RUTHFULLY YOURS

PARIS (AFP) –

French police and airport authorities said Saturday graffiti, much of it in Arabic, had been found sprayed on four aircraft belonging to British carrier Easyjet and a plane from Spanish airline Vueling at two airports.

Three of the jets had been defaced at Lyon airport in eastern France with two others sprayed at the Paris hub of Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle, police said.

A police source added authorities believed the graffiti had been painted on prior to the jets’ arrival in France, but that the issue posed questions about airport security.

The words “Allah Akbar” were found to have been scrawled on a fuel tank hatch of one Easyjet plane at Charles de Gaulle airport on Tuesday, a day after the aircraft arrived from Budapest, an airport source said, adding it was scrubbed off before the next passengers embarked.

“Five years since the launch of the Arab Spring, between five and seven million people live under the yoke of the Islamic State in parts of Iraq, Syria and Libya, a further two million under the rule of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in Gaza, and a total of at least another million are under Insag control in Lebanon, Sinai and parts of the Sahel region — all in all between eight and ten million human beings, in what is already the world’s least politically stable region. Whatever the fate of one Insag or another may be, the phenomenon is here to stay. Should they continue their territorial gains and entrenchment among the local populations, they will inculcate millions of children in various forms of militant jihadism, gradually acquire more state-like military and financial assets, and increasingly transform the nature of international terrorism and challenge the state-based international order itself.”

When the Arab Spring erupted five years ago, observers of the Arab world asked themselves mostly what kind of state governments would emerge from the popular revolts and anti-regime uprisings sweeping large parts of the Middle East and North Africa.

Some, like the late Fouad Ajami, read the unrest as the birth pangs of a region-wide struggle towards modernity. A long-silenced Arab world was finally clamouring to be heard, eager to find its place in the modern, possibly even democratic, order of nations. Others, like Khaled Abu Toameh, were less sanguine. Looking at the balance of power between liberals and Islamists in key Arab states, they warned that the Arab Spring was the mother of all misnomers, and that a harsh Islamist Winter was coming. Viewed through their prism, the electoral victories of the AKP in Turkey in 2002 and Hamas in Gaza in 2006 were the early precursors to a tsunami of Muslim Brotherhood wins in Tunisia, Egypt and beyond. Those “old” Arab autocrats — statist, socialist, secular, and sclerotic — who would prove unable to effectively co-opt or suppress the Islamists, would face wholesale replacement at the hands of a new breed of assertive Islamist dictatorships.

Once the Islamists actually came to power in Tunisia (2011) and Egypt (2012), the question “what kind of state governments will emerge in the Middle East?” morphed and acquired new meanings. Would the Islamists seek to monopolise their grip on state, society and the markets, or would they tolerate spheres of autonomy for the old guard and other opposition groups? Would the Achayun (Brothers) of Tunisia and Egypt follow the Turkish model of incremental, largely non-violent Islamisation of society and (at least for the time being) the preservation of democracy, or would they quickly turn towards the more coercive methods of forced Islamisation favored in Iran and Gaza? Did the fact that only Arab “republics”, not monarchies, collapsed in the regional earthquake, point to some genuine monarchical stability-advantage — and therefore portend well for regime durability in Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia — or is this a statistical fluke that is bound to be corrected sooner or later? And in the international sphere, would the untested new Islamist leaders (most importantly Egypt’s Mohamed Morsi) accept the existing rules of the game — honouring previous agreements with the United States and Israel — or veer towards some truculent new “Islamist foreign policy” whose features were not yet defined?

“Your values are our values,” intoned a sombre British Prime Minister in solidarité with the people of France on the morning after the bloodbath in Paris last month. Maybe, but until recently the two countries have taken a markedly different approach to trying to prevent such massacres, the second in Paris this year.

The Paris attacks mark the latest in a series of increasingly successful strikes by French jihadists since 2012. Less sensitive to Muslim sentiment than Britain, the French have sought to counter jihadi terrorism with more draconian legislation than us, while expecting the country’s almost 5 million Muslims to assert the robustly secular values of la République française.

The Cameron government, by contrast, has taken a more interventionist approach when it comes to Britain’s “precious” progressive values. Permanent agitation by Islamists to inject ever more of their version of Islam into public life, overpowering more mainstream Muslim voices, means tolerance, freedom of speech, free religion, free thinking, democracy, and gender and sexual equality can no longer be taken for granted.

Even as the IS slaughterers in France were strapping on their suicide belts, that same night on this side of the Channel British values were being dismissed as “junk” at a debate about Islam at the Corn Exchange in Bedford. “Every single one of these speakers is a caliphate-advocating Islamist,” commented Maajid Nawaz, the co-founder and chairman of the counter-terrorism think-tank Quilliam.

They say it’s to ensure an orderly flow of “migrants” through the country, but let’s see what happens when the shoving begins:

A government spokesman says Macedonia has started to erect a fence on its southern border with neighboring Greece in order to prevent illegal crossings and to channel the flow of migrants through the official checkpoint. Aleksandar Gjorgjiev told The Associated Press that Macedonia has begun “all technical operations for channeling the migrant flow to official checkpoints in order to ensure humane treatment and to register the migrants.”

Gjorgjiev said “the border will remain open and all migrants from the war-affected zones will be allowed to enter.” He added that “the dynamic and the structure of the migrants flow has been determined in accordance with EU demands and (those of) the countries of the Balkan route.”

“Paramilitary forces from Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guard have held a war game simulating the capture of Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque from Israeli control,” the Associated Press reports.

…thousands of members of the Basij, the paramilitary unit of the Guard, participated in Friday’s exercise outside the holy city of Qom in central Iran.

The symbolic operations were backed up by Guard helicopters, drones and Tucano planes that bombed hypothetical enemy positions before ground troops captured the replica of the mosque set up at the top of a mountain….

Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, who heads the Guard’s aerospace division, said his force deployed Shahed-129, or Witness-129, drones during the war games. The drone, unveiled in 2013, has a range of 1,700 kilometers (1,050 miles), a 24-hour nonstop flight capability and can carry eight bombs or missiles.

AP then informs us that it’s not really anything to worry about:

Even so, the exercise appeared to be largely for show. Iranian commanders have not said how they would be able to deploy large numbers of forces against Israel, located 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) away, or overcome Israel’s powerful and technologically advanced military.

Actually, there are ways that they can do that. One is to use the immense windfall they stand to reap from last July’s nuclear deal, in the form of lifted sanctions and boosted trade and oil sales, to build up their capabilities. Another is to create a land bridge westward to the Mediterranean, something they’re striving to do at all times.

And another is to rely on the Western preoccupation with the Islamic State, and increasing tendency to treat Iran as a strategic ally and stabilizing force, to keep pursuing their plans relatively untrammeled.

Ehud Yaari, a veteran Israeli Middle East analyst, takes Iran’s aims seriously enough that he devoted a long analysis to them called “How Iran Plans to Destroy Israel.” “The Islamic Republic of Iran,” Yaari notes, “has been committed for the past 36 years to a doctrine aimed at wiping Israel off the map. Statements to this effect still pour out of Tehran almost daily.”