Topic: Failing Islamic States - 2011

[57Chevy]

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Egypt's Islamists win 75 per cent of parliament
Associated Press, Updated: January 22, 2012
http://www.ndtv.com/article/world/egypt-s-islamists-win-75-percent-of-parliament-169308&cp

Cairo:  Final results on Saturday showed that Islamist parties won nearly three-quarters of the seats in parliament in Egypt's first elections since the ouster of authoritarian president Hosni Mubarak, according to election officials and political groups.

The Islamist domination of Egypt's parliament has worried liberals and even some conservatives about the religious tone of the new legislature, which will be tasked with forming a committee to write a new constitution. It remains unclear whether the constitution will be written while the generals who took power after Mubarak's fall are still in charge, or rather after presidential elections this summer.

In the vote for the lower house of parliament, a coalition led by the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood won 47 per cent, or 235 seats in the 498-seat parliament. The ultraconservative Al-Nour Party was second with 25 per cent, or 125 seats.


article continues at link...

[Thucydides]

Bahrain is often overlooked:

http://www.strategypage.com/qnd/pothot/articles/20120123.aspx

Bahrain, Maybe

Items About Areas That Could Break Out Into War

January 22, 2012: Bahrain, a small (population a million or so) Persian Gulf monarchy with a Sunni minority ruling a Shia majority, has been wracked by a year of demonstrations and an increasingly violent crackdown. The Shia are demanding democracy, but this would mean the end of Sunni rule and the Sunni minority are not willing to pay that high a price for peace. The violence increased on both sides for about six months and then declined. At least 40 have died, most of them Shia, and thousands have been injured or arrested. Nearly 400 are being prosecuted. The king set up a commission (in June) to study the protester's demands and offered some concessions that fell far short of real democracy after the commission report was delivered two months ago. While the Sunni government finds all this unrest bothersome and embarrassing, it's not creating enough pressure to force fundamental change. The government sees the protest movement weakening and has been finding more takers for concessions. For example, several thousand Shia lost their jobs last year because of real or suspected participation in the violence. Those men are being given back their jobs, after pledging to stay away from protests.

The Shia protest leaders do not have time on their side. All the unrest and lost income erodes enthusiasm for the cause. The government has supported the use of Sunni civilian counter-demonstrators. These groups are protected by the police but are not given a free pass when it comes to violence against Shia. But these Sunni mobs are another reminder to the Shia that being a majority is not a decisive advantage. It's not lost on the Bahraini Shia that it took an American army to remove the Sunni minority government in Iraq and that was followed by a Sunni terror campaign (unofficially supported by Sunni nations in the region) that killed over 50,000 Iraqi Shia.

The Bahrain unrest is causing the government to spend about a billion dollars more than it takes in each year. That is easily covered by borrowing, and Saudi Arabia is the ultimate source of financial and military support. The Saudis have a restive Shia minority and increasing friction between more secular Saudis and the Islamic conservative old guard. Because the Saudi family justifies its rule via its role as protector of the most holy Islamic shrines in Mecca and Medina, Islamic conservatives have a lot of clout. Technically, Shia are heretics, but the Saudis have managed to prevent much public discussion of that in Saudi Arabia. Privately, many Saudi clerics have harsh things to say about Shia and non-Moslems (infidels) in general. Saudi Arabia is actually the source of much of the Islam based hatred and radicalism. The Saudi government keeps it under control at home and blocks the larger private efforts to support Islamic terrorism abroad. But Saudi Arabia continues to supply recruits for Islamic terror groups throughout the world. The Saudis have been under growing pressure (from Islamic and non-Islamic nations) to suppress the many Islamic radical clergy and their followers in the kingdom.  But those radicals have been part of the Arab culture since the founding of Islam in the 6th century. The Saudi leadership considers themselves heroes for controlling their Islamic radicals as much as they have. For example, Saudi radicals would prefer to apply a lot of deadly force (as in mass murder) against Shia protestors. The king draws the line at that, but many other forms of physical and economic coercion are used. Same deal in Bahrain, where the Sunni minority considers the Shia ungrateful and untrustworthy.

Meanwhile, this is not the first time the Shia Arabs have rebelled against their Sunni rulers in Bahrain, and it won't be the last. The latest bit of violence has involved destroying nearly a hundred mosques and other Shia meeting places. There have been over 3,000 arrests and tighter control of the media, especially the use of the Internet. The Bahraini government blames the violence on Iran, but it appears to be more a matter of the native Shia wanting a better political and economic arrangement. The growing violence by security forces has left over a thousand dead or wounded. Meanwhile, neighboring Arab nations have agreed to provide more economic aid (the 2008 global recession hit Bahrain particularly hard). It appears that the government will be able to outlast this latest Shia outburst. It hasn't been easy.

By late February last year, about ten percent of the population (nearly 100,000 people and nearly all Shia) was out on the streets on some days. The security forces increased the force used to disperse the crowds. The king then dismissed many senior officials and made other good-will gestures. But the protests continued, and on March 3rd, Sunni civilians began forming groups and fighting with Shia demonstrators.  On March 8th, three protest organizations united to call for a republic (a democracy, and deposing the monarchy and Sunni rule).

The majority Shia are the poorest and least educated part of the Bahraini population and want a democracy so that they will be in charge. The Sunni minority in Bahrain, and the Sunni rulers in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, will not tolerate this. Bahraini police were eventually unable to handle the growing number of Shia demonstrations, so the foreign reinforcements and recruited mercenaries were used to suppress the unrest. In mid-March, 1,600 police and paramilitary troops arrived from Saudi Arabia and the UAE (United Arab Emirates). Eventually, over 4,000 foreign troops and police came in. On March 15, the king declared a three month state-of-emergency. This makes it easier to arrest and imprison people. The demonstrations continued, and on March 25th the government complained to the UN about the Lebanese Hezbollah groups assisting the Shia in Bahrain.  The state of emergency ended, the king offered inadequate (to Shia radicals) concessions, and the unrest continues. 

Then there's the threat from Iran, at least as far as Sunni Arabs throughout the region are concerned. Over the last few years, Iranian politicians have increasingly mentioned in public statements that Iran considers Bahrain the 14th province of Iran. That's because, well, it isn't called the "Persian" Gulf for nothing (although since all the oil money showed up the Arabs have been trying to popularize the term "Arabian Gulf," with mixed success). There have been ethnic Iranian communities on Bahrain for centuries, along with a Shia Arab majority, and Iran had a formal claim on the island until 1969 (when the claim was dropped, in order to improve relations with Arab neighbors). Iran has always been an empire and still is (only half the population is ethnic Iranian). The way this works you always have a sense of "Greater Iran" which includes, at the least, claims on any nearby areas containing ethnic Iranians or people of similar religion. Hitler used this concept to guide his strategy during World War II.

Bahrainis (both Sunni and Shia) get very upset when these claims are periodically revived, but the local Shia want an independent Bahrain run by the majority. The Iranian government officially denounces such claims but apparently many Iranians have not forgotten. Arabs are not very happy about that and have responded by pointing out that Iran was Sunni until 500 years ago and were forced to convert, on pain of death, by a Shia emperor (who killed about a million of his subjects in the process). Saudi Arabia is trying, with some success, to organize Arab resistance to Iranian expansionist moves. Iran has responded by encouraging the Shia minorities on the west side of the Gulf to demonstrate their unhappiness with their minority status. Thus the mid-March appearance of Saudi and UAE troops in Bahrain.

The Iranian claim is based on Iranian control of Bahrain for a few years during the 18th century. After that incident, Bahrain, and most of the other Arab Gulf States, sought protection from Britain. During World War II the U.S. joined with Britain in offering the Arab states of the Persian Gulf protection from Iranian aggression. Iran has always resented this, believing themselves to be the regional superpower and the final arbiter of who is sovereign and who is not.

Meanwhile, Bahrain should be, on paper, an excellent place to live for all its citizens. It isn't. The Bahrani population is only about a million (lots of illegal foreign workers are not counted, which makes it possible to keep the economy going without a lot of Shia), with oil and gas providing a per-capita income of over $20,000. The oil is running out, so Bahrain has been recasting itself as an Arab playground and financial center, replacing Beirut, Lebanon (which ceased, for two decades, to play that role in the late 1970-early 80s because of a civil war). Bahrain has used a lot of their oil revenue to build infrastructure and encouraged entrepreneurs to create shopping and entertainment facilities superior to anything available in the region. Unlike Saudi Arabia, which is connected to Bahrain by a causeway bridge, Bahrain does not enforce Islamic law on visitors or residents. That's nothing new. Bahrain has, for centuries, been a port of call for ships and sailors. That means booze and women were always available. But now there are also shopping malls, a full range of hotels, brothels, clubs, and bars. Most of the business for the entertainment spots comes from Saudi Arabia, but sailors, especially those from the 40-50 foreign warships that base themselves here, come a close second. A little over half the foreign sailors are American.

While generally peaceful the country has many unhappy and violence prone citizens. The problems are many. First, there is the monarchy. Although competent many of the educated citizens would prefer a democracy. Then there's the religion angle. The monarchy is Sunni while most of the population is Shia. Moreover, about 20 percent of the population is Christian and Hindu. This offends about ten percent of the population who are Islamic conservatives. Most of these are Shia and consider all the drinking and partying to be sinful and offensive. Meanwhile, the police have a Shia majority that is often stirred up when the Islamic radicals get violent. Then more Shia villagers will take to the streets, and riot, if they feel the police are being too hard on Shia Islamic radicals. This violence rarely gets into the urban, and tourist, areas. But at times the police have to warn visitors going outside the city to avoid certain towns and villages. Because so many of the police are Shia the government cannot always depend on the cops to control large scale rioting by Shia civilians. Thus over the last year a new, entirely Sunni, security force has been created.

A long range solution to that loyalty problem is being sought elsewhere. Bahrain sent recruiters to Pakistan to hire retired military personnel to staff the Bahraini security forces. The recruiters hired more than a thousand men quickly. There was no shortage of volunteers as the money is good even with the risk of death or injury. Pakistan has been supplying such mercenaries to the Arab Gulf states for centuries. Iran has leaned on Pakistan to ban this recruiting. Pakistan said it would look into it and the recruiting went on. Bahrain has long offered citizenship (and access to generous social welfare program) to Sunni migrants (who fill many civilian and military jobs). The local Shia resent this.

Standing in the wings are thousands of U.S. military personnel but more as potential targets than as additional security forces. Over the last few years the U.S. Navy has been expanding its naval base in Bahrain. The navy has taken over the Mina Salman port, which transferred all commercial operations to the new Khalifa bin Salman port two years ago. The navy leased 28 hectares (70 acres) of waterfront space at Mina Salman. At the capital the navy has a .4 hectare (one acre) area at the port there and 17 hectares (42 acres) at a nearby base. The new port is large enough to berth the largest U.S. ships (the Nimitz class carriers). The port currently supports over a dozen American warships operating in the area.

Thus the U.S. Navy has turned a minor naval station in the Persian Gulf into one of its most crucial bases for the war on terrorism. The U.S. moved into Bahrain in 1973, when the British gave it up. The Bahrainis, like most of the other small states along the west coast of the Persian Gulf, like to have some friendly Western power in residence. This provides some insurance against Saudi Arabia to the west and Iran to the east. Before 1918 the British presence helped keep the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire off their backs as well. All the Bahrainis ask is that the foreign troops be quiet and discreet. Until 2002, the Bahraini base was a place where U.S. warships could tie up for repairs or recreation for the crews. About 3,600 American military personnel were stationed there. There was an airbase for navy and air force transports and warplanes. The Bahrainis denied much of this activity, so as to avoid getting pilloried by other Arab states. But Bahrain is a small place (a 655 square kilometer island about 20 kilometers off the Saudi coast), and it's difficult for things like warships and warplanes to go unnoticed.

In the last eight years, several hundred million dollars has gone into building more permanent facilities. The trailers and other "temporary structures" were replaced by more permanent buildings and facilities. This included a new pier just for military ships. There is a shopping center just for the military and a lot of recreational facilities for the troops. Until 2004, some troops could bring their families. But now it's all military and the brass tries to keep everyone happy on base. It's a one year tour for most, but Bahrain is pretty popular. Living conditions are good, and the local Bahrainis are pretty mellow and friendly by Middle Eastern standards, at least most of the time.

[Thucydides]

Following the ideas of Samuel Huntington (the Clash of Civilizations):

http://www.nationalreview.com/nrd/article/?q=MTFhZjcyZmQ1Mjc0NGRmODY2ZGMyMWNmZjE2N2IyNjQ

‘Islam Is Islam, And That’s It’
The Arab Spring was not hijacked

BY ANDREW C. McCARTHY

The tumult indelibly dubbed “the Arab Spring” in the West, by the credulous and the calculating alike, is easier to understand once you grasp two basics. First, the most important fact in the Arab world — as well as in Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and other neighboring non-Arab territories — is Islam. It is not poverty, illiteracy, or the lack of modern democratic institutions. These, like anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, and an insular propensity to buy into conspiracy theories featuring infidel villains, are effects of Islam’s regional hegemony and supremacist tendency, not causes of it. One need not be led to that which pervades the air one breathes.

The second fact is that Islam constitutes a distinct civilization. It is not merely an exotic splash on the gorgeous global mosaic with a few embarrassing cultural eccentricities; it is an entirely different way of looking at the world. We struggle with this truth, which defies our end-of-history smugness. Enthralled by diversity for its own sake, we have lost the capacity to comprehend a civilization whose idea of diversity is coercing diverse peoples into obedience to its evolution-resistant norms.

So we set about remaking Islam in our own progressive image: the noble, fundamentally tolerant Religion of Peace. We miniaturize the elements of the ummah (the notional global Muslim community) that refuse to go along with the program: They are assigned labels that scream “fringe!” — Islamist, fundamentalist, Salafist, Wahhabist, radical, jihadist, extremist, militant, or, of course, “conservative” Muslims adhering to “political Islam.”

We consequently pretend that Muslims who accurately invoke Islamic scripture in the course of forcibly imposing the dictates of classical sharia — the Islamic legal and political system — are engaged in “anti-Islamic activity,” as Britain’s former home secretary Jacqui Smith memorably put it. When the ongoing Islamization campaign is advanced by violence, as inevitably happens, we absurdly insist that this aggression cannot have been ideologically driven, that surely some American policy or Israeli act of self-defense is to blame, as if these could possibly provide rationales for the murderous jihad waged by Boko Haram Muslims against Nigerian Christians and by Egyptian Muslims against the Copts, the persecution of the Ahmadi sect by Indonesian and Pakistani Muslims, or the internecine killing in Iraq of Sunnis by Shiites and vice versa — a tradition nearly as old as Islam itself — which has been predictably renewed upon the recent departure of American troops.

The main lesson of the Arab Spring ought to be that this remaking of Islam has happened only in our own minds, for our own consumption. The Muslims of the Middle East take no note of our reimagining of Islam, being, in the main, either hostile toward or oblivious to Western overtures. Muslims do not measure themselves against Western perceptions, although the shrewdest among them take note of our eagerly accommodating attitude when determining what tactics will best advance the cause.

That cause is nothing less than Islamic dominance.

‘The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism,” wrote Samuel Huntington. “It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture.” Not convinced merely in the passive sense of assuming that they will triumph in the end, Muslim leaders are galvanized by what they take to be a divinely ordained mission of proselytism — and proselytism not limited to spiritual principles, but encompassing an all-purpose societal code prescribing rules for everything from warfare and finance to social interaction and personal hygiene. Historian Andrew Bostom notes that in the World War I era, even as the Ottoman Empire collapsed and Ataturk symbolically extinguished the caliphate, C. Snouck Hurgronje, then the West’s leading scholar of Islam, marveled that Muslims remained broadly confident in what he called the “idea of universal conquest.” In Islam’s darkest hour, this conviction remained “a central point of union against the unfaithful.” It looms more powerful in today’s Islamic ascendancy.

Of course, conventional wisdom in the West holds that the Arab Spring spontaneously combusted when Mohamed Bouazizi, a fruit vendor, set himself ablaze outside the offices of the Tunisian klepto-cops who had seized his wares. This suicide protest, the story goes, ignited a sweeping revolt against the corruption and caprices of Arab despots. One by one, the dominos began to fall: Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya — with rumblings in Saudi Arabia and Jordan as well as teetering Syria and rickety Iran. We are to believe that the mass uprising is an unmistakable manifestation of the “desire for freedom” that, according to Pres. George W. Bush, “resides in every human heart.”

That proclamation came in the heady days of 2004, when the democracy project was still a Panglossian dream, not the Pandora’s box it proved to be as Islamic parties began to win elections. Like its successor, the Bush administration discouraged all inquiry into Islamic doctrine by anyone seeking to understand Muslim enmity, indulging the fiction that there is something we can do to change it. Inexorably, this has fed President Obama’s preferred fiction — that we must have done something to deserve it — as well as the current administration’s strident objection to uttering the word “Islam” for any purpose other than hagiography. In this self-imposed ignorance, most Americans still do not know that hurriya, Arabic for “freedom,” connotes “perfect slavery” or absolute submission to Allah, very nearly the opposite of the Western concept. Even if we grant for argument’s sake the dubious proposition that all people crave freedom, Islam and the West have never agreed about what freedom means.

The first count of contemporary Muslims’ indictment of Middle Eastern dictators is not that they have denied individual liberty, but that they have repressed Islam. This is not to say that other grievances are irrelevant. Muslims have indeed been outraged by the manner in which their Arafats, Mubaraks, Qaddafis, and Saddams looted the treasuries while the masses lived in squalor. But the agglomerations of wealth and other regime hypocrisies are framed for the masses more as sins against Allah’s law than as the inevitable corruptions of absolute power. The most influential figures and institutions in Islamic societies are those revered for their mastery of Islamic law and jurisprudence — such authorities as top Muslim Brotherhood jurist Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Cairo’s al-Azhar University, the seat of Sunni learning for over a millennium. In places where Islam is the central fact of life, even Muslims who privately dismiss sharia take pains to honor it publicly. Even regimes that rule by whim nod to sharia as the backbone of their legal systems, lace their rhetoric with scriptural allusions, and seek to rationalize their actions as Islamically appropriate.

If you understand this, you understand why Western beliefs about the Arab Spring — and the Western conceit that the death of one tyranny must herald the birth of liberty — have always been a delusion. There are real democrats, authentically moderate Muslims, and non-Muslims in places such as Egypt and Yemen who long for freedom in the Western sense; but the stubborn fact is that they make up a strikingly small fraction of the population: about 20 percent, a far cry from the Western narrative that posits a sea of Muslim moderates punctuated by the rare radical atoll.

The Muslim Brotherhood is the ummah’s most important organization, unabashedly proclaiming for nearly 90 years that “the Koran is our law and jihad is our way.” Hamas, a terrorist organization, is its Palestinian branch, and leading Brotherhood figures do little to disguise their abhorrence of Israel and Western culture. Thus, when spring fever gripped Tahrir Square, the Obama administration, European governments, and the Western media tirelessly repeated the mantra that the Brothers had been relegated to the sidelines. Time had purportedly passed the Islamists by, just as it was depositing Mubarak in the rear-view mirror. Surely the Tahrir throngs wanted self-determination, not sharia. Never you mind the fanatical chants of Allahu akbar! as the dictator fell. Never mind that Sheikh Qaradawi was promptly ushered into the square to deliver a fiery Friday sermon to a congregation of nearly a million Egyptians.

With a transitional military government in place and openly solicitous of the Brotherhood, there occurred the most telling, most tellingly underreported, and most willfully misreported story of the Arab Spring: a national referendum to determine the scheduling of elections that would select a new parliament and president, with a new constitution to follow. It sounds dry, but it was crucial. The most organized and disciplined factions in Egyptian life are the Brotherhood and self-proclaimed Muslim groups even more impatient for Islamization, collectively identified by the media as “Salafists” even though this term does not actually distinguish them from the Brothers, whose founder (Hassan al-Banna) was a leading Salafist thinker. By contrast, secular democratic reformers are in their infancy. Elections on a short schedule would obviously favor the former; the latter need time to take root and grow.

Egypt being Egypt, the election campaign was waged with the rhetoric of religious and cultural solidarity. A vote against a rapid transition was depicted as a vote “against Islam” and in favor of the dreaded Western hands said to be guiding the Christians and secularists. The vote was the perfect test of the Arab Spring narrative.

Four-to-one: That’s how it went. The democrats were wiped out by the Muslim parties, 78 percent to 22 percent. While Western officials dismissed the vote as involving scheduling arcana, it foretold everything that has followed: the electoral romp in the parliamentary elections, a multi-stage affair in which the Brotherhood and the Salafists are inching close to three-fourths control of the legislature; the ongoing pogrom against the Copts; and the increasing calls for renunciation of the Camp David Accords, which have kept the peace with Israel for more than 30 years.

Four-to-one actually proves to be a reliable ratio in examining Islamic developments. In a 2007 poll conducted by World Public Opinion in conjunction with the University of Maryland, 74 percent of Egyptians favored strict application of sharia in Muslim countries. It was 76 percent in Morocco, 79 percent in Pakistan, and 53 percent in moderate Indonesia. Before American forces vacated Iraq, roughly three-quarters of the people they had liberated regarded them as legitimate jihad targets, and, given the opportunity to vote, Iraqis installed Islamist parties who promised to hasten the end of American “occupation.” Three out of four Palestinians deny Israel’s right to exist. Even in our own country, a recently completed survey found that 80 percent of American mosques promote literature that endorses violent jihad, and that these same mosques counsel rigorous sharia compliance.

The Arab Spring is an unshackling of Islam, not an outbreak of fervor for freedom in the Western sense. Turkey’s third-term prime minister Recep Erdogan, a staunch Brotherhood ally who rejects the notion that there is a “moderate Islam” (“Islam is Islam, and that’s it,” he says), once declared that “democracy is a train where you can get off when you reach your destination.” The destination for Muslim supremacists is the implementation of sharia — the foundation of any Islamized society, and, eventually, of the reestablished caliphate.

Rachid Ghannouchi is swarmed by supporters in Tunis.
Nicolas Fauque/abacausa.com/Newscom

The duration of the ride depends on the peculiar circumstances of each society. Erdogan’s Turkey has become the model for Islamist gradualism in more challenging environments: Slowly but steadily bend the nation into sharia compliance while denying any intent to do so and singing the obligatory paeans to democracy. Erdogan came to this formula after no shortage of stumbles — it is now rare to hear such outbursts as “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets, and the faithful our soldiers,” the sort of thing he used to say in the late Nineties when he was imprisoned for sedition against Ataturk’s secular order. His banned Welfare party eventually reemerged as the new and democracy-ready AKP, the Justice and Development party. Ever since a quirk in Turkish electoral law put these Islamists in power in 2002, Erdogan has cautiously but demonstrably eroded the secular framework Ataturk and his followers spent 80 years building, returning this ostensible NATO ally to the Islamist camp, shifting it from growing friendship to open hostility toward Israel, co-opting the military that was Ataturk’s bulwark against Islamization, and salting the country’s major institutions with Islamic supremacists.

The Turkish model will be the ticket for Brotherhood parties that have just prevailed in Tunisian and Moroccan elections. In Tunisia, Rachid Ghannouchi, a cagey Islamist of the Erdogan stripe, heads the Ennahda party, convincingly elected in October to control the legislature that will replace ousted ruler Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. In Morocco, an Islamist party whose namesake is the AKP won the fall elections, but further Islamization is apt to be slower. Far from being driven from power, King Mohammed VI remains popular, having balanced his affinity for the West with deference to sharia norms. Moroccan Islamists are making significant inroads, though, as are their neighbors to the east. Algerian Islamists are poised to accede to power this spring after being thwarted by a military coup that blocked what would have been their certain electoral success in 1991.

Egypt, by contrast, will go quickly. There, the most salient development is not the weakness of secular democrats but the impressive electoral strength of the Salafists. Their numbers are competitive with those of the better-known Brothers, and they will tug their rivals in a more aggressively Islamist direction. Vainly, the West hoped that the country’s American-trained and -equipped armed forces would serve as a brake. But the Egyptian military, from which several top al-Qaeda operatives have hailed, is a reflection of Egyptian society, especially as one descends to the conscripts of lower rank. The undeniable trend in Egyptian society is toward Islam. That trend is more blatant only in such basket cases as Libya, where each day brings new evidence that today’s governing “rebels” include yesterday’s al-Qaeda jihadists, and in Yemen, the ancestral home of Osama bin Laden, where even the New York Times concedes al-Qaeda’s strength.

Led by the Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic parties have become expert at presenting themselves as moderates and telling the West what it wants to hear while they gradually ensnare societies in the sharia web, as slowly or quickly as conditions on the ground permit. They know that when the West says “democracy,” it means popular elections, not Western democratic culture. They know the West has so glorified these elections that the victors can steal them (Iran), refuse to relinquish power when later they lose (Iraq), or decline to hold further elections (Gaza) without forfeiting their legitimacy. They know that seizing the mantle of “democracy” casts Islamists as the West’s heroes in the dramas still unfolding in Egypt, Libya, and Syria. They know that the Obama administration and the European Union have deluded themselves into believing that Islamists will be tamed by the responsibilities of governance. Once in power, they are sure to make virulent anti-Americanism their official policy and to contribute materially to the pan-Islamic goal of destroying Israel.

We should not be under any illusions about why things are shaking out this way. The Arab Spring has not been hijacked any more than Islam was hijacked by the suicide terrorists of 9/11. Islam is ascendant because that is the way Muslims of the Middle East want it.

Mr. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

[Thucydides]

Interesting, if true. Even if it is not true, it would stil make an astounding piece of propaganda and derail the narrative the Islamic radicals are trying to impliment:

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/02/12/bin-laden-gave-up-on-jihad/

Bin Laden Gave Up on Jihad

The big news today: according to family members, by the end of his life Osama bin Laden was telling his family to “Go to Europe and America and get a good education.”

What? The great Islamic umma, center of global culture and light of the world has no universities where the children of the Great Jihadi can get a decent education?  The clueless, hell-bound infidels of Europe and America make the Sons of the True Faith look incompetent and backward on the vital matter of educating the young?  It isn’t enough to sit on a dirt floor in Pakistan memorizing the Koran and learning how to wear a suicide bomb vest?

But what about the obligation to take up the cause of jihad and violence and crush the evil doers in the West?
Never mind about all that, Osama supposedly told his children and grandchildren.  “Do not follow me down the road to jihad,” he said.  “You have to study and live in peace and don’t do what I am doing or what I have done.”

All those Salafi ideologues promoting the idea of jihad against the West as a sacred obligation compulsory on all Muslims are presumably choking on their beards as they read these words.  The homosexual-hangers and the adultress-stoners are having a bad morning. No doubt they will tell themselves that this story is yet another lie from the cynical west, but they will have to wrap themselves ever more tightly in the delusions and wishful thinking that blinker their thoughts — and undermine their political effectiveness.

Beside welcoming evidence, however questionable, that a terrible sinner was exploring the path of repentance however tentatively, Via Meadia gloats. Bin Laden’s path was a dead end in more ways than one; any sign that he knew how futile his bloody deeds were and that his effort to topple American power had failed is welcome.

The information, given in an interview to the London Times by a sister of one of bin Laden’s wives, raises many questions.  Was bin Laden telling his own kids to avoid jihad while still trying to recruit misguided young people to the cause around the world?  Or, downloading porn in Abbotabad and reflecting on the consequences of his deeds, had bin Laden come to see the futility of his course? Is the sister-in-law saying whatever she thinks will give her relatives a brighter future now that bin Laden is dead and his movement is shattered?

One doesn’t know, and perhaps we never will for sure. But it looks increasingly as if America not only killed bin Laden: we are destroying his dream.
His kids should have no trouble following his advice to study in America, by the way.  Just think of the essays they will be able to write on their college applications.

[Thucydides]

Oh, good. Nuclear weapons delivered in flower vans:

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-11/07/pakistan-nukes-delivery-vans?utm_source=Outbrain&utm_medium=CPC&utm_campaign=Outbrain%2BTrial

Pakistan carts its nukes around in delivery vans
By Spencer Ackerman
07 November 11

Pakistan is taking nuclear paranoia to a horrifying new low. And it's making the world a vastly more dangerous place in the process.

Freaked out about the insecurity of its nuclear arsenal, the Pakistani military's Strategic Plans Division has begun carting the nukes around in clandestine ways. That might make some sense on the surface: no military wants to let others know exactly where its most powerful weapons are at any given moment. But Pakistan is going to an extreme.

The nukes travel "in civilian-style vehicles without noticeable defenses, in the regular flow of traffic", according to a blockbuster story on the US-Pakistan relationship in The Atlantic. Marc Ambinder and Jeffrey Goldberg write that tactical nuclear weapons travel down the streets in "vans with a modest security profile." Somewhere on a highway around, say, Karachi, is the world's most dangerous 1-800-FLOWERS truck.

Tom Clancy should be suing Pakistani generals for ripping off the basic idea behind The Sum Of All Fears. You'll recall that Pakistan is home to al-Qaida, a particularly fearsome version of the Taliban, the leadership of the old-school Taliban, its friends in the Haqqani Network and a host of anti-Indian terrorist groups that the Pakistani intelligence service employ as proxies. Sometimes the Pakistani military helps these terrorist and insurgent groups attack US troops in Afghanistan. And any one of these groups would love a chance to wield a nuclear weapon.

Except that Pakistan isn't trying to safeguard its nukes from them. It's trying to safeguard its nukes from us. The Navy SEAL raid in Abbottabad that killed Osama bin Laden has made important Pakistani generals think that the US military's next target is Pakistani nukes. So off the vans go, along what Ambinder and Goldberg term "congested and dangerous roads," trying to throw off the scent of the US, with little more than hope to protect them from an adventurous highwayman.

The irony is that the US isn't planning to steal Pakistan's nukes -- but Pakistan's cavalier attitude toward nuclear security is making the US think twice about whether it should revise some worst-case-scenario contingency planning.

Should any of the nukes go missing, an "Abbottabad redux" would likely occur, Ambinder and Goldberg report. An anonymous military official tells the pair that the Joint Special Operations Command "has units and aircraft and parachutes on alert in the region for nuclear issues, and regularly inserts units and equipment for prep." Seizing Pakistani nukes during or after a military coup is a much harder mission, but the reporters consider it doable. "t's wise for the US to try to design a plan for seizing Pakistan's nuclear weapons in a low-risk manner," Goldberg and Ambinder advise, placing a lot of rhetorical freight on the words "low-risk."

That is, if the US actually knows where the nukes are. "Anyone who tells you that they know where all of Pakistan's nukes are is lying to you," ex-national security adviser Jim Jones allegedly said. The Econolines of Doom make that knowledge even more uncertain.

All of which points to the self-reinforcing downward spiral of the US-Pakistan relationship. US cash continues to go into the Pakistanis' pockets, and from there into the hands of anti-American terrorists. There is, for many justified reasons, absolutely no trust between either side's security services and militaries. There is also no alternative to the toxic relationship that anyone cited in the Atlantic piece is willing to contemplate. (When I recently suggested that the US cut off aid and continue the drone war until Pakistan reins in terror groups, I got blasted on Twitter as a warmonger.) "There is no escaping this vexed relationship," Ambinder and Goldberg conclude, reflecting the conventional wisdom in Washington and Islamabad.

Which sinks the US into the nadir of absurdity. It funds a terrorist-sponsoring state while conducting a massive undeclared war on part of that state's territory. It wants that state's assistance to end the Afghanistan war while that state's soldiers help insurgents wage it. And seeking a world without nuclear weapons while its "Major non-NATO ally" drastically increases the probability that terrorists will acquire a the most dangerous weapon of all.

[cupper]

Good thing Fed-Ex doesn't allow shipment of nuclear materials.

[GAP]

In major reversal, Muslim Brotherhood will vie for Egypt's presidency

The Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group, could end up in control of all three branches of Egypt's new government.
By Kristen Chick, Correspondent / April 1, 2012
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The Muslim Brotherhood has nominated its deputy leader as a candidate in Egypt’s presidential elections, in a reversal that upends the race for Egypt’s first post-revolution leader and could leave the Islamist group in control of all branches of Egypt’s new government.

The decision to field Khairat El Shater, a wealthy businessman who has served mostly behind the scenes, came after nearly a year in which the Muslim Brotherhood said it would not contest the presidential elections so as not to provoke fear of Islamic rule in Egypt. But in a press conference Saturday night at their new headquarters, Brotherhood leaders said they found it necessary to change course because the transition to democracy is under threat, and the group was stymied in parliament.

"We have chosen the path of the presidency not because we are greedy for power but because we have a majority in parliament which is unable to fulfill its duties," said Mohamed Morsy, head of the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party. Mahmoud Hussein, the group’s secretary general, cited attempts to “abort the revolution.”

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The move is the Brotherhood’s trump card in a recently escalating battle for power with the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), the military council currently ruling Egypt, say analysts. But it could cause a backlash, not only at home but also abroad, among Western governments wary of an Islamist regime in Egypt. The risky step from the conservative movement is an indication of the difficult political realities confronting the Brotherhood as it attempts to transition from a repressed opposition group to a majority power.

“This is the last-mile fight,” says Khalil Al Anani, an expert on Islamist politics at Durham University who is currently in Egypt. “After [the Brotherhood] realized that the parliament is powerless, they decided to fight until the last point that they can reach to guarantee some kind of power over the new political system…. This is a serious conflict over power with the military.”
Still seeking clout

The Brotherhood’s political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party, won nearly 50 percent of the seats in parliament in recent elections. But they have since found those seats gave them less clout than they had anticipated. The military refused repeated Brotherhood demands that SCAF sack the military-appointed cabinet and allow the parliamentary majority to form a government.

This lack of power, despite what was perceived as a strong victory in the elections, was embarrassing and damaging to their credibility, says Omar Ashour, an expert on Islamist movements who is a visiting fellow at the Brookings Doha Center. “They're not going to accept being marginalized with such a popular mandate,” he says.

At the same time, the movement had few good choices when considering outside presidential candidates to back. They could not endorse any of the handful of Islamist candidates already in the race for various reasons, but risked revolt if they backed a non-Islamist candidate. Not backing a candidate was not an option, says Dr. Anani, because the leadership was afraid a president elected without their support might eventually turn on them. They deliberated mindful of 1954, when Gamal Abdel Nasser turned on the organization, officially banning it and imprisoning thousands of members. The SCAF invoked that history in a recent statement, as its confrontation with the Brotherhood heightened.
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