Egypt’s new military regime could cancel national elections
amid rising unrest, a report said.

The Economist Intelligence Unit said the military regime that ousted
President Hosni Mubarak in February could suspend elections for
parliament and the presidency. The Economist argued that growing ethnic and
labor unrest could lead the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces to continue
martial law indefinitely.

“The increasingly heated disputes about such constitutional issues and the repeated breakdowns in security could lead the army council to conclude that it has no option but to call the whole process off and declare military rule for a prolonged period,” the Economist said.

In a report on Oct. 13, the Economist pointed to severe tension,
particularly between Muslims and the Coptic minority that resulted in scores of deaths. The report said the confrontation between security forces and Copts on Oct. 10, in which 24 people were killed, reflected sharp divisions within the country.

“One of the main causes of the discontent is the failure of the ruling military council to come up with an acceptable plan for the transition to civilian rule,” the report said.

The unrest, which included attacks on the embassies of Israel and
Saudi Arabia, has bolstered the resolve of the military regime to maintain
power. The military council, led by Defense Minister Hussein Tantawi, has
set parliamentary elections to begin on Nov. 28 but delayed presidential
elections.

“The SCAF’s hold on power is indeed starting to look like a permanent
fixture,” the report said, “but this has come about mainly because of its
repeated miscalculations and improvised decision-making, rather than as a
result of any grand design.”

The report said the military regime would maintain its grip until at
least an elected president takes office. The Economist said this could mean
military rule through 2013.

“There is no suggestion that this is an outcome that the SCAF has ever
sought, but it could yet transpire largely because of its own blunders,” the
report said.

I saw the Indian hit movie 3 Idiots recently in an unusual location: a cineplex in Hong Kong. Very rarely do Bollywood flicks make the city’s commercial circuit — the conventional wisdom holds that they do not appeal to local audiences. Yet my Sunday morning matinee was 80% filled, mostly with Chinese of all ages. Some took the movie at face value: the zany antics of Indian college kids. But the majority of viewers, it seemed to me, got the universal moral about breaking free from social straitjackets. They laughed when they were meant to, and didn’t when they weren’t. While the foreign 3 Idiots was a box-office monster, 1911, a China-backed war docudrama starring hometown celebrity Jackie Chan, bombed. Go figure: India 1, China 0.

Introducing India’s 3 Idiots to a Chinese audience won’t make the cut of epic attempts to break down barriers between cultures. But it does tap into a spreading consciousness that China and India and their people share a special place among today’s nations — a tandem locomotive pulling the global economy while much of the rest of the world is a train wreck. You’ve heard the drumbeat: stupendous growth rates; ever richer consumers; geopolitical clout — a new order trumpeted by mega-events and extravagant slogans like the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing and “Incredible India” at Davos. “The rise of India and China,” writes Robyn Meredith in her seminal book, The Elephant and the Dragon, “has caused the entire earth’s economic and political landscape to shift before our eyes.” Indian politician Jairam Ramesh sums up the phenomenon in a neologism: Chindia.

With Western economies reeling, the world is looking especially to China and India as saviors — whether it’s buying Italian bonds or Italian bags. The E.U. is even begging Beijing to help bail out its euro-zone bailout fund. But that’s only one side of the coin. There’s a duality to China and India, a blend of reality and myth, internally as well as between them. China and India have an arabesque relationship. These two giants on the cusp of superpower-hood are more rivals than partners. Despite their achievements, they face enormous challenges. And though they add up to nearly 40% of the world’s 7 billion population, they still live pretty much in parallel universes. Chinese and Indians, writes Indian journalist Pallavi Aiyar in her perceptive book, Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China, are “largely culturally untranslatable to each other.”

Rivals or Allies?
As a Gujarati born, raised and living in overwhelmingly Cantonese Hong Kong — both tribes are brash and materialistic — I have long been privy to what local Chinese and Indians think of the other. It used to be downright ugly. Perceptions and attitudes, liberally spiced with racial epithets, went broadly like this: to the Chinese, the Indians were poor, superstitious and dirty; to the Indians, the Chinese were crass, godless — and dirty. Hong Kong is no microcosm of Chindia, but it reflects how, just as China and India have changed, so have the stereotypes. If before I were assumed by the Chinese to be someone’s chauffeur, now I am a tech entrepreneur or investment banker. Local Indians see China afresh too, but often in just two superficial dimensions: wealth and might. My 17-year-old son’s peers are only half-joking when they tell him that, because he is half Chinese, half Indian, he has it made. (See photos of the making of modern India.)

If only it were that simple. In her book, Meredith quotes Indian tycoon Ratan Tata saying, “China is the factory of the world; India can be the knowledge center of this region … If we orient ourselves to working together, we could be a formidable force of two nations.” That’s ambitious — and perhaps unrealistic. China and India were once soul mates — through the migration of Buddhism some 2,000 years ago. Later, the Indian monk Bodhidharma traveled to China to spread the message of Zen. Prominent Chinese went the other way: the devout pilgrim Xuanzang, later immortalized in the classic Ming novel Journey to the West, and the great explorer Admiral Zheng He. It was a time of mutual discovery. By the 17th century, the Middle Kingdom and the subcontinent were the planet’s trading powers. They then got caught up in their own worlds of feudalism and colonialism — a decaying dynasty in China, the British Raj in India — followed by decades of serial revolution and fervent socialism. Modern relations between the two countries were marked mostly by suspicion — and the occasional border war.

The contemporary period is friendlier, yet tensions are never far from the surface. Even as both governments speak of peace and prosperity, China is establishing a “string of pearls” in the Indian Ocean, unsettling New Delhi, and India is talking oil and gas exploration in the South China Sea, angering Beijing. More to the point, the close economic ties between nations that often prevent conflict do not sufficiently exist between China and India. Chinese investment in India is about 0.05% of its worldwide total, while Indian FDI in China is so low that it does not appear on many charts. Bilateral trade is growing (especially Chinese exports to India), but it’s still a small proportion of their global total. Given their size and footprint, the two are nowhere as connected as they should be. Astonishingly, just a few of the two countries’ cities have direct flights.

Houses in Order
Before they rescue the world, china and India need to fix their own economies and societies. They are beset by some grim news. Growth is slowing, though in China’s case that helps cool an overheated economy. In both countries, exports are sliding, inflation is at painful levels, income inequality is reaching chasm proportions, and injustices like land grabs are sparking widespread protests. Cronyism is a scourge. The two have lifted countless millions out of poverty (though China has done a better job), but countless other millions — youths, workers, farmers — remain marginalized and desperate for decent livelihoods. While China doesn’t follow the rules, India has too many rules to follow. China is, if not at a tipping point, certainly at an inflection, struggling to contain asset bubbles and bad loans and to rebalance its economy away from state-directed investment to consumer-led growth. India’s reputation, meanwhile, has been so dented by corruption that the country’s top corporations have hired U.S. consultancy Bain to craft a “Credible India” campaign. Good luck.

Perception vs. Reality
At least India can count on a better image worldwide than China. Westerners in particular see the pair through a romantic and ideological prism. India is Gandhi, yoga, eat-pray-love. A gentle elephant; an exporter not of unfairly underpriced goods but articulate and urbane CEOs as at home in New York City as in Mumbai. China is “gutter oil”; the country you love to hate. Fiery dragon rather than cuddly panda. Mercantilist, rapacious, threatening; resented even as it is wooed.

There are two reasons for this dichotomy: Beijing’s profile and swagger are bigger than New Delhi’s, allowing India to escape the same scrutiny; and India is a democracy while China is an authoritarian state. All year, Beijing’s leaders have systematically cracked down on political dissent and cyberspace activity; they would not have tolerated, for example, the Indian summer of anticorruption protests in New Delhi. (Remember Tiananmen?) Yet the hard truth is that India is not as free as it’s made out to be. Democracy does not necessarily result in good governance. India’s institutions are weak, human-rights abuses are not unknown, and money and power often buy impunity. “India’s poor [have] a vote,” writes author Aiyar, “but this [does] not always equal a voice.” India even has its own Tibet: I don’t mean Dharamsala but Kashmir.

Whose economic path, China’s or India’s — essentially, state capitalism vs. private enterprise — is sustainable? Which society is more durable? Which nation has a stronger sense of destiny? The entire planet wants and needs to know. In the following pages, TIME’s Bill Powell and Michael Schuman face off to argue the case, respectively, for China and India as to whose template of change will prevail. It’s not easy to pinpoint the killer app. But given a year of restless populaces worldwide, the winner may be the one providing the greater justice and dignity to the most people. On that score, it’s still China 0, India 0.

With the IAEA discussing a dramatic new report from its nuclear inspectors in Iran, are some – such as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – exaggerating the imminence of a nuclear-armed Iran? Or is the U.S. government hopelessly misleading us that the threat is manageable through sanctions and tough talk?

A series of extraordinary leaks in the Israeli press last week revealed an internal debate within Israel’s inner security cabinet over the need to launch a pre-emptive strike on Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons sites.

According to these reports, Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Barak favored the strikes; Vice prime minister and strategic affairs minister Moshe “Bogey” Ya’alon reportedly was opposed. The leaks came on the heels of the third test-launch of a Jericho 3 nuclear-capable strategic missile, and what Israel claimed were long-planned air force exercises over Sardinia to simulate an attack on Iran.

According to former CIA case officer turned novelist Chet Nagle​, the Jericho 3 test may have been designed by Israel to send quite a different message than the one being played up in the press.

Any Israeli attack on Iran is sure to make of Israel an international pariah, Nagle argues. Plus, the likelihood of success – that is, in destroying or disabling all of Iran’s nuclear weapons capabilities so they have nothing to launch on the morning after the attack – is low.

“If you’re going to go to all that trouble and be a pariah, why not take one of those Jericho missiles, and detonate it 300 miles above the surface and deliver an EMP strike on Iran?” Nagel says. “That would stop their clock – if it’s electric – as well as all those centrifuges and everything else. Then the Greens can take over the country and we can go back in and rebuild the grid.”

Nagel was speaking with me and other analysts last week at a briefing organized by EMPact America for Congressional staff. His comments, while purely suggestive in nature, hint at a much larger strategic truth: if Israel is going to attack Iran, they have to make sure they totally disable Iran’s ability to launch a nuclear weapon.

How better to achieve that goal than a nuclear electro-magnetic pulse strike that would take down Iran’s power grid – and with it, even secret nuclear weapons plants Israel might fail to hit otherwise?

EMP or not, Israel was certainly making a show of force in an effort to convince Iran to back off its nuclear plans. On that score, from what we see in public at least, Israel had little success.

According to Iranian press reports cited on Sunday by the Debkafile, top Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps​ (IRGC) commanders in Iran were shaking their fists.

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Connecting the Nuclear Dots on Iran

Posted by Kenneth R. Timmerman Bio ↓ on Nov 10th, 2011
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With the IAEA discussing a dramatic new report from its nuclear inspectors in Iran, are some – such as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – exaggerating the imminence of a nuclear-armed Iran? Or is the U.S. government hopelessly misleading us that the threat is manageable through sanctions and tough talk?

A series of extraordinary leaks in the Israeli press last week revealed an internal debate within Israel’s inner security cabinet over the need to launch a pre-emptive strike on Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons sites.

According to these reports, Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Barak favored the strikes; Vice prime minister and strategic affairs minister Moshe “Bogey” Ya’alon reportedly was opposed. The leaks came on the heels of the third test-launch of a Jericho 3 nuclear-capable strategic missile, and what Israel claimed were long-planned air force exercises over Sardinia to simulate an attack on Iran.

According to former CIA case officer turned novelist Chet Nagle​, the Jericho 3 test may have been designed by Israel to send quite a different message than the one being played up in the press.

Any Israeli attack on Iran is sure to make of Israel an international pariah, Nagle argues. Plus, the likelihood of success – that is, in destroying or disabling all of Iran’s nuclear weapons capabilities so they have nothing to launch on the morning after the attack – is low.

“If you’re going to go to all that trouble and be a pariah, why not take one of those Jericho missiles, and detonate it 300 miles above the surface and deliver an EMP strike on Iran?” Nagel says. “That would stop their clock – if it’s electric – as well as all those centrifuges and everything else. Then the Greens can take over the country and we can go back in and rebuild the grid.”

Nagel was speaking with me and other analysts last week at a briefing organized by EMPact America for Congressional staff. His comments, while purely suggestive in nature, hint at a much larger strategic truth: if Israel is going to attack Iran, they have to make sure they totally disable Iran’s ability to launch a nuclear weapon.

How better to achieve that goal than a nuclear electro-magnetic pulse strike that would take down Iran’s power grid – and with it, even secret nuclear weapons plants Israel might fail to hit otherwise?

EMP or not, Israel was certainly making a show of force in an effort to convince Iran to back off its nuclear plans. On that score, from what we see in public at least, Israel had little success.

According to Iranian press reports cited on Sunday by the Debkafile, top Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps​ (IRGC) commanders in Iran were shaking their fists.

In one unsigned editorial from the IRGC’s Fars news agency, the Guards threatened to utterly destroy Israel with just four missiles if Israel dared to launch any kind of attack on Iran.

Which brings us to the question, what if Iran already had the bomb?

Former IRGC officer and undercover CIA spy, Reza Kahlili, believes Iran acquired nuclear warheads from a former Soviet republic at the end of the Cold War​, and has designed its own nuclear warhead with the help of Ukrainian scientists.

As I reported in my 2005 book, Countdown to Crisis: the Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran, IRGC commander Gen. Mohsen Rezai traveled to North Korea in January 1993, seeking assistance in arming those warheads. My informant, a top advisor to Gen. Rezai who later defected (and who spoke with me), said the North Koreans agreed to provide that help.

From that day forward, Iran believed it had a nuclear deterrent – not a strike force, but at least a deterrent – and its behavior changed. The IRGC believed they could carry out aggressive acts against the United States, including a terror alliance with Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda, and the U.S. would never strike back with any consequence, and certainly would not strike the Iranian homeland.

This week’s IAEA report is only the latest in a series of revelations from the UN nuclear watchdog in Vienna that has documented Iran’s long march toward nuclear weapons.

Despite these reports, nuclear skeptics continue to claim that Iran is hopelessly disorganized, incompetent, incapable, and lacking the will to defy the international community and deploy nuclear weapons.

Just three weeks ago, the same nuclear analyst quoted this week by the Washington Post to sound the alarm about the latest IAEA report on Iran’s nuclear weapons progress, David Albright​, was telling folks how the Stuxnet virus had crippled Iran’s ability to enrich uranium.

As they say, what a difference a week makes.

We’ve had Indicators and Warnings of Iran’s nuclear weapons intentions going back twenty-five years.

In late 1986, the Iranian Atomic Energy Agency publicly announced it was signing a “consulting” agreement with a Pakistani metallurgist named AQ Khan​. I wrote about this agreement at the time – and continued writing about these Indicators and Warnings as they became known.

In 1992, the Simon Wiesenthal Center asked me to compile this information into a monograph called Weapons of Mass Destruction: the cases Iran, Syria, and Libya. At that time, I was looking at patterns emerging from Iran’s procurement of certain dual-use technologies that were needed for a centrifuge enrichment program.

It was clear to me then, as it was to many others, that Iran had a uranium enrichment program. But the U.S. intelligence community failed to connect the dots. Even in 2005 when I wrote a narrative version of Iran’s nuclear weapons development program in Countdown to Crisis, noteworthy scholars dismissed my information as “sensational” and based on “faulty sources.”

This week’s IAEA report shows beyond a doubt that Iran has cold-tested all the components of a workable nuclear weapon design, as I reported in June. It also shows Iran had significant assistance from a Russian nuclear weapons scientists, who for five years helped Iran to design a nuclear weapons trigger.

Rather than a haphazard effort, Iran’s nuclear weapons research was “managed through a program structure, assisted by advisory bodies, and that, owing to the importance of these efforts, senior Iranian figures featured within this command structure,” the IAEA report found.

The program was run out of a “Scientific Committee” under the auspices of the Defense Ministry’s Education Research Institute, the IAEA found.

The IAEA report also shoots down – yet again – the National Intelligence Council’s fatally flawed 2007 National Intelligence on Iran, which stated at the outset that Iran had stopped nuclear weapons research in 2003. The IAEA found that the research continued, underground and unreported.

And yet, in a recent talk to intelligence community retirees and other guests, the Director of National Intelligence, Lt. Gen. James Clapper​, said his fingerprints were “all over” the 2007 NIE and that he stood by it one hundred percent.

How much more information do we need to understand that Iran is hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons and threatening to use them against Israel and the United States? How many more dots do we need before our intelligence community and our political leaders connect them to read the words IMMINENT THREAT spelled out just like that, in capital letters?

Iran’s leaders believe the “end of days” is come, and that by annhiliating Israel with a nuclear weapon they can “hasten the return” of the 12th imam, the Imam Mahdi of Shiite Muslim eschatology.

But in response to Iran’s latest efforts, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the State Department would open a “virtual embassy” to Iran, and gave an interview to the BBC Persian service where she claimed the Obama Administration failed to respond to the June 2009 protests in Iran because their Iran advisors counseled them against it.

Here’s a novel thought: if our intelligence analysts, including those right at the top, fail to connect the dots, why don’t we just fire them?

Stay tuned.

Two new films have been uploaded to the virtual cinema site of the Spielberg Archive — one depicting scenes from the Warsaw Ghetto, and the second showing the agricultural development of the first settlements along the Dead Sea that followed its destruction.

Von Horvot Bis Zum Heimland, “From Ruins Till Destruction” tells the tale of the ghetto in which some 450,000 Jews were forced by the Nazis to live from November 1940 until its liquidation in the spring of 1943.

Israeli songwriter, poet and writer Chaim Hefer, born in 1925, joined the Palmach fighters in 1943. He participated in smuggling “illegal immigrants” through Syria and Lebanon into the Holy Land, and was their chief songwriter.

The Palmach fighter, who later became the assistant director of Promise to Masada and narrator of numerous other films, was awarded the Israel Prize in 1983.

Promise to Masada, the second film uploaded to the Spielberg Archive, depicts the agricultural development of settlements located in the Judean Desert and along the Dead Sea.

Each film is about 20 minutes long.

The Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive, located at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University on Mount Scopus, was founded in the late 1960s by Professor Moshe Davis and other historians at the university. It was named for the famed Jewish American film director in 1987 after he donated a generous sum to the archive. The archive’s first donor, and whose name it originally bore, was Iranian businessman Abraham F. Rad, who supported the project for a number of years.

Christians are being killed by radical Islamists because of their beliefs. Why then, while the world celebrates revolution in the Arab world, are we standing silently while these atrocities are taking place in these democratically-liberated lands?

Israel has long been like the canary in the mineshaft. If the canary succumbs to the odorless, lethal gases of the depths below, the miners know it’s time to get out of the mine. Anti-Semitic militancy, like the canary in the mine, warns the rest of the world of what lies ahead. Now, however, there is strong evidence that there are two types of “canaries” in the mine. Long-suffering Christians in the Middle East are being ravaged by merciless assaults that threaten their very existence.

Liberal elitists in Western politics, academia, and the news media collectively swooned when the mobs in Cairo’s Tahrir Square swept Western ally, Hosni Mubarak, out of the Egyptian presidency and into a prison cell to await trial. In the minds of so-called progressives, the “Arab Spring” was precisely the balm of freedom for which the downtrodden had long been yearning. Democratic reforms were supposedly around the corner, swinging everyone into an era of prosperous camaraderie. That’s how delusional Western leaders saw things.

They were wrong again.

On October 9, 2011, Muslims attacked some 10,000 peaceful Coptic Christians who were protesting the burning of two of their churches. Some Christians were shot, while others were run down by the Egyptian army’s military vehicles or were beaten and dragged through the streets of Cairo.

Islamist jihadists, who have harassed and murdered Coptic Christians for years, are gaining strength in their support for an Islamic regime dominated by the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood. Their oft-stated objective is to rid themselves of Israel first, then to drape the entire region in Arab green. The Copts, who in Egypt number approximately 8 million, have lived peaceful, productive lives among their Muslim neighbors for two millennia. Now, with radicals at the helm of the burgeoning Islamist/Sharia “utopia,” many are talking about fleeing their native land.

In Pursuit of Survival

A decade ago, 800,000 Christians lived in Iraq. Need we be reminded that American and coalition forces in 2003 delivered the country from the protracted agony of the butcher of Baghdad, Sadaam Hussein? Their intent was to facilitate a stable, democratic government. However, when it comes to the country’s Christians, the new Iraqi constitution comes up short. Compass Direct News reported that:
Iraq’s Federal Constitution says each individual has freedom of thought, conscience and belief, but there is no article on changing one’s religion. This makes it legally impossible to apply freedom of belief in the cases of converts, said a Christian Iraqi lawyer on the condition of anonymity.

Radical Muslims ratcheted up their attacks in October 2010, massacring 52 people worshiping in a Catholic church in Baghdad. The persecution of Christians in Iraq has led to a mass exodus. More than 1 million Christians lived there in 1991; today fewer than 350,000 remain.

Even children are targeted. A nine-year-old Iraqi boy was recently beaten and insulted because of his Christian faith. When he started first grade last year, his teacher beat him in front of the entire class, calling him an infidel.

His sister, in kindergarten, said her teacher told her she and her family would “burn” for being Christians. The parents “are weary and wonder if the children’s lives would be easier in a Western country where so many Christian converts have already fled.”

In a US State Department report, released last month, it was stated that there are no Christian churches or schools left in Afghanistan. The last church was destroyed in March 2010. “Negative societal opinions and suspicion of Christian activities led to targeting of Christians groups and individuals, including converts to Christianity,” said the report. “The lack of government responsiveness and protection for these groups and individuals contributed to the deterioration of religious freedom.” Consequently, most fear to communicate their faith or worship openly.

In 2001, Mideast expert Daniel Pipes wrote in the Middle East Quarterly, “At the present rate, the Middle East’s 12 million Christians will likely drop to 6 million in the year 2020. With time, Christians will effectively disappear from the region as a cultural and political force.” A decade later, evidence confirms the truth of his words.

Dismal Prospects

Still to be assessed is the possible imposition of fundamentalist, Islamist regimes in countries taken over by insurgents hostile to Christians and Jews. It is a fallacy to insist that these “Islamocracies” can be cajoled into becoming democracies. A Sharia-dominated constitutional system is diametrically opposed to and irreconcilable with a democratic government. So Christians and Jews in Islamic countries face two dismal fates: “dhimmitude” or death.

Being a “tolerated” dhimmi means living an existence of medieval-like subservience. Many Christians, however, die instead. As demonstrated in a host of Islamist-dominated societies today, Muslims see genocide as a viable way of eliminating Christians, who are viewed as an unacceptable, corrupting presence.

One report claimed that “105,000 people are killed every year because of their Christian faith.” This means that, every five minutes, one Christian is killed because of their beliefs. Furthermore, over the past 10 years, an average of 100,000 Christians have been slain for their faith annually. The vast majority are murdered by radical Islamists.

The Inevitable Question

Since the wholesale murder of Christians is indisputable, why the silence? Why do our leaders not chastise the countries where these atrocities are perpetrated? Egypt, Iraq, and Afghanistan are prime offenders. The United States endorsed the revolution in Egypt, even before clearly understanding who was behind it or what would be the end result. Now, with army vehicles running down Christians in the streets and rabid mobs killing at will, where are the opposition voices among those who are expected to keep Egypt financially afloat?

Iraq has benefited from Western money and military support, as well as from soldiers who shed their blood to breathe life back into the nation. Where then is the outrage when the Iraqis legislate offensive restraints on Christians and allow them to be mutilated and driven out of a country they inhabited centuries before the birth of Islam?

Add to this the insult of tolerating the destruction of the churches in Afghanistan until not one is left standing and Christians are forced to meet in secret. Yet, at the same time, young Christians from the other side of the world are taking the bullets to set these people free. It is incomprehensible.

In America, Muslims are protected, much more so than evangelical Christians. Protecting Muslim citizens is an honorable pursuit that raises America’s standards far above those in so many other parts of the world. Yet why are the same leaders who so passionately protect Muslim rights in America doing nothing for Christians who are dying in record numbers? Why do so many of our leaders hold their tongues as the world turns a blind eye?

And there is another question—one we must all ask ourselves: Why has the church been virtually silent about the suffering of our brethren? We will meet them one day. What will we answer when they ask us, “Why?”

The writer is executive editor for The Friends of Israel

 By: Kenneth R. Timmerman – New English Review

The big news out of the Voice of America’s Persian News Network (PNN), the much troubled broadcasting service you would think would be bringing the “voice” of America to Iran, was the firing ten days ago of CNN/FoxNews broadcasting star Rudi Bakhtiar.

Just a few months ago, Ms. Bakhtiar was considered a treasured catch. Lured away from a prominent position as a public affairs spokesperson for a human rights campaign, she was escorted out of the Cohen building on a Friday afternoon by VOA security guards. It was a humiliating end to a short-lived career where by all accounts she succeeded in raising moral and raising the profile of this much troubled U.S. broadcasting service.

What happened? For now, Ms. Bakhtiar is keeping mum – understandably so – as she undoubtedly consults lawyers and considers taking legal action against VOA.

But PNN has been roiled by a seemingly incoherent set of personnel changes ever since Ramin Asgard, a former State Department diplomat, took over the reins earlier this year after a long search for a new director.

Asgard, who granted many visas to suspect Iranian nationals as a U.S. consular officer in Istanbul and Dubai, seemed intent on accomplishing two goals from the outset of his directorship: insulating his leadership from Congressional challenge, and using PNN as a vehicle to enhance U.S. relations with Tehran.

“Ramin thinks it would be a cool thing to have an office in Tehran,” a knowledgeable insider who has known Asgard for several years told me. “He has been very eager to diffuse criticism from people like Sen. Tom Coburn and Enders Winbush,” a Republican appointee to the Broadcasting Board of Governors, PNN’s ultimate supervisor.

Among Asgard’s first acts as head of Voice of America’s Persian service was to fire controversial managing editor, Seyed Ali Sajadi, the son of a senior cleric in Tehran. Sajadi had become notorious for single-handedly preventing PNN from broadcasting exclusive video footage of the murder of Neda Agha-Sultan, the beautiful young Iranian woman who became the face of the anti-government Green movement after she was gunned down by pro-regime thugs on the streets of Tehran during the June 2009 protests.

So far, so good. Next, Asgard brought onto the air one of VOA’s fiercest critics, a self-proclaimed student leader named Amir Abbas Fakhravar, who had become a source of insider information to Sen. Tom Coburn and others in Congress about anti-American material sent out over the VOA airwaves.

Fakhravar, the darling of a handful of Washington, DC neo-cons, has succeeded in just five years in the United States in alienating every Iranian-American activist and legitimate student leader who has recently left Iran, usually through scurrilous – and often obscene – slanders he penned against them on Persian language blogs.

On April 6, 2011, Fakhravar testified before a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee about the shortcomings of PNN, skipping over Mr. Sajadi (for whom he has expressed sympathy) and instead firing full bore at Ahmad Batebi, the Tehran University student pictured on the cover of the Economist during the July 1999 student uprising holding up a bloody t-shirt.

Mr. Batebi, who had shared a prison cell briefly with Mr. Fakhrevar back in Tehran and knew his secrets, came to the United States three years ago and has been working for VOA ever since, interviewing dissidents inside Iran. Mr. Fakhravar’s accusations that Mr. Batebi was collaborating with Iranian intelligence were so scurrilous that he (thankfully) left them in his written testimony and did not voice them out loud.

Richard Perle, the former Reagan Pentagon official who helped Mr. Fakhravar come to this country in 2006, tells me he is “sick of the whole lot of them” and feels that the current crop of Iranian exiles would put the Romanian, Hungarian and other refugees of the Cold War to shame. He recently  resigned along with the entire Advisory Board from Fakhravar’s “Iranian Enterprise Institute.”

Others, such as Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, have publicly called for ridding VOA of all foreign nationals and turning it over to American citizens, a proposal that has significant support in Congress and from the American Federation of Government Employees that represents most VOA employees. Ledeen has also resigned from Fakhravar’s advisory board, which has been taken down from his website. An archived version is here).

Exile communities historically have a tendency to bicker. In the case of the Iranians, they have good reason to do so, since the Iranian regime has spared no effort to recruit agents in their midst and to sow discord, making it virtually impossible for them to speak with a single voice.

But the rot at VOA goes well beyond a squabble among exiles, however important that may be: it touches core issues of American policy toward Iran, and how we view our public diplomacy.

In one recent staff meeting, Mr. Asgard instructed his work force to keep all anti-regime criticism off the air, because he wanted VOA “to serve as a bridge between the United States and the Iranian governments,” according to two sources familiar with the meeting.

Since issuing that edict, Mr. Asgard has fired top broadcasters who were in touch with Iran’s disenchanted youth, such as Mr. Batebi, Kianoush Sanjari and Kourosh Seyhati, as well as well-respected veteran Jamshid Charlangi. Several of them were escorted out of the building by VOA security personnel on October 7, victims of an earlier Friday night massacre. (Mr. Batebi was fired in July; Ms. Bakhtiar was given the axe this past Friday, Oct. 21).

In their place, Mr. Asgard has hired a group of young protégés of pro-Tehran activist Trita Parsi, the president of the National Iranian American Council, NIAC.

Mr. Parsi has reliably defended the Islamic Republic of Iran leadership through thick and thin, always managing to find excuses for their bad behavior (hint: it’s America’s fault), while urging the U.S. government to just “reach out their hand” to the Iranian regime and lift sanctions. As Herman Cain would say, How’s that workin’ for ‘ya?

My sources at VOA tell me that Asgard is hoping to fire more anti-Tehran regime journalists, while taking on board more NIAC members, to complete the VOA’s transformation into a U.S. taxpayer-sponsored “Make Nice to Dictators” channel.

A recent evaluation of VOA broadcasting that gave support to Asgard’s makeover was authored by Hooman Majd, an Iranian-American “scholar” who has worked as Ahmadinejad’s “voice” during his visits to New York. Hooman Majd has also taken Trita Parsi under his wing and appeared at events with him.

But the plot gets thicker still. In addition to using its lackeys here in the United States, the Iranian regime has also been using its English-language propaganda network, PRESS TV, to spread lies and rumors to smear the reputation of anti-regime broadcasters. Mr. Charlangi was the victim of a particularly vicious – and totally spurious – claim by Press TV that he was under investigation for sexual harassment that ultimately contributed to his dismissal.

Since the Justice Department revealed the Iranian terror plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States in Washington, DC, the Tehran regime has been desperate to deny it had anything to do with the blown plot.

Their latest gambit has been to offer up the IRGC intermediary in the plot, claiming he was an infiltrator from the MEK, the Marxist Islamist group that once was part of the Khomeinist regime but later had a falling out with them over power-sharing 30 years ago.

As I explained here, if only their U.S. agent had picked the right Mexican to execute the terror plot, the headlines would have read “MEXICAN DRUG WAR COMES TO WASHINGTON, DC,” not “Iranian Terror Plot Foiled.”

Today, Trita Parsi, NIAC, and other regime apologists are going out of their way to cast doubt on the FBI’s allegations in the terror plot, and to “warn” the United States not to over-react. And Ramin Asgard’s Voice of America is going along with them.

The Iranian regime is not to blame for plotting a terrorist attack on the United States, in Mr. Parsi’s view. At worst, they were attempting to “provoke” the Obama administration. “[T]he Obama administration should be careful not to walk into such a trap,” he wrote the day the indictment was unveiled. “We must work to prevent such a disastrous outcome” through “restraint and de-escalation.”

Let’s see: the Iranian regime has just tried to blow up scores of people with C-4 explosives at a Washington, DC restaurant, and the United States is the one that should show “restraint” and “de-escalation?”

VOA’s coverage of the terror plot was considered so favorable to the Tehran regime’s narrative that Iranian an state-sponsored website picked excerpts of VOA interviews with five “scholars” and “experts” who cast doubt on the FBI’s evidence in a recent documentary aimed at debunking the U.S. government account of the plot. At one point, the narrator in regime documentary says, “See, even American government television says the case [against the Iranian regime] is a lie.”

Another “expert” Iranian state television quoted in its documentary on the Arbabsiar terror case was Trita Parsi (although they picked footage from an interview he gave the BBC’s Persian service, not VOA).

The Voice of America’s Persian service should be telling Iranians the stories about their own lives they cannot get from their own media because of censorship. It should not be in the business of giving airtime to apologists for the Tehran regime or making excuses for regime terror plots. 

PNN’s new director, Ramin Asgar, seems to think that the true vocation of the Voice of America is to become the Voice of Tehran.

Enough.

Observers have praised the elections’ transparency and high turnout, but success of Islamist movement Ennahda leaves questions.

Parliamentary ballots closed Monday in Tunisia – the country’s first free elections and the first significant democratic exercise in this year’s “Arab Spring.”

Observers have praised the elections’ transparency and high turnout – remarkable in a country with little, to no, experience of democracy.

“The voting process went well. There were few reports of irregularities,” said Daniel Zisenwine, a research fellow at Tel Aviv University’s Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies.

“By all accounts, the elections were very transparent and organized – that’s no small feat for a country with no experience in this. Turnout was high – no one can say this was unrepresentative.”

At the same time, preliminary results indicate that at least a plurality of votes will go to Ennahda, the Islamist movement long banned under the dictatorial regime of former president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Ennahda did particularly well among expatriate voters – electoral rules set aside six voting districts for Tunisians living abroad, most of them in France, other European countries, Arab states and the Americas.

“It remains to be seen whether it will be 30 percent or 45%,” Zisenwine said, “but obviously, a vote for Ennahda coming from France carries a different message than one coming from Tunis. This is in many ways an immigrant identity question, and it’s often been perceived that citizens abroad display more radical or extreme political positions than those at home.”

Ennahda has given conflicting signals over the extent to which it hopes to impose Shari’a law on Tunisia – arguably the Arab world’s most secular state – and how far it will go in upholding the rights of the country’s women.

“There’s a question about its true colors. Is it indeed a right-of- center, conservative-oriented religious-flavored party, or is it an all-out radical Islamic group?” Zisenwine said.

“The results will indicate whether Ennahda has to remain in a coalition status with other parties – which would by nature, force it into some kind of compromise or negotiations – or produce an all-out victory that would produce more bold political conduct. All of this remains to be seen,” he continued.

“Rachid Ghannouchi is certainly among the more reform-oriented Islamists, but he is an Islamist,” said Zisenwine of the Ennahda leader, who, though an esteemed figurehead within the party, is not running in the elections. “Will Ennahda be a sort of Tunisian model of Turkey’s AKP? Maybe – a lot depends on the outcome.”

In the early 1990s, free elections in Algeria, Tunisia’s neighbor, yielded an Islamist victory in the first round of ballots. The result prompted a military intervention that sparked a decadelong civil war, that ultimately claimed at least 150,000 lives.

“We all have the Algerian model in the back of our minds, but this is a different situation. If Ennahda indeed reaches a leadership position, it will have to deliver, and expectations are high… The economy isn’t doing very well, and the country will need to be rebuilt. But they’ve proven and shown remarkable resilience in building themselves as a movement.”

Bruce Maddy-Weitzman, also a Dayan Center Research Fellow, said a more Islamic Tunisia is all but a foregone conclusion.

“Tunisia will be more Islamicoriented – I don’t see how one could conclude anything else…

The question is: Can Tunisia be more Islamic while maintaining its Western, Mediterranean cultural roots? And can it be a country where Western-style rule of law can reign supreme? If it can’t happen in Tunisia, it won’t happen anywhere else in the region.

“Tunisians have a better chance of succeeding in the democratizing process, and working out a fairly stable, nonviolent framework that will allow the country to maintain stability without falling into new violence or dictatorship, or domination by Islamists or the military. They have the best chance in the region, but it’s still very fragile,” Maddy-Weitzman said.

Tunisia, he said, “Has a strong middle class, better status of women, and there is a certain legitimacy of the state. Those things work in its favor – but all of these are going to be tested.”

Maddy-Weitzman said Ghannouchi, who returned to a hero’s welcome in Tunisia in March after decades in European exile, “was always, in his thinking, closer to the ‘Turkish model’ than just about any of the other Islamist leaders. He certainly seems more tolerant, or less demanding of Shari’a law, than the Muslim Brotherhood or Islamists elsewhere.

“But he has also had very nasty things to say about Israel, the West, Iraq, as well. Lover of Zion he’s not.”