Iranian Alert -- March 22, 2004 [EST]-- IRAN LIVE THREAD -- Americans for Regime Change in Iran

The US media almost entirely ignores news regarding the Islamic Republic of Iran. As Tony Snow of the Fox News Network has put it, “this is probably the most under-reported news story of the year.” But most American’s are unaware that the Islamic Republic of Iran is NOT supported by the masses of Iranians today. Modern Iranians are among the most pro-American in the Middle East.

There is a popular revolt against the Iranian regime brewing in Iran today. I began these daily threads June 10th 2003. On that date Iranians once again began taking to the streets to express their desire for a regime change. Today in Iran, most want to replace the regime with a secular democracy.

The regime is working hard to keep the news about the protest movement in Iran from being reported. Unfortunately, the regime has successfully prohibited western news reporters from covering the demonstrations. The voices of discontent within Iran are sometime murdered, more often imprisoned. Still the people continue to take to the streets to demonstrate against the regime.

In support of this revolt, Iranians in America have been broadcasting news stories by satellite into Iran. This 21st century news link has greatly encouraged these protests. The regime has been attempting to jam the signals, and locate the satellite dishes. Still the people violate the law and listen to these broadcasts. Iranians also use the Internet and the regime attempts to block their access to news against the regime. In spite of this, many Iranians inside of Iran read these posts daily to keep informed of the events in their own country.

This daily thread contains nearly all of the English news reports on Iran. It is thorough. If you follow this thread you will witness, I believe, the transformation of a nation. This daily thread provides a central place where those interested in the events in Iran can find the best news and commentary. The news stories and commentary will from time to time include material from the regime itself. But if you read the post you will discover for yourself, the real story of what is occurring in Iran and its effects on the war on terror.

I am not of Iranian heritage. I am an American committed to supporting the efforts of those in Iran seeking to replace their government with a secular democracy. I am in contact with leaders of the Iranian community here in the United States and in Iran itself.

If you read the daily posts you will gain a better understanding of the US war on terrorism, the Middle East and why we need to support a change of regime in Iran. Feel free to ask your questions and post news stories you discover in the weeks to come.

If all goes well Iran will be free soon and I am convinced become a major ally in the war on terrorism. The regime will fall. Iran will be free. It is just a matter of time.

The Moor's Last Laugh

March 22, 2004
The Wall Street Journal
Fouad Ajami

In the legend of Moorish Spain, the last Muslim king of Granada, Boabdil, surrendered the keys to his city on January 2, 1492, and on one of its hills, paused for a final glance at his lost dominion. The place would henceforth be known as El Ultimo Suspiro del Moro -- "the Moor's Last Sigh." Boabdil's mother is said to have taunted him, and to have told him to "weep like a woman for the land he could not defend as a man." An Arab poet of our own era gave voice to a historical lament when he wrote that as he walked the streets of Granada, he searched his pockets for the keys to its houses. Al Andalus -- Andalusia -- would become a deep wound, a reminder of dominions gained by Islam and then squandered. No wonder Muslim chroniclers added "May Allah return it to Islam," as they told and retold Granada's fate.

The Balkans aside, modern Islam would develop as a religion of Afro-Asia. True, the Ottomans would contest the Eastern Mediterranean. But their challenge was turned back. Turkey succumbed to a European pretension but would never be European. Europe's victory over Islam appeared definitive. Even those Muslims in the Balkans touched by Ottoman culture became a marked community, left behind by the Ottoman retreat from Europe like "seaweed on dry land."

* * *

Yet Boabdil's revenge came. It stole upon Europe. Demography -- the aging of Europe on the one hand and, on the other, a vast bloat of people in the Middle East and North Africa -- did Boabdil's job for him. Spurred by economic growth in the '60s, which created the need for foreign laborers, a Muslim migration to Europe began. Today, 15 million Muslims make their home in the European Union.

The earliest migrants were eager to hunker down in this new and (at first) alien world. They took Europe on its own terms, and lived with the initial myth of migration that their sojourn would be temporary. But for the overwhelming majority, Algiers and Casablanca and Beirut and Anatolia became irretrievable places. In time, there would be slaughter and upheaval in Lebanon and Iran, sectarian warfare in Syria, and a long era of sorrow and bloodshed in Algeria, just across the sea from Marseilles. Economic destitution would cut a swath of misery through the lands whence they came. Birth rates worked their way like a wrecking ball: It became impossible to transmit culture and civility and the old familiar world to the young. Migration became the only safety valve.

In the '80s, terrible civil wars were fought in Arab and Islamic countries -- with privilege on one side, militant wrath on the other. The despots and the military caste in Algeria and Tunisia and Syria and Egypt won that struggle. Their defeated opponents took to the road: From Hamburg and London and Copenhagen, the battle was now joined. If accounts were to be settled with rulers back home, the work of subversion would be done from Europe. Muslim Brotherhoods sprouted all over the Continent. There were welfare subsidies in the new surroundings, money, constitutional protections and rules of asylum to fight the old struggle.

"The whole Arab world was dangerous for me. I went to London." The words are those of an Egyptian Islamist, Yasser Sirri. In London, Sirri runs an Islamic "observation center" and agitates against the despotism of Hosni Mubarak. But Sirri, a man of 40, is wanted back home. Three sentences have been rendered against him in absentia: One condemns him to 25 years of hard labor for smuggling armed terrorists into Egypt; the second to 15 years for aiding Islamic dissidents; and the third to death for plotting to assassinate a prime minister. Sirri had fled Egypt to Yemen. But trouble trailed him there, so he moved to the Sudan, but it was no better. He turned up in London -- there, he would have liberties, and the protections of a liberal culture. There would be no extradition for him, no return to the summary justice of Cairo.

Sirri was not working in a vacuum. The geography of Islam -- and of the Islamic imagination -- has shifted in recent years. The faith has become portable. Muslims who fled their countries brought Islam with them. Men came into bilad al kufr (the lands of unbelief), but a new breed of Islamists radicalized the faith there, in the midst of the kafir (unbeliever).

The new lands were owed scant loyalty, if any, and political-religious radicals savored the space afforded them by Western civil society. But they resented the logic of assimilation. They denied their sisters and daughters the right to mix with "strangers." You would have thought that the pluralism and tumult of this open European world would spawn a version of the faith to match it. But precisely the opposite happened. In bilad al kufr, the faith became sharpened for battle. We know that life in Hamburg -- and the kind of Islam that Hamburg made possible -- was decisive in the evolution of Mohammed Atta, who led the "death pilots" of Sept. 11. It was in Hamburg where he conceived a hatred of modernity and of women and of the "McEgypt" that the Mubarak regime had brought into being. And it was in Hamburg, too, that a young "party boy" from a secular family in Lebanon underwent the transformation that would take him from an elite Catholic prep school in Beirut to the controls of a plane on Sept. 11, and its tragic end near the fields of Shanksville, Penn. In its economic deterioration, the Arab world is without cities where young Muslims of different lands can meet. A function that Beirut once provided for an older elite had been undone. European cities now provide that kind of opportunity.

Satellite TV has been crucial in the making of this new radicalism. Preachers take to the air, and reach Muslims wherever they are. From the safety of Western cities, they counsel belligerence and inveigh against assimilation. They forbid shaking hands with women examiners at universities. They warn against offering greetings to "infidels" on their religious holidays, or serving in the armies and police of the new lands. "A Muslim has no nationality except his belief," wrote an intellectual godfather of radical Islamism, the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, who was executed by Nasser in 1966. While on a visit to Saudi Arabia in 2002, I listened to a caller from Stockholm as he bared his concerns to an immensely popular preacher. He made Qutb's point: We may carry their nationalities, he said, but we belong to our own religion.

Radical Islamism's adherents are unapologetic. What is laicite (secularism) to the Muslims in France and their militant leaders? It is but the code of a debauched society that wishes to impose on Islam's children -- its young women in particular -- the ways of an infidel culture. What loyalty, at any rate, is owed France? The wrath of France's Muslim youth in the banlieues (suburbs) is seen as revenge on France for its colonial wars. France colonized Algeria in the 1830s; Algerians, along with Tunisians and Moroccans, return the favor in our own time.

France grants its troubled Muslim suburbs everything and nothing. It leaves them to their own devices, and grants them an unstated power over its foreign policy decisions on Islamic and Middle Eastern matters; but it makes no room for them in the mainstream of its life. Trouble has come even to placid Belgium. In Antwerp, Dyab Abu Jahjah, a young Lebanese, only 32, has stepped forth to "empower" the Muslims of that country. Assimilation, he says, is but "cultural rape." He came to Belgium in 1991, and he owns up to inventing a story about persecution back home; it was a "low political trick," he says, and in the nature of things. The constitution of Belgium recognizes Dutch, French, and German as official languages. Abu Jahjah insists that Arabic be added, too.

Europe's leaders know Europe's dilemmas. In ways both intended and subliminal, the escape into anti-Americanism is an attempt at false bonding with the peoples of Islam. Give the Arabs -- and the Muslim communities implanted in Europe -- anti-Americanism, give them an identification with the Palestinians, and you shall be spared their wrath. Beat the drums of opposition to America's war in Iraq, and the furies of this radical Islamism will pass you by. This is seen as a way around the troubles. But there is no exit that way. It is true that Spain supported the American campaign in Iraq, but that aside, Spain's identification with Arab aims has a long history. Of all the larger countries of the EU, Spain has been most sympathetic to Palestinian claims. It was only in 1986 that Spain recognized Israel and established diplomatic ties. With the sole exception of Greece, Spain has shown the deepest reserve toward Israel. Yet this history offered no shelter from the bombers of March 11.

* * *

Whatever political architecture Europe seeks, it will have to be built in proximity to the Other World, just across the Straits of Gibraltar and in the grip of terminal crisis. There is no prospect that the rulers of Arab lands will offer their people a decent social contract, or the opportunities for freedom. It is a sad fact that the Arab peoples no longer make claims on their rulers. Instead the "drifters," such as the embittered terrorists who blew into Madrid, now seek satisfaction almost solely in foreign lands.

You can't agitate against Mubarak in Cairo, but you can do it from the safety of Finsbury Park in London. The ferocity of the debate in the Arab world about France's decision to limit Islamic headgear in public schools is a measure of this displaced rage. Spain may attribute the cruelty visited on it to its association with America's expedition into Iraq. But the truth is darker. Jacques Chirac may believe that he has spared France Spain's terror by sitting out the Iraq war. But he is deluded. The Islamists do not make fine distinctions in the bilad al kufr.

Europe is host to a war between order and its enemies, fuelled by demography: 40% of the Arab world is under 14. Demographers tell us that the fertility replacement rate is 2.1 children per woman. Europe is frightfully below this level; in Germany it is 1.3, Italy 1.2, Spain 1.1, France 1.7 (this higher rate is a factor of its Muslim population). Fertility rates in the Islamic world are altogether different: they are 3.2 in Algeria, 3.4 in Egypt and Morocco, 5.2 in Iraq and 6.1 in Saudi Arabia. This is Europe's neighborhood, and its contemporary fate. You can tell the neighbors across the Straits, (and within the gates of Europe) that you share their dread of Pax Americana. But nemesis is near.

Five centuries ago, the Castilians took Granada from Boabdil. They were a hardy breed of sheep-herders driven by a Malthusian logic, outgrowing their grazing lands, pushing southward -- and into the New World from Seville -- to answer Castile's needs. Today there is great turmoil in Islamic lands, and a Malthusian crisis. Were it only true that those in harm's way in Europe are solely the friends of the Americans. The New World is a demon of this Islamism, it is true. But that old border between Europe and Islam has furies all its own.

Mr. Ajami, a professor at Johns Hopkins, is the author of "The Dream Palace of the Arabs" (Vintage, 1999).

http://online.wsj.com/public/us

Argentina's Cover-up for Iran

March 18, 2004
United Press International
Martin Arostegui

BUENOS AIRES -- A wreath-laying ceremony took place Thursday at an empty lot in the center of Buenos Aires that marks the spot where the Israeli embassy was blown up by a truck bomb 12 years ago. Two years later, in 1994, a building housing the Argentine Israeli Mutual Association, known as AMIA, was also destroyed in an even worse bombing that killed more than 100 people.

Despite being the most deadly attacks allegedly carried out by Islamist extremists in Latin America, investigations into the incidents remain mired in political and diplomatic controversy amid accusations of a cover-up by Argentine and Iranian officials.

"God willing, these acts will never happen again," said President Nestor Kirchner, who compared the atrocities that shocked Argentina a decade ago to last week's horrifying train bombings in Spain. But Israel's ambassador to Buenos Aires, Benjamin Oron, questions the government's seriousness. He told reporters, "There are a lot of empty holes in the investigations" on the onslaught against the Argentine Jewish community.

"There is a lack of political will to investigate the case," said Marta Nercellas, a lawyer representing families of victims. While she said that Kirchner has been more cooperative in pursuing the investigations than previous presidents, "an official cover-up has been underway for the past 10 years" she claimed.

The case carries major international implications which touch on the highly sensitive relations between Argentina and Iran, whose officials are seriously implicated along with high-level members of Argentina's security services.

Police Chief Juan Jose Ribelli, who was a second in command of the Buenos Aires police force, is accused of taking a $2.5 million bribe for providing a van in which explosives were fixed by Hezbollah terrorists. He has just been brought to trial in the last few months. Lawyers allege that Ribelli has been protected by senior colleagues who have misled investigations, destroyed key evidence, and made witnesses disappear.

"It's now officially conceded that there was police involvement but the plot reaches much higher to the very top of the government," said Nercellas. She pointed to clues indicating at least passive participation by the national intelligence service or State Intelligence Secretariat, known as SIDE, and former President Carlos Menem who is currently under investigation on corruption charges.

Following the '92 bombing against the Israeli embassy, SIDE had much of the Hezbollah infrastructure in Buenos Aires under surveillance, according to intelligence files turned over to investigating attorneys. Key Iranian Embassy personnel, suspected militants and safe houses, including a meat warehouse, were being watched. Somehow, the targets were "lost" during a 24- to 48-hour period preceding the second attack on AMIA.

It's further alleged that Menem, took a $10 million bribe from Iran whose ambassador to Argentina at the time, Heine Soleimonpour, and other Iranian security and diplomatic officials figure on a list of 14 indictments issued by Argentine courts. Former Argentine Foreign Minister Carlos Ruckauf actually made a public apology to Iran when the indictment were announced in 2003. It's believed that he was under pressure from major food exporters to mend fences with Teheran.

"We are going to be able to prove that the Menem government obstructed investigations," said Nercellas, who bases her claims on testimony by a defector of Iran's intelligence service, Abolahem Mesbahi. He has worked with Germany's intelligence services, but is considered unreliable by U.S. counter-terrorist officials.

Mesbahi has said a close assistant to Menem attached to the Argentine Embassy in Teheran, George Ruben D'Ellis, acted as courier in negotiating the bribe which was deposited through accounts in Switzerland used by Iran's intelligence agencies to launder funds for extremist operations.

Menem, who now lives in Chile where he is avoiding court citations on other charges, strongly denies any wrongdoing. An Argentine security official who directed international operations for the Interior Ministry, Mario Baizan, told United Press International that the accusations are false.

"It's ridiculous to think that Menem would have implicated himself in international terrorism by taking a bribe from the Iranians. He was a close ally of the United States who cooperated very much against rogue governments such as Cuba," he said.

Baizan believes that the charges are a part of an effort to scapegoat the former president, possibly by corrupt elements within Argentina's security services who are trying to cover their own tracks.

D'Ellis was working for Yoma Karim, a powerful Arab-Argentine businessman who was selling submarine technology and enriched uranium to Iran, according to Baizan. Menem blocked those sales and froze relations with Teheran, he insists.

D'Ellis is not available to testify, having died in a mysterious car accident in Buenos Aires two years ago.

Cover-up efforts seem to have persisted until very recently. Late last year, British authorities detained Soleimonpour while he was passing through England. According to Argentine officials who participated in the negotiations to obtain his extradition, the British Home Office released the Iranian diplomat because Argentine judges would not move quickly enough with evidence to sustain charges.

The U.K. government may have also caved into pressure from Iran which threatened to attack British interests. The Foreign Office issued a travel alert for Argentina after specific threats were received by British Embassy in Buenos Aires while the diplomatic mission in Teheran was the target of a drive-by shooting during the time that Soleimonpour was held in London.

"For Iran, it's of vital importance to keep the lid on this case," said a counter-terrorism analyst. "Its full exposure would seriously compromise Iran's support for terrorist networks".

Imad Moughnieh who is accused of having arranged the logistics for the '94 attack in trips between Argentina and the tri-border region with Paraguay and Brazil, is allegedly one of Hezbollah's top operatives who is believed to be the main liaison with al-Qaida. According to officials involved in the investigations, Moughhieh arranged visits to Teheran by top al-Qaida leaders, including al-Zawahiri, a chief lieutenant of Osama bin Laden.

Teheran has rejected appeals by Argentine Foreign Minister Rafael Bielsa to arrange a trial for accused Iranian officials in a neutral country.

During last month's summit of G-15 Third World leaders hosted by President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, an expected meeting between Kirchner and Iranian President Jatami never took place.

According to reports in the Israeli press, Jatami called off the session because he did not want to discuss the Buenos Aires bombings.

http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20040318-045749-3039r

Bahrain Rioters Hit Streets, Torch Cars of Arab Playboy Boozers

March 22, 2004
World Tribune.com
worldtribune.com

ABU DHABI -- Shi'ite attacks against foreigners are now targeting playboys from neighboring Arab states who come to Bahrain for the more readily available alcohol.

Western diplomatic sources said last week's street violence appears to have shifted its focus from Westerners to Gulf Arab nationals who use Bahrain as the watering hole of the region. The kingdom is the only Gulf state that approves the public sale and consumption of alcohol, banned by Islam.

Most of the patrons in the La Terrasse restaurant, one of the targets of last week's rampage, were Gulf Arabs, particularly Saudi nationals. Two cars owned by Saudi nationals were torched.

The diplomatic sources said the Shi'ite vigilante campaign appears to be supported by members of Bahrain's parliament, dominated by fundamentalists. Many parliamentarians have called for a ban on alcohol and the expulsion of the U.S. military presence in the kingdom.

Bahraini police and security forces have been unable to quell Shi'ite attacks against foreigners, including those from other Gulf Cooperation Council states, Middle East Newsline reported.
The diplomatic sources said police have often seemed unwilling to respond to complaints of attacks by Shi'ites against Westerners or other GCC nationals said to have been in violation of Islamic law.

Last Wednesday, Arab and Western expatriates came under attack by Shi'ite militants in the capital Manama. Shi'ites torched cars and attacked patrons in a restaurant in what was termed a campaign against the sale of alcohol in the kingdom.

Scores of Shi'ites, armed with knives and batons, attacked customers, looted and vandalized restaurants and torched cars. At least three people were injured and several of the attackers were arrested.

The rampage began with attacks on suspected Asian alcohol dealers in Manama. Shi'ite rioters, who sought to break bottles of alcohol, clashed with Bahraini security forces throughout the night as the violence spread toward the affluent suburbs.

"I doubt that I will continue to operate in Bahrain after what happened," J.J. Bakhtiar, the co-owner of La Terrasse restaurant said. "Customers are afraid, and I had to spend all day today convincing the customers who had reserved places at the restaurant that it was safe for them to come here and enjoy a meal."

This was the second Shi'ite attack in as many weeks in what was termed an Islamic campaign against alcohol. In early March, hundreds of Shi'ite youngsters rampaged through the Asian section of Manama, beating expatriate laborers and destroying property. Bahrain has a Shi'ite majority that regards itself as close to neighboring Iran, but is ruled by a Sunni royal family.

http://216.26.163.62/2004/me_gulf_03_22.html

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