 Who is the most important European alive today? I nominate the Dutch politician Geert Wilders. I do so because he is best placed to deal with the Islamic challenge facing the continent.
He has the potential to emerge as a world-historical figure. That Islamic challenge consists of two components: on the one hand, an indigenous population's withering Christian faith, inadequate birthrate, and cultural diffidence, and on the other an influx of devout, prolific, and culturally assertive Muslim immigrants. This fast-moving situation raises profound questions about Europe: will it retain its historic civilization or become a majority-Muslim continent living under Islamic law (the Shari'a)? Wilders, 46, founder and head of the Party for Freedom (PVV), is the unrivaled leader of those Europeans who wish to retain their historic identity. That's because he and the PVV differ from most of Europe's other nationalist, anti-immigrant parties. The PVV is libertarian and mainstream conservative, without roots in neo-Fascism, nativism, conspiricism, antisemitism, or other forms of extremism. (Wilders publicly emulates Ronald Reagan.) Indicative of this moderation is Wilders' long-standing affection for Israel that includes two years' residence in the Jewish state, dozens of visits, and his advocating the transfer of the Dutch embassy to Jerusalem. In addition, Wilders is a charismatic, savvy, principled, and outspoken leader who has rapidly become the most dynamic political force in the Netherlands. While he opines on the full range of topics, Islam and Muslims constitute his signature issue. Overcoming the tendency of Dutch politicians to play it safe, he calls Muhammad a devil and demands that Muslims "tear out half of the Koran if they wish to stay in the Netherlands." More broadly, he sees Islam itself as the problem, not just a virulent version of it called Islamism. Finally, the PVV benefits from the fact that, uniquely in Europe, the Dutch are receptive to a non-nativist rejection of Shari'a.
This first became apparent a decade ago, when Pim Fortuyn, a left-leaning former communist homosexual professor began arguing that his values and lifestyle were irrevocably threatened by the Shari'a. Fortuyn anticipated Wilders in founding his own political party and calling for a halt to Muslim immigration to the Netherlands. Following Fortuyn's 2002 assassination by a leftist, Wilders effectively inherited his mantle and his constituency. The PVV has done well electorally, winning 6 percent of the seats in the November 2006 national parliamentary elections and 16 percent of Dutch seats in the June 2009 European Union elections. Polls now generally show the PVV winning a plurality of votes and becoming the country's largest party. Were Wilders to become prime minister, he could take on a leadership role for all Europe. But he faces daunting challenges. The Netherlands' fractured political scene means the PVV must either find willing partners to form a governing coalition (a difficult task, given how leftists and Muslims have demonized Wilders as a " right-wing extremist") or win a majority of the seats in parliament (a distant prospect). Wilders must also overcome his opponents' dirty tactics. Most notably, they have finally, after 2½ years of preliminary skirmishes, succeeded in dragging him to court on charges of hate speech and incitement to hatred. The public prosecutor's case against Wilders opens in Amsterdam on January 20; if convicted, Wilders faces a fine of up to US$14,000 or as many as 16 months in jail. Remember, he is his country's leading politician. Plus, due to threats against his life, he always travels with bodyguards and incessantly changes safe houses. Who exactly, one wonders, is the victim of incitement? Although I disagree with Wilders about Islam (I respect the religion but fight Islamists with all I have), we stand shoulder-to-shoulder against the lawsuit. I reject the criminalization of political differences, particularly attempts to thwart a grassroots political movement via the courts. Accordingly, the Middle East Forum's Legal Project has worked on Wilders' behalf, raising substantial funds for his defense and helping in other ways. We do so convinced of the paramount importance to talk freely in public during time of war about the nature of the enemy. Ironically, were Wilders fined or jailed, it would probably enhance his chances to become prime minister. But principle outweighs political tactics here. He represents all Westerners who cherish their civilization. The outcome of his trial and his freedom to speak has implications for us all. Mr. Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. Daniel Pipes 
 A Massachusetts college has modified a controversial security policy after criticism it infringed on the religious rights of students, a school official said Friday. The policy originally banned any head covering that obscured the student's face while engaged in student activities. The Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences e-mailed students about the initial changes this week, saying, "Any head covering that obscures a student's face may not be worn, either on campus or at clinical sites, except when required for medical reasons." School officials said the policy was intended to ensure that all students would be identifiable "for reasons of safety and security." But on Thursday, the policy was changed to include an exception "for medical and/or religious reasons." The original policy had prompted questions and concerns among Muslim students and organizations, particularly because it meant Muslim women at the college could no longer wear the niqab, or face veil. The college -- with campuses in Boston and Worcester, Massachusetts, as well as Manchester, New Hampshire -- stated that the initial modification was "based on a constructive dialogue with our extended community, and an intensive review of safety and security measures with advisors." College spokesman Michael Ratty said, "We will achieve our objective of campus security while allowing for a medical and/or religious accommodation. As always, our primary concern is the security and safety of all our students, faculty and staff." Ratty stressed that Muslims were involved in the original policy decision saying, "Prior to implementation, the college discussed it with several officials within the Muslim community." Muslim students had mixed reactions to the original ban. Aisha Bajwa, president of the Muslim Students Association at the college, called the unmodified policy "unjustified and unconstitutional." Bajwa, who does not wear the niqab, said that having to wear student IDs at all times keeps students safe. Ibrahim Hooper, communications director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, thinks the policy targeted Muslim students and filed a third-party complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Writing to the commission, the Council invoked Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employers from discriminating based on religion. Hooper acknowledged that the college's policy focuses on students but said it will inevitably target Muslim employees in the future. After the complaint, George Humphrey, the vice president for College Relations, e-mailed Hooper, announcing the new policy. "We have reviewed our ID policy and made an accommodation for religious reasons," the e-mail said. "Thank you for your input on this matter." Hooper then stated, "We are pleased that the religious rights of all students and staff will now be protected. This is a victory for religious freedom and tolerance." Ratty said, "The complaint was not the sole reason for the reversal but rather an ongoing discussion this week with our community." Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, supported the original policy. Though Pipes acknowledged the larger cultural debate, he said the college is focusing on security. "I have documented dozens and dozens of cases about criminality and terrorism that have been abetted by burqas and niqabs," he said. "It is sensible to ban these, and there are a number of these bans in institutions such as banks or jewelry stores." With increasing concern about terrorist attacks, religious practices will have to be weighed against security, Pipes said. "In Turkey, the hijab has been banned from government offices, so this is not something that is just an American concern," he added. CNN
 A startling fact just emerged in the course of some routine maintenance work on the mailing lists for www.DanielPipes.org: One "Dr. Nidal Malik Hasan" has been subscribed as nidalhasan@aol.com since March 2009 to all the Middle East Forum mailing lists, including my own. He opened some but not many of the mailings. In addition to the name, there are several reasons to think this is the butcher of Ft. Hood: He received the mailings for over half a year before his identity became notorious; he has not opened any e-mails in a while, presumably since he has been jailed; and a search for nidalhasan@aol.com on the internet finds this address associated with the Texas jihadi (for example, by the Northeast Intelligence Network).. Comments: (1) I have never assumed that all the Middle East Forum's or my readers share our outlook. To the contrary, the lively debates carried on in the more than 100,000 published reader comments show that readers have all outlooks. Still, I never imagined that a future terrorist would subscribe himself to our writings. (2) Why, I can't help but wonder, would Hasan have wanted to see the Middle East Forum's work? Opposition research? Or might he have been stalking us? (3) This subscription gives new urgency to the concerns I addressed at "Am I Helping the Terrorist Enemy?" and I hereby rededicate myself to assuring that the Middle East Forum does not inadvertently provide guidance to the country's foes. (4) On a sad note, this news brings to the mind that I learned just two months earlier, again while doing routine chores, that my articles were still being sent to the late Daniel Pearl's Wall Street Journal e-mail address, which had been initially subscribed before his murder nearly eight years ago. (December 30, 2009) Daniel Pipes
 The emirate of Dubai has in the past few decades been more than a shiny example of glitzy capitalism and the insulation from the repercussions (and responsibilities) of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It has represented the type of political model which has been promoted to the Arabs, by their rulers and by the West. When George W Bush, the former US president, visited the United Arab Emirates during his last year in office, he praised Dubai and its models of economic and political prosperity; he promoted the UAE's mantra and ethos as glimmers of hope to the new generation of Arabs. It took the former president little more than a few hours during his stop-over to assess the conditions in the region, and to reach his conclusions: resistance to Israel clashes with the type of prosperity that was prevalent in Dubai. Dubai hit a dramatic rise in the 1990s and became a success story that was carefully calibrated, promoted and disseminated in the Arab media and collective psyche. Daniel Pipes, who has a reputation for hostility towards Arabs and Muslims, was interviewed two years ago in the Jerusalem Post praising Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai, after the release of his memoirs. There was not one word about Palestine in that book which nevertheless offered a recipe of unregulated and unrestricted capitalism. Dubai was supposed to be the antithesis of Palestine. It was designed to create a concrete Utopia that would encourage all young Arabs to forget about their political aspirations and dreams. In Lebanon, the March 14 opposition movement has been posing this question to the Lebanese people for three years: Hanoi or Dubai? But Hanoi is today a far more promising model than Dubai. Not only has Hanoi been liberated from foreign occupation and a corrupt puppet regime, but it has also become part of a sovereign country with a record of fast economic growth. Much has been written about Dubai and even more will be written about the emirate which was positioned as the success story that all Arabs were to emulate. However, its success is not based on sound economic or classical political theories. It was in fact a projection of what the West wanted to see in the Middle East. This projection represented the fruits of US co-operation with Middle Eastern governments, especially in the realm of defence and national security. Dubai was more important for the US due to military intelligence co-operation than for its lavish seven-star hotels. Dubai was supposed to be a vision but one not rooted in the productive sectors of the economy. There were early warnings of the debacle that struck Dubai World - too much glitz and ostentation and little attention to a careful building of culture and economy that reflect the region. There was a rush to build multi-billion dollar artificial ski slopes and playgrounds for the very rich of the world. But Dubai did not want to be part of the region, politically speaking. Instead it modelled itself as a copy of Las Vegas in the heart of the Arab Middle East. Dubai carefully steered away from all the issues that alarmed and agitated Arab public opinion. More at Al Jazeera
 The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) announced on Friday that none other than Jesse "Shakedown" Jackson will be headlining their annual banquet next Saturday. He will be sharing the stage with 1993 World Trade Center bombing unindicted co-conspirator Siraj Wahhaj. It would sure be unfortunate if Shakedown Jesse and his CAIR conspirators were met with some kind of protest outside the Marriott Crystal Gateway in Arlington, Virginia next Saturday, October 24th at 7pm where the banquet is being held (just a block away from the Crystal City Metro Station): No doubt CAIR put down considerable cash to bring Shakedown Jesse to town after four members of Congress demanded an investigation this week in response to the release of a new explosive expose, Muslim Mafia, by Dave Gaubatz and Paul Sperry. No doubt that's what prompted Obama Muslim adviser Dalia Mogahed (who we reported on last week) to back out of the banquet at the last minute. As Daniel Pipes explains, this new book is based on 12,000 internal CAIR documents secretly obtained through an undercover investigation and destroys the prevailing myths about the Hamas front group, which was itself and its founders named unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism finance trial last year (continued below the fold): Claim 1: According to Ibrahim Hooper, the organization's communications director, "CAIR has some 50,000 members." Fact: An internal memo prepared in June 2007 for a staff meeting reports that the organization had precisely 5,133 members, about one-tenth Hooper's exaggerated number. Claim 2: CAIR is a "grass-roots organization" that depends financially on its members. Fact: According to an internal 2002 board meeting report, the organization received $33,000 in dues and $1,071,000 in donations. In other words, under 3 percent of its income derives from membership dues. Claim 3: CAIR receives "no support from any overseas group or government." Fact: Gaubatz and Sperry report that 60 percent of CAIR's income derives from two dozen donors, most of whom live outside the United States. Specifically: $978,000 from the ruler of Dubai in 2002 in exchange for controlling interest in its headquarters property on New Jersey Avenue, a $500,000 gift from Saudi prince al-Waleed bin Talal and $112,000 in 2007 from Saudi prince Abdullah bin Mosa'ad, at least $300,000 from the Saudi-based Organization of the Islamic Conference, $250,000 from the Islamic Development Bank, and at least $17,000 from the American office of the Saudi-based International Islamic Relief Organization. Claim 4: CAIR is an independent, domestic human rights group "similar to a Muslim NAACP." Fact: In a desperate search for funding, CAIR has offered its services to forward the commercial interests of foreign firms. This came to light in the aftermath of Dubai Ports World's failed effort to purchase six U.S. harbors in 2006 due to security fears. In response, CAIR's chairman traveled to Dubai and suggested to businessmen there: "Do not think about your contributions [to CAIR] as donations. Think about it from the perspective of rate of return. The investment of $50 million will give you billions of dollars in return for fifty years." Source and thanks to The Jawa report H/T: Weasel Zippers
 At last, a readable and honest guide to the book that inspires terrorists worldwide: the Koran
Robert Spencer writes,,,the Conservative Book Club has made my new book, The Complete Infidel's Guide to the Koran, a main selection for this month. Here is their review of the book: If we don't know the Koran, we can't defeat the jihadists: Osama bin Laden, the masterminds of 9/11 and those who have perpetrated the over 13,000 jihad attacks worldwide since 9/11 repeatedly point to it as their inspiration and authority, explaining that they're committing acts of terrorism and hate because of it. Yet the Koran is not an easy read -- it has been called "wrist-slittingly boring," as well as confusing, contradictory, and muddled. But Robert Spencer reads the Koran so that you don't have to! Now, in The Complete Infidel's Guide to the Koran, Spencer, the bestselling author and Islam expert, shows exactly what's in the Koran, and why every military and intelligence official -- and every American -- should be concerned about this revered and reviled holy book. This witty and breezily written guide to the Koran explains who those who have vowed to destroy us think they are, what they think they're doing, and what they hope to accomplish. Spencer explains what the Koran says about who Infidels are and what must be done about them; its appallingly harsh teachings on women; what it really says about warfare against Infidels; its strange teachings on Christians and Christianity; and its relentless demonization of the people whom the Koran identifies as the chief enemies of the Muslims: the Jews. He shows how the Koran developed, why central Muslim claims about it are false, and even provides a revealing and disquieting glimpse into the Hadith, the traditions of Muhammad that for Muslims worldwide are second in authority only to the Koran itself. A huge number of policy decisions are predicated upon the assumption that the Koran teaches peace, and that those who brandish Korans and commit violence are misunderstanding their own religion and perverting the teachings of their own holy book. These include U.S. government postures toward Pakistan and Egypt; immigration matters; airport security procedures; military strategies in Iraq and Afghanistan; domestic anti-terror policies; and our acquiescence to Saudi Arabia's Islamic proselytizing campaign in America and many other countries. That's why The Complete Infidel's Guide to the Koran is so urgently needed: it shows how and why U.S. policies in these areas are not only wrong but dangerous to our national security -- and sounds a clarion call for a restoration of sanity on these issues in our national security establishment. Proof: the Koran is just about the opposite of a "book of peace": * Why most government and media analysts dare not even question the assumption that the Koran is peaceful * How sacred texts are not entirely determined by what the faithful wish to see in them * Infidels: why Allah hates them, and what he has in store for them -- straight from the Koran * The strange story of how the Koran was compiled -- and the explosive significance of the existence of alternate versions * The worst sin of all for Muslims: it's worse than murder, worse than rape, worse than genocide, and you're probably committing it * The Muslim claim that the Koranic text was never altered -- why it's false, and why this matters * Why it is so easy for non-Muslim readers reading English translations of the Koran to miss some of its most violent and worrisome passages * The passages of the Koran that mandate warfare against unbelievers: why in traditional Islam they take precedence over more peaceful passages * The little-noted and violent corollary to the Koran's famous passages forbidding the killing of innocent people * But doesn't the Koran promise salvation to Jews and Christians? The truth about this celebrated passage * How the Koran retells stories of the Biblical prophets but alters them to support Muhammad's claim to be a prophet * Moses: the Koran's frequent retellings of the Exodus story -- and the all-important element of that story that the Muslim book leaves out every time * The Islamic prophet Muhammad: why the Koran is essentially all about him * Telling signs that the Koran was not delivered from heaven in pristine form, but was compiled from earlier Jewish, Christian, and pagan sources * Koranic Jew-hatred: proof that Islamic anti-Semitism is not an import from Christianity, as many have claimed * Are the Koran's violent commandments are largely meaningless, since similar ones are found in the Bible? * The surprising and disquieting truth behind Islam's professed respect for other religions and reverence for their central figures * The extraordinary implications of the Koran's preposterous teachings about Abraham, Moses and Jesus * The alarming teachings of the Koran on women: how it reduces women to the status of commodities, and even teaches that women are deficient intellectually * The Koran: does it really contain miraculous prophecies and other evidence of divine origin? * The strange Islamic phenomena of "temporary wives" and "temporary husbands" -- and how justification for both comes from the Koran * Love your enemies -- and other things the Koran doesn't say * Barack Obama's June 2009 speech to the Islamic world: an object lesson in the hazards of not understanding the Koran * How mistakes and false assumptions about Islam and the Koran is today leading the U.S. to make serious foreign policy errors * What Infidels can and must do to defend free societies against those who take the Koran's message of violence and supremacism to heart "Meticulous, comprehensive, indispensable. 'I read the Koran so you don't have to,' Spencer writes, but even for those of us who have read the Koran, this is a richly illuminating work." -- Bruce Bawer, author of Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom and While Europe Slept. "Governing officials and media spokesmen may ignore Spencer's warnings, but they do so at their own risk, because Islamic jihadists are not ignoring what's in the Koran, and are working to destroy our freedoms in obedience to Koranic dictates. In illuminating for Westerners exactly what the Koran teaches, Spencer has performed a valuable service in the defense of Western civilization against the Islamic jihad." -- Geert Wilders, Member of Parliament and Chairman of the Party for Freedom (PVV), the Netherlands "Unlike most of today's self-styled experts, Robert Spencer won't tell you that 'slay the idolaters wherever you find them' really means 'love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.' In The Complete Infidel's Guide to the Koran, Spencer shows once again that he is America's most informed, fearless, and compelling voice on modern jihadism, insisting that we come to grips with the words behind the ideology that fuels international terror." -- Andrew C. McCarthy, senior fellow at the National Review Institute and author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad. "Robert Spencer incarnates intellectual courage when, all over the world, governments, intellectuals, churches, universities and media crawl under a hegemonic Universal Caliphate's New Order. His achievement in the battle for the survival of free speech and dignity of man will remain as a fundamental monument to the love of, and the self-sacrifice for, liberty. In our epoch of intellectual jihadism, this honest book is essential to understand the challenges of the twenty-first century." -- Bat Ye'or, author of Eurabia; The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam and Islam and Dhimmitude "Tony Blair calls the Koran 'progressive [and] humanitarian' but Robert Spencer has actually read the scripture and begs to differ. In an informed, sardonic antidote to the usual soft-peddling of the Koran, he concludes that its actual contents should alarm infidels and prompt them to defend their 'freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the legal equality of all people.' " -- Daniel Pipes, director, Middle East Forum "For 1,400 years Muslim leadership spread misinformation and covered up what is in the Koran, even criminalizing exposing the truth or asking questions. The truth is too scary for many, both Muslims and non-Muslims. I thank Robert Spencer for bringing the truth of what is in the Koran to non-Muslims." -- Nonie Darwish, ex-Muslim and author of Now They Call Me Infidel "This book is an incisive analysis of how Islamic jihadists read the Koran and understand it to be commanding them to wage war against non-Muslims. Military and intelligence analysts, as well as all Americans interested in protecting our freedoms, will find The Complete Infidel's Guide to the Koran to be a valuable guide to the thought processes and core beliefs of Muslim terrorists." -- Steven Emerson, author of American Jihad Source: JihadWatch
 By Daniel Pipes Those of us who argue against Shari'a are sometimes asked why Islamic law poses a problem when modern Western societies long ago accommodated Halakha, or Jewish law. The answer is easy: a fundamental difference separates the two. Islam is a missionizing religion, Judaism is not. Islamists aspire to apply Islamic law to everyone, while observant Jews seek only themselves to live by Jewish law. Two very recent examples from the United Kingdom demonstrate the innate imperialism of Islamic law. The first concerns Queens Care Centre, an old-age home and day-care provider for the elderly in the coal town of Maltby, forty miles east of Manchester. At present, according to the Daily Telegraph, not one of its 37 staff or 40 residents is Muslim. Although the home's management asserts a respect for its residents' "religious and cultural beliefs," QCC's owner since 1994, Zulfikar Ali Khan, on his own decided this year to switch the home's meat purchases to a halal butcher. Read more ...Source: FPM
By Daniel Pipes July 24 Back in 2004, I noted the disbelief that greets me "when I explain that the Islamist goal is to take over the United States and replace the Constitution with the Koran." Five years later, it's still the case, with most Americans incredulous at such an intention. So, I thank (1) the Hizb ut-Tahrir organization (on which, see Zeyno Baran, Hizb ut-Tahrir: Islam's Political Insurgency) for holding a forthright conference yesterday and (2) Steven Emerson's Investigative Project on Terrorism for attending the event and reporting on it. IPT begins by setting the scene: Nearly 300 people packed the Grand Ballroom of the Hilton Hotel [in Oak Lawn, Illinois, near Chicago] for its Khalifah Conference on "The Fall of Capitalism and the Rise of Islam" to listen to listen to HT ideologues blame capitalism for World War I and World War II; the U.S. subprime mortgage meltdown; the current violence in Iraq and Afghanistan; world poverty and malnutrition and inner-city drug use. … Security at the conference was very tight. Oak Lawn police maintained a checkpoint outside the Hilton, and local police and HT's own security people had a substantial presence inside the hotel. In the ballroom where the conference took place, men and women were largely segregated, with men in the front and women in the back. One speaker, identified as Imam Jaleel Abdul Razek, engaged in the following dialogue with an unidentified member of the audience on the subject of which law should rule in the United States (click here for the video clip): Audience member: "Would you get rid of the Constitution for Shariah, yes or no?" Abdul Razek: "Over the Muslim world? Yes, it [the Constitution] would be gone." Audience Member: And so, if the United States was a Muslim world, the Constitution would be gone?" Abdul Razek: "If the United States was in the Muslim world, the Muslims who are here would be calling and happy to see the Shariah applied, yes we would." Audience Member: "And the Constitution gone. That's all." Abdul Razek: "Yes, as Muslims they would be long gone." Source: Daniel Pipes
Caught on Tape: The Middle East's Culture of Cruelty
by Daniel Pipes - FrontPageMagazine.com - 15, 2009
Some of the bravest and most distinguished analysts from the Middle East emphasize that region's culture of cruelty. Kanan Makiya titled his 1994 book about Arabs Cruelty and Silence. Fouad Ajami writes about Beirut being "lost to a new reign of cruelty," about Iraq's "plunder and cruelty and sectarian animus," and about the region's "cruelty, waste, and confusion." [PICTURES]
- Issa bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
- Bassam Nabulsi.
- Issa shooting around Shah Poor.
- Issa stuffing sand down Shah Poor's mouth.
- Issa directing the cameraman.
- Issa running over Shah Poor. That cruelty, usually at a remove from outsiders, became cinematically vivid on April 22, 2009, when ABC News aired a tape of a prince from the United Arab Emirates sadistically torturing an Afghan merchant he accused of dishonesty. No less instructive were the passive reactions of his government and of American officials. The story reveals much and is worth pondering:
In Abu Dhabi, the UAE's largest and most powerful emirate, the Nahyan family has long ruled and dominated. After the 2004 death of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, who had ruled the emirate since its independence in 1971, his long-restrained 22 royal sons and grandsons reveled in their new-found freedom of action. One of them in particular, Issa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a younger brother of Abu Dhabi's current ruler and president of the seven-member United Arab Emirates federation, Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan (b. 1948), went crazy. "It's like you flipped a switch and the man took a wrong turn in his life and started getting violent," comments Bassam Nabulsi, 50, of Houston, Texas, a native of Lebanon and former business associate of Issa's.
Issa met Nabulsi in Houston, where Nabulsi provided him with hotel and limousine services. Their relationship developed into a business partnership that lasted over twelve years. But Nabulsi is now suing Issa for breach of contract in a federal court in Houston; to support his accusations, Nabulsi made public a 45-minute tape of Issa torturing an Afghan grain dealer named Mohammed Shah Poor in 2004. Issa accused the dealer of cheating him of a grain delivery to his ranch worth about US$5,000 and assaulted him at night in a remote spot.
ABC News ran an initial television story of the tape (which can be seen here). Its accompanying print story, "Torture Tape Implicates UAE Royal Sheikh," summarizes the gruesome details:
The Sheikh begins by stuffing sand down the man's mouth, as the police officers restrain the victim. Then he fires bullets from an automatic rifle around him as the man howls incomprehensibly. At another point on the tape, the Sheikh can be seen telling the cameraman to come closer. "Get closer. Get closer. Get closer. Let his suffering show," the Sheikh says.
Over the course of the tape, Sheikh Issa acts in an increasingly sadistic manner. He uses an electric cattle prod against the man's testicles and inserts it in his anus. At another point, as the man wails in pain, the Sheikh pours lighter fluid on the man's testicles and sets them aflame. Then the tape shows the Sheikh sorting through some wooden planks. "I remember there was one that had a nail in it," he says on the tape. The Sheikh then pulls down the pants of the victim and repeatedly strikes him with board and its protruding nail.
At one point, he puts the nail next to the man's buttocks and bangs it through the flesh. "Where's the salt," asks the Sheikh as he pours a large container of salt on to the man's bleeding wounds. The victim pleads for mercy, to no avail. The final scene on the tape shows the Sheikh positioning his victim on the desert sand and then driving over him repeatedly. A sound of breaking bones can be heard on the tape.
Shah Poor survived this sustained assault; Nabulsi says his frantic efforts got Shah Poor to a hospital where he spent months recovering from internal injuries.
Nabulsi recounts that Issa had tapes made of this and other torture sessions so he could later relish his sadism and writes that he "maintained all important business and personal items for Sheikh Issa," including the Shah Poor video. In April 2005, Nabulsi explains, due to his criticism of Issa's torturing, the two business partners fell out. Nabulsi hid the tape as evidence of Issa's depravity and, in turn, Issa sent the Abu Dhabi police to retrieve it. When Nabulsi stonewalled, they arrested him on trumped-up charges of marijuana possession and held him in Al-Wathba Prison for three months.
Nabulsi says he was subject to many assaults during his incarceration. According to his Houston lawyer, Tony Buzbee, as police officers stuck a finger in his anus. they said, "This is from Sheik Issa. Are you going to give us the tapes?" Buzbee maintains that the guards "would keep him from sleeping, deny him his medications, tell him they were going to rape his wife, kill his child. They made him pose naked while they took pictures." Allegedly, Issa himself sometimes participated in the torture sessions. A court eventually acquitted Nabulsi and he managed to escape Abu Dhabi.
Almost as revealing as the tape itself was the response to it from the Abu Dhabi and U.S. governments. In an official statement, the former deemed the matter settled privately between Issa and Shah Poor because the two agreed "not to bring formal charges against each other, i.e., theft on the one hand and assault on the other hand." Prodded by ABC News, Abu Dhabi's Interior Ministry acknowledged Issa's role in the tape but claimed that "The incidents depicted in the video tapes were not part of a pattern of behavior." Its review found "all rules, policies and procedures were followed correctly by the Police Department." As for Nabulsi's case, Interior "also confirmed that Mr. Nabulsi was in no way mistreated during his incarceration for drug possession."
Perhaps it bears mentioning that Abu Dhabi's minister of the interior is one of Issa's brothers?
As for officials at the U.S. Embassy in Abu Dhabi, Nabulsi gives them mixed grades. Some knew about the torture tapes but did not protest Issa's actions. In particular, Bill Wallrap of the Department of Homeland Security saw some of the tape one day before Nabulsi's arrest; Nabulsi quotes his response as advising him to "gather your family and get out of the country as soon as possible for your own safety." Other U.S. embassy employees, however, did help and Nabulsi says their visits to him in prison had a critical role in his staying alive and fleeing the country. Hillary Clinton's State Department has been conspicuously silent on the matter; revealingly, after watching 10 minutes of the film, one U.S. diplomat bloodlessly commented, "It was interesting."
However, the one-two punch of ABC News playing portions of the torture tape on air and to Rep. James McGovern (Democrat of Massachusetts), chairman of the Human Rights Commission of the U.S. House, did have consequences. Fully five years after the incident took place, Abu Dhabi authorities finally arrested Issa, detained other participants in the torture session, and announced a criminal probe into the torture.
Most inconveniently for the UAE, the torture tape surfaced just as the U.S. government was considering a nuclear cooperation agreement with it, jeopardizing the bill's passage. Rep. Ed Markey (Democrat of Massachusetts) expressed the view of many: "A country where the laws can be flouted by the rich and powerful is not a country that can safeguard sensitive U.S. nuclear technology." Despite itself, the State Department is having to take the torture tape into account; the nuclear deal has been delayed and faces uncertain congressional prospects. Comments:
(1) Issa's unrestrained rage over a $5,000 delivery perfectly symbolizes the Middle East's culture of cruelty. Those who have power flaunt and brandish it.
(2) What would befall someone accused of stealing $10,000? What might befall Bernard Madoff in Abu Dhabi?
(3) Issa and his henchmen have a practiced air about their torturing – suggesting they have done it before. Indeed, Nabulsi says he has more such videos in his possession.
(4) Abu Dhabi has a relatively benign government; one shudders to think what sport the grandees of tougher Middle Eastern states indulge in.
(5) As the world gets smaller, how does the West maintain a distance from this ghastly aspect of Middle Eastern life? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- May 22, 2009 update: "Despite Torture Video, U.S. and Emirates Sign Key Pact" reads the New York Times headline today. The $40 billion agreement will besubmitted to Congress,where opponents of the agreement are said to be unlikely to find a two-thirds majority to reject it, if only because it should create more than 10,000 jobs. Source: http://www.danielpipes.org/6364/caught-on-tape-middle-east-culture-of-cruelty
By Daniel Pipes | 24 Apr Does terrorism work, meaning, does it achieve its perpetrators' objectives? With terror attacks having become a routine and nearly daily occurrence, especially in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, the conventional wisdom holds that terrorism works very well. For example, the late Ehud Sprinzak of the Hebrew University ascribed the prevalence of suicide terrorism to its "gruesome effectiveness." Robert Pape of the University of Chicago argues that suicide terrorism is growing "because terrorists have learned that it pays." Harvard law professor Alan M. Dershowitz titled one of his books, Why Terrorism Works. But Max Abrahms, a fellow at Stanford University, disputes this conclusion, noting that they focus narrowly on the well-known but rare terrorist victories – while ignoring the much broader, if more obscure, pattern of terrorism's failures. To remedy this deficiency, Abrahms took a close look at each of the 28 terrorist groups so designated by the U.S. Department of State since 2001 and tallied how many of them achieved its objectives. His study, "Why Terrorism Does Not Work," finds that those 28 groups had 42 different political goals and that they achieved only 3 of those goals, for a measly 7 percent success rate. Those three victories would be: (1) Hezbollah's success at expelling the multinational peacekeepers from Lebanon in 1984, (2) Hezbollah's success at driving Israeli forces out of Lebanon in 1985 and 2000, and (3) the Tamil Tiger's partial success at winning control over areas of Sri Lanka after 1990. That's it. The other 26 groups, from the Abu Nidal Organization and Al-Qaeda and Hamas to Aum Shinriko and Kach and the Shining Path, occasionally achieved limited success but mostly failed completely. Abrahms draws three policy implications from the data. -
Guerrilla groups that mainly attack military targets succeed more often than terrorist groups that mainly attack civilian targets. (Terrorists got lucky in the Madrid attack of 2004.) -
Terrorists find it "extremely difficult to transform or annihilate a country's political system"; those with limited objectives (such as acquiring territory) do better than those with maximalist objectives (such as seeking regime change). -
Not only is terrorism "an ineffective instrument of coercion, but … its poor success rate is inherent to the tactic of terrorism itself." This lack of success should "ultimately dissuade potential jihadists" from blowing up civilians.
This final implication, of frequent failure leading to demoralization, suggests an eventual reduction of terrorism in favor of less violent tactics. Indeed, signs of change are already apparent. Sayyid Imam al-Sharif At the elite level, for example the former jihad theorist, Sayyid Imam al-Sharif (a.k.a. Dr. Fadl), now denounces violence: "We are prohibited from committing aggression," he writes, "even if the enemies of Islam do that." On the popular level, the Pew Research Center's 2005 Global Attitudes Project found that "support for suicide bombings and other terrorist acts has fallen in most Muslim-majority nations surveyed" and "so too has confidence in Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden." Likewise, a 2007 Program on International Policy Attitudes study found that "Large majorities in all countries oppose attacks against civilians for political purposes and see them as contrary to Islam. … Most respondents … believe that politically-motivated attacks on civilians, such as bombings or assassinations, cannot be justified." On the practical level, terrorist groups are evolving. Several of them – specifically in Algeria, Egypt, and Syria – have dropped violence and now work within the political system. Others have taken on non-violent functions – Hezbollah delivers medical services and Hamas won an election. If Ayatollah Khomeini and Osama bin Laden represent Islamism's first iteration, Hezbollah and Hamas represent a transitional stage, and Turkey's prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, arguably the world's most influential Islamist, shows the benefits of going legitimate. But if going the political route works so well, why does Islamist violence continue and even expand? Because they are not always practical. Rita Katz of the SITE Intelligence Group explains: "Engaged in a divine struggle, jihadists measure success not by tangible victories in this life but by God's eternal benediction and by rewards received in the hereafter." In the long term, however, Islamists will likely recognize the limits of violence and increasingly pursue their repugnant goals through legitimate ways. Radical Islam's best chance to defeat us lies not in bombings and beheadings but in classrooms, law courts, computer games, television studios, and electoral campaigns. We are on notice. Source: Islam Watch
 By Daniel Pipes In " Europe's Stark Options," I considered the future of the Muslim-European encounter and conclude there are three possible futures, "harmonious integration, the expulsion of Muslims, or an Islamic takeover." I then dismissed the first as unrealistic and stated that it is too early to predict which of the latter two unattractive possibilities will come to pass. A reader, Chris Slater of Upper Hutt, New Zealand, writes me to predict a fourth outcome as most likely: "larger existing Muslim areas will re-create themselves into independent national entities" and "by the middle of the twenty-first century nearly all western European countries will be riven by the creation of Islamic city states within their borders. For the sake of brevity they will be referred to as ‘microstates,' that is, autonomous conurbations defined by the Islamic beliefs of their citizens." Slater foresees boundaries being formed "around existing Muslim centres of population, initially in France, Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark, followed rapidly by Britain, Norway, Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Spain. Dates for eastern European states, particularly Orthodox, may be more difficult to predict, although Russia, with 15 percent of its 143 million people professing Islam, may well lead many western European countries in having an independent Islamic state. By the end of this century this process will affect every non-Islamic state throughout the world." Read more ...Source: Daniel Pipes Blog
 by Daniel Pipes | Tue, 30 Dec 2008
1) Arab-Israeli warfare is not the conventional battle to control territory of old. Since 1982, the primary goal in this theater is to persuade the world of the righteousness of one's cause. (I.e., who has the more affecting casualties?)
2) Palestinians have proven themselves more competent at the p.r. battle than the Israeli government, winning public support everywhere — with the lone but decisive exceptions of Israel and the United States.
3) Secondarily, Hamas's defiance should be seen in light of Iranian ambitions to wear down the Israeli body politic.
4) Most Arab regimes so fear Tehran that they can barely bestir themselves to denounce Israel's war on Hamas, much less do anything.
5) The PLO's Mahmoud Abbas condemns Israeli actions as intensely as he roots for the Israel Defense Forces to destroy Hamas.
6) The moral opprobrium for Palestinian rockets raining down on Israeli towns falls entirely on the Palestinians and their enablers.
7) Israel has made astounding tactical mistakes, including the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, long years of passively enduring rockets, and tacit acceptance of elaborate smuggling tunnels from Egypt to Gaza.
8) The IDF has learned from tactical mistakes made in 2006.
9) Still, the Israeli war effort remains problematic. For example, an unnamed Israeli defense official was quoted saying "Hamas knows our demands, and there's no use to talking about them publicly." Since when does one signal military intentions to the enemy and hide them from one's own population?
10) The Israeli goal should be victory, not ending terrorism.
11) The Bush administration must not save Hamas.
12) Nor should the Obama administration save Hamas.
Source: National Review Online
By Perry Stein Prominent conservative activist and Middle East expert Daniel Pipes took the podium last night in front of an audience of more than 50 people inside the Laboratory Sciences Building with a speech titled “Vanquishing the Islamist Enemy and Helping the Moderate Muslim Ally.” Pipes’ views on the threat of Islamism—or the view that Islam is not only a religion but also a political ideology—have been met with controversy from people across the political spectrum. According to sophomore Caleb Posner, the events manager for the Conservative Leadership Association, which hosted the speech, Pipes’ words are always truthful. “What he says is 100 percent grounded in fact and is the product of incredible scholarship,” Posner said. “However, what he says is often politically incorrect at times.” Pipes’ address centered on what he believes is the immediate need to confront radical Islam before it significantly impacts Western democracy and the Western way of life. Pipes quickly made the distinction that not all Muslims are Islamists and that to classify all as such would be erroneous. He later did state, however, that based on his research and surveys, one in every eight Muslims worldwide is an Islamist, equaling about 150 million Islamists. Read more ...Source: Student LifeDaniel Pipes
Latest recipient of The MASH Award
 "Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West" (2005)The recent distribution of some 28 million copies in the United States of the 2005 documentary Obsession has stirred heated debate about its contents. One lightening rod for criticism concerns my on-screen statement that "10 to 15 percent of Muslims worldwide support militant Islam." The Muslim Public Affairs Council declared this estimate both "utterly unsubstantiated" and "completely without evidence." Masoud Kheirabadi, a professor at Portland State University and author of children's books about Islam, informed the Oregonian newspaper that there's no basis for my estimate. Daniel Ruth, writing in the Tampa Tribune, asked dubiously how I arrived at this number. "Did he take a poll? That would be enlightening! What does ‘support' for radical Islam mean? Pipes provides no answers." Actually, Pipes did provide answers. He collected and published many numbers at "How Many Islamists?" a weblog entry initiated in May 2005. First, though, an explanation of what I meant by Muslims who "support militant Islam": these are Islamists, individuals who seek a totalistic, worldwide application of Islamic law, the Shari‘a. In particular, they seek to build an Islamic state in Turkey, replace Israel with an Islamic state and the U.S. constitution with the Koran. As with any attitudinal estimate, however, several factors impede approximating the percentage of Islamists. Read more ...Source: FrontPage Magazine
By Daniel Pipes Aafia Siddiqui, 36, is a Pakistani mother of three, an alumna of MIT, and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Brandeis University. She is also accused of working for Al-Qaeda and was charged last week in New York City with attempting to kill American soldiers. Her arrest serves to remind how invisibly most Islamist infiltration proceeds. In particular, an estimated forty Al-Qaeda sympathizers or operatives have sought to penetrate U.S. intelligence agencies. Such a well-placed infiltrator can wreck great damage explains a former CIA chief of counterintelligence, Michael Sulick: "In the war on terrorism, intelligence has replaced the Cold War's tanks and fighter planes as the primary weapon against an unseen enemy." Islamist moles, he argues, "could inflict far more damage to national security than Soviet spies," for the U.S. and Soviet Union never actually fought each other, whereas now, "our nation is at war." Read more ...Source: FrontPage MagazineAafia Siddiqui
Latest recipient of the Distinguished Islamofascist Award
 By Daniel Pipes Israel has lived the past sixty years more intensively than any other country. Its highs – the resurrection of a two-thousand year old state in 1948, history's most lopsided military victory in 1967, and the astonishing Entebbe hostage rescue in 1976 – have been triumphs of will and spirit that inspire the civilized world. Its lows have been self-imposed humiliations: unilateral retreat from Lebanon and evacuation of Joseph's Tomb, both in 2000; retreat from Gaza in 2005; defeat by Hizbullah in 2006; and the corpses-for-prisoners exchange with Hizbullah last week. An outsider can only wonder at the contrast. How can the authors of exhilarating victories repeatedly bring such disgrace upon themselves, seemingly oblivious to the import of their actions? One clue has to do with the dates. The highs took place during the state's first three decades, the lows occurred since 2000. Something profound has changed. The strategically brilliant but economically deficient early state has been replaced by the reverse. Yesteryear's spy masterminds, military geniuses, and political heavyweights have seemingly gone into high tech, leaving the state in the hands of corrupt, short-sighted mental midgets. How else can one account for the cabinet meeting on June 29, when 22 out of 25 ministers voted in favor of releasing five live Arab terrorists, including Samir al-Kuntar, 45, a psychopath and the most notorious prisoner in Israel's jails, plus 200 corpses? In return, Israel got the bodies of two Israel soldiers murdered by Hizbullah. Even The Washington Post wondered at this decision. Read more ...Source: Jerusalem postH/T: Gramfan
 MEK members display their flag as they pass
through a U.S. checkpoint in Iraq in 2003By Daniel Pipes As the United Nations mandate that legitimizes the presence of U.S forces in Iraq expires on December 31, 2008, a humanitarian and strategic disaster is coming into view. The fate of about 3,500 anti-regime Iranians will be decided in the course of status-of-forces negotiations between Washington and Baghdad. They are members of the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK; it is also called the People's Mojahedin of Iran, or PMOI), the leading Iranian opposition group. Based at Camp Ashraf in central Iraq where they are recognized as "protected persons" under the Fourth Geneva Convention, they have since 2004 been under the protection of U.S. military forces. According to the Convention Against Torture of 1984, to which the U.S. government is a party, expiration of the UN mandate does not end the American obligation to continue to protect MEK members in Iraq. Further, the MEK's network of supporters inside Iran have provided invaluable intelligence. For example, it exposed Tehran's nuclear ambitions and its shipments of roadside bombs to Iraq. Recognizing this assistance, a "Memorandum for the Record" by Lt. Col. Julie S. Norman dated August 24, 2006, noted that "The PMOI has always warned against the Iranian regime's meddling and played a positive role in exposing the threats and dangers of such interventions; their intelligence has been very helpful in this regard and in some circumstances has helped save the lives of [U.S.] soldiers." Read more ...Source: FrontPage Magazine
By Daniel Pipes As one of the few pro-U.S. and pro-Israel voices in the field of Middle East studies, I find my views get frequently mangled by others in the field – thus I have had to post a 5,000-word document titled "Department of Corrections (of Others' Factual Mistakes about Me)" on my website. Usually, the precise evolution of such mistakes escapes me. Recently, however, I discovered just how one developed in three steps and confronted the two academics who made the errors. Their unwillingness to acknowledge their errors illustrates the mixture of incompetence and arrogance of Middle East studies as it is, unfortunately, too often practiced in the academy. (1) In "The Muslims are Coming! The Muslims are Coming!" National Review, November 19, 1990, I wrote about some of the reasons for Western fears of Muslims: Muslims have gone through a trauma during the last two hundred years – the tribulation of God's people who unaccountably found themselves at the bottom of the heap. The strains have been enormous and the results agonizing; Muslim countries have the most terrorists and the fewest democracies in the world. Only Turkey (and sometimes Pakistan) is fully democratic, and even there the system is frail. Everywhere else, the head of government got to power through force[,] his own or someone else's. The result is endemic instability plus a great deal of aggression. Despite such problems, I concluded, "none of this justifies seeing Muslims as the paramount enemy." Read more ...Source: History News Network
By Daniel Pipes "Since 9/11, there have been over 2,300 arrests connected to Islamist terrorism in Europe in contrast to about 60 in the United States." Thus writes Marc Sageman in his influential new book, Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century (University of Pennsylvania Press). This one statistical comparison inspires Sageman, in a chapter he calls "The Atlantic Divide," to draw sweeping conclusions about the superior circumstances of American Muslims. "The rate of arrests on terrorism charges per capita among Muslims is six times higher in Europe than in the United States." The reason for this discrepancy, he argues, "lies in the differences in the extent to which these respective Muslim communities are radicalized." He praises "American cultural exceptionalism," admonishes European governments "to avoid committing mistakes that risk the loss of good will in the Muslim community," and urges Europeans to learn from Americans. Sageman's argument rehashes what Spencer Ackerman wrote in a New Republic cover story of late 2005, when he found that "Europe's growing Muslim culture of alienation, marginalization, and jihad isn't taking root" in the United States. Read more ...Source: FrontPage Magazine
Westerners opposed to the application of the Islamic law (the Shari'a) watch with dismay as it goes from strength to strength in their countries – harems increasingly accepted, a church leader endorsing Islamic law, a judge referring to the Koran, clandestine Muslim courts meting out justice. What can be done to stop the progress of this medieval legal system so deeply at odds with modern life, one that oppresses women and turns non-Muslims into second-class citizens? A first step is for Westerners to mount a united front against the Shari'a. Facing near-unanimous hostility, Islamists back down. For one example, note the retreat last week by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in a dispute concerning guide dogs used by the blind. Muslims traditionally consider dogs impure animals to be avoided, creating an aversion that becomes problematic when Muslim store-owners or taxi drivers deny service to blind Westerners relying on service dogs. I have collected 15 such cases on my weblog, at "Muslim Taxi Drivers vs. Seeing-Eye Dogs": five from the United States (New Orleans, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Brooksville, Fl.; Everett, Wash.); four from Canada (Vancouver, twice in Edmonton, Fort McMurray, Alberta); three from the United Kingdom (Cambridge, twice in London); two from Australia (Melbourne, Sydney); and one from Norway (Oslo). Read more ...Source: FrontPage Magazine
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Who is the most important European alive today? I nominate the Dutch politician Geert Wilders. I do so because he is best placed to deal with the Islamic challenge facing the continent.
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