Britain's So-Called Jewish Spiritual Leader
Sounds Off Like a Fundamentalist Fanatic
Memo to the Moron: This lifelong American Jewish Zionist, himself an Internet content pioneer who was fortunate enough to have been able to enter into mutually beneficial business relationships with Apple and Microsoft -- this ex-Betari and yeshiva elementary school graduate -- this Jabotinsky Centennial Citation recipient -- who writes and works on MacBook and iPhone -- resents your foolish, ignorant rant. You clearly long for the shtetl.
# posted by Confidential Reporter 
Worst Case Predictions Come True
More and more Tunisians agree: the Islamists, effectively copying the Bolsheviks of the Russian Revolution, are tightening their grip on the country. Click here for the story.
Tunisia, Egypt, Libya ... Syria's turn is next. The Muslim Brotherhood, backed by the United States and Europe ... and Saudi Arabia and Turkey ... is taking power across the region.
Turns out, 9/11 was a huge success for the Islamist cause. The (Pakistan/Iran/Saudi-supported) Islamists proved that they could carry out a seismic strike against "the Great Satan," suck their enemy into never-ending, draining military adventures abroad, and move the policymaking and opinion shaping needles that measure political acceptability (and correctness) in the U.S. significantly in the Islamist direction, so far, in fact, that only the Islamist organization directly responsible for the coordinated, mega-terrorist attacks of September 11, Al Qaeda, and an "irreconcilable" faction of the group that aided and sheltered it--the Pakistan-created Taliban, now poised to retake Afghanistan--are considered by the U.S. and European Power Elites to be unfit for engagement (appeasement and collaboration).
# posted by Confidential Reporter 
Barry Rubin on Syria's civil strife--click here to read his analysis. He confirms that the Turkish/Western-backed opposition is dominated by Islamists; but Rubin is less pessimistic than Foreign Confidential™ regarding Syria's future. He argues that a real democracy could emerge in Syria following the overthrow of the current dictatorship because the country is only 60% Sunni and more modern and urban than other Arab countries.
One hopes he is right. But Rubin and others in Israel, admittedly much closer and more tuned into the action than this reporter, may be engaging in a bit of understandable wishful thinking. "The West" is pro-Islamist. The only democracies the Obama administration and its European allies are interested in promoting are so-called Islamic democracies--a menacing and ominous oxymoron meant to advance the Arc/Sword of Islam across the Middle East and Central Asia in order to control the region's enormous energy reserves and counter and contain--and perhaps, even, crack apart--Russia and China.
In other words, if anything close to a genuine democracy emerges in Syria it will happen in spite ofObama and his allies, not because of them.
POSTSCRIPT: Rubin's analysis may also reflect a residue of pro-Islamist thinking in Israel. Sadly, Israel, too, once believed it could ride the Islamist tiger without being eaten by it. Seeking a counterweight to the nationalist PLO, the Jewish State aided and encouraged Hamas in its formative years--the late Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin reportedly referred to this secret support as a "fatal error" in a conversation with PLO chief Yasser Arafat--and Israel, Jordan, and the United States covertly supported the failed Muslim Brotherhood uprising against the regime of the current Syrian despot's father, Hafez al-Assad. The Israeli policy--which helped to make an uncontrollable monster--mirrored the Cold War-era U.S. policy of using rightwing political Islam against the Soviet Union.
Incredibly, the horrific blowback of 9/11 has not really changed anything. Al Qaeda and so-called irreconcilable Taliban elements may be beyond the pale of Western engagement (code for appeasement and collaboration). But every other Islamist group or entity seems to be alright to engage in the eyes of the present U.S. administration--and its European allies. The nuclear-arming Iranian regime is so fanatic, so consumed with Islamist hatred of the U.S. and Israel, that the regime cannot even fake moderation--all that would have been required of it to win Obama's warm embrace and a pledge of permanent non-interference in Iranian affairs from Washington.
Of course, the Bush administration should have blown away the monstrous mullahocracy, along with the Taliban and Al Qaeda, after 9/11, instead of (a) allowing Osama Bin Laden and Mullah Omar and their most senior leaders to escape into neighboring (nuclear-armed) Pakistan and (b) needlessly invading contained, secular Iraq, a monumental strategic blunder from which the U.S. has yet to recover. Israel should have been given the green light to wipe out Hezbollah and Hamas ... and Syria should have been bribed into making peace with Israel and playing ball with the U.S.
Also, Turkey's military, traditional guardian of the country's secular system, should have been allowed to crush the country's Islamist threat.
None of that happened. The U.S. and NATO (an alliance that should have been disbanded following the collapse of the Soviet Union and Soviet Communism) have thrown in with the Islamists. With the support of the West, the Muslim Brotherhood is taking over the Middle East, and an Islamist, neo-Ottoman Empire is emerging.
The danger is that the imperial interventions and intrigue, meddling and mayhem, will lead to a multi-stage war with Iran--as opposed to the swift smashing of the monstrous mullahocracy by any and all means necessary that should long ago have taken place--which could result in the rubbling of Tel Aviv and the ultimate squeezing down and chopping up of Israel to create Obama's "contiguous" Palestine, an irredentist, Islamist-dominated entity that will take over Jordan (the East Bank) and, with the help of restive Israeli Arabs, relentlessly harass and seek to conquer the remnant Jewish State.
Moreover, given the Obama administration's rising tensions with rising China and failure to "reset" relations with resurgent Russia, there is a real danger, too, of a world war. That all three powers have nuclear weapons does not mean they will automatically be deterred from shooting at each other, escalating in stages, etc. Unthinkable ... stuff ... happens. WW III could be a conflict radically unlike any one that has ever been seen or imagined.
# posted by Confidential Reporter 
Prediction: The Obama-orchestrated overthrow of Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak, a pro-Western leader who preserved the peace treaty with Israel and courageously and consistently battled and suppressed Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists, will go down in history as one of America's most perfidious betrayals, strikingly similar to the catastrophic, Carter administration-assisted, Islamist ouster of Iran's pro-Western, modernizing monarch, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.
Few Americans appreciate that their current President is actively, enthusiastically pro-Islamist, in spite (a) of having killed his top competitor for leadership of what he insists on calling "the Muslim world"--an Islamist concept--Al Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden, and (b) of ratcheting up tensions with nuclear-arming, Islamist Iran, after first appeasing and trying to align with it in a Grand Bargain for pacification of the Middle East.
The Shah--may His Imperial Majesty's soul rest in peace--who was driven from Iran by Islamists, and his great friend, Anwar Sadat, Mubarak's predecessor, who was assassinated by Islamists for having committed the "sin" of making peace with Israel, must both be rolling in their (Egyptian) graves. Everything they fought and stood for has been or is swiftly being washed away, thanks, in large measure, to the hoary, Anglo-American strategy of trying to ride the Islamist tiger without being consumed by it.
Ironically, Sadat, too, tried to ride the Islamist tiger.... Himself a former Muslim Brotherhood member, Sadat served as the Nasser regime's liaison to the group. After taking power following Nasser's death, Sadat invited the Brotherhood back into Egypt--Nasser had exiled the group--and then promoted it as a counterweight to Nasser's nationalistic, semi-socialist, Soviet-leaing, pan-Arab movement. Washington approved; like the British, it had secretly backed the Brotherhood against Nasser.
# posted by Confidential Reporter 
Absent a miraculous change, the war against rightwing political Islam will never be won by the so-called "West"--meaning, in this context, the United States and Europe--because the West stupidly and cynically intends to influence and use rather than destroy and defeat the enemy that aims to end civilization as we know it.
In other words, the problem is one of policy, not a lack of political will, as many observers naively contend.
The U.S./European policy--actually, the policy of the power elites that really rule the so-called free world--is to manage the clerical fascist creed commonly called Islamism, or radical Islam, through a complex, protracted process of support and co-optation. Western policymakers perceive political Islam as both a potential ally against adversaries and competitors--essentially, the old, Cold War concept of Islam as sword and bulwark--and a portal for wealth extraction and creation. More specifically, our so-called leaders aim to manipulate and exploit Islamism
- (a) to control and/or establish and maintain preferential access to the enormous energy resources of the Middle East and Central Asia;
- (b) to counter resurgent Russia; and
- (c) to contain and, possibly also, cause the crackup, or dismemberment, of rising China.
Understanding all this helps to explain why the Bush administration responded to the Islamist mega-terrorist attacks of 2001 with a never-ending, misnamed "War on Terror" and the unnecessary invasion and conquest of a contained, secular enemy, Iraq, which had neither weapons of mass destruction nor meaningful ties to the monsters that actually slaughtered some 3,000 Americans on September 11--Pakistan/Iran/Saudi-supported Al Qaeda and the Pakistan-created Taliban.
POSTSCRIPT: The antidemocratic Left also sees political Islam as an ally--to cripple capitalism, bring down the United States, and eliminate Israel.
# posted by Confidential Reporter
Comment: The developing civil war in Syria has nothing whatsoever to do with democracy or freedom. Rather, the Arab League, the Obama administration, NATO, and the EU have all sided with neo-Ottomon, Sunni Islamist-ruled Turkey and the Sunni Islamist Muslim Brotherhood in order to topple the secular--but Shiite Islamist, Iran-supported--Syrian regime.
The objectives of the anti-Assad intervention include (a) installing a supposedly moderate Sunni Islamist (Muslim Brotherhood) government in Damascus that will be friendly to Turkey and NATO, and (b) regime change in Iran--i.e. overthrowing Syria's (Shiite offshoot) Alawite-dominated despotism ahead of or in order to trigger a war with Tehran's nuclear-arming, turbaned tyranny, resulting in its collapse and replacement with a more "moderate" and non-nuclear-arming turbaned tyranny, meaning, a regime that will no longer seek Middle Eastern hegemony and will instead be content to merely oppress its own people under the (NATO/Obama-blessed) banner of "Islamic democracy."
# posted by Confidential Reporter