Monthly Archives: July 2012

Arab Politics, Egypt, Iran

Egypt: An Iranian Shi’a Woman in Nasser’s House?……….

   

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Was Tahiyya Kathim, the woman of Iranian origin and wife of Gamal Abdel Nasser a Shi’a originally but abandoned her sect and her Persian roots? That is the question of the Saudi semi-official Alarbiya network asked. Alarabiya is obsessed with two things more than anything else: fending off an imagined spread of Shi’ism and destroying the memory and legacy of Egypt’s late president Nasser. Nasser came closer than anyone else to overthrowing the al-Saud regime. He even charmed and got several princes to defect to Cairo and denounce the al-Saud clan. The princes have not forgotten this even over 40 years after his death. Nor have the Muslim Brotherhood who tried to assassinate him more than once in the 1950s. The Muslim Brotherhood leaders went into exile in Saudi Arabia and some other Gulf states. Yet they returned to Egypt largely unconvinced of the Wahhabi doctrine, which put them at odds with the Saudi regime later on, especially after they tried to challenge Hosni Mubarak politically.
Tahiyya Kathim was an Egyptian of Iranian origins, but then there are many Egyptians of Iranian origin, more than you would think. A simple DNA test could prove this. Egyptians also come from many other origins, including Arabs and ancient Egyptians and Jews and Italians and Greeks and Turkish and Albanians, among others. So all this is no big deal.

All this is not the point. The point is that Alarabiya, which specializes in stoking sectarian fires mostly along the Gulf GCC states but also across the Arab world, may be tying the legacy of Nasser to the al-Saud’s more modern target, Shi’ism. The report does, however, introduce an interesting history of her ancestors and how they migrated from Rasht in Iran to Egypt. I did learn a bit of history from it.
Cheers
mhg
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cyber war, Iran

Cyber Wars: Malware, Mahdi, and Hail Mary in Iran and Israel………..

   

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“Who knew that when the Messiah arrived to herald the Day of Judgment he’d first root through computers to steal documents and record conversations? That’s what Mahdi, a new piece of spyware found targeting more than 800 victims in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East, has been doing since last December, according to Russia-based Kaspersky Lab and Seculert, an Israeli security firm that discovered the malware. Mahdi, which is named after files used in the malware, refers to the Muslim messiah who, it’s prophesied, will arrive before the end of time to cleanse the world of wrongdoing and bestow peace and justice before Judgment Day. But this recently discovered Mahdi is only interested in one kind of cleansing – vaccuuming up PDFs, Excel files and Word documents from victim machines. The malware, which is not sophisticated, according to Costin Raiu, senior security researcher at Kaspersky Lab, can be updated remotely from command-and-control servers to add various modules designed to steal documents, monitor keystrokes, take screenshots of e-mail communications and record audio………..”

A Mahdi malware. If it is aimed specifically at Iran, which is very likely, the Iranians will retaliate and create their own malware for the enjoyment of whoever sent them the Mahdi (and Stuxnet and Duqu and Flame and other cyber invaders). The Iranians may choose to call their malware the Seder or the Passover if they think it were Israelis behind the Mahdi attack, or they may choose Hail Mary if they think it were Americans. Yet the Iranians will not, mainly because of their religion which precludes mocking other religions (especially mocking Mary or Jesus or Moses or Passover is a no no among Muslims).
Cheers
mhg
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Al-Qaeda, Syria, Terrorism, US Foreign Policy

The Enigmatic Syrian Opposition: about the Jihadists………

   

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“This is not to say that Syria’s uprising is easy to understand, marked as it is by regional and sectarian interests, little to no central command and, yes, a paucity of clear information flows. It is undoubtedly the case that there’s a great deal that the US would like to know about the rebellion that remains out of reach. But that is a far different thing from driving blind. In the same Post article an unnamed “Middle Eastern intelligence official” implied that a great deal is understood, though he complained that vetting the rebel groups is “still in the very early stages.” The Post writes: “The foreign official cited concern that the opposition is at risk of becoming dominated by Islamists pushing for a Muslim Brotherhood government after Assad. ‘We think this is a majority view, at least among those who are fighting in the streets,’ the official said.”…………. There are also Islamist militants of a darker color, from a US perspective, at work in Syria. Jihadis more in the style of Al Qaeda are also operating inside the country. Veterans of the war against the US in Iraq have been involved in attacks on government forces, bringing with them the skills honed in building powerful improvised explosive devices (IEDs) around Iraqi cities like Fallujah………These fighters often stand apart from the FSA.………”

Actually the jihadist terrorist bombers, slitter of throats, choppers of heads and limbs do not stand that far apart from the FSA. As an example: Salafis and Wahhabis in the Gulf GCC states, mostly admirers of al-Qaeda, are always collecting money for the FSA. I suspect they would not be collecting money for them if it did not go to the benefit of their Salafi jihadist brethren, meaning al-Qaeda terrorists.
Cheers
mhg
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Arab Revolutions, Syria, US Foreign Policy

Syria and the Club of Arab Dictators and Absolute Tribal Kings: “rapists on both sides…..”

   

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“His story was as revealing as it was frightening. Damascus was about to be attacked. But the fighters were out of control. There were drug addicts among them. “Some of our people are on drugs,” the visitor said. “They will take anyone out. We can’t guarantee what some of these men will do. If they went into Malki [a mixed, middle-class area of central Damascus], we couldn’t protect any of the people who live there. ………. It was a true civil war story. There were bad guys among the good guys and good guys among the bad. But sectarianism is biting into the Syrian revolution. At the end of last week, one Syrian told me that “they are bayoneting people in the villages around Damascus”. Women, they say, have been raped outside the city of Homs – one estimate puts the number of victims as high as 200 – and the rapists are on both sides. . ……………”


Regardless of all this, Any respectable leader in a respectable country (that means any leader outside the Arab world) in a similar situation would resign office and go into exile. Bashar al-Assad “inherited” the power from his father with the approval of the Baath Party, misnamed Arab Baath Socialist Party with an Immortal (Eternal) Message to remain in power forever and at any price. And with the approval of all other Arab leaders, the Club of Arab Despots and Dictators and Absolute Tribal Kings. At some point even an Arab dictator, or lousy king, can decide that it is not worth the blood. Take a lesson from Bin Ali of Tunisia: he didn’t insist on staying, he gave it up rather than see more killing. al-Assad should resign and just get the hell out.
I don’t like the current opposition in Syria either, they are a nasty bunch as well, as nasty as the Baath regime, but with less weapons and less goons than the regime to do the dirty deeds. Many of them former henchmen who served the dictators and the part loyally and now pose as revolutionaries.
Syria should hold free elections under the supervision of various world powers, including Russia and China, after which a coalition of Muslim Brothers and Salafis will take power legally. The Kurds will get their nominally autonomous region, and that will leave only al-Qaeda for their allies to deal with. After that, the Syrian people should be left to their own devices to judge how good their new Islamist rulers are, or how badly they fuck up the country (a very likely outcome).
(Of course we know it ain’t gonna happen: nobody will leave the Syrian people to their own devices).


Cheers
mhg
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Arabian Peninsula, Saudi Arabia, U.S. Politics

Bandar the Romantic Royal Jeffersonian: from the Kingdom of Fear to the Home of the Brave…………..

   

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“Saudi Arabia’s Prince Bandar bin Sultan, 62, fell in love with the United States when he was still a pilot in his country’s air force and took aerobatics training on an American air base. The romance was renewed several years later when he was named his country’s ambassador to Washington, a tenure that lasted 22 years, during which he was a regular guest of both George Bushes and was the only ambassador who was guarded by the U.S. Secret Service. Last week King Abdullah named him director-general of the Saudi Intelligence Agency, replacing Muqrin bin Abdulaziz, on top of his post as secretary general of the National Security Council, which he’s held since 2005. Bandar’s appointment to the most important position in the Saudi security echelons is no coincidence. Aside from the fact that he is very well connected to the kingdom’s leaders (his wife, Haifa, is the daughter of King Faisal who was assassinated in 1975, her brother, Turki al-Faisal, was once head of Saudi intelligence and another brother, Mohammed al-Faisal, is one of the kingdom’s richest men), it seems that the primary reason for his appointment now is that Saudi Arabia is preparing for the next stage in Syria………..” Haaretz (This link was through Google webcache , but it has been rendered in-operable as well)

This WAS a gushing tribute to Prince Bandar Bin Sultan al-Saud (I am so tempted to add ‘al-Yamama al-Money‘ to his name, but that may be seen as disrespectful, so I won’t). It was posted in the Israeli daily Haaretz briefly yesterday, then pulled out quickly. But there is no going back on the Internet, as they say (I am not sure who the hell said that, but somebody must have said it, or ought to have said it).
The piece starts with Bandar “falling in love with America”. That part is easy to understand: I fell in love with America from my first day, nay first hour, as a teenager student arriving in New York City. But I doubt that Bandar fell in love with American values. He did not, of course. You’d think from the piece that he has become such an avid Jeffersonian democrat, which may explain why he seeks to convert his country from the ‘kingdom of fear and no magic” into an imitation of the “land of free and home of the brave”. Except that he and the other princes have no use for a Land of the Free nor for a Home of the Brave in the Arabian Peninsula. They rule and prosper by fear, and fear is becoming a rare commodity in the Arab world these days, from Tunisia all the way to Syria and Bahrain. (No doubt Bandar will also fall in love with Bibi Netanyahu as soon as he meets him, possibly, nay very likely, he already has. By Arab standards Israel is no doubt a free democracy, except that Bandar, being an Arab prince, confuses the leader with the country).
It is possible the piece was pulled because it has many serious errors and omissions. The impression it gives that Bandar helped set American foreign policy is ridiculous, although I have facetiously called him a National Security Adviser of the Bush administration. (There are other reasons as well for pulling the piece, but that is for later). Of all the reasons given in the article for Bandar’s “promotion”, the most important is not mentioned: he is the son of the late crown prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz, and in the division of spoils among the elderly al-Saud princes and their clans, this is part of his share of the spoils of the kingdom.
As I sagely clarified in another posting, the kingdom is fast becoming a land of turfs, fiefdoms, and princely principalities. I had succinctly explained the issue in an earlier posting, and in some older writings. I also had posted something about his famous American connections here.

Cheers
mhg
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Culture, Europe, Racism

Europe: “a toxic blend of traditional fascism and Western bigotry posing as secular liberalism”……….

   

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“How’s this for the fashion police? In late May, in a suburb of Brussels, a Muslim woman was arrested for wearing a niqab—the garment worn by a tiny proportion of Muslim women that covers all of the face but the eyes. In the subsequent melee, the woman broke an officer’s nose while being frisked. Her arrest sparked clashes between Muslim youth and police in the area. A week later, the hard-right Flemish nationalist Vlaams Belang offered a 250 euro bounty to anyone reporting veiled women to the police. The Belgian law banning the niqab, like measures across Europe ranging from outlawing the wearing of certain face veils in France to the building of more minarets in Switzerland, was ostensibly aimed at integrating Muslim minorities into Western culture. To the extent these laws have integrated Muslims into their place in the new hierarchy of European racism—a toxic blend of traditional fascism and Western bigotry posing as secular liberalism—they’ve been successful. But as a tool for promoting inclusion and equality, these laws have singularly failed. Indeed, this bid to prevent the importation of “radical Islam” has been both laughable and lamentable. The Belgian woman in question was a locally born convert, as were the girls at the heart of the French head scarf law, whose father is Jewish…………”

I do not believe that women should wear a the niqab or burq’a, especially if they don’t want to. I don’t believe that, say, Sarkozy, should wear a fedora or a dunce’s hat, if he doesn’t want to. Yet I believe they both have the right to wear what they want. The same Europeans who were for the ban would raise hell if their government banned them from wearing some item of their own national attire.
Some Arab and Muslim women who never wear the niqab or burq’a hurriedly supported this new European ban on public Islamic dress as ‘liberating’ the women. Maybe it is in some cases where they are forced to. Yet for some this may not be the case: then how can imposing restrictions on anyone ‘liberate’ them? What next? Banning speaking Arabic publicly as a “liberating” measure? Banning halal meet as a ‘liberating’ measure?
Cheers
mhg
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Outer Space, Pacific

The Sun is a Tempestuous Mistress………….

   

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“THE sun is a tempestuous mistress – and her out¬bursts are becoming more and more violent as the weeks go on. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory spotted the summer’s first ‘X’ solar flare last Friday – a huge outburst from the sun right at the top of the scale. This came on the back of 12 ‘M’ flares in just six days, with a M6.1 flare knocking out radio signals across the planet last week – hinting at the destruc¬tion the sun could reign on our technology if Earth takes a full blast across its blow.
The sunspot group behind the flares – named as AR1515 – stretches across 191,000km of the sun’s surface. This makes its width more than 15 Earths set end to end, said NASA solar astrophysicist C. Alex Young. The biggest flares are known as “X-class flares” based on a classification system that divides solar flares according to their strength. The smallest ones are A-class, which are similar to normal background levels, followed by B, C, M and X. Similar to the Richter scale for earthquakes, each letter represents a 10-fold increase in energy output, meaning an X is 10 times an M and 100 times a C. The sun is now heading into the peak of its 11- year solar flare cycle, with 2013 expected to the tu¬multuous year.
With the increased spread in communications in the last 11 years, a severe solar storm could cause huge issues for the planet. Radio blackouts occur when the X-rays or ex¬treme UV light from a flare disturb the layer of Earth’s atmosphere known as the ionosphere, through which radio waves travel.
The constant changes in the ionosphere change the paths of the radio waves as they move, thus de¬grading the information they carry…………..”

I thought this was something you should know.
Cheers
mhg
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Al-Qaeda, Arab Revolutions, Slavery, Wahhabi

Cherchez L’argent: Financing al-Qaeda from Syria and Iraq to Yemen and Beyond…………

   

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Speaking of this Wahhabi Spring and the resurgence of al-Qaeda (my last post): it takes a lot of money, hundreds of millions to finance these extensive operations. From recruitment and training of the terrorists, then transporting them into target countries (Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, etc), then finding shelter and food and weapons for them, then paying informants, then bribing locals to keep quiet. Then finding and paying for new wives for them in target countries. They can catch and rape local women by justifying it as legal booty of war, war slaves. They can always get one of their clerics, shaikhs, to justify the forced intercourse as legal use of war concubines, or jawari (the men are allowed to have sexual intercourse with their slaves, it is halal and kosher even if not cool).
So where do these hundreds of millions, billions over a few years, come from to finance these groups? Al-Qaeda terrorists don’t go around selling Lottery tickets, it ain’t considered kosher nor halal, and they presumably are not into the drug trade, not outside Afghanistan. Somebody with deep[ pockets can afford to finance them. Now who can that be?
Cherchez de l’argent, stupid.

Cheers
mhg
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Al-Qaeda, Arab Revolutions, Iraq, Syria

The Wahhabi Spring: Al-Qaeda Multitasking in the Levant and Yemen and North Africa and……

   

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“al-Qaeda for the first time came out and openly announced its participation in battles in Syria. They even raised the al-Qaeda flag at the Bab el-Hawa border crossing. A Jordanian security source stated that more than six thousand al-Qaeda fighters have entered Syria in recent months. Most of them are non-Syrian Arabs, according to the al-Sharq Saudi daily. The newspaper reports that two factions of al-Qaeda are competing for supremacy in Syria, one led by Saudi Emir Majid al-Majid and the other led by al-Fatih Abu Mohammed al-Golani………….”

Al-Fatih is the Arabic term for “conqueror”: this al-Golani guy is optimistic. His last name al-Golani, like the rest of his name, is fake (nom de guerre). It implies something about the Golan Heights should al-Qaeda prevail in Syria.
The terrorist group has moved thousands of its fighters into Syria, yet it has enough terrorists left inside Iraq to continue slaughtering civilians in that country. No wonder the Iraqi government refused to support the Arab League call for regime change in Damascus. Considering that the same organization killing Iraqi citizens is now part of the group that the Arab Saudi League wants to take power in Damascus. Not that it matters anymore: no doubt the current regime in Syria is on its way out and it is a matter of when.
Al-Qaeda’s old leadership has been decimated by American firepower in the past few years. Yet al-Qaeda has managed to expand its operations in new parts of the Arab world. It is now more active than ever in Yemen and North Africa and still active in Iraq and making an important grab for a piece of Syria as well as northern Lebanon (thanks to the Hariri alliance). Who would have thunk it, as the funny man in the movies said? The Wahhabi terrorist group has been as much a beneficiary of the so-called Arab Spring as the Saudi and Qatari regimes: both have expanded their influence, and they are ALL three Wahhabis.
The Saudis seem to have maintained their influence in the “New” Egypt and they may be on the verge of expanding their sphere into Syria (replacing Iran and handing it a major diplomatic and logistic defeat). Syrian rebels are often seen raising the photos of Saudi King Abdullah and even the Qatari Shaikh Hamad. Some revolutionaries against despotism, raising photos of the most absolute rulers in the world. But all that is for the short term, of course.
Cheers
mhg
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Iran, Yemen

Revolutionary Guards in Yemen………..

   

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“President Abdrabuh Mansur Hadi on Thursday told Tehran to stop meddling in Yemeni affairs after the defence ministry said the authorities had uncovered what it called an Iranian espionage network. “An Iranian spy network that had been operating in Yemen for seven years under the leadership of a former leader in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards” has been dismantled, the ministry’s news website 26sep.net reported late on Wednesday. Quoting informed but unnamed sources, it said the network was “conducting espionage operations in Yemen and the Horn of Africa.”…..….”
Cheers
mhg
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