How the Obama Administration Helps Kill the Chances for Arab, Turkish, and Iranian Democracy

by Barry Rubin

Note: This is a follow-up to my previous article on the Clinton speech, but stands alone also.

In a speech, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asks:

“Why does America promote democracy one way in some countries and another way in others?”

Here’ s how the question should be rephrased:

Why does America subvert the chances for democracy one way in some countries and another way in others?

Here’s the answer:

In some places—notably Iran, Syria, and the Gaza Strip—America does nothing to promote democracy and the downfall of anti-American regimes because it is afraid to challenge the dictatorships. In fact, at times it comes to their aid and comfort.

In Iran, it did so by wasting two years on engagement and by failing to back the democratic opposition, even at the height of protests over a stolen election.

In Syria, by coddling the dictatorship until that became too obviously gruesome in backing such a bloodthirsty regime during an all-out revolt. Since then the U.S. government sub-contracted choosing the Syrian opposition exile leadership to the Turkish Islamist regime. Naturally, it chose a majority of Islamists. So this is the group that will be asked by the U.S. government for advice and be given money!

In the Gaza Strip, it helped the tyrants by pressing Israel to reduce sanctions and by doing nothing seriously to subvert that anti-American, genocidal revolutionary Islamist entity. Now it is empowering Hamas’s strongest ally, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood which in power would give Hamas a huge amount of help.

While in other places—such as Libya, Egypt, and Tunisia–it enables anti-American, anti-democratic, antisemitic, dictatorial movements.

But if I were to take Clinton’s question at face value the proper answer would be this:

The United States should support democracy most energetically where it hurts enemies and is aimed against the most vicious, bloody dictatorships. That means Iran, Syria, and the Gaza Strip.

The United States should support democracy less eagerly when it hurts allies and the prospects are for a new regime far worse than the existing one. That means Egypt, Tunisia, and several other places. At any rate, in each such case U.S. policy should support genuine moderates and do everything possible to reduce the power of revolutionary Islamist and far left groups that are anti-American and anti-democratic.

Clinton explained U.S. involvement in Libya as being part of a broad coalition that worked “to protect civilians and help people liberate their country….”

Is U.S. policy going to defend civilians in Turkey, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, and the Gaza Strip when they are threatened by Islamist regimes? No, it is going to help put those civilians in far greater danger . It is doing the opposite of liberating their countries. It is helping to enslave them.

“In other cases,” Clinton continued, “to achieve that same goal, we would have to act alone, at a much greater cost, with far greater risks and perhaps even with troops on the ground.”

Imagine the intellectual poverty of this statement. Is sending troops the only option? This is a trick known as setting up a straw man. We couldn’t help people in places like Iran or Syria, we are told, because we would have to send troops and since we don’t want to send troops we won’t do anything at all.

There are, of course, many other ways to act: to support the moderates through overt and covert means,, to consider establishing a no-fly zone, and to do everything possible to undermine the interests of those regimes. For example, a serious campaign to sabotage Syrian interests in Lebanon would make sense.

Instead we get a policy of helping Islamist groups in Egypt, Tunisia, Gaza, Libya, and even Syria.

Says Clinton:

“Our choices also reflect other interests in the region with a real impact on Americans’ lives — including our fight against al-Qaeda; defense of our allies; and a secure supply of energy,”

Yes, the U.S. government is fighting al-Qaida and the Taliban, or at least a “faction” of the latter. But those are the only revolutionary Islamist forces it is battling.

Moreover, which allies is America defending? Give us a list. When an ally tries to defend itself, like Israel, Obama says he can’t stand Netanyahu because the Israeli leader won’t buckle under to make more risky concessions. Is U.S. policy defending Arab allies? No, with the partial exception of Iraq. It is enabling their foreign enemies and often suggesting–albeit implicitly–that those monarchies should be overthrown as well.

What about defending Saudi Arabia and Jordan? The moderate government in Lebanon, was overthrown because Washington wouldn’t help. If the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is so moderate and should be running the country why doesn’t that apply to Jordan, too?

Concluded Clinton, “What parties call themselves is less important than what they do.”

But doesn’t what parties call themselves have something to do with what they do? And what has the Muslim Brotherhood done that shows it isn’t a radical group? How has the Turkish regime behaved, at home and abroad, that shows it isn’t a radical Islamist government?

Finally, here’s something interesting. Consider Bahrain, which Clinton called a “challenge.” She explains, “Mass arrests and brute force are at odds with the universal rights of Bahrain’s citizens and will not make legitimate calls for reform go away.”

What’s going on there? A hardline Sunni Muslim monarchy that is friendly toward the United States is repressing a Shia Muslim majority. Among the Shias there are more moderate forces that just want fair treatment and more rights, and a radical Islamist faction backed by Iran.

The Obama Administration makes things worse. By backing Islamists, it has convinced the Bahraini government and its Saudi backers that compromise is impossible. The ideal solution would be to make a deal with the moderates and defeat the radicals.

But with the Obama Administration arguing that there are no radicals, how could Bahrain’s regime take such a risk even if it wanted to? The Obama Administration has thrown away all of its potential leverage over Bahrain’s government. By becoming the enabler for radical Islamists, Washington proves the hardline regime “correct” in arguing that compromise would bring disaster. If an election were to be held, the Shias who want a pro-Iran Islamist regime (and to throw out the U.S. naval base there) would win.

So let me say it again: The chances for a stable, moderate democracy in Arabic-speaking states were always slim. By being so weak in supporting the moderates and so energetic in backing the radicals, the U.S. government has destroyed those chances and helped to ensure years of bloody dictatorship.

Does this sound too extreme and alarmist? That’s because the policy is too extreme and dangerous enough to set off the alarms.

Barry Rubin

Source: http://www.gloria-center.org/2011/11/how-the-obama-administration-helps-kill-the-chances-for-arab-turkish-and-iranian-democracy/

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

What Does "Moderate" Islamist Mean?

by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi

In the run-up to the Tunisian Constituent Assembly elections and the aftermath that saw a plurality of seats won by the al-Nahda (Renaissance) party, you may have noticed frequent references in the media to this political organization as a "moderate Islamist" party. This is of course not the first time such terms have been used to denote Islamist political factions: recall for example how the ruling AKP party in Turkey is often called "mildly Islamist" (to borrow the Economist's phrasing).

Unfortunately, however, such terminology can only be characterized as part of what Hussein Ibish - director of the American Task Force on Palestine - calls an "intellectually and politically indefensible rush" to portray Islamist parties as "more moderate or pluralistic than they actually are."

Take the case of al-Nahda in Tunisia, which outperformed by a factor of two most analysts' expectations that it would win 20% of seats at most. The party's leader- Rashid Ghannouchi- has tried to reassure secularists of his supposedly moderate credentials by pointing to the example of Turkey, which is often viewed as a model for harmonizing secular traditions with Islamism under the allegedly pragmatic AKP.

In fact, the AKP government's record demonstrates how the Islamists in Turkey have gradually been reversing the democratic reform process that was initiated in the first three years after the AKP's rise to power in the 2002 elections. The aim at the time was to win EU membership for Turkey, and given the widespread support among the Turkish population back then for such a goal, as well as the fact that the military had intervened to ban the AKP's ideological predecessor known as the "Welfare Party" in 1998, the AKP pragmatically went along with implementing the reform process.

Yet since 2005, as the EU bid process has stalled, the AKP's authoritarian tendencies have become increasingly apparent, in accordance with a step-by-step implementation of an Islamization program also supported by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Examples of these worrying trends include wiretaps on the cell phones of political opponents, hefty "tax fines" imposed on the independent media company Dogan, which was recently forced to sell one of its three television channels to reduce the fines, and greater control of the media as a whole by pro-AKP businesses as Turkish authorities have lobbied to reduce Dogan's share of the media market.

Meanwhile, more and more journalists and military figures have been imprisoned on flimsy allegations of coup plots. As the International Press Institute reports, Turkey leads the world in the number of jailed journalists, with 57 currently behind bars, and as analyst Soner Cagaptay points out, around half of all Turkish naval admirals have been imprisoned.

On the wider international stage, the AKP government has pushed for the Muslim Brotherhood to take advantage of the unrest in Syria, while Assad hopes to use the Kurds as proxies against Turkey by granting them autonomy, according to a report in Le Figaro. The AKP's belligerence towards Cyprus and Israel is also worthy of note, as the Turkish prime minister has threatened to send "frigates, gunboats and…air force" against Cyprus should it go ahead with plans to exploit potentially very large oil and gas reserves in the Eastern Mediterranean's international waters.

Coming back to Tunisia, Ghannouchi is also on record in Arabic for pointing to Hamas-led Gaza as the "model for freedom today." The Palestinian areas are a case in point to discuss. It is of course true that Hamas was democratically elected in the Palestinian legislative elections in 2006, but Hamas' term in power expired last year and the group has since blocked all attempts by the Palestinian Authority to hold elections.

The reason for Hamas' behavior here is the blow to its popularity the group has suffered for its poor governance in Gaza, where Fatah was ousted from power completely in 2007 and where Hamas has established the rule of Islamic law.

Thus, one must surely concur with Ibish's point that "it's simply foolish not to recognize that they [the Islamist parties] remain in every meaningful sense radical and retain their totalitarian impulses. That they would like to broadly and severely restrict the rights of individuals, women and minorities in the name of religion is obvious."

Given the significant support base groups like al-Nahda and the Muslim Brotherhood have, does it follow that we are back to the old dichotomy of "secular tyranny or Islamists"? Not necessarily. The general point to be made is that if democracy is going to work in the Middle East and North Africa, strong constitutional checks on government power, enforced by the military, together with a firm, healthy secular opposition are needed to prevent Islamists from attaining unrestrained power.

Hence, secularists can learn much from the Turkish experience with the AKP. First, the military should not be afraid to confront the government if the warning signs of Islamist authoritarianism become apparent. Unfortunately, after hundreds of arrests, the Turkish officer corps is choosing to act too late, if it is planning on any action to counter the AKP's autocratic initiatives. In Tunisia, it is disconcerting to note that the army appears to be largely withdrawing from the political realm, while in Egypt, the army panders to Islamist sentiment, as when it facilitated an attack on the Israeli embassy in Cairo and massacred Coptic Christian protestors in Maspero, Cairo.

In the meantime, secularist parties in Tunisia and other countries need to put aside factionalist squabbling and stand together in the promotion of liberal-democratic values, while making an effort to offer a comprehensive program of policies for voters, rather than just attacking the Islamist parties for their radical records. In Turkey, the opposition has failed to get its act together for ten years, and is behaving too erratically, condemning for the pure sake of being oppositional more sensible AKP policies like the stationing of a NATO radar system.

Ultimately, the solution for reducing the appeal of the Islamist parties and eventually marginalizing them lies in reform within mainstream Islam to bring the religion as a whole in line with modern conceptions of human rights and liberal democracy- above all in separating Shari'a from the public realm- but the suggestions outlined above should stand a reasonable chance of at least keeping the Islamist parties in check and perhaps forcing them to moderate out of political expediency, even as they remain radical at heart.

Update: Secretary-General of Al-Nahda- Hamadi Jbeli, was also recently caught on film footage proclaiming "We are in the sixth Caliphate, God willing." So much for "moderate Islamist," then.

Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi is a student at Brasenose College, Oxford University, and an intern at the Middle East Forum. His website is http://www.aymennjawad.org.

Source: http://www.meforum.org/3099/moderate-islamist

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

Tunisian Pledges a New Caliphate

by IPT News

Secular Tunisians are expressing concerns after a leader of the country's Islamist Al-Nahda movement said Tunisia's emerging government marks "the Sixth Righteous Caliphate."

The fifth caliphate, an Islamic imperial governing system, was abolished by Turkish secular Kemal Ataturk in 1924. In a speech posted on YouTube Sunday, Hamadi Jbeli also pledged that "we shall set forth with God's help to conquer Jerusalem, if Allah wills… From here is conquest with the help of Allah Almighty."

Al-Nahda won 98 of 217 parliamentary seats in the nation's first free elections and Jbeli may be its candidate for prime minister. The group's electoral success won international praise as a "moderate" movement promoting a democratic form of political Islam. Headlines in mainstream media outlets like theNew York Times, Los Angeles Times, and CNN called Al-Nahda moderate.

Jbeli's statements have many Tunisians questioning the label's validity. He spoke at a rally held by the group in celebration of its electoral success and leading role in forming a governing coalition. It is also not the first time the group has promoted moderation to outsiders while preaching different values to party members.

Leading secularist party Ettakatol suspended its participation in committees to form a governing coalition. "We do not accept this statement," said Khemais Ksila, an executive committee member of Ettakatol. "We thought we were going to build a second republic with our partner, not a sixth caliphate." Issam Chelbi of the secular PDP party called the speech "very dangerous."

"This is what we feared," Chelbi said.

Tunisian women's groups also have been skeptical of Al-Nahda's moderation, saying there has been an increase in verbal and physical abuse since President Zine Abidine Ben Ali resigned in the wake of a popular uprising.

Party leaders tried to contain the damage, telling Reuters that Jbeli was talking about "good governance and a break with corruption ... not the establishment of an Islamic regime."

Although Al-Nahda's breach of Tunisian secularism dominated reports on the controversial political rally, including Reuters' article, speakers also promoted the military conquest of Israel. The event also marked the first time Al-Nahda invited a Hamas representative, Houda Naim of the Palestinian Legislative Council in Gaza, to address a political rally in Tunisia.

Naim expressed hope that the liberation of Tunisia would lead to the "liberation of Palestine," which Hamas believes can only be achieved through violence or "resistance." Al-Nahda's secretary general echoed Naim's call, stating, "The liberation of Tunisia will, Allah willing, bring about the liberation of Jerusalem."

Support for Hamas and the complete "liberation of Palestine" have been consistent messages from Al-Nahda's political leaders and its charter. Hamas has reciprocated with its support for Tunisia's revolt against dictatorship and embracing political Islam.

The Arab Spring "will achieve positive results on the path to the Palestinian cause and threaten the extinction of Israel," Party leader and ideologue Rashid Ghannounshi said in a May interview with the Al Arab Qatari website. "The liberation of Palestine from Israeli occupation represents the biggest challenge facing the Umma [Muslim nation] and the Umma cannot have existence in light of the Israeli occupation."

Further, in the same interview, Ghannouchi said: "I give you the good news that the Arab region will get rid of the bacillus [bacteria] of Israel. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the leader of Hamas, said that Israel will disappear by the year 2027. I say that this date may be too far away, and Israel may disappear before this."

Ghannouchi has also given his support to specific types of terror carried out by Hamas, including rocket attacks against Israeli civilians and "martyrdom operations."

In June 2001, Ghannouchi appeared in an al-Jazeerah panel discussion in which he blessed the mothers of Palestinian suicide bombers:

"I would like to send my blessings to the mothers of those youth, those men who succeeded in creating a new balance of power…I bless the mothers who planted in the blessed land of Palestine the amazing seeds of these youths, who taught the international system and the Israel (sic) arrogance, supported by the US, an important lesson. The Palestinian woman, mother of the Shahids (martyrs), is a martyr herself, and she has created a new model of woman."

Ghannounchi has even gone beyond rhetoric, calling for Muslims to fund and provide logistical support for Hamas. He signed the controversial "Istanbul Declaration," issued by Muslim clerics in support of Hamas after Israel's January 2009 war in Gaza. The declaration stated that there was an "obligation of the Islamic nation to open the crossings – all crossings – in and out of Palestine permanently" to provide supplies and weapons to Hamas to "perform the jihad in the way of Allah Almighty."

Ghannounchi's statements are consistent with Al-Nahda's platform, which declares that the party "struggles to achieve the following goals … To struggle for the liberation of Palestine and consider it as a central mission and a duty required by the need to challenge the Zionist colonial attack. The platform also refers to Israel as an "alien entity planted in the heart of the homeland, which constitutes an obstacle to unity and reflects the image of the conflict between our civilization and its enemies."

In September, the organization stated that it "supports the struggle of peoples seeking liberation and justice and encourages world peace and aims to promote cooperation and collaboration and unity especially among Arab and Islamic countries and considers the Palestinian struggle for liberation to be a central cause and stands against normalization."

Standing against peace. Envisioning a new Caliphate. Meet the moderate Al-Nahda party.

IPT News (The Investigative Project on Terrorism)

Source: http://www.investigativeproject.org/3290/tunisian-pledges-a-new-caliphate

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

Wash. Post Extols Palestinian Agitators as Latter-Day 'Freedom Riders'

by Leo Rennert

Joel Greenberg, the pro-Palestinian Jerusalem bureau chief of the Washington Post, is in top form in the November 16 edition with a piece about a group of Palestinian agitators from the West Bank trying to take a bus ride from the West Bank into Jerusalem without requisite security permits.

The headline, splashed across three columns, reads:

"'Freedom Riders' arrested on the bus to Jerusalem - Palestinian activists tried to ride through Israeli checkpoint."

Here's how Greenberg uses his lead paragraph to shape his latest pro-Palestinian oeuvre:

"HIZMA CHECKPOINT, WEST BANK - Evoking the nonviolent tactics of the American civil rights movement, six Palestinian activists boarded an Israeli commuter bus linking Jewish settlements in the West Bank to Jerusalem on Tuesday and were arrested as they tried to ride through an Israeli checkpoint on the outskirts of the city."

Greenberg goes on to describe how these "activists" call themselves "Freedom Riders" so as to link their tactics to civil rights demonstrators who challenged segregated buses in southern U.S. states in the 1960s.

However, Greenberg's attempt to analogize these Palestinian agitators with non-violent challenges to segregation in the United States is a bit of a stretch too far - as even Greenberg has to admit farther down in his story, when he writes the following:

"Israel tightened restrictions on entry of Palestinians to Jerusalem after a string of suicide bombings in the city during a violent uprising in 2000."

Thus, Greenberg ends up arguing against himself. First, he extols Palestinians as non-violent "Freedom Riders" - in the headline and in the opening paragraphs -- only to acknowledge farther in his piece that Jerusalem has a history of violent suicide attacks by Palestinians encroaching into Israel's capital from the West Bank. This violent part of the equation gets buried, with no mention in the headline or in Greenberg's lead.

Actually, one doesn't have to go back 11 years, as Greenberg does, to find good reasons for Israel to maintain security checkpoints in West Bank approaches to Jerusalem. Since 2000, there have been numerous attempts by armed Palestinians to ram through Israeli checkpoints. Blood has been spilled by knife-wielding Palestinians as they tried to push their way through roadblocks.

American "Freedom Riders" left no such violence-soaked legacy. The analogy Greenberg touts between a genuine campaign of non-violence in the segregated south with a Palestinian propaganda ploy that tries to camouflage ongoing security threats against Israel is an affront to history.

By minimizing and trivializing these security threats, Greenberg follows a well-trod agenda that challenges Israel's basic right to defend itself.

In line with this agenda, Greenberg ignores or whitewashes Palestinian adherence to a violent struggle -- whether by camouflaging Mahmoud Abbas's glorification of suicide bombers or by failing to report, during the same news cycle, continued rocket fire from Gaza, including a rocket that hit near a kindergarten in the Negev just as the Post was putting the finishing touches on Greenberg's ode to Palestinian "Freedom Riders."

Leo Rennert is a former White House correspondent and Washington bureau chief of McClatchy Newspapers.

Leo Rennert

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2011/11/wash_post_extols_palestinian_agitators_as_latter-day_freedom_riders.html


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

Liberals, Israel and Disaster

by James Lewis

Liberals start from false premises. False premises always lead to false conclusions. Being stuck with delusional belief systems, they keep running into brick walls, getting bloody noses, and being surprised every time it happens. Then they fix up their false beliefs -- mostly by blaming any adults in the vicinity -- and go back to their delusions, having learned nothing.

Only to run into another brick wall. (Repeat from the top.)

This is the stuff of the Keystone Kops comedy, but it's funny only until one of them gets into the White House. Jimmy Carter. Bill Clinton (who had four chances to get bin Laden handed over without a shot being fired). And now we have the most mentally stuck hero of them all, Barack Hussein Obama.

Israel shares every delusional disorder of the West -- like radical left-wingers. The left is a cultic delusion both here and there, because they deny reality, make up their own, and then try to steer the supertanker of state using imaginary maps.

The one advantage Israel has in this mind game is more brick walls to bump into. Where it matters, Israelis are constantly focusing on reality. That's why the U.S. and Israel have the only two armed forces in the world that are effective: practice, practice, practice. War is the most disillusioning experience in the world, literally dis-illusioning -- its kills illusions and delusions starting with the first contact with the enemy. Peace is wonderful, but you can just see what's happened to American in times of peace -- we drift away from reality until some rent-a-mob of certifiable morons on Wall Street go out to stop capitalism, which has paid for every single diaper they've ever soiled. These people are not just ignorant. They are perverse. But then, kids of the very wealthy have been that way since the Roman Empire.

To Obama's cult-inside-a-cult, Israel is a problem, not a solution. This puts Obama at odds with the existence of Israel, which returned persecuted Jews in Europe and the Arab world (about a million refugees) to their ancestral homeland. You can't sink the refugee ship and pretend to love the drowning people. But that's the iron logic of the Obama left.

It was always in the cards that Obama would demand the abolition of Israel. If you don't remember that historic moment, it was because he lied about it, the way he does. When Obama "demanded" that Israel retreat to its 1967 borders, leftist low-brows around the world thought it sounded very reasonable. Everybody else realized that (a) there were no 1967 borders -- that's another Obama lie; rather, those were the 1949 ceasefire lines of the War on Independence, which the Israelis barely survived by stopping five invading Arab armies; (b) the resulting border between Israel and its deadly enemies looks like a gerrymandered Chicago ward, and is indefensible. Obama knows that. Anybody who bothers to read up on it knows it. But the vast, ignorant products of PC education, including half of American Jews, have never even thought about it.

Now, liberals always bring disaster. It's one of those fundamental truths of life. They think they have good intentions, and they think that's all they need. No farmer, hunter, ditch-digger, gardener, or politician in history has ever survived that way. Liberals survive because capitalist farmers, engineers, and even media protect them from reality and dis-illusionment. It's only in their private lives that they confront reality and become amazingly conservative. It's a miracle.

What does all that have to do with Israel and Disaster? It's simple. Israel is believed to have 200 nuclear weapons -- doomsday weapons that are never meant to be used except as a last resort.

Barack Obama has now created the conditions where in the next year, Israel (and the rest of the Middle East) may be forced to confront the doomsday option. The Saudis are the most directly threatened by maniacal Iran, because they live next door. They have openly said that they are importing nuclear weapons from Pakistan in the face of the Iranian threat. It was Barack Hussein Obama who helped push over Mubarak, Gaddafi, and maybe Syria's Assad, who is still fighting a vicious civil war. That's how you "organize communities" in Alinsky Cult.

In his celebrated Nobel Prize-winning quest to bring eternal love and peace to the Middle East, Obama is therefore driving every major government there to go nuclear. Read that again, please: Obama is forcing the Middle East to go nuclear precisely by his "peace" policies. Already 25,000 Arabs are reported to have died in the so-called "Arab Spring." The media are covering it up, as usual, but those are the actual facts on the ground.

If Iran is as suicidally determined to bring Shi'te Armageddon on earth, as soon as it gets enough nukes and missiles, as it seems like it's been saying at least once a day ever sing Jimmy brought Khomeini to power in 1979, there will be the first nuclear war in human history. When Golda Meir was prime minister during the 1974 Yom Kippur War, Israel seriously considered using nuclear weapons to stop the Egyptian tank divisions driving through the Sinai Desert from reaching Israel's civilian heartland. She would have done it, too.

By building up radical Muslims (who are winning the "Arab Spring" civil war), Obama is empowering the worst enemies of Israel and the West. Those radicals hate our guts, as they say every single day on MEMRI (the translation site for Muslim hate propaganda). But Israel and the West are not defenseless. When their backs are against the wall, they will certainly use weapons of mass destruction in self-defense.

Obama says he's all about bringing peace to the Middle East. In fact, like Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and all the other liberals, he is creating greater dangers than any Republican ever would.

They start from false premises, they end up with false beliefs, and when they're in power, they inevitably bring disaster. It's not a surprise. It just follows step-by-step from their delusional beliefs.

Obama Peace-Bringer inevitably turns into Obama War-Monger.

James Lewis

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/11/liberals_israel_and_disaster.html

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

Iran’s Thugocracy Attacks Again

by Kenneth R. Timmerman

The 35-year-old son of the former commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards​ Corps, Gen. Mohsen Rezai​, was found dead in a luxury suites hotel in Dubai on Sunday, a death his family deemed “suspicious.”

Ahmad Rezai had gone to Dubai on September 8 to visit his family, who maintain a residence in Dubai. He has been unable to travel to Iran since he was released from house arrest by the regime on May 1, 2008.

According to the Tehran Times, the younger Rezai “died after receiving an electric shock.” An opposition Iranian source told me he was followed back from Tehran by two members of the Quds Force who may have carried out the hit.

The younger Rezai’s murder was discovered just hours after a series of explosions rocked the main depot for the Revolutionary Guards stockpile of Shahab-3 missiles in the southwestern suburbs of Tehran, killing one of Iran’s top missile experts, Brig. Gen. Hassan Moghadam.

It’s unclear if the two events are related, as many bloggers have been suggesting. However, Gen. Mohsen Rezai commands a substantial following within the IRGC even today, fourteen years after he was replaced as IRGC commander. The murder of his son by another faction of regime thugs will surely have repercussions inside Iran.

To me, this feels like the murder of Ahmad Shah Massood in Afghanistan on Sept 9, 2001. I can still remember hearing of Masood’s murder and thinking at the time: this is the beginning of something really bad.

By the very fact that he lived in the United States and had U.S. citizenship, Ahmad Rezai gave his father an “American connection” the regime jinned up into a massive conspiracy. The fact that they couldn’t prove any of their allegations against him, despite many years of efforts, only convinced them further that father and son constituted a threat to the regime.

Combine this murder with the missile base explosion, the latest IAEA report that reveals ongoing nuclear warhead work – despite the CIA’s 2007 National Intelligence Estimate to the contrary – and the intense factional warfare inside the regime that is pitting Ahmadinejad against Khamenei and splitting the IRGC into multiple, mutually-hostile factions – and you’ve laid the table for a dramatic series of events. Something bad is going to happen. And the target is likely to be Israel.

Family background

Gen. Rezai has twice run for president, both times against Ahmadinejad. After the stolen election of June 2009, he joined the other failed candidates, Mir Hossein Mousavi​ and Mehdi Karrubi​, in calling for a full investigation of election fraud.

But as street protests in Tehran and elsewhere intensified, Rezai caved into pressure from Ayatollah Khamenei​ – including threats to his family – and retreated to Mashad for several months where he lectured at the local university. (He holds a PhD in economics.)

Khamenei also threatened the family of Rezai’s boss at the Expediency Council, former president Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani.

Rafsanjani’s daughter, Faezeh Hashemi, was arrested after the election on allegations of failing to pay import duties on large quantities of green “mantos” – the head to toe covering, usually in black, that Iranian women are forced to wear in public – she was planning to distribute thanks to grants from NGOs with ties to George Soros​ and his Open Society Institute.

Rafsanjani’s son, Mehdi Hashemi​, was planning to return to Iran from London after the election, but was ultimately warned away from returning by Ahmad Rezai, who learned that the regime had issued an arrest warrant for Hashemi and fully intended to carry it out if he came to Tehran.

Ahmad Rezai has been in the gunsights of the regime ever since he defected to the United States in 1997 at the age of 22.

I first interviewed him in Los Angeles the following year, when he blasted the regime for carrying out terrorist attacks, including the Khobar Towers​ bombing.

“Three persons sign off on every order to commit a foreign terrorist action: Ayatollah Khamene’i, Rafsanjani, and Khamene’i's chief of staff, Hojjat-ol eslam Mohammadi-Golpayegani,” he told me in that interview.

In 1999, his father dispatched two people to lure Ahmad away from Los Angeles, where he had obtained political asylum, to the estate of a wealthy Iranian businessman in Costa Rica, on the pretext that Iranian agents in Los Angeles were trying to kill him.

Gen. Rezai was trying to get Ahmad to return to Iran, where he thought he could get the regime to “forgive” his outspoken radio and television interviews. At the time, President Khatami​ was leading a reformist movement that included a loosening up of the regime’s intelligence apparatus. Gen. Rezai was working with Khatami at the time.

In the end, the younger Rezai managed to return to the United States from Costa Rica, with help from the Foundation for Democracy in Iran, which I founded in 1995. He learned English in my basement by watching Jackie Chan movies for three months while getting resettled into the United States.

He eventually moved to Los Angeles but shunned the Iranian exile community, which distrusted him because of his family background. For several years he worked at ordinary jobs. He got married, had a child, and tried to lead a normal life. In 2004, he became a U.S. citizen.

But Iran was always close to his heart.

Even as a 16-year-old, Ahmad Rezai rebelled against the repression of the regime his own father represented. As a young “inspector” within the Bassij corp, he would visit jails around the country, and quietly work to get political prisoners released.

On January 28, 2007, after reconciling with his father, Ahmad returned to Iran with his South Korean wife and their three-year-old daughter, with the understanding that his past “sins” would be forgiven and he could help his father build a political base after his first failed run for president in 2005.

But as soon as they arrived at the Tehran airport, regime agents confiscated his passports and accused him of being a U.S. spy. His wife and child were allowed to leave after ten days, but the younger Rezai was subjected to fourteen months of hell.

Regime intelligence agents interned him in a Tehran hospital to conduct extensive body scans looking for a “CIA chip,” and ultimately subjected him to several rounds of brutal electro-shocks, hoping to break his will. These sessions were video-taped by his father’s security guards, to make sure the regime doctors didn’t kill him outright.

An intelligence officer named Akbar Baghari accompanied the entire Rezai family on the Haj to Mecca in March 2007. He insisted that Ahmad marry a Muslim woman, and began presenting young women to him as potential brides. “I told these young women, ‘I am already married. This is who I am, I am not going to be your husband. I am under pressure,’” Ahmad told me later.

Baghari made clear that if he refused to take an Iranian Muslim wife, he would be jailed or killed, so in May 2007 the younger Rezai agreed to a white marriage with the daughter of an IRGC general, all the while he kept trying to get his passport back so he could leave Iran to rejoin his wife and child back in California.

Ultimately, Gen. Rezai wrote a report detailing the torture Ahmad had been subjected to and threatened to circulate it throughout the IRGC officer corps if the regime did not agree to allow his son to leave the country, and so on May 2, 2008, he was finally allowed to leave Iran to return to the United States.

Mexican stand-off

When his father declared his candidacy for president in early 2009, Ahmad again sought to return to Iran, thinking to assist his campaign.

After a failed effort in February 2009, he flew to Tehran from Dubai in April 2009 where armed intelligence agents were waiting to arrest him on the other side of the immigration line. Ahmad called his father, who dispatched armed guards to the airport, where they engaged in a Mexican stand-off with the MOIS goons until Ahmad abandoned his attempt to enter Iran and got on the next flight back to Dubai.

As Ahmad said in his initial interview with me in 1998, he represents 30 million young Iranians who are fed up with the violence and repression of this regime. That is why he was so dangerous then, and why he continued to be considered a threat to the regime today.

The regime was all the more determined to crush him after he reconciled with his father and joined his effort to reform the regime from within, an effort that is rejected by many Iranian opposition activists who believe that reform is impossible.

For those who think the Iranian regime is a government like any other, contemplate this: On the eve of a planned trip to Washington, DC in April 2010, where he was scheduled to brief Congressional staff on political developments inside Iran, Ahmad was brutally attacked and beaten almost to death by Armenian gang members while playing pick-up basketball at a 24-hour gym in Glendale, CA.

Although the police treated it as gang-related activity, his father phoned him from Tehran and warned him to stay away from public places, convinced that the attack on his son was the work of regime agents.

Mysterious death

Many questions remain surrounding Ahmad’s death.

- Who were the two Quds force goons who apparently shadowed him back from Tehran?

- When exactly was he murdered, and how? Some sources say he was drugged and suffocated three days before he was found; others say he was electrocuted.

- What was he doing in the Gloria Hotel to begin with, when his family maintained a residence in Dubai where he normally stayed when visiting there?

- What action has the U.S. government taken to ensure that the murder of an American citizen is properly investigated by the Dubai authorities?

Ahmad’s widow asked me what she should say to their seven-year old daughter. Here is what I told her: “Tell her that her dad was a hero, and that he was killed because he wanted people in Iran to enjoy the same freedoms that you enjoy here in America.”

R.I.P.

Kenneth R. Timmerman

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/11/16/iran%E2%80%99s-thugocracy-attacks-again/

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

Egypt Falls into Darkness

by Daniel Greenfield

Rebuilding the Library of Alexandria some 1300 hundred years after its final destruction at the hands of its Islamic conquerors in a country where blasphemy against Islam is still a crime was always a fool’s errand. But it was a fool’s errand lavishly embraced by every collection of useful idiots from UNESCO to the National Library of France, which kicked in half a million books.

Most of the money was spent constructing a massive edifice housing only a fraction of the books that could be found in the Harvard University Library, the Library of Congress or the British Library– in a country with a lower literacy rate than much of the African continent. The Library was a Mubarak project and as the wonderful Arab Spring turns into the Islamic Winter, the mobs of Tahrir are coming for the library.

The Library of Alexandria 2.0 is hardly a beacon of culture and enlightenment, but its arts programs, feeble as they are, have already become a target for Egypt’s rising Islamists. There’s no room for ballet in a country where women are expected to cover themselves head to toe in black and walk behind a man. To learn its future, we need only go back to the words of Caliph Omar who declared that if the contents of the library accord with the Koran then they are redundant, if they contradict the Koran, then they are heretical and must be burned.

Ibn Khaldun​, the Berber historiographer, whose statue stands in a Tunis now fallen to Islamic mobs, asked, “Where is the literature of the Persians? Their literature was destroyed by order of Omar when the Arabs conquered the country. And so the literature of the Chaldees, the Babylonians, and a literature still more ancient that of the Copts.”

This cultural genocide isn’t discussed much by modern Western scholars who spend a great deal of time on what the Conquistadors did in South America, but are reluctant to address what the Arabs did in North Africa and the Middle East. Every traveling fair showcasing Islamic science, a misnomer in a religion that denies science, is an obscene spectacle of revisionist history by the conquerors who destroyed much of the knowledge and culture of the peoples they ground under their boot, and now want to take credit for what little they appropriated and put to use.

The true picture of Islamic science is of fragments of knowledge that survived despite Islamic barbarism. Caliph Omar’s encounter with the rich science of Persia is a frightening repetition of the same formula, according to Ibn Khaldun.

“We know that the Muslims, when they conquered Persia, found in that country an innumerable quantity of books and scientific treatises, and that their General, Saad Ibn Abi Oueccas, asked Khalif Omar by letter if he would allow him to distribute those books among the true believers with the rest of the booty. Omar answered him in these terms: — “Throw them into the water. If they contain anything which can guide men to the truth, we have received from Allah what will guide us much better. If they contain errors, we shall well be rid of them, Praise Allah.” In consequence of this order, the books were thrown into the water and the fire, and the literature and science of the Persians disappeared.”

What will happen to the Library of Alexandria, or to any library, under a new caliphate of the Muslim Brotherhood? The same thing that will eventually happen to the National Library of France, the British Library and the Library of Congress if the Islamic conquest continues to advance.

The Christians, Jews and pagans living in Alexandria could not have foreseen the crushing dark ages that would come with Islamic rule. And many Persians, Berbers and Copts still resent Islam for what it did to their cultural heritage. New York is the next Alexandria, Paris is the next Constantinople and London is the next Babylon.

When Muslims target our freedom of speech, when they tell us what we can say and think, they are acting as the vanguard of the new conquest. The Ground Zero Mosque is another Mosque of Omar, raised to celebrate the conqueror’s triumph in bringing down our great buildings and erecting their own mosque nearby.

The city of Alexandria once held many of the wonders of the ancient world. The Pharos Lighthouse, the Empire State Building of its day, was turned into a mosque by Muslims and then allowed to decay into ruin. Islamic rulers tore apart what was left of the building for their own projects. According to a story recounted by Al-Suyuti, the Caliph broke the lighthouse looking for the gold that he thought was buried under it and then could not get the lighthouse to work again. An apt metaphor for what Muslims are doing to the modern day wonders of the West.

Alexandria’s former multiculturalism has given way to Islamic dominance after the Arab-Muslim conquerors seized native women and converted them to their religion. Alexandria was once home to one of the largest Jewish communities in the world. Today it’s down to twenty-three people. But it’s not only the Jews who have vanished from Alexandria.

Life has become increasingly intolerable for Egypt’s Christians. In 2009, the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life listed Egypt, along with Iran, Pakistan and Indonesia as having the most restrictions on religion. Of the ten countries that scored “Very High” along with Egypt, only two, China and Burma, were non-Muslim. That was in the Mubarak era, the rise of the Brotherhood means that Copts, Bahai and other minorities will be able to look back on those days with nostalgia before the unfiltered version of Islam held sway over Egypt.

Al-Azhar University’s Islamic Research Council already controls what books may be published. It has succeeded in banning books directly through legal channels or through rioting and threats. Islamic pressure has resulted in the censorship of even the American University library. And the IRC has the power to seize books, magazines and other materials that violate Islamic codes. How long until the IRC’s power extends directly into the Library of Alexandria? Not very long.

Three years before the UNESCO design competition for the new Library of Alexandria began, an Egyptian court confiscated three thousand copies of “One Thousand and One Nights”. If one of the classics of Arabic literature could be seized that way and its publisher prosecuted, then any lesser book could.

The Library is a relic of the Mubarak era and it is easy for Islamists to make the case against an expensive building full of heretical books while the population doesn’t have enough to eat. The question isn’t whether Islam will burn the Library of Alexandria a second time around, but of when it will get around to pouring the gasoline and lighting the flames.

Daniel Greenfield

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/11/16/egypt-falls-into-darkness/

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

Will Israel Face Iran Alone?

by P. David Hornik

Adrian Blomfield, Jerusalem correspondent for Britain’s Telegraph, reports that “Israel has refused to reassure President Barack Obama that it would warn him in advance of any pre-emptive strike on Iran’s nuclear capabilities,” and that Obama “was rebuffed last month when he demanded” such a guarantee.

Blomfield says he has this dope from “insiders briefed on a top-secret meeting between America’s most senior defence chief and Benjamin Netanyahu​, Israel’s hawkish prime minister….” He’s referring to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s visit to Israel last month, during which, in a “private meeting with Mr Netanyahu and the defence minister, Ehud Barak,” Panetta conveyed Obama’s “urgent” demand. Yet

the two Israelis were notably evasive in their response, according to sources both in Israel and the United States….

Alarmed by Mr Netanyahu’s noncommittal response, Mr Obama reportedly ordered the US intelligence services to step up monitoring of Israel to glean clues of its intentions.

The report meshes with Panetta’s not-so-veiled warning to Israel just before that visit to lay off Iran, and with his statement this week—albeit not explicitly directed at Israel—that an attack on Iran could have “unintended consequences…. It could have a serious impact in the region and it could have a serious impact on US forces in the region.”

The same message came through from Europe this week. French foreign minister Alain Juppe​ said an attack on Iranian’s nuclear facilities would “drag the world into an ‘uncontrollable spiral.’” In the wake of last week’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report on Iran’s nuclear progress—confirming all of Israel’s warnings over the years—EU foreign ministers “ruled out any military action for now.”

Juppe did say the EU would be “asking the European Investment Bank to freeze loans to Iran.” Meanwhile the EU foreign ministers “decided to wait till their next meeting on Dec 1., before taking further action.”

It somehow doesn’t have that ring of urgency.

And yet, as The Telegraph’s Blomfield also notes, “many in [Israel] believe time is running out.”

Blomfield quotes Ephraim Asculai, former IAEA official and an Israeli expert on Iran’s nuclear program, saying that “if the Iranian regime decides to do so, it can produce a nuclear explosive device within a year, plus or minus a few months.” There are also warnings that Iran could soon be transferring most of its nuclear production under a mountain near Qom, making it much harder—or impossible—to bomb from the air.

Is Israel, then, facing the threat essentially alone? If so, it would hardly be unprecedented. There’s an inglorious history of the United States and Europe leaving Israel to fend for itself against threats, sometimes even existential ones.

It happened in Israel’s 1948-1949 War for Independence, when it found itself embargoed by the West (with Britain aiding the Arab side) and had to turn to the Soviet bloc for arms. Just before the 1967 Six Day War, Israel’s “ally” France slapped an arms embargo on the region that was mainly aimed at Israel.

Six years later, in the Yom Kippur War​, it took an Israeli threat to use nuclear weapons against its attackers Egypt and Syria for the U.S. to finally airlift desperately needed military supplies. Even then, America’s European allies refused the U.S. planes landing rights to refuel, with only Portugal finally acquiescing.

The record in recent years is not much better. Israel’s Operation Defensive Shield​ (2002) against the Palestinian terror war, Second Lebanon War​ (2006) against Hezbollah, and Operation Cast Lead​ (2008-2009) against Hamas in Gaza all evoked a clamor of Western demands for immediate ceasefires along with charges of Israeli moral offenses. The U.S. was sometimes more sympathetic than Europe but still distinctly uncomfortable with Israeli military action and showed short patience for it no matter what savageries Israel had been subjected to.

It may be too soon to conclude that the current situation is as stark. As Joseph Klein notes, Obama could “surprise us and show the boldness he displayed in making the decision to take out Osama bin Laden,” though “his record to date on Iran is dismal.” And while some of the Republican presidential candidates have made hawkish avowals on Iran, Israel—even if one of them eventually defeats Obama—has to watch the clock.

If the reports (notably in The Guardian and Time) that Israel’s Mossad was behind the blast at the Iranian missile base are accurate, it could be an indication that Israel is already taking its own tack. As Israeli author and military commentator Ronen Bergman told the Telegraph reporter:

People outside Israel don’t understand how profound memories of the Holocaust are, and how they affect future policy making. At the end of the day, this policy of “never again” would dictate Israel’s behaviour when intelligence comes through that Iran has come close to a bomb.

P. David Hornik

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/11/16/will-israel-face-iran-alone/

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

Norway Embraces Islamist Tyranny

by Bruce Bawer

Anti-Semitism in Norway, where I have lived for twelve years, is over the top. I have never quite gotten used to it. Every now and then I hear or read something that reminds me that I am living in Europe, in a country that was occupied by the Nazis, and where a lot of people were perfectly okay with that. I think it is fair to say that anti-Semitism in Norway is most virulent among the cultural elite – the academics, intellectuals, writers, journalists, politicians, and technocrats – although thanks to the media and schools, it has trickled down to many ordinary Norwegians, some of whom may never even have met a Jewish person.

This anti-Semitism manifests itself in various ways. When Obama became president, former Norwegian prime minister Kåre Willoch said things did not look promising because Obama had "chosen a Jew as chief of staff." The chief rabbi of the Oslo synagogue reportedly receives a pile of hate mail every day. During the Gaza War, a major Norwegian newspaper had trouble finding Norwegian Jews who were willing to comment on the record about the war: they said they were scared of repercussions. Norwegian academics have sought to ban contacts with Israeli universities. Norwegian activists have encouraged boycotts of Israeli products. There is terrible anti-Semitic bullying in the schools. Every so often, a high-profile professor or activist or famous author will write a virulent op-ed or give an angry speech denouncing Israel and insulting Jews. Nothing could be safer for them to say; no one will seek to harm them physically or otherwise – as opposed to what would happen if, say, they made certain public statements about Islam. And they know this. Norway's most respected newspaper cartoonist, Finn Graff, who has admitted that he never draws cartoons about Islam because he is scared for his life, has frequently drawn cartoons comparing Israelis to Nazis; he knows Jews will never harm him. These anti-Semitic op-eds and speeches and cartoons are never remotely fresh, witty, or original; all they ever do is recycle tired cultural-elite clichés. And their creators get nothing but praise from their colleagues, who celebrate them as courageous truth-tellers. It is much more acceptable to scream "kill the Jews" at an anti-Israeli protest than it is to criticize Hamas.

The quintessential expression of Norwegian anti-Semitism during my time in Norway was an op-ed written by Jostein Gaarder, author of the international bestseller Sophie's World. It appeared on August 11, 2006, in Aftenposten, Norway's newspaper of record. I will quote from it just to give you a flavor of the kind of thing that is considered respectable discourse in Norway. "The state of Israel in its current form is history," wrote Gaarder. "We do not believe in the notion of God's chosen people....To act as God's chosen people is not only stupid and arrogant, but a crime against humanity....We acknowledge...Europe's deep responsibility for the fate of Jews....But the state of Israel...has massacred its own legitimacy....The State of Israel has seen its Soweto.... " Gaarder went on to describe little Jewish girls writing hateful words on bombs to be dropped on civilian populations in Lebanon and Palestine – as if it were Israel that teaches its children to hate and kill. He wrote: "We do not recognize a state founded on anti-humanistic principles and the ruins of an archaic national religion and warrior religion." You might have thought he was talking about Saudi Arabia or Iran, but no; he was talking about Israel. After reading Gaarder's op-ed, one of the leading members of Norway's tiny Jewish community, a writer named Mona Levin, said she had not read anything so disturbing since Mein Kampf. Many ordinary Norwegians agreed. Yet members of the cultural elite lined up to support Gaarder. As far as they were concerned he had struck a blow for truth and virtue.

What motivates this anti-Semitism? Several things. For one, the leading lights of Norway's cultural elite are overwhelmingly on the far left, and intensely hostile to the West, to capitalism, and therefore to the US and to Israel, which they see as America's puppet and vassal – a colonialist, imperialist outpost of Western capitalism in the heart of the Islamic world. Before the fall of the USSR, an extraordinary percentage of these Norwegian leftists were either Communists or very sympathetic to Communism. They have replaced their affinity to the Soviet Union with sympathy for the great totalitarian ideology of our time: Islamism. Thus they romanticize Palestinians and despise Israel.

Part of the motivation for this anti-Semitism is of course the influx into Norway in recent decades of masses of Muslims from Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia and elsewhere. Multiculturalism has taught Norway's cultural elite to take an uncritical, even obsequious, posture toward every aspect of Muslim culture and belief. When Muslim leaders rant against Israel and the Jews, the reflexive response of the multicultural elite is to join them in their rantings. This is called solidarity.

Then there is Norwegian history. Anti-Semitism has a long, deeply-rooted history in Norway, which was never a cosmopolitan country – no nation in Europe was less ethnically or religiously diverse. On the contrary, Norway was a remote, rural, mountainous land of pious Lutheran farmers whose early 19th-century constitution banned Jews from its territory. Then came WWII. With a few notable exceptions, Norwegians did not exactly cover themselves in glory during the Nazi occupation. Unlike their counterparts in Denmark, Norwegian gentiles made no major effort to protect their Jewish neighbors. To be sure, in the decades after the war, Norway was a staunch ally of the US and Israel; but the entrenched multicultural elite did its work through the schools, universities and media – producing a generation of Norwegians for whom being virtuous and intellectually sophisticated means, among other things, embracing the Muslim "victim," and despising the Israeli "bully," even though the "bully" in this case is a democratic country the size of the island of Vancouver and the "victim" is a group of immensely larger, unfree, and tirelessly aggressive nations dedicated to that tiny country's extermination.

On Oslo's version of Fleet Street there is a bar, a journalists' hangout, called Stopp Pressen (Stop the Presses). For years, there hung in its window a photograph of a smiling, beatific Yasser Arafat. From the way he was portrayed, you would have thought he was Albert Schweizer. I walked by that picture almost every day for years. It was a good reminder of the sickness at the top ranks of Norwegian society.

I should add that part of the motivation for all this anti-Semitism is, I think, guilt. The very existence of Jews and of Israel today remind Norwegians of what their countrymen did and didn't do during the war. Norwegians cannot forgive the Jews for having been murdered as part of a horrendous program in which many of their own parents or grandparents played a role. I think it salves the conscience of many Norwegians about their parents' and grandparents' wartime moral choices to be able to tell themselves that, "well, that was long ago, and today Norway is a virtuous bringer of peace, and Israel is a bloodthirsty warmonger."

And what about Islam? When it comes to that subject, Norway is more or less a microcosm of what is happening elsewhere in Europe. Islam is not as far advanced in Norway as in, say, the Netherlands or Sweden, or in parts of Britain and France, but it is getting there, and you see the same things happening there now that happened in other places a few years ago. Largely Muslim neighborhoods are gradually turning into sharia enclaves -- no-go zones -- where the Muslim residents are feeling their power more and more and where certain kinds of people, certain behaviors, and certain ways of dressing are increasingly being ruled out of bounds. There comes a tipping point, in other words, at which you start hearing: "This is Muslim territory! That is not allowed." One summer gay couples can walk unmolested down a certain street, and the next summer you start hearing reports of local merchants standing outside their stores and saying: "No gays here! Get out!" And then there is a newspaper story about a gay couple being chased out of that neighborhood, or beaten up, and you know that things have moved another step along toward the inevitable end.

And what makes it all so dangerous is the eagerness of the cultural elite to cover it up, to whitewash it, to pretend that none of it is happening. The cultural elite has been forced to admit that there are problems with immigration, but its mantra is still that the only, or at least the main, problem with Islam in Europe is not Islam itself but anti-Islamic prejudice. Also, pretty much any Muslim who is not an active terrorist is by definition a moderate. A few years ago I actually began hearing people in Norway talk about "moderate Islamists" and now this is an entirely familiar label. It is a perfect example of what Daniel Patrick Moynihan called "defining deviancy down."

These so-called "moderate Islamists," moreover, are routinely welcomed into the elite. In recent years, one high-profile young Islamist has become a columnist for Aftenposten, while another has become a leading member of one of the major political parties, and has established himself as an influential figure in Norwegian society, thanks in no small part to nearly reverential profiles in the media. These men enjoy friendly relations with top members of the Norwegian government and with members of the royal family, even though they refuse to say, for example, whether or not they support the death penalty for homosexuality. It is considered impolite to pressure them about such things. Meanwhile people from the Muslim community who object to the tyranny of imams and want to enjoy the same freedoms everyone else does get little support from the very authorities who should be their champions.

I might also mention Norway's resident terrorist, Mullah Krekar, and his family, who have long been the subjects of fawning newspaper and TV profiles in which they are depicted sympathetically as kind, gentle, suffering victims. (This is a man who founded the terrorist group Ansar al-Islam, and who is known to be guilty of murdering and torturing children, but whom Norway will not deport because they are worried more about his safety than about the security of their own country.)

Two years ago, supposedly in response to Israel's actions against Hamas, Muslims rioted in downtown Oslo, making a large area of the city look like Beirut or Sarajevo at their most violent moments in modern history. The violence was out of control, the damage extensive. Yet almost everyone got off scot-free. And the whole event was soon dropped down the memory hole. The media, the politicians, simply did not want to talk about it or address its implications for the future.

Early last year, in the same Oslo Square where Quisling and his henchman once held rallies, scores of radical Muslims gathered to hear a Nazi-like message of hate against Jews, gays, secular democracy, America, the West, Israel. The speeches were chilling. Yet many of the men who gave those speeches continue to be treated with respect by Norwegian authorities. One of them threatened a new 9/11 in Norway. A few weeks ago he flew to Saudi Arabia to resume his studies of the Koran. He was considered so radical and dangerous that Saudi Arabia actually arrested him at the airport and sent him back to Norway, where he is now once again moving around freely.

What can be done about all this madness? A few months ago I told an interviewer for the Jerusalem Post that in the next local elections, Norwegians need to vote for the Progress Party – the only one of Norway's several major parties that is truly friendly to Israel, and the only one that is remotely honest about the realities of Islam. A few months ago a big win for the Progress Party looked like a very strong possibility, because over the last decade there has, in fact, been a big sea change in Norway when it comes to Islam, immigration, and multiculturalism. Ten years ago there was barely any discussion of these issues; the cultural elite called the shots and pretty much nobody dissented. But over the years, there has been more and more open discussion and criticism of Norwegian immigration policy and even of Islam, and the once small Progress Party has grown in power and influence, much to the chagrin of the cultural elite. In recent months, the statements by Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, and David Cameron that multiculturalism had failed made a strong impact across Europe. There was hope that Norwegian voters would take meaningful action – a prospect that sent a chill through the heart of the cultural elite.

Then something happened. On July 22, as you probably know, a man named Anders Behring Breivik murdered several dozen people in Oslo and on a nearby island. He was a terrorist but not a Muslim terrorist – he was an anti-Muslim, anti-multiculturalist terrorist, who targeted that island because it was the site of a Labor Party youth camp, and he blamed the Labor Party for the multicultural philosophy that has led to the Islamization of Norway. The massacre was a horror for Norway, but it was a godsend for the Norwegian cultural elite. Having felt increasingly embattled in recent years, they quickly took to the media to spread the word that the lesson of this atrocity was that Norwegians need to respect Islam, embrace the idea of a multicultural Norway, and shun the critics of Islam. Those critics, they said, and I was among those whom they named most often, had infected the mind of Breivik with their poisonous hate and thus had blood on their hands. The cultural elite were quick to link Breivik to Christianity, to Israel, and to the Progress Party, and to call for new limits on freedom of speech, especially speech about Islam. They insisted that those who had criticized Islam and immigration in the past now owed it to the memories of the people Breivik had murdered to recant.

And it actually worked. Many critics of Islam were so intimidated by this vicious new atmosphere that they stepped forward and expressed regret for things they had said and written. Meanwhile leading politicians and the Norwegian Crown Prince visited mosques to show their solidarity with imams. Never mind that those imams' opinions were no different than they had been the day before the massacre. Suddenly all that was to be forgotten. Solidarity with Islam, shunning of Islam critics: this was – and is – the order of the day. In the local elections on September 10, the Labor Party received a huge sympathy vote, and the Progress Party suffered a disastrous setback. People were quite simply scared to vote for the party that had been linked, however unfairly, to the mass murderer.

Gro Harlem Brundtland, Norway's first female prime minister, who served three terms in that office between 1981 and 1996, once famously said: "It is typically Norwegian to be good." Indeed, Norwegians pride themselves more than anything else on being "good people." And many of them are very good people indeed. But how is the Norwegian cultural elite's endemic anti-Semitism and its ready appeasement of Islamist tyranny and intolerance consistent with the idea of being "good people"?

Bruce Bawer

Source: http://www.hudson-ny.org/2581/norway-islamist

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

Why a Nuclear Iran is Not Just an Israeli Problem

by Alex Ryvchin

Saudi Arabia and Iran may have pushed the region to the brink of crisis.

Photo by: REUTERS

The Middle East is so frequently embroiled in violence that the world failed to note the region’s descent into cold war. That blindness could have continued had it not been for several dramatic incidents that brought the depth of loathing between the Sunni Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Shiite Republic of Iran into sharp focus.

First, there was the explosive WikiLeaks revelation that Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud had repeatedly urged then-US Army general David Petraeus to launch a military strike against Iran’s nuclear program. Then, last month, in a mob-like move aimed at showing Riyadh that Iran does not take kindly to Saudi interference, US Attorney General Eric Holder revealed an Iranian plot to assassinate Adel Al-Jubeir, the Saudi ambassador to the United States.

These incidents have not only demonstrated the extent of hostilities between these two regional giants, they have shown that Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons will resonate far beyond Israel’s borders.

Fueled by the ancient Persian suspicion of Arab hegemony coupled with years of sectarian tension, relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran have descended steeply since the fall of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979. This is a conflict motivated by a desire of one sect of Islam to claim victory over the perceived heresies of the other, to seize control of the oil riches of the Persian Gulf and to establish a pan-Islamic patronage over the entire Middle East.

In short, this intense feud has all the ingredients of destruction – religion, money and power.

Presently, the delicate peace in the Persian Gulf is maintained by US presence in the region, which in turn ensures the stability of the global oil supply. A nuclear Iran would fundamentally transform this fragile arrangement.

If faced with a vastly superior military rival, Saudi Arabia—at the expense of both Israel and the Saudi-allied Gulf States—would be forced to either give in and allow Iran to reign over the region, or it would enter a 1950s-style nuclear arms race. Most likely, Saudi Arabia will seek to acquire its own arsenal through its Sunni ally, Pakistan.

In either scenario, the region would be thrust into chaos and the world would be faced with the choice of either Iranian supremacy in the Middle East or a nuclear arms race between two extremist, radical regimes.

The implications of a nuclear Iran for Israel are twofold: First, a nation committed to Israel’s destruction would have the military capability to match its annihilationist rhetoric. While political commentators may squabble over whether Iran would ever use nuclear weapons to eradicate the Jewish State, the stakes are too high for Israel to risk underestimating Iran’s intentions.

Second, the landscape of the Arab-Israeli conflict would be immediately and fundamentally transformed. The presence of Israel is, at best, begrudgingly tolerated by its neighbors. At worst, they merely bide their time until the balance of power shifts in their favor.

The Arab characterization of the 1967 War as a mere “setback” (Naksa) and the Palestinian insistence that millions of its refugees be resettled in Israel - thereby shifting the demographic balance in the Palestinian’s favor - points to an Arab intention to eradicate Jewish self-determination in the region; whether by force or by stealth.

A recalibration of power in the Middle East would significantly bolster these aspirations and would gravely diminish the military deterrent that is so central to Israel’s survival. Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons may be the battle cry for which Israel’s enemies have been waiting.

Israel’s relationship with its enemies to the north and to the south would also be catastrophically altered. To date, Hezbollah and Hamas have been satisfied to bait and goad Israel through means of terror and rocket fire in the hope of provoking a response that could be easily characterized as an overreaction in the eyes of the world. In other words, Hamas and Hezbollah happily put their own civilians in harm’s way to claim a public relations bonanza.

Safe in the knowledge that Israel will think long and hard before engaging in battle with a satellite of a nuclear state, these factions will be encouraged to undertake more daring provocations,

Syria and Lebanon would also be emboldened: A volatile Syria, led by an increasingly desperate and fragile regime, but now with the protection of a nuclear Iran, may seek to divert attention from its brutality towards its own people by directing some of it towards its preferred foe and scapegoat, Israel.

Meanwhile, Lebanon may decide to pick its own fight. The current territorial dispute with Israel is confined to the minuscule Shebaa Farms, but Israel’s recent discovery of massive natural gas reserves off its poorly-delineated Mediterranean coast constitutes a far greater prize, one which Lebanon may now be prepared to fight for.

Either way, Iran may view these issues as suitable pretexts for waging war through its proxies in order to test Israel’s willingness in challenging a nuclear power.

Since its birth, Israel’s survival has been predicated on possessing a military might greater than that of its combined enemies. Peace treaties with neighbors, dialogue with foes and enormous diplomatic efforts the world over are important, but it is Israel’s superior military capability and in particular, its nuclear deterrent which protects the Jewish State.

Iran now stands poised to rock any stability that Israel enjoys and to transform the balance of power in the Middle East. If at first glance this may appear to be just an Israeli problem requiring an Israeli solution, a closer analysis of a nuclear Iran shows that this is an international catastrophe that demands a united and determined international reaction.
Alex Ryvchin is a London based lawyer and the founder of The Jewish Thinker (jewishthinker.org) a non-profit organization promoting discussion and awareness of matters affecting Jewish life.

Source: http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Opinion/Article.aspx?id=245425&prmusr=mqp8HBA6%2b%2fR5iPkIvWByyGoYK6KEFo17dXGm1J77HQu5Zh8Hcll92m81Z8%2bf8acD

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