Sarkozy visit to Damascus signals thaw in relationsIan ...



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Wed. 12 Jan. 2011

LATIMES

➢ Uncertainty reigns over mysterious Damascus casino………1

DER SPIEGEL

➢ 'We Still Know Too Little about Tehran's Nuclear Activities': Amano…………………………………………………..…...2

JERUSALEM POST

➢ Yalla Peace: Is this not terrorism? …………………………..3

GUARDIAN

➢ The failure of governance in the Arab world………………..6

FOREIGN POLICY

➢ American Decline…………………………………...……….8

FAMILY SECURITY MATTERS

➢ The Muslim Brotherhood Path to Victory………………....17

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Uncertainty reigns over mysterious Damascus casino

Stephen Starr in Damascus,

LATimes,

January 11, 2011

A gambling casino opened Christmas Eve in the Syrian capital without much fanfare. But as patrons have started to pour in, it has begun to stir controversy among pious Syrian Muslims who view gambling as sinful.

Plans to open the Ocean Club casino on the highway next to Damascus International Airport largely fell under the Syrian media's radar. Now members of Syria's parliament are beginning to grumble. They're seeking to have the casino closed and questioning its legal status and whether it has government support.

The Ocean Club was packed to capacity on opening night, reportedly taking in 38 million Syrian pounds, or about $800,000. Despite calls to have it closed down, the casino remained in operation as of Sunday night, with a steady stream of patrons beginning early in the evening.

Gambling and games of chance involving money remain social taboos in Syria, though some illicit venues have operated quietly for years. Lap dancing clubs and night clubs along a highway north of Damascus draw men from the Arabian Peninsula states in the summer, pumping petrodollars into the local economy.

Only non-Syrians, Syrians who live abroad or people who are members of a group called what loosely translated to English is the Association of Tradesmen are believed to be admitted to the casino.

Asking for anonymity, a member of the Syrian parliament told Babylon & Beyond that he thought gambling was good for the economy but was fearful of its growing popularity among Syrians.

"Gambling should not be made accessible to the general public but I think some form of regulation should be introduced," he said. "The country is losing money as people, especially tourists from Iraq, who want to gamble go to Lebanon."

Rumors about the ownership of the casino continue in Damascus. The lawmaker said he believed the government owns the building, but an employee at the Damascus Airport Hotel, which shares its entrance with the Ocean Club, said the property belongs to the hotel owner and that Khaled Houboubati, who runs the casino, built it himself.

Houboubati's father ran a casino on the site until the late 1960s, when conservatives succeeded in outlawing gambling across Syria. Another source said the government owned 60% of the casino.

Syria is attempting to liberalize its economy with a series of tourism drives. The walls of the Old City of Damascus around Bab Touma recently have gotten a welcome face lift, and in October Syria was listed on Lonely Planet's top 10 places to visit in 2011.

Members of the parliament reportedly have given Houboubati until the end of the month to comply with an official parliamentary query to ascertain whether gambling is taking place at the Ocean Club.

According to the lawmaker interviewed by Babylon & Beyond, the parliament will address the issue Feb. 15.

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'We Still Know Too Little about Tehran's Nuclear Activities'

Der Spiegel Online,

12 Jan. 2011,

This is an interview with IAEA head Yukiya Amano.. We took only what he said about Syria.. The full interview is here..

SPIEGEL: Israel, which feels particularly threatened by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has demonstrated, most recently in September 2007, that it does not shy away from military strikes. In Syria, an ally of Iran, Israel destroyed a complex of buildings where plutonium was presumably being produced. Do you have any new information about Syrian President Bashar Assad's nuclear plans?

Amano: Syria isn't letting our inspectors into the country to examine this location in detail. In a letter to the Syrian foreign minister in November, I was critical of his country's cooperation. We also need progress in this case. And then we have a second problem with Syria: The research reactor in Damascus is under IAEA supervision, and we conduct routine inspections there. We have now found traces of uranium from a source unknown to us, which is something we also want to know more about. We have been given two explanations to date, but we don't consider them sufficient. Even if it's only a matter of a few grams, we still want to know where they came from and why they are there.

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Yalla Peace: Is this not terrorism?

When a white man shoots 17 people and kills six, he’s ‘crazy,’ but if the killer were Arab or Muslim, we would be having a very different conversation.

Ray Hanania,

Jerusalem Post

11 Jan. 2011,

When news reports broke that an unidentified man had fired a gun at a meeting organized by a local congresswoman in Tucson, Arizona, I immediately wondered if it was an act of terrorism or just meaningless violence.

Among the 17 people wounded and six killed was Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who had been the target of much hate rhetoric that has come to dominate the political debate in America, not just about the Middle East but about domestic politics.

The gunman turned out to be a 22-year-old white male named Jared L. Loughner. And immediately, media pundits started to say that he was just a “crazed loner.”

It made me think about what might have been said if the killer had been Arab or Muslim.

You know the debate would be different and people would be screaming that the Arab killer was clearly a part of some international jihad network, even if he (or she) had committed the crime on his own.

Yes. When a white man shoots 17 people and kills six, including a nine-year-old girl, he’s a “crazy person.”

But when an Arab or Muslim kills people, like military officer Nidal Hassan for example, he’s part of some vast Islamic conspiracy.

I was about to complain.

But then I actually thought about it; when you are white, you are crazy, when you are Arab, you’re part of some conspiracy, which I guess is better than being a crazy person.

Arabs are never “crazy” in events like this. Even though Loughner refers to himself as a terrorist on one of YouTube videos, no one else is. They just call him a killer.

You see, the fact that some innocent persons were killed doesn’t seem to be as important as the attempts to define why the murders took place.

ONE BRAVE American, Clarence W. Dupnik, has declared that the Loughner shooting is the result of an increase in the strident hate rhetoric that is overcoming America over the past few years, especially since September 11, 2001 and the election seven years later of President Barack Obama.

Dupnik is not just some pundit.

He is the sheriff in Tucson, Arizona, where the killings took place.

Immediately, the right-wing nut jobs started to come out from under their rocks denouncing Dupnik, especially after many media started wondering if some politicians may have been helping to raise the level of hate. They pointed to the website of Sarah Palin and members of the extremist Tea Party movement, who have put “telescopic crosshairs” on graphics to target members of Congress who have been “too liberal.”

A crosshair is a symbol of a rifle’s scope and is associated with guns, so the symbolism is not lost on many observers.

I know that the majority of Americans are good people. In fact, the majority of Palestinians and Israelis are good people, too.

But sometimes the good people don’t speak out enough to challenge the voices of stridency and hatred. We avoid confrontation yet we’re outraged when the stridency results in killings as it did in Arizona.

Moderates need to do more.

We need to speak out against strident voices whether they are here in the US or in Israel and Palestine.

If we want a good future, we need to start showing some compassion, not hostility for those with whom we might disagree.

There is a way to disagree without being disagreeable.

And while we need a lot more of that in the US, Palestinians and Israelis could some too.

The writer is an award-winning columnist and Chicago radio talk show host.

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The failure of governance in the Arab world

Protests in Tunisia and Algeria are part of a rising tide of popular dissatisfaction with illiberal, unreformed Arab rule

Simon tisdall,

Guardian,

11 Jan. 2011,

The official response to unrest on Tunisia's streets comes straight out of a tyrant's playbook: order the police to open fire on unarmed demonstrators, deploy the army, blame resulting violence on "terrorists" and accuse unidentified "foreign parties" of fomenting insurrection. Like other Arab rulers, President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali seems not to know any better. For this murderous ignorance, there is less and less excuse.

The trouble started last month when Mohammed Bouazizi, 26, an unemployed graduate, set himself on fire outside a government building in protest at police harassment. Bouazizi's despairing act – he died of his injuries last week – quickly became a rallying cause for Tunisia's disaffected legions of unemployed students, impoverished workers, trade unionists, lawyers and human rights activists.

The ensuing demonstrations produced a torrent of bloodshed at the weekend when security forces, claiming self-defence, said they killed 14 people. Independent sources say at least 50 died and many more were wounded in clashes in the provincial cities of Thala, Kasserine and Regueb. The latest reports spoke of continuing clashes in El-Kef and Gafsa.

Despite Ben Ali's assertions, there is no evidence so far of outside meddling or Islamist pot-stirring. What is abundantly plain is that many Tunisians are fed up to the back teeth with chronic unemployment, especially affecting young people; endemic poverty in rural areas that receive no benefits from tourism; rising food prices; insufficient public investment; official corruption; and a pseudo-democratic, authoritarian political system that gave Ben Ali, 74, a fifth consecutive term in 2009 with an absurd 89.6% of the vote.

In this daunting context, Ben Ali's emergency job creation plan, announced this week, looks to be too little, too late.

If this long tally of woes sounds familiar, that's because it's more or less ubiquitous. Across the Arab world, with limited exceptions in Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq, similar problems obtain to a greater or lesser degree. Indeed, until recently, Tunisia was held to be better than most. In Algeria, four days of rioting about price rises in food staples earlier this month forced the government to use some of its vast $150bn stash of gas export cash to boost subsidies.

Egypt, the Arab world's most populous country, has problems that dwarf Tunisia's but are basically similar: the population is booming, 60% are under 30, youth unemployment is soaring, 40% of citizens live on under $2 a day, and one third is illiterate.

Add to this a growing rich-poor divide, a corrupt electoral system that bans the country's largest party, the Muslim Brotherhood, and President Hosni Mubarak's apparent determination to cling to power indefinitely, and the picture that emerges is both disturbing and largely typical of the illiberal, unreformed Arab sphere.

Failing or failed Arab governance across an arc stretching from Yemen and the Gulf to north Africa is not a new phenomenon, nor are the likeliest remedies a mystery, except perhaps to rulers such as Ben Ali.

A discussion last month at the Carnegie Endowment identified high unemployment triggering social unrest, rapid population rises and slow growth, caused partly by the European downturn, as the key challenges facing relatively poorer, oil-importing Arab states. Governments were urged to seek new export markets, increase manufacturing and enhance competitiveness through education and labour market reform.

But analyst Marina Ottaway suggested political leadership and the will for reform was lacking as regional governments openly flouted calls for change. Other experts deplored a general trend towards "authoritarian retrenchment" as Arab leaders used the west's preoccupation with terrorism, its energy dependence and the Palestine stalemate to deflect external and internal reform pressures.

The striking underperformance of most Arab governments in political, economic and social terms – and of the Arab League, dubbed by some an "autocrats club" – has been expertly charted in the past decade by a series of UN-sponsored Arab human development reports. Overall, they make depressing reading. Ben Ali and his ilk would do well to study the 2009 Arab Knowledge survey produced by the Al Maktoum Foundation.

It says, in part:

"Stringent legislative and institutional restrictions in numerous Arab countries prevent the expansion of the public sphere and the consolidation of opportunities for the political participation of the citizenry in choosing their representatives ... on a sound democratic basis.

"The restrictions imposed on public freedoms, alongside a rise in levels of poverty and poor income distribution, in some Arab countries, have led to an increase in marginalisation of the poor and further distanced them from obtaining their basic rights to housing, education and employment, contributing to the further decline of social freedoms."

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Think Again: American Decline

This time it's for real.

Gideon Rachman, Foreign Policy Magazine,

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2011

"We've Heard All This About American Decline Before."

This time it's different. It's certainly true that America has been through cycles of declinism in the past. Campaigning for the presidency in 1960, John F. Kennedy complained, "American strength relative to that of the Soviet Union has been slipping, and communism has been advancing steadily in every area of the world." Ezra Vogel's Japan as Number One was published in 1979, heralding a decade of steadily rising paranoia about Japanese manufacturing techniques and trade policies.

In the end, of course, the Soviet and Japanese threats to American supremacy proved chimerical. So Americans can be forgiven if they greet talk of a new challenge from China as just another case of the boy who cried wolf. But a frequently overlooked fact about that fable is that the boy was eventually proved right. The wolf did arrive -- and China is the wolf.

The Chinese challenge to the United States is more serious for both economic and demographic reasons. The Soviet Union collapsed because its economic system was highly inefficient, a fatal flaw that was disguised for a long time because the USSR never attempted to compete on world markets. China, by contrast, has proved its economic prowess on the global stage. Its economy has been growing at 9 to 10 percent a year, on average, for roughly three decades. It is now the world's leading exporter and its biggest manufacturer, and it is sitting on more than $2.5 trillion of foreign reserves. Chinese goods compete all over the world. This is no Soviet-style economic basket case.

Japan, of course, also experienced many years of rapid economic growth and is still an export powerhouse. But it was never a plausible candidate to be No. 1. The Japanese population is less than half that of the United States, which means that the average Japanese person would have to be more than twice as rich as the average American before Japan's economy surpassed America's. That was never going to happen. By contrast, China's population is more than four times that of the United States. The famous projection by Goldman Sachs that China's economy will be bigger than that of the United States by 2027 was made before the 2008 economic crash. At the current pace, China could be No. 1 well before then.

China's economic prowess is already allowing Beijing to challenge American influence all over the world. The Chinese are the preferred partners of many African governments and the biggest trading partner of other emerging powers, such as Brazil and South Africa. China is also stepping in to buy the bonds of financially strapped members of the eurozone, such as Greece and Portugal.

And China is only the largest part of a bigger story about the rise of new economic and political players. America's traditional allies in Europe -- Britain, France, Italy, even Germany -- are slipping down the economic ranks. New powers are on the rise: India, Brazil, Turkey. They each have their own foreign-policy preferences, which collectively constrain America's ability to shape the world. Think of how India and Brazil sided with China at the global climate-change talks. Or the votes by Turkey and Brazil against America at the United Nations on sanctions against Iran. That is just a taste of things to come.

"China Will Implode Sooner or Later."

Don't count on it. It is certainly true that when Americans are worrying about national decline, they tend to overlook the weaknesses of their scariest-looking rival. The flaws in the Soviet and Japanese systems became obvious only in retrospect. Those who are confident that American hegemony will be extended long into the future point to the potential liabilities of the Chinese system. In a recent interview with the Times of London, former U.S. President George W. Bush suggested that China's internal problems mean that its economy will be unlikely to rival America's in the foreseeable future. "Do I still think America will remain the sole superpower?" he asked. "I do."

But predictions of the imminent demise of the Chinese miracle have been a regular feature of Western analysis ever since it got rolling in the late 1970s. In 1989, the Communist Party seemed to be staggering after the Tiananmen Square massacre. In the 1990s, economy watchers regularly pointed to the parlous state of Chinese banks and state-owned enterprises. Yet the Chinese economy has kept growing, doubling in size roughly every seven years.

Of course, it would be absurd to pretend that China does not face major challenges. In the short term, there is plenty of evidence that a property bubble is building in big cities like Shanghai, and inflation is on the rise. Over the long term, China has alarming political and economic transitions to navigate. The Communist Party is unlikely to be able to maintain its monopoly on political power forever. And the country's traditional dependence on exports and an undervalued currency are coming under increasing criticism from the United States and other international actors demanding a "rebalancing" of China's export-driven economy. The country also faces major demographic and environmental challenges: The population is aging rapidly as a result of the one-child policy, and China is threatened by water shortages and pollution.

Yet even if you factor in considerable future economic and political turbulence, it would be a big mistake to assume that the Chinese challenge to U.S. power will simply disappear. Once countries get the hang of economic growth, it takes a great deal to throw them off course. The analogy to the rise of Germany from the mid-19th century onward is instructive. Germany went through two catastrophic military defeats, hyperinflation, the Great Depression, the collapse of democracy, and the destruction of its major cities and infrastructure by Allied bombs. And yet by the end of the 1950s, West Germany was once again one of the world's leading economies, albeit shorn of its imperial ambitions.

In a nuclear age, China is unlikely to get sucked into a world war, so it will not face turbulence and disorder on remotely the scale Germany did in the 20th century. And whatever economic and political difficulties it does experience will not be enough to stop the country's rise to great-power status. Sheer size and economic momentum mean that the Chinese juggernaut will keep rolling forward, no matter what obstacles lie in its path.

"America Still Leads Across the Board."

For now. As things stand, America has the world's largest economy, the world's leading universities, and many of its biggest companies. The U.S. military is also incomparably more powerful than any rival. The United States spends almost as much on its military as the rest of the world put together. And let's also add in America's intangible assets. The country's combination of entrepreneurial flair and technological prowess has allowed it to lead the technological revolution. Talented immigrants still flock to U.S. shores. And now that Barack Obama is in the White House, the country's soft power has received a big boost. For all his troubles, polls show Obama is still the most charismatic leader in the world; Hu Jintao doesn't even come close. America also boasts the global allure of its creative industries (Hollywood and all that), its values, the increasing universality of the English language, and the attractiveness of the American Dream.

All true -- but all more vulnerable than you might think. American universities remain a formidable asset. But if the U.S. economy is not generating jobs, then those bright Asian graduate students who fill up the engineering and computer-science departments at Stanford University and MIT will return home in larger numbers. Fortune's latest ranking of the world's largest companies has only two American firms in the top 10 -- Walmart at No. 1 and ExxonMobil at No. 3. There are already three Chinese firms in the top 10: Sinopec, State Grid, and China National Petroleum. America's appeal might also diminish if the country is no longer so closely associated with opportunity, prosperity, and success. And though many foreigners are deeply attracted to the American Dream, there is also a deep well of anti-American sentiment in the world that al Qaeda and others have skillfully exploited, Obama or no Obama.

As for the U.S. military, the lesson of the Iraq and Afghan wars is that America's martial prowess is less useful than former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others imagined. U.S. troops, planes, and missiles can overthrow a government on the other side of the world in weeks, but pacifying and stabilizing a conquered country is another matter. Years after apparent victory, America is still bogged down by an apparently endless insurgency in Afghanistan.

Not only are Americans losing their appetite for foreign adventures, but the U.S. military budget is clearly going to come under pressure in this new age of austerity. The present paralysis in Washington offers little hope that the United States will deal with its budgetary problems swiftly or efficiently. The U.S. government's continuing reliance on foreign lending makes the country vulnerable, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's humbling 2009 request to the Chinese to keep buying U.S. Treasury bills revealed. America is funding its military supremacy through deficit spending, meaning the war in Afghanistan is effectively being paid for with a Chinese credit card. Little wonder that Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has identified the burgeoning national debt as the single largest threat to U.S. national security.

Meanwhile, China's spending on its military continues to grow rapidly. The country will soon announce the construction of its first aircraft carrier and is aiming to build five or six in total. Perhaps more seriously, China's development of new missile and anti-satellite technology threatens the command of the sea and skies on which the United States bases its Pacific supremacy. In a nuclear age, the U.S. and Chinese militaries are unlikely to clash. A common Chinese view is that the United States will instead eventually find it can no longer afford its military position in the Pacific. U.S. allies in the region -- Japan, South Korea, and increasingly India -- may partner more with Washington to try to counter rising Chinese power. But if the United States has to scale back its presence in the Pacific for budgetary reasons, its allies will start to accommodate themselves to a rising China. Beijing's influence will expand, and the Asia-Pacific region -- the emerging center of the global economy -- will become China's backyard.

"Globalization Is Bending the World the Way of the West."

Not really. One reason why the United States was relaxed about China's rise in the years after the end of the Cold War was the deeply ingrained belief that globalization was spreading Western values. Some even thought that globalization and Americanization were virtually synonymous.

Pundit Fareed Zakaria was prescient when he wrote that the "rise of the rest" (i.e., non-American powers) would be one of the major features of a "post-American world." But even Zakaria argued that this trend was essentially beneficial to the United States: "The power shift … is good for America, if approached properly. The world is going America's way. Countries are becoming more open, market-friendly, and democratic."

Both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton took a similar view that globalization and free trade would serve as a vehicle for the export of American values. In 1999, two years before China's accession to the World Trade Organization, Bush argued, "Economic freedom creates habits of liberty. And habits of liberty create expectations of democracy.… Trade freely with China, and time is on our side."

There were two important misunderstandings buried in this theorizing. The first was that economic growth would inevitably -- and fairly swiftly -- lead to democratization. The second was that new democracies would inevitably be more friendly and helpful toward the United States. Neither assumption is working out.

In 1989, after the Tiananmen Square massacre, few Western analysts would have believed that 20 years later China would still be a one-party state -- and that its economy would also still be growing at phenomenal rates. The common (and comforting) Western assumption was that China would have to choose between political liberalization and economic failure. Surely a tightly controlled one-party state could not succeed in the era of cell phones and the World Wide Web? As Clinton put it during a visit to China in 1998, "In this global information age, when economic success is built on ideas, personal freedom is … essential to the greatness of any modern nation."

In fact, China managed to combine censorship and one-party rule with continuing economic success over the following decade. The confrontation between the Chinese government and Google in 2010 was instructive. Google, that icon of the digital era, threatened to withdraw from China in protest at censorship, but it eventually backed down in return for token concessions. It is now entirely conceivable that when China becomes the world's largest economy -- let us say in 2027 -- it will still be a one-party state run by the Communist Party.

And even if China does democratize, there is absolutely no guarantee that this will make life easier for the United States, let alone prolong America's global hegemony. The idea that democracies are liable to agree on the big global issues is now being undermined on a regular basis. India does not agree with the United States on climate change or the Doha round of trade talks. Brazil does not agree with the United States on how to handle Venezuela or Iran. A more democratic Turkey is today also a more Islamist Turkey, which is now refusing to take the American line on either Israel or Iran. In a similar vein, a more democratic China might also be a more prickly China, if the popularity of nationalist books and Internet sites in the Middle Kingdom is any guide.

"Globalization Is Not a Zero-Sum Game."

Don't be too sure. Successive U.S. presidents, from the first Bush to Obama, have explicitly welcomed China's rise. Just before his first visit to China, Obama summarized the traditional approach when he said, "Power does not need to be a zero-sum game, and nations need not fear the success of another.… We welcome China's efforts to play a greater role on the world stage."

But whatever they say in formal speeches, America's leaders are clearly beginning to have their doubts, and rightly so. It is a central tenet of modern economics that trade is mutually beneficial for both partners, a win-win rather than a zero-sum. But that implies the rules of the game aren't rigged. Speaking before the 2010 World Economic Forum, Larry Summers, then Obama's chief economic advisor, remarked pointedly that the normal rules about the mutual benefits of trade do not necessarily apply when one trading partner is practicing mercantilist or protectionist policies. The U.S. government clearly thinks that China's undervaluation of its currency is a form of protectionism that has led to global economic imbalances and job losses in the United States. Leading economists, such as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and the Peterson Institute's C. Fred Bergsten, have taken a similar line, arguing that tariffs or other retaliatory measures would be a legitimate response. So much for the win-win world.

And when it comes to the broader geopolitical picture, the world of the future looks even more like a zero-sum game, despite the gauzy rhetoric of globalization that comforted the last generation of American politicians. For the United States has been acting as if the mutual interests created by globalization have repealed one of the oldest laws of international politics: the notion that rising players eventually clash with established powers.

In fact, rivalry between a rising China and a weakened America is now apparent across a whole range of issues, from territorial disputes in Asia to human rights. It is mercifully unlikely that the United States and China would ever actually go to war, but that is because both sides have nuclear weapons, not because globalization has magically dissolved their differences.

At the G-20 summit in November, the U.S. drive to deal with "global economic imbalances" was essentially thwarted by China's obdurate refusal to change its currency policy. The 2009 climate-change talks in Copenhagen ended in disarray after another U.S.-China standoff. Growing Chinese economic and military clout clearly poses a long-term threat to American hegemony in the Pacific. The Chinese reluctantly agreed to a new package of U.N. sanctions on Iran, but the cost of securing Chinese agreement was a weak deal that is unlikely to derail the Iranian nuclear program. Both sides have taken part in the talks with North Korea, but a barely submerged rivalry prevents truly effective Sino-American cooperation. China does not like Kim Jong Il's regime, but it is also very wary of a reunified Korea on its borders, particularly if the new Korea still played host to U.S. troops. China is also competing fiercely for access to resources, in particular oil, which is driving up global prices.

American leaders are right to reject zero-sum logic in public. To do anything else would needlessly antagonize the Chinese. But that shouldn't obscure this unavoidable fact: As economic and political power moves from West to East, new international rivalries are inevitably emerging.

The United States still has formidable strengths. Its economy will eventually recover. Its military has a global presence and a technological edge that no other country can yet match. But America will never again experience the global dominance it enjoyed in the 17 years between the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991 and the financial crisis of 2008. Those days are over.

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The Muslim Brotherhood Path to Victory: Part One (of Two)

Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld

Family Security Matters (American blgo concentrates on security issues)

12 Jan. 2011,

And the award for turning Islam into one of the fastest growing, most influential, and most intimidating religious movements in the world goes to… the Muslim Brotherhood (MB).

The most recent victim of the global Islamic movement’s intimidation of free speech in Denmark is Lars Hedegaard, the President of the Danish Free Press Society and The International Free Press Society.

Denmark has been targeted by the MB after the 2006 publication of ‘Mohammed cartoons’ by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Following Sheikh Ali Al-Hudaify, imam of the Prophet's Mosque in Medina call "upon governments, organizations and scholars in the Islamic world to extend support for campaigns protesting the sacrilegious attacks on the Prophet,” the MB orchestrated mass riots in Denmark and across the world.

Responding to an interviewer question on Muslim “honor killings,” Mr. Hedegaard remarked, “They rape their own children.” He now stands accused by Denmark’s public prosecutor of “racism.”

Although Mr. Hedegaard further explained that he was not speaking about every single Muslim or even the majority, the prosecution is proceeding. His trial begins later this month.

The politically correct sensitivity of the Danish public prosecutor that led to Mr. Hedegaard’s prosecution and persecution seems to follow the cowardly public apology issued by the Danish daily Politiken on February 2010, for reprinting the cartoons in 2008. The newspaper’s mea culpa was obtained as part of the settlement with a Saudi lawyer representing 94,923 of Muhammad's descendants, who sued the paper for offending them.

Hedegaard’s legal troubles and Politiken’s cave-in are the casualties of the global propaganda offensive launched after 9/11, portraying the Muslims as victims of discrimination by Western societies. Led by the Muslim Brotherhood, this offensive drastically intensified after the publications of the Muhammad cartoons in Denmark and Sweden.

Ironically, while Europe is obstinately ignoring or kowtowing the growing power of radical Islam and the MB, State Department communications revealed by Wikileaks in November and December 2010 show that Arab leaders in the Middle East have voiced increasing alarm at the spread of the MB’s radical Islamic worldview is spreading.

A March 3, 2008 cable quoted Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali predicting an MB takeover in Egypt, where, he noted, the environment was “explosive.” This view was confirmed in a February 23, 2010 cable quoting the Qatari Emir, Hamid bin Khalifa al Thani, telling U.S. Senator John Kerry, “Everyone knows that Egypt has a problem with the Muslim Brotherhood.” Another cable revealed an allegedly reluctant association between MB offshoot Hamas and Syrian President Bashar Assad. Calling the terrorist group an “uninvited guest,” Assad insisted that “to be effective and active,” he nonetheless had to “have a relationship with all parties. Hamas is Muslim Brotherhood, but we have to deal with the reality of their presence.”

The Muslim Brotherhood proudly touts these accomplishments on their official website, Ikhanweb.

The Wikileaks cables show that MB’s long-advertised aspirations of global control are materializing, fueled by Saudi and Gulf petrodollars and influence, with the complicity and tacit approval of the West.

The MB describes itself as a political and social revolutionary movement; it was founded in March 1928 in Egypt by Hassan al-Banna, who objected to Western influence and together with MB’s most influential ideologues Sayyid Qutb , called for return to the earliest days of Islam as a model for society. MB is an expansive and secretive society with followers in more than 70 countries, dedicated to creating a global Islamic order that would discriminate against women and punish nonbelievers. Its members and supporters founded and funded al Qaeda, Hamas, and other radical Muslim terror groups, as well as Muslim student organizations on six continents, including one “of the largest college student groups in the United States.”

The case of the Egyptian exiled Doha based, 85 year-old MB spiritual leader, Yusuf Qaradawi, amply demonstrates how a well-funded Islamist demagogue who openly calls for violence against Americans, Israelis, and Jews, has managed nonetheless to secure a reputation in the West as a moderate thinker.

A prolific writer, who for decades holds the directorship of Qatar University'sSeerah and Sunnah Centre, Qaradawi is hailed as one of the leading modern Islamic scholars. He is the founder of the International Union of Muslim Scholars and the European Council for Fatwa and Research, and was twice offered the leadership of the MB. He rejected the offers, explaining in 2004 that he could not commit to “any movement which might constrain my actions, even if this is the Muslim Brotherhood under whose umbrella I grew and which I so defended.” In 2006 he clarified that the although the MB consider him “their Mufti” but that he “prefer[ed] to be devoted to the entire nation.” Qaradawi was banned from entering the U.S. in 1999.

Adhering to the MB ideology, which calls on the Muslims to rid themselves of non-Islamic rule, Qaradawi has advocated suicide bombing as “martyrdom in the name of God,” and the killing of American and coalition troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2004, he issued a fatwa forbidding Muslims from buying or even advertising American or Israeli products. Qaradawi issues many fatwas on his popular website ; on another website he helped found in 1997, IslamOnline, as well as on his al Jazeera prime-time television program, ash-Shariah wal-Hayat, “Shariah and Life,” allegedly reaching 40 million viewers. Wikileaks cables confirmed that Qatar uses the Doha-based al Jazeera as “a useful tool” to advance its political agenda.

Another recent example of the Qaradawi-Qatari partnership to increase Islamic influence and expand its reach is found in the Qatar Foundation’s Education City, a multi-billion mega-complex housing a combination of Qatari and prestigious American institutions.

The Qatar Foundation was established by Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the Emir of Qatar in 1995, and is currently headed by his wife, Shikha Mozah Bint Nasser Al-Missned. American universities lured to Qatar by massive financial incentives include Carnegie Mellon, Northwestern, Texas A&M, Georgetown, Virginia Commonwealth, and Cornell. For instance, the Qatar Foundation covers the costs of A&M at Education City, and pledged $750 million to the branch of Cornell’s medical college. Qatar continues its effort to attract additional prominent American and European academic institutions.

Education City is now home to the Qaradawi Center for Islamic Moderation and Renewal, an Islamic Studies think tank whose establishment is aimed to “highlight the middle path propagated by Qaradawi.” In the 2009/2010 academic year the Qatar Foundation awarded five graduate scholarships in Qaradawi’s name for applicants studying Islamic Studies with a specialty in Contemporary Fiqh (Islamic Law). In 2009, Qaradawi was on a roster of prominent Middle Easter figures who lectured to American students participating in “Journalism Boot Camp,” a program affiliated with Columbia University, the University of Qatar, and the American University of Cairo.

Clearly, Qaradawi’s ubiquitous presence in Qatar and its rapidly growing Education City, is not dissuading American institutions of higher learning from exposing American students to Qaradawi’s poisonous influence.

Qatar’s substantial financial and ideological support for Qaradawi, helps to promote the Muslim Brotherhood’s agenda. In February 2009, Qaradawi thanked Qatar “for having accepted me and allowed me to do my work on an international scale. I have never faced any obstacle in expressing freely whatever I wished.”

Qatari money and academic ties provide but one of many means for the spread of Muslim Brotherhood influence, which is becoming pervasive in the Western world, which allows the burgeoning network of Islamic organizations and charities to operate.

In order to understand the scope of MB operations in the West, one must first understand the organization’s long-term planning and methods to secure their growth. MB’s founder Hassan al-Banna, understood that financial strength was critical for the organization’s success, weapon to undermine the infidels — and “work towards establishing an Islamic rule on earth.”

After the 1973 successful use of Middle East oil as a weapon against the West, rising oil revenues encouraged MB leaders to formalize al-Banna's vision. In 1977 and 1982, they convened in Lugano, Switzerland, to chart a master plan to co-opt Western economic “foundations, capitalism and democracy” in a treatise entitled “Towards a Worldwide Strategy for Islamic Policy,” also known as The Project. MB spiritual leader al-Qaradawi wrote the explicit document, dated 1 December 1982.The 12-point strategy includes diktats to establish the Islamic state and gradual, parallel work to control local power centers . . . using institutional work as means to this end. To achieve all these to spread fundamentalist Islam required “special Islamic economic, social and other institutions,” and “the necessary economic institutions to provide financial support.”

But Islamic banking was slow to catch on until 1993, when Anwar Ibrahim—then Malaysia’s finance minister, and current opposition leader—helped to introduce the newly invented “Islamic Banking windows” into conventional banks. This measure helped familiarized potential customers with and built confidence in the unknown Islamic banking system. Indeed, it proved central to the development of the global Islamic finance industry. Anwar constant support and advocacy of Islamic rule led Qaradawi, his friend and business partner, to join the list of prominent Western leaders who publically defend the Malay politician, who is on trial for sodomy and corruption charges, which he denies.

Anwar and Qaradawi share substantial business ties: in 1996, Anwar licensed company headed by Qaradawi and transferred it to Malaysia. The company, Majestic Global Investment is Kuwaiti fund management business. Both Anwar and Qaradawi serve on the board of the MB affiliated, Virginia based International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT), which Anwar helped to found.

The IIIT, which has been under extended federal investigation for ties to al Qaeda and Hamas, advertises two of Qaradawi’s books, and has published literature describing the hurdles it faces in its planned takeover of the U.S. and Canada.

Qaradawi and Anwar share ties to Oxford University. Qaradawi is a trustee of the university’s Center for Islamic Studies, while Anwar was a lecturer at Oxford’s St. Antony’s College.

Another Western media darling, Tariq Ramadan, who is prominent advocate of the MB agenda, found a permanent house at Oxford’s St. Antony’s College. Ramadan, Hassan al Banna’s grandson, was banned from entering the U.S. until January 19, 2010, when U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, issued an executive order allowing his entry to the country. Clinton who pressured the Malaysian government on behalf of Anwar, considers him a reformer and an exemplary moderate Muslim.

One can only wonder why despite the readily available damning information and renewed attention on the MB and its affiliated groups the U.S. as its allies are laying the welcoming carpet to some of the most effective MB actors.

Contributing Editor Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld is the Director of the New York-based American Center for Democracy. She is an expert on terrorism and corruption-related topics such as terror financing and narco-terrorism. She has helped to change New York state law, when the Libel Terrorism Protection Act (pdf) was passed. Similar laws have been passed in other U.S. states, and a federal law known as the SPEECH ACT which was signed by the president in August 2010, follows the same principle - that First Amendment guarantees should protect authors and publishers against foreign libel judgments from countries with poor free speech protections.

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