for Iran’s Military Dictatorship
By Clare M. Lopez
19 June 2009

With Iranians taking to the streets again by the hundreds of thousands, memories flash back to 1979, the last time that sheer mass of numbers fired with hatred of tyranny toppled an autocrat in Tehran. As the United States (U.S.) and the world stood by and watched, the people’s Revolution was stolen by brutal theocratic thugs intent on flinging Iran back to the 7th century even while arming itself with 21st century technology. Now, after 30 years of developing biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons, wrecking every chance for peace between Israel and Palestinians, launching terror across the globe, and perpetrating a gruesome spectacle of atrocities against their own people, the aging mullahs clinging to their Khomeinist inheritance face a population on the edge of rebellion.

Few if any commentators, however, have noted that in the swirl of idealistic young students, restive ethnic minorities, and women determined to claim their equal place in Iranian society, what the cell phone cameras and Twitter Retwits cannot possibly capture is the crass corruption of both sides in this Persian putsch. To paraphrase Patrick Buchanan, it’s Rafsanjani’s boys versus Khamenei’s boys.
The blood-soaked rule of the Ayatollah Khomeini turned centuries of Shi’a tradition on its head with his Velayat-e Faqih (Rule of the Jurisprudent) ideology and imposed a moral code imported wholesale from the baking deserts of the Arab Bedouin. As Khomeini reminded his disillusioned co-revolutionaries, “this revolution was not about the price of watermelons.” Thirty years on, though, absolute power has corrupted absolutely, and what’s left of the Khomeini Revolution is all about the money and very little else.

Khomeini’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) now fights mostly to guard its financial empire. It’s the PTSD-addled survivors of the 1980s Iran-Iraq war who today pledge bayat to Khomeini’s successor, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. But aside from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, first selected as president in 2005, and his chiliastic coterie of Twelver well-watchers, many of the IRGC’s elite commanders are a lot more focused on expanding their personal net worth than they are the austere ideals of a bygone Revolution. It was not long after Khomeini passed on to face the torments of the grave that the IRGC began using force and intimidation to grab whatever financial assets it could get its hands on. As the years of the Rafsanjani presidency gave way to Khatami and eventually to Ahmadinejad, the IRGC grew both powerful and rich. These days, the Iranian press writes of men such as Sadeq Mahsouli and IRGC companies such as its engineering arm, Khatam Al-Anbia, which they say regularly receive no-bid contracts awards worth billions of dollars in the oil, gas, petrochemical, and infrastructure development sectors. Not satisfied with owning outright massive segments of the Iranian economy from banking and finance to manufacturing and the defense industry, the IRGC reportedly is involved in black market smuggling as well. Like Mahsouli, with his six mansions and a net worth estimated by Iranian media to be in the tens of millions of dollars, the IRGC has come a long way from the zealous religiosity of its wild-eyed origins.
With that economic clout has come an increasingly powerful position for the IRGC within Iran’s political leadership; calculated support from the Supreme Leader has enabled the IRGC to turn Iran into a military dictatorship, albeit one with a turban at the top. Not all the IRGC rank and file get to share in the lives of luxury enjoyed by its leading commanders, however, and this surely must be cause for resentment. Should Khamenei deploy the IRGC and its subordinate Bassij and Ansar-e Hizballah divisions onto the streets to confront the demonstrators as threatened, the commitment of those cadres to their corrupt leadership will take on a critical importance.

Besides the furious crowds, there is another element to this showdown, whose presence mostly behind the curtain of Iran’s public face veils its power. This element is comprised of a gang of clerical billionaires whose looting of Iran’s wealth has been no less rapacious than that of the IRGC. Led by former president and speaker of the Majles, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, and fronted for this election by former prime minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi, this gang is fighting not just to defend its share of the Iranian pie from the IRGC maw, but for its very survival. These two gangs are like mafia families and to characterize the one as “moderate” or “reformist” and the other as “conservative” is to miss the point entirely. Neither gang has ever demonstrated the slightest inclination to anything remotely resembling representative governance that is responsive to its electorate. In any case, the entire electoral edifice in Iran is but a façade that bleeds off a bit of the suppressed steam from an oppressed population but in fact wields no real power against the system of clerical control that is enshrined in Iran’s constitution.

Exactly when or even if the Rafsanjani-Mousavi gang consciously decided to confront the IRGC gang via the mechanism of the always fixed and fraudulent electoral system or whether there was or wasn’t an understood deal with the Supreme Leader may be debated as may the question of whether they deliberately roused the fury of Iran’s youthful masses to serve their own ends. What is certain at this point is that from the capi to the fanti, these Mafiosi all miscalculated badly. With a population that is at least 60% under the age of 30, some 23 million Internet users, 7 million bloggers, and an untold number of Tweeters, Iran today cannot be controlled the way the rough-bearded revolutionaries of 1979 did it. Even though everyone in Iran knows the elections are rigged, the staggering brazenness of this year’s fraud took many by surprise. It was over the top and overnight served to transform a simple protest against election results to something far more serious for the Tehran regime. Whether Mousavi intended to topple a regime or not, he’s now leading a revolution. As Ambassador John Bolton put it on Fox News, “Mousavi stands at the Rubicon”.

But events on the streets of Tehran, Tabriz, Mashhad, and Shiraz are making his decision on whether to cross over that dividing line about as relevant as the hapless Obama administration’s faint-hearted reticence, gazing impotently from the sidelines as if at a football match while the Iranian people begin at last to stand up for their liberty. The Iranian Resistance is seizing the moment in defiance of the bloodshed already unleashed by a regime whose escalating threats to them signal desperation, not resolve: it has issued a seven-point manifesto that makes clear its objectives are nothing short of regime change. Among its demands are stripping both Khamenei and Ahmadinejad of power and formation of a new government headed by Mousavi.

The U.S. Congress at least has passed a resolution in support of the Iranian people’s battle for democracy and rule of law. Concern for the protesters is a laudable, if feeble, sentiment. But failure by the erstwhile leader of the free world to stand with the Iranian people as they stand up to tyranny bespeaks vacillation beyond mere concern about tainting the legitimacy of regime opponents or possessing the willpower to follow through. After all, leaders of the last student uprising in Iran, the one crushed by the so-called “moderate” president Khatami in 1999, now tell us they took renewed hope and found the strength to hold fast to their resistance even in their jail cells and under torture because they heard that the United States of America spoke up for them and their cause. Somewhere in Evin Prison today, young Iranian freedom fighters wait for that word of support. Withholding it on the advice of lobbyists more hopeful of future oil and business contracts than a liberated and democratic Iran will not save a corrupt regime or its Mafiosi challengers from the wrath of a people determined to be free.
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Clare Lopez is the Vice President of the Intelligence Summit and a Professor at the Centre for Counterintelligence & Security Studies.

Missiles, Bombs and Tweets
By Sarah N. Stern, June 19, 2009

“Dictatorial regimes and their behavior are a phenomenon that must be confronted constantly... It is very important to explain and stress over and over again that people fighting for human rights are not doing this just for themselves, but they are opposing the humiliation of individuals wherever they may be”---Vaclav Havel, Former Czech President

At this point, we are still unsure whether or not the beautiful dissident struggle for increasing freedoms under the Iranian theocratic boot will flower like the orange revolution of the Ukraine in 2004 to 2005, or will be squelched like the pro-democracy movement of Tiananmen Square, China in 1989.

We know that the Iranian government has a Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Basij Militia and a vast army, and an arsenal of missiles, bombs and guns. Skulls have been crushed. People have begun to disappear from the streets. The demonstrators have simply their consciences, their yearning for freedom and their tweets.

We also know that the leader of the free world should be standing beside those who are struggling on the side of freedom. President Obama has begun slowly, after seven days of the dissidents courageously putting their very lives on the line, to utter some words of encouragement.. But if we do not stand on the side of freedom from repression, what is America all about? What sort of values do we represent if we descend to the least common denominator of governance, as though those
who rule with an iron whip for a despotic theocracy are on the same moral plane as those who struggle for democracy?

Part of the reason why it has seemed so difficult to have been able to have thrown his support behind those who truly yearn for feedom is that the academy has had a pernicious influence on the feeling of security with the American project.

American exceptionalism, being what President Reagan had stated was “that shining city on the Hill” is difficult to swallow together with those who have been products of our educational system for the last several decades where much of the academy has been imbued with a sense of American guilt over much exaggerated stories of colonialism and Western imperialism.

It is this sort of knee-jerk reaction that has led many liberals, who, ironically once represented the party of the little people and the under-dog, to try not to offend the very worst despots and dictators on the world stage. This impulse inhibits them from clearly being able to distinguish between good and evil. In an attempt to understand the world view of those who are clinging onto the reigns of
power today, theyare imbued with a sense of moral ambiguity at best, or insecurity and guilt over America’s past “sins” at worst. What has occurred therefore is a tacit affirmation of the status quo and a tepid and tardy display of support of those who represent the American core values of peaceful dissent and a yearning for democracy and freedom.

However, today, Friday June 19th, in an astonishing bipartisan act of political courage, the US Congress overwhelming passed a resolution in support of the Iranian Dissidents in a vote of 430 to 1. Chairman Howard Berman, (Democrat, California), and Ranking Minority Leader, Ileana Ros-Lehitnan, (Republican, Florida), are to be applauded for their wisdom in the language and for their successful stewardship of this through the House. This is a sure sign that the our American legislators have cast their lot with those who represent human rights and freedom over those who represent the crushing boot of oppression.

An Iranian dissident has just emailed me that he has had a call from inside Iran, pleading that the West know that this pouring out onto the streets is not about a mere election dispute. It is no
longer about simply ballot counting and rigged elections. Mousavi has become an icon of their general yearning for equality, freedom and democracy.

This whole revolution would not be possible had it not been for the generation who is using Twitter and Facebook and other devices to escape the brutal scrutiny of the authorities of the dictatorial Middle Eastern regimes.

One of my close Syrian friends, Ahad Al Hendi, had used the internet to blog against the government, but was discovered and turned in by the owner of the internet café. He was imprisoned and tortured, and upon release, our State Department helped him to gain political asylum within the United Sates. However, many of his friends have not been quite so lucky and are still rotting away in Syrian jails.

In EMET, we have made it a cornerstone of our philosophy to deal with brave Arab and Muslim dissidents ever since our inception. We nurture and value the friendships of those who have the wisdom to speak out against the dictatorial regimes where many of them have been raised. They have had the intelligence to penetrate through the hateful anti-American, anti-Israeli, and anti-Semitic propaganda that they had been schooled upon. We honor them on Capitol Hill, bring them into our homes to break bread, laugh and cry with them over personal events in their lives, and bring them to briefings with staffers on the Hill, so that they can relate to the human faces behind their suffering.

We are now working to strengthen the voice of the dissent inside Iran and the other repressive regimes of the Middle East, through the Cyber Dissident Project. Similar to the devices which have escaped the watchful eye of the Iranian regime, EMET will begin using twenty-first century technology to work in partnership with other NGO’s to promote and amplify the message of dissent, and to penetrate through the Middle Eastern Iron Curtain of hatred.

The Brutal Reality of the Middle East

By Sarah N. Stern

In the punishing sun of the Middle East one is often prone to seeing desert mirages. The climate of the desert is so much harsher than what we find it easy to wrap our minds around, here in the West. The average temperature in Riyadh in the summer is approximately 104 degrees. Without protection, one can easily be scorched.

The seventeenth century British philosopher John Locke felt that the underlying nature of mankind was essentially good and would be constrained by acts of conscience. His contemporary, Thomas Hobbes, famously argued that “life is nasty, brutish and short”, and that people were governed by essentially selfish motives.

Some of President Obama’s statements indicate he is seeing the Middle East through a Lockian view of mankind. However, Israel is forced to survive in what anybody who has followed the events in the Middle East over the past several decades would have to conclude is a Hobbesian neighborhood.

President Obama’s harsh rhetorical tone towards Israel marks a dramatic departure from every single president going back to Lyndon Johnson. The issue at hand is not about borders or settlements or even of the natural growth onto Israeli towns or neighborhoods, the issue is one of maintaining defensible boundaries and the necessary strategic depth for Israel to survive in the age of terrorists, rockets and ballistic missiles.

Seeing the empirical evidence of what has happened to Sderot and other towns of the Western Negav in the light of the Gaza withdrawal, where Kassam missiles are continuously raining down on its population, one would easily conclude that a post-West Bank withdrawal would be a very alluring target for terrorist groups, putting their cross hairs that within striking distance of every major Israeli population center. One attack on Ben Gurian Airport, which would be in easy striking range, could paralyze the country from further air transit and isolate it. Israel’s strategic deterrence would be eradicated, actually increasing the allure of attacks on a very narrow Israel with no strategic depth with which to defend itself.

President Johnson, in the wake of the 1967, Six-Day War seemed to understand this, when he said “an immediate return to the situation as it was on June 4th, before the outbreak of hostilities, “was not a prescription for peace, but for renewed hostilities” What was needed, he said were “recognized boundaries” that would provide “security against terror, destruction and war.”

President Ronald Reagan on September 1, 1982 ,most vehemently argued for Israel’s right for defensible borders when he remarked that “In the pre-1967 borders, Israel was barely ten miles wide at its narrowest point. The bulk of Israel’s population lived within artillery range of hostile armies. I am not about to ask Israel to live that way again.”

President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, Warren Christopher wrote at the signing of the Hebron Accords that “a hallmark of U.S. policy remains our commitment to work cooperatively to seek to meet the security needs that Israel identifies.” Adding, “Finally, I would like to reiterate our position that Israel is entitled to secure and defensible borders.”

Finally, in a letter from President George W. Bush to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of April 14, 2004, after Prime Minister Sharon set out his Gaza Withdrawal Plan, President Bush wrote, “As part of the final peace settlement, Israel must have secure and recognized borders, which should emerge from the negotiations between the parties in accordance with UNSC Resolutions 242 and 338. In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949,and all previous efforts to negotiate a two-state solution have reached the same conclusion. It is realistic to expect that any final status agreement will only be achieved on the basis of mutually agreed changes that reflect these realities.”

If President Obama’s administration believes there is zero likelihood of renewed conflict in the Middle East, then perhaps it would be quite lovely or him to make a grand gesture on the back of Israel as a peace offering to the Arab world However, given the scorching climate within which Israel is forced to live, it is more than likely that the day after President Obama’s grand gesture is made, Israel and Israel alone, will be left out in the harsh desert sun to be scorched.

For a comprehensive discussion of this topic, and for all references, the author would like to refer the reader to the outstanding work of Dore Gold and Dan Diker of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs entitled, “Defensible Borders for a Lasting Peace”, which can be found at www.jcpa.org.

Hopes, Dreams and Nightmares
An Analysis of President Barack Obama’s Cairo Speech of June 5, 2009

By Sarah N. Stern and Kyle Shideler

President Barack Obama’s much anticipated Cairo speech had within it some high points and some rather disappointing ones. It carried a positive tone of respect to the Muslim world which can only help to build bridges and ease some unnecessary tension and several lofty universalist and humanist message that can only resonate well with anyone with a sense of the common thread of humanity and decency. However, there were also several deeply disturbing elements.

There are many conflicting narratives that are straining to be heard in the Middle East. In reaching out as strongly as he did to the Muslim world and glossing over many deeply troublesome issues, he seems to be signaling to all of us his desire to amplify the Arab narrative and to turn down the volume of the narrative of the small democratic state of Israel who has always shared a common value affinity with the United States, and who must live in a very tough neighborhood. This is deeply disturbing because in the international arena Israel and the United States have always had, with the exception of perhaps Micronesia, only one another to depend on. The worry is that this speech may be signaling an unwelcome bend in that long travelled road.

First the good news: President Obama spoke unapologetically of an America founded upon the ideal of equality, pluralism and tolerance. He spoke of his personal biography as someone with Muslim roots, and of the promise of opportunity that America holds for all.

Contrary to the worst fears of many, the President was clearly unapologetic in his defense of the security needs of Americans, promising to “relentlessly confront violent extremists who pose a grave threat to our security”.

The statements regarding the brutal reality of the Holocaust are welcome reality testers in a region that is replete with historical revisionism and Holocaust denial. Another critically important piece of reality that the President unequivocally stated was that “Israel’s right to exist cannot be denied”. As basic as this statement sounds, the fact that the leader if the most powerful nation in the world uttered in front of a Muslim and Arab audience it can only be of benefit in eradicating the fantasy that many unfortunately still harbor in that region of the world about Israel’s eventual destruction.
His statement that “Threatening Israel with destruction” or “repeating vile stereotypes about Jews is deeply wrong” can only help to cement in the minds of the Arab world that antisemitism is not tolerated within his administration and that Israel is not a phase to be wished away or vanquished, but is a reality that is here to stay.

Another piece of good news: The President clearly told the Palestinians that they must abandon violence that it is wrong, and has never succeeded as a tactic. (He failed to state however that it is morally wrong. Is it simply wrong because it never succeeds as a tactic? Was this an intentional act of omission, or what the State Department refers to as creative ambiguity?)

Another high note is that the President exhorted the Palestinians to develop its capacity to govern themselves and that Hamas must abandon violence, recognize past agreements and recognize Israel’s right to exist.

However, that takes us to the bad news, of which there is much. President Obama indicated a profound lack of understanding of history when he compared the struggle of Palestinians to that of the blacks within our own country. Black people never used terrorism against innocents in this country. In fact, both Fatah and Hamas with their constant incitement to hate and kill, using every means of communication necessary, ( including the media, textbooks and, sermons from the mosques) are more analogous to the Ku Klux Klan’s role in the black struggle for freedom within our own country. His use of the term “resistance” totally underscores his misconception that the Palestinian cause is a movement of freedom from oppression, when in fact, Christians and Arabs living in Israel are more free then in any Muslim Arab nation.

The President speaks of the “daily humiliations” of Palestinians living under occupation, totally forgetting the six opportunities offered to Palestinians to have their own state since the 1937 Peel Commission, if it meant that they would also have to accept the existence of Israel as a homeland for the Jews, up until the rejection by Yasser Arafat of the historic offer that was made to him on July 25, 2000 by Prime Minister Barak and President Bill Clinton.

That remarkable generous offer of shared sovereignty of Jerusalem, a return of all of the territories that Israel had captured in its defensive war of 1967, a re-absorption of thousands of refugees into Israel proper and a compensatory package of those that could not be absorbed was met with Arafat’s refusal to give a “yes” or a “no”, but simply walking away from the negotiating table. A few months later, his response came in the form of a renewed intifada which resulted in the loss of thousands of lives of thousands of lives.

If there were no terrorism, there would simply be no need for the “humiliation” of checkpoints or roadblocks, just as we would have no need to take off our shoes and wait on line to go through metal detectors in airports. Nor would there be a need for a security fence, which unfortunately reflects the reality of the tough neighborhood in which Israel is forced to live. It is an irrefutable fact that the erection of the security fence has resulted a great reduction in the amount of Israeli civilians killed by suicide bombings or stabbings.

When the President said that “The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements” there is some degree of ambiguity in the sentence structure as to whether or not that means the construction of new settlements or that existing settlement blocks would have to be dismantled.

If it is the latter, then that reflects a total misreading of American policy heretofore. Since 1967, there has been an appreciation of the vulnerability of Israel’s 1949 armistice lines, an appreciation of how easily Israel could be overrun by rapidly shifting military and paramilitary forces and a recognition in successive American administrations that Israel must have “secure and recognized borders.”

In fact, in immediate days subsequent to the Six Day War, President Lyndon Johnson stated that “an immediate return to the situation as it was of June 4”,before the outbreak of hostilities was “not a prescription for peace, but for renewed hostilities.” He states that the old “truce lines”, (the 1949 armistice lines which had been the previous borders), had been “fragile and violated”. What was needed were “recognized boundaries” that would provide “security against terror, destruction and war.”
This sentiment has been expressed over and over again by countless administrations, including that of Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and George W. Bush.

In fact, in a letter of understanding of President George W. Bush to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of April 14, 2004, the former president wrote, “As part of a final peace settlement, Israel must have secure and recognized borders, which should emerge from negotiations between the parties in accordance with UNSC Resolutions 242 and 338. In light if new realities on the ground, including already existing Israeli population centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949, and all previous efforts to negotiate a two-state solution have reached the same conclusion. It is realistic to expect that any final status agreement will only be achieved on the basis of mutually agreed changes that reflect these realities.”

It would be rather astonishing, in light of the historic record, if the intended meaning of President Obama’s statement would be to dismantle all settlements that have been erected since 1967.
The most troubling aspect of the speech, however, was the facile glossing over the existential threat that the Iranian nuclear program holds not just for Israel, but for the Sunni nations in the region. As opposed to previous presidents, there was no demand to Tehran for the immediate halt in uranium enrichment or nuclear production activities. It almost seems that he is expecting an Iranian nuclear capacity as a fait accompli.

This attitude marks a stark departure from that of previous administrations, and may constitute an extremely troubling shift, one that neither Israel nor the Sunni Arab states can well afford to live with.

Speaking of Iran, there was absolutely no reference to the Iranian proxies of Hamas and Hizballah, as such, even though they are among the most destabilizing elements in the region.
His words unfortunately also reflect a basic lack of understanding regarding radical Islam, and at worst, an implicit, if unintentional, endorsement of the campaign of stealth jihad being promulgated by Islamists in the West.

Take for instance, President Obama’s very first paragraph, which contains an endorsement of the mission of Al Azhar University as a, “beacon of Islamic learning.” It is impossible to imagine that the President really intends to endorse the university whose grand sheikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi issued a fatwa that suicide-bombers are martyrs under Islamic Sharia law , or which considers fatwas on subjects such as whether “the source of all the existing pigs in the world is Jews, who were cursed by Allah.” So instead, President Obama is speaking, not of an Al Azhar University which exists, but rather as he imagines it exists, regardless of facts to the contrary.

This kind of cognitive dissonance runs throughout the length of the speech, particularly when President Obama discusses Islam.

Take for example, President Obama’s reference to the 1796 Treaty of Tripoli. The treaty was signed by a newly forged United States which was too weak to defend itself from the piracy of the Barbary States. The text of the treaty primarily consists of a guarantee by The Pasha of Tripoli of the typical rights and freedoms of the seas, in exchange for goods and cash. It is, essentially, an agreement by the United States, to pay the jizya, the Shariah law proscribed tax on non-Muslims in Muslim controlled land. What is perhaps even more ironic is that the treaty lasted only 6 years, before being abrogated by the Pasha of Tripoli after President Jefferson, (whose ownership of a copy of the Koran President Obama highlights) refused to pay increasing exorbitant tribute, leading to a series of Barbary wars finally ending with an American victory and the end of extortion in 1815.

President Obama would not be the first President to misuse a historical reference in his speech, but in doing so, he reveals the depths of his mis-education regarding the Islamic world’s relationship with the West. Further this flawed understanding, is the basis for the policies he puts forward in the remainder of the speech.

Obama’s self-appointed responsibility to fight “negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear” seems to be taken directly from the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the largest voting Bloc of the United Nations, which in the past several years has been working tirelessly to criminalize free speech, as it relates to analysis of the history and theology of Islam. Take for instance, this week’s condemnation by the Islamic states of U.N expert on the right to free expression by Frank La Rue. La Rue said, "Restrictions should never be used to protect particular institutions or abstract notions, concepts or beliefs, including religious ones…" The OIC, led by Pakistan, and the Africa Group, led by Egypt, slammed the report, for failing to report on “abuses of this freedom [of expression].” Rather than use his opportunity at Cairo to defend the Western concept of free expression, President Obama implicitly endorses the OIC effort to silence its critics.

And while President Obama points to America’s freedom of religious practice, he uses it to endorse a typical Council on American-Islamic Relations talking point that somehow, somewhere, women are being kept from wearing hijabs in America. The reality however, is that when such controversies have arisen, they’ve invariably been in places where all attire covering the head was prohibited, or where it interfered with identification for law enforcement or other purposes. The inclusion of this statement by the president is at best shameless pandering, and at worst, seeks to reinforce the very false perceptions of America Obama claims to desire to dispel. Nor is it the only case where the President avoided an opportunity.

President Obama cited the figure of 1,200 American mosques, but fails to note that at least 27% of them are controlled by the Wahhabist-funded, Muslim Brotherhood-linked, North American Islamic Trust (NAIT). The NAIT is an arm of the Islamic Society for North America (ISNA), an unindicted co-conspirator in the successful Holy Land Foundation prosecution. The ISNA was listed as a partner of the Muslim Brotherhood, in the now infamous Holy Land Foundation trail documents, in which the Muslim Brotherhood calls for a strategy of "eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and 'sabotaging' its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions."

Of course, no pundits truly expected Obama to criticize the Muslim Brotherhood and its “sabotage” plot, in the same speech where U.S Officials allegedly insisted that M.B officials be allowed to make up part of the audience, according to Marc Ambinder of the news magazine, The Atlantic.

Perhaps the least noticed, but most egregious statement in this vein, comes from Obama’s proclamation that he is committed to improving American Muslim’s access to zakat, that is, charitable giving required under Islamic Shariah. The President appears to be asserting that some kind of substantial government action interferes with charitable giving by Muslims in the United States. The only government action which would appear to fit the bill, however, is the Treasury Department’s designation of several Islamic charities for contributing to the financing of terrorism, and the legal action taking by the justice department in terror financing cases, such as in the Holy Land Foundation trial mentioned early. The argument that these investigations are targeting innocent Muslims charities has been made, primarily by the same Muslim Brotherhood-linked groups listed as co-conspirators in the HLF case. Indeed, CAIR drew the same conclusion as to the meaning of Obama’s remarks as it praised the statement in a recent press release.

While it was heartening that President Obama brought up Human Rights and in particularly women’s rights during his speech, sadly the language did not go nearly far enough. Nowhere did President Obama address the wide spread practice of honor-killings in the Islamic world, which is now found even among immigrant communities in the West. As author and long-time feminist Phyllis Chesler wrote in the Spring 2009 Middle East Quarterly, “The United Nations Population Fund estimates that 5,000 women are killed each year for dishonoring their families. This may be an underestimate. Aamir Latif, a correspondent for the Islamist website Islam Online who writes frequently on the issue, reported that in 2007 in the Punjab province of Pakistan alone, there were 1,261 honor murders. The Aurat Foundation, a Pakistani nongovernmental organization focusing on women's empowerment, found that the rate of honor killings was on track to be in the hundreds in 2008.

Indeed President Obama’s claim that some in the West consider women who cover their hair “less equal” makes a mockery of the work being done by advocates to protect women who have been murdered by their own families for failing to adhere to Islamic standards of dress or morality, such as the Canadian case of 16 year old Aqsa Parvez, strangled by her father for refusing to wear a hijab.

In conclusion, as a sermon from a preacher, the speech was soaring, full of humanistic hopes and egalitarian dreams. As a policy statement, it lacked meat on the bone, and what there was to chew on glossed over so many very real threats to Western civilization and the balance of power in the Middle East, that if translated into policy prescriptions, we may well be left with a nightmarish scenario with which to contend for many years to come.

In the June 4th speech in Cairo, President Obama spoke about the bonds America shares with Israel, saying:

“America's strong bonds with Israel are well known.This bond is unbreakable.It is based upon cultural and historical ties, and the recognition that the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied.”

Indeed, Israel is the United States' strongest ally in the Middle East, as reflected in how often the two countries vote the same way in the United Nations:

(Source: U.S. State Department, Voting Practices in the United Nations, 2008, via Michael Rubin at The Enterprise Blog.)

Dear Barack, do not reward terror with gifts

President Obama, Please Reconsider...

June 4, 2009 | Eli E. Hertz

Mr. President: On June 4, 2009 in a Keynote Address to the Muslim world delivered from Cairo you asserted that it is "undeniable that the Palestinian people - Muslims and Christians - have suffered in pursuit of a homeland." You continued and claimed that "for more than sixty years they have endured the pain of dislocation" and "daily humiliations - large and small - that come with occupation." You concluded by stating "let there be no doubt: The situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own."

Mr. President: 61 years ago the Arabs in Palestine were neither hapless targets nor innocent bystanders. The human tragedy of being uprooted notwithstanding, the first stage of Israel's war of independence in 1948, was a fierce interethnic and anti-Zionist civil war in which the Arabs in Palestine were the aggressors and the initiators. Then came the all-out war and invasion of seven regular Arab armies whose participation the Arabs in Palestine engineered. There were 6,000 Israelis dead as a result of that 1948 war, in a total population of 600,000. One percent of the Jewish population was gone. In American terms, the equivalent is 3.0 million American civilians and soldiers killed over an 18-month period.

Mr. President: You speak about daily 'humiliation' of the Palestinian Arabs but ignore the real victims of Arab terrorism. In Israel, every Israeli is searched numerous times during the course of a day. Israelis are asked to open their bags and purses for inspection and in most cases are subjected to body searches with a metal detector every time they enter a bank or post office, pick up a bottle of milk at the supermarket, enter a mall or train station, or visit a hospital or medical clinic. Young Israeli men and women are physically frisked in search of suicide belts before they enter crowded nightclubs.

These ordinary daily humiliations extend to similar searches when Israelis go to weddings or bar mitzvahs. No one in the western world speaks of the humiliation that Jews in Israel are subjected to, having to write at the bottom of wedding invitations and other life cycle events, "The site will be secured [by armed guards]" - to ensure that relatives and friends will attend and share in their joyous occasion.

To date, no one protests the fact that, since the 1970s, Jewish schoolchildren in Israel are surrounded by perimeter fences, with armed guards at the schoolyard gates. Not one Arab village in Israel or the Territories has a perimeter fence around it. Guards are not required at Arab shops, cafes, restaurants, movie theaters, wedding halls or schools - either in Israel or in the Territories. Palestinian Arabs also do not need armed guards to accompany every school trip, youth movement hike or campout, as they are not targets of terrorism.

Israelis are told to disguise themselves when traveling abroad - not to speak Hebrew in public and not to wear garments that reveal their Jewish/Israeli origins. On the other hand, Arabs who frequent Jewish cities and towns in Israel wear their traditional Arab headgear without fear of being attacked or harassed.

In fact, Mr. President, the average Israeli is "humiliated and harassed" far more times a day than the average Palestinian Arab.

And as to the claim of occupation - the former president of the International Court of Justice, Professor, Judge Stephen M. Schwebel makes it clear:

"As between Israel, acting defensively in 1948 and 1967, on the one hand, and her Arab neighbors, acting aggressively, in 1948 and 1967, on the other, Israel has the better title in the territory of what was Palestine, including the whole of Jerusalem."

Thank you for your attention.

Eli E. Hertz

Israel Fulfilled its Peace Commitment in 242
Eli Hertz

It Returned 90% of the Territories Gained in the Six-Day War

UN Security Council Resolution 242, adopted on November 22, 1967, is the cornerstone for what it calls "a just and lasting peace" that recognizes Israel's need for "secure and recognized boundaries." The resolution became the foundation for future peace negotiations.

 

In the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel fought off the armies of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, gaining nearly 68,176 sq. km. of land. Since that time, in expectation for genuine peace, Israel relinquished a total of 61,360 sq. km. that represents 90% of the land gained in a defensive war imposed on Israel by its Arab neighbors' aggression.

The UN adopted Resolution 242 five months after the Six-Day War ended. It took that long because each word in the resolution was deliberately chosen, and certain words were deliberately omitted, according to negotiators who drafted the resolution.

The wording of UN Resolutions 242 and 338 clearly reflects the contention that none of the Territories were occupied territories taken by force in an unjust war.

Judge Stephen M. Schwebel, the former President of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague, stated after the Six-Day War ended:

"As between Israel, acting defensively in 1948 and 1967, on the one hand, and her Arab neighbors, acting aggressively, in 1948 and 1967, on the other, Israel has the better title in the territory of what was Palestine, including the whole of Jerusalem, than do Jordan and Egypt."

Professor Eugene Rostow, then U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs and the former dean of the Yale Law School, went on record in 1991 to make this clear:

"Resolution 242, which as undersecretary of state for political affairs between 1966 and 1969 I helped produce, calls on the parties to make peace and allows Israel to administer the territories it occupied in 1967 until a just and lasting peace in the Middle East is achieved. When such a peace is made, Israel is required to withdraw its armed forces from territories it occupied during the Six-Day War - not from the territories nor from all the territories, but from some of the territories, which included the Sinai Desert, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.

"Five-and-a-half months of vehement public diplomacy in 1967 made it perfectly clear what the missing definite article in Resolution 242 means. Ingeniously drafted resolutions calling for withdrawals from 'all' the territories were defeated in the Security Council and the General Assembly. Speaker after speaker made it explicit that Israel was not to be forced back to the 'fragile' and 'vulnerable' Armistice Demarcation Lines, but should retire once peace was made to what Resolution 242 called 'secure and recognized' boundaries..."

 

In meeting with Bibi, Obama boosted Iran

by Sarah N. Stern
Special to WJW

All lies and jest. Still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest - "The Boxer," Paul Simon

President Barack Obama emerged from his meeting last week with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanayhu with these words: "If there is a linkage between Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, I personally believe it actually runs the other way. To the extent that we can make peace to the Palestinians and the Israelis, then I think that it actually strengthens our hand in the international community in dealing with the Iranian threat."

This line of thought is feckless. It shows an unwillingness to enter into a necessary paradigm shift acknowledging what is going on within the region's hearts and minds. It assumes allegiance to statehood is the primary source of identification. In reality, the spirit that has captured the imagination of many in the Muslim and Arab world, particularly the youth, is loyalty to fundamentalist Islamism. This is far more pernicious than dealing with issues of loyalty to statehood.

Such loyalty to fundamentalism becomes a regnant part of one's very identity, and, particularly when dealing with promises of an afterlife, the stakes that youths are willing to risk are infinitely higher.

One explanation is satellite television, which has brought romantic images of the shahid and the suicide bomber into every Arab and Muslim living room. Yet, many in the Washington policy establishment stubbornly adhere to an outmoded paradigm of allegiance to the state as being the prevailing factor for identification and affiliation, and therefore the primary compelling factor for behavior within the Middle East.

A recent poll taken by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Polling Research indicates that if the Israel Defense Forces were to leave the West Bank today, and free and independent elections were to be held there, an overwhelming majority of residents would vote for Hamas, an Iranian proxy, over Fatah. It is due only to the IDF's finely honed skills that Fatah is in power today.

The "land for peace" paradigm has been empirically proven to have had the antithetical result of empowering precisely those enemies who despise both Israel, the Minor Satan, and the United States, the Great Satan, equally.

We cannot ignore what happened to Gaza since the summer of 2005, when Israel made the internally gut-wrenching decision to uproot every last Jew, in order to give the Palestinians an opportunity for statehood. That following January, Gazans went to the polls, and freely and independently selected the terrorist group, Hamas. Since then, more than 10,000 Kassam rockets have been launched from there, making life for people in Southern Israel a living hell.

Iran is a destabilizing influence, seeking to flex its muscles and having hegemonic ambitions over the entire region - and doing so from the Palestinian territories. Hamas gets a great deal of its commands, equipment, money and training directly from Tehran.

On March 5, Hamas and Iran held a conference in Tehran, probing ways to work closer together to promote "resistance against Israel." The conference was opened by Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameni, by calling Israel "a cancerous tumor" and exhorting that "resistance against the Zionist entity is the only way to save the Palestinians."

Therefore, immediate withdrawal, whether one states that it is for the sake of peace or not, will simply empower Iran, not the other way around.

Finally, in Iran, we are dealing with a toxic combination of state-sanctioned incitement to commit genocide and a full-throttled technological exertion to do so. Israel does not have the strategic depth to absorb one atomic bomb, making this an existential issue.

The essential question becomes: Will the Obama administration use the Iranian nuclear threat as leverage to extract concessions out of Israel, therefore buying itself goodwill within the international arena, as the Iranians use this time as a smokescreen to make their talk of genocide come to fruition?

Too Clever by Half: The fallacy of the “political wing”

“All lies in jest, but a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest”
-----Simon and Garfunkle, “The Boxer”

“War is a continuation of politics by other means,”
- Carl von Clausewitz

In March of this year, the United Kingdom announced that it would reestablish ties with Hezbollah’s “political wing,” which it had only cut the year before. That move was followed by comparable reconciliation with Hamas, including allowing an April videoconference with Hamas “political” leader Khaled Mashaal (the video conference failed due to a technical glitch however.) Similarly, for several years, media sources and former officials in the United States have been laying the ground work for the supposed disconnect between these terrorist groups and their “political wings.” Take for instance coverage of President Jimmy Carter’s April and December meetings with Hamas’ Khaled Mashaal in Damascus. Khaled Mashaal is described as leader of Hamas’ “political wing.” A 2006 Times (UK) article described former U.S Ambassador Edward Peck calling Mashaal, “moderate in many senses,” Hamas leaders are granted softball interviews by such established papers as the New York Times.

For their part, both Hezbollah and Hamas themselves routinely deny that their military and political departments operate separately. In response to the British decision to reestablish ties with the “political” wing of Hezbollah while continuing to criminalize “the military” wing, Hezbollah’s number two man Naim Qassem disputed the claim that there were two separate Hezbollahs:

"All political, social and jihad work is tied to the decisions of this leadership," he said, "The same leadership that directs the parliamentary and government work also leads jihad actions in the struggle against Israel."

Hamas likewise has disputed the idea that there was a political wing which did not control its military forces, “The political wing and the military wing do sometimes have different points of view, but we believe that at the end of the day the political wing will win the decision,” says Hamas veteran Sayyed Salem Abu Musameh in 2006, ““Unlike other organizations, every member of Hamas’s military wing also has education in ideology and culture as well as the gun.”

Terrorism experts likewise dispute the claims of distinction between “political” and “military” wings of Hezbollah and Hamas. Says Walid Phares, Director of the Future Terrorism Project about Hezbollah:

Its military organization responsible for terror operations is part of the Consultative Council (al majliss al Istisharee), which is Hizballah’s supreme command, along with, the organization's legislators, Fatwa clerics, financial executives and political operatives. This "politbureau" of Hizballah oversees the military, security, doctrinal and political actions of the entire apparatus -- there is no structural delineation. Furthermore, the Jihad Council, Hizballah's War Department, which issues the orders for acts of terror, is headed by the Secretary

General of the organization, Hassan Nasrallah and includes many of the organization’s ‘political leaders’…”

Hamas’ political operatives are equally involved in the command and control terrorist operations, says Matthew Levitt of the Washington Institute:

Hamas leaders readily acknowledge the central role that the organization's "political wing" plays in operational decision-making. For example, in May 2002, Hamas military commander Salah Shehada stated publicly that "the political apparatus is sovereign over the military apparatus, and a decision of the political [echelon] takes precedence over the decision of the military [echelon], without intervening in military operations.

If the distinction between “political” and “military” wings is a misleading one, why bother with claiming that there are wings at all? Terror finance expert Rachel Ehrenfeld says Hezbollah utilizes its political wing to orchestrate its “charities” on every inhabited continent, through donations, mosques and special events. Hezbollah also uses its political wing to engage in “social” projects , which are often praised in the foreign press, even as they are used as methods for recruiting the next generation of armed terrorists. Hamas, says Matthew Levitt, engages in similar behavior:

The charity committees, mosque classes, student unions, sport clubs, and other organizations run by Hamas all serve as places where Hamas activists recruit Palestinian youth for positions in the Hamas da'wa, for terrorist training courses in Syria or Iran, or for suicide and other terror attacks. Indeed, Hamas terror cells in the West Bank increasingly rely on Palestinians unaffiliated with the Qassam Brigades for logistical and operational support and even for leading suicide bombers to their targets.

These ubiquitous da’wa operations are allowed to serve as cover for terrorism work, and be used to distinguish Hamas and Hezbollah from the “bad terrorists” of Al Qaeda in the media, as former President Jimmy Carter attempted to do. But they are two sides of the same coin, as former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy writes of Hamas, “The military and social activities, in fact, liberally cross-pollinate… Social welfare, in fact, is a recruitment valve for the military wing. Indeed, Hamas's social activities include summer camps for children that are every bit as militaristic as al Qaeda's more infamous proving grounds in the Afghan-Pakistani borderland.

As the current administration ramps up to provide some $900 million for the reconstruction of Gaza, and as the Lebanese June elections will soon be upon us, the question must not be, “are Hezbollah and Hamas’ ‘political’ wings acceptable partners for negotiations and interactions?” Because they are not and will never be legitimate partners. To invert Clausewitz, for Hamas and Hezbollah, politics is just a continuation of war by other means. Yet too many British and U.S officials hear what they want to hear, when it comes to Hamas and Hezbollah. Instead, they should have listened to the late Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmad Yasin who said, "We cannot separate the wing from the body. If we do so, the body will not be able to fly.” And that’s neither a lie, nor jest.

The Belief in Impossible Things
By Sarah N. Stern, May 18, 2009

There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen…. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
Lewis Carroll, “Alice in Wonderland”

As I write these words, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is about to enter into the oval office and have his first meeting with President Barak Obama. The following impossible premises that are couched behind some assumptions in certain Washington policy circles might make the prospects of survival for our closest democratic ally in the Middle East, Israel, extremely tenuous. These beliefs will only come back to haunt us all when we are later forced to confront an intractable enemy in a battle that none of us in the West would have chosen to engage in, but may be, none-the-less, compelled to.

1. The premise that all international players adhere to the same rule book when it comes to nuclear weaponry. This is tantamount to saying that giving a loaded pistol to a three year old to play with is the same as giving it to highly trained police officer. We will not level the playing field by forcing the United States and Israel, rational actors with Western values about the sanctity of human life, sign a nuclear non-proliferation treaty that would compel them to eliminate their strategic deterrence by destroying their nuclear arsenal against an enemy that teaches the glory of death, martyrdom and suicide to its people. We are talking about vast cultural differences here when it comes to the value placed on a man’s life. We cannot deny the possibility that Iran or Pakistan might sign a nuclear non-proliferation treaty and then liken it to the Habidyah Accords that the Prophet Mohammed had signed with the tribe of Koresh in the Seventh Century, a stronger tribe that they weakened by this accord, and later vanquished. This premise that the ends justify the means, and that it is permissible to lie for the sake of Islam, is a huge cultural difference between the world of Islam and the liberal West that, unfortunately, has its basis in the religious teachings of the Koran.
   
   
2. The premise that immediate progress towards the peace process will weaken the Iranian theocracy and its hegemonic ambitions. In a recent poll taken by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research and Survey Research, if given a chance for free and open, democratic elections in the West Bank most Palestinians would overwhelmingly choose Hamas, an Iranian puppet, over Fatah. It is only due to the finely honed skills of the Israeli Defense Force that Fatah is alive in the West Bank today. We now have the empirically-proven, abject test case of Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in the summer of 2005, when Israel unilaterally elected to make the internally gut wrenching decision to uproot Israelis from their homes and make that territory Judenrein, offering them a highly sophisticated agricultural, economic basis in their greenhouses which the Palestinians in Gaza destroyed in a mayhem of hatred. The following January 2006, Gazans went to the polls and freely and independent elected the Iranian proxy, Hamas.
   
   
3. The premise that a two-state solution is just a matter of ironing out a few compromises between the parties and lies, immediately beyond the horizon. Just last week, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. “A Jewish state?”, Abbas said in a speech in Ramallah, “You can call yourselves anything you like, but I don’t accept it and I say it publicly.” This is like saying I will negotiate with the United States, but I will never accept that this is a state for Americans. Beyond that, this is not just a matter of simple nomenclature. This brings up a critical point in the negotiations. It points to the cherished Palestinian principle of the right of return, which would make the continued existence of Israel as both a Jewish state and a democracy a virtual impossibility.
   
   
4. The premise that we, in America, will buy the love of the radical Islamic world, in particular, and of the international community, as a whole, by compelling Israel into a time-line driven deal with the Palestinians. Another lesson that we should have learned from the Gaza withdrawal of 2005 is that democracy and nation building take time and effort, and cannot be won through elections, alone, which are only one characteristic of a democracy but does not constitute its essence. The essence of a democracy entails a free and independent judiciary, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, due process and a separation of powers, and a fundamental appreciation of the philosophy of Western liberalism. It insures the ability to go into the town’s square and to criticize those in power without fear for one’s very life. One election does not a democracy make. Neither does an immediate or premature bestowal of Palestinian statehood before the Palestinians have unequivocally demonstrated an adherence to the conditions that had been laid out in the Roadmap and had been accepted by the Quartet, The United States, Russia, The European Union, and the United Nations. It clearly states in the Roadmap that “A two state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will only be achieved through an end to violence and terrorism, when the Palestinians have a leadership acting decisively against terror and willing and able to build a practicing democracy based on tolerance and liberty.”

A prematurely born Palestinian state that does not adhere to these principles will only become a Hamas stronghold and will just be perceived in the eyes of the radical Islamist that hate both the Great Satan, the United States, and the Minor Satan, Israel, equally as a victory in its path towards radical Islamist hegemony over the West.

The litmus test for this is a simple one. When the Palestinian Authority no longer tries to enter into agreements with the terror-master, Hamas; When it amends the Palestinian National Covenant that remains in existence today, where 32 of the 33 articles speak about the eventual Palestinian conquest of all of the land of Israel; When it no longer tells its people that all of Israel will one day be theirs, when it stops using its text books, its television programs, its newspapers and its sermons from the mosques as a vehicle to propel Palestinians to believe in the myth that they can one day return to their grandparents vineyards in Haifa; When the deification of martyrdom, of hatred and of death is unequivocally removed from the Palestinian vocabulary; When terrorism is no longer used as a vehicle for negotiation or for blackmail, Then and only then will a two state solution be possible. And then both Palestinian and Israeli children will enjoy the opportunity of living out full rich lives in freedom and democracy, and the chance to actualize their human potential, which all children so richly deserve.

Close the Missile Defense Gap Now

By Larry Greenfield

April 29, 2009

Modern missile technology, in the hands of terror states and their proxies, threatens.

Paradoxical Outcomes
By Sarah N Stern

“He would see civilization in danger of perishing under the oppression of a gigantic paradox: he would see multitudes of people starving in the midst of plenty, and nations preparing for war although pledged to peace.”
Arthur Henderson

With a renewed sense of urgency, the Obama administration is about to take a fresh hand at eradicating the state of conflict that exists between Israel and the Palestinians. A day after his inauguration, the White House released a document entitled, “Renewing American Diplomacy” in which it is stated “US President Barak Obama will make progress in the Israeli Palestinian conflict a priority from day one.”

Along with this, there is currently a robust and popular sentiment among many that occupy positions of power in Washington, today, that in order to repair America’s standing in the international community and particularly in the Muslim and Arab world, progress will have to be made immediately on the Israeli-Palestinian front.

On February 26, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Senator John Kerry, held a hearing entitled, “Engaging with Muslim Communities around the World.” During this hearing, Chairman Kerry stated in his opening remarks:

Restoring our moral authority also inescapably demands that America return to our traditional role as an honest and firm broker in the Middle East peace process. In Gaza, I visited a village called Izbet Abed Rabbo, and I saw little Palestinian girls playing in rubble where, three months ago, buildings stood. It was searing. I said publicly in Gaza, as I’d said in the southern Israeli town of Sderot earlier that day, if Quincy were lobbing rockets into Boston, I’d have to put a stop to it. But the reality is that people on both sides deserve better—and we know what it’s going to take to get them there: two states side by side in peace and security.
I don’t want to delve too deeply into Israel-Palestine in this forum, but suffice it to say that without a demonstrated commitment to peacemaking as an honest broker, this will remain a millstone around any effort to reach out to Muslims anywhere. And as we work to empower partners from Morocco to northwest Pakistan, we can’t afford policies that make it unsustainable for locals to be seen as pro-American. We can’t afford to be politically radioactive.

It is therefore apparent that in the perception of many of the new power elites of the Obama administration, there is a sense of great exigency on coming to a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.

Prior to this, there have certainly been many noble attempts made, particularly since the Oslo Accords were signed on September 13, 1993, including Oslo I, the Wye River Accords, Oslo II Accords, The Hebron Accords, the Road Map, and culminating in the Gaza Withdrawal, where Israel went through the enormously difficult decision of disengaging from Gaza. The Israelis were so desperate to bestow the Palestinians sovereignty that they made the painful and divisive decision to unilaterally withdraw, even in the absence of a negotiating partner.

We all know the outcome of this withdrawal. On January 26, 2005, the Palestinian people freely went to the polls and democratically elected the radical Islamist group, Hamas to represent them, and the people living in neighboring Southern Israel have rarely had a day of peace ever since, with approximately 8,000 Kassam rocket missiles raining down on them.

We also know that Iran is flexing its muscles to become a regional superpower, to develop a nuclear bomb, (it already has enriched enough uranium), and to destabilize the region.
On March 12, 2009, President Obama said, “Iran continues to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security of the United States. ”

The Palestinian territories have become the current gymnasium for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to flex his muscles.

According to Dan Diker, scholar with the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, “There is a direct linkage between the conduct of the Palestinians and the wishes of the Iranians. The decisions that the Hamas leadership makes in Gaza are coming directly from Tehran via Damascus.”

A major new poll of Palestinians, living both in Gaza and the West Bank, conducted between March 5th and 7th, indicates increased support for the radical Islamist leader Ismail Haniyah of Hamas, over that of Fatah leader, Mahmoud Abbas. This was conducted by the Ramallah based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research.

As Ambassador Dore Gold has said, “Gaza poses a very real problem. It is a Mediterranean beachhead now for the Islamic Republic of Iran. It is supplying arms to Hamas. It is giving money to Hamas. It is training Hamas operatives in military groups outside of Tehran, run by the Revolutionary Guards.”

Listening to and understanding the Arab street makes one aware that there is currently a sweeping tide of the rise of political Islam. This extends from Gaza to Turkey to Egypt to Indonesia to Malaysia.

The premature creation of Palestinian statehood, before the people have demonstrated a willingness to live up to the demands of the Quartet , is almost assuredly to result in a new Iranian presence in the Middle East, which will be a destabilizing influence to the entire region.

The basic principles of the quartet: recognition of Israel, renunciation of violence and abiding by previous Palestinian commitments are not matters which can be negotiated. They serve as a fundamental basis which parties in any conflict would need before opening negotiations. Hamas has repeatedly rejected them, doing so upon taking power in 2006, and again in response to Secretary Clinton’s remarks in March. More recently, senior Fatah leader Mahmoud Dahlan explicitly stated that neither Hamas nor Fatah should recognize Israel, while explaining that the Palestinian government should publically claim to support previous commitments, while the political parties which make up the government should continue to reject them, in a cynical attempt to acquire aid from the international community.

However even such blatant evidence of duplicity does not prevent the “experts” from becoming too clever by half. Just as during the Oslo years, most of the West played “good cop/bad cop”, with Fatah and Hamas, the mandarins are now talking of speaking to “moderate members of Hamas”. On March 8th, 2009 U.S former officials including Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Lee Hamilton, Thomas Pickering, and Chuck Hagel wrote to President Obama urging him to open negotiations with Hamas.

Of course, that phrase “moderate members of Hamas” is the quintessential oxymoron. There are about as many “moderate members of Hamas” as there are gigantic midgets. In order to be a member of Hamas it entails nothing short of the immediate eradication of the Jewish state.

The buzzword right now, among the policy establishment is “engagement”. The intellectual elite, argues fallaciously that it was “the isolation of Hamas” that brought about its terrorism that led to the war in Gaza. What they fail to see is the distinction between a correlation and a causal relationship.

There were other factors that have led to the terrorism, including the constant incitement to hate and to kill that has taken root in the hearts and minds of the Palestinian body politic and that has been well documented by organizations such as MEMRI and Palestinian Media Watch.

An engagement with Hamas will ultimately lead to a marriage with Tehran in its quest for regional, and ultimately, global supremacy. And that would certainly not be good for America’s, or, for that matter, any democratic state’s, national security interests.

 

A Muslim Profile in Courage

By Sarah N. Stern

Many years ago, a Muslim with little known, but very real terrorist ties was about to be appointed to the Congressional Task Force of Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare. When I pointed this out to one member of congress, he replied: “Alright. Now please find for us some untainted Muslims or Arabs”

Since then, not only have I found untainted Muslims and Arabs but I have had the privilege to find and to befriend some incredibly heroic members of these communities, who have reached deep down inside of themselves, and somehow have managed to find the courage to tell the truth about radical Islam, and the nature of the Arab world from which many of them hail. Many of these people have faced social exclusion, and many have fatwas, Islamic death threats, hanging over their heads.

Oneof these rare, courageous individuals is Dr. Tawfik Hamid. Dr. Hamid was born and raised in Egypt. Although his parents were secular, the government run secular school he attended had religious instruction one day a week. The fear of a torturous hell was something that was deeply ingrained in his young mind.

By the age of ten, Dr. Hamid began to dream of becoming a religious jihadist. Many of his young friends were excited about the conflict that Islam waged over the West, and over the revival of Islamism. They looked toward Saudi Arabia for inspiration.

Young Tawfik became increasingly more religious, and had dreams of serving Allah, and becoming a shahid ,(martyr), like so many of his classmates and friends.Says Dr. Hamid now, “It felt the only true path, the moral thing to do. It is a result of a gradual, but constant process of brain washing.”

“One is taught not to question”, he continues, “one’s critical intellect is suspended.” The Arabic phrase is “fakir kufr”, which means that is you ever start to question, you become an infidel.”

By the age of eighteen Dr. Hamid was in medical school. The Egyptian government run medical school allowed radical lslamist instruction and recruitment. He willingly joined the terrorist group, Jamaa Islamiya, headed up by none other than Dr. Aiman Al-Zawahiri, (now the second in command of Al-Qaeda).

By the age of nineteen, Dr. Hamid was engaged in an operation where he was supposed to kidnap a policeman and murder him, when he had a sudden epiphany, an empathic moment when he realized he simply could not do this to a fellow human being.

Since then, Dr. Hamid has become a medical doctor and psychologist and has devoted his life toward a reformation of Islam, has studied the texts and is trying to emphasize the non-violent aspects of the religion he loves. He is working on combating radical Islam through a new interpretation of the texts to counterbalance the violence of the Salafists, and a peaceful curriculum that emphasizes critical thinking skills, beginning at an early age, before the jihadists can reach young minds.

Says Dr. Hamid, “Islam can and must be reformed in order to inoculate young Muslims against violent indoctrination. My thoughts and actions have been geared not to destroying Islam, but to saving Islam. My goal is, and has always been, to save the next generation of young Muslims-and society in general- from the catastrophe of Islamism.”

I, for one, feel privileged and honored to have known so many heroes in the battle that confronts our generation, today. (And only hope that I woulddo the same if I were intheirshoes).

EMET, The Endowment for Middle East Truth, will be honoring Dr. Hamid, along withSenator Jon Kyl, Senator Joseph Lieberman, Former Director of the CIA James Woolsey and Dr. Walid Phares, allheroes in the fight against radical Islam, on May 6th at a dinner in Capitol Hill.

 

The Southern Front- Islamic Terrorism and Failed States, South and Central America
by: Kyle Shideler, EMET Senior Research Fellow
March 30th, 2009

Concern over the potential threat of Islamic terrorism operating from South and Central America to strike the United States is not new. As early as 1992, Iranian proxy Hezbollah utilized the lawless enclave known as the Tri-border Area (TBA) which conjoins Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay to strike Jewish and Israeli targets in Argentina . Al Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Hezbollah are all believed to conduct organization and fundraising in the area. In 2002, Paraguay’s public prosecutor for drug trafficking and terrorism stated that since 1995 around $50 million dollars had been remitted to Hezbollah by Lebanese businessmen in the TBA , with as much as $300 to $500 million being transmitted all of the active Islamic terrorists both Sunni and Shiite.

So it has long been known that terrorist groups were active in Latin America, which is why the recent report by the Washington Times in which U.S officials candidly admitted that Hezbollah was utilizing Mexican Cartel controlled smuggling routes into the United States is not frightening because it is news; as it is frightening because it is not news.

Latin America has long been an unsung battle ground in the fight against radical Islam and its terror networks.  Typically when thinking of Islamist terror, the public imagines places like the remote areas of Waziristan on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border or the Bekaa Valley in Syria, or else the slums of Baghdad, Mogadishu and Gaza city. The truly forward thinking among us have  for years now expressed warnings  about Brussels, London and the other capitals of Europe as the Muslim population there is increasingly radicalized by Saudi funded mosques.
Obviously it is the matter of proximity which is most worrisome about Latin America and terror. But there is more to it than that. There are substantial areas in both South and Central America that contain the elements necessary to serve as Islamist bases of operations. That is no-go areas of increased lawlessness or complicit authority and wide-spread corruption.
 In addition to the already mentioned tri-border area (TBA), Islamist terror groups are actively working with existing criminal networks in Columbia’s city of Maicao, Venezuela’s Margarita Island and the Chilean city of Iquique. All are so-called “free trade” areas close to unregulated borders rife with organized transnational crime organizations.

It’s estimated that 60% of terrorist organizations have ties to the international drug trade. Hezbollah is known to engage in drug trafficking, as evidenced by the June 2005 cocaine ring broken up by Ecuadorian police which is believed to have funneled tens of millions of dollars to the “Party of God.” The Taliban also continues to fund itself through Afghanistan’s opium harvest, with as much as $400 million a year   available for terror activities generated by the distribution of 90% of the world’s heroin.

In addition to the lawless “free trade” regions of South America where terrorists and drug cartels mingle, there are the complicit governments like that of Venezuela, which has tightened its relationship with Hezbollah’s Iranian backer. The two rogue states have done $20 billion dollars worth of business together, including arms and explosives smuggling since 2000. Chavez in turn has continued to align himself with the Islamist bloc, going so far as to announce support for Hamas during Operation Cast Lead, leading to a diplomatic row with Israel. Iran has also expanded its consulates and embassy staff in Uruguay, Colombia, Nicaragua and Mexico in addition to Venezuela, all of which U.S officials believe to be cover for infiltration, espionage, and terror-related activities.   Another new opening for Iran is the recent election of El Salvador’s FMLN, a group of supposedly reformed Marxist guerillas heavily supported by Venezuela’s Chavez.  El Salvador’s newest vice -president Sanchez Ceren led an FMLN anti-America march celebrating the 9/11 terror attacks by Al Qaeda just days after the attacks, and the FMLN has maintained ties with Colombia’s Marxist narco-guerillas the FARC. Documents recovered by Colombian Special Forces have shown extensive ties between Chavez’s Venezuela, Venezuela’s anti-American ally President Rafael Correa of Ecuador, and the FARC.

With the assistance of anti-American regimes in Latin America, and with wide-spread corruption of government institutions caused by the flow of drug money, Islamic terrorists are finding the southern front an attractive option for infiltrating in the United States. In 2003, a Mexican investigation into a passports for cash scheme led to indictments and firing among the Mexican Embassy in Beirut Lebanon. One man who received a passport in the scam was Mahmoud Kourani, a Hezbollah operative who paid 3,000 dollars for the Mexican credentials. In 2008, three Afghani men were arrested by Indian authorities while en-route from New Delhi to Paris, France.  They reportedly paid $10,000 for the genuine, but altered passports. In 2006, Colombian police arrested 19 Muslim men with ties to Al Qaeda in a Colombian passport investigation which began in 2002 with 3 Iraqis who were captured with false passports in Bogota.

Yet if the present states of affairs in South America are discouraging, the future could be far worse.

Mexico- a Latin Waziristan?
Northern Mexican cartels are estimated to have killed 7,000 people last year in a ferocious wave of violence which included kidnappings, assassinations, and even beheadings in a manner reminisce of Al Qaeda’s bloody tactics in Iraq’s Al-Anbar providence. According to a 2008 Joint Operating Environment Study conducted by the Department of Defense, Mexico was ranked alongside Pakistan as a nation on the brink of failure,

“The Mexican possibility may seem less likely, but the government, its politicians, police, and judicial infrastructure are all under sustained assault and pressure by criminal gangs and drug cartels. How that internal conflict turns out over the next several years will have a major impact on the stability of the Mexican state.”

The goal of the Mexican cartels is to demoralize and wear down the Mexican state with a series of terroristic threats, violence, and assassination. If successful, the cartels could carve out a law-free zone of urban fiefdoms comparable to Beirut of the Lebanese civil war, complete with terrorists right on the American border. As Small Wars Journal authors John P. Sullivan and Adam Elkus explain:

“Worst of all, a failed state situation within Mexico would provide an ample staging area for terrorists seeking to operate in the Americas. It is in America’s national interest to ensure that Mexico does not become a large version of Ciudad del Este in the South American tri-border region, where all manner of criminals and terrorists have taken up residence. Mexican gangs already smuggle hundreds of thousands of foreigners across the border, there is an increasing likelihood that some of them will be terrorists.”

As we have learned from the continued conflict with the Taliban, which mounts its terror attacks against coalition forces from their protected areas in Northwest Pakistan, as well as in Somalia, Gaza, and Southern Lebanon, terrorists thrive in those areas where the rule of law is absent. There is no organization with more experience in how to establish an autonomous state within a state than Hezbollah, so news of cooperation with Mexican Cartels should be troubling indeed for lawmakers.

America has long had a dream of itself as being impenetrable, bordered East and West by vast oceans, and North and South by friendly partners. That pleasant fiction was temporarily battered on 9/11, but if narco-terrorists are allowed free reign on our southern border, that dream may be replaced with a very real nightmare.

 

“We are proud to say that Nonie Darwish was a Recipient of one of our “Speaker of the Truth” Awards at our annual “Rays of Light in the Darkness Dinner” in 2007.

An Arab-Made Misery

By NONIE DARWISH | FROM THE WALL STREET JOURNAL EUROPE

March 19, 2009

International donors pledged almost $4.5 billion in aid for Gaza earlier this month. It has been very painful for me to witness over the past few years the deteriorating humanitarian situation in that narrow strip where I lived as a child in the 1950s.

The media tend to attribute Gaza's decline solely to Israeli military and economic actions against Hamas. But such a myopic analysis ignores the problem's root cause: 60 years of Arab policy aimed at cementing the Palestinian people's status as stateless refugees in order to use their suffering as a weapon against Israel.

As a child in Gaza in the 1950s, I experienced the early results of this policy. Egypt, which then controlled the territory, conducted guerrilla-style operations against Israel from Gaza. My father commanded these operations, carried out by Palestinian fedayeen, Arabic for "self-sacrifice." Back then, Gaza was already the front line of the Arab jihad against Israel. My father was assassinated by Israeli forces in 1956.

It was in those years that the Arab League started its Palestinian refugee policy. Arab countries implemented special laws designed to make it impossible to integrate the Palestinian refugees from the 1948 Arab war against Israel. Even descendants of Palestinian refugees who are born in another Arab country and live there their entire lives can never gain that country's passport. Even if they marry a citizen of an Arab country, they cannot become citizens of their spouse's country. They must remain "Palestinian" even though they may have never set foot in the West Bank or Gaza.

This policy of forcing a Palestinian identity on these people for eternity and condemning them to a miserable life in a refugee camp was designed to perpetuate and exacerbate the Palestinian refugee crisis.

So was the Arab policy of overpopulating Gaza. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, whose main political support comes from Arab countries, encourages high birth rates by rewarding families with many children. Yasser Arafat said the Palestinian woman's womb was his best weapon.

Arab countries always push for classifying as many Palestinians as possible as "refugees." As a result, about one-third of the Palestinians in Gaza still live in refugee camps. For 60 years, Palestinians have been used and abused by Arab regimes and Palestinian terrorists in their fight against Israel.

Now it is Hamas, an Islamist terror organization supported by Iran, which is using and abusing Palestinians for this purpose. While Hamas leaders hid in the well-stocked bunkers and tunnels they prepared before they provoked Israel into attacking them, Palestinian civilians were exposed and caught in the deadly crossfire between Hamas and Israeli soldiers.

As a result of 60 years of this Arab policy, Gaza has become a prison camp for 1.5 million Palestinians. Both Israel and Egypt are fearful of terrorist infiltration from Gaza -- all the more so since Hamas took over -- and have always maintained tight controls over their borders with Gaza. The Palestinians continue to endure hardships because Gaza continues to serve as the launching pad for terror attacks against Israeli citizens. Those attacks come in the form of Hamas missiles that indiscriminately target Israeli kindergartens, homes and businesses.

And Hamas continued these attacks more than two years after Israel withdrew from Gaza in the hope that this step would begin the process of building a Palestinian state, eventually leading to a peaceful, two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There was no "cycle of violence" then, no justification for anything other than peace and prosperity. But instead, Hamas chose Islamic jihad. Gazans' and Israelis' hopes have been met with misery for Palestinians and missiles for Israelis.

Hamas, an Iran proxy, has become a danger not only to Israel, but also to Palestinians as well as to neighboring Arab states, who fear the spread of radical Islam could destabilize their countries.

Arabs claim they love the Palestinian people, but they seem more interested in sacrificing them. If they really loved their Palestinian brethren, they'd pressure Hamas to stop firing missiles at Israel. In the longer term, the Arab world must end the Palestinians' refugee status and thereby their desire to harm Israel. It's time for the 22 Arab countries to open their borders and absorb the Palestinians of Gaza who wish to start a new life. It is time for the Arab world to truly help the Palestinians, not use them.

Mrs. Darwish, who grew up in Gaza City and Cairo, is the author, most recently, of "Cruel and Usual Punishment," (Thomas Nelson, 2009).