Arab Dictators: Why Are They Hiding the Newest Truth?

by Khaled Abu Toameh

Jordanian citizens learned about the real circumstances in which the intelligence officer was killed from foreign media outlets, first and foremost Al-Jazeera.

It was the first time they were told that the Jordanian General Intelligence Department was working closely with the CIA against Al-Qaeda and other Islamic fundamentalist groups.

The revelations have since embarrassed the Jordanian authorities, whose spokesmen and media continue their attempts to conceal or downplay the role their security forces are playing in the fight against Muslim terrorists in different parts of the world.

In announcing the death of General Intelligence officer Captain Sharif Ali bin Zeid, the Jordanian government said that he was on a "humanitarian mission" in Afghanistan. The officer was killed together with seven CIA employees when a Jordanian citizen blew himself up in the eastern Afghan province ofKhost.

The suicide bomber, identified as Hammam Khalil al-Balawi, had duped the Jordanian authorities into thinking that he had important information that could lead them and the CIA to Al-Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Why are most of the Arab dictators afraid or reluctant to publicly admit that their countries are at war with Al-Qaeda and other Islamic fundamentalist groups?

Failure to acknowledge that they are part of this war underscores the state of fear and denial that the Arab dictatorships continue to live in with regards to the threat from Islamic radicals. These rulers and their governments, the majority of whom are unelected, are actually afraid of the Arab and Islamic masses.

They are afraid of exposing their connection to the US because, for decades, these dictatorships have been telling the masses that Israel and the US are their real enemies, and not Al-Qaeda and the terrorists who have hijacked Islam.

Additionally, these dictatorships are afraid of being accused by Arabs and Muslims of participating in a "war of Crusaders and infidels" against Islam. This is because the majority of the Arab and Islamic regimes have been telling their constituents that this is actually a war waged by the West against Islam.

There is also no reason why the US should be helping these regimes in concealing the truth. The battle against Al-Qaeda and Islamic terror groups cannot be won as long as Washington's allies in the Arab and Islamic world continue to hide the truth from their people.

It is time for these dictatorships to stop their double talk and to openly admit that moderate Muslims are at war with a tiny minority of thugs and murderers who have hijacked their religion.

The Jordanians are not alone in trying to hide the fact that their security services are actively involved in the war against Islamic fundamentalism.

The Palestinian Authority, whose security forces are waging a war on Hamas supporters and extremists in the West Bank, has also been doing its utmost to hide its security coordination with Israel.

In fact, the Palestinian Authority continues to insist that it never helped Israel during the last war in the Gaza Strip although Israeli security officials have confirmed that such assistance had been provided.

Moreover, the Palestinian Authority maintains that the massive crackdown that its forces have been waging against Hamas in the West Bank over the past few years is solely directed against "criminals" and "outlaws."

Similarly, the Saudis, Egyptians, Moroccans and Yemenis have also been very reluctant to expose their close ties with the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies involved in the battle against Islamic fundamentalism.

Forces belonging to these countries have been involved in the fight against radical Islam on various fronts such as the border between Afghanistan andPakistan and the one between Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

Hudson New York

Iran: Victory of Blood over the Sword

Yesterday, Shias all over the world commemorated the 7th-century martyrdom of Hussein Ibn Ali, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad.

Hussein’s martyrdom is to Shias what the crucifixion of Jesus is to Christians: The iconic event of the faith, the story of a man embracing martyrdom for a just cause.

“Blood” after all, proves victorious “over the sword,” the Shia saying goes, and immortal is the one who chooses an honorable death rather than live in dishonor.

Millions of men and women, young and old, religious and secular, rich and poor, went into the streets all over Iran yesterday to commemorate Hussein and to protest an unjust regime.

Iranian police have confirmed the deaths of eight protesters, including the nephew of opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi. They are the latest martyrs of the Iranian nation in its fight against the so-called Islamic Republic.

Thirty years after the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the regime in Tehran is neither Islamic nor republican; instead, it is fast degenerating into a brutal military dictatorship headed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and the Basij militia.

Militarization of the Islamic Republic was accelerated after the fraudulent June 12 presidential election that secured Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a second term in office. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Iranians assembled to protest the rigged electoral process — corrupt even by the Islamic Republic’s low standards — shouting, “Give us our vote back!”

Rather than attend to the grievances of the public, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei arrogantly endorsed Ahmadinejad’s presidency and has since indirectly authorized the IRGC and the Basij to terrorize the Iranian public into submission, though he tries not to take direct responsibility.

For a time repression seemed to work, and the protest movement was losing momentum. Wave after wave of crackdowns on protesters — along with the imprisonment, rape, and murder of political activists — reduced public participation in street protests, while the activists’ “confessions” of collaboration with foreign powers created an atmosphere of Stalinist terror all over Iran.

But Khamenei’s efforts may prove vain.

The older generation, which led the revolution of 1979, along with the sons and daughters of the revolution, chose the commemoration of Hussein’s revolt against injustice to protest the unjust regime.

Facing riot police and special forces, the protesters were armed with green banners and the greatest weapon available to them: the sense of moral superiority derived from a just cause. Superior in numbers, they seized police cars and freed demonstrators held captive. They confronted the riot police, asking them why they were shooting at members of their own families. Weeping youths in anti-riot gear begged for mercy.

Those eight people who sacrificed their lives for the sake of freedom have not died in vain: A week from now, a new wave of protesters will go to the streets to mourn them, no doubt igniting another round of demonstrations against the regime.

Should the regime choose to kill more of its people, the cycle will continue, and members of the armed forces will eventually recognize that they are not taking aim at foreign enemies but are killing their own people. And indeed, there are already reports of policemen refusing to obey their commanding officers’ orders to shoot the protesters.

But the victory of blood over the sword may not be close at hand. Members of the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij have significantly greater political and economic stakes in the regime’s survival than do the police and the regular army.

We may yet witness another phase of the Islamic Republic as it degenerates into a naked military dictatorship, purporting to do God’s work on earth and to pave the way for the Shia messiah.

Revolutionary victory won’t be easily attained without a long struggle. The revolution of 1979 was the result of several decades of revolutionary activity, beginning in the 1950s and accelerating through the 1960s and 1970s. Similarly, 2009 is not the beginning of the end for the Islamic tyranny in Tehran. But it could be the end of the beginning of the necessary revolution.

— Ali Alfoneh is a visiting research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

NRO

The Middle East: Reporting an Enigma

By Alan Caruba

When President Obama delivers a speech on why he is going to send more thousands of U.S. troops and spend more billions on the eight-year-old conflict in Afghanistan, it would be a good idea to better understand why so much of what is reported from the Middle East suffers a great disconnect from the truth.

In 1998, Joris Luyendijk , a Dutch student who had studied Arabic at Cairo University for a year, was offered a job as a Middle East correspondent for a Dutch news agency despite having no experience as a reporter. What followed was his real education about the Middle East and the way it is presented to the West by the news media.

His book about that experience, “People Like Us: Misrepresenting the Middle East” was initially published in the Netherlands in 2006 and has since then it has been translated and published in Hungary, Italy, Denmark and Germany. In October an English edition was published by Soft Skull Press, an imprint of Counterpoint, a Berkeley, California publisher.

Having begun my career as a journalist, I was interested to learn what Luyendijk had taken from his years hopping around the Middle East before and after 9/11 and during the two Iraq wars waged by the U.S. to resolve a problem called Saddam Hussein.

For anyone digesting the news from his morning newspaper or watching it on television, suspecting that it might be biased or wrong, this book that focuses on reporting from the Middle East is a revelation because Luyendijk strives mightily to expose the way the news is manipulated by all the parties involved.

Covering his experiences from 1998 to 2003, the author is refreshingly candid, admitting that, despite his student year in Cairo, he had little or no real understanding of Egypt or the rest of the Middle East.

There is, however, one thing that anyone can understand. The Middle East is composed of dictatorships and the sole purpose of each one is to survive. To do that, their people must be constantly indoctrinated and fearful. That is made possible by rendering them, individually and as a group, powerless. There simply is no such thing as justice or the opportunity to express an opinion in opposition to the leader.

Significantly, those living in the Middle East cannot make an informed judgment of what is occurring around them because they operate two points of view that are very real to them. First is a widely accepted sense of victimhood, and, second, they believe that Israel, ultimately, is manipulating the entire world!

Conversely, Americans who have no contact with the Middle East beyond the headlines and snapshots of bloodshed and warfare are comparably unable to make informed judgments about a people who differ among themselves in many ways.

The Middle East is very different from the West and Luyendijk believes that few in the West are even vaguely aware that those who live there live in a parallel universe; one that functions by the rules of ruthless dictatorships, by tribes, and by a religion that is hostile to all others.

Democracy is not likely to take root in the Middle East and this can be traced to the prevailing religion of the region, Islam. The only reason democracy occurred in Turkey is because the founder of the modern state, Ataturk, isolated Islam from the conduct of governance and that has been backed up by an army that has, thus far, ensured the separation.

More at Facts Not Fantasy

Walid Phares: UN Must Defend Democracies, Not Dictators

As President Barack Obama was addressing the General Assembly of the United Nations, just before Libya's dictator Moammar Gadhafi called for the demise of the Security Council and followed later by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's challenge of international law as we know it, my conclusion has become clear: Indeed the United Nations must reform, and significantly, and here is why:

Gadhafi, whom many Arab leaders called the fata alk majnun (the crazy man), ranted for an hour and a half in front of the General Assembly, accusing the organization of being unfair and intervening against some aggressors and not all perpetrators of human rights abuse. The dictator is right in this particular diagnosis but not in the menu he offered.

The man whose regime invaded and occupied northern Chad for years, looting that poor country's resources; who sent terrorists into Tunisia and Egypt; who kidnapped and assassinated Lebanese Shiite leaders, who ordered the blowing up of PanAm 103 over Lockerbie; and has been funding violence from the Philippines to Suriname is not exactly the head of state who should be lecturing the world community in Manhattan, but answering a court investigation in the Hague.

Ahmadinejad, another lecturer on fundamental rights at the U.N. does not stand on higher moral grounds either. His Pasdaran are behind terror in Iraq, train and funds Hezbollah in Lebanon, and were indicted by Argentina for bloody massacres across the globe. Ahmadinejad's own population is savagely oppressed, as evidenced by this summer’s repression of protests.

This surreal Picasso-like roster of dictators turned "U.N.-preachers," democracies leaders, and particularly the U.S. president should have responded with clarity and boldness, not just in style but in substance and demanded even more serious reforms.

The world changed in 2001. Al-Qaida gave evil a face. But al-Qaida is just the tip of the iceberg.

It presents us with the ideology of jihadism, an ideology that divides the world. Speeches by Osama Bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and other leaders of this jihadist movement convey clearly that either you are in Dar El Islam (as portrayed by al-Qaida, more akin to Dar El Taliban than Dar El Islam), or you are in Dar El Kuffar, the infidels.

There is a new worldwide organization threatening to divide humanity and calling for the opposing side to be persecuted and oppressed. For them 9/11 was legitimate. It is an ideology that accepts the principle of genocide.

It is permissible to kill children, women, the elderly, and non-combatants. In Algeria 145,000 Arab Muslim Sunnis were massacred by the Salafists, the allies of al-Qaida, throughout the 1990s.

But instead of the U.N. mobilizing to prevent this new jihad and neo-Nazi ideology from taking hold, the U.N. secretary-general said in Davos on Jan. 23 that the United Nations is neutral, equidistant from the war on terror and terrorists.

This is a United Nations that has completely abandoned its original principles.

Read more here,,,,

Source: NewsMax

Arab Dictators: Journalists on Trial

By Khaled Abu Toameh

For decades, the profession of journalism has been one of the most dangerous in the Arab world.

The truth and facts are often sacrificed for the sake of “preserving the higher national interests of the people” and “to avoid playing into the hands of the enemies of the people.”

A journalist is taught that his main mission is to be loyal first and foremost to his president or monarch and then to his government and homeland.

In this world, Arab dictators are above any form of criticism. When was the last time one read an article in a newspaper published in an Arab capital that criticized the leader of that country?

Not only are journalists and editors banned from criticizing their leaders, they are also prohibited from publishing any material that may, God forbid, be interpreted as “offensive” to His Excellency or His Majesty.

The official media in the Arab world is often under the control of the Ministry of Information, which appoints editors and journalists, and pays their salaries. Under the Arab dictatorships, there has never been room for freedom of expression.

These dictatorships have their own media, which actually serve as a mouthpiece for the ruler and his family and close friends.

In Morocco, for instance, five local journalists will go on trial later this month after they published articles about King Mohammed VI’s health. The journalists work for Al-Jarida, Al-Ayam, Al-Oula and Al-Mishaal newspapers. Read more here ...

Source: Hudson New York