http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/124491/sec_id/124491
The eleventh anniversary of 9/11 broke like a thunder clap in North Africa sparking outrage and violence throughout the Muslim Ummah. It began with the premeditated attack on the Benghazi consulate in Libya by a force of Ansar al-Sharia militia led by an ex-GITMO detainee equipped with heavy weapons, rocket propelled grenades and diesel fuel. They seized a safe house and caused the death of US Ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens (from smoke inhalation) and dragged his body unceremoniously through the streets to the cries of “Allahu Akbar!” Stephen Smith, spokesperson for the Ambassador was also killed in the attack. Two former Navy Seals, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, security contractors seeking caches of weapons in Benghazi, fought valiantly against overwhelming odds, but were also killed.
Simultaneously, crowds of Salafists attacked the US Embassy in Cairo. They clambered up the protective wall, tore down the US flag and ran up the black flag of Islam to the cries of “Obama, Obama we are all Osama bin Laden!” The flag had the traditional Qur’anic inscription: “There is no god but Allah and Mohammad is his messenger.”
Prominent among those leading the Cairo Embassy attacks was Mohammed Zawahiri, the younger brother of Al Qaeda leader, Ayman al Zawahiri. They were egged on by Salafist Imams who had translated and posted on-line a You Tube video clip of a crudely made film, “The Innocence of Muslims.”
The US Ambassador to Egypt Anne Patterson seized upon this film clip as a cause of the catastrophes in Libya, Egypt and elsewhere in the Muslim Ummah. A protest of nearly 70,000 Pakistanis occurred at the US Embassy in Islamabad. US and other foreign Embassies were attacked and more than 40 killed in these enflamed Muslim protests. Washington rushed Marine rapid response teams to threatened embassies.
The French satiric journal Charlie Hebdo further outraged the Muslim Ummah by publishing cartoons parodying The Innocence of Muslims. By publishing these cartoons, Charlie Hebdo raised the ante about the lack of humor, let alone freedom of speech within the Muslim Ummah. The French Foreign Ministry closed 20 embassies in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons due to threats from angered Muslim fundamentalists. Nevertheless, the French government is defending the right of Charlie Hebdo to publish the cartoons.
The film was made in California by a 55 year old Egyptian Coptic Christian, Nakoula Bassley Nakoula, who was on parole on federal charges of passing bad checks. Following an FBI investigation, Nakoula has been rearrested on several federal parole violations including using aliases and the internet. Initial reports gave the alias of Sam Bacile an alleged Israel American backed by group of American Jews that proved to be a troublesome libel.
On the weekend following the debacle in Benghazi and Cairo, US UN Ambassador Susan B. Rice was on five Sunday talk programs suggesting that the excerpts of the Film poste on YouTube were the cause of the protests and that the attacks in Benghazi and Cairo were spontaneous acts of mob violence and not a terrorist attack. The interim Libyan President Mohammed Magarief disagreed, saying that it was a planned al Qaeda attack by foreigners infiltrating the area. Moreover, CNN came into possession of late Ambassador Stevens’s journal in which he questioning security arrangements at the Benghazi consulate. Moreover, intelligence assessments made within 24 hours of the Benghazi killings of Amb. Stevens and the three other Americans confirmed indications of a premeditated attack on the consulate. The Administration was further caught unawares by the comments of Matthew Olsen, director of the National Counter Terrorism Center. When asked at a hearing by Sen. Joseph Lieberman, Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, Olsen said that the Ambassador and the other Americans had been killed in a terrorist attack. White House press spokesman Jay Carney quickly back peddled, responding with the new line from the Obama White House that it was evident that there was a terrorist attack in Benghazi. President Obama in his speech at the UN General Assembly perpetuated the myth of the film enflaming the responses against America in the Muslim world when he remarked:
The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam. Yet to be credible, those who condemn that slander must also condemn the hate we see when the image of Jesus Christ is desecrated, churches are destroyed, or the Holocaust is denied. Let us condemn incitement against Sufi Muslims, and Shiite pilgrims. It is time to heed the words of Gandhi: “Intolerance is itself a form of violence and an obstacle to the growth of a true democratic spirit.”
President Obama was perturbed also about the delayed reaction of Egyptian President Morsi in coming to the aid of the US Embassy in Cairo. He made an assessment that Egypt under former Muslim Brotherhood leader Morsi was not “neither an ally nor an enemy.” Morsi in a CBS Charlie Rose interview while at the UN General Assembly Session in Manhattan countered: “we are not enemies, of course … for sure, we are friends,” but he stopped short of calling Egypt and the U.S. allies.” Morsi reached out to Tehran on his recent visit during the Non-Aligned Movement meetings there and has become part of the contact group composed of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran regarding the bloody rebellion in Syria against the embattled regime of Bashar Assad. During his first speech at the UN General Assembly, Morsi rejected the American and Western value of free speech instead calling for the UN adoption of blasphemy codes. He sought to return Egypt to its former position as leader of the Arab world by promoting the Palestinian statehood cause and resolution of the Syrian rebellion. Clearly the Arab Spring in Egypt under Morsi has turned increasingly wintry. Note Muslim Brotherhood and extreme Salafist demands that the Constitution adhere to strict Islamic Shariah, thereby depriving women and especially minority Christian Copts of basic civil rights. Egyptian liberal and leftwing parties have threatened to quit the Assembly drafting the new Constitution.
Morsi also has problems dealing with Salafist Bedouin and other shadowy al Qaeda affiliates in the Sinai. These groups have attacked the Multinational Force and Observers facility and attempted to intrude into Israel on its Southern border in a bloody terrorist raid. 14 Salafists have been condemned to death in a trial for a raid on a police station in El Arish that resulted in the deaths of four Egyptian security personnel and one civilian. Morsi’s seizure of control of the Egyptian military and positioning of troops and tanks in the Sinai have made relations with Israel uneasy. The are rising concern about whether the 1979 Camp David Accords are in jeopardy.
The Palestinians, according to Jon Schanzer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, are having their own version of protests that are inwardly focused. In an article “A Palestinian Spring” published in Foreign Policy, Schanzer noted:
In recent days, from Bethlehem to Hebron to Ramallah, the Palestinians have taken to the streets. Only this time, they’re not protesting against the Israeli occupation — they’re denouncing their own leaders.
Schanzer attributed this internal protest to several factors; a rough economy, political frustration, anger at corruption among leaders of the Palestinian Authority. Then there is the division between PA President Abbas and PM Salam Fayyad whom many Palestinians accuse of being a lap dog for the Americans and Israel. No problem in Gaza despite a self-immolation there, Hamas keeps things pretty well buttoned up. Despite anger at Abbas, he is poised to submit a resolution for non-member status at current session of the UN General Assembly. The PA is probably assured of passage as it has support from over 133 members of the Non-aligned Movement bloc. The vote may coincide with the 65th anniversary of the November 1947 vote that declared a partition of mandatory Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. The later was rejected by the Arabs who instead sought and failed to achieve the destruction of the embryonic State of Israel. Non-member status, if achieved, will complicate economic and diplomatic relations with both Israel and the US. At the UN General Assembly session in late September, Abbas ranted about Israel engaging in ‘ethnic cleansing’ a reference to building in East Jerusalem and expanding settlements in Judea.
Syria’s bloody rebellion largely led by the Sunni opposition Free Syrian Army are backed by Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia against the military forces of Bashar Assad. Recently the commander of the Free Syria Army, Col. Riad al-Assad, announced the deployment of their headquarters from its safe haven inside Turkey to “liberated areas” in adjacent northwestern Syria. A Syrian Muslim leader, Secretary General Mohammed Riad al-Shaqfa, announced opposition to the de facto Kurdish autonomy region in the country’s northeast.
Clearly the objective of the Muslim Brotherhood leadership in the bloody Syrian rebellion is to maintain and assert control over a unified Syrian state governed under Shariah Islamic law with the likely conduct of a brutal sectarian war aimed at ‘ethnic cleansing’ of minority groups opposing this objective; i.e., the Kurds, Alawites, Druze and Christians. With direct Iranian intervention via insertion of Quds forces in Syria and supply of war material for the Assad regime via a ‘humanitarian’ air bridge passing over neighboring Iraq versus the Sunni supremacist coalition of Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia supplying the Free Syrian Army, the bloody rebellion will continue. Iraq–based al Qaeda cadres have also entered Syria from the adjacent Anbar province. The disarray in Iraq leading to the resurgence of al Qaeda there has been attributed to the failure to negotiate a token US force as part of the Status of Forces Agreement with the al Maliki government in Baghdad. See a new book by Michael R. Gordon and Gen. Bernard Trainor, The End Game : The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama. No effective UN intervention is likely given the stalemate at the Security Council with the opposition of both Russia and China to US and other Western resolutions. In the meantime the Kurds in Syria will continue to perfect de facto self government while Turkey is preoccupied in combating heightened levels of asymmetrical warfare from emboldened PKK insurgents in its adjacent southeastern provinces. Add to the imbroglio over Syria recent reports about movement of its formidable chemical and biological warfare caches that concern both the US and more seriously Israel. The latter may be poised to act before those caches end up in terrorist groups like al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas and rebel forces inside Syria.
Overarching these dangerous developments is the threat of Iran’s achievement of its first nuclear bombs. That concern was graphically on display at the UN General Assembly when Iran’s President Ahmadinejad castigated Israel for its illegitimate heritage claims. This was rejected by Israel PM Netanyahu in his address at the General Assembly. Netanyahu noted in his speech a rebuke of Ahmadinejad who spoke on the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur:
On the day when we pray to be inscribed in the book of life a platform was given to a dictatorial regime that strives, at every opportunity, to sentence us to death.
Netanyahu used the graphic device of a cartoon of a bomb with a fuse to address his country’s concern about drawing a red line to stop Iran from achieving a nuclear weapon with which to annihilate the Jewish State. Netanyahu noted how close that achievement is, relying on published IAEA reports which claim that Iran will have enough enriched uranium to produce one or more nuclear bombs by next summer. He said:
The red line must be drawn on Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. I believe that faced with a clear red line, Iran will back down.
Red lines don’t lead to war, red lines prevent war. Nothing could imperil the world more than a nuclear-armed Iran.
Against this background “Your Turn” hosts Mike Bates, of radio station 1330AMWEBY of Pensacola, Florida, Senior Editor Jerry Gordon of the New English Review, Dr. Jonathan Schanzer, Vice President of Research of the Washington, DC- based Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and Shoshana Bryen, Senior Director of the Jewish Policy Center in Washington held a radio round table discussion.
