Archive for February 7, 2012

More than 5,400 people have been killed in Syria since the uprising began in March. The number of dead in Homs alone is now over over 200 and climbing. The Assad regime says terrorists acting out a foreign conspiracy to destabilize the country are behind the uprising, not people seeking to transform the authoritarian regime. He’s right, it was Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood that claimed responsibility in December 2011 for two suicide bombings in Damascus that killed 44 people.

Yet, you have Israeli politicians like Moshe (Boge) Ya’alon telling Army Radio that the end of Assad’s regime could bring ‘relatively moderate’ Sunni elements into power, adding that he did not think radical Islam would take over the country if Syrian President Bashar Assad is ousted. Boge says that, “there could be different developments in such a situation, some of which could be positive as far as Israel is concerned, like a fissure in the Tehran-Damascus-Beirut-Hamas axis of evil… There’s a difference between Syria and Egypt,” says Ya’alon.

Syria is not a trophy for Iran exclusively; Turkey is waiting in the wings, ever ready to control the entire region. Turkey’s Prime Minister Tayyip Recep Erdogan has been urging Assad in Arabic, “Ya Bashar! Man dakka dukka.” In English, that means: “He who hammers will be hammered” or “what goes around comes around.” He reminded Bashar of what his father did when the Syrian army massacred 10,000 Sunnis in 1982; it will come back to hound him. Paradoxically and quite hypocritically, Erdogan neglects to confess the Armenian Genocide.

It is no secret that Turkey has worked extensively with the Muslim Brotherhood and has set its sights on Syria. The Turkish Muslim Brotherhood Network, written last year by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, lays out an iron clad case for Turkey’s involvement in the Flotila and its collaboration with the Muslim Brotherhood.

Boge needs to study his region’s history. The Syrian regime’s arch-nemesis is the Muslim Brotherhood. Syria was the first nation after Egypt where the Ikhwan’s movement took root. It was the Arab nationalist Baath Party that banned the brotherhood and tightened state control over religious institutions to weaken its influence. Israel has two choices relative to Syria. It can support one side of the same two-sided tyrannical coin: Arab Nationalism or Islamist Utopianism. I opt for the first and Ya’alon opts for the second while affixing an oxi-moronic “moderate” label to his argument. This in not the first time that the Sunnis wanted to take control. Violent clashes between the Ikhwan and the regime ensued a short time after the Ba’athists came to power in April 1964 when violence erupted in Hamah, led by Marwan Hadid. In 1965, the events in Hamah ignited violence in Damascus as well. Subsequently, in April 1967, riots erupted among the Sunni population all over Syria, but the regime managed to suppress the violence. Law No. 49 stipulates the death penalty for membership in the Ikhwan. In February 1990 the establishment of an Islamist alliance, the “National Front for Saving Syria” (preceded by the “National Alliance for the Liberation of Syria”), ‘Ali Sadr al-Din al-Bayanuni’ declared that the main purpose of this body was to “topple the Syrian regime.”

In observing what happened in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt over the last year, supporting Assad instead of the Ikwhat seems like an obvious choice, despite the ostensibly naive wishes of Boge Ya’alon; Egypt used public unrest against Arab dictatorships to establish its dominion; it won using this strategy; this is an indisputable fact. The Muslim Brotherhood, regardless of whether the United States considers them to be ‘moderate’ Islamists, are actually the mother of all Islamic terrorism. Haman was a hub for Islamists as Homs is. Many Syrian Christians and Druze share Alawite fears about Sunni domination, even if a democratic system is put in place. Ali Sadreddine Bayanouni, Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood in exile, who has lived in London since being ejected from Amman in 2000, has supposedly moderated the brotherhood’s declared objectives and principles. In October 2005, the brotherhood joined other opposition groups in signing the Damascus Declaration, which called for the establishment of a liberal democracy in Syria. But these are the tactics of Muruna and of Hudaybia, which Arafat used in order to bring him from exile into Israel’s back yard.

As the great Chinese warrior, Sun Tzu, famously said thousands of years ago, war is deception.

The problem with the Islamic deception we’re seeing unfold in the Middle East today is that its targets appear to be more interested in responding with willful ignorance.