Considering Egypt’s presidential elections take place later this month, last weekend’s Islamist clash with the military could not have come at a worse time.
First, the story: due to overall impatience—and rage that the Salafi presidential candidate, Abu Ismail, was disqualified (several secular candidates were also disqualified)—emboldened Islamists began to gather around the Defense Ministry in Abbassia, Cairo, late last week, chanting jihadi slogans, and preparing for a “million man” protest for Friday, May 4th.
As the Syrian revolution against Bashar al-Asad’s rule enters its first year, Asad appears to have a good command over Syria’s large and fractious minority community. Three of the most prominent minority groups include the Christians, Druze, and Kurds. Asad’s control of these groups was not happenstance but the result of a number of hard- and soft-power moves executed by the regime. These calculations did not simply involve direct internal dealings with said minorities, but also outreach to their populations living in neighboring states and abroad. Due to the regime’s many policies, minority support may continue for some time.
Our way of government is not identical with that which is pursued with such conspicuous success in highly civilised and settled countries like your own. We leave the various communities and tribes alone to settle their internal differences. It is only where tribe wars on tribe, religion on religion, or their quarrels stop the traffic on the Sultan’s highway that we interfere. What would you have, mon ami? We are here in Asia!” – An Ottoman governor in Syria to author Marmaduke Pickthall, late nineteenth century.[1]
Ed. note: This is part 1 of the series. Click here to read part 2 and 3.
As the semi-annual Americans For a Safe Israel (AFSI) Chizuk Mission to Israel drew to a conclusion on May 1st, the tour participants told the media that, “Our beloved brethren living on settlements slated to be dismantled by the Israeli government are not alone. We stand with them and our mission will never cease until every Jew has the right to live in any part of Eretz Yisroel.” Having distinguished itself from other tours of Israel that focus exclusively on sights of historic interest, AFSI conducts a thorough exploration of the entire settlement movement; providing emotional and material support to these beleaguered communities.
There is every reason to believe that the Islamic Republic’s days are numbered. The current government, lorded over by the religious supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamene’i, and his Guardian Council of aging mullahs, who can overrule any policy change by the pseudo-elected president, seem wildly out of touch with the general populace. Not only are the youth of Iran—some 70 percent of whom are under the age of thirty—chaffing under the “guardianship of the Islamic jurists” (velayet-e-faqih)—but so is the economy, due to sanctions imposed by the West in response to the regime’s insistence on pursuing its nuclear program.[1] Inflation has long been out of control and trade and tourism a tiny fraction of what it could be, and yet the establishment has on the whole shown little interest in sacrificing militant, revolutionary principles for economic, and indeed, political expediency. Can this approach be sustained in view of the tightening economic noose around Tehran, and at what cost?
The war on Christianity and its adherents rages on in the Muslim world. In March alone, Saudi Arabia’s highest Islamic law authority decreed that churches in the region must be destroyed; jihadis in Nigeria said they “are going to put into action new efforts to strike fear into the Christians of the power of Islam by kidnapping their women”; American teachers in the Middle East were murdered for talking about Christianity; churches were banned or bombed, and nuns terrorized by knife-wielding Muslim mobs. Christians continue to be attacked, arrested, imprisoned, and killed for allegedly “blaspheming” Islam’s prophet Muhammad; former Muslims continue to be attacked, arrested, imprisoned, and killed for converting to Christianity.
To understand why all this persecution is virtually unknown in the West, consider the mainstream media’s well-documented biases: also in March alone, the New York Times ran a virulently anti-Catholic ad, but refused to publish a near identical ad directed at Islam; the BBC admitted it will mock Jesus but never Muhammad; and U.S. sitcoms were exposed for bashing Christianity, but never Islam.
According to the Egyptian website Youm 7, Azza al-Jarf, a female Member of Parliament representing the Muslim Brotherhood’s “Freedom and Justice Party,” is trying to abolish several laws currently enjoyed by Egyptian women—including preventing them from divorcing or even separating from their husbands, because “the man has the authority and stewardship” (see Koran 4:34); mandating that fathers must circumcise their daughters; and trying to get the Egyptian educational system to ban the teaching of the English language—on the grounds that it is an “infidel” tongue—while separating boys and girls in classrooms and forcing girls to wear the hijab.
U.S. president Barack Obama entered office with a bold plan to combat Afghanistan’s escalating insurgency, empower its government, encourage a political resolution of the conflict, and secure the cooperation of neighboring Pakistan—all in time for U.S. troops to withdraw by the end of 2014.
This new Afghanistan-Pakistan (AfPak) policy has yet to deliver on its promise. While the U.S. military surge swept insurgents out of their southeastern strongholds, the rebels have responded with terror attacks and assassinations reaching into the heart of Kabul. Washington has accelerated its training of Afghan security forces, but most U.S. aid still circumvents the central government, weakening its authority. With a political settlement nowhere in sight and Pakistani support for armed extremists unabated, Washington’s options for preventing a Taliban takeover have narrowed.
In October 2011 an extraordinary opportunity to apprehend the ill-defined “Middle East” conflict was offered in the form of a play within the play. Discourse was disabled by flesh and blood images acting out the drama with exquisite unity and perfect casting. Playing the role of Israel, Gilad Shalit, courageous survivor of five years of unspeakable deprivation, emerged frail, pale but gloriously resistant. The little that we know of the conditions of his imprisonment is already too much. Kidnapped at the age of 19 near the Kerem Shalom crossing in Israel (two IDF soldiers were killed in the cross-border attack), held in some sort of dungeon, starved of human company, starved of daylight, undernourished, not even given eyeglasses with which to see the ugly contours of his constricted world, Gilad stood before us, a miraculous survivor. The celestial light of dignity suffused his flesh and bones with metaphysical force.
What decent human being would not have misgivings about the release, in exchange for Shalit, of 1027 murderers, thieves, and thugs determined to use their liberation as a license to renew the persecution of Israeli Jews? And who could not feel, seeing the first images of Gilad roughly handled by Hamas and Egyptian intermediaries, that no price was too dear for the release of one single human being from the tomb in which he was jailed and left to slowly extinguish like a flame without oxygen.
In a surprise move, Jordan has decided to revoke the Jordanian citizenship of Palestinian Authority and PLO officials, sources in Amman disclosed Wednesday. …
The move coincides with a new electoral law in Jordan that seeks to limit Palestinian representation in parliament. …
In recent years the Jordanians have stripped thousands of Palestinians of their Jordanian citizenship in an apparent response to calls to establish a Palestinian state in Jordan. Nearly half the kingdom’s 6 million people are of Palestinian origin. …
Sounds like Arab-against-Arab apartheid to me, not “Arab Unity” or an “Arab Spring.” Let’s be clear: The Hashemite Bedouin regime ruling Jordan, led by King Abdullah II, is not “Palestinian.” Remember that in 1970, Abdullah’s father:
… King Hussein decided it was time to act. Throughout September the Jordanian military launched attacks to push the PLO [Palestinian Liberation organization] out of Jordan, attacks now called “Black September” by the PLO. Casualty reports are uncertain, but hundreds or perhaps thousands of PLO fadayeen were killed in the fighting and large numbers of Palestinian Arab civilians died as well. Arafat retreated to northern Jordan, close to his Syrian sponsors. Within 10 months the PLO were driven out of Jordan completely, and re-established themselves in Lebanon, a choice that led to eventual disaster for Lebanon.
Huge balls of fire and mushrooms of smoke seen on the latest videos from Homs indicate that the Syrian army is using more powerful weapons in its assault on the remaining rebel strongholds in the city.
This is what the daily shelling of Homs used to look like when the Baba Amro district was still under rebel control:
February 8, 2012
Explosions seen on the latest videos look rather different:
We all remember the international uproar that erupted when, during a clash between police and protesters in Egypt, the former beat and partially stripped to her bra a female protester (subsequently known as the “Blue Bra Woman”).
An older video which purports to show an Egyptian officer ordering a woman to take off all her clothes, is even worse, and has sparked new debate. For the stripping is not a product of haste, blind-rage, or chaos—as apologists for the Blue Bra Woman incident argue—but is deliberate, methodical, and sadistic.
Claude Guéant, the French interior minister, sparked a firestorm last month when he praised Western values as “superior” to the oppressive ones found elsewhere, namely the Islamic world. Yet the controversy did more to spotlight an area in which the West clearly trails its rivals: self-confidence. If a government official cannot extol the unique virtues of freedom and equality that define Western life without being cast as a bigot by the politically correct, how can they be safeguarded against the highly motivated forces of Islamism, which doubt neither the superiority of their own principles nor the righteousness of imposing them on others?
Half of Iraq’s indigenous Christians are gone due to the unleashed forces of jihad, many of them fleeing to nearby Syria; yet, as the Assad regime comes under attack by al-Qaeda and others, the jihad now seeps into Syria, where Christians are experiencing a level of persecution unprecedented in the nation’s modern history. Likewise, some 100,000 Christian Copts have fled their native Egypt since the overthrow of the Mubarak regime; and in northern regions of Nigeria, where the jihadi group Boko Haram has been slaughtering Christians, up to 95 % of the Christian population has fled.
In civilized societies, most people regard youth as a time for learning, playing, exploration, creativity, music, fine arts, and independent thinking. Not so in much of the Muslim World. One only need to look at Iran, an Islamic Republic which specializes in repressing its young people. Most recently, we find a sickening wave of intolerance against young, creative kids in Iraq — an intolerance driven by the prevailing belief system based in Islamic law (”Sharia”). This intolerance is being expressed in the most brutal forms of ultra-violence — supported no less by Iraq’s interior ministry:
Young people who identify themselves as so-called Emos are being brutally killed at an alarming rate in Iraq, where militias have distributed hit lists of victims and security forces say they are unable to stop crimes against the subculture that is widely perceived in Iraq as being gay.
Officials and human rights groups estimated as many as 58 Iraqis who are either gay or believed to be gay have been killed in the last six weeks alone — forecasting what experts fear is a return to the rampant hate crimes against homosexuals in 2009. This year, eyewitnesses and human rights groups say some of the victims have been bludgeoned to death by militiamen smashing in their skulls with heavy cement blocks. …
Americans are getting informed about the dangers Islamists pose to civilized societies — threats like stealth infiltration of Sharia (Islamic “law”) into our legal/social system, “honor” killings, homicide bombings, intolerance, support for terrorism… There are too many apologists for Islamist outrages amongst our university academe, primary and secondary educators, media elite, government officials, etc. But the blogsphere, activist organizations, and concerned citizens have learned about Islam, and are fighting back against political correctness gone mad (though we still have a long way to go). Thanks to the efforts of the Florida Family Association, The Learning Channel has pulled its shameless whitewash of Islam, a TV show called, “All-American Muslim,” off the air:
Articles/Entries
