Zachor: Remember Forever

From Arutz Sheva, 12/3/08, by Daniel Pinner:

“Remember what Amalek did to you on the way when you were exiting from Egypt: how he chanced upon you on the way, and attacked you by smiting the weak who were straggling behind you, when you were tired and exhausted, and he did not fear God. And it will be, when HaShem your God gives you respite from all your surrounding enemies in the Land which HaShem your God gives you as an inheritance to inherit - eradicate the memory of Amalek from under the heavens. Do not forget.” (Deuteronomy 25:17-19)

Every year, on Shabbat Zachor - the Shabbat of Remembrance, the Shabbat immediately preceding Purim - we read these three verses as the Maftir, the concluding section of the Torah reading....remembering Amalek is appropriate in the run-up to Purim, commemorating the attempt of Amalek’s descendant, Haman, to complete his ancestor’s evil work. ...

...what was important was ...the fact that Amalek wanted to exterminate us all.

...See how they hate us. In every generation - not just the original generation of Amalek, but throughout history. Lest anyone mistakenly believe that Amalek reacted to a chance encounter.... he was willing to travel across a thousand miles of desert in a single night, deliberately to come upon us, just to try to exterminate us....

...Lest anyone think that, given time, Amalek would realise the futility of conflict, half a millennium later he was still trying to exterminate us in Israel in the days of King Saul. And lest we think that Amalek only wants to drive us out of Israel, that he would accept us if only we would be exiled from our land, lest we think that Amalek is only against Zionists, but not against Jews, a millennium after his initial attack his descendants are still trying to exterminate us in exile in Persia.....

...And lest anyone think that Amalek only wants to destroy the religious among us, lest anyone believe that assimilation will bring us respite, know that he attacked not the religious or the Torah scholars, but those of the tribe of Dan who were the furthest from Torah. [Hitler tried to murder anyone with just one Jewish grandparent, regardless of their observance or even awareness of their Jewish connection- SL]

And should you desire to know who has the greatest obligation to fight Amalek, never think that if you are a Torah scholar, a yeshiva student, then you are absolved of this duty. Those who fight must be those “men... who are brave, strong in mitzvot, and victorious in war.” And never believe that it is forbidden to leave the cloistered walls of the yeshiva to defend your fellow-Jews: “Go out from the protection of the Clouds of Glory to wage war against Amalek’s camps.” ...

...And know that whenever and wherever Israel is attacked, whether on the way towards Israel, whether within Israel, or whether in exile, the appropriate Jewish response is not to conciliate the murderous attacker, not to try to make peace with the leaders of the enemy nation, but to chop off the enemy warriors’ heads....

...And know that those who try to exterminate us will themselves be exterminated - utterly, irrevocably, eternally. Irony of ironies: the only way that anyone will even be aware that they existed will be that our history mentions them.

They will be consigned to oblivion, having no remembrance in this world or the next. And irony of ironies: the only way that anyone will even be aware that they existed will be that our history mentions them. Had it not been for the Torah, who would ever have heard of Amalek or of his descendant Haman? They are remembered solely by those whom they wanted to exterminate, and who instead exterminated them, measure for measure.

And just as victory over Amalek is crucial, so too is it crucial to “write this as a remembrance in the Book, and place it in Joshua’s ears” - specifically, to inscribe it in the Book of the Elders. The leaders of Israel must perforce be educated in this war against Amalek, lest they forget its eternal messages, and end up trying to placate evil, to co-exist with murderers, and thereby collaborate in the extermination of Jews.

And just as Amalek attacked us when we were at peace in the desert - after 210 years of exile and slavery we wanted nothing more than to make our way back home - so too, measure for measure, when Amalek will think himself at peace, we are commanded to attack him: “When HaShem your God gives you respite from all your surrounding enemies in the Land which HaShem your God gives you as an inheritance to inherit - eradicate the memory of Amalek from under the heavens.”

Do not wait for him to make war before going out to obliterate him: attack him when you are living in peace in Israel. Amalek, through his murderous attack on us, has forfeited any right to his own peace and security. And, as Yonatan ben Uziel paraphrases this final exhortation: “And it will be, when HaShem your God gives you respite from all those who hate you surrounding the Land which HaShem your God gives you as an inheritance to inherit - eradicate the memory of Amalek from under the heavens.....”

Trojan camel

From The Washington Times Editorial, published October 8, 2007, by Rachel Ehrenfeld and Alyssa A. Lappen [emphasis added - SL]

...Borse Dubai... proposed acquisition of 20 percent of Nasdaq last week ...

...the arrival of the world's first Islamic stock exchange exerting unprecedented Islamic influence in the heart of the U.S. and Western economies ... should raise our alarm.

...Islamic, or Shariah-based finance, is the 1920s invention of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna. He ordered the Muslim Brothers to create an independent Islamic financial system to supercede the Western economy, facilitating the spread of Islam worldwide. He set the theories and practices and his contemporaries and successors developed Shariah-based terminology for "Islamic economics," finance and banking.

Attempts by Muslim Brotherhood members in the early 1930s to establish Islamic banking in India failed. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel-Nasser shut down the second attempt in 1964, after only one year, later arresting and expelling the Muslim Brothers for attempts to kill him.

Saudi Arabia welcomed them and adopted their ideas. In 1969...the Saudis convened the Conference for the Islamic Organizations (OIC) to unify the "struggle for Islam," and have been its major sponsor ever since. The 56 OIC members include Iran, Sudan and Syria.

Based in Jeddah, "pending the liberation of Jerusalem," the OIC mandates and coordinates actions to "support the Palestinian people, assist them in recovering their rights and liberating their occupied territories." The OIC's first international undertaking was the 1975 establishment of the Islamic Development Bank "in accordance with the principles of the Shariah," marking the beginning of the fast-growing, petrodollar-based Islamic financing market.

From 1975 to 2005, the bank approved more than $46 billion in funding to Muslim countries. Since 2000, it has transferred hundreds of millions of dollars raised especially to support the Palestinian intifada and suicide bombers' families — and has channeled United Nations funds to Hamas.

Yet the bank received U.N. observer status in 2007.

Overseeing Shariah finance are

• the 1991-Bahrain-registered and -based Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions (AAOIFI), which laid the groundwork for the global Islamic financial network and
• the "de facto Islamic Central Bank"— the Islamic Financial Services Board (IFSB), established in 2002 in Kuala Lumpur "to absorb the 11 September shock and reinforce the stability of Islamic finance."

Chairing the [2002] meeting, then-Malaysian Prime Minister Mohamed Mahathir stated: "A universal Islamic banking system is a jihad worth pursuing to abolish this slavery [to the West]."

According to Saleh Kamel, president of the Saudi Dallah Al-Baraka Group and the Islamic Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ICCI), more than 400 Islamic financial institutions currently operate in 75 countries. They now hold more than $800 billion in assets — growing at a rate of 15 percent annually.

All investments with Islamic financial institutions are subject to the minimum zakat (Islamic charitable wealth tax). On April 30, the OIC, the organization that initiated global Muslim riots after the Danish cartoon publications, established the clerical International Commission for Zakat, replacing more than 20,000 organizations that previously collected the money.

Islamic clerics' "expert committee" in Malaysia now supervises and distributes those funds. The new committee will shortly distribute to Muslim charities roughly $2 billion collected during Ramadan.

But not all charities are equal. In 1999, Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Yousef al-Qaradawi decreed: "Declaring holy war [and] fighting for such purposes is the way of Allah for which zakat must be spent." If past zakat distribution is any indication, all Muslim jihadist-terror organizations (including Palestinian Hamas, the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, and the many al Qaeda offspring) will benefit.

Shortly after September 11, Osama bin Laden called upon Muslims "to concentrate on hitting the U.S. economy through all possible means. Look for the key pillars of the U.S. economy. Strike the key pillars of the enemy again and again and they will fall as one."

Most Arab and Muslim states publicly denounced bin Laden. But

• the impending Nasdaq acquisition,
• the purchases of over 52 percent of the London Stock Exchange and
• 47.6 percent of OMX (Nordic exchange) and
• the vigorous expansion of Shariah financing

apparently follow the Muslim Brotherhood-bin Laden script.

President Bush on Sept. 25 at the United Nations called on all nations to open their markets. Surely, he did not mean opening the markets to domination by Shariah.

Rachel Ehrenfeld is director of the American Center of Democracy and a board member at the Committee for the Present Danger. Alyssa A. Lappen is a senior fellow at the American Center of Democracy.

HIZB UT-TAHRIR: WAITING PEACEFULLY FOR THE CALIPHATE TO COME

From The Globe (Canada), August 22, 2007, by MARK MACKINNON ...

Growing Muslim movement offers alternative to Hamas

KFAR AQAB, WEST BANK -- The bearded young Muslims strode in silence until we reached the threshold of a nondescript mosque in this middle-class town on the edge of Ramallah. "Now we'll see if we can convert you," he said with a sudden smile. He laughed, but it wasn't entirely a joke. There's nothing a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir takes more seriously than trying to convert others to their particular brand of Islam. The party's goal is the establishment of a worldwide Caliphate, a global Islamic empire. We're all welcome to join the umma, or Islamic nation, and become its subjects.

Founded in 1953, Hizb ut-Tahrir has for decades troubled governments from the United Kingdom to Uzbekistan with its calls for peaceful Islamic revolution and the establishment of strict sharia law. But it wasn't well known outside of intelligence circles until now.
In recent weeks, a newly assertive Hizb ut-Tahrir has been showing its strength across the Muslim world, most impressively by drawing 100,000 people to a soccer stadium in Indonesia earlier this month. They noisily called for a return to the time of the caliphs, a line of centuries of Islamic rulers that ended with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire more than 80 years ago.

Now the rapidly growing movement has been emerging from the shadows in the Palestinian territories as well, capitalizing on public unhappiness with the recent bloodshed between the mainstream Hamas and Fatah movements that has split the Palestinian cause in two. A recent rally in the West Bank drew a crowd estimated in the tens of thousands. Days later, the centre of Ramallah is still covered in dark red posters praising "The Caliphate: The Coming Force," and Palestinians are flocking to mosques to hear preachers with an angry message.

"Why are we watching infidels prosper in this world and not stopping them?" Sheik Abu Abdullah, a young-looking man sporting a black turban and a neat black beard, asked a silent crowd of 50 people gathered at the al-Faruq mosque in Kfar Aqab last night. The audience, all men, most middle-class professionals, sat in silence as a battery of ceiling fans sliced through the humid night air. "Muslims in China, Indonesia, Pakistan and everywhere in their thousands are asking for God's government through the Caliphate. They demand the return of God's rule on Earth," the preacher continued. He acknowledged the road to a global Islamic empire would be a long one, but told the worshippers to "please be optimistic."

The scene at al-Faruq mosque was one that's now repeated nightly at mosques all around the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Hizb ut-Tahrir even offers such post-prayer "lessons" at Jerusalem's iconic al-Aqsa mosque, one of the holiest sites in Islam. The message they're selling is one that resonates with Palestinians who feel betrayed by both the secular, corrupt Fatah movement of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and the often senseless violence perpetrated by Hamas, which recently seized military control of the Gaza Strip.

"Our numbers have increased and most importantly, the ones who are coming are the younger generation," Sheik Abdullah, who works as a health-care administrator during the day, said after the mosque had largely emptied. "People have tried other political parties and are fed up with them." But Hizb ut-Tahrir won't try to capitalize on its new popularity in the next Palestinian elections. It teaches members that there should be no democracy, because democratic systems are a tool of Islam's chief enemy, the United States.

Nor does Hizb ut-Tahrir see value in Hamas's policy of using violence against Israel. Sending poorly armed Palestinians to fight the Israeli army is "fruitless," Sheik Abdullah said. The Jewish state and its occupation of Palestinian lands will be dealt with later by the combined armies of Islam. "The solution is not to send 10,000 people from Gaza into Israel or to remove some military checkpoints," said Abu Abed, a 36-year-old physics teacher and senior Hizb ut-Tahrir member who attended last night's lesson.

"Even if a Palestinian state was established under the best conditions, what kind of country would it be? A country like Yemen or Jordan?" he continued, listing off two Arab regimes with repressive, secular, governments that Hizb ut-Tahrir wants to overthrow.

The movement also shrugs off Hamas's recent takeover of the Gaza Strip, charging that Hamas is not Islamic enough because it pursues the goal of a Palestinian state instead of a borderless caliphate. Other fundamentalists who seized power, such as Afghanistan's deposed Taliban, are also dismissed as not having gone far enough.

....While Hizb ut-Tahrir professes non-violence, many experts believe that it serves at least as a "conveyor belt" for groups including al-Qaeda, radicalizing young Muslims who are later recruited by more violent groups. Its members have been subjected to severe repression by nervous regimes in Russia, Central Asia and the Mideast.

The movement is banned in most Arab countries, but operates with relative freedom in the Palestinian territories. ...

*****
Hizb ut-Tahrir at a glance

Founded
Its name means Party of Liberation, and it was started in Jerusalem in 1953 by a Palestinian cleric and judge dissatisfied with the Muslim Brotherhood.
Aims It wants to unite the Islamic countries and eventually the entire world in a single Islamic state - known as a caliphate - governed according to the laws of God, as set out in the Koran, rather than by the laws of man.

Methods
Its first step toward achieving this is to educate Muslims about its philosophies and goals. The second is for adherents to spread these views among others, especially members of government, the military and other power centres. The final step is to cause secular governments to crumble because loyalties will then lie solely with Islam - not nationalities, politics or ethnicities.
Beliefs It doesn't support violent methods, but calls for the end of Israel and the withdrawal of all Western interests in the Middle East. It totally opposes democracy, saying that it is incompatible with its goals because it means voting for parties that do not subscribe to sharia law.

Banned
There have been efforts to ban it in Britain and Australia, but it remains legal there and in Canada and the United States. It is banned in Germany, Russia, many of the former Soviet republics and most of the less liberal Arab countries.

Source: New York Times, Global Security, BBC

Today's Cold War

From Azure magazine (The Shalem Center), Spring 5767 / 2007, No. 28, by DAVID HAZONY ...

A new Cold War is upon us. Though there is no Soviet Union today, the enemies of Western democracy, supported by a conglomerate of Islamic states, terror groups, and insurgents, have begun to work together with a unity of purpose reminiscent of the Soviet menace: Not only in funding, training, and arming those who seek democracy’s demise; not only in mounting attacks against Israel, America, and their allies around the world; not only in seeking technological advances that will enable them to threaten the life of every Western citizen; but also in advancing a clear vision of a permanent, intractable, and ultimately victorious struggle against the West–an idea they convey articulately, consistently, and with brutal efficiency.

It is this conceptual strategic clarity which gives the West’s enemies a leg up, even if they are far inferior in number, wealth, and weaponry. From Tehran to Tyre, from Chechnya to the Philippines, from southern Iraq to the Afghan mountains to the madrassas of London and Paris and Cairo, these forces are unified in their aim to defeat the West, its way of life, its political forms, and its cause of freedom. And every day, because of this clarity, their power and resources grow, as they attract allies outside the Islamic world: In Venezuela, in South Africa, in North Korea.

At the center of all this, of course, is Iran. A once-friendly state has embarked on an unflinching campaign, at considerable cost to its own economy, to attain the status of a global power: Through the massive infusion of money, materiel, training, and personnel to the anti-Western forces in Lebanon (Hezbollah), the Palestinian Authority (Hamas and Islamic Jihad), and the Sunni and Shi’ite insurgencies of Iraq; through its relentless pursuit of nuclear arms, long-range missiles, and a space program; through its outsized armed forces and huge stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons; through its diplomatic initiatives around the world; and through its ideological battle against democracy, Zionism, and the memory of the Holocaust. For the forces of Islamic extremism and political jihad, Iran has become the cutting edge of clarity.

The West, on the other hand, enjoys no such clarity. In America, Iraq has become the overriding concern, widely seen as a Vietnam-style “quagmire” claiming thousands of American lives with no clear way either to win or to lose. ...Europeans continue to seek “diplomatic solutions” even as they contend with powerful and well-funded Islamists in their midst and their friends among the media and intellectual elites–forces that stir public opinion not against Iran and Syria, who seek their destruction, but against their natural allies, America and Israel.

Throughout the West we now hear increasingly that a nuclear Iran is something one has to “learn to live with,” that Iraq needs an “exit strategy,” and that the real key to peace lies not in victory but in brokering agreements between Israel and the Palestinians and “engaging” Syria and Iran.

The Israelis, too, suffer from a lack of clarity: By separating the Palestinian question from the struggle with Hezbollah and Iran, and by shifting the debate back to territorial concession and prisoner exchange, Israelis incentivize aggression and terror, ignore the role Hamas plays in the broader conflict, and send conciliatory signals to the Syrians. Like the Americans with Iraq, Israelis have allowed themselves to lose sight of who their enemies are, how determined they are, and what will be required to defeat them.

The greatest dangers to the West and Israel, therefore, lie not in armaments or battle plans, but in our thinking. ...this conflict cannot be won without first achieving clarity of purpose. .... To achieve this, however, requires a major, immediate investment in the realm of ideas–a battle for understanding that must be won before the battle for freedom can be effectively engaged.

Israel, in particular, has a pivotal role to play. As the front-line state in the conflict, and the lightning rod of Islamist aggression, the world looks to Israel to see how it will respond. From its birth, Israel has served as a model to the West: In deepening its democratic character while fighting a series of wars; in fighting terror effectively, from the defeat of the PLO in the early 1970s in Gaza, to the Entebbe raid in 1976, through Operation Defensive Shield in 2002; and striking preemptively against enemies who combined genocidal rhetoric with the acquisition of sophisticated weapons, as with Egypt and Syria in 1967, and Iraq in 1981.

Israel can again serve as a model of a state proud of its heritage, a democracy that knows how to fight against its tyrannical foes without sacrificing its own character. But to do this will require that Israel, too, disperse the conceptual fog in which it has been operating, recognize the strategic costs of ambiguous outcomes such as with the Lebanon war last summer, and adopt a clear and coherent vision and plan of action. If the West is to act decisively and with clarity, it may need Israel to show the way.

What would such a struggle look like? We should not fear to call this conflict by its name: It is the Second Cold War, with Iran as the approximate counterpart of the Soviet Union. .... Like the Soviet Union, the Ayatollahs’ regime is based on an ideological revolution that repudiates human liberty and subjects its political opponents to imprisonment and death, a regime which, in order to maintain its popular support, must continue to foment similar revolutions everywhere it can, to show that it is on the winning side of history.

And like the Soviet Union in the 1980s, the Iranian regime today has two clear weaknesses, which could ultimately spell its downfall: Economic stagnation and ideological disaffection.

With unemployment and inflation both deep in double digits; an increasing structural dependence on oil revenue; a negligible amount of direct foreign investment; and a stock market that has declined over 30 percent since the election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s heavy investment in other people’s wars and its own weapons and terrorist groups must in the end exact a price in terms of support for the regime.

Today, moreover, the great majority of Iranians do not identify with the government’s Islamist ideology, and among young people the regime is widely derided....

.....When taken in combination with the Soviet Union’s failing economy and widespread ideological disaffection among the populace–much as we see in Iran today–it was possible for the West... to bring about the downfall of what was, during the time of Jimmy Carter, believed to be an unstoppable, expanding historical juggernaut for whom the best the West could hope was “containment” and “détente.” Its vast nuclear arsenals, its pretensions to global dominance, its coherent world-historical ideology–none of these could protect it against the determined, united efforts of the free world. ....

By most measures, Iran is an easier mark than the Soviet Union. It does not yet have nuclear weapons or icbms; its Islamist ideology has less of a universal appeal; its tools of thought control are vastly inferior to the gulag and the KGB; and its revolution is not old enough to have obliterated the memory of better days for much of its population. ...it should be much easier for the West to mount a similar campaign of relentless pressure on the regime–from fomenting dissent online, to destabilizing the regime through insurgent groups inside Iran, to destroying the Iranian nuclear project, to ever-deeper economic sanctions, to fighting and winning the proxy wars that Iran has continued to wage–in order to effect the kind of change of momentum needed to enable the Iranian people to bring their own regime down the way the peoples under communism did in the 1980s and 1990s.

....The fall of the Iranian regime will not end the global jihad. Beyond the messianic Shi’ite movement, there is still a world of Sunni and Wahhabi revolutionaries, from al-Qaida to Hamas, determined to make war on the West even without Iran’s help–just as anti-American communism did not end with the fall of the Soviet Union. Yet there can be no question that today, it is Iran that has earned the greatest admiration, given the global jihad its greatest source of hope and funds, and racked up the most impressive victories, taking on the West and its allies throughout the Middle East–and especially in Iraq, where its proxy insurgencies have frustrated American efforts and even brought about a shift in the internal politics of the United States. Iran is not the only foe, but it is the leader among them. It is only through Iran’s defeat that the tide of the Second Cold War will be turned.

INVERSION OF REALITY

From JCPA, Jewish Political Studies Review 19, Nos. 1 & 2, Spring 5767/2007 by Joel S. Fishman (very brief exerpts only, from a lengthy, excellent academic essay - follow the link to read it in full)...

From the 1960s, inversion of truth and reality has been one the most favored propaganda methods of Israel's adversaries. One of its most frequent expressions has been the accusation that the Jewish people, victims of the Nazis, have now become the new Nazis, aggressors and oppressors of the Palestinian Arabs.

Contemporary observers have identified this method and described it as an "inversion of reality," an "intellectual confidence trick," "reversing moral responsibility," or "twisted logic." Because Israel's enemies have, for nearly half a century, repeated such libels without being challenged, they have gradually gained credence. Since inversion of reality constitutes the basic principle of current anti-Israeli propaganda, it is important to understand what it is and how it works.

This propaganda method is a product of Nazi Germany. It is totalitarian both in its methods, particularly the use of the paranoiac myth, and in the absolute solution it advocates. It denies all of Israel's claims completely and leaves no room for introspection and compromise.

....One of the tactical tools of ideological warfare is propaganda....In the twentieth century, propaganda served primarily as a weapon of war, and its effects could be devastating. Indeed, certain totalitarian ideologies, when brought to their logical conclusion, have been genocidal.

...If sheer repetition, in public and private contexts, can be taken as proof of belief, then it appears that Hitler, Goebbels, Dietrich [Director of the Reich Press Office], their staffs, and an undetermined percentage of German listeners and readers believed that an international Jewish conspiracy was the driving force behind the anti-Hitler coalition in World War II…. They certainly acted as if the Final Solution was Nazi Germany's punishment of the Jews, whom the Nazis found guilty of starting and prolonging World War II.

...a chilling example of the link between propaganda and genocide, namely, Hitler's annual speech to the Reichstag of 30 January1939 ...presented "what became the core Nazi narrative of the coming conflict": "I want today to be a prophet again: if international finance Jewry inside and outside of Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!"

In addition...Hitler's New Year's address to the nation on 1 January 1940...contained the "imputation of genocidal war aims to Nazi Germany's enemies, especially the Jews": "'The Jewish-capitalist world enemy that confronts us has only one goal: to exterminate Germany and the German people.…"

... the ultimate aim of Nazi propaganda was "the imposition of a paranoiac pattern on world events" in the form of a "paranoiac myth." ...

...This is the final horror of the myth. It becomes self-confirming. Once you are entrapped in this illusionary universe, it will become reality for you, for if you fight everybody, everybody will fight you, and the less mercy you show, the more you commit your side to a fight to the finish. When you have been caught in this truly vicious circle there is really no escape. Compared with this effect, the principle of advertising and mass suggestion in war propaganda may almost be called marginal.

Inversion of reality as a tool of media war, with its paranoiac state of mind, has persisted to the present. ...to describe the post-1967 outlook of the Palestinians. ....for them, "Zionism, then, is a new 'Nazism' threatening to dominate and destroy the whole human species…. Thus, in a context where Western elites never tire of calling for the avoidance of 'Islamophobic' utterances, the head of the Islamic Center in Geneva, Hani Ramadan, coolly denounced 'the genocide being organized against the Muslims.'"

It is noteworthy that Ramadan's story line is nearly identical to that of Nazi propagandists. Both presented themselves as targets of a Jewish conspiracy, and the potential outcome of their "logical process"-to use Hannah Arendt's expression-was genocide. Although both have inverted the truth, their assertions contain an additional feature which is disturbing and dangerous: an inversion of morality which leads to criminal behavior and violence without constraint.

....Leo McKinstry, a Belfast-born author and journalist who writes regularly for the Daily Mail, Daily Express, and Sunday Telegraph...identified the inversion of reality in British public discourse with regard to Israel and called it by its real name:
"In a remarkable inversion of reality, Israel has become a pariah state because of its determination to defend itself. A grotesque double standard now operates, where murderous Arab terrorists are hailed as "freedom fighters" yet Israeli security forces are treated as fascistic thugs. No nation has been more demonized than Israel. One recent survey across Europe revealed that Israel is now regarded as "the greatest threat" to world peace, an utter absurdity given that Israel is actually the only democratic, free society in the Middle East. But such a finding reflects the strength of the hysterical anti-Israeli propaganda that fills the airwaves of Europe. No matter how much this anti-Israeli feeling is dressed up as support for Palestine, it is in fact profoundly antisemitic…."

....After the defeat of Germany, the propaganda methods of inversion of reality and the Big Lie fell into temporary disuse. Nevertheless, the Soviet Union and its allies in the Arab world reintroduced them during the 1960s, particularly after the Israeli victory in the Six Day War in 1967. That outcome represented a humiliation and posed an internal danger because it shook the foundations of authority. It heartened the minorities in the Soviet Union, not least the Jews.
Having suffered a major reverse, the Soviet Union and the Arab countries decided to use political anti-Semitism to shift world attention from their own failures. They sought to delegitimize Israel, bringing about its isolation and destruction. Some elements of the new propaganda campaign were:

• The accusation that Israel was the aggressor in the Six Day War and denial of its right to self-defense.
• The passing of UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, "Zionism is racism," on 10 November 1975 which conferred the standing of international law on a proposition totally based on the inversion of reality. This resolution transformed Zionism, the Jewish national movement, into the embodiment of evil by equating it with the depravity of Nazi Germany.
• The drafting of the PLO Covenant in its various versions of 1964, 1968, and 1974. This document claimed that justice was totally on the Palestinian side and that Israel had no standing at all.
• The Hamas Charter of 1988.
• The unprecedented assault on Israel which took place at the UN Conference in Durban at the end of August and beginning of September 2001.

Both the Arab world and the Soviet Union used inversion of reality as a method and drew on the idiom of Nazi propaganda. The transfer of this expertise cannot be traced in detail because the information is incomplete. It is known, however, that many Nazis found refuge in the Arab world. From 1953, Egypt absorbed some two thousand of them. Some worked in Nasser's secret service. Some administered concentration camps. Others were involved in the design and construction of rockets. Among this population were specialists in anti-Semitic propaganda. From Egypt, they disseminated anti-Semitism in the Arab world as well as the doctrine of Holocaust denial.

...For his part, the ex-Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini in his conversation with Hitler of 21 November 1941 and his radio broadcasts contended that Jews were the common enemy of Islam and Nazi Germany. The ex-Mufti frequently went on tour to encourage the Balkan SS Muslim units, and the Axis radio stations faithfully covered these visits. During his broadcast of 21 January 1944, he proclaimed:
"The Reich is fighting against the same enemies who robbed the Moslems of their countries and suppressed their faith in Asia, Africa and Europe…. National Socialist Germany is fighting against world Jewry. The Koran says, "You will find that the Jews are the worst enemies of the Moslems." There are considerable similarities between Islamic principles and those of National Socialism, namely in the affirmation of struggle and fellowship, in the stress of the leadership idea, in the ideal of order. All this brings our ideologies close together and facilitates cooperation. I am happy to see in this division a visible and practical expression of both ideologies."

...If today's Arab anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish propaganda strongly resembles that of the Third Reich, there is a good reason.

...On September 6, 1968, Dr. Simon Wiesenthal held a press conference in Vienna where he accused the German Democratic Republic for its use of language identical to the Nazi era in its condemnation of Israel. The title of the publication which he distributed on this occasion was, The Same Language: first for Hitler - now for Ulbricht. In this well documented publication Wiesenthal and his staff identified thirty-nine Nazis with excellent credentials in the Third Reich who found their way into the service of the G.D.R. Some were extremely well placed. Not surprisingly, one of the tools of propaganda which they used was inversion of reality, accusing Israel of being the aggressor. This information may explain how the East Bloc co-opted Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda themes. J. H. Brinks, in his essay "Political Anti-Fascism in the German Democratic Republic," explained that there was no ideological impediment to prevent the cooperation between Communist party members and National Socialists, as they had once been allies. That is, until Hitler invaded the Soviet Union.

....It should be added that with France's change in diplomatic orientation in favor of the Arab cause, and as a consequence of its great influence in Europe, anti-Israeli information steadily gained currency on the Continent. Historian Bat Ye'or remarked that the Second International Conference in Support of the Arab Peoples, held in Cairo in 1969, was a turning point for Europe. Its chief objective was to "demonstrate hostility to Zionism and solidarity with the Arab population of Palestine." ....

....It did not take long for the cold winds to blow. At the end of 1968, Bertrand Russell published an open letter to Wladyslaw Gomulka, first secretary of the Polish Communist Party, protesting the outbreak of state-sponsored anti-Semitism in Poland. Russell bluntly likened this new anti-Semitism to that of Nazi Germany. He used the term "twisted logic" to describe the method of inverting reality:
"Over the past eighteen months in Poland, the Press, the secret police and the Government have instigated anti-Semitism quite deliberately. By some twisted logic, all Jews are now Zionists, Zionists are fascists, fascists are Nazis, and Jews, therefore, are to be identified with the very criminals who only recently sought to eliminate Polish Jewry…."

The Soviet Union spread several other fictions in its new propaganda war against Israel. One of these was the accusation that Israel was the aggressor in the Six Day War. ....Soviet propaganda has managed to make the main issue appear Israeli withdrawal from the territories occupied in the course of the war. Thus, a matter which should be part of the final settlement of the conflict becomes a precondition of negotiations leading to a settlement. Whatever one's feelings about the substance of the Israeli-Egyptian dispute, one cannot but admire the adroit use of an intellectual confidence trick to turn the tables on an opponent and shift the burden of recalcitrance from oneself to the other party....

....When discussing the developments of this era, one must include the PLO Covenant in its different versions from 1964 onward. It provided a codified ideological statement which embodied Palestinian myths and claims. At first it did not have much impact, but later, particularly after 1973, it became the PLO credo.....Prof. Yehoshafat Harkabi was probably the first to recognize the importance of this document and carefully analyzed its content and language. In the introduction to his publication of the text of the Palestinian Covenant with his commentary, Harkabi stated that the absoluteness of the Palestinian inversion of reality was inherently totalitarian:
"The Palestinian movement claims absoluteness and "totality"-there is absolute justice in the Palestinian stand in contrast to the absolute injustice of Israel;…right is on the Palestinian side only; only they are worthy of self-determination; the Israelis are barely human creatures who at most may be tolerated in the Palestinian state as individuals or as a religious community…; the historical link of the Jews with the land of Israel is deceit; the spiritual link as expressed in the centrality of the land of Israel in Judaism is a fraud; international decisions such as the Mandate granted by the League of Nations and the United Nations Partition Resolution are all consigned to nothingness in a cavalier manner."

The PLO Covenant is central to our understanding of today's Palestinian Authority. The fact that Yasser Arafat refused to amend this document, even though he pretended to do so in the presence of President Clinton on 14 December 1998, is the best indication of his real intentions. Of related interest is the Hamas Charter of 1988, the text of which may be found on the Internet.....its distinctive inversion of reality [is traced ] to Nazi sources:
"The renewed impact of Nazi-style conspiracy theories becomes particularly obvious if we take a look at the Charter of the Muslim Brotherhood of Palestine, otherwise known as Hamas. Created in 1988, the Charter pointedly makes use of the antisemitic rhetoric of the ex-Mufti of Jerusalem which he had adopted from the Nazis. According to this Charter, "the Jews were behind the French Revolution as well as the Communist revolutions." They were "behind World War I so as to wipe out the Islamic Caliphate…and also behind World War II, where they collected immense benefits from trading in war materials and prepared for the establishment of their state." They "inspired the establishment of the United Nations and the Security Council…in order to rule the world through their intermediaries. There was no war anywhere without their [the Jews'] fingerprints on them." The original text of the Charter is clearly stated in Article 32, in which it states that the intentions of the Zionists "[have] been laid out in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and their present conduct is the best proof of what is said there.""

The importance of these charters has not been sufficiently appreciated. Nevertheless, the myths which they embody have become part of the fictional and paranoiac worldview which Palestinian propaganda has imposed on reality.

On 10 November 1975, the Soviet Union and its supporters passed UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, "Zionism is racism," which transformed an anti-Semitic slogan into an internationally accepted "truth." Rabbis Abraham Cooper and Harold Brackman explained that "the term 'racism' was coined in 1936 to rally scientific and political opinion against Nazi doctrines of 'Aryan superiority' over Jews and other alleged untermenschen." According to the original meaning of the term, then, "racism" denotes one of the great abuses of Nazism. Thus, to equate Zionism with racism represents a serious accusation and inversion of reality.

Although Resolution 3379 was finally rescinded on 16 December 1991, and the Soviet Union passed into history shortly thereafter (26 December 1991), the damage to Israel's cause was considerable. By reducing a complicated issue to a slogan, this libel, which inverted reality, prevented rational discussion of the real problems of the Middle East. In an era of mass media when the study of the past has gone out of fashion, slogans such as "Zionism is racism" have taken the place of facts. They have penetrated the popular mainstream idiom and the consciousness of uncritical mass audiences.

Israel's enemies made many accusations during the years after Resolution 3379, but for a time they spared Israel another massive assault on its legitimacy. That changed with the UN World Conference against Racism which took place in Durban, South Africa, from 28 August-8 September 2001. Durban was the scene of anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli speeches and agitation of an intensity unknown since the 1930s.

Some of the main players who joined this effort were the UN high commissioner for human rights and secretary-general of the conference, Mary Robinson; Arafat, Hanan Ashrawi, and Farouk Kaddoumi for the Palestinian Authority; Ahmed Maher and the Arab Lawyers' Union for Egypt; Farouk al-Shara for Syria; and the Iranian delegate. Others included the representatives of the NGOs, the European Union, the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, Cuba, China, Sudan, Iraq, Chile, Jamaica, Finland, and South Africa.

Squarely in the tradition of "Zionism is racism," the Durban Conference made ample use of the inversion of reality. Indeed, the NGOs called "for the reinstatement of the UN resolution equating Zionism with Racism" and "the complete and total isolation of Israel as an apartheid state," and condemned "Israeli crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and genocide."

...The significance of Durban is yet to be fully appreciated, particularly because the malicious intentions of its sponsors-Egypt, which is supposedly at peace with Israel, while those of the Palestinian Authority and Iran-have not been fully acknowledged....

....For more than half a century, inversion of reality has been the essential characteristic of a media war against Israel and has caused considerable harm. This propaganda method is a product of Nazi Germany. It is totalitarian both in it methods, particularly the use of the paranoiac myth, and in the total solution it advocates. It denies all of Israel's claims completely and leaves no room for introspection and compromise. Following the same strategy which the international community applied against South Africa, the long-term strategic objective of Israel's enemies is to destroy the Jewish state, even if it takes years. Its use proclaims the true intent of those who resort to it.

For its part, Israel has a strategic need to defend itself on the battlefield, but in order to exercise this sovereign right, it must effectively defend its legitimacy in the forum of public opinion. Accordingly, Israel must first recognize the type of war in which it is engaged and then formulate an appropriate strategy based on solid information.

.... There is, therefore, an urgent need to expose the lies which have become part of the media war and to discredit those who spread them.

The Mystery of the Obvious

From GLORIA, April 17, 2007, by Barry Rubin ...

...we must be profoundly grateful when someone discovers the obvious. Here are three examples of this phenomenon.

The first comes from David Brooks, writing in the New York Times, April 8. Brooks attended one of the endless series of dialogues... supposed to be getting "Americans and moderate Arab reformers together to talk about Iraq, Iran, and any remaining prospects for democracy in the Middle East." ...All the Arab speakers wanted to discuss was Israel and its alleged control over U.S. policy. ....all the problems within the Middle East, too, stemmed from Israel. That includes not only the Arab-Israeli dispute but also all the crises in Lebanon, Iraq, and stemming from Iran's ambitions. The Americans tried to get their counterparts to discuss other things, including the need for modernization in the Arab world. They failed....

Another example of discovery comes from the well-known blogger who calls himself IraqPundit, an Iraqi exile. He writes of watching an al-Jazira television show, on which a Somali guest complained about Islamist terrorists making miserable the lives of Somalis.

The host responded, "You sound like the Iraqi government when it calls any act of resistance 'terrorism.'" This sent IraqPundit into a spin. Suddenly, all he could think of was, "Iraqi men, women, and children choking to death in a cloud of chlorine gas released by one of the noble resistance's truck bombs....I saw Iraqi girls who had gone to school and Iraqi mothers who had gone to the market, all murdered and lying in a sea of Iraqi blood."

He concludes, "But that's Arab Nationalism, isn't it? When the Baathist regime was overthrown, hardcore nationalists equated Arab 'honor' with the survival of brutal and tyrannical trash. Now, they equate 'resistance' with our slaughter."

My final example comes from an Islamist Internet site, courtesy of MEMRI's translation. One member posted an article opposing a nuclear attack on America by Islamists since the resulting U.S. retaliation against Muslims would be devastating. He also stated the Muslim religion permitted revenge only on those who directly commit an act of aggression and not on unarmed civilians.

Most responses strongly disagreed, starting with one that began, "This article was not written by a Muslim...but by an American... [probably from] one of their strategic centers for countering the Islamic jihad...." The notion was that anyone who opposed attacking a stronger adversary by killing millions of people must be an enemy agent. Of course, the great majority of Muslims reject doing any such thing, but the argument that those who speak in real-world terms are traitors is widespread, a constantly employed tactic.

There are two basically wrong responses to all this in the West. The first, the radical one, is that these claims about Israel's omnipotence, the virtues of Arab nationalist "resistance," and the right to murder Westerners are correct. The alternative, more "moderate" stance, which appeals to a far wider circle, is that since Arabs or Muslims truly believe these things, such grievances must be addressed by apologies, policy changes, and concessions.

When it comes to the Middle East, there is often nothing more difficult than discovering the obvious.

The Radicals' Not-So-Secret Winning Strategy

From GLORIA, March 7, 2007, by Barry Rubin ...

The world's radical regimes--especially Iran, Syria, North Korea, and their associated client groups--have come up with a brilliant strategy that breaks every rule in the diplomatic book and yet works brilliantly. The West's inability to cope with this approach--indeed, failure even to comprehend it--has been one of the biggest problems in Middle Eastern and world politics for the last few decades....

..... A key element in this strategy is that it plays to the strengths of the perpetrators and the perceived weaknesses of the West. On their side, the radicals have several advantages: they like conflict; are patient; not bound by morality (that is, they don't mind murdering people in cold blood); and are willing to suffer (or, rather, let their people suffer since the dictators always eat well). Since they are dictators, they don't care about public opinion and even mobilize it for themselves through demagoguery. (As dictators, they also control the schools and media.)

In contrast, the West likes peace, is impatient for solutions, and doesn't like casualties. As democracies, their people are divided and thus vulnerable to the extremists' propaganda.

So what are the main elements of the radicals' regulations?

1. Ignore the balance of forces. Who cares if the other side is stronger? What are they going to do, attack us?
2. And if they attack us, let our people suffer to make them feel guilty. Use demagoguery at home to promote the appeal of martyrdom and launch appeals for sympathy abroad.
3. Never end a conflict even if you are losing; never make major concessions because keeping the issue open may mean you will win, and get everything, in the future. Show you are willing to destroy everything and go on fighting forever in order to discourage the other side.
4. Fool the West with propaganda; promise to be good if they only give you what you want. Get concessions and then break your promises about giving anything in exchange. They won't dare call you on it or will forget it.
5. Throw in some offers of compromise periodically, even if you don't stick to them. Western leaders will rush to make a deal in order to avoid confrontation, make progress, or get glory for themselves.

Thus, in the 1950s and 1960s, Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser said that, if the West doesn't like what we do, let them drink the Nile. In the 1970s and 1980s, Iranian dictator Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini said, the West cannot do a damn thing. Yasir Arafat committed terrorism for 30 years and made the West fund him and beg for his cooperation. Saddam Hussein in the 1990s said, let them continue sanctions, rather than fulfill his commitments. Today, there is Iran's nuclear campaign and Syria's terrorism against its neighbors.

There are some specific countries--especially India, Israel, South Korea and Turkey--whose survival requires them to make an equally tough response with popular support at home. In contrast, crippled by European weakness and its own intellectual fifth column, its priority on high living standards and low levels of bloodshed, the West has a hard time dealing with this problem.

And yet, nevertheless, the West and democratic world will win, for the traditional rules ultimately will apply. For example, the extremists force the West to oppose them by their very aggressiveness; economic and strategic superiority does count. The problem is that this new radical strategic superweapon makes it harder and longer to achieve this result.

Moderates must not become apologists for radical Islam

From The Age, February 26, 2007, by Colin Rubenstein, executive director of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council ...

A proper multiculturalism upholds the core values of Australian society.
THE Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) cancelled our planned participation in the program of Israeli professor Raphael Israeli after his controversial remarks about Muslim immigration and communities. Characterising Muslim communities as a threat or danger per se is a sentiment we reject and with which we do not wish to be associated....

...It is true, however, that there is a serious problem in Australia and globally posed by an extremist totalitarian ideology generally known as Islamism. It asserts that all problems can be solved by the creation of a divinely sanctioned "caliphate", and that all means are justified in achieving this end. It also sets out to convince Muslims that Christians, Jews and other non-Muslims are inevitably and eternally hostile to all Muslims, and there is no alternative for Muslims except to join the Islamists in a ruthless struggle to the death against them.
Ideological affiliates of Islamism excel at spreading distorted claims about their critics, attempting to portray all criticisms of their ideology as racist attacks on all Muslims because this serves their political ends.

Sadly, even Australian moderates like Waleed Aly buy into elements of this radical program. Many of his claims (Opinion, 17/2) are examples of such distortions. ...We understand that Waleed Aly sought to defend his community's interests. But we would like to see him try harder to overcome "defensiveness" per se, and avoid the traps that radicals have set for the moderates by attempting to brand all critics of Islamist totalitarianism as anti-Muslim racists.

Aly also misrepresents other critics of Islamism. He criticises the distinguished British historian Sir Martin Gilbert, whose sin appears to have been calling for Europeans to be aware in their immigration program of the need to preserve "Europe's true values: vibrant democracy, humanitarian free thinking, and social fair dealing" from those Muslim immigrants who seek to subvert them. This is a legitimate issue, just as Australian multiculturalism has long sought to ensure all immigrants adhere to our society's "core values", such as rule of law, democracy and gender equality.

AIJAC believes that sentiments like Professor Israeli's play into the hands of the Islamists by helping them convince other Muslims that co-existence with non-Muslims is impossible. AIJAC also believes that a properly implemented policy of multiculturalism, which incorporates both rights and the responsibility to uphold the core values of Australian society, remains an important part of the strategy to counter all forms of political extremism.

The war against the west

From Melanie Phillips, February 15, 2007 ...

...the capacity of the intellectual classes to deny the need for action against tyranny never ceases to amaze. If you want to tap into British denial of the need to confront the threat from Iran, listen to last night’s Moral Maze on BBC Radio Four. Particularly astounding was the suggestion that we should stop ‘demonising’ Iran — and of course, there were the inevitable claims that America is fabricating evidence that Iran is involved in Iraq in order to whip up a false case for invading Iran just as it ‘fabricated evidence’ for invading Iraq. Leave aside the case for war with Iraq for a second — the idea that America, which is in such difficulties in Iraq, would actually choose to embark on an all-out war with Iran at this juncture, with all the appalling risks involved, not least to the world economy, simply in order to ‘cover up’ its difficulties in Iraq, is bizarre in the extreme.

...Meanwhile, Iran speeds towards genocide, with people still scoffing that it’s ‘only rhetoric’. I recommend people to read this case for the indictment of Ahmadinejad on the charge of incitement to genocide — including the excellent footnotes and their references — to judge whether it we should regard it as ‘only rhetoric’ or whether it is imperative that we act now to prevent a second holocaust or the world being held to ransom by a nuclear-armed apocalyptic messianist with genocidal intentions.

We have been under attack by Iran since 1979, when Khomeini came to power and declared war upon the west and his intention to wipe out Israel and Islamise the world. Throughout three subsequent decades of Iranian attacks on western interests, we did virtually nothing. Now, with the clock at five minutes to nuclear midnight, we are still in disarray. Washington is mired in vicious internal in-fighting. Our elites continue to demonise America and Israel, thus paralysing our politicians and paving the way for a second holocaust. Meanwhile, we plunge ever deeper into total irrationality, with demented conspiracy theories about 9/11 being given a respectful hearing — as here on BBC Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine show and here.

When are we going to pull ourselves together?

Iran, Hizbullah, Hamas and the Global Jihad:

The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs has published a study entitled "Iran, Hizbullah, Hamas and the Global Jihad:A New Conflict Paradigm for the West" in January 2007. Authors include Dr. Dore Gold, Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Moshe Yaalon, Brig. Gen. (Ret.) Dr. Shimon Shapira, Daniel Diker, Uzi Rubin, Dr. Martin Kramer, Lt. Col. (Res.) Jonathan D. Halevi.

The Arab-Israeli conflict has become increasingly a part of the much larger struggle between radical Islam and the West. Iran is more determined than ever to achieve regional hegemony.

Follow this link to Download Full Report (85pp. - 2M pdf file).

The following excerpt is from the Executive Summary by Dore Gold ...

The Middle East has undergone revolutionary changes in the last few years that require a serious reassessment of how the region's myriad problems should be addressed.

For most of the 1990s it was the conventional wisdom that the key to regional stability was to be found in the resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict ....with a diplomatic investment of a few years, it was hoped, it would be possible to conclude a region-wide peace agreement that included Israel, the Palestinians, and the Arab states.

However... it has become clear that radical Islamic militancy, which had been organizationally led by al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, transferred many of its main centers of operation to the Middle East after the fall of the Taliban regime. This was especially noticeable in the area of western Iraq and in several neighboring countries. Thus, it was becoming increasingly difficult to argue that the Arab-Israeli conflict was the root cause of regional instability. Indeed, the immediate historical roots of radical Islam could be traced to two events that had nothing to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict: the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran and the 1989 defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan that spawned al-Qaeda.

Now radical Islam is gaining strength among the Palestinians with the victory of Hamas in the 2006 parliamentary elections of the Palestinian Authority. This was the first time an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood has seized power in the core of the Middle East. The hostility of Hamas toward Israel cannot be ameliorated through diplomacy or by means of a fair territorial compromise. Hamas and its allies completely reject a negotiated solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict and align themselves with jihadi organizations across the region. As a result, the Arab-Israeli conflict has become increasingly a part of the much larger struggle between radical Islam and the West.

With the emergence for the first time of a Shiite-dominated Iraq, the Islamic Republic of Iran sensed that it now has an historic opportunity to emerge as the dominant power in the entire Middle East, projecting its influence to neighboring Shiite communities and reaching out to the Sunni Arab street over the heads of current governments....

....The Iranian drive for new great power status has been driven by the ideological orientation of its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has rejuvenated the energy behind the original 1979 Islamic Revolution. He has underscored that he firmly believes in an impending Shiite apocalyptic scenario and, as a result, he does not seem to be influenced by the same considerations of deterrence that affected the calculations of the superpowers during the Cold War. He has put in place an Iranian government manned by fellow former Revolutionary Guards, many of whom share his ideological outlook. The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps - and its Quds Force in particular - has been a critical instrument for spreading Iranian political-military influence across the Middle East, from Lebanon to Sudan, and most recently in Iraq.

It would be a cardinal error to see the rise of Sunni and Shiite militancy as completely separate developments that cannot influence one another and do not cooperate. Iran sought to make inroads with the Islamist regime in Sudan in the 1990s. It has backed Sunni organizations like Palestinian Islamic Jihad for years and is now emerging as the most significant source of support for Hamas. The 9/11 Commission details Iranian cooperation with al-Qaeda. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the butcher of Iraqi Shiites during the insurgency, was provided refuge and support by the Iranian regime when he evacuated Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban. In order for Iran to assume a leadership role in the Islamic world, it must reach out beyond the Shiite communities of the world, which account for only 15 percent of all Muslims, and ally itself with Sunni movements, as well.

Yet while Iran seeks greater influence in the Sunni-dominated states, the Iraq War has exacerbated Sunni-Shiite tensions across the Middle East, leading Sunni leaders like Jordan's King Abdullah to openly talk about the dangers of a Shiite crescent encircling the core of the Middle East. And in anticipation of a U.S. pullback from Iraq, the Saudi Arabian leadership has voiced its concern regarding the prospect that Iraqi Shiites intend to ethnically cleanse Iraq of its Sunni minority population with Iranian backing.

As a result, the Sunni-Shiite rivalry is likely to emerge as the central axis of conflict in the Middle East in the years to come. Given this new strategic context, the U.S. and its Western allies have enormous leverage with the threatened Sunni Arab states. As a consequence, the West does not have to pay for their cooperation in Israeli coin. Moreover, Saudi Arabia's continuing support for radical jihadi movements among Sunnis needs to be carefully monitored and addressed.

It is striking that while these revolutionary changes are transpiring, many Western policy-makers seem to be locked into ideas for stabilizing the Middle East that were conceived more than a decade ago under completely different regional circumstances. This problem was particularly glaring in the report of the Iraq Study Group Commission, chaired by James Baker and Lee Hamilton, that sought to accommodate Iran (as well as its Syrian ally) and increase pressure on Israel to reach a settlement with its most radicalized neighbors.

From the analysis that follows, new principles of Western policy become necessary that reflect the new realities of the Middle East:

1. Iran is more determined than ever to achieve regional hegemony in the Middle East and is fueling regional instability across the entire area. ....
2. The primary threat to the Sunni Arab states now clearly comes from Iran....Indeed, Israel and the Sunni Arabs may have many common threat perceptions. The resulting coincidence of their security interests ....might warrant low level discussions between Israel and its neighbors about how to address the threats that they face.
3. There is no short-term diplomatic option for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict....
4. The stabilization of the Middle East requires the neutralization of any of the components of the current radical Islamic wave. In this sense, it doesn't matter if Sunni or Shiite organizations are defeated, for the failure of any one of the elements in the present wave will weaken the other elements as well. The defeat of Hamas among the Palestinians or Hizballah in Lebanon would constitute an enormous setback for Iran.
5. Israel has a continuing need for defensible borders. ... were Israel pressured to concede the Jordan Valley, for example, it would likely expose itself to a steep increase in infiltration to the strategic West Bank...the vacuum such a move created would increasingly attract global jihadi groups to Jordan, thereby undermining the stability of the Hashemite kingdom, and ultimately the region as a whole.
   

President Bush's Iraq Plan

For an excellent analysis of the Bush "surge" plan, and of a Democrat response, by Walid Phares (senior fellow with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) in Washington, D.C.) see World Defense Review, January 29, 2007....

[excerpts only, from the introduction, follow...]

In short, President George W. Bush's plan for "redirecting" the Iraq campaign is logical, in line with the war on terror and targets the correct enemies of Iraq, of democracies and of the United States. But the plan needs to fit within a global vision of winning the global conflict with the Jihadists, on a long term policy, win the support of the new Congress, and be well explained to the American people by the various levels of the administration.

This is where the beef is: On the other hand, the response by the Democratic-led Congress as stated by Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) is also logical, touches sensitive issues if the Iraq battlefield, and lays out the normal outcome of a strategic success: that is the return of the troops. So are the White House and Congress in harmony? We will see. Both have advanced what is essentially logical. The President challenge is to make sure his bureaucracy follows him thoroughly, and the Congress' challenge is to make sure the American public sees the big picture the legislators are not revealing yet for the future. Let's wait and see how Washington's new dual approach will fare in the very near future....

Follow the link to the full article.

'Jihad' sheik to face new police probe

From The Australian, January 19, 2007, by Simon Kearney ...

THE firebrand cleric who went overseas just days before some of his cohorts were rounded up in the nation's biggest counter-terrorism raid is the subject of a new police investigation, after a call for children to join jihad as holy warriors appeared in a DVD being sold in Australia.

Sydney-born Sheik Feiz Mohamed's radical sermons - available on the internet and on DVDs and videos - have become popular with Muslims around the world. In one video, running on the hugely popular website YouTube, he admonishes his followers in English for not "sacrificing a drop of blood" as martyrs.

Australian Federal Police said yesterday they had begun inquiries into Sheik Feiz's DVD encouraging jihad, which is believed to be unclassified in Australia and illegal to sell.
NSW Premier Morris Iemma accused the cleric yesterday of inciting terrorism. "This DVD goes a lot further than vilification," he said. "The sort of incitement that the DVD encourages is incitement to acts of violence and acts of terror."

Sheik Feiz, a member of Sunni Islam's fundamentalist Wahhabi sect, left Australia for Lebanon in late 2004, just days before federal and state police and ASIO conducted raids in Sydney and Melbourne, arresting 23 people on terror-related charges. The cleric calls two of the accused terrorists close friends and knew all of the Sydney men arrested. He has links to almost every notable member of Australia's Islamic community and continues to direct his Global Islamic Youth Centre - the nerve centre of Islamic youth in Sydney, setting the tone for 4000 youths, their families and fraternities.

Along with Sheik Mohammed Omran in Melbourne and Sydney's Sheik Abdul Salem Mohammed Zoud, he is considered one of Australia's leading radical clerics. Unlike Sheik Omran and Sheik Zoud, Sheik Feiz preaches in English with a strong Australian accent rather than Arabic.

In the video running on YouTube, which could not be dated, he criticises Muslims in Australia for not sacrificing their blood as martyrs and for putting lifestyle ahead of action in response to massacres of Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine......In that and another series called Signs of the Hour, made about four years ago, Sheik Feiz labelled Jews "pigs" and exhorted children to jihad. "We want to have children and offer them as soldiers defending Islam," he says. "Teach them this: there is nothing more beloved to me than wanting to die as a mujahid. Put in their soft, tender hearts the zeal of jihad and a love of martyrdom."

....Acting Attorney-General Kevin Andrews said the matter was being investigated by the relevant authorities. "It's offensive to the Australian people, it's reprehensible, it's particularly outrageous that certain groups in Australia, such as the Jewish community, have been highlighted in these comments and we condemn the comments," he said......

Additional reporting: Martin Chulov, Simon Hayes

A Christian Exodus From the Arab World

Doron draws our attention to this, from the Assyrian International News Agency (ANINA), 11/1/07, by Amira El Ahl, Daniel Steinvorth, Volkhard Windfuhr and Bernhard Zand ....

Violence, terrorism and the Islamists' growing influence pose a threat to Christianity in the Middle East. In some countries, members of an unpopular Christian minority are already fighting for their survival -- or fleeing for their lives.

....Christians have lived in the Arab world for the past 2,000 years. They were there before the Muslims. Their current predicament is not the first crisis they have faced and, compared to the massacres of the past, it is certainly not the most severe in Middle Eastern Christianity. But in some countries, it could be the last one. Even the pope, in his Christmas address, mentioned the "small flock" of the faithful in the Middle East, who he said are forced to live with "little light and too much shadow," and demanded that they be given more rights.

There are no reliable figures on the size of Christian minorities in the Middle East. This is partly attributable to an absence of statistics, and partly to the politically charged nature of producing such statistics in the first place. Lebanon's last census was taken 74 years ago. Saddam Hussein, a Sunni who is himself part of a minority, was fundamentally opposed to compiling denominational statistics. In Egypt the number of Christians fluctuates between five and 12 million, depending on who is counting.

Given the lack of hard numbers, demographers must rely on estimates, whereby Christians make up about 40 percent of the population in Lebanon, less than 10 percent in Egypt and Syria, two to four percent in Jordan and Iraq and less than one percent in North Africa. But the major political changes that are currently affecting the Middle East have led to shrinking Christian minorities.

In East Jerusalem, where half of the population was Christian until 1948, the year of the first Arab-Israeli war, less than five percent of residents are Christian today. In neighboring Jordan, the number of Christians was reduced by half between the 1967 Six Day War and the 1990s. There were only 500,000 Christians still living in Iraq until recently, compared to 750,000 after the 1991 Gulf War. Wassim, one of the seminary students now fleeing to Kurdistan, estimates that half of those remaining Christians have emigrated since the 2003 US invasion, most of them in the last six months.

Demographics have accelerated this development. Christians, often better educated and more affluent than their Muslim neighbors, have fewer children. Because the wave of emigration has been going on for decades, many Middle Eastern Christians now have relatives in Europe, North America and Australia who help them emigrate. Their high level of education increases their chances of obtaining visas. Those who leave are primarily members of the elite: doctors, lawyers and engineers.

But there are deeper-seated reasons behind the most recent exodus: the demise of secular movements and the growing influence of political Islam in the Middle East.

It was a Syrian Christian, Michel Aflaq, who founded the nationalist Baath movement in 1940, a career ladder for Iraqi Christians until 2003 and still a political safe haven for many Syrian Christians today. Former Egyptian President Gamal Abd al-Nasser had no qualms about paying homage to the Virgin Mary, who supposedly appeared on a church roof in a Cairo suburb after Egypt's defeat in its 1967 war with Israel. And former Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, who died in 2004, insisted on sitting in the first row in Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity during the annual Christmas service.

But those days are gone. The last prominent Christians -- Chaldean Tariq Aziz, Saddam's foreign minister for many years, and Hanan Ashrawi, Arafat's education minister -- have vanished from the political stage in the Middle East. And since the election victories of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Hamas in the Palestinian Authority, the rise of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the bloody power struggles between Sunni and Shiite militias in Iraq, the illusion that Christian politicians could still play an important role in the Arab world is gone once and for all.

The 800-Pound Guerrilla

From Cox & Forkum, January 11, 2007....

I'm not at all hopeful about Bush's "new" Iraq strategy. It did have a few long-overdue elements, such as an ultimatum for the Iraqi government to disarm militias and take control of security. And Iran and Syria finally appeared to be on Bush's military radar. This News Max article highlights those comments: Bush Targets Iran in Speech, Implies Military Action.
[Bush] singled out Iran, adding that she "is providing material support for attacks on American troops."

Bush made an implied military threat against [Iran and Syria]: "We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We will interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq."

That's fine as far as it goes, but it won't be enough. And not being enough, it will continue to drag out the war and put American troops at unnecessary risks.....Bush is attempting to cure the symptoms while ignoring the disease. As such, the weapons and terrorists will keep flowing across the border, and the chaos in Iraq, though it may rise and fall, will ultimately continue because Iran needs it to continue. How can we expect our troops to win a war in which we don't allow them to directly attack the enemy?

In World War II, we didn't stop with engaging enemy soldiers at the front lines; nor did we stop at disrupting their supply lines. We took the fight all the way to the weapons factories and the command centers from which the war emanated.

....Iran is fighting to defeat us in Iraq, and they have demonstrated time and again a determination to succeed. To top it all off, they are also seeking nuclear weapons. The only way to secure Iraq--and, more importantly, America--is to topple the Iranian regime. Tragically, nothing in Bush's new strategy indicates a plan to go as far as is needed.....

The second Holocaust

Doron draws our attention to this op-ed piece from DIE WELT (in German), January 6, 2007, by Benny Morris ....

[The following is the original text in English provided by the author]

The Nazis, of course, industrialized mass murder. But still, the perpetrators had one-on-one contact with the victims. ...

The second Holocaust will be quite different. One bright morning, in five or ten years' time, perhaps during a regional crisis, perhaps out of the blue, a day or a year or five years after Iran's acquisition of the Bomb...orders will go out and the Shihab III and IV missiles will take off for Tel Aviv, Beersheba, Haifa, and Jerusalem, and probably some military sites, including Israel's half dozen air and (reported) nuclear missile bases. Some of the Shihabs will be nuclear-tipped, perhaps even with multiple warheads. Others will be dupes, packed merely with biological or chemical agents, or old newspapers, to draw off or confuse Israel's anti-missile batteries and Home Guard units.

With a country the size and shape of Israel (an elongated 8,000 square miles), probably four or five hits will suffice: No more Israel. A million or more Israelis, in the greater Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem areas, will die immediately. Millions will be seriously irradiated. Israel has about seven million inhabitants. No Iranian will see or touch an Israeli. It will be quite impersonal.
Some of the dead will inevitably be Arab. 1.3 million of Israel's citizens are Arab and another 3.5 million additional Arabs live in the semi-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. ....It is doubtful whether such a mass killing of fellow Muslims will trouble Ahmedinejad and the mullahs. The Iranians don't especially like Arabs, especially Sunni Arabs, with whom they have intermittently warred for centuries. And they have an especial contempt for the (Sunni) Palestinians.... And surely, to be rid of the Jewish state, the Arabs should be willing to make some sacrifices.....

...To judge from Ahmedinejad' s continuous reference to Palestine and the need to destroy Israel, and his denial of the first Holocaust, he is a man obsessed. He shares this with the mullahs: All were brought up on the teachings of Khomeini, a prolific anti-Semite who often fulminated against 'the Little Satan'. To judge from Ahmedinejad' s organisation of the Holocaust cartoons competition and the (current) Holocaust denial conference, the Iranian president's hatreds are deep (and, of course, shameless).

He is willing to gamble - the future of Iran or even of the whole Muslim Middle East in exchange for Israel's destruction.....And, with his deep contempt for the weak-kneed West, he is unlikely to take seriously the threat of American nuclear retaliation.

....As with the first, the second Holocaust will have been preceded by decades of preparation of hearts and minds, by Iranian and Arab leaders, Western intellectuals and media outlets. Different messages have gone out to different audiences - but all have (objectively) served the same goal, the demonization of Israel. Muslims the world over have been taught: 'The Zionists\the Jews are the embodiment of evil' and 'Israel must be destroyed.' And Westeners, more subtly, were instructed: 'Israel is a racist oppressor state' and 'Israel, in this age of multi-culturalism, is an anachronism and superfluous' . Generations of Muslims and at least a generation of Westerners have been brought up on these catechisms.

The build-up to the second Holocaust (which, incidentally, in the end, will probably claim roughly the same number of lives as did the first) has seen an international community fragmented and driven by separate, selfish appetites - Russia and China obsessed with Muslim markets; France, with Arab oil - and the United States driven by the debacle in Iraq into a deep isolationism. Iran has been left free to pursue its nuclear destiny and Israel and Iran, to face off alone.

..... And, as with the first Holocaust, the international community will do nothing. It will all be over, for Israel, in a few minutes - not like in the 1940s, when the world had five long years in which to wring its hands and do nothing. After the Shihabs fall, the world will send rescue ships and medical aid for the lightly charred. It will not nuke Iran. For what purpose and at what cost? An American nuclear response would lastingly alienate the whole of the Muslim world, deepening and universalizing the ongoing clash of civilizations. And, of course, it would not bring Israel back. (Would hanging a serial muderer bring back his victims?) So what would be the point?

Still, the second Holocaust will be different ....there will be no ...heart-rending scenes, of perpetrators and victims mired in blood (though, to judge from pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the physical effects of nuclear explosions can be fairly unpleasant).

But it will be a Holocaust nonetheless.

Hilali ridicules Australia

From The Australian, January 12, 2007, by Richard Kerbaj ...

SHEIK Taj Din al-Hilali has ridiculed his adopted country on Egyptian television, dismissing the furore over his insults to women and defence of gang rapists while claiming Muslims had more right to live in Australia than the descendants of convicts.

The latest outburst by Australia's chief Muslim cleric came during an interview as he enjoyed what was meant to be a self-imposed exile in the Middle East to duck the national outrage he sparked late last year.

But rather than douse the controversy, which divided Muslim Australia and further strained relations with the broader community, the imam of Sydney's Lakemba Mosque has inflamed it.
"The Western people are the biggest liars and oppressors and especially the English race," the Mufti of Australia said in Arabic during the extensive interview in Eqypt, his birthplace. "The Anglo-Saxons who arrived in Australia arrived in shackles. We paid for passports from our own pockets. We have a right in Australia more than they have."

Having last year suggested victims should share the blame for being sexually assaulted, Sheik Hilali used the interview to blame the September 11 attacks on the US for influencing lengthy sentences given to Sydney's notorious Lebanese Muslim gang rapists.

....Keysar Trad, president of the Islamic Friendship Association of Australia, said that while some of Sheik Hilali's comments were controversial, the cleric deserved a chance to explain himself upon his return to Australia. ....Mr Trad said while he did not want to be seen defending the imam, Sheik Hilali's comments about convicts were in response to a provocative question by his interviewer....

TERRORIZING TERRORISTS

...and now, for a feel-good story from NewYorkPost, January 10, 2007, by RALPH PETERS ...

-- WE'LL get you. No matter how long it takes, we'll get you. That's the message our special-operations forces just sent to al Qaeda fugitives in Somalia - and everywhere else.

With AC-130 gunships pounding terrorist hide-outs and training sites in the badlands near the Kenyan border, we may have nailed senior al Qaeda figures involved in bombing our embassies in Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam. At the very least, we killed some really bad hombres.

As always, terrorist propagandists will claim that only innocent civilians suffered, and media sympathizers will echo their nonsense. Fortunately, though, most pro-terrorist journalists and "human-rights advocates" are preoccupied just now with the awful mistreatment of poor, misunderstood Saddam Hussein.

And the devastation left behind by our gunships is only part of a very big U.S. win:
* Thanks to resolute military action by Ethiopia's government (quietly backed by Washington), the terror regime in Mogadishu crumbled overnight - collapsing the lie that extremist Islam is on the march to an inevitable victory.
* The speed of the Ethiopian advance cornered hundreds of hardcore Islamist fighters in a forlorn backwater, where they can be killed out of sight of their media defenders. And be killed they will.
* Islamist outrages and subversion inspired unprecedented cooperation between moderate Somalis, Ethiopians, Kenyans and Americans. For its part, the Kenyan government grew sick of Somalia exporting hatred, weapons and terror. Now Kenyan troops have sealed their border so al Qaeda's agents can't escape.
* Far from being a growing threat - as America-haters insist - al Qaeda's on the run. Confident that they had a new refuge in Somalia, international terrorists instead find themselves scrambling to escape justice.
* Our special-ops forces are getting their revenge: After Army Rangers and Delta Force troops won a hands-down victory in the streets of Mogadishu back in 1993, President Bill Clinton sold them out (as the Pelosi-Reid Democrats threaten to do to our soldiers in Iraq on a greater scale). Now they're killing al Qaeda fanatics and their local allies with the full support of a new Somali government.

Much remains unresolved in Somalia - it won't turn into a quiet garden spot any year soon. But no amount of rationalizations by anti-American voices can disguise the fact that this has been a huge defeat for radical Islam and its terrorist vanguard: They're homeless again.
Fanatical dreams of re-establishing - and extending - the Muslim caliphate on the African continent are suddenly in shambles (although our enemies, from al Qaeda to the Saudi royal family, won't give up just yet). Far from impressing the world with its strength, extremist Islam just revealed its inherent weakness again: Average Muslims don't like it and won't defend it.
Yes, there's plenty of anti-Ethiopian emotion in the streets of Mogadishu today - but that's not the same as pro-Islamist sentiment.

As for al Qaeda's media pals, they'll try to play down the scope of this defeat, lying that only a few foreign terrorists were in Somalia. But even apart from the number of fanatics now lying dead in mango swamps, snake-ridden forests and scrubland, the psychological blow to al Qaeda has been huge: Mired in Iraq and hunkered down in remote rat-holes in Pakistan, Terror International, Inc. has been robbed of its biggest success story since 9/11.

The Islamists lost their vital beach-head in the Horn of Africa. Even Sudan, for all its villainy, is wary of associating with al Qaeda today (Khartoum has enough problems). Of course, not all in the region is exactly as it seems on the surface. The do-it-in-the-dark boys - our military special-operations forces and CIA personnel - have been deeply involved in getting this one right. Joint Task Force Horn of Africa, the American regional headquarters in Djibouti, has been a consistently effective player, too, punching well above its weight. JTF-HOA is an economy-of-force operation that returns a huge strategic dividend on the taxpayer's investment.

We owe all of our engaged military and intelligence personnel - overt, covert and clandestine - a debt of thanks. But the thanks won't be public. As always, our special operators will fade back into the strategic mist. Some may have been on the ground in Somalia throughout this operation, helping out with intelligence and targeting, nudging key actions along and hunting specific terrorists. The use of AC-130 gunships - incredibly effective weapons - against massed terrorists may have been cued by cell-phone intercepts, but I wouldn't discount brave Americans on the ground directing those airstrikes.

That's speculation, of course. But I can guarantee two things to Post readers: First, Somalia and the world are better off with the Islamists on the run and living in terror themselves, and, second, our special operations forces - from all of the services - are greater heroes than the history books or Hollywood films will ever be able to capture.

Whack 'em again, guys.

Ralph Peters is a retired Army officer and the author of "Never Quit The Fight."

Iraq would 'collapse' if US steps back, warns Bush

From The Australian, January 11, 2007, by Mark Dodd ...

US President George W. Bush, poised to order more US troops to Iraq, warned today that reducing US efforts now would lead to the collapse of the Iraqi government and a longer, deadlier war.

“(To) step back now would force a collapse of the Iraqi government,” Bush said in excerpts of his speech released by the White House before he was to deliver it at 9:00 pm in Washington (12.00 AEST). “Such a scenario would result in our troops being forced to stay in Iraq even longer, and confront an enemy that is even more lethal. If we increase our support at this crucial moment, and help the Iraqis break the current cycle of violence, we can hasten the day our troops begin coming home,” he said.

Bush said today he will send 21,500 additional US forces to Iraq to break the cycle of violence and “hasten the day our troops begin coming home”. The decision will push the American presence in Iraq toward its highest level and put Bush on a collision course with the new Democratic Congress. ...

Mr Bush also bluntly warned the Iraqi government it risks “losing the support of the American people” if it fails to do more to quell violence. “I have made it clear to the prime minister and Iraq's other leaders that America's commitment is not open-ended,” he said. “If the Iraqi government does not follow through on its promises, it will lose the support of the American people - and it will lose the support of the Iraqi people. Now is the time to act. The prime minister understands this,” Mr Bush said. Iraq will take control of its own security in November under Mr Bush's plan to end the violence in the war-torn nation.

....Despite the troop increase, which will bring the total US deployment in the country to 150,000, Mr Bush did not ask John Howard to commit more Australian troops when he spoke to the Prime Minister early yesterday to brief him on his plans.

...Acting Prime Minister Mark Vaile told Sydney radio that there had been no request from the US to increase Australia's troops. Mr Bush, who will outline his new Iraqi strategy in a televised address at 1pm (AEST) today, has faced escalating pressure over Iraq. Public opinion is turning against the war, which has taken 3000 US lives since the March 2003 US-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein.

....Mr Bush's speech comes after he rebuffed two key recommendations from the Iraq Study Group led by former US secretary of state James Baker - pull out most US combat forces by 2008 and open direct talks with Syria and Iran.

On the eve of Mr Bush's televised address, Democratic senator Edward Kennedy tabled a bill that might deny the President the billions of dollars needed to send more troops to a war he described as "George Bush's Vietnam". Senator Kennedy said his bill would ensure "no additional troops can be sent or no additional dollars can be spent on such an escalation" without the approval of Congress....Although the bill is unlikely to become law, it will serve as a rallying point for Democrats and an increasing number of Republicans who oppose any escalation in the war.....

Additional reporting: The Times, AFP

Local push for Islamic state

From The Age, January 9, 2007, by Barney Zwartz ....

AN ULTRA-radical Muslim group banned in many countries will promote support for an Islamic superstate in a seminar in Australia this month. Christian critics claim that the seminar, to be conducted by the group Hizb ut-Tahrir, will be a recruiting ground for extremists. Hizb ut-Tahrir believes that the caliphate — a part of the world under Muslim rule that, at its peak, ran from Spain to Iran and beyond — is about to be re-established.

Hizb ut-Tahrir is banned in Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia and most Muslim countries in the Middle East because of alleged links to terrorism, including the bombers behind the 2005 London attacks.

It is not banned in Australia but is controversial because it opposes democracy and Muslim integration, has tried to recruit young Muslims and ran a lecture last year titled "Israel is an illegal state that Muslims will never accept". A promotional video for the January 27 Sydney conference on the internet site YouTube.com claims the world was "plunged into darkness" on March 3, 1924, the date when Turkish leader Kemal Ataturk ended the Ottoman caliphate. "The consequences were unimaginable: death, destruction, chaos, exploitation. After 80 years of the absence of the khilafate (caliphate) the Muslim world has awakened from its slumber, and the umma (the community of all the world's Muslims) is ready to resume its political destiny," the video says. "From the darkness will emerge a new light."

Some observers have expressed fears that the conference will be used to radicalise Muslims in Australia and recruit extremists. A spokesman for federal Attorney-General Philip Ruddock said group members would have to be careful about what they said at the conference and remember that Australia was a harmonious society.

Melbourne Anglican minister Mark Durie, author of a book comparing Islam and Christianity, said in a widely distributed email: "If we wake up in 10 years' time and wonder what went wrong, historians who are able to look back and analyse the rise of radical Islam in Australia will identify events such as this conference as part of the answer." Dr Durie said yesterday Hizb ut-Tahrir was a major world force for radical political Islam, with links to terrorist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, and had strategies for Australia. He said the purpose of the conference was to "inspire and mobilise Muslims to establish Islamic government in the medieval model of sharia law with no concession to other principles such as democracy or human rights". "They want to legitimise the caliphate as a political aspiration." ....