Cat Among Pigeons in The Washington Note

By Con George-Kotzabasis

It’s good and encouraging in seeing a politically realist downy bird from the right like Jim Pinkerton, former senior staffer of the Bush I administration, invited as a guest by Steve Clemons to perch on the intellectually dry branches of The Washington Note. But Clemons must be in a mischievous frolicsome mood, as he deliberately places a cat among the pigeons of the TWN.

Mosque-Made Terrorism

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Short reply to: Not in the name of our Islam By Orhan Cicek ON LINE opinion August 07, 2009

Who is going to educate the educator? The author of the article, Orhan Cicek, engages in a litany of the good aspects of the Muslim religion but abhors identifying its bad aspects from which Muslim terrorism stems. All religions, including Christianity, are a mixture of the good and the bad based on fantasies and “dark forces.” That is why the reign of reason cannot find its throne in religion. All the great achievements of our contemporary Western civilization emanate from the fact that they were achieved against religion or by reforming religion. Muslims cannot liberate themselves from the “dark forces” of their own religion and achieve their own greatness without at least having their own religious reformation. But is such reformation possible when the Koran has been dictated by Allah Himself and given to His prophet Mohammad? Who among Muslims will dare to ‘edit’ the words of God?

Presently the deafening evidence is that jihadism and terror are incubated in the religious institutions and Madrasas of Islam and one can only “preserve’ one’s “objectivity” by realizing that this is Mosque-made terrorism. The Australian newspaper reports today that all of the five accused of terrorism were regularly praying at the Preston Mosque in Melbourne where the ‘moderate’ Mufti of Australia Sheikh Fehmi Naji el-Imam, who replaced the radical ‘meat exposed’ Hilaly, presides. And the other incontrovertible fact is, unlike the claim of the author that “the problem of terror and crime...is an issue that the mainstream Muslim society strongly opposes,” that all the moderate streams of Muslim society are dry of any demonstrable opposition to acts of terrorism and seem to be merely the banks within which the terrorist stream moves along.

Islamists Cannot be Pacified by Olive Branches but only by Fire of War

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Your quote states the obvious. Of course one does not fight terrorism only with police methods but the question is out of all the methods which are the most effective by which one can defeat the jihadists. And while your paragraph in your previous post that mentions “predators” and all the other ‘hard things’ that one has perforce to do against the jihadists is full of strategic clarity, by reverting back to your old argument of three years ago that the present terrorists are similar to the anarchist terrorists of the past and can be interdicted by ‘police’ methods, you unconsciously downgrade the seriousness of your ‘hard things’ position.

Moreover, you are locked in the fallacy of a rational person who premises his actions that his enemies that ‘round’ him up are also rational and if he shows by his actions, in our case America, that he is not against Arabs and Muslims this will bring a definitive change in the attitudes of the jihadists. This is a ‘straightjacket’ delusion that has lost all contact with reality. Islamic fanaticism will not be influenced, soothed, abated, or defeated by moral examples or olive branches but only in the field of battle and that is why a military deployment against it is a prerequisite. In short, it’s just another but more effective method in defeating the jihadists in a shorter span of time.

Replacing Radical Hilaly with 'Moderate' Naji as Mufti of Australia a Farce

I'm republishing this article written on June 2007 and published originally on my blog Nemesis as a result of a report of the Australian on August 7, 2009 that all five of the arrested would-be terrorists were regular prayers at the Preston Mosque in Melbourne where the Mufti of Australasia Sheikh Fehmi Naji el-Imam presides.

By Con George-Kotzabasis

"The evil doctrine, the armed forces at the disposal of those professing the doctrine, and the sympathizers with the doctrine in other lands ( e.a) constitute one united threat which must be met by force". Edmund Burke, writing on the French revolution and of the English citizens who supported it either in word or deed.

In a battle between flaming fundamentalists and mute moderates, who do you think is going to win. Irshad Manji, Muslim writer

As we have predicted in the past, the stepping down of radical Hilaly as Mufti of Australia and his replacement by another imam who would be just as radical but who would attempt to cover the sinews of his spiritual radicalism under the garments of moderation, has just happened. The selection by the Australian Council of Imams of the elderly and scholarly Sheikh Fehmi Naji el-Imam of the Preston Mosque to replace Hilaly as Mufti of Australasia, is no less than an attempt by the politically minded advisers of the Australian Council of Imams to cozen and dupe the Australian public that they were substituting a moderate cleric in the person of Sheikh Naji for the radical Hilaly.

But let us see whether our prejudgment of the new Mufti is too hasty and facile by looking at the past conduct and statements of Sheikh Naji. Six years now since the twin towers bombing and all the objective evidence who was behind the attack, the Sheikh still refuses to acknowledge that Osama bin Laden was behind it. His reply is that he has heard people saying that al Qaeda were the perpetrator but he himself has not seeing the evidence. Now the Sheikh is reputed to be a scholarly and intelligent man and one would expect of him to use the latter two qualities in search of the truth. If six years after the event, he still cannot make up his intelligent mind, despite the resounding evidence that is also verified by the statements of bin Laden himself that al Qaeda was the deadly agent, as to the real perpetrator of that dastardly action, then people must come to the conclusion not that the Sheikh does not have the truth in his hands but that he hides it. And the reason why he hides it is that he does not want to alienate himself both from other imams, who also believe that bin Laden was not behind the attack, and of the wider Muslim community which also believes likewise, after hearing their clerics for so long repudiating that the attack was engendered by al Qaeda.

Hence the important question is not what Sheikh Naji truly believes about 9/11 but what he truly represents. That a great number of Muslims, after being indoctrinated for so many years by their radical imams about the evils of the West and the Great Satan America have been also radicalized, and it’s exactly this fundamentalist stratum that the Sheikh represents. That there is a majority of fledgling radical Muslims in our midst has been lucidly illustrated by the recently religiously arrogant statements of the head of the Supreme Islamic Shia Council of Australia, Kamal Mousselmani, as reported in the Australian, on June 23-24, 2007. He said, his entire of 30,000 Shi’ites in Australia were avid [my emphasis] supporters of Hezbollah (Party of God) and haters of Israel, considered Hezbollah to be a “resistance group” not a terrorist organization. He continued, “Shia in Australia considers Israel a terrorist organization and also view those who support Israel in the same light”. And with the superciliousness of a fanatic who speaks in the name of God, he said to the reporters attending his press conference, “put those words down, we are not afraid to say that”.

Certainly there is a minority of moderate Muslims within their community but who would dare to swim against the stream of such torrential river of radicalism? This is why the expectation by some civil libertarians and politicians that moderate Muslims can oust the radicals from their position of power and influence, is completely unrealistic at least in the short term. And in “the long term we will all be dead”, to quote John Maynard Keynes.

Furthermore, Sheikh Naji’s record speaks for itself. He officially supported the application for residency of Abdul Nacer Benbrica, who presently awaits trial for alleged terrorist actions in Australia. Asked by a reporter if moderate Muslims should take a stronger stand against extremists, he ducked the question and answered that the media misrepresented the facts about Muslims. What he would say to those Muslims who wanted to go overseas and participate in jihad, he replied, “I don’t know what (the) circumstances outside (Australia) would be”. He also called for the removal of Hezbollah’s military arm from Australia’s proscribed list of terrorist organizations. And in a lame attempt to shift jihad in favor of Australia, not realizing that he was throwing a boomerang in the air, he said that Australian Muslims would participate in a jihad to “protect Australia from its enemies”. (m.e.) Presently Australia is fighting its enemies, extremist Muslims, in Iraq and Afghanistan; is the Sheikh going to send his holy warriors to these theatres of war as an outcome of his pledge to protect Australia? Lastly, asked in his press conference after his election as Mufti about the war in Iraq, he was promptly muzzled by his minders to articulate his views on the issue, pleading his ill-health (he had suffered a stroke), and was quickly whisked away from the tough-fisted questions of some reporters, his advisors replying that he will answer these questions another time.

Hence, the Australian Council of Imams being too clever by half, not only have they picked a seemingly moderate imam to replace Hilaly, so he can pass muster in the eyes of the general community, but a frail one to boot. So whenever Sheikh Naji faced difficult questions of the media his minders would plead his ill-health, thus shielding him from giving an impromptu answer that could compromise his position as a moderate imam, and, also, exposing all those who elected him Mufti as being also avid representatives of the radicalism of their flock since they happen to be its sires.

The general public must not allow itself to be duped by this latest farce of the Muslim clerisy that they are willing and preparing to walk hand-in-hand with the Australian maiden, on the path of moderation, mutual respect, and peace, when their sermons are replete to the brim with the seeds of war against the infidels, the Jews, and the Great Satan, America.

Former Secretary of State Equates Politics of Hamas and Israel

By Con George-Kotzabasis

A reply to: ...on Israel-Palestine Conflict by Steve Clemons
Washington Note June 21, 2009


“Absolutists on both sides need to be overcome” which Steve obviously agrees with this statement of former Secretary of State James A. Baker. This statement however ravages the truth by its direct reference of a ‘political equivalence’ between Hamas and the Netanyahu government. No Israeli government ever governed on behalf of the minority absolutist interests of the religious fanatics of Israel unlike Hamas which governs Gaza in the interests of its millenarian goals. It’s like saying that Republican governments, such as the former Bush administration, governed on behalf of the narrow interests of the religious right and not for the general interests of the United States.


If this is the quality of strategic thinking that the four eminent persons of Carter, Baker, Scowcroft, and Brzezinski, are offering to the Obama administration for resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict then such advice will be a repeat performance of past failures as it rises from the lowest ebbs of their strategic ‘cogitations.’


And Steve will be found to be completely wrong if he thinks that the new turbulent situation in Iran might ‘force’ the Khatami-Ahmadinejad regime to change its policy toward its Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist surrogates. Steve in his misplaced realism does not realize that Iran will never abandon its pawns as long as it engages in its power-play in the region.

REPLY TO AMERICAN PESSIMIST ABOUT THE GAINS OF THE SURGE


By Con George-Kotzabasis


Andrew Lebovich continues pessimistically to ruminate on his doubts about the surge and on General Petraeus’s counterinsurgency plan. He states, “The strategic outcome of the surge cannot be determined now” as it depends on the establishment of a democratic Iraq “after our occupation...has ended.” And if the gains of the surge are so fragile and can be lost with a resurgence of al Qaeda how can one say that “Petraeus’s counterinsurgency plan is proven,” as is stated by McCain? He is also concerned about the “Sons of Iraq and other local militias’ being integrated “into the Iraqi security forces” and some of the corrupt practices of the Iraqi government.


Starting in reverse of his concerns, it’s decal like clear that he has not learned anything from the mistakes of the Bush administration when in toto disbanded the Iraq army instead of integrating it in the new army of the Interim government that would have forestalled the future insurgency. The Maliki government is integrating the Sons of Iraq and other militias and hence effectively disarming them instead of letting them hibernate until a possible next round of violence. Lebovich also is oblivious of the fact that corruption affects all governments that have not as yet found their point of stability and their members have a strong proclivity to get as much as they can from an assumed short term in office. However, with the stabilization of the government, as it seems to be happening now in Iraq, corruption can no longer be a stable staple feeding the mouths of corrupt officials.


As to the gains emanating from the surge, Lebovich apparently is unaware that one may have a perfect investment plan that will give one immense gains but if one “misinvests” or squanders these gains in boondoggle projects one is bound to lose them. This however does not impugn or diminish in any way the perfection of the original investment plan. And Petraeus’s counterinsurgency strategy falls in this category. The danger lies in squandering these gains, as McCain correctly says, before they reach their stated goal, i.e., a democratic Iraq.


Lastly, Lebovich does not perceive that even the most successful of counterinsurgency strategies can only be effective in a different geopolitical milieu if they make the necessary improvisations and modalities in the new context of their implementation. And this elementary principle applies in Afghanistan.


I rest on my oars: Your turn now...

Obama's Angelic Doctrine Defeats America's Enemies

By Con George-Kotzabasis
Reply to: The Mellow Doctrine by Roger Cohen
global.nytimes.com May 03, 2009

Roger Cohen riding his high horse as a columnist of The New York Times trots a 'neighing' argument that throws the rider on the paddock. He claims and infers that the new policies of President Obama in foreign affairs, which he frames in his term of The Mellow Doctrine, are holistic remedies for the wanton malicious inflicted maladies that the Bush-Cheney administration had placed upon the body politic of America that had alienated it in the minds and hearts of so many people in the world.

These policies now are spreading and reverberating across Latin America, Europe, and Asia Minor and are creating an echoing melodious sound of Europeans, Turks and Latinos--with only a slight discordant hoarse bass note coming through the nostrils of an old dog, Fidel Castro, who can smell in Obama another imperialist rat. In Strasbourg the French and Germans loved to hear the President expostulating on the new fully cooperative conduct of the U.S. with its major allies, the French seeing him as an exemplar of their own past mission civilisatrice in the sphere of diplomacy, and the Germans as a second Ich bin ein Berliner, after John F. Kennedy. In Prague, the multi-cultured Czechs were delighted to hear him say that he was “committing the United States to a world without nuclear weapons,” and his outpouring of a profusion of mea culpa of America’s past misdeeds and the arrogance of imperial powers and its leaders, who like Roosevelt and Churchill would determine the fate of peoples “sitting in the room with a brandy.” In Turkey, the most modern of Muslim nations thanks to its insightful great Soldier-Statesman Kemal Ataturk, the Turks were regaled to see Obama parading before them his own partial Muslim origins and hear him say that Muslims had been treated with “insufficient respect” in the past. And in Trinidad and Tobago, where the Fifth Summit of the Americas was held, Obama enraptured the Latinos to such a degree that even the spirited anti-American warriors Raul Castro and Hugo Chavez were won over, the latter being moved so much so that he gave as a gift to Obama a book on American imperialism and the latter reciprocating to Hugo’s generous gesture by giving him a warm handshake and a friendly touch on the shoulder.

To Cohen, all the above related events are a clear sign that “Foes...have been disarmed by Barack Obama’s no-drama diplomacy.” Obama’s “mellow doctrine...finding strength through unconventional means: acknowledgement of the limits of American power; frankness about U.S. failings; careful listening; fear reduction; adroit deployment of the wide appeal of brand Barack Hussein Obama; and jujitsu engagement.” If the above quotes are not a perfect illustration that Obama made a confession of American weakness before the ‘priesthood’ of his ‘Catholic’ enemies, then one will ever search in vain for a definition of weakness in any dictionary. And to bring jujitsu in this bout of weakness as a saving line is like offering someone who already lies unconscious on the floor from the blows of his opponent the Japanese art of training the mind and body in unarmed combat. In this context for Cohen to mock Dick Cheney for saying that America’s enemies perceive “a weak president,” is to brand himself with his own mockery.

This confession of weakness is the ‘Eighteenth of Brumaire of Barack Hussein Obama,’ to paraphrase Karl Marx on Louis Bonaparte, the intellectual coup d’état by the constitutional lawyer against the constitution of the political wisdom of the ages in whose preamble imprescriptively is written that to show and admit weakness before one’s enemies is the cardinal unforgiveable political sin. As in any human contest only when a party is weakened is prepared to make concessions whereas the strong seek and drive home their victory. This applies more so to fanatically religious enemies who have an ineradicable tendency to see, due to their irrational cogitations, any conciliatory initiative of their opponents as an admission of weakness.

But the intellectual fragility of Cohen’s argument is exposed by his use of the weakest enemies of America, that is, the Castro brothers and Hugo Chavez, and surprisingly Turkey, which has not been an enemy of the U.S., to drive home the success of the conciliatory attitude of President Obama. In the case of Turkey, he claims that at the NATO meeting the Turks dropped their opposition to the nomination of Denmark’s Anders Rasmussen as the alliance’s secretary general because of “Obama’s conciliatory message to Muslims.” In contrast, the previous administration by “humiliating Muslims” filled the schools of Waziristan and Ramadi with recruits for future terror. When one asks whence this humiliation of Muslims started the unutterable answer of Cohen must be since 9/11. The undeniably harsh but necessary measures that the Bush administration took against Muslim terrorists to protect its citizens from, at the time, imponderable future attacks, were in the eyes of Cohen measures that “humiliated Muslims.” Just as well that columnists of this sort are ‘unsheathing’ their pens to write their columns instead of unsheathing their paper swords to protect Americans.

Most of all Cohen is apparently very fond of the following by President Obama. “Resistance” to set of U.S. policies “may turn out to be based on old preconceptions or ideological dogmas” of the previous administration, and “when they are cleared away ...we can actually solve a problem.” So President Obama with a broom in his hand once he sweeps this ideological debris of the Bush administration he will be able to start solving the innumerable problems that America is facing. But the fact is that the United States is not countenancing these problems because of “old preconceptions or ideological dogmas,” but because of its status as the sole superpower is inevitably burdened to carry like Atlas all the world’s crises and hot spots on its back and to set up actions that are not always agreeable by the rest of the world that would have a chance to resolve these crises. And inevitably because of the multiple actions it has to take in so many complex parts of the world it cannot jump over the shadow of fallibility. The alternative, to restrict its engagement with the rest of the world because of its immense risks and possible errors of judgment, is not the raison d’être of great power. Moreover, a disengagement from the hot spots of the world would allow sinister and brutal fanatical leaders to take over countries and oppress their peoples as well as endanger the stability of the world.

The political naivety and immaturity of President Obama is encapsulated in his own terms in regard to Iran: Normal relations can be restored on the “mutual respect” of opponents. This would be forsooth the reality if your opponent considered you to be negotiating from a strong position. It would not be true if his estimate was that his opponent was negotiating from a weak position contra his own strong position. The strong can be at times kind, gracious, and helpful toward the weak but never have any respect for the weak. This is more so in the hard realm of geopolitics. The Iranian theocracy will see any diplomatic initiatives by the United States as an admittance of political feebleness by the latter and will exploit this to their advantage. And by the time when President Obama will become aware of this the Iranians will be already close to the entrance of the nuclear club. No angelic or mellow doctrine of Obama will disarm America’s implacable irreconcilable foes. Only the thunder, and as last resort the bolt of Jupiter, can defeat these deadly enemies.

Hic Rhodus hic Salta