by Ian Johnson*

In early 1959, a small West German intelligence operation stumbled over a sensational find: U.S. collusion with the Muslim Brotherhood. According to the West German sources — two ex-Wehrmacht soldiers who were in Washington’s pay but still felt loyalty to their old German bosses — Washington was supporting one of the Brotherhood’s top men, the Geneva-based Said Ramadan, son-in-law of the movement’s founder Hassan al-Banna, in the hope of using him in the global battle against communism. The U.S. double-agents wanted to know if the West Germans would also help support Ramadan.

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by Steven Shamrak

On September 28th, the world was supposed to celebrate, but conveniently forgot the anniversary of the Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement, widely known as the Oslo Accords. Three political stooges, Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin, and Shimon Perez received the Nobel Peace Prize for signing this worthless piece of paper, which was based on fake promises made by Yasser Arafat in a letter to then Israeli Prime Minister Rabin on September 9, 1993.

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by Daniel Pipes*

Western diplomats and journalists fell for Stalin’s show trials but eventually learned not to accept developments in the Soviet Union at face value. In the Soviet Union’s later years, a crowd assaulting a foreign embassy would have been assumed to have state approval.

Other autocrats engage in similar tricks and illusions. Indeed, it’s often best to bring the U.S.S.R. to mind while trying to understand tyrannies. Specifically, that was the case concerning the Sep. 9 mob attack against the Israeli embassy in Cairo.

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by Daniel Pipes*

In a Middle East wracked by coups d’état and civil insurrections, the Republic of Turkey credibly offers itself as a model thanks to its impressive economic growth, democratic system, political control of the military, and secular order.

But, in reality, Turkey may be, along with Iran, the most dangerous state of the region. Count the reasons:

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by Amitai Etzioni*

The 2001 attacks on the United States have intensified the debate that has existed since the dawn of Islam: How is the West to respond to the followers of Muhammad? Some — most famously Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington — held that the contest is between two rather monolithic civilizations that are bound to clash. In a 2007 award acceptance speech at the American Enterprise Institute, Lewis described a history of clashes between Islam and the West. He stated that at first Muslims sought to spread their nascent faith through conquest throughout the then-Christian world; then the Christians invaded the Muslim world (the Crusaders); then the Muslims pushed back into Europe (the Golden Age of Islam); then the West retaliated by colonizing the Muslim world; and now the Muslims are again rising against Christendom by terrorism and flooding Europe with immigrants.[1] Huntington argued that “Islam’s borders are bloody, and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.”[2] By contrast, President George W. Bush stated in the wake of the 9/11 attacks that “Islam is peace,”[3] while British prime minister Tony Blair argued that the problem was not Islam but “extremists trying to hijack it for political purposes.”[4]

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by Steven Shamrak

There are many lands around the world that have been occupied not so long ago by other countries. Many of them are still subjugated to the rule of an occupying power. They were conquered during offensive or defensive wars, throughout the process of establishment of statehood or as a part of colonial and imperial policy. The following is a far from complete list of the lands currently occupied under such circumstances:

Great Britain still occupies Gibraltar, 17 provinces of Ireland, and is holding on to the many residual symbols of her former colonial glory around the world.

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by Efraim Karsh*

Sixty-four years after partitioning Palestine into two independent states — one Jewish, the other Arab — the UN General Assembly is set again to vote on the same issue. While this time around Palestinian leaders appear to be preaching compromise, closer scrutiny reveals this to be a tactical rather than a strategic change of heart, stemming from the different circumstances of the two votes and aimed at disguising their lingering unwillingness (or perhaps inability) to live with a two-state solution.

In 1947, prior to the first UN General Assembly vote, Palestinian leaders rejected any form of Jewish self-determination in Palestine. Hajj Amin Husseini, their most prominent leader from the early 1920s to the late 1940s, upheld that “there is no place in Palestine for two races.” All areas conquered by the Arabs during the 1948 war were cleansed of Jews.

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by Jonathan Schanzer*

In its final report of July 22, 2004, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (commonly known as the 9/11 Commission) charged that Congress had failed America. In the commissioners’ judgment, Congress had “adjusted slowly to the rise of transnational terrorism as a threat to national security. In particular, the growing threat and capabilities of [Osama] bin Laden were not understood in Congress … To the extent that terrorism did break through and engage the attention of the Congress as a whole, it would briefly command attention after a specific incident, and then return to a lower rung on the public policy agenda.” Indeed, the commission was unequivocal about “Congress’s slowness and inadequacy in treating the issue of terrorism in the years before 9/11.”[1]

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By Fern Sidman

On Sunday afternoon, September 11th over 500 people gathered at Park Place and West Broadway in lower Manhattan to mark the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that left close to 3000 Americans dead. Organized by the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), a human rights organization headed by author and activist Pamela Geller, (who achieved notoriety for spearheading the campaign against the construction of a mosque at Ground Zero), the 9/11 Freedom Rally featured members of the clergy, New York City firefighters and police, 9/11 first responders, and 9/11 family members who were barred and/or not invited to the official ceremonies that took place earlier in the day.

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September 11: A Decade Later

by Dov S. Zakheim*

Everyday American images of the war on terror — the legacy of 9/11: Government buildings surrounded by ugly concrete blocks. Pennsylvania Avenue, the street that the White House — once known as the “people’s house” — faces, no longer open to traffic. ID cards required everywhere. Airline passengers waiting patiently in line to take off their shoes, belts, jewelry — and to have their bags searched and perhaps their bodies as well. Fans searched as they enter football stadiums. People on the watch for suspicious characters — including those who might take photos of bridges and tunnels. People fearing to retrieve lost bags in case they are booby trapped. Increased government surveillance of individual Americans, including their telephone calls overseas.

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

Yesterday and this morning, as I surfed the web and switched between network and cable coverage of 9/11 commemorative events, one thing I noticed that was conspicuously absent: Naming those who perpetrated this heinous crime, the Islamo-fascists. The words, “Islamist” and “terrorist,” were glaringly absent. I did stumble upon a sickening local “news” story entitled, “…Muslims recount treatment after 9/11.” Thousands of Americans incinerated and we should be commemorating a few insults hurled against a few Muslims? In fact, I found an even more sickening story that was newsworthy entitled, “Muslim Extremists Noisy Protest At 9/11 Commemoration” (in London). These perverts carried signs stating, “Islam Will Dominate the World.”

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Ten years after the 9/11 World Trade Center attack, the threat of Radical Islam is as great as ever. It is crucial to stay informed about this threat so that the words said on 9/11 by Bush hold true — “they cannot touch the foundation of America.”

by Daniel Pipes*

Three weeks after 9/11, I wrote an article titled “Why This American Feels Safer” in which I noted that, unlike the 2/3s of my fellow countrymen who felt “less safe” than before the atrocities, I felt more secure. Twenty-two years after radical Islam started making war on the United States (counting from the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979), Americans finally took this threat seriously. “The newfound alarm is healthy, the sense of solidarity heartening, the resolve is encouraging.”

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By Gary Gerofsky

With the 10th anniversary of 9/11 a few days away, I was thinking about how the world has been impacted and changed by that gruesome act of jihadist terror against free nations. The effects can be viewed from many different levels: Security, military, religious, political, psychological and propaganda. 9/11 changed the way I viewed the world and made me even more active in fighting the kind of ideological cancer that would carry out such carnage. It also made me realize that all of those wars against Israel and the terror that was directed at one nation up to 2001 were not only between Israel and the surrounding nations but, rather, a global conflict between Islamists and the free world.

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by Aaron Menenberg*

For decades now, Western governments have been seeking to contain Iranian nuclear ambitions through a standard stick-and-carrot policy combining incentives for reforms with financial sanctions for retrenchments. This approach has failed primarily because it lacks appreciation of Iranian history and Islamic values as well as the extent of the regime’s religious convictions and its attendant goals. Yet as Tehran experiences a slow but significant weakening of its governing blocs with many young Iranians free of the virulent anti-U.S. sentiments that fed the Islamic Revolution,[1] positive gains can be made if the Western capitals properly understand and act upon the Iranian reality.

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