Tuesday, 9 September 2008

China Confidential


Tuesday, September 09, 2008

 

Islamists Threatening Xinjiang





The United States is missing an opportunity to team with China against radical Islam. The reason: State Department sympathy for so-called moderate Muslim militants in Xinjiang.

On August 28th, at a summit in Tajikistan, Chinese President Hu Jintao told fellow leaders of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, which groups China, Russia and four Central Asian countries, that members should “deepen cooperation” in their fight against the “three evil forces” of terrorism, separatism and religious extremism.

Analysts say Muslim separatist and possibly Al Qaeda-associated groups in Xinjiang are responsible for recent violent incidents there and are also organizing new terrorist attacks.

The group most deeply committed to waging a terror campaign in Xinjiang is the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM). 

In 2001, China described the ETIM as a “major component” of Osama Binladen’s network. Earlier this year, Chinese officials said the ETIM had been plotting attacks against the Olympics. 

A group calling itself the Turkestan Islamic Party--believed to be an ETIM front--released videos claiming responsibility for bus explosions in Shanghai in May and the south-western city of Kunming in July.

Monday, September 08, 2008

 

Why the Democrats are Wrong, and Differences Between Al Qaeda and Islamist Iran Don't Matter

Foreign Confidential....

There are intriguing indications of increasing animosity and rivalry between the leading branches of Islamism--Shiite Iran and Sunni Al Qaeda. 

The signs of intensifying competition and possible conflict are likely to be seized upon by Barack Obama and Joe Biden and their Democratic supporters as proof that "aggressive diplomacy" (code for appeasement) can still prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. In an interview with Bill O'Reilly on Fox News, which was televised last week, Obama tried to draw a distinction between the mass-murdering, terrorist-sponsoring nation and the mass-murdering, terrorist group while conceding that Iran represented a "serious threat" to the United States. He asserted that lumping Iran in with Al Qaeda could embroil the US in another unnecessary war the way conflating Iraq and Al Qaeda did after 9/11 ("the wrong battlefield," as O'Reilly put it).

The Great Conflator

Obama, of course, is the Great Conflator. As shown by his comments, he fails--or refuses--to recognize that differences among Islamists are meaningless in terms of the threat to Western civilization. The ideological and theological disputes are of no more importance than the differences among various German Nazi party factions before and during World War II. Students of history (an endangered species in the United States) may recall Hitler's infamous "Night of the Long Knives" in 1934, when the Nazi regime used its elite SS corps to carry out a series of political executions of the paramilitary SA (Storm Troopers), which had helped the Nazi leader to come to power. Hitler and his German industrialist backers felt threatened by the so-called left-wing faction that the SA and its leader, Ernst Rohm, headed. So the Fuhrer had them killed. 

Put simply, whereas all Nazis were in agreement when it came to pseudo-scientific, aryan racial theory , anti-Semitism, hatred of democracy, and the idea that rearming, re-industrializing Germany was destined to dominate Europe and the entire world, some Nazis made the fatal error of taking the "socialist" in Nationalist Socialist too literally, and it cost them their lives.

So what? At the end of the day, Nazism in all its evil manifestations had to be crushed. The internal differences didn't matter. But, even in the years leading up to and during the war, there were those in the West--weakminded individuals, well intentioned but misguided advocates of appeasement, isolationist Nazi and Fascist sympathizers, and outright Nazi supporters, spies, and agents of influence--who insisted on seeing "moderates" where none actually existed. Thankfully, FDR and Churchill resisted suggestions for a negotiated peace with "Nazi moderates" right up to the end of the war, and the Nazi menace was utterly destroyed and defeated. (Imagine how many innocent lives could have been spared had the US had the atom bomb when the war started and dropped it on Berlin.)

The New Nazis

In contrast with the heroes who saved the West, an Obama administration would take a different view when dealing with the new Nazis--the Islamists. Obama's Democrats, like their European counterparts, are obsessed with finding and working with moderates. People like Biden and Pelosi are hopelessly devoted to the notion that inside the rising regimes and ruling circles of totalitarian despotisms there are important factions and sub-factions and sub-sub factions ... yearning to break free, waiting to move, the Democrats assure us ... that can somehow be accommodated, appealed to, and constructively "engaged" and influenced. 

Baloney. The Theory of Moderation is illogical--and ultimately suicidal. But this nuanced nonsense maddeningly permeates much of the foreign policy political establishment. The State Department reveres and follows the idiocy as if it were a religion. Wall Street is not much better (contrary to naive liberal and left-wing suspicions that Big Business loves war and conflict). American business leaders and bankers have been educated ... programmed, actually ... to think that every dispute can be satisfactorily negotiated over drinks or dinner, that there is always a deal that can be struck--if not with maniacs like Hitler and Ahmadinejad, then certainly with their henchmen or rivals or aspiring lieutenants. In short, the businessman is always looking for someone with whom it is possible to do business. But he overlooks a key concept: politics is primarily about power. And Ahmadinejad, like Hitler before him, is bent on changing the power relations among nations in his country's favor. It is impossible to appease an enemy of this kind once it has embarked on and committed itself to a foreign policy of overthrowing the status quo. 

Myth of Muslim Moderation

That said, the stupidity of the State Department and Wall Street's natural inclinations pale in comparison with the mainstream media's fanatic devotion to the myth of Muslim moderation, which dovetails neatly with the lie that Islam is a religion of peace. Hence, the likely leap by the so-called prestige press in coming days and weeks to exaggerate the importance of the following intelligence items, which are nevertheless worth reporting:

1. Al Qaeda deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahri accused Iran of taking part in a Western "crusader" war against Islam, in a video aired by al Jazeera television on Monday. Zawahri, a Muslim Brotherhood operative who had a hand in the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, attacked Iran's Supreme (clerical fascist) Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, questioning Iran's anti-Western stand. 

"The leader [of Iran] collaborates with the Americans in occupying Iraq and Afghanistan and recognizes the puppet regimes in both countries, while he warns of death and destruction anyone who touches an inch of Iranian soil," Zawahri said. 

He added: "Not even one Shi'ite authority, whether in Iraq or elsewhere, has issued afatwa (religious edict) obligating jihad and taking up of arms against the American Crusader invaders in Iraq and Afghanistan."

2. Al-Zawahri recently accused Hezbollah's Al-Manar television of starting the conspiracy theory that Israel was behind the 2001 suicide airplane hijacking against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. 

"The purpose of this lie is clear--[to suggest] that there are no heroes among the Sunnis who can hurt America as no else did in history. Iranian media snapped up this lie and repeated it," he said in a lengthy audiotape posted on an Islamist web site. 

POST SCRIPT: Interestingly, Islamist supporters, sympathizers, and fellow travelers across the world--including radicals like Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and other lunatic-fringe members infiltrating and gravitating towards the Democratic Party--continue to question Al Qaeda's role in 9/11. 

Even more interestingly, perhaps, the Islamist/left-leaning Reuters news agency makes a point of using the phrase "is blamed for" 9/11 in reference to the Al Qaeda attacks. Reuters has also basically banned the word "terrorists" from its style book, preferring "militants" and "extremists."