LCCC ENGLISH DAILY NEWS BULLETIN

August 21/16

Compiled & Prepared by: Elias Bejjani

The Bulletin's Link on the lccc Site

http://www.eliasbejjaninews.com/newsbulletin16/english.august21.16.htm

News Bulletin Achieves Since 2006

Click Here to go to the LCCC Daily English/Arabic News Buletins Archieves Since 2006

Bible Quotations For Today

But the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little.
Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ according to Saint Luke 07/36-50/:"One of the Pharisees asked Jesus to eat with him, and he went into the Pharisee’s house and took his place at the table. And a woman in the city, who was a sinner, having learned that he was eating in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster jar of ointment. She stood behind him at his feet, weeping, and began to bathe his feet with her tears and to dry them with her hair. Then she continued kissing his feet and anointing them with the ointment. Now when the Pharisee who had invited him saw it, he said to himself, ‘If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what kind of woman this is who is touching him that she is a sinner.’Jesus spoke up and said to him, ‘Simon, I have something to say to you.’ ‘Teacher,’ he replied, ‘speak.’ ‘A certain creditor had two debtors; one owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. When they could not pay, he cancelled the debts for both of them. Now which of them will love him more?’Simon answered, ‘I suppose the one for whom he cancelled the greater debt.’ And Jesus said to him, ‘You have judged rightly.’Then turning towards the woman, he said to Simon, ‘Do you see this woman? I entered your house; you gave me no water for my feet, but she has bathed my feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in she has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment. Therefore, I tell you, her sins, which were many, have been forgiven; hence she has shown great love. But the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little.’Then he said to her, ‘Your sins are forgiven.’But those who were at the table with him began to say among themselves, ‘Who is this who even forgives sins?’And he said to the woman, ‘Your faith has saved you; go in peace.’

God, as chosen you, because our message of the gospel that came to you not in word only, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction
First Letter to the Thessalonians 01/01-10/:"Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy, To the church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ: Grace to you and peace.We always give thanks to God for all of you and mention you in our prayers, constantly remembering before our God and Father your work of faith and labour of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ. For we know, brothers and sisters beloved by God, that he has chosen you, because our message of the gospel came to you not in word only, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction; just as you know what kind of people we proved to be among you for your sake. And you became imitators of us and of the Lord, for in spite of persecution you received the word with joy inspired by the Holy Spirit, so that you became an example to all the believers in Macedonia and in Achaia. For the word of the Lord has sounded forth from you not only in Macedonia and Achaia, but in every place where your faith in God has become known, so that we have no need to speak about it. For the people of those regions report about us what kind of welcome we had among you, and how you turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead Jesus, who rescues us from the wrath that is coming."

Titles For Latest LCCC Bulletin analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources published on August 20-21/16

In Lebanon’s miserable era, Jobran Bassil is the FPM president/Elias Bejjani/21 August/15
Israeli Defense Minister Surprises by Announcing West Bank Projects in Key Area/David Makovsky/The Washington Institute/August 19/16
Aleppo: Syria’s Guernica/Mshari Al Thaydi/Al Arabiya/August 20/16
Rage, rage, unadulterated rage against the dying of hope/Hisham Melhem/Al Arabiya/August 20/16
Forcing secularism, one burkini at a time/Brooklyn Middleton/Al Arabiya/August 20/16
Milk of human kindness; a Greek village shows the way/Ehtesham Shahid/Al Arabiya/August 20/16
Bayit Yehudi: The 'Jewish Home' that wants more Druze/Ynetnews/Yuval Karni|/August 20/16
Migrant Problems Still Threaten Europe/George Igler/Gatestone Institute/August 20/16

Why the Ayatollah Thinks He Won/By Jay Solomon/The Wall Street Journal/August 20/16

Islam and Nazism: What Are the Connections/Paul Eidelberg and Will Morrisey/Irapundit/The Israel-America Renaissance Institute/August 20/16

Titles For Latest Lebanese Related News published on on August 20-21/16

From 2015 archieve/In Lebanon’s miserable era, Jobran Bassil is the FPM president
Lebanese protest Israeli road on occupied land
Report: Lebanon Launches Talks with UNIFIL after Israeli Violations
Moqbel Postpones Retirement of Kheir
Rahi from Seoul: Lebanon Incapable of Tolerating Burden of Refugees
Protesting Civil Defense Volunteers Sleep in the Open, Erect Tent Near Technical Fence
One Man Killed, Six Injured in Car Collision North Beirut
Raad: We ask for President who expresses people's will
Lebanese Army shells militants in Arsal outskirts
Rifi meets with delegation of Muslim scholars
Sonic bomb explodes in Arsal's Wadi Ata
Civil Defense volunteers continue sit in
Newspapers headlines for August 20, 2016

Titles For Latest LCCC Bulletin For Miscellaneous Reports And News published on on August 20-21/16

Prominent London, Ontario imam openly justifies jihad attacks on the West
“London, (Ontario-Canada) Imam calls on Muslims not to apologize for foiled suicide attack”,
UN: 130 million need assistance to survive
Civilians flee as deadly Hasaka battle rages on
More than 300 Civilians Dead in Recent Aleppo Violence
Turkey: Assad Can be Part of Transition in Syria
Incendiary bombs dropped on hospital, Syrian rebel group says
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu in surprise Iran visit
Turkish parliament approves deal ending rift with Israel
Turkey: More active role to be taken in Syria
US Justice Dept to send team to Turkey for Gulen probe: Bloomberg
Egypt’s ISIS group affiliate confirm chief’s death
Houthis kill allied forces for fleeing battle
Afghan district falls to Taliban
Pentagon downplays talk of Russian troop buildup near Ukraine
Nice becomes latest French city to ban burkini
40 New York Orthodox rabbis condemn Trump’s ‘hateful rhetoric
Dozens arrested in swoops on mixed-gender parties in Iran
The 1988 massacre in Iran

Links From Jihad Watch Site for on August 20-21/16
Saudi-sponsored Georgetown report grossly inflates hates crimes against Muslims in US
France mistakenly gives suspected jihadi too much money in damages
Muslim-friendly workplaces on the rise out of fear of lawsuits
Germans turn against Merkel over Muslim migrants

Latest Lebanese Related News published on on August 20-21/16

From 2015 archieve/In Lebanon’s miserable era, Jobran Bassil is the FPM president
Elias Bejjani/21 August/15
The Dwarf in politics and all domains of public services, Micheal Aoun’s spoiled and vulgar son-in-law Jobran Bassil became the FPM President: Why not, as the proverb says,”Birds of a feather flock together“. Definitely such a Trojan and puppet pro Iranian and mercenary political party requires such a baby president. It is worth mentioning that Bassil failed in two parliamentary elections in the Batroun region.
 

Lebanese protest Israeli road on occupied land
Staff writer, Al Arabiya English, Saturday, 20 August 2016/Residents in southern Lebanon crossed into Israeli-occupied territory on Friday in protest of the construction of a road intended to be used by Israel’s military in the area, Lebanese media reported. UN peacekeepers along with the Lebanese and Israeli militaries station on the border went on high alert as demonstrators crossed into the occupied Shebba Farms to raise Lebanon’s flag, Lebanon’s Daily Star reported. Snippers were positioned between trees where protesters were raising the Lebanese flag on a barbed wire fence the reported said, with an additional 500 Israeli troops on standby 3 kilometers away. Armored vehicles and a tank were also deployed near the protest.Israel has been constructing a road almost two kilometers-long between the Blue Line, the internationally recognized border between the two countries, and Israel’s electrified wire fence approximately 50 meters south of the Blue Line. "Israelis are doing whatever they want under the eyes of people and the world. They have been bulldozing inside the occupied lands and no one has budged an inch," Shebaa MP Qassem Hashem was cited in The Daily Star, accusing Israel of seeking to control more Lebanese land with this road construction. Hashem also criticized Lebanon’s government for doing little regarding the situation and said that Israeli-occupied territories belong to Lebanon and that there will come a time when they will be liberated. However according to state-owned Kuwaiti news agency, Lebanon is planning to lodge a complaint with the United Nations over Israeli acts that breach the country's sovereignty at the border Al-Ghajar village and Shebaa farms. The Lebanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement on Friday that Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil has addressed a letter to the UN, condemning the acts that violate UN resolution 1701, the local natives' rights and the State sovereignty. Construction on the road had halted earlier in the week after a bulldozer collided with a military vehicle, causing casualties.
 

Report: Lebanon Launches Talks with UNIFIL after Israeli Violations
Naharnet/August 20/16/Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi called on the international community to help The Lebanese army and General Security kicked off contacts with the United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon after the Israeli incursions in the southern towns of Ghajar and Shebaa farms, al-Joumhouria daily reported on Saturday. General Security chief Maj. Gen. Abbas Ibrahim visited on Friday the leadership headquarters of the UNIFIL and met with Maj. Gen. Michael Beary, the newly-appointed head of UNIFIL in Lebanon. The two men assessed the security situation on the southern border and the Israeli violations of the Blue Line, and the cooperation between the General Security and the UNIFIL leadership in the framework of the tasks entrusted to it in implementation of international resolutions, particularly resolution 1701. Early this week, Israel began construction works to open new roads and other infrastructure activities in the occupied Shebaa Farms. Foreign Minister Jebran Bassil asked Lebanon's mission to the United Nations on Friday to file a complaint to the Security Council about Israel's incursions in Ghajar and Shebaa, the National News Agency had said. “Since the Israeli occupation forces persist to violate Lebanon's sovereignty and fail to comply with the international resolutions particularly 1701, we hereby ask you to inform the concerned authorities in the United Nations, particularly the UN Security Council, of Israel's offenses in both the occupied Lebanese part of Ghajar and the Shebaa Farms,” said Bassil’s letter. Israel fought a devastating month-long war in 2006 against Hizbullah that killed more than 1,200 people in Lebanon, mostly civilians, and 160 Israelis, most of them soldiers. The Lebanese group has targeted Israeli army patrols in the Shebaa Farms in response to strikes against its members in Syria, most recently on January 4.

Moqbel Postpones Retirement of Kheir
Naharnet/August 20/16/Defense Minister Samir Moqbel issued a decision on Saturday postponing the retirement of Higher Defense Council chief Maj. Gen. Mohammed Kheir until 21 August, 2017. The decision came after a cabinet meeting held on Thursday failed to reach an agreement over the thorny issue of military appointments that included a decision on whether to extend the term of Kheir which ends August 28, or postpone it. The appointments at the military posts is a contentious subject among political forces especially that the Free Patriotic Movement says it rejects term extensions for any military or security official. Moqbel had suggested three candidates for the post during the meeting, but none of them garnered the needed minister votes. The Defense Minister had in August last year postponed the retirement of Army Commander General Jean Qahwaji, Chief of Staff Maj. Gen. Walid Salman and Higher Defense Council chief Maj. Gen. Mohammed Kheir, extending their terms by one year, after the political forces failed to reach an agreement on security and military appointments.

Rahi from Seoul: Lebanon Incapable of Tolerating Burden of Refugees
Naharnet/August 20/16/Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi called on the international community to help stop the war in the Middle East pointing out that Lebanon can longer tolerate the burden of the exodus of Syrian refugees as a result. “We urge the international community to speed up the solutions and impose a halt to the wars, fueled by foreign countries, raging in the Middle East,” said al-Rahi from Seoul where he takes part in a peace conference. “Lebanon can no more tolerate the burden of the happenings in Syria and the repercussions of the Syrian exodus towards it. Not to mention the Palestinian crisis resulting from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (on one hand) and the Israeli – Arab (one on the other). The solutions begin by creating a Palestinian state for the Palestinians who were displaced from their land and to implement all international resolutions related to these conflicts,” he added. “Lebanon is paying dear price for the political-religious and political-sectarian conflicts whether in Israel or in some Arab countries. The price has reached the point of inability to elect a president for more than two years now,” remarked the Patriarch. Lebanon is hosting over a million registered Syrian refugees. Unofficially, the number of Syrians who have fled to Lebanon is estimated to be closer to two million. Many of them are unable to find work, and spend much of their day in tented encampments or makeshift accommodation around the country.

Protesting Civil Defense Volunteers Sleep in the Open, Erect Tent Near Technical Fence
Naharnet/August 20/16/Civil Defense volunteers continued their protests on Saturday and held a sit-in near the technical fence south Lebanon on the border with the occupied Palestinian territories, the National News Agency reported. They plan to erect a tent near the technical fence, added NNA. The campaigners, who demand their full-time employment, have been protesting since Monday and have slept the night in the open near the southern Kfar Kila road in a walking distance off the border. On Monday, the volunteers erected a tent along the border protesting the government’s delay in granting them full-time employee status. Late in 2015 the cabinet adopted decrees for the appointment of the head and members of the Civil Defense Directorate. However it failed to pass decrees related to the full-employment of volunteers although it vowed to address the issue in coming meetings. The technical fence runs parallel to the Blue Line, a border demarcation between Lebanon and Israel published by the United Nations on 7 June 2000 for the purposes of determining whether Israel had fully withdrawn from Lebanon.

One Man Killed, Six Injured in Car Collision North Beirut
Naharnet/August 20/16/One man was killed and six other people were injured on Saturday in a vehicle collision on the Jal el-Dib highway north of Beirut, the Traffic Management Center reported. Initial reports had said that seven people were injured, but a man has died early Saturday as he succumbed to his wounds. The car crash occurred at dawn between three cars one of which has overturned on the highway.
 

Raad: We ask for President who expresses people's will
Sat 20 Aug 2016/NNA - "Loyalty to the Resistance" Deputy, Mohammad Raad, called for the election of a President who expresses people's will, noting that that the country has been suffering from presidential vacuum for two years and four months. Raad's words came during an honorary ceremony for students at Kamel Youssef Jaber Center in Nabatieh.

Lebanese Army shells militants in Arsal outskirts
Sat 20 Aug 2016/NNA - Lebanese army units are currently targeting with heavy artillery armed militants in the outskirts of Arsal, NNA correspondent reported on Saturday.

Rifi meets with delegation of Muslim scholars
Sat 20 Aug 2016/NNA - Justice Minister, Ashraf Rifi, is currently meeting with a delegation of Muslim Scholars Committee headed by Sheikh Zakariya Al-Masri. Minister Rifi will hold a press conference after the meeting to talk about the twin mosque bombings in Tripoli as well as domestic and regional developments.

Sonic bomb explodes in Arsal's Wadi Ata
Sat 20 Aug 2016/NNA - A sonic bomb was heard in Wadi Ata in Arsal with no immediate reports of damages or injuries, National News Agency correspondent said on Saturday.

Civil Defense volunteers continue sit in
Sat 20 Aug 2016/NNA - Civil Defense protesters spent their night outdoors near southern borders, National News Agency correspondent reported on Saturday.

Newspapers headlines for August 20, 2016
Sat 20 Aug 2016/NNA - Following are the headlines of some of Lebanon's newspapers for Saturday August 20, 2016:
Al-Mustaqbal: Aounists' approaches between "escalation or boycott."
"Question mark" on Hezbollah position.
Berri: No threat or resignation of cabinet.
An-nahar: Calm or escalation before UN meetings?
Machnouk unexpected campaign against "Brigades of discord."
Assafir: Aounists ministers' to withdraw. Machnouk attacks "Brigades of occupation."
Nasrallah has not forget July "sufferings": Our hand extended to all parties.

Latest LCCC Bulletin For Miscellaneous Reports And News published on on August 20-21/16

Prominent London, Ontario imam openly justifies jihad attacks on the West
Kihad Watch/Christine Williams/August 19, 2016
“Mazin AbdulAdhim, a prominent Imam of Iraqi descent in London, Ontario who is affiliated with the radical Islamic global movement of Hizb ut-Tahrir, says in reference to ISIS foiled suicide attack west of London on August 10, 2016, that Muslims should not feel pressured to apologize for actions that they are not responsible for. He maintained that the ‘crimes against humanity’ committed by the West are far more worse than the attacks carried out by individuals.”AbdulAdhim should be investigated by police, and he is only one example of why the West needs to monitor what is being preached in mosques. The Muslim population should also be assisting authorities and supporting efforts to thwart the spread of such hate and messages that serve to radicalize their youth. Imams inciting violence, sharia and anti-Western rhetoric openly in mainstream mosques are not exceptions to the rule, but a ubiquitous problem, so much so that Italy leads the way by closing down unregulated mosques. Following the murderous rampage in Paris, France, French imam Abdelali Mamoun declared that “we are in a state of war” and “need to act fast.” Mamoun, who has been pushing for mosques that preach terror to be “cleaned out” or shut down, stated that “people are not educated to love their country in France, unlike in U.S. schools where they pledge allegiance to the flag. It is our duty to love and defend our country against any potential threats.”Already since December, it is reported that France has shut down 20 of its 2500 mosques for preaching a “radical” (literal) message of the Qur’an.

“London, (Ontario-Canada) Imam calls on Muslims not to apologize for foiled suicide attack”,
by Jonathan Halevi, CiJ News, August 14, 2016:
Mazin AbdulAdhim, a prominent Imam of Iraqi descent in London, Ontario who is affiliated with the radical Islamic global movement of Hizb ut-Tahrir, says in reference to ISIS foiled suicide attack west of London on August 10, 2016, that Muslims should not feel pressured to apologize for actions that they are not responsible for. He maintained that the “crimes against humanity” committed by the West are far more worse than the attacks carried out by individuals.
The following are excerpts from Mazin AbdulAdhim’s Facebook posting on August 11, 2016:
“Aaron Driver, a Muslim convert from my city, was killed in a confrontation with the RCMP yesterday. They allege that he detonated a device inside a taxi, hurting himself and someone else, and was shot when he tried to detonate another one.
“It is important to not jump to conclusions about this information until details are made clear. The media clearly has a campaign against Islam and Muslims, and so we should be careful how we respond to news like this.
“Even if the information is true, we must not allow these sorts of events to cause us to be pressured to apologize for actions that we are not responsible for, nor should this cause us to become afraid of speaking the truth.
“The governments of the West kill and help kill dozens of innocent civilians every day, and the crimes they have committed against humanity through their foreign policies are orders of magnitude worse than anything these individuals have committed or tried to commit.”
Mazin AbdulAdhim encouraged Muslims to wake up from the illusion that the Western governments represent them, to disavow democracy, to follow the true teachings of Islam, and to work together for re-establishing the Islamic State – the Caliphate.

In a Facebook posting dealing with the aftermath of the massacre of 50 people at Orlando gay club carried by American Muslim (June 12, 2016), AbdulAdhim wrote among other things the following:
It’s amazing that Muslims think that any amount of explaining will make the growing anti-Islam sentiment go away…
It’s amazing that Muslims still have not grasped the fact that Capitalism – including its media – views Islam as a threat and a competitor to its interests in the Muslim lands, and an alternative system that could quickly end Capitalism’s global influence.
It’s amazing that Muslims still demand justice from a system that has killed literally millions of their own people, and continuously kills more every single day.
It’s amazing that Muslims expect justice from governments that have never provided justice to 3rd world nations, rather they only fund tyrants and prop up and protect murderous, despot regimes.
It’s amazing that Muslims still have not absorbed the fact that this is not our system, these are not our laws, and these are not our governments. This system does not represent us, and it will not protect us if those behind it decide that we are no longer worth protecting.
It’s amazing that Muslims continuously ignore the fact that our Creator gave us our own system and obligated it upon us, and He will never allow us to solve these countless problems we face today until we return to His system that He ordained for us in His final message…
We are the ones who have turned away from the systems revealed by Allah (swt), and look at this most miserable life we live, constantly apologizing, lacking in dignity, and never having proper representation of the proper implementation of Islam.
And we are the ones who have caused the spread of corruption throughout the land and the sea, since we abandoned our positions in implementing Islam on the political level, and left those positions for the worst of humanity to occupy.
Stop apologizing, stop making excuses, and stop expecting things to get better within this system. There is only one solution, and you all know what it is…
We will not have protection until we return to this protective shield that Allah (swt) gave us. Until then, enjoy begging the media for mercy – and you will find none.
Few months ago AbdulAdhim slammed the Western media for its “biased” coverage of ISIS attacks in Brussels, Belgium.
“The media in the world today belongs to the colonialist West. Only their people’s lives have a value to it, only their property have a value to them, and only their lands should be protected and immune to attack,” wrote Mazin AbdulAdhim on his Facebook page on March 23, 2016.

UN: 130 million need assistance to survive
The Associated Press, United Nations Saturday, 20 August 2016/Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says in a message on World Humanitarian Day that a record 130 million people depend on assistance to survive, a staggering number that would comprise the tenth most populous nation on earth.
At an event in the UN General Assembly on Friday night to mark the day “Arab Idol” winner Mohammed Assaf, Actress Natalie Dormer of “Game of Thrones” fame, “The Voice” winner Alisan Porter and former “Hamilton” star Leslie Odom Jr. joined hundreds of diplomats and guests to support stepped up global efforts to alleviate global suffering. The General Assembly established World Humanitarian Day in 2008 to honor humanitarian aid workers who have been killed or injured in the course of their work. August 19 was chosen because it is the anniversary of 2003 bombing of UN headquarters in Baghdad which killed 22 staff members including top UN envoy to Iraq Sergio Vieira de Mello. UN Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson said it is a day to remember sacrifices and courageous actions, to celebrate “our common humanity,” and to pay tribute to the thousands of humanitarian workers around the world “who risk their lives to deliver life-saving aid to people in need on the front lines of crisis and utter despair.”Last year, Eliason said, 109 aid workers were killed, 110 were wounded and 68 were kidnapped, most in Afghanistan, Somalia, South Sudan, Syria and Yemen. UN humanitarian chief Stephen O’Brien said “in crises around the world, from Syria to South Sudan, people are forced to make impossible choices — risking violence for food or risking drowning in search of a safe haven — choices that most of us can barely imagine.” He urged people around the world “to show solidarity, use their voice and demand that world leaders take action.”

Civilians flee as deadly Hasaka battle rages on
Reuters, Beirut Saturday, 20 August 2016/Civilians fled a city in northeastern Syria where government warplanes bombed Kurdish-held areas for a second day on Friday, as the Syrian army accused Kurdish forces of igniting the conflict by trying to take over the area.The fighting this week in Hasaka, which is divided into zones of Kurdish and Syrian government control, marks the most violent confrontation between the Kurdish YPG militia and Damascus in more than five years of civil war. The YPG is at the heart of a US-led campaign against ISIS in Syria, and controls swathes of the north where Kurdish groups have set up their own government since the Syrian war began in 2011. A Pentagon official said US-led coalition aircraft were sent near Hasaka on Thursday to protect coalition special operation ground forces in response to bombing by Syrian jets, and additional combat air patrols were being sent to the area. The government air strikes on Hasaka mark the first time the Syrian military has deployed its warplanes against Kurdish groups during the war. Pentagon spokesman Captain Jeff Davis said the incident was not an intercept and the coalition aircraft reached the area by the time the Syrian government warplanes were leaving. YPG spokesman Redur Xelil told Reuters that Kurdish authorities had evacuated thousands of civilians from their area of control. “Whoever can bear arms is fighting the regime and its gangs,” Xelil said. “Our situation is so far defensive but it will change all the while the regime escalates in this way.”In its first comment on the situation, the Syrian army accused a YPG-affiliated security force known as the Asayish of igniting the violence through escalating “provocations” including the bombardment of army positions in Hasaka that had killed a number of soldiers and civilians. In a statement, the military command said the Asayish were aiming to take control of Hasaka city, and the army had responded appropriately by firing at armed groups’ “sources of fire”. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which tracks the war using a network of activists, said civilians were using lulls in the fighting to flee the city. Xelil said dozens of civilians had been killed over the past two days. The YPG and Syrian government have mostly avoided confrontation during the multi-sided war that has turned Syria into a patchwork of areas held by the state and an array of armed factions.
Assad, backed by Russia and Iran, has focused mostly on fighting Sunni Arab rebels who have been battling to oust him in western Syria with support from countries including Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the United States. The Syrian and Russian air forces are routinely deployed in the war in western Syria.
The YPG, or People’s Protection Units, has meanwhile prioritized carving out and safeguarding predominantly Kurdish regions of northern Syria. The group has ties to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in Turkey. While the YPG controls most of the northeast, the Syrian government has maintained footholds in the cities of Hasaka and Qamishli at the border with Turkey. The YPG has controlled most of Hasaka city since last year. It is the second major eruption of fighting between the YPG and Syrian government fighters this year. In April, they fought several days of lethal battles in Qamishli, north of Hasaka city and also mostly YPG-held. The Observatory said Kurdish forces had gained ground in the southern part of Hasaka. Rami Abdulrahman, Observatory director, said the fighting began this week after pro-government militiamen detained a number of Kurdish youths, a step that had followed advances by Kurdish security forces towards government-held areas.

More than 300 Civilians Dead in Recent Aleppo Violence
Naharnet/Agence France Presse/August 20/16/More than 300 civilians have been killed in a three-week surge of fighting and bombardment in Syria's devastated Aleppo city, a monitoring group said on Saturday. The battle for Syria's second city has killed 333 civilians since July 31, when rebels launched a major push to break a government siege of districts under their control. The toll includes 165 civilians -- among them 49 children -- killed in opposition fire on the city's government-held western districts. Another 168 civilians died in Russian and regime air strikes and shelling on its rebel-controlled eastern neighborhoods, the Observatory said. Russia has been carrying out air raids in support of President Bashar Assad's forces in Syria since September 2015. Another 109 people were killed in bombardment across the rest of Aleppo province during the same period, the Britain-based monitoring group said. Once Syria's economic hub, Aleppo city has been ripped apart by violence since mid-2012, with warplanes bombarding the east and rockets raining down on the west. Air strikes pounded Aleppo's southern edges on Saturday, and the intense battles there could be heard throughout the city, Agence France Presse's correspondent in an eastern neighborhood said. The violence rendered the rebel route out of the city -- via the southern district of Ramussa -- temporarily unusable, and trucks of food and other produce could not be brought into the city, the correspondent said. Approximately 250,000 people live in the city's eastern districts, while another 1.2 million live in its western neighbourhoods. While rebel groups are accessing the city via Ramussa, the regime is using the Castello Road to the north of the city to reach areas it controls. According to the Observatory, regime forces seized territory on the city's southern edges on Saturday. "There are a lot of clashes and air strikes, and the regime made modest advances. They are trying to reinforce their positions," Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said. The Observatory -- which relies on a network of sources inside Syria for its information -- says it determines what planes carried out raids according to their type, location, flight patterns and the munitions involved. More than 290,000 people have been killed since Syria's conflict started in March 2011 and international efforts at putting an end to the war have faltered.

Turkey: Assad Can be Part of Transition in Syria
Naharnet/Associated Press/August 20/16/Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim says his country is willing to accept a role for Syrian President Bashar Assad during a transitional period in Syria. However, Yildirim told foreign media representatives on Saturday that Assad has no place in Syria's future. The prime minister also said that Turkey would aim to become more of a regional player with regard to Syria in the next six months. On Syria's future, Yildirim said Turkey would not allow the country to be ethnically divided and favored a system in which all ethnic groups are represented. Turkey is one of the main supporters of rebels fighting to overthrow Assad, and hosts more than 2.7 million Syrian refugees.

Incendiary bombs dropped on hospital, Syrian rebel group says
Reuters Saturday, 20 August 2016/A Syrian army helicopter dropped incendiary “barrel bombs” on the only hospital in besieged, opposition-held Daraya early on Friday, putting it out of action, rebels and a war monitor said. Around 25 people who were in the hospital at the time were evacuated and no one was hurt, Issam al-Reis, spokesman for the Free Syrian Army Southern Front groups, said in an emailed statement, but all the hospital's medical equipment was destroyed. The army has dropped up to 45 barrel bombs on Daraya, launched dozens of rockets at the area and shelled it heavily since midnight, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based war monitoring group, said on Friday. Barrel bombs are oil drums packed with explosive material and shrapnel that set fires and cause bad burns. Their use was condemned by the United Nations Security Council last year. The Syrian military could not immediately be reached for comment. The government has previously denied dropping barrel bombs, but their use has been widely recorded by a UN commission of inquiry on Syria. Daraya, only 12km (seven miles) from Damascus, has been besieged by the government since 2012, but aid agencies gained access to the town during a humanitarian cessation of hostilities earlier this year. Neither ISIS nor Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, formerly known as Nusra Front and aligned with al-Qaeda until last month, are based in Daraya, Reis said. On Tuesday, Human Rights Watch said in a report that Syria and Russia, which intervened in the war a year ago with airstrikes in support of the government, were using incendiary weapons in the civil war in violation of international law. “Incendiary weapons produce heat and fire through the chemical reaction of a flammable substance, causing excruciatingly painful burns that are difficult to treat,” its report said.
“The weapons also start fires that are hard to extinguish, destroying civilian objects and infrastructure,” it said.

k place during the past year in the country. In the statement, the militant group also announced Sheikh Abdullah as its new chief.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu in surprise Iran visit
AFP, Tehran Saturday, 20 August 2016/Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu has made a surprise visit to Tehran for talks on “regional issues”, Iranian state television said on Friday. Cavusoglu’s short trip follows a meeting last week with Mohammad Javad Zarif in Ankara, an Iranian foreign ministry official was quoted as saying. Thursday’s meeting “dealt with consultations on regional issues and bilateral relations”. foreign ministry spokesman Bahram Ghassemi said. Iran and Turkey back opposing sides in the war in Syria, but Cavusoglu’s visit comes after high-level talks between Iranian and Turkish officials and a visit by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Russia.
Support for Erdogan
Both Tehran and Moscow were quick to voice support for Erdogan following the August coup attempt against him, and Cavusoglu last week called on Russia to carry out joint operations with Turkey against the ISIS in Syria.
 

Turkish parliament approves deal ending rift with Israel
Reuters, Istanbul Saturday, 20 August 2016/Turkey’s parliament approved a reconciliation agreement signed with Israel in June which has brought to an end a six-year rift between the two regional powers, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said on Saturday. Relations between the two countries crumbled after Israeli marines stormed a Turkish ship in May 2010 to enforce a naval blockade of the Hamas-run Gaza Strip, killing 10 Turks on board. Israel, which had already offered its apologies for the raid, agreed under the deal to pay out $20 million to the bereaved and wounded in return for Turkey dropping outstanding legal claims. Both countries are to appoint ambassadors under an agreement which is partly driven by the prospect of lucrative Mediterranean gas deals. The accord, signed on June 28, was a rare rapprochement in the divided Middle East, also driven by mutual fears over growing security risks. Two weeks afterwards more than 240 people were killed in an attempted coup in Turkey. Under the deal, the naval blockade of Gaza, which Ankara had wanted lifted, remains in force, although humanitarian aid can continue to be transferred to Gaza via Israeli ports. Israel says the Gaza blockade is needed to curb arms smuggling by Hamas, an Islamist group that last fought a war with Israel in 2014. Hamas, which won Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006, is designated as a terrorist organization by the United States and European Unions.

Turkey: More active role to be taken in Syria
Reuters, Istanbul Saturday, 20 August 2016/Turkey will take a more active role in addressing the conflict in Syria in the next six months to prevent the war-torn country being divided along ethnic lines, Turkish Prime Binali Yildirim said on Saturday. Yildirim also told a group of reporters in Istanbul that while Syrian President Bashar al-Assad could have a role in the interim leadership, he must play no part in its future. Syria’s more than five-year conflict has taken on an ethnic dimension, with Kurdish groups carving out their own regions, and periodically battling groups from Syria’s Arab majority whose priority is to overthrow Assad. Turkey fears the strengthening of Kurdish militant groups in Syria will further embolden its own Kurdish insurgency, which flared anew following the collapse of a ceasefire between militants and the state last year. “Turkey we will be more active in the Syria issue in the coming six months as a regional player. This means to not allow Syria to be divided on any ethnic base, for Turkey this is crucial,” Yildirim said. On Friday Syrian Kurdish authorities evacuated thousands of civilians from Kurdish areas of Hasaka following Syrian government air strikes, the Kurdish YPG militia said. The fighting this week in Hasaka, which is divided into zones of Kurdish and Syrian government control, marks the most violent confrontation between the Kurdish YPG militia and Damascus in the civil war. It came a week after Turkey and Russia, Assad’s strongest military backer, repaired ties following Turkey’s downing of a Russian jet late last year. The YPG and Syrian government forces had mostly left each other to their own devices in the conflict, during which Kurdish groups have exploited the collapse of state control to establish autonomy across much of the country’s north. The Kurdish YPG militia is an integral part of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which are at the heart of Washington’s military campaign against ISIS and last week seized the northern town of Manbij from the militants. Despite the intensified military involvement of world powers, including the former Cold War foes, Yildirim said he was optimistic that Iran, Gulf Arab states, Russia and the United States, could work jointly to find a solution.

US Justice Dept to send team to Turkey for Gulen probe: Bloomberg
Reuters Saturday, 20 August 2016/The US Justice Department will dispatch a team to Turkey in coming days to pursue allegations by the Turkish government of criminal activity by Fethullah Gulen, Bloomberg news reported on Friday, citing an Obama administration official. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has demanded the United States extradite Gulen, a Turkish-born cleric who lives in Pennsylvania, accusing him of being behind a coup attempt last month. Gulen has denied the accusation.

Egypt’s ISIS group affiliate confirm chief’s death
Staff writer, Al Arabiya English, Saturday, 20 August 2016/Egypt’s ISIS affiliate has confirmed the killing of its chief, two weeks after the military announced his death during an operation in the North Sinai, state-owned Ahram Online reported on Thursday. A statement posted online by accounts affiliated to the group said that Abu Doaa al-Ansari along with other militants were killed while countering a military campaign by the army. However, earlier in the month the army announced that al-Ansari was killed along with his top aides and several other militants in a series of airstrikes. Originally known as Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis, the group now calls itself Sinai Province, and has claimed several of the deadly attacks that too

Houthis kill allied forces for fleeing battle
Staff writer, Al Arabiya English Saturday, 20 August 2016/Iran-backed Houthi militias have retaliated against allied forces belonging to the ousted Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh for fleeing clashes with Saudi forces near the southwestern province of Najran, killing at least 15 fighters, Al Arabiya News Channel reported. Houthis have long been allies with Saleh’s forces to combine efforts against the internationally recognized government of President Abed Rabu Mansour Hadi. The clashes, which took place near the Saudi-Yemen border, led to the killing of nearly 70 Houthi militias by Saudi forces.
Coalition airstrikes
The Saudi-led Arab Coalition aircraft, meanwhile, launched airstrikes targeting Houthi militia positions in the Yemeni District of Harad near the kingdom’s border. Security sources told Al Arabiya News Channel that coalition forces continued to target Houthis on Saturday near the northern governorate of Saada, killing four militants. Sources also confirmed the deaths of 64 Houthi members on the Yemeni border near the southeastern Saudi province of Jizan. Earlier this month, the Arab coalition resumed its Operation Restoring Hope against the Houthis and their allies loyal to Saleh after UN-sponsored peace talks in Kuwait ended without an agreement. The operation was also renewed after the Houthi militias started launching attacks on the Saudi borders, which Riyadh dubbed as a “red line”. The Houthi militias and Saleh’s General People’s Congress hold most of Yemen’s northern half while forces loyal to exiled Hadi share control of the rest of the country along with local tribes. The fighting during which more than 6,400 people have been killed - half of them civilians - has created a humanitarian crisis in one of the poorest countries in the Middle East.

Afghan district falls to Taliban
AFP, Kunduz, Afghanistan Saturday, 20 August 2016/Taliban militants on Saturday captured a district in northeastern Kunduz province, near the provincial capital where militants scored their biggest victory in 14 years last September. The militants, waging a bloody insurgency to topple the Western-backed Kabul government, have intensified their attacks nationwide and tightened their grip on the besieged capital of Helmand province southwest of Kunduz in recent weeks. Khan Abad district, which is around 30 kilometres east of Kunduz city, fell to Taliban after the militants launched a pre-dawn attack on the district centre, according to local officials. “After several hours of fighting the militants overran the district,” the district's governor Hayatullah Amiri told AFP, adding that the provincial governor ignored their calls for reinforcements.Provincial spokesman Sayed Mahmood Danish confirmed the overnight battle, and said security forces were “trying to get back control of the district from the Taliban”. Khan Abad resident Abdul Satar told AFP hundreds had fled their homes amid the fighting. “The residents of the city are worried about their lives and safety. People are fleeing their homes and they have left their shops,” he said, adding that roads to neighbouring provinces were closed. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid confirmed in a statement that the group's fighters were in control of district and police headquarters. The Taliban briefly captured northern Kunduz city in September last year, the first city to fall to the insurgents in their biggest victory in 14 years of war. The militants were driven out almost two weeks later by Afghan forces backed by US aircraft and NATO soldiers, but it marked the first time since 2001 that the Taliban were able to take control of a major city in the country. But US and Afghan officials insist that they will not allow another urban centre to be captured after after Kunduz was briefly overrun last year.

Pentagon downplays talk of Russian troop buildup near Ukraine
AFP, Washington Saturday, 20 August 2016/The Pentagon on Friday moved to tamp down talk of a Russian invasion of Ukraine, saying extra troops along the border were associated with a regular military exercise, AFP announced. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on Thursday said he could not rule out a “full-scale” Russian invasion. His warning came amid increasing violence in the pro-Moscow separatist east and accusations that Russia is increasing its forces, replenishing munitions and building up military hardware in the region. Pentagon spokesman Captain Jeff Davis said the United States was concerned by the increasingly strident rhetoric from both Ukraine and Russia. “We are concerned about Russia’s continued occupation of Crimea, and we are concerned about the heightened level of violence in eastern Ukraine,” he said.
 

Nice becomes latest French city to ban burkini
AFP, Nice Friday, 19 August 2016/Nice has become the latest French seaside resort to ban the burkini, the body-concealing Islamic swimsuit that has sparked heated debate in secular France, city officials said Friday. Using language similar to bans imposed in a string of other towns on the French Riviera, the city barred apparel that “overtly manifests adherence to a religion at a time when France and places of worship are the target of terrorist attacks.” The ban in Nice referred specifically to last month’s Bastille Day truck attack in the city that claimed 85 lives as well as the murder 12 days later of a Catholic priest near the northern city of Rouen. Fifteen towns in the southeast, as well as others elsewhere in France, have already banned the burkini including nearby film festival host city Cannes, where three women were each fined 38 euros ($43) under the ban at the weekend. Nice’s deputy mayor Christian Estrosi, from the center-right Republicans party, wrote in a letter to Prime Minister Manuel Valls Tuesday that “hiding the face or wearing a full-body costume to go to the beach is not in keeping with our ideal of social relations.”
Valls came under fire after saying Wednesday that the burkini was “not compatible with the values of France and the Republic.”The Socialist premier cited the tensions in France after the militant attacks to justify his support for the mayors who barred a garment that he said was “founded on the subjugation of women.”France’s Human Rights League accused Valls of “participating in the stigmatization of a category of French people who have become suspect by virtue of their faith.”Burkinis are a rare sight on French beaches, where a small minority of Muslim women can be seen bathing in ordinary clothes and wearing headscarves. Islamic dress has long been a subject of debate in France, which was the first European country to ban the Islamic face veil in public in 2010, six years after outlawing the headscarf and other conspicuous religious symbols in state schools.

40 New York Orthodox rabbis condemn Trump’s ‘hateful rhetoric
By JTA \08/19/2016 /Forty American Orthodox clergy co-signed a letter condemning Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump for what they called his “hateful rhetoric and intolerant policy proposals.” The letter — whose signatories included Irving “Yitz” Greenberg, the founding president of Clal-The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership in New York City — was published Friday on the website Cleveland.com. Noting that “religion should be invoked with care” when addressing politics, the rabbis added that, “Nevertheless, there are times when the political discourse veers into morally offensive language and policy proposals that violate fundamental religious norms.”The rabbis’ “core religious values and essential theological beliefs,” they wrote, “require us to condemn Donald Trump’s hateful rhetoric and intolerant policy proposals in the strongest possible terms.”
In the current presidential election campaign, they also wrote, “we have been deeply troubled to hear proposals that condemn whole groups and which are justified by pointing to evil behaviors by members of that group or religion.”
Trump has called for banning Muslims from entering the United States and later, in remarks made in the context of the fight against radical Islam, for “extreme vetting” of immigrants. Trump attracted outrage after lashing out at Muslim American parents whose son died while serving in the U.S. military in Iraq. After the soldier’s father criticized Trump at the Democratic National Convention in July, Trump lashed back by suggesting, among other things, that the boy’s mother “wasn’t allowed” to speak, presumably by her Muslim husband.
In a reference to this incident, the rabbis wrote: “We were shocked by the disrespect shown to parents who suffered the greatest pain — losing a son who died in the service of our country. The Torah commands us always to comfort mourners. The fact that the parents criticized a candidate does not justify harsh and hurtful retaliation.”The signers tend to represent institutions on the religiously liberal side of modern Orthodoxy. Other signers include Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz, founder and of the liberal Orthodox group Uri L’Tzedek; Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld, of Ohev Sholom: The National Synagogue in Washington, D.C; Rabbi Jeffrey S. Fox, rosh yeshiva of Yeshivat Maharat, a seminary for Orthodox women and Rabba Sara Hurwitz, the former rosh beit midrash at the Drisha Institute in Manhattan. Separately, Trump apologized on Thursday for past remarks that “may have caused personal pain” as he sought to refocus his message in the face of falling poll numbers. “Sometimes, in the heat of debate and speaking on a multitude of issues, you don’t choose the right words or you say the wrong thing,” Trump told a crowd in Charlotte, North Carolina, in his first speech since shaking up his campaign team this week. “I have done that, and I regret it, particularly where it may have caused personal pain. Too much is at stake for us to be consumed with these issues.”Trailing Clinton in national opinion polls, Trump has tried to reset his campaign, announcing on Wednesday a shake-up of his senior campaign staff for the second time in less than two months. In the past week, he has abandoned his free-wheeling style of campaigning, instead using a teleprompter at every rally. On Friday, Trump’s campaign officially acknowledged the resignation of campaign chair Paul Manafort as part of a larger shakeup of the campaign staff, Vox reported.
The departure of Manafort, seen as one of the most conventional political operative in Trump’s orbit, could help consolidate the power of Kellyanne Conway, who was promoted earlier this week to campaign manager and is credited with urging Trump to offer regret for his past offensive comments, and Stephen Bannon, the executive chairman of the conservative Breitbart News site, who was brought on as campaign CEO, according to Politico.

Dozens arrested in swoops on mixed-gender parties in Iran
Saturday, 20 August 2016
NCRI – Iran’s fundamentalist regime has arrested dozens of youths in a string of raids on mixed-gender parties this week. In Shiraz, southern Iran, 63 young men and women were arrested in two separate swoops on parties that were deemed “unlawful” by the mullahs’ fundamentalist standards.
“After receiving reports about two parties held in the middle of the night in north-east Shiraz, a joint operation was carried out by the police and another security agency and 63 half-naked boys and girls were arrested,” Colonel Yousef Malek-Zadeh, commander of the regime’s State Security Forces (police) in Shiraz said on Friday, August 19. His remarks were carried on Friday by the Tasnim news agency, affiliated to the regime’s Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) Quds Force. Malek-Zadeh added: “In these two mixed-gender parties that took place last night, boys and girls had gathered together under the guise of a birthday celebration. With the arrival of the police, all of them were arrested and sent before the judiciary.” “Given the attraction of the gardens in the vicinity of Shiraz, the police have tried to fully monitor all the venues and gardens in this region. Police deputies and commanders stringently monitor these venues through snap inspections,” he said. “With the arrival of summer, police monitoring of these venues has been stepped up.”Separately the regime’s prosecutor-general in Amol, northern Iran, announced on Friday that 20 university students were arrested for attending a mixed-gender party.
Ali Talebi said: “These individuals were arrested at 11pm last night in a residential property in Hezar Street.”
“Following their arrest these individuals were handed over to the local judiciary for prosecution,” he said. His remarks were carried on Friday by the state-run Entekhab website. “We will deal with anyone in this city who disturbs public order,” he added. On Tuesday, August 16, state-media reported the arrest of more than 60 boys and girls for attending a mixed-gender party in a park near the capital Tehran.
The arrests took place during a raid on the party which was held in Tehran's Sorkheh Hesar National Park, east of Tehran, the Fars news agency, affiliated to the IRGC, reported on Tuesday, August 16. The raid was carried out by the IRGC's para-military Bassij force with a warrant from the regime's Judiciary signed by Tehran's deputy prosecutor. The youngsters were caught dancing and partying, and the state-media report claimed that the young women had violated the regime's so-called Islamic dress code.
The report added that the prime suspect behind the "unlawful" party was an individual, identified only as Fariborz G., who had organized the event via social media on the internet.
Commenting on the recent spate of arrests, Shahin Gobadi of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) said: “The clerical regime has never been so isolated at home and loathed by the Iranian people, in particular by the youth and women. As such, it is resorting to more and more repressive measures to confront this growing trend. This once again proves that the notion of moderation under Hassan Rouhani is a total myth. But it also indicates the vulnerable and shaky state of a regime that cannot even tolerate private festivities of the people, particularly the youth. It is becoming more evident that the mullahs are totally paranoid of any social gathering in fear of a popular uprising.”
Last month, the regime arrested 150 boys and girls for attending a mixed-gender birthday party near the capital Tehran. The arrests took place at an overnight party in a garden in the vicinity of Islamshahr, south-west of Tehran, according to Colonel Mohsen Khancherli, the regime's police commander for the west of Tehran Province. Khancherli told the Tasnim news agency, affiliated to the regime's terrorist IRGC Quds Force, on July 25: "After we obtained a report about a mixed-gender party in a garden in the vicinity of Islamshahr in the west of Tehran Province, an operation was carried out by the police and another organization, leading to the arrest of dozens of boys and girls."
"Some 150 boys and girls had gathered at the mixed-gender party under the guise of a birthday party in this garden which is situated next to a studio where unlawful music was produced and recorded. Upon arrival of the police, all those present were arrested and sent before the judiciary," he said.
Khancherli claimed that given the popularity of gardens in the west of Tehran Province, the regime's suppressive state security forces (police) are constantly monitoring venues and gardens in that area, with police commanders carrying out snap inspections of sites. "With the arrival of summer, the police surveillance at these sites will be stepped up," he added. This followed news days earlier that more than 50 young Iranians were arrested by the regime's suppressive state security forces at a party near Tehran.
The Tasnim news agency reported on July 22 the arrest of more than 50 young men and women at a party in the town of Davamand, east of Tehran. Tasnim quoted Mojtaba Vahedi, the head of the regime's judiciary in Damavand, as saying that the organizers of the party had invited people to attend via online social networks. Vahedi added security forces initially monitored the social sphere and after carrying out the necessary investigations obtained a warrant to clamp down on the party and arrest the party-goers.
Judicial files have been opened against those arrested at the party, Vahedi said. He added: "Families must be more vigilant regarding their children to make sure they do not end up in such circumstances."
Some 35 young men and women were flogged in May for taking part in a mixed-gender party after their graduation ceremony near Qazvin city, some 140 kilometers northwest of Tehran, the regime's Prosecutor in the city said on May 26.
Ismaeil Sadeqi Niaraki, a notorious mullah, said a special court session was held after all the young men and women at the party were rounded up, the Mizan news agency, affiliated to the fundamentalist regime's judiciary, reported on May 26. "After we received information that a large number of men and women were mingling in a villa in the suburbs of Qazvin ... all the participants at the party were arrested," he said.
Niaraki added that the following morning every one of those detained received 99 lashes as punishment by the so-called 'Morality Police.'According to Niaraki, given the social significance of mixed-gender partying, "this once again required a firm response by the judiciary in quickly reviewing and implementing the law." "Thanks God that the police questioning, investigation, court hearing, verdict and implementation of the punishment all took place in less than 24 hours," Niaraki added.
The regime’s prosecutor claimed that the judiciary would not tolerate the actions of “law-breakers who use excuses such as freedom and having fun in birthday parties and graduation ceremonies.”
Similar raids have been carried out on mixed-gender parties across Iran in recent months.

The 1988 massacre in Iran
Saturday, 20 August 2016
NCRI - In the summer of 1988, the Iranian regime summarily and extra-judicially executed tens of thousands of political prisoners held in jails across Iran. The massacre was carried out on the basis of a fatwa by the regime’s then-Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini.
The facts:
• More than 30,000 political prisoners were massacred in Iran in the summer of 1988.
• The massacre was carried out on the basis of a fatwa by Khomeini.
• The vast majority of the victims were activists of the opposition PMOI (MEK).
• A Death Committee approved all the death sentences.
• Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi, a member of the Death Committee, is today Hassan Rouhani’s Justice Minister.
• The perpetrators of the 1988 massacre have never been brought to justice.
• On August 9, 2016, an audio tape was published for the first time of Khomeini’s former heir acknowledging that that massacre took place and had been ordered at the highest levels.
The Montazeri Tape
On August 9, 2016, relatives of Hossein-Ali Montazeri, Khomeini's former heir, published a shocking audio tape in which Montazeri can be heard telling a meeting of members of the “Death Committee” 28 years ago (August 15, 1988) that they are carrying out a crime against humanity. The Montazeri tape revealed new information about the scope and breadth of the massacre of political prisoners at the time. It has sent shockwaves in Iran and in particular among the regime's officials who had for more than two decades attempted to impose an absolute silence on the massacre.
The clip also showed that the Iranian regime’s leaders who held positions of power since the beginning of the regime’s establishment must face justice for committing one of the most horrific crimes against humanity.
In the audio tape, Hossein-Ali Montazeri, who was subsequently dismissed as the heir by Khomeini, for these very remarks, tells members of the “death commission”, Hossein-Ali Nayyeri, the regime’s sharia judge, Morteza Eshraqi, the regime’s prosecutor, Ebrahim Raeesi, deputy prosecutor, and Mostafa Pourmohammadi, representative of the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), “The greatest crime committed during the reign of the Islamic Republic, for which history will condemn us, has been committed by you. Your (names) will in the future be etched in the annals of history as criminals.” He adds, “Executing these people while there have been no new activities (by the prisoners) means that … the entire judicial system has been at fault.”
Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, the President-elect of the Iranian Resistance, described the audio recording as a historical document. She said the recording attested in the strongest possible manner both to the Mojahedin (PMOI/MEK) political prisoners’ rejection of surrender and to their admirable allegiance to, and perseverance in, their commitment to the Iranian people. The recording is also irrefutable evidence that leaders of the mullahs’ regime are responsible for crimes against humanity and the unprecedented genocide, Mrs. Rajavi said.
There are strong indications that Khomeini’s fatwa, which led to the massacre of some 30,000 political prisoners in Iran, was issued on July 26, 1988.
The Iranian regime has never acknowledged these executions, or provided any information as to how many prisoners were killed.
The majority of those executed were either serving prison sentences for their political activities or had already finished their sentences but were still kept in prison.
Some of them had previously been imprisoned and released, but were again arrested and executed during the massacre.
The wave of massacre of political prisoners began in late July and continued unabated for several months.
By the time it ended in the autumn of 1988, some 30,000 political prisoners, the overwhelming majority activists of the People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI or MEK), were slaughtered.
A site of a mass grave for some of the victims of the 1988 massacre of political prisoners in Iran
Mass executions of prisoners in 1988 begins with Khomeini’s death decree
In the final phases of the Iran-Iraq war, Khomeini who felt that defeat was imminent, decided to take his revenge on the political prisoners. He issued fatwas (religious decrees) ordering the execution of anyone who had not “repented” and who was not willing to collaborate entirely with the regime.
The massacres began, and everyday hundreds of political prisoners were hanged and their corpses were buried hurriedly in mass graves all over major cities, in particular Tehran.
Khomeini decreed: "Whoever at any stage continues to belong to the Monafeqin (the regime’s derogatory term to describe the PMOI/MEK) must be executed. Annihilate the enemies of Islam immediately." He went on to add: "... Those who are in prisons throughout the country and remain steadfast in their support for the MEK/PMOI are waging war on God and are condemned to execution... It is naive to show mercy to those who wage war on God."
Khomeini's "Death Decree" for mass executions of Iranian political prisoners in 1988
“Death Committee” of 1988 massacre of political prisoners
Khomeini assigned an "Amnesty Commission" for prisons. In reality it was a "Death Committee” comprised of the three individuals: A representative of the Ministry of Intelligence, a religious judge and a prosecutor. The final decision rested with the Intelligence Ministry official. They held a trial for a few minutes that resembled more of an integration session. The questions were focused on whether the inmate continued to have any allegiances to the PMOI (MEK). The PMOI prisoners made up more than 90 percent of those taken before the “Death Commission.” If the prisoners were not willing to collaborate totally with the regime against the PMOI, it was viewed as a sign of sympathy to the organization and the sentence was immediate execution. The task of the Death Commission was to determine whether a prisoner was a so-called “Enemy of God” or not. In the case of Mojahedin prisoners, that determination was often made after only a single question about their party affiliation. Those who said "Mojahedin" rather than the derogatory "Monafeqin" were sent to be hanged.
Members of the death committee
Khomeini's heir protests haste of executions prisoners in 1988 massacre
The haste to execute was so abhorrent that some of Khomeini's closest confidantes, most notably, Hossein Ali Montazeri, Khomeini's heir apparent, had doubts and protested it. In letters to Khomeini, Montazeri urged for some leniency and slowing down. But Khomeini ordered there should be mercy for no one, including teenagers. He said pregnant women should not be spared or have the chance to give birth to their child and should be executed immediately.
In December 2000, Montazeri published his memoirs. The book revealed shocking documents on the atrocities committed by the clerical regime, none as horrendous as the massacre of 30,000 political prisoners in 1988 on the orders of Khomeini.
Montazeri’s book was not the first document informing the world of this massacre. News of the carnage had already begun to trickle through the iron curtain of censorship imposed by the mullahs to ensure a complete blackout on their crime.
Text of Montazeri’s letter to Khomeini on July 31, 1988, complaining that mass execution of Mojahedin (PMOI/MEK) prisoners would only enhance their legitimacy and popular appeal.
Khomeini required total conformity from the regime's officials
All officials of the regime at the time had to conform fully to this massacre or they would be sacked or deposed. Ayatollah Montazeri, who protested the massacre, fell from grace and was sacked by Khomeini in March 1989. Montazeri’s memoirs in December 2000 and its shocking enclosures exposed the horrendous scale of the massacre. What gave weight to the revelations is that they were made by a man who was at the time of the executions the officially ordained successor to Khomeini and the second highest authority in Iran. Yet when it came to massacring political prisoners, Khomeini showed no mercy to slightest nonconformity even by Montazeri.
Role of Hassan Rouhani in 1988 massacre of political prisoners
Hassan Rouhani was Deputy Commander-in-chief of the regime's armed forces at the time. Furthermore, since 1982 he was a member of the regime’s Supreme Defense Council and a member of the Central Council of the War Logistics Headquarters.
In those positions, he was fully cognizant of this hideous crime and obviously was in full conformity.
This shows that the notion that Rouhani is a “moderate” and “reform minded” is absolutely preposterous and baseless. Actually he, like all other senior officials of the regime, is a culprit of this hideous crime.
International assessment
There has been little international attention to this crime against humanity.
In 2008, twenty years after the massacre Amnesty International "renewed its call for those responsible for the 'prison massacre' to be held accountable. There should be no impunity for such gross human rights violations, regardless of when they were committed." Amnesty added: "Those responsible for the killings - one of the worst abuses to be committed in Iran - should be prosecuted and tried before a regularly and legally constituted court and with all necessary procedural guarantees, in accordance with international fair trial standards."
Justice not yet served
The massacre of 1988 remains to be one of the darkest stains on the recent history of mankind, as one of the least exposed and discussed.
Some human rights experts have described it as the greatest crime against humanity in the 20th Century following World War II that has gone unpunished.
It is the darkest irony of this very dark episode, that of all its human rights violations the Iranian regime has been most successful at keeping the 1988 killings a secret from the international community and even from many Iranians. By now, virtually everyone knows of the reign of terror that immediately followed the Islamic Revolution, the Iranian government's assassination campaign abroad, and the "Chain Murders" that targeted opposition intellectuals and activists in the late 1990s. Tragically, however, there is very little public awareness of the 1988 executions.
Not only has there been no prosecution of the criminals who orchestrated and carried out that summer's gruesome murders, but the regime continues to deny that they even occurred.
The Iranian regime continues to deny the 1988 elimination of opposition prisoners. None of the perpetrators or masterminds have been brought to justice and none of the regime's senior officials including the current Supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, have been held accountable.
The pervasive silence of the past 28 years should be shattered. The UN should launch an independent investigation into one of the most hideous crimes against humanity after the Second World War.
‘Increase in number of women living on Iran’s streets is due to unemployment and lack of job security’
Saturday, 20 August 2016/NCRI - A member of the Iranian regime’s Majlis (Parliament) has confessed that the rise in the number of women living on the streets of Iran may be due to the rise in unemployment in the country caused by the regime’s policies. Nader Qazipour confirmed to the state-run Basij News Agency on Tuesday, August 16, that the homeless women were, in fact, Iranian citizens forced into life on the streets because of a lack of job security and high unemployment. Qazipour said that regime agents who have multiple jobs “do not care about the people damaged” through their actions. He said: “The main cause for all of these problems and woes, is the so-called responsible agents who only think about their pleasure and they neglect the livelihood of people. The failure to address the urban and rural issues as well as the level of unemployment for youths intensify the issues such as marginalization, prostitution and the damages caused by them.”

Latest LCCC Bulletin analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources published on on August 20-21/16

Israeli Defense Minister Surprises by Announcing West Bank Projects in Key Area
David Makovsky/The Washington Institute/August 19/16
The initiative could boost the Palestinian economic sector in Area C during a period of diplomatic inactivity, but continued cooperation between Foreign Minister Liberman and the IDF could be tested if a rather quiet West Bank returns to violence.
This week, Avigdor Liberman made his first substantive foray into the Palestinian issue since becoming Israel's minister of defense three months ago. While Liberman's inflammatory rhetoric tends to overshadow his constructive actions, he indeed took a significant step by enabling the Palestinians to engage in economic activity, previously off-limits, in some parts of the West Bank's Area C. The eleven projects, ranging from a medical facility to residences, will be carried out in locations adjacent to Areas A and B. While the projects may only occur in a limited geographic space in Area C, they certainly create an interesting precedent.
In recent years, greater Palestinian economic access to Area C, which constitutes 60 percent of the West Bank -- although only a small proportion of West Bank residents -- and is controlled entirely by Israel, has been one of the most contentious issues between Israel and the Palestinians. (As for the other West Bank sectors, Area A covers 18 percent of the territory and is made up of urban areas under Palestinian security and civil control, and Area B, accounting for the remaining 22 percent, consists of towns and villages adjacent to urban areas where Palestinians are responsible for civil affairs and maintaining public order.)
Among the projects announced by Liberman are an industrial area west of Nablus, an economic corridor between Jericho and Jordan backed by Japanese funding, a hospital in Beit Sahour (near Bethlehem), and expanded residential construction in approved Palestinian master plans for Qalqilya and other existing towns and villages. Liberman appears to favor further Area C projects as well.
Economic Steps in the Absence of Diplomacy
This week's move suggests that Liberman, obviously with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's support, will back an emphasis by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on taking stabilizing economic steps during a period of diplomatic stasis. In particular, the IDF has resisted pressure from the most right-wing forces within the Israeli government to sharply reduce work permits granted to Palestinians in response to the wave of stabbings that began last October. IDF officials generally believe that any such overreaction will only worsen the situation, and they feel vindicated by the dissipation of the stabbings. Yet while the IDF's pragmatic streak would seemingly point to a more active diplomatic track, with even Netanyahu now publicly noting the insufficiency of "economic peace" -- a term with which he was linked years ago -- the reality of diplomatic stasis means key Israeli officials favor taking economic steps on the ground.
But violence has not vanished entirely. Over the past few months, the perpetrators of three fatal attacks have all come from Hebron's adjacent villages of Dura, Yatta, and Bani Naim, as Liberman demonstrated on a map in this week's press conference. Therefore, no projects in those villages were approved. Liberman also said the IDF will be more active around Hebron, explaining that he would advocate a "carrot and stick" approach. He declared, "Our purpose is to continue to benefit those who wish to coexist with us and to impede those who want to hurt Jews," adding that "anyone who is ready for coexistence will profit and anyone who takes the route of terrorism will lose."
Potential Consequences of Area C Demolitions
Despite Liberman's pragmatic steps, any international praise for the Israelis over their actions may be clouded by the demolition of almost two hundred Area C homes this year based on their lack of a proper permit. Related criticism of Israel has extended to the U.S. State Department, whose officials have publicly complained that legal permits have not been available in Area C and that therefore the demolitions raise questions about Israel's commitment to a two-state solution. Netanyahu could be confronted on this matter when he heads to the United Nations next month for the General Assembly session, as he will likely do.
For its part, Israel contends that only a small number of West Bank Palestinians live in Area C, despite its large size, and sees the area as a bargaining chip in any negotiations over the West Bank's final disposition. However, no such negotiations appear to be in the offing, and Israel's claims have raised alarms that it wants to hold Area C indefinitely -- claims bolstered by leading right-wing elements in the government, such as Education Minister Naftali Bennett, who heads the Jewish Home Party. Bennett has publicly called for Israel to annex Area C, fueling U.S. concerns about Israel's intentions for the area and leading to much American scrutiny. Indeed, the potency of the Bennett statements could explain Liberman's desire to balance the recent Area C moves with tough rhetoric.
While Liberman's announcement suggests that Israel is indeed open to selective Palestinian projects in Area C villages adjacent to Areas A and B, his rhetoric eviscerating Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas got the headlines. Likewise, Liberman has long insisted that he distinguishes between his criticism of Abbas and support for the PA -- and a corresponding desire to avert its collapse. The defense minister further argued this week that he saw the projects as a sign that Israel will find ways to reach the Palestinian people directly. And he announced that the Ministry of Defense will be publishing a new Arabic website, designed to inform Palestinians of steps Israel is taking to improve their lives.
As for Liberman's opposition to Abbas, it is unclear what this means in practice. Until he became defense minister, a plethora of media reports suggested that Liberman favored Abbas's rival Mohammad Dahlan, who currently lives in exile in Abu Dhabi, to lead the PA. However, since Liberman assumed his current post, key Israelis have evidently told him that Dahlan does not enjoy serious public backing from the Palestinian people. As a result, these sources say Liberman has cooled to Dahlan. The defense minister told reporters this week that Israel will not "meddle in [Palestinian] internal affairs."
Conclusion
Liberman prides himself on using hawkish rhetoric, but his words can be harsher than his actions. As foreign minister during U.S. secretary of state John Kerry's diplomatic initiative in 2013-14, Liberman surprised observers with his public support for the U.S. effort. Now, as defense minister, Liberman has once again shown his ability to surprise by favoring more projects in Area C. Such a pragmatic approach would be consistent with his indicated desire to show he can work with the IDF, an attribute the electorate would need to see in order to potentially consider him down the road. Liberman has not hid his ambitions to be a future prime minister.
So long as the West Bank is quiet, one can expect Liberman and the IDF to see eye to eye. However, Liberman's pragmatism will be tested by potential developments such as a spate of terrorist attacks, in which case he will be challenged to find common ground with the IDF. In such circumstances, the military will likely favor isolating perpetrators and creating political distance between them and the overall West Bank population, whereas Liberman could be inclined to enact a wider crackdown -- at least in a specific zone of the West Bank. This divergence could position him for a showdown with the country's military leaders.
**David Makovsky is the Ziegler Distinguished Fellow and director of the Project on the Middle East Peace Process at The Washington Institute.

Aleppo: Syria’s Guernica
Mshari Al Thaydi/Al Arabiya/August 20/16
“Seeing the picture of the five-year old Syrian boy this morning, while heading to work, made me cry.” This comment by a Western woman was posted on the BBC website in reference to Omran Daqneesh, whose haunting picture has resonated widely on social media. Video footage shows him covered in dust, staring in shock, so much shock he cannot even cry. He wipes his face and looks down at the blood, the red color a vivid reminder of the horrors caused by the Syrian regime and Russia, which are bombing Aleppo. This is not the first picture of the ravages of war in Syria. The heartbreaking one of Aylan Kurdi went viral. The boy’s corpse was found lying face down on a Turkish beach away from his parents. He died after fleeing Syria, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Russian missiles, regime barrel-bombs and Iraqi militias linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).
Art
Artwork has illustrated and immortalized the horrors of war to remind us of people’s ordeal. For example, Picasso’s painting “Guernica” immortalized the small Basque village wiped out by German shelling in 1937 during the Spanish civil war. The painting perfectly portrays this shocking incident. Had Picasso been alive now and seen Daqneesh’s picture, would he have painted something similar to “Guernica”? Back then, planes and weapons were ‘primitive.’ What can we say about what Russia and its allies are inflicting today on Aleppo, which is trapped in the shadow of death? Had Picasso been alive now and seen Daqneesh’s picture, would he have painted something similar to “Guernica”? High-quality pictures, live streaming and smartphones have paved the way for hundreds of “Guernica” pictures, but have they influenced global public opinion? The picture of Daqneesh is itself a “Guernica” - no need for a painter to add his or her personal touch. However, this present-day “Guernica” has left Western art connoisseurs indifferent. This article was first published in Asharq al-Awsat on Aug.19, 2016.

Rage, rage, unadulterated rage against the dying of hope
Hisham Melhem/Al Arabiya/August 20/16
August is the cruelest of months for the Syrian people. In August 2011, responding to Syria’s enlarging killing fields, President Obama called on the grim reaper Bashar al-Assad - who was “slaughtering his own people” - to step down. But Assad contemptuously continued his death march with impunity because the American president did not say “or else” and opted to naively believe that diplomatic pressure and strong words would result in action. In August 2012, President Obama warned Assad that if he even dared to move chemical weapons, let alone use them against his own people, he would be crossing a “red line,” a dangerous move “that would change my calculus.” He ominously added “we have put together a range of contingency plans.” In August 2013, when Assad horrifically erased Obama’s infamous “red line” by killing more than 1,400 people - among them a large number of children with sarin gas - Obama initially, but hesitantly, decided to deliver a punishing blow to the dictator’s killing machine. A few days later, he reneged on delivering on his threat when Britain and Congress balked, and after Russia threw the embattled president a life line in the form of surrendering Syria’s stockpile of chemical weapons if Obama were to call off the threatened strikes. On September 4, 2013, Obama, who believes that sophisticated sophistry can explain anything and everything, had the audacity to declare “I didn’t set a red line. The world set a red line.” A low point for Obama, to be followed by many more related to Syria.
Passively gazing at death and the dying
By August 2016, Obama’s passivity on death and dying in Syria has been deeply etched in his heart of stone. Over the years, Obama had fortified his conscience against any sharp pangs of guilt regarding his atrocious abandoning of Syria and his shameless retreat from delivering on his threats against the depredations of the Assad regime and his confederacy of Iranian, Russian and Hezbollah mass killers and on his disingenuous promises to the Syrian opposition. From the beginning of the Syrian uprising, even when it was in its initial peaceful phase, President Obama made a priori decision not to seriously or deeply get involved in a conflict that he later described as “somebody else’s civil war.” When the Assad regime and its allies brutally suppressed the nationalist and moderate opposition, thus creating the conditions that led to the emergence of Islamist opposition groups of different stripes including the monstrous ISIS and al-Qaeda affiliated al-Nusra Front, and when the conflict became a regional war with various proxies entering the fray, and when the Syrian war became a serious refugee induced European crisis, Obama and his young lieutenants at the White House blindly and stubbornly clung to their views.
The mere fact that the United States is seriously contemplating military cooperation with Russia’s expeditionary forces in Syria, thus legitimating the very military that occupied Crimea two years ago and have been trying to shred Ukraine to pieces while intimidating the European Union by exploiting the refugee crisis, is in itself a stunning American retreat
The Syrian regime and its allies have horrified the world by killing thousands of civilians in chemical weapons attacks, medieval-like sieges and starvation tactics against besieged communities and the incessant dropping of thousands of crude barrel bombs designed solely to maim and kill civilians. There were many thousands of pictures of horribly contorted and emaciated naked bodies of dead Syrian prisoners, and countless number of children, toddlers and infants - the very hope of Syria - lying dead on the cold and bloody floors of hospitals, in the rubbles of their homes or stretched in the arms of their grieving parents. At times, the world, in fleeting moments of genuine anguish, seemed willing to understand more about the young victims, the dead and wounded children of Syria, even to know their names and other details of their short and stunted lives. Who would forget the mutilated body of 13-year-old Hamza al-Khateeb? I remember him haunting me for days. Or the tiny lifeless body of Aylan Kurdi washed up on Turkish shore, sleeping forever on his belly in his red shirt and blue shorts and the neat sneakers he wore without socks. Kurdi’s family was trying to cross the Mediterranean to Europe and safety. One would hope that Kurdi’s crossing was to a place of eternal bliss.
This week we met Omran Daqneesh, aged five, bewildered and shocked after he was pulled out of the rubble of his home following a bombing raid by Syrian or Russian warplanes. His expressionless face coated with a mixture of blood and gray dust gazing at us as if he were gazing at a limitless void. He was too stunned to cry or complain, after all this is the cruel world he has been accustomed to for all of his five years on this earth. Even when he lifted his hand to touch and wipe his bloody brow under his thick unkempt hair, there was no expression of pain or fright, only a passing hint of a surprise, before he wiped the blood on the orange chair. After his rescuer left the ambulance, Omran kept staring into the unknown, he was totally alone in the world, and for a moment he was like Syria, alone in the world. Looking at him, I was seized with a sense of unadulterated rage. Rage at everything and everyone, including myself. I wanted so badly for President Obama to see the short video, to realize that this reality is partly his own shame; I wanted him to have a sleepless night just as I and many people had.
From Russia, with bombs
On August 15 and 16, Russian strategic bombers took off for the first time from an air base in western Iran to deliver their lethal payload of ‘dumb bombs’ on rebel positions and civilian neighborhoods in Aleppo and on other targets in northern Syria. A callous world power teaming up with a belligerent regional power to help a local despot continue his catalogue of savage acts against his own people, while the world’s sole superpower passively watches the carnage and occasionally issuing pleas for restraint and beseeches Russia to be true to its declared policy in Syria and to lean on its client to cease and desist.
When the Russians announced the new qualitative military cooperation with Iran, they hinted that Russia and the United States were nearing an agreement to conduct joint military operations against ISIS and al-Nusra (which allegedly severed its ties with al-Qaeda and morphed into the newly minted Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, or Front for the Conquest of Syria). Ever since Russia surprised the Obama administration by dispatching its air force last September to prop up Assad’s tenuous hold on power, its cunning President Vladimir Putin and his gruff Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov have been playing President Obama and his eternally optimistic Secretary of State John Kerry like a fiddle. The administration had no clue about how to deal with this assertive Russian move and the initial “policy,” if there was such a thing, was to wait and see Russia being sucked into a Syrian quagmire. This was a case of wishful thinking masquerading as policy. Russia is not bogged down in Syria, at least not yet. And the Russians are saying that the budget they allocated for military maneuvers is being spent on real military operations against real targets, many of them unfortunately are Syrian civilians.
For almost a full year, it was Russia that had been determining the tempo of military operations, the pace of distribution of humanitarian aid (extremely rare) and the frequency of (hollow) diplomatic moves. The mere fact that the United States is seriously contemplating military cooperation with Russia’s expeditionary forces in Syria, thus legitimating the very military that occupied Crimea two years ago and have been trying to shred Ukraine to pieces while intimidating the European Union by exploiting the refugee crisis, is in itself a stunning American retreat. Earlier in the week, Human Rights Watch gave the US military something to ponder while talking military coordination in Syria with the Russians. A report by HRW accused the joint Syrian-Russian military cooperation of using incendiary weapons “which burn their victims and start fires in civilian areas of Syria, in violation of international law.” The report stresses that such weapons have been used “at least 18 times over the past six weeks.”
A new geostrategic alignment?
One could see this budding Russian-Iranian military cooperation (after last year’s sale of the S-300 missile system to Iran) as a potential new geostrategic alignment that could include Turkey, now that US-Turkish relations have become the latest victim of the failed coup attempt in Turkey. While Turkey’s economic and military relations with the West are too complex and important to be dismissed or changed quickly, it is also true that Turkey’s traditional western orientation has been dealt a major setback. The use by Russian bombers of an Iranian air base came after the Putin-Erdogan summit and the beginning of restoration of diplomatic and economic relations between Ankara and Moscow. It also came after recent press reports in the region asserting that Turkey has reached a preliminary agreement with Iran on the fundamental principles for a settlement of the Syrian conflict. A dramatic Turkish shift on the imperatives of peace in Syria, for instance allowing Assad to remain in power within a revamped political system, will have tremendous regional reverberations and will strengthen Russia’s hand in Syria and the region. Such a shift will constitute a serious setback to US power and status in the region. One of the main reasons why Obama was determined not to intervene militarily in Syria before Russia became a direct party to the war was his concern that any serious American effort to help remove Assad from power could undermine the chances of reaching a nuclear agreement with Iran. Contrary to the administration’s public claims that Obama had no illusions that such an agreement may soften Tehran’s animus towards the U.S and the West, it is clear that the American president was hoping that the agreement could open the way to improved relations with Washington. From his public pronouncement about Iran and its historic importance, Obama wanted a historic opening with Tehran, similar to his opening with Havana. One wonders what Obama really thinks when he watches Iran doubling down on multiple fronts, including ratcheting up military coordination with Russia.
Washington’s reaction to Russia’s use of an Iranian facility has been lukewarm at best. It is as if the US is saying since it uses the Incirlik air base in Turkey to bomb Syrian and Iraqi targets, then Russia can use the Hamedan air base in western Iran to bomb targets in Syria. The State Department said the historic attack was “unfortunate” and could make a contentious situation worse. As expected, a Kerry-Lavrov telephone conversation followed and likely ended with Russian promises that will never be fulfilled.
‘The worst place on earth’
As if to make this August bleaker for Syrians, Amnesty International issued a harrowing interactive report titled “‘It breaks the human’: Torture, disease and death in Syria’s prisons,” with focus on the huge Saydnaya Military Prison on the outskirts of Damascus, described by prisoners as “the worst place on earth.” Amnesty used the memories of ex-detainees and architects to build an accurate model of the prison “using ‘ear-witness’ testimony of the president’s hellish torture house.” This is a brutal catalogue of horrors and depravity that are unfathomable. We meet the few Syrians who entered a kind of hell that not even Dante could have imagined and who somehow lived to tell the tales of woes and human cruelty. In Saydnaya, prisoners were forced to share their cells with the dead bodies of tortured fellow inmates. Amnesty estimates that 17,723 people have perished in Syrian prisons and detention facilities since the uprising began in March 2011, an average rate of more than 300 deaths each month. In his last five months in office, President Obama is certainly not going to change his tactics in Syria, regardless of what Assad, Putin, Khamenei and maybe Erdogan do or say. But we should continue to remind him, and the next president, that the rage against the dying of hope in Syria and elsewhere will continue. Unfortunately there will be more Omrans traumatized, wounded or killed, and we will not know or see most of them.
August is the cruelest of months for the Syrian people…

Forcing secularism, one burkini at a time
Brooklyn Middleton/Al Arabiya/August 20/16
There is a deep and bitter irony in French authorities banning the burkini – a swimming garment some Muslim women choose to wear – in an effort to promote liberal values. Only in the most repressive societies are women legally obligated to comply with stipulated dress codes. Whether on a beach in Cannes or at a market in Tehran, no woman should be confronted with the humiliating experience that is being penalized for what she chooses to wear on her own body. In moving to dictate to women what kind of fabric is acceptable for them to place on themselves while sunbathing or swimming, the mayors of Sisco, Cannes, and Villeneuve-Loubet are behaving more like ultra-conservative figures in some countries of the Middle East than like other Western leaders. Sanctioning what clothing a woman must wear in order to be allowed in a public place – whether the law demands her to be more modest or less so – is an affront to women’s rights and liberal values. Even Prime Minister Manuel Valls came out in public support of local officials enacting bans on burkinis, calling the garment, a “provocation” and “not compatible with the values of France.” He also referred to the burkini as representative of “the enslavement of women.” Thus, it is then unclear why PM Valles would support penalizing these “enslaved” women. Just a few days ago, three women wearing burkinis - who were at the beach with their children - were issued fines by police officers and told to leave; who can justify this action? Does France plan on deploying secular police to make sure sunbathers are wearing the attire they deem appropriate? Perhaps they can undergo training on how to handle such matters from an Islamic country’s morality police forces. A nation cannot force secularism on religious women by criminalizing modest swimwear. Women in France who wear Burkinis or other similar swimwear must not be ostracized for doing so. Sanctioning what clothing a woman must wear in order to be allowed in a public place – whether the law demands her to be more modest or less so – is an affront to women’s rights and liberal values
Cannes Mayor David Lisnard attempted to cite safety issues as the reason for enacting the burkini ban noting he decided to do so to ensure the “city is safe in the context of the state of emergency.” The state of emergency – which came into effect after the barbaric ISIS attacks that reportedly caused the worst bloodshed on French soil since WWII – does not justify this ban. Unlike a burka, which obscures the face entirely and could complicate a security check, a head-to-toe bathing suit presents no security risk to French beaches. Further, the law in Cannes reportedly indicates that the burkinis are “liable to create risks of disrupting public order (crowds, scuffles etc.).” If French authorities are concerned that burkinis may trigger skirmishes with other beach goers, then the focus should be on deescalating tensions not heightening them by introducing bans that single out and embarrass. France is facing a number of critical security issues and none of them have to do with the type of bathing suit their citizens and tourists wear.

Milk of human kindness; a Greek village shows the way
Ehtesham Shahid/Al Arabiya/August 20/16
For every Omran Daqneesh episode that occasionally moves us to tears, there are hundreds of refugee children around the world who carry stories of horror and survival. These fortunate ones have either been escorted by their parents to safety or, in some cases, rescued by people not even remotely known to them. Several such stories have unfolded in Europe and elsewhere in the West. In the streets of Greece’s port town of Mytilene, Arabic is said to have surpassed Greek as the dominant language. Its not the same story everywhere though. Switzerland’s Oberwil-Lieli – one of Europe’s wealthiest villages – has refused to accept asylum seekers and has instead voted to pay a hefty fine.
However, New York Times reported a particularly striking story few days ago. The story unfolds in a tiny Greek village called Skala Sikaminias. Last year, a handful of fishermen belonging to this village encountered hapless families, small children in tow, turning up on its shores, desperately seeking asylum.
The village’s 100-odd residents not just welcomed these refugees with open arms they did everything they could to help them make a new beginning. Soon, a remote sleepy hamlet came alive and the struggle for existence was met with acts of kindness and empathy for fellow humans. Despite challenges, bonhomie prevailed. The village of Skala Sikaminias has dispelled the notion that a place or an individual has to be rich and resourceful to help the poor and the needy
But that’s just one part of the story. The local population’s natural instinct to help hapless survivors from troubled faraway land turned out to be a disaster. Tourists, who were so critical to the local economy, started deserting the place. Apparently, they were wary of spending their vacation in a place “now associated with human desperation.”
One can only imagine the dilemma the native inhabitants of the land would have faced under these circumstances. Caught between the instinct to help and the need for sustenance, this village chose to keep their arms open, an act that had defined them in the first place. Despite understandable murmurs of discontent, and the hardships presented by the large number of refugees mutually draining the scarce natural resource, the villagers seem determined to stay the course. After all that has happened in Skala Sikaminias, its inhabitants still maintain that “if it happens again, everyone will do the exact same thing.”
Mirror on the wall
Besides serving as an example of the essential goodness of mankind, Skala Sikaminias should inspire us at various levels. To begin with, this was not an affluent community that was prepared to pitch tents, open townhouses and arrange food packets for thousands of families pouring in. For all its virtues, Greece is not Germany when it comes to organized response system to public challenge and deep pockets. It has only slightly recovered from its own economic predicament. Yet, in many ways, what this village has managed to extend to the refugees goes far beyond its means. It demonstrated the attitude of accommodativeness that seems to have gone missing from global affairs today. The village of Skala Sikaminias has dispelled the notion that a place or an individual has to be rich and resourceful to help the poor and the needy. The more pertinent questions though are the following – if these men and women had reached the shores of a bustling city with a vibrant economy, would they be welcomed as compassionately? Even if the urban folk find resources, would they have the time to bring thousands of lives back on track? If we go back to where it all began, one cannot help but emphasize the futility of conflict. There is a lesson for the host communities too – peace and tranquility is the ultimate guarantor of prosperity, whether it is a town or a village.
 

Bayit Yehudi: The 'Jewish Home' that wants more Druze
Ynetnews/Yuval Karni|/August 20/16
A new registration drive for Naftali Bennett's party is taking advantage of a recent charge to party rules that permit its members to be secular or even gentiles; the Druze community is signing up in the hundreds; some allege that it's all a cynical attempt to refill empty party coffers.
The chairman of Bayit Yehyudi, Minister of Education Naftali Bennett, took an unusual decision a few weeks ago: Cancelling the last registration drive carried out in his party and ordering a new one to recruit members. Following that, some 77,000 members were deleted from his party list, and Bayit Yehudi began a new chapter. The decision drew criticism, most of which was concentrated on the claim that it would be difficult to recount tens of thousands of members who were already registered. It turned out that the new registration drive attracted interest in a sector not necessarily associated with Bayit Yehudi (or "Jewish Home"): the Druze. A senior party official reported that several hundred residents of Kisra-Sumei, Hurfeish, Beit Jaan and other Druze villages in the north had already registered. Behind the process stands Eyal Assad, 41, a resident of Kisra-Surmei, who is the chairman of the party's Druze forum.
According to him, the Druze used to register for the two largest parties, Likud and Labor, but they both failed to meet expectations. "We saw that they dismissed the Druze minority, so we found a warm home in Bayit Yehudi. Soon, I'll have 1,000 registered members."
Assad says that he's been a member of the party for three years and that he only has good things to say about it. "The cooperation with the ministers and MKs works great. They know our problems, visit us, promote bills and open new schools for us. There's a broad common denominator between us and Religious Zionism: high morals, love of the land, love of the army and the homeland—and we don't have any liberalism, either. The percentage of our enlistment to combat units is as high as in Religious Zionism."
Adding that he intends to run for a spot on the Bayit Yehudi list, Assad explained that the rules were changed to allow such a thing. "Under the previous party constitution, only religious Jews could run. Naftali changed the constitution, which permits seculars and non-Jews to run. Naftali hopes that Bayit Yehudi will be the ruling party, so he decided to add new communities."
Asked if members were required to actually pay their dues, Assad replied, "Everybody pays for himself in this registration drive. Even a father can't pay for his children. The payment is personal."
A senior party official pointed out that the membership dues had nearly doubled since the previous membership drive, which explains the real purpose of the new drive. "There's an attempt here to cover the deficit that the party has run into after wasting money of PR for Naftali," he claimed. "There's not even a website through which you can register. The new registration drive allows groups of power and workers' unions to register themselves in an organized manner so that they can influence the party from the inside. This is also what's happening with the Druze: As with employees of the Israel Electric Corporation or Egged, they also decided to enter the party to influence it from the inside." To what extent the Druze will manage to influence the party, if at all, is not yet known, but if their dues are indeed paid, they'll at least manage to reduce the deficit.
 

Migrant Problems Still Threaten Europe
George Igler/Gatestone Institute/August 20/16

http://eliasbejjaninews.com/2016/08/20/george-iglergatestone-institute-migrant-problems-still-threaten-europe/
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/8668/migrant-problems-europe

In September 2015, a Canadian broadcaster, Ezra Levant, suggested that what Europe was experiencing, was not primarily an influx of "refugees" fleeing conflict, but rather a new Gold Rush, in which young men from the Muslim world were seeking to improve their fortune at Europe's expense.
Rome-based journalist Barbie Latza Nadeu seriously asked whether Italy was "enabling the ISIS invasion of Europe."
Profits in the people-smuggling business often flow to terrorist-backed gangs operating in Italy. The numbers drowning in the Mediterranean continue to mount.
Chaotic scenes have erupted on the coastal Mediterranean frontier between Italy and France. On August 4, for instance, hundreds of migrants, chiefly from Eritrea, Ethiopia and the Sudan sought to storm the crossing in their attempts to make it to Northern Europe.
"Both the Italian and French forces at the border were taken by surprise," remarked Giorgio Marenco, a police commander in Ventimiglia, where tear gas was used to disperse the migrants. Others merely braved the choppy waters of the sea to breach the crossing by swimming towards their goal.
The Italian town contains the last train station in Italy near the border. The besieged terminus lies three miles from the French Riviera. It has been a gathering point for the predominantly Muslim migrants since June 2015. A fractious tent city for migrants has sprung up, mirroring others spread across Italy. The capital of the French holiday district is Nice, which experienced a jihadist massacre on July 14.
Although mercifully free from mass terrorist outrages this year, Italy has already endured several alarming scenes of disorder and protest resulting from the pressure of accepting increasing illegal migrants.
On May 7, violent attempts by "open borders" activists took place, aimed at forcing open the frontier between Italy and Austria. On May 21, various groups in Rome organized mass demonstrations against Italy's "invasion" by migrants. Apparently the prevalence of populist politics in the country has created movements which do not lie within the usual "Left-Right" political spectrum in which analysts usually classify parties.
The chief example is the presence in Italy of the Five Star Movement, founded in 2009 by the comedian Beppo Grillo, and now considered Italy's second largest political force. Having taken a back seat after frequently being condemned for his "Islamophobic" anti-mass immigration rhetoric, Grillo's party nevertheless helped to elect Virginia Raggi, in July, as the new mayor of Rome.
Despite the assurances of Angelino Alfano, the Italian Interior Minister, that Ventimiglia would not turn into "our Calais" -- a reference to migrants amassed at the French channel port who are seeking illegal entry into the United Kingdom -- the challenges faced by Italy lie not merely in numbers.
African migrants camp out on the beach in the northern Italian town of Ventimiglia, along the French border, as they wait for the opportunity to cross into France, in 2015. (Image source: AFP video screenshot)
Italy's terror alert status remains at "Level Two" -- the second highest in its security index. On March 30, the Rome-based journalist, Barbie Latza Nadeu, seriously asked whether the country was "enabling the ISIS invasion of Europe."
After the collapse of Libya -- occasioned in 2011 by military intervention masterminded by then French President Nicolas Sarkozy and then UK Prime Minister David Cameron -- the North African nation has become the gathering point for those on the continent farther south, who possess the will or resources to push into Europe.
Two separate governments are currently attempting to wrest control from each other in Libya, a former colony of Italy, while ISIS forces also maintain their foothold. It is through this seemingly unresolvable ongoing chaos that people-smugglers ply their lucrative trade.
Waves of migrants heading into Europe, primarily through a corridor beginning in Turkey and resulting in short crossings to nearby Greek islands, are still stranded in the so-called Western Balkan route into the continent.
After the widely derided imposition by the Prime Minister of Hungary of a razor-wire border fence on his country's southern frontier, other nations nearby, that were subjected to migrant pressure, soon followed suit.
Remaining conscious of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's analysis, that only half a year's total migrants come to Europe between January and October, with the other half arriving through the remainder of the year, the steady focus in 2016 is likely to be on Europe's "soft underbelly" -- a term Winston Churchill used during the Second World War to refer to the susceptibility of Italy being invaded by sea -- as opposed the susceptibility of the Balkans.
The enthusiasm of the present government of Chancellor Angela Merkel to import Muslims into Germany apparently remains undiminished. As reported by Markus Mahler, a succession of migrant flights into Germany from Turkey are now taking place – in one instance, more than 11 planes landed during the same night at Cologne-Bonn airport – as some analysts predicted last year.
In September 2015, a Canadian lawyer and broadcaster, Ezra Levant, suggested that what Europe was experiencing, was not primarily an influx of "refugees" fleeing conflict, but rather a new Gold Rush, in which young men from the Muslim world were seeking to improve their fortune at Europe's expense.
Sea crossings from Africa into Italy, which initially targeted the small Italian island of Lampedusa, had begun in 1996. Since then, they have magnified in number year on year, considerably aided between 2013-2014 by the Mare Nostrum program of the Italian navy, which picked up stranded vessels and brought their occupants to Italy, rather than returning migrants to their countries of origin. This program was then superseded by Operation Triton, run by the European Union's border agency, Frontex.
It is often simpler for migrant ships to send a distress signal while near Italian coastal waters, as happened in January 2015 with the ship Ezadeen, abandoned by its crew of smugglers, after they set the ship on autopilot pointed towards Italy's southern shore. The ship's 450 migrant passengers were towed to harbor by a Frontex ship from Iceland.
Profits in the people-smuggling business often flow to terrorist-backed gangs operating in Italy. The numbers drowning in the Mediterranean continue to mount.
Successful migrants from Africa usually then traverse Italy, but can remain stranded if their attempts to penetrate further into Europe become frustrated. That situation frequently leads to violence at migrant camps and outrage at local government level as the migrants are then distributed across the country.
Despite the swelling number of illegal sea crossings, there seems little interest in curtailing them by force, given the existence of international refugee conventions and European legislation on human rights, which some migrants appear to be exploiting.
During four days in July alone, 10,000 illegally crossed by sea into Italy. As in 2015, the vast majority looking for "asylum seeker" status in Europe are military-aged Muslim males seeking eventual European citizenship.
Meanwhile, relations between Italians and their existing established Muslim communities seem to be rapidly eroding. The introduction of gay marriage into Italy on June 5, against fierce opposition in the home of the Roman Catholic Church, has had unforeseen consequences.
As a reciprocal gesture in the spirit of "civil rights," Hamza Piccardo, the founder of the Union of Islamic Communities and Organizations in Italy, has demanded the legalization of polygamy.
As the pressures grow on the Euro, the currency which binds 19 European nations together both politically and economically, the long-term future of Italy's banking system has already been called into question.
The picture drawn by the present migration into Europe may fundamentally undermine the "Refugees Welcome" narrative that dominated news reports last year, but the continent-wide economic ramifications of its effects on a country such as Italy, already subject to considerable political tumult, should not be underestimated.
**George Igler, between 2010 and 2016, worked helping persons across Europe who were facing death for criticizing Islam.
© 2016 Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. The articles printed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors or of Gatestone Institute. No part of the Gatestone website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied or modified, without the prior written consent of Gatestone Institute.

Why the Ayatollah Thinks He Won
By Jay Solomon/The Wall Street Journal/August 20/16

http://eliasbejjaninews.com/2016/08/20/44673/
http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-ayatollah-thinks-he-won-1471627970

The U.S. hoped that the nuclear deal would boost Iran’s moderates, but after more than a year, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his allies seem to be the big winners
Since the completion last year of a landmark deal limiting Iran’s nuclear program, the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has lashed out again and again at the U.S. for its supposed failure to live up to its end of the bargain. But a speech he gave on Aug. 1 in Tehran took his anti-American rhetoric to a new level. He accused the Obama administration of a “bullying policy” and of failing to lift sanctions in a way that benefited “the life of the people.” Mr. Khamenei ruled out cooperation with the U.S. in the fight against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, telling his audience that Iran’s experience with the nuclear deal “showed us that we cannot speak to [the Americans] on any matter like a trustworthy party.” Many in the crowd chanted anti-U.S. slogans.
Is Iran preparing to walk away from the accord? It’s unlikely. Mr. Khamenei’s speech was classical political posturing intended to rally his hard-line followers. But more than that, his bluster conceals a deeper strategic calculus. For all his complaints about American treachery, Mr. Khamenei and his allies recognize that the nuclear deal has produced significant benefits for their hobbled theocracy and may serve to further entrench the regime brought to power in the 1979 revolution.
President Barack Obama defined the nuclear deal primarily as an arms-control exercise, designed to constrain Tehran’s nuclear program for at least a decade and to keep the U.S. from becoming embroiled in yet another Middle East war. But the White House and its top diplomats, including Secretary of State John Kerry, also quietly suggested that the agreement might open the door to a broader rapprochement between Tehran and Washington and empower Iran’s moderate political forces, particularly its elected president, Hassan Rouhani.
U.S. officials have always cautioned that it would take time for the salutary effects of engagement with Iran to take effect. They have even conceded that, in the short term, the agreement might energize hard-liners opposed to engagement with the West—and that, indeed, seems to be what is happening.
Since the accord was announced last summer, Mr. Khamenei and his elite military unit, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, have moved to solidify their hold. As international sanctions against Iran have slackened, the ayatollah and his core allies have expanded the Iranian military and pursued new business opportunities for the companies and foundations that finance the regime’s key ideological cadres. Iran has continued to fund and arm its major regional allies, including the Assad regime in Syria, the Lebanese militia Hezbollah and Houthi rebels in Yemen—all of which are at war with America’s regional partners—and the regime has continued to test and develop ballistic missiles. The government has also stepped up arrests of opposition leaders and political activists.
Mr. Khamenei has been deeply involved from the start with his country’s talks with the U.S. After the U.N. Security Council imposed tough sanctions on Iran in 2010, he became alarmed by the drain on Tehran’s finances. In 2012, he backed secret talks in hopes of relieving the crippling financial pressure. A collapse in global oil prices made Iran even more vulnerable. As the talks evolved into public negotiations with the U.S. and its partners, Mr. Khamenei instructed his representatives to ensure that Iran could keep the major infrastructure of its nuclear and military programs.
Today, the 77-year-old ayatollah—who reportedly suffers from cancer—is seeking to cement his legacy and to shape the political transition that will occur once he is gone. The nuclear agreement provides him with the building blocks to do that, and for now, at least, Mr. Khamenei and his allies look to be the deal’s big winners. The next U.S. administration is likely to face an unhappy choice: to continue to work with Iran or to challenge an increasingly entrenched supreme leader and his Revolutionary Guard.
For its part, the Obama administration says that the nuclear deal blocks Iran from all paths to develop an atomic bomb and that the agreement’s success doesn’t depend on political change taking root in Tehran. They note that the deal is still in its early stages and suggest that an opening of Iran’s economy could help reformists over time. They also insist that it has served the cause of peace in the region. “The president and I both had a sense that we were on an automatic pilot toward a potential conflict, because no one wanted to talk to anybody or find out what was possible,” Mr. Kerry said in an interview. “I have no doubt that we avoided a war. None.”
To understand Mr. Khamenei’s perspective on the negotiations and the resulting deal, the best place to start is Iran’s nuclear program. The agreement requires Iran to accept key limitations: Previously, the country had nearly 20,000 centrifuge machines producing nuclear fuel and was on the cusp of possessing weapons-grade uranium. A plutonium-producing reactor was also nearly online.
Today, only 5,000 centrifuges are spinning, the plutonium-making reactor has been made inoperable, and most of Iran’s enriched uranium has been shipped out of the country. Iran also agreed to grant greater access to its nuclear sites to inspectors from the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, to prevent the country from diverting fissile materials to banned military purposes. “There are serious constraints on their nuclear program for 15 years,” Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, an important player in the negotiations, said earlier this year. “Fifteen years, with serious verification measures, should give considerably more comfort to our allies in the region.”
Mr. Khamenei, however, doesn’t appear to share this view of the deal’s constraints. Just as Iran’s negotiators were agreeing to these terms in July 2014, the supreme leader delivered a speech about the nuclear program—without consulting his chief negotiator, Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, according to U.S. and European officials. In the address, Mr. Khamenei said that his oil-rich country needed at least 100,000 centrifuges to power its civilian nuclear program in the coming decades. This was more than 20 times what the Obama administration envisaged. Western diplomats wondered whether Iran’s diplomats really spoke for the supreme leader.
Over the next year, the U.S. and its partners brought the Iranians back down to a capacity of just 5,000 machines. Washington hailed this as a major negotiating victory, but there was a twist: After a decade, the international community would go along with Mr. Khamenei’s vision of an Iran that could develop an industrial-scale, civilian nuclear program without checks on the number or capacity of the centrifuges spinning. The U.S. had won only a short-term pause in the expansion of the Iranian program, and the supreme leader had gained international approval for his longer-term plan.
Indeed, in recent weeks, Iranian officials have talked of their preparations to build 10 new nuclear reactors with Russian help. This will require a steady supply of nuclear fuel from centrifuges that will be allowed to go online in a decade. “The agreement gives us time, provided Iran implements it. But it’s limited,” said Mark Hibbs, a Berlin-based expert on nuclear programs at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The Revolutionary Guard controls the program, and there’s a risk that in 10 or 15 years, they might decide to restart their [weaponization] activities.”
Mr. Khamenei also came away from the talks with much of what he wanted for reviving Iran’s economy—a longstanding anxiety for the regime. Before the nuclear deal, Iran had been on the financial ropes, especially after the Obama administration ratcheted up international sanctions. The deal relieved that pressure.
The U.S.-led international sanctions campaign against Iran raised alarm bells in the supreme leader’s office in 2013, according to Iranian officials. In just over a year, Iran’s oil exports had been cut by more than half, and its banks were almost completely shut off from the international financial system. Iran’s currency, the rial, fell by two-thirds against the dollar, spurring massive inflation and unemployment. This gave the U.S. an opportunity to extract new concessions from Tehran.
The more moderate Mr. Rouhani was elected president that year with a mandate to improve Iran’s economy and ease the sanctions. His aides say that Mr. Rouhani convinced Mr. Khamenei that sanctions posed an existential threat to the government.
Mr. Rouhani got many of the U.S.-imposed penalties lifted under last year’s nuclear agreement. The impact on Iran’s economy has been mixed so far, stoking charges from Iranian leaders that the U.S. hasn’t lived up to its commitments. Iran’s oil exports have largely returned to their pre-2012 levels, and the World Bank projects that Iran will see nearly 5% growth in its gross domestic product next year. But European and Asian banks remain skittish of financing projects in Iran, and the U.S. Treasury Department maintains its ban on dollar transactions with Iran.
This path of modest growth has worked to Mr. Khamenei’s advantage, Iran analysts say. Far from hoping for a flood of foreign investment, the supreme leader has repeatedly warned his people that Western culture and business could undermine the revolution and its values.
Mr. Khamenei says that Iran must remain economically self-sufficient and independent of the West, running a “resistance economy” fueled by domestic production and capacity. “With its calm appearance, and with the soft and glib tongue of its officials, America is damaging us from behind the scenes,” Mr. Khamenei said in his speech earlier this month.
Mr. Khamenei is managing the economy the way that he wants it—with enough money to avoid a financial crisis but not so much that it might threaten his system. The supreme leader’s “system wants technology, and he wants access to imports,” said a political adviser to President Rouhani. “But his ‘resistance economy’ is a way to keep the West out of Iran.”
In an apparent effort to ward off foreign influence, the Revolutionary Guard has stepped up arrests of dual nationals from the U.S., Europe and Canada over the past year. One of the detained Americans, Siamak Namazi, is an oil-industry executive who has written and spoken about the need for Iran to embrace economic and political reforms. Friends and family of Mr. Namazi say that his arrest was a warning to Iranian expatriates not to return home to pursue business dealings. Many Iranian-Americans have heeded the message. The economy is now dominated by the Revolutionary Guard, which controls many of Iran’s largest companies.
As for conventional military capabilities, the deal didn’t do much to curtail Iran’s ambitions. The supreme leader demanded a provision weakening a U.N. Security Council resolution that prohibits Tehran’s ballistic-missile development—and got it. He wanted the U.N. embargo lifted on Iran’s ability to buy or export conventional arms—and got it, in five years. He wanted to retain Iran’s ability to export arms—and the deal does nothing to interfere with that.
“Ayatollah Khamenei has emerged as the single most powerful man in the Middle East,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert and senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. “It will take years to assess the full impact of the nuclear deal on the Middle East and in Iran internally, but the hope that the deal would weaken Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards so far hasn’t been borne out.”
Finally, the nuclear deal also seems to have boosted Mr. Khamenei’s ability to influence the region. In the ornate former palaces and six-star hotels where the nuclear talks took place in Austria and Switzerland last year, U.S. and European officials talked optimistically about using the deal to stabilize a roiling Middle East. They hoped that Iran, the region’s great Shiite power, might play a constructive role in ending conflicts in Yemen, Iraq and, above all, Syria.
It hasn’t worked out that way. Even as the talks continued, Mr. Khamenei and his generals were plotting a much broader military campaign in Syria in partnership with Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to European, Arab and Iranian officials. Starting in January 2015, the supreme leader’s top aides began a series of visits to the Kremlin to chart out a plan to bolster the embattled regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
The result was a highly coordinated operation in Syria that began just weeks after the nuclear deal was completed. Mr. Putin’s air force has pounded Syrian rebels, bombing not just Sunni jihadists associated with Islamic State or al Qaeda but also U.S.-backed fighters. At the same time, Mr. Khamenei’s Revolutionary Guard mobilized thousands of soldiers and Shiite militiamen to launch a ground offensive, with Iranian troops fighting alongside militants from Hezbollah and other Shiite militias. The joint Iranian-Russian operation drove back Syrian rebels who had been advancing on the Assad regime’s stronghold on the Mediterranean coast, according to Arab and U.S. officials, and allowed the minority regime to retake large swaths of territory. The Kremlin announced this week that it has started launching airstrikes in Syria from Iranian territory.
Mr. Khamenei has sworn off any collaboration with the U.S. in the Middle East, even against shared regional enemies like Islamic State. Instead, he has continued Iran’s campaign to control the oil-rich Persian Gulf and weaken the influence of the U.S., Israel and its Sunni Arab allies across the region. U.S. military commanders say that they have seen no tapering off of Revolutionary Guard support for its allies in Yemen, Iraq or the Palestinian territories.
Mr. Khamenei cannot know how the U.S. will respond to his uncompromising stance, especially with a new administration soon to take office. But he may figure that he wins either way. If the deal falls apart, he could call it proof that the Americans never could be trusted and figure that another round of biting U.N. sanctions will prove too difficult to assemble. If the deal survives, he will have his military continue to develop missiles and conventional arms to position Iran to become a latent nuclear weapons power in 10 years.
Either way, it is Mr. Khamenei, not his more moderate rivals, who are acting as if they have been strengthened by the nuclear deal. “Our problems with American and the likes of America…on regional matters and on various other matters are not solved through negotiations,” Mr. Khamenei said in his Aug. 1 speech. “We ourselves should choose a path and then take it. You should make the enemy…run after you.”
Mr. Solomon is chief foreign affairs correspondent for the Journal. His new book, “The Iran Wars: Spy Games, Bank Battles, and the Secret Deals That Reshaped the Middle East,” will be published next week by Random House.

Islam and Nazism: What Are the Connections
Paul Eidelberg and Will Morrisey/Irapundit/The Israel-America Renaissance Institute/August 20/16
http://www.israpundit.org/archives/63617026?utm_source=phplist2930&utm_medium=email&utm_content=HTML&utm_campaign=ISRAPUNDIT+DAILY+DIGEST+AUG+19%2F16
Winston Churchill defined Mein Kampf as “the new Qur’an of faith and war.” Consistent therewith, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the notorious former Mufti of Jerusalem, declared, “There is a definite similarity between the principles of Islam and the principles of Nazism.”
Although Hitler and Muhammad shared an enthusiasm for military adventurism and a hatred of Jews, still, their world views would seem to be diametrically opposed. Let us see.
Hitler grounds his Jew-hatred in racism as well as atheism. His Jew-hatred flows from the sewers of nineteenth-century ‘race theory.’ Its calculated blasphemy, its materialism (despite Hitler’s self-described ‘idealism’), and most obviously its idolatry of a ‘master race,’ ought to offend, and deeply offend, any serious student of the Qur’an. Islam calls for the conversion of all ‘races’ to Islam, and it does much more than merely call for such conversion – it conquers for it. Moreover, the insistent legalism of Islam sets strict limits on any would-be tyrant. To be sure, Islam is ‘totalistic,’ as are most religions. Islam seeks to explain and to regulate all of human life. This suggests that Islam is ‘totalitarian.’ Various scholars, Bernard Lewis and Daniel Pipes among them, deny this.[1]
One may indeed conclude that Islam is not ‘totalitarian’ in the modern sense, since modern totalitarianism involves the all-encompassing power of the state and the exaltation of its leader. Hence it can be said that might does not make right for the Muslim, as it does for the Nazi, the Communist, or the Fascist. Besides, is it not obvious that for the Muslim God rules, not Hitler or Stalin? It may well be, however, that we are here dealing with half-truths which obscure Islam’s linkage to Nazism.
What links Islam to Nazism is the ethos of jihad. For both Islam and Nazism war is not merely a means to an end: mere conquest. War for both is a moral imperative: for the Nazi, to purge the world of racial impurity, for the Muslim, to purge the world of religious impurity. Both have or require an enemy: for the Muslim the ‘infidel,’ for the Nazi the ‘Jew,’ Accordingly, both Islam and Nazism aim at purifying i.e. conquering the world, and there is no limit to the violence that may be used to achieve that aim. The genocide perpetrated by Muslims against the Armenians preceded the genocide the Nazis perpetrated against the Jews.
The Nazis regarded the Jews as a virus infecting mankind, something that had to be exterminated. Although Muslims reject this racism – for a Jew could convert to Islam – slam’s contempt for non-believers has much in common with the Nazi’s contempt for non-Aryans, Jews in particular. As in Nazism, Islam has never respected the sanctity of human life; it has always regarded infidels, Jews or Christians, as devoid of human rights—as subhuman. Bat Ye’or has documented fourteen centuries of dhimmitude – the degradation and dehumanization of countless Jews and Christians.[2] Dhimmitude is inherent in the ethos of jihad – the most distinctive principle of Islam.
Also inherent in the ethos of jihad, but which has no parallel in Nazism, is the will to martyrdom. The most horrific manifestation of this jihad ethos is the homicide-suicide bomber. Islam may forbid what may be termed ‘personal’ suicide but not in the ethos of holy war. That Arab parents can exult in their children being sacrificed as human bombs is of course mind-boggling. This pagan-like phenomenon indicates that the sanctity of human life is not a normative Islamic doctrine. Indeed, on page after page of the Qur’an¸ unbelievers are consigned to Hell—Islam’s crematoria.
If the will to martyrdom is construed in terms of sacrificing the individual for the sake of the community, then Islam converges with Nazism. While Muslims exalt the umma, the Islamic nation, Nazis exalt the volk, the Aryan race. Lost in both is the dignity of the individual.
In Jewish law the individual stands on a par with the community, and such is his infinite worth or dignity that he cannot rightly be sacrificed for the sake of his community. (That Nazism regards Jews as ‘selfish’ should be understood in this light.) The dignity of the individual has no other rational source than the Torah’s conception of man’s creation in the image of God. Adam is an individual. It follows, given Islam’s subordination of the individual to the collective, that Islam, like Nazism, rejects the God of the Bible! The same God also creates diverse nations, which attests to His infinite creativity. Both Islam and Nazism reject the existence of diverse nations. Both would impose on mankind a stultifying uniformity.
The contrast with Judaism could hardly be more striking. Aside from the Seven Noahide Laws of Universal Morality, Judaism insists on differentiation and individuation. One nation should not impose order on others by erasing their salutary national differences. Diversity in unity, reflected in the twelve distinctive tribes of Israel, is a basic Torah principle.[3]
Militant nations cannot tolerate much diversity, especially where the militancy is animated by a creed or ideology as in Islam and Nazism. In the case of Islam, its extraordinary military success and global expansion during the first hundred years of its inception was perceived by Muslims as ‘proof’ of Islam’s validity and superiority. Might did indeed make right, in Islamic history. In fact, according to Islamic doctrine, the mere seizure of state power gives religious authority to its leader even if he is not a devout Muslim.
The ethos of jihad has an ethics which is quite pragmatic, as one may expect from a militaristic religion. One might go so far as to say that Nazi militarism is jihad secularized—jihad without religious pretensions and obfuscations. Although literary Islam and Nazism have profound differences, these are of little significance to the victims of these militant doctrines. The one reduces human beings to dhimmis, the other to slaves. Militarism in a religious as well as in an atheistic creed means expansionism, murder, and degradation.
In Islam, as well as in Christianity, belief in its founder is part of the creed. The Jews have suffered the consequences of rejecting both. Many if not most Christians have forgiven the Jews for their stubborn adherence to Judaism, a religion that does not proselytize and that seeks not external glory but internal perfection. The Jewish rejection of Muhammad always rankled Muslims and aroused their hatred. But with the progress of Zionism, the Balfour Declaration, and especially with the rebirth of Israel, fear began to take hold of Muslim clerics and rulers. So long as Jews were dhimmis, Muslims did not feel threatened theologically or politically. This is no longer the case, which is why Muslim leaders throughout the world have held conferences to confront the ‘Jewish and Zionist menace’ and have issued papers which could have been written by Nazis.
Consider, for example, a 1968 international conference of Arab theologians held at Cairo’s Al Azhar University—Islam’s most authoritative university.
The mufti of Lebanon referred to the Jews as the “dogs of humanity.” They do not even constitute a true people or nation. Their evilness has been transmitted throughout their history by means of their cultural inheritance. By their behavior, the Jews have called forth the hatred and persecution of all the peoples with whom they have come into contact. They deserve their fate. As for the State of Israel, it is the culmination of the historical and cultural depravity of the Jews. It must be destroyed, having been established through aggression which is its congenital and immutable nature. This must be achieved by jihad.[4]
The participants at this conference make no distinction between Judaism and Zionism. Their virulent statements against Jews and the State of Israel point to nothing less than genocide and politicide.
For decades Muslim anti-Semitism, worldwide, has outpaced those of the neo-Nazis; “what was historically a Christian phenomenon”—largely transcended—“is now primarily a Muslim phenomenon.”[5] “The mounting scale and sheer extent of this vehemently anti-Semitic literature and commentary in the newspapers, journals, magazines, radio, television, and in the everyday life of the Middle East [is indescribable] …”[6] Not only is Mein Kampf a fast-selling title in the region, but even in Egypt, which has a peace treaty with Israel, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion has reappeared on a forty-one part Egyptian television program and in recycled form in Arab print media. And this is actually one of the least toxic of such excrescences. Palestinian Authority TV had this to say about Jews and Judaism: “Their Torah today is just a collection of writings in which those people wrote lies about God, His prophets and His teachings …To their prophets they attribute the greatest crimes: murder, prostitution, and drunkenness. The Jews do not believe in God …” Meanwhile, in countless mosques Muslims are poisoned by recent Islamic sermons denigrating Jews:[7]
“Their tongues never cease lying, [disseminating] abomination and obscenity.… The Jews preached permissiveness and corruption, as they hid behind false slogans like freedom and equality, humanism and brotherhood. They kill Muslim youth, entice the [Muslim] woman with shameful deeds, and act to lure others through her. They defile the minds of adolescents by arousing their urges. They are envious of the Muslim woman who conceals herself and protects her honor; for this reason, they preach to her to expose herself and throw off her values. Their goal is to destroy the Muslim family, to shatter religious and social ties and foundations. They are cowards in battle. They flee from death and fear fighting. They love life.”
“Read history and you will understand that the Jews of yesterday are the evil forefathers of the even more evil Jews of today: infidels, falsifiers of words, calf worshippers, prophet murderers, deniers of prophecies. The scum of the human race, accursed by Allah, who turned them into apes and pigs. These are the Jews—an ongoing continuum of deceit, obstinacy, licentiousness, evil, and corruption.” “The Jews are miserly and enslaved by money.… Most of the world’s wars, particularly the great modern wars, were planned and started by the Jews so as to disseminate corruption in the land, and to achieve their goals on the ruins of the human race.”
“The Jews are defiled creatures and satanic scum…. The Jews are the cause of the misery of the human race …. The Jews are our enemies and hatred of them is in our hearts. Jihad against them is our worship.”
Der Sturmer is tame compared to the anti-Semitic cartoons of the Arab world.[8] Such is their hatred and loathing that Arabs depicts Jews as snakes, dogs, spiders, rats, and locusts.
A chilling example of what this zoomorphism signifies may be gleaned from the Syrian celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. In that ceremony, “Syrian militia trainees [male and female] put on a show for Syrian president Hafez Assad. Martial music reached a crescendo as Syrian teenage girls suddenly bit into live snakes [some four or five feet long], repeatedly tearing off flesh and spitting it out as blood ran down their chins. As Assad applauded, the girls then attached the snakes to sticks and grilled them over fire, eating them triumphantly. Others [militiamen] then proceeded to strangle puppies and drink their blood.”[9]
Bearing also in mind that the Syrians exterminated some 18,000 Sunni residents of the city of Hama in 1982 with cyanide—to speak of Arab Nazis is not to succumb to hyperbole.
Some scholars may contend that what has here been imputed to Islam should in truth be imputed to “Islamism.” They allege that Islamism, as distinct from Islam, twists Qur’anic teachings to un-Qur’anic uses. The candid scholar will admit that the Qur’an lends itself to such twists, and much more clearly so viewed from the Sharia, Islamic law. Robert Westrich lists Qur’anic verses condemning a variety of vices imputed to certain Jews, including falsehood, distortion, cowardice, greed, corruption of Scripture.[10] But the fact that the Qur’an condemns these vices does not preclude those influenced by the Qur’an from attributing such vices to the Jews—the more readily so given the Qur’an’s unrelenting degradation of non-believers. This degradation was canonized by the Umariyah—the legal code of the seventh-century Caliph Umar—which established dhimmitude. That dhimmitude was also construed as an act of charity or patronage hardly minimizes its dehumanization of Jews and Christians under Muslim rule. Indeed, as Bat Ye’or has shown, the condition of the dhimmi was in certain respects inferior to that of a slave.[11]
Still, while admitting that Jew-hatred is inherent in Islam, why has it metamorphosed into the Nazi-like anti-Semitic race-baiting that now inundates the Muslim world?
A historical account might begin with the turn of the last century. “[I]t was not until around 1900, with the growing influence of Europeans in the Middle East, and with the active dissemination of anti-Semitism by European colonists, that extreme anti-Semitism”—as a racial doctrine—“began to spread both among Arab Christians and among Muslims.”[12] The English themselves installed the notorious anti-Semite, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.[13] Much of the Mufti’s early material derived from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a document that focuses not on racial categories but on the charge that Jews are Satanists associated with democracy, capitalism, and socialism.
For the true racist anti-Semitism we must look at the inroads Nazis made in the Middle East before and during the Second World War, when they exploited the sentiments of Arab populations eager to throw off British and French imperialism. This story is well known, as is the collaboration of the Mufti of Jerusalem in deepening those inroads. Sayyid Qutb, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and his secularist enemy, Egyptian President Nasser, both continued anti-Semitic propaganda after the war, combining the Protocols’ ‘Satanism’ charge with ‘race theory.’[14] In one of those spectacular reversals seen only in the nightmare land of propaganda, where the principle of non-contradiction may be suspended so long as the purpose is sufficiently malicious, some Arabs began to charge Israel with Nazi-like racism, as the first chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Ahmad Shukeiry, was wont to do.[15] And to bring things full circle, Yasser Arafat referred to the Grand Mufti as “our hero,” claiming to have been “one of his troops” in the 1948 war.[16]
But the mere introduction of an ideology does not explain its currency. Only its political utility does. The political utility of Nazi race propaganda to Arabs in the Middle East in the 1930s and 1940s served as a foil against the capitalist and democratic regimes that dominated the region. And although those regimes have receded, the commercial regimes of Israel and the United States, demonized as the smaller and greater Satins, respectively, have taken their place as useful targets for Muslim political elites in the region. It is one thing to cite religio-cultural and ideological reasons for any prevalent mindset in a given part of the world. Ideas do matter, and they do have consequences.[17] But those consequences will be slight so long as they serve no political regime, real or intended. It is the political regime—the institutional structure and the persons who frame and use that structure—that influences, if it does not wholly determine, the character of the intellectual life, the moral atmosphere, of any human society.
Barry Rubin has correctly observed that “The Middle East is the only region in the world where the modern type of society most influenced by the West has not yet been accepted.”[18] The modern type of society, as Alexis de Tocqueville saw in the 1830s, is democracy. By democracy Tocqueville did not mean simply a government characterized by equal rights, personal and civil liberty, the rule of law. Democratic society might have none of those things. Tocqueville understood modern democracy to mean social egalitarianism, seen primarily in the decline of the titled aristocracies throughout Europe, and, eventually, throughout the world. Democracy was first of all a social phenomenon, the rise of the middle class, and not for some Marxian reason of ‘historical inevitability,’ but because human nature itself was emerging as men sought to enlist more and more of their fellows in ambitious projects to conquer physical nature.
The political implications of this social phenomenon were two: modern, egalitarian societies might go the way of the United States, the way of representative government or commercial republicanism; alternatively, these societies might go the way of Russia, the despotism of the rule of one man, who enforces equal subordination or dhimmitude upon all, except his small circle of courtiers.[19] Tocqueville writes:
The American struggles against the obstacles that nature opposes to him; the Russian grapples with men. The one combats the wilderness and barbarism, the other, civilization vested with all its arms: thus the conquests of the American are made with the plowshare of the laborer, those of Russian, with the sword of the soldier.
To attain his goal, the first relies on personal interest and allows the force and the reason of individuals to act, without directing them. The second in a way concentrates all the power of society in one man. The one has freedom for his principal means of action; the other servitude.
Their point of departure is different, their ways are diverse; nonetheless, each of them seems called by a secret design of Providence to hold the destinies of half the world in its hands one day.[20]
Tocqueville’s prediction of the bipolar world of the Cold War astonishes his new readers to this day. But the prediction follows logically from his insight into the democratic character of modern society. The United States and Russia were in fact the two most conspicuous examples of the two roads modernity could take. This was obscured for a long time by the rise of Germany, but Germany represents exactly the same thing. Where, except in a society that has failed to manage the transition from the old aristocratic order to the new – where, except in an egalitarian society could a ranting guttersnipe like Hitler cunningly boost himself not only as the champion of lost aristocratic glory, but also of the long-suffering workers and soldiers? Modernity, with its social egalitarianism and its technologically-fueled drive to master nature, puts enormous power in the hands of the masses and those who rule, and are ruled by, the masses. It makes a very great difference which political regime wins the struggle between ‘America’ and ‘Russia.’
Turning to the Middle East, if distinctions are to be made between Islam and Islamism, two are in order. First and foremost, Islamism is a rejection of Arab nationalism and, in this respect, a return to classical Islam. However, Islamists have been influenced by modernism, which makes the return to classical Islam impossible. Second, Islamism has adopted the anti-Semitic racism of Nazism [which is not to say that classical Islam is not politically racist]….
It is easy to see exactly where Israel stands with respect both to Arab nationalism and Islamism. Arab nationalism was always an instrument of state-builders, just as nationalism had been in Europe. It opposes the imperial state (except when a given nation-state decides to take on an empire), but loyally serves whatever state the state-builders envision. What were Nasser and Saddam Hussein if not nationalism-mongering state-builders (with vain imperial ambitions)? And what are the Islamists, but Muslims who seek to seize control of the apparatus of the modern state, which they nonetheless reject as fragmenting the umma?[21]
To [Muslims-cum-Islamists], the Oslo ‘peace process’ seemed profoundly threatening. Such a peace could result in one of two outcomes, equally disgusting. The peace might be part of a ‘salami-tactic,’ wherein Arab secular nation-states set Israel up for the kill. This would only enhance the authority of such secularists. Alternatively, if the peace process resulted in real peace, Israel would survive and thrive, its commercial republicanism infecting Muslim souls with the insidious temptations of prosperity and tolerance….
Commercial republicanism would spell death to Islam, and must be stopped. Symbolically and physically, Israel, for all its socialist trimmings remains the sole commercial republic in the Middle East. After the repeated failures of (Arab) nationalist states to eradicate Israel, and especially after Israel acquired submarine-launched nuclear missiles, Muslims needed a new war strategy. Terrorism was an obvious choice, whether by proxy the Arab states, or by Muslims who have controlled only one state, Iran, for an extended period.
Conversely, and increasingly, terrorist organizations have operated independently of states, with funding from individuals, fronts, legitimate and illegitimate businesses, sympathetic bankers, and charities.
Another technique of conquest is immigration, a technique of traditional Islam as well. Europe has been a major target, and the political effects of that targeting have been seen in the reluctance of Europe to intervene forcefully in the region. In the United States, Daniel Pipes reports, every leading Islamic group has links with Islamist terrorist groups, as do eighty percent of the mosques; half-a-dozen terrorist acts in New York City in the 1990s arose out of such links, as of course did the attacks of September 11. Even the racist demi-Islamist Nation of Islam, under its demagogic leader Louis Farrakhan, has introduced the inane charge that Jews, not Muslims, ran the African slave trade.[22]
The core institution transformed by this strategy was the Islamic madrasa. “Westernized and usually affluent Muslims lack an interest in religious matters, but religious scholars, marginalized by modernization, seek to assert their own relevance by insisting on orthodoxy.”[23] The madrasas reach out to the most democratic of the democrats: the impoverished Muslim masses. The Shi`ite Muslims of Iran and the Sunni Muslims of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and elsewhere attempted to outbid one another in funding madrasas run by mullahs.[24] These institutions are ideological breeding-grounds for worldwide terrorism as well as for propagating worldwide anti-Semitism.
The only way to overcome this worldwide terrorism and anti-Semitism is to change the theo-political regimes that now rule the Islamic world. These regimes are highly unlikely to change (except for the worse) by means of internal forces – ‘inside-out.’ Only a comprehensive geopolitical strategy will transform those regimes, ‘outside-in.’?
*Slightly abbreviated version of our 2003 article published by the Ariel Center for Policy Research, Israel.
Notes
[1] See Bernard Lewis, The Political Language of Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 31; Daniel Pipes,Militant Islam Reaches America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002), pp. 39-40, who distinguishes between Islam and Islamism and regards the latter as totalitarian [which suggests that Islam is not totalitarian!
[2] Bat Yo’er, Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations and Collide (Fairleigh Dickenson University Press, 2002), pp. 85, 87.
[3] See Bezalel Naor (ed.), Of Societies Perfect and Imperfect: Selected Readings from Eyn Ayah Rav Kook’s Commentary to Eyn Yaakov Legends of the Talmud (New York: Sepher-Hermon Press, 1995), pp. 7-10.
[4] D.H. Green (ed.), Arab Theologians on Jews and Israel (Geneva, 1976), p. 8.
[5] Daniel Pipes: “American Muslims vs. American Jews.” Commentary, May 1999.
[6] Robert Westrich, “Muslim Anti-Semitism: A Clear and Present Danger,” The American Jewish Committee, 2002. See also the numerous examples of virulently anti-Jewish sermons culled by researchers in the FBIS Report: “Destroy the Jews, Americans: Friday Sermons Slam U.S.-Israeli Plans Against Iraq, Arab Nation, January 24, 2003.
[7] See IMRA – Independent Media Review and Analysis, Website: www.imra.org.il.
[8] For an extensive collection of these cartoons accompanied by penetrating political analysis, see Arieh Stav, Peace: The Arabian Caricature, A Study of Anti-Semitic Imagery (New York: Gefen, 1999).
[9] Jerusalem Post Magazine, October 21, 1983.
[10] See Westrich, op.cit.
[11] See Bat Yo’er, op. cit., p. 89.
[12] Richard Webster: “Israel, Palestine and the Tiger of Terrorism: Anti-Semitism and History.” The New Statesman, November 29, 2002.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid. Webster—himself an anti-Zionist and a sharp critic of American foreign policy, remarks the recent forty-one part series on the Protocols on Egyptian television, and recalls how King Feisal of Saudi Arabia would present copies of the Protocols to visiting diplomats, including, on one memorable occasion, Henry Kissinger.
[15] See Robert Westrich: Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991), p. 247. The ‘logic’ goes something like this: Hitler was right to attempt to destroy the Jews; the Holocaust, however, never happened, although it should have; the Jews have killed Muslims/Arabs; ergo, the Jews are the real Nazis. (The conclusion, we suppose, is that the Jews have killed the wrong people, and should finish the job Hitler attempted by killing themselves). See Westrich 2002, op. cit.
[16] Joseph Farah: “Arafat the Nazi.” WorldNetDaily.com, August 14, 2002. Egypt was the home of the Grand Mufti until his death in 1974, as well as the homeland of Arafat.
[17] Richard Weaver: Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
[18] Barry Rubin: The Tragedy of the Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 61.
[19]] Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
[20] Ibid. p.p. 395-396.
[21] The locus classicus of this view is Sayyid Qutb’s Milestones. The book is widely distributed in the Arab world, and is easily available on the Internet. For an excellent commentary see Zeidan, op. cit. It might also be noted that the attempt by many Islamists to dominate existing state apparatuses by infiltration is right out of the playbook of the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci. It is fair to say that Islamists have learned from radical modern thinkers ‘right’ and `left.’ Indeed, Arafat (to give only the most prominent example, aligned himself with the Soviet bloc throughout the Cold War, styling himself along the lines of a Mediterranean Castro.
[22] Daniel Pipes, “American Muslims vs. American Jews.” Commentary, May 1999.
[23] Husain Haqqani: “Islam’s Medieval Outposts,” Foreign Policy, November/December 2002.
[24] Ibid.