False Flag: Leading Analyst At Pro-Israeli Think Tank Publicly Discusses How U.S. Can Be Forced into a War with Iran

"Many critics have argued that there is a concerted effort to push the United States into a war with Iran by supporters of Israel. Patrick Clawson, director of research for the highly influential pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) think tank, seemed intent to prove those rumors true this week in comments as a luncheon on “How to Build US-Israeli Coordination on Preventing an Iranian Nuclear Breakout.” Clawson casually discusses how to create a false flag operation to push the U.S. into war to overcome any reluctance by the public. We have been discussing how many leaders like Senator Joe Lieberman had begun to use the same rhetoric that led to the last two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and how the suggest timing of an attack has been tied to the presidential election."

 Read the full article here

Bahman Baktiari 

Book Review:Nonviolent Revolutions: Civil Resistance in the Late 20th Centur

GLOBAL POLICY

Bahman Baktiari 

The Economist: Behind the rants, uncertainty grows

 Sep 29th 2012 | from the print edition

Iran’s presidential and nuclear future is in doubt.  

FOR Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president, the annual session of the UN’s General Assembly in New York is an opportunity to forget domestic burdens and to shine, however bizarrely, on the world stage. Even before he addressed the assembly, he had created his usual rumpus on his arrival in the United States—by calling homosexuality “ugly”, denying the Holocaust, and describing Israel as a mere “disturbance” in Middle East history that would be “eliminated”. Moreover, he breezily dismissed the recent flurry of speculation that Israel might attack Iran’s nuclear facilities before the American presidential election in November.

A few days later, in his actual speech to the UN, he blasted “the uncivilised Zionists” for “intimidating” Iran. But he heralded a hoped-for second coming of Jesus, to be accompanied by “a perfect human being…named Imam al-Mahdi”, the “disappeared” 12th imam revered by Shia Muslims, who pray for his return, too.

Back home, however, his top brass showed that they take the threat more seriously. On September 22nd a senior Revolutionary Guard commander made clear that Iran would treat an Israeli attack as American-abetted and would respond by attacking American military bases as well as shipping lanes in the Persian Gulf. A “third world war”, he said, would ensue.

In his own UN address, Barack Obama did not deviate from his previous line that diplomacy, as well as the sanctions that have isolated Iran and slashed its oil revenue, must be given more time to work. But “the United States will do what it must,” he said, “to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.”

If the Iranians did start turning their growing stockpile of enriched uranium into a bomb, Mr Obama would indeed find it hard not to respond with force. Yet a policy of more of the same—continuing to impose and tighten sanctions and taking covert action to contain a regime that is thought not yet to have taken a definitive bomb-making decision—is the one still apparently being mooted by Mr Obama’s advisers. Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington, thinks Iran will eventually make concessions in return for a lifting of sanctions. “This regime cannot survive without some source of external income,” she says.

There is another, less sanguine theory, that Iran will persist in its drive to achieve a bomb—or at least a break-out capacity to get one quickly if it so desired. The Iranians say they never trusted Mr Obama’s offer of detente early in his presidency because of the heavier sanctions and the campaigns of sabotage and assassination that accompanied the offer. In the same vein, they deplore the American administration’s recent decision to drop its longstanding classification of the exiled People’s Mujahedeen of Iran as a terrorist organisation.

So Iran’s rulers will not easily trust future pledges to lift sanctions in return for nuclear concessions. In any event, Iran’s leaders may now believe that such concessions would destroy the Islamic Republic’s credibility and open it to a recurrence of the unrest that followed Mr Ahmadinejad’s disputed re-election in 2009. So it is possible that an American policy of containment, even an undeclared one, might lead to a long campaign of attrition of the kind that impoverished Iraq in the 1990s, while leaving its leader in power.

Anticipating trouble, Iran’s hardliners have been stifling the remaining repositories of dissent as fiercely as ever. The most notable of these is Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, an establishment heavyweight and former president who became an opposition figurehead after the contentious poll of 2009. The two most controversial of his five children—his daughter Faezeh and his son Mehdi—have recently been arrested, undoubtedly with the approval of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. Mr Rafsanjani had been expected to put up a fight when Mr Khamenei tries, as he probably will, to install his own nominee as president in elections that are due next spring. But with his children behind bars, the former president may favour circumspection over principle.

Bahman Baktiari 

How to Help Iran Build a Bomb

September 28, 2012        By WILLIAM J. BROAD          Ny Times

ADVOCATES of airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities have long held that the attacks would delay an atom bomb for years and perhaps even buy Israel enough time to topple the Iranian government. In public statements, the Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, has said that an attack would leave Iran’s nuclear program reeling, if not destroyed. The blow, he declared recently, would set back the Iranian effort “for a long time.”

Quite the opposite, say a surprising number of scholars and military and arms-control experts. In reports, talks, articles and interviews, they argue that a strike could actually lead to Iran’s speeding up its efforts, ensuring the realization of a bomb and hastening its arrival.

“An attack would increase the likelihood,” Scott D. Sagan, a political scientist at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, said of an Iranian weapon.

The George W. Bush administration, it turns out, reached an even stronger conclusion in secret and rejected bombing as counterproductive.

 The view among Mr. Bush’s top advisers, recalled Michael V. Hayden, then director of the Central Intelligence Agency, was that a strike “would drive them to do what we were trying to prevent.”

Those who warn against attacking Iran say that such a move would free officials in Tehran of many constraints. An attack, for instance, would all but certainly lead to the expulsion of international inspectors, which, in turn, would allow the government to undo hundreds of monitoring devices and safeguards, including seals on underground storage units. Further, an Iran permitted to present itself to the world as the victim of an attack would receive sympathy and perhaps vital imports from nations that once backed trade bans. The thinking also goes that a strike would allow Iran to further direct its economy to military ends.

Perhaps most notably, an attack could unite what is now a fractious state, these analysts say, and build an atmosphere of mobilizing rage. As the foreign ministers of Sweden and Finland wroteearlier this year, “It’s difficult to see a single action more likely to drive Iran into taking the final decision.”

History, the analysts say, demonstrates that airstrikes and military threats often result in unbending resolve among the beleaguered to do whatever it takes to acquire nuclear arms.

“People always assume the bad guys want nukes,” says Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear nonproliferation specialist at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. “But I think there’s usually a hesitation about the balance of risk. My sense is that the threat of military action makes bad guys feel like they need the bomb.”

Pakistan’s foreign minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, seemed to have embodied that kind of determination when he said famously in 1965, “If India builds the bomb, we will eat grass or leaves, even go hungry, but we will get one of our own.”

Mark Fitzpatrick, a senior nonproliferation official at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a prominent arms analysis group in London, said in an e-mail interview that it was “almost certain” that a military strike on Iran would result in “a Manhattan-style rush to produce nuclear weapons as fast as possible.”

These analysts maintain that the history of nuclear proliferation shows that attempting to thwart a nuclear program through an attack can have consequences opposite of those intended. Mr. Lewis of the Monterey Institute and other experts often cite Iraq. Israel’s attack on the Iraqi Osirak reactor in 1981, they argue, hardened the resolve of Saddam Hussein and gave his nuclear ambitions new life.

“All of the historical evidence that I have seen,” Mr. Lewis wrote recently, “suggests Saddam had yet to decide to seek nuclear weapons until the humiliation of the strike.”

Top Israelis disagree. Amos Yadlin, one of the pilots who attacked the Iraqi reactor and a former chief of Israeli military intelligence, argued early this year that Iraq’s nuclear program “never fully resumed” and cited the bombing episode as a compelling rationale for military action against Iran.

But a number of former Israeli officials have echoed those who think the attack emboldened Mr. Hussein and worry that an attack on Iran could do the same there.

Yuval Diskin, who retired last year as director of Israel’s internal security agency, told a gathering in April that “many experts” cite the acceleration risk. “What the Iranians prefer to do today slowly and quietly,” he said, “they would have the legitimacy to do quickly and in a much shorter time."

Nuclear historians say intimidation alone can spur an atomic response, as when American hostility prompted China to seek nuclear arms. Beijing succeeded in 1964 with a thunderous blast.

In “China Builds the Bomb,” John Wilson Lewis and Xue Litai wrote that Washington’s threats provoked “defiant anger and the decision to undertake the costly nuclear weapons program.”

The question of what prompts the speedups would seem to go far beyond the Iranian crisis and atomic history because the number of latent nuclear states (ones that could make bombs but choose not to, like Japan and Germany) has risen around the globe in recent decades. The estimated number now stands at around 40.

Scholars have long debated the social factors that keep countries from crossing the line.

Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told his colleagues before they won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 that the bomb decision often turned on nothing more complex than a “sense of security or insecurity.”

In a turbulent world, he added, that kind of evaluation could change rapidly. “Thin,” he called the margin of safety, “and worrisome.”

A New York Times reporter who has written extensively about weaponry.
Bahman Baktiari 

How-many-civilians-would-be-killed-in-an-attack-on-irans-nuclear-sites?

TIME

 Bahman Baktiari

Bahman Baktiari

Tom Donilon: A Manager of Overseas Crises, as Much as the World Permits

September 23, 2012                      THE NEW YORK TIMES                           By PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — When President Obama flies to New York on Monday afternoon for the United Nations General Assembly, he will dispense with the usual battery of one-on-one meetings with world leaders so he can tape an appearance on “The View” and return by midweek to the battleground state of Ohio. Left to help smooth over any ruffled feathers will be Tom Donilon.

Gray-suited, meticulous and little known to the public, Mr. Donilon is the president’s national security adviser and central figure in American foreign policy, “the most important person in the mix,” according to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. In this critical campaign season, he has also become the president’s geopolitical bodyguard, charged with keeping the world at bay for another 43 days.

Mr. Donilon is the one who wakes the president when an ambassador is killed in Libya, the one who tries to keep Israel from rupturing relations and Egypt from heading off track. Solutions to intractable problems like Iran’s nuclear program are for another day. For now, it is Mr. Donilon’s mission to manage problems and keep them from blowing up, so Mr. Obama can focus on Mitt Romney rather than Benjamin Netanyahu.

But the world has not been cooperative with the American political calendar, as the tumult in Muslim countries attests. Afghan troops keep killing American troops. Syria keeps massacring its people. China and Japan keep rattling sabers. Iran keeps defying the West. And the bill will come due in November when Mr. Obama will confront a daunting list of challenges that the final weeks of the presidential campaign have seemingly put on hold.

If anyone can manage it, colleagues say, it is Mr. Donilon. “Tom can keep 10 important things in his head at once while juggling others in the air, trying to avoid any falling to the ground,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said. Jacob S. Lew, the White House chief of staff, said Mr. Donilon ensures that “we don’t end up just with all the grains of sand but we see how all the issues connect.”

Mr. Biden, whose wife, Jill, employs Mr. Donilon’s wife, Cathy Russell, as her chief of staff, said Mr. Donilon channels Mr. Obama. “In a sense, he kind of thinks like the president,” Mr. Biden said. “Tom knows where the president wants to go. Tom knows when the president wants to go left, straight, up or down.”

A longtime political operative, Mr. Donilon has methodically reinvented himself as a maestro of international affairs, consolidating control of the national security apparatus in a corner West Wing office stacked with classified briefing books as thick as a fist. He oversaw support for the Libya war that toppled Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. He made sure surge troops left Afghanistan as scheduled. He is a champion of Mr. Obama’s so-called pivot to Asia.

Yet Mr. Donilon has not escaped controversy. Colleagues talk of clashes with the Pentagon and the State Department and flashes of temper that should have lasted 30 seconds but extended for 10 minutes. Republicans suspect him of orchestrating national security leaks to make Mr. Obama look good, “which a spokesman calls ‘completely false.’ ” And some foreign policy specialists consider him a pretender without a real vision.

“He is ferociously protective of the president’s priorities,” which is part of his job, said Kori Schake, who worked on President George W. Bush’s national security staff, “but comes down squarely on the side of the president’s political interests when they are at odds with our national interests.” She cited the timeline imposed on the Afghanistan troop surge, a move that mollified the antiwar left but has been criticized as premature.

Mr. Donilon, 57, who has lately avoided journalists amid leak investigations and declined to be interviewed for this article, is an unlikely foreign policy maven. He grew up in Providence, R.I., studied at Catholic University, then won an internship and later a staff job in Jimmy Carter’s White House. In 1980, he wrangled convention delegates to beat Edward M. Kennedy.

After Mr. Carter’s defeat, Mr. Donilon studied law at the University of Virginia and worked on campaigns, including Mr. Biden’s 1988 presidential bid. When Bill Clinton won in 1992, a Carter-era mentor, Warren M. Christopher, became secretary of state and made Mr. Donilon his chief of staff.

He worked for six years as an executive at Fannie Mae, the housing giant that after his departure was at the center of the 2008 economic crash. Mr. Donilon, who made millions, was not linked to Fannie Mae’s problems with accounting irregularities, but he was part of a management that lobbied Congress against tighter regulation.

Mr. Donilon was drawn into Mr. Obama’s orbit late in 2008 to help prepare him for his debates in the general election campaign. After the election, Rahm Emanuel, a friend from the Clinton administration who was tapped as Mr. Obama’s chief of staff, made sure he became deputy to Gen. James Jones, the new national security adviser.

Mr. Jones focused on high-profile meetings with ambassadors and foreign ministers, leaving Mr. Donilon to brief the president and run the National Security Council. Mr. Emanuel often bypassed Mr. Jones to work with Mr. Donilon. “Tom and Rahm were making decisions,” said a former White House official. “There were times he probably felt left out,” the official said of Mr. Jones, but Mr. Donilon “never meant to make the general look bad.”

Mr. Donilon made enemies at the Pentagon during the debate over sending more troops to Afghanistan. He suspected the military of trying to manipulate the new president; the military suspected Mr. Donilon, who never served in uniform or visited Afghanistan, of substituting politics for strategy.

Mr. Donilon clashed with officials like Michèle A. Flournoy, then under secretary of defense. “She really took a pounding from Donilon,” one colleague said. Robert M. Gates, then the defense secretary, warned that making Mr. Donilon national security adviser would be “a disaster,” according to a book by Bob Woodward.

Mr. Donilon has since visited Afghanistan, and colleagues said he forged better relations with the military.

“It’s not unusual, especially with a new administration coming in, getting a sense that the military might try to box you in on a political position, and I think Tom had what I would call kind of a questioning nature — are we really getting the real scoop?” said Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, who succeeded Mr. Gates. “Over time and with some of the changes that were made with regard to the military leadership, it became much more of a give and take process.”

Mr. Emanuel tried to enlist Mr. Donilon to succeed him as chief of staff, but it was Mr. Jones whom Mr. Donilon hoped to succeed. Mr. Obama, impressed with Mr. Donilon’s trains-on-time proficiency, obliged.

“It’s not something he had to learn,” said Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, who went to high school with Mr. Donilon. “He’s been preparing for a role like this for several decades.”

Mr. Donilon righted an operation seen as dysfunctional. He is an “evangelist for process,” one aide said, calling meeting after meeting to ensure every quarter is heard. His preparations and work ethic are legendary. “The notion of 24/7 — he gives new meaning to it,” said Dennis B. Ross, a former special envoy. Once he was so exacting in choosing a basketball jersey for his son, recalled Tommy Vietor, his spokesman, “it was as if it was a principals’ meeting.”

Mr. Obama gave him grief for never taking time off and browbeat him into losing 50 pounds. But he remains a famous worrier — “the bed-wetter,” some at the State Department call him. “He has a lot to worry about,” Mrs. Clinton said. “He really cares deeply about getting it right.”

Mr. Donilon has a complicated relationship with Mrs. Clinton. Colleagues said he seemed to fear her and rarely takes her on, yet is insecure about her, asking before a recent trip to China whether his meetings were on par with hers.

Mrs. Clinton played down tension and lavished praise — “incredibly intelligent” and “extraordinarily efficient,” she said. “I have a great relationship with him. We don’t always agree, obviously. I bring my own perspective and experience to the table. But he is truly an honest broker.”

For a model Mr. Donilon has James A. Baker III, another convention delegate wrangler turned foreign policy statesman, and he is known to resent the idea that he has not evolved over the course of his career. When an aide said half-jokingly that Washington still viewed Mr. Donilon as a political operative, he replied bitterly, “Fourteen years in foreign policy and I’m a political guy. O.K. I ran the State Department but O.K. Baker complained about this, too.”

For Mr. Donilon, politics is largely in the past. “He has devoted an incredible amount of time and energy over two decades in making the shift from being a political person to a policy person,” said Benjamin Rhodes, a deputy, “and that’s reflected in everything he’s been doing.”

Bahman Baktiari

David Lesch: The Dictator of Damascus: Did we get Bashar al-Assad wrong ?

FOREIGN POLICY

Bahman Baktiari

Sarah Chayes: Does 'Innocence of Muslims' meet the free-speech test?

latimes.com       September 18, 2012

U.S. 1st Amendment rights distinguish between speech that is simply offensive and speech deliberately tailored to put lives and property at immediate risk.

In one of the most famous 1st Amendment cases in U.S. history, Schenck vs. United States, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. established that the right to free speech in the United States is not unlimited. "The most stringent protection," he wrote on behalf of a unanimous court, "would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic."

Holmes' test — that words are not protected if their nature and circumstances create a "clear and present danger" of harm — has since been tightened. But even under the more restrictive current standard, "Innocence of Muslims," the film whose video trailer indirectly led to the death of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens among others, is not, arguably, free speech protected under the U.S. Constitution and the values it enshrines.

According to initial media investigations, the clip whose most egregious lines were apparently dubbed in after it was shot, was first posted to YouTube in July by someone with the user name "Sam Bacile." The Associated Press reported tracing a cellphone number given as Bacile's to the address of a Californian of Egyptian Coptic origin named Nakoula Basseley Nakoula. Nakoula has identified himself as coordinating logistics on the production but denies being Bacile.


PHOTOS: Protests over anti-Islam film spread

According to the Wall Street Journal, when the video failed to attract much attention, another Coptic Christian, known for his anti-Islamic activism, sent a link to reporters in the U.S., Egypt and elsewhere on Sept. 6. His email message promoted a Sept. 11 event by anti-Islamic pastor Terry Jones and included a link to the trailer.

The current standard for restricting speech — or punishing it after it has in fact caused violence — was laid out in the 1969 case Brandenburg vs. Ohio. Under the narrower guidelines, only speech that has the intent and the likelihood of inciting imminent violence or lawbreaking can be limited.
Likelihood is the easiest test. In Afghanistan, where I have lived for most of the past decade, frustrations at an abusive government and at the apparent role of international forces in propping it up have been growing for years. But those frustrations are often vented in religious, not political, terms, because religion is a more socially acceptable, and safer, rationale for public outcry.

In the summer of 2010, Jones announced his intent to publicly burn a copy of the Muslim holy scripture, the Koran, that Sept. 11. He was eventually dissuaded by a number of religious and government officials, including Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who called him to say his actions would put the lives of U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan at risk. On the Joint Chiefs of Staff, where I worked at the time, consensus was that the likelihood of violence was high.

When Jones did in fact stage a public Koran burning on March 20, 2011, riots broke out in Afghanistan, killing nearly a dozen people and injuring 90 in the beautiful, cosmopolitan northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif. Seven of the dead were United Nations employees; the rest were Afghans.
In Afghanistan, and in all of the Arab nations in transition, an extremist fringe is brawling for power with a more pluralistic majority. Radicals pounce on any pretext to play on religious feeling. I could pick out the signs of manipulation in Afghanistan — riots that started on university campuses where radicalized Pakistani students abound, simultaneous outbreaks in far-flung places, the sudden
appearance of weapons. By providing extremists in Libya and elsewhere such an opportunity, the makers of "Innocence of Muslims" were playing into their hands.

As for imminence, the timeline of similar events after recent burnings of religious materials indicates that reactions typically come within two weeks. Nakoula's video was deliberately publicized just before the sensitive date of Sept. 11, and could be expected to spark violence on that anniversary.
While many 1st Amendment scholars defend the right of the filmmakers to produce this film, arguing that the ensuing violence was not sufficiently imminent, I spoke to several experts who said the trailer may well fall outside constitutional guarantees of free speech. "Based on my understanding of the events," 1st Amendment authority Anthony Lewis said in an interview Thursday, "I think this meets the imminence standard."

Finally, much 1st Amendment jurisprudence concerns speech explicitly advocating violence, such as calls to resist arrest, or videos explaining bomb-making techniques. But words don't have to urge people to commit violence in order to be subject to limits, says Lewis. "If the result is violence, and that violence was intended, then it meets the standard."

Indeed, Justice Holmes' original example, shouting "fire" in a theater, is not a call to arms. Steve Klein, an outspoken anti-Islamic activist who said he helped with the film, told Al Jazeera television that it was "supposed to be provocative." The egregiousness of its smears, the apparent deception of cast and crew as to its contents and the deliberate effort to raise its profile in the Arab world a week before 9/11 all suggest intentionality.

TIMELINE: 'Innocence of Muslims' unrest

The point here is not to excuse the terrible acts perpetrated by committed extremists and others around the world in reaction to the video, or to condone physical violence as a response to words — any kind of words. The point is to emphasize that U.S. law makes a distinction between speech that is simply offensive and speech that is deliberately tailored to put lives and property at immediate risk. Especially in the heightened volatility of today's Middle East, such provocation is certainly irresponsible — and reveals an ironic alliance of convenience between Christian extremists and the Islamist extremists they claim to hate.
Sarah Chayes, former special assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is a resident associate at the Carnegie Endowment and a contributing writer to Opinion.

Bahman Baktiari

Book Review: Useful Enemies: When Waging Wars is More Important than Winning Them

LSE REVIEW

Bahman Baktiari 

What if Israel bombed Iran? The view from Tehran.

THE WASHINGTON POST

Interactive Site with lots of info on how Americans view other countries & global issue

 American Views of the World

Bahman Baktiari

How The Arab Spring Killed Hezbollah

THE NEW REPUBLIC

Bahman Baktiari

Said Sadek

Interview with Said Sadek, Professor of Sociology at American University in Cairo.  A Sociologist’s Brief Take on Protests in Egypt

Bahman Baktiari

Cartoons as Iranian political speech by Prof. Babak Rahimi

PROFESSOR BABAK RAHIMI

Bahman Baktiari

Cyberwar on Iran more widespread than first thought, say researchers

THE GUARDIAN



Bahman Baktiari 

Tariq Ramadan: Islam, Democracy & the Pursuit of Civil Society -

Islam, Democracy & the Pursuit of Civil Society

Bahman Baktiari 

Important report warns of massive civilian casualties in Iran should Israel attack Iranian nuclear facilities

http://nucleargamble.org/

Bahman Baktiari 

The Sources of Salafi Conduct: Harsh Politics in the New Middle East

FOREIGN AFFAIRS

Bahman Baktiari 

Ban Ki-moon blasts anti-Islam filmmaker

Reuters  September 19, 2012

UNITED NATIONS: U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Wednesday the maker of an anti-Islam film that triggered violent protests across the Muslim world abused his right to freedom of expression by making the movie, which he called a "disgraceful and shameful act." 

The blasphemous film was posted on the Internet under several titles including "Innocence of Muslims".

It sparked days of deadly anti-American violence in many Muslim countries, including an assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi in Libya in which the U.S. ambassador died.

"Freedoms of expression should be and must be guaranteed and protected, when they are used for common justice, common purpose," Ban told a news conference. "When some people use this freedom of expression to provoke or humiliate some others' values and beliefs, then this cannot be protected in such a way."

"My position is that freedom of expression, while it is a fundamental right and privilege, should not be abused by such people, by such a disgraceful and shameful act," he said.

Gay rights in Malaysia: Creating change in the mosque

Creating Change in the Mosque

Social Values, Not religion, at the Heart of Protests

What's at the heart of recent protests over the Innocence of Muslims video?
ARTICLE


Bahman Baktiari 

Nir Rosen: Among the Alawites-Syria

Reports from Syria

Bahman Baktiari 

MUSTAFA AKYOL: Why Turkish Muslims are calmer

In just one week, the vulgar anti-Islamic film titled “The Innocence of Muslims” has become a global phenomenon. The protests against it, some of which have been violent, are spreading from country to country. Luckily, the lethal attack against the Americanconsulate in Libya has not been repeated elsewhere, but the fury in other places is still disconcerting. 
READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE

Bahman Baktiari 

Imminent Iran Nuclear Threat? A Timeline Of Warnings Since 1979

The Christian Science Monitor

Attacks on US embassies and autumn of apologetics after Arab Spring

AL JAZEERA

Juan Cole: Top Myths about Iran’s Nuclear Enrichment Program

JUAN COLE

Bahman Baktiari

Fawaz Gerges' New Book: Obama and the Middle East: The End of America's Moment

 The Middle East Policy Council

John Esposito: Uprising in Middle East was totally unexpected

John Esposito

Bahman Baktiari

Pro-democracy "Arab Spring" crowds were much larger than those involved in the current protests in the Middle East and North Africa; lack of media objectivity about geographic scope of so-called "Muslim Rage" has dangerous implications

Megan Reif, Assistant Professor of Political Science at University of Colorado,  has created a very informative spreadsheet of the number people in  "Arab Spring" demonstrations compared with the numbers who took part in the anti-film protests.   Clearly,  the anti-film protestors constitute a very small portion of the crown,  and the lack of objective media coverage gives the dangerous impression that there are large number of protestors taking part in attacks on embassies.

See the full article HERE.

Bahman Baktiari

Islamic Scholar Tariq Ramadan on the Growing Mideast Protests and "Islam & the Arab Awakening"

DEMOCRACY NOW

Turkey and the Arab Spring: Between Ethics and Self-Interest

Ziya Öniş

Insight Turkey, Vol. 14, No. 3, 2012, pp. 45 - 63

Turkey redefined its geographical security environment over the last decade by deepening its engagement with neighboring regions, especially with the Middle East. The Arab spring, however, challenged not only the authoritarian regimes in the region but also Turkish foreign policy strategy. This strategy was based on cooperation with the existing regimes and did not prioritize the democracy promotion dimension of the issue. The upheavals in the Arab world, therefore, created a dilemma between ethics and self-interest in Turkish foreign policy. Amid the flux of geopolitical shifts in one of the world’s most unstable regions, Turkish foreign policy-making elites are attempting to reformulate their strategies to overcome this inherent dilemma. The central argument of the present paper is that Turkey could make a bigger and more constructive impact in the region by trying to take a more detached stand and through controlled activism. Thus, Turkey could take action through the formation of coalitions and in close alignments with the United States and Europe rather than basing its policies on a self-attributed unilateral pro-activism. [ Read more ]

FACT: Worldwide US $4.466,000,000 spent DAILY on military

THE UN DISARMAMENT REPORT

What can the workers expect from a Muslim Brotherhood presidency?

The New Middle East Blog

Who is Nakoula Basseley Nakoula?

Enigmatic Egyptian-American fraudster fingered as main producer behind anti-Islam video is currently on probation.

New York Times Editorial: No Rush to War

Amid the alarming violence in the Arab world, a new report about the costs of a potential war with Iran got lost this week. It says an attack by the United States could set back Iran’s nuclear program four years at most, while a more ambitious goal — ensuring Iran never reconstitutes its nuclear program or ousting the regime — would involve a multiyear conflict that could engulf the region.

The significance of the report by The Iran Project is not just its sober analysis but the nearly three dozen respected national security experts from both political parties who signed it: including two former national security advisers, Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski; former Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering; and the retired Gen. Anthony Zinni.

Yet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is trying to browbeat President Obama into a pre-emptive strike. On Tuesday, he demanded that the United States set a red line for military action and said those who refuse “don’t have a moral right to place a red light before Israel.” Later, Mr. Obama telephoned him and rejected the appeal. On Friday, Mr. Netanyahu suggested in an interview that Israel cannot entirely rely on the United States to act against Iran’s program.

Leaders need flexibility and ambiguity, not just hard and fast red lines. And it is dangerous for Mr. Netanyahu to try to push the president into a corner publicly and raise questions about Washington. Is that really the message he wants to send to Tehran?

There is no reason to doubt President Obama’s oft-repeated commitment to keep Iran from having a nuclear weapon. But 70 percent of Americans oppose a unilateral strike on Iran, according to a new poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and 59 percent said if Israel bombs Iran and ignites a war, the United States should not come to its ally’s defense.

Iran is advancing its nuclear program in defiance of the United Nations Security Council. That’s a danger to Israel, the region and all efforts to curb proliferation. But administration officials and many other experts say Iran is still a year or more away from producing an actual weapon, and, if it begins to build one, they will know in time to take retaliatory action.

The best strategy is for Israel to work with the United States and other major powers to tighten sanctions while pursuing negotiations on a deal. It is a long shot, but there is time to talk. And that’s where the focus must be.

Ashraf Khalil--Cairo’s Many Shades of Protests: What They Reveal About How the New Egypt Operates ?

Ashraf Khalil
 

TIME MAGAZINE: The Agents of Outrage

The violence looked spontaneous; it was anything but. Instead it was the product of a sequence of provocations, some mysterious, some obvious. It seemed to start in the U.S., then became magnified in Egypt and was brought to a deadly and sorrowful climax in Libya — all on the 11th anniversary of 9/11.   See Article TIME

Carool Kersten: Religion, Freedom of Expression and its Discontents

CRITICAL MUSLIM

Why Americans don't understand the Middle East

STEPHEN WALTS provides an excellent article on why  American  media coverage of the Middle East misinforms the  American public. 

New York Times reporting of Iran: Burying the Facts !!

NYT Buries the Lead on Iran

Hillary Clinton: Middle East “did not trade tyranny of dictator for tyranny of mob

Hillary Clinton

Bahman Baktiari 

Indonesian protesters say anti-Islam film declares war

 AL AHRAM ONLINE

Bahman Baktiari 

DEEPENING DEMOCRACY: THE REPORT OF THE GLOBAL: COMMISSION ON ELECTIONS, DEMOCRACY AND SECURITY

Kofi Annan Foundation

Bahman Baktiari 

Fareed Zakaria: The folly over ‘red lines’ for Iran -

Red line’ folly           The Washington Post

Underneath the headlines of the presidential campaign, there are growing signs that we are moving toward another war in the Middle East. This week Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly scolded the United States for refusing to draw a “red line” on Iran’s nuclear program that, if crossed, would commit Washington to military strikes. He added that he would not accept a “red light” placed in front of Israel. Unless something dramatic changes its course, Israel is on a path to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities in the next six to nine months.

Israel’s rhetoric over the past year had seemed, to me, designed to force the international community into action and the United States into hyper-action. It worked in the sense that international sanctions and isolation of Iran are at their highest point ever. But Iran has not surrendered, and Israel seems to view any other scenario as unacceptable. Last month, an Israeli “decision maker” — widely reported to be Defense Minister Ehud Barak — gave a revealing interview to the newspaper Haaretz in which he implied that Israel could not wait for the United States to act and might not be able to wait until next spring before taking matters into its own hands.

The “decision maker” made the point that Israel might find itself more hamstrung if Mitt Romney were elected in November. “[H]istory shows that presidents do not undertake dramatic operations in their first year in office unless forced to,” he said. This strikes me as an accurate reading of the likely scenario that a Romney administration would view economic policy as its urgent preoccupation upon taking office.

The Obama administration has brought together a global coalition, put into place the toughest sanctions ever, worked with Israel on a series of covert programs and given Israel military hardware it has long wanted. In addition, the Obama administration has strongly implied that it would be willing to use force as a final resort. But to go further and define a red line in advance would commit the United States to waging a war; no country would make such a commitment.

Notice that while Netanyahu assails Obama for refusing to draw a clear line, he himself has not drawn such a line. Israel has not specified an activity or enrichment level it would consider a casus belli.The reason is obvious: Doing so would restrict Israel’s options and signal its actions and timetable to Iran. If it doesn’t make sense for Israel to do this, why would it make sense for the United States?

Israeli action is not certain. There continues to be a vigorous debate in Israel, with a majority opposed to unilateral action. Because Israel operates under a parliamentary system with a cabinet government, action would require an affirmative vote in the full cabinet and the smaller security cabinet. And there are some indications that Netanyahu does not have a clear majority.

Many Israelis, particularly in the military and defense establishment, understand that an Israeli strike would delay, not destroy, Iran’s program. The program could be rebuilt, probably quickly and with greater determination. Colin Kahl is among several scholars who have documented how, contrary to conventional wisdom, Israel’s 1981 attack on Iraq’s Osirak reactor actually accelerated Saddam Hussein’s determination to build nuclear weapons. When United Nations inspectors went into Iraq after the Persian Gulf War in 1991, they were stunned at how quickly Hussein had rebuilt his program.

Iran’s nuclear program is already popular. Mir Hossein Moussavi, the leader of the Green Movement who is under house arrest, has been a vocal supporter, and he has criticized Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for making too many concessions to the West on nuclear issues. An Israeli attack would enhance the program’s popularity among Iranians and might even bolster the Tehran regime, just as sanctions and weak economic performance are causing deep internal tensions.

In his book “Confront and Conceal,” David Sanger of the New York Times describes the many U.S. war simulations that have assumed an Israeli attack on Iran: “Soon, the battle sucks the region in, and then Washington. The war shifts to defending Saudi oil facilities against Iranian attacks, and Iran’s use of proxies means that other regional players quickly become involved. And in the end, no one wins.”
The Obama administration is trying to assure Israel not to act. But in doing so, it will have to be careful not to lock itself onto a path that makes U.S. military action inevitable. We should have a national debate before the United States finds itself going to war in the Middle East — again — on auto-pilot.

ROGER COHEN: Our Man in Benghazi

 The New York Times                   September 13, 2012

LONDON — Chris Stevens, the American ambassador to Libya killed in an attack on the consulate in Benghazi, represented the best of the U.S. Foreign Service. He was smart, dedicated and adroit. He loved his work and believed in its capacity for good. He knew history’s hold on Middle Eastern minds yet dismissed the notion that ancient conflict was insurmountable. Other cultures fascinated him even as his own inspired him. No American did more to end the tyranny of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. Like most brave people he had a great sense of humor.

The fanatics who killed him represented the worst of Islam. They attacked the consulate in the midst of Muslim outrage over an amateurish American video portraying the Prophet Muhammad as a buffoon of indiscriminate and consuming sexual appetites. But no religious affront, however vile, can justify killing of a kind that jihadists have made only too familiar over the past two decades.

The makers, funders and promoters of the video, called “Innocence of Muslims,” represent the worst of an American bigotry whose central tenet is that Islam is evil, a religion bent on the takeover of the world and followed by people who are all violent extremists, Jew-haters and sexual predators.

The movie, a procession of insults to Muslims against a background of comically flimsy sets, is of a piece with the ideology, praised at times by Republicans including Newt Gingrich, that has sought to portray Shariah law as a mortal threat to America, perceived stealth jihadists knocking at every door from Phoenix to Peoria, and worked hard to persuade the world that Barack Obama is a Muslim.

Whoever made the film — it was uploaded to YouTube in July by somebody calling himself Sam Bacile and identifying himself as an Israeli-American real estate developer — was driven by the visceral loathing of Islam that forms a significant current in post-9/11 right-wing thinking in the United States.

So perhaps it is no surprise that Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate, would attempt to pander to that thinking in his response to the killing of Mr. Stevens and three of his staff. He claimed the Obama administration’s first response was “to sympathize with those who waged the attacks,” called it “disgraceful,” and said “apology for America’s values is never the right course.”

Huh?

Even coming from a man who on a brief trip abroad in late July lost no opportunity to put his foot in his mouth, blundering into squabbles with the British and the Palestinians, this was heavy-handed. In fact, to use Romney’s word, it was disgraceful.

The Obama administration never expressed sympathy for the assailants. It never apologized for American values. What the Cairo embassy did, as violence brewed in the Egyptian capital and well before the Benghazi attack, was to condemn “actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others” — specifically Muslims.

Since when was extreme bigotry that portrays the followers of one of the world’s great religions as child molesters an American value? Religious tolerance is as fundamental an American value as free speech. For Romney to offer implicit defense of a scurrilous movie in the name of free speech, while misrepresenting the Obama administration’s actions and offering not a word about hatred toward the world’s more than 1.5 billion Muslims, suggests he is deluded or desperate or both.

As a free-speech absolutist I defend the right of Bacile — or whoever — to make the video. It is equally important that the United States says what it thinks of such bile. President Obama got it right saying the United States “rejects efforts to denigrate” others’ religious beliefs, while expressing unequivocal opposition to the “senseless violence” that killed Stevens.

This September surprise has given the world cause to appreciate the cool head in the White House and worry about the hothead who aspires to replace him. Romney, in Jacques Chirac’s immortal phrase, “lost a good opportunity to keep quiet.”

His words reflected a shoot-from-the-hip, America-first approach to the world that will not fly in a time of deep interdependency. Two scarring wars have demonstrated that.

Stevens understood the interdependency. He loved his country but did not seek to impose it. Last year, on July 4, shortly after I saw him in Benghazi, he sent a note to family and friends as the war to unseat Qaddafi raged:

“Greetings, all,” Stevens wrote. “I hope you are enjoying a great 4th with plenty of beer, ice cream, hamburgers and Chinese fireworks. I remember well the ‘sparklers’ we used to have in Grass Valley as little tots, and running around the lawn with abandon, catching our hair and eyebrows on fire.” He had celebrated Independence Day by hosting a party with “an entire lamb, grilled chicken, Arab salads and pastries,” ending with remarks expressing “our hope that Libyans would celebrate their freedom soon, too.”

Stevens died for American values. The least Romney might have done was avoid misrepresenting them. His terrible death was a rebuke to the quest for squalid political capital and a demand for reflection on the best of America.

Tariq Ramadan | Interview

INTERVIEW

David Remnick on Netanyahou

September 12, 2012  The New Yorker

Neocon Gambits

 by David Remnick

Bahman Baktiari 

It is hard to overestimate the risks that Benjamin Netanyahu poses to the future of his own country. As Prime Minister, he has done more than any other political figure to embolden and elevate the reactionary forces in Israel, to eliminate the dwindling possibility of a just settlement with the Palestinians, and to isolate his country on the world diplomatic stage. Now Netanyahu seems determined, more than ever, to alienate the President of the United States and, as an ally of Mitt Romney’s campaign, to make himself a factor in the 2012 election—one no less pivotal than the most super Super PAC. “Who are you trying to replace?” the opposition leader, Shaul Mofaz, asked of Netanyahu in the Knesset on Wednesday. “The Administration in Washington or that in Tehran?”

Mofaz, a former Defense Minister, who participated in the fabled raid on Entebbe, in 1976, along with the Prime Minister’s brother, was reacting to Netanyahu’s outburst against the Obama Administration, at a news conference in Jerusalem. “The world tells Israel ‘Wait, there’s still time,’ ” Netanyahu told reporters in English. “And I say, ‘Wait for what? Wait until when?’ Those in the international community who refuse to put red lines before Iran don’t have a moral right to place a red light before Israel.”

No one had any illusions that Netanyahu was addressing anyone but Obama, with whom he has a tortured relationship, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who had earlier said, “We are not setting deadlines,” but, rather, pushing forward on economic sanctions and diplomacy. Articles in the Guardian and elsewhere have set out the sorry recent episodes in this chaotic relationship. On a trip I took to Israel a few weeks ago for The New Yorker, the political philosopher Avishai Margalit told me that Netanyahu was a kind of “mythomaniac,” a politician utterly absorbed and guided by his sense of heroic mission, and dismissive of the opinions and analyses of even his closest advisers. This goes for his innate distrust of any and all Palestinians, as well as for the vast range of military and intelligence experts, both inside and outside the Israeli government, who are constantly telling him that a unilateral attack on Iranian nuclear facilities will end in political, diplomatic, and military disaster. Netanyahu’s opponents include the current leaders of the Israeli military and the major intelligence branches and their most recent predecessors, to say nothing of a decisive majority of the Israeli population. They fear consequences as dire as regional war and an Iranian regime unified and strengthened by a sense of common purpose.

In a reporting piece published this week in the magazine, David Makovsky adds to what we know about Israel’s solo strike in 2007 on Al Kibar, a facility near the Euphrates that both Israeli and American intelligence agreed was a nuclear installation. Israeli politicians rarely talk openly about the strike, but, when they do, nearly all of them say that what happened in Al Kibar is not at all analogous to the situation now with Iran, which is immeasurably more dangerous. Ehud Olmert, who was Prime Minister at the time and directed the strike on Al Kibar, is among those Israeli politicians who strongly oppose a strike on Iran and who emphasized to Makovsky the essential differences between the situation in 2007 and now.

Netanyahu, of course, does not see it that way. In Netanyahu’s view, Obama, despite instituting crippling economic sanctions, despite carrying out a series of covert operations, despite diplomatic pressure, despite vows that an Iranian bomb is impermissible—despite all that—is weak and deluded. The Israeli Prime Minister has made no secret of his distrust, even though Israeli politicians acknowledge that intelligence and defense coöperation has never been stronger. His trusted American allies are not the elected President but, rather, his friends on the American right, the politicians, business people, and lobbyists, who are never willing to disagree with Israel at all. It has reached the point where even Netanyahu’s principal ally in sabre-rattling, the Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, has shown signs that he, too, believes the Prime Minister has gone too far.
This is not an unfamiliar drama. In his first term as Prime Minister, in the nineties, Netanyahu used to behave in such a high-handed way with White House officials that Bill Clinton left meetings with him bewildered and bemused, wondering who, in their relationship, was the leader of a superpower. But Netanyahu’s arrogance, in the guise of Churchillian prescience, has hardly receded over the years. Obama, in an attempt to cool the latest crisis, called Netanyahu last night and spent an hour talking with him.

Adding to the outrage is the fact that Netanyahu is performing not just for his allies on the Israeli right but for those he perceives as his allies on the American right, including those in the Jewish community. His performance is in the same neocon voice as the one adopted by the Romney campaign and in its opportunistic reaction to the attacks on the U.S. diplomatic outposts in Cairo and Benghazi, which left our Ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, and three other consular employees dead. Unbelievably, the Republican National Committee chairman, Reince Priebus, took to Twitter and wrote, “Obama sympathizes with attackers in Egypt. Sad and pathetic.” Romney himself accused Obama of sympathizing with the attackers in Libya.

The neocon strategy, in both Israel and the U.S., is to paint Obama as naïve in the extreme. In this, Netanyahu and Romney are united—and profoundly cynical.