FDD

Captured British Soldier on Iranian TV (ML)

I think the Iranians gravely miscalculated by making that female British soldier appear on TV dressed in a Shiite black headscarf and white robe to deliver an apology that was obviously dictated and almost certainly coerced. The British are going to go ballistic over this.

Anyone remember that video of Saddam visiting the western hostages in the run-up to Desert Storm?  Saddam made the bad mistake of sitting a British child on his knee; the child looked terrified, and the British public woke up the next morning ready for war.

Tehran Seizure

On March 23, fifteen British naval personnel were seized by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in the northern Persian Gulf. In a symposium today on National Review Online, FDD Senior Fellow Walid Phares explains why this incident has the potential for global military, political, and economic fallout:

The Iranian abduction of 15 British soldiers in the Shatt al Arab area was intended to trigger a regional crisis. Iran’s strategic objectives are clear: First, to precipitate a British action ending in a projected political disaster. Second, to get Britain out of Iraq, thus isolating the U.S. in the region. Coupled with U.S. domestic pressures, Iran intends this event to trigger a swift U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.

The looming economic sanctions, the capture of Iranian agents in Iraq, defections, and internal discontent with Ahmedinejad moved the mullahs make this bold move in their game of chess with the U.S., the U.K, and their regional allies; but it is only their latest move in the ongoing war they are waging.

In response, a multidimensional campaign should be launched, systematically yet gradually, instead of a single retaliation. Along with vigorous diplomatic pressures, the Coalition should formally condemn the regime and call for its isolation. It must create an unbalance of power with Iran via regional deployment while extending an emergency program of support to democracy forces within Iran, including a serious opposition broadcast.

Iran Starts Abandoning the Nonproliferation Treaty (ML)

Right on schedule, the Iranian government announced today that it will stop cooperating with the International Atomic Energy Agency on certain critical disclosure safeguards. On Sunday night, the Iranian government spokesman explained:

"After this illegal resolution was passed against Iran last night, it forced the government to act based on parliament's decision regarding the cooperation level with the agency and suspend parts of its activities with the agency," Elham told Iranian state television. 

"The government in a cabinet meeting today decided to suspend code 1-3 of minor arrangements of the safeguards." He was referring to the part of the International Atomic Energy Agency's code which specifies that countries should inform the agency of any new steps and decisions made in its nuclear programme.

He said Iran would only reconsider this decision if its nuclear case was returned to the IAEA from the UN Security Council where the file is now being handled. "This will continue until Iran's nuclear case is referred back to the IAEA from the UN Security Council," he said.

FDD Expert Reacts to British-Iranian Confrontation

Fifteen British sailors carrying out a routine inspection in the Persian Gulf were captured at gunpoint and taken into custody by Iranian naval vessels on Friday morning. Reacting to this incident, FDD Fellow Mario Loyola wrote on National Review Online that Iranian forces were likely “responding…to a carefully-planned provocation of our own”:

Recall the context: the Security Council route for dealing with Iran's nuclear program has clearly failed. The U.S. and its partners now have few options for responding to Iran's continued belligerence besides the current, fairly massive, naval and airpower buildup in the Gulf. Iran now has a western armada cruising just miles from its coasts, in waters well within its Economic Exploitation Zone — which means that U.S. Navy destroyers are probably waltzing around within Frisbee range of Iranian offshore drilling platforms. The gloves are coming off. And the risk-calculation here is as follows: If someone gets nervous and starts shooting, the timing would be more auspicious now for us than for the Iranians. Therefore, it only makes sense that American and British naval units operating in the Gulf would be in a more forward-leaning and aggressive posture than the Iranians.

Mario is a former consultant to the Defense Department who writes frequently on Iran and national security. His bio and recent writings are here.

British Forces Held by Iran Crisis (WP)

Walid Phares on Glenn Beck - Iranian naval vessels seized 15 British sailors and marines. Today March 23rd, 2007 [ LISTEN .mp3 ]

Middle East Memo

On March 19 the Egyptian parliament passed a set of constitutional amendments that were proposed by the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP), amidst strong protests from opposition parties which have described the changes as a major blow to Egyptian democracy.

The proposed amendments to 34 articles of the constitution were formally presented to the two houses of parliament by President Mubarak on December 26, 2006. These amendments have incited a heated debate in Egyptian political circles for the past three months, as they are viewed by many as a step that would significantly undermine the reform effort in Egypt.

Click here to continue reading "Egypt: Proposed Constitutional Changes and their Impact on Democracy," the first issue of the Middle East Memo, a new publication of the Center for Liberty in the Middle East. CLIME is a joint project of the European Foundation for Democracy and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Peter Pham Helps Launch New Blog

FDD Adjunct Fellow Peter Pham helped launch a new blog, "The Tank," hosted by National Review Online. It will concentrate on security policy, strategic debates, military hardware, and concerns related to the conflict in Iraq and the larger war on terrorism which might not otherwise be covered in general media.

Phares on the War of Ideas

FDD Senior Fellow Walid Phares discussed his book, Future Jihad, with Frontpage Magazine in an interview published yesterday.

Ana Belen Montes (RWC)

The former US Intelligence officer Ana Belen Montes, a long-time spy for Cuba now serving time in a federal prison for espionage against her native America, caused the death of a US Army Special Forces sergeant twenty years ago.

That news has just surfaced in a new book by Defense Intelligence Agency counter-spy Scott Carmichael. Ana Montes was arrested as a spy for Cuba six years ago.

Carmichael says that Montes, working the Cuban desk of the DIA itself, visited a secret US Special Forces Camp in El Salvador in 1987.

She turned detailed information about the camp over to her Cuban handlers almost immediately.  A few weeks later on March 31, 1987, pro-Castro guerillas from the Marxist group Farabundo Marti National Liberation attacked the camp in a precisely planned early morning assault.

US Army Sgt Greg Fronius, who won a Silver Star for his heroism that morning, died from wounds received in the attack.  The terrorists were guided by information that came directly from US intelligence officer Ana Montes at DIA.

The book is being published by the prestigious US Naval Institute Press. All of the proceeds are being given to Sgt. Fronius’ family.

The author, Carmichael, played a role in uncovering Montes as a spy, although the FBI was already aware that someone in DIA was leaking to the Cubans and were investigating.

Montes was arrested ten days after 9/11, the day before she would have been told about secret plans for the US military incursion against the Taliban in Afghanistan and was already under heavy FBI surveillance.  US authorities were fearful she would deliver the Afghan operations plans to the Cubans so they moved in and grabbed her.

Ana Belen Montes is serving a 25 year- long prison sentence.  Not long enough in the minds of some.

Phares on C-SPAN 2

On Saturday, March 17, C-SPAN 2 aired the pre-launch of FDD Senior Fellow Walid Phares' new book, The War of Ideas: Jihadism Against Democracy.

Andrew McCarthy Debates Domestic Surveillance

On April 18, Andrew C. McCarthy, director of FDD's Center for Law & Counterterrorism, will participate in an Oxford-style debate presented by Intelligence Squared (IQ2 US). Mr. McCarthy will join with best-selling author David Frum of the American Enterprise Institute and University of California Berkeley Law Professor John Yoo, an author and former high-ranking official in the Bush Justice Department, as proponents of the motion: "Better More Domestic Surveillance Than Another 9/11." 

Opposing the motion will be former U.S. Congressman Bob Barr, George Washington University Law Professor Jeffrey Rosen, an author and Legal Affairs Editor at The New Republic, and New York Law School Professor Nadine Strossen, the President of the American Civil Liberties Union. The debate will be moderated by Chris Bury, an Emmy Award-winning veteran correspondent of ABC News.

IQ2 US is an initiative of The Rosenkranz Foundation, based on the highly successful London debate program, Intelligence Squared. The debate will be held in New York City at the Asia Society and Museum (725 Park Avenue at 70th Street). There will be a cocktail reception at 6 p.m., with the debate beginning at 6:45 p.m. and concluding at 8:30 p.m. Details about the program are available on the IQ2 US website. 

That Rare Breed: The Senator (ML)

The nation's chatter nowadays seems unusually full of senators, but today a question came to me that I had never thought of before: What is a senator, and why do we listen to them so much?

In the largely-unexplored science of political ethology (here, Charlie Cook = Charles Darwin), the Senate is perhaps the weirdest niche in the political biosphere.  It is a niche perhaps best understood by observing, in their natural environment, the kinds of species it tends most powerfully to select.

The kind I enjoy watching most is the Levin-Schumer-Kerry-Biden species. Often trial lawyers in a former life, these senators are particularly adept at ex tempore indignation.  They always have a firm opinion on every subject--no matter how little they've thought about it. They depart from the premise that both their competence and morals are beyond questioning, while those in the executive branch most prove their credit on both accounts beyond a reasonable doubt -- this indeed is the essential dialectic of many Senate committee hearings. And the amazing thing is how consistently this species of Senator has been around. There may never have been a time in this nation's history when Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden did not exist.

Iran's Nuclear Program: Diplomacy Has Almost Run Its Course (ML)

Late yesterday, envoys of the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany (the "P5+1" — which has led the effort to halt Iran's nuclear breakout) reached agreement on the second sanctions resolution, which imposes a few additional sanctions. According to one report:

The new draft resolution gives Iran another 60 days to comply or face the threat of further sanctions...Under the package, all conventional weapons exports from Iran will be banned and the assets of more Iranian groups and companies will be frozen...The text also calls on countries to "exercise vigilance and restraint" on selling heavy weapons to Iran. The package discourages nations and international financial institutions from entering into new deals for grants, financial assistance and loans except "for humanitarian and developmental purposes". No mandatory travel embargo has been proposed for Iran's nuclear officials but governments are required to notify a council sanctions committee if any named people were passing through.

But China was hesitant over the draft deal saying the text should not go beyond the main objective. "The main objective is our concern about Iranian nuclear and missile activities," Wang Guangya, China's ambassador to the UN, said. "So there is no need to expand beyond that area." 

China worked to shorten the list of companies on the sanctions list, because its state-owned enterprises have so many transactions with so many of them.  And indeed, China is not wrong to object that it is being forced to pay a higher price than the United States in order to solve a problem that is of interest most of all to the United States.  The administration has downplayed this objection, taking the position that the Iran crisis represents a test of China's intentions and of the strategic relationship being forged between it and the United States. I have always disagreed with this position. As Churchill said, it is those states most directly concerned with a problem that can be expected to apply themselves vigorously to its solution. China is right. It is the U.N. Charter that is wrong, by forcing states to concern themselves with problems that are no concern of theirs, and limiting the options of the states which are the most worried to those approved by the states which are the least worried. 

At any rate, diplomatic options have now virtually run dry.  It is clear that the P5+1 have now gone as far as they are willing to go together in imposing sanctions. The great lesson in all this for the diplomatic option in future crises, has been not simply the non-surprising weakness of the Security Council, but the surprising strength of the U.S. Treasury Department, which in recent months has quietly and methodically enveloped Iran's demand for international finance in a hornet's nest of political risk.

The ball now is in Iran's court. In violation of its obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, Iran has started curtailing access to International Atomic Energy Agency inspections and threatens more if further sanctions are imposed. Worse, Iran has made it clear that it will reject all Security Council resolutions, thus declaring that it will not be bound by its obligations under the U.N. Charter. 

Fine. Then as to Iran, the United States will not be bound by its obligations under the U.N. Charter either, including the Charter prohibition on the use of force.

The "diplomatic option" (modern euphemism for a carrots-but-no-sticks approach) has almost run its course. It has succeeded only in emboldening the Iranians and making them more belligerent. The time for talking to them in a language that they will find more convincing, and that is more likely to gentle their disposition, is now approaching fast. 

Claudia Rosett on the U.N.

"In January, the U.N. swore in its eighth Secretary General, Ban-Ki Moon of South Korea. Mr. Ban takes the helm of an organization which has been roiled by conflict and criticized for peacekeeping failures and mismanagement,” writes ForaTV, a new online source of public affairs programming, in its weekly Think Tank feature.

“He has promised managerial reform, and a new spirit of cooperation with the major powers, but will it be enough to restore the reputation of the world's only forum for nations to constructively work out their differences and maintain international order? And with no power over the member states, is it possible for any U.N. Secretary to deliver true reform? Where does the U.N. go from here?”

ForaTV asked FDD’s Journalist-in-Residence Claudia Rosett whether the U.N. has lost its way. Her video response is available here.

For more information on Claudia’s work exposing the U.N. Oil-for-Food scandal, please click here.

Senator Lieberman's AIPAC Speech (CM)

A few sections to draw to your attention:

I continue to believe that a withdrawal from Iraq, as many are now urging, would be a victory for Iran and Al Qaeda and the cause of Islamist extremism, and a catastrophic defeat for the United States and all who desire peace and security and freedom in the Middle East and here at home.

I understand the anger about Iraq, but I am deeply troubled by how this anger, and the feelings of animosity that many people have for President Bush, have begun to affect the way we talk and think about what is happening in the world beyond Iraq and America's role in it.

There is something profoundly wrong when opposition to the war in Iraq seems to inspire greater passion than opposition to Islamist extremism.

There is something profoundly wrong when there is so much distrust of our intelligence community that some Americans doubt the plain and ominous facts about the threat to us posed by Iran.

And there is something profoundly wrong when, in the face of attacks by radical Islam, we think we can find safety and stability by pulling back, by talking to and accommodating our enemies, and abandoning our friends and allies.

Some of this wrong-headed thinking about the world is happening because we're in a political climate where, for many people, when George Bush says "yes," their reflex reaction is to say "no."

That is unacceptable.

It's time to step back and start thinking together about our national interest again, to say "yes" when we agree and "no" when we don't, and to find ways to disagree without dividing ourselves from one another.

It's time to step back and remember that there is a real enemy out there — an enemy violently opposed to human rights and women's rights and gay rights and the basic political rights of each one of us.

It's time to step back and see that America's interests lie with the interests of free people everywhere, and that the response to radical Islam is not to abandon them but to stand with them — whether they are in Baghdad or Teheran or Jerusalem.

The full speech is here.

The Problems at the FBI Are Overblown (AM)

For reasons previously noted, I'm not a big fan of National Security Letters. But, that said, media accounts of the DOJ Inspector General's report about problems with the FBI's use of NSL's have blown those problems way out of proportion. That's the conclusion of an analysis by Ron Kessler today at NewsMax. Kessler is worth heeding on this — he has followed the FBI for years and has not pulled punches in criticizing the Bureau when they've had it coming.

As Kessler points out, the IG stressed that the problems here are sloppy mistakes, not "abuses" — as the privacy obsessives in the press claim. There's no indication whatsoever that the Bureau has engaged in Big Brother tactics to spy on innocent Americans. 

What they've basically done is two-fold: they've accidentally transposed (or otherwise gotten wrong) phone numbers for which calling-activity records were sought (meaning they got the records for the wrong number), and they've accepted from overly cooperative NSL recipients information that went beyond what the NSL requested. 

As human error is not going to be eliminated any time soon, it should come as no surprise that either of these problems can — and frequently do — happen even when government pursues information by subpoena, the method preferred by critics (including me). Anyone who has ever dialed a wrong number should be able to understand that. Indeed, as Kessler notes, the Washington Post, in its breathless page-one story on the IG report, included a table which inadvertently stated that the IG had examined a total of 273 NSLs over a three-year period. The number was actually 293 (as the Post had correctly stated in its accompanying story). Don't hold your breath waiting for a page-one story on media errors.

The Bureau has made the sorts of mistakes here that make its usual defenders (like me) cringe. Without a malevolent bone in their bodies, agents failed to keep adequate records of what they'd initially asked for and failed to go carefully through what was disclosed to them to make sure it was limited to what they really needed.  hese are dumb mistakes. They happen too often, but they are not sinister. And to its credit, the FBI did its own internal review, found and forthrightly reported 26 other errors that the IG had not uncovered, and put in place an improved training and record-keeping regime to avoid a recurrence of these problems.

So let's get a grip. The errors are worthy of being criticized. But the suggestion that Director Mueller or AG Gonzales should be made to walk the plank over this controversy is absurd.

Time Out for Iran? (CM)

According to an AFP dispatch:

Russia warned Iran Monday to expect delays in launching the country's first atomic power station, adding to mounting pressure on Tehran to compromise with the international community over its controversial nuclear programme.

Amid signs of frustration in Moscow over Iran's combative stance, state contractor Atomstroiexport announced that Iranian financial problems mean a probable set-back in completing the power station at Bushehr in southern Iran.  …

Russian engineers are close to finishing Bushehr, jewel in the crown of Iran's nuclear programme, but have repeatedly postponed delivery of atomic fuel and the start-up of the reactor.  …

Under the latest timetable, fuel had been expected this month, with the reactor launch in September. ...

The three main Russian news agencies quoted an unnamed source close to the authorities accusing Iran of "abusing our constructive relations."

"We absolutely do not need Iran getting a nuclear bomb or the potential to make one," the "informed source" was quoted as saying. "We will not play any kind of anti-American games with them."

Let me add this: If the U.S. has skillful diplomats on the payroll, now is the time to send them into the game. The focus should be on Russia: Whatever Putin’s faults (and they are many and they are serious) surely he can be made to see that Russia’s future should not be as the junior, infidel partner to an aggressive, expansionist, radical Islamist, nuclear-armed Iran.

And Europeans need to be persuaded that if they want to prevent America and/or Israel from resorting to military measures against Iran later, the best thing they can do is ratchet up sanctions on Iran now, rather than take the view -- reminiscent of Chamberlain at Munich -- that a nuclear jihad would be no problem for them. Could Iran go nuclear without Russian aid? Yes, almost certainly. But anything that can be done to slow their progress toward the end zone is useful.

Walid Phares Speaks at AIPAC Policy Conference

At a policy briefing at the annual AIPAC conference on Sunday, March 11, FDD Senior Fellow Walid Phares discussed the "Battle Over Beirut: What the Struggle in Lebanon Means for the Future of the Middle East."

This year’s AIPAC Policy Conference will be the largest ever, with more than 6,000 people participating and 5,500 going to Capitol Hill on the final day of the conference to lobby Congress in support of the U.S.-Israel relationship.

Terrorist P.R. (CM)

Debra Burlinghame on a detailed, well-funded legal-cum-public relations strategy that:

sought to accomplish two things: put a sympathetic "human face" on the detainees and convince the public that it had a stake in their plight. In other words, the militant Islamists who traveled to Afghanistan to become a part of al Qaeda's jihad on America had to be reinvented as innocent charity workers swept up in the war after 9/11. The committed Islamist who admitted firing an AK-47 in a Taliban training camp became a "teacher on vacation" who went to Afghanistan in 2001 "to help refugees." The member of an Islamist street gang who opened three al-Wafa offices with Suliman Abu Ghaith (Osama Bin Laden's chief spokesman) to raise al Qaeda funds became a charity worker whose eight children were left destitute in his absence. All 12 Kuwaitis became the innocent victims of "bounty hunters." …

[A] year and a half after they began the campaign, their PR outreach produced literally thousands of news placements and that, eventually, a majority of the top 100 newspapers were editorializing on the detainees' behalf. …

The Kuwaiti 12 case is a primer on the anatomy of a guerilla PR offensive, packaged and sold to the public as a fight for the "rule of law" and "America's core principles." Begin with flimsy information, generate stories that are spun from uncorroborated double or triple hearsay uttered by interested parties that are hard to confirm from halfway around the world. Feed the phonied-up stories to friendly media who write credulous reports and emotional human interest features, post them on a Web site where they will then be read and used as sources by other lazy (or busy) media from all over the world. In short, create one giant echo chamber

Much more here. (FYI, Debra Burlingame is a former attorney and a director of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation. She is the sister of Charles F. "Chic" Burlingame III, the pilot of American Airlines flight 77, which was crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.)

Phares on the Iranian Defector

FDD Senior Fellow Walid Phares told The New York Post that Iranian defector General Ali Reza Asghari would be able to provide intimate details about Iran's role in backing terror groups like Hezbollah, as well as provide some fresh details about Iran's nuclear program.

"It's not a surprise that they are concerned. My contacts tell me the Iranian regime would regard his defection as a very big intelligence loss," Phares said. Read More.

Moderate Muslims Speak Out (LH)

Released by the delegates to the Secular Islam Summit, St. Petersburg, Florida on March 5, 2007:

We are secular Muslims, and secular persons of Muslim societies. We are believers, doubters, and unbelievers, brought together by a great struggle, not between the West and Islam, but between the free and the unfree.

We affirm the inviolable freedom of the individual conscience. We believe in the equality of all human persons.

We insist upon the separation of religion from state and the observance of universal human rights.

We find traditions of liberty, rationality, and tolerance in the rich histories of pre-Islamic and Islamic societies. These values do not belong to the West or the East; they are the common moral heritage of humankind.

We see no colonialism, racism, or so-called "Islamaphobia" in submitting Islamic practices to criticism or condemnation when they violate human reason or rights.

Ralph Peters on the Saudis

Ralph Peters writing in today's New York Post:

When picking allies in the Middle East, we've been on the wrong side of history for over a half-century. And now the Saudis are waging a propaganda campaign to convince American opinion-makers that they're our best pals in the whole, wide world.

It works. An honorable elder statesman I respect recently got suckered during a junket to Saudi Arabia. He left Riyadh convinced he'd been sitting down with our indispensable allies.

Well, the view I've seen with my own eyes — in dozens of Muslim and mixed-faith countries — is of Saudi money spent lavishly to divide struggling societies, to block social and educational progress for Muslims and to preach deadly hatred toward the West. Read More.

Lantos on Iran

Rep. Tom Lantos, chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, on Tuesday proposed new legislation that would sanction oil companies and countries that strike deals with Iran:

Iran’s theocracy must understand that it cannot pursue a nuclear weapons program without sacrificing the political and economic future of the Iranian people.

That is why this week I am introducing the Iran Counter-Proliferation Act of 2007. The objective of my legislation is two-fold: To prevent Iran from securing nuclear arms and the means to produce them. And to ensure that we achieve this goal in a peaceful manner.

My legislation will increase exponentially the economic pressure on Iran, and empower our diplomatic efforts by strengthening the Iran Sanctions Act. It will put an end to the Administration’s ability to waive sanctions against foreign companies that invest in Iran’s energy industry.

Until now, abusing its waiver authority and other flexibility in the law, the Executive Branch has never sanctioned any foreign oil company which invested in Iran. Those halcyon days for the oil industry are over.

FDD's Richard Carlson Presses Congress to Reverse Foreign Broadcasting Cuts

FDD Vice Chairman Ambassador Richard Carlson and ten former directors of the Voice of America have issued a joint statement calling on Congress to reverse a Bush administration plan to substantially reduce VOA's English broadcasts and those in 15 other languages

Foreign Broadcasting (RWC)

I’ve been moaning and groaning over the cuts in foreign broadcasting from the US lately. 

Radio from abroad is listened to by tens of millions people in this world.  Those signals, and the ideas in them, fly right over the heads of government leaders in authoritarian societies and they can have an enormously positive effect.

It was broadcasting from the Voice of America and from Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty that helped bring an end to the cruel tyranny that held the people of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in its iron grip for a half-century.

I used to run the Voice of America.

I was its director during the last six years of the Cold War.

I’ve signed an open letter to Congress, along with a half-dozen other former VOA  directors-general

We have asked for a reversal of planned reductions in the VOA that could silence America’s largest overseas network in many regions of the world. 

The proposed budget cuts constitute a serious threat to our national security.

The Bush administration has proposed to eliminate VOA English transmissions to every continent except Africa.

They plan to abolish services in Cantonese, Croatian, Georgian, Greek, Thai and Uzbek. 

They plan to cease radio broadcasts in Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian, Albanian, Bosnian, Macedonian, and Hindi (to India), and significantly scale back programming in Tibetan and Portuguese to Africa.

Notes & Comments

DISPATCHES FROM LEBANON: FDD Fellow Mario Loyola reports from Lebanon:

Hezbollah's many civic activities are taken in the West as evidence of Hezbollah's humanitarian side. But the recent stoning of a French medical team reveals Hezbollah's civic side for what it is: the erection of an alternative state -- one that wants to create exclusive dependence among its supporters, and whose supreme political leader is not Lebanese but rather the Iranian religious leader Ali Khamenei.

Continue reading this week's Notes & Comments.

Muslims against Jihad? (WP)

A peculiar conference, taking place on the West coast of Florida drew the attention of many observers of the War of ideas: The first Secular Islam Summit. Organized by the Center for Inquiry Transnational and activists, the meeting included two dozens of speakers and about two hundred participants from various backgrounds and nationalities. It took place at the Hilton of St Petersburg, just before and in conjunction with the Intelligence Summit taking place in the same location. But this meeting, unlike many other Muslim intellectual conferences in the West or even worldwide was aimed against Jihadism and for a secular and liberal expression within Islam. It wasn’t the first time Muslim authors and critics of the dominant religious and cultural order within their own community, spoke out, wrote about or debated the issues. The History of dissidence within the Muslim world, particularly in modern time is rich and diverse. It is also full of drama and violence, particularly against the dissidents themselves.

FDD Expert Reporting from Lebanon

FDD Visiting Fellow Mario Loyola is in Lebanon to report on the pro-democracy movement, Hezbollah and Iran’s ambitions, and the current political crisis. He issued his first dispatch from Beirut yesterday on National Review Online.

The article explains how Hezbollah and its allies have crippled the central government for weeks. Hezbollah’s campaign of disobedience, Loyola argues, reflects its ambitious goal: the establishment of “an alternative state — one that wants to create exclusive dependence among its supporters, and whose supreme political leader is not Lebanese but rather the Iranian religious leader Ali Khamenei.”

U.S. Diplomacy

FDD's Claudia Rosett explains how U.S. diplomacy is changing -- for the worst:

It would be wonderful to feel warm and happy about the diplomacy now breaking out all over. Five years ago America was confronting the axis of evil. Today we are offering access to envoys. After years in the cold, North Korea's Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan is on his way to New York for talks involving U.S. promises of aid and diplomatic normalization if Pyongyang just stops making nuclear bombs.

Later this month, at a "neighbors" conference convened by Iraq, America plans to sit down with Syria and Iran, whose leaders, in the grand tradition of Tony Soprano, are sending delegates to ponder ways of "stabilizing" the region they have been destabilizing with terrorist networks and bombs.

From global superpower and world cop, America is now recasting itself as feel-good therapist for rogue regimes -- seeking to know what's really on the mind of Kim Jong Il, and ready to break bread with the ayatollahs. It all sounds so civilized.

FOX News Documentary

FOX News will air Radical Islam: Terror in Its Own Words again this Saturday at 4 PM. FDD's Walid Phares is featured prominently.

Resolution 1701 (ML)

The U.N. Secretary-General's special envoy to Lebanon for implementation of Security Council Resolution 1701 announced today, after meeting (for the third time) with Hezbollah representatives, "We are pleased with the commitment of Hezbollah to Resolution 1701.  Pop quiz: Who or what is "we" in that sentence? 

Clifford May: "Hollywood Shuffle"

How curious that at the Academy Awards ceremony last weekend not a word was said about the terrorist movements dedicated to the destruction of the West.

Hollywood stars and moguls don't appear to fully grasp that such groups as al-Qaeda and such regimes as that ruling Iran not only hate Republicans, evangelicals and Richard Perle. They also hope to suppress artistic freedom, impose second-class status on women, and stone to death those with unconventional sexual orientations.

Continue reading Clifford May's Scripps Howard column, "Hollywood Shuffle."