Live, United Nations addresses of President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Netanyahu

The Arab Spring/Summer signals the autumn for Western illusions of Middle East stability

Triumphant: A group of rebels ride through the centre of Tripoli yesterday
as others fought running battles with pro-Gaddafi troops
 as they battled to save the city (Photo: Daily Mail)

"Why this is the moment Libya's Islamic extremists have prayed for" By John R. Bradley in the Daily Mail Online

The fall of the Libyan capital represents a clear victory for freedom over tyranny, they tell us, and a new country — defined by an enthusiastic embrace of democracy, pluralism and representative government — will emerge. However, we have been here twice before in the Middle East in recent months. First, when Tunisia’s strongman, Zine El-Abidene Ben Ali, fled Tunis, and then when Egypt’s dictator Hosni Mubarak vacated the presidential palace in Cairo.  

Rebel leader Abdul Jalil says his opposition forces had chosen to start their first attack on Tripoli on the 20th day of Ramadan, which marks the ancient Islamic Battle of Badr, when Muslims fought for the holy city of Mecca in AD 624. That hardly inspires confidence in a secular, liberal future for Libya.  

The fiercely independent Islamists, moreover, will not relent on their demands for an Islamist state. In the transitional council’s draft constitution it is clearly stated that Islamic law will be ‘the principal source of legislation’. Nato, then, can at best achieve replacing the Gaddafi regime with an Islamist-infiltrated tribal council. And that means Libya is as far as ever from being a Western-style democracy. Indeed, it is more likely to turn into the West’s worst nightmare. 

Rachel Lipkin, the Egyptian born Jewess and ex-Israeli government interpreter, gleans info from studying Arab media. Her husband, Avi Lipkin, interprets it and shares it in books, videos, and lectures in English. Last week, he presented his interpretation of the differences between Western culture and Arab/Islamic culture in a presentation to LA's ACT! for America, San Fernando Valley Chapter.



In "The End of Normal," Daniel Greenfield of Sultan Knish, illuminates the social, cultural, and political distinctions which Westerners mis-understand in forging treaties with Muslim cultures which don't abide by Western expectations.

Western diplomats have been convinced that solving the Rubik's Cube of the Muslim-Israeli conflict is the key to regional stability. But the Arab Spring disproves it on both points. 

The Arab Spring is a reminder that it is only a bit player in the larger dramas of the Muslim world. A scapegoat for Muslim states who come to terms with it behind the scenes, while using their state controlled media to spread paranoid and bigoted conspiracy theories about it. And a reminder that no treaty can create regional stability when it can hardly outlast the men who sign their names to it. 

Even if a Palestinian state is created, what of the Kurds, who have also acted as the Palestinians of Turkey, Iran, Syria and Iraq. And what of the countless stateless ethnic and religious minorities in the region. What of the Iranian refugees in Camp Ashraf who duplicate on a smaller scale the dilemma of Palestinian refugee camps. Even if all these people received their own micro-states, the violence would still not end. And if it somehow did, that would only mean less proxy warfare through terrorist groups and more direct confrontations between regional armies. Is that something anyone really wants? 

The Middle East has never been normal, or rather it is as close to normal for a baseline that goes back thousands of years. The progressive model applied to the West has no relevance to its Muslim conquerors. And there is no normalization to be had anywhere here. 

If the Arab Spring has accomplished anything, it is to destroy the illusion that a treaty signing and a handshake will stabilize the region and allow Israeli mothers to stop worrying about their sons. These childish ideas have created an entire peace industry built on expectations that have not been realized anywhere in the region. 

It is a moral and mental laziness that the peace depends upon. A willingness by the public to believe sentimental slogans about the power of love and of politicians to think that a shortcut to market stability can be reached with territorial concessions and foreign aid. This laziness carries as high a price as war, but with far less to show for it. 

The Pax Americana is losing its grip on the Middle East, and its American and European leaders are pressuring the one country still intimidated by them. The one regional democracy that they can count on as an ally.

Live from AIPAC: Douglas Murray reacts to Obama advocating Jews cede Judea to an Islamist Palestine

Associate Director of Britain's Henry Jackson Society, Douglas Murray, discusses his concerns about Israel's security in view of Pres. Obama's middle-east policies. A exclusive DemoCast video from the AIPAC Policy Conference 2011 in Washington, DC.
An outspoken critic of political Islam, British Mr. Murray is the author of Neoconservatism: Why We Need It (2005) and is published in The Spectator and Standpoint.

Gaza terror group steps-up the heat against Palestinian reunification through Jerusalem bomb; kills woman tourist, wounds dozens including 2 pregnant women

In the wake of a popular movement to remake Palestinian rule by uniting Fatah with Hamas, a terror group with links to Hezbollah lauded the bombing of a Jerusalem bus-stop today. The blast killed a 59-year old tourist, and wounded dozens more, including 2 pregnant women.

Globes news reports: On Wednesday a pipe bomb exploded today near Bus 174 in Jerusalem. The attack took place at the entrance to the city, near Binyanei Ha'uma Conference Center. Emergency services rushed to the scene. One woman who was critically injured later died of her wounds. Three other injuries were termed serious, and there were dozens of other injured people.

Rescue workers: Pregnant women among Jerusalem blast victims  from the Jewish Chronicle by Jennifer Lipman and Jessica Elgot  March 23, '11

Rescue workers attend to victims of the blast. The terror
 act wounded more than 24 people and killed a lady tourist.

Israeli emergency workers have spoken of treating injured pregnant women and seeing pools of blood at the scene of the bomb near Jerusalem’s central bus station today.

Yonatan Yogadovsky, director of the Magen David Adom (MDA) international department , said ambulances were on the scene immediately to tend to the wounded, estimated to include more than 30 civilians.

Mr Yogadovsky, who was director of MDA’s Jerusalem operation during both intifadas, said: “The streets were packed with people during the evening commute, as workers left for home and children finished school.

“There were two pregnant women injured and taken to the hospital by MDA.”

He added: “The people who were badly injured were outside near the explosive device and some people inside the number 74 bus [which was stopped when the bomb exploded] were lightly and moderately injured.”

Motti Bukchin, a volunteer for clean-up organisation ZAKA, said: “When we arrived at the site of the attack, we saw two women lying in huge pools of blood on the pavement.”

Video from the scene in this report by InfoLive.TV in Israel:

The suitcase bomb blasted hundreds of ball-bearings into the crowd and bus, Israel Police Spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld told reporters on an Israel Project tele-conference.

Carly Fiorina criticizes Washington's Middle-East policies; will challenge Calif Sen. Barbra Boxer at polls

California senate candidate Carly Fiorina relates concerns about the Obama Administration and Democrat-controlled Senate's prioritizing of forcing a Palestinian State on Israel and what she considers misguiding U.S. policy to enable Ahmadinejad's Iranian regime's tyranny and fostering a nuclear-weapons race in the Middle East.



DemoCast video interview at the Iranian-American, 30YearsAfter Conference in Los Angeles October 10, 2010.

Political challenges to Israel's safety and global stability - Prof. Alan Dershowitz; an exclusive, DemoCast news video

A DemoCast exclusive video: Prof. Alan Dershowitz gives a comprehensive (1 hr) exposition of  his views about the Obama administration's direction of middle-east policies, its effect on Israeli security, Jewish safety, and global stability.

Presented by the Los Angeles division of Shmuley Boteach's This World: The Values Network, moderated by Arash Farin, chairman, at Sephardic Temple Tifereth.

Pentagon pushes bunker-buster bomb back 6-months; Cordesman's conflict scenarios

 A "bunker buster" bomb, with more than 10 times the explosive power of its predecessor, has been rescheduled for availability by the United States December 2010, six months later than previously scheduled, the Defense Department told Reuters on Friday.

Military analysts doubt Israel could disable Iran's nuclear facilities in a raid even with dozens of aircraft. Tehran has had years to build covert facilities, spread elements of its programs and develop options for recovering from an attack."Strong as Israeli forces are, they lack the scale, range and other capabilities to carry out the kind of massive strike the U.S. could launch," Anthony Cordesman, a former Pentagon strategist now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in September. (Reuters)

An Illustrative Scenario Analysis
By Anthony H. Cordesman

Nov 19, 2007 - The attached briefing provides the material used in a scenario analysis and interactive game that looks at some of the consequences of a future nuclear exchange between Israel and Iran, and the possible impact of its expansion to cover targets in Syria, Egypt, and the Gulf.

There is no way to predict the forces each side will have in the future, or how they might target those forces and use them in war. It does seem clear, however, that both sides would probably be forced to target the other's population centers in any scenario that escalated beyond an initial demonstrative strike.

It also seems likely that such a conflict would quickly become existential in the sense that both sides would seek to inflict the maximum possible casualties on its opponent, and to destroy its ability to recover as a nation.

Oil-rich Arab states stiff Palestinians on promised aid; scapegoat Israel over P.A.'s bankruptcy

In 2002, when oil prices were hovering around $21 a barrel, nearly two dozen Arab nations joined to pledge yearly contributions of $660 million to support the Palestinian Authority's annual budget.

Now, even with oil prices more than six times higher and the Palestinian Authority bordering on financial ruin, only a handful of Arab countries are sending even a small portion of the money they promised, according to data examined by The Washington Post.

Out of 22 Arab nations that made pledges, only three -- Algeria, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates -- have contributed funds this year, while oil-rich countries such as Libya, Kuwait and Qatar have sent nothing and still owe the Palestinian government more than $700 million in past-due pledges.

Many members of the Arab League that committed to make annual contributions do not have oil riches and have paid on average about 4 percent of what they pledged since 2002, according to U.S. figures. But some of the worst offenders are oil producers. Through the first half of 2008, Bahrain has paid 13 percent of its total pledges, Libya 14 percent, Oman 23 percent, Kuwait 35 percent, Algeria 73 percent and the United Arab Emirates 92 percent. Saudi Arabia has paid just shy of 100 percent, but many experts believe it should be paying four times as much, given the increase in the price of oil since 2002.

One senior U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of diplomatic sensitivities, said that Arab nations could be doing much more to support the peace process launched at a conference in Annapolis last year and that "their effort falls short in every category." He said he is puzzled by their failure to meet their pledges in a period of phenomenal oil wealth.

"The one thing I find hard to explain is why they don't contribute more financially," the official said, noting that the Palestinian government is "really operating hand-to-mouth." He added that more than 50 percent of the money goes to the Gaza Strip, which is controlled by Hamas, so even people living under Hamas rule are suffering from the Arab failure to pay pledges.

Arab diplomats, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said there is little trust that the Palestinian Authority will use their contributions wisely, even though Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad is a veteran of the International Monetary Fund and, during his time as finance minister, introduced new standards of accountability and financial management. Arab diplomats said they also resent the tight grip that Israel has maintained on the Palestinian territories during the peace talks.

Read entire article by Glenn Kessler with charts showing unfulfilled, promised aid, by country

Israel's greatest defense challenge - Gen. Effie Eitam

Israeli Parliamentarian, Gen. Effie Eitam, talks smart and tough about the seriousness of the Islamist nuclear threat against Israel - intent on resuming Hitler's incomplete annihilation of Jewry- and the West's moral responsibility to militarily prevent Iran's professed genocide for the sake of Allah. Watch video:



Gen. Eitam is introduced to Zionist Organization of America's gathering by fellow frontiersman, Ed Ames, the star of TV's "Daniel Boone" series (Gen. Eitam resides in the Golan Heights).

Bush managing US Mid-East policy - through the (oil-tinted) looking-glass

Western groups and leaders, including the US State Department, supported "Reporters without Borders" in petitioning Middle East governments to free arrested dissenter bloggers, including the Saudi Arabian, Fouad al-Farhan.

On January 1st, The Washington Post published: "Farhan's is the first arrest of a blogger in Saudi Arabia. Two Egyptian bloggers and one Tunisian are currently behind bars, according to Sami ben Gharbia, advocacy director for Global Voices, an international research group focused on the Internet and founded at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Farhan told The Washington Post and others in early December that an Interior Ministry official had warned him that he would be detained because of his online support for a group of men arrested in February and held without charge or trial.

At the time of their arrest, the government accused the Jiddah-based group, made up of a former judge, academics and businessmen, of supporting terrorism. The men's attorney, Bassim Alim, had said they were arrested for their political activism and their plans to form a civil rights group.



Farhan wrote that he was told he would be released if he signed an apology for his activism. "I'm not sure if I'm ready to do that. An apology for what? Apologizing because I said the government lied when they accused those guys of supporting terrorism?"

Jon Ward in the Washington Times published,

"One day before President Bush arrived here to meet with King Abdullah, he spoke out against Middle Eastern governments that crush dissent and punish political or religious speech.

“You cannot expect people to believe in the promise of a better future when they are jailed for peacefully petitioning their government,” Mr. Bush said Sunday during a speech in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.

“And you cannot stand up a modern and confident nation when you do not allow people to voice their legitimate criticisms,” he said.

But when Mr. Bush arrived in Saudi Arabia yesterday, he stepped into a kingdom where some crimes, including apostasy from Islam, are punished by beheading, and where expressing one’s views on a blog can land you in prison.

Mr Bush said to Gulf Arab leaders in the UAE in the major speech of his nine-day Middle East trip, "The best way to defeat the extremists in your midst is by opening your societies, and trusting in your people, and giving them a voice in their nation." While Mr Bush continued to tout democracy, he put more emphasis on the need for "justice" and broader societal changes, offered a cautious critique of political repression in the Middle East- reassuring nervous Arab leaders of continuing US support.

But Michael Hirsh in "The Growing Power of Petro-Islam" published in Newsweek, calls the President hypocritical in not publicly advocating in Saudi Arabia for the high-profile, jailed civil-rights journalist, Farhan, despite Mr. Bush's inaugural address proclamation,"It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture," while he stumped in Saudi Arabia (pledging his support to sell the monarchy a $20 Billion smart-bomb package) for them to hopefully use to contain Iran's nuclear program, and not against Israel - seeking their support for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

"The Saud family's legitimacy is built not on law but on an extremist brand of Islam, Wahhabism, in which Osama bin Laden was schooled, much as Tony Soprano's power is based on violence. (Remember when people used to talk about forcing the Saudis to change their radical Islamist views after 9/11? Didn't happen. Instead we invaded somewhat secular Iraq—at least it was next door to the real problem—and found ourselves preoccupied.) Imagine if Tony S. ran much of the world's oil supply and used the vast profits to fund more Bada-Bing fronts for organized crime all over the world? Don't you think governments would band together to stop it? Well, that's not unlike what's happening today, with Saudi Arabia's financing of anti-Western sentiment—but no one's doing anything about it, starting with George Bush. Simply because it's the Saudi government. Our "friends."

Clearly King Abdullah and other senior members of his government are not unfriendly to Washington. But many other Saudis are. This is what some experts have called petro-Islam. The Saudis have used their vast profits to fund not Bada-Bing clubs but Wahhabist mosques around the world, even in the United States. Wahhabists—or Salafists, as members of the broader movement are called—believe in a strict interpretation of the Qur'an and a pure, self-contained Islamic state. Many also embrace the idea that integration into the West—or American society—is profane. This never represented mainstream Islam.

In fact, the creator of Wahhabism, the 18th-century thinker Mohammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, was notorious among Muslims of his time for being something of an extremist himself. He vandalized shrines, and he was denounced by many Islamic theologians for his "doctrinal mediocrity and illegitimacy," as the scholar Abdelwahab Meddeb notes in "Islam and Its Discontents." The upshot is that Western consumers are paying hundreds of billions of dollars in oil profits to help educate and fund their own potential murderers.

None of this would have happened had it not been for the petro-dollar. The Saudis would have stayed obscure Bedouins and Wahhabism little more than a cult. But because of their oil wealth, the Saudis were able to spread Wahhabism's seed worldwide, making it far more mainstream than it would have been otherwise. As one Egyptian intellectual described it me, "It's as if Jimmy Swaggart had come into hundreds of billions of dollars and taken over most of Christianity."

Saudi Arabia was always the problem, and not just because 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudi. It is because of the rise of petro-Islam in this troubled land. And as oil climbs in value, and research lags on alternative energy sources, this pathological family concern known as Saudi Arabia only grows. Even now no one is really doing anything about this critical problem.

Bush was right when he said in his second inaugural address, "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." If only he had taken himself seriously on this trip. Perhaps next time he ought to insist on seeing a few dissidents.

Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert hasn't missed the White House's complacency against the persecution of political critics.

According to Caroline Glick in the Jerusalem Post:

"WORSE EVEN than the media's intimidation of Zionists is the official harassment suffered by those who insist on speaking out. And as Olmert moves ahead with the leftist establishment's program of expelling Israelis from their communities and transferring them to Palestinian terrorists, that harassment is becoming more and more palpable. {...}

On January 9, three activists stood in front of the Dan Panorama Hotel in the capital where the foreign press accompanying Bush on his visit to Israel was being housed. Jeff Daube, Susie Dym and Yehudit Dassberg were attempting to distribute a report on Fatah's support for and involvement in terrorist attacks against Israel to members of the foreign press. The report, written by veteran researcher Arlene Kushner, contained no policy recommendations. It simply documented Fatah's terrorist activities. For their efforts, they were detained by the police and accused of distributing "seditious materials" and causing a public nuisance.

Beyond its harassment of street protesters and activists, the government is now attempting to silence online protests of its policies. Last week, the ministerial committee on legislation approved a bill that would make Web site owners and editors legally responsible for comments published on their sites. Given the government's arbitrary and biased definition of sedition and incitement, if the law is passed it will effectively force bloggers and Web site operators to block all comments to their Web sites. Yet another avenue of protest will be silenced.

The cumulative impact of these phenomena has been the fifth and perhaps determinative factor enabling Olmert to continue in office. Simply stated, between the media's intimidation and the official harassment of citizens who dare to protest or even disagree with the government's policies, the public has simply lost faith its ability to influence the course of the country. This sense of disenfranchisement has demoralized the public into silence.

For those who wish to help end the tenure of a government pushing a radical, post-Zionist agenda with the support of a mere eight percent of the public, it is important to understand this state of affairs. All ameliorative actions must be geared towards ending the stranglehold of the radical Left on the national debate, and towards defending the civil rights and upholding the reputations of those who protest.

Will all the Western sympathy afforded to Mid-East bloggers' political free-speech also be extended to nationalistic, Israeli bloggers (or blog-commenters) to be jailed for criticizing PM Olmert's "land-for-peace" policies?

Reuters Self-Exposed - Self-Incriminating Photo Eludes Doctoring

Reuters Arab photographer admits purveying known stolen goods
Police confiscate over 150 digital cameras, laptops and plasma screens from store owned by Ahmed Shanti, a Reuters' cameraman in Qalqilya. Electronics stolen from residential homes near Tel Aviv.

In all police seized some 50 laptop computers, 48 digital cameras, 40 video cameras, 20 PDA's, 20 mobile phones and 20 plasma television screens.