Foreign Confidential ™
Foreign News and Analysis Since April 2005 -- formerly China Confidential -- for America and Israel and their friends abroad
Sunday, October 02, 2011
Palestinians Seek Land Without Peace
Charles Krauthammer on the Palestinian push for statehood without peace, land without any permanent settlement that would entail acceptance of a Jewish State--essential reading over here.
Khamenei: 'All Land Belongs to Palestinians'
IRAN'S SUPREME CLERICAL FASCIST CALLS ISRAEL
Appeasement of Iran is making war inevitable--on Iran's terms. The ceaseless threats to annihilate Israel ... and attack the United States ... should be taken with the utmost seriousness. Iran's intentions are clear as it proceeds to develop nuclear warheads and long-range missiles, including ICBMs, and other weapons of mass destruction.
Iran may already have several dirty bombs; and together with North Korea, the monstrous mullahocracy is thought to have test-fired ballistic missiles from seemingly civilian cargo vessels.
For what purposes?
Saturday, October 01, 2011
US, Saudis Pressuring Jordan to Accept Hamas
The plot thickens.
Hamas, formerly designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. State Department, is, of course, the main Palestinian offshoot of the transnational, Sunni Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, the Cairo-based organization that spawned Al Qaeda and the Islamist terrorist group that assassinated Egypt's secular, pro-American, peace-making President Anwar Sadat. The Muslim Brotherhood is now trying to take power in Egypt, following the Obama administration-assisted ouster of Sadat's successor, the pro-American, peace-preserving President Hosni Mubarak. The Muslim Brotherhood was also responsible for several failed assassination attempts against Sadat's secular, semi-socialist, Soviet-backed predecessor, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was both am immensely popular pan-Arab leader and a Third World icon.
Hamas Hates the Monarchy
Hamas hates the Jordanian monarchy. The Islamist opposition in Jordan is controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood.
Impressively bridging Islam's great theological divide and traditional Arab-Persian rivalry, Hamas is strongly supported by Shiite Islamist Iran (whose pro-American, modernizing monarch, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, was overthrown by forces led by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini with a helping hand from the catastrophic Carter administration).
The Obama administration is attempting to engage (appease and align with) the Muslim Brotherhood. U.S. backing for the group dates to the 1950s. The Eisenhower administration secretly supported the Brotherhood against Nasser.
According to DEBKAfile, the administration and the dysfunctional Saudi royals aim to weaken Iran's influence over Hamas by transferring its base of operations from Iran's secular ally--which is threatened by the Muslim Brotherhood--to Jordan.
More immediately, DEBKAfile reports that intended move is also meant to punish the secular leader of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, for seeking United Nations recognition of a Palestinian state against the wishes of the Obama administration, and to pressure him into returning to the negotiating table with Israel.
Hamas and the PA are bitter rivals. Hamas controls the Gaza Strip; the PA, portions of the disputed West Bank territories.
A Long History
Foreign Confidential™ analysts believe that the alleged, secret U.S.-Saudi push to relocate Hamas HQ should be seen in the context of decades of covert and overt U.S. support for rightwing, political Islam, or Islamism, and overlapping state Islam.
All important Islamist groups have been used as tools or weapons by Islamic states. The Taliban was actually created by Pakistan with the support of Saudi Arabia, an Islamic state that is also an absolute monarchy (with no human or civil rights). The Taliban merged with state Islam by taking over Afghanistan in the aftermath of the covert, pro-Islamist, U.S. intervention in the Afghan-Soviet war. It's only a matter of time before another merger takes place.
Hezbollah, bursting at the seams with Iranian-supplied missiles capable of leveling Tel Aviv and Haifa, is another Foreign Terrorist Organization that has basically become a government, having effectively taken over Israel's northern Arab neighbor, Lebanon.
Gaza, under Hamas rule, has become a de facto Islamist/Islamic state--with missiles capable of reaching Tel Aviv.
With the support of the Obama administration, Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, and Turkey will soon become Islamic states of one sort or another. Turkey, a full NATO member, is already ruled by an "Islamist-inspired" regime that is being hailed by the Obama administration as a model "Islamic democracy." (To be fair to Obama, Washington's betrayal of Turkey's military, traditional guardian of the country's secular system, began under the Bush administration.)
Turkey is also pursuing an imperialist foreign policy--with tacit U.S. support. The Obama administration, as previously reported, welcomes the rise of a neo-Ottoman empire as a counter to nuclear-arming Iran.
The administration doesn't even oppose state Islam in Iran. Mere reform of the Islamic Republic system of government is what Obama and his advisors have in mind for Iran--not revolution.
Should a Palestinian state comprising the disputed West Bank lands and Gaza and a closed, connecting land corridor ever come into being, the new nation will most likely be dominated by Hamas--meaning, more state Islam.
Bin Laden's Big Mistakes?
In light of the above, it could be argued that the world's most notorious Islamist leader, the recently eliminated Al Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden, made two big mistakes: he turned against his main Islamic state sponsor, Saudi Arabia, and he went too far--literally and figuratively--in attacking the U.S. It's one thing to attack a U.S. Navy ship or a U.S. embassy, and another thing, entirely, to slaughter 3,000 Americans on U.S. soil. Had he stuck with the proven model of other Islamist terrorist groups--a Marine barracks bombing here, a hijacking there, kidnappings, torture, and suicide blasts everywhere, etc.--Al Qaeda and the Taliban would probably still be running Afghanistan.
Who knows? Had he never attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and instead limited his terrorism to internationally acceptable Hamas/Hezbollah/Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps levels of mass murder and mayhem, Bin Laden might very well have been allowed to visit New York in order to address the U.N. General Assembly--and Columbia University.
POSTSCRIPT: There is no end to Middle Eastern intrigue--and irony. In the late 1970s and early '80s, Saudi Arabia and Jordan's King Hussein, the father of the country's current King Abdullah II, covertly aided a Muslim Brotherhood campaign of terrorism and violence in Soviet-supported Syria in an effort to topple the regime of the country's dictator, Hafez al-Assad, father of Syria's present, beleaguered despot, Bashar al-Assad. Hafez ultimately crushed the Islamist uprising, killing thousands of Muslim Brotherhood members in the Syrian city of Hama. (Bashar is basically repeating this history.) It is widely believed that the U.S. and Israel also used Lebanese allies to indirectly back the failed Muslim Brotherhood insurrection. Jerusalem, like Washington, in those days mistakenly believed that it could ride the Islamist tiger without being consumed by it. The U.S. sought to use Islamism as a Cold War sword against the Soviet Union and its allies; Israel saw the movement as a useful counterweight to the secular, nationalist PLO, which was also allied with Moscow.
Bringing the Muslim Brotherhood's Palestinian branch into the Jordanian capital could lead to the overthrow of the monarchy and an end to Jordan's peace pact with Israel (just as the looming Islamist/MB takeover of Egypt threatens to end its treaty with the Jewish State). Israel would be confronted by a new nightmare--namely, the emergence of an irredentist, Islamist enemy east of the Jordan River.
But replacement of the Jordanian monarchy by an Islamist regime that would also be seen as Palestinian--i.e. an East Bank Palestinian state led by Hamas--could have an unintended consequence for its supporters--namely, diminished international support for the establishment of yet another Palestinian entity in the West Bank and Gaza. Logically, the governments in Amman and Jerusalem should long ago have agreed on the disposition and administration of the formerly Jordanian-controlled, contested West Bank lands that Israel captured during its defensive Six-Day War of June 1967 (when King Hussein made the mistake of joining Egypt and Syria in an attempt to annihilate the Jewish State).
In short, the region may be backward; but it isn't dull.
Copyright © 2011 Foreign Confidential™
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