Mideast Dispatch Archive: October 2014 Archives

BDS activists put severed pig’s head in Kosher section (& Iran hangs rape victim)

October 26, 2014

(One of the severed pig’s heads placed by anti-Israel activists in the kosher food section of a Woolworths store)

You can see these and other items that are not in these dispatches if you “like” this page: www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia.

CONTENTS

1. Anti-Israel activists in South Africa place severed pig’s head near Jewish products
2. Iran hangs woman, ignoring widespread calls for clemency
3. Cartoon: Iran continues to claim that Israel and the U.S. are behind ISIS
4. India spurns U.S. offer and purchases guided missiles from Israel for $525m
5. China’s submarines ‘add nuclear-strike capability’
6. John Kerry’s wife’s foundation criticized for funding “Anti-Israel” cafe
7. French Jewish leader indicted for calling Dieudonne an anti-Semite
8. “Horror before the beheadings: What Isis hostages endured”
9. Victims of Isis: non-western journalists who don’t make the headlines
10. AP criticized for headline over murder of 3-month-old baby

[Notes below by Tom Gross]

ANTI-ISRAEL ACTIVISTS IN SOUTH AFRICA PLACE SEVERED PIG’S HEAD NEAR JEWISH PRODUCTS

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign – some of whose proponents openly call for the destruction of Israel – has again become embroiled in accusations of outright anti-Semitic hatred against Jews, after its supporters in South Africa placed a pig’s head in the Kosher food section of the Cape Town branch of the Woolworths shopping chain.

Jewish leaders in South Africa expressed dismay that the Congress of South African Students, which is a part of the ruling African National Congress, said they helped organize the placement of the pig’s head, claiming they ware doing so “in solidarity with the Palestinians”.

Woolworths director of operations Paula Disberry said: “Placing a pig’s head in our store is unacceptable and offensive to our employees and customers, including Jewish and Muslim employees and customers. We will consider our options to prevent such distasteful protests in our stores.”

IRAN HANGS WOMAN, IGNORING WIDESPREAD CALLS FOR CLEMENCY

Iran yesterday executed 26-year-old Reyhaneh Jabbari despite international pleas for her release. The official IRNA news agency said she was hanged at dawn on Saturday.

Jabbari, an interior designer, was executed for stabbing Morteza Abdolali Sarbandi, in what Amnesty International described as an act of self-defense as he was trying to sexually assault and possibly rape her.

Iranian actors and other prominent figures in and outside Iran had appealed for a stay of execution.

The UN says more than 250 people have been executed in Iran so far this year. As I have noted in past dispatches, the number of people executed in Iran has sharply increased under the “moderate” President Rouhani compared to his Holocaust-denying predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The New York Times international edition continues to provide a regular platform to Roger Cohen (one of the most anti-Israeli of the former foreign editors of the New York Times) to write columns about how the Iranian regime is misunderstood and the West should be drawing closer to it. Cohen is a subscriber to this email list.

Feminists, such as Naomi Wolf (who last week again compared Israel to Nazi Germany), don’t appear to have much to say about Jabbari’s case.

* A reader writes: No doubt the New York Met is planning an opera praising and “understanding” the man who tried to rape her, as well as the hangman who pulled the noose yesterday.

CARTOON: IRAN CONTINUES TO CLAIM THAT ISRAEL AND THE U.S. ARE BEHIND ISIS

Following up on: Iran: CIA, MI6 and Mossad “created ISIS” (& Inside Assad’s torture chambers)

Some in Iran continue to claim that Israel and the U.S. are behind the Islamic State.

Here is an English language cartoon doing the rounds in pro-government Iranian media circles:

INDIA SPURNS U.S. OFFER AND PURCHASES GUIDED MISSILES FROM ISRAEL FOR $525M

Reuters New Delhi bureau reported yesterday that “India has opted to buy Israel’s Spike anti-tank guided missile, a defense ministry source said on Saturday, rejecting a rival US offer of Javelin missiles that Washington had lobbied hard to win.”

“India will buy at least 8,000 Spike missiles and more than 300 launchers in a deal worth 32bn rupees ($525m), the source said after a meeting of India’s Defense Acquisition Council.”

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi ignored intense lobbying by the U.S. including by defense secretary Chuck Hagel during Modi’s visit to Washington last month. He chose a system produced by Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, rather than those by American groups Lockheed Martin Corp and Raytheon Co.

India is the world’s largest arms buyer. It is attempting to close the gap on its strategic rival China, which spends three times as much a year on defense. Analysts point out that China has territorial claims on India just like it does on many of its other neighbors.

***

There have been many previous dispatches on this list drawing attention to Indian-Israeli relations, the most recent being Note 9 here:

BBC presenter mimics Israeli spokesperson (& Mossad reaches out to new candidates)

CHINA’S SUBMARINES ‘ADD NUCLEAR-STRIKE CAPABILITY’

Quoting unnamed intelligence sources, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that China now has nuclear-powered submarine capability and that Chinese submarines have recently surfaced as far away as off the Sri Lankan coast and the Persian Gulf.

The Journal writes: “The message was clear: China had fulfilled its four-decade quest to join the elite club of countries with nuclear subs that can ply the high seas.”

Tom Gross adds: Israel is believed to belong to that unique club. But unlike China, which has plenty of territory, the terroritory of Israel is so small, that it feels it needs its enemies to know that is has second strike capabilities so even were the whole of Israel to be wiped out, it could respond – the idea being to deter would be attackers from doing so.

Analysts say China’s nuclear attack subs are part of an emerging strategy to prevent the U.S. from intervening in potential conflicts over Taiwan, or with Japan and the Philippines – both U.S. allies locked in territorial disputes with Beijing.

China has used diesel subs since the 1950s, but they have proved easy to find because they must surface every few hours. Nuclear subs are faster and can stay submerged for months. China launched its first nuclear sub on Mao’s birthday in 1970 and test-fired its first missile from underwater in 1988, but until recently were not able to patrol carrying battle-ready nuclear missiles.

The U.S. reportedly has at least 55 nuclear attack subs.

***

You may wish to read this article of mine concerning Israel’s non-nuclear armed subs.

JOHN KERRY’S WIFE’S FOUNDATION CRITICIZED FOR FUNDING “ANTI-ISRAEL” CAFE

A foundation, which is chaired by Secretary of State John Kerry’s wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, is being criticized for funding what is being descried as “a radical anti-Israel, anti-American snack bar near the Carnegie Mellon and University of Pittsburgh campuses.”

The “Conflict Kitchen” restaurant received a $50,000 grant from the Heinz Endowment in April.

It has now begun serving sandwiches in wrappers that include quotes from Palestinians opposing the existence of Israel and others appearing to sympathize with violent attacks on Israeli civilians.

A spokesman for Heinz said in response to the furor, “The opinions of Conflict Kitchen do not represent those of the Heinz Endowment.”

Conflict Kitchen is run by art professor Jon Rubin and his former student Dawn Weleski.

Here is some info from the restaurant website:

http://conflictkitchen.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Palestine_wrapper_final.pdf

“Conflict Kitchen also serves foods from Afghanistan, North Korea, Cuba, Iran and Venezuela.

Among its other funders are the Benter Foundation, which is one of the biggest funders of the left-wing American lobby group J Street.

FRENCH JEWISH LEADER INDICTED FOR CALLING DIEUDONNE AN ANTI-SEMITE

Roger Cukierman, a Holocaust survivor and president of France’s largest Jewish group, the CRIF, has reportedly been indicted for denouncing the “comedian” Dieudonne M’bala M’bala as a “professional anti-Semite.”

This is despite the fact that Dieudonne, who created the neo-Nazi “quenelle” gesture and has repeatedly poured scorn on Holocaust victims, has been convicted in France on ten occasions for inciting anti-Semitism and for Holocaust denial.

Dieudonne has a large following: his fans have even travelled as far as Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial to photograph themselves making the “quenelle” salute.

Dieudonne’s latest comedy show is called “The Anti-Semite.” He has also recently started making jokes about Ilan Halimi, the young Parisian Jewish phone salesman who was kidnapped, tortured and murdered by a group of self-confessed anti-Semites. (You may wish to read my article on Halimi in the National Post.)

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls has denounced the “quenelle,” saying that “all those who perform it … are performing an anti-Semitic gesture.”

Indictments are “quasi-automatic” in France when police receive complaints of defamation, according to L’Express.

Dieudonne and the far-right Holocaust denier Alain Soral last week announced they were going to form a political party. Record numbers of French Jews are emigrating to Israel and some to Canada and the U.S.) following a wave of anti-Semitic attacks.

In a video posted on the CRIF website Cukierman said: “So I am being indicted for having stated on Europe 1 that Dieudonne is a professional anti-Semite. Isn’t that funny? For once, Dieudonne is actually comical.”

Cukierman survived the Holocaust at the age of nine, hidden in a convent by two nuns, while his entire family was gassed in Auschwitz.

***

Paris-based writer Nidra Poller adds for readers of these dispatches: The English language media sometimes mistranslates these matters. Cukierman may be “mise en examen.” It’s a subtle difference, but it’s a difference. It’s closer to being “sued” than being “indicted.” Dieudonne accuses him, and the court agrees to hear the case. The chance that Cukierman will lose this case are minimal.

“HORROR BEFORE THE BEHEADINGS: WHAT ISIS HOSTAGES ENDURED”

The New York Times runs an important story today on Page 1 of its Sunday print edition. In a promotional email the Times stated:

When James Foley was forced to his knees on a bald hill somewhere in Syria and executed on camera, it was a very public end to a hidden ordeal.

The story of what happened in an underground ISIS prison in Syria, which is now being told for the first time, is one of excruciating suffering. Mr. Foley was one of at least 23 Western hostages from 12 countries who were routinely beaten and subjected to waterboarding. They were starved and threatened with execution by one group of fighters, only to be handed off to members of another group who brought them chocolates and spoke as if they were contemplating freeing them. In their darkest hours, the hostages turned on one another. And they sought comfort in the faith of their kidnappers — embracing Islam and taking Muslim names.

The fates of the 23 diverged once their captors decided to trade them for ransom. Mr. Foley and his American and British cellmates watched as, one by one, 15 of their cellmates, all but one of them European, were freed for cash while they remained chained inside.

Their struggle for survival was pieced together through interviews with former hostages, locals who witnessed their treatment, family members and colleagues of the captives, and a tight circle of advisers who made trips to the region to try to win their release. Crucial details were confirmed by a former member of the Islamic State — the militant Sunni group also known as ISIS — who was initially stationed in the prison where Mr. Foley was held, and who provided previously unknown details of his captivity.

You can read the whole article here.

***

Tom Gross adds: it is not quite, as the Times claims, “being told for the first time”. Various details have appeared in the French press and other newspapers, and also in these dispatches. Nevertheless the Times does an important job in their thorough examination of the issue.

Among related dispatches:

* “Good to meet you, bro”: A poetic tribute to James Foley

* The abandoned freelance journalists trying to report the world’s worst war, Syria (including a tribute to Steven Sotloff)

VICTIMS OF ISIS: NON-WESTERN JOURNALISTS WHO DON’T MAKE THE HEADLINES

Jon Henley of The Guardian points out that “In the past 10 months, at least 17 Iraqi journalists have been executed by Isis – and many others have been kidnapped, their fate unknown” – and these journalists do not attract the media attention that Western ones killed by Isis attract.

Among those killed in recent days:

On October 13, Isis shot and killed Mohanad al-Aqidi, the Mosul correspondent of Iraq’s Sada news agency.

On October 10, they publicly beheaded Raad Mohamed al-Azaoui, an Iraqi cameraman and photographer for Sama Salah Aldeen TV. Azaoui, a 37-year-old father of three, was killed with his brother after Isis finished celebrating Friday prayers.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists says more than 80 journalists have been kidnapped in Syria since 2011, and that about 20 (mostly Syrian) journalists are still being held by Isis.

***

The “Islamic State has more support in Britain than in Arab nations,” according to this article.

***

Paul Cantlie, the father of one of the Islamic State’s British hostages, has died. Cantlie recorded a video message from his hospital bed earlier this month, urging those holding his son, John, to release him.

***

At least 23 British jihadis have been killed in Syria and Iraq this year, some as a result of American airstrikes, according to London’s International Centre for the Study of Radicalization (ICSR). In addition to the 23 verified and named cases, there are likely to be several more unknown cases. At least four of the dead are from the town of Portsmouth. ICSR’s Shiraz Maher said many of the British dead were “well-educated and relatively affluent”.

AP WIDELY CRITICIZED FOR HEADLINE OVER MURDER OF 3-MONTH OLD BABY

The Associated Press is being criticized for its highly misleading headline last week “Israeli police shoot man in east Jerusalem”.

The headline refers to a Hamas terrorist who was shot after he attacked passengers waiting to use the light railway in Jerusalem last week. Several Israelis were injured and a three-month-old Israeli-American girl was killed in the attack. He was attempting to kill more people when an Israeli security guard shot him.

Hamas admitted responsibility for the attack and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh praised the killing of the 3-month-old baby girl only days after his own daughter had been treated in an Israeli hospital.

The AP headline was later changed, but not until it had already been repeated by news outlets throughout the world.

Here is a satirical look at the “top 11 AP headlines in history”

Cemeteries in the sky (& UK paper suggests Jews spread Ebola?)

October 22, 2014

[Notes below by Tom Gross]

BDS ACTIVISTS SUDDENLY SILENT AS YET ANOTHER HAMAS RELATIVE OPTS FOR ISRAELI CARE

All those activists in the West constantly condemning anyone who doesn’t boycott Israel, have been strangely silent this week after it was revealed that Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh sent his daughter for treatment at a Tel Aviv hospital.

https://news.yahoo.com/hamas-leaders-daughter-received-medical-treatment-israel-sources-154814306.html

Many of the anti-Israel crowd in the West are probably not aware that in the past, Israeli hospitals have treated Haniyeh’s:

* Granddaughter, last November.

* Brother-in-law.

* Mother-in-law, who was treated only this past June, for cancer.

Mother-in-law

* Or that Haniyeh has three sisters living in Israel as full Israeli citizens.

***

As this article makes clear, while Israel has in the past also helped build medical centers and hospitals in Gaza, for really specialized medical cases, Israel treats over 1000 Gazans in its own hospitals each year, usually at Israeli taxpayers’ expense.

***

Among previous related dispatches:

* Disabled Gaza toddler lives at Israeli hospital

***

Meanwhile, yesterday Hamas openly announced it was rebuilding its Gaza tunnel network. Some of its tunnels have been used to send gunmen into Israel to kill Israelis. Israel destroyed many of the tunnels during this summer’s war. Now it seems international donor money, including from the U.S. government, will be used to rebuild them.

ISRAEL DELIVERS FURTHER EMERGENCY RELIEF TO SYRIAN KURDISH REFUGEES

Through its IsraAID agency, Israel has stepped up provisions of desperately needed supplies to tens of thousands of Kurdish and Yazidi refugees from Syria and Iraq. They had fled the brutal Islamic State onslaught.

These include baby milk and blankets. Each winter, some parts of the region experience heavy snowfalls and subzero temperatures.

Some Israeli humanitarian workers are on the ground. In the Kurdish city of Duhok, in northern Iraq, IsraAID has supplied beds, blankets, and food to over 1,000 families. In the heavily crowded refugee camp close by, IsraAID has brought in 2,000 blankets and mattresses, and enough powdered milk for the more than 1000 babies under one year of age.

Many refugees arrived at the camp with little more than the clothes they were wearing, having fled for their lives.

Kurds and Israelis have long standing close relations and the director of IsraAID noted that, unlike some other past of the world, where Israeli aid was given, IsraAID didn’t have to disguise the fact they were Israelis, and were openly welcomed.

IsraAID has provided aid in disaster zones in Haiti, Japan, the Philippines and South Sudan, among other places.

***

Among previous related dispatches:

* Israel delivers aid to Iraqi refugees (& Lady Gaga: Media is wrong on Israel)

* And his name will be ‘Israel’: Mother of Haitian baby honors IDF rescuers

ISRAELI COMPANY MAY PROVIDE CURE FOR EBOLA

Israel’s Channel 2 TV has reported that Protalix, an Israeli biopharmaceutical company, says it has the resources to produce ZMapp, which is very short in supply in Ebola-hit regions of Africa. It says it can do so “in large quantities, and in a relatively short period of time.”

ZMapp has been given to about 10 infected health workers, including Americans and Europeans, of whom three recovered. WHO assistant director general Marie-Paule Kieny told reporters earlier this month that “there is not enough experience with ZMapp to conclude whether this treatment works or not, but there do seem to be encouraging signs.”

The Ebola virus has killed thousands of people in Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone and elsewhere since the latest outbreak started last December.

Israel is a world leader in pharmaceutical breakthroughs.

HOW THE SUNDAY TIMES CHOSE TO ILLUSTRATE ITS EBOLA STORY

Last weekend, the (London) Sunday Times used a years’ old photo of an orthodox Jew to illustrate the way the Ebola virus supposedly threatens America.

Many will indeed find the photo (at the top of this dispatch) of the orthodox Jew bizarre. For just a few seconds, as the plane he was in passed over a Jewish cemetery, he wrapped himself in plastic. Some orthodox Jews try to adhere to a halachic ruling that Cohens mustn’t fly over a cemetery because it is disrespectful to the dead, but ruled that covering oneself in plastic made this permissible.

Whatever one thinks of certain practices by a few ultra-orthodox Jews, they certainty shouldn’t be blamed for spreading the Ebola virus, which readers of the Sunday Times, one of Europe’s highest circulation newspapers, might now think.

In the past, Jews were blamed for other viruses, including the Black Death, and were murdered as a result.

PAST CONTROVERSIES

I have noted controversial content in the Sunday Times before. For example, last year the Sunday Times used this cartoon on Holocaust Memorial Day:

Rupert Murdoch, the owner of The Sunday Times, who remains a strong friend of Israel, issued an apology for the cartoon, calling it “grotesque”.

There is creeping borderline and not so borderline anti-Semitism elsewhere in the British press. For example, reading the Financial Times’ profile of this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature laureate, French writer Patrick Modiano, the Financial Times casually referred to his father as “a shadowy Jewish businessman”. He was in fact a Holocaust survivor.

There is, of course, also quite a lot of philo-Semitism in the British press too, though not too much in the Financial Times.

BIGGEST ISRAELI TV PROVIDER DROPS BBC

The Israeli satellite television provider YES, one of the two biggest TV providers in Israel, has said it will drop BBC World News from its package of channels, the Israeli business daily Globes reports. The BBC will be replaced by France 24’s English-language international news channel.

YES said is has received numerous complaints from customers about what many say is the almost non-stop demonization and twisting of the truth about Israel by the BBC, which is the world’s biggest network of TV and radio stations, broadcasting in many languages.

For example, while the Middle East was in turmoil this week (including some very underreported deaths of civilians at the hands of American-led airstrikes, and terrible atrocities in Yemen and Sinai) the BBC’s much heralded Chief Middle East correspondent Jeremy Bowen was doing yet another long story on how Israel supposedly damages olive trees.

YES said, “The British perspective, which BBC World presents, will continue to be represented by Sky News,” which will keep its spot.

YES will continue carrying other international news stations, including CNN and five other channels in English.

NEW WORLD SERVICE DIRECTOR PROMISES “FAIRNESS”

Meanwhile, the BBC has just appointed Fran Unsworth as the new director of the BBC World Service. She currently serves as BBC director of news. She is the first female director in the World Service’s 82-year history.

In a statement Unsworth, who takes up the post on December 8, said:

“I promise to be the guardian of the best of the BBC’s values of independence, impartiality and fairness in our international services, while continuing the successful modernization of the World Service Group to take our journalism to new audiences worldwide.”

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/oct/20/bbc-fran-unsworth-world-service-director

Clearly she still needs to do some work to persuade Israelis that the BBC’s proclaimed “impartiality and fairness” will apply to them too.

ISRAELI-ARAB DOCTOR KILLED FIGHTING FOR THE ISLAMIC STATE

Barzilai Hospital, in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon, has confirmed that Alkian Othman, who died fighting for the Islamic State in Syria, had been an intern at the hospital.

Othman, age 26, from the Israeli Bedouin town of Hura, 10 miles north of Beersheba, disappeared at the start of this year. It has now been confirmed he died fighting for the Islamic State (ISIS) in August.

Israel’s Shin Bet security service arrested Othman’s brother last April for helping to recruit Israeli Arabs to join ISIS.

Othman was supposed to begin working in Israel’s Soroka Medical Center in May but didn’t show up.

At least 30 Israeli Arabs, all with Israeli citizenship, have joined ISIS, many after going for a “vacation” in Turkey, according to the Israeli intelligence services.

Some family members have condemned their children. The father of Ahmed Havashi, from northern Israel, who also was killed in Syria earlier this year, told Israeli media. “I told my son this is not our religion; this is not the message of Islam.”

BRITISH AIRWAYS INCREASES CAPACITY TO ISRAEL BY 50%

Tourism from Britain and other countries seems to be rising again following this summer’s Hamas-Israel war. Yesterday, for example, British Airways announced it would expand London-Tel Aviv service from next summer.

“Due to the growing demand for our service to London and long-distance flights, we have decided to expand our Israel operation, with a significant increase in seat capacity and frequency,” the airline said in a statement.

http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-british-airways-expands-london-tel-aviv-service-1000979168

As I noted this summer, when under pressure form the U.S. State Department, American airlines (seemingly for political reasons) stopped flying to Israel for a day, many European airlines continued to fly -- and the head of British Airways security noted it was “Safer flying to Tel Aviv than walking down the street in London.”

ISRAEL RAISES THE DEAD WITH SKYWARD CEMETERY

Israel, partly because it is a very small country, is now at the forefront of a global movement building vertical cemeteries in densely populated nations.

As the Associated Press notes in this article, the reality of relying on finite land resources to cope with the endless stream of the dying has brought about creative solutions. From Brazil to Japan, elevated cemeteries, sometimes stretching high into the sky, will be the final resting place for thousands of people. They are now the default option for the recently departed in the Holy Land.

And after some initial hesitations, and rabbinical rulings that made the practice kosher, Israel’s ultra-Orthodox burial societies have embraced the concept as the most effective Jewish practice in an era when most of the cemeteries in major population centers are full.

The world’s tallest existing cemetery is the 32-story high Memorial Necropole Ecumenica in Santos, Brazil. In Tokyo, the Kouanji is a six-story Buddhist temple where visitors can use a swipe card to have the remains of their loved ones brought to them from vaults on a conveyer belt system.

Other plans for cemetery towers have been presented for Paris and Mumbai. In Mexico City, another big project has been proposed: the Tower for the Dead, which will combine a vertical necropolis and an 820-foot-deep (250-meter-deep) subterranean complex.

Iran: CIA, MI6 and Mossad “created ISIS” (& Inside Assad’s torture chambers)

October 17, 2014

[Notes below by Tom Gross]

IS IT MORE MORAL TO TURN A BLIND EYE TO ASSAD THAN TO ISIS?

While a strong western response to the Islamic State movement (IS, or ISIS) is essential, an equally strong response against the Assad regime, and its Iranian backers who are assisting in some of Assad’s worst atrocities, is, I believe, at least as important.

Is there a moral difference between Isis and Assad and the Iranians?

Is the use of chemical weapons against thousand of men, women and children (which still continues in small incidents today) any less immoral than beheading people, as ISIS and others have done, or torturing people and then throwing them off high-rise buildings as Hamas has done in Gaza, or torturing people in secret prisons all over Iran?

INSIDE BASHAR ASSAD’S TORTURE CHAMBERS: PHOTOS TO BE SHOWN AT U.S. HOLOCAUST MUSEUM

Though many western media are too busy attacking Israel day after day – very often for things Israel has not done, or in some other cases for the most minor infringements – Yahoo News reports in detail on the fact that the U.S. State Department has obtained 27,000 photographs showing the emaciated, bruised and burned bodies of Syrian torture victims – gruesome images that a top official told Yahoo News constitute “smoking gun” evidence that can be used to bring war-crimes charges against the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

A small number of the photos were put on public display for the first time on Wednesday at the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington.

The photos are “horrific – some of them put you in visceral pain,” said Stephen J. Rapp, the U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes.

The photos were smuggled out of Syria by an official regime photographer who has since defected and is known only by his code name, Caesar. The FBI says that U.S. citizens may have been among the victims.

According to David Crane, a former war-crimes prosecutor for Sierra Leone, they document “an industrial killing machine not seen since the Holocaust.” They show corpses, some of them lined up in a warehouse, many appearing to be victims of starvation, their ribs protruding from emaciated bodies.

Some show men whose eyes were gouged out; others had bruises and lacerations consistent with beatings and in some cases strangulation.

Ed Royce, a Republican from California, and the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said that when he first saw the photos he thought of his father. As a member of Gen. George Patton’s Third Army, “my father had taken photos at Dachau when it was liberated, of the bodies stacked up at the ovens. This is eerily reminiscent. It’s absolutely appalling.”

You can see some of the photos here. Warning: They are horrific.

IRAN’S FORMER INTELLIGENCE MINISTER: CIA, MI6, MOSSAD “CREATED ISLAMIC STATE”

Former Iranian intelligence minister Heydar Moslehi has said that the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria was created by “the triangle of Mossad, MI6 and the CIA.” He made the remarks in an interview with Fars News, a news outlet run by journalists close to Iran’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

It is in Farsi, here.

Moslehi’s remarks come a day after Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei accused the United States and Britain of creating ISIS. (Surprisingly, perhaps, he didn’t include “the little Satan,” Israel.)

Khamenei said on Monday that Washington and “the wicked government of Britain” created both ISIS and Al-Qaeda, in order “to fight against the Islamic Republic [of Iran],” and that “dollars from Saudi Arabia and some of the Gulf countries” had financed the creation of ISIS. His speech, the first since undergoing prostate surgery last month, was reported by presstv.com and Khamenei.ir among other outlets. It seems that his illness has not tempered his views.

Yet some prominent American and European news outlets are, even now, still trying to insist that the “new-look” Iranian regime – which seems on track to soon to get nuclear weapons (after the appeasement by Western powers towards them) -- is somehow “moderate”.

(Incidentally, some staff at the Fars news agency seem to be readers of these dispatches and have occasionally reproduced material from them.

See also: How the Iranian government spins these dispatches (May 17, 2011)

IS MAGAZINE CALLS ON EUROPEAN JIHADISTS TO TARGET VATICAN AND CHRISTIANS

The newly-released (fourth) issue of the Islamic State’s English-language propaganda magazine “Dabiq” has been published. It features the Vatican on its front cover, with the IS black flag with white Arab lettering flying on top of the obelisk at St. Peter’s Square in Rome.

Not content with territory it has seized in the Middle East, the lengthy cover story (titled “The Failed Crusade” about the failure of Christianity) envisions the Italian capital under the rule of a Caliph and a Sharia regime.

The article calls on aspiring jihadists to target both the Catholic Church and individual Christians, saying they can only be saved if they convert to Islam and adhere to Sharia law.

The article claims that IS will one day conquer Rome. It threatens to “break the crosses” of infidels and sell their women “in accordance with Sharia”.

Tom Gross adds: IS often use the term “crusader” and “Christian” interchangeably, and includes non-practicing Christians in this term.

It has already killed (or in some cases captured as sex slaves – see below), thousands of Christians and other religious groups in the area they’ve seized, including Kurds, Yazidis, and Shia. Hundreds of thousands of others have fled.

ISIS OFFER ISLAMIC JUSTIFICATION FOR TAKING THOUSANDS OF YAZIDI WOMEN AND GIRLS AS SEX SLAVES

ISIS jihadists is attempting to justify seizing thousands of Yazidi teenage girls and women in northern Iraq and offering them to fighters as sex slaves.

The (London) Daily Telegraph reports: “When stories of mass murder and enslavement first emerged in August there were suggestions they might be exaggerated.

“Now, however, researchers who have talked to survivors and imprisoned women on hidden mobile phones believe that up to 5,000 men may have been shot dead and bulldozed into mass graves, and 7,000 women held in detention centres to be offered as slaves.

“After capture, the Yazidi women and children were then divided according to the Sharia amongst the fighters of the Islamic State.

“Moreover, ISIS has not only admitted taking the women, but issued a lengthy theological justification.”

After capture, the Yazidi women and children were then divided according to the Sharia amongst the fighters of the Islamic State,” says a new article in their English-language online magazine Dabiq.

The article, titled “The Revival of Slavery before the Hour,” says that “well-known” rules are observed, including not separating mothers from their children.

When the jihadists attacked areas occupied by Yazidis, the West’s attention focused on tens of thousands of refugees who crowded the barren hills of nearby Mount Sinjar. But thousands more were captured in nearby villages.

“My 13-year-old sister was separated from my family,” said one man, Ahmed Naif Qasem. His parents, wife and extended family were seized from their home in Snuny, near Sinjar, and taken over the Syrian border to be converted to Islam at gunpoint.

When the family returned, his sister and his wife had been taken away. His wife was later allowed to rejoin her family after having been “treated badly,” but no one had seen his sister since.

What has happened to the women has been relayed in a series of phone calls from families, and in some cases by women and girls who managed to escape.

According to a new UN report, Bakat Khalaf, 60, another refugee in Ba’adre, said his 13-year-old niece had escaped seven weeks after being “taken away” but had so far been too distressed to describe what had happened to her. Other escapers have told of being “married” to older jihadi leaders, in some cases raped, and made to watch acts of barbarity.

STILL TIME FOR THOUSANDS OF YAZIDI GIRLS TO ESCAPE IF ONLY WEST WOULD HELP

Matthew Barber, a leading scholar of Yazidi history at the University of Chicago who was in Kurdistan as the assaults happened, says he had a list of 4,800 names of women and children being held captive.

“In every place where Yazidi women or families are held, jihadists come and randomly select women that they take away,” he said. “A final total above 7,000 is perfectly feasible.”

The town of Tal Afar alone is thought to hold around 3,500 women and children in five detention centres. Others are being held in Mosul.

***

A new UN report says 250-300 men were killed in the village of Hardan, including 10 by beheading; another 400 were gunned down in the village of Khocho; another 200 civilians were killed by IS shelling them as they left the village of Adnaniya; as another group of refugees reached the village of Qiniyeh, the men were separated from the women and children, and 70 to 90 of them were lined up by a ditch and shot.

On another road, witnesses reported dozens of bodies left behind, including those of four elderly men with disabilities, who had been shot dead.

In some massacres, the bodies were bulldozed into mass graves. In others, men were herded into Yazidi temples that were then blown up.

***

Tom Gross adds: For weeks now, Yazidi leaders have been begging President Barack Obama to bomb the compound where thousands of Yazidi women and girls are being held. They say that even though some Yazidis would be killed in the bombing, it would give the others a chance to escape. If they can’t escape soon, the others will be sold on to men in Baghdad or even taken as far as Riyadh and the Gulf States, kept as sex slaves, and likely never be able to see their families again. The pleas are reminiscent of the calls by some Jewish leaders during the Holocaust for President Roosevelt to bomb the railways lines to Auschwitz.

As was the case during the Holocaust, most Western media are barely bothering to report on these calls.

Among previous dispatch on Yazidis:

* The item “Threats against Yazidis were predictable and predicted” in this dispatch.

* “Genocide” of Yazidis waiting to happen if America pulls out of Iraq too soon (November 16, 2007)

TURKISH PRESIDENT ERDOGAN ATTACKS LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, ARRESTS FOREIGN JOURNALISTS

In yet another speech that will outrage many in the West, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said Western “spies” and journalists were supporting ISIS’s plan to redraw the region’s borders, and he criticized Lawrence of Arabia, comparing him with ISIS.

Erdogan compared the current interference in the Middle East to the role the renowned British army officer played during the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans during World War I.

Erdogan made his televised speech earlier this week in an angry response to Western criticism that he should stop bombing and killing besieged Kurds on Turkey’s borders, and instead help rescue them.

Erdogan blamed Lawrence of Arabia for the Sykes-Picot Agreement, a secret understanding that divided the Middle East after World War I into largely British and French spheres of influence, calling him “an English spy disguised as an Arab.” (In fact it was signed behind Lawrence’s back and Lawrence opposed it.)

Erdogan said that “there are modern-day Lawrences in Turkey right now disguised as journalists, religious men, writers and terrorists.”

His remarks came on the day five foreign journalists, including three Germans, were put on trial in the southeastern Turkish city of Diyarbakir, following their arrests last weekend by Turkey’s anti-terrorist police. They had dared to report on the shooting dead by the Turkish police of dozens of Turkish Kurds protesting Turkey’s refusal to help save the besieged Syrian-Kurdish border town of Kobani.

German freelance photographer Christian Grodotzki said he and other journalists were punched and kicked in the stomach. “It was a pretty rough arrest. They tried really hard to get us to confirm we were spies or trick us into signing false confessions.”

***

Last summer, after seizing Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq, IS produced a video called “The End of Sykes-Picot,” in which they blew up a border outpost and said they would destroy other Western-imposed borders too. You can view it here.

“LET’S PUT IT THAT WAY, IF ISRAEL IS THE ONE THAT SHELLED KURDS, THE OUTCRY IN THE ARAB WORLD WOULD BE MORE”

“The indifference of the Arab world to the slaughter of Kurds at Kobani is only the latest manifestation of a deeper malaise,” says Nervana Mahmoud, an influential Arab blogger and commentator on the Middle East.

In a blog post titled “Kobani, a victim of our sins” and in other posts, she said that the Islamic State knows that its actions against minorities like the Kurds will provoke no protests from fellow Arabs, “in contrast to the outcry that followed Israel’s assault on Gaza.”

“I have no recollection of protests in Arab streets when Saddam Hussein bombed Halabja and there is no response now, when ISIS is shelling Kobani and killing Kurds,” she said.

“Let’s put it that way, If Israel is the one that shelled Kurds, the outcry in the Arab world would be more. Arabs are more angry when a foreign enemy commits the same crime, sadly!” she told the Rudaw news outlet.

Tom Gross adds: It’s not only the Arabs but the whole world that is indifferent to Kurdish suffering.

***

Dozens of Canadian Jews joined Kurdish demonstrators gathered in front of the U.S. Consulate in Toronto last weekend in support of Kobani.

***

Syrian Kurds have received a “symbolic” amount of military aid from Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government that is meant for Kobani but is stuck in northeastern Syria because Turkey will not open an aid corridor, a Syrian Kurdish official told Reuters.

BRITISH JIHADISTS SECRETLY RELEASED BY TURKEY ARE NAMED

Last week, it was reported that Turkey freed Islamists – including European and British jihadis – in a swap deal for Turkish diplomats captured in Mosul and held hostage by ISIS.

British officials said that they were shocked that the Turkish government, a member of Nato, could have made the deal.

Details of the reported trade, published in the Turkish daily Taraf, surfaced in the wake of the beheading of Alan Henning, the British taxi driver, by ISIS.

The two British jihadis released by Turkey and allowed in to Syria were named as Shabazz Suleman, aged 18 (an elite grammar school pupil), and Hisham Folkard, 26. Three French citizens, two Swedes, two Macedonians, one Swiss and one Belgian are among other Europeans thought to have been released in the deal.

ISIS captured 49 Turkish consulate staff in Mosul in June. They were released on September 20.

ISRAEL “SUCCESSFULLY TESTS NAVAL ‘IRON DOME’ SYSTEM”

The Israel Hayom newspaper has reported that the Israeli navy has successfully tested a naval anti-missile system.

“The Israeli Navy secretly tested an upgraded anti-missile system designed to protect naval vessels several months ago. The test was a success,” reported the paper. “The test was conducted as part of a general overhaul of the navy’s defense systems, which also provide protection for offshore drilling rigs.”

Not all the details of the test were released, but according to the paper, the exercise involved a mock Russian-built Yakhont missile fired from sea, which was successfully intercepted by the Israeli Barak missile, fired from an Israeli Navy missile boat.

The ship-based anti-missile system is similar to the land-based Iron Dome system, which intercepted 90% of the rockets that were fired into populated areas of Israel this past summer by Hamas.

Israel is also developing the Iron Beam system, a laser system designed to destroy incoming mortars.

Israeli military intelligence believes that Hizbullah has acquired Russian Yakhont anti-ship cruise missiles from Syria.

The mock-Yakhont missile used in the test was developed by an Italian company.

And now for three more positive, “human interest” stories…

CRIME-FIGHTING JEWS DRAW PRAISE FOR PROTECTING MUSLIMS IN LONDON NEIGHBORHOOD

Australia’s channel 9 news reports:

The unusual sight of crime-fighting Orthodox Jews pounding the streets of a tough London neighborhood after dark has captured the attention of grateful locals, but their ongoing protection of local Muslims has seen their profile go global.

The work of the 25-strong “Shomrim” even caught the eye of US Secretary of State John Kerry, who praised the neighbourhood patrol group’s “remarkable courage”.

Members of the Haredi Jewish community in Stamford Hill formed the group - named after the Yiddish word for guards - in 2008 in response to high crime levels.

Police initially feared vigilantism but now cooperate closely with the volunteers, who helped in 197 arrests last year and even apprehending the area’s “most wanted burglar”.

It is Shomrim’s role in helping protect the area’s large Muslim population, however, that has secured its place in the community and garnered international praise.

Full story here.

MUSLIM FAMILIES LOOK AFTER KOLKATA SYNAGOGUES

Muslim caretakers are maintaining three synagogues in eastern Indian city, which was once home to a thriving Jewish community, reports al-Jazeera:

“The city’s Jewish population has dwindled over the decades to just about 20 as compared to 3,000 at its peak before the country became independent from British rule in 1947.

“Khalil Khan, 71, has been working as caretaker of Beth El synagogue, one of the city’s three synagogues, for the past 55 years. His two sons - Anwar and Siraj - have chosen the same job.

“… There are no regular services conducted on Saturdays nowadays: only one person from the Jewish community visits each of the synagogues on Friday evenings - to light a candle.

Full story here.

WOUNDED SYRIAN REACHES MECCA IN WHEELBARROW

AFP reported earlier this month (on October 3):

“Wounded Syrian rebel Abdulkarim al-Naseef had to be pushed in a wheelbarrow during his long journey to Saudi Arabia, where he will perform the hajj and hopes to start a new life.

“Proudly showing off his artificial iron leg, and with a rebel scarf draped over his shoulders, Naseef said he had journeyed to Saudi Arabia not only as a hajj pilgrim but also in the hopes of receiving treatment.

Along the road from Syria to Turkey the tall, bearded ex-fighter and former businessman had to be pushed in the wheelbarrow part of the way. He waited hours until he entered Turkey, travelling on from there to Saudi Arabia.

Naseef is among some 12,000 Syrians performing hajj this year, around half of them from inside the country, according to Mohammed Ismael Ahmed, who heads a group of 800 pilgrims.

***

I attach one further article, below, by Michael Freund, a subscriber to this list:

-- Tom Gross

IS REBUILDING GAZA MORE IMPORTANT THAN HALTING EBOLA?

Is rebuilding Gaza more important than halting Ebola?
By Michael Freund
Jerusalem Post
October 14, 2014

This past Sunday, some 50 nations from around the world gathered for a major donor conference aimed at raising billions of dollars to tackle what organizers described as an urgent humanitarian predicament.

A host of prominent figures, including UN Secretary- General Ban Ki Moon, US Secretary of State John Kerry and Norwegian Foreign Minister Børge Brende all set aside time in their busy schedules to attend the gathering, underlining its importance to much of the international community.

And just what, you might be wondering, was the pressing issue that prompted such extensive and concerted action? Well, it wasn’t the mounting Ebola crisis, which has already killed thousands in western Africa and threatens to take the lives of many more. Nor was it the growing disaster confronting Syrian refugees, over 2.3 million of whom have fled to other countries to escape fighting at home.

Believe it or not, the vital topic on the agenda was to raise money to rebuild parts of Hamas-controlled Gaza.

That’s right, despite the Islamist terrorist group’s cynical use of the area as a launching pad for thousands of rocket attacks against Israel, Western powers and others have rushed to open their checkbooks to help with reconstruction.

This is morally obtuse, politically obscene and strategically oblivious behavior, and Israel should loudly and forcefully protest against it.

Consider the following. At the Gaza donor conference, which was held in Cairo, a whopping $5.4 billion was pledged, half of which will go towards rebuilding efforts while the rest will be used to sustain the budget of the Palestinian Authority, which now includes Hamas, through 2017.

In other words, even though the Palestinians siphoned off previous aid and used it to prepare for war with Israel, they are once again becoming recipients of Western largesse.

Needless to say, the funds pledged are not contingent on Hamas disarmament, nor will any demands be made of the terrorist group to cease building tunnels to try and burrow into Israel and murder innocent civilians.

Worse yet, by alleviating the humanitarian difficulties confronting Gaza residents, the international community is effectively reducing popular pressure on Hamas to refrain from sparking another conflict and mitigating popular anger against the terrorist group.

Indeed, the decision to funnel billions to Gaza is so dramatically short-sighted, and so remarkably stupid, that it makes one wonder if Europe and the Obama administration even understand what their own interests are. After all, why on earth would they want to assist Hamas, even indirectly, to strengthen its position vis-à-vis the Palestinian population? The inanity at work here is even more pronounced when one considers that the United Nations has been having difficulty raising just $1b. to fight Ebola.

Although the disease has killed more than 4,000 people and spread to at least seven countries, UN Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson said on Friday that just $250 million – a mere one-quarter of the amount needed – has been raised thus far. “I now appeal to all member states to act generously and swiftly,” Eliasson said, adding that, “Speed is of the essence. A contribution within days is more important than a larger contribution within weeks.”

And so, even though the number of Ebola cases is reportedly doubling every three to four weeks, billions of dollars will be lavished on Gaza rather than on the jeopardized populations of Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Similarly, a recent donor conference in Washington aimed at combating cholera in Haiti, which has killed more than 8,000 people and infected 700,000 others, raised just $52.5m. out of the $400m. needed for the program’s first two years.

And just last month, Ertharin Cousin, the head of the World Food Program, said that because of funding shortages, the organization has had to reduce food rations and distributions.

“We’re going to need to cut rations to those people we’re supporting inside Syria and to cut the size of the vouchers to those Syrians who are refugees outside Syria,” Cousin told the Associated Press (September 23).

Clearly, the money that countries can afford to spend on humanitarian crises is not unlimited, so hard choices often have to be made. But no reasonable moral calculus can justify prioritizing the reconstruction of Gaza apartment buildings over preventing an Ebola epidemic that threatens millions of people.

To be fair, some countries, such as the US, are spending money to combat the disease in other ways, outside the purview of the United Nations.

But what John Kerry and others fail to appreciate is that every dollar they are pouring into Gaza is a dollar that can best be spent saving lives elsewhere.

Rather than strengthening Hamas’s hand, they should be looking to rally international support to stem Ebola before it is too late.

In the meantime, however, thousands of Africans will inexplicably continue to perish while Palestinian contractors and Hamas terrorists in Gaza reap the benefits.

Video dispatch 29: “Fighting terror by day, supermodels by night” (& Sign of the times)

October 14, 2014

Other dispatches in this video series can be seen here:

* Video dispatch 1: The Lady In Number 6

* Video dispatch 2: Iran: Zuckerberg created Facebook on behalf of the Mossad

* Video dispatch 3: Vladimir Putin sings “Blueberry Hill” (& opera in the mall)

* Video dispatch 4: While some choose boycotts, others choose “Life”

* Video dispatch 5: A Jewish tune with a universal appeal

* Video dispatch 6: Carrying out acts of terror is nothing new for the Assad family

* Video dispatch 7: A brave woman stands up to the Imam (& Cheering Bin Laden in London)

* Video dispatch 8: Syrians burn Iranian and Russian Flags (not Israeli and U.S. ones)

* Video Dispatch 9: “The one state solution for a better Middle East...”

* Video dispatch 10: British TV discovers the next revolutionary wave of Israeli technology

* Video dispatch 11: “Freedom, Freedom!” How some foreign media are reporting the truth about Syria

* Video dispatch 12: All I want for Christmas is...

* Video dispatch 13: “Amazing Israeli innovations Obama will see (& Tchaikovsky Flashwaltz!)

* Video dispatch 14: Jon Stewart under fire in Egypt (& Kid President meets Real President)

* Video dispatch 15: A rare 1945 BBC recording: Survivors in Belsen sing Hatikvah (& “No Place on Earth”)

* Video dispatch 16: Joshua Prager: “In search for the man who broke my neck”

* Video dispatch 17: Pushback against the “dictator Erdogan” - Videos from the “Turkish summer”

* Video dispatch 18: Syrian refugees: “May God bless Israel”

* Video dispatch 19: An uplifting video (& ‘Kenya calls in Israeli special forces to help end mall siege’)

* Video dispatch 20: No Woman, No Drive: First stirrings of Saudi democracy?

* Video dispatch 21: Al-Jazeera: Why can’t Arab armies be more humane like Israel’s?

* Video dispatch 22: Jerusalem. Tel Aviv. Beirut. Happy.

* Video dispatch 23: A nice moment in the afternoon

* Video dispatch 24: How The Simpsons were behind the Arab Spring

* Video dispatch 25: Iranians and Israelis enjoy World Cup love-in (& U.S. Soccer Guide)

* Video dispatch 26: Intensifying conflict as more rockets aimed at Tel Aviv

* Video dispatch 27: Debating the media coverage of the current Hamas-Israel conflict

* Video dispatch 28: CNN asks Hamas: “Do you really believe Jews slaughter Christians?” (& other items)

* Video dispatch 29: “Fighting terror by day, supermodels by night” (& Sign of the times)

* Video dispatch 30: How to play chess when you’re an ISIS prisoner (& Escape from Boko Haram)

* Video dispatch 31: Incitement to kill

* Video Dispatch 32: Bibi to BBC: “Are we living on the same planet?” (& other videos)

“Arab civilization has collapsed. It won’t recover in my lifetime.”

October 05, 2014

ARTICLES

“ARAB CIVILIZATION, SUCH AS WE KNEW IT, IS ALL BUT GONE”

The Barbarians Within Our Gates
Arab civilization has collapsed. It won’t recover in my lifetime.
By Hisham Melhem
Politico (Washington)
September 18, 2014

www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/09/the-barbarians-within-our-gates-111116_full.html

With his decision to use force against the violent extremists of the Islamic State, President Obama is doing more than to knowingly enter a quagmire. He is doing more than play with the fates of two half-broken countries – Iraq and Syria – whose societies were gutted long before the Americans appeared on the horizon. Obama is stepping once again – and with understandably great reluctance – into the chaos of an entire civilization that has broken down.

Arab civilization, such as we knew it, is all but gone. The Arab world today is more violent, unstable, fragmented and driven by extremism – the extremism of the rulers and those in opposition – than at any time since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire a century ago. Every hope of modern Arab history has been betrayed. The promise of political empowerment, the return of politics, the restoration of human dignity heralded by the season of Arab uprisings in their early heydays – all has given way to civil wars, ethnic, sectarian and regional divisions and the reassertion of absolutism, both in its military and atavistic forms. With the dubious exception of the antiquated monarchies and emirates of the Gulf – which for the moment are holding out against the tide of chaos – and possibly Tunisia, there is no recognizable legitimacy left in the Arab world.

Is it any surprise that, like the vermin that take over a ruined city, the heirs to this self-destroyed civilization should be the nihilistic thugs of the Islamic State? And that there is no one else who can clean up the vast mess we Arabs have made of our world but the Americans and Western countries?

No one paradigm or one theory can explain what went wrong in the Arab world in the last century. There is no obvious set of reasons for the colossal failures of all the ideologies and political movements that swept the Arab region: Arab nationalism, in its Baathist and Nasserite forms; various Islamist movements; Arab socialism; the rentier state and rapacious monopolies, leaving in their wake a string of broken societies. No one theory can explain the marginalization of Egypt, once the center of political and cultural gravity in the Arab East, and its brief and tumultuous experimentation with peaceful political change before it reverted back to military rule.

Nor is the notion of “ancient sectarian hatreds” adequate to explain the frightening reality that along a front stretching from Basra at the mouth of the Persian Gulf to Beirut on the Mediterranean there exists an almost continuous bloodletting between Sunni and Shia – the public manifestation of an epic geopolitical battle for power and control pitting Iran, the Shia powerhouse, against Saudi Arabia, the Sunni powerhouse, and their proxies.

There is no one single overarching explanation for that tapestry of horrors in Syria and Iraq, where in the last five years more than a quarter of a million people perished, where famed cities like Aleppo, Homs and Mosul were visited by the modern terror of Assad’s chemical weapons and the brutal violence of the Islamic State. How could Syria tear itself apart and become – like Spain in the 1930s – the arena for Arabs and Muslims to re-fight their old civil wars? The war waged by the Syrian regime against civilians in opposition areas combined the use of Scud missiles, anti-personnel barrel bombs as well as medieval tactics against towns and neighborhoods such as siege and starvation. For the first time since the First World War, Syrians were dying of malnutrition and hunger.

Iraq’s story in the last few decades is a chronicle of a death foretold. The slow death began with Saddam Hussein’s fateful decision to invade Iran in September 1980. Iraqis have been living in purgatory ever since with each war giving birth to another. In the midst of this suspended chaos, the U.S. invasion in 2003 was merely a catalyst that allowed the violent chaos to resume in full force.

The polarizations in Syria and Iraq – political, sectarian and ethnic – are so deep that it is difficult to see how these once-important countries could be restored as unitary states. In Libya, Muammar al-Qaddafi’s 42-year reign of terror rendered the country politically desolate and fractured its already tenuous unity. The armed factions that inherited the exhausted country have set it on the course of breaking up – again, unsurprisingly – along tribal and regional fissures. Yemen has all the ingredients of a failed state: political, sectarian, tribal, north-south divisions, against the background of economic deterioration and a depleted water table that could turn it into the first country in the world to run out of drinking water.

Bahrain is maintaining a brittle status quo by the force of arms of its larger neighbors, mainly Saudi Arabia. Lebanon, dominated by Hezbollah, arguably the most powerful non-state actor in the world – before the rise of the Islamic State – could be dragged fully to the maelstrom of Syria’s multiple civil wars by the Assad regime, Iran and its proxy Hezbollah as well as the Islamic State.

A byproduct of the depredation of the national security state and resurgent Islamism has been the slow death of the cosmopolitanism that distinguished great Middle Eastern cities like Alexandria, Beirut, Cairo and Damascus. Alexandria was once a center of learning and multicultural delights (by night, Mark Twain wrote in Innocents Abroad, “it was a sort of reminiscence of Paris”). Today Alexandria is a hotbed of political Islam, now that the once large Greek-Egyptian community has fled along with the other non-Arab and non-Muslim communities. Beirut, once the most liberal city in the Levant, is struggling to maintain a modicum of openness and tolerance while being pushed by Hezbollah to become a Tehran on the Med. Over the last few decades, Islamists across the region have encouraged – and pressured – women to wear veils, men to show signs of religiosity, and subtly and not-so-subtly intimidated non-conformist intellectuals and artists. Egypt today is bereft of good universities and research centers, while publishing unreadable newspapers peddling xenophobia and hyper-nationalism. Cairo no longer produces the kind of daring and creative cinema that pioneers like the critically acclaimed director Youssef Chahine made for more than 60 years. Egyptian society today cannot tolerate a literary and intellectual figure like Taha Hussein, who towered over Arab intellectual life from the 1920s until his death in 1973, because of his skepticism about Islam. Egyptian society cannot reconcile itself today to the great diva Asmahan (1917-1944) singing to her lover that “my soul, my heart, and my body are in your hand.” In the Egypt of today, a chanteuse like Asmahan would be hounded and banished from the country.

***

The jihadists of the Islamic State, in other words, did not emerge from nowhere. They climbed out of a rotting, empty hulk – what was left of a broken-down civilization. They are a gruesome manifestation of a deeper malady afflicting Arab political culture, which was stagnant, repressive and patriarchal after the decades of authoritarian rule that led to the disastrous defeat in the 1967 war with Israel. That defeat sounded the death knell of Arab nationalism and the resurgence of political Islam, which projected itself as the alternative to the more secular ideologies that had dominated the Arab republics since the Second World War. If Arab decline was the problem, then “Islam is the solution,” the Islamists said – and they believed it.

At their core, both political currents – Arab nationalism and Islamism – are driven by atavistic impulses and a regressive outlook on life that is grounded in a mostly mythologized past. Many Islamists, including Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (the wellspring of such groups) – whether they say it explicitly or hint at it – are still on a ceaseless quest to resurrect the old Ottoman Caliphate. Still more radical types – the Salafists – yearn for a return to the puritanical days of Prophet Muhammad and his companions. For most Islamists, democracy means only majoritarian rule, and the rule of sharia law, which codifies gender inequality and discrimination against non-Muslims.

And let’s face the grim truth: There is no evidence whatever that Islam in its various political forms is compatible with modern democracy. From Afghanistan under the Taliban to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and from Iran to Sudan, there is no Islamist entity that can be said to be democratic, just or a practitioner of good governance. The short rule of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt under the presidency of Mohamed Morsi was no exception. The Brotherhood tried to monopolize power, hound and intimidate the opposition and was driving the country toward a dangerous impasse before a violent military coup ended the brief experimentation with Islamist rule.

Like the Islamists, the Arab nationalists – particularly the Baathists – were also fixated on a “renaissance” of past Arab greatness, which had once flourished in the famed cities of Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo and Córdoba in Al-Andalus, now Spain. These nationalists believed that Arab language and culture (and to a lesser extent Islam) were enough to unite disparate entities with different levels of social, political and cultural development. They were in denial that they lived in a far more diverse world. Those minorities that resisted the primacy of Arab identity were discriminated against, denied citizenship and basic rights, and in the case of the Kurds in Iraq were subjected to massive repression and killings of genocidal proportion. Under the guise of Arab nationalism the modern Arab despot (Saddam, Qaddafi, the Assads) emerged. But these men lived in splendid solitude, detached from their own people. The repression and intimidation of the societies they ruled over were painfully summarized by the gifted Syrian poet Muhammad al-Maghout: “I enter the bathroom with my identity papers in my hand.”

The dictators, always unpopular, opened the door to the Islamists’ rise when they proved just as incompetent as the monarchs they had replaced. That, again, came in 1967 after the crushing defeat of Nasserite Egypt and Baathist Syria at the hands of Israel. From that moment on Arab politics began to be animated by various Islamist parties and movements. The dictators, in their desperation to hold onto their waning power, only became more brutal in the 1980s and ‘90s. But the Islamists kept coming back in new and various shapes and stripes, only to be crushed again ever more ferociously.

The year 1979 was a watershed moment for political Islam. An Islamic revolution exploded in Iran, provoked in part by decades of Western support for the corrupt shah. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and a group of bloody zealots occupied the Grand Mosque in Mecca for two weeks. After these cataclysmic events political Islam became more atavistic in its Sunni manifestations and more belligerent in its Shia manifestations. Saudi Arabia, in order to reassert its fundamentalist “wahhabi” ethos, became stricter in its application of Islamic law, and increased its financial aid to ultraconservative Islamists and their schools throughout the world. The Islamization of the war in Afghanistan against Soviet occupation – a project organized and financed by the United States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan – triggered a tectonic change in the political map of South Asia and the Middle East. The Afghan war was the baptism of fire for terrorist outfits like the Egyptian Islamic Group and al Qaeda, the progenitors of the Islamic State.

This decades-long struggle for legitimacy between the dictators and the Islamists meant that when the Arab Spring uprisings began in early 2011, there were no other political alternatives. You had only the Scylla of the national security state and the Charybdis of political Islam. The secularists and liberals, while playing the leading role in the early phase of the Egyptian uprisings, were marginalized later by the Islamists who, because of their political experience as an old movement, won parliamentary and presidential elections. In a region shorn of real political life it was difficult for the admittedly divided and not very experienced liberals and secularists to form viable political parties.

So no one should be surprised that the Islamists and the remnants of the national security state have dominated Egypt since the fall of Hosni Mubarak. In the end, the uprising removed the tip of the political pyramid – Mubarak and some of his cronies – but the rest of the repressive structure, what the Egyptians refer to as the “deep state” (the army, security apparatus, the judiciary, state media and vested economic interests), remained intact. After the failed experiment of Muslim Brotherhood rule, a bloody coup in 2013 completed the circle and brought Egypt back under the control of a retired general.

In today’s Iraq, too, the failure of a would-be authoritarian – recently departed Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki – has contributed to the rise of the Islamists. The Islamic State is exploiting the alienated Arab Sunni minority, which feels marginalized and disenfranchised in an Iraq dominated by the Shia for the first time in its history and significantly influenced by Iran.

Almost every Muslim era, including the enlightened ones, has been challenged by groups that espouse a virulent brand of austere, puritanical and absolutist Islam. They have different names, but are driven by the same fanatical, atavistic impulses. The great city of Córdoba, one of the most advanced cities in Medieval Europe, was sacked and plundered by such a group (Al Mourabitoun) in 1013, destroying its magnificent palaces and its famed library. In the 1920s the Ikhwan Movement in Arabia (no relation to the Egyptian movement) was so fanatical that the founder of Saudi Arabia, King Abdul-Aziz Al Saud, who collaborated with them initially, had to crush them later on. In contemporary times, these groups include the Taliban, al Qaeda and the Islamic State.

Yes, it is misleading to lump – as some do – all Islamist groups together, even though all are conservative in varying degrees. As terrorist organizations, al Qaeda and Islamic State are different from the Muslim Brotherhood, a conservative movement that renounced violence years ago, although it did dabble with violence in the past.

Nonetheless, most of these groups do belong to the same family tree – and all of them stem from the Arabs’ civilizational ills. The Islamic State, like al Qaeda, is the tumorous creation of an ailing Arab body politic. Its roots run deep in the badlands of a tormented Arab world that seems to be slouching aimlessly through the darkness. It took the Arabs decades and generations to reach this nadir. It will take us a long time to recover – it certainly won’t happen in my lifetime. My generation of Arabs was told by both the Arab nationalists and the Islamists that we should man the proverbial ramparts to defend the “Arab World” against the numerous barbarians (imperialists, Zionists, Soviets) massing at the gates. Little did we know that the barbarians were already inside the gates, that they spoke our language and were already very well entrenched in the city.

“THE DEATH OF ARAB THUGGERY, NOT ARAB CIVILIZATION”

The death of Arab thuggery, not Arab civilization
By Khaled Diab
Haaretz
Oct. 3, 2014

* The Arab world’s 100-year political order is in its death throes. Like dying wild animals, the nationalist, Islamist and foreign mafias and despots clinging to power are at their most dangerous when fatally wounded.

www.haaretz.com/misc/article-print-page/.premium-1.619002

In an influential essay in Politico, the veteran Lebanese journalist Hisham Melhem who is the Washington bureau chief of Al Arabiya, sounded the death knell for Arab civilization. “Arab civilization, such as we knew it, is all but gone,” was his bleak prognosis. “The Arab world today is more violent, unstable, fragmented and driven by extremism… than at any time since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire a century ago.”

Melhem then goes on to detail a long list of ills plaguing the Arab world: From the apparent defeat of the Arab Spring revolutions in most countries to the failure of Arab secular and monarchist regimes, not to mention the proliferation of fundamentalist violence.

“Is it any surprise that, like the vermin that take over a ruined city, the heirs to this self-destroyed civilisation should be the nihilistic thugs of the Islamic State?” he asks.

But to my mind, the domino-collapse of one state after another is not a sign of the death of Arab civilization, but is rather the result of the implosion of three bankrupt forms of despotism: That of the tyrannical Arab state, Islamist demagoguery and foreign hegemony.

Despite the massive differences in the forms of government and the nature of the governed, most post-independence Arab states shared one thing in common: They all served a narrow elite to the detriment of society as a whole. Wherever you turn your gaze, you will find, almost without exception, local masters seated in the place of the previous imperial overlords.

In addition, the foreign rule of yesteryear did not go away, it just changed its face and modus operandi. The loose-knit Ottoman empire in which local leaders and elites paid lip service and tribute to the Sultan but sometimes behaved like independent leaders, such as in Egypt, was replaced by the British and French who spoke the language of independence but often engaged in direct rule.

When the United States muscled out the old-world European powers, it spoke the language of self-determination and anti-imperialism but created its Pax Americana empire which exercised control through vassal leaders in client states and a ruthlessly punitive approach, including crippling sanctions and invasions, towards those who rejected its hegemony. The upshot of this is that Arab populations have lived under a double oppression: That of their native rulers and that imposed on them from distant capitals.

Just like Washington tolerates little regional dissent, Arab regimes have shared, to varying degrees, a ruthless attitude to domestic opposition. This had the dual effect of robbing their societies of a clear cadre of effective alternative leaders and empowering ever-more extreme forms of opposition by side-lining or decimating moderates.

Although a lot of attention has been directed at regime crackdowns against the Islamist opposition, especially the various chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood, less well-known is that secular dissidents suffered repression easily as harsh or more so, especially leftists.

This is to be expected of the Gulf monarchies whose claim to legitimacy is founded on dubious religious pretexts. However, the revolutionary republican regimes of Egypt, Syria and Iraq, despite their reputation for having been closet communists and pro-Soviet in America, not only dealt ruthlessly with the liberal opposition but were also bitterly anti-communist.

Though the reasons varied, the decades-long oppression of secular opposition forces in the Arab world had far-reaching consequences. One was the decimation of viable alternative leaders, which was acutely felt when the leaderless Arab uprisings did not manage to assemble a credible leadership quickly enough to consolidate their gains.

This, along with the weak, corrupt, incompetent and dysfunctional nature of Arab secular regimes – not to mention the “democratic” fig leaf the West used to disguise its interests – led to the discrediting of secularism in the minds of many, and, after decades of being in vogue, Westernization became a dirty word rather than something to aspire to.

This left an ideological and political void which radical, anti-authoritarian Islamism managed to occupy, for a time.

To counter both the secularist and Islamist threat to their legitimacy and rule, a number of Gulf states went on the offensive and actively exported, lubricated by petro-dollars, their own brand of Islam, such as the ultra-conservative Wahhabi ideology from Saudi Arabia or Salafism from Qatar.

For a while, political Islamism’s simple “Islam is the solution” formula apparently won a lot of supporters as a counter to the failure both of secular pan-Arabism and conservative monarchism, but this is waning.

Though the secular opposition forces may have been down, they were definitely not out. This was reflected in the progressive, leftist, pro-democracy nature of the 2011 Arab uprisings, especially in Tunisia, Egypt and Syria.

This set alarm bells ringing in what had become the trinity dominating Arab politics: The Arab autocracies (whether republican or monarchist), the Islamist opposition and the U.S.-led West. And each of these set in motion their own anti- or counterrevolutionary forces.

The one country where these forces did not manage to cause major mischief is the only place where the Arab Spring has been a relative success: Tunisia. For a time, Egypt looked like it might also escape this fate but, instead, turned into a battleground for regional and international forces.

But the worst proxy battleground has been Syria. Caught between the intransigent and murderous Assad regime and its allies in Russia, China and Iran, on the one hand, and the unholy alliance between the United States and the conservative Gulf monarchies, on the other hand, the peaceful, secular uprising didn’t stand a chance.

What the above reveals is that it is not Arab civilization that has died, but the political order put in place almost a century ago following the collapse of the Ottoman empire is going through its death throes. And like dying wild animals, these beasts are at their most dangerous when fatally wounded.

Despite the surface decay in Arab society, submerged underneath are the fresh shoots of a robust, youthful, dynamic civilization kept from blossoming by the stranglehold of the suffocating weed on the putrid top soil of the established order. This is visible in the courageous youth who led the revolutionary charge against despotism, neo-liberalism and socioeconomic inequality. It can be seen in how tens of millions of Arabs have lost their deference to their leaders and their awe of authority. It can be traced in the innovative reinvention of religion and in the growing assertiveness of secular Arabs, not to mention in the pent-up creative social, economic and even scientific energies eager to be unleashed and harnessed.

Once the crushing weight of the oppressive weed has been removed, future generations will have the space and opportunity to enable a true Arab Spring to bloom. But the road to recovery and then progress is long, hard and gruelling.

100 MILLION PEOPLE IN THE ARAB WORLD ARE ILLITERATE

What the Arab World Produces
By Dennis Prager
dennisprager.com
Sept. 30, 2014

At least since the early part of the 20th century, aside from oil, the Arab world has produced and exported two products.

It has produced essentially no technology, medicine or anything else in the world of science. It has almost no contributions to world literature, art or to intellectual development.

According to the most recent United Nations Arab Human Development Reports (2003-2005), written by Arab intellectuals, Greece, with a population of 11 million, annually translates five times more books from English than the entire Arab world, population 370 million. Nor is this a new development. The total number of books translated into Arabic during the last 1,000 years is less than Spain translates into Spanish in one year.

ArabianBusiness.com reports that about 100 million people in the Arab world are illiterate; and three quarters of them are between the ages of 15 and 45.

As for Arab women, the situation is even worse. Nearly half of the Arab world’s women are illiterate, and sexual attacks on women have actually increased since the Arab Spring, as have forced marriages and trafficking. And the exact number of women murdered by family members in “honor killings” is not knowable. It is only known to be large.

In Egypt, the largest Arab country, 91 percent of women and girls are subjected to female genital mutilation, according to UNICEF. Not to mention the number of women in the Arab world who must wear veils or even full-face and full-body coverings known as burkas. And, of course, Saudi Arabia is infamous for not allowing women to drive a car.

Another unhappy feature of the Arab world is the prevalence of lies. To this day, Egypt denies that it was the Egyptian pilot, Ahmed El-Habashi, who allegedly crashed an EgyptAir jet into the ocean deliberately. Vast numbers of Arabs believe that Jews knew of the 9-11 plot and avoided going to work at the World Trade Center that day.

So, then, is there anything at which the Arab world has excelled for the past two generations? Has there been a major Arab export?

As it happens, there are two.

Hatred and violence.

The Arab world has no peer when it comes to hatred - of the Western world generally, and especially of Israel. Israel-hatred and its twin, Jew-hatred, are the oxygen that the Arab world breathes.

Two of the most popular songs in Egypt over the past decade have been “I Hate Israel” and the ironically named “I Love Israel.”

Lyrics of the latter song include:

“May it [Israel] be destroyed. May it be wiped off the map. May a wall fall on it. May it disappear from the universe. God, please have it banished.”

“May it dangle from the noose. May I get to see it burning, Amen. I will pour gasoline on it. I am an Egyptian man. I am not a coward.”

“I Hate Israel” is so popular that it was the song which Egypt’s pop star Chaaboula sang at the largest music festival in the Arab world, Morocco’s Mawazine. The festival, one of the biggest in the world, featured Alicia Keys, Justin Timberlake, Ricky Martin and Kool and the Gang.

Some of the lyrics:

“I hate Israel, and I would say so if I was asked to.

“Two faces of the same coin, America and Israel. They made the world a jungle and ignited the fuse.

“About that [Twin] Tower, oh people. Definitely! His friends [Israel] were the ones who brought it down.”

The other major Arab product and export has been violence.

It is difficult to overstate the amount of violence in the Arab world. Mass murder and cruelty have characterized the Arab world.

Regarding Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Dexter Filkins, the New York Times correspondent in Iraq from 2003-2006 wrote: “Here, in Hussein, was one of the world’s indisputably evil men: he murdered as many as a million of his people, many with poison gas. He tortured, maimed and imprisoned countless more. His unprovoked invasion of Iran is estimated to have left another million people dead.”

Syria, too, has been a country of mass murder, torture, and brutal totalitarian rule – under the rule of Hafez Assad (in power 1971-2000), and his son, Bashar, the current killer-dictator who, among other atrocities, used Sarin gas against his own people in 2013.

In the ongoing Syrian Civil War, according to the United Nations, between March 15, 2011 and April 30, 2014, 191,000 Syrians, about a third of them civilians, were killed. In addition, 2.5 million people have fled Syria to neighboring countries, and 6.5 million have fled their homes within Syria.

In Algeria in the 1990s, Islamist terrorists engaged in wholesale murder of their fellow Algerians. That war cost Algeria about 100,000 lives, mostly civilian.

In Sudan, the Arab government’s atrocities against the non-Arab population in the region of Darfur led to about 300,000 deaths and over a million refugees. In addition there was systematic rape of untold numbers of non-Arab women by Arab gangs known as the Janjaweed.

And then there was the terror unleashed by Palestinians against Israeli civilians in restaurants, at weddings, on buses, etc. The Palestinians are the modern fathers of terrorism directed solely at civilians.

There are two possible reactions to this description of the Arab world. One is that it is an example of anti-Arab “racism.” That would be the reaction in much of the Arab world, on the left and among most academics – despite the fact that the description is of a culture and that the Arabs are not a race. The other is that is that it is tragically accurate. That would be the reaction of some in the Arab world and anyone who cares about truth. One such individual is an Arab. In Politico Magazine two weeks ago. Hisham Melhem, Washington bureau chief of Al-Arabiya, the Dubai-based satellite channel, titled his article “The Barbarians Within Our Gates.” The subtitle is “Arab civilization has collapsed. It won’t recover in my lifetime.”

Islamic State, which is overwhelmingly Arab, is just the latest manifestation.