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From: "Gatestone Institute" <list@gatestoneinstitute.org>
Date: May 13, 2013 3:17:28 AM GMT-06:00
To: bobbygmartin1938@gmail.com
Subject: Gatestone Update :: Ali Salim: Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Middle East, and more
Reply-To: "Gatestone Institute" <list@gatestoneinstitute.org>
In this mailing:
- Ali Salim: Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Middle East
- Veli Sirin: The Real Erdogan
- Lawrence Kadish and Hy Horowitz: Could iPhone Videos Have Destroyed the Third Reich?
Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Middle East
Not an American Western
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There exists in the Middle East a basic willingness to use WMD against civilians -- with no hesitancy involved -- and with full Islamic religious justification. The US and the EU are trying to find a diplomatic solution to a problem that does not have one. It is Iran that must be struck. If it is, the other players will get the message. There is nothing to fear from an Iranian military retaliation so long as Iran does not have an atomic bomb. Once it does, it will be too late.
Political scientists and orientalists in the West who think that the nuclearization of the Middle East is containable, and not an existential threat to them, are making a serious mistake. These political scientists seem to think Iran's nuclear weapons, Pakistan's bomb and Syria's chemical arsenal are just local problems. Most of these scholars do not speak Arabic and do not understand the Middle Eastern mindset: they deeply wish to believe it is a mirror image of how they think.
It is not. Had Hitler possessed weapons of mass destruction, does anyone doubt that he would have used them against the Russians and Americans? In north Yemen in 1967, Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser sprayed poison gas on civilians; in Halabja in 1988, Iraq's Saddam Hussein sprayed poison gas -- including mustard gas and sarin -- on his Kurds, and now Bashar Assad is pouring chemical weapons on his fellow Syrians.
The use of weapons of mass destruction by leaders in the Middle East against their own people is an indication of just how light the trigger finger is of many tribal leaders and religious fanatics running wild in that region. There exists in the Middle East a basic willingness to use WMD, whether chemical or nuclear, against civilians -- with no hesitancy involved -- and with full Islamic religious justification.
If the extremists in Iran, the Hezbollah or the mujahideen of the global jihad get their hands on nuclear or chemical weapons, the world will immediately become a very difference place. Unfortunately, a substantial proportion of the so-called "free Syrian army" is cast in the same radical Islamic mold as Al-Qaeda and the Al-Nusra Front. If the West provides the anti-Assad forces with advanced weaponry, or intervenes to collapse the Assad regime, it is entirely possible that fanatic Islamists will take control of Syria – the same scenario the Americans have already seen played out in Afghanistan and Egypt.
America, which withdrew from the battles in Iraq and Afghanistan -- abandoning the people there to the mercy of merciless extremists -- racked up painful statistics on the loss of American soldiers' lives, the loss of military equipment and a mounting economic damage that threatens domestic stability. Since then, the world, as it did after the Second World War, has been aligning itself into two camps, one represented by the enlightened, if faltering, West, and the other by the forces of reaction and repression: namely North Korea, Russia, China, and Iran -- along with its satellites, Iraq, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas -- in addition to countries and terrorist organizations spread throughout the African continent.
In this divided world, the leaders of the United States, who are also the leaders of the free world, have been standing at the sidelines, looking on, apparently not wanting to put their hands into the dirt. Historically, such a stand is seen by countries you would not want to live in as an invitation to take over all abandoned ground.
The Arabs, as usual, whose brothers are being massacred in Syria, will wait on the sidelines until someone has taken out Assad for them; as far as they are concerned, the best candidate for this job is America. The leaders of the Arab states excel in taking no action whatsoever while repeating empty slogans -- the most common of which is, "The Liberation of Palestine" -- while at the same time either ignoring the Palestinians or treating them like trash.
The wealthy Arab states, at most, are willing to fund jihad missions, including suicide bombings carried out by unfortunate, brainwashed Islamists whom they send, as part of the global jihad, to blow themselves up along with innocent Arabs and Westerners.
This sorry fact recently came up in a class action lawsuit against the Arab Bank: at the request of various Arab countries, the Bank both financed suicide terrorist attacks, then paid reparations to the families of the suicide bombers.
Countries such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar self-righteously proclaim they oppose terrorism and hold media-covered seminars for de-radicalization while funding madrasas [Muslim religious schools] in which children and impressionable adults are pumped full of radical Islamic ideology. They build "Cultural Centers" throughout Europe while sending emissaries of the da'wah [Muslim outreach] to incite terrorist operatives to commit acts of violence around the globe.
The hypocrisy -- and duplicity -- of the Arab-Muslim world is staggering. Last month, the Prime Minister of Qatar and Arab League representatives met with American Secretary of State John Kerry to present a revised version of the 2002 Arab League Israeli-Palestinian peace plan. To look as if they were moving their peace initiative forward, they included "the (possibility) of comparable and mutual agreed minor swap of the land" (two percent) to allow for the Israeli retention of blocks of settlements -- while the flow of funds from Qatar to the terrorist organization, Hamas, continued uninterrupted, and still does.
As Hamas, since its inception, has not only rejected any agreement with Israel, but also flatly stated its refusal to accept the right of Israel to exist, the head of the Hamas administration in the Gaza Strip, Ismail Haniya, not only immediately rejected the Arab League's proposal, he reemphasized Hamas's demand for the destruction of Israel and the establishment on its ruins of an Islamic Palestinian state. Shortly after that, Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal repeated the same intent, that Israel should be obliterated.
Qatar not only inundates Hamas with millions of dollars, it also produces Al-Jazeera TV which daily broadcasts from Qatar programs in Arabic such as "The Right that Refuses to be Forgotten," that perpetuate and immortalize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and incite the Palestinians to reject any possible arrangement other than the total destruction of the Israeli state.
While tension between the United States and Russia makes direct American action in Syria problematic, the Arab countries do not have that predicament. As the primary concern of Arab leaders is self-preservation, no Arab leader is prepared to take the risk of directly confronting the Syrian regime and personally backing up his empty talk.
As for Russia, the request by American President Obama that President Vladimir Putin help arm the Syrian rebels sounded nothing short of surreal: Does Obama really expect the Russian fox to guard the Syrian chicken coop and collaborate with him against Russia's interest -- which is assuring the survival of the Assad regime and keeping the price of oil as high as possible? Diplomatic meetings have borne no fruit; when John Kerry sat down with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov, evidently the best they could come up with was to agree not to agree.
Without a doubt Obama's discomfort is great: he is trying, with European cooperation, to find a diplomatic solution for a problem that does not have one. It can only end with the death or exile of Bashar Assad. Worse, just as the Taliban in Afghanistan made use of American support to overcome the Russians, the "free Syrian army," composed as it is of operatives from the Al-Nusra Front and Al-Qaeda, once it takes over the country will do just the same. This is not a straightforward black-hat-white-hat American Western in which good triumphs in the end, but a devious, intrigue-ridden, back-stabbing Middle Eastern affair.
The duplicity of the Arab leaders was also seen early in May after the Israelis bombed an Iranian arms convoy on its way from Syria to Lebanon to supply Hezbollah. The Israelis apparently also bombed military targets of the Assad regime. While Israel refuses to comment, it is clear that the attack also served the anti-Assad rebels. But while the American President justified the action, two-faced Arab leaders were quick to condemn it, and fell back on the claim that Israel had violated Syrian sovereignty, as though this were a problem that kept them up night.
Without a doubt, the joint maneuvers held by 41 countries, led by the United States and Britain, in the Persian Gulf -- as well as the gradual detente between Israel and Turkey and the recent Israeli air attack in Syria -- not only send a message to Syria, but also to Iran, which is currently putting the finishing touches on a nuclear device that will threaten every Arab and European within striking distance. If Iran has nuclear-tipped missiles pointing at every capital of Europe, it would not even need to launch them: the threat alone would be enough. All one has to do is look at Europe's refusal to declare Hezbollah a terrorist group -- despite its attacks -- for fear of inviting even more attacks.
Nevertheless, an American decision to provide the Syrian rebels with weapons is a gun the Americans would be using to shoot themselves in both feet. It is Iran that must be struck. If it is, the other players will get the message. Once Iran has been revealed as vulnerable, the arrogance of Hamas, Hezbollah, and even North Korea will wither. The leaders of the Middle East will lower their tone, say thank you nicely, and the sheriff will return to the conflicted Middle Eastern town stronger and more admired.
America does not even need to send troops on the ground, just exploit its air superiority to strike deep at the heart of Iran's nuclear project and the rule of the Ayatollahs. There is nothing to fear from an Iranian military retaliation so long as Iran does not have an atomic bomb. Once it does, it will be too late.
Related Topics: Ali Salim
The Real Erdogan
Share: The Turkish judiciary has become a weapon for settling scores, silencing opponents, restructuring Turkish society as an AKP party-state, and undermining secularism. That is the true nature of Erdogan's program.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, born on February 26, 1954, comes from a shabby Istanbul waterfront neighborhood where children grew up between rusting ships and old tires. He sold snacks on the street as a youth, to help his family. He called himself "the black Turk." He emerged, a parvenu in Istanbul's elegant, secular social strata, as a much-feared religious advocate for the masses. He is now married to Emine, with whom he has four children: two sons, and two daughters. His daughters, like his wife, wear headscarves (hijab).
Erdogan graduated from a religious high school, was a semiprofessional soccer player for various teams, worked in municipal bus services, and served as an accountant and manager in a food company. He completed his education in business administration and served as Mayor of Istanbul from 1994 to 1998 – but was then tried and sentenced for anti-secular incitement, and spent four months in prison. In 2001 he founded the Justice and Development Party (AKP), which swept the Turkish elections of 2002 in a landslide majority.
Since then, Erdogan has turned Turkey upside-down. The Islamist outsider, the extreme religious believer, the failed soccer player, now determines the future of his country. He is the most powerful Turk since the legendary founder of the republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. His history is that of someone who, in seeking to change his country, was transformed from a fighter to a reformer, and then a ruler.
In 2002 people in Turkey already seem to have viewed Erdogan as an "alpha male;" but his mastery is now obvious. Assistants and advisers crowd around him, bowing and scraping. Does he actually need their support to remain standing?
He had claimed to be seeking "Anglo-Saxon" secularism and was quoted in the London Economist in 2001, saying "I am not an Islamist – I'm just an observant Muslim and that's my own business." That was the genius of Erdogan: to profess loyalty to secularism while, once in authority, acting with determination to dismantle it.
Turkey, he repeated in political speech after speech providing the early basis of his appeal, was administered badly. His party's predecessors in government, in 2000, faced a deep economic crisis. Erdogan argued, "We want a Western standard of living and to join the European Union."
This requires reforms. The old secular elite challenged Erdogan from the time of his rhetorical excess as mayor of Istanbul in 1998, while the army warned the AKP openly in 2007 that it was on dangerous ground and could be removed. Nationalist groups summoned mass demonstrations, which the secular media applauded. The chief public prosecutor attempted to ban the AKP and its prime minister in 2008. The attempt failed and left Erdogan more powerful than before. The military delivered a more subtle series of hints about their willingness to act against the Islamists during the approach to the election of 2011, but was ignored.
Erdogan cultivates the art of provocation, as seen in his confrontational rhetoric toward Israel and Germany. He is self-confident and controlled, but aggressive. He rebuffed Angela Merkel's criticisms of Turkish press restrictions in February 2013, with the result that the dream of rapid EU entry, already clouded, appeared to have failed definitively. He called for more Turkish-language schools in Germany, where people with a family background in Turkey account for about 4.5 million, or 5% of the population. He criticized the Americans over sanctions against Iran and supported defiance of Israel's Gaza blockade by backing the Mavi Marmara maritime attempt to break the embargo, and officially endorsing the Islamist Humanitarian Relief Foundation, or IHH. He currently plans to change the constitution by expanding presidential powers, and for this many citizens are lauding him.
The constitutional referendum he called in 2010 reduced the independence of the judiciary. Three constitutional court judges are now chosen by parliament and 14 by the president. In this way Erdogan and the AKP gained dominance over the court. Similarly, and with the same intent, the Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors was enlarged, from seven to 22 members. Trials of anti-Islamist public prosecutors and journalists began. A justifiable investigation of conspiracy within the army became a blind pursuit of opponents of the AKP. Generals and lawyers, until then the backbone of the Turkish state, were sentenced to prison. The army, which had long guarded Turkish secularism, was to be expelled from politics, leaving governance to party functionaries.
In every election, Erdogan gained more votes. The AKP has an absolute majority, but the separation of powers in the state is irritating to it. Erdogan seems to think he must be the only boss.
When they hear the way in which he speaks, secular and sophisticated Turks are frightened. At 59 years of age, Erdogan apparently loves to deliver advice. He criticizes the increase of single people living in the cities and calls on the young to marry as quickly as they can. A happy family, according to him, will need to produce three children or "Turks will become extinct." He calls loudly for the reintroduction of the death penalty, abolished in 2004 as an element of the nation's approach to the EU.
Erdogan seems to have two major goals: The first is the protection of his own political future, the second is that of aggrandizing what he sees evidently as Turkey's geopolitical ambitions. His accomplices also appear to envision a new constitutional order in which the president will hold the highest authority. This could work in a federal country or one with other checks on power. But Turkish centralism could easily slide into authoritarianism. The opposition denounces him, and the majority of Turks would reject a dictatorship, but Erdogan, a political rock star, looks likely to be chosen for a new-style, expanded presidency.
His project for the protection of Turkey encompasses some accommodation with the Kurdish minority, who make up as much as a quarter of Turkey's population of 85 million. Worried by the Syrian civil war and the success of the Kurdish autonomous, oil-exporting zone in northern Iraq, Erdogan would do well to solve the Kurdish issue. His representatives negotiated with the radical leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party [PKK], Abdullah Ocalan, while he was in jail, and offered political and cultural reforms in eastern Turkey – if the PKK agreed to cease fighting. Were Erdogan to establish Kurdish rights within Turkey he would repair a birth defect of the Turkish Republic and complete the legacy of Ataturk.
At Nowruz, the Kurdish and Central Asian New Year celebration on March 21, 2013, held in the eastern Turkish city of Diyarbakir, which has a Kurdish majority, hundreds of thousands of Kurds were electrified by the announcement that Ocalan had declared an end to the PKK's insurgency. At least 40,000 people had died in the struggle. Ocalan endorsed a cease-fire, and the PKK revised its earlier demand for independence, now asking only for autonomy.
Erdogan's presidential system may be a curse, but if Erdogan is still partly a reformer, peace with the Kurds would be a blessing. Erdogan has the future in his hands and many hope he will act wisely. Few really believe in this promise, but hope dies last.
Meanwhile, Erdogan must also face the problem of the Turkish and Kurdish Alevi minority, which also totals about a quarter of the Turkish census, or 20 million. Alevis are heterodox Muslims following a tradition fusing Shia Islam, metaphysical Sufism, and pre-Islamic shamanism. In 1995, an Alevi leader, Izzettin Dogan, launched an "officially-approved" Alevi group, Cem Vakfi. As members of the spiritual movement do not pray in mosques, a cem is an Alevi meeting house.
The Turkish government then used Cem Vakfi to split the Alevi opposition to the regime. The government, even when it was secular, favored Sunni Islam and harassed Alevis. Politically, Dogan represented the extreme nationalist right, and was linked to the fascist Nationalist Action Party or MHP, known as the Grey Wolves, from the title of its paramilitary branch. The MHP supported the military in its campaign against the Kurdish PKK, and the Grey Wolves have been charged with at least 5,000 murders of Turkish and Kurdish leftists, including Alevis, in the 1980s. Today the veterans of the Grey Wolves are intertwined with the state and are responsible for countless abuses of human rights in both the Kurdish areas of eastern Turkey and in localities of the country's western region, where they hold political office.
In 1978 the Grey Wolves committed a massacre of Alevis, calling all "believers" to aggressive jihad, or war on alleged non-Muslims, against Alevis and leftists. The Grey Wolves proclaimed, "One who kills an Alevi will enter paradise, and the death of an Alevi is equal to five hajj pilgrimages to Mecca."
In 1980, after a military coup, the MHP was banned, along with all other political parties. Nevertheless, many supporters of the Grey Wolves achieved careers in the military and state bureaucracy. The ban on the MHP was eventually removed and in the late 1990s the party changed its public orientation in a religious direction. In 1997, Izzettin Dogan introduced his Cem Vakfi in four different towns in the Netherlands, under the auspices of the foreign branch of the MHP, the so-called Federation of Turkish Democratic-Idealist Organizations in Europe or ADUTDF.
Erdogan's government has approached the Alevis in Turkey with plans for ambitious construction of mosques in their communities, even though Alevis meet for their rituals, as noted, in cem houses, and only a few Alevis attend mosque services.
Mosque-building in Alevi villages, therefore, is a waste of public funds, but since the 1980s, pressure for "Sunnization" has been intense and has provoked political protest among the Alevis. Today, Alevis increasingly refuse to conceal their identities, as they might have done in the past; instead, they present themselves openly as Alevis, defending the Alevi faith. Alevi books and magazines are now issued prolifically and Alevism is offered as a counter to Islamist ideology.
Support for Cem Vakfi and Izzettin Dogan by the Turkish state institutions and mass media has failed. The democratic Alevis reject him, and the situation should remain as such.
Nevertheless, the AKP regime, through its apologists, including the journalist Mustafa Akyol, who has performed brilliantly in convincing Washington politicians of his moderation, accuses the Alevis of supporting the bloodthirsty dictatorship of Bashar Al-Assad in Syria. There is no serious corroboration of this claim, which has also been made by Erdogan himself. Its proponents assert falsely that the Alevi movement in Turkey is similar to the ostensibly Shia Alawite cult ruling Syria. This is denied by Alevis themselves as well as by authoritative, objective Western academics.
While Erdogan contends with the appeals from Alevis and Kurds for an end to discrimination against them, the AKP's purge trials of military officers and journalists grind on. The Center for Islamic Pluralism has received a communication from Yasin Turker, one of 328 victims sentenced to 16 years' imprisonment in the "Sledgehammer case," in which the defendants were charged with attempting to overthrow the AKP government in 2003. According to Turker, the evidence in the "Sledgehammer" proceedings was falsified by the introduction of unprinted, unsigned, digitally-fabricated documents. Forgery of the material was proven by its appearance in Microsoft Office 2007 format, which did not exist in 2003. Not a single item of evidence or eyewitness testimony has ever supported the indictment.
Turker, a former lieutenant commander of the Turkish Navy, was tried in a courtroom in a high-security prison, away from the public and without any attorney-client confidentiality. The burden of proof was on the defendants to establish their innocence. There was no procedure for evaluating the evidence. The court refused to analyze the authenticity of the digital files included in the indictment, and refused to call witnesses for the defense. No opportunity was provided for the defense to cross-examine the prosecutors' "experts."
According to Turker, the Turkish judiciary has become a weapon for settling scores, silencing opponents, restructuring Turkish society as an AKP party-state, and undermining secularism. That is the true nature of Erdogan's program and reveals the real character of Erdogan as a politician.
Related Topics: Turkey | Veli Sirin
Could iPhone Videos Have Destroyed the Third Reich?
Share: As we observe an anniversary of the end of World War II, it's intriguing to ask "Could the Third Reich have survived the iPhone?" The all-pervasive social media's use of iPhone video created an instant universal awareness of the Boston Marathon bombings. It also created a bittersweet reflection on how world history could have been profoundly different had it been available in the early 1930s.
It was an era when the Nazi Party began its ascent to power in Germany, ruthlessly destroying a fragile democracy through meticulously staged and managed attacks that portrayed itself as a popular rising of the "people's will." These efforts at manipulating world opinion reached their crescendo during the Berlin Olympics where international visitors barely saw the venom of state sponsored anti-Semitism. The Nazi's street attacks on Jews and others were far more selective and parades of smiling stormtroopers suggested a nation merely intent on restoring "order." It was meant to buy them time as they prepared their war machine and the death camps that would follow.
Yet there were instances of Americans who became eyewitnesses to street attacks on German couples whose crime was that one happened to be Jewish. There were also foreign visitors who witnessed the raids that saw the regime's opponents vanish literally overnight. Few, if any of these actions, were reported by an indifferent international media or were believed when they were. They were dismissed as unsubstantiated reports from unreliable sources.
Yet consider how a handful of digital camera phones could have revealed the savagery of Kristallnacht as state-sponsored terrorism destroyed thousands of German synagogues, businesses and homes in one night alone while thousands were hauled away to concentration camps. Think of how a barrage of tweets read worldwide, written by those watching books being burned by stormtroopers, would have left the Reich with no place to hide. Their mask of civility would have been revealed as a cynical ploy. The world would have had no choice but to see and understand the emergence of absolute, undiluted evil. They could look away if they wished but no one would be able to say they didn't see, they didn't hear and they didn't comprehend what was occurring because the avalanche of images would be inescapable and undeniable.
In today's world where murderous regimes seek to engage in a 21st century version of genocide, the new weapons of war include digital devices that make our indifference unforgivable. The state's total control of the media mastered by the Nazis has been shattered by providing every citizen with the power to be an observer who can instantaneously share his experience with the rest of us. In Boston it helped apprehend terrorists. It also reminded all of us that this technology comes with the responsibility of conscience and an understanding that turning our recording devices away from terrorism in any form makes us complicit in these murderous actions.
Far more important than any Facebook friend count or trending tweet is the fact that the digital technology we own and the social media world it has created may finally allow us to break the curse of mankind being doomed to repeat history.
Lawrence Kadish is president of The Museum of American Armor and a board member of the Gatestone Institute. Hy Horowitz, 93, was a tanker in General Patton's 7th Armored Division, and while attached to the British 2nd Army, helped liberate the Bergen-Belsen death camp. He is an associate member of the Museum of American Armor.
Related Topics: Lawrence Kadish
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