Turkish Forum

Tag: Barack Obama

  • Clinton’s Visit to Genocide Monument Necessary but not Sufficient

    Clinton’s Visit to Genocide Monument Necessary but not Sufficient

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    During her visit to Armenia on July 5, U.S. Secretary State Hillary Clinton placed a wreath at the Armenian Genocide Monument at Tsitsernakaberd in Yerevan. Regrettably, however, the U.S. Embassy in Armenia issued a press release describing the visit as “private.” By using such a characterization, U.S. officials were trying to preempt any backlash from the Turkish government.   In my opinion, the State Department mishandled Secretary Clinton’s visit to the Armenian Genocide Monument. Here are the reasons why:

    • There was no need to downplay the visit by characterizing it as “private,” since such visits are standard procedure for foreign dignitaries visiting Armenia.
    • Paying a visit to the Genocide Monument does not necessarily imply recognition of the Armenian Genocide, as all previous and current U.S. Ambassadors have visited this site every April 24.
    • Secretary Clinton’s visit to the Genocide Monument could not have been described as “private,” since it was a part of her “official” visit to Armenia.
    • The characterization of the visit as “private” was contradicted by the fact that the ribbons on the wreath she laid at the Genocide Monument carried the inscription: “From Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.”
    • Clinton’s visit the day before to the “Alley of the Martyrs” in Baku was not described as “private,” creating the disturbing impression that U.S. interests in Azerbaijan’s oil weigh heavier than its humanitarian concerns for victims of genocide.
    • Another double standard was Clinton not allowing any Armenian government officials to accompany her to the Genocide Monument in Yerevan, while she was accompanied to the “Alley of Martyrs” in Baku by a Deputy Minister of Azerbaijan!
    • Clinton permitted neither the international press traveling with her nor the local Armenian media, except Armenian Public TV, to report on her visit to the Genocide Monument. Her action undermines her advocacy for media freedom.
    • There was no reason for Secretary Clinton to be coy about Genocide recognition, since Pres. Reagan had acknowledged it in 1981, and the U.S. House of Representatives had recognized it in 1975 and 1984.

    Even though the State Department downgraded Secretary Clinton’s visit to the Monument, Armenian officials did their best to publicize it as much as possible! This time they acted more decisively than last May, when Mevlut Cavusoglu — Turkish President of Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly — refused to visit the Genocide Monument. They insisted that the Secretary add to her itinerary a stop at the Genocide Monument. They then arranged for Armenian Public TV and other TV stations to repeatedly air the video of Clinton’s July 5 visit to the Monument.

    In addition, the website of the State-owned Armenian Genocide Museum prominently featured Clinton’s visit by displaying photos of her wreath with ribbons that carried a visible inscription of her name and title, and an authentic medal issued by the American Near East Relief Committee that Museum Director Hayk Demoyan presented her.

    Pointing across the Turkish border, Demoyan told Secretary Clinton that Mount Ararat is “a symbol of Armenia.” In addition to explaining the basic facts of the Armenian Genocide, Demoyan told her that the graves of heroes fallen in Artsakh (Karabagh) were located near the Monument, since Armenians consider that war to be a continuation of the Armenian Genocide. The Secretary was also given a historical photo in which Armenian children in the American orphanage of Alexandropol (Gumri) were standing in formation that spelled out the words: “AMERICA, WE THANK YOU.”

    Clinton’s visit was both praised and criticized by Armenian-American organizations. The Armenian National Committee of America took Clinton to task for her “secret” visit to the Genocide Monument, while the Armenian Assembly of America commended her for the visit. Former U.S. Ambassador to Armenia, John Evans, told The California Courier that “Clinton’s visit was a small, but positive step forward.” The last Secretary of State to have visited Armenia was James Baker in 1992, who did not, however, make a stop at the Genocide Monument.

    In my view, Secretary Clinton should be commended for making such a positive gesture, but also blamed for going to such lengths to downplay her visit to the Genocide Monument. Why was she so concerned about offending Turks who have brazenly undermined every major U.S. foreign policy initiative in recent months?   Unfortunately, Secretary Clinton, Vice President Biden and Pres. Obama have drifted far away from their campaign promises to recognize the Armenian Genocide! Clinton’s brief stop at the Genocide Monument on July 5 is a welcome first step that fell short of her solemn commitment to support recognition of the Armenian Genocide.

    ================== COMMENT —- YORUM ================================================

    Democrats are in serious trouble. They need every vote they can get in November so that is why they are posturing around.
    I would like to see the day when Turkey can care less and shrug off  the American and Armenian clamors, resolutions etc  about this farce of genocide.
    Turkey and Azerbaijan should unite more and defy this idiotic nonsense..
    Almost 80 million Turks being manipulated by a 2 million weakling nation and its masters in Washington…Disgusting….

    .. Oya Bain [[email protected]]

  • Hamas is a threat to the Palestinian cause

    Hamas is a threat to the Palestinian cause

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    By RicHard Cohen

    Tuesday, June 29, 2010

    It’s a pity that Israel, while substantially loosening its grip on Gaza, will continue to enforce a blockade when, with just a little imagination, it could insist on a deal with the activists once again steaming its way: You can proceed to Gaza if, once you get there, you demand that Hamas cease the persecution of women, institute freedom of religion, halt the continuing rocketing of Israel, release an Israeli hostage, ban torture and rescind an official charter that could have made soothing bedtime reading for Adolf Hitler. This may take some time.

    In fact, these demands would never be met. Gaza is a mean and brutal place with a totalitarian government steeped in a cult of violence and death. This hardly means that the government does not have a measure of popular support and did not, as some of the activists naively point out, come to power by democratic means. So did the Nazis.

    The term “Islamic fascism” gets thrown around a lot. I initially recoiled from it because I prefer to reserve fascism for fascists. The term is too loosely employed — New York City cops were called fascists by Vietnam-era peace demonstrators — but Paul Berman, in his new book “The Flight of the Intellectuals,” makes a solid case that it can, with justice, be applied to Hamas.

    Berman traces Hamas’s intellectual pedigree to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, whose founder, Hassan al-Banna, greatly admired Hitler, and to Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who spent much of World War II in Germany cozying up to Hitler, organizing a Muslim SS unit and, on occasion, remonstrating with the Nazis for not killing enough Jews. (See also Robert S. Wistrich’s recent book, “A Lethal Obsession.”) It’s appalling not only that Husseini was granted sanctuary in Arab countries after the war but also that he continues to be revered as a Palestinian patriot.

    The successor to both Banna and Husseini was Sayyid Qutb (1906-66), an Egyptian intellectual of uncontested importance whose influence can be found in the writing of the Hamas charter. Qutb was an indefatigable author (more than 20 books, some written while in an Egyptian prison where he was tortured), but the article that should interest the pro-Hamas activists the most is called “Our Struggle with the Jews.” It is a shocking and repellent work of anti-Semitism that, among other things, says the “Jews will be satisfied only with the destruction” of Islam. Qutb cites that hoary anti-Semitic forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” for substantiation — suggesting that his status as an intellectual is somewhat due to heroic grade inflation.

    The extremely useful term “useful idiots” was originally coined to describe Soviet sympathizers in Western countries. But there is no reason it cannot be applied to so-called activists who wish to break the blockade, which is an increasingly untenable exercise that Israel, bit by bit, is loosening. That’s a good thing. But if Israel is expected to release its grip on Gaza, it’s entitled to a bit of reciprocity — at the very least the release of the hostage Gilad Shalit, who was captured not in Gaza but on the Israel side of the border. He has been held for four years now and has never once been visited by an outsider. How about maybe one ship in the approaching flotilla just for him?

    Now is the time, I suppose, to say that Israel is not exactly perfect either. It continues to overreact, uses too much force and has often trampled on the rights of Palestinians. Still, Israel is Thomas Jefferson’s idea of heaven compared with Gaza, which could serve as a seaside Club Med for Jew-haters. One country is consonant with the Enlightenment; the other is a dark place of religious intolerance where the firmest principles of anti-Semitism — not anti-Zionism or pro-Palestinianism — are embedded in the Hamas charter.

    The irony is that Israel is often called a colonialist power. In some sense, the charge is true. But the ones with the true colonialist mentality are those who think that Arabs cannot be held to Western standards of decency. So, for this reason, Hamas is apparently forgiven for its treatment of women, its anti-Semitism, its hostility toward all other religions, its fervid embrace of a dark (non-Muslim) medievalism and its absolute insistence that Israel has no right to exist. Maybe the blockade ought to end — but so, too, should anyone’s dreamy idea of Hamas. It’s not just a threat to Israel. It’s a threat to the eventual Palestine.

    [email protected]

  • Fethullah Gulen’s cave of wonders

    Fethullah Gulen’s cave of wonders

    By Spengler feto gulenTAKKELI

    We’ve been had, boys and girls: the international community, the world press, Israeli intelligence, the United Nations, the lot of us. The existential drama off the Gaza coast turns out to be a Turkish farce, the kind of low comedy that in 1782 Wolfgang Mozart set to music in the opera The Abduction from the Seraglio, with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan playing the buffo-villain Osmin and Turkish self-exiled preacher and author Fethullah Gulen as the wise Pasha Selim.

    In the post-American world, where every wannabe and used-to-be power makes momentary deals with other powers it plans to kill later, one makes inferences with caution. But I’ve seen this opera before.

    Gulen, who lives in Pennsylvania in the United States, was silent as a jinn in a bottle about politics until last Friday, when he told

    the Wall Street Journal that the Free Gaza flotilla’s attempt to run the Israeli blockage of Gaza “is a sign of defying authority, and will not lead to fruitful matters”.

    Erdogan’s Islamists have run a two-year campaign of judicial activism against secular politicians, journalists and army officers, and secular critics long have alleged that Gulen is the clerical power behind the prime minister.

    For the secretive Gulen to criticize the Turkish government in the midst of its public rage against Israel is an imam-bites-dog story. Gulen appears to have positioned himself as a mediator with Israel. Turkey does not want to end its longstanding relationship with Israel; it wants Israel to become a Turkish vassal-state in emulation of the old Ottoman model.

    The killing last week by Israeli commandos of nine activists on board the Mavi Marmara served numerous goals, and Gulen’s grand return to Turkish politics appears to be one of them. The question that every commentator in the Turkish press asked over the weekend, in one form or other, was: When will this voice of Muslim moderation re-emerge as an open force in the ruling Islamist party?

    There is every indication that the Turkish government dispatched the Gaza flotilla in order to stage a violent confrontation. The Erdogan government announced that it had carefully vetted the passenger list on the Mavi Marmara, which is to say that it knew that many of the passengers boarded with the intention of achieving “martyrdom” in a clash with the Israelis. They must have known this, for both the Turkish as well as the Palestinian press ran interviews with family members of some of the nine dead passengers explaining this intent.

    The passengers’ plans for martyrdom have been celebrated in the Arab press, and translated on the website of the Middle East Media Research Institute. The Turkish government also knew that the Insani Yardim Vakfi (IHH), the Islamic charity behind the Gaza flotilla, had ties to Hamas, for it had banned the IHH from charitable activity in Turkey a decade ago due to its connection to an organization that the previous secular government regarded as terrorist.

    What explains Israel’s apparent intelligence failure? Israel fields a small service tasked with operations in Iran, southern Lebanon, Gaza and Syria among other prospective enemies. The Mossad probably relied on counterparts in Turkish intelligence – with whom it has a long history of collaboration – to cover the passenger list on the Mavi Marmara. The often-unreliable Debka claims that “Turkish intelligence duped Israel”, which in this case is likely. By stealth or by sloth, Israel was roped into the comedy.

    The star of the comedy, at least for the Turkish media, is Gulen. The 78-year-old imam has lived in self-imposed exile for two decades, due to charges by Turkish prosecutors that he led a conspiracy to subvert the secular state. He presides over Turkey’s largest religious movement, commanding the loyalty of two-thirds of the Turkish police, according to some reports. His movement – a transnational civic society movement inspired by Gulen’s teachings – also controls a network of elite schools that educate a tenth of the high school students in the Turkic world from Baku to Kyrgyzstan. And it reportedly controls businesses with tens of billions of dollars in assets.

    His movement has been expelled from the Russian Federation and his followers arrested in Uzbekistan by local authorities who believe his goal is a pan-Turkic union from the Bosporus to China’s western Xinjiang province (“East Turkestan” to Gulen’s movement).

    In Mozart’s Abduction, Belmonte and Pedrillo descend into the pasha’s harem to rescue Kostanze; in last week’s version, Israeli commandos descended onto the Mavi Marmara. And there is the stock villain of Viennese comedy, the Turk Osmin, played by Erdogan. The predictable occurs, and the prospective Shahidi become actual corpses. And Erdogan threatens Israel with terrible things, in emulation of Mozart’s Osmin, who sings:

    “First you’ll be beheaded!
    Then hanged!
    Then spitted on hot stakes!
    Then bound, and burned, and drowned, and finally skinned!”

    This, one supposes, is supposed to frighten the children in the audience, who then will smile and clap when the Wise Old Man enters to urge moderation, caution and respect for authority, in the person of Gulen.

    The Islamic shift in Turkey has been underway for years. As Rachel Sharon-Krespin wrote in the Middle East Quarterly (Winter 2009):

    As Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, AKP) begins its seventh year in leadership, Turkey is no longer the secular and democratic country that it was when the party took over. The AKP has conquered the bureaucracy and changed Turkey’s fundamental identity. Prior to the AKP’s rise, Ankara oriented itself toward the United States and Europe. Today, despite the rhetoric of European Union accession, Prime Minister Erdogan has turned Turkey away from Europe and toward Russia and Iran and re-oriented Turkish policy in the Middle East away from sympathy toward Israel and much more toward friendship with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Syria.

    We are now in a post-American world, at least where the Barack Obama administration is concerned, and Turkey like its neighbors is scrambling for position. What does Turkey want in a post-American world?

    The question itself seems stupid, for the obvious answer is: “Whatever it can get.” It wants to become the dominant regional power rather than Iran, casting a wolfish glance at Iran’s Azeri population, who speak Turkish rather than Persian. It wants to “mediate” the Israeli-Palestinian issue and is not squeamish about its prospective partners. It wants Palestine to be an Ottoman province once again. It wants to be the energy hub for the Middle East and the outlet for Russian and Azerbaijani pipelines.

    But it is a bit more complex than that. Modern Turkey is an artificial construct, rather than a nation-state in the Western sense. Since the Turks completed the conquest of Byzantine Anatolia in the middle of the 14th century, a relatively thin crust of ethnic Turks has ruled over subject peoples. The Ottoman Empire at various points in its history had a Christian majority; its civil service at different points was more Venetian, Armenian and Jewish then Turkish; its self-understanding was global and religious, that is, as the caliphate of Islam, rather than as a national entity.

    When World War I reduced Turkey to an Anatolian rump, Kemal Ataturk attempted to impose “Turkishness” as a secular, national ideology on the European model. To make the country “Turkish”, several million Orthodox Christians were estimated to have been killed. The hollowness of Ataturk’s secular construct, modeled on the nastier European national movements, made it vulnerable from the beginning. The army was the only institution that could hold Turkish society together.

    What will replace Ataturk’s secularism? I wrote two years ago:

    If political Islam prevails in Turkey, what will emerge is not the same country in different coloration, but a changeling, an entirely different nation. In a 1997 speech that earned him a prison term, Erdogan warned of two fundamentally different camps, the secularists who followed Kemal, and Muslims who followed sharia. These are not simply different camps, however, but different configurations of Turkish society at the molecular level. Like a hologram, Turkey offers two radically different images when viewed from different angles. Turkish Islam, the ordering of the Anatolian villages and the Istanbul slums, represents a nation radically different than the secularism of the army, the civil service, the universities and the Western-leaning elite of Istanbul. If the Islamic side of Turkey rises, the result will be unrecognizable. Turkey in the throes of Islamic revolution? Asia Times Online, July 22, 2008.

    Gulen’s pan-Turkic mysticism views Turkey as the center of a new caliphate uniting the Muslim world. He preaches a “Turkish renaissance” with a modern spin “to ensure that religion and science go together and that science penetrates not only individual lives, but also social life”. His schools educate the elite of the Turkic world across Asia. Gulen’s interest, to be sure, focuses on the Turkish state, whose bureaucracy is now filled with his acolytes. But unlike Ataturk’s secular nationalism, which tried to redefine Turkey on a European model, Gulen’s Islamism is inherently expansionist.

    What Gulen means by science is of an entirely different order than the Western understanding. This “imam from rural Anatolia”, as his website describes him, inhabits the magical world of jinns and sorcery. Science is just a powerful form of magic of which Turks should avail themselves to enhance their power, as he writes in his 2005 book, The Essentials of the Islamic Faith:

    Jinn are conscious beings charged with divine obligations. Recent discoveries in biology make it clear that God created beings particular to each realm. They were created before Adam and Eve, and were responsible for cultivating and improving the world. Although God superseded them with us, he did not exempt them from religious obligations.

    As nothing is difficult for God almighty, he has provided human beings, angels and jinns with the strength appropriate for their functions and duties. As he uses angels to supervise the movements of celestial bodies, he allows to humans to rule the Earth, dominate matter, build civilizations and produce technology.

    Power and strength are not limited to the physical world, nor are they proportional to bodily size … Our eyes can travel long distances in an instant. Our imagination can transcend time and space all at once … winds can uproot trees and demolish large buildings. A young, thin plant shoot can split rocks and reach the sunlight. The power of energy, whose existence is known through its effect, is apparent to everybody. All of this shows that something’s power is not proportional to its physical size; rather the immaterial world dominates the physical world, and immaterial entities are far more powerful than material ones.

    He goes on to warn about sorcery and the danger of spells; he allows that it is meritorious to break spells (for evil witches are everywhere casting spells), although a good Muslim should not make a profession of this, for then he might be mistaken for a sorcerer himself. The notion that “wind” and “energy” are “immaterial” forces exudes the magical world view of an Anatolian peasant; the miracles of technology are the secret actions of jinn, just as the planetary movements are the actions of angels. When Gulen talks about the union of religion and science, what he means quite concretely is that the magical view of jinns in the Koran aids the believer in enlisting these “immaterial” forces to enhance the power of Islam. Science for Gulen means the management of jinn.

    Gulen, in short, is a shaman, a relic of pre-history preserved in the cultural amber of eastern Anatolia. Kemalism was sterile, brutal, secular and rational; the “moderate Islam” of Gulen is magical, a mystic’s vision of Ottoman restoration and a pan-Turkic caliphate.

    The Erdogan government crafted the Mavi Marmara affair as a piece of theater, preparing the deus ex machina (god from the machine) entrance of Gulen himself, more Pagliaccio than Apollo, to be sure. The trouble is that the Turkish Islamists live in a world of magical realism in which theater and reality, human and jinn, desire and achievement blend into a mystical blur. Gulen explains in his The Essentials of the Islamic Faith that Allah created the jinn out of fire. And that is what the apologists for Turkish Islamism are playing with.

    Spengler is channeled by David P Goldman, senior editor of First Things (www.firstthings.com).

  • Obama selects Muslim expert in Islamic transactions as fellow

    Obama selects Muslim expert in Islamic transactions as fellow

    HOMELAND INSECURITY

    White House welcomes Shariah finance specialist

    June 25, 2010

    Samar Ali (Photo: Vanderbilt Register)

    By Chelsea Schilling

    The Obama administration has announced its appointment of 13 White House fellows – and the first person featured on its short list is a Muslim attorney who specializes in Shariah-compliant transactions.

    “This year’s White House fellows are comprised of some of the best and brightest leaders in our country,” Michelle Obama said in the June 22 announcement. “I applaud their unyielding commitment to public service and dedication to serving their community.”

    White House fellows spend a year as full-time, paid assistants to senior White House staff, the vice president, Cabinet secretaries and senior administration officials.

    Samar Ali of Waverly, Tenn., is the first name appearing on the White House list. She is an associate with the law firm Hogan Lovells – a firm that claims to have advised on more than 200 Islamic finance transactions with an aggregate deal value in excess of $40 billion.

    What does Islam plan for America? Read “Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America” and find out!

    According to Ali’s biography posted on the White House website, “She is responsible for counseling clients on mergers & acquisitions, cross-border transactions, Shari’a compliant transactions, project finance, and international business matters. During her time with Hogan Lovells, she has been a founding member of the firm’s Abu Dhabi office.”

    Hogan Lovells lists Ali’s experience “advising a Middle Eastern university in the potential establishment of a Foreign Aid Conventional and Shari’ah Compliant Student Loan Program and advising a Middle Eastern client in relation to a U.S. government subcontract matter.”

    “Our team members are at the forefront of developments in the Islamic finance industry,” Hogan Lovells boasts. “We help set standards for the sector. We have also advised on numerous first-of-their-kind transactions, such as the first convertible Sukuk, the first equity-linked Sukuk, the first Sharia-compliant securitization, the first international Sukuk al-mudaraba and Sukuk al-musharaka, the first Sukuk buy-back, and the first Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) guaranteed Islamic project financing.”

    Ali also clerked for Judge Gilbert S. Merritt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and Judge Edwin Cameron, now of the Constitutional Court of South Africa.

    Promoting Islam and Shariah

    The White House notes that Ali also led the YMCA Israeli-Palestinian Modern Voices for Progress Program and is a founding member of the first U.S. Delegation to the World Islamic Economic Forum. Ali was listed as a member of the British delegation to the World Islamic Economic Forum in 2009 and as a U.S. delegate in 2010.

    Shariah Finance Watch blog noted, “[I]t was at the World Islamic Economic Forum where key leaders declared Shariah finance to be “dawa” (missionary) activity to promote Islam and Shariah.”

    In fact, the president of Indonesia, H. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, delivered a March 2, 2009, keynote address to Islamic leaders at the World Islamic Economic Forum in Jakarta during which he called for Islamic banks to do “missionary work in the Western world.”

    “Islamic banking should now be able to take a leadership position in the banking world,” he said. “Islamic banks have been much less affected by the financial meltdown than the conventional banks – for the obvious reason that Shariah banks do not indulge in investing in toxic assets and in leveraged funds. They are geared to supporting the real economy.”

    He added, “Islamic bankers should therefore do some missionary work in the Western world to promote the concept of Shariah banking, for which many in the West are more than ready now.”

    ‘We didn’t consider terrorists to be Muslims’

    Ali received her law degree from Vanderbilt Law School and served as the first Arab-Muslim student body president at Vanderbilt. She has interned for the Islamic International Arab Bank in Amman, Jordan.

    According to Vanderbilt Law School, Ali’s mother immigrated to the U.S. from Syria, and her father is Palestinian. He left the West Bank town of Ramallah at age 17.

    America.gov reported that Ali said her parents taught her to “never forget where we came from and to never forget where we are now.”

    “I will always be Arab and I will always be American and I will always be Muslim,” she said.

    Ali spoke out at a campus memorial service days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

    “In my opinion,” she told the Washington File, “Al-Qaida is trying to ruin Islam’s reputation and we are simply not going to let them win this fight. If someone has a political agenda, they need to call it what it is, and not disguise it in the name of a religion or use the religion to achieve their political goals. This is simply unacceptable.”

    While she said she grieved the loss of thousands of American lives, Ali told the File she grew concerned about whether Americans would assume that she, as aMuslim and Arab-American, approved of those attacks.

    “Thus, I was worried that many of my fellow citizens, would not realize that just because my friends and I are Muslims and Arabs, did not mean that we were part of or even agreed with the terrorists who caused September 11,” she said. “We didn’t even consider the terrorists to be Muslims. I was worried that people would confuse Islam with Osama Bin Ladin and his agenda, that they would confuse his agenda as the agenda of all believers in Islam.”

    (Creeping Shariah

    Shariah already is moving into some elements of American society, with a lawsuit pending over U.S. government involvement in a financial institution that accommodates Shariah requirements in its business operations.

    WND also reported in November 2008 that the Treasury Department sponsored and promoted a conference titled “Islamic Finance 101.”

    Islamic finance is a system of banking consistent with the principles of Shariah, or Islamic law. It is becoming increasingly popular, having reached $800 billion by mid-2007 and growing at more than 15 percent each year. Wall Street now features an Islamic mutual fund and an Islamic index. However, critics claim anti-American terrorists are often financially supported through U.S. investments – creating a system by which the nation funds its own enemy.

    In his July 2008 essay, “Financial Jihad: What Americans Need to Know,” Vice President Christopher Holton of the Center for Security Policy wrote, “America is losing the financial war on terror because Wall Street is embracing a subversive enemy ideology on one hand and providing corporate life support to state sponsors of terrorism on the other hand.”

    Holton referred to Islamic finance, or “Shariah-Compliant Finance” as a “modern-day Trojan horse” infiltrating the U.S. He said it poses a threat to the U.S. because it seeks to legitimize Shariah – a man-made medieval doctrine that regulates every aspect of life for Muslims – and could ultimately change American life and laws.

    Some advocates claim Islamic finance is socially responsible because it bans investors from funding companies that sell or promote products such as alcohol, tobacco, pornography, gambling and even pork.

    However, many Islamic financial institutions also require industry participants to adhere to tenets of Shariah law. According to Nasser Suleiman’s “Corporate Governance inIslamic Banking , “First and foremost, an Islamic organization must serve God. It must develop a distinctive corporate culture, the main purpose of which is to create a collective morality and spirituality which, when combined with the production of goods and services, sustains growth and the advancement of the Islamic way of life.”

    Three nations that rule 100 percent by Shariah law – Iran, Saudi Arabia and Sudan – hold some of the most horrific human rights records in the world, Holton said.

    “This strongly suggests that Americans should strenuously resist anything associated with Shariah.”

    Tenets of Shariah

    In his essay, “Islamic Finance or Financing Islamism,” Alex Alexiev outlined the following tenets of Shariah taken from “The Reliance of the Traveler: The Classic Manual of Sacred Law”:

    • A woman is eligible for only half of the inheritance of a man
    • A virgin may be married against her will by her father or grandfather
    • A woman may not leave the house without her husband’s permission
    • A Muslim man may marry four women, including Christians and Jews; a Muslim woman can only marry a Muslim
    • Beating an insubordinate wife is permissible
    • Female sexual mutilation is obligatory
    • Adultery [or the perception of adultery] is punished by death by stoning
    • Offensive, military jihad against non-Muslims is a religious obligation
    • Apostasy from Islam is punishable by death without trial
    • Lying to infidels in time of jihad is permissible

    ‘Useful idiots’

    Alexiev wrote that many Islamic financial institutions claim Shariah-Compliant Finance “derives its Islamic character from the strict observance of the ostensible Quranic prohibition of lending at interest, the imperative of almsgiving (zakat), avoidance of excessive uncertainty (gharar) and certain practices and products considered unlawful (haram) to Muslims …” However, he said, “[E]ven a casual examination of the reality of Islamic finance today reveals it to be a bogus concept practiced by deceptive ploys and disingenuous means by practitioners that are or should be aware of that, but remain predictably silent.”

    Shariah finance institutions have funded militant Islamism for more than 30 years. Alexiev cited Islamic Development Bank’s hundreds of millions of dollars in contributions to Hamas in support of suicide bombing. Bank Al-Taqwa and other banks and charities run by Saudi billionaires have funded al-Qaida activities.

    Additionally, Shariah law mandates that Muslims donate 2.5 percent of their annual incomes to charities – including jihadists. When 400 banks regularly contribute to such charities, potential financial sums can be virtually limitless.

    If Western banks endorse Shariah, they will “end up becoming what Lenin called useful idiots or worse to the Islamists,” Alexiev wrote. “And it is a very thin line between that and outright complicity in the Islamist agenda.”

  • TURKISH FORUM INTELLIGENCE SUMMARY

    TURKISH FORUM INTELLIGENCE SUMMARY

    With Friends Like These ; Turkey is ready to start a new round of diplomatic initiatives to stop countries that supply the PKK with arms. Turkey has undertaken similar initiatives in previous years.

    Over the past few months, the PKK has relied on arms from Mediterranean countries, intelligence reports indicate. The roadside bomb that exploded in Halkalı on Tuesday was of Portuguese origin, intelligence sources said, adding this country to the list of countries that supply arms to the terrorist organization. That attack was carried out by the PKK’s urban offshoot, the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK).

    The most crucial question is how the PKK is able to bring these arms supplies it obtains from Mediterranean countries to northern Iraq. US journalist Seymour Hersh claimed in 2007 that this was done via Israel.

    The General Staff has seized PKK arms and ammunition originating from
    31 different countries.However, NATO-member countries have been the biggest suppliers. Most of the arms and ammunition seized are of Russian, Italian, Spanish, German and Chinese origin.

    EARLIER REPORTS

    May 22, 2007

    C4 plastic explosive

    Explosion rocks Ankara, the Turkish capital

    Five people have been killed and at least 60 hurt in an explosion during evening rush hour at the entrance to a shopping centre in the district of Ulus. A Pakistan national was among the dead. The area has been cordoned off and an investigation has begun. Unconfirmed reports suggest an explosive device may have been left at a nearby bus stop and is PKK related. It is suspected that the explosive is C4 which was supplied (as Block demolition charge M112, which may also be cut and/or removed from the mylar wrapper and hand formed as desired to suit the target) to US forces in Iraq and is more that a few tons are missing . PKK routinely uses Italian sourced plastic land mines and Armenian made remote detonation (cell phone type) equipment. In recent months huge weapons caches were discovered in many parts of Turkey such as Muğla, Van, İzmir, Ağrı and Şırnak.

    C-4 is the standard-issue plastic explosive used by the US military.
    C-4 or (Composition C-4) is used for any stable explosive, and “Composition A” and “Composition B” are other known variants. Made up of explosive, plastic binder, plasticizer and, usually, marker or taggant chemicals such as 2,3-dimethyl-2,3-dinitrobutane (DMDNB) to help detect the explosive and identify its source C-4 is 1.34 times as explosive as trinitrotoluene (TNT).

    C-4 is made by combining RDX slurry with binder dissolved in a solvent. The solvent is then evaporated away and the mixture is dried and filtered. The final material is an off-white solid with a feel similar to modelling clay. A major advantage of C-4 is that it can easily be moulded into any desired shape. C-4 can be pressed into gaps/voids in buildings, bridges, equipment or machinery. C-4 is also well known for its durability, reliability, and safety. It will not explode even if hit by a bullet, punched, cut, or thrown into a fire.

    The only reliable method for detonation is via both heat and pressure, i.e a detonator or blasting cap.

  • Fetullahs Businessman flex their newfound political power

    Fetullahs Businessman flex their newfound political power

    Wednesday, June 23, 2010
    Rep. Bill Pascrell, center, and Levant Koc, right, of the Interfaith Dialog Center, with Mehmet Sahin of the Turkish Parliament.
    BY HERB JACKSON
    The Record
    WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT

    Turkic businessmen and community leaders packed a posh Washington hotel to announce their new national group, and invited members of Congress to learn about their growing population and economic power.

    “I want to see all the Jersey guys,” says Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr., D-Paterson, who is quickly surrounded in the Willard Hotel ballroom. “Are these the guys that own all the restaurants?”

    Census data show Pascrell’s district is home to the biggest concentration of Turks in New Jersey, and as he works the room, he waves to members of the band he recognizes from events in Passaic County. He also meets Mehmet Sahin, a member of the Turkish Parliament who, among other things, is seeking contacts for an associate who wants to open a hotel in New Jersey.

    Near the buffet table, Rep. Scott Garrett, R-Wantage, takes a break from his tabbouleh to debate with a Westfield businessman about whether Governor Christie really will cut property taxes.

    Congressmen wooing new business to their districts or debating local politics is hardly new terrain, and in that sense, the opening gala of the Assembly of Turkic American Federations (A fetullah Gulen Organization)last month is like thousands of other receptions every year in Washington.

    But the formation of the ATAF, which highlights an Islamic identity that makes some secular Turks uneasy, comes as Turks are playing catch-up in the Washington influence game.

    They especially want to counter the influence of Armenian-Americans, whose No. 1 issue in Washington for decades has been a United States declaration that the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey from 1915 to 1923 were genocide.

    Turkey denies the charge, and disputes what Rutgers University genocide expert Alex Hinton says is a consensus of historians.

    When the latest genocide affirmation resolution passed the House Foreign Affairs Committee by a razor-thin 23-22 margin in March, Turkey briefly recalled its ambassador, and congressional opponents warned that full passage in Congress would damage relations with an important ally.

    Co-sponsors of the measure — including the entire New Jersey delegation except Pascrell — do not share that fear.

    “It should not injure a relationship built on many other things,” said Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., who added that his attendance at the ATAF gala was not a sign he was changing his support for the genocide resolution.

    Until recently, Turkey argued its case in Washington primarily through influential former members of Congress who registered with the Justice Department as foreign agents of its government.

    Over the past decade, a few hundred congressional staffers and a handful of members of Congress also took trips funded by Turkish-American groups to Ankara, Istanbul and other cities.

    Starting in 2007, however, the first of two federal political action committees registered, and the principal leader for one of the PACs also registered as a federal lobbyist in 2008.

    By contrast, Armenian groups had spent $2.6 million from 1999 through 2007 on lobbying, and made $569,000 in contributions through federal PACs.

    “We’re historically disorganized,” said Levent Koc, chief executive of the Interfaith Dialog Center founded in Carlstadt and now based in Newark, who invited many of the New Jersey officials to the reception. “We decided to come together for better coordination and communication.”

    The ATAF is an umbrella for 150 separate local organizations around the country, including Koc’s center, the Turkish Cultural Center in Ridgefield and the Pioneer Academy of Science in Clifton.

    All are affiliated with Turkish Muslim scholar Fethullah Gulen, Koc said. Gulen, who now lives in Pennsylvania, advocates a conservative brand of Islam that condemns terrorism and advocates more interfaith cooperation and science education. He was acquitted in absentia of what supporters called politically motivated charges in Turkey of advocating an Islamic state.

    Koc said the new group’s primary goal is to foster better understanding of Turkic people — a term that includes not only those from Turkey but also those from such countries as Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan — and cooperation between Muslims and other faiths.

    It’s not connected to the Turkish government or Turkish politics, he said.

    But one person attending the reception, South Hackensack chemical importer Tarik Ok, said one reason the ATAF was forming now was, “The government suggested we all go under one roof.”

    The new group has the leader of a much older group with a similar name uneasy.

    Gunay Evinch, president of the 30-year-old Assembly of Turkish American Associations, said he has asked the newly formed Assembly of Turkic American Federations to change its name and make its ties to the Gulen movement clear.

    “I told them it’s unnecessarily confusing, and it would be better to define yourselves as who you are, a sect movement within Islam,” said Evinch, who has already received mail at his Washington headquarters intended for the other group.

    Evinch said his group and the Turkish Coalition of America, which created a PAC in 2007 and registered to lobby in 2008, have worked hard to increase Turkish influence in Washington by getting American Turks to overcome a reluctance to make campaign contributions.

    “Turks did not [traditionally] reach into their pockets to give to campaigns, they thought it was corrupt,” he said. “The PAC educated people to understand that in the U.S. you can give to campaigns.”

    Evinch said a key difference between his ATAA and the new ATAF is that his group advocates only on issues important to Turks and Turkey, including the Armenian resolution and questions surrounding Cyprus.

    “We don’t advance the cause of Islam or a sect of Islam, and we don’t do interfaith dialogue based on Islam or any religion,” he said. “We also don’t import Turkish politics into our community.”

    Koc said that while it supports better understanding of Islam, his group is not limited to Muslims.

    “I cannot say we’re faith-based. Some scholars say this is a religiously motivated social movement. That doesn’t mean we are serving only Muslims or Turks. We serve all,” Koc said.

    He also disputed any religious motivation in seeking a change in Turkey’s government.

    “There’s a new generation in Turkey, and it’s more open. People opposed to this change are blaming religious people, but there are change supporters who are left wing and right wing, some of them are old socialists,” Koc said.

    “When they try to change the status quo, people who want the status quo blame Muslims. I don’t know why.”

    E-mail: [email protected]