Daled Amos

Mideast Media Sampler 5/24/13: Does Current Mideast Chaos Mean Olmert's Offer To Abbas Gone Forever?

2013-05-24T13:58:00.000-04:00

by David Gerstman, contributing blogger at Legal Insurrection

1) Missing another opportunity to miss an opportunity

Yesterday, The Tower published an exclusive story about the peace deal that Ehud Olmert offered Mahmoud Abbas in 2008 but that Abbas never accepted.

Today Isacharoff follows up with more detail in Olmert: ‘I am still waiting for Abbas to call’ – If This Offer Wasn’t Enough, How Can Anyone Believe The Palestinians Will Ever Say ‘Yes’?. Towards the end, Isacharoff quotes Olmert:

“In the last meeting I brought a big map, like the size of this whole table,” recalls Olmert. “With colors for all the regions that go over to us and the reverse. We would receive 6.3%, they would get 5.8%, but they also get a safe passage in a tunnel between Gaza and the West Bank that was the equivalent in territory of the remaining half percent. Territories that were considered no-man’s-land before 1967 would be divided 50-50. Ariel would stay with us, and a network of tunnels would go under the Trans Samaria Highway to ease the passage of Palestinians in that area. Similarly for the areas of A-Zaim and Hizmeh, since I was insisting on E-1. There would be a tunnel that would enable Palestinians to have quick passage between Bethlehem and Ramallah, despite our control over the territory, and so their territorial contiguity would not be impaired.”

“At the same time, I gave Abbas territories in the Beit Sh’ean Valley, next to Tirat Zvi, not far from Afula, in the area of Lachish, in the area of Katna (next to Har Adar), the northern Judean desert and the area around the Gaza Strip. I completely gave up on having an Israeli presence in the Jordan Valley. That was because I could protect the line of the Jordan River through an international military force on the other side of the Jordan RIver. There was no opposition on the Palestinian side to our having a presence in warning stations along the mountain range.”

Olmert, Bush and Abbas at Annapolis, Md., Nov. 27,2007.
Photo courtesy of US Navy

Among the other concessions Olmert proposed were the ceding control of the Temple Mount to an international administration (consisting of the United Stastes, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Palestine) and allowing 5000 Palestinians to be repatriated to Israel. The report is consistent - though more detailed than previous reporting on the negotiations. Ethan Bronner citing Olmert's memoirs and an interview with the ex-Prime Minister reported a similar account in 2011.

Isacharoff observes regarding Olmert's plan to cede the Jordan Valley to the Palestinians.

Today, such an offer, particularly as it relates to the Jordan Valley, is all but inconceivable.

Given the chaos that has swept the Middle East since that potentially historic night in September 2008 – with security now deteriorating or having collapsed in every country bordering Israel – Olmert’s offer contains elements that are now simply incompatible with fundamental Israeli interests.

The observation is interesting because in contrasts with an op-ed Olmert wrote for the New York Times in September, 2011, Peace - now or never, regarding the Palestinian statehood bid at the United Nations.

We Israelis simply do not have the luxury of spending more time postponing a solution. A further delay will only help extremists on both sides who seek to sabotage any prospect of a peaceful, negotiated two-state solution.

Moreover, the Arab Spring has changed the Middle East, and unpredictable developments in the region, such as the recent attack on Israel’s embassy in Cairo, could easily explode into widespread chaos. It is therefore in Israel’s strategic interest to cement existing peace agreements with its neighbors, Egypt and Jordan.

Isacharoff's observation refutes Olmert's claim. The uncertainty in the Middle East makes the risks of concessions greater. More generally, the Palestinian Authority's weakness means that any concessions Israel makes have to assume that Hamas could well come to power in the not too distant future.

2) Saving the children of enemies

Ten years ago, following the war that deposed Saddam Hussein, Israeli doctors operated on and saved an Iraqi infant with a severe heart defect.

Now the same Israeli organization, Save a Child's Heart, has recently saved a young Syrian girl.

The mother told reporters she was hesitant about coming to Israel because it is an enemy country to Syria but also said the only thing that mattered for her was having the opportunity to save her daughter’s life.

... “We kept taking her to doctors and to the hospital but nothing could be done for her,” the mother said. “She couldn’t run and play like other children and she was very sick most of the time.”

Dr. Lior Sasson, one of the physicians to volunteer with the SACH medical team, said the child was in grave condition when she arrived in Israel and would not have survived much longer. “Without the surgery, she could have died within a few months, maybe even weeks,” he said.

Save a Child's Heart boasts:

Since 1995, Save a Child's Heart (SACH) has treated more than 3,000 children suffering from congenital and rheumatic heart disease aging from infancy to 18 years of age from the “four corners of the Earth” - 45 countries where adequate medical care is unavailable.

Approximately 50% of the children are from the Palestinian Authority, Jordan, Iraq, Syria and Morocco; more than 30% are from Africa; and the remaining are from Asia, Eastern Europe and the Americas.

Israel is regularly condemned in some venues as a racist state. Organizations like Save a Child's Heart show that the claim is absolutely false.

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Technorati Tag: Israel and Olmert and Abbas and Syria.

The Murder of Lee Rigby -- Typical of Other Examples of Islamist Mutilation

2013-05-24T10:54:00.000-04:00

The following by Daniel Pipes is reposted here with permission:

Muslim Acts of Beheading in the West

by Daniel Pipes
May 23, 2013
Cross-posted from National Review Online, The Corner

http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2013/05/muslim-acts-of-beheading-in-the-west

Michael Adebolajo after murdering Lee Rigby on May 22, 2013, near London.

The gruesome murder yesterday of a soldier outside London by a Muslim convert, Michael Adebolajo, brings to mind that throat slitting and beheading are Islamically sanctioned forms of execution. Although these occur particularly often in the course of family-related crimes – think, for example, of the case of Aasiya Hassan in suburban Buffalo, N.Y., killed by her husband in 2009, stabbed with two hunting knives more than forty times in the face, back and chest, then beheaded – this monstrous form of violence is also used in non-family instances. Some of those that took place over the past decade in the West in chronological order include:

Ariel Sellouk – Houston, August 2003: throat slit attempted but incomplete beheading.
Sébastien Selam – Paris, November 2003: throat was slit twice; his face was mutilated with a carving fork and his eyes were gouged out by a Muslim neighbor who boasted "I killed my Jew, I'll go to paradise."
Theo Van Gogh – Amsterdam, November 2004: shot, throat slit, and five-page paper pinned to his body.
Hossam Armanious, Amal Garas, Sylvia Armanious, and Monica Armanious, – Jersey City, N.J., January 2005: necks, throats and bodies stabbed, mutilation of Coptic tattoo.
Brendan Mess, Erik Weissman, and Raphael Teken - Waltham, Massachusetts, September 2012: throats slit, probably by Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bombers.
Hany F. Tawadros and Amgad A. Konds – Jersey City, N.J., February 2013: shot, decapitated, hands severed.
Lee Rigby – Woolwich, England, May 2013: run over by car, mutilated, beheaded.

This gruesome list (to be updated as needed) is only part of the story: other characteristically Muslim crimes taking place in Western countries include honor killings, female genital mutilation, and slave holding. These, sadly, are among Islam's contributions to the lands of immigration. (May 23, 2013)

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Technorati Tag: Michael Adebolajo and Lee Rigby and Islamists and Terrorism.

Video: Latma on Mohammed Al-Durah Muhammad and other PR victories

2013-05-24T07:58:00.000-04:00

This week Latma takes a look at the Israel report on the Al Durah hoax -- presented 13 years after it took place. Also, a look at the questions raised over the cost of modest Netanyahu's lifestyle.

Here is the video:

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Technorati Tag: Israel and Al-Dura and Latma and Netanyahu.

Daniel Pipes on The Obama Administration Bibliography Of Books About Islam

2013-05-23T19:58:00.000-04:00

The following by Daniel Pipes is reposted here with permission:

The U.S. Government Compiles a Bibliography

by Daniel Pipes
The Washington Times
May 23, 2013

http://www.danielpipes.org/12918/neh-muslim-journeys

N.B.: WT title: An apology posing as a bibliography: An official book list discounts Islam's menacing side

At this moment of sequester and belt-tightening, the U.S. government has delivered a reading list on Islam.

My alternative bibliography.

The National Endowment for the Humanities has joined with two private foundations, Carnegie and Duke, to fund "Muslim Journeys," a project that aims to present "new and diverse perspectives on the people, places, histories, beliefs, practices, and cultures of Muslims in the United States and around the world." Its main component is the "Muslim Journeys Bookshelf," a selection of 25 books and 3 films on Islam sent to nearly 1,000 libraries as well as awebsite and some other activities. Marvin Olasky, who brought this project to public attention, estimates the whole project cost about US$1 million.

As one of the taxpayers who unwittingly contributed to this project as well as the compiler of my own bibliography on Islam and the Middle East, I take interest in the 25 books NEH selected for glory, spreading them around the country.

Some of the books, such as "The Arabian Nights," do have beautiful covers.

Softness characterizes its list: the 25 books quietly ignore current headlines so as to accentuate the attractive side of Islamic civilization, especially its medieval expression, and gently promote the Islam religion. It's not so exuberant an exercise as the British 1976 World of Islam Festival, described at the time as "a unique cultural event that … was no less than an attempt to present one civilization—in all its depth and variety—to another." But then, how can one aspire to such grandeur with all that's happened in the intervening years?

NEH's list and mine do share minor commonalities: for example, one author (the Moroccan writer Fatima Mernissi) and one series (the Very Short Introductions series issued by Oxford University Press).

But our purposes could not be more different: whereas I help readers understand why Muslims fill 30 out of 32 slots on the most wanted terrorists list and how Islamism came to be the main vehicle of barbarism in the world today, the endowment's list shields the reader's eyes from all this unpleasantness. Where I provide background to the headlines, NEH ignores them and pretends all is well with Islam, as is the federal government's wont.

I seek to answer burning questions: Who was Muhammad? What is the historical impact of Islam? When is warfare jihad? Why did Islamism arise? How does tribal culture influence political life? Where can one locate signs of hope for Islam to moderate? In contrast, the NEH list offers a smattering of this and that – poetry, personal accounts, antiquities, architecture, religion and history, original texts, and a smidgeon of current events, preferably presented fictionally. For example, In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar, tells about a boy growing up in Qaddafi's Libya).

I suggest Marshall G. S. Hodgson's 3-volume scholarly masterpiece, The Venture of Islam, while NEH proffers Jim Al-Khalili's derivative House of Wisdom: How Arabic Science Saved Ancient Knowledge and Gave Us the Renaissance. I offer up books by sturdy anti-Islamist Muslims such as Khalid Durán's introduction to Islam or Bassam Tibi's Challenge of Fundamentalism. The endowment, of course – for what else does a government agency do? – promotes Islamists, including the Canadian phony moderate Ingrid Mattson and the Obama administration's favorite Eboo Patel.

My books are personal selections based on decades in the field; theirs is a mish-mash brokered by a committee of four standard-issue academics (Leila Golestaneh Austin, Giancarlo Casale, Frederick Denny, and Kambiz GhaneaBassiri) and one don't-rock-the-boat journalist (Deborah Amos).

The NEH bibliography reminds one of the Middle East Studies Association's annual meetings, which often avoid interesting or important topics in favor of such obscure feminist issues as "Problematizing 'Women's Place' in the Multiple Borderzones of Gender and Ethnic Politics in Turkey" and "The Turkish Women's Union and the Politics of Women's Rights in Turkey, 1929-1935."

As these titles suggest, today's scholars have a strange tendency to focus in on questions no one is asking, as do many of the NEH books. Anthony Shadid recounts inHouse of Stone: a Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East his efforts to restore an ancestral home in Lebanon; Kamila Shamsie's Broken Verses: a Novel tells the story of a television journalist in Karachi.

As taxpayer and as specialist, I condemn the NEH list. Far from presenting "new and diverse perspectives," it offers the usual academic obfuscation mixed with Islamist triumphalism. It reminds us that of the many things governments should not do, one of them is to compile bibliographies.

Mr. Pipes (DanielPipes.org) is president of the Middle East Forum. © 2013 by Daniel Pipes. All rights reserved.

May 23, 2013 addendum: Here is the complete list of books from the NEH list:

A Quiet Revolution by Leila Ahmed
Acts of Faith by Eboo Patel
The Arabian Nights edited by Muhsin Mahdi
The Art of Hajj by Venetia Porter
Broken Verses by Kamila Shamsie
The Butterfly Mosque by G. Willow Wilson
The Children of Abraham by F. E. Peters
The Columbia Sourcebook of Muslims in the United States edited by Edward E. Curtis IV
The Conference of the Birds by Farid al-Din Attar
Dreams of Trespass by Fatima Mernissi
House of Stone by Anthony Shadid
The House of Wisdom by Jim Al-Khalili
In an Antique Land by Amitav Ghosh
In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar
Islamic Arts by Jonathan Bloom & Sheila Blair
Leo Africanus by Amin Maalouf
Minaret by Leila Aboulela
Muhammad: A Very Short Introduction by Jonathan A.C. Brown
The Ornament of the World by Maria Rosa Menocal
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi
Prince Among Slaves by Terry Alford
Rumi edited by Reynold A. Nicholson
Snow by Orhan Pamuk
The Story of the Qur'an by Ingrid Mattson
When Asia Was the World by Stewart Gordon

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Technorati Tag: Islam.

Arlene Kushner on Terrorist Beheading Of British Soldier in Great Britain and Implications

2013-05-23T16:27:00.003-04:00

From Arlene Kushner:
May 23, 2013

"What Comes First?"

There are several items of news requiring attention that can, in one respect or another, knock you off balance.

But let us start with this indisputable winner, because it will take the time required to read the rest of my post before you get your breath back.

Most of you probably know that a UK soldier, not in uniform, was killed yesterday on the street in broad daylight by two Islamic terrorists -- both of whom are believed to be native British, and at least one reportedly a convert to Islam -- who then proceeded to behead him with a meat cleaver, while calling “Allahu akbar.” Eye witnesses described the victim as having been hacked "like a piece of meat." The terrorists were shot by police, taken to a hospital, and then arrested.

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Many of the sites I pulled up when searching for data on this referred to a "likely terrorist event," or "what appears to be terrorism." So tentative, so cautious.

A British security officer said it seemed to be "ideologically motivated."

You think?

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Today, British Prime Minister David Cameron said (emphasis added):

"This was not just an attack on Britain and on the British way of life, it was also a betrayal of Islam and of the Muslim communities who give so much to our country..."

Read: UK PM Cameron says London attack was betrayal of Islam

Credit: currentaffairs

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Now it strikes me that Cameron is just a tad afraid of guys like this. He did allude to "terrorism," but then he quickly disassociated what happened from Islam.

Well...let me tell you what one of the attackers said (emphasis added):

“We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you until you leave us alone. Your people will never be safe. The only reason we have done this is because Muslims are dying by British soldiers every day.

“We must fight them as they fight us. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth...You people will never be safe. Remove your government, they don’t care about you. Do you think David Cameron is going to get caught in the street when we start busting our guns? Do you think your politicians are going to die?

“No, it’s going to be the average guy like you, and your children. So get rid of them. Tell them to bring our troops back so we, so you can all live in peace.”

Read: Woolwich attack: terrorist proclaimed 'an eye for an eye' after attack

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These terrorists, reports indicate, speak with a London accent. But they are of Nigerian heritage. The "us" is Muslims in Nigeria. What is clear here is the threat. The threat against the British people generally and against Cameron and the British government specifically.

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So lets jump to a report from three years ago by American Robert Leiken, author of Europe's Angry Muslims. In this report for CNN, entitled, "London breeding Islamic terrorists," he writes:

"Since the mid-90s, London has been a haven for foreign jihadi preachers, organizers, agitators and propagandists, many of them recipients of generous welfare benefits.

"'Londonistan' attracted second-generation British Muslims who spurned the folk Islam and customs of their immigrant parents but were repelled by a British culture they regarded as decadent and racist...

"About 100,000 British university students are Muslims. About a quarter of them belong to Islamic Societies, and half of those are active members.

"With the ascendancy of identity politics in Britain, Islamic Societies, rather like African-American student associations of yore, have become the hub of students professing to seek 'social justice.' But their idea of justice is to indict as the world's real terrorists the U.S. and Israel...

"Islamic Society members vary widely. They may be moderate Sufis, apolitical pietists, democratic Islamists, windy radicals or extremists like Abdul Mutallab. Many of them believe that violence is acceptable if their religion is under attack, which is little comfort, because the central plank of radical Islam is that their religion is under attack worldwide...

"But if we begin to point fingers at Britain, we will need two hands. The danger from Britain has its source in nearly every institution in British society: a Parliament that cannot pass counterterrorism legislation, police that do not arrest because evidence is not strong enough to convince a British court, security agencies that do not disclose to the media information about suspects, Islamic organizations that tell Muslims that such silence proves that the suspects have been falsely accused, a press that allows the public to believe such claims, jurors who then hold prosecutors to impossible standards and a once-glorious culture of tolerance that has lost its bearings.

"London has become a fertile field in the jihadi playground, along with Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia.

"Our great friend has allowed herself to become a strategic resource to our common enemies and a liability in the struggle against terrorism."

Read: London breeding Islamic terrorists

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So for Cameron to disassociate this terror attack from Islam is extremely disingenuous. For him to have cited, as he did, ostensibly "brave" pieties about how in Britain they know how to deal with such attacks by going on with their lives is pathetic. For he is refusing to grapple with Britain's essential problem. And in refusing he becomes part of the problem.

London is in a whole lot of trouble.

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Well, Secretary John Kerry is here, so can peace negotiations be far behind? Actually, yes...

Credit: JewishJournal

In greeting Kerry today, PM Netanyahu said they would be talking about Syria and Iran...

"But above all, what we want to do is restart the peace talks with the Palestinians.

“It’s something I want, it’s something you want. It’s something I hope the Palestinians want as well and we ought to be successful for a simple reason: When there’s a will, there's a way."

Read: US, Israel raise hopes for Mideast peace restart

I know. This is hard to swallow. But consider how blatant it is. With Russian rockets in Syria and the possibility of a nuclear Iran sitting on his shoulders, is it remotely plausible that "most of all" he wants to restart peace talks? This is Netanyahu playing his game, and playing it well enough so that Kerry voiced appreciation for his "seriousness."

This is what it's about for Netanyahu: appearing serious on the issue before the (very biased) court of world opinion. He's got to be the good guy, to Abbas's foot-dragging bad guy. Presumably, there are diplomatic benefits to this, even if negotiations never happen.

Seems that our chief negotiator, Tzipi Livni, is also playing a game. She was out there today cheerleading for talks with great fervor. But apparently she didn't count on what her close advisor, Tal Becker, of the Foreign Ministry, would tell Maariv :

He doesn't believe an agreement with the Palestinian Arabs will be possible for several years. In his opinion, this is the fault of Abbas, who is "not enthusiastic about returning to talks" and is "unwilling to pay the political price" for entering into serious negotiations.

Most likely, folks, there you have it. Kerry is still mum on what various innovative plans he has brought with him to "jump start" the talks.

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Yesterday I wrote about the difficulty of assessing Netanyahu's true intentions -- the quote above being yet another case in point. There is one matter on which he is taking a proper stand that I didn't mention in the course of that discussion and would like to return to now.

On May 16, I wrote about the decision of the government to attempt to apply legal status to four communities that had been considered "unauthorized." You can see details of the situation here:

Read: Dead Serious

There is no question but that the fact that Moshe Ya'alon is now defense minister has a good deal to do with this government position, yet it is impossible to believe that this situation would have taken shape as it has if the prime minister had not signed off on it.

According to Times of Israel, Kerry contacted Netanyahu on this directly and protested. This interferes with his "peace plans" you see -- because Israel is supposed to be giving up (Heaven forbid) Judea and Samaria, not legalizing additional communities. The American Embassy in Tel Aviv also came out with a statement regarding the fact that this action was not constructive for peace.

There has been no stalling, however, no backing down, on the part of the Israeli government that I have been able to discover. Yesterday, representatives for the state had to appear at the High Court to answer the petition of Peace Now regarding the need to take down those four unauthorized communities. The state presented its position as previously outlined. The Court has not yet ruled.

There is however, concern about what went on in the courtroom:

For the very first time ever (Peace Now chair Yariv Oppenheimer said it's something he's never seen in all his years of petitioning the court on this issue), a representative of the US Embassy, Andrew Shut, attended the court session. Legally, he is within his rights to do so, but there is the suggestion of impropriety.
Nachi Eyal, Director of the Legal Forum for Israel protested that:

"..the very presence of a diplomat in a legal debate about internal matters of the State of Israel" aims to exert pressure and influence the judges’ decision.

“I think there is unhealthy and inappropriate intervention here on the part of the United States. What do the Americans want there? Do they want the judges to see that [the Americans] are there to oversee them?"

Read: US ‘pressures’ Israel with diplomat at settlement hearing

This sure sent my blood pressure up.

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Syria. The situation remains exceedingly volatile. Reports have come through that the Russian S-300 missiles may be on their way to Syria very soon -- but no one is talking and this cannot be confirmed. A very, very troublesome possibility.

In the town of Qusayr, a major battle has been waging for days, with outcome still uncertain. Both sides are claiming imminent victory and are receiving reinforcements. There is no question but that Iranians and members of Hezbollah are in the midst of the fight, alongside the forces of Assad. This town has been in rebel hands for some time, and Syrian troops are attempting to regain control there. The significance of this battle is that Assad's control of the town would clear the way for a direct line into Lebanon for transferring weapons to Hezbollah.

Syria's national television reported on Tuesday that Abu Omar, a top commander with the jihadist al-Nusra Front, was killed in battle in Qusayr.

Top Israeli military personnel have warned Assad that he will be responsible if he escalates the situation with Israel. And there have been warnings, as well, on the part of Israeli military regarding the fact that matters could seriously heat up at any point. We here in Israel are sitting on the edge...

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In a turn-around of its previous position, German intelligence now believes Assad will hold out. You can see the assessment here:

Read: Syrian Rebels in Trouble: German Intelligence Sees Assad Regaining Hold

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One man who does not think it is a good thing is Ephraim Inbar, Director of the BESA Center. His concern is in breaking the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah axis.

I am not alone in my anguished conclusion (acknowledging that there is no good answer) that better Assad than the jihadist world-domination maniacs who would likely take over if Assad fell. But in the interests of presenting a balanced picture, I share here the link to Inbar's piece on the issue:

Read: Israel’s Interests in Syria

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And then, in closing, a thoughtful piece by Aaron David Miller, "The Myth of the Arab State" (emphasis added):

"From North Africa to the Levant, a process of state decentralization, perhaps even fragmentation, is underway that will have negative consequences for American interests, and there may be very little the U.S. can do about it.

"The three elements required for democratic life in any form simply aren't evident in the Arab world: leaders who rise above sectarian, religious and ethnic affiliations and govern in the best interests of the nation as a whole; institutions that are deemed authoritative, legitimate and inclusive and not mere playthings in the elites' struggle for power; and an accommodative process that contains and manages even the bitterest of debates without spilling over into violence or political pressures that paralyze national life."

Read: The Myth of the Arab State

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Miller does not deal in any serious way with the historical background to these Arab states, which were, in some considerable measure, established by the Western powers by drawing arbitrary border lines for political reasons and without regard to internal cohesiveness. Nor does he talk about Islam as potentially a destabilizing factor in this situation.

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If it is reproduced and emphasis is added, the fact that it has been added must be noted.

See my website at www.arlenefromisrael.info Contact Arlene at akushner18@gmail.com

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Technorati Tag: Israel and Terrorism and John Kerry and Netanyahu.

Will Calling For End to Blasphemy Laws Help Christians Persecuted By Islamists?

2013-05-23T12:02:00.000-04:00

The following by Andrew Harrod is reposted here with permission:

Catholic Cardinal Calls for End to Blasphemy Laws

by Andrew Harrod
Frontpage Mag
May 21, 2013

http://www.legal-project.org/4086/catholic-cardinal-calls-for-end-to-blasphemy-laws

Once favored to become pope, Scola made his remarks at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart for the opening of a conference focusing on Roman Emperor Constantine's 313 Edict of Milan granting imperial toleration to Christianity. Scola advocated a "healthy secularism" allowing religious freedom, defined by him as a "true litmus test" for a civilized society. To Scola, this "freedom means above all encouraging religious pluralism and opening to all forms of religious expression," including "eliminating laws that criminally punish blasphemy."Speaking at a conference in Milan, Italy, on May 8, 2013, that city's archbishop, Cardinal Angelo Scola, called for the abolition of blasphemy laws worldwide. Such a step would significantly help protect globally the freedom of speech and religion desperately needed by Christians in particular while countering Islamic fanaticism with freedom.

As the Catholic cable television channel EWTN reported online, the role of blasphemy laws in Muslim-majority countries in persecuting Christians and other religious minorities formed the global context of Scola's remarks. As reviewed previously by this writer, the authors of Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians have extensively documented that "Christians are the single most widely persecuted religious group in the world today," a "terrible trend…on the upswing." Moreover, "it is in the Muslim world where persecution of Christians is now most widespread, intense, and, ominously, increasing." Abolition of Muslim blasphemy laws, often used to prohibit propagation of Christian beliefs contradicting Muslim doctrine, would eliminate one important instrument of Islamic repression.

Such religious freedom would protect not just private rights, but also public peace. "Religious freedom," notes Scola's fellow Catholic, Professor Thomas F. Farr of Georgetown University's Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, & World Affairs, "the evidence shows, can be an antidote to religion-related extremism, including terrorism." Freedom, analyzes Farr, dilutes fanaticism by forcing various faiths to justify their claims intellectually without coercion in a marketplace of ideas. "What if," speculates Farr,

Osama Bin Laden had been raised in a Saudi Arabia that allowed for religious freedom? What if, instead of being steeped exclusively in the toxic teachings of Wahhabism and Sayyid Qutb, he had been exposed to other forms of Islam, to critics of Islam, to other forms of religious belief, and to liberal religion-based arguments about justice and the common good?

Christians like Scola and Farr have a perfectly sound theological basis for faith-based advocacy of religious freedom. As the prominent Protestant pastor and theologian John Piper haswritten, numerous Biblical verses relate that "Christ did his work by being insulted" in stark contrast to Islam in which the "work of Muhammad is based on being honored." As the somewhat religiously eclectic but committed freethinker Thomas Jefferson wrote to a majoritarian-Christian America in his landmark 1779 (adopted 1785) Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, "all attempts to influence" individual religious belief

by temporal punishments, or burthens, or by civil incapacitations…are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do, but to extend it by its influence on reason alone.

Ironically, Christian calls for religious freedom with respect to Islam would manifest precisely the Christian concept of the "church militant" (ecclesia militans). Muslim entities like the 57 Muslim-majority member states (including "Palestine") of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) have often tried to hide advocacy of de facto Islamic blasphemy laws behind a supposedly "ecumenical veneer" of opposition to "defamation of religion" in general. Christian calls for religious freedom, come what may in criticism and/or condemnation of any particular faith, ostentatiously breaks ranks with this united front claimed by some Muslims, leaving them to defend religious repression on their own.

European opponents of blasphemy laws like Scola, though, will have to begin actually with their own continent. Scola's native Italy as well as seven other European countries (out of a total of 45, or 18%) had blasphemy laws according to a 2011 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life study. Somewhat similar to blasphemy laws, laws against "defamation" of religion also existed in 36 European countries (80%), while collectively religious restrictions of various sorts exist in 47% of countries worldwide.

As many have already noted (see here, here, and here), ultimately arbitrary European enforcement of such laws today more often than not involve the Islamic faith of recently arrived immigrant communities, not Europe's historically dominant Judeo-Christian beliefs. Accordingly, concerns about limiting free speech with respect to Islam played a role in the 2012 abolition of the blasphemy law in one of the eight European countries listed by Pew in 2011, Holland. The Dutch precedent is a model to follow for all faithful people who believe that they have a religious truth that will set free, a truth that need not fear freedom.

This article was sponsored by The Legal Project, an activity of the Middle East Forum.

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Technorati Tag: Free Speech and Islam.

The Madness of Islamist Terrorism and How It Is Reflected In American Society

2013-05-23T07:53:00.000-04:00

The following by David P. Goldman is reposted here with permission of Middle East Forum:

Syria's Madness and Ours

by David P. Goldman
Asia Times
May 20, 2013

http://www.meforum.org/3511/syria-madness

"Syria's Descent into Madness" is the cover story of the May 27 Time magazine, recounting the act of ritual cannibalism by a Syrian rebel commander that transfixed the West last week. The sort of atrocities viewable on YouTube - the slaughter by government troops of entire families including infants in Tartus province this month, mass rape of women in rebel-held zones, or the rebel leader Abu Sakkar eating a piece of the lung of a dead government soldier - are becoming Syria's new normal.

Westerners cannot deal with this kind of warfare. The United States does not have and cannot train soldiers capable of intervening in the Syrian civil war. Short of raising a foreign legion on the French colonial model, America should keep its military personnel at a distance from a war fought with the instruments of horror.

There is nothing new about the use of atrocities to persuade one's own forces to fight to the death because defeat would entail a dreadful retribution.
The Nazis "deliberately insinuated knowledge of the Final Solution, devilishly making Germans complicit in the crime and binding them, with guilt and dread, to their leaders," as the Atlantic Monthly's Benjamin Schwarz reviewed the latest research. [1] Both sides in Syria perpetrate crimes against humanity for the same reason. The Assad government encourages its irregulars to rape as many women as possible in towns controlled by the opposition. [2] Abu Sakkar's videotaped cannibalism was allegedly retaliation for such rapes.

Something more sinister is at work in the killing fields of the Middle East, however. The danger that Islam would conquer the West attenuated after the Ottomans' failed Siege of Vienna in 1683. Muslim birth rates are falling faster than those recorded for any people at any time in history, and two of the prospective Muslim powers, Iran and Turkey, will become geriatric shells within a generation. But Muslim societies in their death throes offer a different and deadly threat to the West. It was in response to this threat that I began writing these essays. A month after the 2001 attack on the World Trade center, I warned:

The grand vulnerability of the Western mind is horror. The Nazis understood this and pursued a policy "des Schreckens" (to cause horror) and "Entsetzens" (terror, literally: dislodgement).Horror was not merely an instrument of war in the traditional sense, but a form of Wagnerian theater, or psychological warfare on the grand scale. Hitler's tactical advantage lay in his capacity to be more horrible than his opponents could imagine. The most horrible thing of all is that he well might have succeeded if not for his own megalomaniac propensity to overreach.

America, as Osama bin Laden taunted this week, lost in Vietnam. But it was not military setbacks, but the horrific images of Vietnamese civilians burned by napalm, that lost the war. America's experience in the war is enshrined in popular culture in the film Apocalypse Now, modeled after Joseph Conrad's story, The Heart of Darkness. The Belgian trading company official, Paul Kurtz, sinks into bestiality and dies with these words: "The horror! The horror!" It was a dreadful film, but a clever reference. At the close of World War I, T S Eliot subtitled his epitaph for Western civilization,The Hollow Men, with a quote from the Conrad story: "Mr Kurtz, he dead." [3]

Pre-modern societies competed as a matter of course to commit acts of cruelty horrific enough to paralyze the will of their enemies. The Mongol conqueror Tamerlane - the Boston bomber's namesake - killed almost all the city's residents and piled their heads into a pyramid. The Romans lined the Appian Way with 6,000 crucified slave rebels after crushing Spartacus' revolt in 71 BCE. During the Siege of Jerusalem in CE 76 they crucified 500 victims a day. Among all the ancient peoples only the ancient Hebrews prohibited the public display of executed corpses (Deuteronomy. 21:23), because an atrocity inflicted on the living image of God is an offense to God.

That is what holds the West together. The Christian West summoned the pagans out of pre-history on the authority of a God whose love extends to every individual, so that as individuals they might abandon the collective identity of tribe and instead embrace an individual identity as Christian converts. The bright line that separates pre-modern collective identity from the covenantal identity of the Western individual is nowhere clearer than in the matter of atrocity. Pagan tribes feel no compunction about torturing and desecrating the cadavers of members of another collectivity; Western societies cannot abide such acts without going mad. We cannot even observe them from afar without feeling a touch of madness.

We in the West already are more than a little mad. A gauge of our madness is our preoccupation with horror in popular entertainment. The horror genre supplied one in eight feature films released in the United States in 2009. When Universal Studios made its classic supernatural thrillers during the 1930s, the ratio was 1:200, and in 2000 it still was 1:25. Since 9/11, the volume of horror films has expanded from a trickle to a flood.

Proportion of Feature Films Released in the US from the "Horror" Genre

Source: International Movie Data Base

Horror films are not merely repellent, but stupid and repetitive. There aren't enough possible variations on subject matter like vampires, werewolves and zombies to permit much originality, except, perhaps, in the realism of their depiction of mayhem. American audiences watch horror obsessively, the same way they watch pornography.

It is probably not a coincidence that that first big jump in the proportion of horror films (from the 2% to the 4% range) came towards the end of the Vietnam War (with Night of the Living Dead" and Rosemary's Baby), and the second big jump (from the 4% range to 12%) came after the attacks on the Twin Towers. Americans are horrified because something has horrified them.

That was not always the case. In an essay on the horror genre for First Things magazine in October 2009, I noted that the old classic horror films were viewed as an exotic import:

Hollywood gave us a small run of exotic-origin horror films in the 1930s, all drawn from European fiction: Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Gray. After the Second World War, however, these nightmares of tormented Europeans were mostly naturalized as sight gags for American adolescents. And that was how it was supposed to be. The monsters had a different meaning in their Old World provenance. As Heinrich Heine once observed, the witches and kobolds and poltergeister of German folktales are remnants of the old Teutonic nature-religion that went underground with the advent of Christianity. The pagan sees nature as arbitrary and cruel, and the monsters that breed in the pagan imagination personify this cruelty. Removed from their pagan roots and transplanted to America, they became comic rather than uncanny. America was the land of new beginnings and happy endings. The monsters didn't belong. [4]

Horror became an American genre with local themes after Vietnam. The monsters have taken out citizenship papers and are no longer subject to deportation. The pre-modern roots of horror remain evident-every haunted house seems to be built over a Native American burial ground-but they now stem from our own past rather than the remote legends of European tribalism.

Why did Americans display a psychic immunity to the horrors of the European wars, but show such susceptibility to the Black Breath wafting from the World Trade Center? There are many reasons, but chief among them, I believe, is that we have forgotten what makes us different. President George W Bush told us that Islam is a religion of peace, and President Barack Obama told the world in 2009 at Cairo that America and Islam "overlap, and share common principles - principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings". Our clergy inform us that all adherents of the "three Abrahamic religions" are brothers under the skin sharing the same principles, and our political theorists assure us that democratic institutions eventually will make Muslim countries more or less like America.

We were told, and most of us believed, that the so-called Arab Spring of early 2011 portended a great democratic transformation of the Muslim Middle East. As the images of tech-savvy Facebook friends in Tahrir Square gave way to video clips of ravaged bodies, our faces turned gray.

It will get much, much worse. There is a reason that Syria has labored under brutal minority regimes for half a century, since the Ba'ath Party coup of 1963 led by the Christian Michel Aflaq, followed by the Alawite Assad dynasty's assumption of power in 1971. The colonial cartographers who drew the modern map of the Middle East after World War I understood something that America's political mainstream does not: states composed of the tribal remnants of pre-modern society can be stable only if the ethnic and sectarian melange is ruled by a minority. Syria's Alawites ruled over a Sunni majority with Christian support, while Iraq's Sunnis ruled over a Shi'ite majority, also with Christian support.

Tyrannical as a minority regime might be, it is constrained by the fact that it is a minority. The minority cannot exterminate the majority, so it must find some sort of compromise arrangement. A majority government, though, can (and frequently will) exterminate an ethnic or religious minority. That is why the Sunni majority in Syria long tolerated the Alawite minority regime while the Iraqi Shi'ite majority tolerated a minority Sunni regime.

Syria's Alawites will fight to the death because a Sunni victory would mean the end of their sect, and Iran will provide unlimited numbers of weapons and fighters. Iraq's Sunnis, divided from their Syrian cousins by the thin pencils of colonial cartographers, will not stand by and allow Syria to turn into an Iranian protectorate, while Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar support the Sunni rebels with weapons and personnel. What we have seen so far are the preliminary skirmishes. The real horrors of war are yet to come.

It will not help to stick our fingers in our ears and shout, "I can't hear you!," as Ron Paul and the new isolationists propose. America cannot abandon a region in which it retains vital strategic interests without disastrous consequences. But it must act in pursuit of these interests, rather than attempt to export democracy.

What America most requires is a renewed understanding of its own uniqueness, and the grim recognition that it cannot prevent civilizations that are determined to destroy themselves from doing so.

David P. Goldman is the Spengler columnist for Asia Times Online, associate fellow at the Middle East Forum, and the author of How Civilizations Die: (And Why Islam Is Dying Too) and the essay collection It's Not the End of the World, It's Just the End of You: The Great Extinction of the Nations

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Technorati Tag: Syria and Terrorism.

Arlene Kushner on Kerry's Visit to Israel, Parsing Lapid's Statement and Guessing Netanyahu's Intent

2013-05-22T19:54:00.000-04:00

From Arlene Kushner
May 22, 2013

"Peace Process"

The notion that there can be a viable negotiation process that will result in peace with "two states side-by-side" persists whatever the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. And so, no matter how weary we become of the delusion, we must continue to track efforts to make it happen, and combat it as effectively as possible.

As I wrote yesterday, Sec. of State Kerry is due here tomorrow. And so there is a flurry of activity -- or, more accurately, perhaps, a deluge of words espousing one position or another -- in anticipation of his arrival.

What we have most notably are the words of Minister of Finance Yair Lapid (head of Yesh Atid), who gave an interview to the NYTimes, on Monday in which he declared that he would do everything he can to advance the discourse on peace:

“Israelis want peace and security and Palestinians want peace and justice – these are two very different things, and this is the real gap we have to close."

~~~~~~~~~~

Let's pause here, to consider this statement. The Palestinian Arabs do NOT want peace and justice. They want the destruction of Israel. The failure to grapple with this reality is at the heart of the position of those who continue to push for negotiations.

As to "justice": A very basic misconception -- which has been fueled by PLO lies -- is that the Palestinian Arabs are entitled to the land beyond the '67 line, and that "justice" requires our giving it to them. They have no moral or legal or historical basis for this claim. The land is Jewish -- as history and legal documentation make clear.

See here for more: In a nutshell: Why eastern Jerusalem, and Judea and Samaria are Jewish

~~~~~~~~~~

Actually, when it comes to "justice," the question I would like to pose to "two-state" advocates is why they imagine the Palestinian Arabs deserve a state within any parameters. There are probably thousands of ethnic groups -- groups with legitimate historical reality and distinct cultural traits -- who are without their own state. And yet the world does not clamor to give them sovereignty over the land on which they live.

What have the Palestinian Arabs done, even, remotely, to merit that sovereignty? What would a "Palestinian state" contribute in a positive way to the family of nations? What have the Palestinian Arabs done to develop a positive, constructive civil society that would form the basis of that state? Their failure in this regard is all the more striking because they have received so much international support and such huge international funding.

~~~~~~~~~~

At any rate...

Lapid is far too left for my taste. At a Yesh Atid faction meeting, he declared, "Whoever thinks we can have peace without a two-state solution is mistaken." In fashioning the negotiations as some sort of moral imperative -- “even if it’s controversial here, and even if it is hard to trust the Palestinians.” -- I believe he is the one who is badly and dangerously mistaken.

But to certain other members of his party, and to Tzipi Livni, he is not left enough. For he came out in the interview for an undivided Jerusalem:

"We didn't come here for nothing...Jerusalem is not a place; Jerusalem is an idea...Jerusalem is the capital of Israel."

What is more, he opposes changes in "settlement" policy and supports their natural expansion.

Read: Lapid clarifies stance after 'NY Times' interview

~~~~~~~~~~

But let me not inadvertently lend the impression that the government is solidly for that "two-state solution." There are many within the coalition who are opposed to the formation of a Palestinian state. This is certainly true of Habayit Hayehudi, headed by Naftali Bennett, and including members such as Uri Ariel and Urit Struck. Just yesterday, Struck, pictured below, declared,

"Two states for two nations is not the official government position. It's not in the coalition guidelines..." (Emphasis added)

Credit: JPost

It is also so within Likud -- Tzipi Hotovely, Danny Danon, Ze'ev Elkin (who is now a deputy foreign minister), Ofir Akunis (who advanced legislation requiring a referendum for a deal), Gideon Sa'ar, Miri Regev, Yariv Levin, and others oppose that state.

And within Yisrael Beitenu -- Uzi Landau, Yair Shamir (son of former prime minister Yitzhak Shamir), etc.

Avidgor Lieberman, head of Yisrael Beitenu and currently chair of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, once supported the "two-state" concept. But he said at a committee meeting yesterday that Abbas has lost his legitimacy, and that it is impossible to solve the conflict now -- it can only be managed.

Credit: Forward

"There's no magic solution to the conflict with the Palestinians. Why are foreign ministers always here? Why are they so obsessed with the Palestinian issue?" (emphasis added)

Read: 'PA must know peace talks are only game in town'

Lieberman's questions are good ones.

~~~~~~~~~~

About the prime minister himself, I will simply say this now. It is his MO to "play the game," something I've written about often enough. It is not his style to cross the Americans confrontationally for the most part. This can be dangerous, as it leads him down a slippery slope, and he may (inadvertently?) set precedents that will be regretted later.

And yet, it remains important not to assume that in playing that game he is necessary stating his true intentions. I'd be a millionaire many times over if I knew what his true intentions were. (I was told by one analyst yesterday that probably Netanyahu's closest advisors don't know his true intentions.) And so I reject rumors that are afloat -- as they were bound to be -- suggesting that he has caved; while they might contain some kernel of truth, they are based on no documentation that I am aware of.

I cringe at some of the things that he says, I recognize that sometimes he talks tough but doesn't follow through, and yet, I am mindful, for example, that he came out in support of a referendum on a "peace deal." At that time it occurred to me that he might see this as an out: "Gee, I was really for this, but the electorate is not in favor."

And he is holding out for parameters for that Palestinian state that he knows full well will never be accepted on the other side. I do not think he trusts the Palestinian Arabs or believes they would negotiate in good faith -- and in this respect differs substantially from Tzipi Livni. (Yes, I fully recognize that, infuriatingly, he appointed her to head negotiations; but he also appointed the tough, right wing Elkin as deputy foreign minister -- at a time when Lieberman is absent and there is no real foreign minister. So, go figure.)

My last thought here is that he is under the most incredible pressure right now, with regard to Syria, Russia, Iran and more. Tough decisions have to be made concerning when to hit armaments, even armaments from Russia, in Syria and when and if to hit Iran. I see him doing a very credible job in this respect, at least to date, and wonder if it's appropriate -- not to turn a blind eye, but -- to cut him a bit of slack with regard to criticizing his policies on "peace negotiations."

Unless we know all of the parameters -- and we most certainly do not -- there is no way for us to know if he is taking a stance supportive of Obama with the understanding or the hope that there's a quid pro quo in terms of Obama's support for us if we hit Iran. All speculative, I realize. But not entirely irrelevant. It may seem to him like a very unwise time to directly confront Obama, and I'm not sure he'd be wrong.

(Rest assured, if Netanyahu -- please, may he not -- were to take a stance that is outrageous, I'd be raising my voice, figuratively, his need to make decisions on Iran not withstanding.)

~~~~~~~~~~

Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ya'alon have already decided on one "good will gesture" before Kerry's arrival: The territorial limit into the Mediterranean for Arab fisherman from Gaza has been increased to six miles. In March, Ya'alon had cut the limit back to three miles after 14 rockets had been launched from Gaza. (The three-mile limit had been imposed after the Cast Lead operation in 2009, was increased as part of the ceasefire following the last operation, Pillar of Defense, and then was cut back again in March.)

I'm really not fond of these "gestures," in particular when they involve removing checkpoints or otherwise loosening security. But our government acts as if they are expected, and in this instance I'm not aware of risks to Israel incurred.

~~~~~~~~~~

There are a couple of positions vis-a-vis the formation of a Palestinian state that require a closer look.

One such position states that even though Judea and Samaria and eastern Jerusalem are all Jewish -- legally and historically -- once we document this fact, we ought to show our willingness to act for peace by surrendering it to the Arabs. Livni says something like this, and Max Singer, of the Hudson Institute, just wrote a column on this notion in last week's JPost Magazine.

This very perverse position makes me want to tear my hair out. Who but Jews would ever espouse such a stance: Oh, I can prove it's mine, incontrovertibly, but to keep matters quiet, to be nice, I will give it away. What's ours is ours. And it ought to be retained by us. Especially as what would be surrendered would be the very heart of the Jewish heritage. This would speak to a lack of national pride.

This need to please, to make sacrifices, to step back instead of defending our rights -- this, I firmly believe, is the legacy of 2,000 years in galut (diaspora). And it's not a healthy attitude. What is more, in demonstrating such a position we would be seen as weak by the Arabs and the gesture would not bring peace in any event.

~~~~~~~~~~

Then there is the even more horrendous notion just advanced by Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan, who proposed it in a talk on Friday at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC: first create a Palestinian state, and then make peace. Peace, he suggested, must be made between two equal states negotiating with each other.

I would remind him that the whole purpose of proposing a Palestinian state was to bring peace, within a "land for peace" concept. It turned out to be a failed concept. But what he's suggesting here is having Israel surrender land without securing peace. Even far leftists here in Israel understand that there would be establishment of a Palestinian state only with an "end of conflict" agreement.

~~~~~~~~~~

A slightly less horrific version of what Erdogan has suggested has come from Israeli politicians, including, most recently, Lapid: That is, create an "interim" Palestinian state with "temporary borders" until all issues can be resolved. Lapid proposed a three year time frame for determining permanent borders. The idea is to give the Palestinian Arabs something, to move past the status quo. But it's a non-starter.

Suppose all issues cannot be resolved, in three years or in 10, and we've already given them some sort of state. If all issues are not resolved, they'll claim the "right" to "resistance."

The Palestinian Arabs will never go for this -- out of concern that all they'd ever get in the end would be those "temporary" borders. Their position is just the reverse. Before negotiations are even begun, they want Israel to acknowledge the '67 line as the basis for those negotiations.

Lapid has called upon President Obama -- whose administration is seeking new approaches -- to endorse this idea. Lapid, however, also calls for Obama to endorse former president Bush's position of 2004, recognizing that some settlement blocs would be retained by Israel.

Read: Lapid calls for interim peace deal with Palestinians

~~~~~~~~~~

I believe I've mentioned this before, but with Kerry's arrival imminent, I wanted to point out again that the so-called Arab League Peace Plan has not been modified -- in spite of wide-spread impressions to the contrary.

A League delegation, which was in Washington a few weeks ago to negotiate changes in the plan, said that it might be possible to amend it so that "minor" land swaps would be instituted. But that suggestion then had to pass muster with the full League, and it did not.

Arab League head Nabil Elaraby has stated clearly that there have been no amendments to the 2002 plan.

Read: League chief says no changes to Arab peace initiative

~~~~~~~~~~

And so, if you read something that suggests that Israel should be more forthcoming because now the Arabs have "moderated" their plan -- reject it out of hand. For, there has been no modification.

But even if there had been, it would have been such a minor modification that the entire plan -- which was presented on a "take it or leave it" basis and included "right of return" -- was still not anything for Israel to remotely consider.

~~~~~~~~~~

I will mention here that this is not the first time that the Arabs have lent the impression that they have modified a document, when in reality they have not. The most notable example: Arafat's widely accepted claim that he was removing clauses calling for Israel's destruction from the PLO charter. They're still there.

~~~~~~~~~~

And the latest word from our "peace partner"? On Monday, PLO negotiator Saeb Erekat, told a UN committee:

"Today in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem ... I can sum up the situation with one word - apartheid. Worse than that which existed in South Africa." (emphasis added)

This is not even a subtle misrepresentation, it is a bold lie -- and very typical of what we see from the PLO/PA. Does he really think anyone believes this? In eastern Jerusalem (there is no "East Jerusalem"), live some 250,000 Arabs. They have residency cards, are provided full rights and can move about all of the city -- in stores, restaurants, hospitals, etc. -- with no prohibitions and no danger. Some apartheid.

Replied Israeli Ambassador to the UN Ron Prosor,

"The more the Palestinians continue to fertilize the soil with hatred toward Israel, the smaller the chances that the seeds of peace in the Middle East will sprout roots."

Read: Prosor Slams Erekat Over 'Apartheid' Comments

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If it is reproduced and emphasis is added, the fact that it has been added must be noted.

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Technorati Tag: Israel and John Kerry and Yair Lapid and Netanyahu.

Why FDR Wrote: "We the American Holy Warriors have arrived...to fight the great Jihad of Freedom"

2013-05-22T15:58:00.000-04:00

That's right: Franklin Delano Roosevelt wrote those words -- not Barack Obama.
Decades before JFK spoke to Germany in German, Roosevelt did something similar during WWII.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressing Americans during
fireside chat. He also addressed the Muslim world in an
Arabic letter. Government photo.

Daniel Pipes writes that in October 1942, FDR Addresses the Arabs, sending an appeal in Arabic to the Muslim world in Arabic. The British forces had just succeeded in stopping Hitler's Afrika Korps, giving the Allies hope that they could successfully keep Germany out of the Middle East. In an effort to take advantage of this and win Muslim favor, Roosevelt sent the following message:

Praise be unto the only God. In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. O ye Moslems. O ye beloved sons of the Maghreb. May the blessing of God be upon you.

This is a great day for you and us, for all the sons of Adam who love freedom. Our numbers are as the leaves on the forest tress and as the grains of sand in the sea.

Behold. We the American Holy Warriors have arrived. We have come here to fight the great Jihad of Freedom.

We have come to set you free. We have sailed across the great sea in many ships, on many beaches we are landing, and our fighters swarm across the sands and into the city streets, and into the wide country sides, and along the highways.

Light fires on the hilltops; shout from your housetops, and from the high places, and say the sound of the drum be heard in the land, and the ululation of the women, and the voices even of small children.

Assemble along the highways to welcome your brothers.

We have come to set you free.

Speak with our fighting men and you will find them pleasing to the eye and gladdening to the heart. We are not as some other Christians whom ye have known, and who trample you under foot. Our soldiers consider you as their brothers, for we have been reared in the way of free men. Our soldiers have been told about your country and about their Moslem brothers and they will treat you with respect and with a friendly spirit in the eyes of God.

Look in their eyes and smiling faces, for they are Holy Warriors happy in their holy work. Greet us therefore as brothers as we will greet you, and help us.

If we are thirsty, show us the way to water. If we lose our way, lead us back to our camping places. Show us the paths over the mountains if need be, and if you see our enemies, the Germans or Italians, making trouble for us, kill them with knives or with stones or with any other weapon that you may have set your hands upon.

Help us as we have come to help you, and rich will be the reward unto us all who love justice and righteousness and freedom.

Pray for our success in battle, and help us, and God will help us both.

Lo, the day of freedom hath come.

May God grant his blessing upon you and upon us.

- Roosevelt

Read the whole thing for Pipes' background information and analysis.

No, this definitely wasn't a fireside chat.

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Technorati Tag: FDR and Roosevelt and Arabic.

Is Egypt's Military Ready To Take Control Back From The Muslim Brotherhood?

2013-05-22T11:58:00.000-04:00

A year ago, Dr. Jacques Neriah asked Are Egypt’s Islamists Headed for a Collision with the Military?

At the time, leading up to the presidential election, the apparent agreement between the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) led by Field Marshal Tantawi and the Muslim Brotherhood had already begun to unravel. It was becoming clear that it was the Islamists after all, and not Egypt's military, that was gaining power as the military began to lose favor.

We now see where that scenario led.

Protesters demonstrate against the arrest of Egyptian journalist
Yousef Shaaban on the steps of Cairo's journalist's syndicate. Credit: Al Jazeera

Yet today, Neriah analyzes how matters may have turned completely around, as he now poses the quesition
Is Egypt Heading toward a Military Regime?. Here is his summary of his article for The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs:

After the jubilation that accompanied Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi's "victory" over the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) in August 2012, the Muslim Brotherhood and Morsi himself began signaling their intention to turn Egypt into an Islamic state, arousing the fears of liberals and religious minorities.
The opposition turned hostile to the regime and began castigating it, exploiting the newly acquired freedom of the press. Never in Egypt's modern history had the press enjoyed such liberties, and Morsi became the target of satire and mockery. In addition, a new activist group emerged calling itself the Black Bloc. Its members, who dress in black with black masks, have declared open war against the Brotherhood.
Today, Egypt is on the verge of chaos. Amid a sudden popular wave of affection and longing for the Mubarak days, there is renewed talk of the army retaking power. As Morsi's government fails to achieve true democracy, respect human rights, restore security, or improve economic welfare, an increasing number of people are calling on the army to return to the political scene as Morsi's only possible replacement. A recent poll found 82 percent supporting such a move.
The question that remains is to what extent Morsi will allow Egypt to drift into anarchy and chaos before he asks the army to take the reins. The Muslim Brotherhood waited almost eight decades to become the rulers of Egypt. Certainly they are in no hurry to give back what the 2011 revolution gave them almost on a silver platter.

The question remains as whether the current chaos in Egypt does in fact create an opening for the Egyptian army to re-enter the stage. Neriah writes that even with the current crisis, the situation is not so simple:

When in August 2012 President Morsi stripped his generals of their powers, what was surprising was the army’s lack of reaction. Given the army’s wish to maintain its control of Egypt, analysts had not thought Morsi would dare make such a move. Now, with the renewed talk of the army returning to rule, the surprise may be the army marching on Cairo and seizing power. How likely is such a scenario? The more the societal crisis intensifies and the greater the chaos, the greater its likelihood. As Morsi’s government fails to achieve true democracy, respect human rights, restore security, or improve economic welfare, an increasing number of people are calling on the army to return to the political scene as Morsi’s only possible replacement. A recent poll by the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies found 82 percent of respondents supporting such a move.15

However, one must bear in mind that in the case of Mubarak’s crisis, the army did not initiate a takeover; it was Mubarak himself who asked the army to fill the vacuum. Moreover, diplomats and analysts suggest that the army, fearful of further damaging a reputation that suffered badly during the transition period when it was in charge, would only act if Egypt faced unrest on the scale of the revolt that toppled Mubarak.16

The question that remains is to what extent Morsi will allow Egypt to drift into anarchy and chaos before he asks the army to take the reins. The Muslim Brotherhood waited almost eight decades to become the rulers of Egypt. Certainly they are in no hurry to give back what the 2011 revolution gave them almost on a silver platter.

Read the whole thing.

The crisis in Egypt still does not draw the media attention that Syria does -- especially since unlike Syria, the chaos in Egypt does not invite external intervention. Nevertheless, the ramifications of the direction Egypt ultimately takes will have ramifications across the Middle East due to Egypt's continued influence in the region.

Col. (ret.) Dr. Jacques Neriah, a special analyst for the Middle East at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, was formerly Foreign Policy Advisor to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Deputy Head for Assessment of Israeli Military Intelligence.

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From Middle East Quarterly 1995: Does the Arabic Language Encourage Radical Islam?

2013-05-22T07:54:00.001-04:00

The following by James Coffman is reposted here with permission of Middle East Forum:

Does the Arabic Language Encourage
Radical Islam?

by James Coffman
Middle East Quarterly
December 1995, pp. 51-57

James Coffman is director of America-Mideast Educational and Training Services, Inc. (AMIDEAST), Tunisia.

Native speakers of Arabic have long claimed that Arabic is far more than a language; rather, the language of Islam, the language chosen by God to speak to mankind, influences how a person perceives the world and expresses reality. This, in turn, has a profound impact on a society's outlook. Thus, Ahmed Taleb Ibrahimi, a former Algerian minister of education, declares that "a people that changes language is a people that changes its soul and its view on the world."¹ Abdelkader Yefsah, a sociologist, recently wrote that use of the Arabic language "leads straight to . . . the primacy of the religious over all other activity."²
In contrast, nonspeakers of Arabic tend to be somewhat skeptical of such claims. They acknowledge the importance of Arabic and appreciate its profound connections to the Islamic faith, but find it hard to believe that Arabic is so consequential.

While doing research at two Algerian universities in the academic year 1989-90, I had a unique opportunity to conduct a systematic investigation of this question. Looking at the differences between students schooled primarily in Arabic and primarily in French, I found the differences between them to be many and profound. To sum up the differences, Arabized students see the world in a far more Islamic fashion than do their French-oriented peers. What Arabic-speakers say about their language, in short, is true.

ARABIC IN THE EDUCATION SYSTEM

The Arabic language is the most potent symbol of Arab-Islamic culture and its transmission, and as such has always been considered the necessary medium of instruction. Nearly all Arabs accept the importance of primary and secondary instruction's being conducted in Arabic; and, in fact, Arabic does dominate the curriculum through high school. Algeria, which long had a French educational system, completed its transition to Arabic in 1989, when the first class of twelfth-graders graduated from a completely Arabic education.

However, a good part of university instruction in the Arab world remains yet in English and French, prompting a major debate. On the one hand, a great majority of Arabs, regardless of their own linguistic skills, in principle favor the Arabization of higher education. The Francophone technocratic elite in Algeria's modern sectors publicly "approves" of Arabization even as it insists on the necessity of retaining French as a tool of modernization. But privately, this elite says with surprising frequency that Arabization would send Algeria "back to the Middle Ages." This elite is attached to a Western, secular, and scientific world view (and lifestyle), and it rejects Arab-Islamic traditionalism.

Also, attempts to Arabize instruction have run into the hard barrier of practicality: resources to make a complete switch simply are not there. The result is a splitting of institutions into Arabic- and European-language sections. Islamic studies and Arabic literature are the only completely Arabized disciplines. Scientific and technical instruction takes place in English even at Cairo's venerable Arab-Islamic institution, Al-Azhar, and at the universities of Medina and Mecca. In the entire Arab world, only Syria appears to have managed completely to Arabize its university.³ The other countries have all partially Arabized, with the humanities and social-science disciplines largely or completely in Arabic, and the scientific and technical fields largely or completely in English or French.

Every Algerian student with whom I spoke emphasized the necessity of maintaining contact with the developed West in order to effect a transfer of knowledge. The Islamist students stressed the necessity of separating that which is scientific and technical from the cultural and "moral." The greater a student's observed and professed attachment to Islamic ideology, the greater his tendency to reject the Western cultural and societal model as inappropriate or dangerous for Algeria. The Islamist movement therefore seeks to maintain the transfer of knowledge directly from the West while enveloping it in an Arab-Islamic cultural-religious ideology that filters out those Western aspects deemed harmful to Algeria.⁴
In many ways, the linguistic struggle is between two liturgical languages: Arabic is the medium of an arcane and powerful religion, and French is the medium of an equally arcane and powerful body of scientific myths and rites. The number of Algerians who told me "French cannot express the beauty and depth of the divine Islamic message" was matched by an equal number telling me "Arabic is incapable of transmitting modern science."

STUDYING IN ARABIC ENCOURAGES ISLAMISM

My research shows that the language of study is the most significant variable in determining a student's attachment to Islamic or Islamist principles. Cultural-religious orientation is more closely tied to language than to sex, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, geographic origin, or field of study. I reached this conclusion from extensive observation and interviewing at the Université des Sciences et de la Technologie Houari Boumediene (USTHB) and at the University of Algiers. I focused on two comparisons: (1) Arabized students in the incoming class versus slightly older, less-, and non-Arabized students; and (2) students in the Arabized social sciences and humanities versus those in the largely Francophone sciences and engineering.

To assess students' attitudes about Islamization, I asked questions on such matters as equal rights for men and women, coeducational elementary and high schools, frequency of prayer, the sale of alcohol, their perceptions of Western societies and culture, and the importance of having Muslim teachers. Of women, I asked about their wearing the hijab (the garment worn by women that hides every part of their body except the face and hands) and their willingness to marry a non-Muslim. Of men, I also asked two specific questions: their attitude toward the hijab and their mosque attendance on Fridays. For students' attitudes toward "the West," I asked whether Algerian culture has anything to learn from Western culture, the importance of Algerian relations with Western countries, the impact of Western films and television programs, and music preferences.

The interviews showed that wealthy Algerians and Berber males are the least likely to be Islamists. Female students, whether identifying themselves as Arab or Berber, tend to be moderate. Arab males tend to be more strongly Islamist. Students from rural origins--who seem much less sophisticated--and from lower socioeconomic groups are manifestly more Islamized than others.

Student attitudes toward the Arabization of higher education reflect a national ambivalence toward the role of Islam in society: yes, we must enhance our cultural and linguistic national personality; but no, we must not allow it to deprive us of the power of universal scientific knowledge. It is only extremist Islamists and extremist Berberists who are able to escape such wavering and adopt firm, unequivocal stances for or against Arabization/Islamization.

In interviews, Arabized students show decidedly greater support for the Islamist movement and greater mistrust of the West. Arabized students tend to repeat the same simplistic stories and rumors that abound in the Arabic-language press, particularly Al-Munqidh, the newspaper of the Islamic Salvation Front. They tell about sightings of the word "Allah" written in the afternoon sky, the infiltration into Algeria of Israeli women spies infected with AIDS, the "disproving" of Christianity on a local religious program,⁵ and the mass conversion to Islam by millions of Americans. I was not the only one to notice this distinction. When asked if the new, Arabized students differed from the other students, many students and faculty answered an emphatic yes.

Student opinions. Many students saw the Arabization of primary and secondary education as responsible for much of the differences between them. Students from the first Arabized cohort of 1989 see themselves and are seen by other students as more competent in the Arabic language than their elders in the university. They differ from students just a year or two older in their attachment to Islamic precepts, values, attitudes, and behaviors.

Many students perceive Arabization as a primary cause of this increased Islamization. For example, a group of third-year students in psychology at the University of Algiers's Bouzaréah campus affirmed that the new students in their department were quite different. One explained:

They're a lot more conservative, religious-oriented, and narrow-minded than before. Especially here in psychology. You can't talk to most of them about certain subjects at all. Religion, for example. They just refuse to discuss it.

Asked why she thought that students in the sociology department were more religiously oriented than those in foreign languages, Nabila, a student of English, offered her analysis:

I don't know, although I've often wondered about that myself. I think it may be due to the fact that they have greater contact with the Arabic language and with professors who bring them things on religion. There are more professors who belong to the Da`wa Islamiya [Islamist religious group] than in our department. I think that when one is strong in a language, it encourages one to read more in that language than when one is not so strong. And that leads to other readings. Me, for example, when I find an Arabic book that interests me, I read a little of it, but that's it. I can't read the whole thing. It's too much work.⁶

The greatest difference is among scientific and technical high school graduates, for these high school tracks were the last to be Arabized. Mehdi is a student from the totally Arabized cohort who now studies engineering at USTHB in French. He has strong views on language:

Arabization will change the ways of thinking of Algerians in certain domains. It's true. For example, there are many Algerians who are simply not Algerians -- they're really French.

For them, language is their umbilical cord with France. I'm sure that Arabization will change this society -- make it more religious than it is. . . . I'm convinced that we can transform the Algerian personality through Arabization. But that doesn't mean that we will be separated from the world of science and modernity. That's not true. In fact, I have a teacher who did a little statistical study of her own here at Bab-Ezzouar [USTHB]. She found that in comparing her Arabized and bilingual students, the Arabized worked a hundred times harder than the others. Why? Because they are seeking something. . . . They're afraid of lacking something, so they seek it to make up for it. I do that myself.⁷

Mouloud, a fourth-year engineering student, feels that studying in Arabic has caused students to adhere more to traditional values and Islam. But the real effect of Arabization is due to the difference in teachers at the primary and secondary levels. "A lot of the teachers come from Arab countries. They're more traditional. They are stricter, hit students, and emphasize obedience more." Indeed, many university students told me that they found their elementary and high school teachers from the Middle East, as well as the Algerians who were trained there, more austere, authoritarian, less approachable, and more likely to beat students physically.

A group of four fourth-year electrical-engineering students at USTHB all agreed that the new Arabized students were different from all the others. "Arabization has changed students' attitudes. They have another mentality; we really don't have much in common with them. They're so narrow-minded!" They all felt that being steeped only in the Arabic language meant "thinking differently." How, exactly? "There's something there," but they couldn't put their finger on it. Two of the four pointed to the cultures and attitudes implied by the two languages (Arabic and French).

Older students see Arabized students as weaker in French, more religious, and more narrow-minded. Indeed, rapid change is felt even within the family; many students described their Arabized brothers and sisters in such terms. Fatih, a Berber engineering student, had to repeat his first year's studies, and so wound up in classes with the new Arabized students. He found them unlike himself:

They are definitely different, more conservative -- narrow-minded on a lot of issues. They are a lot weaker in French, making them struggle more in class than we did. I don't know . . . they say things differently, and don't talk as much. I have a hard time even talking to them. I even notice it with my brother, who is Arabized. We're only three years apart. But he's so narrow-minded. I know it's because he only reads the Arabic press and listens to the Arabic radio station. That gives him a completely different view on what's happening in Algeria and the rest of the world. He shakes his head when he sees me reading Horizons [the leading French-language daily]. I don't know . . . there's this gap between us. And most of these first-year students are just like him.⁸

Faculty views. The professors I spoke with at three campuses all noticed a difference between the Arabized group and their predecessors, though they perceived less a change in attitudes than in intellectual quality. Every professor indicated seeing a serious drop in the level of student competencies in all domains. While the switch in languages at the university level must be expected to cause some difficulties, most professors felt that linguistically, the new students were much weaker in French without being competent in Arabic. In contrast to the student opinion that the new students were strong in Arabic, a professor of engineering sighed, "What we're getting now is bilingual illiterates!" The professors attribute this drop in student quality in part to the overburdened school system, which does not provide adequate materials, conditions, or proper student-teacher ratios; and in part to Arabization, which removes the best and most experienced teachers from the schools. The drop in students' academic preparation, especially their analytical skills, say many teachers, causes the Arabized students to become easy prey for simplistic discourse and the Islamist movement. Sou'ad Khodja, professor of sociology at the University of Algiers's Bouzaréah campus, bitterly attacks the Arabized Algerian school system:

The educational system has been infiltrated for fifteen years by Islamists and Ba`thists. The two have joined efforts, under the cover of Arabization at full speed, to produce children who are totally uncultured and without a critical mind. . . . The pedagogical method used was based on memorization and repetition.⁹

A large number of students and teachers agree with Khodja's thesis; and my own experience leads me to do so as well.

To sum up, this study establishes several connected points. The Arabization of education has direct effects on individuals' cultural orientation. Arabic's Islamic references imbue it with powerful religious symbolism that has important political connotations. When Arabization leads to a weakening of French, a dramatic shift in civilizational orientation results.

WHY ARABIC ENCOURAGES ISLAM

Four explanations most likely account for my finding that Arabized education results in increased Islamization.

Arabic's different symbolic order. "Why is it so hard for a teenager to tell his girlfriend `I love you' in Arabic?" asks Mohamed Talbi, a linguist. "In French, it's so easy." To which his colleague Amina Zaoui replies, "The Arabic language has a memory that atrophies it: it has gone through the funnel of Islamic thought. . . . Arabic is a prisoner of Islam . . . sacred, it remains the language of modesty."¹⁰The particular structure of the Arabic language and its allusions mean that a child who studies and thinks in Arabic will develop distinct historical and cultural references, cognitive approaches, attitudes, and styles of reasoning.

Arabic and Islam are complementary and mutually reinforcing. Arabization and Islamization are inseparable parts of a single cultural ideal that now pervades the Arab world. In Ann Swidler's terms,¹¹ their cultural "tool kits" of cognitive and symbolic thinking differ from those imparted to earlier bilingual cohorts. The Arabized students prefer the Arabic-language press and radio, which differ in ideological orientation from the Francophone media. The Arabic-language media clearly have a more Islamic and anti-Western approach to political and social issues; and the radio stations' choice of music is Arab, in contrast to the Western music on French-language radio. During the current period of great social upheaval and uncertainty, these students tend to gravitate toward movements and activities more in harmony with their Arabophone references. As the ideological crisis deepens, individuals choose their camp by how well they understand and associate with its message. Arabized individuals find the Islamic groups' symbols, linguistic style, and cultural referents more familiar and persuasive.

This explanation fits with the views of such linguists as Jerome Bruner, Joseph Glick, R. Jakobson, Edward Sapir, and Benjamin Whorf, who argue that language inevitably imposes cognitive categories that force an individual into a particular symbolic order in thinking, communicating, and the ordering of his experience. Arabic's highly charged sacred character increases its coercive power, making it what Benedict Anderson calls a "truth-language."¹² It is an emanation of reality and thus the only access to that reality. This has made Arabic particularly resistant to change and accretions.

It is worth noting here that while the Arabic language is perfectly capable of serving as a medium of modernity, it does not do so, because it serves as a highly charged religious symbol. Understanding the dynamics at work, Islamist leaders in Algeria make Arabization of the school system a primary goal.
Less competence in French. Arabized students soon realize that even in the Arabized university faculties (Islamic studies aside), French holds an undeniable prestige as the key to quality reading material and instructors. And they know that the large state companies of the economic sector function almost entirely in French. As Clement Henry Moore and Arlie R. Hochschild demonstrated in Morocco,¹³ these students, unable to share in the veneer of French culture that pervades the modern sector, are the most likely to become politicized. Fifteen years ago in Algeria, this discontent led to student strikes; today, it is channeled toward Islamist opposition.

A poorer quality of instruction. Using Arabic in the schools implies much about teachers, textbooks, and pedagogical approaches. As the primary and secondary levels adopted Arabic, many of the most qualified and experienced teachers, unable to teach in Arabic, were let go, then replaced with poorly qualified Arabic-speaking teachers who also brought more traditional and pro-Islamic attitudes. Textbooks in Arabic do not match the technical quality, sophistication, and diversity of French textbooks--a fact usually acknowledged by teachers. As for pedagogy, while the West emphasizes a child's observation, critical awakening, and active participation, Arab pedagogy builds on memorization of the Qur'an, a text never to be questioned.¹⁴ From this base, the child learns to be less active or critical in acquiring knowledge than his Western counterpart. Knowledge for him is less an object of discovery than a corpus to be deposited in the child through rote learning.

Graduates of such a system tend to have a weaker mastery of subject matter, are less able to express themselves, and have less developed critical, analytical, and creative skills. Also, these less analytical students, say many (and I agree), are more easily swayed -- especially during periods of social crisis -- by the authoritarian nature of Islamist discourse, which demands unquestioning obedience to a dogmatic belief system.

Strengthened links with the Middle East. Just as young Algerians in the 1960s voraciously read leftist political literature in French, many of today's university students consume large quantities of Islamist works in Arabic, something made possible by their strong grounding in classical Arabic language and literature. Greater contact with the Middle East, with its Arabist and Islamist culture, has spawned sophisticated writings, debates, and discussions on Islam in Algeria. As Dale Eickelman points out, this relatively new intellectual discussion of Islam on a wide scale has done much to transform Islam from a lived tradition into a conscious ideology.¹⁵
CONCLUSION

Every Arab government, regardless of its political or social character, uses the symbolic power of the Arab language in its drive toward national modernization, authentification, and uniformization. All of them see the Arabization of society, particularly the educational system, as crucial to their mission. This leads, however, to an unexpected irony: because Arabs draw so close a connection between classical Arabic and the faith of Islam, Arabization invariably leads to an identification with the (supranational) Islamic religious tradition. Even the most secular Arab nationalits (such as the Ba`thist variants in Syria and Iraq) must appeal to Islamic symbolism to bolster sagging legitimacy and to mobilize the masses (as Saddam Husayn did in his wars against Iran and the U.S.-led coalition). Hence, Arab nationalism has, however inadvertently, contributed to the rise of Islamism. Indeed, today's Islamist surge is the natural, perhaps inevitable consequence of the Arab nationalist policies of thirty years ago.

This logic applies to Algeria as well. To build national identity, the Algerian nationalists who came to power in 1962 greatly emphasized Arabism and Arabization; their heirs, today's Arabized university students, identify themselves not as "Algerian" or even "Arab" but as "Muslim." This correlation between Arabic and Islam, we have seen, cuts across all ethnic or socioeconomic groups. Even among Berbers, the most fervently pro-Western and anti-Islamist group in the country, young people who recently graduated from Arabized programs show more Islamic attitudes than their parents and older siblings. The radical enterprise of a generation ago, in short, ended up hijacked by the power of the Arabic language.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

I conducted my study in the capital, Algiers, where there is the greatest concentration of university students, the largest array of fields of study available, and a population in which all the country's ethnic and socioeconomic groups are represented. The two universities in Algiers -- the University of Algiers and the Université des Sciences et de la Technologie Houari Boumediene -- offer a good point of comparison for this study. Of the same size and considered the top universities in the country, the former is an Arabized institution specializing in law, social sciences, and humanities, and the latter a largely French-language institution training scientists and engineers.

The year 1989-90 was the perfect moment to research the effects of Arabization, for it marked the first-ever entry of a fully Arabized group into the university. Also, the concomitant collapse of communism that year, the weakening of Algeria's ruling National Liberation Front, and the rapid rise of Islamism created an atmosphere in which students felt particularly free to express their opinions on all subjects without fear of repression.

To obtain information on students' attitudes and their adherence to Islamic religious values, I conducted approximately seventy-five interviews and administered over two thousand copies of an attitudinal questionnaire of forty-five items. The sample included students in several disciplines.

My research did not pass without controversy. Just three days after first using the questionnaire, a large poster appeared on the bulletin board reserved for the students of the mosque at the University of Algiers scathingly attacking me and my activities.¹⁶ But this proved a summer storm, and efforts to clear it up even resulted in my establishing closer relations with the students.

¹ Quoted in Bernard Cubertafond, L'Algérie contemporaine (Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 1981), p. 23.
² Abdelkader Yefsah, La Question du Pouvoir en Algérie (Algiers: ENAP, 1990), pp. 381-82.
³ Gilbert Grandguillaume, Arabisation et politique linguistique au Maghreb (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 1983), p. 20; Fatiha Akeb, "Moi et Ma Langue," Parcours Maghrébins, Dec. 1986. "Appears," for official declarations often only loosely correlate with classroom reality. Considering the lack of scientific textbooks, it is likely that Syrian students, like their counterparts in other Arab countries, must do extensive reading in European languages.
⁴ I showed Abassi Madani, the head of the Islamic Salvation Front and a professor of education at the University of Algiers's Bouzaréah campus, the book Islamization of Knowledge: General Principles and Work Plan (Herndon, Va.: International Institute of Islamic Thought, 1987); he shrugged it off as "idealistic," saying that what is necessary is to seize control of the university environment and determine what is taught and how.
5 This recent religious program had a profound effect on millions of Algerians. I many, many times heard about when Ahmed Deedat, a South African Muslim scholar, invited Jimmy Swaggart (the "leader of Christianity") to a debate on the veracity of the Bible. Swaggart was apparently trounced, finally admitting that the Bible had indeed been altered throughout history. For many millions of Algerians, this constituted proof of the superiority of Islam over Christianity.
⁶ Interview, Jan. 22, 1990.
⁷ Interview, Mar. 28, 1990.
⁸ Interview, Apr. 30, 1990.
⁹ Le Point, Jan. 18, 1992.
¹⁰ Algérie-Actualité, Apr. 3-9, 1986, quoted in Henri Sanson, "Peuple Algérien, Peuple Arabe," Annales de l'Afrique du Nord, 24 (1985).
¹¹ Ann Swidler, "Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies," American Sociological Review, Apr. 1986, pp. 273-86.
¹² Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 1991), p. 14.
¹³ Clement Henry Moore and Arlie R. Hochschild, "Student Unions in North African Politics," Daedalus, Winter 1968.
¹⁴ Grandguillaume, Arabisation, p. 21.
¹⁵ Dale Eickelman, "Imagining Islam: Books and Higher Education in Contemporary Muslim Thought," paper presented at the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association of North America, Washington, D.C., Nov. 1991.
¹⁶ The most important passage read as follows: "DANGER! A foreigner has been distributing this questionnaire [a copy was hanging above the poster] in our faculty. This person has introduced himself into our midst under false pretexts! He claims to be studying our university, but distributes a questionnaire focusing on students' religious beliefs. It is clear that he intends to use information obtained for insidious ends. His questions show his bias and anti-Islamic attitudes. For example, the question asking whether Western societies could serve as a model for Algerian society. And why does he insist on the comparison between Arabic and French, with no mention of other Algerian languages, such as M'zab, Chaouïa, and Tuareg? Once again, foreigners are attempting to malign and slander us. Do not answer this questionnaire! Anyone cooperating with this individual is a traitor to his people, his country, and to Islam! This man is an enemy of God!"

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Technorati Tag: Arabic and Islam and Islamism.

Report: U.S. Government Funding for Mideast Political NGOs Undermines U.S. Policy

2013-05-21T19:56:00.000-04:00

PRESS RELEASE
May 20, 2013

Contact:
Lenny Ben-David
NGO Monitor
054-216-8155
lenny.bendavid@ngo-monitor.org

Report: U.S. Government Funding for Mideast Political NGOs Undermines U.S. Policy

Jerusalem - A report presented to Members of Congress today by NGO Monitor shows that U.S. Government funding of several political NGOs in the Palestinian Authority and Israel contradicts U.S. policy, has a negative impact on the peace process, and lacks the independent oversight necessary to prevent abuses.

Professor Gerald M. Steinberg, President of NGO Monitor, a Jerusalem-based research institute, is meeting this week with Members of Congress, congressional staff, Washington think tanks, journalists and foreign policy decision-molders.

The 13-page report, The Negative Impact of U.S. Government Funding for Mideast Political NGOs, is written by Steinberg and Naftali Balanson, NGO Monitor Managing Editor. The 38-page appendicesinclude a directory of the political NGOs involved and correspondence with U.S. government agencies and officials.

"Some of the NGO grantees conduct activities that sharply contradict program objectives and policies," Steinberg explained. "The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), for instance, funded by the U.S. Government, in turn funds political advocacy NGOs that demonize Israel and promote BDS (boycotts, divestment, and sanctions) campaigns targeting Israel. This activity is entirely inconsistent with U.S. policy."

One such organization is MIFTAH ($178,740 in 2007-2012), a Palestinian NGO involved in anti-Israel campaigns and antisemitism, including repetition of the infamous blood libel and allegations of "the slaughter of Palestinian children."

Another group, "Windows," received $750,000 in a three-year grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). It is described by the Agency as "a tool for Israeli and Palestinian participants to learn about each other." Windows' Youth Media Program adopts a Palestinian narrative of the conflict including highly offensive comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany.

"Obviously, USAID and NED do not endorse such views," Steinberg said, "but the funding is indicative of the lack of supervision and transparency in such grants. Self-reporting, without independent evaluation on such complex issues, violates the principles of good governance."

NGO Monitor urges U.S. officials to conduct detailed, professional and independent evaluations of NGO activity before grant allocation, during implementation, and at the conclusion of the grant cycle.

NGO Monitor notes that U.S. officials have taken important steps to increase transparency and accountability. NGO Monitor recently received an assurance from U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Daniel Shapiro, "We have put in place greater policy oversight of grant-making decisions over the past few years."

NGO Monitor (www.ngo-monitor.org), based in Jerusalem, provides information and analysis, promotes accountability, and supports discussion on the activities of NGOs (non-governmental organizations) involved in Middle East politics and human rights affairs.

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Arlene Kushner on Russia Heating Up The Situation In Syria -- And Israel's Response

2013-05-21T15:58:00.000-04:00

From Arlene Kushner:
May 21, 2013

Strong for All Things

There are multiple ways in which enormous strength is required of the Israeli government now. In no situation is this more the case than with regard to Syria and armaments shipped there, either for use by Syria or for transfer to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The situation is rife with threats, claims, charges, counter-charges, and rumors.

What seems to be the case is that Russia recently shipped its Yakhont anti-ship cruise missiles to Syria. And this is bad news:

The JPost has cited Nick Brown, editor of IHS Jane's International Defense Review, who said,

"They fly at just over 2.5 times the speed of sound, have a range of about 300 kilometers (185 miles) and pack a huge punch from their 200 kg (440 pound) warhead."

"They are hard to detect and ever harder to shoot down or decoy away, so they're a powerful tool for keeping warships a long way off the Syrian shore."

Russia had previously supplied Assad with Yakhont missiles in 2011, but they were an earlier, less accurate model.

Read: US: Russian missiles could embolden Assad

Credit: Oratert

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A big question that hangs over this is whether Syria will attempt to transfer those Yakhont missiles to Hezbollah, which could use them to threaten Israeli ships and the Israeli gas fields in the Mediterranean -- which would just about be in reach.

It is exceedingly unlikely that Israel would sit still for such a transfer of weaponry. Last Thursday night, CIA chief John Brennan flew into Israel unannounced to consult with Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon about the escalating situation in Syria. Ya'alon made it clear that Israel had no intention of allowing advanced weapons to reach Hezbollah.

Read: CIA chief pays surprise visit to Israel

Last Friday, the Wall Street Journal cited US officials who said they anticipated another series of Israeli strikes in Syria, against these missiles.

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On Sunday, the Times of London reported that Syria had trained sophisticated Tishreen missiles on Tel Aviv, which would be used if Israel entered Syrian air space again. It said that satellite images indicated this, but provided no source.

Read: Syria training advanced missiles on Tel Aviv — report

At the Sunday Cabinet meeting, PM Netanyahu, refusing to be intimidated by this report, responded that:

"The Israeli government is acting in a responsible and measured way in order to secure the safety of Israel's citizens and prevent advanced weapons from reaching Hezbollah and the terror organizations. We will know how to do this in the future as well.

"The Middle East is experiencing one of its most sensitive periods in decades. We are following developments closely and are readying for any scenario."

~~~~~~~~~~

It's not possible to consider the current situation in Syria without looking at the role of the US -- or, more correctly, the US's failure to play a decisive role at a critical earlier point in the Syrian civil war -- as a factor in what's going on. The vacuum left by American inaction has permitted Russia to move more vigorously in this region.

The Russians, who want to be able to call the shots here, have even sent in warships. Five entered the Mediterranean last Wednesday, when the Russian foreign minister announced:

"The Russian Defense Ministry started setting up a special force of warships in the Mediterranean in order to protect Russia's interests in the region."

Yesterday, two additional Russian warships were brought in from its Black Sea fleet.

~~~~~~~~~~

US officials are concerned now that Russian shipments of armaments to Assad will allow him to prolong the war. But I was stuck by how clueless the Americans are when I read this comment by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez.

"We can watch from the sidelines as the scales are tipped in Assad's favor, or protect US national interests by supporting the armed opposition striving to build a new Syrian future."

From: US: Russian missiles could embolden Assad

"a new Syrian future," huh? This might have been true a year or 18 months ago. But now there are reports of Iraqi al-Qaeda forces over-taking other rebel forces in Syria. The Nusra Front was already Islamist, but is being splintered by the al-Qaeda forces that have a larger anti-Western, jihad, greater Islamic nation agenda.

Were the US to supply rebels with weapons, they might well end up in al-Qaeda hands.

Israel cannot say this -- is taking great care not to say this -- but me? I'm hoping Assad, as vile and immoral as he is, does not fall. For the very likely alternative is worse for this entire region.

Writes Reuters:

"... if the West were to intervene, it may now be under pressure to attack al-Qaeda opposition forces rather than Assad."

Read: Syria's Nusra Front eclipsed by Iraqi al-Qaida

~~~~~~~~~~

At the same time, rumors that Russia had already sent S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to Syria have not been confirmed. In fact, while Russia is saying that it must honor its previously signed contract to deliver them, it is not at all certain that this will happen.

Former head of IDF military intelligence Amos Yadlin is one of the analysts who is not convinced that Moscow will actually deliver the missile batteries...

"in Yadlin’s assessment, the S-300s are just one piece in the complex face-off over Syria now playing out between Moscow and Washington."

Read: Russia knows exactly what the fuss is about

It is enormously irksome, when Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov claims that there's no problem because the S-300 is a defensive weapon, implying that Israel just has to stop attacking and all will be fine. He knows very well indeed that Israel attacks are not against Syria, but against the transfer of weapons to Hezbollah and are thus defensive in nature. He is, indeed, enormously disingenuous.

There is no way that Israel will permit the transfer of S-300 missiles, should they arrive in Syria, to be transferred to Hezbollah. They would, I imagine, have to be hit before installation was complete.

~~~~~~~~~~

Please see what Shoshana Bryen, of the Jewish Policy Center, has to say about this situation.

While referring to Putin's "disdain for the Obama Administration" (her description of Putin's treatment of Kerry makes fascinating reading), and saying that "neither Secretary of State Kerry nor the president he serves seem to understand Russia's goals in the region, and thus neither is prepared to uphold our own interests," in the end she believes Russia's policies are shortsighted and will fail. Putin, she says, has taken on the impossible task of controlling the Shiite-Sunni fighting.

Her vision is sharp and broad.

Read: Russia: Playing a Losing Hand like a Winner

~~~~~~~~~

One last mention of Syria here: Last night, IDF soldiers patrolling near the border with Syria in the Golan were fired upon. A vehicle was damaged, but no one was hurt. The IDF issued a statement that "IDF forces returned precise fire at the source of the gunfire. They reported a direct hit." The Syrian army had claimed that it destroyed the IDF military vehicle and everything in it.

"We will not remain silent regarding fire from Syria at our territory," said Defense Minister Yaalon.

~~~~~~~~~~

And then a correction: In my last posting, I had cited an article by Avigdor Haselkorn on the war over preemption. In it, he spoke about the fact that Iran is trying to get Fateh 110 missiles into Hezbollah's hands because this would "deter Israel from launching a preemptive strike on its nuclear facilities by holding hostage Israel’s Dimona reactor as well as other strategic installations."

Well, it has been pointed out to me (and for this many thanks to Jeff D.) that the Fateh missiles have a range of 300 kilometers, but from where those missiles would be launched to Dimona is well over 300 km. I never would have caught that. Haselkorn's piece still has considerable validity, but I am eager to set the record straight here.

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I had hoped to address the other matter in which Israel requires strength: Kerry is coming on Thursday to move forward that ever elusive "peace process," and there is much to say about the political dynamics this issue engenders. But not today -- this posting is long enough. Hopefully, this will be my key focus when next I write.

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If it is reproduced and emphasis is added, the fact that it has been added must be noted.

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Technorati Tag: Israel and Syria and Russia and Hezbollah.

Jonathan Rosenblum: The Feminist Story the Media Missed at the Kotel

2013-05-21T11:56:00.000-04:00

The Feminist Story the Media Missed at the Kotel

by Jonathan Rosenblum
Jerusalem Post
May 17, 2013

That the Women of the Wall's (WoW) monthly visits to the Western Wall will provoke insults, spitting, and sometimes worse from a group of haredim at the Western Wall is old news. But there was another story last Friday that the media either missed or botched entirely: the thousands of Jewish women and girls who filled the area directly in front of the Kotel and almost to the back wall of the Kotel plaza, completely dwarfing the group of one hundred or so women associated with WoW. (The figure of 400 to 500 WoW given by some media outlets is patent nonsense.)

When I arrived at the Kotel a little past 7:00 a.m., there were about 25 (not 2,000 as reported by Ha'aretz) young haredi men standing on the upper level at the far north of the Kotel Plaza shouting and ruining the prayers for all those on the men's side who had come to pray on Rosh Hodesh. (I had already heard on the radio that police had arrested one haredi man.) What surprised me, however, was that the most prominent video camera remained exclusively focused on this small group among the many thousands then at the Kotel.

The media showed absolutely no interest in the thousands upon thousands of seminary girls and older women praying on the women's side and not raising their voices above a quiet whisper. Yet that sight brought tears to my admittedly biased eyes. There is a special purity about seminary girls found no place else in the world today.

And this group was special in another respect: It included women and girls across the national religious-haredi spectrum. The leading rabbis of the national religious world had publicly given their support for the national religious seminaries to participate as well. The Kotel thus united the leading rabbis of both the national religious and haredi world.

Somehow the media managed to mangle the presence of the thousands of girls, lumping them together with the male hooligans -- often in a single sentence (as in this paper's front-page story on Sunday) -- as part of a single haredi protest. Yet Rabbi Aharon Leib Steinman had explicitly conditioned his permission for seminary girls to attend on there being absolutely no violence. Yosi Deutsch, a haredi member of the Jerusalem municipality, lamented in a radio interview that the boys at the Kotel were ruining the message, which was to juxtapose traditional women's prayer with the attention-seeking of WoW.

THAT MESSAGE WAS formulated by two friends living in the Jerusalem suburb of Kochav Yaakov – Ronit Peskin and Leah Aharoni. Over the three weeks leading up to Rosh Hodesh Sivan, they created WomenfortheWall, employed their considerable skills in social media to publicize their initiative, were interviewed dozens of times by both the local and international media, and took on the WoW agenda in numerous blogs at the Times of Israel. But for their initiative, there would have been no organized women's prayer gathering last Friday morning.

They are true heirs of Sarah Schenirer, the divorced Cracow seamstress, who founded the Bais Yaakov movement, the most influential movement in the haredi world in the 20th century. Without the approval of the Chofetz Chaim and the Gerrer Rebbe, the Bais Yaakov movement would never have grown as it did. But without Sarah Schenirer it would never have come into existence, and she led the movement.

Neither Peskin nor Aharoni are mainstream haredi. Peskin, 25, home schools her three young children, teaches women how to forage for edible food growing wild, and runs a website called Penniless Parenting, on how to keep down the family food budget, which receives 60-70,000 hits worldwide a month.

In response to the boast of WoW founder Susan Aranoff that WoW seeks to liberate haredi women so that they can "function religiously . . . without the 'help' of men," Peskin describes her religious journey from her modern Orthodox upbringing in Cleveland to "quasi-chareidi" -- i.e., strict in halachic observance, a cross between "Litvak" and Chassidic," accepting of people from different backgrounds, and open to the outside world -- including a rebellious teenage period of no observance in between. Her religious search forced her to become financially independent at 17.

Of her current life, she writes, "It was a path I chose, and fought lots of obstacles to get there. I don't live this way because I haven't witnessed alternatives. I've witnessed them and rejected them, and made the choice to live as I do because I find it the most meaningful type of life for me. Implying that I'm doing what I do merely because I'm subjugated by men is insulting to me, insulting my intelligence, insulting to the men I love, and insulting to the entire population of Chareidi women. . . . I don't need you to rescue me. . . ."

Aharoni is firmly in the national religious camp, and makes her living as a business consultant helping "female business owners create more income doing work they love." She too traveled a long religious path from her native Soviet Union – a path that started in a Reform Temple and included a period of time in the congregation of Rabbi Avi Weiss, a leading figure in Orthodox feminism.

She finds "the epitome of misogyny," in WoW's "rejection of the feminine Jewish experience." "There is nothing more demeaning to women than positioning the male experience as the only one worth living and setting up women for an ongoing game of catch-up. . . . I have liberated myself from the need to predicate my identity on becoming 'one of the boys."

Peskin points out that WoW's mission statement does not mention G-d once. WoW supporters speak of the Kotel as a wedge issue for liberal Judaism in Israel (Rabbi Eliana Yolkut in Ha'aretz); tell the BBC that Israel is no "Club Med for the Jewish soul," convince non-Orthodox Jews that they are hated in Israel and not allowed to worship freely, even though they can pray as they want, almost any place they want, including just south on the Western Wall at Robinson's Arch, as Conservative and Reform groups already do; and call for the Kotel to be declared a national monument, with the mechitza to be removed between 9:00 a.m and 3:00 p.m. (Anat Hoffman in the St. Petersburg Sun Sentinel).

The omission of G-d is no surprise. For Anat Hoffman, the Rosa Parks of WoW, the Kotel has no sanctity and the return of the Temple and its "sacrificial cult" is a repugnant thought. The Kotel is just the best place to attract attention.

If G-d were the addressee of WoW's prayers, Aharoni points out, there is the tunnel on he women's side just opposite the Holy of Holies, where no paraphernalia is needed to be heard by The One Above. A group of Jewish women has come there to recite Tehillim on behalf of the entire Jewish people in the small hours of the morning every single night since 1967. They come not to "liberate religion; they come to liberate themselves. At the wall, they polish the lenses and attain clarity of purpose."

Those women know that just as marriage does not thrive in a glass house service of G-d is not for TV cameras.

In a post after Rosh Hodesh, entitled "Why Guys are Thugs . . ." Ronit Peskin speculated that those who attacked WoW suffer from a low self-esteem. To compensate, they need attention and an illusion of control. In that at least, the haredi thugs and the WoW have something in common.

For more articles by Jonathan Rosenblum, see Jewish Media Resources

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Looking Back -- Both Democrats and Republicans Got The Arab Spring Wrong

2013-05-21T07:53:00.000-04:00

The following by David P. Goldman is reposted here with permission of Middle East Forum:

Dumb and Dumber

by David P. Goldman
Tablet Magazine
May 20, 2013

http://www.meforum.org/3510/dumb-and-dumber

Errors by the party in power can get America into trouble; real catastrophes require consensus.

Rarely have both parties been as unanimous about a development overseas as they have in their shared enthusiasm for the so-called Arab Spring during the first months of 2011. Republicans vied with the Obama Administration in their zeal for the ouster of Egypt's dictator Hosni Mubarak and in championing the subsequent NATO intervention against Muammar Qaddafi in Libya. Both parties saw themselves as having been vindicated by events. The Obama Administration saw its actions as proof that soft power in pursuit of humanitarian goals offered a new paradigm for foreign-policy success. And the Republican establishment saw a vindication of the Bush freedom agenda.

"Revolutions are sweeping the Middle East and everyone is a convert to George W. Bush's freedom agenda," Charles Krauthammer observed in February 2011. "Now that revolution has spread from Tunisia to Oman," Krauthammer added, "the [Obama] administration is rushing to keep up with the new dispensation, repeating the fundamental tenet of the Bush Doctrine that Arabs are no exception to the universal thirst for dignity and freedom." And William Kristol exulted, "Helping the Arab Spring through to fruition might contribute to an American Spring, one of renewed pride in our country and confidence in the cause of liberty."

They were all wrong. Just two years later, the foreign-policy establishment has fractured in the face of a Syrian civil war that threatens to metastasize into neighboring Iraq and Lebanon and an economic collapse in Egypt that has brought the largest Arab country to the brink of state failure. Some Republican leaders, including Sen. John McCain and Weekly Standard editor Kristol, demand American military intervention to support Syria's Sunni rebels. But Daniel Pipes, the dean of conservative Middle East analysts, wrote on April 11 that "Western governments should support the malign dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad," because "Western powers should guide enemies to stalemate by helping whichever side is losing, so as to prolong their conflict." If Assad appears to be winning, he added later, we should support the rebels. The respected strategist Edward Luttwak contends that America should "leave bad enough alone" in Syria and turn its attention away from the Middle East—to Asia. The Obama Administration meanwhile is waffling about what might constitute a "red line" for intervention and what form such intervention might take.

The once-happy bipartisan consensus has now shrunk to the common observation that all the available choices are bad. It could get much worse. Western efforts have failed to foster a unified leadership among the Syrian rebels, and jihadi extremists appear to be in control of the Free Syrian Army inside Syria. Syria's war is "creating the conditions for a renewed conflict, dangerous and complex, to explode in Iraq. If Iraq is not shielded rapidly and properly, it will definitely slip into the Syrian quagmire," warns Arab League Ambassador Nassif Hitti. Iraq leaders are talking of civil war and eventual partition. Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, meanwhile, warned on May 1, "Syria has real friends in the region, and the world will not let Syria fall into the hands of America, Israel or takfiri [radical islamist] groups," threatening in effect to turn the civil war into a regional conflict that has the potential to destabilize Turkey. And the gravest risk to the region remains the likelihood that "inherent weaknesses of state and society in Egypt reach a point where the country's political, social and economic systems no longer function," as Gamal Abuel Hassan wrote on May 28. Libya is fracturing, and the terrorists responsible for the September 2012 Benghazi attack are operating freely.

This is a tragic outcome, in the strict sense of the term, for it is hard to imagine how it could have turned out otherwise.

* * *

In January 2012, after the first hopes for Arab democracy had faded, former Bush Administration official Elliot Abrams insisted:

The neocons, democrats, and others who applauded the Arab uprisings were right, for what was the alternative? To applaud continued oppression? To instruct the rulers on better tactics, the way Iran is presumably lecturing (and arming) Syria's Bashar al-Assad? Such a stance would have made a mockery of American ideals, would have failed to keep these hated regimes in place for very long, and would have left behind a deep, almost ineradicable anti-Americanism.

The neoconservatives mistook a tubercular fever for the flush of youth in the Arab revolts, to be sure, but they read the national mood right—as did the Obama Administration.

There were dissenters, of course. Daniel Pipes warned against pushing Islamists toward elections, writing in 2005:

When politically adept totalitarians win power democratically, they do fix potholes and improve schools—but only as a means to transform their countries in accordance with their utopian visions. This generalization applies most clearly to the historical cases (Adolf Hitler in Germany after 1933, Salvador Allende in Chile after 1970) but it also appears valid for the current ones.

Henry Kissinger excoriated the Obama Administration for toppling Mubarak, arguing that no other force in Egypt could stabilize the country. Francis Fukuyama broke with his erstwhile neoconservative colleagues in 2004, after hearing Vice President Dick Cheney and columnist Charles Krauthammer announce the beginning of an American-led "unipolar era." "All of these people around me were cheering wildly," Fukuyama remembers. "All of my friends had taken leave of reality."

It is a widespread misimpression (reinforced by conspiracy theorists seeking the malign influence of the "Israel Lobby") that the neoconservative movement is in some way a Jewish thing. On the contrary, it is a distinctly American thing. As the born-again Methodist George W. Bush said in 2003, "Peoples of the Middle East share a high civilization, a religion of personal responsibility, and a need for freedom as deep as our own. It is not realism to suppose that one-fifth of humanity is unsuited to liberty; it is pessimism and condescension, and we should have none of it." The Catholic neoconservative and natural-law theorist Michael Novak put it just as passionately in his 2004 book The Universal Hunger for Liberty: "The hunger for liberty has only slowly been felt among Muslims. That hunger is universal, even when it is latent, for the preconditions for it slumber in every human breast."

By contrast, Israelis were overwhelmingly pessimistic about the outcome of the Arab revolts and aghast at the celerity with which Washington dumped Mubarak. "The message to the Middle East is that it doesn't pay to be an American ally," a former Israeli intelligence chief told me in 2012. Although the prominent Soviet refusenik-turned-Israeli-politician Natan Sharansky believed in a universal desire for democracy, the vast majority of Israeli opinion thought the idea mad. As Joshua Muravchik wrote in 2011, the Arab Spring:

precipitated a sharp split between neoconservatives and hard-headed Israeli analysts who had long been their allies and friends. While neocons saw democratization as a balm to soothe the fevered brow of the Arab world, Israeli strategists (with the notable exception of Natan Sharansky) thought this utterly naive. Their message in essence was this: you do not know the Arabs as we do. Difﬁcult as their governments are to deal with, they are more reasonable than their populations. Democratization of the Arab world would lead to radicalization, which would be a bane to you and us.

The Israelis are accustomed to living with long-term uncertainty; Americans want movies with happy endings. The alternative to the Bush Freedom Agenda or Obama's proposed reconciliation with the Muslim world would have been ugly: the strategic equivalent of a controlled burn in a forest fire, as Daniel Pipes proposed—prolonging conflict, at frightful human cost, as the Reagan Administration did during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. It was one thing to entice prospective enemies into a war of attrition in the dark corners of the Cold War, though, and quite another to do so under the klieg lights. The strategy might have been correct on paper, but Americans are not typically in the market for pessimism.

The American public fell in love with the young democracy activists who floated across the surface of the Arab revolts like benzene bubbles on the Nile. More precisely, Americans fell in love with their own image, in the persons of hip young Egyptians who reminded them of Americans. Conservatives and liberals alike competed to lionize Google sales manager Wael Ghonim. Caroline Kennedy gave him the JFK Profiles in Courage Award in May 2011. He made Time magazine's list of the world's 100 most influential people. The conservative Lebanese scholar Fouad Ajami kvelled in the Wall Street Journal:

No turbaned ayatollah had stepped forth to summon the crowd. This was not Iran in 1979. A young Google executive, Wael Ghonim, had energized this protest when it might have lost heart, when it could have succumbed to the belief that this regime and its leader were a big, immovable object.

Mr. Ghonim was a man of the modern world. He was not driven by piety. The condition of his country—the abject poverty, the crony economy of plunder and corruption, the cruelties and slights handed out to Egyptians in all walks of life by a police state that the people had outgrown and despaired of—had given this young man and others like him their historical warrant.

Republican hawks advocated the furtherance of the Arab Spring by force of arms, starting with Libya. On Feb. 25, 2011, a month after Mubarak's fall, Kristol's Foreign Policy Initiative garnered 45 signatures of past officials and public intellectuals "urging President Obama, in conjunction with NATO allies, to take action to end the violence being propagated by the regime of Muammar al-Qaddafi." Three weeks later a NATO force led by the United States intervened. By September, the Qaddafi regime was beaten, and Robert Kagan lauded President Obama in the Weekly Standard: "By intervening, with force, the NATO alliance not only saved the people of Libya and kept alive the momentum of the Arab Spring … the end of Qaddafi's rule is a great accomplishment for the Obama administration and for the president personally. Furthermore, the president deserves credit because his decision was unpopular and politically risky." A month later the victorious rebels put the cadavers of Qaddafi and his son on public view.

The national consensus behind the Arab Spring peaked with the Libyan venture. Elliot Abrams was in a sense right: To intimate that democracy might not apply to Arabs seems to violate America's first principle, that people of all background have the same opportunity for success—in the United States. It seems un-American to think differently. Isn't America a multi-ethnic melting pot where all religions and ethnicities have learned to get along? That is a fallacy of composition, to be sure: Americans are brands plucked out of the fire of failed cultures, the few who fled the tragic failings of their own culture to make a fresh start. The only tragic thing about America is the incapacity of Americans to comprehend the tragedy of other peoples. To pronounce judgment on other cultures as unfit for modernity, as Abrams wrote, seems "a mockery of American ideals."

The neoconservatives triumphantly tracked the progress of what they imagined was Arab democracy. After Iraq's March 2005 elections, Max Boot wrote:

In 2003, more than a month before the invasion of Iraq, I wrote in the Weekly Standard that the forthcoming fall of Baghdad "may turn out to be one of those hinge moments in history—events like the storming of the Bastille or the fall of the Berlin Wall—after which everything is different. If the occupation goes well (admittedly a big if), it may mark the moment when the powerful antibiotic known as democracy was introduced into the diseased environment of the Middle East, and began to transform the region for the better." Well, who's the simpleton now? Those who dreamed of spreading democracy to the Arabs or those who denied that it could ever happen?

Similarly, in April 2011, Kristol wrote:

The Arab winter is over. The men and women of the Greater Middle East are no longer satisfied by "a little life." Now it's of course possible that this will turn out to be a false spring. But surely it's not beyond the capacity of the United States and its allies to help reformers in the Arab world achieve mostly successful outcomes. … And who knows? Helping the Arab Spring through to fruition might contribute to an American Spring, one of renewed pride in our country and confidence in the cause of liberty.

Writing in the Weekly Standard in September of that year, Robert Kagan was so confident of the march of democracy that he proposed to throw the Jordanian monarchy under the bus after Mubarak, despite Jordan's longstanding alliance with the United States.

Even when Islamists trampled the democrats in the aftermath of Mubarak's fall, the foreign-policy consensus held strong. The Obama Administration courted Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, while Republican sages argued that Islamist rule, while suboptimal, nonetheless represented progress on the road to democracy. Joshua Muravchik pooh-poohed the risks of the Muslim Brotherhood role in a September 2011 essay: "[I]t seems unlikely that the Egyptians, aroused as they are and having lived through the Nasser experience, would succumb to a new despotism. The most likely force to impose it, the Muslim Brotherhood, has been having trouble keeping its own members in line, much less the rest of the country." Muravchik wrote:

Perhaps the most important of the region's hopeful signs is the rebellion in Syria. Who would have thought that Syrians, of all peoples, would have earned the world's admiration? Yet it is hard to think of many cases in which nonviolent protestors have exposed themselves to shoot-to-kill security forces for months on end without being cowed into surrender. If these brave people persevere and drive the Assad dynasty from power, that itself would go far toward making the Arab Spring a net beneﬁt for the region and the world.

But the democracy enthusiasts missed a crucial feature of the Arab Spring: The toppling of Hosni Mubarak and the uprising against Syria's Basher Assad occurred after the non-oil-producing Arab countries had lurched into a dangerous economic decline. Egypt, dependent on imports for half its caloric consumption, faced a sharp rise in food prices while the prices of cotton and other exports languished. Asia's insatiable demand for feed grains had priced the Arab poor out of the market: Chinese pigs were fed before Egyptian peasants, whose labor was practically worthless. Almost half of Egyptians are functionally illiterate, and its university graduates are unqualified for the global market (unlike Tunisians, who staff the help desks of French software firms). Out of cash, Egypt faces chronic food and fuel shortages and presently is on life support through emergency loans from its neighbors. The insoluble economic crisis makes any form of political stabilization unlikely.

Egypt's Exports, Imports and Trade Balance

(Source: Central Bank of Egypt)

Syria's economic position is, if possible, even worse. Yemen is not only out of money, but nearly out of water. Large portions of the Arab world have languished so long in backwardness that they are beyond repair. After the dust of the popular revolts dissipated, we are left with banana republics, but without the bananas.

It is a salutary exercise to consider the views we hold with impassioned conviction and ask: "What would it imply if we are wrong?" Neoconservatives of all stripes believed with perfect faith that the desire for liberty is a universal human impulse, requiring only the right institutions to reinforce it. The Obama Administration believed that all cultures have equal validity and that—as Obama said early in his presidency—that he thinks of American exceptionalism the same way that the Greeks think about Greek exceptionalism. In both cases, Republicans and Democrats believe that there is nothing inherently unique about America—except that this country was the first to create the political framework that corresponds to the true nature of every human being.

Kristol's 2011 assessment of the Arab Spring was erroneous, but he was right to link America's state of being to events in the Middle East. We stumbled by national consensus into a strategic morass, from which there is no apparent exit, in the naïve belief that under every burka was a prospective American ready to emerge like a butterfly from a chrysalis.

But if large parts of the Muslim world reject what seemed to be an historic opportunity to create democratic governments and instead dissolve into a chaotic regime of permanent warfare, we might conclude that there really is something different about America—that our democracy is the product of a unique set of precedents, the melding of the idea of covenant brought here by radical Protestants, the traditions of Anglo-Saxon democracy, and the far-reaching wisdom of our founders. To present-day Americans, that is an unnerving thought. We do not wish upon ourselves that sort of responsibility. We eschew our debts to deep traditions. We want to reinvent ourselves at will, to shop for new identities, to play at the cultural cutting-edge.

What these events might teach us, rather, is that America really is exceptional and that there is no contradiction in cultivating our democracy at home while acting elsewhere in tough-minded pursuit of our security interests.

David P. Goldman, Tablet Magazine's classical music critic, is the Spengler columnist for Asia Times Online, associate fellow at the Middle East Forum, and the author of How Civilizations Die: (And Why Islam Is Dying Too) and the essay collection It's Not the End of the World, It's Just the End of You: The Great Extinction of the Nations
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Technorati Tag: Israel and Arab Spring and Obama.

Video: Professor Eugene Kontorovich on The Legal Case for Israel

2013-05-20T19:59:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I posted the video of an interview with international law professor Eugene Kontorovich on the Jewish right to Israel and the double standards that are applied to it.

Here is a second, earlier, video -- this one of a lecture Professor Kontorovich gave last year on The Legal Case for Israel, featured on Torah Cafe.

Enjoy.

Here is the video:

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Technorati Tag: Israel and International Law.

Nidra Poller on The Muhammad al-Dura Hoax

2013-05-20T15:57:00.000-04:00

This Wednesday, the French Court of Appeal is expected to rule in the defamation case brought by France 2's Charles Enderlin against French media analyst Philippe Karsenty who accused Enderlin of fabricating the story of Mohammed Al-Durah.

In light of that, I am reposting the following 2011 article by Nidra Poller with permission of Middle East Media.

For more background information on the Al-Durah hoax, check out The Al-Durah Project, which gives you the opportunity to check out evidence -- including comparing raw footage of what happened with the edited version broadcast on France2.

The Muhammad al-Dura Hoax and Other Myths Revived

by Nidra Poller
Middle East Quarterly
Fall 2011, pp. 71-78 (view PDF)

On September 30, 2000, a day after Yasser Arafat launched his war of terror, euphemized as the al-Aqsa intifada, state-owned France 2 Television broadcast a news report, filmed by a Palestinian cameraman, of the fatal shooting of a 12-year-old Palestinian identified as Muhammad al-Dura. The dramatic voice-over commentary by the station's long-time Jerusalem correspondent, Charles Enderlin, described how the boy and his father Jamal were pinned down by Israeli gunfire at Netzarim Junction in the Gaza Strip. The father pleaded frantically with the soldiers to stop shooting, to no avail. "A last burst of gunfire," intoned Enderlin, "the boy is dead, his father critically wounded."

Despite a mountain of evidence disputing the charge of his intentional killing by Israeli soldiers in 2000, 12-year-old Muhammad al-Dura, seen cowering with his father, became the poster child of the "Second Intifada." As seen in this billboard, his image soon attained iconic status in the Arab world and helped refuel myths of bloodthirsty Jews.

The bloodless images of Jamal and Muhammad al-Dura were instantly seared into the public mind. Distributed free of charge to international media, repeated endlessly like a raucous war cry, the Dura video provoked anti-Jewish violence in Israel and, on a scale not seen since the Holocaust, throughout Europe.[1] The recently-created al-Jazeera television—founded in 1996—was significantly boosted by exploiting the Dura death scene.

Recognized almost immediately as a staged scene by astute observers, denounced by others as an unfounded accusation against Israeli soldiers, the Dura video has been analyzed, investigated, dissected, exposed, taken to court, attacked, defended, exploited, and debated for almost ten years.[2]
As it turned out, the Palestinian cameraman Talal Abu Rahma, who has won countless prizes for the video, captured less than one minute of the dramatic scene that lasted, according to his sworn testimony, for forty-five minutes. Forty-five minutes of uninterrupted gunfire "from the Israeli position" left the man and boy miraculously intact as far as one can gather from looking at the video. Contrary to what the world has been led to believe, there is no raw footage of the scene. And, contrary to what might be expected, this and other equally embarrassing revelations have left the Dura myth, to all intents and purposes, intact.

Reinventing a Lie

In his latest attempt to silence critics of the controversial broadcast, Enderlin recently published a book-length defense of the original allegations, Un Enfant est mort (A Child is Dead), followed by the dateline Netzarim, 30 septembre 2000.[3] Systematically presented in France as an internationally acclaimed expert on the Arab-Israeli conflict, the France 2 correspondent is virtually unknown in the rest of the world, except perhaps for his role as producer of the "Death of Muhammad al-Dura."

Enderlin likes to scold critics of the broadcast by saying they have never set foot in Gaza and know nothing about war reporting. In spring 2011, riled by complaints in "communitarian" (i.e., Jewish) media about the failure of national media and, more particularly, the state-owned France 2 TV channel, to cover the blood-curdling slaughter of five members of the Fogel family in the Itamar settlement on March 12, 2011, the professional journalist treated critics to a lecture on his blog on how a newscast is composed. "I wish I could report all important events," he wrote, "the horrible Itamar crime, the tragic death of Palestinian adolescents killed last year by an Israeli strike on Gaza (… for which Benjamin Netanyahu apologized), rockets that fall regularly in the south of Israel." A news director, explained Enderlin with a touch of exasperation, must allocate limited air time to a flow of incoming news. Priorities are set according to "well-established criteria." With thousands dead from earthquake and tsunami in Japan, "the world's third largest economy," there was no room to cover "what happened in Itamar." The next day, he added, a short item was squeezed in on the consequences of the murder (i.e., anticipated settler violence). Until the culprits were arrested, opined the seasoned journalist, the attack could not be qualified as a terrorist assault.[4]

No such doubts about the identity of the culprits had tempered Enderlin's enthusiasm for the Dura video, aired within a few hours after its filming. No "well-established criteria" had weakened the conviction of his dramatic voice-over commentary: The boy was killed and the father wounded by gunfire from the Israeli position. Today, readily admitting that the Dura scene was exploited by, among others, the killers who beheaded Daniel Pearl,[5] the France 2 correspondent asserts his right to unrestricted liberty: "If a journalist were expected to anticipate the subsequent use of his report by extremists, it would amount to unacceptable self-censorship."[6] Does the Dura broadcast respect any well-established journalistic criteria? Reliable sources, corroboration, fact-checking, general credibility, coherence? Does the video actually correspond to the incident as it was reported? Was the original report modified by subsequent input? Does the journalist honestly address questions raised by serious investigators about the veracity of the report? The answer is no, no, and again, no.

Though fed into the news stream, the Dura report was not produced as news. What was it, then? Sloppy journalism? Crafty Palestinian propaganda? Perhaps a new form of street theater: a staged killing to represent the very real "murder" of Palestinian children, year in year out, at the hands of merciless Israeli soldiers? Or, more gently, a staged representation of the real killing of Palestinian children caught in the crossfire of an endless conflict? These and similar hypotheses fly in the face of the testimony of the sole eyewitnesses—Talal Abu Rahma and Jamal al-Dura—and the France 2 correspondent who brought the incident to the world's attention.

Careful study of the literature shows that no credible defense of the Dura scene as a legitimate news item has ever been formulated. Arguing the case that they brought before the French courts as plaintiffs against media watchdog Philippe Karsenty and other defendants, Enderlin and the France 2 hierarchy were unable to furnish any new material evidence to prove the video's authenticity.[7] Likewise, in his recently published Un Enfant est mort, the author rehashes the original narrative, twisting and tweaking here and there to cover with new inventions some of the glaring anomalies exposed by his detractors.

Here is an example of the method and its madness: What became of the spent shells left at the feet of the victims, which would furnish irrefutable proof of the source of the alleged forty-five minutes of uninterrupted gunfire? The France 2 cameraman Abu Rahma, who has repeated in countless interviews the enveloping narrative that gave substance to his brief non-graphic video, was no match for Esther Schapira of the German broadcast network ARD, who caught him in a convoluted explanation of the disappearance of the spent shells.[8] First, he told her that the Palestinian general Osama al-Ali had the bullets, to which she argued that she had footage of the general denying that he had the bullet casings. Abu Rahma stumbled, then admitted that France 2 had them, breaking into an irrepressible smile of pure deception.

Now Enderlin sets the record straight: "If Esther Schapira had bothered to ask, she would have learned that the Palestinian general Osama al-Ali went to the site early in the morning after the death of Muhammad al-Dura to examine the barrel and, so doing, he put the stone back on top of it, as it was in the France 2 video. He also gathered all the spent shells and asked our cameraman not to tell anyone."[9]

Is this the work of a responsible French-Israeli journalist and his loyal Palestinian cameraman? Is no one shocked or embarrassed by this confession? Did the dozens of French journalists who signed a petition in defense of Enderlin, victim, in their eyes, of conspiracy theory whackos backed by a communitarian lobby, read this passage? Did the journalists who served Enderlin a microphone on a silver platter in so-called interviews to promote this book ever read that passage? Or would they argue: "In case you don't know it, journalists have a right to protect their sources." Their colleague, Enderlin, demeans every individual, newspaper, magazine, or online media that has dared to cast doubt on the authenticity of the Dura incident.[10]

Blood Libels and Genocidal Intents

Muhammad al-Dura, alleged victim of merciless Israeli soldiers, was reportedly twelve years old; more of a youth than a child. What is the connection between the world-shaking news of his death and the eerie journalistic silence that veiled the murder of a 3-month-old Jewish infant, Hadas Fogel, on Sabbath eve? The baby's throat was slit so far she was nearly decapitated. Two of her brothers were slaughtered like animals in their beds. Their mother and father, who tried to protect the children, were stabbed to death. The bloodied, stabbed, slashed corpses lay in pools of blood.[11] The Dura video, by contrast, displays no signs of violence, bodily harm, or untimely death. The sensation of violence is induced by the voice-over commentary, by the grimaces and gestures of the alleged victims, and guttural cries from unseen observers within range of the microphone attached to Abu Rahma's camera.

One might ask with feigned innocence why the picture of a man and boy bearing absolutely no signs of physical assault would stir the collective soul of humanity to its utmost depths while the vicious bloody slaughter of three young children and their parents—coupled with the heartbreaking portraits of family members when they were still alive and full of light—seems to provoke an embarrassed shrug.

Stripped of its context and significance, the slaughter of the Fogel family was apparently handled by newsrooms as a onetime crime whereas the Dura incident, enhanced by a crudely fabricated narrative that escaped critical examination, was raised to the highest media power. Is there a connection between the unfounded certainty about the identity of Dura's killers and the artificial doubts about the murderers of the Fogel family? Yes, if there is a connection between blood libel and genocide.

The twenty-first-century blood libel branding Israelis as child-killers, like the earlier version that accuses Jews of killing non-Jewish children for ritual purposes, is intractable to factual evidence. Deconstruction of the Dura myth encounters a cascade of problems: Only a tiny minority of the general public has the slightest knowledge of the case. That tiny minority of informed, convinced, discerning observers can at best enlarge its circle by small increments, leaving essentially the whole world still believing that a Palestinian child was deliberately shot by Israeli soldiers. Those who are convinced by the mass of concrete evidence to the contrary, rarely figure among the population that will commit genocidal acts based on or reinforced by the blood libel.

Though scriptural and historic Islamic anti-Jewish bigotry would suffice without the Dura incitement to fill certain hearts with murderous rage, the Dura blood libel, indelibly engraved in the public mind, interferes with the perception of a rising genocidal wave. Blood libel incites and excuses genocidal attacks on Jews whether they are the slaughter of the Fogels, shahid operations (misnamed "suicide bombings"), rocket attacks from Gaza, or the promise to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. One way of disguising genocidal attacks is to treat them like common crimes. Was the Fogel massacre soft-pedaled because of an overabundant news flow or was it kept out of view precisely because it reveals genocidal intentions?

A similar mechanism operated in France to cover the true nature of two atrocious murders of Jews. The Sébastien Selam murder[12] was literally attributed to one third jealousy, one third insanity, and one third anti-Semitism. The twenty-seven defendants in the kidnapping, torture, and murder of Ilan Halimi[13] were tried behind closed doors in the court of first resort and again in appeals court. Attempts to expose the true nature of these killings have been decried as Jewish hypersensitivity, tribalism, self-interested exploitation of suffering, manipulation of the judicial system by pressure groups, and shameful resort to primitive vengeance.[14]

These and other acts of gratuitous, unmitigated cruelty were committed in a context of explicit genocidal intentions that are willfully ignored or denied. By contrast, the alleged killing of Muhammad al-Dura is readily accepted though framed by a ludicrous narrative. Cameraman Abu Rahma and the surviving victim, Jamal al-Dura, insist that Israeli soldiers deliberately shot at the defenseless civilians for forty-five minutes until they had critically injured the man and killed the boy. Insisting adamantly that the gunfire came solely from the Israeli position, they claim the soldiers could clearly see the target. One can imagine that television viewers believed they were watching the scene from the same vantage point as the soldiers, who saw it in a close-up, as it appears in the video, looking more like a poster than a news clip.

Soldiers do not need forty-five minutes to hit a sitting target at close range. Obviously embarrassed by this detail, commentators seeking to show that critics of the Dura story are wrong-headed often replace the forty-five minutes of uninterrupted gunfire with a more credible crossfire. Blithely contradicting the two eyewitnesses, they create a more palatable version of the incident for Western consumption while tacitly admitting that the Dura report is for some reason excluded from factual analysis.[15]

Whether one prefers forty-five minutes of relentless gunfire aimed at the man and boy, or forty-five seconds of crossfire, Jamal al-Dura's wounds combined with his grief at losing his son are given as evidence of the veracity of his testimony. The wounded man wrapped in bloodied bandages was filmed on his hospital bed the day after the incident. He has dramatically described the wounds, bullet by bullet. His scars were displayed on several occasions, most recently in a film made by Abu Rahma for screening at a semiprivate press conference organized by then-news director of France 2, Arlette Chabot, in 2004 when two mainstream journalists, Denis Jeambar and Daniel Leconte, came close to exposing the Dura broadcast as a staged scene.[16] Those wounds are now at the center of a libel suit brought by Dura against journalist Clément Weil-Raynal and the Israeli surgeon he interviewed, Yehuda David, as well as Serge Benatar, editorial director of the Actualité Juive weekly, who published the interview.[17]

David has testified under oath that the scars exhibited by Jamal al-Dura were not inflicted by gunfire in September 2000; they were inflicted by knives and an ax wielded by fellow Palestinians who attacked Jamal in 1992. David did reparative surgery, successfully restoring the patient's use of his right hand. On April 29, 2011, Weil-Raynal and David were found guilty of public defamation of Dura.[18] The text of the decision is incoherent, illogical, and peppered with contradictions. The defendants have appealed.

In the meantime, Metula News Agency—one of the major sources of investigation and analysis of, in their words, the "Netzarim Controversy"—reexamined a passage in the video.[19] As he describes how a bullet pierced his right hand, Jamal waves a report from the Jordanian hospital where he was treated several days after the alleged shooting. A zoom on the document shows that Jamal was treated for a gunshot wound to the left hand. In fact, a close look at the Dura "death scene" reveals that Jamal's right hand was deformed in the first image, shows no signs of additional damage at the end of the brief video, and looks exactly the same today as it did before it was allegedly pierced by an Israeli bullet.

Charles Enderlin asks, rhetorically, how Palestinians could be so clever as to stage the Dura scene in the middle of a fierce gun battle. But raw footage shot at Netzarim Junction shows that "fierce gun battles" were also staged that day. While men and youths attacked the Israeli outpost with rocks, firebombs, and burning tires, fake battle scenes were filmed in another part of the junction, out of range of the Israel Defence Forces outpost.[20]

Many staged scenes and Israeli atrocity hoaxes have been launched and eagerly consumed by the Western media in the past decade. Abu Rahma and Enderlin relayed the Gaza blackout hoax in 2008. The term "fauxtography" was coined for the method used in the 2006 Lebanon war. The Dura scene is particularly resistant to demystification. The emotional investment elicited by the incident extends far beyond the core population of anti-Zionist anti-Semites. This is due, some would argue, to the dramatic construction that draws the viewer into identification with the father, said to be desperately trying to protect his son. Then, in a brief lapse of time, less than one minute, the helpless father is said to be critically wounded, and his child is dead. Viewers feel that they should have jumped in and saved the child.

The vast majority of articles devoted to the Dura affair begin, notably, with a visual memory of the scene (e.g. "the boy dies in his father's arms") induced by testimony from the two eyewitnesses but contradicted by the concrete reality of the video.

A recent incident in the Libyan capital of Tripoli shows how journalists can, if they so desire, exercise healthy skepticism when invited to cover staged scenes. Reporters were shown damage allegedly wreaked by a coalition strike on the home of a prosperous, well-dressed gentleman. Furniture and personal belongings were topsy-turvy, but there was no sign of an explosion, breakage, or soot. The alleged victim argued that his home was not a military target: "The children were doing their homework." A reporter, displaying missile fragments in the garden, points out the absence of signs of an explosion on the site. The crater, which was apparently dug for the occasion, does not correspond to the munitions displayed as evidence. Other television reports on mass funerals or wounded civilians taken to hospital were accompanied by levelheaded warnings: "None of this can be verified. We have no way of checking this information. The wounded were perhaps used by Qaddafi's forces as human shields; they may be soldiers disguised as civilians."

All of that lucidity should also be retroactively transposed to Israel's 2009 Cast Lead operation in Gaza. The same manipulations were practiced by Hamas without evoking the appropriate skepticism. (Richard Goldstone has just admitted that his report was based on faulty information, to which Jeffrey Goldberg commented: "Well, I'm glad he's cleared that up. Unfortunately, it is somewhat difficult to retract a blood libel, once it has been broadcast across the world.")[21] Obviously, and regrettably, staged news, parroted agency dispatches, falsified documentaries, and sloppy journalism are common fare. When, however, Western media serve as facilitators for hostile forces engaged in geopolitical operations aimed at radically transforming the international balance of power, they cannot be shrugged off as the petty misdemeanors of mass communications. Israelis in particular and Jews in general are the target of the Dura blood libel, but it does not stop there. Other "lethal narratives" are funneled into the news stream with exquisite ease.

Myths and Double Standards

Viewers have been presented, since December 2010, with what the world media has termed the "Arab Spring." Though the footage in this case is not staged, it is subject to highly selective editing and transformed by way of narrative into a spontaneous uprising of freedom-loving democrats throwing off tyrannical rulers in certain Arab-Muslim countries. Western governments are expected to align themselves with the popular uprising at the speed of television coverage: Anchormen and women, who identify with the crowd in this or that liberation square, set the pace, and Western leaders appear to follow suit. European heads of state scramble to outrun President Obama with imperious demands for immediate compliance. The targeted autocrat is told to abdicate. His misdeeds are splashed across the screen; his foreign investments are frozen; his crony capitalism is denounced; his wife is vilified, and his opponents are portrayed as Internet savvy, cosmopolitan, secular, charming, young professionals who would fit in with one's dinner party guests tomorrow evening.

This young Facebook-Twitter image is pasted over the somewhat grimy reality actually captured by television cameras. Soothing words flow from the mouths of journalists determined to deny the reality of Star of David graffiti, women in hijab (Islamic head covering), men with Islamic beards, shouts ofAllahu Akbar (Allah is great), row upon row of prostrate men praying in the "secular revolution" square, man-in-the-square interviewees promising to destroy Israel, Muslim Brotherhood figures waiting in the wings, confusion, connivance, danger, violence, and sexual assault.

Spring blossomed with the "Jasmine Revolution" in Tunisia. In the space of three days, commentary went from, "What Islamists? There are none!" to "The dictator ben Ali had excluded many groups, including the Islamists, from the political arena" to "Of course, the Islamists, like other parties, will assume their rightful place in the democratic process." Step by step, country by country, in what was supposed to be an entirely positive, virtually unstoppable momentum, the conflicts become more violent, culminating at this writing in the Libyan adventure—armed intervention by a hastily concocted, essentially untenable coalition that includes, or included, the Arab League. Western journalists and reporters, like gawkers at a country fair, run from one show to the next, rarely looking back to report on retrograde forces gobbling up freedom-lovers or newly-liberated nations spilling out refugees. Over 20,000 have landed in Lampedusa since January 2011,[22] and thousands more are on the way. Jews are harassed in Tunisia; Copts are persecuted in Egypt; Shari'a is poised to replace the arbitrary rule of the dictator with an implacable tyranny.

The question is not, "How could we have known it would turn sour?" Nor can one conclude that, come what may, democracies should always act to defend a popular uprising even at the risk of paving the way for a new autocracy. The question is rather: What will become of democratic countries if they abdicate their international relations and defense to a consortium of the United Nations and international opinion?

The power balance in the Middle East is undergoing a radical transformation that touches Western vital interests, not the least of which is the security of Israel. Old-fashioned national sovereignty is nearly as unpopular as the Oriental potentates pushed out of their palaces and into a black hole. Democratically-elected leaders committed to defending the welfare and security of their citizens are now expected to prove their integrity precisely by ignoring that responsibility. A crowd with slogans and banners is instantly awarded the title of "humanity," and everything done to satisfy their demands is "humanitarian." Of course, the citizens of democracies should be inclined to welcome liberation movements against tyrannical rulers, but it is absurd to actively support movements that may well shift the international balance of power toward greater tyranny.

Conclusion

And what does all this have to do with the Dura hoax? The answer is: far too much for comfort. As suggested above, the staged Dura death scene was conceived by forces hostile to Israel and Jews and made credible by the Western media that relayed it. Though the video and its narrative are crude, the prestige of Enderlin and the French television network have protected it from the profound reexamination that could eventually remove its sting. Similarly, the restructuring of the Middle East, which could ultimately deliver free individuals, groups, and nations into the hands of our enemies, is prettied up by the Western media that, hand in hand with official discourse, makes one believe this change harbors no danger. Citizens of the free democracies are enticed into trusting the United Nations, which has in fact lost its integrity, instead of counting on their democratically-elected governments and national sovereignty.

Finally, who is that international community with its international opinion enthroned like bloodthirsty spectators of gladiatorial combats, empowered to give the thumbs up or thumbs down? Is it not the dumbstruck viewer convinced that this Palestinian child, a "target of gunfire from the Israeli position," could escape death if only he would come to the child's rescue?

In a parallel inversion, jihad conquest justifies itself as a defense against aggression by infidels who refuse to accept the dominion of Allah and comply with Shari'a law. The Palestinian child is not a real victim of real bullets; he is the symbol of that "aggressive" refusal to submit to Islam. The murderous rage unleashed against Jews in response to that symbolic aggression reveals its genocidal intent. The fury is now aimed at Christians in Muslim lands, at Americans and Europeans on their own soil. Panic strikes the embattled citizens of our lands—not at the thought of this merciless jihad, but panic at any attempt to discern it, describe it, defend against it.

Israel is not the victim of a double standard; it is the target of no standard at all. The reasons for this are profound and cannot be limited to anti-Semitism. The fear and trembling provoked by the crudely fabricated Dura scene is the misdirected terror instilled by genocidal forces bearing down on citizens of free democracies. These citizens are the helpless child cringing in fear. No matter how honestly that force designates itself, how clearly it shows its face, how vast the territory it covers, how frankly it expresses its intentions, the frightened child seeks comfort in accusing himself of his imminent destruction.

Nidra Poller is an American novelist and journalist living in Paris since 1972. A collection of her short stories, Karimi Hotel et autres nouvelles d'Africa, was published by l'Harmattan in May 2011.

[1] "The Muhammad Al-Dura Blood Libel: A Case Analysis," interview with Richard Landes, Institute for Global Jewish Affairs, Jerusalem, Nov. 2, 2008.
[2] See Philippe Karsenty, "We Need to Expose the Muhammad al-Dura Hoax," Middle East Quarterly,Fall 2008, pp. 57-65.
[3] Charles Enderlin, Un enfant est mort/ Netzarim, 30 September 2000 (Paris: Don Quichotte Editions, 2010).
[4] Victor Perez, "Charles Enderlin nous prend pour des simplets," Victor Perez Blogspot, Mar. 25, 2011.
[5] Joel J. Sprayregen, "The New York Times and the al-Dura Hoax," The American Thinker, July 17, 2008.
[6] Enderlin, Un enfant est mort, p. 99.
[7] Karsenty, "We Need to Expose the Muhammad al-Dura Hoax."
[8] Esther Schapira, dir., Drei Kugeln und ein totes Kind, Mar. 18, 2002, ARD Network (Germany).
[9] Enderlin, Un enfant est mort, p. 52.
[10] Ibid., pp. 112, 117, 125, 135, 153.
[11] The Guardian (London), Mar. 14, 2011.
[12] The Jerusalem Post, Jan. 21, 2010.
[13] The New York Sun, Feb. 22, 2006.
[14] New English Review (Nashville, Tenn.), July 13, 2009 ; Le Monde (Paris), July 21, 2009.
[15] Larry Derfner, "Rattling the Cage: Al-Dura and the Conspiracy Freaks," May, 28, 2008; Gideon Levy, "Mohammed al-Dura Lives on," Ha'aretz (Tel Aviv), Oct. 7, 2007.
[16] Andrea Levin, "The New York Times Buries al Dura Story," CAMERA, Feb. 7, 2005; Charles Enderlin v. Philippe Karsenty, Court of Appeals, Paris, May 28, 2008; Le Figaro (Paris), Jan. 25, 2005; RCJ FM radio (Paris), Feb. 1, 2005.
[17] Debriefing.org, May 9, 2011; Véronique Chemla, May 31, 2011.
[18] Debriefing.org, May 9, 2011; Véronique Chemla, May 31, 2011.
[19] Metula (Israel) News Agency, Mar. 23, 2011.
[20] Richard Landes, dir., Pallywood (documentary), accessed May 31, 2011.
[21] Jeffrey Goldberg, "Judge Richard Goldstone: Never Mind," The Atlantic, Apr. 2, 2011.
[22] The Irish Times (Dublin), Apr. 4, 2011.

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Technorati Tag: Israel and Al-Dura and Pallywood and Media Bias.

Forget Iran -- What Are The Chances of Saudi Arabia Developing A Nuclear Capability?

2013-05-20T11:59:00.000-04:00

The following by Naser al-Tamimi is reposted here with permission Middle East Forum:

Will Riyadh Get the Bomb?
Saudi Arabia's Atomic Ambitions

by Naser al-Tamimi
Middle East Quarterly
Spring 2013 (view PDF)

http://www.meforum.org/3509/saudi-arabia-nuclear-bomb

As the impasse over Tehran's nuclear program worsens, those most likely to be directly effected by an Iranian bomb are showing greater alarm. While the media fixates on Israel and its possible reaction, other regional players have no less at stake.

Despite Riyadh's long-held advocacy of making the Middle East a zone free of weapons of mass destruction, there has been much speculation in the last two decades about the possibility of its acquiring or developing nuclear weapons should Tehran obtain the bomb.[1] In the words of King Abdullah: "If Iran developed nuclear weapons … everyone in the region would do the same,"[2] a sentiment echoed by Prince Turki al-Faisal, former head of Saudi Arabia's General Intelligence Directorate.[3] Has Riyadh decided to go down the nuclear road, or is this bluster a desperate bid to stop Tehran's nuclear program dead in its tracks?

Why Go Nuclear?

A major deterioration in U.S.-Saudi relations—especially if Washington fails to stop Tehran's nuclear program or decides to scale back its military presence in the Middle East due to its recent energy discoveries—could force Riyadh to reconsider nuclear weapon acquisition to avoid having to face foreign aggression without U.S. security assurances. However, the relationship between Riyadh and Washington has thus far provided the Saudis with an unprecedented level of protection. From Washington's perspective, conventional wisdom holds that U.S. security commitments can keep Iran in check, prevent U.S. allies in the Middle East from submitting to Tehran's demands, and dissuade them from pursuing nuclear weapons. Yet both the willingness and the ability of the U.S. government to defend its partners in the region against a nuclear-armed Iran have been questioned.[4] As an Israeli observer argued recently:

The lack of American will to confront the ayatollahs and stop them in their tracks has given various Arab leaders plenty of incentive, as well as a good excuse, to proceed down the nuclear trail ... If the Iranians aren't stopped, and soon, we may wake up a few years from now to discover that Saudi Arabia and other unfriendly regimes have decided to upgrade their "civilian" nuclear programs into weapons-making industries.[5]

Additionally, the Saudis are increasingly nervous about the strength of any U.S. commitment in light of the Obama administration's abandonment of such a long-standing regional ally as Egypt's Hosni Mubarak.[6]

The second issue is a mirror image of the first, namely, the concern over Tehran's nuclear ambitions. In February 2012, one senior Saudi source told the London Times:

There is no intention currently to pursue a unilateral military nuclear programme but the dynamics will change immediately if the Iranians develop their own nuclear capability … Politically, it would be completely unacceptable to have Iran with a nuclear capability and not the kingdom.[7]

Abdulaziz Sager, head of the Geneva-based Gulf Research Center, argues that the consequences of Tehran acquiring nuclear weapons would result in

turning Iran into a hegemonic power over the [Persian Gulf] states of the region, through its control of Iraq, its holding fast to the continued occupation of the UAE's [United Arab Emirates] islands, and its intervention in the domestic affairs of countries in the region through the agitated Shiite groups in these countries, which could push the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council], namely Saudi Arabia, to seek, in turn, the acquisition of a nuclear weapon to confront Iran.[8]

Riyadh is most concerned about Iran's ambitions especially because it and many other Gulf states have substantial Shiite populations that could potentially become radicalized were a nuclear-empowered Iran to step up its incitement.[9] Many analysts argue that in the event of an Iranian nuclear breakout, Riyadh would feel compelled to build or acquire its own nuclear arsenal. Given Saudi Arabia's vast wealth and strategic weakness, such a decision might seem logical.[10] Riyadh's perception of the Iranian threat as serious and immediate was recently expressed by Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal:

Sanctions are a long-term solution ... But we are looking at an Iranian nuclear program within a shorter term because we are closer to the locus of the threat. We are interested in immediate rather than in gradual solutions.[11]

Diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks reveal that King Abdullah privately warned Washington in 2008 that if Iran developed nuclear weapons, Saudi Arabia would do the same.[12]

A third factor in the Saudi calculus is Israel's nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities.[13] Given Israel's status as an assumed but undeclared nuclear weapons state, the most immediate consequence of Tehran's crossing the nuclear threshold would be the emergence of an unstable bipolar nuclear competition in the Middle East.[14] Were Israel to end this ambiguity and admit its possession of nuclear weapons, this might provide a form of deterrence against Iran, which in turn will increase the pressure on Riyadh to acquire its own deterrent vis-à-vis both countries.[15]

Finally, domestic factors must be taken into account. So far, King Abdullah and even Crown Prince Salman favor the continuation of military cooperation with the United States, but the two suffer from old age and poor health, and a change at the top of the pyramid could have a decisive impact on this issue. However, there has long been speculation that the royal family is divided over the nuclear issue. Former intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal favors a secret nuclear program for military uses in cooperation with Pakistan and is supported in this by Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, director of the Saudi intelligence agency and former ambassador to the United States. In contrast to the hawks in Riyadh, there is also a group, headed by Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal, which opposes establishing a secret nuclear military program reliant on Pakistan and prefers to be defended against Iran under the U.S. nuclear umbrella.[16]

Consumption and Constraints

Perhaps a more critical factor in the nuclear equation is Saudi Arabia's economic outlook. The country depends almost exclusively on oil export revenues to develop its economy. Jareer Elass and Amy Myers Jaffe of the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University contend that

It is in the Kingdom's long-term geopolitical and security interests to maintain its leadership role in the global oil arena. Riyadh's ability to threaten other oil producers that it could flood the oil market is a critical aspect buttressing its leadership role inside OPEC [Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries] and gives the country regional clout as well. Saudi Arabia's ability to single-handedly alter the price of oil gives the Kingdom significant geopolitical power, and it has used its ability to lower the price of oil to its geopolitical advantage on many occasions over the decades. With this oil superpower stature comes much of the global influence that Saudi Arabia enjoys on the international stage.[17]

But the kingdom is an oil-consumer as well as a producer. Burning oil for electricity production currently consumes about a quarter of the crude oil Saudi Arabia produces, which could have very serious implications for the future.[18] In 2011, Saudi Arabia consumed an average of 2.87 million barrels per day (mb/d).[19] The country needs to find at least another 20 gigawatts (GW) of generating capacity by 2020 to add to its existing 40 GW if it is to meet projected demand.[20] As the GCC's largest economy, Saudi Arabia has more reason than most to turn to nuclear power.

Saudi Arabia's current energy consumption is rising exponentially as illustrated by this image of Riyadh at night, potentially forcing it to cut exports to meet rising domestic demand. The Saudi government recently declared its intention to launch its own nuclear program, one that could, however, be transformed from a strictly civilian project to a military one.

According to analysts at Riyadh-based Jadwa Investment, oil demand in the kingdom rose by 22 percent between 2007 and 2010, outpacing China's oil demand growth rate despite the latter's economy expanding almost three times as fast.[21] While official data shows Saudi oil consumption rising by more than 5 percent a year in 2003-10 to an average of 2.4 mb/d in 2010,[22] analysts at British Petroleum put it at 2.85 mb/d in 2011,[23] (see Tables 1 and 2) making Saudi Arabia the world's sixth-largest oil consumer. On a per capita basis, its oil consumption is sky-high;[24] its consumption in 2011 is set to jump by 5.6 percent, way above the global average of 1.4 percent.[25]

Some economists argue that if Saudi Arabia's energy consumption continues at its current rate, within twenty years the kingdom will burn the equivalent of almost all its recent daily output—more than 8 mb/d —or around two-thirds its total production capacity.[26] Citigroup goes further to say that Riyadh could be an oil importer by 2030. Oil and its derivatives account for 50 percent of Saudi electricity production, mostly for residential use. According to Citigroup analysis, if nothing changes, the Saudis may have no available oil for export by 2030.[27] The head of Saudi Aramco has admitted that unless internal demand is controlled, the amount of oil left for export could fall to less than 7 mb/d by 2028.[28] Jadwa Investment paints an even bleaker picture, declaring that the kingdom could face a serious revenue crisis within the current decade, forced to cut exports to meet rising demand. By 2020, it expects exports available for the global market to fall to less than 5 mb/d.[29]

(Table 1): Saudi Oil Production Demand (2001-2011 million barrels per day)

	2001	2002	2003	2004	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009	2010	2011
Production	9,15	8,87	10,10	10,56	11,03	10,77	10,37	10,76	9,80	9,95	11,16
Consumption	1,62	1,66	1,78	1,91	1,97	2,04	2,16	2,33	2,55	2,74	2,85

Source: Adapted from BP Statistical Review of World Energy, (June 2012), pp. 8-9.

Given rising spending needs, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimated the break-even oil price for Saudi crude in 2011 to be US$80 a barrel, a rise of US$30 a barrel from three years ago; this would increase to US$98 by 2016.[30] The Washington-based Institute of International Finance suggested that Saudi Arabia will need at least US$110 for oil by 2015 to balance its budget.[31] But even these figures look conservative; the sheer scale of the kingdom's spending commitments now necessitates a substantially higher oil price.[32]

It is within this context that Riyadh's recently declared intention to launch its own nuclear program makes sense. In December 2011, Abdullah Zainal, minister of commerce and industry, announced that the equivalent of US$100 billion would be spent on building sixteen nuclear power plants to generate electricity in different parts of the kingdom.[33] Riyadh has signed nuclear technology agreements with several states for research reactors and nuclear power plants. Abdullah M. al-Shehri, governor of the Electricity and Co-Generation Regulatory Authority (ECRA), recently outlined Saudi Arabia's road map in building its nuclear capabilities for peaceful means:

First, we need to secure international cooperation; second, come up with long-term planning; third, study the required safety measures mandated by the international community; fourth, ensure we have the needed fuel supply; and fifth, we must prepare a national work force that is educated in nuclear engineering and operation.[34]

Such projects would, however, enable the Saudis to enrich uranium. With the aid of their Sunni allies in Pakistan, they could then obtain knowledge of bomb-making capabilities and the relevant technologies.[35]

Saudi nuclear ambitions crystallized in the run-up to the 2009 Copenhagen summit when it was realized that global efforts to control climate change could end up punishing countries that put off including non-carbon-based energy sources in their power portfolios.[36] According to the World Trade Organization, the Saudi economy is increasingly dependent on international trade: The ratio of merchandise and services trade (exports and imports) to gross domestic product (GDP) rose from 88.7 percent in 2005 to a peak of 104.9 percent in 2008 and reached 97.4 percent in 2010. Riyadh's export base is highly concentrated in fuels (petroleum and gas). The share of fuels in total merchandise exports depends largely on the evolution of world oil prices and Riyadh's quota production within OPEC. In value terms, the share of fuels in total merchandise exports (including re-exports) went from 89.5 percent in 2005 to 85.7 percent in 2010.[37]

(Table 2): Saudi Break Even Oil Forecast at Current Spending Patterns

	2005	2010	2015F	2020F	2025F	2030F
Oil Indicators (million barrels per day)
Oil Production	9.4	8.2	9.3	10	10.7	11.5
Oil Exports	7.5	5.8	6.3	6	5.6	4.9
Domestic Consumption	1.9	2.4	3.1	3.9	5.1	6.5
Breakeven Oil Price (US$ per barrel)
Saudi Export Crude	30.3	71.6	90.7	118.5	175.1	321.7

Source: Adapted from Brad Bourland and Paul Gamble, "Saudi Arabia's coming oil and fiscal challenge," (Jadwa Investment, Riyadh), July 2011, p. 24. F= forecast

Third Party Connections

There have been suggestions that, rather than develop an indigenous nuclear program, Saudi Arabia would simply seek to buy nuclear warheads from Pakistan or China. According to a news media report, Riyadh is beefing up its military links with Islamabad to counter Tehran's expansionist plans either by acquiring atomic weapons from Islamabad or a pledge of nuclear cover,[38] a claim also reported earlier in The Guardian.[39]

Alternatively, Pakistan might offer a deterrent guarantee by deploying its own nuclear weapons, delivery systems, and troops on Saudi territory. This arrangement could be particularly appealing to both Riyadh and Islamabad, allowing the Saudis to argue that they are not violating the nuclear nonproliferation treaty (NPT) since the weapons would not be theirs. A Pakistani presence might also be preferable to a U.S. one because stationing Muslim forces on Saudi soil would not trigger the kind of opposition that has in the past accompanied the deployment of "infidel" U.S. troops.[40]

Despite these rumors, the Pakistanis know as well as anyone that the principal threats to the security and stability of Saudi Arabia are domestic against which nuclear weapons have no value but rather might stir up more trouble than they alleviate. But, a good Pakistani working relationship with Washington is essential. The Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act of 2009 (also known as the Kerry-Lugar-Berman bill) authorized a massive increase in U.S. civilian assistance to Islamabad, tripling it to US$1.5 billion a year.[41] In spite of tensions between the two states, Pakistan remains keen on developing its relationship with Washington, and continued proliferation of nuclear technology is unlikely to encourage either economic or military aid.[42] Indeed, selling complete nuclear weapons would come at great political cost. Islamabad might forfeit U.S. foreign assistance and drive Washington into closer cooperation with its mortal enemy India.[43]

Providing Riyadh with a Pakistani nuclear umbrella would also increase the likelihood of convergence between New Delhi and Tehran as both nations might view the move as part of a larger Sunni threat. In addition, Saudi nuclear acquisition could prompt a preventive strike by Israel—especially if the sale became known before the weapon was activated. Finally, although relations with Islamabad are improving, the House of Saud has no great trust in Pakistan's intentions; on the contrary, many of the WikiLeaks documents revealed Saudi dissatisfaction with Pakistani politicians and policies.[44]

In theory, the Saudis could pursue a nuclear option with the Chinese, but in the current strategic environment, it is hard to imagine this as a realistic scenario. Beijing and Riyadh have never had close military relations largely because Washington has provided the Saudis with advanced military equipment as well as security assurances against international threats that China cannot provide. While Beijing and Washington do not see eye-to-eye on many issues, including the severity of the Iranian threat, it is unlikely that Beijing would jeopardize its trade and other relations with Washington by supplying the Saudis with nuclear weapons.

Additionally, China is a member of the NPT system and thus obliged "not in any way to assist, encourage, or induce any nonnuclear weapon State to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other explosive devices, or control over such weapons or explosive devices."[45] Under the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Act of 1994, Beijing would face revocation of the U.S. nuclear cooperation agreement it worked so hard to secure, as well as the possible imposition of economic sanctions, if it were deemed to have "aided or abetted" the acquisition of nuclear weapons.[46]

If U.S.-Saudi relations should falter, the Chinese would doubtless view it as an opportunity to take a more active role in Saudi affairs. However, there is no evidence suggesting that this relationship will sour in the near future; in fact, as shall be seen, it is clearly improving.

Domestic Constraints

Technical barriers for entry into the nuclear club are high, and it is difficult for states to completely hide a clandestine military program from foreign intelligence observers. For example, the West successfully (albeit belatedly) detected Tehran's secret uranium enrichment facility constructed in tunnels under a mountain near Qom.[47] Indeed, many analysts believe that Riyadh's talk about developing nuclear arms may be more intended to focus Western attention on its concerns about regional risks than to indicate any kind of definitive action to go nuclear.[48]

It is unlikely that the Saudis would want to proliferate at the present time; doing so would deeply strain the U.S.-Saudi relationship, perhaps to an irrevocable degree.[49] Doing so would also place Riyadh in breach of a memorandum of understanding signed with Washington in 2008, promising U.S. assistance with civilian nuclear power on condition that Riyadh not pursue "sensitive nuclear technologies."[50] Riyadh's desire to maintain a strong relationship with Washington, especially in light of the royal family's desire to prevent unconventional terrorism within its borders, inhibits any strong appetite to develop nuclear weapons.[51]

There is also strong evidence that Washington is committed to defending Saudi Arabia. President Obama notified Congress on October 20, 2010, of the largest ever arms sales to Riyadh, including the proposed sale of fighter aircraft and upgrades to existing Saudi fighter aircraft, attack and utility helicopters, and related weaponry and services. If all options are exercised, the proposed sales may be worth more than $60 billion dollars over a period of ten to fifteen years.[52] The Saudis will also get help with training, logistics, and maintenance. The Obama administration hopes the sales will help "sustain long-term relationships to ensure continued U.S. influence for decades,"[53] or as the Economist put it:

the package of sales would not only tilt the balance of conventional weaponry in the Gulf decisively against Iran, whose suspected bid to acquire atomic bombs frightens its Gulf neighbors as well as Israel and the West. It would signal the return to normal of America's tight, 70-year-long alliance with Saudi Arabia. This had frayed following the revelation that 15 of the 19 hijackers who attacked American cities on September 11, 2001, were Saudi nationals. Fearing congressional opposition, Saudi Arabia had in recent years sought weaponry from other sources.[54]

Riyadh will also feel more secure from Tehran's missile capabilities once it acquires the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system. This system is intended for shooting down short-, medium-, and intermediate range ballistic missiles in their terminal phase, using a "hit-to-kill" approach. At the same time, a potential $30 billion upgrade of the Saudi navy would greatly strengthen the latter's power projection in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. Ultimately, the U.S. arms package will increase Riyadh's confidence and capabilities in countering Tehran's rising power in the Middle East.[55]

Further, the character of the Saudi establishment militates against taking the drastic step of nuclear proliferation; the House of Saud is simply too conservative to undertake such a bold and controversial step. As Thomas Lippman argued,

The Saudis' weapons of choice are cash and diplomacy. It is difficult to imagine the princes of the House of Saud deliberately positioning themselves as global outliers and inviting reprisal from countries capable of inflicting serious damage on them.[56]

Journalist Richard Nield has noted that Riyadh has committed itself to a major industrialization and economic diversification campaign that will require sustained engagement with the rest of the world. "It's not rational that they would jeopardise this in favour of a preemptive strike against the theoretical possibility of a nuclear-armed Iran."[57] The same idea is echoed by Kate Amlin, who believes that Saudi leaders would not want to incur the political and economic backlash resulting from pursuit of a nuclear arsenal at a time when they are trying to integrate further into the international economy.[58]

Finally, it would take many years and considerable financial cost for Riyadh to develop nuclear weapons. There exists a relatively strong consensus regarding the immature state of the Saudi nuclear technology infrastructure. The country lacks the human expertise and technical knowledge necessary to develop a nuclear weapons program on its own.[59] It does not operate nuclear power facilities, and its scientists do not have the necessary experience to enrich uranium for reactor fuel, to convert nuclear fuel, or operate nuclear reactors.[60] A recent Citigroup report warns that several complex issues are likely to result in delays to Saudi Arabia's target nuclear power launch of 2019:[61] the lack of available nuclear power experts; cost overruns or high capital costs, and above all, plant safety risks such as keeping plants cool in desert conditions since there is no history of successful execution in such conditions.[62] According to Citigroup, the "safest location for a nuclear plant in Saudi Arabia is deep in the desert between Riyadh and Jeddah. Water would have to be piped over 30 miles to this region and under conditions that keep the pipes and plants cool."[63]

There have, however, been clear signs recently of the Saudis' intent to enter the nuclear arena. In June 2010, the kingdom commissioned Finnish management consultancy Poyry to offer a strategy for nuclear and renewable energy use and to study the economic and technical feasibility of becoming involved in all aspects of the nuclear power chain, including uranium enrichment.[64] Earlier that year, the Saudi government said it planned to build a new technology centre, the King Abdullah City for Nuclear and Renewable Energies, in Riyadh.[65] Despite this, it will be years before it is developed. In a 2007 visit to Saudi Arabia, Mohammed ElBaradei, then-director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, estimated that the Saudi nuclear civilian plan might take up to fifteen years.[66]

Conclusion

Given that it is the world's top oil exporter, handling a nuclear Saudi Arabia would be a delicate manner. But, at least for now, the Saudis have no alternative but to rely on a U.S. defense umbrella. Still, it would be contrary to Riyadh's practice to put all its eggs in one basket. Thus, the kingdom will work in two parallel routes, strengthening its military, particularly the air force and navy, and aggressively seeking to buy the civilian nuclear technology that will in the future provide the technical capacity and human resources for dealing with nuclear weapons.

Riyadh is currently linked to arms deals with Washington for at least the next decade. It could also take a decade to develop the potential human and technical resources needed for a civilian nuclear program. At present there is no solid evidence that Riyadh has taken firm steps to go down this route, nor is there any evidence of Saudi acquisition of weapons of mass destruction

Overall, though not insurmountable, the obstacles to Saudi nuclearization are considerable. Much depends on Tehran's ambitions and the West's determination to stymie them.

Naser al-Tamimi is a U.K.-based Middle East analyst with research interest in energy politics and Middle East-Asia relations. He holds a PhD degree in International Relations from Durham University, U.K.

[1] Robert Shuey and Shirley A. Kan, "Chinese Missile and Nuclear Proliferation: Issues for Congress," U.S. Congressional Research Service, Nov. 16 , 1995; The New York Times, July 10, 1999; The Guardian (London), Sept. 18, 2003; The Washington Times, Oct. 21, 2003; Dan Blumenthal. "Providing Arms: China and the Middle East," Middle East Quarterly, Spring 2005, pp. 11-9; Cicero (Hamburg), Mar. 28, 2006;Ha'aretz (Tel Aviv), May 30, 2012.
[2] The Guardian, June 29, 2011.
[3] Reuters, Dec. 6, 2011.
[4] Eric S. Edelman, Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., and Evan Braden Montgomery, "The Dangers of a Nuclear Iran," Foreign Affairs, Jan./Feb. 2011, pp. 66-81.
[5] Michael Freund, "When Saudi Arabia Goes Nuclear," The Jerusalem Post, Apr. 29, 2010.
[6] The Wall Street Journal, June 23, 2011.
[7] The Times (London), Feb. 10, 2012.
[8] Abdulaziz Sager, "Alwady'a fi al-khaleej: Derasa Isteshrafeya 2025," paper presented to the Manama (Bahrain) Development Forum, Feb. 8-9, 2008, in al-Wasat News (Bahrain), Feb. 13, 2008.
[9] "Saudi Arabia Defense and Security Report Q1," Business Monitor International (London), Jan. 2011, p. 55.
[10] Thomas W. Lippman, "Nuclear Weapons and Saudi Strategy," Middle East Institute, Policy Brief, no. 5, Jan. 2008.
[11] Associated Press, Feb. 15, 2010.
[12] The Guardian, June, 29, 2011.
[13] "Avoiding a Nuclear Arms Race in the Middle East," Report to the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Washington, D.C., Feb. 2008.
[14] Edelman, Krepinevich, and Montgomery, "The Dangers of a Nuclear Iran," pp. 66-81.
[15] Kathleen J. McInnis, "Extended Deterrence: The U.S. Credibility Gap in the Middle East," The Washington Quarterly, Summer 2005, pp. 169-86.
[16] Ha'aretz, Sept. 8, 2011.
[17] Jareer Elass and Amy Myers Jaffe, "Iraqi Oil Potential and Implications for Global Oil Markets and OPEC Politics," James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, Rice University, July 2011.
[18] Mark Hibbs, "Saudi Arabia's Nuclear Ambitions," Carnegie Endowment, Washington, D.C., July 20, 2010.
[19] "Oil Market Report," International Energy Agency, Paris, Nov. 13, 2012.
[20] Petroleum Economist (London), Dec. 14, 2010.
[21] Brad Bourland and Paul Gamble, "Saudi Arabia's Coming Oil and Fiscal Challenge," Jadwa Investment, Riyadh, July 2011.
[22] Reuters, Oct. 12, 2011.
[23] "BP Statistical Review of World Energy Report," British Petroleum, London, June 2012, p. 9.
[24] Bourland and Gamble, "Saudi Arabia's coming oil and fiscal challenge."
[25] Financial Times (London), Feb. 28 2011.
[26] The Wall Street Journal, June 23, 2011.
[27] Heidy Rehman, "Saudi Petrochemicals: The End of the Magic Porridge Pot?" Citigroup, London, Sept. 2012, p. 1.
[28] Reuters, Oct. 12, 2011.
[29] Bourland and Gamble, "Saudi Arabia's Coming Oil and Fiscal Challenge."
[30] "Regional Economic Outlook: Middle East and Central Asia," International Monetary Fund, Washington, D.C., Sept. 2011, p. 22.
[31] Elass and Jaffe, "Iraqi Oil Potential."
[32] Middle East Economic Digest (MEED, Dubai and London), Dec. 23, 2011.
[33] Al-Akhbar (Beirut), Feb. 9, 2012.
[34] Saudi Gazette (Riyadh), Feb. 22, 2012.
[35] The Daily Mail (London), Feb. 24, 2012.
[36] Saurav Jha, "China's 'Third Island' Strategy," World Politics Review, Jan. 6, 2010.
[37] "The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia," Trade Policy Review, World Trade Organization, Geneva, Dec. 21, 2011.
[38] United Press International, Sept. 15, 2011.
[39] The Guardian, May 11, 2010.
[40] Edelman, Krepinevich, and Montgomery, "The Dangers of a Nuclear Iran," pp. 90-1.
[41] Alexander Evans, "Pakistan and the Shadow of 9/11," RUSI Journal, Aug./Sept. 2011, pp. 64-70.
[42] "Saudi Arabia Defense and Security Report Q4," Business Monitor International, Jan. 2012, p. 66.
[43] James M. Lindsay and Ray Takeyh, "After Iran Gets the Bomb: Containment and Its Complications," Foreign Affairs, Mar./Apr. 2010, pp. 33-49.
[44] See, for example, Associated Press, Dec. 3, 2010.
[45] Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, U.N. Office for Disarmament Affairs, New York, July 1, 1968, art. I.
[46] Lippman, "Nuclear Weapons and Saudi Strategy."
[47] Ian Jackson, "Nuclear Energy and Proliferation Risks: Myths and Realities in the Persian Gulf," International Affairs, Nov. 2009, p. 1157.
[48] The Guardian, June 29, 2011.
[49] Sammy Salama and Gina Cabrera Farraj, "Secretary General of Arab League urges Arab countries to exploit nuclear power, enter 'nuclear club'" WMD Insights, May 2006.
[50] The Times, Feb. 10, 2012.
[51] Kate Amlin, "Will Saudi Arabia Acquire Nuclear Weapons?" James Martin Center for Non-proliferation Studies, Washington, D.C., Aug. 1, 2008.
[52] "The Middle East: Selected Key Issues and Options for the 112th Congress," U.S. Congressional Research Service, Washington, D.C., report R41556, Jan. 3, 2011, p. 6.
[53] The New York Times, Dec. 29, 2011.
[54] The Economist (London), Sept. 15, 2010.
[55] Business Monitor International, Sept. 14, 2010.
[56] Lippman, "Nuclear Weapons and Saudi Strategy."
[57] MEED, Dec. 17, 2010.
[58] Amlin, "Will Saudi Arabia Acquire Nuclear Weapons?"
[59] "Avoiding a Nuclear Arms Race in the Middle East," Report to the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Washington, D.C., Feb. 2008.
[60] Yana Feldman, "Saudi Arabia Country Profile: Nuclear Facilities Profiles," Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, July 2004.
[61] Rehman, "Saudi Petrochemicals: The End of the Magic Porridge Pot?" p. 36.
[62] Ibid, p. 35.
[63] Ibid.
[64] "Saudi Arabia: Going Nuclear," Country Monitor, Economist Intelligence Unit, London, June 7, 2010.
[65] Petroleum Economist, Dec. 14, 2010.
[66] The New York Times, Apr. 15, 2007.

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Iran Fears Growing Israel-Azerbaijan Cooperation

2013-05-20T07:53:00.000-04:00

Iran Fears Growing Israel-Azerbaijan Cooperation

Lt.-Col. (ret.) Michael Segall
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA)

The visit to Israel in April 2013 by Azeri Foreign Minister Elmar Mamadyarov intensified growing Iranian concerns over the tightening ties between Jerusalem and Baku, both of which view Iran as a threat. Iran's progress in its nuclear program and the failure of the nuclear talks with the West have raised Tehran's threshold of sensitivity about a military attack on its nuclear facilities, and it increasingly fears that Azerbaijan is turning into a base for such a strike.
In recent months, Iran has stepped up its critical public tone toward Baku's "incautious" policy. Iran continues its covert subversive activity in Azerbaijan including through Lebanese Hizbullah, which is providing assistance to local terrorist and espionage cells. Iran's aim is to build an infrastructure for retaliation there in case it is attacked, and also to try and influence Azerbaijan's domestic political arena. Azerbaijan has exposed and arrested a number of Iranians, Hizbullah operatives, and local activists on suspicion of involvement in terror and subversion.
Some 25 million Azeris live in northwestern Iran, forming the country's largest minority. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is of Azeri extraction. Both Iran and Azerbaijan are Shiite, and both have territorial claims that sometimes rise to the surface. Some in Iran refuse to accept the loss of the province of northern Azerbaijan, which was conquered by the Russian Empire at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The humiliating agreements which the Persian Qajar dynasty was forced to sign are part of a legacy that the Islamic regime seeks to replace with an ethos of resistance to foreign forces at any price.
Today, Iranian-Azeri relations are being influenced more and more by the geostrategic environment, leading Tehran to a more menacing stance toward what it sees as the threat posed by Israel via Azerbaijan. This could include renewed attempts to strike Israeli and Western targets in Azerbaijan.
In 2008, 2011, and 2012, Iranian terrorist cells were uncovered there that planned to hit Jewish, Israeli, and American targets, including assassinating the Israeli ambassador to Baku and attacking Chabad's Ohr Avner Jewish school in Baku.

Read the full article.

IDF Lt.-Col. (ret.) Michael (Mickey) Segall, an expert on strategic issues with a focus on Iran, terrorism, and the Middle East, is a senior analyst at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and the Terrogence Company.

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Video: Eugene Kontorovich on Israeli Settlements -- Real International Law and Double Standards

2013-05-19T20:54:00.000-04:00

Eugene Kontorovich is a Professor of Law at Northwestern and a contributor at The Volokh Conspiracy blog

In this video, Professor Kontorovich examines the actual issues of International Law as they apply to Israeli settlements and the double standards applied to them.

Also see his video on The Legal Case for Israel

Here is the video of his appearance on Shalom TV:

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Obama Praises Turkey's Erdogan As Erdogan Puts A Knife in the US's Back

2013-05-19T16:59:00.000-04:00

The situation is getting very dangerous and with a "friend" like Erdogan it is clear that Obama’s policy toward Syria, Iran, the advance of revolutionary Islamism, and the Israel-Palestinian “peace process,” is in serious trouble.
Barry Rubin

Barry Rubin writes about further signs of Obama's failed foreign policy as Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan Praised at White House as He Subverts U.S. Interests

Rubin notes 5 factors that should have mitigated against the warm reception that Obama gave Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan during his visit to the White House -- yet didn't. Here is a summary of 2 of them:

The Obama administration had pressured Erdogan not to visit Hamas-ruled Gaza, yet Erdogan announced -- in the White House Rose Garden -- that visiting Gaza was exactly what he was going to do. An alleged US ally -- and Obama did boast about the friendship and bond of trust he had with Erdogan -- publicly says in front of Obama that he is going to defy the United States. This is a sign not only of how little respect Erdogan has for Obama and US foreign policy -- but also how little Obama will do about it.
Erdogan promised Obama he would conciliate with Israel -- but then Erdogan showed he would not follow through on the agreement he made.
- Turkey demanded absurdly large amounts of money to compensate the families of the members of terrorist-associated IHH who were killed when they attacked IDF soldiers boarding the Mavi Marmara
- Legal action against Israeli officials involved in the Mavi Marmara affair has continued
- He has delayed the promised return of the Turkish ambassador to Israel

Rubin goes on describe how Erdogan has not only subverted US interests with with minimal cost, but that the Obama administration has abetted Turkey in doing this -- in regards to human rights in Turkey, sanctions against Iran and dealing with the civil war in Syria.

Read the whole thing.

Obama and Erdoğan from Sept. 23, 2009.
Is Erdogan really a friend of the US?
(Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson).

Following Erdogan's lead in Syria and supporting the Islamist insurgents dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, we have reached a situation where --

One day there will be congressional investigations on how U.S. policy armed terrorist and even, albeit unintentionally, al-Qaida groups. It will be too late. The situation in Syria makes the Iran-Contra affair--U.S. involvement during the Reagan Administration in supplying arms to pro-American Nicaraguan rebels--look like a picnic.

Till then, we will have to be satisfied with the focus being only on the domestic scandals of the Obama administration.

Apparently Obama is as badly informed in making friends with Erdogan as he was in picking fights with Netanyahu -- and there is no sign that Obama has learned his lesson.

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Raymond Ibrahim: Islamic Forced Conversions - Past and Present

2013-05-19T13:57:00.000-04:00

The following by Raymond Ibrahim is reposted here with permission of Middle East Forum:

Islamic Forced Conversions - Past and Present

by Raymond Ibrahim
The Blaze
May 16, 2013

http://www.meforum.org/3508/islamic-forced-conversions

The lost history of Christians forced to convert to Islam—or die—is reemerging, figuratively and literally. According to the BBC: "Pope Francis has proclaimed the first saints of his pontificate in a ceremony [last Sunday] at the Vatican—a list which includes 800 victims of an atrocity carried out by Ottoman soldiers in 1480.They were beheaded in the southern Italian town of Otranto after refusing to convert to Islam."

The BBC adds in a sidebar: "The 'Martyrs of Otranto' were 813 Italians beheaded for defying demands by Turkish invaders to renounce Christianity. The Turks had been sent by Mohammed II, who had already captured the 'second Rome' of Constantinople."

Historical texts throughout the centuries are filled with similar anecdotes, including the "60 Martyrs of Gaza," Christian soldiers who were executed for refusing Islam during the 7^th century Islamic invasion of Jerusalem. Seven centuries later, during the Islamic invasion of Georgia, Christians refusing to convert were forced into their church and set on fire. Witnesses for Christ lists 200 anecdotes of Christians killed—including some burned at the stake, thrown on iron spikes, dismembered, stoned, stabbed, shot at, drowned, pummeled to death, impaled and crucified—for refusing to embrace Islam.

If history is shocking, the fact is, today, Christians—men, women, and children—are still being forced to convert to Islam. Pope Francis alluded to their sufferings during the same ceremony: "As we venerate the martyrs of Otranto, let us ask God to sustain those many Christians who, in these times and in many parts of the world, right now, still suffer violence, and give them the courage and fidelity to respond to evil with good."

Consider some recent anecdotes:

In Pakistan, a "devoted Christian" was butchered by Muslim men "with multiple axe blows [24 per autopsy] for refusing to convert to Islam." Another two Christian men returning from church were accosted by six Muslims who tried to force them to convert to Islam, but "the two refused to renounce Christianity." Accordingly, the Muslims severely beat them, yelling they must either convert "or be prepared to die. . . . the two Christians fell unconscious, and the young Muslim men left assuming they had killed them."

In Bangladesh some 300 Christian children were abducted in 2012 and sold to Islamic schools, where "imams force them to abjure Christianity." The children are then instructed in Islam and beaten. After full indoctrination they are asked if they are "ready to give their lives for Islam," presumably by becoming jihadi suicide-bombers. (Even here the historic patterns are undeniable: for centuries, Christian children were forcibly taken, converted to and indoctrinated in Islam, trained to be jihadis extraordinaire, and then unleashed on their former Christian families. Such were the Janissaries and Mamelukes.)

In Palestine in 2012, Christians in Gaza protested over the "kidnappings and forced conversions of some former believers to Islam." The ever-dwindling Christian community banged on a church bellwhile chanting, "With our spirit, with our blood we will sacrifice ourselves for you, Jesus."

Just as happened throughout history, Muslims today regularly "invite" Christians to Islam, often presenting it as the only cure to their sufferings—sufferings caused by Muslims in the first place.

In Pakistan, a Christian couple was arrested on a false charge and severely beaten by police. The pregnant wife was "punched, kicked and beat" as her interrogators threatened to kill her unborn baby. A policeman offered to drop the theft charge if the husband would only "renounce Christianity and convert to Islam," but the man refused.

In Uzbekistan, a 26-year-old Christian woman, partially paralyzed from youth, and her elderly mother were violently attacked by invaders who ransacked their home, confiscating "icons, Bibles, religious calendars, and prayer books." At the police department, the paralyzed woman was "offered to convert to Islam." She refused, and the judge "decided that the women had resisted police and had stored the banned religious literature at home and conducted missionary activities. He fined them 20 minimum monthly wages each."

In Sudan, Muslims kidnapped a 15-year-old Christian girl; they raped, beat and ordered her to convert to Islam. When her mother went to police to open a case, the Muslim officer of the so-called "Family and Child Protection Unit," told her: "You must convert to Islam if you want your daughter back."

Indeed, because Christian females are the most vulnerable segments of Islamic societies, they are especially targeted for forced conversions. In 2012, U.S. Congress heard testimony about the "escalating abduction, coerced conversion and forced marriage of Coptic Christian women and girls [550 cases in the last five years alone].Those women are being terrorized and, consequently, marginalized, in the formation of the new Egypt."

As my new book Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians documents, wherever there are large numbers of Muslims—whether in the Arab World, Africa, Asia, or even in the West—Christians are being persecuted. Forced conversions are the tip of the iceberg, and certainly not anomalies of history.

Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and associate fellow at the Middle East Forum.

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In Germany, UN Helps Islamist Attack on Free Speech Against Thilo Sarrazin

2013-05-19T10:58:00.000-04:00

The following by Andrew Harrod and Sam Nunberg is reposted here with permission of the Middle East Forum:

UN Pressures Germany to Bow to 'Hate Speech' Hysteria

by Andrew Harrod and Sam Nunberg
Frontpage Mag
May 16, 2013

http://www.legal-project.org/4080/un-pressures-germany-to-bow-to-hate-speech

A recent decision by the United Nation's (UN) Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) foreshadows an ominous future for free societies should Muslim entities like the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) achieve their goal of having "Islamophobia" defined internationally as a form of prejudice.

Former German central bank board member Thilo Sarrazin has got himself in trouble with the UN, as theTurkish Union in Berlin-Brandenburg (Türkischer Bund in Berlin-Brandenburg or TBB) stated with satisfaction in an April 18, 2013, German-language press release. The spokesman of this German-Turkish interest group, Hilmi Kaya Turan, praised a February 26, 2013, "historic decision" by the CERD condemning Germany for not having prosecuted Sarrazin's criticism of Arab and Turkish immigrants.

Sarrazin, a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands or SPD), produced a storm of controversy with his August 2010 book Deutschland Schafft Sich Ab: Wie Wir Unser Land aufs Spiel Setzen ("Germany Abolishes Itself: How We Are Risking Our Country"). In the context of this controversy, CERD's detailed 19-page decisionextensively excerpted in English translation a fall 2009 interview with Sarrazin. In the interview, the Berlin magazine Lettre International discussed some of the upcoming book's themes.

CERD complained that "[i]n this interview, Mr. Sarrazin expressed himself in a derogatory and discriminatory way about social 'lower classes', which are not productive' and would have to 'disappear over time' in order to create a city of the 'elite'." Sarrazin specified that about 20% of Berlin's population depended on welfare payments, which he wanted to cut, "above all to the lower class."

Berlin's indigent included within the immigrant population a "large number of Arabs and Turks in this city, whose numbers have grown through erroneous policies, have no productive function, except for the fruit and vegetable trade." Compounding the problem for Sarrazin was a birthrate among Arabs and Turks about three times their percentage of the population. Sarrazin thereby saw "Turks…conquering Germany just like the Kosovars conquered Kosovo: through a higher birth rate." Sarrazin "wouldn't mind if" these immigrants "were East European Jews with about a 15% higher IQ than the one of Germans." Central to Sarrazin's thesis was the assumption that "human ability is to some extent socially contingent and to some extent hereditary." Sarrazin's "solution to this problem" was "to generally prohibit influx, except for highly qualified individuals and not provide social welfare for immigrants anymore."

As noted by CERD, Sarrazin's interview comments prompted on October 23, 2009, a criminal complaint by the TBB under the German Criminal Code's Article 130 against "Incitement to Hatred" (Volksverhetzung). Yet upon review, German prosecutors suspended their investigations on November 23, 2009, deciding that Sarrazin's views fell under the protection of free speech contained within Article 5 of Germany's Basic Law (Grundgesetz). Prosecutors quoted by CERD had judged Sarrazin's statements as a "contribution to the intellectual debate in a question…very significant for the public."

Following this domestic defeat, the TBB turned in 2010 to Article 14 of CERD's governing convention (Article 14), the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Article 14 provides that the CERD may "consider communications from individuals or groups of individuals within" a consenting State Party's "jurisdiction claiming to be victims of a violation by that State Party of any of the rights set forth in this Convention." In response, CERD agreed with TBB that Sarrazin had made discriminatory comments and that the German "State party failed to provide protection against such discrimination." CERD thus wanted the "State party" to "review its policy and procedures…to give wide publicity to the Committee's Opinion," and to deliver "within 90 days, information from the State party about the measures taken."

CERD's decision did not involve Islam directly, for Sarrazin had referenced the ethnicity of Arabs and Turks, not their majority-Muslim faith. Yet CERD's decision noted various party submissions according to which in Germany the "labels 'Turks' or 'Arabs' are applied as synonyms for Muslims." Citing various evidence examples, CERD agreed with one submission that "Mr. Sarrazin's statements led to public vilification and debasement of Turks and Muslims in general."

Any such foreign judgment of a country raises sensitive questions of national sovereignty, particularly when involving limitations of free speech. Sarrazin's case was no exception, especially in light of CERD members mocked by the German conservative website Politically Incorrect as "torches of democracy and human rights." Analyzing this roster, Germans might well wonder what they could learn in equality under the law from members hailing from Algeria, Burkina Faso, China, Niger, Pakistan, Russia, Togo, and Turkey, among other countries.

The Sarrazin case exemplifies how international law and its institutional developments can impact domestic matters. Observers of the OIC, an international organization of 57 majority-Muslim nation-states (including "Palestine"), would be well advised to keep Sarrazin in mind when considering the OIC's longstanding campaign against "Islamophobia." This campaign would only too willingly extrapolate from Sarrazin's comments about Arab and Turk immigrants, however controversial, to a condemnation of criticizing Islamic ideas as well.

Defenders of free speech should beware. The transnationalist, multiculturalists and OIC have a new mechanism to override domestic legal hate speech decisions. Precedent is slowly but surely being set.

This article was sponsored by the Legal Project, an activity of the Middle East Forum.

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Technorati Tag: Free Speech and Hate Speech and Islamophobia and Islamism.

Why Is It Difficult For The West To Behave Rationally And Defend Itself Against Terrorism?

2013-05-19T07:53:00.000-04:00

The Price of Blindness

by Jonathan Rosenblum
Jerusalem Post
May 3, 2013

In preparation for Yom Yerushalayim, I've just finished The Battle for Jerusalem: An Unintended Conquest by long-time Jerusalem Post reporter Abraham Rabinovich. (The book is an expanded e-book version of his 1972 classic.) Rabinovich interviewed over 300 combatants in the battle, and it shows. No one captures the experience of war from the fighters' perspective better than Rabinovich.

While reading The Battle for Jerusalem, it struck me that Israel's need to constantly defend itself against threats to its very existence from 1948 to the present, has prevented the most basic human instinct – the instinct for self-preservation – from atrophying here to the degree it has throughout the West.

Retiring Yale classicist Donald Kagan, 80, expressed concern in his valedictory interview with the Wall Street Journal's Matthew Kaminski that the delicate flower of democracy is threatened today. He laments the development of a culture that "makes it difficult for us [i.e., the West] to behave rationally when the rational thing is to be tough." He sums up the basic lesson of growing up in the tough Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn: "If you don't want trouble with someone be sure he has something to be scared of."

Kagan attributes the West's failure to absorb that lesson to culture and a lack of political leadership. Democracy, he argues, requires free, autonomous, and self-reliant population, and they are in increasingly short supply in an America of office workers and disability recipients.

Israelis, however, have been forced to be tough for wont of choice. And the experience of war has developed the qualities Kagan considers fundamental for democracy and the capacity for leadership.

In the bloody fighting in Jordanian trenches to take Ammunition Hill, the greatest casualties were absorbed by the platoon leaders, who took the lead position moving through the trenches and were thus most vulnerable to Jordanian fire. Fifty per cent of the junior officers were killed or wounded in the battle. (By contrast, the Jordanian officers were much more likely to flee the battle than their soldiers.) A country that of necessity must produce many such young men has a better chance of developing the toughness and clarity to confront reality as it is, not as we wish.

ELITE REACTIONS TO THE BOSTON MARATHON BOMBING provide another example of the Western failure to confront reality. Even after the radical Islamic associations of the brothers Tsarnaev were known, the media was still wondering 'Why?" Could it have been the difficulties of immigrant absorption or possible concussions suffered by Tamerlan in his Golden Gloves boxing career?

A Boston Globe headline would have been funny were in not illustrative of a dangerous cast of thought: "Islam might have had a secondary role in Boston attacks." Commentators had fun creating their own riffs – e.g., "Gravity may have played secondary role in fall;" "Anti-Semitisim may have played secondary role in Hitler's Final Solution."

Politicians and commentators point out ad nauseum that the vast majority of Muslims do not become terrorists, as proof that Islam had nothing to do with the bombing. That's like arguing cigarettes have nothing to do with lung cancer because not all smokers develop lung cancer. And try making the argument in the New York Times: An infinitesimal percentage of gun owners commit murder schoolchildren so it is ridiculous to impose new background checks for gun owners.

We cannot admit the truth: Islam possesses a power unique among all the world's religions today to fill its followers with the desire to murder innocents among non-believers. Most Muslims will never become terrorists. But jihadis of various stripes draw on a rich lode of canonical Islamic texts – the Koran and sayings of Mohammed (the hadith) for support.

It is frightening to contemplate that out of 1.3 million Muslims worldwide, there may be tens of millions susceptible to the lure of radical Islam. And it is a natural human tendency to avoid facing a frightening reality.

After the carnage of World War I, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain could not bring himself to contemplate the possibility that Hitler was preparing for war. He never read Mein Kampf, certainly not the sections in which Hitler talks about the role of deception. The British press went along happily, failing to report on Germany's military build-up. In a similar vein today, Western leaders and media steadfastly turn their eyes from what the radical Islamists say and their presence at the heart of over 90% of terrorist acts.

THE FEAR OF FACING REALITY is compounded by a lethal political correctness. Much of Europe has enacted "hate speech" laws indistinguishable from the Organization of Islamic Cooperation's (OIC) efforts to make Muslim blasphemy laws part of international law. Even the suggestion of a link between Islam and terrorism can land one in jail.

Nor has the United States been immune. The Report of the 9/11 Commission is filled with references to "jihad," "Muslims," and "Islam." By contrast, the 2008 FBI Counter-Terrorism Lexicon contains no such references. Such references, we are told, might give credence to the notion that Islam sanctions terrorism, as if proliferating Islamist websites, with their prolific citation of Islamic sources, require such confirmation.

The government report on the Ft. Hood shootings, in which Maj. Dr. Nidal Malik Hasan, mowed down thirteen servicemen and civilians, while shouting Allahu Akbar, determined that it was a case of "workplace violence" and made no mention of his radical Islamic beliefs. "Religious fundamentalism alone is not a risk factor," the Report concluded. Army Chief of Staff George W. Casey opined that it would be even a greater tragedy than the murder of thirteen if the attack led to a reduction of Muslims in the service. Yet that pursuit of diversity kept Hasan in the army, after colleagues complained of his erratic behavior and espousal of radical beliefs. The FBI questioned him -- one of five cases in which Muslims questioned by the FBI subsequently participated in terror attacks.

In late 2011, the president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council threatened that the U.S. Muslim community would refrain from cooperation with counter-terrorism efforts unless "deep anti-Muslim sentiment" in training manuals was immediately addressed. In response, President Obama's then counter-terrorism advisor and now head of the CIA John Brennan ordered that all U.S. government counter-terrorism manuals be "purged" of any material that the undersigned Muslim organizations, many of them Muslim Brotherhood front groups, deemed unacceptable.

LESS THAN A WEEK before the Boston Massacre bombing, Clare Lopez, a former CIA operations officer and presently a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy, published a detailed report entitled "History of the Muslim Brotherhood Penetration of the U.S. Government." She relies heavily on two documents laying out the Muslim Brotherhood's plans for spreading Sharia law in America. The first is the Explanatory Memo uncovered by the FBI during the Holy Land Foundation Hamas-funding prosecution.

The Memo refers to the use of front-groups that will raise little concern, and lists 29 such groups in the United States, including the Muslim Student Association, with 600 chapters, the Council on Islamic-American Relations (CAIR), and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). These groups are almost all treated by the U.S. government and the media as "moderate" and "mainstream" Muslim defense organizations, despite their links to the Muslim Brotherhood.

The second document referred to by Lopez is "the Project" dated 1982 and uncovered by Swiss authorities in a 2001 raid on the villa of a suspected terrorist. It sets forth seven rules for front groups, including avoid open alliance with terrorists or expressions of support for terrorism; use deception to conceal the true goals of the organization; establish funding networks; create alliances with "progressive" organizations; influence Muslims living in the West to maintain a jihad mentality; and maintain hatred of Jews.

Muslim Brotherhood affiliated organizations have followed the game plan with remarkable discipline. By constantly raising the specter of Islamophobia, they have succeeded in stifling open discussion of the Islamic element behind terrorist threats to America. Lopez lists a number of figures with extensive connections to the Muslim Brotherhood who attained influential positions in the United States government and as presidential advisors, at least two of whom were subsequently convicted of terrorism related offenses.

WILLFUL BLINDNESS to what is known comes at a high cost. Alan Johnson prepared a lengthy government report while working in the United Kingdom's Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism, based on interviews with young British Muslims who had been radicalized. In virtually every case, there was a skilled recruiter, who succeeded in aligning the target's life goals with a larger narrative involving a rigid, angry, politicized distortion of Islam. And that contact is rarely confined to just the Internet, but involves personal contact – e.g., in a mosque or at overseas training centers.

Even if the Tsarnaev brothers acted as "lone wolves," not in conjunction with any overseas terror organization, the older brother Tamerlan, almost certainly had terrorist training abroad. Reporter Judith Miller points out that virtually everything about Tamerlan would have earned him surveillance under the guidelines of the New York City Police Department anti-terror unit: his travel to Dagestan, a Russian Republic with an Islamist insurgency; the warning from the Russian government that he could be dangerous; his rapid behavior changes – adopting traditional Islamic clothing and growing a beard. Once under surveillance his Internet postings and even his purchase of a pressure cooker might have alerted authorities.

Yet the NYPD anti-terrorist surveillance program, which is credited with foiling 16 potential attacks, has been under constant assault by so-called "mainstream" Muslim defense organizations since the 2007 publication of its 2007 Report "Radicalization in the West: the Homegrown Threat." Last year Associated Press won a Pulitzer Prize for "exposing" the NYPD's surveillance program.

After Boston, any law enforcement agency that does not have a program in place based on the NYPD model is in dereliction of duty. Israelis would know that.

Read other articles by Jonathan Rosenblum at Jewish Media Resources

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Technorati Tag: Boston Marathon Bombing and Israel and and Western Civilization.

By Bungling Both Iran and Russia, Obama Continues To Empower Syria

2013-05-18T21:17:00.000-04:00

For Immediate Release:
May 16, 2013

Contact: info@humanrightsvoices.org
Follow us on Twitter

Obama and Kerry's Fingerprints
All Over Syria Crisis

This article by Anne Bayefsky originally appeared on FOX News.

In Syria, the motto for stopping the bloodshed might be summed up this way: when the going gets tough, the tough hold a conference. That’s the latest word from Secretary John Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov who are planning the event for some time in June. Neither Assad, nor the opposition, has committed to attend.

Meanwhile, the United Nations General Assembly President Vuc Jeremić raised the number of dead on May 15 to “at least 80,000 people, most civilians.” Syrian NGOs this week put the figure at more than 94,000. With the Assad regime busy adding to the death toll, and rebels recently releasing a video of one of their own cutting out and then eating the heart of a Syrian soldier, the unfortunate reality is that good guys are few and far between.

Cannibalism versus mass murder appears to leave poor President Obama in a quandary not of his own making. But the reality is that it is the President who has repeatedly miscalculated on the Arab “spring” and who early on emboldened President Assad.

Obama sent a U.S. Ambassador to Syria for the first time in six years with no promise of reform in return. Obama’s Secretary of State gave traction to the claim that Assad was “a reformer.”

Closely interconnected to Assad’s bloody calculation is the administration’s dithering on Iran. The Iranians don’t see the downside from backing Assad, just as they don’t fear anything from President Obama except more hot air. The “door is still open” but the “window is closing” routine is by now a standing joke. In April at his first Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearing following his confirmation, Kerry analogized the Iranian and American election processes and said we couldn’t possibly do anything on Iran until their June so-called “elections” had played themselves out.

Similarly, the administration’s bungling of America’s relationship with Russia has also licensed Assad. Kerry was in Russia on May 7, 2013 talking a Syrian conference at the same time that the Russians were giving the green light to sell Syria advanced ground-to-air missile systems.

So, yes, it’s now all so complicated.

Syrian forces use chemical weapons on their own people. On May 5, 2013, a UN Syria inquiry official said there was strong evidence that Syrian rebels have used chemical weapons.

Assad launches more attacks on civilians. Last week Syrian rebels again kidnapped UN peacekeepers.

Assad is revving up Palestinian terrorists, long harbored in Damascus, to attack Israel. Al Qaida fingerprints are clearly visible among the Syrian opposition.

And then there’s the impotent United Nations. Security Council action is stymied by the Russian veto. So yesterday, the General Assembly adopted a resolution introduced by Qatar. The vote was 107 for, 12 against and 59 abstentions – that’s barely half in favor of coming down hard on Assad. The accompanying UN press release opens with this: “the General Assembly took action…” Action, UN-style.

Secretary Kerry says the forthcoming conference will be driven by an agenda which does not call for Assad’s ouster but lets the parties decide on transitional players “by mutual consent” – notwithstanding they can’t agree on anything else.

Americans are genuinely concerned by the horrific human rights violations in Syria but are not interested in installing and promoting one more anti-American and anti-Israel Arab government at their expense. The Obama administration has made a mess of it, in large measure by taking its eye off the Iranian ball. Get serious about Iran and its client states and terror satellites will feel the blow.

Anne Bayefsky is director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust. Follow her @AnneBayefsky.

For more human rights and United Nations coverage see www.HumanRightsVoices.org.

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Technorati Tag: Syria and Russia and John Kerry and Obama and Iran.