How the persecution of Islamists across North Africa, in the name of fighting terrorism, is sowing the seeds for future instability. Go to Foreign Policy.

Free Iran:  This is a must read…

Reza Kahlili is a pseudonym for an ex-CIA spy who requires anonymity for safety reasons. “A Time to Betray,” his book about his double life as a CIA agent in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, will be published by Simon & Schuster on April 6.

…Khamenei ignores the fact that, in the mid-1980s, Mohsen Rezaei, then chief commander of the Revolutionary Guards, got Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s permission to develop nuclear bombs. As a CIA agent in the Revolutionary Guards then, I learned of this nascent effort and reported it to my handlers. The Iranians approached several sources, including Abdul Qadeer Khan, father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb. His account of Iran’s bid to buy atomic bombs from Pakistan was reported very recently.

…That Khamenei has chosen to conceal Iran’s nuclear program shouldn’t be surprising. He also claims that the Iranian government doesn’t condone torture, that the recent Iranian election was just and proof that his nation is a real democracy, and that Iran is not involved in terrorism.

Islamic teaching considers the spilling of blood during the Islamic month of Muharram to be haram. Yet that didn’t stop the regime’s troops from slaughtering unarmed protesters last year on Ashura, one of Shiite Islam’s holiest days.

…Within Iran, radical Islamists have grown in power since Grand Ayatollah Khomeini’s death in 1989. Even Khomeini – an extremist by any reasonable definition – saw them as too fanatic and tried to keep them in check.

These radicals belong to a secret society called the Hojjatieh. It’s essentially a cult devoted to the reappearance of the 12th imam, Mahdi, and Islam’s conquest of the world. To achieve that end, the radicals believe they must foment chaos, famine, and lawlessness, that they must destroy Israel, and that world order must come to an abrupt halt. Free Iran:  Sounds familiar?  It seems awfully like the evangelical Christians that support the most right wing Israeli factions because they believe a major conflict in the Middle East would pave the way for the coming of Jessus Christ. They couldn’t care less about the Jews.  They just want the conflict.  These evangelicals and the Hojjatiehs are two sides of the same coin.  It’s incomprehensible that at the dawn of the 21st century – after the Age of Enlightenment – we still have to deal with this kind of nonsense…

Long ago, my best friend and commander in the Revolutionary Guards reminded me of a hadith, a saying from the prophet Muhammad, about Imam Mahdi: “During the last times, my people will be afflicted with terrible and unprecedented calamities and misfortunes from their rulers, so much so that this vast earth will appear small to them. Persecution and injustice will engulf the earth. The believers will find no shelter to seek refuge from these tortures and injustices. At such a time, Allah will raise from my progeny a man who will establish peace and justice on this earth in the same way as it had been filled with injustice and distress.”

The Hojjatieh see any movement toward peace and democracy as delaying Mahdi’s reappearance.

Although he strenuously denies it, Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi reportedly sits at the top of this secret society. He is an influential member of the Assembly of Experts (the body that chooses the supreme leader), an adviser to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the founder of the Haghani School that teaches the most radical Shiite beliefs.

The teachers and students of this school run some of the most important political and security institutions in the Iranian government, including the Ministry of Intelligence, which is involved in organizing death squads against the opposition and coordinating terrorist activities against the West.

Ayatollah Janati, the powerful chairman of the Guardian Council, is also associated with the school. Yazdi, Janati, and Mojtaba Khamenei (Ayatollah Khamenei’s son) were central to President Ahmadinejad’s fraudulent reelection last June and the suppression of the opposition, and they are directing the supreme leader regarding the nuclear program.

…The choices are clear: We can either rise up to our principles and defend the aspirations of the Iranian people for a free and democratic government, or we can continue with our vacillation and indecision, allowing Iran to become a nuclear-armed state.

Instead of counting on watered-down United Nations sanctions, the West should cut off all diplomatic ties with Iran, close down all airspace and seaports going to or from Iran, sanction all companies doing business with Iran, and cut off its gasoline supply. We should then demand an immediate halt to all Iranian nuclear and missile delivery activities and the right to peaceful demonstration and freedom of speech for all Iranians. And if that fails, a military action should be in the cards.  Free Iran:  Not sure about the conclusion of military action?

Go to CS Monitor.

Her recitation on the show brings cheers, death threats

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates – It was a startling voice of protest at a startling venue. Covered head-to-toe in black, a Saudi woman lashed out at hard-line Muslim clerics’ harsh religious edicts in verse on live TV at a popular Arabic version of “American Idol.”

Well, not quite “American Idol”: Contestants compete not in singing but in traditional Arabic poetry. Over the past episodes, poets sitting on an elaborate stage before a live audience have recited odes to the beauty of Bedouin life and the glories of their rulers or mourning the gap between rich and poor.

Then last week, Hissa Hilal, only her eyes visible through her black veil, delivered a blistering poem against Muslim preachers “who sit in the position of power” but are “frightening” people with their fatwas, or religious edicts, and “preying like a wolf” on those seeking peace.

Her poem got loud cheers from the audience and won her a place in the competition’s finals, to be aired on Wednesday.

It also brought her death threats, posted on several Islamic militant Web sites.

‘It’s a way to express myself’
Hilal shrugs off the controversy.

“My poetry has always been provocative,” she told The Associated Press in an interview. “It’s a way to express myself and give voice to Arab women, silenced by those who have hijacked our culture and our religion.”

Her poem was seen as a response to Sheik Abdul-Rahman al-Barrak, a prominent cleric in Saudi Arabia who recently issued a fatwa saying those who call for the mingling of men and women should be considered infidels, punishable by death.

But more broadly, it was seen as addressing any of many hard-line clerics in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the region who hold a wide influence through television programs, university positions or Web sites.

“Killing a human being is so easy for them, it is always an option,” she told the AP.

Poetry holds a prominent place in Arab culture, and some poets in the Middle East have a fan base akin to those of rock stars.

Hilal’s 15-verse poem was in a form known as Nabati, native to nomadic tribes of the Arabian Peninsula. She criticized extremism that she told AP is “creeping into our society” through fatwas.

“I have seen evil in the eyes of fatwas, at a time when the permitted is being twisted into the forbidden,” she said in the poem. She called such edicts “a monster that emerged from its hiding place” whenever “the veil is lifted from the face of truth.”

She described hard-line clerics as “vicious in voice, barbaric, angry and blind, wearing death as a robe cinched with a belt,” in an apparent reference to suicide bombers’ explosives belts.

The three judges gave her the highest marks for her performance, praising her for addressing a controversial topic. That, plus voting from the 2,000 people in the audience and text messages from viewers, put her through to the final round.

“My message to those who hear me is love, compassion and peace,” Hilal said. “We all have to share a small planet and we need to learn how to live together.” Go to MSNBC.

Huffington Post:  Texas Textbook MASSACRE:

‘Ultraconservatives’ Approve Radical Changes To State Education Curriculum

Thomas Jefferson? Who’s that?

The Board removed Thomas Jefferson from the Texas curriculum's world history
standards on Enlightenment thinking, “replacing him with
religious right icon John Calvin.”
.

AUSTIN, Texas – A far-right faction of the Texas State Board of Education succeeded Friday in injecting conservative ideals into social studies, history and economics lessons that will be taught to millions of students for the next decade.  Teachers in Texas will be required to cover the Judeo-Christian influences of the nation’s Founding Fathers, but not highlight the philosophical rationale for the separation of church and state. Curriculum standards also will describe the U.S. government as a “constitutional republic,” rather than “democratic,” and students will be required to study the decline in value of the U.S. dollar, including the abandonment of the gold standard.  Ultraconservatives wielded their power over hundreds of subjects this week, introducing and rejecting amendments on everything from the civil rights movement to global politics. Hostilities flared and prompted a walkout Thursday by one of the board’s most prominent Democrats, Mary Helen Berlanga of Corpus Christi, who accused her colleagues of “whitewashing” curriculum standards.

Free Iran:  If Thomas Jefferson, one of America’s leading Founding Fathers and the author of the Declaration of Independence, isn’t safe from religious conservatives here in the US, then what are we to do in the Islamic world?  It is astonishing that we still have to defend the Age of Enlightenment or evolution (85 years after the Scopes trial) in America.  Is religious bigotry and intolerance hardwired into human beings?  Can we not escape it?  If it weren’t for America’s deeply rooted democratic institutions, what would these folks do if they ever took power? How right was Jefferson when he said that “The Price of Liberty is Eternal Vigilance.”

The Iranian revolution in 1979 was the biggest event of the last generation in the Middle East, spawning wars and radicalization that have reshaped the region and, to some extent, the world. If we’re now watching the slow unwinding of that revolution, the consequences will be equally momentous.

To be sure, this is a long-term question, not a short-term one. Iran’s Islamic government in its current form is well-entrenched, and the Revolutionary Guards that sustain it are by far the country’s most powerful force. The government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has shown that it possesses the most important attribute of any imperiled regime, which is the willingness to use brute force to quell rebellion.

So it may take years rather than months to know the end result of today’s grass-roots opposition to the Ahmadinejad government, and there is a distinct limit to what the U.S., or any outside force, can do to affect the course of opposition within Iran.

Yet slowly, things appear to be changing. For one thing, the world increasingly views Iran’s mistreatment of its own dissidents as a problem on a par with its nuclear program. One small sign of this came Thursday in the U.S. Senate, where a bipartisan group of senators unveiled a bill that would compel the Obama administration to target economic sanctions on Iran at officials who abuse their citizens’ human rights, not just at those involved in the country’s nuclear program.

“The scheme of the bill is straightforward: targeted sanctions against human-rights abusers in Iran,” said one Senate aide involved in drafting the legislation. IND:  Excellent! At long last, America is beginning to differentiate between the symptoms of the problem and the problem itself.  Helping to moderate Iran’s domestic policy will bring about a more moderate foreign policy.  Vice versa leads to nowhere – as it hasn’t for the past three decades. How one frames a problem impacts the solutions one chooses. This new approach will help America achieve what it has failed to accomplish for the past thirty years – a more stable Middle East.

Without doubt, the stakes are enormous. The best way to grasp the consequences of a potential unwinding of the Islamic revolution in Iran is to consider how fundamentally that revolution altered the course of history in the first place.

The 1979 revolution was the event that, more than any other, inspired a rise of Islamic fundamentalist sentiment across the Middle East and the larger Islamic world. That rise has shaken governments across the region, prompting them to alternately accommodate fundamentalists, giving them new power, or to suppress them, generating a backlash of sympathy among the populace.

Most notably, the government of Saudi Arabia, in response to both the forces unleashed in Iran in 1979 and to an uprising by Islamic radicals at the Grand Mosque in Mecca that same year, granted new power, money and freedom to the kingdom’s conservative clerical establishment. That allowed the most conservative elements of the Saudi theocracy to better spread their fundamentalist philosophy not just within the country, but to places such as Pakistan and Yemen as well, sowing the seeds for troubles that continue to erupt.

The rise of Islamic power in Iran also led both the U.S. and rich Arab states to bulk up Saddam Hussein in next-door Iraq as a bulwark against the spread of Iranian-style revolution. This empowering of Iraq led to the massively destructive and expensive eight-year Iran-Iraq war—and also to the cultivation of a monster in Saddam Hussein that took two more wars to eliminate.

Further abroad, the Iranian revolution led directly to the creation of the Hezbollah armed Islamic movement in Lebanon, which has become a military threat to Israel more real than that posed by any surrounding Arab state. Iran’s revolutionary government also has provided at least inspiration, and some funding, over the years to Hamas, which has undermined the secular Palestinian movement in the Gaza Strip and threatened it in the West Bank. Go to WSJ.

We face a threat that involves far more than terrorism. It should not take what is happening in Yemen, or an attempted airline bombing, to remind us that we are involved in struggle for the future of Islam that involves both violent forms of terrorism and insurgency; that affects virtually every country with a significant Muslim population; and that and has spilled over into rest of the world. Moreover, this struggle is not driven by a handful of extremists. It is driven by ideological, political, demographic, and economic forces that are virtually certain to make extremist violence an enduring threat for at least the next decade and probably the next quarter century.

The Burke Chair has developed two papers that address these issues. The first focuses on changes in US strategy for counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, and dealing with the broader threat of violent extremism in predominantly Muslim states.

The second paper is written for an international audience, and address the broader improvements required in international cooperation in dealing with international terrorism, including the efforts needed from Muslim and other states. Go to CSIS.

If ever one year in recent times was a catalyst for change in the broader Middle East and Muslim world, it was 1979. One ray of bright light in that year of darkness was the signing of the historic Camp David peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. Conversely, three events had dire consequences with which we live today.

First, there was the overthrow of the shah of Iran by the Ayatollah Khomeini. Second, there was the takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, by a group of Islamic extremists. And third, there was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Go to WSJ.

IND:  Iran’s embrace of democracy would have a profound impact in moderating such radical forces in Egypt.  That’s why we urge the Obama administration to abandon realpolitik and side with the Iranian people.  Iran’s democratic movement has presented President Obama with a momentous opportunity to spread peace and democracy across the Middle East – an opportunity that no other American president had.  It would be tragic should he tie his hands with the limited vision of realpolitik.

Egypt’s main opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood, is facing a change in leadership that could sideline reformists. That could deprive Islamists of an avenue for participating in Egyptian politics, and some could become radicalized.

Mahdi Mohammed Akef, the general guide of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood for the past six years, will step down in January amid a widening split in the organization.

Mr. Akef, who has held together a group that includes moderates and conservatives, young and old, urban and rural, says that the organization’s internal disagreements are one of its strengths. But his blowup with the group’s 15-man Guidance Council when he tried to appoint a younger, reformist member to the elderly and predominantly conservative council has ignited an unprecedented public debate in Egypt. Go to CS Monitor.

IND:  This outstanding essay highlights our main premise that America first and foremost needs to expose the fallacy of Islamic fundamentalism as an ideology.  The best way to do so is by exposing the disastrous track record of the Islamic republic for the past 30 years.

In 1979, the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was overthrown and replaced by an Islamic Republic basing much of its governance practices on its interpretation of Islam. Today, 30 years later, the answer to a basic question is overdue: Did the theocracy deliver a better life for the Iranian people? The answer is a resounding no. Iran is far worse off today – an argument supported by the continuing political unrest and economic contraction associated in many ways with the country’s ongoing brain drain.

According to the International Monetary Fund, of 91 countries tracked according to the displacement of their elite citizens (those with advanced education and technical know-how), Iran ranks first.

What transpired in Iran in the last three decades must be viewed as a warning to Arabs tempted to see Islam as the political solution to their problems of governance…The establishment of Islamic regimes in other nations may well prove as devastating as Iran’s experience. Substantial brain drains will provoke further economic contractions.

Three valuable decades have been wasted since the formation of the Islamic Republic of Iran; the region cannot afford another such period. Political Islam is not the answer. Skeptics should look at Iran and take note. It is not a pretty picture. Go to original article.

The Iranian Supreme Leader’s representative in Britain has told Muslim servicemen and women to quit the Armed Forces, saying that their involvement in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars is forbidden by Islam.

The cleric, personally appointed by Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to be his special envoy to the UK, also urged Muslims to defeat the opposition to the Iranian regime and keep the 30-year-old Islamic Republic alive. Go to Times UK.

Anyone who counts Ayatollah Abdolhossein Moezi as a spiritual leader is unlikely to have joined the British military in the first place. He is the religious envoy of the same regime that calls Britain “the little Satan”. Go to Times UK.

IND:  Demagogues like Wilders who climb the ladder of political power by appealing to people’s worst fears and prejudices (like Limbaugh and other intolerant talking heads on cable TV) help strengthen the very people they claim to oppose.  Those demonstrating against him shouted “Sharia for UK” – that’s not only just preposterous but also totally counterproductive.  This is why at IND we advocate that the Obama administration needs to put aside its myopic Realpolitik blinders and take a look at the bigger picture of what’s taking place in Iran.  Iran’s Green Movement is the equivalent of Europe’s Enlightenment.  Helping Islam embrace modernity is the single most important security issue facing the world in the next decade and possibly beyond, i.e. just consider what’s taking place in nuclear-armed Pakistan in the past few days.  And nothing will help Islam embrace modernity better than the success of Iran’s Green Movement.

A far-right Dutch politician who was turned away from Britain after criticising the Koran as a ‘fascist book’ was today forced to hastily change the location of a scheduled press conference in London in the interests of his own security.

Geert Wilders, who is head of the Freedom Party, flew into Heathrow airport this morning after winning a court battle to enter the country.

Mr Wilders had been due to host a press conference on College Green, opposite the Palace of Westminster, at noon.

However, about thirty male activists from a group called Islam for UK began chanting: “Wilders burn in hell” and “Sharia for UK”. Go to Times UK.

The influence of clergy over Iranian society is not limited to today’s Islamic Republic — far from it. For much of its history, Iranian society has faced the clergy and its influence in the formulation of social, economic and educational policies of the state. Iranians have historically fought corrupt rulers, the influence of clergy, and foreign intervention in their quest for social justice, equality and a better treatment by the ruling class — each time producing mixed results. Such a narrative can be found as far back as the Shahnameh, or the Book of Kings. Go to Tehran Bureau.

Yes, the dominos you see falling in the Muslim world today are the extremist Islamist groups and governments. They have failed to persuade people by either their arguments or their performances in power that their puritanical versions of Islam are the answer. Having lost the argument, though, the radicals still hang on thanks to gun barrels and oil barrels — and they can for a while. Go to NY Times.