Internal French Document Shows Troubling Discrepancies With US on Iran Deal - IPT News

by IPT News

U.S. and Iranian officials have described last week's framework for a deal to slow Iran's nuclear weapons program with disturbingly different details. According to a Times of Israel report Tuesday, the U.S. account also differs significantly with a key ally – France.

U.S. and Iranian officials have described last week's framework for a deal to slow Iran's nuclear weapons program with disturbingly different details. According to a Times of Israel report Tuesday, the U.S. account also differs significantly with a key ally – France.

The proposed deal lets Iran continue to develop use advanced centrifuges which could allow for uranium enrichment as much as 20 times faster than the Islamic Republic's current technology. After 12 years, Iran can actually resume enriching uranium, which the newspaper reported "would enable Iran to more rapidly accumulate the highly enriched uranium needed to build nuclear weapons, accelerating its breakout time to the bomb." The source is an internal French government fact-sheet which the newspaper was able to review, but which has not been released publicly.

That timeline, however, dovetails with an acknowledgment President Obama made this week in an interview with National Public Radio. Iran's "break-out" time to make a bomb could shrink "almost down to zero" by year 13 after any final deal is negotiated, Obama said.

It's a concern shared by Olli Heinonen, a former senior nuclear proliferation watchdog for the International Atomic Energy Agency. Iran has yet to fully acknowledge the depth of its nuclear weapons program, Heinonen told the Times of Israel. The proposed agreement leaves Iran "a threshold breakout nuclear state for the next 10 years."

That, he predicted, would trigger a regional nuclear arms race that the agreement was supposed to help avoid.

U.S. and Iranian negotiators have until the end of June to hammer out a final agreement.

Israeli analyst Ehud Yaari identified six terms in the proposed agreement in which the United States and Iran have offered different assessments. Among them: Iran believes it stands to secure immediate relief from crippling economic sanctions, while the U.S. says that relief comes in phases as various commitments are met. In addition, Iran believes it can continue to use the Fordo underground uranium enrichment plant for developing centrifuges, while the U.S. says no enrichment could take place there for 15 years.

Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz briefed reporters Monday on recommendations which could lead to "a more reasonable agreement." The Fordow plant must be shut down entirely, inspectors must be able to make unannounced visits "anywhere, anytime" and development of new centrifuges must be prohibited, he said.

U.S. officials expressed little interest in pushing for those recommendations. "We believe that this is the best deal that can emerge from these negotiations," Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, told Israeli television.

Read the full interview in which Olli Heinonen details his concerns here.


IPT News

Source: http://www.investigativeproject.org/4817/report-internal-french-document-shows-troubling

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

France, the West and the Islamist Challenge - Amir Taheri

by Amir Taheri

Even in poor countries that become breeding grounds for Islamic terror, the funds needed always come from richer Muslim nations. What we are facing is not a revolt of the poor.
What matters is what you are taught, where and by whom and for what purpose. Many jihadists are taught a vision of the world and the place of Islam in it that is bound to lead to conflict, violence, terror and ultimately war.
Non-Western cultures have no doubt that they are the best... it is only Western civilization that regards self-criticism as an almost sacred duty. In a civilization built on critical, and self-critical, thinking, we are invited to practice censorship and self-censorship. If danger there is, it comes from those who wish to silence such voices in the name of multiculturalism and "respect for the other."
The adepts of political correctness in the West measure everyone's worth with the degree of his or her victimhood.
The problem was misguided Islamophilia not bigoted Islamophobia. Islamophilia is often mixed with anti-Americanism, blaming America for whatever goes wrong under the sun.
The Imperialism of guilt blames the West, especially America, for everything, and denies "the other" any credit, even for his own mistakes. Every year a group of Americans travels to Jerusalem to meet Arabs and apologize to them for "the Crusades." The fact that at the time of the Crusades the U.S. did not even exist is conveniently forgotten, as is that Arabs at best played second fiddle in the Crusades, which was mostly the affair of Turks, Kurds and Mamelukes.
That ideology [Islam] is aimed at world conquest. Islam seldom tried to convert people by force, but always insisted on control of territory and imposing its values and its rule. The next step is to cleanse the area of "pockets of kufr [infidels]," such as cinemas, cafes serving alcohol, and book and music shops offering non-Islamic material. This is what the "brethren" do in the suburbs of Paris.
Jihadist movements did not come into being in reaction to American "imperialism" or Zionism.
There are those who insist that Islam is a religion of peace. There is no word for peace in Arabic. There is "silm," which means submission. They ignore the fact that Islam will be a religion of peace only after it has seized control of the entire world.
The sad fact is that Islam cannot be reformed, if only because it lacks a recognized authority capable of proposing, let alone imposing, reform. Today, the bulk of Islamic energies are devoted to political issues, with theological work not even getting a stool at the high table.
What France and the West in general face today is a war waged by part of Islam against the democratic world. The silly slogan, "this has no military solution," is based on a denial of the reality that Western democracies are being attacked in a multifaceted war. The only question that really matters in a state of war is: Are you with us or against us? The unwillingness of Western democracies to agree on an analysis of the situation enables opportunist Muslim powers by tolerating the terrorists.

Three months after the Islamic terror attacks in Paris, France is still grappling with the diagnosis of what happened and remains uncertain on how to cope with what everyone agrees could be a long-term threat to French freedom and security.

There is disagreement, even at the highest levels of state, on the designation of the terrorists who carried out the attacks.

While France's Prime Minister Manuel Valls has spoken of Islamic fascism and announced that France was at war with "terrorism, jihadism and Islamist radicalism," its President, François Hollande, has insisted that "the events had nothing to do with Islam." Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has gone even further by claiming that the men responsible for the carnage belonged to no religion at all. They were simply "men without faith."

The phrase "this had nothing to do with Islam" is found everywhere, a mantra for those who say they are concerned about pouring oil on fire.

That inability and/or unwillingness to decide who the adversary is has affected the debate on the origins of the threat and ways of dealing with it.

Poverty and Terror

As usual, some analysts have blamed "society," an all-purpose abstraction that is supposed to be capable of both good and evil, for the evil deeds of the men who carried out the attacks. Thus we are treated to a litany of woes about how French society had forced the would-be terrorists into a life of poverty, which presumably made terrorism an attractive, if not the only, option for them.

The fact that none of the men involved was especially poor and that, in a welfare society such as France, violence is not the only way out of poverty, is conveniently ignored.

In reality, Islamist terrorism in its latest manifestations is not a product of poor Muslim countries or poor Muslim communities in non-Muslim nations. In the past 40 years or so, Islamist terror has come from fairly wealthy countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Iraq, Algeria and Nigeria, more than poverty-stricken nations such as Bangladesh, Mauritania or Sierra Leone. Even in poor countries that became breeding grounds for Islamist terror, countries such as Afghanistan, Somalia and more recently, Yemen, Mali and Niger, the funds needed for creating and operating terrorist networks -- the training and financing necessary and the theological-political guidance -- always come from richer Muslim nations.

In the past two years, thousands of volunteers for jihad from rich European countries, as well as the United States, Canada, Russia, China and Japan, have joined various Islamist terror outfits including the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, the Al-Shabaab in Somalia and the Ansar al-Allah (Helpers of God) in Yemen, among other groups.

In its early form, Al Qaeda was created with seed money from several oil-rich Arab states to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. When those states stopped the flow of funds in the 1990s, a number of wealthy Arab families, often operating in the guise of Islamic charities, stepped in to keep the wheels of jihad lubricated.

Today, the Taliban in Afghanistan, Boko Haram in Nigeria and, of course, Islamic State (Da'esh in Arabic) are better funded than some small developing nations. Recent footage from Raqqah, capital of the Islamic Caliphate in Syria, reveals a city flush with money. The jihadis go around in the latest 4-wheel-drive gas-guzzlers manufactured in "Satanic" lands. The Caliph who has just renamed himself Abubakar Hussein al-Hashemi himself drives a bullet-proof Mercedes 600 and, when in public, likes to show off his $25,000 Swiss gold watch.

Thus, the claim that poverty causes terrorism is a moot point at best. What we are facing is not a revolt of the poor but a movement that attracts relatively well-to-do individuals from all over the world. After all, to reach the area controlled by the Caliphate, one would need cash to buy airline tickets to Turkey and then hire a taxi for a 200 mile drive south to Raqqah.

Failure of Education

The second diagnostic, that the terrorists represented a failure of the education system, is equally open to debate. The men who carried out the Paris massacres had all benefited from an educational system that many French boast about as the best in the world. They had obtained their "Bacs" and could also have proceeded to secure university education had they so wished.

More broadly, the current international jihad movement is not an affair of uneducated individuals. Members of the top echelon of the Islamic State all have higher education, as do the leaders of various Al Qaeda franchises in North Africa and Yemen. All the top five theoreticians of Da'esh have the equivalent of PhDs from the Al-Azhar University in Cairo, reputed to be the most exclusive center for Sunni Islamic theological education.

There are more PhDs, often from U.S. universities, in President Hassan Rouhani's administration in Tehran than in that of President Barack Obama in Washington. And, yet, the Rouhani administration, claiming a duty to "export revolution," is the principal supporter of a variety of Islamist terror groups, including branches of Hezbollah, the Ansar Allah, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas.

In any event, no education is ever neutral. What matters is what you are taught, where, by whom and for what purpose. Many jihadists do attend Islamic madrassahs to complement and counter-balance their education in schools they do not consider halal. They are taught a vision of the world and the place of Islam in it that is bound to lead to conflict, violence, terror and ultimately war.

"Crusader-Zionist" Claim

Another suggested explanation of why terrorists did what they did is based on the classical claim that Muslims have been victims of Western Imperialist or "Crusader-Zionist" injustice for centuries, and are thus venting their anger through "violent extremism," to borrow a phrase from my favorite lexicographer, Barack Obama.

In his book "The War for Muslim Minds", French Islamologist Gilles Kepel echoes the Obamaesque cliché. He denounces the phrase "war on terror" as "a phrase engineered to heighten fear" among Americans. He writes, "Stigmatizing the enemy by calling them 'terrorists' is of little help in defining the nature of the new threat."

The domestic variation of the same theme is that Muslims living in Western democracies, including France, are somehow deprived of full citizenship rights or are subjected to Islamophobia.

French journalist Edwy Plenel has devoted a whole book called "Pour les Musulmans" ("For Muslims") to the claim of victimhood for Muslim communities in Europe in general and in France in particular. He questions the idea that there is any specific "Frenchness" and argues that France belongs to whoever lives there at any given time.

To drive in the point, he asserts: "We are a little America after all."

His whole thesis is based on the rejection of the idea that in a secular republic founded on the principles of equality and fraternity, there could be such a thing as a Muslim community. That, however, is anathema to many Muslims who firmly believe that an "Infidel" could never be regarded as an equal to a follower of "The Only True Faith," that is to say, Islam. Plenel undermines his own thesis with the title of his book. If Muslims do not represent a distinct reality in France, how could one be for or against them?

The Racism Claim

Another claim is that the jihadists are angry young men from ethnic groups subjected to racism in France.

That claim, too, is hard to sustain.

To start with, Islam is not a race; there are Muslims of all shades and colors, including quite a few ginger-heads, and not only in Europe. In any case, though France has had and continues to have its share of racist bigots, it has one of the best records in Europe for accommodating ethnic and racial diversity. It has had black members of parliament and Senators, Cabinet ministers and other ranking officials long before people like Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and Barack Obama injected a bit of color into the upper strata of American politics. For at least two decades after World War II, France was a haven for black American writers and musicians and artists, among them Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Miles Davis and Josephine Baker. Since the Second World, there have been black and "colored" faces in almost all French Cabinets and parliaments.

France also had Arab/Muslim members of parliament long before such "exotic" figures could enter the British or any other Western legislature. While the US is yet to have a Jewish president and Britain a Jewish prime minister, France has already had two Jewish prime ministers and a president who is a grandson of a Rabbi. Add to that at least two Protestant prime ministers, while Britain has not yet had its first Catholic premier, and France's record as a fairly tolerant society would be hard to challenge.

The Islamophobia Claim

The next claim one has to deal with is that of Islamophobia as at least a partial cause of the resentment that is supposed to have pushed those "angry young" men towards jihad.

That claim, too, is based on little evidence, if any.

France is, in fact, one of the few countries in the world, all of them Western or Western-style democracies, where Muslims of any and all denominations could live, practice, and propagate their faith in freedom and security. In every one of the 57 Muslim majority member-nations of the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), only one version of Islam, the one approved by the state, is allowed basic freedoms.

If you are a Sunni Muslim in the Iranian capital, Tehran, for example, you are not allowed to have a mosque of your own, even though your fellow believers number 2.5 million.

In contrast, if you set up a Shi'ite mosque in Cairo, you are likely to get killed, as was the case in 2013 with the Egyptian capital's now-destroyed single Shi'ite mosque and its founder. Editions of the Koran printed in Saudi Arabia are banned in the Islamic Republic of Iran, and Saudi Arabia repays the compliment by confiscating Korans published by the Iranians. In Paris, however, you could buy both editions, and many others, without fear of arrest or worse.

In many cases, rare texts of Islamic scholarship, often saved from destruction in their original Islamic homelands, are available in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. French universities and other centers of learning and research do more work on all aspects of Islam than is done in almost any Muslim-majority nation.

The label "ethnocentric" has become an all-purpose device to shut down any critical scrutiny of communities and cultures supposedly "oppressed by the West" since the dawn of history. Interestingly, the very concept of ethnocentrism is a Western invention and remains unique to the West. It started with Montaigne four centuries ago in his essay "Les Cannibales," written to castigate reports by Western travelers that pockets of cannibalism persisted in some parts of the world beyond Western influence.

If no other culture has developed the concept of ethnocentrism as a means of questioning its own values and world view, the reason is that non-Western cultures have no doubt that they are the best and that, as such, fully merit being at the center. The Chinese are not ashamed of being labeled "Sinocentric," nor would Persians have any qualms about being accused of Persocentrism. It is only Western civilization that regards self-criticism as an almost sacred duty. In other civilizations, it is self-reaffirmation that is highly prized. It was on that basis that Imam Muhammad al-Ghazzali, the first Muslim scholar to be given the highly coveted title of Hojat al-Islam (Proof of Islam), castigated philosophical speculation as anti-Islamic.

"The task of the Muslim scholar is to seek knowledge that reaffirms the message of the Koran and the teachings of the Prophet," Ghazzali wrote. "Philosophy, however, sees casting doubt on all certainties by questioning them as its principal task."

Islamopologia or Islamophobia?

Often, in the post-modern Western view, the concept of otherness -- altérité, made famous with Claude Levi-Strauss's seminal work -- implies at least the equality of the other, if not his superiority, in terms of cultural value.

There is, in fact, evidence that France may have more of a problem with Islamopologia than Islamophobia. Was it Islamophobia that persuaded President Jacques Chirac to try to suppress a report he himself had commissioned on the emergence of Islamist ghettos around Paris and many other French cities? Though it focused on what was going on in state-run schools, the Obin Report, eventually released a year later, portrayed a wider picture of a society that, as admitted by Prime Minister Valls recently, practiced a form of Apartheid for fear of angering its Muslim minority. The fact that a small minority of radical Muslims imposed their "way of life" on others, including a majority of French Muslims, showed that the problem was misguided Islamophilia, not bigoted Islamophobia.

In a small Paris street, Rue des Petites Ecuries, in the 10^th arrondissement, one finds Muslims of many different backgrounds living side by side as shopkeepers and residents.

In many parts of the so-called Muslim world itself, however, they would not even address the routine "salam aleikom" to each other, or they would be killing one another in sectarian wars.

France is estimated to be home to around six million Muslims, the vast majority of them not practicing. However, in 2013 the country had just under 2000 mosques. Not a bad number when we remember that Tehran, with a population of 14 million, has only 720 mosques. Riyadh, the Saudi capital, has 3000 mosques for a population of 7.5 million.

It is also hardly a sign of Islamophobia that the French Republic, always proud of its secularism, financed the creation of what President Nicholas Sarkozy dubbed "une église française de l'Islam" in the shape of Le Conseil français du culte musulman.

Even an occasional viewer of French television would soon find more evidence of possibly well-intentioned but ultimately misguided Islamophilia than Islamophobia. Over the past few years, dozens of documentaries showing Islam in the best possible light have been screened, including a few claiming that had Islam not saved the pre-Christian Greco-Roman heritage, modern Europe would have been impossible. One documentary even suggested that cinema was invented by a certain Abu-Hufus, a Muslim lens-maker in 10th century Baghdad, echoing similar claims by President Barack Obama in his notorious speech at Cairo University.

By encouraging the illusion that Islam is really better than it is, and regardless of their intentions, Islamopologists do great harm both to Islam and to France. At the same time, the creation of a new category of topics beyond any critical scrutiny prevents France from developing policies needed to cope with Islam's positive as well as negative aspects.

Islam is the Solution

In his "Relire le Coran" ("Re-reading the Koran"), the late French Arabologist Jacques Berque tried to prove that there was something miraculous about the "Holy Book" by showing that in one of the suras the same word was repeated on two pages facing each other in exactly the same place. That, in fact, is a reduction of the Koran to a book of jumbles, even though supposedly of divine origin.

I remember Michel Foucault, a French philosopher, who came to Tehran in 1978 to watch our "revolution." He loved every moment of it. "Here we have the explosion of spirituality in the street," he opined. "In the West we have nothing but crass materialism." But when the mullahs started shooting people by the thousands, and hanging gay men, including one of the Frenchman's Iranian lovers, in public, Foucault was outraged. "The revolution has been sullied," he moaned, as if a revolution could ever be immaculate.

"Islam is the Solution" has always been a slogan of the Muslim Brotherhood. However, some Western writers, some of them converts to Islam, have adopted it in a broader civilizational sense.

Roger Garaudy, a Stalinist who converted to various versions of Islam in succession, starting with that marketed by Colonel Kaddhafi and ending with the version patented by Khomeini, argued that the West is at "an historic impasse" created by the Enlightenment, with Islam offering the only way out.

In his book, "The Promise of Islam," he claims that only Islam is capable of offering mankind a future. "The future is depicted by men like Kaddhafi and Bani-Sadr," he writes. Today, of course, no one knows where Kaddhafi is buried, while we know that Bani-Sadr is an exile in a Paris suburb.

Tariq Ramadan, an Islam advisor to various European governments, echoes that analysis in his book "The Future of Islam in Europe." He claims that Islam, "more than any other civilization has advanced science to a higher level" while maintaining "the spiritual aspect of human existence," supposedly neglected by the West.

Ramadan struggles hard to decide how to define the West. He rejects the concept of the West as Dar al-Harb (Abode of War) as outdated. He then suggests the label Dar al-Sulh (Abode of Truce) but translates the word "sulh" as "peace" which is entirely misleading because 'sulh' means truce, not peace. In fact, there is no word for peace in Arabic in the sense found in Indo-European languages. There is "silm" which means submission," the root of the words Islam and Muslim.

Conscious that his trick might be exposed, he then considers the terms Dar al-Ahd (Abode of Treaty) and Dar al-Dhimma (Abode of Tribute). But these, too, appear unsatisfactory because there is no overall treaty between the West and the Islamic states, while no Western nation pays tribute (jizya) to an Islamic Caliphate.

Ramadan ends up with the term Dar al-Shihadah (Abode of Testimony) which, although it sounds inoffensive, suffers from the disadvantage of being meaningless.

He reveals his full hand when he suggests that the Islamic shariah law offers "creative and innovative possibilities" for solving the problems of a Western civilization in terminal decline.

In his book, mentioned earlier, Gilles Kepel suggests that the West should go "beyond bin Laden and Bush" -- who are, by implication, in positions of moral equivalence -- and aim to create the "New Andalusia," a 21st-century version of what he imagines southern Spain to have been under Muslim rule, this time in the whole of the European Union.

Kepel does not say who would rule, but waxes lyrical about his Islamo-Christian utopia. "Andalusia must come to symbolize a place where the hybridization and flowering of two distinct cultures can produce an extraordinary progress in civilization. The advent of the New Andalusia is the only way out of the passions and impediments [sic] that Osama bin Laden's Jihad and George W. Bush's war on terror have produced."

Kepel would have done well to read some of the Islamic texts, especially the poems of the Emir Al-Mutamed, which depict part of the atrocities committed by the Al-Moravids in the heyday of the Andalusian utopia.

Islamophilia is often mixed with anti-Americanism. Blaming America for whatever goes wrong under the sun has always been a favorite sport of a section of the French intellectual elite, and Kepel is not alone in indulging in it.

As early as the 19th century, several French writers, among them Stendhal and Villiers de L'Isle d'Adam, adopted anti-American postures in the name of preserving Europe's "authenticity" or rejecting "crass materialism." JK Huysmans saw America as "a gigantic whorehouse" and warned against "the invasion of American manners and its aristocracy of wealth."

The French neo-anti-Americanism may not be as direct or as brazen. But it is certainly no less intensely felt.

In his book "Le Pacte de Lucidité," the philosopher Jean Baudrillard describes the US as "a negative power that disregards [other nations'] sovereignty and representative democracy."

According to Baudrillard, what we are witnessing is "The antagonism between world power [i.e. the US] and terrorism." He writes: "The current confrontation between American hegemony and Islamic terrorism is the visible aspect of the duel between an integral reality of power and the integral refusal of that same power."

The background to that epic struggle is the death of Western reality itself.

Baudrillard writes: "In fact, this profane and desacralized reality has slowly become a useless function, a fiction that we desperately try to save as we did with God's existence in the past. Deep down we don't know how to rid ourselves of it."

If Western democracies are attacked by terrorists, it is, once again, their own fault.

Baudrillard writes: "The capitalist world order is no longer facing the specter of Communism but its own specter: terrorism."

I believe that one of the reasons for the West's success as a civilization is its almost unique capacity for self-criticism.

However, that unique capacity is undermined when Islam, which is now part of the Western reality, is allocated a special category labeled "handle with care" or "vilify at will."

Sometimes, that "handle with care" position on Islam is taken to the limit of the absurd. For example, some stars of La Gauche (The Left) appeared on television to call for a campaign of silence against Michel Houellebecq's novel, "Submission," which, they claimed, insulted Islam. Former Trotskyite Edwy Plenel invited reviewers simply to ignore the novel, a new form of censorship.

As far as Islam was concerned, omerta was in order, just as it is in the case of the Corsican Mafia.

In a civilization built on critical, and self-critical, thinking, we are invited to practice censorship and self-censorship. Would Milton be allowed to publish what he wrote on Catholics? And what about Voltaire and what he wrote on blacks? Need one mention Chateaubriand on Muhammad and Thomas Jefferson on Islam?

What happened to that great European dictum "Error has no rights"?

The French are, of course, not alone to get carried away in their enthusiasm for "the other" whether it is Mussolini or Hitler or Stalin or Mao or the Red Khmer, and, more recently, Khomeini and Osama bin Laden.

Susan Sontag's admiration for the "courage" of Al-Qaeda bombers of 9/11, Noam Chomsky's passionate support for the Taliban in Afghanistan, and Ramsey Clark's boundless admiration for Ayatollah Khomeini and Saddam Hussein, are too well known to need being recalled here.

In a recent nook, the British author Michael Axworthy reflects similar fascination with the Khomeinist regime in Iran. A former diplomat who headed the Iran Desk of the Foreign Office for years, he notes that as "Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote that the French were never as free as they were under Nazi occupation, in the sense that moral choice and the seriousness of consequences were never as sharp as they were at the time. That too is true in Iran. In Western countries, for many of us, we have it easy and have become morally lazy, relativistic and cynical. In Iran, the essentials of right and wrong, freedom and repression have been everyday matters of discussion and choice."

In other words, the estimated 150,000 highly educated Iranians who flee the country each year, creating the biggest "brain drain in history," according to the World Bank, do not know what a good thing they are leaving behind in Iran. Let us also remember that under Nazi occupation, Sartre continued to live a comfortable life of philosophical speculation while quite a few French men and women took up arms to drive out the occupier.

The Imperialism of Guilt

In the past two centuries, contemplating the outside world, the West has passed through a number of phases. The optimism of the 18th century, with its rose-tinted spectacles, was followed by 19th century romanticism and the tragic pessimism of the 20th century.

The Imperialism of arrogance, based on the belief that the West had a sacred mission to civilize the rest of the world, was replaced by the romantic illusion that "the other" had developed a lifestyle closer to human nature and nature in general.

In our time, the Imperialism of arrogance, which denied "the other" any positive achievement, has been replaced with an Imperialism of guilt that blames the West, especially America, for everything and denies "the other" any credit, even for his own mistakes.

Thus, the Imperialism of guilt invites us to see the crime committed by the Kouachi brothers as somehow related to "French atrocities" in Algeria.

Sometimes, peddlers of the Imperialism of guilt go even further. Every year, a group of Americans travels to Jerusalem to meet Arabs in the eastern part of the city and apologize to them for "the Crusades."

The fact that at the time of the Crusades the U.S. did not even exist is conveniently forgotten, as is that Arabs at best played second fiddle in the Crusades, which was mostly the affair of Turks, Kurds and the Mamelukes.

One of the 14 papers presented during the annual "Death to America" conference in Tehran was also devoted to the role of "The Great Satan" as leader of the Crusades against Islam. That Iran was in no way involved in the Crusades, a clash between the Europeans and the Turkic, Mameluke and Kurdish principalities of Egypt, the Levant and Anatolia at the time, was overlooked.

In a political version of the Original Sin, the West is invited to account for all its real or imagined misdeeds, including those unjustly imputed to it by its enemies, to apologize for them and, as often as possible, even pay compensation.

The adepts of political correctness in the West regret everything and measure everyone's worth with the degree of his or her victimhood.

And, yet, to quote Spinoza, "after hatred, regret is the most fundamental enemy of mankind."

Self-Loathing and Submission

Sometimes, self-criticism degenerates into self-loathing and a longing for peace even through "submission," in line with the Stockholm Syndrome.

Eric Zemmour, a TV journalist, has become the bête-noire of the politically correct crowd in France because he dared warn against the danger that Islamism posed for Europe and Western civilization as a whole.

However, Zemmour's main target is France, or more precisely the French intellectual elite, who, he claims, are leading their civilization to suicide in the sense meant by British historian Arnold Toynbee: by failing to meet their challenges. Zemmour is not blaming Islam in the sense claimed by Islamopologists. He is blaming the French, who have lost their will to fight back in defense of their own values and way of life.

Zemmour's "suicide" warning is echoed in a new book by former Prime Minister Michel Rocard, in which he claims that France and Western civilization as a whole are digging their own graves.

Even Michel Houellebecq, now castigated as the paragon of Islamophobia, in his latest novel "Submission," points the explosive anger of his derision at the French rather than Islam and Muslims. He portrays a civilization gripped by self-doubt, obsession with sex and consumerism, and lacking the will to take any risks in defense of its fading values.

France and Europe in general are prepared to listen to the voice of the tempter promising them tranquility, if not peace. As described by Mark Lilla in the New York Review of Books, in Houellebecq's dystopian novel, the tempter tells the narrator, a wobbly François, that

"the summit of human happiness is to be found in absolute submission," of children to parents, women to men, and men to God. And in return, one receives life back in all its splendor. Because Islam does not, like Christianity, see human beings as pilgrims in an alien, fallen world, it does not see any need to escape it or remake it. The Koran is an immense mystical poem in praise of the God who created the perfect world we find ourselves in, and teaches us how to achieve happiness in it through obedience. Freedom is just another word for wretchedness.

In other words, Houellebecq is, in a roundabout way, endorsing Kepel's claim that only a New Andalusia could save France and Europe from their current decline. Houellebecq's novel is a fruit of cultural pessimism, which has a long history in the European civilization. And, yet, Houellebecq's novel is routinely castigated as an "Islamophobic" tract rather than a caricature of French society supposedly in decline.

Since I reject the very premise of the novel, as well as Kepel's analysis, that European and/or Western civilization in general is in decline, I need not dwell on the nature of their pessimism. However, what I wish to emphasize is that, contrary to what they think, Islam is torn between currents of self-aggrandizement and self-loathing at least as strong as we witness in Europe today.

The danger that Europe faces is not from pessimists like Zemmour and Houellebecq, who continue a long line that goes back to Saint Augustine, Tomassino Campanella, The Song of Rolland, and more recently, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Oswald Spengler, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, George Orwell, and Thomas Bernhardt, to name but a few. If danger there is, it comes from those who wish to silence such voices in the name of multiculturalism and "respect for the other."

Terror without Frontier

What we face today is terrorism without frontier in the context of globalization, which was so ardently desired and anticipated just a generation ago.

I think the question whether or not this new brand of global terrorism is Islamic cannot be settled by outsiders such as François Hollande and Anne Hidalgo. During a television program, I was taken to task by a blond sheikh from California who, having recently converted to Islam, was angry at my readiness to accept Osama bin Laden's claim that he acted in the name of Islam.

However, since Islam has no mechanism for excommunication, one could not reject anybody who says he is a Muslim. All that one could do is to have recourse to "bara'ah," a mechanism for self-exoneration indicating that the reprehensible deeds of some Muslims do not concern all Muslims.

In its most dynamic and active current manifestation, Islam is a religion transformed, upgraded or downgraded as you wish, into a political ideology. That ideology is aimed at world conquest as a long-term objective, which could be attained through a relentless fight against all other forms of organized human existence.

To fight this new brand of terrorism, the Western democracies need to take its claim of representing Islam seriously, even if they regard such a claim as misplaced. It is up to Muslims themselves to practice "bara'ah," that is to say self-exoneration, and put some clear water between themselves and those who pretend to be the champions of modern Islam. Hollande and Hidalgo cannot do that for them.

A growing number of people in France are beginning to face the reality of the problem Islam poses for the French way of life, if only by providing a radical alternative. François de Closets, best-selling author of the book "Don't Tell God What He Should Do," insists that the French should openly admit that the presence of a large Muslim community in the country poses a problem. This does not mean that Islam is good or bad; what is at issue is that Islam is different, and with things the rest of the French might not want. The only way to deal with the problem is to admit its existence, examine it as calmly as possible and seek solutions compatible with the values of a modern Western democracy. In other words, the ostrich-style denial preached by people such as Plenel simply misses the point.

Islam's Civil War of Ideas

Islam is going through a major civil war of ideas, a civilizational conflict between those Muslims who regard religion as just a part of life, and others who believe religion must be assigned no more than a well-defined place in the public space. That such a conflict should trigger violence, part of which is transferred to non-Muslim lands, is no surprise.

Violence was woven into the very DNA of Islam from the start. After all, the Prophet imposed his domination on parts of Arabia with a series of wars conducted in the style of razzias [raids], from the Arab word "ghazva" [battle]. Islam seldom tried to convert people by force, but always insisted on control of territory and imposing its values and its rule. Even today, the aim is not to force anyone to convert; what is demanded is "submission."

Of the four Well Guided Caliphs of Islam, three were assassinated by Muslims from rival factions. Since then, the history of Islam is dotted with countless political murders at all levels. Jihadist movements did not come into being in reaction to American "Imperialism" or Zionism, the two punching-bags routinely blamed for any surge in Islamic violence. The Kharijites massacred people in what is today Iraq almost 1500 years ago. The Thaqafites, in turn, conducted massacres 1300 years ago. In the 19^th century, The Akhund of Swat, in what is now Pakistan, had never heard of America, let alone George W. Bush and his "neo-cons." Zarraq Khan in the Afghan uplands, Mullah Hassan in what is now Somalia, and the Mahdi and his Ansars in the Sudan waged jihad in pursuit of political power, rather than the settlement of theological disputes with Christendom.

Control of territory, by force if necessary, has always been and remains at the heart of Islamic ambitions. This is what the "brethren" do in the suburbs of Paris and other major French cities which they are trying to "halalize" [make permissible, according to the tenets of Islam] through a mixture of force, intimidation and bribery. The first step is visual "halalization," that is to say a suburban landscape in which beards, hijab, and Islamic dress codes and appearance in general predominate. The next step is to cleanse the targeted area of non-halal "pockets of kufr" [pockets of infidels], such as cinemas, cafes serving alcohol, wine and spirit shops, restaurants serving heathen food, and book and music shops offering non-Islamic material.

The Khomeinist mullahs try to do the same through surrogates such as Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hashad al-Shaabi in Iraq, Haras al-Watani in Syria, Ansar al-Allah in Yemen, and Islamic Jihad in Gaza. Large chunks of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen have already been "halalized" under huge portraits of Ayatollah Khomeini and his successor, Ali Khamenei.

Sunni Muslims are reacting to the threat of Shi'ite expansion, which would mean loss of territory for Sunnis, with their own land-grab schemes, the latest of which has taken the form of the Islamic Caliphate in Iraq and Syria.

"A pure Muhammadan Islam": This is what the Islamic State promises in its propaganda, much of it in cyberspace, to deliver once the Caliphate, established in parts of Iraq and Syria, has defeated "Infidel" enemies and secured its position.

It is not solely thanks to its blitzkrieg victories that IS has attracted universal attention. Perhaps more interesting is the group's ability to seduce large numbers of Muslims across the globe, including in Europe and the United States, with an ideological product designed to replace other brands of Islamism marketed by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, not to mention that of Taliban in Afghanistan and Khomeinists in Iran. Da'eshism, to coin a phrase, also tries to transcend the ideological hodgepodge marketed by Al Qaeda franchises since the 1980s.

The Three Rejections

The "Pure Muhammadan Islam" promised by Da'esh is based on three rejections, explained by the late Islamist ideologue, Yussef al-Ayyeri, in a book published more than a decade ago.

The first rejection is that of traditional Islamic tolerance for Christians and Jews who, labeled "People of the Book", could live in an Islamic Caliphate by paying protection money (jizya).

The idea is that the "protection" offered by Muhammad belonged to the early phase of Islam, when the "Last Prophet" was not strong enough to claim total control of human destiny. Once Muhammad had established his rule, he ordered the massacre of Jews and the expulsion of Christians from the Arabian Peninsula.

What is now needed is "cleansing" (tanzif) of the world, starting with areas controlled by the Caliphate, of other religions. People of other faiths could always convert to Islam and escape death. Last summer, the Druze in northern Syria did that by sending a delegation to Caliph Abubakar Hussein al-Hashemi al-Baghdadi to swear on the Koran and announce the community's mass conversion.

The Zoroastrian Yazidis refused conversion and were massacred, driven out or taken into slavery. Some Christian towns and villages captured by IS also refused conversion, "obliging" the Caliph to order massacres and mass expulsions.

In his book, Al-Ayyeri argues that the history of mankind is the story of "perpetual war between belief and unbelief." As far as belief is concerned, the absolutely final version is Islam, which "annuls all other religions." Thus, Muslims can have only one goal: converting all humanity to Islam and "effacing every trace of all other religions, creeds and ideologies."

The second rejection is aimed against "infidel ideologies", especially democracy, that is to say government of men by men rather than by Allah.

Al-Ayyeri writes:

"Various forms of unbelief attacked the world of Islam in the past century or so, to be defeated in one way or another. The first form of unbelief to attack was "modernism" ... which led to the emergence in the lands of Islam of states based on ethnic identities and territorial dimensions rather than religious faith. The second was nationalism, which, imported from Europe, divided Muslims into Arabs, Persians, Turks and others. ... The third form of unbelief is socialism, which includes communism. That, too, has been defeated and eliminated from the Muslim world."

All along, many Muslims have fallen for those "heathen ideologies," thus postponing the inevitable unification of mankind under the banner of Islam.

Hilmi Hashem, currently regarded as chief theological advisor to the Caliph, believes that the decision by Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to take part in democratic elections, with tragic consequences for "true believers," was "a sin rather than an error."

Hashem is one of the four disciples of al-Ayyeri, all of them Egyptians, to provide the new Caliphate with theological arguments and methods of applying the Islamic law (sharia). Hashem is now acting as "Grand Mufti" (religious Guide) for Da'esh. He is joined by Abu-Moslem al-Masri, who has been appointed Chief Justice, and Abu-Hareb, who is Chief Judge in Aleppo, Syria's most populous city.

The third rejection in IS ideology is aimed against what is labelled "diluted" (iltiqati) forms of Islam. For example, there are those who insist that Islam is a religion of peace. They ignore the fact that Islam will be a religion of peace only after it has seized control of the entire world. Until then the world will continue to be divided between the House of Islam (Dar al-Islam) and the House of War (Dar al-Harb).

Like the Taliban, Boko Haram in Nigeria and Al-Shabaab in Somalia, the Islamic State also rejects the "aping of infidel institutions" such as a presidential system, a parliament, and the use of such terms as "republic" to describe a Muslim society. The only form of government in "Pure Muhammadan Islam" is the caliphate; the only law is the sharia.

It is clear that if Islam has a problem with the West, and indeed with the whole world, as testified by tensions in more than 50 non-Western countries, including India, Burma, Thailand, the Philippines, China and even Japan, not to mention more than a dozen African states, it is because Islam has a problem with itself, not knowing whether it is a religion or a political movement.

Dreams of Islamic Reform

When at a loss as how to deal with what they admit is an Islamic threat, some writers and public officials in France reach for the hope of an Islamic reform movement.

The pious hope that Islam could be reformed has hovered in the background of many debates since the early 19th century, but has never been a serious basis for building an effective policy to face the challenge. The sad fact is that Islam cannot be reformed, if only because it lacks a recognized authority capable of proposing, let alone imposing, reform. I know this from personal experience, as in the 1970s I covered the proceedings of a working group from eight Muslim countries, led by Tunku Abdul-Rahman, a former Malaysian prime minister, appointed by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) to propose a package of very mild, non-theological reforms such as regulating the Haj pilgrimage and fixing the fasting month of Ramadan. The whole exercise collapsed after a few meetings, because no one knew how to propose reforms, let alone find an authority to impose them.

Today, reforming Islam is harder than ever, if only because the bulk of Islamic energies are devoted to political issues, with theological work not getting even a stool at the high table. The last credible Islamic theologians one could cite died over 50 years ago. The few noteworthy theologians one finds in the seminaries of Mecca, Medina, Cairo, Najaf and Qom, among other places, are focused on either esoteric topics or tinkering at the margin of practical problems of modern life.

What France, and the West in general, face today is a war waged by a part of Islam against the democratic world. The most effective way for the West to deal with this situation, and eventually win this war, is to mobilize the resources of its nation-states for facing the challenge on all fronts -- political, economic, and cultural and, when needed, military. The silly slogan "this has no military solution" is self-defeating, if only because it is based on a denial of the reality that the Western democracies and their allies in the Muslim world are being challenged and attacked in a veritable multifaceted war.

Once the Western democracies have admitted to themselves that this is a war, they would be in a position seek allies in the Muslim world by posing the only question that really matters in a state of war: Are you with us or against us?

Today, they cannot pose that question because they are dancing around the issue, talking of social injustice, education, colonial heritage, racism, ethnocentrism and other fashionable shibboleths already mentioned.

The unwillingness of Western democracies to agree on a common analysis of the situation, enables opportunist Muslim powers to hedge their bets by helping or at least tolerating the terrorists under the banner of Islam. And that is bound to prolong the deadly struggle, which terrorism in the end cannot win.


Amir Taheri, syndicated columnist and author of 11 books on Islam, the Middle East and Iran, is Chairman of Gatestone Institute Europe. The above is an edited text of inaugural remarks at Gatestone Institute's conference held in Paris, France, on March 23, 2015.

Source: http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5511/france-the-west-and-the-islamist-challenge

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

Latest polling shows public wants to get much tougher on illegal immigration - Thomas Lifson

by Thomas Lifson

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 62% believe the government is not aggressive enough in deporting these illegal immigrants, up from 52% a year ago and 56%in November. Fifteen percent (15%) feel the current number of deportations is about right. 

The political elites of both parties are ramming illegal immigration down the throats of Americans, and the public is increasingly opposing them. There is a message here for GOP hopefuls for the presidency though they may have to forego the megabucks the US Chamber of Commerce is capable of raising.  Rasmussen reports:

More voters than ever feel the United States is not aggressive enough in deporting those who are here illegally, even as President Obama continues to push his plan to make up to five million illegal immigrants safe from deportation.
Just 16% of Likely U.S. Voters think the U.S. government is too aggressive in deporting those who are in the country illegally. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 62% believe the government is not aggressive enough in deporting these illegal immigrants, up from 52% a year ago and 56%in November. Fifteen percent (15%) feel the current number of deportations is about right. 

You can examine the poll questions here. Some more highlights:

Thirty-two percent (32%) believe illegal immigrants who have American-born children should be exempt from deportation, an element of Obama’s plan, but 51% now disagree. In November, voters were much more closely divided: 38% said they should be exempt from deportation, and only 42% disagreed. Seventeen  percent (17%) remain undecided.
But then most voters (54%) continue to feel that a child born to an illegal immigrant mother in the United States should not automatically become a U.S. citizen, as is now the case.  Thirty-eight percent (38%) favor the current policy of automatic citizenship for these children. Opposition has ranged from 51% to 65% in surveys since April 2006. Support has been in the 28% to 41% range in that same period.
An overwhelming 83% of voters think someone should be required to prove they are legally allowed in the United States before receiving local, state or federal government services. Just 12% disagree. These findings have changed little over the past four years.

These are rather overwhelming numbers, and yet they have no effect on government policy, which seems to be fully in support of s many illegals as possible entering the US, obtaining government services, and transforming the United States into a bilingual nation with a large cohort of poorly-educated people comprising an underlass [sic]. Some more like Brazil or Argentina than the America of yore.  

On the other hand, have you seen how well the elites live in the countries (the necessity of bodyguards aside)? Cheap servants are good for the elites.

Thomas Lifson

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/04/latest_polling_shows_public_wants_to_get_much_tougher_on_illegal_immigration.html

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

Obama's UN Ambitions - James Lewis

by James Lewis

Obama’s eyes have always been on the biggest prize in the world, the virtual Presidency of the Planet. He has been signaling (the way he always does) to the fantasists of the Left, the people who think world government is the answer. That’s the point of the global warming scam and similar power grabs. It is also why Obama pretends that the UN can guarantee the Iranian nuclear surrender, rather than the U.S. Senate, as required by the Constitution.

Why does Obama do dangerous and irrational things? By now half of American voters have pretty much figured him out as a power-hungry and self-serving Chicago pol with strange Muslim sympathies, and damn the U.S. Constitution and the law.

A lot of Obama’s actions make no sense in terms of American politics, where even the Democrats are running away from their messiah of yesteryear. The radical Left, which runs the Democrats today, is now yearning for Liz Warren to be their newest false prophet. She looks younger than Hillary, and the left likes to flatter itself as being the party of the young and good looking.

Obama’s eyes have always been on the biggest prize in the world, the virtual Presidency of the Planet. He has been signaling (the way he always does) to the fantasists of the Left, the people who think world government is the answer. That’s the point of the global warming scam and similar power grabs. It is also why Obama pretends that the UN can guarantee the Iranian nuclear surrender, rather than the U.S. Senate, as required by the Constitution.
This is Tony Blair’s Third Way Socialism, the Marxist ideology that runs the European Union. The key is for the socialist power caste to use the economic efficiencies of capitalism to leverage their own power. That is Obama’s political game, and to make it work he will play footsie with Wall Street, robber barons, and theofascists in Iran.

That is also why Israel’s safety and security had to be sacrificed to the Iranians, along with the safety of Iran’s Arab enemies. The inevitable result is nuclear proliferation, and the Saudis are giving out hints they are getting armed up.

Obama needs those “57 Muslim states” to become UN secretary general, once a Democrat nominates him. He can count on Eurosocialists, and he may be trading away Eastern Europe to Putin to get Russia’s support.

Obama is all about self-glorification and power, and even after two terms as president his hunger for more is not abated. He would need a personality replacement to change. The best hypothesis is that he has been using the presidency to collect IOU’s from Muslim nations, and probably from Putin and the rest. Obama didn’t resist China’s gigantic grab of disputed seabed territory from Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines. As a quid pro quo, China might support Obama for secretary general. And Obama would get to be King of the World.

Remember Obama’s deep bow campaign? Remember his failure to place promised antimissile defenses in Eastern Europe? Remember his retreat from the Middle East, and his support for the Muslim Brotherhood terror-sponsors?

Islamic fascists want to control the world. So does the radical Left. Obama is a creature of both. To become secretary general, Obama might even officially become a Muslim, a publicity smash that may make him the favorite of those 57 states. Europe is run by socialists who also believe in world conquest -- by peaceful means, of course. As for Putin and China, they will demand a high price -- such as crippling limitations on US energy production, which Obama has already promised China. Putin is advancing in the Arctic for mineral exploitation, and has taken over a major northern base on the Russian border with Norway that was abandoned after the Cold War.

Obama will never let the words “Muslim violence” escape his lips. This seems increasingly bizarre -- but it would fit his ambition to go beyond U.S. president to build up the UN as a superior center of real power. UNocrats and EUrocrats would love it, because they follow an imperialistic Marxist ideology. Islamic extremism actually helps them, which is why Europe’s International Criminal Court just allowed the Muslim Brotherhood terrorist arm, Hamas, to gain recognition in the EU.

Obama has no American sense of self-restrained power. Just the opposite. Obama has no ethical absolutes, not even if hundreds of women and children in Kenya and Nigeria are stolen from their homes for Boko Haram slave markets. Not even if the CIA ends up smuggling arms to the barbaric Sunni rebels in Syria, thereby making that civil war even worse.

The silence of our “Civil Rights” establishment watching Muslim depredations in Africa, exactly like the slave taking their ancestors suffered, is just one straw in the wind. Obama is not bothering to oppose African slave kidnapping by Muslim raiders. That is an amazing fact.

Obama is after something else than promoting the well-being of this country and the world. He is always grandiose, ruthless, abusive, and willing to sacrifice our allies to his own desires.

The likely reason is that Obama does not plan to stop after two presidential terms. 

James Lewis

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/04/obamas_un_ambitions.html

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

Iran Military Chief Celebrates 'Diplomatic Jihad' Victory - Dalit Halevy, Ari Yashar

by Dalit Halevy, Ari Yashar

Revolutionary Guards commander says Obama didn't change Iran's policy - but did reverse US policy on Tehran's nuclear program.

 

Iranian Revolutionary Guards commander Genera

Reuters

 

Iranian officials continue to bask in the afterglow of the framework deal reached with world powers last week over the Islamic regime's nuclear program, and joining the victory parade this week was Iranian Revolutionary Guards Commander Maj. Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari.

At a conference of Revolutionary Guards officers Jafari spoke about the deal, which temporarily limits Iran's nuclear program while leaving all its nuclear facilities intact and allowing it to continue enriching uranium in return for sanctions relief.

According to Jafari, one of the most influential figures in Tehran, Iranian firmness made the American attempt to "impose its will" on Iran ineffective.

America sought to change Iran's policies and in the end the US changed its own policy, crowed Jafari at the conference. He explained that the US had in the past threatened that all options - including the military option - were on the table, but in the end US President Barack Obama said only the diplomatic option could resolve the standoff.

Jafari elaborated that Obama himself said the military option and continued sanctions on Iran will only strengthen the Islamic regime and make it more intransigent.

The statement on changing US policy comes after US representatives last week said the original US position of having Iran dismantle much of its nuclear infrastructure was scrapped in the face of Iranian opposition, and instead the US changed its position to increasing Iran's nuclear breakout time. The US settled on a year as the time it would be willing for Iran to need to obtain a nuclear weapon - although Obama has admitted that at the end of the deal Iran would have a "zero" breakout time.

The Revolutionary Guards Commander emphasized that the Iranian people stood firm on its red lines, and that the "diplomatic jihad (holy war - ed.)" was difficult due to the American "lack of integrity" and its "not sticking" to obligations it placed on itself.

Jafari also accused the US of misinterpreting the deal, saying Iran's delegations succeeded in standing firm on their lines including the "right" to enrich uranium, to continue nuclear research and development, and to demand the end of all sanctions against Iran.

Israel has pointed out that of the 17 states with peaceful nuclear programs, none enrich uranium as Iran will be allowed to continue doing at limited rates under the deal. It also will be able to continue developing advanced centrifuges which will allow for a rapid ability to produce nuclear weapons in the future.


Dalit Halevy, Ari Yashar

Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/193782#.VSQf55Ozd-8

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