Muslim Student Group a Gateway to Jihad?
Erick Stakelbeck
CBN News Terrorism Analyst
WASHINGTON - The Muslim Students Association, or MSA, is one of the largest Islamic organizations in America, with chapters on hundreds of college campuses. It's alumni include doctors, lawyers and engineers.
But the group has another track record that it doesn't advertise: several of its leaders have been convicted of terrorism, prompting some terror experts to call the MSA a recruiting tool for jihad. Although many Muslim and liberal groups complained about recent congressional hearings on homegrown Islamic radicalism, American-born Muslims are behind a growing number of terror plots -- a trend that Attorney General Eric Holder has said keeps him "up at night."
Many of these homegrown jihadists once belonged to the MSA, which has thousands of members on college campuses throughout the U.S. and Canada.
Student Network or Terror Factory?
The MSA bills itself as a resource and support group, a place where Muslim students can network and help grow the association.
Terrorism expert Patrick Poole, however, told CBN News his investigation of the organization shows it's being used for another purpose.
"The Muslim Students Association has been a virtual terror factory," said Poole. "Time after time after time again, we see these terrorists -- and not just fringe members: these are MSA leaders, MSA presidents, MSA national presidents -- who've been implicated, charged and convicted in terrorist plots."
The roll call includes Anwar al-Awlaki, the al Qaeda cleric linked to terror plots from Fort Hood to Times Square and beyond.
Awlaki, now a target for assasination by the U.S. government, was president of the MSA at Colorado State University in the mid-1990s.
Then there is Ramy Zamzam. Before his conviction in Pakistan last year for attempting to join the Taliban and kill American troops, Zamzam was president of the MSA's Washington, D.C., council.
Omar Hammami, a leader of the al-Shabaab terrorist group in Somalia, is another MSA alum. He was once president of the group's chapter at the University of South Alabama.
And the list goes on.
Abdurahman Alamoudi, who was national president of the MSA during the 1980s, was al Qaeda's top fundraiser in America and is currently serving a 23-year prison sentence.
Radical Islam Incubator
The MSA is a supposedly "mainstream" group that has long operated on college campuses from coast to coast. Yet a 2007 New York Police Department report identified the organization as an "incubator" for Islamic radicalism.
Former FBI Special Agent John Guandolo told CBN News that the problem can be traced back to the group's roots in the Muslim Brotherhood -- a jihadist movement that seeks to establish Islamic Sharia law worldwide.
"The MSA serves as a recruitment tool to bring Muslims into the Brotherhood," Guandolo said. "Which was its original purpose: to evaluate Muslims and to bring them into the Brotherhood and to recruit non-Muslims into Islam as a dawa entity, giving them the call to Islam."
Guandolo worked on several major terrorism cases for the FBI. He calls the MSA the "focal point" for the Muslim Brotherhood in America.
"Their goal, both from their senior leaders, presidents of MSA's around the country, national leadership, is to implement Islamic government here in the United States," he explained. "And they say that."
Founded in 1963 at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, the MSA quickly spread to other campuses in the Midwest.
"There were really three leaders, three Iraqi guys: Jamal Barzinji, Ahmed Totonji, and Hisam Altalib, who really set it up, who are known, identified Muslim Brotherhood leaders," said Poole. "And from there, MSA became the mother ship of all the Muslim Brotherhood front groups."
Rabidly Anti-Israel
In 2004, the FBI uncovered an internal Muslim Brotherhood document in which a Brotherhood leader identified the MSA as one of "our organizations and the organizations of our friends."
Part of the MSA's on-campus strategy is to aggressively confront pro-Israel speakers.
The Muslim Students Union at the University of California-Irvine, an MSA affiliate, was suspended by the school after members repeatedly heckled Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren during a speech in 2010.
Another MSA member endorsed genocide against Jews in May 2010 during an exchange with conservative commentator David Horowitz at the University of California-Davis.
"I am a Jew," Horowitz said. "The head of Hezbollah has said that he hopes that we will gather in Israel so he doesn't have to hunt us down globally. For or against it?"
"For it," the MSA member answered firmly, in front of a stunned crowd.
The MSA's national body did not respond to CBN News's request for comment on this story and the organization has not officially addressed the pattern of terrorism arrests involving its former members.
Original broadcast March 19, 2011.
Posted by GS Don Morris, Ph.D./Chana Givon at 4:34 PM No comments:
An Opportunity to Throw Kids A Lifeline
In the shadow of the U.S. Capitol, children suffer in a public education system rife with violence and ranked among the worst in the nation. Yesterday, the U.S. House of Representatives took action to give those students some hope when it voted to reauthorize the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program (D.C. OSP), which provides scholarships to low-income children, allowing them to attend their school of choice. It was one of the most consequential education votes that Congress will make this year. The program empowers parents, and it rejects the notion that a child should be relegated to a failing public school because they were born in the wrong zip code. Yet, remarkably, the program faces opposition from President Barack Obama and Democrats in the U.S. Senate. The D.C. OSP was first launched in 2004, and since that time more than 3,300 children have had the chance to escape the underperforming and unsafe D.C. public schools. The statistics are jarring. As The Heritage Foundation's Lindsey Burke notes, the D.C. public school system ranks 51st in the nation. Only 14 percent of 8th graders are proficient in reading, and just 55 percent of students in D.C. public schools graduate. Under the D.C. OSP, though, students have blossomed amid otherwise unfertile ground. Burke writes:
Congressionally mandated evaluations of the D.C. OSP, conducted by the U.S. Department of Education, revealed that scholarship students were making gains in reading achievement compared with their public school peers. The gains in academic attainment, however, have been most astounding.
While just more than half of all students in D.C. public schools graduate, 91% of students who received a voucher and used it to attend private school graduated.
Despite the program's success, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) inserted language into a 2009 omnibus spending bill that brought about the program's slow death and, without congressional reauthorization, no new students were allowed to receive scholarships. With the new Congress, Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) introduced a bill re-authorizing the D.C. OSP; in anticipation of its passage in the House, President Obama launched a pre-emptive strike against the program. The White House issued a statement of opposition to the D.C. OSP, ignored evidence of its success and claimed, "it has not yielded improved student achievement by its scholarship recipients compared to other students in D.C." Yesterday, The Washington Post editorial board strongly rebuked the president and cited testimony by the principal investigator charged with evaluating the program, Patrick J. Wolf:
'In my opinion, by demonstrating statistically significant experimental impacts on boosting high school graduation rates and generating a wealth of evidence suggesting that students also benefited in reading achievement, the D.C. OSP has accomplished what few educational interventions can claim: It markedly improved important education outcomes for low-income inner-city students.'
Sadly, despite the documented success of the program, the choice it offers parents and the opportunities it gives students in an otherwise failing school system, President Obama stands in opposition to its reauthorization, along with Democrats in the Senate. As Virginia Walden Ford, executive director of D.C. Parents for School Choice and visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation said, "The president cannot claim to be an education reformer while rejecting a program that raises graduation rates, increases parental satisfaction and boosts reading achievement."
The president and Members of Congress who oppose the D.C. OSP are committing another offense against D.C. parents, as well – depriving them of the very choices they enjoy. Nearly 40 percent of the Members of the 111th Congress sent a child to private school. As a child, President Obama was a scholarship recipient, affording him the opportunity to attend the prestigious Punahou School in Hawaii. On top of this, his daughters attend the upscale Sidwell Friends School in D.C. As Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) said in a floor speech prior to yesterday's vote:
I went to the public schools in South Carolina. My wife teaches in the public schools in South Carolina. And my son will graduate from the public schools in South Carolina. But I will miss his graduation like many of you have missed things in your lives because we will be in session. What I will not miss is the opportunity to throw a lifeline to kids who were born through the vicissitudes of life into poverty. We will give them the same choices and chances that we have.
President Obama and Congress have an opportunity to throw that lifeline. If they truly want to empower parents, improve education and help students succeed, supporting the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program would be a good place to start.
* An 18-month congressional investigation into AARP reveals that the organization stands to make more than $1 billion over the next 10 years from Obamacare, a law the seniors lobby supported despite opposition among its core constituency.
* As NATO assumes full command of air operations over Libya, CIA forces are on the ground gathering intelligence and making contact with anti-Qadhafi forces.
* Ohio lawmakers have passed a bill limiting collective bargaining by public sector employees and requiring government workers to make minimum payments for health-care coverage and pensions.
* U.S. military advisers are seeking to limit a reduction in combat forces in Afghanistan this summer, contrary to President Obama's wishes, The Washington Post reports.
* India's population has hit 1.21 billion, up 181 million from 10 years ago. That accounts for 17.5 percent of the world's population.
Op-ed: Israel's amazing altruism largely ignored by media as it doesn't fit with Zionist stereotypes
Israel's amazing altruism largely ignored by media as it doesn't fit with Zionist stereotypes
Giulio Meott
Israel Opinion
Israel was the first country in the world to send aid to Haiti after the earthquake. An impressive mass of goods, people and emergency facilities was sent to the Caribbean island after the natural disaster. It happened also with the tsunami in Asia, when Israel was among the most generous countries. And now again, when disaster struck in Japan, Israel was the first to dispatch a field hospital to assist in the recovery effort. However, Israel's amazing altruism never had its legitimate space in the global media, because this radical goodness doesn't fit in with the Zionist stereotype of the colonialist, fascist and apartheid occupier.
In Haiti, an IDF team worked to identify the victims. After the 9/11 attacks, Israeli pathologists helped their fellow Americans at Ground Zero. In 1979, Israel sent a delegation of medical staff to provide medical relief to thousands of displaced people in Cambodia following the downfall of genocidal communist Pol Pot. The Israelis also ran a pediatric field hospital in Rwanda during the Tutsi genocide, assisted the Albanians during the Kosovo war and helped Turkey following the 1999 earthquake.
There is an untold, sad reason for Israel's ability to offer such help. For the Jewish State, terrorism has always been an involuntary master of speed, precision and caring. There is an amazing quantity of research, inventions and new techniques for helping the disabled and the paralyzed return to normal life after terrorist destruction.
During the Second Intifada, Dr. David Applebaum invented a special method to treat wounded people transported to the emergency room. In New York, Dr. Applebaum showed slides illustrating how it is possible to treat "44 injured people in 28 minutes," as he had done after a terrorist attack in Jerusalem. Then he returned to Israel and took his daughter Nava to Cafe Hillel, the day before her wedding was supposed to take place. Both of them were killed by a suicide bomber. Applebaum's method has been copied around the world.
Boycotters hurting themselves
Israel's ignored goodness can be extended to the incredible record of scientific and medical discoveries. Especially now that the "light among nations", as Israel was called by David Ben Gurion, is boycotted by universities around the world. The Jewish State is one of the world's leaders in the per capita registration of US patents by its scientists and doctors. One of the most important tumor suppressor genes was cloned in 1983 by scientists at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot (defective copies of this gene are found in more than half of all human cancers.)
A non-invasive diagnostic method for detecting breast and prostate cancer was developed by another Weizmann's pioneer. Israel developed the early diagnosis of "Mad Cow" bovine disease in Creutzfeldt Jakob genetic disease in humans with a urine test instead of a brain biopsy. The list of miracles includes the identification of the gene that causes muscular dystrophy, a revolutionary supportive metal in a coronary arteries to prevent a heart attack, a vaccine that prevents the development of juvenile diabetes, the discovery of a gene linked to post-traumatic stress disorder, the development of drugs to combat Alzheimer, cancer, Parkinson and multiple sclerosis and the late deciphering of the structure of the ribosome - the cell's protein factory.
Israel is also the definitive model for finding solutions to major climate challenges, from the fight against desertification to water shortages. The boycotters and the haters of Israel are damaging their own interests, because the Jewish State truly is a light that benefits humanity as a whole.
The first child born after the Haiti earthquake came into the world in the tents of the Israeli army. The mother had no doubts about the child's name: Israel.
Giulio Meotti, a journalist with Il Foglio, is the author of the book A New Shoah. The Untold Story of Israel's Victims of Terrorism
The Unsolved Problem of Labor
Both national and local newspapers have made a great show of commemorating the Triangle Waist Company fire, a horrifying event in which women working in a sweatshop burned alive or fell to their deaths. The Triangle fire was not the only example of sweatshop abuses, but it was the most horrifying, and even a 100 years later it is being used by labor advocates to make a point. But that point may not be what they think it is.
A century later there are still sweatshops not very far from the former building that housed the Triangle Waist Company, which has been absorbed by the spreading blot of the NYU campus. The women who work in these sweatshops are not Jewish and Italian, but Chinese. They make from 1 to 3 dollars an hour -- and 90 percent of them are members of unions. Many of the NYU students who go in and out of the Brown building, where hundreds of women died, wear trendy clothing made in sweatshops. The clothing is not cheap, it is cheaply made. Those students who wanted a moral alternative bought clothes from American Apparel, which promoted its clothes as sweatshop free, turning the company into a major player in the garment industry. But American Apparel started out by subcontracting its manufacturing to Sam Lim, since then it has employed large numbers of illegal aliens and the lawsuits charging the AA boss with sexual harassment and blackmail, suggest its office workers might envy Norma Rae.
The tale of the Triangle Waist Company is intertwined with that of the ILGWU, the union which represented female garment workers. But the ILGWU no longer exists, instead it has been merged into a restaurant workers union, and even that combined union has half the membership the ILGWU did. The combined union is run by a Yale Phi Beta Kappa grad, whose wife, another Yale alumni, cozily runs the union's health plan. Additionally he serves on the Board of Trustees of Washington D.C.'s high end liberal public policy think tank, the Brookings Institute. It's enough to make the NYU tenants of the old home of the Triangle factory seem downright lower class.
What happened to the unions? A union is an organization, not the expression of the collective will of the workers. It is not fundamentally different than the sweatshops, it just operates on another business model. A sweatshop and a union both run for the benefit of the bosses, they just have a different set of customers, the sweatshop's customers are the brands and the union's customers are the workers. Both the sweatshop and the union win over their customers with ruthless tactics, but the final profit goes to the bosses.
The Triangle era saw ruthless exploitation and conflict between workers and bosses. The bosses suppressed worker discontent and strikes by hiring local gangs for protection or relying on the Democratic party's Tammany Hall machine to send out its cops, at a time when promotion in the New York City police force meant paying money to the boys on top . The workers turned to gangs and to left wing radicals, who built up their unions, took them over and turned them into a trust that controlled entire industries. The trust was integrated into the political machine. Soon the sweatshop workers and owners were both working for the same people.
The ILGWU, which newspapers and labor mythmakers would have us believe that the falling women of the Triangle Waist Company died for, used gangsters like Little Augie and Lepke Buchalter, head of Murder Inc, to maintain control over the trust. And though much is made by feminists of the ILGWU being a mostly female union, it was and in its current incarnation is still run by men who did not tolerate any dissent. When the Depression killed the boom that had powered the garment business, it also killed the ILGWU's trust. Only federal intervention by FDR's labor regulations turned the tide. But that too was only temporary. Once the garment industry was able to begin outsourcing to cheaper labor abroad, the ILGWU began dying a slow death.
The sweatshop's business model depended on raising the cost of labor, and charging the workers for doing their organizing for them, which conflicted with the garment industry's need to make clothes as cheaply as possible. Now those same clothes are being made in China or Chinatown. The ILGWU, like so many unions, promised the good life, but they could only deliver temporary raises followed by the decimation of the industry itself. It was enough time for a generation to get on its feet, but not for those that followed it. There are still garment worker union members and plenty of them work in sweatshops while making below minimum wage. This is no paradox. A large membership means wealth and power for those on top. It doesn't necessarily mean anything for those on the bottom. Cheap garments will always be made, whether they will be made cheaply by union or non-union members. They fill a need and as long as people buy based primarily on price considerations, the sweatshop will go on existing.
Sweatshops were built to take advantage of a new business model, that sidelined tailors who worked for individual customers, for mass produced garments by factory workers. The workers could be unskilled and disposable. An owner made the lowest bid for a contract, borrowed money and rented a space and equipment, got workers for as little as he could, and then tried to squeeze blood out of them to make a profit. If he succeeded, then he might be able to do the same thing again, if he didn't, he would be bankrupt. The cheaply made clothes were of lower quality (though of much higher quality than most clothes you'll find at Wal-Mart or K-Mart today) but affordable for millions of people. A successful worker might save up enough to become an owner himself. And plenty of doctors, lawyers and tycoons had fathers or mothers who started out this way.
That is what makes the problem of labor so difficult. Over a hundred women died in the Triangle Waist Company fire, but how many hundreds of thousands of women lived because the garment industry, with all the ugliness of its sweatshops and child labor, provided a way for them and their families to come to America. How many of them would have survived under Nazi or Communist rule?
It isn't a cheerful question to ask, but any moral consideration of the Triangle Waist Company must also raise that question. The possibility that the garment industry still saved far more lives than it took. And that moral consideration is often at the heart of unregulated capitalism. Does its ultimate prosperity justify its abuses?
Today China has slave labor, widespread pollution and a rising middle class. And America has a tightly regulated labor market and a declining middle class. Liberals despise trickle down economics, but prosperity is undeniably trickling away from the regulatory republics of the West and into the maw of Chinese crony capitalists. And the Chinese sweatshop workers in New York, slaving over machines in hot rooms, the way their Jewish and Italian predecessors did, are more likely to have children who will go to Yale, than the Black and Hispanic government employees living on generous union negotiated salaries
New York City has lost 2 percent of its Black residents who are mainly moving to the non-union south, because there are jobs there. The large Black populations in Northeastern cities had come for the jobs in booming urban industries. Particularly during wartime, when so many American workers were fighting in Europe or Asia. When those industries moved abroad, they left behind ghettos full of people who could no longer find work. The race riots had far more to do with joblessness, than with discrimination, as can be seen by looking at the much milder race riots during WW2 when jobs were available.
The liberal northeast is a union paradise, and yet black people are deserting it. They are abandoning strongholds like New York, Chicago and Boston. And it's not just the Northeast, even a Pacific liberal haven like San Francisco is losing its black population. The Federal government is going after Marin County for its lack of diversity, accusing it of violating the Civil Rights Act. But officials have tried to attract Black residents with the usual diversity buzzwords, but how do you do that without jobs? Every article about Black emigration from urban areas uses those same buzzwords and all of them miss the point. Chicago, New York and San Francisco did not suddenly turn racist-- they turned jobless.
While unions can lock in a guaranteed number of jobs at a given salary-- they can only do so at the cost of reducing the overall number of available jobs. You can have a 100,000 very good jobs, a 1,000,000 average jobs or 10,000,000 miserable ones or a 100,000,000 slave labor jobs. The unionized northeast has gone with the.100,000 and China has gone with the 100,000,000. Which is why they have jobs and we don't. That is not to say that we should be imitating China-- rather it is important to understand the dynamic at work here.
Liberalism's celebration of diversity is properly a celebration of capitalism. That diversity would not exist without it. America was built by everyone from indentured English and Irish servants, German, Irish, Jewish and Italian factory workers, Swedish farmers and miners to African-American slaves, and half the world, from Norway to China. Many of them were treated badly, but the larger story may be what they and their descendants achieved here. Liberals like to fit that into a narrative that begins with exploitation and ends with regulation-- but then why are so many of the millions of White and Black workers who depended on major industries out of work?
Their answer is that government solves everything. But let us take a look at another fire that happened not far from the site of the Triangle Waist Company fire and is much less remembered today. The fire on board the General Slocum.
In the summer of 1904, the General Slocum, a ship taking the women and children of the ethnic German community in Manhattan, for an outing caught fire. But its safety equipment from life jackets to hoses were completely useless. Over a thousand women and children died within sight of the shore. Died in useless and senseless ways that would have never happened had the safety equipment been inspected. But the 'inspectors' were part of the Democratic party's corrupt Tammany Hall network, who were appointed by political patrons to a lucrative office and were notorious for passing anything. Life vests filled with iron bars and rotten hoses on the General Slocum got their approval. The regulations were there, but government corruption ensured that they would not be enforced.
A year earlier, 650 theater patrons had died in Chicago during the Iroquois Theatre fire, again because of corrupt inspectors. Safety equipment was non-existent and the law went unenforced. Charges were leveled against everyone up to Chicago Mayor Carter Harrison, but the 'Chicago Way' ensured that justice was not served. And a year later, Carter Harrison was running for the Democratic party's nomination for President.
Both these events were at least as horrifying as the Triangle Waist Company fire, and had a much higher death toll. But they are not remembered because not only do they fail to make a pro-labor point, but they actually make a much more dangerous point about the inherent corruptibility of government authority. They remind us that regulation is law and law is enforced by men through a bureaucracy overseen by political patronage. And that such systems are no more moral or ethical, and no less greedy, than that of the sweatshops. As we confront a 15 trillion dollar deficit and an uncontrollable orgy of greed by politicians and public sector unions who are their electoral base, we are reminded of that every day.
The only answer may be that there is no answer. It is men who make moral choices, and it is the individual, whether in a corporation, a union and or a government who does or does not do the right thing. The problem of labor cannot be solved by creating more organizations, as that only creates more hierarchies which also treat workers as cash cows. They cannot be solved through passing laws in one country, while its citizens purchase the benefits of slave labor from another. There may be no solving it at all. And on the former site of the Triangle Waist Company, students pass holding iPod's made by abused workers in China whose economy is nevertheless threatening to dominate the 21st century.
A Dangerous Doctrine
Alan W. Dowd
A growing number of observers—from here at FrontPage to NRO to Foreign Affairs—are calling the West's intervention in Libya's civil war a test run for the UN's so-called "Responsibility to Protect" doctrine. The Responsibility to Protect (or R2P, as UN types call it) basically holds that nation-states have a responsibility "to protect their populations—whether citizens or not—from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, and from their incitement," in the words of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. Further, the doctrine holds that UN member states have a "responsibility to respond in a timely and decisive manner…to help protect populations" when a nation-state commits one of these acts. As the secretary general concedes, R2P "could have profound implications." Genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, mass-murder and state-sanctioned brutality are not unique to our times, of course. But the fusion of mass-murder and mass-communications—the CNN effect, as it was called in the 1990s—is. In other words, it's easy to understand why R2P has gained traction in an age when man-made famine in Somalia, ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, and government massacres in the Middle East are broadcast for the all world to see—in real time. Moreover, it's reasonable to expect governments not to murder their own people.
What's more problematic is expecting—let alone requiring—members of the UN to intervene whenever a government fails to live up to the murky and malleable definition of "protecting" its population.
First, on the intervention side of the equation, R2P taken to its logical conclusion will increase the heavy burdens on the U.S. armed forces, while decreasing America's freedom of action and independence. The U.S. military, after all, is already the world's first responder and last line of defense. Playing this role in pursuit of an enlightened self-interest that promotes America's goals while helping the world's unfortunates along the way is one thing; doing it as handmaiden to the UN, EU or Arab League is quite another.
On the other side of the R2P equation—the trigger for intervention—who at the UN, ICC, Arab League or European Union decides what justifies an R2P intervention? R2P advocates are quick to answer that an R2P intervention can only be triggered by genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity or inciting such actions. Of course, all of these are subjective terms. Just ask Armenia and Turkey, Kosovo, Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia, Russia and Chechnya, the people of Sudan. Everyone from Tony Blair to Tommy Franks was accused of war crimes during the Iraq war. Today, Libya's rebels and Libya's government, NATO's leaders and Khadafy's henchmen, are all accusing each other of war crimes. This isn't to say that there aren't genuine cases of war crimes, genocide and the like in the world, but rather that Americans may define these terms differently than the bureaucrats who roam the UN.
Speaking of Khadafy, no one will cry over his overthrow or death. If anyone has forfeited his right to govern, it's the thug who runs Libya. Still, that's probably best decided by Libyans—unless or until Khadafy threatens the United States or its interests. But if Khadafy is guilty of violating R2P principles, what about Syria's Assad, Sudan's Bashir, Cuba's Castro, Iran's Ahmadinejad, North Korea's Kim? The list could go on and on. In fact, if I made the list, it might include China's leaders and Russia's leaders (see Tiananmen, Tibet and Chechnya). If they made the list, it might include the United States or Estonia. If Kosovo made the list, it might include Serbia. If the Serbs made the list, it might include Kosovo. If Pakistan made the list, it might include India. If India made the list, it might include Pakistan. You get the point.
Moreover, what level of negligence or outright willfulness constitutes "failure to protect"—disproportionate death rates among different ethnic groups, mass-arrests, seizure of property? These sorts of things could be twisted to apply to the United States, especially in a world awash in moral relativism. Before scoffing at this, recall that Belgian lawyers tried to put U.S. commanders in the dock for failing to stop postwar looting in Iraq. One wonders where their outrage was when a bona fide war criminal reigned in Baghdad. But this points out one of the problems with many R2P advocates. They are surprisingly silent on the obvious cases: the Saddam Husseins and Kim Jong Ils and Fidel Castros of the world. It's difficult to understand why.
Whatever their motives, it seems that advocates of R2P are opening the door to the further weakening of national sovereignty and the further weakening of the nation-state system—a system which has served America well. It pays to recall that the United States has thrived in the nation-state system. We were born into it, raised in it, grew to master and shape it, and today we benefit from it, sustain it and dominate it. When and if it ceases to be the main organizing structure for the world—if R2P seduces America into taking sides everywhere, weakening the responsibilities and benefits of sovereignty along the way—there is no guarantee that Americans will have the same position and place they enjoy today.
NYT checkpoint op-ed: "We're Jewish, so we can insult Israel" (updated)
The New York Times has an op-ed about the experience of two pro-Palestinian activists, Katia and Alain Salomon, as they decided to go through the Israeli checkpoint at Kalandia.
We had no trouble reaching Ramallah from Jerusalem by public transportation. But we had problems on our return trip. We reached the Kalandia checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem on Friday, March 11, at 9:30 in the morning. We chose to get off the bus with everyone else, even though as foreigners we could have stayed on. We were stunned by what we saw: dwarfing cement structures, barbed wire, cameras. As we lined up we could see an Israeli woman soldier inside a multifaceted concrete blockhouse, peering out at us. Ahead of us there was a tunnel of bars just wide enough for one person. At its end a turnstile was blocked electronically from somewhere.
...After that narrow corridor we stepped into a small area, again in front of a metal turnstile. Many of us were wet, as it had rained in the morning, and it was cold. There were not that many people waiting but only one or two people were let through every 10 minutes or so.
At 12:10 it was finally our turn. We could see the people controlling the turnstile. There were several young Israeli soldiers inside. They seemed to be having a very good time, laughing, horsing around, like all youths. We want to believe that they had no clue as to the moral and physical suffering they were inflicting with their very slow control process.
I have never been to Kalandia so I cannot comment on why there are no benches, or why the process is slow. But the authors of the article - who inform us twice that they are Jewish - know one thing:
We are Jewish, and began to weep. How was it possible that our own people, who have gone through such suffering, can inflict this ordeal, intended to humiliate and intimidate another people?
Here is all you need to know about the Salomons. Yes, they tell us, they are Jewish - but they do not for a second believe that the checkpoints, which have saved countless lives, serve any purpose besides humiliation and intimidation. Nay - their very intent is to humiliate Arabs! Some Israeli architect decided when he designed the building that it must humiliate and degrade people. Because that's how Israelis are.
Later on, they again explain more of what they "know:"
One can easily imagine the feelings of resentment that are born from this experience. This treatment is unwarranted from the perspective of legitimate security imperatives; it is degrading and inhumane and not understandable coming from a nation that wants to be perceived as democratic, a nation among nations.
Here's what this awful, humiliating checkpoint at Kalandia looks like:
What fair minded person can believe that this was designed to humiliate people? All I see is "security." Narrow passageways assures that only one person - potential terrorists included - can go through at a time, limiting damage he or she can do. The bars are no more intimidating than those that are adjacent to New York City subway turnstiles. The cameras are necessary so that individual Israeli soldiers aren't attacked with knives, as they have been. The area is clean.
The Salomons emphasize that they are Jewish in order to find reasons to insult the Jewish state. Instead of researching the reasons why Kalandia was designed as it was, they ascribe evil intent to Israel and insist - without any background in physical security as far as I can tell - that these measures are unnecessary.
It is a shame that so many Jews like the Salomons don't give their co-religionists the benefit of the doubt as to why they might possibly want to build such a checkpoint. Checkpoints are specifically designed to stop suicide bombers, shooters, people smuggling in pipe bombs, and people with knives who want to attack the first Israeli they see including the guards. Unlike what these Israel-bashers who love to say they are Jewish claim, there are legitimate reasons for every decision made when designing Kalandia - all one has to do is pend a little time researching it.
It is almost sickening that people can write an article like this without once mentioning the challenges that Israel faces and the years of terrorism Israel that forced Israel to build structures like these. If they are as committed to Judaism as they claim, perhaps they can give a little benefit of the doubt Israelis who are trying to avoid being blown up.
Because giving the benefit of the doubt is also a Jewish concept.
UPDATE: I received an email from JB:
I served in the area for months, been to the checkpoint itself a few times and the article is BS. Sure, at certain days there are holdups, but usually the traffic is going just fine - both pedestrian and vehicular. Cases where one person goes through every few minutes are very rare and are usually a result of some kind of brawl the Palestinians started with soldiers. When I served there, our batcom received reports of a fight breaking out with the locals at least one or twice a week. The MPs got it particularly hard, as they were the ones in direct contact with the populations. The guys - and the girls - often got hit, spat on and abused in various ways. That is not to say this is an every day occurence, but it happens. The gals there got to use their pepper sprays quite often.
Comment: I have stood with the soldiers at this very "checkpoint" and observed the soldier's behavior as well as the Arabs passing through the gate. I have witnessed the interception of munitions being illegally carried through the area by a teenager. I watched the interception, the arrest and the interrogation-all done professionally.The lines moved with ease as those who had the proper id, no different than what I do in American airports.I also have been present when a film crew arrives and if as on cue, inappropriate line behavior begins. When the crew leaves the area, amazingly the behavior returns to normal. NYT, you intentionally misrepresent.Being Jewish does not grant you any special rights nor abilities to distort the truth.
Olympic Stadium for Suspicion of Possessing ExSecurity Officer Arrested Outside London's Explosives
Published March 30, 2011 | FoxNews.com
The London Metropolitan Police reportedly arrested a female security guard outside London's Olympic Stadium Tuesday, according to police officials.
After police searched the 40-year-old dog handler's car, she was arrested for "suspicion of possessing explosives," according to officials.
A police statement said: "Searches were carried out at residential addresses in Kent and London, no further substances were found."
Since the woman apparently has a small amount of the substance, police are not treating it as a terror-related incident, a police spokesman told FoxNews.com. The incident did not represent a threat to the safety and security of the Olympic site.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/03/30/woman-security-officer-arrested-london-suspicion-possessing-explosives-73457120/#ixzz1I9BhBGKT
Comment: There has been a change in protocols for terror ops-the "usual suspects" will not be the next bombers-pay attention-doc
Posted by GS Don Morris, Ph.D./Chana Givon at 6:11 AM No comments:
Who Really Made Egypt's Revolution?: The Story The Media Missed
Jerry Gordon (March 2011)
Kenneth Timmerman is a NewsMax.com columnist and foreign correspondent. He has authored important non-fiction works on domestic and international foreign policy issues and thriller novels about contemporary national security and human rights issues. Starting in 1977, Timmerman spent nearly two decades abroad reporting on developments in Europe and the Middle East from his base in Paris. From that vantage point he had an early view of the Iranian Islamic Revolution that overthrew the late Shah's reign and secularism in Iran to become the theocratic Islamic Republic of Iran. He fashioned important relations with the Iranian opposition and dissident community, both in Europe and inside Iran. This led to his co-founding the Foundation for Freedom in Iran upon his return to America in the mid-1990's. Beginning in the late 1980's, Timmerman spent over 20 years tracking the development of Iran's nuclear weapons development program, presciently predicting the current threat to the world. For that investigative effort he was nominated along with US UN Ambassador John Bolton for the Nobel Peace Prize. While reporting from Beirut during the First Lebanon war in 1982, he was briefly a prisoner of the Fatah faction of the PLO. That experience of several weeks' confinement in the PLO dudgeon in Lebanon influenced his views about the Palestinian cause and Israel transforming him into a Christian Zionist. While reporting on the signing of the Jordanian-Israeli Peace treaty, he interviewed many leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood affiliates, the Islamic Action Front and Hamas for the Simon Wiesenthal Center that exposed him to the core of Jew hatred in political Islam. Timmerman has been critical of both the Bush and Obama Administrations' lassitude in supporting pro-Freedom movements in Iran and employing stronger sanctions against the Islamic regime in Tehran for its brutal suppression of dissidents. He has also exposed pro-Islamic regime lobby groups in Washington, DC that have influenced White House policies. His most recent human rights activities and reporting have endeavored to spotlight the precarious predicament of the indigenous Assyrian-Chaldean-Syriac Christian community in Iraq which is teetering on the brink of possible extinction. We were fortunate to have interviewed him following a recent return from assignments in Northern Iraq.
Gordon: Ken Timmerman, thank you for kindly consenting to this timely interview.
Timmerman: I am pleased to do it.
Gordon: How did you become a foreign correspondent?
Timmerman: I began while I was in Paris as a young man with a trip to Prague behind the Iron Curtain in 1977 to cover the Charter 77 Movement. I guess I have always had a thing for dissidents and people who are resisting an oppressive authoritarian or totalitarian regime and have been covering similar types of conflicts ever since. I started working as a reporter full time in Lebanon covering the 1982 war. Ever since, it's been a long, passionate, fascinating story.
Gordon: What happened to you when you were in Beirut during the first Lebanese war with Israel?
Timmerman: I went into Lebanon having lived in Europe for many years, so I bought the Euro-leftie mind-set that Israel was an Imperialist aggressive State who was massacring the "poor Palestinians." I was accredited to the PLO to cover the war. I arrived in Beirut and not long afterwards was kidnapped by guerillas on the street and turned over to Fatah in West Beirut. Over the next three and a half weeks I was held in an underground cell with about 20 other people, most of them Lebanese, some from neighboring Arab countries, and I learned a lot about the way the PLO operated. Most of the people with me were being punished for trying to leave Beirut during the siege. The PLO wanted to make an example of them, so they would keep people for a week or two weeks, beat them up, some of them they would take out and shoot, and the others they would release onto the streets as a warning to anybody who wanted to leave Beirut. Their intention was to hold the civilian population of West Beirut hostage and then claim any civilian casualties were the result of Israeli barbarity. I gradually woke up to this during those 3-1/2 weeks, and by the end was tracking the advance of the Israeli tanks, whose shells were exploding all around us, waiting with great anticipation for one of them to bust down the walls of my prison and set me free.
Gordon: Did that experience transform you in terms of your views about Islam, your Palestinian captors and Israel?
Timmerman: Oh, absolutely. But not in the way you might think. I never hated my captors, the Palestinians. I was born again in the rubble of my prison, both in the literal sense and as a Christian believer. I understood that the only reason I survived was because God had a plan for me – to be a witness, not a martyr - and had sent guardian angels to protect me and deliver me from evil. I went back to Lebanon soon afterwards. I also went to the West Bank, Egypt, and to Israel and realized early on that it was hard to view the Middle East struggle at an individual level at least in black and white terms. I spent a lot of time with ordinary people in the Palestinian areas and could certainly identify with their suffering. I spent a lot with ordinary Israelis over the years and I certainly identified with their suffering, with their history and with their struggle. Today, I consider myself a Christian Zionist. That belief has come to me over a number of years as I look at the bigger picture and the larger politics involved. But it's hard not to feel sympathy for individuals on both sides of the conflict on a very personal level, and I think it's very important to remember that.
Gordon: What prompted your book, Preachers of Hate – Islam and the War on America?
Timmerman: Well it's kind of a funny story. I've been doing some reports for the Simon Wiesenthal Center on weapons of mass destruction in the early 1990's, so when I had the opportunity to cover the signing of the Jordanian -Israeli peace treaty in 1994, I made a phone call to Rabbi Abe Cooper, who was the Associate Dean of the Center. He said, "Ken, why don't you take that opportunity to interview some of the leaders of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and ask them just one question." I said "o.k., what is it?" He said, "Ask them what they think about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion." I laughed and I said, "come on, Abe, you've got to be kidding. These guys are sophisticated. Some of them have been to medical school. They have Masters Degrees, business degrees." They are not going to fall for that kind of nonsense. He said, "Ken, just ask the question and let me know what happens." So I asked the question and I was absolutely floored by the responses I got. It was my introduction to Muslim anti-Semitism 101. To a man every single Muslim leader I spoke with - and I spoke to people at the top of the Islamic Action Front, the Muslim Brotherhood front organization in Jordan, I spoke to leaders in Hamas, some of whom have since been dispatched to their maker by the Israelis, some of whom are still in power, and to a man they all believed that the Protocols were factual and true. Some of them got out their own copy of the Protocols and flipped to certain pages and said, "you see, it is written right here: the Jews have a plan." And they would go on and on as if this stuff was actually real. I was floored, and so I taped all of these interviews and eventually put out a monograph with the Simon Wiesenthal Center in 1994 called, "In their Own Words" which was exactly that. It was the transcription of these interviews. It changed my view forever to realize that if you scratched the surface of political Islam, almost immediately you hit these core anti-Semitic beliefs. Political Islam simply couldn't exist without this deep hatred of the Jews. The Jews had victimized them, the Jews were the cause of all evil, the cause of their under-development, their scientific and social backwardness, you name it. I must say that understanding this basic underlying truth made it easier in the ensuing years to see more clearly what was going on here in this country with the Muslim Brotherhood penetration of American political institutions and even conservative institutions such as CPAC.
Gordon: When did you become involved with the Iranian Democratic Opposition and when did you assist in establishing the Foundation for Democracy in Iran?
Timmerman: I started following Iran during the Revolution of 1978 while in Paris. The uncle of my then girlfriend owned a bicycle factory in Tehran and was traveling back and forth between Paris and Tehran during the revolution trying to keep his factory open and his workers paid before it eventually was nationalized and taken over by the revolution and everyone was laid off. He brought back a little green book of sayings of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Two thirds of them were about sex. How do you keep the fast of Ramadan if you have sex with a goat? How do you keep the Ramadan fast if you have sex with a woman who is not your wife or a 12-year old girl? I won't get into too many of those details, but it was graphic. Now, needless to say this should have made Khomeini a laughing stock, but the media never read it. There is a story that Richard Perle likes to tell about Bernard Lewis who had a copy of one of Khomeini's books and he gave it to the CIA in 1979 and they said, "We've never heard of this." Then they came back and said the book didn't exist because they couldn't find it for sale in Iran. It was typical of the kind of intellectual shallowness and a lack of inquisitiveness that has led the CIA to make such monumental errors again and again.
I began tracking the first dissidents that came out of Iran once the Islamic Republic was established in 1980. First came Bakhriar, the Shah's last prime minister. Then came the first president of the Islamic Republic, Banisadr, was forced to flee in 1981. Then came Qassemlou, the leader of the Kurdish Democratic Party. And many more. I developed personal relationships with them as a reporter based in Paris. When I came back to the U.S. after living abroad for 18 years, I set up the Foundation For Democracy in Iran in 1995 with Peter Rodman, now sadly deceased, who served in six Republican White Houses and was a top aide to Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon and Ayatollah Mehdi Rouhani, a dissident Iranian Shiite Cleric who taught me everything I know about Shia Islam. We spent days drinking tea in his Paris apartment when he would teach me what Itjihad was all about. Also, there was Joshua Muravchik, a human rights activist here in the United States, and Nader Afshar, who had worked with the Iranian opposition in Pakistan when it was actively infiltrating Iran in the 1980s and early 1990s. We initially applied for and received a grant from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) to monitor human rights abuses in Iran. We quickly realized that the internet was starting to become a powerful tool for promoting civil society and democratic expression and by the time the student rebellion took place in 1999 in Tehran University, we had good enough contacts inside Iran that we got the first photographs of students being tossed out of their dormitory windows by the Basij -- within ten or fifteen minutes of the actual events. We posted them on our website, iran.org. We were funded by NED through about 1999, but since then no one seemed to care.
Gordon: You were among the first to publish about the Iranian nuclear development program with your non-fiction work, Countdown to Crisis, The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran. Where did most of that information come from? What positions did you espouse in the book to counter the threat and in your opinion, what has prevented the Bush and Obama Administrations from pursuing them?
Timmerman: Countdown to Crisis was actually the culmination of nearly 20 years of investigation into Iran's Nuclear Programs. I first wrote about them in the mid-1980's when I was in Paris working for Newsweek and earlier, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In 1987, I launched a confidential newsletter called, Middle East Defense News (MED News) and wrote about a relatively obscure Pakistani nuclear engineer named A.Q. Khan who had just signed a nuclear cooperation agreement with the Iranian regime. I thought that relationship was quite noteworthy, but no one seemed to pick up on it. My sources? You know I'm a veracious reader of what used to be called Foreign Broadcast Information Service which translated the Pakistani, Iranian and Arab media. I also had many sources among the dissidents, former intelligence officers and even family members of top leaders of the Islamic regime itself. I thought it was most important to roll out the long chronology of Iran's nuclear weapons development, something not very well known here in this country. Then I predicted in 2005 that this would lead to a nuclear showdown between Iran and the West. It has taken a little bit longer than I initially thought. There have been many ups and downs in the Iranian Nuclear Weapons Program. The most dramatic admission of which is the computer malware Stuxnet which appears to have done serious physical damage to Iran's centrifuge program and to the Busheir nuclear power plant.
I argue in the book that it's absolutely, number one, for Western governments to recognize the threat from a nuclear armed Iran; number two, to take steps to prevent that from happening - economic sanctions that could include an oil blockade and even a total trade embargo. And, number three, if the West really cares about preventing a nuclear-armed Iran, it should do the most effective thing, the moral and the right thing, and that is to help the pro-freedom movement in Iran. I have always believed that the problem with nuclear weapons in Iran is not the weapons themselves. We don't really fear a nuclear armed France. But a nuclear armed radical Islamic regime in Iran is a threat to the entire world. So it's the combination of a radical regime and nuclear weapons that make it a clear and present danger.
Gordon: Why in your opinion has neither the Bush nor Obama Administrations provided support for the democratic opposition in Iran?
Timmerman: That's a good question. The Bush administration did earmark 75 million dollars to help the pro-freedom Movement, but the money was misspent. Most of it went to the Farsi Service of the Voice of America, which has been heavily infiltrated by pro Iranian regime elements. I think part of the reason that the money got misspent was ignorance. Part of the reason was deliberate efforts by State Department bureaucrats who detested George W. Bush and his agenda of bringing freedom to the Middle East and to Muslim countries. They actively tried to sabotage his efforts. I remember we applied for a State Department grant for the Foundation For Democracy in Iran to assist the opposition movement inside Iran. They told us as we were preparing the application to make sure that our programs targeted groups and individuals inside Iran, because they didn't want to fund think tanks and studies on the outside. I said great, we can do that. They green lighted us for about a million dollars and then the grant was reviewed, and it went to a woman named Suzanne Maloney who was not even a permanent State Department employee. She was the State Department fellow from Exxon Mobil. She argued that our proposal was "way too provocative." She said, we can't possibly approve this kind of thing. And so they funded think tanks and studies. That happened in the Bush administration. It was sabotage. The President's agenda was sabotaged by bureaucrats and political activists masquerading as bureaucrats he didn't even know existed.
With the Obama administration I think there is simply no desire to even pretend to help the pro-freedom movement. When given the chance in June 2009 of giving moral support, not even financial material support to the millions of protestors who were asking simply to have their votes counted in the election in Iran, President Obama chose to stay silent for three weeks. His silence as protesters were beaten and murdered in the streets by regime thugs sent a devastating message to the pro-freedom movement. It also sent an empowering message to the Iranian regime. They understood what he meant. Afterwards they would refer to Obama with a play on words, "Oo ba m'ast." In Persian, that means "he's with us."
Gordon: Are there in your opinion lobbying groups in Washington who are in fact foreign agents of the Islamic regime in Tehran?
Timmerman: That is a legal determination that I'm not capable of making. What I can say is that there are lobbying groups that support an agenda of changes in U.S. policy that directly coincide with the interests of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Most notably there is the American Iranian Council (AIC), run by Hoosang Amirahmadi, and the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) run by Trita Parsi – who actually is not Iranian-American but Swedish-Iranian. Both groups have been lobbying for a number of years to remove U.S. sanctions on Iran, to open negotiations with Iran and to strike a so-called grand bargain with the Iranian regime. Trita Parsi in particular has been an avid purveyor of fake documents purporting to demonstrate that the Iranian regime had made an offer of a grand bargain to the United States in 2003 shortly after the liberation of Iraq. In fact the State Department examined the document and their Iranian specialists told Secretary of State Colin Powell that the offer was not authentic. It came from the Swiss Ambassador to Tehran, not from the Iranian regime. Yet to this day, Trita Parsi and people like Flynt Leverett – another pro-regime shill, who worked for the National Security Council under Clinton and was held over by President Bush - still claim it was an authentic offer. In fact, it was a fake, a fraud. In my opinion, Mr. Parsi, whose positions seem strangely to coincide with the positions of the Iranian regime in Tehran, is also a fake and a fraud.
Gordon: How did both you and former U.S. Ambassador John Bolton get nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize?
Timmerman: I received a call one day in late 2005 from Per Ahlmark, Former Deputy Prime Minister of Sweden, saying that he wanted to nominate us. I was obviously thrilled and honored. I couldn't believe it at first and so I asked him how the process worked. He explained to me that the only people who have the authority to make official nominations for Nobel Peace Prize are current or former members of the governments of Sweden, Norway or Denmark. So I said "Wow," that is quite an honor. He wrote a six page letter to the Nobel nominating committee where he detailed my work in exposing Iran's nuclear weapons work years before the International Atomic Energy Agency became aware of it, and detailing John Bolton's work to set up the Proliferation Security Initiative. He argued that our efforts were worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize because they helped to prevent the spread of technologies that enabled regimes like Iran to build nuclear weapons or ballistic missiles.
Gordon: Your first thriller, Honor Killing was the fictional treatment of a nuclear nightmare from Iran. Is that a case of art following life?
Timmerman: I have always believed that art precedes life, that the imagination precedes reality. The novel has two plots. One involves an Iranian effort to bring a nuclear weapon into the United States on a cargo ship, so we follow the cargo ship around the world and watch as the hero, who is a Spec-Ops officer now working for DIA, warns about it and nobody listens. The second plot involves the honor killing of a young Muslim girl of Pakistani origin whose bloated corpse was discovered by a dog walker on a riverbank beneath a dam in Montgomery County, Maryland, with her hands bound behind her back with cable ties. She was 17 years old, and the state medical examiner soon discovers that she was three or four months pregnant. Quickly the investigation by the FBI and the local police determines that it could be an honor killing. So as the threads are pulled together by the FBI investigation, the ship carrying the Iranian nuclear weapon sails closer and closer to the United States, and gradually the two plots intertwine. We find that some of the same characters are involved in both plots. One of the subplots that I found very important, and it was one of the reasons I wrote the book, was the infiltration of the U.S. political leadership by Americans who are agents of radical Islam. People at very high levels with influence and extremely senior officials in the administration of the United States Government are agents of radical Islam. There is a scene in the book where one of the fictional characters, a conservative activist with ties to the White House, barges into the office of the FBI Director, outraged, literally jumping up and down and calling him a racist and a bigot because FBI agents had dared to interrogate the brother of the girl who was murdered in the honor killing. He argued that instead they should be going after her white boyfriend, who he claims probably impregnated her. Well it turns out that the FBI had DNA that proved it wasn't the white boyfriend who impregnated her but one of the Muslim friends of the brother. This was done in fact so she would die not as a virgin and go to heaven but die as a woman and go to hell. So I thought it was important to tell the story of the infiltration of the U.S. Government with real characters and dramatic scenes, and also to dramatize what I perceive to be the ineptitude of the U.S. intelligence community to deal with that infiltration and to deal with the sophistication and the determination of an Iranian regime that is absolutely convinced that it can and will destroy the United States of America.
Gordon: In a parallel scenario, your non-fiction book, Shadow Warriors, the Untold Story of Traders, Saboteurs and the Party of Surrender, you identified several members of the U.S. intelligence establishment working against our national security interests. Are there among these so called shadow warriors you've identified people who have surfaced in the Obama administration and in your view how dangerous is that to our national security interests both here and in the Middle East?
Timmerman: Look for example at the President's top advisor for counter-terrorism, John Brennan, who is a former top CIA official. I believe it is extremely troubling when you examine Brennan's role as a private contractor after he left CIA in a scheme to "sanitize" the passport files of the three main candidates in the 2008 Presidential election, including his soon to be boss, Barack Obama. The State Department investigation into what happened in the spring of 2008 remains so highly classified that all you and I can read of it are page after page of redacted text.
Gordon: Do you believe that current Obama administration diplomatic initiatives have given rise to the downfall of the sectarian government in Beirut posing a direct threat to Israel?
Timmerman: I don't think it was the intention of the State Department to cause the collapse of the government of Saad Hariri. However, I think the diplomatic initiative that was Obama's signature foreign policy issue during the 2008 Presidential campaign to open negotiations with Islamic Republic of Iran had the effect of empowering the Iranian regime, and made them believe that they could get away with things that they didn't think that they could get away with doing under the Bush administration. I think they believed they had a good opportunity to get rid of a government they did not like and the United States would do nothing to oppose them. Let's remember what this was all about. Saad Hariri is the Prime Minister because his father Rafiq Hariri was murdered on February 14th, 2005. Now we are learning from the International Tribunal in the Hague, run by the United Nations, that Hariri was probably murdered by Hizbullah on the direct orders of the Iranian regime. So there is no love lost between Iran and the Hariri family. The Iranians believe that the Hariris, who were Sunni Muslims, were also in the pocket of the United States, the Saudis and more generally the West. So it was just a matter of time before they acted. I do think that Obama's initiative towards Iran, emboldened and enabled Hizbullah to sabotage the government of Saad Hariri.
Gordon: Were the recent events in Egypt and across the Arab Muslim world in your opinion abetted by President Obama's June 2009 Cairo speech about outreach to the Muslim Ummah.
Timmerman: It's very curious to see the way Obama has dealt with Islam and the Middle East in general. You mentioned his Cairo speech. I would say more important than that was his response to the millions of protestors in the streets of Iran in June of 2009. There you had a radical Islamist regime in Tehran fighting against millions of pro-freedom protestors who were begging the United States to show them some support. Obama made his choice. He chose the radical Islamist regime. Fast forward to what happened in Egypt. You had an Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak who was an autocrat, but not a dictator. People have exaggerated vastly the oppressiveness of the Mubarak regime. I have gone to Egypt many times under Mubarak's reign and Egypt is an authoritarian country but people are a lot freer there than you might think. Remember, the Egyptians also love to talk and they have a reasonably free press, compared to many other countries in the Arab world. In Egypt you had a staunch U.S. ally, and opposing him you had the Muslim Brotherhood. Two months before his Cairo speech, President Obama met in the White House with several senior leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood from Egypt. He told them that he favored them coming to power in Egypt. Moreover, if they came to power his Administration would do nothing to oppose them. Fast forward to the first protests in Cairo against Mubarak. Within two days President Obama is pounding his fist on the table saying that Mubarak has to take into account the demands of the protesters. Then within a week he sent a special envoy to Cairo, Frank Wisner, to tell Mubarak that he has to step down. Within 18 days it was all over. Now, so far we've been lucky and the Egyptian army has stepped into the void. The Egyptian army is not pro Muslim Brotherhood although they have Muslim Brotherhood officers. However, lurking beneath the surface is the Muslim Brotherhood and we will not know the end of this story for many months. We didn't know how the 1979 Revolution against the Shah of Iran was going to finish until almost a year later. It could easily take that long to see how Egypt's revolution finishes, whether the Muslim Brotherhood seizes power or whether there is some kind of soft landing. However, I believe the common thread between Obama's response to the cries for freedom of the Iranian people and his enabling of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is this: Obama likes radical Islamic rule.
Gordon: Do you believe that the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood affiliates across the Arab Muslim Ummah will pose a serious threat to both Israel and U.S. interests in the region?
Timmerman: Without a doubt. This is as dangerous and its impact would be as far reaching as the collapse of the Shah in Iran in 1979.
Gordon: Given your recent trip to Iraq, what if anything is the U.S. doing to alleviate the plight of Christian minorities in the Middle East threatened by annihilationist Muslim majorities and in particular with the Assyrian Chaldean community in Iraq and the Copts in Egypt?
Timmerman: Under President Obama the U.S. is doing nothing. They are putting no pressure on Al-Maliki in Iraq. In Egypt when we had on Christmas Eve a horrific bombing of a Coptic church in Alexandria, you know there was some huffing and puffing from the Obama Administration but nothing serious. I just returned from Northern Iraq to celebrate the Rogation of the Ninevites, which is a three day ceremony of prayers to commemorate the Prophet Jonah as he calls the Ninevites to repent. I was in many different places on the Nineveh Plain in the North. I went to churches in Erbil and in Mosul. I can tell you that this is a community that is on the verge of extinction. The Assyrian Chaldean Syria community in Iraq constitutes the indigenous people of Iraq. They have been there for millennia. They are being driven out by Jihadi Muslims on the one hand and by Kurdish Nationalists on the other.
I think that the Kurds are divided. Many members of the Kurdish Regional Government such as Prime Minister Barham Saleh and many others in his government, are striving to do the right thing and see themselves as protectors of the Christians. President Massoud Barzani and the former Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani see themselves as protectors of the Christians. The President of Iraq, Jalal Talabani, and the Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari have publicly stated that they want to protect and maintain the Christians in Iraq, so this is not a religious persecution on the part of the current Iraq government. What you do have is an ethnic conflict between the Assyrian Chaldean Syriac community and the Kurds that dates back hundreds of years. You have land encroachment, you have the Kurdish Democratic Party Intelligence Service harassing Assyrian leaders throughout the Nineveh plain. This is part of a larger goal on the part of the Kurds to bring the Nineveh plain within the Kurdish regional government and annex it. The Arabs, on the other hand, and Da'wa party of Prime Minister Al-Maliki simply want to drive the Christians out of Iraq entirely. In fact I have just finished a story for Newsmax.com with new information about the October 31st attack on Our Lady Salvation Church in Baghdad where 58 worshippers were murdered in cold blood and nearly 100 others wounded. The information that I received in Northern Iraq from credible sources suggests very strongly that Al-Maliki's Da'wa party was directly involved in the attack on the church. This was not just Jihadi Muslims trying to drive Christians out. It was an organized political act to drive the Christians out. I believe that Congress and the President should become engaged and push Prime Minister Al-Maliki to purge his security forces and allow the Christians their rights under the Iraqi Constitution to form an autonomist province in the Nineveh plains. This is the only thing that will keep Christians in Iraq.
Gordon: Your latest thriller, St. Peter's Bones, talks about this background. Do you think this is an example of triumphalist Qur'anic Islam endeavoring to rid the region of all Christians and non Muslim minorities in the Middle East?
Timmerman: Absolutely. That is what the Muslims themselves say. Now I'm not saying Iraq's Muslim leaders say this, but the Jihadi leaders say that they would like to rid the Middle East of the infidels and they say this openly and repeatedly. They say this in letters that they put on the windshields of Iraqi Christians. They say this when they burst into houses and murder Christians, and when they machine gun liquor stores owned by Christians in Baghdad. When I was recently in Northern Iraq I had the opportunity to meet a young man, an Iraqi Christian who worked as an interpreter for U.S. Coalition forces. He told me of a number of operations that he had been on when they were taking down terrorist cells and interrogating terrorists. While sitting there with him, I was thinking he could have been the original model of the fictional narrator in my book, St. Peter's Bones. Yet another case of art preceding life!
He told many of the same stories that my narrator tells in the book. There is no real coincidence because the narrator in St. Peters Bones, was based on a number of real characters who I have met during my previous trips. Nevertheless, it was really extraordinary to come across somebody in the flesh who thoroughly embodied this composite character who narrates St. Peter's Bones.
The tragedy of the Iraqi Christians is just heartbreaking. I wrote St. Peter's Bones as a novel to try to get this emotional impact across to ordinary American readers, so when they read new stories about churches getting bombed, liquor stores getting machine gunned and Christians being threatened because of their faith, they will realize that these things are happening to real people. When you create characters in a novel, you hope that they will jump off the page, and that your reader will identify with them, and care about them. In St. Peter's Bones, bad things happen – really tragic things happen - to good people. I wrote this novel to wake up Americans, wake up Christians in this country, and wake up Jews in this country, to the threat of extermination of the Christian minorities in Iraq, by hopefully getting them to care about these characters as real people.
Gordon: Whom do you see as the strongest political candidates in the upcoming 2012 Presidential race capable of making make a major mid-course correction in the devolution of American moral presence, both at home and abroad?
Timmerman: Now it probably won't surprise you Jerry that I like John Bolton. People will say John Bolton has no experience. He is not a politician. All that is true. However, he certainly has plenty of experience in executive positions and in policy positions in government. He has a track record of running things and confronting crises that people can very easily examine and evaluate. Between Barak Obama and John Bolton, it's easy to see which one has got more executive experience, even today. John Bolton is the only thoughtful person in the GOP camp who has the timbre and intellectual fortitude coupled with experience to deal with this rising threat from Iran and the Muslim brotherhood against the West and the U.S. But can he raise the money he needs to run? I don't know.
Gordon: Ken, I want to thank you for this engrossing, timely, comprehensive and insightful interview.
Timmerman: It was both an honor and a pleasure to do it.
Posted by GS Don Morris, Ph.D./Chana Givon at 11:30 PM No comments:
Shock Waves
The renewed violence in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict may be tied to the wave of unrest in the Arab world—as a distraction meant to lure the U.S. back to a failed peace process
By Lee Smith | Mar 30, 2011
It's unclear who is behind the recent bus bombing in Jerusalem and the waves of rockets coming from Gaza. Yet the intent of these attacks is obvious—to change the subject from massive popular discontent with Arab regimes to one that both the region's endangered rulers and the world's political and intellectual elite are more comfortable with: the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The fact that a wave of revolutions has shaken the foundations of Arab politics without the slightest apparent connection to popular outrage against Israel's treatment of the Palestinians should be surprising to most experts and politicians in the West. For over four decades, the driving idea behind the West's approach to the Middle East has been the supposed centrality of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process to Arab popular anger at the West and its key to ensuring the stability of the West's favored regimes. That the price tag for this American diplomatic instrument has been thousands of dead Jews and several lost generations of Arabs has, in the upside-down world of Mideast policymakers, made the achievement of an ever-elusive peace deal seem all the more important with every passing year.
This idea was a convenient point of agreement between Washington policymakers and Arab regimes. For Washington, the peace process was a good source of photo ops and a chance to show concern for human rights in the region without interfering with the propensity of America's Arab allies to torture and murder their political opponents. As for the regimes, they were happy to escape criticism of their own failures—rampant corruption, lack of basic human rights and freedoms, and violence against the Arabs they rule—by blaming Israel.
More Context
Bashar al-Assad has maintained his country's key position in Mideast politics by drawing out the peace process and turning it into warfare by other means
Now the notion that the genie of revolution in the Arab world can be put back in the bottle by blaming Israel is laughable. Even Arab populations with no special love for the Jewish state know that the regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and now Syria were not loved or hated by their people because of their adherence or opposition to the Palestinian cause. In fact, one of the most baffling things about the current wave of Arab revolutions to professional Middle East watchers must be the complete absence of any mention of the Palestinians in popular demonstrations and regime counter-propaganda alike.
However there is a clear connection between the Palestinian cause and the wave of popular discontent that has upended the foundations of Arab politics. By pushing the centrality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the past four decades, the West has helped to underwrite Arab repression at home. The rationale behind the emergency laws in places like Syria and Egypt (even now after Cairo's "revolution") is that because of the war with Israel, the Arab security states must be ever-vigilant and therefore forbid their people from exercising basic rights like freedom of speech—or, in the words of Gamal Abdel Nasser, "no voice louder than the cry of battle"—diktats that they enforce through torture and murder.
If the recent wave of revolutions in Arab countries has proven anything it is that the Israeli-Palestinian peace process isn't even a convenient fiction by which Washington can make nice to the Arabs. Rather, it has been a recipe for failure on a grand scale—social, political, and economic—that has now been laid bare. While the Arab regimes are being held responsible for their failures by their fed-up populations, Washington seems to feel no need to hold itself accountable for the collapse of a set of enabling fictions that has greatly diminished our position in a region that is of crucial strategic importance for the United States both militarily and economically.
So, who might have an interest in the sort of disruption and realignments the Jerusalem bus bombing has caused? Maybe it was the Syrians tapping a few of their Palestinian assets to heat things up in Israel. With so many people on the streets of Syrian cities burning pictures of President Bashar al-Assad and toppling statues of his father, Hafez, from whom he inherited this authoritarian Baathist regime, the leadership in Damascus could sure use a lifeline. And the U.S. administration, always on the prowl for another go at the peace process, is happy to throw it one.
Or perhaps it was the Islamic Republic of Iran, attacking Israel through proxies in order to signal to Washington that maybe they're ready to come to the table at last. If this turns out to be the case, it will be worth remembering that President Barack Obama failed to support the protesters who took to the streets for Iran's Green Revolution in June 2009—because he wanted to engage an Iranian regime he thought was ready to deal on a host of Israel-related matters, such as Hezbollah and Iran's nuclear program.
Of course even then the blame couldn't fall exclusively on Obama. It's all a matter of perspective, for in reality everyone plays the same vicious hand, from U.S. presidents to Arab regimes, as well as Arab "liberals," and even the government of Israel itself.
Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, for example, reached out to Syria when he embarked on a quiet round of negotiations with Damascus under Turkey's supervision in 2007. Up until then, President George W. Bush's administration had put the Syrians in isolation after their suspected involvement in the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. But Olmert was facing a domestic crisis, including charges of corruption, and he knows how the game works—as soon as the international community gets a whiff of the peace process, everything else is put aside: The Arab regimes get a free pass for killing Arabs if they say they're willing to talk to the Jews.
Still, Olmert's opening freed the Syrians from their separation and brought the rest of an international community back to Damascus on bended knee—with France in the forefront. So what if the Syrians tortured their own people, murdered Lebanese journalists and political figures, and helped kill U.S. soldiers and American allies in Iraq, as well as Palestinians and Israelis? Olmert needed some breathing space, and the rest of the world was happy to comply.
Whoever attacked Israel last week knows how the game works, too, and sure enough in short order the U.S. policy community jumped to attention. Instead of pushing to cut off the regime in Damascus as the Syrian people braved death to go the streets, American policymakers like Sen. John Kerry and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered their bona fides. "There is a different leader in Syria now," Clinton said of the man believed responsible for ordering the murder of Hariri. "Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he's a reformer." Never mind that her own State department says rather that Syria is a state sponsor of terror; Washington will do nothing to help the Syrians who've come out against their own government, because the U.S. president is going to make good on his word to engage dictators, no matter how many Arabs have to die as he proves his point.
The pro-Israel community in the United States must also share in the blame, or at least that large segment of it that has invested its energy and money in backing the peace process. Some say peace talks have to bring in the hardliners, like Hamas and Hezbollah—even as that means empowering those who have most to gain through murder. Those who want to keep the terrorist outfits out of negotiations are less stupid than they are cynical, for they know that in truth any agreement without Hamas and Hezbollah isn't worth the paper it's printed on. Others say that the peace process is phony, but it's a diplomatic tool that Washington uses to keep our Muslim allies off our back.
And finally there are the Arab "liberals," those Western-educated intellectuals who fill the editorial pages of the U.S. press with pleas to push harder on the peace process lest we empower the radicals. But at this stage the peace process does nothing except empower radicals by providing them with a staging ground.
The peace process wasn't so bad when it started. Sure, President Jimmy Carter nearly undermined the prospects for an Egyptian-Israeli treaty when he tried to bring in the Palestinians and Syrians, but Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was savvy enough to escape the American president's grand plans. And surely Sadat's idea of reorienting Egypt from the Soviet Union toward the United States was a good thing for the Egyptian people. There's also a Jordanian-Israeli deal on the books. But we're just now beginning to see how high the price is.
There are the thousands of Israelis who were killed and injured when Hezbollah, Hamas, and other Palestinian factions negotiated on behalf of Syria, Iran, and others through the use of terror. And there are the thousands of Arabs killed and injured when the Israelis responded. But this is no "meaningless" cycle of violence; rather, it is the product of a deliberate diplomatic process overseen by the world's oldest democracy. It was the United States that kept going back to the well over and over, with U.S. policymakers telling themselves that anything was worth the chance of peace.
Suicide bombing and the attacks of Sept. 11 were the logical conclusions to a strategy that started with a fund of surplus Arab youth that the regimes could dispose of as they saw fit. It is that same disposable youth that have taken to the streets these last three months—Arab men under the age of 30 who have no prospects because their regimes turned their countries into economic basket-cases and physical torture chambers, with Washington's blessing. What they got in return for their suffering were the other-worldly fictions of a peace process that have now been laid bare.
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