Islamic totalitarianism

Archive for Tag “Islamic totalitarianism”

The Jihad, two years after Bin Laden

Thursday, May 2, 2013 by

Two years ago, Navy SEALs dispatched Osama Bin Laden in a spectacular raid on his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The notion at the time was that the jihadists were done for, with Al Qaeda decapitated and its operations soon to be decimated.

But as I argued in my book (released in 2009), bringing Bin Laden to justice was essential but would be far from sufficient to thwart what we call the Islamic totalitarian movement, the cause of those seeking Islamic domination worldwide. The basic reason is that Al Qaeda is just one part of the movement, and Bin Laden was just one leader. If we conceptualize the forces we oppose as just Al Qaeda, or just the Taliban, or just random losers, etc., we fail to recognize that our enemy is moved by ideas and a common goal.

It remains to be seen whether the Boston bombers had contacts with jihadist enablers or groups; perhaps yes, perhaps no. But the fact remains that even without Bin Laden, the pernicious ideas fueling the jihad remain potent and continue to empower attacks against us.

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Iranian-linked plot in Toronto

Monday, April 22, 2013 by

[CNN reports that] Canadian authorities have arrested two men accused of planning to carry out an al Qaeda-supported attack against a passenger train traveling between Canada and the United States, a U.S. congressman told CNN on Monday.

“As I understand it, it was a train going from Canada to the U.S.,” Rep. Peter King, R-New York, chairman of the counterterrorism and intelligence subcommittee, said.

The news follows an announcement earlier in the day by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that they had arrested Chiheb Esseghaier, 30, and Raed Jaser, 35.

The two men are charged with “receiving support from al Qaeda elements in Iran” to carry out an attack and conspiring to murder people on a VIA railway train in the greater Toronto area, Assistant Police Commissioner James Malizia said.

“When I speak about supported, I mean direction and guidance,” he said. [emphasis added]

Received wisdom after 9/11 was that Iran’s role in terrorism was confined to the Middle East. That was false then. It’s false now: Tehran has a well-established role as a global standard bearer and enabler for the jihadist cause, a point I argue in Winning the Unwinnable War. While the Iranian role in the alleged plot in Canada remains to be proven, on the face of it this fits with the regime’s modus operandi.

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An Iran do-over for Obama?

Monday, April 22, 2013 by

protesters in IranMichael Ledeen writes in the Wall Street Journal that with “an Iranian presidential election coming in June, President Obama may be presented with a second chance to get his policy right.”

In 2009, when massive protests followed Iran’s disputed presidential vote, Mr. Obama sat by as the insurrection was brutally put down by the Tehran regime. But the rage against the regime is still intense, and if similar protests explode in June, the White House should be prepared.

The president ought to know from the example of the Arab Spring that seemingly secure despots can be toppled by popular will. The coming elections offer a chance for America to demonstrate its belated support for the Iranian opposition, and Washington would do well to encourage the Iranian people to rise up in the coming months.

Ledeen points to evidence that some opponents of the Islamists’ regime are eager to rise up. Perhaps they are. Their bravery is laudable. And it would be wise for Washington to back them. But it beggars belief that now, four years later, the Obama administration would somehow adopt the correct policy toward protestors. What signs are there that the administration has learned from its failures in the last few years?

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Flotilla raid to blame?

Friday, April 12, 2013 by

President Obama’s March mission to coax an apology from Israel for the 2010 flotilla raid that left eight Turks dead has brought the decrepit state of Turkish-Israeli relations back into the spotlight.

According to the popular narrative, the Israeli decision to confront the boats with maritime commandos was not only unjustified and reprehensible, but also drove a wedge between the two states, ruining a once-cooperative relationship.

The truth, though, is that the relationship was crumbling long before 2010. And not on any fault of the Israelis.

Turkey expert Michael Rubin, of the American Enterprise Institute, argues that the secular, relatively-free Turkey that Israel had come to trust began to disappear as early as 2002, when the Islamist Justice and Development Party won Turkey’s general election. Over the next decade, he writes, Turkey underwent a methodical revolution that transformed it from a staunchly secular state, to an Islamic one:

Gone, and gone permanently, is secular Turkey, a unique Muslim country that straddled East and West and that even maintained a cooperative relationship with Israel. Today Turkey is an Islamic republic whose government saw fit to facilitate the May 31 flotilla raid on Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Turkey is now more aligned to Iran than to the democracies of Europe. Whereas Iran’s Islamic revolution shocked the world with its suddenness in 1979, Turkey’s Islamic revolution has been so slow and deliberate as to pass almost unnoticed. Nevertheless, the Islamic Republic of Turkey is a reality—and a danger.

Since the 2002 election of the Justice and Development Party, Turkey’s increasingly theocratic orientation has expressed itself in the form of antagonism against Israel. One way this has been manifest is in Turkey’s dealings with Israel’s enemies. In addition to aligning itself with Iran, Turkey has effectively endorsed Hamas by inviting its leader Khaled Meshaal to meetings in Ankara in 2006 and then, of course, sponsoring the blockade-challenging flotilla in 2010.

Taking account of these observations, the deterioration of Turkish-Israeli relations has to do with a more consequential factor, which predates the flotilla raid: Turkey’s embrace of a hostile ideology.

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Islamists Rising in the Middle East: Where next for America? [Event]

Thursday, April 4, 2013 by

For readers in northern California: on April 11 at U.C. Davis I’ll be part of a panel on the rise of Islamists in the the Middle East, with Daniel Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum, and Larry Greenfield, Senior Fellow at the American Freedom Alliance. Here’s the event description:

Since the so-called Arab Spring, upheavals and revolutions have racked the Middle East. So far, the Islamist movement has gained not only greater prominence but also political power in Egypt and elsewhere. Amid the tumult in Egypt, the Syrian civil war, and an imminently nuclear-capable Iran, what are America’s interests in the region? What’s fueling the rise of Islamists, and how should we view them?

Where are things heading in the Israel-Palestinian conflict? What should America’s policy be toward the region, and toward Israel in particular?

Join the panel for a discussion of these and related questions.

The Facebook event page provides the info on time and venue.

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Will the EU take a stand on Hezbollah?

Tuesday, April 2, 2013 by

Bulgaria’s February announcement implicating Hezbollah in a July 2012 bus bombing has brought a torrent of pressure upon the European Union to finally designate the group as a terrorist organization.

Indeed, a furor is swelling—with US House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce deeming the EU policy “indefensible.”  The July attack, which was perpetrated in the resort city of Burgas and left five Israeli tourists dead, was the first on EU member state soil in decades that has been directly linked to Hezbollah. To compound the issue, two weeks ago a court convicted a Hezbollah operative of plotting another attack on Israeli travelers, this time on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus—also an EU member state.

Given these developments, will the EU join the US, Canada, and Israel in labeling Hezbollah as a terrorist group, thereby freezing its assets and rendering any operations illegal?

Since 2004, the Dutch have been lobbying their EU partners to join them in levying the terrorist designation against Hezbollah and the recent developments have certainly given their arguments a new gravitas. According to Dutch Prime Minister Frans Timmermans, “Bulgaria’s findings will quickly lead to fresh consultations in Brussels on designating Hezbollah a terrorist organization.”

But (and with the EU there’s always a “but”) fresh consultations do not mean any decision will be made. For the EU to designate any group as a terrorist organization, the member states’ diplomats must unanimously vote “aye.” And such a vote is unlikely due to one major roadblock: France.

Why, despite what we know about Hezbollah, would the French demur?

The answer isn’t pretty. According to the Washington Institute’s Matthew Levitt, “[They] feel that if you poke Hezbollah or Iran in the eye then they will do the same to you. If you leave them alone, then maybe they will leave you alone.” Words spoken by Claude Moniquet, a former French intelligence official, lend credence to Levitt’s assessment:  “Calling [Hezbollah] terrorist would limit France’s ties with Beirut and put French targets and personnel in Lebanon at risk of retaliation,” Moniquet said. “The Bulgarian report doesn’t alter this realpolitik. There were always plenty of smoking guns.”

Levitt and Moniquet’s observations suggest a naked cowardice and a moral bankruptcy that will only hurt the French in the long run. As we’ve seen countless times across history, far from pacifying Hezbollah, this approach will strengthen and embolden it.

If the French maintain such an attitude—and there’s no evidence to suggest they won’t—the EU is unlikely to designate Hezbollah a terrorist organization and the syndicate will remain free to operate in Europe making more attacks like the one in Bulgaria last July a sad inevitability.

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Blaming the victims of rape in Egypt

Thursday, March 28, 2013 by

The sheer number of women sexually abused and gang raped in a single public square had become too big to ignore. Conservative Islamists in Egypt’s new political elite were outraged—at the women.

“Sometimes,” said Adel Abdel Maqsoud Afifi, a police general, lawmaker and ultraconservative Islamist, “a girl contributes 100 percent to her own raping when she puts herself in these conditions.”

The New York Times story notes how statements by president Mohamed Morsi’s “Islamist allies blaming the women have proved embarrassing.”

Embarrassing? That’s it? More like: hideously immoral and deeply revealing. Some of those Islamist allies complained that protest organizers had failed to segregate men and women.  Others condemned the women for speaking out.

“You see those women speaking like ogres, without shame, politeness, fear or even femininity,” declared a television preacher, Ahmed Abdullah, known as Sheik Abu Islam.

Such a woman is “like a demon,” he said, wondering why anyone should sympathize with those “naked” women who “went there to get raped.”

Just let that sink in for a moment, then consider: The NYT describes this preacher as an “ultraconservative” Islamist. The article implies that on this issue there’s a spectrum of meaningful gradations between conservative Islamists and ultraconservative Islamists. What matters here, however, is that they basically share the same perverse view: that women are in some sense sub-human, lacking any sovereignty—physical or moral—so that if someone rapes a woman, its her own fault.

A couple of years back, the so-called Arab Spring prompted some in the West to trumpet the emergence of a new era of freedom and progress. Note that the sentiments quoted above come, not from the margins of Egyptian society, but from allies of the Muslim Brotherhood-backed Morsi government in Cairo.

image: flickr/cc

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Tahrir Square two years on

Friday, February 22, 2013 by

Egypt, now two years removed from the beginnings of its revolution, finds itself again in upheaval with violence erupting in cities across the country. The impetus for the riots, clashes, and reprisals that have persisted for months was a November 22 power grab by President Muhammad Morsi that effectively nullified the power of the judiciary and propelled Egypt—already without a functioning legislature—toward (another kind of) tyranny.

On December 15, a referendum on a proposed constitution was held, but—predictably—the vote elicited only more controversy. Since that time the two year anniversary of the Tahrir Square protests of 2011 has been eclipsed and with it has come only more uncertainly for the country’s future.

Here are several articles that have given me pause and will give you a condensed look at the unfolding chaos in the Arab world’s most populous country:

1. Vivienne Walt’s “Women’s Rights at Odds in Egypt’s Constitution Wars” Time.

Walt’s article on the efforts of women in Egypt to secure political rights for themselves speaks to the tragedy of the “Arab Spring.”  The women of Egypt, many of whom played active roles in the demonstrations that lead to Hosni Mubarak’s ouster in 2011, now find themselves on the outside looking in. In the place of Mubarak’s (relatively) secular regime has emerged a political bloc headed by the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party and with it an ideology opposed to the rights of women—or anyone else for that matter.

2. Salma Shukralluh’s “Egypt protesters tell stories of torture, abuse at presidential palace” Ahram Online.

Shukrallah’s report from Cairo reveals a society in which men settle their disputes not with reason, but with fists, sticks, knives, and guns.

3. David D. Kirkpatrick’s “Blood is Shed as Egyptian President’s Backers and Rivals Battle in Cairo” and “Egyptian Judges Challenge Morsi Over New Power” The New York Times.

Kirkpatrick’s coverage suggests a country on a precipice, teetering between outright dictatorship and anarchy.

4. “Egyptian says he was abducted for anti-Islamist work” Reuters.

Reuters’ coverage in Egypt points to the dangers faced by average Egyptians. Though this short write-up discusses the brutality faced by a political dissident, buried in the article is the fact that roughly sixty people have been killed in riots, clashes, and reprisals in the last month alone.

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Bulgaria blames Hezbollah. Will the EU ban it?

Monday, February 11, 2013 by

Defying pressure from France and Germany to back down, Bulgaria last week implicated Hezbollah in a lethal bus bombing last summer. (See my earlier post.) Ben Weinthal, writing at Foreign Policy, describes the almost continent-wide refusal to designate Hezbollah as a terrorist group, a fact that I think makes Bulgaria’s decision all the more courageous:

There was ample reason to believe Sofia would punt. While the U.S., Canadian, and Israeli governments for months have been urging the EU to clamp down on Hezbollah’s activities—including raising funds, recruiting, and procuring dual-use technologies—within its 27-member union, the Europeans have consistently pushed back, and the issue has failed to gain traction.

Has the tide turned? Weinthal goes on to weigh the implications (and the odds) of a broader, perhaps EU-wide terror listing of Hezbollah:

A ban on Hezbollah could cripple it. Hezbollah‘s Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah acknowledged this reality several years ago, noting that an EU terror listing “would dry up the sources of finance, end moral, political and material support, stifle voices, whether they are the voices of the resistance or the voices which support the resistance, pressure states which protect the resistance in one way and another, and pressure the Lebanese state, Iran and Iraq, but especially the Lebanese state, in order to classify it as a state which supports terrorism.”

Read the whole thing.

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How European nations enable Hezbollah

Tuesday, February 5, 2013 by

Hizbollah_flagThe Wall Street Journal reports:

Bulgaria’s government is expected to release an investigative report this week blaming the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and its ally Iran for a terrorist bombing last summer that killed five Israeli tourists.

When you dig into the backstory, what’s curious is not that Hezbollah and Iran are implicated, but that there’s in effect a third party that deserves some blame: a pair of EU nations.

The U.S. and Israel rightly designate Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, but France and Germany do not. And they have pressured Bulgaria to avoid fingering Hezbollah for the attack last summer, because, well, that would be just so awkward. Why?

A sort of modus vivendi exists where Hezbollah keeps a low profile for its fund-raising and other activities and Europeans do not crack down. In Germany alone, some 950 people have been identified as being associated with the organization as of 2011. The group has always been treated as a benign force, even if assessments of the danger it presented varied greatly. [New York Times]

So for years now, Hezbollah has enjoyed unearned legitimacy and free rein to operate on European soil. That connivance typically relies on the claim that Hezbollah has a political wing and a distinct, separate military wing. In reality, the political side, which includes charities and medical care, is integral to the group’s ideological goal. The social services establish the group’s fidelity to Islamic morals (e.g., aiding the poor) and attract recruits for, and build loyalty to, the cause of jihad. Treating these two wings as separate is a rationalization, useful if your goal is to pass off a vicious organization as somehow non-vicious.

Even if the Hezbollah agents behind the Bulgaria attack had never set foot in France or Germany, for permitting the Islamist organization to raise funds and function within their territory, these governments should be branded as accessories to Hezbollah’s crimes.

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