Iranian Strike Back on the Table for U.S.
From Eye on the World:
A military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities is "back on the table," for U.S. military planners after diplomacy failed to achieve any results, Joe Klein of Time magazine writes.
Intelligence sources say that the U.S. Army's Central Command, which is in charge of organizing military operations in the Middle East, has made some real progress in planning targeted air strikes — aided, in large part, by the vastly improved human-intelligence operations in the region.Money quote:
"There really wasn't a military option a year ago," an Israeli military source told me. "But they've gotten serious about the planning, and the option is real now."
Israel has been brought into the planning process, I'm told, because U.S. officials are frightened by the possibility that the right-wing Netanyahu government might go rogue and try to whack the Iranians on its own.
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Italy: Muslim Brotherhood and Its Current Challenges
(ANSAmed) — ROME — “If we keep seeing all Muslims as fundamentalists, and all fundamentalists as actual or potential enemies of the West, it is most likely that they will in fact become our enemies, and we will become theirs”. And “the risk is that the logic of the ‘construction of an enemy’ will prevail on both sides of the Mediterranean”. These are fragments of the book “I Fratelli Musulmani nel mondo contemporaneo” (The Muslim Brotherhood in the modern world), by Massimo Campanini and Karim Mezram, published by Utet (254 pages, 22 euros). The book was edited by several experts, ranging from Egypt to Sudan, from Jordan to the Palestine of Hamas, from the Maghreb countries to the United States and Europe. They illustrate a phenomenon that is too often seen in a narrow and monolithic view. The risks of superficiality are also stressed in the first lines of the book: distinguishing between “moderate Islamism” and “radical Islamism”, in the words of Campanini (professor at the Orientale University in Naples, and Mezran (John Hopkins University), “means adopting a “Euro-centric, Western-centric” vision, in which the moderates are those who accept the political concept and international order established by the West, and the radicals contest these “putting their universality up for discussion”. “Despite this ambiguity”, the two scholars continued, “one can say that a ‘moderate’ Islamism, though conservative in many of its choices, particularly on a social level, does exist”. And one of the ways moderate Islamism has tried to legitimate itself has been the one chosen by the Muslim Brotherhood, with its “patient consensus building and political representativeness” in several Contries. With regard to Europe, now the movement must deal with a new, internal drive for change towards an Islam that no longer searches the debate “with” the West, but has become an European Islam “in” the West, and therefore can no longer be looked at with the categories used for Islamism in the past and the Islamism of Muslim countries.
On the other side, betweeen North Africa and the Middle East, the role that could be played by the Muslim Brotherhood from now on is yet unclear. “We believe”, the editors continue, “that the contrast between Green and Black, present in the Middle East for at least 40 years, must be left behind”. With ‘Black’ the editors mean the repression of authoritarian States and autocracies, which justify themselves as barriers to extremist and radical Islamism; with Green they mean Islamism, as a matter of fact the only real opposition to these systems for the time being. And on this junction, the Muslim Brotherhood — backed by the consensus it gained because the movement often tries to fill the gaps in State welfare — could now be put to the test. “Only by giving the Muslim parties a chance to democratise, one can hope that they will become more democratic” underline Campanini and Mezram. “Only by accepting their presence and role in contemporary political debate they will hopefully find their place in that context”. (ANSAmed).
stoopid crowley
US Reiterates Disagreement With France Over Veil Ban
US officials on Wednesday reiterated Washington’s disagreement with a measure approved by the lower house of France’s National Assembly banning the use of face-covering Islamic veils in public.
“We do not think that you should legislate what people can wear or not wear associated with their religious beliefs,” said State Department spokesman Philip Crowley.
“Here in the United States, we would take a different step to balance security and to respect religious freedom and the symbols that go along with religious freedom,” he said.
The bill is not yet law, as it will now go to France’s Senate in September.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s determination to ban the hijab and the burka won enough political support to approve the measure, even though critics argue that it breaches French and European human rights legislation.
“I would only say that, as I understand it, this is a first step in what may be a lengthy legislative and perhaps legal process,” said Crowley.
"U.S. officials are frightened by the possibility that the right-wing Netanyahu government might go rogue and try to whack the Iranians on its own."
Meanwhile, NORMAL Americans are frightened by the possibility that Israel might not.
Remember, remember - freedom's last chance November.
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