A Tipping Point in North Africa and the Middle East

(October 2012)

ran up the black flag of Islam to the cries of “Obama, Obama we are all Osama bin Laden!” The flag had the traditional Qur’anic inscription: “There is no god but Allah and Mohammad is his messenger.”

publishing cartoons parodying The Innocence of Muslims. By publishing these cartoons, Charlie Hebdo raised the ante about the lack of humor, let alone freedom of speech within the Muslim Ummah. The French Foreign Ministry closed 20 embassies in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons due to threats from angered Muslim fundamentalists. Nevertheless, the French government is defending the right of Charlie Hebdo to publish the cartoons.

disagreed, saying that it was a planned al Qaeda attack by foreigners infiltrating the area. Moreover, CNN came into possession of late Ambassador Stevens’s journal  in which he questioning security arrangements at the Benghazi consulate. Moreover, intelligence assessments made within 24 hours of the Benghazi  killings of Amb. Stevens and the three other Americans confirmed indications of a premeditated  attack on the consulate. The Administration was further caught unawares by the comments of  Matthew Olsen, director of the National Counter Terrorism Center. When asked  at a hearing  by Sen. Joseph Lieberman, Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, Olsen said that the Ambassador and the other Americans had been killed in a terrorist attack. White House press spokesman Jay Carney quickly back peddled, responding with the new line from the Obama White House that it was evident that there was a terrorist attack in Benghazi. President Obama in his speech at the UN General Assembly perpetuated the myth of the film  enflaming the responses against America in the Muslim world when he remarked:

CBS Charlie Rose interview while at the UN General Assembly Session in Manhattan countered: “we are not enemies, of course … for sure, we are friends,” but he stopped short of calling Egypt and the U.S. allies.” Morsi reached out to Tehran on his recent visit during the Non-Aligned Movement meetings there and has become part of the contact group composed of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran regarding the bloody rebellion in Syria against the embattled regime of Bashar Assad. During his first speech at the UN General Assembly, Morsi rejected the American and Western value of free speech instead calling for the UN adoption of blasphemy codes. He sought to return Egypt to its former position as leader of the Arab world by promoting the Palestinian statehood cause and resolution of the Syrian rebellion. Clearly the Arab Spring in Egypt under Morsi has turned increasingly wintry. Note Muslim Brotherhood and extreme Salafist demands that the Constitution adhere to strict Islamic Shariah, thereby depriving women and especially minority Christian Copts of basic civil rights. Egyptian liberal and leftwing parties have threatened to quit the Assembly drafting the new Constitution.  

condemned to death in a trial for a raid on a police station in El Arish that resulted in the deaths of four Egyptian security personnel and one civilian. Morsi’s seizure of control of the Egyptian military and positioning of troops and tanks in the Sinai have made relations with Israel uneasy. The are rising concern about whether the 1979 Camp David Accords are in jeopardy.

Foreign Policy, Schanzer noted:

announced the deployment of their headquarters from its safe haven inside Turkey to “liberated areas” in adjacent northwestern Syria. A Syrian Muslim leader, Secretary General Mohammed Riad al-Shaqfa, announced opposition to the de facto Kurdish autonomy region in the country’s northeast.  

insertion of Quds forces in Syria and supply of war material  for the Assad regime via a ‘humanitarian’ air bridge passing over neighboring Iraq versus the Sunni supremacist coalition of Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia supplying the Free Syrian Army, the bloody rebellion will continue. Iraq–based al Qaeda cadres have also entered Syria from the adjacent Anbar province. The disarray in Iraq leading to the resurgence of al Qaeda there has been attributed to the failure to negotiate a token  US force as part of the Status of Forces Agreement with the al Maliki government in Baghdad. See a new book by  Michael R. Gordon and Gen. Bernard Trainor, The End Game : The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama. No effective UN intervention is likely given the stalemate at the Security Council with the opposition of both Russia and China to US and other Western resolutions. In the meantime the Kurds in Syria will continue to perfect de facto self government while Turkey is preoccupied in combating heightened levels of asymmetrical warfare from emboldened PKK insurgents in its adjacent southeastern provinces. Add to the imbroglio over Syria recent reports about movement of its formidable chemical and biological warfare caches that concern both the US and more seriously Israel. The latter may be poised to act before those caches end up in terrorist groups like al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas and rebel forces inside Syria.

noted in his speech a rebuke of Ahmadinejad who spoke on the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur:

On the day when we pray to be inscribed in the book of life a platform was given to a dictatorial regime that strives, at every opportunity, to sentence us to death.

noted how close that achievement is, relying on published IAEA reports which claim that Iran will have enough enriched uranium to produce one or more nuclear bombs by next summer. He said:

Bates:  Good afternoon and welcome to Your Turn. This is Mike Bates and this is a special edition of Your Turn. We do these Middle East Roundtable discussions from time to time and today is one of the days we are doing it. Jerry Gordon, Senior Editor of the New English Review and it’s blog, “The Iconoclast” is with us in the studio. Jerry, welcome.

Gordon:  Good to be here Mike.

Schanzer:  Thank you very much.

Bryen:  Thank you.

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