After being caught out, Iran is behaving as though it is under threat of war, its fury fueled by the US-Egyptian-Israeli-Hamas prisoner deal which threatens to cut the Islamic Republic out of Palestinian affairs and curtail its influence in the Gaza Strip, an important outpost.
With a valuable Middle East holding about to be lost, Iran is capable of unleashing terrorists for acts that would force the hands of the United States and Israel. By drawing Hamas into such operations, Tehran would seek to torpedo the Shalit deal a moment before its consummation.
US on global alert for Iranian reprisal that may jeopardize Shalit release
DEBKAfileExclusive ReportOctober 12, 2011, As Israelis joyously celebrated news of the forthcoming release of their soldier from five years in Hamas captivity, US officials in Washington released details of the plot instigated by Iran to murder Saudi ambassador Al-Jubeir, one of King Abdullah's closest advisers.
US Atty Gen Eric Holder & FBI Dir Robert Mueller (AP)
US Attorney General Holder and FBI Director Robert Mueller named Iranian-American Mansour Arbabsiar, 56,and a second man, Gohlam Shakuri, an Iranian official, in a five-count criminal complaint filed Tuesday afternoon in the federal court in New York. It included counts of conspiracy to kill a foreign official and conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction, a bomb. Shakuri is still at large in Iran. Holder identified him as an Iran-based member of the Al Qods force.
US officials are deeply concerned that Tehran may not take lying down Washington's charge that the Revolutionary Guards' Al Qods Brigades were complicit in the assassination plot or the success of a prisoner exchange deal releasing the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit from Hamas captivity.
After being caught out, Iran is behaving as though it is under threat of war, its fury fueled by the US-Egyptian-Israeli-Hamas prisoner deal which threatens to cut the Islamic Republic out of Palestinian affairs and curtail its influence in the Gaza Strip, an important outpost.
With a valuable Middle East holding about to be lost, Iran is capable of unleashing terrorists for acts that would force the hands of the United States and Israel. By drawing Hamas into such operations, Tehran would seek to torpedo the Shalit deal a moment before its consummation.
Sources in Washington therefore criticized Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for jumping the gun by his announcing the deal Tuesday for domestic political kudos. "Prisoner swaps are counted successful only after or during the fact," said one official.
Other Western intelligence sources commented that by letting the cat out of the bag a week in advance, Israel gave Iran and Hizballah time to sabotage it. Both maintain a strong presence of undercover agents in the Gaza Strip who are fully capable of blowing away the deal Hamas political leader Khaled Meshaal struck with Israel in the framework of an accord with the United States for packing up his Hamas bureau and command centers and moving them out of Damascus.
Walmart-scale, Islamic center planned to be erected in quiet, residential neighborhood. As large as the Griffith Observatory, the proposed Benedict Canyon palace "will make Playboy Mansion look like a bungalow," according to L.A. Weekly blogger Dennis Romero. The local neighbors (super-agent Michael Ovitz lives nearby) have activated an initiative, Save Benedict Canyon, to try to convince the L.A. Planning Commission to halt the project. L.A.'s KTLA Ch. 5 News' Jamie Chambers shows the neighbors' resistance:
The records account for at least $492 million in contributions to the William J. Clinton Foundation. The foundation has raised $492 million from 205,000 donors in the last 11 years, but the former president had not previously made the list of donors public. He agreed to release the names after the nomination of Hillary Clinton to serve as secretary of state because of worries about the impact his business dealings around the world could have on his wife's new job.
Saudi Arabia, Norway and other foreign governments gave at least $46 million, and donors with ties to India delivered millions more. Corporate donors included the Blackwater security firm, at risk of losing its lucrative government contract to protect U.S. diplomats in Iraq, and Web company Yahoo, involved in disputes over surrendering Internet information to Chinese authorities that led to the imprisonment of dissidents there.
Hollywood's Chaim Saban, an AIPAC supporter and the founder of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, gave between $5 million and $10 million to the foundation. Also at the same level was the Wasserman Foundation, founded by the late Universal Studios head Lew Wasserman. The non-profit organization only listed ranges of giving and not specific contribution amounts.
Saudi Arabia, whose donation was in the $10 million-$25 million range, donated more than any Jewish donor.
An organization called "Friends of Saudi Arabia" (which the Wall Street Journal reports is a group of former diplomats and U.S. businessmen with interests in Saudi Arabia) as well as the "Dubai Foundation," and the governments of Kuwait and Qatar each donated between $1 million and $5 million. (Source: The Jewish Telegraphic Agency)
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?"
"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.
"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?
Saudi's give British justice a public dhimmifying, as British prosecutors abandon bribery charges when Saudis threaten to cancel a 10-billion-pound weapons contract to British Aerospace.
"Attorney General Lord Peter Goldsmith said the decision had been made "in the wider public-interest," which had to be balanced against the rule of law."
Less-publicized Saudi leverage might help explain Western intelligence's disregarding Saudi's advocating sedition through the Wahabi movement throughout the West.
After being caught out, Iran is behaving as though it is under threat of war, its fury fueled by the US-Egyptian-Israeli-Hamas prisoner deal which threatens to cut the Islamic Republic out of Palestinian affairs and curtail its influence in the Gaza Strip, an important outpost. 
US officials are deeply concerned that Tehran may not take lying down Washington's charge that the Revolutionary Guards' Al Qods Brigades were complicit in the assassination plot or the success of a prisoner exchange deal releasing the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit from Hamas captivity. 
