Srdja Trifkovic

Trifkovic – Immigrant Invasion: Der Untergang Des Abendlandes

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Source: Chronicles of Culture

By:Srdja Trifkovic | November 13, 2015

Over 8,000 migrants entered Serbia on November 11 on their way from the Middle East to Western Europe. The item went unreported by the major media because it was not newsworthy. Daily totals may vary, not much, as the Great Invasion of 2015 continues unabated.

Millions are on the move, with unknown further multitudes tempted to follow suit. They will do so because Europe, rich and decadent, irresistibly tempts them. In all creation disease and frailty invite predators, as witnessed in the scene of Madame Hortense’s death in Zorba the Greek. Both the loss of the will to define and defend one’s native land and culture, and the loss of the desire to procreate, send an alluring signal to the teeming kazbahs and sukhs: Come, ye all, there’s money for nothin’ and chicks for free. Come, for no Western nation has the guts to shed blood—alien or its own—to keep you out in the name of its own survival. According to the leading German daily Die Welt (October 14), “Merkel’s call of welcome echoes even in West-Africa. The German welcome-culture appeals in Mali even to those who did not want to leave until now. TV pictures of nice people with welcome presents lure migrants. German visas can be bought.”

Spengler famously heralded The Decline of the West ninety years ago…It now appears that the protracted fall is over, and the stage is set for a series of quick, brutal catastrophes.

Spengler famously heralded The Decline of the West ninety years ago, but the English title of his magnum opus did not convey the dark, tragic implications of the word Untergang, “going under.” Spengler himself did not anticipate a cataclysmic event but rather an extended decline, a twilight. (Abendland, the West, literally means the “evening land.”) It now appears that the protracted fall is over, and the stage is set for a series of quick, brutal catastrophes.

The German media are by now positively blasé about the numbers. According to the leading weekly magazine Der Spiegel, “Between September 5th and October 15th 409,000 new migrants reached Germany, 10,000 every day.” Ten thousand a day equals three and a half million a year. Incidentally, the number of migrants the European Union expects to arrive next year is three million. Die Presse, one of Germany’s leading news magazines, noted on November 5 that “the experts in Brussels say that until 2017 the influx of refugees into the EU will not abate.”

This is an eminently Muslim invasion. As the Tagesspiegel wrote on August 27, “at least 80 percent of immigrants are Muslims . . . Some mosque communities have doubled within a month.” The information came from a reliable source, Germany’s Central Muslim Council. The Western media, in their fits of the pornography of compassion, dwell on the suffering—alleged or real—of women and children “refugees,” but there are not many of them to be found in the migrant onslaught. According to the respected Austrian daily Die Presse (October 3), “Eighty percent of the refugees are young men under thirty.” It is estimated that a further ten percent are men in other age groups. They are pushy, arrogant, and often aggressive if if their demands for passage and amenities are not obliged promptly enough. In Hamburg they were furious about being temporarily accommodat in a warehouse because there were no more vacant apartments in the city. “We were shocked when we arrived here,” said Syrian refugee Awad Arbaakeat.?

Nobody knows who is coming into Germany and other European countries. “About one half of the refugees don’t get registered,” the respected Focus magazine reported on November 3 (“The great registration chaos”). “Numbers or even estimates about the number of refugees staying in Germany without registration are not available to us,” Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) told the magazine. “It’s simply impossible to register everyone at the border.” Other news sources report that 73 percent of invading aliens don’t have any papers at all: “We are all Syrians now, thanks to the new forged papers – Africans, Albanians, Kosovars, and Chechens,” says one. “A Syrian passport is the best document to open the door to Europe right now.”

The situation in the majority-Muslim ghettos all over the EU had been dire even before the ongoing onslaught. It is now rapidly becoming unmanageable. “Police warn of no-go-areas in Germany,” was Der Spiegel’s headline on July 25. The ability of the police to uphold public order in certain localities “is uncertain in the long term” and ‘in serious danger,” president of the German Police Union Rainer Wendt told the magazine. “In Berlin or in northern Duisburg there are neighborhoods where colleagues hardly dare to stop a car, because they know that they will be promptly surrounded by 40 or 50 men.”

The immigrants’ propensity to criminality is supposed to be a secret, however. That organ of Germany’s bourgeois establishment, the FAZ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung), on November 13 quoted Germany’s chief of criminal police Ulf Küch as saying: “In this country nobody likes to talk about the criminal behavior of the refugees.” At the same time, police in Germany are known to have asked newspapers not to report about the problems police are having with the refugees.” The Press Council of Austria has decided that the identity of foreign criminals should be concealed in media reports: “People of same origin could feel hurt and discriminated. The First Senate of the Press Council therefore urges more restraint and sensitivity“?

Thousands of refugees have disappeared from their German and Austrian camps without trace, but “local authorities point out they have no authority to make the people stay.” They can communicate, however: mobile provider Yourfone donated 50.000 German SIM cards to “refugees”—but without verifying their identity, as the German law mandates.

The response of the establishment is clear: “Europe has to take migrants and to relinquish sovereignty.”

The response of the establishment is clear: “Europe has to take migrants and to relinquish sovereignty.” (Die Welt, November 3). According to the vicechairman of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) Thorsten Schäfer-Gümbel, “we must not give right-wing extremist criminals in the leadership of Pegida [an anti-immigrant movement] a single millimeter of room. The hatred from Pegida lays the ground for packs of thugs that assault refugees or set fire to their camps.” And Roman Catholic Bishop Franz-Josef Overbeck, comparing the transit campt for the migrants to the Nazi concentration camps, asked the nation to be “more welcoming.”

Once upon a time the West and the Muslim world could clearly define themselves vis-à-vis each other in a cultural and political sense. What postmodernity and secularism have done, since replacing Christianity as the guiding light of the West, is to cast aside any idea of “our land,” of a space that is European (or indeed American) in the ethnic, geographic, and cultural sense, a space that has an external boundary and that should be protected from all those who covet it but to whom it does not belong by birthright.

That same problem faces us even more starkly today, as the West faces two clear alternatives: determined defense or eventual submission and—as V.S. Naipaul eloquently put it – our acceptance of sacred Arab places and culture as “our own.” And what will Europe get in return for giving up all that she has? “What kind of art can there be, when human beings cannot be represented? What kind of philosophy, where thinkers must accept the crudest fatalism as the revealed word or an absolute first principle?” And Europe stands to lose everything that makes civilized life worth living, from the Magna Carta to the prosciutto, from the grand opera to the grand cru, from St. Peter’s in Rome to St. Paul’s in London . . .

The monsters in Berlin, Brussels, Paris, Rome, Stockholm and everywhere else who are allowing this abomination to happen, and their gauleiters in the media, are guilty of the greatest betrayal in human history. What they are doing is evil beyond words and beyond endurance. They will suffer the consequences in the fulness of time, of course, because the invaders will not feel any debt of gratitude; but by then it will be too late for the finest civilization the world has ever known.

Srdja Trifkovic: 9-11, Ten Years Later: Islam’s Unmitigated Success

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Srdja Trifkovic

From the article:

What can save us? A miracle! Or else, as I said eight years ago at the JRC meeting in New Orleans, what can save us is a precipitous, drastic economic crisis that would remove all legitimacy from the ruling elite and end any credibility it may have in managing the crisis. For the time being people are still looking to governments for solutions, rather than perceiving them as part of the problem.

What can help save us is the fact that the Muslims are not capable of thinking creatively and establishing harmonious and prosperous polities. If there is a belated recovery of the West in the wake of a global economic meltdown, and if the Muslim world is subsequently left to its own devices, the end-result will be the rediscovery of meaning and faith in the West—and yet another round of decline into moral depravity, intellectual decrepitude and material poverty in the Muslim world.

Source: Chronicles of Culture | Srdja Trifkovic

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I thought that the Muslims had made a big blunder. At first I believed that they had scored an auto-goal: this was the sort of thing that would shake up the Western world, wake it up to the fact that the Islamic demographic deluge—a process that had been in full swing for some two decades prior to 2001—would now be subjected to some long-overdue critical scrutiny to which the politicians would have to respond. I hoped that the end-result might be the kind of formative, life-altering awakening that, particularly in the case of Western Europe, would prevent our further slide into self-destruction.

This pretty illusion lasted for about 48 hours. It disappeared as soon as I saw President George W. Bush go into the mosque in Washington D.C. later that same week, dutifully taking off his shoes before declaring that Islam was the religion of peace and tolerance, that the perpetrators of 9-11 did not really understand Islam and were distorting the message of the Prophet. When in addition I saw identically intoned editorials in Le Monde, The Guardian, Corriere della Sera, The Independent, or the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, it became clear to me that the Western elite class was behaving in 2001 exactly the way it did in 1937 and in 1981.

Why those particular years? Well, in 1937 the Moscow Trials were at their height. The trials of Comrades Kamenev, Zinoviev and others were followed by those of Marshal Tukhachevsky and a host of other Red Army officers. They were some of the most egregious misuses of the quasi-judicial process ever used in history. And yet, just as the Gulag machine was switching into high gear, the apologia of Stalin in the Western world was reaching a hysterical pitch. If you read Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon,” or—at the opposite end of the moral divide—Walter Duranty’s New York Times dispatches from Moscow, you’ll know what I am talking about. The lies, the inability or unwillingness to tell the truth about what was going on in Moscow in 1937 was a sure sign of a strange phenomenon: The more murderous, the more outrageously antihuman Communist behavior became, the more determined the Western elite class was to come to its defense, as subsequently witnessed by Mao, Tito, Che and Ho.

Fast-forward to 1981, when the AIDS epidemic was officially recognized as such. Its direct link with promiscuous homosexuality was soon established and remains undeniable. Lo and behold, that same instant the grandsons and granddaughters of Walter Duranty & Co. suddenly discovered that the Gay Lifestyle is one of the most valuable contributions to our multicultural civilization, worthy of praise and emulation. Any attempt to link that particular “lifestyle” and its idiosyncrasies—such as hundreds of partners, randomly encountered—with the grim harvest of death was banned. Contrary to evidence it was asserted that AIDS could happen to all of us at any moment. It became a metaphysical evil unconnected to any particular form of human behavior, just like “terrorism” was to become two decades later.

The aftermath of 9-11 proves that the spirit of celebrating death and depravity is alive and well all over the Western world. The events of that day triggered off an immediate and massive wave of officially sanctioned Islamophilia, akin to the elite class Sovietophilia at the height of the Purges and sodomophilia amidst the AIDS epidemic. It soon transpired that, far from committing a blunder, the Muslims scored an incredible coup on 9-11. They effectively tested the limits of “tolerance” of the Western elite class at an entirely new order of magnitude—and they found out that there are no limits! It became obvious to the Muslims that the more outrageous you are in your stated intentions—and nobody has been more frank in this respect than the founder of Islam, both in his alleged revelations and in the Hadith—the more determined your Western fellow travelers will be to assure their subjects that Muslim intentions are not like that at all.

The geopolitical harvest for the Jihadists has been rich and rewarding. The biggest prize of them all was Turkey. Not only was it the most populous of the ostensibly secularized Muslim societies but it was also once ruled by radical reformers most determined to break with the Islamic mindset and tradition and to turn Turkey into a modern European nation-state.

Already in the early 1990’s the late Turgut Ozal, first as prime minister and later as president, tried to reverse that legacy. He laid the foundation for the success in that endeavor by the AKP, the Justice and Development Party, over the past decade. The AKP came to power in February 2002 and for the past nine years Prime Minister Erdogan has pulled off a succession of coups. The first among them was his decision in early 2003 not to support the United States in the war against Iraq, not to allow the passage of U.S. troops across eastern Turkey to open the Western front, and yet to be praised and celebrated as the “essential partner” by then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz during his subsequent visit to Ankara. The key AKP objective was to change the constitution and to neutralize the Turkish army as the legally sanctioned guardian of secularism, which they did in a stage-managed referendum exactly a year ago. And yet the masterminds of the project were congratulated for this giant step towards full democracy by President Obama and the European Union. In recent months the AKP regime imprisoned some two hundred senior-ranking Turkish military officers, both active-duty and retired, as part of the Operation Sledgehammer—a monstrosity on par with Stalin’s 1937 Moscow Trials which remains virtually unreported in the Western media.

The significance of Turkey’s metamorphosis from Kemalism to post-Kemalism to anti-Kemalism cannot be overstated. Turkey is now a regional power in its own right and it is pursuing a neo-Ottoman strategy with three main thrusts. One is in the Balkans, one is in the former Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus, and one is in the Arab Middle East. In all three of those regions Turkey is now conducting a fully autonomous policy. That policy is effectively helping each and every local Jihadist movement, such as the Bosnian-Herzegovinian SDA (the Party of Democratic Action) which is now headed by Bakir Izetegovic, son of the late author of the notorious Islamic Declaration, Alija Izetbegovic. Turkey is fully supportive of the radical religious leader of Bosnia’s two million Muslims, Mustafa Ceric, and his counterparts in the Sanjak region of southwestern Serbia and in Kosovo. Turkey, rather than Saudi Arabia, is sponsoring the Islamic revival of the Pomak community in Bulgaria.

In the Middle East the Turks have gained popularity in the Arab Street by systematically and openly destroying their previously close relations with Israel. They did so without so much as a peep of protest from the United States, which indicates the limits of what the friends of Israel inside the Beltway can do. They are notably ineffective when it comes to criticizing this “essential bridge between the East and the West,” the tail is wagging the dog. And vis-à-vis the former Soviet Central Asia the Turks are pulling wool over Moscow’s eyes by pretending that they are the moderate barrier to the extremist Wahhabist influence emanating from the Arab world. At the same time the Turks have established a special relationship with Azerbaijan, Turkmenia, Kazakhstan etc.

The exceptionally capable team of Prime Minister Erdogan, President Gul and Foreign Minister Davutoglu has brought this process of Turkey’s re-Islamization to the point of no return. It is no longer possible for the army to contemplate a coup, let alone to carry it out. The middle class Westernized Turks who were the backbone of the Kemalist order, feel like the Jews of Berlin in the last days of the Weimar Republic (as an American journalist living in Turkey put it to me in Istanbul last January). They see the writing on the wall but they are hypnotized by fear and can do nothing to affect the outcome.

The second richest jewel in the crown of Islam’s geopolitical advance after 9-11 is of more recent origin: Egypt. It is no longer necessary to argue in detail why the Muslim Brotherhood will be the ultimate beneficiary of what has come to pass over the past eight or nine months. Suffice to say that the Brotherhood is so confident of its power that it is going to contest only one-half of all constituencies. It does not want to be too successful right away, so as not to alarm unduly the Army which still has a number of nationalist-secularists in its senior ranks. The Brotherhood already has a tacit understanding with the military, according to which the Army will run the transition in political terms while the Brotherhood will quietly be given an upper hand in cultural and educational areas. We can confidently expect the Islamic Republic of Egypt to come into being within three to five years.

Why is the United States acting as if this was a great and glorious victory for democracy? Prima facie it does not make sense. Any sober analysis of the Egyptian political scene should have started with Mubarak’s brief experiment with democracy. In December 2005 he allowed the Brotherhood to contest a quarter of seats, and it swept the board in all of them, proving yet again that “democracy” in the Muslim world equals Islamization, or to be precise, re-Islamization, like in the case of Turkey. And yet Washington remains enthusiastic. The most significant result of the Iraqi war is that is has been made safe for the ayatollahs with close links to Iran. As soon as the last “Coalition” soldier leaves Afghanistan, it will revert to its Hobbesian ways or else to a Taliban-style Islamic dictatorship.

One possible answer regarding American motives may be roughly as follows. The friends of Israel are developing a long-term Machiavellian ploy: they are pleased to let these previously secularist Muslim states revert to their Jihadist ways, so that our unsinkable aircraft carrier appears that much more valuable and indispensable as the only reliable ally in the region. The Muslims are just impossible, we supported their democratization—and now, look! The Jihadist veterans of Benghazi have replaced Qaddafy, the same thing has happened in Tunisia, and we were helping them bring down Bashar al-Assad in Syria…

It is entirely possible that this is the broad agenda of some elements of the power structure inside the Beltway. On the other hand, within that structure there are still many people who do believe that all those English-speaking, tweeting yuppies from Tahrir Square protests last February will have an upper hand in Cairo and that the Arab Spring will go on from one triumph to another—but of course not to Saudi Arabia, not to Bahrein, not to the Emirates, because our friends there have warned us that things would get out of hand and that we would end up with some rather nasty Shiite dictatorships.

The aftermath of 9-11 has not only displayed the geopolitical shortsightedness of the Western elite class. Above all it has unveiled the extent of its self-hate. This goes well beyond its inability to protect the citizens of the Western world. It reflects a pathological desire to enable the enemies of the traditional nations of Europe and of what used to be “the American people” to establish a physical, cultural and political foothold in those countries. The elite class has been facilitating this process every step of the way, to the point where it is no longer possible to have a meaningful debate on the character of Islam in the European Union or Canada. Effective criminalization of meaningful debate has reached the point where merely quoting Islamic sources can get you into trouble if the guardians of the multicultural grail determine that you had done so with hostile intent.

What 9-11 has done for the Muslim world is enormously valuable. It has tested the will of the West and found it wonting. There is no need for further terrorist attacks, and if they happen it will be by some isolated self-starters disconnected from the “community.” Large-scale attacks are no longer necessary. The point has been made. What the Muslims need now is merely to continue on the long Gramscian road that will turn Dar-al-Harb into Dar-al-Islam. The shift is well under way and it is statistically predictable. In Britain, net immigration is greater than ever before, and much of it consists of Muslims from the Subcontinent, the Middle East and Africa. On current form the strategy of Riyadh and Ankara will continue to pay dividends because there is nothing in the way of changing the demographic transformation of Europe in particular. By the end of this century some of its oldest nations will no longer be able to reverse the process, and there will be no political will to make an attempt.

What can save us? A miracle! Or else, as I said eight years ago at the Joh Randolph Club meeting in New Orleans, what can save us is a precipitous, drastic economic crisis that would remove all legitimacy from the ruling elite and end any credibility it may have in managing the crisis. For the time being people are still looking to governments for solutions, rather than perceiving them as part of the problem.

What can help save us is the fact that the Muslims are not capable of thinking creatively and establishing harmonious and prosperous polities. If there is a belated recovery of the West in the wake of a global economic meltdown, and if the Muslim world is subsequently left to its own devices, the end-result will be the rediscovery of meaning and faith in the West—and yet another round of decline into moral depravity, intellectual decrepitude and material poverty in the Muslim world.

Syria: Nowhere Near Regime Change

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Srdja Trifkovic offers trenchant analysis on world events for this reason: he is not bound to the liberal/neo-con vision of American foreign policy that justifies the invasion and domination of sovereign nations under the rubric that behind every dictator lies a nascent movement of political liberty waiting to emerge. This view is misguided idealism and naivete at best, cynical opportunism at worst, and it afflicts Democrats and Republicans alike. (It’s been the sum of liberal thinking since Viet Nam and maintained by neo-cons when moving over to the Republican side.)

The problem is that “regime change” affects in catastrophic ways the minorities in the countries where dictators are overthrown, including Orthodox Christian minorities in the Middle East who otherwise live in relative safety. Last month I heard William Krystol (a dean of the Washington neo-con establishment; Charles Krauthammer is another) urge American forces to enter Syria to topple the government. He had no idea what kind of government would replace it (not to mention that putting American lives as risk comes very easy to him) but anything is better than the present regime he argued.

Trifkovic explains below why that view is not only wrong-headed, but dangerous.

Source: Chronicles Magazine | Srdja Trifkovic

“Unrest in Syria has discomforted rather than shaken the regime of Bashir Al-Assad,” I wrote in the May issue of Chronicles (Cultural Revolutions, p. 6). “On current form it is an even bet that he will survive, which is preferable to any likely alternative.” The violence has become far worse since the editorial was written in mid-March and the regime looks somewhat shaken by now, but the overall conclusion still stands.

What was “last but not least” a month ago needs to be stated first now: the army and the internal security apparatus remain reliable in spite of several weeks of intense pressure. Contrary to the protesters’ claims of a split within army ranks, the soldiers are loyal to Bashir and to the regime—rather than to the Army as an institution (like in Egypt), or to whoever appears to be winning in the streets (like in Tunisia). The soldiers appear singularly unintimidated by mob violence, which is often instigated by the Islamists who treat “martyrdom” as an essential element of their destabilization strategy. The Syrian deaths are now in the low hundreds. This is well below the bimonthly score of our NATO “ally” Turkey during its clampdown on the Kurds in the 1980s, and less than the death toll of a single day of rioting in Saudi Arabia in 1987.

Less dependent on foreign countries than either Egypt or Tunisia, Bashir is virtually immune to U.S. pressure. Alarmed by the misuse of the UN Security Council Resolution 1973 by NATO as a quasi-legal tool of attempted regime change in Libya, China and Russia have successfully blocked an initiative by the U.S. and some of its European allies for the UNSC to condemn the Syrian government’s “attacks on peaceful protesters.” The regime in Damascus is certain there will be no Operation Libyan Freedom, and it is correct to make that assumption. It is also mindful of Qaddafy’s predicament when faced with Western demands and pressures.

Bashir is potentially sensitive to EU (especially French) sanctions, but he would rather risk such sanctions than agree to a string of unreciprocated concessions on the short road to self-annihilation. He can learn from the mistakes of Ben Ali and Mubarak. The first lesson is not to panic and not to appear weak. Bashir is making some concessions—such as the ending of the state of emergency and the promise of multi-party political system—but at the same time the authorities in Damascus are demonstrating “that they have the capacity for so much force” that they don’t have to use it all at once. We are nowhere near a genuine nationwide revolt yet, and the regime is nowhere near collapse.

Bashir’s major advantage is the absence of coherence and clarity among his opponents. He faces an enigmatic opposition movement, amorphous and apparently leaderless. It is conceivable that the opposition as a whole is more popular than the regime, but it is heterogeneous. There is the Muslim Brotherhood and several Ikwani splinters, as well as Saudi-supported Salafi groups, there are two armed communist factions and an array of other leftist secularists, there are Kurdish separatists, and other regional militias are beginning to emerge. Even if there were a free election, Bashir’s Ba’ath would likely remain the strongest single party.

In case of Bashir’s collapse the final outcome would be a fundamentalist Sunni regime controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood. The standard chant of Bashir’s opponents, “Allah, Freedom, Syria,” indicates the order of their priorities. Far from being latter-day Jeffersonians, they demand “freedom” from a modernizing, secularist government that has successfully kept political Islam on a tight leash for some decades now. It is therefore self-defeating, but sadly not surprising, that the U.S. appears actively engaged in encouraging an eventual regime change.

The prospect of a fundamentalist victory strikes horror into the hearts of Alawites, Druze, Christians, and secularists of all hues, who provide the bulk of government cadres and a third of Syria’s population. Many of them would prefer civil war to a regime change. The growing middle class—which includes many prosperous Sunnis—is also loath to see their country become more akin to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The dislike of a common enemy can be a powerful bond, and Syria’s assorted heterodox Muslims, secularists, Sunni moderates and non-Muslim “infidels” know that they need to hang together with Bashir. Otherwise they are likely to hang separately and rapidly disappear, which is exactly what happened to Iraq’s previously stable and prosperous Christian community in the aftermath of the U.S.-led 2003 occupation.

The protesters capture the headlines but Bashir remains popular with a large segment of the population. This applies to the young, who account for more than a half of Syria’s 24 million people and many of whom have taken advantage of his economic liberalization over the past decade. They see the termination of the decades-long state of emergency as a key step on Bashir’s reformist path. “Syrians have two roads to choose from — both being calculated gambles,” the country’s leading author and commentator Sami Moubayed wrote a month ago. They either give Bashir the benefit of the doubt, or they entrust their future to a street movement that doesn’t have a clear command, vision, or agenda.

Some foreign proponents of Bashir’s downfall use the standard rhetoric of “democratic” regime change but do not give a hoot for what “the people” actually want, or what is optimal for the region’s long-term stability. It appears that they want to see him replaced by a hard-core Islamist regime in order to ensure that Syria becomes and remains weak and divided. Caroline Glick thus argued in The Jerusalem Post that Syria led by the Brotherhood would be no worse than that led by Assad. “What would a Muslim Brotherhood regime do that Assad isn’t already doing?” she asked. “At a minimum, a successor regime will be weaker than the current one. Consequently, even if Syria is taken over by jihadists, they will pose less of an immediate threat to the region than Assad. They will be much more vulnerable to domestic opposition and subversion.”

This is a remarkably short-sighted view. On current and recent form Bashir is not a threat to the region, “immediate” or otherwise. A Muslim Brotherhood regime would do all sorts of bad or unpleasant things that he isn’t doing. Bashir and his father have kept peace on the Golan Heights for almost forty years. An Islamist Syria would be unlikely to follow suit; its cue would come from the Hamas-ruled Gaza, Kassem rockets included. An Islamist Syria would become a stronger link in the Iran-Hizballah axis than Assad had ever been. If there is a Syrian civil war instead, it would spill over into Lebanon and Jordan immediately and into the Palestinian Authority soon thereafter. The region would become less stable than at any time since 1947.

None of these alternatives to Bashir are more desirable than his survival. His present connection with Iran is neither natural nor inevitable. He is a secularist with Alawite roots, whereas Ahmadinejad is a millenarian Shia visionary. Bashir may be ready for all kinds of deals—peace with Israel included—in return for Washington’s recognition of the legitimacy of his regime. He should be tested, because the road to Damascus cannot and should not lead through Mecca.

Egypt: The Realist Scenario

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It’s Jimmy Carter all over again.

Source: Chronicles of Culture | Srdja Tifkovic

The image of the “democratic revolution” in Egypt, as constructed by the mainstream media in North America and Europe over the past two weeks, evokes the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989. The BBC World Service, NPR and other Western media outlets bring us young, articulate, lightly-accented demonstrators who talk of democracy, freedom, human rights and the rule of law. Hosni Mubarak is presented as a latter-day Erich Honecker, heading a corrupt and sclerotic regime on the wrong side of history.

The image is attractive but inaccurate. The unrest may be brought under control by Mubarak’s loyalists working in tandem with the military, or it may lead to one free election resulting in the establishment of an Islamic republic, but it will not produce a Western-style democracy. Political Islam, embodied in the Muslim Brotherhood, is the only well organized force capable of supplanting the regime and the only group with deep popular roots. The Brotherhood has let the secular reformists take the lead in the streets, confident that it will reap the benefits.

President Obama begs to differ. “The Egyptian people want freedom, they want free and fair elections, they want a representative government,” he told Bill O’Reilly in an interview just ahead of the Super Bowl. Downplaying concerns that the Brotherhood could take power and install a government hostile to U.S. interests, Obama described it as “one faction in Egypt” devoid of majority support:

[T]here are a whole bunch of secular folks in Egypt, there are a whole bunch of educators and civil society in Egypt that wants to come to the fore as well. And it’s important for us not the say that our only two options are either the Muslim Brotherhood or a suppressed Egyptian people… What I want a representative government in Egypt. And I have confidence that if Egypt moves in an orderly transition process, that we will have a government in Egypt that we can work with together as a partner.

This statement practically guarantees that the U.S. Administration will continue to mismanage the crisis. Obama’s wishful thinking suits the current strategy of the Brotherhood, which is based on a well established precedent: in 1979 Khomeini’s followers forged a tactical alliance with the reformist opponents of the Shah, only to eliminate them once the job was done. The process was completed in 1981 when Khomeini’s former ally, Iran’s first president Abolhassan Bani Sadr, was impeached and had to flee the country.

The oft-repeated media claim that the Muslim Brotherhood is “moderate,” or likely to become so when burdened with the responsibility of power, is absurd. It is a hard-line group based on a simple credo: 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. It was founded in 1928 by Hasan al-Banna, an Egyptian school teacher nurtured on Wahhabism, as a revivalist movement explicitly opposed to the ascendancy of secular reformism. It started performing terrorist acts in Egypt, which led to a ban on its activities. An Ikhwani tried to assassinate Egyptian President Nasser in 1954 and four others succeeded in killing his successor Anwar al-Sadat in September 1981. Today the Brotherhood has branches in every traditionally Muslim country and all over the world, including the United States. Some minor regional differences notwithstanding, they all share the same long-term goal: the establishment of a world-wide Islamic state. Its strength was manifested when its candidates were allowed to field candidates as individuals in the 2005 legislative elections. They were able to compete for one-fifth of the seats, and won all of them.

Obama’s implicit treatment of Egypt’s current government as a spent force is short-sighted and detrimental to a stable solution. The regime of Hosni Mubarak has been very good to America. For almost three decades it has honored the peace treaty with Israel signed in 1979 by Mubarak’s slain predecessor Anwar al Sadat. On many occasions, and notably during the Second Intifada, it ignored the pressure of “the Street” and rejected the lure of pan-Arabism. The U.S. Navy has enjoyed privileged access to the Suez Canal—a key consideration in Washington’s overall Middle Eastern strategy—and the Pentagon was free to stage elaborate war games in Egypt’s deserts. Egypt was an active participant in the first Iraqi war in 1991 and a silent American partner in its 2003 sequel. It has provided non-lethal support to the “Allied” effort in Afghanistan. It has shared anti-terrorist intelligence with U.S. agencies at all levels of classification. Unlike Saudi Arabia it was a true “American ally,” one of the few in the Arab world and the most important one of them all.

Mubarak’s Egypt was comparable to Turkey during the Cold War. The regime believed in a firmly guided democracy, mistrustful of “the people’s” ability to decide what was good for them. It was nevertheless eminently liberal in comparison to Saudi Arabia or Libya, as a visitor to Tripoli or Riyadh could attest while recovering from the ordeal at Cairo’s Mena House poolside. It was corrupt—all Arab governments are—but not more so than most. Providing the longest period of relative stability in Egypt’s post-medieval history, the Mubarak regime was unloved but respected at home, and regarded abroad as a key factor of regional stability.

Mubarak faced a formidable challenge of demographics: one-half of Egypt’s 85 million people are under 25, and one-half of young adults are unemployed. Yet steady liberalization of the economic system over the past decade has created millions of real, non-state jobs. Further up the social scale it has produced an entrepreneurial class that now offers more attractive career paths to middle-class youths than the traditional venues of the Army or the civil service. As he turned 80 two years ago, Mubarak thought he could look forward to another term in office after which he’d pass the torch to his son Gamal (47), declare that all’s well, and leave for his favorite foreign country, Germany, for another protracted medical cure.

It was not to be. In January 2009 Barack Obama was inaugurated. One of his major early foreign policy initiatives was to come to Cairo, in June 2009, to deliver a major “speech to the Muslim world.” The Egyptian government was presented with a destabilizing fait accompli. Obama’s address was a strange performance, full of misrepresentations and liberal platitudes on the nature of Islam, on America’s relationship with the Muslim world, and on Islam’s alleged compatibility with Western-style democracy. More significantly for Egypt’s domestic political scene, a dozen members of the Muslim Brotherhood were invited to attend the speech. This happened at the insistence of the U.S. State Department, on the President’s explicit orders, and in spite of the host government’s misgivings. The remarkable spectacle was taken by the Western media as “a clear sign that the Obama administration is willing to publicly challenge Egypt’s commitment to parliamentary democracy.” Mubarak was horrified.

Reminiscent of Jimmy Carter’s public challenge of the Shah 30 years earlier, Obama’s gesture produced similar results. The Brotherhood took it as a signal that Washington was ready to ditch its old ally. As I wrote at the time, Barack Obama, like George W. Bush before him, wanted a democratic transformation of the Middle East regardless of the consequences for the American interest: “the end result would be detrimental to U.S. security: in Egypt and everywhere else in the region. [Mubarak] would be swept from power and the Muslim Brotherhood would turn Egypt into an Islamic Republic, without ever thanking Obama for the favor.”

The unrest in Egypt has already given heart to the upholders of Islamic radicalism all over the region. The decision makers in Teheran and Ankara are pleased, albeit for somewhat different reasons. Iran has long regarded Mubarak’s Egypt as a major obstacle to the establishment of its hegemony in the region, and welcomes its debilitating internal crisis regardless of outcome. Turkey’s ruling Islamists rightly see Mubarak’s regime as a local equivalent of the Kemalist old guard that they have successfully neutralized over the past nine years. Last but not least, Hamas—a Brotherhood branch long hostile to Mubarak—now looks forward to the lifting of the blockade on Gaza’s western border. If this happens Israel will retrench ever more deeply behind its fortified boundaries. “The peace process,” always elusive and currently non-existent, will become impossible.

For the greater part of the 20th century Cairo had led the way in the intellectual quest for an authentically Arab response to the challenge of modernity. Vice President Omar Suleiman should be given a chance to continue that quest by incremental reforms within the framework of a firmly guided democracy. If he fails the Brotherhood will win, and duly condemn as rebellion against Allah’s supremacy the submission to any form of law other than the Shari’a. It is to be hoped that Egypt’s political class and military officers will prevent that outcome regardless of Obama’s expectations and advice.

Trifkovic: Liberal Totalitarianism More Oppressive than Communism [VIDEO]

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H.L. Mencken Club Distinguished Speaker Series: Srdja Trifkovic on Western Postmodernia vs. “Real Socialism”

Americans love telling themselves “it’s a free country,” but Srdja Trifkovic relates that in terms of (self-)censorship on key issues like race and immigration, American is a place less open to honest communication than the Soviet Bloc.

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