Gamaa al Islamiya: Check out the “Mod­er­ate” in the middle

Intro­duc­tion: This broad­cast con­cludes a long series of pro­grams, enfold­ing cov­er­age of the Wik­iLeaks phe­nom­e­non with the coups and upris­ings in the Mid­dle East. (This com­pli­cated, deep analy­sis is syn­op­sized in FTR #737.) Assess­ing Egypt, Libya and other coun­tries affected by the “youthquake” in the Mid­dle East, the broad­cast ana­lyzes the alleged “mod­er­a­tion” of the Islamist forces loom­ing on the polit­i­cal horizon.

After review­ing the Al-Qaeda links of the Libyan fight­ers enjoy­ing NATO  sup­port, the pro­gram high­lights the grow­ing pres­ence of Muslm Broth­er­hood ter­ror­ist out­crop­pings on the Egypt­ian polit­i­cal scene.

Wael Ghonim: Is he an Islamist?

Broth­er­hood off­shoot Gamaa al Islamiya has been par­tic­u­larly vis­i­ble in the wake of the Piggy-Back Coup, fea­tur­ing con­victed assas­sins of Anwar Sadat recy­cled as “democrats.”

Other ter­ror­ist ele­ments who may ben­e­fit from the tur­moil include al-Qaeda-linked ele­ments in Yemen and Hezbol­lah.

A sig­nif­i­cant fea­ture of the pro­gram con­cerns devel­op­ments in Turkey. Billed as “mod­er­ates” and seen as a role model for emerg­ing Islamist move­ments in the Mid­dle East, the regime of Mr. Erdo­gan has seen the rise of the Gulen forces–again billed as “mod­er­ates.” Being inves­ti­gated by the FBI for activ­i­ties, the Gulen ele­ments have appar­ently forged links inside of the Turk­ish secret police.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: The opin­ion that Egypt­ian Islamists want a sec­u­lar gov­ern­ment that will fail, ush­er­ing them into power in the wake of pop­u­lar dis­il­lu­sion­ment; Egypt­ian upris­ing fig­ure Wael Ghonim’s found­ing of an appar­ently Islamist web­site; Turk­ish secu­rity forces’ destruc­tion of a book reveal­ing Gulen pen­e­tra­tion of that country’s police and intel­li­gence estab­lish­ments; a Wik­iLeaks “dis­clo­sure” about Mossad links with Bahrain and other Mid­dle East­ern coun­tries expe­ri­enc­ing upheaval–a fact that may well polar­ize the pop­u­la­tions of those coun­tries and lead to war with Israel.

1. Turn­ing to the sub­ject of the Libyan con­flict, the pro­gram reviews the fact that NATO fight­ers are help­ing forces aligned with al-Qaeda.

In an inter­view with the Ital­ian news­pa­per Il Sole 24 Ore, Mr al-Hasidi admit­ted that he had recruited “around 25″ men from the Derna area in east­ern Libya to fight against coali­tion troops in Iraq. Some of them, he said, are “today are on the front lines in Adjabiya”.

Mr al-Hasidi insisted his fight­ers “are patri­ots and good Mus­lims, not ter­ror­ists,” but added that the “mem­bers of al-Qaeda are also good Mus­lims and are fight­ing against the invader”.

His rev­e­la­tions came even as Idriss Deby Itno, Chad’s pres­i­dent, said al-Qaeda had man­aged to pil­lage mil­i­tary arse­nals in the Libyan rebel zone and acquired arms, “includ­ing surface-to-air mis­siles, which were then smug­gled into their sanctuaries”.

Mr al-Hasidi admit­ted he had ear­lier fought against “the for­eign inva­sion” in Afghanistan, before being “cap­tured in 2002 in Pesh­war, in Pak­istan”. He was later handed over to the US, and then held in Libya before being released in 2008. . . .

“Libyan Rebel Com­man­der Admits His Fight­ers Have al-Qaeda Links” by Praveen Swami, Nick Squires and Dun­can Gard­ham; The Tele­graph [UK]; 3/25/2011.

2. More on the Libyan fighter/al Qaeda link:

Amer­ica is now at war to pro­tect a Libyan province that’s been an epi­cen­ter of anti-American jihad.

In recent years, at mosques through­out east­ern Libya, rad­i­cal imams have been “urg­ing wor­ship­pers to sup­port jihad in Iraq and else­where,” accord­ing to Wik­iLeaked cables. More trou­bling: The city of Derna, east of Beng­hazi, was a “well­spring” of sui­cide bombers that tar­geted U.S. troops in Iraq.

By impos­ing a no-fly zone over East­ern Libya, the U.S. and its coali­tion part­ners have effec­tively embraced the break­away repub­lic of Cyre­naica. As you can see on the map above, Libya is a mashup of three his­tor­i­cally dis­tinct provinces. As recently as the 1940s, Cyre­naica was an inde­pen­dent emi­rate, with its cap­i­tal in Benghazi.

The emnity between Cyre­naica and Tripoli­ta­nia runs deep. The Emir of Cyre­naica awk­wardly cob­bled together mod­ern Libya and ruled as its monarch. This is the same king that Qaddafi deposed in his coup of 1969. And the Qaddafi regime has seen the for­mer king’s home­land as a threat ever since, as this Wik­ileaked cable from our Tripoli embassy explains:

East­ern Libya had suf­fered ... from a lack of invest­ment and gov­ern­ment resources, part of a cam­paign by the al-Qadhafi regime to keep the area poor and, the­o­ret­i­cally, less likely to develop as a viable alter­na­tive locus of power to Tripoli.

Another cable reports that the dis­re­spect is mutual:

Res­i­dents of east­ern Libya ... view the al-Qadhafa clan [Qaddafi’s tribe] as une­d­u­cated, uncouth inter­lop­ers from an incon­se­quen­tial part of the coun­try who have “stolen” the right to rule in Libya.

That’s the back­ground. Flash for­ward to 2008: A West Point analy­sis of a cache of al Qaeda records dis­cov­ered that nearly 20 per­cent of for­eign fight­ers in Iraq were Libyans, and that on a per-capita basis Libya nearly dou­bled Saudi Ara­bia as the top source of for­eign fighters.

The word “fighter” here is mis­lead­ing. For the most part, Libyans didn’t go to Iraq to fight; they went to blow them­selves up — along with Amer­i­can G.I.‘s. (Among those whose “work” was detailed in the al Qaeda records, 85 per­cent of the Libyans were listed as sui­cide bombers.) Over­whelm­ingly, these mil­i­tants came “from cities in North‐East Libya, an area long known for Jihadi‐linked mil­i­tancy.” [UPDATE: West Point’s Com­bat­ting Ter­ror­ism Cen­ter refused to com­ment on its own report.]

A Wik­iLeaked cable from 2008 explained that Cyre­naicans were wag­ing jihad against U.S. troops as “a last act of defi­ance against the Qad­hafi regime.” After the U.S. nor­mal­ized rela­tions with Qaddaffi in 2006, Cyre­na­cians believed they no longer had any shot at top­pling him:

Many east­ern­ers feared the U.S. would not allow Qadhafi’s regime to fall and there­fore viewed direct con­fronta­tion with the GOL [Gov­ern­ment of Libya] in the near-term as a fool’s errand.... Fight­ing against U.S. and coali­tion forces in Iraq rep­re­sented a way for frus­trated young rad­i­cals to strike a blow against both Qad­hafi and against his per­ceived Amer­i­can backers.

The epi­cen­ter of Libyan jihadism is the city of Derna — the home­town of more than half of Libya’s for­eign fight­ers, accord­ing the West Point analy­sis. The city of 80,000 has a his­tory of vio­lent resis­tance to occu­py­ing pow­ers — includ­ing Amer­i­cans, who cap­tured the city in the First Bar­bary War.

A sur­pris­ingly read­able cable titled “Die Hard in Derna” makes clear that the city “takes great pride” in hav­ing sent so many of its sons to kill Amer­i­can sol­diers in Iraq, quot­ing one res­i­dent as say­ing: “It’s jihad — it’s our duty, and you’re talk­ing about peo­ple who don’t have much else to be proud of.”

“U.S. Bombs Libya, Helps . . . Jihadists?!”; Rolling Stone; 3/21/2011.

3. In Yemen, the pass­ing of the old order may weaken U.S. counter-terrorism capabilities.

Coun­tert­er­ror­ism oper­a­tions in Yemen have ground to a halt, allow­ing al-Qaida’s dead­liest branch out­side of Pak­istan to oper­ate more freely inside the coun­try and to increase plot­ting for pos­si­ble attacks against Europe and the United States, U.S. diplo­mats, intel­li­gence ana­lysts and coun­tert­er­ror­ism offi­cials say.

In the polit­i­cal tumult sur­round­ing Yemen’s embat­tled pres­i­dent, Ali Abdul­lah Saleh, many Yemeni troops have aban­doned their posts or have been sum­moned to the cap­i­tal, Sanaa, to help sup­port the tot­ter­ing gov­ern­ment, the offi­cials said. Al-Qaida in the Ara­bian Penin­sula, the group’s affil­i­ate, has stepped in to fill this power vac­uum, and Yemeni secu­rity forces have come under increased attacks in recent weeks. . . .

“Unrest in Yemen Is Seen as an Open­ing to a Branch of al-Qaida” by Eric Schmitt [New York Times]; San Jose Mer­cury News; 4/4/2011.

4. The media dar­ling of the Egypt­ian uprising–Google mar­ket­ing exec­u­tive Wael Ghonim–set up what appears to be an Islamist web­site (albeit a rel­a­tively “mod­ern” one). A grad­u­ate of Amer­i­can Uni­ver­sity in Cairo (at which Mus­lim Brotherhood-linked ele­ments embrace the eco­nomic the­o­ries of Ibn Khal­dun), Ghonim is alleged to have devel­oped one of the most pop­u­lar web­sites in the Arab World.

Is Ghonim an Islamist? Is he Mus­lim Brotherhood?

We may be fairly con­fi­dent that the dri­ving ele­ments behind what we have termed “the Piggy-Back Coup” will doubt­less assure us of the “mod­er­ate” nature of the site and its con­tents. An Eng­lish ver­sion of the web­site (per­haps edited for West­ern con­sump­tion) is avail­able here.

. . . 1998–2002 – Helped in the launch of one of the most vis­ited web­sites in the Arab world (http://www.islamway.com) . . .

“Wael Ghonim”; Wikipedia.org.

5. The forces of Gamma al Islamiya–a Mus­lim Broth­er­hood off­shoot that assas­si­nated Anwar Sadat and exe­cuted the Luxor mas­sacre of 1997–is join­ing the “mod­er­a­tion” dance in Egypt. (Gamma al Islamiya is also tied to Sheikh Rah­man, con­victed in con­nec­tion with the first World Trade Cen­ter attack.)

Nageh Ibrahim once spoke of slay­ing infi­dels and cre­at­ing an Islamic state that would stretch from the Nile Delta to the vast deserts of Egypt’s south. Today he lives in a high-rise with a view of the Mediter­ranean Sea and has the sooth­ing voice of a man who could lead a 12-step pro­gram on reject­ing radicalism.

Ibrahim’s group, Gamaa al Islamiya, plot­ted noto­ri­ous attacks, includ­ing the 1981 assas­si­na­tion of Pres­i­dent Anwar Sadat and the mas­sacre at an ancient Luxor tem­ple that killed 62 peo­ple, mostly tourists, in 1997. He spent 24 years in jail read­ing the Koran and tem­per­ing the rage of his youth.

“We were young and we took extreme mea­sures. But now we’re old men and our time in prison has made us wiser,” he said. “Al Qaeda and Islamic mil­i­tancy have lost their glam­our. Look at what has hap­pened. The young saw that vio­lence didn’t bring change to Egypt, a peace­ful rev­o­lu­tion did.”

Ibrahim is one of an increas­ing num­ber of ultra­con­ser­v­a­tive and mod­er­ate Islamists seek­ing a polit­i­cal voice in a new Egypt. Since the down­fall in Feb­ru­ary of Pres­i­dent Hosni Mubarak, who for three decades kept reli­gion far from the cen­ter of power, the Islamist mes­sage is unshack­led. The Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, the largest oppo­si­tion party, expects a strong show­ing in September’s par­lia­men­tary elections.

The sec­u­lar reform­ers and twen­tysome­thing urban­ites at the van­guard of the Jan. 25 rev­o­lu­tion have found them­selves eclipsed. They lack expe­ri­ence and grass-roots net­works to com­pete with the Broth­er­hood and other reli­gious groups that have qui­etly stoked their pas­sions for this moment. In a sense, Mubarak’s obses­sion with both co-opting and crush­ing Islamists instilled in them the dis­ci­pline and orga­ni­za­tion that now pro­pels their polit­i­cal agendas. . . .

“Islamists in Egypt Seek Change through Pol­i­tics” by Jef­frey Fleish­man; Los Ange­les Times; 4/2/2011.

6. An arti­cle from the Asia Times high­lights an inter­est­ing possibility–that Mus­lim Broth­er­hood in
Egypt (and else­where?) wants a sec­u­lar gov­ern­ment in place to fail, and thus pre­pare the way for an Islamist government.

There are already signs that women, Cop­tic Chris­tians and other, pre­vi­ously oppressed/marginalized seg­ments of Egypt­ian soci­ety are on the receiv­ing end of vio­lent repression.

In an ironic twist, the ref­er­en­dum and the dec­la­ra­tion pit­ted the old ene­mies — the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood (MB) and Mubarak’s National Demo­c­ra­tic Party (NDP) — against the lib­eral youth movement.

The lib­er­als were par­tic­u­larly dis­ap­pointed by the ICD, point­ing out that the dec­la­ra­tion includes 80% of the old con­sti­tu­tion, includ­ing ”an out­dated social­ist quota” stip­u­lat­ing that half of the seats in the par­lia­ment are reserved for work­ers and farm­ers. A lot of ambi­gu­ity remained con­cern­ing when and by whom a more per­ma­nent con­sti­tu­tion would be drafted, and what that would look like. ”Any mod­i­fi­ca­tion or amend­ment of the cur­rent con­sti­tu­tion will not achieve the aspi­ra­tions of the peo­ple” said Ayman Nour, one of the lead­ers of the youth move­ment and for­mer pres­i­den­tial can­di­date, in a recent inter­view with Asharq Al-Awsat.

At this point, the ICD was not a major sur­prise: the dec­la­ra­tion fol­lowed, with some addi­tions, the amend­ments con­sid­ered at the ref­er­en­dum. Ten­sion has been brew­ing for some time now, and another leader of the lib­er­als, Mohamed ElBa­radei, was phys­i­cally attacked by Islamists dur­ing the vot­ing. The ”25 Jan­u­ary Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Youth Coali­tion,” includ­ing ElBa­radei and Nour, largely voted ”No” in the polls, over con­cerns that the changes were insuf­fi­cient and would not allow enough time for the oppo­si­tion to orga­nize for the elections.

The amend­ments, which opened the way for par­lia­men­tary and pres­i­den­tial elec­tions this sum­mer, ben­e­fited unfairly already estab­lished par­ties such as the NDP and the MB, the lib­er­als claimed. The ”25 Jan­u­ary,” on the other hand, con­sid­ers itself a move­ment, and lacks grass­roots party struc­tures that are of vital impor­tance in elec­tions. It has threat­ened to orga­nize a new ”million-man protest” on Fri­day, April 8, if broad demands, includ­ing tougher mea­sures against for­mer Mubarak regime offi­cials, are not met.

Pre­vi­ously, I pro­jected that the army and the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood may prop up a sec­u­lar demo­c­ra­tic gov­ern­ment with hopes of using it as a scape­goat when the econ­omy takes a turn to the worse, the polit­i­cal reforms stag­nate, and dis­il­lu­sion­ment sets in. [1] Despite the spike in ten­sions, this is still a pos­si­bil­ity, and it is impor­tant to note that the three main pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates so far, Amr Moussa, Mohamed ElBa­radei and Ayman Nour, are rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the lib­eral oppo­si­tion. [Ital­ics are mine–D.E] . . .

. . .
A gov­ern­ment with­out a real power base is a dis­as­ter for democ­racy at a min­i­mum, and most likely for the gen­eral well-being of soci­ety as well. The alter­na­tives are not very good — or clear — either. Mean­while, sec­tar­ian vio­lence is soar­ing. Thir­teen peo­ple were killed in clashes between Mus­lims and Cop­tic Chris­tians in Cairo on March 9, an inci­dent that came on the heels of sev­eral deadly attacks against Copts (who make up at least 10% of Egypt’s pop­u­la­tion) in the last months. More recently, on Sun­day a group of ter­ror­ists attacked the Egypt-Israel nat­ural gas pipeline for the sec­ond time in two months; the bomb they planted failed to explode.

Other wor­ri­some inter­nal devel­op­ments include reports that women pro­test­ers were sub­jected to tor­ture and humil­i­a­tion by the army last month, includ­ing pseudo-scientific forced vir­gin­ity tests. . .

“Egypt Moved by Deep Waters” by Vic­tor Kot­sev; Asian Times; 4/2/2011.

7.  Among the newly-minted “mod­er­ates” defin­ing the Egypt­ian polit­i­cal land­scape is one of Sadat’s assassins!

Abboud al-Zomor — the for­mer intel­li­gence offi­cer who sup­plied the bul­lets that killed Pres­i­dent Anwar el-Sadat and is Egypt’s most noto­ri­ous newly released pris­oner — waxes enthu­si­as­tic about end­ing the vio­lent jihad he once led.

”The bal­lot boxes will decide who will win at the end of the day,” Mr. Zomor said dur­ing an inter­view in his large fam­ily com­pound in this ham­let on Cairo’s west­ern edge. ”There is no longer any need for me to use vio­lence against those who gave us our free­dom and allowed us to be part of polit­i­cal life.”

In its drive to cre­ate a per­fect Islamic state, his Islamic Group and other groups like it were once syn­ony­mous with some of the blood­i­est ter­ror­ist attacks in Egypt. But they are now leap­ing aboard the democ­racy band­wagon, alarm­ing those who believe that reli­gious rad­i­cals are seek­ing to put in place strict Islamic law through ballots.

The pub­lic approval of the con­sti­tu­tional amend­ments on March 19 pro­vided an early exam­ple of Islamist polit­i­cal mus­cle, the vic­tory achieved in no small part by fram­ing the yes vote as a reli­gious duty. But per­haps the most sur­pris­ing aspect of the Islamist cam­paign was the energy invested by reli­gious orga­ni­za­tions that once damned the demo­c­ra­tic process as a West­ern, infi­del inno­va­tion mas­ter­minded to under­mine God’s laws.

Mr. Zomor, 64, with his bushy gray beard and nearly 30 years in prison, has emerged as a high-profile spokesman for that sea change since he was released on March 12.

He and other Salafis, or Islamic fun­da­men­tal­ists, rhap­sodize about found­ing polit­i­cal par­ties and forg­ing alliances with the more main­stream Mus­lim Broth­er­hood to max­i­mize the reli­gious vote.

Sev­eral rea­sons lie behind this remark­able turn­about, accord­ing to senior reli­gious sheiks, junior mem­bers and experts.

Fore­most is the desire to pro­tect, if not strengthen, the sec­ond amend­ment of Egypt’s Con­sti­tu­tion, which enshrines Shariah, or Islamic law, as the main source of Egypt­ian law. The par­lia­ment to be elected in Sep­tem­ber will guide the draft­ing of a new constitution.

”If the con­sti­tu­tion is a lib­eral one this will be cat­a­strophic,” said Sheik Abdel Mon­eim el-Shahat, scoff­ing at new demands for minor­ity rights dur­ing a night class he teaches at a recently reopened Salafi mosque in Alexan­dria. ”I think next they will tell us that Chris­tians must lead Mus­lims in the prayers!”

Sec­ond, the Salafis arrived late to the rev­o­lu­tion, with many cler­ics emphat­i­cally sup­port­ing Pres­i­dent Hosni Mubarak and con­demn­ing the protesters.

Young Salafis rebelled — extremely rare for a group that reveres tra­di­tion and hierarchy.

”The major­ity of the Salafi youth were the peo­ple who actu­ally said, ‘No, this is impos­si­ble, we have to be part of this, it is a just cause,’ ” said Sherif Abdel Naser, a 24-year-old Egyptian-American who now attends polit­i­cal classes three nights a week at Sheik Shahat’s cramped mosque.

The Salafi move­ment is inspired by the puri­tan Wah­habi school of Islam that dom­i­nates Saudi Ara­bia, whose grand mufti churned out a fatwa con­demn­ing the Arab upris­ings as a West­ern con­spir­acy to destroy the Islamic world. But an array of philoso­phies exists under the Salafi umbrella, rang­ing from apo­lit­i­cal groups that merely pros­e­ly­tize on the ben­e­fits of being a good Mus­lim to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda. Ayman al-Zawahri, Al Qaeda’s No. 2, is an Egypt­ian Salafist.

Some Egyp­tians are con­vinced that the gov­ern­ment released the likes of Mr. Zomor as a kind of bogey­man — to frighten the coun­try about the pos­si­ble down­side of democ­racy. Mr. Zomor said Salafist vio­lence was only a reac­tion to the repres­sion of the Mubarak gov­ern­ment, but he shocked many Egyp­tians by advo­cat­ing pun­ish­ments like ampu­tat­ing thieves’ hands.

In an exam­ple of fun­da­men­tal­ists now emerg­ing into pub­lic light, the sons of Omar Abdel Rah­man, the blind sheik who is serv­ing a life sen­tence in the United States, con­victed in a con­spir­acy to bomb the World Trade Cen­ter in 1993, recently addressed a con­fer­ence at a five-star Cairo hotel, demand­ing that the United States release their ail­ing father. . . .

“Rad­i­cals’ Turn to Democ­racy Alarms Egypt” by Neil Mac­Far­quhar; The New York Times; 4/2/2011.

8. Some observers feel that the events in the Mid­dle East will ben­e­fit Hezbol­lah.

As the surge of rev­o­lu­tion­ary fer­vor that has taken the greater Mid­dle East by storm con­tin­ues to spread, many observers are grap­pling with the polit­i­cal uncer­tain­ties the tumult has pro­duced from Morocco to the Per­sian Gulf and beyond.

The pop­u­lar upris­ings that prompted the ouster of the dic­ta­tor­ships in Tunisia and Egypt and threaten the panoply of author­i­tar­ian despots cling­ing to power in other coun­tries have already had a pro­found effect on regional pol­i­tics. Despite their highly fluid nature, it is not too early to assess the impact of these events on the posi­tion of promi­nent actors such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah.The movement’s place amid the unfold­ing unrest bears spe­cial rel­e­vance, con­sid­er­ing the open hos­til­ity that has char­ac­ter­ized its rela­tions with the recently top­pled Hosni Mubarak regime and other gov­ern­ments threat­ened by the wave of protest. The pop­u­lar­ity Hezbol­lah enjoys among a large seg­ment of the very same peo­ple who have taken to the streets to demand polit­i­cal free­doms, rule of law, rep­re­sen­ta­tive gov­ern­ment and eco­nomic oppor­tu­ni­ties adds another dynamic worth closer examination.

Hav­ing weath­ered the mas­sive Israeli assault dur­ing the July 2006 war and deftly out­ma­neu­ver­ing attempts by polit­i­cal oppo­nents to under­mine its posi­tion and blame it for the Feb­ru­ary 2005 assas­si­na­tion of Lebanese prime min­is­ter Rafik Hariri, Hezbollah’s stock as a polit­i­cal party, social move­ment and para­mil­i­tary force in Lebanese and regional affairs con­tin­ues to rise.

In char­ac­ter­is­tic fash­ion, Hezbol­lah has not been coy about artic­u­lat­ing its posi­tions on the upris­ings that have shaken the foun­da­tions of power in the Mid­dle East in var­i­ous media out­lets, par­tic­u­larly its own Beirut-based al-Manar satel­lite tele­vi­sion net­work. [1]

Ini­tially, how­ever, Hezbol­lah adopted a cau­tious approach to the oppo­si­tion activism that engulfed Tunisia and Egypt. Hezbol­lah was con­cerned that a show of sup­port for the protests early on would tar­nish their legit­i­macy and lend cre­dence to alle­ga­tions repeated by the embat­tled regimes that the pro­test­ers were act­ing at the behest of hos­tile for­eign ele­ments aim­ing to desta­bi­lize the region.

Hezbol­lah essen­tially opted to refrain from issu­ing an endorse­ment of the protests until the pop­u­lar grass­roots char­ac­ter of the rebel­lions entered into the dis­course of global media cov­er­age and analy­sis. Hezbollah’s sec­re­tary gen­eral Has­san Nas­ral­lah encap­su­lated this point in a state­ment broad­cast dur­ing a Feb­ru­ary 7 event in Beirut orga­nized to sup­port the oppo­si­tion in Egypt: “In case we announced sol­i­dar­ity ear­lier, they would have said that the rev­o­lu­tion was moti­vated by Hezbol­lah or Hamas cells or even by the Iran­ian Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Guards. Then, this real, orig­i­nal and patri­otic move­ment would be accused of serv­ing a for­eign agenda”.

Hezbol­lah has since expressed sol­i­dar­ity with what it sees as the asser­tion of the true will of the Arab and Mus­lim masses who strive for social, polit­i­cal, and eco­nomic jus­tice in the face of ille­git­i­mate and cor­rupt autoc­ra­cies that it claims are beholden to the United States and Israel. . . .

“Arab Revolts Hand It to Hezbol­lah” by Chris Zam­belis; Asia Times; 4/5/2011.

9. A mea­sure of the mod­er­a­tion of the Turk­ish AK Party of Mr. Erdo­gan may be found in the Gulen schools.

The FBI and other U.S. fed­eral agen­cies have been inves­ti­gat­ing whether a Turk­ish reli­gious com­mu­nity oper­at­ing hun­dreds of schools world­wide is involved in visa fraud to bring teach­ers from Turkey to the United States.

The claim was made in a broad analy­sis by the Philadel­phia Enquirer on reli­gious leader Fethul­lah Gülen, who the paper describes as “a major Islamic polit­i­cal fig­ure in Turkey,” and the more than 120 char­ter schools in the United States that are linked to his movement.

“Reli­gious schol­ars con­sider the Gülen strain of Islam mod­er­ate, and the inves­ti­ga­tion has no link to ter­ror­ism. Rather, it [the inves­ti­ga­tion] is focused on whether hun­dreds of Turk­ish teach­ers, admin­is­tra­tors and other staffers employed under the ‘H1B visa pro­gram’ are mis­us­ing tax­payer money,” the news­pa­per wrote. H1B visas are meant to be reserved for work­ers with highly spe­cial­ized skill sets.

The char­ter schools are funded with mil­lions of tax­payer dol­lars, accord­ing to the daily. “True­bright [Sci­ence Acad­emy in Penn­syl­va­nia] alone receives more than $3 mil­lion from the Philadel­phia School Dis­trict for its 348 pupils,” said the newspaper.

The Depart­ments of Labor and Edu­ca­tion are also involved in inves­ti­gat­ing the claims of kick­backs to the Mus­lim move­ment founded by Gülen, known as “Hizmet” (Ser­vice), accord­ing to the paper.

Gülen, who has been liv­ing in the United States since 1999, is a Turk­ish reli­gious leader whose move­ment is con­sid­ered one of the strongest fronts in the civil­ian strug­gle for power in Turkey, espe­cially because of its influ­ence over state struc­tures in the country.

World­wide, the Gülen move­ment is known mostly for the schools it has estab­lished in Turkey and in more than 80 countries.

Fed­eral offi­cials declined to com­ment on the nation­wide inquiry, which is being coor­di­nated by pros­e­cu­tors in Pennsylvania’s Mid­dle Dis­trict in Scran­ton, the Philadel­phia Enquirer wrote. A for­mer leader of the par­ents’ group at a Gülen-founded char­ter school in State Col­lege, Penn­syl­va­nia, con­firmed that fed­eral author­i­ties had inter­viewed her.

Although many have posited links between the Gülen move­ment and the char­ity schools around the world, fol­low­ers deny the links.

The news­pa­per wrote that Bekir Aksoy, who acts as Gülen’s spokesman, said last Fri­day that he knew noth­ing about char­ter schools or an investigation. . . .

“FBI Inves­ti­gat­ing Gulen Schools in US”; Hur­riyet Daily News; 3/21/2011.

10. A Turk­ish jour­nal­ist was arrested for expos­ing the extent of the Gulen organization’s pen­e­tra­tion of the Turk­ish police. Of par­tic­u­lar sig­nif­i­cance, here, is the fact that Ahmet Sik, whose book was erased by the Turk­ish police, had opposed the Ergenekon plot–an alleged plot by Turk­ish mil­i­tary and secu­rity forces to stage a coup against the Islamist forces of Erdo­gan. (Some observers have sug­gested that Ergenekon was actu­ally cooked up by the Erdo­gan forces to dis­credit the heirs to Turk­ish sec­u­lar­ism and Kamal Attaturk.

Istan­bul police raided a print­ing house Wednes­day evening in search of com­puter files con­tain­ing an unpub­lished book by an arrested sus­pect in the Ergenekon coup-plot case and erased the dig­i­tal draft.

The print­ing house, İthaki, was the pub­lisher that owned the rights to “İmamın Ordusu” (The Army of the Imam), an unpub­lished book by jour­nal­ist Ahmet Şık, who was arrested two weeks ago. The book was found in dig­i­tal form on a com­puter at the office of the dis­si­dent online news por­tal OdaTV; Şık has stated he did not know how it got there, call­ing the staff of the web­site peo­ple he would not stand together with in any case.

Şık’s arrest has been crit­i­cized in legal cir­cles since the evi­dence against him was not revealed to his lawyers.

His unpub­lished book deals with the alleged orga­ni­za­tion founded within the Turk­ish police by the Fethul­lah Gülen reli­gious com­mu­nity. This fact has led to sus­pi­cions that Şık was arrested due to the book’s con­tents, rather than his involve­ment in the alleged Ergenekon gang, which he has worked as a jour­nal­ist to expose. . . .

“Turk­ish Police Raid Print­ing House, Erase Unpub­lished Book; Hur­riyet Daily News; 3/24/2011.

11. The pro­gram con­cludes with a look at another of the “dis­clo­sures” being gen­er­ated by Wik­iLeaks (WHERE are they com­ing from?). As the Piggy-Back Coup was gain­ing momen­tum, an item con­cern­ing Mossad con­nec­tions with var­i­ous embat­tled Mid­dle East gov­ern­ments surfaced.

As with many (most?) of the Wik­iLeaks “leaks,” this could be rea­son­ably sur­mised by an intel­li­gent observer. Nonethe­less, this seems primed to stir up pro-Islamist and anti-Semitic sen­ti­ments among the Arab pop­u­la­tion of those countries.

Wik­ileaks  founder Julian Assange released addi­tional clas­si­fied doc­u­ments about Israel and the Mid­dle East: Britain’s Guardian news­pa­per stated that the sen­si­tive doc­u­ments expose, among other things, Israeli crit­i­cism of the man who is the de facto head of state in Egypt, Hus­sein Tantawi Chair­man of the Supreme Coun­cil of the Armed Forces.

The diplo­matic cables were trans­ferred to Yedioth Ahronoth and some have been pub­lished on Friday.

One of the doc­u­ments leaked to the Wik­ileaks site and pub­lished in the Guardian, addresses alleged rela­tions between Israel’s secu­rity ser­vices and Bahrain.

In a cable describ­ing a meet­ing between the US ambas­sador to the emi­rate and King Hamad in 2005, the US diplo­mat noted that the king admit­ted “that Bahrain already has con­tacts with Israel at the intelligence/security level (ie with Mossad) and indi­cated that Bahrain will be will­ing to move for­ward in other areas.”

In another cable, a US doc­u­ment from Novem­ber 2009 newly released by Assange, Israeli secu­rity sources claim that Tantawi is an “obsta­cle” in efforts to foil smug­gling from Sinai to the Gaza Strip. On the other hand, the doc­u­ment noted that Israel praised the actions of the man who was direc­tor of the Gen­eral Intel­li­gence Direc­torate at the time, Omar Suleiman, who now acts as Egypt’s vice pres­i­dent. Israeli secu­rity sources stated that he sup­ports smug­gling prevention. . . .

“Bahrain’s Secret Mossad Ties Revealed?”; ynetnews.com; 4/8/2011.