RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Saudi Arabian-Iranian crisis that has erupted with the former’s execution of prominent Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr could easily, but not quickly, lead to open war. That war may be inevitable because it is, at the same time, a religious struggle as well as a conflict for domination of the Middle East.

The two nations have been engaged in proxy wars for years, but the nature of the conflict and President Obama’s nuclear weapons agreement with Iran shorten the time before open war breaks out.

As I’ll get to in a moment, the proxy wars in Yemen and Syria — as well as Iran’s having turned Iraq into a virtual satellite — made the Saudis feel surrounded and isolated. Al-Nimr’s execution, however, is significant in ways the other parts of this conflict are not. Its implications reach beyond to the core of the Sunni-Shiite religious wars that are almost as old as Islam.

The immediate results of al-Nimr’s execution include an attack on the Saudi embassy in Tehran which resulted in its being partially burned. Two Sunni mosques in Iraq were similarly attacked. Accelerating the crisis were statements from Iran’s “supreme leader,” Ayatollah Khamenei, defending al-Nimr, and from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps accusing the Saudis of a “medieval act of savagery” that would result in the “downfall of the [Saudi] monarchy.”

Charles Lister, 28, is a specialist on Syria with the US think tank Brookings Institution and has been in regular contact with local opposition groups in Syria since the outbreak of the conflict in 2011. Within the framework of the Syria Track II Initiative, which is supported by Western governments, he has coordinated several hundred meetings in the last two years between leaders of more than 100 armed rebel groups and representatives of Syrian civil society. Most recently, Lister was based at the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar. Recently, his new book appeared analyzing the development of the Syrian civil war and the rise of jihadist groups.

SPIEGEL: A surprising conclusion in your new book* is that while Islamic State (IS) and the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad are obvious obstacles to ending the Syrian war, in your view the biggest problem is Jabhat al-Nusra, which is allied with al-Qaida. Why is that?

Charles Lister: In the West, the threat posed by IS has become an understandable, but convenient obsession. However, Jabhat al-Nusra has embedded itself so successfully within the Syrian opposition — within the revolution for a long time — that in my view it has become an actor that will be much more difficult to uproot from Syria than IS. Islamic State is all about imposing its will on people, whereas al-Nusra has for the last five years been embedding itself in popular movements, sharing power in villages and cities, and giving to people rather than forcing them to do things. That has lent it a power IS just doesn’t have. The reason I call IS a convenient obsession is that I don’t think anybody in the West knows what to do about Jabhat al-Nusra. There was a period of time where it was relatively clear that al-Nusra had a foreign attack wing that was plotting attacks in the West. They have never let go of their foreign vision, they have explicitly said they want to establish Islamic emirates in Syria, and they belong to an organization, al-Qaida, whose avowed goal is to attack and destroy the West. Not to establish an “Islamic State” and gradually expand it like IS, but explicitly to destroy the West.

SPIEGEL: Yet it was IS that killed 130 people in Paris on Nov. 13, carrying out the bloodiest terrorist attack on foreign soil since 9/11. Are these attacks a sign of strength or a sign of them being under pressure in Syria?

Lister: If these attacks were indeed centrally planned by IS, they have to be a sign of strength. Islamic State certainly is not weakening in Syria and Iraq. Yes, it has lost territory, but as a movement it is in no weaker position than it was 18 months ago. It still has sustainable sources of income, it has large amounts of territory under its control, and now, for the first time it has demonstrated a real ability to carry out what one might call spectacular attacks in the West, with real geopolitical repercussions. It shows its ability to shape international affairs. That in itself is a sign of strength.

Islamic terrorism has dominated the history of Islam, as demonstrated by the murder of three of the first four Caliphs succeeding Muhammed: Umar ibn Abd al-Khattab (644 AD), Uthman Ibn Affan (656 AD) and Ali ibn Abi Talib (661 AD). Islamic terrorism has been one of the most active and dangerous volcanoes – domestically, regionally and globally – since the initial eruption of Islam in the 7th century. Historically, all Arab regimes have achieved, sustained and eventually lost power through domestic violence, subversion or terrorism.

Currently, irrespective of Israeli policies and the Palestinian issue, Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Libya have become battlegrounds of rival Islamic terror organizations. All pro-US Arab regimes such as Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and the UAE face clear and present lethal terror threats. Iran and Saudi Arabia – the two leading world bankers of Islamic terrorism – confront each other militarily, economically, ideologically and religiously. Intra-Muslim fragmentation, unpredictability, instability, intolerance, subversion, terrorism and the provisional nature of Islamic regimes, their policies and agreements have been recently intensified in an unprecedented manner.

The lava of Islamic terrorism has consumed mostly Muslims in the abode of Islam, but it is aiming to sweep the abode of the “infidel,” and is currently spreading into the streets of the USA, Europe, Russia, China, India, Africa, Asia and Australia.

In his introduction to Democracy and America (1835), Alexis de Tocqueville explained that Europeans could learn much about their future from the United States: the place where equality of social relations—the defining feature of the democratic age into which both Europeans and Americans had entered—had reached its most advanced form. The young nation’s experience, Tocqueville wrote, shed light on certain tendencies inherent in democracy that could actually weaken the passion for freedom and the institutions that protect it. Understanding this potentially destructive drift would, he hoped, assist lovers of liberty in both Europe and America in fashioning measures to safeguard freedom and thereby fortify democracy.

One-hundred-eighty years later, today’s Americans can, in turn, learn much about their own future from Europe’s confrontation with well-developed dangers to freedom that, while peculiar to our historical moment, are also typical of mature liberal democracies. As Daniel Johnson warns in his concise, dense, and sweeping essay, “Does Europe Have a Future?,” the continent’s failure so far to grasp the magnitude of the clash of civilizations in which it is embroiled stems from a crippling loss of self-knowledge. That his forceful alarm is unlikely to affect those most urgently in need of heeding it testifies to the precariousness of the European condition.

Evidence of the clash abounds: the state system in the Arab Middle East has fractured; religious war, pitting Sunni Islamists and Shia Islamists against secular authorities (and each other), consumes greats swaths of an area extending from North Africa to the Persian Gulf; in a little more than a year and a half, jihadists have perpetrated brazen terrorist attacks in Brussels, Paris, Copenhagen, Paris again, and California; large numbers of Muslims resist assimilation in the European nation-states to which they have immigrated; and Europe has largely acquiesced in the this tendency of Muslim immigrants to remain in communities apart or, worse still, has encouraged Islamic separatism on the basis of an incoherent multiculturalism that denigrates identification with the nation-state while celebrating every other kind of partial identity.

The year 2015 closed with the BDS movement in South Africa releasing a triumphalist video.They’re not alone in that: a number of Israel-hating activists around the world have been doing likewise. But unlike the BDS movement in most countries, their efforts to isolate, undermine, and destroy Israel as we know it are supported by their country’s head of state.

“We reiterate that we discourage travel to Israel for ANC leaders, members, and representatives, for business and leisure purposes. The ANC encourages our government to continue its programme of talking to all parties in the Palestinian territory and calls on the people of Palestine to work together to bring about self-determination.”

Thus declared South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma on 8th January, during the ANC’s 104th anniversary celebrations.

President Zuma went on:

“The ANC is very concerned about the deteriorating situation in the Middle East as this has the potential to trigger a global conflagration. We urge parties to co-operate in line with principles of international law and resolutions of the United Nations.”

Now, President Zuma, it’s a sad and well-known fact that more people in your country are suffering from the AIDs virus than are any other people in the world.

Right or wrong in its economic specifics, the Pontiff’s Laudato Si encyclical draws attention to the wide material gap between rich and poor and to the insuperable problem of bridging it. The Pope surely has a point, even if his nostrums are not wholly of this world.
We fight for and against not men and things as they are, but for and against caricatures we make of them.

—Joseph Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, 1954

Reading can be a pleasure and sometimes, as we all know, a chore. I confess as a Christian—albeit not of the Roman Catholic persuasion—to having not read a papal encyclical before the latest, issued on May 24. On my rough count, Laudato Si’ (On care for our common home) ran to a daunting 40,000 words or so. The flesh is weak. I was deterred. However, my interest was piqued by media commentary on the Pope’s condemnatory views, or so they were portrayed, on the role of free market forces in guiding economic affairs. It turned out to be a rewarding read.

A first thing to say is that when Pope Francis is on his “home turf”, discussing spiritual matters, he is inspirational. I had to put his words down at times because they were so powerful and moving. On the other hand, his wide-ranging comments on the environment, to which the encyclical was primarily directed, were unremittingly one-sided. The way he begins sets his unchanging compass: “This sister [Mother Earth] cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods which God has endowed her.”

Instructively, as you read on, it becomes increasingly clear that the Pope’s perspective on the environment stems from, and is caught up with, his perspective on economics and capitalism. But stop here. Economics and capitalism take us down the road apiece from where the Pope starts. I think it is safe to say that the Pope starts with God. As you might expect, a number of conservative writers and broadcasters, in passing comment on the encyclical, started further down the road. And this, I believe, and as I will later explain, has led them into being more sharply critical of its economic content than is justified.

At one point John Maynard Keynes broke off debate with some of his contemporaries after the publication of The General Theory in 1936 because he did not believe that they were engaging his arguments with an open mind. Those who write with good will, hoping to persuade, are entitled to an open-minded reception. The Pope is no exception.

How can you explain why Germany, which in the 20th century had such a gigantic anti-Semitism problem, would import so many people from those areas of the world which now have the same gigantic anti-Semitism problem?

The police water cannons were not in evidence on New Year’s Eve to break up the migrant gangs committing violent crimes against women. Instead they were used to break up a lawful demonstration of people opposed to such violent attacks on women.

The late Robert Conquest once laid out a set of three political rules, the last of which read, “The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.” This rule comes in handy when trying to understand the otherwise clearly insane and suicidal policies of Chancellor Merkel’s government in Germany. These policies only make sense if the German government has in fact been taken over by a cabal of people intent not on holding Germany together but on pulling it entirely apart. Consider the evidence.

Muslims had the habit of slaughtering “infidel” Muslims for centuries when there was not a country called Syria or any “Islamophobia.”

The main lack of logic seems to be that innocent people are attacked repeatedly by Muslims, so they become suspicious of Muslims; this suspicion is then called Islamophobia — but it does not come out of thin air.

President Erdogan is explicitly saying that even non-terrorist Muslims have the potential to become terrorists if they happen to feel offended. So easily?

Pro-Sunni supremacists, such as the Turkish president and his top cleric, do not understand that cartoons do not kill people. But some of their friends do kill people.

There is hardly anything surprising in the way Turkey’s Islamist leaders and their officials in the clergy diagnose jihadist terror: Blame it on everyone except the terrorists. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the inventor of the theory that “there is no Islamic terror,” recently warned that “rising racism and enmity against Islam in Europe[an] and other countries” will cause great tragedies — like the Paris attacks.

TransCanada took Uncle Sam to court last week to reclaim some of the damage done by the Obama Administration’s multiyear, drawn-out rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline. It may not come up in the litigation, but someone should point out that the same Obama Administration that rejected Keystone seems to have no problem supporting a new oil pipeline project in Africa.

That was the story last week out of Kenya, where U.S. Ambassador Robert Godec told Kenya’s energy minister that Washington would help Nairobi raise $18 billion to finance its PowerAfrika project. The pipeline would stretch from Kenya’s Rift Valley to Lamu on the coast. “Kenya needs $18 billion worth of financing,” Mr. Godec said, according to a dispatch in Oilprice.com, “so one of the questions we are discussing is how we can work together with the private sector and governments to raise that sum, to find ways to make certain that this financing becomes available.”

Has Mr. Godec checked with Secretary of State John Kerry, or, perhaps more important, anti-oil Democratic financier Tom Steyer? Kenya and Northeast Africa could certainly use the investment and jobs that would come from the oil project. Then again, so could the United States. What’s with the double standard on pipelines?

PARIS—Europe needs to beef up its border controls to prevent Islamic State from using authentic-looking Syrian and Iraqi passports to smuggle its operatives into the region amid the mass of refugees fleeing conflict in the Middle East, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Sunday.

Mr. Cazeneuve said he plans to discuss the issue with officials in Brussels before European interior ministers meet in Amsterdam later this month.

Mr. Cazeneuve’s remarks are part of a rush by European security authorities to respond to the threat that Islamic State can make Syrian and Iraqi passports that are indistinguishable from the real thing. Officials believe the group has obtained thousands of blank Syrian and Iraqi passports, plus equipment used by those governments to print the documents. Mr. Cazeneuve said several of the Islamic State operatives who killed 130 in the Paris attacks on Nov. 13 used false passports to slip into Europe undetected.

“It’s a central question,” he said in an interview with French media. “It’s a phenomenon that will continue if we are not able to halt it.”

Officials say Islamic State likely obtained those materials when it overran the cities of Raqqa and Deir Ezzour in Syria and Mosul in Iraq. Without reliable lines of communication open, particularly to the Syrian government, Western officials have little clarity on what passport numbers are linked to stolen passport books containing fraudulent identities.