Mideast Dispatch Archive: September 2015 Archives

Egypt, welcomed at the UN, “now second only to North Korea as jailer of peaceful political opponents”

September 29, 2015

$1.5 BILLION IN FRESH MILITARY AID WHILE TORTURE IS ROUTINE

* Jackson Diehl: “The United Nations General Assembly tends to inspire grand gestures by dictators. This year’s drama prize must go to Vladimir Putin, who dispatched troops and planes to Syria… Others, however, are seeking attention. Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, the former general who now rules Egypt attempted to lay the groundwork for his U.N. speech on Friday – and Egypt’s ascension to a seat on the Security Council – by pardoning 100 political prisoners, including two Al Jazeera journalists convicted on spectacularly trumped-up charges.

“[What most media aren’t mentioning is that] a regime for which the Obama administration has proposed $1.5 billion in fresh military aid has become, with the arguable exception of North Korea, the largest jailer of peaceful political opponents in the world… there are more than 40,000 prisoners, including more than 1,000 who have been sentenced to death. The democratically elected president Mohamed Morsi, deposed by Sissi in a July 2013 coup, is on the death list, along with scores of his top political aides.

“At least 18 journalists are still imprisoned in Egypt, along with hundreds of secular liberal activists, including the intellectual authors and leaders of the Jan. 25, 2011 march that touched off the popular revolution against former strongman Hosni Mubarak… Torture is routine; authorities acknowledged that more than 90 prisoners died…”

THE WORLD LINES UP TO GREET THE “MODERATE” ROUHANI

Tom Gross adds

Another “star” at the UN in New York this year (as he was last year) is Iranian President Rouhani.

Rarely mentioned by the BBC, CNN and other media during all their substantial coverage of Rouhani’s Iran, is the incredible wave political executions that his “moderate” regime continues to carry out.

Rouhani’s regime has now executed over 2,000 people, far more than killed under his “hardline” predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Amnesty International has described it as a “staggering spree” of executions.

Iranian-American groups staged a protest in New York outside the UN yesterday against Rouhani, but it garnered hardly any media coverage.

They held up placards pointing out that Rouhani’s current Justice Minister was, in 1988, on “the three-member panel that issued orders for the massacre of 30,000 political prisoners under instructions from then-Supreme Leader Khomeini.”

***

As well as being interviewed on CNN on Sunday, President Rouhani met all kinds of dignitaries in bilateral meetings in New York, including UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, President of the European Council Donald Tusk, French President François Hollande, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven, Italian Foreign Minister Matteo Renzi and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Here are photos from the Iranian news agency IRNA of President Rouhani addressing the United Nations General Assembly.

***

I attach one piece below, by Jackson Diehl, the Deputy editorial page editor of the Washington Post. (He is a longtime subscriber to this email list).

* Please “like” these dispatches on Facebook here www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia, where you can also find other items that are not in these dispatches.

“FREEING EGYPT’S PRISONERS AND CREATING SPACE FOR PEACEFUL OPPOSITION TO SISSI OUGHT TO BE A U.S. PRIORITY”

Sissi’s teeming prisons
By Jackson Diehl
Washington Post
September 27, 2015

The United Nations General Assembly tends to inspire grand gestures by dictators. This year’s drama prize must go to Vladimir Putin, who dispatched troops and planes to Syria to set up his Monday address to the assembly. Others, however, are seeking attention. So let’s save some oxygen for Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, the former general who now rules Egypt.

Sissi attempted to lay the groundwork for his U.N. speech on Friday – and Egypt’s ascension to a seat on the Security Council – by pardoning 100 political prisoners, including two Al Jazeera journalists convicted on spectacularly trumped-up charges. His hope was to be seen as a strong-but-fair statesman, willing to correct mistakes even as he ruthlessly battles the growing Islamic jihadist movement in his country.

In fact, attention is way overdue on the subject of Egypt’s political prisoners. But the story is not Sissi’s “token gesture,” as Amnesty International called it. It is the extraordinary fact that a regime for which the Obama administration has proposed $1.5 billion in fresh military aid has become, with the arguable exception of North Korea, the largest jailer of peaceful political opponents in the world.

No one knows for sure how many nonviolent detainees are being held in Egypt’s prisons, but the regime itself has conceded that the number is in the tens of thousands. According to the Egyptian Revolutionary Council, an opposition coalition, there are more than 40,000, including more than 1,000 who have been sentenced to death. The democratically elected president Mohamed Morsi, deposed by Sissi in a July 2013 coup, is on the death list, along with scores of his top political aides.

At least 18 journalists are still imprisoned in Egypt, along with hundreds of secular liberal activists, including the intellectual authors and leaders of the Jan. 25, 2011, march that touched off the popular revolution against former strongman Hosni Mubarak.

A couple of those liberals were released last week, including Sanaa Seif, a 21-year-old activist jailed last year for protesting a law banning all protests. But Seif’s older brother, Alaa Abdel Fattah, Egypt’s most famous blogger-activist, is still imprisoned on the same charge. So are Ahmed Maher and Mohammed Adel, leaders of the April 6th youth movement, which led the fight to make Egypt a liberal democracy after 2011.

Conditions for those prisoners are “harsh,” as the State Department put it in its latest human rights report on Egypt. Torture is routine; authorities acknowledged that more than 90 prisoners died in the first 16 months after the coup. Notwithstanding Sissi’s gesture, the repression is worsening. Security forces have begun summarily executing suspects they arrest – including 13 members of the Muslim Brotherhood who were seized in Cairo on July 1, then tortured and shot to death, according to family members.

Senior Obama administration officials are well aware of all this. Among other things, they’ve recently heard the harrowing firsthand account of Mohamed Soltan, a 27-year-old American whom Sissi freed in June after 21 months of imprisonment. An Ohio State University alum who worked as a translator and unofficial spokesman at an opposition sit-in after the coup, Soltan somehow survived losing more than half his weight in a prolonged hunger strike, along with torture that included sleep deprivation, repeated beatings and prolonged isolation in a tiny cell.

As his hunger strike gained international attention, Soltan told me last week, senior officials at Cairo’s notorious Tora prison tried to push him to commit suicide. Once they dumped a dying man in his cell; when he died hours later, Soltan was berated for not preventing his death.

After he was finally packed onto a plane to the United States, Soltan found a new way to fight back. He moved to Falls Church and began a concerted campaign of lobbying on behalf of the political prisoners. He’s had excellent access: Secretary of State John F. Kerry met him, as did U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, and Soltan believes a private letter he wrote reached President Obama.

Soltan’s message to the administration is as simple as his story is affecting. First: “Pressure works. I am living proof that when the administration pushes hard enough it can make a difference.” Conversely, “when there are no consequences for repression, [the regime] takes it as a wink-wink, non-nod” consent.

Second, Soltan says, freeing Egypt’s prisoners and creating space for peaceful opposition to Sissi ought to be a U.S. priority. A whole generation of young people is being radicalized in Egypt’s prisons, he says, “and the only thing they agree on is hatred for the United States,” which is blamed for enabling Sissi.

Obama may feel compelled to answer Putin at the United Nations this week. “But something has to be said about Egypt,” says Soltan. Let’s hope the president read his letter.

So which nation is the U.S. not sworn to defend? Albania? Slovenia? Philippines? Iceland? Argentina?

POP QUIZ

It’s Time for a Formal U.S. Alliance With Israel
By James Stavridis
Foreign Policy
September 25, 2015

Here’s a quick pop quiz: Which of the following nations do not enjoy the protection of a mutual military defense treaty – a formal alliance, if you will – with the United States. (You know this type of treaty, right? It is one that requires our nation, by force of treaty, to come to the defense of another nation if it is attacked.) So which nation are we not sworn to defend:

1. Philippines
2. Israel
3. Albania
4. Slovenia

Very few U.S. citizens would get this one right. We are sworn by treaty to defend the Philippines (Philippine bilateral treaty of 1951). We are likewise sworn to defend NATO members Albania and Slovenia (North Atlantic Treaty of 1949). But we have never executed a formal treaty with Israel, though successive U.S. presidents throughout the history of Israel have pledged American support, which few in the world would doubt.

Given the new agreement with Iran – the awkwardly named Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action – it seems high time to consider a formal alliance with Israel.

First, let’s dispense of the debate over the Iran deal. Is it a good deal? A bad deal? At this point, what matters is that it is a done deal. There is a great deal to dislike about the agreement, beginning with the weak verification regime, the shower of gold descending on Iran as sanctions are lifted, and the 10-year shelf life; but at this point – given international support, especially from our co-negotiators, and the inability of the Republican Senate to force a veto and then override it – the game is over. The agreement will move forward.

So we have to think through the execution of the agreement and what steps we can take to mitigate the ill effects of the plan. At the top of the list should be seriously considering a formal alliance with Israel.

There is certainly broad consensus on the need to assuage Israeli insecurities. A wide variety of observers have opined on the need to do so, including most recently Michèle Flournoy and Richard Fontaine, both well-regarded defense analysts at the Center for a New American Security. Their prescription includes bolstering allies in the region, maintaining the ability to keep sanctions in the face of other Iranian illicit behavior, increasing the ability verify and “snap back” in the case of cheating, and reducing Iran’s regional influence. Many others have made similar sets of recommendations. But now may well be the time to look again at a decades-old idea: a treaty for Israel.

This conversation goes back to the founding of Israel. The Israelis, perhaps surprisingly, have been cool to the idea, with Abba Eban famously saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” about the extant relationship and whether there is a legitimate need for a treaty. The general argument in Israel against such an agreement has been that the independence of Israel in the eyes of the American public might be compromised by such a treaty.

Likewise, some in Washington worry about perceptions in the Arab world of a United States that is “taking sides” even more firmly than we already do. Israel applied for membership in NATO in the 1950s and was turned down for a variety of reasons. But the discussion about a possible treaty has continued with ups and downs over the decades.

Of course, the United States has been very generous with aid of all kinds to Israel, particularly in the military dimension – over $100 billion in defense over the years. Perhaps the closest we have come to a treaty was in 1975, when Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Foreign Minister Yigal Allon signed a memorandum that stated: “The United States Government will view with particular gravity threats to Israel’s security or sovereignty by a world power.”

That memo is a pretty good overview of the level and status of commitment; and there is, of course, a strong and vibrant military relationship between the two nations today. When I was commander of U.S. European Command, I often visited Israel to review our military-to-military cooperation, participate in high-level talks with Israeli leadership (including then-President Shimon Peres), exchange high-level intelligence, compare views on the regional situation, and witness the execution of the enormous military aid package to Israel from the United States. The subject of a treaty did not come up, and most Israelis seem content with the pledges from every U.S. president about the sanctity of the security of the state of Israel.

But things have changed. Iran’s supreme leader recently offered his opinion that Israel will “not exist in 25 years.” The level of acrimony and hostility directed against Israel is not abating with this agreement. Indeed, given the rise of Iranian influence in the region in the wake of the JCPOA and the additional resources Iran will have to devote to its stated goal of destroying Israel, now is the moment to begin a dialogue with Israel about whether the need exists for a formal defensive treaty, similar to the ones we have with Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and our 27 NATO allies, among many others.

We do have with Israel a series of several dozen memorandums of understanding about defense matters from intelligence to terrorism – but not the gold standard of a treaty.

Were Washington to consider such a treaty, it should be done working closely with Sunni allies in the region – Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf states. The rise of Iran will require much work with them and may even offer some opportunities to push for cooperation between them and Israel. A regional cooperation organization is not inconceivable.

Negotiating such a treaty with Israel will be complicated on both sides, with many insisting there is no need given the strong relations between the nations. But if we can put the right level of energy into such talks, and find willing interlocutors on the Israeli side, what better symbol of the lasting special relationship between our nations than a treaty?

It’s a dangerous region, and Israel is our strongest ally in it. Now is the time to explore the outlines of such a deal.

U.S. COLLECTIVE DEFENSE ARRANGEMENTS

http://www.state.gov/s/l/treaty/collectivedefense/

Set forth below is a list of U.S. collective defense arrangements and the parties thereto:

NORTH ATLANTIC TREATY

A treaty signed April 4, 1949, by which the Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all; and each of them will assist the attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force.

PARTIES: United States, Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom

AGREEMENT BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND

A Treaty signed September 1, 1951, whereby each of the parties recognizes that an armed attack in the Pacific Area on any of the Parties would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and declares that it would act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes.

PARTIES: United States , Australia, New Zealand

PHILIPPINE TREATY (BILATERAL)

A treaty signed August 30, 1951, by which the parties recognize that an armed attack in the Pacific Area on either of the Parties would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and each party agrees that it will act to meet the common dangers in accordance with its constitutional processes.

PARTIES: United States, Philippines

SOUTHEAST ASIA TREATY

A treaty signed September 8, 1954, whereby each party recognizes that aggression by means of armed attack in the treaty area against any of the Parties would endanger its own peace and safety and each will in that event act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes.

PARTIES: United States , Australia, France, New Zealand, Philippines, Thailand, and the United Kingdom

JAPANESE TREATY (BILATERAL)

A treaty signed January 19, 1960, whereby each party recognizes that an armed attack against either Party in the territories under the administration of Japan would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and declares that it would act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional provisions and processes. The treaty replaced the security treaty signed September 8, 1951.

PARTIES: United States, Japan

REPUBLIC OF KOREA TREATY (BILATERAL)
A treaty signed October 1, 1953, whereby each party recognizes that an armed attack in the Pacific area on either of the Parties would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and that each Party would act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes.

PARTIES: United States, Korea

RIO TREATY

A treaty signed September 2, 1947, which provides that an armed attack against any American State shall be considered as an attack against all the American States and each one undertakes to assist in meeting the attack.

PARTIES: United States, Argentina, Bahamas, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Trinidad & Tobago, Uruguay, Venezuela

NOTE: In 2004, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovak Republic, and Slovenia were added to the list and Mexico was removed.

UK Muslim leader: Grand Mosque collapse “a blessing in disguise” (& Israelis save Syrian refugees off Greek coast)

September 15, 2015

[Notes below by Tom Gross]

ISRAELI AID WORKERS RESCUE SYRIAN REFUGEES OFF GREEK COAST

This is the kind of story that most anti-Israel Western media would never report.

On Sunday, Israeli aid workers in Greece were hailed as heroes both by Syrian refugees and local Greeks as they bravely plunged into the stormy waters to rescue drowning refugees.

Aid workers from the Israeli charity IsraAid were the first to react while others reportedly hesitated to risk their lives, when a boat full of refugees overturned after its engine exploded off the Greek coast, leaving many refugees, including young children and babies, stranded in the water and unable to swim.

IsraAid is funded both by the Israeli government and by Diaspora Jewish communities.

As I have reported previously on this list, IsraAid is among one of the Israeli charities that also provided substantial help after the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka and the huge 2007 earthquake in Peru – as well as this year’s earthquake in Nepal.

In a separate incident on Sunday, the Athens News Agency (ANA) reported that 34 refugees, including four babies and 11 young children, died when their overcrowded boat capsized in high winds off the Greek coast.

***

Israel is one of the only countries to have consistently helped those worst off victims of the Syrian civil war. Israeli doctors have saved the lives of over a thousand injured Syrians including dozens of children, since the start of the war.

Among past dispatches on this, please see:

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

* Israel’s secret doctors (& Disabled Gaza toddler lives at Israeli hospital)

* The National Post of Canada has also acknowledged this weblist’s work in highlighting this, paragraphs 10 and 11 here.

* More Syrian children’s lives saved by Israel over Christmas (& Buffett donates $10m)

UK MUSLIM LEADER: GRAND MOSQUE COLLAPSE “A BLESSING IN DISGUISE FOR THOSE KILLED”

A British Muslim leader has said that the collapse of a crane operated by the Saudi government at the Grand Mosque in Mecca on Friday was “a blessing in disguise” for the 107 people killed. It was a “great honor from God” to die on the annual hajj pilgrimage, he said, reports the British left-leaning paper The Independent.

Dr Hojjat Ramzy, who made the remarks, is an imam and the director of the Oxford Islamic Information Centre, which many Oxford University students attend.

The accident with the crane happened during a fierce thunderstorm.

Official figures reveal that so far about one million pilgrims have arrived in Saudi Arabia in advance of this year’s pilgrimage season, which begins on September 22.

One pilgrim from Egypt, Mohammed Ibrahim, told the AFP news agency: “I wish I had died in the crane accident, as it happened at a holy hour and in a holy place.”

SAUDIS BAN NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC FOR RUNNING A PHOTO OF THE POPE

Saudi authorities have censored the Arabic version of the August issue of National Geographic magazine, which featured a cover photo of Pope Francis.

In a Twitter message, the editors of the Arabic version of National Geographic said the edition was being banned, report Asia News and other Riyadh-based media.

HUNGARIAN MUSLIM LEADER IN FRIDAY SERMON: “HOMOSEXUALS ARE THE FILTHIEST CREATURES”

The research website MEMRI has translated the Friday sermon by Imam Ahmed Miklós Kovács, Vice President of the Hungarian Muslim Community, on July 10, 2015, in which he tells worshippers that homosexuals are “the filthiest of Allah’s creatures,” and that Muslims “must never accept this disease.”

He said: “My dear brothers, as you know, wickedness has become widespread in these times. Sinning has become widespread, and moral values have become rare worldwide. Things that were considered beautiful in the past have become ugly in the eyes of some people, and things that were considered ugly have become beautiful in the eyes of some. One of these things is homosexuality, may Allah protect us from it. These days [homosexuals] are celebrating their disease. Effeminate homosexuals are the filthiest of Allah’s creatures. They are sick, and a Muslim must never accept this ugly thing. [Homosexuals] are destroying sound moral values and societies. This filthy thing is not accepted by this country’s society, and is forbidden.” (Video in Hungarian here.)

Tom Gross adds: While the New York Times has repeatedly run front page stories about Judaism’s supposed intolerance to homosexuality, stories that are based almost exclusively on the criminal actions of a single mentally-deranged orthodox Jew at this year’s Jerusalem Gay pride parade, they have next to nothing to say about the hate preached towards gays in an EU and NATO member country like Hungary.

IRANIAN FEMALE SOCCER CAPTAIN PREVENTED BY HUSBAND FROM TRAVELING TO MATCHES

Iran’s leading female soccer player, Niloufar Ardalan, known as “Lady Goal” for her achievements in international women’s Islamic tournaments, has been banned by her husband from travelling to further international matches.

Ardalan will not be able to compete in the upcoming Asian Football Confederation’s women’s championship in Malaysia because her husband has refused to grant her permission to travel abroad as required by Islamic laws enforced in Iran.

Ardalan, 30, was set to captain the Iranian team in the tournament from September 21-26.

In Iran (as in Saudi Arabia), married women need the consent of their husbands to leave the country and can be banned from traveling abroad if their spouses do not sign the required documents.

Ardalan’s husband is a sports journalist and television presenter.

The frustrated soccer star told the news site Nasimonline.ir that she had trained hard for weeks to compete in the games and make her country proud.

Many western feminists, while berating Israel and America (both of whom have among the best records for women’s rights in the world) have little to say about the fact women can be kept as virtual prisoners by their husbands in countries such as Iran.

ANTI-SEMITIC UNRWA IS ONE OF THE “BEST BITS OF THE UN,” SAYS THE GUARDIAN

Many times over the years I have highlighted the shortfalls of UNRWA, a UN agency with a track record of supporting violence against Jews and promoting anti-Semitism. (Many would also say it perpetuates the Palestinian refugee problem and deliberately makes it impossible for the Palestinians to agree to a two state solution with Israel.)

For example, there were these anti-Semitic cartoons last month, here.

It is perhaps not a surprise then that the (often) fiercely anti-Israel paper The Guardian, as part of its series celebrating the 70th anniversary of the creation of the United Nations, has declared UNRWA to be one of the “best bits of the UN”.

UNRWA’s teachers in Jordan talk about “the so-called ‘Holocaust’” instilling doubt in pupils that it happened, while at the same time, other UNRWA employees have praised Hitler’s actions.

UNRWA allowed its schools to be used as rocket storing and rocket-firing facilities by Hamas in last year’s war with Israel.

Western governments continue to provide the bulk of funding for UNRWA.

ANTI-SEMITIC TWEETS FOLLOW CORBYN VICTORY

While people that know him say that the newly elected leader of the British opposition Labour party, Jeremy Corbyn, is not anti-Semitic, his extreme anti-Israeli record has attracted many anti-Semites in Britain to profess support for him.

Following his victory on Saturday, one of those who Corbyn sacked from Labour’s front bench team was Ivan Lewis, who is a Jewish member of the Labour party.

These are the kind of tweets that followed:

[Notes above by Tom Gross]

Saudi Arabia’s 100,000 unused air-conditioned tents denied to refugees; will build 200 new mosques in Germany instead

September 11, 2015

Saudi Arabia is refusing to allow any of its over 100,000 large, air conditioned, 8 meter by 8 meter tents (seen above and below) to be used by refugees. The high quality tents are only used for 5 days of the year by Haj pilgrims. The tents are accompanied by good condition kitchen and bathroom facilities.

CONTENTS

1. Saudi Arabia’s 100,000 unused air-conditioned tents denied to refugees
2. Saudi government offers to fund 200 new mosques in Germany for refugees
3. Poll of US voters: 62%-35% say Iran unlikely to honor nuclear weapons deal
4. Netanyahu responds to European Parliament decision on product labeling
5. Amazon criticized for selling “anti-Semitic” iPhone covers and other products
6. UC-Irvine Jewish professor: Right to exclude American-Jewish singer Matisyahu

[Notes below by Tom Gross]

SAUDI ARABIA’S 100,000 UNUSED AIR-CONDITIONED TENTS DENIED TO REFUGEES

While European countries are being criticized by some Middle East leaders for not doing enough to help refugees, Saudi Arabia – which, with other wealthy Gulf Arab countries such as Qatar*, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and the UAE – has refused to grant a single Syrian refugee or asylum status – has over 100,000 air conditioned tents that can house over 3 million people sitting empty.

The high quality tents, in the city of Mina, are reportedly only used for five days of the year by Haj pilgrims.

The large tents, each measuring eight meters by eight meters, were constructed by the Saudi government in the 1990s. They are accompanied by kitchen and bathroom facilities.

The tents could probably shelter about two million Syrian refugees.

Photos of tents by Akram Abahre: http://www.panoramio.com/photo/71083525

***

* (Tom Gross adds: Qatar doesn’t take any refugees but it does confiscate passports and treat migrant workers from Bangladesh, Nepal and elsewhere like slaves. At the same time Qatar funds Al-Jazeera to run programming about how appalling it says Europe is to refugees.)

A photo of the tents occupied during the Haj

SAUDI GOVERNMENT OFFERS TO FUND 200 NEW MOSQUES IN GERMANY FOR REFUGEES

While it refuses to process any Syrian refugees, Saudi Arabia has offered to build 200 mosques for the hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants arriving in Germany, reports The Independent, a left-wing British newspaper.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung adds that Saudi Arabia says it will build one mosque for every 100 refugees who entered Germany in extraordinary numbers last weekend.

***

Tom Gross adds: While there is, of course, nothing wrong with building mosques for Muslims in Europe, questions must be asked about the fact that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which encourages one of the most intolerant, sexist, homophobic and anti-Semitic forms of Islam in the world, is funding them. On past record, Saudi-funded mosques, for example in the UK, have employed the most radical preachers, and worshippers at some of them have gone on to commit acts of terrorism, and attempted terrorism.

For example, the “Shoe bomber” Richard Reid, who attempted to blow up American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami, was converted to Islam and then radicalized at a Saudi-funded mosque in London.

(To be clear, I am for a generous refugee policy in Europe. But western governments should at the same time pressure our Arab “Allies” to also take in refugees. And most importantly, the West should intervene from the air in order to ground or destroy the warplanes Assad is using to inflict terror on his population with barrel bombs and chemical weapons, which would much reduce the need for people to flee Syria in the first place. As I have repeatedly pointed out on this list, the vast majority of Syrian refugees are fleeing Assad’s terror, not that by ISIS.)

POLL OF US VOTERS: 62%:35% SAY IRAN UNLIKELY TO HONOR NUCLEAR WEAPONS DEAL

In a major new opinion poll conducted this week, 1,000 U.S. likely voters were asked:

“The United States has reached an agreement with Iran that ends some economic sanctions on that country in exchange for cutbacks in Iran’s nuclear weapons program. How likely is it, that Iran will uphold its end of the deal?”

The replies: 35% likely, 62% unlikely.

And “just 23% believe the treaty the administration has negotiated with Iran will make the Middle East safer.”

(Margin of Sampling Error, +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence.)

NETANYAHU RESPONDS TO EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT DECISION ON PRODUCT LABELING

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, yesterday evening on a visit to London, responded to the decision of the European Parliament on product labeling, by saying:

“This is unjust. It is simply a distortion of justice and of logic and I think that it also hurts peace; it does not advance peace. We have historical memory of what happened when Europe labeled Jewish products.”

AMAZON CRITICIZED FOR SELLING “ANTI-SEMITIC” IPHONE COVERS AND OTHER PRODUCTS

Amazon.com is being criticized for selling a new range of products featuring bloodstained Israeli flags.

Among the new products: cell phone covers, umbrellas, doormats, shower curtains, pillow cases, mouse pads and more. There is an example from Amazon pictured above.

Israeli Channel 2, which broke this story, says no other country in the world has its flag defaced this way and sold on the Amazon website.

The CEO of Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos, also owns the Washington Post. Several senior managers, editors and columnists at the Washington Post subscribe to this Middle East dispatch list. They might want to have a word with Bezos about this product range.

***

The new iPhone covers are extra hypocritical considering that the new iPhone model announced yesterday includes new Israeli developed components, as did the previous iPhone and iPad models.

UC-IRVINE JEWISH PROFESSOR: RIGHT TO EXCLUDE AMERICAN-JEWISH SINGER MATISYAHU

University of California, Irvine professor of history, Mark LeVine, has written an opinion piece for the website of Qatar’s Al-Jazeera network, defending the decision last month by a Spanish music festival to exclude American-Jewish reggae artist Matisyahu on the grounds that he wouldn’t first sign a statement denouncing Israel.

This despite the fact that the music festival itself then reversed its decision, which had been labeled anti-Semitic by the Spanish government and many others.

LeVine is one of a small group of prominent Jewish academics and journalists who have been labeled self-loathing, anti-Semitic Jews (though they would deny that and claim they “merely” wish to see Israel cease to exist as a Jewish state).

For background, please see: Dilemma for Israel boycotters as scientists make HIV breakthrough (& The Palestinian case against BDS)

Incidentally, some readers wrote to ask me whether Paul Eisen, one of Britain’s leading Holocaust deniers, is Jewish. Yes he was born Jewish, and indeed his brother and mother (who now don’t want anything to do with him) live in Israel. I mentioned Eisen last month because of his past links to Jeremy Corbyn who looks set to become the new opposition leader in Britain.

* Please “like” these dispatches on Facebook here www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia, where you can also find other items that are not in these dispatches.

An interview with one of the favorites to lead the Mossad (& Israel allows Vanunu to speak openly about nukes)

September 09, 2015

ARTICLES

AN INTERVIEW WITH RAM BEN-BARAK

An exclusive interview with Ram Ben-Barak
By Amir Rapaport
Israel Defense magazine
September 3, 2015

“I think it is quite possible that the next objective of the Islamic State organization will be the Shi’ite community in southern Lebanon, namely Hezbollah. They are already fighting against one another in Syria, and if ISIS wins over there, they will advance into Lebanon,” says Ram Ben-Barak, Director General of the Israel Ministry for Intelligence Affairs.

This statement reflects one of the Intelligence Ministry’s objectives – to think of intelligence affairs in an “outside-the-box” way. It is made by the Ministry’s Director General, Ram Ben-Barak, in his first-ever media interview. This could well be his last public interview for a while, as the race for the position of the next Director of the Mossad, in place of Tamir Pardo who’s about to step down, has entered the last stretch. If Ben-Barak wins this race he will be unable to grant interviews until the end of his term in office.

Ram Ben-Barak is one of three primary candidates for the position of the next Director of the Mossad, along with Yossi Cohen, who currently serves as the Head of the National Security Council, and N., who currently serves as Deputy Director of the Mossad. The next director will enter office in January 2016. Ram Ben-Barak was one of the major speakers at the Intelligence and Special Units Conference initiated by the Israel Intelligence Heritage & Commemoration Center (IICC) and Israel Defense, held under the auspices of the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Israel Ministry for Intelligence Affairs. Ram Ben-Barak became the Director General of the Ministry for Intelligence Affairs in 2014, when it was still attached to the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, just before the recent elections to the Knesset. Following the establishment of the new government, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to appoint Yisrael Katz, who also serves as Transportation Minister, as the Minister for Intelligence Affairs, while Gilad Erdan was appointed as Minister for Strategic Affairs. Both ministries are regarded as an inseparable part of the Prime Minister’s Office, and reside in the Office’s building in Jerusalem. It was further decided that Minister Yuval Steinitz, who served as Minister for Intelligence and Strategic Affairs in the previous government, will remain in charge of the dialogue with the USA and with other western countries on the issue of the agreement being consolidated with Iran regarding Iran’s nuclear program, while serving in his new role as Minister for National Infrastructures, Energy and Water Resources.

In this interview, Ram Ben-Barak presented his views which have been shaped by decades of defense/security service. He is 57, born at Moshav Nahalal in the Jezreel Valley and is a veteran of Sayeret Matkal, the IDF elite unit. He served in numerous operational positions within the Mossad, and in the 1990’ his photograph was published when he was arrested with other Mossad operatives while breaking into a public facility in a European country. The Mossad managed to get him released quickly back to Israel, after he had been tried and sentenced to a fine only. Among his more recent positions within the Mossad, he served as head of the operations division and as Deputy Director.

“I deeply regret the separation between intelligence and strategy. In my opinion, intelligence and strategy are closely interlinked,” says Ben-Barak sincerely.

What is, in fact, the function of the Ministry for Intelligence Affairs in its new-old format?

“The Ministry for Intelligence Affairs has several functions,” says Ram Ben-Barak. “In principle, the Minister for Intelligence Affairs is a member of the Israeli cabinet, and raises his hand in voting over essential issues, like war and peace. That is why the best thing for him is to be well-versed in the current status picture, to know as many things as possible, and the Ministry sees to it. It is good to have in the cabinet people who are thoroughly prepped and briefed prior to important discussions. This is a service we provide to all of the ministers.

“Intelligence is a part of the day-to-day activity. Practically, the Minister for Intelligence Affairs is the Prime Minister’s ears and eyes. Agencies like ISA and Mossad are subordinated directly to the Prime Minister, who is the busiest person in the State of Israel. He cannot see everything up close. Once you have a Minister operating on the Prime Minister’s behalf, everything is presented to him on an ongoing basis. We perform budget audits on findings and on the force build-up process, which enables the Prime Minister to get a better picture of whatever is going on. The Minister does not tell the agencies what to do, but they know that any remark he makes will be heard by the Prime Minister, so his remarks are heeded. His importance is in the ministerial ability to supervise and ensure that the needs and directives issued by the Prime Minister are executed on the ground.”

Is there any difference between the intelligence information delivered to the Ministry for Intelligence Affairs and the information available to the Ministry of Defense, which is in charge of the IDF but not of ISA and Mossad?

“The Ministry concentrates all of the intelligence available to the State of Israel. We are an organized state. There is no difference between the Ministry for Intelligence Affairs and the Ministry of Defense as far as information is concerned. Everything works very efficiently. Numerous lessons were learned from past events, where the intelligence had been stopped at various places and was never delivered to those who needed it. The Ministry sees to it that the Minister reviews and analyzes the intelligence. We deliberate and ponder the intelligence received and attempt to consolidate an independent position of our own. There is nothing smart or intelligent about receiving it all from other sources.”

Is Iran really the top intelligence priority of the State of Israel?

“The Iranian issue is one of the most important issues we deal with,” said Ben-Barak during the interview that was held close to the date when the interim agreement on the nuclear issue between Iran and the P5+1 was about to expire.

“The Iranian issue has substantial influence, far beyond the fact that a nuclear Iran is intolerable in Israeli eyes. The agreement which is about to be signed will enable the Iranians to decide for themselves when they would like to become nuclear, and that is the most problematic aspect. It leaves Iran in possession of almost all of her capabilities. If it is concluded in a manner where it would not be possible to supervise Iran’s military facilities, and at the same time they receive massive amounts of money within a very short period of time, their economy will experience a massive growth and this would enable them to gain more influence in the Middle East, much more than they have at present.

“The greatest danger is that Iran is advancing toward a situation where no one will be able to threaten it anymore, a situation that would enable it to gain dominance in any region it chooses.

“Look at the situation even today – there is hardly any area in the Middle East where Iran is not involved: Iraq (at present, Iran’s interests in Iraq are consistent with the interests of the USA), Lebanon (Hezbollah is, in fact, an Iranian armed force) and Yemen (which is currently dominated by the Houthis, who receive their arms and advisors from Iran). Now, imagine what would happen if billions of dollars were to drop on Iran in the coming years. Iran would be under no restrictions whatsoever.

“I think that if the Americans had insisted and pressed a little harder, it would have been possible to reach a much better agreement. No one contests the fact that an agreement is a better option than war. This is fully understood by everyone – from the Prime Minister to the last civilian in the street, but a bad agreement can have very grave implications.”

Are the Americans sharing information on the process with us, or are we not really fully informed as the permanent agreement is being finalized?

“We are involved in the process with some degree of openness – sometimes more, sometimes less. Minister Dr. Yuval Steinitz is intensively involved in the process. He will remain in charge of this activity until August 2015 at the very least. At the moment, Iran is the most pressing issue, but there are other issues.”

There has been some talk about the process with Iran leading to an arms race by Middle Eastern countries regarded as more moderate, like Egypt or Saudi Arabia, as a counterweight to the nuclear arming of Iran. Do you share those concerns?

“Absolutely. This process will almost certainly take place. The Saudis and the countries of the Persian Gulf are just as apprehensive as we are of an Iranian domination of the region. Eventually, there are massive natural resources in that area and in the past we witnessed an attempt by the Iraqis to capture Kuwait for its massive oil reserves.

“Consider the Shi’ite-Sunni confrontation that is currently dividing the Muslim world, and you will reach the inevitable conclusion that those countries are under pressure. There is no shortage of money in the Gulf States, they can buy anything they want. Once they realize that the Iranians are walking through a corridor that would lead them to a nuclear capability, they will enter that corridor too, and the entire region would be thrown into a new arms race.”

What can be said about the relations we have or do not have with countries regarded as more moderate, including countries in the Persian Gulf?

“There is an opportunity here. I would not like to go into details. I assume these things are being considered and that interests are shared. You can see the interests we currently share with Egypt. I assume other things are happening as well.”

“In the struggle between Shi’ite and Sunni Muslims, the Sunni Muslims face a dual problem,” adds Ram Ben-Barak. “On the one hand, they are threatened by the Shi’ite axis that aspires to gain influence and dominate. On the other hand, they face radical Sunni Islamists, who regard their states as heretical.

“For example, the Sunni Muslims are fighting against the Assad regime in Syria, but they should already think about the day following his collapse. The Islamic State organization, ISIS, is already confronting the moderate Sunni Muslims in Syria. This reality is highly problematic. As the situation in Syria currently appears, it would not be far-fetched to predict that very soon, these organizations will be deployed along the border with Israel on the Golan Heights.”

Is Assad’s situation really that bad? Is he approaching the end of his reign?

“That’s what it looks like on the ground at the moment, but we must not exaggerate it. The successes of ISIS and the other rebel groups were achieved in Sunni-dominated areas. Generally, they have not been very successful in non-Sunni areas. They succeeded against the Kurds in Iraq, but the Kurds managed to reinstate their domination. Assad’s military is practically shattered at this time, and it seems that Syria is advancing toward a situation of an Alawite-dominated area (the president’s religious affiliation), an ISIS-dominated area and an area dominated by other rebel groups, including Jabhat al-Nusra. It will be very interesting to see what eventually happens. We need to look forward and consider the possibility of ISIS moving on to their next objective, in southern Lebanon.”

Hezbollah is intensively involved in the fighting in Syria. Do you think they will lose their war over there?

“I believe so. They are not doing very well. There are Shi’ite militia groups that the Iranians dispatched and quite a few Hezbollah warfighters, but they are unable to stop the rebels. In his recent TV appearance, Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah called for an all-out mobilization. At the same time, you can see the pressure he is under with regard to the possibility that Israel could launch an initiated move against him now, of all times. He understands that this is a viable option.

“The Shi’ite Muslims are currently preoccupied more by radical Islam than they are by the Jews. In 4-5 years from now, there might be something different in southern Lebanon. In the Golan Heights it’s already happening. The Syrian Army is no longer there. Reality has changed. Frequent terrorist attacks along the border fence can actually begin tomorrow.”

Is there any sort of international move that could bring the war in Syria to an end?

“In my opinion, no. The conflict is stronger than the influence the superpowers can wield. It is a Shi’ite-Sunni conflict. The Russians and the Americans are not a factor. They have some leverage over Assad, but he is only one player among many. Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS do not care about the superpowers.”

When different enemies of Israel are fighting one another, it is not necessarily a bad thing from an Israeli point of view. Do you agree?

“This is a somewhat childish approach, as wars eventually come to an end and then a new reality emerges. Look, Hezbollah will be crippled without Syria, as it will be difficult for them to take delivery of the arms shipments from Iran, and that is important for us. But it is by no means certain that the alternative will be any better. During the Iran-Iraq war in the last century some people said it was the best thing for the Jews – and look where we are today. Even the war in Syria will stabilize eventually, and then we will once again become the common enemy. We must prepare for that.”

Generally, the state Hezbollah is in does not seem to be too good in the summer of 2015…

“Correct. On the one hand, it is not too good. On the other hand, they have thousands of warfighters who are fighting and gaining combat experience, which is less favorable for us.”

So some of the processes you refer to are positive while others are very negative. Bottom line, does time play in our favor or against us?

“I think that no existential threat is currently imposed on the State of Israel as was the case in the Yom-Kippur War of 1973. We share the same interests with many other countries, which is another advantage. From an economic point of view, we are a wonder. We live like they do in America. Consequently, I think that in general our situation is much better than it used to be, but we still face some serious challenges with which we have to cope.

“In my opinion, our greatest challenge is not necessarily an external one, but the fact that we have here a fairly large ‘middle-class-plus’ class, people who live in Israel and really think that we can afford to evade serving in the IDF. These people think that if they travel twice a year to Thailand or to ski somewhere, everything is fine. This is highly problematic, and might change the IDF into something quite different. The economic elite will not be a part of the military game. I think that it is becoming visible. You see it in the amount of youngsters who evade the draft. In my time, the Kibbutz movement provided the manpower for Sayeret Matkal. Today the religious Zionist movement does it. I think it is a problem, not because of the religious Zionist movement, but rather because a major segment of the public does not think that it has to be there.”

Do you anticipate the possibility of a third Palestinian Intifada?

“With regard to the Palestinian issue, we have to aspire to a solution of one kind or another. It is no coincidence that the Palestinians have not launched a third Intifada to this day. They are looking around them, they see what is taking place in Egypt, what is taking place in Syria, and they look at themselves. Overall, despite all of the problems. and there are many problems, their situation is relatively good and they should not worsen it by staging another uprising. On the other hand, a solution must be reached, but that is a political-diplomatic issue so I will not address it.”

What are the effects of the international boycott movement on Israel?

“It is undoubtedly an element in our strategic situation. The boycott phenomenon is a cause for concern and should be addressed. It is worrying mainly because it permeates. It has the potential of influencing people who are 20 today. By the time they are 35, the filth they hear today could influence them. It is important to realize that it is not a spontaneous effort by ‘bleeding-heart liberals’ concerned about human rights. Many people over there are misled by a well-oiled, amply-rewarded machine and a lot of money is being poured into it. Every time you see four Palestinians walk into a supermarket in London and remove Israeli-made products from the shelves – be aware that they are being paid to do it. It is a campaign that we should fight. The State of Israel has a problem fighting it, so pro-Israeli organizations should be encouraged and convinced that it is important to fight against this phenomenon, as Israel should be presented for the positive things it represents. The Palestinians maintain paid activists who conduct a propaganda campaign against Israel in every university campus around the world.”

Does the boycott have any implications with regard to the relations between the Israeli intelligence agencies and similar agencies around the world?

“No. It has no effect whatsoever in that regard. It does have an effect on the decisions made by employee committees, student organizations, lecturer organizations and cultural institutions.”

Is our relationship with the USA in perfect order?

“The strategic relationship is in perfect order.”

And within Israel, are the relations between the various intelligence agencies – the IDF Intelligence Directorate, Mossad and ISA – in perfect order?

“Those relations can always be improved. It is not that we do not have our controversies, but I have never seen, in my entire career, a problem that necessitated cooperation where that cooperation failed to materialize. It is my estimate that there are quite a few arguments even today, but with all due honesty and sincerity, I have never seen a situation where they failed to set aside all of their differences and resolve the problem. The personal relations between the directors of the services themselves are very good. No quarrels, no envy.

“There is no other place anywhere in the world where the inter-organizational relations are as good as they are over here. We have the entire information disseminated by every agency to the others. No one conceals information – this notion never even enters anyone’s mind.”

What about the controversy between the agencies as to who should be responsible for the developments in the Gaza Strip, which in the past was the exclusive intelligence responsibility of the ISA, when the IDF controlled the Gaza Strip?

“This is, indeed, a complex issue. Should the Gaza Strip be regarded as a separate country, another state, and therefore be the responsibility of the Mossad? For years, the people of ISA have said that they are still operating over there. I should imagine they think about how to handle it pursuant to the changing circumstances. They will probably reach some sort of arrangement regarding this issue, too. While the arguments are ongoing, I am still confident that the agencies will not sabotage the operations of one another.”

According to Ram Ben-Barak, “Our next war will be fought against organizations, not against armed forces – and that is a completely different story with regard to the resources to be acquired and our ability to dominate a space and engage individual warfighters. It is a different kind of warfare, not necessarily fought using tanks. These organizations are defeating armed forces all around us. We possess the technology and have to invest money and resources in it and get this technology into the actual fighting, on the land battlefield. It is not a simple undertaking fighting in the alleys of Gaza with a terrorist popping up from every sewage manhole. You should reach a situation where you dominate Gaza without actually conquering it. It is possible if you can create a situation where you can imagine hitting every armed person popping up from the subterranean medium.”

Do you think that the massive investment in intelligence in the context of the strategic force build-up process of the State of Israel is justified?

“Yes, especially with regard to the new battlefield. You must know what to hit and where the enemy is located. For this you must have good intelligence. The investment in intelligence is super important. I think that we should invest more in other things. Large-scale conventional wars are not very common anymore, anywhere around the world. They do not take place, first and foremost, because the outcome normally turns out to be the opposite of what you wanted originally. There is a high price to pay, in money and in human lives, and it is never beneficial politically. We must develop an alternative to war. We should enhance our covert capabilities – and I am not saying that because I come from the Mossad. That is where the future war will take place.”

There is nothing simple about covert warfare. Our enemies are not exactly losers in that field either…

“There is nothing simple about it, to put it mildly. Covert warfare is very challenging. We should invest more in it.”

Is the tremendous worldwide reputation of the Mossad justified?

“I am, of course, biased, but the answer is a resounding yes. I love that organization. It is my home, and I truly think it is an exceptional organization which is even better than what people think. The Mossad is a relatively small organization. It can change very fast, identify the threats and invest and apply the appropriate resources. It is an organization with exceptional people who possess excellent capabilities. It is good that the public does not know everything it does, as that means that we are okay. When people know – it normally means that something went wrong.”

So do you hope to return to the Mossad next year as Director?

“Very much.”

Who, in your opinion, will be selected as the next Director of the Mossad?

“All of the candidates are worthy this time. It is up to the Prime Minister to decide.”

NEW IDF STRATEGY GOES PUBLIC

New IDF Strategy Goes Public
By Michael Herzog
The Washington Institute
August 28, 2015

On August 13, the Israel Defense Forces published a thirty-three-page document titled “IDF Strategy.” This is a shorter, unclassified version of a comprehensive document designed as the conceptual framework for the new IDF five-year plan, “Gideon,” which has yet to be approved by the government.

This document, bearing the imprint of new chief of staff Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, is unique in Israel’s history because it not only defines and bases itself on elements of a national security doctrine, but was also released to the public. Israel has not had a formal, written national security doctrine since the time of its first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. The last attempt at developing one in 2004-2007 (the Meridor Comission), was completed but not put to government approval; the “IDF Strategy” draws on that effort.

The unprecedented publication may be motivated by a desire to shape the lively public debate on prioritizing national resources between security and socioeconomic needs -- specifically, to shift it from a technical discussion of budgetary inputs to a strategic discussion on required security outputs. The new document explores the fundamental changes in Israel’s strategic and operational environment, which has seen rapid, violent upheavals and the collapse or weakening of state frameworks. The high degree of strategic and budgetary uncertainty has left the IDF without a formal government-approved multiyear plan since 2011.

Strategic Shifts

The document highlights several major changes in Israel’s strategic landscape:

1. Extreme, violent, and well-armed substate actors have replaced neighboring state armies as Israel’s main military threat; these include Hezbollah in Lebanon/Syria and Hamas in Gaza (nonstate jihadist elements are also accumulating on Israel’s borders, but for now they do not pose the same level of threat). In the past fifteen years alone, substate actors in the Lebanese and Palestinian theaters have forced Israel into five rounds of major armed conflict.

2. These actors can now target Israel’s civilian population centers and vital strategic facilities with significant firepower, potentially affecting the country’s societal resilience and ability to conduct a continuous war effort. This threat is constantly growing in volume, pace, range, accuracy, payload, and survivability. In addition, sophisticated military capabilities could undermine the IDF’s offensive capacity in the ground, air, and sea theaters. The threat also includes extensive subterranean activities; during last year’s Operation Protective Edge in Gaza, the IDF exposed an extensive network of cross-border tunnels dug by Hamas for offensive purposes.

3. These substate actors are operating from civilian areas in a bid to deny Israel’s freedom of action or undercut the legitimacy of its war effort. This kind of warfare therefore encompasses nonmilitary dimensions such as legal, humanitarian, and media issues.

4. Israel’s political standing in the West has eroded over the years, complicating efforts to gain increasingly needed international legitimacy for fighting armed elements in civilian areas. Clearly, the main cause of this erosion is the unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict, though the document does not explicitly make this point.

5. As the domestic costs of national security grow, so are the pressures to invest more in the economy and society.

Interestingly, the document does not mention the Iranian nuclear threat directly. This has led some commentators to conclude that unlike Israel’s government, the IDF does not attach the same severity to this threat following the P5+1 nuclear agreement. Yet Iran does in fact play an important part of the strategy underlying the document. First, while the IDF does not expect the nuclear threat to come to fruition during the next five-year plan’s timeframe, it does call for enhancing deterrence and maintaining preparedness for potential preemptive strikes against “countries with no joint border [with Israel].” Second, the IDF believes that substate actors “supported by Iran” do pose an imminent threat. Privately, its leadership is troubled by the prospect of these actors enjoying Iranian resources unfrozen by the nuclear deal.

Responding To the Challenge

The IDF identifies three basic situations for the use of force -- Routine, Emergency, and (full-scale) War -- distinguishable from one another by the scope of military and national resources involved and defined by different logics. Although armed conflicts with substate actors usually fall under “Emergency,” the IDF continues to focus its force buildup mostly on “War,” but with added versatility for Emergency. In the latter situation, the IDF could be directed to achieve “military decision” (see below), especially by destroying significant enemy capabilities, or to conduct a limited campaign focusing on strategic targets. Either mission would be designed to eliminate the enemy’s will to fight and achieve long-term deterrence. In Gaza, for example, the IDF would seemingly prefer to apply this concept by using a mixture of debilitating firepower and limited ground operations rather than conquering the territory and fully dismantling Hamas’s military capabilities.

The IDF strategy document assumes a protracted series of armed conflicts with substate actors and strives to force long lulls by achieving and maintaining credible deterrence. It also envisions building “cumulative” deterrence through a series of unequivocal military victories. Yet the new strategic and operational environment has compelled the IDF to redefine deterrence and the two other traditional pillars of its military strategy (early warning and military decision), and to add a fourth pillar: defense.

Deterrence is now defined in terms relative to the nature and diversity of the threat, unlike its near-binary role in preventing full-scale wars. It requires constant boosting, for which purpose the IDF developed the concept of a “campaign between wars” -- namely, clandestine, covert, and overt activities in Routine situations in order to thwart emerging enemy threats, especially the acquisition of specific arms. Early warning is now an element of intelligence superiority, which is to be achieved before and during any armed conflict. The term military decision also assumes a more relative character, corresponding to long-term deterrence, while consistent with the traditional Israeli goal of fighting short conflicts (it is often joined by the amorphous term “victory,” which the document defines as “achieving the political goals set for the campaign, leading to a post-bellum improved security situation”).

The defense pillar has been added to address the significant threat of enemy fire on Israel’s heartland. The most important element of this pillar is the ongoing development of a multilayered active defense system against rockets and missiles. If compelled to prioritize what it will defend first in a given conflict (e.g., when facing Hezbollah’s enormous rocket arsenal), the IDF would focus on preventing disruption of the war effort and protecting critical national infrastructure before protecting civilian centers. The document also takes potential enemy conquest of Israeli territory into consideration, including possible evacuation of civilians (a departure from the Israeli ethos), yet it calls for denying the enemy any territorial gain by the end of the confrontation.

Notwithstanding the growing weight of defense, the IDF continues to prioritize offensive action in both the buildup and employment of its forces. In this context, it strives to rebalance the relationship between firepower and ground maneuver, which has in recent years tilted increasingly toward the former with an overemphasis on achieving significant burnout of enemy capabilities over the course of a conflict. Under the new concept, the two have to reinforce each other, thereby creating synergic and systemic effects. The IDF document sets the goal of preparing tens of thousands of targets in Lebanon and Syria and thousands in Gaza ahead of a conflict, and striking thousands of targets daily during a conflict, including targets of opportunity. To enable this, the IDF is revolutionizing connectivity within and between service branches, combat units, and intelligence assets. Ground maneuvers will be launched from the outset of a conflict (unlike in the 2006 Lebanon war), including a new emphasis on surprise operations aimed at centers of gravity in the enemy’s operational or strategic rear, employing significant ground or special forces led by new command structures. The overall offensive concept is based on maintaining Israel’s qualitative edge as well as its air, naval, and intelligence superiority, and on ensuring critical mass of forces and capabilities.

Finally, the document breaks new ground in devoting attention to the nonkinetic aspects of armed conflict, adopting a multidisciplinary approach toward it. It regards cyberspace as another front, for which a Cyber Arm is being established. It highlights the need to prepare for the war of perceptions and to thoroughly address legal, humanitarian, and information dimensions; that is, Israel must strive to create and maintain political legitimacy for the use of force in order to enhance the IDF’s freedom of action in the current international environment.

Conclusion

The “IDF Strategy” is an important contribution to Israel’s strategic thinking and public discourse on national security. It deserves to be solidified by a governmental national security strategy.

The bottom line is that Israel faces extremely complex challenges in a fast-transforming landscape, posing acute strategic, operational, and domestic dilemmas. These challenges are epitomized by Iranian-supported Hezbollah, with its arsenal of over 100,000 rockets and its capacity to fire over 1,500 daily for weeks. As Israel prepares for the consequences of a nuclear deal that could compound existing uncertainties and threats from Iran’s proxies, the IDF document should provide a sound basis for bilateral U.S.-Israel strategic dialogue on major Israeli security concerns for the coming years.

The West’s supremacy is a relatively new phenomenon in historical terms. Will it last?

September 08, 2015

EXTRACTS FROM THE ARTICLES BELOW

“IT IS FAR SAFER TO BE FEARED THAN LOVED”

William McCants:

The Islamic State’s brutality and its insistence on apocalypse now and caliphate now set it apart from al-Qaeda. We’re used to thinking of Osama bin Laden as the baddest of the bad, but the Islamic State is worse. Bin Laden tamped down messianic fervor and sought popular Muslim support; the return of the early Islamic empire, or caliphate, was a distant dream. In contrast, the Islamic State’s members fight and govern by their own version of Machiavelli’s dictum “It is far safer to be feared than loved.” …

As Zarqawi saw it, the Shi’a had united with the Jews and Christians under the banner of the Antichrist to fight against the Sunnis. The Final Hour must be approaching, to be heralded by the rebirth of the caliphate, the Islamic empire that had disappeared and whose return was prophesied…

The State revels in gore and wants everyone to know it. And yet it has been remarkably successful at recruiting fighters, capturing land, subduing its subjects, and creating a state. Why? Because violence and gore work.

We forget that this terrifying approach to state building has an impressive track record…. [notably in the way] the Saud family and its ultraconservative Wahhabi allies [conquered Arabia]. “The inhabitants made but a feeble resistance; and the conqueror put to the sword all the men and male children of every age. Whilst they executed this horrible butchery, a Wahhabite doctor cried from the top of a tower, “Kill, strangle all the infidels,” a contemporary Wahhabi historian wrote. “We took Karbala and slaughtered and took its people as slaves, then praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds, and we do not apologize for that.”

THE SUPREMACY OF THE WEST IS A RELATIVELY NEW PHENOMENON IN HISTORICAL TERMS

Jason Burke:

In March, Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, the chief spokesman for Islamic State, issued an audio clip to acknowledge a pledge of allegiance from the Nigerian group Boko Haram. This expansion into a part of the world in which it had previously had no presence was something of a coup for his organisation. However, al-Adnani addressed only a few brief sentences to welcoming the west African “brother mujahideen,” devoting most of the 30-minute statement to a lengthy tirade against the Jews, the Crusaders and the “filthy” Shia.

Among the threats he addressed to IS’s various enemies was the following: “We will surely bring back Badr and Uhud… Mutah and Hunayn… Qadisiyyah and Yarmuk. We will surely bring back Yamamah, Hattin and Ayn Jalut. We will bring back Jalawla, Zallaqah and Balat ash-Shahada… I swear, I swear, Nahawand will return.”

To most western observers, this sounds like nonsense, or at the least the sort of invocation of esoteric religious figures, events or concepts by Muslim extremists that has become wearily familiar over recent decades. Yet it would be wrong to dismiss these lines. Though they refer to events which mostly took place hundreds of years ago, they allow a crucial insight into the thinking and world view of IS, as well as many other Islamic militants active today…

Since the 9/11 attacks, there has been much western interest in Islam. Barack Obama, Tony Blair, George Bush and many others have all spoken of the religion as one “of peace.” Others have argued the opposite. But the debate about the nature of the faith and its relation to violent extremism is missing an important element. If we want to understand the world view and aims of IS, and why some people seem attracted to its project, we would do better to focus more on the history of Islam, both as understood by militants and as it actually occurred, than the extraordinarily difficult question of the essential nature of a religion.

One obviously important area of historical inquiry is the life of Mohammed… Quite why Islam spread as fast as it did is still debated…

While for Jews the collective memory of the earliest believers is exile, and for Christians persecution, for Sunni Muslims at least, it is one of the most successful military and political campaigns in history…

Films about military heroes of the early Islamic period, or the battle of Yarmuk or Hattin, often get half a million YouTube views. The reading material of one detained IS fighter, from India, comprised a copy of the Koran and biographies of Saladin and Khalid bin Waleed, a legendary 7th-century Muslim General. This is typical…

The Management of Savagery, an anonymous but highly influential text published around 2004 which is still circulated among extremist leaders and fighters, including those of IS, tells militants that if they capture Algeria they should “begin to prepare for conquering Libya and Egypt the following morning,” while “if the mujahideen are given victory on the Arabian Peninsula, on the following day they must prepare immediately to begin conquering the smaller states which these paltry regimes in Jordan and the Gulf rule.”

“WE MODERATE MUSLIMS MUST SPEAK OUT”

Fethullah Gulen:

It isn’t fair to blame Islam for the atrocities of violent radicals. But when terrorists claim the Muslim mantle, then they bear this identity, if only nominally. Thus members of the faith must do whatever possible to prevent this cancer from metastasizing in our communities. If we don’t, we’ll be partly responsible for the smeared image of our faith…

It’s obvious that mainstream voices are less likely to capture headlines than extremist ones. But instead of blaming the media, we should find innovative ways to ensure our voices are heard… Muslims must publicly promote human rights – dignity, life and liberty…Living the essence of our faith means respecting diversity – cultural, social, religious and political… Finally, it is imperative that Muslims support equal rights for women and men…

Among the latest ISIS atrocities…

Chained upside down and burned alive: ISIS forces four Iraqi Shia prisoners to watch flames inch toward them in latest horrific killing

FULL ARTICLES

How ISIL Out-Terrorized Bin Laden
By William McCants
Politico
August 20, 2015

The American journalist James Foley was beheaded a year ago by an Islamic State fighter in retaliation for U.S. airstrikes on the group. In a video of the brutal act circulated online, Foley’s masked executioner promised more beheadings if the United States didn’t stop attacking the newly-proclaimed caliphate. Three months later, the same fighter beheaded American aid worker Peter Kassig and 18 Syrian soldiers outside the small Syrian town of Dabiq. Although Kassig had converted to Islam, the fighter proclaimed his death to be the first step in fulfilling an ancient Islamic prophecy of an apocalyptic showdown in Dabiq between Muslims and infidels.

The Islamic State’s brutality and its insistence on apocalypse now and caliphate now set it apart from al-Qaeda, of which it was a part until 2014. We’re used to thinking of al-Qaeda’s leader Osama bin Laden as the baddest of the bad, but the Islamic State is worse. Bin Laden tamped down messianic fervor and sought popular Muslim support; the return of the early Islamic empire, or caliphate, was a distant dream. In contrast, the Islamic State’s members fight and govern by their own version of Machiavelli’s dictum “It is far safer to be feared than loved.” They stir messianic fervor rather than suppress it. They want God’s kingdom now rather than later. This is not Bin Laden’s jihad.

In some ways, the difference between Bin Laden and the Islamic State’s leaders is generational. For Bin Laden’s cohort, the apocalypse wasn’t a great recruiting pitch. Governments in the Middle East two decades ago were more stable, and sectarianism was more subdued. It was better to recruit by calling to arms against corruption and tyranny than against the Antichrist. Today, though, the apocalyptic recruiting pitch makes more sense. Titanic upheavals convulse the region in the very places mentioned in the prophecies. Sunnis and Shi’a are at war, both appealing to their own versions of prophecies to justify their politics.

The French scholar of Muslim apocalypticism, Jean-Pierre Filiu, has argued that most modern Sunni Muslims viewed apocalyptic thinking with suspicion before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. It was something the Shi’a or the conspiracy-addled fringe obsessed over, not right-thinking Sunnis.

Sure, the Sunni fringe wrote books about the fulfillment of Islamic prophecies. They mixed Muslim apocalyptic villains in with UFOs, the Bermuda triangle, Nostradamus and the prognostications of evangelical Christians, all to reveal the hidden hand of the international Jew, the Antichrist, who cunningly shaped world events. But the books were commercial duds.

The U.S. invasion of Iraq and the stupendous violence that followed dramatically increased the Sunni public’s appetite for apocalyptic explanations of a world turned upside down. A spate of bestsellers put the United States at the center of the End-Times drama, a new “Rome” careering throughout the region in a murderous stampede to prevent violence on its own shores. The main antagonists of the End of Days, the Jews, were now merely supporting actors.

Even conservative Sunni clerics who had previously tried to tamp down messianic fervor couldn’t help but conclude that “the triple union constituted by the Antichrist, the Jews, and the new Crusaders” had joined forces “to destroy the Muslims.”

The Iraq war also changed apocalyptic discourse in the global jihadist movement. The languid apocalypticism of bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri now had to contend with the urgent apocalypticism of Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi, the founder of al-Qaeda in Iraq, and his immediate successors. Iraq, the site of a prophesied bloodbath between true Muslims and false, was engulfed in a sectarian civil war. As Zarqawi saw it, the Shi’a had united with the Jews and Christians under the banner of the Antichrist to fight against the Sunnis. The Final Hour must be approaching, to be heralded by the rebirth of the caliphate, the Islamic empire that had disappeared and whose return was prophesied.

Because of the impending Final Hour, Zarqawi’s successor, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, quickly dissolved al-Qaeda in Iraq in order to establish the Islamic State in 2006. Masri rushed to found the State because he believed the Mahdi, the Muslim savior, would come within the year. To his thinking, the caliphate needed to be in place to help the Mahdi fight the final battles of the apocalypse. Anticipating the imminent conquest of major Islamic cities as foretold in the prophecies, he ordered his commanders in the field to conquer the whole of Iraq to prepare for the Mahdi’s coming and was convinced they would succeed in three months. The Islamic State’s forces fanned out across the country, only to be recalled a week later because they were spread too thin. When those close to Masri criticized him for making strategic decisions on an apocalyptic timetable, Masri retorted, “the Mahdi will come any day.”

Chastened by his failed predictions that first year, Masri’s messianic ardor cooled. At the same time, the person of the Islamic State’s first commander of the faithful, Abu Umar al-Baghdadi, became more substantial. Iraqis in the Islamic State were unhappy with the power amassed by Masri, an Egyptian, and the other Arab foreign fighters. They gravitated toward Abu Umar, a fellow Iraqi, which enhanced his standing in the organization. As his stature grew, so did the power of his office.

When Masri and Abu Umar were killed in 2010, the new commander of the faithful, Abu Bakr al-Baghadi, brought even greater substance to the office. Also an Iraqi, Baghdadi was supposedly descended from the Prophet and had scholarly credentials his predecessor lacked. Rather than declare Baghdadi the Mahdi, the Islamic State’s scholars argued he was one of the prophesied handful of just caliphs who would rule before the end of the world. The immediacy of the Mahdi’s return and the apocalypse to follow was attenuated in favor of building the institution of the caliphate. Messiah gave way to management. It was a clever way to prolong the apocalyptic expectations of the Islamic State’s followers while focusing them on the immediate task of state building.

Although the messianic fervor has cooled in the Islamic State’s leadership, the group’s apocalyptic rhetoric has intensified. References to the End Times fill Islamic State propaganda. It’s a big selling point with foreign fighters, who want to travel to the lands where the final battles of the apocalypse will take place. The civil wars raging in those countries today lend credibility to the prophecies.

Most people, al-Qaeda’s leaders among them, can’t imagine that political success could come from enraging the masses rather than charming them. But the Islamic State has deliberately provoked the anger of Muslims and non-Muslims alike with its online videos of outrageous and carefully choreographed violence. It showcases the beheading of prisoners – something Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of al-Qaeda today, had expressly warned against – and dumps enemy soldiers in mass graves while the camera is rolling. The State revels in gore and wants everyone to know it. And yet it has been remarkably successful at recruiting fighters, capturing land, subduing its subjects, and creating a state. Why?

Because violence and gore work. We forget that this terrifying approach to state building has an impressive track record. The pagan Mongols used it to great effect in the thirteenth century to conquer land stretching from the Pacific to the Mediterranean. They were far more brutal than the Islamic State, massacring entire towns that refused to surrender in order to discourage anyone else from resisting. The Bible says the ancient Israelites did the same in their conquest of Canaan. More brutal too was the Saud family and its ultraconservative Wahhabi allies, who came to power three times between 1744 and 1926, when the third and last Saudi state was established. A Spanish traveler who saw firsthand the rise of the Wahhabis in their second incarnation describes the scene when their fighters stormed the Shi’i holy city of Karbala in 1801: “The inhabitants made but a feeble resistance; and the conqueror put to the sword all the men and male children of every age. Whilst they executed this horrible butchery, a Wehhabite [ sic] doctor cried from the top of a tower, ‘Kill, strangle all the infidels who give companions to God.’” A contemporary Wahhabi historian wrote, “We took Karbala and slaughtered and took its people [as slaves], then praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds, and we do not apologize for that and say: ‘And to the unbelievers: the same treatment.’” It was one massacre of many, and locals thought twice before resisting.

More recently, the Sunni Taliban came to power in the 1990s in Afghanistan by murdering thousands of unarmed civilians, often Shi’a or ethnic minorities. After capturing cities and villages that resisted, they would line up and gun down the locals, including women and children. According to a report on the Taliban’s recapture of Bamian in 1999, “Hundreds of men and some women and children were separated from their families, taken away, and executed; all of them were noncombatants. In addition, houses were razed to the ground, and some detainees were used for forced labor.”

All these groups were savvy at working with local tribes with whom they had ethnic and religious ties. Some tribes joined for political advantage over their rivals or because they wanted a share in the spoils. Others saw the fight as a religious duty. Still others didn’t want to resist for fear of what would follow. But playing nice with a tribal leader whose followers have guns is not the same thing as trying to win over your average citizen to the cause.

(William McCants is director the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World at the Brookings Institution.)

The truth about the caliphate
By Jason Burke
Prospect Magazine (London)
September 2015 issue

In March, Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, a former stonemason who is the chief spokesman for Islamic State (IS), issued an audio clip to acknowledge a pledge of allegiance from the Nigerian group Boko Haram. This expansion into a part of the world in which it had previously had no presence was something of a coup for his organisation. However, al-Adnani addressed only a few brief sentences to welcoming the west African “brother mujahideen,” devoting most of the 30-minute statement to a lengthy tirade against the Jews, the Crusaders and the “filthy” Shia.

The Battle of Yamama was fought in the Arabian Peninsula during the “Apostate Wars” which followed the death of the Prophet in 632. Yarmuk, a major battle between the Byzantine Empire and Muslim Arab forces, took place in 636. The battles of Jalula, Nahawand and Qadisiya were all roughly contemporaneous victories over the forces of the Sassanid Persian empire; Balat al-Shuhada refers to the Battle of Poitiers in 732 where the Frankish forces repulsed a strong Muslim raiding force. The battle of Sagrajas, known too as Zallaqa, was fought between a local Muslim dynasty’s army against Christian forces in present-day Andalusia in 1086. Hattin took place just over a century later and saw forces under Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, better known in the west as Saladin, destroy a Crusader army.

“If yesterday our forefathers fought the Romans, the Persians and the apostates altogether, on various separate fronts, then we take pride in fighting them today on one front and gathered under one leadership,” al-Adnani told listeners.

One obviously important area of historical inquiry is the life of Mohammed. Dozens of books have been published explaining the centrality of the Prophet within Islam, as well as the consequences of the various imperialist incursions and occupations in the Islamic world since the 19th century. But the 11 centuries between the death of Mohammed in 632 and the arrival of Napoleon in Egypt in 1798 have received less attention outside specialist circles. This is a shame because much of what is happening now can be explained by what happened then – particularly IS’s project. It may allow us some, very qualified, optimism about the long-term prospects for the group.

It was not Mohammed himself but his first four successors who oversaw the campaigns that turned Islam from a new creed restricted to the Arabian Peninsula into a global imperial force. Around half of the historical references cited by al-Adnani in his statement in March occurred during the rules of the caliphs Abu Bakr, Omar, Othman and Ali from 632 until 661. In his book Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes, the Afghan-American writer Tamim Ansary argues that the core religious allegory of Islam – analogous to exodus, bondage and the return to the promised land for the Jews, or the last supper, crucifixion and resurrection of Christ for Christians – is not limited to Mohammed’s life, but includes the reigns of these men too.

Quite why Islam spread as fast as it did is still debated. Some historians suggest it was the military superiority of the early Arab armies that was primarily responsible. The black flags under which contemporary extremists fight, and which they use as idents on their videos and fly above their offices in places like Raqqa, deliberately recall what are imagined to be the battle banners of the earliest Muslim forces. Those troops’ historic success may have been due to extremely capable battlefield leaders, the faith of the fighters, their ability to do without cumbersome supply trains, or flexible and innovative tactics. It may also have been because the faith emerged at a time when the two superpowers of the era – Byzantine Rome and the Persians – had exhausted themselves in centuries of conflict.

The conquests meant that Muslims’ collective memory has a different starting point from that of Jews or Christians. Mohammed did not merely outline a vision of a utopian community to be realised at an unspecified future date but actually built one during his lifetime. That community then transformed much of the known world, through diplomacy, trade, cultural exchange and war. While for Jews the collective memory of the earliest believers is exile, and for Christians persecution, for Sunni Muslims at least, it is one of the most successful military and political campaigns in history.

Moreover, as its great cities expanded and its traders prospered, the new Islamic empire developed into a hugely rich and powerful civilisation. The Umayyads, who ruled from the death of Ali in 661 to 750 from Damascus, continued to acquire new territory, extending their rule as far as the Atlantic coast of the Iberian peninsula to the west and the Indus valley in the east. They gave the new imperial entity a permanence in other ways too. Some of the most famous examples of Islamic architecture – the Great Mosque of Damascus, the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem – date from this period.

The Abbasids, who overthrew the Umayyads in 750, ruled from a series of cities including Baghdad, Raqqa and Samarra, and are credited with ushering in a golden age of Islamic civilisation. By the turn of the first millennium, the new empire had splintered into states run by competing dynasties, but brilliant cultural activity continued, and the various incursions of the Crusaders from the west were eventually repulsed and invasions from the east successfully resisted. Even the catastrophic sack of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258 did not mean the era of the great Islamic rulers was over. Those who had destroyed the great city converted to Islam themselves. Within 200 years, Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks, who went on to conquer much of the Balkans and threaten central Europe. Even as late as the 17th century, no European state, with the arguable exception of Catholic Spain, came close to rivalling the Ottoman empire’s territorial extent, military capability, scientific knowledge and artistic achievement. From Delhi, the Mughals, an Islamic dynasty descended from Mongol converts, dominated south Asia. Their wealth and power were fabulous. Between these two superpowers, the Safavids built their spectacular Shia state in Persia. The contrast with the poor, backward, bickering, strife-torn nations of Europe is striking.

What today’s commentators in London and Washington often forget – and militants repeatedly remind themselves and anyone else prepared to listen – is that the supremacy of the west is a relatively new phenomenon in historical terms. Across much of the world, for two thirds of the last 1,300 years, the power, the glory and the wealth was, broadly speaking, Islamic. The story of the caliphate, both as historical reality and as imagined by extremists like those of the Islamic State, can only be understood within the context of this overarching narrative, as the means by which the militants seek to return the world’s Muslim community to what it sees as its rightful status: a global superpower.

When Mohammed died, he left no clear instructions as to who should succeed him and also gave no indication of what sort of leadership the Muslim community should expect in his absence. Many questions were unanswered. What would a successor’s powers actually be? Would he have a spiritual role as well as a temporal one? Would there be a succession at all?

When the elderly Abu Bakr was chosen to lead the Muslims after a debate among the close associates of the Prophet, he was designated the caliph, which simply means deputy. No formal decision on his powers was taken. The caliphate was thus, from the beginning, an ad hoc arrangement, not a specifically designed institution, and no consensus has ever been reached on exactly what role the caliph plays.

It was perhaps inevitable that the office would become the subject of fierce competition and conflict. The split over the first succession became the division between the Shia and the Sunnis. Three of the first four caliphs also died violently at the hands of fellow believers. The Umayyad caliphate was, and remains, deeply controversial. Its replacement by the Abbasids led to the creation of a rival caliphate in Andalusia. Another arose in Egypt. This chaos and competition continued over the centuries. The title eventually ended up with the Ottoman sultans, from the 16th century to the 20th. But by then these various conflicts had undermined the credibility of the institution. As the modern era dawned, there was little left of the awesome grandeur that the title had once evoked. The link to the men who had built the Islamic empire had long been broken.

When Kemal Atatürk, the modernising ruler of Turkey, effectively abolished the caliphate in 1924, there was uproar in many parts of the Islamic world but no effective resistance. Atatürk dispatched the last caliph into ignominious exile in France. The institution lapsed into redundancy, existing theoretically, but not physically. Undefined, incorporeal, the caliphate was ripe for reinventing.

Within less than a decade of the caliphate’s abolition, activists within the Islamic world had begun to see its restoration as the panacea to all its ills. One of the first to do so was Hassan al-Banna, the Egyptian schoolteacher who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928. By the 1990s, a new wave of violent militants would also be calling for a restoration of the caliphate, among them Osama bin Laden, the founder of al-Qaeda, and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the group’s present leader. For them, as for their predecessors, the institution represented a return to the days when Islamic sovereigns were feared and respected by western rulers.

But bin Laden and al-Zawahiri saw such a restoration as a distant goal, unlikely to be realised in their own lifetimes. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of IS, did not share this long-term vision and last year took the unilateral decision to re-establish the caliphate shortly after seizing the city of Mosul. He appointed himself at its head. Not long afterwards, al-Baghdadi, a former religious studies student and veteran militant, issued a message that summed up the world view not just of IS but of all Islamic extremists active today.

First and foremost, the caliphate would allow Muslims to heal the damage done by centuries of western dominance, through dismantling all the structures it had imposed. “The Muslims were defeated after the fall of their caliphate,” al-Baghdadi wrote. “Then their state ceased to exist, so the unbelievers were able to weaken and humiliate the Muslims, dominate them in every region, plunder their wealth and resources, and rob them of their rights. They accomplished this by attacking and occupying their lands, placing their treacherous agents in power to rule the Muslims with an iron fist, and spreading dazzling and deceptive slogans such as civilisation, peace, coexistence, freedom, democracy, secularism, Baathism, nationalism and patriotism, among other falsehoods.”

Surveying the Islamic world, al-Baghdadi described sectarian clashes everywhere from Burma to the Central African Republic. He listed alleged atrocities, including repression of Muslims in western China, the ban on the hijab in France, “the destruction of Muslims’ homes in Palestine, prisons everywhere full of Muslims, the seizing of Muslims’ lands, the violation and desecration of Muslims’ sanctuaries and families” and the “propagation of adultery,” though quite where this final crime was occurring was left unclear. All this violence was attributed to the west and aggregated into a single global conflict between belief and unbelief, between the west and their proxies in the Islamic world and true Muslims. The solution was the caliphate.

“Raise your head high, for today – by Allah’s grace – you have a state and caliphate, which will return your dignity, might, rights and leadership… rush O Muslims to your state. Yes, it is your state. Rush, because Syria is not for the Syrians, and Iraq is not for the Iraqis. The earth is Allah’s.”

That this might be attractive to young men in the chaos-hit countries of the Middle East is not difficult to understand. There has been much interest in the apocalyptic tone of so much of IS’s rhetoric. Yet although this is undoubtedly present the historical element is just as powerful and possibly more widespread. Films about military heroes of the early Islamic period, or the battle of Yarmuk or Hattin, often get half a million YouTube views. The reading material of one detained IS fighter, from India, comprised a copy of the Koran and biographies of Saladin and Khalid bin Waleed, a legendary 7th-century Muslim General. This is typical. As with all Islamic militant groups, the names taken by recruits are almost all those of important personalities from the first decades of the faith. In his speech at the mosque in Mosul in July last year, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi cited entire paragraphs taken from the acceptance speech of his namesake the caliph Abu Bakr some 1,400 years earlier. That he should do so, and thus claim the legacy of a man revered by a lot of Muslims, angered many.

For most Muslims, al-Baghdadi’s hubristic announcement does not make him caliph at all; it simply makes him the latest of a long line of religious revivalist leaders, of all faiths, who have claimed the right to lead a given religious community to redemption. But while his claim to the title may have been dismissed by all major Islamic religious authorities, and most minor ones too, none would dispute its subtext: the resurrection not simply of a title but of the power, dignity, wealth and military renown of Muslim rulers from the 7th to the 18th centuries.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his followers have not simply revived the caliphate but reinvented it. This has some important strategic implications for the west. Until the emergence of IS, the territorial extent of any putative caliphate was fairly well defined, broadly limited to the historic extent of the great empires – Abbasid, Mughal, possibly Ottoman – with the addition of Muslim-majority parts of the Asia Pacific region and Africa. It does not seem to have occurred to extremist thinkers in the 1960s and 1970s that they might attack the west directly, let alone conquer western nations. Speaking in the 1980s at the end of the war in Afghanistan against the Soviets, Abdallah Azzam, the best-known ideologue among the leaders of the foreign legion of largely Middle Eastern fighters in that conflict, had spoken of the “mujahideen” liberating areas from southern Spain (once a Muslim state) to the Far East, but not beyond. The Management of Savagery, an anonymous but highly influential text published around 2004 which is still circulated among extremist leaders and fighters, including those of IS, tells militants that if they capture Algeria they should “begin to prepare for conquering Libya and Egypt the following morning,” while “if the mujahideen are given victory on the Arabian Peninsula, on the following day they must prepare immediately to begin conquering the smaller states which these paltry regimes in Jordan and the Gulf rule.” It does not, however, mention any major operations outside what is usually defined as the Islamic world. There is no evidence that either bin Laden or al-Zawahiri ever envisaged invading western nations either.

The imagined borders of IS’s caliphate are still unclear. In his statement ostensibly welcoming Boko Haram in March, al-Adnani sent mixed signals. He said that the Muslims would “return to mastership and leadership in every place” and listed a dozen cities within the Islamic world. But he also threatened to “destroy the White House, Big Ben, and the Eiffel Tower… just as [Muslim armies] destroyed the palace of [the Persian monarch] Chosroes [at Ctesiphon in Iraq in 637]” before stating bluntly that the group “want Paris” and “will enter Rome.” Al-Baghdadi himself, in an audio tape in July last year, told his fighters that “brothers all over the world” were waiting for their arrival and, if they followed his orders, they would enter “Rome.” Rome, for the early Muslims, meant Byzantium. Do al-Adnani and al-Baghdadi actually mean the capital of Italy? It seems unlikely that they mean Istanbul.

A new vision of the extent of the caliphate does appear to be emerging, in which the new Islamic superpower is no longer constrained by the boundaries of earlier Islamic empires. A British fighter with IS, writing in June this year, promised that: “When we descend on the streets of London, Paris and Washington the taste will be far bitterer [sic] because not only will we spill your blood but we will also demolish your statues, erase your history and most painfully convert your children who will go on to… curse their forefathers.” Others have spoken (with hyperbole) of flying the black flag of IS over the White House.

This new vision of a genuinely global caliphate may sound like bad news for the west. Yet this is not entirely the case. IS may have deployed this new global vision precisely because it faces key vulnerabilities. It is, after all, only a fractured coalition of different extremist strands and groups which have been empowered first by a decade of violent conflict from 2001, and then by the failings of policymakers in Iraq and Syria after the Arab Spring. IS rules by a mixture of threats of horrific violence, the provision of some basic services, exploiting a Sunni fear of Shia domination and the promise of a degree of security. If it can no longer deliver on any of these then its current power may start to wane.

For decades, when faced by significant challenges, Islamic militant groups have “gone global.” Al-Qaeda emerged following the check of local campaigns in the early 1990s around the Islamic world. Algerian militants joined al-Qaeda’s international network in 2009, when it was clear that almost 20 years of efforts in their own neighbourhood had failed. Their leaders admitted they hoped for “breathing space” and a “change of image.” Commanders attracted to IS in Afghanistan currently are often those who have lost out in internal power plays. Factions of al-Shabab in Somalia were drawn to the more global vision as their hold on terrain shrank and internal disputes sharpened.

Continued expansion is key to the group’s survival. One reason for the successful campaigns of the early Muslims was that every victory appeared to justify the claim that “Islam was the solution.” Many battles were won before being fought, with defections or surrenders bringing them huge amounts of territory. Leaders of IS, and their recruits, clearly believe that they too are now executing God’s projects on earth.

Yet as with all such claims, this cuts both ways. For if IS starts to lose significant amounts of ground, or even stops gaining new territory, then the group’s credibility will be significantly damaged, as it will if al-Baghdadi is killed. Its followers understand that those favoured by God are tested, but they are not usually repeatedly defeated.

When this has happened previously, rulers in the Islamic world have turned to other resources to bolster their legitimacy and support. Sometimes this simply involved paying off key figures. Sometimes it involved disseminating new interpretations of Islam. But neither tactic is likely to work for IS for long. Neither ploy will allow it to fulfil the threats or the promises on which its current power depends.

A series of reverses, especially if al-Baghdadi is somehow eliminated, will probably fragment IS permanently. Given luck and a scintilla of sense among regional powers as well as international ones, the organisation may be relatively rapidly reduced to a much-weakened remnant that is bothersome rather than dangerous. In the short term, sadly, however, this is something to be hoped for, rather than anticipated.

(Jason Burke is a New Delhi-based correspondent covering South Asia for the British papers The Observer and The Guardian.)

Muslims Must Combat the Extremist Cancer
By Fethullah Gulen
Wall Street Journal
August 27, 2015

As the group that calls itself Islamic State, known as ISIS, continues to produce carnage in the Middle East, Muslims must confront the totalitarian ideology that animates it and other terrorist groups. Every terrorist act carried out in the name of Islam profoundly affects all Muslims, alienating them from fellow citizens and deepening the misperceptions about their faith’s ethos.

First, we must denounce violence and not fall prey to victimhood. Having suffered oppression is no excuse for causing it or for failing to condemn terrorism. That the terrorists are committing grave sins in the name of Islam is not merely my opinion; it is the inevitable conclusion of an honest reading of primary sources: the Quran and the accounts of the life of Prophet Muhammad. The core principles of these sources – relayed over the centuries by scholars who devoted themselves to studying the Prophet’s sayings and practices, and to the “author’s intent” in the Holy Book – dispels any claims terrorists make of religious justification.

Second, it is important to promote a holistic understanding of Islam, as the flexibility to accommodate the diverse backgrounds of its adherents can sometimes be abused. Islam’s core ethics, however, are not left to interpretation. One such principle is that taking the life of a single innocent is a crime against all humanity (Quran 5:32). Even in an act of defense in war, violence against any noncombatants, especially women, children and clergy, is specifically prohibited by the Prophet’s teachings.

We must demonstrate these values by showing solidarity with people who seek peace around the world. Given the nature of human psychology and the dynamics of the news, it’s obvious that mainstream voices are less likely to capture headlines than extremist ones. But instead of blaming the media, we should find innovative ways to ensure our voices are heard.

Third, Muslims must publicly promote human rights – dignity, life and liberty. These are the most basic of Islamic values and no individual, nor any political or religious leader, has the authority to snatch them away. Living the essence of our faith means respecting diversity – cultural, social, religious and political. God identifies learning from one another as the primary goal of diversity (Quran 49:13). Respecting each human being as a creation of God (17:70) is respecting God.

Fourth, Muslims must provide educational opportunities to every member of their communities, where the study of sciences, humanities and arts is embedded in a culture of respect for every living being. Governments in the Muslim world must design school curricula that nurture democratic values. Civil society has a role in promoting respect and acceptance. This is the reason participants of the Hizmet movement have set up more than 1,000 schools, tutoring centers and dialogue institutions in more than 150 countries.

Fifth, providing religious education to Muslims is critical to depriving extremists of a tool that they use to spread their twisted ideologies. When religious freedom is denied, as it has been for decades in parts of the Muslim world, faith grows in the shadows, leaving it to be interpreted by unqualified and radical figures.

Finally, it is imperative that Muslims support equal rights for women and men. Women should be given opportunity and be free from social pressures that deny their equality. Muslims have a great example in Prophet Muhammad’s wife Aisha, a highly educated scholar, teacher and prominent community leader of her time.

Terrorism is a multifaceted problem, so the solutions should address the political, economic, social and religious layers. Approaches that reduce the problem to religion do a disservice to at-risk youth and the world at large. The international community would do well to realize that Muslims are the primary victims of terrorism – both literally and symbolically – and they can help marginalize terrorists and prevent recruitment. That’s why governments should avoid statements and actions that result in the alienation of Muslims.

Violent extremism has no religion; there will always be people who manipulate faith texts. Just as Christians do not endorse Quran burnings or the actions of the Ku Klux Klan, and Buddhists do not endorse atrocities against Rohingya Muslims, mainstream Muslims do not endorse violence.

Muslims have historically added much to the flourishing of human civilization. Our greatest contributions were made in eras when the faith cherished mutual respect, freedom and justice. It may be immensely difficult to restore the blotted image of Islam, but Muslims can be beacons of peace and tranquility in their societies.

(Mr. Gulen is an Islamic scholar and founder of the Hizmet civil-society movement.)

TV “told not to broadcast images of refugee children” (& Norway’s anti-Semitic credit card)

September 02, 2015

[Notes below by Tom Gross]

HUNGARIAN TV “TOLD NOT TO BROADCAST IMAGES OF REFUGEE CHILDREN”

There are a number of items below connected to anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism (and its modern offshoot extreme, anti-Israelism) isn’t only a Jewish problem. The failure to properly acknowledge and confront such prejudices by many Europeans (with notable exceptions among them, German Chancellor Angela Merkel) is symptomatic of the wider racism we are now seeing directed against refugees in Europe. Even when thousands are dying at sea and dozens in trucks and tunnels, few Europeans seem to care too much.

The media in many countries are downplaying what is going on. See for example: Hungarian TV “told not to broadcast images of refugee children”

In the Czech Republic, there is a deep unease among Jewish and other groups after police inked numbered tattoos on the forearms of refugees last week.

Last weekend, the British paper the Financial Times devoted considerable space to “asylum seekers” in Israel – where no one has been killed or injured – while given scant coverage to the deaths of 71 adults and children in a lorry in Austria, or the hundreds who died last week in the Mediterranean.

The Syrians are not “migrants” as papers such as The Independent call them. They are refugees fleeing hideous barrel bombs, chemical weapons, rape and beheadings.

It is worth looking at these pictures.

This is Europe in the summer of 2015, but European street protests continue mostly to be directed at Israel.

(Among previous recent dispatches concerning refugees, please see here.)

NORWEGIAN BANK APOLOGIZES FOR ISSUING ANTI-SEMITIC CREDIT CARD

One of Norway’s biggest banks, DNB, has withdrawn their Visa credit card (pictured above) after a Norwegian-Israeli friendship society complained that the card featured a hook-nosed Jew, gleefully laughing against a backdrop of gold coins. The image is reminiscent of the anti-Semitism in Norway during the pro-Nazi Quisling era.

The bank claimed they hadn’t chosen the design themselves but the image was the result of customers being allowed to choose and upload their own card designs, a policy the bank says they are now reviewing. The bank has apologized for the anti-Semitic card.

SPANISH BROADCASTER REMOVES “JEWISH SATANISM” SHOW FROM ITS WEBSITE

Spanish state radio broadcaster RTVE has apologized for airing a 30-minute program accusing Jews of worshiping Satan and trying to undermine the world.

Even after critics complained, the program remained on the RTVE website until a few days ago.

The program, titled “From the Inferno – The Jewish People: Propagator of the Satan Cult,” was based on a notoriously anti-Semitic book written by a group of Catholic priests in 1962, called the “Plot Against the Church”.

Critics said the program contained “a full half-hour of unadulterated anti-Jewish conspiracy theories”.

The controversy comes days after an international outcry over the disinvitation of the American Jewish reggae singer Matisyahu from a music festival in Spain over his refusal to denounce Israel.

SWISS FOREIGN MINISTRY SAYS SORRY FOR CARTOON OF BIRDS DEFECATING ON NETANYAHU

The Swiss Foreign Ministry has apologized to Israel after the Swiss ambassador to Iran put on display a cartoon (above) in which two doves defecate on the head of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Ambassador Giulio Haas displayed the image on a large screen last Thursday while addressing hundreds of Swiss and Iranian businesspeople at a conference in Zurich promoting renewed trade ties between the two countries.

The Reuters news agency reported that the Swiss Department of Foreign Affairs said it “regrets the use of this cartoon. Ambassador Haas did not intend to insult anybody with the cartoon. If that is the case, however, he regrets it and seeks the pardon of everyone who could have felt insulted.”

Many Jews felt the “apology” was less than fully sincere.

Even more shocking than the cartoon, according to observers, was the content of his speech, in which Haas lavished praise on the regime in Teheran.

LUXEMBOURG’S BIGGEST SUPERMARKET CHAIN STOPS SELLING ISRAELI PRODUCTS

Cactus, the largest supermarket chain in Luxembourg, has stopped selling Israeli products. This follows months of sometimes rowdy protests at their stores by anti-Israel activists – the same people who don’t come out and protest when thousands of refugees die trying to reach the safety of Europe.

A Cactus spokesman said that the relatively small profits generated from the limited range of Israeli fruit and vegetable on sale was no longer worth the disturbance and cost of paying security guards to protect customers.

CHINESE CONGLOMERATE IGNORES BDS PROTESTS, BUYS MAJORITY STAKE IN AHAVA

While the Luxembourg case is being touted as a victory by the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement, the Israeli economy continues to thrive in many ways.

Yesterday China’s largest privately owned business conglomerate, Fosun International, bought a majority stake in Israel’s Ahava Dead Sea skincare and cosmetics company for $76.5 million.

Ahava, which has long been a target of the BDS movement (with sometimes violent protests affecting its British outlets, for example), is expected to make a major breakthrough into the Chinese cosmetics markets.

Among other recent dispatches on BDS: Dilemma for Israel boycotters as scientists make HIV breakthrough (& The Palestinian case against BDS)

TWO INJURED AS JEWISH FOOTBALL TEAM ATTACKED IN BERLIN

Two players were injured in a brawl on Sunday in Berlin during a football (soccer) match between BFC Meteor and a newly formed Jewish team, TuS Makkabi III. The fight erupted after anti-Semitic slurs, such as “Jewish pigs” and “dirty Jews,” were directed at the Jewish players.

The referee abandoned the match 10 minutes into the second half after the police were called. Four people were arrested for causing bodily harm.

The Berlin office of the American Jewish Committee, which has two members of staff on the Makkabi team, called on the Berlin Football Association to take action, noting that there were increasing incidents of anti-Semitism at German football games.

***

Investigators in Bulgaria say that anti-Semitism may be behind the mass food poisoning of Israel’s Maccabi Petah Tikva youth soccer team at a hotel in Sofia last month.

Following the poisoning, members of the team suffered from stomachaches, diarrhea, vomiting and some even fainted. Several were hospitalized.

Shortly before the poisoning the team had sung traditional Shabbat songs in the hotel at a Friday evening dinner, apparently infuriating some hotel workers.

MAN ARRESTED FOR ATTACK ON PARIS SYNAGOGUE

French troops guarding a synagogue and Jewish school have arrested a man who threw rocks at them on Thursday in the Paris suburb of Auvervilliers.

The troops were posted outside the school after the murder of four Jews in January at the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket in eastern Paris, one of a wave of violent assaults on French Jews.

Following that attack, the French government ordered 10,000 soldiers and police to guard hundreds of Jewish schools, synagogues and community centers throughout France.

In spite of this, attacks on individual Jews have continued and a record number of French Jews are in the process of emigrating to the relative safety of Israel this year.

VISITORS COMPLAIN ABOUT “COOL DOWN” SHOWERS AT AUSCHWITZ

The Polish authorities at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp have been criticized for installing showers at the entrance to the site, where over a million Jews were exterminated in gas chambers disguised as showers.

The authorities defended their actions in a Facebook post, saying they had merely wanted to let visitors cool off while wandering around the camp in the summer heatwave Poland has been experiencing.

More than 100,000 others, including non-Jewish Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and anti-Nazi resistance fighters, also died at Auschwitz.

PRINCE ALBERT OF MONACO APOLOGIZES FOR HIS COUNTRY’S DEPORTATION OF JEWS

In a speech on Thursday, Prince Albert II of Monaco asked Jews to forgive his country for its round up and deportation to Nazi death camps of its small Jewish population 73 years ago. Prince Albert unveiled a monument carved with the names of the 66 deported Jews. They were rounded up on the night of Aug. 27-28, 1942. Only nine survived.

The Prince added that he was deeply sorry that it had taken the government 73 years to apologize.

A palace official told the Associated Press that this was the first public acknowledgement of Monaco’s complicity in the Holocaust. The official compared it to French President Jacques Chirac’s landmark 1997 speech admitting for the first time the complicity of the French state in the Holocaust, in rounding up tens of thousands of French Jews and handing them over to the Nazis, while stealing their property.

JEWISH CAFE RE-OPENS IN SHANGHAI

Shanghai’s White Horse Cafe – famous as a popular meeting place for Jewish refugees during World War II – has reopened.

Ron Klinger, 74, the grandson of the café’s co-founder, who grew up in the cafe, said in a speech at the reopening that “The White Horse was like cafe, bar and nightclub. It was very popular, a place of refuge for Jews who had escaped the Nazis.”

The cafe is located next to the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum. Shanghai was one of the few cities in the world that allowed Jews to take refuge and about 20,000 Jews lived there during the Holocaust.

Yesterday, Israel also released this one-minute video thanking the people of Shanghai. It features survivors and their children and grandchildren.

You can watch it here.

(More, here, in Chinese.)

LABOUR’S CORBYN CRITICIZED FOR SUPPORTING PALESTINIANS WHO BOMBED JEWISH CHARITY

In the latest of a long line of controversies involving Jews, it has emerged that Jeremy Corbyn – the clear favorite to become leader of Britain’s main opposition Labour Party next week – was a key activist in the campaign for the release of two terrorists jailed for their involvement in the car bombing of a Jewish charity and of the Israeli embassy in London.

Jawad Botmeh and Samar Alami were convicted for their roles in the 1994 bombings at the charity’s office in Balfour House, and at the Israeli embassy. The pair were sentenced to 20 years in prison but were released in 2008.

Corbyn repeatedly campaigned for their release, claiming that there had been “a miscarriage of justice”. But Crown prosecutors said evidence linking them to the car bombs was “overwhelming”.

(Among past dispatches on Corbyn, see here.)

IRAN BARS DANIEL BARENBOIM FROM CONCERT OVER ISRAELI CITIZENSHIP

Internationally renowned conductor Daniel Barenboim has been banned by the Iranian authorities from accompanying his Berlin orchestra for a performance in Tehran because he is Israeli.

Iranian culture ministry spokesman Hossein Noushabadi said the Berlin orchestra was welcome, but they would have to find a replacement conductor and Barenboim would be banned.

Barenboim, an Argentinean-born Jew who has long campaigned for Palestinian statehood, also holds Palestinian citizenship as well as an Israeli one.

“Our investigation revealed that the conductor has nationality and identity dependent to Israel, was raised in Israel and his parents also lived in Israel,” Noushabadi said (in poor English).

ISIS-AFFILIATED TERRORISTS FIRE ROCKET AT ISRAEL BUT HIT GAZA

Terrorists in Gaza who have affiliated themselves with the Islamic State yesterday fired two rockets from Gaza in the direction of the Israeli city of Ashkelon, but it fell short and exploded in Gaza. One hit a house, injuring a number of Palestinians.

The rocket was fired at Israel’s civilian population just hours before two million Israeli children began the new Israeli school year. An Islamic faction affiliated with the Islamic State operating out of Gaza claimed responsibility.

I mention this item because hardly any international media reported on it. During last year’s war many Palestinians were killed and injured by rockets fired from Gaza that fell short and landed in Gaza.

[Notes above by Tom Gross]