 A fine article by Bertram Wyatt-Brown, "Lawrence of Arabia: Image and Reality," in The Journal of the Historical Society, December 2009, pp, 515-48, traces the reputation of T. E. Lawrence (1888-1935) through the near-century since his remarkable exploits during World War I and his famed recounting of those events in Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926). Wyatt-Brown's account of Lawrence's role since 2006, when he had a deep impact on the American expeditionary force in Iraq, came as news to me. He focuses on Lawrence's 2,800-word summary of lessons learned in war, published in The Arab Bulletin, August 20, 1917, and bearing the supremely modest title, "Twenty-Seven Articles."
In it, Lawrence offers his "personal conclusions, arrived at gradually while [he] worked in the Hejaz and now put on paper as stalking horses for beginners in the Arab armies." He adds that the rules "are meant to apply only to Bedu [Bedouin]; townspeople or Syrians require totally different treatment." His advice includes such insights as "Win and keep the confidence of your leader," "Be shy of too close relations with the subordinates," and "Cling tight to your sense of humour." Wyatt-Brown explains the recent role of this slight, archaic document: A renewed attention to Lawrence's military understanding of Middle Eastern insurgency may have been helpful in the reform of U.S. policy in Iraq, once General David Howell Petraeus took charge. According to journalist Linda Robinson, before assuming that command, the general had studied Lawrence's writings at night.
He took special notice of the difficulties Lawrence had faced in organizing the Bedouins. Petraeus had his senior officers read "The Twenty-Seven Articles" and Seven Pillars of Wisdom. … The chief reform under Petraeus's orders was in the conduct of officers and soldiers toward Iraqi leaders and civilians and in making armed alliances with Sunnis willing to break with Al Qaeda. …
Petraeus soon recognized that the Iraqi power structure was rooted in tribal politics. Policies had to accommodate that Middle Eastern arrangement. … He adopted a major cornerstone of Lawrence's understanding of guerilla warfare. In the Army War College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Petraeus, David Kilcullen, and other strategists tirelessly worked out the new strategy, with Lawrence's observations providing a helpful point of departure. Like Lawrence himself, Petraeus used lavish distributions of money as the lubricant of good relations with the Iraqi tribesmen. He also adhered to Lawrence's dictum, "Do not try to do too much with your own hands" even if you can perform the mission better than the native forces. The general recast it as "the host nation doing something tolerably is normally better than us doing it well. "Twenty-Seven Articles," writes Wyatt-Brown, "has become something of a bible for current American military experts dealing with the problems of occupying and controlling" Iraq. Indeed, Lawrence earned the compliment of being almost plagiarized without a line of acknowledgment in the U.S. Army field manual for counterinsurgency. With Petraeus offering the Foreword, the document was compiled at Fort Leavenworth in 2005. Conrad Crane, a War College historian, and Lt. Col. John A. Nagl led a team of experts. When the University of Chicago Press published an edition, it received wide coverage that nearly made it a bestseller. A considerable number of passages, however, were paraphrasings of Lawrence's work, according to anthropologist Roberto Gonzalez. Petraeus himself was willing to credit Lawrence for helping him develop his counterinsurgency ideas. The general pointed out in an article in Military Review that Lawrence had given this advice: "It is their war, and you are to help them, not win it for them," a notion, Petraeus declared, as "relevant in the 21st century as it was in his own time in the Middle East during World War I." Wyatt-Brown sees the Lawrence-inspired shift as hugely consequential, perhaps saving "an enormous number of American and Iraqi lives." Ironically, "Lawrence's insights, though far less prominent, were more significant in [the American] Middle Eastern engagement than they had been in his own day." He credits Lawrence's deep insights into tribal culture to several factors: "years of training in the study of the Near East, its history, and its traditions," learning colloquial Arabic, visiting the region in 1909 and traveling over 1,100 miles mostly by foot. These interests, Wyatt-Brown concludes, "grew out of his unconventional love of the Bedouins and their habitat." Comments: (1) Traveling "over 1,100 miles, mostly by foot" in the Middle East constitutes an enviable education in itself. (2) Great strategists sometimes have unusual, even eccentric backgrounds. (3) The most difficult thing for a Westerner to learn about the Middle East – even more so than the Arabic language – is the abiding role of tribal culture. For a recent study, see Culture and Conflict in the Middle East (Prometheus) by Philip Carl Salzman, a book I have highly recommended. (4) Military technology changed so much over the past century that contemporary warfare appears completely unlike World War I. But the human dimension hardly changed; thus does a Clausewitz or a Lawrence retain his importance. Daniel Pipes (See also this piece previously posted )
 Jordan has demanded that Israel hand over some of the famous Dead Sea Scrolls. The kingdom claims Israel seized the scrolls illegally from a museum in East Jerusalem during the Six-Day War in 1967. Israel seized the scrolls and other antiquities from the Palestinian Museum, which was managed by Jordan in east Jerusalem when it occupied this part of the city in 1967,” said Rafea Harahsheh of Jordan’s antiquities department. The scrolls were discovered by a Bedouin shepherd in 1947. The famous parchments number 900 documents and biblical texts belonging to the Essenes, a breakaway Jewish sect that lived in the craggy hills above the Dead Sea where the scrolls were discovered. They provide a rare insight into life in the Holy Land and the emergence of early Christian groups in the area. The Jordanians recently asked the Canadian government to seize some of the scrolls while they were on display in Toronto. They have also appealed to the United Nations in support of their case. Israel has refused to discuss handing back the scrolls. Its foreign ministry told the Jerusalem Post, “Jordan’s occupation of the West Bank was never recognized by the international community and the kingdom relinquished all claims on the territories. The scrolls have no relation to Jordan or the Jordanian people.” Jordan says Israel seized 14 scrolls kept in a museum in the eastern sector of Jerusalem when its army occupied that Jordanian-controlled part of the city in the 1967 war. Israel annexed eastern Jerusalem soon after the war and now says the entire city is its unified, eternal capital. Israel’s annexation of Jerusalem has not been internationally recognized. ”We are very keen on getting them (the scrolls) by reminding different countries of the international accords on cultural wealth they signed,” Maha Khatib, Jordan’s tourism minister, told the AP, citing the 1954 Hague Convention governing the protection of cultural property during armed conflict. Earlier this month, Canada refused a Jordanian request to stop the scrolls’ return to Israel, after they were displayed at a Toronto museum. It also refused a similar request made by the Palestinian Authority, according to Canadian diplomats. Khatib said Jordan has given up hope that Israel would directly give back the more than 2,000-year-old scrolls and now hoped Western nations would return them to the Arab kingdom when they host them in exhibitions. The scrolls include the earliest known version of portions of the Hebrew Bible and have shed important light on Judaism and the beginnings of Christianity. Their origin is the subject of an insular, but notoriously heated, academic debate. They will next be exhibited in Milwaukee, Wisc., starting Jan. 22. With thanks to Vlad Tepes 
 Jordan has tried to reclaim the Dead Sea Scrolls from Israel, an official said. In a complaint made to the United Nations Jordan said that the ancient texts were seized from the Palestinian Museum when Israel captured east Jerusalem in the Six Day War. “The Government has legal documents that prove Jordan owns the scrolls,” Rafea Harahsheh, of the country’s antiquities department, said. The scrolls had been on display in Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum. Jordan asked Canada to seize the texts under the 1954 Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict.
A Canadian Foreign Ministry spokesman said that it was not appropriate to intervene.
 The visit of Bulgarian Prime Minister Boiko Borissov to Israel this week is a timely reminder that Israel's problems with Islam are not unique. Like Israel, Bulgaria was ruled over by the Ottoman Empire, which exported their population to Bulgaria, oppressed the native Bulgarians, seized their lands and attempted to become the dominant majority. And when the Ottoman Empire lost control over Bulgaria, it left behind a huge Muslim population in Bulgaria.The key difference between Bulgaria and Israel, is that Bulgaria since the 1870's forced much of its Turkic Muslim population to leave. As a result millions of Turkic Muslims left Bulgaria, leaving it a quieter place than neighboring Yugoslavia or Russia, or for that matter modern day France. Muslim clothing was banned, mosques were torn down and lands held by the Ottoman Muslim settlers were returned to native Bulgarians. Today Bulgaria still has a troublesome Muslim minority of under a million, led by Ahmet Dogan, and backed by Turkish intelligence, which under Islamist PM Erdogan has branched out into promoting Jihad, much as Pakistan had. But despite Turkish attempts to intervene in Bulgaria, the country's Prime Minister, Boiko Borissov is a staunchly anti-Muslim leader, who has challenged Turkey's EU bid over its expulsion of Bulgarian in the 1920's.Bulgaria is an example and a warning not just to Israel, but to Europe, Russia, Australia, America and many other parts of the world as well.
Had Bulgaria not made life uncomfortable for Muslims, its fate in the 1990's would have probably resembled that of Yugoslavia, torn apart by foreign backed civil war and then carved up by Clinton and Albright. That same fate is now overtaking Israel and will overtake Europe as well.
That is because Israel's Muslim problem is not unique. Israel, like so many other lands, was overrun by Muslim conquerors who repressed the native Jewish population and settled their own population in its stead. The only unique thing about Israel's dilemma is that when the Ottoman Empire was defeated, Israel did not receive its freedom. Instead a British Mandate that was supposed to create a Jewish state, instead tried to create an Arab client state by expanding Arab immigration to Israel, while restricting Jewish immigration.
Had Israel received its freedom after WW1 when its Ottoman overlords departed, it would have never been overrun by Egyptian and Syrian Arabs who were magically transformed into "Palestinians" in the 70's at the behest of the KGB.
Nor would the Holocaust have claimed a fraction of the lives that it did, had Israel existed as an independent nation capable of taking in refugees, instead of having its ports shut to refugees by a British Empire more interested in appeasing Muslims and using them to establish client states under their control. And the worldwide Jihad and Oil for Terror are the aftereffects of British and American appeasement and coddling of Muslim desert sheiks then.
But the past is in the past. The challenge of the future is to learn from it. The long term effects of Muslim expansionism around the world has embedded Muslim minorities in countries across Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Those minorities have always served as a local powder keg, which is now being lit with the help of Saudi petrodollars. Now a new wave of Islamic expansionism through immigration and Jihad is spreading even into regions that had never known the tyranny of Islam such as Australia, North and South America; as well as Europe where Islam had not succeeded in taking root before.
The toxic brew of religious supremacism and nationalist racism represented by Islamic expansionism is a threat to nearly every country in the world, whether they choose to admit it or not. And while Israel's troubles with Islam are more likely to become front page news, because its presence some 700 miles from Mecca is a perennial thumb in the eye of the Jihad-- it is also the canary in the coal mine for the rest of the world.
Islamism insures that Muslims cannot co-exist with non-Muslims except under a harsh dictatorship.
Which leaves free nations with a choice between tyranny and removing the Muslim minority within its borders. The absence of Islam within one's borders does not guarantee peace, but the presence of Islam insures that conflict will come sooner or later. The examples of that are unfortunately all too numerous across the globe, across entire hemispheres where blood is being spilled in the name of Islam.
From suicide bombings to honor killings, from Muslim insurgencies in the countryside to Islamist parties creeping in from within, from Sharia at the point of a sharpened knife to riots in the streets-- where there is Islamism, there can be no peace.
Israel's great mistake was its belief that it could co-exist with Muslims, and for its entire existence has bent over backward to accommodate them. From accepting the UN Partition Plan to sending troops to urge fleeing Arabs to return to Israel, to leaving the Temple Mount in Muslim hands, to the entire disastrous attempt to negotiate a peace with terror by agreeing to the creation of a terrorist state within its borders-- Israel's folly has been to seek peace with an ideology that uses the promise of peace as a lure to convince you to cut your own throat.
Where Islam exists in a nation, it will sooner or later either be suppressed or it will come to dominate. That is a scenario that every nation with a Muslim minority must understand and address, or it will become a Muslim nation with the native population reduced to an oppressed minority or butchered in the night. A totalitarian ideology cannot be made peace with. Either you will defeat it, or it will defeat you.
 by Alan Caruba The failed Christmas bomber attack was yet another wake-up call for Americans who have slipped into a self-induced coma regarding Islam’s constant threat to the nation and the West. Despite the post-9/11 attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, President Bush and now President Obama have both repeatedly asserted the absurd notion that Islam is “a religion of peace.”
It is, in fact, a religion of conquest and one in which the religion and the state are one. To live in a Muslim nation is to live under Sharia law in which conversion to another religion is punished by death. “When Asia Was the World” by Stewart Gordon is an interesting book about life in Asia during the years 500 to 1500 of the Common Era. “Buddhism and Islam arose and spread along Asia’s far-flung trade routes. So did luxury goods, such as silk, pearls, spices, medicines, glass, and simple things like rice and sugar.” “Two centuries before Ibn Fadlan traveled (921-922 CE) through this region, the overall borders of the Muslim world had been set in one of the fastest, broadest conquests in human history.” “Between 630 CE and 680 CE, Islamic armies swept north from Mecca across what is present-day Jordan, Palestine, and Syria and east across Iraq, then fought in Persia and attacked south into Yemen. By 720 CE, Muslim armies had successfully attacked Egypt, North Africa, and Spain and had conquered several caravan cities, Samarkand, Tashkent, Bukhara and Khwarizm. There, however, the conquest stopped.” As the memoir of Ibn Battula (1325-1356 CE) revealed, “Every king was surrounded by rivals, factions, squabbling nobles, and a necessary but unwieldy bureaucracy. Kings particularly wanted to know about the successful strategies, symbols, and ceremonies in other courts.” In other words, the worlds of these early kings was no safer than our own today when Western leaders must maintain vast intelligence gathering agencies to know what is being plotted in the Middle East and everywhere else in the world. It is therefore essential for America to be led by a President who understands the threat posed by Islam in general and by al Qaeda’s network in particular, but in contrast to that we have a President who intends to close the Guantanamo detention center for non-state enemy combatants, extend the protections of the U.S. Constitution to admitted terrorists given civil trials instead of military tribunals, and was slow to respond to the Fort Hood murders and the Christmas day attempted airliner bombing. On such events and attitudes does the safety and fate of the nation hangs. It is therefore vital that we pay attention to the voices of those who understand that history turns on winners and losers. “The greatest advantage our opponents enjoy,” writes Ralph Peters,”is an uncompromising strength of will, their readiness to ‘pay any price and bear any burden’ to hurt and humble us. As our enemies’ view of what is permissible in war expands apocalyptically, our self-limiting definitions of allowable targets and acceptable casualties, hostile, civilian and our own, continue to narrow fatefully.” Peters is a retired U.S. Army officer, a journalist who has reported from various war zones, is widely traveled, and an author of 24 books. He is quintessentially politically incorrect. Among the obstacles facing the present generation of Americans, as Peters sees them, are (1) “we simply do not feel endangered”, (2) American’s “collective memory has effectively erased the European-inspired horrors of the last century”, (3) “ending the draft resulted in a superb military, but an unknowing, detached population’, (4) Americans have come to believe in a “catechism of bloodless war”, and (5) “we have become largely a white-collar, suburban society in which a child’s bloody nose is no longer a routine part of growing up, but grounds for a lawsuit.” Americans who passed through our nation’s schools since the 1960s have been neutered because, as Peters notes, “History is no longer taught as a serious subject. As a result, politicians lack perspective; journalists lack meaningful touchstones; and the average person’s sense of warfare has been redefined by media entertainments in which misery, if introduced, is brief.” “We have cheapened the idea of war,” says Peters, forgetting or never knowing the price paid by previous generations to defend the nation and its principles. “More Americans died in one afternoon at Cold Harbor during our Civil War than died in six years in Iraq. Three times as many American troops fell during the morning of June 6, 1944 (D-Day) as have been lost in combat in over seven years in Afghanistan.” While President Obama cited Gandhi in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Peters points out that “Gandhi would not have survived very long in Nazi Germany.” The President made a case for the necessity of some wars, but returned home to spend three months making up his mind to increase our troop presence in Afghanistan and to then tell the enemy that they would be gone in eighteen months. That is astonishingly stupid and reveals the chasm that exists between Obama’s first year in office and the nearly eight years under George W. Bush in which America was spared another attack. “The problem is religion,” says Peters. “Our Islamist enemies are inspired by it, while we are terrified even to talk about it.” History teaches us that Islam has long since plunged those parts of the world over which it holds sway into centuries of backwardness while Europe and the New World grew in power, innovation, and dominance. My view is that Islam is literally fighting for its life despite the more than a billion who subscribe to it. Far from its earliest years when it championed intellectual inquiry, it now holds desperately to the most primitive control over the lives of its adherents and cannot expect a Reformation such as took place in Christianity. The wars to defeat it will take a long time, cost many lives, and be worth every dollar and every casualty. CFP
 Jordan has asked Canada to seize the 2,000-year-old Dead Sea scrolls, on display until Sunday at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, invoking international law in a bid to keep the artifacts out of the hands of Israel until their disputed ownership is settled. Even if Canada ignores the request, it will make other countries think twice before accepting the controversial exhibit. Summoning the Canadian chargé d'affaires in Amman two weeks ago, Jordan cited the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, to which both Jordan and Canada are signatories, in asking Canada to take custody of the scrolls. Jordan claims Israel acted illegally in 1967 when it took the scrolls from a museum in east Jerusalem, which Israel seized from Jordan during the Six-Day War and subsequently occupied. The Hague Convention, which is concerned with safeguarding cultural property during wartime, requires each signatory “to take into its custody cultural property imported into its territory either directly or indirectly from any occupied territory. This shall either be effected automatically upon the importation of the property or, failing this, at the request of the authorities of that territory.” This means Canada must act, says Jordan. “The Government of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan would be grateful if the Government of Canada would confirm … whether it is prepared to assume its international legal responsibility, and the means by which it intends to do so,” it wrote. While confirming that Canada has received a message from Jordan, a spokesperson for the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade said yesterday that “differences regarding ownership of the Dead Sea scrolls should be addressed by Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority. It would not be appropriate for Canada to intervene as a third party.” The ROM's exhibition of the scrolls, mounted “in partnership with the Israel Antiquities Authority,” opened on June 27. While Jordan has acted only recently in asking Canada to take custody of the scrolls, the Palestinian Authority has made its position known since April, when Salam Fayyad, Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority, wrote to Prime Minister Stephen Harper concerning what it argues is the illegal use of the scrolls. More at the Globe and Mail H/T: Smooth Stone
Today the fake government of Iran held their own rally, and they could only find up to 20,000 people to show up. They bought them food, made them signs, told them what to chant, and took them home. Oh yes, they had to bus them in from outside of Tehran, so they were not Tehranis. Pretty slick, eh? Notice one thing, they did not have police shooting at them, they did not have the basij and the irgc fighting them. No riot gear. Yet the Green Movement, which is many times more popular, had about over one million people in July after the fake election and many hundreds of thousand people facing these thugs with no weapons, no protection, no nothing. All they had is disgust and courage. They want a peaceful, secular Iran. They don't want to fight, and they were not fighting. It was the basij and irgc who started the fighting. They pushed them past the point of peaceful protest. They restrained their anger for so long. Sunday was the 7th day after the death (they mourn the dead of Mohammad's grandson and family after 7 days on the day of Ashura, very holy day) of one their reformist Clerics who had criticized this regime ever since the 80's. He was one of the original people of the revolution in 1979. He soon became disenchanted with the way the government was taking shape. Many people in Iran are saddened at his loss, so their is a little division because the protest started on that day. Otherwise, they generally agree with the Green Movement. It is true that not all the people agree or want Iran to change. You will find this in any party, any country, any state, etc. So please don't misquote me as saying everyone! *heh* Even though I have been praying for the Christians in Iran and trying to talk to Congress about human rights issues, I still do not know as much about the Persian history as I would like to know. That is why I have three people I would like to introduce you to that are Iranian bloggers. First I would like to introduce to a friend of mine who we share a blog with, his name is 'Korosh' and his blog is DEMOCRACY FOR IRAN دموكراسي براي ايران. He is a very peace-loving man, and he keeps up with the news pretty well. I met Winston next. He has a site over at The Spirit of Man. He is a rather funny guy. (He has a great sense of humor.) He also desires a regime change. He has been following this history as it happens, so you should really check out his site. I just found this site a couple days ago, but it is very good also. The name of it is The Daily Nite Owl and his latest post is ‘Millions’ Out in Support of Government in Iran? Think Again. This one covers the state run, state owned, state bought people to rally as if they are pro-government. Ha. If they loved the govt so much, why did they have to go out of town to gather people...starting yesterday! I don't want to report anything I cannot confirm, and unfortunately I can't even be sure of this. All of them have relatives and friends in Iran, so I have a tendency to rely on their versions. They coincide with what I've been reading in the papers and seeing on Twitter's #iranelection. Also unfortunately, that's all I have for now. I hope to learn more for tomorrow. Until then, everyone stay safe and pray for our brothers and sisters who are fighting for their own Life and Liberty. Thanks. Update: I have just read a marvelous article at Muslims Against Sharia by SP. The name of the article is Amil Imani: Is Regime Change Coming To Iran? Well written and more in depth than I could write. Great job. May you walk with the LORD always, and when you cannot take another step, may He carry you the rest of the way until you can walk along side Him again.
 If there is an American remaining who does not understand that the Islamic revolution is at war with our nation and the West, then they are in serious denial.
For general purposes, it began with the Iranian revolution that overthrew a U.S. ally, the Shah of Iran, in 1979 and then took our diplomats hostage, holding them for 444 days.
Only recently have we learned that Iran has been providing sanctuary to the family of Osama bin Laden, the founder of al Qaeda, the perpetrators of 9/11 and an earlier attempt to destroy the Twin Towers.
This raises serious questions about the Obama administration’s first year in which considerable effort was made to open diplomatic communications with Iran, the primary source of all the conflicts in the Middle East as the guide and funding source for Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, and the provider of weapons against our troops in Iraq.
No Middle Eastern nation is safe from Iran, least of all its obsession, Israel. Its quest for nuclear weapons is not merely just another nation seeking to join the Nuclear Club.
On Christmas day, Abdul Farouk Abdul-Mutallab, aka Umar Farouk Abdul Madallad, a 23-year-old Nigerian and former engineering student at University College in London, attempted to set off an explosive device over the U.S. as Delta-Northwest Flight 253 was soon to land in Detroit.
Eight years ago this past week, Richard Reed, aka Abdul Raheem and Tariq Raja, tried to blow up a flight from Paris to Miami. There is an important message to be understood from these two incidents and it is the contempt for both Christianity and Judaism that Islam has always displayed. It’s worth remembering that Israel was attacked in 1973 on Yom Kippur, one of its holiest days.
The other message is that al Qaeda’s war on the West and its quest for the establishment of a new caliphate to rule the world is far from over.
The fact that the vast intelligence gathering machinery of the United States, in cooperation with that of many other nations, have not been able to find and kill Osama bin Laden and his colleagues has been a major failure.
In 2007, Strategic Forecasting released a report saying, “All signs indicate this group is no longer functional and cannot be replicated. Whether or not Osama bin Laden is still alive, al Qaeda as it once was is dead.”
There are ample signs of life from al Qaeda and events in Somalia and Yemen suggest that some elements of it are still very much alive. One of Osama bin Laden’s earliest goals was to replace the Saudi Arabian monarchy.
It does not help that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has, during the first year of the Obama administration and its Secretary, Janet Napolitano, refused to even use the word “terrorism” throughout 2009. It does not help that President Obama has gone out of his way to display his sympathies for Islam.
What I have found interesting is the way the perpetrators of acts of terrorism against the West frequently involve well educated Muslims willing to die for Islam, but not before killing large numbers of innocent infidels, “unbelievers”, in places like U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, against the citizens of Madrid, London, and, of course, New York.
After attacking the Taliban in Afghanistan following 9/11 and then ridding Iraq of its dictator, Saddam Hussein, I am beginning to believe that former President Bush had a better understanding of the threat of militant Islam than anyone has ever given him credit for. As war-weary as Americans may be at this point, the fact is we have a fairly substantial military engagement precisely where it needs to be in the heart of the Middle East.
Reducing our troop levels now or even in the near future is very likely a very bad idea.
Something is very wrong in the Obama administration’s decision to give Khalid Sheikh Muhammad a civil trial in New York. It defies the obvious fact that he is an enemy combatant who should be subject to a military tribunal, not the full rights of an American citizen. The decision goes beyond just being stupid. It makes New York City “ground zero” for another spectacular attack in 2010.
In large and small ways, the Obama administration betrays sympathies for al Qaeda’s larger mission and the election of a President who spent several years of his youth in a Muslim nation as the step-son of a Muslim father, and whose very first message as President was an interview with Al Jezeera, the popular television channel that serves the Middle East, does not bode well for our national security.
Al Qaeda has sent America a Christmas message. Are we paying sufficient attention to the one the White House is sending?
 Does anybody besides me remember the remilitarization of the Rhineland?
Or that that unopposed action was followed by the Austrian Anschluss? Or the Obersalzberg conference that brought forth “Peace in Our Time” for Sir Neville Chamberlain?
Or the occupation of the Sudetenland followed closely by the conquest of all Czechoslovakia? And that fateful day, September 1, 1939, when World War Two started in Europe with the invasion of Poland? Obviously not. Perhaps it is fitting that the radio station I am listening to is broadcasting Brahms German Requiem.
If you go back and read the accounts of the times on the German side you find out that Hitler would have retreated at the first sign of opposition. He know that his Wehrmacht was still hollow. Had the French mobilized we might have postponed if not ended World War Two before it started. Has Iran “remilitarized the Rhineland”?
Only time will tell. But you can be sure that if Iraq does not take strong action Iran will seize another oil well. Eventually they will seize the entire field if they do it one well at a time or all at once.
Will the Iraqis mobilize and take the well back?
There are rumors that Iraq has ordered home the families of its security personnel in Damascus.
Debka is reporting that the Obama Administration has gotten Israel to postpone by another six months any military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Can you say “Peace in Our Time”? Except we haven’t even gone to Obertehran and had a conference with the Hitler of our time or his puppet master. Sir Winston Churchill chronicled the rise of Nazi Germany in his The Gathering Storm.
The British were slow to believe what Sir Winston was saying during the rise of Hitler. Are we being slow to believe what Iran’s neighbors are saying about Iran’s rise under the Ayatollahs?I pray we are not chronicling the events prior to the next World War. World Threats
 French President Nicolas Sarkozy handed his Egyptian counterpart Hosni Mubarak a stolen ancient relic on Monday, ending a row between France and Egypt over artifacts taken from a Luxor tomb. "Thank you very much," Mubarak said as Sarkozy presented the painted wall fragment to him, following a formal lunch at the Elysee presidential palace. The small relic is one of five "steles" that were chipped off a wall painting in the ancient Egyptian tomb of Tetiky, dating back some 3,000 years to the Nile kingdom's 18th dynasty. Louvre curators purchased the artifacts in 2000 and 2003 and kept them in storage at the museum. Egypt demanded the return of the stolen fragments in October and broke off relations with the Louvre. Afterwards, France agreed to hand back the works, which are from Luxor's Valley of the Kings. "France is particularly committed to fighting the illegal trafficking of works of art," Sarkozy said, in a statement. The other four artifacts were to be given to the Egyptian embassy in Paris during Mubarak's visit to Paris, French officials said. The French president emphasized that the Louvre museum had acted in good faith when it purchased the artifacts and said that doubts were only raised in November during archaeological work at the site. Egypt had produced photographs from the mid-1970s showing the fragments in place on the tomb's wall. A 1972 UNESCO convention states that artifacts are the property of their country of origin and pieces smuggled out of a country must be returned. Cairo's antiquities department, which controls access to all of Egypt's archaeological sites, had broken off ties with the Louvre and said they would be restored once the relics were returned. Egypt is stepping up demands for the restitution of many relics including the Rosetta Stone on display in the British Museum and the bust of Queen Nefertiti in Berlin's Neues museum. "Everything which was stolen from us should be given back," said Zawi Hawass, the current head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, in January. Museum curators purchased four of the five fragments in 2000 from the collection of French archaeologist Gaston Maspero and a fifth piece was bought in 2003 during a public sale at the Drouot auction house. But Hawass had said that he believed the Paris museum bought the antiquities even though its curators knew they were stolen. "The purchase of stolen steles is a sign that some museums are prepared to encourage the destruction and theft of Egyptian antiquities," he said. Egypt had put on hold a series of conferences organized with the museum and suspended work carried out by the Louvre on the Pharaonic necropolis of Saqqara, south of the capital Cairo. Sarkozy said the restitution of the relics reflected the "quality of relations between the two countries and the excellent cooperation in the field of archaeology." In 2007, France returned hairs from an ancient pharaoh that were nearly sold on the Internet by a French postal worker whose father had acquired them during the scientific examination of the royal mummy 30 years previously. The case prompted Egyptian authorities to bar foreign scientists from examining royal mummies. YNet
 Frontpage Interview’s guests today are Robert Spencer and Moorthy Muthuswamy. Moorthy Muthuswamy is an expert on terrorism in India. He grew up in India, where he had firsthand experience with political Islam and jihad. He moved to America in 1984 to pursue graduate studies. In 1992, he received a doctorate in nuclear physics from Stony Brook University, New York. Since 1999 he has extensively published ideas on neutralizing political Islam’s terror war as it is imposed on unbelievers. He is the author of the new book, Defeating Political Islam: The New Cold War. Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch, a program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is the author of nine books on Islam and Jihad, a weekly columnist for Human Events and Frontpagemag.com, and has led numerous seminars for the U.S. military and intelligence communities. He is the author of the new book, The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran. FP: Moorthy Muthuswamy and Robert Spencer, welcome to Frontpage Interview. I’d like to talk to both of you today about the Yemeni Koran. Moorthy Muthuswamy, let’s begin with you. Tell us about this Yemeni Koran and what it signifies. Muthuswamy: Thank you for the opportunity, Jamie. First, some background. In 1972, during the restoration of the Great Mosque of Sana’a, in Yemen, a gravesite containing a mash of old parchment pages was discovered. It became clear that this parchment hoard is an example of what is sometimes referred to as a “paper grave.” In this case, the site was the resting place for tens of thousands of fragments from close to a thousand different parchment codices of the Koran, the Muslim holy book. Using a technique called “carbon dating,” some of the parchment pages in the Yemeni hoard were dated back to the seventh and eighth centuries, or Islam’s first two centuries. Until now, three ancient copies of the Koran were said to exist. One copy in the Library of Tashkent in Uzbekistan, and another in the Topkapi Museum in Istanbul, Turkey, date from the eighth century.
A copy kept in the British Library in London dates from the late seventh century. But the Sana’a parchment pages are even older. Moreover, these pages are written in a script that originates from the Hijaz—the region of Arabia where the prophet Muhammad purportedly lived. This makes the Yemeni Korans not only the oldest to have survived, but one of the earliest copies of the Koran ever. In 1981, the first scientific undertaking to study the Yemeni Koran was initiated by a group headed by Gerd-R. Puin, a specialist in Arabic calligraphy and Koranic paleography based at Saarland University, in Saarbrücken, Germany. Puin and his group recognized the antiquity of some of the parchment fragments. Their preliminary inspection revealed unconventional verse orderings, minor textual variations, and rare styles of orthography and artistic embellishment. Interestingly, some of the sheets were also palimpsests—versions very clearly written over even earlier, washed-off or erased versions. To quote Puin: “So many Muslims have this belief that everything between the two covers of the Koran is just God’s unaltered word… They like to quote the textual work that shows that the Bible has a history and did not fall straight out of the sky, but until now the Koran has been out of this discussion. The only way to break through this wall is to prove that the Koran has a history too. The Sana’a fragments will help us to do this.” The idea that the Koran is the literal Word of God, perfect, timeless, and permanent, is crucial to Islam, in particular, to the Islamists at the forefront of spreading sharia and jihad.
However, some of the Sana’a fragments revealed small but intriguing aberrations from the standard Koranic text. Indeed, this evidence compels one to conclude that the Muslim holy book has undergone a textual evolution rather than simply the Word of God as revealed in its entirety to the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century. More at FPM
 President Obama's speech in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize showed great growth in his development as a leader. He courageously set forth the principles of just war before those who had assembled to give him a peace prize. The president boldly acknowledged America's very real enemy, Al Qaeda, in a move rarely heard from him prior in public addresses. His remarks also rectified his failure to mention any leaders besides himself in his remarks for the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In doing so, President Obama exhibited humility and grace as he noted the achievements of leaders like Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Pope John Paul II, and Lech Walesa in his Nobel address. President Obama failed in just one key area in his otherwise impressive address. Once again, he proved himself ignorant of history and embarrassingly sycophantic when it comes to the history and nature of Islam. In the very same week in which five American Muslim men were apprehended in Pakistan for intent to wage jihad, President Obama offered these words that so often sprinkle his messages:
“Most dangerously, we see it in the way that religion is used to justify the murder of innocents by those who have distorted and defiled the great religion of Islam, and who attacked my country from Afghanistan. These extremists are not the first to kill in the name of God; the cruelties of the Crusades are amply recorded.” President Obama loves to reference the Crusades as his one Christian parallel for the modern-day Islam of massive religiously-inspired violence. He could not be more wrong. Were Obama to read distinguished Cambridge historian Jonathan Riley-Smith's The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam, he would find an excellent account of what happens when Islam expands it reach and what is required to thwart it. Riley-Smith helpfully counters the modern misconception that Christians attacked Muslims in the Crusades without provocation to seize their lands and forcibly convert them.
All the Crusades met the very criteria of the just wars in which President Obama sought to ground his Nobel speech. They came about in reaction to attacks against Christians or the Church. The First Crusade was called in 1095 to defend against the recent Turksih conquest of Christian Asia Minor as well as the earlier Arab conquest of what until then had been the Christian Holy Land.
The second Crusade developed as a response to the Muslim conquest of Edessa in 1144. The third resulted from the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem and a number of other Christian lands in 1187. In each case, Christians went to war to defend Christians, to combat the attackers, and to rectify egregious wrongs. President Obama continues to show a lack of history education as he likens the Crusaders to the Muslim jihadists. That ignorance is unacceptable. One would hope that in an Ivy League education that included undergraduate years at Columbia and law school at Harvard, the President would have had access to a non-politically correct reading of history. It appears not. More at Townhall
 The Islamist Hamas-run government ruling Gaza has approved a legal change that will allow for the execution of convicted drug dealers, its attorney general said on Monday. "The government has approved a decision to cancel the Zionist (Israeli) military law with regard to drugs and enact Egyptian law 19 of 1962," Mohammed Abed, the attorney general, said in a statement. "The latter law is more comprehensive in terms of crime and criminals and the penalties more advanced, including life sentences and execution."
Egypt administered the Gaza Strip from 1948 until 1967, when Israel seized the territory in the Six-Day War along with the Sinai peninsula, the Golan Heights, the West Bank and east Jerusalem. "The Zionist law included light punishments that encouraged rather than deterred those who take and trade in drugs, and there is no objective, national or moral justification for continuing to apply it," Abed said. Israel withdrew its settlers and soldiers from Gaza in the summer of 2005. Two years later, Hamas seized control after a bloody internal struggle with the secular Fatah party of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas. Abbas' remit has since been limited to the West Bank.
Hamas, meanwhile, has cracked down on drugs, saying it has arrested more than 100 alleged drug dealers and users, with dozens of kilograms (pounds) of contraband, mostly marijuana, seized. Abed said the Egyptian law on drugs would remain in effect until a new law could be passed by the Palestinian parliament, which has met only rarely since elections were held in 2006.
The patchwork of laws governing the Palestinian territories reflect their turbulent history, with ordinances left over from the Ottoman Empire, the British Palestine Mandate, Egyptian, Jordanian and Israeli authorities.
 Thailand: Former US President Jimmy Carter said he was pressed by his advisers to attack Iran during the hostage crisis there more than 30 years ago but resisted because he feared 20,000 Iranians could have died. Islamist militants stormed the US Embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979, and seized its occupants.
Fifty-two Americans were held hostage for 444 days. Carter said Monday that one proposed option was a military strike on Iran, but he chose to stick with negotiations to prevent bloodshed and bring the hostages home safely. "My main advisers insisted that I should attack Iran," he told reporters in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai, where he was helping build houses for Habitat for Humanity.
"I could have destroyed Iran with my weaponry. But I felt in the process it was likely the hostages' lives would be lost, and I didn't want to kill 20,000 Iranians. So I didn't attack." The hostages were released on January 20, 1981, just minutes after the swearing in of President Ronald Reagan, whose victory over Carter is largely attributed to the crisis. The former president has commented in the past on how military action had been an option but that he feared a death toll in the tens of thousands, according to Carter spokeswoman Deanna Congileo. More at China Daily
 By Amir Taheri The mausoleum of Hussein Ibn Ali, the third Imam of Shiism, in Karbala will soon have a new gate. It took dozens of Iranian artisans several years to make the gate that, according to experts, is a masterpiece of Persian handicraft. At first glance, there is nothing remarkable in that news item carried by Iranian media last week. After all, the mausoleum, like other Shiite places of pilgrimage in Iraq, was built by Iranians and maintained by their donations for centuries. What is remarkable is that the Iran's state-owned media have chosen to present the report in the section devoted to "domestic news." The official news agency, IRNA, carried the item in its section of "news from the provinces." Karbala, however, is located in Iraq, a country that, although a neighbor of Iran, has been an independent state for almost 90 years. It is clear that many within Iran's ruling elite have difficulty acknowledging that fact. To them, concepts like national sovereignty have little meaning. Official mullahs, such as Ahmad Khatami, a preacher at the Friday prayers at Tehran University, pretend to have never heard the word "Iraq." To them, Iraq is either "Bayn al-Nahrayn" (Mesopotamia) or "Atabat al-Aliyat" (The Holy shrines). Apparently, even the war that lasted eight years and left a million dead has not convinced them that Iraq is a sovereign state. Dominating Iraq has been an ambition of Iranian elites since the Ottomans drove Persia out in 1797, after the death of Karim Khan Zand. After the First World War and the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, the Shiite clergy tried to persuade the Qajar Shah in Tehran to annex the "holy" cities of Iraq. However, the Qajars, on their way to the graveyard of history, were in no position to dream of conquest. Once it became clear that Iraq would become independent with British support, the clergy decided to boycott the process and kept Iraqi Shiites on the sidelines. By the 1940s, the Iranian elite had more or less accepted independent Iraq as a fact. In the 1950s, an attempt to link the two countries through royal marriage, however, failed, when the Shah's daughter, Princess Shahnaz, and Iraq's King Faisal failed to develop enough chemistry for the plot to proceed. Read more,,, Source: Asharq Alawsat
 THIS week the world marks the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall's fall. Thirty-five years ago an event with global ramifications likewise occurred. On November 13, 1974, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat famously addressed the UN General Assembly. Carrying a gun and an olive branch, Arafat appealed not to let the olive branch fall from his hand. Arafat's speech signified that the Palestinians had moved in international eyes from being a group of stateless refugees to a legitimate national movement.
Whether Arafat intended it or not, his statement also signposted two dichotomous directions for the Palestinians. One was the road to peace and reconciliation with Israel via mutual compromise and a two-state solution. This path would be encapsulated in the 1993 Oslo accord that led to the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, and almost resulted, via the American-auspiced 2000-01 negotiations, in the creation of a Palestinian State. The other was the unbending war of terror and violence reflected in suicide bombings and rocket attacks to achieve the destruction of Israel. Notably they did not endorse a compromise two-state solution that recognised the legitimate claims of Israelis and Palestinians. Rather, they simplistically constructed the Israeli-Arab conflict as an extension of the struggle between Western colonialism and the Third World, and recommended the elimination of the Israeli side of the conflict. Anti-Zionist fundamentalists captured the pro-Palestinian agenda. In 1974 and again in 1975, the extremist-influenced Australian Union of Students, passed motions calling for the elimination of the state of Israel and its replacement by a democratic secular state of Palestine. The latter term was a disingenuous euphemism for an ethno-religious Islamic Arab state, given that most Palestinian Muslims are highly religious. The motions were rejected by Australian students, but this did not deter the fundamentalists. The fundamentalist agenda cooled following the PLO's implicit recognition of Israel in 1988. However the outbreak of the second intifada in September 2000 produced a renewal of the inflammatory rhetoric from the far Left. The higher the tide of violence perpetrated by the Palestinians, the greater the fury and blame directed at the Israeli victims.
The March 2002 attacks provoked the Israeli invasion of the leading West Bank cities in an attempt to destroy the terror networks, and stop the carnage. Yet the first Australian petition for an academic boycott of Israel initiated by a small clique of Australian academics after this invasion in May 2002 was directed at the victims of terror. Another group condemned Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard's visit to Israel last June. The petition signatories seemed oblivious to the fact that more than one million Arabs are citizens of Israel; that the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip overwhelmingly demand an Arab state rather than a Jewish-Arab entity, and that most Arab states ethnically cleansed their Jewish populations over 50 years ago. No exposure of the infantile slogans of the fundamentalists obviates the need for Israel to promote rather than undermine the olive branch solution. More and more Israelis and diaspora Jews understand that Israel will not only have to freeze West Bank settlements, but eventually dismantle at the very least all settlements east of the security barrier.
Equally the Palestinians will have to make concessions that facilitate peaceful relations. This means finally accepting that the 1948 refugees will only return to the Palestinian state and not to Israel. The fundamentalists of course will never accept this win-win plan. Such is the nature of black-and-white revolutionary socialism. But their all-or-nothing demands for a similarly coercive utopia will bring only tragedy to the Palestinians. Philip Mendes is the co-editor of Jews and Australian Politics (Sussex Academic Press, 2004). Nick Dyrenfurth is the co-editor of Confusion: the Making of the Australian Two-Party Political System (forthcoming with Melbourne University Publishing). Source: The Australian
 It was America’s first showdown with radical Islam. On November 4, 1979, radical Islamist students stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran.
Initially, it was to be a brief protest against America’s decision to allow the exiled Shah of Iran to enter the United States for medical treatment.
Instead, the world watched as a 444-day hell began for 52 American hostages. Thirty years later, Iran's unpopular leadership still paints America as the "great Satan," but the younger generations — those Iranians who had nothing to do with the Revolution — showed last spring that they do not always agree with the oppressive regime. And at least two of the Iranian students who were closely involved in the Embassy takeover 30 years ago are now ardent critics of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's regime—the very same government they supported and helped to establish. VIDEO: Fox News Reports on Iranian Hostage Crisis. In this watershed moment of American history, Fox News Reporting talks to those who were there and goes inside the strategies of the players and the politicians at the epicenter of the Iranian hostage crisis.
Fox News examines how President Jimmy Carter struggled to solve the crisis in an election year, and talks with insiders in the Reagan administration about the negotiations leading to the hostages' eventual release.
We also hear the dramatic stories of four former hostages, including then acting Ambassador, Bruce Laingen. "Fox News Reporting: Americans Held Hostage in Iran" hosted by Greta Van Susteren airs Friday, Nov. 6, at 10 p.m. ET only on Fox News Channel. Source: Foxnews
 In the movie, “Groundhog Day”, the main character wakes up day after day, trapped in the same events, desperately looking for a way out of that living nightmare. It’s a very good metaphor for the Middle East.
Here are some quotes from a book whose title I will reveal in a moment:
“The only truly transcendent law in the Middle East is that of unintended consequences.”
“Nation-building and the redressing of historic wrongs were in the air…”
“His fighters secured control of key rivers, recaptured Kut, and on (date withheld) stormed victoriously into Baghdad. Still undecided was how this famous city—and, indeed, most of Mesopotamia—would now be governed.”
“I suppose we have underestimated the fact that this country is really an inchoate mass of tribes which can’t as yet be reduced to any system. The Turks didn’t govern and we have tried to govern…and failed.”
And finally “Our armies have come into your cities and lands not as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.”
All this and more was said in the 1920s by British imperialists. If it sounds like things being said by Americans, then you must assume that America has been repeating all the mistakes of Great Britain in the exact same places.
The book being quoted is “Kingmakers: The Invention of the Modern Middle East” by Karl E. Mayer and Shareen Blair Brysac ($18.95, W.W. Norton, softcover) and its five-hundred pages are devoted to the extraordinary personalities of the 1920s who, believing it was Great Britain’s duty was to bring civilization to India, Africa, and the Middle East, devoted themselves to “Pax Britannia”, the rule of distant colonies representing a fourth of the world’s population.
The book is a reminder that whatever passes for modernity in the Middle East has generally been imposed by the process of European colonization in quest of its oil and other riches to fatten the profits of various British, French, and American business enterprises such as the Suez Canal and the oil companies.
Left to themselves the polyglot of tribes would never have experienced anything resembling modernization.
Afghanistan today would look very much the same to the earliest invaders and explorers who passed through it. No roads. No hospitals. Few schools. No jobs except raising poppies for the heroin trade or serving in the army or police. Men raised from youth to fight anyone and everyone. Pushtuns, Tajiks, Hazarus, Uzbeks, Turkmen, and Qizilbash.
The Middle East had been ruled by the Turkish Ottoman Empire for centuries—from Egypt to Persia. Going back even further in history, the region was no stranger to European invasions. The Crusades were a response against the Islamic invaders that at one point had laid siege to Vienna.
As the authors note, “In his history of Jerusalem, the Israeli writer Amos Elon calculates that over four millennia the Holy City has known ‘twenty ruinous sieges, two intervals of total destruction, eighteen recent reconstructions, and at least eleven transitions from one religion to another.” In 1967 visitors could find the remnants of “Roman encampments, Crusader castles, Turkish parapets, and British pillboxes.”
To suggest, for example, that after more than sixty years of Israeli national sovereignty that Arab neighbor nations (and Iran) have the slightest intention of allowing it to exist is to ignore the history of centuries old intolerance directed against both Christian and Jew.
Following World War One, England and France divided the remains of the Ottoman Empire that had chosen to side with Germany. It would have died sooner or later of its own dead weight, but it was Sir Percy Zachariah Cox who would take out “a map and a pencil to draw the boundary between Iraq and the Nejd (now Saudi Arabia). The borders with Syria and Transjordan were defined similarly.”
There were Arab leaders, but they were generally the pawns of the great powers, frequently assassinated or deposed. With some exceptions, the nations of the Middle East continue to be ruled by monarchs and despots.
As the British Empire shrank in the wake of World War Two and American power grew only one thing is clear.
Neither of these imperial powers had any clue, nor way of dealing with the Middle East’s regressive Islamic fanaticism that remains a ceaseless threat to Western civilization. And, as in past times, the debates rage about staying in or getting out.
Every day in the Middle East is Groundhog Day.
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Copyright Muslims Against Sharia 2008. All rights reserved.
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A fine article by Bertram Wyatt-Brown, "Lawrence of Arabia: Image and Reality," in The Journal of the Historical Society, December 2009, pp, 515-48, traces the reputation of T. E. Lawrence (1888-1935) through the near-century since his remarkable exploits during World War I and his famed recounting of those events in Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926). 
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