Spanish photographer Samuel Aranda won the 2011 World Press Photo of the Year award Friday for an image of a veiled woman holding a wounded relative in her arms after a demonstration in Yemen. … the image has religious ‘almost Biblical’ overtones and noted its resemblance in composition to Michelangelo’s Pieta — but in a Muslim setting. …”

- CBC, Feb 10, 2012

“Almost Biblical.” Not… even… close… Comparing Michelangelo’s Pietà to some snapshot of a burqa-ed Muslim woman holding some injured Yemeni street protester is an ideal example of Westerners wearing rose-colored glasses. Many Western “intellectuals” are bending over backwards to placate the largely violent and intolerant Muslim World, because they want to believe in an “Arab Spring.” The Pietà “analogy” is not an analogy at all. It is political correctness gone mad.

The burqa-ed woman is wearing latex gloves, for Christ’s sake! Is she afraid of being soiled by or soiling the wounded man she’s holding? Why is the woman covered from head to toe in black, except for an eye-slit? Because Islamists are so repressed a la Freud that they can’t trust themselves to look upon their own women. The burqa is the sure sign of the third-place status of Muslim women — they can’t drive, work, or be seen to varying degrees depending on what dysfunctional Islamic country in which they reside. Yemen ranks worst in the world according to The Global Gender Gap Report.

Yemen may be or become the top stronghold of al-Qaeda. The country is notorious for Islamic extremism; it’s opposition “is anti-Western and strongly opposes [President] Saleh['s] government;” Yemen’s president and family are corrupt, at times in cahoots with Muslim radicals. The “Arab Spring” is a Western wishful-thinking fantasy and in reality is a grab for power by Islamist extremists (see here, here, and here).

Jesus was a man of peace. His mother Mary stood by his side through the worst of times — and she didn’t wear a burqa or latex gloves. “Jesus publicly included many women as his disciples” (see here also for Biblical citations). When Jesus rose from the dead, the first person he appeared to was Mary Magdalene.

So to you “jurors” for selecting the 2011 World Press Photo of the Year award: You got it wrong. It’s a photo — and not the best I’ve ever seen. Do you morons remember who Michelangelo was and what he accomplished — like his David? Michelangelo’s work was sublime, not the product of some digital, idiot-proof, one-shot camera.

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by Daniel Pipes*

It’s not every day that someone like the U.S. secretary of defense forecasts an ally’s move but this just happened when Leon Panetta said that he believes, in the paraphrase of a Washington Post reporter, that “there is a strong likelihood that Israel will strike Iran in April, May or June.” Thoughts on this unusual statement:

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By John Thompson* and Sara Akrami*

The recent deaths of Iranian defence scientists have allowed the Iranian regime in Tehran to weep copious tears and sputter outrage about the inequity of assassination as a political tool. One might think that they would react with envy. Assassination has been one of the “outreach” tools of the ayatollahs and their regime in Iran since the early days of the Revolution. When the Islamic Republic of Iran was established in 1979, it had two strategies to eliminate its opponents. At home, it killed its internal opponents — murdering 7,900 of them in its first five years alone using techniques many totalitarian regimes have employed, such as mass executions, torture, “disappearances,” and “accidents.” Abroad, it used its embassies and cultural offices to host killers and sent them out after prominent critics. Many of these critics living overseas were Iranian intellectuals and activists who had escaped from Iran after the establishment of the regime. In addition to employing terror against its own citizens and émigrés, the Iranian government has also claimed victims from other nationalities. The Islamic Republic of Iran is one of the world’s most significant sponsors of terrorism. During its 33 years of existence, it has continually instigated violence elsewhere and pursued indirect war through the use of terrorism throughout the Middle East, Africa, and both North and South America.

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by Ali Alfoneh*

In July 2011, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appointed Maj. Gen. Rostam Qassemi of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) as oil minister,[1] bringing the number of former IRGC officers in his cabinet to twelve out of eighteen. Yet the IRGC’s seizure of the Oil Ministry could have far reaching economic, political, and strategic implications.

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By Stephen Steinlight, CIS.org

His eyes fixed on November 6, President Obama is desperately trying to stop hemorrhaging political support in a Hispanic community outraged by the success of his administration’s data-based deportation policy and whose vote is potentially critical in several swing states he won by a razor’s edge in 2008. It has sent some 400,000 illegal aliens home a year for a total of about a million during his time in office. A frenetic effort is now on to shift gears and show results well before the election.

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by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi*

As U.S. military operations in Afghanistan drag on inconclusively, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the Taliban insurgency is gaining ground. In the first six months of 2010, for example, there was a 31 percent rise in civilian casualties while the Shari’a was implemented in areas hitherto inaccessible to the Taliban.[1] Insurgent attacks in the first quarter of 2011 grew by 51 percent compared with the previous year[2] while the Afghan security forces have been increasingly penetrated by the Taliban.[3]

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By Barry Rubin

In a rare glimpse behind the curtain, a Palestinian scandal sheds a lot of light on the Palestinian Authority, Arab politics, and Western illusions. Palestinian Authority (PA) Minister of Labor Ahmed Majdalani was being interviewed by a radio station when, not realizing that his microphone was on, he referred to Palestinian workers as “brothers of whores.” Hundreds of callers complained. Majdalani’s answer? He claimed he was talking about Israelis, not Palestinians!

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By Andrew Whitehead

Ahmed Rehab, director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ (CAIR’s) Illinois chapter of the infamous Islamist-terrorist-supporting group, is having yet another bad day.

It seems that Ray Mauro had the nerve to write the FrontPageMagazine article “Illinois State Government’s Muslim Brotherhood Love Affair” detailing the truth behind some of the odious characters appointed by Illinois Governor Pat Quinn to his “Muslim American Advisory Council.”

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By Barry Rubin

Assuming that the Muslim Brotherhood and smaller Islamist groups do very well in Egypt’s parliamentary election today, what does it tell us about the modern history and political future of that country? The main cause for the political upheaval in Egypt was the long-term failure of the Arab nationalist regime that governed there, and in much of the Arab world, for well over half a century.

Rulers’ inability to keep promises about what they were going to achieve — pan-Arab union, rapid social and economic progress, genocide against Israel, driving out Western influences — has long been clear. Their corruption, the lack of freedom they offered and the economic hardships they brought have also long been clear.

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by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi*

According to a report by the French daily Le Figaro, Bashar al-Assad is apparently aiming to destabilize Turkey, which has been supporting the predominantly Sunni Islamist leadership of opposition groups to the Syrian regime, by seeking to grant greater autonomy to the Kurdish population that primarily lives in the north and north-east of Syria.

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by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi*

Since Nouri al-Maliki first became prime minister of Iraq in April 2006, a recurring talking point about his time in office has been that his days are numbered. Indeed, in a paper I wrote for the Middle East Review of International Affairs quarterly journal in the summer of this year, I cast severe doubt on whether the Iraqi premier would remain in power until the expiry of his second term in 2014.

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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 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 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 Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi*

As troops aligned with the Libyan interim government continue to advance on the few remaining strongholds of Gaddafi loyalists — such as Bani Walid (where the tribal elders are refusing to surrender) — much debate is still raging over Libya’s future. Will the country emerge as a stable liberal democracy, will it be torn by ethnic and tribal divisions, or will it transform into an Islamist state?

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