Tag Archives: Arab Spring

Al Qaeda Leader Urges Unity for Sake of Islamic State

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imagesAl-Qaeda’s leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri has posted a 103-minute message on militant websites calling on Muslims to unite to create an Islamic state.. The audio was produced by al-Qaeda’s media arm, As-Sahab, and was presented alongside video footage showing Iranian Revolutionary Guards captured in Syria.

Zawahiri urged Muslims to use the “Arab Spring” to come together and wage jihad. He specifically praised the mujahideen in Syria, exhorting them to step up their fight against the “criminal secular” regime of President Bashar Assad. He also issued a warning to France that its military intervention in Mali will be bogged down.

“I warn France that it will meet in Mali, with God’s permission, the same fate America met in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Al-Zawahiri said.

Al-Qaeda is unhappy that France launched a military operation in Mali last January after being asked to intervene by the country’s interim president. Since then, French and Malian troops have liberated main towns in the north, but remnants of al-Qaeda-linked cells remain active there in some of the vast rural areas.

Read more at The Clarion Project

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Rich Muslims More Likely to Support Terrorism than Poor Muslims

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Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, the Emir of Qatar

Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, the Emir of Qatar

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In the “official worldview”, terrorism is a product of deprivation. The old, “They’re depraved on account of being deprived” cliche. The reality is that’s a myth.

Terrorism not only has nothing to do with poverty, it’s a hobby for the Muslim middle and upper classes. (Gates of Vienna)

Not a single study could make a cogent case that terrorism had economic roots. This lack of evidence culminated in a recent review of the literature by Martin Gassebner and Simon Luechinger of the KOF Swiss Economic Institute.

The authors estimated 13.4 million different equations, drew on 43 different studies and 65 correlates of terrorism to conclude that higher levels of poverty and illiteracy are not associated with greater terrorism. In fact, only the lack of civil liberties and high population growth could predict high terrorism levels accurately.

So does this relation also hold for Pakistan? It appears so. Christine Fair from Georgetown University documents a similar phenomenon for Pakistan. By utilising data on 141 killed militants, she finds that militants in Pakistan are recruited from middle-class and well-educated families. This is further corroborated by Graeme Blair and others at Princeton University.

They too find evidence of a higher support base of terrorism from those who are relatively wealthy in Pakistan. In a robust survey of 6,000 individuals across Pakistan, it is found that the poor are actually 23 times more averse to extremist violence relative to middle-class citizens.

This should not come as a surprise. Left wing terrorists were also largely drawn from the middle and upper classes. Lenin’s father was a nobleman. Castro’s father owned a plantation.

The reason why Islamic terrorism is so often conflated with poverty is because the left insists on justifying it and willfully ignoring its true causes and agendas.

Like any nationalist or ideological movement, Islamism is not out to remedy some occupation or oppression. It is out to impose a theoretical notion of how things should run developed by its leaders on everyone else by force. This isn’t resistance, it’s tyranny.

We’ve already seen how in Egypt and Tunisia, the revolutions of the Arab Spring gave way to even worse forms of oppression. This is how it always works in such revolutions.

My own work too comes to a similar conclusion. Exploiting the econometric concept of Granger causality and drawing on data from 1973-2010 in Pakistan, I document a one-way causality running from terrorism to GDP, investments and exports.

The results indicated that higher incidence of terrorism reduced GDP, investments and exports. However, higher GDP, exports and investment did not reduce terrorism.

The bottom line: when the economy was not doing well, terrorism did not increase and vice versa.

That should be obvious considering that the Middle East’s core of terrorism is  in oil rich Muslim countries who have the wealth and leisure to plot terrorism and global domination.

To understand what causes terrorism, one need not ask how much of a population is illiterate or in abject poverty. Rather one should ask who holds strong enough political views to impose them through terrorism.

 

UAE Trial Sheds Light on Muslim Brotherhood Tactics

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muslim-brotherhood-cult

Front Page, By Daniel Greenfield:

While Qatar has become the Brotherhood’s sugar sheiks, the UAE has chosen to crack down hard on the Muslim Brotherhood. And while these days the odds of the legal system here being used to expose the Brotherhood are slim, the UAE trial is already beginning to expose and reaffirm much of what we knew about how the Muslim Brotherhood operates.

Investigators told the State Security Court in Abu Dhabi on Monday that they overheard the group during secret meetings planning to seize power as the Arab Spring began in 2011, according to reporters present at the trial.

The court heard details of the group’s finances, including stocks, property and commercial companies. The accused owned educational centres for children and adults and had attempted to infiltrate institutions of the state including schools, universities and ministries.

Each of the accused had invested money from Brotherhood membership fees and charity funds to set up commercial enterprises and real estate investments held in their own names to conceal their activities from the state, it was alleged.

This isn’t all that groundbreaking, but it does remind us of how the Brotherhood operates. It launders money through legitimate businesses and sets up Islamic institutions that don’t bear its name, but are run by its operatives. Its members go into business and build political influence that way with the Brotherhood acting like a mafia. Each achievement sets the stage for the next step, from religious organizations to economic organizations and onward into the government.

And finally the Brotherhood uses that infrastructure to take down the country and then take over. The Brotherhood operates covertly, but its strategies never truly change.

 

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Manal al-Sharif: The Woman Who Dared to Drive

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OB-WU669_winter_DV_20130322183751By SOHRAB AHMARI:

‘You know when you have a bird, and it’s been in a cage all its life? When you open the cage door, it doesn’t want to leave. It was that moment.”

This is how Manal al-Sharif felt the first time she sat behind the wheel of a car in Saudi Arabia. The kingdom’s taboo against women driving is only rarely broken. To hear her recount the experience is as thrilling as it must have been to sit in the passenger seat beside her. Well, almost.

Ms. Sharif says her moment of hesitation didn’t last long. She pressed the gas pedal and in an instant her Cadillac SUV rolled forward. She spent the next hour circling the streets of Khobar, in the kingdom’s eastern province, while a friend used an iPhone camera to record the journey.

It was May 2011, when much of the Middle East was convulsed with popular uprisings. Saudi women’s-rights activists were stirring, too. They wondered if the Arab Spring would mark the end of the kingdom’s ban on women driving. “Everyone around me was complaining about the ban but no one was doing anything,” Ms. Sharif says. “The Arab Spring was happening all around us, so that inspired me to say, ‘Let’s call for an action instead of complaining.’ “

The campaign started with a Facebook FB +0.29% page urging Saudi women to drive on a designated day, June 17, 2011. At first the page created great enthusiasm among activists. But then critics began injecting fear on and off the page. “The opponents were saying that ‘there are wolves in the street, and they will rape you if you drive,’ ” Ms. Sharif recalls. “There needed to be one person who could break that wall, to make the others understand that ‘it’s OK, you can drive in the street. No one will rape you.’ “Ms. Sharif resolved to be that person, and the video she posted of herself driving around Khobar on May 17 became an instant YouTube hit. The news spread across Saudi media, too, and not all of the reactions were positive. Ms. Sharif received threatening phone calls and emails. “You have just opened the gates of hell on yourself,” said an Islamist cleric. “Your grave is waiting,” read one email.

Read more at WSJ

H/T Citizen Warrior

 

Muslim Brotherhood Sets Up Militia to Enforce Rule

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 The Islamists are looking for alternative law enforcement methods now that the police cannot be relied upon to stand by President Morsi.

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Protests against the Muslim Brotherhood continue to rock Egypt without a word being said from the White House. Now, the Brotherhood and allied Islamists are taking a cue from their Shiite counterparts in Tehran and have announced they are setting up a civilian force with the power to arrest those they deem to be criminals.

The Muslim Brotherhood first hinted at setting up a militia on December 16 when Vice Chairman Essam Erian of its Freedom and Justice Party said it needed defenses in the wake of clashes. “They would have defended themselves in front of the presidential palace and killed the other [anti-Brotherhood] protesters,” he said.  At around the same time, Jama’a al-Islamiya threatened to set up a pro-Brotherhood militia to “protect private and public property and counter the aggression on innocent citizens.”

The Brotherhood and Jam’a al-Islamiya have announced their intention to set up a joint civilian police force with other Islamists. The Brotherhood and its supporters point to Salafi groups like Jama’a al-Islamiya as proof that they are comparatively “moderate.” This Islamist relativism is a defining feature of the Obama Administration’s foreign policy. Yet, here we have the Islamists coming together for their common Sharia cause in recognition that their differences are nothing compared to those they have with the secularists.

Jama’a al-Islamiya says it will soon submit a draft law to Egypt’s Shura Council for approval and that the militia will be unarmed and supervised by the Interior Ministry. Those apprehended are to be transferred to military or official police custody.

Read more at Front Page

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Jordan’s King Finds Fault With Everyone Concerned

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King Abdullah II of Jordan during a state visit to Russia in February, when he met with President Vladimir V. Putin. (Pool photo by Sergei Ilnitsky)

King Abdullah II of Jordan during a state visit to Russia in February, when he met with President Vladimir V. Putin. (Pool photo by Sergei Ilnitsky)

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CAIRO — King Abdullah II of Jordan leads one of the smallest, poorest and most vulnerable Arab nations. But that does not stop him from looking down on many of those around him, including the leaders of Egypt, Turkey and Syria, as well as members of his own royal family, his secret police, his traditional tribal political base, his Islamist opponents and even United States diplomats.

President Mohamed Morsi of Egypt has “no depth,” King Abdullah said in an interview with the American journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, to be published this week in The Atlantic magazine. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey is an authoritarian who views democracy as a “bus ride,” as in, “Once I get to my stop, I am getting off,” the king said.

And he said President Bashar al-Assad of Syria is so provincial that at a social dinner he once asked the monarchs of Jordan and Morocco to explain jet lag. “He never heard of jet lag,” King Abdullah said, according to an advance copy of the article.

The king’s conversations with Mr. Goldberg, an influential writer on the Middle East and an acquaintance of more than a decade, offer a rare view of the contradictory mind-set of Washington’s closest ally in the Arab world as he struggles to master the upheaval of the Arab Spring revolts. Seldom has an Arab autocrat spoken so candidly in public.

King Abdullah appears humbled and even fatigued by the many challenges he failed to foresee when he inherited the throne 14 years ago, describing himself before coronation as a “Forrest Gump” in the background of his father’s long reign. In contrast to his father, King Hussein, King Abdullah promises to move Jordan closer to a British-style constitutional monarchy, and thus to stay ahead of the Arab Spring wave.

Read more at NYT

Jeffrey Golberg talks to Jake Tapper about his interview with King Abdullah:

 

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The Secret Document That Set Obama’s Middle East Policy

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propheciesslide9by Barry Rubin:

“… we have to confront is violent extremism in all of its forms. … America is not — and never will be — at war with Islam. We will, however, relentlessly confront violent extremists who pose a grave threat to our security — because we reject the same thing that people of all faiths reject: the killing of innocent men, women, and children. And it is my first duty as president to protect the American people.”  – President Barack Obama, Cairo, June 2009

“The United States is now experiencing the beginning of its end, and is heading towards its demise. … Resistance is the only solution. [Today the United States] is withdrawing from Iraq, defeated and wounded, and it is also on the verge of withdrawing from Afghanistan. [All] its warplanes, missiles, and modern military technology were defeated by the will of the peoples, as long as [these peoples] insisted on resistance.”  – Muslim Brotherhood leader Muhammad al-Badri, Cairo, September 2010

What did the president know, and when did he know it? That’s a question made classic by the Watergate scandal. Now, it is possible to trace precisely what Obama knew and when he knew it. And it proves that the installment of power of the Muslim Brotherhood was a conscious and deliberate strategy of the Obama administration, developed before the “Arab Spring” began.

In February 2011, the New York Times ran an extremely complimentary article on President Obama by Mark Landler, who some observers say is the biggest apologist for Obama on the newspaper. That’s quite an achievement. Landler praised Obama for having tremendous foresight, in effect predicting the “Arab Spring.” According to Landler:

President Obama ordered his advisers last August [2010] to produce a secret report on unrest in the Arab world, which concluded that without sweeping political changes, countries from Bahrain to Yemen were ripe for popular revolt, administration officials said Wednesday.

Which advisors? The then counter-terrorism advisor and now designated CIA chief John Brennan? National Security Council senior staffer Samantha Power? If it was done by Obama’s own staff, rather than State and Defense, it’s likely that these people were the key authors. Or at least one of them was.

So should U.S. policy help allies avoid such sweeping change by standing firm or by helping them make adjustments? No, explained the report, it should get on the side of history and wield a broom to do the sweeping. The article continued:

Mr. Obama’s order, known as a Presidential Study Directive, identified likely flashpoints, most notably Egypt, and solicited proposals for how the administration could push for political change in countries with autocratic rulers who are also valuable allies of the United States, [emphasis added] these officials said.

The 18-page classified report, they said, grapples with a problem that has bedeviled the White House’s approach toward Egypt and other countries in recent days: how to balance American strategic interests and the desire to avert broader instability against the democratic demands of the protesters.

As I noted, the article was quite explicitly complimentary (and that’s an understatement) about how Obama knew what was likely to happen and was well prepared for it.

But that’s precisely the problem. It wasn’t trying to deal with change, but was pushing for it; it wasn’t asserting U.S. interests but balancing them off against other factors. In the process, U.S. interests were forgotten.

If Landler was right, then Obama did have a sense of what was going to happen, and prepared. It cannot be said that he was caught unaware. This view would suggest, then, that he thought American strategic interests could be protected, and broader instability avoided by overthrowing U.S. allies as fast as possible and by showing the oppositions that he was on their side. Presumably the paper pointed out the strength of Islamist forces and the Muslim Brotherhood factor, and then discounted any dangers from this quarter.

Read more at PJ Media

Also see:

Democracy Is Not the Answer (frontpagemag.com)

CAN ISLAM BE REFORMED?

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Al-Ghasali: Photo source: Die Welt

Al-Ghasali: Photo source: Die Welt

By Tiffany Gabbbay:

After turning away from Islam and becoming an atheist, young blogger Kassim al-Ghasali became a target in his native Morocco. Following a string of death threats, he sought political asylum in Switzerland, where he now lives and continues to embrace ideals of freedom and tolerance.

Ever-outspoken in his beliefs, al-Ghasali presented a speech at the Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy in February. Speaking to the German-language news outlet Die Welt following the event, the young Moroccan shared his views (a translation of the full interview can be found in the Gates of Vienna blog), on the Arab Spring, why he believes Islam cannot be reformed in the same way that Christianity was, and why moderate Muslims should admit that “terror and violence” — or more pointedly, “unmitigated horror” — is part of the Koran.

Al-Ghasali also poignantly added that the Koran is a “politically and historically-determined book and not the word of Allah” and that Islam cannot be reformed as its tenets are anathema to Western enlightenment, which helped to reform Christianity [emphasis added].

“In my opinion, there can be no reformation or enlightenment in Sunni or Shiite Islam, because there is no church to be reformed,” al-Ghasali explained to Die Welt.

“In Islam, we are subject to the power of a sacred book and the instructions it gives. Identity and understanding of self come from the Quran. If Muslims could use their reason without the instructions of a book which is recognized as the Word of God, then we could talk about enlightenment. But today most Muslims are against the ideas of the Western Enlightenment.”

Read more at The Blaze

 

Zuhdi Jasser and Robert Spencer debate Islamic reform:

 

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Secure Freedom Radio: The Connection Between John Brennan and Benghazi 9/11/12 Revealed

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705059705Secure Freedom Radio Podcasts:

With Jack Murphy, Michael Davidson, Barry Rubin, and Gordon Chang.

What ties does CIA Director nominee, John Brennan, have to what happened in Benghazi on September 11, 2012 that resulted in the death of an U.S. ambassador? JACK MURPHY, former US Army Ranger and author of Benghazi: The Definitive Report, answers this question, and reports on the situation in Benghazi since 9/11.

Continuing the Benghazi discussion, former CIA officer and author of newly released novel Incubus,MICHAEL DAVIDSON  explains what the CIA was doing at their annex in Benghazi on 9/11, and how Russia is arming Iran.

Director of the GLORIA Center, BARRY RUBIN reports on the Islamization of the Middle East as opposition parties in Egypt promise to boycott upcoming parliament elections, Turkey’s Prime Minister makes anti-Semitic comments, and the rebel groups in Syria are overwhelmed by extremists.

GORDON CHANG, from forbes.com, explains how the Chinese government has knowingly been distributing Chinese manpads to hostile state and non-state actors, how China perceives President Obama’s “open hand” policy as weakness, and reports on Japanese Prime Minister Abe’s recent visit to Washington.

To listen to the podcasts go to Center For Security Policy

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Secure Freedom Radio is pre-recorded and airs week days at 9 PM on 1260 AM WRC in Washington, DC. SFR is characterized by its high caliber guests in leading military and policy making positions.

The Uprising in Bangladesh that the Media Isn’t Covering

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Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina

Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina

by: Ryan Mauro:

For the past two weeks, Bangladesh has been experiencing its largest demonstrations in two decades. Anti-Islamist Muslim Tarek Fatah says  it is “the first time ever in the Muslim world there has been a popular uprising against the fascism of Islamist parties.”

Unlike the Arab Spring revolutions, this uprising’s goal is not overthrowing a secular government, but protecting one.

The current government is led by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, a female secularist from the Awami League Party. Her party won in a landslide in December 2008, a remarkable—if mostly unnoticed—achievement in a 90 percent Muslim country.

Part of the reason for the victory was the party’s support for bringing justice to those responsible for the killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians in 1971 when Bangladesh broke from Pakistan. The Islamist party, Jamaat-e-Islami (JEI), opposed independence and its student wing was involved in the bloodshed. (Read our interview with Saleem Reza Noor, a Bangladeshi-American, about JEI.)

Read more at Radical Islam