The press calls him a “moderate,” yet the agreement signed by the Palestinian Authority President Mahmud Abbas Monday in Qatar is anything but the deal of a moderate. The agreement makes Abbas the interim president of a consensus government between the Palestinian Authority and the terrorist group Hamas. Being heralded as a long sought-after reconciliation, Abbas and Khaled Mashaal, head of Hamas, signed the agreement Monday in Qatar, in the presence of another “moderate,” Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani.
“Reconciliation is in the Palestinian and Arab national interest,” Abbas said, adding that he and his Fatah movement “did not sign this agreement for show … but because we plan to implement it.”
In reference to Israel, Abbas said the Palestinians now needs to "devote all our power to confronting the occupying enemy."
In response to the agreement, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu remarked, "I say to Abu Mazen (Abbas), you cannot grasp the stick at both ends. It is either peace with Hamas or peace with Israel, you cannot have both."
Noticeably different was the United States reaction. "As we've said many times, questions of Palestinian reconciliation are an internal matter for Palestinians," said State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland.
Abbas also recently appointed released terrorist Gen. Mahmoud Damara to be his advisor in Abbas' office in Ramallah. Damara was one of the leaders of the Fatah Force 17 terror unit and initiated numerous shooting and bombing attacks against Israeli civilians. Damara was released in October as part of an exchange to free Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit, who was kidnapped by Hamas in 2006 and held in the Gaza Strip.
Abbas also allocated $5 million to the 1,027 terrorists released in the Schalit deal. Abbas' Palestinian Authority is primarily supported through millions of dollars in donor money from the United States and the European Union.
The current agreement between Abbas and Hamas calls for a government of “independent technocrats” to oversee reconstruction in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip and to “facilitate the implementation of presidential and parliamentary elections.”
A senior Fatah official told AFP news agency that the new government would be announced in Cairo on February 18 at a meeting between the Palestine Liberation Organization leadership and all Palestinian factions, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
"On the 18th of this month in Cairo, there will be a final declaration on the formation of the new government to be headed by president Mahmud Abbas," Azzam al-Ahmad said.
We hear so often about Muslims as victims of abuse in the West and combatants in the Arab Spring’s fight against tyranny. But, in fact, a wholly different kind of war is underway—an unrecognized battle costing thousands of lives. Christians are being killed in the Islamic world because of their religion. It is a rising genocide that ought to provoke global alarm. In recent years the violent oppression of Christian minorities has become the norm in Muslim-majority nations stretching from West Africa and the Middle East to South Asia and Oceania. In some countries it is governments and their agents that have burned churches and imprisoned parishioners. In others, rebel groups and vigilantes have taken matters into their own hands, murdering Christians and driving them from regions where their roots go back centuries.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, and escaped an arranged marriage by immigrating to the Netherlands in 1992. She served as a member of the Dutch parliament from 2003 to 2006 and is currently a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Her autobiography, Infidel, was a 2007 New York Times bestseller.
The Iranian government, through a website proxy, has laid out the legal and religious justification for the destruction of Israel and the slaughter of its people. The doctrine includes wiping out Israeli assets and Jewish people worldwide. Calling Israel a danger to Islam, the conservative website Alef, with ties to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said the opportunity must not be lost to remove “this corrupting material. It is a ‘jurisprudential justification” to kill all the Jews and annihilate Israel, and in that, the Islamic government of Iran must take the helm.”
The article, written by Alireza Forghani, an analyst and a strategy specialist in Khamenei’s camp, now is being run on most state-owned sites, including the Revolutionary Guards’ Fars News Agency, showing that the regime endorses this doctrine.
Because Israel is going to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, Iran is justified in launching a pre-emptive, cataclysmic attack against the Jewish state, the doctrine argues.
On Friday, in a major speech at prayers, Khamenei announced that Iran will support any nation or group that attacks the “cancerous tumor” of Israel. Though his statement was seen by some in the West as fluff, there is substance behind it.
Iran’s Defense Ministry announced this weekend that it test-fired an advanced two-stage, solid-fuel ballistic missile and boasted about successfully putting a new satellite into orbit, reminding the West that its engineers have mastered the technology for intercontinental ballistic missiles even as the Islamic state pushes its nuclear weapons program.
The commander of the Revolutionary Guards, Brig. Gen. Seyyed Mehdi Farahi, stated in August that the Safir missile, which is capable of transporting a satellite into space, can easily be launched parallel to the earth’s orbit, which will transform it into an intercontinental ballistic missile. Western analysts didn’t believe this would happen until 2015. Historically, orbiting a satellite is the criterion for crediting a nation with ICBM capability.
Forghani details the Islamic duty of jihad as laid out in the Quran for the sake of Allah and states that “primary jihad,” according to some Shiite jurists, can only occur when the Hidden Imam, the Shiites’ 12th Imam Mahdi, returns. Shiites believe Mahdi’’s return will usher in Armageddon.
In the absence of the hidden Imam, Forghani says, “defensive jihad” could certainly take place when Islam is threatened, and Muslims must defend Islam and kill their enemies. To justify such action, Alef quotes the Shiites’ first imam, Ali, who stated “Waging war against the enemies with whom war is inevitable and there is a strong possibility that in near future they will attack Muslims is a must and the duty of Muslims.” In this regard, Ayatollah Khamenei has issued a fatwa in which he has even authorized carrying out primary jihad in the age of the absence of the Hidden imam under the authorization of Vali Faghih.
The article then quotes the Quran (Albaghara 2:191-193): “And slay them wherever ye find them, and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out, for persecution [of Muslims] is worse than slaughter [of non-believers] … and fight them until persecution is no more, and religion is for Allah.”
It is the duty for all Muslims to participate in this defensive jihad, Forghani says. A fatwa by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini made it clear that any political domination by infidels over Muslims authorizes Muslims to defend Islam by all means. Iran now has the ICBM means to deliver destruction on Israel and soon will have nuclear warheads for those missiles.
In order to attack Iran, the article says, Israel needs the approval and assistance of America, and under the current passive climate in the United States, the opportunity must not be lost to wipe out Israel before it attacks Iran.
Under this pre-emptive defensive doctrine, several Ground Zero points of Israel must be destroyed and its people annihilated. Forghani cites the last census by the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics that shows Israel has a population of 7.5 million citizens of which a majority of 5.7 million are Jewish. Then it breaks down the districts with the highest concentration of Jewish people, indicating that three cities, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa, contain over 60 percent of the Jewish population that Iran could target with its Shahab 3 ballistic missiles, killing all its inhabitants.
Forghani suggests that Iran’s Sejil missile, which is a two-stage rocket with a trajectory and speed that make it impossible to intercept, should target such Israeli facilities as: the Rafael nuclear plant, which is the main nuclear engineering center of Israel; the Eilun nuclear plant; another Israeli reactor in Nebrin; and the Dimona reactor in the nuclear research center in Neqeb, the most critical nuclear reactor in Israel because it produces 90 percent enriched uranium for Israel’s nuclear weapons.
Other targets, according to the article, include airports and air force bases such as the Sedot Mikha Air Base, which contains Jericho ballistic missiles and is located southwest of the Tel Nof Air Base, where aircraft equipped with nuclear weapons are based. Secondary targets include power plants, sewage treatment facilities, energy resources, and transportation and communication infrastructures.
Finally, Forghani says, Shahab 3 and Ghadr missiles can target urban settlements until the Israelis are wiped out.
Forghani claims that Israel could be destroyed in less than nine minutes and that Khamenei, as utmost authority, the Velayete Faghih (Islamic Jurist), also believes that Israel and America not only must be defeated but annihilated.
The radicals ruling Iran today not only posses over 1,000 ballistic missiles but are on the verge of ICBM delivery and have sufficient enriched uranium for six nuclear bombs even as they continue to highly enrich uranium despite four sets of U.N. sanctions.
The Iranian secret documentary “The Coming Is Upon Us” clearly indicates that these radicals believe the destruction of Israel will trigger the coming of the last Islamic Messiah and that even Jesus Christ, who will convert to Islam, will act as Mahdi’s deputy, praying to Allah as he stands behind the 12th Imam.
Reza Kahlili is a pseudonym for a former CIA operative in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and author of the award-winning book, A Time to Betray. He is a senior fellow with EMPact America and teaches at the U.S. Department of Defense’s Joint Counterintelligence Training Academy. More articles by Mr. Kahlili can be found on his website A TIme to Betray
Even though Norway is a democracy, there are Muslim Norwegian women do not have full rights. They are denied them by their families, and they live in fear for their lives.
In addition, the non-Muslim women are facing an epidemic of rape. Recent police statistics showed that in the capital city of Oslo, 100 percent of reported assault rapes between strangers were committed by immigrant, non-Western, Muslim males. And nine out of 10 of their victims were native Norwegian women. To protect themselves, some blonde Norwegian women have reportedly begun dying their hair black, and many travel only in groups.
Over the years, Palestinian terror groups have slaughtered countless Israeli civilians. In the process, they've also killed and injured dozens of American citizens. Now there is a movement to have those Palestinians face justice here in the United States. But the hardest part may be getting the U.S. government to take action.
The U.S. has extradited a Somali pirate, al Qaeda members, and several Israeli citizens who were involved in drug trafficking and Internet fraud, but no Palestinian terrorists.
Many Egyptians have blamed the police and the ruling military for standing by and allowing a massive soccer riot that left 74 people dead and hundreds more injured after the home team Al Masry beat Egypt's top club Al Ahly in a league match in Port Said, Egypt. Representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood, who recently won a majority in the election claim that security forces, supporters of ousted President Hosni Mubarek, deliberately engineered the violence to cause instability in their regime.
The chief of police in Amsterdam announced that police will not arrest women wearing burquas, even if a ban is the law. Police Chief Bernhard Welten said on public television, “I do not feel that I should always be an instrument of the government who always does what is asked.”
He also said that policemen have to use their “common sense.” Calling the burqua ban an "extremely complex dilemma," Welten said he will choose instead "civil disobedience." Welten further said he sees the job of the police to "to guarantee freedom, equality and justice."
Freedom Party MP Hero Brinkman, a former policeman, was outraged, saying, “The police should be subservient to the authorities. The government and parliament make the laws. The police enforce them. We would be a banana republic if it were the other way around.”
A bill to ban garments that cover the face is due to go to the Dutch parliament in the near future as part of a coalition agreement between the conservative VVD party and the Christian Democrats. The coalition is a minority government supported by the Freedom Party.
Brinkman also said that regional police chiefs had abused the room they have to use their own discretion for years. He predicted this will no longer happen under the current government. The Dutch police force is due to be reorganized, with the regional police corps merging into a national force. This means that the police will have just one chief.
The recent trial of the honor killing trial in Canada has garnered an abundance of media attention. In that trial a wealthy businessman, Mohammad Shafia, 58, a Muslim native of Afghanistan, and his second wife, Tooba Yahya, 42, were convicted of killing their three daughters (two shown, left) and the girls’ aunt (who was also Shafia’s first wife and sister to his second wife). Their 20-year old son Hamed was also found guilty of first-degree murder in the case as well.
Media coverage of the trail and its verdict were extensive but noticeably missing in most mainstream media coverage (NBC, AP, CNN) was any mention that the Shafia family was Muslim and that such killings are sanctioned by Sharia law.
For example, the Associated Press (AP) reported that the killings were the result of a “culture clash” involving a “strict religious family.”
NBC’s Anchor Brian Williams reports: “A verdict has been reached in a murder case that's gotten a lot of attention because it involved so-called honor killings of family members by family members. In this case an Afghan family living in Canada. It is a culture clash getting a lot of attention to our north. NBC's Kevin Tibbles has the story.”
Reporter Keven Tibbles: “Three teenage sisters murdered because of how they wanted to live their lives. Dress like westerners, use the internet, meet boys. Also killed, their father's first wife, by a strict religious family that felt it had been disgraced.”
In fact, the only time religion is mentioned in the report is to tell us that one of the girls had a Christian boyfriend.
The CNN reporter, on the other hand, sounded shocked that the jury convicted the three and that it took only 15 hours to deliver its first-degree murder charge. It is clear from her tone that she questioned the validity of the jury’s judgment.
“I mean … that’s not a lot of time … There were 12 counts. That means that they must have spent just slightly over an hour on each count. What does that tell you? This means that the prosecution basically did make their case as far as this jury is concerned.”
She wondered why they didn’t consider the lesser charge of second-degree murder, since the three convicted family members held to their story throughout the trial that they were all innocent and didn’t point the finger at each other. She sounded amazed that the jury believed that two biological parents would murder their own children. She called it “a stark verdict. “
Never mind that the prosecutor had rock-solid evidence to the contrary, including wiretapped conversations of the father. The evidence never made it to CNN’s report nor did the mention of which faith allows honor killings.
As to the girls brother, also convicted of first-degree murder, the CNN reported mused that, since he was “just 21-years old,” an appeal will probably made on these “extenuating circumstances.”
“It’s not exactly a sign of strength when a dictator is found trying to import chemical weapons ingredients and has to rely upon a foreign terrorist group to fight a small group of protesters.
“A senior official in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards says that Hezbollah sprung into action to save an Iranian base in Syria from being overrun by protesters and presumably, the rebel forces called the Free Syria Army. The base is located in Madaya in Zabadani, which fell to the rebels last week. The official claimed that Iran and Syria is working with Russia and China to “deter” foreign powers from intervening and that Russia has sent ships including aircraft carriers to protect the country.
“A Lebanese opposition figure claims that Assad even relies upon Hezbollah for personal security and the staging of pro-regime rallies. He said that over 200 cars and one bus arrived in Syria from Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon to take part in a rally in Damascus. When Assad appeared in Umayyad Square, Hariri says, he was guarded by Hezbollah terrorists. He also noted that Assad only appeared for three minutes, indicating it was a staged event.
“In a worrisome sign that Assad may be preparing to use chemical weapons, it has come out in the Turkish press that four Iranian trucks intercepted on their way to Syria two weeks ago contained WMD-related materials. One truck had components for ballistic missiles and the other three had 66 tons of sodium sulfate, used in the production of chemical weapons.”
Meanwhile, according to CNN reports, heavy clashes continue to take place in the suburbs of Damsacus, leaving at least 98 killed and 50 wounded. The numbers were reported by opposition groups, since the government limits access to journalists in these areas. All Arab League observer missions have also been suspended as all observers have been redeployed to Damascus.
In addition, The Jerusalem Post reports that Syrian security forces attempted to smuggle Syrian President Bashar Assad's wife, children, mother and cousin out of the country through a convoy of official vehicles. The report comes from sources in the Syrian opposition, picked up by the Egyptian daily newspaper Al-Masry-Al-Youm. The sources said that the convoy was intercepted by brigades of army defectors before it was able to reach the airport in Damascus.
According to the source, there was a heavy exchange of fire between the security forces and the Free Syrian Army forces. The family was prevented from escaping and returned to the presidential palace.
Ryan Mauro is a frequent analyst on FOX News Channel and is a national security writer for Family Security Matters. He is also a strategic analyst with Wikistrat, a consultant to government agencies and an adjunct professor.
Documenting the Islamic ideology behind Iran’s leaders, Iranium explores the scenarios we may face if this radical regime comes to possess the world’s most powerful weapons.
The press calls him a “moderate,” yet the agreement signed by the Palestinian Authority President Mahmud Abbas Monday in Qatar is anything but the deal of a moderate. The agreement makes Abbas the interim president of a consensus government between the Palestinian Authority and the terrorist group Hamas. Being heralded as a long sought-after reconciliation, Abbas and Khaled Mashaal, head of Hamas, signed the agreement Monday in Qatar, in the presence of another “moderate,” Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani.
The chief of police in Amsterdam announced that police will not arrest women wearing burquas, even if a ban is the law. Police Chief Bernhard Welten said on public television, “I do not feel that I should always be an instrument of the government who always does what is asked.”
The recent trial of the honor killing trial in Canada has garnered an abundance of media attention. In that trial a wealthy businessman, Mohammad Shafia, 58, a Muslim native of Afghanistan, and his second wife, Tooba Yahya, 42, were convicted of killing their three daughters (two shown, left) and the girls’ aunt (who was also Shafia’s first wife and sister to his second wife). Their 20-year old son Hamed was also found guilty of first-degree murder in the case as well.
