Jerusalem News (19 September, 2014, 24 Elul, 5774)
Duration: 12.02 minutes. To Read Entries Please Scroll Down.
Contents:
1. Reflections on British Society in General.
Why are so many Western jihadists from Britain? by Robert S. Leiken, WSJ
2. Israel has a substantial arsenal of nuclear weapons.
Israel's Worst-Kept Secret by Douglas Birch and R. Jeffrey Smith
3. ISIS Plotted Australian Public Beheading by Rachel Levy
4. Scotland Votes to Stay with Britain
(a) Article: Huge Turnout In Historic Scottish Referendum
(b) BBC Report
5. Obama Yes-Man Takes Arab Money
How Peace Negotiator Martin Indyk Cashed a Big, Fat $14.8 Million Check From Qatar by Lee Smith -
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1. Reflections on British Society in General.
16-Sep-14: Why are so many Western jihadists from Britain? by Robert S. Leiken, WSJ
http://thisongoingwar.blogspot.co.il/2014/09/16-sep-14-why-are-so-many-western.html
http://online.wsj.com/articles/robert-leiken-britain-finally-faces-up-to-its-homegrown-jihadist-problem-1410124536
Posted: 16 Sep 2014 10:28 AM PDT
Extracts:
Scotland Yard estimates that at least 500 Britons have traveled to the Middle East to join the Islamic State. British-born terrorists have been the most numerous, violent and influential of European jihadists since well before 9/11. [WSJ]
Theodore Dalrymple, writing ["Islam's Nightclub Brawl | Jihadis from Britain are acting out a brutality learned at home"] on the National Review Online website, has some pungently negative analysis about what makes British society distinctive, and how this explains certain deeply disturbing perceptions about Britain's Islamists. He writes under a pen-name chosen, he says, to sound "suitably dyspeptic"; that he achieves in this piece extracted from a longer on-line article:
The South London accent and intonation of the apparent killer of James Foley, Steven Sotloff, and David Haines, and the manner of the murders, have shocked and horrified people in Britain. Very little is known of the man, not even his ethnic origin: In London, a third of whose population was born abroad, there are so many possibilities, even among Muslims. But his joy in his own brutality, his sadistic delight in doing evil with the excuse that it was for a supposedly holy cause, in inflicting such a death under the illusion that it was a duty rather than a crime, was obvious. His 'faith' allowed him to act out the fantasy of every dangerous psychopath dreaming of revenge upon a world that was not good enough for him and that otherwise failed to accord him the special notice or place that he thought he merited.
Not only is the British contingent the most numerous among the Western jihadists, but by all accounts they are the most brutal of the brutal. That, at any rate, is the conclusion of researchers at King's College London who have followed the evolution of the jihadi temptation in Britain, the latest instance of what Jean-Francois Revel called 'the totalitarian temptation.'
Two questions call for answers. The first is why there should be proportionally more jihadis from Britain than, say, from France. The second is why they should be more brutal. Since the premises of the questions themselves are somewhat speculative, depending on information that is itself far from proved beyond reasonable doubt, any answers must be even more speculative. In any case, the uncovering of the why of any human conduct is seldom straightforward.
Are there more British jihadis, for example, because the condition of Muslims in Britain is worse than elsewhere? In answering this question it is well to remember that Muslims are not just Muslims and nothing else. The Muslims in Germany are mainly of Turkish origin; in France, of North African; and in Britain, of Pakistani or Bangladeshi. Any difference in their collective behavior, therefore, might be attributable to their origin as much as to the country of their upbringing.
The position of the Muslims in Britain is not 'objectively' worse than that of their coreligionists in France; if anything, the reverse. It is considerably easier for a young Muslim man to obtain a job in Britain than in France, and social ascent is easier. Britain is more obviously a class society than France, but also more socially mobile (the two things are often confused, but are different). And there has been no legislation in Britain against the public use of that cherished Muslim symbol of male domination, the veil. But failure is not necessarily easier to bear in a more open society than in a closed one: On the contrary, resentment is all the stronger because of the additional element of personal responsibility for that failure, actual or anticipated. In some ways, life is easier, psychologically at least, when you can attribute failure entirely to external causes and not to yourself or anything about yourself.
The relative failure of Muslims (largely of Pakistani origin) is evident by comparison with Sikhs and Hindus: Their household wealth is less than half that of Sikhs and Hindus (immigrants at more or less the same time), and while the unemployment rate of young Sikhs and Hindus is slightly lower than that of whites, that of young Muslims is double. Sikh and Hindu crime rates are well below the national average; Muslim crime rates are well above. Racial prejudice is unlikely to account for these differences.
Jihad attracts ambitious failures, including those who are impatient or fearful of the long and arduous road to conventional success. Jihad is a shortcut to importance, with the added advantage of stirring fear in a society that the jihadists want to believe has wronged them, but that they are more likely to have wronged.
But why should the British be the most brutal of European jihadists, by all accounts the doctrinally most extreme among them (supposing that reports of this are true)? This, I think, is explicable by the nature of contemporary British culture, using the word 'culture' in the widest sense. It is the crudest, most aggressive, and most lacking in refinement of any of the Western cultures, at least of any that I have observed.
Nowhere else known to me do so many young men desire to look brutish and as if the slightest disagreement with them, the first thing denied them, the first word they deem offensive, will cause them to become violent. In no other country in the world are so many doormen and bouncers necessary to keep order in places of entertainment; in no other place in the world does collective enjoyment so quickly turn to fight and riot. Eye-to-eye contact is regarded as a challenge and can lead to an attack of murderous intensity, while sexual crudity and incontinence are accompanied by furious jealousy, a common occasion of violence among young men.
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2. Israel has a substantial arsenal of nuclear weapons.
Israel's Worst-Kept Secret
Douglas Birch and R. Jeffrey Smith The Atlantic September 16, 2014
http://www.defenseone.com/threats/2014/09/israels-worst-kept-secret/94187/
Extracts:
Former CIA Director Robert Gates said so during his 2006 Senate confirmation hearings for secretary of defense, when he noted, while serving as a university president, that Iran is surrounded by 'powers with nuclear weapons,' including 'the Israelis to the west.' Former President Jimmy Carter said so in 2008 and again this year, in interviews and speeches in which he pegged the number of Israel's nuclear warheads at 150 to around 300.
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But due to a quirk of federal secrecy rules, such remarks generally cannot be made even now by those who work for the U.S. government and hold active security clearances. In fact, U.S. officials, even those on Capitol Hill, are routinely admonished not to mention the existence of an Israeli nuclear arsenal and occasionally punished when they do so.
The policy of never publicly confirming what a scholar once called one of the world's 'worst-kept secrets' dates from a political deal between the United States and Israel in the late 1960s. Its consequence has been to help Israel maintain a distinctive military posture in the Middle East while avoiding the scrutiny, and occasional disapprobation, applied to the world's eight acknowledged nuclear powers.
James Doyle, a veteran nuclear analyst at Los Alamos National Laboratory who was recently censured, evidently left himself open to punishment by straying minutely from U.S. policy in a February 2013 article published by the British journal Survival.
'Nuclear weapons did not deter Egypt and Syria from attacking Israel in 1973, Argentina from attacking British territory in the 1982 Falklands War or Iraq from attacking Israel during the 1991 Gulf War,' Doyle said in a bitingly critical appraisal of Western nuclear policy, which angered his superiors at the nuclear-weapons lab as well as a Republican staff member of the House Armed Services Committee.
Israel's nuclear-weapons program began in the 1950s, and the country is widely believed to have assembled its first three weapons during the crisis leading to the Six-Day War in 1967, according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit group in Washington that tracks nuclear-weapons developments.
For decades, however, Israel itself has wrapped its nuclear program in a policy it calls amimut, meaning opacity or ambiguity. By hinting at but not confirming that it has these weapons, Israel has sought to deter its enemies from a major attack without provoking a concerted effort by others to develop a matching arsenal.
Israeli-American historian Avner Cohen has written that U.S. adherence to this policy evidently grew out of a September 1969 meeting between President Richard Nixon and Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. No transcript of the meeting has surfaced, but Cohen said it is clear the two leaders struck a deal: Israel would not test its nuclear weapons or announce it possessed them, while the United States wouldn't press Israel to give them up or to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and would halt its annual inspections of Dimona, the site of Israel's Negev Nuclear Research Center.
As an outgrowth of the deal, Washington, moreover, would adopt Israel's secret as its own, eventually acquiescing to a public formulation of Israeli policy that was initially strenuously opposed by top U.S. officials.
'Israel will not be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East,' the boilerplate Israeli account has long stated. 'Israel supports a Middle East free of all weapons of mass destruction following the attainment of peace.' When Nixon's aides sought assurances that this pledge meant Israel would not actually build any bombs, Israeli officials said the word 'introduce' would have a different meaning: It meant the country would not publicly test bombs or admit to possessing them, leaving ample room for its unacknowledged arsenal.
'While we might ideally like to halt actual Israeli possession,' then-National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger wrote in a July 1969 memo to Nixon that summarized Washington's enduring policy, 'what we really want at a minimum may be just to keep Israeli possession from becoming an established international fact.'
Even when Mordechai Vanunu, a technician at Dimona, provided the first detailed, public account of the program in 1986 and released photos he had snapped there of nuclear-weapons components, both countries refused to shift gears. After being snatched from Italy, Vanunu was imprisoned by Israel for 18 years, mostly in solitary confinement, and subsequently forbidden to travel abroad or deal substantively with foreign journalists. In an email exchange with the Center for Public Integrity, Vanunu indicated that he still faces restrictions but did not elaborate. 'You can write me again when I am free, out of Israel,' he said.
Gary Samore, who was President Obama's top advisor on nuclear nonproliferation from 2009 to 2013, said the United States has long preferred that Israel hold to its policy of amimut, out of concern that other Middle Eastern nations would feel threatened by Israel's coming out of the nuclear closet.
'For the Israelis to acknowledge and declare it, that would be seen as provocative,' he said. 'It could spur some of the Arab states and Iran to produce weapons. So we like calculated ambiguity.' But when asked point-blank if the fact that Israel has nuclear weapons is classified, Samore, who is now at Harvard University, answered: 'It doesn't sound very classified to me, that Israel has nuclear weapons?'
The U.S. government's official silence was broken only by accident, when, in 1979, the CIA released a four-page summary of an intelligence memorandum titled 'Prospects for Further Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit environmental group.
'We believe that Israel already has produced nuclear weapons,' the 1974 report said, citing Israel's stockpiling of large quantities of uranium, its uranium-enrichment program, and its investment in a costly missile system capable of delivering nuclear warheads. Release of the report triggered a spate of headlines. CIA said in 1974 Israel had A-Bombs, a New York Times headline declared. 'Israel a Nuclear Club Member Since 1974, CIA Study Indicates,' announced The Washington Star.
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3. ISIS Plotted Australian Public Beheading
http://www.jewishpress.com/news/breaking-news/isis-plotted-australian-public-beheading/2014/09/18/
By: Rachel Levy
Published: September 18th, 2014
A massive security sting operation hauled in 15 suspects and foiled a plot by the Islamist State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to hold a public beheading in Australia.
More than 800 police officers were involved in the raids that revolved around 22-year-old Omarjan Azari, who was charged on Thursday with preparing to commit a terrorist act.
An intercepted phone call triggered the operation, prosecutors said.
A senior member of ISIS was urging Azari and his group to carry out the demonstration executions, according to Prime Minister Tony Abbott. 'That's the intelligence we received,' he told reporters.
'The exhortations, quite direct exhortations, were coming from an Australian, who is apparently quite senior in ISIL (Islamic State in the Levant, an alternate name for ISIS), to networks of support back in Australia to conduct demonstration killings here in this country. So this is not just suspicion, this is intent and that's why the police and security agencies decided to act in the way they have.'
Azari appeared in Sydney central court, where prosecutors told the judge the suspect planned to 'shock, horrify and potentially terrify' the public with such executions.
Bail was denied because he was considered a flight risk, partly due to his 'unusual level of fanaticism,' the court said.
Australian federal police Acting Commissioner Andrew Colvin said a warning had been received the plot involved abducting a passerby from the street in New South Wales and beheading them while filming the murder.
The other 14 suspects can be held for up to 14 days without being charged, under Australia's counter terrorism laws, according to a report in The Guardian newspaper.
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4. Scotland Votes to Stay with Britain
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(a) Article: Huge Turnout In Historic Scottish Referendum
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/scottish-independence-result--scotland-rejects-independence-as--no--vote-triumphs-043827993.html#vO0H3qZ
Sky News - 15 minutes ago
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Scotland has rejected independence, despite the Yes campaign winning a majority in the largest city.
While Glasgow voted in favour of independence, the margin of victory was not large enough to give Alex Salmond and his campaign the momentum they need.
There were also wins for Yes in three of Scotland's 32 local authority areas - Dundee, West Dunbartonshire and North Lanarkshire.
While there was a comfortable majority in Dundee, the turnout in the city was 78.8% - lower than many other parts of Scotland, indicating that the Yes campaign has not managed to get voters out in sufficient numbers.
The turnout in Glasgow was even lower at 75%, with 194,779 Yes votes (53.49%) and 169,347 No votes (46.51%).
At the same time, nationalists conceded defeat in Alex Salmond's Aberdeenshire constituency.
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(b) BBC Report
http://www.bbc.com/news/events/scotland-decides/results
SCOTLAND VOTES NO
Scotland has voted against becoming an independent country by a projected 55% to 45%.
Should Scotland be an independent country?
Votes
%
NO
1,914,187 55.42
YES
1,539,920 44.58
TARGET TO WIN
1,822,443 N/A
After 31 of 32 counts
Turnout
 84.48%
Rejected ballots
 3,261
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5. Obama Yes-Man Takes Arab Money
How Peace Negotiator Martin Indyk Cashed a Big, Fat $14.8 Million Check From Qatar by Lee Smith -
23 Elul 5774 (September 18, 2014)
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/184713/martin-indyk-qatar
http://israelbehindthenews.com/peace-negotiator-martin-indyk-cashed-big-fat-14-8-million-check-qatar/
Extracts:
The New York Times recently published a long investigative report by Eric Lipton, Brooke Williams, and Nicholas Confessore on how foreign countries buy political influence through Washington think tanks.
... Martin Indyk, the man who ran John Kerry's Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, whose failure in turn set off this summer's bloody Gaza War, cashed a $14.8 million check from Qatar. Yes, you heard that right: In his capacity as vice president and director of the Foreign Policy Program at the prestigious Brookings Institution, Martin Indyk took an enormous sum of money from a foreign government that, in addition to its well-documented role as a funder of Sunni terror outfits throughout the Middle East, is the main patron of Hamas, which happens to be the mortal enemy of both the State of Israel and Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party.