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April 2016

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THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MILITANT ISLAM: BY BRYAN GRIFFIN WITH HERB LONDON AND JED BABBIN

By on April 12th, 2016

A BOOK THAT BELONGS IN EVERY LIBRARY, EVERY HIGH SCHOOL AND EVERY UNIVERSITY
Published by the London Center for Policy Research http://www.londoncenter.org/

Resurgent militant Islam is an international movement that affects every continent. Too often, it is brushed off as a minority movement with limited impact, active only in the Middle East, or as reaction to the “root causes” and false narrative of Arab/Moslem dislocation in Palestine. The Encyclopedia of Militant Islam is unique in describing with meticulous research and detail the leaders, the funding, the tangled web of alliances, and the deadly goals and agenda of forty four of the most active militant Islamic groups and their deadly global agenda.

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1979: Annus Horribilis—Modern Jihad Goes Global Book excerpt: Sebastian Gorka, ‘Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War’

By on April 12th, 2016

Three momentous events mark 1979 as the year in which modern jihad, having evolved over the course of the century, emerged as a global movement: the establishment of a theocratic regime in Iran, the siege of Mecca in Saudi Arabia, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. While the conditions for an Islamist explosion had existed for a long time, these events were the spark.

On April 1, 1979, following the overthrow of the shah and the return of the fundamentalist Ayatollah Khomeini from exile in France, the Shiite populace of Iran voted in a national referendum to become an Islamic republic. A new constitution outlined the central role of divine revelation in determining Iran’s laws, which would be based on the Koran and the Sunnah, the traditions of Islam. Then on November 4, a crowd of student protesters who were loyal to Khomeini and committed to taking their revolution to the “great Satan,” America, stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took sixty-six Americans hostage. Most of them would remain in captivity until the day Ronald Reagan took Jimmy Carter’s place in the White House. Focused on rescuing their imprisoned countrymen, Americans had a poor understanding of the broader picture in Iran. The elderly Khomeini was not seen as a serious alternative to the royal Pahlavi family, who were friendly to the United States. But the revolutionary cleric and his new guard of religious fanatics were able to exploit the ancient Persian reserves of pride and resilience, quickly imposing a Shia version of theocracy in which Islam and politics were totally reintegrated. The mullahs of Tehran became the center of political as well as religious power in Tehran.
Mideast Two Revolutions

Demonstrators hold up a poster of exiled Muslim leader Ayatollah Khomeini during an anti-shah demonstration in Tehran in 1978 / AP

The Shia of Iran thus demonstrated to the world—including the Sunnis, many of whom would be envious—that the theocratic caliph- ate was viable in the modern world. It also demonstrated that Muslims not only should but could reject the Western separation of politics and faith. Modernity’s separation of Allah’s writ and governance could be reversed.

Just as important, the success of the Iranian revolution and the embassy attack proved that the United States, and by inference all other great powers, was not invulnerable. The Muslim world did not have to be the powerless victim of Western machinations, such as interference in Iran’s domestic affairs and overarching control of the geopolitics of the Middle East.

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Trump, Mr. ‘Win, Win, Win!’, Doesn’t Know How to Play – Even When the Game Goes His Way By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on April 12th, 2016

Two things are worth noting about Donald Trump’s whining over what he suddenly perceives as the “rigged” GOP nomination contest.

1. Trump is powerfully illustrating the fraud at the core of his case for the nomination. He claims that because he is a successful businessman he would be much more adept than conventional politicians at mastering the intricacies of problems and processes. He will, he brags, figure out how to deal with challenges in a way that maximizes American interests, assembling the best, most competent people to execute his plans of action. As a result, we are told, American will “win, win, win” with such numbing regularity that we will be bored to tears by all the success.

But look what is happening. The process of choosing a Republican nominee for president, while far from simple, is not as complicated as many of the challenges that cross an American president’s desk. There are, moreover, countless experienced hands who know how the process works and how to build an organization nimble enough to navigate the array of primaries (open and closed), caucuses, party meetings, varying delegate-allocation formulas, etc., exploiting or mitigating the advantages and disadvantages these present for different kinds of candidates. Yet, Trump has been out-organized, out-smarted, and out-worked by the competition – in particular, Ted Cruz, whom I support.

Trump is not being cheated. Everyone is playing by the same rules, which were available to every campaign well in advance. Trump simply is not as good at converting knowledge into success – notwithstanding the centrality of this talent to his candidacy. Perhaps this is because he is singularly good at generating free publicity (and consequently minimizing the publicity available to his rivals). Maybe he underestimated the importance of building a competent, experienced campaign organization. But he can hardly acknowledge this because it is a colossal error of judgment – and his purportedly peerless judgment is the selling point of his campaign.

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Barack Obama, National Security Risk By Roger L Simon

By on April 12th, 2016

Barack Obama has made some of the stranger foreign policy decisions in American history such as going into Libya even after the Iraq debacle and making the nuclear deal with (aka billion-dollar hand-out to) Iran. Now we know why. He simply doesn’t care about our national security. He practically said as much on Fox News Sunday this weekend.

As Obama explained to Chris Wallace regarding the contents of Hillary Clinton’s email currently under FBI investigation, “there’s classified and then there’s classified.” He further opined that all Hillary was guilty of was “carelessness.”

What a bizarre and lawless thing for a president to say while a federal investigation is being undertaken by over a hundred FBI agents. Put simply, the president of the United States is a security risk.

According to The Hill, this reckless approach to national security caught the eye of none other than Edward Snowden.

To advocates for government transparency, the remarks stunk of duplicity by suggesting that federal classification rules are arbitrary and don’t apply to the Democratic presidential front-runner.

“If only I had known,” tweeted Snowden, the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who fled the country in 2013 before leaking reams of classified documents about global surveillance. Snowden is now facing multiple federal charges for his leaks.

Former FBI official Ron Hosko says in that same report from The Hill, “It leaves you with a sense that he [Obama] is reaching his thumb toward the scale. I think it is, as I said, unnecessary and, from an investigators’ point of view, not at all beneficial.”

So why is Obama putting his thumb on the scales of justice in this way? A retired prosecutor of my acquaintance wrote me that Obama deliberately went on Fox (something, as we know, he rarely does) to speak indirectly to FBI Director James Comey (something the president supposedly cannot do overtly or else he’d be guilty of interfering with an active case). The prosecutor thinks Obama was signaling to Comey, telling him to recommend an indictment for Hillary for negligence only, which is a misdemeanor — something for which she could pay a fine, act contrite, and then get elected president.

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John Muscat :You Can’t Say That About Islam!

By on April 12th, 2016

Tony Abbott’s invocation of “Team Australia” inspired an immediate pile-on, his comments hurled onto the heap of reasons why, or so it was said, he had to go. Sure enough, as Malcolm Turnbull re-endorsed all the coy circumlocutions, Australia’s jihadis kept reporting for duty.
As PM, Tony Abbott drew a lot of flak for his stance on homegrown Islamic terrorism, not least for his use of two rhetorical strains. On August 18, 2014, he said “my position is that everyone should be on Team Australia”, and on February 23, 2015, he went further: “I’ve often heard Western leaders describe Islam as a religion of peace … I wish more Muslim leaders would say that more often and mean it”. These comments marked a departure from the tone and language chosen by senior politicians over most of the previous decade. And they sparked the inevitable round of hand-wringing and denunciations.

Unsparing in their hyperbole, The Guardian called them “damaging and dangerous” while The Age condemned them as “reckless”. In similar vein, Labor’s deputy leader Tanya Plibersek said they were “at risk of being counterproductive”. Notwithstanding the inanity of such claims, Abbott’s foray into tough language was short-lived. His enemies hurled it onto the pile of reasons why he had to go and, sure enough, the old ways were conspicuously restored by Malcolm Turnbull.

For present purposes, let’s call Abbott-style discourse hard rhetoric and the alternative soft rhetoric. Usually in the form of a mollifying post-atrocity sermon, the soft line combines four elements:

Terrorism has nothing to do with true Islam, which is a religion of peace.
The overwhelming majority of Muslims are peaceful and law abiding, and should not in any way be judged by the actions of a few.
The Muslim community and its leaders are as horrified by terrorism as the rest of us, and do all they can to prevent it.
Those who blame the Muslim faith and Muslims in general for terrorism have no place in our inclusive multicultural society.

However much it may represent conventional practise for progressives and the political class, as a strategy to prevent terrorism, soft rhetoric is a pretense. Its real purpose is to prop up official multiculturalism by diverting attention from a troublesome minority onto the supposedly racist mainstream. These are Australians who, we are lead to believe, will lash out at innocent Muslims on the slightest provocation. Never mind that this hardly ever happens. On the other hand, Abbott’s hard talk actually was about preventing terrorism, by making Australian Muslims and their leaders publicly accountable for developments in their community.

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The Model Atmosphere and Global Warming By Anthony J. Sadar

By on April 12th, 2016

Last month, Attorney General Loretta Lynch testified before the Senate that the Department of Justice that she is considering taking legal action against energy industries dubious of the dire role of carbon emissions to change the climate. And Democratic attorneys general from numerous states are in hot pursuit of global warming heretics.

Before more partisan lawyering and congressional testimony clouds the climate change concern, let’s clear up what is known about this issue.

“Everything we know about the world’s climate — past, present, and future — we know through models.” So states professor Paul Edwards, a supporter of the “consensus” view of climate change, in the Introduction to his highly acclaimed book A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2010). He also notes that “without models, there are no data.” [italics in original]

Models have become integral to modern scientific practice. In many fields, Edwards says “computer models complement or even replace laboratory experiments; analysis and simulation models have become principal means of data collection, prediction, and decision making.”

Such is the contemporary world of science aided by the powerful tool of modern computers. The three basic components of the scientific method — observation, hypothesis, and testing — still hold, but in many cases the testing portion has been abetted, if not in some cases usurped, by models.

As many challengers of the manmade disastrous global warming hypothesis can attest, the “evidence” for a worldwide climate catastrophe is founded upon the results of atmospheric models. Yet, can such results be trusted enough to direct trillions of dollars in the years ahead to shift the energy sector and redistribute financial resources? After all, as University of Pittsburgh virologist John Mellors asserted in a recent article about HIV treatment in Science (“Researchers claim to find HIV sanctuaries,” January 29, 2016), “You can use a model to support anything you want, but you can prove nothing… You can model that the sun orbits the Earth.”

Atmospheric models have tremendous difficulty simulating key elements of the hydrologic cycle like cloud cover and precipitation patterns. Such components are obviously important to decades-hence projections heavily relied upon for drastic global public policy decisions.

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BRET STEPHENS: ISLAM AND THE RADICAL WEST

By on April 12th, 2016

Years ago I had a chat with three young Muslim men as we waited in a Heathrow airport lounge to board a flight to Islamabad. I was going to Pakistan to report on the fallout from a devastating earthquake in Kashmir. They were going there to do what they vaguely described as “charitable work.” They dressed in white shalwar kameez, wore their beards in salafist style and spoke in south London accents.

I tried to steer the conversation to the earthquake. They wanted to talk about politics. Had I seen Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11”? I avoided furnishing an opinion about a film they plainly revered. The unvarnished truth about Amerika—from an American. Authority and authenticity rolled into one.
Noam Chomsky (left), speaks to Hezbollah leader Sheikh Nabil Qaouq (right) at the former Israeli jail in Khiam, southern Lebanon, May 13, 2006. ENLARGE
Noam Chomsky (left), speaks to Hezbollah leader Sheikh Nabil Qaouq (right) at the former Israeli jail in Khiam, southern Lebanon, May 13, 2006. Photo: AFP/Getty Images

I think of that exchange whenever the subject of Islamist radicalization comes up. There’s a great deal of literature about how young Muslim men—often born in the West to middle-class and not particularly religious households—get turned on to jihad. Think of Mohammed Emwazi, the University of Westminster graduate later known as Jihadi John. Or Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, of Fort Hood infamy. Or Najim Laachraoui, who studied electrical engineering at the prestigious Catholic University of Louvain before blowing himself up last month in Brussels. Or Boston’s Tsarnaev brothers and San Bernardino’s Syed Farook.

It’s a long list. And in many cases investigators are able to identify an agent of radicalization. Maj. Hasan corresponded with extremist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. Laachraoui seems to have come under the spell of a Molenbeek preacher named Khalid Zerkani. The Tsarnaevs took their bomb-building tips from “Inspire,” an online English-language magazine published by al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen.

But the influence of the Awlakis of the world can’t fully account for the mind-set of these jihadists. They are also sons of the West—educated in the schools of multiculturalism, reared on the works of Noam Chomsky and perhaps Frantz Fanon, consumers of a news diet heavy with reports of perfidy by American or British or Israeli soldiers. If Islamism is their ideological drug of choice, the political orthodoxies of the modern left are their gateway to it. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Trump’s Delegate Whine Scalia’s lesson for candidates who gripe about party nominating rules: Get over it.

By on April 12th, 2016

As the prospect of a contested Republican presidential convention increases, so does the brawling over delegates—and the whining from the losers. If someone decides to run for President, is it too much to ask that he or his campaign managers understand the nominating rules?

“The system is rigged, it’s crooked,” Donald Trump said Monday on Fox News, with his usual understatement, after Ted Cruz won 34 GOP delegates in Colorado while Mr. Trump was shut out. “The people out there are going crazy, in the Denver area and Colorado itself, and they’re going absolutely crazy because they weren’t given a vote. This was given by politicians. It’s a crooked deal.” The truth is that he lost due to his own campaign’s ineptitude.

The state politicians in Colorado did exactly what they are entitled to do under Republican Party rules: set up a process that allocates delegates to candidates in any way a state party sees fit. Most state parties nowadays hold primary or caucus elections, but some do so with a hybrid system that can seem convoluted but makes sense if the goal is to build a party of volunteers from the ground up.

Colorado awarded delegates through a caucus process that began with precinct meetings and moved to congressional district and state GOP conventions. The attendees at those conventions then voted to elect the delegates to the national convention, and Mr. Cruz won 30 delegates that will be pledged to him on the first ballot. Another four are free agents but say they prefer Mr. Cruz. Three others are state party leaders who are free to vote as they please.

None of this was “crooked.” Mr. Trump is claiming the process was rigged because the Colorado GOP cancelled its usual straw poll held on Super Tuesday (March 15 this year). But the state party made that decision last August because such a poll would have been binding under new national GOP rules, and the Colorado party wanted its delegates to be free to support the candidate they liked in what was then a crowded field. The decision wasn’t aimed at Mr. Trump.

Mr. Cruz cleaned up in Colorado because his campaign was paying attention to the process. Whatever one thinks of the Texan’s appeal as a candidate, his campaign is organized and focused on winning the required 1,237 delegate majority. This speaks well of his ability to lead a complex organization. CONTINUE AT SITE

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JED BABBIN: THE BIGGEST REVELATIONS FROM PANAMA ARE YET TO COME

By on April 12th, 2016

It’s not a leak, it’s a tidal wave. The documents (illegally) obtained from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca by the grandiosely-named “International Consortium of Investigative Reporters” comprise about twelve million documents going back about forty years. It’s some 2.6 terabytes of information. (The entire Library of Congress consists of about fifteen terabytes of data.)

The size of the leak is less important than the content. Mossack Fonseca specializes in forming offshore corporations, trusts, foundations, and other legal entities. In many cases, they are entirely legal. They may be created legally to do business overseas and keep earnings and savings away from domestic taxation authorities. Mossack Fonseca insists it has vetted its clients to ensure their businesses are legal. But among the hundreds of governments, companies, and people involved is almost certainly a massive amount of corruption.

Many, if not all, of these business arrangements are created in the most complex manner possible to conceal the true owners and beneficiaries. Like Russian matryoshka dolls — any number of figures, one inside another, each one progressively larger — each layer has to be taken apart to get to the people who are profiting.

So far, Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson, prime minister of Iceland, has resigned over the Panama Papers revelations. UK Prime Minister David Cameron took the extraordinary step (for a Brit politician) of publishing his tax returns after it was revealed he’d benefitted from offshore deals his father had made.

Even those closet capitalists in Communist China are implicated. Relatives of Chinese President Xi Jinping — including his brother-in-law — were revealed to own, or have owned, secret offshore companies set up by the Panamanian lawyers. The Chinese government has written the whole matter off as another Western plot against them but took the trouble to make it impossible to search the term “brother in law” in the Internet.

The Russian government had the reaction you’d expect. Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, said that because he wasn’t named in the documents, there was nothing to talk about. And, of course, he said that, “In this connection, attempts are made to weaken us from within, make us more acquiescent,” painting the whole Panama Papers leak as another American plot against him.

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Israel’s legendary spy Sylvia Raphael returns to the spotlight

By on April 12th, 2016

Sylvia goes to Cannes – in a documentary about her life.

My interest in Sylvia Raphael began at the end – her end.

“One day when true peace comes, they will write books about her, name streets after her and make movies of her life,” wrote Eitan Haber, former defense correspondent and close associate and adviser to former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, in Yediot Aharonot in 2005, following the funeral of top Mossad agent, Sylvia Raphael at Kibbutz Ramat Hakovesh.

Her “unveiling” at the world premiere on the March 29 at Yad Lebanim in Ra’anana is proof that the day has assuredly dawned.

Interviewed in the movie Sylvia – Tracing Blood following years of personal interest and research, I am proud – as a South African – to introduce the film and its director Saxon Logan, before both departed for Cannes.

MY JOURNEY with Raphael began one morning in 2005 when my eyes zoomed in on a brief report on Page 3 of The Jerusalem Post regarding a funeral that had taken place the previous day, a few kilometers north of my home city of Kfar Saba.

It revealed that the deceased was a South African, that she had been a Mossad agent convicted of a botched assassination in Norway connected with the 1972 Olympics Games Munich Massacre. It also seemed to hint at her not being Jewish. Fed on crumbs, I was hungry for more, and it came in the form of a line that to most would be inconsequential, but for me was alluring and illuminating: “The entire perimeter of the kibbutz had been cordoned off by the police.”

This was a red rag to the journalist’s Gallic bull. The message between the lines was clear – the funeral would be attended by a Who’s Who of Israel’s security community, and the powers- that-be did not want the general public to know too much about it. Why? While her remains were lowered into the earth, it was her life that invited unearthing.

My first question was why would a woman, not Jewish, dedicate the best years of her life, risking life and limb, to a foreign cause – the survival of the Jewish state? Shmuel Goren, a former deputy head of the Mossad, had also expressed after the funeral, “It is a pity that there are not more like her.”

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