Levitt Letter Extra News

By Monisha Bansal
www.cnsnews.com

The Saudi government has not only broken its promise and failed to eliminate anti-western rhetoric from its public school textbooks, some Saudi-funded schools on U.S. soil continue to incite violence, a Persian Gulf watchdog group alleged Wednesday.

One of those schools — The Islamic Saudi Academy — is located in Alexandria, Va., a short drive from the nation’s capital, according to the Institute for Gulf Affairs in a report that it released in conjunction with the human rights group, Freedom House.

“They are telling Saudi students and American students of the Academy that you must hate Christians and Jews and consider them enemies until the Day of Judgment and at the end of time,” said Ali Al-Ahmed, director of the Institute for Gulf Affairs. “This is very dangerous because this is how you get a terrorist at the end of the day.”

In November, Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, a valedictorian at the Islamic Saudi Academy and member of al Qaeda, was found guilty of plotting to kill President George W. Bush, Al-Ahmed said.

Ali was raised in Falls Church, Va., but was arrested in Saudi Arabia in 2003 while attending college in Medina. He was transported back to the U.S., last year, convicted in U.S. District Court in Alexandria in November and sentenced in March to 30 years in prison.

Al-Ahmed said students like Ahmed Omar Abu Ali are similar to a deadly weapon. “It is more dangerous than planting a bomb, because a bomb will go off and have short impact, but to have these students graduating every year with these ideas is a lifetime effect,” he said.

In 2002, just months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York City and the Pentagon, (15 of the 19 hijackers who participated in the attacks were from Saudi Arabia) Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal declared that “our schools and our faith teach peace and tolerance.”

“There is no room in our schools for hatred, for intolerance or for anti-western thinking,” Al-Faisal added.

In March of this year, the Saudi government stated that it had removed all of the content from its public school textbooks that disparaged other religions. But on Monday, the Saudi Embassy in Washington, D.C., backed away from that statement while responding to the Institute for Gulf Affairs and Freedom House study. The embassy explained that the changes required more time.

“Overhauling an educational system is a massive undertaking. There are hundreds of books that are being revised to comply with the new requirements, and the process remains ongoing,” said Saudi Ambassador Prince Turki Al-Faisal.

He added that “the Saudi government has worked diligently during the last five years to overhaul its education system, which includes textbooks, teacher training, and the introduction of new teaching methods.”

“The objective of the educational system,” the prince added, “is to fight intolerance and to prepare Saudi youth with the skills and knowledge to compete in the global economy.”

According to the Institute for Gulf Affairs and Freedom House report, current Saudi textbooks obtained by the Institute indicate that intolerance is still being taught.

“These books continue to reflect a curriculum that inculcates religious hatred toward those who do not follow Wahhabi teachings,” the report stated. Wahhabism is a fundamentalist sect of Sunni Islam dominant in Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

“When the current school year ends, thousands more will graduate from Saudi public schools steeped in the belief that those of differing religious faiths are morally inferior and even evil,” the report alleged. “Their texts will have taught them that peaceful coexistence with so-called ‘infidels’ is unattainable and that violence to spread Islam is not only permissible, but an obligation.”

“There is a lot of misinformation and disinformation about others in these textbooks. These textbooks groom a child to be a terrorist,” Al-Ahmed added.

With about five million children in Saudi public schools instructed each year in Islamic studies from Ministry of Education textbooks, and many more outside of Saudi Arabia, Al-Ahmed told Cybercast News Service that the threat “is more dangerous than the Chernobyl reactor.”

“If even 1 percent takes this to heart, you will have a lot more terrorists than just the 15 (Saudis) that we saw on September 11,” Al-Ahmed said. He alleged that Saudi schools are graduating 1,000 terrorists each year.

“Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden understands this well,” Al-Ahmed asserted. “In his April 23, 2006, audiotape, he railed against those who would interfere with school curricula.”

The Islamic Saudi Academy is funded by the Saudi government and according to the report uses the same textbooks as those in Saudi Arabia to teach Islamic Studies courses. The Academy did not return phone calls made Wednesday seeking comment for this article.

by Daniel Pipes
www.frontpagemagazine.com

The illegal immigration of non-Western peoples, I predict, will become an all-consuming issue in every Western country.

As Western birth rates plummet, as communication and transportation networks improve, and as radical Islam increasingly rears its aggressive head, Europeans, Americans, and others worry about their economic standards and the continuity of their cultures. After ignoring this issue for decades, reactions in Europe especially have sharpened of late.

• The French lower house of parliament passed a tough new immigration law.
• Austria’s interior minister, Liese Prokop, asserted publicly that 45 percent of her country’s Muslim immigrants “cannot be integrated,” and admonished them to “choose another country” in which to live.
• The Dutch minister of immigration, Rita Verdonk, withdrew citizenship from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Muslim-born immigrant who became renowned as a critic of Islam.

But the most dramatic, agonizing, and consequential developments for immigration to the West are taking place along the remote west coast of Africa. It has emerged as a main springboard for would-be emigrants to access the riches of Spain and then all Europe.

West Africa’s role is a new one. Until late 2005, emigrants gravitated to Morocco, in part because, separated by the Straits of Gibraltar, it is a mere eight miles [13 km] away from Europe. Also, they could easily sneak into the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla. At worst, they could reach the Canary Islands, a Spanish territory 70 miles [110 km] off the coast of West Africa. Any of these served equally well as a gateway to all Europe.

But no longer: under intense Spanish and EU pressure, Moroccan authorities cracked down hard on illegals to the point of dumping them without provisions in the desert. The same forbidding inhospitality reigns in the Western Sahara, a territory to Morocco’s south fully under its control. Meanwhile, the European Maritime Border Guard Corps patrols the Mediterranean Sea with increasing efficiency.

That made Mauritania, south of the Moroccan-ruled areas and one of the poorest, most isolated countries in the world, the new transit point of choice. Africans and other would-be European migrants, especially South Asians, began turning up in large numbers. Nuadibu (population: 90,000) found itself hosting more than 10,000 transients in early 2006. Under pressure from Spain, the Mauritanians also cracked down.

Ever resourceful, migrants repaired further south, now to Senegal. The Canaries run takes less than a day from Morocco but 3 days from Mauritania and 7-10 days from Senegal. Notoriously rough seas off West Africa can easily overwhelm the open wooden fishing boats and their single outboard engines as they cover the 900 miles [1,400 km].

Manuel Pombo, Spanish ambassador-at-large for humanitarian issues, reports that up to 40 per cent of those attempting to reach the Canaries die en route. Ahmedou Ould Haye, head of the Red Crescent in Mauritania, calls it “collective suicide.” Another observer sadly predicts, “Three months or so later, some of these sorry vessels may creep into the Caribbean — as ghost ships, or worse.”

These gruesome odds notwithstanding, the waves of immigration keep growing, in good part because once they land on Spanish territory their reception is so accommodating and very few illegals are ever deported. (A head of emergency services in the Canaries, Gerardo Garcia, compared landing there to going on holiday.) On May 18, a record 656 persons landed in the Canaries, or one-seventh of the total number of arrivals in all of 2005. “It is almost like an invasion,” lamented a volunteer in the Canaries.

Hoping to stem the immigration tide at its source through deportation agreements, Spanish diplomatic delegations offer West African countries financial aid in exchange. But African governments resist these, appreciating the remittances from Europe as much as they dislike the bad publicity of large-scale expulsions. These palliatives cannot possibly solve the tensions as have-nots try to crash the haves’ party.

Rickard Sandell of the Royal Elcano Institute in Madrid predicts that the migration now underway could signal the prospect of an African “mass exodus” and armed conflict. What one sees today “is only the beginning of an immigration phenomenon that could evolve into one of the largest in history…the mass assault on Spain’s African border may just be a first warning of what to expect of the future.”

Thus begins the first chapter of what promises to be a long and terrible story.

www.omegaletter.com

Appeasement: “the making of concessions to an aggressor in order to avoid war.”

The most celebrated case of appeasement in modern history was the Chamberlain/Deladrier compact with Adolph Hitler.

British PM Neville Chamberlain went with French leader Eduard Deladrier to meet with Adolph Hitler in Munich. At that meeting, Hitler assured the British and French leaders that war could be avoided if they would sign off on Germany’s annexation of Czechoslovakia.

Undeterred by the fact that Czechoslovakia was an independent state that wasn’t theirs to give, they agreed to trade Czechoslovakia’s freedom for their own.

Returning from Munich, waving a worthless piece of paper bearing Hitler’s signature, Neville Chamberlain breathlessly pronounced; “My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time… Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.”

One year later, Britain’s nice quiet sleep was interrupted by the sound of Nazi jackboots marching into Poland…

The WWII troika of appeasers, Britain, France and Germany, have proved George Bernard Shaw’s observation that, ‘the one thing man learns from history is that man learns nothing from history.

I have a friend in a 12-step program who is forever repeating one-liners he hears at meetings. One always stuck with me: “the definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over again, thinking this time, they will turn out differently. A variation I’ve heard since is comparing it to renting a movie over and over again, hoping this time it will have a happy ending.

Both sound about as nuts as the idea that, this time, appeasing a fascist dictator with a fanatical obsession for war will work better today that it did in 1938.

There is little doubt that the leaders of the so-called EU Three are as aware of the historical uselessness of appeasing a dictator as was Winston Churchill, who likened appeasement to ‘feeding a crocodile in the hope he will eat you last.’

The US State Department has signed on to the Appeasement Brigade, offering Iran a series of incentives to drop their quest for nuclear power. This, despite the fact that Iranian officials have gleefully observed that they are indebted to the Europeans and their supporters for “buying time” for the regime in Tehran, allowing it to bring its so-called “nuclear power” program to fruition.

Appeasement has a long tradition among US liberals, but when it infects conservatives (as it has), the prognosis could be fatal.

Jimmy Carter’s diplomatic efforts including negotiating a peace deal between Egypt and Israel in 1977. To do so, he met all of Egypt’s demands, including forcing Israel to give back all the territory it captured from Egypt except the Gaza Strip.

Carter used the ‘carrot and stick’ method. To get Israel to give back the Sinai, Carter linked it to continued US foreign aid to Israel. To get Egypt to sign the peace treaty, he made Egypt the second largest recipient of US foreign aid in the world, after Israel. Israel got nothing it didn’t already have but an essentially meaningless piece of paper. The Carter deal created a new foreign policy term, that of ‘cold’ peace’ to describe the subsequent state of Israeli-Egyptian relations. It was, and remains, a sham.

The Clinton administration launched the ‘land for peace’ initiative between Israel and the Palestinians with the signing of the 1993 Oslo Agreement. The ‘land for peace’ initiative was a textbook example of appeasement in action.

To appease the Palestinian uprising, Clinton convinced Israel to accept Yasser Arafat as a ‘peace partner’. As with Egypt, Israel got nothing it didn’t already have, Arafat got whatever he wanted. By 1998, the Clinton administration had brokered a deal whereby Israel would give up virtually all of the 1967 territory in exchange for peace with a Palestinian state.

For most of its first term, the Bush administration resisted calls from the Left to appease the various threats facing the United States. The Left rushed to appease Saddam Hussein, the French, the Germans and the UN. They resisted any effort to deal with the threats, calling instead for more diplomacy, more appeasement, more negotiations.

It didn’t avoid war anymore than Chamberlain’s Munich Pact did. It only stalled it for awhile to allow Hitler to get stronger. In Iraq’s case, the delay gave Saddam time to recruit, equip and train his feyadeen insurgency movement. And instead of the war ending in April, 2003, it was only just beginning.

The ‘carrot and stick’ offer being made to Iran will go down in history (if there is anyone left to write it) as one of the most egregious appeasement efforts in modern history. The ‘carrot’ is nuclear power for a regime dedicated to a nuclear weapon. The ’stick’ is no nuclear power for a regime that already has it.

Winston Churchill was one of the most eminently quotable politicians in modern history. His comment about the crocodile is timeless. So was his admonition to the British Parliament in opposition to the parliamentary appeasers 70 years ago.

“You must look at the facts… for the facts are looking at you.”