Notes and Comments (CM)

WAS THERE A MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE? Here's a question about the nuclear facility that North Korea had hoped to build for Syria: Who was picking up the check? Syria is not a wealthy country. North Korea is not ruled by a generous dictator. Iran, however, does have oil money gushing and Syria is, of course, Iran's client. I'd wager that Iran paid North Korea to build the facility for Syria.

More on the Syrian nuclear controversy here, here, here, here and here.

CONFUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH: The AP reports:

 

'Jihadist' booted from government lexicon

Washington - Don't call them jihadists any more.

And don't call al-Qaida a movement.

The Bush administration has launched a new front in the war on terrorism, this time targeting language.

Federal agencies, including the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the National Counter Terrorism Center, are telling their people not to describe Islamic extremists as "jihadists" or "mujahedeen," according to documents obtained by The Associated Press. Lingo like "Islamo-fascism" is out, too.

The reason: Such words may actually boost support for radicals among Arab and Muslim audiences by giving them a veneer of religious credibility or by causing offense to moderates.

Andy McCarthy notes:

According to the State Department, the Intelligence Community, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the sundry other components of government that are having our agents endure sensitivity training from CAIR and its ilk, the "real" jihad has nothing to do with violence. The real jihad is the internal struggle to become a better person, right? Regardless of what such minor authorities as Mohammed may have thought of it, and despite credible scholars who acknowledge that jihad was ordained as a forcible, military struggle to establish the supremacy of Islam, we very sophisticated, evolved geniuses now know that jihad is really something we should all look at as a very wholesome, positive obligation. Nothing to worry about.

More also here on the Counterterrorism blog.

Andy adds:

 

As elements of the Bush administration continue their jihad against any discussion of jihadism (i.e. - as I outline in Willful Blindness - the ideology that fuels radical Islam's war against the United States and the West), the State Department is reportedly funding the soft jihad being practiced by faux "moderate" Muslim groups. See this from Belia Rabinowitz and William Mayer of PipeLineNews.com:

A grant made by the U.S. Dept. of State to the Islamic Society of North America [ISNA] ... and the left wing National Peace Foundation is being used to fund Islamic da'wa via a spurious "citizen exchange" program.

The grant is confirmed on ISNA's website, here.

What is State buying with your money? Well, Islamic da'wa, you may be interested to know, is the "call to Allah" - the summons to Islam. ISNA, as Rabinowitz and Mayer elaborate, is "an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood and named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the ongoing Holy Land Foundation terror funding prosecution," principally involving the Hamas jihadist terror organization. The Muslim Brotherhood is the ideological engine of modern jihadism, and though it purports to have abandoned violence in favor of other means of persuasion that we should all be governed by Sharia, its mission statement remains: "Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Qur'an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope."

Wonderful!

Mindful that their warriors are being defeated on the ground in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, the Islamists continue to transition from violent to a stealth jihad mode, confident that they will triumph by following the Muslim Brotherhood's plan to use the West's freedoms to subvert it from within...

More here.

But at least we can count on the media to use language with precision, right? Wrong, dromedary breath. James Taranto observes:

 

A New York Times story on Gen. David Petraeus's proposed promotion to head of Central Command contains this linguistic howler:

 

[Defense Secretary Robert] Gates said he and President Bush settled on General Petraeus for the post because his counterinsurgency experience in Iraq made him best suited to oversee American operations across a region where the United States is engaged in "asymmetric" warfare, a euphemism for battling militants and nonuniformed combatants.

The Times editors apparently can't tell the difference between jargon (technical language) and euphemism (using an inoffensive term to refer to something disagreeable). Here's an example:

- Plain English: He died.

- Jargon: His metabolic functions ceased.

- Euphemism: He went to a better place.

"Asymmetric warfare" is jargon. How funny that the Times misidentifies it as euphemism in the very same sentence in which it employs its own euphemism for the enemy - i.e., "militants and nonuniformed combatants" instead of terrorists.

DEFINING VICTORY: In Iraq, Fred Kagan writes, success will not be difficult to recognize. It will have been achieved

 

when Iraq is a stable, representative state that controls its own territory, is oriented toward the West, and is an ally in the struggle against militant Islamism, whether Sunni or Shia. This has been said over and over. Why won't war critics hear it? Is it because they reject the notion that such success is achievable and therefore see the definition as dishonest or delusional? Is it because George Bush has used versions of it and thus discredited it in the eyes of those who hate him? Or is it because it does not offer easily verifiable benchmarks to tell us whether or not we are succeeding? There could be other reasons - perhaps critics fear that even thinking about success or failure in Iraq will weaken their demand for an immediate "end to the war."

Note also this key point:

 

[T]here is no state in the world that is more committed than Iraq to defeating al Qaeda. None has mobilized more troops to fight al Qaeda or suffered more civilian casualties at the hands of al Qaeda--or, for that matter, taken more police and military casualties. Iraq is already America's best ally in the struggle against al Qaeda. Moreover, the recent decision of Iraq's government to go after illegal, Iranian-backed Shia militias and terror groups shows that even a Shia government in Baghdad can be a good partner in the struggle against Shia extremism as well.

And he offers this challenge:

 

Let those who claim that the current strategy has failed and must be replaced lay out their own strategy, along with their definition of success, criteria for evaluating success, and the evidentiary basis for their evaluations. Then, perhaps, we can have a real national debate on this most important issue.

Much more here.

WINNING HEARTS AND MINDS? Al-Qaeda's plans in Iraq include poisoning "Iraq's water supply with nitric acid to spread disease and death." More here.

PETRAEUS, IRAQ AND IRAN: Jeffrey Bell writes that the promotion of Gen. David Petraeus to head of Central Command

 

should also prove far from reassuring to Iran. At first glance President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Revolutionary Guard will no doubt welcome Petraeus's departure from Iraq before he has a chance to finish off their Sadrist clients as he did the Sunni jihadists to the north. But they are aware that General Odierno will be no walk in the park. And the transition from the previous head of Central Command--the buffoonish, publicity-hungry Admiral William "Fox" Fallon, with his semi-public vows to let Bush invade Iran only over his dead body--to General Petraeus, the one man Fallon publicly and privately disdained nearly as much as he did his commander in chief, is likely to be more than a little disconcerting to Tehran. ...

Iran and its drive to acquire nuclear weapons is the central challenge of American foreign policy, whoever becomes the next president. But the days, no doubt highly satisfying to Tehran, when Central Command saw its mission as threatening to sabotage any conceivable presidential coercion of Iran will most decidedly be over. And all this is without calculating the reaction of Ahmadinejad, the Revolutionary Guard, and Ayatollah Khamenei to the possibility of Petraeus-inflicted woe on the jihadists in Afghanistan, to Iran's east, comparable to that recently experienced in Iraq, to their west.

More here.

IRAQ FALLOUT: Peter Wehner observes that

 

since the Iraq war began, we have seen much of the Arab and Muslim world turn sharply against bin Ladenism. The "Anbar Awakening" seems to be spreading not only to the rest of Iraq but to the wider Muslim world. This is in part the result of the savagery of jihadists and in part the result of the U.S. military having dealt punishing blows to AQI and other terrorist cells.

It's fashionable to argue that everything is going poorly in the war against jihadism. In fact, the deeper currents seem to be running in our favor. If, five years ago, you had said that close to the end of this decade a large and growing number of Muslims in the Middle East and elsewhere would be rejecting Islamic extremism, most people would have considered that enormous and heartening progress. And most people would have been right.

More here.

THAT DIDN'T TAKE LONG: Washington Times headline last week:

"Hamas rebuts Carter's claim of concession."

It turns out that while Hamas is prepared to take over any territory that Israel will give up, it is not prepared to accept Israel's right to exist - within any borders or under any circumstances.

So Carter's announcement yesterday that he had made a significant breakthrough during his visit with Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Syria reflects either dishonesty or ignorance. This has been Carter's pattern for many years, as I noted in this recent column.

In the end, Carter has conveyed legitimacy not just upon a terrorist but also upon the practice of terrorism. He has received nothing of benefit in exchange (unless you count the media attention lavished on him and the warm smiles of the Islamist donors to his Carter Center).

What's the dictionary definition of "useful idiot"?

Bernard-Henri Levy writes that Carter "has demonstrated an unusual capacity to transform political error into moral mistake." More here.

IS THIS REALLY IN QUESTION? Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman, called Carter an "enemy of Israel." (The United States government registered an official protest in response.)

MAYBE HE SHOULD HAVE SAID THIS INSTEAD: The Manchester (NH) Union Leader had the toughest headline for my most recent column on the former president: "Jimmy Carter appeases anti-Semitic killers." It's here.

Michael Rubin notes how the Iranian press used Carter's words to score propaganda points:

 

Former US President Jimmy Carter called the blockade of Gaza a crime and an atrocity on Thursday and said US attempts to undermine Hamas had been counterproductive.

Speaking at the American University in Cairo after talks with Hamas leaders , Carter said Palestinians in Gaza were being "starved to death" and received fewer calories a day than people in the poorest parts of Africa receive.

"It's an atrocity what is being perpetrated as punishment on the people in Gaza. It's a crime... I think it is an abomination that this continues to go on," Carter said.

More here.

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES: Tom Gross notices that:

 

A page managed by Hatem El-Hady, a fundraiser for the Palestinian terror group Hamas, was suddenly removed from the Obama campaign's official website yesterday after it was highlighted by Charles Johnson's Little Green Footballs website.

El-Hady is the former chairman of an Islamic "charity" closed by the U.S. government in 2006 for terrorist fundraising.

As recently as yesterday lunchtime, one of the three "friends" listed by El-Hady on the site was Barack Obama's wife, Michelle.

More here.

- Cliff May

Comments

[davod]

I hope our intelligence services are scouring the planet for other locations of North Koreas industriousness