By Andrew L. Jaffee

As usual, the Islamists have blamed the Jews, this time for an Afghan’s conversion to Christianity (pause and think about that one for a moment). The convert, Abdul Rahman, may face the death penalty for turning away from Islam. Do those condemning this man have faith or an ultimate form of insecurity? From the AP:

Rahman had “committed the greatest sin” by converting to Christianity and deserved to be killed, cleric Abdul Raoulf said in a sermon Friday at Herati Mosque.

“God’s way is the right way, and this man whose name is Abdul Rahman is an apostate,” he told about 150 worshippers.

Another cleric, Ayatullah Asife Muhseni, told a gathering of preachers and intellectuals at a Kabul hotel that the Afghan president had no right to overturn the punishment of an apostate.

He also demanded that clerics be able to question Rahman in jail to discover why he had converted to Christianity. He suggested it could have been the result of a conspiracy by Western nations or Jews.

This is the thanks the “Western nations” get for freeing Afghanistan from the plague of the Taliban? I’m sorry, but strings are attached. Further American/NATO aid and support to Afghanistan must be made contingent on that country adopting the civilized rule of law, not barbarity.

Another cartoon-controversy-like event? Yes, and with the same silver lining. The desire to execute Rahman will help bring clarity to many Westerners who had been content to be complacent or to apologize for Islamism’s many ugly deeds. In fact, the wake up call has already been heard.

Footnote: Accusing Jews of converting Muslims into Christians? I guess we could at least call it original, if not fantastical. Jews have suffered much under Christian societies. These Islamo-fascists are ignorant of history. The pogroms under the czars. The Edict of Expulsion by British King Edward I. The Spanish Inquisition (”No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!”). C’mon, maybe they would at least accuse Jews of trying to find their own converts (which is quite rare).

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by Michael Rubin and Patrick Clawson
Middle East Review of International Affairs*
March 2006
http://www.meforum.org/article/921
* Cross-posted with permission

While international attention is focused on Iran’s nuclear program and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s bombast, Iranian society itself is facing turbulent times. Increasingly, patterns are re-emerging that mirror events in the years before the Islamic revolution. These include political disillusionment, domestic protest, government failure to match public expectations of economic success, and labor unrest. Nevertheless, the Islamic regime has learned the lessons of the past and is determined not to repeat them, even as political discord crescendos. This essay is derived from the authors’ recent book, Eternal Iran: Continuity and Chaos (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005).

Mahmud Ahmadinejad’s victory in Iran’s 2005 Presidential elections shocked both Iranians and the West. “Winner in Iran calls for Unity; Reformists Reel,” headlined The New York Times.[1] Most Western governments assumed that former President and Expediency Council chairman Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani would win.[2] Many academics also were surprised. Few paid any heed to the former blacksmith’s son who rose to become mayor of Tehran. Brown University anthropologist William O. Beeman, for example, spent the election campaign in Tehran. In a June 15, 2005 interview with the Council on Foreign Relations, he called Rafsanjani the frontrunner and said the clerical establishment backed Muhammad Baqur Qalibaf.[3] He did not mention Ahmadinejad in his analysis, just two days before he won the first round. The Washington Post only mentioned Ahmadinejad once prior to the election.[4] The New York Times did little better, with just brief four mentions dating to Ahmadinejad’s 2003 election as mayor of Tehran.

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

I almost fell off by chair when I found out that Japan, the world’s second largest economy, “…has paid out billions of dollars in yen loans for Chinese infrastructure projects over the past two decades.” Why? Fear of the 1.3 billion person gorilla just across the straits from the Japanese archipelago? Guilt over Japanese war crimes during WWII? The loans are just one piece of the puzzle of new strategic alliances being formed while old ones are being challenged — even rekindled. This seismic reshuffling confronts the security of all the democratic nations, not just Japan, and the story’s antagonists include China, North Korea, Iran, and Russia.

Having China next door must be quite disconcerting for the Japanese:

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

In the tradition of great investigative reporting, proving the merits of the blogsphere, Bill Levinson of Israpundit points out how San Francisco’s Indymedia is censoring evidence of Islamo-fascist gay-bashing. Here’s a snippet, but the original post is a must-read:

San Francisco Bay Indymedia must be OK with Ahmadinejad’s position on killing gays for Allah because it wasted no time in concealing the following from its readership in violation of its own editorial rules. …

Well, it’s hard to see condemnation of executing people for being gay as “right wing propaganda or hate speech” and it’s obviously not spam (no commercial links, and in fact all links are to either pro-gay or neutral Web sites).

There is no question as to what is going on. Indybay.org’s policy is that the militant “Islamic” world must not be made to look bad no matter how horrific its conduct against the very “oppressed” groups whom Indybay.org claims to represent and champion.

Note that Islamist mistreatment of gays is nothing new. Obvious but under-reported examples: Iran’s theocracy hung two boys for being gay last July; Egypt “entrapped, arrested and tortured hundreds of men thought to be gay” in 2004.

Also note that the “Little Satan,” Israel, treats gays like… human beings with rights.

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

NewsMax.Com has found indications that the AP is selectively covering the “500 hours of tapes ordered released by President Bush last week” which reveal “Saddam’s deception” over his weapons of mass destruction. From the story entitled, “AP in Saddam Tape WMD Flip-flop?:”

However, Saddam didn’t sound nearly so exasperated in another meeting taped the year before, as his son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, explained how he’d hidden Iraq’s WMD stockpiles from inspectors.

In quotes reported by the AP on Feb. 16, Kamel told the Iraqi dictator:

“We did not reveal all that we have. We did not reveal the volume of chemical weapons we had produced.”

Kamel boasted that he had managed to conceal “the type of weapons, [and] the volume of the materials we imported.”

In other comments not covered by the AP, Saddam’s son-in-law went on to note: “None of [the information we gave the U.N.] was correct. They don’t know any of this.”

As translators continue to pore over more of the 500 hours of tapes ordered released by President Bush last week, the outlines of Saddam’s deception become even more clear.

In one recently released snippet, the Iraqi president orders his advisors to prepare for what sounds like an upcoming weapons inspection:

“We want to make them fail at the last minute, squeeze them to the end. We have to create situations where the Special Commission will go search for one time, the Special Commission, not the team that is coming. Now at the same time I want two inspections to be simultaneously conducted; one for the things that we are going to ignore in the special locations the Special Commission will search only once.”

Comments like that don’t exactly jibe with the AP’s latest claim that an innocent Saddam was doing everything he could to prove he’d given up his WMDs.

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

Japan’s exports were healthy even during its 10-year recession, but a truly healthy economy cannot survive on exports alone. Japan’s domestic economy is back, largely due to the reforms pushed through by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. From Bloomberg:

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

Is free speech alive and well in Canada or not? The CBC’s politically-correct censors have edited the word “hell” from a TV ad. But Canada’s Defense Minister, Gordon O’Connor, thinks publication of the Danish cartoons was a bad idea. And in 2004, Walid Shoebat was denied entry to Canada for a speaking engagement. Mixed messages, strange priorities, silly incoherence, or what?

From yesterday’s The Age (Australia):

Hell’s bells. Just as British censors clear Australia’s colourful tourism campaign, Canadian officials have banned it, but not because of the word “bloody”.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has refused to run the “Where The Bloody Hell Are You” ad during family television programming because of the word “hell”, Toronto’s Globe and Mail newspaper reports.

From Canada’s National Post (Feb. 14):

An Alberta magazine’s decision to publish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad has stoked fears of attacks on Canadian troops and embassies abroad, caused a major Muslim group to consider asking police to lay hate-crime charges and led the country’s largest bookstore chain and airline to withdraw the publication.

Defence Minister Gordon O’Connor warned the latest edition of the Calgary-based Western Standard, which features cartoons that have sparked riots and protests worldwide, will put Canadian troops in Afghanistan at greater risk.

“It doesn’t help. Radicals in Syria and Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iraq, they get people roused up because their religion’s being offended,” Mr. O’Connor said in an interview. “We don’t need any more risk in the area than we have.”

And finally, from IsraelNationalNews (2004):

A former PLO terrorist who is now pro-Israel was not allowed to enter Canada - but he spoke to his scheduled audience anyway, via live video link.

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by Daniel Pipes
The Commonwealth*
March 2006
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/3473
* Cross-posted with permission

The following is an edited transcript of a speech given by Daniel Pipes at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, November 16, 2005, followed by an extensive question-and-answer period. The transcript was edited by The Commonwealth Club.

A Palestinian-Israeli war probably is not the way most of you think of it. In the definition of the problem lies both an understanding of the Arab-Israeli theater and its potential solution. The consensus view is that this is not a war. This is diplomacy that hasn’t quite worked right.

In 1993, on a sunny, late summer day, on the White House lawn, the prime minister of Israel and the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization shook hands – the Oslo accords. In that was seen not just potential for achieving a breakthrough in Palestinian-Israeli relations, but a whole new era: After decades of wanting to destroy, undermine or overtake the state of Israel, the Palestinians had formally, officially and apparently permanently come to the conclusion that they could not defeat Israel – and accepted the existence of Israel. With the signing of the Oslo accords, with President Clinton as its sponsor, the Palestinians and Israelis began years of intense negotiations about important but secondary issues: the borders of Israel, the natural resources that would be divided between them, the sanctities and who would control them, patterns of residence, weapons – who would control what.

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

China and Russia’s relationship has come full circle. Warm. Cold. Now warm again. This warming is a strategic threat to the democratic world, to be ignored at its own peril. Just yesterday:

Russia and China have signed an agreement to pipe large quantities of gas from fields in Siberia to China. …

The agreement came as part of a raft of economic deals signed between the two sides during the visit to Beijing of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization accord of 2001 seems to have slipped under the radar, at least in the popular press. Hopefully it was not ignored in the capitals of the Western World. As Lev Navrozov points out:

If the SCO jointly develops post-nuclear superweapons to annihilate the West or enforce, by the threat of annihilation, its unconditional surrender, the further development of SCO relations (”who whom,” as Lenin used to say) will be purely academic history for the West if any history will be studied in the colony once called the West except the history of the glorious global victory of communism as predicted by Marx, Lenin, Mao, Hu and Putin – until Hu destroys Putin, or vice versa.

What bigger strategic threat could there be than an anti-democratic, ex-KGB Russian autocracy aligned with China’s billionaire dictators? Yesterday’s gas deal will serve to cement these dictators in power, and unfortunately impede the spread of democracy — perhaps threaten its very existence.

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by David Kennedy Houck
Middle East Quarterly*
Spring 2006
http://www.meforum.org/article/920
* Cross-posted with permission

First in Europe and now in the United States, Muslim groups have petitioned to establish enclaves in which they can uphold and enforce greater compliance to Islamic law. While the U.S. Constitution enshrines the right to religious freedom and the prohibition against a state religion, when it comes to the rights of religious enclaves to impose communal rules, the dividing line is more nebulous. Can U.S. enclaves, homeowner associations, and other groups enforce Islamic law?

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

When Spanish voters hid under their beds after Madrid 3/11, and voted for the country’s anti-Iraq-war Socialist Party, they thought the terrorists would leave them alone. They thought wrong. According to FOXNews.com:

A Spanish judge indicted 32 people for allegedly plotting to drive a truck packed with explosives into a courthouse that has been the hub for anti-terrorism investigations, authorities said Tuesday.

The 32 men, mostly Algerians, were charged with membership in a terrorist organization, conspiracy to commit a terrorist attack and forgery of public documents, Judge Fernando Grande-Marlaska said in his March 13 ruling. …

Spanish authorities suspect Achraf [the ring-leader] was planning to ram a truck loaded with 1,100 pounds of explosives into the court in downtown Madrid.

Still believe in appeasement?

by Daniel Pipes
New York Sun*
March 21, 2006
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/3466
* Cross-posted with permission

Expect the Bush administration to continue to make the Middle East the center of American foreign policy. Also expect its strategies to remain basically unchanged – despite their mixed record so far.

That’s the message in a major foreign policy document issued last week by the White House, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America. Mandated by law to appear every four years, the NSS, 49 pages long, was written by the national security advisor, Stephen Hadley and his team.

The Middle East’s outsized role comes across in various ways. In a cover letter, President Bush opens the report by stating “America is at war” and describing the enemy as “terrorism fueled by an aggressive ideology of hatred and murder, fully revealed to the American people on September 11, 2001.” The report singles out the Middle East as the region that “continues to command the world’s attention” because for too long, many of its countries “have suffered from a freedom deficit. Repression has fostered corruption, imbalanced or stagnant economies, political resentments, regional conflicts, and religious extremism.”

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

The Western World is still caught up in the parenting methods taught by Dr. Spock.

“If you’re good, I’ll give you some ice cream. I mean it.”

In other words, children have their parents wrapped around their fingers and can get away with anything, as long as the parents have to put out the least effort. And, of course, they want their kids to “like” them. No tough love allowed. This is the tack the European Union has taken, deluded into believing that paying off terrorists will keep their populaces immune from terrorism.

From the BBC:

The European Union has handed over 64m euros (£44m) in aid to help the poorest Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

But it said that future aid depended on the incoming Hamas government showing a commitment to work for peace, saying the group was “at a crossroads”. …

In Brussels on Monday, EU external relations commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner handed a cheque for 64m euros to Karen AbuZayed, of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).

She was insistent that Hamas, which has refused to recognise Israel or renounce violence, needs to fall into line with the international community.

“Last time I really meant it, but I’m giving you another chance.”

That is, until next time. Then the appeasement starts all over again. The EU wants the Palestinians to like them as friends. Never mind that the current ruling party in Palestine is committed to genocide against Israel, basically a European country. Never mind that Hamas is in league with Iran, al-Qaeda, and Hezbollah, all whose ultimate goal is to eventually establish a world-wide Islamist caliphate, which includes Europe.

First the Middle East, then Europe. Remind you of a certain 20th century political figure… Hitler?

Palestinian chaos (and economic conditions) have gone from bad to worse precisely because of EU enabling — letting Palestinians get away with murder, literally, in the hope that Europe could avoid the conflict. Hamas is already spitting on the EU money, but is taking it nonetheless — at least they’re pragmatic.

The microcosm of parenting is no different from the diplomatic relations between great and small powers. You would think that, by now, intelligent people would have noticed this. But fear is the first enemy, and most people never get past it so that they can then face clarity and true individual power. And white guilt plays a great part:

“How can we live so well while Palestinians live in hovels? It is those damn Jews’ problem. Send money to Hamas; that assuages our guilt.”

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

Demonstrators exercised their right to free speech this weekend, and came out to protest the Iraq war, on the third anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion. The turnout was quite low, and the sentiments of some of the protestors was questionable — the usual anti-U.S. diatribe. What is more important is polls showing waning support for the war among American citizens. From the AP, entitled “Few in US protest Iraq war on third anniversary:”

In a country with a population of 298 million, the events drew only about 1,000 people in major cities.

The low US turnout was mirrored in anti-war protests in most other countries.

Then, the usual dogma:

At a rally of 1,000 protesters near New York’s Times Square, speaker after speaker denounced the Bush administration and the continuing US troop presence in Iraq. …

In Washington, about a thousand protesters gathered outside the residence of Vice President Dick Cheney. ” This racist war has to go,” they chanted, some carrying signs reading “Bush step down,” “Impeachment now” and “Hands off Iran.”

Finally, the utter nonsense:

Ingrid Severenson suggested that the light turnout might be due to Bush opponents’ opting to put their energy into solutions instead of complaints.

“I see a lot more solution-based activism,” Severenson said as she scanned the slowly growing mass of protesters. “Instead of looking for justice in the streets, they are trying to implement better ways of doing things.”

I’ve yet to see any evidence of “solution-based activism” among my left-wing acquaintances in my home town. Their “activism” consists of stringing anti-Bush slogans over highway overpasses. I’ve yet to see them making appointments with their elected representatives — or, at least, organizing letter-writing campaigns.

But these “protests” are generally infantile, a way to feed a need for attention, relive the civil rights movement, and show everyone how “noble” and “progressive” the demonstrators are — and a way for them to feel like they’re doing something without really doing the hard work of democratic, political lobbying.

The real issue is an American public which seems to be convinced that the war is going badly. Bush has started another campaign to bolster support for rebuilding Iraq. I wish him well. It is also incumbent that Bush convince Iraqis that they need get their butts in gear, and start taking action against the terrorists living amongst them. Strings need to be attached to seeing real action, like the development of independent Iraqi battalions, and an end to the petty squabbling over forming a coalition government.

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

Here we go again: Palestinian chaos and lawlessness are being ascribed to “desperation” and “poverty,” according to the BBC. Just last week, the Beeb blamed Israel for Palestinian bedlam — a spate of kidnappings of foreign aid workers. Palestinians then vented their fury at teachers and the director of International Red Cross, people stationed in the West Bank and Gaza with the noble intention of helping. How can Palestinians expect to be treated as responsible members of the world community when they cannot even govern themselves and adhere to established, civilized norms? Will Palestinians ever learn anything as long as so many Westerners continue to enable Palestinian pandemonium as opposed to using some tough love, and teaching Palestinians the difficult lesson of personal and collective responsibility?

Here’s the boo-hooing from today’s BBC report:

BBC correspondent Alan Johnston says brief, violent protests like this have become quite common in Gaza and are a reflection of a chronic lack of law and order and how desperate some are becoming as poverty deepens.

And here’s the litany of today’s Palestinian chaos:

Gunmen stormed the main government compound in Gaza, opening fire randomly in the air and battling police.

A gun battle broke out when gunmen blocked a main road and attacked a convoy going to meet the police chief. …

There were at least five attempts by members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades to disrupt government activities on Monday - a day after the victorious Islamist group Hamas named its new cabinet.

The most serious was when about 30 militants charged the foreign and finance ministries and exchanged fire with security forces.

Two gunmen and two security officials were wounded - one of them hit by stray bullets in the legs as other employees ran for cover. …

Earlier, gunmen had briefly taken over Gaza’s power plant and tried to seize control of a military hospital. No-one was injured.

But two officers and a gunman were hurt during the clash on the main road near the Erez crossing between Israel and the Gaza Strip. …

Gunmen also briefly shot at Gaza’s main police station. Guards returned fire but there were no casualties.

But the West has its own issues with personal responsibility. The question is, will personal responsibility become the norm at home, let alone when dealing with Palestinian chaos? Many Westerners can’t even discipline their own children — even their own pets. Fiddling while Rome burns?

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