In Israel, Time for Peace Offer May Run Out from The Newyork Times

By ETHAN BRONNER

Published: April 2, 2011

 

JERUSALEM — With revolutionary fervor sweeping the Middle East, Israel is under mounting pressure to make a far-reaching offer to the Palestinians or face a United Nations vote welcoming the State of Palestine as a member whose territory includes all of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.

 

The Palestinian Authority has been steadily building support for such a resolution in September, a move that could place Israel into a diplomatic vise. Israel would be occupying land belonging to a fellow United Nations member, land it has controlled and settled for more than four decades and some of which it expects to keep in any two-state solution.

 

“We are facing a diplomatic-political tsunami that the majority of the public is unaware of and that will peak in September,” said Ehud Barak, Israel’s defense minister, at a conference in Tel Aviv last month. “It is a very dangerous situation, one that requires action.” He added, “Paralysis, rhetoric, inaction will deepen the isolation of Israel.”

 

With aides to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thrashing out proposals to the Palestinians, President Shimon Peres is due at the White House on Tuesday to meet with President Obama and explore ways out of the bind. The United States is still uncertain how to move the process forward, according to diplomats here.
Israel’s offer is expected to include transfer of some West Bank territory outside its settlements to Palestinian control and may suggest a regional component — an international conference to serve as a response to the Arab League peace initiatives.

But Palestinian leaders, emboldened by support for their statehood bid, dismiss the expected offer as insufficient and continue to demand an end to settlement building before talks can begin.
“We want to generate pressure on Israel to make it feel isolated and help it understand that there can be no talks without a stop to settlements,” said Nabil Shaath, who leads the foreign affairs department of Fatah, the main party of the Palestinian Authority. “Without that, our goal is membership in the United Nations General Assembly in September.”

Israeli, Palestinian and Western officials interviewed on the current impasse, most of them requesting anonymity, expressed an unusual degree of pessimism about a peaceful resolution. All agreed that the turmoil across the Middle East had prompted opposing responses from Israel and much of the world.
Israel, seeing the prospect of even more hostile governments as its neighbors, is insisting on caution and time before taking any significant steps. It also wants to build in extensive long-term security guarantees in any two-state solution, but those inevitably infringe the sovereignty of a Palestinian state.

The international community tends to draw the opposite conclusion. Foreign Secretary William Hague of Britain, for example, said last week that one of the most important lessons to be learned from the Arab Spring was that “legitimate aspirations cannot be ignored and must be addressed.” He added, referring to Israeli-Palestinian talks, “It cannot be in anyone’s interests if the new order of the region is determined at a time of minimum hope in the peace process.”

The Palestinian focus on September stems not only from the fact that the General Assembly holds its annual meeting then. It is also because Prime Minister Salam Fayyad announced in September 2009 that his government would be ready for independent statehood in two years and that Mr. Obama said last September that he expected the framework for an independent Palestinian state to be declared in a year.
Mr. Obama did not indicate what the borders of that state would be, assuming they would be determined through direct negotiations. But with Israeli-Palestinian talks broken off months ago and the Middle East in the process of profound change, many argue that outside pressure is needed.

Germany, France and Britain say negotiations should be based on the 1967 lines with equivalent land swaps, exactly what the Netanyahu government rejects because it says it predetermines the outcome.
“Does the world think it is going to force Israel to declare the 1967 lines and giving up Jerusalem as a basis for negotiation?” asked a top Israeli official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “That will never happen.”
While the Obama administration has referred in the past to the 1967 lines as a basis for talks, it has not decided whether to back the European Union, the United Nations and Russia — the other members of the so-called quartet — in declaring them the starting point, diplomats said. The quartet meets on April 15 in Berlin.

Israel, which has settled hundreds of thousands of Jews inside the West Bank and East Jerusalem, acknowledges that it will have to withdraw from much of the land it now occupies there. But it hopes to hold onto the largest settlement blocs and much of East Jerusalem as well as the border to the east with Jordan and does not want to enter into talks with the other side’s position as the starting point.
That was true even before its closest ally in the Arab world, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, was driven from power, helping fuel protest movements that now roil other countries, including Jordan, which has its own peace agreement with Israel.

“Whatever we put forward has to be grounded in security arrangements because of what is going on regionally,” said Zalman Shoval, one of a handful of Netanyahu aides drawing up the Israeli proposal that may be delivered as a speech to the United States Congress in May. “We are facing the rebirth of the eastern front as Iran grows strong. We have to secure the Jordan Valley. And no Israeli government is going to move tens of thousands of Israelis from their homes quickly.”
Those Israelis live in West Bank settlements, the source of much of the disagreement not only with the Palestinians but with the world. Not a single government supports Israel’s settlements. The Palestinians say the settlements are proof that the Israelis do not really want a Palestinian state to arise since they are built on land that should go to that state.

“All these years, the main obstacle to peace has been the settlements,” Nimer Hammad, a political adviser to President Abbas, said. “They always say, ‘but you never made it a condition of negotiations before.’ And we say, ‘that was a mistake.’ ”

The Israelis counter that the real problem is Palestinian refusal to accept openly a Jewish state here and ongoing anti-Israeli incitement and praise of violence on Palestinian airwaves.
Another central obstacle to the establishment of a State of Palestine has been the division between the West Bank and Gaza, the first run by the Palestinian Authority and the second by Hamas. Lately, President Abbas has sought to bridge the gap, asking to go to Gaza to seek reconciliation through an agreed interim government that would set up parliamentary and presidential elections.

But Hamas, worried it would lose such elections and hopeful that the regional turmoil could work in its favor — that Egypt, for example, might be taken over by its ally, the Muslim Brotherhood — has reacted coolly.
Efforts are still under way to restart peace talks but if, as expected, negotiations do not resume, come September the Palestinian Authority seems set to go ahead with plans to ask the General Assembly to accept it as a member. Diplomats involved in the issue say most countries — more than 100 — are expected to vote yes, meaning it will pass. (There are no vetoes in the General Assembly so the United States cannot save Israel as it often has in the Security Council.)

What happens then?

Some Palestinian leaders say relations with Israel would change.
“We will re-examine our commitments toward Israel, especially our security commitments,” suggested Hanna Amireh, who is on the 18-member ruling board of the Palestine Liberation Organization, referring to cooperation between Palestinian and Israeli troops. “The main sense about Israel is that we are fed up.”
Mr. Shaath said Israel would then be in daily violation of the rights of a fellow member state and diplomatic and legal consequences could follow, all of which would be painful for Israel.
In the Haaretz newspaper on Thursday, Ari Shavit, who is a political centrist, drew a comparison between 2011 and the biggest military setback Israel ever faced, the 1973 war.

He wrote that “2011 is going to be a diplomatic 1973,” because a Palestinian state will be recognized internationally. “Every military base in the West Bank will be contravening the sovereignty of an independent U.N. member state.” He added, “A diplomatic siege from without and a civil uprising from within will grip Israel in a stranglehold.”

A version of this article appeared in print on April 3, 2011, on page A1 of the New York edition.

"The Larger Game in the Middle East: Iran" from The New York Times

 By DAVID E. SANGER

Published: April 2, 2011

WASHINGTON  — On a Tuesday afternoon in mid-March in the White House Situation Room, as President Obama heard the arguments of his security advisers about the pros and cons of using military force in Libya, the conversation soon veered into the impact in a far more strategically vital place: Iran.

Enlarge This Image

Bryan Denton for The New York Times

Rebels under artillery fire in Libya.

The mullahs in Tehran, noted Thomas E. Donilon, the national security adviser, were watching Mr. Obama’s every move in the Arab world. They would interpret a failure to back up his declaration that Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi had “lost the legitimacy to lead” as a sign of weakness — and perhaps as a signal that Mr. Obama was equally unwilling to back up his vow never to allow Iran to gain the ability to build a nuclear weapon.

“It shouldn’t be overstated that this was the deciding factor, or even a principal factor” in the decision to intervene in Libya, Benjamin J. Rhodes, a senior aide who joined in the meeting, said last week. But, he added, the effect on Iran was always included in the discussion. In this case, he said, “the ability to apply this kind of force in the region this quickly — even as we deal with other military deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan — combined with the nature of this broad coalition sends a very strong message to Iran about our capabilities, militarily and diplomatically.”

That afternoon in the Situation Room vividly demonstrates a rarely stated fact about the administration’s responses to the uprisings sweeping the region: The Obama team holds no illusions about Colonel Qaddafi’s long-term importance. Libya is a sideshow. Containing Iran’s power remains their central goal in the Middle East. Every decision — from Libya to Yemen to Bahrain to Syria — is being examined under the prism of how it will affect what was, until mid-January, the dominating calculus in the Obama administration’s regional strategy: how to slow Iran’s nuclear progress, and speed the arrival of opportunities for a successful uprising there.

In fact, the Iran debate makes every such chess move in the region more complicated. At the end of this era of upheaval, which the White House considers as sweeping as the changes that transformed Europe after the Berlin Wall fell, success or failure may well be judged by the question of whether Iran realizes its ambitions to become the region’s most powerful force.

Last week, the decisions being made at the White House were about how firmly to back the protesters being shot in the streets in Syria and Yemen, or being beaten in Bahrain. For each of those, White House aides were performing a mostly silent calculation about whether the Iranians would benefit, or at least feel more breathing room.

Only two and a half months ago, things seemed very different. In January, American officials were fairly confident that they had cornered Iran: new sanctions were biting, the Russians were cutting off sophisticated weaponry that Iran wanted to ward off any Israeli or American attack, and a deviously complex computer worm, called Stuxnet, was wreaking havoc with the Iranian effort to enrich uranium.
But that changed with the arrival of the Arab Spring. Suddenly the Arab authoritarians
who had spent the last two years plotting with Washington to squeeze the Iranians — “Cut off the head of the snake,” King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was famously quoted as advising in the WikiLeaks cables — became more worried about their own streets than the Iranian centrifuges spinning out nuclear fuel at Natanz. And American and European citizens became distracted, even as oil at $108 a barrel undercut many of the sanctions that the White House had hoped would convince Iranian citizens that the nuclear program was not worth its rising cost.

So when the White House sees the region through a Persian lens, what does it look like?

THE LIBYA LESSON

Mr. Obama argued, in his speech on Monday night, that Libya presented a special case — an urgent moral responsibility to protect Libyans being hunted down by the Qaddafi forces and a moment of opportunity to make a difference with what the president called “unique” American capabilities. (Translation: a multitude of technologies, like Tomahawk missiles, reconnaissance and electronic jamming.) Those are the same capabilities that would be critical in any attack on Iranian nuclear sites. The administration’s top officials knew that a demonstration of that ability would not be lost on Iran. But it is anyone’s guess how Iran would react.

“You could argue it either way,” said one official who was involved in the Libya debate and spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Maybe it would encourage them to do what they have failed to do for years: come to the negotiating table. But you could also argue that it would play to the hard-liners, who say the only real protection against America and Israel is getting a bomb, and getting it fast.”

But at least in public, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates told members of Congress not to expect that Iran’s nuclear program would accelerate much because of the attack on Libya — or that Iran’s security forces would crack down even more vigorously on the protest movements they have all but strangled. “My view is that, in terms of what they want to try and achieve in their nuclear program, they’re going about as fast as they can,” he said on Thursday. “And it’s hard for me to imagine that regime being much harder than it already is.”

THE ARAB ALLY CARD

The problem gets more complex when dealing with Arab allies who have little compunction about shooting protesters in the streets, even as they seek to undermine Iran. Saudi Arabia and Bahrain are the prime examples. The Saudis see Iran as the biggest threat to their own regional ambitions, and have cooperated in many American-led efforts to hem in Tehran. Yet relations between Washington and Riyadh have rarely been as strained: To King Abdullah, President Obama’s decision to abandon President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt was a sign of weakness, and a warning that he might throw the Saudi leadership under the bus if democracy demonstrations took root there.

Perhaps that explains why there was barely a peep from the White House when the Saudis rolled troops into neighboring Bahrain to help put down the Shiite-majority protests there. Much as Mr. Obama wants to see the aspirations of democracy protesters fulfilled, and urged steps toward reform in Bahrain, he has no desire to see the toppling of the government that hosts the Fifth Fleet, right across the Persian Gulf from Iran.

THE SYRIAN PUZZLE

For years the United States has tried in vain to peel Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, away from Iran and to reconcile with Israel. It fears that if his government collapses, chaos will reign, making Syria unpredictable as well as dangerous. It’s a reasonable fear. But in recent weeks the White House has concluded that it has much less to lose than the Iranians do if Mr. Assad is swept away. And, as some in Mr. Obama’s war council have noted, if protesters succeed in Syria, Iran could be next.
ISRAEL’S OPTIONS

All the Arab turmoil has left many Israelis convinced that America and its Arab allies are too distracted to credibly threaten that they will stop the Iranian nuclear ambitions at all costs, even though Mr. Donilon has pledged that “we will not take our eye off the ball.” Inside Israel, a debate has resumed about how long the Israelis can afford to put off dealing with the problem themselves, fed by fears that Iran’s reaction to the region’s turmoil might be a race for the bomb. That could lead to the worst outcome for Mr. Obama — a war between Iran and Israel — and that consideration alone makes the case for the administration to see little room for error in handling the main act.

"What's Missing From Their World View?" from Citizen Warrior

Posted: 02 Apr 2011 01:28 PM PDT MANY NON-MUSLIMS instinctively defend Islam because they see Muslims as weak. They see Islam as the underdog, and out of their kindness, they don't want to anybody to pick on a weak underdog. But is Islam weak? What do these people not know about Islam that leads them to think Islam is the 98-pound weakling and the West is the big, mean bully? What do they need to know to see the situation clearly? For example, they need to know that Islam is an ideology that consumes and subverts other cultures until eventually nothing is left of the previous culture. And they need to know that the process is underway in all Western democracies today. Islam is by nature and design a dominating, usurping, continually spreading ideology that now has the largest voting block in the UN. If these facts, and many more, were understood, more people would see Islam as worthy of criticism. A major barrier to the criticism (the automatic defense of 98-pound weaklings) would have been removed. So what's your answer? What do people not understand about Islam that makes them see Muslims as disadvantaged, vanquished, helpless victims bullied by omnipotent, intimidating, domineering non-Muslims? Please post your answers here. Or email them to us and we'll post them for you (anonymously, unless you say otherwise). We'll be posting the strongest answers in a future article, so give it your best shot!

"Mr. Obama's Libyan Adventure" from Sultan Knish

Posted: 02 Apr 2011 06:34 PM PDT It's a lot easier to start a war than it is to finish it, as Mr. Obama is learning on his Libyan adventure. That is why wars are generally entered into after some consideration of the situation on the ground. There is only one excuse for a rush to war-- and that is either an imminent threat or in response to an act of war. Such was the case after September 11, and yet even then the United States waited longer to begin bombing the Taliban-- than we did before bombing Gaddafi. Obama rushed in when bombing Libya was popular, and now when it hasn't he's rushing out again. The US is ending combat operations almost as soon as it began them to avoid being associated with the failure of the Libyan intervention. Or rather to avoid associating Obama with its failure. Obama was happy to take credit for the fall of Mubarak until the Muslim Brotherhood stepped up to succeed him. He was happy to take credit for toppling Gaddafi until he realized that it wasn't going to happen without a full bore invasion. The Arab Revolt was cool, but now it isn't anymore. And Obama doesn't want to be associated with it anymore. Suddenly it's last year's Keffiyah lying in the trash. Waiting is not a virtue in and of itself-- but planning is. That allows you to determine if the rebellion you are intervening to support only consists of a few hundred fighters-- some of whom are Al Qaeda. No general would have called for an assault before learning such simple facts and clarifying what the mission was to be. But the Summa Cum Anti-War grad of 2008, who has doubtless read Chris Hedges and Noam Chomsky, and built a grass roots network based entirely on his opposition to the war, had spent too much time studying why war is wrong and not nearly enough time studying how wars are won. A month ago the Arab League and European leaders were rushing to get on the right side of history. When the Libyan army, which had lost every war it ever fought, was pushed back by a few rebel attacks, the consensus was that Gaddafi was finished. Leading members of his own regime rushed to join the opposition. And the media triumphantly reported an inevitable rebel victory. There was just one problem. This time we were the ones getting our news about the war from 'Baghdad Bob'. The Libyan army is probably the worst army in the Middle East. It may be the worst army in the world. The last time it fought a war was 1987 and it lost badly, even though it had tanks, jet planes and the African warlords it was fighting had Toyota pickup trucks. Despite 3 to 1 numerical superiority, Gaddafi's forces somehow managed to lose 7 men for every 1 they killed. And also lost nearly a 1,000 tanks, armored vehicles and aircraft to enemies who were driving Toyota pickup trucks. When you come equipped with top of the line Soviet equipment and lose it all in something called The Toyota War, your enemies have good reason not take you seriously. With this in mind, it wasn't unreasonable to assume that the rebels could defeat Gaddafi. It was just unreasonable to assume that without knowing anything about the rebels. On the last day of the Six Day War, Soviet citizens woke baffled to the news that the Israelis who had been on the edge of defeat for five days straight were suddenly threatening Cairo and storming through Jerusalem. It was inexplicable. But there was a simple explanation. They had been getting fed false information by the losing side in a war. And then reality caught up with them. Similarly, King Hussein jumped into the war because he believed reports that Egypt and Syria were on the verge of victory. Actually they were on the verge of defeat. For weeks the media treated every Libyan rebel report as fact-based and every Gaddafi report as fiction. When the Libyan rebels began to lose, it was inexplicable. Our elites gaped like Baghdad Bob confronted with American troops. It wasn't supposed to happen, but it did. So the elites convinced themselves that it was just air power making the difference. If we could shut down Gaddafi's air force, then the rebels would win. And so we did that. The No Fly Zone is here. The Libyan air force is toast. So why are the rebels still losing? They're losing because the No Fly Zone was built on an illusion. The Libyan air force was never a major factor in anything. In the 1980's, it lost to African fighters in Toyotas brandishing Stinger missiles. And the entire Libyan army is mostly useless too. Arabs make terrible soldiers, but good skirmishers. The entire history of the Arab-Israeli wars should amply testify to that. An Arab country with a thousand tanks and jets is no threat to anyone. But a thousand fighters can cause serious havoc. Even win a war. This makes no sense to First Worlders who have grown on images of massive armies clashing on the battlefield. But this is not the modern world. The Libyan civil war is primitive even by Arab standards. It's a typical African civil war, complete with pickup trucks and swords. A battle is won when a dozen men die and the other side runs away. Once the Libyan army stopped pretending it was a modern military force, and whoever is in the field began ignoring whatever crazy orders were being issued by Gaddafi and his loyalists, and just started fighting this the old fashioned way-- the tide began to turn. A modern army is a complex instrument. If you don't use it properly, then it's worse than useless. But turn a couple of thousand fighters loose with machine guns and some artillery, and manpower becomes the crucial factor. And this time the African fighters are on Gaddafi's side, while the rebels are Arabs from different factions who don't trust each other. This is no longer a war between an army and guerrillas, but between militias, some of whom wear uniforms, most of whom don't. Gaddafi's men are handing out AK-47's to anyone willing to fight the rebels. We went in to protect civilians, but how do we do that when the civilians are massacring other civilians. Gaddafi is a butcher, the Arab rebels are violent racists. This is not a conflict between democracy and tyranny, but between tribes, clans and ethnicities. It is exactly the type of war we should have avoided like the plague because there is no up side to it. There is no right and wrong, just an explosion of tensions reined in by a tyrant, as every faction scrambles for power. This is the dumb war we stumbled into with our new administration's smart power. We're tossing cruise missiles into a war being fought with pickup trucks. And we don't even quite know why we're here. Our intervention will drag out the conflict, perhaps indefinitely if we choose it. NATO forces may be enlisted to guard a few rebel strongholds, dividing Libya between the rebels and Gaddafi. And with Al Qaeda fighters pouring in to take advantage of our air strikes, that will make for a pretty picture. Our unclear mission objectives mean that we've become a peacekeeping force with no goal or exit strategy. The Obama Administration is now warning Libyan rebels that if they kill civilians we will bomb them too. So not only are we at war with Gaddafi, we may now also be obligated to fight the rebels too. And how do we tell civilians from soldiers anyway. Once a weapon is picked up as loot, one body looks the same as any other. We could assume that all men are fighting men, but we went into Kosovo, because we treated Serbian executions of Muslim fighters as atrocities. Even though they were all men. If we apply the same rules to Libya, we'll have to start bombing everyone. Including ourselves. This is what happens when you start a war without thinking it through. Liberals have an ideological approach to war, as to all things. They are not concerned with whether a war can be won-- only whether it should be won. Either a war is right or it's not. If the war is not right, then it's also unwinnable. And if a war is right, then it is also winnable. Reality must comply with their ideology. That's how we came to have a 15 trillion dollar deficit to aid a 'recovery' in which families are struggling to put food on the table. And a democratic revolution in which the Islamists are set to take over. Reality meets ideology-- and their ideology crumbles every time. From the 1860's, Democrats have been a party ideologically averse to war, and yet the party most likely to get into a war without really knowing what they're doing. JFK and LBJ got into Vietnam with tens of thousands of advisers and before they knew it there was a war on. The enthusiastic college students who came out for JFK, did their best to denounce Nixon for the war, but it was their man who had done it. The Vietnam War was a disaster for the simple reason that we lacked clear goals and tactics from the start. It was not a war we chose, but a war we stumbled into. After World War II, liberal intellectuals fancied a new order in which military force would be used to enforce international law. Instead of wars, there would be police actions. And police actions are vague things. Euphemisms for war without its clarity. We know how to fight and win wars by applying force to achieve the destruction of enemy forces. But what is a police action. What are its goals? Implicitly it is to keep the peace. Not to win, but to stand as the Union Nation's towering beat cop on the block, waving our armed forces around like a billy club.  This is why we lost in Iraq and Afghanistan, because we defined the objective not as the defeat of the Axis of Evil, but as rebuilding the target countries into havens of peace and democracy. The vaguer the objectives, the harder it is to accomplish them. Obama treated Libya like an adventure, announcing a war from sunny Brazil, and ignoring congress and the public, until they forcefully made their objections clear. The war turned goalless, confused and contradictory-- with military leaders saying one thing and political leaders saying another. The coalition is confused and at odds with each other, packed full of frightened European and Arab leaders who are afraid that the world is changing, but have no idea what to do about it. Now Obama is running away from the war that he started. And Mr. Obama's Libyan Adventure is what happens when liberal leaders start wars with no idea how to see them through.

Geert Wilders' March 25th Speech in Rome

Posted: 01 Apr 2011 02:36 PM PDT Signore e signori, ladies and gentlemen, dear friends of the Magna Carta Foundation, molte grazie. Thank you for inviting me to Rome. It is great to be here in this beautiful city which for many centuries was the capital and the centre of Europe’s Judeo-Christian culture. Together with Jerusalem and Athens, Rome is the cradle of our Western civilization — the most advanced and superior civilization the world has ever known. As Westerners, we share the same Judeo-Christian culture. I am from the Netherlands and you are from Italy. Our national cultures are branches of the same tree. We do not belong to multiple cultures, but to different branches of one single culture. This is why when we come to Rome, we all come home in a sense. We belong here, as we also belong in Athens and in Jerusalem. It is important that we know where our roots are. If we lose them we become deracinated. We become men and women without a culture. I am here today to talk about multiculturalism. This term has a number of different meanings. I use the term to refer to a specific political ideology. It advocates that all cultures are equal. If they are equal, it follows that the state is not allowed to promote any specific cultural values as central and dominant. In other words: multiculturalism holds that the state should not promote a leitkultur, which immigrants have to accept if they want to live in our midst. It is this ideology of cultural relativism which the German Chancellor Angela Merkel recently referred to when she said that multiculturalism has proved “an absolute failure.” My friends, I dare say that we have known this all along. Indeed, the premise of the multiculturalist ideology is wrong. Cultures are not equal. They are different, because their roots are different. That is why the multiculturalists try to destroy our roots. Rome is a very appropriate place to address these issues. There is an old saying which people of our Western culture are all familiar with. “When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” it says. This is an obvious truth: If you move somewhere, you must adapt to the laws and customs of the land. The multicultural society has undermined this rule of common sense and decency. The multicultural society tells the newcomers who settle in our cities and villages: You are free to behave contrary to our norms and values because your norms and values are just as good — perhaps even better — than ours. It is indeed appropriate to discuss these matters here in Rome, because the history of Rome also serves as a warning. Will Durant, the famous 20th century American historian, wrote that “A great civilization cannot be destroyed from outside if it has not already destroyed itself from within.” This is exactly what happened here, in Rome, 16 centuries ago. In the 5th century, the Roman Empire fell to the Germanic Barbarians. There is no doubt that the Roman civilization was far superior to that of the Barbarians. And yet, Rome fell. Rome fell because it had suffered a loss of belief in its own civilization. It had lost the will to stand up and fight for survival. Rome did not fall overnight. Rome fell gradually. The Romans scarcely noticed what was happening. They did not perceive the immigration of the Barbarians as a threat until it was too late. For decades, Germanic Barbarians, attracted by the prosperity of the Empire, had been crossing the border. At first, the attraction of the Empire on newcomers could be seen as a sign of the cultural, political and economic superiority of Rome. People came to find a better life which their own culture could not provide. But then, on December 31st in the year 406, the Rhine froze and tens of thousands of Germanic Barbarians crossed the river, flooded the Empire, and went on a rampage, destroying every city they passed. In 410, Rome was sacked. The fall of Rome was a traumatic experience. Numerous books have been written about the cataclysmal event, and Europeans were warned not to make the same mistake again. In 1899, in his book, The River War, Winston Churchill warned that Islam is threatening Europe in the same way as the Barbarians once threatened Rome. “Mohammedanism,” Churchill wrote — I quote — “is a militant and proselytizing faith. No stronger retrograde force exists in the World. […] The civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.” Churchill is right. However, if Europe falls, it will fall because, like ancient Rome, it no longer believes in the superiority of its own civilization. It will fall because it foolishly believes that all cultures are equal and that, consequently, there is no reason why we should fight for our own culture in order to preserve it. This failure to defend our own culture has turned immigration into the most dangerous threat that can be used against the West. Multiculturalism has made us so tolerant that we tolerate the intolerant. Ladies and gentlemen, make no mistake: Our opponents are keenly aware of our weakness. They realize that the pattern which led to the fall of Rome, is at play today in the West. They are keenly aware of the importance of Rome as a symbol of the West. Over and over again they hint at the fall of Rome. Rome is constantly on their minds. • The former Turkish Prime Minister Erbakan said — I quote: “The whole of Europe will become Islamic. We will conquer Rome”. • Yunis al-Astal, a Hamas cleric and member of the Palestinian Parliament said — I quote: “Very soon Rome will be conquered.” • Ali Al-Faqir, the former Jordanian Minister of Religion, stated that — I quote: “Islam will conquer Rome.” • Sheikh Muhammad al-Arifi, imam of the mosque of the Saudi Defence Academy, said — I quote: “We will control Rome and introduce Islam in it.” Our opponents are hoping for an event that is akin to the freezing of the Rhine in 406, when thousands of immigrants will be given an easy opportunity to cross massively into the West. • In a 1974 speech to the UN, the Algerian President Houari Boumédienne, said — I quote: “One day, millions of men will leave the Southern Hemisphere to go to the Northern Hemisphere. And they will not go there as friends. Because they will go there to conquer it. And they will conquer it with their sons. The wombs of our women will give us victory.” • Libyan dictator Kadhafi said, I quote: “There are tens of millions of Muslims in the European continent today and their number is on the increase. This is the clear indication that the European continent will be converted into Islam. Europe will one day soon be a Muslim continent.” Our opponents are aiming for a repetition of the fall of Rome in the 5th century and want to use exactly the same methods. “The strategy of exporting human beings and having them breed in abundance is the simplest way to take possession of a territory,” warned the famous Italian author Oriana Fallaci. However, the situation today could be worse than it was when the Roman Empire fell. The Germanic Barbarians who overran Rome were not driven by an ideology. After having sacked Rome, they eventually adopted the Judeo-Christian civilization of Rome. They destroyed Rome because they wanted its riches, but they realized and recognized that Roman civilization was superior to their own Barbaric culture. Having destroyed Rome, the Germanic tribes eventually tried to rebuild it. In 800, the Frankish leader Charlemagne had himself crowned Roman Emperor. Three hundred years later, the Franks and the other Europeans would go on the Crusades in defence of their Christian culture. The Crusades were, as Oriana Fallaci wrote — I quote — a “counter-offensive designed to stem Islamic expansionism in Europe.” Rome had fallen, but like a phoenix it had risen again. Contrary to the Barbarians which confronted Rome, the followers of Muhammad are driven by an ideology which they want to impose on us. Islam is a totalitarian ideology. Islamic Shariah law supervises every detail of life. Islam is not compatible with our Western way of life. Islam is a threat to our values. Respect for people who think otherwise, the equality of men and women, the equality of homosexuals and heterosexuals, respect for Christians, Jews, unbelievers and apostates, the separation of church and state, freedom of speech, they are all under pressure because of Islamization. Europe is Islamizing at a rapid pace. Many European cities have large Islamic concentrations. In some neighbourhoods, Islamic regulations are already being enforced. Women’s rights are being trampled. We are confronted with headscarves and burqas, polygamy, female genital mutilation, honor-killings. “In each one of our cities” says Oriana Fallaci, “there is a second city, a state within the state, a government within the government. A Muslim city, a city ruled by the Koran.” Ladies and gentlemen, make no mistake: The multiculturalist Left is facilitating Islamization. Leftist multiculturalists are cheering for every new Shariah bank, for every new Islamic school, for every new mosque. Multiculturalists consider Islam as being equal to our own culture. Shariah law or democracy? Islam or freedom? It doesn’t really matter to them. But it does matter to us. The entire leftist elite is guilty of practising cultural relativism. Universities, churches, trade unions, the media, politicians. They are all betraying our hard-won liberties. Ladies and gentlemen, what is happening in Europe today has to some extent been deliberately planned. In October 2009, Andrew Neather, the former advisor of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, confirmed that the British Government had deliberately organized mass immigration as part of a social engineering project. The Blair Government wanted to — I quote — “make the UK truly multicultural.” To achieve this end, 2.3 million foreigners were allowed to enter Britain between 2000 and 2009. Neather says this policy has “enriched” Britain. Ordinary people, however, do not consider the decline of societal cohesion, the rise of crime, the transformation of their old neighborhoods into no-go zones, to be an “enrichment.” Ordinary people are well aware that they are witnessing a population replacement phenomenon. Ordinary people feel attached to the civilization which their ancestors created. They do not want it to be replaced by a multicultural society where the values of the immigrants are considered as good as their own. It is not xenophobia or Islamophobia to consider our Western culture as superior to other cultures — it is plain common sense. Fortunately, we are still living in a democracy. The opinion of ordinary people still matters. I am the leader of the Dutch Party of Freedom which aims to halt the Islamization process and defend the traditional values and liberties in the Netherlands. The Party of Freedom is the fastest growing party in the Netherlands. Because the message of my party is so important, I support initiatives to establish similar parties in other countries, such as Germany, France and the United Kingdom, where they do not yet exist. Last month, a poll in Britain showed that a staggering 48 percent of the British would consider supporting a non-fascist and non-violent party that vows to crack down on immigration and Islamic extremists and restrict the building of mosques. In October last year, I was in Berlin where I gave a keynote speech at a meeting of Die Freiheit, a newly established party led by René Stadtkewitz, a former Christian-Democrat. German polls indicate that such a party has a potential of 20 percent of the electorate. My speech, in which I urged the Germans to stop feeling ashamed about their German identity, drew a lot of media attention. Two weeks later, German Chancellor Angela Merkel stated that multiculturalism is “an absolute failure.” Horst Seehofer, the leader of the Bavarian Christian-Democrats, was even more outspoken. “Multiculturalism is dead,” he said. Last month, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said: “We have been too concerned about the identity of the immigrant and not enough about the identity of the country that was receiving him.” Five weeks ago, British Prime Minister David Cameron blamed multiculturalism for Islamic extremism. “We have allowed the weakening of our collective identity,” he said. “Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live […] apart from the mainstream.” In his speech, David Cameron still makes a distinction between the Islamist ideology, which he calls extremist and dangerous, and Islam, which he says is peaceful religion. I do not share this view, and neither did Cameron’s great predecessor Winston Churchill. Stating that Islam is peaceful is a multiculturalist dogma which is contrary to the truth. Politicians such as Merkel, Sarkozy, and Cameron still do not seem to have understood what the problem really is. Nevertheless, the fact that they feel compelled to distance themselves from multiculturalism is a clear indication that they realize they need to pay lip-service to what the majority of their populations have long understood — namely, that the massive influx of immigrants from Islamic countries is the most negative development that Europe has known in the past 50 years. Yesterday, a prestigious poll in the Netherlands revealed that 50 percent of the Dutch are of the opinion that Islam and democracy are not compatible, while 42 percent think they are. Even two thirds of the voters of the Liberal Party and of the Christian-Democrat Party are convinced that Islam and democracy are not compatible. This, then, is the political legacy of multiculturalism. While the parties of the Left have found themselves a new electorate, the establishment parties of the Right still harbour their belief that Islam is a religion of peace on a par with peaceful religions such as Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and others. The problem with multiculturalism is a refusal to see reality — the reality that our civilization is superior, and the reality that Islam is a dangerous ideology. Today, we are confronted with political unrest in the Arab countries. Autocratic regimes, such as that of Ben Ali in Tunisia, Mubarak in Egypt, Kadhafi in Libya, the Khalifa dynasty in Bahrain, and others, have been toppled or are under attack. The Arab peoples long for freedom. This is only natural. However, the ideology and culture of Islam is so deeply entrenched in these countries that real freedom is simply impossible. As long as Islam remains dominant there can be no real freedom. Let us face reality. On March 8, the International Women’s Day, 300 women demonstrated on Cairo’s Tahrir Square in post-Mubarak Egypt. Within minutes, the women were charged by a group of bearded men, who beat them up and dragged them away. Some were even sexually assaulted. The police did not interfere. This is the new Egypt: On Monday, people demonstrate for freedom; on Tuesday, the same people beat up women because they, too, demand freedom. I fear that in Islamic countries, democracy will not lead to real freedom. A survey by the American Pew Center found that 59 percent of Egyptians prefer democracy to any other form of government. However, 85 percent say that Islam’s influence on politics is good, 82 percent believe that adulterers should be stoned, 84 percent want the death penalty for apostates, and 77 percent say that thieves should be flogged or have their hands cut off. Ronald Reagan was right when he called Kadhafi a “mad dog.” However, we should not harbor the illusion that there can be real freedom and real democracy in a country where Islam is dominant. There is no doubt that the results of the Pew survey in Egypt apply in Libya, too. It is not in our interest to bring the Muslim Brotherhood to power in Tripoli and install a caliphate in Libya. Of course, the world has to stop Kadhafi from killing his own people. However, as UN Resolution 1973 stated last week, this is primarily the responsibility of — I quote — “in particular [the] States of the region.” Why does a country like the Netherlands have to contribute six F16 fighter jets to enforce the arms embargo in Libya, while Saudi Arabia does not contribute a single plane from its fleet of nearly 300 fighter jets? Arabs are dying, but the Arab countries are shirking their responsibilities. And one of the major threats of the current crisis is not even addressed by our leaders: How are we going to prevent that thousands of economic fugitives and fortune seekers cross the Mediterranean and arrive at places like Lampedusa? Now that Tunisia is liberated, young Tunisians should help to rebuild their country instead of leaving for Lampedusa. Europe cannot afford another influx of thousands of refugees. Ladies and gentlemen, it is time to wake up. We need to confront reality and we need to speak the truth. The truth is that Islam is evil, and the reality is that Islam is a threat to us. Before I continue, I want to make clear, however, that I do not have a problem with Muslims as such. There are many moderate Muslims. That is why I always make a clear distinction between the people and the ideology, between Muslims and Islam. There are many moderate Muslims, but there is no such thing as a moderate Islam. Islam strives for world domination. The Koran commands Muslims to exercise jihad and impose Shariah law. Telling the truth about immigration and warning that Islam might not be as benevolent as the ruling elite says, has been made a hate speech crime in several EU member states. As you probably know, I have been brought to court on charges of hate speech. That is the paradox of the multicultural society. It claims to be pluralistic, but allows only one point of view of world affairs — namely, that all cultures are equal and that they are all good. The fact that we are treated as criminals for telling the truth must not, however, deter us. The truth that Islam is evil has always been obvious to our ancestors. That is why they fought. It was very clear to them that our civilization was far superior to Islam. It is not difficult to understand why our culture is far better than Islam. We Europeans, whether we be Christians, Jews, agnostics or atheists, believe in reason. We have always known that nothing good could be expected from Islam. While our culture is rooted in Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome, Islam’s roots are the desert and the brain of Muhammad. Our ancestors understood the consequences very well. The Koran, wrote the historian Theophanes, who lived in the second half of the 8th century, is based on hallucinations. “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman,” the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II said in 1391, adding: “God is not pleased by blood — and not acting reasonable is contrary to God’s nature.” For 1,400 years, Westerners have been criticizing Islam and its founder because they recognized evil when they saw it. But then, suddenly, in the last decades of the past century, especially from the 1970s onwards, Western intellectuals stopped doing so. The moral and cultural relativism of Marxism led the West’s political and intellectual elites to adopt a utopian belief in a universal brotherhood of mankind. Multiculturalism is a culture of repudiation of Europe’s heritage and freedoms. It weakens the West day by day. It leads to the self-censorship of the media and academia, the collapse of the education system, the emasculation of the churches, the subversion of the nation-state, the break-down of our free society. While today — at last — our leaders seem to realize what a disastrous failure multiculturalism has been, multiculturalism is not dead yet. More is needed to defeat multiculturalism than the simple proclamations that it has been an “absolute failure.” What is needed is that we turn the tide of Islamization. There are a few things which we can do in this regard. One thing which we should do is to oppose the introduction of Sharia or Islamic law in our countries. In about a dozen states in the United States, legislation is currently being introduced to prevent the introduction of Sharia. In early May, I will be traveling to the U.S. to express my support to these initiatives. We should consider similar measures in Europe. Another thing which we should do is support Muslims who want to leave Islam. An International Women’s Day is useless in the Arab world if there is no International Leave Islam Day. I propose the introduction of such a day in which we can honor the courageous men and women who want to leave Islam. Perhaps we can pick a symbolic date for such a day and establish an annual prize for an individual who has turned his back on Islam or an organization which helps people to liberate themselves from Islam. It is very easy to become a Muslim. All one has to do is to pronounce the Shahada, the Islamic creed, which says — I quote “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.” It should be equally easy to leave Islam by pronouncing a counter-Shahada, which says “I leave Islam and join humankind.” A third measure to turn the tide of Islamization is to reemphasize the sovereignty of the nation-state. The peoples of the free world will only be able to fight back against Islam if they can rally around a flag with which they can identify. This flag, symbolizing pre-political loyalty, can only be the flag of our nation. In the West, our freedoms are embodied in our nation-states. This is why the multiculturalists are hostile to the nation-state and aim to destroy it. National identity is an inclusive identity: It welcomes everyone, whatever his religion or race, who is willing to assimilate into a nation by sharing the fate and future of a people. It ties the individual to an inheritance, a tradition, a loyalty, and a culture. I want to elaborate a bit on this since we are gathered here today in Rome. Again, it is appropriate that we are in Rome. In this city, in 1957, and — what an ironic coincidence — on this very day, the 25th of March, the Treaty of Rome was signed. This Treaty obliges the member states of the European Union to aim for “an ever closer union.” Unfortunately, this union, like other multinational organizations, has become one of the vehicles for the promotion of multiculturalism. The EU has fallen in the hands of a multiculturalist elite who, by undermining national sovereignty, destroy the capacity of the peoples of Europe to democratically decide their own future. The new government in my country, which is supported by my party, wants to restrict immigration. That is what our voters want. But we are confronted by the fact that our policies have to a large extent been outsourced to “Europe” and that our voters no longer have a direct say over their own future. On account of international treaties, EU legislation prevails over national legislation and cannot be reversed by national parliaments. Indeed, in 2008, the European Court of Justice, the highest court in the EU, annulled both Irish and Danish immigration legislation. The Court stated that national law is subordinate to whatever is ruled on the European level. In March 2010, the European Court of Justice annulled Dutch legislation restricting family reunification for immigrants on welfare. The ease with which Europe’s political elite conducts an immigration policy aimed at the deracination of Europe shows the insensitivity of this elite. It willingly sacrifices its own people to its political goal, without any consideration for the people involved. Lower class blue-collar people have been driven from their neighborhoods. There is no respect for their democratic vote. On the contrary, people who do not agree with the multiculturalist schemes are considered to be racists and xenophobes while the undefined offence of “racism and xenophobia” has been made central to all moral pronouncements by the European Union, the Council of Europe, the United Nations, and other supra-national organizations. This represents a systematic assault by the elite on the ordinary feelings of national loyalty. In 2008, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe stated that the member-states must — I quote — “condemn and combat Islamophobia” and ensure “that school textbooks do not portray Islam as a hostile or threatening religion.” — end of quote. In March 2010, the United Nations Human Rights Council passed a resolution criminalizing so-called “defamation of religions.” The resolution, authored by Pakistan, mentions only one religion by name: Islam. With its 57 member states the Organization of the Islamic Conference systematically uses its voting power in the UN to subvert the concept of freedom and human rights. In 1990, the OIC rejected the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and replaced it with the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, which states in articles 24 that — I quote — “All the rights and freedoms stipulated in this Declaration are subject to the Islamic Sharia.” — end of quote. This “human rights” charade has to stop if Western civilization wants to survive. Human rights exist for the protection of individuals, not religions and ideologies. The EU’s aim, meanwhile, seems to be to destroy the old sovereign nations and replace them with new provincial identities, which are all clones of each other. Britanistan will not differ from Netherlandistan, nor Germanistan from Italiastan, or any other province of the European superstate in the making. We must reclaim Europe. We can only do so by giving political power back to the nation-state. By defending the nation-states which we love, we defend our own identity. By defending our identity, we defend who we are and what we are against: those who want to deracinate us, against those who want to cut us from our roots so that our culture withers away and dies. My friends, twenty years after the ordinary people, Europe’s mainstream conservative leaders, such as Merkel, Sarkozy and Cameron, have finally — better late than never — come to the obvious conclusion, namely that multiculturalism is a failure. However, they do not have a plan to remedy the situation. Ladies and gentlemen, it is time for change. We must make haste. Time is running out. Ronald Reagan said: “We need to act today to preserve tomorrow.” That is why I propose the following measures in order to preserve our freedom: First, we will have to defend freedom of speech. It is the most important of our liberties. If we are free to speak, we will be able to tell people the truth and they will realize what is at stake. Second, we will have to end cultural relativism. To the multiculturalists, we must proudly proclaim: Our Western culture is far superior to the Islamic culture. Only when we are convinced of that, we will be willing to fight for our own identity. Third, we will have to stop Islamization because more Islam means less freedom. We must stop immigration from Islamic countries, we must expel criminal immigrants, we must forbid the construction of new mosques. There is enough Islam in Europe already. Immigrants must assimilate and adapt to our values: When in Rome, do as the Romans do. Fourth, we must restore the supremacy and sovereignty of the nation-state. Because we are citizens of these states, we can take pride in them. We love our nation because they are our home, because they are the legacy which our fathers bestowed on us and which we want to bestow on our children. We are not multiculturalists, we are patriots. And because we are patriots, we are willing to fight for freedom. Let me end with a final — and a positive — remark: Though the situation is bad and multiculturalism is still predominant, we are in better shape than the Roman Empire was before its fall. The Roman Empire was not a democracy. The Romans did not have freedom of speech. We are the free men of the West. We do not fight for an Empire, we fight for ourselves. We fight for our national republics. You fight for Italy, I fight for the Netherlands, others fight for France, Germany, Britain, Denmark or Spain. Together we stand. Together we represent the nations of Europe. I am confident that if we can safeguard freedom of speech and democracy, our civilization will be able to survive. Europe will not fall. We — Europe’s patriots — will not allow it. Thank you very much.

Translated from almoslim.net, 2 April 2011:

Security forces in Afghanistan killed 10 people and wounded 83 others during protests in Kandahar against the burning of a copy of the Noble Qur'an by American extremist pastor Terry Jones. An individual also blew himself up in a military base belonging to foreign occupation forces in the capitol city of Kabul which resulted in 3 soldiers wounded.

The killings occurred during the second day of protests against what was done by the extremist pastor in Florida on 20 march. Some of the protesters raised the white banner of the Taliban movement, and chanted "Long live the Taliban" and "Death to America."

An official disclosed that two of the killed were from the Afghan police. The violence connected to these demonstrations is the worst such violence witnessed in Afghanistan in the last several months. This comes at a time when the country is preparing for the first stage of an operation which will last years to turn over authority for security from occupation forces to Afghan forces loyal to the occupation.

These attacks came due to an outburst of rage caused by the extremist pastor Terry Jones burning the Qur'an in front of 50 people from his church in Florida on 20 March, according to his website...

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Posted By Translating Jihad to Translating Jihad at 4/02/2011 07:24:00 PM

Free Speech Wins in Battle Over Anti-Jihad Bus Ads
Friday, April 1, 2011
A Michigan Federal Judge yesterday ordered a Detroit-area transportation authority to display an anti-Jihad advertisement on its buses. Judge Denise Page Hood granted an injunction request filed by the Thomas More Law Center (TMLC) to reverse the bus authority’s refusal to display the ads, which state, “Fatwa on your head? Is your family or community threatening you?  Leaving Islam?  Got questions? Get Answers!”
The ad was sponsored by the Freedom Defensive Initiative (FDI), which was founded by Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer.
When the ad request was refused last summer, TMLC, a national public interest law firm based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and the Law Offices of David Yerushalmi, P.C., filed the lawsuit against the Suburban Mobility Authority for Regional Transportation (SMART) on behalf of the ad’s sponsors.   The lawsuit asked the Court to issue a preliminary injunction to permit the ad to run pending the final outcome of the litigation.  
Richard Thompson, President and Chief Counsel of the Thomas More Law Center (TMLC), commented, “TMLC’s Senior Trial Lawyer Rob Muise and David Yerushalmi have successfully represented FDI in several cases.  Judge Hood’s instant decision represents a victory for free speech, but the battle is not over. Other battles loom on the horizon.”
An evidentiary hearing on the injunction request was held in July 2010.  Judge Hood granted the injunction, finding that “[t]here is a strong likelihood that Plaintiffs could succeed in demonstrating that Defendant’s decision not to run the advertisement was not reasonable, but rather arbitrary and capricious.”  The Judge also ruled that the loss of Plaintiffs’ First Amendment freedoms “for even minimal periods of time, unquestionably constitutes irreparable injury . . . sufficient to justify injunctive relief, ” and that “[b]ased on Plaintiffs’ likelihood of success on the merits, it is in the public’s interest to grant the preliminary injunction.” 
Read Judge Hood’s Decision Here
In the past, SMART had no problem running an anti-religion ad sponsored by an atheist organization that stated, “Don’t Believe in God? You are not alone.”
TMLC Senior Trial Counsel Rob Muise, commented, “In this environment of political correctness, it is encouraging to see decisions such as this one that uphold our basic constitutional freedoms.”