Mideast Dispatch Archive: December 2015 Archives

Mohammed: “Surrender (i.e. convert to Islam) and you will be safe” (& “President Edward Snowden”?)

December 21, 2015

* Western leaders invariably respond to Islamist violence with pronouncements about Islam’s peacefulness.

* But the claim that Islam is a “religion of peace” first appeared less than 100 years ago.

* Mark Durie: The West is in the throes of acute cognitive dissonance over Islam, whose brands are at war with each other. On the one hand we are told that Islam is the religion of peace. On the other hand we are confronted with an unending sequence of acts of terror committed in the name of the faith.

* The slogan “religion of peace” has been steadily promoted by Western leaders in response to terrorism: Bush and Chirac used it after 9/11, Blair after 7/7, Cameron after British tourists were slaughtered in Tunisia, and Hollande after the Charlie Hebdo killings. After the beheading of 21 Copts on a Libyan beach Obama called upon the world to “continue to lift up the voices of Muslim clerics and scholars who teach the true peaceful nature of Islam.”

* Islam was first called the “religion of peace” as late as 1930, in the title of a book published in India. The phrase was slow to take off, but by the 1970s it was appearing more and more frequently in the writings of Muslims for Western audiences.

* Words for “peace” in European languages imply the absence of war, and freedom from disturbance… [But] in Arabic the word Islam is based upon a military metaphor. Derived from aslama (surrender) its primary meaning is to make oneself safe (salama) through surrender. In its original meaning, a Muslim was someone who surrendered in warfare.

* It was Muhammad himself who said to his non-Muslim neighbors aslim taslam, “surrender (i.e. convert to Islam) and you will be safe.”

FROM THE DAYS BEFORE AIR TRAVEL WAS THREATENED BY TERRORISM

[Note by Tom Gross]

I attach three pieces below that ask whether there a “moderate Islam” and whether “Islam is reformable”.

Before that, here are two lighter items to balance the more serious ones.

***

Scrolling through these photos may be amuse (or bemuse) you:

Flying in the Sixties: what air passengers did before in-flight entertainment.

(London) Daily Telegraph (December 18, 2015)

The captions on this series of photos are pretty funny.

RT 2035 PROMO: “PRESIDENT EDWARD SNOWDEN”

The Russian government-funded channel RT celebrates its 10th birthday this month with a satirical look at life when RT turns 30, in December 2035: Featuring Obama and Kerry in retirement and “President Edward Snowden”.

You can watch it here. Make of it what you will.

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

CONTENTS

1. “Here’s where the phrase ‘Islam is a religion of peace’ came from. Politicians should stop using it.” (By Mark Durie, Independent Journal Review, Dec. 16, 2015)
2. “Is there a ‘moderate’ Islam?” (By Irshad Manji and Mohammed Dajani, Washington Institute Talk, Dec. 16, 2015)
3. “Is Islam reformable?” (By Amil Imani, American Thinker, Dec. 17, 2015)

ARTICLES

RELIGION OF PEACE OR OF SURRENDER?

Here’s Where the Phrase ‘Islam Is A Religion of Peace’ Came From. Politicians Should Stop Using It.
By Mark Durie
Independent Journal Review
December 16, 2015

Days after the ISIS-inspired terrorist attack in San Bernardino, President Obama’s address to the nation concerning the threat of ISIS missed the mark. In fact, President Obama seemed at times to be more concerned with Americans ostracizing Muslim communities through “suspicion and hate” than he was with protecting innocent American civilians from murder in the name of radical Islam.

It is high time for Western political leaders to stop responding to terrorism by naming Islam as “the religion of peace.” It is time to have a hard conversation about Islam.

The West is in the throes of acute cognitive dissonance over Islam, whose brands are at war with each other. On the one hand we are told that Islam is the religion of peace. On the other hand we are confronted with an unending sequence of acts of terror committed in the name of the faith.

There is a depressing connection between the two brands: the louder one brand becomes, the more the volume is turned up on the other.

The slogan “religion of peace” has been steadily promoted by Western leaders in response to terrorism: George W. Bush and Jacques Chirac after 9/11, Tony Blair after 7/7, David Cameron after drummer Lee Rigby was beheaded and after British tourists were slaughtered in Tunisia, and François Hollande after the Charlie Hebdo killings. After the beheading of 21 Copts on a Libyan beach Barack Obama called upon the world to “continue to lift up the voices of Muslim clerics and scholars who teach the true peaceful nature of Islam.”

One may well ask how “the religion of peace” became a brand of Islam, for the phrase cannot be found in the Qur’an, nor in the teachings of Muhammad.

Islam was first called the “religion of peace” as late as 1930, in the title of a book published in India by Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi. The phrase was slow to take off, but by the 1970s it was appearing more and more frequently in the writings of Muslims for Western audiences.

What does “religion of peace” actually mean?

Words for “peace” in European languages imply the absence of war, and freedom from disturbance. It is no coincidence that the German words Friede (peace) and frei (free) sound similar, because they come from the same root.

While there is a link in Arabic between salam, a word often translated “peace,” and Islam, the real connection is found in the idea of safety.

The word Islam is based upon a military metaphor. Derived from aslama (surrender) its primary meaning is to make oneself safe (salama) through surrender. In its original meaning, a Muslim was someone who surrendered in warfare.

Thus, Islam did not stand for the absence of war, but for one of its intended outcomes: surrender leading to the “safety” of captivity. It was Muhammad himself who said to his non-Muslim neighbors aslim taslam, “surrender (i.e. convert to Islam) and you will be safe.”

The religion of peace slogan has not gone uncontested. It has been rejected by many, including Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Melanie Phillips writing for The Times, who called it “pure myth.” Even among Muslims the phrase has not only been challenged by radical clerics such as Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, but also by mainstream Muslim leaders.

Sheikh Ramadan Al-Buti of Syria was one of the most widely respected traditionalist Sunni scholars before he was killed in 2013 by a suicide bomber. The year before he had been listed as number 27 in The Muslim 500 (http://themuslim500.com), an annual inventory of the most influential Muslims in the world. According to Al-Buti, the claim that Islam is a peaceful religion was a “falsehood” imposed upon Muslims by Westerners to render Islam weak. He argued in The Jurisprudence of the Prophetic Biography that when non-Muslims fear Islamic jihad, their initial inclination is to accuse the religion of being violent. However they then change tack and craftily feed to Muslims the idea that Islam is peaceful, in order to make it so. He laments the gullibility of “simple-minded Muslims” who: “readily accept this ‘defense’ as valid and begin bringing forth one piece of evidence after another to demonstrate that Islam is, indeed, a peaceable, conciliatory religion which has no reason to interfere in others’ affairs. ... The aim … is to erase the notion of jihad from the minds of all Muslims.”

There does seem to be something to Al-Buti’s theory, for it has invariably been after acts of violence done in the name of Islam that Western leaders have seen fit to make theological pronouncements about Islam’s peacefulness. Who are they trying to convince?

In the long run this cannot be a fruitful strategy. It invites mockery, such as Palestinian cleric Abu Qatada’s riposte to George Bush’s declaration that “Islam is peace.” Abu Qatada asked: “Is he some kind of Islamic scholar?”

We do need to have a difficult conversation about Islam. This is only just beginning, and it will take a long time. The process will not be helped by the knee-jerk tendency of Western leaders to pop up after every tragedy trying to have the last word on Islam. This strategy has failed, and it is time to go deeper.

IS THERE A “MODERATE” ISLAM?

Is There a ‘Moderate’ Islam?
Irshad Manji and Mohammed Dajani
Washington Institute Talk
December 16, 2015

On December 11, Irshad Manji and Mohammed Dajani addressed a Policy Forum at The Washington Institute. Manji is the founder and director of the Moral Courage Project at New York University and author of the book “Allah, Liberty, and Love” (2011). Dajani (a Palestinian) is the founder of the Wasatia movement of moderate Islam, and former director of the American Studies Program at al-Quds University in Jerusalem. (Both are recipients of these Middle East dispatches.) The following is a summary of their remarks.

IRSHAD MANJI:

The difference between “reformist” Muslims and “moderates” is not semantic. The latter term is misleading because many “moderate” Muslims exhibit all the traits of orthodoxy, including dogma and a fear of challenging their communities’ groupthink. The qualities associated with religious moderation are positive and desirable as a goal, but they are inadequate as a means to realize positive change in Islam. Although Islam has the potential to be wise and tolerant, it has been deeply corrupted, and rooting out this corruption requires something more potent -- even radical -- than moderation. It requires reform. As Martin Luther King Jr. said about a racially segregated America, moderation in times of moral crisis is a cop-out.

The good news is that a new generation of Muslims is increasingly using the word “reformist” to describe their pluralist and humanist aspirations for Islam. Their vision for “reformist Islam” is not one that merely abstains from terrorism. It includes dignity for gays and lesbians, full equality for women, respect for religious minorities, and tolerance for different points of view. In all likelihood, a critical mass of this generation’s Muslims will provide audible calls and visible evidence for each of these principles.

Society should seek out and support budding reformists, just as humanist Christians and secularists in eighteenth-century Germany rallied behind reformers of an insular, walled-off Judaism. Muslims must lead the movement for Islamic reform and prepare for the inevitable backlash from Muslim elders and self-appointed community leaders. Their success will also require mainstream backing.

Steeped in group identity, many Muslims fear they will be ostracized if they speak out in their communities. This dynamic inhibits them from naming imperialism within Islam, even though Muslim imperialists target and kill fellow Muslims in far greater numbers than foreign powers.

The fear of stigma is cultural more than religious. The Quran contains plenty of passages about the need to display moral courage by standing up to abuse of power inside one’s own tribe. Islamic scripture also calls on Muslims to think rationally. There are three times more surahs advocating introspection and analysis than blind submission. In this sense, reformist Muslims are at least as authentic as the moderates and, quite frankly, more constructive.

More Muslims need to read -- not simply recite -- the Quran. Instead of reading, grappling with, and understanding it, many moderate Muslims simply repeat stale cultural shibboleths. Among the most damaging of these is the Arab custom of group honor, which intimidates moderate Muslims into silence lest they be accused of selling out their communities and dishonoring their families by sowing internal chaos and division. Group honor narrows the possibilities for individual liberty, freedom of thought, and personal responsibility. It victimizes women because they are assigned the burden of carrying familial shame. Men also face cultural pressures to conform to low expectations of behavior, which leads to their infantilization. In this way, both genders experience limited choices and lack of empowerment.

Arab cultural norms, with the assistance of petrodollars, have colonized the faith of Islam, undermining even traditionally pluralist and tolerant practices such as those of Indonesia. This reality is all the more disturbing given that 80 percent of Muslims worldwide are non-Arab. Yet instead of exposing the cultural imperialism that emanates from Saudi Arabia and its oil-rich neighbors, “moderate” Muslims tend to obsess about American, Israeli, and Indian colonialism. Out of defensiveness, they practice a dangerous form of distraction. This highlights the shortcomings of moderation -- in theory, it is an admirable end state, but in practice, it is incapable of reclaiming Islam’s better angels.

Practically speaking, then, moderation may be the objective, but reform is the means to that end. Moderation as a destination is beautiful and Islamic, but only reform will generate the creative tension necessary to push Muslims out of their comfort zones and engage with the critical questions facing Islam.

In pursuing this goal, reformist Muslims can be assured of their religious integrity. Muslims are obliged to worship one God, not God’s self-appointed ambassadors. Because nobody can legitimately claim a monopoly on truth and knowledge, the paradoxical conclusion is that Muslims have a spiritual duty to build societies in which we can disagree with each other in peace and with civility. In short, commitment to one God obliges us to defend human liberty.

MOHAMMED DAJANI:

Islam needs to transition away from the past. The concept of “reform” implies a return to the original. Islam, Christianity, and Judaism are religions of moderation, reconciliation, and peace. Because these qualities are essential to the human pursuit of felicity and security, these religions are part of the solution to conflict. Unfortunately, all of these faiths can be perverted and abused by extremists, who cherry-pick verses to support their own agendas. Would-be peacemakers need to remember that their religions share the same moral values, including the golden rule, the prohibition against evil, and encouragement to do good deeds. Moderation is a core human virtue that can cultivate social harmony and peaceful coexistence.

In this sense, moderation is fundamental to Islam, with a clear basis that can be found in many surahs and hadith. Justifications for religious freedom, gender equality, and abolition of the death penalty can all be found in Islam. Only rational analysis of religious texts and principles enables one to reach a moderate and righteous version of Islam. Moderate Muslims also need to learn that jihad is the spiritual struggle within themselves against evil and sin, not a struggle against nonbelievers.

While extremists can select surahs and hadith to support their narrow interpretations of Islam, proper religious study looks at the intention of the text and teachings. Strictly literal interpretations do not provide true meaning -- Islam should look at the Christian reformation, which distanced the religion from literal interpretations of the Bible. Islam’s ultimate aim is the betterment of humanity, so it must be studied with a human heart, not a heart of stone.

Moderates are also impelled to stand up against extremism committed in the name of Islam. Extremism will not be eradicated by a war of hatred, but by moderates conquering fear and promoting reconciliation. Muslims, Christians, and Jews know little about each other’s religion; thoughtful interfaith dialogue can combat ignorance and highlight the good in all sides. Government, civil society, and think tanks also have a role in combating extremism, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism.

While Arabs have monopolized Islam and imposed their terminology and interpretation, extremism promoted by the likes of Ibn Taymiyah, Sayyed Qutb, Hamas, and others is not cultural. For example, the veil is not traditionally Arab or Islamic, yet Hamas tells poor female students that unless they wear it, they will not receive scholarships. Similarly, female genital mutilation, enmity toward Jews and Christians, the stoning of adulteresses, and the killing of apostates and homosexuals are not prescribed in the Quran, nor are they traditionally Islamic, yet they are being practiced by extremists today. Moderate Muslims do not advocate or practice these backward views.

(This summary was prepared by Patrick Schmidt.)

IS ISLAM REFORMABLE?

Is Islam Reformable?
By Amil Imani
American Thinker
December 17, 2015

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, and a host of others believe that Islam can and should be reformed. But how?

The idea of reforming Islam is not entirely new. But Islam cannot be reformed the way Christianity was. For one, Islam claims that it is the perfect eternal faith for mankind. Divisions have happened and will continue to occur in Islam. Yet reformation has not happened in nearly 1,400 years and is not going to happen. In the mind of millions of Muslims, Islam is carved in granite, just the way it is. No change. Allah’s book is sealed.

About the only universal agreement that exists among Islamic scholars is that every word of the Qur’an is the word of Allah and is not subject to human modification, ever. The Hadith enjoys a similar sacrosanct standing. And of course, the faithful Muhammad’s conduct as recorded in the Sunna is the model to be emulated. Hence, one can pick and choose, but one cannot discard or revise any part of the Islamic scripture. For this reason, a Martin Luther-type reformation has not happened and will not likely ever happen within Islam.

Numerous people have tried it in every imaginable way. The Mu’tazelis tried it, the Sufis tried it, and hundreds of old and new schools tried it, and they all failed. Many open-minded Muslim intellectuals have tried reforming Islam, including Muhammad Ali of Egypt, Sayyid al-Qimni, Nasr Abu Zayd, Khalil Abdel-Karim, Abdolkarim Soroush, Mohammed Arkoun, Mohammed Shahrour, and Ahmed Subhy Mansour. Sheikh Mansour was fired from Al-Azhar University after expressing his Hadith rejector views. Edip Yuksel, Gamal al-Banna, Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri, Javed Ahmad Ghamidi, Ahmed Al-Gubbanchi, Mahmoud Mohammed Taha, and Faraj Foda, Taha were hanged in 1985 under the sharia regime of Jaafar al-Nimeiri, and Foda was assassinated in 1992 by al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya. Persian scholar and historian Ahmad Kasravi was also assassinated by Fada’iyan-e Islam (the devotees of Islam).

Thus, Islam is not reformable for the following primary reasons:

* At the heart of the problem is the Qur’an, Islam’s sacred book, considered as literally perfect and the immutable words of Allah.

* Islam is a perfect religion.

Qur’an 5:3: Today have I perfected your religious law for you, and have bestowed upon you the full measure of My blessings, and willed that self-surrender unto Me shall be your religion.

How can fallible, limited humans possibly reform or improve the handiwork of the all-knowing, all-wise Author of the Universe?

Freedom of all forms is anathema to Islam, which is squarely based on total submission to the dictates and will of Allah. Muslims must obey Allah and His Messenger.

Qur’an 33:36: And it behoves not a believing man and a believing woman that they should have any choice in their matter when Allah and His Messenger have decided a matter; and whoever disobeys Allah and His Messenger, he surely strays off a manifest straying.

* Violence is part and parcel of Islam.

Qur’an 2: 216: Fighting is ordained for you, even though it be hateful to you; but it may well be that you hate a thing the while it is good for you, and it may well be that you love a thing the while it is bad for you: and God knows, whereas you do not know.

* Reforming Islam requires discarding sharia, and also purging the Qur’an itself of enormous suras that are not only patently false, but totally repugnant to a civilized humanity. This line of thinking, to sanitize Islam, is explicitly forbidden in the Qur’an.

Qur’an 2:85: Do you, then, believe in some parts of the divine writ and deny the truth of other parts? What, then, could be the reward of those among you who do such things but ignominy in the life of this world and, on the Day of Resurrection; they will be consigned to most grievous suffering? For God is not unmindful of what you do.

* Islam is a super-religion.

Muslims consider Islam a super-religion and the final religion of Allah. Judaism and Christianity are the only other two religions that are granted a grudging minimal recognition by Islam. All other religions and those without religion are blasphemy and blasphemous.

In short, Islam is not reformable. Reforming Islam requires purging of its sacred book, the Qur’an. In so doing, we have a different religion, not Islam.

Muslim leaders advance to their positions of leadership in Islam Inc.’s numerous subsidiaries by cleverly and ruthlessly navigating their way through the hierarchical labyrinth of cutthroat competition. Kissing up and demonstrating unconditional loyalty to the higher-ups is required. Undeviating, total devotion to the charter of the corporation as defined and promoted by the particular subsidiary, while vigilantly exploiting any opportunity for climbing up to the next rung of the ladder of leadership is a prime requisite of staying in the game.

The individuals who attain high leadership positions in Islam have invested their all with great acumen and gone through a tortuous wringer for years to attain their positions. They deeply covet that position and will do absolutely nothing to rock the boat.

The individual who ascends to a high leadership position must craftily and successfully work his way through a maze of high intrigues for many years. These leadership positions are greatly coveted, and the person would hardly be inclined to do anything that would endanger his status. The slightest deviation by any of the Islamic high clergy entails tremendous risks. The late grand Ayatollah Ali Montazeri of Iran, for instance, who was initially tapped by Khomeini to become his successor, was disgraced and placed under house arrest for daring to voice his concerns about the Islamic government’s summary mass execution of political prisoners.

The profession of a clergy is to attract a select segment of men, men who have already significantly bought into the Islamic charter and its methods. As these men undergo formal indoctrination, a culling process takes place. Hundreds of thousands of these men, for a variety of reasons, do not advance very far. A great number of Muslims function in lower positions for the rest of their lives. They are the drones, so to speak. They loyally keep working the rank-and-file Muslim believers in villages and towns, making them toe the line and pay their tributes and cash to their parasitic handlers, who continue their highly successful smoke and mirror charade. A significant number may leave the ordination altogether, for a variety of reasons, and begin earning their living like the rest of the people.

In short, those who claim that they want to reform Islam want to transform it by stripping it of a great many provisions that are anathema to civilized humanity. These people are trying to make a new religion out of the old, with none of the divine authority that was supposedly bestowed upon Muhammad to form and launch his religion.

Pakistan now has the world’s fast growing nuclear arsenal -- and how Mossad tried to stop it

December 20, 2015

FULL ARTICLE

Pakistan – The Quiet Nuclear Threat

The largest nuclear arsenal in the Muslim world, launching platforms for long and short ranges and a second strike capability. A glimpse of the Muslim nuclear superpower that remained under the Radar.

By Ami Rojkes Dombe
Israel Defense magazine
December 17, 2015

“The Pakistani nuclear program is rapidly growing… along with an unusual problem: Pakistan is not a rogue state that might go nuclear, but rather a nuclear state that might go rogue. Such a situation presents an almost endless stream of nightmare scenarios for U.S. policymakers,” wrote Kevin Hulbert, a former CIA Station Chief, in an opinion column on “The Cipher Brief” website in early October.

“While Pakistan is not the most dangerous country in the world, it is probably the most dangerous country for the world, and as such, a serious case for close and continued U.S. engagement with Pakistan can be made. As a country ripe with the triple threat of terrorism, a failing economy and the fastest growing nuclear arsenal, Pakistan has the potential to create more nightmare scenarios for U.S. policymakers than any other country.”

Pakistan is a nuclear state possessing the largest arsenal in the Muslim world: about 120 warheads and the capacity to manufacture 20 warheads per year, according to The Washington Post. Other experts claim that the aforesaid number of warheads is overrated, and that in fact the number is a double-figure one, but much smaller. Pakistan conducted its first nuclear test in 1998 (“Chagai-I”) before joining the NPT. That is the reason why it is not currently a part of the Treaty.

Pakistan’s nuclear history began in 1965, with a reactor supplied by the USA in the context of the “Atoms for Peace” program. That PARR-I reactor was activated in 1974. Alongside the official program, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (who subsequently became President of Pakistan), initiated a military nuclear program in 1972. The reason was the defeat of Eastern Pakistan (currently Bangladesh) in the war against India a year previously. In 1974, Pakistan tested a first device – but not yet a bomb. In 1975, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan entered the picture. Khan had been educated in Germany, and he brought along his knowledge of gas centrifuges that he had acquired at a plant of the Urenco Company in Holland. He also brought along uranium enriching technologies stolen from Europe.

Khan assumed responsibility for the establishment of the Kahuta uranium enrichment facility in 1976. Under his leadership, Pakistan developed a global network of smuggling operations, through which it obtained the necessary materials and technologies. By 1986, Pakistan had already produced a sufficient amount of nuclear material for a bomb. A year later, it acquired the knowledge required in order to perform a nuclear explosion.

As stated, Pakistan conducted its first nuclear test in May 1998. In the course of that test, six explosions were initiated. The Los Alamos laboratories in the USA claimed that one of the explosions involved low-grade plutonium. Opinions regarding that claim are divided to this day.

In the early 1990s, estimates claimed that Pakistan possessed 3,000 active centrifuges. In those days, Pakistan aspired to develop plutonium production capabilities. They found a sympathetic shoulder to lean on in China, which helped the Pakistanis build a 40 megawatt reactor at the Joharabad facility. According to US sources, that reactor can produce between 8 and 10 kilograms of plutonium per year – enough for one or two bombs per year. The plutonium separation process takes place in the Chasma reactor at the Rawalpindi sites. According to the fas.org website, this reactor can also produce tritium out of lithium-6 (for the purpose of producing a hydrogen bomb). Both facilities are not supervised by IAEA.

Another major facility in Pakistan’s nuclear program is Khushab, which serves as a production plant for plutonium for nuclear weapons. As stated, the first reactor was established in the 1990s by China. Among other things, China also helped the Pakistanis design their warheads and contributed various elements to the uranium enrichment plants, along with radioactive materials. Over the years, Pakistan also acquired dual-use elements in Russia and Western Europe.

The Khushab facility is located about 200 km south of Islamabad. Originally, the facility consisted of a single reactor. Over the years, Pakistan expanded it with three more reactors in 2002, 2006 and 2011. According to a report on the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) website, the fourth reactor became active in January 2015. Each one of those reactors is capable of producing 10 kg of plutonium per year, namely – a bomb production rate of 14 to 27 bombs per year, according to various estimates. If Pakistan maintains its current production rate, in one decade it will possess the world’s third largest arsenal of nuclear warheads, after the USA and Russia.

ALMOST ATTACKED BY ISRAEL, THREATENED BY THE MOSSAD

One of the better known stories around Pakistan involves Khan’s smuggling network. After being indicted for running a worldwide smuggling network for nuclear technology elements, he was placed under house arrest in 2004 and subsequently released in 2009. Khan was apprehended in 2004 after having been accused that over the course of the two previous decades he had shared nuclear technology with Iran, Libya and North Korea. Some sources maintain that Khan also helped Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. The arrest was made after the CIA had been monitoring Khan’s network for a long time.

The Khan affair introduced the world to the black market of the nuclear world. Khan’s network had centrifuge parts manufactured in Malaysia and purchased various elements in Africa, Europe and the Middle East. In the case of North Korea, missile technology was transferred to Pakistan and centrifuges were transferred to North Korea. In the case of Iran, Khan had planned to sell Iran 50,000 centrifuges in 1987. Eventually, this plan never materialized and Iran purchased from Khan a certain amount of old centrifuges for a lot of money.

In 1979, the Indian intelligence agency intercepted an American document according to which Pakistan intended to conduct a nuclear test very soon. The intelligence agencies of Israel that were monitoring the Pakistanis knew that they were working on a nuclear bomb, but the information betrayed the fast progress made by that country. In view of the new information, Israel planned an attack against the nuclear facility in Kahuta, used by Dr. Khan. The attack was cancelled owing to US pressure, according to the book “Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons” by Adrian Levy & Catherine Scott-Clark. The Reagan administration feared that the attack would undermine American interests in Afghanistan, which Pakistan supported vis-à-vis the Russians. According to various reports, Israel even went as far as building a complete model of the Pakistani nuclear facility in the Negev, for the purpose of training the strike mission pilots. According to the book, the attack was to be staged in March 1984 from the Jamnagar Indian Air Force base in Gujarat. Another source claiming that Israel had planned an attack against the Pakistani nuclear facility is the fas.org website.

Other allegations pertaining to the connection between Pakistan and Israel include a claim according to which in the 1980s, following the attack against the Iraqi nuclear reactor, Pakistan wanted to assure Israel that it was not threatened by Pakistan, in order to prevent a future Israeli attack. For this purpose, the Pakistani President, Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, asked the USA to assure Israel that Pakistan would not attack it. According to the same allegation, that is the reason why Israeli officials never mentioned Pakistan as a nuclear threat in their rhetoric. Additionally, it was alleged that Pakistan and Israel established a cooperative alliance between their respective intelligence agencies, ISI and the Mossad.

Another allegation maintains that Israel trained the bodyguards of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. In one case, in 2003, a frequency jammer supplied by Israel even saved the President’s life. Other allegations maintain that this intelligence cooperation revolved around Iran, namely – information collected by ISI was transferred to the Mossad.

Other reports alleged that Pakistan purchased arms from Israel. A British report from 2013 claimed that Israel sold Pakistan Radars, electronic warfare equipment, pilot helmets, fighter aircraft spare parts and engines, optical target acquisition systems, parts for trainer aircraft and other items. Another report, dated 2012, alleged that Turkey sent trucks to Israel to be converted to aircraft refueling trucks for Pakistan.

The same book, Deception, also reports that in the early 1980s, the Mossad threatened a member of Khan’s network, a British national named Peter Griffin. Griffin reported that a Mossad operative sat next to him at a pub and said: “We do not like what you are doing, stop it.” In another case, the Mossad sent a bomb to the home of a German national named Heinz Mebus who had established a fluoride and uranium conversion plant in Pakistan for Khan. The bomb killed Mebus’ dog, but the message was received.

In those years, the 1980s, the Mossad, under the cover of such fronts as “The South Asia Demilitarization Group” or “The Committee for the Safeguarding of the Islamic Revolution” attempted to assassinate members of Khan’s network. The Mossad also threatened such European companies as Alcom Engineering of Italy or CORA Engineering of Switzerland, who were involved in business with Khan – all according to the same book.

Along with the development of fission or fusion-based warheads, Pakistan also developed launching platforms, including short-range launchers such as the Nasr (60 km), nuclear artillery, and long-range launchers such as the Shaheen-III (2,750 km). Additionally, they developed the Babur missile that could be launched from submarines or surface vessels, and the Raad cruise missile. Missile technology was developed at the Kahuta facility. In 1999, Saudi prince Bin Abdul Aziz visited that facility, probably for the purpose of purchasing Ghauri missiles. According to various sources, Saudi Arabia is one of the primary financing sources for the Pakistani nuclear program.

A THREAT MORE SERIOUS THAN THE IRANIAN THREAT

According to a report dated 2011, about 9,000 people in Pakistan are involved in the nuclear project, of whom about 2,000 possess “critical” knowledge about the project. As stated, Pakistan holds an arsenal of between tens and hundreds of nuclear warheads and diversified launching platforms from the ground, from the sea and from the air.

Although Pakistan maintains that their nuclear weapons are properly protected, various experts estimate that in effect, it is a ticking time bomb. The reason for it is the high risk-to-odds ratio regarding the possibility that Pakistan will become a rogue state dominated by fanatic religious elements from al-Qaeda or the Taliban. Additionally, there are concerns that nuclear weapons may find their way into the hands of those organizations who might actually use them. Another concern stems from Pakistan’s history in the context of technology leaks.

In 2001, those concerns reached a peak. The USA and Israel feared that President Musharraf was losing control over Pakistan and planning began for an operation intended to steal some of the nuclear warheads considered to be under risk from Pakistan. It was feared that former employees of the Pakistani intelligence agency ISI might steal 24 such warheads if the President lost control. For this purpose, the special operations units of both countries prepared for a joint operation. According to reports in the Telegraph of Britain, teams of the Israeli unit Sayeret Matkal were sent to the USA in order to train with US units in preparation for the operation that never materialized.

With regard to the ideological aspect, too, Pakistan continues to be a threat to the world. It never adopted the “No First Use” (NFU) doctrine, it is not a part of the NPT or the NSG and some of its facilities are under no supervision. According to various reports, Pakistan also provides a nuclear umbrella to the Gulf States, in particular to Saudi Arabia that bankrolled parts of Pakistan’s nuclear program. Some reports alleged that Saudi Arabia wanted to purchase nuclear strike systems from Pakistan. Pakistan’s shaky economic situation does not bode well regarding the stability of the present regime.

Along with the dangers on the part of the regime, China, which built the nuclear reactors for Pakistan, apparently sold Pakistan outdated technology that is highly probable to produce safety problems. China also intends to build two more electrical power nuclear reactors in the Karachi area in the near future.

Concerns have undoubtedly intensified pursuant to the agreement between Iran and the superpowers. The Middle East has embarked on a nuclear arms race as no country wants to remain devoid of nuclear deterrence opposite Iran. This has made the Pakistani knowledge highly valuable, and in a poor country like Pakistan, with so many people involved in the nuclear industry, this situation is a ‘loophole beckoning to the thief’.

WITH ONE EYE OPEN

Owing to the growing concerns on the part of the USA regarding the Pakistani nuclear program, the White House channeled into Pakistan US$ 30 billion between 2002 and 2015, in an attempt to gain access to the nuclear facilities for supervision purposes. Recently, reports have started floating about a deal being concocted between the two countries. In the context of that deal, Pakistan will be recognized as a nuclear state and will be allowed to maintain a civilian nuclear program in exchange for close supervision over its nuclear and missile program.

Another development is related to the development of a second strike capability by Pakistan. According to a report on the Defense News website, Pakistan will acquire eight Yuan-class SSK submarines from China. Four of those submarines will be built in China and the others will be built at the Karachi Shipyard & Engineering Works in Pakistan. Experts assume that those submarines will be able to launch the Babur missiles fitted with nuclear warheads to a range of about 700 kilometers.

Why is that important? Because such a capability could lead Pakistan to change its strategy to the Credible Minimum Deterrence strategy, which was also adopted by India, Pakistan’s primary rival. In the context of this strategy, the state commits to “No First Use” of nuclear weapons and reduces its production of bombs, as opposed to the Mutually Assured Destruction strategy which Pakistan has maintained to this day. This is also the reason why Pakistan maintains one of the world’s largest nuclear weapon arsenals.

Does the Pakistani nuclear arsenal constitute a threat to Israel? Well, it seems that at the present time, Islamabad does not constitute a direct threat. As long as the stability of the regime is maintained, Pakistan is a global problem handled primarily by the USA. At the same time, Israel should have a plan for the time when a radical religious leader may ascend to power in Pakistan.

With regard to the broader perspective, Israel should be concerned primarily about the leaking of knowledge, technology and products from Pakistan. As Khan’s network provided the momentum for the nuclear infrastructures of Iran, North Korea and possibly other countries as well, Pakistan is currently an objective for terrorist organizations and countries wishing to acquire nuclear capabilities. Admittedly, the regime declares that they are doing their best to protect their nuclear assets, but Jerusalem will be well advised to remain vigilant vis-à-vis the world’s largest Muslim nuclear state.

(Tal Inbar, Head of the Space & UAV Research Center at the Fisher Institute for Air & Space Strategic Studies, contributed to the preparation of this article.)

Obama’s former Defense Sec. Hagel: The White House Tried to ‘Destroy’ Me (& more Holocaust denial)

December 19, 2015

INTERVIEW

HAGEL: THE WHITE HOUSE TRIED TO ‘DESTROY’ ME

Hagel: The White House Tried to ‘Destroy’ Me
In an exclusive interview, Chuck Hagel said the Obama administration micromanaged the Pentagon, stabbed him in the back on the way out — and still has no strategy for fixing Syria.
By Dan De Luce
Foreign Policy
December 18, 2015

https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/12/18/hagel-the-white-house-tried-to-destroy-me/

Jet-lagged from a long overseas trip, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel had just sat down with his wife for a quiet dinner at an upscale Italian restaurant in northern Virginia when his phone rang. It was the White House on the line. President Barack Obama wanted to speak with him.

It was Aug. 30, 2013, and the U.S. military was poised for war. Obama had publicly warned Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad that his regime would face consequences if it crossed a “red line” by employing chemical weapons against its own people. Assad did it anyway, and Hagel had spent the day approving final plans for a barrage of Tomahawk cruise missile strikes against Damascus. U.S. naval destroyers were in the Mediterranean, awaiting orders to fire.

Instead, Obama told a stunned Hagel to stand down. Assad’s Aug. 21 chemical attack in a Damascus suburb had killed hundreds of civilians, but the president said the United States wasn’t going to take any military action against the Syrian government. The president had decided to ignore his own red line — a decision, Hagel believes, that dealt a severe blow to the credibility of both Obama and the United States.

“Whether it was the right decision or not, history will determine that,” Hagel told Foreign Policy in a two-hour interview, his first extensive public comments since he was forced out of his position in February. “There’s no question in my mind that it hurt the credibility of the president’s word when this occurred.”

In the days and months afterward, Hagel’s counterparts around the world told him their confidence in Washington had been shaken over Obama’s sudden about-face. And the former defense secretary said he still hears complaints to this day from foreign leaders.

“A president’s word is a big thing, and when the president says things, that’s a big deal,” he said.

Hagel, now that time has passed and he’s willing to discuss his tenure in office, cited the episode as an example of a White House that has struggled to formulate a coherent policy on Syria, holding interminable meetings that would often end without a decision, even as conditions on the ground worsened and the death toll grew steadily higher.

The 69-year-old former Nebraska senator and Vietnam War veteran, speaking for the first time about his treatment by the Obama administration, said the Pentagon was subject to debilitating meddling and micromanagement by the White House — echoing criticism made by his predecessors, Robert Gates and Leon Panetta.

Looking back on his tenure, Hagel said in the Dec. 10 interview that he remains puzzled as to why some administration officials sought to “destroy” him personally in his final days in office, castigating him in anonymous comments to newspapers even after he had handed in his resignation.

Although he does not identify her by name, Hagel’s criticisms are clearly aimed at Obama’s national security advisor, Susan Rice, and some of her staff. Hagel’s former aides, and former White House officials, say the defense secretary frequently butted heads with Rice over Syria policy and the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo.

The former Pentagon chief offers a view from inside an administration that was caught flat-footed by the multi-sided conflict in Syria and by the subsequent onslaught of the Islamic State. His account describes an administration that lacked a clear strategy on Syria during his time in office and suggests that it may not have one anytime soon — despite the mounting carnage and waves of refugees.

The White House declined to comment for this story after being told about Hagel’s comments regarding the fallout from Obama calling off strikes against Damascus, the absence of a clear policy on Syria, and his treatment by the administration.

But a senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the president was not ready to go forward with the military operation in 2013 without consulting Congress first and it endorsing his decision. And the final outcome of Obama’s decision opened the way for a diplomatic deal brokered by Russia that saw the Assad regime hand over its declared chemical weapons stockpiles. “The end result of all this is a Syria that’s free of its chemical weapons program,” the official told FP.

The senior official also insisted the president has a clear strategy to defeat the Islamic State, relying on U.S.-led air power and the training of local forces while pushing for a diplomatic bid to end the civil war in Syria and negotiate Assad’s exit.

Appointed to shift the Pentagon to a peacetime footing and oversee tough budget cuts, Hagel ended up having to contend with Russia’s incursion into Ukraine and a new war in the Middle East after he entered office in February 2013.

And inside the Defense Department, he faced a series of crises: automatic budget cuts and a government shutdown that threw the Pentagon’s budget into chaos; a shooting rampage at the Washington Navy Yard facility that left 12 people dead; a spate of sexual assault cases in the military; and a cheating scandal by nuclear missile crews.

As defense secretary, Hagel carried out the administration’s policies dutifully without missteps. But his meandering public comments seemed to strike the wrong note at a moment of upheaval. And if Hagel had no major mistakes, he also had no major accomplishments; during the height of then-Defense Minister Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hagel’s aides boasted about the dozens of times the U.S. defense chief was speaking to his Egyptian counterpart and touted Hagel as the administration’s main conduit to Cairo. Left unsaid was that Sisi ignored Hagel’s entreaties and continued his brutal campaign to repress the group.

Hagel’s biggest hurdle, though, was that he was never fully embraced by Obama’s tight inner circle.

Even before he started the job, Hagel had been crippled by a bruising and unusually partisan Senate confirmation hearing in which many of his former Republican colleagues denounced him as unfit for office, painting him as hostile to Israel and weak on Iran.

A few Republicans had warned him in advance that they would have to “rough him up” at the hearing because of their dissatisfaction with the president, Hagel said. And conservative websites had painted him as “anti-Semitic” before the hearing began.

But the level of vitriol at the hearing — from lawmakers whom he had long worked with and even raised money for — came as a shock to Hagel.

More than one senator took Hagel’s comments out of context or simply misquoted him. During the 2006 Lebanon War, Hagel had called for an end to the “sickening slaughter” carried out by both sides, but Republican lawmakers wrongly accused him of singling out Israel.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), now a leading Republican contender for the White House, accused Hagel of possibly receiving speaking fees from “extreme or radical groups” but offered up no evidence.

“It is at a minimum relevant to know if that $200,000 that he deposited in his bank account came directly from Saudi Arabia, came directly from North Korea,” said Cruz, in a performance that some commentators compared to a Joe McCarthy-style smear.

Hagel looked taken aback but chose not to push back against the barrage.

“I was stunned at the whole thing,” Hagel told FP.

At one point Hagel misstated the president’s policy on Iran, saying the aim was to “contain” Tehran.

In the face of stiff opposition from Republicans, the former senator told the White House he was ready to withdraw as the nominee, “because I said don’t want to take the president nor the country through this.”

Obama, Vice President Joe Biden — an old friend from his time in the Senate — and White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough all called and encouraged him to hold steady. But some officials did not rally to his side.

“I know not everyone in the White House was that supportive,” he said, without elaborating.

After a filibuster from fellow Republicans, an unprecedented move for a defense secretary’s nomination, Hagel was confirmed in a narrow 58-to-41 vote that was mostly along party lines. Only four Republicans voted in favor. Afterward, Hagel said, some Republican senators privately apologized to him for their attacks.

For Hagel, the bitter confirmation fight illustrated the new hyperpartisan, take-no-prisoners brand of politics that had taken over Washington. And it served as yet another reminder that the moderate wing of the Republican Party he represented had virtually vanished. Hagel sees himself as a Republican in the tradition of former President George H.W. Bush and ex-National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, sober-minded pragmatists favoring a foreign policy driven by national interests and realpolitik. But that stream has “gotten thinner and thinner,” Hagel said.

“I’m not sure if you asked people, ‘What is the Republican Party?’ they could give you an answer,” Hagel said.

When Hagel was offered the job of defense secretary after Obama’s re-election in 2012, a position that he said he never asked or lobbied for, his only request was that he be given access to the president.

Once he was in office, Hagel’s request was generally granted. But he sometimes found that access to the president did not necessarily mean a one-on-one meeting in the Oval Office.

“There were times that I had called over and asked to have a private meeting with the president, and when I showed up, there were others in the room,” he said.

DEFERRING DECISIONS

While Hagel preferred smaller meetings and one-on-one phone calls, the White House often summoned him to large Situation Room sessions with last-minute agendas sent out overnight or on the morning of the meeting.

The White House’s policy deliberations on Syria and other issues run by Rice and her deputies seemed to lead nowhere, according to Hagel.

“For one thing, there were way too many meetings. The meetings were not productive,” Hagel said. “I don’t think many times we ever actually got to where we needed to be. We kept kind of deferring the tough decisions. And there were always too many people in the room.””I don’t think many times we ever actually got to where we needed to be. We kept kind of deferring the tough decisions. And there were always too many people in the room.”

At larger White House meetings, with some staffers in the room he did not even know, Hagel was reluctant to speak at length, fearing his stance would find its way into media reports. “The more people you have in a room, the more possibilities there are for self-serving leaks to shape and influence decisions in the press,” he said.

Instead, Hagel preferred to convey his views in weekly meetings he and then-Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey had with the president or in phone calls and meetings with Rice, Biden, or Secretary of State John Kerry.

In contrast, national security meetings led by the president were efficient and focused, with no time wasted on tangents, he said.

“We’d get in and get out,” Hagel said. “I eventually got to the point where I told Susan Rice that I wasn’t going to spend more than two hours in these meetings. Some of them would go four hours.”

But the same senior administration official defended the long National Security Council meetings, saying their length was only natural given the complexity of the security challenges facing the country: “It speaks to the rigorous policy process that we run.”

Hagel, however, said there was too much time spent on “nit-picky, small things in the weeds,” while larger questions were ignored. “We seemed to veer away from the big issues. What was our political strategy on Syria?”

While Hagel agreed with Obama’s reluctance to deploy a large ground force to Syria or Iraq, he wanted the administration to hammer out a plan for a diplomatic settlement in Syria and to clarify whether Assad needed to go and under what circumstances, he said.

While the White House sought to stay out of the conflict in Syria, the Islamic State’s lightning advance into northern Iraq in June 2014 — with Baghdad’s army collapsing in retreat — came as a “jolt” to the administration, Hagel said.

Asked at a press conference in August of that year about the nature of the threat posed by the Islamic State, Hagel told reporters that “this is beyond anything that we’ve seen.” He cited the group’s military skill, financial resources, and adept online propaganda as an unprecedented danger that surpassed previous terrorist organizations.

Some administration officials were not happy with Hagel’s description, and “I got some criticism from the White House,” he said.

But events have vindicated his remarks, he said.

“Then I got accused of trying to hype something, overstate something, and make something more than it was,” Hagel said. “I didn’t know all of it, but I knew we were up against something here that we had never seen before. And in many ways, we were not prepared for it.”

For Hagel, the administration’s indecision over how to address the conflict in Syria was driven home in a congressional hearing in September 2014, when he was grilled by senators about the administration’s plans to build a force of rebel fighters to take on the Islamic State.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), an outspoken critic of the White House’s anti-Islamic State strategy, asked Hagel if the administration would come to the aid of U.S.-backed rebels if they were attacked by the Assad regime. The administration had debated that pivotal question for weeks but had not made a decision, and Hagel was forced to improvise.

“We had never come down on an answer or a conclusion in the White House,” Hagel told FP. “I said what I felt what I had to say. I couldn’t say, ‘No.’ Christ, every ally would have walked away from us in the Middle East.”

McCain pressed him, and Hagel told the lawmakers: “Any attack on those that we have trained who are supporting us, we will help them.”

But the question remained a “glaring” omission in the administration’s policy that he raised in meetings afterward. “Are we going to support our guys or not support our guys?” Hagel told FP. “It’s a damn crucial question.”

Asked for comment this week, the senior administration official rejected Hagel’s portrayal as misleading and said the Defense Department had a leading role in setting up the training program and could have addressed any shortcomings that arose.

A month later, with his concerns mounting about the absence of an overarching policy on Syria and the fight against the Islamic State, Hagel wrote a two-page memo to Rice and Kerry — and copied the president — saying the administration needed to decide on its approach to the conflict in Syria and its stance toward the Assad regime. The memo argued that “we don’t have a policy,” Hagel told FP.

“I was saying, ‘We’re not getting to where we need to be,’“ he said, “because I’m getting this from all of my colleagues around the world. All of my counterparts are coming up to me at NATO meetings and everywhere, saying, ‘What are you doing? Where is this going?’”

But Hagel said the memo — which was not well-received by the White House — was meant only as an appeal to come up with a coherent way forward and did not attempt to dictate policy.

“In the memo, I wasn’t blaming anybody. Hell, I was part of the National Security Council,” Hagel said.

Since leaving office last February, Hagel said he has not seen a full strategy on Syria materialize.

“The administration is still struggling with a political strategy, but Secretary Kerry is making some progress toward the right strategy,” Hagel said, citing recent talks with Russia, Iran, and several Arab governments.

Although Hagel opposes a major escalation of the military campaign against the Islamic State, his criticisms of the administration will almost certainly feed a Republican critique, led by McCain, that the Obama administration has been weak and indecisive on the Syrian conflict.

That outcome is an ironic twist for Hagel, whose fierce criticism of President George W. Bush’s administration over the Iraq War — and opposition to the 2007 troop surge — generated lasting resentment among his fellow Republicans, including McCain.

MICROMANAGING THE PENTAGON

The White House’s penchant for meddling was a frequent problem, Hagel said. Dempsey complained that White House staffers were calling generals “and asking fifth-level questions that the White House should not be involved in,” he said.

Hagel’s predecessors, Gates and Panetta, as well as Michèle Flournoy, the former No. 3 official at the Pentagon, have all criticized the White House’s centralized decision-making and interference with the workings of the Defense Department.

Hagel said the politically motivated micromanagement, combined with a mushrooming bureaucracy at the National Security Council, raises a real risk for the executive branch — potentially undercutting the proper functioning of the Pentagon and other cabinet offices.

“There is a danger in all of this,” he said. “This is about governance; this isn’t about political optics. It’s about making the country run and function, and trying to stay ahead of the dangers and the threats you see coming.”

RESPONDING TO RUSSIA

Russia’s seizure of the Crimean peninsula in March 2014 and its support for pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine blindsided Washington, and it produced another rift between Hagel and White House officials.

In National Security Council meetings, Hagel said he stressed the importance of avoiding a direct confrontation with Moscow and keeping communication channels open with the Russian military. But he urged the administration to send a clear signal to Moscow — and U.S. allies in Europe — by expediting communications and other gear to the Ukrainian government as it fought against pro-Russian separatists.

“I also made the point that the U.S. should be giving more non-lethal equipment to the Ukrainians than we were, at a much faster pace,” Hagel said.” I also made the point that the U.S. should be giving more non-lethal equipment to the Ukrainians than we were, at a much faster pace,” Hagel said. “We had to keep in mind that there was a global leadership optic here. The world, including our NATO partners, was watching to see how we would respond.”

The administration moved too slowly to help Kiev, Hagel said, though he does not believe Washington should have given weapons to the Ukrainians.

“I think we should have done more, could have done more,” he said.

GUANTÁNAMO WARS

Apart from his impatience with the administration’s drift over Syria, Hagel said some of his biggest clashes with the White House came over the controversial detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Under a law adopted by Congress, Hagel, as defense secretary, had the ultimate responsibility for approving the transfer of inmates to other countries. And it meant he would bear the blame if a released detainee later took up arms against the United States.

The White House, trying to fulfill Obama’s promise to close the facility that has been condemned by human rights groups as a legal black hole, pressed Hagel to approve transferring inmates to other countries.

But Hagel often refused or delayed signing off on dozens of transfers when he judged the security risk too high, often based on advice inside the Defense Department.

The White House grew deeply frustrated with Hagel over the delays.

“It got pretty bad, pretty brutal,” Hagel said. “I’d get the hell beat out of me all the time on this at the White House. “

Although he had long supported shutting the detention center, Hagel insisted that he would not be rushed into approving transfers. The White House kept pushing, arguing that security concerns had to be weighed against the damage done to America’s image abroad as long as Guantánamo remained open and the ammunition it provided for extremist propaganda.

The arguments over Guantánamo detainees were cited by White House officials as the last straw that led to Hagel having to step down. But during his two years in office, Hagel approved 44 detainee transfers. His successor, Ash Carter, has given the green light to only 15 transfers, according to the Pentagon, citing numbers from Dec. 15. At the current pace, Carter will fall short of the number Hagel approved by the time Obama’s second term ends.

After clashing repeatedly with the White House, Hagel said it was probably inevitable that he would have to step down as Pentagon chief, given the friction that had developed. But he was not prepared for the humiliating way in which he was let go, “with certain people just really vilifying me in a gutless, off-the-record kind of way.”

The White House asked Hagel if he would stay on until a successor was found, and he accepted. But even after he agreed to leave, Hagel said, some White House officials trashed him in anonymous comments to newspapers, claiming he rarely spoke at Situation Room meetings and deferred to Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

“They already had my resignation, so what was the point of just continuing to try to destroy me?” he said.”

It was a painful end to a career in which Hagel had gone from success to success. After his 1968 combat tour in Vietnam, where he was decorated with two Purple Hearts, he had served as a Capitol Hill staffer, worked as the deputy administrator for the Veterans Administration under President Ronald Reagan, made his fortune in the early years of the cellphone industry, handily won two terms as a senator for Nebraska, and was at one point considered a potential contender for the White House.

Despite how his Pentagon stint ended, Hagel said he still holds Obama “in high regard.”

“I’ve always had a very good, positive relationship with the president,” he said.

Hagel — who shares with Obama a skepticism about resorting to military force — gives the president high marks for not over-reacting to terrorist threats, for pursuing a strategic “rebalance” toward the Asia-Pacific, and for clinching a landmark agreement with Iran to curtail its nuclear program.

But Hagel remains pained at how his term as Pentagon chief was tarnished by what he views as backstabbing by some in the White House.

“I don’t know what the purpose was. To this day, I’m still mystified by that. But I move forward. I’m proud of my service,” he said.

Still, he added: “I would have preferred that my days as defense secretary not end that way.”

“Negotiate With ISIS” (But “does God compromise”?)

December 17, 2015

CONTENTS

1. “Negotiate With ISIS” (By Jonathan Powell, The Atlantic, Dec 7, 2015)
2. “Why it’s time to grant Isis diplomatic recognition” (By Vadim Nikitim, The Independent, Dec 15, 2015)
3. “Why Assad Is Uninterested in Defeating Islamic State” (By Christoph Reuter, Der Spiegel, Dec 8, 2015)

ARTICLES

NEGOTIATE WITH ISIS

Negotiate With ISIS
Jonathan Powell
The Atlantic
Dec 7, 2015

The natural human reaction to mass murders by ISIS or their purported sympathizers in Paris, Beirut, and San Bernardino is grief, anger, and a demand to redouble efforts to “degrade and destroy” the organization. People have had similar reactions after every terrorist attack, whether it was committed by the PLO or the IRA, whether it was in New York on 9/11 or London on 7/7. Once the red mist of rage has lifted, however, it’s important to think coolly and calmly about the long-term strategy for ending the horrific violence.

In doing so, Western governments need to learn from history. During the Irish War of Independence in 1919, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George said he would never talk to the “murder gang” that was the original Irish Republican Army, but would defeat it. Two years later he was engaged in negotiations with the group’s leader Michael Collins. More recently, Dick Cheney expressed the same idea more pithily: “We don’t negotiate with evil; we defeat it.” In reality, however, we nearly always end up talking to terrorist groups rather than defeating them militarily. Instead of continuing to suffer from collective amnesia and repeating the same pattern again and again, it would be better to look back at what has happened over the past century and imitate the steps that have led to the successful conclusion of other conflicts.

The causes of ISIS’s violence in the West can only be tackled at their root in Iraq and Syria. That requires a convincing military strategy both from the air and on the ground. I don’t know anyone who seriously believes ISIS will be defeated by bombing alone – an army can only be driven out, and kept out, of territory it controls through the use of ground forces. So far the United States and its allies haven’t come up with a convincing answer to the question of who will provide the necessary “boots on the ground” to do this, although the United States has started sending special-operations forces to both countries.

Even if the United States and its allies were able to beat the group back into being a guerrilla force again, as the White House has rightly emphasized, “there is no military solution” to the ISIS problem. Past experience demonstrates the need for a political strategy, as well as a military one, to defeat the idea behind a terrorist movement. If an armed group enjoys significant political support – unlike the small 1970s-era groups like Germany’s Baader-Meinhof gang or America’s Symbionese Liberation Army – ending its violence has historically required addressing the grievances on which the group feeds and, in the end, negotiating with its leaders. In the words of Hugh Orde, the former police chief in Northern Ireland, there are almost no examples in the world of such a terrorist group being “policed out.”

If there is a political issue at the heart of a conflict, it needs a political answer. The violence of the Provisional IRA – the original Irish Republican Army’s successor, which engaged in a three-decade terrorist campaign to drive the British out of Northern Ireland – was constrained and undermined by security and intelligence work in the 1980s and 1990s. But the conflict was only finally ended by the decade-long negotiations that led to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 and the Saint Andrews Agreement in 2006, for which I was the chief British government negotiator. After 30 years of fighting, the Free Aceh Movement’s guerrilla campaign in Indonesia only ended through the negotiations led by former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari in 2005. The FMLN in El Salvador wasn’t defeated by more than a decade of American-backed military campaigns, but only ended after UN-brokered talks in 1992. A terrorist campaign by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in Mindanao in the southern Philippines was only ended after negotiations with the government of President Benigno Aquino in 2014.

There are many more such examples, but almost no examples of a terrorist campaign with widespread political support being brought to an end by military means alone. Such negotiations do not always succeed the first time around. In Aceh, in Spain with ETA, and in Northern Ireland, eventual success was built on a series of failed negotiations. There is no such thing as an insoluble conflict with an armed group – just one that hasn’t been solved yet.

Of course people argue that ISIS is completely different from anything we have seen before. But people have said that about each new armed group since the rise of the IRA in 1919. It is true that ISIS is religiously inspired – in the words of a former Israeli cabinet minister, “God doesn’t compromise.” Governments have, however, made peace with Islamic guerrillas before, including the Free Aceh Movement and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, so it is not impossible to do. Others suggest that ISIS fighters are nihilistic psychopaths and thus not capable of rational negotiations. On the contrary, ISIS’s sophisticated military and media strategies show that its leaders are unfortunately very shrewd, as well as very brutal. ISIS is indeed different from past groups, just as those groups were different from each other, but the question is whether that means the lessons of history no longer apply. I doubt it.

There is no such thing as an insoluble conflict with an armed group – just one that hasn’t been solved yet.

A political strategy to deal with ISIS is thus ultimately likely to mean negotiations with the core leadership, however much we despise the group’s methods. It may seem outlandish that a creed as absurd as ISIS’s should enjoy political support, but on the other hand, it is very hard to see how 2,000 fighters were able to take the Iraqi city of Mosul, population about 1.5 million, without it. And any political strategy will need to address the sources of this support – particularly Sunni alienation. In Iraq, a major cause of this was the corrupt and sectarian rule of Nouri al-Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad, which made even ISIS seem preferable among some Sunnis. It’s no coincidence that the self-styled Islamic State caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi draws many of his deputies from among former officers in Saddam Hussein’s army and members of the Baath party. It is less likely that those individuals have suffered some sudden genuine conversion to an extreme sect of Islam than that they see an opportunity to fight the Shiite majority that has ruled the country since the fall of Saddam’s minority Sunni-dominated regime. In Syria the domination of the Assad family and their Alawite backers have had much the same effect on Sunnis there. There are, in other words, genuine grievances underlying ISIS’s resilience in Mesopotamia.

Who should be talking to ISIS? Like the Taliban in Afghanistan – who have been in on-again, off-again talks with the U.S. government for several years – they are likely to want to talk in the first instance to those who are fighting them, in other words the Americans and their allies, not least since they do not accept the legitimacy of governments in Baghdad and Damascus. Their immediate aim will be to reduce the military pressure they face. It should ultimately be legitimate governments in Iraq and Syria – which in the latter’s case will almost certainly require the removal of Bashar al-Assad – that work with Sunnis to determine their place in society, perhaps through the creation of autonomous Sunni regions comparable to the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq. In the same way, the Afghan government will be the Taliban’s interlocutor if and when peace talks finally take off in Afghanistan.

What is there to talk about with such a horrific and fascistic group? For one thing, it is important to understand that talking with terrorists is not the same as agreeing with them. In the 1990s, the British government would never have been prepared to talk to the IRA about a united Ireland at the barrel of a gun and against the wishes of the majority of the people living there. When we sat down with the Republicans, however, we found that there were a series of legitimate subjects they wanted to discuss – from power-sharing between Catholics and Protestants to the protection of human rights. It is not impossible that the same pattern could be repeated with ISIS. No one is going to be interested in discussing a universal caliphate, but there are issues that can legitimately be discussed, starting with the oppression of Sunnis and future efforts to forge for them a comfortable place in both Iraq and Syria.

It is possible to imagine a solution that includes autonomy for Sunni communities in both Iraq and Syria.

Moreover, such negotiations are dynamic, not static. Positions change as part of a process. Even if some of the hardline leaders of ISIS, particularly the foreign fighters, want nothing less than their full demands (including ushering in the apocalypse), other more moderate leaders will, under military pressure, be prepared to settle for more modest gains. The aim should be to strengthen those moderates’ positions in ISIS’s internal discussions. Such a negotiation would not be easy, but it is possible to imagine a solution that includes autonomy for Sunni communities in both Iraq and Syria, respect for their rights, and oil-revenue sharing that allows a viable system of government.

Of course some will insist that Sunni grievances in Iraq should be discussed only with Haider al-Abadi’s government in Baghdad, and not with ISIS. Certainly replacing Maliki with Abadi was an improvement from the point of view of Sunnis, but it is equally clear that many Sunnis, and not just ISIS supporters, remain alienated from Baghdad. One of the many mistakes the U.S., U.K., and their allies made in Iraq was to pull out in 2011 without ensuring power-sharing or at least an effective dialogue between Sunnis and Shia there. A major external effort will now be required to create such a dialogue.

In Syria there is no legitimate government for the Sunni opposition to talk to, and the principal efforts of the non-ISIS opposition will continue to be focused on removing Assad rather than fighting the group. The first objective of negotiations should be inter-sectarian dialogue with more moderate opposition groups to try to split off Sunni support from ISIS. But in Northern Ireland, while we started trying to make peace between the more moderate Ulster Unionist Party and Catholic SDLP, we ended having to conclude the agreement between the more hardline Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Fein, and I suspect something similar will be true in Iraq and Syria. We will again have to speak to the extremes if we want to silence the guns for good.

I am not for one moment suggesting that talking is an alternative to fighting ISIS. We need to do both.

I am not arguing that those of us in the anti-ISIS coalition should try to sit down with Mr. al-Baghdadi now, even if he wanted to do so. Past experience tells us, however, that it would be sensible to open a secret channel now so we can communicate with ISIS and put ourselves in a position to negotiate once we have arrived at a “mutually hurting stalemate” in which both sides realize they cannot win militarily. That is what has happened in previous cases. The British government, for example, opened a secret channel to the IRA in 1972, even though the real negotiations didn’t start until 1992.

I am also not for one moment suggesting that talking is an alternative to fighting ISIS. We need to do both. If real military pressure – on the ground as well as from the air – is combined with attempts to address the Sunni grievances that fuel the conflict, and to offer ISIS’s supporters a political way out, then maybe the world will eradicate the problem of ISIS, just as we have eradicated the threat posed by previous armed groups. If we learn the lessons of the past quickly, rather than waiting for years and trying everything else, many fewer people may die in the Middle East and in the West.

WHY IT’S TIME TO GRANT ISIS DIPLOMATIC RECOGNITION

Why it’s time to grant Isis diplomatic recognition
When pariah states are brought into the international system, they become subject to constraints. Consider the USSR
By Vadim Nikitim
The Independent (London)
December 15, 2015

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/why-we-should-grant-isis-diplomatic-recognition-a6773761.html

Last week saw the publication of a cache of internal memos leaked from official Isis sources, including a “24-page statecraft blueprint”. The documents show that Isis has already lived up to its name, whether we like it or not.

Yet Western policies continue to deny this reality. Like the war on drugs, the war against Isis remains predicated on the flawed notion that acceptance implies legitimation. With the US and other Western countries are finally coming round to more reality-based drugs policies, the time has come to embrace the same principles of harm-reduction when it comes to international relations. Only by recognising and treating Isis as a bona fide state can we hope to understand its workings and motivations and, ultimately, contain its murderous advance across the region.

History shows that diplomatic recognition of extremist governments can make them more likely to moderate their behaviour. While pariahs are able behave with impunity, when brought within the international system, they become subject to constraints. The most striking example of this was the Soviet Union.

For three years following the revolution of 1917, the US, UK and France believed they could defeat the spread of Communism in Russia with force. Thousands of troops were deployed to fight against the Red Army in a brutal and confusing civil war, to no avail. When Vladimir Lenin finally proclaimed the creation of the USSR in 1922, Western powers refused to accept it.

Shunned by the international community, the Bolsheviks acted in much the same way as Isis do now. Thousands of churches and priceless historical artefacts were destroyed in the name of an extremist ideology. Firing squads roamed the countryside brutally executing enemies of the regime. Similarly to Isis, Russia’s new rulers recognised neither the legitimacy of neighbouring governments nor the sanctity of their borders. For example, the Communist International explicitly sought to export world revolution and sponsored armed uprisings in Germany, Hungary and Estonia.

Britain finally established diplomatic relations in 1924; nearly a decade passed before the US and most of the rest of the world followed suit. Widespread diplomatic recognition of the USSR did little to quell the internal excesses of the regime. But it did correspond to a shift in Soviet foreign policy from ideological zealotry to greater pragmatism and accommodation with its neighbours.

As the quest for world revolution was replaced with the much more modest doctrine of “Socialism in one country”, Moscow stopped actively plotting the overthrow of Western governments. While the USSR would remain a foe of the West for the next 50 years, it became a predictable and rational opponent, one that knew the rules of the game and could be counted to stick to them. In fact, for all its anxiety and terror, the cold war also produced the longest period of peace and stability between the great powers. The historian John Lewis Gaddis described it as the “long peace”.

Isis exists, and wishful thinking cannot will it away. As with the war on drugs, which has singularly failed to curb either use or trafficking, the international bombing campaign has done little to stop the self-described Caliphate from attaining the core principles of statehood. It now controls significant territory, governs a population of up to 10 million, operates an increasingly sophisticated civil service bureaucracy and has largely established a monopoly on violence. Only by accepting reality and extending diplomatic recognition to Isis can the West hope to gain a credible means to moderate and constrain its further advance. The Soviet scenario is now the least worst option: it is time to forge a long peace with militant Islam.

WHY ASSAD IS UNINTERESTED IN DEFEATING ISLAMIC STATE

Why Assad Is Uninterested in Defeating Islamic State
By Christoph Reuter
Der Spiegel
December 8, 2015

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/islamic-state-helps-assad-gain-legitimacy-in-west-a-1066211.html

In the fight against Islamic State, the West is considering cooperating with the Syrian army. There’s a hitch though: Assad’s troops aren’t just too weak to defeat IS -- they also have no interest in doing so.

Sunday, Nov. 29, was market day in Ariha, a small city located in the northwestern Syrian province of Idlib. In May, various rebel groups had taken control of the town, which is legendary for its deep-red cherries. Ariha is located far from the front, and even further away from areas under the control of Islamic State (IS). But the Russian air force bombed it anyway.

The people shopping at the market didn’t stand a chance. Just seconds after the roar of the approaching Russian Sukhoi fighter jet first became audible, the first bombs struck. They killed passersby, vegetable sellers and entire families. “I saw torn up bodies flying around and children calling for their parents,” said a civil defense rescuer hours after the attack.

One day prior, just before 10 a.m., it was the turn of Safarana, a small city northeast of Homs. A first barrel bomb, dropped out of a Syrian regime helicopter, killed a man and a young girl and injured more than a dozen others. The victims had hardly been delivered to the clinic when two more barrel bombs exploded in front of the hospital, operated by Doctors without Borders, killing patients and paramedics who were caring for those who had just arrived.

Such attacks are nothing new in Syria. Jets from both Syria and Russia continue unhindered to bomb markets, hospitals, bakeries and pretty much any other place where people gather in the provinces that are under rebel control. Two years ago, Russia voted in favor of United Nations Resolution 2139, which was supposed to bring an end to attacks on Syrian civilians. But that hasn’t prevented Russia from flying hundreds of exactly those kinds of bombing raids itself since the end of September. And that, in turn, hasn’t prevented France from talking to Russia about the possibility of conducting coordinated air strikes and joining together in the fight against Islamic State.

Just three weeks after the terror attacks in Paris, Europe has prepared itself for entry into this war against Islamic State. But it is a war that unites many radically divergent elements -- and one for which there is no strategy. French jets, joined recently by British warplanes, are now flying sorties against IS in Syria. And Germany will soon join them. German Tornado jets, equipped with high-resolution imaging technology, are to help identify targets while A-310 aircraft will refuel warplanes in the air. In addition, a German frigate is to provide protection to a French aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean.

PARTNERSHIP WITH THE DICTATOR

But beyond Germany’s limited contribution to the air war, Berlin and Paris are discussing a vastly more sensitive and extremely uncertain engagement on the ground. Meanwhile, the French government -- which had long been a vocal opponent of Syrian President Bashar Assad -- recently introduced the idea of a possible partnership with the dictator and his troops in a joint alliance to fight IS.

German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen recently said somewhat awkwardly of Syria: “There are parts of the troops, that one could very well -- like in the Iraq example, where the training of local troops was very successful -- emulate here too.” Her spokesperson quickly made it clear that such a concept doesn’t apply to troops under Assad’s command. But the idea of cooperating with Assad is one under discussion: Islamic State terror in Europe would seem to have partially rehabilitated the dictator.

Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier even proposed that fighting between the Syrian opposition and regime troops could be “discontinued, for a start.” Steinmeier’s words reveal his frustration at the fact that the two sides are engaging each other in a war of attrition instead of joining forces against IS. But the reality on the ground refuses to conform to his aspirations.

Indeed, it is increasingly difficult to identify such a potential partner for Europe on the Syrian battlegrounds. Assad’s official army is now just one of many fighting forces on the side of the regime -- and is also suffering from poor morale and a lack of soldiers. For many young Syrians from areas under government control, forced conscription has become the most significant motivator for embarking on the refugee trail to Europe.

This is also one reason why Russia’s initial strategy for Syria is not finding success. Moscow had been hoping that massive air strikes would force rebel fighters in opposition-held areas to abandon the fight. That would then pave the way for Assad’s ground forces to advance and take back those regions. But in October, when Assad’s tank units rolled into those areas that Russian jets had previously bombed, they didn’t get very far. Instead of fleeing, rebels there had dug in instead.

SYRIAN FIGHTING FORCE?

Using TOW anti-tank missiles supplied by the US, in addition to Russian anti-tank weapons that had been captured or acquired from corrupt officers, the rebels struck some 20 tanks before the others turned back. The army’s ground offensive south of Aleppo likewise quickly ground to a halt. Meanwhile, rebels near Hama were able to finally take control of a long-contested city.

Assad’s army isn’t just vulnerable, it also isn’t strictly a Syrian force anymore. For the last two years, the forces on his side have increasingly been made up of foreigners, including Revolutionary Guards from Iran, members of Iraqi militias and Hezbollah units from Lebanon. They are joined at the front by Shiite Afghans from the Hazara people, up to 2 million of whom live in Iran, mostly as illegal immigrants. They are forcibly conscripted in Iranian prisons and sent to Syria -- according to internal Iranian estimates, there are between 10,000 and 20,000 of them fighting in the country. The situation leads to absurd scenes: In the southern Syrian town of Daraa, rebels began desperately searching for Persian interpreters after an offensive of 2,500 Afghans suddenly began approaching.

It is the first international Shiite jihad in history, one which has been compensating for the demographic inferiority of Assad’s troops since 2012. The alliance has prevented Assad’s defeat, but it hasn’t been enough for victory either. Furthermore, the orders are no longer coming exclusively from the Syrian officer corps. Iranian officers control their own troops in addition to the Afghan units, and they plan offensives that also involve Syrian soldiers. Hezbollah commanders coordinate small elite units under their control. Iraqis give orders to Iraqi and Pakistani militia groups. And the Russians don’t let anyone tell them what to do.

The odd alliances aren’t just limited to the Shiite fighters. Anti-Assad rebels were recently surprised to see American Humvees -- a vehicle that quickly became a symbol of IS attacks after the Islamists captured hundreds of them in Iraq in summer 2014 -- rolling towards them from government-controlled territory. “We thought only IS had captured Humvees, but the Shiite militias fighting alongside Assad use them too,” said Osama Abu Zaid, a local legal advisor to various groups belonging to the Free Syrian Army (FSA).

Elsewhere, attacks by Assad supporters and by Islamic State have likewise taken place with astonishing temporal and geographic proximity to each other. Near the northern Syrian city of Tal Rifaat in early November, for example, an IS suicide attacker detonated his car bomb at an FSA base, though without causing much damage. Just half an hour later, two witnesses say, Russian jets attacked the same base for the first time.

UNSURPRISING COOPERATION

Was it a coincidence? Likely not. There have been dozens of cases since 2014 in which Assad’s troops and IS have apparently been coordinating attacks on rebel groups, with the air force bombing them from above and IS firing at them from the ground. In early June, the US State Department announced that the regime wasn’t just avoiding IS positions, but was actively reinforcing them.

Such cooperation isn’t surprising. The rebels -- in all their variety, from nationalists to radical Islamists -- represent the greatest danger to both Assad and IS. And if the two sides want to survive in the long term, the Syrian dictator and the jihadists are useful to each other. From Assad’s perspective, if the rebels were to be vanquished, the world would no longer see an alternative to the Syrian dictator. But the rebels are also primarily Sunni, as are two-thirds of the Syrian populace -- meaning that, from the IS perspective, once the rebels were defeated, the populace would be faced either with submission and exile, or they would join IS.

In short, a Syria free of rebels would put both Assad and Islamic State in powerful positions, though not powerful enough to defeat the other. Still, such a situation would be vastly preferable to the alternatives: Being toppled from power (Assad), or being destroyed (IS).

Relative to those two camps, the Syrian opposition in the West is hardly being paid attention to anymore. That is in part a function of their confusing structure: There are dozens of larger rebel groups and hundreds of smaller units, mostly at a local level. They cooperate, but alliances often crumble due to the ideological differences of their foreign supporters.

British Prime Minister David Cameron presented numbers last week indicating the existence of some 70,000 moderate rebels. In addition, he said, there were two large Islamist groups: Ahrar al-Sham in the north, with 15,000 fighters; and Jaish al-Islam north of Damascus, with 12,500 militiamen -- and the al-Qaida-allied group Nusra Front, with its 6,000 to 10,000 men. Cameron had hardly finished reciting the numbers before questions were raised as to whether the 70,000 he cited were prepared to partner with the West in the battle against Islamic State. They have, though, been fighting against Islamic State since January 2014 -- but have primarily focused their fight on Assad.

SIGNIFICANT MORAL QUESTION

Sending ground troops into such a situation, or even lending legitimacy to the Russian-Syrian offensive, would unwittingly transform Europe into Assad’s vassals. Beyond that, the dictator would have to be given troop reinforcements so that he could halfway successfully advance against the enemy.

Even if one were to ignore all of the military problems, there is also a significant moral question: Would the West really want to go into battle with a regime that has used, aside from nuclear weapons, pretty much every weapon imaginable against its own populace in an effort to cling to power? And once Islamic State is defeated and driven away, what should happen with the cities -- such as Raqqa, Deir el-Zour, al-Bab, Manbij and Abu Kamal -- that they now hold? All those cities had been take over by local rebels long before Islamic State moved in. Who should such areas be given to?

Certainly not to Assad. That would merely turn the clock back on this war by three years. Rebel groups would once again try to throw out Assad’s troops -- and ultimately Islamic State would strike again.

Making matters even more complicated is the fact that IS, the declared enemy-number-one of international efforts, is receding from the focus of two major foreign actors in Syria. Ever since Turkey shot down the Russian jet, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Vladimir Putin have been engaged in a proxy war in the Aleppo province, a conflict which has seen Kurdish IS-opponents exchanging fire with Sunni IS-opponents in recent days. Furthermore, Russian jets have stepped up their bombing campaign against Syrian settlements along the border with Turkey while the Turkish secret service is sending weapons and ammunition into the fight against the Kurds. Both presidents have fragile egos, and Syria has emerged as the perfect playing field for them to get Kurdish YPG units and rebel groups -- both of which had thus far focused their efforts on Islamic State -- to fight against each other.

And Islamic State? The jihadists had been facing significant pressure in recent months from ongoing air strikes launched by the US-led coalition. Not because it had lost ground, but because it had been unable to continue its advance. The group’s exploitative economy and its propaganda image both make a steady stream of victories necessary. The “caliphate” is facing financial difficulties and is also having trouble recruiting more foreign fighters. An expansion of allied air strikes could likely increase the pressure, while cooperation with Assad would put Islamic State in a perfect strategic position.

But for as long as Islamic State’s enemies are busy fighting each other, the Islamists can carry on as before. Like last Wednesday, when the jihadists took over the small city of Kafra north of Aleppo -- not long after it had been bombed by Russian jets.

King of Bahrain hosts Chanukah celebration, while Obama compares Chanukah to Star Wars movie

December 11, 2015

[Notes below by Tom Gross]

CHANUKAH OFFICIALLY CELEBRATED IN BAHRAIN FOR FIRST TIME SINCE 1948

Only days after Abu Dhabi announced that for the first time it will allow Israel to open a diplomatic mission there (part of the International Renewable Energy Agency office, which has its headquarters in Abu Dhabi), Chanukah has been celebrated in the neighboring Gulf state of Bahrain.

It is the first official Chanukah candle lighting in the Gulf since all but a handful of the region’s historic Jewish population (which predates the birth of Islam) fled in 1948.

King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa held a meeting with Jewish and other faith representatives at the royal palace in the capital city of Manama on the second night of this week’s Chanukah festival.

Rabbi Moshe Levin, director of the Conference of European Rabbis, met with the Bahraini King, before moving on to light candles at the Manama synagogue.

During his address, Rabbi Levin said: “A little light drives off a lot of darkness. Bahrain under your rule is a little light in a dark world of radical fundamentalism.”

ACCOMPANIED BY A FRENCH IMAM

Levin serves as rabbi of the French National Gendarmerie, and is also an adviser to the chief rabbi of France. He was accompanied to Bahrain by French Imam Hassan Chalghoumi, who also took part in the Chanukah ceremony. You can see a video here.

***

Only a few dozen Jews remain in Bahrain. One of them, Houda Ezra Ebrahim Nonoo, is a female lawyer who was the first Jew and the first woman to serve as Bahraini Ambassador to the U.S. She is a subscriber to this email list. I wrote about her here, in 2008.

OBAMA SAYS CHANUKAH STORY SOUNDS LIKE PLOT OF NEW STAR WARS MOVIE

When President Barack Obama lit the Chanukah candle at the White House on Wednesday evening alongside visiting Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, he not only “re-affirmed the unbreakable bond between the United States and Israel” but jokingly compared the Chanukah story to the plot of the new Star Wars movie.

“All of us come together along with Jews around the world to celebrate a band of Maccabees who inspire us even today,” said Obama. “They were outnumbered, out armed, yet proved freedom can prevail over tyranny, hope can triumph over despair, light can prevail over darkness. That sounds like a description of the new Star Wars movie but this one happened a little earlier,” joked Obama, to a round of laughter and applause.

“The light from one day’s worth of oil has lasted not just for 8 days but for more than 2000 years. The Maccabees sense of faith, and courage and righteousness continues to animate the Jewish community even now,” Obama continued. “It is no accident that when we are called out to speak on behalf of refugees or against religious persecution, American Jews remember what it’s like to be a stranger and are leading the way.”

You can watch a video of Obama’s remarks here.

PARIS JEWS DEFY THREATS AND CELEBRATE CHANUKAH; ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER LENDS HIS SUPPORT

While candle lighting in Marseilles had to be held indoors this year at the request of the police because of terror threats, Parisian Jews went ahead and celebrated the first night of Chanukah with the lighting of a 30-foot menorah. Among those turning up to celebrate and lend their support was Hollywood superstar and former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was in Paris for the COP21 climate conference.

Asked by the audience to make a few impromptu remarks, Schwarzenegger unexpectedly took to the stage and said: “It is very important that light prevails over darkness and good prevails over evil. And I stand there with you!”

Schwarzenegger later tweeted a picture from the event, with the backdrop of a lit-up menorah and a glowing Eiffel tower. He captioned it: “Happy Hannukah from Paris! Light will always overcome darkness.”

Hundreds of armed French police guarded the Chanukah event.

As I have noted in past dispatches on this list, Schwarzenegger has on many occasions stood up for Israel and for Jewish rights. He has also criticized his own father for having volunteered to join the paramilitary wing of the Nazi party, the SA (the “brown shirts”), responsible for numerous crimes against Jews and others.

ELTON JOHN DEFIES BDS, WILL AGAIN PERFORM IN ISRAEL

British pop star Elton John has announced he will perform in Israel next May – his fourth visit to Israel.

A month later, in June, he will headline the annual 3-day “Life Music Festival” held in the town of Oswiecim, close by the Auschwitz death camp. “We’ll be celebrating life, peace and music,” John said in a statement published on the festival’s website yesterday.

ISRAELI “SPY” OUDA TARABIN RELEASED FROM EGYPTIAN PRISON AFTER SERVING 15 YEARS

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday met with Ouda Tarabin, an Israeli Bedouin released from an Egyptian prison after serving a 15-year sentence on charges of spying for Israel. Tarabin arrived back in Israel yesterday morning.

“I feel like I’m in a dream,” Tarabin told reporters. “I don’t believe it. To return after 15 years is a lot of years. Thank God.”

Israel has consistently denied Egyptian claims that Tarabin, now 35, was a spy. (Informed persons tell me that indeed he wasn’t.)

“Welcome home,” Netanyahu said to Tarabin. “We had long discussions with the Egyptians for many years about your case, and we are happy to see you here with us now.”

Netanyahu’s personal envoy Yitzhak Molcho has, for years, raised Tarabin’s case with Egyptian interlocutors going back to the days when Hosni Mubarak was in power.

Tarabin, a Bedouin who moved from Egypt to Israel when he was 10, was arrested in 2000 at age 19 after illegally crossing the border into Egypt. He said he had wanted to visit family members in Egypt.

As an Israeli citizen he was treated particularly badly in the Egyptian prison system. For example, he was denied the right to use the toilet each day for 16 hour stretches, between 4 pm and 8 am.

3-WEEK-OLD ISRAELI BABY WOUNDED IN PALESTINIAN ROCK ATTACK

Aviel Mamo, a three-week-old baby, was injured yesterday when a rock thrown by a Palestinian hit the car his mother was driving in on the way to Jerusalem.

The baby was evacuated to the Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem with slivers of glass in his eye and received treatment for his wounds. “We left this hospital only three weeks ago, I never imagined we would be back here so soon, and yet here we are,” said Rachel Mamo, Aviel’s mother.

The Palestinian Authority continues to incite on a daily basis through its TV stations and mosques encouraging ordinary Palestinians to murder Jews, with barely a word of criticism from European governments that fund the Palestinian Authority.

***

Graphic images: How to slit throats of Jews on Palestinian social media:
* Little girl demonstrates art of stabbing: “Stab! Stab! Stab! Stab! Stab!”
* Singer: “Stab! Stab! ... Cut, tear apart... shower the humiliated Jews with fire... let death come for them in a flash”
* “Knock on Heaven's door with the head of a Jew”

SYNAGOGUE TERROR VICTIM NAMED “DANE OF THE YEAR”

Swedish-Israeli relations have a reached a new low after Sweden’s prime minister Stefan Lofven appeared to say Israel shouldn’t defend itself against the recent stabbings of Israeli citizens and his foreign minister blamed Israel for being the root cause of last month’s Paris terror attacks by Isis.

By contrast, in neighboring Denmark, Dan Uzan, the economist and voluntary synagogue security guard who died protecting 12 year old girls at a bat mitzvah party at the Copenhagen synagogue in February, has been named “Dane of the Year” by the Danish daily newspaper Berlingske.

About 25,000 Danish newspaper readers voted online for the ten nominees in the competition. The nominees included astronaut Andreas Mogensen, the first Dane in space; the CEO of the Novo Nordisk pharmaceutical company; and Pia Kjærsgaard, the parliament speaker.

Uzan, the attack’s sole fatality, was an active member of Copenhagen’s Jewish community. He has an Israeli father and had lived in Israel for a period of time.

The Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen called him “an inspiration” and “a hero”.

Hundreds of other Danish Islamists and anti-Semites turned out to pay their respect not to Uzan, but to the terrorist who murdered him.

FACEBOOK’S ZUCKERBERG: “I WANT TO ADD MY VOICE IN SUPPORT OF MUSLIMS”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday posted a message of support for Muslims around the world.

“As a Jew, my parents taught me that we must stand up against attacks on all communities. Even if an attack isn’t against you today, in time attacks on freedom for anyone will hurt everyone,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post.

“I want to add my voice in support of Muslims in our community and around the world.”

In his post, the new father called for the world to remain hopeful and unite in creating a better place for all people. “Having a child [last week] has given us so much hope, but the hate of some can make it easy to succumb to cynicism. We must not lose hope,” he said.

***

Meanwhile Zuckerberg’s earlier Facebook post wishing people a happy Chanukah was defaced by a wave of anti-Semitic comments.

FORBES: ISRAELI TECHNOLOGICAL BREAKTHROUGHS HELPING THE DISABLED (INCLUDING NEW MOSSAD CHIEF’S SON)

Forbes magazine lists “12 technological breakthroughs coming out of Israel that will dramatically improve the lives of the disabled”.

***

Tom Gross adds: Yossi Cohen, who has just been appointed the new director of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, says “the true hero is my son Yonatan.”

Yonatan Cohen was born with cerebral palsy, can’t read or write and yet has mastered four languages and managed to become an officer in the IDF’s elite 8200 Intelligence Unit.

***

See also from yesterday’s Yediot Ahronot: Four Israeli Medical Apps Win Top International Competition

And: Soldiers with Autism Take on Key Roles in IDF

And: Japan Turns to Israeli Tech to Treat Radiation Disease

ISRAEL’S BEN GURION AIRPORT MAKES CONDÉ NAST TRAVELER TOP 10

Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion International Airport was placed fourth in Condé Nast Traveler’s 2015 Readers’ Choice Awards for best international airports.

Condé Nast Traveler is one of the world’s leading travel magazines. Singapore’s Changi Airport was No. 1 on the list.