With Islamists Rising, Will Egypt Go The Way Of Iran?

The Obama administration comes up another loser. Incompetence starts at the top at the weakest link. mc

Posted 12/01/2011 06:12 PM ET

Islamism: The news from Cairo is bad. Early election returns point to a Parliament dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood and the even more extreme Salafis. It's time for a fast reset to realism.

History never repeats itself precisely, but Egypt's revolution does seem to be falling into a familiar rut. Liberals lead the charge, overthrow the autocrats and then fall to a new breed of oppressors, more brutal, fanatical and globally ambitious than anything that went before.

Think France in 1789, Russia in 1917 and Iran in 1979.

Balloting has begun to choose the first Egyptian Parliament since the ouster of pro-American strongman Hosni Mubarak. To no one's surprise, the well-organized Muslim Brotherhood (slogan: "Islam is the solution") is getting the largest share of the vote, about 40%.

This would not be so troubling if the Western-looking liberal parties and more moderate Muslim groups had picked up enough votes to keep the Brotherhood in the mainstream, where it claims now to be.

Instead, it's the extreme Islamists, the Salafis, who are on the rise. Their strong showing could bring them about a quarter of the vote. Not only would the Islamists have a huge majority, but any moderate leanings in the Brotherhood could be squelched by the clout of the hard-core Salafis.

What now? For America, that question might be moot. We are neither loved nor feared in Egypt, so our ability to influence events there is almost nil. Blame for this condition, to be fair, is shared by the past two administrations, which have treated democracy — or the trappings of it — as a sort of pixie dust that would bring peace and prosperity to the Middle East.

George W. Bush at least tried to balance this >>>

A Terror State On Israel's Border?

This article speaks for itself. Please read thru to the ending and judge for yourself.

Posted 09/19/2011 06:44 PM ET

United Nations: The planned vote on statehood for the Palestinians is more than just a bad diplomatic move. Though likely to be vetoed, it's an epic disaster for Israel, the U.S. and what remains of the West.

The proposal that will be put forward in the United Nations to make Palestine a full member of the U.N. — and thus, officially, a state — has overwhelming support from some 127 countries. But it's a dangerous idea that will lead to a new terrorist state in the Mideast and probably another war.

The noose of energy-states that surround Israel is tightening by the day.

In Egypt, which signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, a power shift will likely bring the Israel-hating Muslim Brotherhood to power.

Turkey, once both an ally and friend of the U.S. and Israel, has been taken over by Islamists. It's forging close new ties with Egypt and a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran, whose leader has threatened to "annihilate" Israel.

Earlier this year, Turkey supported the launch of a flotilla to break Israel's embargo on aid to Hamas. The flotilla was no "aid" group, as reported, but an al-Qaida-linked financial front.

Meanwhile, Syria, which has waged war against Israel>>>

Muslim Brotherhood Channel

Once again, the camels nose enters the tent abetted by the Obama Administration and many other unaware politicians of the threat of Islamofacism.

Posted 09/15/2011 06:44 PM ET

Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal will launch a pro-Islamist 24-hour news network even more radical than Al-Jazeera. View Enlarged Image

Islamofacism: Quick: What would be the biggest casualty of a merger between the Saudis and two of the West's most influential media moguls? Answer: the truth.

Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal announced this week he will launch a pro-Islamist 24-hour news network with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's privately held news service.

The deal has Bloomberg News providing five hours of financial and economic news programming throughout the day on the new "Alarab" channel, which the prince says will be "right of Al-Jazeera" — that is, even more radical. It will no doubt promote Alwaleed's notoriously anti-Israel agenda.

After 9/11, he gave a $10 million gift to New Yorkers, but with a string attached: They had to acknowledge our Mideast policies brought on the attacks. Mayor Giuliani famously told the prince to go pound sand.

Gotham's current mayor, on the other hand, has no qualms about doing business with the creepy billionaire. They seem to see eye-to-eye on many issues.

Take the Ground Zero mosque.>>>

Fast And Furious And Ugly

AG Eric Holder should resign immediately. That means soonest. There is no doubt that he was complicit in the death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.

Posted 10/10/2011 06:48 PM ET

At the Arizona Peace Officers' memorial in Phoenix Friday, Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu announced that 10 Arizona sheriffs had called for a... View Enlarged Image

Scandal: The attorney general once again pleads ignorance as some 40 Fast and Furious weapons are found at a Mexican drug lord's home. If the AG doesn't read memos, maybe he can read a subpoena.

After Eric Holder was involved in the pardoning of international fugitive Marc Rich, he confessed to not doing a thorough check of Rich's history and background. When he criticized Arizona's immigration law, SB1070, he admitted to not even reading the law. Now, with dead bodies and illegal weapons piled up high in Fast and Furious, Holder says he didn't read the memos.

Holder's "Sgt. Schultz" defense that he knew, saw and heard nothing about the ATF's gun-running operation does not wash with the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Darrell Issa.

On "Fox News Sunday" Issa said he plans to issue subpoenas that Holder and other top Department of Justice officials will have to read. On Friday, Holder reacted to calls for a special prosecutor and the fact that five weekly emails sent to him by Michael Walther, director of national drug intelligence, in July and August 2010 should have made him aware of the program and its problems.

"I do not and cannot read them from cover

Don't Cry Over Terrorist Awlaki's Death

Another 'down' and many more to go in our long war against terrorism.

Posted 09/30/2011 06:51 PM ET

War On Terror: U.S. forces dealt a huge blow to al-Qaida's Western recruiting when they took out two American al-Qaida traitors on the Saudi-Yemen border. It's also a blow to the ACLU.

Dead: Anwar Awlaki, tops on the CIA kill list, and his understudy Samir Khan, both U.S. citizens blasted by drone-fired missiles.

Awlaki, a Muslim cleric who advised the 9/11 hijackers and the Fort Hood gunman, became al-Qaida's top recruiter and external operations chief in the Arabian Peninsula. Khan, a 25-year-old from Charlotte, N.C., joined him in Yemen, where he published in English al-Qaida's slick, new jihad how-to journal.

The American Civil Liberties Union had worked with Awlaki's father to block attempts by America to hit him, arguing that targeting U.S.-born terrorists set a "dangerous precedent." To its credit, the White House fought the left-wing group's suit and did what's necessary to protect Americans.

Of course, the ACLU condemns the Awlaki "assassination" as a "violation of both U.S. and international law." And it may bring further action against the U.S. drone program. "As we've seen today," an ACLU spokesman complained, "it's a program under which U.S. citizens far from any battlefield can be executed by their own government without judicial process."

Earth to ACLU: The battlefield in the war on terrorists>>>

Cuba's Terror Smoking Gun

And how close is Cuba to our shores?

Posted 09/01/2011 06:58 PM ET

Terrorism: For years, Cuba's apologists have debunked U.S. warnings of Havana's sponsorship of terror. It withers in the face of news that Cuba has just set up a Hezbollah base.

According to a report in Italy's respected Corriere della Sera Wednesday, three Hezbollah terrorists operating out of Mexico have left that country to establish a permanent "bridgehead" to the communist island, calling their clandestine operation "The Caribbean Dossier."

Twenty-three other terrorists from the Iran-linked terror group are expected to join the operation, which has a startup budget of more than $500,000. Corriere reported that the mission in Cuba is to provide logistical support for upcoming terrorist attacks planned in the hemisphere.

This is what "state sponsor of terrorism" means, which is how the U.S. accurately classified this odious regime since 1982, even as Cuba's leftist apologists have dismissed it, claiming Cuba is no threat.

Safely ensconced with the Castro brothers' hospitality, Hezbollah's operatives can carry out missions such as acquiring passports, recruiting informants and forging documents.

More disturbingly, they have been tasked to network with Hezbollah's other terrorist cells in Venezuela, Paraguay and Mexico, all in need of logistical support for attacks.

The Italian newspaper reported that Hezbollah might be planning a major attack against Israeli targets in the Western Hemisphere in retaliation for Israel's killing of Hezbollah's chief assassin, Imad Mughniyeh, in Damascus in 2008. Mughniyeh was a Hezbollah terrorist leader implicated in the two huge attacks in Buenos Aires in the 1990s on Jewish targets — strikes that remain unpunished.

But the targets might not all be Latin American. With Hezbollah ordered to meet with, presumably in Havana, Mexico's cartel traffickers that control illegal alien routes into the U.S., it's likely terrorist attacks are in the works for America, too.

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"Once you create the networks, the guerrillas will be held ready for their missions," Corriere reported of Hezbollah's orders.

That's classic terrorist networking coming into a place before a scourge emerges.

Make no mistake, it's the Castro dictatorship that's enabling Hezbollah. More to the point, it corresponds with the fact that the Castro brothers have always opened the doors wide to terrorist operatives — from Colombia's FARC, M-19 and ELN terrorists, to Chile's leftist terrorists of the Allende era, Nicaragua's Sandinistas and Spain's ETA Basque operations.

The Castro brothers have long been champions of Hezbollah, and there are no more "professionally trained" terrorists capable of carrying out large attacks than Hezbollah operatives.

Against all this, the Cuban regime screams>>>

Lessons from ten years of the global war on terror

This global war on terror will last many lifetimes and we must be prepared in all ways always.

Last updated on: September 10, 2011 09:04 IST

Colonel Anil Athale

Colonel (Dr) Anil Athale (retd) on how the global war on terror has changed the geo-politics of the world and India's role in it.

It is more logical to call it ten years of 'America's war on terror' because the soft state that is India has been suffering from this scourge for much longer period, nearly 30 years. It needs reiteration that till the terror attacks on 9/11, the biggest single terror strike was the blowing up of Air India Boeing 'Kanishka' on June 23, 1985. In that attack 329 Indians were killed. It also must be noted that the perpetrators of that crime continue to roam around freely in Canada and the United States and have never been brought to book.

All traces of the conspiracy behind it were erased at the instance of the 'agency'. In the changed global context it is politically incorrect to rake up the past and the fact that the Khalistani terror campaign against India was a joint Pakistan-US-United Kingdom enterprise.

It is only in 2001 when similar terror visited the mainland US, that the US declared it to be a 'global war on terror' (GWOT for short).

'Realism' dictates that it is the view of the dominant and the powerful that becomes a 'world view' and not that of citizens of Burkina Faso or India. The fact is that till about five years ago and certainly in 2001, the US was the sole superpower. So the world had very little choice but to follow the lead, particularly when the then US President George W Bush declared that 'You are either with the US or against the US!'

The GWOT soon assumed the shape>>>