Tag Archive for: Middle East

Putin to those who supported the “Arab Spring”: “Do you realize what you have done?”

“Instead of the triumph of democracy and progress, we got violence, poverty and social disaster — and nobody cares a bit about human rights, including the right to life. I cannot help asking those who have forced that situation: Do you realize what you have done?”

No, they don’t realize what they have done, and they’re poised to do more of it. And those of us who warned at the time that the “Arab Spring” would not lead to “the triumph of democracy and progress,” but to “violence, poverty and social disaster,” were dismissed and derided as racist, bigoted “Islamophobes.” And no matter how often the establishment analysts get things wrong, and disastrously, fatally so, they never get called to account, and keep applying the same failed solutions over and over again.

“Putin: ‘Do you realize what you have done?,’” by Everett Rosenfeld, CNBC, September 28, 2015:

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday admonished those who supported democratic revolutions in the Middle East, telling the United Nations they led to the rise of a globally ambitious Islamic State.

“Instead of the triumph of democracy and progress, we got violence, poverty and social disaster — and nobody cares a bit about human rights, including the right to life,” Putin said through a translator. “I cannot help asking those who have forced that situation: Do you realize what you have done?”

The Russian president added that the power vacuum following these revolutions led to the rise of terrorist groups in the region — including the Islamic State group.

He told the General Assembly it would be an “enormous mistake” not to cooperate with the Syrian government to combat the extremist group.

“No one but President (Bashar) Assad’s armed forces and Kurdish militia are truly fighting the Islamic State and other terrorist organizations in Syria,” he said.

In an earlier speech at the U.N. , President Barack Obama said it would be a mistake to think that Syria could be stable under Assad.

Acknowledging some of the criticism lobbed at Russia’s proposal, Putin said his country is only proposing to help save the world from terrorism.

“I must note that such an honest and frank approach from Russia has been recently used as a pretext to accuse it of its growing ambitions — as if those who say it has no ambitions at all. However, it’s not about Russia’s ambitions, dear colleagues, but about the recognition of the fact that we can no longer tolerate the current state of affairs in the world,” he said.

He proposed a “generally broad international coalition against terrorism,” likening the suggestion to the anti-Hitler coalition that brought together disparate interests to battle fascism in Europe.

Putin warned that international policy toward the region has led to an Islamic State with plans that “go further” than simply dominating the Middle East. And citing recent data about failures in successfully recruiting “moderate” Syrian opposition, Putin said countries opposed to Assad are simply worsening the situation.

“We believe that any attempts to play games with terrorists, let alone to arm them, are not just short-sighted, but hazardous. This may result in the global terrorist threat increasing dramatically and engulfing new regions,” the Russian leader said….

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Pressure on Obama grows to declare war against Christians a genocide

“Christianity in the Middle East is shattered,” Rep. Jeff Fortenberry, Nebraska Republican, told the IDC [In Defense of Christians] conference on Sept. 9. “The ancient faith tradition lies beaten, broken and dying. Yet Christians in Iraq and Syria are hanging on in the face of the Islamic State’s barbarous onslaught. This is genocide.”

Yes. And as the Islamic State itself tells the world, it is the direct result of devout Muslims following the commands in the Qur’an, imitating Muhammad’s example as extolled in the ahadith and the Sira, and applying the doctrines of Islamic jurisprudence. Islam itself is the direct cause of the first genocide of the 21st century.
“Pressure Grows to Declare War Against Christians a Genocide,” By Douglas Burton, Washington Times via AINA, September 23, 2015:

Memorial to victims of 2010 church bombing; Baghdad, Iraq.

Human rights activists see it. Foreign leaders see it. And more than 80 members of the U.S. Congress see it. Together, they are pressuring the leader of the free world to declare there is a Christian genocide going on in the Middle East.

Their campaign — which was discussed at a Capitol Hill conference earlier this month hosted by the two-year-old In Defense of Christians nonprofit — has an influential ally on its side.

Pope Francis, making his first visit to the United States on Wednesday, has noted the number of Christians being martyred today exceeds the number martyred during the days of the Roman Empire.

In fact, the sheer numbers of Christians murdered and tortured every year in a dozen countries in the developing world is only getting worse, thanks to the relentless campaign of the ISIS and al-Qaeda terror groups.

For example, in 2014, 2,000 Christians were murdered in Iraq alone, which is the number cited by historian Edward Gibbon as the total number of Christian martyrs in the first three centuries of Christianity.

In Iraq, where Christian churches were planted 1,800 years ago, Christianity has been wiped out except for 200,000 refugees sheltering in Kurdistan and a few in Baghdad. Their language, Aramaic; their homeland, the Nineveh Plain; and their calamity are Biblical in scale. Hundreds have been publicly tortured and executed in Mosul while women and children have suffered severe levels of sexual violence since the Islamic State took control in 2014.

“Christianity in the Middle East is shattered,” Rep. Jeff Fortenberry, Nebraska Republican, told the IDC conference on Sept. 9. “The ancient faith tradition lies beaten, broken and dying. Yet Christians in Iraq and Syria are hanging on in the face of the Islamic State’s barbarous onslaught. This is genocide.”

A year after Congress authorized a special envoy to expedite the humanitarian relief of persecuted minorities in Iraq, the Obama administration has finally chosen a person to fill the spot. Knox Thames has been named the State Department’s special adviser for religious minorities in the Near East (NEA) and South and Central Asia (SCA). His appointment was announced Sept. 16 by Ambassador David Saperstein, ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom. The Christian refugees in Irbil hope that Mr. Thames hits the ground running.

“The appointment represents a positive step toward strengthening the U.S. response to religious persecution in the Middle East,” says Delia Kashat, who works for the Nineveh Council of America, a newly established office that raises awareness on the plight of threatened Iraqi minorities, including the Yazidis.

“History is repeating itself,” she says of the latest crisis that reminds many refugees of the massacre of 3,000 Assyrian Christians in August 1933 and the Armenian genocide of 1915 that also claimed the lives of many Assyrian Christians.

“Having suffered multiple genocides over time, the true natives of Iraq and Syria serve as the equilibrium and peacemakers of the country,” she says. Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Assyrian and Chaldean Christians in all provinces have suffered kidnappings, torture and brutal attacks, and massive exodus has followed the ascendance of the Islamic State.

Ms. Kashat grew up in the Detroit metro area, home to around 150,000 Chaldean Christian immigrants, but her parents were born in the Nineveh Plain and fled Iraq in 1973. “They came to this country because this is where is they could freely live and practice their faith,” she says.

Whether they call themselves Assyrian or Chaldean, Catholic or Orthodox, Iraqi Christians belong to a common ethnicity and claim descent from the ancient peoples who established Assyria 4,500 years ago.

Currently there are 14 Christian parties seeking seats in the Kurdish regional parliament, and each is tied to a particular church, according to Louay Mikhael, a Chaldean Christian rom Dohuk, who arrived in Silver Spring, Maryland, with his wife and child only in April.

Mr. Mikhael represents the Chaldean Syriac Assyrian Popular Council of the Kurdish Regional Government (CSA Popular Council), which will open its lobbying office in Washington in the coming weeks. Both Ms. Kashat and Mr. Mikhael are working in Washington to raise awareness on the issues affecting ethnic-religious minority populations.

After the surge of the Islamic State in the summer of 2014 approximately 130,000 people — virtually the entire population of Christians remaining in the Nineveh Plain near Mosul — have either fled the country or taken shelter in Kurdish cities.

“On Aug. 6 when ISIS attacked Qaroquosh, approximately 55 miles from Irbil, we had 60,000 people arriving in one day,” said Rev. Douglas Bezi, the Chaldean Catholic priest who manages a refugee center in the Christian suburb of Ainkawa.

The city of Irbil and its suburbs have nearly 100,000 Chaldean Catholic refugees sheltering in rented apartments, unfinished buildings or steel shipping containers. “When they arrived, I divided them into two groups, those who wanted to return in one group and those who wanted to leave the country,” Father Bezi said. “But after a year, no one wants to return to the Nineveh Plain. More than 60 percent of my people are traumatized, and wake up every day demoralized.”

Iraqi Christian advocates are united in their priorities for the United States: They want direct humanitarian assistance and international condemnation of the abuses these vulnerable groups face.

A Congressional resolution introduced Sept. 9 by Mr. Fortenberry and Rep. Anna Eshoo, California Democrat, calls on signers of the United Nations’ Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, signed in 1948, to be “reminded of their legal obligations” under the agreement.

It also says those who have forced the migration of religious communities from their ancestral homelands — especially the Nineveh Plain, the historic home of Yazidis — be “tracked, sanctioned, arrested, prosecuted and punished.”

“Christianity is running the risk of becoming extinct in the region it was born. What is happening to the Christian community in Iraq will happen to all of Christianity in the Middle East if we don’t take action,” Ms. Kashat said.

Douglas Burton, a former U.S. State Department official in Kirkuk, Iraq, is a former opinion editor of Insight on the News.

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Senator Jeff Sessions: 90% of Middle Eastern refugees get some form of welfare

Yesterday we told you about the Center for Immigration Studies analysis of data indicating that legal immigrants (which include refugees) are using our social safety net at a higher rate than native born Americans, now we learn that Middle Eastern refugees are using welfare assistance at an even higher level than other legal immigrants.

Sessions and Trump at Alabama rally August 21

Senator Jeff Sessions with 2016 Presidential hopeful Donald Trump at August 21st rally in Alabama.

From Breitbart (presumably these numbers include all Middle Eastern refugees no matter which religion they practice) Hat tip: Joanne.

The numbers are much more shocking than those we had previously obtained!

More than 90 percent of recent refugees from Middle Eastern nations are on food stamps and nearly 70 percent receive cash assistance, according to government data.

According to Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) data highlighted by the immigration subcommittee staff of Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) chairman of the Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest — in FY 2013, 91.4 percent of Middle Eastern refugees (accepted to the U.S. between 2008-2013) received food stamps, 73.1 percent were on Medicaid or Refugee Medical Assistance and 68.3 percent were on cash welfare.

Middle Eastern refugees used a number of other assistance programs at slightly lower rates. For example, 36.7 percent received Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), 32.1 percent received Supplemental Security Income (SSI), 19.7 percent lived in public housing, 17.3 percent were on General Assistance (GA), and 10.9 percent received Refugee Cash Assistance (RCA).

The high welfare rates among Middle Eastern refugees comes as the Obama administration considers increasing the number of refugees — who are immediately eligible for public benefits — to the U.S., particularly Syrian refugees.

ORR defines refugees and asylees from the “Middle East” as being from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, and Yemen.   [Hah! And these figures don’t include the Somali welfare usage numbers!—ed]

More here….

Shortly after a meeting with Sessions on Capitol Hill, saying we need to take care of our own problems, Trump expressed reservations about plans to resettle Syrian refugees in the US.

Addendum: Senator Jeff Sessions was the leader of the opposition to the Gang of Eight’s amnesty bill and here in 2013 called out “meatpackers” as among the big industry lobbyists pushing for a greater supply of cheap immigrant labor.  Long time readers here know the large role the meatpackers are playing in changing small town America by encouraging the resettlement of refugees.

RELATED ARTICLE: If you want to save Syrian Christians, do not take refugees from UN camps!

Video Message to the U.S. Congress: Tear Up the Iran Deal — Pass a Resolution Killing It!

This video presents a straightforward analysis as to why the United States Congress should rip up the Iran deal and instead pass a Resolution rejecting the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that was negotiated between the Obama Administration and Iran, the number one state sponsor of Islamic terror.

The rejection of the JCPOA is based up the Senator Corker Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015, signed by President Obama, which prohibits a vote of disapproval if the complete deal, including any side deals between Iran and any other parties are not handed over to Congress for their proper and professional review.

Our analysis is based upon the outstanding and extensive work of former U.S. Prosecutor, Andy McCarthy.

For an excellent summary, see Andy McCarthy’s National Review article “Obama’s Iran Deal Is Still far from Settled.”

RELATED ARTICLE: Obama, It’s Time to Reverse Course on Iran Deal

Wealthy Gulf Arab States close borders to Muslim Refugees for fear of Terrorism

Invasion of Europe news continued…

gulf-states-640x438-640x480

While you are looking at the above map courtesy of Breitbart, consider that Turkey is allowing ‘refugees’ to pass through and launch boats into the Aegean Sea so that thousands of the migrants can reach Greece. Why isn’t anyone criticizing Turkey? Or, turning the boats back to Turkey?

Breitbart has more news on a topic that obviously interests you.  Our post from last week, Why should US/Europe take Syrian refugees while Gulf Arab states take ZERO?, was visited by over 6,000 readers in a couple of days.  So what do the Gulf States know that we don’t, maybe that the “refugee” stream is composed of 75% men of fighting age!

demographics of muslim refugees

UN High Commissioner for Refugees chart on refugees from the Middle East. Ages not shown.

Here is Breitbart:

Five of the wealthiest Muslim countries have taken no Syrian refugees in at all, arguing that doing so would open them up to the risk of terrorism. Although the oil rich countries have handed over aid money, Britain has donated more than Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar combined.

No time today to linger, read it all here!

Our ‘Invasion’ archive is here.

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“Just wait”: Islamic State says it has smuggled 1000s of Muslim jihadis into Europe

Dead toddler’s father wanted to go to Europe to get new teeth!

VIDEO: Six Patriots explain why the Iran Nuke Deal is a ‘Bad Deal’ for U.S.

The United West video taped six American patriots on the Iran nuclear deal. These six distinguished individuals include: a Rabbi, a former Iranian prisoner and dissident, a gold star father, a wounded warrior veteran of Iraq, a retired Army Lieutenant General and a former CIA operations officer.

A statement by William Kristol, Chairman of the Emergency Committee for Israel, on the potential vote in Congress on the Iran deal reads:

“The Obama Administration has not complied with the legal requirement that it provide Congress ‘any additional materials’ related to the Iran deal, including ‘side agreements, implementing materials, documents, and guidance, technical or other understandings, and any related agreements, whether entered into or implemented prior to the agreement or to be entered into or implemented in the future.’ The Administration has not given Congress a key side agreement between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency, one which describes how key questions about the possible military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear program will be resolved, as well as how the verification regime will work.

“Congress should not accept this evasion of the law by the Obama Administration. Congress should insist on the text of this and any other side agreements. Lacking this, Congress can and should take the position that the Iran deal has not been properly submitted to Congress to review, and therefore that the president has no authority to waive or suspend sanctions.

“We understand the temptation of leadership to get to a vote on a resolution of disapproval and then to move on to other votes. But the Iran deal isn’t just another legislative issue where some corner-cutting by the Administration is to be accepted with a brief expression of discontent followed by a weary sigh of resignation.

“The Iran deal is the most important foreign policy issue this Congress will have before it. Congress should rise to the occasion and insist on its prerogative — and the American people’s prerogative — to see the whole deal. The first resolution the House should consider when it returns tomorrow should be one stating that Congress has not been provided the material it needs, that the Iran deal has not been properly submitted to Congress, and therefore that the president has no authority to waive or suspend sanctions on Iran.”

Please take the time to watch all the videos or one that interests you the most. It is important to keep the pressure on those 34 Democrat U.S. Senators who have decided that the interests of Iran far outweigh the interests of the American people.

Thanks for taking the time to watch, share and send this compilation to your U.S. Senators and member of Congress.

VIDEO #1: Billy Vaughn and Staff Sargent Robert Bartlett. Gold Star father Billy Vaughn and U.S. Army Staff Sergeant (Ret.) Robert Bartlett urge everyone to call their Congressman and Senators to vote NO on the Iran Deal. Our soldiers died and sacrificed for your freedoms, pay them back by simply making your voice heard.

VIDEO #2: LTG Jerry Boykin. Retired U.S. Army General Jerry Boykin is one of America’s most significant leaders on national security issues, including Iran’s march to Atomic weapons. Moreover, Boykin is an ordained Minister serving as the Executive Vice President at the Family Research Council in Washington DC. Listen to this his critically important and insightful analysis of the Obama/Iran Nuclear Deal.

VIDEO #3: Amir Fakhravar. Amir Abbas Fakhravar, (Siavash) is an Iranian jailed dissident and award winning writer. Amir exposes the Blindfolded inspection procedure under the current Iran deal. Currently Fakhravar serves as Research Fellow and Visiting Lecturer at the Institute of World Politics.

VIDEO #4: Clare Lopez. Clare Lopez is a retired CIA Operations Officer, currently VP of Research & Analysis at Center for Security Policy. Recently in Montecito California she presented an amazing, short, insightful deconstruction of this horrendous deal that President Obama has made with the Iranian Ayatollah.

VIDEO #5: Rabbi Efrem Goldberg. Unedited footage of Efrem Goldberg protesting Joe Biden on the Iran deal in Broward County FL, at a Jewish Community Center.

VIDEO #6: Rabbi Efrem Goldberg at his Boca Raton synagogue. Senior Rabbi at the prestigious Boca Raton Synagogue in Florida delivers a powerful, on-point message against the Obama Iran Nuclear deal. Please listen to this very brave man!

VIDEO #7: Ryan Mauro, Research Analyst for the Clarion Project, producers of award-winning documentaries on national security issues presents a powerful deconstruction of the Iran/Obama Nuke Deal at the Montecito Luncheon Briefing.

Nuke deal will make war with Iran more likely, say former top military officials

It’s “will enable Iran to increase support for terrorist and insurgent proxies, aggravate sectarian conflict and trigger both nuclear and conventional proliferation cascades.” But who cares? Kardashians!

“Nuclear deal will make war with Iran more likely, former top military officials say in report,” by Kellan Howell, The Washington Times, September 2, 2015 (thanks to Banafsheh):

A group of former top military officials and intelligence analysts released a new report Wednesday concluding that the nuclear deal with Iran will threaten American interests and increase the probability of military conflict in the Middle East.

In its report, the Iran Strategy Council wrote that the nuclear deal, called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), “will enable Iran to increase support for terrorist and insurgent proxies, aggravate sectarian conflict and trigger both nuclear and conventional proliferation cascades.”

Additionally, the deal will “provide the expansionist regime in Tehran with access to resources, technology and international arms markets required to bolster offensive military capabilities in the vital Persian Gulf region, acquire long-range ballistic missiles and develop other major weapons systems,” the council wrote.

In its report, the council argued that the deal is not an alternative to war with Iran, as many of its supports have claimed, but would actually make war more likely.

“Contrary to the false choice between support for the JCPOA and military confrontation, the agreement increases both the probability and danger of hostilities with Iran,” the report noted. “Given the deleterious strategic consequences to the United States, implementation of the JCPOA will demand increased political and military engagement in the Middle East that carries significantly greater risks and costs relative to current planning assumptions.”

The Iran Strategy Council was commissioned by the Jewish Institute of National Security to educate Americans on the consequences of the Iran nuclear deal.

Members of the council include retired Gen. James Conway, former Commandant of the Marine Corps; retired Air Force Gen. Chuck Wald, former Deputy Commander of the United States European Command; retired Adm. Mark Fitzgerald, former Commander of the U.S. Naval Forces in Europe/Africa; and retired Vice Adm. John Bird, former Commander of the U.S. Seventh Fleet….

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Washington’s Convenient Relationships with Dictators by Ted Galen Carpenter

US leaders routinely emphasize that America’s foreign policy is based on support for the expansion of freedom around the world. But as I point out in a recent article in the National Interest Online, Washington’s behavior frequently does not match the idealistic rhetoric. Too often, US policymakers seem to favor even brutal and corrupt authoritarian allies over boisterous, unpredictable democratic regimes.

During the Cold War, US administrations enthusiastically embraced “friendly” autocratic governments in such places as South Korea and the Philippines—even when there were viable democratic alternatives. Because it was uncertain whether democratic governments would be as cooperative with US foreign policy aims, officials preferred dealing with more compliant autocrats. Worse, US leaders repeatedly misrepresented such allies to the American people as noble members of the “free world.”

The tendency was especially pronounced in the Middle East, and that cynical policy has persisted longer there than in other regions. It began early, as the US Central Intelligence Agency helped overthrow Iran’s elected prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, in 1953 and restore the Shah to power as an unconstrained monarch. The Shah became America’s chosen Persian Gulf gendarme for the next quarter century, despite the regime’s appalling human rights record and pervasive corruption. Elsewhere in the region, Washington developed a cozy relationship with Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak that lasted three decades, even as he and his military cronies looted and brutalized that unhappy country.

Unfortunately, the Obama administration seems just as hypocritical as its predecessors when it comes to relations with Egypt and other Middle East countries. US leaders were reluctant to cut Mubarak loose even as pro-democracy demonstrations surged throughout Egypt in 2011.  In a PBS interview, Vice President Joe Biden even objected to describing Mubarak as a dictator and rejected calls for him to step down. 

Similar sentiments were evident after General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi led a coup against Egypt’s first elected president, Mohammed Morsi. Obama administration officials steadfastly refused even to describe the action as a coup. Not only has Washington continued to lavish weaponry on Egypt’s military, it has ignored mounting evidence of egregious human rights abuses by the Sisi regime. And as with respect to Mubarak, US officials pretend that Sisi is not a dictator, even though he became “president” through a blatantly rigged election that gave him more than 96 percent of the vote. American leaders used to scorn the results of such phony elections in communist countries, but they chose to view the farce in Egypt as progress toward a mature democratic system.

Hatred of hypocrisy is an emotion that tends to occur throughout very different cultures. US leaders do not help America’s reputation when they profess a commitment to freedom and democracy while they fawn over such allies as thuggish Egyptian dictators and the odious Saudi royal family. Victims of oppression were unlikely to take Washington’s alleged dedication to liberty seriously when they saw President George W. Bush strolling through the fields of his Texas ranch hand in hand with Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah as though they were intimate friends.

Washington needs to walk the walk as well as talk the talk when it comes to supporting freedom as a key component of its foreign policy. It should at least stop undermining balky democratic regimes and embracing thuggish autocracies.

This post first appeared at Cato.org.

Israel in the Eye of the Storm By Tom Wilson

Tom Wilson, Resident Associate Fellow at the Centre for the New Middle East, writing in The Journal for International Security Affairs, outlines the key geopolitical challenges facing Israel.

In a region convulsed by the turmoil of civil wars, revolutions, and insurgencies, Israel stands out as an island of relative stability, one that has successfully weathered the multiple storms of the Islamist winter that abruptly followed the so-called “Arab Spring.” Yet in the summer of 2014, the calm in Israel was shattered by rockets, terrorists emerging from tunnels, and amphibious attacks along the country’s shoreline. The abrupt intrusion of terrorism back into Israeli domestic life—with all of the country’s major cities within reach of missiles fired by the Hamas terrorist group—was reminiscent of the second intifada, when suicide bombers from Hamas and other extremist factions entered Israel’s busy city centers and transformed them into war zones, paralyzing daily life.

During the height of the summer 2014 Gaza War, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu commented that Israel could not afford to give up control of the West Bank and risk the creation of “another 20 Gazas” there.(1) That remark resonated particularly strongly with many Israelis, not least because it came just months after a failed American-led effort to push for a peace agreement with the Palestinians—one that would have obliged Israel pull out of the vast majority of the West Bank. And whereas Netanyahu’s statement about the potential horrors of Palestinian terrorism appears to have been received approvingly by many in Israel, Secretary of State John Kerry’s peace-making efforts enjoyed far less popularity. Indeed, many sections of Israeli society came to resent the Obama administration’s focus on promoting a peace agreement, as did some in Israel’s political establishment.

That they did speaks volumes about just how much Washington’s diplomats, like their counterparts in Europe, have fundamentally failed to appreciate the changes that have taken place in Israel’s calculus of risk over the preceding decade. Furthermore, they have failed to view Israel’s predicament in its full regional context.

Rather, ever since Barack Obama took office, his administration has pressed unrelentingly for reconciliation between the Israelis and Palestinians. It has done so, moreover, as if the parties in question were still operating in the relative stability of the Middle East of the 1990s. Thus, Kerry’s approach is reminiscent of the Clinton administration’s hammering out of the Oslo Accords with Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, and its subsequent full-court press for a final agreement at Camp David between Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat. But while it is true that the current Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, is a somewhat more preferable negotiating partner to Arafat, the similarities end there; the political landscape for a peace agreement today is more inhospitable than ever before.

This is so for two reasons. The first relates to the changing regional circumstances now confronting Israel. The second is tied to the fundamental transformation that has taken place in Palestinian society and politics.

Region on fire

Half-a-decade into the “Arab Spring,” Israel faces numerous Islamist militant groups on its borders, from Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria to Hamas in Gaza and al-Qaeda and Islamic State-aligned factions in the Sinai. The emergence of each of these groups has transformed Israel’s security outlook and diminished hopes for securing a durable peace. Rather than an environment ripe for a modus vivendiwith essentially pragmatic neighboring states, Israel now faces jihadist non-state actors, most of which are locked in power struggles with other militants as well as with the nation-states whose territory they now operate from.

The spread of this regional turmoil has had a mixed impact on the Israeli-Palestinian situation. To some extent, the conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Yemen have made the mostly-cold confrontation between Israel and the Palestinians appear far less pressing and far less relevant. Whereas once the words “Middle East conflict” were shorthand for referring to the dispute between Israel and its Arab neighbours, now this expression is more likely to refer to the struggle between Sunni and Shi’a extremists, backed by the Gulf States and Iran, respectively.

It is particularly significant that many of these militant groups are now operating from territories that Israeli security forces have previously withdrawn from (the Sinai, Southern Lebanon, and Gaza) or are directly adjacent to strategically important territories that Israel has previously considered giving up (e.g., the Golan Heights and the Jordan Valley). This naturally has had a considerable impact on Israel’s current willingness to make territorial concessions in return for peace agreements or international good will. From a strategic point of view, such moves have ultimately amounted to creating power vacuums that have eventually been filled by militants, so effectively moving a range of security threats ever closer to Israel’s civilian population centers and core national infrastructure.

Take Hezbollah, Iran’s most significant terrorist proxy. The Shi’ite militia represents one of the most formidable fighting forces in the Middle East, and is one of the greatest security challenges facing the Jewish state. Hezbollah and the Israeli military engaged in a deadly clash in 2006, one in which Israel’s military failed to strike a truly decisive blow against the Shi’a militants. Since then, Hezbollah is understood to have dramatically increased its military capabilities, and even with Israel’s Iron Dome and David’s Sling air defense systems operational, it is likely that Hezbollah could still inflict considerable damage in the event of a future conflict, since most of Israel’s territory is now well within Hezbollah’s reach.

The other major threat to Israel’s north has been the unfolding crisis in Syria. Stray projectiles from the fighting have impacted the Israeli-controlled parts of the Golan on numerous occasions, but it is the advance of Islamist groups close to the Syrian border that has caused the most alarm in Israel. For the moment, militants have been too absorbed with the fighting in Syria to direct their attention toward Israel. Nevertheless, the threat from chemical weapons and other capabilities falling into the hands of such groups must be taken seriously. Given that less than a decade ago, the Israeli government had contemplated a withdrawal from the Golan Heights—a territory that borders the Galilee, one of Israel’s most vital fresh water sources—these developments have done nothing to win public support for the notion of making further territorial concessions for peace. To the contrary, they have demonstrated that while Israel might hand territory into the possession of one regime, there is no guarantee that that territory will remain secure, or that the regime in question will survive long after the signing of any such peace treaty.

That, in part, has been the Israeli experience in the Sinai as well. True, Egypt’s short-lived Muslim Brotherhood government never officially revoked the peace treaty between the two countries, as many feared would happen after the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in 2011. Yet in Egypt—as in Lebanon and Syria—the threat to Israel has not come from the state itself, but rather from the weakness of those states and the prevalence of terrorist non-state actors moving into the resulting ungoverned and under-governed territory. Today, groups loyal to both al-Qaeda and the Islamic State continue to operate in the Sinai Peninsula. And while Israel has now constructed a security barrier along its Egyptian border, and jihadists there are currently occupied with battling Egypt’s military, the lawless nature of the peninsula represents a major security concern, among other things because of the way in which the Sinai has served as the primary channel through which weapons and weapons-related matériel have reached the Gaza Strip.

The one border from which Israel currently faces the least significant threat is the Jordanian one. Like other monarchies in the region, the Hashemite Kingdom has so far survived the ripple effects of the “Arab Spring” uprisings—but this may not remain the case indefinitely. The growing popularity of Salafism in Jordan(2) may well come to undermine stability in Jordan, creating a scenario that would almost certainly jeopardize Israel’s security. Although it has been the case that some Jordanian Salafists have been drawn away from that country to join the fighting in Syria, it is also true that Jordan’s proximity to both Iraq and Syria places it in a particularly fragile situation. Furthermore, the significant influx of refugees into Jordan from those conflicts may well have brought other extremists into the country. The resulting concerns about Jordan’s long-term future have contributed to Israel’s insistence that the Jordan Valley must remain its most eastern border, or at the very least that the Israeli military must be allowed to maintain a presence there.

The Islamization of Palestinian politics

Ever since the establishment of Hamas (The Islamic Resistance Movement) in 1987 at the outset of the first intifada, Islamist jihadist groups have played an increasingly prominent part in Palestinian political life in general, and in particular as part of the Palestinian clash with Israel. Hamas had, of course, grown out of the Muslim Brotherhood, which was operating in the area even during the days of the British Mandate in Palestine.(3) The group’s founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, had led the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza since 1968, but Islamists had always played a minor role in Palestinian terrorist activities compared to the secular and Marxist guerrilla groups as represented by the PLO.

The past two decades, however, have seen a veritable explosion of Islamist politics in the Palestinian Territories. Drawing from the lessons of Hamas, Palestinian militants began to adopt the tactic of suicide bombing as a preferred method of attack. As they did, other Islamist groups (such as the smaller Palestinian Islamic Jihad) became increasingly prominent across the West Bank and Gaza Strip. And, beginning in the mid-2000s, Salafist- and al-Qaeda-aligned groups began to proliferate in Gaza. Among them were small groups, such as Jaish al-Islam (Army of Islam), Jaish al-Umma (Army of the Nation), and Fatah al-Islam (Islamic Conquest), all of whom began to make their presence felt in the Gaza Strip. (4)

The Islamist politics of the Gaza Strip have been far from harmonious. These factions were always fiercely critical of Hamas’s failure to fully implement Islamic law, in particular following the group’s takeover of the Strip in 2007, and have opposed the temporary cease-fires Hamas has agreed to with Israel from time to time. But while these groups certainly attracted some disaffected Hamas operatives,(5) they did not appear to represent an immediate challenge to Hamas rule—at least for a time. More recently, however, some of these factions have sworn loyalty to the Islamic State, and clashes have broken out between them and Hamas, which has found itself in the position of needing to eliminate more extreme Islamist elements to maintain its hold on power. At the same time, Fatah has been locked in a long-running struggle to prevent a takeover by Hamas Islamists in the West Bank, where it holds sway.

The heavy involvement of Islamists in the terror attacks of the second intifada was certainly an indication that radical Islam was playing an increasingly decisive role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Nevertheless, few at that time predicted that Hamas would win a decisive victory when elections were held for the Palestinian national assembly in 2006. The group’s subsequent seizure of power in Gaza by force in 2007, and the ousting of Fatah there, further cemented the process of radicalization sweeping Palestinian society.

Indications of what was happening should already have been apparent from the results of two surveys conducted in the mid-2000s. A 2004 survey by the Jordanian Center for Strategic Studies found support for al-Qaeda to be noticeably higher among Palestinians than in neighboring Arab countries, with 70 percent describing al-Qaeda as a resistance movement as opposed to a terrorist organization.(6) Similarly, a 2005 survey by the Norwegian group Fafo found 65 percent of Palestinians questioned supported al-Qaeda attacks against the West, and in Gaza that figure rose to 79 percent.(7) European observers living in Palestinian society at the time noted this trend of popular extremism, with one European diplomat stating that Palestinian society was undergoing “an accelerated process of broad Islamization and radicalization.”(8)

While the Palestinian Authority had itself noted the presence of Salafist evangelist preachers operating in the West Bank,(9) Palestinian sympathies for violent extremism had still tended to be expressed as support for nationalistic Islamist groups such as Hamas and the Islamic Jihad. Indeed, by many estimations Hamas would have a strong chance of winning West Bank elections were they to be held again today. Although certain West Bank cities such as Ramallah, Bethlehem and Jericho have remained quite firmly under the control of Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority, there are other localities where Fatah has been severely weakened.

Abbas’s approval rating had clearly plummeted by the time of the summer 2014 war in Gaza. An indication of where the sympathies of West Bank Palestinians lay came shortly before major hostilities erupted. At the time, Israel’s security forces had undertaken a military operation to rescue three Israeli teenagers kidnapped by a Hamas cell based in Hebron in the southern West Bank. During that eleven-day operation, Israeli forces arrested some 350 militants, including almost all of Hamas’s leadership in the West Bank. But while this operation received the backing of the Palestinian Authority and the cooperation of its security forces, widespread anger erupted into several nights of anti-Fatah rioting in Ramallah.

The Gaza conflict in the summer of 2014 appeared to give Hamas a significant boost with the Palestinian public, with many believing that the organization was doing far more than Fatah to lead “resistance” against Israel. Polling shortly after the war revealed that support for Hamas had doubled among West Bank Palestinians, rising from 23 percent in March to 46 percent in September.(10) There are other indications to suggest that the pro-Hamas feelings that arose during last summer’s war have not dissipated. Student elections across West Bank universities in the spring of 2015 witnessed a surge of support for Hamas and the Islamist bloc, with the two being tied at the Palestinian Polytechnic University in Hebron, while the Islamic bloc won outright at Birzeit University.(11)

What Israel is now watching for are signs of whether or not sympathies for the Islamic State and its ideology are increasing among Palestinians. Unlike in Gaza, the security presence of the Israeli military throughout the West Bank will go some way to ensuring that IS militants are unable to establish fully operational cells in the West Bank. Nevertheless, there have been early indications of pockets of support for IS among West Bank Palestinians. Israel’s intelligence services have already warned of a process of militants defecting from existing terror groups, primarily Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and swearing allegiance to IS.

This process may have been underway for some time now. At the time of Hamas’ kidnapping of the three Israeli teenagers in June 2014, a previously unknown group claiming to be aligned with IS attempted to take responsibility for that action. And during the Gaza war that followed, the Islamic State’s media wing, al-Battar, released a series of images depicting the Dome of the Rock and threatening Israel’s Jews that the Islamic State was coming for them, and in August images appeared online showing an individual displaying the group’s flag on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

In Gaza, the process of extremists shifting their allegiances to the Islamic State is far more advanced than in the West Bank. This is partly because in recent years violent Salafist groups have already been able to establish a foothold in Gaza, with some groups such as Suyuf al-Haq (Swords of Righteousness) launching IS-styled attacks against institutions and individuals accused of spreading Western influence. It had also become increasingly apparent that the military wing of The Popular Resistance Committees (Al-Nasser Salah al-Deen Brigades), the third-largest military group in Gaza, was displaying signs of radicalization, placing it further to the extreme than either Hamas or Islamic Jihad. It is out of this milieu that support for the Islamic State appears to have arisen.

Early indications of the growing support for IS in Gaza began to emerge in the fall of 2014. At that time, a group calling itself “ISIS-Gaza Province” began to establish an online presence, with a video appearing on YouTube showing a group of armed militants claiming to be the Islamic State in Gaza, complete with IS flag. Indeed, by late 2014 ISIS flags had become an increasingly common sight in Gaza, with eyewitnesses reporting their appearance everywhere from football stadiums to car windshields to wedding invitations. On November 3rd, the Shura council of Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis in the Sinai, as well as the group’s leader, Abu Khattab, formally pledged loyalty to the Islamic State. This was a telling indication that not only individuals but also entire Salafist factions are defecting to IS—a trend that Israel will need to grapple with in the not-so-distant future.

Mind the gap

As the surrounding Middle East increasingly descends into turmoil, Israel for the most part has managed to maintain relative calm and stability over the territory under its control. This stability is not a naturally occurring state of affairs, but rather the result of the extensive efforts of Israel’s security forces to keep a multitude of surrounding threats at bay. Almost all of these threats stem in one way or another from violent Islamism, which refuses to be appeased by any number of Israeli concessions.

International policymakers, however, do not appear to have adjusted to this new reality. The failing has been particularly noticeable in the policies of the Obama administration, whose representatives still seem to regard the Israeli-Palestinian dispute as one of the most pressing and problematic concerns in the region. In the early 2000s, at the height of the second intifada and prior to the second Gulf War, this may indeed have been true. Today, it is not. Yet American and European leaders continue to push for drastic changes in the current status quo, even at a time when much of the rest of the region is already in a state of extreme and unpredictable flux.

They are bound to be disappointed. Israel will naturally be reluctant to make any significant concessions while the surrounding region remains so unpredictable. It knows that the security and stability it enjoys has been hard fought and remains fragile. Under the present circumstances, a dramatic change in the existing status quo could begin a chain of events that would plunge Israel into one of the deepest security crises of its history, making it once again one of the region’s major flashpoints.

It is a reality that Israeli policymakers—and the Israeli public at large—understand well, even if officials in the West do not.

Tom Wilson is a Middle East analyst and a Resident Associate Fellow at the Henry Jackson Society in London.


1.   “Netanyahu: Gaza Conflict Proves Israel Can’t Relinquish Control of West Bank,” Times of Israel, July 11, 2014, http://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-gaza-conflict-proves-israel-cant-….

2.   See, for example, David Schenker, “Salafi Jihadists on the Rise in Jordan,” Washington Institute for Near East Policy, PolicyWatch no. 2248, May 5, 2014, http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/salafi-jihadists….

3.   Jonathan Schanzer, Hamas vs. Fatah: The Struggle for Palestine (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 24.

4.   Jonathan Schanzer and Mark Dubowitz, Palestinian Pulse: What Policymakers Can Learn from Palestinian Social Media (Washington, DC: Foundation for Defense of Democracies, 2010), http://www.defenddemocracy.org/content/uploads/documents/Palestinian_Pul….

5.   Yoram Cohen and Matthew Levitt, with Becca Wasser, “Deterred but Determined: Salafi-Jihadi Groups in the Palestinian Arena,” Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Policy Focus no. 99, January 2010, http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/uploads/Documents/pubs/PolicyFocus%20….

6.   “Revisiting the Arab Street: Research from Within,” Center for Strategic Studies, University of Jordan, February 2005, http://www.mafhoum.com/press7/revisit-exec.pdf.

7.   Gro Hasselknippe, “Palestinian Opinions on Peace and Conflict, Internal Affairs and Parliament Elections 2006,” Fafo Paper 2006:09, 2006, http://almashriq.hiof.no/general/300/320/327/fafo/reports/797.pdf

8.   As cited in Cohen and Levitt, “Deterred but Determined.”

9.   Ibid.

10.   “We’re Back; Hamas in the West Bank,” The Economist, September 3, 2014, http://www.economist.com/blogs/pomegranate/2014/09/hamas-west-bank.

11.   Adnan Abu Amer, “Hamas Sweeps Student Council Elections in the West Bank,” Al-
Monitor
, April 28, 2015, http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/04/hamas-victory-student-….

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in Journal for International Security Affairs.

Peace Processing Iran

The principle is similar: faced with an enemy that repeatedly declares its genocidal hatred, acts on it wherever possible, constantly strives to improve its ways and means, you peace process. Why was it successful with Iran and not with the “Palestinians”? Perhaps because the comical P5 + 1 applied the pressure to itself in the case of Iran, leaving no one to resist. The same pressure applied to Israel since 1993 has failed to produce total surrender. Drastic concessions were proposed but the enemy insisted on the right of return of “refugees” down to the third, fourth, and forever generations that would spell the elimination of the Jewish state. There were no significant limits to the concessions made by the P5+1 and no expectation that the deal will yield anything other than itself. The deal is that there’s a deal.

The devil is not in the details it is in the evil, the collusion with evil. Antisemitism in its modern form of antizionism is the ultimate perversion: choosing death over life, it reverses good and evil. The perverse subject embraces evil while proclaiming his goodness. The Iran “deal” is not the result of American government naiveté, faulty negotiating skills, or realpolitik. It has nothing to do with slowing Iran’s nuclear arms development. It is an international seal of approval for Iran’s genocidal project. A wink of complicity.

What better proof than the hasty visit of German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel accompanied by a regiment of businessmen? Germany of all nations, still heavy with the weight of the Shoah, had to demonstrate immediately that the deal is a practical matter of trade and polite relations. But the truth bled through the window dressing and, as befits perversion, was expressed in an outright lie: Gabriel reminded his Iranian counterparts that they must not question Israel’s right to exist. “That is unacceptable,” he declared, accepting it as if it were a second helping of ham hocks. Italy’s molto simpatico PM Matteo Renzi reassured his amico grandissimo that his country would always be there to defend Israel. With what? French MFA Laurent Fabius who distinguished himself during negotiations by taking a strong position—before caving in to pressure—waited an extra week for his sober visit, sans traveling salesmen but bearing a missive from President Hollande inviting President Rohani to visit him in November. What could be more grotesque, more obscene than these frantic gestures laced with hollow excuses?

Obama&Kerry are trying to force, cajole, intimidate, manipulate Congress and public opinion to approve the phony agreement that will, they claim, slow down Iran’s nuclear arms project while giving the Islamic Republic (they don’t pronounce its real name for good reasons) time to become the friendly partner they deserve. All the concrete evidence proves the contrary. So what have they really accomplished?

While talking up the deal domestically, with special emphasis on Jewish organizations, they sent Defense Secretary Ashton Carter to dangle yummy defensive military goodies in front of the Israeli government as a consolation prize. What have they wrought? Kerry, grilled by the Senate Foreign Relations committee, is scolded for being duped. If his only fault was a failure to get better terms from those crafty Persians, then the honor of America’s chief negotiator and aspiring Tour de France cyclist would be intact. Now, fearing the slick sale pitches will not do the trick, the Secretary of State has moved on to sinister threats. Invited by the Council for Foreign Relations to defend the deal, he warned that if Congress should vote against it, “Israel will be more isolated and more blamed [sic].”

So that’s the win-win? If the agreement is approved, Israel will be in greater danger, if it is rejected, Israel will be blamed. In fact, it doesn’t matter. The collusion agreement with Iran has nothing to do with foreign policy or non-proliferation of nuclear arms. It is a call to ratify the genocidal equation: Iran is deserving of trust, Israel can be thrown to the dogs. Good and evil are reversed. The damage is already done.

While Europeans were creeping to Iran like worker ants, each with a few crumbs to sell, the EU parliament was mulling over a measure that would stigmatize products from the Israeli “colonies.” Grotesque perversion. Iran, by virtue of the deal, instantly becomes a suitable trading partner while Israel, an apartheid state guilty of Occupation, is unfit for human consumption. Gays swinging from the hangman’s rope, political prisoners tortured to death, arms and treasure flowing to jihad forces that wreak havoc throughout the Middle East and sow subversion in the rest of the world… all disappear with the lethal narrative fed to global media by the wire services. After months of negotiation…a historic agreement…Iran forgoes nuclear arms development in exchange for removal of sanctions and the dawn of normal relations with the well-behaved world. Unprecedented inspections regime. Money-back guarantee. Snap-back sanctions. Diplomacy trumps war.

Death to America, Death to Israel. Our plan to erase Israel from the face of the earth is not negotiable. We will never abandon our right to develop nuclear arms and advanced delivery systems, we will arm our allies, no American will be included in the inspection teams, our military sites are forever off limits, allahu akhbar, flag burnings and raucous bloodthirsty cries… Secretary of State Kerry proves he’s a good sport by briefly admitting that if Death to Israel Death to America were actually a statement of policy, it would be worrisome. But it’s just rhetoric.

The once-free world, draped in virtue to exclude Israel from the concert of nations, mired in perversity to welcome Iran with open arms, dives into the abyss. And a significant percentage of American Jews, apparently, buy into this perversion. Out of the goodness of their hearts they become deaf, dumb, and blind to Iran’s words and deeds, and reserve their severity for an Israel they could accommodate if it would stop throwing monkey wrenches into the global jamboree.

Vainglorious President Barack Hussein Obama, displaying his major diplomatic exploit—bouncing up and down the stairs of Air Force One—makes his victory lap in Kenya, where he lectures the locals on, of all things, clean government, democracy, and homosexual rights. Tell it to yer mulla’, brotha’!

Though the personal responsibility of Obama, Kerry, Mogherini, and other grinning negotiators is enormous, it won’t help to blame them because they are upheld by populations that are themselves captive. People who sincerely believe in their own decency and wish to do no harm recoil at the very sound of the name “Israel.” Americans, who win all the polls for loving Israel, dumbly follow their twice-elected president though he made his intentions clear from the first step of the primaries. How many American Zionists repeat the absurd fairy tale about how Iran will be contained, mollified, and magically turned over to the freedom-loving youth they see on BBC news? British Prime Minister David Cameron interjects “Islam is a religion of peace” into a forceful defense of the nation against Islamist ideology. France, still reeling from the latest beheading/impalement incident sails into a new plot to behead a naval officer. The denial machine tries to photoshop the Chattanooga jihad attack against a military base. The body count in Syria rises inexorably, Bashir al Assad thanks Iran and Hezbollah for their invaluable support, the Middle East, with the exception of Israel, is being ethnically cleansed of Christians, and the good news is that Iran signed something? With disappearing ink.

“It starts with the Jews but it doesn’t end with the Jews.” This isn’t an incidental geopolitical fatality. It starts with the Jews because it is the triumph of evil and death over goodness and life. Judaism is the source of the ethics on which our civilization is founded. Antizionism, the contemporary variety of antisemitism, is a lethal perversion. When the genocidal hatred of the Islamic Republic is validated by an international agreement piloted by the United States of America, when every single concrete detail is clearly available for public information, when every public statement by governments that defend the deal is patently false, when the “alternative to war” is a virtual onslaught against Israel’s existence, when the immoral United Nations is invested with powers stolen from democratically elected governments, we have reached the catastrophic level of perversion.

Rational arguments will be useless unless this perversion is understood, exposed, and confronted.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review. Nidra Poller’s book Karimi Hotel is now available in English and Al Dura: long range ballistic myth is available in paperback and on Kindle.

Obama: “Ideologies are not defeated with guns”

1. Yes, they are. Cf. National Socialism.

2. The United States is not trying to defeat the Islamic State, or the global jihad in general, with “a more attractive and more compelling vision.” Instead, we supervised the installations of constitutions that enshrined Sharia as the highest law of the land in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Imposing Sharia is the goal of all jihad groups, including the Islamic State. The United States has never stood in Iraq or Afghanistan, or anywhere else, for the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, equality of rights for women, etc. — all of which are denied in Sharia. In other words, we didn’t counter their ideas with a more attractive and compelling vision. We didn’t counter them at all, and still aren’t doing so, because to do so would be considered “Islamophobic.”

And how is he going to counter their ideology when he won’t even acknowledge what it is?

3. “Our efforts to counter violent extremism must not target any one community because of their faith or background.” If he is referring to attacks on innocent Muslims, of course, no innocent Muslims should suffer any harm or injustice. He seems to be saying more than that. The idea that it is wrong to fight Islamic jihad by paying attention to Muslim communities more than Baptist or Jewish or Hindu or Amish communities is absurd. Islamic jihad is committed by Muslims. Obama won’t even call it Islamic jihad or admit that it is a specifically Muslim phenomenon, and insofar as he diverts any resources to tracking “right-wing extremism” on the basis of bogus studies, he makes us all less safe.

“Obama’s War Speech: ‘Ideologies Are Not Defeated With Guns,’” by Charlie Spiering, Breitbart, July 6, 2015:

At the Pentagon, President Obama delivered an update on his war against Islamic State terrorism, saying that the operation would take time to defeat the terrorist organization.

“This will not be quick, this is a long-term campaign,” he asserted, describing ISIS as “nimble” and infiltrated with civilians across the Middle East.

Obama did not announce any major shifts in his strategy, but reminded reporters that the fight was “not simply a military effort.”

“Ideologies are not defeated with guns, they are defeated by better ideas, a more attractive and more compelling vision,” he said.

Obama warned Americans of the increasing threat of individual acts of terror by lone wolf terrorists, but warned against targeting the region of Islam.

“Our efforts to counter violent extremism must not target any one community because of their faith or background – including patriotic Muslim Americans who are keeping our country safe,” he said.

But he admitted that ISIL was targeting Muslims.

“We also have to acknowledge that ISIL has been particularly effective at reaching out to and recruiting vulnerable people around the world including here in the United States and they are targeting Muslim communities around the world,” he said.

When asked by reporters if he was considering the use of American ground troops to defeat ISIS, he insisted that it was not under consideration.

“If we try to do everything ourselves all across the Middle East, all across North Africa, we’ll be playing ‘Whack-a-mole’ and there will be a whole lot of unintended consequences that ultimately will make us less secure,” he said.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Syria: Obama-backed rebels persecute Christians, force them from their homes

UK: Man carries Islamic State flag by Big Ben & Houses of Parliament, police refuse to arrest him

U.S.: Iran’s Support for Terror Undiminished

Despite the fact that Iran’s global terror activities were “undiminished” between 2013 and 2014, the U.S. State Department is still entirely committed to pursuing a nuclear deal with Iran.

“We think it’s essential that we pursue those negotiations,” said Tina Kaidanow, the State Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism, as quoted in The Wall Street Journal. “None of that implies that we would be, again, in any way taking our eye off the ball with respect to what Iran is doing as a supporter of terrorism.”

Iran’s support for terror was documented in the State Dept.’s annual report on global terrorism, which was released Friday. The report says “Iran’s state sponsorship of terrorism worldwide remained undiminished,” which makes the State Dept. “very, very concerned,” according to Kaidanow.

While the June 30 deadline for the deal is now fewer than 10 days away, the release of the report shows, “Iran continued to sponsor terrorist groups around the world,” according to Kaidanow.

The report specifically mentions Iran’s continued support for the Shiite terror organization Hezbollah in Lebanon as well as those fighting with embattled Syrian President Bashaar al-Assad.

The Clarion Project reported last week that Iran is supporting more than 100 terrorist organizations in Syria and Iraq alone.

In an interview with The Atlantic, U.S. President Barack Obamas admitted that some of the money freed up the deal’s proposed sanction relief may up going towards terrorism, although he argued that Iranian government would have to make good on their commitments to improve the country’s economy.

“I don’t think …anybody in this administration said that no money will go to the military as a consequence of sanctions relief,” Obama said. “The question is, if Iran has $150 billion parked outside the country, does the IRGC automatically get $150 billion? Does that $150 billion then translate by orders of magnitude into their capacity to project power throughout the region? And that is what we contest …”

The report also showed that between 2013 and 2014, there was a significant rise in global terror attacks, causing an increase in over 80 percent of violent deaths from the previous year (which itself had seen a 43 percent increase from the year before). In addition, the report showed:

  • There was an average of 1,122 attacks per month
  • Kidnappings increased by one-third, with more than with 9,400 people taken hostage
  • The number of global attacks rose by 35 percent
  • 32,727 people were killed worldwide (versus 17,800 in 2013)
  • 34,700 people were injured in attacks in close to 95 countries
  • In Iraq alone,  10,000 people died in 3,360 attacks representing close to a third of all people killed in terror attacks worldwide

RELATED ARTICLES

Nuclear Agreement Misleads About Iranian Breakout Time
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Why People Become Islamic Extremists
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EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of members of the Iranian volunteer Basij militia. Photo: © Reuters.

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The Islamic State is the Fourth Reich by V.S. Naipaul

A grotesque love of propaganda. Unspeakable barbarity. The loathing of Jews – and a hunger for world domination. In this stunning intervention, literary colossus V.S. Naipaul says ISIS is now the Fourth Reich

Imagine a world in which a young man is locked in a cage, has petrol showered over him and is set alight to be burnt alive.

Imagine the triumphant jeering of an audience that has gathered to witness this. Imagine, also, a 12-year-old child with elated determination on his features shooting at close range a kneeling man with his arms tied behind his back.

Then picture the spectacle of a hundred beheadings of victim after victim in humiliating uniforms, their hands and feet bound, kneeling with their backs to their black-robed executioners who wield knives to cut their throats as though they were sacrificial lambs.

Picture queues of helpless men and women being marched by zealous executioners who nail them to wooden crosses and crucify them, howling and bleeding to death as crowds watch.

Then picture thousands of girls and women, their arms tied, being marched by hooded and armed captors into sexual slavery. And then, if that is not enough, picture men being thrown off cliffs to their deaths because they are accused of being gay.

Yes, all these scenes could have taken place in several continents in the medieval world, but they were captured on camera and broadcast to anyone with access to the internet. These are scenes, of yesterday, today and tomorrow in our own world.

I have always distrusted abstractions and have turned into writing what I could discover and explore for myself.

So I must begin by admitting that I have not recently travelled in those regions threatened by barbarism — the Middle East, the north west of Africa, in pockets of Pakistan and in the Islamic countries of south eastern Asia.

However, in the 1980s and early 1990s I undertook to examine the ‘revival’ of Islam that was taking place through the revolution in Iran and the renewed dedication to the religion of other countries.

I travelled through Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia attempting to discover the ideas and convictions behind this new ‘fundamentalism’.

My first book was called Among The Believers and the second, perhaps prophetically, Beyond Belief. Since those books were written, the word ‘fundamentalism’ has taken on new meanings.

As the word suggests, it means going back to the groundings, to the foundations and perhaps to first principles. It is used to characterise the interpretation given to passages of the Koran, to the Hadith, which is a collection of the acts in the life of the Prophet Mohammed and to an interpretation of sharia law.

However, the particular fundamentalist ideology of ‘Islamist’ groups that have dedicated themselves to terror — such as Al Qaeda, Boko Haram and now in its most vicious, barbaric and threatening form the Islamic Caliphate, Isis or the Islamic State (IS) — interprets the foundation and the beginning as dating from the birth of the Prophet Mohammed in the 6th Century.

This fundamentalism denies the value and even the existence of civilisations that preceded the revelations of the Koran.

It was an article of 6th and 7th Century Arab faith that everything before it was wrong, heretical. There was no room for the pre-Islamic past.

So an idea of history was born that was fundamentally different from the ideas of history that the rest of the world has evolved.

In the centuries following, the world moved on. Ideas of civilisation, of other faiths, of art, of governance of law and of science and invention grew and flourished.

This Islamic ideological insistence on erasing the past may have survived but it did so in abeyance, barely regarded even in the Ottoman Empire which declared itself to be the Caliphate of all Islam.

Islamic State is dedicated to a contemporary holocaust

But now the evil genie is out of the bottle. The idea that faith abolishes history has been revived as the central creed of the Islamists and of Isis.

Their determination to deny, eliminate and erase the past manifests itself in the destruction of the art, artefacts and archaeological sites of the great empires, the Persian, the Assyrian and Roman that constitute the histories of Mesopotamia and Syria.

They have bulldozed landmarks in the ancient city of Dur Sharukkin and smashed Assyrian statues in the Mosul museum. Destroying the winged bull outside the fortifications of Nineveh satisfies the same reductive impulse behind the destruction by the Taliban of the Bhumiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon has described this destruction of art, artefacts, inscriptions and of the museums that house them not only as a butchery of civilisational memory but as a war crime.It is telling that the victims of Wednesday’s barbarous shootings were visitors to the great Bardo Museum in Tunis, a repository of art and material from Tunisia’s rich, pre-Islamic past.Isis is dedicated to a contemporary holocaust. It has pledged itself to the murder of Shias, Jews, Christians, Copts, Yazidis and anyone it can, however fancifully, accuse of being a spy. It has wiped out the civilian populations of whole regions and towns. Isis could very credibly abandon the label of Caliphate and call itself the Fourth Reich.

bulldozing historic statues

Isis has bulldozed landmarks in the ancient city of Dur Sharukkin and smashed Assyrian statues in the Mosul museum (pictured).

Like the Nazis, Isis fanatics are anti-semitic, with a belief in their own racial superiority. They are anti-democratic: the Islamic State is a totalitarian state, absolute in its authority. There is even the same self-regarding love of symbolism, presentation and propaganda; terror is spread to millions through films and videos created to professional standards of which Goebbels would have been proud.

Just as the Third Reich did, Isis categorises its enemies as worthy of particular means of execution from decapitation to crucifixion and death by fire.

Whereas the Nazis pretended to be the guardians of civilisation in so far as they stole art works to preserve them and kept Jewish musicians alive to entertain them, Isis destroys everything that arises from the human impulse to beauty.

Such barbarism is not new to history and every nation has suffered mass murder and barbaric cruelty in the past.

That Isis has revived the religious dogmas and deadly rivalries between Sunnis and Shias, Sunnis and Jews and Christians is a giant step into darkness.

That a European country in the 20th Century launched a holocaust on the basis of race is a matter of the deepest shame

The Arab lands, relatively stable under the Ottoman Empire, were divided up by the British and French victors of the First World War into the kingdoms of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria and Jordan at the Cairo Conference of 1920. Borders were drawn in straight lines and the sons of the Mufti of Mecca imposed on the newly carved territories as kings.

Winston Churchill was advised at the Cairo conference by T. E. Lawrence and by Gertrude Bell, who should have known that the Shia would not readily welcome or acknowledge a Sunni king and vice versa.

After upheavals, rebellions and military coups, the region settled down under dictatorships in the 1950s and 1960s.

The Ba’athist Party was, in some senses, a modernising force and Saddam Hussein, though a Sunni, ruled the predominantly Shia and partly Kurd nation of Iraq with a ruthless hand. Wherever two or three were gathered in the name of the Almighty, he sent in his police.

He may not have been a savoury character but his overarching policies were holding on to power and modernising Iraq.

He was the cat that kept the rats of Islamism at bay. His invasion of Kuwait, another artificial sheikdom, poor in territory at the knee of Iraq but rich in oil, triggered the international reaction against him. The Bush-Blair alliance invaded Iraq and the puppet regime they set up executed Saddam. In the absence of the cat, the rats ran riot.

And so it has proved throughout the region. The Libyans, with the assistance of a European alliance, overthrew Gaddafi. The country is now at the mercy of Islamic militants. The same Arab Spring saw democratic protest against the Egyptian dictator and resulted for a while in an elected regime veering towards the repressions of Islamism.

It was overthrown by a military coup whose leader, General el-Sisi, speaking to the clerics and supposed scholars of the authoritative Islamic university Al-Azhar, called on them to denounce Isis as the greatest threat to international peace and exhorted them to declare the ideology of Isis a heresy. The mullahs of Al-Azhar have not as yet complied.

In Syria, the conflict of groups opposed to the government of Bashar Al-Assad resolved itself in the formation of a Sunni Islamicist militia, which in turn evolved — after a significant bloodletting — into Isis.

Are Isis and its followers heretics? The politicians of Europe and America, including David Cameron, Barack Obama and Francois Hollande, after every Islamicist outrage insist on describing them as a lunatic fringe. Their constant refrain is that these perpetrators of murder and terror have as much to do with Islam as the Ku Klux Klan has to do with Christianity or the testament of Jesus Christ. But does such political assurance bear scrutiny?

nazis pretended to be civilized

Whereas the Nazis pretended to be the guardians of civilisation in so far as they stole art works to preserve them and kept Jewish musicians alive to entertain them, Isis destroys everything that arises from the human impulse to beauty.

Of course the politicians, church leaders and others who say ‘these atrocities have nothing to do with Islam’ are not making a researched or considered theological statement. They are attempting, quite rightly, to prevent civil discord in a world in which there are considerable Muslim immigrant populations in most countries of Europe and in the US.

So what impels the tiny minority of young men and women from immigrant communities to volunteer themselves to ‘jihad’ and to almost certain self-destruction, or young women to abscond from their families and from European reality to become jihadi brides.

When I visited Pakistan, I discovered what I have characterised as the effects of an ideological nurture. The Pakistani or Bangladeshi Muslim is taught that he or she has no historical antecedents before the conquest of parts of India and its conversion to the faith.

The pressures of poverty and promise bring this Muslim to Britain. He and his family don’t speak English.

They are confined to work and live in an exclusively immigrant area of an inner city — say Bradford, Tower Hamlets or parts of Greater Manchester or Birmingham.

Their children are raised as Muslims, some strict some not so strict, and are sent to the normal city schools which soon become almost exclusively immigrant.

Some find that the values that traditionally inform them are at variance with those of the lives they see around them. This is true for even those Muslim young men and women who are being educated, through Britain’s by-and-large egalitarian system, to be surgeons or computer programmers.

Islamism is simpler. There are rules to obey, a jihad to fight against the civilisation you can’t comprehend, a heaven to go to when you martyr yourself and now a real fighting force in the world which you can join to simplify and solve your existence: no history to complicate your self-awareness, no art to distract you, no ambivalence and choices that ‘Western’ civilisation offers you, no doubt about the fruits of martyrdom, no allegiance to the country in which you were brought up and which gave you a free education and perhaps welfare benefits. A gun, a half-understood prayer and the simplicity that a simple and singular upbringing craves.

That is why they go. And volunteer for death, and die.

In the past three or four centuries since Descartes, Leibniz and Newton, Islam remained encrypted in the revelations of the Koran and the Hadith of a 6th Century life.

The expansion of the scientific enquiry coincided with or possibly caused the maritime expansion of European colonialism. Empirical science, the progress of liberal religion and the germination of modern democratic ideas coincided with European colonial dominion over Asia and Africa.

The process of decolonisation in the 20th Century gave rise to the idea that every advance in civilisation, scientific or democratic, was to be condemned as ‘colonial’. There may be no ideological answer to such bigotry.

The Islamic world does contain currents that are opposed to the interpretations that Isis gives to the Koran, the Hadith and to sharia. These are yet to declare themselves.

Though the appeal of Isis can be challenged by other strands of Islam, its murderous presence persists in the failed states of Iraq and war-torn Syria and threatens to spread through northern Africa.

The crippled Iraqi government has launched its reluctant armies against Isis. The Iranians, being Shias opposed to Sunni Caliphates, are supporting the Iraqi army and the Shia militias, who are a considerable force independent of the Iraqi government, are in a coalition to fight Isis on the ground. With air support from the West, they may manage to push Isis back.

Such an offensive, with the immediate objective of regaining Iraqi territory has to be urgently expanded. Isis has to be seen as the most potent threat to the world since the Third Reich.

Its military annihilation as an anti-civilisational force has to now be the objective of a world that wants its ideological and material freedoms.

ABOUT V.S. NAIPAUL

VS Naipaul

The Nobel Prize-winning author V.S. Naipaul has warned that Islamic State are the most potent threat to the world since the Nazis.The Daily Mail (UK) wrote of this article: In a hard-hitting article in today’s Mail on Sunday, the revered novelist brands the extremist Muslim organisation as the Fourth Reich, saying it is comparable to Adolf Hitler’s regime in its fanaticism and barbarity.

Calling for its ‘military annihilation,’ the Trinidadian – born British writer says IS is ‘dedicated to a contemporary holocaust’, has a belief in its own ‘racial superiority,’ and produces propaganda that Goebbels would be proud of.

A long-term critic of Islam as a global threat, he also challenges those who say the extremists have nothing to do with the real religion of Islam, suggesting that the simplicity of some interpretations of the faith have a strong appeal to a minority.

The author of A House For Mr Biswas, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, is known for his sharp views.

He has likened Tony Blair to a pirate whose socialist revolution had imposed a ‘plebeian culture’ on Britain and found himself embroiled in controversy in 2001 by comparing Islam to colonialism, saying the faith ‘has had a calamitous effect’ as converts must deny their heritage.”

EDITORS NOTE: This article originally appeared  on March 21, 2015 in the Daily Mail (UK) and is archived here.

Jihad on Churches: Muslim Persecution of Christians

On Sunday, March 15, as Christian churches around the world were celebrating morning mass, two churches in Pakistan—one Catholic, one Protestant—were attacked by Islamic suicide bombers. At least 17 people were killed and over 70 wounded.

The Taliban claimed responsibility. It is believed that the group had hoped for much greater death tolls, as there were almost 2,000 people in both churches at the time of the explosions.

According to eyewitnesses, two suicide bombers approached the gates of the two churches and tried to enter them. When they were stopped—including by a 15-year-old Christian youth who blocked them with his body—the Islamic jihadis self-detonated. Witnesses saw “body parts flying through the air.”

According to an official statement of the Justice and Peace Commission of the Episcopal Conference of Pakistan, despite all the threats received by the churches, authorities only provided “minimal” security.

As in other Muslim-majority nations, churches in Pakistan are under attack.  On September 22, 2013, in Peshawar, Islamic suicide bombers entered the All Saints Church right after Sunday mass and blew themselves up in the midst of approximately 550 congregants, killing nearly 90 worshippers. Many were Sunday school children, women, and choir members. At least 120 were injured.

One parishioner recalled how “human remains were strewn all over the church.” (For an idea of the aftermath of suicide attacks on churches, see these graphic pictures.)

In 2001, Islamic gunmen stormed St. Dominic’s Protestant Church, opening fire on the congregants and killing at least 16 worshippers, mostly women and children.

The rest of March’s roundup of Muslim persecution of Christians around the world includes, but is not limited to, the following accounts, listed by theme and country in alphabetical order, not necessarily according to severity.

Muslim Attacks on Christian Churches and Monasteries

Central African Republic: At least eight churches were burned in the northern province of Nana Grebizi, after heavily armed Muslim Fulani herdsmen attacked several villages. Two Christians, including a pastor, were killed in the attack; another Christian was severely tortured. After the carnage, the Islamic herdsmen started fires and looted the local population. The blaze destroyed swathes of farmland, at least eight churches, several other mission centers and an unknown number of Christian homes.

Egypt: During the early morning hours of March 9, the Coptic Catholic Church of Kafr el-Dawar was attacked by armed men who used an explosive device against the place of worship.  Two policemen were hospitalized after the attack.  Separately, Dr. Yusuf al-Burhami, a leading cleric in Egypt’s Salafi movement, appeared in a video that surfaced in March saying that “Destroying churches is permissible—as long as the destruction does not bring harm to Muslims, such as false claims that Muslims are persecuting Christians, leading to [foreign] occupations.”  He further added that “the reason we agree to their [churches] being built, via the article in the constitution dealing with worship, and the reason we do not collect the jizya [tribute] from the Christians, is because the condition of Muslims in the current era is well known to the nations of the world—they are weak and deteriorating among the people.” Burhami explained that when the Arab Muslims first conquered Egypt in the 7th century, the ancient nation was Christian, and because the Muslims were few in number, Coptic Christian churches were allowed to remain—“just as the prophet allowed the Jews to remain in Khaibar after he opened [conquered] it, but once Muslims grew in strength and number, [second caliph] Omar al-Khattab drove them out according to the prophet’s command, ‘Drive out the Jews and Christians from the Peninsula.’”

Germany: A potential jihadi attack on the cathedral and synagogue in Bremen was averted following action by police, a Belgian newspaper reported.  Numerous police guarded the cathedral and synagogue and searched a local Muslim cultural center.

Iraq: Islamic State militants blew up a 10th century Chaldean Catholic church north of Mosul and bulldozed a nearby graveyard.  According to Nineveh Yakou—an Assyrian Archaeologist and Director of Cultural Heritage and Indigenous Affairs at A Demand for Action—the Saint George monastery was “wiped out” by IS.  The building was founded by the Assyrian Church in the 10thcentury but rebuilt as a seminary by the Chaldean Catholic Church in 1846. “The current monastery was built on an archeological site containing ancient Assyrian ruins. It was an important show of continuity from the Assyrian to our culture,” Yakou said. “ISIS is wiping out the cultural heritage of Iraq. The monastery was classified as cultural heritage. It’s a cultural and ethnic cleansing.”

Kenya: On the afternoon of February 28, in Maramande, Hindi, Muslims from neighboring Somali set a Christian church on fire.  This same church was set on fire last July 5, 2014, but was built again in January 2015.  According to the pastor of the twice-torched church, “These people do not want Christianity in this area….  They want to finish me so that Christianity will not go on here. But I will continue raising up my eyes to God for help.”  According to Morning Star News, “Violence in Kenya’s coastal region has accelerated in the past few years. On Jan. 11 in the Mombasa area, a gunman shot a Christian dead at the gate leading to a church building, apparently after mistaking him for the church pastor. Police reportedly said the assailants could be members of an active Islamic extremist terror cell in Mombasa blamed for past gun and grenade attacks.”

Lebanon: Unidentified persons invaded Mar Elias, an ancient Maronite church in Bekaa.  Along with damaging one of the church’s windows, they destroyed a portion of the flooring, as they dug a large hole near the altar.  According to Maronite Bishop Joseph Mouwad, much of the church’s sacred items were left intact and not stolen.  Instead, “they broke the tiles and dug the ground, apparently looking for something, though we do not know what.”  Fingerprints and cigarette butts were found. 

Muslim Slaughter of Christian ‘Infidels’

Central African Republic:   An argument between a taxi driver and his Muslim passenger led to the slaughter of at least 16 Christians in Bangui, the nation’s capital.  A Muslim man known as Aladji hailed a motorcycle taxi and asked to be taken to a Muslim-dominated district of Bangui. He was carrying a bag of grenades. When the motorcycle broke down, the driver stopped to fix it, but his agitated passenger pulled out a knife and tried to stab him. The driver overpowered Aladji and killed him instead.  After his body was found, Muslims marched to the Christian sector of the city where they slaughtered at least 16 Christians—some decapitated.  Authorities arrested 10 members of Seleka—the almost entirely Muslim rebel group—following the killings…. Click for complete report

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