ad hominem attacks against King George for the bulk of the document.  While some like Ann Coulter have stated that the French Revolution was all about emotion, mob rule, and imagery, the truth is that the 1770s were a time of emotion, ragtag militias, and provocateurs dressed in disguises throwing crates of tea into harbor waters.  The two nations are nowhere near as divergent as a casual gloss of the eighteenth century might conclude.

The "family" is a hotly contested unit in republics that have eliminated monarchies.  The role of the king and queen, in monarchies past, was to be the father and mother to the nation, to transmit family values by performing their oedipal tragedies in full regalia and by resolving them on a stage for all the nation to see.  In a monarchy, the king and queen make all the citizens siblings by virtue of fathering and mothering them all.  In a republic with no king, each father and mother must do this onerous social task individually, building an entire mini-republic in the walls of their home.  They must pass their own laws, see to their own treasury, and face the consequences of their ill-thought decisions.  France and the United States explode, therefore, when the rights and welfare of children are subject to irreconcilable differences of opinion.

Marches, manifestos, photos of dead children, overseas war letters, parades, flag-waving, and vicious invective -- it is truly the making of a watershed.  Neither Obama nor Hollande should take opponents lightly or rebuff their objections by condescending to them with hasty counterpoints.  It is likely, though, that both, rather than neither, will do just that.  Obama issued executive "actions" to limit gun ownership and ration ammunition, while Hollande's attorney general, Christiane Taubira, stood shamelessly in the French parliament and told the deputies who asked for a referendum on gay marriage that, essentially, she didn't care because their party lost the last elections.  In both countries, ivory-tower academics prattle against the angry mobs for being angry mobs, not realizing that their intellectual legitimacy has been squandered on their incestuous conferences and nepotistic tenure reviews for so many years that their words carry no weight anymore.  American and French universities are the best in the world, and yet professors in both countries have been shoved aside by talk-show hosts quoting the Federalist papers and French yeomanry issuing spontaneous re-interpretations of Montesquieu over Wordpress.  When the French marchers in Paris carry signs that say, "We care about sex, not gender," you know that the intellectual elite's theories are being rejected --  not because people are anti-intellectual, but because people are anti-elitist.

The average Yankee and the Gaul of the street no longer care what Paul Krugman says about guns or what columnists in LeMonde tell them about the dignity of gay couples.  The great philosophical debate that both guns and gays have opened -- a sweeping fight over who can speak for children and when or how their rights can be championed without creating a totalitarian state -- is a mental war that must be settled through street fighting.

In some ways, it is depressing. One must ask, why did we get to this point?  It is easy to blame conservatives in both cases, for one must ask, why do gun owners need so many bullets, and why can't the vast heterosexual majority simply let gays build families with medically assisted procreation?  True watersheds happen when these obvious questions give way to deeper, less evident ones: if the Democrats care about children so much, why have they said nothing about abortion, why do they block parents from using vouchers to move their children to safer schools, why do they watch the skyrocketing rates of single-parent households with seeming neutrality, and why do they show so much caution in discussing the children who die at the hands of the impoverished criminals whom they are more likely to protect on socioeconomic grounds?  If the French socialists care so much about gay equality, why not focus on policies that affect the vast majority of France's gay men who do not end up in lifelong couples, struggle with the threat of AIDs, and seem to want children to have mothers and fathers the same way they did?  The editor of France's Elle magazine, Valerie Toranian, may have said it best in her latest missive, which sent shockwaves through the fashion world:

Among Elle's editors, if yes to marriage seems the majority, the question of insemination, surrogacy, and adoption, how these things affect transient mothers, gives us pause and splits us. One thing brings us together: the conscience that these discussions that affect the female body deserve a long debate, including in the columns of our magazine. Worried about not swelling the ranks of bickerers, the government chose to separate insemination from the issue of marriage. It was a wise choice. But we must go further. We must not above all rush to put these things into law this spring, as was initially called for. There is a range of things to talk about -- ethics, science, law, which needs an open debate among competing viewpoints.

 Much of the West's intellectual class was delighted at the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Arab spring of 2011, which they viewed as parts of the same glorious dawn.  Actually, 2011 was still the "darkest" part of that saying "it is always the darkest just before the dawn" -- the dawn is now, in mass movements of ordinary people who feel the eighteenth century because they live its dilemmas, not because they have Ph.D.s.  The presidents in both France and the United States must be cautious, lest they become Hanovers and Bourbons in socialist drapery.


Robert Oscar Lopez's translations of the French debate can be found here.  His academic work is available here and his fiction here.

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2013/theodore-shoebat/islam-and-environmentalism-united-in-anti-humanism/

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

The Algerian Hostage Situation

by Abraham H. Miller


The hostage situation in Algeria has descended into chaos and Western governments are venting their criticism at the Algerian government for storming the Al Qaeda-linked hostage takers and precipitating a shootout. The Western governments might wish to reconsider the appropriateness of their judgments. 

For decades I labored in the world of hostage and barricade situations interviewing hostage negotiators and assault teams both here and abroad. The Western model of hostage negotiations emanates from law enforcement, specifically from a program designed by the New York City Police Department. The NYPD model was highly successful and adopted by governments through out the Western world. It was predicated on the idea that every life is valuable, hostage takers ultimately do not want to die, and success is achieved when everyone walks out alive -- including the hostage takers.

Similarly, the model for dealing with airline hijacking was predicated on the idea that hijackers were not suicidal, one should cooperate with them, get the airplane safely on the ground, and let some government's trained specialists get the hijackers to capitulate. We all saw how successful that model was on 9/11.

The idea of saving everyone's life -- even the lives of terrorists -- was widely celebrated in these policies and seen as rooted in our Judeo-Christian heritage. So imbedded in our thinking was the idea of the value of a human life that at the highest levels of government, pre-9/11, people spoke of Islam as also finding suicide abhorrent. Intelligence analysts dissected what appeared to be obvious suicide missions against Israel as having an escape route. And suicide bombings were deviant events, certainly something America would not have to worry about.

Hostage and barricade situations, no matter who the hostage takers were, could be handled by getting the hostage takers to embrace the value of their lives and do the rational thing, capitulate. Consequently, a domestic dispute resulting in hostage taking, an interrupted robbery resulting in hostage taking, or a terrorist group taking hostages for political reasons all were generally seen through the same lens and intellectually dissected the same way.

Some European countries used trained psychiatrists as negotiators and when some hostage-takers capitulated and subsequently committed suicide, the medical community demanded investigations of the negotiators. Rather than assume that a hostage taking might be a manifestation of a suicidal impulse, the medical community thought that somehow in the process of negotiating the psychiatrist had implanted thoughts that drove the hostage taker to take his own life. Psychiatrists who had saved lives found themselves being investigated for being catalysts for suicide. 

Of course, not everyone adhered to the "everyone walks out alive" model. Police departments other than New York were less likely to run the clock and put innocent lives at risk while a crazed man with a gun made demands. The Los Angeles Police Department's SWAT team became legendary in police circles, and somewhat grudgingly admired, for its physical training and the skills of its marksmen. LA SWAT would negotiate and try and get a hostage taker to do the right thing, but if they had an opportunity to use force, they were going to do it. If terrorists shot first, SWAT was not going to hesitate to return fire. In police circles the adage was, "New York will talk you to death, but if you start f**kin' with LA SWAT, they will kill you for real." 

Although European countries lined up with the New York model, Israel was more like Los Angeles. I once interviewed an Israeli general whose units had handled some of Israel's most difficult and violent hostage and barricade situations. In preparing for my interview, I noticed that no terrorists survived the assaults of his troops. I asked him about that, and after digressing into the nuances of a fire fight with automatic weapons, he looked me straight in the eye and said, "You notice that. They notice that too."

That was a time when the Palestinian terrorist groups, like Palestinians generally, where largely secular. And killing a group of terrorists made it far and away more difficult for the terrorist organization to recruit for the next mission.

Precious few who operated in the world of hostage and barricade situations before 9/11 truly embraced or even mentioned the idea of Jihad and religious fanatics willing to sacrifice their lives to be with virgins in paradise. And those few who did, like Dr. Robert Kupperman, the one-time Chief Scientist for the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, were treated as alarmists.

Even after 9/11 a lot of thinking in policy circles was that terrorism is a problem for domestic law enforcement. It is this mentality that gives rise to the unfortunate and inappropriate criticism of the Algerians.

We need to grapple with the reality that a new breed of terrorist does not want to live but wants to die for Jihad. The old models for hostage situations do not work, and labeling incidents like the Fort Hood massacre as workplace violence does not help. It denies that the perpetrator, Major Nidal Hassan, was motivated by fanaticism and acted in the name of Jihad. We cannot simultaneously deny what terrorism is and formulate policy to deal with it.

Hostage and barricade situations that pit terrorists who want to die against hostages who want to live are not going to be resolved as a scenario out of the NYPD negotiating manual. It's time to realize that. Domestic terrorists who embrace Jihad cannot be treated like bank robbers who walked into a bank to take money and only take hostages to escape being captured. Bank robbers do not embark on a suicide mission. Jihadists do.

Yes, the situation in Algeria is chaotic and messy, and it will continue that way until the terrorists in this episode are hunted down and killed. To defeat this kind of terrorism, we must realize that terrorists commit acts of terrorism for the same reason that people sell bread. There is some profit in it. When people can't make a profit from selling bread, they will stop. When terrorists realize that there are far reaching repercussions for those who orchestrate acts of terrorism that make terrorism a liability, they will stop.

To achieve this we must recognize what and whom we are fighting. This means stopping the euphemistic rhetoric about terrorism and the political censorship that removes "Jihad," "Islam," and "terrorism" from the same sentence. It means crafting new policies that makes acts of terrorism immensely costly for those who send people out to kill innocents for their cause. There is much that can be done, if we have the political will to do it. In the meantime, the Algerians deserve our support, not our misguided criticism.

Abraham H. Miller

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/01/the_algerian_hostage_situation.html

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